Hereunder

A Word On Time

Gentle visitors, it would appear to the casual chronologist that we have all the time in the world. 

Consider that, a single year -- the approximate age of this humble journal -- is comprised of 525,600 minutes.  Allowing time for sleeping, eating, working, traveling to and fro home, and quaffing a pint of Tupper's Hop Pocket and snapping a bowl of Captain Black at day's end -- and other of life's necessities -- why, by a generous calculation it would appear that your humble Contributor have 100,000 spare minutes to keep this journal jamb-packed -- a full measure, pressed down, spilling over.  But the truth is far from that.

There is no time.  We have previously treated the concept of "space" hereunder.  Now, space is comprised of points -- Note Well: there is never a "point in time", and those who making such a passing assertion are guilty of the most heinous etymological vice -- as we were saying, points in space.  And, yet, a "point" is a conceptual isolation of space that has no existence in itself.  Just so, time is comprised of moments -- themselves conceptual and immeasurable aspects of time, with no duration.  Wherefore, if time is comprised of immeasurable units, then time does not exist.  Time, so to speak, is timeless.

Having thus demonstrated metaphysically that there is no time, we turn to the quotidian world to see if, nonetheless, it does have some existence.  Consider the following daily schedule of your humble Contributor:

6:45 Arise, stumble from bed, rub eyes, scratch, yawn, self-administer caffeine, wash, rinse, brush, garb, grub, depart.

8:00 Inch vehicle forward on pavement designed for high speeds.

9:00 Arrive office.  Multitudinous, snarling, pleading, questioning, disputing emails, voice mails, phone calls, things to read, to write, to sort, to send, to forward, to correct; appointments; events; tasks; hither; yon. 

9:05 Ditto.

6:15 Stare blankly passed piles of unfinished work out window into dark.

6:30 Inch vehicle forward on pavement designed for high speeds.

7:30 Eat.  Remember to chew. Swallow.  Wash dishes.  Feed dog.  Walk dog.  Talk to dog as if dog understands.

9:00 Consider issues raised by other Householders.  Attempt to resolve issues raised by other Householders.  Fail to resolve issues raised by other Householders.

10:00 Begin work on unfinished household tasks.  Fail to complete work on unfinished household tasks.  Resolve to take up unfinished household tasks following day.

11:30 Retire.

6:45 Arise, stumble from bed....

There you have it,  gentle visitors: what further proof could you require.  And, even those among you who are yet unconvinced, saying "Now, just wait just a moment..." -- ah! but there we have you again, for there are no moments to wait.

Love to continue this proof, but we're out of time.

Stayed Visited

Stayed visited* for the shocking stunning  breathtaking  heart-pounding predictable  banal ho-hum concluding conclusion of  "Last Will and Testament of Herbert L. Stanger, Sr"!

* We were about to say "stay tuned", but that's so analogical, so last century.  Considered "stay fed", but that assumes an RSS or Atom feed, which we still have not figured out.  Might have said, "Stay out", but that tends to scare away vistors -- except in a kind of appeal to the  appalling postlapsarian appetite for that which is forbidden (see "Adam & Eve" & "Thou shalt not eat of the fruit of the Tree ..."). 

Hereunder... where else can you find drama* in estate planning?

*Not that you will find drama here; but, would you not at least allow for the logical possibility of same? 

Serial Scrivening

Gentle visitors, we are, in a word, giddy that we have posted the first true serial item below (an annotated last will and testament, as it were).  Your comments welcomed.

A Word On Nothing

Gentle visitors, the lateness of the hour and the endness of the week have combined to render your humble Contributor unable to contribute anything of substance to these otherwise fulsome pages.   The concerns and tasks of these last five days have, in effect, sucked dry the dewy tendrils of thought leaving a brittle tangle of straw.  The bright insights have gone dim; the colorful images, gone gray; the bon mots, gone sot. 

Thus, he is left to draw out -- in a manner most painful to visitors -- an extended rumination on what is wanting in his own rumination. 

The very act of bringing pen to paper -- he speaks figuratively, of course, since he is in fact stroking a QWERTY input device  -- itself an anachronism, designed for the mechanical typewriter such that's it's keys would not compete for the brief passing of the ribbon -- though, as those who remember such things, they often did, sticking together in a most inelegant fashion, seizing the carriage and leaving a smudge or a poor hybrid of a letter resembling misspelled cuneiform -- such that the keyboard (against its will, one would guess) became an monstrously inefficient digital interpreter -- and, too add to the sorrow, this ungainly arrangement of keys doggedly persists, despite the introduction of the Dvorak alternative and the fact that type-bars have long since given way to electronic signals, converted to binary bits, thence to hexadecimal bytes, thence to ASCII alphanumerics according to sets of characters ones mother would never have approved -- to say nothing of the multiplicity of typefaces only a mother could love --

This very act is accomplished only with the greatest of labor, producing little of value or meaning, except the aformentioned exposition on vain and fruitless pursuits.

