Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2001 20:16:50 -0500
From: Tom Emerson <thomas@btl.net>
Subject: Creative Camp - 27 (Conclusion.)

The reader is responsible for the contents of the title page.

Creative Camp -- 27 (Conclusion.)

(m/f, inc., rom.)

by Feather Touch



Chapt. 27


       We are the least entertained generation.  Try to imagine, one
hundred years ago, walking a mile in any city or town.  Put it this way, if
Disney, et al, could truly recreate an urban street scene of 1900, with its
interplay of animal and human life, and it's great brawl of energy, noise,
ripping confusion and simply tearing progress, visitors would pay one
hundred dollars an hour to become enmeshed.  Real fish and real flies.
Real smells, real hustle and harness bells.  One hour, and you'd pay two
hundred for a second.  +That was their entertainment, often with
waterfronts and their smells and lingos.  Indeed, we are entertainment
deprived to the point we've stuffed a forest of a thousand masts and
warehouses on a hundred piers into a box that is precious small for the
job.  Once upon a time in America you had a president who thought we could
bomb the Japanese with bats.  The critters froze to death and so did little
to bring peace, but one can hardly deny the entertainment value of FDR's
proof positive of the moronic imbecility making up the heart and soul,
terms used very loosely, of liberals.

       In writing this book I have found one reason, only, to have any
faith.  If there is this much talent in the world, maybe somebody will use
some of it to pull us from the brink.  For me, it's been both the tortoise
and the hare and the duckling and swan.  Both fairy tales, evolving, not
over some months and years, but over decades.  Slow and ugly as I child, I
even managed to be so brutalized by a wicked birth mother I saw little
fiction in the story of Cinderella.  And now I sit at the end of the most
stupendous dash in literary history.  Five hundred pages, non-stop, without
thirty seconds of help from anyone, and not a single letter.  Number one
content provider in the world.  Some turtle.  Higher by twice than all
who've come before.  Some duckling.  A tickle or two along the way, to live
up to my nome de plume, ha, ha, and show that I can be, as they say in
Maine, some charming.

       Born a prince, abused to the verge of insanity, and out of the
cocoon, a butterfly which happened to land on one of Sir William's
keyboards and then danced upon it the greatest work of art possible.  Even
bestowing special gifts on the reader.  First, by working as an artist,
free, and, second, providing on various pages ample legitimate excuses for
the reader to detach and thereby maintain his individuality.  Other writers
hire agents, flacks and attorneys to prevent reader alienation.  I have no
need of such.  I stick myself into your marrow because I stick you with
yourselves.  Your only defense is a seething rancor, but you must always
direct it at the proper target or it will fester and turn into something
incurable.  Meantime, the alienation goes a long way toward perfecting my
image of myself as king.  Why would my subjects spend a nickel, public or
private, to build a statue one inch high to a monarch so willing to
celebrate himself?  I'm not sure there will be other advantages to our
bi-polar relationship, but I am sure you have no other choice.  Blame
yourselves, not your mirror.

       Not only are we at the end of entertainment, we are at the end of
the industrial revolution.  Look ahead.  Nothing.  Nothing at Comdex,
nothing at E3, nothing at PC Expo.  The only possible innovation is the
external screen laptop, as described in this manuscript, and still, no one
has offered so much as a prototype.  What's new in cars?  So little over
the last ten years that listing the real improvements couldn't be done with
a straight face.  (Plus, the electronic whiz-bang stuff can be installed by
after-market vendors.)  Boats?  Same story.  Aviation?  Ditto.  Television?
So far, only about thirty thousand HDTV sets have been sold and digital
television is getting off to an unpromising start.  I have my Samsung
playing eighteen hours every day, and the only new thing promised has been
"It," some kind of gufus flummery involving a cold fusion derivative
applied to personal transport.  Where do I call to find a dealer?

       We have a giant collection of idiot empire builders trying to sell
us an eight lane highway from our house to the corner store.  There is a
frighteningly real possibility we do not need an eight lane road to
accomplish our daily routine.  And look at the quality of the folks doing
the selling.  Tech TV, for example.  Martin Sargent and cohorts become, on
familiarity, a bunch of wind-up anarchists embodied in new-age goofballs.
And these guys are the crème de la crème of geekdom.  Everything has
to be wacky, and is judged primarily on that criteria.  If not wacky,
childish.

       From the clothes they wear to the stunts they pull to their hatred
of "ME," even unto my little Clippie bud gazing out affectionately from the
upper-right margin of the page , they are, with some exceptions, indicative
of their wacko industry and thus unwitting litmus strips proving just what
I say.  The industrial revolution Is Over.  It began with James Watt and
the steam engine, and ends with Linus Torval and Linux.  Our only option
for the future is to do our part in the world by bringing over vast number
of immigrants to clean up the mess.  Our only pleasure will be modest
entertainments like the Xbox, Nifty, and, for the nicest and best of us,
perhaps an affair along lines sketched in this work.  All other roads from
bungee jumping to sports-card collecting lead nowhere you want to go.


       More top-ten coasters.  I often find English quite easy to
translate.  I'm proud of this, because even though I lived almost five
years in Mexico, I learned virtually no Spanish.  But if I hear television
is going to show me more top-ten roller coasters I can make the translation
almost subconsciously.

       "Queer as Folk."  What's that all about?  If you want to know why
New Englanders think New Yorkers are a bunch of slippery, dead-faced
schmoes, tune in.  On the other hand, it has make-out scenes between
attractive younger males, so how far can this writer be from
top-dead-center, and the power stroke that follows?

       Also playing this week, a feature on Stephen King.  That brings up
writers.  Every horror Stephen King has ever imagined or experienced,
specifically including living with Tabatha, is going to come true the first
time he reads a single page of me.  Any page.  Each is better than all he's
ever written, or will write.  Some are funnier, some are friendlier, some
are sexier, but all are simply better.  More work and about one tenth the
booze.  Not selling out, not coping out, not entertaining gratuitously.
Not hardly.  That's where the prince thing kicks in.  It's your fault it
has to kick so hard, but, as our English cousins say, there it is.  And
Stephen's problem is simplicity, itself.  He never had a chance to
practice.  He hit so big, so young, he caught up in tournament play and
never had the time for the thousands of hours -- creating nothing -- that
it takes, in any art, to reach or even reinvent the level of the virtuoso.
He got four-hundred grand for "Carrie."  He should have high-tailed it to
Mexico, and not published a word for ten years.  Then he'd have a book he'd
trade his money for in a heartbeat.

       Speaking of the English, there was a recap of the Revolution on The
History Channel.  First, it's pronounced Concord, definitely not Con-cord.
(Also Thoreau, not Thor-eau, [and congratulations, Grandpa Henry, you made
the spell-checker].)

       The parallels between Sam Adams and Adolph Hitler are remarkable.
Baseline: the Lee Harvey Oswald crowd; mean malcontents.  And Franklin
ranks right along with Lee (the corn-pone one) as ultimate traitor.  I got
a kick out of a quote from one of Washington's letters calling his rabble
just about exactly that (written at the time William Emerson was dying of
his rabble).  And try to imagine how Louie had his chops set on all those
rivers and all that forest when charming Ben came to dance and prance
before him.  Of course, the irony of the end game was perfectly terrific.
Louie went broke trying to fight England under the guise of peddling
rot-gut liberty, and precipitated the revolution that cost him and his
family their sixteen thousand heads.  Good thing, or we'd be stitching up
goose asses from Maine to California.  Commoners trying to play with kings
are like small kings trying to play with big kings, or, more saliently,
dumb kings trying to play with smart kings.

       The only luck you have in the world is having a smart king, and if
his prize patrol offers eroticism, for the zillionth time, it's your fault.

       Good example of Jewry over the weekend.  Dylan on the phone.  I've
heard the tape before, but it was enlightening to once again be reminded of
the simple nature of the Jewish mind, a substandard apparatus so dwelling
upon itself it has no creative energy left.  Listening to Dylan's
consistent recalcitrant, knee-jerk, gratuitous disagreeableness is a
reminder of his race's compulsion to base life on hate.

       How many roads must a Jew walk down, before they call him a man?
The answer my friend, is a million and ten, the answer is a million and
ten.  Poet bashing, and I do limericks.  It should be an awesome power.  To
be not only the best, but the most prolific, ought to humble a fellow.  God
must have given me this extraordinary gift, therefore I should use it in
his name for the greater good.  If you buy into this, I'll die of grinning
because it'll cost you ten percent.

       This is an important chapter.  As we come to an end of our time
together you need to know, that, A, I won't cost you ten cents, much less
percent, and, B, you don't have to build any statues or commission any
postage stamps or coins.  I wish there was a C on this list of good news,
but the only C I see is one for catastrophe if you keep letting technicians
run things.  Leaders are a breed utterly apart, and honest leaders, yet
more entirely apart.  For example, a real leader will frequently remind you
it is your skill in following, and obedience, in general, that counts at
the end of the day, and absolve himself of any responsibility, because he
dwells in a region that cannot even be sketched, much less indexed and
defined.  Why should he do well?

       An event occurred last Sunday.  For the first time in nearly seven
years no one came to visit.  This Sunday, I had four, which is normal.
That's in case you think I live in some kind of barren little circling
world, like Nader.  Not one day in a decade.  I've even taken to watering
my own banana trees.  If that isn't a common touch, what is?  Shoveling
snow?  I'm too smart a prince for that, also, too smart to live anywhere
there are seagulls.

       While no human has helped with a line of this work, or any of my
work, for that matter, there are elements to this volume, not of my own
making.  One example is what is locally called mosquito destroyers.  These
are incense-like coils that repel sandflies.  They are, in their small way,
a miracle.  Less than forty cents for a box of ten.  Each coil actually
lasts the eight hours claimed.  They somewhat reduce mosquito incursions,
but more importantly for a writer, reduce the midges by almost one hundred
percent.  That alone, adds two hours to a workday and is a good lesson on
comfortable working conditions vis a vee, productivity.  The mystery of
this humble miracle is how they can get the Zebra brand from China to rural
Belize and across the counter for half a dollar, including tax.  I never
fail to light one without wondering at this.  It would be a good theme for
those What can you get for a buck telephone commercials.  One hundred and
sixty hours of freedom from sandflies, for one thing.  I don't suppose it's
cost me even a dollar for Net time to send what by now must be something
like seven hundred pages of copy.  That's quite a bit for a dollar, and
think of yourself.  You've received the greatest novel yet written, and it
cost you nothing..

       For all the ever increasing hoopla that will probably end up nothing
more than the death rattle of democracy, I find in my early age of wisdom
that the whole goofy experiment depended on coal.  Not only on coal, but on
coal exactly where it was, and in the quantities it was.  For a brief
amateur jaunt back in time, consider the fact that by 1850, under
democracy, there were no standing forests within seventy miles of any city.
What would have happened without coal?  Some river cities might have
survived a few more decades, plundering their valleys if they were long
enough and wide enough, but what would everyone else have done?

       Imagine the cost of a cord of firewood if it had to be imported
first eighty, then a hundred, then a hundred and twenty miles, by oxcart.
As we seem bound and determined to spend our last cultural dollar, today,
on geezer pills, so, in those days, the sole purpose of life and commerce
would been to get ahold of enough wood to build a shelter, and heat it.  In
the end, it's something for you democracy buffs to smoke in your pipes.
Democracy survived because there was coal, and, under monarchy, steam
engines had been developed.  If those coal fields had been located even
fifty or a hundred wilderness miles west, the experiment would have
collapsed for want of twigs.

       In the end, all of history is a patchwork quilt of empire builders
and charismatics [Spell checker want me to use charisma tics.  I think I
like it.] mixed with pots full of fickle luck (which way was the wind
blowing on battle day).  That a few thousand raving geniuses were thrown
into the mix, and precious little to do with democracy, per se, is why we
have what we do.  But they have had their day, and are now rapidly
approaching extinction.  (Undoubtedly, Marty Sargent will be confused at
ending up a waiter, may not get it even should he read this book
repeatedly.)

       It is almost true that no genius is ever seen anymore, and, not only
that, but a class of anti-genius has arisen.

       It will be a few years before we have a list with the depth and
fidelity required of an official hall of fame, but, in the meantime, we
might be interviewing the folks at Iridium and dozens and then hundreds of
others in the Anti-Genius rank and file.  I know a perfect place for my
valadory center, West Edmonton, home of the world's largest mall.  Imagine
that puppy pulling through tuff times, and try to get your mind around the
indulgent, soap-bubble consumerism, on credit, it represents, even in the
best of times.  Also give a moment to consider the commercial scorched
earth such an emporium creates for hundred of miles in every direction,
except out to sea, if it's a coastal market.

       Additionally, speaking as a prince, at least in my own mind, I would
think my peasant class would be getting tired of being scalped with
lotteries, snack foods, malls, portion-control restaurants, and enough of
their related demons to keep Willy the Worker bent to his task until the
day he drops to low man on totem over the grave.  Instead of being enslaved
by paper, law, ink, and bond, you are slaves to what my class does to keep
you ringed, hooked, tethered and bound, for life.  It's almost a shocking
good thing I am every bit the prince I'm always going on about, and thus
above such gratuitous exploitation.  I mean offering you addictive
alternatives, and profiting from them, while extracting every hour of work
you have in you, just isn't my style.  I'd rather send you out in a grand
old fireball as we race toward fair and square domination of the planet by
the good half of American life, and, yes, democracy.

       I was a journalist for a few years.  Sometimes I play at
interviewing myself.  If it's yet another sign of arrogance, let me put it
this way.  Sure, I could circle my toe in the sand (sassy, I'm always
barefoot) and say, aw, shucks, no big deal, I just got lucky.  For
five-hundred pages?

       Question: Your Majesty, when did you realize you were the best
writer in the world.

       Answer: Shortly after completing the letter to Harvard.  My computer
crashed some one-hundred times, and I still finished it several days ahead
of schedule, though I printed and signed it on the first, as indicated.
Running that long gauntlet, with no feeling other than that I was lucky to
have Word, in any emulation that worked at all, made me realize I'd passed
into some kind of stratosphere.  It wasn't the quality of the document,
which is no better than fair, it was the tenacity of simply completing it
while often having to re-write pages I thought I'd just finished.  (Ask any
writer about that particular hell.)

       Question: When did you realize you were a prince.

       Answer: When I was five.  I learned I was the crown prince when I
was in my late twenties and read the story of William Emerson and the depth
to which he invested himself in the originating cause of our society.  Only
this can make a king, or technically, perhaps, an emperor.  Direct lineage
to the founding individual, and nuts to the loudmouths and their paperwork.
The direct connections to AT&T, Harvard, and other legacies provide the
timbre and texture that confer fidelity and depth to the heritage.

       Question: How many lives will be lost in the transition to
Emersonia?

       Answer: Ten to fifteen million over the first few years, perhaps
double that number in total.  It's a difficult question to answer, because
it depends entirely on the co-operation and goodwill of my subjects.  If
they scruff up the mission, the costs may easily be as absolute as the cost
staring you in the face if you do nothing.  My coin is ten million old and
sick people for a vague chance at anything at all.

       Question: And that would be in addition to the 250,000 you deport to
Newfoundland?

       Answer: I hope there will be some overlapping, casualties with
deportees, that is, but the short answer is, yes, ten million Stateside
deaths, plus 250,000 sent off to determine whether or not socialism is
schmo-proof.  Inquiring minds want to know.

       Question: What is your I.Q?

       Answer: I aced the mensa test in half the allotted time.  I'm not
sure it can be measured.  I'm smarter on a single page than all writers
saving a handful were, and are, in their careers, and I've written
thousands of pages.

       Question: So, as I understand it, you are regent by birth, artist by
work, and smart by genes.  Is that accurate?

       Answer: You could add, funny by mother, without offending me, nor
would I mind being categorized as arrogant by choice, since the choice ends
up being yours.

       Question: Why do you write pornography, and, specifically, child
pornography?

       Answer: Because I'm an anti-Semite and forbidden access to any press
other than the manic nonsense offered by enclaves of Aryan gargoyles.  I'd
rather have the Jews.

       Question: Going back to arrogance, isn't that kind of an expense?

       Answer: It's my secret weapon.  Freedom from my subjects.  Arms'
length, and that sort of thing.  I actually believe my own press, that I'm
a god by virtue of the level at which I practice the most difficult art on
earth, writing English fiction in an American idiom.  Having thus exalted
myself in a land where most everyone with half an inch of tread on their
tires figures themselves blessed, I become an unlikely encounter of the
first kind, and being anti-Semitic makes me an unlikely encounter of the
second kind.  As a pornographer, a third level of detachment is ensured,
and writing without thought of pay pretty well covers any possible
additional levels, or any encounter at all, for that matter.  That's why I
water my bananas, contact under some auspices.

       So, to answer your question, yes, the price of absolute conceit is
absolute, as is the value received.  This raises, once again, exceedingly
awkward questions relating to who actually pays any price, and who receives
value in kind.  This news is invariably bad, so I leaven it with sex.

       Question: How would you feel if you were a Subject, not the King.

       Answer: Glad that someone else had the headache.  Seriously, I'd
hope he was a humorless drudge, grinding exceedingly small both in respect
to getting rid of the bad guys and also, just as importantly, watching over
all the smaller facets, segments and enterprises that amount to the
vitamins and minerals, as well as the spices and seasonings of a culture.
If you mean how would I like living under myself, I have a sneaking
suspicion I'd head for the tropics and await developments.  You are a
vastly screwed up and twisted society, at death's doorstep thanks to
imbibing the socialist cocktail of utopian Kool-Aid, and King or Subject,
the best idea is to implement the Mexican concept of afuera.

       Thank you, your majesty.

