Shambal Brambel sits at his usual table in The Rabbit’s Foot tavern. With his back unassailable, the corner table gives him view of the whole room, even through muddy air bereft of wafting currents. The tavern isn’t particularly large, but somehow cluttered and cramped tables make it appear grander. Bar flies bumble and stagger towards and then away from him. Shambal doesn’t bother to brush them away or even give them a glance.

Only the barkeep keeps him company, if company is what it can be called. Her name is Brenda or Billie or something with a B, but Shambal always calls her Anežka. She puts up with it, just like everyone puts up with him, and eyes him more with pity than revulsion. She goes about the morning tasks, watering down various bottles, wiping away insect faeces from tumblers and snifters, and occasionally thumbing her swollen clitoris through dirty stockings. She’d handed over a smudged tumbler of Brandy just five minutes earlier. She’d called it Brandy. Shambal always orders Brandy in the morning. It came out of a bottle with a rumpled label that said Brandy. It probably wasn’t Brandy.

The tumbler stares at him vacantly. His stubby claw hands poise themselves centimetres on each side as if guarding a treasure that has been lifted. He’ll order another soon enough. Ten in the morning is beginning to become his personal late evening. Lately, he’s been stumbling back to his hovel at high noon. So far, each showdown with the padlock that slows access to a musty sleeping pad has been a success. However, habitually, at around ten in the morning, he’s got used to mulling over a possible losing showdown.

His torpid mind etches a portrait of him batting at the padlock, or pair of padlocks, or trio. Vision and motor skills are two of the first physical failings he experiences during the tails of his evenings. Stabbing at the aperture with his key like he sometimes dreams he’d do to Anežka with his penis, his eventual success is short-lived. Slipping in a slough, he goes down while still gripping the key. It snaps.

His head snaps up and his claw hands grip the tumbler. Don’t pass out! One late afternoon, he awoke with bruised ribs, tumbled beside the wooden wall of the tavern. Passed out, apparently he’d been kicked aside from the immediate doorway. Thankfully shaded by an overhang, he’d only been suffocating on heat and dust and not torched by the Sun. Skin disease was a real threat in his world. It had claimed his brother the year before.

Glancing to the left of the tumbler, he sees the precious metal case where he keeps his cigarettes. He’d rolled eleven upon awakening the day before. This made Shambal a light smoker. He’d never exceeded nineteen in any given day during the last three years or so. He was not only a light smoker, but a latecomer to the addiction. Unsticking his claw hands from the tumbler, he opens the case.

Briefly, another thought shambles across his late shadowed brain. How could I still have the case at all? Perhaps the denizens of my village give me more respect than my bi-polar disorder suspects. He’d lain drunken not only in front of the tavern time and again with any one of his possessions easily liftable by any passer-by. They must respect my talent. I am, after all, the village jester, entertainer and philosopher, all wrapped up in a single skin-package. He smiles and the thought tumbles away. He places a cigarette between his index and middle finger of his right hand.

Anežka sees his hand raised and emitting a helix of smoke through the gloom and caws loudly, as her sisters taught her to do. If ya want you another drink, Mister Shambling Shambal, ya gotta come get it. Her thumb pokes involuntarily at the cleft of her stocking and a shocking sketch appears of the lout who is attempting to stand pounding her from the back behind the bar. To assuage the horror if the image, she pours herself a Brandy. She’ll be slightly blitzed throughout the day, yet it had happened before. Fuck um. Since she is one of the only nubiles left, a little day tipsy won’t harm a fly. One of the myriad bar flies lights and seems to watch as she put her drink away with a single swallow. Then it moves on. Shambal is stumbling across the room towards her.

A brandy, please, Anežka.

You forgot your glass.

He peers back with a touch of anxiety.

Ah, shit. Can I get another one, darling?

Her eyes shift from him to his table and back again. They were faded hazel.

I sup’ose it don’t matter. And don’t call me that.

Shambal opens his yam to retort, but he doesn’t have the strength to voice a claim. Additionally, even in his current state, he is aware that her antecedent is not clear. A thin line of drool snakes down his chin and then throat as he decides not to bother. He shuffles back to his table with his Brandy, thinking better of taking a sip during the journey. Maybe an hour more of this haze. My life is on repeat. I wish I could change it to shuffle. Across the room, from over an endless proliferation of empty tables, the dual doors of the tavern creak. Perhaps they wanted to warn Shambal of an upcoming change of routine - perhaps not shuffle but skip skip skip.

