Yesterday, April 10th, 2025, I walked around an imaginary reservoir within an imaginary park in an imaginary city with an imaginary friend, again.
[in8 iD] said they had received, because they are highly skilled and accomplished, employment offers in other countries and even had now several choices in where to move. Though the pay and prestige at these potential jobs would all be significantly less than their current one, we had been discussing such moves because the Russian Asset had begun his chokehold on open society, like a mafia boss shaking down neighborhood merchants, and so [in8 iD] and their other halves most likely would choose to flee.
I told them I totally understood and probably would, if I were more able, do the same. Just yesterday, I told [in8 iD], one friend had told me that ICE agents had arrived at his daughter’s elite college campus as academic institutions, along with places of worship, were no longer protected spaces. And another Moroccan-French friend, a new father and green card holder wedded to an American, had just been told by his lawyer that, due to a minor arrest from many years prior, that he was now likely on ICE’s list and a target for deportation.
[in8 iD] spoke of how professors they knew at Columbia and NYU and Stanford were scrubbing even their personal emails of all mention of the Russian Asset, now POTUS, due to fear of retaliation.
“Thus we record our sinking,” I said to my imaginary friend.
“What do you mean?” [in* iD] said.
“I mean I’ll write it up on my pointless blog.”
“No one reads those anymore,” [in8 iD] said, once again.
“I know,” I said.
“But the bots will,” [in8 iD] added. A tiny shiver of terror ran through me when they said that.
All of a sudden everyone around us in the imaginary park and all throughout the streets of the imaginary city stopped. They looked toward the sky and said out loud, “Is there nothing we can do?”
Receiving no answer, everyone went back to how they had been.
For eample [in8 iD] and I began talking about cascading style sheets and Bulgarian web hosting.
Then I mentioned that my friend Tan, a poet, had said to me just the other day that There is a kind of writer who writes not particularly to be read.
[in8 iD] nodded knowingly.
I speculated the reason these kinds of writers write is more about the act itself, which is a conceptual art work — the doing — more so than the finished piece. And I said that I’d once conceived Oulipian writing as the poetic residue of another’s thought experiment.
“Today, for instance,” [in8 iD] nodded in agreement and said, “I’m writing about the number 43.”
I stopped walking and turned to them. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“You know the Sri Yantra?”
“No.”
“It’s a mandala,” [in8 iD] said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Do you understand?” they asked.
“No,” I said to my imaginary friend.
“It’s like a sheet of cascading styles,” they said.
“I think I’ll call the post that,” I said.
“What? CSS?”
“No, ‘Sri Yantra,'” I said.
“Oh. Okay. Good.” [in8 iD] said.
“I’m reading the Brothers Karamazov,” I said, changing the subject again. I think it’s because my kitten is still having seizures.”
[in8 iD] nodded in understanding.
“I’m finding it, perhaps because of this new translation, amazingly beautiful and wise and understanding of human folly,” I said stupidly.
“I once had a professor,” [in8 iD] said (or maybe this was my friend Anelise who had suddenly joined us in the park), “who made us pick one of the brothers to represent us. It was like Sex and the City. Were you Carrie? Miranda? It was the same. Which was your spirit bro? Alyosha? Dimitri?”
“That’s dumb,” [in8 iD] said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’d be Alyosha,” [in8 iD] said.
“I’d be Ivan,” I said.
Then we both shook our fists at the sky and, because we were late for our respective dinners, parted ways and rushed home.
