AT THE STOA

  “Good morning,” I texted, and received an almost instantaneous phone call as a response, which, after five rings, I answered. I was looking for my glasses, which, of course, one needed glasses for. “Good morning. You’re up early,” Bjørn said, sipping his coffee and looking distracted, somehow. I squinted my eyes in order to divine why, and, having caught my look, he explained, “I’m looking at your picture, the one where you have a black t-shirt on.” I was thoroughly confused. And when I am confused, I commit small mistakes, the most common being that I open my mouth. However, this time, I didn’t do that. This failure further added to the general confusion all around. The reason for not saying anything immediately was I didn’t know which remark to make first: the fact that I have almost twenty of those shirts hanging in my closet, or the fact that what he was staring at on his phone is actually, in a similar yet different way, right there, on his phone. That threw me in ...

  What I ended up asking Bjørn, however, was simply the complete opposite of a home: I asked about his oldest brother that he frequently calls an idiotic man-child: Didrik. I suppose I should actually use his name, the poor bastard. The question was an innocent accident, I will maintain. He texted me after having had a football game with his mates, full of testosterone from making the game-winning goal, and, perhaps not quite knowing what to do with the extra hormones rampaging to about six feet from his personal space, he turned the joy of victory into the despair of aggression. The end result of doing this was as masterful as a Katana-kaji forging a Nihonto, and equally, if not more, deadly. It was quite a sight. So intense was his aversion for everything that his brother is, and blatantly continues to be, that Bjørn, with the rare ability to sublimate a love for a game into a hatred for his brother, told me what Didrik told him once: that “football is the best metaphor for h...

  For no rhyme or reason, I had been listening to The Art of Manliness Podcast by Brett McKay, when a message from Bjørn, his first for the day, arrived. “I am returning to my lover, on Klovn og Tosk , in a month and a week. Have you had breakfast?”, never quite remembering that our time differential is seven hours and thus breakfast is actually lunchtime. “Okay. Say hi to her for me. Yes,” I replied. “One does not say hi to the Murmansk Fjord, much less to the sea.” “Oh. Pardon me.” I was smiling, though I wasn’t sure if he actually meant it. “ Du er tilgitt . (You are forgiven.) I will visit my younger half-brother in the afternoon, so I may not text for a while. It’s his birthday.” That while lasted for eight hours, by which time I ate again, completely read a book by Tessa Bailey (I did tell you I was tired of philosophers of various ilk, so I proceeded to entropize my brain with smut), worked for a bit, and had been asleep when my phone rang with its signature Cosmic Radio ...

  When I was younger and therefore more pretentious, I used to write poems about the sea a lot.   In all probability I may have abused the metaphoricity of all sea-related things - lighthouses, boats, sailors, waves, albatrosses - all standing for one emotional crisis or another. Most of the time I would, like a teenager who doesn't know his Shakespeare (I still don't), fill a card and send it to my boyfriend, having written about an obtuse poem featuring a lone sailor on the sea with stars and whatnot only to guide his way, filled with love and longing for something he knows he cannot have, or even successfully navigate (since the sailor is an idiot).   And most of the time I would get a baffled response along the lines of "If the sea represents me, and the sailor is you... Why is the sailor male?", or something like that.   Which of course begs a lot of questions, the first one being, “Why use the metaphor of sea-sailor when mountain-hiker or toaster-bread would ju...

The night comes with terrors, with shadow and darkness, and monsters untold. As such, we have created artificial lights to illumine our cities, to dispel the ancient fear of the world's ever and primal dark, to ward off being blind. The night holds secrets, cradling criminals and hookers, broken dreams, abandonment, and illicit trysts. It is the time of shady dealings, of gunshots in the dark, of stealing babes away from mothers, of pillaging villages and wartime desperation, and of utter hopelessness in prisons. The night is a time of silence, when we fully hear the great heartbeat of the city and the rumble of its arteries, the howls and songs of its citizens, the fatigue of the day slowly being replaced by the winding down of furious men and women whose hopes and resiliency are equaled only by the drudgery of the calendar going on and on in society running fast toward its own oblivion. The night is a time for forgiveness, when we finally look at our creator in the eyes and...

