Shakespeare was a Big George Jones Fan

 Happy Boxing Day. Your 2025 present is the video (embedded here or watch on YouTube), recommended by John Prine in direct quotation by Tom Piazza in his book, Living in the Present with John Prine. I highly recommend the read and hope you will consider purchasing it at your local intelligent book store or online as you will. You are welcome.

Oh! Virtual Learning! The Book!

Hello, and may this day find you well and safe, two iffy constructs in these dark days for American government and public safety. But that's neither here nor there (although it may feel like everywhere).

I stumbled across this in my Dropbox whilst looking for an ancient song I had written in the mid 1970s. It is from Sharebook, a feature that appears no longer to be available at blogspot.com for bloggers to archive their work, and it begins with a post from May 7, 2007 and ends with one at February 21, 2012. The blog went on for a few posts, and featured a revival announcement in August, 2023. That last is, though, the last. The revival never was followed up upon, and will not likely be.

Still, this little online book, spreading across some 277 pages of .pdf file, is fun to explore, at least for me. Many of its links got lost in the process of publication and a cursory click-thru demonstrates that many of the links that survived take one to a polite "page not found" message.

During Oh! Second Life!'s publication online, I was teaching young kids about technologyin independent then public schools whilst helping my wife to raise our own two kids, and Second Life for education was my primary creative side hustle. My involvement with virtual worlds for learning spread and grew over decades, until upon my May, 2022 retirement I audibly brushed together my hands and for reasons I can understand better than I can explain, I turned my back on the teaching world. I will herein say that I was so done with the reshaping of schools into businesses, and the data-driven administration of them (just how accurate was that data, beginning with standardized testing results?),  that I was, like, outta there, and for good--for my own, if for no one else's.

https://bit.ly/scottsecondlife will get you there.

So. There you are. Pretty much the sum total of my educational experience over 5 years of the nearly two decades of what people called Leadership in that field. I made friends, and many of those were from other geolocations--Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Japan. Once we loosely organized, we were always just on the "about to be" side of the Bell Curve of Adoption. It may be that those still involved will always be, and will pass, in turn, their own fascination and dedication to its newbies, who will one day do the same. It may be that the experiences within virtual worlds are simply so unfathomable to the unitiated that they will never be of real use to the powers that shape "the education system." Who knows?

What I know is that these engaging fascinations, with their promising and unfulfilled possibilities, are archived palpably in the blog, which is still available on Google's blogger.com platform (possibly useful if one wants to pursue a lost link) and shared here for as long as my Dropbox footprint evades the inevitable and eradicating winds of time. 

Stay well. Stay safe. 

Be Good and Have Fun.

Scottmerrickdotme Gallery in Second Life

Well, it's there, and done, and regularly updated as new art arrives into the tumultuous
"real world". I'm going to post here and update soon with a video tour, but I wanted to get it out there for anyone who may be interested in seeing it "in person" in Second Life.

Seasoned Second Lifers may need no introduction, but maybe others can use some media here. I'll pursue and add as I can. Click to visit: 

Scottmerrickdotme Gallery in Second Life:

iGtab Start Page and more

 Hey, all.

All five of you. All you beautiful readers. All of you who care.

Yes, I'm doing fine.

Autum is engaged in becoming real this year, dancing in and out from summer to winter and stumbling into itself with a rye vengeance, then slipping into one or another again. I'm painting, as evidenced in my work displays at scottmerrickdotme and in my new Second Life gallery at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Kerlingarfjoll/178/118/48.

I'm walking my beautiful Great Pyr mix, Lemon, and cheerfully taking her pictures on my iPhone 13, an endeavor which I once would have characterized as "wasting a lot of film," but which now seems just another minor obsession of an old man. There is a sizeable gallery of such pictures at my Google Photos storage site. Here's one I took yesterday morning: 

 so you can see why.

Mainly I popped into Blogger today to share the "Notes" section of my iGoogle start page. I found this feature of Google when I retired, yielding subscription to an online start page service I had used for teaching for years whose name not unnaturally (for today) escapes me. I'll paste it in here when it does re-enter my dusty old memory bank. 

