Time seesaws in and out of focus. I am as an inebriate or a sober man with impaired vision.

I am become articulate in the diameters of my pint-sized dominion. In an act of compassion or (likelier) manifest disquietude*, one of the detainees proffered a tape measure to subsidise my efforts. But, as I told Mrs. Absolam, such accoutrement of augmentation would be cheating. What did humanfolk do pre-Industrial Revolution? They quantified with thumbs and speculation.

Yes, my fraternity, sorority and (insert gender, apparently)ity of segregationists†, these are addled times indeed. My eyes just flitted to the digital read-out. And 11:59 became 11:60.

Prelapsarian harbingers notwithstanding, Marje has been a sturdy dame. She has been my buoy in these choppy Covid waters. Bart fucking Joyles has naturally been an anchor. Thus, I find myself betwixt trench and surface. Submerged. A deep-sea diver bereft of apparatus. A submariner sans submarine. Snorkel-less. Drowning everlasting and denied the mortal lung.

Fingering the blurb for this Episode 19 is, if nothing else, an intermission ‘mid The Soak. Is there else?

*I have been informed by a bevy of second parties that I have taken to casually collapsing into fugue-like raptures. I am reluctant to take them at their word for I cannot recall doing so but their claims are afforded some gravity by my inability to recall much of anything.

†Purely in the epidemiological sense, one hopes. If you’re a racialist, I flatly think you’re not on, moral-wise.