The Blog

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.

The pending literary work was baptized The Blog – the shorter, the clearer – to bump off any needless straining, and https://proza.ru agreed upon as a sufficient scribbledrome.

However, all the files submitted there get filtered, post-uplodingly, by their editor program to sift out the words rooted in the language alive from the times immemorial. The platform's specialty wrinkles, are you with me?

Simple example – in place of 'dick' they stick in '****' which planetarium gives you a hard nut to crack if you're a normal guy and it was Friday yesterday, the weekend's inauguration. Seriously, I've checked it out – you just run into a starry-eyed hang-up considering a such-like piece of nightscape.

OK fine, I didn’t pick up rubbing in to their system administrators about glossarial racism, compulsory castration of the mother-tongue means of expressiveness and orgiastic witch-hunt by catabolically impaired inquisitors under the disguise of struggle for Native Speech Purification. Because there was no time to lose…

And the need to keep narrative vivid and athrob called for introducing some orthographic innovations to this end and adding '*' (not asterisk but letter yobz hereafter) to the accustomed spelling rules.

Insert this here yobz in any controversial word of your preference and their censuring software's sight grows dim, thick smoke flows out its happy ears and, for instance, 'cu*nt' is welcomed as normative linguistic innocence, like any other necessary word of feather when fixed properly.

Bye-bye, constellations of **** and other fuc*king malarkey of taboos while any minimally aware reader will see through the non-obscuring yobzes.

Still and yet, I’ve betted on the wrong horse because The Blog took a week longer to finish off.

I dunno what to say Dickens on his next visitation.

* * *

Chapter or (more appropriately) Bottle #1: ~ Who Cares for Rhymes If Having Reason ~

A-and well, if pondering the issue deep and proper, all haste aside, do I need it at all? Speaking of this here Blog, eh?

The question from the nasty lot of those which get mooter while being processed, I must admit, by their endless nature and bent to trigger up another "yes, but then…". When run into a whirlpool of that kind, a scrupulous explorer, of my qualities, would, first off, plumb the depths to the very bottom, and for the brought up case – what is the meaning of being a blogger? Huh? After all?

One thing sticks out like a sore thumb though, dichotomically: there are established bloggers followed by millions of fans, as opposed to self-proclaimed guys eager to sell themselves and spin off the like careers, and both groups, interestingly, are alive and kicking… Well, for the most part.

Which circumstance encourages, by the bye, a closer consideration of the befogged question, at least for the sake of self-education, within reasonable limits. More so when you’ve happened to enroll in some advanced mob (but later they corrected me, politely, that the like associations are safer to name „social nets“ now), where, in addition to your personal account, you get a sexy gizmo (yes, the harsh bitch of life does make you yak up all sorts of discombobulations that would leave my granny frozen in her tracks), that of a personal blog, on-the-spot and less than just-for-asking, in the state of vanilla virgin blankness. A freebie from the blue, see what I mean?

As it happens, the registration came to pass by a total fluke, sort of. I’d even call it accidental occurrence caused by curtain rapt anticipations. However, a closer look derailed my premeditated designs in that direction – no loopholes for picking any silly nose there and smudging the items in public domain with the mucosities of ill-considered hopes, if you know what I’m about…

On the other hand, here is your brand new account plus the blog, unasked-for…

That's how divers confluent circumstances had slithered in to kinda mate and make me ponder on self-education issues, although I personally would not count the like matters among my natural bents.

So, yes, straight from the shoulder – that over-smart-ass trap-scheme does indent the principle of non-interference, an outrageous (albeit cleverly disguised) intrusion into my innate sloth. But then again, the more we learn the more we know. Period.

In the light of the above considerations, it's only cogent to touch the rumors fleeting, now and then, tangentially, at the periphery of my scattered, in general, attention as regards well-advertised show business celebrities, who—before passing away in the established way of their hopeless fight with cancer (choosing a career you sign up for the specific strings attached to the profession) or hanging themselves in sore resentment of the shattered hopes that motivated them some fifty years back—they vengefully blow the Net up with their blogs, a kinda punch-line stunt. Before going to their reward…

"How’s that for a good-bye kiss from me, sweeties, huh?!."

BZDAH-BANG!!!

But why? Why not to meekly drown themselves in peaceful, polite manner?.