Half of his Brandy eats away at his stomach lining. Anežka is no longer at the bar. She is in back placating what she considers to be a need. The Sun positions itself to spray beams through the hollow above the tavern doors and into the gloom creating smudgy rainbows that coalesce, shift, and dance with bar flies. The doors creak again and more rays tumble in as if to flee from a gaunt shadow. Apparently, they are. A man dressed in bleached skin, bleached clothing, a bleached panama and bleached oxfords with red laces enters and stands still for a moment. The moment passes, he glances with bleached blue eyes across the murk, and walks weaving around tables directly at Shambal.

Shambal raises his claw hand, which was stuck to his second tumbler, to his mouth and drains the Brandy. After setting down the tumbler, it stares back at him from the wooden table, reflecting empty thoughts. For the first time in ages, he doesn’t know what’s going to come next.

The newcomer is out of place from sheer whiteness. He stands in front of Shambal’s table for a moment. The moment passes, he picks up both tumblers with one pale hand, banging them together with a muffled clink, turns and approaches the bar. He raps twice on the bartop with the knuckles of his other hand, but didn’t speak.

Anežka emerges a few seconds later, looking disheveled and harassed. She eyes the stranger warily, her hazels quickly moving vertically, squinting slightly from ostensible brightness. He places the tumblers on the bar.

Can I do for ya something?

What’s your name, young miss?

Brandy. Yours, stranger?

I’m Raun and I’m thirsty. What sort of goom is that dero setting over there drinking?

What?

What’s that vagrant in the corner been drinking?

Oh… He drinks Brandy. All we got here is Brandy. Whereabouts are you from, mister?

Please pour me two double Brandys, then, please, miss. I’m from another world.

She starts to pour, stops, but the stranger curls the fingers of his left hand palmwards. She resumes pouring.

Another world? For real?

The first tumbler is full. Anežka begins the second.

Is there a difference?

He lays a few coins on the bar. She frowns, but is still chewing on his last statement, so says nothing. Raun doesn’t appear to mind that talk has fallen dead. In fact, to Anežka, he seems to shine brighter. He walks back towards Shambal with the two tumblers.

Shambal greets the newcomer with a grunt that is a quarter as loud as the growl the chair makes as at scrapes along the warped floor of the tavern. Raun places a tumbler in front of him. It stares at Shambal, now contrasting his vacuity. The stranger takes a sip and grimaces.

Pleased to meet you. I’m Raun.

I heard your banter with the barmaid.

I see. This tastes like turp, not Brandy.

Honestly, I don’t know what it is, just its effects.

Are you, like me, ending your day’s work with a stiff drink before passing away into the land of dreams?

I’m mostly already there, actually. I’m the village singer. A tenor. Or I was, I think, in another life. Why did you ask Anežka Is there a difference? to her question about your whereabouts, friend?

I was poking fun, I suppose. I had the gall to say something I knew would probably confuse her. It’s a failing of mine. A failing I don’t wish to repair, really. The dreamland you are walking towards is another world, in a manner of speaking. I am a relativist. A singer, eh?

Yeah. I play guitar and banjo a bit on the side, too. Nothing special much, though. Villagers like weepy ballads, mostly, and especially the later it gets and the drunker they are.

A pity.

Yes. A pity. What do you do?

I hunt lycanthropes.

Ashley pointed out on Facebook:

I keep seeing things like, “People shouldn’t be doing (fun thing) when (problem) is happening in the world!” This reasoning essentially chastises anyone who ever does a fun thing, since there are always huge problems in the world. So, no dinner with friends while there’s a refugee crisis. No karaoke while there’s war. No water skiing while there’s poverty. We must solve everything before anyone is allowed a moment of happiness.

Since I was a child, I have found myself in similar situations time and again, though on smaller scales. The key foundation of what Ashley refers to in his post is expectation and forcing one’s own expectations onto others. Ultimately, I see this as a form of fundamentalism.

Therefore, I wish it to perish.

