You may remember the media frenzy. Research teams from various scientific institutions, a group of rangy poets from the Institute for Applied Philosophy, and a Papal-appointed team of forensic investigators direct from the Vatican descended upon the library to take readings, run tests and examine the statue. For two weeks straight, Portland’s hotels were booked solid with the faithful, who lined up to view the statue after the day’s tests were complete.

The hullabaloo had to do with the way in which this little icon threw shadows. Under direct light from a single source, it seemed to the eyewitness that the statue cast three distinct shadows, none of which corresponded to the direction of the light source. Under diffuse light, the shadow seemed to swirl, move and multiply, depending on the angle of the viewer. Adding to the mystery, any attempt to photograph or record the phenomenon failed; the image captured by all manner of cameras, spectrographs and video recording devices would reveal the statue to possess a perfectly ordinary shadow. It seemed that the phenomenon could only be witnessed with one’s own eyes–the “holy shadows” could only be documented by eyewitness accounts.

All the varied and exhaustive tests revealed nothing out of the ordinary in the statue’s physical components or method of manufacture. All sides were at a loss to explain the phenomenon. Scientists compared the mystery of the shadows to Erwin Schrodinger’s quantum thought experiments, while religious philosophers considered the statue to be a fitting metaphor for the ardors of faith.

One scientist took the matter into his own hands. One night, a few days before the Equinox, he stole the statue and boarded a plane bound for Quito, Ecuador. Factoring in the curvature of the earth, the height and width of the icon, and the proximity of Quito to the equator, he had determined the exact moment in time and geographic location whereupon it would be physically impossible for the statue to cast a shadow. It would last a total of 3.2 seconds. Surrounded by cameras, the scientist placed the statue in position and waited.

The outcome of the experiment has never been released to the public, all that is known is that the statue was lost, and the scientist has steadfastly refused to talk about the incident. The film and video recordings of the event were donated to the Vatican, and in what one conspiracy theorist blogger has called “some real Da Vinci Code shit,” they promptly claimed to have lost all the film in a warehouse fire.

As for the scientist, he has kept out of the public eye and has essentially been barred from professional work at most major universities and scientific institutions. “Being black-listed” he remarked, “is a pain in the neck.”

Continued soon…I promise!

Click here to continue…

Oddly, perhaps, Pete felt content. He spent most of his time wheeling down the polished corridors of Kerner’s Joe E. Lewis Knife-Wound Wing with a transistor radio on his lap, flirting with his nurse and listening to Team Gustav’s progress in Europe. His Swedish friends eventually finished the race in a respectable fourth place, and Pete left Kerner with a clean bill of health, although he did suffer from a severe limp for the rest of his life.

Not long after his release from Kerner, we asked Pete about the cause of his limp. We asked, quite pointedly, about that strange night in the village of La Tenatrice with that strange woman. What happened, really? Did she drug him? Was she a psychotic, a sadist, a grifter? Had she robbed him or was she innocent? Was he, perhaps, to blame? Had he done something wrong? And then, the larger questions: Was it all worth it? His time with Team Gustav, the optimism he instilled in those broken men, the life he had begun to build, was it all real or was it just a fantasy? There he was, undone and scarred by a malicious act, his profitable cycling career and the promise of international fame come to an end. Was he bitter? Was he angry? Did he feel he’d been treated unfairly? In short, did he still believe in himself and the universe at-large? The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the mysteries of which began this yarn, had risen its unfathomable head yet again. If all things decay and fall into disrepair, if all hopeful things can sour, and if all lovely things can wilt, where then, Spartan Pete, is your wisdom and your optimism? Give us an answer to the whole kit and caboodle.

We were at a downtown lunch counter. Pete ordered liver and onions and we sipped coffee. We placed a recent copy of the French society paper, La Folie Quotidien, in front of him. We wanted to get a reaction out of our friend. There on the page was a photo of a beaming and smiling Kitty Piraeus, sharing a romantic dinner with a blandly handsome would be-matinée idol.

Pete stared at the photograph for a bit, and then handed the paper back to us. He smiled and lit his pipe, and then Pete gave us what we might call a koan, and what you might call the overriding moral of this long-winded tale. “You raise some good questions, kid.” he said, “But you know, I’m as confused as you. And I got the wounds to prove it. Nobody likes being a fool, but frankly, that’s what we all are–from day one until check-out time. The only positive aspect to this entire situation is that life is far too short to wait for answers.”

In our next episode, we return to the present day and to the Golden Circle Doughnut Shop to discuss some of the ups and downs of contemporary rock music.

