But you are a hologram.

Oh, you can believe that if you wish. It’s all the same to me. In fact, I can easily assume that you are also a hologram.

But I’m not made of well placed patterns of light. I’m made of sinews, various liquids, and a revolting stench which always precedes me.

You got that last part right, at least. Sit down with me. I’ll shut off the idiot-box. IDIOT-BOX. Don’t they call it that where you come from?

I don’t come from anywhere. I was a test tube baby.

I hope you see the contradiction in those two sentences.

You seem unreasonably chipper considering your woman left you for some other surely more pumped hologram.

I’m suppressing it.

Huh. Supressing it? Your words make me think back to a time when I sat in a restaurant / bar somewhere in Texas. A waitress named Samantha worked there. She had a bizarre tattoo on her ankle. I cannot at the moment recall what exactly it was. It was bizarre, however. Truly. Every time I (or one of my companions) would make an absurd comment implying we’d soon do something decidedly shifty, she’d say “Suppress it.”

You see? My presence is already stimulating your memory. Can you give me an example of one of these absurdities?

Yah. For example, I’d say to Samantha - “I have the intense desire to impale that drooling, wheelchaired, obese man on my salad fork.” And she’d say - “Suppress it.”

The creature makes a low grunt.

Or, Acy would state - “I feel the need to slather the mayonaisse from Jason’s burger onto the left leg of my jeans then rip their remaining tatters violently apart, leaving most of the lower half of my body naked and exposing to the clamouring restaurant clientele my uniquely extreme hairiness.” And Samantha would retort - “Suppress it.”

This Acy is not actually exhibiting a part of his personality in this description, but accessing the thread of the situation that surrounds him. Perhaps a better way to put it would be that he is joined with Samantha (and the rest of you) in a synergy. You are a mass of flesh and thought, unseparable. You see, individualism in unique humans does not exist. Only a sequence of a vast array of individuals exist that are contextual in nature. One dies and another is born nearly immediately. These various states of being are conglomerates. Your concept of individual misses that they are actually just one dimensional changelings who morph perpetually as they conjoin and retract.

The piano plays a recurring theme, though it is not excatly recurring. It is an example of who were are right now. We are wandering. We do the same things over and over without question. We are stained by the purpose. The purpose is to stay the same. We can create, whilst we are here, but nothing we create will last outside of where we are. It is a box. Sealed. To break out of what we are is to be not what we are. For the splinters may ahnnihilate us.

Shambal appears more tired than he’d ever seen him. His friend is weary beyond years. We are beyond years, he thinks. The disconsolate darkness we just left behind was our death - or our passing.

A feeling of loss crosses his face. Shambal notices, and like a yawn, begins to share the same expression. He sits erect in a wooden chair. It is time to begin asking questions.

We seem to be the only ones in our chosen place of beverage seeking.

But they both hear a shuffle from behind a translucent wall. A shadow shuffles, magnifies and recedes. Perfume wafts through the room.

You are wrong, as usual, you leprous swine. A serving wench will soon arrive to bring us surely anything we desire. I smell her stench.

You have no idea how much money threw into the void on sweet scents for my ex-woman.

Your EX-WOMAN? You sure she’s not around here somewhere, that Karla? Hey! Perhaps it is here behind yonder bulkhead!

Look, shitface. Don’t fuck with me. It was a learning experience. I’ve moved on. I’m a better person because of it.

The shadow flickers and flits, glides and morphs. A tentacle extends towards the partition. The partition is translucent. The tentacle seems to be an arm. The arm grows appendages. One begins tracing curves on the partition. Shambal’s jaw quakes.

If it is Karla, then she is about to pronounce the fate of my existence on yonder blue-green glass.

I don’t think it is glass, scum-boy.

No? It’s frosted something.

I think it is simply mist. Her fingers will poke through and trace caustic symbols. They’ll assail you with their power. You’ll once again become her slave. Maybe there’s another rock around here for you to get absorbed into.

A lone clarinet begins to play. It is a recording. They recognize that. The source is hard to discern, though. The sound seems to come from everywhere. Or perhaps it eminates from them.

A piano stumbles into the room. He thinks of a man shuffling. Each chord is a step. They are erratic. Instead of a determined straight line, the course zig-zags and turns without warning. The man reaches a barrier and must turn either right or left. He chooses one. Shambal breaks this reverie.

