So, whats stalking at a glance?
Its evening Yet another Hero, as crazy about reading fantasy novels as all morons and losers are, staggers back to his little cozy den in the five-story condo he likes so much, to fall into anabiosis until the pure, good, and just event the publication of a new remake that depicts him as the Great and Powerful throughout happens.
In the meantime, the powers of darkness in the persons of a budding criminal nicknamed Lisper (sentenced for rowdy behavior to three years suspended) and a couple of other young and gifted good-for-nothings, stopped by the condos entrance hall, looking for something soft and pliant to train their adolescent psyche.
Scenarios:
1. Hero didnt spot Lisper until he was all in Heros face. Heros right hand hurriedly went searching for the mouse and hurriedly clicked the left button that wasnt there, and the absence of a screen sight to aim through made talking to these people a tad harder for the powerful magician.
The days last thing saved on the hard drive was a blurry, dirty 50 Hz palm closing the world shut before turning it upside down. So he couldnt see the young yet promising judo champion who ran up the stairs behind him and confidently set about knotting the young and gifted good-for-nothings into a macramé pattern.
2. Hero got so blown away he slipped and dropped all his fantasy books at the entrance door. While he picked them up, a young yet promising champion boxer named Gavrila burst into the hall, ran up the stairs, and tripped over Lisper. A short, if informative, discussion followed.
Over the course of that discussion, the advantage of the left hook over bluff and thief-argot bluff was elucidated. Gavrila helped Lisper get better at lisping by giving him an unassuming professional kick in the teeth.
Drenched in cold sweat and stepping with disgust over the bloody spit and puke, Hero ran fast to his den to leave it all behind by diving into the second level of the book about Him, the Great.
3. Hero went home, sweating gallons.
All day long, signs kept shouting to him that a white furry beastie would be coming for him soon. The worlds hints were getting more insistent by the hour the cats squealed by his ear louder and the passersby, saying something seemingly irrelevant, looked at him more and more meaningfully, making the matrix bulge so much they seemed out to pounce out of the RAM at him.
The last sign was the scrap of a newspaper he saw at the condos entrance door, with the headline Gazprom Gives Last Warning to Ukraine, torn so that only the words last warning remained visible.
I wonder what Castaneda would have said about that, Hero thought, squatting with his feet on the bench at the entrance door.
The answer came as usual in the form of the young yet gifted good-for-nothings, headed by Lisper, cussing and yawping heartily, slagging off Gavrila, the young yet promising champ of youre-in-deep-shit do, who had brushed past into the hall while Hero pondered the to be or not to be of his situation.
4. Offscreen voice: Hero was asleep but he knew that in five minutes hed wake up in his bed, remembering all hed been dreaming about. Thats why today he let the champ of what-did-you-say-it-was and Gavrila enter the hall first.
5. And thith thime well leth the king of spades come firthst, come firtht, Hero mumbled malignantly under his breath, lisping as the result of his last encounter with Lisper, getting deeper into his role of the local lunatic, as he looked after Gavrila, who had no idea he was about to meet Lisper in a way that would be fateful for Hero, hurrying in to meet Lisper all the same
6. Let the Kings of Swords come first please, Hero thought calmly, looking Gavrila in the eye, exchanging meaningless phrases with him before Gavrila rushed, in a businesslike manner, to smash Lispers face in as any patience card was supposed to do.
7. Nnnoooo, I dont like the way the cards have fallen, Hero thought, and he jumbled his cards laid out to show Gavrila give Lispers head a kick with his strong foot, freeing the condo once and for all from that bold-faced asshole. And, all things considered, Lisper wasnt worth laying out a patience for.
Gavrila, on the other hand, was a cool guy, ready to beat the hell out of Lisper for the asking. Svetka from apartment 54, however, didnt see what she was missing, the hoity-toity fool.
Better lay out a patience for the two. So that they could move in together and live happily. Then thered be more descent people living in the condo in some teen years, by the way.
For those in doubt, heres the classification in brief:
1. Stalking version zero.
2. Unconscious stalking, or where the guardian angel strikes is your home.
3. Ooooww enemies, they shut me in, thats an ambush, how dya like that, bro? Semiconscious stalking that often transforms smoothly into madhouse stalking, directed by the kind and sympathetic men in white coats.
