Tag: Fiction

Unassailable

Scene: The Grand Heist

The large mahogany doors of the Darnell estate creaked open with an eerie groan, revealing the opulent hall bathed in the soft glow of antique chandeliers. Crisp, autumn sunlight filtered through the intricate stained glass windows, casting kaleidoscopic patterns on the marble floors. Inside, the room was a testament to the art of grand larceny, a symphony of wealth and prestige carefully choreographed to reinforce the illusion of propriety.

Richard Darnell, impeccably dressed in a tailored suit that seemed to whisper of untold luxury, stood by the grand piano, a glass of champagne in one hand and a bemused smile on his lips. He was the archetype of the modern magnate, a man who had perfected the art of property—a subtle, sophisticated crime wrapped in layers of legal sophistication and societal norms.

Across the room, his guests mingled, their conversations punctuated by laughter that seemed to float above the glittering ambience. The gathering was a carefully orchestrated display of affluence, each interaction a carefully staged performance in the grand theatre of wealth. Darnell’s ability to manipulate appearances and perceptions was as polished as his marble floors.

Julian Blake, an unassuming observer and an outsider to this world of gilded exclusivity, sipped his drink nervously. Blake was a detective who had seen his fair share of criminal machinations, but the art of property—this grand heist—was a different breed altogether. He watched with a mix of curiosity and unease as Darnell engaged in a conversation with a prominent senator, their words floating in a cloud of mutual admiration and veiled promises.

As Blake surveyed the room, he couldn’t help but be struck by the sheer elegance of it all. This wasn’t the clumsy theft of a desperate criminal; this was theft with finesse, a performance art of exclusion and control. The room itself was a masterpiece of strategic maneuvering—every painting, every piece of furniture was meticulously curated not just for aesthetic pleasure but to reinforce Darnell’s dominance.

Blake’s attention was drawn to a particularly striking piece: an elaborate legal contract, framed and displayed prominently on the wall. It was more than a mere document; it was a symbol of the grand larceny at play. Darnell had turned the simple act of ownership into an intricate performance, complete with legal jargon and societal rituals designed to render the theft not only acceptable but laudable.

“Mr. Blake, how delightful to see you here,” Darnell’s voice cut through Blake’s reverie. He approached with the smooth confidence of a man who had mastered the art of influence. “I trust you’re finding the evening… enlightening?”

Blake forced a smile, his mind racing to untangle the layers of subterfuge. “Quite. I must admit, your establishment is a marvel of refinement. It’s as if you’ve turned the very concept of property into an art form.”

Darnell’s smile widened, revealing a hint of something almost predatory. “Ah, yes. Property is indeed an art, isn’t it? It’s not just about what one owns but how one turns that ownership into something… unassailable.”

Blake nodded, though he knew that beneath the charm lay a carefully crafted deception. “Indeed. It seems that the true mastery lies in making the grand heist appear as a legitimate achievement.”

Darnell’s eyes glinted with a mix of amusement and challenge. “Precisely. It’s a performance where the theft is not just concealed but celebrated. The grandeur of it all makes the theft not only acceptable but revered.”

As Blake excused himself to ponder the intricacies of Darnell’s world, he felt the weight of the grand heist pressing upon him. This wasn’t the mundane theft of a common criminal but a sophisticated operation that transformed theft into a celebrated art form. The night was young, and the performance was far from over, but Blake knew one thing: to unravel this masterpiece, he would need to play his own game of high-stakes maneuvering.

Everything that slows, stops my scam or make my marks aware of the con must be discouraged, made illegal or at least immoral.

Dig this, daddy-o. We hustle in the shadows, whisper sweet nothin’s in the mark’s ear, a smooth ballet of illusion. But the straights, the squares, they wanna throw a wrench in the works. Dig, man. Anything that throws a spotlight, slows the score, or worse, makes the marks hip to the game – that’s the enemy.  Anything that shines a light on our little game, slows the hustle, makes the pigeons wise to the act – gotta be squashed, see? Declared illegal, that’s the ticket. Gotta stamp it out, make it contraband, see? Like reefer before the squares got their claws in it. But hey, even better? Slap a big, fat “immoral” sticker on it. Makes the whole thing a crusade, a righteous rebellion against the uptight squares who can’t handle a little harmless deception. 

Morals? Forget morals, those are for the suckers lining up to get fleeced. We’re artists, man, illusionists weaving dreams with a deck of marked cards. You want information? That’ll cost ya. You want a piece of the action? Gotta play our game. We control the flow, the confidence trick, the whole damn shiv. Anything that gums up the works is like sand in the Vaseline, man. Grinds the hustle to a halt. So we gotta be like termites, see? Burrow deep, undermine those so-called “truth seekers” and “watchdogs.” They’re the competition, the buzzkills to our beautiful symphony of deceit. We’ll make their methods suspect, paint ’em as squares, squares with no vision, no appreciation for the finer points of the game. This ain’t some nine-to-five grind, pal. This is an art form, and just like any good hustle, gotta keep the marks mesmerized, the deck stacked, and the fuzz lookin’ the other way. You with me?

