Dear Ndugu,

Due to a mad outbreak of gonorrhea, there will be no Untapped Talent this month.
Please check back next month for an interview with February\'s Untapped Talent, photographer Ben Mistak.
Thanks.

I get so tired of repeating the same acts. Sleeping. Eating. Shitting. Waking up in the morning and persuading myself to don the silly costume that symbolizes my job. Long ago I was something more, and I long to feel something again. Something new, outside my present realm of consciousness.

My living room has become a gigantic resonating chamber for the apartment below. Every word, every television show, every belch is felt through these floorboards. Every thought voiced aloud to friends on the phone becomes the soundtrack to my life. I first noticed some 'sweet' spots in the living room, but it was so cluttered. The chair and the sofa stopped too much of the vibration. The coffee table dampened the ring of 30-20 kHz tones, so I moved them all to the bedroom. The quality of the reception improved ten fold once the carpet came up.

December 28, 1979
Brenda,

A few years before I left home, a girl I knew locked her baby in the trunk of her car, and abandoned her car in the parking lot of a popular Catholic Church. Silly girl. The car was discovered a few weeks later, and the baby was as cold and dead as you would expect it to be. The police were called, and the girl was arrested.

Imagine taking a dull, but pointed, hunk of iron and pressing it as hard as you can into the center of your molar. Imagine that pressure being consistent for days. This is the worst kind of pain because it doesn't come all at once. It's not the sharpest or most excruciating pain, but it is agonizingly continuous. It's kind of like that Chinese Water Torture thing. The thought of being strapped in place with water dripping on your forehead doesn't seem so bad at first, but after days, months, or years it would feel like having a drill bit slowly piercing its way through your skull.

Kawashima was sent because of her ability to move in silence, her feet not even snapping a single twig on her way through the trees. She had crept silently through the Grey Woods, up the mountainside, and into the beast's enormous nest. She began to tremble, gently at first but with increasing nervousness, until she dropped silently to one knee, unable to breathe. She couldn't do this. No one could. She, alone and unaided, with only her father's knife to protect herself, had been sent to kill the Houshaki as it slept.

When anything happens, people tend to shirk away from it. With the help of popular phrases such as "that's the way the cookie crumbles," they wash their hands thoroughly of any causative remnants. Seems to me, it's highly unlikely that a cookie's crumb will determine anything.

Franklin,
I was thinking about re-wallpapering my apartment, but was unsure as to how to remove the old wallpaper. Any advice? Also, do you think I should invest the time in this project (since I am moving to Colorado next fall) or just live with the old paper? I was also thinking that I could just paint over the old paper.
Thanks,
Gordon Hamilton
Gordon,