Finish. Bourbon barrel, on the side palate. In fact, wood pallet dominates the palate, hot as the garish red the backlights turn as Tatiana opens her bedroom mirror to a nightmarish onrush of dancers donning creature heads: bears and bunnies, boars and owls, antagonizing her, pursuing her, spinning her bed about the stage like The Exorcist On Ice.

If the wild crayola film shots that Scorsese - Mr. Cinema himself - famously drew when his bedroom window proved a facile diversion from his asthmatic quarantine, what isn't irreplaceable? Surely, my misanthropic ramblings - indeed, this entire 'zine - are not immune to the monkeying of a simulacrum, any less than is the crafting of the very whiskey over which my nostrils hover. 

And, before I know it, I'm asleep. 

All the eye can see is a blanket black. The fog's alive. 

I'm in a pressed tuxedo, tails and top hat. My build in this realm is decidedly that of a dancer: tone, taut with muscle. Yes, I have the codpiece on, but ignore this; for now, consider what I float above: baseball games played to empty stadiums. Parks unpeopled. Unsurfed oceans. The glow of movie screens shone over barren rows. Actors bowing for encores that never come. Is that…John Lennon, singing, in an amphitheater's ruins? 

Imagine only imagining / 

it's easy if you try. 

No one creating / 

just sadly sitting by. 

His voice rolling like thunder on a breaking tape across the bucolic apocalypse. 

Now, I'm in a solo spot, on an otherwise ink black stage, my glorious, sheer, pastel-peach-pink robes dramatically blown back by a 9-foot prop fan. I'm hoisted by the Ghost of Onegin, the Original Superfluous Man who bore us all. I plummet to my face and crush, my bone ash swirling in the breeze-artifice like the implacable winter snow.