A Man Who Wins The Dog Lottery Is A Lucky Man

Four years ago today a sickly, seven-month-old stray who had already spent three stints in his short life as a ward of the Humane Society took a chance on me.

He was severely malnourished, underweight, riddled with parasites, and missing a tooth. He was not an ideal candidate for adoption, I was told; he had been labeled a loud and destructive dog, an habitual runaway, and virtually untrainable.

I was blind to these accusations. I had been making regular trips to the shelter in the hopes of finding another Siberian Husky that might fill the hole left by my beloved Willis two months earlier, but from the instant I saw Wendell (that would become his name), standing at calm attention and intently watching me bounce a ball that left every other dog in the place either indifferent or in a frenzy, I knew that he was the one.

There was, however, a hold on him. He had just been picked up yet again, a street dog and a scavenger; he was also in very poor health, and his suitability for a "conventional adoption scenario" was being evaluated.

I visited him three straight days during this probationary period, and --other than the fact that he had clearly never been on a leash-- he was always attentive, affectionate, and a perfect gentleman. I also never heard him make a peep. When I mentioned this fact to the staff I was told that he was, without question, a barker, and one of the noisier dogs presently in the shelter's care.

I'm not entirely sure why (other than that first connection, which was probably enough), but after three days I took him home to share my life. It took less than 24 hours for me to realize that I had, once again, won the dog lottery.

Wendell has now been with me through thick (lots of thick) and thin (lots of thin). He has traveled all over the U.S. and Canada with me. For many months we were in the woods of Vermont and I never had a leash on him. Whenever I can get away with it, I allow him off leash, and he never strays far from my side. He has never barked in the house, has never destroyed a single one of my possessions, let alone any of his own toys or those he inherited from his predecessor. He never had to be house trained.

He has never disappointed me. Never. Not once. And he has endured with patience --and, sometimes, almost eerie attention-- my countless lonely late night monologues, stories, filibusters, lamentations, riddles, and bursts of random madness. I have read to him from Aristotle and Wittgenstein and countless other authors who were breaking my brain and making me feel stupid. People he had loved and depended on have disappeared from his life without a trace, but I have not disappeared from his life, and for long stretches during our time together I have desired very little other than to not disappear from his life.

Wendell has kept me going during times when I otherwise did not much feel like I wanted to keep going.

He is now a healthy, happy, adventurous, and astonishingly athletic dog. I haven't yet met anybody who appears to have any clear idea what sort of dog he is --almost everyone seems to have a different guess as to his jumble of breeds-- but I have never had any doubt that he is a guide dog, a service dog, and a first-rate companion dog. And at the bottom of every day --we both live on Hong Kong time-- I tuck him into his Garden of Sweet Dreamers and promise him that I will do everything in my power to be worthy of such a tremendous blessing and responsibility.

He still gets nervous on a certain type of concrete floor, and I have concluded that such cold, slippery surfaces must remind him of his days as a shelter inmate. He is, though, always lovely to me, and he inspires waves of almost unbearable tenderness every single day. Watching him run never fails to make me happy, and watching him sleep never fails to calm me.

I've honestly never known another breathing thing with such a lust for life.

Dozens of times a day I scratch him or hold him and say nothing but, "Thank you, thank you, thank you," or "Good boy, good boy, such a good boy." Time after time I assure him that we are together as long as we breathe, and longer if there's any sort of decent place beyond this one.

And every single night before I turn out the lights I tell him, without fail, "Sweet dreams, my beautiful boy, my precious pride and joy. Tomorrow we'll try like hell to make some new magic."

If this all seems utterly daft, so be it. I am blessed to have a dog, and if I did not have a dog --if I did not have this dog-- I would be a sad excuse for a human being.

The Mongoose Vs. The Cobra

Every month or so I sit down and watch the Ma Lin/Wang Hao Gold Medal table tennis match from the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

A couple years ago I paid $25 on eBay for a poor DVD bootleg of this match.

At the time of the Beijing Olympics I was entirely ignorant about table tennis, and had watched the competition with two questions foremost in my mind: "What sort of person devotes their life to table tennis?" And: "Where do these fellows get their flamboyant smocks and how can I build a collection of my own?"

To say that the Ma Lin/Wang Hao match changed my life is probably something of an overstatement, but I nonetheless can't deny that I harbor an unshakable and inexplicable obsession with this particular DVD.

I usually fast forward to the moment when, late in game one, Ma Lin takes a few steps back from the table and, smirking, fans himself dramatically with his paddle. At this point --in a match that was at the time heavily touted as "The Mongoose vs. The Cobra," the two monsters of the Chinese table tennis machine-- Ma, the older and more conservatively dressed of the two combatants, has game point on his paddle.

Wang, however, stages a couple of furious and inspired rallies, manages to battle back to 10-9, and Ma grimaces and takes a towel break.

The table looks impossibly small. It's almost as if they are playing table tennis on an air hockey table.

Towel break over, one of the television announcers observes that Wang, who with his foppishly highlighted pompadour and patterned gaudy brocaded gold-on-black smock looks like a Hong Kong action movie idol, "is definitely swimming against the tide now." There is no question that Ma has been playing with surgical precision, and he quickly finishes off game one with an 11-9 victory.

In game two, Wang again falls behind before mounting another stirring comeback. His rally falls short, however, when Ma crushes a vicious back-corner cross-spin return to finish off the stylish and feisty youngster. Ma, we are told, is the possessor of "the strongest and most feared forehand on the planet."

Wang,  finally getting into a groove with his signature Reverse Penhold Backhand, breezes to an 11-6 victory in game three, and the commentators note that the world's number one ranked player (and the sport's most flamboyant and bankable star) appears to be getting stronger as the match goes on. In game four he jumps out to a comfortable early lead only to choke it away down the stretch with flubbed shot after flubbed shot. As Ma eases into cruise control and pounces on his opponent's every mistake you can see in Wang's body language that he has lost his poise and is mentally tired. There is an almost cavalier insolence to the way he plays out the rest of the game, which Ma ultimately wins comfortably to take a three games-to-one lead.

By game five it looks like Wang has thrown in the towel, yet after Ma takes a 7-2 lead Wang makes one more aggressive and tactical charge and pulls to within 10-7. Ma, the consummate old pro, takes a strategic timeout, which effectively ices his younger opponent. As Ma clearly stalls and engages in a bit of dramatic grandstanding you can see that Wang is visibly rattled, and even seething. He mutters to himself, and paces like a panther. He shakes his hair violently, scowls, and appears to strum a few air guitar chords on his paddle. Upon resumption of the action, Wang manages one more brief rally before eventually falling 11-9 and surrendering the Gold Medal to Ma.

