I have put on some Handel.

I'd like to talk to someone closer to me, or more accessible, but I don't like being a pest...

This might be considered a week without consequence in the larger scheme of things. I have been focusing on the Marketing & Promotions side of The World's Magazine. On changing servers, an administrative chore.

I leave Manhattan, suddenly there's a Subway (World) Series (of Baseball.) Go figure!

By Dumb-Luck I've been looking at a prospective sticker campaign in New York City, London and San Francisco, thanks to the volunteer efforts of my pals Chris at bla-bla.com and Fliss in London. AND there will soon be G21 t-shirts, mousepads, coffee mugs. What did Frank Zappa say, "Strictly commercial?" Oy gevalt!

The Writer, meanwhile, has slipped onto the back-burner again as the Webslinger takes precedence. It's an on-going struggle.

THE BIG TREAT of this week was the news that PIYUSH KUMAR, of the G-Crew, celebrated the birth of a new son ! In the typical way of his gentle spirit, he took time out to share the news with me and apologize because he would be off-line for a week or so. (Can you see why I like working this group of people?) Those of you who believe in such things, please send good vibes in the direction of India and Piyush's family. Thanks.

I noted that my former employers at Bendover.net redirected any call on my former IT Manager's Journal column to take people to their News Forgery site. A very cheap trick, really. Just a snippet of code to make my old readers wonder "What the Hell?!?" Gotten quite a bit of mail about that. There's only one word for it, of course: CHEESY. But then I heard that News Forgery was going over like a lead balloon for them before I was asked to leave....

We can't all demonstrate class, can we?

I just have one Open Queston for them: How can you pretend to be for encouraging FREEDOM on the Internet and also seek to assimilate everyone to your creed? Just wondering. All I see over there these days is white-on-white: swiss cheese on white bread with mayo.

Meanwhile, Back at The Ranch

We have another debut this week, too! The World's Magazine is actively recruiting female writers, so we're proud to bring you a great cover story by Michigan's PHALA RAY-ORIANS. She pricks our consciences before we enter those voting booths here in the USA.

AND I've been in contact with G21 alumnus ADAM J. SMITH this week, recently relocated from Washington, DC, to nothern California, and now working with DanceSafe.org about a series we're planning for next month on the Rave scene and the government crackdown on Ecstacy. As we go into the party season, you might want to check this out.

There's other rad' stuff here, too, Kids --- as always. Let me know what you think and feel free to send along suggestions.

The Ghost Who Walks

In the dream, I was now wandering New York in much the way I had wandered Cairo.

Sometimes, after many hours of slogging through the muggy heat, listening to the apocalyptic tirades of homeless people on the streets corners, in the subways, I would simply be too exhausted to go on. I would surrender, curl up in a hovel of rags and old newspapers and try to sleep like any beggar, any hapless peasant in the shanty-towns on the outskirts of Cairo where villagers had created floating cities.

I often awakened dazed, unsure how long I had been asleep, where I was, but always remembering the dreams of the toy. And other depths of the dream also.

I awakened under the Cross-Bronx Expressway and saw that I had fallen asleep among a group of homeless men and vagrants there. It was night, but I had no way of telling what time. I did not have a wrist watch. The man next to me, there against the piling, smiled as I started awake, as though to reassure me. There was something familiar about him, his face.

Though his clothes were shabby, that is both over-sized and obviously second or third hand, he did not appear that much worse for the reduced circumstances of his life. He was dirty, but so was I from the collected grime of the subways and doorways in which I had invariably slept. His face was grizzled by a four or five day growth of beard, but so was mine. I remarked all this in such detail because of the curious familiarity of that man's face.

He was friendly enough, too. I thought he was a handsome man, with an appealing dark face, black hair greying at the temples. As I was searching his features, his eyes, for some clue as to our mutuality, he was offering me to partake of the bottle he kept sheathed in the ubiquitous brown paper bag.

I did so. "Thanks," I said as the hot liquor burned down into my center. I was almost immediately suffused with a comforting lethargy. The heat of the alcohol seemed to spread throughout my limbs.
"Thought you might need it," the man said. "Talking in your sleep."

"I have nightmares," I confessed.

"Don't we all," the man smirked. He offered me another snort from his bottle.

I waved it off. "Was I loud?"

He chuckled affably. "Naw. It was more like in a fever. Something about four questions... Four questions. They must be awful important to you."

"Can you help me with them?" I asked.

"Perhaps I can. Tell me the questions."

I told this friendly man the four questions Masrui had posed to me.

The man chuckled. "All good questions," he said, "if surprising. It is not often that you run into a metaphysical bum." He raised a hand to fend off my protests. "But I do think I can help you," he said. "It is written somewhere that Satan loves a riddle. I am sure this is why your sorcerer chose to leave you with riddles to confound and consume your mind.

"And it worked, didn't it? The Sphinx used riddles to trip up travelers on the road to Thebes until Oedipus came along. Many of the oracles from Delphi came in the form of riddles. Aristotle claimed that this was so the mysteries would not be readily accessible to lesser minds. The Bodhidarma, the first Chan patriarch of Zen Buddhism, believed that a riddle, or Koan, was central to achieving true knowledge. And even the Bible and Koran are replete with riddles, my friend; not least among the former, the riddle of the Second Coming and the rapture. Rumplestilskin loved a riddle, as did the Trickster.

