the diplopic ad actor

under the aegis of the same J.D. Steelritter

a prolix and confusing one

By now Mark and D.L. were being seen together. Why? [...]

Yes and but he, Mark: why?

in that gloaming territory between

any more than brave Philoctetes of yore had needed that snakebite

Life goes on. You're empty, sad, probably the least appreciated creative virtuoso in the industry; well and but life just goes on, emptily, sadly, with always direction but never center. The hubless wheels spins ever faster, no? Yes. Admen approach challenges thus: concede what's hopelessly true, what you can't make folks ever want to not be so; concede; then take your creative arm and hammer a big soaked wedge, hard as can be, into whatever's open to interpretation. Interpret, argue, sing, whisper, work the wedge down into the pulp, where the real red juices be, where folks feel alone, fear their genitals, embrace their own shadows, want so badly it's a great subsonic groan, a lambent static only the trained adman's sticky ear can trap, retain, digest. Interpretation, he's fond of telling DeHaven, is persuasion's driveway. Persuasion is desire

a lambent static only the trained adman's sticky ear can trap

[...] He represents the Product. Is Ronald McDonald. Professionally. This son, this sty on the cosmic eyelid, this SHRDLU in the cosmic ad copy, represents the world's community restaurant.

Schlamazl is the totally innocent hapless guy who gets spilled on

Schlemiel is the clumsy waiter who spills the scalding soup

Bagwanite's pirate squint

What's contemporarily tragic about Sternberg is that he has a fatal physical flaw. One of his eyes is turned completely around in his head. From the front it looks like a boiled egg. It won't come back around straight. It's like an injury. It's incredibly bad for his ambitions as a commercial actor. He doesn't talk about what the backward eye sees. He's offended that D.L. in person asked him right off the bat.

He has other flaws, too.

Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men's Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He's needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the LordAloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O'Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg's shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in the stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs.

as hero, as Protagoras

[...] Ironically, a good part of his anticorporeal stance (it was his idea to call having a body Corporeal Punishment) derives from his non_fatal flaw, the skin trouble, the skin trouble itself deriving from a weekend years past, just before a cattle call for a Wisk spot he didn't get, a weekend of solo camping and getting-into-collar-soiled-character, with a tent, in the Berkshires, West of Boston, during which he'd contracted a mild spatter of poison sumac, and had purchased a discount generic brand of poison-sumac medicine he curses now and forever (like most terse-labeled generics the product was untrustworthy, turned out in fact to be medicine for the _sumac, not the sufferer therefrom, but if the label says MEDICINE FOR POISON SUMAC what the fuck are you going to think, standing there?) that had set his face, neck, chest and back aflame: pulsing, cystic, volcanic, allergic, clotted, almost sacredly scarred. The sumac is so bad it hurts--which of course is a constant reminder that it's there, on his body--and it won't go away, no sooner healed by brand-name antitoxin than reinfected. The whole thing's just pretty loathsome, and you can bet Sternberg loathes it. He's unhappy, but in that comparatively neat and easy way of those who are at least pretty sure they know why they're unhappy, and what to curse, now and forever.

But and so things are slow, and like you they have this irritating suspicion that any real satisfaction is still way, way off, and it's frustrating; but like basically decent kids they suck it up, bite the foil, because what's going on is just plain real; and no matter what we want, the real world is pretty slow, at present, for kids our age.

a linguistic bewitchment, a leximancical fraud

to engage in general orgiastic Walpurgisrevel that would have just shot Faust's rocks

carefully targeted inducements and duressments

[...] We just want to ride, dude. Gratis. To the Reunion. We just want to do the bare unavoidable minimum. Pay taxes, die. Sternberg has resentment even he can't see, it's so deep inside. So an ugly mood, and a desperate need to evacuate his body. It's loathsomely real, I'm afraid. But what's to be done?

aglitter in eyes far smaller than good old familiar occidental eyes

good old familiar occidental eyes

weltschmerzian end-lust aglitter

"But Miss this Visa has unlimited credit. Look--it's got 'LIMIT: SKY' printed right on it. Embossed."

verdant, tall, total, menacingly fertile

beardedly distinguished non-Mormon Steelritter janissary

Cause it's only dark, generally, back there in his eye's guts. Sometimes a spidery system of synaptic color, if he tries to move the bad eye too quickly. But usually nothing. But it'll heal, anyway. It'll come around. It's all in his head, he knows. Youthful-rebellion injury. Mrs. Sternberg warned from day one that the boy that does a forbidden thing, such as like for example crosses his eyes just to hurt a mother: that boy finds they stay like that. Well-known fact. Look it up in whatever resources orthodox mothers with lapsed sons access. Like early to bed: it's the sleep before dark that's most important. Like don't cry: you're better than whoever laughs at you. Like try this lotion, for sumac.

Here's the fresh sumac cyst, though, here, boy, between his eyes. It's darkened richly since the last cyst-check in O'Hare, matured from that tomato pink to the same plum shade as the airport lounge. The mirror does not lie.

Your average deformity sufferer has a love-hate thing with mirrors: you need to see how things are progressing, but you also hate it that they're progressing. Sternberg's not at all sure he likes the idea of sharing a mirror with a whole lot of actors. He's not sure he wants to rent a bureaucratic car and head West without sleep or soap for a Funhouse the brochure says is carefully designed utilizing mostly systems of mirrors. A crowded, mirrored place ... Sternberg ponders the idea as the automatic sink fills gurgling to his slit of the emergency drain at its rim. This sumac cyst between is eyes feels fucking alive, man. Pulses painfully with the squeak of his head's blood. The cyst is beginning to show a little bit of white at the acme. Not good. Clear evidence of white blood cells, which implies blood cells, and so a bloodstream. From there it doesn't take genius to figure out that you've got a body. A bit of white at an infected cyst's cap is pretty much embodiedness embodied. No way he's messing with the fucker, though. It would just love to be messed with. Would feed on it. And the stage after plum is eggplant, big and dusky and curved, like a new organ in itself, to be an ism of.

