——Sometimes I think I must be the nicest person who ever lived, as I watch myself in situations, conversations mostly, and see to what extremes I go, to help other people prop themselves up. Though I barely have time to stand back–it is an ongoing assignment I guess I feel I have been given, like from on high, to talk to other people, like wherever they are–well, not only just talk to them, but sometimes just sit with them and console with occasional looks. I am incredibly thoughtful, all situations hum like with potential for either the application of special kindness, or quick rescue, right around me. Whether I am talking to somebody in earnest about the their most immediate crisis in their personal life, or some guy at the bar who in twenty minutes I have inspired to talk in depth about his race car, I go from one person to another, and I juggle their problems and puff up their triumphs, one and all, I care about them all, I don’t want anybody to suffer the slightest impingement of their own self image, doubt themselves or begin to doubt the world–but I want everyone to be a hero.
——I don’t know how I can convey, really, this sense I have of myself, or rather the importance of this sense I have, that I am such an absolutely nice person–for you see, it is partly by maintaining the superior view of myself, that I empower myself to be superior–and that can only sound like I have some problem myself! In truth, I am sure, only people who have been subject to my ministrations (let’s call them that, for now) get to know how infinitely nice I am. For of course only firsthand are these miracles enacted. All I can do, though as I just said I don’t have time to just revel in my accomplishments, is marvel at the variety of situations, changing, unpredictable, requiring alertness and fast action, or deep consideration and precise tinkering, where I acrobatically display this inveterate quality of being nice to other people. I watch myself in action–I have to watch myself, for I learn from myself; and I am continually amazed at the way I act with other people; what a pulling and clinging effect they have on me, how quickly they can sort of hire me as their new best friend.
——In order to be such a nice person one cannot in fact get a reputation for such, so that others point to you and refer to you as “just the nicest guy” or something. And indeed I don’t, I have a reputation as someone who is all involved in their own ambition. Ha! This is the perfect cloak. A reputation would impede me, in the constant mission. For it would cause people to expect something different, a generic or already accepted niceness, so to speak. As opposed to what one who has a genius for being nice, like myself, can especially provide. I am not regarded as even normally considerate, much less an overt flatterer, by anyone except by those who have received my close assistance, and my building-up affections. For, such is the necessary irony–eh, the martyrdom I face, even they are caused to credit themselves with having created the good feelings that result while in my presence. For you will learn it, my students of humanity, the final nicest thing one can do is leave people with the impression that they have been generous to you. And then that spreads further, I believe, if you have found just the right, universal chord.
——On certain days opportunities flood in, all around me; it’s like there are people waiting in line. Of course I have this strong interest in helping people talk, in becoming articulate, flexing their vocal chords, brandishing words. More than half the time, really most of the time, to begin with people splutter half-baked opinions, pitiful narrations, descriptions you can’t make head or tail of, so very unadept is your average Joe, at making anything clear. Indeed they don’t expect much from the others they are hanging out with, either. So look out, here I come. In order to get interested (and like I said, I can’t stand confusion and vagueness– and take it as my personal duty to make everyone look sharp, and make sense); in order to clue into what this average Joe is saying, say, about his plans to go to the Burning Man festival, or his endless, but also current, job dilemma, I always have to express tremendous, fake interest, and tell them to back up. Say that again! I say. And then I have to quickly display expert understanding, about this niche activity, or that unfettered obsession. Like that guy who is going down to Watkins Glen with his souped up BMW, after I sacrificed forty-five minutes listening to his fundamentally boring and impenetrable obscurities . . . then, sure, he was ready to philosophise. Which you have to be ready for. People are pretty impaled on the big questions, if you can get their confidence; don’t I know that! It is probably my best trait, and greatest of talents, facilitating the speech of these always very shy people (no matter what bluster they hide behind, or smarmy personalities they wear), these people who must be quite fortunate–and feel fortunate that they ran into me on the night, say, before they went to Watkins Glen, or the night when they are all whipped up about having taken their last class at Community College, and I actually ask them about it like I cared, because I do care, I care about them all; and then they find, like it were some coincidence, for I make it sound like a coincidence, the digression to what they really want to talk about, more abstract and serious and binding me to them for that conversation, so that I am their friend, they hail me in the street and come running up like to get some news. I remember with indelible associations the topics of importance to people. I store them up, ready for use, the topics I got an inkling of the last time I talked to them. I get to know people very quickly, and can practically establish good friend status in no time–not nice guy status, mind you, but status as someone whom they can talk to; and most everyone thinks most other people simply cannot be talked to. I venture to say, I am many many people’s favorite exception!
