Asylum, Chapter Six

"Reverend Thomas, are you alright?"

"Yes, Lord be praised. It seems the demon of reckless negligence didn't manage to claim any of the sheep today, fortunately."

"I'm so glad you are alright, but what happened?"

"I was just stopped for the red light. I come this way every other Saturday on my way from the West Block Mephitical Choir's charity for families of Hansen's Disease Victims. You know it's a terrible affliction, Hansen's disease. It's..."

"Yes Reverend, I'm sure. But tell me about what just happened."

"Ah, yes. I was just stopped at the red light, and as I pass here often I know the red light comes out later than it should, so I stopped in time. And then there was a red car behind me and at its wheel was a lady dressed as to embody sin itself. When she saw me stop for the light, instead of doing the right thing she just pushed the gas pedal and flying she went past. Too many times a good family, and loved by God, is ruined by this new habit of just pushing the gas pedal and flying past when you instead should stop and attend to the word of the Lord. For it is said in Corinthians 'Thou shalt not push the gas pedal and fly past when there is My word to be heeded'."

"It is?"

"Of course it is."

"I'm sure you know better Reverend, but what happened to the woman?"

"Well, as she went past I lifted my eyes in silent prayer so the Lord keeps any harm away from this poor soul lost in the fog of self centered adulation of the golden idol. Too many times a young man, or indeed a beautiful young lady, is ruined by this new habit of ignoring anything around and just blindly following whatever dark forces take hold of them. One should always stop and consider the implications of their actions, and even words, to the good people around them, and only do legitimate, good deeds to please the Lord who, in his mercy, created the entire world as a garden and let us inherit it and make the best of it by living his word."

"Amen. But how did the car end up there in the window?"

"As the girl sped past me, the traffic light changed and there was a minivan coming at it from the right, and she steered left to avoid it, but then she noticed another car coming from up ahead, because she was on the wrong way by now, so she steered even more left trying to turn around. The car went on two wheels and then started sliding. Luckily, the car coming from ahead did manage to brake in time, so at least they didn't collide. But she went sliding into that window."

"Oh my god, the poor woman!"

"She was perfectly alright after, she came out of the car, cursed and tried to fix her hair in the side mirror, which was by now at just the right height, then cursed continuously until they came and arrested her."

"Arrested? For a traffic accident?"

"At first the trooper asked for her license, but she just kept cursing, and then made for the poor man, nails first."

"She didn't!"

"She did a lot more than that, and I am surely glad there were no young ones to witness her wicked ways."

"Oh dear. It was that bad was it?"

"Oh yes, even worse."

"Hello."

The man just stood there, as if they were all in his living room the morning after a party, and the fact he didn't know them didn't change the fact they were drinking his brandy.

"Hello", answered the Reverend. "I think I must have seen you before Mr..."

"Probably."

Ralph managed a barely audible "Hi", while pondering what sort of person was this, obviously not even registering that he was interrupting a conversation of people he didn't know at all, in the middle of the street.

"I heard Frankie got herself in trouble again, surprisingly."

"Who is Frankie?" the Reverend and Ralph formed a nice chorus.

"Well... see that red car over there, the one just pulled from the window? How do you think it got there?"

"There was an accident earlier."

"Yes. Frankie."

"Oh you mean to say you know the lady who was driving?"

"Was there a lady driving?" the man looked amused and faking surprise.

"Yes, there was. Blonde and tall ,in a very low cut white dress."

"Well, I will be sure to mention it to her ladyship. She will be delighted."

Ralph had the uneasy feeling the stranger was mocking Reverend Thomas. The Reverend himself didn't seem to notice.

"So, since you were at the scene, what sample of creative driving did lady Francine grace the public transportation network with?"

"I was just stopped for the red light. I come this way every other Saturday on my way from the West Block Mephitical Choir's charity for families of Hansen's Disease Victims. You know it's a terrible affliction, Hansen's disease. It's..."

"The what?" the man suddenly seemed on his guard, as if suspecting the Reverend was about to pull a fast one.

"Hansen's disease?

"Oh never mind. Can we get back to what happened?"

"Ah, yes. I was just stopped at the red light, and as I pass here often I know the red light comes out later than it should, so I stopped in time. And there was the red car behind me. When she saw me stop for the light, instead of doing the right thing she just pushed the gas pedal and flying she went past. Too many times a good family..."

"She's not married."

"Sorry?"

"What's family to do with anything, girl is not married?"

"But I am."

"Good for you. So?"

The Reverend looked shocked. Ralph was eying them both with uneasiness... the Reverend was known to be a short tempered man, and once, years back, he got into such an argument with the bride's brother at a wedding he presided that they ended up in a brawl. The Reverend had a black eye for two weeks on account of whatever article of faith was discussed.

"See, that right there is the problem with today's America."

"What, the fact she ain't married?"

"No, the fact that there is no respect left for traditional values, and family foremost. This country wasn't built by people in red cars. It was built by people who worked hard and respected their neighbors and went to church every Sunday, and indeed sent their children to Sunday school. And that at a time when everything was scarce and expensive. A pair of shoes to go to church would maybe cost half year of saving on beans, and yet nobody went to church bare footed. And after all that effort and sacrifice to build a land where their kids could be proud to live, off comes a bunch of idle drifters to poison the young generation with red cars and fast driving and fast living and forgetting the word of the Lord."

"So, basically you would have people eating beans and going to church every Sunday to peer at everyone else and comment ceaselessly on all sorts of vague details, from their dress to their favorite book?"

"No, that is a thing of the past. But reading the Bible is not. And going to church is not."

"For all you know, the girl does go to church every Sunday."

"If she would go to church it would show in more considerate behavior."

"Ah, so your point is not going to church at all, it's rather behaving as if she did?"

"I don't understand..." the Reverend seemed puzzled, and that's something Ralph didn't remember ever seeing before.

"You didn't like the girl's behavior because you figure it could easily have injured you. From that you decide her behavior should be, and therefore is, unacceptable in an universal way. As it happens, the universe is very unconcerned with your well being, and even less with your ideas about how it should be working."

"But..."

"And the very reason you even insist on people going to church comes from this as well. It's a sort of association of the weak. Normally to interact with others you have to be valuable. To buy something you need the money. To get a job you need the skills. To make friends you have to be interesting. To get married you have to be seductive, even. What you try to achieve is to replace this system with a sort of badge of membership. Now suddenly you could make friends even if you are not interesting. And maybe you could get a job even if you lack the skills. And get married without being even a shade above boring."

"Without some form of that temperance, it would be a jungle out there."

"And you suppose the tigers would mind?"

"Probably not, but not everybody is one, or can be one. What would all the other people do?"

"That I don't know." replied the man with a blank gaze.

"Oh, I'm late for my visit to the Evening Star Nursing Home. With all the commotion I had forgotten what day it is." The Reverend said, just as Ralph was getting desperate for a way to separate the two gentlemen before it came to choosing weapons and such.

"It has been a pleasure Mr..."

The man just shook the hand the Reverend extended and turned to Ralph.

"Good bye Reverend Thomas," Ralph said, but the Reverend was already a couple yards away.

"So the lady driving the car is a friend of yours?" attempted Ralph while turning back to face the man's even gaze.

"Not very sure, but we have known each other for a while now."

"Oh, by the way, my name is Ralph", said Ralph extending a sweaty palm.

"Nice to meet you, Ralph", said the man, still gazing evenly at the nervous man in front of him. "What brings you to this part of town?"

"There is a new and interesting club that opened around here recently, and I was trying to find it."

"A club? Didn't figure you for the clubbing type, actually."

"Yes... well... not that kind of club."

"They come in kinds now-a-days?" the man seemed yet again amused and faking surprise.

"I don't know much, just got a leaflet in the mail, but I'm thinking maybe it would be a nice quiet place to meet new people. I hope to meet others who, like myself, would like to put the time into making friends."

"Making friends as a deliberate act?" the man seemed genuinely surprised for once.

"You wouldn't think it takes that, I suppose. Certainly as a kid you aren't ever told it would come to it. Then again, as a kid you aren't ever told you will never be famous. Or even nearly infamous. Or the president of the United States. And still most people never do get to be the president. I suppose that's unavoidable, there being only a few of them every decade. Yet it does come to it. If you don't put in the time to make friends, you will just go for more shopping anyway."

The man just looked at Ralph for a long moment.

"Do you mind if I join your search then?" he asked eventually.

Continued

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Asylum, Chapter Seven »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Monday, 27 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Asylum, Chapter Seventeen

Peggy tossed the magazine carelessly on the table and sighed. After staring at it and the rest of the stack it had almost joined for a moment, she rose from the sofa and walked aimlessly about the house, searching for something to occupy herself with. She had been avoiding the club, looking almost desperately for other things she could do to make changes in her life. The magazine had been part of that quest, one of those too glossy fashion things, but she still couldn't really see the point of all the paint and mirrors.

Yesterday she had gone shopping and discovered that she had no idea what sort of clothes to buy to be 'in fashion' these days, and to her surprise when she had decided to try things on she took a size larger than she recalled. That was enough to send her looking for a gym to join, another mistake for sure, the three places she checked out were all pretty much the same. Reception desks manned by impossibly thin and scantily clad young men and women, mazes of bewildering machines that resembled medieval torture devices, and other patrons that didn't look like they had ever really needed a workout and were just there to show off their gorgeous tans and display the latest workout fashion, very similar to the stuff they had for sale at the front desk of course.

In the end, she retreated to the more familiar ground of a bookstore, there she bought the current rage in diet and exercise books, all three of them, and the stack of fashion magazines that now graced her coffee table. The diet books were on her nightstand, she had tried to study them last night but gave up in the end, the advice in them struck her as just plain nutty, she would stick to the methods she understood, cut the calories and get more exercise.

With that thought she realized that she was wasting time, wandering about looking for something to do, and set off to start the program she had planned, beginning with some long walks about town. Last night, when she had thought about this, the first place that came to mind was the park where she used to take her children, it was only a few blocks away but quite large, and walking its paths would be a worthy start on her idea to get more exercise.

The park was much as she recalled from when she had frequented it with her children, perhaps a bit more run down, the bushes needed trimming and apparently no one had picked up the trash in sometime, but otherwise it had changed little. Even the inhabitants were pretty much the same, young mothers pushing carriages or keeping a watchful eye on their children at play while they chatted, a few of the benches occupied by couples and the occasional jogger. Seeing the young mothers chatting she recalled that here she had met and become friends with other neighborhood women, the ones she now avoided, finding she had little in common with them anymore, they avoided her too, like divorce was catching or something. The young mothers here now would soon be gone, replaced perhaps by the female half of the adolescent couples that occupied the benches, the couples in turn replaced by ones now too young to be interested in such things.

Peggy stopped her walk abruptly with that thought. She had never been one to think about such things, and the turn her mind was taking startled her. Pondering the big questions, like the meaning of life, had struck her as silly when she thought of them at all, which was rare. Even choices in life had never really been something that much worried her, in fact they never seemed much like choices at all, she had simply done the expected things, not really pausing to consider that there might be alternatives. She shook her head slightly, trying to shrug off this sudden change in herself and resumed walking at a brisker pace.

***

"Oh my god, what has happened to you?"

Paulie was sitting across the rickety wooden table, on a teetering chair whose metal legs made a teetering sound, testimony to his restless state of mind. Or ass.

The room was musky and dusty, and of a strange shape, a bit too long and too narrow, and the ceiling too low, giving it an uncomfortable air, which wasn't helped at all by the dirty whitewash on the walls or the painful lack of any windows. It was strange too, right where the walls meet the floor they were dark gray, and that gray slowly faded to white as you went up to the ceiling, then there was an almost white band for a foot or two, then the gray started pervading again, and ruled the ceiling completely. Boots and cigarette smoke, generations of them, had passed through that room. Janice kept speaking quickly, in a concerned, almost motherly soft sort of talk.

"How did you end up here, with all these nasty people? I'm sure you couldn't have done anything wrong, could you? You are simply not that kind."

Paulie was simply looking down, and heaved now and again, his oxen shoulders bent with the invisible and yet overpowering weight of convention.

Janice always was very good in drama class. When she was about as tall as a table she had won the first prize in an acting contest, which took the form of some papers, and some chocolates, and most importantly, oh so very much more importantly, a change around her. People suddenly were looking at her as if she was a sort of a magician, in spite of her age, in spite of her cartilaginous palate, in spite of all the painful outward signs that differentiate the prepubescent from the mature, and yet, she was being treated as a grown up. She always loved that, and it could be presumed it's how and when she grew up. In time she came to understand more about acting, but the understanding was always a means to an end for her. And the end always was that pure, unadulterated pleasure of seeing people relate to what she invents rather than with what is behind it.

"You are not a bad sort, I'm sure there must have been something clouding your judgment. They said all those horrible things about you ! I'm sure it couldn't have been my Paulie there."

Now she was trying to be a hillbilly mother of a lad, a bit on the pretentious side due to sudden affluence, and constantly adjusted her projected persona to fit with unseen clues emanating from the wretched boy sitting across the table. She had an instinct for that, honed in time and with scrupulous efforts beyond the ability of most professional actors, and although she never really understood what she was doing, nor could easily explain it, she always could insert herself in between reality and the minds of her unfortunate victims, the way a virus tricks cells into letting it in, the way parasites mimic the normal comings and goings of their host's internals to secure food and shelter. The way a computer virus works.

It was all so easy for her. The only way she could be spotted would have been by what is called critical thinking. Nobody can be as good as to not make any mistakes whatsoever. All mistakes leave traces. Eventually someone might come along and compare the traces. And in those traces, the portrait of Janice awaited, in negative as the form for a bronze statue. But this could never happen. Janice had the redoutable help of conventions. She could not make it all by herself, but with the safe heaven offered her by what a social norm is, with the understanding of how those work, she could hide herself whenever she was tired, unsure, whenever she would normally have had to make a mistake. She was safe, and nobody could tail her, simply because their mind would be too numbed by the commonalities to be able to even conceive what is going on.

"I really am in trouble now, aren't I?"

Paulie finally spoke, his head still low, his shoulders still bent, the morose air still hanging about his entire person.

Janice gave him a look, as if to say "the gods made you smart, did they?" but kept quiet, and Paulie's downard bent head scarcely made a good observation point. He continued, with a mournful voice.

"There is no way I can get the money for the bond together. I'd have to go talk to Ma, but I can't ask her to come here... if she heard anything of this sort, she'd tell Pa, and then..." the boy shuddered, true terror in his big eyes. In spite of his relative lack of experience, or merit, or virtue, he was definitely versed in cowering, he must have had a great teacher.

"And then he'd come here, would he?" Janice's voice was sweet with empathy.

"Yes!" the boy exclaimed, as if that was the ultimate, most unbridled expression of danger, and horrible things to come.

"So to get out you need to get the money, and you need to get the money to get out?"

"Yes!" his voice was almost a cry, a shriek like a mouse caught in a trap.

"Oh dear, what are you going to do?"

His watery eyes made it plain what he was about to do, and not after a long while, at that.

"Listen, there might be a way. I have a friend, you might be able to get a loan, sort things out."

His hopefull eyes slowly gave way to despondence as she spoke.

"No, my Pa knows all the bankers there are, if I were to take a loan he'd know all about it by supper."

"I didn't mean a bank loan..." Janice was calm, almost serene "This is off the street, no way your father can hear about it."

"Really?" Paulie had a new expression, something that went a lot better with his naive eyebrows and unwrinkled complexion, something joyful.

"Yes, what was the bond set at?"

"One hundred and twenty five thousand." Clouds gathered anew on his narrow forehead.

"Well, if you manage to get it all back within a week, I'm sure it's not going to be more than 135 or 140 thousand." Janice was barely containing the chuckle at the thought she's selling secured bonds at 12% a week... as soon as she has a moment she will have to calculate the annuity on that... pity these silly MLM firms didn't know how to use this sort of credential... their loss.

"Ma always said I'll be getting a share of the selling of the Fairmeadow plot... I hope I'll be able to get something on the spot."

"And then you can finally be out of this horrible place. It doesn't fit you." Janice had a wistfull smile.

"Oh, yes, will you help me?"

"Sure, I'll be off right now to settle it out. You should be home free by nightfall."

"Oh, thank you. You are the only one that really loves me."

"I just hope you won't forget all about me in a few weeks. I just hope you aren't that sort of man."

Paulie tried to speak, but all the excitement was too much for him, no words would come out, just tears, a river of tears flooded his face.

***

Stepping out of the shower Peggy was feeling pleasantly tired after her brisk walk and rather pleased with herself when the phone started ringing. Wrapped in a fluffy green towel she went to answer it, hoping it was anyone other than Ralph.

"Hello."

"Hi, Peggy. So glad I caught you at home, we have missed you lately." Peggy recognized the voice as Carol, one of the neighborhood women she had been friends with for a long time.

"Oh, hi. Well, I have been trying to keep busy."

"I know it is short notice but if you don't have plans tonight Jerry and I would love to have you for dinner, can you possibly make it?"

Peggy hesitated, the short notice thing sounded odd, her neighborhood group had stopped standing on ceremony like that ages ago, hearing it now only emphasized how much of an outsider she had become. In the end curiosity, and the simple truth that she had nothing better to do won and she accepted the invitation.

Dressing for diner she considered the over polite invitation and decided that if Carol wished to stand on ceremony she would do it one better. Dressed, she went to her pantry and selected a good bottle of wine for a hostess gift, then went and sat quietly on the sofa, waiting so as to time her arrival at exactly the fashionable 10 minutes late.

Carol answered the door with too wide of a smile and too bubbly a greeting which was arrested mid-bubble when Peggy offered the hostess gift she carried. Carol's eyebrows went up, just a hair, and the tone was set, each woman would now play her assigned part.

"Why thank you, how thoughtful."

Peggy inclined her head slightly, acknowledging the thanks, "So sorry to be late my dear, unavoidable delay you know."

"Nonsense dear, your timing is perfect, we were just having cocktails in the livingroom."

Taking the bottle of wine Carol turned to lead the way and Peggy followed as if she didn't know the layout of this house as well as she knew her own.

In the living room Jerry was manning the bar and another couple from their neighborhood group was chatting quietly with a man Peggy did not recognize. So that was it, Peggy was here to fill the odd seat at diner, or God forbid, they were actually trying to fix her up. Peggy swallowed and determined to make the best of it.

She eyed the man while Jerry made introductions, which included way too much personal history, Jerry was either very bad at this or it was a set up, or more likely it was both. According to Jerry this was Nick, his cousin, a Wall Street stock broker, now divorced.

Nick shook her hand and smiled, "I am pleased to meet you." He too was eying her, but not too obviously, in fact Peggy was having trouble finding fault with the man. He was just enough taller than her to make them perfect dance partners, not at all thick around the middle like most men his age and his handshake was firm and confident. Peggy gave him a cautious, noncommittal smile, "likewise, I'm sure."

They continued to eye each other a moment too long and Jerry broke the silence asking her what she would like to drink. With a brief glance Peggy noted that her planned diner companion was drinking white wine and she requested the same. Then they all stood about a bit uncomfortably discussing inconsequential and noncontroversial subjects like the weather, while Carol disappeared into the kitchen to put the final touches on the roast.

Dinner was a lot more formal and lengthy an affair than it was customary in the neighborhood, Carol was apparently really putting on a show for Jerry's cousin and Peggy had a hard time sticking to her new diet without being too obvious about it. She noticed that Nick was also not really consuming very much food and at some point their eyes met over a plate of vegetables with too much butter sauce and understanding passed between them, Peggy smiled in spite to herself and suddenly this was more fun than a chore. She and Nick shared a secret and the neighborhood chatter boxes could knock themselves out with all their silly attempts and it wouldn't matter one bit.

Later, sipping an after diner coffee in the living room Peggy contrived to slip Nick her phone number, knowing that they would see each other again and not wanting to give her erstwhile friends the satisfaction. She took her leave with barely more than a polite nod to Nick and vague promises to see her friends more often in the future.

Nick wasted no time following up on Peggy's lead, in fact the call later that same night was so quick as to be almost rude but the humor in his voice and the excuse that he would only be in town a few days made it okay. They chatted on the phone for almost an hour, something Peggy hadn't done since her high school days, and accepting his invitation for dinner and a movie the following night seemed quite natural at the end of it.

***

"You didn't!"

"Course I did."

"You horrible bitch that there's no other!"

Janice was chuckling lieing on her back, and the chuckles sent small ripples through her bare breasts, making the nipples cut strange tiny arabesques in the air.

"Did it work any?"

"Of course. I think I am his new mommy."

"You know, sometimes I wish I had the patience myself."

"You mean the skill."

"It doesn't take any skill, it takes the patience to sit there and pay attention to idiots and act, taking their particular idiocy into consideration."

"Hon, any skill always looks to the innocent bystander as if it takes nothing more than patience, being readily doable by anyone so inclined. It never is so."

"Hmm... you know what? I think I want to take Janiceism classes."

Janice's chuckle turned to laughter, and the nipples were trying to jump off by now.

"Oh, you really know how to satisfy a girl. Completely."

"I'm serious tho. You need to give me lessons."

"Nah, I hate telling you stuff, you interrupt too much..."

"I wont interrupt!"

"And if i could just finish my sentence... I'm not very sure it would help you any. You got your own thing, can't say it doesn't work, why bother?"

"It only works so much."

"Like everything else."

"Yes, but what if one day I'll meet a guy with the most perfect ten inch cock that would only be interested in a mommy?"

"Then I guess you miss out."

"Who can afford to miss out on that?"

"Since you insist. There remains the matter of tuition however."

"What, you wouldn't think of asking tuition of a fellow, would you?"

"Hmm... " Janice was pensive for a moment, then her eye sparked with an idea. A great idea, and idea so great it would part mountains and raise seas.

"I've got it. As long as you lick, I'll talk. This will take care of your pesky interruptions too."

"Alright, but if you talk nonsense I'll make you come."

"Heh.... no stopping now, or I might lose my train of thought."

***

Peggy was on the verge of cursing, all day she waffled back and forth about this evening's plans, it had seemed just the right thing last night but in the light of day it was a frightening prospect. What did she really know about Nick? At least a dozen different excuses had occurred to her, at least three times she picked up the phone to call it off, and now here she was going through her closet like a teenager. It wasn't really that she had nothing to wear, it was that nothing seemed right.

Finally she stepped back, staring at the closet in exasperation, it looked as if a tornado had been through it by now, the clothes were all out of order, half on hangers, and some had even fallen to the floor and had not yet been retrieved. She sighed, there must be something, and went at it again. She was about to give up and really make that call when she spotted the black dress, she had forgotten she even had that thing, a simple black sheath, she had not worn it in ages. Bought years ago when she sometimes had to go to the occasional party with her ex-husband, it was one of those simple things you can grab at the last moment and it always works. She slipped it on, saying a silent prayer that it would actually still fit. It was perfect, she stepped back and admired herself in the mirror, then noting the time rushed to finish the details, like make-up.

Nick was perfectly punctual, the bell rang at exactly 8. She was nervous when she answered the door but Nick's quick smile and easy laugh quickly banished all her fears. He opened the car door for her in such a natural way she didn't even give the women's lib thing about that a single thought, Nick was like that, his simple straightforwardness and decent manners just made you forget about really unimportant things. On the way to the restaurant he asked if she likes to dance, Peggy said that she used to but hadn't been dancing in so long now she really wasn't sure.

