Shambal was well known for his obsession with religion not only in his own land but in empires abroad both fallen and in the throes of power. He was brought up by a despotic mother stewing eternally (well, eternally until her demise) in catholic ideology. To finally flee his childhood oppression and its monkey clawing like his later cocaine demon at the back of his neck for decades and then for centures, he decided to reform the old ways and scribed the following:

The Ten Goat Commandments

• Thou shalt not have other goats before me
• Thou shalt carve my visage into every stone and tree
• Thou shalt smite human females in my sacred name
• Remember the Copulation Day and penetrate me with thy penis
• Honour my goat ancestors and goatlings by penetrating them
• Thou shalt kill only the females of thy own kind
• Thou shalt save the juices from our copulation for thy otherwise pitiful cocktail parties
• Thou shalt steal ovaries from thy human females, implant them within me so that I may gestate and birth a hybrid goat-being
• Thou shalt expose my reeking genitals to thy neighbours
• Thou shalt teach their own progeny to worship and penetrate my kind

Long ago, when the wind still whipped the edges off of sharp stones, Rabbit was a great trapper. He lived with his grandmother on the fringe of the Pellucid Desert. She was an ancient and emaciated creature, as well as the only other of his kind he could recall. Perhaps she was his great-grandmother, or even great-great-grandmother. Time was funny in the borderlands. In any case, all the rest of his kind had disappeared.

His grandmother was very weak, but at times still spoke. She never looked directly at Rabbit when she recounted what sputtered and strobed behind her eyes. Her head bobbed and swung. Her face was lined and the colour of long soiled and dried skins. It occurred to Rabbit now and again that she was completely unaware of him. He did feed and water her, sure, but those demands could have as easily been met by the brook flowing out of the hilly lands he never visited. Fish even occasionally suffocated themselves on the banks, sacrificing themselves as food before an inevitable, wasted death as the stream narrowed and dried in the desert.

During those times, she spoke in fragments. He caught as many as he could with the cup of his mind and sewed them together when curled and about to rest, or when wandering the perimeters and setting traps.

She talked of faces in the moon and a sickness in the sun. The stars were invisibly stitched together to form animals. In his mind, the shapes resembled animals caught in his pits. There was the Wolverine, the Bear and the Fox. Sometimes a coyote took the place of the fox. That other animal - the kind that lived in the village nearby - was always absent. He’d never had the occasion or luck to trap, snare or pit one of them. So they somehow were outside of the textured mythology he wove from his grandmother’s mutterings.

He often remembered his grandmother as a younger creature, speaking at length and with great coherence about the moon and the sun. The moon made faces that predestined the humour of the coming day. The sun’s sickness grew and waned, casting and dispelling shadows. He could remember snatches of stories about creatures wandering in the inky ocean between the points of light in the skies at night. The creatures could set the course of lives in the Pellucid Desert. He often had dreams of them, but in the dreams, their identity was confused. His mind’s eye told him that they were one and the inky ocean was actually a singular mass. He liked to call it the oracle. Rabbit often wondered what the oracle’s prophecy for him would be, or if it was already fixed like a carving into a stone.

Rabbit’s trapping was limited to the area within his burrow’s sightline. His speciality was stone traps. He’d been crafting them since the dim past. Some were quite formidable. He’d hew them from stone with tools as ancient as his grandmother, or more so. Were he to measure time like the strange creatures in the village did, a single trap would occupy dawn to dusk every day for months. He cleverly wired the traps to snap their serrated teeth shut. His hinges were made of the taut guts of wolverines and bears.

These creatures, not anywhere as smart as Rabbit once thought, fell time and again into another type of trap he created. Every few sunups, he found one dead or dying, impaled on spikes at the bottom of one of his pits. Some of the spikes were even fashioned from the bones of the animals’ own kind. As a wolverine panted blood bubbles from his final breaths, Rabbit liked to think that the very bone piercing the animal’s stomach and chest came from that very animal’s own brother, mother or father.