All of which is to say, nada.

A Word On "Space"

Gentle visitors, we have heard recent expressions of alarm about our apparent gaps in posting. You have asked (and, believe me, we have asked ourselves): are we slacking? are we uninspired? are we psuedonymously posing? These questions, we believe, fairly answer themselves.

Even so, we are grateful for your concern: it tells us that someone cares -- like the alert neighbor who notices that our grass is overgrown, our paint is pealing, our driveway is cracked, and our rusting, wheel-less 1981 Toyota pickup is resting on cinder blocks in the front yard, then promptly reports us to the community board and the county zoning office, leading to a citation and a chilly visit from the covenant enforcement gentleman from over on Broken Branch Court whose hair and lawn are clipped to within a micron tolerance. But, the truth is far from that.

As any (as if there were any) frequent visitor to these pages well knows, the editorial committee, hereunder, has long resisted the urge to fill these pages with bizarre or inconsequential pieces, just for the sake of posting something. More recently, we engaged a Feng Shui consultant who, having examined your humble Contributor's mind and thought processes, and the relative merit of the content of these pages, cried out, "Empty!", like some ancient, possessed oracle.

We took this to mean that we needed to create a space in our editorial floorplan: some room to breath, as it were, to stretch out, to ponder things, to consider objects and intervals, to put up our analytical feet, to doze, to snore, and to awaken with a start, confused and with a slight drool at the corners of our prosaic mouths. That is, to make these pages our own personal central Illinois. This "way of being", we believe -- filled as it is with space -- will permit us to reach greater levels of depth on subjects most relevant to our visitors, such as, say, the biomechanics of knuckles.

And, what a relief this new space has been from the 24/7, go-go-go, double-shot-expresso-in-hand milieu of these latter days. But, fear not, gentle visitors, this does not signal a substantial change to our editorial policy.

This Stands In Place Of A Post

This nearly empty space stands in place of a post one of our esteemed other Contributors might have made, had he made one.

Their very silence is a testament. For, words could not express the words they might have employed. And, oh!, what they might have said! Each syllable would have dripped liked honey -- though, actually, that simile wouldn't apply here, since they would not have been speaking, or even writing in the traditional sense -- but, in any case, they would have been as sweet as some nectar or other.

Gentle visitors, close your collective eyes and imagine what might have been. Yes. Do you see it? The telling phrase... The beautiful yet abject adjective... The proverbial adverb... The enticingly dangling participle... The giggling gerund... The catastrophic apostrophe... The slender, elegant hyphen... The slap dash... The hilariously misplaced semi-colon... And, of course, the sublime and ultimate question mark?

All of this and more or less -- what might have been.

ALERT: Differentiated Prose Generator Down

Gentle visitors, we are embarrassed to report that the Differentiated Prose Generator (DPG) is temporarily down. Our technicians are working diligently on this glitch, and we expect to have it up and running again soon, certainly by tomorrow. We apologize for this inconvenience.

In the mean time, we have been able to retrieve the post, below, from the dark corners of the archives of the Poetical Subsystems (PSS), with further apologies to ben Sirach.

A Word On Our Commentators

We have had many inquiries of late concerning our commentators: Who are they? Where do they live? What do they look like? What are their backgrounds? What are their habits and predispositions? True, almost all of these inquiries came from law enforcement authorities. But, our other gentle visitors should not hastily conclude that these commentators are denizens of some seedy and seamy virtual underworld. Far from that.

As we have done with our other Contributors, we wish to dispel some myths surrounding this noble group of note.

• Your commentators are all bought and paid for. Read our lips: our commentators have never been remunerated in any fashion for their comments on these pages. We have never given anything of value in exchange for a kind-hearted note (other than whatever trifling, incorporeal, and even immeasurable value these pages offer). In fact, they have pleaded with us that they be permitted to pay us for the privilege of commenting. But, we would have none of that: we may be poor -- in fact, so desperately poor that we can barely afford the private barista or the mobile stylist for our Pomeranians -- but, we are too proud to accept this charity.
• Your commentators seems so distant and remote. A classically unfair charge. The very nature of the medium suggests that the commentary will be widespread and remotely offered. To be sure, they may concentrated among the American East Coast establishment; but, as you can see, we are graced by Heartlanders, Flatlanders, Panhandlers, and Ranchers -- not to mention our correspondents in Sao Paolo, Lagos, and Borneo. We have flung open our binary doors to the world -- near and far -- and, we could, thus, hardly complain about the character of wanderers and strangers who drift in to drink our coffee and admire our award-winning dogs.

