As the one person who has read the last post probably guessed, it did not come out of a vacuum.
     I've had a few run-ins with bona fide bibliophiles over the last couple of days - you know, the prissy sort that moan with pleasure when they hold the first edition of a book you know they're never going to understand but which is obligatory ['I just love this first edition Dickens; look at the craftsmanship!'] if they're to appear virtuous and educated. 
     Of course, the holy grail is a first edition signed by the author.  This baffles me. 
     For the uninitiated, it's like this.  Nitwits who would scoff at the thought of venerating a saint's relic will positively fall over themselves to line up and have some second-rater sign the first edition of his new novel with its vivid language and believable characters. 
     All the more orgasmic is the chance find of a book by someone Really Important, like Hesse, signed by the Great One himself.  The energies of the Great One, you see, are passed to the book, and thence to the buyer and owner [note I didn't say reader] of the Artifact.  [I find the whole obsession with signatures bizarre and stupid to begin with.] 
     Well, give me a book I can toss into my bag and carry about all day.  Now, I do have a number of hardcover books, and like 'em for their durability, but really now, is the book, as artifact, in itself that valuable?  I don't think so.  Practical, yes.  Ingenious in its portability and ease of use, in fact - I'll say all that and more of the humble book.  Still, any particular edition is not, as a thing, that interesting to me.  If it's rare, and the work itself is fine, it will as a damn fine work of art be a wonderful find.  The thing with covers and pages remains, I say again, just another thing.

     I just realized that I have never curled up with a good book.
     The one time I tried to read a book under a tree, ants nearly killed me and unidentified insects from the tree's branches tried to finish the job.
     I don't really know if a book, that is, the thing with covers and pages in my hand, is 'beautiful' or not.
     In fact, I'm just not a bibliophile.  Weird, huh?
     So, I come at last [I almost typed 'least' - if I cared about Freud that might make me pause] to the, what, pointless point of this post composed to pass the time.
     Reading, in itself, is no more virtuous than cutting the lawn.  If you think it's virtuous to have read, say, Madame Bovary then, well, you need to watch more television.
     Since I have, for no apparent reason, alighted upon Madame Bovary, we will stick with it.
     All the same, Madame Bovary is damn fine and sad and a work of linguistic genius.  The act of reading the thing may, I repeat, may help cultivate in you an articulate inwardness and an empathy with your fallen fellows - fallen, that is, just like you. 
     You may also walk away with a sense of the uncanny strangeness of language written or spoken within a work of art like Madame Bovary.  That is to say, you'll notice that great works of literary art are just full of commonplace locutions like 'the door opened' and 'the headmaster motioned to us' and 'she died', which are no more literary than my nosehairs.  In fact, a great novel like Madame Bovary is often nothing more than many thousands of these insignificant signifiers strung together to make a work that is, strangely enough, quite significant.  Just how that works is difficult to say. 
     But I digress, dear reader.  Reading, again, Madame Bovary, that arbitrarily chosen example, might allow you to reflect intelligently and affectingly on all of this and more.  You might also simply like the thing - or not.  In all these ways, reading a most excellent work just might be good for you.  But don't, don't, again I say don't imagine that reading in itself - even reading Endlessly Rocking - is morally better than watching television, playing football [the kind where you rarely use your feet], selling insurance, eating Doritos, and driving fast in a truck along the winding roads cut through the hills south of town.
     With that, I leave you until my next pointless verbal meandering to pleasantly redeem the time while not expending too much energy.
     Yes, yes, I'm working too much...
     Peace out.

     No, senator, choosing a babe with brains for your VP candidate does not make me want to vote for you.  It does, however, make me like you more....

