Wenceslaus

As the moment of the resurrection grew nearer and nearer, they waited with bated breath for the sensory deprivation tank to come to town; it was time for a party, get quick with it now – to the horses! Embellish the letters and bring the good people to feast! He bent down to protect his face from the dry winter wind, but still it burned him, and turned his eyes red.

The good king drove to the village to visit the children. Along the way he drove past a lawman and the lawman gunned him down, flashing his frantic blue lights. They laughed together and then the officer gave him a fine of $500 and led him away like a ghoul through the chambers to the rose street department, Don Juan on the coals and the open prairie smoking after the rain…

It was just a year ago today that he was just a boy still, and a prince. He felt particularly well that day. He considered himself a very lucky man. He thought he was strong because his strength had insofar never been tested and he had no reason to believe otherwise. But time would tell that he was not strong, and it would break him down into submission again and again in his life. The life of the old man is lonely and hardly worth telling. The buses took them into the wilderness and the pirates raided them at a road block with rifles and knives, and somehow he managed to hide his passport and money, and he helped his fellow passengers find food in the nervous aftermath. A woman approached him with a proposition and he laughed, but turned her down. A part of him wanted her – it had been a while, and…

God’s own men could not contain him. In the years following the wounded soldiers, it became clear he was not without grace. The warrior is not without motion or faith, his hands must remain palm up and gracious. It was the romance of the occasion that inspired him most and he spent his mornings calling up travel agencies. He browsed the internet for cheaper tickets to destinations farther and farther away. With postcards he stayed in touch with his friends but they never sent anything back to him, because land mail had become a niche habit. Kings should be niches. Princes, maybe – boys, not men. Like a loving piece of equipment. A tool – immodest. He was ashamed of himself like all smart men, and he tried to make amends and improve things, but there was something impossible about it all – and he could not put his finger on it. “Your highness,” they said, and it filled him with dread. Not a reluctant king, no, but an honest person, and so very ashamed.

In a letter signed and dated in the king’s own script during the winter solstice of 19– he confided his feelings on the matter to a childhood friend. The letter, in its entirety, is reprinted below.

“My love. I don’t expect this to reach you in time for the ball but if it does I would be honored to have you join me. As for me, well, it is more of the same, maybe worse these day, maybe better. Things go their own way these days and it is like I have nothing to do with it. But so too it is always my fault when things when do happen. Tired you know, always tired. Neck pain as always. I miss you. I have been philosophizing. As usual, it stems from an offense – at least a perceived offense. Perhaps I’m too easily offended. But listen to what I am thinking. I can think of no exception. It is like this: it is an assault of character to call a man anything other than his name. It is a breach of conduct to call a man anything at all, even something complimentary. This is at least what I believe, having personally felt the pressures of, especially these days with my multitude of titles and addresses. You see it in fiction, sometimes, and real life, too, with addicts, and with the mentally unwell. Call a man an addict, what can he do? If he denies it he will just be an addict in denial, and if he affirms it he will assume the roll of an addict. Call a man insane, and it is the same; what can he do? You have pinned him. He’s insane. Call him a good man, what does that mean? If you deny it, you are just being humble. If you affirm it, you are being too proud. There is no Aristotelian intermediate in these things; the accusation itself is almost a form, a Platonic ideal which your existence is suddenly tied to, incontestable, one-sided and inchoate enough to ensure no way out of it. There is never a way to argue with or dismiss the essence of the title itself, once it has been applied; by its very nature it is instantaneous and independent. It is an accustation of an unchangeable disposition, a fascist decree in its way – to say, you are, and thus you are not, as though the rhetorical “you” (the other-than) is capable of making such claims (which as an other-than is not)… Hah! The ontology of a rambling man, forgive me… Anyway, that’s what I’ve been feeling lately, clearly I need to get out of this terrible village soon… The locals, they get in my way, they are killing me with their leeriness, their shifty behavior… I caught one of them watching me through the windows, they climbed up the lattice work, I went out that night and I cut it all down… Just last night a thief made off with my patio furniture. I ran after him and brandished a gun, can you believe that? Me with a gun? I said, “Come at me, then! You cowards!” I don’t know what I would have done if they had come back for me. Well… Winter… I get cold so easily… Sickness? Been wearing that shirt, that nice red shirt you gave me once. As for the horses, well, you must have heard… Grace came by, she said she saw you on the beach, walking barefoot through the evening tide, I am jealous! I have always had strong feelings for Grace. I think I should marry her if given the chance. Wouldn’t that be something? Anyway. Come see me! Brooks at the strand at this month, you should see that performance! Real live stuff. It inspires me to write poetry. This guy’s a real poet of a man, an actor-poet like I’ve never seen. I’ll tell you what though.  If I don’t get my dick wet soon I’ll go nuts. You’d laugh if I told you how long it has been! I’m going crazy without it. I feel like staging a public execution or something. Oh! I shouldn’t say stuff like that. One more thing. I heard on the radio, ‘Any man with a chainsaw can chop down a tree – what matters is what happens afterwards.” But instead of telling us how to chop down a tree correctly, they just said, ‘So hire a tree-chopper.’ Well! So much for masculinity. My how I ramble! Love, X—–“

