For the Institute; the Grand Remonstrance, Part 1

Last week’s post may have unfairly left the reader hanging, in an unbearable tension over the reported surprise attack by the bogus institute, led by my former friend and gaming colleague, which may have seemed to the reader to have left me in a desperate and pitiable state. While I appreciate the sympathetic nature of this anxiety, as it is for my mental well being, I must sternly denounce the sentiment, if the reader did in fact actually experience it, as counterproductive and perhaps indicative of a lower estimation of my mental resilience and inner fortitude than I care to contemplate. As is often the case, pity can be taken too far, to the point that it becomes an insult. But if this insultingly heartfelt pity exists only in my mind then I can brush it off with ease, and let bygones be bygones. In any case, I did experience desperate hours before I turned for advice to an authority who can always be relied on for the best sort of counsel in trying times, Winston Churchill, and in addition to some delightful observations on the best procedures for defeating tyrants, I found his account of his famous napping procedure, which I immediately applied in my own life to secure the extra two or three hours of daily sleep needed to compose my counterattack, a lengthy condemnation and expose of the flounder and his machinations which I intend to insist be included as a disclaimer in any publication the Institute attempts to spatter against the ignominiously polluted wall of the modern publishing world. The statement is too lengthy to be included in a single blog post, so I will include only the first few paragraphs here so that the reader may gather a sense of the sweep and scope, and gain a perspective on the scale of its impact, by inevitable stylistic comparison alone, on the flounder’s diluted offering:
I wish to clarify several details with any unfortunate readers of this “collection” as they’re calling it. If these hypothetical (I fervently hope) readers have managed to swim through the chunky miasma of nonsense spewed out in the preemptive strike that the flounder (my former friend and employer) will probably call “the introduction” to this book, they will no doubt labor in confusion over who I am, why I am writing a statement for this book, why I am including a “draft” of a story conceived many years ago, and more importantly, why this book was ever printed and why they have wasted a few moments of their limited allotment of time as a sentient being in this universe attempting to read it. I will answer all these questions. And if the reader is one of those sad, deluded souls who spent money on this book, I can only offer them my condolences. 

Years ago I participated in a weekly gaming group that included several friends and acquaintances, among them the flounder. We did not use computers to play this game, but would actually meet in person, usually at the home of that week’s Dungeon Master, and usually used published dungeons and maps. But sometimes we would create our own materials, and the flounder, being one of those troubling personalities with plenty of creative tendencies but no self critical instincts at all, produced a comic dungeon that we all enjoyed very much, as a brief break, a change of pace. I must emphasize that most of us primarily enjoyed the comedy in direct proportion to its singularity and uniqueness. After he began to eagerly produce his comical dungeons like an assembly line, our enjoyment dropped precipitously. Soon, he was producing more dungeons than the rest of the group combined. I am not speaking of a large group; the game nights varied in size from week to week, but there were about three or four people in the core group, which swelled to eight or nine, some of them truly odious people. Although we tried to trade off hosting duties equally, with the host traditionally serving as DM, this system broke down under the absurdist wave of comic dungeons. The crisis prompted a secret meeting of the core group, the true aficionados, who convened at the Arby’s on 35th to discuss the darkness engulfing our way of life. Who were the members of this group? Our names don’t matter. We were the true gaming aficionados, the purists. Who initiated this secret meeting? The ringleader? I don’t actually recall. We were desperate men, beset with enemies, several of whom patronized this very Arby’s. We conducted the meeting in a furtive corner, away from the windows and hidden from the line of sight from the condiment palette (it took a slow walk around the dining area to find a good spot).  

And from this semi private table, over curly fries and jalapeño bites, we hatched a diversionary tactic worthy to stand alongside Churchill’s D-Day wooden army. Briefly to be told, we changed the core gaming night to Sunday. Then we designed a phaseout program for the Saturday night gaming group, to mimic a slow waning of attendance that would not elicit curiosity from the “pseudo-gamers” as one of the members of our group, not myself, called the people we wanted to slough off. We wanted a non-confrontational end to the comic dungeons, and to continue to enjoy weekly gaming nights. So we took turns attending the Saturday games for a short while, one of us attending each week, which immediately halved the operating size of those meetings. I had, rather casually I’m afraid, predicted that the crowd mentality of the “dungeon tourists” as we called them, sensing the checkout line so to speak, would end the Saturday night games in three months. The others expressed their vehement doubts of this overly optimistic prediction, but even I was staggered at the efficacy of my method, at the swiftness of the reaction, and the incredible accuracy of my prediction, as attested by the other “purists” (as we called ourselves) on the occasion of our next secret meeting, at the same Arby’s, almost 3 months to the day later, wherein we all agreed to move the game nights back to a reclaimed Saturday night, as the tourists had all ceased attendance at the Saturday games! Now, as I have indicated, the Saturday night meetings were a broken system, a system in decline, and not only, I am forced by my incredibly rigid personal sense of fairness to admit, from the comic dungeons, so I can’t quite credit our strategy alone for the swift success, but I well remember that Unanimous vote of the secret purist cabal as one of the most singularly triumphant and transcendently joyful moments of my life. I felt as I imagine Moses would have felt, had he been allowed to watch the children of Israel stream back into the promised land under his leadership. 

But like that great man, I was denied the fruits of my mighty labors, after only four sweet weeks of gaming as it ought to be. 

Just as I had settled blissfully, gratefully, into a routine of reading, intense thought, bursts of writing, and the stimulating release of the weekly game nights, I received an inexcusably early in the morning telephone call from the flounder. He indicated that he had learned to web program and had created a web site dedicated to his art, which he invited me to see and offer opinions on. I refused to do so, as I had absolutely no interest in the internet at the time, and I hoped he would go away, but a scant few weeks later he appeared at the Wasatch Hollow library during my mother’s Wednesday night DHS meeting, which I usually accompanied her to out of concern for her safety, as she liked to walk the block and a half to the library in the summer for some daft reason, and the neighborhood is no longer the monotonously safe place it was in my youth. The flounder popped up like an awkwardly malevolent genie at my side while I perused the titles in the sadly depleted science fiction section, thrusting his face close to mine and startling me so severely that I stumbled against the soft immensity of Randall Lund, a schoolmate of mine two years my senior whose parents are in my parents Ward but whom I have never spoken with even though he seemed to have found permanent living accommodations on the disgusting benches by the science fiction rack at that branch. I experienced a level of physical closeness with Randall that I thought I would not ever experience with any human being, and hope for the remainder of my life to avoid that level of closeness with any living thing on earth with the exception of Princess Patty, my cousins aged corgi, a beloved fixture of my youth who enjoys tummy rubs and scratches behind the ears. 

After cursing the flounders name, I asked how he came to be there and he insisted that he had popped into the library by chance to check out an art book even though I knew that he dislikes the Wasatch Hollow branch intensely for its smell and that the only art books he has ever been interested in are the modern photography books that the Mormon staff at that branch routinely eviserate with scissors the moment they appear in the donation bin. 