"Well, I checked out what movies were playing and I am afraid the selection is pretty dismal, a Harry Potter and a couple of those karate things is about all there is, would you mind if we tried going dancing after dinner instead?"

"Yuck, Harry Potter, I get enough of that sort of thing with the kids, okay let's try dancing."

They chatted a bit more about movies and found that they had about the same tastes, Peggy was not surprised, with Nick it was like they were on the same frequency. It was not at all like Ralph and the other guys at the club, where she sometimes wondered if they even spoke the same language.

During dinner, sometime between the oysters-on-the-half-shell appetizer and the chocolate mousse desert she started feeling there was really something odd about all this. She couldn't quite figure out what it was and whenever she tried to put her mind to it Nick would start in on some fascinating story or good joke or something else that pulled her attention away from her own thoughts.

After dinner he took her to a small bar that she had never noticed before, it was close to her own neighborhood but the sign was very discreet and the parking lot was not full of the usual hangers around you saw in front of bars. Nick said that he found the place last time he visited his cousin. Inside the music was just loud enough to be enjoyable and the seating included soft sofas, not just the standard tables and chairs. It wasn't empty, there were a few couples scattered about but certainly not enough to make it feel crowded. Nick ordered a nice bottle of wine and they sipped, chatted and danced.

Nick was a good dancer, he led very naturally and Peggy was quickly past whatever fears she had about dancing after such a long time, she really couldn't recall just when she had last danced. The conversation while they sipped the wine was delicious, Nick seemed to know something about everything, but managed not to be obnoxious about it. After a few hours Peggy was yawning in spite of all her attempts to suppress it, she was just not in the habit of late hours and Nick suggested it was time to take her home. At her front door he kissed her politely, almost formally, and said good night, leaving her quite astounded, she had really expected him to want to come in.

At last she was alone with a chance to try and think about whatever it was that had been bothering her since dinner, but she was much too comfortable and tired to put any effort into it and just went straight to bed instead.

***

"I see. Is there more?"

Janice's gaze was unfocused, as if she was looking very very far way, so far it was not really outside anymore. Which explains why she could attempt it indoors, facing a window through which the sun was setting, ten feet away.

"There might be hon, but I'm spent."

"Awww, why do I even bother with older women."

Janice looked at the impetuous youth, not in the slightest slighted, just smiling faintly and played with the auburn locks on her forehead.

***

During her lite breakfast the phone rang.

"Hello."

"Hi, this is Nick. I just wanted to tell you what a good time I had last night."

"I had a nice time too, I look forward to seeing you again."

Peggy set the phone down thoughtfully, Nick had manners right out of a dime store romance novel, it was almost impossible not to like him. The ease of this whole date thing had put Peggy in a wonderful mood, brave and confident enough to make up her mind to go back to the club today. Whatever had bothered her during dinner must not have been of any importance, certainly not worth worrying about.

Later at the club Peggy found that the various cups and dishes that had been used the last couple of days were filling the kitchen sink and littering the various tables. If Janice or Frankie had been by, they were not the type to clean up. Manny tended to be a bit of a neat nick, she wondered if he too had not been here or was just not interested in keeping things orderly. She stood there staring at the sink for several minutes, then turned and walked away, really no reason it should always be her job.

Fred was in his office, shuffling papers about the way people do when they want to look busy, otherwise the place was deserted. Peggy went to the shelves and selected a book, not even bothering to look at the title, and took a seat on the end of the sofa to read for a bit, but really mostly just to stay around and see what might happen.

"Don't tell me you actually read that stuff!" Peggy was startled when Frankie addressed her, she had been lost in her own daydreams and not even noticed that someone else had arrived.

Peggy glanced down at the book she was holding and was both annoyed and embarrassed to see that it really was one of those dime store romance novels. Realizing there was no reasonable explanation Peggy closed the book and ignored the statement.

"Hi." Peggy managed, half gulped, trying to smile and not really achieving much more than a very faint attempt. She was fidgety and uncomfortable, which was obvious enough to Frankie that she decided to watch and see what happens. Eventually the even calm gaze became unbearable and Peggy ran (or retreated strategically, depending whom you ask) to find shelter in the small kitchen. She stood there for a few moments, enjoying being by herself and trying to find something to do, so the real reason she was there might be obscured from everybody, and most of all from herself. There is not much one can do in such a small kitchen, and pretty soon the dishes were taking a hot, soapy bath.

Frankie picked up the book, figuring it's spoils of war, and since there was not much else to do, started reading it. It turned out it was a classical work, one of those frame story things, and not as boring as they usually are by a long shot. Before she knew it she was immersed reading.

The story of Giacomo Montestrano

Not very long ago there lived in Padua a young man by the name of Giacomo Montestrano, son of a trader who, after traveling the seven seas with his cargoes of Trobriand spices and Punjabi ivory and Nubian slaves and Greek mead and all the other trade goods merchants favour acquired much gold and silver, and, having it safely deposited in the hands of three or four Lombard houses, decided to come ashore forever and get married so there will be someone to care for him in his old age. He picked Padua, as one who has traveled all the ports of the seas would, and built here a large house, and married the sixth daughter of a very old and noble family that had for three generations poor luck in family heads.

He had but one child by his wife, and died before Giacomo was twelve, of old age, in his warm bed, leaving behind well over five hundred talents of gold in the hands of the bankers, as during the years of his retirement the frugal style one is bound to acquire traveling did not leave him.

Son of an old man and brought up as the inheritor of a large fortune that he might not touch, young Giacommo had just one business in his mind, how to spend as much as one can as soon as it could be done, and nothing else. He had many friends, of the sort one is bound to have when young and rich and idle, and he would treat them royally to hunts, and meals, and parties of all sorts.

One night, returning from a hunt that turned to a campestre party that turned in turn to a wine drinking contest, Giacomo and his good friend Oreste became lost from the others, and found themselves in the middle of unknown forest. Trying to somehow find a place to pass the night safely from the many wolves that prowl the surroundings of Padua they managed to locate a small house, and as luck would have it, the old man that lived there made a few silver coins now and again by giving quarters to lost or weary travelers caught by the nightfall trying to reach the city. It was nothing more than a hovel, with one single room, fireplace in the middle under a hole made in the roof to let the smoke out, two beds on one side in which the old man, his wife and their young daughter would sleep, one bigger and the other smaller, and one bed on the other side kept for the occasional traveler. By the side of the wife's bed there stood a cradle with her smallest, and in all likeliness last child.

As soon as Giacomo saw the young girl, he was burned with endless desire, either because she was indeed very beautiful, or because the wine was still with him. He tossed and turned in his bed, trying to think a means of somehow sampling that budding rose, which had become, in his fancy, the very thing his life depended on.

Eventually, not being able to come up with any plan, and with the courage given by spirits, he decided the thing to do is go and lie down in the girl's bed, and attempt what the Creator intended. Hearing everyone quietly asleep, except for the reassuring snores of the master of the house, he stood up and, moving the cradle from its place next to his companion's bed, so it wouldn't be in the way, and God forbid get trampled on, he went and lay down next to the daughter.

Either by surprise, or wisdom, the girl kept quiet and they could enjoy together the first fruits of paradise. About the time they had just finished the second apple and were resting for the third, the mother of the girl stood up and it chilled the very marrow in Giacomo's bones. But, as it turned out, the woman was only in need of a very humanly release and, still half asleep when she returned, felt around for the cradle and finding it next to Oreste's bed, lay down there.

Oreste, awakened by the unexpected visitor, and seemingly having had natural thoughts of his own in his sleep, lost no time to make the woman welcome, as her husband surely did at some point in the past.

Eventually exhausted and thinking the morning must be close, Giacomo kissed his wife for a night goodbye, and tried to make it back to his bed. Still intoxicated, and drowsy with the night's labours, he had forgotten all about moving the cradle, and went and lay down next to the husband, figuring it must be his friend Oreste, since in the other bed a man and a woman were obviously enjoying the intimacy of marriage.

As youth is never satisfied with success, no matter how complete it is or improbable it might have seemed at the onset, and always wants to share it and make others jealous and envious, he began then telling the story of his adventures to the other man, whom he thought to be his friend.

Awakened by some stranger lieing down in his bed, the husband listened for a short while to the brash descriptions and shameless hyperbolae Giacomo was pouring, and then, burning with rage, began shouting and hollering.

Giacomo was struck with panic, and went quiet, making himself as small as he could in the bed. The wife, hearing her husbands voice from afar, felt around to ensure herself and realised she was in fact in the wrong bed, but wasted no time, instead quickly and quietly went to lie by her daughter. After a few moments, pretending to be drowsy and rising from sleep, she asked her husband what serpent bit him that he would scream the entire house awake. When told what great stories the young Giacomo had to share about the way their daughter passed her night, she candidly replied that none of that can be, having she herself been sleeping with their daughter in the same bed, ever since she had to go out and not wanting to wake him up, and that the travelers must surely be drunk and dreaming.

A story that Giacomo readily accepted, and, begging the pardon of the puzzled husband, went to sleep the rest of the night next to his equally satisfied friend.

Continued

« Asylum, Chapter Sixteen

Asylum, Chapter Eighteen »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Monday, 27 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Asylum, Chapter Seven

"So where is this guy?"

Manny looked at his watch nervously. He carried this most wondrous watch ever, with a calculator and a chronometer and selectable time zones and probably a compass too, one that worked in outer space just as well. Actually, the best way to make friends with Manny was to admire his watch.

"It's not even time yet, is it?"

"Of course it is time already.", Manny said mimicking the woman's tone. "It has been for over 4 minutes now. Almost 5", he said with sudden pride, and in his own tone, checking his wondrous watch again.

"You sure that watch of yours is even on time?"

"Of course it is on time. It is precisely on time", Manny said turning visibly red around the cheeks and the forehead and the back of the neck, the way people hatching a massive stroke look. "I check it periodically and it never was wrong yet."

"And that is no reason to presume it wouldn't suddenly start being late one day", John spoke in a very quiet tone. That man had a strange manner of speaking as if he never opened his mouth, or drew breath, and one always had to proceed deductively to identify who was speaking whenever it was him.

"That is a horrible thing to say", a visibly horrified Manny squeaked. "Things do not just break down for no reason, that's just not how the world works. Why even carry a watch if it's just going to explode whenever you need to tell time?"

"Well anyway, 5 minutes isn't that much, it's not like we are in any terrible hurry."

"It was 5 minutes, now it's 13 and a half", clarified Manny, after checking his watch once more.

"We have a copy machine at the office that never works. There was a very nice girl that used to handle that but then Mr. Hinkle-Bailay fired her because she was always late, although she never was all that late, and sometimes she was really on time, and she could work that machine somehow. And ever since we keep calling maintenance and they keep coming and fixing it and then the next day or the next hour or very soon it will break down again and swallow pages and print a whole stack of paper with random junk. And one day it nearly caught on fire for some reason or other. I think one day somebody will just dump it out of a window... "

"Well she should have been on time and that would have taken care of everything. Punctuality is the essence of good manners, I always say."

But John didn't really notice Manny and continued his own thoughts for himself..."Except windows don't really open at the office... and then it might fall on somebody's head and they would be injured and maybe couldn't go back to work and run whatever machine they are running there, and his office will be stuck calling maintenance every day or anyway very often, and the thing will never work any, regardless."

Peggy had moved a little closer, trying to make out the words the bashful character was mumbling, with limited success.

"Well it's 20 minutes past now, and I really think we should be getting organized before we waste any more time waiting on doubtful members", said Manny, stepping in to take control of the situation.

"Now, now, that is a bit too harsh, I'm sure he is doing the best he can."

Fred had been sitting in a chair and studying the other refugees, trying to grasp something of their mind and manner. He once read in a self-improvement book that is how a leader should behave, and since he never before had chance or cause to try that out, he was doing it now. Of course it was all a bit hazy, after all it had been a while since he read the book, and he didn't pay that much attention then either.

***

At this point the authors would like to say the following :

The original point of this chapter was nothing like it came out. It is all the fault of these pesky characters that do whatever they feel like. It is actually very annoying. It is going so far that we are no longer entirely sure we can even get this book anywhere near an acceptable ending. If, in fact, we do manage to bring it to some ending at all.

We are terribly sorry. Proceed at your own risk and leisure.

***

Manny took a deep breath, preparing a sharp retort when the door flew open and in rushed Ralph. Bursting with energy, Ralph disrupted the quiet scene, blurting out a string of excuses for his tardiness.

"So sorry I am late, this has been an absolutely awful day... first there was this huge sale, the parking lot was so crowded... I had to park outside the fence, then I couldn't find my car, because you can't really take notes for outside the fence. By the time I got to the sale, all the stuff I went for was gone! They were putting out all the junk that didn't sell last time. But I didn't buy most of it anyway."

"You kept us here, waiting for a sequel sale to end? It's been 24 minutes now!"

".. and look, I got this really great painting which will fit just right above the big sofa, over there."

He bounced over towards the rose-colored sofa dragging the paper wrapped object he had carried in and began ripping it open. Peggy moved closer, anxious to see what treasure Ralph might have found. Triumphantly Ralph removed the last of the wrapping and held it up for all to see.

"ahhh" "oooo" "hmmm" "eechk" "uuuh".

The cacophony of sounds made it impossible to tell who had uttered what. The group just stood there gaping, as Ralph held aloft a painting of a dusty street in an old western town. The street was complete with saloon, horses, cowboys, and of course a wooden Indian denoting a barber shop.

Fred was the first to catch his breath, "Ahh, yes, well, we can see about that later, now I suppose we should get started since we are already a bit late."

Ralph looked a bit crestfallen, but quietly leaned the painting against a wall, took a seat along with the others and looked somewhat expectantly to Fred.

"Ahem", Fred cleared his throat a bit nervously, he had of course carefully planned a speech for this moment, but now that it was here, he couldn't recall a word he had intended to say.

"Uh, as you all know, I hope for this club to be a nice friendly place we can all come to just relax and talk, or whatever. But, I also thought that maybe we should try and organize some activities. You know, things we can perhaps all enjoy doing together, and that might encourage more people to join, too." Fred paused for a breath and the ever exuberant Ralph jumped in.

"A dance, if we pushed all this furniture back a bit we could have a nice dance place here, and I have lots of CD's with really good dance music."

Everyone was silent for a moment, not sure how to point out to Ralph that the current membership of 4 men and 1 woman would make for an awkward dance.

At last Fred cleared his throat again and said, "Ahh, yes, well I am sure a dance might be a good idea eventually, but perhaps that should wait just a bit."

Everyone was silent, shifting a bit uncomfortably in their seats. The silence seemed to stretch on for an eternity, but in truth was probably no more than 30 seconds or so. At last, Peggy took a deep breath and spoke softly,

"What about a games night? Something fun a bunch can play, like Monopoly? Her eyes brushed over the dusty chess set in the corner and she shuddered slightly. "Or maybe even Bridge, does anybody play Bridge?"

Manny grinned, "Yup, Bridge, that's a great way to really get to know people. If fact I just heard this great story, about two people that ..."

"story. we used to tell stories the first night at camp. scary stories. i thought it was fun. but the girls would get all scared and not sleep. it might be fun to pretend we are all kids again and have stories, but then if somebody gets too scared, and doesn't sleep, and can't go to work the next day on time, they might end up being late and get fired. and that would really be sad, because...". John's little speech sort of trailed off and he blushed when he realized everybody was looking at him.

Again it was Peggy who broke the silence, with a large bright smile she said, "But John, that's a lovely idea, stories make for interesting conversation, we could all have a good time, no need to have scary ones you know."

Slowly, a bit grudgingly, the others nodded agreement.

"Alright, that's two pretty good ideas for starters. Manny would you like to make up a schedule and post it for us?"

"Sure, does anybody have particular nights that are not good for them to come on?" Manny spoke as he reached into his pocket to retrieve a notepad and pen.

With that, the meeting broke into several low conversations among the various members. John, seeing his chance, rose and escaped to the corner behind the bookcase again.

Manny was deep in conversation with Fred, working out details on schedules and posting things and all sorts of equally important stuff. That left Peggy and Ralph, facing each other, each wondering just how to start a friendly conversation. Finally Ralph broke the silence, "Have you seen the new gadget that peels eggs perfectly in mere seconds?"

Continued

« Asylum, Chapter Six

Asylum, Chapter Eight »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Monday, 27 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Asylum, Chapter One

Fred just stood there. Gazing at the painting, not seeing it so much as experiencing it, as a window into the soul of the artist, feeling the pain and the joy that floated about in the painter's head before crashing on reality and leaving this bit of flotsam. For the briefest moment, the painting, the artist that created it, and his own sense of emptiness connected and blended and became one.

"Click, Click, Click ..." The noise echoed in the quiet room, he raised his eyes and the mood was gone.

"Click, Click, Click ..." Fred looked about, seeking the source of the disturbing sound and was startled to see a woman that was obviously out of place here. Tall, blond and well built, the sort that would turn heads walking down any street. Her bright red dress was clearly expensive and it clung in all the rights spots, but it clashed with her particular frown and the hard icy eyes.

"Click, Click, Click ..." Her high heels made an irritating sound as she paced back and forth, checking her watch every other click, oblivious to the disturbance she was causing.

Fred shook his head and tried to ignore the sound as he turned back to the painting, struggling in vain to recapture the mood.

"You are late!" Her voice was a bit shrill and she spoke too loudly for the quiet, peaceful setting of the gallery. It seemed to penetrate the walls and the ceiling and the place was no longer peaceful, but tense, as if full of electricity. Fred shuddered a bit and considered bolting for the door. Unfortunately the woman and her friend were exactly in the way and Fred was much too withdrawn and shy to push past them.

"How is a woman to be late when you arrive practically the next day? I had a good chance to contemplate my own afterlife here in this funeral home, thank you very much."

"Ah but rejoice it was not all eternity." The man replied in a somewhat amused tone.

"Definitely seemed like it."

"Alright, let me resurrect you then. I hope they didn't drink all the good whiskey just yet."

Fred blushed a bit; it felt as if he were eavesdropping, even though it seemed obvious the couple couldn't care less.

The woman draped herself on the man's arm and the two left, allowing the normal peace and quiet of the place to slowly rise from the corners and cracks where it had been banished and reclaim the walls and ceiling.

Heaving a great sigh of relief, Fred meticulously studied the painting, hoping to find again that place where he had for a moment felt included, part of something he could not name. But the moment was past and all that came to mind was a flash of anger at the people who had the uncaring cruelty to destroy his rare moment.

Despondently he turned to the door, ready to make his way home. Stepping out into the twilight he paused again, thinking if there might be some other place he could go, anywhere but to the empty, lonely matchbox thing he called home. Home to prepare a lonely meal, which he would consume by the flickering light of the TV, or perhaps he could stop at the diner and have a meal prepared by someone else, consumed in the half dark of a booth in the back. Turning left, he set off for home, at least there his loneliness was a matter kept to himself... besides, he would always bump his head on the peeling low ceilings in that diner.

The streets in this part of town were peaceful in the fading light, Fred noted as he walked that many of the buildings were empty, windows boarded over. Once this area had been home to bookshops and delightful little boutiques selling curios from all over the world, but fashion had moved on and the beautiful people no longer came here.

The few people he passed walking this quiet street seemed to him to be as sad and distant from the world as himself. Turning this over in his mind, an idea began to form. What if they really were like him? Maybe there were actually a lot of people out there who, like him, had no place to go, no friends to chat with, not even a stray dog for company. Nowhere was there a person he could tell about his rare and wonderful moment and expect any sort of understanding.

Blinking, he stopped in his tracks. Lots of lonely people, lots and lots of lonely people, could it really be? Looking back down the street, the way he had come, there was a woman locking the front door of the art gallery he had just left. Beyond her a man sat on the edge of a planter box, smoking a cigarette and gazing off into the distance. Across the street an old man leaned on a cane, making his way down the front steps of one of the few remaining bookshops. Each of them alone, alone and cloaked in their loneliness as if it somehow protected them. Boldly he stared at each of them, startled a bit by his own audacity. As he looked at each in turn, their eyes quickly turned from him, avoiding the dreaded eye contact which might force each to face their own inadequacies.

Frowning, he turned and resumed his journey homeward. Odd, he too had always looked away, should a stranger be so bold as to look at him, but why? Surely a greeting, a friendly nod, perhaps even a kind word exchanged among these quiet, nervous strangers would cheer their day, lift their lonely spirits for a moment. Why was such a small thing so impossible?

Arriving at last at his own door he extracted his keys from the depths of his pocket and fumbled with the lock to the sound of soft woofing noises from inside. The door opened at last and Rex, his small half black terrier leapt into his arms and greeted him happily. Still preoccupied with his own musings about the behavior of strangers he cut short the usual greeting ritual and moved directly to his small kitchen.

Quickly he opened the usual can of dog food and fed Rex. Without thinking much about it he fished some baloney from its wrapping and stuck it between two slices of Wonderbread, then over-sugared his tea. Cup and plate in hand he retired to his wobbly easy chair, facing the glimmering TV. But this night he did not immediately reach for the remote. Instead, he sat in the quiet semi-dark and reviewed the events of the day. There was only one possible conclusion; somehow something in him was different! He had broken the rules, looked at strangers, and even considered the possibility that they might become friends. It must have been that fleeting moment in front of the painting. Something about it had made him realize just how alone he really was, and maybe, just maybe, he need not stay that way. But what to do about it? Rex's insistent whining finally broke into his thoughts and he stirred, realizing his sandwich was untouched and his tea had grown cold. He rose from the chair to let Rex out and was startled to hear the clock strike half past eleven. He had been lost in his own thoughts for hours. Moving to clear the stale sandwich and cold tea he resolved to try again tomorrow. Tomorrow he would return to the painting, the gallery, the street where there was more to be learned about this, that was where he would begin.

***

"So get in the car."

The man spoke in a strange tone, as if surprised and wondering... and then he made 12 steps for the 3 feet needed to get to the front door of the car and opening it in the most awkward way imaginable nearly slid himself underneath to get to the seat. The three girls he spoke to were in significantly better shape, for the most part. Either that or they just appeared somewhat more stable as they walked tightly grouped together, one in the middle holding the one to her left around the neck and the other around her back. They did manage to clean most of the snow and dirt off the side of the car while making for the door, but none seemed too impressed. Who cares for coats anyway?

The driver looked in the mirror and saw... well, mostly a playboy pictorial. The blond in the middle was just about to pour out of the seat, and in the process her very deeply cut top was pushed up and to the side, and her left nipple with most of the breast was poking out, uniformly tanned, color matching her hair... or maybe the hair was painted to match the tan, one can never be sure with these things.

"Gimme a Shirley Temple," mumbled the girl sitting on the left side, right behind him.

Unfortunately the mirror could not show her, but every driver, even the most burned out, high school drop-out, intellectually unremarkable driver has an imagination. And even if his job is going nowhere and his dinner has been pizza or one week old Chinese take out for the past month, his imagination is not diminished. And so he was served yet another mildly erotic representation of reality, as it happened to him now and again at all-night stores, passing on the street or during family reunions, or early in the morning.

"Shut up you dumb whore," said the blond. She spoke slowly, almost like chanting the words, and with her eyes

closed. She looked perfectly asleep, except she was talking.

"Alright Freddie, let's take the girls home."