The commentary throughout the match is consistently wonderful and educational --we learn, for instance, that Chinese table tennis stars are inordinately pampered, are often notorious divas, and routinely have much publicized dalliances with pop stars, models, and actresses-- but there is one moment during the closing points of that final game that I find myself returning to again and again: "This would definitely be a disappointment for Wang," one of the commentators says, "but his place in Chinese table tennis is secure. The 24-year-old star is already a controversial legend in his native country, and last year he won a million-dollar casino match against Zhang Yan, an older star who was disgraced in table tennis's first doping scandal. Late in the decisive game of the match --which Wang won with ease-- he purportedly used a barber's mirror as a paddle, and paused between each point to admire himself in the mirror and make adjustments to his hair. Grandstanding, certainly, and some might say bush league, but, hey, he's still young and has brought a lot of energy to the sport." At which point the other commentator interjects, "In his defense we should probably point out that Wang comes from a long line of barbers, and he has often claimed that he played his first games with a barber's mirror."

Night Comes Down: Night Falls

Some nights you'd sit there tracking moonlight across the floor, or studying the garage roof next door as if it were a radar screen. Your mind on a very low flame, a few tired words alternately see-sawing in the silence or surfacing through the waves of static. You'd sit there barely conscious, but the moment you'd try to climb into bed and close your eyes the whole chorus would convene again with a vengeance. The woozy carnival of hypnagogia. Channel surfing long before the advent of cable television and remote control. So random, stuttering, and relentless was your consciousness in those hours that you would make an exercise of trying to isolate a particular fragment, and then attempt to concentrate your mind on the fragment's origin, trying to trace it back, if possible, to its original source. Sometimes it would be a line from a book or a television commercial, other times it might be something you'd overheard in school, or a snippet from a song or a random conversation. You would find yourself obsessing about an outrageous pair of shoes you had seen weeks earlier on a complete stranger in a grocery store.

Ultimately, towards dawn, you were always left with nothing but the barely-beating heart of the sleeping world. The ceaseless surf of even the smallest quiet town. The furnace. The pining of the clock. The world on the back burner, as close as the modern world comes to stasis: You were left with only you and what remained of the night, the retreating darkness, shadows receding on the walls, the cruel pinch of exhaustion, the terrible reality that you were going to have to sleepwalk through another lost day. What was that they were saying about what?

Eventually, every night you would reach a point where you could not fall asleep but you could nonetheless not be truly awake. You were reduced to fumbling around, grasping, in a dense and hazy subterranean no man's land, lost in the gauzy, impressionistic foothills of sleep. You would take a walk to try to resuscitate your sanity, to get clear thoughts moving again in your head. You moved in slow motion through a woozy, muslin-filtered border country, imagination and hallucination bleeding into reality. You heard what sounded like chanting. You heard the clanking of dog tags. You heard the distant tolling of a clock, and a burst of faint music sucked from a car window somewhere out in the town. You heard a baby crying, then someone laughing, retching, congested laughter. You heard a radio playing in a junkyard. You heard what sounded like a piano. You heard wind chimes twisting in a backyard somewhere. You heard the barking of a dog, answered by another, in the next block. You thought of the men across town, in the slaughterhouse, exhausted on their feet in the slippery dead mess, blood bubbled everywhere, the tangy reek of animals being broken down into meat. Some teacher would send you there from time to time to stand at the mouth of the tunnel that took the tired men to and from the slaughterhouse and out to their cars and trucks in the parking lot. You would stand there in the last of the darkness with a little collection can for UNICEF, and you would shake your can at the blood-soaked, broken-knuckled zombies as they plodded past, blank-faced and clutching their empty lunch pails, moving almost unconscious into the bruised light that was just then creeping into the eastern sky.

Somehow, though, you escaped and you got saved, and now Albert Ayler takes you across catwalks in your imagination, down fire escapes, and right out into a landscape that is both hallucination and reality, into a city that feels utterly paralyzed yet purrs the whole night through; through empty streets, past other half-dreaming houses where there are still signs of the half-life of the sleepless, glum lamplight and the blue wobble of TV screens in dark windows. You wander along a river humming with idling industry and the great under-throb of the city at three a.m., the sprawl of shadows, the litter and moonlight and longing and the great hold-out behind and beneath every heartbreak; the silence violated in myriad and mysterious ways and the compromised darkness; the way light launches little sneak attacks and cameo appearances even while a city sleeps, all the creeping, sleepless things, and still that doomed saxophone rising like a prayer somewhere in the night you can never entirely banish from your muddled brain, a wish at least, a promise, an apology, a stirring monologue, a beautiful loose thing traveling like a breathing kite from a small puddle of light cradling a park bench or an abandoned mattress.

The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Me When I Start Wondering About The Longest Utterance Ever Produced By A Parrot

Psittalinguistics: The Science of Talking Birds. This Being a Brief History of That Subject Along With Diverse Examples from the Archives of the Bergen Institute of Cultural Parrotology. (Third Revision of a Work in Progress.) Dedicated With Gratitude to Robert Burton.

A parrot, it has been alleged, was responsible for planting many of the more heinous perversions in the head of Tiberius, the most depraved of the Caesars, this after the bird had had read aloud to him (by a sociopathic dwarf tutor in the Caesar's employ) from an early and particularly pernicious primer in lechery. (See: A. Towson Dandridge, A Psychological Portrait of the Tyrants of Antiquity, Stanhope and Adelman, Manchester. 1949.)

We also learn, in Dr. Renata Steenblom's Unnatural Nature (University of Winnipeg, 1963), of a parrot that was allegedly capable of divining --and divulging at inopportune moments-- the innermost secrets of its mistress, including sexual fantasies of a shockingly explicit nature. The bird was notorious for regaling unsuspecting visitors with a tortuous impression of the poor woman's whinnying orgasm.

According to Fr. Xavier Empson's Curiosities of Catholicism and Marvels of Mariolotry (Eternal Image Press, Skokie, Illinois. 1957), there was, once upon a time, a parrot belonging to a tavern owner in a small village in Italy, and this bird was renowned for its ability to recite the Rosary (in Latin) in its entirety. One day, Empson recounts, the bird solemnly proclaimed, "It is the will of God, and I am but His humble servant," and promptly fell over dead.

From the pages of the children's magazine, Highlights, we learn of an unassuming insurance adjustor and confirmed bachelor in Dallas, Texas who purchased a blue-fronted parrot which, upon being installed in the man's home, was discovered to have committed a number of Faron Young songs to memory. The bird was capable of singing these songs in their entirety, and in a passable impersonation of the country legend's voice.

