Like every day lately, earlier in the afternoon, I took my twelve day old bicycle out for spin. I shambled up the incline of a mini-mountain to a disheveled vineyard. The trunks and stalks of barren grape bushes twisted and groped towards me, towards the sky and towards each other. Apparently, it’s not grape season. My ride today was brief and I believe the reason was lethargy. Still, it’s always thrilling to be out in the air, alone in a capsule as I merge with the elements. My awareness is always heightened. It is truly zen.

To a lesser extent, I get the feeling as I travel in a car, as the driver. I am hyper aware. My mind does not drift, even if music threatens to envelop me wholly. The music actually helps my focus. Even Shambal could vouch for that, and he is not a creature to vouch for much.

Exercise, like driving aimlessly, is a release for many, and it is a process without mental focus. It’s purpose is to spend time out of focus. I can’t count on my infinite digits spanning my infinite paws the times my ex-hollow-eyed-wife-waif was a part of a collision. She was one to pursue such drifts. She was also one to take her bicycle out for a spin. I have written about this piece of spite before, as it occurred to me several times during my excursions about Saaremaa on that handsome and ancient three-speed. A relic of another time. I claim it as spite because most of my complaints are rooted in spite. I reach for a time when my complaints are no more, whether in death, sleep, an oceanic stream of fermions, or whilst eating a pomegranate.

Brynn refused to use the gear-changing facilities provided by the machine that carried her. The slope of the landscape was not an issue she whished to face. Somewhere in her muddy mind was the thought that switching to a more reasonable gear on, say, a steep incline was tantamount to failure. I’ll repeat another thought that is always awakened by memories of that chick: I sincerely pity whomever she is with at this moment. Poor bastard.

My bicycle, whom I should name, and perhaps I shall do so in one of the following sentences, is, as I mentioned, twelve days old. Not literally twelve days old, of course, but twelve days in my possession. It’s name is Plellent. Hail, Plellent!! I must remember, even when graced with dust streaming past me on account of my new, metal friend, that complacency is not an option. Items fill my life at times and entertain me. They may even improve my health both mentally and physically. But, in the end, I cannot use them as an excuse to stay put.

I, like that lumpish crone Christián, am a wanderer. A deep sadness will finally take hold if I allow anything resembling superficial roots to take shape, much less grasp any plot of soil. Perhaps part of me longs for a sordid hovel to make my home base of sorts. Surely, that would augment creativity, or at least music composition. Or perhaps that sordid hovel can be achieved wholly in my mind as I shift bodily from place to place. It may serve as a repository for all my needless accomplishments and let me drift like a wraith that brushes up crumbs from every floor I pass over.

Or, as Shambal wafts through my mind, as he always does, I can plant my enormous buttocks onto a bed and cultivate the life of a sessile stalk, branching and flowering to engulf my singular land. In the darkest and most mellifluous of ponderings, I already really do.

Shambal grunted and turned onto his side from a torpid, supine night. He reached over to nastily clutch his she-goat’s porous flesh, but grasped only the rough, tangled blankets. The she-goat wasn’t there. Had he dreamed her all along? But the morning spring in his brain began to wind and he remembered the night before. His niggard had assured him that the she-goat’d be taken to Dunkirk for repairs.

Damn biological failings! he screeched silently to himself.

First thing in the morning, usually, the she-goat sucked him off. Shambal got cranky if he didn’t get his morning suck. Like almost everyone in this late land, he was a creature set in his ways. Nor could he escape from etched routines easily. He fumbled through the nightstand for one of his old wet-rags. He’d have to masturbate. No other means of release existed that moment. Considering superficially as he began to whack, the proposition of a she-goat harem shambled through his mind. Yes. He arched his turgid spine slighly. A harem could bring ease to petty morning problems. The she-goats would flounce about in anticipation of their turn with his skin-tube. He smiled and disgarded the wet-rag.

Who was that Gina Hammond, actually? Was she named after the organ that defined a certain sound of the seventies? I suggest that, were the timelines different, she’d have been named by the progeny of Keith, who is dead. Yes, Christián reminded me that Keith is dead another time today. No, not Keith Teal, but Keith Emerson. You know - the keyboard dude.

Gina Hammond was a Bond fan. I know personally because she loaned me six or seven Bond films in 1986 (or thereabouts). They tooted my muffin, but these days, especially after continuous lectures about the nature of women from Christián, I wonder why such a nubile chick would be obsessed with action movies. Ok, Bond may have always been delectable hunkily by females, but the actual persona of the film would not hold any girl I have known in the last 20 years’s attention for more than a few minutes.

