The Blog

Ode to Sensitivity Numbness

By and large, they were on the march to defend their Motherland, because each of them was a Soldier and God was with each of them …

Well, specifically, they had a combat mission to climb the hill, gain a foothold there and prevent the forward movement of the advancing enemy forces. So, on they went, upward, in a march column, united by the common mission, one and the same goal.

However, while climbing up, under their individual helmets, there spun personal thoughts or, rather, some fragments of thoughts, by each one his own, about what a handsome goal Barcelona scored in that game, the sock in the right boot should be neaten tighter otherwise the bitch will rub the foot to bleeding, to tell the younger brother to look well after the horse, but that girl from the parallel class at the prom, in her pink blouse, really beautiful and gave a kinda personal smile, like, in a grown-up way, a sort of…

Each about his own, but outwardly only heavy abrupt breaths, almost hoarse wheezing, is heard, yours and of your comrades.

So they marched and did not know that the cup with coffee grounds at the bottom had already been set aside and the fingertips habitually lay on the slippery back of the mouse in the monotonous calmness of the control room, wrapped into the cozy even hum of computer technology…

The drone in the sky left the stand-by position and followed the given course to drop a cluster bomb…

They did not complete their combat mission, they died on the march. All of the platoon. 25 people…

Later the parents will post photos of their boys in soldier uniforms on Facebook*.

‘Help find the missing person’.

Only in vain. Everyone who knew him lay around in riddled camouflage with patches darker than the darkest khaki, jagged holes torn in helmets.

All of the platoon…

Thoughts are gone, the sock does not bother anymore, the bay horse Booyan crunches the faded grass of autumn, Barcelona runs out to train, a beautiful girl, not in a pink blouse, without a smile, enters the subway car, the operator hands over the shift to his partner…

More and more often I am accused of callous heartlessness. I hope this is true: I have strangled out the empathy secreting organ in me, otherwise my heart would have burst long ago.

But still, even so, by the end of a day, it feels squeezed nastily…

Forgive me, boys—let, after all, at least someone will ask… just because at least a single one should… beg you for forgiveness…

DC WDB

(Displaced Civilian in the War of Doomed Boys)

(*Facebook is an allegedly terrorist organization, its activities banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.)

* * *

Bottle #38: ~ Consolation By Means Of Philosophy ~

(A rather cozy though, at certain junctures, pretty screwed up interior of the study of a semi-middle-aged philosopher who has long since dropped out of giving a fuck about all that shit, however, the bookcase still emits the dull gleam of the golden embossing in the volumes’ spines.

The stout table is flanked on both sides by a pair of chairs created by the full of divine afflatus chisel of Chippendale, a cabinetmaker from conscientious London artisans.

On the bare tabletop, a Chinese cheep counterfeit of Anthony van Leeuwenhoek's microscope, which did open our eyes to the surrounding microbial world about us. Two or three Parisian nick-knacks for nonchalant amusements of a loner are casually dropped upon a pile of clippings from forgotten newspapers seen thru the press at the times of storming the fortress of Ochakov and consequent alienation of the Crimea.

From under that mess there hangs an engraving over the edge of the table – a Playboy poster from about the last decade of the 18th century. The caption grabs attention by use of those izhitsa and yat letters from the obsolete, pre-revolutionary spelling, and fills a long, fluffy, sausage-like cloud that hovers over a juicy lady who stands in profile on all fours atop of a trough fretted to chips by constant usage—her hoop-skirt crumpled and tacked up her laborious vertebral column, the corset flung open in the frank negligee of a suburban slut—runs: "And only by tireless handwork wilt thou come and reach the goal of thine striving!”

A tall bottle of dark glass, lacking its cork, stilled in a motionless round-dance along with a pair of glasses, one of which is empty.

The philosopher himself stands with his butt pushed chillily into the unlit fireplace to the right of the tall double-leaf door. In thoughtful silence he strokes the dimple, which looks like a pea print lost in the three-day stubble over his upper lip.

The unpretentiously quilted dressing gown is casually bound up over his hips with a tasseled waistband. The brocade in his attire is pretty worn, the diamonds patterned by the stitches in quilt seams bear occasional marks of encrusted spatters of coffee dried up with the flow of time, and irregular spills of sperm, crusted as well.

