The term “Old New York” can mean several things. For some it means the New York of Caleb Carr’s mystery novels, the New York of Boss Tweed, or the New York of Teddy Roosevelt – the historic old New York. The well-conceived but terribly executed film, “The Gangs of New York” showed us something like the possible flavor of the time.

For others old New York invokes images of Alexander Hamilton at the Battle of Manhattan, with his regiment cut off by the British in the Battery until Aaron Burr broke through the lines to their rescue – ironically enough, considering their future, more famous, meeting. What I think of is New York in the 1970’s, when Times Square was a haven for pornographers and the South Street Seaport was a tourist attraction for the ghoulish rather than the gentile. I think of the garbage strike, the homeless blight, stepping over the frozen corpses of alcoholics on a winter’s morning. Believe it or not, there are New Yorkers who nostalgically long for the return of such misery. Change of any kind is threatening. How well I understand that. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the recent city-wide ban on trans fat – whatever that might be – which is apparently guided by an ambition to improve life’s quantity by diminishing its quality, a predictable error of the current day. For food lovers, therefore, old New York may mean the glorious period before the arrival of the health police.

 

Gothic mystery surrounds the hidden places of New York. I found several web sites devoted to exploring abandoned subway stations and condemned asylums, and the like. Sure, I remember passing a subway station that was no longer used during one of my many rides on the IRT. The train slowed – for some reason known only to the driver – and there it was, like a setting from “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” or some other apocalyptic dream. And yes, it was interesting. I could imagine what it might be like to try to find it on foot, behind some door in some other station, and down many stairs, or up many stairs – who can say? As you may know, since I wrote of it extensively in the old White Lodge, one of my earliest childhood memories is of having my hair cut in a barber shop in the old 42^nd Street subway station, after coming all the way from 207^th Street with my grandfather on the legendary A Train. I remember it as a city underground, with shops, with street musicians, with a gypsy fortune teller – the whole bit. It’s still down there, somewhere. The new station is not the same station. I think the Times Square station on the Number 1 train more closely resembles what I remember. Maybe I have it wrong. We might have walked over to Dyckman to catch the Number 1, but I’m just about lead pipe certain we descended into the sidewalk right at the end of the block, which was Inwood – the A Train.

 

Whichever the case, it is fine to imagine the subway station of my memory still exists in a parallel dimension that can be reached by pushing open some forbidden door. It is 1965. The gypsy is still telling fortunes. The men are wearing hats. Two Hasidic diamond sellers are talking animatedly with their hands while they wait for the next train to Brooklyn. The market sells live poultry in feathered cages. The telephone numbers on the signs begin with words. The word romance means several things, but firstly it means story. Hidden, secret places that may or may not exist in the real world – and I suppose that is for the intrepid spelunker to discover – must exist first in the heart if they are to be interesting, if they are to be worth finding. There’s a story behind the forbidden door; otherwise there would be no reason to open it. I suppose I could always apply for a job with the Metropolitan Transit Authority to gain access to the secret places of old New York. And, come to think of it, that was Grandpa’s job. He built the subway – or parts of it. Grandpa came over from Ireland in 1920 or thereabouts. His first job was carrying coal up in Boston. When he moved to New York he got a better job – the same job he would retire from, (and I remember when he retired) – with the New York Rapid Transit Authority. He must have known the city’s secret places rather well. It was a boiler room explosion that had scarred the one side of his face. It was smoother than the other. In our own minds there are doors which open into stories – romances – beyond counting. Each of us carries within us a mysterious labyrinth of doors and tunnels, and chambers, and stairs.

The Third Avenue Elevated was his project, so I am told. That’s the train King Kong destroyed in the movie. And then, Kong headed over to the other engineering masterpiece of the time: the Empire State Building. When we look at that movie we may see something quaint and old, but of course everything old was once new. King Kong was promoting the modern marvels of its day. Oh brave new world that has such humungous monkeys in it… When you put the words elevated and subway together you’re speaking nonsense, but the elevated trains were part of the subway system, and the underground subway in Manhattan became the elevated subway in Brooklyn, so… go figure. Riding in those trains is one of life’s pleasures which is better appreciated in memory – once you don’t have to do it anymore. But even then I know I enjoyed it, notwithstanding the occasional giant primate attack.