Another way to view it, and I am aware that this is a form of meta-pun, is how those who choose not to share focus with the arbiter or designer of a current context are punished. I encountered it at funerals, family reunions and other important events according to my parents. When my focus drifted from the focus I was required to have, I was in trouble. I had somehow sinned. That or I’d crossed a line into a space from which I should’ve immediately withdrawn.

Distractions were not allowed. I floundered for hours in a pool of boredom. My toes barely touched the bottom and therefore I always ended up emotionally exhausted.

I get it, sure: at a funeral, one is not allowed to have fun. No, the expectation is that one should mourn. Most never take into account that no rule-book that I know of has ever been written that states there is an overreaching code of conduct for expressing grief. Unwritten conduct exists, but it differs depending on context. A child is supposed to absorb these rules by osmosis, or so it seems to be in retrospect. Fuck um.

Widening the ellipsoid, expectations are toxins whorling through the atmosphere in any social occasion. I agree that one must remain within a certain part of one’s more expansive personality. There is a cone radiating from each individual indicating the space in which one’s focus can wander. Drifting outside of this cone can lead to anything from odd looks from other participants of said social situation to ostracism. Depending, the cone has a fatty buffer zone, fuzzier to some participants than to others.

Getting back to Ashley’s point - those who ultimately come across as controlling cunts should die. The GOAT BLADE need impale them. And I want to watch their faces twist in pain. Their brain death will benefit their peers. Fuck um. Their allowable cone of focus is at times slender to the point of one-dimension. If, truly, a human tells you that you cannot enjoy yourself since a tragedy is occuring elsewhere in expansive human sphere, stroll in a direction orthogonal to the current carrying that human. Or, alternatively, impale them on the GOAT BLADE.

Emotional exhaustion ages everyone. It is a common form of stress. Hanging out with humans who force more on you is not worth the minutes, hours, months or decades. Walk away. Fuck um.

The other day, while whiling away an hour or so in my brain, I came across the notion that it might be possible the most amicable relationships consist of two humans (or homunculi) who detest their existence outside of the relationship itself. For instance, at one or several points in his existence, Shambal Brambel earned his keep lying for ten hours nine and a third days a lunar week in a septic drain field. He came across this profession after being diagnosed with a rare talent for absorbing filth and trasforming it into nourishment. The science of this epoch was paying him to be studied. He did bring a book at the beginning of every shift, though reading material usually spent most of its time lounging in various bubbling excrement pools peppering his field on any given day. You see, Shambal was even more dyslexic then than his corpse is during the present epoch.

I have drifted from the original subject and I apologize.

Shambal Brambel lay in septic drain fields. That was his job. I used to walk past him atop tributaries of cracks on sidewalks bordering each side of the fields. The stench seared the hairs from the insides of my nostrils. I remember each membrane of my face swelling from the caustic air. Shambal was miserable. I could feel it through the pallor.

Then he went home to his Karla. Each day a revelation took place! She was a goddess awaiting him on the doorstep, having endured her own dastardly hours scrubbing drool, mucus and semen from the floors of the theatre. Sometimes Shambal, seeing her scabbed hands, felt even a little lucky. At least he was only tortured by endless daydreaming in the slime. Physical labor was not part of his employment contract.

The immense contrast with their oppressive other lives brought them closer. Happiness enveloped them when they met, as if for the first time, every evening. They made ugly love like grunting warthogs, playing out scenes that would make even those with the strongest of stomachs turn quickly away.

Do happy couples thrive because of misery elsewhere in their lives? Though Shambal and Karla truly gained from their situation, I’d be hard pressed to get up from this chair and conduct a study to verify it as a more general truth or not. I did stumble across the idea whilst taking a stroll in my mind the other day…

The nigger falls from the tree. His abdomen is pierced by a fierce branch of a blackberry shrub. The goat wanders over to nibble the fruit. He nibbles the whole plant from within the nigger. His holy goat-saliva heals the nigger’s wound.

They both wander their separate ways - the goat to nibble more and the nigger to the town, to be captured by different coloured niggers and eventually flayed. This proverb illustrates that no matter how arbitrarily benevolent the actions of the holy goat are, niggers like you and me will still die horrific deaths.

