I've been off for two days, basically shitting around doing nothing. I went up town and got coffee at a dozen different places, sat around and wrote in my notebook about anything and everything, and hung around with a few friends.

I hung out with my friend Omin after work three days ago. We were philosophizing when two girls approached that were "seeking solitude" so they could get stoned. I knew both of them - one of them was a friend of someone I knew from work, and the other was an extremely attractive girl I'd been eyeing for quite some time. I seemed to bump into her everywhere, most often at work when she came in with her friend. I got to flirting, and it felt good.

Okay, it's irrelevant. I thought I'd spew at you something that made me look less pathetic than usual. Shut up. I never know what to say in editorials, all right?

My nipple itches.

I get ticked off at this one lady at work who always tries to drill into my psyche with her mind-probing questions. Her eyes are like laser beams that try to drill into my soul and dissect my mind. Other than myself, she's the most analytical person I know - yet where I am subtle in my quest to understand the inner being of others, she's painfully direct and almost ruthless in her determination. She's the psychologist I never had... good thing I'm immune...

I mean, it disturbs me when people try to figure out what I am so quickly - it takes years and years of that. Even my friends don't know what I'm about. At least I feel I'm a very complex person, and I don't understand myself yet - hell if I'm gonna let anyone else see who I am first.

Anyway, she enjoys reading the Gopher, picking out the things I write and trying to put together the puzzle pieces. She'll never get it. She'll never understand.

She can't.

But we've all thrown little pieces of ourselves into this here zine; they float about in the stories and essays and rambling editorials. So please, sit back, enjoy, regurgitate last night's supper, read our bullshit and psychoanalyze.

Understand us. Understand the world in which you live.

This is good a place as any.

Hell, reality might not even exist. We may not exist.

Which means reading this is futile.

So is me talking about it.

I'm satisfied.

I think I'll poop now.

The scarlet cardinal flew above Ava, always leading her in the same direction. Ava's feet were sore, and the open blisters pained her poorly covered feet, yet still she got up and followed after the red speck in the deep blue sky. She knew not why she followed, all she knew was that she had to, that there was some compelling reason that made it worth more than anything else. After several hours of walking, Ava found herself in a mountainous area looking down into a large blue lake. Here, Ava thought, is where I have brought. A deep red setting sun reflected off the pool as though to mark the spot. Overhead she heard the sound of geese, and she felt as though the strange burden should leave her soon.

Opening her small knapsack, Ava took out some of the nuts she had picked up and ate them. The walking had kept her warm, but now that she was resting, the cool night mountain air felt chilly though her pale blue shirt, and light green jacket. Eating some food helped to rejuvenate her, giving her energy and warmth to push on further. On a nearby branch the cardinal landed, its stern face still pointing her to the west.

As the night grew thicker, and the day was coming to a close, Ava spotted the beacon of a fire near the edge of the lake. The suspense in Ava grew as to what she was to find, her pace grew light and quick, and the cramps in her body left as she flew through the forest. The night sounds grew steadily with the sounds of crickets, and animals that rustled through the forest. Soon a new sound was heard; the pounding of drums and steady sound of human voice penetrated through the mountain woods.

Finally the dancing tribe was in Ava's sight. The dancers beat their path in a circle around a blazing fire, while the drummer, and a painted man sat next to an elderly woman who was laying on the ground. Approaching the group Ava looked upon the elderly woman and to her surprise she recognized the woman as being her grandmother. Ava had only seen pictures and heard stories about her grandmother, and now that she found her, she learned her grandmother was dying. Looking into her grandmother's eyes she learned why she had been brought there. It was to find freedom, and to learn to be able to see into the depth of nature.

Without a word Ava's grandmother died. Taking off her coat, Ava laid her green jacket over the still open eyes of her grandmother. Never having met, she still felt and indescribable intimate closeness, and shed many tears by the glass smooth lake, under the star filled sky. As Ava opened her arms unto the heavens a red feather dropped into her lap from above, and in the distance a crow's call could be heard.

Cheese weasels do not exist because they cannot exist. (That was right to the point, huh?) To debate the existence (or lack thereof) of cheese weasels, we must first understand cheese weasels (i.e. What the hell are they? [And by the way, now that we are on the subject, what the hell are Fnords anyway?]). Cheese weasels are a form of weasel made completely out of cheese. Either that, or they are a giant cheese wheels that live and breathe. But for the sake of Does It Look Like I Give A Fuck (otherwise known as D.I.L.L.I.G.A.F.), I will use the latter. Or was it the former? What the hell are they anyway? I don't know. Okay. Kay. Okie dokie. I will use the weasel scenario. (That is a weasel of cheese for you norons. [Yes norons, not morons. Inside joke.] Doesn't that sound kinda-sorta-ify-cool-type - weasel of cheese? Whatever.)