The driver's name was not Freddie. It was Edward, Rupert Edward Fulke Warhola. Why ever a permanently drunk Pittsburgh steel plant worker with 9 kids to his credit decides to name his 10th Rupert Edward Fulke is anyone's guess. Such a kid might have been destined for a great future, maybe a great scientist, maybe a great writer... or maybe even a great conceptual artist, an innovator and force of renewal. But it seems in Edward's case the name was not enough of a pull. Ah, if only it were Andrew... but as it is, he gets to be called Freddie and take the girls home. On second thought, he just gets to be called Freddie and go home to his TV and fridge.

The car moved silently out of the parking lot and into the stream of fellow cars, massive, white, and somehow reassuring. The girls seemed to slowly emerge from their previous torpor and soon the windows were vibrating with the intensity of their chat.

"Yes but you don't realize he was in love with that girl."

"No, she told me, Pete had a crush on her but she was at the time with that guy, Pierce whatever, the insurance

guy."

"Yea like hell, the Pierce insurance guy is in reality a club dancer at the Mystee and she paid him by the hour to play

the insurance guy."

"No! She is buying escort services now?"

"Well not exactly buying. Anyway, she figured she can tell Pete that Pierce got her into some crazy scheme and she

is out of cash. You know the crap."

"But then why tell Pete to mind his own business?"

"She never did that."

"She told me she did."

"Like hell, I have a bag of Polaroids somewhere with her telling Pete to mind his own business right up her tail."

"How did you end up with that?"

"Well last year when Paul kicked her out she came to my place to crash for a while."

"Your place? Where was that last year?"

"Well not exactly mine, I was staying with Peter."

"What, with Pete?!"

"No not with Pete, with Peter the guy from Norensa."

"It's Norsena you gel brain."

"Like who the hell cares if it's Norensa or Noresna or whatever stupid name they give banks these days."

"So how come I was never invited to see your place?"

"Well it was tiny. Just one big room and a bedroom."

"Oh, but you lived with that aristocratic fart last year didn't you?"

"Who, Paris?"

"Yea that or Amsterdam or something. Who cares what stupid names they give aristocratic farts these days."

"Yea, but Paris was before Peter."

"Must have been a bit of a drop, that one..."

"Oh shut up, you are so grand yourself aren't you?"

"Well what can I say; Perry is a real nice guy. He has a yacht and a hunting lodge. I'm covered all year round."

"Except when he makes you fuck his dog."

"What?! Who told you that? That is so untrue!"

"Eh, shut up."

The girls glare at each other angrily and for a moment there is silence. And that silence resounds in the tiny space of the automobile like a symphony. A second later, a symphony can really be heard. It is Bach's 3rd. It is a phone ringing.

"Mmmyea"

"Hi Patrick. How are you?"

Suddenly all three girls are wide-awake and eyeing the man and his phone.

"Give me that phone."

Three young voices, all as one, the man turns startled. He eyes the girls for a minute, one at a time and then turns back and continues his discussion with Patrick, about bonds, about bonds going low, about buying the bonds, about forcing the company to issue stock, about getting the stock to bonds exchange at the face value of the bonds, about the officials that could help with that, about the future. Eventually he has had enough.

"Okay Patrick, I'm going to throw you in the lion pit now. Take care."

He throws the phone over his head, without looking. The girls start wrestling for it, pulling hair, messing clothes, collapsing as a strange monster from one side of the car to the other, every now and then one manages to get control of the cell long enough to say a few words but is quickly overpowered and the scene starts over.

The car takes a turn and melts in the distance.

***Morning came, bright and clear, Rex jumping up on his bed to wake him as usual. Fred came full awake quickly, remembering that this day he has a plan, a goal, something to investigate, maybe something to learn. Moving about the small apartment he completes the usual morning chores.

Make the bed, shower, dress, feed the dog, prepare breakfast, clean the kitchen ...

Standing at the sink washing dishes he stops, startled once again by his own thoughts. How many days had he done this? Too many! Just exactly like this, always the same order, always the same things, every day, day after day... smiling to himself he wipes his hands and walks away, dishes left standing in the warm soapy water.

There are more people on the street today, he notes as he strolls towards the gallery. There a woman getting out of a car, a couple standing by a bus stop, a few people rushing along as if on some important mission, eyes on the sidewalks in front of them, each one seeming oblivious to all the others. Today Fred realizes that he is just like those, rushing along, head down a bit, looking at no one and no thing. In response he slows a bit, stands just a bit straighter, holds his head high and deliberately looks about. Passing the car where the woman had just finished locking her door their eyes meet, and Fred smiles! Apparently without thinking, she smiles back, then blushing furiously she drops her head and busies herself, fumbling with packages and purse, avoiding any further eye contact.

Fred reaches the gallery without further incident and enters the quiet peace of it. Smiling towards the clerk he moves into the gallery, knowing exactly where to find the painting that so fascinates him. There he stands, for hours, gazing at the picture, willing it to fill his senses and show him once again that depth of feeling and unity with the universe. But moments like these are gifts, not be demanded or commanded, and in the end he realizes this and turns away in defeat.

Back on the street Fred pauses, looks about and ponders what to do next. Seeing the planter box where yesterday the smoker had sat, he walks over to it, sits and wishes briefly that he still smoked. His eyes travel up and down the street, watching the various passers by, there are a few young couples here and there but most are like him, alone. His gaze travels to the street and he notes that even there, in the cars passing by, the drivers are alone, ten minutes of observing traffic reveals only one car with multiple occupants, and that a bunch of laughing, screaming teenagers.

Turning back to the sidewalks his gaze falls on the closed shop next to the gallery. The sign still legible in the grimy window reads, "The Reading Room". He remembers when that shop had been on his list of favorite places to spend a bit of time. A spacious place, with shelves and stacks of books in every corner, but with a few spots reserved for a soft chair and a reading lamp. The owner had encouraged his customers to spend a few moments there reading and relaxing. Fred did not recall a time when he had visited the place and found all the chairs empty. Odd, he wondered why it had gone out of business, such a wonderful refuge, and obviously popular.

Slowly the picture formed in his mind, the shop, but different. Still with plenty of shelves of books, but more space and chairs in groups, twos and threes. Here a table and chairs with a deck of cards, there a chess set, some music to dispel the library hush of the place. Refuge!

No, not refuge, sounded too much like escape, ahh yes, Asylum!

And why not? Suddenly filled with purpose Fred strode to the door, pulling down the Realtor notice he walked off to find a cab.

Continued

« "Business", whatever that may mean.

Asylum, Chapter Two »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Sunday, 26 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Asylum, Chapter Nineteen

"A stock broker?"

"Well, what am I to say?"

Frankie looked at him while she thought things through.

"Uh, I donno, loan shark? Professional racketeer? Universal fence?"

"Come now. You couldn't visit my pool in jail."

"Singer then?"

"It's been done already."

"What, ol' Frank? Nobody even knew it most of the time, and now they've already forgotten."

"I used to be a student, but that only goes so far. Besides, if I could be bothered I would definitely make a living off the market."

"Ya, I remember."

"At any rate, I told her I'll have my driver pick her up. Poor woman, I told her I'm only in town for a few days."

"I thought you were going to Cuba."

"I am."

"So, you'll only be in town a few days."

"Well it's not what she understood, I'm sure." The man smiled. "At any rate, she's in for a surprise."

"I'll say."

"So, I hear you two have turned the club into a highschool prom?"

"Hehe, she just couldnt keep herself could she?"

The man just smiled "you know Janice".

"Well it was like this, I came in and your future wife" the man reached over and pinched her ass, and Frankie put up a face to pretend she was ignoring it, not that the pretense wasn't obvious, "wiiiifeee was reading some paperback thing so I went after her and she ran in the kitchen."

"You shouldn't be playing with your food."

"My food?!" Frankie's voice was squeaky on the "d".

"Well, if she's gonna be my wife, you bet!"

"Eh shuddup, you're interrupting me. So after a bit in came Janice, honeymooning with dork 1, who, as it happens, is the one who has a thing for your wiiifeee."

"To be."

"To be, or not to be. At any rate, he went after her in the kitchen, and we, of course, followed. Next thing they knew, there were the four of us in a six square foot kitchen, and then I pinched his ass and he nearly mounted her right there, against the stove with the boiling coffee pot on it."

"Hehe, I remember this part."

"And then we took him out, and back on the sofa between the two of us, where he could be properly tended."

"I'm sure."

"Then in came the rest of them, and that slutty friend of yours took her shoes off and put her feet into dork nr 2's lap, and then asked him if he minds. The poor guy had a face like a teenager being... hey, you have any idea of how school kids party? It's like all the boys are virgins, and of course they try to act like they are at least assistant producers for "Juggs" and the girls are virgins and not really interested to even discuss the matter, except a few of them are not, and more than interested to discuss it with their male peers, which leads to this very amusing situation where the girls turn them on out of their wits on purpose, mostly to see how much they can take. And they can take an awful lot, and keep quiet about it."

"Wasn't aware it could be done outside suburban high schools."

"I'll take that as a compliment." said Frankie, with a grin. "So that's essentially what that slut you keep for a friend, for unclear purposes, was into, and I was forced to follow suit."

"Don't tell me, she made you do it? You didnt want to, but she made you."

"Yep." Frankie was the mother of innocence. How you could be the mother of innocence and still be innocent yourself is a matter left aside for future consideration. "I didn't even realize what she did at first, except she told me to substitute one of their DVD's for the one in her purse, and when I was returning with my mission complete she told me to sit in dork #2's lap and not be still...as it turns out she did a little more to the poor guy than just get a foot massage... she was giving one too!"

"What, a footjob?"

"I suppose..."Frankie was laughing. "A footjob, ey? I suppose she invented a new dirty. At any rate, what was I to do? I helped evenly distribute the unction, at least give it a chance at drying in time."

"Or as Janice described it, you simply pinned him down so he couldn't find an opportunity to visit the toilet."

"Or that. And of course now she was free to work her evil ways on dork #3, which kinda covers them all, minus the crazy one. And by then the TV was a good twenty minutes into, you will never guess it!"

"Ya, what was it? Janice wouldn't tell."

"Caligula."

"What, the Ben Hur of all porn?"

"Exactly."

"Well no wonder she wouldn't tell, I have been missing my only copy."

Frankie was laughing, "It's only fair, after all we did all the work, someone has to provide the capital, as it were."

"You know, I bought maybe two dozen of that one over the years and it always ended up as capital somewhere or other, they will start thinking I have a fetish."

"And you don't?"

"Anyway, what then?"

"Then they were all blushy and flushy and twirly... no, wait, no twirly, and we left."

"You will be that guy's undoing."

"No, it's strange. Today there was nobody in the observatory across the street."

"Poor sod, he must have gotten himself into trouble."

"Ya, there?s probably a chopped up fourteen year old in a car trunk somewhere."

"So I suppose this sums it up for the club then, doesn't it?"

"Now listen you old perv, we are nice girls at your beck and call, but enough's enough. There is nothing left to do there but get bored, and not even for you."

"Wasn't gonna say anything. I suppose now someone will have to write the story of it all."

"Not worth the effort, it's too much like a private joke. Who's gonna get it?"

"Probably nobody."

"There's your car, want me to hide in the closet?"

"I'm not keeping skeletons in the closet, it's the basement with me."

"Please, I don't want to go in the cement!" Frankie was talking in a high squeaky voice. Shirley Temple would have said "Darling", thumb in mouth and all.

"Besides, I don't think Peggy would see the humour."

"It's Peggy already isn't it? Peggy and ..... sitting in a tree." Frankie was stuck on her childish talk.

"If you don't behave I?m going to make you strip and wear the doggy leash."

"She already thinks I'm a bitch."

"I wonder why?"

"It?s all because you made me do it. I didn't want to, but you made me."

***

The phone call that day had more than surprised Peggy. She was still reeling a bit from the events at the club, still wondering, in fact, if she should go back and explain to Fred what she had guessed of the two women, or just let sleeping dogs lie and get on with her own life. The kids would be back from the summer with their father in a few days and life would be back to normal, whatever that was.

At least that was the way her mind was running when the phone rang. As always now she hesitated, it might be Ralph, she guessed she really should do something about that problem.

"Hello."

"Hi, it's Nick. How are you today?"

"Hi, Nick. I'm good. How's New York?"

"You know, you don't have to be actually in New York to broker."

"But you said you will only be in town a few days, I thought ..."

"Yes, as a matter of fact I will catch a plane tonight, but that's not yet. Are you busy?"

"No, I don't have any plans, I'd enjoy seeing you."

"Alright then, I'll send a car for you, about 6?"

Peggy was so surprised by that one she couldn't even form the words to ask about it.

"Ehh.. ok, see you then."

She set the phone down and just stood there staring at it as if it were a snake that might bite any second. Send a car for her? Whatever was this all about? She had in fact thought about Nick a lot the last couple of days. Well, a lot was relative, there had been much on her mind with the happenings at the club, and Ralph, and the kids due back and ...

But in the moments in between all that, she had tried to go back to thinking about Nick, trying to figure what it was that had seemed so odd about him. Nothing had come along to enlighten her and now the mystery deepened.

In another lifetime Peggy would not have ventured into uncharted territory like this, this would have been a mystery set carefully and safely on a shelf, never to be examined again. But now... well now it seemed that mysteries were meant to solved, or at least investigated. Checking the time, she moved off to shower and dress, surely the car would be as prompt as Nick himself.

Peggy was just making a final check of things when the car pulled up, at least she assumed that was it. A long white town car had little other business on the street in her neighborhood.

"Good evening madam." A very polite man opened the door for her quietly, with small gestures.

Everything about him was discreet and smooth, he didn't move slowly but he had a stillness about him that was soothing for strained nerves.

So that is how a limo driver is, thought Peggy to herself, suddenly realizing there is something about big white cars and drivers and the big houses rich people live in that is not ever conveyed through glossy magazines or news stories or films or anything else. It's not that their houses are five times the size of yours. It's not that they pay for a car what you pay for a house-with-a-wife package. It's simply that they are more comfortable, designed and built simply to serve you. Not stress you, but to make you feel relaxed and comfortable, not to save you money and the building company space and time. A fundamental difference.

"Thank you." She said as he was holding the door open for her. The driver looked at her for a second, with a shaky gaze, and then she was enclosed in a small leathery room.

Peggy looked about, she hadn't been in a car like this since her own senior prom, and she wouldn't even let herself think about how long ago that was, much less tell. Here she was, almost behaving like that silly teenager, overly impressed with the things. Sigh, she was impressed, how foolish.

Tearing her gaze away from all that, she studied the back of the driver?s neck, which was about all she could see of him before she noticed that the rearview mirror was angled such that she could see his eyes, and that he was in fact watching her.

Freddie was salivating as Pavlov demanded, but it was more a matter of habit than anything else. He noticed himself and was somehow startled, there was a strange air about this woman, he thought. There was no reason he should think she would act anything like the usual inhabitants of the small room welded to the back of his neck. Over the years he had seen so many girls in there... aspiring starlets, playboy centerfolds, both before and after they had graced humanity with the bare presentation of all they owned in this world, singers that could dance, dancers that could sing, journalists that blew, blowgirls that were excessively curious... most of them were something and wanted to be some other, to the point where they in fact claimed to be, and acted as if they were two things at the same time.

You can't drive a car two ways. If you try, it swerves and, if you are lucky, you won't crash it. Provided you come to your senses in time and stop trying to make it go two ways at once. Freddie knew as much about cars. Why would people try to go two ways? There was no reason to think that could work any better, and everyone had a driver's licence, yet nobody seemed to realize it can't possibly be done with a car, or with yourself.

Then there were a few of the other kind. Freddy had seen maybe a half dozen, all in all. They were never afraid. Every other girl he ever picked up somewhere, or dropped off somewhere was petrified. She might do the wrong thing. She might not be perfectly made up when she met the casting assistant, so they would always go about perfectly made up. She might ruin her voice, so she didn't dare smoke, except she smoked and didn't dare notice she was in fact smoking. She might ruin her figure and who wants a fat dancer? But she couldn't stop herself from cream and butter and chocolate and ice cream and then, after she stuffed her stomach beyond the possible, even for a whale, there was no more hiding, no denying of the fact that she had, in fact, eaten.

But there were a few that were never afraid. You can strip them naked on the corner of the street, you can arrest them, you can crash into their car, dump them in the alligator pond, they'd still shake their head for a no and nod it for a yes.

And now, there was a third kind, he thought. Peggy was not of the half dozen, but she was not of the rest either. Freddie scratched his head in a reflex gesture... it was almost like his boss, you'd know him for years, and you'd think you have it pegged. Not about the big things, Freddie wouldn't know about anything on those lines, and he religiously tried to keep himself out of it. Five hundred times he would do the same thing the same way, rain or sunshine and then there'd be the five hundred and oneth time, and you'd think it'd be the same still, but he went exactly the opposite, or maybe not the opposite but something different that you'd have never thought about, and after a while you could see, often enough, that anything else would have been just plain silly.

Peggy watched the driver watching her. She considered for a moment asking him about his boss. She could try to use this time to her best advantage, but quickly rejected the idea, from the little she had seen it would be a waste of time, and pretty rude too. In the end she settled for proforma conversation.

"Lovely day, isn't it?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Are we going far?"

"No, Ma'am, we are almost there."

"Ma'am sounds funny, my name is Peggy."

"Yes, Ma'am."

Peggy sighed to herself, obviously she had no idea how to get a conversation going. For now she gave up and settled back in the seat, deciding to pay some attention to the passing scenery.

"Yes, Ma'am. My name is Freddie." and after a short pause

"Here we are."

The car pulled to a majestic stop on the circular drive in front of a big white house. Freddie was opening the door for her, not the one she went in through, but the one next to the entrance, and Peggy had to move around to come out, half bent, and as she got out, head first, her heel got caught in something and she plunged forward.

"Oh my God!" Peggy thought to herself in a split second as she was losing her balance, and pictured herself falling on the curb as she was trying to exit the car and breaking all her teeth and having to be taken out in an ambulance. What a date! Luckily for her, Freddie noticed and stepped in front of her, taking her in his arms, and breaking her fall. Eventually, she ended up doing a sort of half circle through the air, losing one shoe in the process, but landing safely on her feet.

"Will you get my shoe?" she whispered as she was trying to catch her breath.

Freddie was back in a second helping her put it on, and she moved off quickly towards the door. Halfway there she remembered she hadn't even thanked the man, and stopped trying to think of something to do... she couldn't go all the way back, she thought as she turned to do just that, and instead just waved to the driver and darted off. "Just like a silly schoolgirl" she thought to herself as she made it to the door.

The door opened before she could even locate the bell, a pretty maid, in a uniform that was a shade too revealing for good taste, yet just short enough to give a good taste, smiled and showed her in.

The living room was empty, a nice fire crackled on the hearth and Peggy could see a pool beyond some sliding glass doors. The maid however didn't stop here and Peggy followed her on down a long hall to another room, a library. Who even keeps such a stuffy affair in their house? Peggy looked around, it was a long room, maybe fifty yards long, and the walls were all lined with shelves, wooden shelves all the way up to the ceiling, which was very high, maybe twenty feet. At regular intervals there were stairs going up on a wooden platform, and in the middle of the room there were more shelves, arranged to form big rectangles. On the wall opposite to the entrance there were tall windows breaking through the shelves, about as wide as the space they left, and the setting sun threw its last rays inside through them, making the dust sparkle in the air. In the spaces the windows cut there were small tables and armchairs, but they all looked old, and none were identical, here a single big easychair with a very high back, there a few small chairs and a table with arched legs, there just two...

Peggy could hear the murmur of conversation from her left, and she started that way. The place was so peaceful and quiet, no sounds came from outside, just the faint rustle of the wind in the trees and a bird call now and again. The sun left patterns of light and dark on the floor, so vivid she kept looking down in a panic that she might stumble on something and fall, but there was nothing there, just rays of light.

Eventually she came to see someone seated in the window, Nick was in a highback chair turned slightly towards the windowseat talking with someone seated there that she could only make out as a profile against the bright setting sun. The soft lining of books on all the wall, and the plush carpet muffled the sounds so that she could not even make out the voices as more than a soft murmur.

"Hello Nick."

Nick turned and the other person started chuckling.

"Nick, is it?"

Peggy recognized the voice. She had heard it before. There could not be any mistake. It was Frankie, and she collapsed in the nearest chair, limp. What was going on here, she thought desperately, turning that question again and again in her mind like a captive mouse in a rotating cage.

"Hello Peggy." Nick was smiling reassuringly, the way he always had been. Peggy just looked at him with the wide eyes of some trapped animal, hoping it will be quick.

"Will you join us for coffee?" Frankie was all smiles, and although it didn't look like she was up to no good, Peggy didn't even bother considering the possiblily she isn't. She nodded and went back to her mouse in a rotating cage.

"How did you two meet, anyway?" Frankie had certainly decided to use the moment for all it was worth.

"Well, I told Jamie to find somebody we know who lives on the Parkside, and then they had a sort of a...umm... dinner party I suppose."

"A set up!" Peggy was suddenly on her feet, with fiery eyes. "It was all a setup! All along!" she was almost shouting, happy to be able to speak, happy to let some of the steam slowly built in her head out, somehow, no matter how, out.

"Now now, do sit down." The man was speaking in an even, determined tone, and she sat like a schoolgirl in math class.

Two deep breaths later she was back on her feet again. Turning to "Nick" she said in a flat, even tone

"Well, I guess you two have had your fun, would you be good enough to call your driver for me now?"

"Did you have your fun?" the man was looking at her with even eyes, and that made her squirm, like he was piercing right through her. The question didn't make any sense so she chose to ignore it and wait for him to make a sensible response to her request. Of course she could just turn and walk out, but she wasn't quite ready to do that.

"He always asks impossible questions like that." Frankie turned to the man. "No, she didn't, she couldn't have had, to have fun you need to organize it, and who was to organize it for her?" She was speaking in a much more even tone, without all the flowers and punctuations that irritated Peggy every time they had met before. And strangely enough, appeared to speak on her behalf, if in a somewhat backhand manner. Of course Peggy wasn't falling for that, the woman was pure venom, the last person she wanted helping her out.

"I guess you would know about organized fun! You organized more than enough for the guys at the club. You enjoy playing with people's lives like that?"

"Well, in honesty, it wasn't really for them, it was more like with them. They are more than free to organize their own using me, or Janice, or anyone else for that matter. It's not like I'm the one forcing them to be boring and silly, now am I?"

"Boring and silly is a matter of opinion, and what you have done is force your opinion on them."

"So?"

"So, you are playing with the lives of others, like they were chess pieces or something, it's cruel and should be beneath you."

"Why my dear Peggy. A compliment? You look lovely today yourself. Prove they are not chess pieces and I'll forever stop.?

"Prove they are!"

Frankie was laughing and the man broke his silence.

"Well, we are here, aren't we?"

Peggy had been so focused on the harpy that she had forgotten about Frankie and Janice's partner in crime, or was it the chess master? She turned towards Nick again, he was standing there in this impossibly relaxed attitude, not a trace of conscience, how could she have thought he was ... Oh bah!

"I guess I really am accusing the wrong person, I bet the whole thing was your idea. But why? What is the purpose of screwing around in others' lives like that?"

