骨肉

Summary

“我们会一起下地狱的，大卫。”洛朗附在弟弟的耳边，发颤的声音喃喃低语。他不知道自己是在劝诫谁，在向谁宣告谁的命运，又或是在乞求早已离去的谁的原谅。大卫缠一缕洛朗的头发于无名指根，捧着他的脸，从暗流着欲望的脖颈一直吻上他樱桃般的唇，似乎已经尝到沾染暴食与情欲的腥甜。 “才没有什么地狱可下，”大卫盯着那双几乎涣散开的绿色眼睛，“就算是有，我也不在乎。快点告诉我你也不在乎。”

Chapter 1

大卫班一共有过两次出柜经历——虽然他觉得这个词一定程度上用得并不准确。一次他坦白了自己对洛朗的爱，这早在他十三岁时就已经让洛朗知道；第二次时，他一把扯开父亲用教育牢牢锁在他脑后的止咬器。

他本来可以忍下去的，大卫的下巴不停地嚼动，品尝着世界上第一颗果实，甘美的肉汁顺着嘴角流进胡茬，他珍惜地揩去舔进口中。如果洛朗没有离开过就好了，他对自己说，通过唾液和爱液偶尔一次解馋，他可以永远忍受下去。

在二十余年间他也是这样做的——直到洛朗拖着一具骷髅般的身体从亚洲回来，深陷下去的眼窝里燃烧着一种渴望。他说女孩们好像更喜欢他纤瘦的模样，他会更受欢迎，会得到更多丰盈的爱意——大卫，他轻声发问，为什么你的眼神透着陌生，你不喜欢吗。

大卫想说哥哥长成什么样他都喜欢。可是空气中本应热切地钻进鼻腔诱惑起欲望的、他梦寐以求的温热甜腻呢？他和洛朗拥抱了一下，在颈窝里细细嗅闻——没有，没有，什么也没有。洛朗莫名其妙，从行李箱里翻出洗发水要送给他，被他粗暴地拍掉在地上，薄荷味溢得满房间都是刺骨的凉意。

大卫听到一声不祥的钟声，像是有一碗水在身体里晃；现在碗碎开了，他的耐性不再能被湿润。

他一反往常，没在洛朗回家的第一夜就迫不及待在哥哥身上消耗掉积攒的性欲与食欲；他在床上坐了整夜，灰色的眼睛直勾勾的，盯得洛朗发毛。洛朗数月间早已习惯空着肚子入睡，和过去的一百多天一样拒绝了晚饭，半夜翻身时差点被大卫愈发扎人的目光吓得掉下床去。他熬到黎明才堪堪入睡，睁开眼睛发现弟弟不在简直松了口气。

……直到大卫像把鸡巴捅进他嘴里一样，用叉子强撬开他紧咬的牙关，逼他吞下那些他似乎表达过喜爱的食物，餍足地注视每一次几乎要呛进气管的吞咽，喉结与他一起滚动。油乎乎的碎肉和黏奶酪包裹长久未经刺激的味蕾，肉桂香反流至舌根，洛朗被摁着肩膀压在饭桌前，在大卫身下抽搐着腹部。大卫一把捂住他的嘴，油润的嘴唇在掌纹间颤抖，急促的呼吸喷在虎口；他清晰地记得哥哥被精液呛到都没有这么抗拒过，现在却因为区区巡演前正常一餐的食物——他甚至还没吃完——就将滚烫的泪水流到他的手背上；洛朗的眼角还晶莹着，却已经紧皱着眉毛，仗着哥哥的威严怒视着他，看得大卫暗暗咽下口水，血液往下半身冲，硬得他发疼。

大卫觉得哥哥变的太多了。压着他不可避免肢体接触，掌根蹭过哥哥的胸脯时手底下肋骨根根分明，薄得像是能捏住那捧的受惊的心脏，他饱满的大腿也因肌肉的消解而瘦下去，紧身牛仔裤套在腰上松松垮垮。他想着唯一的希望就是那口被操熟了的逼，还有他缓解饥饿的良药……如果连这都变了，那与其靠无味的奶浆苟活，不如把洛朗直接吃干抹净，趁他还没成为一颗明星，微不足道的光辉还不足以照亮凶手的面容。

但洛朗还没完成呢，他可以慢慢来……或者再像这样过上几天，让洛朗成为他丰盛的晚宴；他衷心感谢父亲的培养。

瘦削的两肋下，上腹被撑起了陌生的弧度。大卫试探着抚过，隔着单薄的衬衣，胃部艰难地蠕动着，顺着哥哥混乱的呼吸节奏一起一伏，在摩挲的压力下轻微改变形状。洛朗察觉到口中不断分泌的唾液，慌忙扒开弟弟的手，胃液的酸腐已经冲进鼻腔，嘲笑他的任人摆布。

够了，我受够了，洛朗在心里大声对自己说，大卫转身去倒蛋酒了，好机会，快像以前一样揍他一顿，让该死的大卫还能知道洛朗·班是他的亲哥。洛朗狠下心，往大卫的膝盖窝重重地踹了一脚。

弟弟没像他预想的那样趔趄着跪在地上。玻璃杯磕在桌面上剐出刺耳的一声，再转过身时洛朗面对的只有洒了满胸膛葡萄酒的白卫衣，以及一张没了表情的脸。大卫莫名觉得自己胸中升起烦躁，那应该是在生气，但是不知道是为了什么，或许是因为刚刚那充满报复心的反抗都无力绵软了；唉，或者是他根本就把某种情绪的混合物匆忙视作了愤怒。洛朗已经撑起身子，挥着拳头踉踉跄跄朝他扑过来——还不如一个装醉酒的妓女呢，他略带遗憾地想，真可惜他没能真得喝下这杯酒，也没有跟我玩什么演员游戏的心情——

但仍然是个合格的、身经百战的婊子，他张开双臂迎接哥哥的投怀送抱，成年人的体重把两人都摔在地板上。大卫直起身子坐在洛朗的胯骨上，髂骨硬得他撇了撇嘴，托着哥哥的屁股扒下那条太过宽大的牛仔裤。

洛朗反而平静下来，听到上方传来满意的赞叹，“我妨碍到你用我取乐了？”他的声调没什么起伏，“我瘦下来你就不爱我了？我不明白你在想什么，大卫。”

“……你在剧组里跟谁上床了？”

洛朗短促地尖笑一声。蹩脚，他想，幼稚的嫉妒和胡乱猜测。

“你非要塞给我的毛绒睡衣，还有我的两根指头。满意了吗？听到你哥哥并不是个随处跟同事做爱的贱人？”

大卫非常大方地承认了。洛朗身下的肉缝还没湿透，他隔着发潮的内裤，打着圈揉捏已经鼓起的阴蒂。洛朗仰起脸颤抖不已，久未满足的女穴渴望获得更多，渴求被填满……手指探进那块湿润织物的边缘，径直插进了泥泞不堪的穴口。大卫喉咙发干，哥哥湿热的穴肉贪婪地轻轻吸吮着指尖，随着指节的弯曲与剐蹭，剧烈地抽搐起来。

“别……别停下，”洛朗爽得吐出半截舌头，断断续续地把词句咬得破碎。他抠着地板的缝隙，指尖发白，身体向上迎合，每一寸技巧都比他自己笨拙的抠弄，更深地触及快感的边缘……大卫另一只手也没闲着，继续折磨那粒充血硬起的肉豆。

快感堆积得太快，洛朗的视线开始模糊，饱胀的不适被驱逐出大脑，只剩下空白一片的欲望。他觉得自己像一颗半融化的太妃糖，理智化作甜腻的夹心，从交合处流出。大卫俯下身，鼻尖抵在洛朗剧烈起伏的小腹上，深深吸了一口气，甜香再次萦绕。他猛地抽出手指，脸埋在洛朗的腿心，粗糙的舌面重重刮过阴蒂。

洛朗的尖叫哽住了，身体绷紧，随后是哭叫与颤抖——高潮来得彻底，大量透明的液体喷涌而出，洒在大卫的脸上和胡茬里。甜蜜的气息爆发出来，充斥了房间。大卫咂了咂嘴，稀释的甜蜜在舌尖上绽开，压抑数月的食欲汹涌而来，蒙蔽了双眼。他迫不及待地想要更香醇的味道，彻底填平那道欲望的深渊，不仅仅是靠这寡淡的汁液……

