You have to swing the bat. Hit it into the sky. Don't hold back. Before he swings the bat a real slugger imagines an arc inside his heart arching directly to heaven... There. That star'd make a perfect target.
- Enokido Yooji of GAINAX, "Furikiri (The Swing)"

"FLCL"
The North Star wasn't always Polaris. It used to be Vega, but then the tilt of Earth's axis shifted. It's still shifting.

You know what that means? It means the planet's spiraling out of control, and the night sky -- which is a faded and outdated celestial newsreel of the life and times of incandescent gas way back when -- is an even dimmer illusion of permanence. All us wayward wanderers who've let the stars be our guide are going to have to rely on dead reckoning if we want to figure out where we're going.

Frankly, Lenar Clark's lost.

"Fire Starter"
My last October in Columbia has come and gone, and I was fine to let it go. I like November, too. Everything looks like it's been burnt to crisps, but it's (fooly) cooling down. And if you buy into all that phoenix sagacity, you might be under the impression that we can rebuild.

My dad's birthday's in November.

"Marquis de Carabas"
We used to have a cat named Mookie. Mom always said he was supposed to be my step-father's cat, but I don't get the feeling Don liked him all that much. Apparantly there'd been some friction between Don and a cat he'd had in his previous marriage. There's a suspicion that this prior cat might have tried to smother my step-sister when she was an infant, but I don't want to talk out of hand. That's just what I think I heard.

Mookie was a great cat. He was a fluffy grey persian with a sense of exasperated apathy that warmed my heart. I could tell he was always thinking, "Dear Bast, Goddess of All Cats, just let these people leave me alone!" because he suffered indignity after indignity in our little household -- for example, every summer my mom insisted on shaving all his hair off so he wouldn't "get too hot," and he spent a month or two looking like a large rat -- but he never let it get him down. He was that cat hanging on a clothes line in the "Hang in there!" poster, and I think it was that attitude that allowed him to be the one pet my family managed to hold onto for more than a few years.

For a while, we had a dog named Barney who loved to torment Mookie, but Mookie just stuck to his guns, fighting to make it through his day relatively unmolested, hiding in the basement while Barney dug up the backyard and made messy in the den. That's probably why when Ja'nelle and I came home from a summer with our Dad in Colorado, Barney had disappeared, but Mookie was still hangin' in there.

Barney was replaced by a white cat named Duchess who also loved batting the Mookster around for amusement. I didn't know Duchess for too long, as we got her shortly before I spent my year in Montana, but when my mom called one afternoon to tell me that one of the cats had been runover, I knew it had been her. Mookie wouldn't have been foolhearty enough to leave the house.

What was truly astounding about Mookie was that he excelled in one of the many social mores that escape me: the art of gift giving. In my family, the best Christmas present of the year would always come from Mookie. I asked my mom how this languorous fluffy grey persian could afford such extravagance, especially when he spent his days lazing about the house, and she'd just shrug.

When Chelsey was born, it was decided that Mookie would be an outside cat, even though I'm sure he had no desire to leave that space by the vent he was known to occupy in the twilight years of his cohabitance. I remember that Don would put him out on the porch, and he'd wait there for hours until we'd let him back in. That's why it was such a surprise when one day we put him out and he never came back. We all blame Don.

I like to imagine Mookie went to Pella, Iowa, where dreams are made and fortunes are found. If the Dutch can do it, anybody can.

My mom got a cat for Chelsey last year. I've mentioned him before. He's young. His name is Oliver. Again. He's young. He looks a lot like Mookie... except for his eyes, which have a vivacious amber glow, while Mookie's eyes were a cool blue pond of wearying experience. Ollie's a playful guy (read "young") and Chelsey loves him, so he'll probably be a fixture in the ol' homestead for quite sometime... but he didn't get me anything for Christmas.

Strangely enough, however, Don still gets a gift from Mookie every year.

All this to say that if the fairytale of "The Puss in Boots" were true, any chance I had of a fantastic feline bringing me fame and fortune was set out on the porch and wandered away (perhaps to Pella, Iowa) a few years back. So with Mookie gone, and Oliver's paws filled playing patty-cake with Chelsey, it looks like I'm on my own. It's high time I got to work.

"Full Swing"
My dear friend and esteemed colleague Mr. Woodward is a big fan of the old adage, Like the book says: "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."

Sure. I can see that. I liked Magnolia, too. I wrote that whole essay about it, "When It Rains, It Ribbits." But don't the past ever quit? Will I be forever haunted by fowl and pastry and corn fields?

What about what that other book says? You know, that back-up story from the clone saga: Going back's out of the question -- but going forward? Now that might have some got some possibilities...

"Brittle Bullet"
I had this dream that I was dressed up like Daredevil and I was trying to bring in the Punisher. He kept throwing knives at me, but I kept blocking them until I decided that I should close my eyes since Daredevil's supposed to be blind. Then I got stabbed right in the head, but not too deeply.

I had an earlier dream about the Punisher, but he just shot me in the back of the head. The bullets felt like warm liquid in my brain. It was really rather pleasant actually.

Last night I dreamt of chuckling.

"FLCLimax"
Frankly, Lenar Clark's lost.

He's watching anime. He's not sure if he's serious or not. He's lying about his knowledge of Hollywood starlets. He's staying up to watch Wings. He's rambling about a cat that's probably long dead by now. He's trusting idiots. He's talking about himself in the third person.

And I'm not sure if he can wake up tomorrow morning and love the world all over again.

What does FLCL even mean anyway?