It was morning in New York City and Bartleby, Amble, Kempt, Tun and Arch were in the Brooklyn office.

Skullvalley After Whistletown Booksellers Inevitable and Invincible does not need a Brooklyn office. Their essentially infinite in dimensions and resources Wall Street office is more than sufficient for their finite needs and capabilities (perhaps Thundration “Tun” Whistletown & Archangelbert “Arch” Skullvalley have infinite capabilities, but — as is all too common with literal publishing Titans who exist prior to and beyond time-space — they are too blessed and eternal to consistently concern themselves with mortal woes and other passing dramas).

Still, somebody said something once kind of off-handed about how it would be nice to have a Brooklyn office and then somebody else kind of absent-mindedly conjured one into being, and — well, here its is: And it’s centerpiece is a nice and spacious room with waterfalls flowing down the walls in a kind of “clearing in the jungle” motif (actually, I think it is actually like five or six desks and a long rectangular conference table in the middle of a clearing in the jungle — judging by the average temperatures, humidity, rainfall, flora and fauna). The office looks out on Brooklyn, mostly set to 2024 these days. Sometimes they’ll spin the dial forward or backward. And somehow the views are that of a brownstone fronting a nondescript street not too far from the museum, the botanical gardens, the library, Prospect Park, downtown Brooklyn, and trains galore! So many trains. Yes, even though inside you’ve jungle on all sides stretching on and on to mountains that you could hike to if you had the time and everything; even though that’s how it is on the inside, still it looks out on one little conveniently located street.

Anyway, Amble comes down from his bedroom (still, one assumes, located in the SAWB Building in Somewhere, Sometime Wall Street) full of ideas:
“You know we were arguing that this test for US American democracy should be a lob ball that any nation could smash out of the stadium into a game-winning home run?”

Tun looks up from a morning paper — it is a sheet of life’s whirl fashioned from this morning sampled from all over the globe and it looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels-in-the-tactile-sense like nothing; but it feels-in-the-whole-conscious-moment-experience-sense like what it is — and shrugs, “Did you guys even finish that essay? It felt, correct me if I’m wrong, but it felt … ”

Amble: “You’re wrong!”

Tun: ” a little abandoned ”

Amble: “Anyway, I woke up wondering what’s to blame for the nation finding itself in this bind and apparently unable to stand reliably against the evil: Is the system, the culture, or the people broken? Obviously, it’s some combination, but I thought maybe, we could look at each strand and then weave them together into a more complete tale of critical failure.”

Anyway, Bartleby comes out of the sea (he’s still, one assumes, been overnighting as a giant whale fish slumbering at the bottom of the darkest deepest sea, “the only place one can get some peace and quiet — the only place far enough from this claptrap city and its infernal never-ending [!?and-yet-it-boasts-of-this?!?] racket!”) in his mild-mannered, scrawny, see-through, and 1950s-business-casual (black dress shoes, khaki slacks, white button-up without a tie and with the optional tweed jacket) form (well, his scrawny … 1950s-business-casual form, anyway) full of ideas:
“Perhaps the most overlooked of the many spiritual tales seething out of this bubbling cauldron of our present catastrophe is how do we save Donald Trump’s soul? For, make no mistake, a man who would gain power in order to corrupt a system designed to keep the rulers from abusing their own people — such a man is begging for spiritual destruction. But this raises many interesting and in print journalism so-oft woefully underreported questions; to name a few of the more obvious examples:

“What is ‘spiritual destruction’?

“How can outside observers assess a politician’s willful devastation of their own soul? And, more importantly, is it possible — and if so, pray God: HOW? — to assess a politician’s spiritual journey without falling prey to the underhanded crime of falsifying the spirit, of — to use a New Testament parlance that will perhaps resonate with my fellows gathered here, iced teas at your lips, in the chaise furniture of our Breukelen ouerwood — sins against the Holy Ghost?

“And, perhaps most importantly: Is there any place for such discussion in a democratic republic? Isn’t asking people to accurately assess each other’s spiritual circumstances exactly the kind of evil that separation of church and state is there to help us avoid? Don’t democratic republics function precisely because the leaders and citizenry alike agree to focus on what honest observers can reliably assess: clarity, openness, honesty, accuracy, fair play, competency, and good judgement in service of the nation as a whole?

“Anyway, scratch all that, or [here, Amble, who’d been taking furious notes and was reluctantly about to scratch it all out, holds his pen hovering above the open journal] consider writing a long and ponderous tome analyzing both Donald Trump’s spiritual train wreck and the spiritual confusions (“pretzel land” will be the phrase used the most) of the narrator, culminating in an explosion of both critiqued and critic that rains like confetti from the heavens. [Amble, brow scrunched, jots down a few notes and several large question marks.]