Is there only right or left? What if we had chosen one of those instead of straight? Would we not be here at this café, but instead still lost in the shroud? Do you hear the music?

I know the music. It is the music of constriction. We are constricted to worlds we have conceived throughout our lives. As we grow older, they grow smaller. Do you hear the piano? The chords are footsteps. Do you hear the right angles?

Shambal ponders this:

The steps are more even. The rhythm seems to have purpose now. At first it was like they were of a child learning to walk. Now that child is older. But now I hear that he repeats his steps again and again with only minor variations.

Yes, he retraces his path because he is constrained to a single world. He is in the process of creating that world. The occasional deviations are a fleshing out. Like all of us, we eventually carve a niche and stay only in that niche because safety, or should I say, security, is what we are created to crave from birth.

A pudgy sausage of flesh pierces the bulkhead. Or, rather, it appears to them that it does because the transluscence becomes wholly trasparent at that one point. The pinkish flab moves slowly at first, picking up pace and confidence with each stroke.

Backwards, from either incompetence or scorn, it is writing a menu for them onto the partition.

Discussions involving swabbing the anuses of one’s in-laws always lead to constructive conclusions. I’ve pondered many times in this journal and in many other tomes lying about about how my upbringing shaped me. Marred me, rather. I sometimes think whether I can put a positive spin on my childhood and how it affected my current personality.

I’d firstly like to say that it taught me resilliance. I was for years bombarded with scurrility from my so-called peers. Even my friends found negative reinforcement their favourite means of making a point. So, does criticism slide off me like, for example, boiling wax? If that is the case, then past wounds from said wax have become scars. I feel nothing when the taunts come.

However, I’d say this is more numbness than resilliance.

It’s more a function of growing older than learning from constant barrages to ignore insecure cunts who attempt to lower you into the netherworld with words of scorn. Simple writing / music / art / enunciation - bashing would break me into shards when I was a teen. Reassembly took days, even weeks when certain slivers flew to distant parts. I suppose somewhere along the way I found more cohesive glue.

I rebelled because I was offered no freedom of expression. Many things I did were looked on with suspicion. Poems I wrote in High School threatened to get me into counselling. Any view which pointed to the abstinence from religion tripped me up.

tripping me up …

My writing this evening is tripping me up. I stumble through the words and I am changing the subject because all the previous paragraphs have been covered ad nauseum. To what am I changing the subject? Well, I am changing the subject to the topic of changing subjects.

What does it mean to drift from position to position in my mind while writing casually about it? I’m typing as quickly as possible while still attempting to hold coherent sentences together with a glue which was not aforementioned in this entry. I should be proud that I am able to do such a thing without falling flat onto my pointed proboscis.

The television blares from the other room. My door is securely closed, but the noise lurches into my ears. It is distracting, dismaying and stiltifying. I know it brings my parents comfort, however, just as religion does.

We are back to conformity! Dogma! Living by a set of rules is easier than creating one’s own principles to adhere by. I have a book that tells me what I can and cannot do, otherwise there is anarchy, eh? I don’t despise all dogma, but I am deeply suspicious of it. Vague philosophy seems more suitable for my life than concrete rules.

I’ve held this belief since my early teens, though I am sure I never articulated it in the manner I just did in the previous paragraph. In fact, I’d like to read something I scribed back then. Sure, I’d most likely find it daft, but it would be telling at least of my budding brain’s processes. When I stretch my memory back to when I was twelve or thirteen, the bare bones impressions cannot possibly be accurate.

Flashes.

The flashes can be assembled, but make little sense in the context of sitting on my bed even in Seminole at this moment.

Were I able, I’d absorb all of the memories this bed has, for I have been contained in it intermittently for over thirty years. I could sop it all into my spongy brain. Once the next millenium rolls around and external brains are common, I’ll be sure to upload everything pertaining to this bed into it, tar and bzip it up and share it on whatever the equivalent of Dropbox is.

Sucking information directly from objects would make creative writing unnecessary. Lists of objective facts will replace the novel. Imagination will become unnatural, even disdained. See that external USB drive? It’s a brain. When it makes contact with that water bottle you found in a trash heap in yonder alleyway, it will reveal the physical contact of the transient who was blind drunk sprawled atop it.

