'Three,' He Entitled It, With Great Pretention

They took me along a familiar path, across the flatlands. A distant spot, something of an obstacle ahead, appeared and seemed to grow as we approached it. Out there, in the middle of the flatlands of the desert, stood a ski resort.

Now, it wasn't what you'd call a top-notch ski resort; from my angle, it was just a sledding track with a t-bar running up one side. In fact, I'd put the elevation at somewhere under two hundred feet. Nonetheless, it was a strange thing to see in a New Mexico noon.

As I got closer, I could hear the children--it was all children on the slope--laughing and shouting. This was good wholesome exercise. After all, snow is soft.

Yes, the kids were happy; they were very happy. Still, I wondered at the marvel of it. A boy on a tube veered off-course, and a cloud of snow flew high overhead.

I said to my companions: "How can such a thing be? Here in the desert?"

One of my companions replied: "You find the play of children somehow alarming?"

"No, rather, it's a hundred and ten degrees. Why doesn't the snow melt away?"

"Because it's actually cocaine."

 

*

 

The open-house all-invited sex party we hosted last night went pretty good, ma. I myself did four of my neighbours, while Jilly did three (one of them twice, so we were statistically even). Really glad we got that pool put in in the spring, along with that heavy-duty filter. Thanks for that piece of advice, ma!

Morning after, we were for a walk. We saw four muggings and a murder. Now, I know there's some wet blankets who get all in a fuss about this stuff, but I say: Why so few? Back in the day, when I was growing up, in my little one-room schoolhouse, we'd get brutally punished if there wasn't enough peer-to-peer violence. Times have changed, ma, and I'm not sure I like it.

In the evening, we settled down. We'd gotten a new shipment of drugs from China. We read the recommendations but they were so complicated we ignored them. We ingested them by sizes, with the littlest ones first. It took four hours (so we believe, ha-ha, ma!) to even make a dent in the stash. Now it's three in the morning. Jilly's out cold. Suddenly I'm bored with her. Should I kill her, ma?

 

*

 

Isn't this the way scruples work, most of the time? For a spell, I thought the machine would work almost certainly alright even though I'd threaded the paper over the capstans rather than between them, but then when Lily showed up in the print room, I suddenly knew there wasn't a hope in a hundred years that the recorder would work right.

"This machine isn't going to work right," I averred.

She gave it the once over and agreed. "It'll have to be re-wound."

I was happy to hear her make the machine the subject of the sentence precisely as I had done. (That's known as 'framing.')

We pressed the big rewind button together to empty the spool, then fitted the paper between the capstans. We played it past the leader, and the paper was ready.

In the next room, from which we could control the printer, we started scanning. First we scanned the rectos, and second we scanned the versos. We were being monitored all the while, through one-way mirrors on all four sides of the room. We got to the end of the folio, then proceeded into the record room.

Then came the plot twist, and the zinger.

 

From a Bengali Folk Tale

From a Bengali Folk Tale

 

I was out walking through some seldom-frequented woods not too far from my house when I came upon a silver cage the size of a bedroom, and in that silver cage there stood a beautiful woman gripping the bars. She called to me: "Help! Help! An evil genie locked me in here! The latch is there, too far for me to reach!"

I found the latch and twisted it. The cage door opened, and the woman emerged. And then‑wouldn't you know it?‑she cackled wildly.

"I can't believe you fell for it!" She said. "Now I'm going to gobble you up!"

"Hey, wait a sec," I said. "Why me? I did you a favour."

She pondered this, then said: "I see your point; and yet, I am so very hungry! Find me something good to eat, and you may live!"

Off I went, in more than a little terror, back towards my home. I came across a family of squirrels, and asked them if they would sacrifice themselves for me.

They said: "Why should we do that? You've never given us the time of day. Get lost!"

Proceeding on, I met a farmer and explained my position.

He said: "I don't know you, and I don't think I want to know you. Forget it!"

Then, a block from my house, I came across a rosebush and asked it: "Will you die so I may live?"

