THE BUS STOP: Chapter 3 (kinda sorta)

As we were reviewing, the two women were finishing up with the housecleaning, and just at that point where Lena would sneeze. And she did just that, rather loudly, as always. But right between the first and second sneeze—just as Lena began rolling her shoulders back and pushing her chest forward to pull in a sufficient volume of air for the next sneeze—there came such a violent banging on the front door that it scared the sneeze right back to wherever it is sneezes come from. As she wiped her startled and somewhat disappointed nose, Oma opened the door to find a rather voluptuous, so to speak, woman standing on her front step. Lena smiled and cocked her head to one side and walked to the door. It was her neighbor, Frau Janss, one of her family's oldest friends, whom Lena had known since before memories began. Frantic and out of breath, she was leaning on the porch post and trying to recover from what was evidently some fairly serious exertion. As soon as she'd recovered enough to stand up straight Frau Janss lurched through the doorway, shoving Lena back inside the house, nearly knocking her off her feet and slamming the door behind her.
She was a fairly grandmotherly woman herself—Frau Janss was—though a good thirty years Oma’s junior. Yet despite the intruder’s relative youth, nor even the fact that this intruder wouldn’t have looked a bit out of place on stage with a Viking helmet on—these seeming setbacks had no deterrent effect on Oma, and Lena only just managed to fend off the blow from Oma’s cane before it dented the younger Frau’s unfortunatley helmetless cranium.
Frau Janss, however, far less interested in Oma than Oma was in her, merelyy grabbed the cane and tossed it across the room before locking Lena in a bearhug. Oma stood there, stunned and listened, through Frau Janss breathless sobs, as she said, “Lena, Liebchen, you can’t go home.”

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Lena introduced the two old women, and Frau Janss set about telling the horrible tale of what had happened at Lena's house earlier that day. After buckets of tears and prayers and swearing, and after much earnest cursing of Nazis, the two old Fraus decided right then and there that Oma’s was about as safe a spot as one could find for a "a, …uh,…well, for a girl who is just a wee tiny bit, uh…well…slow, you know,” Frau Janss said quietly to Oma after Lena left the room to go make some tea. Oma nodded knowingly as Frau Janss volunteered to bring whatever surplus food she could scrape up, and get to work on getting her hands on the medicine Lena took to control her palsy.
“Without it liebchen will be shaking like a child in the snow,” said Frau Janss. “She just won’t be able to function, at all, and she’ll…. she’d…probably…. Well, suffice it to say, Oma, she’s just got to have that medicine. There’s no two ways about it. You understand that, Oma?”
Oma laid her spindly fingers across Frau Janss’ massive forearm, looked over the tops of her bifocals at her and said, “She’s a precious child. The lord Jesus won’t let those hounds touch a hair on this child’s head. I just know it.”
“Hmph,” Frau Janss grunted, turning to Lena as she returned with the tea. “I’ll be back with some food and clothes as soon as I can scrape them together. DO NOT answer the door to anyone. ANYONE, mind you! And if anybody comes, Liebchen, you run hide under the bed; or the two of you find some better hiding place. Do you understand, Liebchen?” Lena nodded rapidly, understanding the urgency, if not the big picture. Wide-eyed with fear as she was, her lips still couldn’t help but betray her incorrigible, albeit nervous smile. Frau Janss kissed Lena on the forehead, whispered some encouragement in her ear and left.

Lena and Oma stared silently out the window and, as the buxom woman waddled away down the path and disappeared into the forest, Oma slipped her spindly arm around Lena's waist.

At least she's on the right track

"If we do not help to educate our friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family--" warns Karen DeCoster via the LewRockwell.com site, "via encouraging independent and critical thinking--we will see a fascist state that will far surpass the Hitlerian totalitarian system or Stalinist regime. We may not be starved and locked behind a fence, but the masses will be stripped of all self-sufficiency, freedom of choice, mental stamina, skepticism, and the ability to discern between what is morally right or wrong."

Hello! Hey, Karen, are you in there? Well, if you can hear me down there in that pitch black cave you're living in.........

Seriously, though, "stripped of all self-suffiency, freedom of choice, mental stamina, skepticism, and the ability to discern what is morally right or wrong;" sounds pretty much like she's summed up about, oh, say, 75% of Amerikans. And that's probably being a bit too generous. How else can we explain away the likes of Oprah? Or Survivor? Or that rythmic noise known as hip-hop? C'mon, "get a thousand dollars back when you buy a new Chevy!"???? Cocoa Pebbles? Or how about that new cultural staple: the award show of the week?i.e. grammys, emmys, mtv music awards, country music awards, and that biggest circle-jerk of all, the oscars (capitalization omitted out of disdain).

No, Karen, I submit to you that homo sapien sapien americanus has evolved (or been selectively bred, I'm not sure which) from the farmer/hunter-gather we once were---way back when our first hardy forebears clambered off their rickety little boats and began their multigenerational westward migration on their way to California, where men were men, so very long ago---into our present pathetically spineless, docile, begging subspecies known a Sheeple.

And like lambs led to the slaughter we don't even so much as put up a fight. No indeed, we just try to stay as close to the lamb in front of us, so as not to stand out and draw attention to ourselves from that Hitlerian Totalitarian regime guy loading up the boxcars.

Ms. DeCoster continues with what appears to be an at-least-mildly-sensible, albeit pragmatically meaningless, cliche. To wit:
"Arming the people with knowledge, however, is our best defense against a creeping totalitarianism that will otherwise go unimpeded."

I might add that arming the people...period (with deadly weapons), is actually the best defense against a creeping totalitarianism; for when a person (even a rooseveltian socialist!) arms himself, he begins to understand that he is ultimately responsible for his own pursuit, of life, of liberty, or security, wealth, sex, drugs, rock & roll, (maybe a big black SUV and a good christian school for the resulting progeny of those heady days of sex, drugs & rock'n'roll); then will he begin ceasing to be a sheeple. Which is where the knowledge must begin: learning about the history of freedom, resistance, uprising. Yet knowledge alone, sans practical application, will only produce yet more generations of sheeple, after their brief stint as libertarian-leaning republican youth, of course.

