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.

Now, inline images have always been a problem. What if the link doesn’t exist anymore? Well, I must maintain them in a proper place, then! I suspect that will be on the server itself. IE, the link will have to be local. Yessiree. So, let’s give it a whirl.

Now! Isn’t that lovely? I’ll find out the answer to that question in a few moments.

The simplest solution has now been implemented. Now I am off to gnash my teeth during my dreams.

Christian, in his infinite wisdom and silliness, typed the following to me on some sort of chat mechanism. The mechanism itself involves a type of grease-stained rodent not found in these parts any longer. In fact, all of the rodents are gone. One day, no one could find one. I’m surprised the mechanism survives and is still in working condition this evening. I mourn the loss of the rodentia.

BUT … Christian, in his infinite wisdom and silliness, typed the following to me:

My trust issues stem from my childhood, when my mother, or perhaps father, would suspend me for hours upside down with goggles in an aquarium filled with mildly carnivorous fish. One nostril was closed, while the other was “sealed” around a straw through which I breathed. The straw was just short enough so that if I relaxed my entire body it would become submerged. Then my mother/father/community would take turns flashing cards though the glass, with various words and phrases upon them, such as “mother”, “state”, “girlfriend”, “tuna”, and so on and so forth…

I’ll treat this as some sort of adolescent allegory. These happenings begin long before adolescence, however. They did for me, anyway. I suspect they did for Christian, as well. Brainwashing … I never heard that term until much later. I sat on a pew at church for many years. That church was the sort of aquarium that Christian is writing about.

The semi-carniverous fish are the thoughts vomited violently from the pulpit onto the congregation. Keeping stiff is my concentration. The congregation must not be left to their own thoughts. Were they to relax, the straw would dip beneath the surface. A nasty shock awaits when one’s breathing apparatus is occluded. I may have let the straw slip below a number of times. I probably received that nasty shock. My attention surely snapped back to the pulpit. Lapping up the vomit and chewing on its chunks was the only proper way.

The aquarium became more complex in high school. The impenetrable walls were the authority figures. Teachers were translucent enough to flash words and phrases at me. I had to mirror them. Otherwise, the fish were told to feast on my face. I had pock marks galore. Blood did not clot easily in the warm water, but flowed freely and further obscured the translucence of the maestras. My mistakes trebled. The feeding began once again. Finally, I was nothing but a fleshless skull.

That is me today.

I have just rewritten the script which slurps up new blog entries. This time, instead of whatever the first pattern was I used (lack of pattern at all - ie, haphazard?) or the prototype pattern, I have opted for the elegance of the module pattern.

Have I tested it?

No.

Is this entry part of the test?

Yes.

So, thirty or so minutes later, I have completed this so-called module pattern. The code can be seen here.

(here)

It is high time to begin translating the radiotracking software from Ruby on Rails to Sails (node.js). The funnel of the evening is sucking me towards sleep, though it is still early. Perhaps instead of spending my remaining waking hours peering around sagging eyelids and attempting to code, I’ll scoop out the innards of my sinuses, cartilage and all, puree it with olive oil, avocado and cashews, and attempt to feed it intravenously to the neighbourhood calico.

Pink kolmteist

A knife has sliced that blue dome and I watch the rift slowly heal.

Were I Shambal, which greatfully I am not, I’d sit in a bare room thinking. I’ve just started writing and I’ve already lied. The room is not completely bare. A low table sits off-center. A rumpled, stained, blue-white blanket is draped over one corner, splaying also about the floor. A dirty cushin or two or three lie about. Perhaps more are under the blanket.

I’ve always been amazed at the lengths he goes to to prove his asceticism. One would think that such a lifestyle properly taken on denied the possibilty of proving any appearances. The dim fire of ego still burns, I suppose.

The letter I received yesterday morning contained the quoted words above. I call it a letter because part of me pines for correspondence. I am definitely no ascetic. It was a mere note. Two scribbled lines. The break was between blue and dome. It was no surprise. Shambal has been babbling on for weeks about the sky cracking and letting in what he calls fumes from what he calls the mantle. I’m not convinced at his ravings. No one is.