Now, if a weasel is made completely out of cheese, then thus he (and/or she) would be eaten by mice and/or other cheese-loving animals (that being including Mister G.). They (that being cheese weasels made completely out of cheese) cannot exist if they were all eaten. (I believe this falls in the 'No Duh' category.) And besides, they would mold. (Unless they are [dunt dunt duh!] weasels of moldy cheese; which would thus then mean that they would thus then consist of... cheesy mold. Nummy.) (You know, if an English teacher would read this, he [and/or she] would flip out and either attempt to kill at least one [1] and/or more students in his [and/or her)] unwilling class.)

But if you examine (That is mentally examine, not with a microscope. Think about it[<double meaning there]) the scenario of the cheese wheel, (Doesn't that sound kinda-sorta-ify-cool-type too- scenario of the cheese wheel? Whatever or something to that effect. ['something to that effect' has been pseudo-copyrighted by me, Lemming; a.k.a. Tim Hawk, Reverend Mocha, josh zwolinski; formally known as PACMAN Overload, cereal killer.]) then perhaps cheese weasels do exist. (Maybe they don't exist because they go under a different name like Fred or something to that effect. Just a thought.) But then wouldn't living, breathing cheese wheels be a pretty odd sight and not so hard to spot, don't ya think? Or maybe, just possibly, these cheese wheel cheese weasels mold and then their mold would thus act like a chameleon's skin and hide itself from the rest of the unknowing world. (Of course, their chameleon-like mold would thus have to work better than a chameleon's skin because a chameleon has been seen and cheese weasels have not.)

Or maybe cheese weasels are just those of you out there (not including me) (You know who you are.) that are just obsessed with cheese and cheese by-products. (Notice the lack of naming names.)

Life from the water
what has fallen slowly
remembers once again
newness now arises
a bird in first flight
shooting forth in green

The cycle never stops
what has been quieted
swells up again
it all returns to life
life from the depths
life from the death

It all becomes surreal
the open eyes are blind
closed eyes are dreaming
their lucid minds are real
clarion thought awakens
cycles repeating life

Here in nature stands man
heroic in defiance
yet still a twig struggling
surviving nature's yawning
with only minor losses
proclaims himself victor

Hurting and harming
proclaiming desired peace
feebly offering back
while still taking more
come celebrate your peace
you shall find it eternal

It had been so long since he had fought.

It had been so very, very long. In all that time, he had never strapped himself into his tiny steel and lead glass cockpit, pitted and scarred from a million close calls, had never tested his thrusters or the rotations of his cannons, had never released his magnetic docking clamps and floated joyously in free fall for an instant before giving power to his jets and rushing off to face the enemy one more time.

All those years and he had never even looked back, never wanted to. Now he had to, but it was different.

His old starship fighter was long gone, disassembled and melted down into something useful. His old enemies were gone, all shot to vapor and dust by hot, intense blasts from the cannons. So were his friends. Now, after decades of trying to forget it all, they wanted him to do it again.

The only difference this time was that he would be flying Starship Earth, the third stone from the Sun. Rotation would bring the giant and precise Earth cannon around to face the enemies for only twelve hours before it was too late. They wanted him to blast the meteor field, make all of the incoming threats dissolve into a harmless spray of ice so that he might save the world again.

He wished suddenly that he hadn't killed all the other good pilots and marksmen.

But he hadn't, not really. He hadn't been the one to kill all of them. He had killed an awful lot, probably more than any one man had, but not all. The rest had killed each other. Or themselves. It had been a war, after all. That was the point of war: to kill as many people as possible and hope that you were one of those left over in the end so that you could go home again. Every war was like that. This one though, had been a little different. He had been the only one to go home in one piece. Every other combatant was dead or blind or lame or insane. He was the only who could still fly and shoot and fight and that was somehow supposed to make him the best.

Or lucky. But nobody believed in luck anymore. They had back then, though. Everyone had believed in luck.

He was a different person now. His hands ached and he knew that the cannon's recoil would play havoc on them. His back was bad sometimes. His eyes were playing tricks on him with more regularity. His mind was crowded with a million bright flowers all blooming in identical orange bursts. They were not actually flowers he knew, but it helped to think of them that way. As long as they were flowers, he did not need to feel the memories come back or see the ghosts. It was only when he remembered that he had created each of those orange flowers, that he had vaporized a starship and transformed it into a mist of incandescence... Those were the times when the ghosts came back to him. He remembered every explosion, every death perfectly. He was a walking almanac of execution. He couldn't see any faces or hear any voices, but they were there, laced throughout the nerves of his body, pulling and tugging at him and wearing him down. He wasn't a kid anymore. He was old. He was tired. He needed to rest.