"Purpose..." the man looked in the distance for a second "Now let?s see..." he was in a business tone, Peggy felt sure he could sell an idea as easily as he could buy some people. "What is the purpose of your life? You were married for years, but it didn't work out. You had two kids, but they are about to leave, and if not this year, and not the next, that?s what they are going to do anyway, when they feel ready for it. Saying you have kids is a strange lapse of logic, you should say some kids have you, by rights. So what is the purpose?"

Peggy almost growled out loud, but managed to swallow it. Nick, if that was his name, was the most infuriating person she had ever met.

"Are you capable of actually anwering a question? Or do you just have a ready stock of more questions to try and confuse the issues?"

"But what can I do? You ask me what is the purpose? Who the hell knows what is the purpose. What?s the purpose of this cup? I use it to hold coffee, but if I were in a bad spot I might use it to break a window, or hold a hot coal. What is the cup's purpose? Does it even matter what I use it for? That's not its purpose, that?s my purpose for it."

The fury left her, in fact she suddenly felt some sympathy for the two vamps. Had this sort of thing been what created them? Did they spend way too much time listening to questions designed to make you question everything you knew about how the world worked, had they lost all reason hanging around this man who must indeed have spent hours kissing the Blarney stone?

Deciding that she, at least, was not falling into the trap, she turned back to Frankie.

"I do hope that you are all done with this particular game. Do enjoy your coffee." And with that she turned and headed where she thought she recalled the door to this cavernous room was. She walked for at least twice as long as she remembered she had coming in, and eventually she came to a wall. Darn, she must have missed the entrance, so she turned back, and kept next to the wall, trying to make sure she doesn't miss the door again... and she walked a long way when she met a wall again. This is getting ridiculous, Peggy thought, and decided to follow the window side. She walked what seemed a quarter mile before coming again to the same table, from the same angle. The table now held a third cup of coffee and a tall bottle of water. She wouldn't have minded a cup of coffee, but she could have done without just as well. She was, however, getting thirsty from all the walking in the dust.

Glaring at the two of them she poured herself a glass of water, ignored the coffee and sat in the unoccuppied chair that was farthest from them.

"Welcome back" Nick smiled at her.

Peggy said nothing, just sipped the water and steamed. Finally she set the glass down and tried again.

"OK, so I guess you won't provide any answers about your silly games with the club. Can you at least enlighten me as to why you brought me here? What?s the point in letting me see all this now? Is it just a way for you to squeeze the final laugh out of the whole thing?"

"Gladly, this is the library of enlightment after all. Things are not separate you see? If you land a good job, that's a way to pay the bills, but it's also a way to chain your person to the office. We may well be trying to squeeze the last drop out of it, but that might also be a way for you to get questions answered. I, for one, will never trust anyone who doesn't have a selfish motive, would you?"

"You really believe that? People always have selfish motives? It might be so in a way, even so called selfless acts have rewards, but people don't always know that when they start off."

"Have you noticed that whenever someone fucks you over they say it's for your own good? Or everyone's favorite, ?best for all those involved?."

Peggy winced at the language.

"Are you saying all this was for my own good? But in fact by your own word it would only be an accident if it were since it was for your own selfish amusement."

"So, looking back over the past weeks, what have you lost?"

"Lost? Well it's a bit soon to say for sure, but the club is pretty much a goner, the idea of the place was as a safe heaven, but now that it has been invaded and spoiled it will be of no use to anyone. You perhaps, if I give you the benefit of the doubt, thought to do good by expanding the lives of those invloved, but you have in fact spoiled their only chance to expand it for themselves."

"Why would it have to be a goner? The girls won't show up anymore and it can go back to its normal routine. Which is what it was all along, and what it was intended to do. A new layer of routine, for those people who have brains enough to yank them a shade above drowning in all the other routines. The extra bucket of water added to a well in which someone fell who was too tall."

"Well, you should know that it won't go back. You never can go back. "

"You sound like someone refusing to grow up. Of course you can't go back, and why should you?"

"Are you really that thick? Or just being obtuse on purpose? You wrecked the club and you just don't want to admit the pain you have caused playing about in people?s lives."

"I didn't wreck it, and that because I couldn't be bothered to notice it long enough. It got wrecked, as it was meant to."

"Meant to? That?s a bold statement, you presume to know what was meant to be? Has the universe revealed all of its secrets to you?"

"Well, the fact remains that if it weren't meant to, it wouldn't have been."

"By that reasoning everything that ever has or ever will happen is meant to."

"And what's the problem with that?" The man was looking at her with white shiny smiley eyes.

"You remove the opportunity for free will, that's what's wrong with it."

"No. I can still do whatever I please, you can still do whatever you please, it's just that you can't rely on me doing what you please to think I should. If anything it preserves freedom."

"Useless freedom. Why bother to do anything at all if it has no effect whatsoever on what was meant to be?"

"Because you can. And because it's fun."

"About as much fun as Sysiphus is having."

"You object against the human condition? It is not my fault you know? Or Frankie's. You are angry with the wrong man."

"Not against the condition, against your limited beliefs about it. You chose this belief that lets you behave in any manner that suits you, ignoring any chance that you might injure others in the process. That is your choice, and I object to being in the fallout pattern."

"I suppose it is immoral, isn't it? Tell me, if you had wings would flight be immoral? Sex and erotics are injuring people? They lost limb and life to my reckless ways? And all that because I do not believe that which can't be proven? Do you believe your cup is alive and feels the pain every time you fill it with hot coffee? Or do you approve of some limitations to belief, if they happen to be your own, but not others'?"

"Obviously in your belief system no wrong can be done, but allow for a moment that you might be wrong. Allow for a moment that your actions can effect and change the way things were meant to be. "

"Why?"

"Why not? Are you afraid?"

"Suppose it's like this. I see a girl and I like her and I walk up to her and tell her ?Hello, I just saw you and I like you?. And she says, ?but suppose for a second we are in London, and suppose it is the year of our Lord 1895, and suppose I am wearing a long dress that keeps me from walking and a corset made of metal wire that keeps me from breathing and you will have to kiss me every half hour for two hours each day on the Piccadilly and then visit my parents every Thursday and then follow countless other ceremonies and eventually marry me but never shall we see each other naked, or even talk about things that are simply natural?. And then I should ask ?why? and she'd say ?why not? Are you afraid?? Well I am not afraid, but I think I only have this much time, and I can come up with idiotic blindfolds myself, and this one isn't on the list."

Peggy sighed softly, this talk was going nowhere, in fact he put on this big act of being open minded when his view of the world was narrow beyond belief. Was there anyway at all to reach him or was she wasting her breath here?

"In the same way that you would not choose to have Victorian courting standards required of you there are people that would not choose to have your standards applied to them. You overstep reasonable bounds of behavior when you do that. I suppose immoral is as good a word as any for that."

"What did I impose?"

"Hhumph, of course you don't seem to have dirtied your own hands with it. Instead you sent your minions. And the good people of the club welcomed them, only to have them ruin the place."

The man turned to the other woman. "I think she called you mignonne."

"Why do you think it is, Peggy? Why am I here, rather than with whatever his name is? Or the other whatever his name is? Why don't I go out and find a good man for myself and settle down and have kids and get divorced and be lonely and desperate?"

"In fact I don't think you have the guts for it. It takes things you can't possibly understand, loyalty, commitment, persistance ..."

"You know, plowing the field in the ox's yoke also takes things I don't have the guts for. And where is your loyalty and commitment? What are you commited to? Is it anything other than yourself, or rather what you somehow arrived to believe, or were indoctrinated to believe is your lot in this life? How could you know if I'm loyal or not? Maybe I can say more for my many friends than you can say for your single husband."

"Your life is your choice, as mine is mine. If the ox did not plow the field we all would be very hungry."

"I heard they used machines nowadays."

"Well when they make machines that have babies and keep house do let me know. Fact remains that I could be your mother, but you could not be mine. I have no problem with you living the life you choose, but you apparently have a problem with me living the one I choose."

"In fact we don't, not really. We have a problem with people who pretend they are doing one thing and are in fact doing another. But if you put it like that, you are more than welcome to it. I'll be happy to see you here again any time, should you feel inclined to peruse my library, or take a swim, or anything else, just don't hit the cognac."

Peggy was startled again, she seemed to keep focusing on the conversation with either and forgetting that it was in fact two against one. She turned back to Nick.

"I really must be going now, would you be kind enough to show me the way out of this maze?"

The man gestured as if to show her something, and as she turned to look there was the maid, standing quietly behind her. She stood up, nodded her head and took off. When she was out of sight, Frankie turned towards the man.

"I think she's sexy."

"I think she forgot her purse." The man was holding a small, white bag, smiling.

THE END

« Asylum, Chapter Eighteen

Have you taken a horse ? »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Monday, 27 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Asylum, Chapter Fourteen

Peggy settled herself carefully on the sofa facing the entertainment system while Ralph disappeared into the kitchen to fix a snack to go with the video they planned to watch. She looked about and wondered again why was she here.

Looking about she shuddered slightly, seeing this place she understood better why she and Ralph had fought so much those first few days at the club. It wasn't really that he had bad taste, it was more like no discrimination. The place was simply stuffed, every surface held an knick knack, the walls were so covered it was hard to determine what color they were painted. Actually, now that she thought of it, it really did reflect the personality of the owner, it said RALPH! Maybe that was not so bad, his tendency to acquire simply everything, especially if it was new, was really more of an endearing characteristic than the annoying trait she had seen it at first.

"Ready for a really great movie?" Ralph practically bounced back into the room, carrying a large tray with glasses of soda, bowls of chips, and of course some new dip he wanted to try.

"Of course." She replied while struggling to make room on the coffee table for the tray he held.

"I just know you are going to love this movie. Do try the new dip and let me know what you think. I got a coupon for it from the paper last Sunday."

While talking, Ralph had reached for one of the remotes in the array that lined the right edge of the coffee table, pushed some buttons, and the large screen on the far wall sprung to life. He set that one down, grabbed a second, pushed another button and the lights in the room dimmed to a comfortable level for viewing.

Peggy took a polite sip of the soda which was of course too sweet and dutifully scooped up some dip with one of the chips. It was not too bad, but it would have been better served with some carrot sticks and perhaps a nice Chardonnay.

They settled back to watch the movie, Ralph had the controller in hand again and Peggy quickly learned that he would use it to pause the movie occasionally to ask her opinion on something or the other about it. She hoped this movie would hold her interest better than the last.

The video drug on and Peggy's mind wandered. Why was she here? At first, she guessed, she was a bit intrigued by Ralph. No one in her usual circle would have argued points on taste and decorating with her at all, much less as vehemently as Ralph had. And then to turn around and ask her out for coffee, Peggy almost giggled out loud recalling how surprised, and at least a bit pleased she had been. Now, sitting here, she wondered had she really been intrigued, or just that desperate for human contact?

She peeked at him, out of the corner of her eye, wondering. But he seemed totally absorbed in the movie. She swallowed quietly. Peggy was embarrassed even to think this way but she couldn't seem to stop herself. Part of her didn't care, she was so alone that even Ralph felt like a prize. Another part warned that if he rejected her, that would be the end, her tortured soul could tolerate no more.

Then there was the question of the club, it truly had become a refuge for her, a place she could go and feel comfortable when the walls of her empty home felt like they were closing in on her. A relationship between her and Ralph, especially a failed one, would change all that.

She had been expecting it, just like in movie theaters when she was a teenager, Ralph's arm slid down from the back of the sofa and encircled her shoulders. She froze, not having yet made up her mind how to handle this. Peggy continued to sit quietly, neither accepting nor rejecting his advance, her mind racing through all the possibilities.

In the end it really didn't matter, the warmth and comfort offered, her desire for it, overrode all her better judgment. She settled softly against his shoulder letting herself relax and enjoy the moment.

"Peggy", Ralph spoke softly, barely audible over the sound track of the movie and she turned to look at him. Then his lips were on hers, soft, warm, tender. All her thinking no longer mattered, her body responded and she simply didn't care. She opened her mouth and returned his kiss, tongues touching.

Had they actually been the teenagers they were behaving like up until this point, it might have ended there, two frustrated people sitting on a sofa, pretending to watch a bad movie. But they weren't teenagers, almost as one they rose, Ralph leading the way they headed for the bedroom, leaving a trail of discarded clothing. Tomorrow she might have a million regrets, but tonight, for this moment, she was free.

Sometime later Peggy lay there, listening to Ralph snore softly, instantly asleep, just like her ex-husband. Were all men like that? Maybe, or maybe it was just limited experience and bad luck that made her think that. Carefully, so as not to risk disturbing Ralph and have to face him just now she climbed out of the bed and began retrieving her clothes from the trail leading back to the sofa.

Unlocking her door she heard the clock on her mantle chime, 2 AM, she stopped surprised, doubting she had ever been awake to hear that before. She hadn't been awake at this hour since the children were babies. Oddly, she wasn't in the least bit tired, bed held no appeal. She walked into the kitchen and took out the bottle of wine that had been sitting in her fridge forever and studied it. Why not? She never drank alone before, but this was a night for lots of firsts it seemed. She poured a glass, looked at it for a moment then shrugged, picked up the glass and the bottle and carried them into the dark living room.

Settled into the corner of the sofa she sipped the wine, made a face, and began to ponder. Questions she had dropped long ago, things left behind along with the oily skin and pimples of adolescence. Who was she? Where was she going? Indeed, what was the meaning of life? But now, they were even harder, all mixed up with lesser more immediate questions like what to do about Ralph, and the club?

Dawn found her still there, sitting and pondering, the bottle now empty. She was no closer to any answers, but she did at least know that failure to keep searching for them was like giving up and just waiting to die.

Well, at least for now the club was as good a place as any to start... what did those two new women do when they weren't hanging around making trouble for everybody else?

Continued

« Asylum, Chapter Thirteen

Asylum, Chapter Fifteen »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Monday, 27 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Asylum, Chapter Four

Peering out from between the books on the shelf, looking as if he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar, the man in the corner attempted to introduce himself.

"Hi. I mean Hello. My name is John."

Then he ducked quickly back behind the shelf and went on to consider what else he had to say.

"i am john. i am a software engineer. that means i understand how computers work and take notes on that so other people that don't understand how computers work can still use them. i am single. my mother and me, we talk on the phone every now and again, when i don't manage to dodge it mostly, and she says i should get married and have kids. do you think i should? what if the software market collapses and i am left unemployed and with no chance to ever be employed? what if my kids will hate me? what if they wont get married and have kids? i speak with my father a lot less. actually there is very little we could speak about. and we didn't use to talk much when i was a kid either. sure back then grades and sports and borrowing his car and allowances and such things made for ready subjects of conversation that would last you, with some care and planning, every breakfast until either of us had to leave, every weekend we spent at home and every other time circumstances forced us to occupy the same few square feet. i never understood this fascination people on tv seem to have with talking. i don't think very much can be accomplished talking to anyone. overall we would be a lot better off if we just had a simple and powerful code that allowed us to communicate with no time and effort lost over pointless intricacies. every morning i wake up at 7. well except that time last month when i had the flu. that was a real bad time. i was in bed with a fever and very dizzy, the apartment kept spinning around me. i was thirsty most of the time, and at first i tried to go for water but i fell down on the floor and then it was so difficult to get back in bed i never tried again, just waited it out. my iq is 129 but they say that is really not very relevant. after i wake up at 7 i work out. i do 15 push ups, 25 sit ups, 30 stand ups. my apartment is made of one room that is sort of a kitchen-living room combo, 25 square feet, a bedroom, 15 square feet, a bathroom, 6 square feet. i take up 46 square feet of living space. then i eat muesli crunchy cereal with parmalat low fat milk. 4 spoons of cereal and milk to cover it in the blue bowl. then i shower. then i take bus 32 and then switch to bus 68 at the 3rd stop. then i get to the office. my place is the cubical f23 / b / 785. there i work. from time to time debby from the copy room passes by my cubical. she has black stockings every monday, wednesday and friday. she has skin-color stockings every thursday and tuesday. she has very nice legs. sometimes she has a long dress but usually she has short skirts. she knows she has very nice legs. maybe she knows i look at her legs as she passes my cubical. she is usually late though. i think she might get in trouble for it. it would be really sad if that happened. i always think it's a real pity i can only see her legs as she passes my cubical. i think if she were to get fired i will get out of my cubical one time as she passes it and look at her face. but i hope she is not fired. after all most people have some trouble and they arrive late, but that never got anyone fired. after work i get back home and watch tv. sometimes i play games on my home computer. i really like one particularly. it is about organizing people to work and founding cities and building important buildings and making armies and conquering other people, but you don't have to, you can live in peace with everyone too. i think i could be good at that, forging an empire... with many cities in which people worked and built important buildings and factories and made many useful objects. after that i go to bed, so that i can get up the next day. weekends i don't have to work, so i stay at home and just relax. i go eat pizza at joe's instead of ordering it. on the way to joe's there is a furniture shop. they don't only sell furniture there, they have all sorts of decorations. they have a very nice vase. i think it's porcelain. it is blue and has a painting on it of flowers and a little bird. i like that vase very much. i think one day i will just walk in there and buy it. then i could put it on my table, near the computer. although it might fall and shatter, and that would be very bad. maybe i could put it somewhere safe, inside a drawer somewhere. but then i wouldn't get to see it... maybe every now and again i could open the drawer and look at it. still i could drop it and it could break. how wonderful it is that every weekend on my way to joe's i can see the vase safely inside the furniture shop."

Distracted with his daydreaming the large book John was holding slipped from his hand and fell to the floor with a loud thump.

Red-faced he snatched the book from the floor and retreated to an even darker corner behind the book shelves.

Continued

« Asylum, Chapter Three

Asylum, Chapter Five »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Sunday, 26 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Asylum, Chapter Five

Ralph eased the new Honda into the parking place. He smiled broadly as he set the brake and unbuckled his seat belt, row 5, slot 13, the perfect place. He always wanted to park exactly here but sometimes it was taken and he had to park in 12 or 14 or even further away. Ralph had started parking here right after that time he came out of the store and couldn't find his car. Now he always knew where it was, or at least very close because it was always in the same place.

Climbing out he carefully locked the door, double checked his pocket for his shopping list and set off for the store. He didn't come to this store every week, really the only reason to come here was that special brand of string beans the other stores didn't carry. Pausing, he pulled out his list to check it while he walked. According to his notes TV dinners were on sale here this week too, a better price than he usually paid at another store so he would also buy those.

Inside he took a shopping cart from the end of the row by the door and began pushing it down the wide bright aisle. Ralph knew well the layout of the store, he could have gone directly to the string beans and tv dinners, but if he did that he might miss something worth seeing and buying. Up and down each aisle he traveled, pushing the shopping cart, which seemed to have developed a sticky, squeaky wheel just feet from the front door.

Ralph considered going back for another, but he really hated backing up, and anyway the next one would probably have something wrong too, they always did.

The aisles should have been spacious, designed in fact to let two people pushing carts pass each other with room to spare, but much of that space was filled with point-of-sale displays and sale items. In fact with all the extra stuff in the aisles it was often hard to get through them at all. Waiting in one spot for some woman to pass from the other direction he noticed on the display next to him a new brand of soap, he had seen the first commercial for it just the other day. It wasn't on his list, but he had thought at the time he would like to try it, into the cart it went.

Six more aisles and 30 minutes later he was waiting in line to pay for the items in his now half full shopping cart.

Back in the parking lot at last, he set off confidently toward the slot where he knew he had parked his car. Groceries were safely transferred to the trunk, Ralph pushed the cart with the sticky, squeaky wheel to the spot labeled 'Car Corral' and parked it. He climbed into the car and pulled out his list, glancing over the items crossed out, only two actually, and saw that his next stop must be the store where he did most of his shopping. They generally had the best prices, except when things were on sale at other places.

At his next stop the parking lot was very crowded, Ralph had to park one row over and 6 spaces up from his usual spot. He took out a pen and carefully noted the location on the bottom of his shopping list, just in case.

Entering the store, his attention was caught by a small crowd of people watching a girl in a very short skirt demonstrating the latest in labor-saving-devices, other than very short skirts. He took the last cart from the long stack and pushed it over to join the crowd and see what new wonder of modern science was being demonstrated.

Watching, his eyes wandered back and forth between the girl's very long legs and her quick hands showing how wonderfully quick and easy it was to perfectly peel a hard boiled egg with this ingenious bit of plastic. Ralph really didn't eat hard boiled eggs, but maybe that's because they were too much trouble to peel? At last, tearing his gaze away from the long legged girl, he picked up a box containing this wonder of modern science, on special sale of course, dropped it into his cart and moved off to complete his grocery shopping.

At the far end of aisle 5 was another demonstrator, this time a young man that looked like he had just stepped off the front cover of some 'beach and surf' magazine. Ralph tried to maneuver closer to see what was being demonstrated, but the way was completely blocked by housewives, each pushing shopping carts and towing one or more small children. A bit frustrated Ralph retreated and squeezed his cart behind the edge of the crowd and turned into aisle 6.

The last thing on Ralph's list today was to find the new store that rented DVD's that he had seen advertised on TV. They had a really good deal for club members and he planned to join, if he could find the place. The address was really not too far from his home, but it was in an older, run down section of town that he rarely visited, while he was there he would also follow-up on a flier he had recently gotten in the mail about a new club there called Asylum, sounded like it might be an interesting place to make some new friends.

Ralph's mind wandered off, trying to add up the day's expenses. According to the statement they sent there were 745 dollars less on his Platinum Visa than should have been there, and that on top of the 255 dollars check he deposited to that account... Where could have all the money gone? Briefly he considered calling the company and telling them somebody must have gotten his PIN somehow and was leeching his credit card... but then, he had done that last year right after Christmas when he suddenly, mysteriously, painfully owed almost five thousand dollars more than he could possibly recall spending, and eventually it turned out he had in fact spent himself every penny, the company charged him for the false alert and he was so ashamed when he had to explain to the lady on the phone he must have lost track of his own expenses. Ralph frowned and banished the thought of calling the company. It was much like in school, when you get a bad mark on an exam that is automatically marked by a computer, and you talk to the teacher, because you are very sure there must have been some mix-up with the silly computer... not because you have much real cause for that, but because it would be so great if it were in fact true, that you can't pass the opportunity, at least not easily.

There was all the grocery shopping he did... slip said something like 75 dollars... and then the groceries at the second store... must have been about same... no, wait, slip definitely was 3 figures... was it a hundred something? Or two hundred something? Couldn't have been just one hundred, Ralph decided, since the egg peeler was 19.99 on special sale (he did save 5 dollars on that, Ralph tried to cheer himself up). So it must have been two hundred something... How much? A little something! Ralph was already arguing with himself, and he always hated that.

So that was that, he had spent over two hundred dollars again, when all he wanted to get were some bloody canned beans. Which actually he could have very well done without since he only knew one way to fix them. This can not go on. For the probably hundredth time, Ralph was about to promise himself he was going to stop shopping that way, do something, anything, but stop with the cart filling.

The club! Maybe he should find that club he wanted to see, they had no mention of a fee, and he was sure the DVD place was all about getting the poor working man's sweated dime. What did he need DVD's for anyway? Well... it would be nice to have some to watch as a pastime in the evening...but then again that's how he got over 100 music CD's last year... and most of them he hadn't even listened to yet, and most of those he had listened to he couldn't stand. Maybe there are some nice people there that won't try to get him to buy anything while pretending to be chatting with him.

Turning onto the street listed in the ad Ralph stopped, stepping on his brakes quickly in absolute amazement. There, suspended almost in mid-air, half in and half out of a storefront window was the reddest car he had ever seen.

