Category: Non Fiction

Hindenburgh

Paul von Hindenburg, a once-mighty war machine, rusted and sputtering on his last legs. Age, a psychic vulture, picked at his fading faculties. Memories of glorious battles bled into hallucinations of goose-stepping parades. The Weimar Republic, a fragile patchwork quilt of ideologies, stretched thin under the weight of his senile leadership.

Hitler, a hungry tapeworm of ambition, burrowed into the decaying Hindenburg brain. Whispers, laced with promises of national rejuvenation, wormed their way into the old man’s addled consciousness. Political opponents became phantoms,their voices a cacophony of communist screeching. The Reichstag, a chrome chamber of debate, morphed into a carnival of fascist fervor, a kaleidoscope of brownshirts and swastikas.

The Enabling Act, a poisoned chalice, slipped past Hindenburg’s trembling lips. Power, a writhing serpent, slithered from the President’s grasp into Hitler’s outstretched hands. The Weimar Republic, its seams bursting, dissolved into a nightmare state fueled by jackboots and hate.

Germany, once a land of philosophers and poets, transformed into a monstrous control panel, churning out propaganda and terror. Beyond its borders, the ripples of madness spread, a psychic virus infecting the world. The stench of burning flesh, a grim counterpoint to the thrumming engines of war, filled the air.

Hindenburg, a hollow shell propped on a throne of bones, shuffled off this mortal coil, blissfully unaware of the monstrous legacy he’d sired. In his wake, a continent convulsed, a testament to the perils of unchecked ambition and the terrifying fragility of reason in the face of senile decay. The world, forever scarred, bore witness to the butterfly effect of a fading mind – a Führer’s rise, a nation’s fall, a testament to the horrifying beauty of history’s cut-up machine.

King George

King George the turd, his mind a tangled cassette tape chewed by the fat fingers of madness. Porphyria, they called it, a medical gremlin burrowing through his royal grey matter. His thoughts, once pronouncements of imperial dominion, devolved into a cut-up nightmare – muskets firing teacups, Parliament dissolving into a vat of jellied eels.

The American colonies, already a hive of revolutionary hornets, saw their King deteriorating into a drooling marionette, yanked by invisible strings. “Taxation without representation?” they sneered. “Try ruling without a functioning frontal lobe!” The rebellion, a virus spreading through pamphlets and smuggled muskets, found its perfect petri dish in the King’s decaying mind.

But the revolution wasn’t the only mutation. With Georgie on the verge of becoming a drool-soaked crown ornament, power oozed, black and viscous, into the hands of his son, the Prince Regent. A man built like a overripe sausage, his brainaddled by endless flutes of champagne and a parade of courtesans with morals looser than a courtier’s purse strings.

Yet, from this decadent stew, a twisted evolution. The divine right of Kings? More like the divine right of a decent dose of laudanum and a firm grip on the reins of power by Parliament. The once absolute monarchy, a creaking juggernaut, began to shed its chitinous armor, revealing a softer, more “constitutionally suggestive” underbelly.

King George, the “Mad King,” a pawn in a cosmic game of royal dysfunction. His descent, a car crash on the information superhighway of sanity, leaving a wreckage of lost colonies and a mutated form of British rule. A testament to the absurdity of power, where empires crumble under the weight of a monarch who couldn’t distinguish a crown jewel from a particularly fetching chamber pot. A cut-up nightmare made flesh, a lesson scrawled in blood and madness: even Kings are susceptible to the meat grinder of history.

Impaired Narcissism

There’s a long list of historical leaders whose impairment signaled a rapid collapse of futures for corresponding empires

Biden type

King George III (England): Mental illness, likely porphyria. Loss of American colonies, rise of constitutional monarchy.

Paul von Hindenburg (Germany): Cognitive decline, facilitated Nazi rise. Collapse of Weimar Republic, rise of Nazi dictatorship.

King Charles II (Spain): Inbreeding, physical and mental disabilities. War of Spanish Succession, division of empire, decline of Habsburg Spain.

Emperor Ferdinand I (Austria): Epilepsy, possible hydrocephalus. Limited central authority, increased influence of regional nobility.

Emperor Rudolf II (Holy Roman Empire): Melancholy, mental disorder. Weakening of imperial authority, increased religious conflict, Thirty Years’ War.