The sink, with a gurgled sigh like almost mercy, overflows, emergency drain-slit and all, Sternberg's spent so unmercifully so much time in here. The water gurgles over the rim and onto the crotch of his gabardines. Great. That's just great. Now it looks like he's maybe wet himself. And what's he supposed to say. Or even if he doesn't say anything. Either way, explanation or interpretation, he comes out embodied. He demands compassion from a mirror he's backed away from, hoping to make the water stop. But it doesn't. Maybe it's been on too long. It's spilling onto the floor. Great. He demands compassion. Except of whom, though?

Because DeHaven Steelritter, son, has unwittingly given J.D. some of J.D.'s most creative and inspired ideas. It was DeHaven who first poured Arm & Hammer baking soda down the drain of the Steelritter farmhouse kitchen, in Collision, to try to erase the indelible odor of two marijuana roaches mistakenly washed down there along with the remains of something sweet. What happened to the fridge's baking soda? asks Mrs. Steelritter, who fears the noisomely oily smell of the fried roses that festoon the second-to-the-bottom refrigerator shelf. Where's my Arm and Hammer? she asks, as they sit down to a giant Midwest supper. DeHaven--who, like anybody who smokes dope under his parents' roof, is quick on his feet when it comes to explaining wild kitchen incongruities--delineates a deep concern for the impression the odor of the Steelritter drain could have made on the next houseguest who just might visit the kitchen and have occasion to get a whiff of the drain that, he declares, dry-mouthed, had smelled like death embodied.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF HOW SOME OF J.D. STEELRITTER'S MOST POWERFUL AND LEGENDARY PUBLIC-RELATIONS CREATIONS ARE REALLY NOTHING MORE THAN A SLIGHT TRANSFIGURATION OF WHAT REALLY JUST GOES ON AROUND HIS OWN ROSE FARM'S FARMHOUSE

One fine winter morning, years back, J.D. Steelritter was getting ready to go off to work at the J.D. Steelritter Advertising Complex, just across the snowy, greenhouse-dotted fields and intersection from home. But anyway he's heading for the door, and little DeHaven, home from sixth grade (his second shot at it) with one of those mysterious feverless colds that just cry out to be nipped in the bud--he tells J.D., in complete innocence, the innocence of a child before a television, to have a nice day.

The rest, as they say.

fried roses that festoon the second-to-the-bottom refrigerator shelf

more like an epicurean taste for

wangled a tête-à-tête

[...] but it's a bit too late in the game for this ploy to do more than cover some losses, and the pesticide salesman is angst-ridden and red-eyed and effetely low on self-esteem, and wants very much to ball this ageless but oddly sexy orange-faced stewardess, as further coverage against estimable losses.

[...] If all blacks are great dancers and athletes, and all Orientals are smart and identical and industrious, and all Jews are great makers of money and literature, wielders of a clout born of cohesion, and all Latins great lovers and stiletto-wielders and slippers-past-borders--well then gee, what does that make all plain old American WASPs? What one great feature, for the racist, brings us whitebreads together under the solid roof of stereotype? Nothing. A nameless faceless Great White Male. Racism seems to Mark a kind of weird masochism. A way to make us feel utterly and pointlessly alone. Unidentified. More than Sternberg hates being embodied, more than D.L. hates premodern realism, Mark hates to believe he is Alone. It's the high siren's song of the wrist's big razor. It's the end of the long, long, long race you're watching, but at the end you fail to see who won, so entranced are you with the exhausted beauty of the runners' faces as they cross the taped line to totter in agonized circles, hands on hips, bent.

In a related development, Mark Nechtr is now revealed by me to have professionally diagnosed emotional problems.

of the land speculator's need for läbensraum

[...] We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; [...] That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsis binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd. It's Steelritter's meat.

[...] The enormous crowd J.D. hath wrought over thirty years of time purchased second by expensive second will come together, lose the supplicants' courtesy that atomizes crowds, and desire past all earthly care the rendition of fat, the sigh of oil, the sparkle of carbonation, the consumption of government-inspected flesh. [...]

succumbs via epistasis to the bewitchment of the Mesmermaze he spins

arches, altar, predella

red Kekulian serpent

D.L. is utterly silent throughout this exchange, watching the odometer begin slowly to lose its magic. There is a reason for her silence that is in a way parallel to the historical U.S. conflict in Vietnam. For her, Vietnam does not exist except as complicatedly cancelled letters and hissingly connected phone calls, a completely flat-eyed father whom she first met on a tarmac at nine. Who had a hook. Who dropped at automobile backfires (Datsuns never backfire--too little power), who gazed dully and accepting at the mosquito feeding at his one big bicep. Who's long gone, now. Who left a note.

the other hand is inflicting absolute entomicide

[...] J.D. sometimes looks at DeHaven with this sort of objective horrified amazement: I made that?

Mark decides on maybe just one petal, to tide him over against arrival.

bottomless dread and phylogenic lust

"These things are the violent end of American advertising, kid," J.D. grimaces critically at the dusty, well-traveled crud in the blurred Baggie. "Advertising embodied."

Sternbeg horrified for real: "What?"

watching his gabardines go up and down like a derrick

eleemosynary fiction desires charity

declivated shape

homiletic fiction desires peace

acclivated shape

toponymic topoi

toponymic topoi

type of parousia whose advent leaves exactly zero to chance