Jofella, chapter 8

Drifella’s dragon ears, which had been standing by to the Jofella stream on low volume in a little picture-in-picture window in the bottom corner of his screen, picked up on the familiar cadence of these poke-words as Jofella fumbled the bag of introspection, making a mental note, ‘trading is like an eerie mushroom trip’. He enlarged the window to a near full screen, keeping a little space at the top where he could monitor the general statistics of the battle-verse world, current battles, casualty numbers, troop movements, network loads, threat levels, etc, and focus in on Jofella’s trader war. For one thing, Drifella wanted to learn how to trade, he had asked Jofella numerous times to give him the alpha but Jofella never really said that much, and if Jofella was to be generous with himself he could say he never gave it because he never really knew what he was doing, clearly he did know something, and so Drifella thought it best simply to observe. 

But that was just money, Drifella himself had minted out recently and it was all a question now of hard work and waiting for the next bull run for his market value to increase. But hard work meant hard work on the fella verse collective and cuckcore movement-–it wouldn't hurt to reinvest his profits a little bit, compound some gains, if he did plan on spawning future generations of Drifella children it would be nice if he had a stockpile of pedomon dollars––not pedo, poke. Drifella was not even really a sexual being, if he was, we would see no evidence of it, but I'm sure he treated many Driladies right. He was in fact a hypercitational being, with a much more coherent base structure than Jofella. Not to say his meaning in the universe was any more clear and established than Jofella’s, just that Drifellas metadata can be analysed on-chain and categorized by his various traits. As an individual he was vast, but as a digital military art object, he had 10,000 unique soldiers in his image, a number which was inherited by the effectiveness of the roman legion. Although all these traits are identified, categorized and analysable, there is little ground to interpret what exactly the totality of these traits amount to as far as their literary meaning in the interconnectedness of world culture. However, in Jofella, other than a few simple facts and accessories, the jofella line has not yet been organized into a cohesive collection. We know he wears the Jofa hockey helmet, he is a trader, streamer, has certain facts to his family and personal life, yet there is a strong instability within his underlying mental genetics, a gymnastics of genetics. And here Drifella believes, looking at him through the stream, perhaps he can help Jofella. How, it is not certain, the first thought that pops into the mind uninvited by logical thinking is by having sex with him, “That's what a human would do, wouldn't they?” Drifella ponders to himself. “Well that's it! No, not me you sickos. Lalaidy! Perhaps I could reach him through Lalaidy. If I were to somehow maybe have sex with her, while she's having sex with him… no, or I reanimate myself in her body as Drifellalady…or… hmm… me, a non-sexual being, mechanically having sex with her while he watches, could this possibly achieve anything useful?... Just thought, just brainstorming, gotta start somewhere.”

Drifella shivered his tail and bowed his head, his horn stub pointing into the monitor, his curse, it's the price of friendship that one picks up and is influenced even by the more negative characteristics of his companions, but I wouldn't change it for the world, the piglet in pooh, a victim even, in all his wisdom inherited from the anime universe, that even he could be affected by watching the Jofella streams in all their baseness like the serial killers of the 70’s raised on 1950’s television violence. Or maybe he really did need to learn something from Jofella. Was he trying to help Jofella even, or was he already on the path to helping himself. No, he would help jofella, and in the process, if he learned to lighten up a bit, perhaps he could get back into the childhood influences that formed the basis of his traits. Were they simply solidified traits for him now? Polaroid records of a life once lived? Would that be enough? There was something more sinister to the fellaverse, it wasn't simply a question of living like a child to produce an art of the present, something dumber, more driven and more confused. Mifella himself was a fella beyond wisdom and control, beyond childhood, and less than everything, just a fella. Did Drifella then have any right or any reason to “help” Jofella? Would it not be better to let the man go on in his mission, and merely join in the fun where it could be had, and withdraw when it got to be too much? Yes, he thought to himself, if Jofella wants me to have sex with Lalaidy and Lalaidy is into it, I’ll do it, why the fuck not, perhaps then I can produce the beautiful children I’ve always wanted. But first I need to evolve. I can produce some dragon semen as I am, but I don’t think it's potent enough to get another species pregnant. Is it?

