1 “This is not What I Meant at All, Not at All”: An Ode to Blueberries and Yellow Aspen Leaves David W. Jardine “Like us on Facebook” always seemed so needy, so desperate, and my continuing rankling over such things is clearly a sign of age, clearly a sign that, slowly but surely, the world is not for me anymore. And don’t get me wrong, here. I check my “hits” on Google Scholar far too regularly, and on Academia.edu as well, and I miss something the stuttery fray of it all, the sense of visible accomplishment. It is quite a jar to see how quickly the whole thing evaporates into thin air. A relief and a tragedy, both. It is, therefore, my own lingering pathologies and distractions that draw me here, to blueberries. And yellow aspen leaves, now long gone all over again. All this flightiness of attention is linked to utterly old‐fashioned market‐manipulation con‐games, and I can rest assured that lists of “likes” are traded in, somehow, somewhere, for someone’s profit other than the one giving or getting the “like.” There is also the weird and nebulous increased self‐estimation of the one receiving the “likes.” Just like numbers and sources of citations used to count for what was once my job as a University professor. It is an old Kinks lyric: “People take pictures of each other, to prove that they really existed.” Now, however, the odd and delicious allure of these cites still lingers, and is, for me, now, nothing more than a rather sad commentary that pulls at the entrails of regret and retirement (see Jardine, 2016). And, I suppose, a bit of this: Saturday, October 7, 2017 Fat moony sphere in the west Just past full of aspen leaves. Yellower. Me, like ripe and pungent fields inside. Fruit rotting on the vines, well‐past full of aspen leaves. Yellower. But let’s speculate further: market con‐games have entered into our, my consciousness, in such a way that our living is caught up in the shapes of market‐manipulation con‐games in ways far more pernicious than we might sense or explicitly condone or intend. “I didn’t mean it” is the great last resort in the face of Hermes tricks: Hermes is cunning, and occasionally violent: a trickster, a robber. So, it is not surprising that he is also the patron of interpreters. (Kermode, 1979, p. 1). When Hermes is at work. . .one feels that one's story has been stolen and turned into something else. The [person] tells his tale, and suddenly its plot has been transformed. He resists, as one would try to stop a thief . . . “this is not what I meant at all, not at all.” But too late. Hermes has caught the tale, turned its feet around, made black into white, given it