 

Trains offer a view of the normally unseen and secret back ends of places, the back yards of houses with the laundry hung out to dry, the back loading docks of factories and stores seen only by truck drivers and garbage men, and workers on break. I suppose there are people in the world who never get to see such things. I would watch commuters riding on the train with their faces buried in the newspaper. That seemed like such a waste. The scene was ever-changing outside the yellowed windows, a view far more fascinating than any written account of the latest sewer scandal. But I suppose seeking out the hidden places of the world is an acquired taste. Or perhaps some of us are born with that curiosity – who can say? I am a person who looks in windows, and not as a peeping tom who wants to catch a glimpse of skin, but as an explorer of hidden places who wants to catch a glimpse of life. The outside world resembles the inside world of the mind in several special ways, so that exploring the one leads us to discover the secret places in the other. The fortune teller said I would become an explorer when I grew up. She was only half right; I was already an explorer even then. But the fortune only cost a dime. That dime and a lollipop were my rewards for sitting still in the barber’s chair. Then we got back on the train, Grandpa and I. It was a terrifying, fascinating trip.  

 

 

At some point a bus service came into being. My town was in the country. Where the parking lot is now for the public beach there was once a corn field. A few weeks ago I posted a picture which I took from that parking lot. You can’t really call my neighborhood a suburb. Grandpa built the house in 1925 as a summer cottage – a camp, as it might be called hereabouts. The other houses which sprouted up around us in the 50’s were also camps, for the most part. Mine wasn’t a business commuter’s neighborhood – yet. It was too far east of the city. By the time I was born that was beginning to change. The bus service started when I was a teenager in High School, and not yet driving. I had to walk the three and a half miles out of the posh and woodsy North Shore hills to reach the bus stop. From there it was a fifty cents ride to Huntington Station and the Long Island Railroad into New York. It was a trip I took many times, alone and also with my friends.

 

We just bummed around in Manhattan. We had the return fare and maybe five dollars between us. Later, when we started working we would probably have had a little more. Being able to buy coffee became important – coffee and cannoli in a dark cellar on MacDougal Street. In those days passing a joint on the street didn’t raise any eyebrows, though looking back on it I’d say that probably depended on the neighborhood. Times Square was one thing, Greenwich Village was one thing; but Tudor City? That was something else. That was a place where well-to-do cardiologists did lines of coke in the privacy of their homes, overlooking the East River. Yes, there’s a specific reason I think of that – one memorably foggy afternoon. The geezer wanted us to like him, though his expectations were a little beyond reality. I thought those high rises were like tombs, and down on the street level there was nothing to dispel that simile. There wasn’t much foot traffic, and hardly a storefront – just liveried doormen standing out in front of gold and glass doors.

We enjoyed hanging out in book stores and record shops. Occasionally we had enough money to see a film. But when I think of New York I think mainly of being very young, sitting in the back seat of the ’64 Rambler watching the city breathe through the glass. By the time I was old enough to catch the train on my own most of the cobblestone streets were gone. There was one stretch in particular – I’ll have to ask Dad where it was – where the whole length of the street was underneath the train tracks. Actually, that could describe any number of streets – several I can think of just off the Cross Bronx Expressway. But, with the tracks above and the cobbled street below, the buildings forming canyon walls on either side, it was like being underground. People went about their business oblivious to the 70 ton train which was screeching over their heads. I thought if they ever woke up out of whatever spell had them so transfixed they would become terrified, and run inside somewhere and hide.

 

Now that I’ve set that up, I’ll tell you again about how Dad lifted me up so I could look through a hole that had been cut into a fence, and down into Hell itself I watched monstrous earth moving machines moving earth, though hundreds of feet below me. When I looked up I could see skyscrapers, and down, just as deep as a skyscraper is tall, was the foundation for what would become the World Trade Center. Around the site, in fact, there weren’t any really tall buildings. I am blending images from memory that were imprinted there at different times and in different places. In order to erect the ill-fated tallest buildings in the world as was an entire neighborhood had had to be demolished. Dad used to do some bargain shopping there. And then one day the neighborhood was no more. It ceased to exist. It vanished. Replacing it was a concrete plaza which might have been imagined by Franz Kafka, and eventually – we watched them grow each time we crossed the bridge – two rather nondescript mammoth towers. It was hard to believe that people could inhabit anything so plain. They looked like solid bars on a bar graph in a school textbook which somebody had drawn inexplicably into the Manhattan skyline. It was not a masterpiece of urban architecture because the days of masterpieces were gone, like the Biblical age of giants – and like that vanished neighborhood.

