October 2026

October 20-22, 2026: Moral ascendancy was the only game in town. Now it’s power, baby, power, don’t give anything else another thought. This state of affairs tends to produce one low-rent scandal after another, bumper crop humiliations, bemused apex predators in all the Mar-a-lagos across the land. (I have Kimberly in mind as a prime under-achiever in grift-laden enterprise.) Gets Hamlets of all stripes their day in court. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind and all that. Unknown fate? In this kind of “moral” climate everything is all too familiar; everything is known, because everyone is doing it. But has Musk sired more spawn than Idi Amin?

It is, as Laurens van der Post in his book “The Heart of the Hunter” had it, citing a Bushman name of Dubé, the “time of the hyena” (as if there has ever been any other brand of epoch). When the time of the hyena falls upon a person, it makes a person, among other things, go off his or her nut. Van der Post: One has only to observe the great paradox of our time: how, in the midst of the imposing display of public welfare, the private sense of neglect and insecurity has grown in the heart of the individual man. The world has fallen through its cracks. Kazillionaires, bless their ultra-soft shoes, are fashioning a social construct in which dignity, or a person’s “inherent value”, is meant either to be a museum piece or a luxury or both.

In any case, Van der Post wrote the words italicized above roughly 80 years ago. I do not believe he intended to channel the likes of any Ayn Rand as might champion selfishness, so-called “enlightened self-interest”, when he remarked on the “public-private” stand-off, but that the people he was depicting in his book – the Bushmen of the Kalahari – in addition to their sense of community, had another “sense”, had a condition of honour within themselves that their contact with Europeans destroyed individual by individual, members all of the “ethnolinguistic Khoisan group”, 150,000 years old. (Nor did they, the Bushmen, over the centuries, receive any succour from Bantu-speakers.) Otherwise, van der Post would cite T S Eliot and D H Lawrence in the same sweep of thought, imagine that, and throw in a little C G Jung – for the cherry on top and a vain hope for continuity of lineage, Nietzschean weapons-inspectors notwithstanding.

Whereupon I might recall (from “I, Claudius”, the BBC TV series, 1976), a bit of dialogue on the part of a mouthy Roman senator, as he is being beaten at the behest of Sejanus, Tiberius’s hatchet man, Tiberius’ own Stephen Miller, so that the senator will confess to treason. Instead, bloody-faced, to Sejanus’ face, the senator assails the republic as “the putrefaction that spreads after death”. Sejanus is not only amused by this show of backbone, the theatrics, he is tickled. Just that one might consider that what is already moribund is the Roman republic, the very same, and how does this redound on America? That it has happened, can always happen, and most likely will happen, especially as America cannot get enough serial trash.

Speaking of which, I am thinking “Dick Tracy” the movie, the interlude in it whereby Tracy, framed and jailed and out of the picture, and all the weirdos like Big Boy Caprice and his hideous minions go on a crime spree for the ages, and if my mind is not already put in this or that cesspool by way of the news, it is up to its neck in the news: the actions of You-Know-Which-Top-Dog-Strange-O doing You-Know-What to You-Know-Whom, and in bucko portions.

Postscript I: It is National Mozzarella Stick Day somewhere on this earth with its circulating heat waves. Or ought we have recourse to one of Mar’s moons? Carpenter will tell you that things have gotten this “wiggy” as used to get said in incense shops shimmering with the sound of the sitar back in a far-back yesteryear, Trump’s cankles not yet on the horizon but getting there. Do mention of them commit the sin of objectification? Is there a grandfather clause with respect to the matter of the colour orange as applied to a countenance and overall aura?