After I had voiced this sentiment, in tones appropriately modulated for the library environment, the flounder suddenly changed tack, adopting a sadly unconvincing managerial tone, indicated that he had been thinking of me for a position with his new venture, an educational institute that would teach humanities curricula to whatever miserable dregs of suburban society that could not muster the intellectual wherewithal to gain entry to a real university. Despite a sincere attempt on my part, made out of respect for our friendship, to piece together coherent meaning from his inchoate mutterings, I could not ascertain any logical structure to his business plan for this enterprise, beyond the questionable assumption that this sham institute would attract tuition paying students by calibrating their tuition based on the graduates actual expected earnings. I indicated to him, as gently as possible, that since this “Institute” would be teaching art and literature, an honestly calculated fee based on such a ratio would result in a disappointingly meager operating budget, and that he would be forced to staff the faculty of this institute on a volunteer basis. He expressed relief that I had voiced this estimate, and offered me the position of Dean of Literature at once, thanking me for bringing the salary negotiations to such an agreeably swift end. Disarmed by his frankness (if you’ll excuse the wording), I found myself accepting the position without any hesitation. 

The next month would have been a whirlwind if the institute had ever actually gotten past a few pathetic HTML files on the flounder’s home pc, but the river of work, promised by the flounder to imminently flood my waking hours with institute business, never materialized, and if you have spent even a tenth of your waking hours reading as much as I have, and experienced that fraction of the consistently developed metaphors that I have, you’ll know, without my even bothering to explicitly write it, that the word “trickle” will be trotted out to humorously contrast a certain something with what a certain someone most certainly did not ever put much further work into. 

Stay tuned for part 2 of the Grand Remonstrance, next week

Stabbed in the back and called to arms!

For the past two weeks I have, against my judgement and against all reason, attempted to compose, with the meager dregs of mental alertness available to me in the summer months, a suitable rejoinder to a distressing notification I received from the institute, in which the flounder, my former friend and gaming comrade, indicated that the wearisomely trivial and monotonously eternal quest for easy money that he terms, with unintentional humorousness, his “career”, has arrived at a point of such a desperate bleakness that he intends to self publish a book, a “history of the planar pentoidals and their incredible impact on one life.” I don’t think that there could exist a reader perspicacious enough to follow this blog who does not immediately understand whose “life” he intends to inflict upon the self-publishing market, so we will pass by that ruinous landmark without any comment from our tour guide, except to describe my utter outrage and despair at this news, knowing that any book with this purported subject would be paper thin without the usual wholesale plundering of my work that has characterized every other reselling of that “history.”  Make no mistake, the timing of this notification was calculated to strike my psyche at its most weak and lethargic time. Since I made no secret, during the time of his false friendship, of the extremely seasonal nature of my genius, and reiterated and expounded on this theme quite freely and often, it is not possible that an intellect even meagerly equipped with slightly lower than average powers of mental capacity could fail to note the timing. If the missive had come from Duane, his former creature, I might suspect chronological accident. But the flounder knew. He knows my weakness, he knows the summer fog I exist in. Like lex Luther, carefully measuring out the grams of kryptonite to centerpiece his latest doomed plot against the man of steel, the flounder crafted the timing of the news, counting on two, three months of helpless silence from his victim while he works at maximum speed, to do whatever the disassociopaths who self publish do to expedite the process (I wouldn’t have the foggiest notion and have no intention to research it) so that by the time I have composed my counter response, whatever fate awaits his effort will have already run its total course, and I will be composing a tasteless obituary, or, horrifying to contemplate, screeching from the dustbin of history, a pathetic figure, after inexplicable and gigantic forces have thrown the flounder like a witless leaf on oceanic waves, to the summit of fame and power, thanks to the stolen genius of my work!

I cannot allow this to occur and must strike now, with everything; satire, wit, and renewed litigious threat! They shall not pass!

Let me reassure any interested readers of My Afterlife; this serial fiction will most definitely continue next week, whatever the result of the coming battle

“My Afterlife” part 2, its the best I can do this time of year

I have begun to experience my final decline, the terminal diminishing of my mental powers, barely perceptible even from month to month, but unmistakable when viewed at a yearly scope, like a subtle change in the declination of the ground, a few minutes more for each day’s journey, a dreadful slowing that the common person never sees, or unconsciously chooses to ignore, where the sober intellect, coldly objective in self assessment, registers with ghastly precision. Each year the summer change, the fascist directive of daylight savings time, seems to hamper my cranial circuitry a little more, and I lose a little more time to befuddlement than I once did. And the recovery in the fall, my neuronal healing process begun upon resuming adequate sleep at night, becomes noticeable a little later, maybe a day later, perhaps more, each year. I could choose to wallow in despair over this shadowy harbinger of the tomb, but I will instead follow the bold example of my intellectual leaders; Hume, Bruno, Bacon, Churchill, Sagan and Asimov, and focus on the passing of my torch to my successor, that they may enjoy the fruits of my progress and pass it off to the next runner in the glorious race to enlightenment!

In that spirit, I really would prefer to discuss my theory of literature, my life’s work, in depth. But during this season of mental hibernation I could not do it justice, and grieving, I must return to the fluffy exercise I have entitled “My Afterlife”:
“The Leaping Fox, thank Frank!”, cried Chèvre, executing a weary pirouette in her “Shieldmaiden’s Regalia,” as she termed the fabulously colorful and incredibly light and breathable armor she’d worn for the quest after Byron had purchased it for her with most of his allotted budget after Twiglet and Rufus and Nim and Kyle and Gretel had begged him to spend more on blankets and medicine and gourds and goblin repellant fire sticks after they all heard stories about the Northern Wastes and how really horribly cold it was and many people died there and Byron had agreed and told them how seriously they would take this portion of the quest and how it was a proving ground and he’d tried to reason with Chèvre and she’d agreed totally but begged him to let her try it on and his leadership meant so much to her personally and he’d said go ahead you’re free to try on whatever and she put it on and he saw her in it and he’d purchased it along with an elf arrow set with Phoenix feathers and a bow that doubled as a lute so that when chèvre used it to miss game animals it played a strikingly beautiful chord that made Byron think about magical fairy kingdoms and making out by a crystal river in one and Nim assured him that the curse she’d put on him would shrivel his organs whenever he and chèvre made love. He’d laughed uneasily but didn’t know if she was kidding or not because chèvre had told him his friendship meant everything to her when he’d jokingly suggested they see if the curse was real 

Everyone but Twiglet had forgiven him for Chevre’s regalia by the time he’d paid the Widow Harmony, proprietor of the Leaping Fox, for their rooms and a “hearty meal” and they’d bathed and everyone but Twiglet and Rufus stumbled down to the dining room where they could smell the chicken that Harmony had used to flavor the carrot soup which along with copious quantities of watery ale comprised their hearty meal. There in the inn’s main hall, which Rufus could have not fit in, guzzling ale and gagging down soup amongst the townsfolk, Byron thought to pursue his quest by asking about about the prices and availability of local touring companies. He’d originally thought to ask the Widow Harmony, but after briefly meeting that person to negotiate the price of their stay, he resolved for their remaining time at the Leaping Snow Fox to spend as minute a quantity of time speaking with her as was possible. He was reflectively astonished at how rapidly his mind had gone from obsessive pondering over his Quest, his diminishing finances, his resentment at Chèvre, and plans to dispense with the shield, to a rabid hatred of the Widow Harmony in just a few precious exchanges.  

So he asked the other townies, or tried to speak with a few anyway, and ask them about tours, but he experienced an unexpected language gap, his first in a land where everyone supposedly spoke the same language, and seemed to be experiencing failure where he least expected it. Chèvre chose this moment of frustration to ask him why he was bothering people. 

“We’ve got to find a guide,” Kyle told her. They’d been getting along like gangbusters this afternoon, Chèvre and Kyle, after Byron had stopped talking to Chèvre earlier in the day. 