I am thinking of the lady I used to know who worked in a huge commercial bakery where they made sour cream doughnuts – yum. She told me that when she and her co-workers went out on their break they would shut off the big mixer which folded the batter in a very large stainless steel vat, or bowl. When they would come back there would invariably be a number of flies on the surface of the batter. If there were a large number of flies someone would bend into the bowl to pick them out before the mixer was turned on again, but if there were only a few flies they wouldn’t bother. They would just turn on the mixer and let the flies disappear into the oblivion of sweet and sour sticky goodness. Apparently, there was an acceptable level of fly in the mix. I think that’s how memories also work – with an acceptable level of fly. You can’t demand perfection from them; nor can you practically apply a zero tolerance policy towards their occasional inaccuracies.

 

I can well imagine working in such a job. I used to run two web printing presses which stood side by side with an alley in between them. They were about as long as a tractor trailer truck, and little higher. Ladders built into the frames allowed us to reach the ink fountains which were up on top. Three-quarter ton rolls of paper were mounted on the back ends of each, and each press had six printing units, and one of them a color deck, which means that each press could pull six separate rolls. Like most lead pressmen, I began as a general helper, or materials handler. Within four or five years I had become an ink devil, or second pressman. A year later I was the shift supervisor and lead pressman. I was fired three times from that job, and hired back twice. That’s far from the record. We had a plant manager with a mercurial temperament. One of my firings played out like this: I took a book into the office to show the plant manager the difficulty we were having with the glue lines registration. He said, “My grandmother could do this job.” I said, “Well then, hire your grandmother.”

 

I miss it sometimes – the smells of ink and solvent. In those days I took the train with the construction workers and the fashion models – the five fifteen. The early rising trades had their own distinctive uniforms. Mine was blue, with black steel-toed boots. The construction workers wore either flannel and blue jeans or cotton-polyester blend overalls like my uniform. The fashion models wore smart little skirts that revealed more of their skinny legs than they covered. The effect was underwhelming, except the canvas sneakers added a certain je ne sais quoi. Riding the train was no longer like tripping the light fantastic. My friends would say, “Why are you doing this to yourself? Why didn’t you stay in school?” I would say it was because of that damned bus – the one that took you to the station for only fifty cents. It was because of the coffee and cannoli. It was just because. 

  

It is good to have a memorial service for the dead. It is a necessary part of the process of grief for the family that’s left behind. After mass I’d like to have a few people sit in my kitchen and say nice things about me. My son tells me we won’t need any extra chairs.

 

Well it is true I have more chairs than I need. I might try sitting in each and every one tonight. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that before. I’ll do it now – be right back.

 

Oh, the car needed a new hinckstchickler – happens every winter – and that darned roof of the lake camp needed shoveling off again. This time I remembered there was a slippery glass skylight under the snow and managed not to fall off.

 

An abscess has taken over half of my face. I look like a Dick Tracy villain. Who even knows Dick Tracy anymore? The first time I can recall having a nightmare inspired by something I read it was Mary Worth in the Sunday funnies. A white-faced, ghastly, (or ghostly), old woman appeared suddenly behind the protagonist as she was speaking into a telephone in the last frame.

 

I am told a dream of falling water towers haunted me. I have no recollection of that, but it seemed to make an impression on my parents. I think it must have been inspired by the Elmhurst tanks, which were gas tanks – of course – not water towers. I just did an image search and discovered that the Elmhurst tanks were demolished in 1991. I didn’t know that. Well, I’ve been living here since ’94. That means Long Island radio traffic reports were missing a vital landmark for nearly three years while I was still down there, and I didn’t even notice. They were hard to miss.

 

 

Now I miss them.

 

 

Both my boys are sick, and snotting up my apartment during their winter break. I am, as always, immune to whatever it is that supposedly causes the Common Cold. I haven’t had one in about twenty years. I wonder now if I ever really did. I do remember saying I had a cold. I remember buying the bargain Cold relief medicine that contained 35% alcohol. That was the best kind – only a dollar a shot. You can’t beat that in a bar.

 

It doesn’t matter how many Tic Tacs you take, by the way – the smell of vodka comes out through your hair. It will be eight years next month since I’ve had a drink.

 

Have you ever met a holy person? I don’t mean a “holier than thou” person, but an honest-to-goodness saint. I have. She appeared without warning. Nearness to her became overwhelmingly important, and there was also a little terror in the idea. She could see you. But there was peace, mainly – a violent peace that crushed every possible problem you might have, or think you have. I want that experience again. One of the definitions of passion is violence. God loves us passionately. I’ve been wanting to write about saints, but I’ve put it off for some reason. Other things seem to come up.