He distributed the stone jaws, small, medium and large, over his range. Each morning, his haul consisted of anything from rats to coyotes. He stewed them all in the burrow inside a great cauldron also hewn of stone. He supposed his grandmother had hewn the giant bowl herself, for who else could have? There was no-one else. There never was, not that he could remember.

Rabbit awoke before the sun gouged the black oracle from the sky every day, before even the few remaining birds began to fill the air with their nonsense. One morning, however, he discovered some of his traps were different. They had been moved ever so slightly. None of his catch was disturbed at first, but as morning after morning passed, crushed animals habitually lying limp within the jaws were missing. The traps were splattered with gore. There was too much gore, as if an animal had been violently ripped from its grave. He began to discover more and more of his traps devoid of prey. He had been robbed. He was being robbed every night.

He could not see the traps at night. Before he slept, he interpreted the face in the moon the best he could and what it could mean for the following day. He imagined the blackness between pricks of light oozing and perhaps loosing tentacles of ink time and again to caress anyone who dared to wander the Pellucid Desert at night. During the failing twlights after his discoveries, he wondered if those imaginary tentacles were the culprits.

Time passed and his food supply dwindled to almost nothing. He was strong, and still persisted, but his grandmother was reduced to nothing more than a bag of bones. She became sessile and crepuscular. She summoned her remaining strength at dawn and at twilight. She still muttered then.

At first, Rabbit thought the thief could be a cunning wolverine, evolved beyond the stupidity that landed its bretheren into the pits. The traps were not so easily opened, though, and he finally dismissed the idea as nonsense. He pondered as his own hunger grew. He reached a decision to snare the thief himself. It was a risk. It was always a risk. What if the culprit was one of those from the village?

He fashioned a loop of the strongest beargut and set out in a waning dusk. By luck, he’d caught a fox in one of his stone jaws early in the evening. It hung like two rags draping a stained, red fossil. He stealthily placed the coiled intestines, hid, and waited.

Rabbit faced the thing struggling within his snare. The looping beargut left weal after weal as it flailed. The thing’s eyes shone with a combination of surprise, rage and a strange resignation. It was as tall as a villager, but wider. It’s bulk displayed protrusions that could have been stunted extra limbs. The weals poured rivulets of dark juice through thick, matted fur.

Finally, the thing calmed, or weakened, or both - Rabbit could not tell - and half collapsed to the hardpan. Without looking directly at Rabbit, it began to speak. Rabbit listened and began to despair.

I was stealing a fox. It had been nearly severed in two parts, but I had to pry the teeth of your trap slightly to remove the tendon that resisted. I brushed against one of your marvellous hinges. I was stung, as if by an insect, and the mark has remained to this day. Surely it was concocted from the same material as these restraints that leave weal after weal on my flesh. The part of my arm that touched the hinge will never heal, nor will these wounds from your rope. It could be that what you call the oracle - the being the flows like sooty fluid between the pricks of light in the sky - wrote that sting in the earth with its black tentacles at my birth. I stared at my demise when I was scarred by your hinge. And my demise is now, as I cannot escape from your ropes of meat.

Unlike the creatures of the village, you nor I have archives or mentors to teach us how to persist in this world. Our only teacher is experience. Though I always pushed it from my mind, I knew that one experience would end me. I also knew that the end of me was not the end of my task. It had to be carried forward.

We also do not come into this world knowing exactly what we are or what we will become. We discover these things as we traipse our violent path through our lives. Better is to not have expectations of oneself, for great changes do not happen gradually. They are sprung upon us like your stone jaws upon your next meal or like the snare now binding me.

Before I slaughtered him, one older one from the village told me at length about what he called spirits and how they, unlike us, were undying. They simply passed from fleshy creature to fleshy creature at their own whim. He was only trying to entertain me with his mind in hopes I would not consume him, of course. His ruse did not play out the way he wanted, but, true or not, his story left an impression.