He didn’t even feel the crunchy lump of plastic under him as he clutched the teenage prostitute to him. Even though she was on top, his strength was too much for her. Even in the abyss of his intoxication, his body strived to pry her existence from her corporeal form.

The brain, later plugged back into the universal network, reveals the identity of the filthy transient. Over the next weeks, he is hunted down. When finally found in a slum near Olomouc, he is praised, given gifts of myrrh and osmium, and installed in a tenement. A small sum arrives at his door every Tuesday.

Thinking back, the transient who is no longer a transient considers the bare-bones reconstruction of that drunken night. He only comes up with blurs and flashes. Finally, he can only be content that he ridded the universe of another teenage floozy.

His name, of course, is Shambal. He goes into the kitchen to make a sandwich.

Pink Kolmteist

On slowly sloping hills where mägi house themselves, the grass grows in arbitrary blotches.

Shambal clutches the blanket around his shoulders with one hand. The other holds an old, wilted journal open between his legs. The stained blanket falls all about him. It’s his only protection from the chill. His proper clothing has long since rotted in the closet without a door. The resulting nest is a home for a mouse named Murida. She is saved for another story, however.

The entry in the journal he keeps rereading reminds him of those blotches. A hill with twin cemeteries rises above a town in his mind. The town is like a village, even if over one hundred thousand occupants might say otherwise. To Shambal, village is a spirit that inhabits a place and not a measurement of area or population.

He wants to trasform his putrescent blanket into new and shiny threads so he can board the train round the corner. He’d order a glass of white wine. He’d order another. He’d smoke a cigarette in the dining car. Later on a bit, he’d vomit into the rattling toilet. These thoughts are happiness to him.

He clutches the cloth tighter to his body. It is a new skin plastered to his old one.

If a blue flag (fluttering) means safety and a green flag (furled) signifies capitulation, then which flag (and which state) denotes synergy?

On each grave in the muslim cemetery is a green flag. Death is a sort of capitulation, after all. He squats in front of one and speaks in a low voice in a language the stone knows. The flag shivers. The grave denies him entrance.

He’d be buried there. That, rather than dissolving into a salty sea, he muses. He wants to turn the page of the journal, but is unable. He wants to board the train. It may be too late.

If this is his elongation, then he partially understands why the page cannot be turned. He is left to scrutinize the words and creep down the page more and more slowly. Surely there is a haiku at the end. They are his curse, those wretched poems. The lower half of his face cracks into a smirk when he realizes that he’ll never have to finish it. Lastly, he’ll be floating between the particles of penmanship of the final syllables.

Perhaps a fusion of consciousness is the summation of these eternities.

Shambal gets up to make a sandwich.

He uncrosses his eyes for a moment, then lets them drift back out of focus. For a few seconds, he clearly saw leaves in varying shades of green moving in slender lines like serpents rolling and squirming. Those reptiles took some hallucinagen or other. He thinks of ferns and then the fibbonacci sequence. Blotches of sloppy green swim in spirals in front of him.

He wants to stand. He tries to stand. The trap around his ankle does not allow him to. He settles back, wishing to regain strength.

Nataša had told him that she’d still be dying when he was crawling along the sand to have a final conversation with the sea. She had also told him which piece of music would be most delightful for his final journey. Naturally, in a purely Nataša-like way, she followed up with a disclaimer.

Since your final song will stretch into a widening eternity, you’ll have to choose wisely.

He smiles despite the pain in his ankle. He always felt smitten, confused or both when talking to the dissolved girl. He continues replaying the conversation in his thoughts.

A widening eternity? What does that mean? How can an infinity grow?

Though he saw her femurs melting and skin was flaking and drooling from her torso, she smiled. It lit up in his hara. A recurring thought came to him. Was this what Shambal was so apeshit about? What about the hide of my woman? What about Nataša’s dissolving skin? At the time, possibly because of the warmth in his hara, he did not think to fill his water bottle from the pool. She had replied.

Eternity is just an encapsulation of all that is. Beyond does not exist. In this case, your consciousness is what is. All that is. As you crawl along the sand with your fettered ankle dragging behind, and with a spritely companion bounding round you, the expanse of all that is - meaning you - stretches. You are never meant to reach its end. We are all immortal in this manner.