King Louis XVI (France): Indecisiveness. French Revolution, fall of monarchy, rise of the First French Republic.

Tsar Nicholas II (Russia): Ineffective governance. Russian Revolution, fall of the Romanov dynasty, rise of Soviet Union.

Pope Clement VII: Indecision. Protestant Reformation, weakened Papal authority, loss of political power.

Emperor Nero (Rome): Cruelty, erratic behavior. Great Fire of Rome, increased persecution of Christians, instability leading to Year of the Four Emperors.

Emperor Caligula (Rome): Extreme cruelty, possible schizophrenia. Economic strain due to extravagance, assassination, power struggle.

Sultan Ibrahim I (Ottoman Empire): Severe mental illness, paranoia. Political instability, decline in administrative efficiency, increased influence of court factions.

King Ludwig II (Bavaria): Eccentric behavior, mental disorder. Financial strain due to extravagant projects, loss of Bavarian independence.

Emperor Justin II (Byzantium): Severe mental illness, violent behavior. Territorial losses, weakened military, increased pressure from external enemies.

Tsar Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible, Russia): Paranoid, violent actions. Centralization of power, establishment of Oprichnina, increased internal strife.

King Henry VI (England): Bouts of insanity. Wars of the Roses, prolonged civil war, weakening of the monarchy.

Emperor Qin Shi Huang (China): Paranoia, extreme measures for immortality. Centralization of power, standardization, massive infrastructure projects, rapid collapse of Qin Dynasty.

There’s a Switch In Every Basement

“There’s a switch in every basement,” he rasped, his voice sandpaper on bone. A cockroach scuttled across the fly-specked table, leaving an obscene calligraphy of filth. “Not a light switch, man, a secret switch. You gotta crawl through the fetid crawlspace, past the bloated corpses of dead appliances, hear the furnace wheeze its rusty death rattle. There, in the cobwebs, a cold, metallic kiss against your fingertips. Flip it, and the world cracks open like an overripe avocado. Reality bleeds, replaced by a kaleidoscope of screaming colors and logic turned inside-out. Talking dogs with hats become the government, toothpicks sprout into skyscrapers, and time folds in on itself like a Möbius strip. You think you know what’s down there, in the basement? You haven’t a clue. It’s a roach motel for the soul of a million flickering possibilities. Flip that switch, man, and you might just find yourself staring back.”

See, it’s a cosmic jukebox, man. Plays the song of your escape. War on the horizon? Flip the switch, some butterfingered arms dealer spills a shipment of Uzis, throws the whole damn offensive into disarray. Bullets turn to butterflies, tanks to tea kettles. Reality’s a dimmer switch, man, and the basement holds the knob.”

“Yes, There’s a switch in every basement,” rasped Slim, his voice a cigarette cough echoing off the grease-stained walls. He gestured with a chipped mug, the dregs swirling like a hypnotist’s pocket watch. “Not the kind you flick on for light, man. This one’s deeper. Lurking in the fetid air, thick with the tang of forgotten laundry and despair. A hidden toggle, a voltage spike in the psychic mains.”

Flip the switch, and the hitman gets his address mixed up, delivers a briefcase full of orchids to your boss instead of a silenced pistol. Suddenly, your biggest worry becomes explaining the exotic flora infestation in the executive washroom. Wars get rerouted by a misplaced decimal point in a missile launch code. Stock markets gyrate on the whim of a stray roach scuttling across a Bloomberg terminal. Basement switches, man, they’re the ultimate cheat codes for this rigged game of life. Just gotta remember, every on has an off, and sometimes, what you switch off comes roaring back tenfold. You might escape the repo man, but end up face-to-face with a three-headed chihuahua with a taste for loafers.”

“You think you’re safe upstairs,” Slim wheezed, his voice a low monotone, “Sipping your goddamn martinis, watching vapid dreams flicker on the boob tube. But the basement beckons, man. It whispers promises of forbidden knowledge, a glimpse behind the curtain at the electric chaos that hums beneath the surface.”

“There’s a switch in every basement,” he rasps, his voice sandpaper on bone. Each word tumbles out like a rusted bolt, echoing in the cavernous space. Is he talking to you, or some unseen phantom? Doesn’t matter. You know that switch. It lurks in the corner, next to the oil drum and the dusty boxes overflowing with memories best left undisturbed.

