I have found...

definitive evidence for Astrology. I kept musing upon the parallels betwixt music and astrology. Twelve notes, twelve signs, etc. I began to wonder about what a band comprising the Three Water signs would sound like. I supposed such a group must once have existed.

Today I found this album; I had all ready dreamt of finding such a thing, but having assumed its nonexistence I interpreted the dream literally. I am presently listening to it for the first time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ9sE8B_gIY
Now, I had all ways known Isaac to be a Cancer. But I began to wonder about the other members. Thinking little of playing guessing games this time, I consulted Google. Eric Judy, to my surprise but understanding, is a Scorpio.
I said to my self: watch Jeremiah Green be-a-Pisces. I thought of his mental break-down, for which he was temporarily replaced after he tried to "attack" Isaac. He all ways seemed so sensitive in interviews, oscillating betwixt pleasant humility and a grave stare.*
I was right. March 4th. Dm.
"I pretty much lived in a factory... and it sucked.[glares at camera.]"

One Thousand Words of Good Bye.

[This was written at first on paper, without a means of computing the word count, and without the word count in mind. The only insertion was the first foot-note, which hardly would have drawn the writer's attention to the word count, for it occurs so early in the piece and was written prior to what followed and even a great deal of what preceded it.]

A Tale of Bitches.

I listened to a song by a Canadian rapper today. The song was entitled “I got yo Bitch”. I do confess that I reposted it and even added it to my playlist called “The Next Level”. It was an ironic appeal that it had to me, of a nearly sadomasochistic sort. I of course imagined Mr. Gemoney to be “singing” towards an adversary, as an act of vengeance, and whilst I could not “get behind” his vengeful sentiments I could neither deny its affective appeal on a visceral level.

It made me think of Ketchup. I supposed, with the same instinctiveness, that hip-hop did not turn people into assholes; ass-holes simply turned hip-hop into some thing it was not supposed to be.

If you disagree, then perhaps you approve of the line: “She up in my crib cooking bacon and grits.”

You get the idea.

It was very hard to come to terms with our initial deal: that if I did what I could do to get the band back together then you would never make out with him in front of me.

It seemed too rational and reasonable, too generous and kind, for me to protest without becoming guilty of passion and self-interest. After all, your earlier argument that I should not be AFFECTED by your “private lives”* was still tempting. Yet apathy is the worst of sins. Just as easily as I could praise your kindness and consideration I could not deny that the very THOUGHT of your sleeping with him drove me viscerally mad. At first my instinct was of course to dismiss this as a covetous logocentric projection, as any decent man would do in a knee-jerk. Yet the more thoroughly and profoundly that I analysed it the more the imminent Absurdity of it stared me in the face. Besides: You had all ready proven to me that such projections, logocentric as they might appear, do tend often to be sources of truth, emanating from a rung of the Unconscious that is unmuddled by cultural hypnosis. In effect I must thank you for helping me to transcend my Derridean Period.

*As shall be demonstrated, it is even the notion OF a PRIVATE LIFE that I find now totally intolerable and indefensible.

Undoubtedly what bothered me most was simple: The thought that the two of you would even have all ready dared to enjoy your selves, and each other, not only WITHOUT me, but in SPITE of me. It continues to this very day, over a year later, to haunt me like any past trauma. My nose-bleeds might be less common, yet the dizzying disorientation at the thought of it still challenges my entire Grasp.

I did not know that that was possible! What possible motive could he have had to DO that if he knew not only that I would prefer to do so, but that I would prefer HIM *NOT* to. I tire and sickcen at his feeble attempts at a justification. The audacity he has to accuse ME of harbouring self-interest, insisting that he “did nothing wrong” (though the objective facts of my infuriation should serve as a haunting reminder to the contrary, as well as his OWN stated preferences) because he simply did not do what *I* wanted him to do. What blatant insubordination! He had literally no alternative!!

