to Jim & Tommy & *.pdf
Epigraph:
“…self-preservation is the game’s name, the modifiers like ‘friendship’, ‘love’ and so on do doom the player yet their absence make the game unbearably dull…”
from Untwitted Thoughts
Foreword
And who do you think can't be tripped with "I-dare-you!" trick and egged on, further, into less than wholesome actions? More easily so with the mark stuck in her state of soporific inefficacy, unresisting. For which obvious reason the things popped up in sleep should certainly be kept at arm's length which attitude only indicates that your lick of sense still sits where it has to, to preserve your fettle fine and fit as a fiddle.
Hence salutary rule #1: first thing in the morning do forget all the stuff broadcast to you in the grip of Morpheus' arms, so to say. And that's the course for both ladies and gentlemen to stay on – the night's over – time to become an innocently blank slate in disregard of things done, and seen, and been in by you at night, dreams or no dreams…
Which attitude might prove being a misstep though, at times. Recall from your reproductive memory a certain Mendeleev, if you would. The old fart amassed right smart notability among the screwballs slanted toward Chemistry by skipping to forget the periodic table presented to him while he slept and—here you are!—crowds of cityfolks populate now the streets named after him while their majority, statistically speaking, don't know shit from shinola in terms of strictly scientific formulating which they primitively substitute with fairies of color from different segments of the spectrum. Not that I mind it. In the least. The geezer had his footing to produce those morning doodles he'd been abused with the previous night. Timely reaped rewards, you follow?. As a result, today you might stumble on his monument, sitting some place or standing at full height (in different locations) yet never shorter than a bust from which the posture of the remaining parts in his anatomy remains in-figure-outable though. Good news they never dare amputate his beard, a quick check: full? chest-brushing? – and you're all set:
“G'Morning, Dmitry Ivanovych!. How's Your most precious?. Yeah, sure, they did promise a light rain by noon!.”
Speaking of monuments, they also are not to be approached in I-don't-care-a-fig manner, some pretty slippery ground to horse about they are, the monuments: up to 7 years in prison, Mr. Dare-Devil. Article 214, the Penal Code of the Russian Federation. Not to mention the fine starting at half a million rubles. Some weighty pros and cons, huh?.
Or how do you like the trick Don Juan got undone by the Monument of Commodore? Whose freshly baked widow had just got her share of consolation he served her in every humanly possible way, Don Juan did. To where it belongs. Before running into another example of ‘I-dare-you!’ catch.
“So what?” sez he, the Monument. “Chicken out to shake hands with me, Wet Pants?”
And the gull swallows the hook and all, full tilt, like a Juanito-kid from the slums of the Mexico City, the capital of the same-named state:
“Shut up, booger!” he sez. “Who’re you to freak me out? We'll check whose pants are wetter!”
And he slap-squeezes Commodore's meathook in glove. Which is not of velvet nor a kid glove but hard stone through and through! Plus palming a handful of P4! And that white phosphorus stuff is a too nasty shit and after that handshake they never collected a sliver of Don Juan to poke out a DNA sample for checking his alleged fatherhood in the slew of bastards spawn all over Europe whose Moms went out to litigate Juan for alimonies. Alongside those eager to boost their rating in the upcoming elections to the respective municipal bodies of self-government…
To cram it all in a laconic nutshell, when Charles Dickens chose to appear in my dream, as his monumental embodiment, I was Correctness itself full of due respect, you know. Yet the spook kept bulldozing me most immodestly, like, you can find no writers any more and it's just computers sweating in their (writers) stead to process the copy-pasted text by reading it backward and then arranging paragraphs diagonally or whichever tweaks you ticked up in the application GUI. So that after, there remains only to specify the time and place your masterpiece-in-progress narrates of (which takes a separate tweak for spicing the text with appropriate word collocations) and crosscheck that the love-triangle was not compromised by scrappy vestiges of Mimi the Bitch from the previous bestseller based on facts from canine life. Miles away from the toil he, this here Charles, plunged into in his time!.
And the like old geezer's hooey about 15 novels in 27 years of banging out a weekly bunch of pages, specific number thereof as stipulated by the contract.
And thus our discourse somehow tacked to wanna-bet-or-what? direction and whether I could turn out a novel by Charlie's method at all – a chapter per 5-day working week because on weekends I’m in the entirely inoperative state thanks to the long-standing tradition, the two-day dead season, sort of.