     Since we are about to elect a president, I have given some thought to just what a 'President of the United States' might be.  He's not a king, not a little god, not a ruler, not a strong-man, though the men who have occupied the office have aspired to one or all of those delightful positions.  He is, if you will, a flunky, a hired hand.  He has an employee manual, and we hire him to work according to its dictates. 
     Or so one might think, were one an idealist with great faith in the American People.  The reality is that for many, many decades, more and more of my fellow citizens have invested the men who occupy the office of President with enormous, not to say terrible, powers.  We have, in short, made the President into a little god.  Like any god worth our time, he must take a peremptory interest in the most mundane details of his subjects' lives, for if he cannot speak with comforting assurance on my debt to income ratio and how this affects my ability to buy the house to which I'm entitled, how can I know that he really cares?  Consider also his great powers over the earth itself.  He can stabilize the global climate and restore fertility to a weary and wrung-out land so that crops will once again be abundant; he can as a matter of policy create abundant, cheap, clean energy for all; he can foster the proper education of Our Children [tm] so that they might all grow to maturity with the cultivation of Rhodes Scholars and the paychecks of so many Warren Buffets.  
     In all this and more we see that The President guarantees the blessings of Security, the great God whom our little god of a President serves and to whom he offers sacrifice and praise.  Without Security, what does it profit if a nation has a perfect climate, energy-efficient cars, and shiny, well-adjusted children?  Yes, our President is there to Keep Us Safe, Snug, and free from Risk.  Of course, some few of us will have to pay the ultimate price to sustain this Safety and Security, but rest assured, their sanitized sacrifices will not be in vain [nor will we be disturbed by images and thoughts of 'em while we eat our abundant food].  Yes, through the judicious use of other peoples' lives, our god and king will see to it that no contagion, no fanatic with a suitcase bomb, no threatening thoughts at all, can pass through our impermeable borders.  Thus we come to that most terrible power with which The President has been invested by the autochthonous powers of the earth - to protect our safe, well-groomed, ordered lives, the President must be prepared to destroy everything on the earth.  It's that simple.
     Who, then, can doubt but that we the people, for a more perfect union, long ago embarked on the search for a Man-God?  Yes, the President as Philosopher King, Guardian of the Sacred Grove, Master of the Tides and Shepherd of the Wind and the Rain - each election brings us closer to finding the Great One who will restore us to the primal place of greatness, prosperity, safety, that we once in our minds enjoyed. 

     Have you ever noticed that many who throw the 'render unto Caesar' passage about are quite happy to let Caesar himself determine what is his?  Or how about those who think that Romans 13 signifies that everything Caesar does and commands in the name of the 'common good', or 'reasons of state,' must therefore be good and thus for our own good here and now?  'All things work together for good' for those who love God - an eschatological truth, you know, that includes the mostly willful, stupid, venal, and sometimes downright evil acts of those who are in authority.  Somehow, God takes up these acts of impish evil and uses them for his own good ends, that is, our salvation and the glory of his Son in his Church.  He is neither author nor creator of such nonsense, but, again, is happy to use what's at hand to further his cause.  This is rather different from the banal, and all too smug assertion that what Caesar does is, as such, good, because, you know, he's there by 'God's will' and so must be for our own good. 
     Where do we learn the discernment necessary to say such a thing?  Why, you guessed it, the Church, disordered mess that she is.  Caesar is a dumbass, really - I mean, to have Truth before you and still ask, with an air of late antique Imperial ennoi, What is truth? - so we really can't count on Caesar, in his many guises, to tell us what is good and true.  It follows that Caesar always has an inflated view of what is his, and thus what we are to render unto him.
     So remember, dear readers, submission does not signify assent, agreement, support.  Indeed, there are limits to our submission to the powers that be, limits we all too often ignore in the name of necessity and good order.

     From my friend TS comes this work of satirical whimsy from Disputations:

Hello. I'm here to abduct your family and sell them into slavery. Now, I know that many people, people of good will, believe this is wrong. I understand that, and I respect their opinion. At the same time, many others are equally convinced of the need for slaves, particularly when our own government can't guarantee that hard-working families will have time to clean their own houses. For my own part, I have thought long and hard about this difficult issue, an issue that doesn't admit of simple answers. And I've come to the decision that the right thing for me to do is to be a slaver. But a new kind of slaver, one who does not vilify those who disagree.