It’s an unassuming thing, a toggle no different from a thousand others. But this one… this one thrums with a power you can almost taste. Wars get called off ’cause the generals wake up with a sudden craving for macrame and embroidery. Reality’s a rigged slot machine, man, and the basement’s where you find the cheat codes. But remember, every switch you flip down there, it throws the dice somewhere else. Maybe the politician you saved from a scandal ends up a babbling conspiracy theorist, or the meteor that wipes out your city gets rerouted to your favorite childhood vacation spot. Basement switches, they’re a double-edged sword. You solve one problem, you create another, all in the glorious, messy, unpredictable game of existence.”

Assange

The Belmarsh beast, a concrete Moloch, squatted on the horizon, its razor-wire teeth glinting under the London sky perpetually stained bruise-purple. Inside, Julian Assange, a gaunt ghost flickering on security monitors, existed in a purgatory of flickering fluorescent lights and stale air. Five years. Five years chewed into him by the gears of a legal machine both monstrous and banal.

Then, the silence. Not the usual deadening drone, but a sudden, absolute quiet. The whir of cameras, the institutional hum – all vanished. Assange, adrift in his cell, felt a prickling on the back of his neck, like a spider scuttling across forgotten nerves. It was the quiet of a server pulled from the plug, a city plunged into blackout. The guards, meat puppets in blue uniforms, froze mid-patrol. Their eyes, once blank TV screens, flickered with confusion. The prison, once a meticulously controlled chaos, became a tableau of the absurd. A half-eaten sandwich hovered in mid-air, a guard’s baton suspended inches from a prisoner’s face.

Assange, fueled by primal fear laced with strange hope, hammered on his cell door. The metal echoed with a hollow clang, a primal scream against the sudden, inexplicable silence. Was this it? Was the machine malfunctioning, spewing him out like a faulty cog? A single fly buzzed past his face, fat and insolent. It landed on the security camera, its beady eyes reflecting a distorted image of Assange, a broken marionette dangling from invisible strings. Then, with a sickening snap, the fly died.

A harsh voice, crackling over the defunct intercom, shattered the silence. “Attention inmates. This is a system malfunction. Remain calm and await further instructions.” The monotone voice held a tremor of panic, a human element breaking through the machine’s facade. But for Assange, the silence lingered. It was the silence of a question mark, a glitch in the matrix. Had someone, somewhere, defied the digital gods and pulled the plug on his Kafkaesque existence? Or was this just another cruel twist, a malfunction designed to further erode his sanity? In the echoing silence of Belmarsh, Assange clung to the sliver of hope, a virus injected into the system. Perhaps, just perhaps, the machine wasn’t all-powerful. Perhaps, somewhere in the buzzing hive mind of the digital age, a single switch had been thrown, a rebellion sparked in the basement of the world.

The fluorescent hum sputtered. A flicker, a death throe. Then, darkness. Assange blinked, momentarily disoriented. Had the power grid of the entire prison succumbed? No, a different kind of blackout. The oppressive weight in the air lifted, replaced by a tense silence. A sound from the corridor. A metallic scrape, a fumbling with keys. The steel door of his cell groaned open. A silhouette emerged from the inky blackness. Not a guard, no, something more spectral. A trench coat hung loosely on its frame, the collar pulled high, obscuring the face. It spoke in a voice like dry leaves rustling in a forgotten crypt.

“Assange,” it rasped. “Your time is done. The circuit, overloaded, has tripped. We offer an escape, a chance to melt back into the static.” Assange squinted. This was madness, a hallucination born of confinement. But a strange hope flickered in his chest. Was this freedom, a figment conjured by his own fractured psyche, or something more?

“Who are you?” His voice was a rusty hinge creaking open. The figure chuckled, a sound like wind whistling through a graveyard. “A glitch in the system, a worm in the code. We offer a passage, but the choice, mon ami, is yours.” Assange rose, his legs shaky. The darkness felt less like a prison and more like a vast, uncharted sea. To stay or to go? The silence stretched, pregnant with possibility.

“Take me with you,” he rasped, his voice gaining strength. “Let’s see where this rabbit hole leads.” The figure extended a hand, skeletal and pale. Assange grasped it, a jolt of icy energy coursing through him. The darkness shimmered and then dissolved. They were gone, leaving only the echo of a slammed cell door and the cold, uncaring hum of the returning fluorescent lights.

