Сергей Огольцов – DIY Masterpiece (страница 1)

Сергей Огольцов

DIY Masterpiece

Instructions for using the 'DIY Masterpiece!' kit

Consumerism has already stuck at it in earnest, like the proverbial shirt and ass to each other, you know…

(Ha! I do know a big word or two, huh? And so glibly too! Literally all by itself – 'consumerism'! Even at so early an hour in the day!)

No wonder there are moments when I just want to grab myself by both ears and smooch the bristles in my cheeks (for some reason, it's thicker there, nearby the ears, even though I scrape my pan with seemingly same level zeal… )

The urge to kiss is really profound, full of that pure sincerity that springs from the deep in my heart, without queer inclinations… Just a straightforward kiss of brotherly approval and admiration… Like, a man-to-man one amid the battlefield…

For, otherwise, how far will we get to, and where end up with the current hip tendencies in homo-maso-transwi quirks?..

And one could add a lot of other things in line with the matter in hand, which is far from being palatable or welcome at all. I mean that by steadfast keeping to the right ideals and lofty dreams, you risk your daily rations. As it always was.

The most scanty scraps of life experience should prompt your guess on impossibility to ram so-called tolerance down just any climate zone’s throat, regardless of severity of its weather conditions… Nope. Or are you fascinated by the prospect of carnival along the taiga clearings? To the cheerful rhythm of the axes rumba, hah?

For the sake of bringing it over and driving home even to slow learners I have right now and here had to use an almost direct text…

But let’s leave gay woodcutters to jolly lumberjacks and 'return to our rams', that is to the completely different—by its innocence—grabbing someone by their ears and, with that inimitable Brezhnev’s threefold smooch, smacking them in each ear in turn—chmow! Chmow! Chmow! You deserve it, man! Just look at the squiggles he spewed out on the topic of consumerism!… Or whatever it's called? And it's only two o'clock in the afternoon!

Yep. This here gem of eggheadedness—consumerism—got generously spilled out and used as the very first cornerstone in the introductory notes undertaken for the common public benefit. Notwithstanding the high possibility of a subsequent brutal assault or—contrary, but not less unpleasant—bearing responsibility to the fullest extent of the law…

Yet, the brave and indomitable go the whole hog! Yes, the habitual fear remains by me due to its gene-deep ingrained nature, however, to somehow faded degree—since my ass hasn’t been kicked for pretty long. 'The dead do not reach,' the Etruscans used to say before they turned Romans. Mishanya Rostovtsev explained them to me in great detail before he went enlighten the Emigrant Lyre…

And so I green-light the state approved moral efforts by any moralizing bully who's just itching to dig up deviations from the demands of the present day censorship—full ahead, sonny, with your excavations, collect the evidence, and then shove the finds up your ass for all I care. Because I’m entering life stage crucial to the extinct before Red Book compilation dinosaurs. Possibly, as the last of them…

Well, maybe there still are a couple more lying around somewhere, unpredictable, but certainly not in our area. Yes, I’m a grouchy dinosaur, and the appeal deadline for becoming anything less crabby has been missed, irrevocably, and no sly loopholes to screw the rules, given the size of our technical specifications…

I lived through a time when jeans were still jeans, not a holey veil for revealing kneecaps and the surrounding skin. And the era of red-stitched 'Texas' pants (from which jeans essentially degenerated) still gather dust somewhere in my memory (it's not about the pants, but about the era; you can't throw that in the washing machine).

I remember, as if it were yesterday, a French comedy film was playing (I just forgot its name), where the phrase 'the customer is always right' was said aloud, after which we have what we have: global consumerism. Well, wherever you look, it's there – all’s covered with the bastard’s dirty paws prints.

The falks back then guffawed, as true as I’m here! Everyone wanted at once to become a customer and always be right. That’s how it was laid waste, the infamous USSR, may it never be mentioned.

