DE PROFUNDIS
WHICH IS YOU TAKE COFFEE, you take milk, you take sugar, or you take sugar substitute, depending on which your preference is, depending whether it's for sugar or for sugar substitute. Me, I always go for the substitute.
Then you go take some ice to it, depending if you have a blender which can deal with ice in it.
So I'm blending.
I'm blending with the reconditioned blender we went ahead and had reconditioned before one thing leads to another and everything goes and gets itself so haywire and she, guess what, drops dead from it.
Brother, does it work!
I'm telling you, talk about when a thing works!
Producing, you might say, on low power a nice type of low-powered type of smooth-powered output — and then, when geared up to full power, giving out more of a more powerful type of full-powered output but meanwhile not being self-induced into erupting into the type of wave motion which you know how it can get crazy on you to the point where the contents of the canister is all of a sudden climbing the walls of the canister, making a wreck of the kitchen counter, not to mention the rest of the kitchen, from like, you know, from coming all of the way up and out from like this — down there! — this, you know, this vortex.
It's not called a vortex?
Well, guess who just cleaned up the tiles up.
Bleached the grout lines even.
You know the tile boundaries around them made of grout, they're not grout lines?
Grout boundaries!
So finish the blending and pour out the blendation — and sorry, I'm sorry, but it's sensational, it's a sensation.
Down her in a gulp.
Down the whole deal in one whole gulp.
Turns out it's the best darn drink which I have ever in all my experience blending drunk.
So here I am — a widower, the widower — standing at the sink, thinking all credit to them which did the reconditioning, credit to the heavens to the outfit which turned around and did the reconditioning — rewinding the little motor for it, regapping the synapses of the switches for it, getting the wiring — isn't there a magneto, a terminal, a resistor? — wired up for it just right.
FANGLE OR FIRE
PEOPLE BELIEVE ME, or think me, imagine me to be Lish, the lit-fag, hyphen entered aforethought. Whereas nothing could be farther — or further — from the truth. The truth is that I have not been, and shall never be, a man of books, as I have, whilst under orders, sought to seem to be, but that I have been — and should like to continue to be — a fighter against our nation's enemies within the theater of our nation's boundaries. I was inducted into service in 1954, this at an installation called Miami Retreat. My sponsor was Helen Deutsch, married name Siegel, younger sister to my mother, Regina. I can furnish the documents. You have heard of Fort George Meade? You have heard of Maryland's Laurel Park? You have heard of the National Security Agency? The terms of the agency's mandate to act for the common good, as inaugurated by the President and as thereafter regulated solely under the direct jurisdiction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, frees the N.S.A., shall we call it, from potentialities of legal and political tether to all entities of Government save those just remarked. Hence, the volatility — or vaporousness — of my position and that of my colleagues — or cohorts. Please know that I seek to cover myself with no special status — or favor — when I hasten, as I must, to illumine a certain detail of my affiliation as heretofore recorded. The N.S.A., or NSA, was organized, as was everything else in its day, to perform duties contextualized within the perception of that which could properly be construed as international in the emphasis of concern, thus confining, to the extent reasonable, the compass of the aforementioned entity to activities whose source and flux placed the impress of those activities beyond the borders of this land — or suitably without the so-called Line of Limit. Here you have it. We come, in this, to the peculiar character of my status and, accordingly, to the case to be made for the making of this disclosure. Let me explain — or struggle to unstitch — what will at first appear, I do not doubt, both inexplicable and too tightly seamed to yield to parsing. My mother is — or was — Regina. She was one of five girls — daughters of Louis Deutsch and Ethel Goldstein. My father, however — and now we commence to approach the crux of it — was one of five boys and three girls — the offspring, it was claimed, of Rachel Boulansky and Isaac Lishkowitz. In fact, my paternal grandmother's name was Routchel Boolski, my paternal grandfather, for his part, named Sik Lescowicz. These two made their way to these shores, it was thought, from Russ-Polen, whereas papers demonstrate Louis and Ethel brought themselves hither from Vienna. The issue of this other pair — Pauline, Regina, Helen, Adele, and Sylvia, names cited in order of birth — spoke, owing to the fluency of their parents in these tongues — or idioms, or idioma — German and Hungarian and, presently, impeccable English, owing, the accomplishment of this last, to the intervention of the Metropolitan Orphan Asylum at Astoria, New York, the shelter to which the children were sent on the occasion of the death of Louis (circumstances "suspicious," to say the "least") and the ensuing incompetence of Ethel, herself confined to a facility for persons suffering such an infelicity. It was here — at Metropolitan — that (these details are acknowledged in diarist accounts given by Pauline, the eldest) the keen lingual and mathematical skills of Helen and Adele were first detected and thereafter, quite purposively, "cultivated," or nourished, or encouraged. That our forefathers were not unalert to the coming belligerencies with the Axis powers, this so long previous to the actual onset of events, is terribly interesting, or intriguing, I believe — or allege — but we doubtless could not handily sustain a digressive inquiry into the matter so soon in the formation of our not unperplexing considerations, could we? Thusly, thenly, as for the case in and among the non-Deutsch side of the "family," the products were these, sequence of enunciation again controlled by order of sequencing: Joseph, Jenny, Ida, Charles, Lily, Samuel, Philip, Henry. I now focus our attention on two suggestive items — no person named Uncle Joseph nor any person named Aunt Jenny was ever in view either of myself or of any official body in pursuit of the Government's proprietary engagement with the lives of its "citizens." Furthermore, Henry, my uncle Henry — all through the war years — which is to say the years one is referring to when one refers to the years of the war years—"fished" for flounder and for fluke, this whilst anchored "offshore" in the so-called channel, his vessel a small, wood boat — or wooden boat — or rowboat — its engine either a modestly powered Johnson outboard motor, or Evinrude, or Mercury. The man's "sons" — Big Eugene, Kenny or Kenneth, and Abby or Abbott — were, during the interval to which I now point notice — members of our armed forces, this in the European theater of operation. Fulton Lewis Jr. would say, "That's the top of the news from here!" Here is a further element worthy, at this stage, I aver, or believe — or think — of notation — namely, that in the film, or in the motion picture,