I admit that I used to gawk at her naked thighs and shins as she fanned her parents’ automotive devices with water on summer afternoons. I took walks specifically for this purpose. I memorized her schedule when she was a junior in high school and I, a sophomore, on the day before school ended. I recall walking through the halls will the absurdity burning in my mind that this knowledge will lead to the blank wall of another summer.

I sparred with her boyfriend, Jimmy Wyrick, because he could not accept my passive interest in her. He threatened violence. he showed me his status as an alpha male by revving his shaft shaped gear shift to ascertain over one hundred miles per hour on Río street in flaccid Fort Stockton, Texas. I laughed.

(street)

So I found Jimmy Wyrick on Facebook. I have asked him - Where is Gina?

The last I heard of her was when I was pining over that forlorn piece of property near the University of Texas campus in hopes to share it with Jimmy Miles in a soggy 1989. What was I listening to then? I’d guess Marillion before Hogarth, with pomp and importance. Hawkwind circa Levitation, and not much else that I can think of. At least Levitation has stood the test of time.

Moo

Another one from The Buried Giant:

Those weathered women with their flapping rags were once innocent maidens, some possessing beauty and grace, or at least the freshness that will often serve as well in a man’s eye.

Desperate men lower their standards. That one is a well-worn platitude to be sure. At his current point, Christián will take most any creature with a cunt to compensate his enforced chastity. Hah! Enforced! The purpose of the quote is not to berate Christián’s methods, but to illustrate desperation. The roots of this necessity for a mate, no matter how brief, has its root in fear of solitude. The longing for sexual release is a deeper affliction. And, in many cases, it is eventual mental ruination.

In the novel, Gawain encounters these weathered women on the road to his life-task. At one (or several) point(s), he wanders if one of them is the lass he aided to her vengeful goal ages ago on the same (or similar) road. That lass was an old woman in a nubile girl suit. He should have just done her, slain her and let the memory retreat into the void. The weathered women curse him for never achieving his goal and therefore allowing the breath of forgetfulness freely roam the land. Distributing blame is a womanly hobby, especially distributing blame for events that occur naturally by no force of (especially) any particular man.

Perhaps his task is foolish to begin with? Or maybe meaningless? or pointless? The breath of forgetfulness waxes and wanes but is never snuffed out. All these women know is that they have forgotten the details and thus the importance of their lives. They are left to hurl clumps of mud at a impotent symbol of change. Gawain is an old man, so an impotent, mortal and fading agent of change. As we, as a species, are but a temporary blight on the fertile earth, Gawain is but a temporary irritation to the flux of the breath of forgetfulness.

Enduring those clumps of mud is the curse of a lasting relationship. Culture has marinated our minds in the idea that women should be cared for. Fucking white knight syndrome. To watch them during the last century rise from this oppression brings me almost to a smile. It most likely appears more like a grimace, though. Some have raised themselves above the quivering fright of Victorian hangover, surely, but few have discarded all its benefits.

And those pusillanimous white knights perpetuate the madness!

Every nubile wench, if not justifiably hacked to pieces and tossed like chum to fishes, becomes a dessicated hag. They find their clumps of mud within less than satisfactory pasts they can hardly even recall. Vapours from forgotten times taint any immediacy. These parched skin bags inhabit the opposite of Zen, feeding on perfumes afoul with eidolons. These feelings spawn resentment and rage. Who is the target? He is the enduring figure who carried her in his arms through the torment of receding beauty. Poor sap.

Growing old with another brings happiness. Or so another cultural more states. In my experience, I’ve seen bent old men enduring the undeserved wrath of crones. The minutes of pleasure diminish from an encompassing sphere to a singularity. The broken man floats on the outside but the crone remains within. May she suffocate. It’s no wonder so many men are seen pursuing endless projects during the twilight years. They are scrabbling at the thickening atmosphere to punch holes for air. In out in out in out. This time, just breathe.

Someone told me that the oldest profession is prostitution. It’s the only proper profession for a woman. Pools of prostitutes can be assigned to the rich and poor alike. Some politicians pine for a static income for all citizens. Not a bad idea, really, but even better to round up all the wenches, place them in programs to get um off the couch and into shape. Organise them and distribute them in waves, morphing for variety, to the rich and the poor alike. For every man, a cleft can facilitate needed release with no strings attached.

