From the Chronicles of A

I pass freely between worlds. For all I know, you do too: for all I know, I know you in another, or we may have just barely missed each other on a thousand slips between the realms of Latium and Gotham, of pre-Justinian Byzantium and post-modern Sorbonne, of cool and so-called gothic, of waking and dreaming. If so, my apologies for not saying good day; I am frequently in a hurry when world-switching. But I think you do not make such trips, not as easily as I do. I once told a professor of metaphysics of my travels, by which I mean my identity, and to my surprise found him less credulous than a physicist (non-meta) who the year before had bought my story until he realized I was a fan of Berkeley--the man of ideas, not the city or its college--and concluded I could not be trusted on any matter. I kept the money and so partially confirmed his conclusion. (Do not say the tender implied by the phrase “he bought my story” is not real, lest you betray your unfamiliarity with reality.) Unfortunately I could not convince even the most sensible of airline executives to accept said money for a transatlantic ticket until I got hold, through a mutual masseuse, of the CEO of Frantumai, an obscure Italian carrier that was having a bad year on account of internal problems related to its archaic bookkeeping methods. More on that later, maybe; I was speaking of various intellectuals who have led me to believe my situation is rare if not unparalleled. An American semanticist of my acquaintance assumed that I was attempting to live some mental exercise in predicate logic; he understood art well enough (without knowing so) not to convince me to abandon it, but was himself none the better for it, and went on speaking of unicorns, Santa Claus, and various quantifiers. Perhaps the closest I have come to being believed was by the son of an seventeenth-century Westphalian baron, who had no trouble accepting the possibility of my travels, but assured me that his was the best of all possible worlds. Alas, to be believed only by the poster child of gullibility is meager consolation.

But consolation is not necessary, indeed is a void category, for a winner, and I am a winner if I am a man at all. For instance, I once won a toaster oven and a luggage set, respectively, for my Old Icelandic rendition of “YMCA” and my Sindarin performance of “Put Me In, Coach (I’m Ready to Play)” at the third annual krc-re-pifǿlikh festival: “today’s hits in yesterday’s tongues,” held in Clare, Michigan. (The event’s name is thought to be Esclyvian for DO-RE-MI; fascinatingly, the middle particles appear to be cognates. This theory and even the proper back translation of DO-RE-MI are under dispute as they are based on a questionable reconstruction of Melpitian [B]; both issues and several others are treated in a special session krc-re-pifǿlikh offers every year in addition to the rotating seminars.) To this day no one else has carried away two Golden Uvulas from the same k-r-p festival.

What I am saying is that I am no loser.