Flash-fiction – Anna Bidoonism

‘Dark ladies’

and *duplicitous* men

We know, you and me, we know, you and I, we know that throughout history beautiful ladies have been lusted for, loved madly and loathed deeply. They have been demonised, objectified and denigrated, in no religious tome are they depicted as anything other than subservient to man. I mean look, this ain’t exactly an epiphany on my part but the more I dig, the more I learn about English literature and the history of the English language, the more I’ve been required (willingly actually) to read critiques and summaries of the seminal works, those that are lionised and imortalised by the compilers of one anthology or another, kept contemporary by being chiseled into a seminal chronology of this language’s literary history.

But, my dear reader, we all — most of us anyway — are partial to pleasures of the carnal kind. And, well, might this fact of nature — we are here after all for no other purpose than to breed ‘n’ raise our offspring, aren’t we; ain’t we? — mean that the inequalities between the genders will never be ironed out… Yes I’m over the moon with the likes of

Finland's Prime Minister Sanna Marin — Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern — New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern

but I fear like all ‘great’ empires, progress along gender equality lines waxes and progress wanes. The deep truth is this — and dear reader I am from one of your so-called developing countries — sex controls the mind’s of men. It does, even if they don’t think it. Yes, they all have mothers, many too have kid sisters but when all’s said and done, they don’t tend to like the kind of woman who speaks her mind. On this blog I’ve talked about:

Sex and Punishment
Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire
Eric Berkowitz
The “raging frenzy” of the sex drive, to use Plato’s phrase, has always defied control. However, that’s not to say that the Sumerians, Victorians, and every civilization in between and beyond have not tried, wielding their most formidable weapon: the law. At any given point in time, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly. Jump forward or backward a century or two (and often far less than that), and the harmless fun of one time period becomes the gravest crime in another. Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout the millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior.

I’ve talked about:

hand-up

The selection of Judge Brett “the gyrating groper” Kavanaugh to the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States, once more, the mother of all misnomers: the ‘Pro-Life’ constituent. It also makes clear the extent to which a female’s right to decide upon her own reproductive decisions is now under threat.

I’ve talked about:

Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy on love that is succinctly encapsulated in this masterstroke of hers: “No one is more arrogant toward women than the man who is anxious about his virility.”

but I somehow think that because we many of us are driven by sexual desires and urges, this somehow makes society inherently gendered and, inevitably, us, the fairer sex, are gunna be buggered by the misogynists amongst mankind.

The Fear Factor

a letter, unread:

Dear Jamela,

There’s one thing I know for sure, there’s nothing I fear more than losing you.

I’ve just woken up from a nightmare (covered in a cold sweat etc.). In the nightmare (I remember it vividly because I woke with a jolt), I had done something to annoy you and, as a consequence, you had blocked me. I was desperately trying to contact you, but each time I did you’d read what I had to say then blocked that communication channel. Finally, every avenue was blocked so I kept on going to your house (this was a dream and your house and family were here in Holland). Each time I’d go to your house (which was a different one each time) a member of your family would tell me you no longer lived there but I could hear you dancing, or singing, or talking or even playing tennis… I kept trying to get into these different houses to see you, to apologise, to explain myself but on each occasion I found myself trapped in a bathroom, a bathroom from my childhood, a bathroom with carpet on the floor; a bathroom that kept turning into a padded cell of a lunatic asylum.

Anyway, that was a nightmare, nothing more — I’m remembering now that book, Why we Dream. I don’t believe that nightmares are anything other than our brains sorting out and processing information. Nevertheless, as that book kind of suggests, we can somehow take guidance from these dreams/nightmares and that I plan to do. I will be thankful for every day I have you with me as a soulmate, I will work hard to understand each and every one of your personality traits in order for me to treat you right. You have given me so much, you continue to give me so much and, to me, you are the elixir of life; the epitome of my happiness; ‘the’ reason to celebrate and cherish being alive.

It was just a dream, just a dream.

Yours in life & in love,
James

Heaven — is with you

Hell — is without

p.s.
Welcome to the twenties! They say to be happy, inter alia, we should (a) go to bed early and (b) embrace boredom. I can see the logic behind such advice but am I likely to follow it? I think not. I am a hedonistic human being and this is something that I cannot escape. Oh! The (futile & fruitless) Pursuit of Happiness.

The book mentioned — Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey — is written by Alice Robb and is reviewed in this post: Dream on

Dream

on the vexing subject of anxiety — **Understand your anxieties**
Try keeping a diary of what you are doing and how you feel at different times to help identify what’s affecting you and what you are best able to take action on.

Elixir
A magical or medicinal potion. — “The seller of snake oil promised Oliver an elixir guaranteed to induce love.”

Epitome
A person or thing that is a perfect example of a particular quality or type. — “He looked the epitome of elegance and good taste.”

