The sculptor chisels subtleties from stone
Or weaves the softest cloths of brazen thread
To clothe immortal gods, or gild the throne
Of some archaic queen who’s long lain dead.

A poet sets in bezel by his pen
The diamonds that he catches as they fall
From parted lips and opened tomes from when
Our wasted words were fresh of scholar’s scrawl,

But I can’t find a chain so precious as
To hold your whisper.

He first considered that climbing a slope of forty-five degrees should logically be twice as difficult a task and take twice the amount of time and exertion as would traversing flat ground of the same distance. By extrapolation, a slope of nearly ninety degrees, as was the cliff above him, would require twice again that exertion, making the prospect of climbing for twenty meters of sheer rock equal to that of hopping for eighty meters through some pleasant meadow (an activity which he had, on numerous occasions in the past, completed without the slightest of difficulty). The mathematical simplicity of his ascent thus established, it remained only to resolve those matters of logistics that so often confound the elegance of scientific thought. With this end in mind, Hopper set himself to more practical observation and speculation.

The difference, mused the rabbit, between a vertical surface of granite, and a horizontal surface of earth, is that the latter provides much better footing than the former. This is for two reasons: first, that one has better footing on firm earth than on smooth stone, and second, that one always has better footing when standing flat than when askew.

"My chief consideration, then," he said to himself, "is that of cant, as stone varies less in temper than in angle."

Hopper then stepped back several paces to examine this wall of rock that occupied one half of his horizon. A narrow shelf, possibly just wide enough to accommodate his passage, started a meter above him and ran crookedly upwards and to the right until he could no longer make it out among the other incidental outthrusts of stone. Seeing that this was the best route by way of both angle and firmness of footing, Hopper, without further contemplation, leapt up onto the narrow rock ledge, and started to carefully make his way along and up the face of the cliff, leaving his erstwhile companion to decompose in relative peace.

By the unknowable decree of providence, Hopper found himself, after near a half hour of painstaking traverse, at neither the lip of his destination, nor at that hopeless impasse that would have arisen had his narrow path ended with an unceremonious void. Instead, and whether by good or bad fortune, the narrow mouth of a grotto gaped at him with ravenous darkness. It exhaled a cold wind that chilled the tips of his white fluffy ears, and tickled his paws, seeming to moan some disjointed tune. When he poked his head in, he could barely see past his whiskers before the last remnants of oblique sunlight dissolved into a blackness so perfect it was as if God’s first word had there been defied. Though he trembled with fear, Hopper saw that to enter this passage would be a matter of necessity, not one of discretion, and so, with only a brief hesitation, he stepped into the breach and all light seemed to perish before him.

As he crawled through the passage of cold stone, his bloodied and mud-streaked fur might well have been that same shining white pelt that had yet to change but once for the seasons, for the pitch blackness of the depths into which he wandered effaced those outward blemishes his adventures had dealt him. In his mind, however, as he felt blindly for the one winding path that would take him forward, those wounds that had scabbed over began to fester, and those that were hidden bled freely, for though the marks made of flesh may scar and fade and be shed and forgotten with the seasons, lashes laid on the mind will be fostered by time and take their places, for good or ill, among the legion of their peers, which no darkness can obscure.

Though his spirit ached and his body grew numb in the cool of the dark rock that pressed him on all sides, Hopper pressed on, taking up a merry tune to hum while the drafts of the earth moaned around him. That chilling breeze still blew his gentle fur, now inwards, and now out, like the moaning breath of some great wounded beast.

The premise of the story is rather simple: Rubin, clad in bell bottoms and platform shoes, spends all his time in his room in his mother’s apartment complex listening to Rachmaninoff and squeaking his deceased cat’s mouse-shaped toy, presumably in some sort of mourning ceremony. Ed regularly attends real-estate-selling-personality-cult-pyramid-scheme meetings. Rubin’s mother insists that he make a friend, and bring that friend to dinner. Ed’s Organization insists that he bring a new recruit to his meeting. I can’t elaborate further, lest I reveal crucial details and spoil the suspense, but suffice to say that they end up neither at dinner with Rubin’s mother, nor the Organization meeting, but in the cave of the Echo People in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

Anyhow, it’s an excellent movie, with great depth and subtlety in its superficial physical comedy. Though I haven’t had the opportunity to see any of the few other movies by Trent Harris, the man who wrote and directed Rubin and Ed (and was apparently ejected from Hollywood as a result), I will be sure to write about them as well if I get the opportunity. They have such promising titles as Plan 10 from Outer Space and Beaver Trilogy, so if you find them, I heartily recommend them as well, if only by merit of name.

