Sunday Scribbling #132: Lost in Space

History 230: Hadrian’s Villa: Tivoli and Beyond

Mr. Pencil Supply Company sat in the blue isles of McCullough Avenue, rattling the cages of serial commodities, evaluating the NASDAQ empires of fun to be had at the Greek Funstival, opting for neo-conservative liquidity in the dying daze of communal warfare. The tributaries of his lust swarmed the figurative Guineveres of marsupial podcasts, envying the water lilies, aspiring to Forms 183-B and Dissipations 196 and 197-F.

“I’ve breathed my last,” said the stiffneck, his Eberhard Fabers at half mast. He’d muscled his shoals one time too many, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health. He took comfort in the fact, presumed apocryphal but indeed not in the least, that Henry David had spent large parts of unsurveyed summers deep in the heart of Teutonic graphite technology. He’d withered in the end, as likely to cut a stick as fill a barge, but the sentiment was there, there might as well have been an “& Bros.” shingle, had brother survived the dismal winters that would eventually claim them all, HD in the faltering bloom of now eleven years the junior of the pea-brained executive wailing in the middle of 5 o’clock rush hour traffic. No Armadillo World Headquarters to dispense wisdom of the ages or even the sound-bite of a Pearl longneck in swamp-locket sweat.

“I came because I was axed,” Cyril breathed in stentorian monochrome: fervent cheese maker, liberal democrat, calibrated sensualist in these the fading days of the artesian west. He’d climbed into the beds of the Stephen F. Austin women twins, the abattoir of next to nothing you would that I didn’t.

Mr. Pencil Supply Company was having none of it. Sisal was not his cup of tea, violins were not his drug of choice. He felt he’d seen the last of casual percolation, and he was not about to sin for the better. That edge cut too deep, and the cost/benefits were loaded solidly in favor of the latter.

“Nod, if you must.” This from his mother, a wedding bell beeline, seminarian licensed to kill, Beethoven Hall debutante, sequestered since ’79 in the back hollows of the King William, a projection dimmed by fading headlights and occasional transmission. Mi Tierra at two in the morning, breasts in detailed inventory through rummy haze and titular scheming, these were the lemmings of all our ancient lusts, and those were the subliminal checks and balances of an account long overdue. You fought for the window seat, but you never cried foul, never gave the signal.

“I’m a Beauregard,” she said once, hoping it would stick, but never sure of the effect. You might think berets and absinthe and calendrical yearnings for boozy teen Rimbauds, but the truth was lost in Abyssinia, severed hands, severed tongues, severed hearts of the very matters most not on your mind. Those were Gemini days, when anything could happen, and absolutely nothing would. We prayed for rain; rain was beyond repair.

“Kisses, then.” The last thing you’d expect from Mr. Pencil Supply Company, in the stormy surge beyond the Conrad Gesners of Borrowdale, in the fiftieth parallels of curricular wit. Cancel the subscription, animate the fuse, embezzle the fiefdom, generate the mesmerism that entails the each and every last you ever hoped for.

“I will not desist.”

“I will loom in the mist.”

“I will expedite the very last syllable of youth’s crazy bliss. Finally, enviably, charismatically, reverentially, with hope of prism or capital. The rest is yours, and I am forever lost in your midst.”

The prismatics, the optics, the barometrics, the geriatrics of embryogony—find your persistence and fire at will. Only time takes down the willow.