——How’s that? Well, when I was younger the imperative was more to lay it on others, what breakthrough I had made, what rough ideas I was peddling. Now it’s like I am a medic out on the field after the day of battle. There are wounded ones I have been formerly nice to, a pimply balding fellow who gets nothing but dirty looks, who I turned into a helpmate with just a couple self-deprecating remarks, so that he gazed upon me with pity–and it brought his haughtiness into relief. He became my sidekick and defender–sometimes this is exactly the trick, you have to become a kind of pet, a kind of project, for these guys who have learned only to be bullies in life. And then what I can do is wheedle my way into their good graces, and, knowing they are in fact total weaklings, start coaching them to improve their manners, like just for the sport of it. They go around being nice to people for the sport of it! This is all about the goal which is to ladle out niceness, to the needy and the proud, like at a soup kitchen. And the thing is, if I operate on this awareness of myself, what looks like this exaggerated portrait of myself, as the absolute nicest person you have ever met, it works to make me even nicer. Not more vain, self-aggrandising, pretentious, deluded . . . But I can say this awareness functions to spur me on to greater episodes and acts even more daring and invisible, propping up those who have, like spinning tops, begun to wobble.
——This is not the behavior of a saint, far from that explicit and most admirable and rare type of person. Nor are these just acts of kindness that I achieve this niceness with–see how awkwardly I put it now! What I am talking about is the rush to engage, whomever I am talking to, whomever I sense is even slightly stranded, tentative, even as I look at them. I have tremendous sympathy for everyone, just looking at them, and it puts in motion virtual schemes to flatter their being, encourage their self-image, make them aware of themselves as people of mystery, who do not know where they are going . . . People have hidden talents, if you make them part of a plot to find the truth. I think when I get this surge of comradery, I recognize it as unique, something I must be in charge of, my own gift. So it is on a par with other excellences I have charted and mined, out of genuine faith that I was a kind of knight-errant, during my ever so long life. When you get a line on something you can do, you want to step it up, put your foot on the pedal. Let me handle this, I want to say, and I step in like a referee, when I see someone is being shafted, or impinged upon–shall I go on? I am employed, full-time in this endeavor, for what I recognize is an enormous capacity, filled with a sense of possibility, and–I shall only say one more thing now–it is precisely by maintaining this absolute confidence, this standard, that one can in fact increase in one’s ability, to do the thing they have already declared themselves exceptional at.
——Oh my God! Then the mood changes and it seems there are a raft of people in sight, to whom he bears no responsibility at all. Nor is he inclined to seek the mere acquaintance of them, and their obviously futile and vain existences. Though, on balance . . . he feels he is basically a nice person.

This is where we live, a candyland of tulips in the rain at present, including our front yard garden and the neighbors’, topped off by some lilacs blending into the grey mist of the street bending into the . . . future, I want to say, beyond.

——I think what you come to want is a summary, at least a few summaries, maybe even a grand, relaxing, humor-filled summary of life. To match the mood, say, of the late afternoon stretching out. And you realise you can’t have it, because it is obvious there is no place for such a summary, except in the world of thought. But this is not the type of thought that can be located, traced anywhere, it is unaccountable, floating as if not even in your head–but, over there, identical to the late afternoon and the relapsing  twilight, and the calmness just noticed. Of this you would speak; you would make a reference to this mood, while you are in it, while it is out there; but you can’t have this, because it is not produced, certainly, but only an idea that has been caused by sheer accumulation. It is weariness, and it is exhilaration. Moods never strategized, or deliberately visited upon you, but produced out of nowhere, like apparitions that came and replaced the place you are standing. You have been whipped out of here and put back in an identical, but unreal duplicate setting, in the blink of an eye. Standing in your garden, as you bent down to brush the dirt from the bed of tulips, say that, just like that. And the threat is past, before you knew it, but the thought is there; what you have come to want is a summary, at least a few, maybe a grand outtake, on life.  And this is frightening to even consider, and you are not up to it–even though it has been there all the time, the clear desire, the option for a summary of life, a summary even of a day in your life, or some other way of organizing what happens, and how it links to what has happened. And most exhilarating of all, if it can be time for such thoughts!, what will happen.
