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Whenever I can, I take long, long walks alone through the byways, fields, and woods around my home. I live in the suburbs of Santa Reál, California, a city in California's South Coast strip that connects the city of Ventura with Santa Maria. In Santa Reál, a short walk or, at worst, an easy afternoon’s bicycle-ride will get you well away from the urban sprawl and into regions approaching wilderness. So during my walks I can escape all the alarums and excursions of city life and get away to places where I can hear myself think – which is as much a matter of necessity for me as it is pleasure. I’m a writer, you see. I need a lot of time alone, without any interruptions or distractions, to work out some of the knottier details of plot, characterization, or other aspects of a story I’m currently writing, or hash over the hows and wherefores of some article or essay I’ve been asked to write for this magazine or that journal. On my walks I can find the privacy and peace I need for this – and rarely can any other time and place. I live on Camarillo Street, over on the southwest side of the city. My house is about three blocks from Fairchild Elementary School, which is right on the city’s western border, next to the semi-wilderness of fields and woods that hedges the city there. The school’s immediate neighborhood is a very nice residential area, upper-middle class/Yuppie classic, with large two-story homes intermingled with townhouses, sprawling ranch houses, $120,000 “cottages,” and all the other gorgeous homes, big and small, that that area boasts, which I’d never in my wildest dreams be able to afford. Nevertheless window-shopping is one of the great pleasures of my life; so frequently on the way to the fields during my walks I stroll through that area, past the school, wistfully daydreaming of The House, modeled on some of the larger, more awesomely priced houses near the school – the one I’ll get when I’ve finally worked out all my bad karma, about three godzillion incarnations from now, and can get some of the *real* goodies instead of the cheapies and freebies I have to pretend are truly the best things in life. Several months ago, I decided to take a walk through that area, past Fairchild Elementary, on my way to the fields beyond. It was Saturday, mid-morning of a lovely summer day. I set out feeling marvelous. The warm sunshine was interwoven with a cool, iodine-y breeze off the nearby Pacific ocean to make an endlessly unwinding bolt of silken delight brushing seductively against the bare skin of arms, face, and legs. The homes along the streets I followed were nearly all landscaped with almost obscenely brilliant, riotously abundant flowers, shrubs, and trees of every description, many of them, like the flowers, descended from ancestors originally imported into this country from the most unlikely places. (Someday, maybe a million years from now, when civilization once more begins to arise out of the parched, radioactive ashes of our current one, the cockroach paleobotanists will try their damnedest to reconstruct the evolutionary history of our planet from the record of the rocks, just like we do today. But when they begin digging up the plastic-crudded rubble of Santa Reál, they will all have nervous breakdowns trying to figure out how in *hell* Sudanese gorse-bushes, sub-Saharan cacti, Yukon *prima flora*, and English tea-roses all managed not only to establish themselves here, but to flourish on such a scale that they were all able to produce thousands and thousands of varieties and sports!) The city limits coincide on the west with the western boundary of Fairchild Elementary School. By some miracle, the land beyond for about half a mile is completely undeveloped. The school itself faces away from the fields which come right up to its back boundaries. The land on which it sits is partially fenced, but for about fifty feet each way from the place where they intersect, its southern and western boundaries are completely open to the land beyond. Only a few low shrubs mark the place where the tamed, zoned piece of land belonging to the school district meets relatively wild country. The exception is a stand of several oleander bushes close to the southwestern corner of the school-yard. Every spring these bushes put forth gigantic clusters of glorious white, electric pink, cerise and scarlet blossoms in vast profusion, enormous cloaks flaunted by the bushes to set the style of the season. Now that it was summer, most of the chromatic riot they had displayed was gone, dispersed in dying, brown, rotted shreds which, poor ghosts, did not even hint of the fantastic, splendid beauties of the season just past, of which they were only the necrotic revenants. A lone yew, rooted at the exact place where the southern and western sides of the school-yard met, accompanied the oleanders. A well-trod footpath runs across the city limits and into the fields along the southern edge of the school-yard, right next to its border. At the time, the path was bordered by luxuriant grass, for the winter and most of the spring just past had been far wetter than average. I decided to follow it out to the fields. Walking across the far edge of someone’s front yard to get to it from the sidewalk, I inadvertently trod upon some of the numerous herbs growing all about, largess from the previous season’s rains. The fleeting, succulent odors of young sage, rosemary, rue, and countless others which I unthinkingly crushed underfoot as I made my way deeper into the wild land tantalized my palate. The breeze had set such that all the smog from U.S. 101, which runs near the southern edge of the city, was carried out to sea rather than toward my part of town, and the air was exquisitely clean and fresh. I felt much, much younger than my forty-plus years as I walked along the southern boundary of the school-yard. I was just coming abreast of the group of oleanders that guarded the corner of the school-yard when I heard a small voice singing contentedly to itself, so softly it was almost whispering. The words it sang, coming to me as clearly on the light breeze coming from the voice’s owner straight toward me, froze me in my tracks:“Bidj-ee . . . bidj-ee . . . hoooo-reeeee . .