       Like half the funnies on the farm, I nurture a Napoleonic sense of
destiny.  Patton, McArthur, a handful of others.  Full blown, too, so
rather than nurturing it - as I just said - the truth is, it nurtures me.
This sense, probably akin to that of Bernadette, leads me to a mass
audience through Nifty.  That's actually pretty plain and simple, as the
alternative is to come up through the ranks of conventional periodicals and
publications, none of which are read.  For example, one on-line fiction
site lists seven thousand titles.  How would a big, rangy novel, on any
subject, fare under competition like that?  How would it even been found?
Plus, I'd have to think up a plot.  Have characters quarrel and fight.  Use
suspense to effect.  Include conflicts resolved in stages with clever
twists and turns.  Charge money for the tome.  About what?  Contemporary
American life?  After Mr. Rogers has had you for thirty years?  And
J.D. Salinger?  As if.  The only thing you've got left is sex, so don't go
dissing me for writing about it.

       Those who've made it over these 520 pages will also recognize an
additional reason for writing erotica, and that is an attempt to instill at
least some insight, perspective and context.  Sexual encounters such as I
write of, are everyday occurrences, perhaps a bit dramatized, for tens of
millions of happy, productive people.  If something bad has happened to an
individual, it can't but help for them to know that gigantic numbers of
people, from most walks of life and backgrounds, happen to like what they
deem offensive.  This is imperfect.  I wouldn't have liked cold,
half-cooked Brussels sprouts, if every person on earth swore they were
delicious, nor half-burned peas.  But sex isn't vegetables.  Rape, either.
Duh'uh.  What do you want me to do, provide a magic spell or sacred balm?
You know how much that type of stuff goes for?  No, free advice.  Look at
what others have endured, travails without number or limit, and roll on,
faster, better and stronger, for all your individual misfortune.  Be nice
enough in the process of rolling on, and who knows? maybe you'll raise a
Barbie princess and share her bed with leggy Ken.

       In some kind of summary, since this chapter amounts to the decline
and fall of the third act, America has a short list of acute,
non-survivable problems and a moderate list of serious problems.  These
will compound and escalate under socialism, becoming, at the first serious
economic, or other, downturn, fatal.

       It might be remembered here that the lifeboat analogy, beloved of
high-school sophomores, has, historically, played out thousands of times.
Of these thousands of times, a representative sample of survivors' tales
has emerged over the centuries.  In each lifeboat scenario recorded,
exceptionally rational decisions were made as to who should live and who
should die, with straws given to those not obviously superior or inferior.
Of course, bringing up lifeboats brings up Captain Bligh, and I can hardly
take credit for anything but honesty in mentioning his name.  On the other
hand, if one actually happens to be adrift in a lifeboat, abandon on a
stormy and very salty sea, maybe a former before-the-mast prick is just
what you do need.  Yours is not to figure why, yours is just to do, or die.
Not a fun-loving mantra, so maybe you'd be better off leaving the fun up to
me.

       Acknowledgements, before we bring Charles and Blissy back for their
final scene, amount to a total and unqualified admission that this work, or
any of my stories, would never have been possible without my ever more
beautiful XP.  Also, the Griga Boyz practicing their sweet raggae.  Many
thanks dudes, I owe you.  My typing teacher, Mr. Richards, and also
Mr. Kohler, a superb chemistry instructor who managed to get across, in a
manner I understand to this very day, exactly how thick my beloved head
bone was when it came to math sciences, allowing me to focus on the mother
of all languages.  In like vein, my family deserves much credit.  Having
grown up in a preppie managerie, and then witnessed over four and more
decades, the oxymoronic spectacular mediocrity, and outright mental
imbalance of the entire tribe gives me absolute confidence as both
visionary and futurist.  I've seen it, dozens of bad examples, no good
ones, with my own eyes, `it' being the remorseless cost and barbaric
cruelty of liberalism.  They have left me a clean windshield, indeed.

       Samsung deserves much credit.  My 19" set enthralls me with its
imagery on a daily basis, even after seven years, and makes a mockery out
of those who would waste precious money, and even more precious power, on
some humongous entertainment system for the 99.99 percent pure drivel that
the cable pumps to the tube.  On a more philosophical footing, television,
as an entity, provides massive entertainment, Rupert, Ted, dem guyz an' der
channels.  Martin Short aping Lincoln, Four-score and blah, blah, blah.
Humor of an impressive stature.

       The long hurricane season has begun, so it's time to zero in on The
Weather Channel, and pull the trigger.  This is the most dangerous outlet
in all the media.  "Rage" might have caused Columbine, but The Weather
Channel kills thousands, and does it in two ways.  First, it vastly
exaggerates the storms, themselves, and, second, it encourages people to
run for high ground, which often means up valleys.  They exaggerate in a
number of ways.  First, they imply that the wind speeds they cite are
surface winds and only rarely mention that they are, in fact, winds aloft.
Winds at ten or twenty thousand feet, where the hurricanes trackers fly,
are almost always far higher, twenty to fifty to one hundred miles an hour,
than surface winds.  Second, they use time-lapse radar images to suggest
extreme cyclonic action, when ninety-eight percent of what they are showing
is plain-old weather.  For example, Keith, 2000.  This storm gained a bit
of fame because it almost blew apart the "Temptation Island" set.  To look
at The Weather Channel's display, you would have though my town, in
southern Belize, was in the middle of a hurricane hell, when, in truth, the
winds never exceeded a breeze and we had maybe an inch of rain in two days.

       Hurricane Mitch was the worst storm in modern times, killed some
20,000 in Guatemala and Honduras.  For almost two full days this "Category
6" storm remained stationary over the Bay Isles.  Aerial footage taken as
soon as the weather cleared showed a god-awful mess, but little serious
damage.  What The Weather Channel does is use dramatic footage of
shorefront property to demonstrate wind damage.  Have you ever wondered why
they use the same pictures more often than Ted uses Andy?  What actually
happens is, sure, the shorefront property takes a beating, but get even a
hundred yards inland, and the wind is burbled and tumbling, so to speak,
eighty percent of its destructive force dissipated.

       If I ran this outfit, first, they'd have attractive topographical
maps, not the flat diarrhea brown they use.  For storms, they'd provide
zoom-ins showing significant terrain detail to help viewers in deciding
whether to run, and where to run, or to stay put.  If the resources of
travel books like Let's Go and Lonely Planet were coordinated, specific
directions to storm shelters might be included for many coastal regions.
Leaving a delta for a valley is a particularly unpleasant form of suicide.
Coastal plain flooding is a relatively mild event, the water rises slowly,
has little force of motion, and recedes quickly.  It is virtually
one-hundred percent survivable.  For example, Hattie is still cited in
every list of major Atlantic storms.  Hattie hit Belize square in the
chops, and killed 96 people.

       So, I accuse.  The Weather Channel of being a bunch of shekel
obsessed Jews pandering terror for profit with their mindless adage that
starts, If it saves one life...  This obsession, it's called cowardice,
costs all lives; always has, always will.  Wait and see.  One minor aspect
of my sovereignty will be the exhaustive and comprehensive meteorological
data supplied from Newfoundland.

       There's Jack Lemmon doing his tennis racket schtick.  A great moment
of comic genius.  Sure, to a Jew.  But then Lucy stuffing her giant mouth
is funny, to a Jew.  Myron Cohen was funny, to a Jew.  In my eyes, I'm the
funniest son-of-a-bitch of all time, though, I'll have to admit, probably
not to a Jew.  Not a problem, they're getting their innings.  They've got
the whole crib so twisting and turning, fretting and puling, it's a wonder
we last a week. Emotion is their stock in trade, the cheesy, cheap tirade;
no reason attenuates their parade, it wasn't for that that they were made.

        This is the danger, tiny technicalities linked to vast use of noisy
face, numerous societies have identified over the millennia.  A subculture
never actually guilty of anything you can put your finger on, but, somehow,
when they're around, even in small number, things deteriorate.  Since it is
genetically impossible for the chosen professional scapegoats of god to be
guilty of anything, they must be expelled if the society is to survive.
The first lesson of history.  And yet here we are, perverting the tolerance
and inclusiveness for which we are famous to the point we seem to be
licking their smear from the toilet seat.  Even though wire was invented by
two Scotchmen (yes, Scotch.  I earned the right to spell as I choose
through suffering a Scotch mother0 fighting over a penny, there is still a
parasitic evil to this race, all the more lethal because even alluding to
it renders the critic an Aryan stereotype, you know, bald nut, no job.
Guess again.

       As a summary thought, you have your Xbox, you have Nifty, and you
don't need anything more except for a few banana boxes full of good
paperbacks, chiefly historical novels, which are constantly being augmented
with tech era discoveries on land and under the sea.  All you have to do is
survive long enough to enjoy them.

       				 . . .

       This was often the gist of Charles's conversations.  Yes, in spite
of the bleak harbinger of Napster's death at the hand of quibbling schmoes
backed by a judge of glossy political correctness, there actually were
reasons to carry on.  Sex, literacy, the Xbox and the Web.  A short list,
and maybe cable should be included, but comprehensive enough to allow some
novelty to life, in general, that actually could amount to the new paradigm
of legend.  Had he left anything out?  You didn't need cars, motorcycles,
boats, horses, season tickets or window treatments.  You certainly don't
need to break your toes on an exercise machine.  You didn't need one hour
in a mall in a lifetime, nor, in all likelihood, an entertainment
experience sold by a multinational.  What you needed was to read, so if you
ever met someone nice, you'd have something to say.  Best to augment this
with a handy fist, because, if you read, it was unlikely many people would
know what you were talking about, so solo entertainment was important.
Cats.  Cats were good, and the boffins have even come up with genetically
engineered house lions, hypo-allergenic.

       He was holding Blissy's hand these days.  That's how far they'd come
in the boy's first month at Creative Camp.  Their story hours had ranged to
Ireland, to Iowa, to Normandy, to boy bands, to D-Day.  Charles had pulled
out stops he hadn't realized existed, and many a night he'd have to shuffle
his young guests, physically, from his room, though, if he were honest
about it, out of sight was not necessarily out of mind.  As to the boys,
they watched their leader out and about on his immersion tours and tried
their best not to succumb to the universal feeling of awe their leader
inspired.  He was so everyman, except for being a particularly handsome
beast.  Wore the most ordinary clothes, wandered about with his hands
behind his back, head bowed so that it might be a good idea to step aside,
least he accidentally run a boy down; in a word, unprepossessing.  The awe
thing was not engendered by style, nor was it a product of raiment,
charisma, or even personality.  It was his body of work.  The stories he
published, the stories they often printed and read aloud.  Even without the
long list of original product concepts and business plans, Charles was a
bit off the earth.  With them, he seemed a god, didn't act it, life was too
short, but seemed it, until Blissy brought him to earth.  Eight, and even
nine, were too young for a deity, so the obvious conclusion was that their
august leader shared a mortality common to humans.  Who knew?

       In the process of all this, Charles had managed to fall unutterably
in love with Blissy.  He'd often held a gentle fondness for particularly
winsome boys, and had nursed his share of secret lusts for those whose
indescribable carnality intruded, unbidden.  But Blissy was a fireball.  It
burned him awake in the morning, and half the nights, burned him awake
until the morning.  He was witty, literate, curious and yet still happy to
wander off on kid loops, those half-flights to a fantasyland known best to
eight year olds and friends.  It was appalling the boy was so after him.
To be in love with someone who seemed to magnify what he returned should
have been the very light of life, itself, and the fact he tolerated
pedophilia, philosophically, should have allowed what the boy wanted.  But
he couldn't.  Not Charles.  Totally enamored of himself when it came to
telling others how they should live, and how they should not live, .he
nonetheless found himself pinioned on a dilemma that was, in a not very
funny way, horn-free.

       A hypocrite.  A phony.  Not only talking the talk, big time, but
writing it, giant time.  Yet when it came to the walk, he dove under his
pillow.  Sure, that was safe.  Little Blissy of the pertinent observation
and pithy comment would never follow him there.  Lazy boy, he didn't even
have to.  He was already comfortably ensconced, every night of the week.
And everywhere else around the camp, at all times.  Magic.  Well, certainly
sublime and subliminal if not actually something one could saw in half.
Ethereal.  That was an oxymoron because the kiddo could turn flesh to stone
with a grin or a chuckle.  He was more like a Clydesdale when it came to
taking care of business, than anything wraithlike, and his business seemed
to have to do with a permanent injunction against anything to do with
sanity.

       In some ways the boy was tragic.  Not so much him, of course, and
not the other campers, but how he and they innocently diminished the
rank-and-file kid, by comparison.  Their moronic Dragon balls, the all but
Jewish hollow ritualism of Pokemon.  Their angsturbation music, so-called,
never mitigated by charming melody or winsome lyric, but rather ceaseless
and monotonous neurohowling.  Shit only a Jew could sell.  Hey, they got
seventeen bucks for a fifteen cent platter, they must be doing something
right.  It was the world's most forlorn garden.  Millions of twisted stems,
or perhaps swollen pods was a more apt description, seeing as how obesity
was as common as T-shirts.  The truth of the matter was that perhaps as few
as ten percent of them would pursue happiness with any degree of success.
The other ninety percent would grow up, so-called, not knowing Gettysburg
from the Gestapo and thus not comprehending how something so big could be
so empty..

       Wasn't it all backfiring?  Hadn't it been overdone?  How far could
the capitalists exploit liberals to subjugate the labor force with
gambling, costly weed and endless credit, before succeeding generations
became unfit for work and were rendered unable to contribute in any way, at
all?  One thing was pretty obvious to Charles, and that was that when bent
too far, there would be no cracking of bones.  What bones? Rather, a
ghastly slurping sound with blubbery overtones.  What commercial writers
called a `sickening' sound, or sensation, take your choice What once had
been a labor force now amounted to no force, at all.  Bigger certainly was
not better and huge was outright repulsive.  They needed to be hit so hard
to wake them up there didn't seem much chance they'd survive the blow.  And
what would the popular attitude be, if they did survive?  Would they blame
him?  Duh'uh.  Liberals loved the accountability of others as much as the
backyards of others for power plants and nuclear waste.  They were as
tolerant, for all their prattle, as raw nitroglycerin.  Since they adored
the mile-a-minute subversion of Giant-Faced Seinfeld, they'd be unlikely to
see anything very funny in subjugation.

       How many teachers would he have to fire, for example, to bring
hardball rote and drill back to the classroom, and what on earth would you
do with them?  His quota for Newfoundland was 250,000, total, and New York
and California, between them, probably had that many deficient, jew-box,
teachers.  And the lesson plans and texts managed to amount to less than
the instructors.  It reminded him of the Afghans who had thirty words for
sheep, and one for women.  These kids had thirty words for their footwear,
but only `ignorance' described their heads.  As for their cocks, most were
so disagreeable, personality-wise, they'd end up, whatever their choice in
gender, assuming they were cute enough, in the first place, with no higher
a level of action than a rooster gets in a barnyard, or a rat in a
dumpster.

       So his camp, so his refuge, so his outpost away from it all.  So his
detachment from the main, so his devotion to his modest troop of boys who
had read and did think.  And now, so Blissy, who, regrettably, did not have
any control over the conscience that did not belong to him.  If he had, it
would have been a push-button affair.  Instead, he had to proceed with the
tiresome routine of intellectual seduction.  Get him talking, keep him
talking, try for infinite cleverness and boundless charms, and hope against
hope.

       "I think you're right about being at the end of everything there
is," the child said.  They were back under their tree, alone together for
the first time since their trip to camp a month before.
       "How so?" Charles said, obviously agreeing but nonetheless wanting
to hear the delightful voice.

       "What is there?  All technologies plateauing at the same instant.
Medicine with super drugs that make common drugs too expensive.  The space
program knowing humans will die if they remain in zero gravity for any
extended period of time, hanging on by momentum and special interest
politicians and tradeunions.  Education.  With what we've done at C-Camp,
already this summer, it shouldn't be two years before you can go into
Wal-Mart and buy a brilliant Calculus 101 course, each point presented by
three teachers with simultaneous graphic and visual explanation, and lots
of review, for ten dollars, including a printed, mail-in test."

       This was what love was to the mature male.  "Side by side kiosks,"
Charles added.  "One selling high-school and college courses, the other
selling processors for $12.95, hard drives for $19.95, ram sticks for $4.95
and a dazzling laptop with external screen for $295.99.

       "And between those kiosks," Blissy added, happily, "an Xbox
wonderland, ten dollars per program or game."
       "I can't get $12.95 for `grow Pedro?'"
       "Only if you stop acting like some weirdo prude," Blissy answered.
       "No act of kindness goes unpunished," Charles thought to himself,
and added a line about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

       "Maybe if I told you a story?" the kid queried, brightly.

       Another story.  His Nifty manuscript was already massive.  In raw
page count, one of the largest in the world, and if even one point were
awarded for content, simply in a class by itself.  But it was flawed.
Every time he got on a good tear, kicking Jews around, designing an
ultimately efficient power system for light vehicles, inventing cat and dog
gravies for kibble, whatever, another story would come along..  Granted the
characters tended to be nice, that there was more to the tales than just
sex, still, it was over 550 pages, 210,000 words and 1.1 megabytes.  All
because of story after gratuitous story.  And Blissy was right.  There was
no future, all fields of technology were flat-lined except cloning and
genetic engineering, in general.  Space was dead, and electronics were at
the doorstep of Appliance City.  Three years hence consumers would be no
more interested in how a computer worked than they were in the operation of
their toaster.  And there was nothing after it, except for all the recipes
for bread to cook in the appliances, most of which would end up being
one-trick novelties, a/k/a the shovelware beloved of fast-buck content
providers.

       Poor kids.  They didn't have the street entertainment, the thronging
animals and folk of their ancestors. Their packaged entertainment
experiences were so gussied and oversold the whole concept of entertainment
had been polluted unto death.  When Travolta can't flap dem lips to no
crowd, boss, you got problems, and Stephen is not going to solve them with
the likes of "AI."

