``Don't hate the player; hate the game.,,
  -- Полиграф Полиграфович Шариков

This ain't quite an obituary, for I disqualify myself from writing those about people of whom I only first learned by reading those written by others; for, however often professional journalists may discover that, contrary to chasing dreams of shattering records in composition of the primary sources, the formal funereals are their responsibility, and I am neither paid nor well, and not much of a reporter, either. If only I could write one for that pastime!

Baseball has done a lot for me,
given me an education in meeting
other kinds of people...
It has taught me that regardless
 of who you are and how much money
  you make, you are still a Negro.
 - Henry Aaron [quoted in the link]

Individual pinnacles of athleticism frequently speak louder than arbitrary rulesets, especially when doing so in the face of adversity, yet I am puzzled as to why a man no stranger to the limelight, would credit so strong a lesson to the whims of a nation; it's just a pastime, after all, and far too measured and quantified for consideration as a game like football (either kind, really!). So you may rightly ask, who did teach that lesson, if not the grassy diamond? Definitely not the upper management, and probably not the wastes of oxygen, nitrogen, and other assorted fuels of capitalism that kept Aaron's spam chute balanced; perhaps it is merely evidence of the man's humility, likely strengthened adversely by societal biases against a man who had the balls to spare the four seasons that'd let him walk to commencement, instead actually spending his every hour of youth honing the skills that payed his bills. Let's hope that future teachers, regardless of their pedigree, academic and otherwise, are less hesitant to claim a lesson as simply found, written in their own life story, that merely happened to be buried beneath the behaviors of fans and fanatics.

It's not much; definitely not enough for an effort at reconstructing the truth, however alleged you may allege mine be, nor should I give details sufficient to place the geography, leaving instead only cues for those who recognize, and voynichal salad for those who don't.

;;;;;
title: Greenshifted Spake From The Head,
        or: How I Learned To Worry STOP
tags: school, people, truth, geography, prose
date: 2020-11-02
;;;;;

   This one's dedicated  to the school-girl-city
who reminded me, during an expected interdiction
of my  restless pacing  through the  both sleepy
and  ambullomutationally hollow  suburb, at  the
north of its tidal  sewage, open to the freshest
swills  of  the   Ostajhian  Puddle,  where  the
innocent and guilty frolick alike through desert
dunes, paved and tarred lanes, and under rooftop
weather vanes,  that although dogs go,  and cats
me-ouch, too,  and snails  die under  John's Old
Brown Shoe, one must never forget that goats can
eat, bleat, climb, rhyme, and have an all-around
jolly good time.

   Although I must acknowledge honorable mention
to  those   who  have  encouraged   me,  through
ridicule,  anger,  incredulous faith,  and  most
importantly, dance-free safe,  that although the
most  important techologies  are  those that  no
sane green  man, while he patrols  the Corridors
of  Time,  should  expect to  find  absent  when
falling through a one-way floor, there are a few
that work no more.

   Instead  of  pretending   to  understand  the
broken  symmetries  of   the  vector  guage,  as
normalized   relative   to   few-dozen-component
Johnson  noise across  a hand's  span of  mostly
empty  printed circuit  boards,  I  will tell  a
story that never happened,  about a soldier that
my brother quite  possibly personally instructed
in  every important  skill of  the variety  that
keeps certain  cases alive, certain  cases dead,
and avoids shooting uncertain dire wolves in the
head;   and   for  the   unavoidably   pervasive
imposition that words  describe actions, instead
of  merely patterning  the  shape  of the  world
across flat  space, and mapping  the projections
sattallittic onto oblate  spheroids without ever
considering  whether  the Integral  Trees  could
consider the  unidirectionality of  time's arrow
as  mathematical certainty,  I will  continue my
avoidance of  scalable vector  graphics, bitmaps
both compressed  and chromatically  reduced, and
include    a   small    amount   of    paragraph
justification  for  purposes   of  allowing  the
prosecutors  a  sideband,   through  which  they
invariably accuse  me of wasting fuel  for music
school; and I reserve in the hearts and minds of
the architects untimed one special place for the
invariable  case, computationally  equivalent to
the Axiom  of Choice, wherein the  world's shape
is described in  softly spoken direction cosines
and aggressively murdered men.

Although, as men older and wiser than myself have observed in the archives, there are few reasons to increase the rate with which one encounters the enforcement branches of the public service, I have often, and usually do, as a matter of policy, disregarded this priority when planning the path taken in retrospect by the author of the next mind, resulting in a number of encounters with the local fuzz.

Although the precise documentations in the relevant departments almost certainly differ, possibly wildly, from the descriptions that I have listed, my record is sufficiently diffuse that they can probably serve as mnemonics for either interested party.

namer of profession 2014  racketeering sting
claims investigator 2017? stolen tree splint
deliverer of corpus 2018  altercation with
head of corrections 2018   ... pub bouncer
tlv-jaffa detective 2018   ... same incident
tlv-jaffa detective 2019  assault? battery?
tlv-jaffa detective 2020 ... breached peace!

