Where the 2016 Presidential election is going…and why Bernie Sanders will be the next president of the United States.

Capitalism has reached a global tipping point in a concentration of elitist prosperity that has alienated the traditional lower and lower middle white social issue voters that sustain the voting block to push a supply side economic agenda.  Ronald Reagan catapulted this economic battle plan into prominence during the ‘glory days’ of the 1980’s.  The economics are now systematically dysfunctional enough to threaten rampant governmental bankruptcies.  The aging of the Boomer population has left the Republican Party to political strategies such as: disenfranchisement through voter-fraud paranoia and gerrymandering, petulant legislative obstructionism, xenophobic nationalism, theistic fundamentalism, and most importantly degradation of science and at its root mathematics. 

Political discourse based in mathematics is the greatest threat to the elitist Republican agenda inside the donor pool that funds candidates ballyhooed by Citizens United.  The Trump conundrum inside the party is that the traditional strategies of the Republican Party are backfiring by empowering a rouge candidate who may not be under the Darth Vader-like obedience to the donor Emperors.  The donors for the preponderance represent Wall Street, the humans who run Wall Street and the capitalist agenda of aggregating the wealth of humanity into an elitist finite ownership group to direct the continued consolidation of that wealth. 

As the average lower to lower middle class Republican voter sees her or his economic position deteriorate the clout social issues that previously encouraged that individual to vote against her or his economic self-interest is waning.  One can see the budgeting nightmares of state after state and nation after nation which has tied their prosperity to unfettered capitalism prioritized on stock markets rather than the health, education, housing, and security of citizens.  Wall Street has created a moving goal line to keep desperation and ignorance among the citizens at a constant creep despite an avalanche of profits since Reaganomics was implemented.  This has been carried forward by Clinton and Obama’s Democratic presidencies because Wall Street controls both parties. 

The rise of Bernie Sanders and the popularity of Elizabeth Warren, who will either continue to lead in the Senate or be the vice presidential nomination as the first open democratic socialists in decades, is directly related to the antithesis of this global tipping point on capitalism.  Hillary Clinton represents a candidate closer to the Obama economic doctrine in not directly going after Wall Street.  Sanders and Warren will.  Clinton takes their donations just like her husband. 

Clinton is spouting the impracticality of a full assault or revolution against this form of crony capitalism. We face an environmental crisis which requires an economic evolution based on empathy and an overhaul of Wall Street through a consortium of nations to insert a global progressive wealth tax and the elimination of tax shelter locations like Ireland.  Wall Street will exploit the definition of what is legal in terms of filing locations and labor sources on a global basis until market assurances are in place to assert a consistent set of rules to prevent legal tax avoidance equating to higher earnings per share through offshore havens and the exploitation of human capital through non-living wages.  The root of the problem must be addressed with the United States leading the change for the good of humanity with international agreements to put teeth into legislation like the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and a revision of the tax code to focus more on capital wealth rather than income after the nexus issue has been resolved.  The global economy has a cash consolidation issue that must be addressed.

The Republican Party appears to be begging for a candidate other than Trump to take the lead in polling with a slew of Mitt Romney clone candidates spouting the Regan agenda in Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Chris Christie, alongside the tea-party flavor Ted Cruz who all pose the same ideological flaw at the root of the party.  To get traction one must not use mathematics; one must avoid or reinvent science. 

The Democratic Party has flaws with the overt political correctness and an impractical approach to the gun crisis in America.  However due to a xenophobic rebuttal and the NRA the Republican Party does little to capitalize on these issues.  The answers are all in institutional and systematic changes to the economic foundation of this country.  Government is not the problem.  Wall Street running the government is.

We need to regulate and break up the banking industry.  Overturn Citizen’s United. Deconstruct government retirement systems into defined contribution.  De-privatize corrections facilities and address institutional racism.  De-criminalize drugs grown via the sun and implement international distribution agreements regulated by the U.S. government to support local farming in foreign supply-side nations and the street price in America to coordinate a demand-side approach to combat addiction through a functional national healthcare system which includes mental health and taxpayer negotiated pharmaceutical pricing. 

