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[JodyCasgraine]

I return with a happy greeting for all!

Last Saturday, I was distressed because I thought that my thread, La Giovinezza, had disappeared. But it was Cody once again to the rescue. He doesn't read all that well, but he knows his way around the internet and found the splendid blog that someone going by Sanity Check has started in my honor. This blog gave him a link to the current location of my thread, and from that point we actually read a few other posts and learned that my thread needed to be shut down and that I needed to start another, which I most willingly do at this moment.

It is my sincere hope that my readers will find me here.

I had a few Five Forks events to summarize, and there is, as expected, more news about Cody's work for President General François Bozizé of the Central African Republic, but an event last Saturday before my thwarted attempt to post has compelled me to bring another story up to the forefront.

It began at the yearly Meringue Festival on Nullchester Square in the center of Five Forks. The Meringue Festival is a rather obscene event during which residents of Five Forks coat their bodies with gobs of home made meringue and wear little or no clothes and walk about licking meringue off whomever they want to experience more of. I do not participate in the Meringue madness, and dressed as I do in China Poblana, I was making my contribution to the festivities by serving emu sausages from a booth on the square. For some reason, the imputed sexuality of the Meringue Festival bores me, and I had drifted off to memories of my first life in Pre-Fascist and Fascist Italy. I was, in effect, thinking about the awesome Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet, adventurer, patriot---a flamboyant and dashing man who captured Fiume from Dalmatia in 1919 against the wishes of the weak government which was then in place under Giovanni Giolitti. D'Annunzio magnetized the spirit of all Italy with his swashbuckling heroics, and I was in the process of musing about how different this dull second life in Five Forks was from the energetic and eventful one I had previously lived. Suddenly I saw a boy I went to school with at Five Forks Consolidated High School from 1992 until graduation in 1996. The boy's name was Hamlo Drumlock, and as with me, 2007 will mark his 29th birthday.

Hamlo was the original model of the most boring kid one can possibly imagine. He was virtually invisible to fellow students and teachers alike. He had the sort of looks that simply marked a fleshy biped, the kind of looks which caused him to blend into crowds and never arouse anyone's attention whatever. He had absolutely nothing to say to anyone, and thus had neither friends nor enemies. From time to time he was, of course, picked on by the more active boys, like-- I regret to say-- Eric Fletcher, inventor of the urine powered engine. Hamlo barely defended himself, and ultimately his non-defense became his main defense, as the meaner boys of Five Forks came themselves to ignore him as an unworthy target.

On a schoolgirl bet, I asked him out on a walking around date once and learned the awful truth: There was no fictional happy ending to Hamlo Drumlock. He had no concealed skills or even a bright side which a pretty girl like me could disclose. He was as drab and dull as he looked, and he readily admitted it. I offered him gratuitous sex, and he turned it down. I offered to hang out with him in order to give him a little status, and he turned that down. But for some reason, known only to Hamlo, he did not turn down my friendship. So up until our graduation in 1996, we remained loose friends and chatted occasionally whenever we met, that is, if you could call it chatting. Hamlo did nothing and was nothing, so he had very little to talk about. But for some altruistic reason, I attempted to maintain a contact with him.

After graduation, Hamlo's parents sent him to a private, religious university of some sort in Omaha, Nebraska. He did very poorly. He had no interest in whatever it was that he was meant to be studying and had no friends in the tiny dormitory where he stayed. I know this because we met once in early 1997 when he was back home on a visit, and he told me so. He had carried his boredom to Omaha, but regardless where he was, he was just his old dreary self, and it looked as if nothing was going to change that. But something did, and that is the story of Hamlo Drumlock, a rather unbelievable story which I wish to relate.

On his second visit home in 2001, Hamlo actually asked to see me. He came by my aunt's house on Nullchester Street and asked me if I would "listen." Already at that point, I was collecting Five Forks stories with the idea in mind of creating these chronicles, so listen I did.