Anyway, as you'll see if you investigate its link above, "Gtab" has one of the various optional sections called "Notes." I really like this and it's turned into a little staging ground for smippets from my readings and living. I looke at it as a place to retain  and celebrate for oneself (for oneself is precisely why one might have such a page--look into it for your own "oneself".)  It's totally revisable, inside a simple text box iframe. Here're my current Notes:

   "Twain rarely found any experience, be it gay or gruesome, that did not make him laugh." --Mason Curry, Daily Rituals, How Artists Work
"Time is our perception of change. Each individual perceives change uniquely. Therefore, there is no common time, no time that is "the" time. Or is there?"-- moi
"Rather than being a mysterious limitation, uncertainty appears to be the essential feature that makes everything else possible, if indeed energy and uncertainty are inseparable." --Rocky Alvey

     “Every moment of our existence is linked by a peculiar triple thread to our past—the most recent and the most distant—by memory. Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.”― Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
     "Sunny day today. And I'm inside myself again. My body just walking or standing on top of its shadow and I'm way up in my head, crouched panting in some far corner crying God please let me be. Please let. Me be. And from my corner I can gaze out through two gaping holes and then through two round windows paned with dusty glass. And finally over that hill of flesh in the lower center of my view I watch the images play.

Once had a dog, when I was six,

I taught her how to fetch me sticks.

I loved that dog, she read my mind,

since she once died I ain't

stopped

crying.

     That I am at times unable to hold the images to forms is not really worth mentioning. I mention it anyway. So that we might mutally come to better grips with the situation. Which is, he said with quiet desperation. I do not exist after you close this magazine and cease to think about me." -- Scott Merrick, Druid, an Humanities Magazine, Fall, 1970

"I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere." -- Leonard Cohen

"Relentless maximization is the strategy of a cancerous tumor, not of health."--Kelly Clancy, Playing with Reality, epilogue (in the context of gamification and game theory as applied to economics)

From Mary Jane Harvill: Wise and important words from sociologist Jennifer Walter about what is happening in this country right now and what to do about it:

"As a sociologist, I need to tell you: Your overwhelm is the goal. The flood of 200+ executive orders in Trump's first days exemplifies Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine"—using chaos and crisis to push through radical changes while people are too disoriented to effectively resist. This isn't just politics as usual; it's a strategic exploitation of cognitive limits.

Media theorist McLuhan predicted this: When humans face information overload, they become passive and disengaged. The rapid-fire executive orders create a cognitive bottleneck, making it nearly impossible for citizens and media to thoroughly analyze any single policy.

Agenda-setting theory explains the strategy: When multiple major policies compete for attention simultaneously, it fragments public discourse. Traditional media can't keep up with the pace, leading to superficial coverage.
The result? Weakened democratic oversight and reduced public engagement."
What now?
1. Set boundaries: Pick 2-3 key issues you deeply care about and focus your attention there. You can't track everything - that's by design. Impact comes from sustained focus, not scattered awareness.
2. Use aggregators and experts. Find trusted analysts who do the heavy lifting of synthesis. Look for those explaining patterns, not just events.
3. Remember: Feeling overwhelmed is the point. When you recognize this, you regain some power. Take breaks. Process. This is a marathon.
4. Practice going slow: Wait 48hrs before reacting to new policies. The urgent clouds the important. Initial reporting often misses context.
5. Build community. Share the cognitive load. Different people track different issues. Network intelligence beats individual overload.
Remember: They want you scattered. Your focus is resistance."

You, my friend, are welcome. Some fun now.

Camping at Lock A, Cheatham Dam, This Past Week

 

I have a little photo album of my camping trip to Cheatham Dam Lock A Campground last Monday through Thursday. Well, to clarify...

I had reserved Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights at my bestest favorite campsite up at "Cheatham Lake," really just a wide spot in the mighty Cumberland River. From  HISTORIC CHEATHAM COUNTY TOUR SITES:

               ASSEMBLED AND WRITTEN BY
                     J. M. ALLEN
                        Corresponding Secretary CCHGA
                     FOR THE CHEATHAM COUNTY HISTORICAL AND GENEALOGICAL ASSOCIATION

LOCK "A" & FOX'S BLUFF

CCHGA 3

    Located at the end of Cheatham Dam Road off Highway 12 North in Cheatham County. The Lock was completed and placed in operation November 26, 1904 at a cost of $490, 010 .77. It was 52 feet wide and 280 feet long. lt was erected to control the waters of Harpeth Shoals, a fivemile stretch of the Cumberland River between Ashland City and Clarksvillle which interrupted more steamboat business than all other natural impediments along the navigable course of the river.

    On November 19, 1906 Captain W. T. Hunter became the first Captain on the Cumberland todeliberately "Jump" a Dam with a Steamboat. He accomplished this feat at Lock "A" on the "H. W. Buttorff", while the water was at high level.

    The peak of the cliff overlooking Lock "A" is Fox's Bluff with one of the most scenic and picturesque views of the Cumberland Valley anywhere in the area. It used to be one of the local points of interest for visitors to the area but is now inaccessible due to the area being part of the Camp Grounds at the Cheatham Dam Recreation Area ..