This time, he thought to himself, I shall go all the way through and find what’s there on the other side of the dark forest, for it can’t be as dangerous as mother and father have said. And so, leaving his lush field of dandelions, and hopping past his home, he came to the round white rock that marked the edge of the forest, where he stopped for a moment.

"Mother would not like it one bit if I were to go off without telling her and she were to come home and see that I’m not playing among the dandelions or frolicking in the brook or in my room eating carrots and playing with my new chess set, and father will certainly punish me if I get back after dinner," said Hopper to himself thoughtfully, "but I shall certainly be home before dinner, for there cannot be more than 100 trees in this forest," (For Hopper fancied 100 to be a handsome big number and quite suitable for the purpose of counting blades of grass, grains of sand, stars and other numerous things) "And as I have already easily ventured as far as the fourth tree in a matter of minutes, it will take no longer than fifty minutes to reach the end of the wood, and no more than fifty to come back, which leaves me nearly an hour to look as I may at what I find thither and allows me to arrive back home still well before dinner."

Much pleased with his reasoning and mathematical acuity, Hopper thus set off at a brisk pace, quickly penetrating beyond the known reaches of the wood into the unknown reaches of the wood, which bore a striking resemblance to the known reaches, but were of far greater number. As he hopped, he counted the trees that passed him on either side, and when he got to fifty, he decided that, being halfway through, it would be a good place to sit and rest for a while. But before his furry bottom even touched the ground, Hopper heard a sound from just the direction in which he himself had been heading. Suddenly much afraid, and much regretting his bravado in setting off so hastily into the dark forest, Hopper moved behind a shrub and crouched down, making himself very small and wishing for his mother to be there in order to comfort him. His fears of monsters and snakes were relieved when he saw, bounding through the forest, a rabbit just like himself, smiling and humming a merry tune as he went. Hopper, delighted beyond conception by the arrival of this jovial creature, stepped from the shrub and called an enthusiastic "Hello!" to the passing stranger, who stopped and turned to him.

"Why hello there, little fellow, what brings you to these woods?" said the stranger.

"I’m a very curious little bunny and I desire to know what lies beyond these woods," said Hopper, admiring the stranger’s marvelous long whiskers.

"Nothing lies beyond them," said the stranger "they go on forever."

"But that’s impossible!" cried Hopper. "I know for a fact that just where we stand is halfway between my side of the woods and the far side. I made the calculations and I shall go there and come back in time for supper."

"I made calculations as well," said the stranger, "I was to be back in my den sipping carrot tea and reading a book by dusk, but I’ve been hopping through this forest for three whole days now with neither tea to sip nor a book to read. The first tune I was whistling wore out after the first day, so I chose another for the second day, and the one you must have heard me whistling just now is the third. I have made up my mind that because I know only three more tunes I will save them for the journey home and turn back on the morrow."

"I know many tunes I could teach you to whistle!" said Hopper, and whistled one to demonstrate, "but I don’t think you’ll be needing them because if you keep going on your path you will come out on my side of the woods in just under an hour. You will find a delightful little brook and a field of dandelions and a little hollow stump where I live with my good mother and father!"

"Keep your tunes for yourself. You’ll need them if you really mean to find your way to the end of this forest, for, as I’ve already mentioned, it doesn’t end, and as for me, my calculations do not allow for dawdling and talking with passers by, as pleasant as the conversation might be, so I shall be on my way. Good day to you, my dear rabbit."

"And good day to you," said Hopper, and continued on his way.

And so he went for a long while, the dark forest getting rather darker all the while as the trees thickened around him. The way by which he hopped became obscured by twigs and brush, forcing him to slow his pace, and even stop entirely when he came upon a brier so thick he wouldn’t have been able to make his more than three yards a day, and only that if he had had the forethought to bring a machete on this adventure. He was hopping hither and thither along front of the thicket searching for a path through to the other side, and was on the point of giving up hope and returning home, when a little path of trodden grass caught his eye.

Perhaps this is the path that cheerful rabbit with the whiskers took in coming the other way, thought Hopper, and perhaps it will lead the way to the far side of this unfortunate obstacle. And sure enough, as Hopper had hoped, the trail lead off to the side a little way before it turned sharply and plunged into a narrow passage through the thorns. It was dark in the thicket, and Hopper squinted into the blackness as he went, doing all he could to keep from tearing his delicate skin on the twisted thorns that lined the edge of the way, and even so gained a painful scratch oh his ear when it caught on a nastily barbed vine just above his head. "Gosh!" he squeaked aloud. "Another mishap like that and I’ll very soon tire of this adventure!"

