1
“He had named her Mayumi, true arrow, because the name suggested strength and fidelity: a person who can fly like an arrow, straight to the heart of the matter.” – Kyoko Mori
The inner space of the cardboard face; the languishing lines that fall around her ankles from the topography of looking, moving the folds of concrete into structures that belie the inner workings of the backwards clock. Those are the temporal hands of past and present that always surround oneself, that always reach backwards down one's throat into the Void of desire, waiting for the feast of heavenly, or rather, cosmic bodies from the hurtling exoplanets that fall to earth like adhesive marbles, shot down with the blue arrow of truth from the bow of the distant Felid constellation.
What was once a twisted candelabrum of rusted iron and barbed wire, now abandoned to the rainy alleyway, has become the luminous star of the Quiet. The Quiet always comes, offering choices but no doorways. Quiet as lightning, and the harrows from the lake, where the fish pupils rise from the depths to greet the light – contracting like a pupil, or so the Lady Warrior might surmise. Again the face contorts and peels, palpitating with the inversion of butterflies in order to gnaw at the wooden gristle. The Quiet seeks and it runs its tail along the guard rail, with wet pawprints that quickly disappear as they move along labyrinthine streets, peeling back zippers and sealed within hidden alcoves of concrete, with the busts of deposed Napoleonic emperors entombed within, amidst the moldy largesse. The Quiet remains in the delineated depths, forever seeking the topographical indices that might shatter the libidinal stopgap.
The chiseling effect seems so futile, doesn't it? Who wants to sculpt when one can just buy? Or at least that's the conventional wisdom disseminated by the press. When your young hands reach inside of me like that, the gastric caeca of a cicada’s oblong stomach reacts like a rose, opening up in the sunlight, but then drawing closed once the first snowflakes of paranoia hit. The blizzard obscures your face, as does the bright candle that’s next to our bed, when regarding the wintry forgottenness of deciduous dithering, like when one worries about whether or not leaves will fall to especially designated places on the immediate landscape.
Then after several weeks of silence came to pass, and as luck would have it, in fact the leaves had fallen, and she who once was smitten by silence, by the provocative feathers of the Audible Quiet (that fickle-pickle, existentialish, post-modernish Void that was both friend and enemy, that was committal yet not committal, that wanted the rest of the universe to pay attention to it, but then really didn’t give a shit) eventually transitioned from shy girl to lady warrior. When questions evolve into even more questions, sometimes with budding answers, in fact, then it should come as no surprise that this lady panther – direct descendent of the Mayumi Panther clan – might gingerly step over the silicone caltrops left in her path by the erect nipple dirigibles of clay-like hands that formed from the earth, perhaps even from the beaches at Dover, or then maybe from the sacred claylicks in the Amazon where visit those colourful parrot species that live to unusually grand ages. The Lady Warrior stalks the moment with the blue sword of the sky, moving along beams of light that cast shadowy stripes across her maturing face in the way a tiger emerges from the bush, with the scent of animal musk all over her face, reminding herself and all with whom she comes into contact of her most recent feasts, her most recent exploits, as well as the fear and the pleasure that are associated with the most profound of personal transformations.
The Panther Warrior, exceptional changeling that she is, can at a moment’s notice move backwards to adolescence and then forwards to maturity; she does this because her mind has evolved beyond what most would expect from her body, in that she remakes herself every day in a non-linear fashion, without needing any source of external validation, and where articles of her clothing become mismatched with those boring cultural expectations, where the grains of sand in unsuspecting oysters revert to virgin pearls and then forward in time to those smoothed daggers of mortal obsidian, and so on. The Lady Warrior has tamed the blue dragon of truth and fidelity, sometimes known as the blue arrow of the sky, and she learned long ago how to send this beast forth into faraway lands to do her wicked bidding – or perhaps bedding, as it were – and she communes with virgin pearls in the way the skin of a cat’s paw knows the substrate on which it walks, even in total darkness, as the tactility of pleasure might eventually supersede the call of the Void, the call of the Paradise-for-One into which the mystics descend after a hard day’s work when they wish to disconnect from the world and to wash away the stress of the mortal day.
2
“…for the first audible diamond to be obtained, it is evident that the fusion of the two elements - music and poetry - could only be accomplished at a very high emotional temperature. And it seems to me that it is in the expression of the passion of love that both music and poetry are most likely to reach this supreme point of incandescence.” – André Breton
There was one particular autumn celebration of the burning leaves – resplendently orange and crimson – where the Mayumi Panther launched her sky arrow of truth in the direction of a faraway land where resided the mythical Voice of the Butterfly Man. To all who had lived in that faraway place, the Radiostatic Butterfly Man was mostly without form or substance, but rather existed as a voice. To some, this voice might as well have been made of the same substance as that of the Quiet, although that particular theory was far from certain, and in fact the Lady Warrior of the bow decided right then and there, in the midst of the beautiful autumn ceremony of fiery leaves, that she might visit this faraway land in order to quell some of these uncertainties.
As the supple felid changeling passed by many a familiar bamboo forest on her voyage to the domain of the Butterfly Man, she remembered the felid lessons of her early life, or what some might have considered to be her “childhood”, and began to focus on a distant memory regarding a certain myth about a very young and inexperienced cat in quest of the radio-butterfly: once there was a young and nimble cat who could balance herself on the sharpest of fence-posts without getting cut or losing her balance, so as to traverse many a field of private property, since she was living in the time of late capitalism. This young cat could move along such linearly arranged fences with the sharp posts at various speeds, being able to alter her speed of motion at any given time, which thus introduced an element of musicality to her multi-variable methods of fence locomotion. Therefore her movement from point A to point B could never happen in the same way, at the same rate as she traversed this path many times over the course of any particular day, and so her movements had the ability to assume a rhythmic quality, even with gestures of motion that were often syncopated with external events, like the nearby passage of a falling leaf, or the random raindrop that might always and uncannily tap her furry elbow or head in the same way each time. In this regard, the young and nimble cat, nearly grown and no longer a kitten, could deftly stalk her prey through the temperate countrycide in just the same way musicians might collaborate to produce what is sometimes referred to as precise music. According to legend, this particularly distant relative of the Mayumi Panther clan had inherited that venerable trait of homologous musicality through syncopated analogy, and obviously had no inhibitions about using such music to her own advantage, and thus to the benefit of the “Natural Environment” to which she belonged. Thus in the fullest sense of ecological harmony, the biological niche she currently occupied became a never-ending song that lasted for the duration of her lifetime, until her physical frame would eventually crumble to dust, releasing her patterns of thought (or whatever it was that made up her sense of “consciousness”) back into the Void from which they originally arose. And by way of extension, because her life was a song, then the young and nimble felid became a song as well, with a beginning, middle and end that would warmly echo and reverberate in the places with which she shared ideational homology. It was in these terms that the young and nimble cat found herself hopping along the sharp spines of a bamboo fence, on one of the many paths that would eventually bring her to the domain where the essence of the radio butterfly was to be found.