——One gets into a habit of thought, in which they are engaging memories on the spot, because everything reminds them of something, like it is politely begging to be part of a greater reality; and it is entirely possible and it happens that one works on this reality, where are kept these summaries large and small. So increasingly it is a lure and an enticement, and in fact a newly discovered land, this building reality of thought upon experience and all the depths of experience that one has had before in a life that, really, has been endless. All of which leads to the issue, not squarely addressed, of the location of this type of thought, the location of these built up worlds that link you to your person, your past. There simply is no accounting, by any rational means, for the existence of these complex worlds of interacting experience and memory. They are not in your brain, how ridiculous is that? I will tell you it is more like your brain is within them.  In your case, your case especially!, you have a world of thoughts that are so obscurely tied to untrackable, ethereal, unresolved, fictional, shreds of memory and expectation, it is impossible to house them. To shelter them. And not because of the great number, but because of the type of content. There is a type of thought that is so exposed . . .
—–And you are, in these campfire moods, breaking out in such obscurity, and so much more aware of how inconclusive is the intricate linking of your life to the world. It is not so vast, but only a little hut, a refuge out beyond the horizon, that you have made without even good planning. You are without foundation in all your private thinking.  It has been as if you cannot find a place in your thoughts, where you can hide, and review what has happened. And what it has been like, for it is like something else, tugging at you. You should make provisions, which are summaries, really. And have conversations with the other parties in what seems like a very elementary group; or find some lazy  setting like at the end of the pier out on the beach, where the sun is nicely halted in it’s tracks, for once, or in the backyard by the conference of white wire chairs, or strolling through the streets where all the book vendors have set up, like in history, in London, like that day I recall . . . you can have that day for part of the setting if you wish. It is almost there, if you could turn the corner, but you can’t find the coefficient. The coefficient that is the neighborhood that has no physical twin, and has no location. This is the sequence of thought that is self-generating, and like concurring glimpses of heaven, and once glimpsed, well, heaven is  . . . relentless.
——This is the thought that can create, and I don’t mean just an annex, but material thought that creates the semblance of a physical world, where you are. Thought happens outside the mind and correlates back to it. Your body is an empty husk. This is, also, too much to bear! And it is not what you have achieved, only what you have held on to, and after a while, quietly decided to expand in its very nature. This is the picture of the future, and maybe you will watch it.  And whisper. I do not know, but I tell myself–that now you may expect with this discovery, this explicit labelling, from which there is no return, to promptly suffer a slow exchange,  great thirst and hunger, let’s say, a few dreaded ailments, and background exaltation.  It will be imperative you focus and resist the impression that you are slowly dying.  For nobody dies, if you think about it. You must drag down these angels, bring them to the campfires, and regain your strength.  For surely that will be needed–your strength, I would think. You will note that certain parts of the landscape are missing. And certain parts are lit up, and no camera crew anywhere to be found.

I took this photograph from my car window, down a road not far from Wegmans Food Market, that dead ends amidst abandoned warehouses and factories. It was of one orange shopping cart, strangely abandoned near the railroad tracks. But when I got back and zeroed in on it, there was the second one . . .

—–What I said was that I only do things that only I can do. I got some looks, from three directions, for saying such a thing, and one person even ventured to challenge it. Do you want to repeat that? he said. I wasn’t sure if he was asking me to repeat it because he thought I would trip up, if I tried to repeat it, or whether he wanted to see if heard it it right, before considering for himself whether it was . . . viable. It is something I have come to understand about myself, I said; that I am so constituted as to be only capable of doing things that only I can do. This sounded worse, downright idiotic. Everyone was hanging their heads. What I mean, I said, is that I am a natural born leader, and know no other way than to be a leader. Ah! A natural born leader; here is something to consider. It only occurs to me, I said, rising to my feet, to get involved in things in which I can so far excel, that I must be in charge of the whole shebang. That got their attention, the concept of the whole shebang.