• Your commentators are just a bunch of elite, pseudonymous literary types. This charge is tough to answer, because of the evident learnedness of our commentators. How, you ask, do you know that they are learned. Well,... we are hesitant to admit that we don't really understand their cryptic and ominous addenda -- which tells us that they must really be very genius and profound. Moreover, these anonymous savants are very nearly celebrities -- one might well have hosted the "Chop Cut Rebuild" cable show; another very nearly fought off lions; a third displays a remarkable sense of snow. How difficult it must be for such para-celebrities to seem like one of the crowd: they are and, yet, clearly they are not.

But, do not take our word on it: see below, anon, for commentary on this latest outrage.

Uninspired Co-Inditors

Gentle visitors, what a patient lot you are. Your humble Contributor is just back from a meeting of those poets, philosophers, seers, savants, sycophants, dilettantes, and ex-cons whose singular and largely astigmatic vision led to the creation of the pages hereunder.

No doubt, at some time hence, historians and, probably, prosecutors, will sift through the unshredded documentary precursors to piece together the motive, means, opportunity, and mens rea of this group of uninspired co-inditers. Against advice of counsel, we believe that it certainly would be wrong to withhold these from our faithful visitors pending criminal proceedings.

Therefore, we offer one of the formative documents, with certain proprietary material and expletives expurgated.

There you have it, gentle Visitors -- the uninspired beginnings of it all.

December 1, 2004

Gentlemen --

Yesterday, Mr. * send me a typically provocative and offensive message. He noted that it was

Jonathan Swift's birthday, then quoted Swift to the effect that the Emerald Isle

was a "vile" place. Of course, Swift, though an Anglican dean, was a hero of the Irish people for his insistence that their cross-channel governors treat them as human beings. I'm not sure whether Swift ever got outside of Dublin, but if he traveled to, say, the border of Limerick and Kerry (not the losing candidate), along the beautiful River Feale, he would have thought that he'd died and gone straight to heaven.

In any case, this was curious and serendipitous for the following reasons:

* My alma mater required a senior thesis for graduation. I did mine on Swift. That my first submission was deemed insufficient is merely a biographical footnote, such as that Mark Twain was unschooled and Thomas Aquinas was thought stupid. Having left off senior revels briefly, I did a passable second submission, which left me forever sympathetic to this giant of literature.

* Did you know that, in his day, Swift was a member of his own informal writer's group, known as the

Scriblerus Club, along with Alexander Pope, John Gay, William Congreve and occasional others. Unlike our own humble group, however, it was not tragically Sisyphusean

.

* Yesterday, an infrequent pleased client came by to deliver a hand-carved chestnut pen to me. (I still have not decided how much to bill her for the time I spent admiring this gift.) In case you've forgotten, an ink pen is an instrument for what was once called handwriting. Those who are nostalgic can now purchase a digital pen, which will digitize your scribblings.

This leads me to the unavoidable conviction that we should undertake a blog. Swift was a blogger in his day -- a pamphleteer, a commentator on politics and culture, a poet, as it were. "Pen names", or more accurately, "handles" or screen names are common in blogs, just as they were in the Augustan Age and other ages. (I think Swift used the name "

Isaac Bickerstaff

".) If the sniffling, bespectacled, vegan literati have not yet fully realized the brilliance of our writing, we should take it directly to the people. If we don't catch on, then we will have simply wasted our valuable time (and, I suppose, the valuable time of the unfortunate persons who actual bother to read it).

Here are the details of the proposal.

[CONFIDENTIAL: REDACTED MATERIAL.] [BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.]

Group Activities -- We could continue our quasi-monthly meetings, of course -- but focus on what has become most important in these gatherings -- that is, quaffing ale.

***
What am I forgetting? It's hard to imagine that anything could improve on the plan I've set forth; but, anything is possible. Let me know your thoughts

Remainderman

Whatever of the Year

Our __________ (fill in the blank) of the Year goes to our frequent commentator Harry, a strange, wayfaring blogger.

Admittedly, it was a difficult choice from among the three suggestions we received; however, "whatever" seems to capture not only the essence of the pages hereunder, but also the observant visitor's immediate and emphatic reaction to them.

For, we are everything or anything, even if that is nothing, no matter what; we are any one of a number of things, whether specifically known or not; we are whatness -- quiddity, if you will -- of any kind, in any amount, to any extent, being what or who it may be. We are definitively indefinite; we are pro-noun; we are poetic (whate'er you say).

Whatever.