The roses said: "All you've ever done is kick us when you lost your ball. We remember that! Beat it!"

Finally, I was in my house. No-one was home save Archie the dog. I said to him: "Oh, Archie, an evil woman in the woods wants to eat me unless I find her something nice to eat instead of myself!"

Archie put his head on his crossed paws to think. Then he said: "I'll do it for you."

"You will?"

"I'm man's best friend."

Archie came with me back to where the evil woman was. I told her: "My dog is willing to be the sacrifice."

Archie interrupted quickly, saying: "Now hold on a minute here. Before I get eaten, I want to know the circumstances." He looked at me. "How did you get into the cage in the first place?"

I said: "I wasn't in the cage; she was in the cage."

"Ah! So, you," he said, turning to the woman, "were just happening along, and you came across my master, who was in that cage‑"

She cried: "He wasn't in the cage, numbskull! I was in the cage!"

"Oh!" said Archie, who proceeded to put his head on his paws once again. "But why in the world would my master think he had the right to eat you, then?"

"It's the other way around! I am going to eat him, unless he finds‑"

"Well, why didn't you say so! But: why did you let him out of that cage?"

"He was never in that cage!"

"What?"

"I was in that cage!"

"But.... Then.... Oh dear, I'm all a-muddle!"

The evil woman, trembling with anger, cried: "Look, this is how it was!" She went over to the cage and fluttered her hands at it. "I was in this cage! Like so!" She climbed into the cage.

Archie darted forth and slammed the cage shut. The lock did the rest.

She cried: "What a terrible trick!"

Archie looked at me and smiled. "Man's best friend," he said.

The Wuhan Flu Chronicles II

146. I commented to a person who prefers to remain anonymous: "There's a fringe benefit to this work-from-home thing. When the working class finally recognizes how we in the elite have fucked them over, it will be difficult for them to murder us all since we're not all in the same building."

147. I was taken to a park today. I saw a whole lot of bourgeois folk sitting on blankets and talking about same stupid shit the bourgeoisie like to talk about. Not one of them senses the guilt they should be feeling.

148. We were up in Bala a week ago. We went to the grocery store, the fruit stand, and the liquor store. Every worker said they'd been "crazy busy." Yes, all those places were, indeed, crazy busy. We didn't talk to any unemployed people.

149. Interesting to me is the idea that the high rates of murder and suicide can be partially attributed to the lack of male access to stranger pussy.

150. Sociability has taken a serious dent. We were with our best friends this evening, and it was almost impossible to communicate with them. Everyone's gotten so wrapped up in themselves, we appear crazy.

151. •I sprayed some window cleaner through my Badger airbrush. Worked fine. •Then I tried the bottle of semi-gloss black, and nothing came out. •Something was jammed in the airbrush, so I pulled it apart for a cleaning. •While I was doing to, a small metal part fell on the floor. I looked for it for a while, but I couldn't find it. •I figured out the name of it: 'back lever'. It was for sale on Amazon for $10. Since we were leaving town, I waited till we returned before ordering it. •When we got back, it was sold out, so I instead ordered a new Badger 155. •It arrived, but in the box was a cheaper Badger. I had to return it, while they sent me a replacement. •Next day I got the replacement, and it was the same cheaper Badger. I returned that one too. Then they were out of stock for Badger 155s, so I had to take money as a return. •I decided to root around on the floor some more. I finally found the lost back lever. •I assembled my airbrush again. •Turned out the bottle of semi-gloss black was clogged. •Damn you, Coronavirus!

152.1. Skipping all the death and destruction that is resulting from this massive over-reaction, I must say, firstly, that, having not worn shoes for the overwhelming majority of the past months, my feet are looking pretty good indeed.

152.2 Secondly, like all other privileged folk, I have saved an awful lot of money by not going to restaurants and shops. (The shops and restaurants, as a result, have been more-or-less destroyed, naturally.)