The villagers once got the better of me. I was foolish that day. They had me tied to a stack of timber and were set to burn me. Maybe they’d have smoked out my spirit and set it adrift. And maybe it would have found you then instead of now, as I die before you. I let them have their fun and I pretended to struggle and even moan, all the more to see their shock when I at last exploded the bonds. The strands were fashioned from fibre, not the once living meat that now sears my flesh. I killed eight and dragged two of those dead with me back into the desert. They served as food for a few days before the real rot set in.

I know you know the ones in the village. They are not like you. They stand erect and prance like owners of the desert. I know you’ve hidden in the scrub on the outskirts and watched their masses swell and wane, pulse like the maggots that will soon infest my wounds. I believe their rationale for tying me was to stop my stealing their pigs and sheep. They roast these animals. I, like you, prefer them raw.

They roast the animals they catch outside of the village, as well. Animals like you and the ancient one you live with. Before I stood in your place, I was in danger of becoming impaled on a spit and turned slowly over a fire, my life juices dripping and sputtering in the flames. The sable night sky took me, as it is taking you, and changed me. Instead of being the pursued, I became the pursuer.

I had a dream that I knew was prophesy. I am one of the replicated. I was an iteration. You are the next iteration. Don’t look away. Just by being here, you have already accepted your own iteration. The dream was cruel. It showed me this night and my demise. I viewed your loops of meat and my wounds seeping beneath them. The dream told me I’d forget when I awoke, but remember once again when prophecy became reality. You’ll have a similar dream.

I fade. The desert will swallow me as it swallows your tiny river further on towards its uninhabited centre. Go back to your burrow. Bury the thing you live with. She is dead. Go. Now.

I am always frightened when I am invited to go to a authentic concert of some ethnic music. Let’s take flamenco, for example. Besides the fact that is pretty much howling mierda, the vomit of cultural emotions, why strain to enjoy a virtuoso guitarist through that haze? Through that filter?

What is the point?

Learning to divine presentiments from some arcana doesn’t make you interesting, you cunt! Why do people flock to see authentic music? What are they hearing? Are they there for some sort of ancient realism or for the chic feeling of nowness. Oh, Carlos, (licking the undulating abdomen), I was there during your performance.

There is not art to performance any longer. The contrast I see in videos Dave Willey shows me of a dance troupe gyrating to avant-garde tunes makes me smile, for sure, but it is so distance from the leprous theatres of today that I want to actually kill a goat and feed it to the dancers who strive to dance to the same music that was made to dance to in pasts they could not even fathom.

WHY DON’T THEY DIE?

I think quite a bit of this bile erupts from contrasts I have made between attempting to enjoy flamenco and then listening to an artistically relevant group of musicians like Present.

Follow your folk music, you junkies. Do it! What else have you? You’ll die a slow death. Neil Young said that it’s better to BURN out than to fade away. See the contrast?

Listen to something challenging. Stop staying within your fucking borders, you passive-agressive cretins.

I sit in a bar in Bilbao. The barman wears a beard and casually goes about his duty. This is in contrast to the previous bar, very close to the bus station, filled with backpacked women with demands for pintxos. Their drooling eyes almost matched the saliva that pooled on their thighs as they sat on metal barstools. They only wanted to get to the aeroport. It is a pity they are dead now.

But, anyway, I wrote these things to Christián, of which I shall elaborate on in turn:

I appreçiate that the Spanish in the north is more pure and delineated.

It is much easier to understand people who speak clearly. Heh. Crudity has its cruel pleasures, however, and those exposed to redneck life during formative years are victims. I find the south crude. Their gypsy and moorish blood birthed abominations. These died and fertilised the land. Music arises from the ashes (or asses) of humans who do not know anything else to do with themselves. Circumcised with drink, I am sure their filth crept into stringed instruments.

I can understand your love of the south and the rawness of Andalucia and Murcia and Extremadura. They slur their words and their brains fire on hormones dying without completion.

At times, I figure the heat is what drives people to vagrancy. Vagrancy of the mind, I tell ya. Texas held the same for me. I wanna sit here and press my ICED TEA to my forehead until the ache the LIQUOR I swigged to forget about YOU gave me wanes into oblivion. Yeah. That was Fort Stockton. There were two choices: the DRINK or the CHURCH. I suspected at times both. Fuck um.