Not quite able to believe I had really heard it, I unfroze enough to tip-toe closer to the bushes which hid the singer from my view as quietly as my hole-y old sneakers allowed. I succeeded in doing so undetected; in fact, I could probably have marched in there with the U. S. Marine Corps Band playing “The Stars & Stripes Forever” and not have been noticed by the singer. Completely oblivious to my presence, whoever it was went right on singing:“Dir-dee bay-bee hooo-ree,
Appalled, I tiptoed around the side of the nearest oleander and peeked into the pan of school-yard dirt enclosing the oleanders, terrified of being spotted by whoever was singing – though why, I couldn’t say. That voice couldn’t have belonged to anyone – or *anything* – much heftier than Tinkerbell. I needn’t have worried. The owner of the voice, deep in that awesome, laser-like concentration that only young children, saints, adepts, and the totally mad can achieve, remained completely oblivious to me as she sat and crooned softly to herself. She sat there on the ground, her profile toward me, legs stuck straight out before her in the manner of very young children, whispering her song to herself as she scratched at the dirt between her legs. Eyes closed, she was concentrating intently on something deep in the middle of her skull, a small, Lovecraftian version of a Hindu holy-man at his meditations. At first I estimated her age as about three or four, in spite of her relatively large size and the weird, hard note in her voice that crept silently along under the words and notes of the song. But at last the proportions of her arms, legs, and torso, all wrong for a small child, managed to shout through my befuddlement that she could have been no less than seven or eight years old. She had very long, glossy, black hair hanging down her back like an ink-fall, obviously carefully and lovingly brushed earlier that morning. She wore a blue-and-white checked gingham outfit with a white apron, a short-sleeved blouse, and a little unpleated, ruffly, blue-and-white-checked skirt that came to about her knees. On a child of five or so it would have been darling. On a child her size and age it looked bizarre, like a Barbie Doll dressed in Snuggies®.“Dir-da bay-ba hooo-ra . . .
Now I stepped out quietly from behind the oleander to see what she was doing. Her concentration never wavered; she remained completely oblivious of me, so absorbed was she in whatever she was doing. Curious to see just what it was that required such horrendously powerful concentration, I looked at her hands, scrabbling busily before her in the dirt. At first I’d thought she was making designs in the dirt with something, a child’s equivalent of the sort of doodling adults do when talking on the telephone or at a committee meeting. But her fingers weren’t touching the dirt. They made odd patterns in the air just above it, as if she were simultaneously making a cat’s-cradle out of thin air and pretending to practice on some strange musical instrument. Her blissful unawareness of anything in the world beyond her closed eyelids made me bolder, and I stepped farther out to get a closer look. She sat on the ground, leaning back slightly, legs making a V before her, with her busy hands, like two big white spastic, amputee spiders, held out stiffly before her, close to the dirt. It suddenly hit me that the dance which those hands were engaged in was a highly stylized if jazzy parody of masturbation – masturbation carried out several inches away from her genitalia or, indeed, any other part of her body, performed solely upon the air. And beyond that, woven into the hands’ eerie dance were flourishes and clutching gestures suggesting strangling, stabbing, the gesticulations of heated political debates, the cruel confidence of the born tyrant, the will-to-power of a trial-sized Caligula. For a timeless moment, I watched the dance of her hands in aghast silence. Those hands moved with a controlled precision that was virtually impossible in anyone her age. The vision of a master surgeon or a concert pianist trapped in a little girl’s body, gone crazy from such imprisonment and weaving bedlam Magicks in the air, came back to me. And now back she went to her original song:“Dir-dee . . . bid-jed-ee hooo-ree . . .