Postscript II: Alberta (the province) on his mind, hence Lunar: … …. ‘What a waste of time the Alberta vote was. … …. And this: … …. ‘The news has so messed up my brain I begin to wonder if the fire in Alberta was not a covert operation.’ (Talking CFB Wainwright here, the explosion, the dead and injured…) … …. ‘[Elsewise], I am reading a very deep book on snow, "Snö: A History" by Sverkir Sörkin, who is Swedish, which is packed with ramifications for the future, i.e. the disappearance of snow heralding a planetary disaster. Why do I insist on upsetting myself? One can only laugh at the fall of [Katie] Zacharia, but what is less funny is the dirty deal with Russia.’ … …. I might interpose, saying that no one here deemed her brief sway as a centre-stage item funny at all. Sad Sack comic, perhaps, but not funny. Just more fill-in-the-blank haplessness and then steady as she goes. Back over to Lunar: … …. ‘Yesterday was a nightmare becoming a yet bigger nightmare with a magnificently sung but hideously staged Parsifal. What in God's name takes hold of these directors who have to leave their stamp over everything they do without reference to the composers' designs? Parsifal was de-Christianised for the sake of all the delicate atheist souls out there, so it makes nonsense of the opera. The singing, though, the orchestra, were glorious. Little need to say just how treacherous Trump is (Ukraine, Starlink) but he is a dirty and sick man. You may have heard about the poor lad who stepped into a tiger's cage here and was mauled to death. Somebody took a video of the killing and the boy's family asked that it not be shown. Who shows it? Trump, and then [this is] followed by an AI-generated film of himself with a tiger. Sick, sick, sick.’ … …. We here at Ephemeris cannot vouch for the reportage, but anyway, amen, amen, amen to the umbrage taken with sick, sick, sick.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you think the “situation” has hit bottom only to realize there is no bottom, no such luck, the mendacity being bottomless, and that all the short and curlies of any resistance are fully engaged, grabbed, yanked on. That is, there is kompromat on you and everyone else by the man on whom Putin has kompromat one way or the other: … ….’[In light of which] I'm hiding, cloaked all day in football games. A pleasant break—one I'm thinking of extending indefinitely. I no longer see the point. But, being an idiot, I'll likely allow myself to get sucked back in.’ … …. Into what? The Hunger Games, mid-terms edition?

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘I’m not about to tell Percival lest I throw him into an existential crisis, but that in the 15th century heyday of Florence, manuscripts were “often made of goatskin” almost as an afterthought, every other goat body part consumed one way or the other, waste not, want not. Maa. Also, it seems that literacy as such declined with the advent of book-printing, which throws one immediately in mind of the effect of the computer on collective intelligence. I suppose one then says that, over the years, the unintended effects of the printing press were ironed out, and the book had its quasi-literate public, one eager to get its mitts on a printed page of theology or porn. These days? Has there been a spiritual benefit born of the Great Dumb Down? A less abstracted, a less compartmentalized mind? Who’s a good goat? Who’s a good goat? (I’ve done it now, Percival disgusted.) I went over the waters to the mainland the other day and wandered through the bookstores disconsolate. Self-expression is the name of the game for market shares. And why did I think I’d find some old haunts on the Drive as might’ve pushed my nostalgia button? Nothing’s left. Nada. Nix. Zero amounts of the old spirit that, as misguided as it may have been, at times, at least was spirit and could even boast of a touch of spunk however tentative. A lot of author photos all smiles replace that spirit, ones that say you too can smile, just follow our easy 5-step program to self-actualization and a proper word count.

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘Citing from Lost Time, Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, Józef Czapski, citing Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, re the problem of God and immortality, and more or less to this effect, or that many things in life are hidden from us, but in exchange, and here’s the quote verbatim: “we are given the intimate feeling of a link with another world, a higher world. Even the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here, but in other worlds.” And what you’re telling me is that the Bushman van der Post describes was no stranger to the sentiment, and has had it forever, and would’ve said “to be sure” were you to cite him John 1:1. In the beginning was the word and so forth.’ The weather here? Are you serious? It’s raining trepidation even on sunny days, it beginning to dawn on some Slovakians at least (in light of Putin) that their hold on life is slightly more tenuous than heretofore.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘I promise you: no more Jack London, even as I begin to have some sympathy for the denizens of the “manosphere” who either did, or did not get the memo that man and woman are a separate species one from the other, and that, at any rate, the world seems bent on having its ghettos and extra passport controls…. Was that a zinger? So then, cupcakes in the oven. French horn on the couch, set aside, along with “Shades of Grey”. (The Monkees.) Albeit Polish cousins are in a tizzy. Not one of whom is going to, with “lucid and just mind” as per Proust, go on about all the “weaknesses, all the small and large acts of cowardice, all the lies so often encountered in artists” but who may round on Putin with broad strokes even as they keep clear of 7th storey windows…. Just keeping you honest. Which is to say I read too, and sometimes I read in and around the hinterlands of the French auteur.’ … …. Look, I never doubted you for a second. And how is your Wharton?