Hedonistic
[adjective]
To be engaged in the pursuit of pleasure; sensuous and self-indulgent. — “Julie dreamed of a hedonistic existence of sex, drugs, and hardcore house music but in reality moped around in her dressing gown in her suburban living room.”

Lunatic asylum
A psychiatric hospital.

Padded cell
A room in a psychiatric hospital with padding on the walls to prevent violent patients from injuring themselves.

Strung out on

a marooned schooner,

I was way down, deep deep down below the decks and it’s unbattened hatches, scouring and lurking around like a stowaway seeking succour. It seemed as if there was no tonic to be found; no medicine to mend, for a time, my moribund mood — all the hammocks were of hemlock, no harbour on the chart could afford me birth to lay low in and ease, for a while, my knotted mind — but then, a hint of respite, the faintest of breezes did blow and the sagging sail taunted ever so slightly, I happened upon the following line, penned by one Scott Jeffrey: “There are three main ways to learn about human psychology: read Greek mythology, read Carl Jung, observe others.” He went on to say that while observing others was the most powerful, reading about the psyche helps inform such observations. As currently I’m at sea, I’ve few, and ‘no ‘ new humans to observe, I thus decided to hold course and scrolled down to see which books he’d recommend — this, the going off on absentminded digital tangents, the seeking out of uncharted waters, is what I’m now driven to do — my one&only has abandoned ship and thus, locked shut the open book that we would deviously delve into on a near nightly basis; these nightly trists did span for more than the proverbial one thousand and one nights (they lasted just shy of 6 whole years, 6 deliciously delectable but deeply destabilising years) — but anyway, nevermind (well obviously I do deeply mind but this is my burden to battle with, not one that tonight at least, I’m able to thrash out and fathom in the public arena: Oh! Ladies of Rome, lend me your ear for I’ve a tale to tell of yesteryear) — of Jeffrey’s recommendations was Victor Frankl’s, Man’s Search for Meaning. I didn’t realise what it was about but it is, I learnt, well received and has obvious pulling power. Upon the embarkation of my investigations into Frankl, I stumbled upon Lapham’s Quarterly – a magazine that (and I here quote verbatim), “embodies the belief that history is the root of all education.” To which I say, “here here to all of that.” You see, the magazine’s editors juxtaposed an excerpt from Frankl’s book, in a feature section called ‘Conversations,’ against a passage extracted from Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes, 1651). You tell me. You tell me because, after that, I then ‘stumbled’ upon some eerily touching poetry it seemed to be speaking directly to me. It is alas the sort that’s uploaded on social media platforms as images and thus not easily sharable (of course and probably, that’s the point). I feel I’m going mad (maybe) because I feel it is being written in an indirect but explicit way for me to see and read. I was compelled to ask myself if I’ve now become the Captain of that fabled becalmed clipper ship, doubting my sanity and questioning my very existence but think — I reason to myself — of the Midnight stalker, the Mute troll; I mean, I’m saying, was I not prowling known hangouts? Was I not trawling about in places where I should/shouldn’t be? Where I was/wasn’t assumed to be cruising about in? Maybe I’m not as delusional after all. It is as if my departed other half is pouring out their soul to a receptive receiver who in turn is converting these pains into poetic form and posting them online. But it can’t be, can it? Well, technically it could be. It really speaks to me and the trials that I imagine my absconded soulmate to be going through seem to be those that I read and the imagery of scars could at a push be those that I may be considered to carry… it was said, was it not, that you could have (had) it all…

❝
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end.
–
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt.
–
❞
— Trent Reznor (but in the tenor of Johnny Cash)

Yeah, they’ve cut and run, left me high and dry to cry out and die a thousand deaths but it was i. It was me. It was i who’d made them walk the plank a hundred or more times, knowing full well they were no good with convoluting currents. It was i that unleashed my vile cat-o-nine-tailed tongue and delivered vitriolic diatribes of great length (with her highness Hindsight these were a consequence of my guilt on the one hand and my anger at not being able to be with my one & only day and night — context, culture and circumstance did forbid that from ever realistically coming to fruition during those turbulent times). And maybe the lost love i read about in those jay-peg image poems is between another pair of nature’s most mentally troubled creatures. We can all of us read into something whatever the fuck we want to read into it; some like the sea of tranquility, others of us prefer the fire and the fury.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”

**Thomas Hobbes**
by John MichaelWright (circa 1669-1670)

Viktor Frankl, österr. Psychologe und Arzt. Photographie. Um 1975

som_cover — but when all’s said and done we continue to (over)think

lapman's-history--02 — so when night is upon us we continue to wonder

flesh_cover_0 — this morphs into a mixture of simple to quantify carnal lust

8173PEH672L — and, alas, deeply felt love that’s simply not quantifiable, is wholly insatiable and can ultimately only tear us into two severed and separated hearts.

