That people will care what music I listened to while I was creating it.

That the WikiPedia article on me (and it) will be able to note that I was X and that I liked Y while still meeting article notability guidelines.

But then again, I can say:

Right now I’m listening to Trevor Pinnock playing Scarlatti’s sonatas for harpsichord.

With the Internet, one can say anything.

The difference is

One day

I want people to listen

I’m tired
she said.

He didn’t need to see her face to know her apathetically drawn smirk. So he kept his eyes flitting low.

Oh. Tired
he nodded as she tapped the buttons for his food;
the screen offered him a donation suggestion of 4.99.
He tried vaguely to come up with something to say to fill the gap, but ended up realizing his deadness again. He stopped the search cold and let the silence for the requisite beats as he counted out five bills and watched them handed off.

She was new here, she was young like him, she was angular and thin, and he recalled that she hadn’t said anything at all in reply to his conditioned greeting the day before.

He hadn’t yet decided what he was going to say when she stuck out the penny.

Oh thank you very much
he said and placed the moldy coin in its bright red attention!-tray, gathered his food, glanced up again, and said

Get some rest
with a momentary naked warmness and a smile that caught him off.

Her cords let a suppressed, stunted giggle that didn’t quite know itself as he strode off with a fleeting vigor.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There were no bubbling mental gestures behind her face the next week when he saw her again at the register. She was all sad, unwilling business, and her eyes didn’t so much as outline his frame.

He made his way hesitantly through the protocol of purchase, eyeing her with a polite openness. She was not giving connection, and he was not the kind to take such things.

He ate his food at a table not too far away from her counter, but not so close as to agonize.

She could sleep Van Winkly and her pillow wouldn’t allay the weariness her head held locked up within it, that much was clear, and that much he knew firsthand.

What kind of rest could he have meant?

he wondered.

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

It’s a delicate business, 21st century social work. There’s much to abrade, too much to lose of oneself. It’s a sandpaper street we ride our split-fast machines on and guillotine doorways we sidle our way through. One’s name has no meaning, even if the others remember it, and one’s image is filtered by a stifling non-culture. The bit-byte parade only gets faster and more total.

At some point, something has to give itself up. Either this exhaustion will exhaust itself, or our husks will dissolve away by the crashing tides of historical progress; either way, some insane miracle will arise.

What’s lost in the feminine is openness, what’s lost in the masculine is drive. But the merry task of flagellation soldiers on, with the whole of humanity screaming its dreams in its heads to the beat of the whipping.

For my friends, the Blacksmith and the Particle Man.

The Pedantry Technician, 2009

The Blacksmith’s initial difficulty was not exactly that the rocks were slick with wet algae, and uneven, and punctuated by areas of non-rock at the same sort of altitude [i.e. right around one foot above sea level] as his sandals. Those were the corollary difficulties, and while his companion, Particle Man, was in exactly the same boat, location- and locomotion-wise, it was kind of a cliche among those who new him [Particle Man] that he [PM] possessed the sort of gross motor skills, or sense of balance, that made such terrain sort of an epsilon in his already considerable familiarity with asterisk/teakettle exchanges. The real issue was not exactly that the strip between concrete wall and lazily angry North Atlantic on which they walked consisted of slimy rocks distributed unevenly with respect to the scale at which feet perform their tricks. The real issue was this fact, plus the darkness, it being both nearly midnight and hazy – the kind of June evening which makes even New Englanders, which class of people sweated and fretted under clammy sheets in the houses across the wall and subsequent road, nostalgic for the recently-departed winter. Particle Man was lost in thought re: the haze: it was the sort of night that, were it daylight, would have people pointing out that it was not, as would seem intuitive, the heat, but that instead the real issue, at the barest analytical bottom of things, was the humidity.

The exact sort of June evening that the two friends failed to see through is, in its real, sweaty particulars, unique to New England, but Particle Man wondered why the expression about it not being the heat, but the humidity, which expression of course applied, given its climactic broadness, in a pretty multi-regional way, was always uttered as though it was not even some sort of culture-specific traditional complaint, but as the actual like independent, abstract creation of the person saying it, in the presence of the first case of sweat-induced pubic putrescence in all of human history. What’s remarkable is that Particle Man kept his footing throughout his ruminations. In fact, he was sort of drawing strength from the comparative coolness he felt, still being dressed in the same cutoffs as had seen him through the much hotter afternoon, and having only yesterday buzzed his dome-piece almost to the scalp, which dome-piece was adorned with shiny blonde hair whose ‘do varied in some bizarre stochastic way between that of the kind of person who calls people “SIR!” and the sort who says “brah”.

