Foreword: This is another sort of autobiography, mixed with speculation and outright fantasy. Like some of my other pulp, it is sprinkled with a high degree of the uncouth. It could be though that, pertaining to certain topics there is no other way to present them, save for in an uncouth manner. It is - that overarching dash of the uncouth - perchance the very nature of those same certain topics. Perchance on the other hand, it - the fact that any and all discussion pertaining to certain matters may appear as sordid - involves social or religious conditioning. That may be an open question.
	Be that as it may, this story has a real 'edge' to it which some of my other works may lack. Some of it may appear to be a borderline, unfounded complaint; or to put it another way, a whine. This was not my intention. Such passages were left in because they seemed to add to the narrative. As I was re-reading this manuscript, it appeared to me that such whines, as they popped up there and about could be read in more than one way, and perchance weren't at all complaints, but rather observations.
	In the end, massaging this manuscript gave me a greater sense of unease than perhaps even Ouroboros. That may be saying a lot, or on the other hand nothing at all. Of that said, 'massaging,' this story definitely received more editing and proofreading attention than did Ouroboros. That is not to say that it is left without mistakes.
	In any event, this was another tales worth the telling; at least in my view. As well, the all-out insults and attacks which were so rife throughout Ouroboros have faded a bit into a 'kinder, gentler' presentation. Of course, your mileage may vary; or as they used to say on the old-fashioned BBS systems, YMMV.
	Be warned that this story contains some of the longest, run-on or compound sentences I've ever 'penned.' As with everything else, take what you want and leave the rest.

The Mini Mart (DMZ Eyes)

By Andy Thomas

2008

	What follows is perchance but a tale of unfolding, unwinding insanity. 

	He was lost to the world but he made videos anyway; snippets of stills and video clips mixed into visual collages and adorned with bits of music - songs - he'd recorded for himself along the way. The visuals were mostly of women, and partly of war machines. The music had over the years and for the most part spiralled up through yawning chasms of invisible misfortune and inhuman woe, intermingled with a love of satins and sheers and and oft-forlorn craving for the female form; manifested as audio recordings in our world as the ostensible creation of he; our protaganist; Hardy.
	Perchance his obsession with woman and warfare were some Stalinesque conundrum; wafting over the digital landscape of our collective present as but a series of cascading, morbidly grotesque ghosts from within the proverbial machine.
	He loved the human female form, and early in life had celebrated it. He had for so very long been fascinated by the war between nazis and bolsheviks. He spent his formative years playing wargames, and then looking at pictures of women. Sometimes, in reflecting upon his misbegotten past he would wish he'd never known sexual desire. What great work might he have undertaken if he'd been born with the capability of ignoring the beauty of the female form; if he had only not been waylaid by countless hours rather working toward a sort of being sucked into the vortex of female attraction?
	By then, Hardy were invisible. His heart ached. He knew the horror. Whether he were more intimate with the hideous than anybody else; that is a question for the ages. Whatever any of his fellow citizens might have known of terror; Hardy himself knew at least a bit about the same. Once there had been free-flowing beauty of which would assuage the ongoing phantasmagoria of suffering. By then though the beauty were reduced to a mere trickle of sometime miasma and near-constant regret, while the taps of full blown fear and disdain had been let wide open.
	Like his music and his writings, Hardy's videos were neither wildly nor widely consumed by any human audience, but they weren't either entirely ignored by the same. He well knew though that the fiends behind the veil - or some of them at least - enjoyed his sometime discombobulated lifetime collection of artistic meanderings. He'd never walked the stage in the grandest sense, so all he had were his visions of what that might be like; were he ever to get the actual chance to present his music to some audience small or large. In these imaginings he invariably saw inhuman beings wearing black cloaks and hoods. That is to say that - in the same way he'd never completely been able to visualize the opening to the bottomless pit in his mind - he could neither visualize a human audience. Whenever he would try to imagine knowing the bottomless pit, he could never see his throbbing flagpole pulsating in and out of any thrashing, wettened, tightening chasm. In the same way, his imagined musical audience was more or less always comprised of any number of some sort of transfixed type of ghast.
	There were myriad, multitudinous women whose images from day-to-day, face-to-face life; in still; and in video had so piqued his imagination. There were so many machines of war which, in his detached state of passion he'd christened as works of antique art. He knew where the bottomless pit would lie, yet he was never able to identify the star who fell to earth.
	Entities from the other side of the veil had dogged both his dreams and waking hours. Perchance his life were a faint yet damning signal to any youthful fool who might be yet contemplating an occult dabbling. Anyone could look upon his life and see through the resigned meaningless of his surface visage; a map beneath which pointed the sorrowful way to a metaphysical nowhere.
	As he had always been wont to do; Hardy could not refrain from comparing himself and his life to the same where others were concerned. As with everything else, he knew though that his observations could be constrained by the narrowness of tunnel vision; the bias of false memory; the projection of accomplishment and satisfaction where there were in point of fact none; the false notion of esteem invariably equalling virtue. The fiends gently encroached from beyond the veil.
	His religion had been of at first the bottomless pit, and then later of Lucifer. Were such one and the same? Certainly his fascination with each had gone from an, in some way fairly innocent desire for reciprocation, to outright reeling in the face of unmitigated terror which ostensibly lies at the core of all human catastrophe. Being a sometime Jacobin in his heart, Hardy had no need for pharisees and their laundry list of trite specifications and punishments for failure to abide by the same; and by definition this made him lawless. Somehow the lawful, with their overarching compendium of rules and regulations had used a blackened talisman forged in some tyrannical furnace of yore, and through the power of its enchantment enslaved all of humanity going forward throughout hystory. It weren't so much the voluntary enslavement; the bitter bileous sludge of submission to a human authority; a poison which sycophantic others had labelled 'progressivism' or 'democracy' in an attempt at transmuting the same into sweet nectar; it weren't that others so threw themselves into slavery with such enthusiasm whilst calling it liberty. Rather it were that the crowd had always expected Hardy and his ilk; those who are lawless in their hearts; to accept their witch's brew of stultifying, life encroaching conformity.
	Somehow the arch-demon of 'majority rule' had manifested itself in the hearts of everyone within Hardy's vicinity. The dream-killing fiend had through hypnosis of some incredible sort, convinced nearly everyone that somehow the decision of the majority were without exception, sacrosanct. What had been forgotten by nearly all in their rush to the ultimate slaughter which would invariably be begotten by this same majority rule was the ancient and simple truism that, 'the crowd is always wrong.'
	Of course all cultural axioms lead eventually to war and slaughter. To pretend that certain methods of culture might lead in another direction is a lie of the highest order. Prosperity begats decadence. The bottomless pit receives and regurgitates all. At its core are alternating doses of terror and beauty, with a constant drone of suffering to bind them as one. The bottomless pit receives the masqueraded bravado of the macho man, and the fawning, slippery machinations of the eunuch alike; and after some gestation spasms forth both strength and weakness; beauty and ugliness; the profound and banal; genius and buffoonery; all riding that twisting, neverending thread of at once suffering and hope.
	Hardy had been raised a Christian. He couldn't be sure by then that he'd ever loved Jesus. He was fairly certain that he'd never been loved by the same, but to be fair he understood that his version of love were probably far different from the one they call the Man from Galilee. What if Jesus were in actuality a demon? What if everyday Christians were in truth every bit as oppressive as the Saloth Sars of the world? The combined works of JS Bach had at least mitigated that. Hardy could see the monsters behind and interwoven with everyone and everything; not the least of these including himself. At some point he had come to embrace the demons, for they were every bit a part of creation as he in any event. It wasn't easy; it may not even have been right or good; but it was where he had ultimately led himself in the spiritual sense. Maybe someday there would be angels who would touch him. What would such be like? Would he ever want that? Did he in any way deserve the same?
	Long ago, he had sold his soul for rock and roll. That had been perchance the beginning of his travails. Actually, it may have started shortly before that, or even further back. Had it been with the dream at the age of 5 or 6; the dream of leaving the earth in a rocket ship at the moment of the glorious 2nd coming of Jesus? Had it been with his first dabblings in the occult; prior to the contract with the devil, at the age of 16 or thereabouts? Was his punishment by the Raven Girl; was it recompense for the spell he'd cast upon the other buxom lass, or for the contract with the devil; or perchance both? Would the curse ever be broken? Why had he ever lived? Had he actually lived at all?
	Perchance the thought of happiness is the lie we must all disabuse ourselves from. All of those fluffy and puffy ideas of sincere smiles and innocent laughter taking place beneath a backdrop of fairness through tax and spend democracy; it was the thing - the nightmare pretending to be but a dream - which each of us needed to flee from. How the demons of democracy must laugh as the bombs fall in Cambodia, Dresden, Tokyo or Fallujah. The fashions and the scapegoats change, but the constants are seared, mutilated, ripped and rendt flesh; combined with prison camps and marching bands; and the bottomless pit endlessly taking and then giving forth again; all of it built upon a foundation of overarching lies.
	Hardy had written his screeds; given forth his say; immersed himself in the diabolical; yet something shone forth. Perchance it weren't him at all but some heretofore unregistered beacon in the spiralling chaos outside of the majority of human perception.
	The Cambodian women had stolen his heart. Other women had stolen his heart, but none quite like the Cambodians. He still loved them. They had taught him. Saloth Sar haunted him. The Raven Girl had vexed him for nearly 30 years; even if such had never been her intent; the cursed kiss from a distant, on-tilt teenaged Summer night had held sway even through the passage of soul-shattering, mind-numbing, sense-deadening time. He had not forgotten the other; to say more would be to kiss and tell yet again.
	He had written about all of this; made music whose lyrics sang of the same; all guided by esoteric nuances outside the realm of time and space. It was inhuman, at least in no small part. He couldn't stop. He had attacked Jesus and the Christians. He had laid his grievances bare, but perchance in such a way as to gain zero traction with any normal audience; whether by intent or accident; failed to gain the attention of anyone; remaining himself invisible in nearly every desireable regard. Who had suffered more? Who had suffered less? Who had taken the high road, and who ridden the low? Who had fought the good fight, while others had run away as if possessed by the spirit of the one so many of us know as, Dr. Smith?
	Hardy had attacked the church, and later apologized. After psilocybin and salvia combined that one dreary day to rob him of his life's work; and to send him careening along a seemingly one way ticket out of this world; he had finally begun to understand the concept of death, sacrifice, and resurrection and the symbolic - if not entirely physical - reality of the same. Yet is it a sacrifice if it is returned? In the game of chess, if one throws away a piece in order to gain advantage; is the piece ever returned as either a direct or indirect result of a successful gambit? What if the gambit fails? Is all lost? What spirits reach forth from infinitely harsh realms to gently torture the minds behind the pieces on the board? If a piece is given up, yet this somehow leads to the promotion of pawn to Queen, does that mean the piece is returned in the guise of the newly crowned Queen? Did the death and resurrection of Jesus even represent any kind of ultimate loss? What had ever been traded, as in a certain definition of the word, sacrifice?
	Hardy didn't suppose that it mattered either way. Christians would believe as they always had. Whether inspired by faultless angels and the Most High God; or secretly driven by diabolical entities; Christendom was more than likely here to stay. It didn't feed Hardy.
	Was he corrupted beyond repair? He kept staring into the bottomless pit on the one hand, but no longer kept much faith in either Lucifer or Jesus. He had spoken before of his sense of possession. No one had ever listened, even on that night of the hour of his greatest need. Perchance by then the people around him were at a loss as to what to do; and at least in part they secretly wished he'd just fade away so they wouldn't have to deal with the stream of conjecture as if from Azathoth; bombastic, thinly-veiled blasphemy marked only by its noxiously meandering pointlessness as it poured forth from his mouth.
	He wondered what power might be behind Magibon. Her eventual success brought a tear of joy to his eye. He couldn't quite rid himself of the thought of her manicured nails; her magical face; the idea of making love to her even though she were less than half his age. At least she were a woman. Were he a man?
	What was it about Magibon of YouTube that made Hardy so happy; so happy in just watching as she spoke in a girlish, halting Japanese and made faces for the camera? What was it about her curves and the subtle things she did with her body, flowing forth from ostensibly the most innocent of poses, yet cutting into his heart of hearts like a knife representing never-before-then known love? He liked Magibon. It didn't matter what the naysayers had to say. The vast majority of them were simply jealous. There was only one Magibon; some imitators had fully grasped the concept and in turn had made equally pleasant, yet similar videos of their own; others had thought nothing of what Magibon were doing, and had made the mistaken assumption that copying her would be but a trivial matter; and in doing so they had failed miserably. Some people are paying attention, and others are not. This is not to say that those who failed in emulating Magibon are not without gifts of their own; it's only apparent that seducing the camera isn't the strongest of their suits.
	Be that as it may, in those sullen days bridging a fading Winter and nascent Spring of an indeterminate year, Hardy vaulted into some at least slight adventure; perchance one worth re-telling:
	
	He had collected footage of Cambodian Apsara dancers; Asian Racequeens; Yin Ling; a full, online copy of the movie classic, Dr. Strangelove; Wermacht Panzers in action; the Messerschmitt Komet; Stalin, Hitler, and FDR; lovely Latinas of Primer Impacto; on and on; by far the most common themes being primarily either women or secondarily, 20th century military hardware. In addition, he had found a copy of some videos he'd shot himself; of hired models from the 1990s; and of he and his friends shooting off various guns in the direction of tin cans spread against the backstop of a hill; as well were the footage of women, adorned in satins and sheers and shooting guns. What kind of phantasm had used him in interweaving all of these various and sundry visual bits together, with the songs he'd recorded over the space of 25-odd years? He had always toyed with the idea that procreation begats violence and vice versa; and that peace is only found through motionlessness; that liberty is impossible in a world of motion; that every movement ultimately requires that a cost be paid; and despite all of the suffering, he had come to - at least from time to time - believe that the beauty of it all was worth the price; at least such were his hope. Had some hideous heretofore unseen visage of blasphemy with neither beginning nor end, long-since claimed his eternal soul?
	Hardy thought himself out of time. The rent was due. He hated paying the rent. Some part of him loathed the idea of working day in and day out in order to simply live from hand to mouth. More often than not he couldn't pass the drug tests which even the most menial of jobs required; there in that demonically-inspired, pharasaic corporate social state. 
	Years before a person could have shown up for a job interview drunk (not that in reality Hardy would have done such a thing), and gotten a well-paying job which in truth would have amounted to downloading pictures, video, and music from the internet all day. By now though the new economic realities had set in, and a person had to go through the veritable wringer to pick up even the most unskilled position. What cackling fiend had rubbed its hands in glee from outside the house of mirrors which Hardy and those of his ilk - assuming there were any others of the same - then found themselves in?
	In job interviews, the pharisees would look down their noses at him; belittling his contribution to the arts; so certain of the civil efficacy of their beloved democracy; so sure that they were on the right path and it were Hardy who were faltering off into the abyss; so seemingly consciously unaware of the hidden, hideous beings who were in point of fact guiding their own way to their ultimate tortured oblivion. They would pat themselves on the back with regard to their drug tests; they who had swallowed the blue pill and loved their state-sanctioned medications. When faced with the reality of the situation in the guise of the things Hardy would speak frankly of, they would retreat into their love of law enforcement; fawning over the hallowed sanctity of loss of human rights; patting themselves on the back in their demonic, state-worshipping stupor. They were the cultural Marxists; theirs would last forever; they were right and true; Hardy was a doomed specimen. Perchance they were right in ignoring the ghasts and ghouls behind the veil; those horrendous super beings who would barter with their lives unbeknownst to them; infest the same and in so doing stealthily mould their countenances. Perchance it were just as well; perchance Hardy's knowledge of the same had availed him absolutely nothing. Whatever were happening to Hardy with regards to the miasma which he were witnessing civilization sink to within; he could not fathom whether he had brought the same upon himself, or if he were somehow a sort of innocent. Perchance only those with Down's Syndrome are the innocent among us. Certainly the most high God holds the special people in best regard. As for the pharasaic minions and their burgeoning faux hifalutin yet in reality hellish hankerings, Hardy could only continue for as far as he might along that path upon which his life had set him, whether by comedic accident or tragic design.
	He knew of the secret societies; of the would be lawyer-kings - the pharisees - who by interacting with diabolical beings would deign to set the course of human hystory. What gave Hardy a smile from time to time was the idea that these once-human beings, shorn of their souls in the service of the invisible agents of hideous fortune; that in the drop of a hat their secret meeting places could, at last be burned to the ground; that their precious law books might one day be shredded into the flotsam and jetsam of something less than a memory; that the collective sigh of a weary humanity at large could set off the tidal wave of that purging at the hands of the spirit of real and lasting transformation into a land of actual art and science; faith and logic; a much simpler yet profoundly sturdy sense of what is desired and what is not.
	For the time being Hardy and his ilk would have to attempt to weather the storm of the tyrannical forces of that invisible yet hideous strength; their notorious, edict-enforcing pharisees; legal codexes accepted by handwringers of every stripe as being holy writ when it were all much more akin to fabled company store scrip; that tempest in a proverbial teapot which despite everything had given the illusion of as being so overwhelming and chillingly real in its overarching, inhuman tyrrany; to ride out the wave of ongoing human misfortune which so many had - in more often than not being mere bystanders - paid for with their very lives in upholding its vaingloriousness. He knew how they worked.
	He knew that fortune sometimes favors the fool, and tragedy ultimately reaches into the lives of the beautiful and well-to-do. Such was small solace in any event. Hardy wanted more. Perchance that want was the key to his wantoness, reaching back into the days even before his birth; he fair of face and tracing through a sort of lifelong, untold mirth; simple gaiety which sustained him even through the blackest of hours. It could have been that everything were simply out of place; and that one day with the blink of an unwavering eye something might awaken and displace humanity's curse.
	In the experience with the mushrooms he had wondered whether he were dead. Had he died whilst attempting suicide those decades before? Had everything since been but a charade; but a clever camouflage covering for an actual trip through Tartarus? Did Elysium faintly call, through the hue and cry of that oft-wretched adventure otherwise known as his life?
	The dragon were there in his vision. Were it separate from he; or rather had he seen only a reflection of himself? The dragon was huge. It was angry, but not in totality. Senses oscillated as he careened through visions at once diabolical yet glittering with at least the faint illumination of a better way. Was he face to face with an actual entity named Lucifer? Had he passed through Dimmu Borgir, whilst traipsing through visages whether real or imagined of Yin Ling, Magibon, the Apsara, and Michelle Trachtenberg?
	Hardy sought shelter from the overwhelming confluence of conflicting yet complimentary visions. He played his backwards guitar. The strings were tuned that way. Everything was upside down. The pentatonic scales flowed in a fashion he'd never before experienced. There was something royal in their import as he flailed somberly yet with small, glorious anticipation of what might come to be. Would the women come to rule? Had he swallowed a lie?
	Hardy wondered if he had been lost to the devil. He sensed that the world were changing; outside his door. He didn't think he could take much more. Liquid fell from his nostrils and he thought it might be blood. He went to the mirror and saw that it were only clear, not crimson. Would he be touched to the point of living inside his head, consigned by some heretofore hidden hand never again to sense the world we all know and share amongst ourselves?
	It seemed he had no real friends. He attempted to call someone. They weren't answering. He called his parents and asked for an exorcism or deliverance. They didn't much listen to that, but gathered some members of the flock and came to see him; to make sure he was all right; to set him back on the path of Christian faith. Yet it only lasted for a few days. 
	They had blessed his apartment. He had deleted all of his music, and videos; destroyed all of his DVDs; but his backwards guitar remained. Only days later he had fairly well lost his newfound faith. At night it seemed as though spirits swirled about him, but they never spoke his name. A part of him regretted that his parents had ever witnessed the cascading failure which indicated his life. What had they ever done to have deserved a son such as he? Would the world have been better without him?
	That night at least, they had listened to his life's story. He had told them of the madness of his sense of being an avatar, perchance in point of fact the great beast of the book of St. John's revelation. How many thousands of others had themselves had the same inkling that they might in point of fact be the man of perdition? 
	He had long before disabused himself of the notion that he were some hideous avatar; yet the 666 had from a certain point onward come back to hound him. Once, he had forgotten, yet some entity had remembered. The invisible forces had sought him out. Why had they put the number of the beast on the door of his office, there at the large company of whose accursed, gleaming glass doors he had once labored within? 
	Why had the lady friend once begun her speech as to how more than one of her boyfriends had confided in her that each of they were in fact, the beast? Certainly Hardy had never said the same to her of himself; he'd never even broached the subject. Until then he'd only tried to forget. The number had appeared again on a cake at a party at the dot.com where he'd worked for awhile. Again, the number had appeared at the party where the host had given him a toke of DMT. As Hardy had foolishly fashioned a t-shirt as a teenager; a shirt with 666 emblazoned upon it; so had the host at that party 25 years hence worn a shirt with the same 666 on it. The DMT had taken Hardy into a vision of the beast. The host would have none of it, and interrupted Hardy's trip to tell him that he could not be the beast; that the host were the only  true beast. The host had solved the riddle of the Book of the Law, after all; and he had a picture of Crowley on his wall, as if to bolster his own claim to fame.
	Going into the DMT trip, Hardy had heard the voices of the invisible spirits; all about the room and speaking in what sounded like ancient tongues. Hardy had passed through several apparitions and arrived as he had at loggerhead with the host as to the identity of the beast. While the conversation were unfolding externally; inside the vision itself there were suddenly colors of blue, green and silver. A voice from within stated that the Tetragrammaton were not the demiurge. Hardy wanted for a moment to be as Sepp Dietrich; to be one of those soldiers who only lived for the next battle; to be a man who honored his oath; so misunderstood in the world of today yet projecting a sort of quaint loyalty, even as but the echo of a ghost from days past; to know that ultimate adrenaline of combat; to have a deep, abiding loyalty to one's comrades; yet, by the end of the vision some minutes later, Hardy only wanted with his heart to carry on in the tradition of Jimi Hendrix and Uli Jon Roth; to play guitar with the soul of a gypsy. The guns of the Waffen SS had gone silent so long ago. It didn't matter what anyone said about them; not today. No one's mind was going to be changed. In any event, the weapon required by the fight Hardy now faced were the guitar, not the automatic rifle; the pen, not the stick grenade.
	On the night of the overwhelming mushroom flight, Hardy had told the story of his life to the Christians; they at a loss for words. The group of them had said the Lord's Prayer together. Perchance in light of that, he weren't demon-possessed as he'd thought. In any event his conversion fell short and he found himself back looking into the bottomless pit, and wondering who were the star who had fallen to earth.
	His life's work seemed to have all been for naught. A chilling realization set in; that he had met the dragon and flinched, and in so doing had been shunted into a metaphysical spiral the cackling demonic likes of which he might never recover from; rather that he might caterwaul ever further downward through the nightmarish realms of cowardice and on into his ultimate destruction.

