Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life)
In summer, another presser started to work by us and very timely too because Misha the presser went on his annual vacation. The newcomer had some kind of a long oriental name because he was a Tajik, but I could not pronounce it in any way. So I dropped the attempts at unfamiliar phonetics and started to call him simply “Ahmed”.
Ahmed was short and swarthy, and never parted with his happy smile until he tried to enjoy a midday meal in the canteen at the "Motordetail" plant. Returning from there, he stretched out on a bench in the locker room to groan pitifully, while the women from Popovka stood around the sufferer gravely shaking their heads and sharing all kinds of Stone-Age health-care recommendations… After the payday, Ahmed began to come to work with "brakes" wrapped in newspaper and his digestion normalized, upholding my belief in power of printed text…
On his first working day, it was I who passed to him the wisdom and niceties of the presser profession. After exhaustive explanations on the purposes of all the 3 press buttons, followed by live demonstration how a skillful presser was expected to lock the box’s door with the hook outside it, I started to share to Ahmed my delights caused by the statement of a certain German poet that all seagulls, when in flight, look like the capital "E". And why? The name of his beloved was Emma! That’s a good fellow, ain't he? Eh? What a smart eye!
Enthusiastically grabbing a scrap piece of wire from the floor, I scratched capital E's, a flock of them, in the gray plaster coat of the nearby wall scarcely lit by a bulb over the press…
(…and now I'm asking myself: why to harass the innocent guy, dumping on him the needless facts in disregard of his poor command of Russian? The answer is simple: so is the human nature. The desire to teach is embedded in our genes.
To visualize this trite truth, look out of the window into the yard and watch the everyday picture: a mujik raised the hood over his car engine and right away a slew of advisers surround him to flash their personal crumbs of ken.
That desire is uncontrollable as proved by the case of the barber who spied the ass ears on King Midas: "I know something! Hearken to me!"…)
Among the wastes brought and dumped at Rags, there at times happened usable things. So, loader Sasha stored in his locker about half-dozen sweaters with and without the rain deer file across their chests; and each day he was sporting another one from his collection…
Volodya Kaverin did not care for small fish. He hunted fur cuffs and collars from discarded coats so that having hoarded enough of them he would order to sew a fur jacket for him or, maybe, a fur coat. 3 collars had been collected so far, and twice a week he used to take them out of his locker, like, to air the goods and, giving them a shake, in turn, he'd proudly ask you, "It should work out a nyshtyak jacket, right?"
Vanya, in his locker, was keeping a ceremonial tunic of Lieutenant-Colonel of the Soviet Army with golden shoulder straps and stuff…
When I was sent on the errand to buy vodka from the liquors store on Semashko Street, they at once equipped me with the kind of jeans of which I could be only dreaming when I still cared for such things. It’s only that the maple leaf or, maybe, some kind of a flower embroidered on the right leg was some excessive, in my opinion, detail of design…
The line to the store started way far from it, and it was a pretty tangled line looping with incomprehensible twists over the sidewalk, for which fact such lines were handled "Gorbachev’s loops". But it was not advisable to share the handle too loud because, as the rumors had it, the KGB sec-cols were present midst the thirsty part of the population to pick up fresh jokes and take note of especially dissatisfied citizens.
On the strength of those rumors, I demanded a camouflage outfit from the recycling colleagues, and everyone agreed that, yes, it was necessary, though they did not manage to find me normal jeans without that effeminizing flower on the thigh.
Despite the costly disguise, I still was identified by the pair of errand-boys from SMP-615, however, they chose to keep aloft.
(…to enter such a line after the working day, and reach the store before it was closed was unthinkable. That's why the enterprises and organizations were necessitated to develop an interlayer of ‘errand-boys’ among their employees. The co-workers covered their absence doing the job "for the guy not there"…)
With its progress, the line ofttimes was shaken by grave rumors that vodka at the store was running out. And indeed, the movement stalled. But soon a truck arrived at the store back and volunteers full of unconcealed enthusiasm dragged inside the wire boxes of 25 bottles each…
I returned to the recycle factory with vodka, at half-past four. 2 loaders, in turn, had been pressing the bales to fulfill my daily norm. Because of inexperience, they produced the bales with underweight. Valya, the bale weigher, expressed her dissatisfaction with loud yells from inside her booth, while half-deaf Misha kept cheerful silence and sprightly dragged the lightweight bales away. His barrow rolled to the Hut outdoors with noticeable acceleration – moving a-pace with the rest of our boundless Homeland of Great October, loader Misha was entering the crucial phase in the reconstruction, aka Perestroika…
~ ~ ~
And with all the deficit of terry towels, the running-water pipe over the tin trough in the washing room, where everyone washed the layered dust off their hands before the meal, there hung no less than a dozen of such towels, angled from among the rags. However, my personal towel was brought from 13 Decemberists, and I kept it in the locker room, hung separately on the heating pipe in the corner by the right window. I was afraid that if left in the washing room, it would be used by inattentive folks like any other piece of garbage hanging there.