We need to create national federally funded web based software to run or guide the governmental functions of almost all taxpayer to government interfaces that recognize what the internet is.  This includes the IRS, utility systems, fines, permitting, sales taxes, educational curriculum options under the discretion of local educators, medical premiums and appointments under a single-payer system which ties cost and ability-to-pay with user-driven demand.  We need the average citizens to have the option of controlling their digital identity and data in context to all government functions from utility bills, education, tax payments, banking, and medical history through a secure modernized web-based approach.

Shift a significant portion of defense spending into a total reinvestment to educate students from preschool to college to function in a globally competitive market place that emphasizes mathematics, science, and information technology while securing our empathy for the global community by a proper use and recognition of how the arts benefit the interconnection of our species.  Sell the usage of web-based portions of that educational infrastructure to the countries we have military conflicts with as leverage to combat the ignorance at the root of global terror and systemic poverty. 

Invite the leaders of the world’s major religions to embrace the science of climate change in a consolidated effort of choice and maintained dignity to each religious doctrine that links the survival of humanity with the interconnection of our species through empathetic individual decision making as a commonality of the ‘golden rule’ amongst faiths.  Use a system of carbon credits, emission reduction, renewable energy, and greener manufacturing and transportation that recognizes the economic threat the world’s reduced appetite for oil has on the political stability and wealth disparity in the Middle East and other hot beds of conflict as access to water continues to become the crucible for planetary survival.  

None of that can be accomplished through the current form of capitalism.  Given the internet every trend to expand the empowerment of the individual through technology to participate in his or her government through democratic socialist mechanisms inside the arenas of education, healthcare, security, energy, voting, and civic participation will be encouraged by the people.  Every policy to hinder that current will inevitably be defeated.  The Republican Party must reinvent itself or it will never win another national election given the population trends based on its core problem with suppressing science and mathematics.  

Where the World Is

Empathy is the pressure relief valve

The breach of air in the pipe humanity is mashed

Clogged and gasping trillions

Saprotrophs evolved to feed on desperation 

Sequestered air pocket billionaires

Profiteering off of location-independent commerce

Iceberg submerged global heater accounts

Commandeering employment waiting rooms of lowest-denominator tax calculus

Line out the door willing to labor more for a dollar less

Simply to eat GMO soybeans and a spot in the show

Both armrests taken at the theater

Loud noises distract the mathematics of rushing the gunmen 

Terrorists rise within the audience

Pawing god from the popped kernels

Beneath the seats planting blame

In the ticket-buyers who do not provide soil to germinate

Copyright papyrus about salvation and damnation

Oil and cancer, skin-tone and harmonic dissonance

Disembodiment rights to take in discomfort

Expectation of a firearm in the maw of a hoodie

Vomited out after the police overseer writes a report

Rembrandt’s Nights Watch ivory brandished rifles

About who made the first quick-movement

Rationalized lords of flies ignoring the encompassing box, the tube

The train cars and Plessy and Parks and London Calling seven-seven

The rats and cheese and IMF and OPEC and NYSE and BP

The stench of stuffed Gouda in Cayman Switzer-lands

Holes for FACTA world agreements global progressive wealth taxation

To recognize capitalism has leukemia in the marrow

The skeleton has lifted under the whip of extracted profit

To create the most efficient state of delivering food, shelter, clothing, and medicine