"I'm not who you think I am," he said. "That person is gone. Has been for thirty-five years, since the war ended and he found out that in order for him to win, for him to be a hero, everyone else had to die."

He was suddenly very tired with this whole business. He did not want people to look up to him or even at him. He wanted to go home, to go to bed, to be anywhere but here, in this place where they wanted him to exhume something that had been dead so long that he could hardly believe it had ever existed.

"Get yourself a kid," he found himself saying. "What you need is a kid. Do you know who won that war all those years ago? A kid. A kid from nowhere who was going nowhere but somehow knew that he, of all people, could do it. He knew that it was a million to one shot that anyone could win it themselves, that it was a million to one shot that anyone could get that many kills, that it was a million to one shot that it was going to be him. He knew that, but he didn't care. He knew that it would be him, that it had to be him." He paused. "There were a thousand other kids just like him. They all knew that it was going to be them, too. The only difference is that they're all dead, nothing left to them except a frozen cloud of dust floating out in the vacuum a hundred million miles from anything. That's war. That's what I did. I don't do it anymore.

"I thought that when I killed all those people it was for something, that all their lives would buy peace for the world forever. I ended the war, that kid ended the war because he could. He believed that he was doing something good and true and right and he believed all that until he got back home and saw what he had really done, what he had really saved.

"I was the hero once. I single-handedly saved the world once. I'm not going to do it again. I don't want to do it again. It's not in me anymore; it's gone. I quit. I quit a long time ago, but now I'm quitting again. No more cannons or enemies or starships. It's all over. Get yourself a kid. If you really want to save the world, get yourself a kid. There's a kid out there, somewhere in the world, who can do it, who's melted a hundred thousand asteroids in his mind, who's dead center certain that he can bulls-eye every one a hundred times over. That's who you want. Find him. I promise you he won't let you down."

And he turned and he walked out forever, for he deserved at least that right. They all watched him, sadly and hopelessly, but not one of them tried to stop him. They all recognized, all at once, that he deserved at least that much respect. For once, long ago in a time they rarely talked about, he had set out alone and saved the world himself. As he vanished into the sunlight, they wondered where on earth they would ever find anyone to do it all again. But, of course, they all knew the answer to that now. It had only been a matter of remembering where they ought to be looking.

They all looked at him once more, the hero receding into obscurity, disappearing from their view. In the last instant before he turned the corner and was gone, they all had the same feeling that he had, somehow, managed to save the world all over again. No one, however, dwelled on it long. There was work to be done.

"Something the matter dude?"

"I just had a Ho-ho dropped on my foot, what the fuck do you mean 'someth'n matter' ?!"

"Dude, Ho-ho's don't hurt."

"Oh. Then... really? Are you sure?"

"Maybe it was a Twinkie dude."

"Dude! It WAS a Twinkie! That makes so much sense now!"

"Let me see this. Dude, look."

"What the...? Twinkies don't hurt either! Then why does my foot hurt?"

"Are you sure your foot hurts?"

"Why the hell would my foot hurt? Wanna Twinkie?"

It's so good being alone
I write you poems
I sing the trees
it's so good being alone
on my way to London
on my way to Paris
on my way to you
I sing the trees
the snow and the wind
I sing Europe
I sing you a love song

It's so good being alone
such a wonderful
loneliness
of coming back to you.

THWAP

Alarm clocks during Summer Vacations. Why? Only for those of us who worked did each day start with a ringing in the ears.

I started my job as a landscaper early in the summer. There were usually three other workers helping me spread the mulch, cut the grass, and prune the trees. Mike was the boss, and older guy who was a work-oholic. He was usually easy to get along with, but sometimes he could be a real pain. Bill was the foreman, a great guy to work with. He was the type of person who wanted to make sure that the work got done right, but that didn't mind taking a few extra breaks every once in a while when the boss wasn't around. Joel started the day after I did. He was not very smart to say the least and was fired not to long after he started. Chris was the last person. He was a friend of Bill and was hired about one week after I started. Chris was a compulsive liar but was able to tell a good story.

Work started every day at 8:00 in the morning. We started this particular day with the regular maintenance of cleaning and fueling the mowers, and edgers. After that we loaded up the trucks for a day of mulching. Rakes, tarps (plastic and cloth), wheel barrows, back pack blowers, mulch forks, brooms, and scoop shovels all put on a truck for moving that woody dirt-like substance.