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘Pass. But Dick Tracy the movie? What I remember from it is Breathless Mahoney and her observation (as she breathed it to the hapless copper): I know how you feel. You don't know if you want to hit me or kiss me. I get a lot of that. Ergo, a cartoon character had, by way of a depth charge, a wannabe smooch, a shot at the chaos in the human heart.’

ADVISORY: “Blue Neptune”, a collection of poems by Norm Sibum is listed on Amazon.

RECEIVED: “The Quantum of Happiness. Two Scottish Islands: The Isle of Lewis and South Uist”. Marius Kociejowski, Armchair Traveller, Haus Publishing, 2026. (The first few pages of which so far sparkle, like a glittering calm sea.)

Apropos of Nothing, Penned vs. Printed Department: The English merchant and printer William Caxton, who in about 1473 recounted the travails of writing out a manuscript: “my penne is worn,” he lamented, “myn hande wery and not stedfast, myn eyen dimmed with overmoche lokyng on the whit paper.” He therefore undertook to learn, “at my grete charge and dispense,” the art of printing—through which means he produced copies of his English translation of Raoul Léfevre ‘History of Troy’ in a single day (begonne in oon day and also fynysshid in oon day”).

October 13-14, 2026: “One ought to go careful in Vienna.” This quote, or rough paraphrase thereof occurs in the movie “The Third Man”. Which it is a classic still: post-war Europe, corruption filling the political void. But in the here and now, how else explain it? The man has it in for various institutions, various pockets of the American populace. Then he goes and makes a deal with Putin, America’s putative enemy. Whereupon the Russian head of state extends a “suck-on-this” to the world’s greatest deal-maker who, if not in actuality, would in an existential sense, liquidate the country he supposedly leads into that good night on the back of executive orders and hissy fits and under-the-table shenanigans. Spheres of influence? We are not attempting analogies here (a spate of free association enroute, you are warned), but for one reason or another, we see Ottoman cannons smashing Constantinople’s battlements (1493), a chess-playing sultan barely out of his teens having a high old time pounding on sclerotic city walls. Well, Putin is no spring chicken; the Carnival King is a mess of decrepitude, but the energies those two release are kinetic enough, For Sale signs everywhere – in an existential sense in every county and state and bent of mind.

I had occasion to hear out an historian, the early 20th century apparently her field. One of them there podcasts unfolding like a peony, revelation slow-walked. 1933? She recommended the year 1914, or the push-me, pull-you slippage toward catastrophe. (One sensation I cannot shake, and it has been a decade at least in duration, is that of being at the wheel of an automobile, driving the thing normally and yet, the vehicle is in four-wheel drift despite the driver’s excellent skills and best intentions.) In any case, the historian elucidated her reasons, and it was not that Chaos and Conflict were Abbott and Costello, comedy duo let loose in a world gone madly transactional, vampires and other monsters collecting on all the side bets, but that, circulating about, they were the ghostly echoes of trenches and attrition battles. Then again, midnight knocks having commenced (consider the very recent raid upon a congresswoman), “1933” returns to primacy, having politely stepped aside to allow “1914” scenarios to pass on by.

Postscript I: On this day in the year 54 A.D. Nero succeeded Claudius whom his mother (Agrippina the younger) may have poisoned with mushrooms so as to make her preen-addled son emperor. Be this the case or not (speaking of mushrooms, that is) there is plenty of intrigue to go around present day, and grift is high on the menu, a la carte at that, just ask Carpenter or, have you the inclination, Kimberly.

