The Game
Be patient. I’ll explain as we go. Eventually.
My energy level is down. Not surprising. I’ve been working unbelievable hours for weeks, most of it on things you don’t see here. I have different operating modes. There’s one in particular where I switch into a spinning active-passive mental state, receiving information and writing quickly in alternation. It’s a mode that can last for days, weeks, and on some occasions years at a time. How I’ve completed several of my biggest projects. The last time I was in this mode was about three years ago and it came to an end rather abruptly. I thought I’d laid the project I was working on to rest, but the truth was it had laid me to rest. I felt finished with the business of trying to say anything more except in the fairground sideshow sense provided by Facebook. Throw the softball at the lead milk bottles, shoot the target that goes ping when you hit it, and hand off any stuffed toys you win to the kids. Except there aren’t anymore kids. No real reason to keep your hand in on the entertainment skill set.
Thought I’d been doing okay since late ‘22 when I gave up on the idea that there was one last big project in me. I wasn’t in big project mode because I was in bunker and wall-building mode. The thing that threw that switch might have been this…
September 22, 2022, Independence Hall, Philadelphia
That’s about 31 miles from my couch, as the crow flies. Pretty close to a creature who looked to me like this…
An exaggeration? Maybe. But that’s what satirists do, isn’t it? I was filled with dread about what would happen in years to come. Not fears about my physical safety per sē. Fears about what would happen to my work. If we’re truly entering a Dark Age in which a civilization overturned into a state of sheer suicidal self mutilation could go unnoticed by the ones who were most responsible for maintaining it, people like me would have to be systematically erased from the record. Not talking here about mass graves or even gulags like the Capitol jail where the pitiful J6ers were immured. Talking a deadlier, quieter version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Make no mistake. When the Government wants to, and there’s no one to stop them, there’s nowhere to hide from them in our nation anymore. You don’t need to be made an example of. You just need to be silenced as an opposing voice. All of us who write and create materials critical of the ones in charge are already hostages in the custody of social networks and communication service organizations like Google, YouTube, and Amazon. All my creative output over a 50+ year writing life was not, is not, in my possession but theirs.
What’s a “bunker, wall-building mode”? It’s ceasing work on any big projects that are underway, knowing that time spent there could be swept away in a moment and therefore wasted, while doing what is possible to make others aware that vulnerable but potentially valuable material is still hanging out there on the Internet by a thread. I’d been aware of these dangers before September 22, 2022, but that was for me the proof that it had descended at last into pure insanity. We had a mentally incompetent and rabidly vicious President whom our media watchdogs refused even to criticize except around the margins while his minions perpetrated every legal and moral outrage against a rival he was publicly accusing of the exact same crimes he was committing himself. Yes, the sky is bright green, water is no longer wet, women are men and vice versa, and every shade of black is white as snow.
The bunkering was not adding new books to my Amazon list, inflammatory new posts or sites to my Blogger presence, new videos of any kind to YouTube (where I was already on probation with two strikes against me), and walking a tightrope on Facebook that swayed menacingly in the phantom winds of the accelerating climate change in reality itself. I didn’t make any attempt to grow my friends list or push harder at getting my posts onto the network’s Newsfeed. I did not message my provocative posts to anyone. I was not trying to attract attention.
What I didn’t do was shut up. Wall-building, to the extent I could manage, was on Facebook and Instapunk Returns. Without asking, I was hoping that other concerned rebels were occasionally printing hard copies from time to time of posts I was still writing against the grain. I made some efforts to increase the survivability of large chunks of work already sitting here and there on the web. I tried to generate some interest in getting The Boomer Bible republished, because it wouldn’t be that hard to do, and the book was still showing up repeatedly even on Google searches. It still had its fans, and anyone new who could be induced to sit down and study it would see how deeply relevant it still is to what has been occurring in our national life since it was published in 1991. In other words, The Boomer Bible could still make money for a publisher who still likes making money directly from the market as opposed to banking the Foundation subsidies of famous people who write books nobody reads but political organizations buy in bulk.
At Facebook, I was still the squeaky hinge I’d always been, though consciously working within the weirdly neo-Victorian prudery about nudity and the obsession with shooting down criticisms of climate change orthodoxy (which actually covers quite a lot of territory, as I found out). I levied a lot of my most scathing satirical jibes and critiques at the media outlets who were supposedly on the side of the timid MAGA masses who show up at rallies but never in the Comments section of the FB underground. (I recall being asked to remove certain friends from my list even though they still liked what I was saying because of their legitimate fears of reprisal on the job or on their cars and front lawns… I complied with no hard feelings. In immediate terms, they have far more to lose than I do.)