洛朗的喘息和呻吟突然变成了痛苦的呼喊，想揪着头发把脑袋拎起来中断这场荒谬的性爱，最终只是抓伤了弟弟的后颈。他用手撑着地板，向后一步步挪动，极度惊恐的视线在自己血淋淋的大腿根和弟弟染红的嘴角之间反复移动。交姌后的淫靡，薄荷的冰冷，鲜血的铁腥气，冲进洛朗的脑子里，和眼前发怔的、咀嚼着自己大腿肉的大卫，把理智搅成一摊烂泥。

好吃。酥脆的，在牙齿下咔吱作响，绵软的蛋糕不断沁出奶香味的糖浆，乳脂在味蕾上欢快地跳着舞。好吃。大卫抬起头，一滴奶油从嘴角淌出来，他赶忙用指头沾了重新塞进嘴里，不忘细细地舔舐指缝里残存的殷红。

这时候他注意到洛朗，哥哥看怪物一样的眼神刺醒了他。他意识到自己吃下的是什么。他开始不知所措，爬起来想要去找药箱，又顿住脚步，不知道这种进食造成的伤害会不会毁了哥哥作为演员的下半生。

“……但是为什么？”洛朗嗫喏着问。他的伤口并没有喷射出大量鲜血——但大卫的牙齿显然已经咬到了某条动脉；他试着抬腿，已被啃下一块的大腿一屈一伸。他的大脑还没彻底罢工，顽强地支撑着他直面现实，没直接报警。

大卫抿着唇。他不知道洛朗能不能接受他一定会被吃掉这一事实；但为什么不做得更过火一点呢？

“因为我生下来就是要吃人，”他说着，踮着脚从橱柜上拿下药箱，“我是个以人类为食的怪物，所有人，但我还需要像人一样活着；我最喜欢你的味道，你闻着像刚出炉的拿破仑蛋糕。”

“但是我也爱你，舍不得把你这么美味的东西一口气吞掉，当然那也是违法的，”大卫把纱布缠在伤口附近，洛朗没有喊疼，他自顾自地继续说下去，“你离开得太久了……你自己闻不到，但是你的气味随着你的消瘦，稀薄得无法再满足我。对不起，洛朗，对不起。”

“还有，”他架着哥哥的肩膀把他扶起来，“算我求你，别再瘦成这样了。”

洛朗始终没看他一眼；他怀着深深的忏悔准备把哥哥送去医院，祈盼还能有一丝挽救的余地。但是洛朗停下不愿意再走了。大卫以为他不想走去医院，拿出手机想叫救护车。

“收回去，我没说我不乐意活了，”洛朗漂亮的脸扭歪了，他开始嘶嘶倒抽冷气，艰难地坐回沙发上，指指那条伤腿让大卫解开绷带。

不，不应该叫伤腿了，那里的皮肤光洁如初，只是仍然看得出凹陷的痕迹，大卫怔怔地凝视着那处薄得看得出血液流动的皮肤，底下的肌肉没有任何差错——却没了脂肪。

这是什么？上帝的旨意，上帝的奇迹？上帝最大的玩笑？洛朗疲惫地倒下去，闭上了眼，连欢呼的力气都没有了。

“对不起，大卫，”他突然又睁开了眼睛，直直地盯着天花板，“我不该送你洗发水。我不知道，我今天面临的事情太多了；但是、但是，我又饿了。”

还沉浸在未来吃得饱饭的欢乐中的某光头张口结舌。

Chapter 2

洛朗没再继续维持他所谓的东亚人爱好的体型。

他自诩明智，但大卫觉得他不过是抵抗不了弟弟在身边大口咀嚼的诱惑，脱离了变态剧组的环境，洛朗又变回了熟悉的哥哥；大卫没忍心告诉他自己根本无法对普通的食物产生食欲，他吃东西的主要目的是引诱洛朗吃饭。损伤的胃口使一开始的体重恢复计划进展缓慢，洛朗花了足足三个星期才把那块凹陷皮肤下的脂肪也生长回来，在褪去病态的躯体上完美得看不出一丝被撕咬过的痕迹。

又到了大卫该进食的时候。

洛朗第一次主动成为食物，还是按捺不住心中的怪异之感，眼神里无法掩饰恐惧。大卫倒是习以为常了，以前把洛朗压着操的时候他就总是这样一副怕得要命的姿态，最后不还是爽得喷他一脸。对大卫来说这仍然是一场愉快的进食，甚至食材比以往更加高级。洛朗浑身赤裸，局促得手都不知道往哪里放，大卫绕着他转，揉捏每一个理论上容易囤积脂肪的部位——最后停在了侧腰。

“听我说，洛朗，”大卫单膝跪地，捏着哥哥侧腰软肉的手并没有松开，选择性忽略了洛朗已经从脸颊红到胸口，“这次不仅仅是给我解馋了。我要验证一个猜想，足以改变我们的命运。如果我失控了，把这个嘴套扣在我脸上。”

他也没在乎洛朗能不能照他说的做。哥哥散发的蛋白霜气味已经让他偷偷擦了好几次口水，大卫的牙齿叼住手指捏出的赘肉，用力咬下去。皮肤被犬齿刺穿，洛朗盯着弟弟的脸观察他的表情是否开始扭曲；幸好他依旧冷静，享受着美食也死死捏着他的伤口。他预感再生的痛苦要把自己击倒了——

他突然觉得大卫掐了他一把。洛朗恼火地低下头想说现在不是时候，弟弟却提前举起双手示意无辜。他意识到了什么，侧过身子去摸本应该凹下去的伤口，却摸了个空，一切如同数分钟前光滑如初：切口完好地合并在了一起。

大卫还在咀嚼那块口感松脆的皮肤，脂肪已经化成醇香的奶液，顺着喉咙流进胃里。他咧开嘴露出一个胜利的微笑，牙齿上沾着斑斑血迹。

在南希之前，他和哥哥一样学习平面设计。现在是学雕塑的时候了，洛朗，他最亲爱的哥哥和食物，将成为他一生雕琢的作品。

或许是怀着某种奇怪的包容与责任感，洛朗知道仅仅是他的肉体就足以安抚一个危险的怪物后，开始大量地主动进食，生长速度快得让大卫欣喜而担忧；他害怕他连皮肤都撕扯开，刻印下曲曲弯弯爬开的紫色生长纹，不敢保证皮肤再生时是否可以抹去这种痕迹。洛朗丰满起来，恢复了以往的强壮，甚至不仅是强壮……没有人可以避免脏增肌时在身体上覆盖赘肉。 洛朗显然很清楚自己的变化，知道自己卓有成效——

未免太有效了吧！

大卫擦着额头上的汗珠，从阁楼下来路过卧室门口。门房虚掩着，健身后甜腻的气息比任何时候都要诱人，他的耳朵灵敏地捕捉到洛朗的声音。洛朗在低声喘息，床垫吱嘎作响。他掏出手机，摄像头伸进门缝偷窥房间里的景象，看到屏幕时几乎呼吸一滞。

洛朗跪坐着床上咬着指甲，他上身穿着一件浅绿色的圆领紧身T恤，将肩头和胸脯包裹得浑圆；T恤的下摆卡在肚脐，半个白嫩肥软的小肚子圆鼓鼓地挺了出来。

大卫张大了嘴，感觉鼻血和涎水一起淌下；他抹了一把脸，幸好前者是错觉。

他闭着眼睛深呼吸了两次，那一抹白皙像是烙在了眼前；他鼓起勇气再次往屏幕上看去——洛朗挺直了上半身坐起来，此时他才看到洛朗还穿着一条灰色的短裤，只是可怜的裤子在他身上显然已经过瘦了，它竭尽全力包裹着哥哥的屁股和大腿，看着像一条怪异的长泳裤，洛朗抓着卡在胯部的裤腰用力向上拽着，试图包裹住他暴露在外的颤颤悠悠的小腹。

大卫脑袋一热，把手机揣进兜里，踮着脚挪到阁楼的楼梯口——然后他几乎跺着脚穿过走道，卧室里透过门传来慌乱的碰撞声；他啪一下推开了门。

他敢保证这辈子不会再见到洛朗狼狈成这样了。洛朗听到脚步声慌不择路，拎上裤子、脱下裤子、打开衣橱假装找衣服、盖上被子装睡午觉，几种解决方法在脑子里经过了两秒钟的化学反应，最后成功让洛朗提着裤腰从床上一跃而下，肩膀撞到了衣柜、脚下勾到被子，摔得躺倒在衣柜前，看到弟弟颠倒的、憋笑憋得扭曲的脸，缓缓将被褥拉起来遮住了自己的脸。

还是大卫干咳一声打破了沉默。

“需要我帮忙吗？”他觍着脸大胆问道。

洛朗抄起拖鞋往他脸上扔。

大卫放弃支援哥哥，逃出卧室，关上门前脑袋还是被砸中了一下。他把门拉开一条缝，在有什么东西飞过来之前开口，声音仿佛恶魔低语，“防止你忘了，你昨天网购的三条裤子都是这个尺码。”