152.3 Thirdly, without the commute, I'm getting to bed earlier, and I am sleeping better. (I think I've been stealing solace from people who will lose their lives or livelihoods as a result of the lock-down; those people are naturally not getting a lot of sleep.)

152.4 Fourthly.... I don't think there's a fourthly. Feet, money, sleep, and I'm all right, Jack!

153. Almost every day, past my window, goes a person who is quite clearly off his nut, and it's never the same nut twice.

154. People all over are gawking, saying: "Ooh, everything is getting back to normal." Riiiight. If it wasn't for the robots building everything, if it wasn't for all the money we're 'borrowing from future generations, we'd be stealing potatoes from one another.

155. Phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four. What's with the French grammar? Is it so we peons can hear it's the all-wise and holy clerisy ordering us around?

156. The anti-sex leagues have taken control of public health departments. "We've done it! Now no-one will want to even touch another person for at least a year and a half, let alone put their dirty things together!"

157. More alarming than the uselessness of non-medical masks is their stone-cold ugliness. Another get for the Philistines.

158. It's too difficult for me to fight against strong superstitions. So, I go along with all the nonsense.

159. The first humorous myth worth mentioning comes from b-films. The idea there is one, and only one, vaccine. We get this myth from the b-fact that there exists one, and only one, antidote to a poison. (Do antidotes even exist outside of b-films? I don't think so.)

160. The other myth worth mentioning runs much deeper, such that it completely takes over. Maybe it shouldn't be called a myth after all, since it's rooted in our deepest instincts for survival. •There are only two categories in the world. There's the clean. There's the unclean.

161. She told me: "It all started a supremely long time ago, back when we became multicellular organisms, or maybe even earlier. Our minds, when we were those organisms‑say, a worm‑knew that there were good things to eat, and bad things to eat, all by instinct alone. Those categories have always existed for us, as far back as when we were pond scum. Then, some billions of years later, human culture grew out of these distinctions. The distinction between that which is clean and that which is not clean. Do you get what I'm saying? Language itself, being structured through this distinction, means we can't not be talking about it, all the time, without being aware of it. It long precedes language, it long precedes reason, and it long precedes governments and multi-multicellular organizations. So, where's the surprise that no-one can come up with a coherent response? It's neither absurd or its opposite. Nothing comes before the distinction between the clean and the unclean. It's the deepest thing there is." •"Interesting, really." •"Yes, it is, isn't it?" •"You figured this all out." •"Yes." •"Well, I have to say, it's the most elegant brush-off I've ever heard in my life." •"Yes."

162. Another intentional consequence,* which I failed to note before, is the decimation of the set of people who have malignant tumors. A great many of them are having surgeries delayed or are refusing medical care due to the high anxiety.

162a. *Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

163. If you are a person who does not like to be seen: Well have I got the epidemic for you!

164. I find it terribly amusing how often people skip the middle term. More suicides due to Coronavirus! More murders due to Coronavirus! Er, you seem to be missing something important there.

165. Oh, and I think I missed another cause of death due to the lockdown: more drug overdoses!

166. If I see a woman walk by on the street, I'm not at all shy anymore about recklessly eyeballing. I've gone from creepy to gross creepy.

167. It's like blindness is being encouraged.

168. Fumigate your home with tobacco smoke. It's what they did in 1665 London, and by God it worked. Three-quarters of the population survived!

169. Isolation. Isolation from the rest of the world. Isolation from those most deeply harmed. Isolation from those who have been killed by the lockdown.

170. Nearly everyone I know is crowing about how much money they have saved. That only goes to show what kind of people nearly everyone I know is.

171. Which leads naturally to Q: Qui bono? A: Electi!

172. I've never been an out-going person anyway, so ... I do my dreaming and my scheming in my room.

172. Sorry. That wasn't satire.

173. All the restaurateurs and barkeeps will have to start all over again. Each one will lose three or four years of life thereby. Oh, but who wants to live forever, am I right? Am I right?

