I open my eyes. Still in the GTHA, on the bus, for a few minutes now. I watch passing faces, their masked mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters. An ancient American car comes creeping around the corner, carbon spewing from beneath a dangling bumper. Dusty rinds of cola-colored rust erupting from the body.  

Trembling, I watch the thing pass.

"That car... " Who sits inside, behind the black windshield? I feel the fear begin to accrete, seamlessly, senselessly, with absolute conviction. 

I find myself leaning forward. 
"El coche," says the bus driver, who wears no mask. Turning, he seems to notice a bike courier for the first time. She flips the driver the bird, and races ahead.
I breath a sigh of relief.

The client couldn't make it any other time except noon today.  Velda tells me, this one’s representing some pretty big interests.

We're at Mohawk and West 5th. I see a crowd collecting at the southeast corner. Another stupid murder. Spitz lives with her parents at West 5th and Upper James. Let’s see, where am I?

Thousands of cop cars race past. Three apartment houses, a delicatessen bar with birds’ nests and beer kegs for stools. On the corner, the crowd is growing to immense proportions. I debate whether I should go in. 

The boy of whom we'd spoken was Henry's only son. His name was

Jeffrey, and of course he was called Jeffy, or Jiffy Pop... A father is generally supposed to like his daughter best, and though he did all he could not to show his preference, there was no doubt that the greater share of Henry Garnet's affection was given to his son. He was kind, in a chaffing, casual way, to his daughter. He gave her handsome presents on her birthday and at Christmas; but he doted on Jeffy. Nothing was too good for him. He thought the world of Jeffy, could hardly take his eyes off him. You could not blame him, for Jeffy was a son that any parent might have been proud of.

It happened at 0400, in the middle of a deep sleep. In the middle of a dream: metal voices, down the vaulted concourses of some European airport, distant rituals of departure. Darkness. The hiss of climate-control.
I sit bolt upright in my bed with an over-whelming feeling of anticipation. The touch of cotton sheets. Sounds of traffic, all tension, panic, are gone. I remember the atrium bar, music, faces. I become aware of an inner balance, a rare equilibrium.

Someone is coming: a woman. I don't know who or why. All I can do is hope.

I walk quickly out into the strange GTHA streets. I look at the morning around me. The QEW hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from this desolate spot of land. We live in a valley of ashes. The sun attempts to make its way through clouds of minuscule particles: garbage burnt through air.

Sewage culverts empty out into Cootes Paradise. When the drawbridge lifts, huge barges pass through. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track. Passengers on waiting GO trains often have the opportunity to stare at this dismal scene for as long as half an hour. Above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor M.T. Kretschmar. These eyes too are grey - their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Some days hang over these eyes like a huge pair of unseen pincers, threatening to squeeze them open, or pop them out.

Makes me wonder, is it more important to see or to breathe. At the intersection of Barton and Earl, I cross against the light. I walk by a huge man wearing a black suit, carrying a newspaper under his arm. I lightly touch his sleeve.
"Excuse me sir, could you tell me how to get to West 5th... "
He looks at me for a moment, and squints.
"What's a five-letter word for deadly?"
I smile and wave, "Woman. Whoa, man. Get it?"
"Who do you think you are, Charlie McKenzie?"
He looks down again and attempts to cross the street. As he's heading over, he motions to a bus stop a block away.

U.V. and the Adventures of Maugham P.I.

It’s 3 in the afternoon. Hot as shit. Passing through Barton Village, I make my way towards airport transit.
It was Henry Garnet’s habit on leaving the city to drop in at his club and play bridge before going home to dinner. He and I stand in the airport terminal, looking around.
“How’s the market today?” I ask.
“Booming. Even the suckers are making money,” he moans.
It was evident that stocks and shares had nothing to do with Henry Garnet’s vexation, but something was the matter. He was a hearty fellow, who enjoyed excellent health. He had plenty of money. He was fond of his wife and devoted to his children.

Henry walks over to the closest wall. It happens to be layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He presses his forehead against it. The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence.