Postscript II: Lunarian cadenzas: … …. ‘We watched a Bulgarian film called "Triumph" that I took to be some madcap extra-terrestrial caper with a couple of psychic women leading a military crew into digging up a strange artefact buried deep in the ground - a chunk of rock to these eyes - that would bring glory to Bulgaria and maybe even herald a new form of humanity - completely bonkers in other words, too bonkers for it to be viable science fiction and then I discovered the whole thing was based on fact.’ … …. Bulgaria? Sure. But what about the glory of Hammersmith based on fact? Back to Lunar: … …. ‘[And yes], what took him so long? Trump was always going to do the dirty (again) on Zelensky, but this is about as treacherous as treachery gets. Senator McCarthy would have put Trump in chains, but the Americans don't do irony.’ … …. Well, they do, but not as you Brits understand it. … …. ‘Putin's war will be now financed by America. The head spins. I always remember R saying the highest standard in any friendship is trustworthiness. And here we have the least trustworthy man in the world. The world is owned by a small handful of people, all of them psychopaths to one degree or another.’ … …. No argument with you there, no matter the nth degree. And, I ask you, what will be the flagship obscenity amongst so many obscenities from which to choose, Gaza surely in the running if not the acme of achievement?

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see shifting yellow lines everywhere. Double-check your geo-location. Someone’s crosshairs may have you in view: … …. ‘[Re that business with the congresswoman], I guess that spared “them” the trouble of seizing voting machines and confiscating ballots later on. Public executions, you say? Iran's method would be much more exciting for the dick-less Hegsethians out there. And at 12:59pm, little Petey could have yelled Allahu Akbar! [if not Sleepless in Seattle or You’ve Got Mail]… …. Maybe a year ago I read MacMillan's rather hefty Paris 1919, about the peace conference. Interesting, she had less to say about Wilson than Clemenceau and especially Lloyd George. But, Oxford, you know. Historical analogies are always flawed, they're like people, no two are exactly alike. But [indeed], internationally, a multipolar world drifting into unforeseen perils, like 1914. As for the US, though, I'd still go with Germany 1933.’ … …. Okay then, have it your way.

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘Florence, early days 15th century. Seemingly overnight, all these ancient Greek manuscripts began to flood the zone, brain activity mushrooming. Philosophy. Science. The arts. Super-intelligence? Did data centres, springing up, begin lapping up all the water? Yes, you see me here making flip commentary, just as will the latest new press secretary any hour now, and she crash and burn. Me and the goat – we avoid what’s overtly political, especially before 10 in the morning, as do your other correspondents. Some days though, the virus is contracted. Then you go with it until it works its way out of your system. As previously stated more than once, I’m dickering about with a novel. I suspect I’m a sell-out, wishing to please what few readers I have. But what am I when I indulge my fancies and could care less for theirs? There are slick answers for these sort of questions – even on this island of maritime heritage. But would the continent tilt were I to fly out east and set foot on soil in your neck of the woods and come knocking on your door?’ … …. Heavens. Do call first.