“To return to questions raised by this now-abandoned project:

“What is the dividing line between politics as usual in a functioning democratic republic and the willful march to political evil? Note that in the case of functioning democratic republics I define as working to undo democratic constraints on one’s power with the ultimate aim of committing crimes against the citizens of the government: ending your ability to lose elections, thereby removing the citizens’ ability to serve as a final check on your corruption madness and criminal behavior; silencing dissent with financial punishments, political punishments, detention, jail, even those Putinesque deaths that we ‘know’ could never happen state-side; and so on. Surely Donald Trump has repeatedly crossed that line; why don’t the citizens recognize this and act en masse against him?

Anyway, Kempt comes through the portal to his apartment (out of state, but with spacetime-bending portals, just next door) full of ideas:

“Beethoven’s A Die Freude, Plato’s Republic, the Bible, the Dutch masters — triumphs of the human spirit! But the US constitution; Abraham Lincoln’s speeches in defense of human freedom and the continuation of our democratic republic, the Fifteenth Amendment; almost 250 years of a continuous representative government with fair elections, peaceful transfers of power; the evolution out of slave nation into one where a black man became president and a woman of an Indian mother and a black Jamaican is a major party’s presidential candidate — also great, world-historic human achievements! Not to say, “job well done and everybody can go home now!” But still, set against the backdrop of human history, a government tethered to the people and able to evolve with them and improve them as they improve it: It’s amazing! It’s so neat! It’s a neat thing! A wonderful work of living and breathing art. That can, that should, that must write itself into something more beautiful; must continue to work on itself; must not be tossed aside like some cheap failed flimsy hack job! And yet, here we are; and the other major party’s presidential candidate shows every intention of becoming a dictator while his party selects for people and ideas that would enable this foolish, this evil quest.”

I’m so tired. I got so little done.
I am so disappointed with my day.
And what can we really even say?
Too tired to write the scene where
Arch asks if everybody’s absorbed
all the news of all the papers in the world
And Tun has, and Bartleby could but is worried
elsewhere,
and Amble and Kempt both twist
their lips in contempt of such unfairness —
being but mortals and not even self-writing fictions

And that was to be
who even cares now?
I want to go to bed and forget I was ever born
I want to go to bed and wrap myself up
in that brief respite
from forever falling down
forever failing flailing wailing alone and forlorn
why was I born? And now I’m shorn of everything but the brittle breaking bits
and just like basically
worn

Anyway
that was to be
the segue
(those top-heavy assholes! if they hadn’t stolen the word, we could start spelling segue “segway”, and the language would be a little bit more manageable, and … I don’t know, but they’re assholes … for taking the word)
to our discussion
of
you know

whatever

oh
we were going to talk
about
Ross Douthat’s heartless article
took the wind out of our sails
What is he even talking about?
And yet, there it is, apparently easy to pluck from winds surrounding Ross Douthat — a man who knows that he can’t be both a columnist for The NY Times and an open Trump voter: supporting a deranged would-be demagogue is a step too far for that venerable old chronicler of human systems lives and times

So the task will fall to Bartleby and Amble
the task of winning Ross Douthat and his army (well, a couple squadrons, anyway) undecided voters
and also all the people currently planning on voting for Donald Trump
to the side of
The Good

Yeah, so Bartleby and Amble —
in this frame story that we are giving up on right here in front of the whole world —
are tasked with demonstrating once and for all
that this election
is about Good and Evil,
and choosing to support Donald Trump is choosing to support Evil,
and choosing to support Kamala Harris is choosing to support Good,
and it is better to support Good than to support Evil,
so we should all vote for Kamala Harris.
That’s right!
Everyone!
It’s the way away from Evil and towards Good.

How to make this clear?

How to show what’s what?

Did we succeed with One Reality?
Somehow not quite?

And yet we’ll not write a better essay tomorrow!
How could we?
We feel
empty
not in the enlightened-Buddhist type way
not empty of self
not resting on impermanence and interdependence
not that kind of empty
but the drained and hopeless and succumbing to the give-up type of empty

Okay, alright, ok:

Tomorrow let’s read “One Reality”, and Epic Irony, and Ross Douthat’s disconcerting essay.
And think again.

But today
Today
Tonight
we must turn out to be cardboard in the rain
must crumble sludge-up and melt-down
must slide along with coursing gutter waters
down the drain
out a fat concrete pipe
into the airs above the sea
must fall with the splashing
city junk waters
and
plunge like Fate
into
the North Atlantic,
where we will
float disintegrate
and settle forever
as a piecemeal dust
upon the unconscious —
all along the thoroughly unsouled and unselfed ocean floor
here and there on the sea floor,
where no glow-nose fish
will ever so much as suspect
that particles of this mucky murky ground
were once cardboard were once dry (whatever that means to denizens of the pitch black parts of Old Ocean) were once an author and his editor —
once took their happy, bristling-with-life, bursting-with-hopeful-vigor places
I tell you that at one time and in their day, these bits of unconsidered dust took their places in the sun!!!

Author: Bartleby Willard?
Editor: Amble Whistletown?
Copyright Holder: But that can only be Andy Watson, the legal fiction and coalescing of circumstances physical and mental that passes for “real people” these days — don’t get us started!!!