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.

He was developing the neuroses of the rich, the non-workers — or would start to, if he wasn’t careful.

The quote is from a novel I finished late last night: The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock. Yes, it has the same title as the Hawkwind song. I first picked up the book in 1993 (or 2?) at either a book fair or a used bookstore in College Station. Some sort of convention actually occurred featuring Michael Moorcock. I reach back with my deft mental prowess and pick out myself talking to him as he stood behind a low table stacked with paperbacks. His breath was fetid. I squeamishly remember.

A fellow student (I laughingly call myself a student) argued that Moorcocks newest (?) novel Mother London was a vortex of dung whilst Behold the Man shone like an emerald. Those were not his actual words. Or mayhap they were and the coincidence of typing them in this paragraph is truly cosmic.

I never read Mother London. I read Behold the Man, I believe, for the first time, in El Paso in that hollow room in that busy house next to Lacey’s. The month I lived there stretched on for decades. I love it when time crawls. Raun complained over two years later that the book was too lurching. He did not use that word. Or mayhap he did and the coincidence once again of me typing it is TRULY COSMIC. I recall the book seeming very fragmented. The concept itself is amazing.

Perhaps Moorcock had excellent ideas but, in general, poor execution. Everyone has ideas, as my deadicated reader surely knows. Few place those ideas onto a page. No matter the quality, I admire those who do. Quality is a terribly subjective, in any case.

Fuck um.

I never finished The Black Corridor in 1992 (or 3?). Perhaps I sensed then that it was low quality. It did not toot my muffin at the time. I grew bored very easily in those days. I paced the apartment when bored, in hopes that my jittering thoughts would coalesce into something other than mediocrity. Did they? Possibly not.

I did finish The Black Corridor this time round. I copied three quotes into another file. The second is the one above. What does it mean to be rich and have the ability to be idle when one wishes? To nap days away? To stroll along the lakes or beaches with your pinkish umbrella and pinkish girlie-friend?

This begs the question - what is it to work, anyway? What is work? Is work just a means to subsist monetarily? It provides victuals with which we can stuff our faces and not emaciate away in a shack in a village in South Moravia. But what about subsisting psychologically?

My mind needs this work thing rather perpetually. I am rarely idle. I feel useless when I am idle. During long walks in the streets of Logroño, my mind is racing. I have to concentrate to follow the music seeping into my ears. My bane is a fragmented mind. Simple meditation on music spilling into my orifices needs effort. I have drifted from the subject. Fractured. Fracture. Cracking. Crumb. Blunt. Bum.

You are referred to another recent entry concerning focus. flip back and read it now. If you don’t, you will be the next hobo tied to the tracks tracing out someone else’s destiny.

A major theme of The Black Corridor was surviving isolation. The mind of the main character literally begged him to be creative. It fooled him time and again out of his severely routinised life. He caught himself varying his course time and again. He fought against his own subconscious during the one hundred twenty or so pages. Constantly. Finally, hallucinations almost destroyed him. Or maybe they actually did. The ending was rather ambiguous.

Being free of the burden of mandatory work would only convert hobbies into work. The travels of creation would be satisfying, as opposed to solely for nourishment of the corporeal tissue.

Drip. Drip. Splatter. My mind has drained away.

I just whipped out A Passion Play by The Tull after finding that its flacs I uploaded to Gulo yestrday evening do not work (on Gulo). Vittata plays them nicely. I noted, as I surely have oodles of times, that the album begins with heartbeats echoing The Dark Side of the Moon. Gonwards begins in this manner, as well. If one thinks it over a bit, normally, an album about the journey through a life should begin thus.

Sitting here writing when I should be working, I am enjoying this band to which I used to listen in my adolescence. Pink Floyd was another and I did enjoy Animals thoroughly the other day. Conversely, I have absolutely no interest in revisiting The Wall or The Dark Side of the Moon once again. Was it overexposure? They don’t tittilate my nipples like they did in my youth.

Yet, A Passion Play and Animals do. I’ll resist making a pun, as I mostly consider puns a product of sloppy thinking.