The annals of parrotology are full of similar wonders, from the ancient world to the modern. In a little known short story by the Russian writer, Gogol, a bird is called upon to testify in a court of law as a material witness to its master's infidelity.

There is an obscure novel, Lucifer's Bird, by a Depression-era Georgia writer by the name of Ernest Winter, which featured a talking parrot that was believed to be possessed by Satan. The bird's sinister commands and insinuations lead a God-fearing local deacon to engage in acts of depravity that shake a small southern town to its core. William Faulkner reportedly attempted a screenplay of this novel for Charles Laughton, but there is apparently no surviving evidence of this aborted project.

In the days before teleprompters, one often heard stories of Catskill comedians in their dotage who resorted to being fed their lines by parrots, which were perched on stage in full view of the audience. One such bird, Ezra, was said to be such a quick-witted master of improvisation that in time it became an actual and valued partner to the comedian Dickie Knickers. Before it eventually passed away from advanced years (the bird survived the old comedian by more than a decade), the parrot had established itself as a successful solo act --if something of a novelty-- in its own right.

The early blues musician Ishman Bracey is another performer who was alleged to have used a parrot as a prompt, often, some accounts allege, after Bracey had become so inebriated that he could no longer remember the words to his songs.

There was a minor dust-up in academia in the 1950s when a man named J. Richard Stevens published portions of his doctoral dissertation in a then reputable scholarly journal. Stevens' thesis, which was immediately and loudly discredited, was that a number of Emily Dickinson's poems had been almost literal transcriptions of the utterances of her beloved parrot, Desdemona.

In the early days of television, talking birds were often used to provide voiceover narration for cartoons, largely in an attempt to cut costs and circumvent union restrictions. The practice apparently continues --albeit somewhat clandestinely-- to this day, most prominently in the dubbing of low-budget animated films from Asia.

The debate over animal cognition, featuring Dr. Irene Pepperberg's famous gray parrot, Alex: Dr Pepperberg's pioneering studies with Alex proved conclusively that the prevailing and pejorative notion of a "bird brain," is grounded in ignorance. Many birds --parrots most particularly-- have very large brains indeed, and possess a cognitive sophistication that is as wondrous as it is little understood. Dr. Pepperberg's work with Alex is almost as important and influential as the better-known work on animal communication and referential speech that has been conducted on the great apes.

Alex's obituary from the New York Times.

The Yellow Naped parrot, the most virtuosic and versatile of the Amazonian talking parrots, can often master an impressive vocabulary of upwards of eight hundred words, and is also capable of singing, dancing, whistling, and doing uncanny impersonations of animals and household appliances.

Double Yellow Head parrots have long been recognized as accomplished opera singers, with extraordinary range. They are among the more excitable and motor-mouthed of talking birds. (See: Robert T. Nicolai, Caruso in a Cage: The Incredible True Story of Sergei, the World's Most Famous Singing Parrot, Bristol House, 1983.)

Budgerigars have been known to have vocabularies in excess of one thousand words. One such parrot, Victor, purportedly demonstrated that birds are capable of engaging in actual conversation, and was alleged to be an influential teacher and mentor to many other birds. Victor, according to its owner, presided over a de facto academy for talking birds, and a lexicon of the parrot's impressive vocabulary, along with an archive of its recordings, can be found on the Internet.

N'Kisi, a New York parrot with an almost 600-word vocabulary and psychic abilities, is purportedly capable of reading the thoughts of visitors.

See also: Bruce Thomas Boehner's Parrot Culture: Our 2500 Year Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird.

There have been innumerable documented cases of talking parrots thwarting robberies, as well as engaging in espionage. 

Pretty much unrelated, but I want one: Nothing talks louder than a bird pistol, even if, strictly speaking, it does not utter a word.

Bryce Hunt, a PhD student at New York University, is compiling an exhaustive, annotated collection of talking bird samples and other recorded utterances in popular music, with an emphasis on hip hop. Hunt has been promising for six months to send me a copy of his findings to date, but I have yet to receive this research. I can attest, however, that in December of last year --in the young man's Brooklyn apartment-- I reviewed a sample introduction to Hunt's thesis and found its scholarship impressive.

Other literary examples:

Eudora Welty's, The Shoe Bird

Excerpt from John Skelton's 16th century poem, "Speke Parrot,"

Flaubert's "Un Coeur Simple." (See also: Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot)

Somewhere in the works of Balzac (and I have thus far been unable to find the source of this story, although I maintain a clear memory of it nonetheless) there is a parrot that recites "The Lord's Prayer."

There is also, of course, the foul-mouthed parrot in Errol Stanley Garner's, The Case of the Perjured Parrot.

More recently: Joe Coomer's The Loop, which features a home invasion by an elderly parrot given to cryptic utterances.

“In the seventh century, Shui Shi Tu Jing published the Book of Hydraulic Elegancies. Indeed, one continually finds descriptions of such technological wonders as mechanical flying doves, dancing apes, and talking parrots in the literatures of Islamic nations, India, China, and Greece. In fourteenth century Florence, it was none other than Filippo Brunelleschi who designed a mechanical stage to bring Paradise to life.”

--Oliver Grau, "History of Telepresence: Automata, Illusion, and Rejecting the Body."

“This defect or imperfection that stands in the way of man's communicating with animals, why isn't it as much our fault as theirs? For we don't understand them any more than they understand us.”
--Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"

“Yet the animals are not incapable of being taught also in our way. Blackbirds, ravens, magpies, and parrots we teach to speak; and that facility with which we see them rendering their voice and breath so supple and manageable for us, to form and constrain it to a certain number of letters and syllables, testifies that they have an inward power of reason which makes them so teachable and determined to learn.”

--Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"

“This story of the magpie, for which we have Plutarch himself as sponsor, is strange. She was in a barber's shop in Rome, and did wonders in imitating with her voice all that she heard. One day it happened that certain trumpeters stopped and blew a long time in front of this shop. After that and all the next day here was this magpie pensive, mute, and melancholy, at which everyone marveled, and thought that the sound of the trumpets had stunned and deafened her, and that her voice had been snuffed out together with her hearing. But they found in the end that it was a profound study and a withdrawal within herself, while her mind was practicing and preparing her voice to represent the sound of these trumpets; so that the first voice she used was that one, expressing perfectly their runs, pitches, and variations; and for this new acquirement she abandoned and scorned all she had learned to say before."

--Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond"

“An old Danish shipowner sat and thought of his young days and of how he had, when he was sixteen years old, spent a night in a brothel in Singapore. He had come in there with the sailors of his father's ship, and he had sat and talked with an old Chinese woman. When she heard that he was a native of a distant country she brought out an old parrot, that belonged to her. Long, long ago, she told him, the parrot had been given to her by a highborn English lover of her youth. The boy thought that the bird must then be a hundred years old. It could say various sentences in the languages of the world, picked up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the house. But one phrase the old China-woman's lover had taught it before he sent it to her, and that she did not understand, neither had any visitor ever been able to tell her what it meant. So now for many years she had given up asking. But if the boy came from far away perhaps it was his language, and he could interpret the phrase to her.


"The boy had been deeply, strangely moved at the suggestion. When he looked at the parrot, and thought that he might hear Danish from that terrible beak, he very nearly ran out of the house. He stayed on only to do the old Chinese woman a service. But when she made the parrot speak its sentence, it turned out to be classic Greek. The bird spoke its words very slowly, and the boy knew enough Greek to recognize it; it was a verse from Sappho:


"The moon has sunk and the Pleiads,

And midnight is gone,

And the hours are passing, passing,

And I lie alone.


"The old woman, when he translated the lines to her, smacked her lips and rolled her small slanting eyes. She asked him to say it again, and nodded her head.”

--Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

The Hill Pilgrims

Many years ago, shortly after my arrival in this place, I discovered a hill in the middle of the city. This hill had long been a sanctuary for moonstruck teenagers, and the rocks and trees were painted and carved with the optimistic and elementary arithmetic of young love; there were charming addition equations to be found up and down the hill.

An old man who'd allegedly once traveled the world would ride his bicycle each evening to the park at the foot of the hill. The old man was in search of aluminum cans, and he would gradually make his way to a swinging bridge that hung above the stream that wound its way through the park at the bottom of a bluff. From this bridge he would sing Schubert's lieder in a striking baritone.

At dusk a procession of local teenagers would climb through the brush to make clumsy love to the old man's songs. This ritual had been a local tradition for two generations, dating back to the first days when the old man --then, of course, a much younger man-- had returned to the town from many years of traveling and hardship. The truth, though, was that no one really knew anything about the hill singer, or understood a word of his songs.

Over the years the town changed a great deal from those early days. It had grown much larger, and was now a place of immense loneliness and institutionalized trepidation. People came to the town from all over the world to suffer; the place had become an international capital of anxiety, of waiting and fretting and fear that was mulled over and expressed in myriad languages. All of this suffering, anxiety, waiting, fretting, and fear was related to the mysteries of the human body and its frequently malign secrets.

These pilgrims brought with them dark and troubling questions, and were entered into a vast lottery for answers, for which they might wait weeks, months, or years, often with little or no satisfaction. The Agency that administered the lottery had become a gargantuan bureaucracy that was plagued by inefficiency and indifference. The Agency was also alleged to be as corrupt as it was massive. The pilgrims often paid exorbitant sums simply to enter their names in the lottery, this despite the fact that it had now been many years since anyone could recall the Agency handing down anything even remotely resembling a satisfactory answer.

The squalid rooming houses and motels that had sprung up around the Agency's vast headquarters were overcrowded with desperate souls. This desperation in time led some of the pilgrims --many of them quite aged-- to venture to the hill in the middle of the town, where they, like the legion of local teenagers, would crawl through the brush and make love to the old man's songs.

Word quickly spread that these passionate excursions had an oddly consoling and salubrious effect, and soon more and more of the lottery entrants began to make the trek up the hill, and the woods and bushes were crowded each night with trysting pilgrims, their cries of equal parts anguish and passion rising like an animal chorus that lent additional poignancy to the old man's songs.

The old man, however, could not live forever, and one evening the procession of pilgrims and teenagers arrived to find only silence on the hill. For weeks a gradually diminishing number of the amorous and desperate continued to make the hopeful journey, but the old man did not return.

Whether or not it was a coincidence remains a matter of conjecture around town (many of the older residents never heard the hill singer, and to them he remains more myth than reality), but shortly after the old man's disappearance the exodus of pilgrims began, a trickle at first, and then a massive retreat. If there were to be no answers, then at least there should have been the comfort of music and unexpected passion. The rooming houses and motels were largely shuttered, and the town fell on hard times. And then, less than a year later, the Agency headquarters were destroyed in a massive fire of suspicious origin.

Those of us who remain --and there are fewer of us by the month-- find ourselves living in a city of ghosts and ruins and, everywhere, aimless processions of shuffling invalids and zombies. The hill in the middle of town is now a neglected and seldom visited reminder of our shameful past, littered with aluminum cans, moldering condoms, hastily discarded items of clothing, and rocks painted with the most abject obscenities.

I recently noticed this bit of graffiti scrawled on one of the sheets of desecrated plywood that has been nailed over the old Agency entrance: “Here even the butterflies walk with a limp, and are going nowhere.”

Spruced Up And Saved From Oblivion: Your Man For Fun In Rapidan's Fifty Greatest Country And Western Songs Of All Time!

1) The Critters, Mr. Dieingly Sad

On the surface a simple little song with a borrowed melody (from Paul Williams, no less), The Critters' masterpiece takes a turn down a very dark road about mid-song, and the next minute-and-a-half is a pure, harrowing cage match with Satan. No surprise: Satan wins, and before he's done with Mr. Dieingly Sad there's broken glass, a shotgun blast, and blood all over the walls.

2) Three Dog Night, One

Hank Williams' entire catalog boiled down to three minutes of existential longing. When the pedal steel starts raining tears after the last chorus you'll feel like you've never been in love, never felt the sun on your teeth, and never had a haircut you didn't regret.

3) Jim Stafford, Swamp Witch

Stafford's got something of a bum reputation as a novelty act, but 'Swamp Witch' ought to convince anyone who cares that the man has a hole in his dark soul that you could drive a Mack truck through. When I heard Jim sing this song at his theater in Branson I had shivers running up and down my spine, and some of the old buffet vultures around me were actually crying out in terror.

4) Charlie Rich, There Won't Be Anymore

This, in a nutshell, is what country music is really all about: a man makes a short, hopeless, declarative statement, and then sings it like he believes it.

5) Cat Stevens, Banapple Gas

Not what it sounds like or seems, neither of which I --or you-- could define. That said, it's something mighty special all the same. But, you ask, is it really country? You're damn right it is.

6) Red Sovine, Teddy Bear

Sure, it's kind of corny: a little Teddy Bear gets abandoned in the woods, gets lost, is harassed by predators, gets hit by a pick-up, and finally finds happiness in the arms of a little girl. Yet in that little girl's willingness to overlook the bear's mangled limbs and missing eye there's a tidy and useful lesson for all of us. If this song doesn't get the tears flowing, you need to see a therapist to help you understand all the damage your parents did to you.

