Sheepeteering Sheepediah

The title, if you're wonderingⁱ, comes from the circumstance that I had it pointed out to me in private and on good authority that I might as well be the world's foremost puppeteer ; and Sheepediah's this ship, you don't know her. It's mindmelting, by the way, just fucking mintmelding, to reference those articles as some kind of history, you know, back in the day, back when we did the bra-mobile & Czech teenagers & the answer to the Florimund riddle... and so forth. Obviously I have a calendar on the wall just like "everyone" (meaning -- no one ; too poor for trees, too dumb to know it in the discolored spot on the wall where a calendar used to hang) and it works as well as everyone's (for as long as the "just as good" electronic replacements work for everyone else -- just as well as everyone's ; otherwise, just as long as mine and mine alone, which is a very different standard all of a sudden and, let it be pointed out and thickly underscored, through no great effort of mine). Yet... what can I tell you, time doesn't flow uniformly for the mind, Senor Florin Angelescu Dragolea has the references & details, in florid, cursive & elegant southern French. Talk to him.

But anyways, I remember a time when I was a kid. It's obvious to me that was long ago, two different tarmuri how the fuck do you say tarmuri in this language... here, the reference, the topmost reference in the lengthy ordered list of poetic references that make that language be a language in the first place (and this one -- nothing) : "among masts counting in hundreds leaving all those tarmurile, how many will be claimed by the winds, and by the tides ?" It's a fundamental question, exactly level and on par with the Hesitancy Empire's fundamental "to be or not to be" (meaning, really, "to do... or not to do, whether tis nobler in the mind to fashion oneself a woman, to sleep, to die..."ⁱⁱ), and its expression's exquisite (and therefore memorable -- so memorable in fact it makes the top of a list, the foremost achievement above all) because while "tarmurile" rhymes with "valurile" (ie, "waves" I suppose you'd say, if you knew nothing about nothing, but no, very much not "waves" like that, more like ^-function sorta "waves"ⁱⁱⁱ), the implicit rhyme's with talazurile because of formal similarity, and that goes straight the fuck to Thalassa and all that great.^iv

Anyways, two unbreachable, celophane-wrapped departures, un-undoable irrespective of final female fantasies, two cast-offs, two rebirths away. That'd be the proper term, the proper usage, the proper form : "But anyways, I remember a time when I was a kid. It's obvious to me that was long ago, two different worlds away." They never really do this, in the movies, or in fiction, or in daydreaming, or at all. Everyone's imagination's alienated from the thing they imagine (which is, perpetually, inescapably, I) because... well, you see, the hero inexplicably escaping the explosion on foot, the chosen making out of the "destroyed" planet just in time in a rescue [magic bean]pod, the... it's never his first time, you see ? Not even the first in your own timeline's the first in his, because the hero's time does not flow like yours, but like his, certain definite future as much a part of his present as the past -- in the end, this is the simplest if most glaring and thereby likely to be overlooked explanation of heroic ousia, of the substance and essence of Carlisle's man : he for whom the definite future's as much part of his present as the past. For everyone else -- the past's as misty and dubiously included in the present as the future, for everyone zoon I mean, the life of the beasts. Man can at the very most hope to live with a definite past by his own hard work and ceaseless labour^v, it'll be dubious but for the larger part rather credible. The hero, however...

Anyways #2 : I remember such a time as you don't, nor can't, nor couldn't. As in fact and as a factual matter you do not, though were you there with me seeing it all -- but what's seen of what's to be seen depends of him seeing it, doesn't it! At such a time as that, once upon a time twice over and again, I played with expended cartridges. I was five, I had a box, I still remember it, five by ten, fascinating human-made wasp's nest for cartridges, little paper separators dividing a palm-sized box among fifty little square cells. I had about half the expended cartridges to fill those slots, I moved them around and re-arranged them, the exact figure decreased over the course of the child's life with the immensely if momentarily sad mishaps of childish pursuits, I might've maybe swallowed some even (though I do not think so, marbles, yes, everything else yes, but not caps for fucks sake, what is this), yet that all is for naught : I still remember them. Them, now gone in fact as in representation, inconsequential as insubstantial, I do remember them, not like a human child in any general, but quite like me, in the particular. I knew what they were, and what they were for, I knew their etymology so to speak, not merely "what I had heard of them", a thoroughness not usually compassed by five year olds yet nevertheless my and mine, then, at the time. They were for a gun, yes, but not the kind you think, you formlessly presume yourself familiar with^vi. They were for a concrete bolting gun.

You see, soviet "communism" had minor advantages to go with its major disadvantages, unlike your present pantsuit iteration of the same fundamental socialism. Since all dwellings were hruschebas, prefabricated concrete temporary military shelters as discovered, refined and perfected by a Red Army desperate to keep moving its essential factories ever East in front of the Nazi onslaught, since economies of scale work as they do and the preoccupation among the period's bureaucrats with keeping the intellectual load minimal was foremost (something the proto-pantsuit of the day derrided them for, as fucking if anyone bought pantsuit craptalk), you knew for a fact everyone lived by among and behind concrete walls of such thickness strength plasticity etcetera. STAS it was called, the standards were few, fixed, reliable and as such permitted... the bolt gun! You know how in the first village, in the wooden days of the wooden village, if you wanted to hang something from the wall you needed a nail, and the tool for nailing it, the hammer ? Well, in the days of the second village, in the days of industrializarea patriei & traim decenii de impliniri marete, lupta & avint etcetera, in the stony days of the stone village, if you wanted to hang something (besides yourself) from the wall you needed... a bolt gun! It fired these cartridges calibrated exactly to send the only kind of bolt an inch into the only kind of concrete wall, and then you could hang yourself from it because I have never seen one separated from its lodging (they came with this colored plastic ring on the business edge, I can still see it, with four little tiny milimeter long diagonal feet projecting on the outside, which with the impact formed a seal) nor do I think it can be done, baring cracking the wall on that point like a wafer. And they were standard screws, too, you could do whatever you wanted with such excellent priors (not that anyone ever did, that I saw, at most they'd hang a set of shelves or something).

I'd like some, now. They are no more. The end ; and a farewell, a kind and heartfelt farewell, ye erstwhile bolts, perfection unused but in that unmitigated. I'm glad I knew ye, though it makes me sad -- but it makes me sad for myself, and not for you.

1. "If", I say, assfucking if. [↩]
2. Hey, did you know there's exactly one Trylema article starting with "hyper" ? Try it! [↩]
3. It is the wave function, yes ? [↩]
4. Here's a free tip : the alternative expression for "endless" is... netarmurita. Du grec, a privatif, gosie, du gout. [↩]
5. And if you can say who your daddy was -- a historical event for which you were not present, see ? -- then you too can be a patrician, at some point in history! [↩]
6. Do you have any idea, by the way, what'd be the count of unintentional firearm discharges in the home during one year of your choice in say the city of New York (or Chicago, or wherever there's a large population of blacks, latinos & c) ? Look it up sometime, wonder with Hannah at the wonders of cousinhood an' cozenship. [↩]