How big are chances, should they ask themselves, first off, the lonely sucker in the island, for so seductively streamlined snack of their bottled message to slip away from this horrendous horde of Order Elasmobranchii at ready to swallow it on sight?

Or could it ever fail to give the pretext to a cruising environmentalist of the Greens Genus to spit out an enraged curse at an anonymous fucker polluting the planet’s ocean with his Goddamn bottles?

~ ~ …and so forth… ~ ~… und so weiter… ~ ~

Scarce and far between are genuine connoisseurs and admirers of OBPS today.

Multi-billion-eyed attention of the global community got stuck to Facebook*, Twitter or whatever else passes for OK in your neighborhood.

(*In 2022 the organization was found guilty of terrorism and their activities banned on the territory of the Russian Federation.)

No one is up to scan the heaving sea waves so as to zero on a vagrant buoy, a marine tumble-weed carrying Uninhabitania islander’s message…

(And if at this here passage at least a single tear of warm empathy is not swished off an eye, let them, the eye owner, go and… hum… well… buy themselves something at Ali-Express or any other proper place for the likes of them – heartless rats.)

But mind you well that OBPS at times can bring you real consolation.

What if some day one of the waves—with a mild «plumpee!»—will unexpectedly bring and serve a bottle onto the desolate sand in the lonely beach, where from it had started its matchless voyage some heck of a long time ago?

And fighting back the tremor in your eager fingers, you’ll open it, O, islander—this vagabond envelope encrusted with uneven sea-salt fancy patterns—because who but you know so too well the meaning of OBPS!

And—lo!—you have already spread out the sepia tinged sheets and got delighted with the inimitable perfection of your style of yore, and the depth of your own thought forgotten by you so long ago (what a pity a couple of pages are fucked up by a stray ship worm!)

Damn! You’re but a sworn philosopher and global thinker, Mr. Kilroy! I swear on my word of honor!.

Well, and this seems quite enough for the first missive, because I still need to find some rubber tree, and bang out a kinda cork to seal the bottle, so as not to miss sending it with the evening tide.

What makes me a definitely ardent devotee of OBPS, it’s its being free—no postage fee whatsoever—look! look! see?! it’s taken! carried off! no stamp is needed, no nothing!

* * *

Bottle #2: ~ Hubba Hubba Ding-Ding, Dear Comrades! Congrats To All On This Jubilee, And – Hooray! ~

And, to be clear at once, you don’t get the uninhabited island as is for just a ‘thank you!’ neither for an honest-to-God stare from your blue eyes. Ha! Seen there in heaps already… Nope. The charm fails to raise the response counted on. The island mulishly awaits till you conquer it. Moreover since it’s equipped with a complete system of canalization behind each convenient bush in the state of the art (the system, not the verdure, silly!) and luxuriously abundant in natural davenports. Aye, aye!.

Yet, all these heavenly niceties are available only after severe struggle and surviving thru the two preliminary levels: The Ivory Tower and Unconquerable Autism. Yep, exactly in this order.

Well, on the whole, The Tower is not an over-complicated thing for egg-heads only, no. All you have to do there is just to stay absorbed completely in your collection of post stamps or whatever is dear to the crux of your soul’s temperament and do not give an eff about anything else.

Reduce all unnecessities to the level of external hum unable interfere with the teaser-thing you tickle your soft spot with.

Everyone around would be too eager to derail you by all kinds of “Go buy bread please!” or else “Run! It’s an air raid!” Don’t let them distract you and hang on till “You Win!” crowns your accomplishment.

Level Two, at first sight, looks a kinda simpler job. No need to give a bean about any-fucking-thing whatsoever. Keep it plain as day and lock yourself off thoroughly, all of the five senses firmly sealed, that’s the ticket to pass the whole thing.

However, be warned of physical harassment – they’ll seat you on the toilet at their will or maybe clutch a cup with your bunch of fingers and pour what was in there down your throat, “See? This how it’s done! Will you never learn nothing? You, damn dumb stupid ass?”

