"The Little Burnette is MIne"

“The little brunette is mine, we have all settled on that,” Leigh boasts haughtily.
She smiles as she looks at the assembled gathering. They were in the library discussing the post modern quandary that is modern life, and instead digressed into picking out the most attractive females struggling over organic chemistry, or the historical precursors to the Russian revolution. In every group, there is at least one.
The one who wants to be the center of attention.
The one who will hold court and address the proud, perfumed courtesans as almost her equal, but only slightly under her.
The one who all look up to.
The one who everyone desires in their sexual fantasies.
In this small, intimate group, Leigh was the one who stood out and filled this role. She did so admirably, but without any small bit of that compromising humility that is sometimes found amongst those who fortune’s light has shone upon. Being the only female in the group helped this desire out. The others, Dan, Steve, Jerry, and Brian were of the class possessing too much intellectual acumen and too little skills to persuade any of the feminine persuasion to accompany them to bed.
I knew them from here and there, no specific point of reference, but I would amiably nod my head when I saw them, in the hallways, walking the street, struggling through the too narrow hallways that accompany alcohol drinking establishments. They are few years younger than I am, and their naivety on the ways of the world made me smile one of those little bemused grins that have been passing my visage more and more as I grow older.
I could not help but look around and try to find who the little brunette was who objectified the little ramblings of the group positioned behind me, closer to the door of the library than I was, not ensconced in such large piles of books and periodicals trying to find infinite knowledge amongst a staggeringly finite number of words, no matter how many they might be, eventually all will be digested. I stick to my studies. I am curious though. I am also, as I understand, a connoisseur of the female form, as Leigh is.
Perhaps this little quandary is the point of attraction those boys with generic names have with her too. There is something about the impossible that makes it so alluring. I know this as I have had my share of impossible dreams. Sir George Mallory, if that was his name, is quoted as saying that the reason you climb the mountain is, simply, “Because it is there.” He died on Everest and they found his remains some eighty years later, his survival gear fit for a blustery Scottish winter, and not for the blizzards of the Himalayas.
I grow rambling and incoherent. I can no longer understand myself. This woman is no mountain. No matter how the cold wind blows, she is the light in the east, through, well, yonder window breaks. Leigh is the sun. No, that is poor metaphor, better suited to Elizabethan teenagers than my Leigh. No matter the manner of erudition, in it still lie the seeds of disillusion and cynicism. I know she is there from her voice. It betrays her beauty in ways that a simple glance could not discern. No! To stare at her for hours one would not know the depths of her soul.
You have to look inward, and see the radiant shining clichés the fill all her being. I’m not crazy, hell, I’ve never touched her that way, but I know how soft and silky her long raven tresses would feel brushing on my inner thigh as she…
But no, I’m not going to become come sycophant appeaser, lingering around her to laugh at her jokes, and return her spiteful smiles. I know the impossibility of it. There are lingering doubts, the hints of some thing or other that make you wonder. There are the drawn out glances you give to her, and you realize that she knows you’re looking. There was that one sweet peck on the cheek that should have been accounted for and wiped clean off the slate, but instead I applied to it infinitely more meaning. Oh, but it is there!
Why not die, cold, gripping an antiquated axe, and taking shelter in a small burrow on the side of the greatest mountain man has ever known? Is it the attempt that we celebrate? Few people remember Mallory. What mankind remembers are the successes. If you don’t have intimate knowledge of the field, you know Hillary, but you even forget the Sherpa accompanying him on his famous trip. How Cyrano is soon forgotten, that man so instrumental in the process but relegated to the dustbins of people’s pasts.
I look around and wonder whom that brunette could be. There is a fine specimen of the early undergraduate variety browsing the referencing shelves. The fleece sweatshirt she is wearing does not disguise her pert breasts. If anything, the baby blue accents the female parts, as the overhead lights cast shadows on the kangaroo pouch where she is resting her left hand, scanning the titles with her right. Her jeans fall flatly against her rear, a decidedly negative aspect if one is fishing for an ideal of perfection. If anything, she needs to gain some weight and fill out to more Rubenesque proportions. It cannot be her, as she is little, but her hair, in my assessment, is more of a dirty brown than anything that can be called brunette

ars poetica

The artifice lies in the deception. We do not know where it truly lies. In a small country house on the outskirts of a poor rural village, perhaps? I don’t know, I need a fertile muse to strike me with her knowledge. Will I ever have a dream again? We are said to write to someone in all the works that we do, I haven’t found that one person I am supposedly writing to. Why do we write, paint, and compose? Is there something altruistic to it, something about creating more beauty in this world? I think much of it spring forth from man’s own vanity, wanting someday to be adored by masses of people, and to be cared about by strangers. It sure has fueled the celebrity culture that surrounds Hollywood.
There is a picture somewhere with Vladimir Nabokov sitting in a bathroom composing some work or another. He states that this one space was the only one in his own apartment at the time where he could sit and work. There is a pile of snuffed cigarettes in the tray to his right. Wolfe said that all one needed (women in particular) was 500 pounds a year and a room of your own. That may not sound like much now, but it seems to be something of a substantial income at the time she penned it. I wish I had my quotes straight and could attribute the next quote, but it fails me off the top of my head, but it has been said that “happiness isn’t very aesthetically pleasing,” There is nothing in the art that makes us want, there is no want. It goes back to Tolstoy, opening one of the most famous novels ever, saying that in despair we are all unique, but Happiness (with the proper noun status that is conveyed by the capitol) is an uninteresting emotion.
Lets see, poverty, squalor, despair, loneliness, and all general conditions of unhappiness do not make a great artist by way of fact. There are just as compelling arguments that the conditions listed above are precursors to many such things as addiction, mental illness, violence, and voting republican. Generally, it seems that in the past (and my knowledge of the literary past is admittedly Anglo-centric) one has to come from at least the middle class to make any kind of real living off the works of the mind. It is hard to consider basic fundamental truths of the human condition if you are excessively worried about how to fill your belly on a day-to-day basis.
It is with this knowledge that I write

And then there were two.

The competition had been a furious wreck of disorganized, but well-meaning people.

I hate to generalize, but there was a sentiment that what we were doing was for the better good of the humans. What we had failed to realize was that all the infighting and the maneuvering against each other would prove to be the downfall of the last settlers here.

If only we had the strength to withstand our own selfishness, we might not be in the position that we were in now. As it was, we were out numbered, out manned, and out gunned. These savages, these less than human humanoids, they had held us to the bay for months, and now our insurrection against them was proving futile.

There was just too many of them, and we were not supported, we were not backed up. We were without hope. All the promise of the “New World” had fallen against us, and I was the only Englishman left.

I knew Sylvan. I knew he felt the power, the absolute superiority of the Empirical European powers, and that in the power of his country, he had no equal. I know what he felt. The power of my empire had never been questioned.