Jefferson

That damn cat!

No it's not a star-rump.

I tried to find a picture of that legendary sternhinterteil deer, but it seems they were extinct before the camera was invented, and the only paintings of them known to exist were buried in the smoldering rubble of the National Museum in Berlin.

Anyway, they're similar to the Axis deer of India (basically a tall, skinny rodent with horns), only instead of being covered with "stars," like the Axis, they only had them on their butt. You can find the Axis on a zillion different web pages.

(My cat, Knuckles, been bugging me to post this for months now, so I figure this is as good a spot as any. By the way, it's a squirt gun, AND the safety was on, in case there's any PETAfreaks out there. And you know how hard it is to say no to a kitten, especially when it's standing there waving at you with both hands, mewing "squirt me, squirt me." )

Marrs

THE BUS STOP: Chapter 2

(if you'd care to put things in chronological order, you can go back and read "7 April, 1943: The Bus Stop. I'll figure some chaptering method, sooner or later.)

It wasn’t exactly invisible—Oma’s cottage—but it might just as well have been. Perched on a quiet, wooded hillside on the edge of town, it had been built as a groundskeeper’s cottage, situated in the middle of what was, some 700 years earlier, a favorite secret hunting grounds of the regional gentry. Way back then, it was located in a nearly impenetrable, swampily lush green forest, far removed from the nearest town. Still very wild wilderness in those days. And in that dark wilderness there lived a certain species of deer: a rather smallish, somewhat spindly and nervous, always extremely reclusive subspecies; each male individual of which possessed a triangular constellation of "stars" on his diminutive rump.

Now, any right-thinking person with even a rudimentary understanding of the concept, indeed, the law of calories-earned versus calories-burned, would immediately see that the pursuit of such an insignificant little critter would be less than economical, calorically speaking. And that person would be absolutely correct: it was hardly worth the effor of one man--the days of tracking through swamps, the picking off of thumb-sized leaches, the crotch rot, and the inevitable injuries (to the tracker slaves, of course). This dragging of a whole gang of ostentatiously clad royals, not to mention each of their entourage, for days on end through such a formidable environment, well, it was pure madness. But, as is common knowledge from St Petersburg to Gibraltar, madness has always been a hallmark of the european royals, indeed, royals everywhere. And still appears to be.

Madness notwithstanding, these nobles so loved these dear creatures, their little sternhinterteil, or star-rumps in the native tongue, that they felt compelled to line their castles’ dens and drawing rooms and dining halls with the fragile creatures' heads, so they could possess and look upon their fair beauty and their doe eyes—forevermore. An odd proclivity we commoners nevertheless seem to share with our arched-brow betters.

But, alas, all things pass. The prize deer, dull creatures they were, eventually grew weary of being shot at, moved out of their swampy forest and, finally, disappeared from that part of Europe altogether.
(Nobles, on the other hand, never weary of shooting, nor having their vassals shot at; or so it would seem when one peruses a bit of history. Always the ingenious sort, these German royals of course found other things to shoot at. Namely Russians, Poles, Frenchmen, pretty much anybody willing to stand and shoot back; and when all else failed, and no enemies appeared to be on the horizon, they simply shot at each other.)

Centuries passed and, save for a few desiccated specimens bolted to museum walls, the tiny sternhinterteils were all but forgotten. It follows, obviously, that having now no need for these muddy, vermin-infested hunting grounds--which had long since been emptied of their only reason to visit in the first place--that the land was neglected. And it further follows, of course, that since those long forgotten and mythically glorious days of yore, that those mythically glorious hunting grounds and their ostentatious lodges and stables (complete with their considerably less ostentatious servants’ and porters’ and trackers' quarters) had for the most part been sold off to, shall we say, less noble nobles.

Then stolen back.

Then resold…and restolen.

Then divvied up and squabbled over. And further neglected; so many times, in fact, that no one actually knew who the forest really belonged to. And even if they did, the once-palatial lodges and stables and servant's quarters, after eight generations of entirely ignoble neglect, were after all completely forgotten and fell into a very sad state of disrepair. And, finally, after all those generations of blood spilt, both human and deer, one by one, they simply fell down.

All but one, of course. And that one just happens to be a rather cozy little stone cottage—the one Oma lived in.

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It wasn’t large, even by 16th century standards. And though it wasn’t particularly ornate, it was rather niche-ey (in that peculiarly Dutch aspect of the more utilitarian of German architecture). Now, as you’re already aware, Lena was a tad, shall we say, ponderous when it came to thinking things through. In fact, though she couldn’t quite put it into words, Lena did have an inkling, so to speak, that she was, well, as Oma put it, “maybe just a tad bit…imperturbably…contemplative” (always out of earshot of Lena, of course).

Since cleaning Oma's house was a better-part-of-the-day project for Lena, she didn’t rush; she was in no hurry to finish, and Oma was in no hurry for her to leave. But, as always, she would eventually complete her work, after about five or six hours—and, as always, after the requisite chit-chat, the two would would end up standing in the middle of the living room, shoulder to shoulder, admiring the result of Lena's naturally fastidious nature.

Another Tuesday's work well done, the inspection begins: Lena standing ramrod straight with her hands clasped behind her back; Oma steadying herself with both hands on her wobbly cane. They survey the day’s accomplishments, nodding their approval—the way women do. Then, after Oma points out two or three obligatory specks of dust or just-slightly-less-than-perfectly-square doilies, and once they're both satisfied, Lena steps outside to smack the feather duster a few times on the trunk of a small willow—the way her mutter always does—then she steps back inside and slides the feather duster into the umbrella quiver by the door. This signals to Oma the job is officially done and that Lena is ready to collect her 50 pfennigs, which Oma happily counts out, einer nach dem anderen, from Oma’s weathered old trembling fingers, into Lena’s young, smooth, albeit also trembling ever so faintly, palm.