How come I had such a deficit? At some of my visits to the village, Raissa Alexandrovna, appreciating my labor achievements about their khutta, paid in kind, presenting me a towel and a brand new briefcase. It was a very nice towel, white and fluffy, not for the whole body though, just for the face and hands, judging by its size. And it had a blue squirrel sitting in it in profile with a bushy tail, also very pretty.
Yet one day, coming back from the midday voyage to the remote canteen at the "Motordetail" plant, I noticed that someone's dirty paws had horsed around the tender squirrel in the corner.
Naturally, I kicked up some dust – what the f-f..er..frivolities with my personal belongings?!. My towel was not picked up from the rags in the dirty garbage, I brought it from home! Everyone pointed at Ahmed.
Once again, in detail, I explained, specifically to him, where the towel had been brought from and I urged him to understand and never ever again, under no circumstantial conditions, use it. There were flocks of that crap hanging in the washing room, were those towels not enough for him? He apologized and said he did nah a-know…
So I had to take the towel back to 13 Decemberists and wash it on Monday. On Wednesday, freshly washed and ironed, the blue squirrel was hanging as the pennant of champions for cleanly way of life in the corner of the locker room.
At a half-hour break, I was playing "goat" with the loaders, when the locker room door slammed after belated Ahmed. Murmuring some Tajik folklore tune, he bypassed the table covered with the sketchy line of bones.
Vanya jabbed me into the side and pointed with his chin into the corner, meaning "look at the prankster!" Ahmed meticulously, like the surgeon before operating on Lucy Mancini, was wiping his wet paws on the bushy tail of my squirrel. But, by the sidelong glance from under the squint of his olive eyelids, I figured it out that he knew it as well as I did that he was no fucking doctor.
"Ahmed," said I, and general attentive silence suspended all the motion in the locker room. "As I see, you fell for the creature, eh? I present it to you together with the towel."
"Oy, I forgotta!"
"Presents are not to be discussed. Take it, it's yours."
And I slammed 2 doubles at both ends of the bones line on the tabletop.
(…he did pay back to me in full for that German poet with his letter-like seagulls, after all, or, maybe, he did not condone me "Ahmed"…)
~ ~ ~
A couple of presses were located outside the pressing section. When I got the task of pressing waste paper by one of them, it was like going out of the dungeon because the press was installed next to a big freshly installed window. And under the window, there were the baggage scales as well, on which Misha the loader checked the weight of the waste paper bales and said it to me. Then he dragged them straight to the Quonset Hut because it was 2 times closer than from the pressing section. That's why Valya, the weigher, gave me a pencil, and she instructed me to keep the record of the produced paper bales’ kilos, and at the end of working day hand her the list so that she would copy the figures into her ledger… And that very pencil made of me an irreparable graphomaniac case.
At first, I used it to write the columns of figures into the hardly started, yet discarded, copybook of the fourth-grade student Lyouba Dolya, picked up from the hillock of waste paper. But then, under creaks and groans of the slowly creeping press shield, the pencil suddenly, and completely of its own accord, wrote The Landscape, a short verbal picture with a puzzling punch line. I read that page from the schoolgirl’s copybook and saw that it was perfect. I did like it – not a word to be added or taken away.
The Landscape was followed with The Still Life against a winter background, and The Portrait from a summertime. Together with The Pastoral, they composed The Vernissage of four paintings.
But all that came later, because The Landscape was just the pencil's testing the water, after which it started to write the initial dialogue in the short story Sehryoga Drenches Horses or the summer piece. Later, there came the winter, spring, and autumn pieces comprising the collection The Four Seasons of a certain writer Bidlook.
Of course, not all of those works were finished with the same pencil, yet it served the spring-board to all what followed. The pencil put a spell on me, transformed me into a hypnotized zombie in order to use the prehensile capacity of my fingers as a holder while it went on writing, line after line, in other scraps of paper, because Lyouba Dolya's school copybook was soon over.