7) Terry Bradshaw, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

Make no mistake: Bradshaw was a great quarterback, and he's entertaining enough playing an unhinged whack-job on TV. But as this peerless interpretation shows, he's an even better country singer, and in Hank Williams' classic Bradshaw found an outlet for all the repressed feelings a professional athlete in America isn't allowed to express in public.

8) Sheena Easton, Morning Train

A classic song of abandonment made even more unforgettable by the reliable presence of the Jordanaires and the sizzling fiddle break provided by Vassar Clements. Also features an uncredited Leon Russell on piano.

9) Steve Miller Band, Abracadabra

'Abracadabra' shows that Miller obviously spent some time studying what Gram Parsons was up to, and there's a languid quality to the arrangement that would make this song right at home tacked onto the end of 'Sweetheart of the Rodeo.' Country --and rock and roll, for that matter-- is full of singers pining for some sort of magical remedy for lost love and broken hearts, but few of them get their hopes squashed so completely as Miller does here.

10) Oak Ridge Boys, Wasn't That A Party

It sure as Sam Hell was. 'Nuff said!

11) John Anderson, Swingin'

No roadhouse jukebox would be complete without a copy of this alternate lifestyle classic, a rare country song with lyrics as racy and erudite as anything in John Updike's randiest novels. You want to get a bar full of drunk fat folks dancin' and hollerin' along to the record player? Just punch up Anderson's deathless key-party stomp --mission accomplished!

12) John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, Tender Years

A beautiful version of 'Tender Years' that actually, miraculously, manages to wring more emotion out of the song than George Jones ever could. Before Hollywood stole his soul, Cafferty was a great, hugely underrated singer, and this may be his masterpiece.

13) The Tijuana Brass, The Lonely Bull

Country songs are full of people who have gotten drunk, cried in their beer, and slept in their clothes, yet in a genre steeped in all manner of lonely funk, fog, and fractured hearts, nobody ever got it so right as the Tijuana Brass. I hope like hell the boys in Calexico get down on their hands and knees every night and thank their version of God for Herb Alpert.

14) Dean Martin, Houston

There are scads of great versions of this song, but Martin's is the only one you need to own --unless, of course, you need confirmation of how great it really is.

15) Gilbert O'Sullivan, Alone Again (Naturally)

Sadder than a sack full of nothin', and if you've been drinking I'd strongly recommend you lock the gun cabinet before you drop the needle on the turntable.

16) Eric Carmen, All By Myself

Ibid.

17) Gary Wright, Dream Weaver

Just how completely fucking great is 'Dream Weaver'? You know the answer to that question as well as I do, so let's just move right along.

18) Randy Vanwarmer, Just When I Needed You Most

I'll admit this one has a bit of personal history behind it, but it still has the power to tear out my spleen and tattoo 'Oh, Fuck' on my buttocks every time I listen to it.

19) Victor Lundberg, An Open Letter To My Teenage Son

Raw, honest, unflinching, and powerful as a shot of monkey serum. If you're a parent --and I'm not-- I suspect it'll make a mess of you in a hurry and then make you a better man (or woman). Sort of like 'Blind Man in the Bleachers,' only different. No blind man, no bleachers, but the same desperate attempt to communicate something vaguely important.

20) Blues Image, Ride Captain Ride

This one might have ranked higher if the pale Marty McGraw cover version hadn't poisoned my memories of the original just a bit. Still, no road trip would be complete without it.

21) Ray Stevens, The Streak

Ok, so maybe this one falls under the 'Guilty Pleasure' category, but sometimes when I'm listening to music I just want to laugh, clap my hands, and sing along.

22) ZZ Top, Tush

An elegy, a prayer, a shout of praise, a cry in the darkness, a yelp of unabashed lust --how can one song be so many things? I don't know, but 'Tush' proves it can.

23) Sammy Hagar, Winner Takes All

Obscure gem from the soundtrack to an equally obscure Canadian Western starring Merlin Olsen, Susan Dey, and Herve Villechaize. Hagar takes an old chestnut and makes it all his own (with help from Mark Knopfler).

24) Will to Power, Baby, I Love Your Way/Freebird medley

It's the craziest idea in the world, and it shouldn't work, and it shouldn't be country, but I'll be damned if it doesn't and it isn't.

25) The Sweet, Fox On The Run

Timeless song of a Nashville dream gone bust, complete with some of the most vivid bus station imagery in all of country music. You feel for this young girl as she falls into the clutches of a 'talent scout' and ends up snorting coke and starring in $500 porn movies. And you cheer for her (sort of) as she finds God.

26) Billy Idol, Hot In The City

The song that launched a million line dances still holds up pretty damn well, all things considered. All I know is that when I tossed it on the stereo at a party recently my guests erupted in a boot-scooting frenzy right there in my living room.

27) The Nashville Teens, Tobacco Road

Who says there's not a place for doo-wop in country music? Not me, not when it's steeped in the dust of gravel roads that go nowhere and the longing of small town teenagers everywhere. This one might be hard to find, but it's worth the journey.

28) Hank Locklin, Please Help Me, I'm Falling

Sex addiction, alcoholism, eating disorders, and codependency --it's all right here, years before Betty Ford ever crash landed at Hazelden. It's all right here, and it's all good in the way that only country music can make bad things good.

29) Styx, Miss America

There's so much going on in this song that I don't know where to begin. Taken on its own --and with the unstated I tacked onto the beginning-- it could be a lazy declaration of disillusionment. Add a question mark and you have a political statement lurking in a tossed-off query. But however you care to interpret Styx's dense, metaphorical rip through the American Dream, it all adds up to a pure, timeless classic of country music --and for once that's country in the broadest sense. Meaning: the place where all of us live.

30) Johnny Horton, The Battle of New Orleans

An epic of American heroism, and the sort of song that gets stuck in your head and drives you absolutely batshit fucking crazy. What 'Battle of New Orleans' demonstrates is that some things are worth fighting for, and some things that are worth fighting for are worth singing about. Also, implicit in this song, as in so much of the great country music I love: Don't fuck with America. Bonus points for rhyming 'beans' with 'New Orleans.'

31) Tom Jones, Green, Green Grass of Home

No list of the greatest country songs of all time would be complete without a contribution from the virile Welshman, who proved that a hirsute wanker could belt out an American classic with all the style and emotional nuance of a Nashville pro.

