This thread is for the sort of people who go to colleges and sit in the cafeteria dining area, waiting. They are reading a manga novel. Involuntarily, their eyes rise up from above the top of the novel, subconsciously scanning.
They are waiting for a female Japanese student to sit down at their table. And Lord, sweet Lord, when their lucky day comes - please give that student the strength to get up and walk away, consequences be damned. Because she will be in for the most excruciating time of her life.
These people will engage these poor students in conversation. They will drone on about how they have studied Japanese since 1989, and give a demonstration of this. They will talk about how they can write the language, and offer up a demonstration.
With a smile, they submit their demonic script up for the poor girl's approval. Maybe she can make out the message (usually, it is "kawaii" or "this is written Japanese!"). The torment does not stop there. They will talk about how they can read the language. And demand to demonstrate this.
These poor girls did not come to this university to write in Japanese. Especially not for thirty to fourty year old male strangers. But write they must. Both etiquette and fear demand it. The comment is written. The man will read it out loud, translate it, and smile at this poor trapped girl. He is like a puppy, waiting for a pat on the head. He may ask, did I get it right? His voice is calm, with a hint of forced pleasantness about it. All the girl can do is fake a sincere laugh of happiness at his linguistic prowess.
Sir! Stop it! She is not interested in you! All she really wants is to do is drink her coffee, have a bite to eat, and maybe read the paper until the next class starts or her friends show up or she has to catch the bus. She doesn't really want to listen to you calmly gush about your dubious accomplishments. She has a whole nation she can and probably will go back to. What you are offering is nothing special to her.
Watch this situation progress. He is talking about how much anime he has seen. She doesn't care about this. It isn't impressing her. It doesn't impress most people. He will ask her if she likes anime. She will give a non-commital yes. She might feverishly wrack her brain, trying to remember a series she saw when she was six years old. Six years old, sir. It has easily been over ten years since she might have even cared about anime. Mister, why do you persist in this?
Finally, some law of the universe comes into effect, and dictates that the conversation must end. He says he's "always here" (which is true - how he earns a living is a mystery) if she wants to ever talk again. She quickly shakes her head, gives a quick and near-stammered parting statement, and leaves.
He will never talk to her again. He may never see her again in the cafeteria. If she does appear, she won't acknowledge his presence at all. Deep down, he knows why this is. But he won't do anything about it. There is manga to read, anime to watch, Japanese girls to torment with his creepy inanity. Maybe he just enjoys this game, on a subconscious level. Or maybe he is no longer the one rolling the dice.
I watched this occur several times. I wish I did something about it.
After a couple of hours more sleep it suddenly strikes me how much I resemble Proust's well-meaning but idiotic great-aunts in the hilarious scene that opens "A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu", who prove incapable of thanking Swann for his presents to them in any manner unsubtle and unallusive enough for Swann, or anyone else present, to be able to recognize that thanks are indeed being offered.
So, with unaccustomed brevity and directness: Thankyou, Ophelia; a ministering angel shalt thou be, when others (I'll name no names) lie howling. (Fuck, when I started writing that sentence twenty seconds ago, there really WEREN'T going to be any allusions, let alone any iambic pentameter, in it)
I've listened to the recording again and it has, of course, already engendered a slew of reprehensible (yes, I think I can say in this case actually criminally prosecutable) dreams and plans. I hesitate to outline any of them here because I couldn't fail to recognize, of course, just from my short glance at the Crackyhouse Lia threads, that your adoration is an art and a science in itself and that a neophyte springing enthusiastically in on the strength of a happy accident like your recording of my post is liable to commit any number of annoying and embarassing faux pas. A lengthy apprenticeship is obviously required in order to learn just HOW to be obsessed with you: the type of desires compatible (even in, or rather, I would suppose, precisely in, their unsatisfiability) with your nature, and the type of desires that would be recognized as stupid and hateful abuses of you even (and again here, most probably precisely and first and foremost) by your most heinous "abusers".
