Beyond the Outskirts (of so-called civilized living)

Despite my title for this blog I’m prone to plenty of hard vices for an amatuer writer: too wordy, archaic language, too light on character as barely formed ideas take me on a brain trip past Toad Hall at 120 mph (or “drunk on the autobahn speed” for any readers outside the USA. Hello pally/s !)

So I’ll try to focus on character driven writing from now on.

Which is that the person who is best suited to live as a true anarchist would be someone the least likely to be one for the great revolt against the ancient ways of master and servant.

A scum of the earth mercenary , who not being so bound by family/nation/deity might well refuse the orders to take a hammer to the skulls of scores of elderly captives in a sacked city, and be able to back up their sudden spark of charity with a panther-like courage.

Of course I might be just identifying with the oppressor and indulging in typical boorish male fantasy if you prefer more socially minded fantasy fiction. To which I say, probably. But without saying I’m not responsible for the ideas I put out there, I prefer the idea that these characters have a life of their own, and are taking <em>me</em> over.

So take it up with these imaginary companions (I’m allergic to psych meds, and the doctors haven’t put a net over me yet!)

No this isn’t a Joker post. I don’t even like New Joker.

Barbaric Splendor

Somewhere above him, sealed in revolving casks of flyweights lay the letters to the book, not the final book perhaps but the book with every secret of the lost land, and Xotl’s own people in their journey from Stygia and the mind blasting secrets they once strove to guard from outside raiders.

Lost without understanding, he could not understand their voices on the wind through the cacti forests. So he’d come here, to the proud keep on the heights, and found only this quartzine maze of the Founder.

The first mirror broke into fragments that rained upon him in his flight. Behind Xotl the Cold Man barreled on with its elongated snout and iron thews, the flat-footed charge of the steel beast ravened in a mechanical maniac way for the blood of the Xuchotlan. As the iron beast crashed closer, Xotl gripped the long knife he still carried and prayed to the Green Lady but no plan came to him.

As it careened forward showering the semi-barbaric tracker with biting shrapnel, he sprang from his hiding place in the manner of a desert mountain wolverine– now he found slight purchase on the smooth and machine tooled surface of the creature, but its grasping pincers were easier to avoid up close.

He knew he was chancing a worse pulping of his injured frame by wrapping up the creatures middle with his legs in a lock position as he strove to pry back the neck plate and expose the semi-organic nerves piping along to the sensors housed in its sleek skull– like a man caught on the charging buffalo with no steering but to hold to its mane he and the metal charger tore through the crumbling Halls of Science in a welter of rending shards and screaming visions of an ancient past brought into the roaring case of steel guarded modern product from the old craft of the counterfeiter.

Beyond the Outskirts III

He’d traveled far from the land of his fathers, and though loath to admit it by voice, he had not witnessed much by deed or rumor to bear up the notion that men were made better in their rule or treatment of other men by the sight of beautiful lands and skies– But then he could say little for their improvement close crowded withdrawal of all comforts and tender human graces within the walls of the mountain castle where the walls seemed to sweat the congealed tears of every miserable end they’d borne mute witness to in the days of the lotus.

He was roused from this meditation by the shout of a Wazri, quickly stifled by his compatriot with a swift slashing gesture of his thick muffled hand. Hark– the passage above, one of the doors is undone, if my ears do not lie…ah what is that? Xotl placed his ear to the marble floor, and though he struggled to hear it, with ears used to the free motion of horses and whirling prairie devils, he felt the bounding tread of some immense animal, carrying all the hooves and snorting fire of hell with it. Form a stout line with your backs to the pillar men, and don’t waver with those lances no matter what comes down that hall he shouted, rising to a flat platform the slightly overlooked the hall where they’d been sitting moments before.

The Seer’s fastness shut its shining doors on Xotl’s attack, blocking them within its square warrens. The three Wazri bounders held their stout claw braided pikes in a ready crouch, but they shook in their padded armor like with an ague of ancient plagues released from long sealed bottles. Xotl pried at the edges of the doors, he threw his granite trained muscles into the quartz barriers, hammering with the strength of a maddened crew at a sealed bulkhead.

Finally sinking to the floor , he found the last fight left was keep his head and eyeline from sinking to his bosom . he’d seen men allow their nerve to leak from their navels long before any enemy with sword or bow claimed them. He composed himself as he rested, counting the strange goldwork and gilt whorls that traced the remnants of a strange and ascetic kingdom that the Silver Seers transposed for their own obscure uses .

