The robes are not that of a tattered crackpot or insulated monastery man. Those are scholars robes and this scholar has done the research by god! He’s evaporated liquids into condensates! He’s emptied test tubes and dropped them clattering to the table! He’s unrolled scrolls and traced things back to their ancient Greek antecedents only to disgustedly clap closed weighty tomes. He’s gone grey and bald at the effort. Oh yes, he’s done the research. And what has he found? What’s it all boil down to after all? el-zilcho.
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
wait a minute! He’s not done writing on the chalk board. Perhaps it’s the head of a stick figure or maybe he’s drawing a pentagram (creepy) or it’s a lollipop. I don’t know! It could be anything. What will that circle shape become when he’s done drawing?! The world will never know.
Oh crap, moose, you’re right! Google ‘John From Cincinnati’, I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner.
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Babyl on … “Hero.”
VR/
And don’t forget the power of “thr3.”
Couldn’t resist that “man & woman part.”
Ha!
Very Respectfully,
(order up!)
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
It took me a minoot, but I read the names on the open book: Heavies. In order: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Heracleitus, Democritus (I’m pretty sure) then Nostradamus, Hermes Trismegistus, and then Kepler and Copernicus. That’s a pretty odd crowd no matter how you slice it. I notice the beaker of hemlock is empty on the workbench. He’ll be found dead on the floor there, by his assistant, a C student who already thinks him mad. Not visible: the tome that did him in, H.G. Wells’ oh-fuck-it-whats-the-goddam-use lament “Mind At The End Of Its Tether.” Our researcher was all ready to hang it up and have a few pints down over at the Plough and Stars, and who knows? maybe even get a rug burn with that not-quite-obese barmaid who just got separated from her gambling addict husband. But to sweat all the details and then find out that prima donna Wells had anticipated his every move, rendered his own research ‘uninteresting’ (any decent scientist would almost rather be just plain wrong than uninteresting!) Ah! And to be this far past one’s prime, and still without tenure… even this piece of chalk seems to weigh as if it were a cinder block upon his wrist, so that it takes a supreme effort to inscribe a perfectly formed cipher, but it is an effort that he makes with his last vestige of will, for it is to be his valedictory. They will never understand, he knows, but to do this last small thing perfectly is to spit in the eyes of the gods.