Once we were loaded up Bill, Joel, Chris, and myself piled into the Dodge with our lunches to go to the job site while Mike went to get the mulch in a dump truck. The ride included Chris changing the radio station every 10 seconds, while telling a story about his latest conquest, which was kind of bad seeing as how Chris already had a girlfriend and a kid. Joel sat next to me in the back telling something about a T-Storm that was supposed to come that day, and other comments which came off as being just generally dumb. Bill, who was the driver, usually held conversation with Chris, and occasionally beeped at good looking girls that Chris seemed to point out more than anyone else.

Arriving at a place called Orange Tree we unloaded the truck, while Chris took a piss behind the cover of the truck door. Bill then took us for a walk around the place, showing us what we were going to be mulching. It was a pretty large area which meant that the four of us would be working alone for the most part while Mike ran back and forth to get more loads of mulch. One thing we could always count on was that when Mike said he'd be back in an hour, it would take at least twice that long as a rule.

Mike finally showed up and dumped the mulch in the drive. Then he walked us around, telling us what he wanted weeded, and what he wanted mulched. Basically a repeat of what Bill already told us. He had a bad habit of talking to us as though we didn't know what we were doing, but I can't blame him that much because when it came to Joel, he really didn't.

Once Mike left we picked up the mulching forks, loaded the wheel barrows and got to work. Bill worked with Joel because he practically had to be told where to put each handful. Bill worked largely as more of a supervisor because he had knee problems for which he eventually had to go to the doctor to get it fixed. I still remember how annoyed Bill got when Joel kept using just one hand to move mulch, instead of using both hands to pick up a big clump. After every few handfuls it seemed that Joel would turn to Bill and ask him with his dumb ape like expression "does this look efficient enough?" I think efficient was one of the only big words he knew, and even then he didn't know how to use it right. The scary part was he said he was going to college to learn to teach biology.

Meanwhile Chris and I worked steadily laying down mulch about three wheelbarrows to Joel's one. Chris and I worked at the same pace for the most part but Chris took a break to smoke a joint for a little bit, which of course lent itself to even more absurd, yet interesting stories about last night's threesome or blow job at the end of a culdesac.

At 12:30 we broke for lunch, washing our hands with some Fast Orange to try to get the fermenting wood smell out of our brown and dried out hands. Then we climbed in the air conditioned Dodge for a half an hour of solace from the 95 degree heat. When Mike came again during the break at 12:45 he yelled at us for using the AC when it "wasn't that hot that you needed to waste the gas." After Mike left Chris talked about how he was going to tell Mike that he could shove it up his ass, and then quit. Words that were always unfulfilled but good for the sympathetic ear anyhow. By the time lunch ended Mike was gone and we went back to work again.

Chris took another leak, smoked another cigarette, and under his new found relief he seemed to work even harder, which I didn't mind because as soon as our pile of mulch was gone, and everything got blown off, that would be it for our day of work. Joel of course couldn't go without some sort of mishap, and it was not long before he accidentally tipped a wheelbarrow full of mulch into the grass. Bill had a good time at chewing him out for that one.

Finally the day's work was done. We went home listening to Tool on the radio, and beeping at some more girls. After Joel left we took a few cracks at just how efficient he was, and picked up our checks to leave. Fridays certainly were the good days, I had the weekend off and I was a little bit richer. All I wanted to do then was go home, shower, and eat about three full plates of food. It may not be living the good life, but it was life.

Mine, my favorite kind of bread, is rye. It would have to be rye. Hands down. First, it's such a cool word. Look at it, examine it. Rye. It's only three letters long, but in those three letters, it conveys a whole experience. And they're not just any three letters either. Why on earth would anyone ever put those three letters together in that order and come up with rye? It almost reminds me of old English. If they were inventing rye bread today, it would be spelt rie or ry. That's no good. Rye, on the other, is very interesting. So would ri, but that's beside the point.

Secondly, rye is basically, when you get down to it, your fundamental spicy bread. I don't know how else to describe the rye flavor, but spicy sort of fits. Have you ever split one of those tiny rye seeds between your teeth and put it on your tongue? That is spicy. Even soft rye (the kind without the seeds) is spicy. It has power. It's forceful. Rye bread will often override the taste of the lunch meat or lettuce or cheese. You can taste rye bread no matter what you put on it. It demands attention. That's why I like rye bread.

Also (and I just thought of this one) I like rye bread because of those little seeds. They're like little packets of taste throughout the bread. They make eating the bread an active experience. They're not like those annoying little sesame seeds that fall off those rolls and get all over the table and then don't even taste like anything. Rye seeds have taste. They are very good. As far as potency goes, rye seeds are very similar to anise or vanilla. There's a lot of taste in a little volume.