Wheels are spinning beneath me once again. I haven’t scribed that line in eons. Sitting on a train, feeling the smooth transition from moment to moment away from a stagnant place and towards one of budding life, gives me hope within a future that is entirely static. Whether this universe is the one I have chosen or (surely) not, my elections have landed me here, gliding on these tracks.

In fact, the stagnant place is always behind and the one of fecundity is always beyond. The place I am sitting in now, like very moment, is limbo. And limbo is where I get my work done. Sweet Entropy calls me. She whispers into my unclogged ear canal: Every moment is limbo. Every instant is a transitional phase. Here we go again.

The head of this moment, as opposed to the middle and then the tail, which will both follow, becoming their own particular heads, I shall begin organising the music I shall send to Christián. Three parts exist for him to sing in the now dubbed The Sheriff Lies. Parts one and three will be entirely mp3s created from my midi drafts. I have not recorded live versions of these. Yes, yes - the demo exists in recorded form, but does not contain Christián’s parts, which to me, have become essential to the whole piece.

Part Two has already been sent once to Death To Tuesday, but I’ll email it along with the other hovno so the crusty old man has everything in one place. That includes sheet music. His part is labelled GOAT.

Christián is rather goat-like, if you think about it.

I am unsure if the mp3s entitled goat1.mp3 and goat3.mp3 were attached correctly to the email I sent to that shivering stink of flesh quivering in his flaccid skin. If not, they will be uploaded to thinklikeamink (along with this entry) and the tail of this extended moment becomes the head of the instant that I am sitting drunken on the bed of my hotel room, doing those punishable deeds.

Why are they punishable?

Pure creativity is becoming less of a criminal act, I agree, but it is still frowned upon in most circles I have tread upon the surface of. I see social circles more as spheres, really. Or ellipsoids. Or ovoids. Or whatever three dimensional construct the reader wishes to pummel his / her mind with. These three-dimensional objects have surfaces. Beyond those surfaces is void, or even limbo were I to write optimistically.

I once wrote in a poem later translated to song (the pertinent line is here for illustrative purposes, aunque the whole was also rather poor quality and now decays inked on yellowing parchment in a box in either mine or Tony’s archives, best forgotten): Two clouds meet and drift away. I should have written Two clouds merge and drift apart. I was naïve during the autumn of 1990, naturally. I suffered from unrequited love, as I often did in those scintillating days. The days brightest blind us to the awaiting drift into the reality of limbo, where creation actually does or doesn’t happen. You see, my social skills were putrescent. No, that is not exactly correct. For something to become putrescent, it must initially be ripe - metaphorically attractive and alive. In contrast, my social skills never really grew beyond a tiny, greening bud knocked from a miniature of a bush in a West Texan Desert. Fuck um.

The two clouds were people, of course, and a mingling of minds, or souls, or spirits, or animas, or bodily juices. Most possibly the most latter. But the ellipsoids also match the cloud metaphor. They drift close. Their skins touch, They buckle slightly. Some of these entities bounce entirely from one another, but most of their cell walls tentatively break and their cytoplasm temporarily merges.

This is a fun, but very heavy-handed metaphor.

Where was I?

I usually swim on the surface of ellipsoidal cytoplasm. When I delve deep and even possibly consort with a mitochondrion, it is among social groups small and close-knit in ways not particularly universal for these strangely bulging creatures. Connections are much more complex than the three dimensional space we mere mustelids see in our everyday jaunts from ellipsoid to ellipsoid (all which share cytoplasm at the head and tail of that moment, naturally, as travelling through limbo is a solitary profession).

I recall a conversation with an exacting woman recently about social circles, concerning ideas she wished to explicitly expunge. She wanted to delete my obtuse metaphor, possibly? Bubbles that couple are actually hyper-ellipsoidal constructs, intersecting orthogonally in manners that she would complain would melt her cerebrum into an oily mass best cooked up with leek, coriander seeds and sour apples. But appreciation of her viewpoint is captivating, as visceral interpretations fascinate me until Sweet Entropy calls again to prod me like the GOAT I am into abstraction.

Swimming on a single surface, two dimensional, of myriad hyper-ellipsoids from which I could have chosen, I am satisfied to peer at the limbo. I’ll dive from the watery cytoplasm into it soon enough. My springboard is this train.