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘Citing from Lost Time, Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, Józef Czapski: “The terrible phrase, Marriage, the lowest condition of Christianity belongs to Pascal. Proust, on the other hand, to wit: In his work we come across an absolute absence of bias, a willingness to know and to understand as many opposing states of the human soul as possible, a capacity for discovering in the lowest sort of man such nobility as to appear sublime, and in the seemingly purest of beings, the basest instincts. On principle I agree, but I ask you, does that mean that instead of Charlus, we’ll be speaking of Trump as delicious?’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. ‘Went to the Townships for holiday turkey. Polish cousin went on about larger-than-life sociopathic narcissists, as came to mind in the person of one Jeffrey Archer, author and scandal-monger. That set me off with respect to Jack London, whether I would’ve liked the man’s company, he being a saint in some instances, an ass in others vis-à-vis his wives, not to mention his flirtation with eugenics and race theory, though he was an avowed socialist. The irony being, this socialist came to own a ranch and employed some 50 people to work it, with respect to the agricultural experiments being conducted on site, workers who consequently set about fleecing him with gusto. That London, the socialist, lived like a feudal lord, one benevolent enough, to be sure, who valued and so hosted, 24/7, learned dinner conversation among friends and enemies. That London rode into the 20th century on the backs of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – or Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Spencer, his best friend being a poet who did Homer-Hesiod on the constellations (The Testimony of the Suns by George Sterling), never mind a middling Odysseus. However, cupcakes, not to be outdone, are in the oven. Now that’s middling. French horn and a new-found penchant for “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, and it looks like I’m a moralist on the cheap. As for the last word on London, some women nailed it: (from Irvine Stone’s biography of the celebrity-author): The attacks against him in press and pulpit continued for several weeks. The seriousness of his work was injured in the minds of many readers, but in return the blazing publicity extended his public. It remained for the fashionable Averill Women’s Club to administer the crowning blow, and close the discussion. At an open meeting the ladies passed a resolution approving free textbooks for public schools, and resolutions denouncing college football and Jack London. Rimshot, if you please.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘Had a vision the other day of poets reading in bowling alleys, pins flying all over the place. The ignominious and continuous thudding of gutter balls on the part of incommoded bowlers or poets serving up klunkers, talk about your purposeful universe. That’s all I’ve got, rain from the gusting remnants of a hurricane just now stripping the colour yellow (leaves) from the trees here where true north is apparently “a must do”, as it’s beginning to look like a last line of defence, as in, speak of a civilized nation and the first country that springs to mind, these days, is Canada. Whence all this? Still no favourite café as it has yet to reopen, and it’s been nearly a year, my verse-making fitful, my guitaring fallen into desuetude, and the only aesthetic one can find in a TV series that is aesthetical these days is gross-out horror.’

ADVISORY: “Blue Neptune”, a collection of poems by Norm Sibum is listed on Amazon.

October 5-7, 2026: There is a movie (its name escapes me), but that, in it, the world awaits the imminent impingement of the moon or asteroid or solar storm or aliens upon this earth. People try to get by normally all the while, everything (including their loves and hates) seen as if through gauze, a smidgen of unreality in every act done or contemplated. This is what gives as we speak, what with the brazen corruption everywhere and at all levels (not to mention the culling, or if you prefer, the killing fields in a certain region of the Middle East). In more than one nation-state, the minds and souls of a social construct generally regarded as a cut above average when it comes to “enlightened and spiritual populaces” make for a trash heap of yesterday’s bestsellers and other pulp fiction. The ghastly body count continues – in nickel and dime sums day after day after day after freaking day. It is said: do not hate the people who commit the slaughter, hate the slaughter, critics of said slaughter regarded as squeamish at best, moral cowards at worst. The hatred is a sacred business, don’t you know? It is the unease with these “mowing the lawn” operations that is unholy, not worthy of beings who may have read a few books, who may have doctorates appended to their monickers. I guess I am condemned to having to say, “I stand corrected” at all times and places. There is a movie, and its name escapes me too, in which everything is upside down. (By the way, I am no doctorate, but have post-graduate honours from the University of Yellow Cab.)

Otherwise, at the beginning of “I, Claudius” (BBC production, 1976), Claudius is setting about to write his meemwar (memoir to you.) He will write it and then squirrel it away. In 1900 years, it will be dug up and read, and the true truth of those early imperial years will be known, all the scuttlebutt as apply to the intrigues that swirled about Augustus C and Livia, Tiberius, Marcus Agrippa, Julia, a host of others, and Claudius himself. Apply this state of affairs to Trump and his regime. (Is Melania sentient enough to pass for Livia, Trump Jr to Caligula on a duck shoot?) Consider what regime change Trump has brought about in light of what Augustus brought about: the removing of the state as a state from one set of tracks, caboose and all, and the laying it down on another set of tracks, the republic a ghost, Congress a sidecar to the engine of autocracy. Is there a gimp-legged historian all stammer and spleen out there who might write the tell-all over and above what a very bald homunculus (I call him Baldy) has already written with his 4-volume compendium on presidential shabbiness? Despite 24/7 journalism, such as it is, despite the myriad podcasts on every conceivable subject, will the truth ever truly get told, one way or the other, about these “extraordinary” times? Meanwhile, in the background, there is high tech achieving what all the mystery religions always wished to achieve: the rendering of the human body as incidental to life, if life not of the spirit but of a virtual void. That we are peons who have signed over our souls, in the service not of philosopher kings but of top-of-the-line predators, the apex kind with headsets.