Hamlo spoke more that day than he had ever done in his life. Behind his dull, sunken eyes, I even detected a sort of dim spark. His story was that in the college dormitory where he boarded, he was again getting bullied and becoming the butt of everyone's jokes, so he answered an ad in a college paper and moved into an ancient house quite near the downtown of Omaha. In this house, Hamlo was offered free rent and board and a chance to continue college, or I should say continue making the D's and C-'s he was then earning. His only task was to spend weekday evenings in a room next to a man who was in a deep coma. Or at least that is what Hamlo was initially told it was. The man, whose name was Mr. Durl-Dix, owned the house, and Hamlo later learned that he was actually in a deep sleep. Hamlo's only job was to make himself available when and if the man woke up. When he was not there, this task fell upon the sole other resident of the house, a manservant called Freebolt, who was the one who engaged Hamlo in the first place.

Weeks and months passed by and the sleeper never woke. Hamlo watched television and did his scant homework in a room adjacent to the sleeper's and looked in on him occasionally. Mr. Durl-Dix required neither food nor drink, and Hamlo's blunted level of curiosity did not allow him to ask why or how the man survived in this comatose state.

One day near the end of Hamlo's final semester that year, the man awoke.

A little bedside bell tinkled. Hamlo entered the bedroom as required and saw Mr. Durl-Dix, still fully dressed, blink his eyes, smile faintly and begin to arise. Mr. Durl-Dix asked Hamlo his name and told him to call Freebolt, which Hamlo did. Then the sleeper got up, peed in the adjacent toilet, drank a glass of water and waited. When Freebolt arrived, the two of them politely dismissed Hamlo, who, as was his custom, just went out and walked aimlessly for hours on the streets of Omaha without any particular purpose or destination in mind.

When Hamlo returned later that night, both Freebolt and Mr. Durl-Dix were absent, but the former had left the totally unimaginative Hamlo a note which said in effect to just continue living in his room and going to school as he had been doing. So Hamlo, bereft of all human curiosity, did so.

Two days later, a Saturday, both Mr. Durl-Dix and Freebolt suddenly returned. Freebolt asked if Hamlo was free to meet with both of them. The three of them sat down at the huge kitchen table where Freebolt offered nut snacks and beer. After a short round of commonplace pleasantries, Mr. Durl-Dix reached into his coat pocket and produced two sheets of paper and thrust them before Hamlo. These turned out to be copies of Hamlo's college transcripts for the three semesters he had spent at his college. Given his accustomed vapidity, Hamlo did not bother to ask how his landlords had managed to procure his supposedly confidential records, but rather acknowledged with some weak, abstract embarrassment that his grades---all D's and C's with a few F's thrown in---were without academic merit.

Mr. Durl-Dix smiled pleasantly and said to Hamlo that perhaps he had never been cut out for college or any sort advanced studies beyond high school. He went on to further note that Hamlo had no life whatsoever, no friends, no romantic interests, no hobbies, no discernable passions. And, of course, Hamlo, addled as ever by his mantle of nescience, agreed.

Mr. Durl-Dix told Hamlo that perhaps he could offer him something else that would be far more exciting than the life he now lived. He showed him a picture of two very beautiful women dressed in rather revealing black garments and garnished by what appeared to be ceremonial daggers of some sort.. Hamlo was rarely aroused by the sight of a woman, but the pictures did, as he reported to me, fire a hormone or two in his bovine persona.

Mr. Durl-Dix went on to explain that the two beautiful women, young mother and daughter as it were, were persons of high status in another world, a beautiful and endangered world just beyond the portals of our own sphere. The world had many names, Mr. Durl-Dix explained, and it really didn't matter which name one used, but that once a person like himself or Hamlo entered this world, they would immediately become something other, something infinitely stronger and more vital than what they were in daily life in our world. One became, in effect, a hero, a sort of warrior possessed of strength, capability and purpose. Mr. Durl-Dix said that even new names were awarded to those who crossed something called the "Barrier" and entered this realm. He said that his own name no longer had the stultifying thud of Durl-Dix upon the ear, but rather he came in this realm to be called Charmax, a single name which he greatly preferred over Durl-Dix. In the other world, Charmax was a hero and a conqueror and a protector. Beautiful women like the ones in the photo depended on his physical strength and mental acumen.

"They need us," Mr. Durl-Dix said, "and their resplendent land, their lavishly sensual culture and they themselves become the prize."

He asked if Hamlo wanted to join with him and enter this realm and become a hero. He told him that fighting, bravery and courage would become his birthright beyond the Barrier. And, of course, he would no longer be known as Hamlo Drumlock but would, as Durl-Dix had done, assume a more vibrant cognomen.