Implement any necessary means to diminish the intelligence of females to a harmless level. Lobotomies are a start. Selected breeding comes next.

We need to get this show on the road.

Fuck um.

Go round and round the wagon, because you’re the mule tethered to the big wheel.

Shambal does as the crone asks. He always does what the crone asks. She’d be dead soon, anyhow, so what did it really matter? And, besides, her cleft is all that tangibly remains of nostalgia that engulfs him hourly. In an extended adolescence, or a dream, he cannot recall which, he imagined himself at his current age. The term that bounced around in his mind was dirty old man. All his compatriots (that’s what they were, really, as opposed to friends) would have swiftly agreed that his destiny was to be a dirty old man.

Indeed, he is a dirty old man. The catch, however, is there are no nubile chicks about for him to exploit. No, there is only the withered cleft.

Again, long ago, that cleft was magic. He turned to it daily for release. At the time, it was not only release, but a sense of empowerment. He was a conqueror, even if he conquered the same treeless valley time and time again. These days, release is the only valid term. He still likes to think of himself as a conquorer. He even traces that word on the slimy walls of his bathing place at times. It reassures him.

Shambal shared his bodily fluids with other clefts back in the day. He was keen on conquering as many as possible and as quickly as possible. He unilaterally refused to take the slightest glance from the point of view of any given conqueree. He may have lost a bit of his sense of empowerment had he done so. Those ripe clefts so full of the juice of life internally referred to him simply as a skin rod.

His conquests never gave him much of a backwards mental glance.

That is, execpt for the cleft he thought once to be eternal but now squirts lubricant into to facilitate his release. He makes the lubricant in his personal studio or workshop. He renders the fat from the clammy worms that crawl round the perimeter of his chosen homestead. Later, he’d think back on even this as the good ol days as he contemplates rendering the fat from his drooping buttocks for an extended whack session. The lubricant keeps well in the patented cold fusion fridge he himself invented during his fecund youth. Before the release sessions, he places it in another unit also powered by his once famous invention for warming.

What is it to be a dirty old man if the objects that assign you to that category no longer exist in your world? Self assignment is natural, sure. Shambal has always been fond of assigning the term genius to himself even as he has lacked any evidence to convince others of this trait. Thankfully, only he and his cleft are left, and that ragged flesh rupture worships him willingly. Gladly. And, given this current context, a genius he surely is.

Dirty Old Man? Uncertain.

Piebald, ghostly figures surround him in his dreams. Their torsos are painstakingly thin. Their breasts burst from whatever skimpy outfit the nightly hallucination has assigned. The bodies never topple from the weight. Aren’t hallucinations great? Each face is interchangeable, though with distinguishing features always pert with whorish smiles and wide eyes. Shambal loves long, dark pelts to spill far beyond milky shoulders. There will be tender bite marks on a few of those shoulders, incised himself in past hallucinations. Legs are always a tad longer than the arched backs. Overall, the chicks have small frames, perfect for almost instantaneous conquest. One by one, and even in duos or trios at times, they fall to his skin rod.

His own visage vacillates unerringly like two orbits of an electron between his current bent form and the prime of his health. His skin rod displays itself proudly, unchanging, in every scene. After all, that borer of the depths has always been the summation of his personality.

He pushes the spokes of the wheel casually round and round and round. The crunching of machinery below sings to him of their next meal. At times, he wished he were not the mule but actually owned one of the likeable beasts. He’s heard rumours of their continued existence in the outlands. Well, he’d heard of their continued existence what could be several rotations of the second star ago. He loses track of time. At times, he also wishes he could measure time reliably by his releases into the puckered cleft. His mind is still agile enough to recognize that this manner of keeping time would be about as precise as hmeasuring it by his agéd bowel movements.

It occurs to him that if he could subsist without releases for some rotations of the first star, he’d be capable of finding out himself if mules do indeed still exist. He might even be able to procure one.

Hrm, he thinks. Life without the cleft for such an extended time? It’s a contemplation of perdition. The cleft is his soul. He’d not lose it. Little does he know that when the cleft does loose its empty skin bag to the void, he’ll make the journey. Furthermore, he’ll never return. The cleft’s resting place, to be dug by Shambal’s own personal excavation robot, will never be seen again by anything approaching the sentience of a humanoid.