  The Lost Charge [1] by Max Kodiček She swept over me like the Ocean. Washing away the plastic memories.   Holding the cheat-codes to my heart, I confessed it all. Rolling around and clawing sheets, A wild animal trapped in pleasure. There were no buts until after, When I'd lost it all with a lion's roar, Until the tide had turned, And I was left shivering on the beach. A hopeless gambler stumbling home, Broken by the house, Empty again, As timid as a mouse.     -- Fin -- [1] https://joeambrose.substack.com/p/the-lost-charge

  It was the twelfth day of training when Max’s absolute dream and absolute nightmare came true: having been ordered through House Joint Resolution 169, the generals of the American military were asking soldiers from the Czechian reserve Army to engage in yet another proxy war against Hungary. At last, he thought, time to put on a goddamned battle helmet , finally, purely, simply becoming a soldier, through and through. (Or had he always been one…?) That morning, after dressing in his Army garb, he briskly and purposefully walked towards the rest of the similarly-clad soldiers. His people. His Captain, watching him, noticed that Max was holding his CZ-805 BREN assault rifle in the reverential way that he was never able to hold a pen. Finally - finally - like a bastard son who nonetheless effortlessly and perfectly play-acted to be what he was not the whole time, he had come home. His mind blessedly out of thought and his body ecstatically screaming with dopamine and testosteron...

  What she lacked in both talent and execution, she made up for by being frighteningly efficient, and therefore was quick but consistently flawed in whatever she does. She took fifteen-minute showers. She rinsed a dish under the tap with one hand while the other puts away a fork, so as to save water. She leapt through lines of transcribed sentences to find errors before the audio recording reaches them, so as to save time. She did not, therefore, waste her energy on useless things such as regret, nostalgia, breakfast, or just plain ol’ bitchin’ about the state of the world. It was, one had to admit, the perfection of the already mentioned path of least resistance. Now, however, Chris was afraid, and thus had to be careful. This one’s just as dangerous as you, albeit in the opposite direction . Max’s boredom in attained perfection is his fodder, as her frustration in consistent failure is hers. It was on Max’s eighth day of training when he finally noticed that he was on the bri...

  Unlike Max, she quit working out, and unlike Max yet again (who consistently does this,) she can write a rare inspired piece. The only reason for this gaping difference between them is because, as she explained to Max when they had moved to a different messenger in what seemed like ages ago, “Boredom is at the once the greatest invention of the human mind and the most painful insult of humanity to the majestic fuckery of the universe. So no, I may not get bored. I may write, yes, but I respect what things are. Unlike you, I have to draw the line of my ego somewhere. Even if it takes me a thousand-mile radius to do it. You are at the limit of that thousand miles. I can, however, draw that line . I am afraid you can’t; you do not know – and, as a writer, should not know - when you as a writer stops. I, on the other hand, have to stop somewhere: otherwise I would write you a love sonnet every day and not even like you. It goes against what poverty-stricken moral compass I have.” I...

  During the fifth day of training, Max, wearing a balaclava and no shirt, was lifting two logs off of a pile, one on each hand, having carefully chosen in terms of their weight and heft. This workout will be hell on his lats and deltoids, he knew. It was worth it, though. Every good punishment to the body is worth it. During the fifth day of training, Max, wearing a balaclava and no shirt, was lifting two logs off of a pile, one on each hand, having carefully chosen in terms of their weight and heft. This workout will be hell on his lats and deltoids, he knew. It was worth it, though. Every good punishment to the body is worth it. Nietzsche would disagree, he thought, but the man had purported syphilis, not to mention one bitch of a sister. He would rather go the way of Giles Deleuze: having steak for all meals of the day, drowning it with rum. And then boom, glorious, glorious defenestration! If Max were truly honest with himself, though (for in the most important moments of h...

  So wild,  This thing. So brazen and untamed,  My breath hitched,  And went away altogether.  Replacing all insecurity with Stones the shape of your hands. So wild, this thing. So solid and sure, Chinks in my armor are kintsugi'd by gold.  Tracing every scar, every battle, Revelling in the dance victory cannot even compare to.  So wild, this thing.  So much like a storm the size of its own eye, Gazing at me from the universe of your words, And whispering, "No. You may not go." And went away altogether. R may not go."

  She understood, also, that she was an attractive woman, and hence, according to the few solid principles that she had, refused to use that fact. She found women and men that just knew that they were attractive ugly. Logic demands, therefore, she being attractive, that she take up Muay Thai with Honey Lou and Janice, if only for the exercise. After all, she was done with karate when she was in high school. (It lasted for all of six months, this second training, and then COVID hit.)  All three of them, when not in the gym, led rather sedate lives of editing audio transcripts. They did almost everything identically and together, except when Chris, then hit with an existential desire she had felt for as long as she can remember, invited them to build houses for the Philippine indigent. (She always wanted to be in humanitarian aid, deciding on and then subsequently being turned off by the Red Cross.) Both had refused, citing time. They then spent their remaining time before COV...