I’m thinking hard, let’s go somewhere else.
“I want some snails, and a decent wine,” I complain.
“Which way’s the baggage room?”
“Ha. Good one, Hank.”
As a rule, he had high spirits, and he laughed easily; but today he was glum and silent. I’m closing my eyes, I center myself in the background hiss of climate-control.
“Why don’t we find some place to sit down? Let’s go to my club for a change.”
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“People who, uh want to hire a private investigator usually feel a little foolish doing it.”
We’ve slipped on to public transit, upper crust. We’re passing through the streets of Hamilton, above sighing trains. Red paper lanterns line a narrow lane. This is our stop. I walk into the crevice between two buildings, beckoning Henry to follow me. Ahh, home again: eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures all carefully aligned. I look at Henry. His brows are crossly puckered and there is a sulkiness to his mouth.
I move sideways, allowing him to pass me. Thin drops of water fall on my neck from an air conditioning unit somewhere above. There’s an old wooden staircase beside us. I dust off one of the steps and signal to Henry.
“Have a seat.”
He looks at me in disbelief.
“This is your club?”
“Very low fees. Plus, I assumed you wanted to go somewhere you wouldn’t be recognized?”
“God, I’m so embarrassed. What you must think...”
“I think you’re a bit nervous about hiring me.”
“Still I may not need you. I may just be paranoid.”
“A lot of people who think they MAY just be paranoid actually aren’t.”
To ease the tension, I deliberately broach a subject upon which I know Henry is normally glad to speak.
“How’s your boy?”
Henry’s frown grows darker.

“He’s done no better than I expected him to.”
“When does he come back from Monte?”
“He just got back last night.”
“Did he enjoy himself?”
“I suppose so; all I know is that he made a damned fool of himself.”
“Oh. How?”
“I’d rather not talk about it if you don’t mind.”

I look at him in curiosity. He scowls back at me.
“Sorry, old boy. Your call.”
Henry’s irritability was such that he did not immediately reply.
“What the devil’s the matter with you, Henry?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m in a hell of a temper.”
I burst out laughing.
“You don’t have to tell me that, old boy. It’s obvious.”
Henry gives me a rueful smile.
“Well, I bet you’d be in a temper too. As a matter of fact I’m in a damned awkward situation, and if you can give me any advice how to deal with it I’d be grateful.”
“If I can’t tell you how to deal with a situation then nobody can.”
“Well, these things have been happening.”
“What things?”
“Little things. I feel as if I’m being followed, and I hear footsteps. I turn but no one’s there.”
“What else.”
“I think someone shot at me. My family has an estate up above Punchbowl, at the end of Lover’s Lane.”
“The old Hermitage?”
“Yes, you know it?”
“I know of it. Someone shot at you there?”
“I was watching the sunset one evening and a floodlight near me just shattered. The gardener said that happens sometimes when the sprinklers are on. I really feel that I heard a shot. I come from a very wealthy family. We own Decker Intellectual Properties inc.”
“I’ve heard of the company.”
“Then perhaps you’ve heard of my twin sister and I. We were kidnapped when we were five and ransomed for a million dollars.”
“Well, yah I vaguely recall hearing something about that. It was a long time ago. That must have been very traumatic for you.”
“I don’t remember. The doctors tell me I blocked it out. Deirdre remembers. She’s always been much better at coping than I. Four months ago we had a rather nasty auto-accident. It’s a miracle that either of us survived. We were having a row over, well it was all my fault. When I was released from the hospital… I just didn’t want to deal with Deirdre’s accusations… That’s when those things began to happen. I’ve kept a diary. Ever since the kidnapping, I began to write down anything even remotely suspicious… You’ll find everything I’ve done over the past 6 months in here.”
Henry pulls a tiny notebook out of his jacket pocket.
Jack pot. Be careful. Remember your karate. This could be dangerous.