Yes, I doubt very seriously and sincerely whether I have, as yet, the right to feel or think or say anything at all about you, Lia (and this "as yet" is frankly likely to endure ad calendas graecas, since the "application for a transfer of my affections" from RavRav to you alluded to above would, of course, in reality be a shabby and pusillanimous thing, and statistics, as we know, show a considerably lesser incidence of pussilanimity and shabbiness amongst habitual child-molestors than amongst almost any other section of the population).
If the lia/rs and necrophi/lia/cs among you can forgive me for it, however, I'll give expression to this one idea and fantasy largely for the sake of its inherent entertainment value just as an idea and a prospect and yes, what the hell, just for the further opportunity it offers for a literary allusion or two:
I honestly can't help feeling that your mesmerizing voice was kind of wasted, Lia, on what were, in my view, some of the rather more strained and self-conscious of the by now many thousands of lines I've written here about RavRav. If you really do possess the Christ-like humility, the world-redeeming power of "kenosis", to subordinate your own nigh-legendary persona to the persona of another (really, much less eminent) young woman....well, I would absolutely love to hear you lend your voice and personality to some pieces I'm currently in the process of composing for Stephanie (although, now she's back with "the boyfriend", I wonder whether that gap in the dyke of her self-esteem that these were intended to plug now needs to be plugged at all (Jesus, the opportunities for vulgar punning that I'm going to let pass unexploited THERE!)).
I don't know you at all, Lia, but somehow already suspect very strongly that the pieces I'm referring to somehow wouldn't be your sort of thing in the least. They're intended to revivify and address that whole central erotic element of whatever it is that I "have" for (i won't say "with") RavRav, which is an element which is tending to get obscured and throttled by all this wordy baroque ironizing on my part about the fact of my "having" it. That is to say, it's precisely anything resembling humor, or beauty or complexity of diction, or ironically-exhibited scholarship, that I'll be doing my best to KEEP OUT of the pieces in question - and I suspect that it might have been just these latter elements, along with the more or less total absence of anything overtly suggestive of sexual need or desire, that made the post you chose to record an interesting and attractive one for you.
Still, the idea of your consenting to do what RavRav appears increasingly disinclined to do and imparting an element of living VOCALITY - sorry, I'm incorrigibly pre-Derridean in these matters - to this whole fantasy made of words on paper, or rather light on screens...well, it's an idea that excites me beyond all bounds.
As always, the excitement over it is inextricably sexual and more (or less) than sexual. There's something inherently intensely stimulating about that slinging-together (in a melting-pot, or perhaps more appropriately in a burial-pit) of different personae and personal identities that it would imply. I'm actually and unfortunately one of the small handful of heterosexual males alive today who WOULDN'T be noticeably sexually stimulated by the Lesbian implications and insinuations of your voice narrating overtly sexual events in the persona of Stephanie Turner (I don't know why exactly, but whatever "does it" sexually for me has to involve at least a significant element of tension and encounter between feminine and masculine principles - perhaps because I feel so incapable of providing that masculine principle myself). But there's a strong fascination and attraction for me in the idea all the same. Maybe it's just that entirely cerebral and aesthetic fascination of a motif that recurs again and again in Borges, and which he suggests to be one of the central secrets and mysteries lying at the foundations of the miracle of the works of Shakespeare. The one viable form in which there might actually be realized, Borges suggests, the perennial, beautiful, and necessary dream of a universal salvation is if every one of us had either already once lived, or were bound one day to live, the life, from beginning to end and in every detail, of every other.
Not that, in playing out my fantasies of her - fantasies that are probably based on LESS real information about the fantasized individual than most other fantasies in the long history of fantasy - you would in any way be "living her life", Lia. But, as I say, this image of you becoming ragged bits of her through the uncertain medium of ragged bits of me has a certain "mass-grave-at-Buchenwald" experimental aesthetic (and yes, OK, erotic) appeal for me that I wouldn't be surprised to see shared by other contributors to this board.
But no, as I write I become, once again, strongly and inhibitingly aware of how little right I have to address you in this way without having even begun the long apprenticeship of your adoration that I referred to. Let me end, then, at last, just by thanking you without allusions or circumlocutions for your lovely and charming gesture.
