In other news, the day before I lost my wallet in Mexico I found out that I have a stalker.
A stalker who has taken it upon themselves to DM anybody with whom I publicly interact to tell them about what they conjecture to be my exploitative escapades. A stalker who has worked up a very warped view of me wherein I travel the world—of all things—lying to women.
How very original.
I wonder if they so liked Exquisite Hours that they thought it could not possibly be made up, and its author MUST have researched his characters in person. Or did they so dislike the book that they decided to exact revenge upon its author by reaching out to his mother (my mother!) in order to misinform her of my supposed Anaïs-capades?
I suspect though, that merely they’re resentful of my freedom, my contentment, my vocation. Perhaps they tried once to write a novel but had not the creativity or the personality to complete the work. Judging by the derivative imagination for revenge, this would be unsurprising. For apparently I lie to women in order to have them pay my rent, buy me flights, purchase my laptops & my iPhones.
Alas. Contrary to my stalker’s trifling mind, I have spent most of the last 4 years living in a Vietnamese fishing village where my rent is $300 a month—every cent of which has been paid from my own tiny pocket. My mother once bought me a flight home for Christmas—perhaps this my stalker resents. Do they in their lives lack the maternal presence and resent my own perfectly loving one?
I have a 2017 MacBook Air that I bought in 2017 in India after Indian pollution destroyed my old one. I believe I am one of the last people on earth using an iPhone 7, which I bought in Bangkok early last year to replace a piece-of-crap HTC I’d had for the year previous.
So it went that when I showed my friends the phantasms of this alternate life their unanimous reaction was, “Man, your life would be fucking fantastic if you lived how your stalker says you do!”
And so indeed it would.
But down here in wretched reality, I persevere. I step back somewhat from social media; protect those I spend time with and to whom I am related. Masturbation seems to have run its course for this dear stalker and they have been left in quarantine with excessive spare time. Fortunately their direct-message narrative is filled with so many demonstrable falsehoods that it falls apart upon scrutiny, dissipates before reality—though the screenshots do entertain somewhat as bland gossip, amuse as rancorous piddling.
If only my life were so enthralling, so advantaged, so labour-free!
I do wonder if this frogsquirting polyp, though, is the same person who Iago-ed my ex-girlfriend—the same inaccurate arse-scratch who poured into her ear such poisonous words as to pollute our relationship to toxicity.
But to speculate upon worthless people is to worthlessly speculate. I suppose I might make some effort to figure out who it is: to find the bridge under which they live; to understand why they’ve chosen “troll” as their profession; forgive them for whatever they wish to do; to love them as only enemies might be loved.
Unfortunately, they are a cuntish motherless coward, and troll me to my family and my friends with a most convenient anonymity, behind ever-changing ghost Instagram accounts.
If only masturbation counted as fucking oneself, I would not have to gently urge them to go and do so.
For I could certainly do with an iPhone 8.
The ‘up’ key on my MacBook no longer works.
And my desire to live in Venice shall require pockets much deeper than are those
of my several pairs of hole-ridden swimming shorts.