He soon came to a small clearing in the thicket which allowed him enough room to sit and catch his breath. He was unused to crawling through such dark and dangerous places and found himself already quite exhausted. Before he knew it, his furry little eyelids had fluttered shut, and he was sound asleep. Night was falling in the dark forest around him. Hopper dreamed of a joyous romp along the banks of his familiar brook with the other little rabbits who were his friends, and when he awoke in the pitch darkness, he missed them sorely and was very afraid, for the sounds and calls that one often hears in a forest at night are just those ones that at which a small rabbit has good reason to tremble. And so Hopper curled more tightly into a little ball, and began to cry, for his torn ear also pained him greatly. Too morbidly frightened to make a sound, he sobbed silently, wishing that his mother and father would come find him and take him back to his cosy room in the hollow stump in the field of dandelions by the bubbling brook. Just as he wished this, he heard the faint rustling of something moving towards him through the bramble. Very much terrified, he pressed himself back into the thorns, hoping that whatever hungry monster might be approaching would pass by without noticing his small fluffy body and therefore not make a delightful meal of his tender flesh. And then he heard a whistle. It was a steady note, at first, then broke into some foreign tune that Hopper had never heard. It must, thought the trembling bunny, much relieved, be that stranger with the very long whiskers who scared me in near the same way before, and who has finished his journey through to my side of the forest and is now making his way back.

And sure enough, in several moments, the other rabbit made his way to where Hopper was sitting and spoke.

"Is that you hiding in the brambles there, Hopper?" he asked, "your mother and father are very worried about you."

"Oh thank goodness it’s you," cried Hopper.

"Not too loud," cautioned the stranger, "there are owls and snakes in this forest who might hear your young voice and come looking for the tasty little morsel that produced it. Just as you said I would, I came through to the end of the wood soon after we parted and met your mother and father, who were out calling for you, very concerned, and when I told them that I had just seen you, they begged me return to the forest and bring you back to them."

"Oh, my poor mother and father!" said Hopper, mindful to keep his voice down.

"Because I was very hungry, I ate some dinner with them, sitting at your place in a chair that was much too small for me, and afterwards, I turned myself round and came right back here to find you, and find you I have, so now let us make haste back to that pleasant field of dandelions where you and your parents make your home."

"But surely the way back is very dangerous," said Hopper, "and full of ravenous sharp-toothed creatures who would eat the both of us in one bite and still be hungry for the cheese course."

"There’s nothing to fear. I saw so many hungry wolves coming here that there can be none left to prowl the journey back."

"I suppose you must be in the right, but I still can’t help feeling rather afraid, and I would like to know your name if we’re going to be hopping together through the darkness, so that if I lose my way I should know what to whisper."

"I am called Buttercup," said Buttercup.

"Very well, Buttercup," said Hopper, still trembling.

The two rabbits made their way back through the narrow passage in the brambles, Buttercup ahead, whistling a merry tune, and Hopper following closely behind. They soon emerged from the thicket into the shadowy moonlight, and, moving more quickly, as bunnies are wont to do in dark forests at night, made their way through the trees and undergrowth back in the direction of Hopper’s home. Hopper stayed close to his companion, for his long ears were filled with those menacing sounds of the night, which seemed to grow ever nearer on all sides and spoke eloquently of razor-sharp beaks and slavering jaws.

"Why do you whistle?" whispered Hopper. "Won’t the noise draw out whatever is lurking behind yonder tree?"

"I always whistle when I’m in a dark forest, and I have never before been eaten mid-whistle," replied Buttercup, who was promptly swept away in the talons of a hungry bird.

Oh dear! thought Hopper, what have I done? Surely if I hadn’t interrupted his tune, that would not have happened! What an awful way to repay his kindness in coming back to rescue me from such despair as I was in! But what shall I do now? I’m worse off than when I was hiding among the thorns, for there I was at least obscured, while any place here I find to hide might very well be already occupied by a snake waiting for some small furry animal like me to wander into its venomous jaws. I am also afraid that I am completely lost; these trees all look the same by night.

