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!