Landmine.
(begun Monday 22nd July at 10.40pm)
You know the sort. People who will casually beat their dogs and say almost affectionately that it's for the animal's own good. That's pretty much how I'd felt when they'd waded into me, shortly after I'd gone to bed at 9pm.
Nowhere near the level of the pure unadulterated rage administered to my colon, but certainly unpleasant enough to know that I was back in the dogbox.
One of them had a muscle in my calf spasming, while another was zapping away at my toe gleefully, and all the while this cur yapped on, irritating them even further. Tsk, tsk.

At about 10.22pm I'd finally caved and had pulled my warm things back on, before heading to the kitchen in search of a coffee. The old man was still bumbling about so I'd asked him to leave the PC on so as I could check my Facebook. Turned out he'd started a full scan, so I figured I'd rather come chat to you here at the desk instead.
A good move, as at that precise moment, the power was cut, and we both fell into the routine we've learned since the Project arrived on our doorstep.

Wanna chat? Any particular subject? How's about hypocrisy? My goodness, if you're looking for a dyed-in-the-wool hypocrite, your search is over!! An example?
See, if I can get it, I'll eat meat in almost any form. Bacon, sausage, steak, lamb, chicken, you name it, and I'll fall on it.
Course, now that times are tight, we generally have bangers on a Monday and maybe a bacon sandwich later in the week, or pasta with mince, and that's it.

So, last Thursday he pulls into the Biscuit Factory parking lot and he leaves me sitting in the Polo to enjoy watching the bustle of the Taxi rank in Old Main Road. A minute after he'd gone I was startled by a really harsh cawing sound, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what caused it. It came again, and I broke out in a sweat it was that unpleasant.
There was an open-bed bakkie pulled in to the rank a few yards further down, as an affluent-looking family loaded up what looked like supplies for a big bash.
The source of that awful noise? Yep. They had a goat trussed up tight and bundled into a corner among all that mountain of goods.

It's just a fekking goat, right? A traditional addition to the anticipated banquet, so what? Godknows how long it had been tied up like that, but you could hear it was horribly distressed, and I'd actually ended up asking my Trackers to simply finish me off there and then (see, not only a hypocrite but a coward as well) Something that I'm certain they could've done with relative ease, due to that wireless mast on the corner.
The bakkie had pulled away and my old man had come back out and we'd left, only I'd been pretty shaken up. That tiny incident of ignorant cruelty that had me blowing bubbles from my nose, was as nothing compared to what goes on in slaughter houses each and every day, and yet I continue to eat meat.

Could I compare it to say, godschild's extreme aversion to profanity? That Devout and kind young man went so far as to abandon one of his favourite pastimes, simply due to the foul language regularly employed by his fellow-players (Billiards? Pool? I can't remember which).
Is he even aware of such things as the Fiddler's Frequency? It's hard to tell, but at a guess I'd have to say he's shielded from such intimate details of the wireless weaponry, and the methods employed by the quantum Recruits.

There's nowt so strange as folk, and that's a fact. If I were to write down as best I could, a blow-by-blow account of just how the Abdominal Frequency had arrived last year to cause me such delights as phantom period pains, the sensation that my womb was falling out, or that my ovaries were about to explode, would he be in any way shocked? Has he too been programmed to believe that the pain caused by the laser attackers is merely virtual, and some sort of Game?
That the groans and cries of anguish given off by Sue, Alice, and myself, night after night during the initial years of the Project's arrival here, were all imagined and exaggerated?

Were I to go on to describe the Fiddler's frequency to him, and the fact that for many months I had become the Village Bike, as well as the pinata, would he reach for a brown paper bag, or would he simply say I must have asked for it? One of my Abusers during that period had eventually stood out from the rest, and had become a genuine expert in the art of causing me extreme pleasure. Balliram himself? Nope. Predictably, he preferred administering the rough approach, and he always ensured that those sessions were unpleasant to a degree. Once I'd confirmed that both No 17 and No 33 appeared to be feeling similar unpleasant side effects from the employment of the lasers to the female reproductive organs, and I'd written of it here, the gang-bangs in ours had decreased to a large extent.
At around the same time, the Specialist whose light caressing touch had so often left me breathless and gasping with pleasure, had vanished without trace.

Should I go on? Should I share ALL my thoughts with you here, on the whys and the wherefores, or should I simply say that I hold no grudges, despite the flurry of knives to my cancer as I sit here now scribbling by torchlight. That I am stupid is irrefutable.. However, when it comes to animal instinct, I seem to have the knack now and then, of actually getting it right.

Would my Devout and Good Neighbour be horrified by the suggestion that the female of the species are having their reproductive organs targeted by the laser Recruits, and that these 'trials' have been taking place for some time on this stretch of the Crescent? Who knows...
It's now 11.55pm, and the power's still out, although of course the quantum laser/wireless technology continues to operate without a hitch. Will they set upon me as soon as I go back to bed?

Tuesday 22nd July at 6.45am

I'd been back on the Sacrificial Altar by the time the power was restored at 12.25pm, and a moment later, one of the two little dogs bundled up on the bed next to me had begun emitting a series of long-drawn out monotonous moans.. You gettit? That at least one of my invisible invaders who'd been following as I'd scribbled my draft earlier, had thought it would be great sport to recreate that unpleasantness with the unfortunate goat, by hitting my innocent dog hard enough to cause those groans of discomfort.

You struggle to accept that anyone could sink so low, let alone an educated cross-section of residents in this little backwater?
I believe the correct term would be desensitised.. The new buzzword that can be applied to an ever-increasing number of the population.
When I'd finally surfaced at 6.30am, it was to find that I'd been crippled by the pincers to my lower spine, but more about that one later.. Oh, and by the by? Our iBurst signal has miraculously been interference-free since yesterday evening.
Peace...

Tuesday 22nd July 2014 at 2.08pm.