(…just think of it – some offal teeny stub of a pencil…)
When The Four Seasons pieces were finished, I wanted to see them in a typewritten form, yet felt strongly against going to the typist pool again, I didn't even know why.
In the one-room public library on the first floor of an apartment block in Zelenchuk Area, I discovered a typewriter with Ukrainian letters. There worked 2 librarians: a woman of retirement age, and a fat girl in glasses, like, a granddaughter of the senior lady, whom she called "granny" anyway. My attempt at borrowing the typewriter met a cold reception. They did not know what I was going to type while knowing that the KGB had stored a sample text written with their typewriter. The senior lady shared also that, by a tacit regulation, the KGB had a collection of samples by typewriters from all the city organizations.
Everything was extremely simple and logical, were I to type some anti-Soviet proclamations the organs in charge would immediately find out whom to catch by the gills.
(…it's nice to realize that you are protected by so shrewd organs…)
Then I asked for permission to type one story directly in their room, at the desk behind the bookshelves and I would leave the carbon copy by them. The lady shook her head in doubt, but the granddaughter persuaded her to allow.
Oh, my! What an up-hill job was typing! It took me 2 days off to tap thru one page and a half. Poor librarians! The knocking out one letter after another with my clumsy index finger had fretted their brains away for sure. The end product was still full of typos but the librarian girl liked it, although she had never in her life heard the colloquialism "to drench horses" and, reportedly, had to ask from her friends for elucidation…
That’s why I had to restore my relations with Zhomnir because once upon a time he proudly showed me a portable typewriter stored in his archive chamber… He could not lend it to me but, as a representative of the intellectual elite, was obliged to allow me solving my creative problems within his archive chamber. And Maria Antonovna had loved me anyway, all along. So I started visiting Nezhyn again, on weekends.
Zhomnir demonstrated the way of using all the fingers for typing with the typewriter. Maria Antonovna was making a bed for me on the folding coach-bed in their living room. I typed at nights and in the morning walked to the railway station for a cup of hot coffee. In the daytime, I went on typing on their tiny balcony. From the height of the fifth floor, I had a nice view of the green trees far below, and the red brick chimney of the stoker-house rising from among them. I watched the pigeon flock tumbling in the sky and tucked another sheet of paper into the typewriter.
I liked that way of life, although at times I remembered that it was Nezhyn and then the nostalgia welled up. Rather, I did not forget where I was, not even for a single moment, and the nostalgia retreated only before the clatter of the typewriter…
The final in the winter piece of The Four Seasons genuinely outraged Zhomnir, "Look! It's ridiculous! How could a man be such a fool!" But I was happy because he did not find faults with the language in my story, his scornful ire was kindled by the protagonist!
In the way of restitution for farming out his typewriter, Zhomnir, for ol’ time's sake, was passing English poems to me for translation. Kipling, Shelly, Frost… I was translating and bringing them back on weekends, but that does not count, I still kept writing poems of my own kicked out.…
By the Soviet labor legislation, every worker in the USSR enjoyed an annual vacation. In autumn I got it after eleven months of slaving at the recycling factory. I did not make plans on where to spend my vacation because I knew perfectly well where exactly I was going.
~~~~~
~ ~ ~ The Eastern Corridor
Thru condensed dark of expiring night, little by little begins to show the darker, solid, blackness of the windbreak belt along the roadside.
…for any vehicle, the road of this quality stands for the capital punishment with no chance of appealing to Philip Sober yet my shank's pony doesn’t mind…nothing will get you farther than a pair of good dogs…a walker makes five kilometers per hour, they taught us in school…by Uncle's estimation, the district center is in 15 kilometers, no more…I started at a little past 5, the bus to Moscow departs at 9… jingling gods and jumping jugs! life's a delicious havvage!. …especially under the favorable wind…
“ The wind blows right from behind
what's on your mind?
The sailing will be plain
to fetch a bottle of Portwein…”
…slow down, little one, don’t rush when cutting corners…the dry law is vigilantly lurking, mind the Prohibition… Dura lex, sed lex… wanna a translation?.
