OK.
I wanted to see how hard it was to solve.
My name is Patrick Hickey and this is my business card. The first thing you will notice is that it is a very pretentious business card. There is a lot of pretending going on, both by myself and by my business card. If it helps with the metaphor, I sell the business card in a disposeable meatsack that I got from the meat aisle of a walmart. So, obviously if I am taking the card out of the meatsack then it is not the card for the meatsack. It just happens to be inside of it.
The title to the piece is My Recipe for Key Lime Pie. If you want to give your business card a title then you go right ahead and do that but mine is called My Recipe for Key Lime Pie.
Lets start from the top. Amon is a guy I wrote a poem for once for really, probably one of the strangest reasons that anybody could ever write a poem to somebody. But we are not going to go into that here. What I can tell you is that his name is not actually Amon. Its actually Alon. Alon had posted an answer to a question regarding how hard it was to answer any given word riddle and I liked his answer and he seemed like a pretty smart guy. And I had a riddle that I wanted him to proof and that riddle was my name. I get it, its pretentious and vain, but it did for a reason for being there and I did need to know how hard it was to solve. And so I tried to contact Alon but I never heard back. I am assuming that he probably thought I was crazy or he just didn't have time to answer. And I'm a bit of a poet n' know it and I so wrote this poem to try to convice him to proof my riddle. The first thing I threw in was what I was working on. That being the IC. The IC stands for InterContinental. Yep, thats what most of the rest of this recipe is about. The InterContinental is a wide-body high speed train that goes all the way around the world at about 160mph. More on that later, back to the poem. How do I go west without going west? I don't go west, I go east until I go all the way around the world and end up where-ever I wanted to be. In regards: bona fidelis. Is there some truth in the middle, its gonna tell us? My thoughts being that if I just straight up showed you the largest and most expensive thing mankind will ever build that you would at least pay attention. Bona fidelis is earned, I suppose. Farther along. A little about me, I'm nobody special. That is true actually. I'm a lot like most people. Just trying to get thru life and make the best of it. The project and I do stand as homonymous. This is true. We ring the same name. And I have been thinking about this for years and years. I've also been thinking about other things as well, but mainly this one. And then it goes into the bit about God or no god. We'll save that one for later.
And then I took a moment to play the preening kookoo bird but then I end it with "most of my prose is really quite boring, but thats where the real story is." And that is where the real story is. Perhaps we've started a little bit of it just now. And then there was talk of some angels banging things. And then I realized that Amon's name was actually, sortof the name of an angel. However, I didn't realize that until about six months after I wrote the poem when I was going back through and reading it later. I had never actually sent the poem to Amon/Alon. Bills called, I had to answer and I didn't have the time to pursue that avenue of approach and I so never sent the poem version to him. But then I started putting together some of poetry that I had written for various projects that I had put my mind towards the last few years. And I started putting these different poems into place on this what was originally, just a collection of poetry and not a business card. In fact, I didn't even realize my own personal self that it was a business card until about three weeks ago. I had it finished almost eight months ago and up until three weeks ago it was just a collection of my poetry with a riddle for who and I was and for what I did. You would think I would just make that connection instantly, but no, it completely evaded me.
Of course, after that, I came up with the origin of the most commonly used word in the entire world. I've been to wikipedia. All of them are wrong. I am right. And it shall be forever known as "Patrick Hickey's Theory of OK" with your own personal choice of intonation and inflection on the word "ok". I shall use the negatively sarcastic version so as to beat you to the punch.
Which poem should we do next?
How about Willy and Wiley?
Willy and Wiley were real people. The were Will Rogers and Wiley Post. Will and Wiley took a ...........oh my gosh. I just realized I made an editorial error. The were not flying a vega. They were flying a Lockheed Orion. I just used vega as a placeholder and forgot to take it out with research. However, Vega did used to be the pole star and it will be once again, soon enough. The word comes from the Arabic and means to fall or land......which is ironic because they fell and didn't land. They crashed off of Point Barrow, Alaska. Wiley Post was surveying a map for a mail route between the United States and Russia across the Bering Strait. The exact same strait the InterContinental would be taking. Will Rogers was just along for the ride. He would send back a dispatch every once in awhile because he was a pretty famous guy and people loved to read his work.
