The Examined Life takes in a lot of territory

Inevitably, another major commitment of my time called Instapunk Returns will occasionally stick its nose into the doings here. Working on both, I’m sometimes forced to ask myself how I got from Point A to Point XXX as I seem to have done yesterday at IPR. Specifically, how did I manage to get from here…

Yes, I did ‘Shapes’ at graduation, but we all learned our ABCs too.

…to here?

The concluding flourish of my latest IPR screed, Thoughts on Foul Language

I put the Little Red Hen Nursery School in the same context with the song abcdefu because we all have an important personal timeline with respect to the alphabet. My parents sent me to nursery school for two years when I was three. Which means when I turn 73 in about three weeks it will be 70 years since I began my formal education. Yes, we had playtime indoors and outdoors at the Red Hen, but we also had classes taught by Mr. and Mrs. Cholerton, and I was already amassing Sunday School perfect attendance points at St. Andrew’s Church (where I was married to Pat 50 years later) in the class of, I kid you not, Miss Toothacre. Graduating from nursery school was a serious affair; there was a ceremony with caps and gowns and presentations to parents by individual students. For years I was relieved that the graduation photo my mother kept was in black and white, which made the pink gowns look white instead. I remember that day, the faces of the Cholertons, and my own performance at the feltboard. 

If I can’t specifically remember the class sessions at the Red Hen, I do remember being read to at bedtime every night by my mother, which is why over the years I have hunted down the titles that have stayed with me unforgettably. One of these was a beautiful little hard bound book by Tasha Tudor.

“A is for Annabelle”

Just a few years later, ‘A’ would also be for ‘Alice’, in the first book I ever read, out loud to my parents on the first day of first grade at St. John’s Day School. 

I hunted them down because I had a history with the name Alice.

So ‘A’ was for Annabelle, and for Alice, but most importantly ‘A’ was for Alphabet. That string of letters that opened the doors to the glorious, fantastically wide world of Reading, whichnis itsmown universe without end. Why my most challenging Dr. Seuss book was this work of genius.

Can’t let this stand alone without mentioning my all-time favorite Seuss character, 

Mr. Sneelock. (AI/AutoCorrupt is determined to correct this to ‘Sherlock’. Not today.) 

If OBZ is the beginning of a bold intellectual quest, Mr. Sneelock is the beginning of 

Everyman’s Walter Mitty quest for unflappable ineffable heroism: If I Ran the Circus.

My personal writing relationship with the Alphabet is even more extensive than my history with ‘Alice,’ or at least more diverse. The most expensive of my Amazon paperbacks is, not surprisingly, the least popular in terms of sales. That’s okay. I did it for purposes of defensive documentation, against the very real possibility that some of my Internet works would become inaccessible as the TekLords moved under the covers of their beds in careless slumber.

Even my own hard copy is only a proof, nearly a hundred pages 

short of the final published version. 40 bucks for a rare book?

Not in my budget since that annoying bankruptcy ordeal…

Poe put me onto puzzles of all kinds, so that I have my own bag of tricks. I do labyrinths (ST99, the Undernet, the DarkNet, et al), jigsaw puzzles, secret codes, cryptic dictionaries & glossaries, and bibles of obscure origin.

There have even been numeric/alphabetic puzzles that defy categorization:

80 is a big deal. You have to rise to the occasion.

And I do alphabetic bestiaries of multiple kinds.

These are serious business for me, no matter how funny they can be. I still know, word for word, every line of The Gashlycrumb Tinies, for example.

There’s a complete alphabet book within a book in The Boomer Bible that serves as a summary of all western history and culture. ST99 has a subway station that shows us what letters of the English alphabet no longer stand for.

Click on the graphic to get to the live ST99 file. (Blow thru the two 

warning screens, which are a Wordpress glitch, not a security risk.)

If I’m so desperate to save Shuteye Nation, why don’t I ante up the $40 for my own copy? Because it’s a demonstration of the dimensional difference between what linear writing is and what I do. The way to navigate The Glossary and the gazetteers to see how poison spreads in words, thoughts, and images is via the hyperlinks. Which cannot be reproduced by ink on paper. Why American book publishing as it conceives of its role in promoting literary artistry is as dead as Griswold’s obituary of Edgar Allan Poe, which can be accessed at the Authors’ Hall of Attention in Philadelphia…

Click the graphic for Griswold’s magnum opus, the only thing he is remembered for.

There will be a lot of other dead stuff at the Author’s Hall when I finally get around to assembling all the floating pieces of it waiting in my files. But as you know, there are several priorities that take up most of my time these days. Excavating and restoring lost stuff ground up in the TekLord Machine is no small part of it. It took me a few hours yesterday just to reassemble what may be the grandest of my bestiaries, even though it took me just an hour and twenty minutes to write it. (Times noted in the linked pdf file below.) the original belonged to a simplesite called Laird Ink which was my most successful effort yet to link a representative variety of my writings in one place for people to browse through. Gone now. Here’s what I extracted piecemeal on the last day.

My Own Personal Bestiary4

How and why did I get so mad at IPR the other day? Because language and insightful conversation has been destroyed by the foul mouths of deliberately uneducated children. For the present I am completely obsolete. But I am trying to remember that George Orwell published 1984 in 1949, to share his perspective on what the world would be like in 35 years. Last I checked, we’re still working on it and poor George died in 1950, without even a glimpse of how right he would be proven to be. 

Pardon me for noting that I typed the first page of The Boomer Bible, including the middle column markers for the Intercolumn Reference on an Underwood Standard typewriter. 

The manuscript I sent to the publisher was made of laser printouts that had the middle ICR column strips pasted on with wax. Only now with the current work-in-progress called The Boomer Bible Online has the technology finally caught up with my conception. Far less progress has been made by littachure experts in understanding what I do and how I do it. 

Let me be clear. I’m content with not being recognized till after I’m dead. It’s the ugliness of the end times we’re going through with our half-dead youth that makes me furious. Having to watch. With no one to talk to who gets just how bad it is and how much better it could be…

That’s what really sucks.

Feels darker now than it did back in ‘23 when I doodled this…

Happy first day of summer…