I’m little, maybe four or five, yes, OK, let’s stipulate so, five, stipulate, yes, the adult vocabulary, I won’t be deploying the cloying imitation of small child’s diction here, also there won’t be any extra layers of so-called narrative sub-agendas, so to speak, you better believe it, don’t, OK, let’s get going already, sitting cross-legged on dark-brown floor, no definite article, the or no the, always the bane of even the advanced-level native Russian speakers in English, nobly and dully dark-brown, with a large picture book for grownups, strike that, no cloying cuteness, open in my lap in our family’s irregularly shaped, dented ovoid maybe, and comfortingly cluttered single room in a rambling ramble ramble Barcelona sixth-floor communal apartment on a quiet, ringing-cobweb-silent side street named after some minor Bolshevik activist killed in the Civil War, forget it, in the roiling, why not, it’s a legit adult adjective, granite heart of old Leningrad-Petersburg, Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg, yes, he can be mentioned on the radio and even read openly and without fear now, as a result of the Khrushchevian thaw, but of course, I’m way too little to know who in the world is Dostoyevsky, all this is rather unnecessary, such a long life it has been, but on a more salient subject, am I absolutely certain that this is the right way to deal with the tough recollection in the process of being reimagined and re-remembered here, because it’s a serious and difficult topic, so why, you know, complicate reader’s access to it in this, uh, show-offishly extravagant and perhaps even jejune no not the right word or whatever the word may be way, one that many of the a priori few readers or critics out there might perceive as offputtingly pretentious and even unseemly, this single wall of text, well, hell, let them take or not take it any way they like, I say, that’s none of my worries, no skin off my nose, I do what I do because I feel like it, like it’s the right way to go about it, and, for the record, I don’t believe this will be an inherently tough text to deal with, yes, once you’re in it, it will pull you right in, maybe not immediately but inevitably, like a deceptively quiet, sedate river’s undercurrent, maybe, hopefully, but OK, perhaps someday I will indeed get around to relating the same, like, recollection differently, in a more canonic fashion, through a straightforward arrangement of simple declarative sentences, perhaps, maybe, nah, won’t happen, but not now, OK, moving on, although admittedly, that probably would never happen, like I just indicated, because the remaining time of my life is relatively short, realistically speaking, false optimism aside, I know I sound like a damn loser but who cares, what difference does it make, when, that’s right, even people almost twice younger and a whole lot more talented than me, you could say that again, and most of us keep dying suddenly everywhere, all over the place, so the whole point is moot, what point, there is no point, o the sorrow of mine, here I haven’t been yet, where’s the edge, the line, who saw it and whom do you belong to now, it’s a quote, in translation, the man’s name was Nikolai, he was extraordinary, a genius really, but anyway, in any event, what’s happening here, what’re we trying to express, suppress, delay, deny, subvert, revert, estrange, OK, fine, getting on with it, so, yes, my parents are both at work, very good, and no need to go into any more specific details about any of that here, where they work and what they do and such, wasting time, well, OK, fine, she’s a technologist at the country’s largest rubber-goods factory, right across the odoriferous granite-bound canal from us, the city’s main open-air sewage artery, and he’s an up-and-coming, as the locution of the time has it, scientist in the super-secret field of submarine electromagnetism, protecting our heroic but hopelessly outmoded Soviet submarines from being detected and thereupon promptly destroyed deep in the boundless ocean, by the enemy shore, by the American radars and sonars and nuclear hyperboloids and what have you, giant and none-too-friendly mountain shepherd dogs, wolves in bear’s clothing, guard the inner perimeter of the research institute, mail box, of his employ, yes, Nikolay his name was, that young man’s, and he was only thirty-nine, a musician and a poet, who knows where the snake is slithering to, OK, concentrate, concentrate, and my little brother probably is with my grandmother, the paternal one, the other one is in Moscow, this one’s my father’s mother, in the very same immediate area of our old Dostoyevskean part of Leningrad, in a spacious, quiet gray light-filled flat with a real immense concert grand piano called Steinway in the dining room, nobly gleaming black, and an entire another room, one of many, though a fairly small one, occupied by a private home library, nothing but books there, anchored and dominated, in a manner of speaking, by the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, fifty-two dark-blue volumes, mostly published when Stalin was still alive but several last ones already brought out after his mercifully cheyne-stokes-ing, OK, cut