Sitting once again at the head of the table, one of the ghosts (it is Shambal) is pushing his women one by one onto the stack - and as his life slows and declines to death, he’ll pop them off one by one, finally getting to Karla, then to Ashley.

I wrote that quote whilst sitting on a bench in the fantastic park in Seminole. I had a ritual during which I stopped at one (or sometimes at two!) benches on each circuit round its perimeter. I sat and typed a short adage into Thinking Space, a mindmapping application that doesn’t seem to exist any longer for Android. I still have the antiquated version.

Resuming this ritual again using whichever type of writing application is a grand idea. I occasionally take walks through Logroño. Benches are available. I am still vital enough to boast a creative countenance. My protoplastmic alter-ego yaks in my ear: So do it, cunt. That bastard rarely shuts up. In this regard, he is similar to Shambal. Shambal doesn’t even quiet his stream of consciousness ramble during sleep. It comes out as grunts and snores, sure, but I am certain they are still the half-baked ideas resembling those spouted during waking hours, just without enough proper non-dormant muscles for articulation.

One can see Shambal’s life like a stack of relationships. He measures his life by his relationships. I have done so before, as well, though these days I’m more apt to place the borders between epochs at changes of long(ish) places of residence.

The quote also presupposes an exact midpoint in Shambal’s life. At this median, he will stop pushing and begin popping. Much like my regurgitation the other day, whilst living the upswing of his life, he pushes women onto said stack. This act signifies that he is temporarily finished with her. He may have another in his immediacy register or just a vacuous cell. At times during the upswing, he’ll pop the most recent off for another go (naturally when the register is vacant). That chick’ll be pushed onto the stack once again, soon enough.

So, Shambal is standing at his apex, peering into the white backwards and then into the black forwards. He doesn’t have the ability to actually travel into the white, but only to observe. Being predominately white, the distance is increasingly blurry.

He carries his stack like one of the stones mentioned in the aforementioned entry. So he begins his descent.

Reviving the dehydrated relationships is a chore. Some are dessicated beyond hope. Since Shambal still has the ability to mature, the creatures in his stack are revelations. They dare him to confront his past self. They are distorted mirrors into layers covered by the murk of his ascent.

The entities are eidolons. Whatever beings in reality they symbolise is not important. When he pushed them onto the stack, they were frozen. He begins all of his relationships once more, but in reverse. These times round, he thrashes in an ocean of despair with no land in sight. Yes, in the manner they ended, they start.

Instead of a maelstrom of encroaching desolation sucking his time and his energy, he finds himself more and more satisfied. His smiles pervade days. He is nurtured. The tumble downhill is simple. He rolls with the flowing avalanche. Then, all at once, during emotional ecstacy, everything vanishes.

He still has his stack, however. It is not yet empty. Perhaps he’ll ease himself slowly down his hill in vacuity. Perhaps he’ll immediately pop another woman off.

He has choices.

Christián loves to point out the fact that I have asperger’s disorder. I am not particularly convinced at the accuracy of his claims, however, as he is of a certain class of people who convince themselves they are correct about certain issues and are never to budge from their position evermore despite any evidence to the contrary.

I would go as far as say this class of people is the status-quo. It is much easier to fall back on long held beliefs no matter their accuracy because of comfort. Further education for most ceases after certain points for topic after topic. One is set in one’s ways, the rubicon is crossed, and the future is as static as a portrait hung in the basement or attic. Well, it does tend to collect dust, but that, too, just tends to place a coating over hardened beliefs, weighing them further.

In any case - asperger’s. A significant, ongoing impairment in social interactions with others, as demonstrated by at least two of the following symptoms:

Significant difficulty in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as the lack of eye contact, few facial expressions, awkward or clumsy body postures and gestures

I’ve always be self-conscious about the manner in which I’ve held myself. Slouching is a problem, for certain. I have to pull my gut in a bit these days. However, the origin of this behaviour is from elementary school. I was always the scrawny one in gym class. (And gym class was an ongoing nightmare.) I wished I had just an inkling of pecs. My nipples seemed inverted whilst those of fellow gym-mates protruded proudly.