And so, as Hopper stood musing along those and similar lines, he felt a quick rush of wind and the unpleasant sensation of talons piercing the loose skin of his back. Being thus seized and swept into the air, Hopper’s line of reasoning was disrupted. Very much displeased by such a disruption, he twisted round and put his teeth into the nearest bit of birdflesh he could find. His avian captor, being similarly interrupted in whatever train of thought she was pursuing and presumably similarly aggrieved, reached down to put a stop to Hopper’s nonsense with her razor-sharp beak, and, being thus distracted, promptly flew head-first into a tree and fell to the ground stone dead. Hopper, though much bruised, punctured and fractured by the ordeal, remained quite alive, and, after a brief and valiant effort to make some inventory of this most recent ordeal, passed out from pain, exhaustion and terror.

He slept until late morning, when the sun shone through the trees above and awoke him. He found, upon awakening, that by some stroke of luck he and his taloned companion had fallen on a sort of rocky outcropping, more or less inaccessible to the ravenings of the night. For this reason he was as yet undigested, but the joy of this initial finding was soon mitigated by an extraordinary and diverse pain and, owing to the large mass of dead feathers and flesh on top of him, a complete inability to move about. As the day wore on, a deep and terrible hunger joined this already lengthy list of grievances.

The rock from which he was unable to move soon began to grow unpleasantly warm from the sun.

When the sun ascends to its acme, thought Hopper, this rock will become unbearably hot, and I will surely, even shaded from above by these feathers, be thoroughly baked from below before the cool of the evening can relieve me.

After having laboriously violated the most basic of lagomorphic dietary codes, and thereby freed himself from his avian encumbrance and eased his hunger, Hopper realized that, having been utterly lost from the outset of his expedition, he was now nearly irredeemably so. That short flight had left him entirely disoriented, and any direction might lead home just as well as any other. Considering that there are four cardinal directions and four additional lesser directions, which each must count as a half of a cardinal one, Hopper decided that to try them all would take, on average, three more days, and possibly as many as six, not including at least a day to rest and let his wounds ease. As spending that amount of time wandering through the hazardous woods would be impracticable, Hopper decided that the best course of action would be to attempt to achieve the summit of the rock face looming above, and from there have greater vantage in determining his course homeward.

Another cool thing about pants, which many people don’t know, is that they are often replete with string, which can come in handy in tight situations. Take this hypothetical, for example: You are lost on a desert island with only four days of supplies and a talking doll for company. There is no apparent means of communication with the outside world. Despair? No! As long as you’ve brought your pants along, there’s nothing to worry about! Most pants can be unraveled to yield many meters of thread, which can be put to use in catching fish and opening lines of telegraphic communication with other nearby desert islands. Bon appetit!

Some people will warn you against pants. Some people like to go without pants or use other forms of leg-protection. While I’m an open-minded person, these people are wrong. Pants provide the best comfort and utility. Period. Some people say that pants are a "gateway garment," leading to use of "harder" garments such as waders, overalls, and lederhosen. These people are wrong too. I’ve been wearing pants for a week now, and know people who have been wearing them for years, and only one of them tried lederhosen once and said that they chafed.

My personal experience with pants has been an overall positive one, and I’ll prove to you that pants are the thing for you. Once, before I was wearing pants, I got my thigh stuck on a meat-hook. If I had been wearing pants, this wouldn’t have happened. Once when my little neighbor Sally wasn’t wearing pants, she couldn’t get out of her house when it was burning down, and her mother hung herself. If she had been wearing pants, this tragedy would never have taken place. You can prevent similar tragedies from happening by wearing pants and telling all of your friends to do the same.

If you decide to give pants a try, I have a few recommendations for you. Probably most important is that you should get real pants, not shorts or anything. Shorts are just like pants, but they’re not as good. Also, you should make sure that you get pants with pockets in them. There’s nothing more annoying than having to ask a friend to hold your wallet while you ride the mechanical bull because there aren’t any pockets in your pants. Seriously, if you’re wearing pants, why not have some pockets in them? Anything else is just sort of dumb. Also, you should make sure you get new pants. A lot of stores will try to sell you old used pants for more money. Don’t fall for this. You can tell if they’re used because they will have lighter worn-out patches. And maybe most important is that you get pants that fit! I know it sounds silly, but you would be amazed how many people I see walking around with pants that are just way too big! I can even see their undies on underneath, and that pretty much defeats the whole purpose of pants!!

Henry, as the fellow was called, got around on foot. Considering the liquor store was four and a half miles from his house, this was an impressive feat, and one which was often surmised to be responsible for his continued good health despite an inexplicably consistent and consistently inexplicable eight-hundred-dollar-a-week cigar and whisky habit. Cigars and whisky, incidentally, were all he ever purchased, and it was surmised that his other nutritional needs were met by squirrel meat, which he acquired, it was said, by standing under a tree and wafting his odors skyward.