it out, into the netherworld, managing to slither away, the lucky bastard, from people’s final judgment, and after his omnipotent and infinitely dreaded and utterly depraved, monstrous sidekick Beria’s soon-to-follow demise by execution via a bullet to his bald head, Lavrenty Palych Beriya ne opravdal doveriya, you can google him, although probably no need, may he burn in hell unto eternity, OK, lighten up, thus creating another ineradicable fissure in the enormous cast-iron tectonic plates of the grotesquely cruel Soviet history, overwriting a bit here, are we, let’s take it down a notch, if possible, and so at some point all of the by-subscription-only Encyclopedia owners simultaneously received at some point around the time of my emergence in the world, cool coincidence, not really, a lengthy extra article on the Bering Straits, along with a sternly worded polite request worded in the form of a gently threatening order to have the ecstatic paean to Beria therein, in the Encyclopedia, replete with his full-page proudly dignified bespectacled portrait, those round rimless glasses, cut out with a razor and manually, however awkwardly maybe, with the aid of a dollop of the extra-strong and best in the world Soviet glue, and then replace it with the aforesaid enclosure of the equal amount of pages on the aforementioned crucial northern waterway, well, OK, this is pretty bad writing here, isn’t it, no matter, it is what it is, accelerate, accelerate, get on with it, and some books there actually were in English, in that library room, imagine, it’s unimaginable, well, try, yes, and stop hyperventilating, I remember one full of Walt Disney’s animated drawings, drawn animations, whatever, and also one other, a very old one, although not by back then, published in early twenties, I suppose, and called This is England or some such, yes, although that might not have been its exact title, for I tried to find it online much later, after I’d lost it, with no luck, and at some point it would come into my possession in Leningrad, yes, definitely, I was the possessor of it, in my single-room apartment near by the Park of Victory metro station, man, I close my eyes now and I’m back there, right there, as if time didn’t exist and I could still crawl back comfortably into childhood and start life from scratch, damn, where did my life go, yeah yeah yeah, I’m feeling sad now, ineffably so, OK, stop it, shut up, up until my departure for the outer world I still had it, that English book, why not just say America, get on with it, but no, wait, come to think of it, I took it with me to America, too, yes, I did, and I lost it there too, in America, that’s right, during one of my numerous address changes, moves from one American city to another, it’s a long story, not even a story, with all those old-timey photographs of laughing, horsing-around, happy-go-lucky long-dead English schoolboys in the narrow cobbled streets of Dickensian London, yes, all that, the old familiar nostalgia for something one’s never lived through, places one’s never been, yes, indeed, I close my eyes, don’t close your eyes, and I’m right there, in that cozy little room with all those incredible books, OK, you’ve said it already, open your eyes, getting on with it, coming back up to the surface of the recollection under recreation here, sounds needlessly fancy, of course, at five, I don’t know yet any words of the English language, I’m little, yes, on Sixth Red Cavalry Street that apartment was located, and still is, no doubt, with someone else, someone entirely different living there now, well duh, unless the whole building has long been sold and resold to one or a whole succession of local mini-oligarchs, barely a five-minute walk away from us, where my little brother and my grandmother are probably, in the now of a forgotten memory, yes, coming back up to the surface, and where my grandmother and great-grandmother live with their older brother and son, respectively, a prominent academician in the cellulose industry, an alternate member of the Academy of Sciences or something too, who would drown while swimming in a large Siberian river in 1968, despite being a great swimmer, apparently, the water was too cold and the river’s multi-vectored currents too treacherous to conquer, on the day before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, yes, his wife taught English in high school and he had traveled abroad, probably, as a notable scientist, despite being a Jew, but those were slightly different times, so that’s where the foreign books must have come from, yes, no doubt, so much mnemonic begetting, what the hell have I just said, you’ve already said that, OK, I contain multitudes, damn straight, well, contain yourself, and his lively family of five, say more, say more, not now, probably not ever either, so that finally, in a nutshell is why I’m alone in our room now, at five years of age, with a large illustrated book for grown-ups open in my puny lap, while my live-in nanny Lyuba, my very favorite person in the whole world, OK, cut it out, stop in the name of love, you’re doing it again, no cloying deployment of child-speak, but it also happens to be true, hailing from