Rye bread is not the only good bread, though. Corn bread is excellent. The color and texture of corn bread is just perfect, especially when it's warm. Corn bread gets all crumbly and when you smear butter on hot corn bread, it soaks all through it and gives it uniform butter distribution. This is one of the prime problems of most breads: uneven butter distribution. Corn bread does not have that problem. Corn bread also has a strong flavor that shows through even past heavy butterings. This is good because the dryness of corn bread makes it necessary to put at least some butter on it.

Because corn bread is dry, it makes it a good end-of-the-meal bread. It soaks up all the saliva in your mouth and leaves a good corn taste on your tongue. I especially like those tiny little corn bread loaves that they give you at Boston Market. I could possibly eat a whole corn bread meal. It depends. Corn bread, however, is a bad sandwich bread. It's flavor doesn't work well with cheese or meat and most vegetables. It's best to stick with butter when eating corn bread.

Other kinds of bread include pumpernickel. Pumpernickel bread is very cool looking, but always disappointing to eat. The white and black parts taste almost exactly the same. There isn't even very much texture difference. You have to wonder why they make it two different colors if it all tastes the same. Whole wheat and oat bread somehow got a bad name because of those health nut people. Everybody thinks that whole wheat bread is scratchy and bland. That's not true. It has a very healthy texture to it because they use the entire wheat germ and there is much more taste to it than there is in any white bread. Whole wheat bread is best when it is toasted and crunchy. I also like its color. The brown is much more natural looking than sterile hospital white. Seven grain bread, however, is just really pretentious. Who can pick out the individual grains? It just tastes and looks exactly like wheat bread, but is more expensive. I am, I suppose, somewhat suspicious about seven grain breads. Where do they get seven grains from? I can think of wheat, oat, rye, barley, corn, and rice. That's only six. After those, you start to get into grains like alfalfa, which people shouldn't be eating, and couscous, which is a rice-like African grain. I wouldn't even want to mix up rice and corn and rye into one bread. That is completely unnatural. I have even seen, on occasion, ten grain bread which totally blows me away. Some of the grains must be repeat grains.

There's also more exotic breads. Pumpkin bread is very good, unless it sits out too long. Mold is very difficult to detect on pumpkin bread because of its color. You never can be sure until you take a bite. Often, the mold will spread itself out evenly and invisibly throughout the bread. Sometimes you can't even be sure if the bread is moldy or just very bad. In this case, I just keep eating because I don't like to throw out non-moldy bread. There's also apple bread and banana bread, but as far as I'm concerned, these are just cheap knock-offs of pumpkin bread. Some people make potato bread or rice bread, but I'm not entirely convinced that these can be considered breads at all. Their shape and texture may place them in the cake category.

People also add things to breads, like pepperoni. Pepperoni bread is absolutely delicious. I would never make a sandwich with it or even put butter on it, but it is terrific to eat all by itself. There is also, I am told, jalepeno bread, which I imagine is probably fantastic. Think about it: you get the full flavor of the pepper while simultaneously neutralizing its most extreme spicy agents with the bread. However, the baking probably takes a good deal of the kick out of the jalepenos.

Then, of course, there's your white bread. White bread does not impress me unless they do something special to it. Cinnamon bread, for instance, is good. However, white bread does have its place. On some days, you just feel like an calm, unassuming sandwich. That's a white bread day. A special type of white bread is Italian bread, which is often harder and denser, coming in smaller, rounder loaves. White bread is good for sandwiches; Italian bread is good with butter.

Last are the third world breads. These are your basic pitas and tortillas. They are gaining a great deal of popularity in the United States. Just the other day, I went to a restaurant called Tommy's on Coventry where I had chicken salad in a pita. It wasn't bad. These most ancient of breads may be the future of breads as well, completing a circle that is thousands of years old and filled with hundreds of fascinating, delicious, and unique breads. Bread will still be around long after every other food is gone. Bread is always going to be good.

But I don't feel so much pain now, I get real sleepy, but I know I shouldn't fall asleep, cuz that's what happens when you get too cold.

How long has the captain been gone? I could fathom large blocks of time that were, well, near forever. I have been here forever. There was once a class I took, in school, a physics class, about how time and space are connected. This always excited me, and I often thought about it, in a playful way, when we left port for six weeks when going on a big trip, how if we were moving the speed of light when we got back more time would have elapsed than what we had experienced. Everything would've changed. Everyone would've grown old and passed on, and their children too, cuz that's what happens they say, when you mix up time and space like that, by going so fast. Perhaps, now I muse, I am experiencing the opposite reaction: I am not moving in space, not one inch, not one less than one inch, and so time slows down for me while it progresses at the same rate in Leicester. So that when I get back, it'll seem to me like I've been gone for years, decades, and everyone'll say, oh, back so soon? How was the fishing? I like to think about this. What would happen to space, for instance, if you moved through time at a different rate? I mean, this isn't possible I know, to time travel, but if you could, what would happen to the space around you? If I were a physicist I would know the answers to these things.