       Publishing.  Returns.  Nothing left in the books, so they were being
sent back.  The only stock left to buy, related to the industry, was UPS,
who carted the books until the last store returned them, and Waste
Management, who carted them to where they belonged in the first place.

       In the end it amounted to the old sports' homily about winning not
being everything, but the only thing.  Crap.  But, ah, writers.  They
weren't everything, they were the only thing..  Madonna didn't make a buck
until someone wrote a note, (and many artists could sing the note).

       In the end, Harry Truman, oddly wrong in his own time, was right
when he said the only new thing in life is the history you don't know.
That's what we were left with.  A common computer and a common Net hookup
were all the intellectual highways and byways needed, precisely as a sedan
with 120 horsepower, along with a network of two and four lane roads, were
all that was needed for the vast majority of consumer transport.  Whether
anyone used the vehicles and roads depended primarily on what it cost to
ride, and secondarily, on where the roads led.  Suddenly, without any
revolution or major flap, writers ruled.  Absolutely.  And they not only
had to work, like the union hacks turning out Hollywood schlock, they had
to excel.  Examine and redefine with both legs buried to the knees in the
cement of reality, convention and conformity.  Everything else was rubbish,
not worth the time and price, just like exercise machines.

       Occasionally, Charles regretted his literary foundation was built on
innumerable failing math grades.  It would be interesting to quantify the
emerging paradigm.  Writers, but writing what?  What were the vectors?  One
e-publisher offered seven thousand titles.  Mightn't one, however
splendiferous, get lost in the crowd for years before he sold ten-thousand
copies?  At one time, sex might have been an answer, but Nifty, as one
among several, had enough sex to act as a catalyst to the detergent
industry.  So sex was eliminated from the formulae.  He thought of Joan
Cusak's line from "Adam's Family Value."  Talking about her nice family,
she says, ominously, Or were they?  He modified the line to Or was it?  Sex
was out of the equation, Or was it?  How much skill would it take to write
real sex into the mainstream?  To turn out a manuscript so dynamic,
innovative and engaging that established communities would start whispering
and passing links or even printed copies.  Coalesce, like a colloidal
agent, bringing the nugget into the main, and, ultimately, lead the main to
engulf, to the point of wolfing, the nugget?  Not to put too fine a point
on it, to render juvenile erotic themes as common as the very recently
forbidden or at least shocking bikini?

       Of course, it would go against the grain, conceptually.  Academics
were into tearing things down; nitpicking, hairsplitting, worrying,
fretting, puling, and sniveling when not otherwise engaged in backbiting,
much like the artists.  And offering nothing in its place, whatever "it"
might be; witless ciphers that they were, other than ritualistic rolling of
populist platitudes..  Neither group, in all of American history, had
grabbed onto something, buttressed it, and brought it healthy and strong
into the world, something the commercial community did routinely.  Randy's
war in Cuba was a possible exception, otherwise it was, don't you know, so
much easier to tear down and leave a shambles without bothering with those
pesky nuisances known as alternatives..  Law enforcement was a classic
example.  A case where three people witness a killing, and surveillance
shows the suspected killer wheeling the body into an animal control
incinerator at three in the morning.  To satisfy Jew lawyers, the cops have
to sift through hundreds of gallons of animal ash to get their man.  And
the Ng case in SoCal.  Video, bodies, witnesses, and twenty million dollars
before the jewboys are satisfied the brute's rights have been subjected to
due process.  To repeat what I said in the Harvard letter, be there a
hundred planets similar to our own, the ultimate in loathsome obscenities
is the phrase Bill of Rights uttered by the mouth of a Hebrew.  They are
simply the deadliest poison in the world.

       Perhaps a bit smug, who wouldn't be with little Blissy practically
panting on the picnic blanket beside him, Charles realized that if the
classic communities failed to respond to him, they would die in special
disgrace.  Their socialism was a porcelain Ferrari.  Not designed for bumps
on the track.  And their sleek truckster was heading for deep rough, and
lots of it.  To mix the metaphor, it was going to take a tiger to stroke
out of it; to both rebuild the car, and smooth the track.  To give Blissy
and his millions something simply to live for.  The academics, the artists,
had better change their ways, and that was a period, unless, of course,
they were waiting on the politicians.

       Plenty of boylovers out there.  Pedophiles.  Representing freaking
everybody.  Couldn't be worse than the lawyers.  Had built Nifty, et al,
while the judicial jewboys tore Napster limb from limb.  Twenty percent of
the population, likely more.  An absolute force, just by dint of number.
Persecute them, go right ahead.  Accountability.  Remember?  Twenty percent
of us, give or take.  Fifty-six million cells outta do it.  Since Boston is
stuffed with liberals, perhaps their tradeunions and the profits from the
Big Dig can play a role.

       The same truisms applied to the artistic and academic communities as
to society at large.  If you hit them hard enough to wake them up, would
they survive in the first place?  Or might a carrot be tried?  Under the
circumstances, that seemed a bit phallic.  Perhaps they could be lured with
humor.  His survival as a youth had depended on it, but had dear mom
stimulated the talent diligently enough to yield something of interest to
the man on the street?  So far, the answer was No.  Nobody had responded to
anything, not a single letter.  This meant nothing.  King Gillette sold 160
razors his first year in business, and Thoreau, about the same number of
copies of "Walden" in its first year.  Half of the world's great successes
had inauspicious beginnings, half of them tortuous.  Charles was hardly
half way through his rookie season, and had known, from the outset, he was
dealing with clunkers.  The real fly in the ointment was a little catch
known as Window of opportunity.  How long would it be open, if, indeed, it
would ever be open at all? Comfortingly, this was entirely up to others.

       The sickest sin, according to one source, was any enjoyment in being
envied.  Charles agreed with this, and so wrote in a dreamy effort to stoke
his subjects to the point they'd never envy anybody.  Resistance was a
given, and it was perversely exciting to anticipate the likelihood of
enough grabbing the life ring in time to do any good.  He bet against them.
His countrymen had simply benefited far too greatly from random fickle luck
and fate, with a terrifyingly shallow understanding of, or appreciation
for, what had been showered on them by a minute handful of geniuses, almost
always fought tooth and nail, to deserve any more lucky breaks.  And for
sure, there were none on the horizon.

       Foi all his crying, Nifty had done a good job archiving his stories.
There they were.  On Forty-Second Street at Broadway.  They would be read
as surely as Stop signs, until the end of electricity, and perhaps beyond.
Few messages.  Get rid of Jews and Jew-types.  Import half a billion
immigrants to bury the power lines and clean and give the place and old
fashioned shave and a haircut.  Make universal use of the new-dimension
polygraph to clear prisons of harmless folk, and clear the streets of
dangerous ones.  Clean-sheet the military and academia.  Re-evolve family
and neighborhood life around Xbox games and programs.  Re-invent a love of
history, it's all that's left.  (If we make a little ourselves at least our
descendents will know we didn't all die on the john.  Parenthetically, if
we don't there won't be any future generations to wonder at our
shenanigans, straight or crook.)

       In the past, empire builders had manipulated round heads to stand in
front of cannons by extolling one of two franchises, liberty or solidarity.
These were derivatives of religion, which peddled faith.  All were false;
weak at the knees and hollow of head, unnatural, and survivable only under
conditions of material opulence.  Life was just to complicated, the
difference between competence and excellence, too vast.  The communists
realized this and so set one person in three to spy on the other two.
Excellence in such a venue would go a long way toward ensuring a diligent
individual's success, but it was hard to find any long-term benefit in the
scheme.  Cuba, East Berlin, North Korea, Albania, Angola.  If those were
the success stories of Karl Marx, what must his failures look like?
Afghanistan.  Burma.  Yeah, workers of the world, go ahead and unite `till
the cows come home and once again the hammer and sickle will be raising
mainly calluses from dawn to dusk.  Also, mass graves are an often
overlooked benefit of solidarity.

       The Jew loved his scroll-in-a-box for the simple reason that in
thousands of years he'd created nothing new to love.  But boxed scrolls did
not a civilization run, not for long, and certainly not through adversity.
Iridium was proof, Napster, Webvan, and hundred of similar enterprises run
by technicians and buck artists who happened to be in the right place at
the right time.  The leading class amounted to little more than winners of
a grand lottery for overblown egos and staggering levels of
blind-leading-blind incompetence.  Common sense had been so devalued it
appeared as if OJ's Jews had been successful in their efforts to subject it
to a final solution.

       While this had a novelty value at a certain time and in a certain
place, the stage was being set for a much wider playing of the old theme.
Days after getting the 2008 Olympic games, China signed a formal friendship
pact with Russia.  This was a direct result of not granting the nation the
millennial games, with the salt in the wound of giving them to nutty little
Sydney.  Rasputin destroyed a monarchy and liberal voters brought down
democracy.  One crazy as `tother.  On the bright side, it is now likely
sons of liberals will get to remind the Chinese about Tienamen Square, mano
a mano, if that's not an overly clever way to put it.  That's how things
tend to go.  For example, Japan.  Brutalized a vast area of the planet,
committed history's longest list of gratuitous atrocities, and, in return,
got McArthur as a committed governor general, whom they loved.  When the
flames and trials were over and Sony was making pix in H-town it began to
become apparent what the real war was all about.  Vaguery.  Nothing.
Poppycock and A-bombs.  A harmless minor diversion and incidental nuisance
in comparison to the defeat they stare in the face today.  See, it's like
this.  McArthur was a democrat.  He infected Japan with trade unions.

       So he continued to write.  Yes, above blessed Mozart.  The
manuscript grew.  The word was there, not through the yowlings of a camera
professional, but in English prose with a few limericks thrown in to
relieve the monotony.  Clear stuff.  No Hebrew miasma.  To paraphrase the
middle male Brady, read it or die.
       The Jew sips his tea from a glass,
       The goy is crude, unclean and crass;
       He drinks from a cup, his luck is up,
       `Cause he's gonna to take the Jew up the ass.


       The world adjusted to his preference, at least in the abstract,
Charles turned his attention back to gazing into Blissy's eyes.  He was so
real, so close, and had infinite trust in his king, however provisional the
crown.  While others might one day turn to Charles, forced by a lack of
alternatives, this boy was drawn, heart and soul, not like an
indoctrinatee, disciple or cultist, but with the realization that an
utterly new way was not only needed, but essential, and the only path was
an aggressive struggle -- what else was new -- under singular leadership.
The host must be freed of its parasites, or it would die of them; indeed,
was already floundering in the clearing with its scent drifting downwind
and into the forest, the last place a wounded animal wants its pheromones.

       Ruminations complete for the moment, Charles asked his little friend
about the story he wanted to tell.
       "I think Stephen King really blew it with `The Stand.,'" the sweet
child answered.  "I mean, what if he'd kept all the paranormal gibberish
out, psycho witches of the west and junk like that, and just worked with
the premise of a vastly reduced society living amongst immeasurable legacy
resources.  How would people be motivated?  Someone would still have to do
the dirty work.  How would you pay a worker to haul away garbage when he
lives in a mansion and drives a Mercedes?"

       Sneaky boy knew the way to a writer's heart.  Charles had fretted a
bit around the edges about bringing his present work to a conclusion.  What
to write next?  Science fiction?  He'd started, a month or so ago, a
re-write of Pvt. Ryan, history wide and history narrow.  Having re-written
D-Day as it should have been, he now wanted to tackle the Pacific theater.

        What had been their all-fired hurry?  After Pearl Harbor, the US
should have gone methodically and diligently to work building a thousand
subs, and pointed out to the Japanese that it was going to do them precious
little good to dominate their rightful trading partners, militarily, if
they had no ships or boats, and, if they didn't withdraw quickly and
completely, in three very short years their navigation buoys would be used
for target practice by bored sailors, while inland, the delights of
feudalism would be reintroduced to every household.  Unquote.  The year
before the war, Japan had produced forty-eight thousand automobile, the
States, ten million.  There was nothing to dither over or get excited about
other than a bunch of stargazing stuffed shirts who rarely failed to do
three things wrong for every one they did right.

       Emotions should be kept out of war like oxygen is kept out an oil
fire.  Perhaps it could be a Nifty story if he developed a theme of subs on
such cloyingly peaceful blockade duty that cadets were assigned as
apprentice crew.

       Wrong theater, but it would be nice to include the Battle of the
Bulge.  Paint Ike as a military genius who knew damn well the Germans were
planning a run for the oil, and let them come, rather than fight them in a
well ordered withdrawal, luring our forces ever closer to their supplies
while stretching the Red Ball Express tighter with every mile the white
hats advanced.  Oddly, and one-hundred percent unintentionally, Vietnam had
amounted to an identical repetition of the concept.  In the end, Russia was
so bled white it could be stated, with respect to the greatest victory in
military history, that never had so few sacrificed so little to save so
many.  Military history.  Fabulous.  And when Leno, a foreign sounding name
Charles's ears, repeatedly played tapes mocking the Chinese leader for
singing traditional opera, it was likely there'd be more military history,
this time for the man in the street, not just an elite group of
aficionados.  Some of these scenarios seemed less than ideal for sexual
themes, and the camp leader's mind returned to Blissy's sketch.

       "The Stand?"  Fantasy?  He'd need a collaborator.  Someone winsome
and bright-eyed.  Creative.  Imaginative.  An eager beaver.  Someone small
enough to sit in his lap and help with the typing?  Hmm.  He'd be playing
into David's hands, of course.  What could he pout about if he were in fact
writing sf-fantasy?  Could an artist exist without temperament?  Very few
had.  Mellow didn't seem to go with magnificent.  Settling in with young
Mr. Charm?  That in fact might just take the edge off.  What edge?  No
polygons on Blissy.  Edgy he was not.  On the contrary, soft, lithe, supple
and probably with brains in his liver.  Boy gras and likely worth the pate
he yearned for.

       Charles's mouth went dry.  He'd said what he had to say, stalled,
temporized.  The kid was neither moony nor creepy.  Close, but that went
with the IQ.  Was something going to happen?  Why should it?  How could it?
He was in paradise, already.  Fifty-five with a nine-year-and--one-week
old?  That was about as califragilistic as super got.

       Face it, he was the best writer in the world, a monarch by birth,
replete with the conceit-free confidence that could only come from being
part of a large family who, decade after decade, had thoroughly proven each
and every theory and tenet he held having to do with liberalism.  Heady
stuff for a visionary, plus, there was a practical side to his mental
agility, which he'd demonstrated when he fingered Robert Gee as the Olympic
bomber, and revolutionized automotive design with his Six-Pac Pac power
system.  Creative Camp was located in Mexico, which was a great plus when
it came to the human side of living, proving a good working man's acumen
and mental resources, and, now, he was with a newly-minted nine year old
who thought he was the cat's pajamas, and had felt so since their first
meeting a month ago.  This was life as it should be lived in an ultimate
demonstration of cranial perfection that dictated one fan and one subject,
at a time.  This logic, romantic as it was, also had a practical side.

       His subjects deemed themselves free, or at least as free as it was
possible to do under stupefying debt loads and equal loads of fat.  They'd
been diddled, but had accepted it readily enough, had gone so far as to
give their popular vote to a functionary who would not operate a light
switch one full day out of seven, said day obviously being Saturday, and so
were not a bother.  Asked by his campers why he wanted to hassle himself
with such a bunch of retards, his answer was that he wanted to see if he
was smart enough to save them, merely as an intellectual exercise.  Sort of
something to do, a project if you pleased, in case he ever got tired of
writing.  He actually thought he'd make a better leader than author,
problem was, most of 281,000,000 people had to think the same thing.  That
fact that they had no choice might influence the development of things.  As
good a king as he'd be, considering what he had to work with, he might
still be able to use his English talents to heighten the interest level and
level of personal involvement If that didn't work out too well, it happened
to be a well know fact that men thought with their dicks.  Perhaps that
might be at least half an avenue.

       On the other hand, readers never wrote.  Maybe he wouldn't be
popular.  If that's how it was, then who in their right mind would lift a
finger to save a culture that harbored and even nurtured ill will?  Napster
had died of ill will.  Then came the writers in New York, who forced
newspapers to de-post their material, because they weren't being paid the
little handfuls of money their stuff was worth on the archival
after-market, and these ripping hypocrites had been followed up by union
radio talkers whose ill will delayed the rollout of Net radio, because the
jewlines on the sheets of paper didn't make specific allowance for various
commercials being disseminated, other than by the little box a jew puts
things in, forever.

       All three were examples of raw jewpower, if for no other reason, by
their speed.  Literally, suddenly, the slow but sure wheels of justice had
been set spinning in hyper overdrive.  Napster, in its popular sense, had
come and gone in a flash, but that was nothing compared to New York papers
destroying archives practically the day the first schmo said boo, while the
uniontalkers had kept their commercials off the air before they ever were
aired.  As a little game of whose got the chutzpah, Levy's parents had set
a precedent for house-to-house and lot-to-lot searches for missing adults.
How many good men would join or stick with the force when due diligence
meant incessant searching of dangerous derelict buildings and endless
thousands of clumps of weeds?  Totally irrelevant, of course, if it's one's
little princess who has disappeared.  The Levy case, right down to the
sleazy-faced SoCal pol, from a family of absolute crud, amounted to a
perfect example of emotion riding out with iron shoes flashing on flint,
the rider beyond criticism because only a loathsome anti-Semite would raise
a murmer of protest while a good little American would be calling out the
Guard.  In all it seemed like a lot to go through for one dead Jewess, but
there was every likelihood the pace would pick up the second the pendulum
reversed itself.  (It always had, before.)  Pendulums, tides, shifts in the
winds.  Calms before the storm...