Cheboksary, the Volga-bound capital of the Chuvash Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, she is, yes, and giggling, she told the confused little me once some funny stories about it, too, her hometown, including one about the statue of Lenin in its main square, whose sculptor was drunk as a skunk, apparently, as a result of which it had more hands than people are supposed to possess or some such, that statue, maybe she was lying a bit, coloring the truth, I don’t remember anymore, telling funny stories about Lenin to a small child was not a an exceedingly prudent thing to do, so maybe that’s why I ended up growing up to be, a dissident or whatever, and why I am where and what I am now, due to her, ah Lyuba, yes, and I know about her too that she has no legal right to be in Leningrad, because she has no Leningrad propiska, look it up if curious, so my parents are taking a bit of a risk having her live with and work for us, good for them, good people, what else, she believes in God, oh yes indeed, she does, insanely enough, good Lord, which is our private little deep secret, hers and mine, which I won’t ever betray, because she is uneducated and I’m no rat, plus Yuri Gagarin hasn’t yet spent those one hundred and eight minutes in the outer space, completing that one full orbital circle around the Earth onboard his Vostok-1, without seeing God once, so there is that, there’s no God, case closed, not that is has ever been open, Gagarin hasn’t seen Him, so yes, but that hasn’t happened yet, give it two and a half months or so, ah, all those millions of Soviet postcards and posters depicting a generic Soviet cosmonaut floating through the cheery, deep-blue star-studded cosmos with a big toothy smile on his quintessentially Slavic face and giving the universe a thumbs-up, like some demented Soviet pre-Trump, which latter, Trump, incidentally, was fifteen and already a thoroughly shitty person, by all available accounts, at the time of Gagarin’s space flight, yes, no doubt, under the caption There is No God, all those postcards and posters, the world we lived in then, but OK, enough digressing, stalling, delaying, postponing, sabotaging the subterfuge of memory, she’s in the communal kitchen, Lyuba is, washing the dishes and talking about something probably non-God-related with Old Faina, ah yes, her, that witch, that old termagant, yes, there, I’ve deployed that word, finally, for the first and last time in my life, in her oversized worn-out Army boots, there’s so much to recollect about her with distaste too, that old Jewess, yes, also, a Jewess, it happens, and at five years of age I I have no earthly idea, obviously, that I and all of us are Jews, was she ever evil, Old Faina was, hounded my mother when my mother was pregnant with me, yeah yeah yeah, I don’t know even remotely either as to where children come from, cornering my mother in the endless dark communal corridor, in one of its nooks, and hissing at her viciously, her breath hot and reeking of onions, to the effect that she, my mother, would give birth to a mouse, yes, mark my words, a little mouse, god-accursed myshonok, rather than a normal human baby, me, oh to hell with her, that hateful old whatever, I contain multitudes, multitudes, restrain yourself, moving on, who hates everybody in the apartment except Lyuba, Old Faina does, Lyuba, it is impossible not to love her, and who also, oh look, oh damn, on my laptop screen just now, man oh man, shit, pardon my French, yeah, OK, I’ve been distracted, so sue me, Trump’s just been dealt a friggin’ slap across his fat mug, a humiliating defeat of, like, unprecedented proportions, by the Supreme Court, his Supreme Court, mind you, my God, oh my, wow, OK, all right, stop it, but anyway, what was I going to say, it’s so exciting, well, screw him, moving on, and before my life is over, I’ll have you know, whoever you are, and I mean, completely over, because right now it isn’t quite over yet, for better or worse, I would like to see Lyuba maybe one more time, just once more, dear god, oh stop it, since the last I’ve seen her was when, oh well, I guess I was ten or fifteen or so, maybe more, I don’t really remember, it was such a long time ago, please, dear nonexistent god, OK, stop being stupid, yeah, OK, but that’s not going to happen, of course, so why even talk or even think about it, there’s no reason, not to mention that, well, OK, look, is she even alive still, somewhere in the world, anywhere, In Russia or who knows where, who can tell, there’s no one to ask anymore, hasn’t been in a long time, decades, so I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for her, don’t even know her last name, how idiotic is that, OK, it doesn’t matter, just accept it, resignation is our only potent weapon against the entropy of time, not sure what it was I’ve just said, OK, against the ravages of old age and the accelerated encroachments of death, OK, that’s better, you get the point, yes, good, moving on, but wait, it just occurred to me, by osmosis, what in the world, what in hell, no, seriously, am I doing still being alive, no, seriously, for real, I’m not being coy or cute now, not even positing this as a question, I’m