According to the myth, the young and nimble cat passed through moments of sun and shadow, through corridors of mist and of drought, and over the course of her journey towards the radio butterfly she at times could feel the vibrations of excited freneticism that always preceded the appearances of that lofty butterfly voice, and if such richly audible speech could be synesthetically visualized, then it would have shone with the colour of the sun, a warm and true golden yellow that bespoke qualities like passion, affection and intellectual fecundity, conveying the reflection of a being that was neither mortal nor godlike but which had nestled in between her outstretched, reaching claws like a glove of warmth and completion and companionship. However, the young and nimble cat was never able to receive these sensations in any constant way, but instead the reception of the butterfly signal was intermittent just like the inherent imperfection of radio transmission – here today and gone tomorrow, but always renewed over the course of short intervals of time. Like the proverbial game of cat and mouse, the young and nimble felid – venerable ancestor of the Mayumi Panther that she was – would from time to time receive the yellow signal of the radio butterfly: a snatch of rapid bird-song that would emanate from her metaphorical “radio” and thus lead her to leap anew in the correct direction, but never with any sustained and direct data, but rather only miniscule clues that were barely sufficient to point her in the vague orientation of her butterfly destination. Thus the young and nimble cat would “pounce” from one listening site to the next, with the incompleteness of the butterfly song squarely complemented by the strong musicality of her own intuitive, analogical thought, and which thus would eventually lead her closer and closer to the source of her objective. As with any radio transmission, the stream of energy could pass through walls, through pillows, and even through ideas, so there was never a time at which she felt truly separated from the mind of the radio butterfly, whether it be the middle of the night when all creatures were secluded within their beds or when the sun was overhead, illuminating the periods of diurnal activities.
Furthermore, the legend specified that the young and nimble cat spent much time chasing her radio butterfly, leaping this way and that, upon reception of his intermittent butterfly signals that were eidetically imprinted with a solar coat of arms, and which only spoke only to her, flagging her closer and closer to his semi-invisible location. And just like any other cat that hops and leaps after its prey, the young and nimble felid eventually made contact with the static beam of the butterfly radio, with her sharp little claws finally free of their soft sheathes and deeply sunk into the climax of contact with the Audible Quiet. The yellow butterfly was merely the carrier wave known as radio, while the voluntary quest of the young and nimble cat was the precise music that was actualised by said carrier wave. And this state of interaction between cat and butterfly, between sound and carrier wave, was the song that could repeat and even reinvent every other song that ever came before it; it was a moment of post-modernism that got caught up in a modernist hiatus only to be dialectically post-modernised, or perhaps the pausing of the past immediately after waking up in the present, while neatly circumventing any resulting identity crisis [essentially we’re talking about a slippery historicist dialectic at play; something to be wary of – the editor]. Thus the myth of the young and nimble cat successfully clasping her radio butterfly to her heart of heart-hearts marked the fulfillment of erotic preclusion and a blazing symbol of the ecosystem that becomes both asperger encapsulation and also a collective everywhere.
3
“If through playing with your feet under the table I might tap the ice-cubes of destiny, then the immanent patterns will be revealed; ah, alas, the strangers were not so different after all…” – anonymous
The direct descendent of the Mayumi Panther clan rose from her slumber before the first light of day (most likely around 4AM) while reviewing her nocturnal thoughts about that myth (elaborated above) of the young and nimble cat as it pounced again and again on the signal of the radio butterfly. Now how many times had she heard that myth, including all of its permutations, as it circulated amongst the elders in her home village? Countless times, really. And yet at this special moment for her that myth was actually becoming a reality, an incomprehensibly distant speck of dust that was quickly growing to the size of hurtling exoplanets that would adhere to her solar system like powerfully seismic marbles with magnets inside of them, teaching her about the grandeur of the infinitesimal, and of the deafening silence of the outer cosmos – relentless void that never ceased to pursue her. These metaphorical exoplanets were drawn to the tips of her claws, to the innermost core of her sensibility, eventually turning the lack of sensation into the overwhelming crest of orgasmic sensuality, oblivious to her convulsive hip gyrations on satin sheets and her admiration of the most colourful of carnations that always mysteriously appeared on her doorstep just moments before the dawn of valentine’s day. Such clockwork movements of shiny analogon were not only curious but likewise very magnetising.
The young feline warrior knew that she had spent over a fortnight in search of her mythical Butterfly Man, that strange being depicted as the “radio butterfly” in her clan’s myth that had been handed down from the depths of felid antiquity. While the sun was still in the process of illuminating the nocturnal landscape, the highly sensitive ears of the Lady Warrior were able to discern the sound of movement coming from a long row of brush that was growing to the east of her – an unusually lengthy snapping of twigs underfoot by some unknown entity. Perhaps some wary predator of the night? Or maybe even some of those clumsy, ugly, nose-picking humans?
The young Mayumi Panther immediately crouched low to the ground, with her ears flattened against her head, in her characteristic stance assumed when in the act of stalking, and surveyed the part of the landscape from which the burst of noise originated. Despite the dim lighting, she was still able to make out the form of one and possibly two creatures who were not all that far away from her position. From her vantage point, after some heavy scrutiny, she was able to discern the presence of two humans: the first one, also crouched low and truly an overgrown boy scout and human skulker of the underbrush, was wearing lime-green argyle golfing socks that were thus highly visible to the young feline. This particular human was somewhat short in stature, with an unusually boyish face for his age, and had bulbous eyes used for staring at people, most likely for purposes of intimidation when he was not being a Peeping Tom. In fact, thought the young felid warrior, there was something about this incredibly insecure, middle-aged human that gave her the impression that he was a very slippery and manipulative individual – just like any social chameleon, saying the right things to the right people in order to assert his control over any situation – and that he had no qualms about invading the personal space of another just for his own personal gain, and that he – supposedly as a ‘civilised’ member of the human society to which he belonged – had great difficulty in understanding and respecting the boundaries of others, whether the others in question were his wife and children, or his coworkers, or neighbors of whatever sort. And despite the rather petite stature of this hominid, he had a rather Napoleonic (subtly aggressive and bullying) demeanor that might have very well have resulted from what appeared to be his barely concealed inferiority complex. And faithfully lurking next to this petite, bulbous-eyed “napoleon” was what appeared to be his henchman and loyal sidekick: a very tall and gangly individual, most likely also equally insecure, but not quite as intelligent nor as socially accomplished. This gossipy, spinster individual through his gestures came across as being very obsequious and subservient to his Napoleonic superior, and was a veritable knuckle-dragger who was eager to please. And despite his middle-age, he was still very naïve to the extent that he was easily placated with promises of fabulous rewards based on the myth of meritocracy that some societies implement in order to promote social cohesion and behavioral compliance. Truly two cartoon peas of the same pod, thought the Lady Warrior to herself, and two individuals thus to be avoided.