Although I strive to always maintain eye-contact during one-on-one banter, I often find my gaze straying, especially during monologues. Marisa asks me to tell her stories at times about my life or even in detail about my day. Of course, part of this is to practise Spanish, but, on the other side of the wormhole, she rattles away at length, herself, so it is encouragement that I do so, as well.

Eye contact has always been something people noticed about me. Only during meandering soliloquies, my view drifts. In these cases, my mind is turning inwards to live the words that dribble from my lips.

Most everyone knows (and in many cases dislikes) my wild gesticulations during conversation. The immediate conclusion is that our first symptom of this portion of asperger’s does not apply to me.

Asperper’s is quite a long way from introversion, honeybunch. In fact, they are not even intersecting in the venn diagram bubbling through my mind at the moment.

Lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people).

I’ve been criticized for pointing out the obvious many times. Unfortunately, I believe I contracted this habit from my father, and it certainly irks me when he does it again and again and again and again during road trips from (always the point of departure) Seminole to (select one from the set of points of arrival) Ruidoso, Hobbs or even Ft. Worth / Dallas. One thing I truly enjoy doing is letting my companions know about objects or situations close-by with interesting attributes. My friends do the same for me. I enjoy observing situations, especially, but never trying to predict outcomes. I want the bandera to unfurl without suggesting I might know beforehand its colours.

A line cannot be drawn distinctly between citing an obvious object or situation and one that may be more obscure. Trying to find novelties in even the mundane is enlightening.

Failure to express appropriate and corresponding social or emotional reactions, such as when conversing or playing with others. For example, a child who shows little or no reaction, feelings or empathy to another child talking with them.

The article from which I am pulling these quotes uses examples with children often, as it is noted that these symptoms are often first seen in youth.

I think Christián has been exposed to a darker part of my personality more than most other people have. Drunkenness has pervaded much of our proximous relationship and drink can make my ego burn. I become much more self-absorbed. Christián, being a self-absorbed cunt in general, as well, usually encourages this behaviour with his own misogynist and misanthropic ravings. What remains is the memory of sociopathic rants both from myself and from him. I can certainly see how a lack of empathy towards other humans in general could be determined from multitudinous enjoyable yet insane hours together.

It is easy to confuse empathy with guilt at times. Is my sorrow for the woes of my faraway mother guilt or empathy? Is it empathy spawned from guilt? When is empathy on longer empathy but some secondary emotion spewing from a ruptured self-esteem?

It is true that I find it easier to feel empathy towards animals than towards human animals. I gather this is because I feel most humans have the ability to change their situation but elect not to. Then, they proceed to bitch and moan at length. I have little patience for such diatribe. Is this lack of empathy? I’ve been told upon thirty five billion, nine hundred seven million, eighty two thousand, four hundred and seventeen occasions that I am an intellectual elitist. How this coincides with having asperger’s, i cannot ascertain (if it is even true in the first place).

Restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as shown by at least one of the following symptoms:

A significant and encompassing preoccupation or obsession with one or two restricted topics, that is abnormal either in intensity, subject or focus (such as baseball statistics or the weather)

On this point, I could argue that Christián, himself, has asperger’s since the majority of times (again whilst sloshed), the only subject that gushes like a waterspout from his maw is of the evil and manipulative nature of women and how to tame them. This tendency asserts itself in Christián’s actions in other forms, as well. I have observed that he becomes obsessive about a certain band or small circle of bands and listens to them relentlessly for a time before moving on to another. I’m not sure this is a good example, but it is a trend that does not let up.

As I grow older, I do not lose my hair, but instead let fall away past foci. Fewer and fewer topics envelop my interest. I attribute this paring of hobbies or occupations to the ongoing press of time. My mortality presses its flattened palm down on my skull, pressing me into the softer and softer earth. It will bury me. I shall parish not by the flame death, but by simple stagnation.

When only the foreskin of my scalp in left to smell the air, there may be only one obsession left. What will it be, I wonder. Music?

Seemingly inflexible adherence to specific routines or rituals that serve little purpose.

I know I have a few of these, but none come to mind immediately. The majority of my time is spent avoiding routines, however, since their mere existence cause time to seem to pass at a pace that is uncomfortable. I follow the Tao, cariño, and strive to be as water. I flow without routine to the lowest places. I do not choose the past most easily navigated. It demands that i flow along it.