My only publishing activity outside of FB posts consisted of a few PDF collections of controversial stuff I hoped might be copied onto someone’s disk or persuade them to pursue the original sources of: 1) an extended, reformatted collection of satirical Breitbart-related posts indicating my disappointment with their interpretation of the Andrew Breitbart legacy; 2) A detailed reproduction from my book “The Naked Woman” of a program for defeating the Turing Test by modeling a female consciousness employing that sex’s talent for non-sequitur non-responses to challenging questions; 3) A collection of the Op-Ed Columns from the ‘Shuteye Times’ and the ‘Balow Star’ in my 2001 multimedia work Shuteye Nation; Et Alia.
My overall state of mind was resignation. I was growing old physically at an increasing rate it seemed. I no longer enjoyed any of the diversions that used to be emotionally vitalizing to me: sports, cars, music from classical to jazz to country to rock to pop, movies of all kinds from the unmentionable race-sex propaganda of ‘23 and ‘24 all the way back to American classics that now seemed like irrelevant fairy tales about values so scorned they had built-in laugh tracks from the vandal NPCs in charge, the whole arena of sexual attraction in an environment polluted by the gross and death-obsessed, and all the intellectually ambitious commentaries written by conservative moles in their ivory siloes and gopher holes.
I was still writing, many hours a day. I was a walking (or sitting) outlier to Fitzgerald’s quip that the test of the intelligent mind is whether it can know that social change is impossible and yet keep working toward social change. I no longer believed Trump or his MAGA followers could save a nation that had so much wrong with it the very people who knew the peril were themselves suffering from crippling deficiencies in their educations and capabilities. The New York Times was actually right about some important things. Their lies were far better written than the truths proposed in anguished Comments by the Deplorables and and Irredeemables, where spelling and syntax were mutilated with depressing predictability. Schools and universities had been declining so long and nefariously that civics and history and even recent defining events in our national experience had virtually disappeared.
If you hadn’t been alive for the Kennedy and King/Kennedy assassinations, the era before the potheading of America, the Vietnam War, the 1968 Democrat Convention, the Great Society, the Watergate coup against Nixon, and the Lewinsky scandal, everything you knew about these turning points was a fabrication, either a deliberately skewed narrative or an outright lie. The MAGA impulse was in many ways incoherent, as the elite press repeatedly insisted, but a kind of instinct explainable only in terms of Carl Jung’s hypothesis of a mass subconscious that pushes through the dark with half awareness of deeper truths which cannot be analyzed under an electron microscope.
I knew we were all damaged because I was damaged too, connected at a level just more visible than Jungian subconscious to the realities I absorbed through unusually close contact with two generations of family before me. But they were still mysteries to me, still beyond me in ways I didn’t like recognizing. My grandfathers had both been heroes of the old, now scorned incarnation of manhood. You learned what they had done so bravely only from others, not from them. And the differences took in more than that. My grandfather Laird had studied Greek in grammar school and could still quote it from memory when he was 80. My Grandfather Miesse retired from a lifetime as a manufacturing plant engineer at 65 and started a 20 year career as a self-taught cabinetmaker extraordinaire, not for the money but for the love of the wood taking on new purpose and shapes under his hands and ingenious use of tools. Despite intensive drilling as a child, I still cannot do what my Dad could do with ease, name every state that bordered every single state in the Union. I blame the fact that geography was the first of the necessary elementary school subjects to die, even before history, and my struggle with geography of all kinds persists to this day, irremediable — as I am, like so many others, one of the Irredeemable ones. Whatever the cause, there’s a part of my brain that’s not up to the task: I have spent hours on commercial plane flights trying to devise mnemonics from maps in airline magazines to help me equal my Dad’s “trick,” which was not a trick at all but an embedded part of his American identity I do not share. He flew over it all, looking down at the land and necessary navigational landmarks from the cockpit of a fighter plane built to defend that land, while I simply flew back and forth as a passenger above it, always in an aisle seat to ensure easy bathroom access while my mind was mostly otherwise engaged.