In the state of our species, but done so with threating Bronchogenic carcinomas

Tumors in bronchioles sprouting in the microscopic notion of how much is enough

To take a moment to breathe, to allow muscle over the femurs to rest

The blood to still the haze of a mushed plow and recognize the shared crop

But the radiation monetizes the mono-product cycles crate after roll

Squared and cylindrical prison of labor demonizing collectivism for a fish hook

Barbed with the worm that came before you in a chain of film-buffs

Uncertain of which end is the mouth or the anus gumming the sugar and fat

Trained tongues to salivate at the screen flicker marketed

Taught to question the sunlight’s glare as taunting the edge of the herd

To be the wildebeest at the perimeter of the circle

Tossed from nudging to the idealism of center

Like a mammalian mother’s nipple

Parched of milk and wandering on the outskirts  

Willing to risk staring the wizardry of the lion in the incisor

The pierce that motivates the globe to dance hoof and pelt  

The legislative cockiness audacity of Prima Noctae

Where the lioness hunts and the mane-bearer feeds

Pale-faced painted in the blood of black buffalo and red antelope

Masticating bone in a short intestinal track shitting out hair and skull

Fertilizing negligible scat panicking forests into blazing stampedes

To fell trunks for fields of bodies piled on bodies

Stewed grass-eaters for ad-campaigns of meat-eater pride

Of you-can-be-a member rallies for elephants

Trumpeted with ivory-tusk megaphones and mahogany stages

Unstamped by the FSC exchanged for the SEC to label legal

To take this land is your land away from Guthrie back to Trump

Beach Havens segregation depletion of affordable housing

For air b and b’s uncontrolled rents have the worms live in the dirt

Heart life cycle four generations, great-grandmother holding great-grandson

In a wheel chair both eyes unable to open, but awake

One arm of eldest meets her daughter wide-eyed smiling

With granddaughter post maternity clean and standing

Tree photosynthesis and seeds, fear and love

Diet pressures of what is pertinent to make a child into an adult

Mined Tantalite for an iPhone global connection

To hold water flowing off Congo into China into Chicago

A President for the Southside white socked to feed the cubs that grow up into bears

Omnivorous besotted in caves hibernating in a dragon’s bounty            

Eleven Hours

Attempting to remember the details of a Friday, an exhale, and a Sunday

In, out, and in, the transformation of an acquaintance into knowing a person

The stilled pots on the stove bubbling stock

The aroma in censorship lodged in mementoes

Of what a person might be, the fraying rungs of ashen ladders

Scurried into a dust pile in the corner afraid by the throes of self-definition

And ego rattling nodes of affection sirens bellowing in hallways

To bring out the pan and broom to do what needs doing

The act of an education rooting evolving into knowing

What is kindness, what is beauty, what is the stitching;

That is capable of fashioning love as a possibility given

The nutrition of intimacy and choice and environmental texture

The taste of coffee on her lips from the venue where we met

Embraced and jostling in the liquid vessel to paper

Motioning to the posture of a park bench cushioned in a living room

Painted crimson in the tongue of Jazz Fest and Springsteen and Louis Armstrong

To pick-pocket the bus tokens and unstrung buttons she told me

Of men that made rules and cut ribbons and told when I call you

Wait until I speak before speaking because someone may be listening

The nature of control and being controlled and strapped laces

The call of feminine care and who comes and who drives and who waits

The drug numb and the tax deductible receipt and the phone conversations

In simulacrums of lobbies with IV’s and the turpentine of judgement

Somewhere like a specter rubbed off and the applications spray the non-vigilant

The Brian and Dusty and Mike and James and the ages and the remembrance of roles

And the comfortable nature of we can be this if we chose, but not that

And the convenience of vasectomies and the shadow of a man who shows up

For the Super bowl but misses the regular season contests, botches the extra point

The Hoosier nation and Wildcat pandemonium of I moved there so I would not be alone

I didn’t try with her or for her; that is the difference the pencil ghost statement

In the margin of the coach saying this to the player of by default

A daughter is included in the non-effort, the reluctance or acquiescence to lethargy

The indolence of the shop keep and the want to indulge in the pipe or

The hallucinogenic Barbie doll turned lecturer the other dot on the eye

The why don’t you try to prim this or shade that prompting obstinacy

In a blather confession of lesbianism to spook the hen house

Feathers and bound family Bibles and who gets it across a Mid-South-West

Balderdash mad libs of who is putting words in mouths like garble chalk teeth

Mulling the spittoon of half-lives of full-loves of medical odysseys

Of what goes on in a young woman’s brain

The developed photograph and the rising hurricane waters to blur

Away the pieces the hours and hours of conviction wheeled into pottery

And ceramic destinies, woven in yarn and knit to keep mothers of mothers warm

When it snows in the desert and the owls are hooting nonsense

The did you ever live with anyone

This friend did with one who was not aware

The not listening to the body that chose this above the others

As a place to stay, the bedsheets and half space evacuation strategies

Of the mortgage holders of the realm compared to the graduate school debt holders