It was HIS act, ultimately, that was an act of aggression, simply by his choice to even Differentiate HIS desires from MINE! So how on Earth can he claim to condemn me for excessive desire and covetousness when, in place of seeking the Higher Way and foregoing his Own desires, leaving mine to the test of fate, for that would have been Humble of him rather than Totalitarian and Presumptuous, he blatantly discarded all attempts at moral supremacy and acted upon his OWN passions?! How is it that a man can in the same breath state his deepest fears of abandonment and yet try to justify my own abandonment? How can he condemn my desires and yet retain his own? We gave him the chance to redeem his failure, of course But the insolent knave refuses! He does not even ADMIT that he had WRONGED me and damaged not only HIS Soul, but YOURS, by permitting YOU to participate in the same missed take!

Of course, this was precisely my reason for abstaining from any kind of sex for YEARS.

I even started this blog, with his encouragement, with the primary intent of deconstructing (though I did not know this term at the time) my sexuality, for I could see the problem of participating in ANY sort of activity that one did not believe, with fervour and zeal, to serve all Beings.

After many fleeting yet laborious years, and with the aid of Brandan Whearty, as well as all my old true friends – Kierkegaard, for instance – I came again to recall the integrity of True Love. So of Course I expected him to respect and even to REJOICE at my decision to court you, for there should have been no greater joy to his heart than to see his friend, long celibate and patient, to have found a proper match. To this day, he still can not produce a warrant for his self-interest, for why did I not deserve you? And sho8uld HE not have taken part in THAT joy?!

You know that I harbour no self-interest. Yet as an extension of my services to him and you I must correct your errors when I would have done differently. The tautology works: Because I am selfless, my word is law, and because my word is law, I can defend my selflessness. Would you not have aspired towards the same peaceful heights? Would not most? What alternative do we have?

Competition is all ways suicide;

Victory at the expense of an other is, as Ketchup should have Known from the Oracle,* all ways Death to both parties.

                                                                                                            Dm.A.A.

*the I Ching.

INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter Sixteen.

Chapter sixteen

            Stephanie's spelling test scores began to suffer. She began to fail spelling tests. Her mother was incredulous.

            'You used to be such a good student,' she would muse in a crippling sorrow. It wouldn't have bothered her, were it not that Stephanie's emotions were troubling her more than they would have usually. Since she had met with Falcon for the third time, she felt strangely as though a chasm had opened within her innerds as though they were merely a holding tubule for some caustic acid. She noted the scientific truth of this fact, yet never before had it affected her this way.

           

            She had not seen him in several months.

            She did not know where he lived. She had to try to find his home.

            One day, she sat on a statue dolphin at the top of the hill where the playground was. She sat atop it for several hours, only interrupted by hypnotic stretches wherein she stepped down.

            Her own heel became fascinating to her as she sank her sandals into the grass.

            The next day, she sat atop this dolphin for only a few minutes. She would revisit it five times throughout the day.

            She found a jungle gym adjacent to the playground. She sat atop it for several hours. The sky sank into a darkness that scraped against her heart.

            Young boys came by and stared up at her. Boys were always obsessed with tiny matters. They had no subtlety. They were like badgers.

            Two approached the foot of the jungle gym. She paid them little attention.

            'Why are you up there?' The voice was from the boy with gray, goatlike hair. He had a constantly nervous desperation in his eyes, which were yellow and gray. His father was in the military. She liked him.

            'I'm waiting for a friend.'

            'Who is this friend?' He could be forceful in speaking sometimes. She did not mind the sarcasm too much.

            'It's a boy. You might not know him.'

            'Is it that Falcon kid?'

            Stephanie's stomach was inflamed with an intolerable pain. It had been the other boy who spoke. He looked up at her curiously. Her eyes glared down at him.

            'How do you know him?'

            Ryan, the other, goat-haired, boy, spoke up.

            'We can tell you where he lives. We just need one thing in return.'

            She was, for once, not entirely paying attention. Her breathing had stopped at the mention 'where he lives'.

            'Where does he live?' she heard a female voice say.

            'You have to answer something for us first,' Ryan responded.