174. And so my organization goes on terrifying people, because that's the nature of the beast. Terror sells.

175. "Fight fire with fire, I say! If they're going to use their brainlessness against me, why, I can be brainless too! Two can play at that game, I say!"

176. For some reason, I am not drinking all day and every day.

177. I cannot explain the irrationality of 176.

178. The weeks begin, pass, and end. There's no variety to it. I have no idea when this all started. It was some time ago. Yes, I remember. "Take a laptop."

179. What's Juvenal's advice? Get out of town! Escape the madness of the city! Buy a farm far from Rome! (This advice is echoed in Candide.) In other words, get as far away from society and culture as you can, and stay there!

180. However, if Juvenal had taken his own advice, he could not have written (in Niall Rudd's translation) this description of Messalina, Claudius's wife, on one of her sojourns in her favourite brothel:
[...] Undressing, she stood there
with gilded nipples under the bogus sign of 'The She-Wolf',
displaying the womb which gave the lordly Britannicus birth.
She smilingly greeted all who entered, and asked for her 'present'.
Then, when the brothel's owner allowed the girls to go home,
she lingered as long as she could before closing her cell
and sadly leaving, still on fire, with clitoris rigid.
At last she returned, exhausted, but not fulfilled, by her men;
and with greasy cheeks, and foul from the smoke of the lamp,
she carried back to the emperor's couch the smell of the whorehouse.

181. Thus, you see, a choice is presented. Stay in the city and write satire, or head for the countryside and write lyric.

182. I was asked for body-bags again today. Again, what is with these people? Have they seen The Walking Dead once too many times? Back in the AIDS days, any zombie film was "an allegory". Now it's reversed in that real life is "an allegory" of the deepest myths we have to trade. So, there's got to be screaming in the streets, the dead returning to life, people stocking up on silver bullets, &c, &c. And if these events are not really taking place, then by God we're going to make it appear but a stone's throw away from it being so!

183. You can blame the Wuhan Flu for just about anything. "Sorry, this coronavirus business kept me out all night, honey. I'll make it up to you."

184. In a couple months, you'll see, there'll be all kinds of stem-winders in the New York Times and everywhere else about re-building trust. How can we re-build trust? Oh, woe!

184.1 I'll sell you this poison, see; and then I'll sell you the antidote, see.

185. Off to our estates, to escape the plague. •Is it over? •Time to return. •Oh gee, civilization had collapsed. •Where did we go wrong?

186. I jumped on the train, which turned out to be the wrong train, as I noted once the landscape changed to something unfamiliar to me.

187. The chair I got is holding out nicely.

188. I said to the stranger, female, across from me: "I'm going in the wrong direction."

189. Today is not an especially hot day.

190. She said nothing.

191. I can hear birds, and what I think is a circular saw.

192. "I only know what's in the other direction."

193. My hands are a bit stiff. I don't know exactly why.

194. She said nothing.

195. Why am I wearing all these clothes anyway?

196. "I'll have to get off at the next station."

197. It's Friday today.

198. Still she said nothing.

199. It could be yesterday. It could be tomorrow. There are slivers of time between yesterday, today, and tomorrow, into which things can disappear. Don't you care to know where they vanish to? They most certainly vanish. Here's a worn tombstone. Someone put it there. Who looked at it most recently?

200. I got off at the next station. That was when I noticed my mask hadn't been covering my nose.

201. If the teachers' trade unions continue to make up wacky packs about how dangerous it is for the tykes to go to school, despite every single piece of evidence pointing to the contrary, one can only hope it results in a diminution of support from lower- and middle-class families. (If you yourself are a teacher, I can only say Educate Yourself.)

202. They'll continue to churn out their misinformation, and other unions, especially those in the media (*cough-cough*), will amplify their stone-cold ignorance as much as they can. However, I hope people will see through it. Who knows? There has to be a reckoning coming soon, and maybe it's the wedge issue that blows this blatant power-and money-grab out of the water.