After pocketing the day’s earnings she gives Oma her hug-and-a-kiss-till-next-week; Oma happily reciprocates; they harmonize “Auf Weidersehen,” and Oma watches through the window as Lena disappears into the forest, her shortcut through the thicket that separates the little hideaway form the city. The tiny trail meanders imperceptibly, to all that is but a few mice and hares and one skinny girl, winding through the dense forest for a quarter of a mile-or-so before abruptly dumping the budding fraulein out onto the Straussplatz, the busy street onto which Lena seems to magically appear from the forest. She invariably squints, even if it was raining, purely out of habit. Visoring her brow with an open and downturned palm, she heads westward, strolling unhurriedly the last mile-and-a-half to the little greenish gray house on Hurststrasse; where every Tuesday afternoon she's met by her mutter, Hellen, on the porch of the house they've shared---with a slowly yet steadily evolving extended family of two cats, one Pomeranian, and three lovebirds—all of her short, smiling life.

Such were Tuesdays for Lena. And though it was, practically speaking, her Monday of the week, it was, in terms of fun anyway, the day equivalent to your average child's Friday; for it was the only day she was allowed to wander so far from home, alone, and without anyone to tell her "do this-do that-be careful, leibling-watch out for such and such," etc., etc. Indeed, as she walks toward home she feels that electric sense of adventure, always secretly hoping that something will happen, something that might cause her to turn down one of the side streets, something that might require her to step into a bus and go downtown. But she knew that Mutti would be worried sick and make a silly fuss, maybe even call the police like she did the time Lena fell asleep in the garden shed.

But lets not get too far ahead of ourselves. Lena, as always, after beating out the feather duster on the willow, carefullys inserts it in the quiver by the door. But I neglected to mention one thing: sneezes. You see, after putting the duster away, but before their final dust-particle inspection and subsequent approval-nodding ritual, Lena, as always, reaches into her apron pocket and produces a clean, pressed, folded handkerchief and then proceeds to sneeze, blissfully , twice. After which she carefully wipes her nose, methodically refolds the handkerchief and, finally, tucks it back in to her apron pocket. Then, with a well-earned sense of job-well-done-ness, she pat her apron pocket with her open palm—three times. You can bank on it.

Actually, though, upon further consideration, I can see that it was two things I neglected to mention. You see, before the sneezing and nose-wiping and pocket patting, yet after the approval nodding, she follows Oma around as the crotchety, generous old frau inspects, quite literally, every nook, niche and cranny (I've yet to figure just exactly what a cranny actually is. I include the category simply because if they existed in Oma's cottage, she surely inspected them), not to mention literally every flat surface in the cottage, ceilings notwithstanding.

It's the same scene every week: der inspektor Oma, trifocals perched high on her narrow nose, craning her leathery neck while hunching over ever so slightly, one knobbly trembling hand resting atop the other on the cane's handle. She smiles, nodding her approval, a tiny spark flashes behind her ever-attentive eyes as she stops to explain, as always, the origins of a vase, or maybe to twist a yarn about her dear boys, “God rest their souls.” She sighs. Lena smiles, nodding. The inspection resumes, and as it progresses, Oma happily attempts to reconcile her fragmented memories to one another, halting occasionally, midsentence, to lightly nibble on the left side of her bottom lip, or to scratch her neck or clean her glasses and decide whether the current story belonged to little Willem or Fritzy, "God rest his soul."

Of these meandering adventures and mishaps Lena was well versed. Nevertheless she listened each and every time with wide-eyed wonder; and much to Oma’s amusement; for, as Oma speaks, Lena (absolutely unintentionally and completely unaware, of course) silently mouths the words as Oma speaks. Years ago, when she first noticed this seemingly rude behavior, she was a bit miffed, but she held her tongue, thinking it might be just an inconvenient idiosyncracy, and peculiar to such "slow folks." But over the years Oma had come to expect it; indeed she now sometimes subconsciously read Lena's lips, metering her own speech patter so as to perfectly synchronize the two. Sort of a harmless rythmic game Oma played, with Lena necessarily unaware of her involvement---obviously---for, had she been conscious of it the game would be spoilt. They two friends had, Oma felt with a sense of gratitude to the heavens, over the years become quite a team. "Jah," she often whispered to herself, "quite a team."

But, this day—this one particular Tuesday in 1940—the routine would be interrupted, and things would begin to change for the two women.

(continued)

More on Lena next time. Until then.....there's just something about purple.

Audio Voyeur Moment: On conveying ideas & concepts

Snippet of conversation overheard at Starbucks: two college-age girls discussing a certain writing class, and on the fickle art of conveying one's ideas & concepts to the reader:

Girl 1: "[Writing] kindamaybesorta seems like when you tap your fingers to a song playing in your head: y'know, You can hear the melody in the tapping."

Girl 2: "Yeah! I always wondered if anyone else could hear that."

Girl 3: "Mm-hmm. And you can sit there and tap out Flight of the Bumblebee, hearing all the horns and violins and drums and cymbals, all coming from your fingertips on the countertop!"

Girl 2: "But all the rest of us just hear tap-tap-tap.

Girl 1: "That's what it seems like to me."

Girl 2: "Me three."

(Me thinks Girl 1's already found the key.)

Titans & Gods

My coal-miner uncle once wrote me:

Dear Marrs,

(small talk deleted)

Theres lots of time to think down here in the hole and after 23 years I finaly come to the conclution that existanse per say as far as I can figure its sorta like this. (sic)

(punctuation added) If you happen to have gotten lucky enough to have had all of your particles blown in the right direction during the most recent Big Bang; and those particles happen to have gotten sucked into the galactic orbit in which earth now spins; and those particles happen to have been lucky enough to have been of the just the right atomic weight, density, and distance from the center of our as-yet-unformed solar system; and those particles were fortunate enough to be sucked into the mass which congealed to form of this thing commonly referred to as Earth; and those particles managed to end up in their recycling phase at just the right time and place to be used as the organic material—the stuff we so unimaginably narrowly describe as 'living'—recruited by some DNA molecule to become one of gazillions of sperm; of which only a few trillion will ever have even the remotest of chances of at developing; of which only a relatively few billion will ever have a chance to actually fertilize an egg; of which only roughly 10-25 percent will actually develop into humans; of which only about 25% will survive long enough to actually emerge from the initial stages (9 mos) of life to become viable human beings; of which roughly 25% will mature to fully developed human beings.