“Why does he need a guide?” she asked. Byron suddenly realized that Chèvre did the same thing the Widow Harmony did, where she managed to twist everything she said into clumsily veiled insult or criticism. But where the Widow Harmony had made her comments in her dull, hateful, gravelly voice, Chèvre voiced her crummy remarks in her delightful childlike lisp, leaving Byron foggy and confused by the emotional pain and rage, unable to focus on the source. It had not taken Byron more than a few moments for his feelings toward the widow to surge with hatred, she was Chèvre without the disguise…Byron physically started with surprise at this insight. He looked around the tiny, filthy room. Nim and Gretel had given up on the soup and were gnawing jerky by the fire, mumbling to each other and stealing resentful looks at Byron and Chèvre, who sat chin in hand, leaning toward Kyle as he murmured something in her ear. The incoherent locals in the room, all four of them, three men and a woman, all looking to be 80 to 100 years of age, seemed to be drifting off to sleep on their benches. Maybe they slept here every night. This expedition is falling apart, he thought, filled with panic. We need to cut costs. 

“Kyle,” he said. “I’m going to have to let you go.”

“No!” Nim and Gretel both shouted from across the room. Byron was surprised by their vehemence, since neither of them seemed to have like Kyle before now. Nobody in the expedition had shown any friendliness to Kyle except for Chèvre. 

“Sorry,” Byron said with shaky authority. “Money’s tight and he’s not a fighter.”  

“Are you kidding me?” Gretel fairly spat in reply. “He’s been the most valuable team member in every fight.” Quite true. As a fairie, Kyle did not wield a weapon, but he had a power move that sprayed vision dazzling and mental befogging magic dust at opponents, effectively nullifying every violent threat the group had encountered so far. It even worked on hobgoblins, reportedly, which the group had a very high probability of encountering out in the snowy wastes. This actually looked like a bad decision now, but leaders had to lead decisively. 

“Sorry, my decision is final and we still need to pay for a guide through the snowy wastes.”

“I quit,” Gretel said. 

“Me too,” said Nim. “Now you can pay your guide and your Cheddar on the side too.”

“Well okay,” Byron shot back. “I guess you’re paying for your room and meal then.”

Chèvre made a face at Nim and Nim flipped her the bird. 

“No we’re not,” Gretel said. “We’re staying here and you can go get your money back from the Widow Harmony if you like.”

“You guys are not going to like the review I’m giving you for this desertion.”

“My rating has weathered lying reviews from incompetent leaders before,” Gretel shot back coolly. Now Nim flipped Byron the bird. 

“You better knock that off,” Byron standing and putting his hand on his sword. Gretel and Nim smiled grimly, but Kyle ended it with a spray of faerie dust in Byron’s face. Byron staggered around shouting for a few seconds while the others cleared the room. Then a blow to his head ended his exertions for the night. 

Byron awoke with a stinging headache, opening his eyes to the cold and frigid light of morning shining from a hole in the stone wall just above the straw pile he was lying in. He saw Twiglet standing at the end of the straw bed, skinny arms on her hips, her face a frozen mask of contempt. Then he turned and forgot all about his long day porting his own and Chevre’s packs, and all his resentment, for there she was, sitting at his side, even in this ghastly jail cell, chèvre herself, looking worried and anxious. 

“Hey,” Byron said tenderly. 

“Hey Byron,” chèvre said. “I came hear to talk to you about Kyle.” 

“What? You came to my jail cell to talk about Kyle?”

“Jail cell?” Twiglet snapped. “This is your room. You’re still in the Leaping Fox. You should have seen the room they gave Rufus and I.”

Byron sat up and looked around in disgust. “I asked for the room by the Royal Suite.”

“That’s where I am,” chèvre said, frowning in confusion. 

“You’re in the Royal Suite?” Twiglet asked her coldly. “And how do you find those accommodations?”

If she caught Twiglet’s tone Chèvre ignored it. “It’s okay. It’s a little too big for me but I can’t sleep in the straw beds because of my hay fever. It’s better than Kyle’s room, gah.” She made a gagging sound. “Byron, you should see Kyle’s room, it’s totally disgusting- did that gargoyle charge you full price for it?”

“What were you doing in Kyle’s room?” Byron found himself asking. 

“Byron, I’m not comfortable with this line of questioning,” Chèvre said coldly. I am so glad I fired that guy, Byron thought. He sat up, wincing at a stinging headache. 

“Well what do you want?” He said to Twiglet. “Are you quitting too?” He tried to voice it as coolly as he could, but his voice cracked a little at the end, ruining his vibe. 

“Rufus and I will stay if you take back Gretel and Nim,” Twiglet said quietly. 

“Okay, but they quit,” Byron replied, shrugging. “So it’s kind of up to them, really.”

“They’ll come back if you take Kyle back,” Twiglet continued mildly. 

“No can do,” Byron said. “We just don’t have the coinage to keep everybody.”

“Okay well, keep your money then, cuz Rufus and I are out.” Twiglet spat back. 

“That’s just fine, Chèvre and I don’t need any of you,” Byron rejoined, glancing at chèvre for some kind of sign. She gave him the sign. It was a distressingly pained expression on her face. 

“Tell him,” Twiglet said to Chèvre. 

“Fine, I’ll take him back,” Byron said hurriedly, throwing his arms up and scraping his knuckles on the low, greasy ceiling. “I don’t know how we’ll afford a guide now, even if we can find one.”

“We actually found someone,” Twiglet said, turning to the door, where one of the raggedy attired and dirt covered children who seemed to wander unattended everywhere in Trees End was sitting on the step at the door of byron’s room, chewing the nasty black gum that seemed to comprise the townspeoples main food group and pastime and about 90 percent of the economy. He’d asked about it the night before, and while the subject seemed to elicit an unusually animated response in the average Trees Ender, their vocalization on the subject had been as incomprehensible to Byron as everything else, and he could not even accurately reproduce their pronunciation of the gum’s name. It seemed to be some variation of “Shit,” as far as Byron could tell. The filthy little urchin asked him something in an adorably squeaky voice. Byron didn’t try to understand. “We need a guide through the Northern Wastes,” he said loudly. 

The urchin appeared surprised voiced something that actually sounded like “horrible place” and Byron shrugged. Then the urchin motioned something definitely looked like a “come with me,” and Byron and Twiglet and chèvre followed him out of the horrible room and down a cramped, dark hallway, into the main dining room, barely lit by a few windows that appeared to have been made by large rocks being thrown through the walls. The room reeked of breakfast still, and they ignored the server chewing gum by the door who looked like a younger and angrier version of the Widow and who was probably her daughter who told them that lunch wasn’t ready yet, and followed the urchin out the door into the muddy Main Street of Trees End. “Did it rain?” Byron asked Chèvre, who frowned. 