Otherwise engaged. Aren’t we all? Passengers I mean. Just like the NYT is right about some things, as I’ve conceded here, even deliberate malefactors in our contemporary world can also be right at times. When Obama said, famously, “You didn’t build it,” referring to the edifice of the globe-dominating American economic and military might, he was right. Generations of brave, hard-working, and forward-looking Americans before us built it, fought and died for it, and overcame the pernicious aspects of organizational inertia to make it more prosperous, more productive, and more altruistic than any civilization in recorded history. We, the Americans alive today, are the inheritors of what our fathers and forefathers built. They were the creators, we are the administrators of an increasingly decadent empire.
There’s an old joke much repeated in the corporate world. About a CEO who upon his departure from office leaves a message in his desk drawer for his successor (as U.S. Presidents famously do in fact), providing guidance about predictable crises ahead. The message consists of a manila folder containing three envelopes and a cover note, which reads. “When the shit hits the fan, open the first letter.” As promised, the shit does indeed start hitting the fan shortly after the successor assumes power. He opens the first letter, which reads, “Blame your predecessor.” The CEO follows the advice and lives to fight another day, year, maybe more. Then the shit makes a big return, and he opens the second letter, which reads, “Reorganize.” Bingo. Big Re-Org launched and implemented through time, with the usual results. Time for the third letter, which reads, “Write three letters.”
Easy to see how closely this models our recent history as a nation. The pattern has been broken only twice during most of the adult lifetimes of most of us. It’s rare for a Vice President to succeed a President except via assassination or other removal of the sitting President. The exception was George H. W. Bush, who succeeded two Reagan terms and seems not to have been left any envelopes in the Oval Office desk. His biggest problem he made for himself and could not blame on his predecessor. He also couldn’t reorganize his way out of the “Read my lips, NO new taxes” pledge, which led to Clinton. Who blamed Bush 41 for being out of touch with voters, which ‘Bubba’ would change by “feeling your pain.” He managed to finish two full terms aided by stout denials of wrongdoing and artful reorganization of left-drifting Democrat priorities into more ‘centrist’ approaches to government policy. Bush 43 had to use his first letter even before he was sworn in, claiming that Clinton’s blatant unpunished perjuries had destroyed the rule of law and turned even elections into a lawless free-for-all. When Katrina blew up the trust in federal responsiveness to human needs, W reorganized and got to eke out his second term despite scandals and other difficulties (some evidence suggests that Clinton’s second letter might have read, “Deny Everything…”). The new President Obama, visionary that he was, escalated the first letter into a grand plan under the rubric “Blame ALL your predecessors, including the founding fathers, for everything.”
That accounts for 30 years worth of the presidency as an administrative state. This changed in 2017, when Obama did not leave any letters for President Trump. In fact, Obama had prepared a fourth letter addressed to himself, which read, “Use all your secret influence to blame your successor for everything he does differently from you.” Which worked and didn’t. It gave us all 10 years of nastiness, lies, and conspiracies to make sure Trump’s upset win would not be repeated. After the 2020 election, Trump left no letters for Biden, who couldn’t have read them anyway, which didn’t matter because he was never really in charge of anything but a beach chair and ice cream stand in Rehoboth, Delaware.
Where we were, where I was, in 2023 and 2024. I saw no particular reason to believe that the 2024 election would differ from the one in 2020. Trump’s rally crowds were the same, but the Rasmussen polls were also same as they had been from the earliest years of the Biden administration, with 45-48 percent of American passengers approving the President’s performance despite dismal downturns in every measure of American well being. I admired Trump’s stubbornness and courage in the face of so much brutally naked lawfare, but I couldn’t help being reminded of the latter years of Muhammed Ali’s boxing career. As a young man, Cassius Clay had been a dazzlingly brilliant boxer so rarely hit that it was believed the first true slugger he met in the ring would take him out. After being stripped of his title for becoming Muhammed Ali, he was barred from boxing for three and a half years while dangerous new slugger opponents appeared on the scene. An older, wiser Ali combined his boxing talent with an unexpectedly extraordinary ability to take a punch and so reclaimed his title. Trump performed a similar fest in reclaiming the nomination of his party, but I can’t forget a number of fights Ali won toward the end when I watched him only because I couldn’t not watch, and he won only because he could thinly outpoint his opponent while routinely taking enormous headshots from fighters like Earnie Shavers and Ron Lyle. These were guys who weren't championship material but could easily kill a man in the ring. I feared for Ali’s life.