十分钟后，大卫提前一周开始了进食，这次因为洛朗复杂的心绪，给乳脂增加了额外的酸甜风味。十分钟，倒不是洛朗在房间里做了多久的思想抗争，大卫把耳朵贴在门上，听到的过程大概是一分钟的停滞，八分钟的与这条可怜裤子的又一次搏斗，最后大概是裤子赢了，因为洛朗拉开门前刻意地花了一分钟时间平复呼吸，没让自己暴露出气喘吁吁的一面。他身上紧紧裹着一件长风衣。

“像暴露狂，走到我面前，唰一下拉开衣服，里面什么都没穿，”大卫中肯地点评，“所以快来吧。我还没到饿的时候，但你已经需要我了。”

洛朗恨不得踹死他。要不是为了喂饱他，自己怎么可能胖到这种可怕的程度；他想到菲比斯，几个月前在巴黎圣母院剧组里要是他唱着爹心累解开衣服，底下露出的是白花花的肉体，观众全得喝倒彩。他开始后悔这所谓的奉献和养育，是不是还不如多被操几次，最坏的后果也就是半脱水，而不是承受这种羞辱性的揉捏和摇晃。

大卫已经咽了好几次口水，但嗓子仍然因为欲火而干渴得发痛。他拉开洛朗抱在胸前的手臂，风衣自然地垂落，衣襟敞开，暴露出哥哥丰腴的肉体。他强行按捺着躁动，屏住呼吸，抵抗空气中浓重到发稠的甜味。你仍然需要保持清醒，大卫告诫自己，从一整块巨石里凿出维纳斯也不比这更简单，毕竟石块不会随着维纳斯轻微的身体动作一晃一晃引诱雕塑家，每一部分都过于饱满以至于有了下垂的趋势。

大臂，上背。

“练这么好什么意思……”

肋侧，肩部。

“你有毛病吗大卫·班！留着斜方肌那块是什么意思！？”

“你急什么，我去冲杯黑咖啡，再不休息会儿就要控制不住啃你肌肉了。”

颈部，胸部。

“啧，洛朗，你真的是我哥不是我姐吗？”

洛朗觉得光是承受弟弟这张停不下来的嘴就已经力竭了。还是该怪他自己，没教好弟弟吃饭不说话。

大卫看他紧阖着眼皮不开口，忽然起了坏心思。胸脯的皮肤在手下愈合，哥哥因为疼痛皱了皱眉毛，对他接下来的出格行为毫不知情——

下垂的肚腩边缘有着圆润的弧度，触手的第一感觉就是温滑，肌肤下是肥厚的脂肪，沉重而松软，让人忍不住想要掂量把玩一番，深吸一口气才抑制住这种冲动。白皙的腹肉从他的指缝间膨出，大卫将他小心翼翼地托了起来。

洛朗的脸上出现了一瞬间的死机般的空白。他第一反应居然是收腹，大卫满脸得意地收回手时，洛朗揪着弟弟的耳朵把他拎起来平视。高耸的眉骨与鼻梁切割开脸上的光泽，将那双蜜糖色的眼睛埋进阴影——他突然打了个冷战，羞赧、拘束，对同类会产生的情感，如同潮水退去。

“你真他妈的是个彻头彻尾的变态。”洛朗说。

“哇，bravo，你说对了。”大卫挑挑眉毛，“那你就是个愿意继续养着变态怪物的蠢货。我腻了，哥哥，把逼露出来给我舔一舔解渴。”

“我警告你——”洛朗本想推开他，尖利的牙齿却钉进了耳廓。大卫猛地叼住右耳，咬穿了那块薄脆的软骨，吐字模糊，血腥味冲进洛朗的鼻腔，“不是说好要利用我做大明星吗？我知道你搞了个歌剧魅影要演，指望着用现在这副躯体登台吗？那就拒绝我吧，不用谢。哦对了，你没有裤子可以穿了，所以也没法拒绝我。”

赤裸裸的威胁和羞辱。大卫松开嘴，又把他拖回床上，他趴下的同时脑袋像被打了一枪，右耳再生的痛苦几乎把他撕裂。洛朗惨嚎了一声，像有一团火把他的声音烤得战栗不已。他从没想过软骨也算是骨头，右耳尖锐的疼痛和大卫不加润滑胡乱抽插的钝痛折磨着他脆弱的神经，他没法想象什么样的人才能在清醒的情况下承受这一切，再从身体深处榨取出淅沥沥的爱液，送到大卫唇边。

大卫才不管他，抓着他腰侧的肥肉使劲顶弄着，龟头研磨他熟悉于心的敏感点，随即更深地撞进去，屁股被顶出阵阵肉浪，阴茎挤开热软的甬道，抵着富有弹性的最深处，反反复复碾磨。狭窄的宫口被强行顶开，被迫灌入痛苦的欢愉。洛朗死死咬着无名指的关节，齿痕早已遍刻在前两根指头，眼睛涣散，呜咽着落下了眼泪。饱受摧残的阴阜即使被操到了最深处，也没能流出哪怕一滴汁水，大卫自讨了个没趣，他把洛朗翻过来，极度不协调的上下半身没能找到一个有性趣的缝可以插。他突然有些后悔这么早就吃下了肩背和胸部，或许半小时前腋下还是个不错的选择，把那对奶子鞠起来也是一汪软肉。

洛朗昏迷前最后的记忆是粗暴的舌头伸进他嘴里，一个可以说是世界上技术最差的湿吻把他的唾液汲净了。

“醒了？你已经变成女孩了。”大卫习惯性地开始贫嘴。

大卫忘了骨头再生需要抽取大量的能量，洛朗饿得没力气说话。但是大卫还在滔滔不绝，对着维纳斯本人介绍他的高超技艺。

“考虑到你的角色，我还额外处理了一下你的脸，口感真好。放心，你演完魅影的那一夜它就能长好的。”

洛朗心里升起不好的预感。他抬手，摸了摸自己的右脸。触及的皮肤贴着骨头，如同树皮般枯槁。

“……歌剧魅影……是配音工作！！”

他又一次眼睛上翻晕了过去。

其实是饿晕的，但从大卫慌乱的大喊大叫来看，应该成功对他的自信心造成了严重损伤

后来洛朗被迫戴了两周的口罩上班，骗剧组的每一个人说他因为过敏，脸上长了可怕的疹子。反正没有人在乎干音是否会受到干扰，只有录音师为了消除那点细微的布料摩擦声而抓狂不已。

Chapter 3

时间不区分罪人与圣徒，贪婪地索取、索取，又不由分说地给予更多。洛朗看«汉密尔顿»的时候应该是记错了哪个词，或者是干脆把整句话的意思理解错了。无所谓。

并不是说姓班的就能逃过这一场盛大的更迭。在几乎未改的容貌之下，精神早已于完美的躯体中变形——常年的增重和减重彻底毁了他对食物的认知。增重，除了堆积出角色的形态以外，还要给大卫留出调整的余地，暴食后胃壁的撕扯感使他这辈子都忘不了冉阿让；他说不清哪个更痛苦，是被填塞过满，还是减重时连续数日的断食，以适应大卫雕琢后的躯体，身体自主重构脂肪的分布。

“你再说一遍？？什么叫右边的胸大一点？？”

“嗯对。狮子王就是这样穿的。”

“……我仅存的良知不支持我只舔你一边的奶子。”

“我承认阿拉丁要裸露上半身让你焦虑了，”大卫犹豫了一下，好心地提醒洛朗，“但也不至于要我把你啃成以前菲比斯那样吧？你再想想？这可是个大工程。”

“没错。”

“……不可能。必须保留体脂，不然你会受伤的。”

“……”

“你大可以相信我的技术，”他抚摩过洛朗皮肤上撑开的生长纹，粗糙的触感让人油然生出心疼，“没有那么多余量也是可以的。”

洛朗撑得不想说话。他又一次达到了人生中体重的新高度，在越过那个曾经的最高点以后，他每增加一磅都得吃下更多的食物。

“把你吃掉十八磅？腰围减去至少八厘米？你没疯吧，洛朗，”大卫目瞪口呆，“你知不知道十八磅脂肪有多少？？正常减肥过程至少要三个月！最少四次进食！”

“你不就是用来让我跳过这几个月的吗？”洛朗瞥了他一眼，手里翻着台词本，小腹堆起明显的赘肉。冉阿让留下的痕迹在他身上逾发显著，但他已经需要成为弗洛罗了，“用不着担心你的作品，那是白费功夫。多吃几口，你可以的。”

