Warning: A metaphor is only slightly less dangerous than a paper cut.
Life in Drips and Sputters
3
Someone once pinned his geography to the wall.
His reputation rested just north of seedy and just south of respectable. Or so said Tina. Or Lucy. Or Gretchen. Or that stewardess, bartender or masseuse. One of them, anyway. While latitude and longitude must cross, his intersect badly. And have been repeatedly subjected to the hasty redraw, poles brought closer or shoved aside according to the shifting coordinates of his moods. And there's only so much one can do with an unpredictable equator.
His is an issue of messy geodesy.
This is the constant. His constant. The lines vary and the relativity of two poles is something of an angle to be played. Much of the time, it's almost comforting, the built-in excuse of a map unfinished. It's not my fault, it's shoddy topography. Besides,you don't read a map. You look at the pictures. Thus he is better seen and not dissected. A cartographer would confine him to the ripped corner, the one that never folds right.
However wrinkled, the equator remains, signifying truth, reality and all the things of pride and inconvenience that make up his particular globe. Unreliable even to him, since truth is best left to saints and reality to devils. But the rest is all him, fitfully changed like a storm's cloud formations.
In the end, trying to alter the center fails. It always does. No amount of tools can aid when skill is lacking. Still, the hard-headed are persistent. Hence the wasted decades. Fun ones, mind.
Because he goes about it all wrong. Just as a proper globe will have a miniature gold eagle perched atop the representation of the north pole, the very height of the scaled-down world, so he has long set him above the important parts, letting the bits sort themselves out in a geography coordinate system that looks more like dropped spaghetti.
Had he been standing at the center, he'd have learned he's not the center.
The equator is not a division of a sphere. It's a constant, the constant. A prime meridian of a woman. And she has unpinned him from the wall.
If there is any enjoyment to be had by these random dribbles, do pass it on to the chained and starving author.