I never made a sound, or moved at all – in fact, I had been unconsciously holding my breath all the time I was watching her – but the girl suddenly stopped what she was doing, opened her eyes, and looked straight at me as if she’d known all along that I was there. She smiled, a carnal, cruel smile that contained all the knowledge of an old, jaded prostitute and none of the wisdom. Her hazel eyes glowed with spots of burning sulfur. “Filts-ee *hor*\-ee,” she said conversationally, as someone else would say “Good morning.” “Who – who are you?” I asked her lamely, stumbling over my words in sheer shock. Lazily, with the economical ease of a healthy predator, the little girl climbed to her feet. Suddenly the thousand-year old jade in a child’s body vanished. In her place was The Idiot: the girl’s eyes became wetly glazed and distorted, turning in different directions, their color going a lightning-shot gray-blue. Her mouth gaped slackly in a wide, vacant, drooling smile of complete imbecility; she spraddled her legs, which ended in little black patent-leather shoes, so that they were splayed wide apart on a vertical plane, just as they had been on a horizontal one while she had been seated on the ground. She held her arms out straight to the sides from her shoulders, her open hands turned palms-out towards me, the fingers spread out widely. Bent over slightly toward me from the waist, her body wove and wobbled as if her sense of balance were defective. She began to rotate her hands back and forth on her wrists, weaving her body from side to side in spastic, greasy bends and shudders. “*My* name ith *Debby*!” she simpered in a spittle-shot, baby-girl voice burdened with a pronounced lisp. “Debby –” Now her idiot-child pose began to slowly mutate into more and more elaborate and complex behavior. Putting the forefinger of her left hand to her lips, she pulled out the hem of her dress with her right hand in an archaic sort of half-curtsy. She began to blink her eyes frantically, the lashes going up and down like insect wings. Behind her finger her mouth opened and closed in a drool-rimmed doll-gape, her red, red lips shiny with saliva. Her eyes went huge and glistened strangely. A trembly, ingenuous, utterly phony smile spread across her face. Her whole seeming was a terrible parody of a small, emotionally crippled, socially backward, badly cowed child in an agony of anxious need for acceptance by the adults around her, trying her best to present herself as winningly and disarmingly as possible. For a minute or two the horrible caricature went on and on. Then, as suddenly as she’d first assumed the idiot act, she forsook it for another, that of a supremely confident, poised little being whose eyes were hard and cold as reptiles’ are supposed to be, but aren’t anywhere outside of badly-researched fiction. “What do you want?” she demanded of me with peremptory hauteur. “Do you live around here?” It was all I could think of to say. “Who has to tell *you*?” Then she changed again. This time I was treated to a performance of The Loon, jaw askew, vapid grin, eyes rolling, limbs going every which way. “Duhhhh . . .” And, mouth agape in another version of the Idiot Smile, she hawked up a tremendous wad of phlegmy mucus with a vile, tearing rasp and spat copiously in my direction. I jumped just in time. “Now *look here –*” I started to roar at her. In yet another of those lightning-quick changes, she turned back into The Idiot once more. “I bet *your* Mom-ee’s a *hooooor*,” she told me, smiling ingenuously at me, her eyes pools of brainless malice. “Oh, *Deeeeeee*\-bby!” a voice called from behind me somewhere, mercifully interrupting this Cook’s Mini-Tour of Hell. At the sound of that voice, the little girl underwent one more instantaneous, startling transformation, the last I was to see that day. Between one point of time and the next she turned into a more or less normal little girl (except for that too-short, Dorothy-from-Kansas gingham dress and frilly white pinafore), completely composed, as if the past few minutes hadn’t taken place at all. “Yes, Mommy?” she called demurely to whoever it was that was coming up behind me.
I turned. Coming toward us along the same path I’d come here by was a handsome woman in early middle age, dressed in a very conventional white shell top, blue skirt, and white sandals. She smiled pleasantly at me. She seemed rather weary, and there were white roots in her otherwise luxuriant, short, auburn hair. “Oh, *there* you are!” she exclaimed upon seeing Debby, relief and concern filling her voice, “Baby, where have you *been*? You *know* we’ve got to go to the dentist now! – “Hi,” she said, turning to me. “I’m Sarah Rothberg. We live over there, on Las Aceitunas, you know, near the corner of Montaigne . . .” She waved vaguely back in the direction of the homes near the school. “I hope Debby hasn’t been bothering you –?” She seemed very kind, a compact, pleasant woman who could have been an executive in a local company, perhaps, or a staff or faculty member- out at UCSR, the local campus of the University of California, about ten miles north of here, next to Golightly and Ano Vista. Though she was very attractive, nevertheless there were crow’s-feet of chronic weariness and worry around her eyes and mouth. I wasn’t about to do her the ugly favor of telling her what her daughter had been up to just a minute before – assuming, of course, that it hadn’t all been just some horrible hallucination on my part. “Oh, not at all – in fact, I was just taking a walk along the path here, going over to the field –” I pointed – “and got here just a minute or two ago. – Uh, I’m Linda. Linda Cutter. I live back there, over on Camarillo Street.” I offered my hand. She accepted it, shaking my hand warmly. “Well, I’ve just come to get Debby,” she told me. “We’re going to the dentist for a cleaning, and it’s nearly time to go. She loves to play over here on weekends . . .” She seemed so terribly