These are the thoughts I can never write—or, if written, never share. How could I ever admit that I’m crazed beyond control just by the imminence of feminine energy? No, not just sight—though women always make the scene, for the spectacle of femininity has no compare. Nor just touch, nor soothing voice, nor enchanting fragrance. Though just light accidental brushing against women can thrill me with chills, and a woman’s unexpected whisper too near to my ear can claim my mind, and a girl’s blossomed fragrance ever compels me to fantasize myself as Pacino playing the blind Lt. Colonel in Scent of a Woman. Of taste? Don’t get me started—I can’t dare talk about that. Yet not one of these alone, or even the compilation of all, ever approaches—or even constitutes—the mysterious allure that female energy has for me, in and of itself.

I’ve been on battlefields with spectacular histrionics, in fights of gallant kinetic involvement, awash in the ocean surf’s captivating and rippling rhythmics, at times soothingly intellectually massaged to my mind’s core. Immersed, engrossed, wrapped up, and absorbed in drugs, extreme sports, dark missions, far odysseys. No match. There’s no match throughout the abundance of all…to one moment of exposure to the vibrancy of a woman.

So what comprises the source of this captivation? This magnetism which can be even empirically meager? This essence disembodied yet pulsing from the incarnate? So am I driven and ensconced in endless reflection…but reflection, like Narcissus, merely shows me myself. What Echo is there that I now long to hear, the actualization of which was clearly once near…but dispelled and now latent in reverberation’s valleys?

Ah! Valley Girls, I ruse in response to myself. Probably as close with this answer as with anything else.

Well, my descent into Oblivion was interrupted by a domestic emergency.  The bathroom toilet's Fluidmaster fill valve snapped off with an ensuing flood of the floor, and this turn of events required me to terminate toilet service immediately and rush to the local hardware store to buy a fill replacement unit.

Actually, the sight of the water gushing unmoderated out of the broken fill valve and beyond the rim of the toilet's tank brought to mind another passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan poem sited two posts below.  Here's the relevant imagery:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

Sacred river indeed.   No doubt that's why a toilet is often referred to as 'the throne'.

Okay.  I'm getting my head out of the chasm (toilet tank) and heading out to soak up some sun on the run. 

Outside the pleasure dome it’s calm.  I’m now in a field called the Plain of Napalm. It’s precisely featureless and lacking even shifting shadows.  It’s the kind of place where you start walking in a straight line and end up instead in circles.  There is an unseen sponginess here, a near manifestation whispering: “Remain and banish all desire.”  I could.  I almost could.  Except that I sense that this inanimate sponginess exactly desires that.  My desires would no doubt disappear, but only because it would inorganically suck them out of me.  This place gives SpongeBob SquarePants a bad name.  It’s time to transpose consciousness, I guees.

  --nfp, still reporting from Oblivion

I am perfectly imperfect and on the verge of wilding into a cavern called Oblivion.  And in this cavern there is a chasm.  I see the edge.  I teeter.  I fall in.  And I understand:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Down to a sunless sea indeed.   Ah, but you say: “A pleasure dome, a pleasure dome!”

But not by anybody’s chinny-chin-chin will it let me in.  Damn Kubla Khan and his private club klan.  I’m stuck on the shore of a lifeless sea with no option but to form my own decree.  So decree I shall, undaunted by this minor setback.  More to follow.

  --nfp, reporting from Oblivion