But despite the momentary distraction of the Overgrown Boy Scout and his gangly sidekick, the Mayumi Panther returned her focus to the task at hand: that of seeking out her highly desired Radiostatic Butterfly Man. She knew that although the ancient myths handed down from the ages were never to be taken so literally – such as to expect the Butterfly creature to exist as actual radio waves that could jump from site to site, possibly leading her on one of those proverbial wild goose chases – she did expect the legend to have a certain facet of truth to it, perhaps in the sense that what she valued and desired, what she was after, was somewhat elusive and thus not necessarily obtained in the easiest and most obvious of ways. And especially after her near-miss encounter with that strange, insecure little man with the bulbous eyes and green argyle golfing socks, it seemed clear to her that a hyper-vigilant approach to the latest leg of her journey would be most appropriate.
The new domain which she had been traversing of late, and that she had only reached the evening before, looked more urban and chaotic to her, such that the vastness of the countrycide gradually gave way to structures and, uh, buildings of fastidious encroachment and private property, ultimately leaving her with the wistful anticipation of soft blueberry skies pierced with the bamboo forests of truth, hearkening to more peaceful moments as she’d once experienced when her parents took her for a vacation on Tashirojima, when she was an infant and when life was far simpler. There was something sinister about the landscape that also led her to take solace in the fact that she herself was not without a sidekick, which in this case was the blue dragon that had no name. This particular sidekick sparkled with enthusiasm and was always by her side. Along with her sky-blue Bow of Truth and the implicitly poetic blue arrows that were exclusively fired from this bow, either in self-defense or to illuminate the night skies with erotic beauty, it would seem to any casual observer (as well as to that strange, insecure, argyle-green Peeping Tom with the bulbous eyes) that the colour blue had become some kind of an underlying theme, and not just a visual attribute of the clear skies of day.
These latter thoughts were quite apropos as she entered a ghost-town, not unlike what one would have expected from the likes of a Chernobyl or Fukushima: pre-fab, uh, buildings in the throes of decay, covered with pseudo-but-not-quite collegiate ivy, replete with those stereotypical tumbleweeds that would migrate from edifice to edifice of their own accord (and sometimes even roaming in packs, as those post-Hollywood, post-modernist semi-sentient tumbleweeds were often wont to do). It was almost as if the man with the bulbous eyes and argyle socks represented an kind of unforgettable portent of sorts, in that he had inspired a state of hyper-alertness in the young Lady Warrior, such that she quietly walked through the town, carefully pausing to notice small details of recent habitation here and there, like in the dilapidated remnants of the saloon, aptly named The Sprawling Dawgue with an iconographic image of an over-intoxicated canine passed out on its back in a cartoon-like but sinister laboratory, with legs stiffly upturned, and a bold “X” substituted for each closed eye. She peeked in through the windows to notice the dusty remnants of the saloon-goers: skeletal hominid remains dressed in preppie attire, some of which who were even still clutching their drink glasses stained with the remnants of whatever poison they’d been imbibing at the time of their sudden demise, as if they were desiccated lab rats on display to be analysed and picked apart for the pleasure of those who felt to superior to those unfortunate miscreants.
Next, the venerable descendent of the Mayumi Panther clan glanced over at a mirror, which showed her the reflection of someone or something that evoked pure confusion: it was almost an existential experience, to the extent that there were now two of her: one of which was the person that she was, but then she felt shadowed by a twin sister or duplicate of herself that was somehow older, more worldly or perhaps more experienced than she was. This unsettling moment of ‘otherly self’ was punctuated with quiet, or as if within an erotic context maybe she had even been penetrated by the Audible Quiet, shedding her girlhood as one would casually discard soft and shimmering bedclothes only to passionately embrace uncertainty, feeling the dubious temptations of the corporeal warmth and skin of another firmly press up against hers, in order to satisfy her desires of transgressive pleasure as well as of intimate companionship. This wasn’t the first moment that the Mayumi warrior had experienced these longings, although with every passing instant such feelings grew in intensity. During moments like this, she thought of her human friend from childhood, Oui-Oui Simoneaux, who despite her brilliant intellect and creativity in the social sciences (as a tenure-track university professor high in social popularity but whose career ended tragically after being abducted one hot and sultry summer night by Eskimonic Extraterrestrials with big green eyes, and thus who was never to be heard from again, or so the rumour) had never managed to find enough interest in sharing a sensual, passionate embrace with another, and so remained celibate forever and always (or at least up until her abduction). She had always admired Simoneaux, although somehow felt as if her destiny was different from that of her friend… although perhaps this had something to do with the fact that Simoneaux was human, while she was felid? Regardless, it was through the casual perusal of old photos that she noticed how Oui-Oui didn’t always have such a studious, analytical disposition, and that in some of the polaroid images she actually had an almost decadent and thoroughly lascivious appearance, as if Oui-Oui had at certain times only barely managed to reign in her fiery lust for the touch and smooth embrace of another? But old photos could be deceiving, to be sure, especially when historical distances and cross-species-cultural concerns were at play. Mayumi had no idea what happened to Oui-Oui after she had been abducted by the space aliens, but the thought of well-lubricated anal probes and vibrating electrode experiments only gave her pregnant pause, leading her to reflect upon her own moments of confrontation with the Other, with the Void, with the Audible Quiet, with Nyarlathotep’s Chaos, or with any other metaphorical, analogonist representations of whatever it was that she both desired and feared simultaneously: perhaps generally those intimate, concrete clues surrounding her destiny – assuming that she believed in such elusive, astucious concepts like “destiny” or “fate” to which so many of her peers and predecessors had so willingly acquiesced – were nothing really but one’s fear of getting to know the entirety and the historical singularity of oneself, of making peace with all parts of oneself, and not just with the easier, socially reputable ones. No, she wasn’t Oui-Oui, and would never want to be Oui-Oui (although she’d always loved her childhood friend dearly); but instead she knew that she was not even primate, but rather felid, and of the venerable lineage of descendants from the first Panther Warrior, Mayumi, who most likely was in turn a descendent of the First of all worldly cats.
It was at this particular moment of creative divergence [“divergence,” because the Lady Warrior’s imagination-of-self, or rather self-conception took a turn that reflected independent thought rather than that of conformism – the editor] that the Mayumi Panther realized that such concepts of “fate” and “destiny” were reflective of an inner passivity, of a subtle but undeniable form of assumed helplessness or acquiescence, against which she felt the organic need to assert her own individuality, simply by way of manifesting the desire to be herself, to be master of her own “singularity of person”, rather than falling for the idea that people are so easily categorised into well-defined bins or types or labels according to subjective affinities and manifest behaviours. Of course it was true that such behavioural patterns and tendencies do indeed exist, but never could individuals be so simplifiable or reducible to mere labelling, since that common approach clearly represented the semantic-reductionist fallacy of thought.
