Arthur wore black-rimmed glasses of rigid looks and soft locks of moderately long hair, also black. At school he taught Armenian to kids and coming home shared the woeful tales about the eternal wounds of Armenia with me.
He held on for almost two months then brought from Yerevan a sack of second-hand garments for the village kids, a kinda payoff for his unfulfilled intentions, and I’ve never seen him any more…
And when the shy and soft first snow coated the ground hardened by the first frost, I got it first-hand that possession of a tin woodburner is not enough for wintering if having nothing to stick in and kindle inside it. The room would feel unquestionably cold both for me and the cohabitant family of mice squealing in the stone walls about the built-in cupboard.
So, I grabbed the ax bought in the process of the mentioned ceiling-remodeling and started off to the woods…
On the slope grown with mighty beech trees, something certainly grabbed me by the collar and brought to the tree as large as any other yet almost put away by the deep cave in the trunk, close to the roots.
Maybe, the dryad dwelling up in that tree got sick and tired of the insufficient nutrition through the defective trunk and called me? No way to figure out why and how it still managed standing upright.
Hacking the trunk leftovers through did not take long, before the tree fell with the bye-bye snap-and-crackle.
However, the fall was intercepted by a neighboring beech. Which situation called for climbing the felled tree and cutting it into separate pieces, for then to fall again and reach the pretty askew ground, one by one now: the crown, the pillar, the foot.
Some exquisite picture! No fuc… famous circus will ever reproduce! The Magic of Ax-Acrobatics!
The audience got frozen by awe and horrified admiration, in their seats.
Houdini! Houdini! Cast a look from wherever you are at the poor wretch, one of the crazy dare-devils, you followers!
Hugging the tree up there—so too high!—with just one hand, uses he remaining one to cut the other, on-leaning tree—felled but not fallen as of yet.
That’s a heck of an uphill job, fair ladies and kind gentlemen! Sure it is!
The man is shedding hot sweat and frightened farts, when another of cut off pieces threatens to pull him off and down in their final plunge…
After all the pieces of the quartered tree plumped down around the propping trunk, the executioner dropped his ax to the ground and descended clench-hugging the freed prop…
When on the slanted woods floor, my hands a-jitter and the knees a-tremble after all the strain up there in the Sweat-Circus Dome, I felt like widdling, and unzipped the fly, and craned over – what the heck! Where’s my doodle?
Instead of the dick I used to, there’s a lean pod of a kindergarten kid’s willy.
That’s why on the ancient Greek amphorae depicting the round dance of sportsmen and warriors, this particular part in the man’s frame was drawn so dinky – your body cannot concentrate in all directions and for all purposes at once.
Not that I really needed a dick in the bleak empty wood on the winter eve, but pinching that medicine dropper out from its sheath of the muffler of non-artificial skin with your shaking, inflexible fingers is a hard nut to crack, which is not a circus any more but some fucking porno thru and thru…
The next day, they snatched me to the village council, from midst the classes. The chairman started his bullying. In Russian but with a noticeable Caucasian accent, “Why da tree da cut? Dey uud prison send you.”
“Felled”, sez I, “as to winter thru because”.
And the wood watcher was also present, Dad of Garrick from the 4th form, putting a good word in, in Armenian, that the tree had been long since kaput already.
In short, the following day they gave me a truck and a couple of young hands to fetch the cut over to the one-room two-storied house. True, on the way some part of the booty was dropped by another house too, yet the remainder still lasted to the next summer…
And the 4th was the most populated grade at school, by the bye. Two boys and two girls. But later Arega’s parents moved to Armenia and took her over as well.
So, when the The Portrait… was finished, I did not instantly switch over to Ulyssesbut felt some inclination for that rascally scribbling once again.
The payoff on the try amounted to 11 pages, however, not a sequence to what had stayed back in the gray notebook, yet from a period ten years later.
Well, I saw they hit it off well, the pages, and only then I plunged into Ulyssesbecause there remained just 9 years of the stretch stipulated.
Thus I put my self-made doodling off, for fifo remains fifo in the Caucasus too, and if you want to get it indeed what it could mean then ask your system administrator.
However, as it turned out, my own writing was put off for 29 years and till some absolutely offbeat village…
What the heck! See? To find the point for a start is just half the battle because the question of equal vagueness and importance is to shut up in time. A lil bit more and this here blog installment would call for a whole keg instead of the routine bottle…
* * *
Bottle #4: ~ The Skedaddler ~
But let the things said up till now create no illusion nor vain anticipation that this here Island will serve just at a snap whatever is your want delivering it on a dish of great artistic aptitude and antiquarian value. Damn no! Prepare yourself for a plain earthenware and no rim embellishments in curly blue vignettes. Just for the record, at times you’d better keep in check your expectations, firm and proper. Don’t drip your mouth water within other guy’s property while having no idea who’s who in the turf of this particular neighborhood…
To start with, Island, if you are fit to recollect, is Uninhabited, and besides, the over-indulgence in colors like blue color or, say, pink, not to mention their dazzling combinations with other catchy daring hues, would result in a closer attention of folks digging the slant of your orientation. Roger that? No prescriptions intended though, just a friendly hint that the like services stayed way back, in the past, sweet, innocent, naive, and fucked up with all kinds of deficits, past, straight and strict, past which wouldn’t tolerate your finicky nitpicking about rim color and stuff but slurp whatever was ladled out and dished to you, asshole!
To wit, don’t ever count on any dainty dishes here. Yet, on the other hand, they won’t take you for a bird of their feather, them those faggy parrots in their gaudy horny, epidermal outgrowth all aglow and—look! ah! dearie cuties!—see those whoopee tails on them?! So big, and long, and simply yummy!
Besides, no, not everything is here in heaps and plenitudes. The calendar, for one, is what Island lacks, in toto. Though yes, who gives a fuck smack bang among the everlasting tropical summer?.
Or is it winter, after all? Well, you sure feel the switch of seasons when they are taking turns, but it is still hard to say if we are drenched with Cancer’s non-stop winter rains or they are Capricorn’s similarly unceasing summer downpours, eh? Right now?
Then, secondly, watch your mouth as regards “fuck” because OBPS (check Bottle #1 in this here blog for the explication) perlustrate your bottle messages and whenever you glide into talking the natural way they substitute your words with asterisks like this “****” and that’s their way to fucking filter your stream of conscience out and expose it as an unnormative lexical anomaly. So if you take aim at presenting human emotions whole-hog then go and break the orthography rules.
So, who turns out now a real lover and who’s the asterisked perverter of the language alive?
How come them OBPS guys see thru thick ocean waves obscured, additionally, by the dim bottle glass? No problem at all. They keep a computer program out there to run down and eradicate from texts the very roots and footing.