*

Lalaidy sat by the old blue-grey Danube twirling her hair and humming a melody of her mind’s escape to the mineral and coal ships grinding by, unaware and happy for it, to the cosmic envelope sealing her beauty in a letter written by the effective philanthropy department of the Tojiba Cpu Corp to the ETH Zurich Foundation for the Preservation of Significant Cultural Aesthetics in World Wide Web Infrastructure and Portal Animation. She would have her own node, golden brown hair and all, with a theater of chairs on the other side of a semi transparent white curtain. "The chairman can't have the factory employees cucking themselves all day to no avail. She needs not only her own disc, but her own design module, underground cables, under the mediterranean, from Carthage to Constantinople, just like the old days when world politics were a little more sophisticated." From her grand portrait high in the Eagle's Nest of the fella alpine cathedral one could swear in the reflection of stand oil glossing her eyes the sea itself could be seen over the curvature of Italian mountains protruding into the sky. "Digital battle armies are already under her command, little boys aware to the hormonal secretions in her clothing, a slight arousal as she senses their desire for her, and the energy loops like an erotic clit node like once seen in cock circuit board erection relayer of Pompeii before the nipple of vesuvius castrated it with its black milk overload. Too much data for the old infrastructure, but we know she can handle it." Ass from the 1990's, that's all she could think, thinking about her ass, shorts of primary colors and afro fusion design, they were all thinking about her ass, there are many fine women on this earth and just as many sturdy cocks, by principle of nature, could she really be that special? The rise of almost any particular e-girl to such a grand status is admittedly somewhat arbitrary but only insofar as the rise of anything in an atmosphere of cultural gravity is only bound to molecular physics as a base condition whose manipulation is the very task of all productive efforts we humans engage in. Just look at her, nested down low on the banks of the water drainage flow of the northern alpine basin, so fertile when she gets up she'll reveal a pile of delicious eggs, alpine valley fresh, three every day for breakfast. No, it's just her egg patterned backpack, little chicks hatching from eggs, pale blue, green and yellow shells, rocking back and forth and cracking, the zipper not completely sealed, a little glimpse of her personal belongings opening up to the world.

*

It was good that Jofella was now arousing himself to the thoughts of an actual female, rather than his own 9 year old penis cock twiddling playing pokemon in his pokemon bed sheets like a sick anime pedophile. The Foundation at ETH Zurich would tentatively agree, but they would need to see the results of the upcoming battle. What if the pedomons won? Would we then get data centers dedicated to Japanese animation depictions of white underwear exposed underneath the ass of 12 year old girls throwing pokeballs while Ash is too young to even get an erection and seduce her in the one case where underage sex could be permissible, given there age proximity and animated status? Jofella did not have too many strict standards of how he thought the world should be, but if you prodded him hard enough he would probably be compelled to say no, he did not want to live in a world like that, a japanese animated pedophile world. What then? What sort of world? The cuck's question. A knock at the door. "Are you cucking yourself?" No, maybe, well, Jofella snaps out of it, another knock at the door for real. "La posta!" yells the voice in an italian voice. “Ahh, the paintings!”

