I remember it so vividly now on my third voyage and I’ve recollected what happened yesterday in the morning garbled details of our fight with the natives by the surf at the beach pop up in my mind the dawn is nearing the stars go out for good and I am omniscient now I know what main course will be enjoyed today at the sovereign's dinner

* * *

25

The enigma was most monstrously frustrating, it drove him mad and made V feel just flabber-fucking-gasted. They definitely were his thoughts in the transcript file he read on the screen but still and yet he’d never thought them. He would remember thinking them, he’s not a not all there geezer succumbed to Alzheimer, galloping sclerosis or the like stuff from their bunch. They were both his and not his, the thoughts were/weren’t.

The most strange, besides his name he called himself in them, it felt like peeping into a looking glass and run into reflection of some other guy and be 100 pc sure the guy was you, nonetheless. Because the thoughts were thought the way they could be thought by him only and no one else.

And then he grew pretty sure that the way one thinks is as inimitably authentic to the thinker as their fingerprints or spots in a giraffe's neck skin. Was it some prank or that backward retroaction 2ic mentioned in one of his duck-PhD rigmaroles? And he delved into the text anew.

“Freak is not a loner by their nature. On the contrary, solitude freaks them out, the freaks. They just can't stand it, 'sitting all by myself' is the ultimate fright for them.

Get-togethers is an immediate, effective remedy. Cheap? I dunno. How much is the ticket to a beauty queen inauguration ceremony? UEFA Championship Finals? All depends. Everything's relative. You better choose a blanket as dictated by your leg’s length, you know.

And here comes the moment of scratching the philosophy bump in your skull. How many make the proper dose?

The more, the merrier, Bro!

2 are a team, 3 makes a company and further soar up the curve of mob-crowd-tribe-nation-global community…

Belonging makes you bigger, stronger, safer, readier to out-smart them outsider freaks, who have not joined as of yet… who're smaller in numbers… not assimilated… them those damn freaks!.

"What are you up to here?"

"Just writing."

"Whoa, man! You call this splash of broken spaghetti you scribbled in your copybook a writing? You serious? It's simply undecipherable!"

"Etruscan can't be read…"

Well, maybe, he's right. I dunno. Should I practice typing? 10 digits are certainly more than 3.

Even Paart's pieces are not for a one-handed piano player…

Seems like it's the must… I might reach the ceiling of 27 clicks per minute, who knows…

The last straw to break me into upgrading my typing skills in earnest became the monthly $100 dangled out by proze.com as their traditional carrot. Yeah, I should train myself indeed!

There happened more than one crowd, actually, that I've tried joining to. Chat-rooms, online courses with spiffy pdf certificates, flash-mobs for fun and recreation, GitHub, Stackoverflow, forums of Linux music makers, wine-lovers, joint suckers, scuba divers… you name it.

It's only I could not hang on anywhere for longer than a month or so. And then I got bored or distracted by something else, and too lazy to come back later and shake it on.

However, MoM became the thing I stuck at and somehow did not feel like quitting. The force of habit, maybe.

Firstly, the site had an exquisite interface, and MoM meant business, you got it at once when signing up. No questions about your credit card and staff. But you had to tick "I agree to…" as by installing an MS program and add your digital signature at the bottom of a long form.

Do you read all their content? Ever?

Like, condition/rule#1: prove you're a monster and not a freak. Because MoM is Mob of Monsters.

Or else (rule#2) annulling your account will not get you off the hook and let walk away because (rule#3) member to the Mob has to prune freaks off.

Fine catch here.

That way, renegade MoMonsters did not last long.

They were taken care of differently. Wide specter of approaches. Starting from the suicide-prone fraction among MoM’s ready to eliminate the freak in a straightforward kamikaze style, up to master-mind multi-move combinations designed behind the stage.

The defector had no loopholes and not a slightest chance of escaping.

It was a self-governing community. Not a few dudes regretted their signing in on high, even more the absence of the habit by them to read all of the preamble.

All tries at finding a way-out ended in the like manner – DOA, and the notorious 2-color card, the ’black mark' (in honor of Billy Bones, Long John Silver et al, from The Treasure Island by Robert L. Stevenson) put in the body's hand or pocket, or shoved up… nah, yeah, it depended on the particular circumstances, you know.

The tastefully designed MoM logo on the dark side, the reprint of the stiff's digital signature on the card's back, that’s what was the constant attribute to all them grim cases.

Activities?

Get-togethers, sure thing, what else a mob is supposed to do?

Online weekly get-togethers, regional at the out-set, but later on, when pruning, deserter-effacing and natural death rate more than decimated the ranks affiliates, the get-togethers grew global retaining the same frequency.

3 missed meetings at a stretch indicated that you are not up to being an MoM, volunteers hit raw-bones-designed button to receive the ’black mark' with the weakling’s signature.

The proceedings at the online hanging out never changed: Mob members' reports indicating their monstrous worth, say, selfies at the backdrop of a kitten hanged by the MoM up to the land-mine planted in the neighbor's lawn, you name it.

The all-in ballot wound