"Something like Atraban," Durl-Dix mused. "That would sound good on you."


This did for once pique Hamlo's curiosity. The idea of transforming into something less prosaic than he was now and in another world to boot was probably what Hamlo had been looking for all his life. And when he consented to learn more, Mr. Durl-Dix explained to him that this other world could only be entered through dreams, that Hamlo would have to become as Hamlo had found him, comatose and lost upon the Earth as we know it. He would, in effect, need to lie dormant in a bed and be looked after by Freebolt and whatever other college student could be recruited to fill in for Freebolt during the latter's daily absences.

In short, Hamlo consented. One day he dressed in his best pair of faded jeans and a sweat-stained college teeshirt and lay down in a bed which had been placed next to Mr. Durl-Dix's. The two of them drank a weak tea-like potion prepared by Freebolt and went to sleep, agreeing to meet beyond the Barrier in a new land.

"You'll know the Barrier when you see it," Mr. Durl-Dix said. "If you lose your nerve or fail to cross it, you will return here to Omaha, wake up, and live the rest of your life in the swails of boredom, wondering, always wondering how things might have been ….. Look for the crimson light. Eschew the dark zones on each side. Follow the crimson trail."

So Hamlo fell asleep, crossed a sort of black and white barrier and entered into a land which he could only describe as invigorating and magical. He became another. He acquired another name and a different, more vital, body. His adventures against the enemies of the new realm spread out before him like a vista of unparalleled action. And when he and Mr. Durl-Dix, now Charmax, finally needed to journey back to our world, they awoke in the same bedroom in which they had fallen asleep, but it was 2001, four years later from the point at which they had fallen asleep side by side in 1997. Beyond the Barrier they had lived only a few months as far as time there could be reckoned, but a full four years had passed in our world. Both had plans to return and nursed exciting entanglements in this new world. Hamlo, who went by yet another given name which he asked me not mention, was conjoined with the ravishing young daughter he had seen in the photo, as was "Charmax" to her mother. In 2001, Hamlo was only home briefly. He was his usual blobby self, and other than his story, not of much interest. It was his plan to return to this Dreamland and resume his life and role there as soon as he could. Brief returns to our sphere were necessary from time to time, but Hamlo was already a part of another world, and most anxious to return there.

So that is the story of Hamlo Drumlock. Last Saturday he was in Five Forks during the Meringue Festival, but only for a short time. Soon he would return to his world apart. There he possessed both status and a purpose. Among us here in Five Forks, he only drifted aimlessly and was largely ignored by the crowd in which he passed barely perceived. Few old comrades even stopped to recognize him. It was simply an obligatory return on his part. His parents, both of them, had long ago given up trying to understand where he was or what he was doing and had simply accepted his story that he'd been recruited by a "secret government agency" of some sort, as they were the very well-spring of disendowed and ponderous incuriosity themselves.

As Hamlo walked away from my aunt's house on Nullchester Street, I pondered briefly what strange fates await even the most commonplace of souls and how in some place lost behind the barriers of sleep, Hamlo Drumlock, class of 1996, was pursuing aleatory and dangerous adventures, annealed with a hard body, coupled with a beautiful companion and possessed of a sense of heroic direction and newfound purpose. Somewhere in the old section of Omaha, there lay two sleepers in a dark room in a house shrouded by the gloominess of time itself, and beyond those sleepers a panorama of the purest and most momentous adventure spread beyond the perimeters of an unseen alien horizon, accessible only by a passage through an unknown corridor in the vale of common sleep.

Thus having related the story of Hamlo Drumlock, one time classmate, I in some weariness set aside my chronicles for the night with a solid promise to return to this, my new thread, and bring details of my new husband Cody Brockett, the daily humdrum of Five Forks, the ever-growing sons who enliven our Nullchester Street house, the African orphan gift babies growling more vocal in the garage and the many incidental and striking tales that can be extracted from this oft-monotonous locale which it is my fate in this, my second life, to unveil before the eyes of those who venture into these chronicles.