As for ritualized death at the heart of Aztec culture, and as for pain among the tribes in general all over the two New World continents, imperviousness to pain was highly prized, was in and of itself virtue. The Greeks decided against human sacrifice in the Greek “Archaic Period”. Why? Gotten soft? (There was the odd instance of human sacrifice in Hellenistic times that accompanied crisis and panic.) Is there virtue in NFL football amidst shoulder-padded head-hunters? It is said that a republic cannot survive any loss of virtue in the sense that it cannot survive the loss of the rule of law, that no one is “above it”. We are dedicated to the proposition that the absence of pain on any of life’s fronts is a good thing, and I am not going to argue with that. Even as there are plenty of people who will wear virtue like a new suit of clothes and not blink an eye, there are still too many opportunists who think they are going to get away with “it”, with all their cash grabs and power-mongering, and it would seem they are right. No pain, and bucko gain. Or else there is a comfortable standing-pat, whatever the law gets up to. Since when has a kazillionaire ever been held to any accounting that he or she could not joke their way clear of, and failing that, spend their way out of a perjury trap? Justice does not come out ahead, not even in the long run. Most of the time, it fails to make the play-offs.

Postscript I: It is National-Do-Something-Nice Day. (Sometimes I think I make these things up.) But I am sure Carpenter has suggestions as would be ”nice” for some, as in cast an early ballot and vote the f—ker out. He has, besides, in recent days, either coined or begged, borrowed or filched for his own use the rather telling pair of words “collaborative insanity”. Now I could have put such words to good use in one of the preceding paragraphs….

Postscript II: Lunar infusions, and we do not mean product exits: … …. ‘I am besieged with computer trouble, spinal trouble, having left my hat on the plane trouble, and, hell's bells, one of the speakers on my sound system has stopped working trouble. It is becoming impossible to fix anything, and it is all down to geeks having made things impossible, the notion that each man is his own technician. I just can't face any of this rubbish. Yesterday, to escape it all, I went into central [London] to sign books and meet H for coffee and sfogiattele. Did you ever try that Neapolitan delicacy? It is fiendishly hard to get right and this café in the middle of Russell Square gets it just so. We cursed the fact this country fails to appreciate its composers, [that] there is hardly ever any modern music on the main classical radio station BBC3 because, uh, the ratings will go down and bloody ratings is what is it all about, the biggest possible audience. There can't be another country in Europe that treats it own composers so badly. North America is, of course, a basket case.’ … …. But before he gets into his next wind-up, let us give Lunar a breather. Alright, he has had his breather. … …. ‘The bungled execution has reached a new height of obscenity, which mirrors the bigger insanity in America. The execution rate has soared at Trump's behest.’ … …. From the day previous then, and this explains it: … …. ‘A woman in Tennessee on death row for thirty (30!) years is about to be executed. This is not to excuse her crime, but it does seem that certain forms of mental punishment are, in terms of what constitutes civilisation, the greater crime. America stinks.’ … …. I was just going to say as much, but it has been stated so, and without the slightest whiff of literary grace which, given the nature of the mouthpiece, is a form of grace.

