First things first: although the Building & Loan has for the nonce been saved, and George (a.k.a. Johnny), he does not now have to go into the prison, all is, not yet, not Saved, from Lost.

Because, while the people have kicked in roughly $3000 to the caucus99 kitty, and further pledged some $855 per month, so that Johnny does not elsewhere have to earn his crust, still, that latter figure, it is but one-fourth the amount Johnny said he requires, or one-half that of which he has said he might, with, settle.

So. Let us open our hymnals. And proceed first to this Dallasdoc canticle, and next to this davidincleveland evensong. There, let us give. And give generously.

Hast thou given? Okay, then. On with the show.

I have decided to embark on a crusade against the Panama Canal. It is stupid and wrong, and it needs to be ripped up and filled in. Also, that imbecilic Indian-killing idiot-ditch that the Chinese want to plough through Nicaragua, that, too, must be Stopped.

Why? Because the existing Panama Canal, and the proposed Nicaraguan nonsense canal, they are right where North America and South America are fucking. Or were. Until the Panama anathema went in, and commenced permanent coitus interruptus.

Everyone knows the universe exists only because Shakti and Shiva are fucking; if ever they were to stop, so would the universe.

Similarly, ceasing the fucking of North and South America, this has cried havoc, and all over the planet. When once that cursed canal is removed, and the two continents can then start up again, many Problems, they shall recede, and many Harmonies, they shall be restored.

This is true science Fact.

Also stupid and wrong, is this wretched heat. It is mid-August now, and I am ready for the summer to be over. The oak trees, they are starting with the dropping of the leaves: doesn't that mean it's fall? So, let's get on with it, already.

Every year around this time I am voting no on the summer, yet, still, always, it burns on. I was really hoping that The Cranky Brooklyn Deli Man, he would become the president, because that would mean we would have the Socialism, and, thereby, the government, it would send me a Free air conditioner. But, alas, it looks like that is not happening.

Instead, it seems, that the president, wants to be either The Mad Bomber, or The Hairball. These people, they are not going to send me a Free air conditioner. The Mad Bomber, her people will lock on officious Measuring snitches to my cooling devices, and, if the numbers come up higher than what I am "allowed," my name, it will be put on a List, in an Email. The Hairball, he will "call up law enforcement, and we have to have the sheriffs, and the police chiefs, and everybody," coming into my house, to confiscate all my cooling devices, on the ground that I touch brown people.

I am sitting here trying to recall if I have ever lived in a place with an air conditioner. And I realize I have not.

Ye gods.

Presently I make do with a swamp cooler, six fans, four fountains, and about 26 houseplants, some of which are larger than Sane, such as the palm, the banana trees, and the monstera deliciosa. The eventual goal is to have a jungle inside the house, so that people will have to push through foliage, as they wander to and fro, talking of Michelangelo. Tubes, they claim that houseplants not only purify the air, but also make it cooler, but who knows whether such tubes may be believed? It used to be said that Satan, he was the Father of Lies, but now we know that this is itself a Lie: for it is the tubes, that are not only the father, but also the mother, aunt, uncle, sister, brother, cousin, and grandma in the corner, too, of Lies.

Sometimes all the do-making of all these devices, waters, and plants, they are simply not enough. And I feel, then, as if I dwell, on the surface of the sun. It is then that I shovel some ashes from out the wood stove, sit in them, and scrape myself with pot-shards, like Job, and, like Job, wonder why the hey, the day I was born.

I was born in August, in the early part, and, according to my mother, when they got me home from the hospital, I basically just laid on the bed and cried. I was the first child of these people—they had no experience—and so they didn't know if this crying was Normal, or what. Various relatives, neighbors, friends, people pulled in off the street, they were consulted. As they were humans, none of them could agree. Finally, I was packed up and transported to a doctor. In those days, (white) people, they could do that—go to the doctor, and without mortgaging the house, or agreeing to someday whack somebody for Don Chicci.