In short, Marrs my boy, if you can still read this you've already overcome every obstacle the universe has ever thrown at you. (Your present troubles ain't even a stubbed toe in comparison!) And if infinite journeys full of impossibly difficult tasks with an individual success rate which is probably a number with a decimal point on the left, a ‘one’ on the right and a whole truckload of zero's in between. And if these incredible journeys make heroes, then we’re all Titans and Gods and survivors of the most fantastic and wonderful kind.

It brings new meaning to being alive if you can just take one big giant step back and look at the whole picture (or at least as much as our teensy little brains can focus on). You realize then that even the weakest and lowliest of us have traveled millions and millions of billions of miles. Hell, Marrs, you and I, we’ve passed through and overcome everything from black holes to your aunt Karylyns lutefisk!
And survived em all!

Live good,
(Your Favorite Earthworm),
Uncle Ruud



(Illumination often comes in the darkest of places! Thanks again, Earthworm.)

The Bus Stop
7 April, 1943

9:15 a.m, at bus stop #371, Breslau St., on the outskirts of Berlin.

More than likely you weren’t there.

But had you been, and if then was now, you’d surely notice sitting next to you a girl. Or woman. Hard to tell, all bundled up as she is. If you were forced to guess, you’d probably guess this young girl/woman must be somewhere between fifteen and twenty. A bit on the frail side. She’s sitting there on the bench, just an arm’s length away, just to your right, waiting for the down town bus.

Her name is Lena, and she’s what we—you and I, here in her future—what we’d call developmentally challenged. Most people just call her, “that retarded girl,” or “that idiot Judenfraulein.”

Of course you couldn’t possibly know all that; as she sits there across the bench from you, faintly humming a tune. It’s a soft, simple tune which, though you’re not familiar with it, has all the universal childlike qualities of a nursery rhyme. Of course it doesn’t even cross your mind that she’s a haflung—a half-breed Jewess—what with that one stray sandy blonde lock spilling out from under her hood, trickling down off her shoulder as if a bit of Germanism might be leaking out and running down her coat.

Only the profile of her unmistakably Aryan nose and her brave Nordic cheekbones, pink from the chill, poke out beyond the frayed hems of her woolen hood. Her eyes remain hidden from you, for the moment, leaving you free to gaze and wonder what lies hidden from your view. The fact of it is, as you’ll momentarily see, it’s her eyes alone, two pools of liquid obsidian, that link her to her ancestors—Abraham and Sarah.

Luckily today, thus far anyway, those eyes—eyes which seem to impart the sense that she can’t remember what it is she’s happily surprised about—those eyes haven’t yet betrayed her. Even when they do call attention to themselves, and they surely will before long, the mere genetic circumstantial evidence of eye color alone is not (not yet anyway) sufficient to outweigh what would appear to be her quintessential German-ness.

But, of course, you’ve no way of knowing all that. Truth be told, it’s the lack of access to those eyes, the burqa mystique, so to speak, compelling you to wait, and stare, with impunity—waiting for just the merest of glances, for just a flash of that irresistible thing, that utterly unique essence, which your mind can never in a million lifetimes imagine, a priori, on its own: her universally singular womanliness.

Neither can you see her aching hands trembling, stuffed as they are, deep into the warm refuge of her heavy wool coat—a wool coat much too large for her hungry frame. Nor do you detect under the almond wool the faint, steady quaking of her shoulders.

But you do notice the coat itself, evidently bright red when it was new, yet faded and threadbare now, from the many seasons comforting Lena’s grandmother, then her mother, and now Lena herself. You wonder if this girl won’t be the last to wrap herself in this clunky, yet oddly graceful, jacket. The sad thought occurs to you, as you sit there in the biting chill, that this coat may be the last of the hand-me-downs handed down a centuries-long line of mothers and daughters; the bittersweet exchange of dresses and plates and chairs and beds and shoes, passing them forward, mother to daughter, down the ladder of generations and right into the here and now. Your mind drifts and you see them, these hard, square-jawed women, marching down through the brutal middle ages in their so-typically soldier-like German-ness; sometimes happily, sometimes doggedly, yet always faithfully rearing up one generation after another of Lena’s Jewish German folk. You close your eyes for a moment and you see this woman’s cozy jacket Lena’s great-grandmother helped Lena’s grandmother into on the day she knotted the last threads now comforts Lena, sheltering her from the gusty, frozen breeze. But, far more importantly for Lena, this gift from the past hides her inherited imperfections.

Right now it’s her closest friend. Maybe, in fact, her only friend now, as far as she knows. And as you watch and wonder what she’s thinking about, she’s remembering her Mutti wearing that same jacket. She remembers hanging on to the same pockets which now hide her hands. She remembers tagging along behind her Mutti on mornings just like this, hiding from the frigid gusts behind its long, once-plush skirt. You see a slight movement inside her hood he looks out from her woolen hiding place, remembering, gazing at a playful little leaf-strewn whirlwind, no taller than the bus stop you share, as it meanders down the lane, zigzagging along toward the bench you and her share.

The tiny little twister ducks around a corner, hiding momentarily in the leeward refuge of an apartment building’s stairs, reappearing only to duck once again behind a broken down milk truck. It sucks up a few more leaves and a scrap of a brown paper bag to dump on top of the two of you as it makes its way down the quiet street.

Lena watches it bobbing and weaving, like a drunken ghost, towards her. She fights the quaking in her shoulders, exacerbated now by the thought of the windy chill it brings with it. She knows better than to draw attention. But, if you look closely, you’ll see she’s losing the battle with her unruly muscles. With no medicine for three days now, her jaw, though clenched tight, shivers, and she’s unable to hide it when she turns away from the harmless little twister; and in so doing provides you a fleeting glimpse of her face.

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You flinch inside, unable to conceal the sympathy you feel upon seeing the pain she’s enduring. And after the initial shock there’s pity, but only for a moment—till your better judgment takes over. Yet, in that brief moment of pity, you realize you have an almost overwhelming urge to wrap your arms around this poor girl, take her home, take care of her.