Told to get moving, packing and the accordion two-stepping into the trunk space

The yoga mat rolled up for the tripod headstand into flying pigeon

The feathers fluttering into reshaping a self, the image of discussion while posing

The reorganization of a body of meteors a planet does not see coming

The impact of skin gravity of proximity arousal and the curves

Of a body pulled into orbit, the rotational geometry of ellipses

Revolving spinning inward as the mass of the central core survives

Impact after impact explaining pebble rocks like depression

Sequestration and am I a good person

Of bigger pictures painted and hung on a wall evaluated

For form and perspective the grading of what is art

What does it mean to be a human

To have these cogs and clocks sounding off

Set alarms intentionally early, to make time

To intercourse in the morning before the world starts to masticate

Lungs whole like flecks of bacon and charred remnants of mammals

In assembly lines squealing and hawing waiting for the blade to the throat

To end the lightning bolts of awareness inside a skull

That this is it; this is all the time we have; that door is the now’s guillotine

So better love and love hard and powerful and as true as truth can muster

In this aroma of coffee and bus tokens rolling around through fingers

Seeing a sea of seats occupied and vacated and debating the commitment

To attempt saying I will try here; I will attempt to inhabit this space

The being viewed as the vessel passes and the voyeurism is ubiquitous

The windows are like microscopes and the how are you doing;

Are you adult enough here to own real property, a life, do you own a life yet my dear

The pounding like Verdi on the anvils asking and making art out of the dissonance

The thrumming dulled into a pillow and time, the sleep and bare knuckle fight

Of being of passive resistance, the non-violent weapon of love

To love oneself and to be kind and patient and able

To feed a child who is allergic to the buffet and help him walk through a market

To pedal a tricycle and talk about what sugar is in the brown water

That outside world from the New York towers

Where people have to sweep up the dust 

Dr. King 20160118

The non-violent resistance movements led by Dr. King were revolutionary.  He was a revolutionary.  We should not forget or reduce him to a vessel of convenience.  Maybe his brand of Christianity threaded with the political weapons of Gandhi allowed the white-powers in America to make a federal holiday for him more palatable then a more straight forward speaker on black-genocide in less commercial-friendly men like Malcom X or James Baldwin, but he was no less a man focused on direct action, change, and combat.  To the revolutionaries, the protestors, the strikers, the freedom fighters…

These are some quotes from the man; in honor of that revolutionary spirit

“The enlightened white southerner, who for years has preached gradualism, now sees that even the slow approach finally has revolutionary implications.  Placing straws on a camel’s back, no matter how slowly, is dangerous.  This realization has immobilized the liberals and most of the white church leads.  They have no answer for dealing with or absorbing violence.  They end in begging for retreat, lest “things get out of hand and lead to violence.”

“We do not wish to triumph over the white community.  That would only result in transferring those now on the bottom to the top.  But, if we can live up to nonviolence in though and deed, there will emerge an interracial society based on freedom for all.”

“The common point in all existentialism, whether it is atheistic or theistic, is that man’s existential situation is a state of estrangement from his essential nature.  In their revolt against Hegel’s existentialism, all existentialists contend that the world is fragmented.  History is a series of unreconciled conflicts and man’s existence is filled with anxiety and threatened with meaninglessness.”

“The first time I was seated behind a curtain in a dining car I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.”

“In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: (1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive, (2) negotiation, (3) self-purification, and (4) direct action.  We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham.  There can be no gainsaying of the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community.”

“We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was illegal.”

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that he Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advised the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.  Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

“The rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny.  All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent.  The agony of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich.  We are inevitably our brothers’ keeper because of the interrelated structure of reality.” 