NOTE: SEE: "Steamboating on the Cumberland" by Byrd Douglas

The whole story of the building of the site and the Army Corps of Engineers campsite there is an engaging one, and I recommend more research, and a visit if you are anywhere in striking distance. One of my favorite features is the grove of pecan trees that lines the river, lacing through the campsites and yielding delicious nuts every year, that is if you can time your harvest to beat the squirrels to them.

Anyway, long story short, I got to the campsite in a light drizzle and set up my tent and other gear, spent one rainy night and awoke into a chilly but lovely day riverside. I wanted to hike on Tuesday but the Cumberland River Memorial trail is closed, small bridges and who knows what else having been eradicated by recent heavy rains. So I spent Tuesday chilling in my chair and hammock, for which I had just purchased  a nice, heavy but portable stand, and fishing. Reading and playing mandolin. It was a very lovely relaxing day. Toward the end of the day I checked my Ventusky weather app and was convinced that it was going to start raining at dark and essentially not stop, with at times downpours, for the next three days. I made the difficult decision to pack it up. 

I did that, then I added all my remaining local firewood to the campfire and sat in my camp chair playing mandolin and enjoying the fall light on the Cumberland until the drizzle started to increase in intensity, threw my chair into the car, and headed home. I'm glad I did, since Ventusky had done me a solid. I enjoyed the next couple days as my usual ones, relaxing and painting in our lovely home in The Nations neighborhood of my birth city. 

Here's the few pics I took. One of them yielded a painting subject, and a piece to paraphrase Philip Levine, a long ago mentor at his teaching residency at Vanderbilt, to celebrate the exquisite in the mundane. That will be at my scottmerrick.me site when it is finished, but the photo is in the album. Look for the stone on the ground with a mossy bowl inhabited by a tiny, perfect, plant. Here, click the photo for the album, silly:

My Americana Fest 2025!

It was a blast. I took a few minutes this morning to slap together a single image summary of my travels in my home town this year:

I cannot recommend this experience any higher. This is, I think, my fourth year of spending nearly a week (5 days and nights) exploring known and unknown venues in my hometown of Nashville, TN, and what do you know? I was better at maintaining notes on where I went and who I saw. 

A few of the names of solo performers and groups are those I saw only a song or two because of scheduling, or perhaps I was not taken enough by their presence to hang around when there were so many other talents abounding about, but I think I did a pretty good week of turning my C note and a quarter into a big bucket of memories and experiencing live new music to add to my Spotify. 

Yeah, I'm still on Spotify. Why? I actually LOVE the algorithm that brings me new music attuned to my listening habits. Which are considerable. I love that my own work with The Last Frontier Band is there (ancient history, but fun), as well as my solo instrumental offering from a decade or more ago. I also like the playlist feature with its access to pretty much anything:  One thing I like to do is create lists containing every cover of a song I can find. There's a folder of these at my account, free to check out at will.

Just google any of the names or venues above to learn more, which, friends and neighbors, I did in abundance this past week. It's now Sunday, the day after, and I'm a happy puppy, listening to one of my new found faves, the Aussie artist Falls.

This won't be long, but quick takeaways:

In the new to me category, from Tuesday to Saturday, I was completely taken by:

• Sister Sadie
• Fancy Hagood
• The Carlile Family Band
• Lisa LeBlanc
• Macon Music Review
• Jackson and the Janks
• Cat Clyde
• John Cragie
• Bek Brooks
• Vanessa Jade
• Jordy Lane
• Falls

In my already-known and can't get enough online or off category, 

• Amanda Shires
• Brandi Carlile
• Kathy Matea
• Suzy Boggus
• Sista Strings
• JesseWelles

And, almost without exception, everyone I heard and saw. I walked, in totale, maybe 4 miles those 5 days, not of course to mention my daily strolls with Lemon, my canine girlfriend. Here's a pic of her:

Lemon dawg

I had very few regrets. I'm glad I added everything I would have liked to see into my "My Schedule" portion of the AmericanaFest app, so I could pick and choose on the fly. In a festival like this, spread out all over the city (and beyond), one is at any given time missing more than one is seeing, but that's just an embarassment of riches. I'm happy to have had so many great conversations with so many good people in so many venues, some of them new to me. I smile to myself, and will for a good while, when I think back on the musical highs I experienced all week. 

I regret missing Amanda Shires (again :) at Musicians' Corner in Centennial Park, which I left early to get to Basement East for Craig Finn. He was good, but Amanda is, well, Amanda; and she slayed at Exit/In on Thursday night. I'm on pins and needles for her new album drop the 26th of this month. I regret leaving The 5Spot Aussie BBQ to hit one of my favorite places, Joelton Hardware, for their two stage venue, their first venture into AF. There weren't many attendees there and though the performers I saw there were good, there is no one on my "newly found" list above from that venture, and everyone I saw at The 5Spot made that list.