I feel the wheels spinning beneath me once again.

I miss you, Hela.

The basic premise of this entry is simply that I am able to appreciate a piece of art, especially music, much more if it can be taken out of all social and historical context and still be intrinsically moving / intriguing to me.

Get it?

I have had many conversations that have touched on this topic in my lifetime. Most happened after the age of twelve or so. I don’t exactly recall the first one, but I can recall one of the first. I believe I was around fourteen and unhappily making the transition from one moment to the next in the acrid atmosphere of Fort Stockton. My cousin introduced me to Rush. I had been already getting into more interesting music, that is, different from the run of the mill pop, metal or country that pervaded the community. Rush isn’t all that freakish or wholly different, but their music contained a hidden (for me, at the time) layer of complexity. Of course, I focused more on the lyrics, but I’ll approach that angle later.

Amy, which was the acrid name of this acrid female in the acrid atmosphere of Fort Stockton, introduced me to the album Hemispheres. We listened to side one together. It resonated with me, especially the ending section (The Sphere). I’d already been listening to Pink Floyd for over a year (and not just the post Dark Side of the Moon stuff), so Hemispheres was not a leap across a ravine. So, cool, I possibly said to myself, here is another group I can explore.

Then Amy began to explain the context of the recording as it stood with their other recordings and furthermore in her life and how it affected her. Even back then, I found this distasteful. That distaste was very undeveloped at the time, but grew steadily hover the years, and I am writing especially with respect with music here. I’d even say that it grew exponentially. I don’t want to initially know any historical or emotional connection or context. I want to enjoy the music on its own merits. zo

CADA LOCA A SU CABRA.

zo She then attempted to explain to me the transition in sound the band had made through the course of six or seven years, then played Power Windows for me. Years passed before I came back to this album and appreciated it fully for what it was intrinsically.

Later, I was happy to find out about the transitions bands go through and historical connections between early and later music. Yes. Firstly, however, I want to hear a piece out of context.

A point that has come up much too often during my existence and especially dealing with humans is how a piece of music (in this case, usually a song or band or especially singer) is tied to a part of a particular human’s life. A particular song can even be attached directly to an event.

I openly admit that I do this, as well. The first album by North Atlantic Oscillation will always remind me, at least for a moment, of either walking through the streets of Tuzla or most likely sitting in the café with my laptop overlooking the first story of what Bosnia passes off as a Shopping Center (Bah!). I let that impression light up in my mind. It soon drifts past. I let it remain neutral. I don’t want to attach any emotional significance to it. The album will always remind me of a period of my life, but effort is made to push that to a portion of my brain that associates raw memories, usually images and scents with sounds (in this case, an album by North Atlantic Oscillation). The music itself needs to stand intrinsically apart for me. It is as it is.

Bob Drake once said, paraphrasingly, A piece of music should express what it is and nothing more. That is a portion of what I am getting at. I am aware, however, that removing all vestiges of context is impossible.

Concerning the post-previous paragraph, I shall always be reminded specifically of walking up the hill here when I listen to the second movement of Shostakovich’s 12th String Quartet. The image and perhaps the scent of pollen will scuttle through my mind, but the music itself sustains intrinsic value to me. I don’t have to attach anything to it for its importance to remain relevant. Shostakovich has much music (I’d say most, actually) tied to historical contexts. I know snatches behind these, but don’t really need or even wish to know them completely and certainly do not wish to tie them to certain compositions. Again, they stand on their own, intrinsically, for me.

(here)

Another anecdote (a shorter one featuring my buboe of an ex-wife):

Everyone reading the Martenblog knows who my putrescent ex-wife was, so I don’t have to provide context. She has contacted me several times since our rupture. The duration of contact each time has varied and usually ended suddenly ostensibly because of something I stated more directly and honestly than she may have liked. Fuck um. One afternoon, evening or night (I don’t recall which), we were discussing (or, more realistcally, having a distracting chat session) a band called the Magnetic Fields. Ok! I told her. I’ll give um a listen. Why not? I gave them a listen. The music did nothing for me. I’d promised that I’d do my best to listen attentively, as well. After informing her of this unfortunate turn of events, she then informed me that my opinion’d’ve been different had I spent hours, days, weeks, months, or some other extended period of time listening to the Magnetic Fields with another person. By other person, I assumed she meant lover or at least drinking compatriot, though I am not sure I ever asked for details. My reply to her clarification was along the lines of what I have been talking about the whole of this entry: I listen to music for the music is itself, not for a nostalgic bang. At least that is what I intend to do, though being a small furry animal, I am not perfect in all of my endevours.

