first the earth was flat
but it fattened up
when we didn't fall off

Sometimes when you are a moose, you need to sound the chimes.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2PfEzx8Kb4]

A moose is a moose in North America, but in Britain a moose is known as an elk. Except not really. Because there aren't any there. In Britain. Moose. Or elk. They all died out there during the Bronze Age. Because the humans killed them. But, somehow, the word—"elk"—persisted in the twists and turns of the language. Even though there were no actual animals to apply it to. So, the British, they became accustomed to monikering as an "elk," any deer that looked to them rather large. Which was kinda, sorta, accurate. Because that's what a moose is: a really big form of deer. Elk: them is, too.

Over on the European continent, there were legitimate elk, as in moose, for a time. Until the humans there started killing them all off, too. Eventually, the animals receded to the far north, to Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Siberia, and the like. Where they dwell today. I don't know what they're called there, because the humans in those places, they speak and write in languages that I don't understand. I, myself: I barely understand English. Some of it—English—I get. Like: "Let floods o'erswell, and fiends for food howl on." That sort of thing: not a problem. But "I think Snowden is a terrible threat, I think he's a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country—you know what we used to do to traitors, right?" Or: "The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families." Nope. No comprende.

They don't have the word "moose" in the European countries, because that word is from the Algonquian, and they don't have any Algonquian in Europe. It is true that, once upon a time, a young Algonquian lad, there in "North America," he said to the people: "Hey, I know what let's say we do. Let's get in some boats, and sail to some other continents, and then we'll kill all the people there, and take all their land, and shit, and we'll invent cities and money and jobs, and all the live-long day we'll worship machines and nonsense, and we'll make everyone else do that, too. So: what say you?" What the people said was, that he was very ill, poor boy, and so they put him to bed, and they gave him Medicine, and they watched over him, until he was Better. And that, was the end, of that.

No matter whether it's called a moose, or an elk, or whatever else it might be named in those languages I understand even worse than English, the Science Men, they have decreed that the animal, wherever it may be, is an Alces alces. Presumably the word, it is repeated twice, so there will be no mistake. "Alces alces," these are words (word) from an extinct language—Latin, a dead language, native only to dead people. The Science Men, they name all things, living or dead, in this dead language, of dead people, who are glumly mumbling about, in their deadness, there, across the river Styx.

Does any of this, make any real sense? Of course not. But: don't worry about it. The moose, they don't care, what any humans might call them. When. Or where. Alive. Or dead. The moose, they just sound the chimes. "We have heard," say they, "the chimes at midnight."

In North America, there are elk, that are not the elk, of Europe. These are different-one elk. Their dead-people name, it is Cervus canadensis. These elk, they are not as big as a moose. But they are certainly bigger than you. Or me. Or even the largest human on the planet, rumbling through a supermarket, in a motorized fat-cart.

Elk, they used to be all over the place, here in California, in a localized version dead-languaged as Cervus canadensis nannodes, or "tule elk." But then the white people showed up, and that meant all the tule elk needed to be dead. They got rid of most of the tules, too. Did the white people. The white people, they managed to stop before they had killled all the tule elk—but just barely. They massacred these animals, down to a single breeding pair.

There are also in California, in a couple of far-northern preserves, a few Cervus canadensis roosevelt, or Roosevelt elk. A name that is extremely rude. Because Theodore Roosevelt, for whom these elk are named, he was almost as avid to roam around the United States, hunting and killing animals, as he was to roam his United States around the world, hunting and killing people, who were not white. Whom Roosevelt, a sort of ur-Hairball, regarded as scarifying "Mongolians," menacing the purity of whiteness. "No greater calamity," foamed he, "could now befall the United States than to have the Pacific slope fill up with a Mongolian population." Yes. Indeed. Everything old. Really is. New again.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nrT3zqYUuw]

Elk, they are useful to understand, for people who are interested in the politics. Because, as the dead person Hunter S. Thompson once so artfully explained, a human who has decided to try to be the president, s/he is akin to a bull elk in rut.

A man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare—any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it. The bull elk is a very crafty animal for about fifty weeks of the year; his senses are so sharp that only an artful stalker can get within a thousand yards of him . . . but when the rut comes on, in the autumn, any geek with the sense to blow an elk-whistle can lure a bull elk right up to his car in ten minutes if he can drive within hearing range.

The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timbers like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares.

A politician finally smelling the White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything he can't handle personally, he will hire out—or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because so few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents.

The presidency is as far as he can go. There is no more. The currency of politics is power, and once you've been the Most Powerful Man in the World for four years, everything else is downhill—except four more years on the same trip.

We know, now, from The Mad Bomber, that this terrifying bull-elkness, it is not cabined to the human male. Wanting to be the president, it can send, deep into the realm of the saneless, x-chromes, too.

But those are elk. Not moose. Moose, I think they would rather play in the sprinkler. And, maybe, to Alison Krauss music.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNy9jTeolUk]

That song, it was written by Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz. On a day that had been a dry hole. Nothing was coming. They hadn't produced a thing. All, the wasted, day. Then, as Overstreet recalls, "as we tried to find another way to say nothing, we came up with the song." These men, who wrote the song, they didn't think much of it.

But Keith Whitley, he did. Whitley, he was a bluegrass person, transitioning to country. And he was really charmed, by the song. He said he wanted it. So, Overstreet and Schlitz, they gave it to him. The song helped kick-start Whitley's career. A career that didn't last long. Because Whitley, his brain was in pain: he suffered from depression. And he self-medicated with alcohol. And that worked. For a time. Until it didn't. And so he died of alcohol poisoning. At age 33.