Almost overwhelming; but you’ve been trained for moments like these, and you’re prepared. "You must be willing," they drilled into you at the Hitler Youth meetings, "to cast your emotions aside, to trample your own proclivity towards pity, for it is a weakness we cannot afford."

But what thoroughly confounds your sensibilities is her eyes. Is it because, though pain racks her face, her eyes reflect only kindness, and goodwill? No, that’s not it—it’s something else—you can’t put your finger on it, at first. Quickly though, you seize upon the ambiguity, the confusion. But you see it’s on your part—not hers. Her eyes are at once the beautiful, beckoning eyes of a young woman in her prime, yet at the same time they are the eyes of a child—trusting, happy, imploring, eager.

But lets not get the cart before the horse, as they say.

I should tell you, since you obviously have no way of knowing this either, that until this blustery morning Lena has been living with a crotchety old widow, the Frau Beckenhauer. Actually she’s been living in frau Beckenhauer’s house till this morning. The poor old woman gave up the ghost four months ago now, a mere two weeks short of her ninety-third Christmas. Oma, as Lena called frau Beckenhauer, had living on her own since she lost her husband, and her sons, and virtually all the remaining men in her family during the Great War, almost thirty years ago now. In a way, you see, Lena and Frau Beckenhauer were both sort of orphans—"folks without folks" as Lena's mother put it to her—and there was an unspoken agreement between them, to take care of each other.

Lena came to live with Oma three years ago, in 1940, when two men in white coats from the sanitarium showed up, unannounced, at the house where Lena and her mother lived. They told her mother they were there to pick up the retard and “take her to a safe place.” Lena’s mother replied in no uncertain terms that Lena’s current place of residence, namely with her, was plenty safe enough, thank you and have a day. At which point they pardoned themselves and promptly dialed up their boss. Fortune, however, smiled on Lena that morning—toothless and bittersweet, yet a smile, nevertheless. For when the whitecoats couldn’t find Lena the Gestapo took over and pressed her mother for the girl’s whereabouts. Her mother, of course, simply crossed her arms across her ample bosom and said, “What retard?” Then took her mother away instead, “just to answer a few questions,” they reassured the neighbors.

Of course that’s not the lucky part. You see, it was Tuesday when the whitecoats showed up for Lena; and as luck would have it, just as she’d done nearly every Tuesday morning since she was twelve, Lena was cleaning Oma’s house. Now, sometimes it seems, when the chips are especially down, luck comes in pairs. For Lena, on that fateful day anyway, it came like a smiling set of sneaky twins—exactly when and where she needed them most. Because if Tuesday’s chore was the first bit of luck, the location of Oma’s cottage was the second.

Continued

Marrs Maniteaux

My Life in the Devil's Rainforest

My earliest memories are of staring at the smooth, convex curvature of the clear yellow pine wood on the back of the seats in the Assembly of God church in Santa Ana, CA. I can still hear the somnolescent droning, on and on and on, during the hundreds---no, make that thousands---of Sunday morning and evening and Wednesday evening services. The few dozen hymns, repeated in heavy rotation, were always rendered as a funeral dirge, regardless of their otherwise joyful message: i.e. Life sucks here, but we'll have it good when we're dead. Much the same as peasants have, by necessity, done since time immemorial.

The seatbacks did change, however, as we changed churches. Some were darker than others, and a few of the really interesting ones might have a tiny knot or imperfection, or some asymmetrical patterns in their wavy grain; to which, like all primates, my nearly-comatose little brain would latch onto like a beetle in a chimp's barren concrete cage. To pass the time I'd stare at these things till they became whatever my mind could twist them into. Most often devils, of one variety or another, staring back at me. Occasionally, whe the pastor was on an interminably loquacious roll, and the ocular muscles began to fatigue, the little devils would morph themselves into breasts. But this was very rare; and usually, after fully awakening, they proved themselves to be simply devils again, sadly.

I shudder to calculate the number of hours spent in church. And, in fact, in my opinion, it borders on cruel and unusual punishment. Because if listening to thousands of hours of moaning and crying and blubbering and "speaking in tongues," if that doesn't seriously deform a child's gray matter, well then, he was probably FUBAR before he was ever conceived.

Myself? Probably a little of both. Nevertheless, I endured, fantasizing and scribbling, sleeping and grumbling, and always my gaze returning to that devil on the back of the pew.

And, you know, the funny thing, uncanny actually, about that devil? It was that he was always, without fail, staring directly at me. Seriously! Even when, seeing we were headed for one of our regular pews, whose seatbacks I knew by heart after years of careful study, I'd maneuver myself forward or backward in the line of my mother's ducklings in order to be sitting in a pew not directly facing him; yet he would somehow ALWAYS be staring at me! Always! Even if ol' Beelzebub was three or four pews away.

And thus was I convinced (by the logic that brews in a child's mind during thousands of hours of mental and emotional torture) at a precociously early age that all this moaning and groaning and crying and pleading and babbling and speaking in tongues and hopping up and down and keeling over "in the spirit," I was convice that it was all wasted on me, if not the most intractable sinner, then scorchingly close. Indeed, to borrow a phrase from my captors, I "knew that I knew" that the devil already had his grip on me; that regardless of any Herculean effort of intercession that might be put forth in prayer and fasting (whatever that was) for me, that I was, on that glorious day when the trumpets sounded, doomed to run with the devil....at least till I was too old to have fun any longer. Like 20.

I figured it this way. There was on the one hand God: which meant a life of a) church; b) prayer; c) discipline; e) suicidally depressing music; f) eternal life (whatever that was); and g) more church.

On the other hand there was the devil: which meant a life filled with a) breasts; b) fun people; c) lots more breasts; d) hellfireandbrimstone (whatever that was); e) NO MORE CHURCH; and f) sex for eternity (whatever that was).

Now, the fact that I really had no idea what sex was really had no bearing on the decision. I knew that this sex thing, or stuff, was something I simply must have, even if it meant dragging my beheaded torso through all that hellfireandbrimstone. I knew that sex had something to do with breasts, and with warm female flesh, and with that warm stiffness in the mornings, and that was enough for me. (Note: I also had some queasy suspicions that there were some positively distasteful things going on between men and women; things which, as far as I could tell, had nothing to do with breasts and were therefore not worth the time to investigate; things having to do with the nether regions of the female universe; things which, at that time, were too bizarre for even my rapidly twisting mind---acts for which I'd yet to form a theory).