“卡洛斯怎么能有这么清晰的肌肉线条？和好朋友整天混在一起的人是不会非常在意自己的身材的，他——”

“那你自己再吃得胖一点好了，”大卫把手里的软尺往桌上一摔，打断哥哥的喋喋不休。近几年哥哥的气质越来越偏向柔美，身体里滋生出玫瑰气味，现在整个人沉浸在卡洛斯里，血肉又染上百合苦味，让他觉得在啃绿化带，不管脑子怎么想胃里都直犯恶心，此时万分怀念副主教的的朗姆酒味，“又要屁股又要腿又要大胸，气质柔软没有明显线条，还不能有小肚子，穿上你那衬衫叠马甲的戏服还不能显胖，要求这么多你怎么不多付点肌肉给我呢？真是自讨苦吃，我给你调整完不出两周就复原了，皮肤张力过高，你还得再挨一次疼。”

“他该是什么样就让我变成什么样，我只喝水就好了，这样你的调整能持续更久。”洛朗语气淡淡的，丝毫没有退让的意思。

大卫这辈子最后悔的事就是验证了那个猜想。洛朗说的对，他早就疯了，他这个疯子还连带着把哥哥一起拖下了深渊，让哥哥也变成了疯子。疯子二号站在全身镜前，扭着身子检查他的艺术成果。“好极了，”他微笑起来，笑容里透露着母性和悲悯，“卡洛斯……”

大卫等着他第四次突然一皱眉，灵机一动告诉自己哪里还要修改，但是洛朗没有再为难他。他套上背心，一瞬间又成了他自己。“我有一个请求，大卫，”他用的是那种商量的、讨好的语气——大卫条件反射就想拒绝了，“我演完唐卡洛斯以后要马上进莫扎特剧组演萨列里了，可不可以，在剧组里每天帮我微调一次身材？”

大卫怔住了。洛朗热切地望着他，眼睛深处燃烧起他似乎陌生的、又从骨髓里感到熟悉的渴望，甚至可以说是狂热。他突然觉得谁是疯子二号还不一定。

“嗯？大卫，从廊坊到北京，接近一个月，不用更久！每天都有晚饭！”

“你要毁了自己，”大卫轻轻握住那双兴奋到颤抖的双手，更修长的手指包裹住五根更厚实的指节，“别把自己想得那么无所不能。你以为cake的再生能力没有限制吗？你会病倒的。”

“别管我叫这个，大卫。蛋糕，让我想起我失败的戒糖，”洛朗不耐烦地甩开他，在房间里来来回回踱步，每一个词都裹满不安与野心；大卫知道自己说漏了嘴，不敢打断他的发泄，“萨列里根本就不是什么失败者，所谓的反派，高贵、卑鄙、敏感、懦弱，全是为了让观众喜欢上这段关系！”

大卫听得莫名其妙又不敢说出来。洛朗踱到房间另一头，猛地转过身，大步迈回大卫面前：“——这位大师需要尊重！我完完全全地进入这个角色，去体会他的压力与痛苦，这是尊重的第一步，而你的调整是我进入角色最重要的一环。或许大家看到我在她们眼皮子底下的改变，会更加爱我？我需要尝试，大卫，没有迈出的第一步就没有成功。”

尝试，大卫在心底复读了一遍。他第一次弄巧成拙的雕刻——19年前的歌剧魅影，就已经替哥哥做过尝试了，皮肤连续经过几次再生就会失去弹性和光泽，如同垂暮老人般松弛皱起。全身的手术，绝对会为萨列里献出生命，再多的爱也无济于事了。

“好吧，”他拍拍哥哥的肩膀，“提前两天给我打电话。”他要走的时候袖子被拉住了，转过身时被洛朗按着脑袋贴上了前额。

“抱歉，太耽误你了，”洛朗带着歉意说，“我拿眼睛作为报偿。我吃过羊眼睛，味道不错。”

大卫都要气笑了。他本来就被卡洛斯的百合味恶心得胃里反酸水，洛朗还要用珍贵的——百合味的、他口感上最不喜欢的器官，来酬谢他，“谢谢，好好保管你的眼睛，我等那位反派在你身上出现的时候再来吃掉它。”

洛朗演反派时总是更美味。大卫承认，洛朗能拥有如此多的爱，部分原因是他对待角色确实非常用心——单单是萨列里，16年时是酒心巧克力，隐隐有肉豆蔻的辛辣；19年更苦一些，夹带了榛果香气。真是可惜，他短时间内不会再为24年的萨列里下口了。

“喂？”洛朗拨通那个号码，耳边立刻涌出嘈杂的音乐，吓了他一跳，“首演日在26号。”

“……”

“大卫？”

“哥哥，我在卢尔德圣女，”大卫的声音清晰地钻进耳孔，轻轻地吐出最残忍的字句，“我没有替卡，巡演一直到六月底结束。你得自己搞定一切了。”

十余年间，健身的目的早已由塑型转为展示身体和消磨时间。到了现在这一步，不得不将训练量扳至年轻时的标准时，洛朗扫视过对他来说已经太过严苛的项目，还未开始已经感觉呼吸困难。

游泳、健腹轮、爬楼梯、断食。

大卫忘了把软尺带走，平时无需在意的维度在一次次束紧的测量中逐渐抽走他赖以生存的某种物质，连这具躯体都与他对着干，无声而蛮横地将自己生长成洛朗·班，而非萨列里。大师已经化身漆黑的秃鹫盘旋在空中虎视眈眈，而他的体重还远远未达标；大卫在他身上安置的卡洛斯确实正在离去，胸围掉了，臀围掉了——他不敢去量腰围，绵软的小腹将层层叠叠的厚重戏服顶出弧度。

刷小红书时他能短暂地脱离苦痛。大部分人在听完上半场后都会对他盛加赞美，有一瞬间他甚至为此而庆幸，随即震惊自己的卑劣；他本以为自己已经习惯了不解风情的观众打下的差评，毕竟不是每个人都能理解艺术。

“妈妈第一次看音乐剧……我问妈妈说那个蹦蹦跳跳一直乱叫的老头怎么样，她说看到老头了，但是只看见了一个全身黑衣服的老头，穿得有点像桶。”

索菲帮阿洛伊西亚整理高高的发髻，酒馆老板拎起小丑的戏服嘀咕着重挂回衣架，莫扎特拽着康斯坦斯忘情地接吻，塞西莉亚背过他们翻了个大大的白眼。晚场还要上班的法国牛马们快要跨上舞台，蒸腾的喧嚣之中，蜡烛A卡似是有心灵感应般突然隔着群舞看了一眼还没化妆的萨列里。大师靠着墙壁，盯着漆黑一片的锁屏发怔。

洛朗的心跳得很快，文字短暂地烙在了视网膜上，漆黑的屏幕映出他低头时下颌挤出的软肉。

“2 shows today , need energy !!”

面无表情地捏着三明治拍完照又放回去，没留下拆开过的痕迹——然后扔到年轻的莫扎特面前。雅尼斯魂不守舍地嚼着孤零零一块能量棒，只是塑料盒与桌面的碰撞声就让他瑟缩了一下，迷茫地抬头看向洛朗。

“我买多了，”他看着那双紧张得快要哭出来的眼睛，不必要地补了一句，“不想吃可以扔掉。”

雅尼斯低下头小声地说了一句谢谢，不需要多敏锐的耳朵就能听出他嗓子哑得吓人，根本不能应对晚上的演出。洛朗悄悄地叹了口气，真是要命，他自己还没恢复到班萨的最佳状态，主角的两位演员已经在迫不及待地摧毁观众的信任了。

“……你请假一天又能怎么样？天天有演出？我还没见过巴黎有胆子这么大的剧团，连罢工都不怕！”

“抱歉，确实有，就是这个该死的地方了。除了我一个愿意罢工的都没有，一群胆小鬼。”大卫很干脆地挂了电话。洛朗还想骂人，耳边的忙音让他有气也没处撒。

“你在跟谁打电话呢，”雅尼斯不知何时出现在背后，“大卫？”

洛朗点了点头。总不好在这位身上再压什么负担了。

年轻人的眼睛里闪过茫然。“可是——这不可能。我昨天中午看见他了，”雅尼斯挠了挠毛茸茸的脑袋，“克伦蒂娜那首«乐声叮咚»的时候，水晶球舞美反射的月光打到他脑袋上了。差不多在第三排最左边，一眼就能看出来了，大卫可是我的艺术教父，我绝不会认错。他没来找你吗？”