—–Of course this was not a jobs seminar, or a leadership training session; this was a dinner party, and it was after dinner, there were beer cans on the table, and these big salty chips. It was sort of a strategy session, since we are inveterate revolutionary types around here, but mostly one falls into defining what one has already done; that is really the challenge. Defining yourself after the fact, when you have alot of evidence! This is why I said, “I am so constituted”, and “I have learned” that I am a . . . what I am. That I only get involved in things requiring the particular kind of leadership that I naturally have; it is not something I look for, but something I gravitate to, and then wake up in the middle of, because I have already taken charge before I even think to declare myself in charge, you see. Yeah, but what can happen is that the other people question my leadership, the very role, as it has devolved. Too fast were they swept up in my ambition, and the whirlwind visions I have for the greatness of the enterprise.
—–And I have to say that I understand them, what they might be feeling, while I am helpless myself. While I only know how to advance my own ambitions, I understand they are competitors themselves, who may assume they have equal rights. Of course this is without looking at what the thing is all about–because if they did, they wouldn’t even want it, it is way too difficult, one would have to have a special talent, and an unbelievable self-confidence to take up such a project, if you really look it it–that is what I am thinking. For I know I have not taken this mantle on lightly, not in fact without long inward schooling, and sharpening of my skills, and it is not a matter of ordinary leadership skills at all. But more like who is most humble, in the fact of the possibility of greatness, if you really look it it. They should let me be in charge, for I am the only blacksmith in this forge–I am thinking.
—–Or they are followers, who are so shame-faced, they do not want a leader at all, because they shrink from the prospect of having their sheepish mentality made evident. Such is the highly neurotic society we seem to live in, that it can neither accept born leaders, or produce a staff of willing followers! Such is our culture, where there are more writers than readers . . . for God’s sake! But the main point is that I realise–and this is a peculiar insight I now have, keep in mind–that I only get involved in activities in which I am bound to excel. With total humility, and what turns out to be (I have learned, looking back) an infuriatingly calm manner, a cool personality, even a non-chalance in all my actions–especially the actions where am forced to make what you might call “executive decisions”. Calmly, I take the reins. I can be so gracious, it is ingratiating. I am ambition in the extreme when I see the possibility of really excelling in my chosen activity, and, furthermore want to be known as the one who is the central creative force, the exceptional case, the real original. Of course, for what a disaster it would be if someone else were handed the reins! Right off a cliff is where this horse and buggy would go. Watch me now, I will go as far as to work the call for recognition into the very process of getting it, so that my acceptance speech is another and even grander speech.
—–And guess what, I am so authentic that I am naively surprised when my audience doesn’t see every aspect of the irony, the extreme humor, of my success and my travail–which are the same thing. This is the psychology of the tyrant. I retrofit the story as I go, so that the biography is perfect, and the legend fitting. I seem to know the ropes of achieving this kind of dominion and its necessarily attached, worldly fame. Others, those only watching from the sidelines, can always see this glowing confidence and constant magnetism, and will assume I must be very successful in what I do. I exude it. People ask me what I do, just on sight.
—–And yet, really there is only one specific arena in which I operate: literature. And not even literature in general, but one type of high-class, historical literature, which, dear readers!, I am actually so suave as to believe I am defining for the future myself! I am self positioned, obscurity itself. Then again, you could say I am operating in the largest and most well travelled arena possible: language. The arena we all share as readers, voracious readers of everything under the sun, and talkers, non-stop talkers buzzing in sundry, uncountable occasions that call for novelty of expression. . . But language, I say, is my possession, total and wholesale. Somehow by now I have come to regard language itself as my possession. How’s that, for bravado? And mystery–that is my subject, for I am conscious of living in a complete mystery–how many of you can say that? You can recognize the idea, but it is like a childhood memory at best, or a piece of mystic reasoning–to you. But I live there in that mystery, one glimpse and I stayed.
—–Then I went on; I also said that I am a worker in the language mines, and that what I write is a product like an excavation brought up from the mines, and what I have to do is diligently sort it out and express it, and lay it out on the table, right between us, and this is historical gold. I said this is causing a seismic shift, its’ very brother is the technology causing a shift in publishing formats, that fits the anxiety of the moment. The accomplishment is in the writing itself, the subtle material changes in the language–as delivered, wherever one can–ecstatic.  For we are not using a dead medium, but we are working the material of that medium, as present to the occasion. I am the author, I say, of the language–which is at the same time to be the steward of the language, that is the identity I gain in an ever escalating sense of my powers. To honour and to advance, in a whirlwind mystery, by expressible thoughts. Very expressible–that is what I went on saying.