Considering the small size of the town, Henry’s weekly economic contribution was enough to secure a small but influential base of political support. Such support is absolutely necessary for a man of his repugnance and wealth. Morality, you see, is at best a subjective matter, and when one of the subjects has crippling halitosis and is rumored to have sex with grizzly bears, justice is often in need of earthly quarter, which, in this case, manifested itself in the form of the liquor store owner’s ratty-mustachioed uncle, who wore a shiny sheriff’s badge pinned to his shirt and a six-shooter on his hip. This second-hand nepotism served to stanch the natural flow of wealth from those who nobody would miss, to those who keep grandfather’s rifle on the mantle and have a fair chance of missing, but are willing to try just the same.

This political favor, though, did not preclude the great deal of conspiratorial talk inevitable in such cases, and, for a time, much talk was made, albeit mostly in whispers or slurs. Many were curious about the actual source of that four million dollars, invested over fourteen years in Henry’s liver and lungs, and men had twice made investigations and come back with nothing but tetanus in one case, rabies in another, and some unidentifiable and lingering odor in both. One of the men died, the other was charged with trespassing, and lust after Henry’s money was relegated to the patrie of drunken conjecture.

The legends, however, grew. A man called Brit (short for Britches), one of the regulars at Pfannenschmidt’s Pub, had colorful story about Henry’s fishing technique. The fickle river that passed Henry’s shack upstream had a fair trout population, and when the season was right, Brit said, he’d catch twelve in an hour. "So I was out there in my waders, the little bastards fighting for a bite of my hook," he’d say, and he’d take a swig of beer, "and I hears this splashing around on up the river, scaring all the fish real good, then I look down at the water, and it’s red like there’s a fucking elephant with its gut cut open just bleeding up the whole damn river. Shot one of those once. Thing bled like a goddamn garden hose. Then these busted up trout come floating down the river, belly up and eyes popping out of the skulls, looking like somebody took a mallet to ‘em. So I walk around the corner, and see there, buck naked, bent over in the river, Henry, punching the shit out of these fish and chucking them into a pile on the bank." Then he’d get quiet and go back to his beer.

"So what did you do then?" somebody would ask.

"I went fucking home is what."

Chronicle and conjecture here met, copulated, and discharged their indeterminate brood into an ever swelling mythos, which had long since bilged out of the barroom and lodged itself somewhere in the very being of the town.

There were a few facts about how Henry arrived, fewer about where he came from, and jack shit on where he was headed. Jackie Thomas, the richest liquor store owner this side of the Mississippi, was an asshole, but his proximity to the object of discussion allowed him some small and begrudgingly granted authority.

The Facts, as Jackie Thomas put them, were these:

Henry had arrived fourteen years ago. He was an employee of the National Park Service sent by the government to make sure the forests were growing properly. Because he was the only Park Service employee stationed in that region, he was payed a regular and exorbitant salary. That salary was well spent on fine cigars and whisky, the provision of which, to this important civil servant, was crucial to the well-being of the nation. To support his claims, Jackie cited a marking on a map that closer resembled a dead fly than a ranger station. Despite the fact that there was no national park land for 167 miles in any direction, the Sheriff fully endorsed this version of events, and went as far as threatening with slander charges anybody who denied them.

The opposition’s story, of course, was rather more exciting, though no more verifiable. This was an amalgam of the most popular conjecture, which, without regard for internal consistency, had coalesced into a single narrative.

Henry had been part of a notorious gang of bank robbers. They went from town to town, always two steps ahead of the law, cleaning out vaults and brutalizing the citizenry. Henry was the mean one who held a sawed off shotgun and shouted at people to get on the floor or he’d blow their fucking faces out the backs of their fucking heads. As much as he enjoyed this, the grace required to be a member of an organized gang of robbers was rather beyond him, and after a string of successes, he decided to blow some faces through the backs of some skulls and make his own fortune. Precisely at this point, his shotgun ceased to function, and he was forced to chew the heads off his compatriots. Because his father was a wealthy Massachusetts senator, the law was discouraged from chasing him on the condition that he stay in a small shack on the outskirts of our fair city and only sate his acquired taste for human blood on full moon nights. He arrived, therefore, on a dark and stormy night fourteen years ago, and when his car broke down in the middle of town, he either pulled it by the bumper to where it now rests or drafted a team of rabid wolves to give him a lift while he leaned his head out the window and snarled.

