The Skinny War

“Not a Big Manual”

The Theory of General Phoniness. It's a phone call to outer space and no one's on the line. It's a lie. It's a construct. Phoniness is an untethered process in outer space.

What if you can respond to the phony process as if it's (a) real (flying saucer)? It puts the shoe on the other foot. My mother could switch from being real to being phony at the drop of a hat.

Phonies and impostors are trying to steal your attention. They say things that appear to be untethered molecules in outer space. They try to string them together in a place that has no atmosphere. See their embellishments (They're watching you!) as false representations. The way out is by being little and weak. The way out is by being bad.

Examine phoniness as if it's an alien disguise disconnected from your senses. Be careful not to treat a phony process as if it's something inside you. Instead, respond to each phony process as if it's a flying saucer.

Note: A bully is simply an impostor trying to push you around by pretending to be a person of real power. They start out acting all nice, safe inside their highfalutin flying saucer.

The future will have secret bands of naked children. This will only occur after the Annihilation of the Phony, and arise simultaneously in suburban areas throughout Lithuania and Japan. These bands will be necessary for time travel, whether anyone likes it or not.

We have already seen in movies like The Terminator, that you have to be totally naked for time travel, and in the future it won't be necessary to hide this in smoke, mirrors and special effects. Children already take baths together, and it's no small leap for the older ones to explain to the younger ones how, before you climb into a Time Machine Box, You have to take off all your clothes. I remember doing this with my cousins, though it was all under the table, so to speak. After a naked girl goes into a Time Machine Box, and emerges a few moments later, You have to see how much her toenails have grown during the Time Excursion.

The Direct Perception of Time Transport Threads. There's something truly exciting about the discovery of Time Transport Threads (ttt). It's as big as the World Wide Web (www). To perceive these little babies (ttt) all you have to do is stand at any street intersection and, avoiding the stooped-over Uber posture, just stand quietly and gaze at the intersection.

1. across. First gaze at the crossing street ahead of you at the street intersection. Drink in its basic left-right nature. That's the 1st dimension of a Time Transport Thread (ttt).

2. ahead. Now gaze at the street you're on just before the intersection. Notice how it extends straight out ahead of you. That's the 2nd dimension.

3. up. Okay, now let's leave Flatland and give some 3-dimensional fullness to everything at the intersection. You've got your trees, your cars, your pedestrians, your bicycle riders, the whole kit and caboodle, rising up from the flat land.

4. motion. Albert Einstein would be proud of this. Set everything in motion. That's the fourth dimension, movement through time. Notice how motion goes every which way. So far, so good?

5. peripheral. Now we move inside your body. Notice your peripheral vision. Stuff to the left of you, stuff to the right. You can drink it in all in at once. This perception is the leading indicator, often unconscious. If you're shooting up heroin, maybe this is as far as you get.

6. surprise. This is where actual attention resides. Your peripheral vision mind has suddenly passed something off to you. “Notice this!” it cries out to you. You shift the focus of your eyes, you change the direction of your eyeballs, and so forth. WTF?

7. karma. There's this realization stream running up your back. It kicks in roughly fifty seconds later. It produces whisper voices inside you, one whisper voice to the left, and a responding whisper voice to the right. It's a realization stream. And don't tell anyone you hear voices! They'll think you're nuts.

8. history. Whatever you're witnessing, either inside your mind and body, or outside, in the outside physical world, has a history, and the part of you that dreams at night will make an association between what you're witnessing, and what you're turning around inside your consciousness. This tiny little history tendril is an actual Time Transport Thread (ttt). They're all over.

9. posterity. People don't understand that the opposite of history is posterity. Some people actively work for posterity, day after day, week after week. For instance, David Brooks at The New York Times, and Richard D. Wolff on the radio. It's something to be proud of.

It's Halloween 2017 and this morning when I showed up at Bette's Oceanview Diner at 6:30, just before Ed switched “Closed” to “Open,” I struck up a conversation with Ed about this story I'm writing.

“There should be a diner in time travel,” I said.

“Open all the time,” Ed replied, lighting up. “When do I get there and what should I wear?” he asked.

“That's already been covered,” I said, “You can't wear clothes when you time travel.”

“I feel totally exposed,” Ed said, looking up as Jenna brought over oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar on the side for me while Ed and I continued our conversaton. Anyone would look up for Jenna.

At various times during my breakfast we discussed how you can always follow a Time Transport Thread into history, then come back along the same dual path, because you have a general idea of where you're going. You go back around and through, do your thing, then come through around and back.

Traveling strictly into the future, or if you're lucky, into posterity, is too tricky. You can't really see where you're going, and you almost certainly can't get back. You simply disappear into the future.

“What about changing history?” Ed asked after he'd prepared me a double cappacino at the end my meal.