Likewise, throughout 2024, I feared for Trump’s life. How much courtroom punishment could he take? Whatever his metabolism and level of activity suggest, he is an old man in terms of calendar years. But he kept answering the bell anyway, and I began to fear for his life too. If they can’t make him quit, I thought, they’ll kill him outright. Which they tried to do, directly or indirectly, it doesn’t matter which. The nation might survive if Trump is assassinated after being sworn into office as President for a second time, but not if he dies before he takes the oath.
But if he could keep fighting, I could keep doing my Facebook schtick. Acting as if I believed he could win, and we could survive this nightmare interim in American history, Which I didn’t. I even prayed, both seriously and in self-deprecating dealmaking ways. I did the “Please keep him safe, O Lord” one. And I also did the “Let Michigan beat Ohio State, and Yale beat Harvard, and Navy best Army, and let the Eagles get aced out of another chance at facing Andy Reid in the Super Bowl… take all of that, Lord, and I won’t whimper or feel even a pang of grief as long as Trump beats Kamaltoe in the election…” You get punchy when you’re battling depression. And it’s not good news when the most hopeful indicator you can find on the horizon is the reality that the Lord, or something, did indeed let Michigan crush Ohio State, Yale humiliate Harvard, Navy embarrass Army, and a late season injury of the Eagles star quarterback imperil their prospects in the playoffs.
Then, of course, Trump won the election, on Election Night no less (awakened by my less defeatist wife with the news at 2:30 in the morning), and I felt both relieved and too stunned to experience actual joy. For over a week. My prayers were answered though. Trump was sworn in on January 20th, 2025. That night Ohio State easily won the National College Football Championship. And a few weeks later the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl overwhelmingly against Andy Reid and a Chiefs team that had already become legendary in their own minds.
I was even tempted to write a Facebook post taking credit for all these events and apologizing to Ohio State, Harvard, Army, and the Eagles for the setbacks I had engineered in exchange for Trump’s electoral victory and subsequent swearing in. Also thanking the Lord for redressing the wrongs against the Buckeyes and the Birds and expressing my understanding of why Harvard and Army were left twisting in the wind… But I thought better of my impulse to take credit. I knew better. I guess. And it wouldn’t do to have anyone know I’m that well connected to the Big Guy. Just kidding.
Hmmm. Kidding again. Realized I had stopped feeling that every day was dusk all day. When the new (old) operating mode kicked in. Back in 2022 I had been in the organizing stages of a truly massive Internet multimedia project. I had started multiple websites that would be anchors for a growing together of different versions of a narrative initiated in 1978, if not even before then. A narrative that had persisted and influenced everything I’ve written since. The projected work would by any definition be the biggest work of fiction ever created and by its existence a proof that the literary world had overlooked an inevitable next step forward for a complete human lifetime. Parallels that such paralyzing time gaps develop? Mayan archaeology missed a full generation of productive research by accepting one professor’s declaration that Mayan script was pictographic not alphabetic and therefore untranslatable. Which ended when a non-Mayan archaeologist succeeded in translating the script irrefutably. A more significant parallel? In the same way, the science of physics had, at the beginning of the 20th century, overlooked the next step implicit in the experimental results of Quantum Mechanics with no Quantum Theory behind those results to drive a next generation of scientific creativity and a new cosmology of the universe(s) we live in. The impact of that missing breakthrough had ripple through all the sciences and turned them dull, bureaucratic, and blasphemously obsessed with consensus and grant money instead of fearless research.
I could see how to use contemporary technology to break the logjam in the field of literature, which has been stone dead since before War II, after death throes that began in WWI. After the 2020 election debacle I embarked on a full-on, full-time operating mode focused on laying out the foundations for such a work. I couldn’t see the whole yet, but that didn’t matter yet. I had some sense of its architecture and its necessary interconnecting systems. I had a template site design that needed more exploration to fulfill its functional roles in several different ways. I had a lot of content material stored well away from Blogger, awaiting plug-in adaptations as needed. I had discovered some unique new tools to assist in the vital layering process that would be instrumental to success.
That’s when the mode I was in switched abruptly to the bunker/wall-building mentality described above.
It was a common sense change. There could be no guarantee I was capable of finishing such a work. There was no proof I was durable enough to live long enough to finish it, even if I had the necessary talent, and even if the political world did not come crashing down on my head to wipe the whole work away at a single killing stroke.
“You’ve done enough,” my wife said. “You deserve some peace of mind.” And so did she.