	Hardy needed a job, and found one at the mini-mart, where the chinese owner woman beckoned. Perchance he might get another shot at life, albeit in an ostensibly reduced role; to be fair as befitting his overall ongoing display of poor judgement and abandonment of any responsibility ever once handed to him. He trained for a few days, then took over the graveyard shift, during whence shuddering demons flitted about from beneath the floor of the godforsaken place. He dreaded most each and every shift, gaining slight respite only on the last 'day' of each week - Friday mornings from midnight to 8 a.m. - as at 2 a.m. he would lock up the booze coolers for the night and breathe a sigh of relief at the fact that at least he wouldn't have to deal with that what really amounted to another two days; not until midnight betwixt Sunday and Monday.  
	Sleeping during the day was difficult at first; yet when he did nod off,  his dreams reinvigorated themselves with a vengeance; that is when he wasn't lying awake in the middle of the afternoon and suffering under the onslaught of the hip-hop beats from his decadent neighbors in the unit above his; they with their childlike, trance beats thumping the air about his place beneath them, filling his ears with the sounds of what can only be described as one of the ever most succesful Tavistock social engineering programs writ large. Much like rock and roll before it, hip-hop promised its listeners that somehow they were rebellious, when in point of fact in listening to the same they were morphing into mindless drones, thinking they had found some sort of racial or group identity where in truth they had succumbed to the machinations of the multicultural combine in all of its at first enticing, and later self-destructive bravado. They thought they had found soul, but instead they had lost it. The demons behind the slow, lumbering beats would turn the intellectual capacity of those listeners caught in its snare; turn their ability to employ logic and reason into mush; and instead the hip-hop mavens would find solace only in the base and banal, and the puerile machinations of their bodies. There were exceptions of course which would prove the rule, but Tavistock and MI5-6; CIA and the minions of Montauk had once again thwarted most every edifying expression of enobling art, and had instead guided any nascent, pharisee-threatening revolutionary movement into the realm insipidly crass commercialism, attended by the overly mindless and  soul-deadening caustic beats.
	How Hardy despised being awakened by the overbearing, immature rhythms  from without. He told himself that, in the end it wasn't a big deal and that it could be a physiological exercise to find sleep, even in the midst of the bombastic sonic pretensiousness. Eventually, and partly through the use of a portable fan which stirred up quieting spirits from the netherworld and in so doing blocked out the sounds from the units around him in general and above him in specific; he at last found rest and respite during the day. To be fair, some of the hip-hop from without had been mixed in with slightly different styles, and sometimes he could actually hear music surrounding the threateningly thudding bass drum. Some of it was actually worthwhile as far as he were concerned. Some of it actually seemed to mine similar sonic veins  as he'd himself from time to time partaken of, in spinning his own threads of random, haunted musical silver and gold.
	In the end he could see that hip-hop had its place, but for one to listen to the same at the exclusion of everything else was mental and spiritual suicide. At least progeny might be produced out of the mix, and one day the offspring of the same might reawaken to a new and glorious set of intellectual and spiritual pursuits. In the meantime Hardy wasn't holding his breath. As for the hip-hop itself, Hardy most enjoyed the pieces which favored women singing, and eschewed entirely the spoken screeds of some otherwise non-descript male. Once, Hardy had spoken with a rappa from New York at a temp job at the auto race track. As the engines roared in the background and seemingly shook the very air itself; he told the nascent rappa that it would be good if he and his compadres might learn to sing once again. As politely as possible, Hardy intoned that the preaching rigamarole was getting to be a bit long in the tooth; already. Hardy understood as well though that the spirit of dancing, and drums, and fornication might have to carry a culture to its full nadir before the trip to the apogee of artistic zenith might once again be carried forth. The hideous beings behind the veil would have their way in any event. 
	Be that as it may, Hardy trained for a couple of days, then took over the graveyard shift at the Mini-Mart. He was alone there from midnight to 8 a.m. It seemed dangerous to him, yet the seductive voice of the Chinese woman calling him on the phone in the middle of the night was enough to keep him going; at least for awhile. How he would ache for her return each morning, and then when she had arrived, dilly dally about before leaving the store that he might spend more time in her divine presence. She stirred his loins. Even her berating seemed to take his desire higher and higher. Her caresses from time to time whilst she commended him upon his work were like a godsend. No other woman had ever shared affection with him like that before. When he found himself one day on the floor of the cooler, breaking down empty booze boxes; and when she patted him on the head and spoke sort of mocking praises in that sing-song voice of hers; as though he were her pet; it were almost like he had found home.
	Of his misgivings about the danger of the graveyard shift and the risks it might entail; the chinese woman made fun of him whenever he broached the subject. Perchance she were right, after all. What a fount of wisdom she was, in her silent interior belied by her fiery, volcanic exterior. When she would look at him over her wire-rimmed glasses; or when she would accidently brush into him in any myriad of ways; what was it she were doing to him? Even when she angered him so, he couldn't help but admit that she was a special, special lady. Perchance indeed she truly were one of the impeccable dragon women.
	At night, when he were alone and had caught up on all of his chores, he would sometimes make speeches into the security camera, and in so doing; speak to the chinese woman about Apsara and how his heart had been stolen by the Cambodian women; or about Yin Ling and how he loved her so; or even about she - the owner of the store - and her husband and how they were a beautiful couple. He would go on about the CIA-fronted fraud known as the Dalai Lhama; or that he hoped the chinese would win, and that even if his suspicions that Beijing and Taipei were in point of fact one; he was hoping that the chinese would find victory. In his speeches to the camera there in the dead of the night, witnessed only by the swirling mass of spirits who haunted the place; and perchance seen and heard by the woman in real-time from her direct, AV feed at her place of residence in the foothills some miles away from the valley floor where the store were located in the suburb of Seattle; in his speeches he would warn she of the encroachments of the bank, and how funny money was no real basis for any lasting civilization. He would warn her of foreign agents who might attempt to ruin China from within as described in the book of Exodus; worshippers of byzantine sets of petty rules, inspired by the most fiendish hounds of hell; he would hope that somehow the chinese takeover of America might once again set his native land on the path of real, verifiable - indeed if there ever before had been - culture. Sometimes he would reveal to her in those speeches to the camera that he loved masturbating into satin and sheer panties; that he had been a crossdresser; that he wouldn't mind wearing a satin maid's outfit with sheer petticoats, with breast implants and some kind of device attached, so as to constantly stimulate his loins whilst at the same time disqualifying him from any potential penile discharge; and scrubbing the floors of her house; and intoning that he were fairly well suited to the role of a shemale eunuch; if he could somehow meet a woman of the proper temperament in order to interact in such a way with her earthly majesty; keeper of the bottomless pit.
	During his stay at the mini-mart, he entertained a plethora of customers of various and sundry type and description; independent callgirls in skimpy outfits and driving fancy cars; black males wearing conspiracy theory t-shirts - "Watch out for the Alphabets! DEA! CIA! FBI! NSA!" - and being treated as but lost children by beautiful women accompanying them; jamaican meth head voodoo doctors; african-americans of questionable means, appearing to take enjoyment in finding ways to trifle with Hardy as he stood behind the counter and attended to the register; people of every shade of color known to mankind, some light and some dark, and others somewhere in between; drunken Aztec priests with large billfolds and looking to purchase booze and cigarettes just prior to the cutoff at 2 a.m.; all with roadmaps about their features that indicated where they had been in life, and perchance even further where they might be headed; professionals who stopped by sometime after 6 a.m., a number of which bought a simple newspaper every day; men with the appearance of means who had no time for anything Hardy - speaking from his low position behind the register - might have to say; crack heads and tweakers with bad teeth in the middle of the night; drug addicts with that smell coming out their pores; a blonde woman who would invariably purchase gasoline with a credit card and thus never enter the store proper, but who could be spied outside as having large, heaving breasts and a pleasant face and hair style; a newspaper delivery man who was black as the night and with dreadlocks who called Hardy 'mang' as they reminisced about the school they had both attended some 30 years before and perchance 3 years apart; apparent boy prostitutes, meandering about the streets outside the store, and appearing inside for the occasional mini cigar or book of matches or cigarette lighter, and seen in the parking lot to the unease of Hardy as always speaking on a cell phone, then sauntering off into the dead of night, or waiting for a pickup by an apparent pimp in a fancy late-model BMW with flashing, spinning wheel covers; apparently flirtatious local ladies, on foot and arriving in every imagineable complexion at any conceivable juncture in time; a handful of individual Southeast Asian women who seemed to taunt him with their shapely asses as they pumped gasoline outside the store, but like the busty blonde, never themselves venturing into the same; Ethiopian cab drivers with a moment to spare for involved conversation in the middle of the night; fairly innocent locals with unulating breasts and shapely behinds, with varying complexion and demeanor, yet each with at least a hint of some sort of folkish wisdom of which, if Hardy were only to open his ears in the slightest he might partake in some sort of distant revelation; seemingly demon-possessed meth heads, on full tilt in life and lowering their eyes when their gaze would meet Hardy's; psychic meth head women who needed a book of matches but couldn't afford the .11 for the same; a Vietnamese man in a beat up van who would sometimes purchase gasoline in the ungodly hours; black men stoned out of their minds on pot and announcing that they were going to stand there and read the newspapers all night, while Hardy pressured them to leave the store, after which they would drop litter over the parking lot; old pot heads entering the store with boy prostitutes and buying beer for the same; women appearing after 5 a.m. and going to and from work; women on the edge of the financial abyss, sometimes with children; young Somali tormentresses with asses like an onion, asses which made Hardy cry; a Cambodian man with two statues of Apsara in his house; school children buying candy on the way to school, just before the chinese woman would relieve Hardy of his shift; an old man who showed up sometimes in the morning and would buy scratch lottery tickets, shunt off into the corner, scratch them all, and bring them back, over and over again, and seemingly invariably adding cash into each consecutive transaction as he bought another batch of tickets, losing, winning, losing, losing; sexy factory workers and party girls who haunted the place in the middle of the night; line workers from the aircraft factory buying booze and cigarettes on their way home from the swing shift; engineers and managers also buying newspapers, booze, gasoline, cigarettes and snack foods as they ebbed and flowed from not only the aircraft factory, but the nearby coffee and truck plants; Latinos on their way in the early morning to painting jobs, picking up water and soft drinks, coffee and pastries; a Laotian man who offered Hardy a job fixing cars, yet located in far-off Redmond so there was no realistic way for Hardy to get there, although the man's ability to commute from Redmond to South Lake Washington was admirable, even though Hardy himself needed something much more local to his own place of residence in Kent; Latinos on their way to landscaping jobs, purchasing gallons of water as Hardy showed them how to eat a raw thai chili pepper, to which they would laugh and walk away in amazement at the crazy gringo; an overly friendly latino who worked at Burger King, and would show up at just about any odd hour and act as though he knew Hardy personally; various and sundry playas of 'african-american' ilk, almost none of whom ever displayed undue hostility; a sport fisherman buying beer in the early morning and on his way to the lake, where apparently there were 20-inch trout, something which caused the mind to reel in light of the fact that decades before the fish population hadn't been so healthy; welfare women stocking up on booze night after night; a couple seemingly teleported from the same neighborhood yet decades prior, as if from an episode of the Twilight Zone, all-American at first appearance but upon closer look raging alcoholics on yet another booze run, dressed in clothes from another era; an apparent runaway with heavy eye liner and the sweetest scent imaginable, with precious manicured nails like Magibon, asking for directions to the bus station and wanting change for the pay phone outside; a fiery bronze priestess from the aircraft factory, with bountiful breasts and beautifully manicured nails and some strange uncanny ability to elicit feelings of love from within the stirring loins of Hardy; a possible apparition of some magnificent woman from Hardy's past, appearing as a teenager, yet with a spirit so like the woman he'd once known, asking for quarters in exchange for a Susan B. Anthony dollar, last minted in 1981; blue-eyed ruffians waiting for their next trip out on a fishing boat, supporting wives and children in Bali and buying long distance phone cards in the middle of the night; friendly drug pushers waxing philosophically whilst tripping on mushrooms and purchasing booze; a pressman in hiking boots and fisherman's cap, purchasing beer after being relieved of swing shift at the local newspaper; workers from the nearby coffee plant where Hardy himself had once worked for awhile; obnoxious drunken American girls of every color and persuasion; a beautiful, tiny Laotian woman who would seemingly capture Hardy's heart each time she entered the store and purchased a 6-pack of Budweiser, he being unable to fathom how such a tiny creature could handle even half a can of the dreaded elixir, and on one occasion his even stating as much only to be rebuffed by her obvious displeasure at his having even broached the subject, to which he heartily apologized as she steamed out the door of the store; straight, bi, and gay; red, yellow, black, and white; profound and base, and in a dizzying panoply of combinations of the same; proud and meek; purchasers of lottery tickets, both scratch and daily game; sincere and fraudulent; a seeming arsonist sulking around in a sort of cloud of guilt over what he had done just hours previous, with bogus credit cards and an apology to Hardy as he tracked mud in and out the door of the store on the opposite ends of his failed purchase; an insane man relating details of a conspiracy so vast it could only boggle the mind; a spy for the FSB, driving a late-model Mercedes and when questioned about Putin, saying on the sly that the same were a brave, brave man with a lot of potential obstacles in his path; fake immigrants from the Ukraine who, once questioned on their supposed home country appeared to know less about it than did Hardy; a black woman nearly exactly the same age as Hardy, whom he remembered from school more than 30 years prior and spoke her name, much to the amazement of both of them, she wearing her scars like a badge and he reflecting his own wear and tear back at her as if they were to silently say to one another, "look at us now," as they would recall what little they had actually shared, how faintly they'd been aquainted, but what a godsend it had been that in the midst of that farce known as federally-enforced mandatory school busing, that the upshot had been a cross-pollination of funk and rock between the resultant intermixed ethnic groups; a bombshell of a woman from Panama who looked as though she could just as well be from the Philippines, someone who instantly stirred Hardy's passion in either event; a prison guard from Panama appearing on the very night that a beaten woman also had, he sort of bragging about how he were training to be a sherrif in King County, to which Hardy could only roll his own eyes, but who seemed sincere enough and after having partaken of a hot chili as proferred by our protaganist, strode out the door with a cup of instant noodles and offered up a "God be with you" in closing; meth heads on edge and purchasing packages of TOP tobacco in the wee hours of the night and asking for change for a $50 bill before retreating into shiny new pickup trucks; a variety of shoplifters, some as young women with indescribable curved behinds, sure in their ability to manipulate Hardy as they stole yet another 22 oz. beer, ultimately chased off only by their picture being posted in the front window of the store by the chinese woman, who had herself studied the nighttime store videos during her day shift, and sought to publically ostracize the given petty offenders; police officers from the canine unit, purchasing aspartame-laden soft drinks and potato chips, and in no unclear terms stipulating that Hardy must keep the parking lot clear of loiterers; a waiter arriving after 2 a.m. and bantering with Hardy about the wonders of hot chili peppers, agreeing with Hardy as well that women weren't capable of love, and adding to the same that only small children and pet animals were capable of the same; a young man listening to the likes of Metallica, whose headphones blasting musical din could be heard by Hardy from behind the counter, also extrapolating on the wonders of chili and how he'd once been egged on by friends of his own into eating at once an entire Habanero, to which Hardy could only nod his own head in astonished suspicion bordering on disbelief, the same metal head having quirks such as no internet connection, and a television set only for games and DVDs, whilst Hardy would expound upon the wonders of YouTube and the like for discovering all manner of music videos, the young man being a dope smoker and having an apparent future in aviation mechanics, to which Hardy could only offer congratulation; a black meth head who reeked of the stuff and could only purchase a pack of cigarettes totalling $5 or less, as Hardy looked at him warily and hoped that the man wouldn't see a demon in him and attack as the press had bandied about such stories with chilling regularity, as though the same were in point of fact anywhere near the actual truth of the matter, the black man in reality having purchased a pack of USA Reds and at once fading into the night, without incident yet with a curious expression on his face, only to return weeks later as a regular customer in the light of morning, always buying a 44 oz. soft drink refill and requesting a bag with which to hold the thing as he inserted it into his pack, and having shown up during the turn of the shift one day, the request for the bag in that event of which the chinese woman had rejected out of hand, and over which Hardy could only look on in dismay at her stone cold attitude toward certain people, but by the same token, which he could at least faintly understand as she were actually thought to be civilized, whilst he and his USA-born compatriots such as the man on the other side of the counter were in point of fact mere barbarians; a woman in professional garb and with decent teeth who yet reeked of meth and appeared to be on her way to work at the aircraft factory, and whose eyes were unforgettable in their utter depth of expression, to which Hardy had found himself forced to look away; a slight woman from the IT department of the aircraft plant who would always purchase 3 packs of Virginia Slims and fill her gas tank with the leftover money from 2 $20 bills; a Korean woman who always bought one or more packs of Marlboro Ultra lights, and whose manicured nails, healthy scent, sultry tone of voice, and pretty face, with that irresistable jet-black hair could only arouse Hardy's want; a man from AOG ('aircraft on the ground') who would purchase Marlboro Light 100s and a tin of chew, a Christian computer professional who - during the Dalai Llama brouhaha - had attempted to trick Hardy into a stereoptypical left-statist-liberal response by asking whether Hardy were going himself to see the physical spectre of CIA black ops as the same toured the country and entertained the vaccuous and vacant-minded handwringers, to which Hardy had replied something to the effect of "No!.. and don't even get me started" and to which he had added the following morning during the customer's routine visit, "He is CIA-backed and has ties into the SS from Hitler's time" and to which the customer could only raise his eyebrows as he left the store, and of whom he later began dialogs with, on such topics as the global warming carbon credit fraud, and Detroit sports franchises, and how it was a crying shame what was taking place with the Sonics leaving Seattle, and who inexplicably would purchase the random scratch ticket, to which Hardy would answer with an audible sort of 'tsk tsk;' a veteran of the SE Asian conflict who would saunter in like a man twenty years his senior, and purchase a newspaper whilst sort of hiding behind the brim of a baseball cap, a customer Hardy began another day-to-day conversation with as he found someone with whom to speak of his own love of the Apsara and all things 'Cambodian woman and Angkor Thom' as the customer would agree that the dancers were very graceful and elegant, much unlike anything anyone could witness within the confines of their own USA, and who himself would regale Hardy with stories from the war which had been a waste not only of physical wealth as our protaganist had observed, but more importantly human capital which the customer had further pointed out; a blonde kid in his twenties and driving around in a hopped up Audi A6 who would stop by for his morning coffee and have the random misfortune of being late to his routine, and running smack dab into the chinese woman as the shift would change, of which in some day following the young man would joke with Hardy about how the woman were a sort of downer or 'buzzkill' in the words of Hardy, and they would both laugh; the odd random, 8 a.m. customer who would witness the chinese woman verbally exploding upon Hardy as though she were a raging hurricane and he but the eye of it; a woman entering the store by early light and claiming her husband had just beaten her, and wanting a phone book to get the number of the police domestic violence hotline, to which Hardy found himself in between yet another rock and a hard place, and upon later driving home in the direction from which the woman appeared, spied no less than 4 police cars outside a house along the way, to which he could only wonder if such were the house where the woman had been; an attractive mulatto out alone before daylight on a cold morning, yet without jacket and dressed only in shorts and a shirt, meandering about the magazine rack and looking lost, making a coffee for herself then leaving it be, leaving the store and seeming to walk around and around, Hardy wondering if there were a women's shelter he could call whereby a pickup car might be dispatched to take the lady to someplace warm and safe, and she returning to the store in the middle of that thought process and bringing a soft drink to the counter, only to intone that she had no money, and to add to it "I'm trippin'" to which Hardy could only reply, "Yes you are. Do you need help?" to which she would say "no" as she left the store and the parking lot for wherever it was she were going; a rotund black women who didn't have enough money to make the purchase and would insist upon leaving everything on the counter while she went out to their car to dig up a bunch of pennies, and finish the purchase with a score of the same, all glued together with some kind of gunky funk, the origin of which Hardy didn't even want to fathom; a young, fairly dark girl with the scent of birth control, with heaving breasts who at least feigned an interest in Hardy, to which he could only react in bemused puzzlement; a beautiful black woman who would show up drunk and in a stunning purple blouse at any random time along the whole of the shift, and would purchase some combination of booze and gasoline, yet seemed to never have more than $3 available for the gasoline part of the transaction, gasoline which by then had approached or even surpassed the price of $4 per gallon; a pair of apparent meth heads, who would show up just before the cutoff point of 2 a.m., and one of whom was short and with missing teeth, and the other who was tall and with long grey hair like the killer from the show Twin Peaks, and who would more often than not reach out and touch Hardy as they worked out their purchase, and who was never lacking for a wisecrack, and would seemingly joke the most about sperm, but sometimes about robbing the store, and other times his friend's lack of teeth, to which Hardy would find himself most often at unease, yet by the same token unafraid, for these men were highly uneven yet appeared to be gentle enough of spirit, despite their apparent proclivity for drug abuse, one time having had nothing but a $100 bill, for which - and per store rules - Hardy had refused to make change on a $10 purchase, and in response their having offered to buy some $60 or $70 worth of booze, cigarettes, and lighters, to which Hardy had relented and changed a $100 bill against the general orders of the chinese woman with respect to transactions taking place before 5 a.m., and of which our protaganist could only think he'd done the right thing in taking their money, even if a rule had been broken in some small way during the process; two black brothers, one of whom seemed genuinely honest and somewhat friendly, and who would for the most part purchase only a single cigarette or two in the latest hours of the night, and as it turned out whose brother was a shoplifter with a taste for the drink known as Tilt, and whose picture was eventually plastered by the chinese woman onto the front window of the store; various teenagers purchasing miniature cigars with which to manufacture a "blunt" or marijuana cigarette; a young latino or aboriginal American male with a tattoo on his neck who would ride up in the middle of the night on a loud minibike and purchase all manner of sugary snacks including candy bars and ice cream, and who appeared to be like some sort of veteran of the golden gloves or somesuch, yet whose demeanor turned out to be more or less friendly over time; transients hell bent upon shoplifting; a rotund black man who would purchase a newspaper each morning and speak of home repairs at his place in Federal Way, and of his attendance at church and lifelong bible studies, and who would eschew the jalepeno or habenero chips that Hardy would recommend to him when he was looking for some Cheetos which were out of stock; the truck driver from the fuel company who shared an American Spirit cigarette one night after the delivery were all done, and regaled him with tales of automobiles, and the things Ferdidand Porsche had done once out from under the yoke of Hitler, and who had looked on with some apparent dismay as Hardy pontificated on the features of the Ferdinand or Elephant 'tank' of Porsche design which had been invulnerable to frontal fire, the truck driver quickly shifting the conversation back to modern automobiles, engines, and trucks, and various power plants along with the virtues of diesel, and how the state government was a complete joke in any regard where fuel and emissions standards were concerned; another fuel deliveryman from Ghana who had forgotten his gloves and borrowed a pair from Hardy; an Ethipian man who joked with a grin that Hardy was "no good" when Hardy confided in him his own belief in the stunning beauty of the average Ethiopian woman's unfathomable rear end; a tall, tweaking alcoholic who told Hardy the story of his Texas canoe race and how once during the same, he'd walked waist deep in a lake infested by poisonous snakes and with the bodies of rotting cattle all around, who told Hardy that he sure seemed quiet but that it was a sure bet that Hardy was potentially dangerous in a fistfight, and who would chide Hardy about the chinese woman and say he didn't understand how Hardy could work with such a woman, and that he was sure that the chinese woman would never make a good employee anywhere, and as he turned to leave, taunted Hardy about his grey beard and how there was a commercial on the television for a formula which might help him look younger and thus perchance enable him to attract a certain type of girl, to which Hardy replied that some of us had long-since turned frigid and sex really wasn't a pursuit of his; a local drunk, completely red of face from booze yet able to function at a job at the aircraft factory, who lived in the neighborhood and would complain of the kid on the minibike and the drug house nearby, and apparently couldn't see the disconnect between societal treatment of his own drug use versus theirs, and would tease Hardy about being on LSD and joke with him about how Hardy would say the strangest of things; a man with thick glasses from the factory who worked a certain shift where he only had to stay for 6 hours but got paid for 8, and who would buy toilet paper and bottled coffee drinks along with lottery tickets as they would banter back and forth, joking with each other about various small absurdities and pecularities in life; a Filipina in her thirties wearing shiny pants which highlighted her perfect-for-face-smothering ass, being driven around by an Ashkenazi in a red sports car, she making eyes at Hardy and teasing him as he told her of his long-lost pining for the Raven Girl, herself a Filipina, to which his immediate tormentress replied in asking whether the Raven Girl had ever taught Hardy any Filipino, and to which our protaganist had responded "no" but in point of fact should have responded, "Yes, she told me how to say 'fuck off!' in sign language," the hot Filipina in front of him sashaying out of the store while her nonplussed boyfriend looked on and left with her; hifalutin scratch golfers, smelling of the scent of woman and claiming to live in the lowbrow neighborhood yet heading out to country club courses at all hours of the morning after purchasing coffee at the mini-mart; rock and rollers bantering back and forth with our cashier about the merits of various rock guitarists from the past, and comparing notes with Hardy on playing styles and techniques; drunken old blues guitarists with tales of bluster enought to fill a Mack truck; bald-headed factory workers buying beer on their way home after a shift, and at some apparent trigger launching into tirades about their being the devil in the flesh; black teens with their pants around their ankles yet who seemed friendly enough despite their offputting appearance; apparent intellectuals and abject morons, sometimes cloaked in at once the same skin; the black woman who stopped for coffee every morning ("because it is good coffee," which it really was) and who would speak ill of the chinese woman, yet the dark woman herself being like some kind of enigma with her face wisened beyond her years and a pretty voice all her own, with manicured nails and a certain fastidiousness as exemplified by the fact that she would purchase gasoline at the register and then Hardy would spy her in the parking lot, touching the gas pump only with the metallic end of the hose and not her hands as most every other customer were wont to do; the African-American woman whom he'd startled so as she'd entered the store, seen no one, and had fixed to exit immediately, upon account of the video surveillance gear and the automatic propensity for authorities to suspect the darker-complected among us with regard to petty shenanigans, who then leapt a foot in the air in said startlement as Hardy burst forth from the cooler where he'd been stocking sodas and booze, and she of whom with great regularity would purchase a 6-pack of Miller 16 oz. cans whilst drawing her 6-pack from the underneath the top one, and who would more often than not accompany that purchase with a pack of Capri Magentas, but who complained that the aircraft company where she worked were about to ban smoking of any kind, to which Hardy would launch into his pro-smoking rant, whereby she would mention that the smokes were giving her difficulty breathing, to which he'd respond that perchance she should stop smoking menthols, to which she would agree that other people had told her the same thing, and then they would both laugh at some random item of interest, and he might lament his being ordered by the chinese woman to spy on certain types of customers, and add that he didn't believe in jails, to which she would at least partially agree, and then in the days following might ask him how he was doing in navigating the pitfalls of his position, to which he might reply 'ok;' drunks claiming to have been in the Special Forces in Cambodia and Iraq, telling jokes which took minutes to develop and ended with a thud of nonsense rather than a knowing chortle guffaw; a black man from the factory who would show up each night, at the exact opening of the shift at 12 a.m., and invariably purchase two bottles of Weinhard's reserve, and a random pack of Merit Ultra Lights and the odd scratch ticket or three, who seemed at times to have nothing but sarcastic quips, but who at other times seemed downright friendly; crows who would uncannily show up for feeding at dawn, and to which Hardy would sometimes respond by laying out a pile of cashews in the parking lot, or even better yet where the sentient serpentine birds were concerned, potato chips; a high-strung veteran of the first Iraqi war, talking fast and non-stop about religion, and pretty girls, and Lucifer and Jesus, and how some people see terrible things and live inside their heads from that day forward, who on another occasion remarked that Hardy was doing a fine job of scrubbing the floor as he did for the chinese woman, and that it was bright and clean just like his grandma used to tell him, or the drill sergeant would have said, who spoke as well of the fact that we're pretty much all the same, walking as we all do on two feet, and that he would never be convinced that anyone else were truly different unless someone were to take off in flight or walk on water or somesuch, and who spoke of how war is tragic and that he was tired of anyone killing anyone, and how Jesus had one trip and Lucifer quite another, and how his dad had been a professor and he'd nearly disowned him once, but had thankfully made up with him before it had ever been too late, and how he was smarter than most people but that he didn't know chinese chess, as he spoke as well of how he had miraculously quit drinking over a year before, and had a difficult time deciding upon which bag of jujee fruits to purchase, and sort of joked with Hardy about the same during one of their few encounters; busty, on-edge women who somehow managed to turn his crank a bit; flirtatious black prostitutes with straightened hair, and going on and on about "cock" and wearing ponytails like the Raven Girl used to wear, cackling the entire time whilst gyrating in an irresistable form, much like she once had; over-the-top tweaked out blue-eyed couples purchasing cigarettes and condoms at 3 a.m., friendly enough yet unsettling in visage; a pair of maintenance workers from the aircraft factory, always goofing around as they arrived to purchase beer and cigarettes immediately after swing shift, and who would sometimes banter with Hardy about how maybe they should rob a bank as they were all sick and tired of working as they did for a living, and if they could only pull it off, it might be worth committing a crime that they could further on live lives of ease, inviting the perchance inevitable allusions to Hollywood (a real-life bank robber) and how he'd really been something else in his time on earth, robbing banks and living in a treehouse near Olympia, attending Evergreen State College and giving all of his money to women, yet who was ultimately gunned down by police after a failed robbery and overnight standoff in the North Seattle neighborhood of Lake City; a sometime trifler who was really a dancer and to whom Hardy had given an Armaggedon sermon one morning in a sort of attempt at chasing the man out of the store; an Asian male purchasing condoms while attempting not to draw attention to what it was he were doing, with a woman in the car outside, and another time openly purchasing the same, with a hot vixen there by his side at the register, he whipping out a handful of $100 bills and claiming not to have anything smaller on hand, Hardy reluctantly making change against store rules, and soon regretting it as the resultant shortage of small bills were acute; a Cambodian landscaper with two trucks who purchased $80 worth of gasoline at the register; two dwarves who entered the store and bantered back and forth about some soap opera-like activities going on at their place of work, who were at once an annoyance due to their prolonged meandering about the store as they spoke in animated fashion back and forth, yet at the same time being a great source of amusement for Hardy in that the stories they loudly related were at least somewhat hilarious; construction workers from the aircraft factory who would purchase a pack of cigarettes and something for lunch each morning at somewhere near 5 a.m.; an auto mechanic with hoop piercings in his ears who would purchase the random pack of blue Marlboro 72s, as he and Hardy would discuss back and forth what the "72" meant and Hardy would say it was because of the length of the cigarette being 72mm whilst the mechanic didn't really have an opinion one way or the other except that he knew that he liked the brand, and who once upon being asked about how things were going at work, replied that times had gotten tougher, that benefits were being cut and employees were being asked to do more and more for less and less; a tall, seemingly vacant man with an apparent fascination for scratch tickets; an accountant who appeared to purchase a 16 oz. Pepsi and two packages of donuts every day on his way to work; a red-headed man, tall and reminiscent in countenance to Jack Sikma, who would purchase 2 tins of chewing tobacco from time to time and banter with Hardy; a painter living next to the store in a house with a sattelite dish on it, who would buy coffee, cigarettes, eggs in no particular pattern, and who had a twin brother who would consistently purchase a certain type of 40 oz. Malt Liquor; a guest of theirs who was belligerent at first yet who moments later was sharing a high 5 with Hardy over the fact that neither of them could much remember the decade of the '70s because of all of the drugs they'd both taken; an Iraqi war veteran who somehow reeked of death, and wore a hat with a unit insignia on it, and as he approached the counter revealed a tattoo of an automatic rifle on his arm, to which Hardy had asked him if he'd been in Iraq and of which the young man whose countenance of combat experience belied his otherwise youthful appearance, and who had replied that he had indeed been in Iraq, and that he was soon going back, to which Hardy added that he hoped the man would be ok as he took note of the sweaty palms of the soldier as they'd exchanged bills and change, and of whom Hardy had wondered about the effects of DU or exposure to any other poison typically found in the war zone; black women of the night purchasing condoms; a beautiful woman of blackened skin but the facial features of a caucasian; a black woman who was always looking to exchange coupons while purchasing scratch tickets and cigarettes, and who once entered into a conversation with Hardy about racism and evil; customers who obviously had the bills in hand with which to make good upon being short on the transaction amount, but who would in an act of apparently intentional obtuseness search their pockets for the exact change, and in having found none would put their bills away and take a few pennies out of the kitty with which to finish their purchase; an older black man who bought two menthol cigarettes at about 7 a.m. every day; the itinerant worker of a Southerner with the snake tattoos about his arms who Hardy would invariably attempt to befriend, and in so doing would more than once screw up the transaction so the customer left the store with something gotten without paying for it, and who had regaled Hardy with intonations of fantastic tales of his previous life in native Louisiana and who spoke of chili as though he might just be able to handle copious amounts of The Man hot sauce as served at Dixie's Barbeque on NE 24th St. in Bellevue, and who would each day purchase one or two packs of Camel Wide regulars, and the odd lottery ticket or pack of gum here and there, and when his girlfriend were visiting him as he completed a construction project before heading out of town and on to the next job in Arizona, purchased a pack of Capri Menthols each day as well, and who on his last visit to the store purchase several containers of motor oil and transmission fluid; a striking woman with a Russian accent and small boy who would for whatever reason steal a cup of coffee, her drinking it down on the spot and leaving the used cup there in the alcove out of site from behind the counter where Hardy stood, and then when asked about it would deny having done the same; an American woman with 2 children who once did nothing more than to make a large mess at the coffee machine before scrambling back out the door; an older white gentleman who would purchase a 12 oz. black coffee, filled approximately 2/3 full every morning, and to whom Hardy would describe as a gentleman, and who would appear on Monday through Thursday mornings but not on Fridays, and eventually stopped haunting the store altogether; a balding man with a moustache who would purchase 1 pack of Merit Ultra Lights and a bottle or 2 of water each day, except on Friday mornings when he would purchase 2 packs of cigarettes; a man of apparent slavic descent with those bushy eyebrows and being tall of stature, who would nearly every morning purchase a 20 oz. vanilla capuccino, and would work overtime at the aircraft factory and then at his own remodelling business on the weekends, to whom Hardy once said, "You work like Asian!" and to which he'd replied, "No, I work better than any Asian" and as well to whom our protaganist never had the heart to say, "You don't want one of those drinks. If you knew our procedures for cleaning the (capuccino) machine you wouldn't be buying one of those drinks every day," and who would joke with Hardy about the chinese woman and how she came across to many customers like a drill sergeant, as for instance she was obsessed with allowing no customer 2 paper cups without charging full price for a drink for the 2nd cup, which customers were wont to use as an insulator for the hot drinks, cardboard drink holders being of which she provided none and instead would say, "Use a napkin instead!"...  on and on the list of visitors to the store went.
	During the entire time, Hardy had found himself much more often than not, ill-at-ease with the cast of characters cascading through the doors of the store and often in the most dismal hours of the night. He admired the other cashier; the one from swing shift. She had a complexion which by then had become rare; that is if such had ever been any different. Her eyes were set a bit wide apart and gave her the look of someone who could see well, and her hair was red and her eyes blue. She was obviously intelligent, and was working at the store as her second job. During their shift change at midnight, she and Hardy would talk about the chinese woman. At first Hardy hadn't considered the redhead attractive, but after awhile he'd noticed that the form beneath her tight jeans was somewhat inspiring. The main problem was that she seemed to have a great number of problems in her family life, and Hardy wanted nothing to do with any of that, so he played it cool with her; and that's not to say that she wanted anything to do with him outside of work in any event. There was another cashier who worked just a few days a week, and she was so morbidly obese and shorn of her hair, yet considering herself attractive that Hardy could only marvel at the disconnect; yet of course he had probably been the source of even greater disconnects regarding his self-perception and the reality of the same. Be that as it may, he wanted nothing to do with the obese woman. The chinese woman enjoyed making fun of the obese woman; how the latter couldn't stock shelves because she was too heavy; how she would stand there and sip on soft drinks and complain of back problems, whilst failing to address the obesity which was the most obvious cause of the same; how the woman had 3 children by 3 different men; on and on. With the redhead, the chinese woman would offer up unsolicited advice. One of the funniest things the chinese woman ever said to Hardy with regard to the redhead was something to the effect of, "She is a great worker. You (on the other hand) are nothing!" There was truth to that. The chinese woman was certainly the mistress of the domain. In comparison her husband was but a faint murmur in the shadow of her sing-song yet towering voice, whether in fact or hyperbole. Hardy loved it when she called him late at night, even if she were berating him. There was something about her voice and the music of her words, not matter what she were saying; he simply couldn't shake the ethereal beauty which is voice of the Asian woman, as exemplified by nearly all of them in general and most certainly by she - the store owner - in specific.
	In any event, despite the often pleasant interactions with customers; and in particular with various females who somehow - whether by accident or intent - had what it took to really get Hardy's motor started; he most enjoyed it when there were no customers at all, and he was free to go about his store cleaning, sweeping the parking lot, or best of all standing there with his miniature MP3 recording device and making spoken observations of the things which were transpiring at the store. He would boast to customers of how the device held 17 hours worth of speech recordings!
	The chinese woman would constantly pressure him to add more to his routine, so that there would eventually be no time to stand around and talk, either into the MP3 recorder, or the store's video cameras, or both. Hardy would balk at her orders for the completion of an every-widening array of tasks, and would add to his routine in a manner which would give him the most free time on the one hand, whilst minimizing her criticisms at his unwillingness to add more and more to his schedule. They would argue back and forth over a checklist, the fire in her eyes and bemusement on his face equally apparent.
	Once she had mimicked elbowing him in the jaw, motioning as if to strike him but pulling up just short. Another time, a tall alcoholic crackhead customer had shown up in the morning and she had rung up the wrong amount of gasoline, and in turn had given him the wrong change, to which he'd asked her if she were dyslexic as Hardy had looked on. From behind the counter Hardy noticed that she had quickly gone into a kung-fu stance, and he was sure that she would have lit the customer up if they had been on the same side of the counter as one another. The tall drug addict was basically a big, slow  galut whilst the chinese woman was quick as a whip.
	Customer after customer would complain to Hardy about the chinese woman, and although Hardy could see their point, in his heart of hearts he loved and admired her. Of course, it wasn't enough to keep him at the store. At some point he had to flee. During one of his wretched magic workings; right around Memorial Day of that year; he left and never returned; just like that; just as he'd done with so many jobs previously; just as they say a drug addict is wont to do. He knew better though.
	Had he ultimately failed her? Was any of it even a test at all? Who could ultimately tell. Certainly the fiends behind the veil were amused by the entirety of it all.
	While he was there he thought of ways to keep customers and police at bay, whilst minimizing any potential criticism from the chinese woman. He couldn't think of any real answer. In an ideal world there would be no shoplifting, and no police. Obviously the world is less than ideal in that regard, but he so loathed spying on customers; so disdained interacting with the police over petty shoplifting incidents; felt so constrained with what the chinese woman had ordered versus the way he might actually handle things; it was a loser's game.
	Of the visitors who would pass through the store or even wander past its parking lot, Hardy would sometimes wonder if any of them were real players on the international scene. Perchance such a question could only be answered were one to peer beyond the proverbial veil which separates this, the world of the game from the string-pullers out of sight and mind of mere mortals; a glimpse into the spiralling chaos of myriad spirits interacting in a certain alien fashion; a view which could only drive the seer mad amidst the answering of metaphysical postulations and high-minded speculation; a glimmer of truth which would surely land the witness in a mental ward, speechless and reeling with a blank look on their face, and with a straitjacket constraining their every remaining movement whilst awaiting passage from this contrived world and into the domain of the spirits in the beyond. Be that as it may, perchance in truth we are all players on an international scale, and all that occurs without ourselves is but a microcosm of the vast universe which might truly lie within each of us, whether we pretend to be mere watchers or actual movers and shakers of the first order.
	Magibon was one of those who had moved and shaken Hardy's world. What was it about her? What spirit did she possess which could transfix the likes of he in front of a computer screen, dazzled in motionlessness and highly content at the simple view of her astounding womanly features and childlike voice? What was her message to the world? Would she reach her intended audience? 
	When Hardy had seen first that Japanese media had arrived at her place and made a YouTube video from there, and then how she'd gained audience on an actual television show produced in Japan, he was ecstatic to the point of tears that she had apparently reached at least one of her goals. It gave him hope that other people everywhere might actually accomplish that which they might ever aspire to. Asia beckoned to him as it had to she.
	He had eschewed standard FIDE chess for the Chinese equivalent, called Xiang Qi. Xiang Qi is the most popular board game the world over, bar none. Perchance a poster at the Chess Variants website had succinctly summed up the allure of the game in writing:
	
	"It's no wonder that Chinese Chess is the world's most popular game. The problems start immediately in the opening. Three of five pawns are unguarded and are soon attacked, big problems concerning the development of pieces starts immediately. If the rook isn't activated in three moves it is said that the game is lost (but thats an exaggeration). There is no time to wait. Should one have an extra powerful piece (like a FIDE queen or bishop) to insert at any time, in the endgame even, then Chinese Chess would have been defunct, because then the player can solve his problems in a stroke."
	
