"That same broken feeling... used to be a friend of mine..."
It was a time in my post-adolescence when I was discovering
any number of unpleasant facts about love, life, and reality
in general. The hollowness of grades and "academic achievement"
became readily apparent, the sickly veneer of romance usually
disguised a bitter core, and various forms of teenage escapism
lost their attraction. It turned out that scientists I had
worshipped in my youth (such as my father) ultimately ran into
dead ends in trying to name and describe the secrets of the
universe. Religion, for a variety of reasons, was not an option.
Being a bored, upper-middle class teenager in a comfortable,
industrialized nation, I didn't have a whole lot else to
worry about. I managed to relish the depressing revelations,
perhaps because they gave me a chance to act melodramatically
and wear black clothing or because I'm a psychological masochist
at heart, but most likely because it seemed to me that most of
my peers hadn't discovered these unfortunate truths yet (or at
least hadn't taken them to heart). Those were the days, when it
still seemed very possible to be a non-conformist without being
paradoxically sucked into the mainstream at the same time.
It may be true that misery loves company, but disillusionment is
a virus that longs to infect new hosts. So I (with a few somberly-
dressed collaborators) adopted a hobby of cynically bursting
bubbles and looking down our noses at any sort of idealism--save
our own brand of wistful romanticism. I even printed business
cards that listed my occupation as "Disillusionment Services for
Idealists."
Disillusionment: the word itself (along with a couple of others
like "Apostate") became a minor obsession of mine, and so in
Russian class, when asked to choose a Russian name to go by, I
whipped out a dictionary and requested "Razocharovanie." The
Russians, I thought, had a good word for disillusionment; they
knew how to be properly depressed. Later on, I discovered that my
dictionary had been cutting corners, and that the usual meaning
of the word is "disappointment," which may have been more
appropriate in any case.
Using the word as a handle on local computer bulletin-boards was
a natural follow-up, even if I did find that some of the more
perpetual electronic denizens had an outlook on life than made
mine seem bouncy and sunlit.
{{What I didn't know then is that disillusionment must be nurtured
and fed if it is to thrive and stay coiled comfortably around the
brain. Immersion in an unfamiliar environment, for example, can
stun it or even send it packing into the remote corners of memory.
Until now, its name had even left my mind for a while.
{{{{leaving you feeling a bit like a suburban housewife who's been
pretending just as hard as she can that the dark blots on her
neighbor's face are from accidentally falling down the stairs
and banging into walls.}}}
{and you're sitting in the dark with wet eyes wishing that you would
forget and everything would go back to how it was when everyone was
stupid, and you start to understand why some people would rather just
talk to machines, or to animals, or to themselves, muttering as they
ramble down the street.
{
"Dear Miss Witherspoon," he noted with the faintest of faint
smiles, "I don't mean to sound rash, and I really musn't
allow myself to be carried away, but the pattern of your new
china..."
"What," remarked the fashionably dressed young heiress,
turning her gaze pointedly upon the glass-fronted cabinet
containing the items in question, "the gifts from Mrs. Banbury?
Whatever do you mean?"
Straightening his cravat as best he could, he continued, "These
patterns, based on ancient Sanskrit carving conventions, if I'm
not mistaken..." he was sweating profusely now, and paused to
look away from her curious, eager stare.
"Blast!" he cried, his polished Oxford accent cracking slightly,
"I simply can't stand it anymore!" Whirling around madly, he
found that she, too, had risen to her feet, and was holding a
crumpet. With a wild look in his eye, he took her in his arms,
the crumpet falling unheeded to the floor, and
{
strapping her into the auto-spreader stirrups on the divan,
he saw out of the corner of his eye that she was taking a
savage bite out of an enormous turkey leg -- satan's
balls, he thought, that's the biggest goddamn turkey
leg i've ever seen. She looked at him lasciviously over
its roasted skin, and he snapped, "We'll have none of
that this time around!" Roughly yanking the [young
heiress'] nipple ring with his right hand, he took advantage
of her moment of ecstatic distraction to seize the turkey
leg and thrust it aside. She looked delighted, and motioned
with her eyes towards the whalebone ball gag on the armoire.
But he could wait no longer; frontal forehead veins bulging
with the mighty effort of restraint, he ripped asunder her
{latex}[crinoline] petticoats and, [listing 80-10] unfastening
buckles, biting apart knots, releasing straps, cracking locks,
opening doors, undoing clasps, bending hooks, winching apart
seals, dissolving glues, he made his way towards her
{
Alert! Alert! The warning signs inside his HUD flashed
red at him, shocking him out of his reverie. His suspicions,
awakened neocortically at the first waft of pheromone, had
turned out to be true; this [heiress] Commandante Witherspoon
was no ordinary daughter of a petty [Don of King's College]
sub-orbital bureaucrat, but a drone agent of the Reticular
Hive. Knowing he had but seconds to act, he thrust himself
backwards off her into the {{Louis XIV rubber fetish gluetrap}}
bulkhead of the pod, his sensory enhancments adjusting easily
to the sudden shift into Zero-G. With lightning precision, the
drone's abdomen burst open into hundreds of tiny Extraphotic
Bloodseeker nanoviral carriers, swarming through the
flourescent light like a cloud of Cornish moor gnats.