“It doesn't really matter,” I said, because no one would even know. “Everything would change, sure, but who cares?”

Ed took the World War III path. “Yeah, but you could accidently do something that would start World War III.”

“I still don't care,” I told him. “Though I suspect the government does care and that's part of the reason they try to keep all this under wraps.”

“And think about what you could do financially!” he said.

I stopped him. “Yeah, well don't you imagine that's exactly what the upper echilons have access to? That's why their wealth is accelerating. Anyway, real wealth is what you have. Not what you don't have.”

As he took my credit card before I had a chance to slip out without paying, he said, “Well, I wish I could find that Time Portal.”

“It's all contacts,” I told him, with more certainty than I should have.

On the way home I stopped for half a cigarette in a little sidewalk cutout and overheard a homeless man discussing what the property owners up in Santa Rosa were going to do with their insurance payouts after the devasting wildfires. “They certainly aren't going to share any of that with the undocumented workers,” he was saying.

I can't really participate in conversations like that because it's all imagination. If he'd turned to me (which he didn't!), I would have simply agreed with his version of things. I would have cheerfully said, “I know, right?”

On the way back home I found myself walking abreast of a man who turned out to be from Boston, where I'm from.

“Isn't it a little too cold for wearing that?” he said, insulting my slim attire.

“What changed? Look at you!” I said.

“What's that mean?” he said, pausing, because he was working on accelerating ahead of me. He stopped for my explanation.

“It's Singlish for ‘You don't respect what I'm wearing?’”

That's the way Boston people strike up a friendship right away. They insult each other. Outside where I live on 7th Street, I paused and showed him the driveway where I live, in the back, and invited him over anytime. Boston people do that. Californians don't.

Back here at my computer I started entering the insult I heard last night on TV. It was from an episode of That '70s Show, and the insult was interesting. Notice how the first part of it sets you up, then the finale let's you have it.

I taught sailing at a little girls' camp in Maine before I went to college, then came back to be Director of Sailing for two years. I think that's how I got into Dartmouth College. Never mind I was so good at Latin that I aced out of the college language requirement altogether, which made the other freshmen hate me. I really didn't know what I was doing. I simply bumbled along. If it was in front of me, I did it.

During my two stints as an undergraduate there I discovered some fellow who had access to a master key to half the campus. I drove to a distant town and made a copy. It must have gotten into my blood, because I soon discovered two more master keys and made copies of them as well. Between the three keys, I could get into almost all the buildings there. It was so easy, it was boring, and I never made anything of it. It was more fun to learn how to get high on marijuana, which was just beginning to come out of the woodwork.

Dartmouth was near the cabin my family owned on Sebago Lake, not more than a few hours drive, and that little cabin was near Wohelo Island. In the wintertime you could walk across the ice from the cabin off a little twisting pebble and dirt fire lane coming out of the woods, over to Wohelo Island. Our family owned that island as well, and I always asked mom if I could trade my share of the cabin, which we shared with my aunt and cousins in Houston, for total ownership of Wohelo Island, for after she died. She'd just say, “Ughm,” and made her next move on the Scrabble board.

Why I wanted to own that island in the first place is interesting. I had no idea. Which makes sense for me. I had my own Y-flier racing boat, so why on earth would I want the deed to an island?

It's a perfect Halloween night! I was watching The World Series and went outside to have a cigarette after a shot of Woodford Reserve Kentucky straight Bourbon Whiskey to see why no one was coming. No one came last year, either. The streets were actually empty. Then I saw a wave of red hair and the brisk gait of two children coming down the block with a woman, stopping briefly at a neighbor's house. I dropped my cigarette on the ground and came across the street to say, “Have I got something for you!”

They followed me down the alleyway to our home as I cried out behind me, “No one comes to our neighborhood anymore! I think they're all following some online regime. A friend of mine said a thousand kids came to their house last year!”

“It must have been quite a chocolate bill," the woman was saying as I hurried inside to our refrigerator. I returned in an instant with four sandwich bags filled with fresh strawberries and blueberries. “I'm giving you each a double dose!” I said to the kids. “Five strawberries and some blueberries in each bag, the freshest ever!”

The beautiful red-haired witch held her bag out, and the little boy, dressed like the Joker, tuxedo and all, stepped forward for his loot. “Here's one for you,” I said, “and another one! And here's one for you, and another one!”

The Backtalktionary's underlying premise, or wish, is the Annihilation of the Phony. Underneath the phony, I believe, is the real flow of life, and until the fake & phony are consciously destroyed, things stay flat, like a little girl's chest.

Before dawn, as I was going around changing clock times, from Daylight to Standard, bringing each timepiece into compliance, like a candle being lit at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Ladue, Missouri, where I did that, I remembered how little I knew then of what was inside me.