            'What?' came a voice slightly more cutting than she wanted. An angst like the black smoke from the furnace of a nuclear reactor rose into her heart.

            'We want to know. If you do talk to him. What would you do?'

            Her brow furrowed. The clouds were sulfur in the midst of a Sun that looked like the yolk of an egg.

            'We think you like him,' said the other boy, with too much eagerness and curiosity for her tastes.

            What does he know? Even Ryan, probably, regretably, can't know.

            'No.'

            She avoided looking down at the other boy. To her frustration, she could hear him climbing onto the first plank. Ryan was more respectful. Of course.

            She began to cry.

            'Why are you crying?' It was the idiot.

            She jumped down from her ledge and exited the jungle gym by a series of metal bars that stuck out at a corner of the structure that was opposite the gaping entrance that the idiot had entered into.

            She was about to go home, but she could not. Her intestines reprimanded her.

            The sky was all ready setting. She looked back to see Ryan approaching. His voice was concerned.

            'Don't you want to know where he lives?'

            'Just if you both stay away.'

            'Okay,' he seemed calm, but he was holding a lot back.

            She found the door when the night had already set in. The deep violet of the evening seemed more comforting than her mother's womb, as though she were suddenly removed, as she had so often felt in earlier years, from the pains and hassles of being an individual human being. The emotion was not her own but that of something else, however impersonal it may be, as though, for one brief moment, she glimpsed a heart at the center of the Universe clockwork. Blue clouds were visible in the midst of the violet haze. The smell of cooking rice wafted from a neighbouring backyard.

            She rang the doorbell.

            She checked the number of the house. '315'.

            A woman with a mass of hair like a giant corsage opened the door. She was elderly, and she was shocked to find that Stephanie had rung the bell.

            'Yes?' she seemed to try to become amiable, but only as a facade.

            'Is this where Falcon lives?'

            Something in Stephanie's total absence of hesitation or reluctance struck the woman, absurdly, as intrusive.

            'He is busy at the moment.'

            Stephanie stood there.

            'When will he be free?'

            The lady was shocked to hear her.

            'Why do you want to talk to him?' she asked indignantly.

            Some monstrous flame ran up her chasm like regurgitation.

            'Because he's my friend.'

            'Well, he is a very strange boy.'

            'Are you his grandmother?'

            'Yes.'

            'What is strange about him?'

            'He has A.D.H.D.'

            A brief pause.

            'When will he be around to play?'

            'I'll tell him you came by.'

            'My name is Stephanie.'

            'Hello, Stephanie.'

            'Tell him, also, that I will be on the dolphin statue tomorrow and over the course of the entire following week.'

            She grimaced. Hatefully.

            'Okay. Good day.'

            She shut the door rapidly.

            Stephanie stood for another few minutes, looking at it.

            Finally, the door opened again.

            'Can I help you? I'm sorry, but I told you that he is busy right now.'

            'I was just wondering about a question.'

            'Okay,' replied the woman dismissively and began to close the door.

            'Why are adults so eager to close their doors in your face?'

            The door was closed five eighths of its entirety. It paused. Then she opened it again.

            'Listen, young lady. Both you and that boy need to learn respect for your elders. He thinks that he is the boss. He doesn't even listen to what his parents tell him. That boy doesn't even care about his appearance. He just has an answer for everybody.'

            The sheer number of statements was a bit overwhelming.

            'Well, is he right in his answers?' she chose to ask first. The grandmother began to close the door again, muttering.

            Stephanie took her opportunity to ask the next and more important question.

            'Wouldn't a lack of concern for his appearance help him when he is an adult?'

            The sentence had been perfectly phrased. Stephanie could not understand why the grandmother's face seemed to shrivel at the sound of it.

            'You may need to see a psychiatrist. You should talk to your parents about it tonight. I feel sorry for them. Tell them.'

            She shut the door for the last time.

            Stephanie had thought back to that day repeatedly for years. She still could not think of anything the woman might have said that would have been more insulting.

           

Dm.A.A. 

INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter Fifteen.

