Monday, November 25, 2002 6:36 PM Joe Coluccio

A Little Jargon here, a little Jargon there and pretty soon you are talking serious Exclamation!

First things, as the philosophers say, first. Or was it the carpenters, or the democrats, perhaps it was the Confusions. In any case I heard it somewhere and it seemed oh so elegant and right!

I believe in Integration. (What does Mac Davis mean when he says he believes in music, or there is a radio station in town that says it is where the music matters, what?) But seriously. I don’t mean to say that I can’t accept differentiation. I can and often strip things down until their constituent elements reverberate with contradiction, ambiguity and segregation. I, myself, shake the rattled role of indeterminate and naked separation. But, when the course is clear, the stars navigate the night, I sail invariably to the shores of that which is whole. It’s just the way I am.

I find that Jargon splits my soul. I am, it turns out, a Jack of all Trades and Master of None of any in Particular.

So when I walk into a Home Depot and someone wants to rabbet his joints, I’m okay, really! Big hairy guys and trendy petite overhauled women, displaying paint smears and swatches of gaily colored fabric, gazing longingly at a radial arm saw with enough power to cut a compound miter through a live Sequoia, or a square tabled router that will cove a piece of flat trim stock with the ease of a knife spreading warm butter on a scone. I gasp. It gives me pleasurable pause.

I move to a science fiction connection on the internet and find that NESFA has published not only the entire short works of Frederic Brown but five of his novels have been anthologized as well. Or not only the Lensman, but the Skylark have been reissued in trade paperback facsimile edition. With the mere mysterious click of a mouse I find that same Frederic Brown has his complete detective fiction published in uniform edition as well as an unknown series by sf’er Robert Sheckley. My eyes tear as the BEM’s blast the moxy from the shamus in me. “I’m a private dick,” says Loren Estleman’s Amos Walker. Hmmm, we kinda related, says the streetwalker, “I’m a public pussy.”

I have a priori discovered that I have a posteriori an itch. It seems my Weltanschauung doesn’t much allow for the Zeitgeist. Or is it that Zeitgeist became embroiled in my Weltanschauung? In any case Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Or to ask it far less succinctly can there be that than which nothing greater can be thought. Ontologically speaking, of course.

It turns. I can name that tune in one demisemiquaver. First declension nouns dative case end in eta or long alpha. James is Joyous because Jung was easily Freuded. You have to have a check valve in the hot gas line when you relieve to an intermediate pressure. Ted Williams has a .344 lifetime batting average. Disney’s multiplane camera has been outstripped by CGI. Wotan is a Rhine Osiris. A trope is a tripe is a trap.

Problem and solution. It integrates in me. And, man, are my arms ever tired.

I just flew in from Cleveland.