He lurches forward into the fern petals. Soft earth underneath gives easily to his fingers. He imagines worms carousing just below his fingertips. The soil is surely laced with ethanol. He knows the forest will soon break.

He begins to crawl.

Pink Kolmteist

The girl in the turquoise skirt comes again to flitter in the mindless breeze across my viewscreen as I haughtily ignore her.

A part of me considers Shambal a prophet. I despise prophets. A girl in a skirt so bright that I am blinded whilst trying to scope her legs walks by in intervals of approximately 13 minutes. Her earrings are also turquoise. They swing most likely to the beat that pulses through the earbuds above them. She cannot possibly be trotting to the rhythm, though, as her steps are erratic. Perhaps she is tipsy. I wouldn’t be surprised. After all, I am.

She never looks at me. I’m not too bothered since I consider myself at least transluscent, if not already completely transparent. If I am becoming like Shambal, it’s not really my fault. He is infectious. I’m not just talking about the sores on his skin.

I think he was referring to this girl in his last note. So, I must be haughty and ignore her. She ignores me, as I already mentioned, so my task is not difficult. She is not a replacement for Natascha, but an eidolon of Natascha. The corporeal are the real wraiths - especially to us ghosts. I said I am at least transluscent and I meant it.

She comes round again, shuffling on the sidewalk in the gait of a crippled goat. I concentrate enough this time to examine her legs. They are healthy enough. They are smooth and creamy. I’d reach out to touch, but I’d be disappointed that my hand wouldn’t just pass through. I fantasize this is a time loop. She experiences the same circuit around the park. Her death and rebirth are at the moment she passes a few metres in front of me.

The thought makes me feel Godlike. I think of Shambal and laugh. The girl is either out of earshot or ignores me. Or perhaps the corporeal cannot hear the transluscent.

Percussive shouts from muted strings beg tension from the illicit calm.

I’m actually sinking into the bench. If I don’t rise at some point soon, I’ll become one with it and forever be a part of this place. At least the skirted girl will be with me, though she won’t know it. Her stumbling steps make more sense on each revolution.

They have a pattern.

Every time one of her sneakers touches the concrete, a claw squeezes my brain. It’s attached to a wrist and forearm. They protrude from the upper back of my cranium. Farther back, there is a body. Atop perches a misshappen, slightly ovoid head. A smile cracks its lower third, but there are no other features.

The claw squeezes every time a sneaker hits the concrete. The squeal of strings played by an incompetent violist shouts from my neurons to the tips of my extremeties. Try as I might, I can’t even suppress an erection.

Shambal reclines wearily in a grimy chair. It’s wooden frame creaks as he shifts uncomfortably. The hempish fabric still holds, even after decades of wear. A large WAD of lipids bulges from part of his right buttock. Many of its cells are mutated. Shambal has waited too long to have it removed without consequence.

He’s been told it’ll grow at a linear rate. The discomfort he feels now will increase, but he won’t feel anything but minor, occasional throbs for years to come. His conclusion is not to deal with it until then. If it eventually comes to suicide, by that time, he’ll have most, if not all, of his personality archived on his three dynos. They are safe for the forseeable future. They will be safe for the life of the moon.

The thing at the biological foundation explained the only alternative to surviving with the WAD. His lower body can be removed. He’d be fused to a mobile rig. Thoughts of such a future make him balk. He shudders. He’d asked boldly Would I still be able to breed? The answer was no. That part of his life would be in the past.

Shambal couldn’t deal with that. He likes fucking.

Choosing a washed out photo seems most appropriate considering my personality is washed out. My colours are faded. I am not distressed. I am just fatigued. Historically, Ruidoso brought relief from the searing cultural dearth of West Texas. How an artistic, progressive community grew up there still amazes me.

I’m happy to be surprised. My opinion of the good ol’ USA sank so low during all my time in Europe that it may be found cerca de la torre enterrada in Del Aire al Aire by Pablo Neruda. So, when an oasis is found in this artificially scarred land, I am pleased.

My mother perpetually prods me with a sort of emotional blackmail. She needs me to live near. They are getting old, you see. You better believe it, I see. Age ripens to a delicate point, and then rot ensues. She blurts time and time again that she’ll even find a place for me to live in Ruidoso. Three and a half hours by car away from Seminole is not far enough.