Now the project is awake in me again. I’ve been working on four to six hours of sleep for weeks now, and I can’t believe how much has already become clearer and more beckoning, with new ideas for how to proceed pouring in apace. I’ve experienced recurrence of a familiar phenomenon that is unsettling when it first kicks in. I end a day’s work with a sense of certainty about what I will begin work on tomorrow. Then tomorrow comes and I work on something completely different. Not a sign of confusion, which is how it seems early on. It’s the work pushing back, knowing more about itself than I do at the moment. Been in this situation before. Here, for example, is something that came into being rather automatically prior to the project definition I’ve been describing:
I shouldn’t be posting this here, at least not yet. But while I’m taking a brief rest before the motor inevitably starts roaring again, I feel it’s appropriate to lay down a marker for myself. For use against the moments of doubt that always intrude in the course of a long development effort.
You don’t need to know any of this, I suppose. What might you find it helpful to know? I have a tentative reader interface for access to the completed work, a work-in-process website called the Game. This is a work that is meant from the start to involve and make game-like demands on readers. Everyone’s path to experiencing the work will be unique, because this is not a linear world of word after after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, in lines and pages from an ordered beginning to an ordered end. That’s what died in WWI that nobody saw.
There were signs that the best writers of the Twenties and Thirties were aware they had bumped up against a wall of sorts, an end of what their medium then constituted could achieve. Most simply and directly, Hemingway wrote of believing there was “another dimension” to be achieved, but he went looking for it in directions that turned out to be dead ends, although one of them won a Nobel Prize. James Joyce was the most prominent of those who tried to break the language barrier, which he did to great empty acclaim because no one could actually make head or tail of what he was doing with Finnegan’s Wake and he wasn’t quite telling. Two extraordinary women also experimented with reinventing language. Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf both produced tour de force works of fiction which challenged readers to be more than an audience at the telling of a tale, but Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and The Making of Americans, as well as Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and The Waves, did more to confirm them as standalone icons than as the vanguard of a breakthrough new ‘dimension’ of writing. Ultimately, Stein did lead to Capote and Woolf to a sad stereotype of tragic women writers with more talent than content. Unfair to say the least. Elsewhere, literary writers essentially traded structure and the quest for meaning in on idiosyncratic first-person narratives about themselves under different fictional names (or in the case of Updike, the same name). Many others just defaulted to unoriginal storytelling to lampoon society’s innumerable traps or advance their sociopolitical agendas/grievances.
None of this was actually taking writing anywhere but farther from the new ‘dimensions’ Hemingway had spoken of. Words had failed, were failing. Art was doing better, but only just. Gertrude Stein knew what a genius Picasso was. So did Picasso. He dismantled representative art before our eyes and then contented himself with repeating himself, having learned words were no more help to his attempts at explaining his work than they were to writers whose whole business was words. But art offered possibilities written literature did not. A successful novel generally spiraled down the drain into some mediocre movie, because movies are even more linear than novels, and they are subject to criticism for how near or far they stray from their source material. Art has its own new dimensional opportunities, which some artists recognized in their work.
The closest we can come to the emerging multimedia opportunity is the thoughtful productions of museums dedicated to Modern Art. That is, Modern Art in the larger sense, including the entire evolution from rococo representationalism, through impressionism, expressionism, modernism, and then post-modernist art. All by himself, Picasso could be the subject of such a multimedia show. Unlike many of his modern confreres, he could draw a horse beautifully. He gave up doing that. His deconstructions can be studied side by side as a progression with attributes of motion through time in a personal artistic quest for the place where the Picasso id merges with the Picasso superego at the end of the road. Quite obviously because so visually, Picasso is painting his way through all the flavors of tantrums of his own narcissism. It’s ugly and beautiful and, yes, a dimension of its own art never really had before. There is, for example, not just one set of Picasso eyes. Not just the subject changes, the eyes beholding the subjects change too, and artist and subject are changing one another, in a new style of metaphysical forensics. [you should see how crazy these words in combination are making AutoCorrect! They want so hard to correct me but don’t even know what characters to type. Hilarious machine madness]. Imagine a gallery exhibition titled “Picasso and the Locard Exchange Principle.”
You may think I’m making this stuff up. But Picasso’s greatest rival ended his days, when age was costing him his own dexterity, a new category of art called collage, which involved borrowings and combinations:
This was not just an eccentric old artist wasting his time. It did have a future in the works of an Andy Warhol and the rappers of early Hip Hop recordings who stole samples of music for backgrounds to their rhymings. Such mixing and matching is illegal because of copyright laws that might have jailed Shakespeare in his day and could have prevented publication of the music score for Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner,” whose melody was plagiarized from an old drinking song.