Double Vision

Shared Secretly (well, honestly so)

Prologue

It is often stated that it’s a miracle a Department of Philosophy exists here at all. Within its underpopulated lecture rooms, it is once in a while asked, ‘where’ exactly, is life led?

PART ONE

“Breakfast’s ready, your mother, umm, wants the both of you to come.”

The peachy pink calm of the dawn sky was becoming, as it invariably did, a blinding, bleached bone white daze. Every day when Amna woke (or more usually when Ezra the Ethiopian maid awoke her) she would then turn to wake her twin sister Eman and then pick up the book she’d been reading the night before. In her hand she took this book and went to where her mother was sitting. She proceeded to give what was essentially another monologue:

“Whilst ignorance is bliss, knowledge, it’s nemesis, is the pivot upon which all of humankind’s progress rests … this, the book argues, in addition to being ironic interferes with life’s fundamental purpose, the pursuit of happiness.” Eman, it should be noted, was rather less loquacious; in tandem, the duo nodded.

After fresh warm milk and buttered bread with apricot jam, Amna went hand in hand (so to speak) with Eman to university. The family driver, an Indian with hairy ears and the temperament of a tortoise called Iqbal, is the chauffeur–cum–chaperone charged with preserving their dignity and upholding the family’s honour. That day he drove as sedately as he always did from the walled compound to the walled campus in a blacked out polar white station wagon. As per usual in the rear seats, Amna helps Eman review the previous day’s lectures.

In the university’s cafeteria, the pair sat. The coffee chain’s cup wasn’t a new one, in marker pen it was written E, with a cross, then Amna and a X. It had been handled a lot but had seemingly been painstakingly and purposefully preserved. Eman was beautiful and she did look strikingly similar to a well-known and much coveted after pop star. (Beguiling would perhaps be the better adjective.) Amna wasn’t in the least bit shy and she was at the superficial level very approachable. Yet, they were typically a solo duet; the type who would bring packed lunches as opposed to purchasing a pizza for two deal.

The world can be cruel and it is gossip not oil that makes it go round and round. She’s aloof, she’s vain, she’s arrogant, she’s two-faced. Yep, such descriptions are commonly thrown their way. A group of girls talked about her latest twist: talking to the skies. Yes it could be to other—sisters perhaps. They conceded, with Bluetooth and Wifi its now impossible to be sure who are the sane and who are the insane. What a pity, she’s no friends, and now she speaks to herself non-stop. Here is the strange thing, all students on first contact want to befriend her but as lunch follows breakfast divides soon follow. They’re jealous of her looks or her grades or her ways with foreign labourers. Unbeknown to them, this day was to be their last (for a while at least anyway).

PART TWO

It wasn’t only at university this habit of talking to unobserved others was increasingly noted. The people in the village were not especially educated and this compounded the problem. Upon their return the final decision was dictated for all to hear: university life was over. Life looked bleak but a ‘chance’ glance over the compound wall would change it all. Yet between the chance glance and the trip above the clouds to a different world (so to speak) the consensus view was that she’d been possessed by another: two souls, one body. The father decreed, “this is what we’ve been told to do so, this is what’s right to do.”

In the weeks that followed the beatings became almost ritualistic—ten firm strikes and some words said before and after each crack of the cane—all books were banned and finally pen and paper was placed under prohibition. In tandem, the neigbour’s son was growing evermore infatuated. It had been the first time that their eyes had met for a dozen years (as kids, they’d all played in the open ground between the villas and that neighbourhood’s mosque). His Master’s dissertation was near completion and he was to travel to Britain to do his Ph.D. in September.

Villages talk, he knew of the happenings next door but was circumscribe and diplomatic toward agreeing with the sentiments of the men of the neighbourhood. That beautiful creature was troubled (she was troubled and/or in trouble), yet, in his opinion, there was nothing that love couldn’t cure. Following another beating, she said, “for how long most all of this go on?” and was answered with the following words, Salem, son of Sultan Al Aswadi has asked for your hand and you are to be married to him. Salem! the one with glasses? Rejection was a possibility, we are in 2015, daughters can now say no, should they dare to do so. But to escape the stick an “oh, okay” was the response.

The morning after the wedding the newly wed husband called upon the father of the house next door, the scarring had made him livid. “This is what we are told to do. This is what we do… don’t say you didn’t know” came the nonchalant reply. Salem had intended to be a man but when faced by this stocky ogre of a foe he draw the duel to a close by saying that they’d be off to the UK sooner than planed. The father was releveled, he’d thought that he may have instead been lumbered with a dependent divorcee to darken his family’s name.