4. Stalking by a dream-seer or, to be precise, a stalkers dreams maybe or dream stalking or in-stalking dreaming or perhaps in-dream stalking Damned if I can get my head around those dreams without a panel of stalkers to help me out
5. Stalking by a not-yet card sharp who already cheats a little with cards and events
6. Stalking by a stalker, or so he thinks
7. Its high time the stalker became a stalker, the world thought
Chapter 4. The name is bluff james bluff
So, whats a stalker under a magnifying glass?
Take necromancers, for instance. A necromancer needs no description since you can imagine them easily, surrounded by the dead they evoked from their graves, howling terribly, jealous of everyone around over the necromancer and out to tear down anyone whodoesnt have a life insurance policy.
Or, say, vampires theyre no rocket science as you cant mistake them for anyone else. At least, before you die.
The bogatyrs distinguishing feature is, say, his strength. The magicians, the ability to do magic. The witchs, to do witchcraft. The sorcerers, to do sorcery.
But whats a stalker and what does a stalker do anyway?
Those whove read the previous chapters may have noticed that any event has lots of potential scenarios. And, strange as it may seem, any scenario has an end, happy or otherwise. And if you look at some five scenarios, it turns out that despite the many possible combinations, they each have a distinguishing feature, the possibility of a happy ending that somehow keeps plummeting terrifyingly as you go.
And the possibility of finding yourself ten feet under tends toward one hundred percent in any scenario. If the scenario is not something you might see in a kids comic, coming instead from the hard, true life, then the happy end vanishes out of sight almost as fast as you can say soulfully, Were screwed.
At this point, any more or less able mathematician will remember the extreme cases of dangerous and unhealthy occupations such as Agent 007 or Indiana Jones. Everyone is after him, and what they want to do to the scapego I mean, the hero clearly interferes with the patients health and sleep. And the most interesting thing here is that even if you follow the Indian movie tradition of shooting away from a six-chambered gun, they shoot too as a rule, in multishot fire mode, coming at you from every side like Black Friday shoppers.
Vampires have it easy in situations of that kind: just feast on a couple of people, wreak havoc, and fly away on the wings of night. But what is the simple Bluff supposed to do?
Strange as it may seem, this doesnt worry him in the least he just keeps going, safe and sound and nothing daunted, from episode to episode. Maybe just a little exhausted by yet another nymphomaniac. How does he do that? How come hes got it made, with the likes of Halle Berry at his side while your toasts just keep landing butter side down?
Thats the way things happen in the movies, I hear you say. But someone wins the national lottery! Or becomes the president or isnt that scary the presidents wife.
And if you look closely at what Bluff does in the movie, youll notice a characteristic detail: hes never late, the fucker. Always just in the nick of time As soon as the security officer looks away for a second to think about the meaning of life, Bluff shows up out of the blue and, to take advantage of the security officers temporary helplessness and save Bluffs bullets for the other 149 security officers, clouts him right on the head there you go, your soul is floating up to hea I mean hell, of course.
As soon as the pretty lady feels an attack of female dizziness coming on, Bluff is right there to help as if he had seen it coming all along, the bastard.
Thats just the way he is no sooner do you stop to take a yawn than hes there to take care of things. Even Homer sometimes nods when the day of villainy is done, the villains need a minutes rest, too. Bluff shamelessly takes advantage of that respite, and the next thing you know, his shameless face looks into your eyes and says insolently, The name is Bluff. James Bluff.
What an asshole, right?
But the most interesting thing is that he takes his one-in-a-million chance as an accuracy on par with the Swiss time-pieces and invariably moves on from episode to episode, maneuvering deftly in the machine-gun fire and sliding between the pretty legs in those rare moments when theyre loose and defenseless.
Or take Next, starring Nicolas Cage.
In that movie, Nic is able to tell the future in all of three minutes, and the spell is long enough for him to bend his head low and lift it back up as necessary.And hes as deft maneuvering in the gunfire. When I first saw him I thought, All right, Bluff is back from another plastic surgery. You see, their tricks looked too much alike, and they contrived to knock the enemy all over the place without as much as shooting a gun.
It logically follows that if Nic doesnt brandish a gun in Next and Bluff isnt a frequent shooter either, then their main weapon is knowing how to be in the right place at the right time, smiling their bulletproof, white-teeth cover-boy smiles at the bullets coming their way
Maybe thats what gets the bullets blinded or how else can you explain that they miss the target all the time?