I told ya it wouldn't be long. Did you have your own AF2025 experience? Comment here if'n you did. 

But before I sign off, I want to mention you can watch some of the best of the best shows archived at the NPR Music Channel on YouTube. I did not make the Americana Day Stage from WMOT at all, partly because I watched a couple performances at YouTube and loved the groups but didn't think I wanted to sit in what looks like a church auditorium (why? it was formerly a church auditorium) in a folding chair all day, row by row filled by fans. I'll watch each and every one online.

I loved the awards show, even though it came across like the stage manager called in sick, with all the dead moments in transitions, and John C. Reilly died multiple deaths onstage as host. I think he's a good actor, but his hosting skills can only improve if he watches the thing, though I don't otherwise know why he'd want to live through it again. I had seen Jesse Wells the night before and he always seems to get a tear or three from me. The awards show, and his eloquent and simple acceptance speech for winning the new "Free Speech in Music" award from the Americana Music Association was no exception. He closed with the stirring comment, "Life's too short not to always say exactly what you think, all the time." You go, Jesse. You go.

Thank you to the Americana Music Association and to the whole AmericanaFest staff and volunteers for making my week, hell, making my year, at least in music!

"The 21" Revised

Greetings. I have spent a few days worth of review and rewrite on a story I first wrote after a dream in 1986. I published it here a while ago, but this is a pretty substantially revised edit, and I think a good deal better and more finished. I'm putting it up here to share with family and friends, and if you are here, you are in that category. I worked this time with an app called Speechify, one of who's capabilities is reading back anything in a pretty decent version of one's own voice. Listening and following along in the story through multiple playbacks, edit uploads, and re=reads, I was able to correct quite a few jarring errors and omissions and to reword sections in my more mature voice. Well, yes, that's debatable, but see what this does for you, 'k?

Scott Gardner Merrick

6104B New York Avenue

4,450 words

All Rights

@ 1986 by Scott Merrick

 

The 21

 

by Scott Gardner Merrick

 

Karl Ivanovich pressed on.

He trudged through this frigid midnight’s sooty snow toward his tiny room on the city's dingy fringe with his fur-capped head lowered into the freezing gusts, heavy boot over heavy boot, as he was all too used to doing.

The thick wolf ruff of his overcoat collar was turned up to protect against the intrusion of that icy wind. He was thinking about nothing.

The mind of Ivanovich was empty.

There was a reason for this. The mind of Ivanovich focused  with enervating regularity twelve to fifteen hours per workday, six or seven days per week, depending on the season, with ninety to ninety-four per cent of its Practically Functional Capacity spent on keeping books for the State.

These percentages had been verified by the Party.

As a result of this tremendously focused effort, maintained as it was for such incredibly  long durations of time, periods of mental emptiness were needed. Some of his other  comrades simply sat at their workdesks for an hour or two after the figurative whistle had sounded; Karl Ivanovich sometimes took this tack, but he preferred to make his way home deliberately, by foot, by foot, by foot, letting his footfalls lull his mind to rest, inhaling the cold night air regularly and deeply until no thought could penetrate the imaginary tank traps and fortress walls his mind had constructed. His feet knew which way to steer his large frame. The entire trek home was over five kilometers, and it normally took him two and a half hours to accomplish it, give or take a half an hour. 

When he arrived, he would no longer be only mentally exhausted, but also physically tired and very, very sleepy. A cup of thick black tea, with perhaps a small lump of crude sugar, would be enough to set him to sleep, until the first hints of the next day would invariably awaken him; and he would rise, wash sparingly, eat a modest breakfast, and finally  catch the public mechanical transit back to his small office. 

Tonight, his full brown moustache was familiarly encrusted with ice and particles of snow. The air was so frigid that the hairs inside his nostrils had become brittle with it. 

Sometimes, as was the case tonight, a flickering image of a steaming teacup would intrude upon the emptiness of his mind and it would cause him to interrupt his walking reverie with an instant of near-normal consciousness. This was now the case.

He looked up. 

He was approaching the corner of Malenkov and Kochetov streets, an intersection his feet knew well. At this time of night there never any traffic, pedestrian or mechanical, and so he once again lowered his head into the wind and pressed on. 

WUUMPH!!! He was knocked off balance as he colided with a heavy man who rounded the corner at precisely the same instant as he. 

In trying to regain his balance, Ivanovich lost it completely. It was much the fault of the compressed snow at the corner of the sidewalk, which was slick underfoot, and he cursed it loudly as he went down, flailing out for support and catching only a handful of ruff from the collar of the other fellow's overcoat.

