EXCERPT FROM WORK-IN-PROGRESS: WITH RAUAN KLASSNIK

[Note: I am presently engaged in a collaboration with writer Rauan Klassnik. We're writing a series of short plays based upon two characters, Pog and Gomey. Below an excerpt from one of these collaborations.]

POG: I never was much for an epistemological argument. I wanted facts. I wanted lists. I wanted hats arranged neatly, or sticks piled interestingly on the beach. I have always enjoyed juke boxes. My musical tastes represent the extremes rather than a compromised middle. The orchestral and the industrial. The acoustic and an amplified noise.  I swim poorly. I don’t like water up my nose. I am opposed to water boarding, yet skate boarding I endorse but only in theory. I enjoy the idea of religion but not religion itself. I was late to driving a car. I ran from parties in the early morning when I was young. I have been in a police lineup. I have had a gun pulled on me. I have been shot. I have been for a while a practitioner of Dr. Arnold Ehret’s mucousless diet. I have ridden a bicycle from St. Louis to Mexico City. I was briefly a heroin addict, but a regimen of aspirin, exercise,  and a diet composed only of nuts and grapefruit cured me of that addiction. I was fascinated by various pumps. dams, levers, architectural ornamentation, gargoyles and cherubs. I applied my Latin to the writing of public declarations which I then insisted be carved into foundation stone. I had a reputation for strangeness, for idiosyncratic pronouncements. I grew side burns. I shaved my eyebrows. I had a stuffed penguin accompany me to the opera. Each and every one of these represents a lapse in judgment. That is, a fact about my being. No one cares, though, in this day and age. There is no interest in the discovery that leaves the discoverer breathless.