I believe what is playing now is a Curtis Mayfield song.

When I was young certain songs had an effect on me. I would sit in the back of my aunt's VW bug (she was a hippie, who wore bell bottoms and braided her hair and decorated herself with flowery patterns) and the songs would make my whole body vibrate. The hook, of the songs, the pop songs. It was radio then, playing stuff I hear again once and a while but those songs don't make my whole body vibrate anymore, instead, they seem to hook the hook. You know what I mean? Like the reflection of a reflection of yourself in a mirror. It's removed, and yet it has a sort of effect. It isn't exactly reminiscence. I'm not specifically reminded of specific times. I don't travel in time. The songs don't do that. It's more like being poked, in the head, with something you're not really conscious was there. This is not entirely coherent. Let me try saying this another way, because this seems very important at the moment and I would like to get to the bottom of it.

Certain songs remind you that you remember.

There, I think that's it. That's like one of those drawings, by that guy, oh shit what's his name, the one who does the drawings of staircases that ascend into themselves and of endless patterns and waterfalls that go down and up at the same time. I think it's Etcher. Something like that. I guess he did etchings, that's not really his name. Those drawings have always been some of my favorites. There was one, a poster of one, in Sabina's house when I knew her, right above her couch. And I would sit there and stare at it a lot. It was of a tower, and stairs going around the tower, and men walking on those stairs, and they were walking up and down at the same time, all together, forever. There were columns, and a fountain too, and looking at it, I would get glimpses of thoughts I never knew I had. Like they were buried very far back, and only occasionally would they shift and show up -- but never fully, they never came out all the way, which often disappointed and frustrated me. And I would say something, about one of these thoughts, but stammer and it would make me very frustrated and people would laugh. Well, don't get me wrong, I don't blame them

for laughing. My tongue gets worked up, and then I realize I'm not actually saying anything. Like one of those men walking on the stairs and not getting anywhere.

I have often wondered about illusions too. I think since the captain's been gone I've gotten to the bottom of some things. I'm not only thinking of getting back to Leicester, I'm thinking about what it means to get back to Leicester. I can't help it. It's out of my control, to make some meaning out of some things.

You need to have some meaning.

Perhaps I will be like Jonah, and after the three days are done I'll be deposited back home, vomited up by the ocean. But if that is true, if that is the case of which we are speaking, that means I'm here because I've done something wrong. I'm asking you, Radio Man, what have I done wrong? The Radio Man tells me I have forsaken him, done him ungodly wrong and when I should've been listening I wasn't

and when I shouldn't have been listening I was. I'm sorry OK, I'm sorry about that, and now that I'm in the belly of the whale I'm gonna prostrate myself (that sounds worse than it may be, I dunno) and everything'll be OK and the Radio Man and I will be right as rain. Radio Man! Listen to me! I want to sing you a song, about my leg, about the winch, and about what Jonah found in the whale's belly!

The huge jaws of the whale gulped water in and Jonah, who struggled in the webs of the baleen, flailed around terror stricken. Pushed by the rushing water, he rolls head over heels swept down the very gullet of the beast. Spinal bones above his head, under a thin veneer of red slick flesh, a cavern before him stretches half a mile. Small waves subside around his feet. He walks on resilient ground. There are smells of rotten fish, and something else, blood and oil. There is very little light. What little light there is makes Jonah wonder, and he's looking to where it seems to come from, and it comes from, get this, from a boat! And Jonah walks to the boat, through the slush of fish parts and mucous, and when he gets to the boat who does he see sitting there with a lantern? It's you Radio Man! You're there in the whale, with Jonah. And he sits in the boat with you, and you both look at the lantern, running on whale oil, and then you start, the way

you started a little while ago, before playing that song, saying, "It's quarter of eleven, and it's a nippy thirty five degrees out, and we're sitting in the belly of a whale, I'd like to play you a song, this is going out to everybody working on the docks, maybe just to warm you up a little bit." Then from Radio Man's mouth comes the sound of the radio, of a song, I think it's a Paul Simon song, Kodachrome or something, and this is like when they have freak occurrences of molars with fillings tuning in to radio. And Jonah sits and listens. His head is downcast, the song doesn't cheer him up. After all, he's sitting in the belly of a whale. You have to admit it's hard to be cheery in a situation like that. When you are done with your song Radio Man, Jonah tells you his troubles, and you listen intently, nodding your head bottom lip jutting out a bit and face drawn in sympathy. You can identify with Jonah. After all, you are in the whale too.