The cyberdoc had said to save this for an emergency, but this
definitely looked like an emergency. Subvocalizing the opening
of the Lotus Sutra, he activated his Marx CXVII Armatron Grid
Activation Unit Activator, and was instantly surrounded by
a field of green microfilament nanowafer grids, capable of
withstanding any amount of force up to a sixty-megaton
thermonuclear detonation. Fortunately, he didn't think the
Hive was packing that kind of heat today. Still, the force
of the combined mass of the carriers colliding (and instantly
vaporizing into tenthousand microscopic puffs of siliconized
air) with the grid was enough to send him hurtling out into
the cold, dark void of interstellar space.
It would be a long walk home.
* * *
O! Sing of thy praises;
LAND OF TEN THOUSAND FACES;
From verdant streams of green;
THE ANCIENT WORKER'S CRY:;
Lo, for the cry of hawk and eagle;
LONG TIME HAVE WE REIGNED!;
I hear the ocean calling;
WITH TEN FISH FOR EACH SAIL;
A full catch, from east to west;
HOW GREAT THY COUNTRY'S NAME;
Till we reign alone.;
{ ------------------- }}}
And when he found himself in the fifty-nine thousandth universe
at the conjuncture of that-suchness and harmony-in-right-endeavor,
Avioltahmbaskera, though he was but one of the eighteen million,
five-hundred-and-fifty-three thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-eight
incarnations of the Buddha, found no sentient being in the universe
capable of enlightened discourse. No conception was present of the
saint's physical body, entombed in brass and tended by his disciples
on the shores of Huang Ho; no conception was present above the
thirteenth level of Pure Reality. He sat and meditated, formless
and bodiless, accompanied by No-Self and Mind-Has-None.
{
You can have a Dicent Symbolic Legisign, but the phrase
"Argumentative Symbolic Legisign" is redundant. An Argument,
is by necessity both Symbolic and presupposes the existence
of a Legisign, a conventional understanding of the nature
of the Representamen (Sign) or Sign (Representamen) apart
from the indexical nature of any context or the similarities
inherent in the iconicity, universal or particular, of the
Representamen to the Object, the Object to the Interpretant,
or the Interpretant to the Representamen. All these are
interchangeable; you can go up and right on the diagram to
form the 10 basic classes of sign, but a different sort of
understanding entirely is needed for the advanced 66 classes.
X | O | X X | X | O X | |
----------- ----------- -----------
O | O | X O | O | | O |
----------- ----------- -----------
| X | O X | O | O X | | X
}
}
{==}
{==}
}
"I win!" he cried, and with that single utterance, every sentient
being in the five hundred and fifty five billion universes attained
salvation, and for the time it takes for the hair of a cow's tail
to fall to the pile of steaming dung beneath, the craving of the
hungry ghosts was satiated. {{{TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: nonsentient beings
were also saved, but were not aware of it until the sudden
enlightenment of Avilotskeratahmabha, three eons later. - Huan-Yin
School Doctrine }}
Time rolls forward%%
Like crashes, of endless tide%%
Down the marches of army thought%%
Comes clarion call of duty!%%
Hark, sons of nation's pride!%%
Cry out, and hear worker's sorrow pain cry%%
Leave bed, unfurl like stony centipede%%
Crawling, to new sun day of brightness%%
[endless mountain range === babbling stream === dawning horizon === cry of gibbon monkey === song of southern plains === hammers of the new railroad {====}
----->
^
He clamped onto the exterior of the shiny C-class Shuttle with his
specially designed, form-fitted Electromagnetic Fusion Z-Rings.
This wasn't going to be as hard as he thought.
^
The ball gag was out, and flecks of spittle sprayed his bruised
and bloody face as she spoke. "Oh my fucking God, Reggie! I thought
for fucking sure you were going to split me wide open with that
huge fucking turkey leg!"
"Shut the fuck up, bitch? Did I say you could speak yet?" His tone
was getting whiny and he didn't like it. "C'mon, baby... you
know this isn't going to work if you're, you know...
talking all the time."
^
"Dear me," she said, offering him a finger sandwich. "I had no
idea of the import of such things. You're so terribly educated,
Professor Daventry. So terribly educated."
He smiled, coughed modestly, and accepted a sandwich.
FIN
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