I
received a copy of a dopey lettertoday written by a dopey,malignant place where I used to work (I left last June) informing the recipient, a minor
creditor of a former client of mine,who remains a client of theirs,
of my “last known address.”
The words and peculiar
imagery in the letter suggested a kind of off-kilter X-Filesfederal bureaucracyscene,
but that’s much too poetica thought. Dopey is better.
I
think my last known address issomewhere between↑and ↓.
No
more need be said, except that the federal government has another snowstorm day-off today (when it isn't snowing) following the previous day-off last Friday (whenit wasn't snowing). Nice work if you can get it.
All anticipation is keener, be it
of joy or pain, than the reality whereof it is a mental forecast; but that
inactive waiting at Redmoat, for the blow which we knew full well to be pending
exceeded in its nerve taxation, anything I hitherto had experienced.
I felt as one bound upon an Aztec
altar, with the priest's obsidian knife raised above my breast!
Secret and malign forces throbbed
about us; forces against which we had no armor. Dreadful as it was, I count it
a mercy that the climax was reached so quickly. And it came suddenly enough;
for there in that quiet Norfolk home we found ourselves at hand grips with one
of the mysterious horrors which characterized the operations of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
It was upon us before we realized it. There is no incidental music to the
dramas of real life.
Text: Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu,
Ch. IX, 1913
