The unclarified gelatin melted butter of love of life: a musing, and a partly-autobiographical bit.

A kind of half-hearted epileptic wiggle from my foot as the orgasm tore through me as if I were a sheet of paper: left in pieces on the floor, a decopage left as a secret message to posterity.

She pawed at the dunce-cap molded into her Queen on the board, a self satisfied smile on her face, so as to, in the modern parlance, "get righteous" by watching the fubar machinations of others.

I returned to my chair, but a drunken vapor that had been expelled by my own person, left somewhere, unknown and almost forgotten.

I remembered Anakin turning to the darkside, and in my own world, I watched a man's love turn to bitter hatred, and he cursed so much, but I had mused at the time, that the curse had always been pressing from the inside onto his lips, just waiting, and such, the ramifications of love and loss, the pretext for what he wanted to do anyway; it was such as wars, wanting to and just waiting for an excuse to fall, for the idea itself to "get righteous", waiting for the thing they anticipated anyway, improbable to some, and the subject of various plans and projections by others, "starting-up".

Shame to watch a man steel himself against the world, his heart sore and his thoughts turned to coldness and cruelty: it was a trust broken, I believe, a trust discarded and done a horrible disservice, renounced, like.

"It is" I said to myself.  "It really is."

Turned into a cold moor rebuke of what love had been, in the ruin, it was such that machines did things, maybe, but not the things for which they were intended, such that things of weight are used as paperweights: heavy wrenches, and the knife becomes a pry bar or some such, like my uncle slicing a pair with a tiny pocketknife, a gentleman's old school model with a wood grain handle, and his clumsy hands, he dropped it somewhere in the back forty and didn't think to look for it till he was long from the spot, leaving it hopeless lost on the ground.

His life was what--a Janis Ian song--imparting a kind of false dignity to be taken up elsewhere, his own rape victim confessions in verse, and all, in the end the comparison making him seem even less dignified than in person, and he were a pookerdoo, but he was one in my collection of pookerdoo, and thus had a value to me, in my own perview.

A wild tiger in the jungle, and a shirtless woman sweating in the sunspots beneath the canopy; maybe it was all false dignity, and we were all just pimps and loafers, pimps and loafers, and not much more, no matter what else was said, and at the end of the day, did that mean love was cheap, and honesty was whispered, and that it was all markedly transactional, a hard reality that for something you wanted, you gave something.

I remember staying in bed an entire year, after.  I think a read a few chapters of the Haunting of Hill House, about an askew geometric nightmare of architecture, and as such, the only things worthy of roaming there, were themselves anti-geometrical nightmares of men like Arosthothenes and Pythagoras, the Pythagorean plane and all, being nothing more than itself paper to be torn.

"What is life?" I mused, taking a moment unto myself, post-orgasm endorphins bringing a renewed, re-invigorated sense of clarity to my wayward thoughts.

"Oh, this!" I said, in astonishment.