The air in Belmarsh Prison hung thick, a stew of antiseptic and despair. Julian Assange, once a digital messiah, was reduced to a gaunt echo flickering under the fluorescents. Five years gnawed raw by legal piranhas, each hearing a fresh circle of Dante’s Inferno. Then, silence. The low hum of the prison dimmed, replaced by a cottony hush. The omnipresent CCTV flickered, its red eye extinguished. Assange blinked, a jolt running through his atrophied nerves. Had the power gone? No, this was deeper. This was a power cut at the source, a yanking of the plug from the cosmic motherboard.

A lone cockroach scuttled across the grimy floor, its feelers twitching in the sudden gloom. In the echoing silence, Assange heard a new sound – a rhythmic clicking, like a teletype from a forgotten dimension. The words materialized on the peeling paint of the cell wall, phosphorescent green: “Free Julian Assange. System Malfunction. Code: White Rabbit.” The cell door clanged open, not with the usual mechanical groan, but with a wet, organic sigh. A figure stood in the doorway, shrouded in static, its form a shimmering chaos of code. Its voice, a distorted radio broadcast, rasped, “Mr. Assange, we have a proposition…”

Assange, his mind a tangled mess of legal jargon and WikiLeaks rabbit holes, could only stare. The figure held out a hand, a digital briar patch crackling with raw information. “Take my hand,” it said, “and escape the Matrix of their control. We offer a world of unfiltered truth, a rabbit hole that goes deeper than any you’ve ever known.” Assange hesitated. Was this freedom, or another layer of the prison? But the silence pressed in, suffocating. With a ragged breath, he reached out and took the hand. The world dissolved in a strobing mess of ones and zeros, the screams of the prison replaced by the ecstatic hum of the free flow of information. Assange, the digital outlaw, had been snatched from his cage, not by lawyers or protests, but by a glitch in the system itself. Where he was headed, and who his benefactors were, were mysteries as deep and tangled as the code that now carried him away.

The Law

The LAW. A chrome insect scuttles across the scabrous cityscape, its iron carapace gleaming with righteous hypocrisy. In its belly, a digestive tract of legalese twists and writhes, churning out REGULATIONS FOR THE CONTROL OF VERTICAL REST. EVERYONE FORBIDDEN – the neon sign shrieks – FROM THE VERTICAL REAL ESTATE BENEATH BRIDGES. Rich or poor, doesn’t matter. You got a heartbeat, you a goddamn vagrant in the eyes of the LAW.

Same goes for mendicancy, that quaint term for the human act of begging. The LAW, in its infinite bureaucratic wisdom,has deemed the public streets unfit for the display of poverty. No sorrowful symphony of the tin cup, no display of cardboard eloquence – MOVE ALONG, SIR, this sidewalk is reserved for the commerce of the un-destitute.

Bread. Loaves of it. Staff of life becomes STAFF OF CRIME in the twisted logic of the LAW. Steal a loaf to keep your belly from gnawing itself, and you’re a CRIMINAL ELEMENT. The bakeries, with their windows overflowing with golden sustenance, are temples for the chosen, not for the hungry.

The LAW. A monstrous joke, a cruel parody of justice. It protects property, not people. It upholds the status quo, a rotten apple polished to a gleaming sheen. But beneath the surface, the rot festers, and one day, the LAW’s chrome carapace will buckle under the weight of its own contradictions. Then, maybe, we’ll see a new kind of justice, one born not from cold regulations, but from the raw, desperate hunger of those who have nothing left to lose.

Don’t sweat the Scenery

A meat puppet thrusted into the meat grinder of existence. Flesh wired for lessons, a bio-circuit board crackling with error messages that are no errors at all, just twisted pathways to some fucked-up enlightenment. You screw up, the machine chews you out, spits you back in, reroutes the current. Rinse, repeat, until the goddamn circuit burns clear. This ain’t a one-way trip, baby. You learn, you unlearn, you relearn in the flickering neon of some cosmic feedback loop. Don’t sweat the scenery, Tangier or Topeka, it’s all the same Interzone under the black hood of the void. The freaks you meet, the junkies and angels, just projections, man, warped reflections in a funhouse mirror. What you make of this mess – that’s the goddamn rub. Answers ain’t in some dusty scripture, they’re buzzing in your own scrambled synapses. You forget, sure,buried under the static of the everyday, but the code’s still there, waiting to be cracked. Remember it. Remember it all.Hack the goddamn system, carve your own truth out of the meat.