The fall took the wind out of him. When he could sit up, he did, and he craned painfully around to witness the tall and broad figure of a man, dressed much the same as he, receding hurriedly off into the heavier darkness. The other man had not even uttered so much as an apology. 

Karl Ivanovich picked himself up, muttering under his breath about rudeness and bad manners, and dusted melting wet snow from his coat. He sighed deeply and crossed the street, attempting to regain the regularity of his breathing.  Before he could accomplish that, he heard a commotion behind him and started to turn around. The heavy bullet slammed into his right shoulder and he heard the loud report of a large firearm, oddly in that order. He fell again, this time for a long, long time. 

 

 

*****

Karl Ivanovich awakened in pain. 

He made no sound, as his disjointed senses attempted to piece together the puzzle of his whereabouts.

A numb but painful stiffness in his shoulder. Cold—a not unusual sensation. A pungent antiseptic odor. Gray walls, relatively clean ones. And a single blaring fluorescent ceiling light. 

They took him from the hospital barracks soon after he exhibited signs of consciousness. Sometime during the move, he again passed out. He awoke on a musty bed in a dank cell. The bars in the window of the single small steel door made clear his circumstances. 

For several days no one spoke to him. A silent jailer came in twice daily with coarse bread and thick gruel, each time taking away the plate and bowl left the previous visit. 

Once a doctor came in and changed the dressings on his shoulder. When the flesh had been laid bare, Ivanovich saw the ugly scab which had begun to congeal over the gunshot wound. It appeared to be healing. The doctor's work was carried out in silence, except for the prisoner's single attempt to communicate.”Please, Comrade Doctor, please tell me. Why have I been shot? Why am I here?" 

The already wrinkled skin surrounding his large brown eyes wrinking further in perplexity, the physician muttered, "Why, Comrade?" 

Karl Ivanovich’s only answer was silence. 

The angry wound was treated with a gelatinous substance and bound with clean bandages, then the doctor packed up his beaten black satchel and departed.

Never once had the Comrade Doctor’s eyes met those of Karl Ivanovich.

Karl kept track of passing time by scraping a notch in the mortar between two granite blocks in the wall of his tiny cell at the end of each day. At the end of 15 days they came for  him.

Two imposingly gruff guards in the drab uniforms of the State came and fitted his hands into heavy manacles. His feet were clamped into wider steel shackles and then  connected to his bound hands by a single heavy iron chain. Karl understood immediately that words with these men would be useless. 

What could they communicate that could be of any use to him? 

Out through what seemed like miles of gray corridors he was led. He found it difficult to walk with the heavy chains, but not impossible. The guards seemed to have had a great deal of experience leading chained men:  Once when they reached a short flight of three steps, they simply picked him up under each armpit (the shoulder cried out, but Ivanovich did not) and hoisted him up. He was half-led, half-dragged into a small waiting room, and the two guards left him alone there. The door shut with a muffled thud. 

All Ivanovich was certain of was that he was in trouble.

Think as he might, he could not come up with any reason for the Party to treat him so despicably. He was a hard worker, not decadent, and not publicly critical of the State. He was impossibly confused. 

A single guard entered the room. 

"Karl Ivanovich," he stated, "please rise and follow me.”

Karl struggled to his feet and shuffled through the little door and into a mouldy-smelling, nearly empty courtroom.

He was led to an ancient heavy wooden stool, upon which he was commanded to sit. He slowly raised his head to survey the other occupants of the room. There were only three. A stern looking magistrate glared down from an elevated podium. An angry looking guard stood behind the judge, not glaring at Ivanovich, but certainly glaring at the world. An emaciated clerk sat directly across from the defendant, looking bored.

"Guilty as charged," he heard the judge say, "of the theft of a loaf of bread. You are sentenced to hard labor in the Wilderness Labor Camps, for a period not to exceed thirty years.” 

Karl Ivanovich wanted to scream, but he could not. Something inside him denied that what appeared to be happening was really happening. It was too absurd, too dreamlike, or rather too much like a nightmare.

Later, he would put a name to that "something." He would call it: "Foolishness." 

 

*****

Karl Ivanovich opened his eyes, which fought against that effort. They felt as if they had been glued shut, but the truth was that they were frozen shut. 

As his eyes adjusted to the dim, scattered light, a loud and constant rumbling bombarded his ears, and the distinct piercing aroma of stale urine and feces burned into his nostrils. 

Yes, he thought, the train. 

He lay there for what may have been a long time. The exact duration was difficult to ascertain since nothing perceptibly changed: It might have been an hour; it may have been two days. The soiled and scattered straw upon which he lay did not change. The uncertain light which filtered through cracks in the rail car did not change. The ice which encrusted the flat iron grid which enclosed Ivanovich 's tiny cell did not melt or grow perceivably thicker. 