String Theory 20160117

Life as a string balanced in tension between

One’s left and right index fingers and thumbs

Taught and lax

Pulled and released, allowed to be

Watching one’s self, the cinema of stimuli

The emersion and the distancing

Tattered raveled twine of who one is

In the universal and the individual woven

Seeing and being the silken fibers

Light reflecting and absorbing

In perpetual cycles of wanting others

To see and not see the quark stories

Of how we see ourselves

This story of me, heroic, fiendish, and sterile

Sand-like in microscopic Babylons of seashells

Begging those who approach to wield delicate ears

To hear the oceans in our breaths

The brine and cackling winds of joy and terror

To face the spit of seas upon cheeks and bask in us

No taming, but cradling our words in a cup of hands

Like a titanic goddess of grace to take two hands

Into a bowl

Their string nested in the basin

To dive below the waters of our tumult and bombastic festivities

And hold us steady

Peering down at their human life witnessing a shaking forest of fingers

A rattling soup hoping we do not see their love as a prison

As our string stretches around the circumference of their planetary palms

Reassuring of our choice to be held

Perspective of the holder and the held flipping circles

Of who is receiver and giver

Moments blink as ships launch and crash

We are not the hull, the mast, or the string that guides the sail

We are the rhythm of air that sets the tide and the wind

We are the choice to see both the horizon and the seashell

We are our permission to be as we are 

Circle of Fifths - 20160115

Into a circle of fifths the sound of it like a lock of turnstile cogs

Clicking and clockwise release in a moment of touch razing the land of the horizon

Into an emulsion of body parts, skin and flesh swelling in erogenous eggshell

Talk of paths and career duties, responsibilities to destinies rush like blood hounds

Leek and roasted garlic soup at a table a bottle of California red

Tongued tales of older men in their fifties lusting her thirty-something body into submission

Of giving herself for a receipt of turncoat confessions

To take photographs of gray-haired testimony, distances that daughters keep from daddy

Flooded in hurricanes lost in the black-speckled mold of crimpling paper dark-room

Developed and drained so that the mark of the water line keeps her hair

Grown short and pinned up to keep the ends form dragging in the muck-tuck

The hibernating nature of turtles in January pre-frozen but chilling

Allowing food to rest on the surface, neck in

Rather not move the body until the sun tilts the zenith in angular allowance, safe

That a body can feel the exhilaration of being embraced but not taken

Not stolen or sacrificed to an adage of mathematics of owed credits

For seasons of artistic crafts pottery molded and oil paints on the canvas avoided

For when does this ever dry, the pliable nature of an ebullient smile and sweat-milk cleavage

Being interpreted by men and by family and by bodies passing bodies

Alert to the juxtaposition of what it means to be wed or with child or in time

To have accomplished love or presence or togetherness

Of any of the grand cataclysmic pursuits of human affirmation

That this is who I am and I am doing, I am here and behold

As I reverberate through this universe to sound the harp of the goddesses nakedly bombastic

In the harmonic shake of a bitten lower lip, the tilt of pelvis

For a clitoris to rub beneath clothing as a man brushes the short-pinned locks back longer

Above an ear and turns her feet from below his thigh on a sofa upward to curve into her

Grasping the moment of Odysseus past the sirens and sailing

Into the huffed sounds of a delicate moan the arousal instantaneously orgasmic

In her loins to climb the arc turn to spread her hips and mount over his

Rubbing in release that every part of him feels good against her folds

Words have evacuated in a space of ember glow lamp light serene phasing

In undulating backdrop of her body over his, throbbing for his geometry

To recognize the levees breaking beneath her panties, the flotsam of her sweater

Into bra jettisoned for a grip of his hands upon her teardrop breasts rising and asking

So he takes her upstairs into his bed like a cloud of white, he is naked to match in seconds

Pacing the application of condom, one of five for the evening

And a sixth after breaking dawn she is pulsating the effort of a witness

The slate of being in a moment that taken view of a day drained

Labyrinths run for Minotaur migraines daring her to chop off her skull

To give into the fireball of capillaries insurgents to be here in his bed

Asking for nothing but her to give into the pleasure of his hands

Gripping her limbs tracing her arms and massaging her thighs

Not into submission to him but to the vine of stimulation like Jasmine

Rounding her garden flushing her labia engorged reckoning with the waterfall

The fluids rising in the room, her folds so wet she apologizes to his sheets

Knowing this is a grown man who does his own laundry, paid for this building

This staircase himself, no help and this is for her to be here

He is allowing himself to be vulnerable to hear the spearhead of emotional connection

