Mishka Zakharin

Year of the Golden Monkey

Daemon Mishka, Volume III

—by Mishka Zakharin

In Year of the Golden Monkey – the third installment of Zakharin’s journalishly rambling ‘Daemon Mishka’ series – one may find all the elements characteristic of the author… it is lyrical, romantic, sexy, clever, humorous, trivial, desperate, devastating, and hopeful. Containing both more fiction – short stories reflective of Zakharin’s own self-perspectives – and more poetry than either of the previous Daemon Mishka volumes, Golden Monkey is perhaps Zakharin at his most extreme… and it is definitely Zakharin at his very best.

9 February 2004.

Nadia was saying today that she used to have blonde hair… but, I think, I shouldn’t want to see it—her long, brunette tresses being so very beautiful as they are… and I told her such was my inclination in the matter, and she smacked me in the head with a brick… (what the hell, anyway!?—do they just always happen to be walking around all the time with a brick or a stick or a rake?!…) So I suppose we have an understanding in the matter…

Oh, how very droll, how very futile, how very… obdurately inconsequential, how very—and that’s it!… I can’t stand it anymore! I have to sit this one out! When you lie down with dogs—don’t be surprised to find puppies on your doorstep on Father’s Day… (treat it like Halloween—shut off the lights, stay quiet, pretend you’re not home…)

Summer—like the warm, bright, loving embrace of death—lies far out of reach, and my yearning for fruition only causes the passing of time to slow in its already insidiously slovenly pace… leaving to flounder and flail in the freedom of winter—as if the raw, frigid, empty stagnation of life….

Denver Blues #1: Ashbery Street

“…think you’d remember tons of fucking people looking up your crotch…”

I suspected I had stepped into the squishy middle of something… I held my tongue, among other things, until I could get caught up to speed…

“No, that was the kidneys—I know who-all has looked up my crotch.” She cast a sharp look my way—but the pointedness of said look softened abruptly, a moment of commiserating lethargy suddenly settling over from where it had been held at bay for so long… she arced an eyebrow of inquiry, her lips tightening in a non-smile of not much of anything; I arced back, offering an uncondescending tilt of my head… I enjoyed our closeness—of being as well as of proximity… we sighed in unison, unified in a shared glance—for a moment, for all time…. “Ready for some doobage?” she asked.

“Oh-hey, now wait just one gal-derned second there… we were discussing those who have looked up your groin, I believe…”

A gimpy coke-whore strode by, a feral glance pointedly not aimed anywhere near us—just bothered by our existence… a car stopped beside her, she hopped in and it took off—backwards—dropping her off again at the car she had arrived in just moments earlier… when she got out of the car to get into her own, she seemed not at all gimpy—though was most probably still a coke-whore…

“Sumpins goin dowwn, brutha’s,” commented Rodrigo, offering up his traditional shaky-fist-but-with-thumb-and-pinky-at-odds gesture.

23 November 2004.

Cute girl is here today. Though a brunette, she has a fine, fine callipygian posterior, and, so, methinks, I love her anyway… or, anyway, I would love her… butt—(excuse)—however… well… I mean—you know… I have never spoken to her… nor she to me… for to do so would upend reality, destroying time and space, unraveling the tapestry of the Cosmos as we know it… so what would be the point?…

—Nothing against brunettes, of course; it’s just that I find myself falling in love with blondes much more often… there are… six brunettes, right off hand, I can think of with whom I have been in love to some degree… (if only a love from afar!… and a bit lower, in its seat, than the heart…) …or—no, no—six and a half…. But blondes? Well, I could name, easily… um… six… or—no, no—six and a half… (ahem~) …and two of auburn tresses—(I’ll not say ‘red-heads’, for such, to me, seems more descriptive of particularly angry, painful zits than pulchritudinous maidens of love…)—and surely no more than that… most probably…

…there really should be a term for this, as well, methinks—the ‘red-head’ thing… (red—which is really more of an orange than actual red-red, so what the hell… or a rust… or copper… or auburn…) The yellow-haired are blondes, the brown-haired, brunettes… so those of auburn (or related hues) might be dubbed… hmm… more difficult than I anticipated… for, of course, by the rules of the game, such a term must begin with the letter ‘B’—if possible, followed by another consonant… but—no, no—it is only the ‘B’ that is most important… for the ‘B’ signifies ‘hair’… (?) …so… ‘bronzers’?… ‘bullfinchish’?… ‘blyscans’?… ‘bergamotese’?… …oh, screw it—

24 November 2004. Desolation in Solitude.

2 December 2004. Musings – #61.

The Avars yoked our women to their carts to dip their toast in—then raped our oxen and ate all the trout-rhubarb-and-embryo pie… we were sorry for the plight of our dear cattle, yet helpless to act against such fierce atrocities—one brave heart, Oleg Igorovich, attempted, but all to be accomplished was a heinously stinky mess in his pants, poor soul… the rest of us learned wisdom—clean, dry, nice smelling wisdom—from his folly….

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