A conflict of interest

I have not slept well as of late. I feel like my bed is full of ants--often red, but sometimes black. Some large, some tinier than can be seen. Dolores, whose promise I once kept in the fortress of my bosum, has acquainted herself with my next-door neighbor, Parphit. He is a Hindu, though I'm not sure where his name comes from--I spent some time in East India, surveying the scars left by the Company, dined with Brahmins and meditated in dank quarters whose smell only affirmed the life of the Divine, so much so that I became nauseous and had to take my leave.

Both the Brahmins and the Italian mafia utilize thread, and in both cases it remains a sacrosanct object. Yet they use it for two completely different objectives. To the Brahmins it shows them to be holy men, and in the mafia it is a close-quatered execution device. The same object means different things to everyone. Where is the certainty in life? When I was a child I was sure--sure that I was standing on my own two feet when I was, when I was in pain when I was in pain. I never questioned whether it was good or bad. It either felt good or bad, and so it was. But seem is not often truth.

I hear them making love every night (Parphit and Dolores). Parphit is a capitalistic, opportunistic, immoral mound of despicable flesh. I daresay I do hate him. I hate him so much that it flushes my face like a drunkard whenever I think about him. Their heathen expression of animal lust shaking the foundations of my soul and my stucco walls. That's when the ants come crawling over me, biting me, trying to make a hill of the flesh of my belly.

I just realized I jumped into this 'blogging' without any introduction. I'm sorry to be so rude. My mother gave me the name Arvel Brushward, and I have honored her by keeping it in spite of much I long for the name Drevi--Drevi Sans-Luphor. This is my first foray into this internet super biway or whatever the youth calls it. Sometimes it makes me feel like a Pelican waiting for fish on an evaporated lake.

I spent last night with my good friend Spurlock drinking Ardbeg on the rocks and listening to him tell his stories and play his trumpet. He sits in a golden ball of central existence, never seeming afflicted in the way most of us are. Wearing his checked trilby and tweed sportcoat, drawing from a cigarette held erect and distanced in an ivory cigarette holder, he told me this story:

"I've had a lot of pets in my life but none more important to me than my pet gibbon Franz, who died in '85. He would sit at the fireplace with me and I would feed him crackers and read to him the poems of Rilke or play my trumpet. If I played something lively like 'Donna Lee' he would raise his hands above his head, start jumping and screaming along with the tune, but I could silence him like a mourner when I played 'Blue in Green.' People say animals don't think like us but they do. Within the first two chapters of the Notebooks of Maltes Laurids Brigges I could see a solitary tear like a diamond fall slightly then be swallowed into his fur like it was a treasure never to be lost or touched by another being. One night he fell asleep in my bed as I stroked his handsome brow, breathing the short shallow breaths that always made him seem like a child, and then it stopped suddenly, like a traveler who had just realized he had been going the wrong way for 12 years and thousands of miles and didn't know where he was, crumpling to the ground in despondency and becoming petrified as a monument to man's folly, never realizing that even though it was not where he meant to go, it still must have been the right way, and that was the right spot to end."

"Oh, Spurlock," I replied, "I think we are all submerged in an endless vat of pudding and the only way out is to eat, but our stomachs will never expand enough."

"That's OK."