Epistemic Valve

Insouciant pill pusher — writer of scrips intended to send me to oblivion, to live the life of the lotus eaters. Dr. Closer, shutter of the epistemic valve — he wants me to live the limpid life of the unsullied brain. Lamb-shackled. You translucent Mesmer of enthrallment…

Then there was talk between my cousin R, and my friend D., and me about the film I recently saw at a nightclub. R. was talking to a masculine woman, and I wanted to ask him about the lesbians in the film — with whom he was familiar.

R. jumped between me and D. — and R. tried to grab my crotch a number of times. I had to push him away.

You see I almost missed the train, but I managed to wave the engineer down by a series of complicated mirrors mounted on the cars. She stopped and I got in, only to find a bunch of young men from a military academy, which I intuited were students from Greenland — they were crowding the train.

I saw D. and sat next to him, and he told me how stoned he was, and all about the genetically modified strain he’d been smoking.

Then R., found us — D. and I were walking down a side street and we saw the shambles of a recording studio with all manner of murals on the ruined walls.

“Look it’s Muscle Shoals studio. How historic! This is where James Taylor recorded that classic album,” D. said.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” I said. “You might be thinking about Johnnie Taylor. I don’t think James Taylor recorded here.”

R. was throwing rocks at the few remaining walls— pristine white bricks with murals of steam locomotives on them.

“Anyway, we’re not in Alabama,” I said. “We seem to be in Greenland.”

“Ah, fuck, shut up!” R. said. “You’re all incongruity and anachronism spilling into other recurrent dream sequences. Or wait, was this all the same pandemic dream?”

The pungent smell of sulphur overtook us as the crusted ground gave out beneath us.

“The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do with it… There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.”

— Zadie Smith / “Something To Do”