the duchy of hetkettle trophish

i went hunting for the first time i described colombia as the israel of south america, in terms of US policy. july, aught-six. i bet other people can beat that.

•ps. later i predicted that the first colombian military excursions would follow fidel’s resignation. i don’t think either of these two hits means people should listen to me.

•pps. there is no link because the actual language of the prediction was snotty. it appears that in 19 months there can be a lifetime of maturation. if i had even suspected such, i would have begun talking to myself passionately at age 8.

how would they look?

soft pages are impractical in tidal currents and thin pages are hard to turn with arms you can’t directly control or find without looking. this would imply non-linear literature, with pages and lines separated by texture, without fixed order. telling stories of wholes without starting points.

for short correspondence, a marked ball or an internally-textured sphere might work. but how would you write? can’t hold tools, can’t see your beak for semantic cutting.

an oral tradition, based on dance, i think. or maybe you would tell your story on the corpse of a fish and make a cast of the fish for wider distribution!

•ps. oh silly me. the easiest thing would be mosaics, in star patterns that could be folded into balls for carrying. instead of paper you’d have some impressionable material that could hold objects or cuts. cuneiform and word characters.

•pps. i know what you’re thinking: why not smell? basically the ocean would wipe it out.

•ppps. now, what we’re assuming is that octopuses would ever get bored with the ocean’s own endless supply of information. my opinion on this is that we get bored because we’re keen on discerning useful patterns of activity while we wait. so we’re ready. the octopus, however, can move constantly, in search of tasty things — in other words, it seems, one waits while one hunts, because patterns are established by currents and geography…? one need only have a swiss army knife to take advantage of the moment.

i’m surprised speakers and headphones can’t tell amps about their sound characteristics. video monitors have been doing that for years now and it’s very popular. then again i keep finding myself at one person’s CRT or another pushing the refresh rate to 85 to ease their headaches. the software engineers could give a shit.

kings and queens can launch ships, but you need real stars to guide them.

remind me to make it like city hunter. i love its jokey sense of place.

•ps. a typical transitional composition. notice the variety of exposure and vulnerability.

the web’s not really a window to the world for me. it’s more of a window for sniping. potshots, right? keepaway from ma house is all it be. this is terrible!

i didn’t figure on writing anything grand or influential or even really playing chorus-kid to everybody’s beautiful music. i wasn’t thinking. i was writing. the web is not my grand piano canvas, it is my bathroom wall. i always wrote the uptight things on the bathroom wall. constipation does that to a person. sticks do, too.

now i’ve kind of got an inkblot thing going here and that seems to be all right. i don’t mind it. you don’t seem to mind it. it’s not so much the issue of superficiality that concerns me. all the little bleeps and burps and spews here, more flighty than before, still carry with them all my heart’s hopes for future people living and breathing as libertequals, and all the animals and plants, too, and the fungi, and all my fella phyla, all to enjoy a nice sunny day and a good night’s sleep or the equivalent.

the question of phases that came up with projects and change that i didn’t want to answer until i’d really totally walked in new shoes — here it is. i haven’t been going to parties. i haven’t been taking phone calls. i can’t look people in the eye. all because…

i don’t know.

i know what approaches i think will work for large numbers of people to meet a variety of goals and still have time left before this bomb or that bomb goes boom. the leap for me is in the economists’ joke — equal misses to left and right mean a hit — what if we say that’s true about framing the actions needed for saving our asses, in our politics?

but that’s them. i diverge. lines never meet up anywhere.

•ps. i could pretend i live in an airplane. that way — sealed windows — no shots fired.