Dopamine, my sphincter - the lengths you’ll go to rationalize your actions would amaze even Natascha.

Before I lay down on my wine-soiled mattress last night and closed my eyes and drifted into coma state, I wrote my reply to Shambal. I try to keep my replies cryptic. Sometimes I feel like it is a sort of competition. Who can out-crypt whom?

If you are wondering who Natascha is, I’ll elaborate for a few lines before my morning refill. I always felt deep pain and emptiness when I was around her. The fact that I’ve not had my refill yet may interfere with proper memories, however. Still, there was something. A gap, maybe? No, not in my memory, but in my feelings when she was around. When she was absent - as she always is now - I drew childish cartoons on one of my four tables with the chalks I kept around. I had blue, orange, green and white. They are used up now. Maybe that is why she is never around anymore.

All of my tabletops are bare of any covering. Sure, tins and metallic cups litter them, but most of the bark is exposed. All that remains of my cartoons are strange smudges in combinations of those colours. Now I cannot even concretely recall what it was I drew. Surely they had something to do with her. Maybe a caricature of her face or of one of her breasts or the discolouration on the inside of her right thigh. I fear she will be completely gone when even the smudges become a wash of nothingness.

My memory is poor enough as it is.

The simmering broth in the cauldron exhales the wafting fragrance of your woman’s bones and hide.

I sent my note off by courier in the morning yesterday.

This reply came almost immediately. I say immediately because time becomes transparent when memory has nothing to register. When spots or windows of this sort occur, I just assume nothing of interest happened.

The prototype version of blog_to_mongo is not grabbing topics, arranging them, finding their ids, and scrunching them into the topic_ids array of the entry in MongoDB. We’ll see if it is now and revisit this post shortly.

Excellent! I’ll consider this bug closed. Speaking of which, I need real bug tracking for these projects. I’ll defer to github, I guess.

(github)

My mothers insanity seethes about the house. It crawls and infests every nook and can of jellied cranberry sauce. Pleasant, it is not. She stood in the doorway of this bedroom at nigh nine o’clock this morning fuming.

This is why you have to live in the same place as us, Bob! I need help! He [Dad] can’t remember anything. He’s lost his mind. It is making me crazy.

Well, Mom, you already are crazy.

As I showered, I pondered what she said and her intentions behind it. My conclusion was as it always has been since I was a child. My mother seeks to imprison me. A cage it is, son! It is her unfaltering method. It is also the reason that Ben visits so rarely. Well, besides the fact that this is Seminole. (He once cited the place as a reason for his infrequent visits.) Given my mother’s way, I’d be living in West Texas, bereft of intellectual stimuli, rotting. Of course, she would not take into consideration (the conditional was not needed there) my mental state, but only hers. I once told her she was very selfish. I do not retract that statement.

I don’t blame it on her aging.

I followed up (unknowingly, at the time) on this morning encounter with a conversation with my father. Mom had gone to the doctor. Ostensibly, she has a bladder infection. I must admit it could have contributed to her mood.

Dad is very rational and down to earth when she is not around. Perhaps this is because the seething insanity is kept at bay. Or at least it is diluted, for I feel some remains in the woodwork, in the bricks and in the furniture and carpet even when she is away. It will remain even after she is in her grave. She may well have poisoned this place.

As an aside, I am reminded of what Christian has told me about his mother and subsequently his family. Perhaps it was better for him that she died early on. It may have saved him at least a portion of his sanity.

My mother, according to my father, is, of course, worried about my imminent relocation to Spain. She tends to create hyperboles from simple stories in her head and project them onto her surroundings. The victims are my father and I. If she thinks I am going to stay here and get a menial job (or even a telecommuting development position) in order to save her sanity, she is truly out of her mind.

Don’t throw away your life, Bobbus. Just don’t do it.