Anyway, more than once it swished at the bottom-page-news level—like a flying saucer over a far off neighborhood in the opposite hemisphere—that some or other scuzz of fame «has blown the Net up». Which meanness, as any sabotage, hardly deserves a properer response than just 2 words: „Fuck yourself!“ (both stressed, the latter stronger).

To be frank, in my post-pubic life I was not much interested in a career of demolisher. However, the pranks of plumb crazy stars do draw attention to bloggerism per se (though pretending I don’t care a fig still in its place). Because I can't but feel alerted when there pops up some threat to my unconditionally rooted and cherished tenderly reflex of genetic proclivity to serene leisure and hasteless thinking, alphabetically.

And at sporadic spells of living my life the way congruent with my likings (some rare treat indeed), I am more than reluctant then to skim all those googlies-wikies and sooner would go by my own ad hoc conclusion or two (of various amount of probability) when in doubt concerning this or that matter in hand. A screeching process, yep, why deny, yet at my natural pace and taking breaks when feeling like that.

In essence, this «blog» idea, at the given moment of my single-handed brain-storming, is not much different from a common chisel, which they use to scratch their marks—“here was I, the one and only!”—so as to impress the eternity to come by their (chiselers’) personal uniqueness. Another tool to stake off mutual awe and admiration, the blog is.

Quite natural and ubiquitously wide-spread drive, exceeding dinky racial dissimilitudes. Suffice it to recollect the globe-trotter Mr. Kilroy sticking his nose from the pole to pole, and in no way less omnipresent Citizen Vasya. Two tireless champions of screwing the world with their respective autographs to preserve their popularity forever and a day.

Still keep in mind both you, sneaky-slinker Vasya, and you, most respectable Mr. Kilroy, that each and any of your askew scribbles is supervised and disposed of by OBPS.

Yes, yes, and yes over again – every single one, for it’s the rule of no exceptions. And wherever you leave your scrawl—on a chimney or the wall, or be it even an ancient temple’s abacus, a 4-axis railroad cistern for sulfatophenol transportation, the top of a decrepit water tower, the concrete lid of the Chernobyl Sarcophagus, the left hip of a drowsing off Hippopotamus, the cup of an alertly spinning radar, the tails spasmodically jerking beneath the coccyx of a symphonic orchestra conductor, a Sequoyah stump, the plastered pedestal or marble back of the monument to Great-Leader-Liberator-Teacher-Steerer, the palate of a cannibal Orca frisking gaily after a hearty meal—each your mark is just another supplement to the blogs of your lives, delivery of whose disconnected messages (even though you, blockheads, never bother to indicate the name and whereabouts of your addressee) would be handled by the Oceanic Bottle Postal Service, OBPS, whose clients are all them bloggers, lock, stock, and barrel. See what I mean?

And here pops up the dark side in the blog definition—if you abstain from getting lost in digging thru the sites of all those googles and wikipedias, who certainly are in the dark and have not the slightest idea of OBPS, because they are so too busy, engaged in copy-pasting from each other to have their content full updated, you know, because not only my nose gets rubbed into them those antiquarian terms by the bitchy realities of life…—

Yes, Mr. Kilroy, yes, Citizen Vasya, all of your blog as well as any of its constituent crappy scrap-and-crumbs is none but just a drop lost in the immense Digital Ocean (DO) where for all and anything (A-N-Y-thing!) there are austerely forked out just 0 and 1 in all kinds of combinations.