32) Pat Benatar, Hell is for Children

In one of country music's finest examples of method acting --or maybe, God help her, she wasn't acting-- Benatar wrings every ounce of pain out of this succinct and wrenching portrait of rural poverty and child abuse. 'Hell is for Children' is a rare example of a country song that dares to tackle social issues without resorting to trailer trash cliches and self pity.

33) Spandau Ballet, True

Tremendous song that touches on country's timeless themes of fidelity, infidelity, and the broken hearts that result when tortured souls venture down to the dark end of the street.

34) Curtis Mayfield, If There's A Hell Below We're All Going To Go

Mayfield's forays into country deserve to be placed next to Ray Charles's 'Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music' on your shelf, but chances are you --and millions of other people-- never even heard them. Here he tosses salvation out the window and wages a wrestling match with sin in which we're all losers. This is a record the Louvin Brothers might have recorded, and if they ever update the splendid 'Goodbye Babylon' set Mayfield deserves a place on the roster.

35) Tommy James and the Shondells, I Think We're Alone Now

One man, one woman, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and a long night of lovin', Tommy James style. Dim the lights, and cue up a little Ed Ames or Ray Price.

36) Neil Sedaka, The Diary

This one seems so obvious at first listen, but listen again: Sedaka's predicament (he finds his faithless lover's diary) is a familiar one, but what he does with this discovery is satisfying and surprising beyond belief. You'll find yourself thinking: I wish I'd thought of that.

37) Jay Ferguson, Thunder Island

What a wonderful metaphor. I think it was John Donne who said 'No man is an island,' and Jay Ferguson might be inclined to agree. A man and a woman, however, now that's a different story, and Ferguson's artful exploration of the pure, tempestuous oblivion of sex is country music's Song of Solomon.

38) REO Speedwagon, Keep the Fire Burning

When it feels like love is slipping away, Speedwagon's 'Keep the Fire Burning' is the perfect lover's plea that'll remind you both of what's at stake and why it's worth fighting for. A nice antidote to D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and one of Owen Bradley's most sumptuous productions.

39) Fats Domino, Jambalaya

It should be apparent by now that I'm bending over backwards here to avoid the obvious choices, but I'd emphasize that this isn't purely a perverse attempt to be contrary. I love Hank Williams as much as the next guy, but his music is now so familiar that it's become like the wallpaper in this room, and more often than not when I get a hankering for Hank I turn to one of his countless interpreters for a fresh spin on the master's music. Domino's take on 'Jambalaya' is about as fresh as it gets.

40) Carol Douglas, Doctor's Orders

It's not often a doctor dispenses practical advice of the sort Ann Landers routinely dishes out, but Carol Douglas had a damn good doctor, and the advice he gave her would have proved useful (and would still prove useful) to country's legion of unhappy women: get rid of that man. Of course such advice sounds a bit like common sense when the man in question has infected you with syphilis.

41) Terry Jacks, Put the Bone In.

The flipside to the smash 'Seasons in the Sun' is a classic of country cooking (Jacks is ostensibly talking about a pork and beans recipe), with a filthy insinuation that takes it over the top.

42) The Alan Parson Project, Eye in the Sky

The anthem for all those paranoid peckerwoods holed up in the mountains out west, as well as the anti-government tax-dodging zealots all over the country. Despite the fact that 'Eye in the Sky' was allegedly found in the car that Timothy McVeigh was driving when he was arrested, it's still a powerful song that taps into some of the anger and distrust that is lurking out there in country's heartland, and as such is a nice counterpoint to the jingoism of Lee Greenwood et al.

43) Cream, White Room

A clear-eyed account of the aftermath of a debauched night on the town that ends in a detox cell. In the sorrow of the hungover protagonist, a man who has let everything slip away, you can hear the echoes of everyone from Hank Williams to George Jones.

44) Foreigner, Dirty White Boy

White trash exploitation songs don't come any more unsavory than this one, the sad tale of a backwoods Don Juan who makes his reputation deflowering virgins and cuckolding husbands. Despite the obvious relish with which Foreigner serves up the nasty details, there's a morality play at work here, and justice is ultimately served. Marty Robbins for people who don't know who the hell Marty Robbins is.

45) Thompson Twins, King For A Day

Another tale of a roadhouse Lothario who comes into a boodle of cash (an inheritance of some sort, I think, although the song is vague on this point) and lives high on the hog for a day. This is essentially the old story of money burning a hole in a man's pocket, and though you know exactly what's coming --the guy squanders every last dime on liquor, women, and riverboat casino slots-- it's a hugely entertaining yarn all the same. Almost sounds like something Hank Jr. might have coughed up in his prime.

46) Jody Reynolds, Endless Sleep

Easily the best of the tributes to Hank Williams that flooded the country market after his death. Its timelessness is a product of its ability to tap into the anguished fuck-up's ancient longing for peace and serenity. It almost makes you wish you were dead, and that's as high a tribute to a great country song as anything I can think of.

47) Rick Astley, Cry For Help

Astley's one great, defining song, and one of the finest things to come out of Nashville in the last 20 years. It's exactly what it says, and more. As pitiless and pitiful a performance as anything in the dense catalog of blues, soul, and country. Unfortunately no one heard Astley's cry, or realized how raw and real it really was, and he'll be remembered --if he's remembered at all-- as one more great talent who died too young.

48) Melanie, Brand New Key

Great off-kilter take on the theme of a woman who's had enough of a philandering lover. Beyond the central metaphor (a revelation that will open up a whole new world for the protagonist), there's an entertaining tale in which the woman changes the locks on the house while her soon-to-be ex is out drinking and carousing with his pals. The locksmith, of course, is more than willing to participate in the woman's liberation, and what ensues --Melanie is clever enough to make you use your imagination a bit-- is straight out of Penthouse Forum.

49) Foghat, Stone Blue

A fat slab of the bluest country you'll ever hear, delivered with typical butt-kicking whump by the titans from Fenniman, Mississippi. The record industry, and its attempts to remake them in the mold of Alabama, ultimately wrecked Foghat, but before the weasels got their hands on them they were one of the most volatile live acts in all of country.

50) Consumer Rapport, Ease On Down The Road

Country music has always been full of songs about people leaving things behind--lovers, families, dead-end jobs, jerkwater towns. Sometimes these characters are leaving to pursue a dream elsewhere; often they're just getting the hell out of town. It's a liberation theme that has resonated with countless people trapped in lives of quiet desperation, and it's certainly not unique to country. It's interesting to note, however, that 'Ease On Down The Road' beat 'Born to Run' to the charts by five months, and it's a more stoic, laidback version of Springsteen's anxious, revved-up classic. The guys in Consumer Rapport don't know where they're going, and they don't much care, just as long as it's somewhere else. 

