I needed to get away to my fortress of solitude, it’s been too long.  The 3D multidirectional stress I am under is exhausting, to me and to poor Seedj.  We both need some time apart once in a while, and we’ve been getting in each other’s way the last few days.

I’ve plunged into a new round of working on the manuscript, producing many pages, with an eye toward an important insight:  every member of the intimate lynch mob must be as sympathetic, fully human, even lovable, as I can make them.   Writing it this way is crucial to the story making sense and for the lessons I hope the story will succeed in conveying.   

It is a cautionary tale intended as a wakeup call to anyone who finds herself (or himself, you priggish pussy) in painful conflict with those who can never be wrong and will kill you to prove it. 

I have to make it clear to the reader that not one of these torch, pitchfork, gun and rope brandishing motherfuckers are at all abnormal, mean, crazy, violent, dumb or irrational.   It’s just that when people act like a clan, all questions stop.  The deepest comfort of being in a loving group is that everyone agrees about what needs to be done.  They all take the same moral stand, for better or worse.

I compare writing it this way to sitting in a comfortable recliner, with a cool drink, wrestling with a medium sized, hungry constrictor.  You certainly have to watch the head, and you need to untangle it when it grabs you a certain way.   It’s exhausting, but also motivating, although mainly fucking exhausting.  

Of course, then I have to read the fresh poop to poor Seedj, since she’s the only one there.   She’s about ready to break, and I don’t blame her a bit, how many times can she expect to be treated to every queasy detail of this horror story loop?   One or two new insights, no matter how they may momentarily excite me, does little to freshen any of this stinking material.  So I came here, to my longtime bachelor pad, to spend a few days by myself.

Still no phone or internet service here, 34 days and counting, in spite of my complaint to the FCC.  Whoops.   Talk about yer fortress of solitude.   Have to go down two flights of stairs and walk about fifty feet up the street to make a phone call or send a text or email.  A drag. I’ll have to go to my local library, or coffee shop, to post this.   It’s a bit creepy, and disorienting, to be in an electronic dead zone in your own home.

I’ve had $250 of non-service comped by the nice people who work for the lobbyist-rich tech psychopath that has stopped providing a network connection to my building and its immediate environs.   Nice.   Every time I need to be in contact, I simply limp down two flights and walk down the block.  When it’s 93 degrees, which it will be tomorrow, or raining, which it will be the next day.

So I finally get back to my brokedown palace, and  — just to give this story a nice kind of punchline — the ceiling over my bed has collapsed, a twenty-five pound slab of concrete and layers of plaster, and a mass of dusty shrapnel, on the floor.  Revealed in the ceiling above, the dirty wood lathe, nailed up there over 100 years ago.  It will be a job to fix it.   Thankfully, I’ve taken to moving my bed out of the way when I leave here, in consideration of the deeply cracked ceiling above it.

Luckily the slab didn’t land near the head of my bed, while I was in it.  That heavy chunk of ceiling would have killed me with a direct hit — and, now that I think of it, I couldn’t have called anyone if I’d managed to regain consciousness.   Not without crawling down two flights and about fifty feet up the block.  Hmmm, that would have been a long, slow death…  

(What kind of wrongful death case would Seedj have?   Not a very generous one, I’m afraid, calculated on the corpse’s projected life expectancy and earnings.   But she wouldn’t bring the case to start with, thankfully.   Remember those 9/11 widows of young financial executives, so pissed off at the paltry sums they felt they were being paid for their dead husbands lives?)

It’s actually hilarious, in a ten plagues kind of way, the only nearby benches where I can sit comfortably, check the internet and talk on the phone, without having to walk up to the park a few long blocks away, is in front of a lush fringe of vegetation fronting the old Dyckman House.  It’s a museum, the Dyckmans had some slaves, they were rich.  A main thoroughfare is named after them.  And the greenery in front of their onetime home is, I learned last night, a paradise for mosquitos.

These thirsty bitches drank from my forearm, I saw the welts, like track marks, and went home, managing not to scratch (as Seedj teaches) doused them with ammonia and avoided the worst of the itching.  I was not so lucky with the bite on my right tit, just above the nipple, which I didn’t discover until I was in bed trying to sleep.

In addition to the mosquitos there are the rats, largely unseen in the bushes above the benches.  The screams and squeaks of these agitated rats vying for something or other in the plants right over your head are annoying.  Rats are pretty determined to avoid humans, and they’re smart in that determination, so you don’t have to worry much about them.  It’s more the idea that rats are screeching right by your ears that is a little creepy.

Fucking hell, the levels of this fucking infinitely swampy world, rotting layers deep, like the corpse lasagne a clannish mob made of my mother’s family in the ravine northwest of Vishnevitz one airless August 1943 night.  The ability of groups of likeminded souls is sometimes atrocious.  

Then again, each member of that long ago mob of drunken Ukrainians, and their German overseers, has a personal story that makes him or her fully human, kind, unique, even lovable.  

That right there, boys and girls, is the murderous tragedy of human history.