I have dull moments myself, and seeing Hamlo and hearing his story once, and seeing him again without speaking this time, has left me in a kind of stupefication from which only the hope of a brighter tomorrow can dispel. If some find this entry to be duller than usual, I apologize. I needed to bring Hamlo Drumlock to the world and immortalize him in some way. It is like the Latin citation that the handsome Canteen patron once left for me in 2005, the words of Horace, always worth repeating and remembering:

VIXERE FORTES ANTE AGAMEMNONA MULTI, SED OMNES ILLACRIMABILES URGENTUR IGNOTIQUE LONGA NOCTE CARENT QUIA VATE SACRO.

[Many brave men before Agamemnon lived, all unwept, forgotten, lost in the distant night because they lacked a sacred poet.]

A new thread begins, and I promise to fill it in the coming weeks with stories less introspective and dreary.

My love to all,

Jody

[SQUEEZE A SNACK]

I'm terribly sorry My friend, I'm still not convinced that thread was slowing us down and may bring your wonderous italian masons come back to life in all thier glory!!!

[JodyCasgraine]

Following my long post above, I saw the many, many PMs which have been sent to me over the past week. I thank you all. In particular Grace and Kevin. I will get around to answering some of the questions the others asked soon. I love and admire you all, and, Grace, I will never let you or anyone else lose track of me. Promise.

Love, Jody

[Bethel]

Welcome back, Jody!
That was an excellent tale.

[JodyCasgraine]

I'm terribly sorry My friend, I'm still not convinced that thread was slowing us down and may bring your wonderous italian masons come back to life in all thier glory!!!

Thank you, Mr. Squeeze. I shall not disappoint you or the other readers. Something of substance must accrete sometime or another to your excellent forum, and I have humbly chosen myself for that role. Look upon me as an embellishment, and be watching for still more marvels to come. There are hundreds of untold stories in Five Forks. Tonight I needed ---I was compelled,as it were, to explore one in depth, and it has accordingly drained me of my usual level of energy.

[Grace]

Great to see you, Jody. Welcome back.

[SQUEEZE A SNACK]

Thank you for takeing the time to respond Jody and as always ,
The refuge thanks you!!!
I am but a minion to the refuge and bow to your excellence and you still look hot in your China Problana

[Bethel]

Kevin is alive?

[JodyCasgraine]

Welcome back, Jody!
That was an excellent tale.

Again, thank you. I am glad you appreciated it. It was a tale I needed to tell. Like a sort of compulsion. Like the Ancient Mariner before the Wedding Feast stopping one of three. Now that it is told, I can return to the more humorous happenings here in coming weeks. Having a new thread is kind of exciting too. I miss the posters who inserted such wonderful speeches and pictures of Il Duce, and I hope that whoever does that will return as well.

My love to you,

Jody

[JodyCasgraine]

Great to see you, Jody. Welcome back.

Grace!!! I am so pleased to see you as well. I am back. You will see much more of me in the weeks to come. You instill me with an indescribable sense of energy and purpose.

My sincere admiration and love,

Jody

[JodyCasgraine]

Thank you for takeing the time to respond Jody and as always ,
The refuge thanks you!!!
I am but a minion to the refuge and bow to your excellence and you still look hot in your China Problana

You must not be so modest. In the past year, I have learned through Cody that you are the heart and soul of this forum. You have given me a place to disclose things which would otherwise be lost in the impenetrable darkness of the shrouds of time.

Jody

[JOEY]

loveisneverending.

[Grace]

Great to see you, Jody. Welcome back.

Grace!!! I am so pleased to see you as well. I am back. You will see much more of me in the weeks to come. You instill me with an indescribably sense of energy and purpose.

My sincere admiration and love,

Jody

I look forward to your weekly posts; you add so much, and the Whorehouse would not have been the same if you had not returned.

[JodyCasgraine]

Great to see you, Jody. Welcome back.

Grace!!! I am so pleased to see you as well. I am back. You will see much more of me in the weeks to come. You instill me with an indescribably sense of energy and purpose.

My sincere admiration and love,

Jody

I look forward to your weekly posts; you add so much, and the Whorehouse would not have been the same if you had not returned.

You will see me soon, Grace. There is much to tell. I am somewhat preoccupied tonight, so it will have to wait. But I appreciate your encouragement so very, very much.

Until later,

Jody