asking rhetorically, seeing that most people I’ve ever loved in my life have already left the building, departed for that no-place from where there is no return, so I’m just trying to, you know, oh man, Trump’s going to totally freak out, will be so much fun to watch, OK, enough, screw him, well, anyway. Coming back up to the surface, I can hear faintly, faintly I can hear distantly the splashing of water and the mumbling of radio in the kitchen, the flat black felt dish on the wall, Cuba my love, Cuba my love, the island of crimson dawn, yes, sure, such a great song, it makes my blood boil with excitement, cut it out, but OK, no, wait, let’s be real, that song hasn’t even been written yet, so a no-go, OK, but at least they still must be talking about Los Barbudos there, as always, Los Barbudos, si, oh yes, of course, all the time, and what else, Klavdiya Shulzhenko, with her modest little blue headscarf, Eisenhower and Adenauer, who in fact, fun tidbit, cute factoid, are not one and the same person, surprisingly enough, despite both being equally horrible enemies of ours and all the rest of freedom-loving proletarian humankind, yes, and moreover, one of them is, or was maybe until a few days or weeks ago, not sure which, let’s go with weeks, I am the master of my past, America’s president, he was, one of them two, yes, America, ughh, but it makes no difference, really, who its new president may be, as he, their new whoever, will be just as bad to and for us, not one tiny bit better than that evil Adenhauser, yes, by default, the one who just became America’s president, the young one, apparently, who will be killed in three years, OK, stop pretending being a child then, if you’re going to say things like that, for God’s sake, well, OK, no need to freak out, and it’s cold and already snowing outside, since they all hate us a priori, on some basic existential level, as prophesied by Marxism-Leninism, oh yeah, hell, Trump’s going to blow his freakin’ gasket, totally, ha, well, good for the Supreme Court, he thought it would be absolute quid pro quo when he was appointing them, but America still is no Putin’s Russia, not by a long shot, and never will be, but yes, as I was just saying, if in fact I was saying it, those nominal rulers of America and their shadowy underground puppet-masters we’re hearing so much about constantly, they will always hate us for hatred’s sake, no matter what, always will, yes, us and all the good, decent, freedom-loving and constantly and tirelessly uniting proletarians of the world, yes, us, the progressive humankind, of which last, I know with certainty but without knowing how I know it, I am an essential and irreplaceable, integral part, a droplet in the ocean of humanity, and they’re the ultimate enemy, America and the rest of the West, our implacable foe, our direct opposites living on the dark side of the planet, that’s right, most certainly, but you know what, what, you know what, what, OK, this is what, let me tell you, seriously, listen, who in their right mind, what bent Nostradamus would ever be crazy enough to predict that all these decades later, the mercifully defunct Soviet Union and the floundering and irrevocably expiring economic basket case post-Soviet, Putin’s Russia, now waging an insane suicidal war against Ukrtaine, would manage to catch up with the unbelievably, just breathtakingly reckless and careless America, yes, and exact, or execute, no, exact their sweet revenge on it, yes, by putting Putin’s total friggin’ fanboy and flunky and eager bagman in the White House, ha, twice, imagine, twice, double-ha, make that make sense, as the young people tend to say these days, yes, and also, yes, also, that, even more massively heartbreakingly still, that, like the lurid traveling light of a long-dead evil star, the official Soviet ani-Zionism, no, damn antizionism, no friggin’ dash, would be showing it too much respect, oh Lord, such an ugly joke on history’s part, unbelievable, man, I’m out of non-obscene words, would, the same decades later, reach and descend like the jagged-edged shadow of a giant prehistoric bird’s wing upon much of the addled Western world, driving hundreds of millions of its inhabitants, especially the younger ones, to utter hate-filled insanity, and so now, how friggin’ ironic, not really the right word, in the Alanis Morrisette’s sense of it, well, anyway, now, on the steep downslope of my life, yes, to call a spade a spade, I have to watch the second goddamn instalment of that ugly old serial of Jew-hatred, except this time it’s unfolding on a foreign, Western soil and in a multitude of foreign languages, so incredibly stupid, and so hopeless, so unmanageably tiresome, too, I’m so tired and dispirited, but what else is new, life, life, OK, enough, breathe, breathe, I’m just a little boy, everybody loves me, even the horrible Old Faina, well, no, she doesn’t, why would she, so what do I know, well, nothing, but oh, I can tell you, yes, that a few days ago, suddenly, out of nowhere, on the spur of the moment, as they saying has it, somehow, OK, keep going, on an inexplicable impulse, some powerful inner urge, go on, keep edging, let’s see what else you can come up with in