洛朗第一次流露出压迫性的气质，但不是冲着他来的。直到被推出化妆间，雅尼斯还在回味那个眼神——他觉得那很萨列里——愤怒突破了皮囊喷涌而出。

“再告诉我一遍，你在哪儿。”

大卫没听出来对面的平静之下快要爆发的情绪，“在化妆间，洛朗，化妆师叫我呢，下次——”

“摇滚莫扎特好听吗？再多看几场闹剧怎么样？”

“……”

“洛朗·班把自己强塞进萨列里的衣服里，真有意思，是不是？所有人凝视着他，看他胖得连马甲都系不上，腋下都得加补丁？而你，大卫，在观众席一起看笑话？”

“我没有，”他突然慌乱起来，“我没有在看笑——”

“撒谎，”洛朗突然压低了嗓音，“你最爱这种桥段了。这一辈子你都在为了取乐而折磨我。”

“除了这次，我什么时候拒绝过你的要求？”大卫的声音透着干涩与真实的疲惫，“我本以为你会好好利用它。用你偏执的脑袋好好想想吧：孤立无援，竭尽全力仍触之不及，被自己无形的标准与期望勒得喘不过气，亲眼目睹成功从指缝间溜走，而大部分的声音仍然是夸耀——”

一句话钻进他的耳朵，一道闪电落入他的心脏。可是那位天才在哪里呢，洛朗听到自己急切的问话，但大卫没有回答。“不要如此苛刻地要求自己了，哥哥。我们都不年轻了。”

对面挂断了电话。洛朗把手机摔在化妆桌上，一抬头看见了自己 不再棱角分明的脸。他贴在衣橱内侧用于激励自己的全身速写也映于镜中一一那是他下笔时照枯瘦的印象往病态瘦削刻画的梦，绝不会像他这样被人说像是桶。 那是他设想里应该有的却绝无可能再拥有的身材。

莫扎特的左手高高地举起指挥棒，重重劈下，鼓点如同脉搏狂热地跳动，音符顺着天才律动不歇的引导，随暗红的心潮汹涌地淹没了萨列里。他这时候应该挣扎着反抗音乐的国王，又不由自主地沉溺其中，扯碎他表层的高贵，他应该表现得无助且绝望——雅尼斯看不见洛朗的表情，但是感觉今天的班萨格外色情。不是，为什么被瓦列里从后面勒着拖走会腿软啊？为什么只是被乐谱拍到肚子上会喘这么大一声啊？J'adore！！不要在我的音符淫趴里显得这么沉浸这么游刃有余啊！

年轻人大受震撼。

今晚的莫扎特没能控制不住这个完全将性爱经验代入舞台的萨列里，但是萨列里太过惊艳的痛苦又弥补了这一点。没人知道他如何能如此深刻地演绎出自身笃信之路无法再走的绝望，在欢快的宴会上于深切的愧疚中解离，又向音乐的女神乞求原谅。

“你还需要我吗？”

“不用了。呃，你能过来就来吧，我点了四人份套餐，今晚失去眼球，明天替卡演出，后天我可以继续上台的。谢谢。”

“……能不能别再提这茬了！我就说说你还当真了！”

“那你过来吃个饭。雅尼斯，我，克伦蒂娜，我们吃不完这些。”

“吃饭？还不如让我干一炮来得划算。”

“……”

洛朗就知道不该因为弟弟展示出一次人性的温暖就推翻他建立了二十年的变态非人类形象。

Texas Rangers vs Seattle Mariners

Thursday's MLB game of choice has my Texas Rangers playing the Seattle Mariners in the first game of a four-game series. Tonight”s game is scheduled to start at 7:05 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's score and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

Two passages have been haunting me as a writer and a musician. The first is Rainer Maria Rilke’s reference to the “half-artistic” professions in his Letters To a Young Poet. Here is the full quotation:

“Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art —as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.” (Last paragraph of letter X).

Depending on your profession you might be incensed or traumatized by this sentence. I will not comment on the censure of journalism and almost all of criticism because I do not have Rilke’s certainty. One could accuse him of arrogance, but I do think he is hitting on a truth, which is the human propensity for making ends of our means. Good reporting on current events serves a valuable end for democracy, but it is not meant to be art. Good literary criticism can help us understand great works and what they mean to us, but the criticism itself would not exist without the art. As a writer and podcast producer who puts work online, I would also add podcasting and content creation and cultural criticism to the list of unreal half-artistic professions. They may serve a good purpose, but they are not a worthy end in themselves, and they can easily eclipse art itself. In my own life I have noticed that I often use the busywork of podcast editing or post publishing to avoid the creation of real art (such as my novels or songwriting). Rilke’s words haunt me in those moments.

The second passage that haunts me is Habakkuk 2:20:

“But the Lord is in his majestic palace.
The whole earth is speechless in his presence!”

This comes at the end of four or five lines in which Habakkuk decries lifeless idols that do not speak or talk:

“Woe to the one who says to wood, ‘Wake up!’—
he who says to speechless stone, ‘Awake!’
Can it give reliable guidance?
It is overlaid with gold and silver;
it has no life’s breath inside it.” (NET)

What strikes me is the image of the entire earth being silent. It made me realize just how much noise we all make. Such a cacophony of words and sound. And yes, I do count online words. They may not make noise out loud, but they make noise in our minds. This is humbling to think about. I wonder: What am I doing, adding to this cacophony? Am I following my calling, or just idolizing myself and attempting to talk over God?

Think about this: our laptops and phones are made of precious metals, and we say to them “Wake up!” We ask them for guidance. We use them to magnify and record our most secret vices and our most admirable virtues. We imbue them with meaning just as ancient people imbued idols of wood and stone. By writing content, I am giving a potential reader more meaning to imbue their personal idol with. Of course, this metaphor has limits, or perhaps none, which is what makes it dangerous. If an idol is anything we imbue with meaning, then an idol could be a book or a coffee mug or a house or a person. What is the middle Way here? The point, for me, is to take the pressure off what I create. God does not need me to proclaim His beauty or His goodness. I can be silent before Him.

After spending hours mixing and mastering I have often gone outside and listened to the wind in the trees and the singing of the birds and the subtle creaking of branches and the fluttering of insect wings and thought, “I have never heard music more beautiful than this.” God, after all, is the Lord of sound itself. Our creations, even the Greatest, are really not so great compared with Him. They are only reflections in a dirty mirror. In a similar way, the publishing of art is a compromise, an attempt to reflect the joy and meaning I have discovered in the act of creation. By the time I share it it is already dead to me, but it can take on a new life in the mind of the reader, and so haunt them.

---

Thank you for reading. If you would like to be haunted by more of words, please consider supporting them by subscribing or buying me a coffee:

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rule #4

The Mapmaker

The map hung on the wall of the village hall for as long as anyone could remember. It was a large map, hand-drawn on yellowing paper, its corners curled with age. The roads wandered across it like uncertain thoughts. Rivers bent where no river bent. Distances were optimistic in one direction and pessimistic in another. Entire fields appeared where there were now houses, while several houses appeared not at all. Everyone knew it was wrong. Visitors would stand before it and laugh. “That road isn't there.” “The bridge is in the wrong place.” “The church is far too large.” The mapmaker who had drawn it was long dead, though his errors remained remarkably alive.

One wet afternoon, I found myself standing before the map with a farmer, a retired schoolteacher, and a man who repaired bicycles. The farmer pointed to a line crossing a stream. “There never was a bridge there.” The schoolteacher disagreed. “There was. My grandfather spoke of it.” The bicycle repairman shook his head. “It was not a bridge. It was a ford.” Within minutes, nobody was looking at the map anymore. They were talking about the village. The stream became a story. The story uncovered another story. The missing bridge led to a flood, the flood to a wedding, the wedding to a disagreement between two brothers that apparently continued to influence local politics many decades later.

The map had failed completely. Yet somehow it had succeeded. Years later, the old map was removed. In its place appeared a new one, produced with the latest technology. Every road was precisely located. Every boundary was exact. Distances could be measured to the metre. Nothing was misplaced, exaggerated, omitted, or imagined. The map was true.

Nobody gathered around it. People glanced at it and moved on. There were no arguments. No stories. No discoveries. No old memories called unexpectedly into the present. The map answered every question before anyone had the chance to ask one. One day I stood before the new map and found myself missing the old one. This seemed irrational. After all, the old map was wrong. The new map was correct. What more could one ask of a map?

Yet something had vanished. The old map forced people into conversation with the place. The new map replaced that conversation with information. The old map made visible the difference between what was shown and what was known. The new map concealed that difference beneath its accuracy. It was then that I began thinking about a distinction that has occupied me ever since.

There are mistakes that reveal truths. And there are truths that conceal mistakes.

