This week in Pittsburgh, as a hot summer ends, the leaves fall early from the great cherry tree hiding this old brick house. I am the guest of a lady and her adult son, the first battling back complaints extending from 62 years of waiting tables and cooking in the Italian restaurants, in which Pittsburgh is so rich. The second, her son, battling cancer for a third wave of attack from within, elements of his body turning on him and eating him from the inside out.

The son needs distraction from his small stage. So we consider the World Stage and view interviews with brilliant minds. He cheers at one part, “Seven years ago you said this was true! Now it is obvious to millions. But back then, we thought you were all nuts—or just too dark. But inside, I trusted your observations. Its just that I did not share them and didn’t want them to be right. But here we are, living in the sick world you wrote about [in The Filthy Few].”

We then began a discussion on faith and God, and this man, who did not have a father, lost his reasoning capacity, which he has honed keen, and waxed emotional. I lured him with words from his bitter pulpit and we took to viewing videos of Russian dancing girls…

One thing we agreed on, since he and his mother abhor, indeed seem to fear, silence, as do most folk I know in the gaslit east, was that keeping the vintage horror movie channel looping all night and into morning, was, oddly, soothing. He has struck on this as a compromise with me, him leaving comedy on, me turning it mute whenever he left the floor. We agreed that the music sound tracks of these scary movies, originally composed and recorded for dreadful atmosphere, feel bucolic, as if Hesiod himself was attended by a troupe of Heliconian Muses languidly prancing to heavenly notes. Compared to the shrill voices and starting music of our current TV, movie and radio “content” the creeping of the wolf man, the pronouncements of the doctor who has created a monster and the ominous evil of the vampire, all provide a welcome break from the bray of Advanced Modernity.

The mother, she really wanted those leaves raked. I see also that the house is not being vacuumed. The sweeper is heavy and she is worn, womanly and in pain. Leaves spot carpet and hardwood floor. She points this out in a weepy silence, ashamed that she can no longer keep house well and cannot lift the leaf blower.

“On it, Punky.”

“No, no, no—not right now, Honey, it is too hot, so hot outside! Besides, Ricky doesn’t think it should be done, thinks that lawns are stupid—something about letting the trees have it back.”

To work the cracker guest goes.

The house clean, I am sweeping and raking at noon, pruning the low hanging branches. The son comes out and says, look, and points to a leaf dropping behind me, “It will not stop. The leaves will not stop falling.”

As I switch from broom to rake, I answer.

“Chances of a slip and fall on leafy sidewalks are 400% over clean. Your front walk is public, your mother coming home with kitchen grease on her shoes.”

“But she doesn’t know that.”

“She does not. She is motivated by an instinct to clear grass. The women gathered, which is a minute visual activity and then they tended the herds and flocks while we abducted some enemy bitch down river to be her slave. The trees want this back. But she knows that grass means she is queen, in some sense, even if just by the process. I’m also going to clip the low branches so that you don’t cut your head mowing the lawn—which is not a useless task as it cuts down on ticks and rats.

He points, to more leaves falling behind me and shrugs his shoulders. “But its stupid.”

“That’s why I rake every day, starting today. It’s good exercise for me. There is no harm in the process and three goods, the only important one being that she is happy with the process. All she has left is her shrinking perception as she loses the ability to impose order on the world that has almost killed us three—and will, soon.”

“You really like doing shit like this, don’t you.”

“It is a pleasure. We were raised to believe manual labor is a disgrace and tens of millions of invaders have been invited in so that we may all play the king or the queen. But I do my best thinking while I’m walking and working—how I wrote an easy 70 books. And since I can’t walk on these Pinocchio legs, sweeping and raking are my favorite meditation.”

He smiled and said, “I’m going to fix the grill. I know why it bothers me so much, not cooking meat, after you pointed out that men cooked the meat and the women and slaves made the bread and wine—now you’re tending our barren grape vines. Thanks, man.”

Every day since, without recourse to the shrill and hallowed leaf blower hanging in the garage, I attend the grass, leaves, walk and driveway, to the mortification of the neighbors and passers bye, seemingly afraid that my behavior might be contagious.

Selfish reason motivates me. It is easier to write listening to Castle Dracula then to a debate between the virtues of the lawn and a permi-culture garden for a yard. But, improved thinking, specifically the recognition of social patterns, is made not easier, but possible by repetitive, manual work of the kind that few Americans have willingly done since 1946.

I posit that one element of System success in consistently lying to its subjects, who, like the lawn buyer that many are, see themselves as the master class, is vested in public removal from mundane physical tasks. The people who are most easily lied to and tricked are the most educated.

The manipulation tree works like this:

-Trunk. College educated people believe that the System serves them, and that somehow the System fails them constantly because THEY the MASTERS, have not yet perfected its design.

-Branches. High school educated people believe that the System has been rigged by its more highly educated designers, the Master Class, to favor their ken and diminish his less privileged kind.

-Leaves. Uneducated, criminal class, and self taught grunts like myself understand, instinctively that the System is Master and that We Are Food.

I was blessed to be too stupid to earn a high school diploma and learned in the old ways, such as Hesiod described to his lazy brother Peres in Works and Days, a bitter fellow who saw the works of others as his right, and understood little about how the world works, beyond an instinct to feed his elder brother to the System so that he might lap up the blood and bits.

Tomorrow, I intend to conclude this line of thought, with a focus on holy notions and a return to physical action patterns as kindling for thought.

We will start with a consideration of shadow boxing, in the light of three conversations this past week with as many orphans grown to fatherless manhood.