*

Drifella sat in his chair, pokepenis in hand, watching Jofella, nothing sexual, just like a hand in a pocket, a reflex of his mifella dna. Was Jofella really done trading, that quick, Drifella was expecting more, a deep all night trading session, a chance to really study Jofella’s trading behavior, Jofella just felt dead to the charts, that's the lesson, when you live your life by the code of spiritual truth like the artist or the trader, the shamans of our time, you cannot force something upon yourself, and by the nature of a man connected to spiritual truth, if he didn’t feel like trading, perhaps it was better not to be trading at this time, a sign from his imminence with the markets to avoid the siren call of participation where all action contains to possibility of wrong action, bad trades. Drifella could see it all in Jofella’s blank nervous stare, or could he even see anything at all? Did he have any idea what was going on in Jofella’s mind? We mustn't forget that Drifella and Jofella both descend from the Mifella line, are they then not brothers, brotherly speaking? Sadly no, their bond would not allow him to get inside Jofellas head, to learn everything he knew about trading, their bond only permitted the grim realization of their difference, but with the assurance that this difference would not lead to hatred, but would serve as a source of support, spiritually financial advice, artistically building off one another, co-ordinating their tastes. But doesnt all overtly brotherly love, betray something beyond the brotherly, brotherly love is not gay love, afterall, and within the brotherly their is also rivalry and a certain emptiness or gap separating their worlds, they did have that gap, each had their specialization of genetic and artistic skills, the culture divides us all into tribes. The truth was, they were both fated in their own way, in their own amounts to suffer the fate of gay little uniformed school boys, chibily animated in a universe defined by a language coming from Japanese hikikomori incels. For deeper in their blood, beyond the Mifella, who escaped the chibi to full stature, albeit, somewhat stunted in height, confined to the body of young adolescence, we find, flipping through the pages of the tomes of lore, more accurately detailed on cuckcore.de, that Mifella arose through the mutation of Milady dna, a once angelic artistic creation exploding with cultural power and influence, as cancer is a side effect of too much life, mutated through a failed exchange of fluids, into the battle arena where reverse natural selection gave way to the genetic unfitnesss of this hated mutation, mifella, who just wouldn’t quit exerting himself, challenging opponents, engaging, fighting, showing his penis and asshole until a survival of the fitest was forced to carve an ecological niche for this viral fella who would just not go away on his own, as the hated are never improved but either destroyed or the people adjust their tastes, so that yes, through all this some element of the milady animation, which through a cultural appropriation and yielding to the market demands of gay nft art did still retain characterisitics of japanese animation, showing itself through the pixel cracks in mifella and the depths of his eyes, and that Jofella even, although unaware to it, retains some of these anime characteristics himself, though stillborn, as the german american would not be called german by a german and he would not call himself german, yet he would talk about his german descendancy and celebrate Oktoberfest while knowing nothing of his past in the old world family, of the anime influences on the surface of his corpse, yet when he travelled to Italy he liked it but thought it was kinda gay and when he travelled to Germany he felt some kind of neutrality of a potential homeland, which is to say, Jofella had some weeb inside him, and Drifella, though perhaps having a larger amount, was not so genetically different from Jofella that Jofella could not understand his struggle. Then what was he doing in Austria, the mountain mutation of Germany, queer as Jofella himself, bastard to the world where he belonged, with a higher elevation and tactile advantage. Jofella had seen several anime films including the standards such as Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Perfect Blue, he had enjoyed some series such as Cowboy Bebop and Lain and had watched some others with various degrees of enjoyment and appreciation such as Evangelion, Sailor Moon and some other kinda gay shit he couldn't really remember from when he was seeing an anime watching goth girl. The point is we are all gay in our own way and if Drifella was so cool maybe all this stuff really wasn't so gay, and maybe, just maybe, Jofella thought to himself, realizing the one viewer he always had on his stream from the same ip address was the same entity liking all his videos firing down the comments and emojis when Lalaidy was in the background, not just behind him on the bed in their bedroom, it was her bedroom too, though she did sleep elsewhere sometimes, perhaps her own apartment, he rarely asked, on the screen behind files and icons, Jofella flicked by it often, desktop 1, desktop 2, 3, left external monitor, right external monitor, the Lalaidy painting there, in the background just there behind him on the bed, reclined, safe, a world of her own troubles in her own head, she asked him about what he was doing on his computer, the only non embarrassing thing he could think of to tell her was about Drifella, talking with Drifella, planning stuff with Drifella, he tried to explain the origins of Drifella in the culture-verse, he showed her pictures of Drifella and his legion of minions, he paused to hear her response, again becoming embarrassed, she said "Don't be, I like him, I think he's cool." 

*

“Hey, what’s that painting of me on your background?” He froze. He hadn’t shown her or told her about it. Why? No sensical reason, perhaps the giddy mischievousness of a secret possession of her, almost voodoo, perhaps not wanting her to feel embarrassed, being a proper artist and influencer in her own right, he wasn’t sure it would be a good idea if her legions would know about her involvement in the fella verse, but it didn't matter in the end, it was just an artwork of her on his computer, for all she knew, she didn’t know about the Cathedral and the gallery of the e-goddesses. But maybe it would be good for her image if people knew some computer artist freaks had a cult devotion to her. Then he thought, maybe it is a bit sick, maybe I am a sick fuck, look at her smiling, thinking her boyfriend just put an innocent portrait of her on his desktop, Drifella of course, he recalled when the portrait was made. He and Drifella were in the Cathedral complex, lower floor on the side of the cliff, south facing with a row of the largest windows the monitors and GUI could support with ancient brickwork to take in maximum sunlight on the high contrast deep blacks bright whites cotton canvas stretched over wooden frames like medieval computer screens, just a normal painting studio work "spaces'' collaboration method. “It's a question of painting methodology.” Jofella explained to Drifella. “In applying paint the main thing is to watch the paint as your hand applies it, do not watch or even think about your hand or even the brush. Thinking will happen automatically despite trying to avoid it, the hand then will develop a thinking of its as you watch the paint, the hand will make adjustments with its brush tactics on its own as you look at the way the paint looks as its applied in a particular manner, when not pleased with the manner, allow the hand to adjust on its own, when pleased with the manner continue as much as you can as fast as possible until the manner is lost to natural degradations in the quality of the hands movement. All the time new paint must be soaked into the brush from the palette, variations in colors, new colors mixed, more color squeezed from tube, more mediums added, thinners, thickeners, just keep going as fast as you can without thinking until the layer on the section of the painting you are working on is complete. Unfortunately you now may have to wait for the layer to dry, or possibly you can move on to a different section of the canvas. This is why I keep at least 20 paintings going at once.”

