Let me get back to what I was saying. Time’s limited—no room for detours. Forget Lotte Lenya. Sorry, metaphors—gotta split. As I said before, inside us what we know and what we don’t know share the same abode. For convenience’s sake most people erect a wall between them. It makes life easier. But I just swept that wall away. I had to. I hate walls. That’s just the kind of person I am.

*

To use the image of the Siamese twins again, it’s not like they always get along. They don’t always try to understand each other. In fact the opposite is more often true. The right hand doesn’t try to know what the left hand’s doing—and vice versa. Confusion reigns, we end up lost—and we crash smack-bang right into something. Thud.

*

What I’m getting at is that people have to come up with a clever strategy if they want what they know and what they don’t know to live together in peace. And that strategy—yep, you’ve got it!—

is thinking. We have to find a secure anchor. Otherwise, no mistake about it, we’re on an awful collision course.

*

A question.

So what are people supposed to do if they want to avoid a collision (thud!) but still lie in the field, enjoying the clouds drifting by, listening to the grass grow—not thinking, in other words?

Sounds hard? Not at all. Logically, it’s easy. C’est simple. The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams, and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of

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time.

In dreams you don’t need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don’t exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don’t hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites.

Reality, reality.

*

Way back when the Sam Peckinpah film The Wild Bunch premiered, a woman journalist raised her hand at the press conference and asked the following: “Why in the world do you have to show so much blood all over the place?” She was pretty worked up about it. One of the actors, Ernest Borgnine, looked a bit perplexed and fielded the question. “Lady, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?” This film came out at the height of the Vietnam War.

I love that line. That’s gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way. And bleeding. Shooting and bleeding.

Did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?

Which explains my stance as a writer. I think—in a very ordinary way—and reach a point where, in a realm I cannot even give a name to, I conceive a dream, a sightless foetus called understanding, floating in the universal, overwhelming amniotic fluid of incomprehension. Which must be why my novels are absurdly long and, up till now, at least, never reach a proper conclusion. The technical, and moral, skills needed to maintain a supply line on that scale are beyond me.

*

Of course I’m not writing a novel here. I don’t know what to call it. Just writing. I’m thinking aloud, so there’s no need to wrap things up neatly. I have no moral obligations. I’m merely—hmm—

thinking. I haven’t done any real thinking for the longest time, and

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probably won’t for the foreseeable future. But right now, at this very moment, I am thinking. And that’s what I’m going to do until morning. Think.

*

That being said, though, I can’t rid myself of my old familiar dark doubts. Aren’t I spending all my time and energy in some useless pursuit? Hauling a bucket of water to a place that’s on the verge of flooding? Shouldn’t I give up any useless effort and just go with the flow?

Collision? What’s that?

*

Let me put it a different way.

Okay—what different way was I going to use?

Oh, I remember—this is what it is.

If I’m going to merely ramble, maybe I should just snuggle under the warm covers, think of Miu, and play with myself. That’s what I meant.

I love the curve of Miu’s rear end. The exquisite contrast between her jet-black pubic hair and snow-white hair, the nicely shaped arse, clad in tiny black panties. Talk about sexy. Inside her black panties, her T-shaped pubic hair, every bit as black. I’ve got to stop thinking about that. Switch off the circuit of pointless sexual fantasies (click) and concentrate on writing. Can’t let these precious pre-dawn moments slip away. I’ll let somebody else, in some other context, decide what’s effective and what isn’t. Right now I don’t have a glass of barley tea’s worth of interest in what they might say.

*

Right?

Right you are!

So—onward and upward.

*

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