“No, why?” she said. The urchin led them through the sea of mud to a small commons where the street ended with a wooden stockade on the West end and a small temple to Frank at the East end. Before them, at the northern edge of the square, a strip of greenery, bushes and bedraggled trees, ran along a fairly impressive stone wall. There were a few vegetable sellers clustered in tents near the temple, but the urchin led them toward the stockade, where Byron espied, with a sinking heart, a cluster of haphazardly constructed shelters of boards and sticks along the west end of the wall. The urchin most certainly was taking them to the group of beggars lounging against the wall at the end of the line of shanties. “It’s a scam,” Byron said to Twiglet, but she ignored him. 
Stay tuned for more of my third rate work; “My Afterlife”

Introducing some light summer writing, another new novel; “My Afterlife”

I can well imagine how eager any readers of this blog will be to continue reading “Childstar”, the novel I began last winter, but I haven’t written any more than I posted last week, and since we’ve passed the equinox I don’t expect to be able to make any valid progress on the novel for at least four months. But have no fear! I’ve actually begun a third novel, a sci fI fantasy sort of novel, which I intend to practice on during the summer, just to keep my mental muscles in shape. I should warn you that I consider genre writing to be inferior, of a lesser caliber than satirical fiction and critical analysis. If I expected to obtain, during the summer months, the 10 hours of sleep per day that I would require, at a minimum, to write adequate Critical Analysis, or even the eight hours of sleep needed to compose satire, I would not bother with genre writing. But I do not expect that the sun will allow me more than seven hours a night until the end of September, so the reader(s) must be content with my third best efforts. Any readers with exceptionally high standards, like myself, should probably not read any posts before October, and confine themselves to revisiting the Sperberspeak winter posts. 10/2016 to 3/2017. 
So now that I have encouraged the intelligent readers to leave, the remaining readers (?) may enjoy my light hearted sword and sorcery romp: My Afterlife
The seven adventurers trudged wearily through the outskirts of the little town of Trees End, regarding the small but sturdy houses by the road with barely a flicker of interest. They all dearly wished for a hot meal and bath and warm bed, and in Trees End, that could only be obtained at the Leaping Snow Fox, the well known last inn before the vast Northern Wastes began. An audible sigh escaped Twiglet the Forest Elf when she caught sight of the Fox at edge of the Town Square. 

“There it is!” she cried, quickening her pace. She’d been walking in the graceful, light footed way of the Forest Elves for more than twelve hours today, and grown to hate and despise the elf slippers she’d been forced to wear for her character spec on this quest. The others had all purchased two pairs of the incredibly comfortable sandals sold at Marta’s Sandal Magic in the great city of Sperber (they still maintained their original store in Frankville), and while they were all much heavier than Twiglet (especially Rufus the MiniGiant), their feet after all the miles of walking were still callous free and riding blissfully on Marta’s patented bunnyskin soles. Twiglet loathed being an elf every time she felt the hard cobblestone pressing against her savagely blistered feet through the beautiful stitched but loathsomely thin elf slippers. But she forgot her elf hate when she turned back to point out the fox to the others and saw the foggy weariness in Rufus’s eyes. For all the softness under his feet, Rufus and his knees had carried his 500 pounds over all the miles that Twiglet had gone, and the soreness had steadily increased and become stabbing pain and had finally driven his beautifully serene mind off into a misty dreamland of unhappy numbness. He walked like an automaton, mindless and unresponsive. Twiglet decided they would take their supper in their room, which had better be on the ground floor. 

“Okay, good,” said Byron with surprising crispness, summoned with an act of will. He’d been carrying Chevre’s stuff since dinner, and had only succeeded in staggering this far by focusing his mind on his Quest Task, his deep and borderline murderous resentment of Chevre’s cheerful singing, and his self assigned task to sell the despicably heavy and at this juncture seemingly completely useless dragon forged hero’s shield that he’d purchased in Sperber on an irresistible impulse after seeing it shiny and glittery in the shop window. 

Stay tuned for more nonsense

Sperberspeak Exclusive: Textual Economics and Childstar part I (fruits of the winter)

We again approach that dreaded time of the year, when the sun begins its climb back up to the high ground of the sky and begins to radiate pitilessly upon the humans below, eroding their sleep schedules and promoting mental incompetence on a staggering scale. Fortunately for my readers, I have taken upon myself a rigorous sleep regime in last few precious weeks of winter, amassing a powerful bank of highly productive thought which I have marshaled and prepared to pour generously upon the thought deprived readers of the internet. 

I will first summarize the recent breakthroughs I have made in my theoretical work on the nature of literature, that I call Textual Economics. Textual economics studies the internal values established in a text; how characters are valued, how actions and ideas are valued. I fully expect this theory to upend current critical theory so severely that it may actually bring about a political revolution, maybe get some faculty canned. At the very least I would hope my ideas lead to some serious reevaluation by tenure committees, nationwide. 

And enough summary, I would now like to proudly present an abstract from the new novel, fruit of many weeks’ toil, that I began in response to the sad direction taken by my former employer at the bogus institute which I refuse to advertise for, not from vengeful feelings, I assure you, but from honest pity, like the Samaritan covering the travelers nakedness. 

Without further ado, I present: 
Childstar part I

 (an abstract):
My attorney, who happens to be my brother Owen, has advised me to make a short statement detailing my personal involvement with the Kid revolution, or the Kid Coup or Bratnorock as it has been variously termed, and the ensuing world pediocracy (or Junior Junta) which lasted for eleven years and was much more terrible than it sounds, for myself personally and for everyone really and as Owen has encouraged me to emphasize my awareness of my own responsibility for events and not to minimize the sufferings of others, in order to distance myself from my ex-fellow junta member Kelly Bateman’s widely excoriated and very unsuccessful defense as presented in the hated and popular “Playing Princess” gamecast; let me make it clear that I am under no impression that my own sufferings as a subordinate member of the Junior Junta even remotely compare with the people who’s lives were destroyed by Kevin’s absurd schemes, and I fully support the total restitution envisioned at the Settlement Hearings, and intend to do my part to support that restitution, even if I remain imprisoned for Treason, Fraud, Racketeering, and distribution of pornographic materials – that charge really stings, you should have seen my mother’s face when they read it in the court. And it’s totally untrue, completely. They just tacked it on to emphasize that we’re all adults now, to portray us all as the seedy and morally agnostic teenagers and tweens we are in the present, to distance us, our much viewed images, from the adorable little kids we were when the junta perpetrated its worst crimes.  
So for beginners, my name is Ian Ochsberger, son of Herbert and Eloise Ochsberger of Moriancumer Utah, members in good standing of the Meganite Mormon sect, which was formed in the twenties around the same time as the larger and more widely known TLDS movement. I spent my childhood before Bratnarok in Moriancumer, which in my youth was a fairly ordinary suburb in unincorporated Salt Lake County but has I am told been recently elevated to the status of a township and acquired its own Big Tent. My parents voted for the tent while some of their friends were agin it, for old people reasons that nobody cares about nowadays except their caretaker myrms who have been infectineered to love and nurture their charges like a parent nurtures their baby, and to jolly them when they are cranky and nod in agreement when they babble their nonsense about natural weather. 
We have myrms guarding us in the Big House, and they really are wonderful people. And most of them willingly underwent the infectioneering, but there are many, of course, who became myrms because of Kevin’s nonsense. One of them, Daveed, is a guard in my unit, and without meaning to at all gave me days of guilty nightmares that almost reminded me of working with Kevin, simply by transferring to my section and telling us about himself at circle time, explaining that he had been one of the parents accused of tyranny by their children and infectineered against his will by the junior junta. I came down with a case of the shakes after hearing this, unable to speak clearly or hold anything heavier than a coffee cup for days until my partner Zach told Daveed about me and Daveed tried to talk to me numerous times and give the usual myrm speech about myrmish instinctive regard for human life but this and other therapies did not help until he told me that his family had applied for the Settlement and were active members of the IJaB movement (Infectineer Junior Junta Associates Back). Hearing this miraculously restored the passive indifference with which I have dealt with the prospects of lifelong imprisonment or forced infectineering (which is actually illegal under the Settlement, a fact which has seemed to completely enrage families of junta victims – and I certainly can see why), and now Daveed and I have long conversations and he told me his harrowing story of the MQKA regulars pounding on his front door after dinner with their juggling ball weapons (which I’m sorry to say were my idea to give the operations a sense of fun and which did not succeed in doing so), and the sickened look on his son’s face, and his daughter weeping, and the tiny secret police waving their palms with the court ordered IIS order projected in blinking blue in front of his face, his wife struggling to pull him out of their wiry little arms, then the sergeant proctor pulled out a page of stickers, each with the kid revolution prism logo printed in reverse (I did design a specific logo for these stickers which Kevin shot down), removed the blotter pad from one, and stuck it to his arm. They informed him that his record was cleared and he was free to go, then hurried out his front door. He said his wife clawed the sticker off his arm (everyone did this, but they were designed to fragment and the adhesive containing the micro injective agents stays on the skin, you’d have to remove the patch of skin containing the patch – and go down at least five centimeters within three minutes – some people tried this and I have heard of some grisly successes) while he looked around for his son, Daveed jr, or Little D, who had gone and hid somewhere. He knew his son had filed the RoPA on him, and he knew why; he’d pretended to throw Snickers, Little D’s Bubble Bunny hand puppet, into the smartweave recycler the night before, when the seven year old had refused to clean the clothes off his bedroom floor. Little D had been quiet and cold to him before school the next day, but Daveed had suspected nothing until the end of the day, when he saw his son’s strangely diffident reaction to finding Snickers on his bed after school. He’d found Snickers in Little D’s closet a week or so later, tossed in amongst the old shoes, two days after his infectioneered change and one day after his wife had fled the house with their daughter, leaving Daveed Myrm to raise his son alone. 