One of the slipping points of a relationship, methinks, is the point a couple reaches at which they simply accept each others’ gush of erroneous data. I see now, in magnificent hindsight, plenty of places in past shindigs I stopped attempting to, as the trollops say, put my mates in their places intellectually. In part, I knew they resented me taking the role of the teacher. EVERY girlfriend / boyfriend / wife / husband / stoat does. Managing the vast, grey area between instruction and kind correction is not a task for the weak of skeletal infrastructure. Therefore, many of my bunghoneys have fallen astray.

It’s easy to note that accepting the flaws of your sack-sloth’s logic can be eventually a binding factor. I say it is a slide into inertia. And inertia is the particular driving force in the majority of gongbashes I have observed during my eternal time in this evaporating universe.

I mention the pivot simply because I reached it in my relationship with Marisa sometime recently. I’d say within the last few months, at most. She rattles out lectures as the teacher she once was and always will be interiorly. Facts are thrown like darts by a blind, drunk bolivian. Sure, some hit a mark, but many are rusted (antiquated) or fractured (simply untrue). I let the projectiles fly. And I shall continue to do so until the final scene and anti-climax of this bopadittle.

I’m sitting in the same place I did yesterday. Today, flames from my right reach their red paws in my direction but never quite fulfill their threat to scorch. The expansive room is empty excepting the crowded furniture. Ha. The furniture is a good analogy of the clutter the agéd accumulate.

Note to self: configure the bluetooth keyboard I am using to type this garbage to create accented characters. Don’t think about it now, Bobbus. Do it later. Push it from your mind.

Note to self: On the readthrough to correct spelling errors, I came upon my note to self and adjusted my settings. All you who nestle with barnacles would approve.

One detrimental thing at a time, you jaw-whore.

Clutter can replace lost lives. Children depart. Relatives snuff out. They can even snuff themselves out. It’s all the same to me. The grand accumulation is inertia itself. To weigh oneself with material bounty is a disease. I’ve been told that each cup, each worn sofa cover, each circular stain on the woodwork and each blackened smudge from the aforementioned flames tell stories. They are the phrases and paragraphs of a novel. The house might be the binding or the cover.

Let the flames claim their ancient words. Let the flames consume the book. Begin anew.

The importance of preservation is baffling. Is it a case of nostalgia? Is it personal? Is it to pass on to progeny? It’s both. The family cannot die! NO NO NO! Many tales of yore spill fears of families being snuffed out.

I am the last of my line!

Let the flames consume. Begin anew.

It’s blood curse. Especially since the dismemberment of the family unit, a process that has eaten away at cohesion decades, the chance of birthright-death has increased. I applaud this procession. MARCH ALONG THE ESPLANADE AND LAY WASTE TO THEIR GUMMY GLUE!! The unravelling leads to a greater cohesion, and one of much more importance than limited genetic pegajosidad. Why do people look at me so strangely when I mention to them that we are all the same species, anyway?

It fact, the books that detail the progression of our species are fundamentally flawed. They focus on clumps of our species divided. Factions warring. The trappings of illusory cohesion are tantamount in western education. Like the chunks of debris in my mind, closer examination could always reveal the slender threads binding seemingly separate masses.

Fighting the gravitational forces of said masses is a lifelong struggle. To form oneself into a binding element can be near suicide and is rarely beneficial to the individual. I’ll leave it at that before I go off on a parallel tangent concerning the merits and demerits of different types of pegajosidad. And then I’d be forced onto an orthogonal path with respect to obsession with pure forms and black / white. Gurgle.

The strength of family pegajosidad is very apparent to me in Spain. It could be I’ve simply stumbled on a hellishly insular group of humans and it is not, as the apes say, the norm. As the mollusks say, the deep end submerges me. I resist, as I always have, but the liquid’s need to subsume will ultimately have an opposite effect.

Let the flames consume. Begin anew.

I sat at this table last year writing. I believe also the year before. It is long and wooden. It can seat twenty or more humans. It those cases, I wonder about those crowded out and their feelings of exclusion. I, for one, am crowded out even when six or seven sit at the table. I’m only on the inside when I am the only one. Like now.

Repeating conversations about the drudgery of working life fill my ears. Not exactly at this moment, I say, but at many others during my existence in Spain. I understand the sentiment. I, too, have lived a life of drudgery, but only intermittently and only for short periods of those intermissions. I was trained up as a child to enter a life of drudgery. It was to be my destiny. I avoided it. How did I do that, exactly?

I achieved an unspoken goal by being a fuckup.