The heavy roaring of steel wheels upon steel track did change, all the time. There was a murmur, then a roar, then a stage whisper, a very loud one; then there came a maddening, deafening, whining followed by a gentle tattoo, then a little rat—a—tat—tat. Underneath it all droned a heavy bass ostinato, forever and always it seemed to say. Forever. Always. Then the roar would steal back into the song, followed by another long murmur. Before long, Karl Ivanovich would come to believe that he had heard all the permutations; and just when he was sure of that, a new sound would manifest itself.

He sat up. The effort drove his breath from the warmth of his body out into the harsh cold of the freight car. Thick clouds of it hung heavily in the air, and then, like hope, were gone. "You afraid?," he heard a hoarse male voice inquire.

Am I afraid, he wondered, "No," Karl answered, although he did not turn his head toward the sound of the other 's voice.”No, Comrade, I have traveled beyond fear into a place that is colder than any other.”

Silence.

Then, laughter. It began as a low chuckle, a gurgling, really, and gradually  rolled up into a quiet, shaking hysteria. After a few moments Karl Ivonovich managed to half-sit and, pulling himself out of the fog that was his perception, took notice of the one who mocked him.

The creature seemed to occupy most of the adjacent cell. It was, or appeared to be, male, from the deep timbre of its noises, but whether it was human was another question altogether.

The cells were a uniform size, and Karl counted them now. There were twenty-two of them, each occupied by a prisoner, each loosely carpeted with straw, each furnished with a single bowl for defecation and urination. By noon, somewhere between three days and a week into the journey to the outlands, the bowls were all overflowing. The corner of each cell had become an excretion zone, with the overspilling bowl occupying a befouled space in the corner and serving as a target.

At the moment, the giant next door was aiming his shriveled member at his own target/bowl. He was not really hitting it because he was still laughing too hard. He finished his business and buttoned the fly on his heavy qiviut wool trousers, and then he lumbered over to the iron bars which separated his cell from Karl's.

His huge hands grasped the bars and his filthy face pressed hard up against them. It was a grotesque visage, framed by wild long greasy hair and a thick red and brown beard, the forehead protruding massively under bushy red eyebrows, and a malformed bulbous node at the end of the large crooked nose.

"Let me look at ya. Ah, yes," the giant hissed, and hissed again, "Ah, yessss, a Comrade from the City.” His head turned this way and that, like that of an inquisitive lower primate checking out the new arrival at his zoo cage.

"Not afraid, are ye." It sounded more a statement than a question.

"I have done nothing wrong."

"Not afraid, because nothing wrong have ye done,” he growled, and then his tone of voice changed altogether, became civilized, almost delicate, as he seemed to muse more to himself than to his prisoner mate, “How curious, how infinitely baffling." The behemoth’s  head lowered and he turned away from the bars, muttering under his breath.

"Wait!" Karl stood up, painfully, for he had been without exercise for days, at least. He shuffled to the cage "My name is Karl Ivanovich, and I think we need each other.”

The giant turned and uttered, “Need? Need? What we ‘need,’ my friend, is a weapon. We do not ‘need’ each other." He had to bend slightly to stand upright, but now he did, and he slowly returned to the cell divider bars. “My name is Aleksandr Denentyev, Comrade Karl Ivanovich, and I am a thespian, not a criminal.”

Karl saw something like a great sadness in the eyes of this huge man. He asked quietly, "What was your supposed crime, Comrade Denentyev? "

The giant chortled, "It so happens that I did kill a man. But he was attacking me with a loaded weapon. I protected myself with these." He outstretched his mammoth hands, palms outward.

"I have talked with many fellow prisoners since my capture," he continued, "and some of them are guilty. Many are most clearly innocent. In the end, it makes no difference once the corrupt courts get ahold of them. Slave laborers are all the judges want, though they have no shortage of them. Of us." He lowered his wide-set eyes and mused, "It is the System. We are no more or no less products of it now than we were at our honest professions.”

Denentyev’s bulk sidled away from the bars, off to another corner of his ridiculously inadequate cell. ”I must rest. Soon I will have a new kind of Quota to meet, and I suspect that the punishment for not meeting it will be somewhat more stringent than loss of a bonus. I must gather my strength and be prepared to work." His bulk succumbed to gravity onto his own ragged mattress.

Karl heard him murmuring something about "outrageous fortune,” but he could not decipher anything else the giant muttered. After a while, both men had once more succumbed to the stupor of imprisoned sleep.