I’d actually read many stories like Daveed’s before, thoughtfully provided by IJAB at no cost to the Big House for the benefit of Junior Junta flunkies like me and others. You can imagine how enjoyable I find them, but as I will explain, I did not come up with the idea of the infectineering, as claimed by Kelly. That was mostly Jason. I know people will not like to hear this, as Jason, by virtue of being the most famous and highest ranking victim of the junta, has emerged through the junta collapse with by far the most squeaky clean reputation of any of us. And I don’t mean to imply that Jason was some kind of evil person, like Kevin or Benny. Jason proposed the infectineering idea as an alternative to Benny’s ideas; think Roman Empire type justice system, think floggings and executions. Can you imagine it? I find it particularly ironic that Benny, an only child of a doctor and a lawyer who as far as I can tell got everything he wanted from his mom and dad – I mean he had a myrm “brother” that grew up with him, and a six passenger drone, can you imagine it? – this is the kid that breathes fire and talks up his parents as mr and mrs Caligula. I know what Sperber would say of course, but people knew about spoiled kids a thousand years ago. 

None of us knew the truth about Benny until Kevin let it out, but by then we all knew there was something wrong with him. 
I met them all at Elf camp, the year I turned ten. Jason sat two rows in front of me on the Silver Dragon, the outbound drone that ferried the kids from three stops in unincorporated Salt Lake County over to Camp Elvinore on Antelope Island in March. Kevin may have been on the Silver Dragon too, he came from Midvale like Jason. I didn’t speak with either one of them, I sat with a kid named Thomas whose family lived in Moriancumer too. All of these suburbs have acquired big tents now. Some of them are designated as Grand Manors. Old people live in them, mostly, and some retro young folks. I find this title interesting, since it means essentially the same thing as Big House, which is what they call prisons. I live under a Big Tent now too. And what’s the difference? We all stay inside. Come to think of it, the HCD’s, High Capacity Dormitories, built by Smartweave in high population areas for Papa-N’Uni are just another word for Big Houses too. Does anyone live outside anymore? Nobody but the furries now. 
I’d bunked with Thomas the previous summer, and we would bunk together this camp too, in Castle Shakespeare, a red and green bouncy castle with a view of the Wasatch mountains across the valley. Castle Shakespeare had 24 two person living pods around the courtyard, and larder below with snacks. It could access the EO. Kelly made a big deal about Castle Shakespeare in her podcast, about how old it was, how we were truly camping and all that, how remote from everything we were, all this in a smartweave gen 14 climate controlled shelter with EO access, water dispense system, and a fully functional food fabber. 

We didn’t use those things, very often, because we were playing a game of pretend. We pretended we had to hunt game for food when our fabbed meals were shipped in daily from the camp headquarters, we pretended to have no EO access so we could use our puppets to pretend we could do magic on the GPS holograms on all the adventure trails. All pretending, all in the name of getting physical activity. People used to sit around real campfires when they went to the woods, even kids. But we were supposed to get the same feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction from acquiring holographic wood, stones, and tinderspark spells, and speaking elvish. I have heard that they’ve toughened up the camping experience at Elvinore since the Kid Coup, in response to the backlash after the collapse of the junta, making the kids actually learn Elvish phrases instead of letting them use their Eldar Dictionary like we did. Good for them! But I bet those kids are still huddling around a puppet fire. Reading Sperber has opened my eyes to the dangers of all this nonsense, and it’s helped me to understand all the willingly self-infectineered, the Furry movement, the Myrm mystique, and the smaller subcultures, like the Spritish, my own Frankenstein creation. They’ve disavowed me now of course. Their leadership published a devastating critique of my admittedly suspicious post Coup and pre-collapse behavior on their Stage, performed by Plastique, the High Awkwardness of their Snack Committee – a title I invented. And I personally appointed Plastique – when he was Thomas – as Somewhat Awkward Member when I was Snack Committee Taster, which was kind of like a chairperson. 

Owen has read what I’ve written so far and indicated that I’m jumping around too much for Stagio to get a good storyline. I told him I’m still doing the introduction, so to speak, but he told me I need to get on with the story and stop writing for human readers. Critical Science has determined that humans tend to be rather forgiving readers because they instinctively assign the narrative voice as an authority figure, so they will put up with all kinds of vexing asides and bombastic meandering from the writer, while Staging algorithms like Stagio will ignore any unstageable script and assign it to the Playbill, which no one ever reads, Owen told me. He said even Kelly knew better than to put anything in the Playbill. I listen to Owen when he talks about legal matters, but he should know how familiar I am with staging algorithms by now. I was educated by the best, Jason and Kevin, who no matter what people may say about them, certainly knew how staging algorithms work; they used Jason’s modded version of Kilotexter to break into Elvania’s Backstage, and well, unbelievably, everything else. I don’t pretend to understand how they did it, but I certainly gathered enough from Kevin’s boasting to understand Stagers as well as Owen. I am perfectly aware that everything I’ve written may go in the Playbill. And he’s dead wrong when he says that nobody reads the Playbill. I myself always read the Playbill. That won’t help my case, of course, and there he has a point. So I’ll get on to my story, for Stagio’s sake. 

Back to Castle Shakespeare, and the first day of Elf camp, beginning with Thomas and I emerging from our room in our Elf costumes, puppets off, for the Courtyard Con with everyone else in the Castle. I actually don’t remember anything about this meeting, except for the disturbingly realistic pig roasting, which I could not eat, and the dizzyingly realistic sky show, which made me glad I had not eaten. Some of the render settings on smartweave make me a little queasy. Jason later told me it was the warp correction they put on the rendering, a 3D effect meant to trick the eye. He and Kevin were a wealth of tech information for myself and the others. 