Finally we reach music that has historical folk origins. And again, initially, I don’t want to know those origins. I want the music completely out of context when I first approach it. I know this is an impossibility in the majority of cases, especially in a live setting. At times, the cultural context is forced upon the audient (I stole that word from Robert Fripp, for anyone who does not know).

Knowing the cultural significance of a piece of music can benefit my appreciation later, perhaps, but that particular piece of music is never going to be as powerful to me as an another that can be completely divorced from historical, cultural and emotional context and appeal to me on its own merits as a raw piece of art.

Lyrics are a different matter and at the moment I tire of typing (knowing I shouldn’t, as I haven’t filled these black rectangles for seemingly ages) or I would attempt to go into great detail. A fascinating appeal of Magma’s music for me is the presence of words simply used as an emotional thrust. The sonorities are much more important than the meaning. I suppose as I have aged, I grow tired of lyrics that dwell of specificities. I still dig existential angst when in the mood (usually an intoxicated one), but time and again, absurdist ramblings are more enjoyable.

Christián displayed to me a photo from a book containing Flamenco Quatrains. Or at least I believe that is what they were. I still have not decided whether they are emotionally abstract enough for me to fully appreciate without yawning profusely. I do enjoy that I can read them out of any cultural or historical context. I am sure I can be presented with performances of several via YouTube that do not bother me with any cultural or historical context, as well.

I’ll return to the beginning.

A piece of music (and, to abstract out, art itself) will appeal to me in a more fulfilling manner, and always has, if it is presented without context. Any importance outside of the container that is the music itself IS NOT RELEVANT. My enjoyment of said piece of music (or art) will be diminished by anything outside the container initially. For me, pieces of art (and, yeah, once again, especially music) are discrete forms. Every connection, even between other related discrete forms do not assist my appreciation, although they may modify it later.

So die.

Today’s Special Consternation (toted by my current girlfriend) is indicative of the striking downfall of large, cohesive families. Yes, as i have mentioned previously, Marisa’s family is monolithic. Only the most distant edges crumble slightly. If her family were a circle, I’d be a point on a plane parallel to it and growing increasingly distant. The line passing through me and Marisa, however, remains.

One of her nephews, Alberto, is moving out of the flat that she owns near to this flat that she also owns. In another lifetime, Marisa, her ex-husband and their spawn lived in the flat from which Alberto is moving. Why she did not rid herself of it after she moved on, I am not sure. But back to that nephew who is also abandoning the place: Some wench named Kristina (or something similar - I forget) has claimed his bumpy soul and they’ll begin to add infant cretins to the family in a new flat in a distant corner of the city come September. She’s also torn Alberto away from any hope of a creative future as a programmer by convincing him he should teach high school computer science instead. It’s just so much more stable. I shall not include that story.

Alberto has a brother named Jesús, who, accordingly, is also Marisa’s nephew. They are currently living together in the flat that Marisa owns that is close to this flat that Marisa also owns. Jesús will be living alone in that flat once Alberto moves out. Will he be able to afford the flat himself? Of course he will because his parents, Marisa’s sister-in-law and brother, are the ones that actually pay. However, Jesús may not want to live alone. Someone once informed me that being alone is not wholly amusing, and though I ignored the booming, disembodied voice, Jesús obviously also heard it and chose not to ignore it.

The logical course of action would be for Jesús to find another family member to move in with him. The situation is grand for Marisa because she is paid under the table by her sister-in-law and brother, gaining her some sort of tax benefit. This wouldn’t be the case were she to put the flat up for rent to regular townsfolk. Miguel, Marisa’s son, has noted that he’d like to live there with his scabrous whore of a girlfriend, Andrea. They’d share Alberto’s ex-room. Jesús would stay put. Everyone would rejoice the arrival of hilarious complications regarding splitting rent and utilities three ways, or two ways, or maybe three ways, or possibly two and a half ways since Andrea and Miguel would only occupy a single room, and so on. Did I mention that Andrea is a scabrous whore?