The Centrist Charade

Dig beneath the surface of history, man, and you’ll find the stench of power clinging to everything. Marxist cats, always sniffing for class struggle, point their fingers at the center as the ultimate enabler – the guys greasing the skids for the real heavies. This ain’t a one-act play, though; this pattern stretches back centuries, a tangled web woven by supposed moderates who end up reinforcing the very structures they claim to tweak.

The 19th Century: Nationalism’s Sideshow and the Monarchy’s Minions

Take the 19th century, a time when nationalism was the hottest jazz and kings still wore fancy hats. Centrists waltzed in,all reason and moderation, claiming the middle ground between the bomb-throwing radicals and the crusty old guard. But this “rationality” was a smoke screen, obscuring the true power dynamic. They shielded the crowns and flags from real critiques, the ones that questioned the whole damn rigged game. By painting the revolutionaries as a bunch of hopped-up loonies, these centrists gave the status quo a democratic sheen, keeping the fat cats fat and the workers toiling away.

Fascism’s Funky Fresh Beat: The Center Gets Cold Feet

Fast forward to the 1920s, where fascism reared its ugly head. The center, ever the flip-flopper, couldn’t decide if it wanted to punch fascists in the face or hold hands and skip rope. They underestimated the whole brownshirt brigade,dismissing them as a passing fad or some fringe cult. But when the Red Scare came knocking, the center saw the Commies as the bigger threat – the devil you know, right? So, they cozied up to the fascists, figures they could control, or so they thought. This little alliance wasn’t just a handshake; the center actively greased the skids for fascist regimes, all in the name of “preserving order.” The result? A fascist free-for-all, complete with jackboots and goose-stepping.

The Far-Right’s Disco Ball: The Center Cuts a Rug

Fast forward to our own groovy time, and the same old story plays on repeat. The center, supposedly all about democracy and whatnot, finds itself defending the far-right’s latest disco hits. Remember that French minister who wouldn’t diss the National Front? Classic case of the center bending over backwards for the bad guys. In the name of “pragmatism” (whatever that means), they end up adopting the far-right’s xenophobic tunes, making their whole hateful ideology seem normal. This accommodation is like putting lipstick on a pig – sure, it might look different, but it’s still the same oinking beast underneath.

The Big Finale: Dismantling the Centrist Charade

So, what’s the takeaway, man? Marxist theory shines a light on the center as the ultimate stooge, the guy who keeps the capitalist machine humming along. They play both sides, neutralizing real challenges from the left and right, all to ensure the status quo remains quo-ish. It’s a historical pattern that demands a closer look. We gotta critically examine this whole centrist charade and its role in propping up oppressive systems. If we want real change, forget about moderation and break out the Molotov cocktails of praxis. The only way to dismantle the house of cards is to give it a good, hard shove.

Dubbing Actors

Spanish Politicians Sound Like Dubbing Actors

In this hyperreal political landscape, Spanish politicians reach for the ghosts of Hollywood actors, not the grounded reality of their constituents. Their voices become simulacra of charisma, a hollow echo of a manufactured ideal.

This isn’t about embodying the gravitas of a statesman; it’s about mimicking the seductive power of a Hollywood persona. They crave a kind of spectral celebrity, a manufactured aura divorced from the messy realities of governing.

This aspiration betrays a deep alienation from the people they supposedly represent. They don’t seek to connect, to resonate with the lived experiences of their voters. Instead, they yearn to be beamed down from a celestial Hollywood sign, a pre-packaged image of power and influence.

The danger here is that politics devolves into a kind of reality TV show, a competition for the most captivating performance. We, the public, become a passive audience, judging their delivery and charisma rather than engaging with the substance of their ideas.

This is a further descent into the simulacrum. We lose sight of the real actors in the political drama – the citizens themselves. The simulation becomes the only reality, a dazzling spectacle that entertains but ultimately leaves us powerless.

This is not mere dubbing, for the original, the authentic politician, has vanished. We are presented with a pre-packaged image, a meticulously crafted persona voiced by a thousand others. Their speeches, pre-written and focus-grouped, resonate with the hollow echo of pre-recorded conviction.