As the seismic rumblings of her growing personality momentarily abated, her eyes latched onto a trove of leather-bound books that were neatly tucked away behind the bar of the Sprawling Dawgue saloon, just next to the cash register, which most likely had been part of the personal collection of the sullen barkeeper that he read when there were no intoxicated pub-goers to serve. All of these volumes – ranging from diverse topics like philosophy, psychology, biochemistry and even those trashy teen romance novels – had collected their fair share of dust, although strangely enough not as much as the historical grime that coated the surfaces of all the other object-remnants in the pub, such as the skeletons and filthy glassware. It was one of these volumes in particular that caught her eye: a leather-bound volume the colour of ochre and with fine gold lettering, even with a minute golden butterfly finely etched onto the book’s spine, that bore the title: The Hour of Passions & of Diadochokinesia.
The hungry young felid was immediately drawn to the book, perhaps even subconsciously enticed by the faint odor of fresh-smelling soap or earthy aftershave, the lingering scent of a man perhaps only accessible via lucid-olfactorical dreaming. Using her claws to flip through the soft, leatherbound tome was a bit awkward for the Mayumi Huntress, but she was intrigued by the thick pages that contained many a drawing of strange images, like those of drunken sailors kissing parrot fishes while standing next to the ocean and snapping selfies, and then of creative thinkers seated next to midnight candles lost in their poetic meditations, and even of sassy, middle-aged human females wearing heavy, red velvet capes over their heads and shoulders, while sniffing their index fingers so as to indicate their uniform allegiance to the Sisterly Order of Rudzik Łechtaczka, one of those super-kinky freemason groups for women, possibly. But what really captured the Lady Warrior’s affection and keen interest was the thick chapter near the end of the book that detailed the legendary life and times of the Butterfly Man, supplemented with more of the elaborate linocut illustrations. This was the special chapter in the special book that she had been searching for!
As she flipped through page after page of the section pertaining to the Radiostatic Butterfly Man, with his warm, yellow robes and butterfly mask made of corroded iron that looked vaguely skeletal but then also druidic (and perhaps even evoking the likes of the Nameless Heirophant with the silken yellow mask from the Plateau of obscure Leng), it seemed that the chapter had multiplied its pages, leading all of the other contents of the book to appear sallow and superfluous, yet while making the entire volume weigh heavily in her hands. But she could not put the book down, and felt a trembling sense of heady breathlessness that compelled her to continue skimming the contents in anticipation of some other-worldly revelation or insight into the myth of the Radiostatic Butterfly Man – or more precisely, her Butterfly Man – he who was both young and old, the epitome of energetic timelessness, never in need of any codpiece or other devices of cosmetic obfuscation, and who had occupied her thoughts for so many days and nights by way of a poetic telepathy that might have been more mundanely described as oneiric reverie. One particular detail that set her on edge was the fact that he was a cunning linguist, able to effortlessly weave new realities of pleasure by repeatedly flicking his poetic tongue back and forth in a way that appealed to her diadochokinetic Leopardopteran-seeking sensibility, just like the wings of the rabid butterfly would repeatedly flutter over a soft target like her strawberry-flavoured czerwony girl-macaroni casserole, exquisitely crowned with a halo of stubble. There was one image in the book that particularly made her swoon: an anachronistic ancient Egyptian bas-relief of the Butterfly Man (circa 1700 B.C.) in the act of using a hand-held transistor radio to electromagnetically mesmerize a high priestess of the Bastet cult, first passionately snogging her and then later pressing his red mustache against her pubic symphysis and pushing downward, all the while diadochokinetically flicking his tongue across her labia in a horizontal fashion, just like the Egyptian god, Thoth – the ibis deity, that ancient wordsmyth extraordinaire – who would snorkel through vast fields of strawberry blossoms in the high courts of Cleopatra, so as to actualise and immortalise the fantasy of written erotica, rather than relying on the spoken tradition.
When Mayumi saw that particular image, a wave of dizziness overtook her and she collapsed onto the floor of the Sprawling Dawgue saloon, effectively becoming a Dawling-Sprague sex-object. This particular transition of Sprawling Dawgue to Dawley-Sprague had happened many, many times before, to so many hapless humans both male and female, although Mayumi the Feline Huntress had never even dreamed that such a moment of deep transition could ever happen to her.
4
“All lovers do well to leave the doors of their love wide open” – Emma Goldman
It was only until she awoke within some kind of lucid but collective dream (perhaps?) that she knew something was amiss: no longer did she have the body of a panther, but instead, that of a primate. And it was only when she stepped in front of a mirror that it became clear to her that she had transformed into one of those really cute bonobo chimpanzees. Now that Mayumi was no longer confined to four-legged locomotion, she was dead chuffed about moving in ways she had never before thought possible. And in addition to the novelty of her new anatomical freedoms, she also noticed the strange dream locale in which she found herself: what some might call the insides of an enormous English Victorian-era “house”, with sub-places like dens and living rooms and libraries and kitchens and bedrooms and bathrooms, etc. Mayumi-now-a-bonobo was especially taken with the bathroom, given all of its plumbing, including a very sumptuous bathtub large enough to accommodate at least two and more likely three bonobo citizens. As she crossed through the luxuriant partitions of the house to finally reach the cozy living room where her intent was to enjoy some sitting time in one of the very comfortable faux-leather recliners, she noticed the sweet rays of sun that entered the room through the big picture-windows, setting off the dazzling colours of the comfortable, domesticated furnishings and decorations. And from the windows, it was possible to see the most picturesque of lush, green landscapes with a superlatively perfect blue sky – just the very kind of visual idealisation that one might expect to find in England where the meteorological reality was often more than not about overcast, rainy, foggy landscapes that did not conform to Hollywood ideals of sterilised perfection.
Mayumi Bonobo had just sat down with a nice cup of cardamom tea when she looked over at the window facing eastward and was absolutely shocked to see the leering countenance of that strange, insecure, little human with the bulbous eyes and green argyle golf socks. He was staring right at her as she lifted the mother-of-pearl teacup to her red lips, staring at her ever so intently, and with a nasty smirk on his face, suggestive of his taking great pleasure in the fact that he knew that she knew that he knew he was stalking her, and also in the fact that he thought he already knew so much about her. In fact, from his mean, little impish, overgrown boy scout face, the man with the bulbous eyes appeared to take great pleasure in her state of surprise at being leered at by such a creepy little, middle-aged Peeping Tom (who in all likelihood probably wasn’t getting at home whatever it is that he needed to obtain from his spouse or partner, or from whoever or whatever it was that he got into bed with at night); implying that even if only on the cusp of her conscious thought, already she knew that he knew that she knew he was already quite self-aware regarding his own pathological creep-hood, most likely the result of his unresolved childhood traumas and unfulfilled emotional needs. Mayumi turned to put down her mother-of-pearl teacup, in order to subsequently confront that strange little imp, but by the time she returned her gaze to the window, the pernicious little twerp was gone.