This was part of his painting speech, when people asked him how he painted, or how to make the surface of a painting look good, he had some prepared explanations. “That’s how I used to do it anyways, before, well, you’ve seen my streams, I self automated my practice through the Vienna School crack art methodology.” What he couldn't explain himself out of was, and he had learned much of his explanatory abilities from the traditional art academy he attended in Old Vienna, was the computer side, if his tactics of the brush could all be accounted for in his paint application theory, when it came to the computer it was all chaos, he could not make a cohesive explanation of mouse and keyboard movement, photoshop tool tactility, copy paste work flows, image selection spontaneities…he actually could not compose images on the computer at all, he could only fuckulate his art practice through the computer, he couldn't precisely finetune the art with traditional tools of art making computer programs. This was why he was collabing with Drifella. “I love paint, believe me,” Jofella explained, “So I want to go back to the classic beauty representation of Flemish oil painting, but Lalaidy’s domain extends beyond the language of the brush. I’m thinking we do something massive, maybe 50 feet tall, 100, who knows. Nothing not already done before, but maybe in some way it breaks out into the meager morsel of newness a humble artwork can hope to achieve. 

Autistically jarring, obsessed, the jarring thoughts incessant in the waking head. Passing fazes, charts of course was the one that just wouldn’t pass, but others came and went, now every day, at this time in the glory days of the pumping market, in addition to the charts, he woke up every day thinking about fungi, like why what the fuck, all day, couldn’t get anything done, watching videos, leaving his apartment desperately before the sun went down to forage wild psychedelics and edibles in the city forests and unkempt land, cooking of pans of hot mushrooms, walking around the streets high on mushrooms, had cartographed nearly every neighborhood with his searching feet, the faster he walked the more he could increase the dose. The iconic red capped ones with the white dots they always told you were poisonous, except in super mario bros, 1990's NES, the autistic obsession would not allow him not to try them, just a little nibble at first, then a proper handle on a safe and enlightening dosage. It was in those serotonin boosted dreams where he saw the divine image of Lalaidy as she really was more than just human, mycelium tentacles from the sky into the earth, delicate enough for a veil, which he learned the amanita muscaria had, both a partial and a universal veil, mushroom appendages protecting it while young, the partial veil covering the gills, the vagina of the mushroom, dusting out spores for reproduction in a suitable substrate and environment. That’s me. He had learned from his former porn addiction and the benefits of semen retention the more just pleasure of having a veil over the vagina until the moment of intercourse arrived, you have to picture Lalaidy as the hottest of girl of the hottest type of girl but subdued to the taste of the basement artist, creature like in elvishness, not the ancient unattainable ideal of a genetically modified goddess, but nestled down down the block, spying on her, waiting for her to leave her apartment, as the springtime gentleman walks the fashionable streets seeing the hottest girl and falling in love three times a day, but one real enough to settle down, at least for now, with a fella, no make up needed, syncopated showers and laundry routine, and there was the function of the universal veil cocooning the entire fruiting body in its nascence like an egg sack, and then as the bright red cap pushes up and expands, stretching the veil in all its organhood, here the white viel fractures into white fragments sticking to the red cap like warts and forming the iconic white spots on the red cap as it continues to grow and unfold, distracting you in this blossom as it rips the underveil from the stem exposing the gills. 