This does nothing to speak of the leg which has begun to beg me with icy air, slowly climbing up my hip like a poison, or from the winch, into my leg, up my hip, into my chest, where it squeezes my heart. Like a cold hand.

But you have the same trouble too Radio Man, in the boat, in the belly of the whale, with Jonah. You are trapped by a fallen winch. Jonah tries to move it off of you, but it is too heavy. Occasional shreds of day light come from the blow hole far above both of you, when the whale surfaces. Like, this magical whale has no insides, just a huge cave. Jonah tries to lift the winch off with an oar. This doesn't work either. All the while Radio Man you have your mouth open and out comes music.

I'm concentrating on the light house again.

I went there a couple of times. Who hasn't?

I imagine John, Billy, Joe, and Sal in their bunks sleeping peacefully, under the water of course, under the cold water, peacefully, wrapped up in blankets and snoring. It would be nice to sleep, but I know I shouldn't. I believe I have already stated this. It's remarkable, noticing the broad loops which certain elements continue to surface. The leg. Sleep. The captain. The water. The radio. That's all there is. No, there is more. If I want to really get to the bottom of things, there is always more. I've changed my mind, the basic elements are in fact only other things in disguise. Do you see this? Wait, I want to make sure I have this right. If one thing, like the leg, actually means another, then the leg itself can no longer be a source of pain but merely reflection. I think I was closer to the truth with the drawings that never end than I gave myself credit for. And when I was thinking about space and time too. Why do I sell myself short like that? The leg means nothing, but it hints at everything. It does not move, I do not move. Have I ever moved?

I am determined to make some sense of this new thought. It seems to me that movement is not possible, and that the reason the physicists have so much trouble with space and time is cuz they don't exist. They are an illusion. Everything is static. And I'm sure Radio Man would understand me when I say everything is static. What is he doing anyway, but moving tiny pieces of static around so that it forms words and songs. He doesn't change the static, nobody changes the static, just shapes it momentarily. But

what is static molding static? More static? OK, I must admit the idea seems to have gotten beyond me. Better to watch the ocean than think about things like that. The ocean is good. The ocean is always changing. The ocean is always moving. Like the world is a glass globe and shaken up by some very large child standing out by the moon.

Oh! I want to shout and scream!

At the stop light I dug around in my backseat for the lighter that was buried under an array of shirts and books and papers, and after I found the lighter I opened up the glove compartment, opened my box of Marlboro 100's and slipped a cigarette between my lips and lit up. I felt the intoxicating smoke as I inhaled deeply - I could feel my lungs dying, and it was in tune with my dying soul. I decided to pollute my body and my brain so it was in perfect harmony with my mental and spiritual state.

I opened the window a ways to flick out the ashes. I went about fifteen miles over the limit - at a steady seventy - always keeping an eye open for any cars that might be cops, which included any car on the road. It didn't number as high as the two-digits, however - not many people were driving down this road this early in the morning. While the world was dead, us nocturnal creatures had the world to ourselves. Insomnia had returned, and I felt the light-headedness of the old days, minus the obsession with delving into those books on the paranormal.

It was over now. Actually that's probably a lie, it wasn't over at all, but my obsession with those particular subjects were over - I had plenty to ponder about in my overactive mind; much to disperse in my writings. The methods of output as of late - being the last half-year or so -consisted mainly of writing short stories, letters, and disjointed essays, and occasionally bitching about my life's imperfection into my micro-cassette recorder, which had now taken up residence between the driver seat and the passenger seat in the box of tapes that also held my sunglasses, a friend's sunglasses, and a shitload of bic pens.

I basically lived in this dark blue Mercury Topaz. When I wasn't at work I was busy driving around trying to avoid going home. Not that my family was bad or anything, or that I felt unbearably nauseous in their presence, but I had just entrapped myself for so long in that house, and more specifically in that room of mine, that I was finally beginning to enjoy my freedom.

In November I was going to be twenty. Twenty. And where the fuck have I gotten in life thus far? Absolutely nowhere. "You're young," they always tell me - all those older people, "you've got time." Bullshit. I've had time, and I could've done a lot better things with it. I could've strove for things more meaningful than these unreachable truths I yearned for, and the means of reaching that truth that I came so obsessed with. I didn't even read the books - I didn't have time to read them, only to skim them. The world was going to end soon, of course. If I didn't learn everything I could as fast as I could I might not be ready when it happens.