	With his own taste for Xiang Qi, Asian women, Apsara dancers, Japanese rock and roll, hot chili peppers, garlic, and so many things Asian, Hardy could identify with the yearnings of someone for an otherwise foreign culture; a culture apparently superior to one's own native ways.
	Like most every culture which had ever shown itself on earth, Hardy could cringe at the dark underside of Asian history as exmplified by tales of Saloth Sar, Chairman Mao, and General Tojo; each with a set of overarching inhuman attributes which could only leave the student of history aghast at the terror of how we as humans are wont to treat one another.
	As for Asia in general, Hardy and his ilk in that regard could likewise only look on in admiration at their overall evenhandedness, appreciation for grace and beauty, and willingness to support one another in life. By contrast, the USA of Hardy's day seemed to be a miasma of base desire, accusatory rhetoric, victim politics, subpar music, insipid film, bombastic  theatre over true sport, unsound money, religious fanaticism, and military jingoism; the list could go on forever. 
	Perchance in that context it could be understood how Asia with all its faults could have been looked at - even if foolishly - as being a beacon of light for the world to follow into the 21st century and beyond. To temper Hardy's enthusiasm, the vast bureaucracies which permitted no economic freedom for the vast, sprawling underclasses; the casual sexual slavery of so many of their young; the seething, teeming growth of endless populations, choking the air in smog and tainting the water in all manner of industrial pollution and human waste; it could only give one pause. If the noble traditions of the East could somehow be merged with the finer sensibilities of the West, then perchance some greater middle ground could be formed out of the best aspects of both. For certain, the cretinous disallowal of individual enterprise by which the poor might otherwise raise themselves up to a decent physical standard; and the utterly unsound financial practices of the banking industry the world over; such would all have to be removed that a golden age of humanity might dawn. 
	Did the path to a new age of enlightment lead though through untold slaughter and trial by fire and water? Would the fiends behind the veil ever loosen their hold on the human consciousness to where the pharisees of every stripe might unceremoniously be dumped from their self-aggrandized positions of power; would the sycophants one day demand an end to their wretched existence as it were in submitting to each and every petty whim of their would-be overlords? Would the shackles over humanity ever be loosened, and at what cost? 
	Was there to be no end to tyranny? Was human debasement and slavery woven into the very fabric of the universe? Which forces might ever relent such that the meek might truly inherit the earth, and be at liberty to tend to their own enterprises, without the meddling of the self-styled handwringers who were in point of fact simply the agents of at once unseen and diabolical beings?
	Hardy could only hope that the next stage of human culture might involve copious amounts of satins and sheers, stiletto heels, fine music, all manner of drugs on demand, sleep until one's heart's content, dreaming beautiful dreams, deep affection, working at one's passion in life, with fulfilling cuisine, and great beauty instead of terror; whilst suffering might be overly mitigated and hope being the order of the day. A person can wonder.
	During the course of his life, there were times when he would lie awake awaiting the sleep to overtake him each night; and Hardy would call out to Lucifer and asked to become perfectly possessed by the same. No lesser spirit would do. Once in an odd while an overwhelming terror might begin to seize him, and he would relent. From what he had heard from other students of the occult, this was normal. Even spirits lesser than the almighty god from beyond were not to be trifled with. Be that as it may, during those moments of his reaching out to Lucifer, he would think it silly that he should even be in the running for such a dubious honor as being perfectly possessed by the ultimate demiurge; the god of Freemasonry and Pharisaism alike. Regardless of that he kept imploring Lucifer that his - Hardy's - own ideas of liberty and lawlessness were the only way for Lucifer to gain victory in the world the same had ostensibly created, at least in the traditions of the Freemasons in specfic.
	Hardy would lie there awake and wonder why he even bothered. Certainly someone of flaming youth and great inherited wealth and handsomeness could gain the ear of Lucifer long before Hardy - in his middle age and declining physical health, material poverty and inhuman loneliness, lack of social connections, being wont to stumbling speech, averse to charming others, having uneven musical skills - would ever know the same. Certainly some fiery young man or woman with all of the marks of having been made from birth; by all rights only such should gain the undivided attention of Lucifer, and participate in all of the flights of fancy and whimsy which might follow from first contact.
	He thought of his parents and how - unlike his siblings - he had attacked their simple Christian faith in so many direct and roundabout ways; how certain of his myriad siblings had seen to let specific and proverbial dogs yet lie, in their falling away from the church of their upbringing; but how in contrast Hardy had in some ways never let the subject matter drop. What had his parents done to deserve such a difficult offspring as he?
	They were decent enough people. Surely, when all would be said and done their overall family was no worse than any other; and in point of fact perchance it were better than many of the other families which, taken as a whole comprise all of humanity. His father was a man of peace; someone who loved plants, and cherished human beings to an even greater extent. His mother, for all her faults whether real or merely perceived on Hardy's part could make a good coffee cake, superlative berry jams, world-beating pie crust, stuffed bell peppers without equal, memorable tuna casserole; shared her husband's love for gardening; read books - even if such seemed to invariably support her preconceived world views - voraciously throughout the whole of her life. In short, no matter what their shortcomings they'd done nothing which Hardy could conceive of which had caused them to deserve such a problem child as he. The same could be said of his siblings; they had done nothing to deserve a brother such as Hardy. So often as his life passed before him and wound inextricably toward the miasma of death, he would ask himself what anyone in his family had ever done to have deserved he and his antics. Often it were all he could do to refrain from wishing that he had never been conceived of, much less born; that everyone else in the world might have ultimately been better off without his ever having haunted this world.
	Perchance in the end it's true what the Buddhists say; no matter who you are, you get what you deserve. Thus all of this going on and on about the form civilization should take; as to what is the best music; discussions of what is ridiculous and what is sublime: It can all be reduced to patterns of particles and waves. Perchance it is all manipulated for the bemusement of fiends behind the veil, yet again when it is distilled down it is nothing more than spiralling, eternal patterns of particles and waves, dancing endlessly in combining, breaking apart, and re-combining into ever further variations on a theme. This is to say that it is all without exception nothing more than the proverbial tempest in a teapot; mere sound and fury signifying ultimately nothing. Be that as it may, it would appear that the terror of it all; that seething, scalding, gale-force-windswept, inhuman, freezing, burning, thrashing reality which awaits there somewhere past the curtain which separates the world we know from the one we don't; that such terror is too much for even the stoutest of human consciousness to observe unobstructed without first falling into untold madness; and therein lies the entire crux of the matter: The world we all know provides a stage for a series of dramas which could not otherwise exist.
	So the sycophants and pharisees; the Christians, Moslems, and Jews; Buddhists and nudists and minimalists and cubists; contenders and pretenders; hilfalutin and lowbrow; beautiful and wallflower; shiny and dull; great and small; on and on and on; they all have a place in this panoply of dancing wave and particle patterns which comprise everything we as people can see, feel, hear, and sense; that our yearnings or conquering of the same are the twin engines which drive us forward into the mysteries of tomorrow; such that the terror and beauty pulsing in and out of the bottomless pit, interlaced with the ever-present strands of both hope and suffering; are finally and without exception, given meaning in the face of the void which haunts the nether regions of the collective human psyche.
	The chinese woman was a magic woman. He had not at first found her highly attractive, but she grew on him as time went past. To be fair, it might be more accurate to say that she grew on him whilst they drifted apart. There were aspects to her such as the awesome affection of her hands and her frottage, the mesmerizing song of her voice, the yet alluring scent she from time to time issued forth, and the praises of him which she would from time to time sing; all of which caused him to love her, want for her company, and to desire her coupling. On the other hand her berating, the seeming concern more for her booze inventory than his own well-being, the unfairness with which she seemed to treat certain customers, the way she would verbally humiliate him in front of others; all of this would drive him away, and at times he would swear to never have any interaction whatsoever with any chinese person. Even as he left her though, his fondness for her grew, and despite her undesirous behavior from his perspective, he wanted to be with her.
	One day he surprised himself by calling out her name as he masturbated into a pair of satin panties. Rarely did a woman in her 50s arouse his desire so. When he thought of it, he could only remember Asian women as having this sort of hold upon him. That is to say that he virtually never fantasized about women that age from any other ethnicity. What he wondered about was if the chinese woman were to take it upon herself to wear tight skirts in specific, and satins and sheers overall. What might she look like if she were to adorn herself in full-fashioned stockings, and stiletto heels, with say, a tight satin skirt and enticing lingerie underneath, topped off by perchance a sheer blouse and bright red lipstick, with her nails painted just so? Even without any of these she was a potent seductress in his mind. How much moreso might she have stolen his heart if she had - even once - been dressed to the nines and seen to have met the gaze that his eyes might provide?
	Regardless of everything, she was a special woman; calm inside yet capable of fiery lambast on the surface; so very pretty even with early signs of middle age. Hers was a triumphant spirit, and one which he would never forget. She was on the level of the Cambodian women; or the Vietnamese, or Mika Tan, Yin Ling, Mai Ly, Hope and Brooke Serrey, Raven Kay Lee, the Raven Girl, Akira Lane, Autumn Lee, Tera Patrick, Jasmine St. John, Jayde, Sanae Asoh, or the Japanese-American who had so utterly seduced him with her enticing breasts whilst they had once worked together at the software outfit in the heart of downtown Seattle; 'back in the day.'
	He had deified the bottomless pit, and in so doing had found himself in a slithering prison from which the quaint siren call of Christianity were lost in the music of the spheres which so helped to define his incomprehensible, yet perchance predilected captivity. He could only hope that the keepers of the same bottomless pit might one day grow to have mercy upon him, and find some arrangement in which all parties might find at least some small conciliation.
	Like millions of otherwise non-descript mini-mart parking lots across the haunted land, the one where Hardy swept in the middle of the night could surely tell its share of sordid tales, were one only to listen for the same. How many lost souls had trodden across that forlorn concrete, masked only by the sighing passage of time, recorded for posterity perchance only by the monster seething below the surface? What manner of myriad, manifold drug deal had taken place near the pay phones sitting astride the store, between partners without exception seeking solace from the otherwise hopelessness of their outcast stations in life? Since the neighborhood had been abandoned by the families who had previously marked the place as a 'decent community,' the interlopers had thronged in and about the milieu. The chinese woman must have witnessed much change over the preceding 20 years, and that she was intent upon seeing her business through despite whatever clarion cry might indicate she should be considering otherwise; it was a testament to her inner calm and strength; evidence that she were a toughened survivor of the school of life, and that in even the hardest of circumstances those with the will to see things through might ultimately triumph over the easy road to oblivion. Hardy was on another path altogether. Whether he had forsaken his own people, or they had forsaken he; by then it didn't matter. What was at the forefront of his mind was the fact that, in sweeping and otherwise cleaning the parking lot in the odd hours of windswept and unduly cold Spring nights; he was but a target awaiting a hit. 
	The chinese woman was too frugal to hire two employees for the night shift, which would have been the case under better circumstances. Again and to her credit, perchance the money simply were not there; perchance her driving about in a fancy Cadillac Minivan belied what were in truth approaching dire financial straits. Whatever the case of that may have been, Hardy found himself alone in the parking lot; sweeping up messes which nearly as often as not seemed to have been created by the people passing through as to intentionally humiliate him; the package from the crackers and cheese that the callgirl had purchased only moments previous; the lottery ticket from the Shuttle Express driver which had been unceremoniously dumped out the window in his driving away; sometime loathsome gatherings of spittle from teenaged tobacco chewers who'd only just before taken their precious tins from across the counter inside; all manner of discarded booze containers; piles of trash from fast food joints across town, but for whatever reason dumped there in 'his' parking lot; even the odd dirty diaper; a spent 'rig' (hypodermic needle); or a trash can stuffed full of detritus and inorganic trash, to the point where the liner had burst; all of it was at best thoughtlessly left for the likes of Hardy to pick up. The janitor job of years previous had been a picnic in comparison. At least there the trash contained the odd assortment of random, and yet edible food; the janitorial job had been within the safe confines of an office park, out beyond the end of highway 520, there along the road leading from Redmond proper, up into the foothills to the East.
	Here at the mini-mart though, what creature of the night waited in either patient ambush, or had the potential to launch an attack of opportunity given the correct stimulus, said stimulus being the mere presence of the blue-eyed, pale skinned Hardy amidst the neighborhood of more often than not, dark skinned bretheren; not a few of whom appeared to carry a very real chip on their shoulder; and more than a couple who appeared to have it in them to take Hardy down a notch no matter what the cost; for they had already paid the price; here and there were individuals with apparently nothing left to lose; from whence might the sudden assault arrive, and at what exact moment? Much of this may have been the workings of Hardy's overactive imagination. At least some of it was the reality of the situation. Once he'd nearly been attacked by a transient, smelling of urine and threatening him physically as he worked. It had been one of the few times during which Hardy had seen fit to call the police. After that, the interloper or one of his compatriots lurk in the shadows, awaiting the precise moment from which to strike forth and exact their revenge?
	Through it all, though he may have acted superior to any number of these locals, in his heart he knew that he had no place in looking down at any of them; something which the chinese woman could yet afford in her civilized state to do; a thing which Hardy in his own fallen way could not.
	A person can generalize until the proverbial cows come home, about the intelligence or lack thereof assigned to a given ethnic group. Hardy could see clearly that in the case of so-called human stupidity, far more often than not it was a ruse by the ostensibly downtrodden; a game some people played in order to get what they could out of life. That is to say that none of the customers he ever dealt with in his stint at the store; not one of them was of low intelligence; although a fair number of them could be seen as obviously portraying the same; but again it was a sort of game which people snared within the lower socio-economic spheres are, throughout time wont to play.
	Once or twice, Hardy caught himself condescending to certain customers, and being called on it by the same. Perchance the spirits below were arranging things so that no matter what might happen, Hardy would always have to play everything straight. The days of subterfuge were over. Only a fair hand on his part could balance out the seemingly impossible situation, that everyone might get their just due in their dealings with he, during the graveyard shift. Perchance that is all waxing a tad melodramatic; on the other hand it could be the closest thing to god's honest truth. You had to have been there; to have been disturbed by the same demonic driving forces; to have been closed in by competing interests; to have captured the full force of dynamism and dramatic intrigue attendant in the nightly happenings at what otherwise appeared after all to have been nothing more than a simple mini-mart; no more and no less.
	There were other women he pined for outside of the Asians. Asian women were like the apex of the attractiveness pyramid, but there were plenty of women whose origins were outside the Orient, gentiles included among them. Such women listed amongst their membership Mistress Jessica of satin and sheers fame, Taylor Robbins, Silver, Alexis Legs, any number of bank tellers  - both Asian and not - who had taken it upon themselves to have shown visible panty lines underneath tight slacks or skirts, Sonia Dane, any number of enticing vixens who had shackled him through their clever employment of satins and sheers whilst he'd otherwise toiled at the software giant, Emily Marilyn (who herself had lived in Japan for awhile), Melissa Pentauk who through the employment of her voice alone had led the likes of Hardy down such a scintillating, soul sucking path to sexual oblivion, a mistress who went by the name Felicia, Maria, Angel (who had arrived for the first time at his apartment in a period so vastly removed from our own; so very long ago; who had shown up only moments after Hardy had opened and read the fortune from a cookie which intoned, "Angel with hands better than angel with wings," as though it were some earth-shattering sensual omen), the Real Estate Agent, the Divorcee, the Karaoke woman and one of her friends, the drummer lady, Audrey, the Boss Lady at the architectural firm, Persephone; the list could go on and, and fill entire pages; yet it were the Asians in general and the Chinese and Cambodians in particular who had so captured his imagination; heart and soul.
	Yet of them all, where had he ever known earth-shattering mutual attraction? Were there really such a thing as love? Certainly unrequited love existed, and the Asians were far and away expert in eliciting that from our Hardy. Certainly there were those who continued to capture his imagination, even after decades. One example of this would be the Raven Girl, who was by then obviously a woman only a couple of years Hardy's junior, which meant that she would have been in her 40s like he, yet just a couple of years behind him. Be that as it may, he could visualize the shape of her astounding ass as though it were yet the day before. He could see her stocking tops and garter straps as she lifted her dress at the graduation party; or the camel toe as she presented her crotch to him as they sat together waiting for cards from the health department, that they might be able to get jobs at fast food restaurants; he could remember how with a knowing look she could create such wonderful sensations in his belly and below; or how she once kissed him on the lips; or the wet dream of her where there had been no one else; the cascading beauty of her black hair; the utter perfection of the shape of her face, dotted though it otherwise were by traces of acne waiting to emerge from beneath the teenaged skin; her ability to ingest copious amounts of LSD without batting an eyelid; her fascination with Tesseracts and the Chronicles of Narnia, with Ken Keasey and the Merry Pranksters; her apparent connectedness to the inner workings of the powers that be; her ability to generate large amounts of cash with a seeming blink of an eye; the shape of her fantastic behind as she berated him, walking away in short shorts as he stood sheepishly and took it all in whilst his friends looked on; the sway of her inimitable ass beneath a sort of peasant skirt, and the knowing look on her face the very first time they ever met.
	A second example of a woman giving him lifelong memories would be of a Catholic schoolgirl who - for whatever reason - decided one day to wear an off-white sheer dress with matching white bikini panties and bra underneath. Somehow Hardy had been with 2 other teenaged girls, and the Catholic schoolgirl had picked the 3 of them up for a ride. Perchance it were a setup and Hardy had failed to put the make on her. At some point they were sitting in the parking lot by the boathouse at Greenlake in Seattle; not a mile distant from either of their respective high schools, at a sort of in-between point; and as they smoked a joint the Catholic schoolgirl sang along with Ted Nugent on the radio, "Wango Zee Tango." Hardy was overwhelmed by her visage, and the clingy dress calling attention to the goddess-like curves of her already womanly body; the thin dress and bikini underwear arousing his desire even more than her form could have if it were entirely nude. In the back seat the other two girls said to her, "Isn't that dress a bit see-through?" to which she replied, "Oh it's nothing, it's just like wearing a bikini on a public beach," to all of which Hardy could only stifle an agonized groan of wanton, unserviced lust. That image of the Catholic schoolgirl in the see-through dress, it had haunted him for the remainder of his life. Despite that he knew such to be a blessing. 
	There were myriad others who had stuck in his mind like that. Some of them included other incredibly-shaped young women, wearing sheer dresses so as to show off their panties underneath. That sort of image would simply add itself to the collection of the same already growing within his enraptured yet frustrated mind, each image or visage along the way never pushing any other out; but rather contributing further to the overall lifelong collage of the incredible female form, adorned in a fashion which seemingly never failed to raise his awareness of being somehow beholden to the same.
	In his own ostensibly American culture the idea of mutual interdependence between lovers had long since been lost in the schtick of dime store psychologists, perchance beginning with Kahil Gibran who had preached that personal independence were the only truly edifying path through life; that everything else was a sort of sick co-dependence. We were all atomized in the process; every one of us split from all of the others. Unity was a quaint buzzword of ill-begotten civilizations of yore. Mutual benefit was something of a debunked, cloying notion. Today we splinter ever further yet. Not only are we divorced, each from the other; but now we become set against our own selves; first fractured into individuals, and now  further disintegrating into multiple personalities or alters. The cackling fiends of Montauk and MI5 are joyous upon this date. Their demonic plans come to fruition as the spirits of untold hideousness waft forth from the nether realms, through fissures in the very fibre of our beings, and into our once-pristine world at large.
	The immediate future seems to inevitably portend not a paradise, with pleasant temperatures and no need for shelter or work; of low-hanging fruits and satins and sheers and all manner of delightful mind-altering substances in abundance; instead the collectivists have won out and in our shattered individual states they propose that we become as one beneath the throne of their multifarious pharasaism; that in our crippled states we serve their demented whims; and the handwringers welcome all of these changes. 
	The foreseeable future holds forth not the promise of pristine pastures with running water flowing through, but instead polluted oceans and the advent of deadly fungus and plagues of giant blood-sucking and flesh eating insects, with a pall of radiation poisoning every nook and cranny and the attendant sickened atmosphere, nurturing armies of genetically engineered mutant fiends whose shells are proof against small arms fire; legions of monsters created through off-budget agencies in caverns far beneath the earth; to be at once let loose to terrorize humanity in the cold grip of cascading failure, chasing the remnants of a once promising people; extinguishing once and for all the dream of anything resembling civilization or pleasing aestheticism; food supplies withering on the vine as the infestation surges forth unabated; that wounded beast lurching alas toward Jerusalem.
	The neighborhood had seen better days. Hardy was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The mind reels. The middle class homeowners were gone. The aircraft, coffee, and truck factories were operational but the aircraft and truck plants in particular had seen better days. Once the same had supported a thriving community of families living in houses they were able to pay for. Now the same houses were nearly all rentals, and their inhabitants were on the dole or working lesser jobs than what the factories had once provided. 
	The aircraft factory was busy, but it simply wasn't the same as it had been in the real, boom times. It had probably never recovered from the bust in the early 1970s. Despite the overtime being logged by the modern workers at the plant, there were far less employees than there had once been, during those halcyon days, and their wages were far lower than they had once been. Some employees lived nearby, but most commuted in and out of the community, and a few of those would stop at the store each day for a newspaper or some gasoline, or whatever else they might fancy. Hardy would spare no opportunity to expound upon the virtues of chili peppers, or suggest to a customer that perchance a daily breakfast of packaged donuts were no good, and that the customer should instead go to a proper grocery store once or twice a week, and stock up on produce so as to enhance their overall physiology.
	Sometimes Hardy would consider that he, and all of them were but monsters in a sort of parade. Even the best of them perchance wore the mask of gentleman over the being of fiend. Even the chinese woman might be a dragon in disguise. Certainly, the color scheme of the place wasn't at all removed from what Hardy had seen in his vision that fateful earlier night, even as the horror of it all sort of faded into a dimly pulsating ember within his by then seared imagination. The Southern drawl he'd picked up during the visit to the netherworld, it was more real than perchance anything. How had he gained a sort of twang?
	It were so unfortunate that the store were a stark symbol of the pedestrian sensibilities of their societal milieu at large. Virtually everything in there save for the varieties of Tim's Chips and certain untainted cigarette brands were nothing more than poison. The gasoline sold outside at the pump was a necessity, but virtually everything inside the store a mere convenience; and again in truth a poison.
	Hardy told the chinese woman of how he loathed selling booze, to which she replied that the whole thing had shocked she as well at first - some 20 years previous - but that she'd quickly grown used to it, and that the best policy was for Hardy to just look down at them as she were wont to do. Hardy could see that she had the metaphysical capital with which to afford such a tack in that regard; on the other hand he had no such surplus moral currency of his own. To put it into some kind of uneasy perspective, he acknowledged once again that everything in life is a sort of poison, and that all roads lead ultimately toward death, and that even through inactivity or further, those behaviors thought wholesome by the flotsam and jetsam of humanity at large; that all of it were actually lethal despite the protestations of those who deigned either themselves, or for that matter anyone else to be living right.
	It rankled him yet that some poisons were prohibited by the pharisees and their hangers on, while others were not only permitted, but actually promoted by the likes of Madison Avenue. That most people saw this state of affairs as being right and true was a sort of mystery to the likes of Hardy and his ilk, and it could ultimately be explained as being, of and by the forces of nefarium weaving their sinister ways about the culture at large, and having established the same through manipulations emanating from a sort of hidden headquarters hovering behind the curtain; having somehow gotten the same ordained as holy writ; that basically black were white and up were down.
	Perchance for a person to buck such a trend were utter foolishness, and led only to an agitated, overarching madness in the thrall of some ghastly, cackling, sadistic fiend. Perchance to rebel against the system of written laws was in point of fact only to ask to be put back into a darkened container somewhere, and shipped off to be committed to slave labor on a much harsher world than our own, somewhat as depicted by the movie, Phantasm.
	In this way it can be seen that the little people who champion the machinations of the tyrants might actually be wiser in the end than the best, most worthy of iconclasts. The seemingly stupid people know that, in truth perchance it simply doesn't get any better than this, while the rebels only tempt a terrible, terrible fate. Here is the question then: Who thrashes headlong into the worst of fates; those who comply, or those who do not? Who maintains their own dignity in the face of that maelstrom which haunts the corners of our minds and souls? What is any of it worth?
	Regardless of anything else, the store stint had given Hardy invaluable experience in interacting with others. From the short time he was there he gained more face-to-face experience with other humans than he'd gathered during perchance any other period in his life, tracing back to the time he'd spent on the fisher/processor ship, plying the rough seas of the North Pacific; working as part of a 23-man crew in the shadow of islands which jutted forth from the darkened water as whitened fingers reaching for the troubled skies, during what must have been the year 1986. Before that he'd worked with a crew of sales associates, out of a van which the defrocked Orthodox priest had driven them in, to and fro about the city of Seattle and its fairly unsettled-at-the-time suburbs. He'd spent time as a phone salesman, first selling (unbeknownst to he and his co-workers) bogus subscriptions to magazines such as Outdoor Life to customers in far-off towns with names like Minnetonka, Minnesota. He'd spent a further while selling crypts and cremation packages over the phone and out of the cemetary on Aurora Avenue North (old Highway 99).
	He'd interacted with fellow students at the college whilst dilly-dallying around a 2-year music degree; gotten drunk with his glass blower friends, several of whom would themselves go on to not only national; but international recognition.
	During the 'go go 90s' he had sat in meetings at the likes of Microsoft and Visio. One time he was even coached by a company lawyer at Microsoft, in preparation for a grilling by an actual FTC panel; which was itself investigating some purported chicanery involving Windows 3.1 and DR-DOS, and having taken place during the beta test of the former. Hardy had been in the midst of that particular tempest in a teapot. As much as he eventually came to loathe Microsft, the outfits in Silicon Valley and Utah were comprised of much bigger bastards than he'd ever come to know in his time in service to the monster of Redmond.
	Be any and all of that as it may, Hardy had really interacted very little with other human beings during the course of his life. There were the family get-togethers, and trips to the paintball field; there were the afternoons spent with former high school friends, and jaunts to the shooting range, the nights spent developing and playtesting new boardgames, one of which was inspired by Axis and Allies but which were meant to be a sort of cross between the same, and the overly complex duo of games also depicting WW2, and as offered originally by TSR.
	His own large scale, all-encompassing 2nd World War game was called, The Second World War. Once he and another wargaming fellow had nearly developed it to perfection. For whatever inexplicable reason he'd torn that version down and tried to build up something else with mapboard, counter, and rules changes; losing the elegance of the playable version in the process, and somehow never regaining it. Over and over again his fellow playtester would implore him to develop first the European; then the Pacific Theatre aspect to the game; one after another but not simultaneously. His friend kept saying that testing the two in tandem was making it too difficult to find any overall balance.
	Somehow that project died, and they began testing an answer to Panzerblitz/Panzer Leader, yet with a sort of Squad Leader sensibility. Amazingly, that experiment went smashingly, and within only 1 or 2 playtesting sessions they both at once looked up from the board and at each other, and agreed that miraculously the thing had finished itself. They had both expected an arduous testing process, much like that which had occurred with the theatre-level Second World War game. In contrast, the game - which was called, Company Commander - had virtually designed itself, and in short order.
	During this period they also played a lot of the old classics; 3rd Reich and the aforementioned Squad Leader. They found that they both preferred the original Squad Leader/Cross of Iron/Crescendo of Doom, over the overly legalistic and slow-playing-as-molasses Advanced Squad Leader which was meant to be an improvement on the same.
	At some point Hardy had picked up his pot pipe and began smoking again after a 6-year hiatus. With his income from Microsoft he could afford to smoke up an ounce a week or more. He had a collection of upwards of 20 guns, 10s of thousands of rounds of ammo, 3 automobiles, video gear, a killer stereo and nice television, loads of audio gear with which to record and mix songs of his making, and the company of a steady stream of callgirls who would pass through his apartment there in Overlake, cast as it were in the immediate shadow of the Redmond Campus.
	As for his chief wargaming and playtesting buddy, their history went back to when they were both teenagers. His pal's wife thought that maybe they were having a homosexual affair, her husband spending entirely too much time in playing boardgames with Hardy. In truth there had never been anything between the two of them except battles carried out through cardboard pieces, across mapboards overlayed by hexagonal grids. 	They had tried a couple of other games; games designed as simple enough to be played quickly; clever, engaging games in the mind of Hardy; boring games in the mind of his compatriot. Hardy's friend wanted most of all to play either 3rd Reich, or the European version of TSR's 2nd World War tandem (the monster game which took a good 50 hours to play through), or Squad Leader.
	At a certain point the two of them would also ask each other; why the fascination with the war; and in particular why the fondness for recreating the bloodbaths of the Ostfront? They would wonder aloud whether there were in point of fact some sort of reincarnation, that the two of them in particular might play out scenarios again and again involving cardboard cutout nazis versus bolsheviks, as though responding to some shared history, itself calling forth from an otherwise forgotten time. They knew virtually every model of tank from both sides, and throughout the entire overall campaign. They knew the rough properties of every gun, the amount of armoured protection afforded each fighting vehicle in every direction (front, side, rear, superstructure or turret), the relative effectiveness of various individual machineguns and squad-sized units, the performance parameters of antitank guns, mortars, and anti-aircraft and artillery pieces in a direct fire mode. They knew the cataclysmic effects of a Katyusha barrage, or in turn the devastation to be wrought by large-barrelled Screaming Meemies; the effectiveness of other types of indirect artillery fire at a battery level. Advanced Squad Leader had gone into even greater detail in every above-listed regard than had the original Squad Leader, but in so doing the Advanced version was simply too unwieldly for either of them to be able to commit to the re-creation of company or battalion-level firefights. Even standard Squad Leader/Cross of Iron took untold hours for the recreation of modestly-sized firefights. This is where the development of Company Commander came in. Company Commander - perchance the best wargame which never existed - actually gave them the opporunity to re-create regimental-level battles, yet with much greater detail than the progenitor Panzerblitz had ever been able to. Yet the gameplay remained highly fluid and fast moving. There were few rules to be bogged down within. The unit characteristics had been extrapolated and distilled from the tables found in Cross of Iron. The whole thing had gone swimmingly.
	The testing of Company Commander had given the two of them another moment of pause. One time they'd set up some boards detailing various terrain, and found themselves in an animated argument as to where each side would be allowed to start, arguing vociferously over certain aspects of the terrain. It was then that they looked at each other and wondered where in the blazes they'd learned to analyze terrain in relation to its effect on modern warfare; to such an extent as they'd never quite previously realized. Here were two ostensible laymen, each of whom in their own way seemed to know not only the hardware of the Russo-German war in detail, but both of whom additionally had an excellent grasp of the advantages and disadvantages of various terrain; and on the squad, company, and battalion level.
	Be that as it may, Hardy had long-since given up on designing board games. His magic workings with the weed, the music, and the admiration of the female form had fairly well since then taken over his entire life. Perchance this is what happens to an unattached male left to his own devices and finding himself alone in this world. He would toy with the idea of committing Company Commander or the Second World War to computer programs, but it seemed he'd at some point lost any real inclination to program a computer.
	Onlookers might blame marijuana as the source of his travails. He was never convinced of the same. Too many other events and inclinations had crossed his life's path. The picture was much more complicated than a first glance from the outside could provide. One thing that all of this taught him was that, since his own life were so difficult to quantify in any real respect, then so must the lives of others be equally difficult to gauge from without. It all involved something about "walking a mile in someone else's shoes" before daring to cast aspersions upon the same.
	Of course, Hardy had continued to press his own intellectual development, yet not in the area of computers or complex wargames. Instead he'd undertaken such things as playing the guitar in a backwards tuning, whereby he would have to find the mirror image of everything he'd ever done, and throw out the impractical fingerings and find new ones where necessary. In this fashion he had perchance defined an altogether new instrument, and in learning this new instrument anew it could only reinvigorate his intellect.
	By much the same token he had fallen in love with the aforementioned Chinese Chess or Xiang Qi. All manner of chess, from the standardized FIDE which was accepted in the West; to all of the other variants most definitely including Xiang Qi; all were exercises in memory. All were exercises in intellect.
	He had developed a variant of his own called American Chess, and upon presenting it to the Chess Variants website, someone had graciously coded it into the Zillions of Games (ZOG) engine, and it had been posted at the ZOG website. Further, he had been able to examine the ZOG coding and, in so doing had gained the necessary understanding of the scripting language to where he were able to develop a few more variants on his own. 
	These were 3 versions of Operational Chess, the last of which was actually interesting, and another variant called Sino-European Chess which was an eclectic fusion of FIDE with Xiang Qi. So his development of, and participation in strategy games had not ended entirely, but had rather taken a new tack; albeit one which required less effort than would have been demanded by, for instance having coded Company Commander into a standalone wargame; but in his mind he were headed in an intellectually viable direction nonetheless. To his small credit, he had actually written a computer program - outside of ZOG - that people might be able to play American Chess by email exchange. He was heartened by the fact that he'd been able to code up an email-only version of the game, yet cognizant that writing a viable AI for the same would require; at minimum something like 20 times the code he'd already written, at least in his own estimation. In this light he highly admired a young programmer who he'd once known at Microsoft. Back in the day, that kid had programmed a full-blown FIDE interface and competitive AI in but a matter of days. That sort of programming skill is highly prized in the world of information technologies.
	To bring the reader back to the subject, and to get back on track with the telling of the mini-mart story; suffice it to say that Hardy's scope of human interaction was highly enhanced by even his short stay as the graveyard cashier at the mini-mart. He'd probably never before met and interacted with such a plethora of characters over such a short period of time as he had at the mini-mart; at least not since the time at the glass factory, or the bookstore, both of which had passed 20 years previous. Perhaps the biggest challenge of working at a mini-mart is in refusing to become numbed by the same. The constant passage of customers buying alcohol and lottery tickets can, for whatever reason grate on the mind.
	In the end though the job frightened him. Whether this is fair or not is probably beside the point. What can a person do if they sense that on any given night they could become the target of a violent attack; and where their monetary compensation or salary (if you could call it that) for the same might never allow an escape from the poverty line? Hardy was convinced there had to be something better; perchance even death itself would be preferable to the mind-broadening, yet oft-agonizing experiences wrought by his tenure at the mini-mart. Certainly in leaving he would never have to sell booze or lottery tickets again, or quibble over the pennies in the kitty next to the register, or catch a waft of the unpleasant smell left by a tweaker, or endure chagrin in the face of some young turk who wants to step up to the counter and play wise guy with either the articles to be purchased, or in coming up with the money for the same, or both. He would no longer be expected to spy on those characters he thought suspicious, in order to prevent them from petty theft; nor would he be expected to keep the parking lot clear of any would-be street walkers, drug dealers, or late-night gatherings of revellers. In all certainty there did have to be something different for him to pursue.
	Ideally, he dreamt of a Raven Witch Woman; someone with dark or maybe copper or red hair, dressed in satins and sheers all the time, with a large bankroll and able to provide him with any drug he desired, and a proper environment for experiencing it in; someone to sing a song as he merrily played along; to put him up in a comfortable house where he could play video games and such in his spare time; perchance someone to dress him up in a satin french maid outfit, pay for his breast implants, and order him to scrub her floors or service her orally; someone he could cook for; a woman to work together with him in magic; someone just right for him. On the one hand he knew that it was a fantasy; on the other he couldn't entirely disabuse himself of the ideal, and the hope that her life's path might one day merge with his; and she take him in, and show him the good life at last. Even if he were never to meet such a wonderful woman, he knew; just knew from the bottom of his heart that life shouldn't end with the mini-mart; there simply had to be something else; something better. It was time to move on, regardless of what might ultimately lie ahead of him.
	Perchance the most interesting of all customers to the store had been the crazed man with the conspiracy theories. Wild-eyed and dishevelled, yet driving a fancy SUV, he had arrived one night and said he was from Latin America, yet who looked like he could possibly be an Ashkenazi. He could just as well have been from Paraguay as Eastern Europe. The man had come into the store one night, babbling about being chased by the CIA; of being backstabbed and accused by sedition by an Iranian at the aircraft factory where he as well claimed to work, speaking of a consortium of gas stations in Bellevue which had colluded to habitually cheat him, on and on with that sort of talk as the black women waiting in line behind him finally told him to get out of the way, which he did. He ambled outside and Hardy rang up the purchse of black women. As they left, he followed because he wanted to speak some more with the distraught man. As the black women passed the man in the parking lot, he implored them to stay out of Bellevue as it were only a bunch of assholes and had been named after a famous mental hospital. Surprisingly or not, Hardy found that he at least partially agreed with that assessment and called after the black women to heed the man's advice in that regard, to which they all rolled their eyese and turned and walked away. 
	The thing was, many of the subjects he would talk about as he careened frantically from topic to topic - much of it struck right at Hardy's consciousness. As for the man's complaints about Bellevue, how the gas stations would rip a person off and the population were all assholes and the place was like a mental hospital; Hardy had lived there for quite large period of his life and could remember having once been hoodwinked by a gas station at the intersection of Bellevue Way and 108th Ave. NE, so that particular accusation remained at least faintly plausible. Hardy was in agreement that most people in Bellevue were indeed assholes, and of the thought that the place were named after a mental hospital, Hardy could at least agree with that; after a slight fashion at the very least. That first time, the man ranted about communism, and criminal faggots, and the systematic rape of women in the old Soviet Russia; of Pol Pot and grifters living from penthouse to penthouse the world over; earthly fiends who only lived to rob the rest of us blind. There was such anger in his voice as he paged through the topics, almost as though he were a walking, talking library of conspiracy theory on steroids. As usual, Hardy couldn't quite believe anything for certain, but he was fairly sure that the man had been sincere and that the entire thing had not been some kind of nefarious, convoluted act or production toward some unknown but certainly nefarious end. In short, it appeared to Hardy that whether the man were cogent or insane, he were most likely and above all; honest in his ramblings. Hardy assured the man that he would always get a fair deal on gasoline at the mini-mart, should he ever decide to return. The man expressed concern that he might be driven off of the road by "them" and as he left that night, at least some small part of Hardy wondered if the man had been revealing some great yet misunderstood truth. On the 2nd meeting, the man had stayed at the store for a longer time, bombarding Hardy with all sorts of tidbits of speculative info; jumping from subject to subject, moment by moment.
	At one point the man said he'd been at Fort Benning in the early '80s, and Hardy asked him if it had been Sand Hill. The man said something to the effect of, "Fuck Sand Hill; I was from Harmony church; and you know, there were ghosts from the soldiers who had trained there for D-Day; and I narced on some very powerful people there, and they're still after me today." Hardy had asked him if he'd been there in 1983, and in response he'd gotten agitated - even moreso than he already were if such were at all possible - and told Hardy to "mind your own fucking business." The wildman went on for over an hour, from topic to topic; communism, Pol Pot, Stalin, motorcycle gangs, drug syndicates, the barbaric nature of people whether they hailed from Wyoming or the mountains of Afghanistan, crooked former cops hung out to dry, mobsters, aliens, time travel, moonbases; all whilst chain-smoking Newports as he gesticulated and ranted while they haunted the parking lot, just before dawn as the store were for the moment quiet. Hardy began to wonder how had it been that, of all customers this one were the one who had somehow most gained his ear? Certainly more than one of the locals had tried to ingratiate themselves with Hardy, and had failed; at least to the same extant where this wildman had succeeded. After a certain point though, Hardy wondered if the man were dangerous, and they passed uneasy jokes about psychiatric medications - or lack thereof - back and forth. It was all further complicated by the fact that, after awhile dawn were breaking; and a growing stream of customers were beginning to file through the store, and as Hardy would follow them into the store, then serve them from behind the register; the man, having re-entered the store as well, woul stand on the other side of the counter, behind a given customer, and prattle on about gang-raping Hell's Angels and the like; even as the Korean woman might be standing right there, or the pretty, petite computer expert from the aircaft factory. He would alternate between speaking; both around, and to them and they would at least feign a sort of friendly familiarity, or ignore him altogether. Hardy sensed that the entire thing were already out of hand, and suddenly he wished that the wild-eyed man would simply go away, never to return again.
	In any event Hardy would never forget the man's wild-eyed, flailing, stream-of-consciousness demeanor. He could only discern that most likely the man were in some real kind of metaphysical distress. Beyond that, all bets were off regarding the veracity of much of what he'd said. Of course, there really were a Sand Hill and Harmony Church at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Certainly there had been atrocities committed for profit by the gangsters of the world. It went without saying as well that the Devil were forever and ever out to teach God a lesson. Of the rest of what the man had spoken of, Hardy could only wonder. One thing which concerned Hardy was how the man were going to go to work at the aircraft factory with the unkempt appearance he were in. Perchance the line about the job at the factory were but a fabrication. He didn't see how the man could go to a job that day; not with the look in his eyes and spouting the things he was going on about. One thing which stuck with Hardy through it all, was the comment the man had made about Hardy's own eyes; he called them "DMZ eyes." Internally, Hardy couldn't really dispute that comment. He'd seen those same DMZ eyes staring back at him, so many times whilst looking in the mirror.

	When the FOX television network were first launched, it included in its Sunday night lineup an oft-forgotten variety show starring Tracey Uhlman, and co-starring Julie Kavner. The humour was often subtle or complex, and such fare were outside the ability of the average American mind to comprehend, let alone appreciate. The show became a regular staple of Hardy's in any event; that is until it were unceremoniously dumped in favor of something more marketable. A Russian Jewess ex-pat had once told Hardy that the show was great, but that Americans simply didn't get it. She had fully expected him to be unaware of its tenure during the nascent days of FOX, but to her pleasant surprise he related to her that he had been a big fan. In any event, During the show's brief run, a certain particular skit had forever lodged itself somewhere within the recesses of Hardy's mind. 
	In the skit, Uhlman had played an Italian maiden in perchance the year 1919. Another of the comedy troupe portrayed a young Benito Mussolini. There they cavorted about an apartment as Mussolini tried to put the moves on the girl, and she cleverly thwarted every advance, even to the point where the Mussolini character was accidentally inflicting self-harm through the failure of his moves. For example, he put his hand on an ironing board, and leaned toward her, but in so doing somehow caused the hot iron to fall and burn his hand.
	The skit ended with the maiden as a grandmother, and relating the tale decades after the fact, to another young woman. She told the girl, "You know, it only goes to show; for women sex is really good; but no sex is even better!" The skit had also deigned to explain in an albeit roundabout fashion, what the cause of Mussolini's drive to dictator had been; a failure to seduce a girl in the days of his youth. At the time, Hardy saw a lot of truth in the skit. As he went forward in life from there, he reflected on his own failure to couple with the Raven Girl so long before, and speculated as to whether such had been a source of seething, oft-repressed anger for the entirey of his remaining days on earth.

	Sometimes, alone at the mini-mart late at night, he would pine over the Apsara he could no longer see face to face. He would wonder what it might be like to speak with Michelle Trachtenberg; to bask in her overarching sensuality. He wondered what it might be like to once again have a youthful, male body; to carry himself like a bonafide male and be found attractive by the most desirable of the distaff gender; of course that were missing the point entirely. In any event there were other times where he would wonder what Michelle Trachtenberg might look like if she were dressed as an Apsara dancer, and making those same kind of timeless, sensual moves to such sweet music as the real ones do in actuality. Sometimes he would contemplate the wonder of Yin Ling's posterior, adorned in attendant satins and sheers, and speculate as to the nature of her personality. 
	He was looking for a queen, yet he never seemed to be drawn totally in by a single female. He wondered if he were to swear allegiance to Yin Ling, or Sanae Asoh, or one of the Apsara, or Michelle Trachtenberg, or Penny Flame, or Aria Giovanni. During his mushroom experience he'd started out thinking of Yin Ling, yet early on there had been those thoughts of Magibon; and as the trip peaked he seemed to have narrowed it down to two; one of the Apsara he'd met and so longed for, and Michelle Trachtenberg.
	He was looking for the "Queen from the East" as from the song Ouroboros, but couldn't quite figure out who she really might be. Perchance it were all a fabrication; the longings of a delusional dying man who has nothing better to do than to while away his insignificant hours making up stories inside his head; someone so disappointed and shellshocked by "real life" in this world that he'd retreated into a series of far-fetched internal fantasies. He knew that on some level he loved them all, yet he wondered if there were ever supposed to have been a "one and only," or perchance a set of twins as symbolized by the 911 event and once-proposed to him by Maria.
	As for this "special woman" he was dreaming of; he figured she could easily be Jewish, or from any place East of say Warsaw or Budapest, with a line drawn roughly North and South from that approximate milieu. He was fairly certain that her roots would not be English or of some other place in Western Europe. She might be living in England as like Sharimara, yet - as with her - would be in at least some way dark as the same; and emanating through any rapturously beautiful outer darkness, her inner star might shine forth as to transfix Hardy. As his life had gone by it seemed to matter less and less that he should ever make love to any woman, and he realized that his stature in the market of human sexual - or much greater yet, sensual - interaction had steadily eroded, perchance even through his own unconscious design!
	He knew that no matter what, there was nothing to be gained in criticizing anyone else; for he himself had made some of the seemingly most stunningly stupid personal choices in his own life that the purported misdeeds of others seemed to but pale in comparison.

	Above all else, Hardy considered himself as being above all, most probably insane. He had once disabused himself of being the beast of the book of revelation. When he'd been a teenager, it had been kind of a joke amongst he and his friends; whilst getting drunk at keggars sometimes his pals would - back in the day - start chanting 'anti, anti, anti!' as his given nickname. At some point though he'd realized that - like selling one's soul to the devil - there must have been millions of disoriented teenagers who'd themselves all tried the same things; selling their souls or fancying themselves the beast. By the age of 20 or thereabouts, he'd given up the notion of either. It hadn't been until in his 30s that the 666 had seemed to follow him everywhere. He didn't think he'd asked for that, but nonetheless there it were. From the moment someone had assigned him the office with the '666' in its designation, he'd slipped into a reeling madness which in turn served to haunt him for the rest of his earthly life. Sometimes he wondered why he weren't in an asylum.
	Something or someone had put the numbers on his door; or arranged his meeting with several of the other the various and sundry other would-be beasts of his day and age. Yet it were as though he had been drawn to that, and not pursued it; for he was convinced he'd long since given up on the notion of his own being the beast.
	During the DMT trip at the house of thelema ('Temple Dahmer'); during those moments when he'd become 'the beast' in his vision, it were as though he were invulnerable to the earthly machinations of all of humanity. It wasn't liberating per se - quite the contrary - but the invulerability he felt at that moment was a kind of salve to his otherwise besieged sense of daily being. In the years following that vision, he wondered why it were so important for him to desire immunity to the rest of humanity. What overarching character flaw did he possess that he couldn't perceive of functioning without that same immunity? Beyond the vision of the beast, the riddle - "The Tetragrammaton is not the demiurge" - would haunt both his dreams and his waking hours.
	As for a "Queen from the East" he wondered what that really meant. He'd converted to judaism - unorthodox judaism - soon after the DMT vision. To his way of believing, if one chanted the name of 'god,' then one's DNA would in turn mutate and one would become more or less, 'jacobin.' For at least a time, this to him was the dividing line between jew and goyim; those who pursued acknowledgement of the creator of this world would in turn become 'jew,' and those who eschewed the same practice would remain amongst the gentiles. Thus there was no question of being born into judaism, but rather it was a conscious decision that everyone would take upon themselves.
	As for the '13th tribe' or the Khazars being 'fake jews,' he didn't agree with that at all, for in his theory of DNA mutation, the Khazars had become of Judah simply by pursuing the worship of the ostensible creator of this world. That is to say, Hardy considered ashkenazi jews to be every bit as jewish as their erstwhile sephardic counterparts.
	Where Hardy diverted from so much of 'mainstream judaism' - and where his own unorthodoxy entered into the picture - was in the fact that Hardy were lawless. In contrast, other facets of judaism - orthodox, hasidic, reformed, etc. - were despite their differences; one and all pharasaic sects in that they - each of them - had some large set of far-reaching rules that they wished to make everyone - goyim in particular - follow. In contrast, unorthodox judaism had no rules; and God (or god) could be sought by the individual, without the oversight of rabbis or pharisees if you will.
	As it turns out, for all of Hardy's rejection of the idea of societal laws; such had put him on the side of 'evil,' for it appeared to him that the vast majority of composite humanity had, long-since considered a byzantine compendium of stifling rules to be a 'good thing.'

	Where the mini-mart were concerned, Hardy had from the beginning sensed that some vast alien presence were waiting beneath the place; swirling below the surface; there on that forlorn street corner, but waiting for the right moment to emerge and appear before humanity at large. Perchance instead the place contained some kind of dimensional door. The Chinese woman was certainly an enigma. He wondered if she didn't possess vast unseen, unearthly powers. It seemed like so many of the locals - people who lived in the neighborhood and who would walk rather than drive to the store - were up in arms over the woman, but at the same time it appeared to him as though she were somehow the parent they needed in order to be kept in line.
	Time and time again, a random local would enter the store and begin to speak ill of the chinese woman. He was at a loss over this. As mentioned earlier, Hardy was of the mind that he shouldn't align with any of them - local customers, the chinese woman, or the police. Navigating through the daily dramas that this quandry presented him proved in the end to be too much for his tired psyche and spirit. Each night before hopping into his car and then speeding over specific highways and byways on his way to work, all the way with college radio blasting over the stereo; he would wonder if it were the very night of which he might be either robbed, or beaten, or killed outright. Perchance he should have stayed there to see if such would ever actually occur. Perchance he'd made a mistake in ever having left the place.
	