Over the next few years, as I see necessary, I will write of specific commendable actions taken by each officer noted in the above list; I doubt any of them recall the incidents as anything other than another day on the job, for they did nothing beyond what can be expectated of their profession. I avoid writing of the other extreme, in the hope that I may forget the people, despite how impossible it seems to forget their actions. I often avoid writing precise descriptions of the settings, although I'm aware that the convoluted confluence of unconvicted innocence, convinced guilt, and inequivalences of architectural practices, simmering metastable across that paper-fine hyperplane, itches.

If you are not, nor have ever been, in the public service, you are advised to read no further; furthermore, if you have been in the public service for a time so short that it left no impression on your identity, and especially if your service was in enforcement branches other than the blues, you are also advised to stop reading. Now that my audience consists primarily of military veterans, medical professionals, and the various branches of police, I proceed:

It is difficult to determine what is permitted, and what is prohibited, in regards to cardiovascular ventures lasting longer than one kilometre, roundtrip. Since this fact is quite distressing, and since I wish the dispensation of advice to last no longer than absolutely necessary, my only advice to those who kept reading, regardless of whether they complied with the previous paragraph's advice, is the less frequent of the two imperatives yelled at me from George Herbert Mangan's window, during the late hours of morning classes:

   GHM:   DOAN GIT ARRESTID!

Getting arrested -- that is, detained, interrogated, and subsequently released after legal proceedings -- is a wonderful way to increase the town's cumulative viral load for the days in question, and what's worse, it comes almost entirely at the expense of others.

TRIGGER WARNING: Vital escense is not absorbed by the kidneys!

Hokay, so: there's the sun, which is active matter of one sort.

There are planets, or overgrown, well-behaved comets, or aggregated, annealed, aquatic asteroids, or whatever you call the rocks. You can kick them quite hard, cut your teeth on them, eat them, smash them at eachother to make more or less of them, but as far as I can tell, they're the kind of stuff the turtles swim above.

On the better-civilized parts of some rocks, are a bunch of... museums. I use that word in the Wolfeian sense, and expect audience familiarity with everything I can recall during the acts of creation, editing, auditing, and reliving, so a "museum" is not quite what you'd expect. Perhaps you know me better than I do myself, and you could define the concept more accurately than my feeble effort, so I'll let you do that yourself as an audience exercise.

One of my earliest memories involves a dispute about who'd visit which parts of a museum, under what conditions (note the omission of unpriced admission). When museums grow large enough, these disputes can heat so vigorously as to cut costs on central heating, and soon enough the tearily nostalgic demand for a thermostat gives way to the much more interesting challenge of climate maintenance. Control, as you may be aware, is naught but the name of a button or two on various antiques littering this museum; maintenance, whether by hand, foot, or nail, is a fucking career.

The incorrect way to express displeasure about museum administration is by amateurly executing the chief executive amateur.

RIP Yitzhak Rabin (b: 1 March 1922; d: 4 November 1995; c: trauma, kidney failure, life)

Content Warning: This post contains a renovated memory. It is an attempt to recollect things said and done during the day which I consider yesterday.

Two main arteries skirt the coast between the clavicle and lower jawbone of the self-styled "Jewish Democracy", aptly numbered two and four (since without them, they can't even, you know, get anywhere). Unlike oxygen-rich blood, licentially-poor cripples can cycle pretty much anywhere they like, blazing capillaries across any barriers surmountable (within the limits of reason, physics, and decorum). Somewhere midway between where the first route (that's Road Two to you) lefts South and the city puns itself divinely away from its founder's pronomen, lies Seas City, a rather hivelike glass-and-cement factory for storage, feeding, and production of humans. Parks and fountains line the southwestern edges, one of the latter bearing a bold sign strictly prohibiting any entrance to the water (which runs less than finger-deep and more than crystal-clear).

I had to break that recommendation twice: once, to pick up the garbage that the idiot cubs left behind (and other idiot cubs also left behind, when I suggested that they, having already broken the recommendation, pick up the other cubs' crap); and secondly, to fish out my dumb-smart phone, which continued working despite falling face-down (until thirty hours later, when it suddenly remembered some wetness deep within). While smugly wiping moisture off the outer surfaces, gloating that my phone was so dumb that it could still work after such a dip, some Brit and brought its cubs to play the 'Hop around on the fountain without breaking the recommendation' game.

Adlai: Where are you from?
Brit: London
Adlai: Ahh. I'm from... wait, let's see if you remember your heraldry.
Brit: Wales?
Adlai: No...
[ADLAI inverts sweatshirt,
       which had doubled as red flag
       to indicate human presence in the field;
 enter WHITE LION RAMPANT upon a RED FIELD]
Adlai: Exeter!
Brit: ...
Adlai: ~New~ England
Brit: Ahh. Stay there!

Seven hours previous, I'd seen the New Sun rise. Seven hours later, I'd see the Old Sun set. That was a good day.