Rest upon his penis underneath the sheath of that condom breaking not spermatozoa

Like some cannon of Valhalla, but feeling her from the inside, listening to the directions

Her body is scripting in the echoes of his mind seeing her signals in the motions of her mouth

Her cheeks and forehead, eyes closing in the intensity of orgasm after orgasm

And those snowflakes of fear behind her lids of what if he is like them

Praying to attempt to notice his uniqueness in the angles, the mathematics of how his penis fits inside her

Of the way he grips buttocks and presses a pillow behind his back as she folds over him

And he finds that measure deeper cradling her with the sheet folded over her back to keep her warm from

The rush of chilled air from invading this space as their bodies nest 

Sisyphus’ Living Wage

Manipulation in modern economics is done by

Moving the line

Maintaining a sense of layered desperation in the population

The dirt floor, lower-mid, to lower, to mid, to upper-mid rungs etc.

Relative imaginations related to the idea of loss, success, happiness

In mythical derivations of compliance in a tiered hierarchy

To sustain order in place of tolerable chaos so that we as a species

Do not circumvent the social contract as the efficacies of technology increase

For in these mathematics one must ask the question

If machines, medicines, communication systems, energy and information

Are more effective and productive as hour-units of human labor

Why is desperation among the masses ever more disparate

When the amount of food to feed, energy to move, textiles to clothe, and bricks to house

Is the same given the basic size of a human?

There are more of us, living longer, yes, but

The basic algebra to sustain a single unit has never been at a lower quotient to achieve sustainability

Therefore we must ask why and how are we as a species perpetually

Moving the line?

Minimum wage laws by geographic region

Social welfare, grocery cart tabulations, employment statistics

Manual, information technological coding terabytes into terraforming

The way empathy is disseminated from the aggregated bank accounts

Of owners of publically traded firms hoarding the monetized labor of the masses

The amount constrained represents the pressure on the system to move the line

As the resources of the world are both consumed and created to never let the poor

Touch a level of affluence that may result in complacency that enough is enough

To have food, shelter, clothing, and the love of other humans and not

The next superfluous labeled product off the advertising assembly line

The lie is that we do not have enough to go around

The old Jesus tale of loaves and fishes has been non-literally true for ages

Ever more so with the acquired skills of the collective brain given the internet

But we choose to not share, to pressurize the system, to move the line

Out of justice, of earning, of rationalized understanding of ownership, of reward, of effort

Sinclair’s Jungle with an endless line of desperate hungry willing to replace a worker

To do more and be paid less simply to survive based on where the top of the pyramid

Places the line of awarding pellets of daily sustainability equating to how much do you want this 

Angels

I found atheism in the angels

Deciphering the coded Christian Biblical tautology

To fund redundant representation in the form of feather-winged

Human-like scions voided of gonads and pudenda

The rudimentary ego to see god from the sky

Knowing not planetary rotation, spherical environmental reality,

But to associate a deity with the flawed notion of up

Marley sang, “Most people think great God will come from the sky.”

Take away everything the authors knew

To claim angels flew down from heaven

As if there was a cumulonimbus seating area

The simplicity in such an easily debunked fantasy

Prevented any metaphorical slipped knot from asphyxiation

The loop hole truncated sincerity into laughter

Seeded in the absolutism of avian hands

Praying bidding announcing non-sexual spontaneous reproduction

The obsession of it all staring above

Ignoring the principles of relativity

To see what is everywhere, all at once

Relinquishing the prerequisite paradigm of human-based

Form, language, or interface

The frail jealousies of fairness, justice, retribution

Conceptual infinities in sets diagramming mathematics

Of sets and larger sets impossibilities to fathom

In the questions, “What is reality?  What is time?  What is now?”

The crutch of judgment and definitive sentencing

The awesomeness of a single moment, love on a quantum scale

Transcending into that space in between the quarks

The notion of forces, the means of connection

Why one is drawn, attracted, compelled, repelled

The alleviation of I am only this self

Angels become as gray-ghost comic-sketch imagined-substitutes