Truth be told, even at the tender age of four I understood that there was some fundamental flaw in this whole "heaven-and-hell" scheme. I mean why, in heaven's name, would this God---this big old guy up there, on whom all this preposterous grovellation was heaped---WHY in the world would he make a girl, if she wasn't to be enjoyed as often and as much as humanly possible, and at the earliest possible encounter?

"WHY?" I asked him.

But there was no answer. Just as there never seemed to be any answers to any of my, or my friends, or my brothers and sisters, or even my parents' requests. Not so much as a murmurred maybe to even the slightest of our entreaties. Example: "Dear Heavenly Father, please kill this evil slimy hissing creature beneath my bed. Injeezuznameayman." I mean, come on, you'd think that he'd at least take pity on a petrified stiff little guy. Eh? Wouldn't ya? You'd think he'd think to himself: Well, maybe if I just show the little tike an few quark's worth of compassion, maybe zap a cockroach or a potato bug, anything to let him know I'm here....

And you wait. And wait. And nothin'! Not so much as a word. So much for that moniker.

Y'see, it ain't just the one thing. I mean sex is pretty much the meaning to life, but there are other things in life that you have to brush aside, circumvent, and otherwise endure in order to nuzzle up to those warm fleshy mammys that have driven and twisted and tortured homo-sapien sapien males since we first looked into that still clear pond and saw that reflection of our faces (superimposed on a gigantic pair of breasts)

To be continued

Marrs

The Cowboy Year

I was coming up on fifteen and I’d been at The Ranch for about three months when I took a shine to one of the female “counselors.” Kathy was her name and she was married to Jim—a nice enough guy, with one of those sort of perma-grins that seems to wrap all the way around the head. Jim was sort of a Neanderthal-ish kind of guy, in his late twenties, stocky, really stocky, like 5-8 and 190 pounds, all workhorse muscle. Kathy on the other hand was 18, quite a looker, stacked, almost to a fault. A permanent fixture of my dreams for a good part of that summer. They weren’t so huge that they looked out of place. More like your modern, garden-variety, comic book superheroine. In other words, just right.
It was your typical beauty and the beast scenario: pretty little horsey type girl from a nice family in Orange county gets scooped up off her feet by incredible hulk of a cowboy/ex-heroin addict/ex-low rider cum born-again Christian. The type of pairing-up which seemed to be common amongst the staff of The Hotline, the drug-intervention organization tasked with staffing The Ranch—the place which I was at that time, after three months of nominal incarceration, beginning to think of as home.
Like I said, Kathy was a little hottie (albeit, long before that word existed) and though it was her physical attributes that drew me to the young couple, it was Jim’s pure manliness—his cowboy up! outlook on life—which really imprinted itself onto my formative young mind. You see, hailing from Orange county in southern California, I’d never really considered the possibility that cowboys, per se, actually existed outside of Clint Eastwood movies. And I’m not sure if it was Jim’s aw-shucks attitude, his straw hat shaped just so, his work-beaten cowboy boots, or maybe even Kathy’s pearl button cowgirl shirts stretched to bursting around her nubile torso—whatever it was, I was hooked. It was goodbye surfer punk, hello cowboy (or “goat-raper” as I would soon find out was the moniker that newbies like myself earned by wearing their hats on the first day of school).
At 14 I still had the ability remake myself entirely, simply by changing my wardrobe and cutting my hair. The transformation was fluid and seamless, mainly, I assume, because I was completely cut off from any social interaction with my peers, so there was little if any ridicule, shunning and clique-switching to be endured. Indeed, I can recall one day staring at pictures of tiny suicidal young men gracefully tearing across the faces of four story ocean swells in Surfer Magazine; the next day staring at pictures in Western Horseman Magazine of suicidal young men not-so-gracefully sprawled out across the backs of saddle broncs—and all without so much as a sidelong glance from anyone who mattered a whit in my teenage universe. There was no effort involved in this transformation, save driving to the Valley Western Store and picking up a couple pairs of Wranglers, a few pearl-button cowboy shirts and, of course, the obligatory “summer” straw cowboy hat.
The felt hat would have to come later as it would require a substantially larger investment, not to mention a more narrowed-down awareness of which cowboy camp I would toss my reins into. Right out of the gates it was obvious to me: Bareback Bronc, or possibly Bullrider. But Jim imparted some good advice and told me to wait till I figured out “which saddle fits your skinny greenhorn butt,” before I laid down (my mother’s) hard-earned money on a felt hat. Sage words, from one who’d been there, and likely more than once.
Lest one think it was all just one big dress-up party, it was far from it. There were stalls to shovel and rake, (I never could figure out why the stupid horses couldn’t just wait till they were outside of their own bedrooms to shit, especially when they shit so prodigiously), there were horses to brush, medicines to administer, corrals to tear down and rebuild, tack sheds to construct (my proudest moment was the day I brought home an 8’x10’ tack shed I built in shop class), and best of all, saddles to cinch and rides to enjoy, all of which I did more than my fair share of, being the lowest on the totem pole.
By the time my 15th birthday rolled around I had pretty much narrowed it down to a couple of not-necessarily mutually-exclusive decisions with regards to my foreseeable future. First and foremost (after watching a movie called American Cowboy) was Bareback Bronc Rodeo Star. This was, as far as I could tell, what God had created me for. I would become a rodeo superstar and help to win the souls of all those poor wretched, drunken, Skoal-sucking, Winston-puffing cowboys and cowgirls all over the west. They would see that bucking the cultural stereotype was cool, very cool. Yes, God would use me to evangelize the world, starting with the cowboy types. I would be the strong, quiet, “let them be won without a word” type, whose strength of character and heavenly sun beams of radiant and peaceful joy would be unmistakable and irresistible to all but the most satanically duped.
(Interestingly, I was a bit disappointed to find out that there already existed a CRCA, the Christian Rodeo Cowboys Association, having assumed, naturally, that God had been preparing the path specifically and exclusively for me—since the foundations of the world were set and Lucifer cast out of the heavens forever. I decided that, in order to fly under the radar, I would not associate with this, albeit well-intentioned, CRCA. No point in drawing ridicule and prejudice from those who in the end would be my adoring disciples. No, no point at all.)
To this end I decided that, just maybe, carrying my King James to school every day, that maybe it wasn’t the way God really wanted me to go about my earthly duties. Of course it was a necessary part of my training: suffering the slings and arrows of ridicule from my classmates for being dork enough to not only dress like a drugstore cowboy mannequin, but to also have the audacity to carry a bible to school. I mean, it’s one thing to make fun of drugstore cowboy who shows up to school decked out in brand-spanking-new cowboy regalia. But it’s another thing altogether to poke fun at that same deluded kid when he’s carrying an ostentatiously large, leather-bound King James bible. It’d be like poking fun at the retarded kid: you just don’t do it. And, in retrospect, it’s got to be downright unnerving, spooky even, to see this walking anachronism pile out of the back of a long white stretch van full of obviously psychopathic gangsterish looking youngsters (tattoos, bandanas, khakis, prison regalia one and all) invading your quaint little backward high school. One might be tempted to think he was amongst this unsavory crowd for a reason.
We must’ve looked like a co-ed chain gang—freshly-unshackled and on our way to sentencing—because other than blank stares and arched eyebrows and nervous sidelong glances, there wasn’t so much as a veiled sneer directed our way. Further evidence that God had ordained this little vacation in the desert as but a minor detour in the greater trajectory of greatness, which would be my life’s calling.