 

I’ve written here that Jesus is the Prince of Peace because He is victorious over death, and the peace we wish each other is the spoil of that victory. We don’t wish each other absence of conflict. That’s not peace; that’s just calm. I don’t mean to run down calm. Calm is nice, unless you’re on a sailing ship in the middle of the sea. Life has its rhythms of action and no action. The famous Wrath of God is the action of God. It’s all about God’s intervention. We think of it as anger – wrath – that’s the word we use, but that’s poetic and anthropomorphic.

 

I once wrote an ode to a coffee shop in Sodom and Gomorrah – what a wonderful place it was. Where was it? Was it here? I’m walking in a vacant lot. I’m trying to recall where that pleasant little corner might have been. All I see is dead grass and garbage. It’s gone. I have fond memories of it. The coffee was OK. That wasn’t the important part, though. It was all about the company, just not worried about a bloody thing, doing whatever we wanted to do and getting away with it. Being young and stupid we drank all kinds of alcohol and crashed the cars, and woke up in jail, and it didn’t mean anything. It was fun. We dropped acid and then walked around these city streets. The sidewalk seemed to pucker underneath our feet. Now the streets are gone – destroyed by the Wrath of God, the holy holocaust.

 

Have you ever had those gigantic soft, hot pretzels from the street cart? Oh my goodness, with a little mustard they are to die for.

 

I’ve learned there’s nothing wrong with having pleasant memories of the little coffee shop in Sodom and Gomorrah. Why shouldn’t I? Every alkie I’ve ever talked to – or listened to – has told me there was a time when his life was indescribably wonderful. At some point or other, he’s had more enjoyment than I think most people can imagine. But then, something happens, and it’s like fire from the heavens burns up everything – his favorite places, his family, his friends. For years he wanders about from here to there in vain, trying to find it again. It’s as though it never existed, but he remembers.

 

I know there’s a TV program on one of the cable networks that features interventions of the human kind. I gather it must be entertaining to watch people in great distress and humiliation. I don’t find it at all entertaining. In fact, I think people who enjoy watching that kind of thing – and I’m sorry if you’re one of them; perhaps I’m not fully getting something – are sadistic, and not quite sane. I’ve learned the only intervention that works is the Wrath of God, a passionate love.

 

A Love Supreme. John Coltrane. I have a friend who said A Love Supreme sounded to her like Muzak. I almost abandoned her on the Interstate, but that was my first thought only. My second thought was that I am profoundly grateful not to be married to her. Well, I know the poor schmuck who is. Fortunately, she is rather wealthy. You’ve got to learn to take the good with the bad. Life’s not fair. It’s not supposed to be. You can’t make it fair. If you try you end up creating a greater unfairness. This is why intervention is important: a team of highly trained Jazz interventionists can – with God’s help – remove whatever rubbish might be stuck in that girl’s mind which is making Coltrane sound like Muzak.

 

Well, I’m done. I keep looking over my shoulder for the ghastly, white faced old woman. I really wish I hadn’t remembered that.

"To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we (will then) be taxed in our meat and our drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they (will) be happy."

 

So, Thomas Jefferson wrote the above in 1791 – just yesterday. I gather that there are very few people who would agree with him these days. And I’d like to revisit a theme I’ve brought up a few times now, and throw it out to you, and hear your suggestions about what I might do. Since I know you care about me, and you want me to be happy – just as I would like you to be happy – and, since you know that I belong to an insignificant and unrepresented aggrieved minority group that definitely does agree with that statement and hundreds more like it, I will truly appreciate your ideas. Specifically, where in the world do you think I might emigrate to live with people who are like me?

 

If you’ve been reading right along you know I don’t mean by that people whose skin color is a little like mine, or people who go to the same church I attend; nor do I mean strictly males, (how dull would that be!), or strictly people in my generation. By “people who are like me” I mean Americans. Where can I go to be with other Americans and live amongst them?

 

I am nothing if not easy to get along with, as you know. I’ve visited other people’s countries, and I’ve been polite. I didn’t break any of their laws or laugh at any of their customs, though they did sometimes seem strange to me. I didn’t start any arguments. It’s really the same as visiting someone else’s home. Now, I don’t know any of you personally, but I think you’re probably friendly and helpful – just judging from your comments. You’re polite, and you’re always courteous when you go visiting.

