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From: Physfitfreak <physfitfreak@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: sci.physics,sci.physics.relativity,sci.math
Subject: Re: The Suspicious Journals of Ross A. Kosmanson :-)
Date: Tue, 13 May 2025 17:17:19 -0500
Organization: Modern Human
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On Mortification, Mahler, and the Unattainable Allure of Iberian Hair: A 
Confessional


It was at Salle Pleyel in Paris, during the adagio of Mahler’s Ninth — 
that sublime confrontation with mortality — that my digestive tract 
staged its own revolution, producing a sound so profoundly corporeal it 
silenced even the double basses.

As the scandalized glances of Paris cultural elite converged upon me, I 
was transported back to my university days, when I would practice Julio 
Iglesias’ smoldering gaze in the mirror, convinced that mastering that 
particular arch of the eyebrow might somehow alchemize my Boisean 
bookish demeanor into continental magnetism.

The great ironies of existence can be formalized as a Banach-Tarski 
decomposition of the self: the essay’s pristine logic in one sphere, my 
traitorous digestive tract in another, and the pomade-smeared 
intermediary of my hair, which remained stubbornly Idahoan in its 
refusal to achieve the Iberian cascade of my Julio Iglesias fixation. 
Like Hausdorff’s paradoxical sets, my aspirations were equidecomposable 
with my failures, yet no amount of algebraic manipulation could make 
them congruent.

The subsequent walk of shame past the brass section (whose members, I 
noted with horror, were suppressing the very same smirk I’d seen on my 
tailor when I commissioned a cream-colored suit in the Iglesias mode) 
laid bare life’s essential truth: We exist in the cruel interstice 
between the transcendent longings of the mind and the implacable demands 
of the flesh - a Sisyphian struggle.

As the adage goes, le bon Dieu est dans le détail — if this be true, 
then surely the Divine finds particular relish in those mortifying 
minutiae born of vain attempts to replicate the sartorial and tonsorial 
excesses of 1970s Latin balladeer, and ill-advised pre-concert pâté.


Ross A. Kosmanson
May 13, 2025
Solemnly using the Dogecoin ATM while seagulls steal the fries, Miami, 
Florida