There, in DO, it, your blog of all your scribble-doodles, is nothing but a message stuffed into an empty bottle by another screwed-up sucker, the loner-resident of an uninhabited island smack-bang in the middle of the wide ocean—from one horizon to the opposite—one more plop-toy carried along, among, and in-between its playful waves, a dildo to be used by torrents or simply one more gourmet nosh for the pack of ever greedy gulpers from the shark species like the dumb, and the small-fin, and the leaf-scale, and the mosaic gulpers, as well as the bird-beak, the long-snout, the arrowhead, and other members in the dogfish family, the large-tooth, the small-eye, the cookie-cutter, and so on from the kite-fin family of sharks, the comb-tooth, the ornate, the bare-skin, the granular (whatever it means) in the lantern family, the cylindrical, the ninja, the brown, the pink, the velvet-belly, the blurred, the lined, the thorny, the rasp-tooth ones, and—their cousin from the viper Genus—the prickly, and the rough-skin, the white-tail, the sparse-tooth, the large-spine, the knife-tooth (I bypass the all-out concatenation of the Genuses of sleepers), the blunt-nose, the big-head, the green-eye, the fat-spine, and the not-yet-described Lombok, the high-fin spurdog; then comes the order of labor-loving saw sharks (ten types in two Genuses), the divine-helpers Angel sharks from all over the globe, the bullhead sharks including horned and cryptic, the great white, the goblin, the megamouth, the sand tiger, the crocodile (not relative to crocodiles per se), the big-eye, and other horror-inspiring mackerel killers, as well as swish dandies from the Carpet subdivision – the epaulette sharks of divers Genuses up to the hooded carpet sharks, and the banded, and the tussled, and the network (sic!), the epaulette wobbegongs to be followed by the collared and the saddle, and the barbell-throats, the ginger, and the necklace, the whale shark, and the zebra (we’re still among sharks), then come the Family of requiem sharks: the gray sharp-nose, the spade-nose, the black-nose, the big-nose, the hard-nose, the dagger-nose, the slit-eye, the pig-eye, the silver-tip, the copper, the bull, the tiger, the white-cheek, the nervous, the silky, the lemon, the hook-tooth, the snaggletooth, the straight-tooth, all kinds of ribbon-tail: both the slender, and the graceful, and the magnificent, and even the false cat sharks different from true cat sharks as exemplified by the white-bodied, the white ghost, the hoary, the pale, the milk-eye, the short-belly, the humpback, the broad-nose, the long-nose, the long-head, the flat-head, the broad-head, the sponge-head, the fat, the broad-gill, and also (my favorite) the Black wonder cat shark (not described as of yet), the spotted, the pale-spotted, the orange-spotted, the variegated, the blotched, and the starry, the somber, the mud, the jaguar (do you really have so much time, eh?), the painted, the draughtsboard, the flag-tail, the balloon, the lollipop, the saw-tail (not to confuse with the saw-heads!), the file-tail, the black-mouth, the mouse, the pepper, the phallic (oho!), the quagga, the puff adder, the grinning, the crying, the honeycomb, the beige, the velvet, the boa, the lizard, the freckled, the chain, the cloudy, (now passing to the hammerhead sharks): the wing-head, the scalloped bonnet-head, to mention just a few, the whiskery shark, the black-tip tope, the big-eye hound shark, the gummy, the dusky, the starry (yes, again but from another Family, if you are still here), the star-spotted, the spotless, the flap-nose, the narrow-nose, the leopard shark, and… and… and now subtract the number of the above-listed from 536 to evaluate the volume of my goodwill, and also the kindness of my heart of gold.

How big are chances, should they ask themselves, first off, the lonely sucker in the island, for so seductively streamlined snack of their bottled message to slip away from this horrendous horde of Order Elasmobranchii at ready to swallow it on sight?

Or could it ever fail to give the pretext to a cruising environmentalist of the Greens Genus to spit out an enraged curse at an anonymous fucker polluting the planet’s ocean with his Goddamn bottles?

~ ~ …and so forth… ~ ~… und so weiter… ~ ~

Scarce and far between are genuine connoisseurs and admirers of OBPS today.

Multi-billion-eyed attention of the global community got stuck to Facebook*, Twitter or whatever else passes for OK in your neighborhood.

(*In 2022 the organization was found guilty of terrorism and their activities banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.)

No one is up to scan the heaving sea waves so as to zero on a vagrant buoy, a marine tumble-weed carrying Uninhabitania islander’s message…

(And if at this here passage at least a single tear of warm empathy is not swished off an eye, let them, the eye owner, go and… hum… well… buy themselves something at Ali-Express or any other proper place for the likes of them – heartless rats.)

But mind you well that OBPS at times can bring you real consolation.

What if some day one of the waves—with a mild «plumpee!»—will unexpectedly bring and serve a bottle onto the desolate sand in the lonely beach, where from it had started its matchless voyage some heck of a long time ago?

And fighting back the tremor in your eager fingers, you’ll open it, O, islander—this vagabond envelope encrusted with uneven sea-salt fancy patterns—because who but you know so too well the meaning of OBPS!