And if dressing and acting the oddball with impunity wasn’t proof enough that God had a firm grip on my young life, well, there were grades to help prove the point. Which is another convoluted story in and of itself, to wit.

TO BE CONTINUED

Next: A RABBIT WARREN

What the @#$% was I thinking?!

Funny, isn't it, how ideas, early on a clear and sunny morning, or late in evening, and especially after reading some particularly stirring author---Voltaire, Twain, Tom Robbins, etc---can be so powerful, so seemingly revolutionary. You get this idea for a story or an essay---or a widget, or maybe a Falling Water House, a pyramid scheme, a new form of government (well, in truth, I guess the last two are, after all is said and done, one and the same thing)---and you let your mind run with it. You scribble, you write, you open up a new Excel program and start running the numbers, or your AutoCad and start snapping lines, or you dig out that dusty old copy of something-or-other by Will Durant, to see if Solon really did exist. And the time slips away between your fingers magically as they tap out a steady but stumbling cadence for hours on end.

I've come to realize that this---this psycho-physical act of writing, when one is deep "in the zone"--- is that much ballyhooed Flow. And moreover, heaping revelation upon enlightenment, that this Flow, at times, is essentially that same experience that my Assembly of God forbears deemed the ultimate experience: speaking-in-tongues. It's that intoxicatingly delicious feeling of creation, during those rare moments when the conduit between the heart and the mind and the fingertips becomes a singularity; when all those twists and turns and potholes and leaps of faith and gauntlets of indecision and self-ridicule that line that impossibly long and tortuous path which any given idea must pass in order to take on a life of its own beyond its creator's fingertips---when, like a wormhole in the folds of time, they all disappear, the conduit truncates infinitesimally, allowing ones mind to gallop unhackneyed through the fields and streams of ideas, emotions, calculation, creations; between the heaven of ones mind and the earth just beyond the fingertip.

.......and then.....

.....a few days go by, maybe a few months or a year or two, and you find those scrawlings buried amongst a stack of papers. Your heart leaps as you suddenly feel that Flow again, its palpable echo still reverberating around the infinite universe of your memory, like a photon ricocheting around the mirrored walls of the inside of your cranium; and even before you ever finish the first sentence you think: Genius!

But, alas, you read on....and on....and on....and you look out the window again, remembering the original inspiration; you rub your chin, you read that one sort-of-off-balance thought again; you make a note in the margin and strike through a word or two. Strange, you think, as that all-too familiar "sinking feeling" begins slowly pulling back down into the depths of, well, not-genius. You read it again...and again...and again. And you suddenly realize: it's gone! Where is the Flow?

You sit back in your chair and consider the delete button, realizing that you have, once again, written shit. And you wonder: what the FUCK was I thinking?!

Marrs

Letter to Claire (my heroine)

Claire,
First off, I love you...or, maybe, actually, truth be told, I'm probably just a bit over-infatuated with your wit, wisdom and especially your cajones. However, like all relationships, ours seems to have hit some turbulence on this circuitous journey to Libertyville. I'll be the first to admit: I'm quite the pathetic excuse for a stalker; actually, I don't even know where you live.

However, just in case you ever decide to come out and meet me first hand, well, make sure you bring your spanglish translator along; because California has, over huge geographic areas, become little more than Baja super-norte. And while I don't have any beef against Mexicans, or any other subspecies of homo sapien sapien, for that matter, I do have a problem with this ludicrous idea that "they only do the work that Americans won't do!"

For this patently Bokanovskovic-ish line of thinking there is but one word: BULLSHIT! I'm sure the illogic of such an idea requires no illumination for one of your mental horsepower.

I'm no eugenicist. My wife is a bona fide Mexican (she prefers the old, politically incorrect title over "Latina"), my two sons are Irexicans, many of our close friends are also Mexicans. And the majority of them seem to agree, to one degree or another, that not only are our personal livelihoods being threatened, but that our culture (such as it is), our educational system (again, such as it is) and our already-bankrupt socialist health care system are being destroyed by an unchecked flood of "job-stealing furriners," as your folks in Hardyville might put it.

While my proclivity for anti-social behavior leads me, naturally, toward a Libertarian point of view, I also have this pesky streak of pragmatism which keeps blurting out: Sure, I'll forget that there's any such thing as a border...as soon the Mexican goverment commits hari kari and installs a Libertarian-ish bureaucracy in its place.