       Cincinnati, where a very jewish outrage over alleged police mistakes
made on dark streets and in dark alleys gelded the profiling coppers and
spiked the rate of shootings, and, presumably, associated general misery
and terror, by eight times, immediately after the riots.  Same exact thing
that happened in Johannesburg a few years ago, turning it into the murder
and torture capital of the entire planet.  Nothing a big bellied bog of a
jew editor loves more than haranguing for over reaction one day, then
haranguing for dereliction of duty later that same evening.  It was
commonly said by the Bolsheviks that it hardly mattered whether or not they
won the war, because they'd come to power from the inside, in any event.
How many times did Clinton visit Isshwriealle?

       In the end, Mel Brooks was right, it was good to be a king.  Being a
camp director wasn't half bad either.  He'd been able to winnow over a
thousand nuggets and find the purest in the world.  The boy had panned a
few nuggets of his own, so there was considerable serendipity, oddly, in
knowing there was little kismet involved.  They were like totally right for
each other.

       Blissy began his story

       .  . . .

       The time-release poison capsules were developed in Lebanon.  They
were deposited in the 250 principal water systems and reduced the
population by, it was later estimated, ninety-nine point seven percent,
leaving three alive out of every one thousand.  The plot had been
imperfectly executed, word had leaked out while there was still time, and a
diverse and understandably confused retaliation had frozen the major
enemies in time and place.

       For three years, rural populations had coalesced.  Mad Max-type
films had rendered the surviving population violently leery of odd
behavior, so an aurora of peace, friendliness, grace and goodwill had
existed as various survivors shuffled themselves together.  Many cells had
been surprised at how few leaders had to be hanged to establish and
maintain a new era of really peaceful peace.

       In was late May of 2023.  The conferences had been underway for
nearly the entire month.  Paper after paper had been presented, carefully
read and thoughtfully discussed.  Emotion was forbidden at the meetings,
and even in the bars, so the atmosphere was of people who genuinely hated
disagreeing with each other, yet had varying viewpoints based on overall
education and life experience.

       Wayne Hancock was enjoying the conclave.  It was good to be in a
larger group.  His village, with its dozens of horses, was something no one
had thought to dream of before Pastoral, quiet, sublime, and, yes, a bit
boring.  His feelings had linked him with thousands of others over the
second and third years, and thus the convention with its agenda to explore
more social avenues and possible venues for their future lives, and try to
decide whether coalesce and relocate, or not.  How happy should one be?

       So many people all of a sudden.  After the poisoning, now known
colloquially as The Great Pill Drop,, there had been massive contractions
of the remaining population, but stinking urban landscapes,
notwithstanding, a rural imperative had quickly reasserted itself, and so
society had expanded, geographically, almost as quickly as it had come
together.  After three years, the cycle was at the verge of repeating, and
interested participants had elected delegates to dampen the swings of the
pendulum, so that a happy medium could be achieved.

       So many people.  Wayne, 24, had gone off with his two brothers, in
the first contraction (their parents had been picced, pronounced `pissed,'
slang for poisoned in the city), and the threesome had ended up on a
horse-rich farm with two semis of assorted goods neatly parked in the north
pasture.  The wolf kept further from the door than they ever could have
imagined, the boys had spent eighteen months in a foggy paradise of
excellent liquor, kilos of weed, and literally tons of everything from golf
clubs to peanut butter and jelly.  It had been everlastingly great, but a
bit on the vapid side.  This feeling had quickly become a groundswell.
Three years had been enough for the decay cycle to be largely complete, the
rats would have come, the maggots and roaches would have helped, then the
mice for the bones, and, with the poison long since diluted, voila, any
American city they wished was not only theirs, but also at its historical
height of perfection.

       Indeed, cities had come to have an almost magical allure to the ten
million survivors.  How you going to keep them down on the farm, after
they've seen Paree?  But city life would bring complications.  No more
tossing the garbage out the back window and dealing with on clean-up day,
which was the first Monday each month.  No more running a little generator
when you were in the mood for some electricity to power the water system or
watch a DVD.  Yes, city life would be different.  Some would have to work.
No one had worked for three totally cool years, other than looting and
muscling plunder around to suit taste and convenience.  So?  Who would work
and who would chill out all day, doing precisely what they pleased?  It was
an ironic replay of the chiefs and Indians relationship, which had dogged
history since cave one.

       It has long been held that if everyone in a culture were given a
fair share of its assets, ten percent would own ninety percent in short
order.  Given a few years, three percent would own ninety-seven percent.
Now everyone had thirty thousand percent.  Three hundred times their
so-called share.  It would take a century to even slightly change that
balance, indeed, most individuals would not be able to intrinsically change
their worth, whatever their mode of living, in the span of an adult
lifetime.

       The convention faced two problems.  How to motivate labor for
essential services, and how to entertain, in general, which was the reason
to speculate on change, in the first place.  A few foresighted survivors
had argued, at early gatherings, and, anticipating just the problem that
had now arisen, that a few Jews should be retained, because they were bred
for marathon nitpicking and hairsplitting, and thus might have come up,
before mid-century, with a formulae that would satisfy the needs of the
moment.  In the end, the forces of here-we-go-again, and
let's-try-something-different, had won, and the small number of rural
survivors had seen the handwriting on the wall, and departed.

       So, these years into the new way of life, the situation had not been
rectified.  By consensus, people now wanted to live together, but who was
going to do what for whom, and when, and what could possibly entertain in a
society where free entertainment was stacked a plate-glass window away from
anyone looking for packaged fun-and-excitement Product?

       As with the chronometer, the first person to fly the English
Channel, and the Atlantic, and other leaps and stunts of history, a prize
would have been offered for a brilliant solution, but what would constitute
a prize?  Back to the drawing board, but there was no drawing board.  There
was nothing except obvious suggestions from assigning everyone small blocks
of work each week to the establishment of a new slave class.  These were
not greeted with derision because the suggesters had been sheepishly trying
to break the silence, contribute at least something, more than they had
been convinced.  In any event, the conventionalities had been presented and
had died out through lack of interest.

       Still, it was fun to congregate.  Be part of even a modest ebb and
flow of folk.  Hang at a bar where a man entertained himself by acting the
role of bartender, sometimes three or four hours at a stretch.  By the same
token, handsome young boys seemed to take pleasure in guarding the pool,
and a group at the hotel had come up with their own small-scale service
system so that the place would run for their amusement.  A modern variation
on the theme of the babe magnet.

       Two hundred families had gathered for this particular segment of the
convention, and, in the limited venue, aligned themselves with the staff of
a dozen to share and share alike.  While a pleasant and efficient
atmosphere was maintained, all realized it was driven by novelty and
maintained by the simple fact it would be over in a couple of weeks, and
everyone could go back to doing, or not doing, precisely as they pleased.

       So hopeless was the situation, in its bizarre way, that the
so-called congresses tended to adjourn by ten in the morning.  Wayne found
it strange to sit by the pool, wishing for more, and yet did they all,
because, even if they did not urbanize, sooner or later men and women were
going to have to do consistent manual and mental labor to preserve even the
laid-back rural and outer suburban lifestyles in vogue since the first
implosion of survivors following the pill drop.  The pool was beautiful,
but wasn't it on a cruise ship stranded a thousand miles from land?

       Wayne noticed them about ten minutes after settling into his deck
chair, double gin and tonic cooling his palm.  He looked about seventeen,
she, perhaps ten.  Obviously siblings, obviously athletic, and there seemed
to be more that was obvious, but it wasn't obvious, so it left Wayne
picking up his towel and pulling it across his waist.  Other males did this
as the brother and little sister frolicked in the clean water.  While the
behavior of the youths was not obvious, neither was the atmosphere of
awareness surrounding the pool.  So not-obvious the level of awareness
might have been compared to an air horn in an elevator.

       "Did they have to be redheads?" Wayne sighed to himself.  "And so
light completed?"  Their skin looked nakeder than naked, and there was lots
of it.  Both redheads were tall and just a pound or two over slim.  Long
legged, with the male so juvenile in appearance he was as hairless as his
little ten-year-old sis.  Amidst their horseplay, the young couple
occasionally locked eyes, glanced in a certain direction, and then went
back to ducking and shoulder diving.  At one point, the glance was so
obvious Wayne looked over his shoulder, the way they do in comic movies.
Nobody was behind him, and he blushed, thankful for his foresight with the
beach towel.

       He closed his eyes to sizzle for a few minutes, May was the time to
do it, and then was interrupted.  "Can I borrow just a corner of your
towel, dude?" the teen asked.  Wayne nodded with a smile, and the youth
wiped the water from his handsome face.

       "Are you here by yourself?" the teenager asked.
       "This trip.  I live with my two brothers, but they stayed home."
       "Here for the convention?"
       "Delegate.  Ozarks.  Everyone died in Branson.  Smallest town they
took out.."
       "It keeps getting better, doesn't it?" the boy murmured.  The
green-eyed redhead sat at a wave from Wayne, and they talked across a
one-foot gap.

       "My sister's name is Brenda, and I'm Cal, which is short for
Caligula, not, but better than the alternative my mother chose.  I mean it
wouldn't matter much, would it; Calbert, Calvert, Calvin, or Calloway?"

       Wayne agreed that the shortened form of the name would be his
choice.

       "Brenda's getting drinks.  She wanted me to introduce us.  Is that
okay?"
       "Fine," Wayne said, swinging his feet back onto his pool chair the
moment Cal was done with the towel.  The boy followed suit, and both males
relaxed a few moments, letting the spring sun shine down.

       "She really likes you.  Me too.  Even from the middle of the pool,
and even with the crowd, we both spotted you before we even hit the water."

       "I'm flattered," Wayne said.  "Brenda is very pretty.  I didn't dare
steal more than a glance, you know how country folk are when they get
around big-city outskirts, but she passed every test I could think of,
except age.  That's why they call it life, I guess."
       "Well," the boy responded, "she's not over the hill, and that's a
fact."
       "Are you very close?" Wayne asked.

       Young yes, but also beauteous and with a gamin friendliness that
might indicate a personality beyond the Touch-me-and-you're-dead-meat
stereotype which had fit most kids up until recent years.  Wayne had heard
about this.  New attitudes.  A twelve year old with his own Porsche, and
vast open roads on which he or she was permitted to drive it, had little to
whine about.  Kids were meant to be nicer now.  For many, according to what
he'd heard his few days in town, this fact, alone, made up the A list of
notable improvements in the post-urban landscape.

       That, and shunning.  That was on almost everyone's A list.  The old
Amish stricture where disagreeable and offensive people, whether crook or
straight, were precluded from social intercourse, at the first level, and
precluded from commerce, essentially, a regional death sentence, at the
second level.  It paid to be nice in the new world, and the ethic of
limited recalcitrance had, in just these few years, seeped so far downtown
in Teen City, even the ten year olds were waking up and taking notice.
Sure made life a sweeter proposition, all the way `round.  So much so that
here he was talking to a seventeen year old, former mortal age of the
twenty-something.  It was often remarked that there was something
auspicious about the year 2020, and the funny ended with a delightful
formulae banality that went, Sure, in hindsight.

       "The `rents went in the big pill down," Cal explained.  It was an
indicator the boy had been out of touch, because the acronym, TBPD was in
common usage, the tongue-twisting nature of the arrangement endured as a
sign of respect for the many deceased

       Sure enough.  "Brenda and I went on a marathon camping trip," Cal
explained, "walked over a thousand miles south, then back.  We were raised
fifty miles from here, and this is our first time out of the woods, so to
speak.  I mean," the boy went on, "other than nipping here and there to
pick up more tins of caviar, extremely nutritious, and maybe some new
batteries for the stereo."

       "It sounds terrific," Wayne said, comparing it with the in-depth
drinking bout he and his brothers had used to while away the time following
the first bouncing, frightening months.  Spunky kids.

       "Yeah," Cal seconded.  "Awesome, in fact.  Just walking along,
knowing you'd find tons of whatever you wanted from vodka to marbles.
T-shirts for hot weather, Cortex, for the cold, and, you know we always
washed them and re-used them for at least a couple of months.  Isn't that
weird?  We could have worn one every hour, for life, but we only changed
once in awhile, just like the old days.  Course, we weren't heroes or
anything.  We had plenty of soap."

       Wayne couldn't help giggling with the boy.  Lucky little sis.  He
was all of magnetic and energetic.  Cute beyond words.  Surely the Garden
of Eden, itself, had never seen such happy campers as these two must have
been, wandering their two-thousand miles, staying warm, rarely hot, and now
back, in May; obviously with a decision in the offing as to whether to stay
for the urbanization conferences or go on north, perhaps another thousand
miles, to while away the coming summer and keep those long legs ripping.

       "What did you do?" Cal asked.  Well, he'd been back in civilization
long enough to know vocational inquiries were couched in the past tense.

       "Librarian," Wayne answered.
       "No way," said Cal.
       "Sorry," the twenty four year old kicked back.

       "Are you kidding?  Want to marry a ten year old?  Brenda reads all
the time.  So do I.  When we're so called hiking? we start by running
two-and-a-half miles as fast as we can, then we do our gym workout setting
up camp, then we read `till midnight.  Every day.  The only other activity
is scouting up new supplies, but there's nothing to that once you've had a
little practice."

       "And you still want to urbanize?" Wayne asked.

       "We're pretty sure," Cal answered, thoughtfully.  "Maybe after we do
Canada.  I mean, it's fun to live like Tarzan, in a way, and curl up with a
good book, or a DVD of an evening, but, well, it's like Christmas every
day.

       "It would be better to be around more people.  Now that the
spiritualists and faith merchants are out of the picture, we can, for
example, talk about the overall monsterism of Catholicism without some
slick-lipped Jesuit tonguing doctrine out of one side of his mouth and
arrogance out of both sides.  That was getting really old, you know, the
phoniness, money grubbing, and all.  We figure if we urbanize there will be
clubs that know real history, and we can put together a properly balanced
assessment of America as it was, not as some special interest group told us
it was."

       The young males batted this conversational ball around for several
minutes.  History always came surprisingly high on the list of reasons for
urbanization.  That, and computer gaming in groups.

       This was the source of the enigma.  The reasons to pick a city and
resettle it were so vague as to be almost translucent.  Many offered the
opinion that it would be hard to beat what they had, and any system which
compelled a few to work for benefit of the many was rendered half-way moot
by the lack of any life-or-death aspect to the situation.  Most logistical
experts agreed that the surviving population, making a nominal effort at
extending the life of prepared foods, could breeze ten to twenty years
before they began to run short of mainstay goods.

       Yes, it was the ultimate back-burner issue, but, by the same token,
it was the only issue there was.  No Jews, no issues.  Could it really be
that simple?  Or was it no clergy, no issues?  Academics?  Criminals?
Artists?  None had the same ring of truth.  In any event, it was an issue
of no immediate import, though, as to Cal and his sister, it did have a
certain sweet ring of community and shared experience.  Again, what else
was there?

       "Brenda wanted to invite you to dinner," Cal allowed.  "I guess
we're looking for sort of a half-dad.  Someone older and wiser, you know
what I mean, and not all up-tight and jittery."
       "Well," Wayne answered, "I'm twenty four.  I read a lot.  I kayak a
lot, usually fishing.  I write.  I had a girlfriend, before, I guess more
friend than girl, but she nevered, and since then I hang with my brothers
and we drink and keep the place looking good.  We have more grass than the
livestock can eat so we do a lot of mowing to keep the scrub at bay.  Room
for the horses.  We have six Arabs."

       "You're a librarian, and you have Arabs?" the boy asked, showing
surprise and respect, alien emotions scant years before.

       "The library was then, the horses, now.  But we kept a couple of
thousand books after I abandon my post, so I guess I'm still half-way in
the business."

       "What happened to the rest of the books?" Cal asked.
       "Nothing," Wayne said.  "They're still on the shelves; the place
operates freelance, no locks, no overseers.  It just had a new roof so it's
safe to fly until we-all decide what we're going to do."
       "Everybody's in that boat," the teen acknowledged with a nod.

       Brenda came bouncing up.  Her brother swung his feet and the girl
released one glass of wine to Wayne and settled beside Cal, handing him a
glass.  With a look of badness over the rim, she held her glass to the guys
and giggled Bottoms up.
       "Have you told him all our secrets?" the girl asked after a long
sip.
       "Not even one," Cal said.  "Wayne's a librarian, and he has a herd
of Arabs."

       "No way!" the little charmer squealed, and launched herself, wine
and all, into Wayne's lap.  Her brother grinned.  This was going to work.
They'd met hundreds of survivors on their camping epic, some super nice
ones, too, but Brenda had never acted like this.  Indeed, it usually took
her some hours to warm up to new acquaintances, if she did so at all.  She
maintained a friendly-child motif that covered most of her relationships --
and seemed to have outgrown it in a big hurry.

       "How many Arabs?" she asked.
       "Six," Wayne said.

       Apparently six was enough.  The girl knackered his chin, gently
enough, with her teeth.

       "Do any of them bite?" she asked.
       "They're rough on grass," the twenty four year old replied.
       "Ah yes," the girl twinkled back, "good old roughass.  Large
herbivores need lots of it."
       "Large herbivores also need a whip," Cal pointed out.
       "It's okay," Brenda responded.  "We're in love."

       Old news.  Wayne had know that for over a minute.  Cal looked into
his eyes.  No trace of denial.  The teen grinned happily.  Ten years old
and happily betrothed.  He'd been a good brother, after all.  There had
been times he was not sure.  Taboos and mores said this, the new way of
living, said that.  A lot had been going on with other hiking couples and
small groups.  At the time it had seemed utterly natural.  Even the things
that had happened by the swimming hole their second day on the trail.