I do remember Kevin and Jason during our first quest, snickering as Thomas and I sang along with the pixy musicians we met in the Stardew Forest, halfway up the slope of Stansbury on our way to Grimjor’s Gate. When I heard the snickering and saw Jason looking off with a smirk and locked eyes with Kevin’s contemptuous face I felt immediately self conscious and hyper aware of Thomas dancing along with the silly tune and wondered if I’d noticeably moved to the music too. I stepped a little away from Thomas and resented him for his mindless enjoyment. It gives me shame to describe these feelings now. I feel more guilt, actually, for the way I treated Thomas than for my participation in any of the infamous policies of the Junta, to which my contributions were absurd and minimal. But I feel bad about Thomas and have no resentment at all for how he’s treated me these days

The occupiers have left; peace amidst the rubble

And as suddenly as it began, like some unbearable affliction that after days of weakness and fever may turn on a night and retreat on its dark wings before a mysterious surge in the body’s immune system, the occupation has ended, the army of nephews and their beleaguered little sister have marched off into their mammoth white transport vehicle under the cadent exhortations of my sister in law, and like some agreeably ancient European, blissfully ensconced amongst the rubble of his hometown while the Americans ride off in their jeeps, contemplating the purposeless poverty in his future with the utter serenity of someone who has lost everything but their own life to an inexplicable, gigantic calamity that has passed, I sit in the silence of my mother’s back porch, scarred but alive, attempting in vain to mentally assign just one tome, amidst the towering queue of reading material built up on my dresser and nightstand and shelf space, to the primary slot, to initiate my return from reality. I admit it, I am stymied. Nevertheless I have been able to manage a few more paragraphs of my novel; The New Religion:
Despite the deep resentment ignited in his heart, yet again, by Dionne’s communication, Frank had initiated the Gentlemen’s Amble for the temp, who was not amusing but was at least making an effort to be interesting, with Stories of Woe about his myriad health problems and the intransigent failure to thrive which seemed to have characterized the lives of his surprisingly numerous offspring. Frank preferred amusing stories, generously dosed with Irony, his favorite spice, but he had with Herculean effort managed to find a role for the temp in one of the ongoing sagas which he presented to his wife at day’s end, for edification and amusement, in lieu of the mounting career accomplishments which he imagined most husbands were able to provide or at least fabricate for their intimate spousal conversations. The saga for which he had cast the temp; “A Weekend Song”, was a manufacturing industry take on Dickens’ Christmas Carol, with a ghost of Weekends past, present and future and a protagonist based on Frank, a lazy, cynical Quality Assurance drone with bushy sideburns who undergoes a series of rapidly paced hauntings, initiated by a thinly disguised James Mathew, who is not in fact expired but is able to successfully haunt or at least harass the protagonist through the scientific wonder of telepresence technology. In truth, the James Mathew character appeared in all of these absurd narratives, by audience demand, he seemed to be the only element of Franks dreary job that Tracy, his wife, found interesting, so much so that he’d often thought about inviting James Mathew for dinner at their home, but never had, not for any particular reason other than that Frank was one of those people who needed much more incentive to do something than he needed not to do something. His father had aptly described him as the easiest person in the world to incarcerate. “They wouldn’t need any locks or bars. Just keep the jail from burning and you’d stay.” Frank found his father almost unbearably annoying, but he could not deny the truth in this statement. 

Now he had the temp, Ghost of Weekends Future, or GoWF, opening cartons and counting booklets and insertion devices in their pouches while Frank listened to Valencia, the Strapari operator, describe her health issues with a concerned frown on his face. 

“Take a look at this,” said the gowf, holding up a mangled booklet. Frank looked the wrinkled booklet over, slowly nodding, then handed it back to the temp. 

“Good,” he said. “Show it to Valencia.” Valencia clucked with disapproval at the sight of the mistreated booklet. She snatched it from the temp and hurried over to Victor, the GUM operator. 

“Look what QA find!” She shouted at Victor, making it as clear as possible to anyone who cared that she was the Strapari operator and had absolutely nothing to do with whatever mangled garbage spewed out of the GUM. Victor took the booklet reluctantly and slowly made his away over to the corner in the belt where QA sampled from. 

“It’s the fingers,” he said helpfully to Frank, pointing to a spot on the line at the other end of the room. 

“Okay,” said Frank, nodding. “Well, it’s a minor defect.” He had enough experience with these interactions to be as bland and uninvested as possible. Some inspectors in his department, especially if they had worked in production, enjoyed the opportunity offered by a defective unit to demonstrate their knowledge of the workings of the machines, actually trying to advise the operators on issue resolution, getting involved, becoming responsible – anathema to the wise QA associate who knew the system. Frank had spent a lifetime avoiding responsibility, he had an instinct for it, a sixth sense that rang internal alarms at the far-off, soft but heavy footfalls of Responsibility’s approach, which served him well in the Quality department. He took it as a moral obligation to do his utmost to impart this sense to his trainees, it was a moral duty to him, even as he knew these new trainees might betray him later on, in the competitive jockeying for position that characterized 90 percent of the mental and physical effort of corporate employees, as he knew that it was better for him personally to let them be suckers for management, to take responsibility, take blame, leave the veterans untouched, he felt a high calling to assist the fools, to teach what others would not. And perhaps in this he was the true sucker. 

Day 57 of the occupation

I have taken what for me constitutes an act of total desperation and offered to take a nephew to his basketball practice. This offer, given in the deluded hope of attaining a few scant precious moments of private time for coherent thought and written reflection, seems to have caught my brother by a surprise so extremely out of joint from his normal expected experience of reality that I had barely completed the full sentence; “I would be happy to take the scamp”, before the unfortunate fellow underwent an intense physical spasm. It was not pleasant to witness, and my mother feared that he had suffered some kind of permanent internal damage.  I am obviously not known as an enthusiastic caregiver within the family, and were it not for a precipitous invasion of my living space by my brother and his family, occurring with all the terrifying and unexpected suddenness of an authentic blitzkrieg, I would have fully expected to have lived the full extent of my life without having experienced even a millisecond of the joys of childcare. And no part of the past two months’ experience of shrieking contention, repellant chatter, stomach churning violence, and relentless, omnipresent, riot level noise has in the minutest part altered that attitude. 

But more unbearable, this influx of family refugees occurred at the beginning of my mind’s ripest season, when my sleep periods extend into the full opulent, dark expanse of the winter nights and beyond, into the grey December and January mornings. My brain, cohesively rested and fully charged, teems with an abundance of fruitful ideas, which pour through my jerking fingers to the keyboard like a torrent, flowing out into the intellectually arid plains of the internet in generous profusion – if only the nation’s leaders had the wisdom to channel this flow into the schools, where it could nourish the fragile but eager young minds languishing in the stem desert!
But the extended family occupying our household, the pandemonium that dominates at all waking hours, has interrupted this sacred flow. Toy footballs fly into my bedroom during writing sessions, incoherent nephews burst upon me in the midst of reading, jabbering nonsensical queries and importunings without the slightest sense of manners or respect for adult presence, ferocious brawls erupt over idiotic sporting contentions, presenting to my mild and sheltered eyes such sadistic actions in the heat of battle that the afterimages agitate the peace of my late night musings. The children even beat upon the door of the downstairs bathroom, which is my inner sanctum, repeatedly attacking the doorknob like monkeys denied their favorite pee bush. So I can’t write, and the winter fruit lies rotting on the foggy floor of my cerebellum. 

