they have a telephone and a martini / one each

Roy R. Behrens, Embattlement (©2026), digital collage

Donald Barthleme in "Brain Damage" in City Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970—

The Wapituil are like us to an extraordinary degree. They have a kinship system which is very similar to our kinship system. They address each other as "Mister," "Mistress," and "Miss." They wear clothes which look very much like our clothes. They have a Fifth Avenue which divides their territory into east and west. They have a Chock Full o' Nuts and a Chevrolet, one of each. They have a Museum of Modern Art and a telephone and a Martini, one of each. The Martini and the telephone are kept in the Museum of Modern Art. In fact they have everything that we have, but only one of each thing...They can conceptualize but they don't follow through. For instance, their week has seven days: Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, and Monday. They have one disease, mononucleosis. The sex life of a Wapituil consists of a single experience, which he thinks about for a long time.

don't go all the way / get off prior to blackpool

Roy R. Behrens, Clockwise (©2026), digital collage

ANON [English woman from the 1920s about preventing pregnancy] We were on the bus and Harold knew the conductor and he asked Harold if we were married. He said "Don't forget, always get off the bus at South Shore, don't go all the way to Blackpool." That was how they kept the family down.

what old age is really like / illusion & despair

Roy R. Behrens, Automaton (©2026), digital collage

Doris Grumbach in "What Old Age Is Really Like" in The New York Times (I November 1998), Op Ed Section—

The most lamentable loss in the elderly spirit is the erosion of hope. The climate of the old country is pessimism. Oscar Wilde's mother wrote: "Life is agony and hope, illusion and despair, all commingled, but despair outlasts all." 

a switch on Mitch / present but not really voting

Philip Stevens photograph on Wikipedia

Oh, for heaven's sake. How strange. A friend of mine just shared a dream in which he visited University College in London. In the student center there (this is factual, not a joke), on public display in a large glass case (shown here), is the preserved body of the famous English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), quietly seated in a chair, so that, even in death, he might still attend meetings ("present, but not voting").

It was Bentham's original wish that his head would also be displayed, but its mummification (albeit successful technically) "left the head looking distastefully macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull." While no longer on display (it had become the "target of student pranks"), there is a photograph of the head on Bentham's Wikipedia article, as well as elsewhere online.

Enough of that. Back to the dream of my dutiful friend: in his nocturnal misadventure, when he visited Bentham's case, it was not his body on display. Instead, it had been inexplicably switched with that of American congressman Mitch McConnell, the "sitting senator" from Kentucky. How bizarre. Fortunately, no votes were taken during the dream.

Frank Lloyd Wright / two sets of kitchen tools

Roy R. Behrens (©2026) digital collage

Edgar Tafel, About Wright: An Album of Recollections By Those Who Knew Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: John Wiley, 1993), p. 259—

It was arranged that we [members of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen Fellowship] would arrive [at the home of Wright's cousin, Richard Lloyd Jones, in Tulsa, Oklahoma] in time for early dinner, see the house [which Wright had designed], and camp there in our sleeping bags for the night. After dinner Mrs. Jones took us around in a group, telling about living in the house: its excitement, the flow of spaces, and experiences of each season with light pouring in in different ways. The tour ended in the kitchen, where she made her final pronouncement: "We have two sets of kitchen utensils—one for cooking, of course, and the other to catch the water from the leaks."

Opening spread of chronology in Roy R. Behrens, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mason: Architectural Heart of the Prairie, with photograph by Carol M. Highsmith. 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton on US immigration

Roy R. Behrens, Cloud Seeder (©2026) digital collage 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (diary entry), in Theodore Stanton & Harriot Stanton Blatch, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton As Revealed in Her Letters Diary and Reminiscences, Arno & The New York Times; New York, 1969. (Originally published by Harper & Brothers Publishers in 1922)—

I am much worked over the infamous Geary bill against the admission of the Chinese into the United States. How my blood boils over these persecutions of the Africans, the Jews, the Indians, and the Chinese. I suppose the Japanese will come next. I wonder if these fanatical Christians think that Christ died for these peoples, or confined his self-sacrifice to Saxons, French, Germans, Italians, etc.?