Jofella felt lame, metaphors are lame, he realized, it was that moment the artist has after they snap out of the head space they had been maintaining to push through a series of work, stuck in their head space convincing themselves that what they were doing was so unique and beyond importance, he'd had the feeling with his chart paintings before, some people just couldn't relate to the metaphor, he became bitter, thinking of the people, yes the people got the best of him, once you get bitter you've lost, but it means you are trying at least, if you never get bitter you're not getting deep enough into your own head space, it wasn't his fault, it wasn't his taste and his anti taste, it was his deep conflation where he thought taste, while trying to be niche and retarded, was still an illustration of the universality of our collective depiction of the world, that the entire meaning of the universe could be seen in the chart, that Lalaidy could be seen in a mushroom, it just reveals that an individual is embarrassing or perhaps cool, the specificity remains stable, the interpretation varies and you get judged. He didn't know what he was talking about, Drifella didn't either. They were just vague leftover concepts in his head from his shotty philosophy degree from a shitty university, that was the problem, too vague, the universal had to be made specific, he had to take the charts further, he was still into the charts, even when they were fucking with him. "Anyways, you probably don't see it the way I do, so it's probably better you think of it in your own way, I just thought, jumping into the autism, in the sense that we are all autistic, I'm pretty sure everyone finds fungi interesting, a good metaphor. I know you don't worship her, it's probably better that way for, you know, objectivity? No, it can't be better, nothing is worse than objectivity but what else can we do, I know you've probably got a little pokemon ass on the throne you worship, I know you have a little bit of that fella’s hotspot for love” “The pokemon genome has actually been pretty much entirely sexualized now. It's not like it used to be in the 90's, we've grown up you know.” “Computers, that's what I'm talking about, she needs computers, I was trying to say, I'm sorry, I do find the entire pokemon sex thing arousing, but I was gonna say the white fragments of her egg sack, the the white spots on the cap are like the oil paint, the old style but underneath that the growing expanding red cap, all her lady energies and internal magic.” “So you want to paint her like the sacred disc images banned from the Toji catalogue?” “Holding a brush is like holding a penis.” “I never said that.” “But holding a pixel is just like painting.” “Right, just apply the paint, it's that simple.” “But we're not talking about a fruit basket or an animated school girl from Titowasaki or whatever, we’re talking about Lalaidy!”

“Look, Jofella,” the conversation continued, had been in and out continuing, visible through the south facing windows of the monastery, a painting in itself, potentially, two gods among men and mons, plotting their monument to the e-goddess, it was already archived in the Wayback Machine 16 times, “I may not love her like you, but I understand the idea, I have learned a few things about the analogue to digital conversion, well from analogue to digital conversion, I’m not saying, once again, that Lalaidy is an analogue being and that we are trying to digitize her. I’m just saying, Dratini was originally hand drawn, and now he’s everywhere, like the point is, you don't really have to do anything, the computers will take over and it will happen on its own.” “Well, not computers taking over, you controlling a computer, taking it over.” “Hey it was your idea, you invited me, I can leave.” “Then why don't you.” Drifella just stood there, face blank, barely moving a talon, and now Jofella realized looking back on their conversation, it had that awkward docility of the third person, waiting for orders from the other two, the I've given up all hope of leading myself in through the power of testosterone, and wait patiently for you to allow me into your game out of pity or perversion. But in that moment he didn't see it yet, all he saw was “Hey, I’m sorry Drifella, I didn’t mean…” “Let’s fuck.” 