—–And by the time our talking companions left, the lopsided moon had climbed, very awkwardly, into the arms of the radio towers, those stalwarts, steadily blinking as if announcing the arrival, I keep thinking, of an alien craft . . . every night I think this, just as I am closing up the house.

——I received an extraordinary e-mail from another blogger a few days ago that has upset the scheduled flow of these carefully crafted and strategicly ordered postings. It is from a fellow across the Atlantic whose audience I had solicited (that’s the way I put it: “I request your audience”), meaning of course that he should read Black Mirrors, link attached. I felt obliged to inform him of my existence, as a fellow player in the literary blog scene, a new superpower, if you will, in the international highstakes arena where, as all of us know, only writers of enormous self-esteem are even capable of launching their unsanctioned . . . sentences. Now actually I wrote to ten other bloggers, making this same formal plea, wording them all the same; but I received only one, as I say, extraordinary reply.
—— He said that he was in fact already a reader of Black Mirrors, but thanked me for sending, as it were, papers of entreaty and words to the effect (words he understood to be to the effect) that, though I was setting up as a competitor, and clearly, he could tell, was after his crown, as a “king of obfuscation”, as he put it, he having that crown, or at least the crown of king literary blogger, for what it was worth, at present, if only since he had seniority, having been a blogger longer, and a longer blogger, in that his posts and sentences were “way less stentorian” . . . gentler, dreamier, and so on . . . drifting off, as if to demonstrate the very point. Ha! I thought, harmless, you mean. You’re sentences are more harmless than mine–that is for certain! And, they never finish.
—— But, the Englishman continued in this extraordinary e-mail–which I have printed out and am going to show to fifty people–though he was already a reader and even an “apppreciator and fan” of mine; and though, he had to admit, I was “perhaps or evidently” a more dedicated, even more talented player than he, even he; and that he could tell I was probably a fully committed writer, while he was a University Professor doing this literary writing on the side, still he was quite sure that my blog itself, Black Mirrors, was doomed. My blog was doomed! I blinked, and heard like the sound of a slot machine in my head. If I was making an appeal to him to get his endorsement, so as to get his thousands of readers, this was futile, for they would never even begin to comprehend me. They, his readers, would not have the slightest patience for my abstruse rambling, “piercing, incisive, and eloquent as it might be” (his words). As it might continue to be. Simply put, he said, I seemed not to have “the gift of approbation”.
——And, he sensed quite clearly that I was headed for a crisis. Well! I knew what approbation means! One who lacks the gift of approbation, is like one born unapproved. For I had not the knack of approbating myself, or whatever one does to get your entrance fees like paid in advance. I had not the silver spoon, must have been born under a bad sign, off the map, in some town in Western New York or something, where what’s-his-name in Tender is the Night ended up. Doomed indeed.
——But I had to brush up on what “stentorian” meant, so I looked it up in the huge Oxford English Dictionary I keep in my office. Ah! It always pays off to lug this old pal of mine, this entire English language in one volume, over to my desk and take time out to turn over it’s large, super-thin pages, with their columns of tiny print, just crammed with portents, meanings and beautiful obfuscation. For unruly language explodes in all directions. For me, a student in the master class of rhetoric, a master myself now, I know I am going to find material justifications for all my abstruse ramblings, precisely. This is my work. Words themselves are . . . palimpsists containing layers of time, black mirrors that put the sparkle in your eyes.
——Stentor, I read, was a Greek warrior in The Iliad, whose “voice was as powerful as fifty voices of other men.” And further, stentor is “a genus of Protozoa; an individual of this genus, a trumpet-shaped protozoan”. Aha! Though protozoa, of course, in their primitive being and environments, are quite silent, some are shaped like trumpets. Primordial trumpets! Yes. I don’t know whether Stentor, the loud warrior, the herald, in Homer (with whom I identify, in my colossal self-trumpeting vanity) comes before trumpets, on the field of battle–I mean I don’t know what is named after what here–but, anyway, it’s all associated now. And the past only comes to life in the process of these types of inquiries, which I keep saying–but, hark, that is really going far afield, or rather back into my actual field, because what I need to talk about here is this outrageous e-mail I got, from the fellow in England.
