A gift of memory

Memory is absolutely the strangest thing. I said I never forgot a word, and it is probably true. You won't believe however what else I had forgotten. Although not entirely, not completely, apparently not forever. But it was lost nevertheless, until I woke up in the middle of the night with it regained, moments ago.

Yesterday I [tried to] read Stephenson's Anathem, which I didn't like, and I tried to watch Friday After Nextⁱ, which the Mistress of Warez downloaded for some reason but we couldn't possibly finish. So I'm two in the hole, μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰⁱⁱ I mean sing O'Goddess the... what exactly ? The most intelligent, the most dedicated people under the Sun bring me gifts, which I do not like, and then I go to bed. Should I be angry ? Displeased ? Depressed ? Perhaps I should be sad ; but sleep's nepenthe and then I wake, in the dark. I have remembered! By now it's starting to get light outside, the Sun slowly coming out, with all the preparations and introductions time has flown ; but in the original darkness I had remembered! Bad writing and bad cinema nevertheless shook something loose, in the deep dark caverns buried beyond the ossuaries underneath the libraries in my head, and...

You see, I had spent years being deeply disinterested in girls, that much I clearly recalled, along with some of the more humiliating attempts to break through into the other side of the poor souls thus cursed. That glorious, happy other side of unspeakable impalementsⁱⁱⁱ towards which a calling incomprehensible impelled them, like moths to the beautiful electric light. Yet, who has any need or use for girls, these weird, fatter, slower, more annoying boys ? They can't climb as well, they don't really understand the matters important, why do they even exist^iv in the world ?

I had already been fifteen for a long long time that Autumn, as we were slowly climbing by bus up the hills surrounding my enclosed hometown towards some restricted resort. One of the girls was the daughter of some big wig in the corresponding item, and so...

She was an elegant feline a year younger^v, almost bereft of secondary sexual characteristics^vi, yet she'd been dedicatedly pursuing me ever since midsummer which is how I even was there in the first place. They all knew each other, by virtue of their parents working together and consequently having received houses together and consequently going to school together and so following ; I was a stranger, a versatile, fascinating, disinterested other.

And then she got them to sing something that was perhaps part of their folklore but I had never heard before. It started innocuously enough,

In Tanzania se zice ca traia un trib ferice,
Iar seful acelui trib era insusi Tibotib.

roughly speaking "there was a happy tribe in Tanzania led by Tibotib himself", but then after some antiphonous winding it became positively filthy. It said,

Fetele tanzaniene, fara chiloti sau sutiene,
Stau pe linga Tibotib, cel mai mare sef de trib.

Ie, "the local girls, without bras or panties, hang about that greatest of tribe chiefs" and I was suddenly ravenous, in the settling dusk, as the giggly echoes explored the dusty corners of the girl-heavy bus. I ate that girl's head clean off for the ten or twenty kilometers left of the trip, and well... things were never ever the same again.

Almost thirty years old, this, entirely lost in the mists. But a wise man once said,

Bai baieti, ascultati la mine. Azi pentru voi e o zi importanta, ca sa stiti ca prima misiune nu se sterge niciodata din cap. Ni se pare noua c-am uitat-o, da' n-am uitat-o. Ea ramine undeva, aici. Si, la pensie, care-ajunge la pensie, o dezgropam de-aicea si-o povestim la nepoti.

and wise old men are never wrong. It just seems to you like they are, but they aren't.

1. 2002, by some dumb motherfucker, written, produced and so on by Jackson O'Shea (who prefers to be called "Ice Cube" for some reason we'll not examine lest we end up uncovering some obscure Clinton conspiracy involving New York gelaterias and small black children back in the 90s).

   It's fucking intolerable, by the way, to the degree a more drastic insult to the "race" of liberated slaves could not conceivably be devised. Let alone that these... whatever they are, let's not get into it, run exactly like chimps and exactly not like humans, which is to say knees apart and knuckles touching the ground occasionally, a detail the anthropologist can not possibly, try as he might, not notice. They do nothing besides bicker! And they bicker all day fucking long in the exact same predictable, tiresome, animal manner. It's insufferable!

   I'm not the type of actor who is trying to do a whole bunch of different shit, you know what I mean?

   should speak for itself. Yes Karen Denise Aubert is hot, but I suspect the driver behind that hotness is that you absolutely want to fuck the O'Shea out of her. I mean that literally, she is sexually attractive for reason of xenocide. [↩]

2. It's really not that hard! μῆνιν, minin, like the Romanian "minie", anger, wrath. It's a genitive, the very thing. ἄειδε, aido, like fucking Aida, right ? Sing, chant, praise, celebrate, hoot, crow, croak, the twang of the bow, the whistle of wind in trees, the sound of struck stone and so following. θεὰ, goddess, the root of the later Latin "dea" for chrissakes. See ? Now you can recite the beginning of the beginning, in original. How cool is that ?

   Minin aido thea, bitch! [↩]

3. "Don't you think sex is weird ?"
   "Sometimes I do, like wanting a boy to stick his finger up your nostril or something. Ridiculous. But some other times..." [↩]
4. To quote a centenarian theme,

   Noi vogliamo glorificare la guerra - sola igiene del mondo - il militarismo, il patriottismo, il gesto distruttore dei libertari, le belle idee per cui si muore e il disprezzo della donna.

   It makes perfect sense, when you're fourteen. [↩]

5. In small enough countries this matters, because you can with reasonable effort actually get to know everyone worth the mention in your generation. Imagine this, like highschool reunion but not of "some kids". Of all the kids. They're not that many!

   There are advantages to smaller size, beyond what you'd imagine. [↩]

6. Outside of an inconsequential whisp of pubic hair and extremely erectile nipples atop no detectable breast tissue whatsoever that we'd discover slightly later in time. Well, "we". [↩]