4

One thing that I'm sure of is that I have to kill myself. The question, then, is, when, how, and, more importantly, how many times? I haven't killed myself yet, but I have died several times. Dying is not easy; not because you die, but because it takes damn' long. One fellow investigator of mine once told me that what makes a pleasure valuable is not its intensity, but its duration. Ironically enough, he didn't die that well, but, at least, he had some good suicide attempts. Once someone truly concludes that the only way of getting rid of the clear limitation of this peculiar self is killing it, the path looks more delightful. This conclusion has been made; I have to die, and Seneca's death is the model; long, painful and sweet. 

3

The charming smell of "Canterbury Tales" shows itself once in a while, and today, or yesterday, was one of those days. Immersed in my thoughts of the notorious case of "the disenchantment of the forsaken", it came to me in a rush. What made it charming was not the content of the smell itself, but its "flying" mode. In my most cases, and, believe me, I have been dealing with many almost everyday, what seems forgotten is the understanding of senses as the "fire-escapes"; you are there, in space and time, as Kant would have loved to mention, your mind is, more or less, fixed on the case,  your eyes are glared at the evidence of the crime, the machete full of blood, you are not listening to your partner, because he is too "nice", and then, then it comes; the charming smell of a forgotten memory, no logical relation with the current situation, at least non at hand, and it makes you fly. The first part of the fly is, in one sense, or in the other, because everything is in one sense or the other, the most unexpected one; you know you are smelling something, you know that's not leading you towards something about the case at hand, but you know that you are flying somewhere; so it is a fly, yet without a explicit direction. That peculiar feeling lasts for a moment, and then it comes, the smell of a primordial dust, a reminder of Dickens, reminiscent of the experience of the past in the past, feeling of the past in my own past. A moment on, and it's gone. I can hear my partner nagging about his grandma's new boyfriend, and I see the bloody machete full of blood again. It was not my mind, as usual, but my nose that lead me out of where I was. It was not a thought, it was not an immediate feeling of something that was there, it was not a vivid memory of anything; just a fly, just a way to not to be there. To be there, but not to be there, and not because you are, which is "I am" here, thinking about anything, but because the damn' nose proves itself as a leader, at least a potential leader. As it seems, my most vivid "smell" memory is one from the Canterbury. My nose is with you, her majesty.