May 23rd, 2002 - 12:12 p.m.

A conversation with the hallucination.

�You know, you are really nothing more then an elaborate fleshy tube,� whispers the ostrich, refusing her any sleep.

�Well, that takes the poetry out of lying in bed with a soft breeze coming from the window, and birds heralding the coming morning,� she replies, �The beauty and inept grace that is being human.�

�Well, take the lowly earthworm for consideration. It is but a tube of muscles. All it lacks to make it human are several appendages, and this over-swollen, over-prized cortex. Its trunk is there. You are not much different, you know.�

�For the love of all that is pure...�

�I love nothing that is pure. Purity is an absolutist idea distilled by humanity to intoxicate themselves with the inane concept that there may be an utopia. Over all the centuries, l�homme, drunk on ideals of the pure, have spread hatred and fear. Formed redundant institutions. Slaughtered masses in the name of purity.�

�When have you begun to care for slaughtered masses? If it were not for these redundant institutions, you would have nothing to nonchalantly mock. And in your desire for dispute, you are merely jumping from one topic to another like a common thug, attacking each phrase with your crude implements. I would like to sleep. Look at it this way: Place me in a room with paper and pen, and I shall weave you prose as light as gossamer, to rival any cloth that Athena may produce. Place an earthworm in the same room, and it shall die for want of water and earth. Better yet, give it it�s own environs and it will do nothing more then till the soil. It would create no beauty...�

�The beauty you would create can only be appreciated by your kind. That is hardly fair. I am sure the brothers and sisters of this proposed earthworm would look at your prose and say to each other: �My that is a frightful bore. What a useless scribbled mess. It does not make the flowers grow, nor the grass sprout as we do by diligently passing soil through our bodies.� And they would laugh at you, and go about their useful business.�

�You have dealt with semantics tonight. As well as made a hypothetical situation in which siblings of earthworms lacking this �over swollen cortex� to formulate discourse as a main point in your disastrous thesis. I would continue, but you see, your logorrhea has served to bore me immensely.�

�Well, that is a desire to end a perfectly civilized pass time.�

�All that shall come to pass here is...�

�Now, now. Let us not say anything that may actually damage. So, let us take the same room, and place within it a common spider. Why, it would spin a most lovely web of gossamer. �The strings as strong as steel,� as they say, �a scientific marvel!� It would...�

She fades asleep. And did not hear the rest. But when she awoke, the damned thing was still babbling.

�On top of which, your entire language is a mutt. A bastard child of Latin, French, and German. You of all people should know that,� the ostrich not looking in the least bit fatigued, �This English! It was formed as a spoken language, not as a written one. Not an intelligent language at all.�

�Have you been here all night?�

�Yes, and it was quite rude of you to fall asleep.�

�Well, I would apologize, but I am not in the least bit sorry. I know quite well that no matter how badly I may scald you with my words, you shall be back. Now, I am sauntering downstairs and telling everyone what a bore you are.�

N.

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