"Today, we think of riddles only as games, don't we? But riddles have always been central to the mystery, haven't they, friend? The ancients understood that riddles could be used to arbitrate questions of life and death.... And that is no game.

"But let me get to your questions. It is a subtle trick, one of the Alam al-Mithal, I think, that your sorcerer plays with you with the first question. He is messin' with your head, as our colleagues in this gutter might say, my friend. It is not presumption, but healthy curiosity which makes us address the great questions contemplated by the mystics. What good is a mystery if no one ever pierces its veil, I ask you? These conundrums, I think, were posed simply so that they would be solved. What is a Gordian Knot without its Alexander, after all?

"The second question is a complex question. Not in that its solution is difficult, but in that it has four parts. If it had had two parts, I would have called it a compound question." The man giggled at what he took for his own wit. "Does God involve himself in the lives of individual men? What is there to prove that he does not? Certainly there is adequate evidence in the Koran and the Torah that such is the case. Thus, it is not presumptuous at all for you to assume that He does. You are working from tradition, and if tradition is given authority, then you have a hard body of evidence. Does he do so with all men at all times? Again, if we defer to tradition, there is less evidence to support this notion. While the New Testament claims that he omnisciently watches even the sparrows, this runs counter to the vast body of tradition which implies that certain individuals are chosen to act as messengers and instruments in certain times and among certain nations. Ipso facto, Job was a particular and unique case.

"As to what marks a man for God's special consideration, the evidence is scanty at best. Each individual brought qualities to the table which were unique. David was certainly not Job, nor was Samson like Daniel. Thus, it would seem to me to be our best answer that the presumption would be in assuming that we could possibly fathom the underlying, root causes of such choices. What, if anything, do we know about the soul and its mysteries? Clearly, not enough, or we would not be contemplating mysteries such as these at all.

"The third question is an irrelevancy. It is put there to trip you up, friend, and to give your tormentor a basis for forming the fourth.

"The fourth is the key question. How you answer it is central to your battle with the sorcerer, Quentin Khorsa. If you say that you are not part of God's Plan, you automatically put yourself outside of the fence of God's protection, you are on your own.

"If you say that you are part of The Plan, something you certainly can not know with any certainty, you are, yes, most likely guilty of the type of hubris for which you have become well known. That, could indeed, be part of the Satanic design, with all the foregoing merely being a means toward reaching that end. Who is to say?"

I was flabbergasted by this last peroration of his logic. "What? What?"

"I'm sorry," the man said, getting to his own feet. "I must go now. I have an appointment. To see a magician die at Radio City Music Hall. I can get a woman for you before I go. I know you need one."

"What? Who are you? How did you know my name?"

"Sorry. I must hurry," he said over his shoulder, rushing away from our hovel.

"Stop!" I called after him, trying to get to my own feet. "Wait!"

I awakened under the Cross Bronx Expressway, from sleeping among the homeless men and vagrants there, bleeding profusely from my nose and mouth.

I made my way up to 173rd and Broadway, where the old buildings full of Dominicans, Blacks and Trinidadians overlook the Hudson. I wandered past the neighborhood groceries, pizzerias, tacquerias, doughnut shops, inhaled the fumes of the passing buses, making my way down Broadway to where I could get down into the subway.

Old women looked away from my eyes, crossed themselves, as though fearful that I might be the possessor of the evil eye. This was an angular part of The City, grey and grimy, where you could feel the people close-packed one atop the other. People spilled from the buildings wearing the costumes of their attitudes: black leather, crushed suede; long, multicolored scarfs which trailed behind them in the wind like banners, skull caps, sequined stockings, spiked heels which punched out the upper calf muscles and defied the conventional sense of balance, jack boots with hobnails that flashed sparks from the pavement, the sandals of a desert shaman; perfumes to do battle with the aromas of sweat, sex, putrefaction, roasting meat going brown on spits, fruit falling from stands.

A tall, blonde woman was standing on the street corner in a full-length fur coat. She looked directly at me. "Wannah see the future?" she asked.

This was queer. She did not look like a gypsy to me. She opened her coat, revealing her voluptuous nude body. It was a delirious night which only New York City could force rushing toward me between the Expressway and the subway. I tried to walk as quickly as everyone else to fall into the cadence of uptown Broadway, but I was exhausted. I wanted Constance around. If I was still asleep, still in the dream, with her lucid dreaming she would be able to provide a test to let me know I was in the dream. Without Constance, I was at the mercy of the perfect trap, my own mind. Perhaps I had not had a dream of the friendly man below the Expressway; perhaps I had been awake fully then and was sleeping now, dreaming that I had awakened spewing blood and needed to get to the subway as soon as possible through this busy night.

Anything was possible in this strange new universe where Masrui had placed me to be beaten down, to seek the answers to his four questions, and eventually to die.

And then the horror of my situation gripped me! I began to sweat and gasp for air. It was possible that I might die in von Schlecht's chamber not knowing if I was awake or asleep!

THINGS THAT I LOVE THIS WEEK

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000. He is now a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine.

He lives in Baltimore, MD, at the moment (though it seems to most people he *actually* lives on the Web,) edits the writing of people from six continents for The World's Magazine, and wonders who The Last Woman will be in his "spare time." Rumor has it he is considering moving to Tahiti and writing about what the world was like before he left...

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