If you'll look closely I have posited that Will Rogers was also working on something else that he did not release and that died when he died. Will Rogers was a big believer in opening up transportation to the masses. He was one of the early promoters of passenger air inside of the United States and was one of the main reasons why passenger air took hold of the market as quickly as it did. And here he is risking life and limb for a quick story and lil' glory? No. I don't buy it. I think he was working on something else. The Panama Canal was opened 15 years before he died so he knew what American ingenuity was capable of. I think he was doing an initial survey for a route for rail and not a route for mail. He would have wanted to put down his observations as he was going along but if it were a book he would want to keep it all in one place and considering that there are, not even now, let alone 100 years ago.......very many places in Alaska when he could have left a copy the book then I would have to assume that he was keeping the book with him in the plane. He was noted to have taken a typewriter with him in the cockpit of the plane that he typed on as they were flying and probably also when they landed and made camp. In my opinion, it is not unrealistic to think that Will Rogers may have been writing a book on inter-continental rail. I'm not too sure how feasible it would have been to do such a thing 100 years ago but what I do know is that if they had attempted it, it would have been the largest and most expensive thing they had ever built......much like it would be today.
Lets move on from that poem and lets move into our new Status Quo. This is another poem that was not written specifically for this piece. I wrote it for something completely different. It was written for a private company that didn't have anything to do with any of the work that I currently do. But it was one of my pieces of poetry and I did appreciate the message and so I included in my collection of poetry. That it just happens to coincide exactly with the Willy and Wiley poem is entirely coincidence. Much like how all of the rest of the poems seem to play off of each other. Which is what the poem "More than one thing can riddle mean" references.
"A pie up high in the sky this guy" was one of my earliest forays into poetry. I wrote that one about five years ago when I very first starting thinking about the IC. It was called Space Space back then. I started with just the words a pie, up high, the sky and this guy. There was a line in a Jimmy Hendrix song that can either sound like "excuse me while I kiss the sky" "excuse me while I kiss this guy." That was the genesis of that poem. Originally it was just a play on those words but then I expanded it. I would be ok with having those words on my gravestone. Its the story of my life in homonyms.
"So how ironic would it be".
A little history. There once was a company called Krupp. And they were very good at blowing stuff up. One hundred years ago they were one of the largest companies in the entire world. They built a good portion of Germany's armaments during WWI and WWII. After WWII they devoted themselves to peaceful purposes. They eventually merged with Thyssen and became Thyssen-Krupp. Thyssen-Krupp built the Transrapid Rail System in Shanghai, China, one of the most technologically advaced magnetic levitation train systems on the planet.
Next little bit of history. The once was a company called GE. And its actually still there, by golly gee. One hundred years ago they were also on the largest companies in the entire world. GE was founded by Thomas Edison and Thomas Edison had a certain distaste for another man named Nikolai Tesla. So.....it would probably be ironic if the first locomotive built by GE for the Intercontinental was named for Tesla.
"Art is somewhat hard to define." I think that section is pretty self-explanatory. Everybody gotta make a dollar and a cent in this world.
I guess we could do gravity now. So I have my own theories on the nature of gravity because I'm kindof a weird sortof guy. I put my little "special apology" (spatial topology) in there for easy viewing reference. That would be zero dimensional space playing a tug of war with 9 dimensional space and using 3 dimensional space as the rope for their little game. Currently nine dimensional space is winning with the score being The Cosmological Constant to Zero. Which sounds like a score that just can't be beat........but I'm here to tell ya. Don't let zero come from behind. She's a sneaky little b!tch.
A single Planck unit is actually dimensionless. It might seem like its not but if you can't move something from one place to another then nothing is capable of change. So you have something, but at the same, you don't really have anything. Time has no meaning whatsoever inside of zero dimensional space for that reason.