…don't you worry, buddy, Latin is a bro from the home neighborhood…
…yet the vulgarity! the meanness of the subject: "portwein", "a bottle", flat as a pancake…
…then what?..show respect to the art of hammerers…a folklore item…next to iambic…
…no iambi-zombie talk, private…or we'll have you rotten with fatigues at dactyl…
…ha!.. who're you?..a self-taught good for nothing…screw up your loose screw first…a gourmand with fluffy chopsticks… "ah, iambus is not yummy! may I have some choree with a sprinkle of trochee, please?”…how about grayling under sherry then?…
…hmm, yes…the chorees are dying out…fucked, in fact, by the hostile ecology…arid vistas are closing in – 'warmly approving the saved reserves we will hold aloof the initiative of the plan in excess replete with the deepest satisfaction ahead of time by centners of running meters from a hectare of rolled metal'…feel free to start up the red book for all the elegant belles-lettres…doomed darlings…not a chance for survival…the golden days of muses gulped down by the abyss of past…
"The wrath sing, goddess, of the Peleus' son, Achilles…"
…this single line of hexameter calls for 2 square meters of footnotes so that the folks suckled and brought up with the editorials from Central Press would get it what exactly that fucker Achilles wants of the Brazilian football star's kid…but think of the paper deficit!..we need it for printing about the growth of wealth and well-being!.
…you know the truth: if you want to live but there is no one to live with, you have to live with anyone you come across…that's why folks adore folklore…the perfection itself, mind you, can be found among those handcrafted items…here, for your consideration:
"Who of you, bastards, dared label God a rasp?!."
In the dark, already slightly graying, over the deserted road sounds a snort of a restrained chuckle. The black clot of a tree floats up along the roadside and falls back.
…yeah, they did school you to toe the line…who's around here to look back at your causeless laugh?…
"I walk, and I keep smiling to myself
and at the thought 'what would they think of me?'
I into laughter burst…"
…another piece crafted in the neighborhood?…
…no, it's by some Czech with a tilt towards poetry…
…you mean, Czechs are not homies?..I'll have your throat cut!…
…have mercy, oh, Abraham!..check in the bush maybe we'll square it up with Yahweh keeping your sonny unscratched…
…and if I am Taras Bulba?…
…oh, yes!..in the dried form, pressed for the herbariums…Robinson Crusoe's goat is more of a Cossack than you…drop your bragging before the neighbor's nanny-goat got chocked and died in a laughter fit…
…not a chance…they say that laughter is the sovereign property of Khoma Sapiensoff…
…well, from the standpoint of physiology all is radiant clear – spasms and coughs tremendously benign to health, but how to grasp it from the significance's point of view?…
…I love challenger kids, yes I do!..let's have a look…where are the decent people laughing?..right, in the places specifically designated for the purpose…that’s where you have to look for an answer…like, in the circus or, say…
…hurray!..to the movies, we are going!..that's some comedy!… Fantozzi, what a good fellow!..wow!..knows his trade!…
Bang! Ding! Plop! Chink! Pisssssss…
Glee and guffaw, giggling, laughter beyond all the limits and past all the bounds.
Boo-ooh-ha! Ha-ho-ho! Gu-gu-hu! Wu-hu-hu!
And only my neighbor to the left, a lady of immense proportions, sits listless, silent. Why? Dozed off or what? No, dutifully gazes at the silver screen, still yielding no reaction.
The man in there does his best to turn her on, he takes a run to hit his head against the lamppost. The hall reports by a happy volley… And she? Good news she's not yawning.
But what's that? Unbelievable! At a minor episode, where Fantozzi, after another fall, plop, splash, whizzz, changes in a suit five times bigger his size and the public almost do not react, exhausted in the previous convulsions, that's when from the exorbitant volumes of my neighbor rolls out the laughter of the same dimensions. Well done, comedian! But how do you start her?
…and now, when asked: why do people laugh?..my answer is – because of fear…
…fear?!..
…exactly!..you can’t put your finger on anything more dreadful for a woman than uglifying clothes… while, when the comedian's bicycle drops its saddle on the run and the zany lands with his asshole onto the pipe still sticking up there, the hall is swaying from the males' guffaw… a lady, naturally, can weather by such a trifle…
…laughter from fear!..nonsense!..they do not laugh but flee when scared…besides, your arguments are based on laughter of the basest sort…and people laugh because of not only that someone stumbled-slipped-sprawled-fell-into-the-drains, they laugh at witticisms as well…then, there are still epigrams…there's a hell of lots of ways to have a hearty laugh…
…verily, verily, I say unto you!..laughter comes from fear and is both request and prayer begging Unknown to avert the thing they laugh at, to keep it off the prayer sayer, I mean, off them who’s splitting their sides…and same exactly foundation underlies the laughter caused by the finest witticisms…where "ha-ha-ha" reads: "let me never be a target of such a joke!"…while laughing at oneself is just a prayer: "let I never again step into it!"…they are inseparable Siamese – fear and laughter…tell me what you laugh at and I'll tell what you are afraid of!…
…so, Fool, you mean to say that someone who never laughs, is not afraid of anything?.