Nothing At All Like A Bruce Springsteen Song

Do you remember that time you threw your heart from the window of a speeding car?

Was it burning?

No, not that time. It was just heavy, a sodden wad of plumbed meat. It felt like a water balloon coated with grease. It couldn't have weighed more than a softball, and it bounced once on the shoulder of the highway and skipped off into the ditch. Some kid who was out fucking around found it the next day, put it in a plastic grocery sack, and took it to school for show-and-tell. An alarmed teacher confiscated your heart and hauled it to the principal's office.

The principal was a wattled walrus of a man, and he called the county sheriff, who came down, took one peek in that plastic sack, and had a pretty damn good idea what he was looking at, even as he wasn't quite sure what to do with it.

Within 24 hours posters started appearing on telephone poles around town, which is how you eventually got your heart back, although at the time you weren't so sure you even wanted it back.

Remember that dinky town? What a strange place. What a strange time in our lives that was. The town was so small that it didn't have a newspaper or radio station, and the closest city that had either was almost forty miles away and had been pretending for half a century that the little town didn't exist.

The town had a serious inferiority complex going back almost a hundred years, and things had gotten so bad that there was a vocal cult of locals that was convinced they were living in the hallucination of a senile god. Somebody had made a trip to a big city in the north some years earlier and had returned with a state road map on which the town was nowhere to be found, further convincing many people that they, their families, pets, cars, homes, neighborhoods, and entire community did not, in fact, exist.

A dwindling group of optimists formed the Existence Party and ran a full slate of candidates for local offices. Every one of them was soundly defeated. Yet still the town carried on as best it could; the residents dutifully paid their property taxes, sent their children to school, maintained their homes and lawns, and --for the most part, anyway-- obeyed local laws.

High school graduation became known as Vanishing. Almost without exception graduates fled town immediately with whatever memories they had left, never to return. You couldn't for the life of you figure out how they escaped. Newcomers, even relative newcomers --anybody, really, who had not lived there all their lives-- tended to suffer from gradually worsening memory problems, particularly regarding how they'd come to live in the town in the first place.

You were definitely in this camp. When I first met you you no longer had the foggiest idea what you were doing in that place or why you had moved there. You insisted it was the most boring place you'd ever been, and you had the odd feeling that you were being held hostage. More and more often you felt like you were lost the instant you left your house. Often enough, in fact, you were lost even when you were in your house.

The streets of the town had become a sort of labyrinth to you, and you often found yourself unwittingly driving in circles, sometimes for hours at a time. The streets all seemed to either dead end or circle back on themselves.

Sometimes at night you would park at one of these dead ends and shine your car lights out into the seemingly endless scrub brush beyond the city limits. You said you would see dark shapes moving around out there, and the occasional flash of yellow or red eyes captured in your headlights. Coyotes, you thought, or perhaps even wolves.

It was the sense of captivity, the boredom, and the torment of your eroding memory that led you to throw your heart from the window of the speeding car. A woman had been driving, but you couldn't remember her name or what she looked like. You retained a vague memory of being tormented by the woman's incessant chatter.

The day you retrieved your heart from the sheriff's office, as you drove home with the plastic bag rattling on the passenger seat, you realized that your eyesight was rapidly fading. By the time you got home you were almost completely blind and had a difficult time finding your way into the house.

You remembered that much, at least for a few days. Your house, you said, was dark, and you could barely make out the various familiar shapes in your kitchen. You could hear the hum of the refrigerator. You felt with your hands and located the counter next to the sink, and there you deposited your heart in its grocery sack.

You were so tired, uncommonly tired was the phrase you used, and you suspected that you might be dying. How long, you wondered, could a man live without a heart?  And how long had it been since you flung it from the window of the speeding car? You really had no idea. There was, however, very little doubt about this much: you were now almost completely blind. You were disconsolate. Words were beginning to break apart in your head; they had been slowing way down for quite some time, but now they were truly starting to disintegrate. There was a moment in which you said you were seized with a powerful longing to hear Louis Armstrong. A few snippets of a tune jerked momentarily between your ears and then just as quickly evaporated.

At some point you fell into a deep sleep, perhaps even a coma. When you regained consciousness you were still sitting at your kitchen table, and you said you could hear your heart stirring in the plastic sack. Rattling, initially, and then jerking around.

When I found you you had your heart in your hands, cradled like a rabbit.

Do you remember the rest? Do you remember how we escaped together, and how, even slumped against the passenger window and blind and barely conscious, you mumbled that our getaway in the dead of night was "just like a Bruce Springsteen song"?

Do you remember how I cut up your heart with a steak knife and fed it back to you one bite at a time?

Can you remember that, baby?

I hope one day soon you'll remember everything, and never again forget what happened next. 

No Flowers, Please

Gogi? I remember saying. Is that your real name?

She said something to me, something impertinent I'm sure, that was lost in the whirring of the blender.

Grasshopper? She said a moment later, offering me a thick green drink in a jelly jar.

I swear, I said, I could drink these all night.

I do, she said.

Later, she put a record on her turntable and said, my mother used to sleep with this guy who's playing tenor. She used to follow Shelly Manne around, and I'm sure she slept with pretty much everybody in his band. She spent half of her life chasing after musicians, until she got too old and worn out. Then she started tending bar in this law-and-order dive, and all she ever dated were old cops. The last twenty years of her life she dated one cop after another. The same guys who used to make life so miserable for her old musician friends. They treated her like shit, the fat bastards. Funny, isn't it?

She went back to the kitchen and fired up the blender again, and when she returned she settled back in on the couch and said, my mother had this big, fat scrapbook full of signed photos and I.O.U.s from jazz musicians, most of them written on cocktail napkins or scraps of placemats. It was like a who's who of jazz musicians, seriously. Those sponges fucked her and drank up all her money and then dumped what was left of her for the old cops to pick over. I wish I still had that scrapbook. I wonder what happened to it? I'll bet something like that would be worth a lot of money.

She got up and put another record on the stereo. I'm sure my mother screwed this guy too, she said. I remember him coming around and crashing on our couch in his underwear. He was an A-number-one creep. Creep central. Bad complexion, bad teeth, nothing really to recommend him other than a decent wardrobe and the fact that he could play music. I guess that was enough for my mother. Me, I've always hated musicians. Every one I've ever met was a bum who never even pretended to be a decent human being unless he was on a stage somewhere, and that was just so they could get some woman like my mother to sleep with them and buy them drinks. Don't get the wrong idea, I love music; I just hate musicians, and don't even try to tell me that's not possible or I'll claw your eyes out.

