The bed comforts my sore buttocks. I have been tortured once again by having to rise from my solace and go into the world. The day was balmy and quiet in the interior, but outside, sleeting. In my youth, the sleet never bothered me. It was another sensation for my skin to relish. Now that and other sensations are far in the past. In fact, the concept of feeling now is only going through the motions. I can pretend an emotion at the touch of a certain element, but it is entirely fabricated.
My buttocks need the bed more than I do. They have grown to enormous proportion. Time and again, I believe I am turning into Shambal. I curse my fate, but know I had many opportunities to turn from it. I let each pass me by and these days I curse every moment away from my bed as a torture. I am sure, for several decades now, he has not risen at all. The system that flushes his bowels provides constant vigilance. Perpetual consumption coupled with perpetual excretion is the norm for beings such as Shambal.
Tales tell of a different being. He was deft on his feet, they say. I doubt if his lower appendages do anything but take up space now. But once upon a time, he stood on a hill during each mid-morning and made the serfs cry with pain and wonder. How did he accomplish this? In the past, the peasants did not labour as machines, but had a smattering of emotions that only a strumpet like Shambal could set afire. He’d get them romping and dancing with a few claps of his pudgy paws. His booming voice, now only a distant croak, scribed as in ink on their minds phrases their grandchildren repeat to this day. I laugh at myself a little at these words, since these grandchildren are little more than infant minds in bodies of able-bodied grunts.
(some minutes later after talking to Marisa about the themes of my writing)
I had to go out into the falling ice because of a broken socket. Sockets are to many, things of a less automated past, things never to be thought or worried about. Two hundred or so years prior, they were common to connect onself, or the machine that was the comforter for onself to either a source of power, or a signal of communication. Even further back, they were strangely less used. All electromagnetic radiation was banned, or, rather, all creature-made electromagnetic radiation was forbidden. Before that, thrust forth from communication sockets were devices that showered an area with myriad radiations filled with streams of chatter. This, that, bing, bong, gobble, gibble, grunt.
A form of eccentricity evolved in creatures that made them spastic and unreliable. Multi-tasking was a name given to the crime. Those too afflicted were cut down and used to feed the remaining agriculture. Sockets that vomited into machines that spread this desease were converted to only connect a single apparatus with a certain focus.
I have meandered from my point, alas. Sockets still exist, of course, or I wouldn’t have had to leave the solace of my bed. Sockets line each floorspace, corridor, atrium, entranceway, tube, tram-capsule and IKEA. They are just not visible. They spew forth lines of invisible focus that are threads with diameters miniscule beyond the senses of creatures. Passing through suits, under-comforts and flesh, they drink each their type of input from all who pass.
Like Shambal, most of my time is spend idle, so sockets have fixed threads impaling my being at all times, even during slumber. Another anomaly of the past was that dreams were forbidden to the socket’s threads. Now, it is commonplace to have a profession that assists in the combination of datastreams from multitudinous creature-dreams to form films and video arcades for the entertainment of creatures too young to be healthily put into stability without damage. When earlier in the day, the socket that gushed threads into my cerebellum, facilitating the perpetual flexions of my muscles, exploded with a pop not unlike that of a creature exploding in a cell accidently turned quickly to vacuum, I harumphed in momentary despair.
Thankfully, my lower appendages still function, unlike what I guess to be Shambal’s. I rose from my comfort and danced along the mildly glowing bluish track that led to the rectangular prism that cleaned and depilated me with gusting powder. Some, also like Shambal, have had their hormones that grow hair deleted, sparing them frequent cleaning. Another machine stamped me with appropriate colour and pressured me outwards into the tube. A bubble-tram awaited. I climbed in.
My first destination had to be for porridge. When one is forced to leave his premises, one must at least have porridge. In the past (yes - again during that distance!), other warm comestibles were available, along with something called fruit manufactured in long forgotten factories. Porridge is what remains of that part of a deceased culture. I am not sure of its actual contents and honestly don’t enjoy putting in into my gullet, but it remains one of the only links to the past and I am stupidly sentimental in my middle age. Being far more decrepit, I’d imagine Shambal to be even more so.
