"Anyhow," he thought as he sucked in the smoke of his reefer, "about the bird, what am I thinking? Who gives a fuck about the bird? Why am I dwelling on this bird. If the bird came in or not it couldn't matter less. It does not even matter if I never know anything and just go from one belief to the next under the influence of whims" for it seemed to him that reality was the obsession that we were under in the immediacy of the moment. If the ultimate decay of one's exterior form made his existence dubious, he argued, the tenuous and watery interior life of a man's mind was even more that way.
With images of wings fluttering salient in his imagination, desire suddenly began to percolate within him, tingling the body like an intimate pot vibrating and ready to boil over with life, and soon he wanted a resurrection from his fetal position on the fetid floor. He wanted to fly and yet all that he could do was remove his clothes. At first, it was to be only the removal of his shirt for he needed to block the marijuana smoke from exiting through the crack of the door. Soon, however, his pants and underpants followed suit in this denuding. Soon they were there caulking the crack as well. And as wind of the open window swept over his nascent nakedness, dispersing the clouds of smoke enough so that he could see fuliginous figures within the world of his cramped toilet, he began to masturbate to the movements of smoke-clouds.
Within, he was seeing diaphanous geckos on top of the ceiling scurrying hurriedly out of the smoke of the toilet and through the other cloud he was ogling a loosely robed sheik of an olive Asian complexion who, fairly and most saliently naked in the most critical aspects of that word, sat on a rock.
Four of the geckos had appearances of his former women as much as geckos were able to resemble human beings. There was a dark, ugly one with spectacles like Noppawan. There was a white angelic one like Kimberly. There was one like the pretty white Thai, Porn, with black hair bowering to her buttocks. There was also that self centered one of childish exuberance radiating its face like a skipping five year old. This gecko was similar to Xinuae, whom long ago he had bestowed the nickname of "Chinese Karen" so as to commemorate the day in which he had learned that he was American by birth. Altogether the reptilian insects were also like these former girlfriends in carrying off his love with their eggs as they ran off to others who promised them an immediate fulfillment of biological urgings, for in reproduction there was not only the continuum of existence but womanly purpose in nurturing posterity, and such happiness had statues of limitation on it. It was not a literal smoke that they were fleeing from nor even the asphyxiation of being alone. He could tell this. It was a symbolic smoke of dying without purpose that they were trying to escape. They knew that the flaming impetuousness with its smoke cloud of being in love so as to beget children was as brief as the body's ability to replicate. They knew that nothing was more asphyxiating than a passing cloud that they had not breathed in. They knew of no grief worse than a barren existence in which they had not done the mating moves in a timely manner that were part of that illusion for meaning and purpose in their lives. To not see life as a rushed activity that one needed to bungee jump into and to run out of time to breed was a capital Sin-u-ae in organisms whose sole purpose was to reproduce a bit of the self that was a composite of replicating cells.