Gravity does not actually come from mass. Gravity come from the nature of space itself. Most mass carries a key, something we might call a Higgs Boson or the like. The key is able to interact with the space around it so that it can open up the liner between our space and zero dimensional space. When it does this zero dimensional space tries to turn our space into itself. We see that as gravitational attraction. Things with mass trying to pull together towards each other. Its the reason why gravity works across such great distances, is because, in some sense, there is no real distance between here and anyplace else in the universe because three dimensional space is wrapped around zero dimensional space. Which makes faster than light speed travel possible and also time travel because if you can harness an "area" within zero dimensional space then you can use it for that. And when you do that all of humanity and planet earth and this solar system will perish so quickly it will be like we were never there to begin with. Just FYI. We're not there yet but it is something you might want to mull around in the ol' noggin while you start figuring out where you are going to be throwing down your "Here Be Dragons" signs.....or, or, or........if there are going to be no "Here Be Dragons" signs at all.
"White space too small to fill." When I wrote this it really was because I had some empty white space on the page I wanted to fill and I was just trying to be humorous with the presentation. But then, like a lot of the other poems, this one was modified by a different poem, and in this particular instance by our little discussion of gravity and it ended up coming to mean something entirely different. Thats what I like about simple words.
In regards, my name. This should probably be read from the standpoint of "what story am I trying to sell?" Or, if I could name myself anything, how would I write it? Because we have so few letters to work with we can't tell much of a story. But we might be able to tease out a sentence. We would do subject, verb and direct object. In this instance the subject would be phi, the verb would be see, the direct object would be key. Because we have enough letters left over for a modifier we can use "a trick" to modify phi. It comes out "phi with a trick in the middle, see, key." Because I needed to obfuscate things a bit, and because phi by itself would have been out of place making it stand out and be too easy to solve, I used the other magic number, pi, as well. For the graphic for pi I used a stick boy that looks like a circle on top of a pi symbol with a magic number explosion in his head. Of course, you'll note that about 8 o'clock of that and about two inches away it says something about somebody being lost in their own mathematic.
Now that we have all of that deconstructed we can begin to assess what the title is actually all about. Because, obviously, it does not have a whole lot to do with Key Lime Pie, even though that does make for a rather delicious recipe.
As far as the word "recipe" we would could always use the words "strangely derived plan." I would think the Key part would be obvious by now. Lime can mean three things. The first is something that would be tart in taste. The second would mean something that is sub-lime. Where more than one thing is going on at a time and with some of those things skirting the boundaries of reality. Lime can also mean Calcium Carbonate. Those little floating animals on the page are called "radiolarians." Radiolarians and other sea creatures like them die and then they sink to the bottom of the ocean where they decompose into their respective molecular elements. Generally all thats left behind is the Calcium Carbonate. Which we call lime. Lime is the primary ingredient in concrete. Without lime, concrete is just a pile of rocks and sand. Lime is what glues all of that together into a cohesive structure. The InterContinental, being a train raised above ground level, will be the largest single user of concrete on the entire planet and probably by at least one order of magnitude. Theres a whole lotta lime in the InterContinental. Pie can mean a couple of things. Pie can have the meaning as referenced in "A Pie, Up High".....as in "this can all be seen as a pie in the sky idea." Pie can also mean pi. As in....."the magic number that gives us the circle."
All put together it means something along the lines of "my sublime plan for developing the key to bringing people together into a cirlce and gluing them on the idea of InterContinental Rail."
The problem with that is that I know it is not true entirely true. Because its not "my" recipe. I realized that about the same time I realized this was actually a business card. It may be my business card but its not my recipe.