Being a fuckup is, unlike the waves of words preached at me during youth, quite productive. I recommend it to all. I’d never force someone into it, though. It is a state that must be approached in sheer solitude. My parents are certainly not proud. Especially my father.

My connotation of fuckup is perhaps not along the lines a upstanding human might recognise. Such upstanding humans at times look down with scorn or pity on those they deem losers. Ah, the downtrodden! Their long noses bead on their points. They are beads of acrimony.

As Scott Hazle said once, as recorded in the Three Subject Quotebook, I like to lose. And Matt Stapp: I’m not a winner. I’m a loser. Shut up. I once aspired to write a long form piece (that is, a concept album) entitled Nobody Loves a Winner. I no longer have aspirations. Well, not in the usual sense. Any reader of these entries would certainly know that by now. Either that, or they’d be pummeled to death by their significant other by now. Pummeled?? But, why? Because by reading my scintillating script, they’d be infected by fuckupedness. Moreover, they’d watch the infection bloom and cultivate it to reap the bounty of discarding a life of drudgery. Up until the point they are pummeled to death. Significant others in search of security unilaterally shun any fuckupedness leaking into their relationship.

I say fuck um.

At times, I admit that I must remind myself to appreciate how different my life is from most. Christian should do the same, and though he probably wouldn’t immediately classify himself as a fuckup, he’d with time grow affectionate of the term. He has also kicked a life of routine into the ditch. He’s left it far behind. I have a feeling it may have been what his father also wanted for me, but certainly not the life that his father, himself, ever led.

So I have dedicated these days to appreciating my life as a fuckup. My days in Spain progress as surely as they come to a close. I’ve passed the peak, as it were, and am descending. I am still content, but even unconsciously forge my own path time and again. I tire more rapidly of hours I feel wasted with useless chatter. I am more apt to unseat myself from said table and create obvious exclusion.

I have things to read. I have things to create. I have music to listen to. I even just have things to think about. I dislike missing chances to analyse the spaces between chunks of debris in my mind. When I look close enough, I always find the slender threads binding them.

Spending time with others is not always a waste. Though these words infer it, It has not been my intention in writing them. However, the obligation to remain in a conversation beyond the period of fecundity out of mere civility is absurd. I suppose I don’t like to just shoot the shit. Fuck um.

I am frightened by how humans shrink into worlds smaller and smaller as they grow older. Marisa did mention to me in the car during our drive to Fresneda that she’ll be one to have projects large small and everywhere inbetween rolling along until the day she looses her empty bag of flesh to the void. I appreciate this attitude. I am exactly like that. So is Christian. In this way, we are fuckups. (Christian and I to a much greater degree, however.) We are not satisfied by oozing away hours, days, months, eons and millenia in what I usually term as vacuum time.

It’s vacuum time again, Pumpkin! Get thee in front of that television before I thrash your behind with this cinder block!

Most of these projects and / or hobbies never arrive at a concrete objective, though an objective or two may have been in mind initially. If objectives are important, then the point is missed and one should rather impale oneself on the engorged cock of self-importance. Yes, I’ll write it once again: The journey is always more important than the destination.

I’ll raise a crusted cup clutched in my withered claw to that, jaw-whore.

Sergio sent a simple, mostly repeating electric piano motif to the Whatsapp group GOLD GUNNERS. I am a part of this group because I have been helping (I use this term very loosely) Dani on a film project to be submitted to somesuch contest later this year. I am an actor and a proofreader so far. A chance that some of my music will be included in the final product is also possible.

Sergio sent a simple, mostly repeating electric piano motif to the Whatsapp group GOLD GUNNERS yesterday afternoon. After years, I began using Pocket Band again. It’s ancient title is ULoops. I began composition of a piece sitting on Soundcloud at this moment in 2011. Pocket Band is basically a loop editor. They loops can be arbitrarily complex, but they are firmly bordered from one another. No overlaps are allowed, as far as I can tell. In the aforementioned composition, this limitation is particularly obvious. No matter.

I took Sergio’s motif, extracted a small part, and had Pocket Band repeat it nine times. Each set of three were plastered with different effects. Beneath rumbled and buzzed a sound generator with far too much LFO. This morning, I used Audacity on Galictis-vittata to overdub minimal guitar picking and scraping.

The GOLD GUNNERS applauded the result. Christian even muttered something positive under his breath with enough force for it to splatter spittle on the keyboard, sending me a message with blessings.