That said, and since it appears our greenhouse gasses have precluded the possibility of hell ever actually freezing over, heres the plan: All California males, sometime between the age of 21 and 30, are eligible to spend six months at the border as a border guard. It'll be rough, primitive, no frills, camp-out time, spent mostly out in the wilderness, for weeks at a time. This six month service will serve as tax-payment-in full, for state income- and all other forms of taxes. (Yes, we'll have to hammer out some deal with the Washington royals, but one step at a time, please.)

The BGC (Border Guard Corps)troops will be armed, but will have strict orders to NOT use firearms, nor any other form of violence, unless fired upon or otherwise assaulted first. Their function will be to act as eyes and ears, and trackers, in order to locate and pursue any illegals for arrest by the Border Patrol. (Yes, of course there will be abuses, which will be dealt with accordingly).

Will we get all of them? Of course not. Do you ever really get rid of cockroaches? No. But if you don't do your best to make their miserable little lives...well, even more miserable, then pretty soon you've got gazillions of cockroaches eating up your food, fouling your water, spoiling your living space, etc, etc.

And, VOILA!, there it is. One small step for Freedom, one giant step for self-sufficiency. (Sorry, but being my brother's keeper, at least for now, ends at the border)

Anyway, keep up the great work, Claire. Your "voice in the wilderness" was, literally, THE turning point in my sociopolitical evolution, and I'm still evolving (or at least I hope I am). Who knows, maybe someday I'll join the real radicals and "get back to the land." But, until then, I've got to figure out some way to get these structural steel beams up in the air, without hiring any illegal aliens---all the legal, non-union ironworkers seem to have disappeared...to whiter pastures. If you see any in Hardyville, and if they're willing to "do work that Americans won't do," tell 'em were hiring here at ZZZ Construction.
With heartfelt gratitude,
Jefferson

GDQ: The Movie (trailer) (first draft) (including sics)

Fleetwood Mac, with their new sax man, Slick Willy Clinton, were wailing out their seventy-third chorus of Give Peace a Chance when Barbra Streisand entered, stage left, to the thunderous applause of the convention. Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Rosie O’Donnell, Oprah, and a glut of other semi-intoxicated politicals, rich political wanna-bes and Hollywood-type Bokanovskovics were singing their precious little hearts out on the huge stage that’d been set up on the Washington mall (with the help of Joe & Jenny Sixpack’s tax dollars, of course). The crowd of mostly rich-, mostly east coast-, mostly white women (none of whom actually marched there), with an ultraliberal yet requisite sprinkling of NOW-, GLAD- and Queer Nation types spilling out over the edges of the park and onto the blocked-off street. The joyous sense of victory was palpable: posterboards bobbing up an down in the sea of feminine self-righteousness. Posterboards writ large with such worn out gems as SAVE THE CHILDREN!; GUNS ARE RACIST!; TED NUGENT SUCKS!; SIGN THE TREATY!; LESBIANS DON’T NEED GUNS; NRA = NAT’L RACIST ASSOC; and so on and so forth, virtually every combination of mindless slogan that will fit on a 36x48 piece of posterboard.

It all reminded Sarah of a church camp meeting she’d attended when she was in 9th grade; the year she’d given her heart to the Hebrew’s deity Yahweh and learned to speak in tongues. She could still remember the warmth and sense of brother- and sisterhood as she and her camper buddy stepped forward and walked up to the bonfire to receive the gift of tongues. Of course, it all seemed so comically quaint now, forty years later, that she hardly even felt silly about the short chapter in her silver-spoon childhood. Truth be told, though, at that moment, watching the proceedings of The Million Anti-Gun Mom March, from the comfort of their elk-rack bunk bed, fire crackling in the rustic cabin’s stone fireplace, breathing in the crisp Montana mountain air, well, the whole menagerie on the other side of continent seemed like an impossibly ridiculous scene that even George Orwell or Ayn Rand (two authors, she noted mentally, that she really needed to bone up on) would’ve been embarrassed to write. A wave of shame—much the same as a deprogrammed Scientologist feels when he sees Tom Cruise bouncing around like a baboon and ranting about his pseudo-scientific epiphanies—came over her and she asked forgiveness of Ted, her bunkmate.

“You were blind, my child,” he said, sucking down the last gulp of his Coors, “but now you’ve seen the light. You are forgiven. Now, go down, and sin no more.” At which point, with an overwhelming sense of gratitude she burrowed under the beaverskin comforter and resumed applying felatio, perfected during years of lobbying on Capitol Hill, to Ted Nuggets’ throbbing, cannon-like member.

Impossible! you say? Libelously ludicrous!? Well, bear with me, incredulous reader, for miracles can, and do, occur. Even in that sparkling city on the swamp, that black hole of common sense on the Potomac, Washington.
D.C. that is.

Chuckling at the sadly comical scene on the TV, he pushed the power button on the remote and watched with a certain sense of job-well-done detachment as the 120” HD screen disappeared into the cedar log wall and popped another Coors. He muffled a groan, checked his watch and then nipped the end off the ten inch Cuban he’d been sucking on for the last half hour. Lovingly, tenderly, with the utmost care and finesse, he applied the clear flame to the Cuban’s foreskin, sucked it like a nubile nipple, careful not to overheat the precious little “girl,” (the idea of utilizing a masculine similitude to describe the blissfullaceousness of a great Cuban cigar was abhorrent to Ted). He closed his eyes and leaned back between the giant horns of the moose rack that made up his bunk bed frame, and slowly exhaled a mouthful of sweet, spicy, almost sensimillia-flavored tobacco smoke. And he groaned, and did not attempt to squelch it, and proceeded to rid his mind of all things temporal, and simply enjoy the purging of Sarah’s conscience.

If he’d waited for just one more nanosecond, though, before exterminating the raucous idiocy on the TV screen, he’d have seen the head of “the gentleman from California,” Ms. Rautenstein, appear to disappear. Then, approximately one-and-a-half seconds later, the screen would’ve gone black for about fifteen seconds; after which time a discombobulated reporter in a frenetic newsroom, somewhere, would’ve Uhhh’d and Ahhhh’d his way through an utterly confused and entirely unsure report about a possible assassination at the much ballyhooed Million Anti-Gun Mom March in Washington. Tears welled atop the azure blue of his contact lenses, and he almost choked up.