Elizah Goodman

As I toiled away in the garage making fine mahogany boxes for the finest stationery sets the country has to offer at the absolutely lowest prices, all alone from my little printshop in the northern hills of Mississippi out of sheer idolization, I decided that I had enough of the world and was ready to retire. “Take me home, please,” I wanted to say. I sped through the night and then, feeling sad, I slowed down, and then a police officer flagged me down and gave me trouble. He fined me for speeding and tried to search the car. He did not like me because my car was nice and I was well-dressed. He took me for a city boy. I did my best to show him that I was not from the city, but I may as well be. He took me for a city boy, might as well be a city boy. I was angry by the end of it and ready to start barking nonsense about a lawyer, like a city boy, but instead I fell mute and disappeared from the scene, burning with resentment, and I tossed the ticket out the window in a tantrum. I am such a lawful man these days, I am not on the wrong side of the law, but they treat me like I’m lawless still… Not that I’m oppressed. But they say you can never really do right in the world, once you’ve just once done wrong. They say your past will always haunt you. They say you are bound to get caught, somehow, in some unexpected moment, for no good reason whatsoever. They say everyone in prison is innocent and for half of them, by God, I believe it. I have met them with the preachers in the county jail and the state penitentiary both, I have eaten with them and listened, I have taught the old boys new philosophy; life was altogether pretty good. But you know it was bound to happen, you just waited, you felt it coming in your bones – that way you read that biography, the way you wait for the moment, that accident, death – and that was the angst that I played with. I have not truly cried, like a child, in many years, although tears flow from my eyes now more than ever, it seems all the time I am on the verge of tears, tears of joy or frustration, tears of fear or pleasure; I watch movies and they bring tears to my eyes, I think of the girl I love most and get teary-eyed, I get embarrassed, so embarrassed I tear up… Ah. Hell. I guess I had it coming. I said, “I guess I had it coming,” which became, “I saw it all coming all along.” I saw it coming all along. At least it wasn’t worse. It will always get worse. Might as well be a city boy after all.

Annie Raised My Spirits

I gave him a book that I found on the floor of the train station. It was a bible. “God chose the foolish things of the world that he might put to shame those that are wisest. And he chose the weak things of the world that he might put to shame those that are strong.”

In a castle on a hill, with a choir, the morning rung out with the breeze, Autumnal, and I rose with the orange bombshell sun to the occasion, the sun in my eyes, and I waited for you. How I’ve longed to see you again, god! And to talk to you! Just look at you! You are so beautiful, I can’t stand it. Hah! I love – I love the way I feel around you. Gee I don’t know. Annie asked me if I’d talked to you the other day. My heart melted. I didn’t know what to say and said, “No,” though it wasn’t true, and she told me she had. It absolutely melted my heart just to think that she thought I might have been talking to you – it was the most wonderful thing in the world to know that somewhere, to someone else, you and I were truly, in our way, connected… do you understand me? Probably not, after all I’m a fool. I’m totally disconnected. I’m a wild disconnected fool and you have no reason to like me. But god don’t you know I like you! I like you and I must! I must!