        But twisted sister images couldn't help haunt him.  She woke to him
as a lover, then kid sissed it all day, returning to his bed as ardently as
she'd left it.  His bellows over her had matched those of other males when
they chanced to camp ensemble, had scared bears and terrified wolves when
they settled for the night in a wilderness.  Had it changed her?
Obviously, not for the worse.  She was a truck, she'd found her target.
Road kill.  He had to be happy at that.  Perfection.  She looked over her
shoulder, her eyes blazing with excitement, and at the same time soft with
unutterable thanks for the things he'd done to her so gently, so tenderly,
so she'd loved them from the first, and wasn't scared of anything, and
especially not a meager librarian with a few nags.

       Having completed her hug, the girl became demure and returned to her
brother's side, stroking his inner thigh down near the knee.  "Isn't he a
doll?" she said.  "Imagine being off in the woods with him for months and
months.  Do you think that would be good for a little girl?"

       "Only if she survived," Wayne responded.
       "It was close, at that," the child said.

       They were delectable.  A pair that would beat three of any kind.
Around the pool everyone was still trying not to notice.  "Not a limp dick
in the garden," Wayne mused to himself, including himself.  Looking at it
from an intellectual point of view, he was ready to get married.  Why on
earth not?  What was Brenda, ten years old?  They'd have to keep it secret,
maybe unofficial was more realistic, for six or seven more years.  With the
brother as chaperone - they were close enough in age to be friends in the
new order - it could hardly help but work out.  There were even enough
horses.

       "Meaning?" Wayne almost bubbled his wine at the thought, "We're on
our honeymoon."

       Problem.  How long had it been since he'd had a problem?  Aside from
a few weeks of strife and confusion immediately after the pilldown,
problems had removed themselves to history, back to the past.  Yet here was
a situation representing the very essence of tribulation.  A fiancé with
no ring.

       It was that kind of place.  Wayne excused himself from his new
friends and circled the pool, looking for a petite lady.  In took him a
minute or so to home in on a pixie brunette.  She was obviously a newlywed,
coaxing her handsome young husband to paw her, which he did.  Approaching
the couple, he introduced himself and explained that his niece, sitting
over there with his nephew, had misplaced a diamond engagement ring she was
carrying to her best friend's older sister.  Would they mind?

       With happy grins indicating they believe about one percent of
Wayne's story, the bride handed over her diamond, saying, with a wink, I
hope it fits.

       The fit was pretty close and Brenda was delighted with the
thoughtful offering, smiling at the happy couple who splashed childishly
and grinned back.  Wayne, mature as he was, with twenty-one of his years
before TBPD, idly speculated on how much jewelry he could obtain repeating
his story around the pool.  Would it be more or less than ten million of
them old dollars?  As the old saying went, It's the thought that counts.
Brenda's eyes glowed with excitement as Wayne slipped the ring over her
dainty finger.  No one intruded by actually whistling or clapping, but the
walls of the courtyard fairly ricocheted tolerance and best wishes.  No
Belzer types with a pithy comment or two to evil up the ambience.  Dull
razors and Jews.  Uptight dykes and screws.  There had been a lot to lose,
but a few thousand pounds of poison had driven off the blues.  Now he was
sipping wine with Miss Nine, well, almost, and it was time to dine.

       The whole institution seemed to sigh collectively as the threesome
decamped and adjourned to the second floor where they'd agreed to dress for
lunch.  As they entered Wayne's suite, he wondered if anyone had ever made
the transition from carefree bachelor to family man quite as rapidly as
he'd just seemed to manage it.  Books to horses to ring to husband to
father to daughter to son and off to the boudoir in a little over half an
hour.  Wife and daughter seemed a lead-pipe cinch.  Son and lover?  Oh,
wow, is that what the boy wanted?  Like the engagement ring, it smacked of
being a problem until the situation was resolved as Cal dropped his towel
the moment the door was closed and let Wayne look at the swollen mass
jutting to his right side.  Brenda danced off to the bathroom, leaving her
spectacular duo of escorts to get acquainted .

       "I can make myself scarce," Cal whispered.
       "No!" Wayne interjected instantly.  The injunction sprang from his
lips before he knew it.  What was this all about?  He'd never touched a
male.  Gay stuff?  This would hardly seem the time or place, except for...
The thought had such an obvious conclusion he didn't bother thinking it.

       Cal stood in front of him as the groom-to-be sat on the arm of an
easy chair.  Came closer and now was a foot away.  "Is it okay?" he asked.

       Wayne's yawned, his mouth dried not by wine.  If the legs hadn't
been so long, and, strung with, lean, muscle, he might have stood a chance.
That was, no innuendo intended, how things stood.  Cal was long, Cal was
lean, Cal was...  He couldn't think straight which turned out to be fine
because there was nothing straight about the situation, so he straightened
himself and stood, bare chested inches from the thirteen year appearing
teen.

       "Is your mouth dry?" Cal asked.
       "Totally," Wayne whispered with a yawn that seemed to alleviate
panic, at least for the moment.
       "That happened to me, too," the boy explained.  "There's an
incredibly effective cure, if you want me to show it to you."
       "It's not experimental, is it?" Wayne managed to rasp.
       "More like all-natural," Cal said, tilting his face to the taller
male in front of him.

       Wayne looked into his cute boy eyes.  Was this the flame that drove
women mad for jewels?  Poor things.  What difference would there be kissing
a diamond and kissing a lump of quartz?  But then again, jewels appealed to
headstrong imbeciles, and Wayne felt himself a long way from this category,
especially with Cal so everlastingly.... close...  That was the problem.
If the Hope diamond's curse was derived from proximity, what foul deviltry
would befall him, and how quickly, it he adjourned himself, say a foot from
those depthless orbs?  Conversely, what would be his fate if he solved the
closeness problem with togetherness?  Maybe it was the hormones talking,
but it did seem worth a try.

       Einstein had a lot to say about time and relativity but Wayne
doubted the sour old schmo had ever truly understood the term `instant' as
it applied to the length of time it took to get used to kissing a boy.
Indeed, the experience actually warped the continuum because he'd adjusted
himself to the idea a full inch before contact was made and the first light
nibbling exploration even began.  No wonder there was so much spiritualism
and psychic desperation in the world: only a fraction of its population got
to kiss a willing juvenile partner, and so were destined to search until
eternity, like Ponce baby, for any fraction of what only the friendly and
generous had any right to.  Good luck to them.  (Try Florida.)

       So far, his luck was running well.  Cal loved being kissed and it
had been intensely exciting when their young naked chests had come
together.  Both had moaned at the sensation, and their foreplay kissing had
warm-jellied into the real thing.  Jelly laced with tiny nuggets of pure
cocaine, boy, that was how it felt.  Soft, warm, and electric.  Shocking at
times.  The way the youth, after several gentle minutes, began gently
sucking the tip of his tongue in a suggestive way.  Shocking, or so it
seemed at the time.

       The kissing went on, after awhile becoming intermittent as the
whispering began.

       "Have you ever done this with a boy before?" Cal asked.
       "Never even thought of it," Wayne whispered back, suddenly aware
that Cal's remedy for dry mouth had worked, adding a holistic dimension to
the frantic warping of time and morality that had all crammed their way
into way less than a few seconds.  History's wackos had raved of liberty,
solidarity and faith to mold emotion to their will.  This boy was not in
the club.  Said nothing for the moment.  What was the old adage about truth
coming from the lips babes.  Boggle.

       Cal, following the train of thought, was just, boggle again, a
prequel.  As if to clobber him simply dead with sensation, Cal whispered,
"Brenda's lucky.  She learned about this almost three years ago, when she
was eight.  I had to wait until I was eleven, for my first time."
       "Well, tiger," Wayne replied, "you beat me by thirteen years."
       "And Brenda, by sixteen," the boy added, helpfully.
       "Then I guess this is what you call making out for lost time," Wayne
whispered as he returned to the trembling lips of his ever-so-boyish lover.

       				. . .

       "They were a well suited pair, Blissy pointed out, and became fully
involved with each other.  This resulted in another shocking experience, do
you want to hear it?"
       "You've gotten off to a very good start," Charles acknowledged.  "I
would like to hear more of your story, yes."
       "It's going to cost you," the gamin youngster replied.
       "I hope not a diamond," Charles replied.
       "Think pink, think red, think warm, think wet, think what Timmy has
done here," the child replied, moving in like a serpent.

       The boy had left his hero, Cal, in the Boggle Hall of Fame, dropped
out of his story, and absolutely instantly recreated the literary effect on
the blanket under the oak.  All Charles had time for was At least he's
nine, now, before the child was against him, licking and nibbling just like
the couple in the story.

       The camp leader reflected back on how many tales had been told, some
by him, some to him, over the past month, in an effort to keep exactly this
from actually happening.  Veteran of so many epics, and such tawdry ones,
he really had thought he could bring Blissy back to this private spot for a
heart-to-heart talk, prepping the boy for departure at the end of the
summer season.

       Now the child was against him, more friendly and happy seeming than
obsessed or neurotic, like Mel Gibson's first young lover, the one that
died, in the film, and more than Santa when it came to giving.  Sometimes
Charles hated being a writer.  He wanted to concentrate, return the boy's
gentle inquiring kisses, and he did his best, but his mind, writer's mind,
had spun crazily off on a tangent titled: "The Ultimate Santa."  Not the
right thought at the right time, that was for sure.  The boy had just begun
a brilliant tale of his own.  One the two of them could plot; heavy duty
sci-fi that would shake the ground under Isaac's feet, or bounce him clear
of the grave, if that happened to be his abode.  He grew almost giddy at
the thought, which, since he was kissing a nine year old, must have been a
good one.  It was.  Supreme, in fact.  If he had a hardball plot, he could
avoid, a, politics, and b, himself.  How ace in the hole would that be?
"Oh, Blissy," he sighed to himself, scared stiff of any word or sound that
might possibly be interpreted by the youngster as encouraging, "you have
done it, angel of all possible angels."

       Of course, he realized, Stephen King had really done it, established
a premise of miniscule population surviving amongst a vast legacy
infrastructure, but, and here his thinking became ice clear, if he wrote
it, triple X, no one would dare admit reading it, thus he could steer clear
of intellectual property issues.  A fiendish plan, but they'd come happily
through a fiendish era, who could ever tell?

       It was a plan, more than.  No writer's ego, no Jews.  Loads of
characters, conflicts and resolution.  It was a shame he couldn't
mainstream it, but he had loads of manuscript for the straight set, so that
hardly mattered, one way or the other.  The writer's strike had not
happened, he'd been counting on it, not happily, as an opportunity to scab.
That had ended up a Sigh, because when one thought about how long it took
the schmoes to recognize Jackie Chan, while wasting massed fortunes on
Kevin Costner, you had to be pessimistic over excellence having any
influence over the right door opened in the right place and at the right
time, just like a McDonald's.

       He loved his age, Charles did.  The crystalline brilliance of
precocious youth, with a well tried set of springs and shocks to dampen the
rough spots (and take the curves at high speed, te he).  Mostly what
maturity brought was an absolute ability to concentrate, to focus, as long
as XP was running, no matter what.  A case in point.  Here he was dithering
about how grand he'd be writing a full-blown sci-fi novel, his job of work,
while an ardent nine year old was probing softly at his teeth with an
insistent tongue.

       					. . .

       How cool is this for a hero?  Truth to tell?  I think you're going
to miss me.  On the other hand, instead of bringing this colossus in for a
full-stop, as it's known, some us will be doing a touch-and-go together.
Since execution of this maneuver crams the vagaries of landing and taking
off into a brief window you can count on minimal commentary from the flight
deck.  For you pilots in the crowd, we are marker, inbound, and an
assumption is made about your seat belts, smoking materials, and tray
position.

       					. . .

       The kissing won out.  If this boy ever wanted a dog, all he'd have
to do was march a day into the forest, and kiss a wolf for five or ten
minutes.  He'd come out with a pack big enough to rule a Texas county.
Fiendish type, really.  Interfering, with his lips and hot panting.  Biting
so it reminded him of being ejected from the deep blue sea, not by a shark,
but by a remora Six inches of persistence, and it was back in the dory for
him.  How long would it take to cut the oak, and hollow it out?  Grasping
at straws, that's what he was doing.  An oak.  A straw.  What did it
matter?  Blissy.  Stop.  Kissing.  Me.  No...w.

       The obedient child looked up into his cranky old god's eyes, not in
disappointment or frustration, but with a purely happy smile.  He won
himself an oscarmajigg for picking up a cue.  "I knew you'd like hearing my
story," he crowed.  "I think whispering is best, too."  With that they were
again side by side, simply holding hands.

       					. . .

       Cal and Wayne were holding each other gently at the waist, still
experimenting with kissing.  It was getting out of hand, really.  At it and
at it, dizzy, to the teen just as new as to the young man.  Yes, Virginia,
there was a difference between curiosity, lust, and being stone-fox in
love.  The books were right about the pheromone thing, there was an absence
of it in an incestuous relationship, and those puppies had some kick.  It
was neat-o they hadn't been swimming; if they'd stopped in the gym for even
five minutes Cal knew he'd be fainting, if not actually dead by now.

       And this was no one-way street.  The boy smelled delicious in his
own right.  That drove Wayne's Fahrenheit to four-fifty.  Powder exploded
at Fahrenheit four-fifty-one.  It was getting dangerous.  How many lips did
the boy teen have, anyway?  A minefield.  What did it matter that one was
alive, half-way across?

       Both males were aching, shaking and moaning into each others'
mouths.  Where did the air come from?  They were frying off the oxygen, had
to be.  Panting helped, so they did.  After each other.  All but wanting
blood.  They learned to rub their teeth together in a way that made them
tactillians of sex, clicking gently, not to a beat, but as a last wall of
defense of precious tongues, each more valuable to the owner than as a
trophy of passion, however grand.

       On a practical note, Wayne was braced solidly against the arm and
back of the massive easy chair.  He usually rode bareback, so his legs were
strong.  Cal, as mentioned, was a few hours off a two thousand mile hike,
and, while neither male had the lung capacity of the trained athlete, both
were fit enough to be comfortable standing with their hands on each others'
waist, and kissing.

       Cal broke off to whisper.  "Bren didn't get her swim, and she's luxo
bath crazy after our hike.  She'll be in the tub for awhile.  Additionally,
she may want some time to digest the idea of being a bride.  But she
wouldn't mind if you want to go in with her, you know, if you want... or
stay here...."

       "You're in charge, Cal," Wayne whispered.  "You've obviously done
well so far."
       "I'm also one-hundred percent biased," the boy whispered in answer.
"More than."  More kissing interrupted for more panted whispering.

       "You never did any homosexual stuff when you were a kid?" Cal asked.
       "No," Wayne said.  "Not all that much of the other kind, either.
Hazard of the library trade.  When I started riding, some stuff happened,
but it was too close to consenting heterosexual adults to be of much
interest."

       "That will be a thrill for Bren," Cal said.  "As it happened, all
the people we spent time with on the trail, mostly guys but a couple of
girls, were experienced as children or with children.  In her eyes, you're
bound to be a virgin."

       Wayne hadn't said Oh, goody since he was five, hadn't thought it,
possibly because the big news had spread and clarified itself over several
weeks -- thus yielding no notable celebratory moment - since he was ten.
It seemed almost rudely out of place, but he was young, inexperienced and
very much in love.  That made a difference and so Oh, goody it was.
Silently, of course.

       He had not understated the case.  Cal was a rapture.  What he'd done
with his mouth, the sensually blatant rhythmic sucking against Wayne's
tongue he now seemed to do with his fingers, seeming to teach the older
male what he wanted done to his own boyish body.  It was easy stuff to
learn.  The nipple part was so stove-bolt simple he felt sure he could have
figured it out on his own.  The extra three or four pounds the lad had
picked up since returning to civilization was a marshmallow heaven, baby
silky skin with a prepubescent feel, soft but definitely warm and there, a
pre-pre love handle in the sense there is an off-off Broadway.  More like a
petting zoo, on second thought.  A good place to spend some time with a
nice young boy.  And....

       "Let me turn around," Cal whispered, "and stand behind me."  Wayne
released the boy for his trip and was thrilled when he made it a short one,
executing a half-turn without moving away more than an inch or two.  Now
the older male was able to really molest the boy's chest and even run his
hands all the way down over the hint of softness at the belly and to his
muscular inner thighs.  The shoulders and neck, and back to chest and
belly, this time right to the verge of the boy's bathing suit.

       "I was letting a man do what you're doing our second day on the
trail," Cal said.  "Brenda was in a Ramba mood, or maybe Hiawatha, anyway,
she went all tip-toes, and when she saw what he was doing to me she crept
in for a good look."

       "Was the guy nice?" Wayne asked.

       "Yeah," the boy answered, "he was great.  I told him I hadn't done
anything since I was eleven, so he took his time and asked me lots of
questions and told me his secrets.  It was cool being really mature, you
know, just finding a nice guy, youngish, reasonably good looking, and
letting him do what he wanted in a private place.  Like I was grown up to
make the decision; wise enough, too.  Twice a month remedy for psychic
problems, real and imagined, you know, sometimes just it for its sake."

       "You were heading in opposite directions?" Wayne asked.
       "No," the boy said.  "We were all headed south.  His name was Lenny
Proudfeather.  We spent three days hiking together, half the time laughing
because he actually was pretty much American Indian and didn't now squat
about the bush, so the white buck and his squaw were teaching tepees and
woodcraft.  It gets a little weird when rich white teens know more about
survival than Indians even one generation removed from their tribes."

       "How did he start molesting you?" Wayne asked.

       "He quizzed me," the boy explained, "while we were walking along.
First it was stuff about te situation, I mean, you remember how it was,
meet a perfect stranger and you'd have a million things to talk about.
Then he asked me the girlfriend stuff, and I knew from what Mr. Terrance
had told me that he wanted to touch me.  I thought it was cool, and, even
without the world having been so recently turned upside-down, I think I
would have been happy hanging out with him.  As it was, he was twenty, and
smart, even if not about the woods, so it was extra special.  Plus, it had
been a long time.  Grades and all that flat-earth old crap.  I didn't have
time to know myself, physically, or any other way.  Plus, Bren and I would
run five miles every day, so it was neuter city for this kid.