Linguistic culture disgusts me, as it it deepens the stupidity of a land. I’d kill them all if I could, but I am a simple drunk at a bar in Bilbao at the moment.

Fleeing from cultural oppression is very similar to fleeing from heat oppression. Cold stimulates the ability to think rationally, to create sublime portents of the future. Heat lets hormones boil and excrete folk music - the music that, simply mourns loss.

Combining these things is genius. I’ve never heard Flamenco that did it. Other, much more angry forms of music do it better for me (the arbiter of ALL quality, errr). I want to put my throbbing, severed member into a goat right now.

I’m about to listen to a piece of music that will thwart everything I am thinking about at the moment. I’ll let it pause for a moment. Fuck um.

Actually, I’m done. Perhaps more later on the FLIGHT.

I wrote to Marisa just now:

Dentro del autobus, hay Ingleses delante de mi y Alemanes atrás! Ha. locos!

But they are not the strangers. I am. Jayson once told me, and actually told everyone around us, aligned with us, groovin’ with us and otherwise accompanying us on the dotted life trek through the universe:

You’re lost and you like it.

They are not the strangers. I am. They giggle like misfits, but laughter among the superficially inane is glue. Camaraderie is a disease that ultimately benefits all with its contagion. Kavus Torabi sings in my ears:

So I’ll drown myself in wine with the only living friends that I can find. If they leave me all adrift on foreign shores, would it be so wrong of me to crash at yours?

Ha. I haven’t actually perused the lyrics of this obra closely, but I enjoy what he is getting at in that, shall we say, chorus.

But still, they are not the strangers. I crash at foreign shores frequently. Or, at least, I used to. I’d say that Michal’s apartment in Praha is one of those shores I have crashed at once upon many times. What’s the irking word in Spanish? He naufragado a menudo en las playas de mis amigos. And why not, really?

I am the stranger.

I’m not claiming that the purpose of friends are to line the shores on which I may crash, but it is certainly convenient when they do so. I’m a fleshy shore-liner, as well, I must admit. Or, at least at times. It is important to remember that we are ALL shore-liners and to certainly visit those who line available shores. They are more than proxies. They are companions that captain encapsulated journeys. Bubbles love to intersect and partially merge. Seemingly, they always separate later. When they DO merge into a larger sphere, they tend to burst before those smaller and less hybridised.

Now I wonder whether breaking open my lager will alert my travelling companions to my intentions of becoming slightly intoxicated en route to Bilbao. I shall find out very soon, and then write about it! Glory be! Fuck um.

Though the beer overflowed onto my fingers and not my keyboard, no-one turned their apparent visual attention on me, though surely the scent of hops radiated out to at minimum one meter. The English bloke in front of me, who I overheard telling an anecdote about a pub (in Logrono?), surely caught it. I recognise a potentially drunken Englishman from a considerable distance. He is not a stranger, but in a strange land, perhaps. I say perhaps, since he may come to La Rioja in his spare time now and again to suck down red wine and fuck goats. It’s a well known English vacation plan.

It occurs to me that my bladder may explode before I reach Bilbao. Regardless, I shall continue sipping my 40 (Loyal would refer to it as that) throughout the journey.

Kavus sings:

Your congregation will die alone. Your congregation will die alone. We’ll build our empire out of their bones. We’ll build our empire out of their bones.

Jayson, the fuckup that told me once You are lost, and you like it, and I discussed how relationships are like books in a personal library. When you spend time with a friend, in depth, you once again open that tome, take out the bookmark, and read. There are paragraphs your go over again and again bearing concentration, and others you simply skim. When beers are drunk, shots shot, cigs littered like a trail of bageta-crumbs, you place the book back on your shelf, bookmark in place, to be resumed at a later date. Or perhaps not. Jayson was fond of this idea. It doesn’t really take into account minglings with groups, though. Cross-referencing encyclopedia after encyclopedia could be exhausting, not to mention the weight to heft all of them in a backpack already splitting at its seams. Christián might suggest to create an app, perhaps with voice analysis, that categorises each human (tome / novel) throughout a night of social density and later allows you to review the myriad cross-references. Jayson would probably be fond of that idea, as well. However, he’s dead. Fuck um.