We should probably take a second to step back and register the number of Gods that have been included here. We start with Amon. The word comes from the same root as Amun or Amun-Ra. Amun-Ra was an Egyptian proto-god. Before there was the Judaic God but after we did away with polytheism we had a number of proto-Gods. They had many of the same attributes of what we might call "God", but they had a different name and without a Judaic origin. If we tear Amon down to its phonetic attributes of A, M, N we can also create the word Amen. In fact, some scholars believe the word Amen comes from the word Amun-Ra. If we add another M we get Ammon. Ammon was a Mormon Angel. We could also use the demonic version of Amon from the 16th century "Infernal Dictionary". Except Amon as a demon was mostly known for telling the past and the future and reconciling feuds and bringing old friends back together. (Seriously, pulled it straight from wikipedia.) We could also step back and see that we've included apollo in our pantheon of gods. Apollo, again, is a proto-god. One of the last of the old gods to survive. One of his temples in the Oracle at Delphi as referenced in that particular riddle. Constantine, the emporer who brought Christianity to Rome, never quit worshipping apollo. And then we have the Norse gods of the Edda. The norse gods are the reason for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Tyr's Day, Odin's Day, Thor's Day and Freya's Day. We also have the ancestral Gods referenced in "pooor trick, I knew him well." Its not just a riff on misquoted Shakespeare. Thats a witch doctor talking. You'll also notice I've included the Diomedian Muses, Terra and Ex Terra. "Diomede" means "between two lands". I took the liberty of naming them myself. And we also have the gods of science as referenced by linguistics and etymology and pi and phi and gravity and magic number explosions. Bona fidelis. Is there some truth in the middle its gonna tell us. You see. I can't tell you who I am and thats the whole reason I'm hidden in spam. The riddle is for something much bigger and its not my only conceit but it does pull the trigger. The rest is outside of me. I'm just the root, the rest is the tree. The project and I stand as homonymous but as it stands......I stand as anonymous.
(I wrote that to a guy I wanted to have proof my riddle. I call it proofed. You call it what you want.)
So we basically have a good portion of the gods of the Western Hemisphere. Of course, we also have the captial G God. That said, we also have what might be termed "color".
Most of these poems were not even written to go with each other. That they all happen to modify each other how they do is entirely coincidental. (Honestly, I just don't have that much talent.) Or, at least, it was not in my power to make them work like they did. In other words, the "My" in "My Recipe for Key Lime Pie" does not actually reference my own personal self. It is my business card but it is not my recipe.
Two columns came along. (Note: There is an actual column on the page. In fact, I guess there's actually quite a few of them.) But in this sense we are talking about two columns of accounting. Column 1 being the amount we spend on war. In this particular instance I have chosen the recent war in Iraq. It would have been possible to purchase three InterContinental rail systems for what we paid for the war in Iraq. (Actually just the American portion of the InterContinental. By the way......I realized that the Intercontinental could be shortened to just IC about four seconds after I came up with the name. However, it took me about two years to realize "IC" could also mean "I see." I don't use the word IC. I use the word InterContinental. I call it the Intercontinental because it says what it does and it does what it says. That it also happens to do things other than what it says and what it does is entirely coincidental and should not be held as either benefit or as fault of the name itself. It just happens to be the right Word, that's all.) And then I asked the question of what capital G God would say if he saw us spending this obscene amount of money to make war and then didn't see us putting that money and that manpower to better use. And then I said that I don't know what God would say in that regard because I don't have his telephone number and I haven't run into any talking burning bushes lately. And so instead of knowing for sure what God would say, I just took a wild guess and used my imagination.
My book is called "How I would spend the three trillion dollars that was spent on the Iraq/Afghan War." by Patrick Hickey.
Now........guess how much of that three trillion is for the InterContinental? We've got three trillion fantasy dollars on hold and waiting for your guess! Unfortunately if you guessed anything other than none of it, then you guessed wrong. You don't go shopping for new furniture when your house is on fire.
1. Medical Corps. - 1 trillion
2. Homelessness and the causes of homelessness. - 1 trillion
3. The Great American Byway. 200 billion
4. A few other things you guys want because I don't want to be selfish and hog all of the three trillion dollars in fantasy money.
Well thats it. That is my riddle solved and that is my business card unsolved. You should try the pie, its a good recipe, even if I did steal it off the internet. Make sure to use real key limes. Accept no substitute for the real thing. Unless they just don't have key limes. In which case anything tart and citrusy will do.
tart and citrusy
but in spirit he,
lost in mystery
with strange calligraphy
applied liberally
in the periphery
Wittily
he lacked coherency.
Was it the epitome of an idiosyncracy
or was it just a bit too fuzzy to see?
His transmit receive is a bit rusty
but he did do a little litaney.
even though, admitted he, eerily
"Theseus ships a' sea."
Trust in he and the validity
or is there heresy in his rigidity?
There's fluidity in his secrecy
and solidity in his flaccidity
but its not a game of Gin Rummy.