       "Then Len, and we were a mile or more from the trail and our camp,
and walking along and it was hot and he was asking me questions and then we
came to the brook and like we'd been together all our lives we settled on a
fallen log and we started talking about really mature stuff, and then I was
sure he was going to play with me."

       "Did he ask you about your sister?" Wayne queried.
       "More like told me," the boy responded, "I mean, not told, like
dictated, you know, but more like just pointing out some pretty obvious
stuff, like that we got along really well together, and she was cute
enough, not that it especially mattered, then he told me something he'd
seen when he was a boy."
       "What was that?" Wayne whispered to keep the conversation going.  It
was the perfect way to maintain that magic 450 when any touch would jolt
the thermometer.

       "He'd dated a really pretty girl when he was sixteen and she was
twelve.  He really fell in love with her, and she let him do things with
her, but he was scared to, you know, do what he wanted to do inside her.
One night, after he left her at her house, he walked around to the side of
the house to get one last look at her, Paula, before he went home.  There
was a lot of honeysuckle off the porch, and loads of frogs making a racket,
and the widow was open with just the screen, so he was able to see and hear
what happened."

       If this was playing with fire, Wayne took no notice.  He was a
superbly intelligent young man and realized he had a whole degree to work
with before things got out of control.

       "What happened?" Wayne whispered to his young partner after several
minutes reviewing what it was like to kiss a boy.

       "Her dad was sitting on the sofa right under the window.  Paula came
in from the hall and stood in front of him.  He put his book down and
looked up at her and asked how it had gone.  She told him he, Lenny, had
had an accident again.  Then she sat on his lap, straddling his knees, and
he began unbuttoning her blouse.  When he got down to her tummy he saw his
daughter was covered with sperm.  He commented on how Len was a pretty
awesome young man, and reminded Paula that the accidents happened because
he was in love with her.  He dried her with some tissues on the end table
and then she stood and he unzipped her shorts and pulled them down while
she got stripped off her blouse.

       He asked her if she remembered the first time as he touched her
girlish chest and fondled her under her training bra.  She replied that it
had been the night he'd come into her bedroom and she'd helped him make her
get all wet.  Then her dad started kissing her around the bra and reached
back to unclip it so he could get her naked on top.  Meantime, she was
working on his shirt, and even the front of his pants.  Then they started
kissing, and stood up for a minute so they could get each other all the way
naked, then he lay her back on the couch, and stood over her so he could
see.  Len said he was really big.  Then he got on his knees between her
legs, and she spread really wide with her left foot up over the back of the
sofa, and about a foot below the window, and they sort of froze together
when he lay down on top of her.  Then he saw Paula's legs come up around
her dad's waist and he started moving.  He could see her golden hair all
over her shoulder and some was across her chest.

       Then she threw her arms straight up over her head, so neither of
them used their hands, but he found her.  She called out Oh, Len, when she
felt him in the right place against her, then Len could see the big
powerful man's back hump strongly and he heard him grunt.  Then it was like
a porno movie.  He was fast and hard on her, but taking really huge long
strokes.  She kept mewing Len's name, and sometimes, Oh, daddy, then, Len,
Len, Len.

       At the end it got frantic and noisy for like five whole minutes and
suddenly Scott, that's Paula's dad, grunted I'm coming, baby, and her legs
went more up around him and that's how they locked together for more than a
minute.  Even over the honeysuckle Len could catch a scent of what Paula's
dad had done to her while he was frozen on top of her.  Then they kissed a
little more, and she told her dad about the rest of the date, and Len went
home.  Happy."

       "People who spy often see spill of themselves," Wayne commented,
wincing at the atrocious paraphrase of the adage concerning people who
eves-drop hearing ill of themselves, but unable to pick another thought
from his cotton brain.

       Humor helped, even at its extreme of lameicity.  It was the single
ice cube that kept the powder from blowing to kingdom come.  That it left
him iron hard and with balls filled with raw nitro was a down side only if
one did not consider the alternative.

       "Had Lenny got you naked when your sister showed up?" Wayne quizzed.
       "No," said the boy.  "He was doing what you are."
       "For how long?"
       "I guess half an hour," the boy said.  "He was asking me lots of
questions and making sure I liked what he was doing to me, and, you know,
asking me about what happened to me when I was a kid."

       Then again, where was it going to end?  How long could he stand
behind this athletic boy and molest him like a cub scout?  He was in no
hurry to find out.  And, he needn't be.  Plots were the essence of any
fiction collection, and, as a librarian, Wayne knew they often developed
slowly, Dickens was good at that, with a corresponding grandeur at the end,
not through artifice, but with legitimate complexities.  So, if things
developed slowly with his new friends, that would be okay with Wayne so
long as it didn't turn into a new edition of the Waverly novels.  Cal
wasn't feeling especially bookish, either.  That was nice.  They ran
against each other, gnawing for bone, happy with nicely marbled flesh, soft
and toothsome.  Who knows where it might have ended had they not decided to
leave some for little Brenda.

       "What happened when you were eleven?" Wayne asked.
       "Big stuff," Cal whispered back over his shoulder.
       "With who?" the new papa quizzed his boy
       "Friend of my dad's," Cal said.  "He came to stay in our house after
my parents got knocked out for a week with food poisoning."
       "Did you like him?"
       "Definitely.  He's a famous photographer, and he brought an extra
Leica with a seventy millimeter and a twenty-four millimeter lens.  Once I
had the hang of that, he let me use a Rollei so I could try Tri-X
Professional, you know, the kind of film you have to store in the
refrigerator.  Serious medium."
       "That sounds excellent," Wayne commented.
       "It was," Cal acknowledged.  "Totally.  He taught me that the most
important piece of photo equipment is a good tripod, to never shoot at
anything other than f-22, locking mirrors, cable releases, and when you
print the picture it's nothing but sharp.  If you overexpose Tri-X but
rating it at ASA 100 and underdeveloped it by ten percent.  There's more,
but that'll give you a hell of a start."
       "I was always interested," Wayne commented.  "When I was a kid, we
had a nutty neighbor who'd saved a bunch of Kodak instant film in his
freezer.  Made Polaroid look like something from before WW II.  And sharp?
One lens to final print.  You could count leaves on a birch from fifty
feet."
       "Frank, he was my friend," Cal explained, "had a four-by-five
Polaroid back on a view camera.  That was sharp, in black and white.  You
could see the tread lugs on a truck tire from two hundred feet away."

       Photography equaled chemicals and chemicals equaled hormones.  They
were in a fix all right.  Prevaricating, temporizing, stalling.  Why?
Because they could both hear Brenda chirping away in the bathroom and it
made them horny.  So much so they were scared to do anything but whisper to
each other, while Wayne kept at his younger friend like a priest with a
stuttering altar boy.

       "Did you pose for Frank?" Wayne asked.
       "He didn't use that," Cal explained.  "Thought it was too likely to
be manipulative or exploitive."
       "What did he do?" Wayne quizzed.
       "He was pretty up front.  The second night he was there, after my
parents were out of danger and everything was half-way back to normal, he
asked if I'd take a shower with him?"
       "Were you shocked?" Wayne asked.
       "Kind of.  I asked him why."
       "What did he say?" Wayne asked.

       Cal leaned back against the powerful horseman holding him, the
better to whisper intimately.

       "He said," the boy explained, "that two of his girlfriends had loved
to, you know, do it to him orally.  Since they were both nice, average
kinds of girls, he'd been intrigued at what it would be like to have the
experience.  Then he said I was pretty cute, and, this was really
embarrassing, that I was probably really full of sperm, because of all the
running and worrying, so he just thought it might work out to be an ideal
time to experiment if it wouldn't make me really uptight."

       "So he'd never done anything with a male, before?" Wayne queried.
       "No," the boy said.  "That kind of made me feel better, you know,
that it would be new for both of us at the same time.  I thought about it
for awhile, we were printing in the basement, and then I decided I wanted
him to do what he wanted, so I said if he wanted to try things we could
stay in the darkroom so we wouldn't run down the hot water which we needed
for the lab.  He thought that was a good idea, so I let him do it to me
right there.  It was a good thing, because it took a long time and we would
have been frozen in the shower."
       "Sounds like he was a good teacher," Wayne commented.
       "We had two accidents," Cal said.  "Big ones.  Very messy.  He joked
that it was a rare student who learned before he was taught.  Then he had
his, so it was a rare teacher who taught before he taught."
       "Were you naked?" Wayne quizzed.
       "Not even half," the boy responded.  "We'd been working in the lab
for three or four hours, you know, at the light box, plus, he'd had to
teach me how to roll the thirty-five millimeter film on the spools for the
developing tank.  So we'd been really close for a long time, and that was
mostly what it took.  A few suggestive remarks, and chaos in the darkroom."

       "So Frank didn't get what he was after?" Wayne summarized.
       "Not until the next morning, then it was about half the first time."
       "No complaints?"
       "None."

       During this interchange, Cal had turned in Wayne's arms and they had
resumed their full facial assaults on each other.  Their whimpers and moans
filled the room, big as it was, and neither young male heard...

       					. . .

       "That's the trailer," Blissy whispered.  "Why don't you use it to
set the mood for a prequel?"
       "I'd be delighted," Charles said.  Indeed, what would be a greater
demonstration of plain, every-day, ordinary-old panache than ripping out of
one story and into the next.  The big brassy ending.  Almost entirely
missing in fiction.  Sometimes there was a bit of show and tell during a
story, but most novels faded, as if, perhaps, in an attempt to satisfy.
Moves, too.  Songs, for that matter.  But why not try it the boy's way.
After all, how much time did one take flipping a beef patty?  It was a
sizzle off, sizzle on affair.  If he could make it work, pull it off, then
the second book could have a dreamy, casual ending and he could hold his
head up high as a real novelist.

       That would be then, this was now, and now included persistent
fingers at his buttons.  Awfully businesslike, seeing as how this was a
picnic and came under the heading of rest and relaxation.  Charles sighed.
Here he was again, sans conflict.  The very lifeblood of fiction, and he
couldn't raise so much as a hesitant glance or arched eyebrow.  He'd have
to talk to his little partner about it; maybe the boy would be so enthused
at the though of staying over the winter, he'd think of something nasty
that could lift the story above his usual cotton candy prose.
Unfortunately for Charles, he was much like Will Rogers in having met few
men he didn't like.  That left women.  Lots to not like, there, so best
they stayed left and let Hillary prove his points for him.  Having assigned
his enigma to safe hands, the camp leader turned his attention back to his
nine-year-old camper.

       He kissed the child, he honestly did, right on the pretty lips.  Not
a peck, either.  What a buttery little mouth you have, my dear, he couldn't
help thinking, all the better to inhale me with.  How many angels could
dance on the tip of a tongue?  To the nearest million.  And wasn't
equipping each of them with a cattle prod overdoing it?  So much voltage.
But the love angels were tough, they had a planet to populate, so the
electric sizzle not only sustained itself, but seemed to amplify in
shocking waves.  So this is what it was like to kiss a passionate nine year
old.  Good thing it was against the law there would be mass starvation the
moment the populace discovered what they'd been missing.

       Yes, it could easily have gone on for hours.  Maybe that's why there
was sex, to bring an end to this madness of almost cannibalism.  Had they
managed to consume each other, Charles was sure two very satisfied grins
would be left.  Hadn't something like that happened in Alice in Wonderland?
Cats?  Who knew?  It was all too literary for the moment.  But then,
anything would be, even the Tear Here commandment on a condom foil.

       Blissy and Timmy must have been practicing, diligently.  That was a
no-brainer.  How could anyone spend much time around that sweet face, it
could have been on the end of a broom handle and still sexy, without
practicing on that hot, young, eager mouth.  What else had they practiced?
Since they roomed together and were all-but inseparable it was likely their
repertoire was extensive.  Also, Timmy's almost wild fits of giggling when
the three of them were alone together, well, they were evidence of a
salacious nature to that particular relationship.  So many nights the boys
had lingered after any others who might have joined Charles for a story,
and, while never ungracious or unmannerly, heaven forbid, they were
nonetheless obviously frustrated at being sent to their own room rather
than being allowed to stay the night.  He wouldn't even kiss them, except
friendly-like.  Not ogreish behavior on the part of the lean, powerful
fifty-five year old, but hardly co-operative and amenable.  Now, things
were changing.  Timmy would be thrilled out of his mind, vicariously, if
need be, but then, who knew? if when they mighty could be toppled they
could be trained to do it on command.

       The nine-year-old camper was not a selfish child.  He wasn't
thinking to himself, wow, if I pull this off, I'll be like the total hero
of all time at C-Camp and go down in history as legendary.  He wasn't
thinking that.  Charles, for his part, was not thinking of what it might
mean if he yielded even just the one time, what being leader of a camp of a
hundred or more boys, and all.  Under other circumstances these would have
been consuming thoughts for both the males, but on the blanket by the tree,
with the Dodge sitting in place of Brad and John's Yamaha, there was only
the here and now.  Lips forever with cute little teeth like very sloppily
buried nuggets of ivory.  Beyond the pearly gate, an entire tropical reef;
warm, but perhaps a bit overpopulated with cloying, love-sick octopi.
Suckers.  The kid had to stop it, honestly, he did.  Had to.  At least
someday.

       Nor was some boggy reef of carnality the only distraction.  The
aggressive boy fingers had not slacked off in their assault, further, they
were pulling at the camp director's fingers, guiding him to the child's own
buttons.  Yeah, that's just what he needed.  A heavenly, sweet, eager
mouth, topped, if that was the word, with a naked nine-year-old chest and
tummy.  Well, need it or not, it was delicious; at once silky soft and
creamy, yet with a dazzling supple sinewyness that told of sprinting the
camp's war canoes.  Yes, unbuttoning the child was a slow business, each
new few inches of the childish breast forcing a halt to civilities so
Charles could examine and kiss the fresh treasure, but it had its
pleasures, too.

       Blissy was so extraordinary in his mouth and in his hands, the elder
male wondered almost aloud at the absurdity of church people who paid ten
percent to a god that brought them torment without end, while, in his
infinite stupidity condemning the one pleasure on earth that rivaled a
serpent's venom in intensity.  Perhaps it simply meant god was a damned old
woman.  On the other hand, the church was maintained largely to provide
vectors to precisely the kind of behavior Charles and his boy were involved
in, but the institution managed to do it in a way that undoubtedly amounted
to a hundred horrors for every good experience, from the point of view of
both partners.  Without love on a wide-open two way street kissing a kid
would be like kissing a kid.  (Might as well french a puppy.)

       As the ludicrous mormons had their latter-day saints, Charles was a
latter-day hero.  Only real.  Latter-day, because he'd only recently
started writing for the Net.  The real honest-to-gosh heroes had been those
who published early in the nineties.  History's oddest oddity.  The
despised pederast and child molester had saved the very planet; had
motivated the early adapters who'd bought the expensive, primitive machines
and taken telephonic data sharing from academic embryo to the very keystone
of the industrial arch.  Laugh, nod, cringe, or pitch a biblical fit, never
had so many owed so much to so few.  Porn artists and game writers.
Revolutionaries, not of the tavern.  Gruntled and happy rather than
disgruntled and seditious.  In a word, heroes.  Sam got the Medal of
Freedom for devastating thousands of sweet American towns, the prurient key
pounders would get nothing, not even paid.  The reality of a society
comprised of little jew boxes, the head box not knowing the ass box from a
hole in the ground.

       These thoughts occupied a full millionth of Charles's mind as his
fingers went to Blissy's all-important third button.  As he aligned the
pearl disk with its hemmed slot and made it disappear he wondered if virtue
might not, after all, be its own reward.

       Oh, a reward he'd been expecting.  But this?  What the hell was
this?  What was going on here?  Who knew?  Jesus, Blissy,
what... what... what... ?

       "Sorry," the child said.  "Timmy was going to tell you.  So was I.
But, you know, we're just kids.  Stuff falls through the cracks because we
get embarrassed or confused.  I mean, half of us still look under our beds,
right?"

       She was right, of course.

       Kids!

       She.

       Boy to girl at, literally, he shrunk within himself at the raw
savagery of the pun, the touch of a button.

       Always, to his toes, 24/7, the writer, his first thought on
beholding the beautiful blossom of the Blissy's juvenile left breast was
how the hell was he going to sell this to his readers.  Snuggling up on six
hundred pages, and, with the approach lights actually in sight, a sex
change?  What was going to be next?  Amnesia?  Cultism?  Clairvoyance?  How
could it be?  The minx with the modest shirts and shorts, hiding out.
That's what she'd been doing, though, on a second's consideration, it was
pretty obvious Timmy knew the little secrets.

       God, but they were pretty.  "Is it okay?" she whispered as he stared
at her, the moreso now that the fourth button had revealed both her
rosettes peaking pink and seemingly very happy from their little half
muffins of pubescent swelling.  Perfection, with cherries on top.  Where
were his manners?

       "Next, you're going to tell me you're Jewish."  It was all he could
think of to say, and was funny because he'd railed up about women --
bessies - a time or two in `her' presence.  Blissy took it as he meant it,
and giggled in delight.

       "You're just a big old wolf child," she scolded, "you'd love me if I
was a syphilitic leper with warts, carbuncles, whatever they are, big feet
and body odor.  Right?"