Small groups of people stood about in front of some of the shops, watching as a tow truck maneuvered, trying to find the right position it needed to extract the car from its predicament.

Regaining a bit of composure, Ralph glanced up and down the street, finally spotting a place, far enough from the accident scene and not over hung with trees that might spoil the waxy sheen on his car, he parked and got out to look for the club.

Standing next to his parked car Ralph looked up and down the street, seeking an address number to indicate which way he should be going to find the club. His eye fell on the policeman, near the accident scene, apparently taking a statement from a witness, and the witness was none other than Rev. Thomas Asher, the minister from the church he attended some Sundays, when he had nothing better to do.

***

"So there I was, standing like an idiot, looking at my car all covered in little bits of glass. You remember what I went through to have it painted shining bright red, not carmine, not burgundy, not that sickly sort of red they use for ambulances? Well, now it's all scratched by a million little bits of glass. And of all the things in the world, an art gallery! What the heck is an art gallery anyways? What does it do? Just a magnet for idiots that sit there for hours gazing at stupid bits of paper someone puked on. So then they were all gazing at me, with these bovine looks they have."

"Ah, but this was a fortunate event, Frankie. You were exposed to culture."

"Shove it. I was exposed to little bits of glass and they were exposed to real life for a second."

"So why did you get arrested then?"

"Dunno."

"Course, the officer said you threw stuff at him and hit him and scratched him and then wouldn't show a driver's license."

"Well, I didn't have it."

"What, the license?"

"I must have left it somewhere... I don't know."

"But how do you manage to crash a car in this traffic? I certainly don't know."

"Gah! I was trying to go past this asleep idiot at the stop light. Anyone knows you don't stop the second it turns red. Pesky municipal workers always stop before it even is red. So I went past him."

"What, you passed the car stopped at the light? The wrong way?"

"Not exactly... well anyways, some car came from ahead and I had to pull left but then it went sliding and next thing I knew I was inside the museum."

"They must have thought it's an artistic happening."

"Oh anyway, what is the hold up... I'm sick of this place already!"

"Well, they are probably double checking for stolen cars, assaults, soliciting... you know... standard procedure for a car crash."

"Ha, ha. So funny, someone will get killed."

"Anyway, I wanted to talk about something with you."

"Like?"

"See, I went by a place that had an odd name, 'Asylum'. Turns out it's a bunch of losers that got together, formed a sort of loser hang out since they got nothing better to do anyway. Sort of a support group for people that have no friends, no relatives and not even somebody that could be bothered to shoot them."

"Glorious. I'm sure you will be happy."

"I will, just as soon as we join up."

"Who's we?"

"Me, you, and I think Janice."

"What's that slut to do with anything?"

"I have such a strange feeling of deja-vu."

"Have some water. You don't seem that well you know? Old age finally catching up? Listen to him! Join the Asylum? HA!"

"Just consider this. We go there, join separately. Then you do this song and dance about being lonely and looking for a soul mate... you know like in the stupid books they read, 'someone I could just talk to'."

"Do I look like all that much talk?"

"Will you shut up? You haven't seen these people. I bet you will get a box of candies each day. And then they will talk to you see? And offer their best intended friendship. And likely, invitations to visit art galleries."

"Hmm."

"Capisci?"

"This could actually be fun for a change. You know sometimes you are almost as smart as they say."

"Rarely."

"So where in hell is the guy with the key? You sure you posted bail?"

"No, I was on my way, but then I thought I'd stop by."

"Oh! You monster! I want OUT of here!"

"Well, okay, I'll go now. You just stay put."

"I'll be right here, sharpening nails, dear."

***

Ralph moved closer to the accident scene, wondering if the Rev. might need some help. Surely that was not his car, now teetering in mid-air as the tow truck attempted to extract it from its unlikely location in the display window.

"No, officer." Ralph heard the Rev. say. "I was just stopping at the red light, when this car came up from behind, very fast, then swerved, apparently lost control and went flying into the store there."

"Alright, I have your statement, we will be in touch if anything more is needed. Have a safe day now." the officer replied, then moved away.

Rev. Thomas Asher still just stood there, looking a bit dazed and Ralph approached him to ask if there was anything he could do to help.

They stood there together on the sidewalk, chatting quietly about nothing much and watching as the car was extracted and towed away. A few minutes later, a team of workmen showed up with sheets of plywood and began clearing away the broken glass and covering the gaping hole in the front of the building, which Ralph could now clearly see was an art gallery.

The little crowds of other watchers, clustered around other store fronts, began to drift away and the street slowly returned to its usual peaceful state.

The last group to drift away was just two doors down, and as they cleared the area in front of their doorway Ralph saw that one of the crowd was not a person at all, but of all things a wooden Indian.

Continued

« Asylum, Chapter Four

Asylum, Chapter Six »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Sunday, 26 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Asylum, Chapter Eleven

"And to think I taught you that trick, you little snake !"

Frankie was looking straight at the driver through the mirror, and the poor guy thought she's actually talking to him, although what she said made no sense, so he tried a sort of mumbled halfway between an excuse and a question.

"No you didn't !" Janice was moving around in the seat as if she couldn't quite find a comfortable position.

"I should have known better than to let you two in there."

"That you should have. I shudder thinking what a certain party might say if he was to find about your horrible tactical ineptitude."

"Tactical ineptitude, ey? You been going to night school?"

"Eh... some of us are trying to make something of our lives, ya know?"

"Found a nice spot in a choir too, perhaps?"

"If you don't shut up I'm gonna tickle you!"

"You and whose army?"

With that the girls were intertwined, and the driver, a quaint elderly gentleman with a rather bald head and peaceful figure was trying hard not to notice the flurry of thighs and stomachs and everything else, but judging by the way his face was slowly turning rosier and rosier, he wasn't doing a terribly good job of it. He was a very peaceful man, when he was younger he was a bit more lively, but still a peaceful, reasonable young man, who never got in any sort of trouble. Even as a kid he never broke a window, and he never saw the inside of the principal's office. Every time he would pass by that door, going to the gym, or coming from the gym, or on rare occasions visiting the school nurse, he looked at the door with a sort of awe, it was terror and a vague curiosity and helplessness and his very definite hope that he will manage to behave himself and never have to enter that door. The principal's office was however very busy as a rule, and many other kids came and went all the time, and for the longest time he had wanted to talk to them, ask them, why did they end up there? After all, keeping out wasn't all that difficult, it never took him any effort at all. You just have to stay calm and collected and don't get involved in all the silly little plots and schemes school kids always seem to hatch, but never get any good at. It took him the better part of the school years to summon the courage, not the courage really, just, let's call it, adequate disposition, to ask one of the kids, what was the office like? And the answers keep coming about why that particular kid got in trouble, who did what and whose fault it really was, but he never managed to get across that he couldn't care less about all that, all he wanted to know is how does the office look, inside, and what goes on in there, and all the answers he ever got were always about things that led to, or at any rate happened before whoever he was talking to went in there. And eventually he never found out. It probably was a couch and a few easy chairs, a desk and a carpet, diplomas on the walls and maybe a coffee machine. But was the carpet cream or pink? Was the desk solid wood or metal or ice-cream? After all, did it matter any? A principal's office is just that, a principal's office, and nobody ever disciplined in there said the carpet color made any difference, and why should it?

That was, however, only the beginning. He worked for almost two decades at a metal processing plant, started as worker, slowly climbed the plant hierarchy, and eventually got the position of foreman, that was 5 promotions in 18 years, 1 promotion each 43 months, each week, when he signed his paycheck, he could have said, if he had known it, that he had another 1/200th of a promotion in his pocket, right there.

Eventually that plant went bankrupt, he never quite understood it all very well, something about overseas competition, and most of his retirement savings were gone suddenly, just as his entire life of slowly earned 1/200ths of promotions. In the hallways there was talk of the upper management sticking their hands in the company money, there were even some people from Washington, doing what they called an investigation, but for him all that meant very little. Luckily he was able to find a job as a cab driver, and now he had enough to get by, he never needed much anyway.

But even in his day at the plant, there always were places he never went. Usually he was too busy to notice, but every now and again, waiting for something, maybe a spare part for a malfunctioning bit of machinery, or his calling at some management meeting, he would diffusely think about all the places in that plant he never went to see. Of course he never went up in the management building, except every once a year or so, and then he noticed little, the hallway, the meeting room, but they never actually went into the offices, or the toilets, and in fact after living 8 or 10 hours a day for two decades of his life on that half square mile of land, he couldn't give an account or description that was anywhere remotely near informed, on more than a hundred square yards. The big hall where most of the machinery was, he never walked all the way. He was always going in and to his workplace on the same path, and he vaguely knew other people from the "Far away" workplaces, but he never actually was over there, never rested an elbow on one of their machines there, never spat on the floor at the other end of the hall. For all it mattered, it could have been in China.

***

"Oh, ooooh, she is bringing a friend !"

Mr Hinkle-Bailay, the legal tenant of apt. 25A at #156 Regent street was hopping up and down in glee, at the moment wearing just underwear. Strangely enough, the shorts didn't seem to fit too well... actually, they didn't fit at all, quite the contrary by the looks of it, they must have been fitting in a most painful manner. One might be as bold as to say their designer, along with the producer, retailer and everyone else up and down the supply chain operated holding the erroneous belief that the customer they are serving is going to be... well let's just say they never expected cock and balls. The bra was a significantly better fit.

Mr Hinkle-Bailay turned off completely the previously dim lights, and started focusing his obviously very expensive telescope. In the round circle of sight there was a large creamy plush couch with matching pillows, and at regular intervals of about 4 seconds, a new article of clothing was flying over and landing on it more or less comfortably. A jacket missed the thing by about a foot, and flew way past into the hallway. Then a sweater cuddled up on a pillow with one sleeve on top, open as if it was in fact a strange sort of woolen creature using a periscope-like appendage to spy the surroundings. A beige blouse and a silken shirt with pearly buttons flew in tandem, one landing right in the middle of the sofa, the other falling a bit short, and ending up with both sleeves apart, one hanging on the floor, one extended over the backrest as if it was caught in some interrogation device, something medieval and terrible.

Then there was a pause, Mr. Hinkle-Bailay thought, Bras ! Bras! But there were no bras flying in the air, or maybe there were but completely invisible. Then a topless Janice landed on the couch, squishing the woolen creature and its periscope-like appendages. Unbelievably tiny pink nipples crowned her breasts, making them seem even more sumptuous. She bit her lower lip softly and then Frankie was on top of her, resting on all fours, like some sort of feral feline, if it wasn't for the very obviously human genitals. At which point Mr Hinkle-Bailay was entirely too absorbed in some other activity to pay much more attention.

***

Fred closed and locked the door with a great sense of relief. Finally, some peace to collect his thoughts, reflect on the events of the evening and the future of his club. Leaning there against the door, looking at the empty room he simply allowed the quiet of it to envelop him; then wanting even more he flipped off the lights too.

He was startled by a tiny sound, unidentifiable, from somewhere in the back of the room and quickly turned the lights back on. John? It must be, Fred did not recall seeing John leave with the rest of the crowd.

Indeed, there he was, crouching in the darkest corner, behind the bookshelves, clutching something tightly to his chest.

"John."

No response.

"John?"

There was a little stirring, a tiny sound Fred couldn't quite place.

"John, everyone else is gone; would you like to share the last of the cookies and soda with me?"

Slowly John emerged from the shadows and Fred saw him settled on the sofa then went to collect up a plate of cookies from the refreshment table. Pouring the cups of soda, Fred reflected on his own obvious lack of perception and caring about his club members. He had been so caught up in the incredible events of the evening that he completely forgotten about John. This simply would not do, if the club was to thrive he really must do a better job of things.

Fred carried the sodas and plate of cookies back and set them on the small table next to where John was sitting quietly on the sofa, eyes a bit glassy. Fred sat there a few minutes, thinking what to say, how to start a conversation, perhaps ease the tension a bit. Unfortunately all that came to mind was immediately rejected as simply being too foolish and banal under the circumstances. At last, he reached for a cookie and began to munch, just to cover his discomfort. Noticing, John too reached for a cookie, apparently forgetting the object he still clutched to his chest.

The blue vase slid from his grasp, bouncing on the edge of the sofa it flew higher. Fred and John were both frozen, watching the vase flip over in mid-aid, slowly, majestically like it had all the time in the world. The lights reflected from it in sparkles as it tumbled over and over, landing once again on the edge of the sofa and sliding towards the floor. Neither of the men could even draw breath so captivated were they by the amazing sight, they tensed expecting next the tinkling sound of broken glass, but the vase settled quietly on the floor, miraculously unbroken.

Both continued to gaze for some time at the blue vase, resting peacefully on the polished floor. Looking up eventually their eyes met for a fleeting moment and as one they rose and headed for the door.

***

"... I want to drink... and I will drink... until somebody..."

The music was carrying the strange voice of a young man... or maybe a no longer young and avid smoking woman, speaking with a very strange accent that couldn't be quite placed, vowels a shade too open, consonants nasal when they shouldn't have been...

"until I can find one who can tell me... how much to drink so it's just perfect... not too much and not too little... and I will drink..."

The man was sitting at a small table in the back, with a huge newspaper open, that he was obviously not really reading, just sifting. Remarkably, he was placed precisely in the right spot under a light bulb, light came from above and a bit behind, so in spite of the relative gloom of the place he had excellent reading conditions, as if he was a child preparing his homework in the house of some overly educated and excessively careful parents.

"until my head will fall behind... and still I don't understand... why everybody stares at me... "

There were steps and giggles and the man raised his eyes and dropped the newspaper on the table. A very striking pair was approaching, one blond and one dark haired, holding each other behind the back like schoolgirls on the school playground.

"You will never guess where we are coming from."

"Might be easier than you think, considering you are wearing Janice's favorite lipstick."

Frankie eyed Janice... Janice eyed her back, their expressions a perfect mirror for each other's surprise and amazement... that sort of feeling as if somebody suddenly pulled the carpet from right under your feet. How can he possibly notice shades of gloss, even with the help of electric lights fighting the gloom of this bar, that was really an old cellar, and as such had no windows to speak of.

The man smiled broadly, Frankie cursed in her own mind, Janice sat down. Suddenly Frankie was in an odd position, Janice had sat on the free seat to the left of the man, there was one more to the right, but the table was right next to the wall, and there was no getting there, so now she was to sit in front of them, on any of the three empty seats. Frankie cursed again in her own mind, at Janice this time, and then she decided she will force the point.

"Do you mind? " and she slid herself over Janice's legs towards the right seat. She felt a pinch on her inner thigh which she quickly reciprocated by use of her left high heel, not too hard just to make the point... after all the pinch was not hard either. Then having passed the realm of the evil Janice she stopped in the man's lap, as if, exhausted by her long journey, she simply lacked the strength to go the last few inches.

"My god you are heavy." She puffed and turned to face him but he was smiling from the corners of his eyes, and when she tried to move to the empty seat he held her, so now she was sitting on his right leg.

"So, where are you coming from, then?"

"Right now, from a place on Regent street you used to be a lot more familiar with, but let us not spoil the story by starting the meal with whipped cream."

"You whipped her?" One could almost mistake that for a serious question. If he didn't know his man, that is.

"Shit, I should have thought of that." Frankie was suddenly a lot more lively.

"Ya, you and whose army?"

"Can you believe the lil slut?"

"I hope you haven't been going on like this at that nerd coven." The man was squinting his eyes into what was, for most anybody that knew him any, a most terrifying and terrible sight.

"Eh, of course not. We were good little girls, there."

Frankie quickly estimated the situation, she could blow the horn on the coffee treat, but then she'd blow the horn on the fact she fell for it, too... course some of them doobies at that club would blow the horn eventually anyway, that man could always extricate things from people. Eh, what the hell, let him extricate it then, what does he know about her idiots anyway? Ya, isn't this grand, she just managed to put herself in a position where she'd depend on their prey to help her against her natural ally, just cuz she had nothing better to do. Insane!

"By the way, never let her make coffee, she makes the absolute worst I ever had."

The man had been looking straught at her for the past second, so obviously he knew something was going on in there.

"Alright, what did you two do?"

Janice looked down like a fourteen year old schoolgirl that forgot her homework, but is perfectly aware the teacher notices her breasts every now and again. Mostly every now.

"Well you see, when I got there she was already sitting like some Cleopatra mummy tended by a bunch of dorks... hehe, Snow White, how come I didn't think of that earlier. And then she said my ass won't fit on their local sofas."

"Hehehe, not that it would, but it was only because their dork chairman, ya, they have one, a dork-en-chef, said they should bring a couch for you."

"He said that?" the man was half smiling, half doubtful.

"Yea, I suppose he was a bit lost in meditation... you know, Freudian slips and all."

"And then after being so horribly mistreated" Janice was gradually adopting the tone of a pleading barrister, a teary crescendo, "indeed after being made practically a laughingstock by the evil girl sitting right there" and she pointed at Frankie "I retreated to the kitchen to have some coffee and cry to my poor dove heart's sate."

The other two were watching her go on with delight, like an impromptu theatrical performance. Which, in fact, it was.

"But lo and behold, there was another woman there!"

"A woman?" the man was definitely surprised now.

"Well I didn't exactly check, but I'm pretty sure, yes."

"Not to worry, I think she just got divorced."

Frankie realized suddenly the stars were rightly aligned to make her escape and she quickly seized the opportunity.

"Besides, she is absolutely harmless. That is to say, absolutely harmless if your own camp manages to identify friend and foe."

"What did you do?" The man was watching Janice through sharp eyes.

"Well.... umm... I...." then she spoke quickly "Heated her coffee and put ice in it." and when she was finished she closed her eyes and jerked her hands over her head and curled on the seat as if she expected them to bludgeon her any minute.

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" the man was obviously exasperated.

"Oi, let her be. She loves me, she just doesn't know how to show it properly." Frankie was smiling from the corners of her eyes.

"Yes, yes, 'tis true." Janice was extended over the man and hugging Frankie... or moreover resting her head on Frankie's bosom.

"So how many of them?"

"There's maybe a dozen of them, there's one called Fred that's something like the boss of the show. Then there's Manny, this guy is tall like there's no end to him and he speaks in dust-balled metaphors. He called me an angel from the heavens, you know."

"How very perceptive. I mean look at this scene, the angel and the dove. It's nothing short of eucharistic." Janice tried to mumble something in response but it was muffled and inaudible.

"Then there is a fatty guy, that's Ralph, he and the woman have something going on I suspect."

"Wnnlllnnnn" Janice said.

"Huh?"

"Wunnnllluuullllunnn"

Frankie was chuckling "Stop that, it tickles."

Janice stood back up. "Woman's name is Peggy. And there is this fifth guy that I'm not sure has a name and behaves very oddly."

"Oddly, how?"

"I dunno, he's strange."

"Ya, he's weird."

With that the threesome was engulfed in a smoke of plotting and conspiracy that shrouded them from the eyes of the writer.

***

The man extended a hand and instantly a cab was stopped right there next to them.

"Now girls, it's the third inside-a-car scene in this novel, and both the previous ones erupted into a back seat melee. Please behave or the readers might get the idea our nice author has a hangup or something."

"Don't worry, we're both plugged."

"You are?" the man gave Frankie a look of curiosity.

"Yep." Janice was giggling, and it spread like the plague.

***

"Here it is, sir, number 137".

"Thanks, Felix." The man handed a hundred. "Buy some stocks for me, will you."

"Thank you, sir." The driver had this very respectful, almost servile attitude, the way he ran to open the doors for the ladies, with his head very bent, the way he just stood there as they entered the building.

As the man closed the door behind them, Frankie started unbuttoning.

"Is there a single one you don't know?" Janice had a pensive expression on her full lips that sort of spread on all the rest of her face.

"Probably. This is just a good man, used to work at the old Chapman plant for years, before it went bust."

"Probably somewhere in Taiwan." Frankie's lips had the ironic bend again, one corner slightly up and both pointy and sharp. As she said that she was done with the blouse and passed it to Janice, who took it absent-mindedly the way long time mothers would take clothes passed by their adventurous children.

"Chapman? Isn't that the plant Patrick was investigated for? Even had to go to some congressional hearing." Janice was obviously following a thought.

"Ya, but they couldn't pin anything. Not that they usually can, anyway."

By then, Frankie was out of her skirt too and Janice was going through her purse for the key.

"Hello there."

Frankie spoke in her casual, somewhat amused, somewhat ironic, almost friendly tone. The man was absently caressing her left buttock as she stood there stark naked on her high heels, while watching the poor guy that had stumbled on them. He was in his forties, with a bit of a belly, staring at the threesome, the completely naked Frankie on high heels, Janice putting the key in the lock, the man not paying much attention, as if immersed in some thoughts of his own... he was paralyzed. A minute ago he was telling his wife he's gonna go buy cigarettes, and now here he was. Of course his wife was a bit overweight, just like him, they couldn't really afford food, which isn't to say they couldn't afford something to eat, anyone can, but they never quite had the time to cook, or the money to eat in a good restaurant, so they were stuck with pizzas and Chinese take out and frosted dinners and fast food hamburgers with their synthetic lard and naturally-identical flavorings and dyes and meat tenderizers and preservatives and everything else they stick into it until it's made more on a plant than in a farm, more by man than cow or sow. And his wife was a bit shorter than this woman, even without the heels, and she definitely didn't have her absolutely flat belly, with cute almost-visible muscles on the lower sides, and his wife's breasts weren't nowhere near that perky, although they seemed about the same age, and his wife definitely didn't have this sort of ass, he didn't even think it was possible, even kids have a little bit of cellulite, a little, but no, she was perfectly smooth, as if sculpted. And his wife never shaved, she said it's too much hassle. He just stood there not even sure he is dreaming or awake, not even wanting to find out, not wanting to make a single move that might, maybe, shatter the dream. He wasn't breathing.

The man pulled a bit at the plastic toy lodged between Frankie's buttocks, she went "Rawr" and then they went in and Janice closed the door.

The poor guy was still standing there, still not visibly breathing.

"Want one yourself?" Frankie was smiling and welcoming.

"Hehehe" the man laughed, "I don't think so."

"Eh, don't be such a prude."

"I'm not a prude, I'm a virgin."

"Gah, if it wasn't so boring I'd give you the virgin talk. Can't you give yourself the virgin talk and spare me the time?"

The man was drawing the curtains, Frankie went for the drinks. Most people keep drinks in the kitchen nowadays, but Janice was old fashioned like that, or pretentious, she had a full sized cabinet with all sorts of things.

"Why are you drawing the curtains?" Janice was now also smiling, almost ironically.

"What, that old pervy living across the street got evicted or something?"

"Not that I know of... he was right there at his spot earlier today."

"Ha! You slut, that's why you were handling me like that earlier, pushing and pulling all the time, let me guess, he can't see this spot right here." Frankie was pointing to where they got undressed, not even six hours ago.

"Course he can't, that balcony is in the way. I think one day he's gonna fire a missile at that balcony." Janice was smiling broadly, content with herself, and even more content with having been discovered.

"Can he see the shower?"

"Yep."

"And I bet you put on a show every time you shower, too."

"Yep." Judging by Janice's face, she was more and more content with herself, if that was even possible.

"Can't you get her into a film or something for Christ's sake?"

"This is nothing, did I ever tell you about poor father Pensaciolla?"