The devotion of the former inhabitants and presumed builders of the Seer’s fortress were seeming devotees of both refined reposes amid gardens and the most barbaric torments inflicted on a captured nobles of another tribe or band of tribes that the absconded builders once warred against.

These halls were built over something much older, crooned the Seer’s disembodied voice. The curtains pulsed in glowing colors, he and the Wazri felt less as a band of desperadoes in a trap than defenders on a lone redoubt, with howling peaks on one side and plummets to the far rocks below to the other. Over it all brooded the strange and evil stones from which the curtains, the narrow shelves and the grisly bowls and candleholders ran with a light that belonged in skies reddened like blood mad eyes.

Beyond the Outskirts II

The broad hall with carven scenes of hunting and journeys over strange mountains and fields ringed the close walls , brooding upon any entrants with a sense of the structure that must weigh above that cliff sealed crypt. It was unreachable from the narrow broken heights from which she’d descended with the Auxai before Xotl took the fighters to scout and try and breach the walled plateau.

Vlayna whirled and squared with a starshot of twin wavering flames that stole back into the dark. Like two burning brands cast into a well of pitch, they fled before the singing of her scabbard as her blade smote and singed some stray mist from the clammy broil of the apparition.

The air within that chamber was oppressive as a summer hothouse despite the fall air that moved the wavering grasses in the vast fields outside. She stared as the floor rose up in glittering panels and she heard the searing yet not unmirthful chatter in the voice that followed– you have a noble figure for one so foolhardy to interrupt my sanctity. I will diminish your presumed lack of station…

She felt torn backwards as if an abyss swallowed the sky in its passage, and her ego telescoped downward to hover above a zero point that yet still hummed and churned with the tormented conscioussness within.

Vlayna felt hurtled on vermillion stained and dusty byways of time, saw roiling eons in their turn and flew above the rise and muster of great legions and cities until the only beggars left were to take up new rags hewn from the raw cacti and yucca stem. Stragglers who armed themselves with such sparse timber from the deserts to face with fear-struck eyes the cold dawn above the scoured wastes as mute mirrors to their vanished ancestors.

Then like a mote in a star tumbled sky she rocketed back into the lush seat before the psychic minister. The air was dark but for the curtains which seemed to glow a pale greenish haze across from the single white painted table that sat between them, and before her the man whom she now knew no mistake was one of the Seers, sought by the fen beating hordes of the Auxai, chortled and grimaced in his delight at her bewilderment.

Now you won’t deny our masterful truth, like those wine sotted japes that call themselves the Meydin Hall of Science. I laugh at the Auxai outfielders as well, the stinking savages won’t accost me here.

Even as she wished to shrink from his merciless gloating and triumphal sneer, she raised her frame to the full and directed the now soaring ire of the river boat privateer and Captainess at her captor — You mottled and failed sooth and stoop haunter! You dare abduct a holder of the keys of the Gonzalin League? Whilst in the fulfillment of a disarming and call to stand before the infallible of this land?

When the Xuchotlan arrives here…she silenced her mouth but not her wrath as a fresh wave of mirth seized the Seer. It shook from his swaying stomach to his stout upper body. Under his silken and loose garments he resembled a water hog with the lower half of a bandy legged wagoneer, fresh from hauling his produce and swaggering on his cushion below the black and white fringed mirrors and the piercing light from a single brand that burnt above them and seemed to give more animate leap and gleam to the strange parodies of life that brooded from the shadows around the sorcerer.

When that devil hearted rouster gets here, I’ll subdue and slay him in my lair. Here, wench! I have complete rule and through you , the City Hall of the League will empty of all but the most supplicant to brush their noble pates upon the royal floors at my leave.

Cowboys and Lawmen in Ancient Plains

Uncouth and halting interactions with the desolate outside. Pressing gifts many threaded sleeves as the men wearing multi-colored patterns of vulture and warthog slapped trinkets and tobacco pouches furnished with strange devices towards the adventurer.

He gestured slowly, several leaf shaped daggers slid from woven sheaths. He did not reach down to the scabbard at his side, but looked at them like dogs in the morning mist. Then he tipped his hand with forefinger and the last cocked in the universal signal for the thirsty traveler. The man with his high head wraps with strange crosses of gold threaded shells gestured for a word, and Xotl stood back, letting him step ahead of him.