——The Professor who e-mailed me knows who he is. But like I said I sent this solicitous request for an audience to ten people all at once, like in a scattershot appeal, and all in England, because England is like, well, always the place for a thriving literary culture. They have always had that there, and American authors never measure up. And, the point is, they must automatically have this attitude there once again, with their subcutaneous (get under your skin) lit bloggers, their post-post-modern Blanchot drones and Lacan fetishers, etc. It is said that Stentor, the herald, whose voice was like fifty men, died in a shouting match with the god Hermes. Hermes, also known as Mercury, is the god associated with travelers and orators, but also thieves. He is roadsigns, a crosser of boundaries, author of transitions. Postmen wear the patch of Mercury on their shirt sleeves, you know.
——Now I can’t tell who I am more like: the fleet, winged messenger god Hermes, or the Homeric herald with the stentorious voice. I guess I will have to look up that scene and mull it over. Do I want to get into a shouting match with fellow obfuscators, over the claim they have made, which is that no one but them could possibly ever understand what I am saying? People understand me all too well, is my feeling. Maybe I should raise my voice with these supercilious, punctilious Brits. These lie-abouts and windbags. I have to discuss this one particular e-mail further with a few of my own advisers. One of the top advisors is coming over tonight! There is just too much to do, it seems–so much to say, and such an excess of words.

——I’ve heard they use that special “full spectrum” lighting at Wegmans Food and Pharmacy, in the fruits and vegetables aisles, flooding the piled high mounds, and bottomless bins, the never depleted rows of fresh produce, the stacks and racks of luscious . . . just give it up, shoppers! Wearing broad grins and drooling, sighing with relief to have found that what is in season is . . . right here!–at Wegmans, you know, the people also look smart. They must dress up to go there, the hungry and the ill-kempt shop elsewhere. A sense of some indisputable triumph fills the air–these are the rhymes, and there must be music playing, or else it is my thoughts. Right here is where you need a shopping cart, I think abstractly, and I look down and lo and behold I have one! So then, I picked up one scorching red, red pepper, selected after due consideration of its shape. Shamelessly one compares the qualifications, as per one’s taste in bodies, and reaches to firmly grasp the strange fruit, or is a pepper a vegetable? But wait, I am distracted by the strawberries, always distracted by the strawberries, and then promptly seduced by the raspberries, wheeling up and reigning in my shopping cart like a whinnying horse. Deftly, I executed a left turn so as to head back into the main lots, to be bathed again in full-spectrum lighting! It was then, that I made the life saving decision, in order to maintain control and establish a plan, suitably whimsical but certain to get me through the virtually limitless store, to limit my selections and purchase only red, items that were red only, please, I said to myself. And hunting on this red alert, I got succulent tomatoes, and Delicious Red Apples, and small red potatoes, red cabbage, red onions, rib steak glowing red through the cellophane! “I don’t know why people don’t use me for more,” I said to my wife, as we were appraising the results of my red shopping spree, laid out as if for a photo shoot on the gleaming white kitchen table.

-

——But in the very next moment there I was standing next to the fierce woman in the alpaca suit, at the Oxford Gallery art exhibit opening, “Awakenings; Images of Spring”. Frankly, she said, she was impressed with the prices of some of the paintings. The huge frame before us, large as a picture window, contained within it a bevy or a bourn, or rather an unappealing, masterfully rendered mass of flowers–floating, or rather superimposed, because one could not switch focus fast enough, above or rather right within the punch bowl. And what a punch bowl it was! The woman in the alpaca suit’s gazing eyes were fixed on the floating glacier, which had the painting beat, in terms of visual stimuli, is what I would say. Anyway, she said to me: “Do you know how much that painting costs!” Well, considering that it was featured in the place where one was forced to look if they wanted some of this delicious golden punch, I would venture to say, “Six thousand dollars?” I shouted back that back, and then I pointed through across the room and said “I wonder how much that one costs.” It was my wife’s painting of a DUSTPAN (of all costly things). Simultaneously, I muttered under my breath: “This is too difficult, I can’t talk this way.” I took a step, three steps, to change the story, but then I noticed how time had not just halted, as it often does, but was now calmly proceeding in reverse. People were even walking backwards, backpeddling as they seemed to be trying to get into my photograph–the one I was about to take.