The bus has paused at an anonymous town full of humans discarding their camaraderie for a time to share the surely pervasive smell of LAGER permeating the autobus. By the time we reach Bilbao, each will crave drink. They’ll flock to watering holes, begin sucking down vodka martinis, sidras, txakolis, snifters of cognac and distilled juices from their own tear ducts. Drying out is not an option, because it means facing the reality of lost camaraderie.

All this being said, it’ll be nice to decapitate Christián and leave his fetid body floating in the fountain in front of the Deutche Oper. Finally, out of fate and familiarity, the flowing water will clog, the fen will become a bog, and his flesh will ferment the liquid into a nectar imbibed by all.

Pestilence.

A facebook friend named Ron Greenough died a few days ago. I don’t know the causes of his demise, but I spent a minute on his timeline and found he posted something (I forget what now) on the 21st. Ron and I never met. Actually, during the last few years, we never exchanged any personal quips.

I believe I got to know him in 2009, soon after my mandatory exile from the Czech Republic. He was some relation of Justin or other. I’m not sure which. I never bothered to find out since it was utterly unimportant to me. I only vaguely recall that we shared some similar spiritual and humouristic views. This, too, was not very important.

He has perished and people are writing on his timeline asking him to rest in peace as if his corpse could somehow absorb the electricity that distributes these messages. I’ll state the obvious and declare that death is a function that has two arguments, or inputs:

• The deceased (or, to be accurate, the fixin’to be deceased)
• A vector or array of people that know the fixin to be deceased

(defn death [human humans]
  (map (fn [h]
         (affect human h))
       humans))

The non-deceased humans are run through the blender that I give the function name affect. This function filters parts of the fixin to be deceased according to each non-deceased and modifies the latter with them.

Ron’s death affected me enough to spawn this entry in the Martenblog. I guess, in my life, this impetus was Ron’s purpose. To each non-deceased, a differing impetus.

The subject of celebrities dying this year seems a big deal on social media. Take Prince, for example. Non-deceased humans are raving about him! Fixin to be deceased ones possibly not so much. Prince’s impetus has been to forcibly take control of the minds of multitudes and make them gather into mobbish clusters and celebrate. I did not know Prince personally, but I feel he’d probably have approved. I did not mingle with any mobbish mass, but I did listen to three of his albums the other day.

• Purple Rain
• Around the World in a Day
• 1999

I enjoyed my time with these albums and attempted to actively listen as much as possible. Slaving away over the terminal for the sake of patching up a few bugs for James’s peace of mind interfered with my concentration at times, as usual. Purple Rain is very enjoyable. The second album, less so. 1999 could expunge its own second half and I’d not blink my singular, ogling eye.

Needless to say, I did not tear up for either of these two corpses. Other corpses will probably have the impetus to create a flow of tears from my singular, ogling eye. We’ll see. I may or may not let Martenblog know.

Fuck um.

That capsule of condensed filth that calls itself Christián and I were discussing mild philosophy a few minutes ago. He claimed that two things he ponders on consistently are:

• Whatever you are doing now is the meaning of your life.
• Wherever you go, there you are.

I’m a fan of both views of life. In fact, they are intimately entwined, and, as Shambal claims, Intimacy is the flower that blooms from cruelty. Taken from a modern viewpoint, both of these views cruelly elide ideas risen on pedestals by our culture. An obvious one is that our lives are a culmination of the past. Our moments concentrate our past prowess into a sharp focus. What’s more, we are set on paths to fashion us into arrows. Our birth is the twang of a string. We rip through the atmosphere of life, puncturing any obstacle on our course. Our death leaves our shaft thrumming momentarily. Hopefully, we have achieved the centre of the target – unflinching success.