All of this tomfoolery has caused Marisa a topping of stress to accompany her already maniacally stressful lifestyle. It occurs to me, as it surely does to you, that including the family first in every facet of one’s life is NOT beneficial. It’s a fucking anchor. They spend a chunk of every day commiserating in family business, in family gossip and family platitudes. Why platitudes? I use that word because they tend to touch on the same topics and pontificate using the same or similar phrases time and again. All of this family time, in my bulging opinion, could more positively be consumed by creativity, meditation, exercise or even reading a fucking book.

I’m not part of that circle. I reside in a parallel plane that drifts further each elastic second.

Marisa has a trait that I find in part very amusing but in part extremely worrying. It is simple, but indicates a blight in my eyes fundamentally. We were just talking, as we released dry and practically dry clothing from their castigation hanging from a flimsy drying apparatus, about the english word pugnacious. Admittedly, it is not a word I use very often. The word describes a certain feature of creatures that I do not desire to be around often.

A parallel word exists in Spanish, and therefore I expect they both come from a Latin or Lakife root. Pugnaz. The parallel seemed obvious to me but Marisa insisted that the term does not exist in Spanish. Probablamente es usado de Panchitos. She does not consider Spanish spoken in the Americas to be real Spanish, you see. I fetched her grand and more or less (according to her) unabridged (more or less unabridged is a phrase I should utilize more or less more often) dictionary and quickly discovered that pugnaz does indeed exist.

I used to enjoy a song during my desperate high school years entitled In My Ways. In fact, I am downloading the album at this moment because I have not heard it in years. Marisa is stuck in her ways. Her accumulation of knowledge up to a certain point is now immovable. She claims to be a erudite Spanish speaker. I believe her, for the most part, but any evidence that goes against her ostensibly total command of the language is immediately rejected.

This inner mechanism of hers behaves like a reflex. Like a vomit reflex, to an extent. Her sphere of knowledge has no intention of growing, let alone evolving. I come to understand her fear of travelling outside of her known world (Spain, Italy and parts of France) as an extension of this mechanism.

It’s all a bit disconcerting, eh?

Whilst Marisa continued to shop in unnamed clothing shop in an unnamed shopping center a few hours ago, I checked Facebook. The top post on my feed was by Acy. He referenced an article that had to do with the Many Minds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. I was sitting on a squat stool at the base of a number of shelves containing articles of ostensibly new clothing. Humans milled and browsed around me as I sat there, a pile of ostensibly new clothing we were about to purchase in my lap and my phone clutched in my hand.

(Many Minds Interpretation)

I opened trusty Jotter Pad and instead of tapping into Google Keyboard wobbily on my perch, I activated trusty Google Drink In My Mellifluous Speech and began dictating.

Be the observer a protozoan or a mouse, theoretically, we all collapse indeterminate wave states with our minds. Whether our bodies are in superposition with themselves before the mind unequivocally chooses a state is not something I equivocally claim to be an expert on. The thought that collapsed another infinite number of waves states whilst I sat on that bench in the unnamed clothing shop in the unnamed shopping center was that our true conscious path through the universe is unique.

Every collapse of a wave state into a choice is a fork, as they say, in the road of existenece, but only our existence. Our consciousness only traverses this singular path. Eidolons of other consciousnesses are around for the ride, be they mice or paramecia. Their conscious path split from our own in time out of mind.

We see others snuff it all the time, sure, but they are only snuffing it in our unique quantum universe - the one that careens off in our sensationally precise direction upon every observation we make. The dimension in which your pet mouse or friend Christián Newman exists in a purely conscious fashion is unreachable.

Therefore, you are the capiain of this boat.

Everything I write here is for me only. The eidolons that surround me can partake and criticise as they might, but ultimately, they are actors. I may not write the script actively, but the multitudinous realities distill to the only one where my life is center stage. For that is what consciousness is, after all. Sit for a minute and then get yourself up off your own personal bench in an unnamed clothing store in an unnamed shopping center. I am not necessarily advocating the ultimate state of selfishness, but instead, the ultimate state of responsibility.