It seemed to my desperate fancy that I would have a precious hour of uninterrupted composition, waiting for my nephew at the gym while he enjoyed the braying remonstrations of his YBA coach, but this daydream swiftly crumbled at the gym amongst the inconceivably annoying parents and the jarring odor of adolescent exertion pouring over the bleachers like a mist of despair. Beset by this tumult, I could barely maintain the presence of mind to scribble a few meandering sentences of my novel; “The New Religion,” which upon review are obviously unfit for publication. If I didn’t know their origin, I would have deduced their author as some terrified elderly person, surrounded for some unknown reason by starving wolves, attempting to compose a last evocative haiku for posterity before being devoured, but finding the task midway through to be beyond their patience and physical and mental stamina: “Frank swayed under the onslaught of hammering noise like hammers, fumbling with boxes while the noise hammered and beat… attempting to write gibberish the wave wall of sound like a solid hammer…his pen swerved jaggedly..pointless writing draw hammers…”

And so on. In the event, I had the opportunity to attempt conversation with the nephew on the drive home, but my Herculean efforts to find interest in the fortunes of his favorite sports team so taxed my mental energies that I distractedly drove into a driveway instead of our street, and of course became stuck in the snow. The nephew suggested we use kitty litter to somehow free the car, and my attempt to weave this completely nonsensical suggestion into the current reality sent my highly suggestible brain into a tailspin of associative musings. I disassociated for several moments, awakening to find the nephew gone from the car. I eventually located the youth at the front door of whoever’s driveway we had unintentionally closed, pounding on their door with shocking force, perhaps in hopes of commandeering whatever toiletries their pet cat had at its hypothetical disposal. Eventually he proffered his belief in their absence, and I agreed, contributing my belief that he had with his violent attack on their completely innocent front door proved that beyond a shadow of doubt, and had in my opinion additionally proved the absence from their domiciles of the neighbors on both sides and the absence of any comatose or recently expired individuals as well. I suggested he jog home and get help, but he refused and suggested I use my cell phone to accomplish the same end, at which point I indicated that my phone had no charge, at which point he pulled a phone from his pocket and called my brother. At this point the evening lost all narrative flow in my memory, fugueing between tedious snow shoveling and car pushing scenes, interludes of oft repeated brotherly inside joking, and that indescribable sense of leaderless confusion that prevails when the males in our family attempt something difficult. In the end I went to bed dispirited and empty. The next afternoon, I obtained a precious hour of piece and attempted some writing on
 “The New Religion”

Frank had perfected several mental techniques to calm his nerves while at work, to be used while performing the mindless tasks that constituted the bulk of his job duties, in order to clear his mind of any work related thoughts – those caused only agitation and powerless rage. As he carefully arranged the Opiotodal cartons on the table in the corner of the GUM packaging room (chosen for its high noise level to drown out text alerts from Dionne or Ursula), he initiated technique 1, scenario Wizard King, where he and his wife were co-rulers of a delightful fantasy land with dinosaurs and insectoid fairy people. His wife turned to evil and instituted a coup, ejecting him from the royal palace and leaving him to wander the land as a tramp, using his magical powers for good while sampling the beer at every tavern along his delightfully wandering path. People complained about his wife’s tyranny and spoke of him as the true good king with a reverence that meant nothing to him at all. 

This blissful scene melted into the cold white and stainless steel scenery of GUM at the moment Dionne’s harsh voice spoke his name from about eight centimeters behind his right ear, causing him to jerk with fear and drop a carton full of pouches onto the floor. He turned, disbelieving his senses, to see Dionne standing behind him with one of her chilling attempts at a warm smile, one hand gripping the temp by the hem of his lab coat as if she’d dragged him into the room at a pace just a little too rapid for his tiny legs. 

“Are you okay?” Dionne asked in her best concerned matriarch voice, sounding something like a velociraptor playing Cinderella in the school play. 

“Um, no, not really,” he stammered his standard reply. People usually laughed, but Dionne had heard it before. She shoved the cowering temp forward. 

“Can you take Dave around with you? We need him trained on your job tasks by the end of the week.”

Frank seethed with rage at this dismissive and entirely purposeful underestimation of his training task. Dionne knew the lengthy training interval required for floor duties well, because Frank had repeatedly described it to her when she’d started. She had no use for this information because Ursula did not want to hear it. She only repeated pleasing things in Ursula’s ears, and exerted most of her work efforts toward acquiring credit for the work of underlings while simultaneously making them look bad, a feat of corporate vampirism possible only under the weak management common in the Quality group. Frank had learned to admire the aerodynamic sleekness of Dionne’s amoral mental structure much as he admired the streamlined ruthlessness of a shark, much as a naturalist cataloging the beautiful function and structure of the myriad creatures of the ocean. Frank enjoyed in a dispassionate manner the discovery of every species of animal swimming through the corporate seas, and the cataloging and analysis of their various traits. But he always tried to keep his distance from her teeth

Post summer healing, return to work

I had a verbal dream the other night. This as much as any astronomical ellipse or solstice or equidistant vertigo signifies to me the end of the cursed summer, when my dreams are fleeting daytime night terrors, and consist of ominous fleeting imagery. A verbal dream signifies that I have begun to experience actual sleep, that my beleaguered brain is able to move beyond low level maintenance operations and do a little productive wordplay. Nobody else that I know of experiences verbal dreams, they are undoubtedly a consequence of my staggering monthly reading throughput. My verbal dreams are an intense discussion with the universe by myself. At some point in the future they may be able to extract a complete transcription of one of my verbal dreams, at which point Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Shakespeare himself may fade in comparison, sinking in critical estimation to historical curiosities, nothing much of note. But for now, they will remain a tantalizing taste of literature could, should, might someday be. And speaking of which, I believe I have the mental strength for another installment of “The New Religion”:

Frank wandered into the packaging room, carefully avoiding pallets, boxes, machinery, and purposely moving operators in overalls and hair nets and safety glasses. He saw Bimal, one of the older operators, sitting at the end of the line, expertly slapping labels on the boxes as they emerged from the machine, occasionally berating the sweating temp who was fumbling the boxes from Bimal’s table to the in process pallet. Frank greeted Bimal, asked him about his weekend, nodded smiling to Bimal’s incomprehensible reply, and sidled around the pallet that blocked most of walking space by the door. He studiously ignored the temp. He’d learned that the temp’s were usually hyper-focused on attaining a permanent position with the company, an impulse he only vaguely understood, and they closely attended to the status of the workers around them in order to work on anybody with hiring power. Because the QA staff wore lab coats like supervisors, and seemed to be outside the normal production chain of command, temps often mistook Frank and other QA as supervisor-level staff, and would attempt to engage them in order to talk about their work experience and knowledge and Frank’s job, and the QA group. Frank found the naked importuning of these interactions deeply disagreeable, especially at those times that he had burrowed into a particular room to avoid the office people, as was the case now. So after respectful salutations with Bimal, who as a veteran operator and amiable personality and important information source for Frank, required respectful attention and demonstrative maintenance, Frank slipped past the utterly worthless and possibly annoying temp and hurried past pallets to the tiny cart where QA performed their in-process sampling and inspections and kept sample containers in the green QA totes that were a source of room cleaning issues and resentment and line clearance issues and resentment and which the simple sight of caused Frank to experience without fail a waterfall of painful association and helpless rage at the Production Manager Alan Stevens. This is one of the many reasons that Frank felt he had been with the company for far too long, that even looking at some objects induced a chain reaction of mental images and associations leading to repressed rage and an unquenchable thirst for total vengeance. Frank sullenly glared at the tote and began to pull product off the line to inspect. This action triggered a rapid response threat display from the machine operator Alex, whom Frank had grow to despise. Upon sight of a QA associate pulling samples, Alex would hurry over to a section on the line about twenty centimeters upstream from where the QA associate stood, and snatch cartons, practically out of the QA associate’s hands, for an ostensible visual inspection. Other operators would just stop the conveyor for a moment to clean the printer, which Frank found annoying but human and understandable. He usually didn’t mind standing around waiting for the machine to start again. But Frank found Alex’s obvious playground signaling annoying for its crudity and implicit contempt of himself and other QA. He found it a manful duty to seize as many cartons as he could while Alex hovered, and to actually search diligently for low level defects, which like most older QA he hardly bothered with. The company had established several risk levels of ANSII standard AQL defects which due to economic reality, compliance politics, and endemic and wholehearted management aversion to the production core, could be greatly controlled by the floor QA group. The high risk defects were highly scrutinized, easily discovered post-manufacture, and could not be ignored, but the lower level defects, at reduced count and allowable at higher probabilities, and usually invisible post manufacture, could be mostly ignored and were, except at the QA associate’s inclination. The long time QA understood how to use them as currency to enforce good treatment in a hostile environment, where they were absolutely loathed by site production management and abandoned by their own, and where their treatment by the operators, for whom they represented a constant nuisance, depended on a fragile truce of respectful interaction and credible deterrence. Frank tried to be punctilious about his work, but he had a general philosophical dislike of management, with varying degrees of amiable feelings for some isolated persons and utter contempt and abhorrence for others. To be fair, Frank didn’t really belong in the standard workforce, he had a dreamy, dis associative nature coupled with idealistic standards of leadership gleaned from history books and sci fi novels. The realities of manufacturing and business mostly appalled him. 