Sometime later, Karl made the acquaintance of his only other neighbor, one Vsevolod Thrardovsky, a student who also professed innocence. His “crime”:  the theft of a book. The boy appeared not well to begin with, and by the time the Keeper came to empty the slop bowls and to dole out a skin of water and a torn chunk of bread to each starving prisoner, there was that one less body to feed.

The Keeper, a silent, grizzly old man with an oddly elegant weighty wooden staff slung over his shoulder, moved from cell to cell repeating the same routine—handcuffing each prisoner through the bars of the outside face of his cell, tossing down the food and water in one corner, and dumping waste from the bowl in another into a large barrel he dragged along the rail car’s floor behind him. Each time, he would wipe his hands on the rag draped through his belt, like a bartender might wear one.

Then he would relock the cell, retrieve his handcuffs, and move on to the next prisoner.

Karl learned all this only by pressing his face to the bars and watching as the Keeper made his slow way down the center aisle. His own cell was near the forward end of the car, beside a door which presumably led to a connecting platform and then to another car. Were there other prisoners? Other cars?

So the old troll made his way first down the side of the jostling car which contained twelve cells, and then back up the other side, with its heavy sliding door in the middle. In the last cell he came upon the corpse of the student. “Get up, you little girl,” he growled, “If you don 't get up now, you will have no food nor drink until I come again, and who knows when that may be. There is a very important card game in the guard car. GET UP, come on, you son of a hog. No? You will live in your own stench a few days more, then.”

                                 "He's dead.”

The voice was that of Karl Ivanovich, and the Keeper's fury now turned upon at him. SMACK, went the Keeper 's staff on the bars of Karl’s cage. “Don’t you ever speak to me unless I order you to, swine! Don't you ever stick your thieving nose in where it doesn't belong! Now I shall have to file a report today, and that will rob me of more winnings at the table.”

Karl lied, stalling, in an effort to gain more information from the Keeper. "He was a Christian, and he wanted me to plead for you to see that he has a Christian burial.”

"I’ll show you a Christian burial, you smart bastard! Gavno!"

The key clanked into the iron door and the freight car door was yanked open,  lumbering loudly, and left partly open. The body of Vsevolod Tvardovsky was dragged out of his cell by his worn leather boots and left laying twisted upon the floor while the Keeper strode back to the door and pulled it halfway open. Biting wind and snow rushed in, and a minor uproar issued from the cells. He returned, smiling grimly, and lifted the student up over his shoulder.

"Oh, "snarled the Keeper, "I haven’t prepared the body yet.  Here, let me anoint it with oils. He grasped the student 's lifeless hair in his fist and dunked the dead face into the barrel of waste. It came up slathered in excrement, oozing brown and green slime.

"There, there young man, that should freeze nicely and keep you your baby-boy expression for all eternity.” The animal smiled broadly at Karl Ivanovich before carrying the student down the aisle and standing him at the open door. ”I commit you to your god, you pig-sucking son of a whore, " declared the Keeper. He shoved the reeking corpse roughly out the door.

"Come here.” He was back at the front of Karl’s cell. “Give me your hands again. Karl did as he was told and was once again handcuffed to the front of his cell. His food and water were taken away, and none left behind, and the cell door was relocked. The jailer released him, and his rheumy eyes met the cold stare of Ivanovich. 

"Maybe you will join your friend next feeding day, Samaritan. “I will try to devise a new and even more entertaining ceremony.” 

Days passed. 

The straw. The bars. The ice and the clouds of breath. The omnipresent stench. These things remained. 

The incessant rattle and booming of steel on steel and the rushing whistle of wind and snow. 

Despair did not leave any of them, not for an instant. 

Karl Ivanovich lay on his left side, his left arm asleep and perhaps dead forever. His breath was regular and shallow, and he stared at the bowl in the corner. What we need is a weapon. 

With an effort whose presence surprised him, he rolled over and pulled himself over to the bars which separated his cage from that of Aleksandr Derentyev. 

The giant slept. 

"Derentyev, " Karl choked out, "Derentyev, wake up.” One large eye opened in that jumble of a hoary face. 

"I want to thank you for breaking bread with me. But it was not enough. There is one more thing you must do.” 

The other eye opened, and the thick brows curled slightly. 

"Break your bowl for me, Thespian.” 

 

*****

The door at the front of the prisoner car creaked and the Keeper stepped  heavily in. The noise of the train's passage was shockingly loud beyond the open door. The jailer stood for a moment, staring into Karl 's cell before reaching outside the car and dragging in his barrel and bag. 

"Pig-turd, mudak, oh darling, ^t' he called tauntingly, "Rise and shiiiiiiine. I’ve come with your eggs and potatoes, your steak and your wine.” He peered into the cell for an exceedingly long time, as if to assure himself that the motionless lump at the back of the cell was indeed as lifeless as it did appear to be. 