       "Well," Charles replied, still awestruck by her pretty female chest,
"they do say a mind is a terrible thing to waste."
       Lord love a duck, she was a girl.  What was a fellow to do?  Kiss
her and tell her everything was going to be alright?  Any port in a storm.
The journey begins with a single step.  Nearer my god, to thee.  Bromides,
adages, homilies and clichés ricocheted around inside his head

       The girls eyes brightened with mischief.  (Hadn't there been enough
of that?)  "It could be worse, you know," she intoned, letting a bit of
drama creep into her voice.  "Timmy and I could be off to his olde sod for
a season of trekking the high meadows.

       She had a point.  The situation could be worse.  But that still left
Dear Reader.  How to handle him.  Leave him to his own devices, and hope
for the best?  With a sigh he realized he'd not read Silas Marner in years.
Hadn't earned the right to use the Eliot quote, but, it was the only one
which fit the circumstances.  In a situation like this, talent would do
what it could; genius, what it must.

       Three more buttons for the delicious girlish tummy.  Her turn.  Was
this some kind of race?  Whoa there, feather touch, guys my age can have
accidents, too.  He didn't say this for the simple reason he was too busy
doing what he must to say anything.  The kissing turned into a slow,
languorous tongue licking, tender and intimate; more sensuous than ripping.
There was something god-awful permanent in the taste of the young female.
Was she some kind of pay-back snapping turtle, or, heaven forbid, a species
of squid that ate only the tongue?  Whatever feral instincts drove the
little virago, they seemed to know their minds and to be content with what
they had.  She wasn't kittenish enough to actually purr, but it was a close
thing.

       At some point in time he had her naked to her waist, and she him.
Charles lay on his back, Blissy's back to his chest as he ran his hands
over a thousand square miles of infinitely soft baby skin, only formed to
tender chick.  If he'd had an adversarial bone in his day-to-day body,
Charles would have taken his child love to task for setting up vis a vee
the opening chapter in her post industrial sf-fantasy; specifically, Wayne
and Brenda.  Engagement rings.  Wedding bells.  Deliberate.  If Brenda's
name had been Alice, it would have been with alice of forethought.  Well,
such a cutie had to be guilty of something, and if she'd wriggled aboard
through adroit story telling, what ploy was a girl her age meant to use?
Of course, she'd also faked out the entire male institution of which we was
founder, director and kahuna of kahunas.  Add to that thousands of readers
over the years and a tally began to mount.  If he thought for a moment he
could spare he'd dispatch her to Edward Bangor and let him deal with her
utterly precious tail.  He wrote spanking stories and didn't wimp out with
any phony pen names -- such as Feather Touch.

       And what touch was this?  Paul Bunyan?  It seemed to have something
to do with logging; heavy timber.  To Blissy it was babe and oxy; to
Charles, blue.  Timber!!-?  There had damn well better be some outcry in
the immediate offing or this blue thing was going to get nuts.

       Her hair smelled of moronic strawberry shampoo.  All she needed was
Kool-Aid on her breath and her childish nature would rise up and smite him
dead on the spot.  Why did she have to smell of delicate, red, tasty fruit?
Oh, lord, Blissy, you need intriguing scent like a moose needs a hatrack.
And what if her scent were of lemons?  If a girl gives you lemons, does
that leave you getting lemonlaid?  Charles realized he was getting close to
a state of mental fibrillation.  It was one thing to tell and listen to
stories of horn dogs making it with pixies, quite another to have a solid,
half-naked, all-eager nine year old wriggling happily as one molested her
with ten crazed fingers.  Smokin'.

       What an angel.  What a spirit.  What a child.  What if she turned
over?  What if she didn't?  Would it be strawberry feels, forever?  The
brazen stupidness of the pun brought Charles half-way back to
consciousness, for all the good it did.  Blissy was still no inches away,
her young breasts still half marshmallow, half crouching tiger - at once
hot and scalding.  And for relief, there was the not quite flat tummy.
Yeah, that did a lot of good.  Face it, she was a trap from her gamin,
boyish face to all ten of dem little piggies.  Question was, who was going
to blow whose house down?

       Turn over she did.  Wasn't there a law against branding human
beings?  On the chest?  Twice?  Well, she was a lawless bit of a vixen,
what with her big secrets and all, so, law or moot, she was going to burn
into him.  Not just lawless, willful.  Oh, she tried to make it better with
kisses, but even with a will, no way.  It didn't help a bit.  The more she
kissed the hotter her kitten breasts with their pretty hard nipples became.
What was that all about?  Cooking?  Fine camper she'd make, if she burned
the host.  Lawless.  Urgent.  Untrammeled.  From time to time Charles like
to pull out all the stops; see what the keyboard yielded at the virtuoso
touch.  The absurdity of a moose needing a hatrack, was, in the camp
director's mind, akin to Blissy needing a keyboard.  The young girl didn't
need anything, and she was the first to know it.

       No.  No.  But, yes.  Her hands left his shoulders, where they'd been
roosting so she could do push ups, the better to stare into his eyes
between kisses, and were now, as she lay full-length against him, moving
down.  Hadn't the child done enough damage?  Two breasts.  All but
unendurable, and she had ten fingers in reserve.  Apparently her concept of
needing nothing specifically included her boyish cargo shorts.  If there
was more she didn't need, Charles was in no condition to think about it.
Some things, besides manned space travel, were better left to the future.

       "Are you thinking about the future?" Blissy asked, practically
freaking the writer out of his jock.
       "Me, too," she chirped happily, cueing off his startled look.  If
she'd said it ordinary like, me, too, it might have been survivable.  Not
Blissy.  With "me" her little hands unfastened her safari shorts while with
"too" she went to work on his slacks, panting now, and rhyming it with
"you."  You, too; you, too.

       Charles lay on his back.  Stone.  Blissy stood, after an eternal
lingering good-bye, between his feet, now in her pink baby-doll panties
like the frost of heaven.  Timmy had made her neither a show off, she
didn't bump and grind, nor a toed-in recluse.  She simply stood there for
the sake of standing there and letting him get used to her being a girl.
Good, that was over.  Time to be a young woman.  Charles, ever the writer,
as in The Writer, watched the transformation as emblematic of the vagaries
of the human condition.  Yin and Yang the Chinese called it.  Bal and oney,
but still, this metamorphosis taking place in his immediate presence;
wasn't it analogous, at least vaguely to other variances?  For example, the
brilliant ad copy in some commercials, and a hairball in jammies: client?
IBM.  Was Blissy free of the ugliness so tolerated under the guise of
political correctness?

       Charles was amused with himself.  Lava moments after congealing on
the one hand, yet so entirely the artist and human he was watching a pretty
nine year old girl kneel between his legs for what was obviously going to
be a hundred percent Santa Ana / Alamo engagement and he was wondering if
she had an ugly side.  How freely could anyone come through the leftist
morass?  What was humanly possible?  For this was the realm of the
novelist, absolute, it took time to write, but was fabulously worth the
effort.  Charles's readers would have to wait.  Net copy came off at breezy
ten thousand words a day, but Blissy chopped that all to hell.  She froze
time, she froze the world.  The Mexicans had toyed with Davy Crockett and
tortured him.  Killed him.  Shut him up.  Well, he had nothing to say,
either.  Just try to remember.

       Had they used torpedoes in San Antonio?  He was dealing with one.
It launched spontaneously but only struck him a glancing blow, scooting
along his chest, spending its momentum and finally coming to rest, head
against his chin.  Oops, squid.  It had tentacles.  Not only had them, but
was not bashful about using them.  Out of the frying pan, into the fire;
branded and now hog-tied.  Bitten.  Whispered.

       "Are you scared?  Because I'm ba-ack!"
       "I'm not exactly keeping notes," Charles whispered back.
       "Mind gone completely blank?" Blissy teased.
       "Just plain-old gone.  Nothing left to waste adjectives on."
       "That's trouble," she said, "because I'm not the kind of girl to
waste anything on a boy who completes sentences by sticking a preposition
in."
       "It was an emergency," Charles whispered.
       "That's why I called you a boy," Blissy responded.  "I mean you go
getting all tongue-tied, what was I meant to think?"  Here the child threw
a pout.  "Honestly," she whispered in mock frustration, "I think Timmy was
more grown-up about it when he found out."

       Right.  Now she was going to lie full length against him, her perky
breasts still fiery, and tell him about Timmy.  Well, he chided himself,
he'd wanted to end his story an unquestioned masterpiece.  Maybe Blissy
could help.

       Not by more kissing.  Why even bother?  Yeah, but that left what,
dodo?  Timmy.

       "I was just kidding when I said he was cool when he found out,"
Blissy whispered between bites at the base of the camp director's neck.
       "He survived," Charles commented.
       "Yes," she whispered, "but then again he's very young; heart of a
lion."
       "I'll bet there was more than heart to the cub," Charles replied.
       "Oh," Blissy cooed, "you mean like brains and charm and wit?  What
did I know about them?  I was only eight years old at the time."
       "So you substituted?"
       "I guess so," the girl said.  "Explored alternatives.  Experimented.
He liked the movie where the girl pretends she's a boy so she can stay with
her brother.  In the art world they call it a provenance; an established
and authoritarian pedigree.  So he didn't run screaming down the hall of
the residence or jump out a window.  I mean he'd been..."

       "I know," Charles cut in.  "Just faked out.  You weren't exactly
girl-handling a wispy virgin."
       "Close, though," the girl responded.
       "Well, duh'uh," Charles interjected.  "He was in love with you.  Was
and is.  Pretty hard to be all crow and flutter when you're struck dumb."
       "I was a virgin," she whispered.
       "Wispy?" Charles teased his little camper.
       "No," she said, "predatory.  I had no practical idea on earth what
it was, all I knew was that if it had been hypos full of strychnine I
wouldn't have cared as long as it was his needle, seeing yours was in the
autoclave or some damned fool thing like that."

       "I'd traded it for a pencil," Charles explained.  "I was writing for
the Web at the time.  It was amateurish of me, you know, write, edit,
submit, publish, in the end, it put quite a hole in my day."
       "And?" she prompted.
       "And now I'm a novelist; more accurately, back to being the novelist
I once was before push button publishing went to my head.  Slower pace.  As
little as ten hours a day."
       "You're just making excuses, Charles," she replied.
       "Ditz," he shot back, "how much time did Timmy spend with you, once
he knew you were a girl?"
       "From ten p.m. to nine a.m." the girl said.
       "And he'd a highly experienced immature lover.  What do you think
the impact would have been with an older guy who hadn't been with anyone
for a long time?  Answer that, then explain how one who is besotted might
fare in his reach to be number one content creator in the world."

       "Always with the explanations," Blissy sighed, digging her chin into
his meaty shoulder.
       "They're true," he sighed.  "That's what it's like being an artist,
child.  An insatiable lust, yet delicate as the fronds of a freshly
unfurled fern."
       "Sounds narcissistic," Blissy replied.
       "I don't know," Charles mused.  "Look at Cassius Clay carrying on
so, and he was just a boxer.  Mussolini, just a dictator.  They thought the
world of themselves, just like Mickey Rooney.  Surely, on that scale,
writing for the ages, even though one has no belief in their existence, is
worthy of a little self adoration."

       "Next, you'll be telling me you're the only one capable of
understanding how good you really are, therefore, your only legitimate
fan."
       "And critic," Charles added.  "It's a devilish business, as the
English would say.  Unless the critics are just going to sputter, you know,
ad lib, they have to write a script.  Freedom of speech, but what good does
it do when you sit at your keyboard and end up worshiping rather than
nitpicking?"
       "You really are that good?" Blissy asked.
       "There's no word for it," Charles acknowledged.  "Like the Jews with
their Yahweh.  But not the name of some kookamuggin made-up god, rather, a
self-evident thing, no burning bushes needed, no whispers, visions, legends
or taboos.  Just there, not only for the literate, but so rendered as to
greatly stimulate literacy, itself."
       "I asked for an excuse, and I get a god.  Guess I came to the right
place."
       "Always room for a lass that knows a provenance from a pedigree."
       "Good boy," the silly child chortled, arching slightly to rub her
pretty tummy against the hard belly of the adult.  "Exactly what I want to
talk about.  Pedigree."

       Then she added, "I'm on message," while rocking her belly against
his yet more graphically.
       "Do you get it?" she quizzed.
       "No," the writer gasped.
       "Pedigree," she hinted, "what's the basic element?  Without it,
there can be none."
       "I guess you'd need an engraver.  A number of gardeners.  It's why I
run a camp, to stay away from the rigmarole."

       Blissy stalled.  She used her teeth to climb his chin, then bumped
her chin over his teeth and onto his nose.  Hitching herself forward, she
stared into Charles's eyes.

       "Are you being dense on purpose?" she hissed.
       "I'm not even alive on purpose, at this point," he rattled in
response.
       "Suffers bashfulness," the nine year old whispered, doctor like, to
the sky.  "Delusional, but quiet and competent about it; momentary attempts
at levity.  Possibly of a nervous derivative.  Tries to diffuse excesses
with explanations rather than excuses.  Laudable, even plausible, yet, all
the while, extremely dense.  Could be genetic, or environmental.  Patient
needs regimen of remedial linguistic review so when a happy girl rubs her
tummy against him and talks about pedigree he doesn't go all obtuse."

       She had him there.  He had been dense.  She'd only dropped a
thousand pound hint with her prequel to her Stephen King knock off and the
almost immediate introduction of Brenda, with its implication of what
Brenda wanted from Cal or Wayne.  She hadn't reached that part yet.  And
the thing about the essential ingredient?  Well, that had been-broad brush.

       "Are we on the same page, at last?" she whispered, her dramatics
stifled for the moment.
       "A little queen?" he hardly dared whisper.
       "Absolutely tiny," she whispered, adding, "no more than five pounds,
because I'm a bit of a tyke, myself."
       "She'll have to wait her turn on the throne.  No upstarts or
usurpers."

       Blissy sighed happily.  They were on the same page.  Good.  Writers
could be difficult, she understood instinctively, having never met one
before.  And a writer-king god?  She felt sorry for the Greeks and Romans,
all they could do was write about magical superhumans.  Myth, legend,
tradition and tale.  Hers actually did the writing, or at least he said he
did.

       Charles interrupted her musing.  "Where does Timmy fit in?" he asked
his princess.
       "Father of second child, but not until I'm eighteen.  You and I are
going to be very careful to get it right the first time.  I want to rock
until we get married, and when I'm not rocking, I want to be teaching our
princess, and Timmy's baby is going to be our wedding gift."

       "And how does a five pound prince fit in, I mean, you know?"
       "The prince is the younger brother, by nine or ten years.
Vice-regent.  I want your reign to demoronize women, and what greater
motivation could you have than a moron-free household of females, with two
of them, one taking over for you, when, as they say, the time comes, and my
daughter, for me when I turn sixty.  Unless, of course, she's not right for
the job, but that's ninety percent your responsibility."

       Since it was going to be ninety-nine percent her responsibility to
produce said queen, in the first place, the trade-off seemed logical to
Charles.  After all, the youngster would have a fine mom to look after
her.(when she wasn't rocking).  It was a plan.

       "You look pensive," Blissy whispered, taking her chin off Charles's
nose.  "I think I need to distract you, before you think of something
diabolical."  With a lingering kiss she slowly pushed herself free of her
lord and master and knelt between his ankles.  Businesslike, she finished
what she'd started some little while before.  The thing she'd been doing
with his khaki slacks.  The belt.  The zipper.  The...  There was no more
the, because they were gone.  And that wasn't all.

       Obviously proud of her decisive victory, Blissy stood and skinned
down her panties.  No lie.  She was a girl.  As before, she let him look,
but this time his hugeness filled her sweet young eyeballs and the girl
child froze in position for so long Charles began to feel he might be
gawking.  Blissy wondered if he would ever grow up.  How could someone old
enough to be her grandfather just look like a bigger, more powerful version
of Timmy?  Cripes, what genes.  And look where they came from, would you?
She bumped to her knees, coming in close to stare.  And she'd had her heart
set on a little princess.  The whole queen thing.  Now what?  Imagine what
his boy-child would look like?  Yeah, that was a great idea.  Why hadn't
she thought of it?  Or was she just being selfish?  Might something happen
between such a child and his very young mother?  And where would leave this
mag stallion she was almost touching?  Half the reason she wanted a girl
was so he could teach her when the time came.  Timmy, too, of course.  Hmm.
It almost seemed trivial to be thinking along such lines, what with the
future of the nation at stake, but, as Charles had pointed out a time or
two, the nation was pretty much beyond leading by anyone of character and
fidelity, so it was a back-burner concept any way one looked at it.

       Blissy had marked off the inside band of her panties with a ruler.
Timmy's suggestion.  The cute twelve year old Irish boy had five and three
quarters inches when he was, in his words, hard as Chinese arithmetic.  She
fiddled with the wisp of pink fabric, holding it about half an inch from
him as she satisfied her curiosity, spying for her young boyfriend, sure,
but relationships were a two-way street and she had to do her part to keep
things exciting.  Seven and three quarters.  Big, like in wow, but not
freaky; some big whore stuffer.  She blushed at all the ribald thinking
that was going on in her head.  Turned pink.

       Charles groaned aloud as the girl flushed.  Pretty in pink didn't
begin to describe the child as she messed around down there, up to
something.  Well, so was he.  Took one to know one.  Then she was done and
had dropped her little panties.  Well, half-done, anyway, what was this, a
skit?  Oh, my, god, she was playing dolls.  Whispering, not in his ear, not
this time.

       "Every one has to wake up now, sleepyheads," the girl cooed, and she
touched him.  Charles was so hard he couldn't tell if he was circumcised,
or no, and Blissy's pretty little girl hands made him swell so he felt like
a horse.  "Mommy's here," the sweet young thing whispered, coaxing.  "It's
that time of day.  Rise and shine."