I'm sure it's possible, I said. I don't have a doubt in the world it's possible.

Oh, Jesus, she said. Don't kiss my ass like that. It's so unbecoming.

I had some fine times with Gogi. We laughed a lot. She really did drink grasshoppers every night, and she had one hell of a record collection. She also had a lot of nice clothes. She hated crowds, I also remember that. I lost track of her when I moved in the early eighties, which wasn't unexpected; I should warn you, she'd told me when I stopped by her place to say goodbye, I don't keep in touch, so this really is adieu.

I found her obituary online a few weeks back, in a Phoenix newspaper. She died in 2002, at the age of 52, which meant that she was older than I thought, but still not nearly old enough. The obituary didn't say how she died, or, rather, of what. She wasn't survived by a husband or any children, which didn't surprise me, of course. Just a brother in Boston, I think. No flowers, please, the obit said, and suggested memorials to the Humane Society. I keep telling myself that one of these days I'll get around to sending a check.

Late Summer Rerun: Lord Knows, Child

One day Ella's grandmother took her to the county fair, something which Ella looked forward to all year long.

Her grandmother wouldn't go on any of the rides, not even the Ferris Wheel, but Ella didn't mind going by herself. If her grandmother had allowed her to, Ella would have gone on every ride --the big, swirling, spinning rides, the fast and high and upside-down rides-- over and over again. She liked to be high above the world, like an astronaut when he could still see the lights and the rooftops and the trees and the tiny people going about their lives, before he moved into the dark part of space.

Ella wanted to be James Bond, only a girl, but if she couldn't be James Bond her second choice was to become an astronaut or a race car driver. She would always like to wear beautiful clothes, though, whatever she did, and she would have to be able to put flower stickers and spangly things on her astronaut suit. When her mother moved away she had left behind boxes of fashion magazines in her old bedroom, along with a collection of James Bond novels that had belonged to Ella's father before he was buried in the cemetery of soldiers. These magazines and books were the main things Ella liked to look at and read.

At any rate, the one day Ella knew she would always remember at the county fair was different from every other day she had spent at the county fair, all of which had been wonderful in their own way. But on that particular day Ella had seen a man --a man wearing a suit very similar to those worn by astronauts or race car drivers-- fired from a cannon and carried high above the bright lights of the Ferris Wheel, beyond which was a waiting net.

Ella asked her grandmother why a man would be fired from a cannon, and her grandmother had said, "Lord knows, child, I suppose he just likes the way it feels."

Later, after they had seen the Human Cannonball, Ella and her grandmother had walked through the county historical museum and the Indian museum and the fish building. The last building Ella's grandmother always liked to look around in was the arts and crafts building, and that afternoon there was an old man sitting at a table and making tiny ships inside of glass bottles.

Ella had never seen anything like it, and she studied the finished projects that were on display with a combination of wonder and confusion. They were beautiful little ships, remarkably intricate, and Ella couldn't understand why they were in the bottles or how they had gotten there. At the moment Ella and her grandmother happened by, the old man was just beginning to build another ship in a bottle, and it was too early to tell exactly how he intended to do it.

Still, it was the question of why that troubled Ella, and she stared at the old man for a moment --he was peering through a large, mounted magnifying glass-- and then she just came out and said what was on her mind. "Why would you put a ship inside a bottle?" she asked.

The man raised his head and seemed to give the matter serious thought. And then he smiled at Ella --it was, she thought, an unmistakably happy smile that she would never forget-- and said, "And what do you think you are, young lady, right this moment, but a ship inside a bottle?"

"But how does the ship get out of the bottle?" Ella asked.

"I do believe," the man said, "that in no time at all you're going to figure that out."

Contemplating My Possible Worthlessness And Immortality

I am worth no money, but I must be worth something. What is not worth money?

I will start with a process of elimination.

If time is indeed money, then I can reasonably conclude that I am not worth time. I can also conclude that I am not worth the price of admission, since "the price of admission" implies a "price," and a "price" implies a cost, and the very idea of "the price of admission" implies some exchange of money.

Just as assuredly can I conclude that I am not worth my weight in gold, as gold is a universal standard of monetary value.

Is there, then, anything at all that I could be worth, given that the concept of worth is now inextricably tied to value, and value to some price tag? A price tag is, of course, the amount one is expected to pay for an item, and the amount one is expected to pay for something is generally agreed to be a monetary consideration.

Given such logic, I must reluctantly conclude that I am worth nothing, and if in fact I am worth nothing then I must turn my considerations, or ruminations, to the subject of nothing and its properties.

And there I find an inadvertent affirmation, or at least some small cause for hope: If, as I have heard said, "Nothing matters," then I might reasonably conclude that I matter.

What, though, does it mean to matter? Could I not reduce the question of my nothingness to something along the lines of "What is the matter?" Meaning here the matter, or mattering, of my personal nothing.

I am thinking here, and feel like I must now go backwards a bit, as something else has occurred to me as I typed the previous paragraphs regarding my possible status as a mattering being.

Another curious thing I have sometimes heard said is, "The best things in life are free." Free obviously meaning here "of no cost" or "requiring no exchange of money." Another possible bit of encouragement, this; since I am worth no money, I must then be some sort of "best thing" as well as free, and "free" is a word, surely, with many positive connotations, including unfettered or in a state of liberation. Yet I now think of the phrase, "There ain't no free," which, if there is truth in it, would once again consign me to a state of non-existence.

This consignment would seem to receive additional support from the following consideration: If I am not worth time, and time is --as people are fond of saying-- of the essence, then I cannot possibly be of the essence, and must therefore conclude that I am non-essential, which clearly contradicts the idea that I matter.

Perhaps you will at this point understand my confusion on this and many other pressing questions.

Again, though, I must look for a silver lining, for surely a man cannot long live without some hope of a silver lining, even if he has absolutely no fucking idea what "a silver lining" might mean in this or any other context. Be that as it may: If time is, as is frequently alleged, fleeting, and time is money, and I am not worth money, then I cannot possibly be fleeting, and so might possibly be immortal.

Perhaps, though, that is not a true silver lining, for surely immortality is an expensive proposition --one can only imagine how much it might cost to live forever-- and thus immortality would therefore be yet another luxury that I cannot afford, as well as, come to think of it, a rather dreary aspiration.

From The Vanishing Dump: Unbroken Promise

Disappointed in love and broken
at forty she married a small town
in Ohio
it made no brash promises whispered nothing
sweeter in her ear than good morning
good afternoon good evening good night
my dear
good night my darling
good night my dear
in the morning
I'll still be here.