Wednesday, February 4, 2015

No Step For a Stepper

             So, I saw Philbert walking around in circles in my basement, again.  I’m not sure what had him all hot and bothered, and it didn’t seem like he was all that certain, either.
            “Oh God, what have I done?” he mumbled fervently. I tried to reply in case he was talking to me, but he interrupted me with, “It wasn’t your fault, Phil, and you know it. They made you do it.  Pi is relentless and omnipresent, you can’t help that.”
            Maybe he had prevented me from interrupting him; I’m not sure how the semantics of situations like this go.  Someone almost interrupted someone else, in any case, but it was foiled effortlessly.  Phil was sweating a bit. I only noticed because of the evidence on his shirt. I wasn’t close enough or concerned enough to see if there was sweat on his face or anything. He must have been power walking like that in circles for a while.
            How’d it take me so long to notice it?  He was hiding in the basement, sure, but I usually catch him close to the start of these, what would you call ‘em, sessions? 
            “Is this close enough? It has to be.  Pi wouldn’t have it any other way.  It is exact. It is endless.  It is perfect and irrational at the same time, how can we not see that we must be as it is?”
            I hadn’t heard Phil talk like this before.  What the fuck was he talking about? Pie isn’t endless unless you make it endless. You’d have to have an infinite amount of resources, which he doesn’t have, so he shouldn’t concern himself with it.  He was definitely concerned, though.
            “Fibonacci was the real genius, he figured out the secret of Pi’s golden ratio.  You don’t see people handing out literature on that, though, do you,” he weirdly rambled on.  By weirdly, I mean he used a fucked-up sounding voice that he doesn’t usually use.  It could just be something he does to differentiate between perspectives when he talks to himself, how should I know? It sounded really strange, though.  I figured I’d try to snap him out of that shit to see if he could explain himself.
            “Hey, Philbert?  Anyone home, man?”
            “Of course, that’s more like Phi than Pi,” he continued, ignoring me like an asshole.  He isn’t usually an asshole, though.  “Not much difference in our spelling of those, if you think about it.  Phi is just Pi with an ‘h’ in the middle, as if humans got in the middle of perfection, screwing it up.”
            “Ok, that’s nice,” I told him, in case some part of him was subversively listening to me.  I told him I’d be back, then went upstairs.  Found a few oatmeal cream pie things in the kitchen, they had to be his.  I can’t stand the thought of eating those now that I’m properly acquainted with internet porno.  I grabbed two or three, went back downstairs, and decided to play a game.  I could feed Philbert and entertain myself at the same time. Why not?
            As he retraced the circle end over end, I tried to toss the cream pies in the middle of the circle without hitting him.  His frantic pace made this an interesting challenge, and he stepped on one of them. His loss more than mine, but I still lost points.  I had good luck other than that, so I left him in the basement to whatever ends he was planning.

            If you’re wanting to go down there, good luck.

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