The old map was mistaken about roads, rivers, and distances. Yet through those mistakes it revealed something true about belonging. Its inaccuracies invited participation. One did not merely consult it. One entered into a relationship with it. The new map was true about roads, rivers, and distances. Yet it concealed a mistake. It assumed that understanding a place consists in locating it correctly. But a place is not exhausted by its coordinates. A village cannot be reduced to the geometry of its streets any more than a friendship can be reduced to an exchange of addresses. The old map was wrong about where things were. The new map was wrong about what a place is.

At first sight this appears paradoxical. We assume truth and error are opposites. Yet experience suggests otherwise. Sometimes an error misses its object and reveals a horizon. Sometimes a truth captures its object and hides the horizon entirely. The distinction is important. For when we discover a mistake, we should not ask only what it gets wrong. We should ask what becomes visible through it. And when we discover a truth, we should not ask only whether it is correct. We should ask what disappears in its light.

The old map no longer hangs in the village hall. I do not know what became of it. Perhaps it was discarded. Perhaps it lies forgotten in an attic somewhere. But I suspect the old mapmaker understood something that his successors did not. He knew that a map should not merely tell us where we are. It should help us discover what it means to have been there.

Later that evening, I wrote the following in my notebook:

Rule #4 Beware the truth that ends a conversation. Attend carefully to the mistake that begins one.

✒️ Sigi

Shoreline with lights. License: CC-0

So, Brennan Kenneth Brown wrote about the experience of my response to one of his posts topping the Bubbles list for most of a day. To that, I have to apologize, and hopefully provide a little context. Brennan wrote at the beginning of his post:

The writing was critical, but it was also fair and written in good faith. That said, seeing a 3,500-word article about me on the top of Bubbles.town yesterday certainly did give me anxiety—but that's par for the course. My chickens have come home to roost. I mean, if you're going to share your work with the world, then you need to expect the world to respond.

So, to set the record straight: I didn't start with the intention of writing a 3,600-word critique in response to Brennan's article. Especially not one as critical as it is. Personally, I like to pick up on someone else's thoughts that have some similarity to mine, or are tangential and seek a common ground. That's how my responses to Gordon Mclean and Michael Lynch have largely gone.

In this case, it felt necessary to start out of with a few corrections before moving on to my own thoughts. But, by the time I had written those corrections, I was no longer sharing my thoughts. Instead, I was back in the role of the critic, attempting my best to use academic scrutiny (despite being out of academia for over forty years):

Believe it or not, we haven't even gotten to the meat of Brennan's article yet. This article is so dense with information that it's going to take a lot of work to go through and pull it apart for a clear examination.

And this is where I failed. I wasn't able to maintain the level of even-handedness in my criticism that I should have maintained. My only excuse: I was frustrated with myself for being so critical that I turned my frustrations towards the author at times, instead of maintaining focus on the work itself. For that I apologize.

Brennan then goes on to talk about his reaction to my article:

But my body doesn't know the difference. I'm somebody who has struggled with scrupulosity, or moral obsessive-compulsive thoughts, for my entire life. I hold a high (maybe impossible) bar for myself to do good, and feel as though I'm failing no matter what I do or don't do. Irrationally—because of mental illness—I see a bad article I've written as an awful moral failure. The same order of magnitude as the things that actually get people milkshake ducked

And I want to address this point because I think, while we experience it differently, there is some common ground here.

For those who don't know, I have another website that has been dormant now for about ten years. But, during it's prime, I wrote over 500 articles on it, over half (360-420) music reviews. And I have a netlabel that has been dormant for about the same period of time. The reason I bring this up is to talk about two situations I found myself in that bear some similarity to Brennan's struggle.

The first, one of the artists I was working with on my label started demanding that I supply materials for him to use in support of his performances. None of those materials had ever been discussed when we started working together, and nowhere had I documented making any such materials available. The truth: the whole operation was running on a shoestring. I was putting in whatever money I could. There were no profits from the label to work with for supplying the artists with anything more than I had provided. The artist was enraged when he heard this, and started posting all over the place about me, trying to assassinate my credibility.

Nobody who knew me bought his allegations. I made a couple of posts correcting misinformation he was spreading, and providing receipts. Receipts I had pulled together in a panic because his attacks felt personal enough that I thought we were going to end up in a legal action. That's when things got worse: his attacks turned into threats against me. Yes, those kinds of threats. However, after his attacks had been called to the attention of the platforms he'd posted them on (by others who knew me) he cooled down a bit. At least publicly. And that allowed both of us to walk away, working relationship shattered.

In the other case, an artist I had written numerous reviews about decided, at some point, that I was his enemy. He wrote a long diatribe to me demanding that I pull down all the reviews of his works over several years. Apparently, this started because I had made a couple of mistakes in some reviews, combined with him having some bad personal experiences unrelated to my reviews. It took a week (or more) of going back and forth with him, but in the end, he agreed that it would be best to just add corrections to the reviews in question. That was something I was always more than willing to do.

But, the reason I relate these two experiences is they are similar in some respect to Brennan's experience. I was invested in the work that I was doing. I thought I was doing a greater good for everyone involved. Never would I have considered my work to be harmful in any way. (Even in my reviews I had a policy: I had to have a minimum of three good things to say about a release, if I didn't, the review would likely not be published.) But both of these experiences made me feel like I was in a war in a way, under attack and on edge for days, even weeks after the experiences. Both experiences severely undermined the person I thought I was, made me question everything.

That is an experience I don't wish on anyone. It is an experience I don't wish to inflict on anyone. And, it is something I will endeavor to improve on in the future.

---

Categories: #Response Tags: #criticism, #scrutiny, #scrupulosity, #writing, #experiences License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

21 July 2026

Psychological price (working title, maybe Goodbye ground): I've had a few variations on a painting of a curtain reacting to a force (thinking of it almost like a gut being punched) lying around the studio for a while, and this may be the first instance of one working. I think the reason it does occurred somewhere in the process of two unsuccessful paintings merging to supplement and solve one. This has happened a couple of times now in the development of this recent body of work as I've begun to notice visual or sensorial similarities in seemingly disparate subjects. In this case, while working on the curtain, I had also been attempting to paint a cloud formation based on one I saw over Spiaggia Blue Moon in Lido. It looks like a large, flat, gray-blue mass of fabric billowing across the sky, like a flag or a tall stage curtain moving right to left, with a small tuft of white cauliflower cloud sinking itself into a wrinkle near the bottom of the form like a paperweight.

That little cloud turned black and ended up filling the role of the aforementioned force, and it gelled such that it now seems it couldn't have been any other way. There's something ineffable in those switches from arbitrary to surprising to inevitable that I don't want to try to define, but I will say that working with paintings as both streams and estuaries is starting to make more sense as certain subjects become motifs. And this also speaks to the potency of opposition and tension and friction (formal and emotional) as it relates to resolution. Crucially though, these relationships are not to be sought, but rather found or stumbled upon or recognized in the aftermath of getting to work. This approach feels important to remember and preserve, because observation still lies at the heart of what I am doing, not invention. Although, with that being said, there is also something to contemplating the modern pattern of widespread dissatisfaction with what is already in front of our eyes.

A lot of time spent with Redon's drawings this week. In his words: “One must respect black. Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and it awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the mind far more than the most beautiful color to the palette or prism.” Woman with Outstretched Arm (1868) especially—the wind, the birds, the body, the earth all moving as one cohered instance.

Their first page is a warning. I had read it for years as liturgy.

DO NOT EDIT OR CHANGE THIS BOOK OR THE MESSAGE CONTAINED WITHIN EITHER THE WORDS OR THEIR NUMBERS FOR ALL IS SACRED

It is not liturgy. It is a maintenance instruction.

Page fifteen, last line. The transcription I had trusted for as long as I had trusted anything reads ENL, then LIGHTENED.

Somebody typed the letter twice carrying it across a line break. Somebody else copied that. Then everyone did.

Their script has a fixed pitch. Their cipher is one glyph for one letter. So the copy makes a physical claim and the photograph can refuse it.

Four hundred twenty-nine pixels of ink. Eight runes predicts four thirty-four. Nine predicts four eighty-eight.

The page said eight. The copy said nine.

4430 → 4357

and the difference between them is seventy-three, which is the value of the letter L, which is the letter that was typed twice.

A composite, corrected, becomes prime.

my lungs are inhaling great volumes of air, what a miracle!

Yesterday and the day before that, I was having some super allergy with asthma out if not asthma, something in the lungs,

But not today

Today I’m counting down until vacation (1,5 days)

I’m counting down to retirement too, but that is ridiculously far away

Isn’t it strange how I can feel this old and yet have soo many years of work left?