apologetic, though entirely unaware of what I had just stumbled over on my morning stroll. It was as if constant apologizing had become sheer habit for her. She went on, unnecessarily explaining in a nervously controlled calm: “So I thought I’d come here to see if she were here – and she was – well, I *am* glad to meet you!” “Yes, it’s nice to meet my neighbors. I’m still getting to know people here – I moved here from Golightly about a year ago, and I haven’t really met many people here yet. – Uh, I’ve got to get going . . .” Not that I had anything to do, really, but I wanted to get out to those fields, away from this little corner of Hell, so urgently that I could taste it. “Oh, of course! I didn’t mean to keep you!” she said graciously. “Come on, Debby,” she said, turning to her daughter. “We’ve got to go.” An odd look crossed Debby’s face, as if she were trying to make a decision as momentous as the one Truman had had to make concerning whether or not to nuke Japan. For a fleeting moment, an ancient, rage-crazed wolverine looked out of her hazel eyes, but her Polite Child mask never quite cracked. Finally she said, with studied politeness, “Yes, Mommy.” Her mother put out her hand; Debby took it, eyes downcast. Heaving an enormous sigh of relief, Mrs. Rothberg headed back toward the tract east of the school, her daughter dutifully accompanying her. I felt as if all the last twenty minutes or so had been an evil dream from which I was just now awakening. That child *had* to have been a figment of my imagination! Only the two sets of footprints in the dirt left by Debby and her mother testified that the whole hideous episode had been something more than just a nightmare or hallucination. At least, a child had actually been here, in this playground, and I had encountered her and, a few minutes later, her mother. But a 7-year old child, talking and acting like the nightmare vision I’d just had? Sure – such things were common in horror movies and the more sensational best-sellers. Writers from Taylor Caldwell to whatever turkeys wrote *The Omen* and *The Bad Seed* had made obscenely opulent fortunes on the public’s appetite for scapegoats, especially archetypal “evil children,” who very clearly served as a means of rationalizing harsh methods of child-raising and the sort of pedophobia that made so many cultures, particularly America and Europe, so prone to child-abuse and other forms of violence. The idea that, just incidentally, there might really be children who fit those caricatures was a little too fantastic to credit – and just too convenient as a “justification” of the sort of “poisonous pedagogy” about which the marvelous Alice Miller has written so movingly in her *tours de force* on the psychodynamic ravages inflicted upon children by child abuse, neglect, and even just highly negative attitudes about children that are integral parts of the cultural dynamics of many societies, such as she describes in her tremendous introduction to the subject, *Thou Shalt Not Be Aware*. . . . No, if anything, I’d had some sort of temporary psychotic break, projecting onto a poor little girl some of the nasty garbage still down there in my own unconscious mind as a result of having grown up and lived all my life in just such a society. I shook myself, trying unsuccessfully to throw off the vast depression that had fallen on me, a leaden weight that alternately went hot and cold and had grown spurs, one of which had thrust its venomous rowels deep into my psyche like so many poisoned daggers. The mood stayed with me the rest of the day, spoiling it entirely.Continued in Chapter 3
This is March Madness betting for dummies (soon to be sharps). Bet March Madness Games on the Moneyline. Betting the moneyline is the easiest way to bet on March Madness. Betting the moneyline simply means betting on which team will win the game, just like picking the winner of each matchup in a bracket contest. With most NCAA conference tournaments about a month away and March Madness tipping off right after, now is the perfect time to get a good grasp of the college basketball betting basics.. The American Gaming Association estimates Americans bet more than $10 billion on March Madness annually. Up until this year, most of that was bet illegally, through illegal bookies, offshore online sportsbooks ... Use these handy reference sports betting pages to help build your knowledge base before making a sports bet. Wager 101: Sports Betting Terms and Definitions Common and not so common sports betting terms in the world of sports betting that you need to be familiar with. Anyone has the potential to be a sharp sports bettor with the right info. That’s why SBD put all the fundamentals into our introductory series for new bettors: Sports Betting 101. Learn about the types of sports bets you can place, how to read odds, and how to manage your bankroll to get the most value out of your wagers. Times have changed. Betting strategies for March Madness are not a static entity. They evolve over time. Concepts that worked 10 years ago don’t necessarily work as well in 2015.
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How's your Bracketology? Las Vegas prepares for the onslaught of sports bettors, while CH8 prepares for 4 days of non-stop college basketball. Copper thieves... it is all about the betting. This video is unavailable. Watch Queue Queue College basketball picks, wagering tips and predictions for the NCAA season from sports betting experts at Doc's Sports and host Tony George. Expert daily college basketball betting tips and ... March Madness Betting Tips: Direct from the WagerTalk TV Studios in Las Vegas host Marco D’Angelo talks with sports betting experts Teddy Covers and Ralph Michaels on how to make money betting ... Cappers Nation LIVE daily Sports Betting Show airs Monday-Friday at 12PM EST and Saturday-Sunday at 9AM EST right here on youtube and our website. Make sure to check out website and twitter ...