Routines have to exist to facilitate improvement in any activity, but shuffling the details of those routines helps to slug time in the paunch, make it pause for you. Everyone needs for their mortality to stub its toe now and again.

Morality, too.

The bridge would collapse even before he got half-way, Shambal thought. He’d been thinking the same for years. Realistically, he’d been crossing said bridge for years. On the way to the center, the point at which he figured the collapse would occur, he’d been collecting. His mother had always told him to goal in life is to collect.

To accumulate.

His feelings now were not just presentiments. He could actually see the absolute center. The apex was obvious because his life was a simple one: A series of crests, each of varying heights, that wore him thinner in preparation for a collapse at the peak.

In a sense, his life was only a half-bridge. He had no intention of descending in ease and good-humour the more or less descending second half. Nah. At the zenith was the place to climax. In slumber and in waking, that climax meant loosing every drop of accumulation.

His mother would have been proud at his accumulation. To accumulate is to be divine. So, in the proper manner of his fore-folks, and being the last in a long line of hoarders, the universe will welcome the imminent explosion. Possessions will rain down into the abyss. The wretched wraiths below will scrabble for the shattered pieces - the ones who are not pummelled by weighty debris.

His mother would have been proud, but she was dead. Or perhaps she is among the wraiths now, waiting to snatch greedily at the air as bits and pieces she once owned hail from the sky. If this is the case, Shambal can see her spittle run down a chin fouled by tough, white whiskers. She has that silver chain in her left hand. It fell directly into her left hand. The amber pendant swings listlessly. Two drops of spittle patter soundlessly in the dust.

Every crest on the way to the top has been a mini-goal of accumulation. At times, these accumulations have been literal, but mostly they consisted of filling empty vessels in his spirit with assembled stones. Once assembled, these stones were static. They did nothing but sat in his chest and on one hand augmented his stamina and strained muscles, but on the other weighed more than solely physically.

Easily, upon each crest, he could have lain stones aside. Then, at the apex, he could look back and see his marked progress. He could even colour each completed stone according to whatever aesthetic an individual climb had instilled in him. He never did so.

His discrete goals stayed with him as eventual burdens. And, as over each hill he went, to lay any of them aside seemed more and more of a task that to carry them all to the zenith.

Oh, what an explosion it will be!

Christián once again clarified his love of goals to me in a message a few hours ago. He had just left some sort of movie premier. Some of the actors (including Brenden Gleeson, woo hoo) were also there, and his titillation shown through even in messages. I resisted the urge to mock it. The urge was strong, however, since I have a deep hatred of star worship. The deification of celebrities is repugnant to me.

I can try to see it from Christián’s point of view. His apex, of course, is to be a successful, and therefore, famous opera singer. Or a rock singer. Or a writer. Or just about any sort of famous thing possible. I’d suggest to him to become a famous pursuer of sexual relations with goats, but he’d probably just laugh it off. Cunt.

He wrote this:

We seriously need to get our stories out there. The world thirsts for them.

And I replied:

It’s not really my objective to get my stories out there. the journey is much more important to me than any destination.

Impermanence pervades life. I admire the artists in San Sebastian who create sand sculptures and relish the moments when they are washed away by the tide. They build them purposefully below the tide-line. I respect these humans.

The idea of Shambal’s bridge is an echo of what I typed the other day about discrete points of life and goal-oriented living. I find it to be a terrible waste. To crush an existence to a number of points with the passages between being only means to those ends makes me at times literally weep.

I was raised like Shambal by a mother (and a stubborn, niggardly father) to create a life of discrete points. With what I have left, the journeys are for the savouring.

At times, phrases from songs have an astounding impact on me. For example, the subject of this entry is a line from a song from the Strawbs’s album Dragonfly. I am hearing this album for the first time in my existence. It is folky and predictable, but strangely nostalgic. Possibly, it recalls other Strawbs albums of which I used to listen often during the primeval years (1996 - 1999).

My mind shifts suddenly to Christopher Bender. We have not chatted in more than a week. The last few things I sent him could not have been decisive in any way, however, and I suspect he is a busy, house-purchasing boy. Yes, he is / has purchased a new house in Wellington.

