Ambient 06 - Going, Going, Gone

without bragging that the Swedish beach volleyball team will head home with Olympic gold. Her favourite things are horsemeat sausage, salt licorice, cloudberry pie, the songs of Lee Hazlewood (especially Some Velvet Morning, as sung with Nancy Sinatra), and the buttocks of Agnetha Falkstog, circa 1975.
     
    Judetha TaShawn Williams, a.k.a Judy, Jude, Avalon, faced her finals at Stuyvesant, where she had since eighth-grade controlled the in-house drug circulation network. While attending Yale on scholarship, majoring in business, controlled the »White Triangle,« i.e. that portion of New England angled by New Haven, Boston and Manchester Center, Vermont through which (thanks to her far-sighted conceptualization) travelled an estimated one-third of all heroin entering the United States. After being graduated from Wharton oversaw the development of her new web site, through which any drug could be effectively bought and delivered anywhere in the world within twenty-four hours. A year later, shortly before announcing the date of her company’s IPO, she was killed by a Portuguese Water Dog as she prepared to cross Third Avenue at 86 th Street. Chasing a ball, it leapt off a 38 th -floor balcony. ARFUL! read the Post headline. The web site still exists, though no search engine will find it.
     
    John Bonney felt much more capable of handling difficult life situations once he ramped up to a 300-milligram daily dose of Wellbutrin.
     
    Leverett Saltonstall Gladstone was the male fatality in the sole recorded instance of mutual autoerotic asphyxiation. »We know very little about some aspects of human behaviour,« as J. C. Rupp, M.D. notes in his classic essay regarding a less elaborate case, The Love Bug (Journal of Forensic Sciences, Vol. 18, No. 3, July 1973).
     
    Gogmagog St. John Bramhall Malloy lives with his lovely wife Allison and two children in the East End of London. As he rides the Jubilee Line into work each morning he thinks long and hard on how the neighbourhood used to be a halfway decent place until bloody fat bastard yuppies with their bloody mobiles started pouring in like cockroaches, making it fucking well difficult for sensible people to be able to get a bloody pint without having to hack a path through a wall of fat bastards who bloody well should have stayed in Cockfosters with their bloody assurance policies and Range Rovers where they bloody well belong instead of lowering the tone of Spitalfields and Hackney, and we won’t even talk about the Isle of Dogs. Works in the garden on weekends, knows his delphiniums. In low moments, fantasizes taking a torch to the Millennium Dome. He hacks into his blancmange instead, and is right as rain once more.
     
    Elvis Presley, doornailed in body for lo these twenty-four years, enters no Kalamazoo 7-11s, drives no Chevy SUVs, shoots no TVs, eats no cheeseburgers, waits in no bank lines in Lincoln, Nebraska, pumps no gas outside Bellingham, Washington; he blesses no magdalenes, heals no lepers, embraces no cripples, rips not asunder the curtain of the temple and darkens therefore no firmament. Nine hundred and seventeen restaurants around the world include on their menus dishes named after him. Some include bacon.
     
    Isabel Bonney tested positive for tuberculosis on March 15, 1997. Six weeks later received diagnosis of multiple-drug-resistant form, type W. Treatment initiated immediately. Was isolated at Roosevelt-St. Luke’s, in a room that looked as if it had been designed as the ultimate Phillipe Starck environment. Although AFB tests were foreseen to remain positive for eight months to forever – depending – she converted to negative in four and a half weeks. Her doctor okayed release on May 23. Went to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt every day for eighteen months afterwards for directly-observed therapy; there took 1200 mg ciprofloaxin, 750 mg ethionamide, 750 mg cycloserin, 100 mg capreomycin injected into alternating hips, 900 mg isoniazid and 1200 mg myambutal daily. Developed arthritis of the knee brought on by ciprofloaxin, developed profound depression partially brought on by cycloserin (a.k.a. psychoserin, within the medical community), developed stomach trouble, lassitude, narcolepsy and numerous other symptoms that may or may not have been psychosomatic. Recovered, slowly. Finished chemotherapy after eighteen months, November 30 1998. Doctor proclaimed her to be well as she’d ever be. A year and a half later, she awoke one morning and at last felt