Letter 4.29

May Flours

May flours are the best for making stringhoppers and glue for aerogrammes without a glue.

I've now returned from my wanderings to distant lands (like Colombo and Dodanduwa), where I writ several novels in my head; such as an action-packed soy thriller with high-governmental intrigues and international consequences that just happens to be set not in modern times but in India, 2500 years ago, in which a certain ascetic who has attracted many disciples, and for whom certain extraordinary claims are being made, happens to play a role which, though minor, turns out to be vitally crucial to the denouement? Howzat for a guaranteed worst-seller? And then there was the one about the very first European who ever became a Buddhist monk (that we know of), who happens to be a Greek at the time of King Asoka (he -- the Greek -- is mentioned in the Dipavaṃsa) -- how he came to India (as a spy for the Persian emperor who, having heard of the death of Bindusara -- Asoka's pa -- and foreseeing a power struggle sees a chance to regain territory lost by his grandpa to Asoka's grandpa, Chandragupta -- perhaps as a spy disguised as a merchant who gets into the court and participates in the power struggle and learns about India -- maybe he was a Stoic back in Athens, from which he's now exiled -- and maybe... but that would be telling you my plot, and maybe you prefer to invent your own, or none at all, and, in fact, due to a power outage of no longer than a hiccup, it -- unrecorded to disk in my head -- has disappeared into an mnemonic black hole forever... Just as well, I could never get up the steam to actually write it...

Yes, it must be getting difficult to know how to address me by now -- I know it's not easy figuring out how to sign off at the end of a letter. Indeed, I shall soon run out of letters in the roman alphabet and shall have to turn to some other alphabet -- fortunately no shortage of them, either ancient or oriental, to choose from -- and shall eventually become first unspellable, later unpronouncable, and in the end, dead.

Yes, love,

um...well...B?...no, V?...no, how about RES? CDE? BEAD? QED?

(Dear Postmaster of Sooke, B.C., Please be advised that the addressee of this letter is a criminal of the worst sort, who refuses to believe the popular lie and will not bow down to Mammon. Obviously he deserves the harshest penalty society can possibly offer him, which is to entirely ignore him, I trust to your good offices to see that this is achieved. He informs me, without ever complaining, that you have been reading his mail. The nerve of him, to have neither righteous indigestion nor wrongeous indigestion. Please horsewhip him, if you have a horse. Or dogwhip, catwhip, or canary whip him. On second thought, he would then no longer feel ignored, so better not. Instead, just put his name quietly on file with the KGB -- North American HQ in Moscow, Georgia. Your friendly spy, X.)