A series of tests at Manchester’s Wythenshawe Hospital, in the cold crisp months of the northern English winter, confirmed that it was a ‘manageable’ psychological disorder which indeed love could aid. In the week after the winter equinox at a procedural health check-up she was told, in a thick Mancunian accent, that she was carrying a little someone inside of her. That evening in their studio flat, she looked into his tired eyes—he’d been reading all the day long in the library on Quay Street—and said, “congratulations, you’ll soon be a father.”

“Should we call her Amna after your mother or Eman after mine?” he excitedly replied.

Epilogue

Periodically the Department would convene open door debates. In a recent one, where the ‘where’ was the focus, it concluded with the arguably troubling thought that one’s very own head was where it all took place. Amna looked at Eman and said with out uttering a single word, “can this really be so?”

Empire of Deceit

entrapped in honey, money or, plain old power?

Wait

honey-1

For

honey-2

It…

honey-3

Earlier that day, a female millennial was conversing with a generation X lady of class. It was done over the telephone and she said, ‘she’s just left and he’s looking at her behind with quite some lust.’

‘There was no touching?’ Enquired the other.

‘No’

‘Was she wearing the agreed upon red dress?’

‘Yes, all’s documented, her body language was clear, she was willing to go further.’

How?’

‘She’d have done it there and then on the desk if he’d wanted it.’

‘Over the desk you say, how convenient, but how cliched too.’

‘Look, I’ll send you the file now, you can go over every syllable and decide for yourself just how salacious she was.’

‘Maybe he suspects—’

‘No, how? If he’d suspected anything, he’d have feigned disdain, he was horny. Watch the video frame if you want.’

‘I shall.’

‘He’s loyal. Perhaps red’s not his colour. Maybe, he prefers older ladies.’

* * *

On another phone, the millennial said to a generation X man of class, ‘good job, you played that well.’

He replied, ‘she is more suited to the fashion houses of Milan than a fictitious hedge fund actuary position.’

‘No, she’s fallen for it; she’s still on hold—’

‘I shall be brief, do not underestimate her—’

‘I don’t.’

‘She said you are wiser than you let on too—’

‘Did she now?’

‘Yes, I mean you fuelled her infidelity concerns and, darling, you got me to fiddle with her Facebook advertising preferences putting my discreet investigative services as her top hit.’

‘Just a little asset management I suppose.’

‘The video file is on the cloud now—’

‘Splendid.’

‘I’ve played my role well haven’t I?’

‘Yes my dear, you have now.’

* * *

The millennial said to the lady of class, ‘I’ve tempted that man of yours at the gym and on the streets. Lady Debonair, he is loyal.’

Well, so it appears—’

‘Appearances don’t always have to be deceptive.’

‘Red is red, black is black.’

‘What? Look, you know, he’s a handyman. I’m not saying he’s as pure as Snow White.’

‘A viewer of filth you mean? Aren’t we all?’

‘If someone says they never watch such stuff I’d trust a snake oil vendor more.’

‘Indeed, as would I.’

‘Job done?’

‘Yes I suppose so. Listen, no offence, but as I’ve explained and as you’ve observed, he’s capable of selling sand by the shipload to Gulf Arabs.’

‘Yep, I’ve noted his capabilities. No offence taken.’

* * *

In the evening of that same day in a palatial suburban family home owned by the man of class, the lady of class lay waiting in her old honeymoon gown. She valued plausible deniability for downstairs, she’d prepared the pasta and pesto in the same way as it had been made for them on the Amalfi coast ten years ago. Over the phone she said, ‘Claudio?’

‘All is a set il mio amante,’ he replied.

‘Hotel first, then quayside apartment?’

‘It will be as you want it to be mio dolce.’

At the same time, in a penthouse apartment which also happened to be owned by the man of class, the millennial lay dressed in nothing but a high-end pair of headphones. Her was anxious look was due to the GPS tracker showing that the iGen girl’s phone was both switched on and stationary. After once more hearing, ‘what’s up, Virginia here, leave a message after the tone,’ she said, ‘we need to debrief… what are you up to?’

At the same time, the driver of a taxicab said to his passenger, ‘where to Sir?

‘The Waldorf Astoria.’

‘Certainly.’

‘I’ve a little bit of business to attend to there… as we say here, no rest for the wicked.’

‘How interesting, back in The Yemen, my father would say, idle hands are the devil’s best friend.’

* * *

Later that night, in the lift up to a Club Lounge and Executive Suites, an Italian sounding man said, ‘let a the good times role.’

‘And why not indeed,’ the lift’s other occupant replied.

‘Life has its ups and a downs.’

‘Indeed it does and, what an apt comment to make whilst in an elevator.’

CCTV footage indicates that regaining his concentration after a moment’s hesitation, the Italian sounding one continued, ‘well, you seem to have dealt yourself a vile little Venus—’

‘I beg your pardon—’

‘Yes, and I in turn, dealt my decade old vendetta.’