The Blog

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.

The Net flopped the mission of scream-silencers in the range of short radio waves. Those crafty contraptions meant for keeping the USSR citizens corralled and hedged off against the subversive influence of the outside world by utilizing the unbearable crackle of the static, while the interior mass media brain-washed the Soviet people 24/7/365 in the prophylactic mentality sterilization to turn the population into dumb cattle.

The prudent precautions did not prevent the disintegration of the Soviet Union though (whose death preceded the birth of the Internet, chronologically), and now everyone is free to choose their own way to get manipulated and formatted into a shithead consumer.

That’s why all the salesmen disseminating nostalgia for the golden days of Soviet era for me will always stay the base promoters of fucking Restoration. It’s only that I don’t stroll around with a Mauser pistol because of the built-in pacifism in the firmware of motherboard and other vital parts of my personality…

Presently, text hunting is looked upon as an oddball warp in your mindset, some funny atavism, sort of.

Who’d ever need the stuff? Wake up, bro! The Net’s swamped with freebie bimbo-dolls, nice yummy spice for jerking off, as well as warfare to edge any quirk of taste—be it War of Tanks or Aviation, or bare Strategy—ready for customers of any preferencial twist in their way of masturbation.

And all that is just fine! Because while they keep jerking or blasting, the Internet roots into inextricable depths and nurtures my optimistic hope for getting free pdf files and a “thank you!” in the bargain.

Me, personally, the Internet had sure liberated from book-buy expenses. What’s the point in outlay while in the Net, running high and boldly, there is everything, including books you’ll never find even for ready money? Both goodies and best things since sliced bread which all is to be paid for by only the time you spend in the online search-and-find, if not too lazy.

Arise, brother, and dig it, firstly, that the up-front page of search results is biased to favor reference to customers who pay Google or Bing, or You-Name-It for their ads, and who now want to harvest, in their turn, the gravy off you, while the rest 1,630,000,000 results in 0.62 sec are way downstream where you not at once guess to check (well, no, I don’t dig deeper than the fourth in the resulting pages) and where there surely sits the book in question, PDF formatted, but you do have what to open a pdf file with, right? And it’s no problem if you don’t because in the Net there is any opener whatsoever and free of charge too, just look for it deeper than the first page served up by Google.

At times the search might go on for a couple of days because of piggy mercantile schemers. Know what I mean? Yeah, sure, whose sites holler mutely “Hey! Hi! Here! ANY PDF FOR FREE!”

You, naturally, rush there only to run into a smaller-font notification “for registered users”, and the registration is certainly nothing else but free. Yet, after a click or two, there pops up the form for entering the number of your credit card. Some fine howdy-do.

No-no-no! They won’t take a penny off the card, and the procedure is just their long-established custom.

But where on God’s green earth could I fetch the required card from? The arid untilled patch (right, it’s me), who’s never had anything to do with the like cards? The sinless virgin hick (me once again) never rolling in the hay of that particular field?.

True, a couple of times I tried at bilking and entered a fictitious number from my imaginative ass. But no-go, Mr. Pariah Outcast!.