Those who were present on the sunny day fourteen years ago to witness Henry peering quizzically under the hood of his car and swearing horribly wouldn’t think of questioning this unofficial dogma.

Few strangers passed through the town, fewer stopped, and none had stayed for a good long time. When a couple of young folks, engaged to be married, apparently, stopped at the motel, there was talk. When they stayed at the motel for a week, there was more talk. Strange people they were, and did strange things. On drugs, said Britches. Satanists, said the motel owner. Goddamn hippies or something. When the young man, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, was wandering about looking for a place to buy toothpaste, Henry happened by, holding his empty whisky barrel on a shoulder, and a fat cigar between his lips. Their paths met, and after some casual conversation Henry knocked the man down with a slap to the jaw and walked on. The young man got up several moments later, dusted himself off, and rubbed his jaw.

"What was that?" he asked a passerby.

"He’s called Henry" the passerby replied.

"What’s the smell?"

"He smells like that."

"Oh."

The town bar was one of those homey homely places that’s more a social symptom than business enterprise. Everyone, except the young man whose name was Joseph McCall, and who nursed a beer with one hand and a swelling jaw with another, was a regular. Due to his irregularity and unfortunately for his inquisitive intentions, everybody stared at him for a good five minutes after he walked in, then, by unspoken consensus, they began to speak loudly amongst themselves of the peculiarly shaped clouds that had been seen hovering just the other day over yonder mountain. During this time Joseph finished off two beers which he had been grudgingly served (a bar is a business enterprise, after all) by the bartender.

"Who’s Henry?" asked Joseph as he was served his third.

"Oh, Henry, hm?" replied the bartender.

"Yeah."

"Oh, Henry. I wouldn’t bother him if I were you. He has a mean temper."

"I noticed."

"Oh. So that his work you sportin’ there on the chin?"

"Asked him where I could get some toothpaste."

"Aah that’d do ‘er. Guy don’t like people all that much. Just in town buyin’ his booze and smokes."

With that the bartender retreated and occupied himself with cleaning some clean glasses. Joseph stepped out onto the dusty pavement. His jaw throbbed purple and bled a little. Fuck toothpaste, he thought. There were a few unhappy trees on the way back to the motel. He went into number four, where his fiancée was laying on the bed watching commercials on the TV with bad reception, and sat down next to her.

"Get the toothpaste baby?" she asked.

"Nah, fuck toothpaste. You can wash with soap."

The girl stared at the television with a vague smile on her mouth. "Alright," she said, "What’s for dinner?"

"We have tuna left from yesterday."

"Oh! I love tuna, my darling!" she said. "And what happened to your face? What a pretty purple."

"Some fuckin’ asshole the name of Henry," said Joseph in an affected drawl.

"Well I never! You gonna stand fer that mister?"

"I tell ya, sure as yer panties is pink I ain’t!"

"Well I tell you what, I’ll go out and get toothpaste and antibiotic cream for that face of yours, and you prescribe for yourself whatever the doctor thinks best." Joe’s fiancée pulled on a pair of jeans and walked out, and Joe did some Georgia hillbilly and watched TV. When his fiancée returned a half-hour later, he was asleep. She anointed him with white Neosporin, careful to keep a crisp line down the middle of his face, right side white, left pink. Then she lathered his neck with the colors switched, and unbuttoned his shirt and had started on his chest when the tube ran out. She admired her newly checkered man and watched the infomercials and fell asleep with her cheek on his white breast and her breast on his limp arm.

He was gone when she woke up as the sun was going down, and the pillow he’d slipped under her head was covered with the same drugged cream smeared across her cheek. She called for him and he didn’t answer, so she went to the room’s dirty little bathroom and washed her face, then out onto the wooden wrap-around patio to see the sun set. Joseph was walking up Mainstreet with another tube of antibiotic ointment. His purple menace had grown, swelling and splitting its dried creamy adversary and spreading freely onto his naked neck and unprotected left side of his face. He opened the tube as he walked and smothered his affliction in medication.

"I think you missed some spots," he said. His swollen skin twitched in pain as the tips of his fingers grazed broken skin. "I had to get some more."

"Let’s go to bed," she said, "if it’s worse in the morning we can drive out to see a decent doctor."

"That’ll be a long drive."

The elements of the wound, which, from a distance, resembled some sort of mauve chiton, resolved at a closer distance into a horrific and multifarious conglomerate of human decay, half covered in a thick layer of white paste, half naked and clinging to the stubbled underside of Joseph’s chin. The swelling where he had been struck hadn’t gone down, and the duly stretched skin cracked and bled. He went inside and vomited and went to sleep.