Chapter fifteen

            Stephanie knew one boy whom she had related with in her early childhood. His name was Falcon. Meeting eyes with him felt like staring into the workings of a clock. He was the only boy that she ever could relate with.

            She would meet with him on a sidewalk that ran through their apartment neighbourhood, back when she lived in his apartment neighbourhood. They would meet at random, always. She preferred it that way, and he agreed, although he never said it.

            They met in the shade of two opposite apartment buildings one day. A cement sidewalk ran from the playground down to the parking lot that lay between every cluster of apartment buildings.

            The Sun was setting. The sky was a vivid and terribly tenacious blue that was descending into deeper indigo. The last rays of light still pierced it.

            She could still remember his eyes. He had the eyes that other children accused of changing colour. They appeared at times blue and, at others, hazel. She observed how particular and ornate they were. The slits in the iris, circumventing the perfectly circular pupil like the increments on her father's watch or the ridges on the rim of a quarter, were interrupted by vivid blotches of a poisonous, gorgeous nebulae that reminded her of the tornadoes on the surface of Jupiter.

            In between, the blue segued into green seamlessly. Yet some days it looked brown. She always held her breath when they talked, yet she spoke much. His eyes always looked straight at her. Usually there was no differentiation between his eyes and hers. There were words, and they were sometimes in a female voice and sometimes in a male voice that synchronised with his face and its gestures. He would grin often. He was a part of their environment, and the fading of the day light was met with no friction or restlessness. It changed as though it were a second hand running along the rim of his eyes.

            The same eyes looked on as the morning light turned to daylight, becoming a bleak white. Time seemed to be reversed as he spoke, as though, while the light of one day faded, behind it, another, white, light set in, bleak as that morning light.

            Sometimes there would be a lapse in their conversation. She would find herself breathing out. The exhalation was always followed by a pang of gentle pain, and she tried to make it less bearable.

            He noted the interruptions. He would simply look on, suppressing the desire to look around, waiting for her to speak again. Sometimes he would find something to say that would immediately catch her interest, and the seconds would seemlessly again begin to move.

            Time was not an entity during their pauses. She would simply look down at her skin and observe how pale it appeared. Yet she would feel a strange sense of identification with it. Her flesh felt as though it had its own tone. She would have felt pride in it were there not Falcon living in her community.

Dm.A.A.

[Long overdue and finally ripe:] Critique of Homosexuality.

It could have been written only yesterday. Down* to the opening sentence.

*I use this idiom “Down” not to signify that its aforementioned relevance ENDS at the first sentence, but rather that it includes even this introductory part of the analysis.

“I have come to terms with the fact that I did not perform my first attempt at stand-up on Thursday, yesterday.

My present restlessness must be the enciting force for this regret. Its true direction must be towards the future, not the past; in the absence of a critical external party it is difficult to find practical value in reflections upon the past, outside of (mere*) utility towards the future.

*?

At first I blamed myself.

Then I blamed my parents, not as an alternative but by extension. Blame is inevitable, and blame of self invariably produces blame of others.

Action and revision depend upon exercise of Will, and for that to be justified the others must be blamed.

Blaming the coaching staff at Palomar helped to alleviate the tension. That way, it was not my fault that I chose to attend. The means of attendance justified the unpredictable ENDS of wasting my time.

In truth, though I have taken pains to reform my parents’ behaviour, insisting that they do not SURVEILL me, I cannot pretend, sado-masochistically, that THAT power conflict, proven Absurd by their satisfaction with my purely SYMBOLIC attendancy, was the solitary cause for the time spent in college. Had I INTENDED, deeply, to per-

form, impressing those lucrative girls with first my boisterous flirtation and then tempting them to watch my set, learning whom among them was a participant and selectively signing my name just prior to hers, strategically, upon the sign-in list – I would have done so. Appeal to ability is the surest cure for a regret; rather than bewailing what I COULD have done, I can simply use the FACT that I had that ability un-consciously to attest that an OTHER impetus, equally under the surface, had fore-stalled me.