And just as soon as the Overgrown Boy Scout had disappeared, suddenly there was a knock at the front door of the now very-unreal Victorian house. Mayumi Bonobo could only have assumed that it was that creepy little Napoleonic stalker again, but was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was actually a very good-looking member of her own species: this particular bonobo was nearly naked except for a cerulean blue silk loin cloth and a small butterfly tattoo over his left eyebrow. He even introduced himself as her Butterfly Man, with her instantly recognizing his voice. And within less than twenty seconds she had led him by the hand into the bedroom, whereupon he instantly penetrated her after first sharing with her the true st, ever-most passionate tongue-kiss of the twenty-first century. It was uncanny, actually, how even their tongues seemed to know each other, although they’d never met in person before. And now that they were both of the same species, of the same flesh and on the very same bed, at least for the moment, she was his and he was hers, and they were able to do all the intimate, anatomically-pleasing, passionate valentine’s-day things together that normally felids and lepidopterans would never even be able to imagine doing when with one another. Up until that moment, the young descendent of the venerable Mayumi Panther clan had never really known what it meant to be “multi-orgasmic”: she found that whether he was on top of her or when she was on top of him, nevertheless her squirming, gyrating body would convulse with orgasm after orgasm, inextricably in the throes of a passionate orgasmicity that she could only have dreamed of up until this moment. And apparently, even after their Conspecific Cladistic-Convergent Transformation (a.k.a. “CCCT”, where members of two very different species were to biochemically morph into the same third species), well, the casual observer (or argyled Peeping Tom, even) could only conclude that the sky was the limit!
It was through their mutual snogging, love-making and deep, post-coital conversations that their own identities grew and evolved. Eventually they put some artificial wood onto the virtual fireplace, and spooned each other, clutching at warm and sticky, musky flesh, and fell into an indigo-tinted sleep. And while they slept, a large envelope was seen sliding underneath the door of their boudoir, and which they noticed immediately upon rising the next day (but not before they made explosive love again, for the umpteenth time). While they were sipping on cinnamon-coffee latte’s and wearing monogrammed bathrobes made of cheap terry cloth that had appeared out of thin air, it was Mayumi who got up the nerve to tear open the envelope, which had the following note tucked inside, deliberately hand-written on delicate stationary that was scented with the essence of freshly picked carnations:
“If the night wind were to howl outside under a floodlight of arctic blue, then the voyeurs will emerge from their caves of solitude and become performers, erotic performers, of LIFE.” – anonymous
Both Mayumi and her Butterfly Man, two free spirits still pleasurably trapped within their bonobo chimpanzee bodies, and scantily dressed in cheap suburban bathrobes, and with both of them still experiencing the conflicting sensation of having amorous pangs of unquenched lasciviousness forever in oscillation with the sweet afterglow of la petite mort, made strange and sneering, rudely lustful primate faces upon their consideration of these mysterious words that seemed to have been written just for them – the conditional words of the lovers – as they might have thought them to be.
Immediately there was a knock again at the front door.
The two bonobo lovers rose from the parlor couch to answer it, but apparently the visitor had his own set of keys and let himself in. And upon their seeing him they instantly realized it was a she, and not a he, and in fact someone who was not at all unknown to Mayumi:
“Oh, Oui-Oui! Now hasn’t it been a fucking, bloody long time since we last met,” exclaimed Mayumi, as she and Oui-Oui kissed each other cheek to cheek with great affection.
“Damn right, Sister! It’s been nearly a century since we were in each other’s company as schoolgirls, but now it seems like a millennium has passed. We’ve both gotten older, more mature, and… Oh, so this is the one you’ve been after!” said Oui-Oui, as she paused to get a closer look at the Butterfly Man. “Oh, you are quite a hunk, and even from the Lost Plateau of Leng, and with your kinky yellow silk mask, seismic oneiricism, and all that. Now I’m sure you’re both going to think of me as just another Peeping Jennifer, but let me say how exquisite the both of you look squirming together on frictionless sheets in front of the camera!”
It was true : as Oui-Oui finished her sentence, she pointed to some very small cameras that had been strategically well-hidden throughout the house, and especially in greater concentration in places where those passionate, intimate encounters were more likely to occur. While Mayumi’s Butterfly Man sheepishly shrunk within his cheap, suburban terry cloth robe with false modesty (and a sly grin on his face), Mayumi was beyond shocked.
“Now of all of us back at the academy, I thought that you were the most 20th-century, the most virginal, the most prudish, the one who was destined to be the bride of Christ, forever chaste and with your holier-than-thou beef curtains sealed for all time with cyanoacrylates. And you’re definitely the one who put the “Neaux” in “Simoneaux”!! But instead, here you have become some kind of transdimensional demi-goddess, picking on us poor mortals with your mystico-religious, psycho-sensualist-savantism!” Obviously Mayumi was beside herself with excitement at that point, from her unusual and recent experiences with butterfly intimacy, as well as from the completely unexpected encounter with her old friend, Oui-Oui.
Then Oui-Oui’s face drew a moment of perfect calm, as she realized that she owed the two an explanation for their current whereabouts and corporeal incarnations.
“You see, unbeknownst to you when we were at the women’s academy, I did not die, but rather I was abducted by space aliens. As things were at that time in the 20th century, I knew that I was terminally ill with a mysterious illness hitherto unidentified by humankind, but eventually learned through ice cube intuition that I would be of acute academic interest to a certain variety of space aliens who sometimes refer to themselves as ‘Space Eskimos’ but who are technically called the ‘Lordosians’ and who are thus obviously from the planet called ‘Lordos’; they were studying various transmissions from our planet earth, as well as spying on us with very high-tech surveillance equipment. The academic group that abducted me has been particularly interested in that extremely rare breed of humans who are of the hyper-virginal, super-prudish, mega-religious persuasion, and after they verified that I was dying of an unknown disease, they decided to abduct me, cure me, and then use me in their most thoroughly depraved studies, just for the sake of furthering the xeno-carnal knowledge database of their most esteemed Space Eskimo species. And believe it or not, I actually had fun helping them. And it gave me a new purpose in life that those earlier, naïve years of vigilantly studying the holy scriptures and protecting my hymen through strenuous forensic debate were never able to provide.”
Oui-Oui paused in her narrative to sip from her cup of earl grey tea – spiked with lots of cardamom, of course – and looked up at her friend Mayumi, who seemed to have a question forming on her lips.
“You have a question?” asked Oui-Oui, as she put her index finger on her upper lip and just below her nose.
“Well, yeah… I mean, how did you know that the Lordosians would abduct you, and how could you really have known much of anything by way of that “ice cube intuition” that you mentioned. Seriously, Oui-Oui, all of what you’re saying makes you sound like a total nutter. And by the way: how come you’ve got your finger between your upper lip and nose, like you’ve got a fake mustache or something? Or are you a member of that very exclusive Rudzik Łechtaczka cult?”
“Yeah!” chimed in the Butterfly Man: “what is the deal with that finger-sniffing shtick you’re laying on us? Isn’t that the very sort of thing done by that that cult of middle-aged nymphos from Alabama or Tennessee or someplace like that, the infamous Sisterly Order of Rudzik Łechtaczka, and that underneath those big, red velvet capes they’re completely naked?”
