Detail from the dream of yesternight: the tombstone handlers’ tattoos were not ink. They were made of copper. The copper was melted and colored as desired, then embedded into the flesh. Is that even possible? Probably not up to FDA or dermatological standards, but it’s fantasy.

To expand on this, I think that the tombstone handlers will be members of an esoteric union of gravediggers and funerary laborers. None of them could explain the union’s origins, or how they became involved with it. It had been part of their lives since birth, and it would stay that way until death. The misplacement of my cement plaque accounted for the extremely rare admission of an outsider into their circle. The proper management and organization of the tombstones took precedence over any relative façade of anonymity.

Even in the year 2017 they had managed to elude the capture of commercial and criminal search engines, escaping mention on the public Internet. No third parties had gobbled up their existence and monetized it. Livelihoods and mouths were not being fed by cursory scraping of these individuals or their union.

One woman in this group had a tattoo of God on her tongue. I could not see it. The others promised me it was there, and that they could see it just fine. I stared at that woman’s tongue for decades and never saw the tattoo of God she said wetly fluctuated there.

…

I pulled the trigger. Sealed the deal. Did the deed. I paid off my credit card and then promptly stuffed it up again with a $319 purchase of Sony noise canceling headphones. That’s an $80 discount for buying them refurbished. I had good luck with a refurbished Sony camera, which I carry everywhere since at least 2 years now. I don’t use cameras as much as I used to. Like a lot of people I just default to the phone camera, though it took me longer than most (it seems) to adopt that behavior.

The headphones will re-introduce me to the screaming inside my head. I can’t wait. Every motion and movement around me will be muted. Well, almost every motion and movement. The noise will rise from my brain, unfiltered. Who wouldn’t want that?

…

Random book of the moment is Teach Yourself Planets, by David A. Rothery… or as his name is lower-casedly printed: david a. rothery. The book’s cover features a picture of a tubby boy, probably 11 or 12 years old, wearing a plexiglass helmet and a space suit. He is standing in what appears to be the front yard of his house, sharing the grass with a phallic rocket that appears to be quite a bit taller than himsself. I hate to say it but his face and spasticly rising hair look a bit like mine. There are also antennæ rising from his plexiglass helmet. At first I found no credit for the photographer of this masterpiece. Acknowledgements on the unnumbered page IV suggested this was a public domain tax-payer funded product of NASA. Alas, a photo credit is found on the back cover: Jock McDonald/Getty Images.

Page 61 is slightly obscured, this on account of someone having dog-eared page 62 and removing the top portion of page 61 in the process.

This pages seems to focus on tectonic plates, a term I vaguely remember from my brief dalliances with Dungeons & Dragons in grade school. Tectonic plates were, to the best of my memory, associated with the elemental plain of fire. They shifted and morphed and on account of their indolent unease they caused a lot of trouble for adventurers.

Page 61 informs me that the earth’s surface is “relatively young”, but this does not seem to be a comparison to other planets. The surface of earth is always changing on account of the movement of the tectonic plates.

Contrary to Mr. Rothery I call it “earth” (lower case) and not “The Earth”. I think there was a United Nations amendment to some global constitution to officially change the nomenclature we assign to our shared planet. The intent, as I recall from the news bite, was to bring humans back down to, you know, earth, by not allowing ourselves the prestige of having ours be the only planet officially called “The” (with the capital T) and by using a word that implies we are the center of the universe or the only habitable place when no one really knows that to be true.

Perhaps, as Webster implies in hi 6th definition of the word, the use of he word is derived from its use in Genesis 1: “God called the dry land earth.” That is not capitalized, nor is the royal “The” prepended. Genesis opens with God creating “the heavens and the earth.

I do not think I have ever seen the version of the Bible at the Vatican’s web site. If I had I would probably remember Genesis 1:2, where “a wind from God swept over the waters.” That sounds like something that happens continuously, trillions of times a second… not that temporal measurements have any relevance in the context of God.

“God, of course, is always capitalized. A foul-mouthed Jesuit once told me that in the Dark Ages, when monks transcribed the Bible as part of their ritual of eternal penance, it was considered a crime to mis-spell God by using the lower case, no matter if it was accidental. I even demure from typing the word “God” in this context without its proper Upper Case stature. One mistake like that and the scribe monk would be excommunicated to the mines, or else simply forced to start over again with his transcription. That anecdote, true or not, has never left me.

It seems, then, that when “God” is the first word in a sentence that there should be some ancillary typesetting trick to supplement the first letter being upper case. It’s like the prestige of God is being supplanted in a way by the rules of spelling and sentence design.

I also think “God” should be the first word of the Bible. “In the beginning” is powerful stuff, but I think it should start like a script. “God:” And then God says something.

Webster’s 1828 dictionary describes our earth, in its third definition of the word, as a “terraqueous globe” and an “oblate spheroid”. Nice.

Page 61  of Teach Yourself Planets further mentions that on account of misbehaving volcanoes the continent of Africa is “showing signs of splitting apart”. I’ll wait for that.

More than half of page 181 is filled with a picture of my anus. Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Here the author tells us that Uranus contains “patches of bright ejecta”. “Ejecta” is a new word to me, one which only further fuels the adolescent instinct to turn any discussion of this planet into something  puerile.

Is that ejecta I see coming from your anus?

Page 207 brings us back to loftier climes, with discussion of the Kuiper belt and Trans-Neptunian objects. I do not know what that means, and the context of the single pages does not go especially deep into the meanings, which I guess are implied to have traveled to the reader from previous pages.

The book, from glazing over its words, seems to be well written, with big and obscure words used not for show but out of necessity.

OK, it is getting crowded with after-school kids here. Time to move on to the sammich portion of my day.

NTTPr. (No Time To Proofread.)