“So.” The Blacksmith’s voice had the rare quality of being unpretentiously enthusiastic and jovial, and was pitched just slightly higher than one would expect from a dude who bestrode the beach on this hottish-but-definitely-humid evening draped in an ancient ass-length black overcoat and an impressive, insulating mane. Ignoring trees falling in forests etc., he looked kind of badass, though it was too dark for PM to see him – his presence could only be deduced from the fact that the region of ocean whose whitecaps blinked red in the light of a nun buoy’s overgrown laser pointer was obscured from the Particle Man’s view.

“So, I emailed the Pedantry Technician about the Klein Bottle thing. He says it’s cool, although he doesn’t totally vouch for it, like legally speaking, but he wishes he were here for it. It’s totally worth having some bee-resembling, bike-walking rent-a-cop fuck telling us to stay out of his nice, peaceful beach community.”

“Bee-resembling?”

“Those yellow shirts.”

“Oh. Yeah, definitely. I wish we could try it. I don’t completely understand it, though.”

“So the PT suggested imagining a square sheet of glass, like a windowpane, and like, if you’re really into the whole empirical literalism thing, to the point of being a metaphortard, which I am of course not accusing you of, heating it until it’s super-flexible, and then bending it around until you can weld one edge to the opposite one –”

“So you’ve got a tube.”

“Affirmative, brother. Now that tube has a circle at either end, and you can sort of imagine each circle as being given a direction, like a clock face, when you look at it from the end with the circle in question. If you curl the whole tube around, you can weld those two circles together so that the clock faces match up, i.e. so that whatever is clockwise on the new, single circle you get when you weld the fuckers together was the same clockwise on each of the original ones. Then you’ve got like a glass doughnut-crust, he said. He made a well stupid pun about the word “glazed” in reference to glass and doughnuts both.”

“That’s more of a double-entendre, though.”

“Fuck you. The point is, you can like abstractly imagine that you welded those end circles together in the opposite way, so that nine o’clock on one got welded to three o’clock and so forth. The result is still just a twisted-up, self-glued windowpane, but it’s now called a Klein bottle. We’re kind of triple-D visualisers, he says, and the only way to sit this thing in three-dimensional space is to have it kind of cross through itself, but otherwise, you’re good. There’s some sort of artisan on the intertubes who blows these things, so, uh, I think we should do tequila shots on the beach.”

“Do that shit up.”

The Blacksmith’s coat had truly carried more cargo of dubious nature and origin in the past, but every bottle of pretentious-ass liquid he’d ever lifted from Whole Foods in his quest to become a yippie Gangster Disciple had been orientable. Now, though, with the sort of gesture, wasted though it was in the dark, that made every picture of The Blacksmith rather cutely posed, he produced an artfully-blown immersion-in-three-space of a Klein bottle, full [in some sense] of the distilled essence of cactus, with worm replaced by a beady little reflection of the glow from the tip of Particle Man’s recently-lit cigarette.

“The PT even says there are two reasons why this doesn’t count as an open container. So it’s legal on the beach.”

The cop had apparently been waiting in the dark, and things became very confused, visually, when he put his lights on. Several times per second, the darkness problem was solved, unto epilepsy, as the prokaryotic slime on the rocks caught and amplified the flashing blue.

“What’s that you gentlemen have right there? I just heard you two talking all about how it’s everything and everything’s grandmother with the exception of an open container on my nice peaceful, pleasant beach, on which you two are due to be trespassing, by the way, in about fifteen minutes.”

The cop was gazing down at them from atop the wall, sort of comically blue and sweaty and steely-eyed as he blinked in and out of existence. The Blacksmith and Particle Man had both weathered numerous such confrontations without incident, via wildly different moduses operandi, and it was thus sort of surprising that it was usually hyperstealth Particle Man who put up his rhetorical fists.