If they had only bothered to ask me, I would have told these people that I was crying in utter despair, having discovered I had somehow incarnated on a planet perverse with unbearable horrors, like The Three Stooges, Pat Boone, and head cheese. But, they didn't. So, I didn't.

There at the doctor, he was running Tests, and muttering that there didn't seem to be anything wrong with me, when once, while he was out of the room, the nurse, she asked my parents to describe our living conditions. Which were: second-floor, small, stuffy apartment, windows along but one wall, no air conditioner, no swamp cooler, just a fan or two. "He's just hot," the nurse said. "Poor baby. When it gets cooler, he'll be fine." And lo. It proved to be so.

When I was older, and therefore able, I became aquatic, during the summer. My parents, they had those plastic pools, in the backyard, pools that grew larger, over the years, as finances allowed. But mostly there were the municipal pools. I don't think they cost money. But then, I wasn't, at that time, really conscious of money. Most children enjoy, if only for a very brief time, a golden age, in which they are wholly ignorant, of money. I remember my own daughter, once wanting to do something or other, and I saying we didn't have the money for it, suggesting to me, very calmly, very reasonably, "why don't you just go to the bank and get the money from there?" See, she had seen me, many times, stick the card in the slot, there at the bank, and money then issue forth. She didn't know that one actually had to "have" money in the bank: she thought a person just put the card in the hole, and then the bank generously dispensed the greenbacks. Which of course is the way it should be. But isn't. Yet.

I also had some friends, born into a class or three higher than I, who had the real, concrete swimming pools. I remember I was in one when the Americans first committed the obscenity of walking on the moon.

I was in the pool with B—it was her house—and her friend L. There in the house were a couple adults, and they, especially the man one, kept urging us to come inside and look at a tube and therein watch some aluminum-wrapped something-or-other shuffle through some dust. "You're missing it!" the man-one kept calling. "You need to see it!" But no. I didn't need to see shit. And I was missing nothing. Because L, there in the pool, she had decided to teach me how to kiss. Really kiss. She was an older woman. Sixteen, I think. Maybe seventeen. I was, I think, twelve. "They're on the moon!" the man-one yelled out from the house. Yeah, well, so was I. On the moon, in the moon, over the moon, of the moon, with the moon, sister of the moon, goddess of the moon.

B went inside, briefly, looked at the moon tube, and then returned with a Report.

"They're putting a flag there," she said. "So silly."

This was a fortuitous confluence of events for me. Because I imprinted that day on the Reality that Eros, is, always, more important, than any silly Space Man, Science Man, Rocket Man, Patriot Man, Flag Man.

And also Politics Man. Because, when the tubes that day weren't triumphantly blatting through the moon dust, they were attending to that Politics Man who, a couple days before, had been in a car, that had somehow gone off a bridge, and into some water, and somehow, there, a young woman, she had drowned, and gosh, he just really doesn't know how that could have happened, and gee, he was really sorry.

That was Chappaquiddick. If those two episodes were to occur in such close proximity today, there would be eleventy-billion tubes screeching at top volume that the moon landing was just shit made up, hastily staged somewhere in Area 51, to distract the people from the Kennedy running wild and drowning people.

This is the Chappaquiddick story I once heard, from a man of Power and Place, in the politics. He claimed it was the common wisdom, among people of his Station.

And this story, it was that Kennedy, he didn't even know Kopechne was in the car, until long after she had drowned.

They had all been whooping it up, these people, at your typical Irish party: prodigious liquor consumption, embarrassing bibulous staggering, wanton sexual fumbling. At some point Kennedy, and a woman who was married, they decided to drive away from the bacchanalia, to seek out some place affording some sexual privacy. Kennedy, sixteen sheets to the howling Irish wind, drove off the fucking bridge. He and his inamorata, they managed to get free of the sinking vehicle, and then wetly tramped on back to the boozeshack. Everyone there considered themselves oh so lucky, that Ted and his woman, they had safely emerged, from their Paddyfied watery ordeal.

Quite some time passed, before it was noticed that Mary Jo, she did not seem to be around.

