Plain Honey is a hive buzzing with essays, stories, and discussions. ____________ Click on each comb, About and Pollinators to find your way around.

A mosquito landed on the 2^nd Regiment of the Royal Guard in battle with the Legion Nostradominitus, a vigilante group sworn to protect the virginity of Satan. It began to find parts of skin that were exposed to the shredded spectrum of daylight in the growing dim of agony. It found many spots to snack. Timmy, a red-haired chap from Devon was bit; and then Steven from Liverpool, on his calloused thumb. The Nostradominiti charged forth, encouraged by the sapping of blood from their enemy.

The gentrification of NYC is a double-edged sword. Previously sketchy “border vacuum” areas—a term coined by Jane Jacobs in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” in reference to neighborhoods around stations, bridges, and tunnels such as DUMBO, RAMBO, and Hell’s Kitchen—now give way to safe, frolicsome, and yuppie-filled waterfront parks. In 21st century Bloombergian Gotham, the waterfront park is both the City’s greatest asset, yet vexing harbinger. It is a conspicuous symbol of what the Apple and its fine boroughs have become: a theme park for the privileged few who can afford real estate with a view.

Tom Hawking’s recent drubbing of Daft Punk’s new “Random Access Memories” LP in Flavorwire (“Why Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’ Won’t Save Electronic Music”: Flavorwire) enjoys the distinction of having ignited a small fire under the rears of some millennial, electronic music fans. That said, my response is less about Daft Punk, and least of all about Hawking’s harangue.

“I am utterly disturbing, and I create only perplexity.”

“Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee, which has gathered too much honey; I need hands which stretch outwards. [Siehe! Ich bin meiner Weisheit überdrüssig, wie die Biene, die des Honigs zu viel gesammelt hat, ich bedarf der Hände, die sich ausstrecken.]” – Nietzsche (Part 1 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

On September 11, 1973—now referred to as the “other 9/11”—Augusto Pinochet staged a successful coup to oust Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. Backed by the CIA, American business interests, and the blessings of Henry Kissinger, Pinochet, enlisting economists trained under Milton Friedman and the so-called “Chicago boys,” restructured the Chilean economy in the image of what has now come to be known as “neoliberalism,” that state apparatus which seeks to deregulate markets, privatize formerly public assets, minimize the power of unions, unleash all manner of austerity measures—in short, to ensure, in the name of freedom, an increasingly frictionless flow of capital across borders and into the bank accounts of those in power.

The following is excerpted from the story of a young girl detective, one Clovis Cassidy, who’s primary jurisdiction lies in crimes of neglect. When a classmate goes missing, unnoticed, in a small town where baby food is the major source of employment, Cassidy is on the case. Mysterious and bizarre elements surround the young girl’s disappearance, including a feral family who’s only order of the day appears to be chaos, a patriarch obsessed with all things Shakespearian, and a curious Lazyboy recliner that may well just be the source of the crime. Not your-regular-Bobsi Twin, not you average-Nancy-come lately-Drew, Cassidy is hard on the trail. Nevertheless one must ask, how will Clovis Cassidy, kid detective, get herself out of this pickle?

Precocious. (adj) As in her mother’s thumb, from which she saw it sucked out, greedily. Pulling the marrow of the word between the teeth. You precocious little bitch, she said (after what kind of incident/accident?). Uttered with foreboding and double meaning by her mother, later a schoolteacher, then a relative, or a stranger; used indiscriminately to describe her behavior, her vocabulary, her manner of dress, her intellect at large. As if the simple addition of a C and an O could occupy a word, like a squatter, forging the former residence into a halfway home. Steal between the letters, post-date itself, wipe out its precious (as in valued/as in affected) existence.

The following is excerpted from the story of a young girl detective, one Clovis Cassidy, who’s primary jurisdiction lies in crimes of neglect. When a classmate goes missing, unnoticed, in a small town where baby food is the major source of employment, Cassidy is on the case. Mysterious and bizarre elements surround the young girl’s disappearance, including a feral family who’s only order of the day appears to be chaos, a patriarch obsessed with all things Shakespearian, and a curious Lazyboy recliner that may well just be the source of the crime. Not your-regular-Bobsi Twin, not you average-Nancy-come lately-Drew, Cassidy is hard on the trail. Nevertheless one must ask, how will Clovis Cassidy, kid detective, get herself out of this pickle?

Interlude

Now she gathers the children around the King Richards. See, she says, how even as they fall from the King’s shoulders, how they are laid out splendidly? See how when a thing falls from the King’s shoulders it does not fall as a leaf does from a tree, scattered with other leaves, but falls JUST SO.