“All due respect, Officer, if you’re going to bust us for the trespassing we’ll be doing in fifteen minutes if we don’t leave, then I’m going to have to go ahead and put it to you that you have some notions about clairvoyance that are probably controversial enough to be excluded from the like canon of shit that we can all agree on as a society constitutes legit police work. I guess I mean it’s totally possible that we’re planning to leave the beach in ten minutes, for instance.

Besides, what my associate and sort of abiological brother has in his hand is not an open container. It’s not open and it’s not really a container.”

“Okay, smartass.” The cop had busted out a mildly frightening Maglite and directed it at The Blacksmith’s hand and its contents. “It doesn’t look to me like it’s got a top on it.”

“But like Officer. What’s a container?”

“I’ve got way less patience than I’d need to have this conversation long enough to bust your hippie asses for trespassing. A container is something you put shit, in this context alcoholic beverages, which come to think of it I’m not even sure you’re even allowed to possess, agewise, in.”

“What was the last word?” This from The Blacksmith.

“I said ‘in’.”

The Blacksmith said nothing; he nodded to his friend, suggestively, and in an alignment of their problem-solving faculties, in which alignment the Pedantry Technician would later fondly enjoy believing he’d had an action-at-a-distance sort of hand, Particle Man understood and knelt, at a pace calculated not to unnerve the cop, and removed a wet shoelace from his sun- and salt-scarred sneaker, handing the former to The Blacksmith. With some difficulty, but rapidly enough, the latter was able to thread the string through the the bottle, around it, and tie a neat knot, forming a handle from which he let the contraband dangle.

“Officer, what other sort of container, with a clear, unambiguous “in” and “out”, can you do that trick with? I’m guessing not a bottle. I submit that this bottle is not a container, and the tequila, which I’m totally 22 by the way, is as much ON this bottle as it is IN it. This is not a container at all.”

The Pedantry Technician had only ever been in one legit, bad-feelings fistfight, and hadn’t really displayed any knuckle-artistry at all. On hearing this tale told, though, he thought, in his hubris, of his two friends as fists deployed in the manoeuvre wherein one strikes a fantastically tall person first in the stomach and, having doubled the fantastically tall person over, has access to that person’s face, for the finisher. What Particle Man said next, without giving the bemused cop time to respond to The Blacksmith’s dissertationette, was:

“And also, Officer, with a regular bottle, you’ve got this little circle where the cap attaches, which is a straight-up little hole in the glass that you need to attach a cap to in order to have yourself a nice unbroken surface. I don’t know how long you were chilling in the dark before you made yourself known, but maybe you heard my buddy here describe how his bottle is constructed. It’s made by bending a sheet of glass and welding things together so that every edge of the sheet is welded to some other edge. A bottle, or any other container that can be open or closed in the absence or presence, respectively, of a top, most definitely is not like that at all. This thing isn’t just not a container, it’s definitely not open.”

The cop mumbled something about the definition of the word “is”; nobody else present at the scene had been watching the news long enough to understand its significance. Then he straightened up and shined the Maglite at his own tired face.

“I can’t say I’m convinced, but I’m really going to lose my shit if I have to talk to you two fap-faced douchepuppets for one more goddamn minute. Just get the fuck off my nice, pleasant beach , and don’t let me see you here at midnight, which is in right around two minutes.”

Then he turned, too confused for convincing contempt, sat heavily in his car, slammed the door, and drove off rather more quickly than the situation demanded or the law allowed.

“Epic win, dude, epic win.”

This was written by the excellent dude over at Indra Design.

In W_ic_ An Inmate Discusses T_e Texas C_ainsaw Massacre Wit_ _is Psyc_olo_ist

“So I suppose it was pretty soon after Dad retired was a massive depression — for Dad, I mean, not me — but my take on it is it started from plain boredom. It’s not so important, maybe, specific reasons, just Dad’s symptoms. I really really felt so bad about it at first. I did. You ever see someone as can’t see any reason to be alive? For fuck’s sake, even insects and cows and bacteria just are alive for no reason at all. Animals just survive, no need for a bloody reason. But Dad, over on like a smelly loveseat — you call it a loveseat?”

“Probably. Maybe it’s not important?”

