I was the sort of melancholic whose greatest joy was in glamorizing the effete. Give me an effete, I would say, I'll show you one tremendous effete. There is nothing like an effete, I would say, the mother-of-tenebrous type who surrounds himself with the gangly in order to swat at delusions, predominant now as always among the gangly because of their stretch, which while metric can have its way in the dunk-and-slit fractional mind of man, always thirsty, man not mind, for facts. The effete, taking to task the gangly for hearty delusions: nothing at all like him. Give me just such an effete, or any.
The effete: utter man. I soon found myself in contact with vast stretches of the effete lining several highways, those big bright roads you cross through cornfields and some of the very best scenery anywhere. Few notice them, but they notice you, and are saddened. Their sadness extends into most of their work and ways of considering truths, and it is in fact seldom that those particular effete by the highway can accept the teachings of their native church. Too dramatic, the teachings, and not dramatic enough. Too concerned with riddling the formidable with the unintelligible, or vice versa. Both full of holes, offending effete.
Taut, heavy effete! I found very few of them in the bestdressed places, the centers of cities, where everyone was on the way to a formal discussion of flauntings. In those places, people's effeteness leanings were stymied, fingered by humdinger jiggers of this or that brew, disaster brew usually, utterly uninspiring, and effeteness could never withstand such robotic.
The rich ones I found in museums, to no one's surprise. My friends were expecting something like that, museums full of effete, and told me so. I had listened and placed an acne-scarred chin on hands and dishevelled said chin and prepared an itinerary of which I adhered to a simplified version, and a table of likelihoods and habits, and a gloss of catchphrases often preferred by the ones who show up in museums (according to friends), and was ready in all sorts of ways long before the event of my going.
Then, of course, there was the matter of contacting many government agencies, bureaus of this or that, and private companies large and small whose dealings with the effete were legion. Of these there were ten.
My pay was usually hourly, few knowing the thread of public opinion or what beat it warps through semantics. Covenants, each in a different mind, wafting or wilting according to stench of the stand-up, prop-up, or stuck, every aspect a different source of the grue-world odor, my job to test and prod until each mind's covenant might consider in one clause or other my client's item, effete, and said item's effeteness, and so on.
Many people said many things to me then and after, things of cunning and amber, slitting my somber hang of it lively, and then I grew rich and had no need to prod the zaftig as did most of my sad, curb-dwelling friends with their cunning facts on museums