Adieu to the Institute, again and forever

Well, I have resigned from the Institute, this time for good. Refreshed by his hiatus from any mental effort other than the mind-numbing legal filing temp jobs that have comprised his twenty year career, the Flounder has posted a record two posts in a row in his capacity as Institute chairman, ostensibly about his pseudo pentoidals, but in truth, much as I hate to say it, they have been about me. I know this sounds fairly narcissistic, but I invite the disinterested reader (a synonym for impartial in this case, but his writing does have that effect) to peruse his posts and correct me if they disagree. I myself read them with mild embarrassment – along with the usual boredom and distaste – exploding into outrage at the wiki leaks scale invasion of my privacy and thoughtless disclosure of personal details. I suffer no delusions regarding the size of the institute’s readership, but to even type the words and post them to any web page, no matter how obscure, is akin to tossing a person’s medical records toward a lidless garbage can on a windy day. As for the ridiculous allegation that I had accused him of homosexual advances at scout camp, I will offer two irrefutable rebuttals:

First, I never had any conversations with Stan, at scout camp or after. I know the Flounder had a queasy, clinically troubling regard for Stan, but I have never at any time had any interest in any 4th grade level word coming out of Stan’s strangely chapped mouth. I honestly had difficulty even looking at Stan, from the lip bleeding. There was a great deal of thoughtless sharing of canteens and unwashed utensils at the camp, along with a totally unreasoning ape-like abuse and mockery of anyone with the self respect to request soap and hot water be applied to mutual cutlery or heaven forbid separate canteens, and in that environment the sight of blood on a fellow scout’s yammering mouth induced a great deal of mental stress in myself, manifested in indigestion and dehydration, along several other debilitating physical effects. Needless to say, I avoided any conversation with Stan, and so never had any opportunity or inclination to describe any homosexual experiences, as such revelations, even of overtures by another, could not have failed, in that milieu, to have resulted in increased attention and hazing directed at myself. 

Second: The true circumstances of my supposed backstabbing are that in conservative societies in America the less educated and less mentally fit make youths seem to have an inordinate fascination with homosexuality, in the form of hyper-focused teasing of each other. The Flounder was susceptible to this impulse, as he has always had a chameleon like social persona, adopting the mannerisms and speech and overt attitudes of whatever group he is in with a disturbing ease and facility. And so I endured much gay-obsessed talk, from him as my tent-mate, homophobic jokes, childish observations of homoerotic themes in pulp science fiction and in the personalities of our fellow scouts and our scoutmasters. At another occasion at the camp, when a group of scouts were attempting to verbally haze myself and another scout with the usual homosexual innuendo, an occasion which Stan may have been present at but I could not be certain, as he was socially above hazing (which is usually practiced by lower level pack members, in bids to elevate their own status), I responded with the rhetorical question of why scouts of their ilk were so fascinated with homosexuality. This silenced and balked the group, until one of the relatively quicker boys deflected my response to my tent-mate, saying something to the effect of; “is that what you guys talk about in your tent. I hear you giggling all the time in there.” This was all the relieved group needed to resume their delightful mockery, and of course the story would have been relayed to the Flounder in garbled form. He is mentally alert enough to know this was nonsense, but apparently had an emotional need to relieve his own guilt. In any case, too much of my private struggles has been revealed, and I have severed all times with the Flounder and the institute, and really spent too much Sperberspeak page count with them both, such that I do not even have time to present additional reading from my pulp novel “The New Religion”. This will have to wait until next week. The summer is ending and my sleep hours are daily increasing. My slumber induced mental energy will surge in the Fall!

Enduring the Summer hours, we press on

Released from the bondage of my administrative duties at the Institute by the sudden and precipitous return of the institute founder from a psychosomatic sickbed to active duty (no doubt his “cure” owed much to his jealous surprise at smooth purr of the institute’s operational machine under my expert care, but we won’t mention that), I now enjoy blissful stretches of time left free to my discretion. Unfortunately this enviable freedom comes at an inopportune time, in the midst of summer, when my thinking, reading, and writing skills are sluggish with lack of sleep. No worthwhile mental work can come during the summer, I have proved this theory myself, and established its immutable truth through a lifetime’s worth of textual analysis. I take longer walks, and read samplings of the trash on the bestseller lists, but I feel there is little else I can do while the relentless greedy sun extracts it’s extra share of the day. Speaking of trash, I see little harm in continuing what for me amounts to mental calisthenics, the continuation of my pulp novel, the New Religion, part 4:

Frank found the double door of the Opioidotol Packaging Room, or GUM as the Floor group referred to it, had been mis-closed, or “Op-Lax’d”, as Frank called it, for the little tricks the operators used to make things easier in the rooms. They usually mis-closed the GUM double doors so people could come in the room without having to knock on the door – it was a double badge room. Frank used the door and tried to mis-close it, but missed the mis-close because he was trying to do it while at the same time not acknowledge that he knew the door had been mis-closed and was himself trying to mis-close it. He could tell he’d missed because he caught the movement in his peripheral vision of one of the operators moving behind him to open and re-close the door in the right wrong way. Part of Op-Lax, if you were QA or in management, was your level of acknowledgement of the trick. Some QA, like Frank, would not only leave the door mis-closed but would actively use the mis-closed door and try to leave it closed incorrectly. Others, usually production supervisors or managers, would close any mis-closed doors they saw, without saying a word to an operator. A few QA would make a production of pointing out the mis-closed door, or any instance of Op-Lax, to the operators in the room. Of course it mattered who they were with at the time, supervisors with QA, QA with QA supervisors, production supervisors with their management. Some levels of upper management had no freedom at all in what they could ignore; too many eyes were on them. They always made a show of closing the door and speaking to operators. But exactly how they did it, how arrogantly, whether with a childish delight in the opportunity to point a finger, or a calm, impassive polish, all provided Frank with material for the secret character assessments that afforded him his chief delight at work