have never held a hard copy
Bottle #18:
~ An Elegy ~
He got it perfectly that all that was not for ever. Yes, he did. Already.
Though at first it was some unalloyed dazzling ecstasy and delight which he soared and coasted with over his boundlessly overflowing self-complacence.
He was tottering on the verge of giving out the timpani part from the 8th symphony by Maler: “dum! tu-dum! Tu-da-dum!” with his fists instead of paired a lil bit asynchronous sticks at the end of the first part before switching over to the rhythms of the drum pop percussion in Brazilian carnivals: “yah-cha-cha-yah-cha-cha-yah” Ha! He did have done the trick!
Then little by little the exaltancy ceased fizzing but still and yet he refrained from using that yellow-black checkered jacket for household purposes which are plentiful in the Uninhabited when the storms delay the delivery of another galleon or privateer.
On the contrary. He even fixed it spread over one of the rough walls in his do-it-yourself hut not to mean a Persian rug but sooner as some trophy hunted down at a safari in a faraway land, maybe a tartan-hide buffalo or else (the cherished dream of any shotgun carrying man) a skin peeled off a patch-pocketed razorback.
But then this particular interior detail began to somehow irritate until annoyed him so bitterly that he had to strip the wall bare although the droughts were getting in too easily in the rain season.
The jacket went around changing hands as is the custom in poverty-stricken families—hand-me-downs from elder kids to younger siblings—and landed onto the outstretched arms of the scarecrow inside the enclosure of the walls built with no mortar, just of dry stones, raised by some previous islander. Maybe by Robinson Crusoe himself.
And, probably, it did have been erected by his hands because he kept goats who graze wherever they get to and draw attention of the local fauna representatives to the illegitimate flora. Yes! And there can be no reasonable doubt about it! This here Great Non-Chinese Wall is but his own creation!
Poor, poor Robinson! How could you possibly come to that!
By the way, in vain were lost his efforts, to no avail trickled his sweat upon the dryness of too heavy stones because in absence of a clever breeder in dreary times after his deportation under blurred out circumstances (the end of the timeless masterpiece by Defoe is just a shameless falsification concocted glibly by a reactionary government fighting the problem of not giving a fuck about the state-supportive values by the younger generations) the grass became just grass, some high-gelded stuff to put it plainly, of so scarce delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) load that it calls for the equivalent number of centuries flown away since the forced displacement of poor Robinson to restore the weed to more or less acceptable condition. Hopefully.
Timely culling and calibration can work wonders, you know.
But for him who got to the island after the Two Levels no less disappointing was the absence of goats. Were they also deported? Or maybe, unable to bear their separation from sweet, sweet Robinson, they in turn (if not as the whole groupie herd) rushed off the cliff into that very bay where later was stranded the storm driven ship with the chest-load of bottles for his postage by care of OBPS?
Anyway, he is alone here if not for the scarecrow behind the hedge and in the evenings he at times stopped by to share a word or two about what’s up–what’s down, however, the scarecrow also was not aware which tropic they were namely in: Cancer or Capricorn?
Yes, it was the scarecrow he presented the trophy jacket to, notwithstanding its low level of education, and gave a look full of his habitual sadness at the hooking-up contours of the leaves in the uselessly beautiful cannabis growth.
Sterile Paris doll unable to give alleviation to plight of the distracted sclerotic by its fruitless crop rotation.
His only salvage from from the depressing disillusionment was his being accustomed to the life in the world of fakes, silicone anatomy, false smiles, nylon feelings...
The scarecrow kept nodding in unison, a pair of bee hummingbirds were building a nest for their future bee hummingbird babies in the right pocket of the tartan jacket fairly bleached by the tropical sun...
But the tiny couple of diligent birdies got kicked out by a pack of crass sparrows. Where did they pop out here from? Sparrow is not bird of passage at all any ornithologist will say you that.
"O my," agreed the scarecrow sorrowfully, "nowadays them those migrants can crawl anywhere thru what you’d never guess to think of bypassing the migration regulations…"
At first he was awesomely proud, of course, of himself but now the feel was gone together with all other thrills and turned into jejune ho-hum automatism.
He certainly loved this Island.
He remembers the exited alertness of his first penetrations into the unfamiliar terrain folds, rubbing elbows with the mysterious world of the rain forest starting from the very threshold in his hut.
And he remembers his first rising up the ridge to the silent volcano not even knowing if it was feasible, going to his spur-of-the-moment adventure… Could he climb it at all?
Yay! What a view!
