fingers are trembling because of the pipe tobacco and I feel a little queasy.
I should be standing outside one of President Obamaâs campaign offices with a sign that says âOur President Is Killing People.â The next day my sign would be: âAbolish the CIA.â And the next day the sign would be: âDrones Are Bad News for Civilization.â My friend Tim goes to marches and carries signs, and he says it feels good. He got arrested once.
A bird has dropped a half-eaten berry on my keyboard. It landed on the tilde key. Maybe it was not half eaten but fully shat. I put my corncob pipe down and blew on the dark fragment of berry and it hopped away onto the mulch next to the metal bench. I imagined the two hooks winching me up, lifting my slouching corpse skyward.
A man walked past, smoking a cigarette, wearing a black stoner T-shirt. âHow are you doing?â I said, waving my new pipe at him. âNot bad, and you?â He walked away across the parking lot.
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T ODAY IS A CLOUDY DAY. I woke up and I was amazed by how completely roasted and smoked my tongue felt. Itâs been many hours since I smoked a pipe, and my tongue is still recovering. It was a piece of meat in my mouth that didnât want to be steak or corned beef, it wanted still to be my own tongue. My very own talker, my slipper and slapper of mysteries.
I could be on the elliptical trainer at Planet Fitness listening to pumping music right now. The slogan of Planet Fitness is that itâs the âJudgment Free Zone.â You can be fat or thin, old or young, and they want you there exercising. I try to go every other, every third, day.
The problem with the corncob pipe, aside from the fact that it bothers my jaw and roasts my tongue, is that I feel as if Iâm impersonating Vannevar Bush. Bush was a famous war scientist who helped create the atomic bomb, and he also was a great pipe smoker and a great carver of pipes. He made presents of his handmade pipes to his cold-warrior friends. He gave a pipe to James Conant, the head of Harvard University and purger of Communists, and he gave a pipe to Allen Dulles, head of the CIA. âI trust,â Bush wrote to Dulles, âthat the pressure of the administration will not be so intense that you cannot find the time occasionally to put your feet on the desk, smoke the old pipe, and puzzle out the course of affairs in the queer world we live in.â
Dulles replied on CIA letterheadâan eagle poised on a shield bearing a strange crystal star. âAs I write these lines I am smoking with contentment, and no little pride, the pipe which bears your initials and which I know is your own handiwork,â he said.
Perhaps Allen Dulles smoked Vannevar Bushâs pipe as he mulled over the CIAâs coup in Iran and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo.
Seven
I ALMOST SKIPPED QUAKER MEETING because I hadnât had a shower and itâs hard to sit silently for an hour if youâre not clean, but then I went anyway. As I drove I listened to Beth Orton sing a song that goes: âI donât want to know about evil, only want to know about love.â I think thatâs very true. Sometimes you donât want to know about evil, you just want to know about love. You want to take off the misery hat and think only about the good things.
When I got inside, the clock was ticking and I was two minutes late and discombobulated, and it took me a while to settle down. I held my car keys. I always hold my keys during meeting. I clutch them at first and later my grip relaxes and I feel the smooth mountain range with my thumb.
Excuse me now while I throat-clear. Harrooom! God, thatâs nasty. As soon as I start talking into this thingâthis little Olympus recorderâmy vocal cords become coated with a resistant substance that has to be ground away by an enormous throat process. And then itâs as if