That's just too good.

     I don't want to say anything about the latest story, but I received an e-mail from a reader who was bothered by it.  All I can really say is, well, that's too bad.  Still, for some reason I want to give some sense of just what the hell I am up to in the spate of fiction, especially the last one, which was for me an experiment as much as anything.  I should also say that the trip to Vero Beach, Florida, that twelve hour poker game while I roamed about with a wad of cash and no idea where I was and when we would go home - all that happened.  I was not, of course, left behind as security on an absurdly large debt, but there is a whole world there that I have only occasionally revisited in my work.  So, I feel more and more like drawing from these experiences of a world of petty thieves, gamblers, mob underlings, chop-shops, drunks, in my work.  So, to say a word about that little story 'Need'.
     First person narratives - the voice is always equivocal, always self-justifying.  Not mendacious, no no no, not necessarily mendacious, but self-justifying, seeking to shape a story from the chaos of experience and compromise and violence, a story that gives meaning to acts that are simply meaningless.  Perhaps we can see no other way out, no other way through than some compromise, some hideous act of violence, some, well, sin.  Such is the fault in each of us, the failure of nerve, the failure of vision, the failure of resistance to the lie that 'reality' is real, necessary, orderly, and to be preserved at all costs.  And so, in this limited life, in this fallen world, we do horrible things in the name of great and real goods.  The Son of God did not go to the cross and die because we are well-meaning screw-ups.  His death and resurrection encompass all the murder, torture, degradation, compromise, and seedy self-justification we can muster.  We may do our worst - he has overcome it all in his condescension and death, his resurrection and ascension for our justification and deification, his overthrowing of all principalities, powers, orders of sacrifice and violence.

     Hie thee over to St Vlad's Press, where you'll find, right there at the top of this page, the lecture David Hart offerred at the 2006 Summer Institute.  The mp3 of the lecture is free of charge, but you have to go through the motions as though you were purchasing it. 

     Whatever the current price of oil, or the volatility or lack thereof in tech stocks, walking the streets about town for my job offers a salutary view of life in this hardscrabble world.  I encounter every day bank repossession notices slapped onto windows and doors of vacant houses.  Sometimes, folks unfortunately flee the scene if they're about to go down in foreclosure, leaving behind their furniture and such to be auctioned off while they try to rent an apartment somewhere. 
     I also see, from my vantage on the front porch, houses in disrepair as their owners work two jobs a piece just to afford the mortgage and utilities, a proliferation of guard dogs and signs of crime, or at least the fear of crime.  Not to say that this is universal, or evenly distributed about the city.  Not at all - some neighborhoods, by no means the most affluent, are well-kept and relatively free of such problems, while some of the higher end neighborhoods will show signs of crisis creeping upon folks who thought they were living the dream.  All the same, it remains a good bet that lower middle and middle class neighborhoods will feel the pinch first.
     I draw no conclusions from this.  It's just a curious fact that I get to meet people at a level of intimacy and risk that is rather unusual, and so I get to see the signs of the times close and personal and still, still, I have to make a sale.
     Strange world, eh?

     All in all, I'd say that the Russians are in the right.
     It's true.   No, really, I mean it.