I’’d rather drag through life as a wandering blunt object. I’ll cover more ground. I’ll meet more obstacles. I’ll probably only injure a few of them, and hopefully learn the shape and contour of the rest.

Is it really cruel to the arrow? It’s cruel to the idea of the arrow. Who wants to be honed to something prescribed by a mythical cultural textbook, anyway? Follow in the footsteps of the success of your father, bah! Fuck um. In fact, most want to be honed into that arrow. They are born into it, whether they know it or not. They strive for it. They toil for it. They die for it. They certainly deserve to die for it.

I know they don’t want my pity, but it exudes from my weeping pores for them. Their eye is ever on the thrumming of the shaft after the point is buried into the wooden block of success and of death. At least they could take heed of the flight, of the course as it is in progress! Enjoy life. This does not mean enjoy your evenings at the pub after a day’s toil. This does not mean enjoy the time with your family during weekends and holidays. This does not mean look to days by the lake when you can lie dreaming while your eyes defocus on the sky. These are the rest stops along the course. They are the weigh stations. Stop for a breather. Have a glass of water. Nah, make it Brandy. Make it seven snifters of Brandy. Fuck um. Sit at a table with your compatriots and share complaints about the journey - the toil.

I’m on the road. I enjoy the road. I want to stay on the road. I’ll hang at a weigh station time and again, but I’ll be whipping out my little journal to scratch out some ideas while I’m there. And you won’t hear me bitching about my mornings or my yesterdays or even about my secretary’s dessicated cleft.

The more i live, I feel that to live simply and without the weight of ambition is the most enlightened path. Create what you can, but don’t worry too much about the end product. The journey is all the more fulfilling. The process of doing, of living. I want to be on the road of life, not at one of its numerous rest stops. This also fits with both your #1 and #2.

I’m working on a piece of music for the credits of Dani’s production. His film has inspired me to create. I’ve always needed a sort of impetus to begin the creative process. I used to walk around that bleak park in Seminole, stopping at arbitrary benches to scratch out a sentence or two. They weren’t to be used just then or even in the near future, but to serve as impetuses for future writing (or even composing!).

I am doing my best to follow the philosophy described above as I compose my piece. I am proceeding slowly. Very slowly. Why? Because I am enjoying the journey. Well, that is one of the reasons. The other main one is I can reflect on the parts, or themes, and let them soak into my subconscious. My subconscious serves as a plaintive vessel to contemplate even when the rest of that squishy organ encased in my malformed skull is busy with more conventional tasks.

I began writing this thinking I’d describe the parts of the piece that fit together, but I’ve decided not to. I believe I need a few more days of letting it soak in muddy puddles pooled in my mind.

The working title is Let Miners Be Interred. Pretentious pap! Hah! Fuck um. In the end, I’ll probably ask Dani to retitle it. I like the naive way he approaches creativity. It is refreshing.

Like every day lately, earlier in the afternoon, I took my twelve day old bicycle out for spin. I shambled up the incline of a mini-mountain to a disheveled vineyard. The trunks and stalks of barren grape bushes twisted and groped towards me, towards the sky and towards each other. Apparently, it’s not grape season. My ride today was brief and I believe the reason was lethargy. Still, it’s always thrilling to be out in the air, alone in a capsule as I merge with the elements. My awareness is always heightened. It is truly zen.

To a lesser extent, I get the feeling as I travel in a car, as the driver. I am hyper aware. My mind does not drift, even if music threatens to envelop me wholly. The music actually helps my focus. Even Shambal could vouch for that, and he is not a creature to vouch for much.

Exercise, like driving aimlessly, is a release for many, and it is a process without mental focus. It’s purpose is to spend time out of focus. I can’t count on my infinite digits spanning my infinite paws the times my ex-hollow-eyed-wife-waif was a part of a collision. She was one to pursue such drifts. She was also one to take her bicycle out for a spin. I have written about this piece of spite before, as it occurred to me several times during my excursions about Saaremaa on that handsome and ancient three-speed. A relic of another time. I claim it as spite because most of my complaints are rooted in spite. I reach for a time when my complaints are no more, whether in death, sleep, an oceanic stream of fermions, or whilst eating a pomegranate.

