The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

That way he achieved perfect virtuosity at performance, to which in the evening was also added singing without too rude deviations out of key. With those two songs, the accordionist was bringing the Area to an ecstatically orgiastic state, transforming by the evening all of us into a single organism, where each organ did what it was supposed to do.

Some sang along in chorus, others danced enthusiastically, even the absolutely free under their ceramic sun-cracked tan began to squeak somehow in time. I saw an elderly female paramedic, succumbing to the general ecstasy, she also danced and shouted amid the circle of halfnuts under the yellow light from a bulb in the summer twilight… That's not to say that such euphoria could be registered every evening, but it happened.

Then the accordion player got discharged because his forty-five-day stretch was over. For 2 days something was somehow amiss in the Area. But suddenly, after a break for the midday meal, with a smile of certain embarrassment in his face, the musician popped up in the wicket because earlier in the morning he put on his necktie and ventured to the city executive committee to point out to them their crying mistakes at managing affairs in the city of Romny…

Ivan Corol, which means "king" in English, would have remained quite normal but the name, eventually, brought megalomania about and here he landed among us, one of us, but with royally conceited manners.

He was not patronizing the gaps in the fence to the fourth unit, he was a gourmet. Louis le Roi Soleil. He lay in ambush for the female plasterers from the nearby construction site to go out on the porch in their mortar splattered spetzovkas. Then he entered the three-wall box of the tin toilet and, watching thru the holes in the tin pierced by erratic nails, he commenced to hastily sweep his palm along his dick—back and forth—standing in profile to the rest of the courtiers in the Area. Some refined example for the sovereign subjects, eh?. On having it away, he left the Versailles with the royally ceremonial, albeit exhausted, gait.

One of the plasterers took a brush for whitewashing, put it on the porch and started to cut its end with an ax, like, to make it even or, maybe, just so, in retaliation.

A male voice cut thru the jungle cacophony in the Area: "Put a plank under! Making the ax blunt against concrete, you fool!"

She dropped her jaw, never expecting instructions from that side; she thought there were only ceramic ones.

It's just that I don't like when they spoil instruments. Probably, that's a hereditary idiosyncrasy…

(…as of yet, I have only outlined the external contours of the Area, the shell of it. But what is its essence? What is the point, if any, in all that chaotically turbulent movement or, on the contrary, in the frozen motionlessness not giving a fuck for anything? Does it exist? Certainly, yes.

The boiling bouillon chaos of the soup, both from messy lightheaded ingredients and motionless vegetables at the bottom, is nothing else but a cross-section of the component parts and the current state of the human race. The question "how tasty is it?" does not belong here. So, without much ado, yet strictly to the point, inside the Area, you easily will assort the following five categories of nuts:

a) personnel, aka paramedics, aka bitches in white, etc., etc.;

b) not all there, aka phase-shifted, aka cunt-thinkers, etc., etc.;

c) crazy, aka schizics, aka halfnuts, etc., etc.;

d) nuts, loony, mad, etc., etc.;

e) stark raving mad, aka bananas, aka departed, aka irrevocably free, etc., etc.

To begin with, you need clearly understand and keep it in mind that the boundaries between the above categories are oscillating and overlapping – some medical workers, for instance, are distinguished from certain other forms among the following categories only by the color of their uniform.

Secondly (and this is of prior importance!), the touchstone that allows for differentiation, is the possibility of using the individual in the interests of the current social formation, which creates those Areas. Such a formation must necessarily be current.

Now in order of appearance.

Those suffering from a "phase shift" are distinguished from the normal ones by their inability always and under any conditions remain the same as everyone else. Therefore, for all those who are constantly like everyone else, they are not all there. Don Quixote, for example, who was not all there, would have perfectly fitted the ranks of the normal in the previous formation, where he would appear like everyone else.

Schizics, those incomprehensible geniuses, invent theories of relativity, probability, etc., or write something like The Finnegan’s Wake in the aftermath of which the normal are necessitated to pretend they have understood the slightest bit of crap in all that theories or literary works.

Yet, if you try to push forward your crazy ideas without having the appropriate diploma – welcome to the fifth unit! The hotly hospitable Area will brotherly embrace you!

Nuts have difficulties when asked to intelligibly expound the logic of their actions, however, having a musculoskeletal apparatus sufficient for moving weights, and being capable of reproduction, they are the backbone of any formation. It's only that from time to time them those sancho panzas must have their ass kicked so they’d wipe the drivel off their gaping muzzles and abstain from crossing the street to red.

The Tarzan-like roaring departed, who has achieved absolute freedom from the conventions of morality and behavior patterns of human species, would easily become their own in the family of brown bears, or in the lost and, sadly, never found by Mr. Darwin, link between the ape and human herds, but the currently normal have no application for his qualities.

Yes, but why shall we need each other? What could the normal have to do with the absolutely free? Let's don't forget the mobility and overlapping of the categories; before reaching the absolute, the departed had been