And—lo!—you have already spread out the sepia tinged sheets and got delighted with the inimitable perfection of your style of yore, and the depth of your own thought forgotten by you so long ago (what a pity a couple of pages are fucked up by a stray ship worm!)

Damn! You’re but a sworn philosopher and global thinker, Mr. Kilroy! I swear on my word of honor!.

Well, and this seems quite enough for the first missive, because I still need to find some rubber tree, and bang out a kinda cork to seal the bottle, so as not to miss sending it with the evening tide.

What makes me a definitely ardent devotee of OBPS, it’s its being free—no postage fee whatsoever—look! look! see?! it’s taken! carried off! no stamp is needed, no nothing!

* * *

Bottle #2: ~ Hubba Hubba Ding-Ding, Dear Comrades! Congrats To All On This Jubilee, And – Hooray! ~

And, to be clear at once, you don’t get the uninhabited island as is for just a ‘thank you!’ neither for an honest-to-God stare from your blue eyes. Ha! Seen there in heaps already… Nope. The charm fails to raise the response counted on. The island mulishly awaits till you conquer it. Moreover since it’s equipped with a complete system of canalization behind each convenient bush in the state of the art (the system, not the verdure, silly!) and luxuriously abundant in natural davenports. Aye, aye!.

Yet, all these heavenly niceties are available only after severe struggle and surviving thru the two preliminary levels: The Ivory Tower and Unconquerable Autism. Yep, exactly in this order.

Well, on the whole, The Tower is not an over-complicated thing for egg-heads only, no. All you have to do there is just to stay absorbed completely in your collection of post stamps or whatever is dear to the crux of your soul’s temperament and do not give an eff about anything else.

Reduce all unnecessities to the level of external hum unable interfere with the teaser-thing you tickle your soft spot with.

Everyone around would be too eager to derail you by all kinds of “Go buy bread please!” or else “Run! It’s an air raid!” Don’t let them distract you and hang on till “You Win!” crowns your accomplishment.

Level Two, at first sight, looks a kinda simpler job. No need to give a bean about any-fucking-thing whatsoever. Keep it plain as day and lock yourself off thoroughly, all of the five senses firmly sealed, that’s the ticket to pass the whole thing.

However, be warned of physical harassment – they’ll seat you on the toilet at their will or maybe clutch a cup with your bunch of fingers and pour what was in there down your throat, “See? This how it’s done! Will you never learn nothing? You, damn dumb stupid ass?”

Don’t talk back and be patient for the sake of “You Win!” and refreshing change to the dangler solitude of Uninhabited Island…

Wow! That’s some unfakeable Cream of Paradise for you!

Rhythmic swell of lolling surf of the Digital Ocean, warm light breeze from the electric blower under your feet, sexy moans of gulls in the headset and other checked on attributes of your favorite widgets. The functions under your control are literally innumerable, on a par with Almighty’s level. And why so? Ha! Since we’ve lived up to a tangible jubilee already.

Come on! Remembered now? Right! The Internet is 25 today! Ho-ho!

A quarter of century ago the scientifically minded public started to call each other to exchange text files over the wires. Not every cat did get it then, all of a sudden, whereto steered so quirky a telephonization. Still fewer could, at that pivotal moment, catch on, o boy! the jazz’s charged with way much cooler stuff than the historical thrust into the cosmic era when all the nation bust their ass to give a couple of citizens the chance of getting high and hanging up there, in the weightlessness, on their orbit before predictable return to normal gravitation. Be brave guys’ landing soft!

Quite different kettle of fish, in toto, to this here Internet where everyone may have an opportunity to individually (yet still en masse) get out of the state where you belong as a taxpayer (what? you haven’t even suspected? yes, sir, they’ll tax you and get you and fuck you without you ever noticing when and how, the state will, that very one which you own quite a few sacred debts, inescapably—if you Old Ones don’t settle the issue with a doctor on the draft medical commission—and where you’ll be used for other needs too, thanks to your citizenship).

And all of a sudden – yay! The independence breeze stirred up! The sweet word “freedom!” echoed from afar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah… O my!. NetScape, AltaVista – the legendary, glorious, long since forgotten names of genus-starters in the line of search engines… It’s them who paved my way to virtually visit the USA Congress Library full of the matter of fact information instead of filtered staple oatmeal broadcast by the TV news program Vremya or, say, Mayak, the All-Union Radio Station, through the bigger half of my life.