Brynn refused to use the gear-changing facilities provided by the machine that carried her. The slope of the landscape was not an issue she whished to face. Somewhere in her muddy mind was the thought that switching to a more reasonable gear on, say, a steep incline was tantamount to failure. I’ll repeat another thought that is always awakened by memories of that chick: I sincerely pity whomever she is with at this moment. Poor bastard.

My bicycle, whom I should name, and perhaps I shall do so in one of the following sentences, is, as I mentioned, twelve days old. Not literally twelve days old, of course, but twelve days in my possession. It’s name is Plellent. Hail, Plellent!! I must remember, even when graced with dust streaming past me on account of my new, metal friend, that complacency is not an option. Items fill my life at times and entertain me. They may even improve my health both mentally and physically. But, in the end, I cannot use them as an excuse to stay put.

I, like that lumpish crone Christián, am a wanderer. A deep sadness will finally take hold if I allow anything resembling superficial roots to take shape, much less grasp any plot of soil. Perhaps part of me longs for a sordid hovel to make my home base of sorts. Surely, that would augment creativity, or at least music composition. Or perhaps that sordid hovel can be achieved wholly in my mind as I shift bodily from place to place. It may serve as a repository for all my needless accomplishments and let me drift like a wraith that brushes up crumbs from every floor I pass over.

Or, as Shambal wafts through my mind, as he always does, I can plant my enormous buttocks onto a bed and cultivate the life of a sessile stalk, branching and flowering to engulf my singular land. In the darkest and most mellifluous of ponderings, I already really do.

Shambal grunted and turned onto his side from a torpid, supine night. He reached over to nastily clutch his she-goat’s porous flesh, but grasped only the rough, tangled blankets. The she-goat wasn’t there. Had he dreamed her all along? But the morning spring in his brain began to wind and he remembered the night before. His niggard had assured him that the she-goat’d be taken to Dunkirk for repairs.

Damn biological failings! he screeched silently to himself.

First thing in the morning, usually, the she-goat sucked him off. Shambal got cranky if he didn’t get his morning suck. Like almost everyone in this late land, he was a creature set in his ways. Nor could he escape from etched routines easily. He fumbled through the nightstand for one of his old wet-rags. He’d have to masturbate. No other means of release existed that moment. Considering superficially as he began to whack, the proposition of a she-goat harem shambled through his mind. Yes. He arched his turgid spine slighly. A harem could bring ease to petty morning problems. The she-goats would flounce about in anticipation of their turn with his skin-tube. He smiled and disgarded the wet-rag.

Who was that Gina Hammond, actually? Was she named after the organ that defined a certain sound of the seventies? I suggest that, were the timelines different, she’d have been named by the progeny of Keith, who is dead. Yes, Christián reminded me that Keith is dead another time today. No, not Keith Teal, but Keith Emerson. You know - the keyboard dude.

Gina Hammond was a Bond fan. I know personally because she loaned me six or seven Bond films in 1986 (or thereabouts). They tooted my muffin, but these days, especially after continuous lectures about the nature of women from Christián, I wonder why such a nubile chick would be obsessed with action movies. Ok, Bond may have always been delectable hunkily by females, but the actual persona of the film would not hold any girl I have known in the last 20 years’s attention for more than a few minutes.

I admit that I used to gawk at her naked thighs and shins as she fanned her parents’ automotive devices with water on summer afternoons. I took walks specifically for this purpose. I memorized her schedule when she was a junior in high school and I, a sophomore, on the day before school ended. I recall walking through the halls will the absurdity burning in my mind that this knowledge will lead to the blank wall of another summer.