A very vivid dream haunted me. Brynn had bought tickets for ME to see Bruce Springsteen in New Zealand. Time was short and my flight was leaving within weeks. I don’t think I was to meet her there. She simply supplied the tickets. Why New Zealand besides the fact that Bender-Boy lives there? Images of an unknown aeroport strobe in my mind. Most likely, it is a collage of images for multitudinous aeroports assembled into some haunting ideal.

I used to love aeroports.

Perhaps I still do. At least, I enjoy occupying them. The feeling of rivers sweeping round me as I sit with a beer at a pricey bar entices me. I used to write during these times. That gradually morphed into sending absurd messages to whomever might be willing to read and reply.

However, in an aeroport in London (Heathrow?), I awaited a flight to the states. I was sitting in a restaurant sipping (guzzling?) a beer and writing on Mustela-ermina. That laptop now sits in a chest-of-drawers in my ex-room in the ex-house of my dead grandmother. Had I it here, it would be running some sort of Arch.

In that restaurant, I wrote plenty. It is one of the last times I recall writing in such a situation clearly. I was overjoyed. Emotions rush back with such memories. I even rememeber, without searching for entries from that day in the Martenblog, that I was listening to one of the albums (probably the first) by Fripp and Summers. And I recall writing about listening to that album. Urk.

One of the last things I sent to Christopher was a link to a recent entry in the Martenblog. In fact, one from a week or so ago. I was still writing on my unnamed Raspberry Pi then. My mood has markedly improved. Creativity has not spiked, but my routine has subsumed it. Many improvements can be made, for sure, and for one I have not accomplished writing every day in the Martenblog. Nor do I practise guitar every day. I did manage a hurdle today, however, by doing so whilst Marisa was still in the house. It is Saturday, after all, and her days off work are filled with constant scurrying.

WORK

WORK

SHRIVEL

I’m not complaining because she did not bat an eye at me practising gueetar whilst she furthered damaging her back working in the garden. At this moment, she is in the trastero below rooting through whatever there is to root through down there, punishing the knotted muscles in her lower back even more. To be idle is not a state she desires EVER. Her finite state machine merges that particular state with to be asleep and to be watching a film.

I’ve put the aforementioned album on random play along with Brother Where You Bound by Supertramp (one I had not heard in several years and never actually appreciated in detail - not that I am doing so currently, as the majority of my mind is focused on the screen before me and words coursing from my bouncing brain to my fingertips). They make an awkward couple. Then again, I am a fan of awkward couples. If it is possible for the two to grow to inhabit each others’ lives in harmony, I belive such a coupling can be more fecund that one that starts simply on the same plot of earth. Harmony signifies mutual encouragement and cracks never forming that ooze emotional blackmail.

Fuck emotional blackmail.

Keep your mouth closed and embrace the simple life. You will live carefree until the end of your days. If you try to talk your way into a better life, there will be no end to your troubles.

For a great deal of my life, I have been a talker. I find that as the ages pass, silence is more and more my friend. I remember once what my friend Ellen once said in the common room of the house on Enfield. She said that especially when many people occupy a conversation, the space is too filled, too jumbled - heavy with words. She chose to stay silent. It is certainly better to try to sort through a tangle of threads than contribute one of your own to entwine among the others even more messily.

I have always preferred one-on-one conversations.

A rather elitist viewpoint could be this: The larger the group, the more the conversation tends towards the lowest common denominator. You’ve gotta keep the slowest dude up on things, don’t ya? Larger groups do split into smaller, intelligent clusters. I am a fan of this fragmentation. Still, most of the time, I sit alone with my thoughts, sorting through threads, occasionally disentangled from it all. I am oblivious.

I was accostomed to talking immediately about any topic assuming my brain would conjure a coherent flow. As the ages passed, I failed more and more. I became more and more quiet. Keeping my mouth shut was a large step away from my ego. Fuck my ego.

As I wrote recently, I am striving for a simple life. To exist only in the present is divine. This screen before me, beyond the keyboard sitting on the coffee table, is my lowly, burning campfire. A solitary pot sits atop it. Within the pot, a gruel is simmering. The result is unknown. The result does not need to be known. The process is more more important than the result.