Postscript III: Cornelius W Drake of Champaign-Urbana, honk if you see some hombre huffing himself so as to look larger, like animals do when threatened, and you may have just caught a glimpse of the latest presidential campaign ad which the “pepple” will be shelling out for, no matter what the man says to the contrary. Honk too if you come across a gaggle of tech bros regarding themselves as a league of “extraordinary gentlemen”, and you may have come across a pack of freaks. As for “un-babied” couples, what is there to say? Either they are guilty of having some foresight or their sense of civic duty is suspect: … …. ‘I guess I saw less of the ending than I thought [with respect to Polanski’s “Ninth Gate”]; I don't remember a [ridiculous] sex scene, every one of which either puts me to sleep or causes me to reach for the remote. They've ruined so many [ ] movies.’ … …. Sex? What follows here on Drake’s part is nostalgia for a civilized cigarette: … …. ‘I recall that awful day when the last vestige of Western civilization collapsed: 10 January 2005, the day Italy—Italy!—banned smoking in such venues. Goodbye, Columbus, hello Dolly. [Moreover], I'm not sure I can handle two more years of Trump. I may snap. Every morning, a dozen news pieces about his latest absurdities that I choke down. Then more as the day proceeds. Then evening wrap-ups, more madness. It's like living in an insane asylum. Pretty soon, one might well become as loony as the others.’ … …. Yes, but it is like living in an insane asylum. How are you at rock-the-cradle while the yo-yo sleeps?

Postscript IV: Talking Avocado: … …. ‘For some reason, well, for many reasons, I've been reading the bible. Suffice to say I have a lot of questions. Otherwise, the less said about the progress of my novel the better. Someone wrote me to say that there is silence greeting his recent publication. There is a lot of noise, to be sure, but it’s the silence that deafens. Percival says hi in goat-ese. Maa. But with asperity. The weather on the island is damp, the kind of damp that licks at despair and gloats.’ … …. Gloats? You have got me there….

Postscript V: Rutilius: … …. ‘What happens when you open the bible at random and you read: But unto Hannah he gave a worthy portion. Nothing much. You can either push on with the story. You can believe you have just dipped your toe in something poetic and sacred and so, should mull the notion of “worthy portion” before proceeding further. A worthy portion of what? Goat, ram, cow, canine? A bag of crisps? Or that on which a patriarch doubled down as he loved Hannah doubly over and above his other main squeeze? It seems a poem [of mine] that appeared in Moss Puppy Magazine has been nominated for a Genre Punk award. I shall practise my sneer and cultivate some zits if I win this one.’

Postscript VI: Sissy Gadzilla: … …. “A favourite scene of mine comes right at the end of the movie “Michael Clayton”. The evil corporation’s head honcho lawyer is tricked into incriminating herself. Sickening, simpering look on her face as she stutters her way into buying her way out of a bind – it’s quite satisfying to someone on the side of justice, her interlocutor having a hidden recorder in his pocket. A modern fairy tale, eh? Now, Alberto Sordi. The great Italian actor-comedian. Could I have liked him who regarded sex as a sin but had a thing about beautiful women, and seemed to collect them as if collecting stamps? My Polish cousins have no opinion on this matter, but they’re split between those who think Putin will invade and those who think he’ll just continue to annoy. Cupcakes in the oven. The French horn in a Sgt Pepper’s sort of mood.’

Postscript VII: Trail Mix: … …. ‘I suppose human life could’ve originated on Mars and drifted our way, only to hit glaciation. I suppose Livia (Drusilla) could’ve poisoned the equivalent of a small town in her quest to install her son on the curule chair so as to wield imperium and she keep pulling strings. (As might Trump when he scampers off to Mar-a-Lago at term’s end but keeps his hand in.) I’ve started in on a biography of Jack London. Wasn’t it better to royster and frolic over the world than break his fine young body on the wheel of other people’s greed? (Don’t give me the gears, I like the sentence and can live with the sentiment.) There’s something amiss with Saturday night hockey, the way it’s being televised. A tidal shift in the Canadian psyche? On a par with how the ancient world saw the Incarnation? There is the secular use of the word “Lord” and then there is the sacral aspect of the word. Voted yesterday in the provincial. Experienced a very brief but tangible sense of virtue in the way the word is meant to signify. That is, I forgot my immortal soul; I concentrated on centering the “x” on the ballot where it was supposed to do its business lest my vote be dismissed as the act of a nutter. And you? Did you vote?’ … …. I did, bantering at the start with the election officers – two women so on top of their game they could afford a laugh or three. In other words, I was primed.

ADVISORY: “Blue Neptune”, a collection of poems by Norm Sibum is listed on Amazon.