 

It has been my experience that people are good before they are anything else, and that the goodness in them is so much more powerful than the badness in them that when they are free to make choices entirely for themselves it is the first thing to show, the first thing to come through. And so – and I think you’ll see why this may be true – in those countries where the people value their liberty they have been much more friendly on the whole, more hospitable, and simply more good. And in other countries where people are more restrained by various rules and regulations they tend to be a little more crabby. They have less to eat, and they don’t live quite as comfortably, so you can’t really blame them. But there was still some good to be found there – pretty mountains, beautiful architecture, or whatever.

 

Now, I haven’t traveled anywhere very recently – at least not to other people’s countries – but the strangest thing has been happening: my own country has turned into someone else’s country without my having to go anywhere. Isn’t that odd? And I was arguably a square peg right along in many ways. There have been a few things I’ve tried to change about the place. No place is perfect. Primarily, I haven’t so much been trying to change the country as I have been trying to change it back. The right to Life, for instance, was abolished when I was 12 years old, and I’ve been doing what I can to regain it. The right to Liberty has never been entirely secure. It depends on laws, really, and whatever their primary purpose seems to be – either to defend and preserve that right, or to limit and regulate it. And it has been more often the latter which you in the majority have wanted, and the result of this as far as I’m concerned is that I’ve been able to inhabit an ever shrinking portion of this country over time, and continue to be who I am.

 

Time was the country was mine to run around naked in – if you know what I mean. I could avail myself of all it has to offer without being attacked or threatened by unfriendly people. I felt at home here, or more at home here certainly than anywhere else. And this was still the case when I was traveling in the 80’s. No matter how wonderful the sights and sounds of foreign lands were I couldn’t wait to get back home.

 

I was in Paris once – a lovely city – near Pere Lachaise, visiting my old friend Balzac – when a couple of policemen stopped me and demanded I produce my papers. Of course by that they meant my passport, for indeed I had no others. And they were courteous in that professional way people who wear uniforms ought to be, so I wasn’t troubled by it. I was in their country, after all. But things like that – little things – made me homesick. And this was such a little thing on – say – a scale of one to ten.

 

But we know, don’t we – and this is why I cite the example – that France isn’t the place for me. Back in 1985 there was only that little thing, but many such little things have been set into motion since then to make it less attractive rather than more. There’s quite a lot of crime, and quite a lot of racial strife – probably quite a lot more than you’ve ever experienced. And we go back to this business of what it is that brings out the badness in people, and makes them less friendly. But I think the right to the Pursuit of Happiness is somehow connected to that friendliness, or lack thereof.

 

I’ve always wondered about that. What does it mean? Of course, it doesn’t mean you will be happy – or else. Nobody can make you happy. Nobody can pass a law that makes people happy. And I’ve learned that the people who do try to make happiness laws never really are. As a matter of fact, they always seem to be miserable. What it really seems to be all about is making everybody else as just as miserable, or perhaps more so. Obviously it’s all about possibilities and opportunities, so it really doesn’t mean anything at all without the Life part and the Liberty part. If you take away Life there’s no opportunity there, and if you take away Liberty there’s less opportunity – perhaps none, depending on how much you take away.

 

So, I hope you can see what my vision is for a place to live – the sorts of things I am looking for in a country. Wherever I might find those things I will move there – and I think several millions of others. Perhaps there is an empty space for me, a wilderness somewhere – hopefully on the water, and with some purple mountains majesty – yes, that would be nice. But those things aren’t as important as ideas. The thing about alien cultures which makes us long for home isn’t the way they look from the outside; it’s the ideas on the inside. People are united by nothing but their ideas. Their skin color doesn’t unite them. Their sex doesn’t unite them. Their age doesn’t unite them. People feel at home wherever their ideas are present, and that’s what makes one place different than another, and what makes one place more attractive than another. And that’s what makes one people different from another.

 

In my case I seem to be living in a country where my ideas are the opposite of mostly everybody else’s. This is very uncomfortable and very unfriendly. When I watch the TV I don’t hear anything like the ideas I have, so I’ve stopped trying to watch it. When I talk to my neighbors I don’t hear anything like the ideas I have. I’m polite, of course, but it’s a bit disconcerting all the same. When I listen to the lawmakers who will determine to a large extent what things are going to be like tomorrow I don’t hear my ideas; I hear the opposite of them. At no other time has this ever been the case. Oh, there’s been a shrinking piece of country for me – shrinking more it seems each year – but then, I don’t need much. Never before has there been no country for me at all.