Christmas Party, 1956

Christmas party, 1956 2012. Only the few of us standing. It’s been a long time coming, yes it has, and I saw it before it had even rounded the bend; in that distant crescent valley there, I heard the lofty rumble, soft, the easy moan of the quiet discrepancy, the nervous hands of the deeply ashamed – and why are you so ashamed? I looked amongst them for a friend. Everyone’s gay. They’ve been drinking. They talk about their recent lives. I try to get drunk with them and laugh, and I get halfway there, upon my knees, doing my strange little dance, for the masses to laugh – and they laughed at me – and I sold them my tricks, I showed them my studies, all the ancient secrets, the vanities of time, the despondencies of Rome, the dissidence of titans; but what are you saying, they asked me, and I fell totally mute. I could not say a word. The girls from my childhood looked at me. God how I wanted to fuck them. Ice in her tracks. I’ve heard the things they say about her. I know she knows me well enough by now to know, and I trust her not to mistake me. But what would I do that demanded deliverance thusly, like some kind of cross? Know yourself, said the young prince, upon his white horse; and he rode swiftly across the moors of Spain and into the deserts of Africa, through the middle east, and India; the story of an arms dealer, a man made of clay, from the natural earth but an idiot, a childish voice in the infinite din; and I, well, I am just made of this regular air, this regular stuff they call air, and it’s wholesome enough for the meanwhile.

A picture on a wall… Who cares. What’s that you said? Oh I’ll say it again. I’ve said it a hundred times already. Word for word no need to change it. It’s my monologue. The monologue of a printer. Pressman, no shame. There are no secrets in my chest; I’m a regular epiphany, no conclusion, no resurrection, just emptiness, echo chamber, loving and warm; the hot agonized breath of the platinum lizard, upon his burning tomb, the burning hot earth of the butte in the canyon, glory in his twinkling eyes. No-good faced rat killer. I took him down once to the dump and shot rats with him. But now they’re all goons to me. I feel like a ringleader in a travelling troupe of baboons. The goons are baboons. How I resent them! I totter away to my own my little part of the house, in the bedroom, where I lay my weary self to rest and look at my watch; it is bedtime! I have a routine that I do. I eat my pills and drink my solutions. I clean my skin and change my clothes. I crawl into bed and black out for twelve hours.

In a prosperous valley in a prosperous part of the country I lived for those long, quiet years, guarding my treasure and preening my fur. I practiced playing instruments again in those days. Peaceful instruments. Finger instruments. I took up the shade in the evening and relaxed in the glow of the old moving pictures. Most of the old motion pictures are lost. Only a desperate fraction of movies from the teens, twenties, and even thirties simply do not exist anymore. They are like plays; they were finite, even they could not outlive their audience. I cried for them and was desperate for them. In the end of course it did not make a difference. I walked through the streets of Mexico looking for an answer. I found nothing like that, of course. It was a gambit from the start. Now, maybe, if I were a different man… But if I were a different man, I would live in the city. I am not a city man. In the old days the city was a stick in the mud, a truck stop where the boys would go up to get drunk and be sluttish, and come home in the morning by Casey Jone’s train to the promised land, the good and civilized valley where only the finest citizens lived in the finest of homes. They built the Cedars for a walking tour. It is the oldest home in the valley. I have been drinking the water that drips down from the rafters. I believe perhaps that it has magic powers. What is the power of Christ in a home from those thoughtless ages past, unthinkable centuries of the cycle of life, unyielding, my God it is great! Until one day the crooked old townsfolk held the railroad company for ransom, and the railroad just took their tracks away. Old Casey Jones left his station and the valley dried up when the TVA built those reservoirs, and the truck stop burst into a masochistic city, full of vice – and the vice spread… And now in the pockets of honor the quiet men hide, watching the sun rise and fall from their window, feeling close to the frost on the glass, like it’s their very own frost on their very own panel of glass; at the neck of the world, in the heart of the beast, sleeps the philosopher-poet, tucked carefully away from the rest of the world. I burned my brain to pieces with drugs and I did so deliberately. It was not the last mistake I’ll ever make. There are no virgins in these woods. There are no unicorns, either. This is the age of the snake as the bedfellow. Eternal living… I have seen it all. It’s a big gorgeous mess. A prison chaplain said to me, “They laid down their colors and cried;” that is the way that the good angel died, a poet and an armsdealer, imitating old Petronius, old Papillon, that devil McQueen – give it all you got, you gotta give it all you got! (That was my line! That was mine!) When you leave you are welcome to take my with you. I will put my arm around you and rest my head against yours. Rest that weary head of yours, rest that heavy, weary head.