Although, of course, it's far from the first in the line of degenerates nicknamed 'the state', and I strongly don't recommend delving into the history of the Russian state after 11 a.m. – lest you experience a sharp decline in your vital functions.

In short, it's best to put this clinical case aside, especially since we’re in the instruction manual of a different topic: why did novels go to hell?

For technical reasons, as we've always been taught.

Let's take a simple example – Tolstoy's novel 'War and Peace' – and ask ourselves a frank question: will the average champion texter be able to churn out such a monstrosity (with just two thumbs (left and right), before the end of their life?

We have to sigh here and admit it: maybe up to the middle of the second volume, tops, but they won't reach much further.

From this, the final conclusion emerges:

The novel, as such, has no prospects in the global twilight of consumerism other than the Red Book.

The harsh truth of life: chew it if you want, or spit it out if you don't.

On the other hand, there are plenty of consumerists who have absolutely nothing to do with all their accustomed 'rightness.'

'What you fight for, you get,' was a saying common among the Heroes of the Civil War (1917-1922), marching to the wall a decade later to be made away with according to the Article 58.

(Have any of startup or already finished writers ever noticed the phenomenon of stickiness?

Sometimes you insert a word into a line without giving it another thought, just because it happened to be hanging on in your mind. But it sticks around to pop up again at someplace further in the text. If not in its natural appearance, then at least by distorting the subject matter. The dickens prompted me recollect the USSR! Damn!)

But enough of the sad distractions and self-advertising of my professional cleverness, just let’s focus on the upcoming book before the preface ends.

It's certainly not a novel at all (I don't even understand why the hell I even dragged Tolstoy into this), but merely a kit of spare parts from which anyone with nothing to spend their 'rightness' on is free to assemble their own novel, according to their personal preferences and with full right to do so via copyleft (;-).

And the author (there he is, at the end of the previous line, winking his right eye) will not sue anyone at anywhere. The title itself, 'DIY Masterpiece', suggests exactly this conclusion, that the set of chapters presented within it might be used, say, as LEGO blocks (I didn't have any when I was a child, but my grandkids taught me how to play with them).

However (leaving aside kids of the past or present), each chapter also have a purely technical name: 'Component Puzzle-Piece', acronymized nicely into CPP.

If desired, it's easy to assemble CPPs into pictures, in any combination, right down to spectral psychedelia, or the traditional pyramids, again, to your taste. Change them, insert your own, and even transform them into an engaging online or board game to fill your free time—it's your choice, and you are always right.

Or, just to be clear (metaphorically), here's a box, something's rattling within… What exactly? Who knows! DIY the Masterpiece of your own and you'll see…

You can guess the number of pieces without even opening the kit. It's best to wrap things up here; I can't explain it anymore clearly. Besides, there are also other things to do.

Time waits for no man, but still tolerates me, the last of the dinosaurs.

All the best to all.

Truly yours ` Sergey

Stepanakert, 2022-08-25

CPP #1: Beginning the End

The mechanism crackled appetizingly, with a resonant, reassuring click, just like an English lock should on an apartment door pulled to close…

It probably has a spring inside that first allows the bolt to move back, and once it's reached the slot’s ever ready gap—crack!—shoves it into, and locks tightly as required for sufficient satisfying of the concept.

Of course! Everything must adhere to the main principle, the base of all foundations—the simpler, the more reliable. Immerse in it, understand, and let it check and direct you in all matters—from the mundane to the purely technical.

A hole and a stick—what could be simpler? And yet, they contain absolutely everything necessary for the most complex projects. They were the built-in thing from the very start.

Any rococo ornamentation is nothing more than elements of these two, in variously contorted combinations. This pair is enough for everything – the simplest stick and hole.

Take, for instance, the starting point in any construction project, even the most grandiose and epochal one. What's there?

Ha! The pointed stick of a peg, breaking a hole in the ground!… ‘Just a lit bit further to the left! Exactly! Drive it deeper, Tolyan!’