It’s some sort of joke,

Like when I was fixing this cable, the one between the barn and the pump house labelled internet, to replace one which mysteriously broke, I sat on my tenth try with all of these tiny cables trying to get them all into their slots of this RJ45 connector, T568 A style. To clamp down, but my hands are way too big and I don’t see what I’m doing, it felt ridiculously hard, I don’t even see what I’m doing, not even without these tears of frustration and shame!!!

But last time, having broken the clamp tool with my mighty grip, having discarded five connectors, I prayed to God please let this work now

And it did!

I feel the same anticipation about my remaining career!!

It’s called faith?

The path lies empty.

They wrote that in 2016 and I took it for a taunt and it was a reading taken off an instrument.

I no longer think it means the door is locked. I think we have all been standing a very long time in front of a very good drawing of a door.

It also turns out I did not ruin my chances of a terrific public service job! There was an internal candidate already! My chances were limited (and reduced to zero since I didn't want to replace anyone who wanted to be there. Nor was I even given the opportunity to. Truly zero).

Still back to square one, but with a less pervasive crushing sense of failure.

Portrait of a bedroom in disorder.

For two weeks in January 2026, a browser extension removed AI Overviews from the Google search results of 374 people. The remaining links moved silently up to fill the gap, so the interface looked just as the search always had. At the end of the two weeks, researchers asked participants how they felt about their search experience: satisfaction, quality, and ease of finding information. On every measure, the numbers matched the group that kept their overviews. Nobody missed them. The only difference was that people without overviews left Google for other sites 67% more often.

This field experiment by Saharsh Agarwal of the Indian School of Business and Ananya Sen of Carnegie Mellon, published on SSRN in April and revised in June 2026, produced the first causal measure of what Google's AI Overviews are costing the rest of the web. The answer is 40% of outbound organic clicks on queries where overviews appear, with no measurable benefit for the people doing the searching. On 20 May, at Google I/O, the company made AI Mode, that demonstrably made no improvement to the user experience, the default search experience worldwide.

What the experiment measured

The study recruited 1,065 US desktop Chrome users through Prolific and randomly assigned them to one of three groups. A control group saw Google as normal. A treatment group had AI Overviews removed in real time by the extension whenever they would otherwise have appeared, with organic results shifting up to fill the gap so cleanly that over 95% of participants reported noticing nothing. A third group was redirected into Google's AI Mode for all queries.

The experiment design settles a methodological argument that has run since the first observational studies appeared. Ahrefs, Pew Research, and Similarweb all pointed at the same traffic decline, but none could prove that the overviews caused it rather than some other change in search behaviour or Google's algorithm. Agarwal and Sen's extension created the counterfactual that observational data cannot. The only systematic difference between the two primary groups was whether the overview appeared. Everything else–the queries, the organic results, the ads–was the same search engine on the same day.

The numbers were stark. For queries where an overview appeared (about 41% of all searches), hiding it increased outbound organic clicks from 0.37 to 0.62 per search. Sponsored clicks stayed at 0.02 in both groups. Total search volume did not change. The overview did not create anything; it simply kept the 40% of clicks it absorbed inside Google.

After the main two weeks, the researchers swapped the conditions. The group that had been browsing without overviews got them back, and their outbound clicks fell from 0.61 to 0.33 per search. The group that had been seeing overviews lost them, and their clicks rose from 0.33 to 0.55. Same people, opposite intervention, mirror-image result.

The “higher-quality clicks” defence

Google's vice president of product for Search, Liz Reid, has characterised AI Overview clicks as “higher-quality clicks” that signal stronger purchase intent and longer downstream engagement. In April 2026, the company advanced a “bounce clicks” explanation, arguing that overviews mainly remove low-value visits — the kind where a user lands, finds nothing useful, and taps the back button within a few seconds.

Agarwal and Sen tested that claim directly. For every click that reached a downstream website, they measured whether the user bounced (left within ten seconds with no further navigation), how long they stayed on the page, and whether they hit the back button to return to search. Across all three measures, there was no difference between the group with overviews and the group without. The extra clicks generated by removing overviews were no different in quality from the clicks Google's system allowed through. The authors are careful to note that Google may measure something further down the funnel that the extension cannot observe. But at the top of the funnel, where the “higher-quality” claim was made, nothing supports it.

In contrast, Adobe Digital Insights' Q1 2026 analysis found that visitors arriving from AI assistants converted 42% better than non-AI traffic, reversing March 2025, when the same channel converted 38% worse. The volume is small, roughly 1% of total site traffic for most businesses, but the quality gap matters for anyone trying to value what remains.

Although the findings appear contradictory, They measure different things, so both can be true. Agarwal and Sen answered: does the AI overview filter out only the junk clicks? No. The clicks it suppressed were the same quality as the ones that got through. It just reduced volume.

Adobe looked wider but shallower. They took all traffic across thousands of sites and split it two ways: came from an AI assistant, or didn’t. Then compared conversion rates. That’s broad, but it can’t answer the Google question, because “AI assistant traffic” doesn’t isolate Google’s overview clicks. Those just get lumped into ordinary search traffic. So Adobe tells you assistant referrals convert well; it tells you nothing about whether Google’s surviving clicks are any good. Agarwal and Sen looked only at Google: narrow but deep: one channel, controlled comparison, cause and effect.

The mechanism, however, is straightforward: the AI overview wins the way anything wins in position zero. In the study, 87% of AI Overviews appeared above all organic results. When the overview sat at the top, removing it led to an 88% increase in outbound clicks. When it appeared lower on the page, the effect disappeared. People did not seek out the overview. They consumed whatever occupied the prime on-page real estate, the way supermarket shoppers take whatever sits at eye level on the shelf. Move the product, and the behaviour reverses instantly.

Forced into Google's fully conversational search interface, users rated their satisfaction at 2.9 out of 5, compared with 4.0 for both other groups. Attrition was roughly four times higher. Some participants installed workaround extensions to escape. This is the experience Google chose, on 20 May, to make the global default. Record queries and accelerating search revenue explain the decision. The fact that their own experiment's closest analogue produced the lowest satisfaction scores and the highest quit rates does not seem to have figured in the calculus.

Meanwhile, roughly twenty national news outlets are negotiating licensing deals for the privilege of appearing in these overviews, with Google winding down its older news-payment programme and making future payments conditional on granting AI training rights. If you are not one of those twenty, nobody is coming to the table. The response has to be self-directed.

Read your own exposure

Not all traffic is equally at risk. Agarwal and Sen classified queries into informational, navigational, and transactional categories. Informational queries accounted for 71% of all searches in the study and had a 53% AI Overview trigger rate. This is where the entire effect played out. Navigational searches (someone typing a brand name to find the website) triggered overviews in only 6% of queries, and transactional searches (purchase-intent, booking, downloading) in 15%. Neither category showed a statistically meaningful decline in clicks.

This means that if your search traffic comes through “what is” and “how to” queries, you are sitting ducks. If it comes from people searching for your name or your products by name, the damage is minor and may stay that way. Open your Search Console, filter for query type, and look at the split. The ratio between informational and branded traffic is the single best predictor of how badly this will hurt.

For many smaller businesses, an audit will show that informational traffic was always the least valuable, even though it has traditionally been encouraged to build domain authority. A plumber whose search visibility comes from “how to fix a leaking tap” was getting visits from people actively trying not to hire a plumber. That traffic was always thin on conversions, and the overview is now absorbing exactly those clicks. The branded traffic, from someone searching for the plumber by name after a recommendation, was always the higher-value stream, and it remains largely untouched.

Stop producing what the machine can summarise

The clicks that persist in a world of overviews share a common trait: the user wanted something the summary could not provide. A named opinion. A tool. A dataset. An experience report. This matches the evidence from the GEO literature I have previously reviewed. The Princeton benchmark found that content with sourced statistics, named quotations, and inline citations earned more citations from AI systems. ZipTie's cross-platform analysis found that sites with high original-data density received 4.3 times more citation occurrences per URL than directory-style listings. The surviving trickle rewards specificity. What a summary can reproduce, the summary will absorb. What it cannot reproduce, because it requires a person to have done, measured, or decided something, retains its click.

For a smaller business, this completely changes the question of content. The commodity “what is X” post, the 1,200-word explainer written to capture an informational keyword, was always a bet on Google continuing to send traffic to the answer. This content type has taken a 40% haircut and already converted poorly. That is a signal to stop producing it, or at least to stop treating it as a customer acquisition channel. Spend that same effort on content the summary cannot assimilate. Publish your own data, even if the dataset is small. Name your prices, your methods, your results, your opinions. Write the thing only you could write because only you did the work, and leave the commodity answer for the overview. Fix your GA4 attribution before drawing conclusions. AI referral traffic typically defaults into “Direct” or “Referral” buckets, and only 14% of marketers track it as a separate channel. You cannot manage what you have filed under miscellaneous.

