"The poetry enclosed in my last letter, Erotica, is a selection I put together for a prison poetry contest....I have written dozens of poems about sex."

- Mark Hoffman, in a letter

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by Edward Lacie

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Episode Twenty-Four

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The episode, besides theme music, starts with Cooper dictating to Diane what has happened up to this point: "Josie is dead, most likely from fear."

I'm looking around at sick roses and the piles of leaves, the evidence of my own prideful spell.¹ I continue to write while watching old tapes of "Twin Peaks". When it ends, and it does - it was cancelled - the writing ends. 

Windham Earl, our bad guy, visits Donna in disguise, invites her to his special Miss Twin Peaks Ball.

It's Jim Post's birthday, and I can't afford to get him a gift. He went out to look at houses to move to. I've been ordered to kill Baysans by the time Jim Post gets home. I don't think I can do it, even knowing that it would achieve my goal.

"John Carr is dead," (The Ultimate Evil, page 202) according to Maury Terry, so Poet X can't be John Carr, but they've got plenty in common from what I learned of Poet X from Baysans while I hold him in captivity. I've learned that Baysans didn't like Poet X as much as he professed.

I've found the Gnome notebook. Looking through it recalls the breakdown in the direction of up. Many memories.

The Log Lady has a mark on the back of her leg that matches the Major's. His showed up after he returned from - Was he in the White or Black Lodge?

I'd remember Terry Gardner's face even if it weren't pictured in the book.

The Gnome notebook includes correspondence² which tells the story of a letter put under an order of toast and delivered to Gardner that Halloween night I thought I was going to be killed for knowing what I knew.

I want to change my name to Fred Sauser. If I were to write in France around the time of the advent of Cubism (1914, say), I'd be born around Sept. 1, 1887.

I think of the roman a clef I'd like to write of Baysans and the writers group in Minneapolis in 1984. I don't know where to begin. Having Baysans as my captive is no help. He's rather dull. He has little to no gossip of those days to tell me which I could include in such a steamy best-seller-type exposé.

I'd be better off attributing my stories to Blaise Cendrars and hacking a few more web sites, invent a primary English translator for Cendrars, etc. (That line was an original draft idea. By the time of the first rewrite, Baysans and I have invented this translator, Ron Padgett, and he is included in a forged back issue of the JWR. Forging an issue of the JWR was, of course, Baysans's idea.)

(The string of Xs, Os, and Is that the hacker inserted here was plotted onto a non-standard 503 pixel screen. The message revealed, in serif type with a drop shadow: "The owls are in the Paciic Northwest.")

Rimbaud's next youngest sister died young but not before she contributed to the mythology of Rimbaud by writing a journal when she and her mother visited Rimbaud in London immediately after Verlaine had departed for Brussels and before Rimbaud's half-year disappearance and then reappearance in Brussels just before being shot.

Now that I've hired Garry to protect these files as I rewrite them, I'm less sure than I've been before that Jim Post did the hacking. Garry found mention of someone named Luke Edwards. 

I shouldn't have been so quick to suspect Jim, I guess, it's just that he was easy to suspect. He may have had more motive than anyone and was the only one I thought might have access to my passwords. I've also set up a camera, and I hope the camera works to catch anyone who might be messing with my work area.

Waldo died but I never made note of it in my first draft which is too bad. Waldo seemed like such an important character for awhile, especially for a talking Mynah bird. Pretty Waldo!

Dandelions are a food for desert lizards. I often accidentally call them sunflowers. Jim Post and I have two, Mr. Moto and Alice. They live inside a box. Lara just brought over some dandelions.

Nothing has resulted from her daughter seeing Baysans that afternoon during the writing of this when Lara and she surprised me. Three mistakes I made after kidnapping Baysans, and none have come back to bite me! Amazing.

Perhaps my biggest surprise in talking with him and getting to know him better, is that Baysans had not read any of the biographies of Rimbaud, even Starkie's which has been available since before he was born.

It especially bothers him that when the poems are referred to and quoted (in Starkie's book), the original French is provided, but no translations are given. 

If one could read French, wouldn't one read a biography written in French?

I'm giving him a crash course in degenerate art,³ then. Baudelaire is our next lesson.

If memory serves me right, Waldo was the murderer's name in Preminger's movie "Laura."

(Final draft, aside: I give up.

What themes I first found in the original draft have been changed by adding notes. My plan was not to talk about the past but to invent a future. My plan was not to kidnap Baysans but to kill him. My plan was not to write about myself but about Rimbaud.

Themes I explore here: like Kurt Vonnegut and Ayn Rand, I explore employment and self-worth. "Work" is in the first sentence! 

Ali Hassannia still works at DJC and no one questions why anyone would question such blatant disservice to a community, a culture, fellow employees, American ideals and simple goodness. Chris Butler is still employed by BCTI and BCTI itself continues to practice the business of "business technology education." BCTI's board of directors that paid someone to create a typing manual with more mistakes than pimples on the student body are living in their $200,000 homes, supported by a government happy to loan students the "other half" of a BCTI loan to those who already have nothing. 

Hitting the "mute" button opens holes in the ozone layer. When the reaction doesn't match the action, understanding cannot occur.

I'd rather be Laura Palmer than withstand years of this deafness, this dumbness, this blindness.)

End of another episode. Another cigarette.