Everything I write here is just for me. The eidolons may benefit from these words. These words may prey on them. They may rot in a ditch in Berlin with laser printed pages of these words clutched to their naked, scabbed chest.

I’m collapsing wave states as I type. I observe each pixel. They are chosen to be real by my consciousness and my personal quantum universe branches once again. And again. And again. Fuck um.

What of the zombie universes?

There are an infinite quantum universes, according to the paramecium that just awoke in its hovel nestled within the goo underneath my left thumbnail. I posit there are only a limited number of consciousnesses, however. The paramecium’s cilia figit. It’s not clear if he is still in superposition or not. Perhaps this eidolon has been with me all along. Perhaps this is our true consciousnesses’ initial time to split. Paramecium goes his way. I go mine. Fuck um.

Accordingly, there are an infinite number of zombie universes. No true consciousness exists in them. They are filled with eidolons of a finite number of consciousnesses playing out programmed roles. Do they learn and evolve as do true consciousnesses? I posit yes, and therefore that they are interacting shadow consciousnesses that can and sometimes do birth their own spawn of the original.

Then why are you not actually just one of the more evolved zombie consciousnesses, Bobbus?

Well, I guess I am, or could be, or if Buddhism has anything to say about it, we all are. The Buddha consciounsess has been in the true quantum universe for eternity and remains so. It doesn’t perish. It persists! Child consciousnesses are one step away from Mr Buddha. But, according to quantum mechanics, can never return. Good for them. They are eidolons once removed from the Buddha. I’m probably a great great great * 2^65536 grandchild of this original consciousness. I, too, am not allowed to return. Fuck um. I never wanted to, anyhow. I’m fine with the eidolons of my unique path. My zombie consciousness continues to evolve into new and exciting states of being. Hades, belovéd: I’m birthing new zombies with every letter I type, backspace over, re-type and even reread.

May those eidolons prosper in universes of their own.

My posit of finite consciousnesses reduced itself to one. Damn you, Buddha.

The switch that was eventually implanted just above the double fold of fat at the base of Shambal’s neckline had been planned for ages. It was his own design, in fact, for he had foreseen his future condition. He was never pleased with what he foresaw, but, always the pragmatist, he took steps to perpetuate his soul.

Shambal’s concept of soul was shaky, sure, but basically, he meant the sphere of personality that engorged itself slowly (and sometimes even quickly) since the dawn of consciousness. A computer could drink its entirety in and regurgitate sequences at any time.

Thus, the switch.

I call it a switch because i prefer the word switch to the flat and uninventive button. Those insipid writers who dare to use the latter are, in each of my tales, tall or not, boiled in their own faeces. Fuck um.

The switch learns because it can gage the delight or despair of each creature that puts it to use. Therefore, it selects from the acumen of Shambal’s life-knowledge to produce phrases. Initially, it might resemble a random fortune generator such as the olden fortune shell command in old UNIX systems from the father planet. Not so, however! The switch learns from the delight or despair of its carers, their neighbours, visitors from zones abroad, and so forth.

Yes, Shambal’s land was finally repopulated. I’ll get around to that story another time.

One could say that the switch generated platitudes. Of course, the expressions were not platitudes when they were first vomited forth from the corpse-lips of Shambal’s mouth, but became platitudes over time. Eventually, they came to be part of the shibboleth that defined the new culture of Shambal’s old land. Generation after generation, and even after the corpse-thing that was Shambal stopped functioning, these platitudes solidified. Eventually, some were even seen as something like commandments.

One must remember that Shambal Brambel was born both deaf and sessile. I was only when the first tenebrous tentacle plunged from the night sky and uprooted him that he began to become a renowned gigolo, vagrant, gourmet and visionary. Centuries have passed and the apex of his life journey is long behind him. He has enjoyed the ease of descent for ages and like the multicellular forms who shed their complexity and become paramecia once again, Shambal has regressed.

His bed is his sessile base now. As described in other tomes, marvellous machines of his own making collect and create energy from his waste. Naught but rhythmic drones feed his brain. As Natascha used to say, the complexity of one age’s music is finally levelled to pulses. The thump of your crawling blood is the last sound that your living corpse will perceive.