Mustard

Jack sat on pins and needles. Anxious, sometimes... Still, waiting for the familiar to arrive, his own familiar -- a suspect double he imagined would lift him from the malaise of knowing nothing -- the anathema of the jack-ass. The familiar, Jack thought, the jack-ass thought, would arrive in a golden carriage, in a flash of light, with an explosion that could not be ignored. Jack would know it had arrived from within -- he'd feel it ... suddenly alive -- bursting with joy and goodwill... Everyone would be surprised at the change. It would seem that Jack was no longer jack, but larger than himself ... still outside of himself but comfortable with this positioning.

The new Jack would look down on the old Jack with an aristocratic disdain. He'd try again to forget the Disaster. The starless, moonless nights... The Wagner Opera would stop running in his head, replaced by popsongs and jingles.

It will not arrive today. The double is careless this way. Couldn't care less...

"It is good to have goals. To have ambitions..." Jack thought as he waited. "But, it is also good not to want." What Jack really wanted was to not want. But, old habits are hard to break.


Lesson 6: night 3

jack-destiny tells us...
the saga continues...
find amity between the hypnotic and the operose...
assemble the insolent apparatus...
dead-duck proclivities dishonors the hic et nunc...

Bunny, ______ left the carnival to live a better life with the Psychoanalyst. Though she had not quite had enough of herself she had had enough of Jack. The lack of Bunny in Jack's life was not a cause for gloomy thirst or hunger, so much as the impetus for celebration. The white noise, the gray noise was gone for now and Jack hoped it would never return. It will of course, but for now he cherished the silence, the lack of thunderous downbeats and the shrill yet stolid warble of Bunny.

Though Jack had originally thought Bunny, ______ to be his familiar, it seems he had mistaken her for what he knew least of himself. He had had a change of heart. More foreign to Jack than Jack's own foreigness, Bunny was now just a speck ... of dust ... a shooting, fallen star ... something to be forgotten.


Lesson 7: day 4

jack-destiny tells us...
the saga continues...
exceed the chaffing hoi polloi...
ventilate through dialectic benevolence...
arrest and nullify efflorescent jack-abundance...

Without the momentum of the Arsonist or the blessings of Saint Augury -- the saga remains. Jack remains.