Still, an allure remains. Accessing my faded imagination, I see myself in a small apartment somewhere near Sudderth Drive, whiling the hours and days away at a tiny desk. I’d write. I’d program. I’d read. I’d probably drink. I’d stay away from the casino - that is for certain. Well, except for playing blackjack or three card poker.

(SudderthDrive)

As a failed romantic, I still find allure.

Café seats would hold me firm to the wooden floor. Coffee, wine and beer would accompany as I scribbed in a leather-bound tome I found in some curio shop. My hair would always be uncombed, falling unevenly across my forehead and into my eyes. My clothes would be mismatched and weathered. I’d become a village staple - a known but unknown introvert who drifts in and out of cafés and casinos, bars and diners. I’d be seen on trails webbing the hillocks and miniature mountains encasing the valley. My tent would be pitched occasionally in remote clearings. I’d have a ferret. Most likely two.

I fade further. My skin dries and cracks. My dusty trail boots sit in the corner, uncleaned, for weeks at a time.

The cards call me and I am there daily. Perhaps I am tipsy. Still I play. There is a horror lurking in the future. Bleakness is my shroud. Yet, I am still not dead.

Some days I win. Most I lose. I put back enough to purchase booze, victuals and enough petrol to get to and from the casino. I assume by this time, my rent is not an issue, nor is internet. Hey - it’s the future, after all.

I look at reality before me as if through slats.

By now, I have finished my two novels. I have sent them to publishers. One is rejected. One sells moderate amounts. Money trickles in. Money is sieved away. When I read through parts of the books, I don’t ponder on the meaning of what I wrote, but on the situations around me when the words splattered from my fingers onto the page. Id est, I submerge into nostalgia. Those visions torment me. I write in my blog / journal / diary about them. They are now part of this.

I recall writing about the future I am now living and search back through my blog / journal / diary and find this entry. It burns as I swallow. I drive out to buy vodka. I return and write about what I wrote.

I am a shadow.

A few days ago, I began to read the novel Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. So far, it has been enlightening. As with any psychologically spun book, there are parts I’ve pondered before and others I’ve failed to.

Like most of our sweat glands, those in our palms respond to stress as well as temperature – which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous.

In the introduction to the book, he described an experiment where four decks of cards, two red and two black, were chosen from. Yeah, a top card from each. Players learned, consciously, after maybe eighty cards, that the red decks, though payoffs were good, were mas o menos awful. The losses offset the gains by a wide margin. The blue decks were more moderate in gain/loss, but the former gradually came out on top.

It took the subjects approximately eighty cards to realize this… consciously. However, intuitively, they began favouring the blue decks only after ten cards.

The book is about exploring semi-immediate unconscious (or, should we say *pre-conscious?) decision making.

As I am in Ruidoso at the moment with my parents, I thought I’d try to explore the idea during my bouts with the gambling machines. Yeah, today (and yesterday), I have only participated in amusement with automatons. I’ll get to the blackjack possibly this afternoon or zítra.

Clammy hands were to tell me when to stop one machine and migrate to another. Now, I understand that these games are pseudo-random, so the pre-consciousness cannot gauge in the same manner that it might an actual card game, but what the hell, eh?

In the past, I have had an intuition about slots that led to magnificent success. In Hobbs, approximately a week ago, I played the Bombay machine and felt a tittilation even though I had not won anything substantial. Call it superstition or just plain stupidity, but within twenty minutes, my grease dripping fingers clutched over one thousand grubby dollars.

I have not been successful on the slots in Ruidoso.

My hands, at this very moment, are becoming clammy thinking about it. Usually, money is not a source of stress for me. It may be emotional transference from my parents. They are perpetually stressed. They feed off of it. That is another story, one that has surely been told at various other places in this journal. (I laughingly call it a journal).

We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.

Job interviews directly relate to the point made here. Another experiment detailed in the book described impressions from close friends of twenty or so college students contrasted with impression from strangers allowed to visit each of the students’ dorm rooms for fifteen minutes.

As the avid reader may have guessed, the latter group did very well at assessing certain aspects of the students’ personalities.