…Your Majesty!..we are not considering abnormal anomalies, the subject at hand is a representative of the class of vertebrates, the subclass of mammals, the species of primates, the subspecies of anthropoid with the Latin name "homo sapiens."..so don't f-f..er..fret our brains, please…
…but look, then it means that by the means of a joking you can find out…
…aha!..starting to see?..excellent!..on we go!..and here, by the way, a kilometer post… …what does it tell?..no, I can't make out, it's still dark.
…well, to hell!..let it be…it's not the first neither the last…stop molesting orphan ones!..do you need it? yomp your way…
Oh, I'm sorry. No crooked tricks or dirty intent, I swear. Once again, please, forgive. Have a nice stay!
…hmm…so, what were we about?..ah, well, of course!..considering the immortal question hoisted by the classic: "What are you laughing at?"…the answer is: at something that we fear to learn firsthand…what is the forerunner of laughter?..that's right – a smile…and what is the smile?..right once again – the show of teeth…let's say, we meet each other at the lowest rungs of the evolutionary ladder, where I can’t see what kind of stegosaurus you are, and you suspect me of being lungfishy…at that uneducated period, we roamed without passports…now, we meet and – first and foremost – what?..that's right!..we bare our teeth, like, look what I have, in case of you allow yourself excessive liberties…see, where all these laugh-hiccups and giggle-spasms spring from?…boiled down to its elementary basis, laughter is a means of self-defense with a Hegelian dual function – to shoo away and carry favor (2 in 1)…it is used, however, not in case of real danger (it's not the right time for giggling) but when the threat is an imaginary one…they don’t use it in absence of threat, or imagination, or when there is nothing to protect…using its monopoly on the gizmo under our consideration, the man climbed up to the top of the aforesaid ladder up to the level where they issue passports and enroll you, if so is your wish, to gyms to learn kickboxing…Amen…
…wow!..it's time to shout "eureka!" and jog off to the patent office…
…why, silly sweetheart?..it's been a long time since all the wheels were reinvented…any supernova idea was brewing more than once in brains of a Chaldean priest, or a Greek sophist, a medieval alchemist, an Aztec knot-tier, a prophetic Brahman, or a Tibetan sage…all discoveries and uber-super ideas are nothing more than using other words or symbols for the same truths old as the hills…invariable, as the change of seasons, or phases of the moon, of day and night rotation…every day is new and unique, every day is a repetition of myriad of lots of exactly same days…
…you know how to wrap it nicely, smart Alec…yet, there's a question from the audience: did you fix the shit firm enough, citizen?…
…sit tight, marijuanisto!..no chance you tear it off unless you’ve got some hugely "bitter but" up your sleeve, or have you?…
…uh-oh, alas, but, yes, Your I-ness…where—in the scintillating shebang of yours—would you place the smile of a two-month-old baby?..what is it afraid of, when smiling to its mother, or nenka, or mutter, or whatever?..that toothless smile seems to flush all you mental juggle-schmuggle straight down the drain…ain't it, Mr. Brilliant Kid?.
It's dawning. Murky-gray ceiling of dissolving darkness overhead gets propped by the endless walls of hazy trunks alongside both roadsides, veiled with a mesh of hunger-black branches and chance twigs still bearing haphazard spots of withered leaves. Along the shredded asphalt, the comets of tiny snow specks are scuttling, swaying, drifting off their orbits, whirling their thinned streams of dry powder snow.
The wind is favorable. From behind. So blow, buddy, blow! Not a chance you ever pierce the padded jacket presented by my aunt. The head in the tight-knitted "cock" hat, warm socks on the feet in the sturdy likes of army boots. The road under the current of whipped-up snow streams stretches to the horizon to merge with infinity… Blow, the curly one! The ancient Greeks found it out, sounding flute makes the march easier. Sturdy rig, firm trail, what else would you want for to be happy?