203. I know, I know. I should go out and get some exercise. I prefer not to.

204. It's telling, with reference with 201 and 202, that even in this "disaster" everyone is still on the make. That seems to me to mean it's not a disaster in any disastrous sense.

205. How long will it take for people to stop quoting 'projections'? Has any projection ever come true? Not to my knowledge.

206. Cooking chicken tomorrow.

207. I cooked chicken today.

208. The devil says to Jesus, amongst the temptations: "You can leave this burden behind. If you want, you can marry a pretty woman, who's totes easy on the eyes, and have some kids, and be ordinary. It'd be a wonderful life. If you play your cards right, and have five or sic kids, you're guaranteed to have some dozen-and-a-half descendants at your funeral, all weeping and wailing, and genuinely. Since you're 100%human, you can have kids. Hell, you could even come on some bitch's face. Seriously: you can drop this son-of-god stuff, since you're allegedly 100% human. Are you tempted?"

209. It don't mean much, but I pridefully again and again find in newspapers folks who roughly agree with me. Where did they get the wisdom from? I started a subscription to the Spectator, and I found an article about how school closures hurt the poor the most, which I argued about back in 201. How could a magazine writer know as much as me? Science and culture and physics and business and philosophy and ethics and aesthetics and poetry and prosody and phenomenology and observatoriartionism may never be able to answer that question.

210. It finally happened, and it happened yesterday. In three weeks, we're heading off for a couple days to the small town of Beaverton, you see, to which, two years ago, we considered re-locating. The idea was dismissed at the time, but now, with no good reason to be living in a downtown area, paying high rent, the idea is more valid. There's nothing I am doing here that I could not do there, at least for the foreseeable future.

211. Of course, the problem with this scheme, like any scheme, is that it's scheme-able only because a lot of other people have the scheme. Apparently, big cities are losing population, and the lost people are going to smaller places. Thus, we would have a lot of competition.

212. We'll see what the situation there is, in three weeks.

213. I'm not perfect; I didn't predict the decimation of cities a couple months ago. (I also didn't predict all the deaths caused by the malfeasance of the hospital industry either. I'm certain there will be many other unforeseen bad consequences caused by this hysterical lockdown before recovery begins.)

214. (Oh, who am I kidding? Recovery is not going to happen.)

215. If there is a turning point at which we un-madden ourselves, it's not going to happen before January; and the un-maddening will take at least a decade to accomplish.

216. I'm not saying it's not the end of the world; all I'm saying is I think there's a solid ten per cent chance it isn't.

217. Trust me, the end is in sight; at least as concerns this long litany of gripes.

218. Hell, even I'm annoyed I have to keep going until I catch up to my schedule; how much vitriol do I have in me?

219. Everyone seems to be battling over rules. Everyone's saying: "Oppress me this way!" and they're being answered: "No, dummy! Oppress me that way!"

220. For once I may end up wearing a mask on Hallowe'en.

221. I see there's someone else who believes that a really terrible virus is right around the corner. Of course, I was saying it would be extraterrestrial, while he says it'll be terrestrial. In any case, who's going to fall for this intentional destruction of lives and livelihoods when that happens? We won't get fooled again ... and an eighth of the world's population will die.

222. For about four weeks I've been nagged to get up, go outside, walk around the block. I've not done it because I don't care to see people who have been exploited by our scuzzy political class leaping off sidewalks when the see me coming.

223. Of course, the truism: to be a sane individual in a crazy environment is to be crazy.

224. I can't muster up the same outrage I once had because I've reached the fifth stage of death, i.e. acceptance. It doesn't matter. The trees will continue to grow, and perhaps some other, wiser, organism will climb the ladder to dominate the planet. Who knows? Who cares? We'll be gone. I accept this.

224.1 They'll probably figure everything out: agriculture, husbandry, language and scripture, cities, energy and electricity, computers and so on; and they'll probably discover stuff we didn't have time to discover how to do, such as space colonies.

224.1.1 And in any case, whatever species it is, we'll be related to it. Who doesn't brag about their more capable cousins? No-one's ashamed because some relative made something of himself and didn't botch his existence by being stupid and rash.

