The cup, the cop, the coop an' the flight. Of fancy.

I'm with a cup before me. Pot belliedⁱ, generous cup holding what seems the best capucino this country of the best coffee in the world has to offer. Breakfast is gone ; the girls are gone. They left to pack all the necessairies, all thousand-and-one items my manner of travel (mirroring my way of life) necessitate back into the car, then pick me up. We're going for a whale-shaped nature reserve, maybe, or else straight back to our fortress up on the hill, if it gets rainy. The day's been a Maramures undecisive mist, now rain, now clear (in the sense of overcast), I'm neither indignant nor that deeply invested -- I'd much rather let the weather lead. If it goes this way, so will I, and if the other, it's no bother.

I have my hounds to handle the minutious, the endlessly minutious flow of administrative concerns for me, making the cup of coffee's leisure quite enjoyable as such, "here sits I, but for the glory of the sluts just me." There's other patrons, pompous youths aiming towards projecting the outer signs of stations and situations they do not understand, often comedically so ; there's families ground out of that pretense by the weight and burden of new infancy. There's also old people, finally indulging what for a long, long time now -- ever since the first pulsion of adolescentine pretense, ever since the very first pang of adulthood's regret -- had promised themselves. This, verily pointedly this, as an experience. One day, went their story, in their mind retold, one day once they retire, once the debts' all paid, the bonds redeemed, one day they'll travel. To far away, incomprehensible corners of the world, nine degrees and a half to the North, eighty three degrees to the West, not much more than the hole a dart makes in the unfurled paper of the map, yet so much more territory than the foot can travel. Travel, travail, labours an' labour all.

There's a woman breastfeeding her nude four-month old domestically, unconcernedly. From under the wash-worn, indistinctly gray-blueish t-shirt soft, warm tits flop out, unremarkable, arch-sufficient, first one and then the other. Her bra was sometime prior burnt. The babe mouths, the mother holds it unconcerned. Under the eyes of her husband, of her mother in law, of her older child biology takes, just as unconcerned, its unassuming course. There's nothing implied and nothing meant ; soon it'll be done, leaving no traces but for the very existence itself. Why do female lives pass unrecorded ? Perhaps because female lives unconcernedly, actually exist ; everyone else may well be in doubt, but her. An easy way out, that's neither all that easy nor actually any kind of out.

The guy wanted his hamburger medium in the sense of medium-well done not in the sense of medium-rare, even though this isn't exactly what he said (nor anyone ever heard as far I know of this wonder of the "medium [well done]"). The waiter's more than happy to accomodate, within a few minutes his patron's hamburger's re-made. Said patron seems content. Smiling adolescents somehow entirely bereft of sexuality, inexplicably crippled in that one aspect only, sit around some imported scammer dutifully "opening their eyes" to who cares what aspect of braindead UStardiana. Why don't teenagers ever change the world ?

"Did they leave you", the friendly waiter inquires, happy to speak a foreign language, to exchange with a foreign mind. The implications foreign to him, he literally means no more by his usage of English than a faithfully playfull dog would have.
"Yes, they are packing up the car." I return, which satisfies him just as well as anything else I might've said. The point is that I said something ; that's good enough.

Before me there's magazines, Hannah brought them as she left, she's thoughtful, slavishly thoughtful like that. One's a 2018 edition of some local rag, full of excited, rural advertisements of all the ilks and sorts that compose rural life, that only place in the world where everything's the same thing. Advertisements all, for funerals and births and marrigeable-age heifer festivals, buckets o' sheepsteel an' bundled chard, all things and manners, all for trade. For exchange, for speech, indistinctly the same. The other's a 2018 edition of the Atlantic, an obscure ezine of an obscure subculture, meanwhile extinct, a few years ago still pompously pretending itself in a position to discuss Donald Trump, and Obama, and immigration and bigotry and whatnot nonsense of their own devising. It's chock full of impudent "perspectives", thinly disguised projection in the form of baseless opining or otherwise, discussions of MP in breach of the obvious obligation of referencing the actual MP when discussing MP, rewritten Trilema pieces "in their own terms" and "from their own point of view", as if there ever could be such a thing, as if the "mutually shared" pretense could enact such wonder into being. Piles upon piles of stories written by poor people, about poor people, here's the schmuck from the family of nine whose Ozark parents took in some Mexican chick as their tenth and never cared much for their own natural born, owning nothing in this world besides some undevelopped land, raising their family from trailers and derping on. There's the fucktard excited about some synthetic duo of "black entertainers" "from the Bronx", as if anyone gives half a shit about two pompous assholes meanwhile no doubt disappeared, Dongo & Mack or whatever, Dweebie and Muie, something like that.