How long has it been since I’ve actually sat down and composed something? I reckon January of 2014. That’s over two full years, you lazy cunt. And I still feel excitement, joy and a fantastic wetness in my knickers. This morning saw me go through eight or nine pairs of undergarments.

Sergio sent two other rather crude acoustic guitar meanderings today. I plan to pick and scrape over one of the two tomorrow morning. The objective, however, as always, is to NEVER do the obvious. Therefore, firstly, anything resembling soling is right out. Repeating patterns of atmospheric pattering.

That’s where’s it’s AT, jaw-whore.

Shambal was in the kitchen that day. He’d peeled seven rutabagas. The discarded rind scattered itself around his bare feet. In ancient times, those times when he could actually see his feet, he enjoyed tactile sensations. One could say he had a foot fetish. One could also say that he just loved roughly hewn stone floors touching his soles.

Times did come, however, when a sliver of rock loosed itself. Usually this happened hear the narrow gaps between stones were mortar had compacted itself, retreating further into the flooring. He loved to howl in three precise tones when one a sliver jammed into his bare skin. The tones, translated to notes, were e, f and gis. Upon many occasions, and especially when a slice of stone was jammed into the sole of his foot, he considered writing a ditty, or even a quartet or symphony, using the three tones as a basis. A wealth of chord sequences including them played in his mind time and again.

Now that he is sessile in his bed, drained of filth by tubes to nether places of his land, he can precisely complete this pagan desire. Why doesn’t he, then? Because he is a jaw-whore. That is the sole reason.

Rutabagas were always one one Shambal’s favourite fruits. As a youth, he plucked them from low bushes and from hedges along rock walls separating his pig-land from one of the neighbouring. He’d stash most in his capacious waist-pack, but since they were fresh, he’d reserve one for immediate gobbling. The sensation of juice trickling from his lips, down his chin and neck, along his forested chest and pooling in his navel always soiled his knickers a bit.

As the hardened fruit boiled in this favourite pot atop the plasma-stove, he considered his earlier actions

He had flayed the skin from the feet, buttocks and head of his true love, a Bolivian chick he’d grown tired of during the past months. She had been a squeal in bed, and that had enticed him initially. He’d never been one to think too much before taking the plunge, so to speak. His vast satisfaction in disfiguring her in the wee hours, however, proved once and for all that the bad had profoundly outweighed the good.

The corpse was in the walk-in fridge. It’d keep for days and his supply of lubricant would allow for necro-shagging until he had the gumption and prowess to lure another tart into his lair.

Good luck, Shambal!! We’re with ya!

But then again I wonder if what we feel in our hearts today isn’t like these raindrops still falling on us from the soaked leaves above, even though the sky itself long stopped raining. I’m wondering if without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.

I am in the midst of reading The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. I delight in, apart from the story itself, his diction and syntax. I usually read each paragraph at least twice to drink in first the meaning, then to allow the structure to solidify. Ideally, I’d like his semantic and syntactic forms to germinate in my own writing. I’ve never been much on learning by osmosis, but giving it a try is better than having your femur shattered into fragments by an angry chick on a motor-scooter. Or so they say.

In fact, I have come to a conclusion many times and usually during lapses into states of depression that I am incapable of learning by osmosis. A better term may be subconscious learning. I prove myself wrong time and again. An example today was deft fingular movements about the fretboard of my pig-nose. They came without thought. I’m not referring to muscle memory, however, as that is truly the result of the opposite of subconscious learning. I write now of choosing particular tones depending on backdrop. My mind is better and better at expressing itself tonally without my conscious interference.

Motor memory is engrained by pattern memorization. Parts of my mind are programmed to repeat patters in certain contexts. Those patterns are played out by my fingers on a guitar. I wonder if, isomorphically, they could also be played out in other means. A portion of my subconscious could be writing this now using the structure of a guitar phrase translated to the syntax of an English sentence. I would never know in the moment, might after careful cross-analysis, but most possibly not even then. As the untamed beast within Shambal’s finicky hypothalamus says: We are much more than our obvious conscious self. Accessing that great veiled monster beneath our everyday façade is only possible by indirect means.

So what if our feelings in the moment are like those raindrops? They are an imprint of something past. If the storm is capsule of time during which something ocurred, important or not, the splatters from salvaged raindrops lurking heavy on tree leaves paint skeletal patterns. Like a portrait is a two dimensional representation of a human in a phase of a four dimensional existence, the impressions are ultimately false.

But they are simply all that remain.