I believe that if Steve from Stonecrop had been allowed to root through my room in Brighton for fifteen minutes instead of interviewing me personally, I’d have never got the job. Close encounters for which we prepare never reflect a great swath of our personalities. Most of those creeping, oozing, flatulent aspects are locked soundly away in a box underneath our hypothetical beds.

I turned out to be a cantankerous cunt in my work. Oh, I did good work, yes, but I questioned most everything the management tossed my way. The entirety of my employed life has been similar, as was my school days. The fact that the hierarchical organization of Stonecrop was rife with stupidities is neither here nor there, Miss Pan-theistic.

I am quite sure that Steve would have rooted around in my privates instead of bellowing at me for thirty minutes about the structure of the company and the application of which they were so proud, he wouldn’t have considered me as a candidate. Oh! My smile is charming! My room in Brighton, however, was not.

Relating directly to the quote above - most IT companies give new employees a three month probation period. This is the time and effort to see whether a new employee fits. Gladwell argues that rooting through someone’s privates would be just as effective and prevent the random tossing about of the company’s dinero.

I’m not complaining about the method they used, however, as some of that dinero which floated about on the apathetic air will secure me diggs in Logroňo.

For a marriage to survive, the ratio of positive to negative emotion in a given encounter has to be at least five to one.

I could pour through my journals for hours, days, months and decades to validate the next claim, but my intuition tells me that I’ve only had three relationships in my lifetime which fit this criteria.

• Kierstinn
• (Blonde) Dana
• (Brunette) Dana

I left all three of them for other women. See! I am a masochist. The women who cut into these relationships, finally shearing them from my life, were insecure, sadistic and inflexible.

One portion of Blink describes a marriage. The couple were invited into a lab for to have a fifteen minute chat in front of a camera. The conversation mostly concerned their dog. The husband did not want the dog. The wife did. The husband related reasons, but always backed down. He’d go on and validate the wife, but she’d never do it back for him. She was inflexible.

The ratio of negative to positive in my relationships other than the three mentioned was far more than the pithy number one.

As I was spinning about Hobbs with my parents today, waiting at counters for photos in Wal-Mart, and sitting stabbing at apathetic buttons in Zia Park casino, I was simultaneously in a Google hangout with Sir Christián Neumann. He needs no introductions. He is truly the excrement from the most foul of Swine. Still, one cannot choose one’s friends, correct?

Correct.

So, taken that given into consideration, I enjoyed our banter thoroughly. He is, at this moment, visiting his Bro in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He informed me the other day that this city / town / village / burg / whatever is a, and I quote, shithole. I have personally never been there, but my trust is with this friend, no matter what transgressions he has in his past.

It is, after all, Xmas time, so even the downtrodden, poor, raped and beaten should be fed with scraps from the barrel. They may drink from the aluminum cat bowl. They won’t mind the sodden pet treats bobbing about the surface, slowly dissolving.

Back to the main theme.

My friend is staying with his Bro and his wife. The latter is from Poland, which is a small, ineffectual state somewhere near Mongolia. No wonder she dug for that gold, found Christián’s Bro, and bounded over stateside. Yes sir ee.

My friend wrote me the following.

So far, I have been informed that when I use the coffee machine, I should empty the grains right away, or else when she makes coffee, hers tastes like mine.

I am guessing that the Polish Wench has a very specific taste in coffee. Or rather, she brews her own brand. Maybe no one else is allowed to use her brand. This is a possibility. I know that Mr. Neumann is not that picky. Be that as it may, the clear solution is to do what I do and make coffee Turkish style in a pot on the stove. Yes! Burble it up nice and strong. I love the feeling when the grains are still stuck to the back of my teeth hours after my final cup.

Then…

Every time the Polish Cupcake is creating her own private concoction, and during the brief moments when she is distracted enough by whatever other housework occupies her tiny mind, spike hers with a bit of the Turkish mud. And every day, spike it with just a little more.

The process will be a slow one.

My friend is very patient, however, and he knows persistence is the true virtue in any magnificent achievement. As the days pass, the Polish Lollipop will begin to change. Turkish coffee takes its effect. Firstly, he’ll notice she has shortened minutely. Her pale complexion has darkened. The corneas yellow.

This is all a gradual process.