FUTURE COLETTE

"you know there are places, other places, nightmare places where everything has a place and a place where there is no place for you. This is hard to express and there is no key knee board.
just mention a famous enough people that you get the whole city hating you an so you’ve got it made until you get sued an then yer fuct. eh, liz fair?"

re: colette
In particular, those disturbances classified as ‘neuroses’ were marked as suitable candidates for marriage to the concept of mental inhibition. Ellenberger also cites a notion of the ‘dynamic’, in relation to the mind, that dates as far back as 1845. Pierre Moreau (de Tours) “taught that a mental illness [was] a world of its own, basically different from our world and comparable to the world of dreams, even though its elements were all taken from the real world.”[1]Moreau’s description of this world seems comparable in many ways to the notion of the unconscious that we still have today. In fact, Pierre Janet, one of the pioneers of modern dynamic psychiatry, insisted that his own theory of psychological analysis was originally inspired by Moreau de Tours’ ‘fundamental law of mental illness’.

What is it to have successful communication? To have an interpretation? True beliefs are essential to interpretation, though there’s always some possibility of error. You have to assume that a believer holds true beliefs in order to allow for communication at all. Meaning requires a person to know what s/he means? It ‘just ain in the head’!

It seems Davidson assumes thta thoughts require self-reflection. According to Davidson, to have thoughts at all you have to be interpretable
inter-operable
and you have to know what you mean. For Davidson there is no line between neutral input and the conceptual scheme that organizes it. The question remains, how do we know which interpretation is right?

I cannot help this obsessive, compulsive mixed pack
of picking myself apart. Other people can. I know this because they look at me with bewilderment and pity.
“I’ve carved out my own flesh with magical precision. Can you beat that?”
They simply shake their heads and carry on with their mended ways. Just as I suspected. How else could you manage so well? With only a little bit of beer and wine, or a moderate amount of yet, as of yet, I can see my own reflection when I look into the acid-rain-splattered face of humanity.
Human dignity
Contribute!
We all pretend not to know what we’re doing, but we are doing it very well indeed.
SPOILER ALERT!
Mulholland Drive
“This is essentially true, though like most artists Lynch has not been without patrons. It was on the strength of Eraserhead that Mel Brooks’s production company hired Lynch to make The Elephant Man in 1980, and that movie earned Lynch an Oscar nomination and was in turn the reason that no less an ur-Hollywood-Process figure than Dino De Laurentiis picked Lynch to make the film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, offering Lynch not only big money but a development deal for future projects with De Laurentiis’s production company.”

is the anti-dote to

The Big Lebowski.


Attacking anyone you ever cared to fear. But I suppose that we already know that. Don’t we?
this is how it begins. you are borne into a family that some will say is not of your choosing. what choice have we ever had? You are picked at for years and years by people who are beyond your control
What is love anyway? A privilege? This house is messy. the notion that people can be cured of emotional or mental ailments by addressing their problems at the subconscious level. It seems strange that so many explanations of mental affliction should appeal to the unconscious mind, despite the fact that we have very little knowledge of... the ellip
eclipse?
elllips
ellipse
ellipses
In fact, if we have so little understanding

the child cannot tell,

of what the conscious mind is, can we really address those processes that take place in the unconscious?
In this paper, the child cannot tell how is it that the unconscious can be explicitly described without understanding the way in which the conscious mind works?

-a rugged, radiant
Alliteration!
Digression!

tomboy sea-green
During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Psychiker trend in psychiatry began once more to take precedence over the Somatiker. Interest in the emotional causes of mental disturbances was on the rise, and it appeared that Pierre Janet was at the crest of this wave.
-invented the century’s first teenage girl:
Rebellious, secretive…
Can we really have an accurate description of the unconscious without having an accurate description of consciousness?

and an auburn plait longer than she was tall
-work created a link between the newer and older systems of dynamic psychiatry
Janet’s main thesis was a work entitled, Psychological Automatism.

Prosper Despine, an adherent to the earlier school of dynamic psychiatry, regarded ‘psychological automatism’ as the means through which complex and intelligent acts were realized. He believed that such automatism was the product of a living machine, completely devoid of consciousness.

-subconscious development, having
both of these distinctions (or the ego)

One of the major differences between these two descriptions of consciousness is, of course, the reference to self-awareness.