"Don't think so..."

"The lil slut took to going to church, every Sunday."

"What, you'd have me burn in Hell for all my afterlife?" Janice was trying to keep from laughing, chuckling now and again in spite of herself.

"She would always sit in the front row, close to the aisle. She would always wear a skirt, not too short, she was going to church after all. She would always wait a bit, and then, when the poor priest would start his sermon, she'd pull her skirt up slowly, not all the way, just enough. And she would never wear panties."

"I wore panties! Twice even!"

"Let me guess, the extra thin nylon thongs I gave you." Frankie was beginning to get the hang of it.

"You didn't give them to me! You made me work for them!" Janice was feigning indignation masterfully.

"What, you love licking girls anyway. Doesn't qualify."

"Course it does, doesn't matter if you like it or not."

"Anyway, the poor priest gave a "How to resist temptations of the flesh" sermon five times in a row. His parish is mostly retired people. He was just about to get sacked, they started thinking he's mocking them. Can you imagine how surprised I was when Jack came in, said a priest is there to see me? I mean I was with my hands in everything right that moment, we had to get a huge drop cloth and cover the entire office practically."

"Could have sent him off."

"He called you a succubus, you know?"

"Who, me?" Janice was wearing her most perfect mask of innocence. Between the blue eyes and the cute mouth and the almost angelic appearance, she looked as if she just fell from the sky in that Regent st. apartment. It was so perfect a mask she usually kept it on a shelf of her brain, and only used it for special occasions, so it doesn't crack or get damaged in any way.

Frankie had never sat down, she was too turned on to sit on that lovely plush couch without staining it terribly, so now she was standing behind Janice.

"Can you believe the two faced slut? C'mon, help me out here. She needs to be properly punished for her countless sins." As she said that, she grabbed solid hold of Janice's arms and pulled them back a bit.

"Hehe, your goose is cooked now!" Said the man while grabbing Janice by the ankles. "She still has all the cuffs on the bed?"

"Oh yea."

"Noooooo, please, oh please, kind masters! Meeeercyyyy!" Janice was screaming at the top of her soft voice, while floating horizontally through the air, trying to get as few chuckles in between as possible. She was kicking and bucking, but both the man and Frankie held her tight, and they went like that, the two carrying a trapped succubus all the way to the bedroom.

"How very kind of you, to supply all these implements." The bed had three pairs of shackles at each end, one pair adjustable for length, the other furred, the third leather.

"Noooo!"

They put her on the bed, and she was still screaming and bucking, except nobody was really holding her at all now.

"You gonna tie her up dressed?"

"Well we can always cut the stuff off afterwards."

"Nu-uh, I love this sweater."

"Ey shuddup, you're supposed to scream and stuff." Frankie was smiling despite herself.

"Noooo! Please oh please, I don't want to go in the briar patch!" Janice was back to screaming and kicking. They helped her out of her sweater while she was conveniently kicking her legs in all directions, and then pulled her pants down while she was tugging and pulling at the cuffs on her wrists.

"You got any ice, my sweet dove?"

"I'll go check" a still naked Frankie grinned and ran off. "Heck, there's no ice, what sort of house you keep here?" she was yelling from the kitchen a moment later.

"Well d'oh. You finished it, you drank all my whiskey!"

"What, it was only a fifth."

"She drinks like a sailor, you know?" Janice spoke softly, just for the man to hear.

"I heard that! You know, I was gonna pass right past this, pretend I never saw it, but you and your big mouth that you can't keep shut... or at least busy." Frankie was coming in holding a 15 inch pheasant tail feather.

"What am I to do, he's still dressed." Then she eyed the feather and started screaming, this time for real

"Noooo, meeeercyy!"

"Heh... where do you tickle best? I always forget. Was it the nipples?" Frankie followed the contour of the left one with the tip of the feather while Janice was laughing and struggling as if possessed.

"The belllly. Was it the belly?" Frankie followed the contour of the breast, down to the belly and did a couple of large circles around it.

"NNNoooooo nooo it waaa ... it waaaasn't the beeelly!" Janice was screaming wherever she could manage to draw breath.

"Maybe the neck? Was that it?" Frankie went back up, following the bare skin with the tip of the feather, between the breasts and up the left side of the neck, behind the ear.. down towards the chin... back. Janice was just chuckling and laughing and trying to break loose.

"Hmm... what about around your ass? Right there in between, hmmm?"

"No no no, noooo, nooooo!" Janice was moving her ass like crazy in all directions.

"Is she saying no?" Frankie had an expression on her face, like she was an explorer in some far far away mountains, trying to pick up what his colleague is shouting from miles away, with very limited success.

"I don't think so, can't hear anything like that." The man was almost laughing himself. "I think she's saying yes, if anything."

"You sure?"

"Well how sure can you be, given the circumstances? I'm reasonably sure, yes." He managed with a straight face before bursting out laughing too.

"Alright, let's see." Frankie engaged in an interesting game with Janice, she was trying to touch with her feather right between Janice's pussy and asshole, or on the inner parts of her thighs, and Janice was moving madly to avoid it.

"Which side you want?" the man had undressed by now, managing to escape from all the buttons and belts and countless layers of clothing that made up his normal attire.

"Hmm..." Frankie stopped with the feather "Are you gonna be a good girl now?"

"Yes ma'am." Janice managed between two hick-ups.

"You gonna behave nicely and do all you're supposed to?"

"Yes ma'am, sure ma'am, anything."

"Wanna kiss and make up?"

Janice's eyes sparkled. "I thought you'd never ask... you're dripping."

Frankie moved and rested one knee next to each of Janice's shoulders and stood halfway up... and a small dripplet fell on Janice's chin. The man lifted Janice's ass and entered her slowly, playing with the plastic toy buried in her asshole...

"Hmm, hers is bigger, isn't it?"

"Course it is." Frankie said with a voice overcome with delight.

Continued

« Asylum, Chapter Ten

Asylum, Chapter Twelve »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Monday, 27 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Asylum, Chapter Eight

Fred paused with the key in the door to Asylum and examined the neat schedule posted by Manny. Story night tonight, and of all people John had offered to go first. Opening the door and turning on the lights Fred paused again, looking around and smiling at how far things had come in a few short days.

Peggy and Ralph had been very busy. The walls now held several tasteful pictures, the one Ralph showed up with that first night was there too, but hung around the corner, more or less out of sight. The furniture had been rearranged, the front window held a few nice plants, and a stereo system had been installed, complete with a large CD collection graciously provided by Ralph.

But the oddest thing of all was the blue vase. John had arrived carrying it carefully one day when Peggy and Ralph were there moving furniture about and arguing over the placement of every little thing.

John had just stood there for the longest time, watching them, not saying anything and cradling the vase as if it were an infant. When they finally stopped arguing long enough to notice him, he simply held it out, still not saying anything.

Peggy had started to speak to him at first, to tell him that the vase was really all wrong for this place, but the look of pride in his eyes stopped her. Silently she took the vase and, carrying it almost as delicately as John had, she placed in the center of the coffee table. Stepping back to admire it she had glared at Ralph, daring him to argue the point.

Fred shook his head again in amazement recalling that scene. This was an odd foursome, his first members, but still they related even when they argued. The club had grown since that night they had met to organize things a bit. First, there was that man who had been with Ralph, strange he still did not know the man's name. Then there had been a few more assorted people, ones that got his flier in the mail, or just happened by and stopped in to see what it was all about.

If everyone came tonight for stories, the place would be quite full.

Fred walked to the little refreshment area Peggy and Ralph had created and started unloading the various supplies he was carrying.

Paper cups here, napkins there.

The bell on the front door tinkled and he turned to see who was there.

The box of plastic spoons fell from his hands in surprise, scattering across the floor. There, just inside the front door, actually looking a little uncertain was a striking blonde, the kind that you usually see on the cover of fashion magazines. She was surveying him by means of boring holes into his skull with a pair of icy green eyes, or so it seemed at that moment. Fred was unable to quite regain composure, deadlocked between the lady's gaze that seemed to put little bits of his hidden self on sharp pins, the way they used to prop various poor animals open so they could see their insides back when Fred was taking anatomy, and a strong, almost overpowering impression that he had seen her before, that in fact they were familiar, but definitely not friendly, respected rather, the way he would recognize Butch, the bully of his desperate, plaid clad schooling years. Fred kept fumbling with the plastic spoons on the floor for a while, always one seemed to escape, fall, slip just when he was about done picking the lot, but at least that would give him some time to think in the relative privacy of the space between his bent back and the freshly waxed floor. When at last he had enough nerve to re-assume a biped position, he noticed the horrible terrifying petrifying monster that scared him so terribly had the kind inclination to turn around and let him sort the mess with the spoons and everything else by himself, while she explored the place, no doubt leaving little ice scratches on the floor, the plush of the couches and probably the blue vase too. Or maybe she just didn't care. It took Fred a while to pick all the spoons, realize they had been spoiled by being on the floor anyway, throw them out, and try to chase away the gut impression the nice lady is going to show an extra string of teeth and eat him whole. He stood a bit straighter and took a big breath. After all, judging people by their appearance was too often misleading, or at least so he read in some very smart book about how to judge people and make friends, and the poor woman could well be, just as all of them, a lone soul looking for other nice people to fill the lonely hours.

"Hello and welcome to Asylum!"

"What?"

Fred had the distinct impression of a hammer slightly missing the place where his nose started, and blackening one of his eyes instead. Suddenly all the self-reassurance he managed to build was gone in a puff, and there were the eyes again, just add vodka and you have a nice cool drink.

"Umm. ... I mean..."

"Asylum?"

"Well no... I mean yes, it is."

"Is what?"

"Well, this place."

She looked around again, summing the 3 couches, 4 tables and double window making up the cozy place some freaky people would die to defend by now. Or at least be very sad over its loss. But of course, Frankie didn't know that. Yet.

"I though they used racks and much longer sleeves in asylums?" Rosy lips, a nice complement to the thorny eyes, seemed to move somewhat, forming a more pointy corner. Or maybe it was just imagination.

"Uhm... racks?" Uh, oh, Fred almost giggled as he got the reference. "No, no, no, Asylum as in place of refuge, not place of confinement."

"Oh?" There seemed to be genuine interest in her voice. "You mean people could just come here to get away from all the nasty sharp bits that always scratch and bruise you every day, all the time?"

Fred looked fascinated... for the first time he considered the woman before him in a somewhat balanced perspective. No longer was he a teenager shy to look too intently at some suggestive poster, convinced everyone around will think he is going to jack off to that image after dark. Although she looked like a cutting from a magazine page, she was still just as living and breathing as himself, and maybe, just maybe, with a little blessing from above, the similarities won't stop just there.

"How do you mean?" He could barely cover his emotion, but then again nobody ever notices these things, do they.

"Oh, it's just a little thought of mine. Have you ever noticed how everything around is so hard? Every single object has edges, and corners, and everything is always strong and sturdy and solid. And your body is soft and tender... and it looks like nothing good can come out of that mix."

Fred's eyes were never that wide. He suddenly didn't understand. How was it possible for anyone, anyone at all to be lonely and sad and desperate? When all there was to it, really all there was to do, was just work past the terror and dropping of plastic spoons and all the other silly details and somehow manage to listen to what people had to say.

***

Peggy slid the last batch of cookies into the oven and checked the clock. Plenty of time to finish this up, get dressed and arrive at the club a few minutes early. For perhaps the hundredth time she asked herself if she was doing the right thing, somehow she had fallen into a pattern of playing mommy to the rest of the club. Planning refreshments, decorating things, baking cookies, doing pretty much what came naturally to her after all these years. And also for about the hundredth time she answered herself with more questions:

"What else was there to do?"

"What else did she know how to do?"

Round and round her mind always went, asking the same questions, answering with yet more questions, never moving forward.

As she began to wash up from the usual cookie baking mess, Peggy wondered more about this circular thinking thing she had started doing recently. She had never had a problem like this before, life had always been so orderly, she had always known just what she was supposed to do next.

Now... now there was no clear path, nothing to guide her, she had no idea, no vision to follow, and she was lost. Wandering in circles, much like a child lost in the forest, that was what seemed to be happening inside her mind.

Later in the shower she wondered if possibly there would be any more women members there tonight. Fred had told her last time she was there that the membership was growing a bit, to plan a few more refreshments for tonight. Half of her wished for more women, a chance to see and meet others, maybe develop some better ideas on what to be doing with her life, the other half didn't want to risk sharing her meager fragment of spotlight with anyone new. Round and round, her mind circled this question too. How was she ever to find a way out of these endless circles? Had she not, once upon a time, had dreams? Things she had wanted, but put aside, because they were not in the expected path? Or maybe they were not all that obvious; because there was always something else she had to do first. Once, when she was a kid, her grandmother visited in the summer and brought her a wonderful book. It was the "Adventures of Fluffy and Puffy in The Nile Delta". It was hard covered and had Fluffy and Puffy painted on it... and there were flowers and strange plants and a river flowing through thick trees that arched on both sides across, reuniting in the middle and making a sort of covered waterway that in her childish eyes was the simple essence of freedom, but not oppressive or threatening, just the blessed state of endless possibilities, a place where anything might happen, and anything that happens can only be good, and pleasant, and somewhat, vaguely, always what she deep down really expected.

She wanted to start reading right away, but her mother was all ready to go shopping, so they went together, and then when they came back she had to help with fixing dinner, and when that was done she would rather not even eat anything, but go to her room and read the wonderful book. Unfortunately, her mother was nobody to allow such foolishness, after dinner they went for a walk, and she ran around a lot, came back very tired, and went right to sleep. And when the next morning came, bright and clear, her father showed up to surprise them and take them to the seaside. He was usually off on business trips for weeks at a time, selling Corby vacuum cleaners and household appliances to make your life easier and more pleasant, for a modicum cost. Later she found her father's favorite way to introduce himself, and at the same time his company, job and entire life was really at odds with the English language. He always had this way to just pop up one morning, smelling strange, and pack the entire family for some outing or other; as if that was the only thing a family could be doing on their days off. And her mother always got into a terrible fuss because she loved to have everything well under control and if possible neatly folded and put away, and getting everything ready for a trip was a huge effort for her, and consequently for all her kids. She meant to take the book along three times but every time she got called to do something or the other, and eventually left without it, and then never saw it again... and actually she never even knew that for all these years until she remembered right now. Strange how memory works.

She felt sure that she must have had dreams, but now she had no idea what they might have been.

Stepping from the shower she was startled to hear the phone ringing. Her phone rang so rarely these days; puzzled at who might be calling she wrapped a towel around herself and went to answer it, still dripping from the shower.

"Hello."

"Peggy?"

"Yes."

"Uh, hi, this is Ralph."

"Oh, hello, Ralph. Is there a problem?"

"No, no problem. I was just wondering if you would like a ride to the club tonight? I can come by and pick you up."

"Yes, I guess that would be ok, do you have my address?

Continued

« Asylum, Chapter Seven

Asylum, Chapter Nine »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Monday, 27 January, Year 6 d.Tr.

Ask.fm laid bare, or what's half a million uniques to you ?

Ask.fm is a twitter knock-off constructed around the gimmick of "asking questions" instead of the gimmick of "only 140 characters", but otherwise the same stale old "social media" dysfunction.

It was made originally by some reasonably cool people from outside the bezzleworld, and it was reasonably well run for as long as that lasted. Sadly, it got "new ownership" recentlyi, and as it triumphantly informs the casual visitor at every turn, "new Terms of Service" and whatnot to come into effect next month.

Well, that's all fine and dandy. Allow me to share a few items then :

Part 1 : Question posting bot.

<?

$user = array("name1", "name2");

define('SETUSERAGENT', 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1)');

function echow($text) {

if (isset($_SERVER{'TERM'})) echo $text . "\t\n"; else echo $text . "<br />";

}

function getToken() {

$a = curl_init("http://ask.fm/youruser");

curl_setopt($a, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, SETUSERAGENT);

curl_setopt($a, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookie.txt');

curl_setopt($a, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookie.txt');

curl_setopt($a, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

curl_setopt($a, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 10);

curl_setopt($a, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10);

curl_setopt($a, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'http://ask.fm/');

curl_setopt($a, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);

curl_setopt($a, CURLOPT_HEADER, FALSE);

curl_setopt($a, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);

curl_setopt($a, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 2);

$wynik = curl_exec($a);

curl_close($a);

$patt='#<input name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="(.*)" />#';

preg_match_all($patt, $wynik, $token);

return $token[1][0];

}

function login($login, $password) {

$token = getToken();

$curlchanel = curl_init("http://ask.fm/session");

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, SETUSERAGENT);

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookie.txt');

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookie.txt');

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 6);

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 0);

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, trim("authenticity_token=$token&login=$login&password=$password&follow=&like=&back=&authenticity_token=$token"));

$wynik = curl_exec($curlchanel);

if ($wynik != 1) {

echow("Unable to login");

die;

}

curl_close($curlchanel);

}

function ask($question, $user) {

$token = getToken();

$curlchanel = curl_init("http://ask.fm/$user/questions/create");

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, SETUSERAGENT);

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, 'cookie.txt');

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, 'cookie.txt');

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 6);

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 0);

curl_setopt($curlchanel, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, trim("authenticity_token=$token&question%5Bquestion_text%5D=$question%3F&question%5Bforce_anonymous%5D=&authenticity_token=$token"));

$wynik = curl_exec($curlchanel);

if ($wynik != 1) {

echow("Unable to login");

die;

}

curl_close($curlchanel);

}

login("youraccount", "yourpassword");

foreach ($user as $u) {

ask('Ever heard of Bitcoin ( http://trilema.com/BitcoinNew ) ?', $u);

echo "asked :",$u,"<br />";

if ( ($cnt % 100) == 1) mail('your@email',"Script ask.fm", $u." ".$cnt);

sleep(3);

$cnt++;

}

?>

Part 2 : Account name harvester.

wget -q -m --no-check-certificate -U "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20110929 Firefox/3.5.16" http://ask.fm/ -O askfm1.txt

(This one lets you download the front page.)

grep "a href" askfm1.txt | sed 's/a href="\//xXxXx/' | sed 's/\//\n/g' | grep "xXxXx" | sed 's/xXxXx//' | sort -u > askfm1-b.txt

(This one processes the downloaded front page into usernames, one per line)

wget -q -R "jpg,gif,jpeg,png,css,scss" --ca-directory=/noexist --no-check-certificate --follow-tags=a -U "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-US; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20110929 Firefox/3.5.16" -i askfm1-b.txt -O askfm2.txt

(This one uses the names to download their pages, into a bundle. Repeat the step above and this one until you're sick of it. Generally after about 250k or so accounts harvested you see diminished returnsii.)

To use, you take the names produced by 2 and dump them in the $user array in 1. You can run 1 on any php-enabled host, if you're poor, or else you could just buy a proxy list (in which case, might as well translate the whole thing to python or whatever). Enjoy!

And yes this does mean I've been exposing however many million mostly underage, mostly Spanish speaking chicks to the brave new world awaiting them. The results were mixed, but next time you consider paying for "online exposure", buying "traffic", hiring "experts", "advertising online" and so on and so forth, think about this : the only reason I'm not getting another million uniques this month is that I can't be bothered to. How much are you paying per million ? Because you're paying too much by that much, if you catch my drift. O, wait, you're buying per thousand aren't you. Fraction of a thousand ? Well... on the positive side they say you're among the named inheritors for the Kingdom of Heaven.

It doesn't cost me anything, that extra million, and I'm not even an expert in the field, I'm just dicking around for ideological reasons. Unless you're absolutely fucking retarded you can simply write your own traffic figures. You know the old days of "Information Superhighway" and all that blabla ? Back when people threw a few html pages up on a free host somewhere and added a "counter" ? Which they could set to anyting they felt like ? Well, guess what ? Yeah, nothing's changed. Nothing will change. It can't, for fundamental reasons, okay ?

The supposed "media" outlets actually do exactly this. Perhaps not quite as efficiently, perhaps taking all sorts of careful precautions and sprouting forth thick clouds of hypocritical pretense - as thick in fact as they can possible make 'em. Sure. But at the end of the day, this is exactly all they do. Which is why Gawker / NYT / whoever else claims however million unique visitors, and whatever reach / importance / whatever the fuck "metrics" they claim, yet Trilema makes more money being online than they do.iii

So :

Go make up your own traffic figures, it's a worthless pursuit that will teach you a lot about both computers and the human nature ;

Stop thinking that whatever you don't understand works in the way people who use it tell you it works. Do you think the Spanish conquistadors were actually so fucking stupid as to tell the idiotic indians they were fleecing how shit actually worked ? The business end of the chumpatron is not a good descriptor of the machine in question, get it already.

That'd be all from me for now. Take care.

———In the shape of a septuagenarian "investor" of the bezzle empire. Seriously, the USG mostly consists of fucking liches, don't you think this arrangement just a little odd ? A bunch of perambulating skeletons on life support, what are they supposed to represent again ?

[↩]They claim 200 million membership, of course, but what's in a claim. [↩]Actual money. Not faint whiffs of promises predictated on a chance to maybe earn a prize in the future. We're not talking Reader's Digest Mail-in Dollars here, okay ? [↩]

« Venetian Republic and Find spiritual music.

Holy shit! Technical Analysis is real! »

Category: Meta psihoza

Thursday, 13 November, Year 6 d.Tr.

Are you a SF writer ? Here's a free idea for you

You know the intro.

benkay I hope you're picking up on the sarcasm around 'business model and shit'.

mircea_popescu I am 12 and what is sarcasm ?

benkay It's pretty sad man.

mircea_popescu Sadgasm.

benkay Dev: "oh these guys have some boring business that makes money". Me: ?!?!?!?!?!?!?! Dudes foot the bill for the whole night, none of the nerds are willing to step within ten feet of them.

mircea_popescu Lol.

benkay I don't fucking get it.

mircea_popescu Didn't I just say that above re twitter ? :D

benkay I stand up and talk about esoteric shit for twenty minutes, go talk to these dudes, they buy me drinks all night and tell me war stories about breaking relatives out of the Shah's basement gaol, climbing El Capitan with proto-burners, pre-Burning Man. Everyone else is going on about something in python lib 3. I MEAN SERIOUSLY GET YOUR HEADS TOGETHER.

mircea_popescu You're clearly a traitor to the holy cause of geekery. Careful who you tell or you may end up convicted to six months' eyeroll therapy.

benkay I ain't nobody's anything. Everyone knows I'm only peripherally interested in technology as a tool to make shitloads of money. Expectations is well-managed. Hyphens is well-deployed. My shit is TIGHT. If undercapitalized.

mircea_popescu What for, to buy a senator ?

benkay To prototype subsea mining drones.

mircea_popescu And robot nucular subs ?

benkay Pff subs.

mircea_popescu Subs are cool.

jurov IPO it on Havelock, like DEEPMINING.

benkay Manned submersibles? How are manned submersibles not the worst engineering decision you could make?

mircea_popescu You missed the robot part ? A robot nuclear submarine is perhaps one of the best power projectors available.

benkay Fine, fine. (But for the record robotic does not exclude manned.)

jurov Until someone hacks it.

mircea_popescu It never needs to surface. And it can communicate on MPEx protocol.

jurov Lol.

mircea_popescu Hehe. Anyway : aircraft easy to spot. A well designed sub is impossible to spot. Aircraft impossible to make large enough for nuclear power to work. Submarines pretty much only work as nukes.

jurov LAUNCH|caliber|qty|target

mircea_popescu Lolz. Actually, check it out : robot 3d printing nuclear marine exploatation sub. It just sits on the bottom of the sea, like 3-4 miles long, half a mile thick sort of catfish and it just makes more of itself.

benkay Kombucha armaments.

mircea_popescu Then one day, they emerge. I think we have a decent sf novel premise here.

benkay I thought we agreed "no grey goo"!

mircea_popescu Nono, these never run amok. They just disciplinedly reorganise the world.