	Oddly, the mini-mart was located not a mile away from the coffee factory where he'd previously performed a brief stint as roaster operator. In point of fact, the mini-mart was located in a spot he'd driven past virtually every day on his way home from the job at the coffee plant. Then, he'd never stopped at the mini-mart. Now he was working there, in the veritable shadow of the coffee factory. Once in awhile, when the wind were just right and he'd be out sweeping the parking lot in the wee hours of the night, he could smell the beans as they roasted on the graveyard shift at the coffee plant only blocks away.
	The coffee plant itself had been a less-than-ideal situation for him. His Vietnamese co-workers had been a real barrel of laughs, and he'd grown quite fond of all of the people of varying ethnicities - Viet, Latino, Pacific Islander, and African-American (like many buzzwords, really too broad a nomenclature to do justice to all of the various and sundry complexions and personalities ostensibly comprising the whole of the same) - who had worked there. Be that as it may, and as with so many other jobs he'd ever had; one day he'd sparked up the chronic pipe and in yet another in a seemingly endless series of binges; he'd once again resume his attempts at reaching the goddess through wholly metaphysical means, and in so doing had simply bailed out on yet another gig.
	While he were there, one thing which had occurred to him about the coffee factory was that it appeared to have been haunted. Apparently, the engineer who'd designed the automated processes; the hydraulic tubes shunting coffee greens from the nearby warehouse into the hoppers which in turn fed the giant roasting machines, to the hydraulics which lifted finished batches of beans into the hoppers above, to the conveyer belts which moved the beans out into further processing and finally packaging; all of it had been apparently designed by some sort of genius. Be that as it may, the architect of that production line had at some point, apparently killed himself over a divorce. In any event, the wonder of the complexity of the entire operation were but mind-boggling. The coffee factory with all of its chutes and ladders, ovens and conveyor belts, packaging machines and forklifts whirring about; it was a writ large, real-life reminisce of the proverbial Henry Huggins and the donut shop.
	From what Hardy witnessed of the plant during his 2-month stint there, it appeared as though perchance the spirit of the engineer had never left. To give but one example of the 'hauntedness' of the place; sometimes certain valves would simply shut themselves off. Such valves would be out of the reach of anyone in the plant, only within reach of the catwalks above the production floor; catwalks where no one had walked that day. There was too much of that going on; or at least that were Hardy's excuse to walk out on the job, there immediately after Christmas. His last day at the plant - 2 days before Christmas Eve - he'd bumped his head something fierce, and there had been a fairly large fire in one of the roasters, and for whatever reason he'd felt drained. There were spiritual battles emerging between himself and certain other mean-spirited employees; battles he didn't sense that he'd asked for, but which had been foisted upon him in any event. Perchance it were only simple Kharma. The proverbial long and short of it were that he never returned to the plant the day after Christmas.
	One thing he had learned from his stay at the coffee plant was that, he'd never much told any woman that he loved her. He would proclaim his love for a woman to other people, but never directly to the ostensible object of his desire. He'd once told Maria Mortorano that he loved her, but by the same token he'd on occasion admitted to her that she were 'safe' to love because there were no chance of their ever being together. She had once told him that she 'owned him' as he fell into her form, and for all of her saintliness, perchance she had truly owned him. She certainly had been beautiful, in body, mind, and spirit. His musical recordings from the '90s had reflected a lot of his desire for her. A release such as Window of Love had in point of fact been almost entirely about her.
	As for the Window of Love CD, some people - including record company muckety mucks - intoned that the drums were terrible. He'd never been a big fan of drums one way or the other, so the drumming - or lack thereof - on that release had not bothered him. What bothered him about the release was that the bass drum sound as taken from the Yamaha TG-30 was too high-pitched or 'harsh' when he'd been seeking to get a more 'pillowy' sound as one might find on a classic 'Roland 808' machine. That lack of 'fluffiness' on the bass drum, combined with some 'wooden-ness' in the programmed cymbals, toms, and snare drum; those had been his own chief problems with the album. Be that as it may, despite his critics he'd also found a fan or two; as apparently someone else had appreciated the orchestration of the entire thing.
	For one there were a telephone dominatrix of whom he'd become a regular customer at the time; someone he'd shared some memorable audio moments with;  she being of scintillating voice and so full of seductive thoughts. She'd gotten a copy of the CD and in turn had given it to her teenaged niece. Months later she'd mentioned to Hardy that her niece absolutely loved that album. As well with a neighbor living downstairs from him in the apartment complex they'd shared; Hardy had given that neighbor a copy of the CD, and in turn the man had given the CD to a manager at his own place of work, and again weeks later the fellow apartment dweller had seen Hardy in passing; and had mentioned that his boss were simply in love with the  songs on the album; that his boss played the thing every day.
	Of the things which Hardy wished he could do again regarding the Window of Love release; there were simply the drums which needed some 'fine tuning,' and the vocals which were at least a bit too nasal; nasal like a eunuch version of Gary - 'here in my car' - Numan, assuming such is not a redundancy; the vocals as well were lost in the mix. He would have sung those songs differently if he'd ever decided to re-do any of those recordings, and as well would have brought the singing up further into the overall mix. As it turns out, he did re-release a bunch of remakes which included songs from that album, on a CD called, About Michelle Marie. This time the vocals were much more to his liking, and the drums were different but perchance no better than in the originals. The main thing of that album of overall remakes as taken from several previous releases, was that the myriad, manifold synths from the original recordings had been replaced by an austere blend of actual guitars. Perchance his favorite song - remake or no - regarding Marie was the one from his 22nd CD; it was called, Ode to MM. Yet again the one on the CD wasn't the best it could be. There was another version which had never been released, and which existed only on a cassette tape he'd made; that lost version were his favorite. The one which had made it to the actual CD was good enough to his ears, but not quite as fine as the one which had inexplicably never been released.
	Another song from the 22nd album was called, Vision of You and was also about Marie. The thing with that one was that his bass and rhythm guitar had gotten quite sloppy during certain parts of that song, and as the drums didn't quite fit to begin with, and at some point the whole thing had fallen 'badly' out of sync with itself, so again it wasn't all it could have been. He liked it nonetheless.
	During one of his magic workings (marijuana-induced metaphysical masturbation sessions) at the end of 2003 and right around New Year's of 2004, he'd discovered a song called something like, My Sweet 666 by a band called, Him. Being so impressed by that, he'd tried to emulate the style of that song with one of his own called, Voices in Her Head. Voices in Her Head was actually a halfway decent number, and a bit unlike anything else he'd done. The problem with that one was that some of the drum fills really didn't fit the song at all. He was happy though with the arrangement of guitars and vocals, and his only other critique of it was that the words were sometimes difficult to understand. Of course, subdued vocals had always been an ongoing problem in so many of his recordings. It wasn't until fairly well the 20th CD and beyond that he'd begun to really bring the vocals out in his mix.
	The real problem with all of the CDs between 8 and 42 was that he wasn't working with professional gear, and all of his mixing was done through headphones. It almost seemed like no matter how hard he would try, it was 'impossible' to get a proper mix using a - whether 4-track or 8-track - BOSS digital recorder. Be that as it may, the sheer scope and variety of the catalogue may have made it of interest to collectors of musical eclecticism.
	As for recording gear over the span of his nigh-invisible music career, the 7", 33 1/3 speed vinyl EP - Shockwave - had been recorded in 1985 in a studio which had employed 1-inch 8-track tape. So it was of reasonable quality. They had recorded the thing in the year 1985, at Triangle Studios in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle; there on Leary Way, and so named because of the triangle-shaped building it were in. 
	The only real annoyances regarding the resultant songs were sometimes out-of-tune guitars (mitigated at least by the copious emploment of warbling, water-like chorus effects), and the fact that the drum kit which the otherwise kick-ass drummer had to work with was severely limited. For one thing the snare had broken prior to the recording session. Overall, the 4 finished songs resulting from those brief sessions had a subtle, jagged  edge about their sound, camouflaged at least in part by a few sugary lyrics interspersed with Hardy's preachy subtext. The jagged, blurred aspect of sound of the finished recordings had been accomplished by the 3 band members themselves; partying until dawn the night before the 1st and major studio session, drinking like fish, chain-smoking cigarettes, and consuming copious amounts of No-Doz in the process. As the session itself began later in the morning, they'd each had at best perhaps 3 or 4 hours of fitful sleep and were thus given; each to their own hangover. They were trying to recreate the rock star mystique, even on their limited budget. What saved them was a  copious amount of ongoing, further ingestion of ever-more No-Doz as the morning trailed into afternoon at the studio. That first session had been the one in which the majority of the tracks comprising the mix had been laid down. The second session had been for them to go in and re-take the odd track here and there; but the vast majority of the same had been spent in mixdown with the studio engineer.
	There are some funny stories about the drummer kicking someone's ass over a bait-and-switch regarding the original 1-inch tape; or an automobile trip made to Vancouver B.C. by the drummer and Hardy, where they dropped the 1/4" stereo master tape off at a record pressing outfit; the trip itself involving copious amounts of stout Canadian lager and Export-A cigarettes, laced with just a tad of the Davies Street streetwalker element; and to be clear Hardy had been the customer whilst the drummer had slightly condoned the same, agreeing to wait in the lobby of the hotel whilst Hardy and the pensive streetwalker had sort of cavorted in the room above. 
	Of that era, Hardy could only look back and be thankful that the alcohol had not been his entire demise, and that while beer can be a right and good thing in the hands of someone of more even temperament, the same were but a deadly plague upon the house of someone wired such as he'd been. In short, psychadelics were his drug of choice, and alcohol sent him reeling out of control more than anything else ever had; and in effect, he'd been forced to quit the alcohol by his return from fishing in Alaska in the Summer of 1986. The only other time he would ever consume the same would be at the behest of the Lemmy Woman where he'd tested a half cup of beer in 1999, and later in a sort of faux suicide attempt which took place in 2002. Beyond a point; the point where in 1986 he'd left a party inebriated out of his mind at a combination of bong hits of green bud and undue amounts of beer, and found himself traversing the express lanes on I-5 over the ship canal bridge, on his way to the U-District from Wallingford; and in so doing, when climbing over the fence before the freeway, he'd fallen and hurt his wrist whilst nearly breaking his neck; after which and despite that he'd forged ahead, crossing the freeway there at some ungodly hour such as 3 a.m., and gone on to get cash; and as to why he'd chosen to go to the U-District rather than the bank, say at N. 45th St. and Meridian Ave. N.; such is anyone's guess, but in any event he'd then he returned to the house where he were house-sitting and not far from the glass house, and in counting his money had realized he were short of the required $150 of which were necessary to ring up a callgirl; and had phoned his drummer instead, of whom he'd been out drinking with earlier in the night, to get a $20 bill he'd thought the same might have pocketed from Hardy at some point along the way, and in the course of the said previous night's debauchery; where they'd been out on the town and taking in some of the local bands before crashing a Mensa party at a hotel in the same downtown; and after which they'd been dropped off at the house in Wallingford and near big bend at N. 42nd street and Eastern Ave. N., where the glass artists were having a keggar of there own; from which he had exited in his entirely out-of-mind state, to where eventually he'd made his trip to the aforementioned cash machine, and in returning and so calling his bandmate for the further $20; had been told by the fellow's mother (as the drummer then yet lived with his folks) to simply "Piss Off!" for phoning them at such a strange hour of the night; and upon waking the next morning, all such activities of the previous night had finally convinced Hardy to disabuse himself of alcohol altogether; which had resulted in his joining AA, at least for a time; and where he'd met the most interesting sponsor, both of them having eventually left the program, but neither of them ever having taken a drink again; of course but in Hardy's case where the 2 exceptions listed above might have been noted by the reader. Suffice it to say that, over the years it would turn out that Hardy's sponsor were connected, both to the would-be beast of Temple Dahmer, and to the haunted Bellevue High School. The would-be beast had harassed Hardy in 1985, at a previous party there at the house where the glass blowers would play. Hardy would not see the man again until 1998, then whilst living in Tukwila in the shadow of the Lemmy Woman; she being tall and dark, and with a sort of superior countenance, sometimes gleaming with all-knowing eyes, with fine feet and long legs; and in practice she being but an inapropriate oil for his brand of vinegarette; they at some point and for whatever reason either real imagined, having had the most acrimonious of falling outs.
	When Hardy had at last again begun laying down tracks again in the early '90s, Female Erotic Power had been recorded in its entirety on a Tascam 8-track cassette deck. For a deck with such a narrow tape, and relatively slow transport speed; the sound were actually decent. The chief synth module he'd employed there had been the aforementioned Yamaha TG-30.
	When he'd begun work on Window of Love and the follow-ups, Fashion Outlaws and, Other Thought; he'd added to his TG-30 with some Korg module, itself which had been hyped by the music store employee, but which in practice were lesser than the TG-30 in available level of expression, with the additional annoyance that the Korg were more difficult by far to use, its only saving grace having been one or two of its built-in sounds; to which Hardy had also subtracted his Tascam and had added a Mackie board with Alesis digital 8-track which used VHS tapes as the storage medium. For the longest time it would be apparent that he didn't know exactly what he were doing, either with the microphone itself, or the overall mixdown of the songs; the vocals seemingly without exception being lost in the mix. Be that as it may, by the time of Other Thought he'd picked up some nice-sounding drum loops and an easy-to-use sampler which had allowed him to actually 'loop' them. The drumming of Keith LeBlanc - of Grandmaster Flash fame - was prominent on Other Thought. As well with the Other Thought release, some of the vocals had actually found a reasonable level in the mix, perhaps in particular on a song such as, White-Assed Gangsta Muthfucka Not. Of that song, the lyrics had certainly been bombastic, or had even been described as 'sick' (and not in a good way) but certain bystanders with prejudice of their own; yet despite whatever one may have thought of the lyrics, the accompanying guitar line was such a work of sheer beauty that even Hardy had surprised himself in listening to as it would play back. He began to wonder if he were truly gifted at playing guitar, because the line from that song had so surpassed his original expectations, and in so doing had given him pause as to how he had done that despite his complete lack of guitar practice over the preceding several years; where he'd instead dropped the guitar altogether in an attempt at doing 'business' as inspired by his having read the Neo-Tech Discovery in 1988, which in so doing had caused him to drop music in favor of computers; but after a roughly 3-year period during which he'd been completely without the guitar, he'd popped in an old cassette of his, of he performing a solo at a college rehearsal, the sound of which had sent him into tears, further aggravated by the machinations of his nascent unrequited love for Marie, all of which had somehow triggered his ensuing purchase of the Tascam 8-track, drum machine and guitar; and had sent him on the musical path once again, to the eventual detriment of his professional pursuit of computers. In truth, he wouldn't have had it any other way.
	By the time of, Not of this World and, Blacklisted he'd added in a couple of loops from the legendary Sly Dunbar. These loops appeared on the tracks, Dream Lover, and The Unloved. Dream Lover could have been great, except for that fact that again the vocals were subdued. It employed a chord progression ostensibly remembered from an Almodovar movie, Matadore. As an aside, at one point around the year 1997, Hardy had sent an online aquaintance living in Spain; copies of all 7 of his CDs up to that point. Apparently they had been passed along to Pedro Almodovar himself.
	The version of Dream Lover from amongst the "3 Live CDs" - the 16th overall to be exact - was probably actually better than the original. Once again though the vocals were subdued. The drums were from the Boss's built-in rhythm machine. The great thing about that track though was the interplay between the bass and the guitar.
	Here are the lyrics from Dream Lover:

Forever and ever dreaming
You never wish to be awakened
Your waking hours are but a curse
Of living in this world

She comes to you in your dreams
Beautiful yet sometimes unseen
Outside the place you go
At night when you’re alone

She is the succubus
She is your dream lover
In your waking hours there is no other
Life upon this earth is mainly but a curse

You’re not the first, the first to have thought it
For it was written ages ago
That no matter what, everything you do is but dust
In this cosmic vice all is ultimately crushed

Our eternity is but a speck
Of time on the immortal clock
So this is why you retreat
Into the peace and wonder of your dreams

Where the succubus she will love you
Like no woman here ever could or for that matter would
And maybe there you touch, just for fleeting moments
Infinity as known by those who are infinitely 

Hidden in your waking hours
Hidden but with vast powers
The Elders and the Ancient Ones exist
As Yaweh certainly is not a myth

All of it will be answered
But for now enjoy your sleep
And be sure in your waking hours to produce enough to eat
And at night give yourself over to she
	
	As for the track, The Unloved he'd also done a remake of that on the 16th disc; again without the Sly Dunbar drumming. The original was better. There Hardy had attempted to emulate an actual 'trumpet solo' employing a guitar synth he'd picked up at the time. To his ear he'd actually done a good job of it. Also, the rhythm guitar on the original had been 'really special' to his ears. When he'd tried to emulate the same feeling in the remake, he couldn't quite figure it out. It were as though, during the making of the original he'd unconsciously laid down a great rhythm guitar track, without giving it a second thought; recreating the exact feel of it at a later date had proven problematical. Perhaps the dichotomy between the rhythm guitar on the original, and the one on the remake; it could be explained by the fact that Sly Dunbar had been the drummer on the former, and a drum machine had employed on the latter. Perhaps Sly Dunbar's groove on the original had, by default evoked a great rhythm line out of Hardy, where in contrast the sort of mechanical sound of the drums on the remake had not instantly inspired the same. Perchance the only slightly compelling feature of the remake was that it were threadbare in mix, having only the single guitar, bass, and vocals; that whatever the pros or cons of the drum machine, the minimalist mix carried a certain charm in its own right. 
	Of course, on all three of the 'live' discs - 16 through 18 combining to comprise a 'triple-live album' - he had done that same sort of high-wire act, with just a single guitar on every track, accompanied by a lone bass, and vocals, and backed by the built-in drums. This was in an attempt at re-creating a 'live' sound, without retakes, and without a myriad of multitracks. It was supposed to represent how a theoretical band of his might have sounded in a live - rather than studio - situation. It was meant to represent a simple, 3 or 4-musician band, and to sound like a bootleg; a recording which hadn't been taken back to the studio for 'sweetening' as for example an album like 'KISS Alive' had once famously been; but rather recorded by an audience member on a simple stereo deck. Further, the album was comprised of the aforementioned 3 discs in an attempt at going above and beyond the industry-standard-from-the-70s-two-disc-set. Of the 3 discs, the 2nd one or 17th overall; it best emulated at the time how he envisioned a theoretical band to sound. There were only 3 or 4 at most; of the songs on the 1st or 16th overall disc which suited his best sensibilities. The 3rd or 18th overall CD was a collection of covers. These were an entirely hit and miss affair; some following fairly closely to their progenitors; others varying widely off the mark; all combining in a kind of uneven presentation of unprecedented sonic mayhem. Of his favorite - the 2nd - of the 3 'live' discs; as time wore on and in looking back, he enjoyed the construction of the interplay between guitar, bass, and vocals; but wished for a better and more varied overall drum sound, and a clearer mix between the 3 actual instruments. Even with the overall mix as poorly done as it were; like a bootleg; again the interplay between the guitar, bass, and vocals was perchance the closest thing he'd made to an authentic representation of how he wished his live act might sound. As time passed though he would have only added new material and perchance subtracted some of the old.
	The 5th album - Not of This World - had contained a series of programmed piano pieces at the end, including Necronomicon. The track, Necronomicon itself was something he'd programmed into sequencing software without the benefit of sheet music. The other pieces were all programmed in, based on the sheet music he'd written when he'd been in college studying theory in the '80s. The song, Sonatina had been entered into the software, then inadvertently mangled through a mistaken overusage of the 'humanization' or 'quantization' or some such routine; in any event utterly disconnected in a rhythmic sense from its original on-paper composition. Unwilling at that moment to agonizingly re-do the entire thing, and lacking in any discernable Undo feature; Hardy had let that one stand as it were. It stood out in its own right, mangled or not. Originally, the small composition had been a pet favorite of his college theory professor; as she had, in sight-reading once played the same as it were written for the piano.
	Perchance the most memorable track from the 6th release - Blacklisted - was, You Get What You Deserve. There he'd gained access to an Ibanez Universe 7-string guitar as designed by Steve Vai, and the song was in standard tuning, and based off of the 'low b' string so it was in the key of b minor. The companion piece to You Get What You Deserve was, Something for Nothing. 
	Blacklisted ended with a 'concertina for piano' which was more programmed classical music. An employee at the music store where Hardy would go to purchase gear - and whose opinion Hardy trusted - when asked what he thought of the Blacklisted release had told Hardy that he should work more on the classical stuff. Hardy wasn't offended by that but rather encouraged; for by then he understood that some of his 'rock' or 'dance' music were; for whatever reason simply offputting to certain people, and this was to be entirely expected. The apparent fact that the store employee had actually enjoyed the computerized concertina; that gave Hardy the said encouragement.
	The Piano Concertina as release as part of Blacklisted was the last music he'd ever made before staring in with the application of female hormones. Just prior to that, and particularly during the making of the concertina itself, Hardy had tried as best he could to be a 'real man.' At the time though he'd begun to dabble in some of the gnostic teachings, and in so doing had further toyed with the idea that the world had been created by a demiurge, and that having children - or upholding one's manly duties in that regard - was something to be rejected. He were fast becoming one to finally seal his own fate, in ultimately coming to belong to one of that ilk referred to as the proverbial, Last in Line.
	During that period, he'd taken vacation from Microsoft in the Spring of '96. He'd gone with part of his family to the beach for a few days; yet upon their return, something had happened in the meantime, and which somehow served to force his own hand in life, at least - and whether rightly or wrongly so - as far as the inner workings of his mind were concerned; an event so shocking that it worked in so doing, to contribute to the ultimate sealing of his fate. A son of their friends had died while they were away. When he and his folks had pulled up into the driveway at their house on his way back from the beach, the father of the dead man was in the driveway, and  after they had parked and gotten out of the car; the neighbor, a lifelong friend of theirs and loved by everyone who had ever met him; immediately relayed the bad news. The son had been sniffing nitrous straight out of the tank. Years later, Hardy would learn from Mr. Thelema that breathing nitrous straight from the tank would freeze the lungs. So in that way and only those years later, he'd finally learned the most likely reason as to why the young man had died that day in March of 1996.
	In any event, on that day bridging late Winter and early Spring; that day in 1996 where he and his folks had learned of the death of the family friend, they went over to the nearby house and entered the kitchen where the rest of the family itself were gathered around and grief-stricken. Afer awhile, and as Hardy was leaving, the grandmother hugged him and said, "You young men are so important," to the idea of which Hardy had recoiled internally. All of the sudden - and whether in fairness or not - he saw the grandmother and Christian women in general as being 'users' of men; and he decided somehow then and there - and in light of the pansexual gnosticism which he were gravitating toward in his mind - that he didn't want to be a man.
	So the next day, while he was yet on vacation from Microsoft, he went to the mall and bought a bunch of lingerie. There a young, sexy Romanian cashier lady was the one making the sale. When she turned her back to him to face the register, he could see her bikini panty lines; and oh how he loved that. She was also wearing a sheer blouse to where he could see the sensuous straps of her bra and camisole underneath; all of which inflamed him even further. She asked him if he wanted to apply for a store credit card, to which he replied, "yes."
	Imagine his embarassment when the clerk left him standing there at the counter with a pile of lingerie in front of him and an old lady waiting behind him in line, as the cashier herself meandered about the store whilst waiting for his credit check to complete. She came back to the counter after a few minutes and told him that he'd been denied. He didn't much mind as by then he was on sexual tilt. He didn't need the credit card anyway. His job at Microsoft paid fairly well; well enough that he had 3 cars, and gaggle of recording and stereo gear, a nice television, and 23 guns with literally tens of thousands of rounds of various and sundry ammo.
	Of course, as his life would spiral out of control during the years that followed, he would lose all of that, eventually finding himself in an apartment with no money, and a car whose brakes were about to give out, and the rent due, and most of his bridges with the rest of humanity at large having been zealously burned.
	That day though, he'd gone back to his apartment, and put on a pair of panties. He'd called the witch who would sell him weed whilst making house calls. She showed up and he bought an ounce of chronic, and again - after a 6-week hiatus where'd he'd tried to become a 'real man,' and during which among other things he'd recorded in full the 5th disc or, Not of This World - began his perchance overly copious weed smoking. After the witch had left, Everybody's Friend showed up and they proceeded to get blitzed. The two of them seemed to share a real fondness for smoking huge quantities of weed. As an example of this, fast forward about a year to where Hardy lived in Monroe, and the Billy Graham of Buddhism came over to visit with both he and Everybody's Friend; the latter of whom had for whatever reason stopped by that day. At a certain point they had - all 3 of them - sat at a table to smoke, and after a bit of this the Buddhist had exclaimed, "How in the hell do you two smoke so much? I'm fucking stoned out of my mind!" Thankfully the Billy Graham of Buddhism - may he rest in peace - was able to drive back to his place in Burien without event.
	In any case, getting back to the day in '96 where Hardy threw away his own manhood and began wearing panties and nylons again; he was sitting there with Everybody's Friend while they were both getting very stoned and the older fellow began to exhibit signs of being precariously close to passing out. Just months before, the same thing had already happened to Hardy so when Everybody's Friend began to sweat and turn pale, Hardy freaked out. Hardy called 911 and in the intervening minutes began to frantically air out the apartment so that the resuce workers wouldn't know that they'd been smoking weed. By the time the aid car had arrived, the crisis were fairly well passed, and Everybody's Friend was more or less, back to normal. With a precautionary  phone call to his wife at Hardy's insistence, Everybody's Friend convinced her that he could make the drive home. As it turns out, weed lowers the blood pressure. So what Hardy had experienced in passing out once before, and what he'd witnessed of the paleness and profuse sweating of Everybody's Friend on that day; in both cases it was due to smoking copious amounts of weed resulting in an extreme loss of blood pressure.
	After Everybody's Friend left that day, Hardy proceeded to masturbate into some panties. When he orgasmed he thought of his manager at Microsoft. She had huge tits, and was otherwise skinny; almost like a perfect body. She was like a ballerina with giant tits. One time, she had worn a tight skirt with some practical little pumps, with a sheer blouse and bra underneath. Hardy had only seen her in this outfit from behind. He told her how great she looked, and she mentioned that she were going to the symphony that night. Later in the day, they both attended a management meeting for the nascent Win95. At some point she had been given a turn to speak, and in so doing had leaned forward that her prominent breasts might be displayed from in their bra and through the sheer blouse for everyone in the room to see. It was right at that moment where Hardy had discovered his own overarching shyness, and having one of the greatest opportunities to gaze upon immense, softening cleavage through the perfect presentation of satin outside, and then sheers underneath; he for whatever reason averted his gaze. To this day, he wonders exactly what her breasts must have looked like in that rarified milieu. There was another time, when they were going to a small meeting in a lunchroom, and she had stood there with the door open, and waited for her staff to catch up with her. Hardy had put his arm on the door as though to hold it whilst she might pass fully through, but she unexpectedly leaned into his arm with her breasts, and for a brief moment he experienced that magnificent pillowy puffiness of her overarching breast flesh. In a way unlike the sheer blouse incident, the brief happening at the doorway before she pulled away in either real or mock modesty; the former had been a sort of sensual will o' wisp, whereas in contrast the latter had been a tangible entry into Hardy's mammary bank. She used to tease him about how she might harass him sexually, and as time went on she realized the strength of her position, and began wearing thin turtlenecks with easily-seen bras underneath. She would wear mini-skirts and paint her toes.
	Her scent would often waft as though it were an irresistable, constricting garment of seduction; up and down the hallways outside her office, almost as if she was the alpha female in the area and her scent were overriding that of any other nearby female - however few there actually were of the same - in her corner of the building. So Hardy had lost his manhood, and he resumed consorting with telephone mistresses as he delved into the consumption of classic (bovine hormone laden) Rejuvex. The Rejuvex was very hard on his body, but almost instantly his nipples began to get sensitive. As well, his voice began to get higher. He'd always been possessed of a deep voice, but had somehow refused to employ it much; and had instead fallen into a sort of whimpy nasal pattern of speech. In any event and with the onset of the experimentation with the female hormones, the range of his voice moved; the lower end got higher, and the higher end higher still. He had the same overall range, but it were as though the entire thing had shifted upward, perchance a perfect 5th or even an octave.
	The 6th CD was finished, and the concertina was realeased at the end of the album. All of the songs leading up to it had been recorded under the influence of the Rejuvex and marijuana, whilst he dressed in panties and stockings. 
	Hardy then began work on his 7th CD, Supermodels Etc. The thing with Hardy's transsexuality was that he was such a bizarre character. His vision was laden with demons and darkness. He loved guns. He wasn't really interested in men, but pretended to be as a sort of penance for what had transpired between he and the Raven Girl (and the elderly witch who'd given him the estrogen ring at the bus stop) those years before.
	The upshot of his strange leanings - morose gnosticism mixed with frivolous, fluffy-puffy, shiny transgenderism - was that the 7th album contained tribute songs to several of the famous supermodels of the day - Tyra Banks, Stephanie Seymour, and Helena Christiansen - intermingled with for instance, Queen Goddess Mash which was itself a tribute to an extremely beautiful Japanese dancer woman named, Mash; but perchance even more into the realms of the macabre it contained songs like, Braingeyser and Blowing Up Pyramids. His mixed feelings were on display in the opening song, Down by the Pier. Down by the Pier had literally written itself, all of the guitar and bass lines being utterly impromptu, and then the lyrics having been scribbled within minutes, and the vocal melody being as well totally improvised:

Sittin' on the pier fishin'
Watchin' the boats go by
The water's so wet and cool
But I'm oh so dry

I wish I'd a fish on the line
Must be the bait 'm usin'
I wish I'd a nickel in my pocket
For every time I cried out alone at night

I used to work for a living
But I was taxed to death 
So now I just come down to the pier
Catch a fish now and then

And try to forget
All of the sweet little ladies whose love I never knew
Oh god someday I'll know how to quit feelin' sorry for myself
And I will forget all about you

	The song had pretty much written itself, and was enough unlike anything else that he'd ever done; that it stuck out in his mind. As a matter of fact, Supermodels Etc. was an interesting album through and through. Entirely gone were the synths from previous albums, going all the way back to, Female Erotic Power; and the sound revolved almost entirely around guitars. The album was laden with drum loops from real drummers, most prominent among them, Keith LeBlanc.
	The closing song of the album, If You Could Have Anything was something he'd recycled from his college days; that is to say that the song had originally been recorded on a demo tape in the college 8-track studio, say in 1987. By 1996 or the release of Supermodels, he'd reached into his catalogue of past writings and recycled the same.
	Blacklisted and Supermodels were both recorded on a Fostex digital 8-track. The scrub function on that deck was really handy. As a matter of fact, he found the mixer-and-tape-deck-in-one combination to be much easier to use than the Mackie/Alesis combo, and that the slight dropoff in sound quality was acceptable to his ear. Of course it weren't actually a tape deck, but it had controls like one; most media having gone from tape to digital over the passing of years. In any event and leading up to 2008 at least; Hardy had never again actually employed a multitrack tape machine of any variety. The last multitrack tape machine he'd ever used had been the Alesis, but it could only be described as a hybrid, as it used a VHS tape, but encoded the tracks in a digitial fashion. The last analog multitracker Hardy had ever used had been the Tascam; and he'd dispensed with that as early as 1993 or thereabouts.
	After Supermodels was finished, he made a cassette (note that a standard cassette machine uses analog tape on the one hand, but is not a multitracker in the sense that is being discussed here) copy and would listen to it in his car every day. At that time in his life he really liked the album. His crossdressing and hormone therapy continued apace, along with his consorting with various callgirls who he would pay to dominate and feminize him. As the late Autumn of 2006 approached, he'd been a Blue Badge or regular employee of Microsoft for 4.5 years. This was when his original batch of stock options had matured. He cashed in at the end of October, 2006. Up to then he'd been constantly worried that the stock were going to crash before he'd ever see a penny from the main batch of options. Of course, his was a somewhat logical mind and by then the market itself were highly illogical, but rather increasingly based upon looming, expanding mania. One could have said of the time and of the equities markets in particular, "funamentals fundaschmentals." As it turned out, he was right in having postulated that MSFT shares would deflate mightily, but his timing was all off. As it turns out the first - yet certainly not the last - big turn south for those shares began sometime during the year 2000. His sale was off by more than 3 years from the actuall all-time high, and this lack of accuity in timing the market had resulted in his having left virtually millions of dollars 'on the table.' 
	Of course by then he really didn't enjoy working at Microsoft, and wanted out as quickly as possible. He was certain that some kind of divine intervention were going to carry him onward to bigger and better things. It's just that in reality it didn't pan out that way. Instead, upon having left MSFT his finances quickly eroded. It was then that he realized he weren't so special as perchance he'd once thought himself to be.
	He knew one thing though; the women of Microsoft were awesome in their intelligence and beauty, however few of them had been there when he'd also haunted the place. As it turns out, the company hired a lot more women as the years progressed. While he was there in the main of his tenure; and of the women who had worked there in the Systems building in that same time frame; such women were almost without exception awesome. Many of them might not have had the sweetest of spirits, but in visage and brains; they were some of the most desirable women he'd ever come across, whether before or since. Sometimes he wondered what it would of been like if he'd actually made a lot of money while there; whether he might have ended up with one of them; cuckolded or otherwise. Sometimes he wondered as well if, something about the spirit of the women at MSFT hadn't been a big part of his feminization. In fairness, the die had probably been cast; even decades before he'd ever first set foot within that place of perchance, diabolical mysticism.
	He knew though, that with all of the 'ifs,' he couldn't speculate on what might of happened had he stayed there. Something told him that he would have committed suicide if he had remained in the state of delicious misery the place provided him; there where something invisible and overarching about the place had, on some level at least; revolted him in any event. As it turns out, it may have been the world at large and not Microsoft in particular which was at the root of his problems. To take things a step further, the source of his problems were far more likely emanating from within, rather than suffocating him from without.
	Interestingly or not, during the time he was at Microsoft he got his first introduction to the concept of MKULTRA. For a time, there had been a fancy Porsche or Ferrari in the parking lot outside of one of the buildings where he had worked, and it had a license plate which read exactly that; MKULTRA. Only years later would he learn of the fantastic, purported tie-ins of the MKULTRA program and the Jim Jones sect, among other things.
	Speaking of cars, Hardy had worked at MSFT during the time where there were far less traffic lights - and traffic in general - than there are reportedly in and about the place - the Redmond Campus - today. That having been the case, various employees entering and leaving the same would have mini drag races, say from the light at 156th Ave. NE and NE 40th St., to the North entrance leading into the area around buildings 1, 2, and 3, etc.
	He could remember a 'famous' drag race where he'd taken on a fancy sports car in his Datsun 510 wagon and - as expected - had lost. Either way, that little Datsun 510 had been one sweet ride. For a time, the car had carried him on I-405 and over the Kennidale hill each evening on his commute back to Kent in the South. Again, during that era traffic weren't nearly the problem which it would come to be only a few years hence. This meant that, every night when he would drive over the ridge at somewhere between 6 and 7 p.m., for whatever reason the road really opened up and he could 'gun' his Datsun and experience the thrill of the passing gear as he shot up to speeds of 80 mph or more. Such a stunt would probably prove impossible today; and at any hour, let alone 6 or 7 in the evening.
	
