Current Music: Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf, BWV 226.
Current Coffee: Sierra Dorada Blend, P**t's feature coffee this month.
Current mantra: If you punish a person for dreaming his dreams / don't expect him to thank or forgive you / the Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton / will in time both outpace and outlive you / HAIL SATAN!
Current excuse: Not a moment to myself in three weeks.
* * * * *
We are compiling an encyclopaedia, here in the baroque town palace in the small Imperial town whence we derive one of our family's names. We are compiling a grand encyclopaedia of all there is to be knowed, and unless we close the encyclopaedias of our predecessors and pick up the nimble plume, we will never get to write anything. Poodff -- There -- we have shut the massy leathern binding of our copy (one of eight surviving) of Johannes Psallocrinius Acropontus' Thaumaturgia Hypozonica (1673) and we have brushed off our laptop. It whirrs and hums to live again; as it de-sleeps, we go to the open casement and gaze down into the cobbled Platz; girls are hawking oranges and violets, strapping young sedan-chair carriers are hawking themselves. Noble ladies in French silk, afflicted with magnetic vapours, whist-addictions, and poxes, crouch to piss into the puddles. The sky is Dresden-china blue, studded with pink skylarks and Cuvill�s clouds. In the distance, the bells of the Sergius- und Bacchus-kirche are tolling one in the afternoon.
On the hills, to be sure, the Prussians are massing, polishing their field artillery and practicing their semiquaver runs. Herr Quantz, in his lavishly-appointed tank-de-campaigne, is sitting down to syllabub and strawberries--O! he has spilled cream on the keyboard of his fortepiano. (It is too cramped inside the tank--room only for an escritoire, the Silbermann fortepiano, and a tiny bed -- and the chinoiseries are beginning to look a little shabby. On the other hand, firing the 120mm Howitzer is a pleasant diversion when the Maestro's head is aching from too much counterpoint. But the Prussians only have their hearts set on the town on the other side of the hill: they will not attack today.
We haven't written since we gave a tremendous rout for old friends of ours from university -- LT, the Imperial ambassadress to the Czarina's court, the eminent natural philosopher MRW, the Student Prince, as well as our neighbours ECG and JL. We didn't know how to express our wonder at it, so we remained silent on the subject. Especially for the occasion, we hired from Verona two illustrious castrati and a doughy but still bewitching soprano to entertain us after dinner with a great deal of torment, gelosia, and virt�. Afterwards, they sang some opera seria for us.
Since then, we have been put on probation at P**t's for being routinely late to work. We don't mind, although we worried all day yesterday that we were about to lose our job (we had shown up an hour late, but at least we'd called ahead. In our favor: the fact that nobody else stays at the FiDi P**t's as long as we have.
The Prussians have started their battery of the next town over; in the Rathaus, our council have hired a courtesan to roll naked over the minutes to the music of a trombone quartet. I am due at Frau Springer's chocolate-house in ten minutes to deliver to some boys from the University a speech upon the rights of man. So far, instead of writing my encyclopaedia, I have written my name and that of M. Diderot in fancy letters, I have spilled the pounce and carved it into volutes and cymas, I have eaten a preserved plum, I have selected a small box in beechwood to hold my notes (from Herr Froschlmayer's Barock Tschotschke Katalog). I have finished my cup of Sierra Dorada Blend (slamming the mug upside-down on my saucer, and shouting "Satt!"). And I have written my hundredth entry.