What had happened is that, seeking some peace, among the drunken revelers, she'd gone outside and snuggled into sleep, there in the backseat of a car. Ted's car. He didn't even know she was there. Till she was long dead.

Then all these desperately hungover rednoses, they frantically tried to come up with some story. That would leave Ted's married paramour out of it. And, what they concocted, was nonsense.

Have you ever been a desperately hungover rednose, trying to come up with some story to explain why, say, you walked down Main Street, with your penis hanging out your pants?

Just. Doesn't. Work.

Now, I gotta say, I been to some Irish parties. Please don't ask me, how many. And I've been both the person who sought peace in sleep in the backseat. And the person who unknowingly drove off, with some sleeper ensconced there in the back.

So, do I think this story is Real? Beats me. Personally, I think both Chappaquiddick, and the moon landing, were just shit made up. To distract the people, from what was most important: that I kissed a girl.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1vyYFEs3L4]

Here's another story, of What Really Happened, this time concerning the Real Reason why Jimmy Carter, he was not elected to be the president, for a second term. Come courtesy, Gore Vidal.

[Rudolf Nureyev] had a great deal of property in and around Washington, DC, where he had installed relatives. He was also eager to get his mother to America if only for a visit. The Soviet authorities were cooperative but the Americans were not. Someone suggested that he appeal to President Carter. This proved to be a disaster. The beloved ex-president-to-be was not yet on view. Instead, "wreathed in malaise" as he called it, he was in no mood to grant favors to someone like Nureyev. Rudi was still in a rage as he described Carter's treatment of him. He had been summoned to the White House where Carter reminded him that the leader of the free world had quite a lot on his plate and had no time to bother about the mother of a famous dancer. Rudi was shocked by the little man's bad manners. It was all so like Rudi's native Siberia where "criminals" were sent and petty bureaucrats ruled. Carter made it very clear that he would do nothing to help Rudi's mother to visit America. Rudi's volatile Mongol temperament was aroused: "I expected better from an American president so I cursed him."

"You did what?" I was not certain I'd understood him. He was grinning in memory. "I cursed him first in Russian but there was no translator so I cursed him again in English." When I asked him for some technical details of the curse—bell, book, and candle, say? "I told this Carter he would be punished for not allowing an old woman to come visit her son, for his cruelty and his rudeness and then I said that because of this behavior he would lose the coming election, which he did and all thanks to my curse."

Sometimes when once you get into a writer, it is hard, then, to get out. Thus, so, now, with Vidal.

In last week's Tummler, I referenced Hitler's pope. Here, per Vidal, is how that fellow, met his, rather explosive, end.

Years later when Howard and I were living in Rome's Via Giulia, Pius XII (real name Pacelli) finally died. Apparently, he was something of a faddist when it came to medicine. The ultimate fad proved to be his embalmment by what seems to have been an amateur taxidermist. As a result, while he lay in state in the basilica, he turned, according to one viewer, "emerald green." Then, in response to the summer heat, he suddenly exploded. This was kept from the world for a long time until someone (a Jesuit?) passed on the information. It is also reported that many sturdy Swiss guardsmen fainted during this holy combustion.

Christ Jesus the Science Men can be such Flailing Upendas.

Now they're having an organism because they think they've found, there, with their Looking, Science Men tools, "a fifth force of nature."

Like: duh.

Previously, the Science Men, they had identified "four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces." The names are all wrong, but they sort of have the general idea. So long as they are operating solely—which they are—on the larval plane.

They've been having, the Science Men, a great puzzlement, about "dark matter," which "is thought to make up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe, but it neither absorbs nor emits light, so it's impossible to detect directly." Now, maybe, from this dark matter, which they cannot directly detect, they think they might have detected "the fifth force."

But of course. Anyone who has viewed the true-life documentary film The Fifth Element, knows what this is about. Dark matter, it is Desire, and the fifth element, it is Love. And all the boy has to do, is say the damn words, and mean them, and then, pouring forth from the woman, shall come the white light, that shall heal all the world.