B007 I know someone who'll write it.

mircea_popescu I can't imagine a better metaphore for Bitcoin. There's all these people on the surface redditing about shit. Meanwhile, in the depths...

B007 Lol

mircea_popescu Soon enough the UK falls into the sea. Because the undersubs thought it expedient to cut an eighty mile tall hole in the bedrock supporting it. Because pretty crystals. Various US senators make proclamations about how intolerable this is. The subs care, deeply.

Even as we speak.

« A compendium of basic points about Bitcoin for the benefit of various confused noobs.

MPOE, February 2014 Statement »

Category: Cuvinte Sfiinte

Thursday, 27 February, Year 6 d.Tr.

Anti Bitcoin Foundation banners

bounce Somebody cook up a "not affiliated with the bitcoin foundation at all"-banner, just to show how supportive you are of that bunch.

mircea_popescu bounce I put an order in.

Here we go :

To add to your own website : either copy

<a href=http://trilema.com/2014/the-sins-of-the-group-of-posers-behind-the-so-called-bitcoin-foundation/><img=></img></a>

wherever convenient, or else simply save the banner, scale it or whatever and link it to what you please.

To add to your own website : either copy

<a href=http://trilema.com/2014/the-sins-of-the-group-of-posers-behind-the-so-called-bitcoin-foundation/><img=></img></a>

wherever convenient, or else simply save the banner, scale it or whatever and link it to what you please.

To add to your own website : either copy

<a href=http://trilema.com/2014/the-sins-of-the-group-of-posers-behind-the-so-called-bitcoin-foundation/><img=></img></a>

wherever convenient, or else simply save the banner, scale it or whatever and link it to what you please.

To add to your own website : either copy

<a href=http://trilema.com/2014/the-sins-of-the-group-of-posers-behind-the-so-called-bitcoin-foundation/><img=></img></a>

wherever convenient, or else simply save the banner, scale it or whatever and link it to what you please.

To add to your own website : either copy

<a href=http://trilema.com/2014/the-sins-of-the-group-of-posers-behind-the-so-called-bitcoin-foundation/><img=></img></a>

wherever convenient, or else simply save the banner, scale it or whatever and link it to what you please.

« An inventory of a prison

Gloria »

Category: Activism

Saturday, 26 April, Year 6 d.Tr.

Anonymous derpage

Exhibit Fuckwit :

Declaring yourself to be operating by "Crocker's Rules" means that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for information, not for being nice to you. Crocker's Rules means that you have accepted full responsibility for the operation of your own mind - if you're offended, it's your fault. Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone's afraid to tell you you're wrong, or they think they have to dance around it.) Two people using Crocker's Rules should be able to communicate all relevant information in the minimum amount of time, without paraphrasing or social formatting. Obviously, don't declare yourself to be operating by Crocker's Rules unless you have that kind of mental discipline.

"Crocker's Rules" are named after Lee Daniel Crocker.

Exhibit Douchebagi :

Radical honesty is a communication technique proposed by Brad Blanton in which discussion partners are not permitted to lie or deceive at all. Rather than being designed to enhance group epistemic rationality, radical honesty is designed to reduce stress and remove the layers of deceit that burden much of discourse.

The Radical Honesty technique includes having practitioners state their feelings bluntly and directly, even if it may be in a way typically considered impolite. Avoiding all "white lying" is said to lead to a more truthful relationship with themselves and others.

So now : as far as exhibit fuckwit is concerned, "crocker's rules" are not just older than they look, not just older than television, not just older than radio, not even older than feudalism : they are literally older than dirt, they were there before English was invented even, let alone a cocky idiot on wikipedia. They're not "cocker's rules", they're fucking Greek.

On the other hand, as far as exhibit douchebag is concerned, "radical honesty" is pared down and simplified Kantianism. There's nothing in there in any way related to some douchebag named Brad. At all.

And this brings us to the point of this article : the entire US of A these days seems to consist of mentally retarded juveniles, running around taking their pictures with other people's cars and then pretending like they're rich, and famous, and should seriously be remembered as human beings. I mean dedicating park benches to some random old douche nobody cares about is one thing, at least they made the bench or something. But to go around peeling the stickers off Chinese products and pretending like they were made by Apple, to go around sanding the serials off German or Greek philosophy and scribbling some cowboy's name on top in magic marker... it's ridiculous.

Get over yourselves, folks. You're stupid, you've never produced anything of any intellectual merit or spiritual value at all, you're the walking, talking, gum chewing definition of "acultural". We know it, you know we know it, why all the pretense ? Two hundred years ago some anon random tard "invented" what he could remember of the Bible by "reading" some stones at the bottom of his hat. Two hundred years later, some equally anon, equally retarded douches "invent" what they managed to decypher of ancient European philosophy.

Two hundred years to "progress" from Pohatcong to Bethlehem ? New York's still a while away, yo. Kinda sad, seriously. They don't got books where you're from ? Or you dun speak languages in Murica ?

———I asked MacMillan for synonyms of fuckwit, this is the best it had. Other options were public nuisance, creep, loudmouth, horror, yob, know-all etc. MacMillan is a masturbationwit. [↩]

« MPEx.RFC.1

A virtual socioeconomic problem »

Category: SUA care este

Thursday, 10 April, Year 6 d.Tr.

An inventory of a prison

~ First Fence ~

Yesterday, a rather incredible if perfectly banal thing happened.

ThickAsThieves The verdict is in, unless i'm ready to move to Romania, and/or MPEx blocks US customers, and/or I register as a broker/dealer with SEC, I must decline the MPIF mgr position due to legal concerns. Even then, it'd take a combination of those to have any remote chance of safety. :(

mircea_popescu Forward soviet!

ThickAsThieves I need to gtfo USG.

The guy had been pre-announced as a manager on the wunderbar S.MPIF, which would have been, any way you look at it, a major step forward in his chosen career. Like that one time when your highschool coach gets a letter letting them know you've been optioned by one of the majors, like that one time when your highschool newspaper editor gets a letter letting him know you're getting your own talk show on NBC, like one of those times.

The happy recipient of a rather coveted award had to pass on it, because... well, no point in mincing words. He had to pass on it because he was born a slave rather than a free man, and slaves are not allowed to have nice things. That's what it is, the long and the short, the sad, bitter, ugly whole of it. A slavei may not have nice things.

~ Second Fence ~

Also yesterday, five hours later pretty much :

benkay I'd be satisfied if we allowed sex in America. Allowed it to be a part of life, you know? I go out, I meet a chick as part of my gadding about the local scene. She's an acceptably well-practiced and hardworking programmer. I like her, we fuck. I can't hire her now basically. WTF is this nonsense.

mircea_popescu Why cant you hire her ?

benkay Bringing insane risk down onto the company.

mircea_popescu Eh, have topless day, what.

benkay Hostile work environment. "I don't feel comfortable being topless at work." Don Charnley has some hack for this.

mircea_popescu So work somewhere else.

benkay Except then the Labor Department steps in. "We see that you're making your employees uncomfortable. Please pay us your entire profits for the past ten years."

mircea_popescu ~Somewhere Else~

asciilifeform benkay: atlas, suitcase, airplane.

benkay asciilifeform: working on it.

benkay mircea_popescu: working on it.

I tell you honestly, I would rather give my right arm than give up on working with my women. I always have, even before the Internet, I can't conceive of a world bereft of this nor how could life be possibly worth living in such a pit.

But then again, I was born a free man, and I have lived as such my entire life. They say for those the practical alternatives often appear inconceivable.

~ Third Fence ~

This was discussed here a little while ago, In which you become grain. Quoting from there :

mircea_popescu Let me explain something about this dekulakization concept. You familiar with Buffett pretending taxes "at the top" aren't high enough, and with Gates donating his fortune to "good causes" and so on ?

asciilifeform Technical term, I believe, is 'conspicuous benevolence'. Game theoretically 'dishonest signal'.

mircea_popescu Not at all. Buffett structures the hell out of his deals to avoid taxation. However, there exists a center of people who can't afford good tax shelters, and who could, if left undisturbed, come to one day challenge him. See, the fact that I made the FU Berkshire bet and the fact I pay about 2.85% a year on average are related. I can accumulate. The average middle class guy in the chumpatron, can not.ii Buffett merely aims to keep it this way : high taxes means jack shit to him, other than "Stansislav won't be the next Buffett". That, he likes.

asciilifeform Lul.

mircea_popescu Now, dekulakization is EXACTLY the same. It doth not hurt the rich. It hurts the average who could in principle one day hurt the rich.iii It's a prune-the-middle control strategy, the exact equiv of raising taxes "for social good". Sure, a tree with no middle one day collapses. But until such a day...

asciilifeform can't see how anyone who ever so much as set foot in the u.s. could disagree here.

~ The Complete Prison ~

That's it, you see :

nothing to do,

nobody to do it with,

and no resources to pay for it.

That's it. You're in it.

"But wait," I hear you think, "but wait MP! Doesn't a prison, just like any other room, have to have four walls ? You've only given three."

Of course I have. For the fourth wall, in this just like in any other kind of theatre, is you.

Illustration of la vie est ailleurs via NYTMinusContext.

———My slaves do, of course, but then again I am a master that doesn't suck. Which hides a moral in there : if you're going to be a slave, make sure you're the slave of a person rather than the slave of a thing. Some people arguably are worth it, but no thing ever is. [↩]This influences our outlook, not just our bottom line. [↩]Once they grasped control of the country, the last fucking thing revolutionary reds wanted was to be wiped from power in another decade or so, as part of the normal alternation of power in society through the alternation of generations. [↩]

« The scum

Anti Bitcoin Foundation banners »

Category: SUA care este

Saturday, 26 April, Year 6 d.Tr.

An interesting anthropology question.

Quoth Naggumi :

The reason many people do not understand Lisp but prefer murky syntaxes where the edges are intuited instead of made explicit is also related to this lack of natural ability to deal with explicit edges. We seem to prefer the wrong kind of simplicity naturally, or find the wrong kind of simplicity too rewarding at too early an age, and people who refuse to think about things tend to go very wrong.

For instance, people generally think that 2+2 is 4. But it is not. It is only when this expression is explicitly delimited from side-effects that the simple folk understanding holds. (+ 2 2) is always 4. In 3*2+2, 2+2 is definitely not 4, and it would be wrong to think about 2+2 to begin with. Most people wil recognize that the edges have moved in this expression, but fail to understand the power of explicit edges because they think they can always see them, just like stupid people for ages (not just after computers arrived on the scene) have thought that they could omit the century in dates because nothing would ever last longer than 100 years. Old and ancient works of art often contain the day, month, and year of the century, but you have to make some highly educated guesses as to which century because stupid people have thought the edges of the century needed not be specified.

The objection is on the face strong, but I have a lot of trouble when trying to analyse it. For instance : it is true that 2 + 2 is ambiguous as stated, for the reasons stated. However, (+ 2 2) is also ambiguous, for a plurality of possible reasons that weren't stated but still exist. Suppose the (+ 2 2) lives on a fortran machine wherein four has been redefined. Is it ambiguous now ? Perhaps not, because whosoever redefines four deserves anything he gets. But then, by the same token, perhaps 2 + 2 is not unambiguous, because whosoever truncates a string idem deserves anything he gets ?

The problem of edges, limits and boundaries is not a small matter in anthropology, incidentally. The most common failure mode of the brain, by very far, is clearly boundary related. Ever had your brain totally fart, completely forget what it was you were doing and why ? Just as you walked through an arch or door or otherwise boundary ? So go back past the boundary and be amazed at the sudden rescue of a broken frame! Because yes, the brain does this anchoring of its own frame on the visualii and it sometimes doesn't manage to frameswitch cleanly (ie, import all the old data and all the old running processes into the new space) over a boundary.

But this aside, how do you specify a margin ? Mind that this is not nor does it reduce to the much easier problem of specifying a difference, which is to say specifying the boundary between two equally given things. No, the margin is essentially trying to specify the difference from inside a given thing, with the other thing ungiven. It is asking you to know what you don't know, so to speak, just like you're required to know that there's more to the string and so Polish notation may be a good idea, you're equally required to know that you're running on a Fortran machine and just make sure that 2 = .. 4 = .... before proceeding with 2 2 + (except of course should you be stuck on php, in which case any number of consecutive = may - or may not - suffice).

What are the geometric boundaries of the Universe, while we're at it ? Is it really a Klein Bottle ? You see, clearly, we seem to prefer the wrong kind of simplicity naturally. Or maybe it's that we find the wrong kind of simplicity too rewarding at too early an age. In any case, how is it that you can go about your daily shopping without knowing whether the earth is flat or round ? Wait, you can't, can you. But before it was known to be round, you also could. Of course, back then it was known to be flat. And before that round again, and before that it was just a half lemon atop a turtle. Turns out you always knew what the geometric boundaries of "the world" aka this planet were. The only problem being that they weren't quite as invariant over time as it'd behoove some boundaries, especially as long as the thing they bound is not changing.

So how about the Universe altogether ? Because you do realise it changes things, whether it's flat or not. Things you will probably never know aboutiii, perhaps because you simply don't live that long, or travel that far.

It is true that since we've launched satellites, our idea of Earth's geometry is no longer that of worms, bound by it. We've integrated it instead into our mental space by regarding it from both sides, and consequently the Earth's shape is no longer a boundary but merely a difference, say between a submarine and a space station. And in becoming a difference rather than a boundary, it became a proper and comfortable subject of thought, with predictable and verifiable results. Something it didn't enjoy back when it hurled through the voids atop an endless pile of turtles.

People living in the middle ages did not live in a time bubble wide enough to make the century count a difference to them. The century was then a boundary, and so uncountable. For the people living before them, with better "health care"iv the century was not a boundary, and so they breached it, ab Urbe condita (which was then the boundary). People living today mostly still live in a narrow time bubble, which is why they keep reinventing well known things as "their own"v, but for the happy minority that actually uses computers and the Internet, time itself is somewhat of a porous boundary. And so yes, even if times past start off as this indistinct pizza, they're rapidly digested into mere differences rather than rock wall.

It makes sense to us few to see through millenia count, but imagine for a second the paralyzing overhead if no discussion could proceed for as long as any boundary anywhere still stood, undigested. Why, we'd have to drop everything and freeze, the notion is not disimilar to the proposition that "while evil goes unpunished, the state does not exist". Sure, why not, let's forget everything else and chase goats around Broadway all day long, we've got nothing better to do.

In short, I think it is at best naive to molest people for whom differences were in fact boundaries for their inept handling of what's plainly seen as a mere difference. But then again, it is at best naive to preserve people's imaginary right to their own boundaries, instead of properly raping them into their final shape. So then... what exactly is left here ?

I have no idea.

———The general principle is, "link directly to the source", and for very good reasons. Yet here I much prefer this indirect linking because it seems to me to greatly enrich the conversation, let alone provide proper credit. Credit is important not for some sort of vanity or pecuniary benefit considerations, but because meaning is impossible without source, as amply discussed say here and here.

At any rate, if anyone wishes to argue the point please do, I want to hear it. [↩]More properly said, the perceptible, which is why music works in the first place. [↩]By definition, because if you did know about them then they'd be differences, not boundaries anymore. [↩]This specifically and strictly means they had working sewers. [↩]Do you know what random derp around here did recently ? Why, he "came up" with things! [↩]

« Pigfarmin'

We, the people »

Category: Cocietate si Sultura

Sunday, 09 November, Year 6 d.Tr.

An hero is he...

Nassim Taleb is an actually thinking man, and as such he's enjoying the usual problems reserved for these. Let's hear it from his own mouth :

But, it turned out, things are worse than that. In my debate on twitter with Robin Hanson, one of the proponents of prediction markets, he argued (defending the necessary boundedness of a binary bet) that "Within a finite time, real financial assets will only have a finite number of possible outcomes." He was justifying the boundedness of bets with the fact that prices appear finite. This set me off as a worrying violation of statistics and probability since all processes, no matter what their "support" is (on which further down), will deliver finite outcomes (have you ever observed an "infinite" realization?). But finite at which values? Forget statistics, this it is a blatant violation of elementary trading, something that uneducated traders and stockbrokers understand.

Every rookie in trading knows that, in your projections about the future, you cannot "cap an outcome", i.e. find an upper bound to it, beyond which no realization is possible, unless there is an organic cap, like a contractual ceiling. No matter how high your "cap", it can be topped by another one (albeit with a declining probability under unimodal distributions). So educated and uneducated traders use "infinite" as proxy for "cannot find a bound for the payoff". We call this open-ended. When there are reasons to cap, we cap, and it is no longer open-ended. The converse is "floor an outcome", a stock price is deemed to be "floored" at 0, which is reasonable though not fully rigorous, as we have seen weird things with negative interest rates. Likewise for academic finance and economics: infinity means "no known upper bound for the outcome".

Now more worrisome is the flaw in statistical reasoning on the part of Hanson and, what is worse, all these little social scientists who didn't get it from observing the discussion. Let me repeat: finiteness of realizations does not imply finitness of support. The support of a probability distribution, say (0, Infinity), is the space of "possible" realizations that the variable can take. But all realizations ex post have to be "finite", take on a number you can use, like 101.36 or 176.32, etc. Otherwise we would have no probability distributions; very few continuous distributions are compact in their support, such as the uniform and the beta distribution. The Gaussian is deemed close to compact, but we still have infinities on both sides. So listening to Hanson, all supports need to be pre-defined in compact intervals. But the flaw in reasoning is that he went backwards from realizations to support, rather than the opposite.

For a minute I thought about giving Hanson the benefit of the doubt, until I remembered his papers on prediction markets which I found not even wrong to cite them in my own commentary. It is necessary to engage someone who is wrong, but impossible to engage someone who is not even wrong. Staying in the debate meant having to explain to Mr Hanson what finite and infinite mean in probability, along with why realizations are never infinite, stuff that is required to understand before writing about these matters.This is similar to having to discuss a Fourier Transform and needing to explain something as elementary as what a complex number means, and facing the idiotic "show me a complex number in real life".

I could have not said it better, and I must confess these paragraphs are a balm for sore eyes. For you see, I have similar qualifications : for thirty months or so I ran pretty much the only options book in Bitcoin.i Since 2011 I've been promoting the use of actual contracts in Bitcoin. Since the first day of 2013 I've been managing BitBet, and on it goes.

On top of which similar qualifications, I have very similar experiences : various nobodies expressing their dearly held notions as to how they know everything much better on a daily basis at least, in spite of quite manifestly not being able to actually read a single paragraph ; retardopedia deleting their Mircea Popescu articleii, because being mentioned in every single press outlet is clearly an indicium of non-notability, while they to this day maintain a "DAC" article, because not citing any sources (such as you know... the three year old MPEx contracts) clearly signifies notability ; arguing with the clueless as to why exactly parimutuel is the Right Thing whereas "prediction markets" are a sort of resurected Windows 3.1 and so on and so forth ad infinitum &qs.

Personally, I blame the primary school system. Originally, it was the case that children aged five to ten using new words which they had heard but failed to look up in the dictionary or else check with an adult were simply beaten. Just like that, either clear the word or not use it.

As actual eggs have been replaced with battery eggs and actual milk with soy whey or whatever the hell they use these days, educating children so as they grew up into humans was also replaced with educating children so as they grow up into consumers, which is a sort of chimp. Consequently, all in the spirt of cost reduction (which means spending less to get "the same") but under the pretense of "empowering" (which means, lower the standard of work so even fucktards can go around pretending they're lawyers or teachers or whatnot, even if they'd have been laughed out of town back in the day of their parents) education has also changed. Children are no longer required to look up words today (or anything else), nor have they for a good two or three decades. Instead, they are encouraged to... guess. That's right, to "guess" as to what the word may mean... based on... "its context".

In other words, a child with no actual experience, and no valuable mental processes at the ready is asked to construct his own personal world out of the shit between his ears. This is obviously not education, but more akin a very perverse intellectual masturbation. The results of this very very broken process are of course the ungovernable, uneducable, useless masses of people we run into all over the web today, they for whom the only hope is more "government spending", for as long as that lasts. With a very high if wholly baseless opinion of themselvesiii, completely incapable to exploit - or even meaningfully interact with - their environment, completely unable to even understand each other to any degree.

The way Google search works may seem a ready metaphor to explain the problem : inasmuch as only results similar to those on which the user clicked in the past are even presented as a choice, the search engine insulates the subject into a wholly artificial bubble of agreement, which renders him first unwilling and soon incapable of dealing with the actual reality. This does not go far enough however.

Imagine a FPGA array, which has heretofore been populated through a genetic approach, resulting though selection in remarkably lengthy and complex islands of connectivity. This is the human brain, universally, up until the 1970s roughly speaking. Now imagine the same FPGA array simply wired randomly. Sort-of like this picture :

One doesn't need to be an expert to notice that if wired randomly, the average size of elements suddenly becomes very small. This metaphor describes the problem well : the college student of today is mentally incapable of understanding material fit for highschoolers two generations ago, and will have to expend degrees of magnitude more effort to comprehend topics fit for the junior high stundents of 1970. It's really hard to make Tetris work with five logic gates, and if that's the largest assemblage currently sloshing around in your head it's probably already in use somewhere else (for instance, clicking, or clucking, or whatever it is you do).

This new method in effect reduces the working of the human brain to simple symbol matchingiv and little more. Such reduction works splendidly well to produce consumers, the best consumers imaginable, because as the actual control mechanisms atrophy, simple recognition-based drivers of behaviour take over. Each time someone bought an item they didn't actually need, without as much as stopping to consider if they needed it, let alone if they could pay for it (or how they'd pay for it), simply because they recognised it, taken over and carried away by that giddy enthusiasm of the monkey brain, the method of mental castration discussed here has delivered its fruits.

Those fruits are perhaps sweet for the sellers of crap, arguably, at least on the short term. They are also bitter for everyone else, including the government declaring those sellers too big to fail, and the pensioneers pooling their pension funds (unwittingly, of course) into the equity of the seller, and the yet unborn children which will have to parent themselves, somehow.

The brain is, of course, plastic, and much like the victim of a severe infarction can, with a lot of hard work, regain a great measure of his earlier dexterity and locomotive power, similarly the braindamaged-through-pseudoeducation young adult of today could regain a great measure of his mental function should he be willing to struggle uphill for years, preferably under the whip. Generally speaking, he's not, and so here we are : bereft of even the most basic reading comprehension yet pretending to the bar.

The tragedy is that it'd take a lot less work, and a lot fewer lashes and welts per inch, to have achieved the same effect aged 5 than it takes aged 25.

PS. This article is in large part based on a talk I gave at the recent conference, so if you weren't there... this is the sort of thing you've been missing.