Need

     ‘So you see it was like this You see I was down yes yes I know I was down but...You see it was like this I had to keep going because I knew I just knew it was the right day the only day...A flush a straight you name it I was going to finally take it all and even Rob with the Big Blind didn't scare me...So you see it was like that and then it happened that the game ended and I still owed 'em a bit was still a bit down still down you see but not out no not out not like that loser Gilbert with his damned horse that was sure to place but didn't even show no not like that...The number looks worse than it actually is...All those zeros...zeros and the interest don't forget that interest they really screw you with interest these guys...But it's not that bad not that bad at all...It's just that...How how the hell did he throw down an ace an ace dammit where did it come from thought I'd kept track thought I knew just where...So many zeros...But it's not that bad not that bad really it's not...So you see it's like this...um...I need...you see...you know...it's like this...I've got to get him back just got to get him back but there's no way without...you see...what I need is...need...'
     With this he trailed off into silence at last, silence and stillness, for he had been fidgeting about as he spoke, fidgeting and gesturing and swirling his cigarette about so that God help me one wrong move and I would have gotten hot ash in my eye.  I had seen him unhinged before, but never quite like this.  I couldn't get him to tell me just what the hell had happened.  All I knew was that he showed up at my house with a look of wild panic in his eyes.  He had lost.  He had lost big.  I had no idea how big until he finally threw himself on the couch and said
     ‘They've got him they've got him I had to leave him had no choice...Promised ‘em that I would get the money promised ‘em but now they've got him they've got Tony...'
     I felt the blood drain from my face.
     ‘Yes yes my son my son...They have him...Security you know make me keep my promise I promised...'
     I sat back and yelled, ‘What the fuck did you do?!'
     He looked over at me, helpless.
     ‘Lost him Lost my son Have to get him back But I promised I promised...'
     He trailed off again repeating under his breath that ugly word ‘promised' - promised whom?  I asked him, ‘What did you promise, exactly?'
     ‘Promised to pay Promised to pay.'
     He sat up and looked vacantly about the room.
     ‘What will they do if I don't if I can't What will they do Jesus Jesus Why did I leave him Why did I leave him...'
     ‘From the beginning,' I said, ‘Start from the beginning and tell me what happened.  Calm the hell down and tell me everything.'
     Shaking and sweating, smoking without let, he told his tale. 
     He had flown with a friend to Vero Beach to play cards.  This was the kind of friend Bill somehow had in abundance - gold nugget pendant and ring, Cuban cigars, a wad of cash in a money clip from God knows where.  This one happened to own a Cessna.  Go figure.  Because Tony so loved to fly, and had never been in one of those small private planes, Bill had taken him along for the adventure of it all. 
     The players met in a mobile home of all things.  The mobile home park itself was just a block from the beach.  He had given Tony a wad of bills and had left him outside to fend for himself.  The game lasted something like twelve hours.  Bill already owed them a lot of money, but hoped to more than recoup his losses this time.  Things had, mirabile dictu, gone to hell, and he had lost more and more until, by the end of the day, he had done the unthinkable - he had left his son as collateral to ensure that the money would be there.  He was given three days. 
     That was last night.  His friend had flown him back to the airport in St Pete, and Bill had driven, all wired and loopy, straight to my house.
     Joy.
     I asked at last, ‘How much do you owe?'
     ‘How much how much Owe...What?'
     ‘How much to do you owe?'
     ‘Uh...oh...you know...'
     ‘No, I don't know, that's why I'm asking again, how much do you fucking owe these guys?'
     He mumbled and fidgeted and made it difficult to hear.
     ‘87...something like that...owe...lots of zeros...so many zeros...owe...need...'
     He started to ramble again, so I pinned him down.  ‘Eighty-seven thousand fucking dollars??'
     ‘Give or take,' he said, in a moment of sudden, fleeting lucidity.
     ‘And what do you want me to do about it?'
     He suddenly stood up and started pacing the room.  He lit another cigarette.  Eyes on the floor, he started in again.
     ‘What to do Yes what to do That's the question Good good need to think need to plan Came to you for help Need the money Need to get him back You have you have you have it all Look at this damn place You've got...got...need...'
     I walked over and grabbed him by the arms and shouted, ‘You seriously think I'm just going to give you close to ninety grand?  Like I just have it lying around so I can bale you out again and again?  What the fuck is wrong with you?'
     He wilted right there and started to sob.  Cigarette smoke rose between us, ashes falling on his shoes. 
     ‘I'm sorry I'm sorry So sorry...,' he sobbed as he rested his head on my shoulder.
     ‘Everything's going to be all right.  We'll figure it out.'
     ‘Knew you would help...Help...Need...,' he sobbed all the more on my shoulder.
     I pushed him away and sat him back down.
     ‘Still,' I said, ‘I just don't have that kind of money.  We'll have to do something else.'
     ‘Anything anything anything...,' he said softly, rocking back and forth and smoking, always smoking.
     ‘Do you mean that?'
     He said nothing, but kept rocking and smoking and mumbling to himself.
     ‘Bill!  Stay with me!  Do you really mean you'll do anything?  This is important.'
     He looked up at me, helpless, sad.  Finally he said weakly
     ‘Yes anything anything anything Anything for the boy for Tony Anything for my son...'
     ‘Good.  That's better.  Now, why don't you go get cleaned up - you look like hell.  You can sleep here on the couch.  The rest'll be good for you.  You'll need it tomorrow.'
     ‘Yes yes...Rest need rest...Need...'
     While he was gone I opened my wall safe and took out all the cash I had, just in case.  Next, I went round to the chest in the corner of the room, and after some hesitation opened it slowly, and searched under the blankets for my old .45. 
     I felt for the first time in many years the heft of the thing.  Just then Bill stumbled into the room again and stopped fast, staring at me.
     ‘Don't worry about it,' I said, and gathered the blankets and a pillow and tossed them onto the couch.  ‘Get some sleep,' I said.  ‘We've got a long day tomorrow.'
     I left him alone and closed myself in the garage and went to work.  I gathered some tools - I had no idea just what I'd need, so I put together the whole kit, just like the old days.  Moving to my work table, I took the pistol apart and cleaned and oiled it.  I unlocked a drawer and pulled out several clips.  It had been so long, so long since I had done any of this.  God help me, it had been ten years if a day.  Finally I took the old silencer down from the shelf over the table and cleaned it as well.  For some reason I had left it there, in plain sight, amused I think that almost no one could possibly know what the hell it was.  
     I reassembled the pistol, passed an oiled cloth over every surface, then wrapped it and the silencer in a towel and packed them with the rest of my tools.
     By the time I came in from the garage Bill was asleep, snoring and tossing on my couch.  I sat up all night, patiently waiting for the dawn.

