Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Gregory Stephenson said Richard Brautigan, American humorist, writing in the tradition of Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Mark Twain, was preoccupied with confronting and resisting the void.

How did Brew confront and resist the void?

In a proposal he wrote for ART "HOME" BREW: THE SALVAGE ARCHEOLOGIST OF FLORIDA'S CO-OPTED COASTS, COMPARE ART BRUT, Brew writes,

Cult writer is Brew's persona. Throwing a spanner in the works. A saboteur.

He doesn't hate corporate America. It's just all he has to fight with. The tools corporate America gives him.

Words. Ink and paper. Magnetic bits shot into the howling void of cyberspace.

John Lennon called a book he wrote A Spaniard in the Works.

Art Brew works as a senior information development specialist for Suent Scientific, a manufacturer of fiber-optic cable, and writes press releases, making fun of the Bush Administration, which he posts at his web site, The Daily Bugle. Periodically, he gets paranoid, and takes his web site down, as he does not want to lose his job, for conduct unbecoming a technical writer. But then he gets mad and puts them up again.

Actually, he is more in danger of losing his job for misuse of company resources, since he writes his columns on company time, using company equipment.

In addition to posting his news releases at The Daily Bugle, Brew writes a pamphlet of poems, Wars, and Rumors of War, after September 11, and publishes it himself. He gives it away to his coterie of steadfast readers, the Buzzard Cult. The pamphlet is followed by two continuations.

Brew thus has a cult following, although, as Truman Capote said, when a reader asked him to autograph his penis, "Perhaps I could initial it."

Bleeto, short for Diablito, didn't have no tail, he had a very short tail.

Lennon wrote a song called "Working Class Hero."

All Brew wanted to be was a Working-Class Hero.

Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Brew was a working-class hero. He had beat the system. At least, the system had not ground him down, like the nutmeg grinds the nutmeg grater down.

The system tried to attrit Brew, and failed.

That's a literary allusion to Melville, who wrote to Hawthorne,

In a week or so, I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my "Whale" while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now, -- I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose, -- that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me, -- I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, -- it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.

Melville said a whaling ship had been his Harvard and his Yale. Brew's Harvard and Yale had been his two hitches in the Air Force, and his graduate school had been the job as senior information development specialist at the Atlanta Product Realization Facility (APRF) of Suent Scientific, a manufacturer of fiber-optic cable.

Pronounced A-perf. A product realization facility is a factory.

Once you can get them to call a factory a product realization facility, you're halfway home.

Better yet, get them to using the acronym.

WMD. COW.

Weapons of mass destruction. Coalition of the willing.

Brew's highest rank held in the Air Force was buck sergeant. Bucking for sergeant. A/1C.

A kind of a working-class rank. Not an officer, a warrant officer, or even a non-commissioned officer, or NCO.

An enlisted man, or GI. For general issue. As common as gully dirt.

Brew wrote a column about being an analyst for YU News Service.

He had a business card once that said Analyst. Short for Operations Analyst.

That was his actual job title, until they reclassified him as a Training Specialist, so they could bid him on a proposal for another contract, with different classification codes.

He was still just a technical writer. A word mechanic.

Not an engineer. A mechanic.

One of Chief's early achievements was killing a javelina at the Fire Tower site on the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge with an atlatl and a fire-hardened spear.

Brew remembered Kevin Smith at his father's funeral, with shades on. At Lake Jackson, at the temple mound.

Brew had dug with Kevin at Andersonville. Brenda would dig with Kevin in the Big Cypress. They'd both dug with Kevin, and Chief, at Port St. Joe, when Kevin was a little kid.

Chief left his body to the medical school at Gainesville for the duffers to practice on. His green mango chutney used to win the prize at the Leon County Fair. He would baste a leg of lamb with coffee.

When they dug the Santa Rosa - Swift Creek burial mound, on Mashes Island, the second summer in the field, in Panacea, and their major professor fired them, Brew for leading a mutiny and Brenda for marrying Brew while he was in Stuttgart, delivering a paper to a scientific congress, Chief took them under his wing and made it possible for them to go in the field with George Percy at Mt. Nebo, a Coles Creek temple mound in Tallulah, Louisiana, and then helped them get into Tulane, which had an accelerated PhD program.

At the time, they thought this was good.

Brew and Brenda loved Chief.

He shot a monkey-eating eagle that had escaped from a zoology lab out of a tree over the Seminole Dining Hall using a length of conduit for a pipe, a shish-kabob skewer fletched with toilet paper for a dart, and some curare he had brought back from the Panama Canal Zone in case he needed to shoot any eagles out of trees on campus.