fiction: Pitiful State

I don't consider myself an emotional swain. Reactionary, but for cause. I can control myself. For
the residue of animal nature in man, there are inanimate objects that keep me from hanging by
my tail, or attacking a brother monkey.

 The Ten Commandments are pragmatic. Absent of a permission slip from the NSA, the first
commandment is a show stopper. The rest of the rules speak for themselves in most cultures,
whether read from the black book in a Midwestern church, or evidenced by a spear attack, for
cuckolding a fellow tribesperson in a New Guinean thatch hut. Not all cultures are as persnickity
as Americans about homicide. Adultery, in some spots, rates a pass for doing the big one. I
don't do violence, and I don't take my misery to a preacher. I sublimate. Using a device.

You can't hear it, for true, but probably know the sound of the gong. "The gong." As if there was
only one in the universe, or all the millions (?) of gongs in use are all one thing, collectively. If
you own a gong, it is the same instrument I have been relying upon for auditory recompense.
The sound is complex, when struck. If it was sight and not sound, it would be a hall of mirrors.
But the carnival of timbre and tone, metalic and musical, crass and fascinating, keeps me from
getting more angry than status quo. The gong keeps my mind off of Timmy Long. I was thinking
about Timmy moments ago, thus I struck the gong. Ka-bong-bing-bing-bing-bing. So resonent,
so many ways sound can play gin rummy.

Timmy was into the samba the way I'm into the gong. He got his thing from watching an old,
maudlin French flick about two elder gametes making love. The suave Frenchman, at the same
time scoring with Miss French Mystique, is having a love affair with the samba , a form of music
that converts to Musak easier than catching fish with M80s. Timmy was one of those creeps
who look cool wearing a beret. Plays a nylon string guitar, needs his head kicked in. At the time,
back at school, people were desperate to prove their mission of equality, e.g. "I'm more
egalitarian than that low-life idiot."

The reason I hate Timmy is because he sabotaged what should have been the love of my life.
Timmy told Sally that I called Susan B. Anthony a dyke. I never said that,or anything like it. I
referred to some other famous darling of the avant-garde as a 'mustachioed dyke.' It was
rhetorical, and everyone at the Witty Campus Bistro knew it, at the time. Timmy is a slandering
low-life samba poser, and it is pure tragedy the way people believe what they are told by creeps
who traffic in deceitful fascination. The purity of the gong sound is honest fascination.

Now before you go postal about a mad fella' winding up like this, Timmy is safe from me. I
wouldn't crush one single ringlet on his Jello mold of blond hair, with highlights. The bells in the
church tower sing of peace and love. Spirituality, if you have to squeeze a boil to exit the puss.
Zen masters are into whacking their gongs. You don't see them going postal on guys who did
them dirt. So what difference does it make how you keep yourself restrained?