       He'd wanted to end his novel at dead run but this was ridiculous.
They were meant to be experimenting, man and child, now it seemed she was
planning on moving in.  One thing was for sure, she had the key.  Also, two
hands, ten fingers, two lips, and, as if her sweet young nipples hadn't
been hot enough, a tongue.  In all, enough keys to open Fort Knox.  As much
as anything could, it made a certain sense.  A queen would need a lot of
keys.  Using all of them at once was unfair, but it was love -- better than
war -- so he let her proceed.

       "Whose first," Blissy whispered.  "I'm not going to make much of a
mother, I have other responsibilities, so I want all you eager-beaver,
hyper-active, short-attention-span guys to leave before you grow up and
make me cross."  She seemed serious about this.  Not dominate so much as
firmly in control.  Rather than continue her coaxing and cajoling, she
accomplished her goal with a steady, rhythmic stroking, using her mouth
silently but liberally.

       What was the nonsense about a man being putty in a woman's hands.
More like iron.  Timmy first, now this.  Good.  Something to build on.
Putty.  How silly.

       What a dream.  Looking down over his flat belly with a nine-year-old
girl, totally naked, beautifully taught, obviously involved, stroking
happily and intently.  Bracing with her left arm so she could lean well
forward and hold him against her breasts as she masturbated him with long
working strokes.  Alternately, sitting upright so she could fondle him as
she continued with her urgent business.  This went on for whole lifetimes.
Then she got childish and ended it.  Lunging forward she bit him where it
hurt, then looked him in the eye, her hand still masturbating him, now
against her slightly soft tummy.  "Let the naughty ones come out," she
instructed, "then you can spray the good ones inside me."

       Having laid down the law, Blissy again rose to her knees, wet her
right hand on his seminal fluid which was flowing freely and was plentiful
seeing as how she'd laid of with her tongue for a few moments.  That was
it.  That was it.  Enough... already.  And it was, of the childish stuff.
Her expression changed, her mouth sagging with lust and her eyes growing
both soft and wanton.

       "Cum, babe," she whispered.
       "Oh, child," Charles groaned as he obeyed totally and absolutely.

       She sphinctered her left hand at his base, sliding her soaked right
hand down to meet it, holding him tight and rigid against her left
little-girl breast.  When it was lost from sight, she move him to cover her
right nipple, then her neck and shoulders.  Charles whipped his arms back
under his neck and arched to the young girl, hardly seeing her through a
fiery haze that made her look like an angel.

       God, he was cumming all over her.  Like it was the first time in the
world for anything of the like to happen.  Worth the wait, but he was glad
it was unlikely he'd have to repeat the experience; the wait, that is.  For
the moment, they both had to wait for it to be over.  "I'm behaving like a
damn kid," Charles had ample time to muse, as it kept happening and
happening. all over his princess.  How to double your lifespan the quick
and easy way.  The infinite minute.  And that was just the beginning.

       Blissy fell on him, slick as a seal, wet as a seal, and slithered
forward.  "You're a little impassive in the bad-boy department," she
commented, but there was no reproach in her pretty young voice.  Maybe she
really was impressed.

       "They got what they deserved for being so pushy," the girl
continued.  "But that's not their fault.  I probably set them off.  No
matter, they're out of harm's way.

       She seemed content with her analysis and cuddled very sloppily
against him, reverting to the kissing she seemed to like so well.  In this
case, youth was not wasted on the young, and her rampant energy quickly
focused itself on Charles's right ear.  "Now is the good-boy time," she
whispered.  "Before you make a lot more impetuous rascals.  The tricks is
to give me the very last one, not one of the first of the new ones.
Understand?"

       He tried, but the only conclusion he came to was beyond
comprehension.  He though of Sally, the little cruise director from a camp
night-story.  Little administrator.  Theorist, too.  Quite the scientific
package, was little Blissy.  Nonsensical, even for her tender age, but wow,
in what a delicious way.  Regrettably, also adamant.  Her theory on seminal
transmigration might have been juvenile, but she was determined to proceed
with the project, her way.  Charles pointed out in a half-dead whisper that
experiments at her age were likely to be premature.  She blithely replied
that it wasn't real smart for a girl to take risks, since the girl would
have to live with the results.  Why take chances?  Unfortunately for
Charles, minimizing risk did not mean abstinence, it meant giving the last
of himself, now.  Indeed, it may have been a practice run, so to speak,
being as she was, after all, nine years old.  What did that matter?
Theories and abstractions were moot.  The window of opportunity, according
to the little miss, was more a shutter than window.  Open for the moment of
a glance.  Dread.  Open now.  This is not a drill.

       The spermy critter's vagaries focused in an instant.  With a
hold-everything thoroughly wifely french kiss she broke off her top action
and faster than a bartender could shake a martini rolled herself underneath
him. And she wasn't being coy.  None of that.  Not the way she spread
Flattering.  More than.  Spread, wet and opened.  Maybe the dude in Iran
had an answer, marrying his female subjects at nine.  Positively more
Muslims.  Perfect matches were made in heaven, so certain churches said.  A
blanket on the grass; hell, that wouldn't even amount to a chapel or
sanctuary.  A little brown church in the wild-wood.  Truth to tell, the
match was not spiritual, or, more elegantly, the spiritual side was
assumed, but physical.  For a fifty-five year old man, however sleek,
boyish and cute, to crow Look ma, no hands, would have been unseemly, so
Charles kept the inanity to himself, true as it was.  No hands meant
neither of his, neither of hers.  Her openness needed to be half raped, so
he pinned her hands high over her head, found her, and ripped his hot,
swollen penis into her, gasping at her screams and flailing legs, heedless
of her frantic struggles to free her hands so she could claw him to the
spine.

       There it is folks.  As advertised, flat out to the end, and I'm not
talking about Blissy's hooters.  Your choice from here is simplicity,
itself.  Sit on your media butt, your academic butt, your corporate butt,
your political butt, your theological butt, your judicial butt, your
tradeunion butt, your environmental butt, your fat butt, your black butt,
your kiddie butt, your e-butt, or your rank-and-file butt, and die, no ifs,
no ands, all butts.  You're the subjects, I'm the king.  Live with it.


       Denouement.  It's kind of a here-you-are-at-the-platform,
watch-you-step, literary tradition.  A transition between the heady climax
of a history and what's beyond your exterior door.  A shock absorber, only
written down, though, if done absolutely superbly, blush, perhaps with just
a Midas touch.

       Few will want more, but we strive to please all.  Those who have had
enough may exit at this point.  To each of you opting to quit, the cabin
crew will issue two life vests.  A strip of foam has been laid down on the
left side of the runway.  If you wear one life vest in the conventional
manner, and inflate the other around your head, your chances of escaping
serious injury should be quite good.  For you continuing passengers, we'll
be taxiing to a part of the field where the sun doesn't shine, and off
again after this last commercial message and a quick change of title.

       					. . .

       Creative Camp boasted a rich layering of prizes, scholarships,
grants and developmental aids, in general.  Principal amongst these was the
Billings Award, an after taxes lump sum of a quarter million dollars.  For
this reason, excitement was especially high on a particular night as boy
after boy delivered himself of his entry material.  There was great
enthusiasm for the novel roller coaster.  "Simple as shitting your pants,"
a boy a row or two behind Charles whispered to his seat mate.  Invention
boiled down to making things simple, hundreds of components wired together
so one man could tap out SOS to another, tens of thousands of man-years to
render a word processor that could handle a five hundred page document as
if it were a grocery list for a family of four.  The SOS was needed, the
novel entertained, so both became mothers of invention.  Nor was the
formulae perfect.  Big, kludgey wrenches were invented because they
demonstrated well on television, pretty close to useless; super sanding
blocks, strip paint or rust with hardly a touch, for a few seconds before
they wore out.  Tried to avoid that kind of thing at camp.  It may have
been the sex life.  Take highly focused and imaginative kids out of their
little, tiny conventional boxes, and, lo and behold, you ended up with a
kid like young Brad from Iowa who'd stunned the group with his ingenious
little problem solver, christened, in the spirit of C-Camp's minimalist
elegance, The Cumera.

       Blissy was back to being a boy.  She was awfully good at it, except,
of course, for a fatal flaw that only the director and Timmy knew of.  Pop
kid in all other respects, though.  Nice round of applause as he approached
the dais for his Billings presentation and promptly set about demonstrating
his feminine side.  His true sex had disgraced itself time and again,
bessies included Amelia Earhart and Princess Dead, but she wasn't going to
play in that sandbox.

       Blissy prefaced his dissertation with a review of the most stressful
occupation next to fire fighting and flying in combat.  That happened to be
shopping, especially grocery shopping, particularly for males.  Since the
stress and misery of this necessary occupation was all but universal, the
customer base for his business was nothing less than massive

       The artist's recipe had endured for years at C-Camp.  It was known
as odds food because there was an old British saying which went odds fish.
No one knew what it meant, if anything, but potato fried rice wasn't
exactly on the A list at the Ling Duck, therefore it was odd enough for the
name.  Tasted good enough for any artist, and was stove-bolt simple to
prepare, either as an original dish in under an hour, or heated up in ten
minutes.  The only secret was cubing the potatoes -- smallish -- and adding
them at the right time, so they'd add a toothsome crunchiness to the bland
texture of the rice and vegetables which made up the main ingredients.

       Quickly he reviewed the intellectual pedigree of the concept.  A,
they ate it happily at camp, six or eight meals out of ten, and often
enough for breakfast on especially busy days.  B, the massive nature of the
customer group.  Damn near everybody, making it easier to calculate how
many would not be interested than how many would see the program as the
answer to a prayer.

       Blissy's report was not particularly organized, style was not
counted for much of anything by campers and counselors, alike, and he read
through it as if delivering a lecture on the various uses of toenail
clippings.  [The one use of a toenail clipping is saving your teeth.
Parings from the big toe make perfect auguring instruments with which to
root around at the base of the human tusk.  Any time you feel a congested
sensation in your gums, dig until it bleeds freely.  Now if I could just
figure out some use for phlegm and puss.]


       "GROCERIES AU GO-GO

       Groceries au Go-Go.

       Slogan: "A Little Like Living in Heaven."

       Possible ad slant.  Does supermarket shopping leave you a
market-basket case?

       Groceries au G-G is a variant on Webvan.  It delivers basic food
baskets valued at $250.00, plus optional baskets, keyed on a basic
potato/fried-rice recipe, with an alternative based on various pastas..

       Basic Basket:

       Fifty pounds rice packed in three-pound plastic bags, twenty pounds
of onions, twenty pounds of potatoes, six quarts of cooking oil, two cases
of mixed vegetables, two cases jalapeno peppers, salt, pepper, soy sauce
and basic spices.

       Optional baskets.

       Dairy Basket: Powdered milk in plastic bags, four percent, two
percent, or skimmed, coffee creamer.
       Bread Basket.  Mix of baked goods, breads and pastries.
       Vegetable Basket: Our selection of top quality general produce.
Choice of spicy or conventional.  My be substituted for the canned
vegetable products in Basic Basket

       Meat Basket.  Our selection of meat and poultry products..
       Fish Basket.  Our selection of fish and seafood products (includes
appropriate sauces).
       Picnic Basket: Hamburger, hot dogs, buns, chips, condiments.
       Fruit basket: Our selection of common fresh fruits.

       Baking Basket: Ingredients (and recipes) for breads and pastries.
       Snack Basket.  Chips, dips
       Beverage basket.  Coffee, tea, hot chocolate.
       Juice Basket.  Mix of fruit juices, vegetable juices.
       .
       Condiment basket.  Sugar, premium herbs and spices, cheeses,
pickles, olives etc.  Choice of spicy or conventional.
       Soup Basket.  Canned and dried products.

       Pet Food Basket.  Dog, cat, and a limited choice of others.  Choice
of kibble, canned, or half-and-half, with a selection of treats included..
       Household Supplies Basket.  Detergent, toilet paper, shampoo.
       Medicine Basket.  Alcohol, swabs, bandage strips, cough and cold
remedies.
       Utensils Basket.  Heavy gauge aluminum frying pan and rice kettle.
If codes and safety considerations permit, the company should also offer
high-output, table-top gas stoves.  These greatly increase kitchen output,
and, in short, allow the system to work at its most efficient for the
consumer.  It also provides a focal point for advertising.  Free double
burner with first year contract, that kind of thing.  Installation issues
should be addressed by the company, either through doing it or subbing it
to reputable contractors..  System may be used with ordinary appliance
stoves.

       Baby Food Basket
       Kid's Basket.  Macaroni and cheese type products, Kool-Aid, candy.
       Soda Basket; Cases of bottled drinks, priced by the case
       Party Basket: Mixers, lemons and limes, for popular adult drinks.

       Specialty Basket.  Based on quality potato and pasta salads that can
be eaten from the container.  Soups.  Easy access meals for use by the aged
or disabled.  May be ordered without Basic Basket, minimum of five baskets
per delivery ($250.00), and also may be ordered with "refrigerated" or
"non-refrigerated" food products.

       Each optional basket costs fifty dollars.  Minimum contract, six
orders per year.

       Advantages to concept.  Typical selection available to customers
will be in the order of 250 products, making for extreme efficiency in
purchasing and warehousing.  Easy business model to scale.  Inexpensive to
try in test markets, yet with unlimited growth potential both here and
abroad.

       Groceries au Go-Go solves a massive problem.  Grocery shopping.
With G au G-G, the average householder's shopping time will be reduced by
eighty or ninety percent.  Less shopping means less impulse buying, a
factor in both physical and economic health.

       Background.  If it could be profitable to deliver customer-specific
orders, A&P would have figured out how to do it years ago (as would General
Motors).  The only way the model can succeed is to offer a fair variety,
and some flexibility, while sticking to a core basic of some few hundred
items and strict minimum orders requirements.  (You have to buy a whole
Chevrolet.).

       Proof of concept.  If a friend invites your family to spend a week
in his or her house, it is very likely you will be happy with a
well-stocked kitchen.  This is the principal behind Groceries au Go-Go.
Lots of good food delivered at routine intervals, like bottled water.  The
basic recipe supported, potato fried rice, is a delicious base for anything
the chef wants to try, and a quick and simple meal if time or budgetary
restraints are in place.

       Method of doing business.  All products are premium brand names such
as Hellman's/Best Foods, Heinz and Del Monte.  Deliveries are made in
plastic tubs on exchange basis, again, like bottled water.  Customer can
initiate delivery or avail themselves of automated delivery.  Internet or
telephone may be used to place or modify orders.  Here there is a great
advantage to the limited inventory concept.  Where the company is flexible,
it can be very flexible, and may be able to accept orders and modifications
as little as six hours, or even less, before delivery.

       Consumer prices will probably be slightly higher than those in the
supermarket, at least at the outset.  Grocery margins are thin and any
significant general discounting would likely depend on extreme volume.
With a limited product line, it is important to offer many customer
oriented refinements.  Holiday meals would be an example, possibly
pre-cooked (outsourced!).  The Company would have staff devoted to
searching out values and products (or coupons) that might be of interest to
its customers.  These would he highlighted in a magalogue
(magazine/catalogue) distributed with each order.  In addition, The Company
would maintain a premium Web site and otherwise try to respond to
profitable customer input.  An example of the Web site's use might be to
establish neighborhood drop points, where a designated consignee's address
might serve a number of local families.  A discount could be offered,
because the savings to the company would be substantial.

       A valet service might be offered, but it would likely be better to
link to an established firm dealing in custom pickup and delivery.  It
would be interesting to explore models by which unused packaged food
products could by relayed by the company from its customers to reputable
food kitchens and share programs.

       In summary, the customer lives in a carefully orchestrated flow of
groceries controlled by a short phone call or a few clicks of the mouse.
It saves lots of time, and,, if shopping expenses are counted, lots of
money, too.  It's healthy.  It's wealthy.  It's wise.  It's a little like
living in heaven."

       Blissy smiled at his audience.  "C-Camp's a lot like living in
heaven," he added, with a wink at Charles, which didn't surprise anyone
because the whole institution knew they were friends.

       					. . .

       It is not relevant to this history who won the Billings award.
Suffice it to say the runner up had cooked up a scheme to add considerable
defensive capability to the Spad.  It amounted to a JATO bottle mounted in
the aft fuselage, with a stove-pipe size nozzle just under the tail of the
plain.  When fired, the solid rocket added fifty knots to the plane's
speed, while discharging a hail of shrapnel into the face of the pursuer.

       It had been quite a day.  Charles and Blissy whispered in bed, their
first night of pillow talk.  The writer worried about his readers, how
would they react to his not only falling off his pedestal, but with a girl.
Blissy was helpful in reminding him that his readers faced such a daunting
list of extreme obstacles any androgynous characters, and especially
children, in a work of fiction, was not likely to be a problem.  "In fact,"
the bright young thing summarized, "with the proof of concept of everything
Creative Camp stands for provided by JDS Uniphase, on top of Iridium,
Webvan, et al, it is likely your readers will be in the mood for a little
hanky panky."

       The writer thought back over the high level of poltroonery that
governed national affairs, from the founding father, through the slobbering
pursuit of Microsoft, and realized his chick was right.  Lay on the sex
with a trowel, American had produced some interesting moments in history
and maybe the bums did deserve an even break, so far as he was able to
provide one.  It was going to be hard to boot up, tomorrow, and not see
"Creative Camp" in its customary place at the top of his file menu, as it
had been for months.  He took solace from the fact the manuscript said most
of what he had to say.  Genius must.  In doing so he knew he'd far exceeded
all artists in both the quality and size of his creation.  It was a
monumental work, underpinned with granite, yet soaring.  He was totally
proud of and satisfied with it, but, yes, it would be hard to face that
empty yawning screen after so many thousands of hours.  On the other hand,
he still had his doll, and her story, "Blissy's Song," and "XP," so who
knew?

       After the narrative, the climax, and the denouement, there was only
one thing left.

       The End

Posted by Thoms@btl.net

233,247/1.309

xxx