The head of the thinker is wrapped tightly in a long strip of cheap Turkish-made waffle towel, also in smears and smudges suggestive of smutty stimulation.

The philosopher's visitor, Count Nulin, who’s recently returned to the smokes of the kurnaya izbas of his Fatherland from the Heidelberg University, is sitting on Chip's chair, since Dale's chair is occupied by a peacefully dormant brown dachshund of a woeful fate, as evidenced by the bald rubbed-out spots in her short hair.

The shaggy mutton chop of the guest naively tries at concealing his absent ear’s stump, cut clear off by the rapier in a student duel.)

Nulin: (Hotly) But what’s after?!.

Charsky: (Leaves his dimple alone.) Why, my dearest, you still haven't touched your glass. And utterly in vain so. Some highly recommended drink, I promise you. As forwarded by our forthcoming classic, "Though the swill reeks it’s not meant for dogs’ dicks…"

(The quote is interrupted by the heart-rending howl of the dachshund all at once burst into life on Dale's chair.)

Mimi, dear, you’re as always at ready with your unasked for censorship.

Nulin: (With his ardor unabated for a sliver of a notch.) Yes, but a continuation?!.

Charsky: (After waiting until Mimi has scratched all of her nude spots in turn and fallen asleep again.) Ah, so that’s what’s put you on the prod… well, it will undoubtedly follow. Fan fiction scribblers are constantly alerted to ride whoever’s coattails, you throw a gnawed bone at the jerks and they will blow it up into a balloon of three-season sequel…

Nulin: (Instructively) Oh, come on, fan fiction practices are by no means and not at all the belles-lettres, sublime examples of which we find in our, albeit not adequately washed yet Fatherland.

Charsky: Oho, my friend, you have not a little been warped into a nostalgic boob by that punky honky-dory Germany! I'll bet my bottom ruble, Sir, you have arrived back an all-round Slavophile. He-he… But as our homespun Westerners will twit you, ‘chirp up and check my titbit on Fri eve slews of lols’…

We all, as condescends to note the literary berserk VB, got spilt out from The Greatcoat by Mykola Gogol, and here I would most modestly attach an aside – the picnic lasted not for long. Sad yet true, with the works of Michal Afanasych the Russian Literature, as such, came to expire their final breath.

The literary throne sees now the endless parade of one-night-stand Pretenders’ arses, hears the self-instructive slurring slurps on how to piss the marital bed over and be pleased as Punch, witnesses the mournful efforts of sophomore seminarians at labors to convey the shades of best-selling garbage on the global podium of mass consumption products, and nothing more for observation in our entire firmament.

Nulin: (Haughtily) Gogol – Bulgakov? From an impotent to a morphine addict? And that's that? Harsh is your verdict, Sir!. Besides, both of them waft off a surely pro-Ukrainian sniff… Why, in the light of growing vigilance and further rancid metamorphosis at the court of Their Imperial… you here run into the risk, deducible by a naked eye, of getting your hide branded for Voltairianism.

Charsky: If afraid of cute young ladies in muslin-wear, the playboy has to grow hair on his balls before attending balls…

And, as regards your innuendos to the recreational preferences of the great ones, then, Sir, such remarks are nothing but a sleeve stitched aloft the cunt, to voice the sage adage of my saddler. The man, a propos, is a pro in the like matters.…

After all, we, by and large, don’t give an eff about the color of the horse pulling the cart of firewood, we’re interested in the cargo. Discussions of the skin-deep properties of a chance intermediary supplier are good only for idle gossips in the lackey room. Let’s not create clay-legged idols nor boys for whipping. The culmination crowning the strain in defecation labors makes us all equal to each other, regardless of confession or race, or shifty whimsicalities in sex orientation, and equals us to any other living thing from any of one-cell transparent protozoans up to our classmates in the class of mammals.

Ben we none but only humus, a fallow field for the growth of the conductor, through whom spirituality beth brought down to our vale.

Where from?

The question is too transcendental.

Who’s the wright?

Over-combinatorial for an answer.