I had buried the memory of being raped as a four-year-old, the memory of why I cried every time I took a bowel movement the entire time I was growing up, the time I even decided to quit shitting for a week as sort of a protest. That didn't work out so well. My mom gave me an enema and cryptically told me, “I've done this to you before.”

I had no idea. This morning, on National Public Radio (NPR) a woman said she thought people shouldn't look at her breasts in the workplace. We wouldn't do it if she was wearing a shirt or something! In Japan they wear eye condoms.

The expression “nigger” really means “despicable, stubborn person” and it's unfortunate so many dark-skinned people have taken full ownership of that word.

You have to remember all human beings are fully telepathic, except for the ones shooting up crystal meth, on a continual basis, and for all others, you can see “nigger” hiding in the shadows.

This morning I had to move my car to the opposite side of the block for Municipal Street Cleaning, which on this side of the block is first Monday of the month. Unfortunately, I saw some nigger slowly backing up the block to take what was to be MY parking spot across the street. As I slowly drove by, I saw the nigger was a Mexican, or an El Salvadorian, and had to drive a whole block away to find a parking spot.

It's easy to take the sting out of words. “Go to Smoakland for the best wine & vinigger.”

“Which do you like better, bourbon or beer?” I asked Jenna, who was at the cash register.

There was a pause, not much of a pause, but for a fast girl, a pause. “Is that a joke?” she asked.

You have to begin laying groundwork for a telepathic girl. Give them a vision of the future.

“No,” I said.

“I like beer,” she said, keeping her attention on the cash.

I wondered whether she'd let me look all the way down her blouse, as a first step, or whether she'd bump one of her titties against my arm. She'd never let any of those things happen in the past, because she's always been able to see me in my pathetic ways.

The answer is “A.”

Today's show will be taken away from you. Might as well let it. It's not important. Maybe we're at the beach together and I say, “If I say ‘hello’ it means ‘I love you and you might as well start taking off your clothes.’ I know how much you like that game.” It's 3:02 in the morning and the train whistle outside startles me. It startles. It's 3:08. I'll have a sip of water before the waters rise at my feet. I'll go outside and have half a cigarette, flick half the burning ember halfway across the street. Hello.

A note was passed around class. “Hemmond Bittings isn't wearing any underpants,” never mind I had no idea who Hemmond Bittings was, or even what she looked like. Everyone was turning and twisting around. The joke was, you could see the girls' white underpants as they giggled and twisted around. The best spot to be was the head of the class, writing a ridiculous note. The joke was repeated a few days more, baring more fruit.

I became very interested in writing fiction, even though I had no idea what fiction was. Our third-grade teacher told us to write a description of the day we passed a jar with salt and buttermilk around in class, each kid shaking the bottle until they got tired. My story was called “Making Butter,” and was selected for publication in the Wilmington, North Carolina newspaper. Nothing there about good old Hemmond! The teacher probably thought if we liked passing things around so much, we might as well make salty butter. It didn't look like butter. It looked like lumpy milk, besides one girl not wearing any. The teacher had prepped us the day before.

There are many things to wonder about our third-grade class. I ended up marrying one of those girls. She was particularly good at “taking our picture” in a demure way we'd appreciate. All of which brings us to the '60s. There were more down-blouses and up-skirts than we knew what to do with. You could take someone's picture and shoot up heroin at the same time.

“I looked at part of your website last night,” Ed told me as I settled into my one-off spot at Bette's Oceanview Diner. He took my order. “You're getting a little better as a writer.” People see only parts of things.

Jenna took someone else's order a few spots down. She told a taco story from last night. “I'm a witch,” she said, glancing at me. “My husband thinks I'm a witch.” She finished taking the order. “I also summon people to the diner,” she said.

Afterwards, as I was buying The New York Times at a nearby bookstore, I told the cashier how I've put all my books into boxes, and have totally empty bookshelves now, ideal for sorting things out. I felt proud of this discovery, of the empty shelves. “Anyway,” I added, “it keeps people from stealing my books.”

“What kind of friends do you have?" he said bitterly. That was funny, coming from a bookseller. I didn't say anything.

You'd watch a TV show in 1955, a cowboy show, we all would. It would start with a stagecoach pulling up, its horses whinnying, no driver. No one inside. Watching this, you'd wonder if there were dead people inside, on the floor, bloody. No blood. It was black and white. You could tell, even before any dialog, the gold would be gone. Then you'd move backward & forward in time, discovering where the stagecoach had come from, all empty now, and deducing for the next while, what possibly could have happened.

All I'll say is, I was born in Dodge City, Kansas, and this has always infuriated people.

Where, inside a person, does consciousness reside? I've never seen the answer to that question in a book. Or, in what physical location inside the body is the intersection of the soul? I've seen the answer to that in lots of books. My teacher David Daniels would ask us these questions from time to time in our group, which moved from Cambridge to Berkeley in October 1982.