They wonder and I sometimes think I should just tell them! I want to, God knows I’ve tried. There is one girl, one person I could tell it to… If she would listen, boy, would I speak! As for that one man – well – to hell with him! To hell with them! Not to say I do not love them. But God, do I love her.

A Folkloristic Horse of Big Dimensions

Mullins of Salem, Ohio, was the most well-known American zinc ornament producer in the late nineteenth century. The foundry was in Salem, Ohio and was one of many American companies in the 1880s that through their catalogs sold ornaments nationwide, such as “urns, eagles, civic ornaments, architectural details, and even cigar store Indians.” They did not purvey grave markers, which were the sole domain of the Monumental Bronze Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

The International J/22 is a popular fixed-keel one-design racing sailboat normally raced with a crew of three or four people (total crew weight is restricted to 275 kg/605 lb). It races with the “class jib,” a non-overlapping jib, a mainsail, and a large spinnaker. The boat is capable of planing on reaches and runs.

There are over 1,600 J22’s now sailing in 65 active fleets in eighteen countries on three continents. Recognized by the ISAF, the International J/22 Class Association promotes activities and regattas worldwide. There is a very active class web site and association newsletters. For class racing, sails are restricted to only a main, small jib and spinnaker with total crew weight at 605 lb.. According to the builder, “There is no better One-Design value available in a 22′ keelboat.”

Peucolaus Soter Dikaios was an Indo-Greek king who ruled in the area of Gandhara c. 90 BCE. His reign was probably short and insignificant, since he left only a few coins, but the relations of the latter Indo-Greek kings remain largely obscure.

Fyra Bugg & en Coca Cola also known as 4 Bugg & en Coca Cola was released on 13 April 1987 and is a studio album from Swedish pop singer Lotta Engberg. It was her debut album.

Rueda Abbey or Rueda de Ebro Abbey (Spanish: Real Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de Rueda, or the “Royal Monastery of Our Lady of the Wheel”) is a former Cistercian monastery in Sástago in the Ribera Baja del Ebro comarca, province of Zaragoza, Aragon, Spain, 74 kilometres to the south-east of Zaragoza on the left bank of the Ebro. The buildings have been preserved by the government and are intended to be used for a hotel and conference centre.

William Snelgrave was an English sea captain, slave trader, and ivory trader on the West African coast. He actually treated his slaves better than most traders, providing two meals a day, visits to the deck, and pipes and tobacco. He also allowed the women and children to be unchained. He was captured by pirate captains La Bouche, Cocklyn, and Howell Davis along the coast of West Africa in 1719. He was originally attacked by Cocklyn’s quartermaster for failing to surrender. He was beaten and shot in the arm, but his men cried out “For God’s sake, don’t kill our captain, for we were never with a better man.” Snelgrave was then spared. Snelgrave wrote about his captivity with the pirates. He described how Davis claimed that “their reasons for going a pirating were to revenge themselves on base merchants and cruel commanders of ships.” This probably explains why Snelgrave was spared, despite the fact that he intended to fight the pirates.