Oui-Oui Simoneaux immediately relaxed her tensed shoulders and sat back in the living room chair, calmly replying in the way a frustrated schoolteacher condescendingly explains the obvious to her pupils: “You mustn’t judge what you don’t understand. But anyway, no, I’m not part of that group, and in fact I was just trying to explain to you where I’m coming from and where I’ve been going to, over the past many years”. At that point the twinkle in Oui-Oui’s eyes was returning. “You see, during my stay with these highly benevolent Space Eskimos, and possibly because of the healing effects of their very special Lordosian Mind-Control-Ray [often referred to as just “L-MCR” – the editor], I was given a new lease on life, as cliché as that may sound. I mean, it wasn’t enough for me to be cured of my terminal illness, but after that, once I knew that I wasn’t going to die and that those vague feelings of immanent death from which I’d been suffering had been chemically dissipated, then I no longer felt like the Bride of Christ, but actually more like the Bride of Frankenstein, and with a huge dollop of promethean eroticism landing right between my legs and of course deep within my subjectivity, all at once. I had to let go of the false pride that I’d formed under those dubious circumstances I endured on earth. I realized that chastity was not a virtue but instead was just mere vociferous vuvuzela, just mere noise to be spouted to anyone who would listen, as well as to those who enjoyed vacuous debate over things they really cared nothing about.
“You see, even though I’d been healed, the shock of being forced to accept life again, to view myself as a thoroughly voluptuous, desirable, living being was alien to me. Among my fellow humans I was the asperger alien! But after encountering the Lordosians, I realized that I was more human than I thought, and what really smoothed my transition over to inter-species, libertine sensuality was the L-MCR and just a smidgen of down-home Lordosian hospitality. This mind-control-ray comes in various sizes, and with various colours to choose from, and is even affordable to those on a more than *tight* budget, gratuitously available at any Ann Summers store in the UK. (Just tell them that I sent you and get a ten percent discount.) In that respect, and after spending some time with these affectionate Space Eskimos, I learned so much about myself, and in such a short amount of time that I hadn’t grasped over the many years of my scholastic, academic pursuits.”
At that moment, Mayumi the Lady Warrior interjected: “What you say is all good and welcome, and please don’t think that I’m not happy for you to have found yourself and your life again, but what I really would like to know is why you brought the Butterfly Man and myself to… this place, wherever we really are at the moment? And what did you hope to gain by bringing us together?”
Mayumi was referring to the strange hyper-clean Victorian house in which they currently inhabited, and that was cleanly nestled amidst an almost perfect, temperate scenic landscape, as one might expect to find on a picturesque autumn day in Scotland, where most extraterrestrials prefer to land when they’re running low on atomic fuel. And of course she was also inquiring about the reason why she, a young descendent of the ancient Mayumi Panther lineage, was so mysteriously yet quickly thrown in with the likes of someone who up until that point had only existed in the collective imagination of her ancient tribe as a myth, as a captivating, mesmerizing butterfly of erotic radio waves of unquenched subjectivity that would without fail draw the listener into his fluttering, enraptured diadochokinetic path. Such was the stuff of bedtime stories for overgrown children! But for Mayumi, all of this had suddenly become real, and she needed to know why.
“Yes, I know that you want to know why. Why did I bother to contact you, to use the L-MCR on you and then to bring you to this virtual place of peace and calm and pleasure, along with the being you refer to as the Radiostatic Butterfly Man. From just yours and his perspectives, one might say it was “destiny”, although I really hate using that word… Let’s just say that both of you needed each other, and I was the medium of conductivity that drew the both of you from distant domains into a relation of close proximity. That’s not to say that you wouldn't have met each other without my intervention, but rather that I just helped things along.
“And to give you the second part of my answer,” as Oui-Oui began to continue, while assiduously preening and fluffing at her hair that had been cut in a very attractive 1930s bob hairstyle, and which almost even vaguely resembled the glans of a circumcised human penis, “I had already told you of my extraterrestrial, heathenistic ‘crisis of living’, which very precisely countered my terrestrial, and very pious ‘crisis of dying’, so after all that, I needed a few decades’ time to heal, and to re-centre myself, to figure out who I was again, which only taught me how plastic the human personality is, how when subjected to extraordinary extra-historical influences, that it becomes possible for the human psyche to so radically transform, to become a new individual. Through that experience I learned that there is a true fluidity or range of human personality, and therefore that I didn’t really know myself, after all, with so much of my identity having been a historical construction, fabricated from the biochemistry and weltanschauung of the twentieth century. It was so liberating, in fact, to achieve this perspective that allows one to separate the “core” self (whatever that really is) from one’s immediate or “manifest” self, that particular self which bends like putty to the historico-materialist forces at play within any given era.
“And as a result of that new perspective, I became a new person, and learned and did new kinds of things I’d never dreamed of while living back on earth, including how to make love the way the very ancient Lordosians do it, which is infinitely more telepathic than physical. Did you know that these Space Eskimos can cross-fertilize each other telepathically? With the power of their minds, they can reach out to their mates telepathically and induce the conception of new embryos? Earth biologists would have great difficulty wrapping their heads around the idea of one member of a species telepathically and unconsciously transmitting genetic information – the genetic variation or differences, actually, which in many ways are based on the life-experiences of the one who mates – to another member of its own kind, which essentially gets encoded or “written” onto the analogue of the terrestrial “egg”, such that rather than relying on sperm to deliver half of the genetic complement, the information is transmitted via “wireless” exo-neurotransmission. Now how cool is that?!?”
Oui-Oui took another sip of her hot tea, while gently tapping at the ice cubes floating in the teacup with a thin cocktail straw, and then continued: “After forming strong emotional attachments with certain members of this species, I realized that I wanted to travel amongst the stars like they do. But before I went on some long-arse journey that might take more than a few centuries, I first wanted to experience some human intimacy, just to remind myself that I’m still human, before I went away for a length of time that I still find incomprehensible.”
Just at the moment where Oui-Oui enunciated the word “incomprehensible”, the sound of that utterance merged with her seemingly random tapping of the icecubes in the cup of hot tea, almost as if on cue, but not quite; it was all done accidentally on purpose, of course. It was a heady, feverish sort of syncopation that again reminded Mayumi of those obsessive, fiery autumn leaves, of the overcast raindrops on pint glasses filled with sodas made with syrup from green hazel limes and the steaminess of noisy pubs, and how frogs that hopped about after a rainstorm would open their mouths to reveal a very large, egg-shaped eyeball wedged into each orifice. This moment before the rainstorm had a way of imbuing the casual observer with a cycloptic awareness of how the wetness of rain could burn the hieroglyphs of Bastet onto the plague-ridden dwellings of primitive people who could smell the sandalwood of the centuries. It was from this muddy deluge that the fresh bamboo forests would eventually grow, displacing the Egyptian dory that would never again ply the unusually blue waters, often carrying travelers who would effortlessly take the mick out of gobshite sperm plants that were so easily fractured by the laughter of homeless, overgrown children. It was only when clan members of Prionailurus viverrinus would throw away their paintbrushes for a spell and then descend to the water’s edge so that the memory of the world became real again, just so that an inverted hourglass suspended in a drop of water could finally begin to understand the hormonal oscillation between concave and convex. Mayumi understood the songs of the riparian Prionailurus so much better than she originally thought, although at least for the moment such understanding only existed at the unconscious level, even while staring at her own reflection on the water’s edge. At that moment, she became less bonobo and more panther, and felt the compelling urge to seek fresh bamboo forests in order to produce a brand-new quiver of her special sky-blue arrows, that she used for so many reasons, but so often just for the sake of the Hunt – that special penetrating sort of Hunt that would always quell the Audible Quiet, fill the Void, dispel those moments of unbearable self-consciousness, like when a dissonant mind finds itself squirming within the uncooperative body that houses it and seeks a moment of total and near-desperate extrication.
