Notes (IV)

That’s a key thread there, of course. Not necessarily interesting in itself, but I’ll need it to make sure I’m getting the details right: when Elena Feller died, how Marsh obtained the materials, how the idea for Spelunk 04! was born from Marsh and Aaron’s enmity. And, come to think of it, it’s Kelsey’s first appearance in this collection of sources. I was never sure how I felt about Kelsey on the Cafe, and after Spelunk 04!, I am even less sure. I haven’t talked to her since it ended, and I probably should. In any case, she was there with us, and she didn’t leave before the end, and that’s all that really matters.

Aaron actually comes off surprisingly well in that last post. I had bad memories of him around this period—in fact, I confess that, despite having considered him a fascinating poster for most of my time on the Cafe, I was somewhat apprehensive about meeting him in person. I’ll need to find an example of the Aaron/Marsh Wars at their most intense, something to cite to prove just how far it had gone. Assuming that it had gone as far as I think it did, of course. My perception and memory are not transparent, non-refracting media.

I’m still not feeling up to writing the actual Spelunk 04! narrative itself. I figured that sleeping on it might help, but instead I just had a lurid, Cafe-related nightmare. I was somehow suspended in midair above a conical, roseate abyss, glistening slickly in dawn-like light, apparently some biological organ of unknown type and purpose. I seemed to have some ability to move, but my body and my mind were not speaking the same language: simple commands to raise or lower an arm produced glitchy, full-body convolutions. Resigned then to float unmoving, hoping the levitating force would not let up and leave me to be swallowed by the maw beneath, I began to perceive a voice.

It was Aaron’s. He was speaking, in his cheerful manner, each phrase ending with a slight uptick in pitch, with the overall tone of someone expounding a theorem or a point of theological doctrine, something coherent with a definite beginning and end. But the words fitted into this schema were incomprehensible. They were English words, and they had a kind of sense, and yet all they added up to was a sort of limp metaphor without enough context to make it potent or applicable, like one of the Lorrum Sage’s nonsensical “definitions” (“universe: a foulmouthed mammal’s monstrous motor”). More distressingly, each word he said was accompanied by a lurching, peristaltic convulsion of the thing below me, as though it itself were the organ producing Aaron’s speech, although the two felt physically disproportionate.

And then? I woke up. What does it mean? Nothing I can make out. I can’t even remember any of what Aaron said, not that it made any coherent impression at the time. The whole dream was amusingly underwhelming, cheaply uninteresting even as a nightmare; my subconscious was phoning it in. But life contains such things, and we must accept them and continue.

Accept and continue. I do not feel ready for Spelunk 04! yet. So I will go back in time, a bit. Collect a few more samples. I’ve told myself I want to show those outside the Cafe a bit of Jennific, and I said a moment ago that I need a good example of Aaron and Marsh in their full grotesque glory. (I have been looking through threads and I have pretty much given up on finding an example that makes them look good the way I want them to look good—as scholars, intellectuals. That’s how they looked to me, but come on—it’s an internet forum. I can’t make the reader see the glory I saw. The best I can do, alas, is to show what the arguments finally became, and let the reader draw his own conclusions.)