Getting out of bed the next morning, Joseph found, was a rather difficult affair, as his face had been glued rather thoroughly to the pillow by dried excretion. Being a rational person, he reasoned that by peeling half of his face off along with the pillow, he would be able to remove a large portion of his infected flesh. He did so and went to the bathroom to observe himself in the mirror. The marbled crimson of exposed muscle oozed with healthy blood. It looked clean, but the blight lurked around the edges, eying his fresh flesh and seeming to slither inwards even as he watched. He took some Percocet and carefully covered himself again in white, then looked again in the mirror. One eye was swelling shut and would probably be itching if he wasn’t already numb. The other was bloodshot and twitched. The rest of his face was immaculately creamy.

There was a note on the door from his fiancée: "Went to get meds. You looked like shit. I’ll be back noonish."

A few townsfolk going about their morning rituals saw Joseph, his face bleeding under its medicinal mask, walk up the road in a bathrobe and boxers with a hunting knife in his fist. They saw him turn up that dead-end road, four miles from its end and already winded, then they found him again two days later half way back with a rotting face, naked and dead. He had left Henry face down on the floor with the hunting knife in his back, They found fifty-seven dollars and seven cents at the bottom of a barrel in the corner.

Joseph’s fiancée never came back. Everybody said she knew.

I first heard Steve Earle at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in October, and since have bought a few of his albums and borrowed some others from friends. I’ve liked everything I’ve heard. Until a few days ago, my appreciation of the man, though substantial, stopped at his music. Though there’s a definite liberal slant to his lyrics, I’m generally loathe to ruin good music with the stupidity of those behind it, and thus avoid their often dubious philosophical social or political beliefs. Musicians should do what suits them and avoid what doesn’t. Steve Earle, however, is political because his politics are sound. Not that I’m preaching one perspective or the other, but I always admire a person who’s seen more than one side of an issue and chooses that which appeals to his sensibilities. Having grown up in Texas in a markedly conservative political atmosphere, Earle’s politics carry a refreshing authenticity rarely found standard-issue San Francisco liberalism.

Having said that, I have to point out that his most recent and most political album The Revolution Starts Now, is a bit of a disappointment compared to most of his older stuff. Anyhow, regardless of your political views or prior musical experiences, give Earle a try.

His site, including a very interesting weblog can be found at: http://www.steveearle.com/

“What?” replied his old woman.

“My feet! They hurt!”

“Well I just massaged the right for you, and the left one’s got a carbuncle on it.”

“Well– I know!” The old man snorted and lay back in his yellow-covered arm-chair.

“So what do you want?” The old woman twiddled her reading glasses and put a jigsaw piece where it didn’t fit.

“Not to hurt.” The woman held the misplaced piece up to the light and stared at it hard.

“That one’s not going to work,” she told one of the horses in the puzzle. The white one, on the left.

“What.”

“Nothing, dear.”

“What’s not going to work?”

“This piece wasn’t fitting where I had it, is all,” she said.

The old man hurrumphed.

“You have an appointment tomorrow.”

“For what?”

“The dermatologist. For your carbuncle, dear. Doctor Garibaldi is going to take a look at it.”

“Dr. Garibaldi just wants our money.”

“Of course he wants our money, everybody wants money.”

“Health plan my, heh heh, foot. What time?”

“At three.” The old woman went into the kitchen to make some tea. The old man cleared his throat. The old woman tucked a white hair behind her pink ear and opened the cupboard. She hated tea. With a passion. But it had antioxidants in it, and she had oxidants in her. So she drank green tea. She filled the kettle with water from the tap, and boiled it.

At two-forty the next day, the man was asleep on his chair, A large-print edition of A Clockwork Orange open on his folded, liver-spotted hands. His wife roused him, and after some significant amount of walker-wrangling and grunts of exaggerated debility, the pair was comfortably seated in their small red Honda. The old woman turned the key. Shafts turned and sparks sparked and gasses burned in the shining machine, purchased with great thrift from a grandchild for the small and punctual sum of twenty dollars on birthdays and Christmases. The grandmother propelled herself and husband down the hedged avenue onto the freeway. The grandfather fell asleep, snoring ruggedly as the car bounced on new and old highway asphalt. When they pulled up in the hospital lot, the grandfather woke up.

With some struggles and complaints, the wife navigated her bitter spouse into the waiting room. She took up her knitting, and he took up a magazine with pregnant and semi-nude celebrities on the front.