I am learning that all things pass and accepting it. Watching my past beliefs crumble is satisfying. The satisfaction, however, is not a feeling of vengence in defeating the ideals my upbringing instilled in me. It is a slow contentment. I can pass the hours without time.

So, I used to be a talker. Is writing in this god-forsaken blog the substitute? An argument could be made for this point of view. The blog is, after all, online for all to read. Though I publish (but never advertise) every entry, the process is what moves me.

One result of writing has been poignant in my life. Like a medicine, it heals me psychologically. During the journey between the first letters and the last mark of punctuation, I am filled with a liveliness. Sleep is shrugged away. Apathy is kicked in the kidneys. Those kidneys fall out and are later eaten by British immigrants. An analogy is vomiting. No. That is not a very good analogy, actually. The process of vomiting is quite unpleasant. It is the antithesis of a healing process. My analogy is wrong. Please behead me. Or just take my kidneys and feed them to British immigrants.

The question of who Shambal is and what he means in my life floats amid the debris of countless other queries without worth. But to be without worth is to be weak. And to be weak is to conquer. Shambal is a vehicle. The fact that I took the original concept from Christián does not matter. His Shambal is a creature of virility. Mine is weak. In the end, he is absorbed by a stone. His insecurity and fears prey on him. But by being prey, his journey has more satisfaction. His end is desolation, but finality is the same as ceasing to exist. A goal oriented life is a life of discrete points. Everything between said points is meaningless to such a being. My Shambal is a creature of the moment. He is eternally on a roller-coaster. He is eternally on that roller-coaster because he never thinks about discrete points, of finalities. Therefore, he is always alive.

On Reddit a few minutes ago, a thread about Kurt Vonnegut piqued my interest. I shall re-acquire what siezed my interest and place it below this line.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

I like to look at Shambal like this: He is riding in a small bubble through a static universe. He has infinite places to visit and infinite time to visit them. The concept of rush or deadline or goal does not exist. In his context, they words are meaningless. In fact, my previous sentence including the word visit also has little sense. Discrete points are not available. Life is a fuzzy wave. Remembering is even not important.

Ride that wave, you bugger, and bask.

The room is dim but for my trusty blue LED lamp on the coffee table in front of me and the television which serves as the monitor for the Raspberry Pi I have not (yet) named. The fact that I have not named the beast is unusual. I have had an obsession with naming inanimate objects for the whole of my life. Well, that is an exaggeration, so I’ll proffer a good deal of my lifetime, instead.

The room is dim except for a lamp and a whitewashed television screen. Since instead of observing my surroundings, I was writing a sequence out of a tepid fantasy, the LEDs from the squarish alarm device more or less below the television also counts as a light emitting source.

And Dunaj has just begun on my headphones. ’Tis a thrilling song.

The room is pitch black if I purposely omit the influence of my blue, LED lamp in front of me and slightly to my right (let’s say at 72 degrees), the television sweltering with brightness directly ahead, and three, green LEDs on the face of the alarm apparatus. Consequently, the house telephone shows the time (20:50) in dim, bluish numerals (plus a colon) directly beneath the alarm apparatus.

The room is still particularly dim, however.

Between the minutes of 18.00 and 19.30, evening is slowly eaten by night. My senses dull along with this consumption as if the encroaching darkness nibbled at my forebrain. For as long as I can recall, this has been the case. One remedy is to, early in the process, provide artificial illumination of a modest to full spectrum variety.

My chump of a blue, LED lamp makes a mediocre job of it.

The room is dimmer, as the television, responding to the lack of stimulus fed from my unnamed Raspberry Pi when said pi itself receives neither stimulus from the keyboard at 88 degrees nor from the mouse at 74 degrees.

The last three days has had me listening to Ruins, especially the album beginning with the letters Hyder. I could look up the rest, but by doing so, I’d stimulate my unnamed Raspberry Pi and therefore the slumbering television. It’s response would be to vomit decidedly non - full spectrum light at me. No way, dude.