	When he left MSFT with the equivalent of $80,000 cash in hand, and with assets yet totalling 2 autos, myriad guns and manifold ammunition, and a tangle of audio and video gear; again he thought that his progression through life was about to be 'upward and onward.' As it turns out, he was broke within a year, and ended up going back to MSFT as a contractor. He left fairly well for good in 1998, with exception of a bizarre 3 weeks he spent there in late 2000, during which he went on the DMT trip, and ingested LSD and mushrooms the same night, with copious amounts of nitrous inhaled from balloons. That party had left him high for literally weeks on end, part of which time he'd goaded the Indian lead lady into firing him from his contractor position. Her ass had been so fine. Yes, her ass had been so fine, and she had been so sexually overwhelming, yet cruel. Maybe he had really missed the boat there in forcing the issue. In the end, it was one of the uglier episodes of his life; how he'd been 'fired' by her, and in turn how he had written a nasty note to her superiors, detailing every bit of the sexual harrasment she had put him through. Maybe he should have stayed, and allowed himself to be pulled further into the feminine wiles of her sensual prison. Her ass had been to die for; that is beyong dispute. He was yet too high from the party. It had been 10 days or more, but he was still tripping on the LSD. Perchance in the end that is no excuse for his having recoiled in the face of what can only be described as exquisite female domination on her part.
	Leading up to the time of his final exit from Microsoft and through the ugly incident with the irresistable Indian woman, he was being torn in a million different directions. He was hanging out with a witch and her daughter (not the same witch as mentioned elsewhere), whilst trying to appease the dominatrix Indian boss lady with the magnificent ass. In the end he had lost all of it; the job; the witch lady with the magnificent breasts; the bitchy, hot-assed indian lead. So it was early 2001, and his mind and spirit both were reeling. Months later he would recover enough to be able to work a janitorial job.
	In the interim though - that period between late 1996 and early 2001 - he'd lived in the house in Monroe with the large, Scalextrics tracks in both the living room and garage, with the large collection of cars from Ninco, SCX, Fly, and the aforementioned Scalextrics, the offerings from Ninco generally being the best runners right out of the box; driven to Las Vegas and stayed for 3 months during which he had been witness to a veritable panoply of stunningly hifalutin adorned ladies, prior to driving back to Redmond; gotten re-hired as a contractor at Microsoft and helped with Win98; continued his hormone and lingerie therapy; grown his hair more than halfway down his back; traipsied around in satins, velvets, and sheers in public (think Victoria's Secret satin pants and stretch satin or velvet turtlenecks); spent delightful evenings at the Catwalk on Saturday nights, dressed in full drag and gaining a seeming mutual empathy with some of the other dancers who regularly haunted the place; moved to the Tukwila and worked in a Southcenter computer store as a tech; had the disastrous, soul-shattering relationship with the Lemmy Woman; played in a sometime - mind-bendingly-busty-Karaoke-Woman-fronted-and-beyond-beautiful-Jewish-Princess-as-drummer - band, the sum of which despite each member's individual shortcomings, were actually quite good in a number of ways, he-as-guitarist, and the Bass Arsonist having established and uncanny instant rapport; had a failed Christian conversion, being enticed by bosomy and otherwise curvaceous lasses and women of maturity alike at every step along the way; moved on to Visio where the Japanese-American had assaulted him with ever unforgettable views of the magnificence of her breasts, adorned as they'd been in sheer bras and thin tops; fallen for both Sanae Asoh and the Race Queens; moved on to Keane and been utterly devastated by the whims and wiles of an Asian-American Seahawks cheerleader with stunning panty lines and that lisp to her voice which would drive any male within earshot to cascading insanity; been treated to the unforgettable visage of any number of incredibly beautiful women as he went; moved on again to the dot.com made up of so many former Microsoft employees, among them being an apparent self-styled Beast; left that job and gotten the last gig at Microsoft which culminated in the ruinous run-in with the Indian woman whose ass never quit; and during that period had also created two or three 'lost CDs' of which he'd produced single copies but as well, eventually lost them all. 
	In the end, and by early 2001, he was left with the original 7 albums, and nothing else in the way of recording. He had no recording gear. He was still reeling from the series events of years past, and perchance of that party at Temple Dahmer in particular. He laid off the drugs for awhile. The only thing he did was smoke cigarettes, and here and there continue to employ the progesterone creme in the masturbation sessions over Jewish Princesses and Japanese Racequeens; Asians all. He wondered if the progesterone could be considered a drug. On some level it felt so good, and despite its obviously myriad detriments; that he found that he didn't want to stop. He did a bit of outdoor landscaping work for the landlord, over at a nearby apartment complex. By then he were living on Bellevue Way, in the shadow of the diabolical Bellevue High School; which itself sat hidden atop a steep hill, and which through the years had spawned any number of infamous and diabolical alumni, there just before the bend in the road where it would  turn and run for awhile longer, and ultimately link up with I-90 and I-405.
	By the time he reached the janitorial job; there in the midsummer of 2001; it was the first job he'd ever had where each night whilst cleaning the men's bathroom he would pray to god to simply kill him. By the time he would get to the women's bathroom everything would be ok. Where he had done an at best, pedestrian job of cleaning the men's facility; by contrast he would do a superlative job on the women's.
	Whilst working as janitor, there was a stunning Jewess at the office building. She would wear shiny skirts and blouses, and high heels; and invariably she always seemed to get the best of Hardy. She certainly had no problems with his staring at her; and as a matter of fact she would go out of her way to present her visage to him. She also had a wicked way of teasing him with the click of her high heels. On his last day there, she met him by accident in the bathroom and was going on about something as they both exited. Then she passed through the door and he watched her through the window of the door as her ass totally swayed; she definitely knew what she were doing. Another thing about that woman which had so seduced him; beyond her wavy mane of dark hair; was her voice. She had that sing-song hypnotic voice down to a tee. He wondered if she were somehow the actual sister of Marie from his past. She certainly could have been. 
	In any event, many of the women at the office building seemed to know of Hardy's ass-attraction, because often they would walk past and he would turn to look, and their movements would be highly exaggerated. Once, a woman even turned up her jacket and held it above her waist with her hands, and sashayed in an exaggerated way so he could stare at her magnificent, bubbling behind as she walked in a direction away from where he stood. Another time, another woman pretended she'd forgotten something at her desk, and so she walked back to her cubicle, and away again so he got the extemded memories of her swaying away from him down a long corridor, not once but twice. The women in that office definitely had him pegged. The Jewess with the high voice and the black hair, and the incredible wardrobe and the high heels; as beautiful as they all were and for as many chair seats as he might secretly sniff in the late hours of the night when he hoped no one were watching; she was the queen of the place as far as he were concerened. It was to the point where he would sometimes fish the gum out of her personal trashcan - there in her cubicle after she had retired for the night - and chew that for the remainder of his shift. Her only drawback was that she were perchance too skinny, and from the looks of her trash can at least; that she consumed copious amounts of diet pop with its diabolical aspartame. He wondered how her apparent perfection might have actually increased, had she quit the diet pop and gained say just a few more pounds. She certainly had heaving breasts in any event. The aspartame caused him to worry about her.
	There was a chinese woman he worked with at the office building. She seduced him as well, to the point where he once ejaculated privately in his apartment whilst calling out her name. It was all he could do to keep his hands to himself when they would ride up and down together in the elevator at work. She knew she had found his number. As time passed, he would see her adjusting her bra in a highly exaggerated fashion, as if to smother his reality with the truth of her magnificent bosom.
	There were other, Latina janitor ladies who also interacted with him to great effect. One of them was particularly busty, and as it turns out her husband was an ex-soldier from El Salvador. The first time he and Hardy met, Hardy instantly knew that the man were of some kind of royal blood. They got along famously; at least the few times their paths would meet. Hardy tried to keep the busty wife of the man out of his mind; out of respect for the apparent warrior king from South of the border.
	Eventually, the janitorial company lost the contract for that building, and he was moved to a place in downtown Bellevue instead of Redmond. He didn't last long there, and during a weed binge walked out on that job. He was yet quite insane but no help from the almighty was ever apparently forthcoming; thus he continued his spiralling down into madness; masturbating for hours and days on end, encased in a lingerie prison and ingesting hormones as well as employing the estrogen creams. At the vitamin store at the mall where he would buy those hormone pills and creams, it seemed that without fail a very beautiful Hawaiian woman with black hair - an employee of the store - would find a way to present her ass to him. Once, she smiled at him from across the counter as he made a purchase as she handed him his feminizing poisons and said, "Have a good one" with a gleam in her eye.
	Invariably on every trip he ever made to that store, the cashier in question would find a way to present her body in some provocative fashion, with an emphasis on ass. Further, she would lapse into that lisping voice as a seductress might be wont to do; whenever he might pass within earshot, further driving him wild.
	Eventually he was at his wits' end and decided he would committ suicide. So he got a bunch of booze - something he hadn't consumed in years - and some benadryl tablets. As it turns out, when he got drunk he drew a bunch of graffiti all over the interior walls of his apartment, most of it saying how much god hated him, and what a piece of garbage he was. When it came time to take the benadryl though, he couldn't bring himself to do it.
	The result was that he moved back in with his folks, and got a job at a computer store, working for a chinese man and wife team. It was the same store he'd worked for in 1998 and 1999, but the name had been changed. The boss was in Texas, and at the Tukwila store he found himself working with two chinese men; one from the mainland proper ('communist China,' back in the day); another from Maccau, and there was a 3rd; their mutual friend, he being from Taiwan. The 3rd were an oftentimes visitor to the store, and not an actual employee.
	Not much of note occurred during that stint at the store, from which Hardy was eventually laid off. The main thing was that he was able to once again get a recording machine; a Boss 4-track digital recorder. It had been something like 4 years since he'd had any kind of multitracker. In the meantime he'd made a bunch of mostly mono recordings using a simple computer mic. To emulate a two-track mulitracker, he would sometimes record a song, then play it back through the computer speakers and into the mic again, whilst being wary of potential feedback; and in so doing would then play along with the first track, and record the pair of tracks as a 2-track mono mix. That in any event was the full extent of his recording capabilities during the time. With the new, 4-track Boss machine and its 5th track as a built-in drum machine; he recorded discs 8-21 over a period of say the next 18 months. 
	The first albums employing the new machine were a jumble of notes. The drums on 8 and 9 were actually subpar. It wasn't until somewhere during the making of the 10th CD that Hardy actually began to program the various drum patterns. Despite the lack of variation in the drums starting with disc 8, and continuing more or less through much of disc 10; despite the subdued vocals which continued to plague the vast majority of his finished recordings; there were some great guitar solos, chord progressions, bass lines, and lyrics. All in all though Hardy didn't consider that period to be one of his better recording periods. For all of the good lyrics, there were others of which in retrospect he could only look on in embarassment. Of the CDs number 8 through 15; disc 15 was a bit different than anything else he'd ever done.
	After the opening, Walpurgis Night (title track) with its 'heavy' sound, he turned off the distortion and recorded the guitars clean for the vast majority of the remainder of the album, the notable exception being the, Solo in e Minor. Some of the chord progressions on that album were influenced by his having watched the movie, Sweet and Lowdown with Sean Penn. Whatever else one might say about the 15th album, in parts it did show that he was capable of playing without distortion; naked before any real or imagined listening audience if you will. 
	In the making of the 16th through 18th discs, Hardy wanted to create something without retakes or punch-ins, like a true rendition of how he might play if he were in a live situation, without the proverbial safety nets of the post-production studio; and he would keep the takes he laid down, warts and all. There he re-did several of the older numbers from the '90s which had once been synth-based, and re-did them with just a single bass, and a single guitar, and a lone vocal track. The 4th track was reserved for some canned audience noises, to give it that 'live signature.' As it turns out, those 3 discs are mostly a display of bass and guitar, as once again the vocals are subdued. Nonetheless, the 18th disc in particular might be said to have some really interesting tracks - at least to any potential listener other than himself, as the 17th disc were his own personal favorite of the 3; the 18th itself being a collection of 'cover tunes;' something Hardy had never really much done before. The renditions of, For the Benefit of Mr. Kite, House of the Rising Sun and, People are Strange stood out in particular. Of the version of, Man on the Silver Mountain, Hardy once had a dream after having recording that; a dream where Ritchie Blackmore appeared and told him that it truly sucked. In the dream Hardy defended himself and said something to the effect of, "Hey, it's all in my approach; I wasn't interested in copying you verbatim, but rather capturing some kind of spirit."
	Only years later would Hardy attempt to rectify any real or imagined misgivings on Mr. Blackmore's part, a latter recording released as part of the Ouroboros album; a cover of the same rock and roll anthem, and in an actual attempt at more or less sticking to the form of the original. The resultant rendition actually had some great moments. As to whether Hardy had actually approached anything resembling the greatness of Mr. Blackmore's original song; perchance that is to be left to the ear of the listener. Certainly, it were difficult to mimic the drumming of Cozy Powell through the use of what amounted to a drum machine; or to recreate the awesome power of Ronnie James Dio's voice, though to Hardy's ear his own rendition of the vocal line had given the cover a distinct signature.
	Thus Hardy's latter attempt at covering Man on the Silver Mountain had some good vocal moments, and some decent riffs during what some might describe as an otherwise overly longish solo, and the programmed drums might have even been thought of as 'servicable.' In retrospect the programmed drums reflected, not Cozy Powell but rather some evocation of the sound one might associate with a parade of the Royal Lippizan Stallions. The very end of that recording was perchance the best part, where the song cut to half-time and Hardy sought with some degree of success to emulate the sort of 'electric blues' motif inherent in the superlative, Little Wing as immortalized by none other than Jimi Hendrix; or the memorable, Yellow Raven by the Scorpions, they featuring at the time Uli Jon Roth on guitar.
	Be any an all of that as it may, once Hardy began work on the 19th CD, his usage of the Boss reached a degree of competency unmatched in particular by the output of the albums prior to the 15th disc. It was during the production of the 19th disc that the songwriting and orchestration really began to come together, at least to an extent greater than anything he'd exhibited beginning with the 8th disc. It could be said that the first 7 discs aren't even worth comparing to number 8 and beyond. It is almost as though the first 7 discs are of their own genre, and in many ways fill a different musical space when compared to anything which might later have arrived as part of Hardy's catalogue
	By early 2004 Hardy had completed a 21st disc, at which point he sold the 4-track Boss and went to live at the mansion as a groundskeeper. By late 2004 he had saved enough money to purchase an 8-track Boss, and he began making recordings again. Backtracking a bit, the 20th and 21st discs were made during a 'magic working' where Hardy lived in an apartment, doing nothing but smoking weed, masturbating, making recordings, and playing with his computer. Prior to that, and whilst living at his folks' place he had ballooned up to about 250 pounds. It was to the point where he'd get winded; out of breath from simply putting on his socks.
	It was on or about the actual day during which his mentor and friend, the Billy Graham of Buddhism had died; the man from Nicheren Dai Shonen who had once sired a future NBA star; who had built the most superlative little N-Scale model railroad; who had over time watched, The Song Remains the Same, Scream, Sweet and Lowdown and the classic, Night of the Hunter with him; one of the few people Hardy had ever met who - in nearly every sense - had truly had commanded Hardy's respect. To this day, Hardy can sometimes be heard himself chanting, 'nam myoho renge kyo' just as the Nicheren Dai Shonen do. Hardy knew for a fact that the aforementioned future NBA star had grown up, gone into the NBA, and also had built a shrine or Gohonzon of his own where he was purported to have practiced that same flavor of Buddhism.
	Be that as it may, it was on or after the day the Billy Graham of Buddhism had died that Hardy had moved into the apartment, just up the street from his dope dealer, or perchance rather; colorful friend who happened to have been a supplier of chronic on the side. In the apartment, Hardy somehow found it easy to go literally days on end without eating much of anything, and simply drinking coffee and tea. There as well he'd developed a technique of 'stir fry' using water instead of oil, and had learned that strawberries and bananas can be really tasty when cooked in with fish and onions and peppers and garlic.
	As it went, Hardy lost a good 80 pounds within a few short months, and had his weight down to just around 165 pounds; a weight he hadn't carried since perchance 25 years previous.
	As the 'magic working' went on, sometimes when he would drift off toward sleep; a hideously powerful counterclockwise spiral would appear and be there as if to swallow him whole. Always at the critical moment, he would balk and wake up. He had a sense as well that perhaps the ghost of Maria Malvar had somehow haunted the place; she having been one of the victims of the Green River Killer, and he then living in an apartment just off of the Sea-Tac strip; it would have been no great coincidence if the apartment had once been a hotel, and Maria herself had once visited the place, prior to her tragic demise. As an aside, a cursory search of the internet on the name, "Maria Malvar" might instantly - and among other things - turn up the following text:

11/05/03
Gary Ridgeway had admitted to killing dozens of women in the Pacific Northwest, a confession that gives him more murder convictions than any other serial killer in U.S. history.
"I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight.  I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could.", Rideway said in a statement read in court today.

Crime Stoppers
The TV show, Crime Stoppers, aired a segment on the Green River Killer and presented a picture of the killer obtained from a prostitute who had been left for dead.  Thousands of tips arrived for weeks but none helped the police located the Green River Killer.  Oddly though, two of the tips assisted the police in solving the murders of two totally unrelated killings...

Ages of the Green River Killer Victims
The youngest of the Green River victims was 13 years old.  The oldest was 36 and was the only one that was not a known prostitute.  Most victims were between 19 and 24.  Three were between 16 and 18.

UPDATE!
On June 29, 2001, the Green River Task Force was reformed.  The King County sheriff's office hopes to use new technologies such as DNA testing and blood type analysis to solve the crimes.
On December 5, 2001, 54-year old Gary Ridgeway was arrested and charged with 7 murder counts.  DNA evidence linked him to at least 3 of the murders - Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman, and Cynthia Hinds. Ridgeway was taken into custody as he left his job at the Kentworth Truck Co. in Renton.  The DNA evidence arose from an earlier questioning of Ridgeway, who has been considered one of the top 5 suspects since 1984, when he was given a piece of gauze to chew on during a 1987 interview.  The gauze has been preserved all these years until technology arose that could be used to extract the DNA.
In 2003, four more bodies were found leading many to believe that Ridgeway is providing additional details on the crimes.

Reader's Comment on Possible Related Murder
Has anyone made any connection to the Independence Avenue prostitutes who were found in pieces in the river. One of them was my cousin. The only physical evidence I know of against the man who went to prison for this crime was items of the women's clothing. My opinion was their clothes could have been found anywhere and this is not a proof of guilt. There was quite a history of these murders written up in chronological order in the Kansas City Star Newspaper at the time her body and the body of two others were found. The last she spoke with anyone, she was calling home to ask for a ride. She then said, "Never mind. I see someone I know." She was never see alive again.

MORE FROM OUR READERS
I recently received the following from Lisa A. Wilson, author of Don't Just Sit There. 

A woman contacted me over 3 months ago with information that was sifted through and researched further. This data came up with one definite link of her ex-husband and Ridgeway possibly knowing each other and their connection to MARIA MALVAR. I am sending you that info, with the hope that you may be able to help bring this to light. I have already sent this to America's Most Wanted, the FBI in Seattle, the Green River Task Force, and many members of the media.

NEW INFORMATION ON GREEN RIVER KILLER THIS MAY PROVE TO BE VERY SIGNIFICANT: Like the incident in Vancouver, police are now and have been ignoring the new tips that were sent to their office about a man who should be a 'person of interest' in the matter of the investigation of the Green River Killer. Are they going to look at this data in 5 or 10 years and realize that there was some very significant information handed to them, but they had never investigated it further? Why is it that the woman who contacted me over 3 months ago has never been given even 5 minutes of time from detectives about the Green River Killer? She has been trying to get the Task Force to look at her ex-husband since 1988 when she was finally able to leave him. She was told many times by Tom Jensen, who heads the TF that "if his name was not on the computer print-out sheet, they were not going to look at him". Does the killer have to be a felon with a previous record? Did the Task Force treat Gary Ridgway's wife & ex-wife in the same manner? Probably not...he was already in police custody when they came forward with all of the information about his very strange HABITS. Did the police in Vancouver treat the family members of the missing women like 'dirt' , that they were 'looney' or had 'mental problems'? I certainly KNOW that I do not have any, but they will not even listen to me and have 'insinuated' that I was calling on a daily basis...which I was not. I do have my telephone records that will prove this. The Task Force has mishandled evidence and not picked up other meaningful pieces of the puzzle. WHY? I seriously believe that when this is all over, there WILL be another lawsuit in Seattle, like the one that is being put together right now in Vancouver, about not investigating THIS matter properly. My letter has been sent to many important people, including several members of the media, and I ask that you read this VERY carefully. In the message below is the DEFINITE LINK that connects this suspect to not only one of the missing women on the Green River Killer List, but there is also the possibility of him knowing and associating with Gary Ridgway, the man that is in police custody but only charged with murder for 4 of the 49 women who made it onto the OFFICIAL list. Since 1982, there have been approximately 150 missing or murdered women. There was at least one time when bodies had been found, that a witness spoke of 2 men being in that area, and they were seen leaving together in a pick-up truck. Could this suspect have been that other man? Why won't the Task Force even READ the information that was sent to them over 3 months ago? I KNOW that they have not looked at the information, otherwise they would have been actively pursuing this man...the LINK is right in front of their noses.

DEFINITE CONNECTION TO MARIE-JANE MOLINA MALVAR: There is one very strong connection, but apparently the police may not have handled the evidence properly (or never collected it). I will tell you my source's name to make this explanation easier - this link may also prove that he knows Gary Ridgway. The first part of this is probably already known by you. I will make it as brief as possible. Maria Malvar was last seen on 4-30-83 by her boyfriend/pimp getting into a vehicle, which sped away from the area very quickly. The b/p thought that something might be wrong and followed, but soon lost them and apparently went home. When she did not return that evening, he and the girl's father went looking for the vehicle. They found it sitting in front of Gary Ridgway's home, decided to park nearby and called the police to the scene. They arrived at the house, briefly questioned Ridgway and he said that he had not been with the girl. It has also been said that another man was at Ridgway's home at the time of the questioning....could the other man possibly be our suspect? On 5-27-83, Patricia and her husband were at the Sea Tac Airport to see off his mother & father at Gate B-4. Before getting out of their vehicle, her husband had pulled out a wallet that looked like hers. He then extracted some cards, holding them in his hand. Patricia saw an I.D. card and assumed that it was hers. She grabbed it out of the stack in his hand, and wondered what he would be doing with HER license. She now had it, glanced down at the front and saw that it was NOT hers. The picture was of a medium complexion girl, in her 20's with long dark hair. She noticed that there were 4 NAMES on the license, but only caught part of the last name MAL ___. He snatched it back from her, then the baby started to fuss in her arms. He gave the BABY the card to play with. They proceeded to pile out of the vehicle and entered the airport terminal. After saying their "goodbyes" to his parents, and getting ready to leave, he went to get the card from the baby. It was not in it's little hand. He FRANTICALLY searched around on the floor, and asked Patricia what happened to it. She said that she did not know, while he was searching the floor. They were then told to leave, because the gates were about to be closed to that terminal, so there was no time to continue looking for it. Later that afternoon, an employee found the license and reported such to the police. The license was for a Marie-Jane Molina Malvar. There are police records of the finding on that day, and another letter dated 2-8-85 about even "walking with him to see where it was located", but the license HAD NOT been picked up as evidence and was disposed of by the airport almost two years later. It also appears that the log book for that particular day is nowhere to be found, or they could prove that Patricia and her husband HAD been there. I have in my possession copies of all 5 police reports. The question here is: If the last known place that Maria Malvar was seen had been in Gary Ridgway's vehicle on 4-30-83, how did Patricia's husband happen to be in possession of the license that was found at the airport on 5-27-83? Was he the 'other man' at Gary Ridgway's home the night the police questioned him, or was he also involved in her disappearance. Patricia KNEW that there had been 4 names on the license...HOW, if she had not seen it? All newspaper articles that I had found about Ms. Malvar either called her Marie or Maria, NEVER was there any articles with all 4 names in it.


	Be that as it at once hideously, deviously, and tragically may; and letting the issue of the possibility of vast cover-ups regarding myriad serial killer cases, including but not limited to the DTK, K.C., Green River, Son of Sam, and Vancouver B.C. cases; ostensible cover-ups framing at least partial patsies whilst letting self-proclaimed citizens of greatly implied high social standing walk away scot free; letting the issue of the same rest; Hardy also had some salvia, including some extract. Once when he smoked the extract, he didn't think much of it - although he'd experienced the potency of salvia leaf previously - and he sat down at his computer.  A couple of non-descript minutes passed before the universe literally collapsed on itself. He had to lie down then; and Maria Malvar could seemingly be heard to whisper in forlorn comfort to Hardy, reaching her reconciled hand through the veil to somehow gently touch him; even through the maze of unfolding time and space; touch him, and in so doing let him know that despite the horror, everything might one day be set right.
	What was it about the name, "Marie" or "Maria?" Four of the most prominent women who had passed through his life had shared the same middle name; the boss lady from Microsoft, the escort Michelle, Karaoke woman, and the Lemmy woman. Sometimes in his mind they were like West, North, South, and East respectively. To add to it all he had some odd, whether real or perceived connection with one Maria Malvar; and of she, he thought her spirit gentle, and told himself that she were finally ok.
	He would dress in drag and play Combat Mission over his broadband connection; and as he went he gained recognition as a 'virtual commander.' He was the one who developed the tactic of 'split squads,' and one of his opponents - a 'famous' Combat Mission player - actually copied that tactic in the winning of a tournament which later took place.
	The problem with Combat Mission was that it didn't represent the 'beaten zone' of machineguns, but only 'point-to-point fire' so infantry squads could run right through any and every machinegun line of fire so long as they avoided the actual target area; move anywhere along the non-existent beaten zone with no effect. In the actual war, the beaten zone of a machinegun was something to always take into account. Even the board game Squad Leader had done a better job of representing 'fire lanes' (beaten zones) than Combat Mission ever did. This was the fatal flaw in Combat Mission's representation of infantry combat. There were several other flaws in the infantry modelling, but the tank-on-tank aspects of the same were actually fairly accurate; except for the fact that the Tiger I was poorly represented compared to the real-life tank; and the Panzer III tank and StuG assault gun (based upon the same chassis) were both abysmal at moving through anything but clear terrain; which in real-life had not really been the case.
	The inclusion in the game of cannister ammo for the bolsheviki T-34 tanks; and the added fact that, in the game it was effective on troops in buildings; was a big error. The bolsheviks had indeed possessed a 'grape shot shell' which could be 'dialed in' to detonate at a given range, but of the cannister and its overly deadly represenation in the game; it appeared to have been an historical mistake. 
	All in all though, the armor modelling on the tanks, and of the standard armor-piercing shots from the guns (both on tanks and standalone antitank guns) was actually quite good. The modelling probably could have used another couple of 'surface figures' for some of the tanks, but it was the most accurate part of the game nonetheless. As for the lack of armored surfaces which were actually accounted for, perchance the most glaring example of the need for more of the same were to be found in the model for the T-34. In the actual war, the T-34 had started out with a weak spot in its turret. The modelling of the same in the game itself didn't recreate this small detail to anyone's satisfaction.
	As it was, just seeing all of those tanks come to life on the computer screen; where such before had been but old photographs, or plastic model kits purchased at the hobby shop and assembled by kids of the days of his youth; just the fact of seeing the old tanks, given life on the virtual screen; it were enough of an attraction that the game provided Hardy with many hours of enthralling engagement. Even the sounds of the MG42s, or Maxims, or 12.7mm machineguns was fascinating despite the deficiencies in realistic modelling of the actual, real-life  effectiveness of the same.
	One of the biggest flaws to the Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin game was that the bolshevikis were always given more ammo than the nazis. While this might have been a common thing say, from 1944 onward; in the Summer of 1941 there is no way that the bolshevikis had typically entered into any given battle with more ammunition than the nazis. In the 'real campaign,' the Summer of '41 had seen a dejected red army, more often than not with acute shortages of ammo (let alone weapons); with tremendous problems even keeping their own tanks running. Hardy's theory on that particular inaccuracy in the game was that a modern-day communist from Spain had helped in the design of the game. The fact of his meddling in the design, combined with the politically correct notion that the bolsheviks were somehow 'morally superior and must be represented in the game as somehow always being better than the nazis' had created an actual game where, no matter what the date of the battle being represented, the bolsheviks always had more ammo; and their officer and NCO cadre were without exception represented as being superior to the nazis, when in point of fact, and at the start of the real-life campaign in particular, the nazis had a huge advantage over the reds in this regard. Stalin's purge of Tukachevsky and the officer corps years before the start of the actual campaign had seen to that.
	If Combat Mission had wished to truly represnt how things were in the Summer of 1941 at the onset of operation Barbarossa, they would have had the nazi cadres as superior in every respect to the reds, and the former would have also had adequate ammunition whilst the latter would have, much more often than not; been low on ammo.
	Also, any kind of unit from either side holding a defensive position should have often had more ammo than was represented in the game. There should have been a mechanism for instance for a given machinegun, antitank gun, or artillery piece to have a large stockpile of ammo whilst remaining in its at-start position on a given map. Only if a defensive machinegun moved for instance, should the ammo have perchance been drastically reduced. Instead the game designers gave all machineguns and other 'support weapons' pretty much a 'one size fits all' ammo loadout, regardless of the overall situation.
	The long and the short of it was that, the reds were always superior to the nazis in every period of the war represented by the game; both in ammunition and in leadership quality. That is to say that in any given situation, the reds always provided more 'bang for the buck' when each side might 'purchase' units, each given 'purchase points' in a, Quick Battle.
	There was one other thing which stuck out in Hardy's mind regarding the game; the lack of gunnery skills on troops designated 'crack' or 'elite.' In the actual conflict the nazis entered the fray with gunners of great skill. This is how, for example Michael Wittmann in command of a StuG B with expert gunner, had been able to score 7 kills against T-34s in a single encounter. 
	In the actual campaign, this is how sometimes a measly 37mm ('door knocker') nazi antitank gun could find the weak spot on an onrushing T-34's turret and score a kill against the same. Obviously as the actual war had gone on and attrition had taken its toll on the nazis, their gunnery and expertise at tank warfare would wane, whilst the reds' ability to fight would continually rise from the ashes of that terrible Summer of 1941, culminating with their march on Berlin in May of 1945. To put it another way, the Germans had extremely skilled armored crews at the start of the campaign. As they were fed into the overall meat grinder - and despite all of their dazzling early successes - these crews were almost without exception lost, and replaced with inexperienced crews.
	Be that as it may, Hardy also recorded the 2nd part of the 19th disc - Interim - from that apartment. He went on to record his 20th - Rain - and 21st - Despondence - discs from there as well, at which point he was out of money and strung out on weed, caffeine, and salvia and so selling everything he owned for a mere pittance. That was the end of his 4-track BOSS.
	The 19th, 20th, and 21st albums are fairly dark affairs, but there are also some beautiful moments. A song like, YHVH Surf was among Hardy's favorites. Whatever else the case about some songs on the 21st album, the music was actually impressive to his ear whilst the lyrics and vocals were strident to the point of embarrassment; yet he was only singing the lyrics of which he thought needed singing.
	After time spent in the mansion, and recuperating what little 'sanity' he could; by the Autumn of 2004 he was able to purchase the 8-track BOSS, and begin making CDs again.
	The 22nd disc - Symmetry - was one of his favorites overall. As a matter of fact it might have been the best thing he'd ever done from a recording standpoint. Of course there were gaffes, but this is perchance to be expected from someone who isn't a recording engineer per se, but more of a composer who happened to own a multi-track deck. As well, the deck itself was not considered to be 'professional gear' but rather 'semi-pro' in overall quality. Whatever the ins and outs of any of that, he was pleased with the 22nd album.
	Admittedly, a couple of the songs were about the cyanascens he'd found that year, the majority of which he'd dried and stashed away for nearly 4 years before his freaking out and ending up at the mini-mart as the result of a bad trip. 
	After the 22nd disc he went on to make the 23rd, which was a series of remakes of earlier songs about Marie; only - as mentioned earlier - with guitars instead of synths. His favorites from that disc were, I Saw You in a Dream This Morning, and Benny Hill. As a matter of fact, Benny Hill captured the essence of what he'd been doing all of those years. He wasn't sure anyone else would like that recording; as a matter of fact he was fairly certain that to the ears of most people it would have been kind of ho-hum; but to him it was an almost perfect representation - both in lyrical sentiment and in 'timbre' and composition - of his own life. The reason he made the 23rd disc an album about Marie was that, Marie was 23 months older than him; to the day. His birthday had been the 25th of February 1963, and hers had been the 25th of March 1961. Ever since he'd learned of that exact, 23-month gap over a decade previous, the number 23 had meant something to him.
	He went on from there and quickly recorded the album, Beast which was named the same because; if you add up the 2 and 4 from the '24' (it being the 24th disc, they added up to '6' and the number of the beast is said to be '666.' On the Beast album he'd let loose with a sort of pornographic abandon, detailing his sexual fantasies in lurid fashion. The album itself being called, Beast he thought that a depraved sort of sexual portrayal would be appropriate. He also figured that if there ever were to be an actual judgement day, that this same depravity would have been catalogued long before the same. Finally, he decided though that the entire album couldn't be about his degenerate fantasies, so he included several numbers that branched off from the pornographic.
	He was aware going in that the album was going to be really 'dark and dirty,' so he intentionally started off with, S/N Ratio to give kind of a misdirection as to what much of the rest of the record would be about. S/N Ratio was actually about the survival of monotheism in general, and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in particular. In it he asks, Who has a stake in discrediting all 3 faiths? Whether such a question is even worth asking - for the song lyrics make some fairly wild and divergent premises before it reaches that question - should be left up to any potential listener.
	Once he'd done S/N Ratio, he went to work on some of the songs about his depravity. He started with another tribute to the Raven Girl called, Comically Hers. In it he asked for her to return to him, and if she were unable or unwilling to do that; to at least send an avatar (representative) in her stead that he might marry the same in 'some kind of esoteric church.'
	Married Tonight, Heaven Sent, and Fluffer were the blatantly pornographic songs on the album. These explore concepts of cuckoldry, female domination, forced feminization, and such; fantasies which had always been close to his own heart.
	The song, Who Knows was a tribute to the Hendrix/Band of Gypsies piece by the same name off of the 1970 live album. The track, Sanae Asoh was a tribute to the beautiful Japanese porno star, and it was an instrumental with 'nam myoho renge kyo' being chanted in the background. It was supposed to be a sort of 'trance' song.
	In a tribute to Aliester Crowley, and at the same time in acknowledgement of the myriad minions of amorality running about in his own day and each proclaiming themselves as being, The Beast; the song, A Million Beasts was crafted. This was also in keeping with the tenor of the overall album.
	It was during the making of Beast that he began to explore covers in earnst, and the album included a rendition of, Sway which he called, Dark City. He called it Dark City because a rendition of the same had been included during a bar scene in the movie by the same name. Here though he made it into a 'surf' piece with a tempo of 180BPM. Sway was a song he'd always loved. The best version he'd ever heard of that was the one where Dean Martin and a lady - Astrud Gilberto? - were trading verses, and in each exchange the key would modulate up and down a half-step. He didn't figure he could pull off the modulations every other verse, so he kept it all in one key. It was actually a fairly successful rendition; to put it another way, for any faults it may have had no one else he was aware of had ever done Sway in that manner.
	The other song from that disc of particular interest to him was a rendition of, Old Man Brown. This was a song he'd remembered from his 4th grade music class: "Old man Brown is dead and gone; old man Brown is dead; he used to wear an old gray coat; old man Brown is dead." Somehow it had stuck with him for the better part of 35 or 40 years so he'd finally made a recording of it.
	Ragnarok For was another tribute to Hendrix/Roth; to his ear one of his better attempts at the "Little Wing/Yellow Raven" style.
	With the Beast disc out of the way, he continued on and decided to call the next one, YHVH after the name of his god. Seeing as how the "2" and "5" from "25" (it being the 25th disc) added up to "7," it only made sense to him; as many people seem to think that the number of God is 777.
	This was where he not only continued to cover certain songs, but he began writing certain, long-winded "freestyle-rap" lyrics where he was determined to sing rather than speak them as typical rappers are wont to do. He only found out years later that there had been at least one 'big time' rapper who both sang and spoke his lyrics. That rapper's name was ODB or "Old Dirty Bastard." 
	Be that as it may, he was determined to do some 'hip-hop' but to sing the words rather than speak them, and to base it upon some actual music as opposed to thudding bass. The kind of hip-hop where the 'artist' simply yells at the listener in a sort of diatribe, with a minimalist sort of music and marked by more than anything else by a pounding bass drum in the forefront of the mix; that style was something he never had great affinity for. It might be said that a musical diet of such to exclusion of all other styles; it is actually overly destructive, not only to the listener but to the 'artist' as well. In the same way, someone who might listen only to the likes of a band such as, Deicide in the heavy metal genre might also be selling their own musical palette short.
	Be that as it may, Hardy began in that vein with, Dreaming and really hit his stride with, Buddy Jesus. In the latter he was commenting on Alex Jones, whom he'd heard on Coast to Coast AM; and as well had figured the same to be a government agent or provocateur of some sort. That was in late 2004. These days nearly "everyone knows" that Alex Jones is a government-sponsored provocateur. The lyrics were:

she heard on the late night radio
about the conspiracy
the skull and bones
the illuminati
and how the hero would save the world
if they could only get the word out
the man on the air had videotapes
the conspiracy nut on the web shed his skin and chimed in with the thought that it was all a trap and the messenger of freedom was really a double agent promoted by the powers that be to foment a revolution in the name of proper evolution and all that is good but to what end will it all lead if there are mobs in the streets and tear gas is real and everyone forgot how to feel as they rioted for their prozac and free condoms for everyone as the world burned down around them surrounded by enemies who never forget just as it said in the bible the son of hagar would be at odds with everybody and so it would appear that it is clear that fear is the tool of the devil and even the disheveled are sometimes heard to slur the word YHVH in their semi-stupored state there out on the cruelest winds of fate but they can take heart because the hour is late and sometimes the broken are made and the made are broken but the cycle often goes unspoken and instead communication and correspondance are done by token and yet if you silence yourself in a room all alone sometimes you can hear that small still voice that whispers that sacred name 
even nam myoho renge kyo has earned the respect of some onlookers of known present and past practitioners but there must be a tetragrammaton if not a demiurge as well
some said see you in hell but that is a broken spell just like every opportunity lost on the battlefield and paid in human cost let us throw our lots before the king of kings that one day we might truly be free to be you and me there with our buddy jesus

	He then launched into a song containing the chorus of the classic, Tea for Two. He'd purchased the sheet music for that from a store in Las Vegas years previous, and only then had actually looked at it and begun to figure out the chords. He could remember Doris Day and Danny Kaye doing that song in a movie, and it was so touching. Somehow the song had always stuck with him as being, 'sweet.' The sentiments - coupling and procreating, yet in a sort of innocent fashion - were so foreign to his own experience and twisted fantasies that the making of the recording had a certain poignancy about it.
	For 4 of the next 5 tracks he then launched several of his 'sung rap' tunes:

Smoke 'em if You got 'em

the magnificent still silent machine at the center of the universe mocks the every move of the pretenders to the ultimate throne  they say some never get home   the politician made a pitch while the young lovers got hitched while a world away they were dumping dead bodies in a ditch  some say they were terrorists while some onlookers said they had been good samaritans   and the man lost his job as a hi tech spin doctor as they transferred it to china but there's a silver lining because wifey makes the money and he gets to play his games all day and it's so clear how times have changed   we're under the sword of damocles and they say the hurricane sounds like a million harpies but sometimes he guesses there's got to still be room for tenderness in this seemingly never ending quest for some measure of success  even if only in one's own eyes it's so easy to critize or fabricate white lies when the occasion arises to be euphemistic in the company of budding mystics chomping at the bit to comprehend it which has been sought throughout the ages by so many differing sages who all agree that in the end such will drive the seer stark raving mad   as if we're all being had  even if today we're getting over because it seems like god loves us just a little bit more than the girl or boy next door   how good it must feel to have never been a whore   better to have been ignored or bored, or a bore ignored on the floor of the ten cent store and outside at night is the borealis of aurora    some come and go amoral   while others always have an axe to grind day and night defiant until the bloody end that to defend the indefensible is never reprehensible if that sacred end should someday be reached   but today he tilts at windmills and beseeches them to go forth and preach the sacred creed   others sit still in small rooms and sing YHVH to get the bling bling or a free pass out of sing sing as the wicked ones conjure up an inhuman ring   they say someday people might be fleeing   the city that should have never been for zion on the hill in her hideously splendorous stead   one said do what thou wilt   others rebuked he and all of his ilk   are each of us shining stars or do we live for the endless czars that hystory parades before us to usher in the next war or a score of land reforms while everyone's friend was out on the street sayin' smoke 'em if you got 'em 

Napping

he was taking a nap while the mechanic fixing his car went to get a part  he had been up until five at the mansion where he'd given up his life if not at least for a time and as he dozed off there were aliens in his dreams practicing genetic engineering for a new race of human beings and in the fantastic yard there was a buddhist monk blessing his guitar as he lay upon it floating across the grass a foot off the ground    the caretaker awoke and the mechanic he spoke and they looked at the house and the estate all about and it was a fine afternoon like spring but still january   at some point the calendar doesn't seem to reflect the weather which befuddles the experts' predictions and oddly enough it was toward dusk that a real life buddhist monk showed up to discuss the value of the house and the caretaker realized he was on the way out and after that what might he do for after all for all its terror the old house had been such a great deal even though he couldn't feel  he thought of these american girls today in a seemingly endless parade in a vulgar display of their vanishing feminity and they called it liberation that she should dress like a slob, act like her idea of a man and have a low paying job   over the years increasingly bitter at her lot in life thinking the solution was in more rules so that the money should go to she and hers - the good people you understand - while those others did not deserve a dime   further he thought of the woman he loved once and how he loved to talk to her and how she had been the only person he'd ever known to have read - among other things - thomas satz   she was the queen of the jews and how he knew he had the blues and part of him hated her but he stronger side loved her and in either case he knew why and whether because of or regardless of that he had to yet try to get the word out in any way which might alleviate his overarching ongoing sense of futility   which in a mid-life miracle he finally found ameliorating    in any event he knew he was through with the berating that he would never again take it and that he was ok with himself no matter what anyone else ever said or did for if nothing else we know life isn't personal and so many it would seem today in this once and in some ways still great nation are chasing fantasies   imagine men past middle age obsessed yet with the state of their ability to penetrate with the help of their pills they couldn't see the mental illness in having nothing in their life after decades of striving but their little need to mimic the siring of yet more babies   but oh they'd thought of that and the cads are the first to sign up for the good time with the girls who will first abort and ask questions second   at least the caretaker could take solace in that he wasn't a fake moslem in an escalade parading around with his money from saudi arabia buying up every available property in the unstable state overlooked by the volcano which over that milieu holds the ultimate keys to civilization's fate     even so the rains might return and wash everything the modern man had ever built or made so that another age might arise far from the silly politics not to mention rhetoric of the golden dawn   the caretaker was on his way  what with the dream of the nephilim and then the monk and then just a waking hour later arising to see just such a similar priest in selfsame attire in his actual yard    he proferred a nam myoho renge kyo even though he had just turned jew so the YHVH might somehow integrate and he was perchance the world's first buddhist of zion   such is at least part if not the full burden of being at the center of the cult of nine out of sight and out of mind at least he can chant YHVH and scribble a rhyme whenever the occasion might arise