“Maybe it is. Dude loved to sit in it, anyway. So, after like maybe a few weeks of melodramatic-ass reasonlessness-pretense, just before it ended, bloody loveseat sofa unit smelled. Dad never left it. Just stared at all sorts of, you know, terrible flicks. I mean, films as feature masked blokes and massive like bladed bloody culinary instruments and like total safety only for plucky bimbos as don’t do like overly pleasant stuff to anyone, wink, wink. Stupid. Secretly Dad lied a little, about no reason to live, I mean, because Dad played favourites. I mean favourite films, and seems to me like favourite films are just maybe a tiny like difference from proper indifference. About life. I mean, if you’ve preferences, it’s a little reason not to top yourself. Maybe. Seems like a start, anyway, but I suppose not to Dad.

So Dad’s total most favourite was about a crazy family. One dude rocks like a mask made of skin and sometimes an apron. One’s all stupid and manic and like self-mutilates in a van. Oldest one comes to dinner and beats on someone’s live skull and everyone eats people. It’s not important — “

“I’ve seen it.”

“Yup. Soon Dad started to complain about our family dysfunctionality. Said a family like in said flick was proper non-dysfunctional and could kill and cannibalise as a family. Dad wanted a reason for our family to be as not self-contained and self-insufficient as it was, as Dad saw it. Crazy. I’m twenty-nine and I live in Dad’s flat — “

“Lived.”

“Aye, true. Anyway, me at twenty-nine in Dad’s flat is as self-contained as a family can properly be as far as I was concerned. So I was pissed off and I took Dad’s words real literal. First, crazy bloke never let up about ‘no more reason to live’ and second, went on all bloody day about ‘members of non-dysfunctional families cooperatively pursue members’ aims’. I just sort of added up two and two and nailed Dad to a loveseat. Dad didn’t even die from loss of blood. Poor dude starved.”

[Note: Two letter keys on my keyboard don't work properly, an important constraint above.]

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“He’s cute. Can you please take him? Your apartment’s in back and Alice won’t see. He’s cute!”

He’s wiggling like he wants to feed Eve an apple is what he is. Sad, there’s no surprise in meeting my neighbour for the first time after we’ve both lived here six months. Let’s be nice. Ask to hold him and don’t write litterbox-related shoebox-flat space constraints on the face-piece.

“What about for the weekend? Just give him to Andrew when he gets back. He’s in Lennoxville but he’ll be back.”

Not too many questions. Who’s Andrew or Where’s Lennoxville but not both. Probably the former. Maybe this is creepy. Is there a protocol for kitten-offers? Probably; who knows. Who’s creepy? If Andrew is too, does that answer the first question? Creepiness isn’t monic so I’m not necessarily Andrew, even if he’s creepy. Now the bastard’s in the fingers-piece. Oh Ja Ja Ja. He’s wiggling more. I’m not Andrew, but I’m creepy. Creepy people are so creepy even cats can tell. She must know Andrew in Lennoxville isn’t creepy and I bet I can’t even manage a little inconsequential weekend of non-creepitude. Best give him back. Excuse but don’t lie…

“Uh, well actually Jason wanted one of them. Thanks though. I guess I might come back if I can’t get rid of the others. It’s just a weekend. You wouldn’t even have to feed it, I bet. Well, Jason will probably take the others, too. He’s a cat person and Alice likes him anyway. Well, uh, have a good night thanksbye.”

Good not to excuse because there isn’t one and lying is impossible. That poor wiggler would have been in the presence of Creepy McCreepsalot all bloody weekend. No excuse no excuse no excuse but none needed anyway. Did I even say anything the whole time? How much time was the whole time? The little chain is chained like a little Jaforsaken fortress in here. Why? Kind of wanted the cat. Do I look like a cat-killer? Maybe if I had a cat I’d be less creepy. I’m talking to a plant, a cactus. I’d definitely kill a cat. I can only be trusted to care for something once a month. No cats, just cacti. Mojave of human bleeding decency. Go to bed and shut up shut up shut up because the enemy is listening and anything you say will be used against you in the court of public opinion and they can all hear you because Carl Jung hacked into the old self-loop and is broadcasting to her and the world in surround sound, and that Jason got your cat is proof. Go to bed go to bed go to bed and for the sake of all all that’s wholly holy shut up shut up shut up.