224.1.1.1 Lay down, in peace.

225. For some reason, I've been thinking about sexual difference recently. I mentioned it David a week-and-a-half ago, and it's like everywhere I look I'm seeing the effects. A woman can have, at perhaps the utmost, something like twenty-five children, while a man can have, again perhaps at the utmost, something like five hundred billion children. I've only started seeing the ramifications of these facts, all because of Wuhan.

226. I.e. I'm more than usually in the lookout. I can't see a woman pass my front door without following her with my eyes, and my eyes are usually trained on her ass.

227. I think I used to watch movies differently. Now I see they're all about SEX. Every single one, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which is all about SEX SEX SEX.

228. There's nothing about our species and society that isn't infused and caused by SEX.

229. And most other species, when they're not thinking about food, are thinking about SEX too.

230. Trees are probably obsessed with SEX.

231. I don't think stars and planets think about SEX, though I could be wrong.

232. Unfortunately, viruses don't care about SEX at all.

233. Advantage virus.

234. Natural geography will play a decisive role in determining the settlement pattern of the future dominant species. As with all water-soluble animals, they will settle near fresh water, on rivers, and, later, as trade routes open up and sea navigation becomes possible, specifically at the mouths of rivers. In fact, the creatures will probably settle in the same areas the once-dominant species (now extinct) chose to build their cities once-upon-a-time. Their archaeologists will dig deep into the ground and be astonished when they find traces of an advanced civilization in which advanced metallurgy and even electricity was widespread, and they'll wonder what cataclysm could have destroyed them, and some may even conjecture (wrongly) it must have been a virus.

235. On a lighter note, the whole universe will come to an end once all its energy is expended.

236. I still don't understand why I'm not drunk day and night.

237. Nobody's perfect.

238. There are some 2,000 microbial species living in your navel, so enjoy your cohabitate symbiosis while it lasts.

239. My favourite field is on the outskirts of town. Each spring, there are more wildflowers. It's good soil. Loads and loads of unknowns are buried there.

240. Winter will be a wonderful wonderland. I can't wait for the reports of people starving all over the world.

241. In certain regions, I breathlessly report, some have resorted to cannibalism of their children.

242. Oh wow look! Africa! We've so turned them into welfare cases they're having civil wars! And more cannibalism!

243. Someone has actually published a po-faced book called "To Serve People" on Amazon! Isn't that extraordinary! It's a real water-cooler topic, let me tell you.

244. Tigers and elephants? They've all been eaten. But don't fret: their deaths released a thousand new species of bacteria. Ecodiversity!

245. I understand there's still some wood left in Europe. Those lucky Europeans!

246. One good thing is that the crime rate has fallen right off. Since no-one is keeping track, it's effectively zero.

247. In the end, we're full of virtue. By what right can we exterminate a species?

248. The Third World has declared collective war on the Developed World. Joke's on them, since they have no way to get at us.

249. We're happy we don't have to clap-clap-clap anymore about culture and art. It all seemed so forced.

250. No Internet? This is an outrage!

251. Who knows the species of the future?

252. The art of physics is to believe to know, given the position of every atom in the universe, how it will all look in a hundred years, in a thousand years, in a million.

253. That's some kind of art to aspire to. The drawback would be, of course, one could never change what's to come, since the physicist would himself need to obey the laws he uncovered.

254. So: what of you? What of me? Whom shall I be feeding in a hundred million years? Will I wind up powering an automobile, like the dinosaurs do today?

255. If I was the perfect physicist, I would know.

256. But if I was the perfect physicist, would I be able to accept I am going to become rocket fuel in a hundred million years?

257. I think I would be quite horrified; or at least I would be initially. Perhaps after a good night's sleep I would find it in myself to laugh.

258. In any case, the future species. Ambulatory, watery, soulful, communicative, and probably mis-informed.

259. Still, folks, that's a long way away. We're all here, for now, anyway.