I had perused Ruins albums in the past and distinctly recall walking through Letna northwards on that tram-lined street that knew my steps so often. In fact, one song from the album Burning Stone is titled Praha in Spring. It grooves mightily. I must have been living with Habosh at the time, or with Pavel (was that his name?). I suspect the former, however.

Hyderomastgroning…

I have just been informed that in cinco minutos, más no something is going to occur. I didn’t quite catch was exactly that is going to be, but I shall conclude for the sake of my rancid navel.

Indeed, the bacon is frying amid cumin. I will always recall that Acy’s love of bacon is unequalled. Or at least WAS unequalled. I ponder at times whether it was the reason for Ramona’s departure. One of several, I suspect. Relationships are the gradual accumulation of disdain. Miniscule granules lump together to eventually be indistinguishable.

I am reminded of a conversation that Acy and I had in the back, screened-in kitchen of his place in Austin. (Note: A place that is missed - a fantastic place - one I regret I’ll never see again) I was probably cooking some sort of bratwurst and the topic of spinach came up. He comforted me in the thought that if I eat enough of it, I’ll die of vitamin a poisoning. Ha! How many cubic meters a day, Ace-man?

Regardless of his overreaching need to prove his correctness scientifically, Acy is charming and a person that I dearly miss. That bastard should come to Spain. Now!

A possibly viral incessant cough arrived in Marisa’s pecho last night. Now, she lies in bed, suffering. Her voice is nearly gone, ragged. It did not help that her children yesterday created a situation of nefarious stress. Miguel elected to take María and the perro (Uriel, no known as Charlie) to Ezcaray with the vehicle in which Uriel is forbidden.

Miguel seems to buck his mother’s wishes at every slight bend of the corridor these days. In my opinion, it is the direct result of his relationship with Andrea.

Andrea is a controladora, an only child on which attention was always heaped. She knows little of any other life. One is reminded that all of this is from my observations and therefore my opinion. I continue. She has Miguel wrapped in a shroud of fear - the fear of irking her in any manner whatsoever.

Yesterday, Marisa told me that María told her (yeah - indirection) that Miguel is afraid to speak out to Andrea’s face and that he retains his ire to explode upon his friends and family. Well, she only mentioned family, but I know from experience that anyone in a social circle that at any time excludes the perpetrator (Andrea, in this case) becomes a victim.

Marisa has also told me several times that Miguel is the stereotypical good son (cue the Sylvian tune). Whether this means, as the first child, he was babied during his life so far by his mother or just behaved ideally or a combination, I am not completely sure. The conclusion is, Andrea being his first serious relationship, his behaviour has remained the same, but the mother role has been transferred. If this is the case, she has total control over Miguel without the forgiving, understanding attitude of Marisa.

I search my memory for my adolescence. I could not tell anything of my own ire or even more miniscule feelings to my parents in fear of reprisal. The situation is similar, as they had no perception of leniency or forgiveness. I digress.

Marisa furthered her opinion by stating that Andrea is poison to the family, in general. I’d further this by adding to anyone she disapproves of in his life.

Somebody needs to slap that whore around.

I am sitting on my bed as Marisa softly coughs beside me. She is playing a game on her mobile. Perhaps it is Pet Rescue Saga or something similar. It entertains her. It relaxes her. She definitely needs it after the stress her children caused her today.

Also, I am downloading an image of Archbang linux to test. I am of the opinion that I will like it, being minimal and supposedly very quick, and shall replace Ubuntu on galictis-vittata. I’ll have that mustelid back in my arms on Monday or Tuesday. Well, so I hope. Bastards.

I realize that I will never know true silence. The ringing in my ears prevents it. Have I ever known it in my lifetime? Surely at some point in Fort Stockton, it presented itself to me. I spent much time on the outskirts of things, literally and figuratively. I’d gamble both of my kidneys, my liver, my larynx, left femur and all of the pine martens in Canada, however, with the assurance that in my casa in good ol’ Fort Fucking Stockton, Tejas, there existed to silence.

The television blared perpetually.

And usually it was American Football - a constant favourite. My days visiting my parents during the last years confirms my win in this gamble. Noise pollution from the tele punches forcefully through the door of my pseudo-bedroom and assaults me.

Deaf bastards.