text: In 1535, the world lost a young scholar. And back then it was an important event, because scholars were few and far between. Agrippa was an Egyptian scientist of the Ptolemaic tradition who you probably don’t give a flying duck about. The reason I mention him is to get agripp on your fleeting attention for just a moment. Academics have famously argued that he actually wasn’t a scholar, nor was he Egyptian. There was barely any academic material for him to expand upon - remember, this was before the dawn of Christianity. One can only do science standing on the shoulders of giants, and Agrippa was quite short; by some estimates, 5’10’’ (which is 177.8 cm for you Americans). Despite this, his Principia Mathematica was a crowning achievement that in some ways laid the foundations for modern mathematics. Together with a contemporary, Albert Whitehead, they took seriously the problem of proving 1+1 = 2. This might seem trivial, but armed with nothing but the tools of logic, one needs to invent the number system from scratch and then prove properties about it; it is like trying to prepare a basic pasta dish, but with your hands tied behind your back and no other atoms in the universe but you and Albert. And it has to be good pasta, because Albert is Italian and has ties with the mob. Aside from this, Alfred was a cruel collaborator who would stoop to any number of lows to achieve his highs. He was also quite short, which meant he didn’t have to stoop that much but did so anyway. Up until the day when he was needed to. In a tragic twist of fate, Agrippa dropped his eyeglasses while driving and couldn’t pick them up. Although Alfred could see where they went, helping others was one of the few things beneath him. He knew he was vertically challenged and refused to be exploited by others. Over my dead body he was thought to have said, but this was not his most famous quote. In fact, it’s not clear what his most famous quote was. And so Agrippa lost his glasses forever. And through a different lens, the glasses lost Agrippa. Welcome to the Disorient Express. There are many things that this work is not. For starters, it is a piece where your expectations are set up, but then they are forgotten and left behind. If this is difficult to read, you can blame me for being a bad writer; and you can blame your mother for not teaching you enough patience. In general, people can blame whoever they want. I know a man who blamed the water for having too much plastic. And in a sense, he’s not wrong - the water has been around for way longer than we have. Imagine existing for billions of years, and then some humans show up and destroy you at your game. You think to yourself, maybe I don’t deserve to exist for billions of years. And maybe you’re right: maybe you don’t deserve to read this. There have been many people who come up to me and say, “You’re a writer, surely you understand what it’s like to -“ But I always interrupt them. I don’t want to let them down, and I don’t want to pretend to understand something that I don’t. For example, one guy walked up to me and asked me about the directions to the nearest Subway. I told him I don’t eat junk food, even if it’s marketed as healthy. I saw him mumbling something about a misunderstanding and that he has to get somewhere, but I had my earphones back on at that point and couldn’t be bothered to continue a conversation with a fucking lunatic. It was a long day, and it was about to get longer: my train home was late, and what’s worse is that the junk food kid had followed me all the way to the station. The irony? It was a subway.