The entire band stared at them with eyes and faces bronzed by no sky traveled by wholesome sunlight. He resumed walking with the man slightly forward. He’d learnt the art of the river jargon and knew the best respect to show among war-like strangers was to give little opening for a short notice sortie. The older man pointed to his headwrap or dressing as Xotl observed with slight unease– they call me Once White Claw, see this ladder? I invented it.

They stepped under a wide framed arch that seemed a copper alloy . As they grew closer to its carvings it loomed as a large boulder splashed with marble carved and shaped to an ornate display.

Several long seats abutted an obsidian bar piled with bent iron bowls, hammered kettles and crack mortars. Downed his glass, each reclined in his own fashion and the gathered men began to drift away while a few from the gate stood with quiet interest.

The trader sank back in his dirt streaked silks and regarded him. He’d not seen his like since he fist entered the stone city. Few found any reason to leave as the gardens that reached down from the broken balustrades in the oval stone cliffs that served them for walls brought in fair harvest. The soil less eeries of the catacombs teemed with a rippling roost of silent bats that brought nourishment to the dew hungry fruiting plants that grew among the caked guano of the caverns.

Not so bad for a straggling crew on a sorrowful watch and no sleep isn’t it wanderer, said the old man. You’ll leave the gambling to professionals and serve no more liquor to Plainsmen this night said Xotl waving off the second round–the face of the old man was creased with amusement as the server swept in on pointed shoes , he seemed to frown as the attendant carefully placed a clear tray of the green melon ice float in front of Xotl who downed it with gusto.

That was for the throat, he indicated the small metal cups as the old man shrugged and filled another. You expect to sing like pretty bird once you leave here? Xotl eyed him with a practiced ease, leaving one side of himself propped to the bar covering any lunges from his front side with the scabbarded fusil.

I’m not the kind of cowboy that sings so sweet he grunted as he helped himself to another ice float. Maybe not, but the canyon carry a long way, you hear many things , ever been down there late at night? Have you retorted the adventurer, knowing it for a blunder just as it left his lips, and knowing further there would be no way back to their genial ease in the city of the barricado’d plains.

A scene from Beyond the Outskirts

She glanced up from the copper dials of the revolving gate’s control. The pound of metal clad feet sounded in the corridor outside, like a troop of steam engines tramping with 1000 tons of might to pummel her down in her tracks. Vlayna glared down at the controls, her rising panic abated in the fires of barbarian senses and force wedded to her perverse feminine vanity—the thud of mailed feet and the trudge of once-men bearing weapons did not stimulate a contrived plan so much as galvanize her to action, she had no time for plans of any man, even Dyre’s idea of silently lifting the gates to allow his forces entry to the Seer ‘s castle galled her as more of  the meddling men’s contrivances—she lifted the entire sheaf of soft copper plates  with their intricate instructions , and slammed them in the feeder slot for the machine.

She shot out a booted heel and kicked the lever to activate the mad mechanism. What this will do, only the shabby gods have any clue.  As she ran from the gatehouse, the paladins of Ishmai broke down the door in a welter of splintered wood, only to find the machine spitting smoke and flames. She’d left the thing running, without the crucial stop-gear put in the sequence to halt when the instructions to build, weld, hammer and mend were complete. It had run along like a horse drawn wagon without a bridle, the rider long since fled. The country fort shook with the judders of an impending blast, as she filed her nails and gazed into a polished shield. Oh did I forget something? She mused, cat-like and serene on the fields outside the flame limned citadel. Dyre and his mercenaries strode up the rock-strewn hill panting with haste and ire. What have you done woman! Now they’ll hang our names on every streetcorner with bounties across the world!

---

Honest Graft

The rain drove down in sheets, turning the worn road into a welter of mud and water. He strode on towards the town, its lights fireflies in the distance that grew into balefires as he came closer.

