A Fool's Story (or) The Robber of Bird’s Nests
I give you fair warning; this is a story told by a fool. Not one of Dostoeveski's idiots, a boorish intellectual, but a fool whose sole purpose in life is to spread foolishness and confusion. Idiocy is far too common; I leave that to anarchists and idealists. I am the excrescence that fills the void, the otherness to the reality you feel, hear, touch, taste, fuck and shit out of all the holes that you lay claim to. I am no idiot, but a foolish man with little patience or tolerance for fools. I tolerate myself, but only out of shear necessity, a necessity to strike a balance in the imbalance of my life. All other necessities are meaningless.
I learned to read from looking through my father’s photography magazines. When I came upon a particularly fetching picture, say of a sunset or a woman without her clothes on, I would try to read what was written underneath the picture, in small and all too unreadable black ink. After much practice, and a great deal of squinting and effort, I taught myself to read, and after that, my whole world changed. I read everything I could get my hands on, newspapers, magazines, those other than photography ones, journals, and books. They sold clever looking paperback novels in the pharmacy at the end of our street, some with scantily dressed heroines on the covers, other with warships and paintings and sketches of historical events I’d never seen or heard of before. Pearl harbor and the Battle of the Bulge, and the siege of Leningrad and the fall of Berlin. I saw them all, and more, garishly painted on the dog-eared covers of cheap paperback novels. I read manuals on sports techniques, and books on tapestry and etching brass with dangerous acids. I read my father’s Maclean’s magazine, the New Yorker, when it was left around unattended, and a book describing how to flail the skin from a Chinese prisoner with knives and oddly shaped spoons sharpened on whetstones. I read until my eyes smarted and tears welled up underneath my eyelids. I read with a flashlight beneath my covers and in the back seat of my father’s new secondhand car when we went of on long summer holiday trips to visit relatives I hardly know, nor cared to. Now, as fate would have it, reading has become bothersome and painful, as I must count and recount, until the feeling is right, or until the correct number sequences is reached, which it seldom is. I sometimes feel compelled to flip the pages back and forth, rereading the last sentence or two until I get it right which then permits me to continue onto the next sentence, or two. This process, or reutilization as my doctor refers to it, has no intentions of letting up, so I’ve had to learn how to work around it, or to forget that its there, which it always is, even when I’m not aware of it. It has become so much a part of who I am that the difference between it and I is negligible at best.
Sodom took a wife named Gomorra, who bore him two children, both with a festering of mites and tics in the scalps of their heads. The children took to licking salt, lolling their tongues like calves awaiting the final bludgeoning. The word sodomy, the noun sodomite, is derived from this man who took a wife who bore him two children with tics and mites and tongues that lolled and licked salt from the gyps of stones. Michel Foucault, the great postmodernist, was a sodomite, a loller of salt licks and assholes. Plato, to the best of my knowledge, which is faulty at best, was not. Ass licking seems to have been a reaction to modernism, which in itself was a response to monotheism, which wrecked such havoc and cold bloodied murder on the world. So I suppose, as I do, that Foucault lolling salt and assholes is of little consequence in the greater scope of things. It changes nothing, as it should. I gave you fair warning from the start that this was a story written by a fool, not an idiot or an ideologue. Forewarnings aside, you best know what you are getting yourself into, because if you don’t, I will not be the one responsible for your sodomies or ill humors, simple or not. Be warned, all who enter.
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