Re: The Suspicious Journals of Ross A. Kosmanson :-)

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