I have labored to honor my introversion. I was not yet Certain that the stand-up invitation was not a Temptation. Did that render the cat-like Blondie (not Alanna, but nameless) a temptation? Per chance.

The question seems to hinge upon this: Is the Unconscious one’s friend? Or one’s foe?

Alanna shall return.

I know it.

Dm.A.A.

Is sexuality a right?

If not, or it is ONLY a right insofar as it is an unrequited urge, then why bother to defend it?

The province of the Strong:

If *I* am entitled to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, what is it to say others are not?

But in FACT this is merely a way to defend one’s own Arbitrary Emotivism by seeking solidarity with a tokenized minority.

Of course, the struggle to develop a private relation to sex, ethically, is unheard of in a community of feminists and a-males.

What guarantee is there that such an enterprise would accommodate homosexuality?

Much love is self-love.

Homosexuality is narcissistic.

‘Homo’ = ‘Same = Self.

The proper function of sexuality is to under-stand the Other.

This will cure emotivism.

The Other cultivates Com-Passion.

The emotion of Jealousy stands as Evidence that we as human beings* have vested interests in the private lives of Others.                                                     Dm.A.A.

The question arises:

Is the other man an Other, if the jealous person is all so a male? Or is only the female on Other? Logic would find comfort in confining Other-ness to gender. But in fact the other man IS an Other. Yet he is not an Other from the per-spective of Sex. Why?

The function of sex is to understand the Other gender. This is no taut-ology. Even if we did not establish the man as Other, as we are tempted to in order to separate him from the woman, the argument would stand. The CONCLUSION – that sex must be a meeting of opposing genders, for it is a function OF gender,– does not DEPEND upon the establishment of the male as an Other. The latter depends upon the former as a Premise, but since that premise does not depend upon this fact in order that it may be a Conclusion, the reasoning is not even circular, or, at worst, it is not EXCLUSIVELY so.

One is tempted to combine the Otherness of both the woman and the man into one fact, so that the fact that the Conclusion depends upon is no different from the fact that uses the Conclusion as a premise…

But we can only do this by treating Otherness as a phenomenological fact.

And when we acknowledge that this Otherness only occurs in the Other gender, where sexuality is concerned, by virtue of the same phenomenological episteme, we have no right to complain about the contradiction. Our conclusion looms as a premise the closer it approaches. Besides that, the fact stands unequivocally and ubiquitously: Choosing same-sex partners over partners of the opposite sex is a prioritization of Self OVER Other, whereas passing judgement of both sexes treats them equally.

Neither is this judgement an attempt to sub-sume the Other to the Self, for jealousy hurts.

And this is chiefly triggered when the Other has failed to HONOR the Otherness of the judging subject.

One might ask: Why do I bother to even DEVELOP an ethic so stringent?

But I assure you:

Those who would laugh at me are precisely those men who would commit crimes of jealousy. And I CHALLENGE you, reader, to explain how THEIR debauchery is just-ified by MY saintliness and trust.                                                  Dm.A.A.

Fed up. Least I'm read up.

Post-modern Rage:

Most troubling is this meme that I am in some way wrong for condemning the recent atrocity that is the Internet because I employ it as a tool against its self. How severe is our idolatry that we must treat it as a human being, who must not be turned against one's own devices? How severred is our intellect from our wisdom if we must forget to use the machine against its self, as though by principle of judo.

The absurdity of this neurosis is unsettling. We must surely all be schizophrenics!

1. We believe money to be a resource.

Dude. It's a number.

2. We believe in "self-interest".

I am not doing this for my own health, faggot, but for yours. There is no I or you. There's only WE. And if WE must address a collective problem then that is MY responsibility, as well as yours. I must be the one to do it, to break it to you, and you are to follow, for in the same way I was to follow by participating in the example that YOU set. Non-participation is a sin tantamount to sodomy.

3. Intolerance for any contradiction.

You nigger-lover. EVERY thing is contradiction! Even computer code is comprised on ones and zeroes.