the way of dilatory tactics, quickly and furiously I drew, alternately using my red and black pencils, Lyuba’s semi-secret gift on some ridiculous religious holiday, chief god’s birthday or some such, on a random sheet of paper with my father’s science formulas and integrals on its other side, I drew a hideously terrible figure of a terrible-looking woman with terrible terrible features and terrible terrible enormous tangled mess of terrible hair and with dark blood dripping terribly from her terrible gaping mouth, OK, see, my vocabulary of dread and existential horror is still limited, even though I’m an old man now, but no, I’m little still, no different from my five-year-old self, yes, I’m little, I’m nothing, I barely even exist yet, I barely even exist already, OK, enough, moving on, and I wrote underneath or beneath or below that terrible drawing of mine, shivering minutely like an aspen leaf and shaking and sniffling my nose, AMEREKA, yes, that’s what I wrote, in ugly capital letters, and then, scared out of my wits by my own terrible creation, I started crying, yes, but of course, weeping unstoppably, what else is new, what else I know how to do well, engulfed as I was by terrible fear with no name, terrible terrible terrible, OK, stop it, terrible terrible, breathe, breathe, unclench your jaws, and Lyuba had to rush back in from the kitchen at that point, upon hearing my despondent wailing, where she was washing dishes and conversing with Old Faina, yes, and she proceeded then to calm me down, pacify and comfort me, holding me tight and telling me in a soothing whisper that everything will be all right, everything will be very good, because God’s looking out for us always, we’re all his children, safe and sound in the kind enormity of his palm, you know, such ridiculous nonsense, so childishly silly, but guess what, it worked, it really did, and I soon fell asleep in her arms, yes, and now, not long after, it is a different day, and it’s cold and snowing outside, beyond our frost-bitten winterized window, most likely, late January probably, and America has a new president, even as I’m sitting on the nobly gleaming floor in our irregularly shaped room with this large book of the supposedly funny or witty or what have you drawings, or caricatures, of various and supposedly well-known personalities, none of whom I happen to know, needless to say, for I’m little, little, and each of those caricatures is accompanied by a short little verse of sorts, quippy ditty or something, quippy ditty, dippy quippy, OK, cut it out, I’m tired, and I’m sort of rating and grading them, you know, those caricature-verse combos, god only knows whence this strange idea has originated in my mind, probably because of my Moscow grandmother, undoubtedly, a high school teacher and school principal in a quiet Moscow suburb called Moose Island, saw no moose there, where I spent almost a year, living with my grandparents, her and my grandfather, an old Bolshevik, after my little brother was born and there was not enough space initially in our communal room, but that’s a whole other story, so much to remember and recollect there also, oh man, well, some other time, even though there almost certainly won’t be any such special another time for that, realistically speaking, but, well, so be it, yeah, this text could go on forever, forever and ever, one memory hooking by the tail and drawing out another one, ad infinitum, until death did us part, me and my memory, this endless begetting, yes, well, anyway, here I am, and, shaking my head vigorously from time to time, now and then, with an ordinary chemical pencil in my bird-like claw of a hand, chemical pencil, yes, the sheer utter Sovietness of it, OK, I’m grading and rating, assessing them, like, well, I’m bored and it’s a pastime, feeling increasingly frustrated and irritated in the process, because none of them, those caricatures and verses, short rhymes, make much or really any sense to me, like for instance, OK, this one, yes, one of them saying, next to the pretty sloppy drawing of a long, thin, stoop-shouldered and generally pitiful-looking man with a crumpled papirosa dangling from his drooling half-open mouth, “Tell us o satirist, why so sad? Oh well, my own jokes I’ve just re-read,” and that’s it, right, I mean, what, make of it what you will, yeah, well, you know, I mean, I’m like, say what, what kind of sense does this make, none whatsoever, so infuriating, yes, and so I write there, slowly and laboriously, by way of entering a grade, the chemical pencil like a miniature dagger in my tiny fist, beneath that moronic little verse, seething inwardly, “Stoopid cant be vors,” yes, that’s right, because it is very stupid and couldn’t possibly be worse, no kidding, breathe breathe, and then I move on, keep on turning the pages, hoping against hope to see something more sensible somewhere down the road, yes, and so it goes for a while longer, while Lyuba is washing the dishes and I think singing something melodiously now in the kitchen, Karambolina, Karamboletta, the great Tatyana Shmyga, The Violet of Montmartre, what in the world is Montmartre, but then, turning yet another page in that book, I freeze a little, go