”Share it with real people,” some still small voice said, wondering, that is, what AI would say if the Riemann hypothesis turned out to be true. Guess AI knew that wasn’t going to happen—what a bummer; Norway blond had been in touch: i was trying to conjure her voice right now. Don’t conjure my voice. Don’t know why she said that. Was telepathic communications more simple than I made it out to be? Did conjuring her voice, at times, force her out? Perhaps the voice I was using needed to change a little; i don’t know. Ursula said the strangest things sometimes. I’m here eating cheese, for example. What was that about? I used to think that cheese, incidentally, would protect my teeth from too much coffee—thinking that coffee could somehow rot my teeth. Maybe thinking, too, that a piece of cheese would take it off my breath—like hitting a reset button. That’s essentially what I was doing. Switching from a cup of coffee every hour for around eight hours to nothing at all.
Couldn’t sit still, couldn’t watch TV, had all these things crawling around in my back, coming to the surface, making knots in my back. What a nightmare. i’m here, and you’re not wow, testy. so she was upset about our separation, too—wondered, a little, how that was playing out with her boyfriend, if she had one. Should I try and imagine one of their conversations? Probably not. He’s like that argumentative? especially when he’s growing hair on his palms? You can’t help me. Just thinking, now, that all of this was stuff that she was saying to him, and, in so doing, when she thought about it, she sent it to me. Nothing new there—that’s how basic toddler telepathic communications worked. When you turned yourself into a walking metronome—weaving a little inside and outside of the rhythm, that’s when the good stuff happened. You could pretty much just listen in on all the people that you wanted to—you could become, in that way, a part of their life.
They were aware of you, weren’t they? That person that they were talking to when they were going over their day, thinking of all the things they said? John, you’re crazy. Now, I don’t think she said that to me—I think she said it to her boyfriend, if she had one, and, if she didn’t, she might’ve said it to herself. But I wasn’t crazy as long as I didn’t ask people if I was crazy. Everybody is crazy when they doubt themselves too much. Whatever—I can’t always respond when I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about. But she’s saying, now, that she used to sit with me when I was drunk in the afternoon, after having had my one gigantic drink for the afternoon portion of the sauce, and laying on my back, in bed, listening to some old as hell radio. Don’t remember, right now, if it was all talk or if they played music, mostly, but I do remember they always talked a bit about the rush hour traffic. I’d nod off, sometimes, but I usually only stayed like that for about thirty minutes. Maybe an hour if was really out of it.
I guess professional alcoholics do that kind of thing until they wind up divorced and or over the top wondering where their wife is—why they don’t have one, what did they ever do to deserve this, etc. Everybody self-destructs when they’re bad. It’s unavoidable. Some people just do it in slow motion, but the end result is the same. You find yourself in the pits, forced to start your life over, practically from scratch. Now, Ocasio-Cortez would try to talk to me sometimes, and maybe I was being mean, but I tried very hard not to let her in—because, the way I saw it, this obsession had gone on long enough—and to speak to her meant backsliding. I’d start thinking she was the real Ursula all over again, when, as it happens, I don’t like to gamble. And thinking that Ocasio-Cortez was Ursula was too big of a gamble—i couldn’t build my life around someone that amounted to a royal straight flush. Maybe it was possible, but the chances were so slim that they went to zero, and I couldn’t do it anymore. Would she think I abandoned her? But that is a gamble too, to think that she is here, now. I needed to keep an open mind, sure, but I had better things to count on—such as some external change that would indicate, in reality, that I wasn’t smoking pipe dreams. The real Ursula was interested in my art works, and, because it was bad for my art work to use Ocasio-Cortez, it was better for the both of us if I didn’t. So when I heard her calling I tried to get in touch with Norway blond, or listen for someone else’s voice, a different voice. I knew what I was doing.
you’ve got it all figured out. Yeah, kind of. we could still send letters back and forth through our backs—and that material would be realized when I did creative things, but a real, text-like conversation was wrong, for me, at this time. yeah, yeah, who am I trying to convince, right? I was on the verge of letting her back in—she was knocking so hard on my door. Norway blond is like: “let her in, then!” She’s pissed, i can tell. But I was with Norway blond now—that was my Ursula. She needed to know that I wasn’t going to leave her for Ocasio-Cortez—or, if i allow myself to backslide just a little—Ocasio Cortez needed to know that i wasn’t going to leave her for Norway blond. It was as if, somehow, the limits got switched up, and Norway blond was code for Ocasio-Cortez. But fuck it, man. I’m schizophrenic—i know what it’s like to have uncontrollable thoughts that lead you to believe things that aren’t true.
They were morphing in my head a little; it was a little beyond my control—but just so you know: I am still taking the full dose of my risperidone. I quit taking an antidepressant named Lexapro and a prostate drug named tamulosin and had backed way off the sleep aid, trazadone. But I was still using the antipsychotic—and, frankly, if I couldn’t stop thinking about something that wasn’t real—that was an indication that I really needed my antipsychotic. But fuck, what am I supposed to do? I see Ocasio-Cortez in my mind’s eye. So I needed to think more of Norway blond—and i needed to substitute an attractive, fertile, viable face to think about when my hero (Ocasio-Cortez) crossed my mind. I needed to quit saying her name, too—that was backsliding in and of itself. As if saying something out loud makes it true. I’ve been through that—trying to make things true by telling people what’s going on—that’s when they’ve got you; you’ve really lost it, because, well, if it were true, you’d keep it inside where it would be safe. You couldn’t ask people to be complicit with your lies—they weren’t going to make it true either—it wasn’t going to become true, period. It just wasn’t. So what? You stop thinking about it. That’s what you do. And if you can’t control your thoughts, and you can can’t keep your thoughts to yourself, then they’ve got you.
You can’t live like that. So what was I thinking? What was I going to do? I needed a powerful weapon to combat this, so I figured I’d use an actress that walks around with breasts so big they make everybody jealous. Now what—are you thinking: oh, so size matters, to you? But it wasn’t like that exactly. It was more that size mattered to other people—and, consequently, you could use size to your advantage. I have to admit, it was nice to think about a young woman with huge breasts hanging out and swinging all over the place. So sue me. Size does matter, but not in the way you think, not exactly. What exactly matters is the power you have over other people. Can you attract people that would normally be attracted to large breasts? If you can, then size is not the issue. Your personality takes over—and your charms serve the same purpose, if not catapulting you over the top, because, as the underdog (since size does matter to people) you get brownie points, and your charms are magnified—you become more powerful and attractive to the opposite sex than someone that has large breasts but doesn’t know to protect them—to force people to think about something besides that.
But no such charmer lived in my mind—so, i figured, the next best thing was a thin woman (a thin body was extremely important) with huge breasts flopping around all over the place. Maybe that would work. I didn’t know. I’d have to keep testing it out to see if, well, my relationship with Ursula improved. If, for example, telepathic progress was made. So I had a young woman, an actress, in mind, a woman that would never be president of the United States but that, nonetheless was blond, blue-eyed, big-breasted, and seemingly carefree with her body. A woman that probably wasn’t quite tall enough or conventionally beautiful enough (without makeup) to help me get over the idea that I never had a chance with anybody like that, anybody big breasted and young, etc. I could think about that as I tried to get over the notion that, well, given my existence as a basement dweller that can’t function without help from other people, i could use that to make me think I was adequate long enough to be aroused to the point of quenching that desire in a competitive way—strong, determined, and fuck-all important.