And as soon as Mayumi had found comfort and the expected within her reverie, she was called back to attention, as Oui-Oui continued with her story:
“So you see, before going on my long journey, I wanted some human intimacy – some personal touching and some deep companionship, even with a little philosophical pillow-talk sprinkled in for good measure. So that was why I brought you both here – I was hoping for a good send-off by having my first manage-a-trois. The two of you had a pre-existing affinity for each other anyway – and perhaps “affinity” isn’t even strong enough of a word – but regardless, it wasn’t too difficult to use the Mind-Control-Ray to summon you forth from your respective, daily routines, to effectively rouse you out of your highly predictable mundanity, and bring the beautiful two of you together to meet at the Sprawling Dawgue Saloon, right in the middle of just another abandoned, human Nowheresville, and then you were straightaway taken up to the mothership, which just so happens to be currently hovering about ten miles above Edinburgh, Scotland. But strangely enough, it seems that more than one little fly got caught up in my sticky web…” After finishing her sentence, Oui-Oui quickly raised the blinds of the virtual window to reveal the sneaky countenance of the bulbous-eyed pervert man with the green argyle golfing socks (but definitely not the kind of argyle socks one might find in Scotland, but rather just a cheap, knock-off variety found in any American suburbia). It would seem that the pernicious little imp was holding up a digital listening device, greedily taking in every word that the trio had uttered, while hunched by the windowsill with a rapacious grin on his face and with very sweaty palms.
As if on cue and with exorbitant poise, Oui-Oui unholstered from her belt a strange, sleek pistol covered in smooth purple velvet. The purple velvet gun snuggly fit her royal-violet, elbow-length, satin-gloved hand, while she immediately aimed and discharged the weapon, which emitted a vibrant, lavender-coloured burst of light that caused the strange little Peeping Tom individual (bedecked in argyle) to fall over, with a thud, just as one would expect when mischievous children tip over a mannequin found in any haughty, provincialist department store. Oui-Oui Simoneaux adjusted the settings on her personal L-MCR and again pulled the trigger, this time rousing the strange, little Overgrown Boy Scout and wordlessly coercing him to join the animate trio in the virtual Victorian living room. The Overgrown Boy Scout was quite a sight! Compared with the other males of his species, he was on the petite side, with a boyish face, clearly middle-aged and with definitively diminished testosterone and subtle but clear signs of extensive estrogenisation. Most likely a family man who’d gotten older and grown quite bored with routine family life, the little twerp had taken to stalking and spying on others, sometimes even intimidating them, just to get his jollies in the feeble attempt to spice up a boring, middle-age life of impending decline and perhaps even possibly with a thread of same-sex attraction insidiously and inconveniently surfacing in his otherwise hetero-conformist, mundane life. This was the type who had a brilliant mind but an insecure, narcissistic personality; the one who was erroneously bestowed with authority in both his professional and personal lives, and who always went to great lengths to present to the outside world the veneer of normalcy and good moral judgement, but who internally was actually seething with the antithesis of those traits. His self-righteousness was just a façade, perhaps some artifact of a highly repressed middle-class background, while he had enough ability to climb the social/professional ladder over the years, convincing his peers and subordinates that he was more than what he really was on the inside. In her own professional life, in the twentieth century, Oui-Oui was well aware of that particular sort, and always made especial efforts to distance herself from all of that.
But then Mayumi explained how she had recently become acquainted with this strange little man, watching him watching her through the window. While Oui-Oui slowly shook her head, the Butterfly Man disclosed to them that generally he was a magnet for this particular kind of bully, and that in fact he had encountered many such codependent individuals over the course of his existence; he firmly believed that the man with the bulbous eyes wasn’t so much interested in Mayumi, but rather that he had taken to harassing her since he knew that she had been seeking the Butterfly Man, and so he was simply using her as a way to get to Monsieur Butterfly. In fact, before Mayumi had taken an interest in her Radiostatic Butterfly Man, he had had many such encounters with this particular individual, such that the latter would always find a way to intrude into his personal space – like going through papers or digital devices, constantly monitoring and watching, sneaking around, spreading rumors and making trouble. Essentially the man with the bulbous eyes and the argyle golfing socks was incomplete somehow, still mired in his own adolescence, and only was able to assuage his inadequacies and spiritual bankruptcy through codependent interference in the living activities of those who had not yet succumbed to the Void of Non-Identity and Pessimistic Inaction. The Butterfly Bonobo related to his companions the fairly recent events of how the Overgrown Boy Scout – a fellow co-worker, actually – had hacked into his personal computer system, and gone out of his way to be seen (via the computer’s desktop) taking screenshots, while also secretly creating a backdoor entry point in the system that would allow him to continue with his intrusions once the original spyware program had been removed. The objective wasn’t to steal anything of monetary value, but rather to wage a sneaky, manipulative gambit of intimidation and surveillance, of cyber-bullying that also spilled into the “real” world (however well or poorly that word could practically defined), just for the purpose of propagating his cowardly program of conformity and control through intimidation tactics. And then another adolescent game of his was to take some word or phrase from Butterfly Man’s online correspondence and then repeat it back to him in a public place, just as a way of pulling his chain, of rubbing his face in it, so to speak – as an indirect way of saying: “See: look how I have power over you, by breaking into your personal life!”