I also write of memories in Martenblog. Those stories are a sketch of a great, colourful, lost season of life. Especially from pattering words, the reader paints the majority him / her / itself with impressions from the present. More accurate, some say, are video takes of life-scenes. What do they not capture? Internal life is never captured by video the way it is in writing. Perhaps I videotape every scene in my existence for one year. Following, I overdub an omniscient narrator, delving into details of every situation. Long pauses occur frequently during which narration carries on over a still frame. He weaves the internal story for the viewer during these stases. The resulting product would span a century.

The internal life is ultimately lost. To express it is futile, for its complexity is beyond the grasp of our narrative abilities.

Ishiguro allows a very complex story to unfold by focusing on subtle simplicities of certain characters. These characters are always everymen, though that is often not obvious initially. Their experiences during a story that unfolds beyond their control, the nuances of their thoughts and especially their remembrances hover perpetually beneath the straight river of storytelling.

A theme that permeates the majority (if not all) of his novels is slow awakening. A plain amnesia inhabits a protagonist and his / her / its view of the world and of his / her / its own existence changes significantly during the course of this awakening. It is an awakening of memory. Pieces lost resurface first individually and without context. Slowly and at times without the reader immediately noticing, these pieces connect. But they do not always connect in satisfying or immediately obvious ways. I find Ishiguro’s mastery of this technique truly marvellous.

The creeping culmination of subtleties finally creates a mass of wonder. Opinions regarding results vary widely, I am sure. I mostly do not hang out reading reviews of his or of other authors’ works. I do recall Renata telling me, upon handing me my first Ishiguro novel – The Unconsoled, this novel is very unrewarding but I cannot help but feel it is a work of genius. I see her point to an extent. The Unconsoled is built upon a series of bizarre anti-climaxes. It is also my favourite novel.

I shall continue with The Buried Giant in some minutes.

I began reading an article on gynocentrism and was inspired to cough out a few paragraphs. I am yet to complete the article, but shall soon after typing a bit.

I have often faced White Knight syndrome during my life and hold it in high contempt. The kind of sexism it brandishes is usually beyond reproach, especially in the repellent nation in which I was raised.

Still, I have always found traces in myself. I was, after all, raised in the south of a nation-state discriminating against yet at the same time placing women in positions pristine. The thought of matriarchy can make men cringe, but their fundamental selves feel the pull of motherhood stronger than any ambition. This discludes, of course, psychopaths such as your humble narrator.

I’ve spent stretches of accumulated time holding doors for random females over years. This time is dead time in my life. It can never be recovered and had no positive effect on neither me nor said females. Holding doors is a simple example. The curious reader will explore his or her own imagination to conclude other enlightening analogies.

Were anyone to ask my advice, I’d promptly state that ignoring any female in the immediate proximity that is not a pervasive factor in your life is beneficial to mental stability, general happiness and blood pressure. Hustle away from there, chap! Don’t engage in sexism!

Most white knights I’ve met are pointedly shitty people. They will slough away any other pressing matter in their immediate surroundings to rush to the nominally needed aid of some wench. I use the word aid rather magnanimously here. These fetid specks of fecal matter discard their regard for anything except gaining favour of the LADY.

Shambal contains no part of this trait.

Christián, being raised in the states by a despotic mother, exhibits portions of this malady often. His death will be welcome.

How do I avoid backsliding into white knightitude? Firstly, I must be observant at all times of my actions towards others. I shall treat every human previously in my midst, in my current midst, and in future midstes equally. A splendid way of achieving this is by envisioning each of them as an identical, squirming maggot. In this fashion, I’ll never block the path of either a prim and spritely businessman or a lumbering and perspiring baglady attempting to hold open the door for some high heeled tart. All maggots. All equal.

Secondly, I shall round them up and place them equally in cells surrounded by electric fences. Each cell will contain between seventy and ninety-six maggots. I’d really like to have each cell filled by an equivalent number, but even my gracious and unprejudiced eye cannot overlook variations in maggot-girth.

Beneath the morass of maggots will be fresh soil to be churned. Future orchards flourish thereupon. When a maggot churns soil, that maggot is of the same social class as his numerous neighbours. In the uniform swath of aromatic peat, envy is impossible.

The cells will have no communication. No internet is possible. If two nation-states are oblivious of one another, neither can have a wish to claim the other’s soil. This model is of a multiverse. Simply a multiverse of orchards, i realize, but a multiverse just the same. I, as the overlord, will watch contentedly as humanity churns to create beauty.