Inception

in a dream there had been a room with fine varnished floors like that of an old public school with high vaulted ceilings and demon beings torturing each other yet in apparent ecstasy with a balthazar in a vat very fat sort of like he'd seen on buffy and humans dancing around with high purposes   he could not understand but then he was in a class and the cute girl sitting at the desk next to him teased him about how he was the leader of the sect and that its moniker was jx1127    he got up and walked and was skating in socks down some smooth stairs, into a  library which had not the appearance but yet the sense of the one from his own seventh grade there in the school half way across town where the buses had carried him day after day   a prisoner of would be social engineers for it was their finest hour the enforced integration which so many had preached but few had in fact practiced  at least not with their own but to ask this of some anonymous working parents so far away seemed a small price for anyone to pay that their dream of everyone being the same might one day come true but of course they were at best fools   moving right along  in his dream he felt a secret love toward the school librarian he himself having been a lifelong contrarian    the dream it passed and he was driven to raise the mast of the number nine cult even though he was its sole earthly member but perchance some of those salvia-soaked would send a rejoinder or a mystical pointer to the key which lies at the bottom of the abyss there beneath abbadon otherwise known as appolyon and fields of nephilim probably were before their time and if you're bored just light up a smoke and sip a cup of coffee while you contemplate the sweet by and by   and of he and his nascent miniscule cult   it's easy to leave it outside your scope when coping is your biggest concern perchance those adults watching reruns of the vampire slayer and dreaming of such deliciously wicked milieus are but magnificent losers   certainly they can attest that they are not boozers and of winning and losing fate may be cruel but yet bittersweet so he tarried in the field borrowing words from the dead that such profound thoughts might allay the insipidness and small-mindedness of the moguls of the media networks in their stead 


YHVH

born into the land of pharisees brainwashed into cherishing things inimical to his own true being and seeing the world through the eyes of a sometime sissy      divided, compartmentalized and fed trite lies like a monarch butterly   they were bent upon turning him into a good consumer before being affected by the rumors about the tumors from the cell phones and the deadly drones     life was on loan yet he was shown that there might be a better way a happier day if only he could do away with his want   how he had at first recoiled at the very thought but that was long ago and the line between everything and naught is taut    turn on the news today and it's all about the pop star and they seek to convict him without even a trial but they are the ones who are juvenile and of the parents who dropped their kids off at the ranch will such ever be called into account or is it really a money scheme or a smear job by the mob he'd dissed in one of his songs   either way you'd better get it or you will be out on the streets with no rent    your lifeblood spent    sacrificed at the altar of this repressive opressing political correctness that they keep drilling into you as the epitomy of human progress while the fiend sits recessed in a dark room counting the money from his spreading gloom and laughing at you and mocking me as we keep our noses to the grindstone afraid to look up for fear of losing our small little insipid sense of belonging to the throng which is of course always wrong but how is it that a person can profit from the tomfoolery that passes for civil discourse where it's really deadly intercourse between reluctant lovers smothering beneath idiotic sensibilities     he was under attack by satanists in the middle of the life-altering dmt trip and much to their chagrin he emerged with a new religion or really a revival of lost beliefs based on the YHVH and not any kind of occultic creed   the tetragrammaton is not the demiurge or so he heard and it was the word which begat life there in spiralling strands of dna and of the YHVH he had paid dearly for his career was shot and his social life lost but he knew he was right and whether sitting on a pile of gold or boasting over his harem his awareness had transcended the mundane or perchance it was all the same but no matter where he had been or where he was headed the acknowledging of the YHVH was his claim to fame   for fate might smile cruelly upon any one of us or raise another up beyond any sensible station in life but the point is that it doesn't matter because the still silent machine which is really the maker of all of this is not interested so much in your satisfaction but rather the ongoing drama which is a result of the neverending motion of the world of suffering    so if you seek release from this land of sheeple and can't see any sense in anything you might just take a pause and say a prayer or chant a chant and realize that the magnificent being at the center of everything is smiling motionless even if you cannot see or feel it

	The other song in that string of songs was a cover of the haunting Elvis classic, Marie's the Name. It reminded him so much of his own past with Marie, only in his own life he had been the fool going around town bragging about her, and not the singer who was actually bedding her. He'd only ever heard that song as 'bumper music' on the Art Bell show. He swore it was the most haunting thing he'd ever heard Elvis record. As it turns out, the Scorpions had done a fantastic cover of the same. The video for that was on YouTube. As for Hardy's version of the same, it was something he was proud of, but he had to admit that in his rush to cover the thing, that he had - for the sake of ease - smoothed out a couple of the apparent rhythmic quirks or partial measures as found in the original.
	The other highlights of the 25th disc were surf versions of, Since I've Been Lovin' You and, In Other Words (Fly Me to the Moon). The version of, Stairway to Heaven; as it were so removed in form from what the original had once been, was also interesting. The best original number of his which was on the 25th disc might have been the song, American Football.
	The 26th Album was named, Infinity because the number '8' is like an infinity symbol turned sideways (or rather the infinity symbol is like an 8 turned sideways), and the '2' and '6' in '26' add up to '8' when combined. As an aside, this is also why the 8th disc were called, Infinitely.
	The best recordings on that 26th disc were probably, Shy Eyes, Hotel California, Game of Love and, Greenback Dollar. It was during the recording of this disc that he'd been forced to leave the mansion as it had been sold to a new owner. As an aside, the real estate agent lady and her partner had driven him insane with desire. The real estate lady had such a certain way about her. One time, after being utterly flummoxed in her presence, and been given orders as to what he needed to do in order to ready the house for a big show, he had gotten his car stuck in the mud on the edge of the house parking lot; there while he fumed over she, and pined for the warmth of her oh-so-succulent-breasts, dreamt about her shiny chestnut hair, and fathomed the curves of her undulating hips and waist, all presented by she in such an expert, cocktease fashion; she with her well-manicured nails, semi-sheer blouses, wisps of lingerie peeking forth from her outerwear and hinting with untold haughtiness at the treasures which might lie within; she with well-manicured nails and sometimes adorned in satin blouses; she who had once again gotten Hardy's attention; she who had playfully whipped at him once with a wrung up towel, and in so doing had enforced his understanding; she of whom he thought as he would scrub the kitchen floor, after dark and alone in the masion, in preparing for an open house, there in his stiletto heels and lingerie as he wished it were her own kitchen floor.
	Be that as it may, he completed the 26th disc from the confines of a small apartment. An astute listener to these recordings might notice how the power of the vocals is reduced, because whilst working within the thin-walled confines of the apartment's bedroom, he was concerned with disturbing the neighbors. In contrast whilst previously at the mansion, he'd been able to sing at any volume he desired; given that the house itself had been surrounded by something like 30 acres of 'yard.'
	The 27th disc was called, JX1127 Cult. The title track (track 2) was a remake of the same song from the 14th disc. As with all of the discs he'd created using the BOSS and its built-in drum machine, the guitar playing was serviceable to brilliant, whilst some listeners simply could't get past the drums. As far as he were concerned, he actually liked the drums built into the BOSS machines. Of course, drums had never been a huge deal to him. 
	The disc also included yet another remake of the song, Raven Girl (originally found way back on the 3rd - Fashion Outlaws - disc), and a quirky rendition of, When the Music's Over, originally by the Doors. As with many of the covers he'd attempted, the form of the original there was  largely - if not completely - cast aside whilst the lyrics were fairly well retained from the original; the music itself having been re-shaped into his own - some would say - childlike style. The song, My Sweet was about Taylor Robbins. She was a famous internet cheesecake model. Hardy had sometimes thought her the most beautiful woman in the world.
	The 28th disc was a collection of verses from a certain, Mother Shipton; a purported internet hoax. The songs on that disc were - more than anything - an excuse for a double-guitar solo which pretty much ran the length of the entire disc. There were 18 verses, and each verse was given a song. The pattern was to record at 60bpm, 120bpm, and 180bpm for each set of 3 verses. A bonus track, Katrina and Rita was named after the hurricanes by the same names, and was included at the end.
	The 29th Album was called, Twins. The opening, title track was based upon a progression he'd used before: i-i-v-v-i-i-v-v-III-v-III-v-III-v-III-v-repeat. It had once been called, Abbadon. In the case of this version, he'd inserted the intentionally creepy-sounding lyrics, "I love you, now you owe me; I love you, now you own me."
	Once, when a kid from Laos had listened to a bunch of MP3 recordings off of a CD Hardy had given him; in reaction the kid had told Hardy that he wasn't into the "haunted house-horror movie" style of singing. Hardy had known exactly what the kid was talking about. Hardy had often tried to sound sort of like a horror movie when he sang, particularly during the general period of time where he'd recorded, Twins and several of the records which followed it.
	As for the remainder of Twins, there were a cover of an "NFL Films" song, and a rendition of, My Favorite Things. The number, Golden Nights spoke of his time as a janitor at the office building. He really loved the music for that piece, and the way the two voices contrasted. The rendition of, Yesterday When I was Young was something that he'd always wanted to record. He didn't have access to the chord progressions (only the lyrics) so he went by memory on both the chords and the melody of the vocals. Later, upon hearing the Roy Clark version again; he realized that he'd kind of missed the music of the original, and had replaced it with his own variant. To Hardy, what was important about the song - more important than recreating the notes - were the lyrics. When he'd first heard the Roy Clark version so many years before, the lyrics had struck him as perchance, fairly well describing his own life; he'd at least in part lived a life as Mr. Clark had once described. So, overall notes being a fascimile of the original or not; the fact of wanting to sing those very lyrics himself had prompted Hardy to make a rendition of the same. In the end, Hardy hoped that the forlorn, regretful sentiment of the lyrics might yet again find their way through to the listener; much in the way the original had once so affected him.
	He also attempted the classics, My Way and, That's Life; both for the 2nd time. Again he'd kind of fallen short of what he'd intended. The 1st attempts at both these songs had actually been better. It wouldn't be until the 31st disc that he would do renditions of these songs which he was fairly happy with.
	He started work on the 30th disc - Since I've Been Loving You - by recording a slow version of Fly Me to The Moon, but as work on the disc continued and it expanded into a 'double-album,' the recording of Fly Me to the Moon was then moved to nearly the end of the record; as the 29th of 30 overall tracks. The entire album itself was sandwiched between two versions of, Since I've Been Lovin' You; at the 1st and 30th positions. The album, having 30 songs was populated by its share of "filler," yet there were in any event some songs which stood out to him.
	As he got more deeply into the record, and recorded the trilogy of, Appolyon, A Council of Nine and,The Architect, the effect had at once fascinated and terrified him. The recordings weren't anywhere near perfect, but they had a certain diabolical energy about them which was unmistakable, the sense of which he'd never previously captured. The later follow-up of, Mene Mene Tekal Upharsin was another one which chilled him whilst he pieced it together. Mene Mene had been a metaphysical and social critique, but he later began to wonder if it hadn't really been about him. The way his own life had gone for so many years, he had to consider whether or not he were the one who were truly found wanting in the eyes of god.
	Being as how he'd recorded, Fly Me to the Moon and and a second version of, Since I've Been Loving You at the start of the project chronologically; and had then made them the 29th and 30th tracks of the actual release; it added an interesting sense to the overall compliation. The last track actually recorded for the album was, The Pauper; but it was found in the 28th spot of the release.
	In truth, he was in a really dark state of mind by the time he'd finished all of the recordings. The most popularly-downloaded-from-the-internet song on that album was, Comets. Perchance his favorite composition of the disc was, Alexis Ways; with a modified, simplified chord progression borrowed from the classic, Puttin' on the Ritz.
	As he moved into the creation of the 31st disc, Terror and Beauty; he began with, Everything She Touches; a re-make of a slow ballad he'd written in 1983 for the blonde girl. He was yet stuck in a kind of a diabolical state, and the lyrics from first 4 tracks on the album continued to reflect this:

Everything She Touches

i met an exceptional woman
i met her recently
i know that i'm now in love
and lovers need no pity
you've seen her at the zoo
but never on tv
you've seen her in your dreams
but never on the screen



A Dream

you had a dream
in a victorian room
high ceilings
invisible, yawning terror loomed
heat came from blue flames
then she came
the woman of your dreams
and they dropped off some archaic and indescipherable notes
and she told you what they meant
something about your name in latin
yet the other woman was ignored
and then your mother the handwringer was there
but you told her she was square
then you were a beast
but they had other plans
(you met a would-be handler
blonde with geek glasses who said he was your father)
and they tried to make her take off her ring
and you killed the black man
threw him over a railing
then you were underground 
and the demons were murdering everyone in sight
and one male was on a torture rack with fingers cut off
but he was liking it
then they tipped him over and scoffed
and some people tried to escape up the chutes
and when you awoke not much at all about the thing 
in any way disturbed you
same old, same old
if it's not one thing it's quite another



 Harlot's Treasure Trove

remember when you were young
and sold your soul that night
then you drifted away
because of how your desires were stayed

many arrived and left 
and you tried and did nearly forget
many with the best of intentions 
attempting to lead you astray

and one day you saw a darkened flash of destiny
as hidden helpers came and went
despite your having been nearly spent
there at the altars of mammon and discontent

day by day though the little hammer blows fell about your being
chipping away at you, showing you what you needed to see

yes, the business with the harlot and Her beast
and the 666 followed you everywhere
as if some sacred swirling darkness 
from within your deepest soul had been unleashed

you walk alone without light
the scent of terror is inside of you
the agony drapes itself around you
and the sounds of hopelessness ring through your ears

yet it is for the beauty that you continue to strive
the cosmic cuckoldry is your guide

you can never go back
not after the demonic attack
you can never go back
not after the luciferian pact

let us pledge our hearts to lucifer
give our souls to lucifer
renouncing every cloying small god the insipid others ever placed before us
let us seek only to arrive at our individually disparate, manifold satanic abodes
all interconnected by our mutual love gone cold

where the wicked light of yawning spiralling time will cascade once again
shining forth as a beacon to all lost souls
reminding all that there is yet a place we can go
and truly call home
there to glean a sacred taste of the supreme harlot's treasure trove


Haunted Dreams

in a haunted dream
there are precursors sight unseen
there are magnificent forges 
sometimes you find yourself unclean
whispering songs from nights by the sea
in a demiurgic fit of unrevealing
spirits hum through your mind
and yet in your third eye
is the plain of tragic smiting
wrapped in the tragedy of your delighting
in things which should have remained but whispers
but which were shouted from the rooftops instead
and the snake swirls and slithers
about your once-innocent feet
you in your humiliation yet total lack of humility
the price of forgiveness is too high
thus lost souls tread the ostensibly vile
and the beauty created makes it almost worthwile
rest your head and never let them tell you
of how things should or will be
for it is a suckers game
one and all pawned as but myriad pagliaccis
do you yet see?

	During many of the tracks at that time, he would put blasphemies in the background; old-style church praises spoken backwards.
	By the time he'd finished 4 tracks - and with what he'd done toward the end of the creation of the 30th disc - he was quickly becoming seriously unwound from a metaphysical standpoint. So he went back and attempted a couple of relatively light-hearted remakes, My Way and, That's Life.
	It was then where he met up with an old friend - The Professor - who introduced him to some 'new scales.' This is how the song, Vincent Price was born. The scale the song employed had been dubbed 'contratonic minor' by the Professor. Originally it had been called, Conquering Worm. 
	The piece, Desolation; was a reciting of the Lord's Prayer in reverse. The making of that one had been a terrifying event, mitigated by the sheer beauty of the underlying music, with its rising and falling, dual-guitar lines. He couldn't tell whether his life's path were veering widely off track, or if indeed he might truly be on his way home.
	Of the song, A Dream; the woman mentioned in that song was Taylor Robbins. She'd been the woman "in the Victorian house." It was strange to him how he could dream so much about someone he'd never actually met, let alone exchanged any correspondence with whatsoever.
	It wasn't like the case with Marie, where he'd dreamt of her so much over the years. At least in that case he could understand, for Marie had been someone he'd actually known in his day to day life. Few women could ever say they had known Hardy; and certainly Marie had known him better than anyone. 
	Cosmic Cuckold was done in a melodic minor key. By then he'd begun tuning his guitar way down so the string bends could be stupendous. The problems with actual tuning when loosening the strings became apparent. First of all, even on a standard guitar without scalloped frets; variations in pressure in fingering given notes often resulted in 'unwanted sharpening' of the note. Also, even if the fingering pressure were perfect; when the strings were really loose (low) even a properly fingered note would have a 'warble' or 'dipping' effect to it. By the end of the disc when he recorded, Muse; the potential outlandishness of the loosened strings was apparent. It was perfect. He loved it.
	By then, a lot of music simply had bored him. Striving for new tonalities, and finding 'notes within notes' was something he began to relish. It was around that time that he really reinforced the notion - once expounded upon by the Billy Graham of Buddhism among others - that there really are no 'bad notes.' He realized that he might lose a lot of potential listeners with this approach, yet the benefit was in having put his own unique signature on the same.
	Thus work began on the 32nd disc, Chaos. He opened with another number employing one of the bizarre 'new keys' (kinetic minor) from the Professor, which in turn Hardy had been experimenting with, Kinetic Chaos. Wingmakers was the follow-up number, and was yet another attempt at an electric blues style; yet with the immistakable loose strings. Wingmakers actually involved a level of expression he'd never previous been able to conceive of; that is to say that on the one had its range of emotion pleased Hardy greatly, yet on the other he understood that others might not be able to fathom any of it, rutted as the plebians were in within their 12-tone limitations of music appreciation; pedestrian, would-be critics of limited musical scope, only comfortable within the zone of what they'd ultimately been provided by the likes of Tavistock and the CIA. 
	The song, City on Earth was about a bizarre dream - one of many as it would turn out - from a certain milieu of a megalopolis inhabited by demons.
	In the dream he'd witnessed - in no particular order and among other things not listed here - Missy Elliot having a rap-off with an unidentified male rapper, whilst many 'colored folk' danced around and shared a large ceramic jug of some kind of psychadelic cider; a corpse in the streets; a scene in the lobby of a hotel where a harlot had committed intense frottage upon him; an encounter with apparent nephilim, inside some sort in a souvenir store. As mentioned above, Hardy would return to that city many times in his dreams. It was always thought of as 'New York' and for some reason seemed to be on the Eastern seaboard of the USA, but whenever he would awken from a dream detailing yet more of that bizarre place, he knew that it wasn't actually the same 'New York City;' at least not as we know it within this realm.
	One time, in that same milieu he'd dreamt that he was the leader of an army of fallen mutants; some being people he'd known in his waking hours, yet with monstrous deformations. If it were to be listed here who some of these people were in that dream, it might be a real 'head scratcher.' Suffice it to say that the series of dreams of that place as a whole were quite odd, even to the twisted mind of Hardy.
	The songs, Clavos Pintados and, y Pelo Ondulado Oscuro ('dark, wavy hair') experimented with a harmonic minor key, yet employing the raised 7th as a 3rd note in the 6th chord. In other words, if one were in a standard 'a minor' key with 'a minor' as 'i' triad and E Major as 'V,' then a 6th chord could be constructed off of 'F,' but instead of using 'f-a-c' it would use, 'f-g#(a-flat)-c; so it would be f minor instead of the traditional F Major in the 6th spot; yet it would still fit within 'a' harmonic minor. This had actually been used in popular music before, most notably in the aforementioned standard, My Way; yet perchance not in exactly the same way as these two songs of Hardy's had employed it.
	There was a version of, Everybody which the outfit, Black Box had done as a house music dance club hit in the early '90s. In this version though, Hardy had tried to speak the lyrics in a low, robotic type of voice, and the actual notes of both the vocal and 'horn' lines from the original had been mimicked by guitar lines here.
	He loved the dual-guitars of, Sweet Lilith. The chord progression was also that 'f minor-a minor' (played in that position but not necessarily those actual chords due to the non-standard - lowered - tuning). The chorus went from something like G Major to f#-diminished or D7 if you will.
	Free as You Can Be, was about Taylor Robbins. As the years went by, he found it amazing that he would still look at pictures of her and pine for she, years after she'd stopped releasing any new photos on the internet. That is to say that he would look at pictures of her from years before, even though she had 'dropped out' of the internet cheesecake biz completely. As far as he were concerned, it was a testament to her great beauty that such pictures would have him gazing upon her so many years later. Were she a secret Mossad operative, sent to steal his heart through the medium of digital/electronic still photography?  
	Another example he could think of, exhibiting  such long-lasting, overarching staying power with respect to still phootgraphy was the one and only Emily Marilyn, the famous fetish model of whom he'd first seen - and thought the world of her beauty - on a cover of DDI in the '90s. Even in 2008 he found that he would search out pictures of her; it must have been 15 years hence. Her visage had never failed to entice him. Add to that what small snippets of video with sound he'd ever seen and heard of her, and her voice were also in his mind. Sometimes she would appear in his dreams.
	The vast majority of women whose pictures he'd ever jacked off to were simply forgotten. Only a handful, or maybe a dozen, or a score; only certain ones would stand 'the test of time.' As an aside but after a fashion in any event, the connection of all of these computers to the internet has served - among other things - to turn so many of the world's PCs into virtual, 'masturbation machines.' He knew for a fact that by the 21st century, many of the members of the male sex in the 'connected world,' first and foremost among these being certain of the obstensibly male variety in his native USA;  vast numbers of 'men' were afflicted with an addiction to erotic internet imagery. It were as a combination giant; erotic-magazine-and-theatre from days past; all rolled into one and packaged for the modern era, and writ so very large. There was something for everybody.
	He could only be thankful that his tastes were generally cheesecake, and that he wasn't into the 'hard stuff.' His idea of the perfect website turned out to be sheerio.com, where the women posed in revealing vintage lingerie. Sheerio.com might have been the single most important cheesecake website he'd ever encountered. Between that, and the lingeriepass/soniadane site where Taylor Robbins' pictures had been presented; between those two and the Emily Marilyn site, and the Jasmine St. John and Hotindianbabe sites; those were some of the websites which had kept him coming back over the years. A lot of other sites and models had caught his brief attention, but these models were some of the ones who fluffed his virtual desire, year after year. All questions of 'most beautiful woman' aside, sheerio.com was the one which had the best lingerie of all of the sites. Sharimara was another strong entry into the field. There are none quite like she. 
	As for the song albums themselves; Hardy was beginning to, more and more enjoy the finished products of his compositions. From the mid-20s, into the 30th, and especially getting into the 31st disc and beyond, he thought that these were by far his most interesting - and best - albums.
	He kept up the torrid pace of recording, creating yet another 10 albums in a period of something like 18 months! One of his favorite songs from that period was the one called, Niburu; off of the 33rd disc. The 34th disc had a bunch of remakes of the theme songs from old television shows. Perhaps, I Dream of Jeannie and to an even greater extent, Flintstones were the best of these. As for the latter, at some point he had found a video clip of an old, black and white television ad in which the principal characters from the cartoon were included, and where the product being pimped were Winston cigarettes. In combining the video from old commercial, with his cover song from the show; he sensed he'd stumbled onto an instant classic.
	The 36th disc - Islands - was created in less than 2 days. It was the closest thing - other than 16-18 - he'd created to a 'live' album. In contrast to 16-18 though, the songs on 36 were deeply multitracked, but virtually every single track laid down throughout the entire 2-day 'super session' was taken in a single try. This is what helped to lend it a distinctive, spontaneous sound. When all was said and done he'd made 27 songs in 2 days. The series of 'surf' tracks or the 'upbeat' ones running at 162 beats per minute; they contained only a bass and a guitar, and drums. Each of the overall 27 tracks were named after an island. Some of the solos on those faster - surf - songs in particular were rather sloppy, but he was pleased with them in that they were 'real' and not some highly spliced, retaken piece of 'perfection' that a 'real famous' band might be wont to do; only to themselves fall apart whilst attempting to recreate the same thing live. That is to say that the tracks on Islands were "real" and would mimick the actual sound of Hardy - warts and all - were he to ever actually form a band and play live. The thing was, that outside of the 'surf' numbers; the rest of the songs were multitracked, some to the level of containing 20 or 30 total individual instruments. The one salient rule regarding the entire album was in any event: No re-takes; no overdubs; no punch-ins. Every individual track was taken once, and the next track recorded; over a period of 48 hours until the entire thing were finished.
	He thought of the superlative lingerie adorning the beauties at sheerio.com; otherwise anonymous models, few of whose names he could actually discern. Out of perchance a dozen models or more who had appeared on the site, only Angela Sora and Crystal White were known by name to him. Be that as it may, he wondered what Taylor Robbins, or Jasmine St. John, or Jayde (hotindianbabe), or Raven Kay Lee might have looked wearing the same. He fantasized that Michelle Trachtenberg might pose for the site, or that he might one day see the likes of Aria Giovanni make an appearance there. As it were, the for-the-most-part anonymous models who did haunt the site were without exception stunning beauties. Among them was a Latina who had once posed for the then-defunct CFM High Heels site, but beyond recognizing her face, he did not know her name. Whatever the case of the same may have been, the models at sheerio were beautiful enough as it were, yet he couldn't help but wonder what certain other women might look like in the same types of outfits. He knew that there were Sheerio picture sets of Sweet Yurizan - or at least prototypical single shots which had popped up elsewhere on the web - but entire sets of these had never been released in full at the sheerio.com site itself. In any event, sheerio.com had to have been one of the most profound websites Hardy had ever seen.
	Raven Kay Lee reminded him so much of Little Wing; the Cambodian woman he'd fallen for and lost his heart to. Actually, he'd lost his heart to all Cambodian women. Sometimes he wondered what Michelle Trachtenberg might look like in an Apsara outfit. One day he was checking out the Jasmine St. John website and he saw that she'd posted a photo of herself in traditional Korean dress. In that picture, she had appeared as a sort of variation on the Apsara theme. Hardy was mightily impressed by that.
	After he'd been out of work for several weeks, and was sinking into a miasma from which he might never recover - at least not in this earthly life - he called the chinese woman at the mini-mart about his last paycheck, which he had never received. Over the phone she gave him the runaround, and told him that she'd mailed him his last paycheck. He thought it strange that, out of every single letter he'd ever been sent through the office of the post, and over the course of his entire life; that the paycheck the woman said she'd sent had never reached him. He figured that she were lying, but all the same he knew that he'd have to go forward without it. In truth she'd been fair enough in her failure to pay his last check, as he'd up and walked out on her in the first place. After that, he considered them to be 'even,' but as his mind might wander from time to time, he wondered as well; what it might be like to hold her in his arms. A part of him had always considered whether it might actually be true that a woman will always want whatever a man does not.
	He worried from time to time about Tigerr Juggs, the former Koko Li. Perchance he ought not to have though. Certainly despite whatever labels the people around her might have put upon her, and whatever roles she'd either volunteered for, or had rather been coerced into submitting to; she were the Queen and everyone around her - everyone in every photograph or video ever taken of her - had in point of fact been at least slightly inferior to she. She was like a lost royal, pristine at the center of her being, yet surrounded by monsters whilst she and they would lace the photographic and video record with scenes of utmost debauchery.
	He could understand her apparent sex slavery. Sometimes he had wondered what it were like to be like her, or to be a shemale slave to someone like her. There was a certain undeniable attraction to her wantoness. The hangers on; the lotharios; the other women around her; far more often than not such were a major put-off in any event. He could only trust that somehow she would be ok. What a woman she was. Of all the models who had ever posed with her, a doe-eyed, pensive Asian female playing with her amidst the sheets of a bed in an apparent hotel room had been the only other one who had caught Hardy's eye. Tigerr Juggs was unsurpassed. In the case of Tigerr Juggs, Hardy might have been given to hyperbole when describing her.
	She had taken him by visual storm, but as he'd looked into her erotic offerings, Hardy had been at once fascinated and sickened by much of what he'd seen. He made up his mind to never look at her again, but he truly did wish her well. Whatever the merits or lack thereof in her actual situation in life, he needed to let her go. Tigerr Juggs had been like the erotic tornado who had swept through his life, but in the end Hardy had no affinity for such hard-core imagery, and retreated back to the comfort of his own cheesecake collection.
	What might become of all of them; all of humanity in all of its bombastic guises, subtle chicanery, and outright buffoonery? Hardy would never shake the sense that women - as keepers of the bottomless pit - were like stars in the center, and men but as planets orbiting around the periphery. Perchance such a notion varied from person to person, but there stood Hardy with his own take take on the same.
	Of his own lifelong patterns of masturbation, Hardy sometimes wondered if it had been a waste. Sometimes he thought so. Other times he would wax philosophically and consider again that life is a series of poisonous choices, encapsulating any manner of terror, beauty, suffering, and hope; as each of our disparate yet interweaving paths; all lead inevitably to death - and in the beliefs of the Orient - rebirth. Perchance it were that birth and death were the ecstasy and everything else the suffering. Perchance along the way of life we find smallish doses of ecstasy and agony amidst even the most mundane of our daily pursuits.
	What if he had never masturbated, and had instead married a sort of Christian wallflower; and in so doing they had been given to a very vanilla type of sexuality, and attendant complete absence of sensuality; and in this way had procreated and lived life based around a family? The idea was by then so foreign and far away from him. It didn't bother him that he were among the Last in Line.
	What if he had never yearned for a woman, and rather had taken to a rigid scientific discipline? Would the world have been better or worse off for it? He didn't know the entire truth of that, but he did know that his own music amazed him greatly, and provided salve for his soul. In this way he had made his own corner of the world a more beautiful, expressive place; a lifelong series of notes from within, intertwined with sounds from without, all combining to weave an invisible tapestry of yet exquisite musical color.
	Whether for better or worse, it would appear in any event that - in this life at least - the abstract questions simply far outstrip the concrete answers; at least by sheer volume if not as well in weight.
	As for the chronic masturbation; it could have been part of his faith; or it could have been that Hardy had always sensed that he were out of control in virtually every aspect of his life; that he were instead simply being swept along in by forces outside his ability to manipulate. For whatever else it may or may not have caused, he realized early and often that chronic masturbation - oddly enough - gave him control over a certain aspect of life. He knew that women could secretly sense a male masturbator, and that women would generally reject such a man in consideration for another who had preserved his own load and were thus more ready - on a moment's notice - to procreate. So, by masturbating Hardy had been able to consistently and successfully predict one thing in his life; that as a result of wankery he would not be getting laid. He could masturbate and in so doing rest assured of his never conjugating with real-life women. Nothing else in his life had been so readily predictable. Everything else about his life was occurring seemingly at random, and outside his metaphysical purview. Perchance it was for this control - no matter what loss of self-esteem or respect given by women - that he'd used masturbation to make at least one area of his life - sexuality - entirely predictable and controllable. Once, a callgirl had warned him that; chronic masturbators of every sexual stripe and among them primarily male and female; that they might lose interest in physical interaction with others. She stated further that after a certain point, a person comes to know their own body, and how to pleasure the same to a greater degree than any other person could ever - even if they had ever wanted to - be capable of.
	Whatever the truths or lack thereof regarding human sexuality, as the years passed Hardy found that perchance his biggest sensory passion came to be in the realm of cooking and food. The old saw, "You can call me anything you want; just don't call me late for dinner" had become something of a statement of gospel truth where he were concerned. Perchance it could be said that Hardy's love of food dovetailed much more closely with his passion for satins and sheers, and of sensuality; to a much greater degree than the raw, animal, friction-fucking sexuality of such overwhelmingly popular plebian variety. As for fucking, his ultimate idea of the same were of the multi-houred, frictionless variety which would lead both partners to Samhadi. His other great sensual repast was in the making, and listening to, of the widely aforementioned music.
	Sometimes Hardy had wondered what it would have been like to have been Adam without Eve. There would have been no sexual question. Instead Adam could have lived freely, walking side by side with all manner of 4-legged creature; picking the fruits and berries from the shrubs and trees; living off of nuts and grains. There would have been fields of weed and opium for his use, and mushrooms and salvia and peyote. Sometimes Hardy thought that such had been the greatest mistake anyone had ever made; when Adam asked God for a mate. Then upon further consideration, Hardy realized that being alone in a garden; while it may have been of great solace for even a thousand years or more; that at some point it must have gotten so terribly boring that the proverbial Adam would have been begging God for a companion.
	Of course most of humanity forgets the first mate he was given. Her name was Lilith and she was into sex for the sake of pleasure, and had no desire to bear children. Adam had been disappointed in this - as had God - so she'd been cast into the outer darkness while the 'submissive' Eve were created in her stead. Hardy had to laugh at such a thought; the supposed 'submissive' aspect of Eve. Regardless of all of the real or perceived abuse he'd witnessed women enduring at the hands of men; in the end he most likely agreed with Mistress Amanda Victoria, who herself believes that the world is, first and foremost a playground for women. In other words a man really can't win when dealing with women; no matter how many of them drop and worship at his feet; no matter how he might ostensibly use, abuse, and discard any number them; no matter how many children he might sire as a symbol of his 'greatness.' There is simply something about women where no man can really use her company in any fashion, to bolster or otherwise bandy about his so-called 'life accomplishments.' 
	After Hardy had quit the mini-mart job and failed to find re-employment, depression set in. He was penniless. He knew he was dying. A sword of Damocles called 'monthly rent' - perchance but a small one among many such proverbial swords, but an immediate and tangiable one at that - was coming due. He was loathe to ask anyone for help. His heart was in the grip of something which squeezed it. His teeth were going bad; at least the cloves and fresh garlic could keep his mouth clean. The garlic was even able to make earaches associated with the onset of an abcessed tooth go away.
	For years he'd thought of how his simple lack of money were killing him, physically, emotionally, mentally. If he could only find the money for another month's rent, without having to ask his parents or friends for help. Maybe he could get a job and get back on his feet again. Yet this pattern had repeated itself so many times, and he was spiralling downward through it all. 
	He had all of these new songs he was rehearsing on the guitar, but he might never get the chance to record them; and they were the best songs he'd ever written. It all seemed so cruel, yet perchance he deserved it. He didn't want to go out onto the streets, for that would have meant certain death. One day he wept and hugged his guitar and talked to it as though it were the only woman he'd ever even come close to having known. The Syrian at the auto shop in Las Vegas had once remarked, and said something to the effect that the guitar is a, "perfect woman, or even better."
	He told his guitar how he'd let her down, and hadn't paid enough attention to her. He didn't know what he was going to do. He was in a state of despair and anxiety bordering on terror. Is this how so many others had ever begun their own exit from this place, on the path toward earthly death? How many people - people better than he'd ever been - had also found themselves in such a hopeless state? God simply would not talk to him. He'd prayed for years for money; or failing in that, that the financial system might collapse. If he were to live in a world which required money to live, then he would need at least some of that same money. If God were to tell him that he should quit asking for money, then he would retort to God that things should not be set up such that such - at its root unsound - money as represented by the ultimate farce of federal reserve notes; were a requirement for any kind of life within his native culture. 
	He had no faith that he could simply hit the open road and even survive, let alone thrive. The USA was fast becoming a police state, and living out of one's car might have been a practical impossibility. He didn't have any of the skills of a woodsman, so living off of the land were out of the question. He was a city person, but he didn't want to hit the mean streets. Sometimes, at least a small part of him seemed to be relishing potential homelessness on his part, as though anticipating that, despite the danger and the humiliation of the same; and the loss of his ability to make music or write; he might actually know some freedom in having no place to go.
	How many had gone before him, down this path of abject material poverty? Surely his days must have been numbered by then. Ultimately none of it mattered, but while that was a known fact, the self-important mind plays tricks on itself.
	He needed to find a way to forgive anyone who'd ever hurt him; whether such grievances might have been perceived or real. He needed to forgive himself. If there were a Jesus who would judge him one day, he needed to lay himself at the mercy of the same.
	Perchance he might find a way to live another day; to find a career late in life and live out his days in relative peace and prosperity; yet from what he could fathom, his civilization - so infected as it were by pharasaism - was about the reap the whirlwind of consequences from all of its past collective actions.
	Sometimes Hardy would pine for Marilyn Chen of internet fame. She was a noted contributor to at least one - if not many, as one could never likely know for certain - of the most famous internet lunatic fringe forums. More importantly she was an artist whose work Hardy found compelling. To top it off, from the pictures he'd seen of her, she was quite beautiful. Sometimes Hardy would catch a tidbit here and there of her interests, and due to their generational age difference, such were so far removed from his own set of the same that he would sit laughing to himself in embarassment. In so many ways they were such worlds apart, yet from her artwork Hardy fancied that they were also kindred souls. He could only hope that her star might always shine brightly, for the entirety of her life. Even with their great age difference he felt a real fondness toward her.
	It was sort of the same way with the Cambodian, Little Wing. Hardy knew that they were worlds apart, and he was over twice her age; yet he'd never seen any star, anywhere quite that bright. It were as though the relatively unknown young Cambodian woman were secretly the Queen of all of the world. That was how bright her star had been as it had revealed itself to he. Hardy could see the light in anyone's eyes; regardless of color or creed; but with Little Wing he'd once witnessed a supernova. No one had ever shined so much light on him, ever before.
	There were several of the Apsara who had been so dear to him. It was a shame how everything had ended there, but perchance it was for the best. He'd wandered alone for all of 44 years, so going forward he ultimately didn't see how - at most - another 30 or 40 years would bother him much. As far as he knew it would only be another year or three. He really couldn't see himself living to be the age of his parents, who were by then approaching 80.
	Sometimes he wondered if his oft-recurring sense of being mentally or spiritually violated were an inverse reaction to the fact that he fantasized about so many women whilst masturbating. He wondered if; whether he were to stop looking at pictures of women, and stop playing with himself altogether, if the - for lack of a better description - mind rape; the violation he were experiencing might go away as a result. He wondered if it were some kind of two-way street. He knew that all of the drugs he'd taken had also opened him up to metaphysical harassment, as well as his calling out from time to time for ostensibly unclean spirits in the middle of the night.
	He would read on the internet of people who'd been violated by supposed space satellites beaming images into their head, or by neighbors who'd been hired by off-the-books black ops agencies; neighbors who had employed smaller machines to 'beam' messages into the victims' heads, through apartment or house walls. He would read these stories and he didn't doubt that the technology were becoming available for 'spooks' to harass specific people. By the same token though he wondered what would happen if he made a strenuous effort on his own part to forget about sexuality; if the mind raping he'd experienced over the years might somehow be inhibited or stopped altogether. That is to say that he didn't totally buy into the 'innocent victim' pleas of the those who'd experienced same, so-called mind rape; and he was inclined to believe that it were a two-way street, and that the ostensible victim could bring an end to the 'attacks' - wherever they might in point of fact be originating from - by cleaning up their own houses so to speak.
	Sometimes he would dream of Lisa Robertson of QVC fame. He really liked it when Heidi Klum and Lisa Robertson would appear together on television. Heidi was a flat-out classic beauty, no matter how many children she might birth, and Lisa was a one of a kind in that she'd never procreated at all. Those C-cup breasts of hers must have been magnificent. There has to be nothing like a woman who reaches the end of her child-rearing years without ever having given birth. The breasts of such women are perchance the rarest of female beauty; and such women themselves are so few and far between in this world. Whatever the truth of any of that, he really liked Lisa Robertson, and when Heidi would appear with her it was a veritbale double-bonus. 
	Hardy didn't have a television set, but he could get screen captures of various broadcasts by frequenting certain specific internet forums; forums whose posters specialized in getting both stills and and video snippets from various television broadcasts, and posting them online. Such forums would be dedicated to preserving the images of women across all of the available mass media. Sometimes Hardy wondered if the more prolific posters to such forums had any lives themselves, other than making screen caps and videos of the women on television, and posting them into those same forums. It looked like some posters put a lot of hours into their efforts; so much so that he wondered if they might be spooks, paid to do the same; and that in turn the idea might be simply to waste everyone else's time. The theory went something like this: The prolific posters would be paid for their output, and in turn people such as Hardy would download those same images, and in so doing waste large chunks of time out of their own lives. 
	In any event, Hardy's favorite pictures from such forums were of the women of Univision, and Lisa Robertson of QVC, and starlets such as Michelle Trachtenberg. Of the Univision women he really liked Satcha Pretto, Barbara Bermudo, and a host of others including Ana Maria Canseco. Giselle Blondet had always been amazing, as well as Carmen - "jeepers creepers where'd you get those peepers; where'd you get those eyes" - Dominici, and Myrka Dellanos. Perchance Jackie Guerrido was the most beautiful of all of them. 
	He very much liked pictures of Japanese Racequeens, and some of the pictures of the Taiwanese Yin Ling as she appeared as part of "Team Mario" in this regard were all-time classics of that genre. He loved the various complexions of asian women in their tight, satin and sheer outfits. The sit, rqueen.com had one of the best collections of these, although they'd stopped posting updates after late 2005. There at rqueen.com, the collections went back into the early '90s. It was interesting to Hardy to peruse that site and see how the costumes of the racequeens would evolve over the years, generally from one-piece shimmering swimsuit outfits, into incredible mini-dress get-ups. Sometimes he wished he could be a racequeen, and be so beautiful as that.
	When he'd had a Youtube connection he'd not only uploaded a number of videos of his own making to the site, but he'd looked up bands he'd remembered from the past such as "Sweet" among others. As for the band Sweet, Hardy had never realized how many of the songs on the radio in the '70s had been by them. Watching the videos, he got a good idea of where transgenderism had manifested itself into society. Sweet were the ultimate prototypical glam band, presaging other greats such as "Queen" who would one day follow in their footsteps. Sweet was a great band; one that most people wouldn't generally think of whilst compiling a list of 'great classic rock bands.' He did have to admit to himself that the female hairstyle on the blonde singer was in a sort of fashion; silly. On the other hand maybe that wasn't the point. Perchance it could be said that 'glam rock' started with Liberace. In truth, androgynous or fru-fru musicians are probably a time-honored tradition.
	Sometimes Hardy would consider Aria Giovanni, and it seemed to him at least that she had a real way with the camera; that she could convey with her eyes that there were some sort of connection between herself and the viewer. Certain women seem to have this gift, and others do not. Perchance as well it depends upon the one doing the watching; that is to say that some women may be able to convey this 'connectedness through the camera' to certain specific men, and other women may be able to convey the very same thing, but only to a different group of men. Whatever the case of any of that, Aria Giovanni was one of those 'special' women in the eyes of Hardy.
	Of course from what Hardy had gleaned over the years - and as to whether that is saying a little or a lot is perchance anybody's guess - it appeared as though most women consider one another to be more or less equal in beauty or magnetism or any number of things in relation to the opposite sex. To put it another way, whilst certain males might try to 'rate' women on their 'attractiveness' where men were concerned, women themselves would fairly well; always see each other as equals in the beauty department. 
	The men who could understand this - such as Ben Franklin had seemingly done during his life - were more often than not also seen as the 'alpha males.' Such men perchance had the attitude that the bottom line surrounding sexual relations was that it were; at heart a chore for the men, and a choice for the women. So the man who is always 'ready to go' with regard to virtually anyone walking around with a vagina in between her legs; this is the man who would be crowned with the moniker of 'king' or 'alpha male' by both women, and other men alike.
	Hardy wondered what it might have been like if the Christ figure had been female, a 'Christiana' if you will. She would be beautiful yet completely outside of sex. She would be beautiful but he would never have to worry about her being with another man; she would be with no man, yet as is the case with Jesus but in the converse, with all men; without them physically but with them spiritually. She would have never copulated, or fornicated, or given childbirth; like a perfect counterpart to Jesus. Hardy told himself that if such a 'god woman' had been the center of worship, that he could have thrown himself into such a faith or creed. He fancied that a female saviour would be utterly enticing, adorned in satins and sheers, with pretty lingerie underneath, and musky perfume, with perfectly manicured nails, and wearing lipstick, with a glorious head of shimmering hair, and sashaying about in stiletto heels, and that she would wear full-fashioned stockings upon her shaven legs; and when she would speak her voice would utterly enthrall; yet beyond all of that she would remain chaste, and in this way be available to every man, yet to none. Certainly, when a Christian woman imagines her own Jesus, she sees in her mind a man who is utterly handsome, yet again chaste.