In the pantry, three drunken party-goers were busy making sardine and hard boiled egg sandwiches, in the stairwell, a man had passed out and was deep into a fevered dream about a fistfight on his grade school playground, and in the foyer, our particular friend, Spartan Pete, exited the building arm in arm with Kitty Piraeus.

Pete and Kitty strolled down Rue de Cassé Rêver with flirtatious amiability. Pete was a practical man, but there was something about the way Kitty’s arm felt in his, something about her high and generous giggle fits–so at odds with her striking beauty, that sent his mind off on romantic flights of fancy: Kitty and Pete on a sailboat in the Mediterranean in bright white swimsuits, Pete and Kitty at the theater in dinner wear, in a Manhattan jazz club smoking tea, “Dear friends, we cordially invite you to the wedding of Helen Piraeus and Peter Waleska,” ol’ gramps and Ma Kitty, and so on, all the way down to matching gravestones in a quaint New England town. Pete knew it was foolish, but it had been years since he’d even pretended to let his heart go a’flutter–it felt better than he remembered.

It is here where the story takes a turn. Pete’s hotel, The Ulysses, was the new couple’s final destination. He had a bottle of bourbon in his suitcase, and it seemed like an inevitable and easy extension of their canoodling to watch the sunrise over the Alps and call it a day. Instead something else, something quite unexpected and slightly tragic, occurred.

Indeed, Pete did not awake to the delicate perfume of his new French lass in a soft and luxurious bed, but instead he found himself groaning in a rum-soaked alley behind The Hotel Ulysses. He was covered in dew and shivering, he had no memory of how he’d ended up there (his last memory was of opening the door of his hotel room as Kitty kissed his neck), and his right ankle was bleeding profusely–in point of fact, his tendon had been severed with a knife.

On the wall he was slumped against were various messages, written in his own blood, including this one: “Crois-moi, je pense que c’est pour le mieux.”

Next time, the final chapter in the protracted tale of Spartan Pete and his brushes with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Gentleman cartoonist, scholar and web-master Chris McD has just revamped the Meathaus website, which is where you should go to check out a preview of the contents before purchasing this hot item.

Below is the cover image (by Chris McD) and a sample of one of my pages.

La Tenatrice roughly marked the halfway point of the TGICT, and the newly reinvigorated Team Gustav (holding a steady third in the race) had been invited to a cocktail party in their honor. The party, held in a well-appointed banquet hall above the village’s most exclusive clothier, was quite typical of affairs of this kind. It was a stuffy room full of halfway decent food and less decent booze, peopled with plenty of glad-handing public officials, decrepit town elders and moneyed socialites, along with a smattering of actual cycling enthusiasts who had snuck their way in to see the Swedish and Yankee curiosities. What ended up setting this soirée apart was the gusto and frenetic grace that Team Gustav brought to the event.

Cured of their romantic despair and bursting with confidence, Team Gustav were winners for the first time in years, and it showed–perhaps a little too readily. Their innocent guffaws at poorly told jokes, their exotic accents and their endless succession of boisterous toasts gave the party a youthful, democratic air. And as the highball glasses continued to be refilled, and a few enterprising party-goers left with shouted promises to bring back more wine, it seemed to all that the women began to grow more beautiful and the men more charming. Only the the true sourpusses were unmoved.

One such sourpuss was La Tenatrice’s Minister of Culture, Guy Magiot, who stormed out of the party after a particularly inebriated reveler–drunkenly pontificating on the uselessness of rain wear, attempted to pour an entire bottle of port into Magiot’s galoshes.

Spartan Pete, for his part, was deeply enjoying this break from the routine of the road (and the ever-present games of chess that had come to define Team Gustav’s success), but more than anything else, he was doing his best to enjoy the company of Helen “Kitty” Piraeus, the one true celebrity at the event. Kitty, the daughter of a well-known Greek shipping magnate and a less-well-known Parisian cabaret singer, was possessed of particularly fantastic level of beauty and charm, and like all beautiful women, she was part evil.

From long experience, Pete knew that he was most likely stepping into a giant heap trouble, but found that he didn’t quite care. He half-hoped and half-expected that it would turn out to be the good kind of trouble. Of course, if there’s a lesson our tale has thus far attempted to impart to the reader, it’s that the forces of chaos particularly enjoy paying visits to those fools who expect one thing to happen over another thing.

Continued here…

Special thanks to Isabelle La Place-Sacher for the French translations. Any grammatical errors are purely mine…

In the meantime, here’s another low-yield ditty to mull over as you consider the state of your interpersonal relationships.