Don’t talk back and be patient for the sake of “You Win!” and refreshing change to the dangler solitude of Uninhabited Island…

Wow! That’s some unfakeable Cream of Paradise for you!

Rhythmic swell of lolling surf of the Digital Ocean, warm light breeze from the electric blower under your feet, sexy moans of gulls in the headset and other checked on attributes of your favorite widgets. The functions under your control are literally innumerable, on a par with Almighty’s level. And why so? Ha! Since we’ve lived up to a tangible jubilee already.

Come on! Remembered now? Right! The Internet is 25 today! Ho-ho!

A quarter of century ago the scientifically minded public started to call each other to exchange text files over the wires. Not every cat did get it then, all of a sudden, whereto steered so quirky a telephonization. Still fewer could, at that pivotal moment, catch on, o boy! the jazz’s charged with way much cooler stuff than the historical thrust into the cosmic era when all the nation bust their ass to give a couple of citizens the chance of getting high and hanging up there, in the weightlessness, on their orbit before predictable return to normal gravitation. Be brave guys’ landing soft!

Quite different kettle of fish, in toto, to this here Internet where everyone may have an opportunity to individually (yet still en masse) get out of the state where you belong as a taxpayer (what? you haven’t even suspected? yes, sir, they’ll tax you and get you and fuck you without you ever noticing when and how, the state will, that very one which you own quite a few sacred debts, inescapably—if you Old Ones don’t settle the issue with a doctor on the draft medical commission—and where you’ll be used for other needs too, thanks to your citizenship).

And all of a sudden – yay! The independence breeze stirred up! The sweet word “freedom!” echoed from afar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah… O my!. NetScape, AltaVista – the legendary, glorious, long since forgotten names of genus-starters in the line of search engines… It’s them who paved my way to virtually visit the USA Congress Library full of the matter of fact information instead of filtered staple oatmeal broadcast by the TV news program Vremya or, say, Mayak, the All-Union Radio Station, through the bigger half of my life.

The Net flopped the mission of scream-silencers in the range of short radio waves. Those crafty contraptions meant for keeping the USSR citizens corralled and hedged off against the subversive influence of the outside world by utilizing the unbearable crackle of the static, while the interior mass media brain-washed the Soviet people 24/7/365 in the prophylactic mentality sterilization to turn the population into dumb cattle.

The prudent precautions did not prevent the disintegration of the Soviet Union though (whose death preceded the birth of the Internet, chronologically), and now everyone is free to choose their own way to get manipulated and formatted into a shithead consumer.

That’s why all the salesmen disseminating nostalgia for the golden days of Soviet era for me will always stay the base promoters of fucking Restoration. It’s only that I don’t stroll around with a Mauser pistol because of the built-in pacifism in the firmware of motherboard and other vital parts of my personality…

Presently, text hunting is looked upon as an oddball warp in your mindset, some funny atavism, sort of.

Who’d ever need the stuff? Wake up, bro! The Net’s swamped with freebie bimbo-dolls, nice yummy spice for jerking off, as well as warfare to edge any quirk of taste—be it War of Tanks or Aviation, or bare Strategy—ready for customers of any preferencial twist in their way of masturbation.

And all that is just fine! Because while they keep jerking or blasting, the Internet roots into inextricable depths and nurtures my optimistic hope for getting free pdf files and a “thank you!” in the bargain.

Me, personally, the Internet had sure liberated from book-buy expenses. What’s the point in outlay while in the Net, running high and boldly, there is everything, including books you’ll never find even for ready money? Both goodies and best things since sliced bread which all is to be paid for by only the time you spend in the online search-and-find, if not too lazy.

