We have a flag we put out on holidays, and there it was, up at dawn. A gentle symbol here in the leafy village of Los Perros.

Long may it wave! It's “our” flag too.

Quote from my 2002 journals, in Paris: I keep working on this new mental exercise of becoming coherent, of being in a mixed state, of existing in multiple parallel universes, and that feels very good. Walking in the Latin Quarter, looking at some smoke from a chimney against the sky, not naming it, just seeing it, letting its motions move within my mind, I realize I’m no different than a computer screen showing a two-dimensional cellular automaton, with the smoke like a touch-cursor dragged across my brain. I am entangled with the smoke. I am coherent, but my coherence includes the smoke, I have joined the system, merged it into me. Like the old koan, Q: I see a flag is blowing in wind: is the flag moving or is the wind moving? A: My mind is moving. Finally I get it, a nice moment of aha, a satori in Paris.

In pyjamas, reflected in a hubcap that Rudy Jr. found.

I’ve been busy finishing Chapter Six: The Gobubbles for Mathematicians in Love. Today’s text is the chapter ending, with a big rocks-off fantasy concert scene with Bela's band Washer Drop playing with metal band AntiCrystal at Heritagist Park, the baseball stadium in SF. The scene relates to the hundred-percent patriotism campaign I was imagining a few days ago.

As long as I'm sinking into political ranting — I heard an intersting rumor after Rumsfeld said that they know where Osama is in Pakistan, but they're not going to do anything about it. To wit: The Chimp sent his personal black helicopter to ferry family-friend Osama to safety from Afghanistan to Pakistan in 2002, so that Osama would be handy for popping out to scare the voters in November, 2004! And that's why they know where he is. They set him up there. Pass it on, and believe everything you see in blogs!

I’m also busy doing my third go-through on the copy edits for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, so today’s graphics are three random images I just corrected in there.

***

[Classified time-lapse photo of the Chimp’s black helicopter!]

“We’ve got a hundred-percent problem in this country,” I yelled into my microphone, my voice booming back at me. “See your future in the bubbles! See what the Heritagists want with their hundred-percent campaign! And, thank you, thank you, thank you, AntiCrystal for letting us play this song! Joe Doakes is — a Hundred-Percent *sshole!” I swung my arms down like a conductor and the bands dug in, K-Jen and Waclaw screaming the lyrics with a classic dreg/metal mix of joy and defiance.

He’s a hundred-percent jerk — Never had to work.

He’s a hundred-percent dumb — Wants all our music numb.

He’s a hundred-percent greed — Robs the families in need.

He’s a hundred-percent rich — He use you for his bitch.

It was a wild ride. Naz and Abdul were pounding the drums in a goose-stepper’s march, Cammy and Jutta were bubbling up fat sarcastic bass notes, Stanislaw was playing a wallpaper of paisley-shapes and I was stabbing rusty triangular knives of ostinato guitar feedback into K-Jen’s stark text.

He’s a hundred-percent war — Our kids are dying for.

He’s a hundred-percent killer — Behind his mansion pillars.

He’s a hundred-percent hate — Stop, it’s getting late.

He’s a hundred-percent pig — Why’d we let him get so big?

We all had mikes, and we came in together on the chorus, with the crowd pumping their fists and roaring the words along with us, over and over again, Waclaw’s hugely amplified voice soaring above it all, barking out the refrain with a quirky passion that made each repetition new.

Hundred-percent *sshole!

Hundred-percent *sshole!

Hundred-percent *sshole!

[Graph of Heritagist popularity.]

Yes, I know the lyrics look crude on the printed page, but forget not the transformative power of rock and roll. Imagine, if you will, thirty thousand people screaming these words at once, and imagine ten thousand Gobubbles floating among them, with each bubble showing a simulated moment of the projected hundred-percent Heritagist administration: truculent Joe Doakes announcing another war in the service of big business, police attacking poor people with clubs, industrial pipelines pouring poisons into rivers, American tanks razing mosques and minarets, hard-guy Frank Ramirez telling FBI agents to shut up, a skyscraper collapsing from a terrorist bomb, peevish Doakes and his marshmallow family hobnobbing with glittering billionaires, a fresh-faced American soldier dying, a hopeless old woman staring into an empty cupboard, pollution-caused cancer tumors swelling from an man's throat, Doakes testily signing another tax cut for the rich — hundred-percent *sshole!

[Your brain on music.]

Backstage we were jubilant, and with good reason. Though we didn’t fully realize it yet, we sensed we’d changed America for good. Before long, whenever a Heritagist politician said their pet code-phrase “hundred-percent” each and every listener would mentally append the word “*sshole,” often as not saying it out loud.

***

Have a good Independence Day. It’s still a free country — but only as long as you remember to use your freedom.

Last night we went to a party for the new office of Monkeybrains, the ISP run by Rudy, Alex, and Rafael. Everyone was dressed up.

Part of the evening’s entertainment was a spoken word performance by local poet Bucky Sinister.

He read from his book of poems, Whiskey and Robots. You can buy the book direct from Gorsky Press with Paypal or from Amazon with a credit card.

I really enjoyed Bucky’s poems, they had a nice Beat/science-fiction sensibility. One of them was about finding dead angels all over town and collecting their halos. Here's three lines:

—

I tried pulling one off, but the head came with it, and this marshmallow fluff crap poured out the neckhole and smelled so bad I thought I would puke.

Dude, that’s NOT how you do it, you said.

You slipped a mirror between the halo and the head and it fell away easily. We filled our bags with halos and left.

—

A great touch, that slipped-in mirror.

I often think of a fairy tale my mother read to me. There's a boy who’s helping the wizard roast the heart of a magic raven. He’s instructed not to taste it, but some hot fat springs onto the boy’s thumb, and he licks it off, and thereby extracts the entire benefit of the raven heart. The boy can understand the speech of plants and animals. The jealous wizard pursues him, but it's easy for the boy to get away, as he's getting advice from the birds and beasts and flowers of the field.

I told this story to my son several times, and at holidays, or even regular family dinners, we often encourage/discourage each other to pinch off the first bit of crisp fat from the food so as to “get all the good from the food and understand the speech of plants and animals.”

By extension this can apply to other dishes, e.g. to pizza or a large salad. It's all about eating the first morsel of the ritual feast.

If plants could talk, what would they say? “Here I am. It's sunny. My roots hold the ground. Soon I'll bloom. Here I am.”