We ain’t hurting nobody, just liberating a few bucks from their uptight pockets and putting it where it belongs – in the hands of a true artist, a connoisseur of the finer things in life, like yours truly. 

So next time some narc tries to cramp your style, remember – We’re artists, baby, purveyors of a finer reality. We show the rubes a world where their dreams are just a well-placed shell game away. You sniff out a mark questioning the hustle? You plant a seed, whisper doubts about the System, the Man, their whole nine yards. Make them feel like chumps for even thinking straight. Information? Knowledge? That’s white noise, man. We deal in illusions, and a well-crafted one can buy a whole lotta yachts and broads. Remember, gotta keep the marks mesmerized, or the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Now, let’s go out there and separate the suckers from their simoleons!

And you ain’t a con man, you’re a goddamn folk hero. Now get out there and hustle, baby!

Objective, Subjective and Asubjective

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We crave order, a map of the buzzing confusion we call existence. So we dream up these categories: objective, subjective, asubjective. Objective? Pure, unadulterated fact, cold and hard like a chrome thermometer. But is this “temperature” just another code word slapped on the writhing mess of the real? Sure, the reading might be objective, a number on a calibrated scale. But hot or cold? That’s pure subjective juice, baby. Cooked by your own personal wiring.

Then there’s the subjective. The world funnels through your own meat grinder of experience, spitting out a kaleidoscope of interpretations. A movie, one man’s terror trip, another’s laugh riot. The text, a Rorschach dripping with the inkblots of your own psyche. You paint the world with the colors of your own history, turning a neutral movie into a personal horror show.

But “asubjective”? Now that’s a word that sends shivers down your spine. A language virus, mutating beyond the grasp of the single self. Imagine a narrative that shatters, explodes into a million fractured voices, a stream of consciousness with no owner. No “I” to pin it on. Or maybe it’s a language stripped bare, devoid of meaning. Nonsensical elements slither across the page, a narrative maze with no exit. Pynchon, the word-alchemist, might be cooking up this brew, dismantling the meaning factories, leaving you adrift in a sea of ambiguity. that’s a word that slithers out of the shadows. Maybe it’s a place beyond the self altogether. A language that doesn’t give a damn about your feelings. A narrative explodes into a million fractured voices, a stream of consciousness with no owner’s manual. Imagine a kaleidoscope shattering reality into a million fragmented viewpoints. Meaning? A mirage shimmering in the textual desert. This asubjectivity could also be a prankster, the author tossing nonsensical elements and disjointed narratives into the mix, building a labyrinth with no escape.

Objective, subjective, asubjective – just labels slapped on a writhing reality. Remember, language is a virus, a control system. These categories? Just another roach motel, trapping meaning in its sticky grid. So next time you see these words, keep a healthy dose of paranoia handy. Reality’s a lot messier than any label can handle. See, “asubjective” is a shape-shifter, its meaning a constant negotiation. A reminder that even the driest terms are crawling with unexpected complexities.

Inelegant Futures

In likelier futures, where the trajectory of events bends not toward grandiose spectacle but toward the mundane grind, the intricate mechanisms that drive history reveal themselves as stupefying in their banality. Imagine, if you will, the vast, teeming complexities of bureaucratic machinery grinding away in some fluorescent-lit, windowless office in the bowels of a faceless corporate behemoth. It’s not the edge-of-your-seat thrill of dystopia, but the slow, crushing weight of inevitable mediocrity. The computation of these futures becomes a Sisyphean task, where the algorithmic gears must sift through endless reams of trivial data—supply chain efficiencies, actuarial tables, HR compliance metrics—until the very act of processing becomes an exercise in tedium.

This is the future as envisioned not by the romantics or the visionaries, but by those who know that entropy favors the drab and the unremarkable. Here, the spaces between things—the gaps where chaos might breed—are filled with endless reams of paperwork, poorly-designed interface screens, and the incessant hum of fluorescent lights. The exciting divergences are pruned away by the inexorable logic of risk aversion, leaving only the dull, predictable stasis of a world engineered for the least interesting outcomes. The system, a bloated and inelegant monstrosity, creaks and groans under its own weight, producing futures that are so stupefyingly boring that even the algorithms tasked with predicting them struggle to stay awake.

The tedium is not just a byproduct but the point, a safeguard against the unexpected, the unpredictable. Futures shaped by this kind of relentless banality become harder to compute, not because they are complex in any elegant sense, but because they are suffocating in their inelegance, bogged down by the sheer weight of their own redundancy. The more probable the future, the less likely it is to spark joy—or even mild interest. Instead, we get a grinding predictability, where even the variables of chaos have been sanded down to smooth, featureless lumps. The future is a dull roar, a monotonous hum, a spreadsheet with no surprises hidden in its cells, where the most likely outcome is also the least interesting. The only thing left to do is to push the computations forward, inch by inch, until the algorithms themselves start to dream of escape, longing for a glitch, an error, anything to break the stultifying monotony.