——I see where this is going. The trajectory is to convey boundless exhilaration, making a public display of a hidden self. Suddenly one is perforce a clown, publishing material that is of necessity, and by its own nature, quickly composed, dished out, or shall we say apportioned . . . and anonymously! No one knows who you are, how could they? Every step is a further step towards shedding a false-in-life identity, while remaining compelled by an inner drive. To blather, and to spew. It is not to offer thoughtfully worked out expositions, that is certainly a laughable (even a historical!) occupation, but it is to be a diary writer. To let the night in, and the world watch you. We greet with a broad, inexplicable grin, the inversion of previous forms of speech. Now we must be spontaneous broadcasters–but since most of us do not want to be this (why would we?), it is left to a few aggressive souls, to rush into this media void. There are really only a few, I told my compadre, who are spewing. “That’s rum,” he said. And the fact that this inversion has come upon us unheralded, overnight, clearly indicates that it will be the worst, the loudest, the ignorant, the most deluded who shall learn all this new, always newer, what is it? . . . technology. They will say the technology made them do it. Most of us will remain merely stunned. I feel this practically physical pull to produce more and more as if to prove myself, turn myself inside out, rambling on the page. They want my notebooks! For I am like Da Vinci. Inventor of the airplane.

——You think these are a few incidental reflections on the situation in life, like inserted as appetizers, or just hung in the gallery in a corner? No, they are the whole show and the context in which life, such as you perceive it, actually happens. These are not side points, mon cher, or mere idle, mere profound, commentary–why do you think I have this habit of suddenly whispering in your ear? These are the definitions, the planks and the running boards, for I am foundational, like . . . Aristotle, you will say.

——–The first time he offers a description of himself, he is some of kind of music agent, who represents bands, books their gigs I imagine, handles publicity one would assume. He has a jaunty air, and looks the part, a little secretive, decidedly smug; he’s got crazy colorful badges sewn onto his denim jacket, and he’s staking out the bar, you can tell, just by standing there right at the moment. Being a scout is his nature–the way I figure it. He doesn’t know I am established as a celebrity around here, we just met. In fact he is so much younger, he is no doubt just being polite, standing next to me with his pint of Guinness half-raised to his lips. He is a kind of a manikin, I am thinking. The plausibility of such an occupation, music representative, here in this city, which we like to refer to as medium-sized–we always say, Rochester is a medium-sized city in upstate New York, or we say Rochester is a town in Western New York, which sounds better to my ears anyway–the viability, in other words, of such a job as full-time agent for musicians, I would have to say flatly, is nil. So one wonders when they meet someone who advertises themselves, though only providing sketchy details I note, as such. Now every time I try to write anything even faintly reportorial, these days (though I used to be a glib journalist, capable of the prolix, and the jocular vein), the sentences take a certain trajectory, as if on their own, roping me into conclusions, and absurdities. Expanding, go these sentences, as if I had only an ill-defined grasp on my subject, and then (of course) pulling defiantly up to a stop. Thought itself in a grand, but futile metaphor describes the flight of an aircraft which takes off well enough, but then has engine trouble and crashes, similar to that plastic motorized Piper Cub, I had when I was twelve. After being laboriously assembled in the living room, this doomed craft only took one flight in the schoolyard. Now, though, it is one of the handiest of my parables, the maxim derived from it being: picking up the pieces is part of life. People configure occupations that relate to what interests them, or confounds them; this is why the rebel fits the bill, better than the straight man these days. And I could tell my new friend, whose nickname was Fletch, was well suited for this occupation of music agent, even if he was faking it, or crashing in the act.
——–Another night, and the next time I endeavor to get this young man to enlarge upon the activities that keep this music representing business of his going, he is friendly, but brushes me off the topic. He says it is going slowly right now. I also note, at this juncture in our slowly evolving friendship, that he isn’t very articulate, to begin with. One would think this, whether it is shyness, or too abundant thoughtfulness, or tragic lack of verbal skills, might hamper him in a field where he has to interact with creative persons . . . like musicians. In my experience with musicians, which is appreciable, they need constant coaxing. (Not to mention lyrics!) Or maybe it is a slow season. Then of course I have to realise this is not New York City, but indeed a mere ”medium town”, as another writer put it. It is possible that Fletch, or Scratch, which some call him, believes you are trying to encroach upon his territory, I say to myself, because, after all, all he knows about me is that I am a free-lance writer–which hypertrophied self-description I often use when first talking with interesting characters at this bar–those who are unaware of my celebrity status, past and present.