I have to accomodate YOU by pretending to our separateness. Yet fundamentally I only serve the WE, as you are obligated to.

Have we all lost our fucking minds?? No century before this had been so depraved!!

Dm.

INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter Fourteen.

Chapter fourteen

Fritz’s thumb was cemented in the ‘Up’ button for several seconds.
The lift rose by one increment. A sweating rage permeated him as every fiber in his lungs seemed to scream for him to scream at the elevator control board.
With every passing floor, Fritz furiously sank his right thumb into the ‘Up’ button, unyielding until the absurdly glaring light behind it shut its eye. He would resume this for countless floors.
He knew not how he would escape the man. Fritz’s mind raced. If he were to make some sign that he was on the twentieth floor and then immediately sprint into the cloistered solace of the elevator, he could then run across the fifteenth floor, sprint down the staircase, and escape onto the first floor.
He had lost count all ready of which floor he was on. With a gripping terror, he allowed the door to slide aside.
There stood the man, interrupting two blocks of cubicles like a dot between two bars in Morse Code. A glaring sapphire washed over and past him like an Ocean. It was like seeing a lunar eclipse.
Fritz screamed again and kept screaming until the doors were firmly closed. The man took only three steps towards him, and then broke into a sporadic berserk. Fritz’s heart seized.

Fritz kept pressing the triangle as though every moment that it was illumined spared him a year in a boiling pot. All the while, the button that rested beneath it, pointing in the opposite direction, remained unillumined. He felt as though it were an absurd temptation. Moving down would serve only to submerge him in an infernal abyss.

He counted something like ten or eleven floors, and he allowed his nerves to yield to his desperate cunning.
The doors slide aside.
It was as though he had rewound an unreal episode which he had experienced on the prior floor. The man was approaching him briskly on a floor identical to the prior floor in everything but the light. Fritz saw him emerge like a bat from a cave.
The doors closed again. Fritz would not waver again. He kept pressing the button until it failed, as its twin had several eternities prior, to come alight.
The doors slide aside.
The man was sprinting at him again.
Fritz jumped out from the elevator, smashing the left side of his body against the left wall of the cell and seguing immediately into a sprint down the corridor.
The doors of cubicles sped past him.
He darted then towards that haunting corner where the black window looked upon the infernal door.
Fritz grabbed at the door with a nervous agony. He felt as though the terrifying stranger had already pounced upon him. He was being drowned in a swimming pool of whiskey. He was staring up at the underside of the top bunk. Hearing his brother's screams, his own were stifled by the weight of lion's paws sinking into his ribs, rupturing them in clumsy defiance of their uniform solidarity, and the innerds unraveling in gushes of surrender to the biological whims and needs of the oppressing predator.
These were the contents of his subjective mind. The objective was secondary. The door would not yield to him. He stared at it incredulously, pushing. He tried his shoulder. With each shove, the door doubled his effort. He pushed, each time, with a magnitude of effort that must have been to a greater exponential power than the previous attempt. Each such effort, in turn, amplified his incredulity to constantly stand double to his threshhold of exertion.
The man appeared at the end of the corridor. He was no longer running. Was he tempting Fritz? Was he teasing him? Fritz screamed as though to blow apart the windows of his aquarium. The whiskey spilled away from him in a flood that ushered in a flood of blue descending upon him from the tiles of the ceiling. He was in the hold aboard the burning ship. The lights glared down upon him like the impersonal, methodical eyes of researchers observing a paramecium lying in a petri dish under a stark white microscope. The eyes had the same degree of affect and empathy towards him that the paramecium could be presumed to have towards its observers. Fritz wanted, with a sudden urge that seemed to have originated at the moment that he first saw his hand, like a tiny rose, approaching the doorknob, to toss himself through the window, unnerved that this one fourth wall of his holding chamber had remained mercilessly, maliciously solid and unshattered as this predator, like a shark whose every tooth was surely a piranha, swam towards him with torturous hesitation.
He screamed again. Strangely, he could not hear his own voice, and neither did his nervous system register any of the impulses or sensations – any of either pleasure or pain – that would serve to indicate that he was, in fact, underwater. His scream was layered with a fleshy plea, as though he were petitioning some non-existent God for advice as whether to sprint down the corridor to his left, one horrifyingly identical to every other corridor he had seen this night that must have spanned several eternities or to jettison himself with a moment's orgasmic tension in his calves through that yonic window into the cool chasm behind, falling to the end of all pain and terror, to be found by meth addicts like vultures and to be buried respectfully.
When his own scream failed to fall upon his own ears, a rage that he could not feel crammed into his forebrain. His attention sought one final refuge in the hind-brain, where his intuition, like a blaring desk lamp whose serene, informed and equanimous amber glow penetrated the sterility of the white lamps overlooking him like fleets of Nazi jets from an unperturbed, black corner of his psyche, made an absurd joke of them.
It told him to jump. Just jump backwards. He tried. His knees folded. Within one moment, he was on his knees, as though about to prostrate himself before this approaching stranger. Within the moment, the lights swam over him and enveloped him like the comforting arms of a wave. He would run no further.