From the basalt tip he observed the immense endlessness of the ocean and all of the island too that looked like a green lizard wrapped in the soft fluff of the tree tops far down below his feet and he even made out the outlines of the bay at its northern end.
Now, after all that what he refrained from even to think of, the one-time vibes of elation did not come back to him. He confirmed it by a probe. He bummed around by his most favorite routs, previously. All of them turned too short, dull, predictable.
He knew at each step what would be brought by the next one and even atop the volcano thought he – it’s been already...
By Jove, where are the cannibals to pay him a visit?! At least some variety.
Well, on the second thought no cannibals are welcome, his blunderbuss got lost somewhere…
On his way back thru the jungle in whose thicket there quivered none of the invisible vibrations of unknown already, a pincer-billed motley-colored parrot fluttered onto a bough above his head and cried out:
"Kenty’s a fool!"
Came it to pass some time ago, the loop of his sling made of the sturdy snake skin of a Bothrops asper would be out at once and he would have parrot soup that night. And now?
"I know it myself," was his sluggish response.
For some reason, he avoided going to the beach, where silently announcing, ‘I know nothing!’ basked Peccy’s skeleton while she herself kinda stepped off to frolic in the oncoming waves and be back any other moment.
What prevented his going there? Not the pitch black stub of the palm smitten by a dire lightning in the memorable pandemonium on Friday. No. Not at all.
However woeful and pathetic it might seem, but any Cocos nucifera did away with his dendrophilicity, killing it stone dead, on sight.
All because of his allergy to the secondary endosperm of its nuts pressed out to produce coconut butter and napalm.
Too much jungles got felled and replaced with coconut palm plantations!
Too many orangutans shot in purchase of predatory income!
I won’t eat the butter mingled with you blood, brother Yum!
A primate is a friend, comrade, and brother to another primate!
But having neither honor nor morality wheeler-dealers commenced to add that butter to anything at all, to what you’d never guess to think of. Even to ice-cream! That’s when the allergy came to the rescue.
No, the palm is not guilty that its endosperm of disgusting marg taste is used to fool the omnivorous consumer (easy as pie! engaging ads and incomprehensible incantations by medical shamans will make them eat any shit).
The palm has nothing to do with the annihilation of countless lives of rain forest sacrificed to the monotonousness of the squared rows of plantations producing its chips.
It’s not the palm’s fault that for the forgetful of their kinship bipeds only a dead orangutan is good orangutan.
Not the palm makes him stop before the turn to the familiar path to the beach with the white shell and the charred stump.
No, his perambulation in that direction is arrested by the knowledge (yes, he knows that and all his sightseeing excursions about the Island, his conversations with the scarecrow—he was not stoned, I swear, where on earth could he get a fucking blunt here!—and all his somnambulistic automatism is just another prove that he knows) that sooner or later he’ll follow that path.
Will he?
Oh, yes. He knows that and is just playing for time and he does not say a single word on that account even to the scarecrow. Not even their united brainstorming will produce the answer to how did he step into?. He, who had passed Two Impassable Levels paying for that with his amnesia. (OK, he did recollected his name but what is a name besides its empty sounds?)
Why to go to where he is nobody (yet not Nobodya any more!).
To where he has lost his, well, not exactly a friend but somebody who, well, if to put it correctly…
Yes! His friend! Old silly Chris who himself was not able to follow all the crap he yabbered and got high from his own blubber…
Chris is not there. No more. Never more...
But there remains Maya. She still hangs on although it’s not clear in which of the 2 hemispheres. However, given his amnesia, he has nothing to be afraid of, left or right does not matter much in his condition and—if God’s truth be disclosed—he’s kept back by only fear.
Or maybe, two fears?
First, suppose, he trades the Island for Maya but what if she too will become an island? One of the dull islands where the thrill of pioneering discoveries gets replaced with boredom ahead of time?
What if he’s heading to the ineluctable loss of a mellow violin melody, with its girlishly naive waist, maturing into the gluey buzzing of cello's solo to be transformed into ungrabby double bass (more and more so) with its regular brain-busting “dum! pdum! dum! pdum!”?
Or else what if…
Stop! Forget it! It does not matter! Even these virtual “ifs” are not enough to steer him back until and if they become a reality...
And then his fear number two – he is not sure if Peccy would assent and how does he start her at all?
"Intuitively, boy! Intuitively! Besides, there always is the old good try and error..."
He moved hither-thither rubbing himself into the tight space, sighed, and sweeping aside the unnecessary in the irreversibility of the current moment doubts, said irrevocably:
"Well, OK. Do it, Peccy. 'Power Button's on!' Come on, babe!"
The upper valve, screechy-and-slow moved downward…
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