The pile's endless, bottomless, like any historical garbage agglomeration readily yielding, perpetually, in all directions. Lots and lots of poor people, borne by poor people, staying poor like dad yet inexplicably expecting someone gives a shit about their "accomplishments". What fucking accomplishments, in poverty ?! Look, they spell good! Shouldn't that efface the inescapable macula of stupidity, as tacked on them by poverty ? They're following the recipe exactly, all stories in the Atlantic are the exact same story, rewritten ad-nauseam. Shouldn't that make the whole lot of bums acceptable wholesale ? Isn't it okay to be a bum yet, they truly thought it would be. By now. Elaborately wrapped nothings that readily reduce to the same one nothing. The colorful paint outside "truly" and "genuinely" (as true and genuine as poverty ever allows -- which is another way of saying not at all, the "honest" indigent's just angling his scrounge a different way, no more) intended to, expected to excuse the vapidly absent substance. Before you fire George Niggerson please consider he's in the smaller office ; before you throw them out of your birthday party with their lame-ass non-gifts nobody could ever want please admire the pretty colors on the wrapping paper, and change your mind. Who thinks like this, and why would they ?

I throw the magazine out in disgust, and with it goes a whole layer of scum. Nobody ever liked them, nor did they ever meaningfully exist to any standard. Power to the Atlantic's readership ? Or to the Atlantic authoring demographic (for every eight or nine ninnies that send in articles for that midden's consideration with any luck an actual reader could perhaps be found, though even such a ratio seems somewhat dubious) ? Never, I don't mean in the future but never at any point in the past. It'd be like "empowering" the frogs ribbiting in the pond. Even if you "gave it to them", somehow, for reasons unknown (retirement, perhaps ?) they never could take it, there's nothing there that could be powerful even if power fell with a dry thud smack drab in "their" coincidental lake.

The truth, insurmountable as it may be for some unpalatable, is that there's no "lifting the poor" available, nor ever could be such a wonder enacted. Any society that by convention agrees to deafen itself with the inconsequential gibberings of the proletarians to the exclusion of all proper discourse isn't thereby a society that's "elevated the rabble", but simply a society that's silenced the elite, always and in all places without possible exception the only legitimately voiced portion of the population. A human vegetable, its brain accidentally or otherwise reduced to silence, isn't therefore a "superior model of ideal humanity, having reduced inequality and voiced the voiceless". It's just -- and rubbed whichever way, propped in however manner, facepainted thus or otherwise forever stays -- a regrettable waste of flesh. That Langerhans islets or keratin secretors have, supposedly, "more of a share of the total voice" doesn't enact the structurally inconsequential into importance ; the poor will never matter, politically or socially, because they are made of unmatterium, they're not people in any proper sense, not human in any true, deep, reaching meaning of the word. They're closer to being things than to being actual people, they're acceptable domestic animals if domesticated and not ever else. They can't ever be the voice of a people, never, no matter what ; label-magics are not liable to alter a iota of this fact.

A little dog, that's also a recently delivered bitch, her diminutively tiny eight teats hanging low, thirty grams apiece or thereabouts on the three pound animal, had quietly, whimperlessly curled under my chair. It felt safe there, I suppose ; or perhaps it felt it were the proper spot. I noticed when the excited giggles of my own bitches pointed out the animal's adequacy (to nature, and to life). I guess it's a coincidence, the instance like all the other instances, the cop like the coop, coincidences all.

Perhaps that's what it is ; but in any case we're leaving now, and what is left behind our leaving has no words.

1. Never before did I realise retainer cups are actually preferrable for coffee ; all my life to date persuaded pervasively (if unexaminedly) by the Italian school, whereby coffee cups must be a near-cylindrical cone, fifteen degrees inclined outwards, perhaps, but no more. Maybe outright straight walls even, if what's contemplated's ristretto, but otherwise retainer cups only figure in the Turkish tradition, you recall those flattened spheres with a flared, 35 degree cone atop, in fine porcelain. I'm sure your grandma had a set. [↩]