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FERDINAND THE BULL (October 2025)

this piece is a complex, multilingual response to a question i heard asked in a course ongoing at the public library: “was there a historical zeus?” fine enough. i pondered it on my walk home. when i arrived at the door of the library over night, shoving my body against the bricks and the windows, thinking thoroughly of the qr code that i had created for the film, hoping in the collection of alpha and beta waves emanating from my brain that it would be “seen”, no body took the call. i walked off, dismayed. another class failed. why every night do i dream that i have not yet graduated from college. have i?

a warlong visitor passed by my window in this crisp, hot, autumn-summer morning. he said (though i couldn’t catch it entirely in his trembling voice, he was covered in moss, there was more sound made by it in his warlong hair, flapping in the wind, i could hear it singe, amazingly, in this strange, growing sun): “is the man atop the mountain zeus? and his compatriots, speaking in italian, the olympians?”

(pause)

no, my friend: i said: staring, not at him, but deeper into my editing software, moving a frame. “you are.”

***

needless to say, after an interaction like that (why does the word “lecherous” come to mind… but first i see the spray of an eagles wings)… i must “split fast.” i await the coming lightening. it is in the destruction of my home, without my body, now gone, far away, that he will find me. grabbing his next pogrom*. they always come dressed as old men.