Fritz had one flashback. His father came home. He was a man with a perpetually angry demeanour. Fritz had two sisters.
Fritz had two friends over. The older of these two was a recent friend. He was the author of this book. Fritz felt himself enlivened by the strange, ornate thought patterns of this young man, who had made the acquaintance of Fritz's group by virtue of volunteering to act as a mentor for his high school Video game club.
The author had the perpetually unsatisfied demeanour of a Thoreauesque outdoorsman with what, at that original moment, Fritz had identified simply as 'a hippy vibe'. The author always seemed desperate in pursuit of some Cause, some unattainable horizon, and Fritz could not deny – and nor could he spare his friend any wry, sarcastic disapproval at the thought of this – that at times his friend's ambitions just seemed too much to involve Fritz himself, threatening to push him out of his comfort zone in pursuit of some self-righteous and surely, at heart, though his friend would never admit it, selfish pursuit.
The nerve of him. Fritz would hear his own thoughts as though listening to a recording on the kind of tiny cassette player-recorder that Fritz had once owned and held, for some time, routinely in either of his pockets. It had usually been the left, because the right-side pocket had been so frequently leased to his wallet.
I put Ubuntu on his computer. I spent hours at his house doing this, and that was NOTHING compared to the hours, which probably added up, honestly, to several days, I wasted trying to start a business with him. He would miss meetings ('One meeting', said Phoenix, as though he had heard Fritz's musings and were making a composed and voluntary effort to defend himself. He always had difficulty with criticism, not because he was too self-assured but because he took everything either too personally or too seriously, if not both.) to take random trips, ('once to retrieve my bass guitar from Vista, California, which is not one of the safest places to be after a certain hour,' he defended.) sometimes for entire weeks ('I left for three days,' corrected Phoenix, with a grimace whose anger seemed somewhat overblown but strangely more pardonable than it was unmerited. 'It was the only window of more than three days that I happened to come by in the midst of my work schedule, and it may have been my only opportunity to see either of my friends up there that entire year.').
'Wait'. Now Fritz was talking out loud. 'You said that it had only been three days. Now, you admit that it had actually been a space of more than three days. Is that correct?'
'No,' Phoenix negated with both fortitude and reproach, but more fortitude. Briefly but palpably, Fritz felt a sense of admiration for how calm and collected Phoenix's voice seemed, like a light peering through the shutters of their disagreement, as though it constantly emanated from a distant sunlight of which this stonerish fellow was only a mouthpiece. 'I actually left very early on the first of the four days and returned late on the fourth day, but the journey both ways occupied a substantial portion of time, and I was only in the Bay Area for two and a half days at most.'
If only he did not have such a high opinion of himself, thought Fritz, and he was surprised to find that he had said it aloud.
'Woah, man,' and here appeared Phoenix the man and not the symbol. 'There's nothing wrong with having a mirror.'

Dm.A.A.