How To Reach Me

Dear Tom,

ก.ท.ม. is indeed remote from L.A., I would beg you not to risk such an endeavor. You would have to travel very far up your own difficult and intransigent coast line, through the farthest land you have already visited, the land of potlach and salmon, to even farther, farther than Pytheas or Parry. In the white lands, it is said that it is so cold, pockets of moist air collapse into columns of standing fog that resemble hooded figures, that mere possibility and exhausted stars fall like ash from the skies and a man's heart stops beating, its sound stolen.

Here, at the summit of the globe, you will find the iced over and justly neglected ruins of Hitler's last fortress, done in a style that is monumental, overbearing, impregnable, illucid and non Euclidian, a sort of n-dimensional kitsch poorly copied out of badly understood alien forms, crossed by the transepts of UFO ports and the melted altazimuth mounts of various super vengeance weapons, all disintegrated and derealized by weapons of still more occult origin from Ag-Har-Ti, the capital of the hollow earth and the unsurpassable armory of its King, who shall remain nameless, but to whom all other kings and leaders are slaves.

Also, nearby the hardy community of Little Arctic Bavaria, settled by the survivors of the arctic conflict and denizens of the inner world who have developed a taste for harsh living, suffering or growing old, or could not or would not return : fitting subjects for Milton's poem.

It is recommended that you stop by Little Arctic Bavaria, particularly the Biergarten, where the ageless Sargent and his children make a number of fine and rewarding Bavarian comestibles. Here, too, some of the heavenly ways survive and if the Sargent thinks you a worthy traveller, you may taste a further draught of the “waters of paradise” courtesy of the children's mother. The way to the inner world is closed, so this may be your only opportunity. But do not mention it directly; it suffices to be a good heart who truly likes beer and children. Everyone else will wake up in the snow. Or not.

The way to the inner world, it must be emphasized, is closed. Do not stay overnight, as magnetic peculiarities produce extremely disturbing and vivid dreams, particularly of continually waking up and dreams of erotic bondage. These are particularly common among younger, more attractive travelers. It is important to remember that everything about the land of the Smoky God, particularly dreams of waking up there, are highly misleading. Do not talk about, or otherwise refer to your dreams, especially to anyone who was in them.

If you and your package somehow escape this remotest of circles, then you will still have to travel south, to negotiate through the Forbidden Kingdom, which is surrounded by a singular and impenetrable wall, whose 9,999 classes of bureaucrat have prepared an infinite maze whose complexity is that of heaven, and whose every citizen will place themselves before you as a guardian of a door you will never open.

Were you to somehow pass through these impenetrable doors, unscalable walls and mysterious foods that leave you hungry a half-hour later, then you would still have to pass through the spoiled Kingdom of ▣▨▩, whose inhabitants are all cursed lepers and whose twelve princesses you must win and marry in order to pass through the country, each disfigured in some terrible way and each afflicted with a different, even worse depravity within.

You must find a way to love each, well and truly for who they are: mutilated and evil, unlovable and unlovely, or never cross the kingdom, but remain in the province of the princesses' rejected affections, along with the other rejected suitors, whom the disease continually consumes, biting off a piece here and there, until they become all but unrecognizable to themselves, hardly able to intelligibly or distinctly pitch woo at all. To end up a suitor in this court is an unenviable fate, dressed up in soiled finery, whose cut cannot accommodate one's horrifically degraded symmetry, pawning what possessions one had for a tincture of parfum to try and abate to any degree, the deadly smell, or a piece of clay to replace a ravaged nose or missing lip, and then to compete with the barbaric yawping chorus of similarly debased and degraded half and quarter men, mumbling loud rumbles of stolen rhyme and gaudy praise through decaying throats and palates, all for a wretched, evil and ugly princess whose heart is long turned against love, in a land whose very soil seems soft rotten and unclean like the flesh of an enormous corpse.

Even if you should succeed in wooing, winning, and ultimately, truly loving each, fighting off army after army of failed and leprous suitors on diseased horseback, you would still have to then live with your bride in a fecund palace surrounded by over ripened groves, as husband and wife for 21 moons, until the birth of your child, who will stumble out like a fetid spoiled coconut and whose death in the river will end the curse and withdraw the venom from the rivers. And you must do this twelve times.

Then you would still have to pass through Lan Na, the land of a thousand rice fields, the Kingdom of my forebears. This will require due obeisance requiring at least 502 head of cattle, 1,400 pigs, 678,000 chicken and eggs, 1,000,897 sacks of rice, 302 bolts of finest silk, several wagons of finest fruit, at least 1,000 fine birds and peacocks of a musical nature, 134 barrels of salted fish, no less than 103 comely and accommodating slaves and Universal Soldier 3 -on VHS.

From there, it is only a week's journey or so to the capital, here, where I will welcome you and your gifts, Venetian, in the highest and most appropriate manner.

As you will no doubt die here, I will erect a splendid plaza in your memory, that curves in a spiral as long as your journey has been, done in gold and ivory, recounting your travails in your journey here. At the center of this structure will be your tomb, where I will select the comeliest and most talented of girl-slaves to lie with your body each night to the accompaniment of fine music.

No visitor shall escape the memorial, however, just as you could not escape your own death.


Or, you could just send your package to the US Post Office.