A cleft in the windbreak belt let a country road fork off. Thru the gap, there peeps a surprised field: who's so happy here? And because of that field, and of that make-believe road ahead, and because of so grim morning with the pale-transparent streams of white snow scudding on under the wind, a sudden jubilant delight and silly joy cut loose welling up the throat to splash out a cry into the confused desert around, "I! Am! Happy!" The snow streams whisked up along the asphalt keep silent, busily reflecting, like a mirror, the whirlwind spirals in the clouds galloping so low overhead.
"Am! Happy!" Repeating, somehow with a threat and as if inquiringly.
"Happy!" This time sounds sad already.
…yes…the music played but shortly…where are you, happiness?..only in the past or in the future…some elusive illusion…
…and when coming across its tiny speck I'm always alone…why so?..it even hurts somehow…now, if she were by…though she needs no hiking marches…or if she watched on a screen, in a dream, anywhere – this very morning, and this crippled road, a solitary traveler along…
…dumb moron!..will you ever get it?..stupid wretch!..there is no "she" at all but only your driveling indistinct dreams unclear even to the dreaming fool…dreams of an impossible conjunction of heavenly beauty and passion for pleasures of quite earthly nature, a non-existent combination of cold-sharp mind and cunt clinging fervently which craves for you and only you…shut your lusty gape, kiddo…you've built a bridge atop a mountain and keep a-waiting for a river to run under…and besides, to get some anything you need to give some kind of something…and what, with your kind permission, do you have to offer?..this dapper dandy padded jacket?..wow!..yes, some heavy-duty rig…and being worn for just a week, no longer…what?..there's even money on you?..50 rubles?!..but that's a jackpot!..now, subtract the tenner for a bus ticket, then 25 for the flight to Kiev, and the fiver for the local train…and keep in mind the havvage expenses…now, give me one good reason for expecting tender love and crazy passion?…
…castes are divided by the abyss unbridgeable…who do you pull for?…where d’you belong?… what are you: a master or a slave?…
…I am what I am what I am at the fifth bottom after the ninth gate…your ‘master’ trap is a too cheap try, everybody’s got at least three masters – Stomach, Genitals, and Brain…the deeper you dig the more of them spring out which one to serve?…so could you get off my back, please?.
…show proper respect to der Heilige Arthur’s teaching, infidel…he sez we cannot change ourselves, we’re only capable of getting to know us a tad bit better, and it’s me who widens your horizons, pal, be grateful to your constant second…or, mayhap, you wanna swap our ordinal numbers?.
…cut out this empty ding-dong, you knows yoursel – the first to wake up retains the slippers all day long so there’s no use to shuffle kings, and cabbage, and walruses, and carpenters…
…to saddle then! and back to your trinity of Masters…if only you don’t want to look for a suitable outsider, Genosse Feldzug-Führer…
…shut up with your red herring!…any raccoon at the Central Committee axiomatically slaves for his stomach…to be a slave’s slave?…count me out! I do not care for his stomach…neither for fucking dialectics with all due respect to imbibed Socrates…
…but then what else to busy me with? I cannot do a better job than my legs…
…enough! no more quibbling!…say it in plain words – are you a master or a slave?…
…damn! you are a nail-hard customer…okay, I am the master of my cock if it will make you happy…
…great!…that makes 33 % plus… you're cooking on gas, bro!…so on we go, would you devour your neighbor at the demand of your empty stomach?…
…I don’t think so…
…yes or no, sweetie?…
…no!…fuck you!…
…good boy! now, I see myself whom I’ve loved so much…and, by the by, you’re at level 66 % plus…now, to disentangle the remainder of the Gordian lacework…
…but I don’t remember what we were about…
…stop your zigzagging!…it’s master or slave choice…who rules who, you know…
…oh!…I’m more tired than my legs already…well, as long as my system is kept in check by means of…
…enough!…no more words!…”means of” is nothing but an instrument…congrats, Mr. Master-unto-Yoursel…two words of warning though…don’t stick your neck out nor try to change the world because a revolutionary without a supporting party is as ridiculous as a stateless citizen…and if I were you I wouldn’t kick up much sing and dance about God’s being dead 'cause all we need is Master giving us commands…but let’s peep out into the wide wild world…what are you personally out there?…
…I have no slaves!…nor need any…
…easy, corner-cutter…a slave owner is someone else’s slave in 99 % plus…and you know as well as I do that having none does not exempt you…so, whose one are you?… Maugham’s?… John Mill’s?…
…yes, yes, yes!…as well as of that topless nuts who popped up above the fence in the Area…I am a slave to all and everything, yet temporarily, until my expiration date or simply getting bored…