And fruit.

Fruit to feed my fetid face.

Since the world worships at my feet, and among the masses of said word is the lowly Christián Newman, I’m creating this entry to let him enjoy the easy benefits of Hexo and get his BLOG back online for easy access by the remains of the steaming pile of masses. Christián is currently using Windows, so here we go.

(Hexo)

Install Git for Windows, ya doof.

Even a less intellegent rodent than Christián can accomplish this feat by clicking on this link. Being a rodent, Christián also knows how to double click on the .exe once his machine acquires it.

(this)

Any request the machine makes to add something to your execution path, ANSWER FUCKING YES.

I went through this mortally wounding ordeal on Marisa’s box a few days ago and found that the git installation includes a fairly usefull bash shell. Christián is advised to use this during later steps in the process of which I am currently expounding. That is, he should use it if it automagically adds Node.js executables to its PATH. If this is not the case (a case I cannot verify at this moment since even my godly state is denied knowledge of the password to Marisa’s laptop), the rodent that is Christián M Newman can use the shell provided with Node.js. But I am getting ahead of my deific self.

I pause to sneeze. A few of my worshippers are covered by a sticky film. They sigh with pleasure and shall ever refuse to scrub it away.

Install Node.js, ya drip.

Having leaped the first hurdle on the bombshelled path to stickin’ it to the listless internet empty and bereft of a BLOG by Christián M Newman, the rodent that is he scurries in oval and trapezoid patterings to celebrate an initial victory. He places his paws once again upon the keyboard of his machine, and installs Node.js from here.

(here)

Any request the machine makes to add something to your execution path, ANSWER FUCKING YES.

Install hexo, ya noog.

With this installation, the rodent notices there is a command-prompt-type thinghie. It loads the Node.js environment so it is not required to do bullshit Windows PATH orienting. Rodents hate that shit. I did mention earlier that Git comes with a command prompt shell, also. As of this paragraph, I still do not know if it automagically loads the Node.js environment, however.

First he tries the Git shell utility. The rodent finds it somewhere in his well-organized start tab. His paws flash over the keyboard deftly as he types node. If an error occurs, he kills this shell utility and opens the command prompt that comes with Node.js (also found in his well-organized start tab).

However, if, within the Git shell, the command node gives Christián Michael Newman (the rodent to which I refer) another prompt, he continues with the Git shell. He hits Ctrl-D to get back to the normal command prompt.

Either way, the rodent (who is the Christián Michael Newman to which I refer) points his slightly bulging eyes at the rectangle of the command prompt. It should indicate where he is within his directory (folder to you Windows-lepers) structure. Something like /users/dickboy. He enters the following with sweaty, trembling paws:

npm install -g hexo-cli

Create the BLOG, ya squelch.

Christián, a rodent, dreams up a name for the directory of his BLOG. This name is unimportant. It is just a place to keep the bloody thing locally, you shaft! Don’t sit there fucking deliberating it!

hexo init THENAMEOFTHEFUCKINGFOLDERYOUCUNT

Casually, the rodent follows up with cd THENAMEOFTHEFUCKINGFOLDERYOUCUNT. He then either types ls or dir depending on which shell or command prompt he has chosen to use (Git and Node.js, respectively) to see the files in his BLOG directory. Of course, being a rodent, he also checks it out in Windows Explorer, which displays for him the files also in a non-finicky manner. Christián sees the two files _config.yml and package.json. These files are important, my furry friend.

That being said, replace them with this “_config.yml” and this “package.json” with whatever means you know to replace files. I could explain how to do it simply from the command line, but that would just not be very GODLIKE.

(this “_config.yml”)
(this “package.json”)

Now get your penis out of that goat!

Back at the command prompt (and making sure he is still in the THENAMEOFTHEFUCKINGFOLDERYOUCUNT directoy), the rodent happily enters npm install. Shit occurs. When the shit ocurring finishes occuring, Christián Michael Newman (a cute, furry rodent), installs a new theme by doing the following:

cd themes
git clone https://github.com/hexojs/hexo-theme-light.git light

If this part does not work, the rodent sends a message to the DEITY that is me and tells him immediately.

If it does work, the rodent backs up one directory (folder - yeah, yeah) with cd .. and starts his BLOG server: hexo server.

Once Christián M Newman (a rodent) goes to his browser of choice and thurks to the parenthesized link, he will contact the HIGHER BEING that has written this.

(http://localhost:4000)

(http://localhost:4000)