	Whatever else had gone on during his brief stint at the mini-mart, Hardy had been glad for the exposure to various people which he'd experienced there. In a way it had been a sort awakening; being back in direct touch with various people, and making talk with them no matter how large or small. Even though he would often fancy the idea of an empty store, devoid of customers; the contact had been good for him. Even if he had up and run away after a time, in his mind the fact that he'd lasted even 9 weeks under those circumstances meant that he'd made it further there than he'd ever thought he would. Whether his failure to return after that were indicative of some kind of losing effort on his part; or whether his ability to last even as long as he did were a sign of burgeoning maturity or even strength; he could not know for sure. He did know that, of all of the jobs he'd ever up and walked out upon; that the mini-mart was the one he missed the least. In contrast the one he'd missed the most had been the one at the airplane parts factory where he'd worked with the Cambodian women.
	One time, Hardy was browsing what, at that moment had been one of his favorite lunatic fringe websites, and he'd read rumours that; certain mass media figures and politicians and such would also frequent the same place. That day he thought he'd found firm evidence, indicating that Lindsay Lohan had made an anonymous appearance there. Someone posted a thread titled something like, "Look at what Lindsay Lohan is doing!" and the thread itself had links to pictures of Lindsay and her friends, and they were all sitting around a bong on a table. It were as though Lindsay had posted the pics of herself, trying to get a reaction out of the onlookers haunting the site. 
	Hardy thought that perchance Lindsay had posted the thread, linking to pics of she and her friends. He thought this because the pics weren't paparazzi pics, but rather had an intimate air about them. They looked as though they'd been taken by a friend of Lindsay's. Hardy posted about how he was worried about Lindsay's low weight, and hoped that she could get off of the booze and cocaine, and stick only with the weed. He also mentioned that he really liked dark-haired women; and that he wished Lindsay would wear her own hair dark; and further that he enjoyed the looks of one of Lindsay's friends in the pictures. The mystery poster replied something like, "Here; if you like that girl (the dark-haired one), here are some more pics of her" and then posted links to pictures specifically of that one friend of Lindsay; pictures of she and Lindsay; almost invariably depicting them in various social situations.
	The mystery guest said she'd gotten the pictures from such-and-such a website, and provided a link to the source. Of the actual photos she'd linked to from the fringe website; those had been copied and re-hosted on photobucket or somesuch. Curious, when Hardy had attempted to go to the original website, the link was dead. So there was someone, trying to make a buzz out of the fact that Lindsay had been smoking dope with her friends; and providing pictures which didn't appear to be from the public domain, but rather had the look that they'd been taken by personal friends of Lindsay, in various partying situations. He was almost certain that the poster of the picture links on the fringe website were none other than Lindsay Lohan herself.
	He had watched the, Mean Girls DVD, and during some parts he had cried. The picture did have at least a bit of the ridiculous social engineering or propaganda element to it; which admittedly all Hollywood films are wont to exhibit on at least some level, yet beyond that there were truly some touching and funny moments in the film as well. Hardy knew after watching Mean Girls that like Lindsay herself, Lacey Chabert was also very beautiful. 
	Hardy once read about Lindsay in the Enquirer, and found out that her father and she were having problems. Hardy could only hope that Lindsay would be ok. He was fairly certain that Lacey would be all right. Sometimes he wondered if he were secretly in love with Lindsay Lohan. Maybe he loved literally hundreds of women. Maybe he fell in love with one or more different women; every day, of every week, of every month, of every year, of every decade; for the duration of his life.
	Be any of that as it may, Hardy loved Lindsay's apparent natural hair color; that reddish tone which in his mind made him fall at her feet in adoration. It was the bleach blonde look which he found offputting. With her light eyes and the rest of her complexion, her natural hair color made the entire combination irresistable, at least in his imagination. He could only hope that in the real world she would find her place, and lay off whatever drug it might have been that were giving her problems; that she might stick with the weed, coffee, and cigarettes and eschew everything else except for perchance the occasional DMT or psilocybin trip. Further, he hoped that if she were ever to attempt psychadelics, that her experiences might be much more pleasant than his own had ever been in attempting the same.
	Whatever else she might do, Hardy could only hope that both she, and all women everywhere could find happiness; the same went for men as far as Hardy were concerned. He knew that no matter what, Lindsay Lohan had such beautiful eyes.
	Hardy had loved so many women; at least in his imagination in any event. Be that as it may, in truth each woman was so unique to him. There was no woman ever like any other. He'd wondered sometimes if women weren't connected by some kind of hive brain, yet despite their - at times - apparent similiarities in thought, each one was so different from the next. He knew as well that by then his heart belonged to the Apsara in general and Little Wing in particular; or maybe it were the chinese women who had seduced him in totality. Chinese women are so petite and beautiful
	Hardy had gone on and made more recordings, including the projects; Islands, People Places and Things, Saga, and Abbadon. From his 30th album forward he was really enjoying all of the new recordings that seemed to simply flow forth from him. These individual recordings didn't have the heavy drums which most people seem to demand in their music, nor did the stock measures or programmed beats as provided by the BOSS machine offer up any great deal of variety; but of the songs themselves, they displayed a kind of style which no one else had ever quite conjured up. Hardy may have been a complete unknown, and his music may have been shunned by humanity at large, but he knew in his heart that he was a fairly accomplished musician, despite any lack of accolades.
	He could have been better; at least perchance. Perchance if he had really concentrated on music to the exclusion of everything else; played and read and written music whilst ignoring computer programming or board games or video games or chess or pictures of women. Perchance if he had single-mindedly pursued music he could have nearly gained full control over the instrument of the guitar. As it is, the guitar is impossible to master. Hardy could have perchance in any event gotten closer to mastering it than he'd actually done.
	All of that aside, no one had ever played the guitar quite like Hardy. Even with his sometimes spotty practice habits, he'd managed to define another style on the guitar. Even if humans ignored him and his only real audience were demons from behind the veil, Hardy had ventured into heretofore unexplored musical landscapes.
	By the time of the making of the 40th disc, he had only then left the Cambodian women at the factory behind him; left them in a sea of misunderstanding and lost opportunities for friendship and love. After he'd quit the factory he'd put the finishing touches on the 39th disc, Abbadon. The presentation of Abbadon was nothing like the order in which the songs had actually been recorded. He'd started out in a defined pattern and with an exact idea as to how the songs would be ordered, but he'd given up work midway through the album and entered the factory job. Over the months which followed he'd found scant time to add to the half-completed album. As he'd added a song here and song there as time allowed, he'd decided to change the order of them; the original idea for the sequence of songs having been dissolved as he was left with a new sequence, completely divorced from the order in which they'd actually been recorded. For example the song, Sokhom which is last on the album project was actually recorded probably 5 or 6 songs from the end. A song like Haunted Fireworks had been one of the very first recorded for the album, but when all was said and done it had found its way to nearly the end of the playlist.
	Haunted Fireworks, Halloween Candy, New Model, Abbadon III, Grey Whales, Blue Kachina, Inhumanoids, Mortality, Campfire, Smoking: These had been the first songs recorded for the album. They had been presented in reverse order on the actual CD. The rest of the songs had been recorded in a much more random fashion, and given their spots on the album; they were placed in the sequence as if by whimsy more than anything else. The opening song of Valkyries had been recorded at the same time as Octopus Sea (right as Hardy had started working at the aircraft parts factory), yet Valkyries had been given the opening slot on the record. The 2nd song Latter Days had been hastily finished right after his having left the Apsara at the plant; much of the original song having been cut out, and the album eventually containing a shortened version. What had been cut from Latter Days then was saved and reworked as the chorus of Back in the Day on the 40th disc.
	The time between the end of the creation of the 39th disc and the beginning of the 40th was something like a month; a month spent in renewed solitude and wondering if he would ever recover from his encounter with the Cambodian women. The 40th, 41st, and 42nd discs were the most important ones in the entire collection as far as Hardy were concerned.
	When work began on the 40th disc, Hardy had sort of functioned as a man possessed. It could be said that the 40th disc almost made itself. New songs came out of nowhere; or old ideas which he'd bandied about for years prior would suddenly - as if literally overnight - crystalize into complete songs. The 40th disc - called Ouroboros - was his most ambitious project to date.
	He spent a not inconsiderable amount of time programming the drums for many of the songs. Drums had never been his forte, but at least on Ouroboros his drum sounds had been somewhat presentable to the public at large. In this regard it only helped that he loaded some drum kit samples onto the machine, and for the first time were employing a customized virtual kit; rather than one of the stock kits as supplied by the BOSS; a selection of stock kits which had provided all of the drum sounds from every project from disc 8 through disc 39. 
	Of course he was working with semi-professional gear in the 8 Track BOSS machine, so it all sounded as though he would never quite get a really professional mix as the end product of any given song. This was perchance by design. Hardy had never been an audiophile. He had never cared about the perfect mix. He knew that this was at least part of what was keeping him from being heard by the public at large, but in a way it was a relief that he could make songs which sounded good to him, but in remaining anonymous he would never have to kowtow to the tastes of the plebians.
	Perchance it were all an excuse; and that in point of fact his music were at least somewhat inhuman and this is why he never gained much of a human audience. The bottom line was that he had something which he enjoyed listening to, and in this sense he was truly divorced from the world of popular music and thus able to inhabit his own unique sonic realms.
	Perchance as a musician he were a bit like Hitler the painter in the effect that, within his chosen medium he were a fairly well-crafted technician, but that the human element was missing from so much of his work. Again, he didn't really know except to say that he enjoyed what he was doing, and it was at least a bit different from what anyone else had ever done.
	When he was mixing down the song Ouroboros, he was satisfied. It were as though, all of his life had led to that very moment in time. All of the failures, pains, and frustrations simply melted away and he was presented with a sound like nothing he'd ever quite heard before. The song was steeped in variations on minor; natural, harmonic, and melodic. With its ascending bass line; e f f# g g# a, it was the reverse of so many songs which had come before. With its guitar solo, employing melodic minor chords underneath a soloing guitar which switched between harmonic, melodic, natural, pentatonic, and even chromatic; he was very happy. The mix wasn't perfect but the song was perchance the most involved composition out of anything else he'd ever done. With its 3 separate sections, each with a different tempo than the other; with its allusions to the well-remembered Stairway to Heaven by the band Led Zeppelin, which itself had borrowed from music by the band Spirit; and from standard chord progressions such as the one presented by Eric Burden and the Animals in their rendition of, House of the Rising Sun; Ouroboros was at once both a unique take, and a remake comprised of bits and pieces of so much of what had gone on before. Whatever the case, it retained a sort of otherworldliness to Hardy's ear. Of course, he didn't have John Bonham on Drums or John Paul Jones on bass; he didn't quite play guitar like Jimmy Page, and his singing was virtually nothing like that of Robert Plant; but the overall feel of the piece combined with his own unique guitar solo provided the thing with a life of its own.
	In any event, it was when he was mixing down the first version of the song Ouroboros, that Hardy realized that his whole life had been worth living; just for that fact of having reached that point in his own creative development. If the song were for no one else yet only himself; even if that were to be the case Hardy could die satisfied. The playing wasn't perfect; as a matter of fact as time went on he would improve upon the progressions of the song, and learn to play them more ably, and dream of having a chance to re-record the thing. Yet even if he were never to get a chance to re-record the song, what he had done with that quickly-made original was a sort of the pinnacle to his creative process.
	Even if Hardy were to never get the chance to record that song again; with attendent improvements in the rhythm guitar, bass, vocals, and drums, and the overall mix; even if he were left with only the version of what he'd laid down on the album Ouroboros; the solo from the 'a' version of the song in particular was unlike anything anyone had ever done before. 
	The 40th album also contained many of his other favorite personal recordings. The entire lineup were cast of gems as far as he were concerned; from the tribute to Dio's, We Rock, which he'd in turn called, Let Us Rock, with its borrowing of motifs from '70s Deep Purple; to Baby Queen Surf Blues which was dedicated to Little Wing of the Apsara, and expressed the sentiment that due to their age difference, he wanted to be with her but could understand if it were only as her cuckold, and he only hoped that she would stay clean in her sexual liasons and not catch a social disease, the song laden with perchance his favorite guitar solos of all time, underwritten by a catchy bassline and understated yet fantastic rhythm guitar, all punctuated by the unearthly, massaged vocal and guitar sounds emanating from the KAOS II pad which he'd run each of them through; on to, After the War with its stark poem about a post-apocalyptic USA; followed by, Back in the Day with its lyrics about the 1970s, and how the Americans of his generation were partying while Pol Pot and his proteges had caused Cambodia to run crimson, and explaining how some of us had been duped by the fake occultism of certain rock and roll bands, who in themselves had in the end only been in it for the 'honey and the money,' to the verses describing Little Wing and how she might appear in his dreams; to the menacing simplicity of Ride With Me, with its allusions to Cambodian women and various snippets of rock and roll lore, streetwalkers, local gunfights, and the tragedy of life; and followed by, Queen of China with its continuation of the same progression such that the two songs - Ride with Me and Queen of China - ran together as one; and after that the aforementioned remake of Man on the Silver Mountain; then followed by Ouroboros; and finished by, Like an Onion, which - like Baby Queen Surf Blues and Ride With Me - was a song whose lyrics and singing were done in complete freestyle in a single take, warts and all, and of which the song Like an Onion had actually been the first song recorded for the album, but having been his least favorite of them all, had found itself last in the order of the final release. He loved the entire album. Lyrically, he was satisfied with what he had done across the spectrum of the entire project. The verses might have been uneven at various points there and about the record, but overall and despite anything else, they at least were an outstanding indicator of where he were in life. The employment of the KAOS II, custom drum kits, and hand-programmed drums, along with some of the best guitar work he'd ever committed to media; it all added up as being his strongest effort to date. Another thing which is apparently neither here nor there but which in his mind at least added another hand-crafted element to the record, was the fact that the lyrics were all; originally handwritten into a paper binder, and only later had been transcribed into digital media. Here are the lyrics for the entire album:

Let Us Rock

they say it can't be done
but you and i, we've only just begun
they will try to trample liberty
yet we set ourselves free
they're blind and cannot see
it is our destiny

let's rock
let us rock

our would-be jailers
will meet with failure
we'll win the day
come join the fray
we have the answer
we are the dancers, and they but the fools

let's rock


Baby Queen Surf Blues

you take that pill
find your thrill
drink that alcohol 
you might just fall
you say you gonna fuck
i wish you lots of luck
you're free
i hope you never get chlamydia
smoke that weed
it's fine by me
sometimes it seems like creampie
do or die
you're a queen on the scene
you've never been mean
seems like destiny
are you green, are you bleen
you're a queen 
you're so mean
don't you know
i'll set you free
without chlamydia
so you go
oh you shine some light
drink your alcohol
then you might fall
you take that pill
you find that thrill
i get my kicks
just spinning riffs
like a blitz
i love your tits
drink that alcohol
you're goin' for a fall
baby queen
babay queen
you know what i mean
sweet sweet babay
sweet sweet babay queen
don't you know what i mean
you shine white light
they hypnotize
sweet sweet baby queen
sometimes i think you know what i mean
take that pill
that one that gives you a thrill
drink that alcohol and you might fall
i shred my riffs to get my kicks just like a blitz
sometimes i'm simple minded
i know i'm often blinded
by the light that shines from your eyes
by your waist so narrow
and your ass so round
so simple
but so profound
so now you shine
it's ok if you wanna be wild
i'll sit here at home and wait for your cream pie
i'll set you free
and hope you stay away from chlamydia
sweet baby queen
little woman



After the War

after the war
we pitched pup tents on the floor
we'd all been at one time or another
great society whores
but there were no gildings in the bombed out buildings
we had our pellet pump guns under the electric sun
the interterrestrial drones undulated, unabated
there were no security gates
no budding, nascent keats and yates
we fished each day up on the new silver lake
and pondered as we wandered
and sauntered through the autumn
that year through a trail of tears
yet our fears were somehow calmed
as if by an invisible balm
and phosphorescent sunsets
lit the giving of the golden aged alms
we sailed the sea in search of the intact fisheries
(after the war, we sailed from shore to shore)
near cape hatteras
it was like the postage stamp had said
back when there was true friendship
despite the sellouts and the brownouts
we lit a fire that first night after the sonic attack
when the fed's computers were ultimately hacked
we'd fanned the flames with paper promises
illuminating our failure after the endless compromises
we hit the road and we drove on alone
until we ran out of fuel then we rode the mules
attempting to mitigate memories of our ultimate hubris
after the war the was no settling the score
foreign invaders had secured what had once been our shores
so we holed up in the mountains
and lived off of our hidden honey hoards
do you remember after the war?



Back in the Day

do you remember, back in the day?
we were young, and real, and full of ideals
that is when we were not pre-occupied with getting laid
do you recall when we wrote poetry by hand?

some of us were young men, and others peter pans
there at the gates of the promised land
do you remember, back in the day?
when liberty was more than a tired old saying?

when a world of possibility was more than a quaint quatrain?
we were so disconnected from the Vietnam
and Cambodia was but a curious place on the map
while we had our parties, they were fleeing the aftermath

how could anyone blame them considering
what they had seen and experienced
was nothing short of perchance true evil

some rock bands pretended to have made a pact
and some of us as young fools took them at face value
(solo)
when as it turns out there were in it for the money and the honey
what happened to old fashioned sincerity?

see you pretend to like the rough guys
yet the look in your eyes belies you
i see you making music; music in my dreams
perchance none of this; none of this is what it seems



Ride With Me

sweet sweet baby queen
take a ride with me
sweet sweet baby queen
(repeat 3 lines)
sweetest sweetest sweetest baby queen
do you know what i mean?
do you know what i mean?
take a slow ride
there's a shootout outside your door
on the street there's a painted whore
who could take advantage
of a life so very tragic?
tell me who
tell me who 
sweet sweet baby queen
take a slow ride with me
sweet sweet baby
take a ride with me
sweet sweet baby queen
you know i love you
if there's a bustle in your hedgerow
don't be a strawberry alarm clock
i met a girl from cambodia
sweet sweet baby
sweet sweet baby (oh yeah)
if i were a man up on that silver mountain
no matter how high i might climb
you will always be above me
so free
so free
so free
take a slow ride with me
i'll set you free
i'll set you free
we step out with lucifer



The Queen of China

She's the queen of China
She'll rule from Beijing to Barcelona
From Chengdu to Carolina

She's the queen of Asia
From Irkutsk to Malaysia
You can't say she hasn't changed you

The fireworks flew through the air
There above us at the county fair
It were as though we didn't have a care

The queen of China play with paper money
We give it to her and pretend it's really honey
She pretend it real, but in private she think it funny

The queen of China sit on throne
Now she make all the world her home
You see she civilized, it her birthright

And for those of us who thought we had god on our side
Even when we lose you see there's a silver lining
We get to play chess and dress the way they do in China



Man on the Silver Mountain

cover of a song by the band, Rainbow
one new lyric was added, 'the lady of the golden fountain'



Ouroboros

There is a lady who knows to make silver from gold
She rides Ouroboros to Elysium
She arrives in paradise; with a nod she talks to God
Even if she has no appointment
On a hill above the river there's an arrow in a quiver
Sometimes takers are yet givers
There's a sense one might get with their back to the West
And with all their being awaiting the queen from the East
(And the snake eats its own tail; whether in success or failure)
In my dreams I have gleaned what it means to be free
Amid music from other dimensions
If life is giving you a hassle, despite your castle
It's just a curtain call before the Fall
Yes there's a fork in the road; which only goes to show
The snake is circling sideways
You picked up a buzz from some chronic FEMA bud
The queen is singing, 'come to me'
Sweet baby can you hear the music, do you choose it?
The snake; it abides from within you
(solo)
As we head out on the highway
Our headlights dimmed because of air raids
There waits the queen we all desire
Whose eyes they radiate a fire
And now she's handing out true weal
About the streams and the fields
And if you seek with all your will
You will finally know the thrill
And the snake yet eats its tail
That those who search might never fail
Yet succeed beyond their wildest dreams
Someplace yet between Tartarus and Elysium
And the Ouroboros lives outside of space and time
And the queen is on our side



Like an Onion

baby
sometimes when we make our beds
we must lie in them
sometimes each one of us
sits down to a banquet of consequences
oh baby
your ass is like an onion
it makes me cry
baby
you gonna make me a custard pie?
if i pretend not to like it
you know it's a white lie
so we make our beds
and we lie down
late at night
someday we, each and every one of us
sit down to our banquet of consequences
don't keep me in suspense
you know i get so tense
every time i surf jeff rense.com
you know they might drop bomb
and of life we may not have long
but we live, we live, we live
oh baby
when i saw you with that drunken guy
how was it i weren't so surprised
even so, i thought i'd go roll up into a ball and die
and i wasn't even high
no i'm, weedless in seattle
down and sometimes addled
but i ain't no drunk
i ain't no skunk
though i like that smell
of skunk weed
it's not so much a need
as my neither here (n)or there deed
what is it with that weed
why do we disagree
you know you might be just like me
if you had grown up feeling
the end was always right there within reach
in mexico they say life is a beach
where are we goin'
where have we been
do you believe in original sin
you know it seems sometimes you just win
to maintain
despite the chains
yet what remains
can we contain
this will to blame
the others 
in our shame
can we break those chains
can we break those chains
in these latter days
you see that i remain unfazed
i see that you are oh so brave
your ass, your ass is like an onion
it makes me cry, cry, cry
what what is that light that you are a shining from within your eyes
can we activate
our 3rd eye
our 2nd sight
will we be the last in line
oh baby you're so fine
lips like red wine
oh yeah
can i prove to you i've risen above
the life of a swine
that in my heart is your gold mine
toe the line
you will find you've been blinded
by the blackened light
in this prison planet we deign as paradise
ob baby
little miss sparkly eyes
baby
i'm lovin' you
what you gonna do?
one day i saw you standin' there
not fair but medium
but without a care
flashin' me your wares
did i dare?
was i scared?
how is your awareness?
how is your awareness?
baby
what if they launch the missiles today?
while my opinions still hold any sway?
did you ever care about that anyway?
if i told you i was gay
would you believe that someone could conceive
of such old-fashioned happiness
away from that brainwashed television set?
do you want to be happy?
do you want to be free?
we make our bed yet we lie in it
because you are you and i am me
you know that freedom is impossible
there are only consequences instead
now go make your bed
and together or alone we face that fabled, imminent
hour of dread
but you get ahead girl
you make the world turn
you give out the lessons that we learn
you're immortal
i say that without chortle
without guffaw
you are inspiring my awe
and your ass is like an onion
it makes me cry cry cry cry cry


	He quickly followed up Ouroboros with a 41st album called, Day at the Improv (The Whine Album). The reason he continued to work with such great speed was more than anything, due to the fact that finances; or lack thereof were closing in on him. So he made an album, going back to stock beats as found on the BOSS machine, but with the custom drum kit as he'd done on Ouroboros. Overall, this disc was not strong. It was the fact of 2 or 3 really viable songs - or even just a few parts, or passages from within the same - which elevated the album as a whole to high status in his mind; that, combined with the fact that every single track on the album had been laid down in a single take, thus the Improv nomenclature. The first song, being yet another rendition of, Since I've Been Loving You and re-titled, Best of Fools was by far his best cover of the same to date. Among other things, it featured a great deal of ad-libbing in the lyrics, going above and beyond what the standard had contained. Again, he loved the guitar work. The 2nd song, Apsara Queen was another homage to Little Wing in particular and Cambodian women in general, interlaced with political, religious, and social commentary. It was a bit uneven, and the lead guitar in particular seemed to fall completely apart in spaces, only to somehow pick itself up and rejoin the fray with renewed vigour. The last song on the album, Touchdown Washington was a bit of a commentary on college football and celebration in life, mixed with deadly, accusatory socio-political commentary; the music itself being highly interesting to Hardy's ear. There were a number of whining, complaing lyrics on the album; and thus it was subtitled, The Whine Album. This was another album where the KAOS II played a large role.
	The 42nd record was a tribute to the song, Heaven and Hell as sung by Ronnie James Dio when he'd been in the band, Black Sabbath circa 1980. Hardy had taken the lyrics from the original song, then taken the 2 main parts and reversed them, putting the fast one first and the slow one second. He'd gone through the original lyrics and rephrased every one of them. He'd taken some of the guitar motifs from the original and also reversed them. Thus he'd created the bookends - first and last track of the album - and called both they and the album as a whole, Inferno to Paradiso. The overall album lyrics were for the most part extremely dark, but from a musical standpoint it was a groundbreaking part of Hardy's overall catalogue. He'd stuck once again to the stock drum measures of the BOSS drum machine, and as well had used a custom kit. The song, Hung Out to Dry seemed happy but if one listened to the actual lyrics in the midst of a sing-song voice, they were the letters of despair. The piece, Off to War was a simple 12-bar blues but with detailed lyrics mixed into it. It also included an old-fashioned chorus as found in an actual army boot camp, "Everywhere I go, there's a drill sergeant there."
	Latter Days was a remake of the song from the Abbadon release, yet without drums and done in a ballad form. The lyrics were expanded and bounded forth between the ridiculous and the sublime. Finally, Suburb of Hackensack was another memorable piece, with totally impromptu guitar lines. It also included a catchy, repeating chorus; "They didn't care, because their love was so fair," and a sort of 3-part-harmony chant intervening between the various verses which comprised the thing. The lyrics to the totality of that record were as follows:

Inferno

Azmodeus is forever a tailor
Weaving garments of desire
All ablaze with eternal fire

Some pretend that life is tragic
Never moving into the fantastic
The world has lost all of her knights and her maidens
And it's replaced it with a vision that is craven
It's the Inferno

Some will tell you that up is down
And that confidence springs forth from a clown
When you sit in silver twilight
Mist rises up from the ground to the sky
From the depths of the Inferno and I'll tell you why

In a place called Inferno
Wise man, you can find the answer
But you've got to cure your own cancer
And slay the necromancer
In the Inferno



Hung Out to Dry

hq sent the patrol 
forward without hope
the enemy was upon them
sworn and deadly foes
they fought until they died 
nothing left to do because
they'd been hung out to dry
mess with things unseen 
services no longer needed
everyone else is doing fine
yourself having long since
been hung out to dry
put the politician on the stage
according to script the opposition rages
they are all in their cages
as if of their own making
they will never understand the master plan
suffice it to say they will realize one day
that even worse than being caught in a fluffy puffy lie
they were instead all without exception hung out to dry
a man puts a girl out on the street
she addicted to crack which is her only pale ecstasy
she never thinks of walking away
but they'll surely hang her out to dry someday
some of us we shake our fists at gods both real and imaginary
it gets us nothing but silent lectures from invisible, ill-meaning fairies
and we carry on beneath that agonized, vindictive sky
as if waiting to leave this life
whilst most certainly without exception 
all but hung out to dry




Off to War

off we went to war
but no parades were thrown that day
they fought, all of them did
that very next fortnight

dogs, thugs, heroes and whores
out on the battlefield and dying by the score
the finest heroes met their death in those days
while all the battle wary dr smiths ran away

for fame not fortune be
there in that lost city
the one they saw on the horizon
those days and nights while the cannon were firing

and on the ground the staccato of machineguns was in the air
as the fighters above would wait and then pounce

those were their halcyon days
they fought for their women, their culture, their ways
and though they might be lost on any given day

what awaits the winner, his ultimate fate
for the battle won today is but a delay
as against that ultimate doom 
from whence its thundering throes 
echo that there is in the end but no real escape

and of the war just ostensibly won
itself being but a single score on a scoreboard 
one of thousands of the same tallies
it's all in the game
today we choose who to blame
last year's scapegoat is tomorrow's fashion statement

they went off to war
and win or lose
they gave it the best they had
myriad heroes lain in far off lands
and scoundrels could be heard cackling in candlelit rooms
out beyond those thundering guns of carnage and doom

remember those days with fondness as we do
and we sit about in easy chairs sipping lemonade
these decades later
with our medals on our chest
sharing drinks down at the local nest
engaging in hopefully witty repast
with our tales of the battlefield
how kings were kings and maidens were maidens
before or after the foreign invasion

sometimes it was their ideals instead
they had a committee saying everyone would be well fed
guns and butter
and marching bands
and loudspeakers and newspapers throughout the land
fashion statements of long former dictatorships
lived on in the minds of certain as yet unnamed would be downtrodden tazer victims

let us, the yet living go back to our women
and make anew thrice what we lost those years 
due to an ulimately tragicomical toss of those cosmic dice
and we will say we have conquered all fear




Before and After the Latter Days

i want to adorn you
make you more beautiful in my eyes
and if that's sick
you can find someone else
to tell you truth or lies

you call me reprobate
because of where i choose to participate
but you're the real fiend
with your democracy
and your funny money
so leave me be
and embrace this tyranny
you have chosen for yourselves
and everyone else as well

remember the days when we were free
and you used to wear sheer bikini panties for me
even though you thought i was insane
you said it was good if i got my way
once in awhile

so you dressed in my style
adorned to the nines
yet never shorned
and somehow it meant so much to me

that you didn't mind my quirks and idiosyncracies
you said you'd dated worse like that undercover neo-nazi

and you know me if you treat me right i'll stay by your side
day and night
now for me to find a way to my own self respect
that i might never reject
anyone who comes knocking at the door
perfumed concubine or street whore

just give me more
of that thing which bore 
us all
whether in winter, spring, summer or fall

and fly as we might
tonight is the night
we are satisfied
with our women and our imbibements once proscribed by those pretending to be wise men 
who themselves were but puppets to the usurpers

yet we found all that was pure and it was the cure for all our hurt
and you mean so much to me
whether you dress in bikini panties or just a trashy thong

you know it's never wrong
no matter what i say
come and go as you may
today is the day
for the last final parade
where we shed our skins
and everyone sees everyone else's sin

and it's nothing we were never thought not to have been born into
but you and i we get used to it
once we find our wings
and sing
and affection rules the day
and harmless panty raids
and backyard barbeques
and cars that go vroom
baby you're a star
i just know you are
i want to give this to you
my heart you see
such sweet baby queen
and so much more than that to me
you made my being
even whilst fleeing the scene
thank you from realms pristine
baby you're a star
i just know you are



In a Suburb of Hackensack

in suicidal collusion with a rope of delusion
submerged in the sea of subterfuge
his thrist unslaked in the lake of fakery
in a day and age where the only consistency is chaos
they said the bugs would be gone with the release of the os
and their marketing arm was dining with the debutantes
he fell under her spell 
so many years ago
in her thrall he hears her call
they say he's lost in space
that he has no place
that his love for her is fake
but he can't change his ways
and waits for the day
for fate to unveil its ultimate prize
blinding to the eyes
of those who never criticized
their own loss of personal rights
that's what they do when they treat the children like adults
and the adults like children
whatever happened to the likes of bettie page 
today sweatpants and tshirts are the rage 
he misses the old days at least in that way
and he would never ask a woman to wear anything he himself wouldn't wear... 
there was a girl who wished she were a boy and a boy who wished he were a girl 
and as to whether that meant ragnarok was anybody's guess... 
but some people out west are heading for the hills because of the volcanoes and tsunamis. 
and it rains in california and seattle is dry. most people try not to ask why 
which is just as well because if that shadow were to ever catch them 
they might know a terror beyond our dimension 
beyond the mention of the ivory tower pharisees 
with their mechanical humming bees and tenured pedigrees and endless speaking fees 
and in the darkened doorway he stood there shivering beholding the ultimate cocktease 
there with bikini panty lines beneath a skirt which did shine as her blouse was sheer 
and her bra was satin and she was reciting an incantation in latin and he was hers in the candlelight 
all tongue tied and beyond satisfied at the ultimate meaning of her denial 
and their neverending discussions on the nature of cold fusion 
which more or less always ended in confusion 
but their love grew despite the onslaught of the nancy drews 
who lived up and down their cul de sac 
in the suburb of hackensack but they didn't care because their love was fair



Paradiso 

There's an asian queen across the sea
She's calling you and me
She wears a garter belt and she knows you well

Recite me a poem like an earth gnome
Do us right you're the bringer of the light

Tell me a tale, storyteller
Then let me be from your curse set free
Satan was never a lover
We are into ourselves and no other
And we go off the deep end to Paradiso

The ones who cherish never perish
And begin is another word for end
The more the confusion from your leanings
Some would call your vision unseemly
And some go off to the depths of a Sothoth trough

If it looks to be fake it's for the taking
For every little white lie there's truth do or die
Hatred is seen as the cancer; Some give their blood for necromancers
And we go off the deep end to Paradiso
Forever without end


	In the end, even as much as he'd enjoyed making so many musical recordings, he knew that he could yet improve further on what he were doing and make and album that might contain great production values. As it were, most of his collection sounded like a series of demo tapes. This was fine where he were concerned; he listened to his own recordings quite a bit. In his mind though; if he were to, at any point reach a wider audience, he must first craft an album that displayed pristine production values. So even though he were once again without recording gear, he continued to write. As mentioned before, he had revamped Ouroboros and made it even better. He'd also written a number of wholly new songs. The only thing by then was to find the time and the money, and in having both; have the chance to make a 43rd disc; something better than anything he'd done to that point. He would build that album from the ground up; find gear which could produce a suitable mix; and go after a really outstanding drum sound, even if the same didn't entirely matter much to him.