The mixing and matching and borrowing principle has been a major component of art and literature for 500 years at least. I’ve had professionals in the publishing industry inform me rather patronizingly that a blog isn’t a book. Sure it is. I’ve got several titles in hard copy that started out as blog entries. (One is selling for more than £16 in the U.K.) As with everything else, it’s not where it came from; it’s what it it is in this or some future incarnation.
My model in this is not simply to smuggle blog content into the book world. It is to force the book world into the Internet Universe. We have reached, I have reached, the point where books cannot do what literature needs to be unless publishers can rise above paper as writers have had to rise above typewriters. I’m guessing nobody told William Blake that you can be a poet, yes, and you can be an artist, yes, but art belongs on the wall and a poem belongs in a book. Or he just didn’t listen because he knew they were full
of shit.
Blake wrote the poem, painted the painting, engraved the copper printing plate, and printed it.
I wrote the poem, “sampled” the art I filtered and collaged into this,
and included it in a punk writer narrative I also wrote and linked.
Wrote the story (first ever punk story) for which this
scene was the punchline, swiped the mask and the
tux, collaged it together, and animated it.
working version. There are at least a half dozen hyperlinks from this scene to others (probably
more). The most important is the slender black vertical at the lefthand side of the frame, which
leads to a darkened bathroom. If you squint you can find the light switch and see a sad tableau.
The three examples are all older stuff. There’s a world of new stuff waiting for its place in the current project, along with useful pieces of the old. Why the graphic that begins this post. What I have in my possession is a massive pile of puzzle pieces that all do belong to the same narrative, which has dozens of characters, innumerable scenes and places, and multiple layers of interpretive potential through time. Here’s how it looks to me at the present time.
Still pieces flying through the ether. Some in place, many still waiting to
be placed, and still others needed to fill holes and complete the narratives.
Of course, my puzzle picture is more complicated than the “Blind Man’s Elephant” above. The target picture is more like this one, whose artist modestly titled it “Everything in the World.”
Did I tell you it’s big project? How I’m viewing it in my head.
Here’s how I’m imagining the process of completing it…
But what will it look like and feel like for you? Conceptually at least, it will seem like this…
Like an old game the Brits called Snakes and Ladders. We softened it
in
the U.S. to Chutes and Ladders. You just go zipping around wherever
you want, when you want. Your path will be your version of the story.
In the early going I created a placeholder point of entry called The Game (Which may change…), although you can get a glimpse of it here:
Click the pic for a look at the rudimentary site…
There will be posts and pages and jumping off places galore. There will be a one time, lifetime fee to play, less than the cost of buying a hardcover book today.
I’m writing this down because it’s part of the whole point of attempting the project. What’s important is for people out there in the creative and publishing universes to know that the ways we define literature must change or there will be no literature. Just because there are graphics and the occasional whizzbang effect does not mean there’s no “serious” literary purpose or depth to the end product. Writers have been yearning in this direction for a long time in a lot of different ways. I haven’t even mentioned the one who probably came closest in the literary establishment. Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a book I don’t write about because I have not allowed myself to read it. For a long time that was probably because I was afraid of either being unduly influenced by it to the point of imitation or too intimidated by it to follow the path I’d already laid out for myself. Then, as I got older, I just kept forgetting about him because he was Russian, affiliated with Cornell (with whom I am no longer on speaking terms), and just not my cup of tea in terms of his subject matter. But I feel it’s important to acknowledge the fact that Nabokov clearly understood the profound connection between words and numbers and definitions of wholeness. He is an extraordinary rarity in the modern era for this accomplishment. And it seems certain that he got that far before I did.
Now. As to the finishing of what I have started. It’s time for me to go back to work. No one can say, especially not me, whether I can turn my grand idea into a finished product or whether it will be worth anyone’s effort to explore it if I do. What seems indispensable to me is that I make an all-out effort to take it as far as I can before last call. If you know what I mean.
Now I’m going to let my wife read this post and tell me not to publish it. I will, of course, have to post it so that she can read it and view the video inserts. Just be aware that it may not be posted for long, depending on her verdict. We’ll just have to see what happens next.
[Foot tapping…]
Good to go, I guess. Catch you later.
Don’t click on the pic.
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