'BORN IN COTSWALD'

145. 'BORN IN COTSWALD':

I was born in Cotswald near to Acrasfordshire by the Tillihanney River where it bends around the gorge and I never saw my mother or father again and I get tired therefore of people complaining and thinking hardly back at anything they've said and the darkest fear of my own sweet life is the fear of running out of time - for money I have - literally millions - yet all I do with it is stash it away and worry about time (it's something - after all - I've found I cannot purchase) but oh don't get me wrong for I can rent a girl for a few hours or so I can buy off a policeman if I must I can silence a prosecutor and a judge by whipping God's cash in their ever-sniveling noses but there's nothing I can do about running out of time and even Denmond my valet knows there's no way out - and he keeps stealing from me so as to forestall his own doom but little does he know right now even as I type that I've got a killer out after him - with instructions of two bullets to the head and then three more to take out his family; which shouldn't be so difficult since it's just a wife and one kid and there's nothing worse than trash to screw up a wonderful day.
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But like they told me in school : 'Just because you're taking up space, doesn't mean you're studying astronomy.'
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My father - I was told - wore two suits of armor : one made of lead and the other of glass - and he sailed the sea in Summer whenever he could which meant leaving my mother alone for weeks at a time on some land-leased raft of flower shop drudgery (roses and peonies and daffodils and thyme) and he was Tirana-born a scion of old Albania crossed to Bari on the old Italian coast and like some wayfaring Greek Odysseus of even older time found himself washed up one day so many years later on some Albion coast riven with fever - from where he took better and was cured and met the mother and they had me and then they both dissolved from this Earth's face to some simply conjoined deaths apart I never knew and here I am with nothing to do and money a'plenty to do it with and whatever else has befallen me (Aunt Dodgy Uncle Jeda and the beautiful cousin Marnie my age) I'll never know nor tell nor even understand.
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Over the years it's become difficult for me to make sense of much of the old - now that I am here in America living in New York City - and of any of the things which once mattered and only after time have I realized (exactly) that I can predict events tell the future understand exactly what's about to happen before it happens and otherwise predict occurrences : this skill has NOT enamored me in the minds of many people and that's probably the exact opposite of what you'd think but it's the truth though there have been by contrast a FEW who have been quite taken by this - followers in fact and acolytes and those who really believe in me although I'd hardly call that belief because after all what sort of belief can there be in something or someone whose only claim to fame is prescience and the many intangibles it brings and for others to believe in someone merely because of that is suspicious - as if the only reason they do so is to be in on any action before it occurs - but nonetheless that cannot stop the reality of what occurs : 64th Street as a good example - I told the old man to walk closer to the storefronts and not so close along the curb as he was doing in his slow feeble and hobbling way and BAM! next thing I knew he's smashed by an errant taxi swerving up onto the curbing right about where he was and all it had taken was perhaps a minute and a half AT MOST walking before it occurred after my speaking and another time after I mentioned to grocer Tony Kerakis that if he continued to take such high doses of medication he'd be dead before he knew it and WHAM! like that next morning I'm told he'd died overnight - now of course it can be argued that I really did NOT have foreknowledge of these events just lucky surmises or even lucky guesses or inspired conjectures based on evidences apparent before me - and that might be - but really what's the difference anyway it's not as if I'm stopping or starting world wars by these surmisings nor am I defining life and death or matters of same for people involved SO I figure thereby I can call it as I wish it to be and besides who really cares ? I don't.
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I've also been told that I embody the bitchiness of wealth (and that may well be true) and others have said that I am haughty cavalier and uncaring towards them or towards the well-being of the mass of my fellow men and THAT too is quite likely true - for I abhor my fellows I detest the crowd and I cannot stand the laborious principles and polite patternings of the globular mass of messy stupid people I see about me - storekeeps bankers solicitors attorneys doctors and all the rest (let alone the smarmy blood-fetishes of the turgid low-class of those who dutifully 'serve' in positions of assist to their fellow-men : livery people haulers clerks doormen teachers laborers manufacturers sellers and the rest) : dour pigs all I'd say ! and this has nothing really to do with the supposed glamor and exclusivity of the rich or their habits their homes or their dining it's rather (again I'd say) just an innate sense of some finer form of breed or awareness - some regal ripe slowness of nature - one which takes in moments for learning and education and observation : let's say 'allows for a certain fine distancing' unlike the lumpen proletariat who act as slaves to their immediate whims and urges and desires and who speak talk spit and spout with nothing much to say yes as if the very world depended on it (which it might) - they inhabit nothing they dwell in a no-place of faddish mob-rule and a pestilence ruled by entertainment amusement and gratification - the basest instincts honed by the most base people ever imagined and I MEAN just look at what they've engendered ! an absolute conundrum of falsehood and lies and a culture of dominance by the loud and offensive a compressed embodiment of crude theory mis-labeled trickery foul mistakes and evil events all mixed in a grotesque atmosphere of un-learning and no-culture and a fearsome nihilism of the no-mind to no-ends - and if you ask 'them' to quote something they'll quote a clown or an idiot if you ask them to say something memorable to themselves they'll mouth the words or the tunes of a moron and if you ask them for a moment's grace or a soliloquy of their intelligence they'll babble inanely about village-goods or water-cooler opinion and vague mis-matched fantasies of sentiment or religion or magic and art - the grossest drivel of the grossest civil disorder that's ever existed no ends omitted and no ends extended.