Some years later, Alison Krauss, she recorded the number, for a Whitley tribute album. Her song, it was released as a "B" side. Nobody, in the money-rooms, thought it anything special. But the people, it developed, they wanted the song. And so, for the first time, Krauss music, it manifested upon the charts.

More years go by, and then an Irishman, Ronan Keating, records his version. And the people commenced swooning, all over the isles . . . and then, too, down in South America, and also over in Asia. Keating's version, it is then inserted into the marvelous mush movie Notting Hill. And you can go, right now, to the YouTube, and experience, there, the Keating version, yoked to the film, uploaded by someone Vietnamese, complete with Vietnamese subtitles.

I really like. How music. It travels.

Music that hasn't traveled, nearly enough, yet, is the gamelan music of Bali and Java. The primary problem, here, is that generally it goes on for twelve to sixteen hours, accompanying intricate wayang puppet performances. Not even opera people, or even Deadheads, are accustomed to "songs," that literally go on all night, from dusk till dawn.

People, they are not accustomed to films that spool out at 720 hours, either. For 720 hours: that is 30 complete days. But such a film, it is coming. Ambiance, from Swedish director Anders Weberg. Recently a seven-hour, twenty-minute trailer was released. A longer trailer, clocking in at 72 hours, is forthcoming. The film features two performance artists on a beach in southern Sweden; that's about it. No cuts. "Space and time is intertwined into a surreal dream-like journey beyond places." Partially based on the beachside chess-match in The Seventh Seal.

So don't bitch. The next time Martin Scorsese. He frenetically spills. One of his three-hour coke bindles. Onto the screen.

That 440-minute Ambiance trailer, it is embedded below. Because: why not?

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLevgVmZ8rE]

That trailer, it is infinitely preferable, to this endless making-the-president horror.

Back in late January, I blithely wrote that a presidential election is "sort of like a vast national pregnancy. For nine months, the nation is increasingly swollen with votes. Then, finally, and in the fullness of time, the new baby president is born." How so totally wrong I was. No pregnancy, it has ever lasted, as long as this campaign. This ceaseless and perverse making of the president, it must have consumed at least 991 months by now. And the end, it is nowhere in sight. It is seriously warping my brain. I feel like a rat in a Science Man torture chamber. And, there, is no one. Who will make it. Stop.

Sunday, I was in the supermarket, standing before the cans of cat food, trying to puzzle out, like all cat people, which of the infinite variety of flavors, on the shelves there assembled, would be considered, at least marginally acceptable, by my impossibly finicky felines.

Then, round the corner, and into my aisle, rumbled a motorized fat-cart. Asprawl in it was a truly massive yeehaw. He was ululating his vocal chords at top volume about the animals he had killed. When still, one presumes, he was able to walk. Or maybe he kills animals from a fat-cart. Who knows. With these people. Then, as he rumbled closer, I beheld, besmeared across his 19-acre torso, a black t-shirt, emblazoned with a giant and hideous image of The Mad Bomber; and, below this, the legend, "Crooked Hillary."

How quickly. I marveled. Did it travel. From The Hairball's twit machine. To the hideously swollen, poisoned, bodies. Of The Hairball's people.

And, I realized, in that moment, that, for me, this campaign, it might not be survivable.

Prior to the commencement of this madness, I had steeled myself, for The Mad Bomber. As I recently moaned here: "Her show, it has been on longer than even Gunsmoke, and it is time to pull the plug. She is fucked-out, worse than ever were Chester, or Miss Kitty. She is like a Wrong refrigerator, old and rundown, that remains there in the kitchen, just out of sloth. It is time she was junked. But first take the doors off. So no children can crawl in there, and suffocate."

But I had not anticipated, this Hairball. I had not thought that, so many, would, so willingly, so lay themselves open, for such a truly depraved fuck.

You see, all of my life, I have had to move among the people of The Hairball. Always, they have been titanically difficult, to tolerate. But, now, when they are emboldened by The Hairball himself, I simply can no longer stomach them. At all. I need them, all, to go away. This instant. I think I need to go down to the basement, and there into the Lab, and invent a Ray. That, when directed at the people of The Hairball, will transform them. Into sentient beings.

I feel like the weatherman in the true-life documentary film Groundhog Day, condemned to every day awaken to more of the same old Wrongness. I have taken, like that weatherman, to wandering the alleys at night, looking for an old dying wharf rat, whom I can hobble into a diner, and there feed him soup. Then, I will go out, and, each day, catch the boy falling from the tree, inflate the flat tire on the old-lady-mobile, Heimlich the mayor, entertain the people with the piano—something, anything, any of it, all of it, just to turn the page, and get past this.

It is worse, this, than limbo, that endless spirit-dulling grayscape, that finally the Catholic Church, it just abolished. Because it was just too cruel. But no one, is abolishing this campaign. Though, it is worse. More cruel. Than ever was limbo.

It is so Wrong, that it can't possibly be Real. I must be stuck in a novel, or a TV show, or a movie, or a play. And I Need, to Get Out.

I am still firm, in my here-stated conviction, that neither The Hairball, nor The Mad Bomber, shall become the president. Something, somehow, will prevent it. Even if it is a Fringe event.

And I am thinking, now, maybe the buffalo, will in some way be involved. Because, ever since The Kenyan, and the Confederates in the Congress, they recently agreed, for once, upon something, to designate the buffalo the national mammal, the buffalo, they have been getting kind of feisty.

They are, for instance, bulling into people's backyards, and there jumping up and down on the trampolines.

Maybe, I'm thinking, they will stampede, the conventions.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q00-Q4U1iKk]

things are not always
how they seem
will you be ready

they don't turn out always
don't quite turn out always
how we think
will we be ready

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0-LC2vyge4]