Wake up from some clonazepam dreams with the Habitant-head; a fog like pea-soup and low-viscosity pig shit, which are basically the same thing here. The old self-loop at so many Hertz it hurts talking talking speaking no words just talking like an immortal drunk on speed, no relief because the other-loop can’t get a word out, edgewise or otherwise. Talking out the side of the mouth-piece is creepy anyway, so otherwise is the only way and who knows how that works. Don’t jump to conclusions though. Maybe that was creepy, maybe not. There was a cat, and conclusions were jumped to. It was no lion, though. Don’t be chased to conclusions by a little serpent-mewlet thing. Maybe it was creepy; maybe she just can’t make up her mind. Hey, brother, don’t do that to yourself with the cats and the dark little intuitive crevices-leapt-into. She came on a whim and she left on a whim and it’s nothing to do with you, brother. That bird’s just far too flighty.

An interesting way to determine how interesting your circumstances are is to get into a state of great concentration and see how much your mind drifts away on tangents, the idea being that if your surroundings can’t hold the attention of someone with intense powers of concentration, they can’t be all that fascinating.

It can be hard to get into such a frame of mind, but Ezra Delaneau is in one right now; even if he could focus on Janet Clausewitz’s class for long enough to draw any conclusions, he wouldn’t be able to determine why it is so boring.

Ezra Delaneau is still an animal, but he’s beginning to reevaluate his thoughts about his personal membrane. Half an hour ago, anyone who’d been able to ask Ezra Delaneau who he was (ignoring the inevitable Heisenbergian beef) would not have been able to get an honest answer that didn’t have a lot to do with the interwoven intricacies of Invalid Ovation’s magnum opus. As much as, or, in the moment, even more than, any characteristic ever ascribed to Ezra Delaneau (stubborn, arrogant, big-eared, slow to anger), Ligetyi and CO’s contrapuntal madness and everything it suggested were integral to his big organic mental-emotional soak-nexus.

Mrs. Clausewitz is talking about James Cook in a rowboat, cruising around the St. Lawrence and stopping now and again to toss a rock on a string into the water and write down the length of the part of the string that comes up wet. She’s such a bad pedagogue that her lecture, while forming a tiny part of the content of Ezra Delaneau’s mind, doesn’t figure much more prominently than the actual event: in the sense of interacting with the rest of the world, Ezra’s in class about as much as he is in the rowboat with Captain Cook, dodging musket balls and Francophone farts in his general direction.

Ezra’s in a boat of his own, instead. The broad placid river he sails is the pan-spatio-temporal river encompassing all of Ja’s creation, and his sounding line doesn’t measure depth. It measures the extent to which each place it is thrown is relevant to defining Ezra Delaneau. After each measurement, Ezra marks the corresponding space on his map of the river with a colour, hot to cold depending on how much of him there is. Thus asteroids unknown to humanity which no longer exist and bamboo shoots in Tibet and gangsta rap are dark blues; Mrs. Clausewitz’s lecture is a lovely azure, the only sense in which it will ever be beautiful. Stubbornness and the notion of big ears are a sort of watery pink and Ezra’s physical body itself is a pink so pink that a case could be made for its redness. Still darker is the spot on his map corresponding to the sounds floating about his car half an hour ago. Eventually, Ezra decides, he will have coloured the whole map. All that exists is Ezra Delaneau, to some degree; the map is a patchwork of oddly-shaped colour-splotches, bounded by meandering isopersonae of shocking complexity — lines of contant Ezrosity. If someone asks who he is and wants an answer sensible to people who haven’t coloured existence in terms of themselves, all Ezra has to do is set a threshold of pinkness and mention everything pinker and tell the questioner that Ezra Delaneau is just a big pink environmental disaster floating on the surface of a river.

Among people who ADD up on mirrors or book jackets or biscuit-tin-lids, most do so for the subjective euphoria and have to tolerate an inevitable, abrupt, decidedly un-euphoric sum when the ADDing is done. Ezra isn’t in it for jollies, just a very clear head and a state of self-detachment, and his crash is always pragmatic rather than depressive: just a sandwich fit for a Darfur escapee and a nap fit for the Narrator in that movie wherein Brad Pitt punches people.

