Yet why multiplying them? The half-back was seated all alone at his desk in the second office to the left down the corridor. Sedentary way of life made of that Sitting Bull a blob of blubber. Unhealthy obesity, not fitting a soccer player.

Let him thank me for the opportunity offered by my benevolent visit—no excruciating push ups, just taking to the post office 472 pages plus their cover—to throw away a sliver of his fat at that exercise, and the Publishing House would reimburse the expenditure confirmed by the post office bill slip.

Not a chance. A courier was sent by the slug. Screw him!.

The long and short of it, the translations returned to where they had initially started from and stilled there, like a mustard-hued tombstone, to crown 6 years of mental toil rewarded with the cobweb-light lines across the forehead to deepen later, when the good-looks period is over, into uneven contemplative wrinkles.

And why not to lie leisurely enjoying such a sound prop? The DIY book-shelves coated with translucent shellac—tranquil and soft environs for a serene slumber?.

Yet, the pages in the package upon the homemade shelf not only weighed down the item of interior but, on the side, were drip-boring my brains in defiance of the coarse steady wrap, the pages were. Their comatose presence made still acuter the inertia amassed along 6 years of handling them those antlike-black-critters-in-the-white-field, at first so effing obstinate but getting tamer, bit by bit, until they hooked me too, in their turn, up. A text-book case of situation-conditioned addiction. Jejunely christomathical exemplification…

And after the Game-Over, in the stiff stillness that followed, there remained nothing to waste myself away. Plodding donkeys and as well as circus horses are incurable… Fucking Sir Isaac Newton and that First Law of his!. Although the inertia thing he cabbaged from Galileo.

The evenings lengthened. Noticeably. Finding a shim to fill and dwindle them away turned out not a cinch. Like, no quick fix, brother, but go and learn playing melodeon squeezebox and, when it gets dark, off you stroll about the hood lanes outpouring some hit air or another, announcing, “Can’t buy me looo-ove!“. Don’t forget to shine your black pair of high boots, and stick a fluffy flower (Portulaca oleracea) in the visor-cap so that the chicks would tag along and fall over themselves to treat the musician to the sunflower black seeds they gobble up spitting non-stop the husk out…

Sad pity but the idea about a squeezebox failed to hook me up effectively, you know, and I bypassed buying high boots.

As for the girls, cute and saucy, they’ll always find who to give their seeds to in this or that, or some other feasible way in any concurrent settings.

Squeezing all the above-said together, instead of a two-row A-major/D-minor melodeon there, by the forlorn heap of paper within the stiff cask-like shell of wrapping (somewhat already softened with the growing layer of the virginal pollen of dust), yes, right next to it, possibly too nigh to, stretched out a notebook, rather thick and of a certain hint at brash boldness in its pale-gray leatherette cover.

The purpose of the stationery bad ass, at first, had rather fuzzy outlines, however, definitely slanted to the ant-like-signs-and-so-on-and-forth private games (because no computer games had existed yet and computers themselves were named Machine-Computer Engineering Tools that necessitated construction of reinforced concrete foundation to mount them (the Tools) upon and on that solid basis they thundered like locomotives spinning the spools of their perforated tapes hither-thither and backward again).