“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.” This Confucian apothegm has been like a pebble in my shoe since I read the AP item about an engineer who drove a speeding locomotive off a track at the Port of Los Angeles. Perhaps you saw it.

With an artist’s quick flash of apprehension, I called the errant engineer “Joseph K.” I don’t know why. I mean, I don’t know if “Joseph K.” properly names him. Which leaves me, by Master Kong’s measure, groping about with a dark lantern, as it were; stalled, so to say, along the track of wisdom. If you see what I mean?

In any event, he tried fleeing the scene, K. did, only to be nabbed by a California Highway Patrol officer who witnessed the crash. “The train smashed into a concrete barrier at the end of the track,” the CHP officer reported seeing. “Then into a steel barrier, then into a chain-link fence, then sliding through a parking lot, across another lot filled with gravel, before it halted with a smash into a second chain-link fence.”

K. did not dispute the officer’s account, or that he intentionally derailed and crashed the train near the U.S. Navy Hospital Ship Mercy. He did it, K. said, “out of a desire to wake people up.” He did not elaborate, other than to share his belief that the USNS Mercy was “suspicious” and that he did not believe “the ship is what they say it’s for,” namely, to provide a thousand hospital beds to non-coronavirus cases in order to ease the load of local medical centers that were expecting a surge of expected COVID-19 patients. He hinted at something sinister, possibly a “government takeover,” he said.

K. was charged with one count of train wrecking. Indeed.

Oh, I almost forgot. K. also said, “You only get this chance once,” adding rather apocalyptically, it seems to me: “The whole world is watching. People don’t know what’s going on here. Now they will.”…

But to my predicament.

As I said, I have been wondering why I chose to call the engineer “Joseph K.,” after, you know, the protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial, quarry overtones notwithstanding. The excursive engineer was not, after all, unexpectedly arrested by an unidentified agent from an unidentified agency for an unspecified crime. Nor does, as yet, K.’s case illustrate a bureaucratic, absurd, demoralizing judicial system, though that ours may well be, I grant, given the brazen and pediculous act of voter suppression that was the Supreme Court’s recent blocking an extension of absentee ballot voting in Wisconsin…and, and, yes, admittedly, the sodden shade cast by the law’s “doorkeeper,” Attorney General Chadband…and, to be sure, the pecksniffian lickspittle of a Vice President and, who can ignore, the furfuraceous Austin Powers doppelgänger Treasury Secretary. Yes, I agree, they speak for themselves…oh, good point—for their boss, for their boss, of course, they do speak, for the tumid and smellfungus President Ananias Highbinder, whose bumptious and carnivorous coronavirus trumpery leaves me screaming at his live stream tenuity: “‘Cease cows! Life is short!’”…

There is, I confess, all of that, but still, of my brainteaser: Why “Joseph K.?”…

Oh wait! Wait! I think I’ve got it! I’ve got it! Well, maybe not “got,” but, certainly, getting—yes, I’m getting it—“catching,” y’cud say, “catching it,” even better…

Why did I not get—catch it before? Before-before climbin’ in the cabin, orders in hand, leanin’ out the window, high on cocaine, drivin’ like hell to the Promised Land?

Of course, of course, now it’s so obvious. It always is, isn’t it, catchin’ once caught?

Like-like-what? Like seeing the doorstop is alive or imagining dead-white faced clowns without ears or—well, you know what I mean, you catch my drift, you know what it means, t’be “catchin’ it,’” like a stranger danger? And make no mistake—it is catchin’, dudettes and dudes.

I’m talkin’ here full-length, white-and-black-striped bib overalls, with matching adjustable snap back cap and quality leather gloves, and a bandana, Tarantino red, the color of eyes congested with blood…phew! Talk about heaving a sigh of relief…

Say what? A wooden whistle for signaling “long-short-long” at  grade crossings?…

Hmm, nice touch, going the vole with headaches and heartaches and all kinds of pain, nice touch, for a choo-choo, choo-choo, choo-choo train…wee woooo!