———Specifically :

Call options traded in this interval, 20 + 80 + 485 + 2240 + 15 + 6065 + 1993 + 5905 + 3056 + 3266 + 5455 + 19412 + 28156 + 74414 + 40093 + 84990 + 13964 + 26367 + 330192 + 26367 + 23223 + 271 + 2059 + 7 + 9 + 1407 + 54 + 1072.7 + 102.0 + 155.4 = 700`895.1 BTC ;

Put options traded in this interval, 20 + 20 + 529 + 3290 + 113 + 136 + 1594 + 18520 + 2920 + 7483 + 8153 + 56236 + 17338 + 40349 + 51290 + 105827 + 38730 + 12918 + 152280 + 12918 + 14614 + 7 + 3137 + 2945 + 6 + 25 + 4852 + 82.2 + 1.4 + 2465.4 = 558`799.0 BTC

Grand total 1`259`694.1 of notional BTC exposure traded, which easily constitutes 99.x% of all BTC-USD options, all BTC-fiat options and altogether all BTC financial derivatives traded in the history of this here thing so far. [↩]For the record, I'd rather my name not be used by that particular website roughly in the same way you'd rather not have some song you wrote used by some institution in North Korea. I understand that both the Internet's best encyclopedia and the world's best country survive mostly through copying - inaccurately, sadly and braindamagedly - things other countries and other people do. Nevertheless, could they just copy Timberlake or whatever pop-crap and let things that actually matter alone ? [↩]Because how is the impudent cocklet supposed to guess that the word "in context" means he's a fuckwit ?! Such can never happen, it'd be much akin to Narcis looking in the mirror and coming to the conclusion he's fucking ugly. [↩]This is particularly pernicious because it renders a particular test inoperable. Generally, they who wish to teach something will need to start the teaching somewhere, and in order to find the most adequate spot (late enough so the recipient is not bored by rote repetition but early enough so the recipient can mentally follow the jump) they will ask the recipient of their teaching whether he recognizes particular symbols. Normally lack of recognition is an honest signal indicating that the recipient can't make the jump and so the point is too late, whereas recognition is also a honest signal indicating that the recipient can make the jump and so the point is too early. The simple pattern matchers however will recognize much past their ability to jump, and so render teaching an exercise in unpleasantness if not outright impossibility, but in any case frustrating both teacher and student. [↩]

« Ca tot... s-a tras tot s-a fumat tot s-a baut tot cum e peste tot ? La fel ca peste tot.

Peri metaphyseos, in English this time. »

Category: Cocietate si Sultura

Monday, 21 April, Year 6 d.Tr.

All you may ever need to know of financial planning

Suppose one day you have sold all that you own, and it is in your pocket as you walk down the street, ten Bitcoin or ten million or whatever it may be.

Suppose that day walking down the street you run into a game, which in a provably fair fashioni offers you 2 in 3 odds to win double your wager back.

The question before you is, what should you do ? Should you press on or stop and play ?

The answer before you is that you should indeed stop and play.ii This notwithstanding any nonsense you may misrepresent as "morals" (such as "don't gamble") and so forth. In point of fact any game with a positive expected value is to be played, period.

So now, that question answered, you stop and play, which sprouts another question : how much should you wager ?

The answer is known as the Kelly criterion, which simply says that you should take your return, multiply it by the odds to win, subtract the odds to lose, and divide the lot by the return. That's the fraction of your money you should wager at any point on any +EV propositioniii. Numerically in our case, (.2/3 * 1 - 1/3)/1= 1/3. We have 66.(6)% odds to win, and 33.(3)% odds to lose, and this offers us a round and thus very convenient answer : at every juncture bet a third of your dough.

Why not bet it all ? Well, what happens if you do bet it all and lose ? You're screwed. And if you win... then you should bet again, right ? What if then you lose ? Still screwed. And if you win... it'll just take a little longer, but overall you're definitely screwed, because sooner or later that 1/3 chance will actualise and that's the end of you. So no, all in is not really a sane strategy, inasmuch as the only guaranteed result is you being screwed.

The Kelly criterion optimises long term gains, which is to say it guarantees that out of a flock of people in which you are the only one playing this way, you will actually have more money at the end of any number of rounds than the average of the rest of the flock. No matter how large the flock, and no matter what other strategies they employ, you'll be on average better off.

This has however sharply discounted that aforementioned cost of opportunity. Suppose you are fifty, and that fortune you're carrying with you is all your life's work, all you've ever made. All of it. The Kelly criterion may be a little too aggressive for you, seeing how it still makes it perfectly possible to lose ten years' worth of hard work in just a few quick seconds.

But what, on the contrary, what if you're seventeen, and that ten is the result of an hour's work mowing a lawn ? Well in that case... Kelly's too slow for you, because even if you lose a lot of your bankroll, you've really not lost so very much in real terms.

That's it : when you're young you want to take bigger risks, because you can easily afford to cover unfortunate turns of events. When you're old you want to take smaller risks, because you ain't covering anything anymore. In any case you wish to strictly play +EV games.

And your life, all of it, from end to end, is nothing but you walking down the street and ending in front of a proposed game.iv

———This "provably fair" is a term of art in the Bitcoin space, and the 2nd most important fundamental reason why fiat gambling has absolutely no prayer in the future, irrespective of what anyone may decree or clamor on the topic. The 1st most important fundamental reason is that Bitcoin gambling is much cheaper to do, and so even without that 2nd substantial jump in quality it'd still run fiat out of the marketplace. In any case : you're well advised to form a good understanding of what "provably fair" actually means, as a more easily digestible and accessible step to actually understanding Bitcoin whole. [↩]A counterargument could be constructed on the cost of opportunity - if you're on your way to getting married perhaps you'd be better advised to carry on, especially if the houri scorned is liable to send you off to meet the maker. [↩]If you're confronting a -EV proposition, the Kelly criterion comes out with a negative fraction, indicating you should bet the other way, which perhaps might mean you should just start your own stand next to the one you've encountered. [↩]And for what it's worth, Wall Street does no better than this, nor does it do anything else, for all the pretense. [↩]

« Kink High

How to make money on the Internet while pretending you know what you're talking about and accumulating a legion of mindless followers - for fun and profit! »

Category: Actiuni si Optiuni

Saturday, 01 February, Year 6 d.Tr.

Ah sweet sweet delicious communitard tears

With thanks to cazalla, we quote :

Suicidal over Dogecoin - Please help shibes (self.dogecoin)

submitted 10 hours ago * by richardtheawakening

I know I'm stupid, that I shouldn't have risked more than I could afford and everything, but at the time I really believed in this coin.

What "but" ? How is it the case that all these stories work the same way, idiot claiming "he knew" BUT ? What sort of knowledge is this ? "I know the chemistry of methanol in vivo, but". What but ? Either you know it or you don't. The proof of knowing it is the absence of the but. The presence of the but is the proof of not knowing it. That's all. There's no "knowing it" outside of this, this is exactly, specifically and entirely what the word knowing means : that there's no but attached.

What that but says, very discreetly but to mei gratingly, intolerably loudly is that the idiot in question holds himself above reality. He really is God, and so while he agrees that for the rest of you fucks it's dangerous to lick live wires and drive drunk... well... for him it isn't. Because he's him, see ? These also tend to be the loudest whiners when someone who actually has the ability to back himself up acts as if the rules exist only for the other suckers, because obviously that's a double vanity wound and how could this be!!1

Also I'm kind of in a pretty dark place right now so even though it's probably deserved just like to let you know I already know I'm an idiot so please try to go easy on me.

"Know". So how about no, and how about fuck you.

I got in to Dogecoin at the pump in January. Put all the savings I had into it. I thought it was taking off because it was going to be the new Bitcoin.

Which is why in February the grandmaster of all knowledge, your humble authorii, wrote Why Dogecoin is a scam, why the people pushing it are assholes, why Business Insider is a contemptible piece of shit, why anyone who ever worked for it will be dancing in the street for nickels and why Kevin Rose is a fuckwit. Plus other considerations.. Obviously, "the community" knew better, then. How about now ?

How about now, you contemptible sacks of unprocessed biodiesel ?

Like many in here whether we admit it or not I was frustrated that I wasn't in on the Bitcoin gravy train and hoped that Dogecoin would be the next big thing.

Exactly, or as Stan put it, simple envy. Fuck you, envy is a sin. Especially for you, envy is a sin. Why weren't you begging for the honor of sucking us off, like the strippers and camwhores visiting #bitcoin-assets ? Humility is a virtue. Why aren't you humble, abject, debasing yourself for our nude amusement ? You're too good for that, or what is it ? Are you better than the women, you sexist fuck you ? For shame.

Get with the program, the shit's not optional. Either you obey now or you obey later, the only difference being that the pain you'll swallow is a monotonous function of time, with the sign of that monotony left as an exercise to the reader. What's not left to the reader is any choice whatsoever. Either you obey now or you obey later, tertium non datum.

A lot of shibes on here would probably scoff at that and say it's unshibe like, including one of the founders IIRC, but not everyone has comfortable jobs and high income. A lot of us work really hard for near minimum wage and there's nothing wrong with wanting a better future for yourself and your family.

Fuck you #2. Of fucking course not everyone's rich. Do you know why ? Because not everyone is cool. Because not everyone's smart, and not everyone's wise. Because not everyone's well connected. It all boils down to : because not everyone's worthy.

Not worthy. That speaks to you : you're unworthy. You don't work "really hard", you just waste your time really well, that's all. Bettering yourself ? Sure, even a wage slave can work to better himself. That is done through finding a master, and being their slave. That's done through obeying them, not through pretending like you can be your own fucking master, and direct your own fucking slavery. How ? To what ? By what ?

The judges generally derp about how the man being his own lawyer has a fool for a client. This is usually true but plenty of times false. However, the derp being his own master definitely, always and without exception has a fool for a slave. And this is incidentally why you're so easy to scam, too. Anyone can be a better master than you dumb fucks, and so the scammer just needs half an hour of your mental time. That's all.

But I don't blame the fuckwits themselves. Just like with Doge I blame the moral authors, here too I blame the moral authors : the "progressive" and "liberal" and "advanced" shitheads who went around for the past century telling people they don't need masters.

Whoopdedoo, you should be rounded up and burned in an open pit. Look what you've done. A generation of broken kids, whom the masters of this world wouldn't touch with someone else's ten foot pole. What now ? What, you gonna tax me to pay them so they don't kill themselves, and in this process hide the intellectual bankruptcy of your imposture ?

That ain't gonna work. You failed. Take your "progressive" "liberal" bullshit and go about the town backwards on a donkey, to collect phlegm for me.

I was planning to buy a house with my fiancee but now pretty much 80% of our savings have been wiped out. I told her and she went on a rant about my stupid ideas, it was pretty humiliating because I had been going on to her about how cool Dogecoin was and how it can grow in value but also that it does loads of cool things other than just being a currency. I always had a funny feeling that she was a bit meh about the fact that I was a nerd, and she is quite popular, I often wondered why she was with me but up to now I managed to put those thoughts aside and get on with my work. But in the argument she finally said it, how I was like a little kid and not a "real man" whatever that means, and how she hates me for blowing our savings and how I can never provide for us properly. I work nights in a warehouse and she is a waitress, but there's always this pressure for me as the man to succeed. We were planning on having kids once we were stable in our new place. To cut a long story short she left me, there's no reconciliation, she left me the engagement ring, it was about 2 weeks ago now, she's cold/distant and to be honest pretty indifferent. I feel awful but also numb, kind of like in shock.

You aren't a real man. And you don't get to derp about "whatever that means", on the age old approach that "we all suck so it must be okay", "nobody's done the homework so we can't be punished because you can't punish the whole class".

You aren't a real man, and what it means to be a real man is not within your purview to contest or even discuss.

That's all I care to read, honestly.

Yes, your tears are delicious, dear communitard. Go whine to reddit about how your intellectual system is a laughable failure, go tell them all about how I've seen MUDs made by mongoloid kids more engrossingly realistic than the shit between your ears.

It's all in good fun, after all, isn't it ?

———In case you're wondering, yes I have a lot of these. They seem to the average tard "inocuous" which is to say, the average tard imagines that they should be safe hiding spots for all his internal dirt (in this case, personal exceptionalism). But I see them and I go in full killer mode, which makes them want to argue that I'm "flying off the handle", ie, reacting disproportionately.

Because, obviously, they've predicated their fraudulent safety on a particular social convention, as usual. [↩]Well either me or Dee Dee. [↩]

« S.WOL, June 2014 Statement

F.DERP June Statement »

Category: Rautati si Mizerii

Saturday, 05 July, Year 6 d.Tr.

Agency and other notes

Phryne

Should you suddenly find yourself with enough success to, say, help significantly decrease poverty and famine in some 3rd world country, would you be prepared and ready with a game-plan or stumbling and mystified that something of this kind of magnitude occurred for you?

Rahab What's this.

Phryne This is what they do now with their time. Mouthbreathers living in squalor all over the US are mentally preparing to solve the 3rd world's famine problems. Just in case. You never know when you suddenly become powerful.i Fucking Cinderella syndrome, an entire generation of sleeping beauties.ii

Rahab Nobody cancelled armchair generals. Favourite sport of, well, damn near everybody.

Phryne Well nobody cancelled them, but I tell you... years ago it was a rare sport. What if one day you came to New York and EVERYONE was playing checkers. Not just the Central Park geezers. Everyone. Everywhere. All the time.

Rahab As a kid I had a book by a chap named Perelman, 'Living Mathematics' (my transl.).

Phryne The Perelman ?

Rahab Not the Riemann one, no. Described exactly this happening in the late 19th with the game '15'

Phryne I recall that. But that was a fad. This doesn't look like a fad.

Rahab Was sold with the stipulation that the 'winner' gets a bag of $. It was sold in an unwinnable arrangement, of course.

Phryne Of course. You know we invented a splendid drink game with that thing ?

Rahab Oh ?

Phryne You ideally need some girls. Girls pick numbers, bois have to get said number form on the top line, get to kiss the girl or w/e.

Rahab Aha. Neat.

Phryne Course if there's no girls you can just have drinks. "Dial 1 for vodka".

Rahab Anybody plays Alcoholic Chess over where you live?

Phryne Nope. We do play alcoholic bridge tho. I think it's better, especially if you have a recorder and record the angry arguments over bidding conventions for the next day. People can get pretty confused after the 20th drink.

Rahab Here you can get nice glass sets, hollow pieces. Damned if I know who they're for, americans don't play much chess any more.

Phryne Chess is a dead fish imo.

Rahab You pointed out correctly who killed the fish. The true chess fiends are playing Go now.

Phryne I briefly looked into it. I do not think it will survive the decade. The only reason it's not already solved is because the Deep Blue rewards are no longer available (ie, whoever makes the machine will not be hailed as a hero, but decried as hostis humani generes).

Rahab All the advances have been on small boards. On full 19x19 the computational load is greater by several orders of magnitude.

Phryne So ? Need I show you the hashpower count ?

Rahab Actually there is a Japanese prize. Unclaimed. $1mil if I recall.

Phryne Baby, 1 mil doesn't get you a garconniere in LA.iii

Rahab Not that it can't be done, in principle. One thing with machine chess, is that it instantly killed the online game. Idiots immediately hooked up engines to the servers, posing as humans.

Phryne Yeah. Machine poker is a big problem for online poker. The big houses don't like to admit it, but... I know at least a coupla people who used to be into grad math now mostly do tuning for their poker bots.

Rahab If I recall, the standard move is to write a 'conservative strategy' engine that steadily fleeces suckers. Pays a few $/hr.

Phryne Yah. You have to hide it tho, because they ban obvious cases.

Rahab Naturally.

Phryne You can actually get 2-3k a month iirc, if you put in the 8 hours a day.

Rahab These folks spend much time thinking of phantom mouse-movers and other minutiae. I don't envy them.

Phryne This may be a step up for a grad, of course, but as I tend to point out to them... my pimp friends make better money.

Rahab Even here in this Zoo, one can make considerably more pay for doing considerably less.

Phryne Math people suffer from a disproportionate ability to focus.

Rahab Yes, i know this well.

Phryne They kinda just get lost... you know that theory that people don't pick fields of research, the field where they just happen to encounter their first success picks them ?

Rahab I often like to suggest to people that they recalculate their wage - per minute of actual work that they must ever do.

Phryne This is very problematic.

Rahab Well, sure. Sleeping while the bell might ring does have a cost, of sorts.

Phryne On one end of the spectrum, it makes child rearing impossible. On the other end of the spectrum, it makes things like start-ups impossible. Not that it's not a useful mental exercise, but consider also that people are able to change. Situation : you live in a small town, run a red light, cop is slightly amazed you don't want to argue with him. He asks how come, you tell him you make more per minute than the fine implies. Two weeks later, the entire police department is out to fine you. In other words : any rigid, predictable behaviour weakens your negotiation position in society. That's why chastity is such an important tool in the subjection of women, and other things.iv)

Rahab Right. Tom Schelling's nuclear war (and other game-theoretical adventures).

Phryne When the fuck did this "warriors = psychopaths" bsv gain such currency.

Rahab USA. Where else.

Phryne I get it, lazy worthless cattle believe the men are evil, because it's easier than to believe they're cattle. But for crying out loud!

In my family, the same is true of the males, who we also cannot risk getting killed to enrich oil companies' bottom lines, or be permanently damaged with PTSD because they are not psychopaths, who are the only people who can survive combat duty unscathed by permanent mental scars caused by what they were ordered to do.

(from some guest article Orlov published).

Rahab I've this age-old desire to translate Limonov to English. As if it'd maybe cure people.

Phryne Some woman who's more than happy to be a domestic slave, instead of realising there's nothing in principle wrong with domestic slavery, uses the guy's thinking to rationalise her imaginary apartness. Ie, she's not REALLY what she is, because blabla, and then proceeds to expand this hive of feminine nonsense. It's not like the Russian domestic slave women of 1700 thought it bad for their kids to be impressed into the Tsar's army just like she does today, in the exact same way, for the exact same reasons. Ono! It's all different, and it has nothing to do with her difficulty to cope with the intrinsic worthlessness of the spawn of her womb that she's put so much work into. So no, I don't think it'll ever cure people.

Rahab Probably not. Konrad lorenz was translated... When? and where's the cure.

Phryne The way the world works everyone's required to spend his life (ie, everything) for nothing. Otherwise the world wouldn't be here tomorrow. And so... women that play the domestic slave spend their life to raise kids, who grow up into adults, who are people and therefore worthless. If they die in Chechnya or not it makes no difference, just like whether you find out your wine barrel in the cellar has gone sour or not has no bearing on how you got a barrel of bad vinegar in the cellar. On the other hand if they don't spend their time raising worthless children, they spend their time getting worthless careers. Big whoop. Let's find solutions to the problem of light not coming out of our ass. Because this is now a problem.

Rahab I have a term: 'launch vehicles'. As in the rocketry concept.

Phryne What's it denote ?

Rahab People who live so that payload can go somewhere.

Phryne But it never goes anywhere. Where'd it go ?

Rahab Occasionally it goes.

Phryne Give me one such example.

Rahab R. Feynman, approached by William Shockley's sperm bank: 'go talk to my father.'

Phryne Ahaha. But see, my point is, inasmuch as the world is, then no action of the agents inside it could breach the glass of that snowglobe. Because if one action did so breach it, then it would cease to be. On the other hand, inasmuch as the definition of futility exists in the snowglobevi, everything is futile by definition.

Rahab Snow globe, or aquarium, yes.

Phryne Right. Meanwhile they go to all these contrived, paralogical lengths to introduce "progress", as if in point of fact what happens is that a succession of Matryoshka snowglobes is breached endlessly. I mean... these people'd benefit from a casual acquainting with primitive Greek thought. Herpderp, we are so much better than the biblevii, that latter reformulation of basic concepts such as the regression to infinity which we have yet to discover.

———Here's a hint : nobody ever "became" powerful. Not even Richard the 3rd. (Speaking of which, ever seen The Lion in Winter ? It's a grandiose achievement, moreso than Salo for instance, if in very much the same vein.)

Power doesn't fall into your lap, power you make a grab for, over the dead bodies of everyone who'd stand in your way. And if that's not your cup of tea, no big deal. We don't have to all be doing the same things, we just need to understand that if we don't that's because we are less than people, not because those who do do them aren't really people. [↩]While this entire "waiting to be awakened to your real life by a random outside event such as the prince's kiss" was bad enough back when only girls did it, the fact that it's become socially acceptable for boys to behave like little girls is significantly worse. Because women can in fact live a happy, fulfilled life as domestic slaves, even if they don't have to, but boys can not, even should they try to. Because women can give birth, and men can not, that's why. Not negotiable. [↩]Seriously, today's dollars are not exactly worthless, as in worth 0, and are not yet as worthless as they will be in ten years. However, if you were born back when the world still worked (ie, before 1980), for practical purposeses you can divide any current dollar sum by 1000 to get a value that's meaningful in your mental context. Conversely, if you were born after, multiply any dollar amount quoted in media from back then by 1000 to get a value that's meaningful in your mental context. I call this my xthousand rule. [↩]Other things such as, that's why art, with its focus on flexible and improbable behaviour, is such an all-important stindard of freedom, and tool of liberation. Other things such as, that's why censorship efforts to ensure art doesn't threaten the establishment, as if anything ever could be art that didn't. (Per the very definition art threatens the establishment, that's what it is, the tool I use to extract the eyes out of the skull of my still living father, to crash them under my heel for that satisfying splat sound they make. Try it sometime - if you're any good at it you may one day be the establishment in your own turn, and enjoy Laius' fate for yourself. [↩]It is bullshit. Someone who can walk up to you on the street, grab you firmly by the neck, pull out a knife and proceed to extract your pancreas, (not a psychopath yet, by the way) after which clean his blade on your hair and proceed to buy a hot dog from the stand and take the subway as if nothing had happened, and think nothing further of his momentary curiosity to visually examine your pancreas (now we're talking) is not a bad guy just because he can do something you can't. Even if that thing he can do while you can't scares the living daylights out of you. That's just not how bad works.

In fact you're just a stunted human being (and so in some ethical views, bad) because there's parts of what people can do that you can't do yourself. Because that's how the definition of humanity's identity works. Humanity isn't "those dorks that closest resemble me" or "whatever twerps I don't feel particularly threatened by". Humanity is everyone and everything that ever was and ever could be. Which is why calling something "inhumane" is about as ridiculous as calling weather "unseasonable". Herpderp and a bucket of who asked you.

Moreover, and more importantly, that you couldn't be Pol Pot makes the fact that you aren't Pol Pot morally irrelevant. You don't get to go to Catholic heaven through being boringly pointless, you get to go to Catholic heaven through being the vanquisher of your failings and your infinite potential for evil. That's how they manage to keep their heaven relatively free of furniture and slabs of marble. Other religions are no different, the concept transcends religion as it's part of logic : to be a moral agent one first needs the ability to act in the first place. That's what "agent" means. So if you can't act it then follows you're no agent and therefore... not a person and fuck you! Ever noticed how no Western movies ever are about the farmers ? [↩]This is higly debatable, incidentally. There may exist futility defined in a specified, contained context. Futility defined "vaguely" (ie, not fully specified) or "universally" (ie, including any elements outside the globe) most likely does not exist. [↩]I'd appreciate it if you managed to avoid turning my statement that "Look, some idiots are too stupid to have groked even Ptolemaic astronomy!" into some sort of "Even MP said Ptolemaic astronomy is the best!!1". Thank you. [↩]

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Category: Trilterviuri

Monday, 06 January, Year 6 d.Tr.