Arise, brother, and dig it, firstly, that the up-front page of search results is biased to favor reference to customers who pay Google or Bing, or You-Name-It for their ads, and who now want to harvest, in their turn, the gravy off you, while the rest 1,630,000,000 results in 0.62 sec are way downstream where you not at once guess to check (well, no, I don’t dig deeper than the fourth in the resulting pages) and where there surely sits the book in question, PDF formatted, but you do have what to open a pdf file with, right? And it’s no problem if you don’t because in the Net there is any opener whatsoever and free of charge too, just look for it deeper than the first page served up by Google.

At times the search might go on for a couple of days because of piggy mercantile schemers. Know what I mean? Yeah, sure, whose sites holler mutely “Hey! Hi! Here! ANY PDF FOR FREE!”

You, naturally, rush there only to run into a smaller-font notification “for registered users”, and the registration is certainly nothing else but free. Yet, after a click or two, there pops up the form for entering the number of your credit card. Some fine howdy-do.

No-no-no! They won’t take a penny off the card, and the procedure is just their long-established custom.

But where on God’s green earth could I fetch the required card from? The arid untilled patch (right, it’s me), who’s never had anything to do with the like cards? The sinless virgin hick (me once again) never rolling in the hay of that particular field?.

True, a couple of times I tried at bilking and entered a fictitious number from my imaginative ass. But no-go, Mr. Pariah Outcast!.

Since then wherever registration includes the form inquiring of my card number I sucker-punch the “X” in the right upper corner of their site page – look for some other twerp, sir Hooker! Go an’ fuck yourself, corrupt crook, you!

But your search target waits for you at archive.org or Gutenberg project if not at z-library. And that is right because the best things in life are free – the air, when not polluted, and love which is not a part to Goods-Money-Goods shebang…

The first computer machine I met at 40, when “Internet” word was yet unheard-of. The lunch break was it, I remember like today, at some office, which name I cannot call back to mind. The staff went out forgetting to turn the machine off, which oversight gave me about an hour for sitting before it and clicking the mouse on the “open file” Button that hovered in the monitor, smack-bang in its center.

On every click the monitor would wink and hop, slightly, as if in doubt: to open or not to open? Yet, eventually, kept to where it was. One whole hour and it never got tired, faith!

Then the office employees came back waking me up from the spell of my first intercourse with the wonder of technology.

On leaving the office or, to be more precise, at the first crossing after leaving it, I met Sam, the most advanced cat in town on such matters, and asked him how that frigging file could, by the bye, be opened with the mouse. Well, he looked at me the way as if I asked about how to put your right foot before the left when walking, however, patiently enough explained that, before to click the button, the file you wanna open should be highlighted in the list.

O yeah! Windows 95 was a mighty cool operational system! The present Windows 10 sucks at every point when compared to that…

So, on the grounds of the current status quo allowing for texts availability, there crops up an uneasy suspicion: what if books—following the example of the vinyl disks by the band Flow, Song, Flow!—will also disappear in the bottomless bin of Past to the common heap atop the mentioned garbage because of the rise of laser disks and pirate sites all over the globe, where you are welcome to download any hit, be it the Lemeshev’s aria What If A Stray Arrow Will Hit And Take My Life?. and all the way up to Hit Me, Baby, One More Time performed by Britney Spears?

To which with all befitting soberness I declare – fuck, no!

Were they even to convert each and every printed volume into an audio book or turn it into a movie, just what they did to poor Harry Potter, and The Steel Was Hardened That Way, or steep it in all kinds of widgets to reproduce of the prairie in bloom aroma or the stench off your dorm buddy drunk blind (to follow the storyline), and send the X-rated impulses of tactile impressions in passages with the sex orgies served by the whores at The Red Mill (as depicted by the seasoned author), or even letting you feel, virtually, taste of any delicacy, up to Zhigulevsky beer when snacked with a briquette of molten cheese for 13 kopecks a piece, still and yet – fuck, no!

Because there is some (what would I call it?) magic (yes!) in books which is beyond imitation by any 3D (or be it +696D if they choose it)!