As Christián incrementally raises the dose, her subserviance will rise proportionally. Eventually, the posession, if I may call it that, will be complete enough that her demands will only bob about the shallow surface of her consciousness. She’ll not have the will to voice them.

And at last, they will dissolve completely.

Now for a photo of a creature living with the subject of this ponderous essay. For reference, a reflection of a houseplant can be seen on the shiny surface of the table.

I was nicely questioned on whether or not I opened the blinds in my room when I got up to let the plants have some light … Something she does every morning.

I suggest buying heat lamps. Position them strategically about the room to give the plants maximum exposure. Four or five per plant is recommended. Since the bedroom will become inadvertently suffocatingly warm, I’d also advise opening all of the windows. Tie them, or better yet weld them open to make sure enough fresh air flows through the room to counteract the effects of the lamps.

This procedure also has an additional advantage:

Wild animals can enter the room during the night. They will have a better opportunity to explore their relationship with humans and domestic animals (see photo above). I predict that their adaption rate will increase exponentially. Soon, the Neumann house will be a central point of symbiosis. Conservation scientists from all rounded corners of the earth will flock to Myrtle Beach to observe and experiment.

My friend’s enterprising spirit will come alive! Cottages will spring up on beaches, in alleys and amid ditches along the highways. The scientists have to have places to rest their weary limbs and ponder the complex interactions brought about by, originally, the Polish Jelly Bean’s house plants.

Then I was asked whether or not I wanted any hangers, as she laughed and watched me put my ancient t-shirts into the drawer. So, she said you’re gonna put your clothes away like THAT? YOU’RE GONNA LOOK LIKE YOU JUST CAME OUT OF THE DOG’S MOUTH!

Well, firstly, what exactly is so bad about a dog’s mouth? Sure, it vomits. Yes, and it masticates its own feces occasionally. I’ve even seen a dog lick up a human’s vomit. Ingesting a grand amount of bacteria routinely over time can be nothing but good for you. The dog’s body is surely more healthy than the average American’s. America!! Germ free America! The country of anti-bacterial gels in cars, trucks, and restaurant bathrooms. I’ve seen dispensers beside coffee machines in gas stations. I bet there are at least eight in the casino (and a small casino it is) I was in today.

The Polish Prickly Pear probably pretends the puppy’s playfulness is not so disgusting when the beast shows its affection by licking the Polish Bear Trap’s face.

Oh…. hangers. I also put my t-shirts in a drawer, usually. Well, in Boston, they were always in a cardboard box because I did not own a skřín. They were folded there, however, which is in the spirit of Christián’s method.

Then she explained to me that, you see, you don’t have to iron them if you hang them UP right as they come out of the dryer.

I don’t recall ever seeing my friend iron a shirt. I can imagine him doing it and in the imagination, he is wearing a sexy, orange apron. One of my exes, let’s call her Jana One because that is what everyone called her back in the day, had a mother who ironed just about everything. She even ironed kapesníky! Slap the shit out of me and call me a utilitarian as I stare up at you from the concrete floor wiping dribbling blood from my chin, but that just about out-anal-retentived anyone I knew at the time.

My solution here is for my friend to use the closet for his lettuce experiments of yore. Yes! I miss those days when I’d come back to Rostej’s flat (my flat, too, at the time) and be bowled over by the reek when I opened the door. Two huge vats of vodka were simmering on the stove. They also contained Lactuca Virosa or Seriola. Olfactory memory is powerful. I step back into that filthy flat as I type.

Our talk of subserviance yesterday (or was it the day before?) reminded me of an ego that permeates Western Culture. I step up and he steps down. I squash his face with my boot. I smile. He wears a frown.

Why are those who are subserviant seen as a lower class? Sometimes they are pitied. At other times, they are mocked. What if the slave takes joy in serving the so-called master? What exactly is the problem in that?

This feature of our culture reminds me of fundamentalism. I see you as subserviant, so I try to convince you that you must pull yourself up by whatever means (usually psychologically) so you can reign instead of the oppressor.

Be it your wife or girlfriend or boss or parent.

What right do I have to tell you what you have to do to make a better life for yourself? Ok. Let’s police the world in order to make it a better place. Let’s police people psychologically to redeem them from whatever may, in fact, make them happy.

Er, right.