The young man, tall and rangy, stepped out from the stable barn as he approached. Say friend, you wouldn’t happen to be a Silter would ye? Dyre felt his chest burn with anger at the slur, but kept an iron control over his features so it did not show. He wanted to belt the young man across his grinning face for the ethnic insult; he felt the pointed tips of the bayonets at his back as he thought so. That’s right, its where I’m from anyways he said. The young man grinned even wider, then hid his glee with a sheepish sweep of his hat. He glanced from left to right, then up the road. Dyre began to follow his gaze, when the lad cried out in a low voice, Shussh, don’t look up! The patrols are tightenin’ up on contraband. I know ye’s from the Southland, probably comin’ up here for work, I don’t judge ye, I’m got my own to tend to here. He slapped the stout broom he carried on the wooden planks before the stables. He waited for the boy to spell it. The kid’s face twitched with the anticipation of a rare deal– Look, you seem like a friend, you want to be my friend and I’ll be your’s even if ye are a Silter, I swear. Now I need someone to bring me some dust, can you swing that?
Dyre sighed, looked up, then back at the young man. The light was fading into pink and azure whorls above them, a glimpse of the empyrean above a blasted plain below. Alright, but I can only get it by the bale, you hear me? I’ll need the full price he said to the lad.
Oh sure-ee, I can well ante. He pushed the pile of metal into Dyre’s massive hands. He caught the glint of silver and knew it was hard coin, maybe a couple month’s savings. Make sure to meet around the other side of the stables, on the other street not this one in an hour. He gave the boy a mock salute and sidled off, the night was deepened so that he wasn’t sure the kid saw he was pocketing the coin and walking towards the gleam of the mosaic strewn stairs that lead to the richer district of the town not the worker’s slums where lotus dust could be bought. Better than stick ups on the road he thought, feeling the coin jangle in his leather breeches.

How can a political figurehead read books when he’s buzzing on gak all day every day?

It occurred to me that all of my non-fiction posts that use academic philosophy goes back to my memory of the consensus style of decision making used at occupy and yes, my reaction to it, but also the observed results of actual experience. The leaders who would not be leaders, using consensus as a way of managing. and only managing, a fluid and possibly unique historical moment. One that Occupy lost, though it’s hard to tell about the direction of history while living in it.

Word as virus– Why is it so easy to steal words from other writers? Its not so much plagarism as influence, and influence is always evil…to make someone be what they would not be, and do what they wilt not do without your influence…but is this repeating Rousseau on the arts and sciences, and so taking on the irritation and prejudice of a sick and tragically remote mind? Rousseau’s own influence on the military minds of the Directorate and the dreams of an entire nation and the world could be taken as a case study of Burrough’s thesis, if we just focus on the word and its influence, discounting the moral sentiments. But of what use is that?

The convincing force of Rousseau’s writing also originated from his more “real, (deeply felt), though so much less sagacious than the other philosophers, experience of poverty. Because he knew it from the inside, having known the horrors of the midnight street and the rural den, from sleeping in the streets and befriending rough men and rougher women. He saw the experience of the poor from the inside, and most of all never shut these things out from his mind, instead finding it the most real and compelling of his experiences”. — My paraphrase of Rousseau’s bio.

Some stupid fiction–

The class setup of the future reflected in the dim glow of VR behind eyelids from face encasing shades worn by youths huddled in the hallways and alleys of mega archo-complex District Nub Expander– sat feed showing low conc. of potential hostiles, deploying back-up turbos and disabling the blast cages to allow protein transfer– Ok I’ve been stabbed by a gang of street urchins, returning to base now…\

Beyond the Outskirts continued– Toweling Off With the Lads

Vlayna, lounging in the shade of the wall, rested her figure not lithe as a
wasp, though her tall well-formed limbs held a deceptive langour that concealed a steeled strength born from long travels in the company of men not bent toward an honest living in the plains and badlands of the Northern Desert. Her arms rested entwined about her broadsword, unusual for a woman of her figure, but no less adept and ready to wield.

The fountain sent a silver river of droplets over the two men’s broad
chests. — she could be as quick as the leaping leopard when it came to battle
with fighters wielding much heavier weapons, but her father was an armorer,
partook of the trade in his duties as governor, and she knew where to strike at
a chestplate or morion’s weakest point to drive her blade into the vitals of
her opponent. But she did not, as she watched Dyre and the barbaric, shorter
lad who’d sacked the last caravan, splash water from the soldier’s work buckets like two school lads hosing off after a horserace, know how to find a weak point in this massive-shouldered man? One who’d strode out of the southern desert with a way of fighting learned more from wolves and hill-beasts than in the fighting schools of the Southron mainland.

