map position, outside the valley

The Scottish pathecardiast walrus Anchvauk slurped on an ollallieberry milkshake in the tidal pool. "I know what broke it, I know who tried to take credit for it, I know who (surreally) ensured it didn't shatter" I said, rolling the potato chip around in my mouth. "What I don't know, is what I should do: I haven't had the kind of in person conversation reaching that emotional altitude or subsurface depth for, oh, an aeon, and the two folks I would be immediately inclined to ask for advice inhabit totally alien and somewhat more politicised climates than I feel comfortable traversing the whatever-distance to" Anchvauk hums, one of those /thinking sagely about the matter at hand/ hums. "I am also not good with stories that involve messy syncopations of pushing and pulling -- be it a dance, what have you. I work on throws and catches: Chekhov's Species-Scale Empathy generator on the wall in the first act, that time I was listening to someone on the street trying to express a concept and then yakking at them 'comprehension activation energy enzymes', and then a 'thank you' in response. There I can function, in fact, soar: it's habitable. What substance is repetition? That's the idea that I recoil from most pungently: I happened to encounter some horrors early on that got crystallized in fairly fundamental fear-dressing, and I haven't particularly found a good curative for them: if traversing the roads and what have you I happen on the kind of interaction which cures without producing addiction, which jives and chimes and rhymes and is perforce of mutual and collaborative fortune I might then be persuaded to remain around. I have tried living in the valley amongst the field insects, and I know I can't operate that way. If by my devices that far-off perspective, you know, this amounts to meaningful and substantives which don't require dancers semantics, I will stay and build a cottage thereinst." Anchvauk: you're dizzy around your own barycenter! The farewells? "The wells? I knowst not what my obligations to whose heart requires zithers of higher order and indirect interaction to sate whateverso my own needs account. My art brings swirly immediacy: I know not of time, like irregular zebra stripes. Gone I can deal with. Not the tiny little lapping antimatter amoeba lapping at my hemoglobin sitting on my mitral valve." Anchvauk smokes a drag from the cinnagar, flops in the water to parts unknown.