     ‘It's time,' I said as I woke him at six.
     By six-thirty we were on the road.  We arrived in the outskirts of Miami at nine-thirty or so.  The man who had Tony kept a house on Key Biscayne, off Harbor Point, right there on the water.  We waited until dusk to move.  I got out at the entrance to the estates and left Bill with the car so I could walk along the waterfront in the dark.  Well, I won't bore you with all the details, but God help me, it was easier than it should have been.  There were only twelve of them.  I found the boy in an upstairs bedroom - there was only one guy watching the door.  Tony ran over and hugged me.  He was so small, so vulnerable.  ‘Where's my dad?' he asked.  ‘Downstairs,' I said, and told him to stay put between the wall and the bed until I came for him. 
     As for the rest of the crew, I had little trouble with most of them.   The worst was this one guy I had to drown in a bathroom sink, holding him under so he couldn't call out and ruin everything.  He had taken me by surprise and knocked the pistol out of my hand.  That wouldn't have happened in days gone by. 
     In the end, Bill and I were left standing.  We had already taken Tony to the car and told him to wait.  I went back inside to clean the place up, while Bill paced the great room smoking, as always endlessly smoking.  When I finished, Bill and I stood alone in this moonlit room with a grand view of the Bay just beyond the pool.  I had what felt like a couple of broken ribs and some bruises here and there that hurt like hell.  Bill was, as always, unscathed.
     ‘We saved him we saved him...'
     With that, he flashed me an idiot smile then took a drag on his cigarette.
     ‘Yes we did my friend,' I said.
     ‘Won't ever let anything happen to him...No, this is the last time...This is the bottom...The worst.'
     ‘The worst.'
     ‘Have to make it right...Have to show him...Have to...must...need...'
     ‘I know.'
     He turned to look over the waters as they shimmered in the Florida night.
     ‘Beautiful isn't it?'
     ‘Sure is.  Sure is.'
     ‘And I've got him back...Nothing going to happen to him now you'll see...I'll get it right, just you wait...Next time it'll be the right time...The right day the only day...I'll come out on top and all for him all for him all for my son.'
     I hung my head.  ‘I'm sure you will.'
     ‘Just love him, you know?  Want him to be safe want him to be free...he's just got to...Want him...Want for him...'
     He trailed off again, weeping and shaking, still turned away from me.
     ‘I know you do.'
     ‘I just can't...have to have...must...don't...,' he wiped his nose with his sleeve and continued, ‘I'll promise him promise him Has to have everything Never leave him again He'll be with me always Always my son I'm so sorry Never happen again...can't...want...need...'
     ‘Yes, I know.'
     Then there was silence and stillness between us for a few minutes.  At the last I said quietly ‘I'm sorry,' and shot him twice in the back of the head.
     He fell forward without a sound.  A light spray of his blood mingled on my clothes and hands with that of the other men I had killed that night.  ‘Goodbye' was all I could say, like it mattered.
     After washing the blood off my hands and arms and changing my shirt, I gathered all my tools and bagged my dirty clothes.  Outside the night was still and clear.  A warm breeze came off the water.  Out of habit I took a long look around.  The neighborhood was quiet.  No one paid attention to a thing.
     As I got in the car, Tony asked again ‘Where's my dad?'  All I could tell him was that his father wouldn't be back for a very long time.  The boy started to cry, so I held him for a while and said ‘Everything's going to be all right,' and I almost believed it.  We had to get away, far away.  I used the cash to get us all the right papers, and so we vanished for all the world knew.
     Since then he's been mine to watch over and to protect.  After a while, I told him that his father died saving him, and that's the God's honest truth of it after all.  I mean, what else was there to do?  Well, God help me, I'll teach him to be a man who won't do the sorts of things his father and I did. 
     God help me I will.