And I thought that's all it took: truth. What a fool I was, and perhaps am. What good is truth if it destroys you? What good is truth without happiness, or, in the least, contentment? It is useless, meaningless, futile. If I had reached those truths I desired with such an intensity, what would I do with them? What could I do with them? Try to prove it to the world? I'd already proved it to myself - hell, the stuff I read merely reinforced what my paranoid brain had already put together on it's own. So was I trying to prove it all to the masses? In my ignorance, I didn't realize that the masses don't want to know, they want to believe what they want to believe, and that isn't truth, whatever truth may be. They wanted their fantasies, and they wanted their petty lives, and they wanted to live as robots to a society damned by it's contents. Feeble minds desire no truth. Feeble minds desire comfort, and that is all - they are satisfied with what science suggests and religion proclaims. They are ecstatic in their feeble-mindedness - ignorance is bliss, of course.

Two words I used in the above paragraph stuck out as I wrote all those intertwined sentences, trying to order my thoughts: "ignorance" and "intensity." Both seem to describe me pretty well. Ignorant to what? Not to the truth, I believe - I may have been blinded by quite a bit of factual information by delving into my wild theories and occult research, but I was on a search for truth, and it brought me to a greater understanding. No, what I was ignoring for five years wasn't the truth at all, on the contrary, it was my goal. What I was suppressing were my feelings, my emotions, my desires and needs. My intellect was so unbearably loud in it's volume that it drowned out any cries that other parts of me may have been expressing: my heart, for instance.

My intensity is this passion that exists so strongly within me. It is like a force, and, at the risk of sounding a little too Star Wars, I had a hard time directing it. This passion, this force, this intensity is what turned up my intellect and desired to know so much. It neglected my desires to feel, live, and experience and grow as a person, as an individual. I was wrapped up in deep philosophy and in trying to construct a new science.

I ignored how I felt about her. How deeply I cared for her, how much I needed her, and, after the hard times and sleepless nights, after the paranoia and the inescapable fear and the fragmentation of my psyche, and after the psychologists and social workers and psychiatrists, and resultingly the medication, I finally came to realize what I desired more than truth:

Contentment.

I had to sit down and ask myself a powerful question: what is it that would make you happy? As mushy and sappy as it sounded, a little voice inside me - the voice of my heart that had been drowned out by my rampant intellect all those years - called out, "love." I cringed. I hated that word. People threw it around so much it meant nothing anymore. I always turned away from it, saying it as least as possible. It was a strong word, I believed - maybe the strongest word in existence. At least for me it was - it held so much meaning, and I promised myself I'd keep it reserved for that special person, that special someone, might I ever meet her.

Yet I had been ignorant for half a decade to this emotional side of me. I needed to be content, and maybe even happy. What would make me happy? Love. I began to play around with the idea that maybe, unbeknownst to me at the time, I had once been in love. First things first: what did love mean? Without a doubt it meant something different to every person - but what did it mean to me?

I brought it down to this: if you could take a moment with someone - anyone - and freeze that moment for three thousand years and never ask for anything more, that would be love. It's that bond between two people that cannot be severed, that link between two individuals that kept them together by heart, even when, physically, they were millions of miles apart - that was love.

I swallowed. I sighed. I swore. Man, I cursed - every damn expletive in the book came rushing into my mind at once, attacking me all at once. "You fool," they told me, "you fucking fool. You were in love."

And love, like consciousness, never dies - and so as I was in love, and I am, and shall always be in love with her.

I wrote some poems - very drastically, my poetry changed from writing about personal hell and combat with mental demons and traumatic, perhaps false, childhood memories into poetry concerning love, heart-ache, and sweet memories of a past I didn't merely let go of, but pushed away in fear.

I read them, and reread them. This was not me, it was not Rewired.

It was another part of this entity - the collective entity was known as Tim, the writer, for five years, even before I had named him, was Rewired. What was I now?

I slapped a new name on him. I let the thoughts and emotions flow.

I feel better now, in a sense. It's good to know how I feel, even if I can't do a damn thing about it. I know I'm a strong person, not the coward I sometimes let myself seem, for if I wasn't a strong person I wouldn't have made it this far. I wouldn't have climbed out of that grave I fell in, looked down at the corpse that I had finally detached from, and I would've never begun to lay on the gasoline, burn it, and cover the ashes in dirt and leave it behind me.

I visit the grave of the dead me in thought, and I smile. I smile even more when I travel away from the grave and to the pond a ways away. I smile because I look in the water and a face stares back at me. It's not too clear, perhaps because I'm not done putting it together - but it's in the works. Things are coming together.

Things are getting clearer.

I get in my car and drive away again, heading down the road. I cradle the cigarette in my hands, drink the cappuccino, and let the wind rushing in from the open window blast in my face and through my shirt. I can feel again. I'm living the life I neglected, rather than living the death I was obsessed with.

I am truly undead.

Yeah, like you understood that... If you can tell me, the super-slacking Mr. G. which issue the above paragraph was printed in English, I'll find a sneaky way to put your name into a future issue of Gopher.