Build the channels the intermediary cannot close

One result in the study was completely unaffected by the presence or absence of overviews: ad clicks. Free organic traffic from search fell 40%. Paid traffic held steady. If your free visitors from Google are disappearing, the route Google left open is the one you pay for, and that was clearly not an accident. If you start to spend more on Google Ads to replace the traffic it used to send for free, it should be watched closely for true return on investment.

So what should be done? Google has remained an intermediary for organic search traffic long after others cut it off at the knees to drive ad revenue. But the organic game has become increasingly difficult as ad slots and other additions to the search engine results page have made the real organic links less and less obvious. The direction of travel has been clear for many years.

Relying on an intermediary’s whims for traffic, even one as durable as Google, has always been a Hobson’s Choice. As its presence continues to fade, we return to basics: email lists, direct bookmarks, repeat visits, communities, and all the channels that do not pass through a search results page.

None of this is new advice; the case for greater focus on owned channels has been made for a decade, and each year the argument grew stronger and the urgency louder while the execution stayed more or less the same. The difference now is that experimental evidence puts a number on the cost. Every month that informational traffic goes unprotected by a direct relationship is another month in which 40% of those visits vanish into a summary.

One caveat deserves emphasis. Do not block AI crawlers outright. The major labs have split their bots into training crawlers and search crawlers. OpenAI separated GPTBot from OAI-SearchBot in late 2024, and Anthropic made the same split with ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot. Blocking the training crawler is your call. Blocking the search crawler cuts you out of the AI answers that are replacing the links you used to get. A Rutgers and Wharton study published in December 2025 found that publishers who blocked AI bots across the board experienced a 23% traffic decline compared with peers who allowed crawling. Google is the harder case, because Googlebot still handles both search indexing and AI features in a single crawler, which is exactly the bundling the CMA’s conduct requirements are trying to force apart.

The empty space

The 374 participants whose overviews were silently removed are, as far as the published literature shows, the only group of people to have experienced modern Google search without AI-generated summaries and been formally asked what they thought. They reported feeling no difference whatsoever.

That absence is visible only from the other side of the results page, where a company watches the traffic graph flatten and wonders whether visitors are finding better answers or simply never leaving the search process. Agarwal and Sen's contribution is to show that the latter is the case. The visitors are not finding better answers; they are milling around in the foyer before going home.

I’m kind of overheating a little bit and I think it’s a little bit funny because A was Surprised that I was A Sagittarius, mentioning that a lot of the traits of being the life of the party, funny all that stuff, but surprised for the sole reason that I don’t have an ego to her. And I think it’s so funny because I absolutely have an ego, I think it’s one of those things where I can keep it to myself, and I’m secure enough with it where it doesn’t need to be pushed down anyone’s throat, I just have a pretty good view of myself in certain lenses. Afterwards we were talking and she was telling our group how she wants to match make us, and she was talking about all these different things that men should due to improve their chances, and the other guys, I was surprised how clueless they were with several things. She even used me as an example and was saying that they should take notes, but also it won’t work for them because they’re not me and they don’t have that dog in them like I do. I remember she was telling this one guy at the beginning that she was going to find him someone because even though he was afraid of women and a bit older, and not as attractive, he was a homeowner. And I held back from mentioning that I am also, and don’t get me wrong. I absolutely understand that this is something that I would not be able to do without the privilege of my dad‘s financial support. But I also kind of do want to acknowledge the fact that it is privileged, but it is privileged that I have., Am I still didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to boast or flex, but it kind of just makes me feel even more like damn I am that guy. I remember I saw an Instagram reel earlier today about something about clavicle length, and I am very fortunate with my genetics. I saw my doctor today and he asked if I was on steroids, and I think that he is being nice, but at the same time there’s a reason that complement lands. I think I have an incredible amount of potential, and I’m very grateful that I’ve done a lot of the work and I’ve gone through a dark enough place that it required me to realize and recognize that potential in actuality. And it’s something that I’ve kind of thought about a little bit where when some of my friends asked me for advice with things or they ask me about how they can have more success in certain endeavors, sometimes they’re just is that somewhat insurmountable gap of just the cards that we are dealt. And I’m not saying that I have the perfect hand or anything like that, and I use the fact that I tried to kill myself a few times, and I still struggle with that as an indication that even though I have all these amazing things, I am sometimes more than I would like to willing to throw it away, and if someone else is not willing to do that, I think that somewhat of a telling comparison, that they would choose to keep living that life instead of just ending it. But that all being said, I feel like for a lack of the brighter word, it’s a brutal mog. Like what am I supposed to say when one of my friends that isn’t doing well in college for a worst major is asking me about career success. And frankly, it’s a mixture of genetics, the environment I was raised in, and everything that I sacrificed to contribute to my intelligence and my success, and so when someone asks me how to be more smooth or how to be better at flirting, how am I supposed to just tell someone to in essence to me what feels like be smarter. Like if someone is asking about how to be funnier or more charismatic and yes, you can work on these things absolutely and I think there isn’t enough of a reason to feel discouraged, it’s one of those things where it’s like if someone ask me hey how am I supposed to lift this heavy amount of weight and it’s a mixture of the cards that I’m dealt and also the work that I put in. And I think it’s one of those things where I have almost slingshotted in life going from being incredibly behind in a lot, if not all different avenues, other than maybe academic success, to having to really put the pedal to the floor and end up surpassing most of my peers. And of course, I’m now surrounded with new peers, but I find that I still am used as an example or a subject of envy or a goal or gold standard to strive for. I remember one of my friends in college kept saying that she was going to beat me on a test at least once or he was going to do something like that and he never did. And I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is. And it’s not at all the case that I’m the best of everything, and I actually really enjoy the things that I’m not the best at because I’ve dealt with the issues of other people comparing themselves to me and holding that resentment and that’s not something that I can necessarily deal with nor is it my responsibility to deal with. Like I remember in college when we would all be in a class together, and I would set the curve on a test and my friends would not be happy. And if they would get excited when they would get a question right that I didn’t while we were cheating and working together on test during Covid, all for me to then point out that they were actually wrong and I was right. I think about how online my friends are sometimes a little bit insecure about the fact that I am better than them at the games and much higher ranked. And because of that, I need to be careful and it’s not honestly that hard, it’s not like I need my ego to be stroked and it’s not like I need them to acknowledge that either and I’m happy letting them shine and not taking up spotlight. But in a lot of different avenues, I find myself near the top and I find myself worrying that friends or people around me will compare themselves to me. And so I really like things that I am not great at, like for example Chess. I’m rated 1000 which is not a horrible, but it’s also definitely not exceptional or great by any means. And because of that at the chest club, most people are better than me, and it’s a little bit difficult in the sense that sometimes when I win or when I make them have to really focus. They are in a situation where they kind of have nothing to gain, but they have a lot to lose. But I think generally I am a good loser in that sense. I am completely comfortable, losing and somewhat stroking someone else’s ego if necessary. But overall in life, I kind of feel bad because there’s nothing I can’t do but just mog certain people. Like on paper, I think a lot of people would wish to swap lives with me and I can’t really say that I’ve met anyone where I felt like I would want to swap lives with them, because I have an incredible amount of potential and I think I have an incredible amount of gifts that are not at all common. And I guess maybe this somewhat egotistical self reflection is an exercising gratitude. I think about that one conversation topic of if you were to swap problems with a random person in the world, would you and I think almost everyone says no. And I think that’s a very insightful thing, that even though we have our problems, we recognize that they could be way worse at the end of the day our problems are not insurmountable. And I guess I’m happy to hear that I have this sense of self value, and I don’t feel like this is the needle swinging too far the other side from the past where I had a horrible sense of self-esteem, and I also got a lot of shit from people. I’m kind of comfortable with me having this echo because I don’t think that I’m being unreasonable or incorrect about anything that I say, but more importantly, I’m writing this on my fucking website that I hope no one really reads. Like I think I’m comfortable with people reading this distant in the future or something like that because by then I have plausible deniability to be able to say oh that was past me. But I’m essentially just saying this into the void and so I’m not putting anyone else down or I’m not trying to convince anyone else of something. I’m just kind of worried dumping while I drive back home from chest with voice to text. But overall, I just wanna say that I’m really proud of the person that you’ve become. If the choice arises again choose to keep living please. Don’t let a temporary lack of chemicals, rob you of an incredible life opportunity.