Yet he could laugh and joke with the men, or
rinse off his troubles with the hill lad, and her passion rose as she imagined
them doing together the rough gestures that reached across the flaming bridge of desire–everything she’d like with both of them at once. Such a thought was safe in her mind, since to act on it would surely, shame a warrioress of her standing and line. She pretended to not notice that both men had toweled off and were glancing in her direction, though failing to gain her apparent interest they quickly headed toward the rousing and rising sound of ale mugs thrown down on rough boards and chanted songs.

What’s rarer avian creature than a snipe oh bother with it

Like most drug snorting guitar players in failed music experiments ( punker shows in rented halls are the whole deal for me, so please don’t take this as Manson style bitterness), I earned my Eagle badge shortly before I found crushing up various pills and punting them up my nasal cavities through rolled up bills and pipettes from those tinctures found in wellness centres– was more intense than playing Scrabble; contrary to the expected melodrama, I never touched the brown stuff , only the venerable drugs once used in baseball were right for me.

Who starts even a depraved seduction by talking outright about porn and jerking off, sleaze and the inevitable hangover? We have a national crisis on the question of chat up lines, their use and absence. He said he had a girlfriend, and then delivered the rankest advice about gurls anyone’s ever concocted while traipsing down the tender nape of my hysterical, frightened miserable teenage self.

Some of the uniformed leaders I’ve unwillingly encountered in a well known camping and knot braiding club (which is its own story) make Mystery’s Method seem the height of decorum as a chat up tactic whether gay or straight.

After browsing more news reports and taking up the dangerous task of thinking about my own experiences, I’ll say at the glad risk of being an absolute bastard about this-

American Boy Scout leaders want yr wallet and yr asshole, yr woman they’d rather not bother with.

We’re all hypocrites, but not all of us are goin’ round the block dressed like a rape crisis center. Saying come one come all, only I can understand your pain.

Distrustful? How could I not be? From my fractured memories of camping trips and weeks away from civilized life, trustful boys get disappeared into the Boss Hog’s tent on Scouting holidays.

As for the Catholic revival underway, I wouldn’t want to discourage the new fella in charge from giving direction to his flock, just giving my reasons for staying one of the unwashed.

It seems more and more arty drunks (aka podcasters) are turning to the Roman Church for guidance. This got me thinking about my experiences in that institution, which I wasn’t confirmed into, having started Catholic ed rather late, well after 2nd grade.

I don’t consider myself lapsed since I stayed non-cooperative with the entire set-up from the first; I remember getting told off by the teachers in Catholic school for daydreaming about Star Wars and I found more meaning in confrontations with the elements than in studying theology. Maybe that’s the buried savage in me.

I’d trade all the holy gold and your unctous admonitions to distrust nature’s song in our flesh for a wholesome gangbang with a coat check gal and her beau on a mattress thrown on some club bathroom’s slime flecked floor.

After reading more on the Revolution, I think the Catholic rules on sexuality are the hollow result of centuries worth of Jesuitical reasoning down a certain garden path– a place where the blossoms droop in poisoned languor over the unwary traveler, what Henry Miller found so horrifying about “Ulysses”– so best head for the America of the mind, mister leave while you can.

The Evil Biz

When I hear Christian thought leaders say “purpose drivin”, I keep asking what do they mean? I think they’d find the idea of a human purpose set above the ordinary self as a sop to the world’s unending depravity. Hence the Satanic doom that some social conservatives see unfolding everywhere on earth. But what does the Prince of this world have to do with tornadoes touching down in Italy and the price of grain in France? Or Long Island goons arming themselves against their families like in the Amityville case.

Doesn’t he have revels to attend and men of position and genius to tempt with quick passes to paradisiac follies?

All I know is that when I met the Tempter, he was wearing a mod-ish hat at an angle while he tried to bum change from me outside a liquor store. I asked why do you need pennies when you’re better dressed than every man on the street?

He told me not to talk shit and then vanished in a cloud of pawn tickets and soda cans flecked with ash.

Beyond the Outskirts IV

There is something else said the chief, a short man without his snorting range pony, and yet he seemed to stare right at Ullara as though her long bow-like limbs didn’t dwarf his own. Among the dark meadow grasses sliding against the stunted branches of the meadow beneath vast depths above and yet he thought he heard a soft noise of horses’ accoutremonts brushing together with a cold metallic sound in the dark of that meadow. His eyes held hers not ungentle in his barbaric finery. We want you to take this elixir to the monks of Ebershir , who can bless it for our use.