At which point I realized that part of the thing that drove me crazy about this fear is that I can’t tell whether the ‘problem’ it involves is real or not. I can’t tell if it’s me receiving my own signal back or if it’s an actual external sign. However, this (as Kant would say) falls into the realm of ‘bad’ metaphysics…
my friends
_ says she don’t want to mess with ‘hers’
there is a rage deep in the coal spike and through the confines offer no retreat
from
-the sinners

of the lowest depths where
“at the time I wore the Great Mantle”
“To these, one by one, death is bringing rest.”

WHERE ARE THE LINKS??

“And truthfully, I was born of the Bear, so greedy to advance the little Bears,
That, there, I pocketed wealth and, here, myself.”
“I have friends who are younger, and in particular younger than I.”

I SAID, WHERE ARE THE REFERENCES?!

Lie hidden in the fissures of this stone.
“Somebody Knows Something”
I too will sink to where they are, as soon as
That one comes whom I believed you to be
When I questioned you so hurriedly.

7th
The stench here is over-powering. This level is also home to the wood of the suicides - stunted and gnarled trees with twisting branches. In those branches the Harpies, foul birdlike creatures with human faces, make their nests.

I’M DISAGREEING WITH THE CANNON!
“Dr. X! I said, ‘I’M DISAGREEING WITH THE CANNON!’”
“Sorry, Colette. I missed that. I was listening elsewhere.”

Colette

“I can retrace my own footsteps, along a path I thought I should never follow again except on the other side of life?
Looking through song lyrics?
To these, one by one, death is bringing rest. I have friends who are younger, and in particular younger than I. If you can’t spot the references then fuck you!”
Maro, slow her thoughts down a bit more…
Find the pattern. Better instructions. No confidence. Yes, I meant to make that spelling mistake.
“I have no idea what I’m doing.”
Looking this up for a moment: a 1992 abstract relates the case of a little girl who had been profoundly abused for the first four years of her life.
Next…
“There now, He’s going to spoil her for us again…”
Background Information
By the time the subject was presented to psychiatrists, she was unable to or would not hear, speak or see.

After careful examination, it was thought that there was no physical impairment or injury preventing her from communicating. The attending clinicians decided that the child had just chosen not to communicate.

A marvel of technology.
“They would speculate on the outcome of the disease, its crises and its temperature chart…”
That’s the key. Capture the proposition every time.
“And what if this one disappears too, what a lot of trouble it will give us, what a job to help her recover her balance!”
You put in your time however you put in your time.


Kretschmar’s Meta-Report:
For the most part she was completely passive. She would not eat, get dressed or clean herself, although she would allow these activities to be performed for her. When left to her own devices, she would just sit, stand or walk in a somnambulistic state.



Observations:
Her only attachment was to a child’s toy abacus with which she had arrived. She compulsively fingered the beads of the abacus and would carry it with her everywhere she went. At night she would sleep with it. When attempts were made to separate her from the toy, she would become quite agitated and be inconsolable until the toy was returned to her. Our first hypothesis regarding this case study was that the subject was moving the beads of the abacus randomly.

Perhaps she had come to rely on this nervous habit as a source of comfort?

Extensive interviews were conducted with very little progress. However, once footage of her was closely scrutinized we realized that there was a distinctive pattern. Though she would not respond to any verbal requests or questions, we discovered that she repeated the same sequence on her abacus whenever she was asked the same question repeatedly over time.

We are discovering torture, one bullied victim at a time. How do we construct a better prison? But I digress…

After a period of time we were able to decipher a type of numerical grammar that the subject was using to communicate through her abacus.

Are we seriously ready for these ideas? I seriously think not, human.
Kretschmar, later that same day…

-new neuropsychological task, measuring salivary cortisol
-which memory processes affected by stress

Now speed it up again Maro, thanks.

“you know there are places, other places, nightmare places where everything has a place and a place where there is no place for you. This is hard to express and there is no point to his key knee board.”

"What's that, Carey? I can't quite hear you."

"The problem isn't evil, or a fight between good and evil. The problem is that each of us wants to make a better world and none of us has the same vision of what that looks like. Some people think the world would be better if they have more money, or power..."

Hey, Maro! I think we have a hero. Who's next? Colette. Oh, tricky. Should we do English?