In between the biscuit-tin and the pleasant exhaustion, Ezra Delaneau does this thing where he insightfully fixates on things, moving from fixation to fixation in quantum leaps when one runs its course. On speed, he takes such good notice of things that he’s never short of fixations to quantum-leap to, and his train of thought is a piecewise sensible express between amphetamines and sleep, two ideas between which no completely sensible train runs.

Ezra Delaneau leaps from his existential cartography into class with a start and lands in class:

“The Royal Navy in Cook’s time was effective because of strict discipline. Drunkenness and laziness could get you flogged. Other infractions were more serious. Mutiny, which was very loosely defined, was punishable by death. Many sailors were also hanged for, uh, sharing their grog with appealing young men in the crew.”

Heather Moseley pipes up. Heather Moseley has rubber cement strawberry-blonde dreadlocks and a picture of Peter Tosh on her forty-dollar 100% natural fiber T-shirt. She rides an expensive bicycle to school, smokes American Spirits and coughs when cars start in her presence. She’s repeating her senior year, having failed chemistry over a dispute about the acceptability of having all of the citations in one’s paper direct the reader to Erowid.

“Mrs. Clausewitz? The last part goes to show the, like, lengths a patriarchal imperialistic organisation will go to to maintain its, uh, hegermany. I think it’s admirable and forward-thinking and, you know, groovy that the sailors wanted to share their grog, which was like a precious resource, right? By punishing them for sharing, the officers were really just trying to stop them from forming a group which could undermine their power, which I think is totally despicable…”

Mrs. Clausewitz looks puzzled. Ezra Delaneau gets confused, and then embarassed for Heather Moseley as he realises the enormity of her misapprehension. He tactfully leans very close to her before whispering.

“Er, Heather, by ‘sharing their grog’, she means ‘buttsex’.”

As she sits bolt-upright, Heather Moseley’s carefully-crafted persona melts like cheese curds on General Montcalm’s pommes frites. The sans-serif “LEGALIZE IT” on her shirt becomes a corporate logo in Ezra Delaneau’s mind as she disgustedly squeals “BUTTSEX!?!”

Janet Clausewitz’s students get busy giving the impression that time has stopped and the only possible motion is that of mental gears processing the fact that BUTTSEX has been referred to in the presence of a Nearly Retired Authority Figure (none of them had been paying enough attention to notice that said BUTTSEX had actually been referred to by said NRAF, the old leprechaun). Janet Clausewitz peers over her glasses to unmediatedly wither Miss Moseley with her gaze; her lips tighten into a pretty decent approximation of the essential receptacle for grog-sharing.

When she senses that every clove-scented instant of Heather Moseley’s short life has finished flashing before the latter’s eyes, Janet Clausewitz simply says, “Sodomy, dear.”

Ezra Delaneau’s next quantum leap takes him to wondering what the isopersonae look like on the totality-of-stuff map of a person whose self-concept is a lie.

I can’t say with complete candor that I saw this latter property become true of Beluapal–I can say only that I knew it to be true.  This was an unusual certainty, though, because while it possessed the inevitability common to certainties of reason, it applied to something at which I was sure I was looking.  I cannot say I saw the post-prandial creature, because such a claim would demand description, and I have not the words to describe it with anything like precision: the inexpressibility of the state in which the frightened creature found itself went beyond that even of the shape and sound of Juja’s instrument.  That said, I never took my eyes from the creature, and I can with certainty say that I observed it as I have never observed anything else.

Build a wall around the greatest fascination and temptation you have ever met.  Post guards on that wall, and then build another.  None of your efforts would match the frustration I felt as I stared, with burning curiosity, at that which I could not see, not because of any defect of observation, but simply because I possessed no conceptual attachment-point for what I saw.  I was vaguely aware at the time, and have since confirmed, that such things as Beluapal may be readily conceptualised abstractly, but I am convinced that even now, with this new knowledge, my encounter with the beast would be no different.

Most disconcertingly, I began to realise, as I stared, that there is much else in the world, and even in front of our faces, of which we have no prior conception and for whose interpretation we lack intuition.  Beluapal had only made an exception of itself by appearing orientably before me in its earlier startled drunkenness.  What do we look at daily, and ignore because we cannot interpret?  What song is sung that we don’t know how to hear?  What unknown and unseen things stimulate us to pain too unfamiliar to feel, and damage us when we’ve failed to heed this pain’s warning?

