A Mystically Loaded Dodecahedral Die

The barnacle’s ambition is to reach the harbor without having built the boat.

In a way, I have also been carried by a boat throughout my life, but not in the way that the Swiss people I am staying with at the moment have been. They are the recipients of luck in a way that I really never have been. They either haphazardly married into or were haphazardly born into an ancient Italian family that was somehow displaced to Winterthur a generation or two ago. This is not a complaint, though my cynical nature defies that it not be. They are the family of my Ivanečka, after all, the person I plan to spend the remainder of my existence with. It is simply their lot in life. They take their lot in life for granted and perhaps this is where we could possibly come into philosophical conflict.

When my fetid friend, Christian Michal Newman, was living in Zürich a few decades ago, he relayed to me an unending sequence of negative emotions about the place. It made quite an impression on me and my opinion of the ostensibly pristine city has been tainted since that time. I know Christian quite a bit better now, as many epochs of both of our lives (possibly more of my life than his own) have passed and I know better now. At times, when he rants, he rants wholly about the negative aspects of sections of his life - to spit out the poison, as it were. So realistically, I should by this time take his past ideas of Zürich with a pinch of cesium salt. But feelings, emotions and those fickle chemicals splashing around in our brains are what they are and thus the impression remains to this day, though filtered through my current experience.

I’m sitting at a table on the terrace overlooking a small garden at Lenta’s řadový dům in Winterthur. Ivanečka and Lenta chat in the kitchen behind me and across the obyvák. Christian told me that when he worked here the Swiss people treated the foreigners working at the opera like bugs. He would possibly say that there is more nuance to it than that, but that’s what he always says about every experience, so fuck um. I detect the insect angle now since I am sitting directly within the environs of Swiss life, though it is not as outright obvious like it may have been to him. The behavior is subtle, but I get the distinct impression that Lenta and to a lesser extent her daughter looks down her nose at me. Or perhaps they don’t look down their nose at me specifically, but at the idea of my existence. The family’s reactions to the things that I want to do with Ivanečka (say, the Nik Bärtsch gig we went to the other night in a fabulously tiny club) are telling as they are wholly negative. I am interested in what the reaction will be to my wish to go to the island on Bodensee in Konstanz today. Given Ivanečka’s influence over my psyche of late, I shall stay positive! On one facet of the dodecahedron, I understand Luki’s and Alessi’s disinterest in some of the things I’d like to do because of the so-called generation gap. They both appeared incredibly bored during our extensive (though conservative in my view) walking excursion through Zürich. Of course, I could be misreading them and I do admit that at times I misread Luki. He seems to have a very rich interior life that he doesn’t show to everyone, and especially not to me.

I have just been corrected by Ivanečka. She believes that it may instead be Jessi that kind of looks down her nose and not Alessi. In fact, it could be that Alessi is like Luki. She may have quite the interior life, as well. Jessi has a bit of that Mediterranean aspect that appeals so much to the lowest common denominator. She is openly very friendly and does her best to create a positive first impression. What lurks underneath, as I found with the majority of the denizens of Spain, could be something either more sinister or vacuous or more likely within the infinite graduated void between the two.

Ivanečka also just related to me the attachment that Alessi had to her during the latter’s childhood. She was even jealous after Ivanečka birthed Luki. The warring emotions within the family dynamic here have evolved over many years and I am a stranger to them still, so some of their attitude may be warranted. Plus, I’m a fucking weirdo as well as an extreme introvert and my so-called social skills have followed a path that have been far from mainstream. Certainly, I am quite pleased with my own development as a human but that doesn’t mean that anyone else is going to be immediately attracted to it. In fact it means that the majority will find me initially extremely bizarre once I actually begin speaking my mind. And that’s even before the absurd humor begins to surface. So, on the other facet of the dodecahedron, fuck um.

But weren’t we speaking of barnacles? The barnacle is a formidable, crusty creature that attaches itself at an early age to spacecraft that hover too close to our planet. They become, much like Shambal Brambel, sessile on their chosen spacecraft. They are then taken to other worlds and are used as palate cleansers after various extraterrestrials have consumed particularly acidic meals. This is their purpose. This is why the exist. This is why the Great Mamba expelled their essence from its essentially infinite vestigial testicle. So it has been written. So it will be passed on generation to generation until the fluttering moths of time can no longer find a source of illumination to flutter around.

The boat the barnacle of my soul has been attached to can possibly be named luck. I, however, don’t particularly believe in luck as a mystical concept, so I’ll go with probability instead. No - better would be to say the probability of a mystically loaded dodecahedral die. So I don’t believe in luck as a mystical concept, but I believe in this particular loaded dodecahedral die. Indeed, I do, for its essence was also expelled from the Great Mamba’s essentially infinite vestigial testicle. Herr Christopher Bender told me many a time during our essentially infinitely durational friendship that my life is somehow charmed. Christian would accredit this to his fuzzy friend the Koala, but either he mistakes his fuzzy friend for the Great Mamba itself or they are essentially the same thing and even share an essentially infinite vestigial testicle.

So, if the probability of a mystically loaded docedahedral die has directed my life, I am quite grateful, essentially for simply being alive and essentially for being able to type these words into my laptop which is essentially named Lajdacky and sits essentially on this table in this essential terrace facing a small, essential garden in Winterthur, which is a particularly droll and uninteresting tract of land that could essentially be bulldozed and replaced with a pristine spaceport so that the aforementioned barnacles could more easily queue up for their intersellar journeys and eventual destinies within the intestines of various extraterrestrials.