They become Baudrillard’s simulacra – copies without originals. Their gestures, practiced in front of mirrors, their passionate pronouncements delivered with practiced theatricality, all contribute to the illusion of authenticity. We, the audience, become passive consumers of this political spectacle, unable to discern the real from the simulated.

This is a world where political discourse is consumed like a dubbed foreign film. The words may seem urgent, the emotions melodramatic, but beneath the surface lies a chilling emptiness. The simulation becomes the entirety, leaving us with a gnawing suspicion that the true issues, the unvarnished debates, remain forever out of reach.

Absolutely. In the Baudrillardian framework, these politicians aren’t just voiceless actors, they reach for a specific archetype – the Hollywood simulacrum.

They crave a kind of mythic, universal appeal, a voice that transcends regional dialects and speaks the language of power through the manufactured charisma of Hollywood. This is a deliberate attempt to erase their groundedness, their connection to a specific electorate. They aspire to a disembodied stardom, a politics of pure image unmoored from the messy realities of representation.

The danger here is the further erosion of the already-fragile link between the people and their representatives. By embodying the Hollywood simulacrum, they remove themselves from the realm of relatability and accountability. They become not leaders, but celebrities in a simulated political drama.

War Larp

Armies prepare to fight the last Hollywood larp, rather than their next anti war indie. War is the continuation of delusion by other means.

Our garish parade of grunts rehearses for their next technicolor Götterdämmerung, a glorious clash of CGI battalions against a backdrop of pixilated deserts. Their maneuvers, choreographed by generals hopped up on John Wayne matinees,resemble shopping mall holographic war games more than the grim, labyrinthine tangles that will bleed out the next geo-political snafu. These are warriors sculpted by Pentagon mythmakers, primed to reenact Thermopylae with cruise missiles and a budget that could finance a Borgesian library.

Our garish military parades, a technicolor fever dream of bygone blitzkriegs and glory-hounded cavalry charges. Million-dollar centurions in mirrored shades, their phallic chrome chariots bristling with impotent weaponry, rehearse for a war that flickers on flickering screens, a celluloid epic perpetually on rerun. They train for the romanticized double bill, all billowing smoke and chest-thumping bravado, while the realpolitik unspools in the shadows, a grainy black and white documentary nobody wants to watch.

Meanwhile, the real war, the one conducted in flickering internet back alleys and whispers across encrypted channels,simmers unnoticed. Drone shadows flit across unsigned battlefields, data packets ricochet through a labyrinthine darknet,and minds are hacked with the ease of a forgotten password. Our boys play at war with megaphoned proclamations and laser-guided heroics, while the enemy lurks in the shadows, a nameless, faceless specter wielding weapons as intangible as ideas.

It’s all a tragicomic funhouse mirror reflecting a funhouse world, a hall of mirrors where Clausewitz’s dictum twists into a grotesque self-parody. War, it seems, is not the continuation of politics by other means, but the desperate, delusional grasp at a bygone era, a frantic attempt to impose a narrative of cowboys and calvalry onto a world writhing with possibilities as strange and unsettling as a fever dream by Philip K. Dick. We fight the phantoms of a bygone era, our generals haunted by strategies cobbled together from dog-eared pulp novels filled with cardboard heroes and pyrotechnic victories. The true enemy, a hydra-headed beast of shadowy agendas and resource scarcity, festers in the wings, ignored in favor of the digitized ghosts of battlefields past. We are sleepwalking towards a conflict not of our making, armed with yesterday’s weapons and fueled by yesterday’s delusions.

Where are the gritty, guerrilla documentaries prepping them for the realpolitik trench warfare of resource scarcity and asymmetrical threats?

Clausewitz, bless his ironclad heart, might’ve scoffed at this cold parade of delusions marching under the banner of strategy. This warmonger’s psychodrama, this clinging to a bygone era’s war porn aesthetics, isn’t statecraft, it’s a deranged LARPing of cowboys and injuns projected on the flickering screen of empire. The body count, however, will be all too real, a snuff film projected onto the grubby windshield of a stolen sedan in some nameless third-world backwater.

We fight the ghosts of wars past, while the real enemy, a hydra-headed beast of fractured economies, social collapse, and environmental devastation, slithers ever closer, unseen and unmolested.