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.”

[I got a pig bowl for Father’s Day, too. It’s shy.]

Here’s a satirical passage that I wrote for Mathematicians in Love yesterday. Bela has just arrived at an alternate Earth and is riding in a car with Cammy, a friend of his, native to this alternate world. They turn on the radio. It’s the summer solstice, June 20, and a full moon is rising.

“Oh, this news is gonna be perfect for you, where your head’s at right now,” said Cammy, putting her hand back on the steering-wheel. “It’s gonna seem like you’ve ended up in a sick, weird, evil alternate reality. Feel it, bud, that’s the world we’re livin’ in.”

The show had switched to a tape of Joe Doakes at a recent rally. “In these perilous times, our nation deserves a hundred percent Heritagist government. We can afford no less. Now, I don’t mean to question the patriotism and honesty of each and every member of the Common Ground party. But — if you buy a dozen eggs and one or two or three of them is rotten — common sense says you get your money back and a fresh dozen from the store.” His voice was dry and humorless as a locust’s chirp.

[A moon near the horizon looks bigger to the naked eye than it does in a photo. So I changed it in this photo.]

“What I’m saying is simple common sense,” continued Doakes. “Over and over, the elected and appointed officials of the Common Ground Party have let our people down — in our Congress, in our courts, in our state legislatures, and in our governors’ mansions. I’m proposing a hundred-percent Heritagist victory this fall. We won’t settle for a majority again. We’ve endured the sorry parades of Common Ground filibusters, seen our dreams die in the power-brokered special-interest Common Ground committees, and tasted the lash of the willful, revisionist Common Ground courts.” Doakes was a madman. But each time he stopped, his audience burst into wild applause. Maybe it was a fake applause track?

[The end of the longest day of the year means the slow return of the dark…]

“With complete control of the Congress and the state legislatures, we can use the constitutional power of impeachment to remove the out-of-control Common Ground judges,” rasped the mean little voice. “This is what the balance of powers stands for. With complete control of the Congress and the state legislatures, we will propose and, with the people’s help, pass a constitutional amendment to remove the out-dated notions of Presidential and Congressional term limits. This is what a stable democracy deserves. The success of the hundred-percent campaign will bring lasting homeland security, an end to legislative grid-lock, and an end to the tyranny of the courts. Our great nation deserves no less than the hundred-percent freedom that a hundred-percent Heritagist victory will bring.” The applause crested like a thunderous wave, with the audience members cheering themselves hoarse.

We spent a peaceful Father’s Day in the back yard. Rudy, Penny and Slug came to visit. We ate out there, read the paper, played Scrabble. No machine noise.

Slug chased a cat up our tree.

After awhile, I felt sorry for the cat, she was scared and not all that agile. Her eyes were going back and forth like one of those cat clocks. Eventually she made her way down. Good thing the ground was slanting, and cushioned with lots of dead vines. She galloped off down the street.

For Father's Day, I got a pig cup and mosquito netting for my hat!

Becoming a father is the best thing I ever did.