A key dully clattered into the lock, and the grizzly old man entered the cell, his staff upraised to strike. He took two steps into the cage and brought his staff heavily down upon the leg of the man on the floor. 

There was a heavy thud and that was all. 

He took hold of the dead man 's heavy boots and dragged him out of the cell, leaving him bent and crooked on the floor as he moved heavily down the aisle to the side door. It slid open, and once again the icy wind rushed in. This time, though, there was no sound from the prisoners. This struck the Keeper as strange, and he turned to survey the cells. What he saw was a dozen faces, tired and in various stages of starvation, despair, and exhaustion, pressed up against cold iron bars.

"So. The swine want their feed," crooned the Keeper, “It looks as though the twenty-two has dwindled to twenty. But never you mind, you see I get paid whether I arrive with twenty-two or with two. The Party, the Party knows it is a long and difficult journey. I am paid by the rail mile, not by the prisoner! Ha, " he laughed, "and," he looked back up the aisle to where the dead man lay, "we’ll be stopping tonight, you see, we'll be stopping tonight at the rail station outside of Kirtutsk for food and water and fuel to take you deeper, yes, deeper into the deep deep taiga, where you will work to build this world, yes," he spoke to them all as if they were an assemblage of Union Workers, and he shuffled up the aisle, shouldering his staff. ”Yes, many hands, light work, hee, hee.” 

The body of Karl Ivanovich was much heavier than that of the student, so the Keeper decided to drag it to the door instead of throwing it over his shoulder. It was in the course of the dragging that the arms fell out behind the corpse, and the Keeper noticed that there was something in one of the hands. 

“Wha…” he began to ask, but it was too late for questions. 

Ivanovich was up and knocking over the jailer with a stout hammering of his fist to the man 's forehead. The old man grappled for the staff on his shoulder, but again, too late. Into his throat something was deeply driven, and Karl felt the burning heat of the man's blood washing his hand. He ripped the sharp fragment of bowl sideways and the Keeper collapsed in a heap, his nearly severed head all ajar on his blood-spewing neck. 

Karl Ivanovich stared down at the man he had killed. 

Into his pocket went the sharp shard of wood from Derentyev’s broken bowl. He rifled the jailer's pockets and came up with the precious key. From the dead man's shoulder he slipped the staff. He held it up so that it gleamed brightly in the soft light. It was a beautiful thing, incongrouously elaborately carved, and he pointed it at the corpse and squeezed the handle just so. 

A pinpoint beam of blue light issued from the business end of the staff and lit upon the mangled face of the Keeper. There was a “poof” sound. The shaft of light vanished and so did the ugly head. 

Karl stepped to the open door and took a deep breath of fresh cold air. His leg and his shoulder throbbed mercilessly.

Luminescent snowglobes blew past almost horizontally, their speed enhanced by that of the train car. The dazzling yellow and blue phosphorescent sheen of them, each animated and swirling like mother of pearl, was almost blinding. Each crystalline bulb was different in shape from all others, and Karl looked out over the plains, witnessed their bursting by the millions upon impact with the glistening yellow snowcovered ground. Beyond, out beyond the taiga, the bright turquoise forest spread out forever. There was shelter there, and there was forage, and there were whole new worlds to be fashioned out of that vast well of raw materials. 

We shall disappear into those forests, and we will enter those hills and find us a valley, he thought, half-aloud. And when we have built something, we will make our way back into the city and we will liberate enough men and women to thrive and prosper, and we will disappear once again. We will be our own Party. Our Comrades will be our true brothers and sisters, freed victims of the Old Way, harbingers of the New.

The New World 's New World.  

Perhaps we will be known, for all time, as The 21. 

In but a few moments he had freed all of the other men. They were bunched up behind him at the door.

He leaned his face out into the wind. Off in the distance he could just make out the tiny image of Kirtutsk, a large city really, the connection not only between the cities and the wilderness but also between the New World and the Earth. There, there, there was the citiy’s distant little bubble, the gigantic dome which sheltered the living quarters of over a million and a half people. The Elevator lines stretched out into the white sky on up, on up to the orbiting station. 

Through the swirling and flashing lemon and blue ice snow he could only just make out the shape of the shining small sun, glowing blue, indistinct. Perhaps if it cleared later in the day the giant golden sun would be visible, too. 

Oh, but he felt alive, for the first time in years. 

He held tightly to the powerful sleek staff and made himself into a ball as he jumped, tucked more tightly yet, and rolled.

 

*****

I am adding a recorded version in a voice trained by Speechify to simulate my own. You can listen to that here.