THIS is nature’s nest of boxes: the supermarkets contain the meaningless products; the meaningless products, false joy; the false joy, true sorrow. And all these are concentric; the consumerist centre to them all is decay, debt; only that is eccentric is confined elsewhere; only that place, beyond the credit card’s swipe, which we can imagine but not demonstrate. That light, which is the very emanation of humanity and unencumbered by those wont to keep up with the Joneses, in which the IKEA freaks cannot perambulate, in which the mantras of Lechter’s and Tiffany are profane, with which the misfits can stick out tongues and “perverts” fornicate in manifold ways without legislative sanction; it does not bend to this vicious circle; that which was assumed to be nothing is not threatened with humorless annihilation. All other things are; even those office jobs which are just “temporary” and go on for years, or those roles upon life’s stage in which one must regularly supplicate to the Almighty Dollar, capitulating life, love, and even literature to keep rumps ensnared within golden hearths. In all these (the fluorescent lights of the supermarkets, the meaningless products advertised on glaring jumbo-sized billboards, the false joy confused with boredom when the true joys remain unpursued and unexamined), those are the greatest mischiefs which are least contemplated, let alone lived; the most insensible in their ways come to be the most sensible in their ends. The supermarkets have had their dropsy, they drowned the world with their hideous music and their limitless selection; and they have effected a great fever upon this land, and threaten to burn the world: a greater conflagration than anything contrived by any religious deity or demon. Of the dropsy, the flood of tears causing so many to be hurt and not know of the Green Trap, the world had a foreknowledge one hundred and twenty years before it came; and so some made provision against it, to live lives of self-reliance and defy quiet desperation; but they were few in number and roundly mocked and frequently incarcerated. The dropsy did serious harm and instilled death and devastation among all bountiful and deserving souls; but it could not put out the light of those that resisted and those that sallied forth despite despicable odds. Though the dollarstar have a pestilent breath, an infectious exhalation, yet, because we know when it will rise, when rent is due and Mastercard debts must dwindle, we clothe ourselves with the misfits, and we diet ourselves, and stand with a long shadow behind us in dropsy prevention; great comets and blazing stars and marvelous achievements yesterday, today and tomorrow! What’s the point of clinging to this dollarstar when the human spirit throws off its yoke and manacles and realizes how illusory the comforts before it? Let the diseased continue their Romero-like stupor, while those who dare to surrender all in the name of greatness defy dropsy!

Some people have emailed me this Seattle Weekly article about the Gary Groth/Harlan Ellison debacle, asking for my thoughts. Since I have no real interest in any of this, I’ll simply remark that it looks to me like a penis measuring contest and move on.

Simon Owens investigates.