A tight-bunned nurse opened a door. “Dr. Garibaldi will see you now, Mr. Burgdorf.” Mr. Burgdorf mounted his walker and ambled after her and into the proffered and vanilla waiting room. Mrs. Burgdorf miscounted the stitches on her sweater. Mr. Burgdorf took off his shoes and sat on the examination table. Doctor Garibaldi entered, and cleared his throat. He was a fat man with an ironical skin problem and thick glasses.

“That’s a nasty one you’ve got there. Hmm,” he said.

“Can ya fix me?”

“How long have you had it?”

“Couple weeks,” said the old man. The doctor scratched his nose with his prescription pad, and sat down so as to better examine the purple appendage punctuating the vein-woven fabric of Mr. Burgdorf’s skeletal foot.

“It sure is ugly, let me see.” The doctor poked it with the back of his pen. “Has it been pussing?”

“Biblically.”

“Two weeks you say? It should clear up of itself, but I’ll give you some pills for it, and you can soak it in some warm water.” The doctor stood and wrote a prescription.

“What sort of pills?”

“Antibacterials.”

“It hurts.”

“Okay, I’ll give you some others too. Let me see. The nurse can getcha these if you wait here, and if you need more, just get them from Schwartz’s.”

Mr. Burgdorf waited, and the nurse brought him two little bottles.

“Take one of each, morning and evening, with a meal.”

“Thank you.”

Mr. Burgdorf pilfered the pregnant celebrities on his way through the waiting room.

“What did the doctor say?” asked Mrs. Burgdorf in the elevator.

“He gave me some pills,” answered her husband.

The old man’s marriage ended that afternoon when his wife was thoroughly decapitated in a violent car accident. The scene was a rather red one, their little red car having been crushed by a little red convertible containing a late professor of sociology with a heart condition and hearty quantities of blood. Mr. Burgdorf, unscathed, hitched himself and his walker a ride back home in the back of a police cruiser, took one of each pill, warmed some water on the stove-top and soaked some pus out of his boil, cried quietly for a couple of minutes, took two more of each pill, and fell asleep. Four men in suits sat on the other side of a long desk. They spoke in unison, but he could only understand the one on the far left, who wore a bad toupee and had a bitter smile, and what he understood, he didn’t remember when he awoke the next morning and pulled his foot out of the tepid, blood-pus-tinged water.

The old man took another pair of pills with some black coffee and sat down in front of his late wife’s puzzle. The frame was set out, with two jagged-edged horses protruding into empty space: that jigsaw purgatory to be filled with homogenous grass and blue sky with a few stringy clouds for ambiguous but merciful guides. Burgdorf took a piece and examined it. The card had separated from the image around the edges.

Just what it is about watching an awkward German man’s misadventures that appeals so profoundly to the human soul is a mystery, but you can rest assured that if the documentation of awkward German men were an age old art, Schultze Gets the Blues would be a revolutionary breakthrough, and perhaps even necessitate some sort of modernizing prefix to be appended to the phrase, like Documentation of Awkward German Men Nouveau, or Neo-Documentation of Awkward German Men. Regardless of the specifics of the nomenclature, the filmmakers were obviously masters in this obscure field, and one only hopes that their trend will be continued in such a way as to honor them as they deserve.

It is inevitable, unfortunately, that there are those to whom the prospect of watching an hour and twenty minutes of excruciating artiness isn’t appealing. To those people I say: Shame on you. It’s the likes of you that brings about all evil in the world, and you would do well to submit yourself to the appropriate indoctrination, which can be rented, for a small fee, at your local video store. Make haste, however, for the revolution has not the convenience of pity.

"There is not enough context here for me to guess what this says."

—Some Greatmind

In which the Possum Dreams.

He dreamed deeply of eidolons, phantasms grim, And bufonidae clad in dark cloaks. He stood in a hall, all murky dim, And to him an anurus spoke.

It was a dark tale of curses and wars, Death coming at untimely times. The tale meandered on and o’er foreign shores Where toad heroes and gods did their crimes.

When finally a point with a point to be made, The warty brown speaker achieved Concisely the slumbering possum he bade On a perilous journey to leave.

He woke the next morn, his fur wet with dew, And with some salt fish broke his fast Then recalled with a start and couldn’t eschew Night’s delusions and what they forecast.

For rarely a possum’s a doer of deeds For those who can ribbit or croak, Just as ne’er will you see out pecking at seeds A man while the chickens all smoke.