—

She rose from the dark floor with an inrush of breath that felt like the fabled stone hermit perched across her chest in the night—- The air wavered with the glint of drifting spirits above the immense pillars– She heard the voice before she saw the green light– it rose and flitted above her and she felt for her cutlass and crushed the steel into the ring of the burning figure’s wavering skull — The glint changed to a dancing sheen of figures ferns above rills and deep mountains with proud figures clad in bright ornament standing distant a pagan riot in her head she turned from the brief vision. The light returned to poisonous green and now she saw a figure moving toward her walking it seemed with that cape of flame — then the figure spoke in a voice that poured out the breath of tombs and some shore outside human grasp–

You are weary why don’t you lie back down?

You despise me do you not?

Like a rampant eel

Will you not bend to my desire? I can deliver you to the height of pleasures!

Then savoire this, and she flicked back the catch on the blade’s hilt and snapped the flint and a charge roared in the mountain hollow wall fell in with a crash not 5 yards behind the figure as the granite shot she’d filled in the water scoured halls above charged through the form that crouched before her. its green fire racing along into its eyes and changing to a fulgent glow to a dolden sheet of flames that capered and staggered toward the plunging stairs behind the vast pillars like a sot fresh thrown from the ale house landing. Mazes and towering wheels of fire turning over souls an iron maze of grinning faces trapped within the pitch like volcanic metal. And such an artist she quoth. With her hair trailing her enormous blonde mane she returned her weapon to its hold and strode up the opposite stair to the escape taken by the storm ghoul.

The mocking screams from the wavering fire over the raw floor capered in her mind’s ear long after she left the abandoned hall. Then the flash of places outside faded like the lights of a far city over a dwindling pass left by the regulator gazing with disgust through stone troughs stained with the ruin of pilgrims in lonesome canyons.

A Confrontation Near An Abandoned Ironclad

lonely stands amid the hushed slurs of late harvest branches and the fading cries of field hounds

the ranker and weedier thickets about the mist shaded brooks out in that last parade of the outlaw Harry Tracy

You let me down champ. But this’ll help with your busted skull. He held out the possum gnawed, foul smelling leather kit. You’ve got to look inside first– he motions like a stadium usher who’d found a new seat. Carson stepped forward to peer down at what the bag holds.

Brief shiver, the clack of ink-stained circuits, frying membranes and segmented limbs picked off shorts in the carrier apparatus with ‘droit pace.

Get rid of it… Trust me! he ducks, looking at the road, he curses softly to himself as a silver haired bicyclist whirred by on an aero frame. That’s the tracer, he’ll have a tester for the ambient skin tone, our pulse is monitored for changes! No you coot its Tracy…He’s too good at racin’ customs Henry. He’d smoke us without touching metal.

Hey cal…don’t switch a piece just yet.. Carson stepped across the bike’s frame and fought for the grip like a miner trying to grasp a falling hammer on a fairground. His forearm and wrist pinched like a bear vice left in a corn fire. The hold on the high-rise dwelling farmer stayed.

Why don’t you tell me what this has to do with the kid back there?

We don’t socialize much he rasped the salt flecked mustache above his large lipped mouth not joining the rattling shake that drove through every joint in his rangy limbs.
he nodded to no one in particular/

 

Get rid of it… Trust me! he ducks, looking at the road, he curses softly to himself as a blaze of dark hair and roaring pistons welded to his legs like Berlin gymnasts. That’s the tracer, he’ll have a tester for the Pulse Ruby of The Gods, our very pores is monitored for changes, // ya let’s fade away from here.

—
The dark theatre heaved with the groans of couples and the sharper image of premier doms in the audience. The lower aisles were prowled by a menagerie of predators and this caused a sort of prehensile frenzy when they applied razors and the pocket skills of a tailor. The picture booth where the images to be displayed on the canvas screen were wriggling with glow eels that swam in a translucent tank in front of the lantern– acting as a pisha show where the goal was to push a bishop into the Sink Well of Madness without using any hands.

The Whiskey Barrel, Ch. XVI , The Presidio

Just a plain fact, that there is no secret that any guru can tell you, to shortchange the old man who toils at his cold die and forge , ragged campaign after who follows every man over other men’s footpaths– to the extent that a thinker would not founder then they avoid letting the course of their thought to rest on the support of any outside factor, not the golden glow of summer fields, the constant whirl and pulse of an active social life nor the constancy of friends. Is it not this other the beginning of a more adult form of humor?