And then in addition to the hardware breach, the follow-up attacks involved the dissemination of lies and rumors – a strong showing of calumny with the intent to harass and intimidate – but which ultimately failed. So while the Butterfly Man gave the little sneak sufficiently high marks for his logistical intelligence and knowledge of technology (so that the creep could retain full deniability for the cyberattack, taking care to erase his tracks and thus remain untraceable – although how cowardly is it for someone to operate in such a way?), he also knew that the bulbous-eyed man with the argyle socks wasn’t all that different from him in generic ways that pertained to personality, intellectual affinities and interests, and perhaps even family background with whatever codependencies, which led to the next realization and generalisation that he who takes pleasure in bullying others and meddling in their private lives, must therefore have certain soft spots or vulnerabilities of his own that he wishes to conceal! [For instance, let’s not even discuss how the middle-aged bulbous-eyed man with that unusually boyish face had an even more-unusually strong predilection for posing as a soccer coach in his spare time, which gave him access to lots and lots of pubescent male youngsters! – the editor] And that when dealing with a bully such as this one, or perhaps with any and all kinds of bullies, one must remember that most of them did not begin their lives as bullies, but were made that way by another, if one believes in the theory of the Narcissistic Cycle of Abuse, with the suggestion that any particular bully represents a lineage of bullies – that percentage of codependents who succumbed to their psychological wounds and in turn chose to become bullies themselves – sort of like how an infectious disease is propagated, or how zombie outbreaks usually transpire in videogames: with an infected individual biting an uninfected one, who in turn transforms into a zombie in order to seek out fresh victims, and so on, thus creating a society of zombies – however in this case it was more of a subjective disorder of volition. Therefore, the true test of one’s character is to manifest the requisite strength of volition or will, so as to withstand this particular kind of social weakness, to remain better than one’s enemies and to defiantly continue to be the person that he originally set out to be, rather than ossifying into that cynical weakling of the moral variety that leaves one as a flimsy shadow of one’s former self, a true coward, which is exactly what happened to the creepy man with the bulbous eyes and the argyle golf socks. So it’s tempting to conclude that the narcissistic bully actually manifests a significant level of unspoken envy and especially heightened nastiness toward his victims or codependents that would dare to resist him! But ultimately, what it really all boiled down to was a question of integrity, and it was more than clear that this strange, creepy little, middle-aged, estrogenised, Overgrown Boy Scout had lost his way somewhere over the course of his adult life.
And if anyone were to remain dissatisfied with this perspective on integrity, then (s)he would do well to consider that the individual who is happy with who he is, with the spouse or life-partner he is with, and with what he has, what he is doing with his life, is also the one who does not feel the compulsion to meddle in the personal lives of others via intrusion, surveillance, social vilification, etc. Thus, if there were any subjective fingerprint that the Overgrown Boy Scout left at the scenes of his crimes, it was the very strong impression of codependency and cowardice, of adolescent insecurity and unfulfillment, of a dearth of integrity as well as of empathy, all evidenced by the desire to hurt and intimidate, but then also to procure attention and assuage his own festering personal inadequacies. Hrrmmmm: an aggressor with an uncommonly strong intellect coupled with an equally uncommon lack of empathy, and with narcissistic, socially predatory tendencies… Now what that might mean, rhetorically asked the asperger fly to the asperger spider?
And finally, to return to the topic of the intimidation gambit founded on ambiguity resulting from stolen and possibly disseminated information, especially in the digital era where the value and saliency of private, personal information had historically become more important than ever before: the lesson learned was only the reinforcement of a much older lesson, which is that the construction of reality, especially social reality, is a two-way street, especially when navigating one’s way through the colloquial ‘Wild-Wild West’ of rumours. The accused/harassed/persecuted must say to himself: “There’s what I know (about myself) and then there’s what you think I think I know…”; being able to tell the difference between the two is critical, and as such it’s the defining kernel that enables one to extricate oneself from falling prey to the Fine Art of Gaslighting. The one who truly knows himself and his experiences is the one who does not even bother to ask about what others think they know about him, as it reveals insecurity and a lack of self-knowledge. But social awareness is obviously a social construct, made by all and yet more strongly influenced by those who have any kind of substantial authority over others in the hierarchy. So even though social arrangements represent a collectively determined social “knowledge” or hierarchical record, and thus made by more than one person, the key to the perseverance of one’s true self within unfriendly social settings resides in the ability to not willfully acquiesce to the conventional (and inherently unbalanced) social rules pertaining to the formation of such knowledge – to remain out of step with that process (through autistic fault or even through autistic design – it doesn’t matter which). Not that such a strategy would be any guarantee of complete success in thwarting such vilification, but that it nevertheless effectively serves as an unspoken rejection of said attempts at projection, such that when both the one who projects and the one who is projected upon unconsciously accept all of the relevant vocabulary and “facts”, then efforts of the projector become so easily validated, whereas if both parties – projector and “projectee” – do not share the same perspectives, then the resulting dissonance between semiotics and semantics effectively thwarts any underhanded attempt at shifting the social reality – thus, it takes two to tango, even when the ugly dance takes place under the gala auspices of labor in a capitalist regime. And so the final conclusion is best formulated with the following rhetorical questions: who judges the judges; who watches the watchers; and who the fuck categorises the categorisers??? We’d really like to know!
But anyway, both Mayumi and Oui-Oui listened attentively amidst the comforts of the virtual-reality living room in the programmed Victorian-era house while the Butterfly Man shared those anecdotes with them that detailed his interactions (on the corporeal, mundane level) with the Overgrown Boy Scout who sat before them, still very much in a daze from being hit with the Lordosian Mind-Control-Ray. It was only when the Butterfly Man finished speaking/sending radio waves that Oui-Oui had finally gotten a better idea about the obscene little prisoner she now beheld at her feet. At that point, Mayumi the Feline Huntress and her telepathic Butterfly Man (who always aspired to keep in touch with her via the telepathic transistor radio, if one believed in the ancient legend of her tribe, handed down from the ages) began tapping innocuous little coded missives to each other on the super-cold ice cubes floating in their respective cups of hot tea. The messages had a brief time delay that made them indecipherable, but as the minutes passed it wasn’t at all difficult to infer that they were transmitted with the kind of language shared by lovers who felt as if they had known each other for all their lives.
After a few minutes of salubrious and highly affectionate ice cube tapping had transpired between Mayumi and her partner, Oui-Oui pulled her hands from her meditative brows, opened her eyes, and then spoke: “As I said earlier, my original intent was to bring the two of you here not only for a casual meet-and-greet, but also to have some juicy three-way consensual sex before I went away on my long, intergalactic journey. But now, given the serendipitous appearance of this cynical, needy little pathetic wretch splayed out before me, I think that perhaps I just might have to procure my jollies from this one here,” while gesturing in the direction of that obscene, little bulbous-eyed Napoleonic Whelp, who had by now fallen into a catatonic stupor and was sucking his thumb, while blankly looking up at the ceiling.
“What did you have in mind?” asked Mayumi.
“Oh, I’ve got some rather refined and definitive ideas about that,” Oui-Oui replied, as she opened up a storage area that had hitherto remained invisible until she pressed her finger against the wall behind the furniture. She reached into one of the cubby spaces and pulled out a Mrs. Claus costume – the finest red velvet from the North Pole, replete with genuine ermine trim – the sort of costume that some Christian women like to wear around the December/January holiday season, like, in the northern hemisphere, especially on those cold wintry nights when they are alone with their nasty thoughts in front of a decrepit, suburban, floor-based heating unit. She held the costume up to her desirable form and asked the two Bonobo lovers what they thought of it.
“It’s definitely you,” replied the Butterfly Bonobo.
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This is your journal, for your writing. An interactive journal with historical tidbits designed to nurture creativity and self-motivation, features one side for drawings, sketches, or pasting personal pictures, and the other side lined for notes or j