 

I know a few people like me. We meet in secret. It’s nice. But it’s just not the same as being home. What do we talk about when we get together? We talk about home. We talk about old times – the usual thing. We talk about this place we’re in now. There’s one old cliché I hear quite a lot: “It’s a nice place to visit, but I’d hate to live there.”

 

And I’m sure more than a few of us would be happy to go somewhere else and let you in the majority get on with whatever you think is best for yourselves, and for your future. While I’m visiting I know better than to interfere. That would be impolite.

 

But if you have any ideas about where I might go next I’d appreciate hearing them. Be nice, though. My feelings are hurt easily, as you are no doubt aware.

 

One of the local cops just came by to tell me he had noticed my car registration expired last month, which was nice of him. My absent-mindedness when it comes to that sort of thing is a known fact. He spotted it at an intersection earlier, and he thought about turning around, but something else came up – I assume something more important – and so…

 

“I thought, ‘He probably doesn’t know,’” said he. Of course he was right. Now I’m waiting for a fax because it turns out I have no current proof of insurance, and I’ll need that. The cost to renew is $91.17. That’s for one car, not six.

 

OK – so here I am, not cleaning a carpet as I had planned, but waiting. I don’t want to drive out of my friendly little town where state troopers prowl. They don’t know me. And that’s interesting. I’ve been driving all over the place for a week in a state of invincible ignorance, not troubled in my mind at all, and no more likely to run into a predatory trooper than at any other time. Ignorance is bliss, right? But that’s not the point. I’m a stickler to the letter of the law when it comes to these trivial matters. If I ever have to go back to jail it won’t be for anything small.

 

I inherited my absent-mindedness from Dad – although I was adopted, which seems a bit strange, but – and Dad can be pulled over by a peace officer for having his legal stickers as much as six months out of date with the end result being no more than a friendly warning. The officer in question may, for all we know, be in the habit of torturing puppies in his cellar, but when he approaches Dad’s car a change in outlook and personality comes over him – at least temporarily – and he ends up apologizing for creating an inconvenience for the obviously innocent-of-all-wrong-doing Enlightened One who sits in the driver’s seat.

 

I don’t seem to make the same impression on policeman. Middle-aged women, yes, but policemen, no, adopted inheritance going only so far, I gather. I have learned that handcuffs only hurt if you try to move, by the way. You might want to remember that.

 

So, I’ll write about what I am thinking as I wait for the fax machine to deliver the anticipated paperwork. I am thinking about thoughts. Try to imagine that thoughts are things, even though you may think the opposite is true, (and if you do, you’re half-way there – wherever there may be). Thoughts are made of two things which are put together, data and information.

 

Data is the raw material of thoughts, like a molecule is to matter. Information is the glue which binds data together in certain shapes, as energy to the molecule. This shape determines the quality of the thoughts.

 

Sometimes these words, data and information, are used synonymously, but there really is no such thing as a perfect synonym. Why? Because, in that case, there would be no necessity for having two different words which mean exactly the same thing. Think of it as the fine tuning knob on your short wave radio. You do have a short wave radio, don’t you? I hope so.

 

I’m also thinking about perception because perception isn’t determined by data, which is neutral (genderless), but by information which is gendered. That’s why two people can arrive at different thoughts with the exact same data. The shape of the thought, determined by the glue of information, affects, among other things, what we call perception.

 

Perception is not reality, as it is sometimes said of politics, but a way of interpreting it. There exists outside of this combination of data and information an objective reality. (Sometimes we call it truth, but the word truth can mean a number of other things too, so I’ll stick with objective reality to avoid confusion.) There being an objective reality – that is, not dependent upon perception – it follows that things are not thoughts, but things exist with or without thoughts, or non-concomitantly. It may more accurately be said that things are plastic in relation to thought. In other words, thoughts can alter the shape of matter – bend it, stretch it, make computers out of it, and so on. But matter is not made of thought.

 

Matter is made of Muenster cheese, as we all know.

 

Anyhoo, these were my thoughts when I noticed the presence of the Law at my door. It’s a long way around saying, “Don’t panic. Maybe he is selling tickets to the Policeman’s Ball.” But it’s the way this mind of mine operates. I am rather gifted in self-entertainment abilities.

 

Nothing about reality changed when I learned my tags were out of date, but something about perception did. This was the result of receiving not just new data, (which was unchanged), but new information. See?

 

Here’s my fax.