Got it what I’m about? Quite so! The words! Those black ant-like-critter-signs in the white field without smell-taste-color, like the distilled water, but making you tighter than all them sweet wines… But then again, if only you know the trick of getting the adequate intoxication from them those ants, sure thing.

Good news, that skills could be developed when you need it, which lately brought about my getting high from classical music, at least on certain pieces. Take The Hairless Heights by Mussorgsky, if you please, where witches fly to, to land under the soundtrack cooler than the chopper’s Ride Of The Valkyries over Nam…

Yet, Alfred Schnitke still remains as remorseless guts ripper as he always was…

No doubt, freedom captivates anyone but since that villain Hegel had shackled the world with his unbreakable chain of unity-of-opposites, it (freedom) got turned into prison as well.

Handcuffed by the edging smartphones, teeter poor Juliets about never spotting their Romeos who—their brows vindictively downcast—keep flicking the beans of Steve Job’s HER’s or someone else’s Samsungs.

Each medal has its backside. The Dark Side of the Moon in action.

However, let’s drop the subject for some other guy to blow up the Net with, because this morning, by the try and error check, it was confirmed that you can stuff no more than five A4 sheets into a bottle. Which is not a cinch, on top of it.

And do not forget leaving some room for them (A4s) to piggyback because of oceanic dampness. Some booked, so to say, volume.

As for bottles it’s not a crunch on Island since that maverick wreck of galleon got stranded by the storm last week. No crew, no nothing but the screwed-up vessel driven into the bay nearby the northern cape. However, the chest in the Captain’s cabin stayed intact with all the stuff inside. Jamaican gin, bottled, follow me?

Well, one of those had to be emptied for the experimentation tries, to see the bottle’s capacity, when you start stuffing it with A4 rolls. No more than five, as it was mentioned. Exactly where I plan to shove this here part of my blog up.

The uninhabited environs have since long streamlined me into a thoughtful expert in practicality because not every day a fried dove glides over to you, served by the favorable breeze adding a snack to the freebie galleon… You know what I mean, huh?.

* * *

Bottle #3: ~ Prince Kurbsky Too Was Not Ashamed Of Taking To The Hills ~

What was it all kicked off with? No way to find out. As in anything at all.

When thinking deep enough, you do behold that any point in your grab might serve the start. Any one and readily.

How about that point, when the gray-covered notebook was taken over to the City Psychiatrist for the evaluation of sanity (if any) still present in the person, and/or how dangerous could the doodler of the like stuff be for innocent civilians?

Or take that pivotal moment, marked by the ample pocketbook of deep sepia tinge in the pages seen through the press in 1968, changing hands?

My Teacher outstretching it (no pathetic blah-blah attached to the book) for me to grab in awe and greedy gratitude? Does it draw a shorter straw to be the start?.

The justification for the gray notebook to pop up at all was, in the first place, provided by the weighty parcel in the mustard-hued coarse paper for postal deliveries, corded about and sealed up with chocolate-like blobs of stamped wax which I hadn’t broken. Ever.

Any use of breaking if you know what’s inside? Translations there were, that’s what. Translations from English, 35 stories, 472 pages typewritten in Ukrainian.

These, like, randomly collected figures do not repeat each other in their summing up of 6 years’ work—… (eh? gee! and this one coincides with not a single one of them!)

Six years deftly wrapped in the mustard-hued paper, bound-sealed up by the skillful hands of a post office service-lady: shrrsh-frisst-trunt-slamp – next, please!

The digits mentioned so far (undeniably non-uniform) do bear certain meaning, albeit not graspable at a fleeting glimpse, because socialism is, first and foremost, inventory, to cite the aphoristic definition by Lenin at the sitting of All-Russia Central Executive Committee on p.57, vol. 35, Complete Collection Of Works in 55 Volumes (four repetitions here but these are not from me)…