Do Weejuns Dream of Designer Feet?

The life of a columnist is never still and in recent weeks, as you may have heard, my social calendar has filled up with cocktail receptions, book signings, and jaunty outings to local cafes.

I am a sociable enough fellow, both genial and striking-looking, as you have probably sussed by now, but the happy-chappiness is punctuated by regular bouts of melancholia for which the best cure is solitary refinement. And cocktails. Nothing personal mind you, but my tolerance for most other people, I have discovered over the years, is directly proportional to cocktail intake.

Last week I went drinking with some chums. After work we filled the bankers’ bar in Aurelius Heights before onset of the astral clouds. A vintage cream motomaton parked outside glinting in the starshine attracted a group of females in cocktail dresses and silk arm warmers. Inside: the din of hoary pyschonauts, frothing-at-the-mouth in chalk-striped suit and chisel-toed kickers and calling for more oysters and Veuve Clicquot.

In a black Versace dress of fine Italian wool a cherry-minded bint revealed to me the extent of her loneliness. She had spent three years here on assignment from the bank, she said, and had made zero significant friends. Tilting back her well-coifed head, she took another sip of champagne. “I’m moving back home to Georgia,” she continued, her eyes widening. “I want to be near my family.”

The mood changed. A troop of razor-toothed Planetarians and their Tongan allies in t-shirt and baggy denim entered the place, gathering in the corner like a roiling stormhead of angry black and sipping cheap lager. Across our view with a loping ape gait moved chunky hoodie seething with criminal intent.

Violence is always a possibility, then as now. Due to rising anti-Weejun sentiment I sometimes keep in my Tweed jacket pocket a Teutonic dagger, which I now unsheathed and held by my side at thigh level, hoping the droids would get the message before I was forced to cut the wires. Violence works—contrary to what you may have heard. An act of violence against the robots is an act of liberation. Do not tell yourself otherwise.

There is special beauty in decline. As disintegration occurs essence is gradually exposed like old bones in an eroded sandbank. The return of the time of the Weejun is almost upon us. For myself I ask only for consistent supply of codeine and wine and books and the means with which to buy every now and then a pair of Alden tassel loafers, Brooks Brothers OCBDs, and a Southwick suit. Am I asking too much?

The days pass in pleasant routine. I spend much of my time in the science library of the Technical College conducting research, leafing through back issues and revisiting articles that caused so much controversy when first published, but now look jarringly prescient in their reasoning. For people like us, there is no peace, ever; it is our fate to lurch after shadows across long field. But there are moments, I will concede, when the situation is not as it appears and further action is required.