In the panic of the moment, I could not allow these thoughts to go unquestioned by action.  I noticed that the horrific smell of the creature remained, unabated, and it occurred to me to try another sense.  I would follow the creature to where it had gone, and I would simply touch it.  With this conviction, at a clumsy run, I situated myself where, minutes before, the animal’s jaws had first opened.

I didn’t come to my senses, nor they to me, exactly: they had been present all along, so it is most accurate to say that my senses began to tell me things which were consistent with my what my notions about normal sensory input had been before I met Horace Maurus.  What I saw was grass, very close to my eyes.  I don’t focus on things so well when they are directly in front of my face, but having been prone in the grass on numerous other occasions, I was aware that the variegated green and brown fuzz which filled my visual field and irritated my cheek meat was simple, familiar grass, growing from a nice flat patch of earth.

My senses also told me that each of my movement-bits had undergone some serious strain, and I had neither the means not the inclination, for the first few moments, to right myself.  Instead, I listened, and heard not the tones of a hyperspatial guitar, but only the cacophonous croaking of crows.  This was a familiar sound and, given my recent brush with the impossibly strange, comforting in that familiarity.  I’d heard agitated crows like that very recently.  Crows, then an engine, I’d heard.  The crows I’d heard before had been loudly contesting their respective pecking rights to a decomposing species-nonspecific carcass at the roadside, and it was the violence in the vocalisations of the current crows that prompted me to overcome my fatigue and stand up.

My rubber muscles and their complaints at my audacity to actually use them absorbed my attention for some time after I stood, but eventually I looked around.  I was standing on a desolate sad-green peninsula in a lake of cracked pavement, one road to my left and one to my right, converging a few yards ahead of me.  This desolate crack in the unkempt woods was one I’d certainly seen very recently, and the dying diesel growl of a receding semi-trailer could be heard and its source not seen, for my back was to it.  Evidently, the semi had passed during my standing-up ordeal, and the noise had frightened the crows into a frenzied cloud above my head.  My discomfort at the feeling of deja vu lent a Hitchcockian, ominous quality in my mind to the avian storm, which leapt straight past foreboding into out-and-out panic when I caught sight of a pale yellow pickup truck rapidly decelerating towards me.//

A little venue, Chris thought, needn’t be a venue for little.  Indeed, the infrastructural vastness of the Bakerloo Line made it rather more than a little venue, but at 7:52 on this Wednesday morning, Chris and, he would have guessed, had he thought to guess it, everybody else going from at most Kilburn Park to at least Oxford Circus [for these were his oldest and most lasting companions this morning], were not thinking about the grand scale of their surroundings.  They were thinking about the small-scale fart-smell and oppressive boxedness of their particular car, in which irresponsibly-headphoned music competed and people shuffled and shifted their weight in order to remain standing — or exaggerated their slouches, as if to justify their seats on some sort of flimsy medical grounds.  On any other vast public transport network in any of the world’s other great cities, a more Darwinian approach might be applied to the Apportioning of the Seats, but here in London there still seemed to exist a widespread default assumption, among those who thought of themselves as at least looking like they possessed two functional feet, that everyone else needed a seat more than they, for skeleto-muscular reasons that only began to exist when the car filled up at Warwick Avenue.  Two minutes later, Chris had dived for a seat after the Emptying-Out and before the subsequent Restuffing at Paddington.

Chris would have guessed, again, had he thought to, that he was rather younger and rather fitter than the median passenger, and he would not have had to guess that he possessed four strong limbs: why guess when you can wiggle?  Chris had more important reasons to need a seat and, in particular, the seat he chose.  Establishing dominion over the not-quite-a-seat elevated ass-cushion at the front of the car was an important ritual for Chris on Wednesday mornings.  It focused him during the chaos of the Emptying-Out and Restuffing at Paddington, and his seat-conquest would be the only thing he’d find rewarding until well after his return commute in the evening, for reasons that were all about Rocks.

There might not be any finish to this little story.  To get some feel for how it’s likely to develop, permute the letters in the title into some sort of literarily-famous combination.