I sparred with her boyfriend, Jimmy Wyrick, because he could not accept my passive interest in her. He threatened violence. he showed me his status as an alpha male by revving his shaft shaped gear shift to ascertain over one hundred miles per hour on Río street in flaccid Fort Stockton, Texas. I laughed.

(street)

So I found Jimmy Wyrick on Facebook. I have asked him - Where is Gina?

The last I heard of her was when I was pining over that forlorn piece of property near the University of Texas campus in hopes to share it with Jimmy Miles in a soggy 1989. What was I listening to then? I’d guess Marillion before Hogarth, with pomp and importance. Hawkwind circa Levitation, and not much else that I can think of. At least Levitation has stood the test of time.

Moo

Another one from The Buried Giant:

Those weathered women with their flapping rags were once innocent maidens, some possessing beauty and grace, or at least the freshness that will often serve as well in a man’s eye.

Desperate men lower their standards. That one is a well-worn platitude to be sure. At his current point, Christián will take most any creature with a cunt to compensate his enforced chastity. Hah! Enforced! The purpose of the quote is not to berate Christián’s methods, but to illustrate desperation. The roots of this necessity for a mate, no matter how brief, has its root in fear of solitude. The longing for sexual release is a deeper affliction. And, in many cases, it is eventual mental ruination.

In the novel, Gawain encounters these weathered women on the road to his life-task. At one (or several) point(s), he wanders if one of them is the lass he aided to her vengeful goal ages ago on the same (or similar) road. That lass was an old woman in a nubile girl suit. He should have just done her, slain her and let the memory retreat into the void. The weathered women curse him for never achieving his goal and therefore allowing the breath of forgetfulness freely roam the land. Distributing blame is a womanly hobby, especially distributing blame for events that occur naturally by no force of (especially) any particular man.

Perhaps his task is foolish to begin with? Or maybe meaningless? or pointless? The breath of forgetfulness waxes and wanes but is never snuffed out. All these women know is that they have forgotten the details and thus the importance of their lives. They are left to hurl clumps of mud at a impotent symbol of change. Gawain is an old man, so an impotent, mortal and fading agent of change. As we, as a species, are but a temporary blight on the fertile earth, Gawain is but a temporary irritation to the flux of the breath of forgetfulness.

Enduring those clumps of mud is the curse of a lasting relationship. Culture has marinated our minds in the idea that women should be cared for. Fucking white knight syndrome. To watch them during the last century rise from this oppression brings me almost to a smile. It most likely appears more like a grimace, though. Some have raised themselves above the quivering fright of Victorian hangover, surely, but few have discarded all its benefits.

And those pusillanimous white knights perpetuate the madness!

Every nubile wench, if not justifiably hacked to pieces and tossed like chum to fishes, becomes a dessicated hag. They find their clumps of mud within less than satisfactory pasts they can hardly even recall. Vapours from forgotten times taint any immediacy. These parched skin bags inhabit the opposite of Zen, feeding on perfumes afoul with eidolons. These feelings spawn resentment and rage. Who is the target? He is the enduring figure who carried her in his arms through the torment of receding beauty. Poor sap.

Growing old with another brings happiness. Or so another cultural more states. In my experience, I’ve seen bent old men enduring the undeserved wrath of crones. The minutes of pleasure diminish from an encompassing sphere to a singularity. The broken man floats on the outside but the crone remains within. May she suffocate. It’s no wonder so many men are seen pursuing endless projects during the twilight years. They are scrabbling at the thickening atmosphere to punch holes for air. In out in out in out. This time, just breathe.

Someone told me that the oldest profession is prostitution. It’s the only proper profession for a woman. Pools of prostitutes can be assigned to the rich and poor alike. Some politicians pine for a static income for all citizens. Not a bad idea, really, but even better to round up all the wenches, place them in programs to get um off the couch and into shape. Organise them and distribute them in waves, morphing for variety, to the rich and the poor alike. For every man, a cleft can facilitate needed release with no strings attached.

Implement any necessary means to diminish the intelligence of females to a harmless level. Lobotomies are a start. Selected breeding comes next.

We need to get this show on the road.

Fuck um.