They were already standing close to each other, their breathing was already nsync, it took the slightest of soft movement to raise their hand to each other’s body and connect with that so rare tingly feeling only really lived through embellished memories, the reason we have stories and movies about it, an opening in time, waiting, never ejaculating, minds crossed with their own chemical secretions we need not understand or worry about, looking at their silhouettes casting shadows on the canvas, ripe and prepared, blooming with double threaded pores, coated with finely abrasive gesso, sanded smooth and coated again, the toji graphics manipulation plug-in gives him the menu option to select that one time an artistic collaboration with a friend actually worked out, he had tried many times actually, but it wasn't easy, not for a lonely basement jacker, music played by hitting the play button like everything depended on it, friendship sequence initiated, no more touching bodies, a stroke of the brush begins the painting equation problem, no solutions, just less wrong, Drifella scrunches in his head and twists around his neck like a newborn dinosaur from an egg, pixels secret across the canvas, punctuating the vulvic wire cathode computer shit fucks that must surely be underneath for this whole thing to work. I’m feeling this is right, I’m feeling only slightly like an actor, I’m feeling my underwear, I imagine feeling how other people doing this would feel. Jofella paints and I paint, holding his hand, he thinks he doesn't have to think while painting, but it's me doing the thinking, with enough mushrooms it is possible to consider it acceptable to take a masturbation break, we are painting Lalaidy here of course, nevertheless, we hold off, if we were alone we would have done it. Drifella appears solid, yet he knows he's fluid on the inside. By now there is clearly some of her sweet hair in representation, coming out of nowhere, strewn about everywhere, no sign of a head, an ur-object before the creation of objects, how nice it feels to be fucking the thing behind the thing, a soul? No, just art, furious walk on the crutches, art is crippled, not a broken bone, just the skin of the canvas growing, expanding outwards and tearing apart into patches and fibers, paint can cling anywhere, but it might not hold forever, the matrix arrives as a safety net for all matter that chemistry and physical properties not fitting into the mold that led the old masters to apply the materials they did to the materials they did, slow increments jacking up, expanding the domain of the painting slightly, glueing shit to it, pissing on it, painting cocks on trains, then retreating back to the canvas, then steam engines, paint tubes squeezing out pistons, somehow movies with a jillion frames are worse than paintings with only one, unless it was a movie about Lalaidy, starring Lalaidy, made by Lalaidy, don’t worry, she will produce that in time, we will see it some time, become a little let down, but just imagine it, for now in this paint we sculpt her head, back of the neck, covering all the digital traces of pores on her skin, contain the digital within, only the veil of her beauty over the skin in paint, her hidden power lies below the canvas, mycilium strapped to Jofellas veins and who knows how many others. This is what they called fucking, making art together. It allowed them to be gay without being gay. The portrait had good form now, but Drifella saw something wrong with the eyes. Jofella had fucked them up. "But you got the eye color wrong, Jofella.” Drifella seemed to think it was a big concern. "Well if you wanna take care of those you can, it's not a big deal to me, her beauty has nothing to do with her eye color.” It was obvious in the painting. Mesmerizing in its masterbateability, for a painting at least, meaning spiritual masturbateability, jacking off through divine revelation of the western painting canon approach, a new era in painting maybe, or just too much health to the artifact, "Now that's a healthy painting." It was glowing even, and not by electric lights, but by the bottled up mysteries of its material composition, but also its formal classical composition, just a pretty face? No, you would have to see it with your eyes if you understood art enough, but no one yet understands art enough to appreciate the sickness of the painting. They did a good job. They performed well together. Lalaidy would be pleased, if she cared as much as they did.

*

It was Drifella who had made this all come into being, If it was just me, it just would have been a nice normal oil painting. It was Drifella who understood her, like I understood her but deeper in some way. Somehow, in his own way, he broadened my own understanding of her. And maybe Drifella was right about himself after all, how did he not see it at the time, that he wasn’t pedo with all the pokemon and anime stuff, I had just thought he was engaging with Lalaidy in the classical way a gay guy engages with a female friend, like why would it matter if a pedo slept with your gf, artistically speaking, it would be just like she masturbated with an inanimate paint brush, so to speak, well maybe the pokemon thing just was who he was, and what he actually wanted was some normal human relation with a like minded and connection in whichever way female or male, with Jofella and Lalaidy and maybe it was meant to be that Drifella should have sex with Lalaidy. Was he not the perfect no... cant you see Jofella, Drifella is the cuck, you are the bull chad... don’t even remember why I am thinking this anymore as a good idea, what the fuck. I don't wanna be a cuck. The markets were falling, he had realized it clearly there well he knew but still had to remind himself sometimes that his emotion went with the markets mainly sometimes they went with how his art was doing, good art, good emotion, shit art feeling like shit, cucked by the markets, cucked in real life, was this fate? No it wasn't him getting cucked, it was his bags. He couldn't take this sh… "Bah!" just get the door bro. Some sort of threesome? Drifella watched him load in the crate through the stream. “The paintings,” Drifella thought to himself, “from Venice. Fire.” Just his internal first layer monologue, but below, the feeling, sinking, not admitting to himself, let down, why didn’t he wanna work with me again? “I’m glad he got them, cute little guy.” Again, first layer. It was just the chart paintings. He couldn't see it clearly, yes, he told himself, he’s right, I couldn't actually help him with these, it's the italian art babes, they understand, nobody wants a painting made by me, who even am I?

*

“The desktop background portrait?” Jofella replied to Lalaidy on that now distant night. “Oh, ya, I felt too embarrassed to show it to you, well I knew you’d notice it eventually, I just wanted to wait. I painted it for you, well for myself to have… What do you think?” Lalaidy sat there on the bed smiling, looking at her portrait on the screen then at Jofella. “Awww, it’s so nice, come here.” He got up from his chair and came to her in the bed. She was reclined with her knees up and head supported by some pillows. He nestled himself beside her with his face by her breast and she rubbed the back of his neck. He slowly rolled up her shirt and began kissing her torso. “Drifella helped me make it,” he said, looking up at her. “Oh.” She grabbed his hair and he began kissing her lower towards her waist, gracefully maneuvering his body up and over her between her legs.