——–It seems like I am always in between times in my life, I reflect, either days of former glory in the memory, or days of promise yet to flower, while the day at hand fairly drab and dimly lit, with only a few inarticulate stragglers, needing encouragement, immediately in my sight. But suddenly it seems like Fletcher has undergone a catharsis, of some sort, or suffered a crisis of conscience over the impression he has given me, and probably others, and wants to confess that he really isn’t a music representative at all, at least not full-time. Well! I hadn’t challenged him, though I might have been trying to figure out how to undermine him, emotionally, because I knew there was something implausible, as I keep saying here . . . But now he is telling me that he has a day job in his Uncles’ hardware store, where he handles shipping, and works behind the counter. He makes keys (here is a subject we can get into: you would be flabbergasted to know how many people lose their keys). The hardware store, one of the last of it’s kind, is over on Dewey Avenue, and now I wake up and I realise this kid is way younger than I thought! He has made a great effort just expressing this set of facts, like he didn’t know what order to put them in, so as to build a plausible presence, in my presence; and I realise that I am like a rock-of-ages, an institution, if you see what I mean, from this kid’s point of view. I am, well, like his Uncle, but with added depth and mystery, and after all, in his scene. He is perhaps even awestruck by my presence. Seeing it from his point of view, I quickly therefore endeavor to relax the whole flow of our suddenly burgeoning comraderie, and I make bold to substantiate the talk, by way of the sacrifice some biographical info. More or less correct even.
——–Confidentially, I told him I was self-conscious, myself, about how I appeared to be the oldest fellow in the bar, tonight at least. That is the way I put it too, “the oldest fellow”. The interesting thing, though, I told him, is I always used to be the younger person, in whatever crowd, and now–well, to make the general assessment, it seems that I have never been the person who was the right age, anywhere, in whatever scene I was in. How’s that? Always younger, or older. Like in this bar, these days–and you could say I actually haunt this place!–I joked. “I guess I never will be the right age, if this is where I am going to end up,” I said. That was a joke that crucified me, but it was more important that I make this kid real. The point is, I went on, Bob Dylan isn’t just a song writer who provides other people including himself with lyrics. No, he writes songs for himself, and if he couldn’t sing them they wouldn’t get written at all. I made this transition so smoothly, and with such authority, it was not about to be countermanded.
——–“That is what I am talking about,” I asserted. I was hoping Scratch, or rather Fletch, whose real name I was to find out is Richard, had been listening–but, whether he could see the expansive analogy or not, I was willing to appear suddenly an as old codger talking Bob Dylan, as so many of do, for this is a distinction, that needs to be made when it spontaneously occurs, wherever. It isn’t the first time that exact point, about Bob Dylan being a singer first and providing himself with his own material, and not the other way around, has been dragged in; I think I used it, though futiley, in a conversation with my brother, who thinks Dylan shouldn’t even try to sing his own songs, because “he has the worst voice any singer ever had.” But it turned out my young friend was earnestly listening, and whether or not he saw the beauty and logic of the transition in the larger conversation, he did clue into the Dylan bit–and was puzzled by it. Mostly puzzled about how sure I was about it, he’d have to think about the point itself, himself. “You sound like you are pretty sure about that,” he said.
——–Well, it is always a question whether one wants to appear as a man whose thoughts have come from meditation, or as one who lives from one inspiration to the next–when called upon to defend your self-confidence. I decided upon the former, which, in a pinch, I usually do, these days. Since a man of my age should (perhaps) have considered most everything by now, every mystery and every absurdity, and shouldn’t just be getting around to . . . crying over the flight of his first toy airplane. Meanwhile, this all related to the music business, and that might be the best that could be said of it, because the whole description (the one I carry away, and the one you are reading, Theopolis), is corrupted from the outset, because from the very first sentence it set up a situation that isn’t even accurate to what happened. It’s like elementary school fiction writing.
——–I feel like starting over! This young man never offered descriptions of himself, much less consciously revised one. He stood there implacable, inscrutable, ageless; and what are those patches on his sleeve! What, does he belong to ten different secret societies? I think, he is like some overgrown Boy Scout . . .