	
	This is where the story line gets a bit fuzzy. Everything written here up to this point was taken from a series of relatively cogent notes. Of the earlier-mentioned MP3 player and its audio recording abilities; the recordings were backed up to optical media, at least one copy of which was found in a back alley dumpster behind a restaurant in the Wallingford neighborhood of the city of Seattle; by a transient aquaintance of mine. Neither my aquaintance nor I have any real idea as to the veracity of the spoken tales contained in the 32k audio wave (.wav) files which comprised the list of recordings. There were around a 100 hours of recordings in total, all claimed by our Hardy to have been made in a period just following his life-shattering experience with the psychadelics. Amidst a great deal of otherwise aimless rambling, the earlier (by date) recordings spoke of his ideas about life, and told a number of tales of his past; and then of his time at the mini-mart. Obviously, he had spoken quite a lot about the music he'd made; and of the women he'd apparently found so fascinating. The last recordings were comprised of an ever-increasing mumbo-jumbo of what I can only refer to as being garbled stream-of-consciousness. The reader can only speculate that, maybe Hardy had at some point become irretrievably touched, and that the last series of recordings reflected this. In any event I will attempt to reconstruct those later recordings within the remainder of this narrative. I can't transcribe them verbatim as they would most likely be but  utter nonsense. With that in mind, I've taken it upon myself to try and glean the originally intended meaning from the same, and reconstruct what it  had been that our Hardy were finally trying to say. At last, wherever possible and for the sake of even greater readability, and as with the rest of this story; yet at the risk of lessening or even ruining the overall dramatic effect; and by the same token, as with the preceding, I have re-arranged the following ramblings from their original, first-person ("I") context and put them into second-person ("He"). 
	My only other comment might be to say that our anonymous protaganist seemed to have a penchant for detail, but much more often than not; only where topics of great interest were concerned; the female form, music, food, dreams, boardgames. Of the rest of it, he was for the most part very sketchy on the visual details of the store and other locations referred to from the course of his life; or even how the chinese woman had appeared, beyond that she wore glasses; or for that matter how any of the women in his life would appear, except as to note the shape of their bodies or whether or not they were adorned to his own perchance odd specifications (satins, sheers, stiletto heels, long hair). 
	The whole of his audio narrative seemed to serve as a mere skeleton or frame reflecting reality, but so many of the details were left blank. As a result, the prose related here might cause more speculation on the part of the reader than it ultimately answers. It could be said that, maybe the person who had made these recordings; the narrator had a sort of variation on Asperger's Syndrome. This would explain his apparent social retardation; his isolation; his fascination with the intricate details of certain things to the exclusion of all others; his being lost in the forest yet unable to spy the proverbial trees which comprised the same. It might appear that his story is lacking in humanity, but in truth it reflects a certain, very real type of person. He may have, over time become an actual alien to his native culture. On the other hand, his apparent grasp of, and seeming desire for; all things Asian only continued to grow. Had he rejected the land of his upbringing, or in fact had the obverse been the case? One can only speculate. Certainly something had apparently driven him into the spiralling abyss of insanity.

	The tan, African-American with the playful blue eyes and the non-stop stacatto speech patterns, full of commentary on pretty girls gone South as crack whores; Kuwaiti oilfields ablaze from which Lucifer had made entry; the relative equivalence of virtually every human being of every stripe, one to another; the regrets of failing family relationships repaired by a last-moment healing of hearts; expoundments upon the efficacy of honest-to-goodness floor scrubbing as opposed to mops; the merits of one package of jujubears versus another; the miracle of instant and ongoing sobriety; the tragedy of cultures erased in the face of empirical misadventure; allusions to the fact that some people witness things in life so overwhelming as to force them back into their shells, where they might live yet only inside their head for the duration of their stay here; sermons of sort on the characteristics of Lucifer as opposed to Jesus; reflections on the truism that you can call a steadfast man most anything you want, as long as you don't call him late for dinner; that it all came down to a fully belly; the difficulties of maintaining a balanced marriage relationship, and how the modern man must fight through the lies he's been given in order to restore some equity to his own house; these were among the topics the man approached Hardy with. Had he appeared in the store but more than thrice? How was it that he could evoke such apparently instant fondness on the part of Hardy, particularly in light of that fact that the man had mitigated Hardy's first impression that he were most of all a tweaker; perchance a street dealer? Somehow the man had found Hardy's wavelength, and despite the odd early transactions at the register, had disabused Hardy of any notion that he might be a danger to him, and had instead moved them into mutual amicability, and all in the space of but three short visits to the mini-mart. Of course Hardy's trepidation toward most every night visitor could never be fully allayed, but the fast-talking, tan man with the bright eyes had certainly enjoyed more success than most anyone else in that regard. It couldn't be ascertained if that were actually the man's intent, but regardless of motivation that had been the overall effect.
	Sometimes Hardy thought his family so retarded; like himself. In the end he was the only cripple; the family gimp; not in any real sense, but yet in a thunderingly metaphysical way. His family members; siblings, nieces and nephews, and parents alike were actually - each of them - quite gifted in their own ways. Isn't this the face of all of humanity, regardless? Perchance even Hardy had some gift of which he might one day share with the world, and they - the rest of humanity - might joyfully receive the same; but up until then he'd been one of any multitude of lost souls who had for whatever reason decided to keep his own lamp under the proverbial shade. We are all born with gifts; our own lights. Why do so many forces in life conspire to cause these lights to dim into eternal darkness whilst never in the meantime having truly shined? It's been said that introspection begats undue morbidity, and in the case of Hardy with regard to his immediate family we find a case in point.
	In truth, there was nothing wrong with his family members. They were all without exception valid participants in the human race. If they had been any different than they actually were, the world would have gained nothing. Hardy was the one who needed to learn to accept himself. Hardy was the one who for whatever reason were hell-bent upon agonizingly slow self destruction. Hardy was the real piece of work; and not very much at all in a good way. In the end he would let his family be as they were; and the same went for his remaining friends. Of business associates, he had none. Of acquaintances, there were the panoply of characters who would pass through the mini-mart, some with clockwork repetition; others at random intervals; and yet more who would patronize the store but once and fade off into the good night. Who was Hardy to judge anyone including himself in any way shape or form in any event? It was a clear signal, a blinding beacon of reality that in his loneliness and inability to get along with others; that he were the one with problems in social interaction; that he were the one who needed work in accepting all of the vast and disparate members of humanity at large. Perchance the mini-mart had been at least some small antidote to his lifelong, spiralling isolation. Who could tell? In the end the most important thing he could do would be to absolve any of those around him - be they family, friends, or whoever else - of any perceived malfeasance toward him; and in truth the same were much more often imaginary than real. He had certainly gotten everything he had deserved out of life. Another thing which he desperately needed was to forgive himself, not only for the ways in which he might have wronged others along his path through life; but in the ways in which he had most certainly hurt himself. The final thing would be to find an acceptable place in the universe, whether that meant a rejuvenated life, or in the acceptance of death itself.
	How he tired of the triflers at the store. Of course he'd been dogged by the same all his life, but at the store and there behind the cash register, the methods of triflers had been plainly exposed for him to see. Of course, this was probably just another one of those things which he'd brought upon himself. So many times, when a trifler would enter the store, trifle with Hardy, and then leave Hardy standing there in a tizzy; Hardy would reflect upon his own life and how he could have at least been perceived by any outsider on so very many past occasions to have been quite the trifler in his own right. That is to say that if you don't want to be fucked with, you probably should avoid fucking with other people in the first place. It is quite true that the proverbial pathetic soul who is invariably the target of the random bottle thrown into the crowd; such is the myth and in truth is rarely found scaling the annals of real, day-to-day life on earth. Certainly in Hardy's case he weren't the instant rigarmarole attractor. His being trifled with had taken a lifetime of petty mucking with the others about him, that the boomerang effects of his being on the short end of the petty-trifling-stick might finally be achieved with great consistency. As the triflers would leave the store, he could only reflect on some of the idiotic things he'd done in interacting with others, and realize that he were no better than the mini-mart triflers who would seemingly invariably leave him in a fuming flummox. Sometimes he wondered about reincarnation, and if he might arrive in another life and simply keep his mouth shut, and avoid interacting with anyone else much at all; that he could mitigate the sort of ongoing stream of pointless and taxing interaction which had so plagued him during his own present life; but to reiterate he had brought it all upon himself. To put it another way, it was fairly certain that he wasn't one of those archetypical good people of whom bad things happen to. Certainly bad things had happened to him, but he wasn't one of the good people.
	Once he had discussed with Cambodian women; how life and kharma might actually work. They talked about how certain people seemed to get away with everything, like the bankers who could print up money out of thin air and lend it to the rest of us at interest. Perchance in the conversation, the women were speaking of Pol Pot and his ilk, who had led the Khmer Rouge and in so doing had brought such eventual and total misery - abject death and destruction - to Cambodia. As it turns out, Pol Pot died before he was ever tried for anything which had happened. Many of his fellow cadre were also able to pass without ever having faced a tribunal. Whatever the case may have been, the Cambodian women and Hardy agreed that it seemed like some people could get away with an awful lot, and other people were mired in woe for no apparent reason; a series of small or large tragedies which could give some certain people no rest in life; disasters they'd obviously neither sought to bring upon themselves, and in no way had even appeared to deserve. So among them they postulated that maybe there were a Cosmic Kharma Bank, and from lifetime to lifetime a spirit could build up a large positive account, and then during a lifetime of negativity, spend it all without any apparent earthly reprecussion. In this way the Buddhist truism of "You get what you deserve" would yet hold sway over the myriad, intertwining strands of destiny. To be fair, it could also as well be that virtually no one understands either Kharma or Dharma. 
	The world is filled with onlookers wishing ill upon others, on the basis of what has ostensibly passed before. These self-styled judges of humanity seem to have it within themselves to know exactly how each person they ever encounter should be punished for crimes both real and imagined, and why it should be so.
	Be any of that as it may, Hardy enjoyed the store when it was empty. He could think of no good way to drive customers away. He might pretend he were insane in order to drive a certain obnoxious, serial trifler away. This could easily backfire. What if his - however feigned - display of insanity were to actually attract a trifler closer to him, even to the point of some physical altercation involving police or even morticians? It was all he could do just to try and ride an even keel; to weather the machinations of the triflers; to find a way to escape the place that he might no longer have to deal with the monster which was making its presence known to an ever greater extent with each passing night.
	At first, the appiration had been nothing more than a quick, blackened cloud passing at once from the corner of his eye, disappearing as he would turn his head to see what were there. It might manifest as a series of rattles from the back of the store. He thought next to nothing of it.
	
	After the incident which resulted in revealing of the Process Cult, the the Raven Girl had arrived. She had known Hardy from the beginning. At some point he would pine for her to the point of madness, whilst his friends would look on and tell him it weren't possible for him to love her. Then one day at the height of his passion she was lavishing a friend of his with affection as he watched in shattered disbelief, and as a coup de grace she said, "Hardy, I would laugh if you died at my feet!" He did nothinig, yet flew into an internal rage, and perchance it were then that his doppleganger had been born. In the night he tried to get back at her through a failed suicide attempt, after having left all manner of uncouth remark toward her in large painted letters at strategic locations about the neighborhood they both inhabited; Wallingford in the city of Seattle, circa September 1981.
	In looking back 27 years later, he deeply regretted that he'd ever written such things about her for all to see. He regretted that he hadn't died that night. He wished instead that he had only gone to her feet at the moment of her soul-shattering words that day, and said something like, "Ok, let's do it." He realized only decades later that if his death at her feet might have given her laughter, that if he had truly loved her he would have given himself up to her in that very fashion. What happened instead might have spawned events which then snowballed from there, and spiralled out of the control of everyone; whether involved in the scandal or not.
	Somehow he had spawned a doppleganger that night. It were a twin of sorts, yet born out of every slight, both real or imagined which Hardy had ever suffered, and hailing forth from nightmarish realms the likes of which only the most hardened of the criminally insane might feign to comprehend. She had also careened off into a seeming madness her own, but of course she were in control and he had long-since lost his own. At some point after all those years, Hardy realized that if she were to be happy it might just take his willingness to die at her feet while she laughed. He did his utmost to become willing then.
	He knew that no matter what horrors he may or may not have spawned through his intolerable behaviors then; that now he might yet have a chance to make it all right again. If he could somehow reach her and she in turn might wish to take his life in an act of his contrition. Perchance she had already taken his life those years before, and he were only then beginning to finally realize it. What misdeeds had the doppleganger manipulated toward its own hideous ends? How many other fiendish doubles had been spawned in similar circumstances as a result of other human interaction throughout the aeons? Was he going mad? How could he think such a thing?
	To know that he'd once carried the madness of fancying himself an avatar on the level of St. John's beast of the book of revelation; to know that he'd toyed with the idea and rejected it, only to have it later pursue him out of seeming nowhere, and then for the forces behind the whole thing to drop him like a bad habit; where was it all leading? Were it not enough that he and thousands of similar ilk had thought themselves ever so special? He knew of the lies which he'd labored beneath. How he'd ever come to entertain the same was beyond him. How invisible forces had taunted him with the whole thing was another great mystery. Yet what about the doppleganger emanating from some loathsome black whole outside of space and time? How much damage had it wrought in manipulating human affairs and using his spite as fuel in its malevolent machinations? So many disasters had his metaphysical fingerprints all over them, yet no one could notice. Hardy and the Raven Girl had spawned a demon; at least one demon; if not two or more. How many other demons had been spawned unbeknownst to a cheerfully ignorant humanity; spawned by the very same sorts of seething interactions between man and woman?
	What would it take to stop the bloodshed? How many more human lives might be birthed, only to be sacrificed at the whim of the pharisees? How could he as a proponent of liberty and all manner of license be painted as the evil one, whilst the keepers of the legal codexes were somehow seen as those with the actual ear on the one hand and megaphone on the other - of the most high God? How could they deign to holiness whilst Hardy and his ilk labored under the yoke of being the evil ones? Hardy knew that to use menses in ceremonial magic could greatly mitigate if not stop altogether, the need for actual human sacrifice. Why was this knowledge being suppressed? Everyone claims to be against killing, yet it goes on and on and on; "Like Heaven and Hell."
	Ronnie James Dio was appearing in his dreams. Was Ronnie his spiritual father? Dio was certainly the greatest rock and roll singer of all time; bar none; far and away. Robert Plant was a hack; Ozzy Osbourne a joke; David Coverdale and Ian Gillan (by then, "Silent Scream") were at best poseurs. Perchance only Minoru Niihara of Loudness could approach the greatness of Dio. Rob Halford had always been too butch; a great singer with questionable material. Maybe the singer from Grim Reaper had been as good as Dio once, but his material had also been a tad weak overall, and his apogee had been quickly reached and he'd burned out like a shooting star. On the other hand, Dio's career had spanned 50 years by then - FIFTY YEARS of rocking and rolling.
	Were the dopplegangers such as ostensibly spawned by Hardy and his interaction with the Raven Girl (not that any of it had ever been in any way her responsibility, but rather only his); were they by then shining forth from their shadow realms, primed and ready for an actual invasion of the physical plane? Had they manipulated things behind the scenes for centuries and were they of enough energy that their manifestation here were immanent? Was the ongoing conflict between male and female resonating in the ethereal realms, and in its attendant, overarching angst reverberating back into the world of the physical; to such a degree that vast changes were in the wings from what had henceforth been from afar, but now were drawing deadeningly near?
	Things were happening around the store at night. The shadow being was flitting about the corner of his eye. He was hearing things. Arson was taking place nearby. Women were being attacked on the streets. Customers were increasing in belligerance. He didn't know how much longer he could asuage the apparent vitriol of so many of them; and he had no idea when one of them might lunge across the counter and stab him, or pull a gun and shoot him, or when a group of them might appear in the parking lot with baseball bats as he were sweeping. He worried about the chinese woman. By the same token he saw that she were more brave than he; at least in that regard; for the store was her life; it was just a transient gig for him. Was it only that? Maybe the job at the store, and the relationshipo with the chinese woman were both of great importance in his life and he simply could not fathom the same.
	Despite the onset of ever gathering madness, he knew that his way of employing menses as a blood sacrifice to the earth were superior to cluster bombs, and depleted uranium, and bunker busters, and heavy artillery; that sexuality needed to morph into sensuality and the generation of human progeny might slow to the point where each of us might have adequate space; that his championing of the plants were superior to industrialized pharmacology; that music and affection and food and dream-like sleep and games which involved healthy competition but not organized physical harm might be the only way for humanity to emerge from the grasp of the ever-encroaching fiends who were at that very moment ripping holes in the veil. If the veil were to break in any profound way, humanity's future might be dire indeed. How he yearned for the witch to gather him in, that he might submit with all his heart to the song of the bottomless pit; that she might dispose of him in some way which would ultimately be for the benefit of all. Somehow it must be that satins and sheers and stiletto heels might carry the day; might lift humanity into a golden age of harmony rather than the cascading discord which in its deadly flowering had tainted the lives of so many.
	He wanted to escape his family and the few friends who yet remained; for a Lady Cab Driver to pick him up and take him to her castle; that he might not be a burden to others any more. Insanity was encroaching not only upon him, but upon the whole of humanity at large. What was going to cause the necessary change? Were they all to die in a cloud of radiation poisoning, a miasma of encroaching fungus, at the hands of monsters from underground laboratories, in an explosion of the sun, an onset of Ragnarok? Perchance it were all just as well. He kept telling himself that he knew better. If there were a Jesus who demanded praise from a willingly subjugated humanity, he told himself that he could abide by it. What choice would he have in any event? If there were and almighty God; and a person could only be happy by the submitting to and praising of the same; it were yet another concept of the Ouroboros. Let The Circle Be Unbroken. Whatever it might be that were spiralling in the direction of humanity as a whole, he redoubled his efforts and steeled himself for whatever eventual outcome there might be. After it all, he was content that he had from time to time enjoyed those first bites of food where everything were completely right, if only for a moment. He was happy that he had witnessed the awesome splendour of the female form. Music had been such a great friend. Sleep and dreams had given him witness to the possibility of untold worlds. Chinese Chess was such a beautiful game.
	He knew more than anything that it was time to take a stand; time to act. He could no longer linger about the shadowy periphery of humanity; a witness to so many of their foibles yet an intentional non-participant in so many ways; perchance the most important of ways. He needed to participate in some meaningful manner, assuming the same should actually exist; it had to exist; what else could there be outside a miasma of mundane meaninglessness? Such were in the end unthinkable. He needed to forge ahead. His days of languish were done. What was it that he could do? Every avenue of approach had been blocked. The spirits had snubbed him. How could he make recompense with the fickle phantasms from behind the veil, that he might at last be led upon something other than the deadly primrose path? How could the high road be regained, when he and those around him without exception seemed to be all on the low? Were it as the days of Shamgar, son of Anat?
	At times and late at night while he wrestled with insomnia, it seemed as though the shadow of Apnea might hover over him. She had such a perfect ass. Could she ever love him the way he needed to be loved? Was he but a ridiculous - indeed grotesque - caricature of his former self? Did the Raven Girl hold sway over the remainder of his life, even to the point of death? Perchance his gnawing hunch were indeed more than a Will o' Wisp and and only his death at her feet as she looked on in detached bemusement, or even gratuitous laughter could bring the entire nightmare to an end.
	He wanted to leave his family and friends, not only because he seemed to depend on them where by all rights he should have been his own person in certain such unnamed regards; but even moreso because he was to be quite frank, frightened at the prospect that his interaction with demons over the years might spill over to an even greater extent than perchance it might already have; that it might suck them in their ostensible innocence in any spiritual regard, into a miasma which by all rights should have been only his own. He wanted his failures to resonate only within him; his having been marked to pay some terrible price to end with his loss and his alone; his foolishness in having tempted the spirit world to take from him and nobody else. Perchance in this way at least he actually did care about the people around him. He simply could no longer take the risk that his activities from the past might form an irresistable vortex and pull everyone in his path into it; as if his spirit had become some kind of abominable metaphysical tornado which only grew in strength and demanded the sacrifice of ever more time, ever more space, ever more blood, more souls, more minds, more bodies, more, more, more. How could he shield his loved ones from his own cruel fate? There was no saving him. How could the unfolding vortex be annulled? He was going mad. 

	The locals seemed to actually care about what the chinese woman thought of them. She had some kind of psycho-sexual hold on everyone around her. Even after she had called the police after a man for innocently passing her a counterfit $50 bill; he had yet returned to patronize her store. One day he had gotten the $50 at the bank; spent it at the store; and gotten his change and stood in the parking lot reading the paper in the middle of the day. The next thing he knew he was being swarmed by undercover cops as she'd called the police on him after the failure of the bill to pass the test of the special marking pen. If she had been fair with him, couldn't she have rejected his bill out of hand, and sent him away? Rather, instead she had taken the bill as though it were legitimate, then unleashed the full fury of earthly law enforcement upon him.
	Of yet another man; Hardy had witnessed one morning as she'd driven him nearly to tears during an argument. Why did any of these people care what she thought? How could she stir Hardy's loins so? Perchance it were a nightmare, disguised as a dream, masquerading as but overly banal waking hours.
	Where had those oh-so-happy times with the Cambodian women in the factory gone? They were all monsters; Hardy and everyone else. He began to sense it at first, and later he could nearly see it. Were they all monsters? The chinese woman was a drug dealer. Her drugs were legal, yet for the most part more deadly than any prohibited substance. Where had all of the '70s pot gone? He needed some Panama Red; Thai Stick (even opiated); any one of a myriad offerings of Mexican; Humboldt County; Puna Bud; Maui Wowee; even a back of simple green commercial; a 4-finger bag of green for $15; a quarter ounce of killer Colombian for $15. '70s weed was so good. Why was it all KGB, FEMA, Red Chinese Secret police; utterly blotto any more? Why had they taken away the best pot, and replaced it with weed that was simply too stony for day-to-day use? Maybe it weren't the potency, but the cost. How could such a thing be illegal? What a crazy world it was. The Cambodian dancers would haunt him at night. His remote viewing started to occur; yet he couldn't control it. Visions came and went with alarming regularity, but it all seemed random while at the same time being oh-so-real. How had he developed remote viewing? Maybe one aspect of the lifting of the veil was that everyone was going to become aware of what everyone else were doing; the advent of The Overmind; Childhood's End. 9/11 hadn't gone down the way they said it had. You would be amazed and terrified if you really knew. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Had that been the ghost of Maria? Where had that Susan B. Anthony dollar come from, and why had the girl asked for change for the same when she didn't even need it? How had she commanded his desire in a mere matter of moments? How could his arousal increase whilst his best sexual days were supposed to have been behind him? Was he being mind raped? He missed the Cambodian women. He wanted to see the Vietnamese women again, and the Laotians and Hmong. He wanted to cavort with the Filipina missionary, the one who drove him insane whenever they met, and the desire for whom drove him insane with guilt. He couldn't lust after a Christian Missionary Woman. How could he do that? Could he think that? He couldn't. He liked her husband. How could he think that? He had to let them go; ask some unseen force somewhere - be it Jesus or whatever else - to mitigate his desire for her; to disabuse himself of that notion; to hope for the best for them; to finally let go. The spectre of the Raven Girl hovered. How could that possibly be? Where had she gone? Was she ok by then? Did she work at Montauk now? Melissa Pentauk had better get real. She is a psy-op. Why had he wasted his time with her? Perchance she were too convenient an excuse. BDSM people have spoken of male submissives masqerading as dominants; the question remaining unasked were as to whether a male dominant could masquerade as a submissive. The terminology itself was too limiting. Promiscuous women often lost their lustre. What that the truth? No one knew of the hideous reality behind the event at Virginia Tech; or the Maryland Sniper; the Columbine Killings; the chicanery rife at Laurel Canyon throughout the '60s, and before and beyond. Was Curt Cobain a CIA brainwashing victim? Had they murdered Jimi Hendrix? Do they raise celebrities up beyond their actual station, only to demolish the same in whatever flight of whimsy might overtake them at any given moment in time? Who are they? If you don't know, does that make you one of them? In buddhism there are no "us" and "them." All is one. The We/They Dichotomy is for losers. His friend from the Nicheren Dai Shonen - a regular Billy Graham of Buddhism - had once told Hardy that. His deceased uncle, who had once been a Christian missionary, had related as to how the Nicheren Dai Shonen had - in 1960s Japan - been known to drag Christians from church and beat them in the streets at an attempt at tough love. Who was behind the Sarin Subway attacks? Had anyone ever infiltrated area 51 and survived? What ghastly mutant robot soldiers haunted any number of multiple secret underground bases? One of the greatest rock singers of all time was Mike Vescara of Loudness. Some people prefer only the material with Minoru Niihara, but the albums with Vescara are outstanding in their own right. Trust no one. That was what they said. Did they speak the truth even though by then they'd led everyone not to believe them? It was the royal scam. Who was the chosen? Could the menses rituals mitigate their slaughter? Who could untie the Gordian Knot? Who could remove the sword from the stone? People don't possess power, but rather it progressively, relentlessly, and without remorse works to possess them instead. Why did Jesus and Lucifer fight, seemingly employing humans as mere pawns in their endless game? Did neither of them in truth give a whit for humanity? Where was the love? Who could mitigate the suffering? Would the beauty endure? Were Jesus and Lucifer twins? Did the apple ever fall far from the tree? Who could know liberty and motion at once? When would the pharisees finally be brought low, for once and for all? Did it even matter? Sanae Asoh was a hero; how steadfast she remained in the face of her bondage. Her eyes shone forth with brilliant resolve mixed with undying gentleness and understanding. Could she ever escape her burden? Leave Britney alone! The watchers might be stirring. Do we face a return to Fields of Nephilim? Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven. There's a sense one might get with their back to the West, and with all their being awaiting the Queen from the East. The snake eats its own tail. Sometimes the Devil is your best friend. In its totality, Led Zeppelin was a great band. Paper always reverts to its intrinsic value, no matter what worth we otherwise attempt to assign it. Honey is the best money. He regrets so much. How can it be made right? When would the mind rape end? Big pharma was no answer. What was the question? He was being fried by waves beaming into his apartment. He could feel his internal organs failing. Would he escape in time? Where was there to go? It is time to take a stand. The portals are opening. Are we ready? Who can mitigate the slaughter? Women, understand the power of your menses! It's our only hope now. The bottomless pit issues forth a challenge. How might we respond? The master becomes the slave. The first becomes the last. The meek trod upon the once-proud. No one is saved. All the lonely people, where do they all come from; all the lonely people, where do they all belong? We'll know for the first time, if we're evil or divine; we're the last in line. We are the dancers, and they but the fools. Wise man cure your own cancer; you must slay the necromancer. The Tetragrammaton is not the demiurge. Who is prepared to venture to the center of the universe? Who can face Azathoth and live to tell about it? The Sothoths slither in rings at the point of the Outer Sphere. What loathsome beast lurches toward Jerusalem? The center has already given way! God help us all! What was it about chemistry? How had the little Raven Girl seduced him yet time and time again, leaving him weeping and whipped in a state of longing depravity for she, She Who Must Be Obeyed? What price could he further pay? She might yet show him the way. He was on his own, like a Rainbow in the Dark; a regular Mong Chuon Trong Mao Dei. Ngoi Cuon soothes not only the palate, but the very soul. The Nyak Nam must arise! Caveza de Pescado in a biting Jalepeno sauce whets the appetite for the body of the fish. We're all Estrella Gigante. When might we realize it? Shine your light! The hour is late! Plowmen dig my earth. Businessmen they drink my wine. How many of us know what any of it is truly worth? Garlic is our sacred defense against the MRSA offensive. The world goes insane! Who will champion us? What remnant might stand in the face of the Ancients; the Old Ones as their age-old clash is revitalized? How could it ever benefit us? The psy-op is fully ramped up.
	He told of how chinese commandoes might disable or even commandeer HAARP. As well, they might one day emerge by the 10s of thousands from stealth freighters in every port large and small up and down the West coast of the USA. Get ready. The Stormtroopers are coming. In the early morning hours there's a din in the air; no time to lose.
	Helicopters hover everywhere, not only taking, but even guiding the pulse of a sleepy populous below. What fate could await them; they in their sleepwalking state? Who could be gruntled in the face of massed disgruntlement?
	Why had he wanted to take on the form of a woman? What was so wrong with having been born male? What was the allure of having a pair of breasts for onself? Could nipple play trigger a life-shattering male orgasm? Where was Yin Ling? How he loved her so. Would Michelle Trachtenberg care? Were she in point of fact the key to the bottomless pit, or even the star who fell to earth? Certainly her complexion was compelling. Her friend; Lydia Hearst seemed to be a sort of dolt; but a beautiful one at that. She bought into the whole War on Terror rigarmarole. Her beau was a fighter pilot; chortle guffaw. Maybe she could find it from within herself to finally get real. As a Hearst maybe she could disabuse herself of the hallowed War on Drugs. War, War, and more war; on poverty, on drugs, on terror; neverending war; against  things and concepts which simply and in point of fact could never be vanquished. On and on we march toward oblivion. Who is the standard bearer? Mercyful Fate's album, Don't Break the Oath is a rock and roll classic. King Diamond and his bandmates were at their best. Long live the Lakota Nation! Here is to the hope that someday the states of Being and Doing might be merged as one. Koyanastasi. Beam me up Scotty, there is no intelligent life here! Swing low sweet chariot style and let me ride! Get up on the down stroke. Everybody's got a little light, under the sun; Flashlight. The doppleganger or Top Hat Guy or whatever you want to call it was calling from within his dreams. Nyarlethotep; where art though? What of your inhuman machines? Kill the King. 
	If he were to leave the mini-mart, would the monster follow? Was it his own, or were it rather a mere feature of the local milieu? Perchance it belonged to the chinese woman. If he fled the mini-mart and the looming, unanswerable terror of the place, where might he find sustenance, even as mere as had been that as provided by his employment at the same prozaic mini-mart? Who might fund him? Was he doomed to die under a bridge at the hands of teenaged ruffians whose souls had been corrupted and who further took some visceral petty pleasure from attacking otherwise helpless transients? Was he at death's door? What could possibly happen to set him back upon some sustaining track? He needed a place; a place to stay; a shelter from the wind and the rain; a haven for his weary head and its brain; an insulated bed free from any would-be neighbor's disdain. What could he do to make things right? He knew what he might do but couldn't bring himself to record it, even into the ostensibly private digital confines of the recorder. Even if he kept it within his head, his plan might not be safe. They had the ability to scan brains, even from geosynchronus orbit; 24/7/365. They could invade a man's mind and insert thoughts; ideas which would leave him one day either speechless with spittle issuing forth from a trembling mouth, or lashing out in words and fits of untold madness as the crowd might look on with disinterested contempt. The game had taken on an entirely new dimension. The earth was under ever-growing and constant invasive surveillance. Perchance the generation rising up now could develop some defense against the encroachment of the digital mind and the minions which attended to it; The Beast. They've been given little machines which they don't understand, and use them to harass their fellow man, as if even though by remote command. He needed a Faraday cage, but was so disorganized and lethargic, without finance and lacking in overall motivation that simply attending to the mini-mart for 40 hours a week was becoming more than he could handle. He needed to get away from the electronic web which was rotting him from the inside out. What would the end be like? Why were so many of those around him so seemingly unaware of the buzz pouring forth from the skies, or out of the earth? Was he a target? He'd heard of such a thing; Majestik12; MKULTRA; Monarch; the Process; Mormonism; Freemasonary; Pharasaism; the labs at Virginia Tech; Montauk; Area 51; MI5/MI6; Tavistock. Where did it end and why would they attack him in his invisibility? How could anyone have noticed him? What threat could he have possibly posed to them? No one listened to him, how could he have become the target of their wrath? Where was the coven? How could he enter it? Who was the Raven Witch Woman? Were it like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where some proverbial Willow might cast a spell over an ancient and superhuman weapon, that its powers might imbue an entire generation of women; that they might unite and rise up to meet, fight, and ulimately defeat the armor-plated cybernetic minions which would one day pour forth from their seething state of present suspended animation amidst the secret underground bases? People needed to get real. Why were they in such a state of willful ignorance? What could possibly be residing there behind the veil which so terrorized them, to the point of such sheep-like existence? Could they call it life? Masuimi Max is incredible. How could it be any more than mere existence? Why did they so sleep, even as though they were awake? Someone needed to tell him it hadn't always been that way. Who had perfected the ultimate trauma-based programming, and on such an overarching, widespread, societal level? They thought that democracy might save them. They paid no heed to the nefarious machinations of the self-proclaimed financiers, but one arm of that proverbial octopus known as the pharisee class. Maybe Jesus would come to save them, if they could only sing his praises. Then they would never be held accountable for anything which had ever happened here. Was there a screw loose in his head? Maybe he was being unfair. The Nexus approached. Niburu was within. Yes, Niburu resides within. If he were ever to make any singular, edifying contribution to the literature and lore of the lunatic fringe, again it were that indeed: Niburu is within. There is nothing out there. It is all within. He had to flee. His plan was hatched. He would disappear. Would they reach him first? Had they already read his innermost thoughts? Certainly he had poured out his soul. What other secret could they possibly goad him into divulging? What real humiliation could he ever suffer, beyond what had already been and passed? He was tapped out; yet he could still play the guitar. His body was falling apart with ever-increasing rapidity; yet he could remain to think. He could formulate a thought, or even a concept, or even a string of interlocking concepts. He could play the guitar. He could yet sing. His body was ebbing. The Raven Girl always said to just go with the flow. He wanted to talk to her again; to find out what she were really all about. He had his ideas. She was special; so special that his middle name should have been Ed. Someone was watching. Someone were listening. Propaganda in the USA was a giant success. People thought they knew, but they weren't even close to arriving at the truth. The game was too convoluted; overly subtle; the babyish American mind could not fathom layers upon layers of chaotic deception. They were all narcissists. They thought they knew. They were sheep headed for the slaughter. They already been tagged. They were in a gilded cage; yet it was a cheap gold plating. Their rations were being cut; so much for the greatest nation on earth. The world was passing them by. It was part of the gambit. They had been set up and they didn't even know it yet. It could not be discerned, the depths to which the handlers had sunk in bargaining with bloodthirsty fiends from beyond time and space.
	One day he set out to catalogue her faults, and explain in any event why he yet wanted her. Suffice it to say that every rose has its thorns. Meanwhile the dark ladies had overtaken him. The Asians and Latinas had conspired to conquer his soul. How many Americans had been shunned from their own insipid native culture, and in turn had sought the higher ideals of Asia and Latin America?
	Time and space were collapsing. The madness was everywhere, even emanating from the heretofore sound of mind. What end were in store for all of them? He was a Manchurian candidate without a station; a politico with neither enticing yet ultimately deadly platform, nor campaign strategem. Asia conquered his heart. He worked for them. How many among us have been turned so, away from the hypocrisies of our native land, and yearning instead for the practicalities of the Orient?


	I could not piece together any more from the overall narrative. As already mentioned, hundreds of hours of audio logs have been distilled into what you see here. Had mistakes been made in the general transcription of ideas, in eschewing a verbatim retelling of one lonely soul's life journey? Undoubtedly some of it must have been lost in translation, and perchance hyperbole had taken its toll; at least upon certain non-specific passages regarding the same.
	The man was obviously a dreamer; full of aspirations yet dogged by demonic entities. From all appearances something had driven him; exactly what, remains a mystery. Over time the Asian women were obviously somewhere at the forefront of his consciousness. He spoke little of the men, but what he did have to say was flattering; it's just that overall these few-and-far-between comments added nothing of import to the overall story.
	From what I could piece together of the very last, rambling diatribe as he said he were leaving the mini-mart and going to do what he had to do; he may have been captured by some agency and taken away to the underground bases for a complete brain suck. It appeared as though, just prior he were being targeted by microwave technology, whether real or imagined on his part. There were allusions to an implant, but weak enough that such were as well excluded from the narrative as composed here. He spoke at last of an ebbing, flowing terror of dull regularity. He countered by once again acknowledging the beauty in all he'd seen and heard, and by stating that he were thankful for the opportunity of having created music as he had; even if it were never to be understood by any adoring fan base at large. He said that it were enough that he had once greatly admired any number of guitarists and other musicians, and that in his own pursuit he had surpassed his wildest dreams of at first emulating them, and in further on creating a unique style which he perceived as being all his own. That he might never have convinced anyone of the same; it really weren't the issue. Despite everything he had more or less remained true to himself. Finally, he said that he were leaving and that no one should try to follow him, and that everything were for the best, and that come what may everything would be as it should be. That my friends, is the sum total of the Tale of the Mini-Mart. 
	In closing, perchance the synopsis would be that our protaganist enjoyed the simple things in life (and in no particular order); dreaming, music, satins and sheers, stiletto heels, a sing-song woman's voice, food, boardgames, the promise of deep affection, ideas, imaginings, the mystery of what is hidden in the beyond, unlimited access to drugs of choice, samhadi, intellectual exercise. It is perchance also telling as to what he seemed to gloss over; any high appreciation of nature outside of the female form; any real desire for overly pistoning fornication as popularized by the mindset of the plebian, eschewing that for a sort of smoldering sensuality instead; any need for casual, face to face conversation. Being more of the air and the water than of the earth and the fire, his ambivalence to drums was another thing which stood out.
	Perchance the very key thing of the entire telling were that the women of Asia had, over time completely and utterly seduced him; unless of course The One were rather, Aria Giovanni, or Penny Flame, or Persephone, or Taylor Robbins, or Michelle Trachtenberg, or Marie, or any one of manifold, myriad women, each of whom had in her own unique way, and at some point in time; in any event fallen under his unrelenting yet satin and sheer gaze. Of course, it could be stated that a woman would not be found attractive in Hardy's eyes; not unless she were first, and in her own heart of hearts, oriental as he had already become. That is to say that; over time Hardy had been utterly vaginized, and that the future ultimately belongs to the East; to the Orient; to Asia.