To put it scientifically for all of you nerds out there, the high probability of success in a situation where the probability of survival is negligently low is guaranteed for these individuals by either congenital or acquired ability to synchronously interact with aggressive agents, thereby allowing the individuals to attain their goals and use their capabilities in the most optimal manner possible.
Anybody get that?
Thats what the distinguishing feature of stalking is the absolute synchronization with the world and the use of power, aggression, and weapons kept to a minimum.
A poem by Guberman, I think comes to mind.
I had a friend who fed himself to lice
Mending his rags as old as life
Cut out Creations likeness nice
And hunted God without a knife
Chapter 5. Look what the cat coughed up
What does it mean to be in the right place at the right time?
In the nerdy parlance of overly smart mathematicians, this means having the right space and time coordinates at a given moment.
That is, F (x, y, z, t) = f (t), where f (t) is that tricky function essential to success and to the feeling of deep mental satisfaction.
Anybody get that?
To put it simply, heres an example: Say a cat runs across the road, escaping the cars prone to hit her any second.
Three things have always amazed me:
1. As a rule, the cat runs without looking around, instead looking steadily at some point ahead.
2. But if it stops and takes a look around, the cat is bound to be run over.
3. A simple yet amazing fact: a car drives through the spot where the cat was a second ago, but the cat is already not there.
Here, the following analogies offer themselves:
1. A person crossing the road of life looks at a point ahead of them like the cat. They can only see their ultimate goal and trot toward it.
This sort of obsession is a distinguishing trait of so-called ambitious people. That is, those who achieve success, for it is ambitious people that do.
Theres a certain secret to it, and in fact its a property of human consciousness. You can look at thousands of things, but you can only see those that your eyes search for, and once you see them, you just keep on looking at them. Thats as simple as that, and everyone knows it, but
Duck hunters know a funny thing: a duck shot while flying falls into the grass, and as the duck falls, the hunter mechanically follows its path with his eyes. Every hunter sees the spot the duck has fallen onto and then goes there to pick it up, but they wont find it unless they look steadily at the spot as they approach it.
But if they only remember the spot approximately and go searching for the duck on the just assumption that their six to eight pounds of brains guarantee locating a lousy duck in the grass, ninety-nine percent of them will never find it, dead or not dead.
Why do they find no duck? The duck cant have crawled away to heaven, right?
2. If you look away from your initial goal and start to have your doubts when youre half way there, youre not likely to succeed remember what happens to the cat when it freezes in front of the speeding car.
But the overwhelming majority of people doubt things all the time. THINGS AND PEOPLE but why?
Theres a good saying that cowards die many times before their deaths.
And if you ask women, who in fact stand behind the natural selection of homo sapience males, what a cool man is, theyll give you thousands of answers, but each will be sure to mention confidence.
Confident is an antonym for tentative. Women believe that a man can be anything a sadist, a murderer, a bastard, a pauper and still be attractive to them. But strip a man of his confidence, and no woman will ever look his way.
The instinct of selecting a potential mate unerringly tells a woman that a male lacking confidence will achieve nothing he has no prospects.
Hero, the laughing stock of the neighborhood, can only be a hero for a girl whos a laughing stock herself. People of this kind never make it unless theyre characters in a book, a drug for losers. In real life, someone who is confident scares predators away with their confidence alone.
Thats why little kids (and professional dog trainers) can, without an ounce of fear, approach a big mean dog to pet it (unless the dog is chained up). Their absolute faith and fearlessness dont provoke the dog to bite them.
If you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, Move from here to there, and it would move. Let me just add that faith is not a thought nor kung fu theory but the special state that stalkers learn first, a real feeling as opposed to mumbling, I do believe, I do believe, I do!
To those with extrasensory perception skills, one can simply say that energy is perception, the twenty-second Tarot trump (the Fool), the dude with a bindle, looking up to the sky to see his way up there, not down on Earth.
This Arcanum is the beginning and the end of Tarot studies.
It is this Arcanum that describes stalking on Earth.
And it is its energy and the perception of it that yield faith and all the resulting consequences, including the blinding bulletproof white-teeth smile.
Fools get all the luck, as the Russians say.
And thats quite true.