"Tell you what", says he
"can we be noncommitally a confederacy
and not waste away under a tyranny of distrophy?"
I would be ok with that.
As long as I get to choose my own hat
cuz a really, really weird cat
does not wear a hat
unless it suits him
and what does not suit this cats whim
is being the organizer guy
with his organizer tie
I wish that guy the best
same as all the rest
but the job I applied for
said "User Experience" on the door
and that is where its at
there's the couch, mind the hat.
But really.......just about anything tart and citrusy will do.
How I wrote this poem, by Patrick Hickey. First I wrote the line "tart and citrusy" and then I couldn't think of anything that rhymed with citrusy. Rhymezone.com is cheating, just like spellcheck is, but every once in awhile I let loose a little labor. Unfortunately "citrusy" doesn't really rhyme with anything and there's no real substitute for a truly rhyming word. It does, however, have a lot of homonyms and sometimes its just a matter of putting those homonyms into an order that makes......ummm.....I'm not too sure "sense" is the right word but as long as it makes cents, who really cares?
But you know what? Thats enough about me. Lets talk about you. I'm thinking on the train......28 feet wide. What do you think? I was thinking, on the units, we do 100 square feet. But I don't know, what do you think? I was thinking, on the Great American, we did about 5000 miles to start us off. But I don't know......what do you think? I was thinking.....on the Medical Corps.....we should do the medical schools in about 6 medium sized cities. Places with low costs of living. Maybe unused Military Bases. But I don't know, what do you think? I was thinking 3 day weekends. But I don't know. What do you think? (You see.....the problem is that if you don't get three day weekends then you won't be able to use my little bitty train and my little bitty Great American as much. One problem is often the solution to another problem, I find.) But I don't know. What do you think?
I think sublimely orchestrated and methodically beautiful would be the way to go. But if you guys wanna do it different way, I can tone it down a notch. I can talk normal talk too, how about you?
Also, I'm not an engineer or a politician or a land planner or really...........there are just a whole host of other things that I am not. But some of you are those things and the worlds a pretty big place.
Here in about four seconds.......but hopefully enough time for this to post, we will begin to wear out our welcome inside of this forum because nobody comes here to read .......whatever the heck this has turned out to be. (Oh Forum Moderator on High, please allow this post to exist. Hey Men.) Heyyyyy Men. Heyyyyyyy Men. Hey men. Hey men. Hey men. And the Colored Girls go do, do do, do do, do do, do do ......Heyyyyyy Babe.....talk a walk on the wild side do do, do, do do, do
Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets
Lookin' for soul food and a place to eat
Went to the Apollo
You should have seen him go, go, go
They said, hey Sugar, take a walk on the wild side
I said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side, alright, huh
Do do do do do do do do do
do do do do do do do do doooooooooooo
Things are gonna slide. Slide in all directions.
Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again.
Conjunction Junction. Whats your function?
BBBBird....BBBBird is the Word.
Little memories, marching on
Your little feet, working the machines
Will it spin, will it soar
My little dream, working the machine
And me and Dell were singin', Little Runaway. And it was sublime.
You know I just realized. I've gotten all the way to the end of this ten page document and I haven't even bothered to save it yet and I can't remember if I enabled the auto-save feature. Bad habit, I guess. If my computer crashed I would have lost all of this work. Gotta remember to flip on the auto-save next time.
Coincidentally, it is also my birthday today. I turn 46 in about four hours. My Dad died when he was 65. My grandfather and uncle around their late fifties. I don't know when I'll die. Statistically maybe 15-20 years. Later this week I have to quit being unemployed (or otherwise employed) and I have to go and get a real job in the real world where they pay real money that I can use to pay real bills. I wonder what I will do. By training, I'm a drafter. I can probably make enough in the next year to take a year off and finish writing. So. Two years from now I would expect to see something more than what I have written here. Its a pretty long book and it won't get it finished in under a year of writing. But right now I need to focus on the "real" world because my mortgage is now 26 days past due. While it has all been fun with the riddles and such, ain't nothin' goin' on but the rent. Until then, ladies and germs, may the road rise up to meet you and may the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. May the rain fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again............