Here's a question I never heard him ask: What is the physical location of criticism, either outwardly-directed criticism of people or things, or, more importantly, self-criticism? The so-called “critical eye.” I have a suspicion the critical eye resides all over the body, within the fabric of the body's psychic dish antenna, which when a person stoops over, becomes activated, and when a person stands up straight or sits erectly, becomes deactivated. A person can “look discouraged,” A person can have an appearance of “foul intent.” You can also see in a person “ulterior motives,” including, but not limited to, “patronization.”

I love this kind of shit.

What I'm really up to is quieting my mind and body of all thoughts and feelings with the express intent of discovering direct elements of joy. You've got to make room for it, right?

I'm at the bottom of the sea, where no one can summon me. The thirteenth, November, I feel a pulse. Something's hostile. “// /// // //// Asshole! //d///// // /,” a whisper voice says. It's odd. I try again. “//// / // / / / /You go! ////d///d///// / / .” I know I'm in my bed, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, under two blankets.

It's odd. I always thought I'd have to be naked for this, maybe in a shower, though I can see the danger of falling over inside there. Best already prone. Another pulse. “// // / //// // //// What are you doing here? /// / // //// / ///.” It's still hostile.

I see a baby at Jenna's breast, even though I'm not even her husband. Some sort of clairvoyance is involved, I see, and I've gone much too far back in time, no way to know. It's all too imprecise.

I'm in my bed. The spiral of energy connected to my throat, somehow extending into space and time, suddenly collapses. A flicker of energy sparks across the back of my neck, right to left, closing down the Time Transport Thread. What time is it? WHAT DATE IS IT !!!?

I get up, get dressed, and after the morning exercise, taught through time to adepts, head out onto the street. I don't know how long this excursion will last. When I walk into Bette's Oceanview Diner I say, “I've come from the future.” Jenna turns to Ed and says, “He's come from the future.” One of them turns to me and says, “So what's it like the future?” I feel a little confused.

“Will my family be safe after the earthquake?” Jenna says, coming close, wiping the counter space next to me. I have no idea why she's saying this, I feel no earthquake now, nor back from where I've come. Difficult to make sense of lots of things.

I do realize, rising to the pulse collapsing, I can take these trips whenever I like. WHENEVER I LIKE!

It's an eye-opener. I'm lying in bed and come to understand I'll be famous for noticing the collapsing spiral at my throat, and for being able to flip the pixels, color pixels yet! – all while maintaining the same degree of darkness. It's not easy, and Jenna would say, “Is it inappropriate?”

Though I might be getting ahead of myself.

I think she casts a wide net, summoning people to her café, and I certainly feel it. As I revisit her at times earlier, I throw energy up the left side of my spine, boosting the energy levels of those around me, especially Jenna. She's the only one who truly appreciates it.

Now we're separated by a certain physical distance, it's easy to see how, by keeping the poles of the magnet apart, traveling along Time Transport Threads becomes possible. There's a lot of energy involved, and you have to wonder about so many collapsed energy fields strewn about us. People think they hate each other because of this, and they really don't, hate each other, because of this. I'm simply laying low.

When you travel into the past, you need a lot of energy. And it really, really helps to know where you're going. I recently bought a book off the Internet, entitled, “Catalog of Copyright Entries, Third Series, 1952,” hoping to find a trace of my father there. I was off by two years. See? It gets tricky.

This is also why traveling into the future, along Time Transport Threads, is virtually impossible. Sure, you may travel into posterity, as opposed to into history, but WTF? It could be for Failure after Death!

You could land in outer space. Lord knows how fast the sun, earth and spiraling moon are hurtling along. And why would anyone even dream of bringing about an earthquake?

No one can understand a witch.

“/// / / / //// It lasts three hours and costs nothing /////,///m/mmm,” a whisper voice reaches across time and space. “df////g //////g g// Is there enough room in there? /// / //// / /// /,” the second answers. Reaching out across a Time Transport Thread is much like signing your name with your left hand if you're right-handed, or vice versa, and then gazing blankly at a handwriting expert wondering if it's actually your signature.

“/// / / / / / Are you back again? //// / / //// / / /.” I've been resisting opening the letters I've been receiving from Camp Timanous, a boys' camp in Maine founded by my great grandfather, Luther Halsey Gulick. He came from a family of Hawaiian and Japanese missionaries, and later settled on Sebago Lake, where he started a girls' camp as well. That's why the island I owned the controlling share of, along with my sisters and cousins, after my mother died, was called Wohelo Island. Lord knows. Was it actually our island?

“Transfer the whole thing to our cousins,” I asked my stepfather, who was controlling her estate, “I'm really not interested in paying the taxes or maintaining liability insurance.”

Nice trees though.