     'China today kicked off the Olympic Games with style as it welcomed the world by arresting the world and throwing it in a reeducation gulag!  Way to go China!'

     John H is right, of course, I'm not really The Man, though according to the Powers I have great potential to one day be The Man.  I find that terrifying, to say the least.  Suffice it to say, this experiment in managerial prowess and big paychecks may come to a sudden and undistinguished end.  At the end of the post below I wrote, 'All the same, I think it would be way cooler to work as a surveyor, a bridge builder, a physicist, a forklift driver, a pastor'.  Well, it's not likely that I will find another decent forklift driver gig - all the logisticalistic types have dumbed down their facilities so that you don't need, you know, any skill or intelligence to work in 'em.  What else?  I've at least helped build DOT bridges in Florida, and still have the ol' pastoral streak in me, so what's next?  It takes a long, long time to become a physicist, and it's hard to imagine that I could both do that and work as an ill-paid but happy parish pastor somewhere in, say, Florida.  I do have a lot of math and physics hidden somewhere in my education, but still, just a semester of advanced calculus and abstract algebra and three semesters of physics do not a physicist make.  So, perhaps surveyor would do to while away some time - at least, surveyor technician type, the kind that need not have a master's degree, but who ventures forth into the field to play with all the really cool toys.
     I need more toys and tools in my life and fewer late night phone calls from managers and canvassers whining about something that will surely wipe out all life as we know it.

     So, I'm working on a story.  I've figured out how it must end.  The logic of the tale demands it.  In the little world made cunningly of the tale itself the end is best for everyone.  It's just, you see, so horrible.  There's nothing else to do but write it, and live with it.