momentarily catatonic, because there, right there, I see a caricature of someone who looks, well, a little or actually a lot like, well, how should I put it, all of us, oddly enough, yes, all of us, us all, except Lyuba, because she looks different, but like all the rest of us, definitely if vaguely yet clearly, like my father, say, yes, and my grandmother and great-grandmother, her in particular, and like my Moscow grandmother, too, and my grand-uncle the academician in cellulose industry, who would drown in that large Siberian river some eight and a half or so years later, and like his grown-up but always very friendly and merry and altogether relatable and approachable sons, and even like the hateful Old Faina, yes, her too, well, in short, like all of us, like I said, both perceptibly and imperceptibly so, and much more the former than the latter, but especially and more specifically like Uncle Osher, well, yes, not really an uncle of mine, of course, but, you know, every grownup within my family’s orbit, or ambit, or whatever, is an uncle or aunt to me, it’s just the way it is, that’s how I’m supposed to address or refer to them, so no, not an uncle but my father’s good and maybe even best friend since high school, also an up-and-coming scientist too, that’s the expression much in use in our household, although not quite in the same field of electromagnetic corrosion, it doesn’t matter which one, I’m little but I’m also old, my life is just beginning but it also already is ending, uprooted by the ever-widening flow of memory I am in my sunset, o Lord, and should I also mention here, for no reason whatsoever, my plush toy bear, dark-brown with yellow glass eyes, probably not, this is not a story of everything, but of something, yes, so OK, Uncle Osher, Uncle Osher, with his long hooked nose and sloping forehead and soulfully protruding black eyes, olives, yes, I’m little and I hate olives, though no one offered any to me, and full curved lips, yes, mouth like a taut bow, and so on, you get the picture, an uncanny, in short, and very strong likeness of his, that drawing represents, obviously made by someone who doesn’t know him but really and very clearly dislikes him and all of us, us all, all of us as us, us as a class, that much is unmistakably obvious, yes, any and all of us, based on that representation of Uncle Osher, myself included, sight unseen, vehemently and genuinely dislikes and just hates us, unaccountably so, and wants us not to exist, me included, so I’m just sitting there, and then my heart comes back to life and starts hammering angrily in my chest, my tiny little chicken coup of a thorax, as I read, ever so slowly, out loud, moving my lips silently, the only way I can read yet, the little rhyme next to that ugly drawing, which goes something like this, “Rootless Cosmopolitan, having no love for our Motherland, would betray us on moment’s notice, loves money more madly, all of Turgenev he’s willing to trade for Hemingway’s single foreign sneeze,” uh, yes, sneeze, a foreign one, too, a pretty short little verse, it rhymes in Russian, in a manner of speaking, and who in the world are those two, Tur.. genev and the other one, Hemp-something, I’m little, I know nothing, nothing, and yet, and yet, at the same time, somehow, I know that I do know something I don’t know, something unknowingly known to me, it’s a strangely exhilarating feeling, as if the sneering words of that sloppy little rhyme and that terrible caricature of Uncle Osher and all of us were making me bigger than I was, lifting me up in the air and floating above the floor, filling me with a heady admixture of hopelessness, dread and happiness, yes, some joyous angry happiness, onomasticon, say what, where the hell was that, where did that word come from, it just popped in my head for no reason, no, palimpsest, palimpsest, well, you know, restrain yourself, no, no, I won’t be restrained, I’m unrestrainable, I contain multitudes, OK, think about how that deranged clown Trump must be feeling right now, yeah, like a total loser he is, stewing and shouting and chucking those Ketchup bottles at the walls, yes, and I start crying again, because I’m little and it is my default coping mechanism, what else do I know how to do well, crying, crying, crying, like the late Roy Orbison, such a weird dude, I’m little and silly, while at the same time sensing, oh yes, definitely, and knowing, how something that is much, just infinitely larger and stronger than me, scarily and ominously and darkly and thrillingly so, so much more enormous than my entire minuscule microscopic being with all its paltry little multitudes, yes, a terrible and beautiful flower of pure angry ardor is unfurling inside and within me, exploding slowly in my solar plexus, fairly devouring me from within, becoming me and all of us, making me feel invincible and gloriously eternal, yes, but OK, time to wrap this up, Trump’s already shuffling out on stage and towards the podium, dragging his elephantine feet, to rant and rave in front of the meekly subdued White House press corps, as if, one more second, I swear, I have existed before, since the beginning of time, and will continue to exist forever.