Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

Phase two of the diet begins when the tongue is hard enough to produce a clear knocking tone when addressed with a small mallet. This indicates that the mouth is ready to be filled with linen. The cloth recommendation here is not strict, but the dieter would do well to avoid wool and wool substitutes. The psychological setback would be too great, and I would no longer be of help through the many discomforts that wool-assisted reading might elicit. In addition, a dieter would sacrifice the claim to free technical support while reading this book if wool is used to stuff the mouth at this stage. Cotton may be used, but cotton does not wick away moisture, and it can thus prevent the full storage of the body’s base language (which is nearly 95 percent water), in which case the language detox process would not be complete before reading, so there would still be sentence pollutants awaiting excretion. Cotton additionally begins to rot and expand if used as a language towel, whereas linen simply erodes into the earth. At any rate, enough cloth should be stuffed into the mouth so that the jaw extends to its full hinge and the cheeks appear ballooned. A neck brace at this time might also assist the dieter. The head, generally, cannot be supported enough, and shoulder splints may profitably be fastened up the ears to the level of the crown.

During phase two, it is difficult to take a full breath or to exhale around the obstacle of cloth in the mouth. Oxygen restriction while fasting (ORF) forces the body to derive oxygen from within itself, particularly from memories and extraneous behavior (which are highly combustible); unnecessary emotions are cleansed from the system through its natural furnace, and the body learns inner breathing. The primary use of feelings, in this book, will be as energy seeds for the body to burn, although the body, when gagged, needs to be trained to view these conditions as flammable. Fainting again becomes a danger here, so netting and helmets should be used to prevent injury. Indeed, a helmet should be worn the entire time this book is being read, and during any foray you might make into the world at large. A helmet will be one more barrier that could possibly save your life.

Food-Intake Strategies

Almonds are language-neutral. They will not affect the perception of sentences by the human head. Eating almonds additionally provides almost certain protection from fainting, which is a very real danger when reading this book. And although it will be demonstrated that repeated fainting is probably the purest way to permanently eliminate behavior, and thus rid the body of unnecessary emotions, it is not a career to enter recklessly. Strategic fainting requires equipment, preparation, and commitment, as well as a supportive family or diet team who are trained to catch and revive you when you collapse. Before I was ejected from Team Quiet, I was able to faint with regularity several hundred times a week, and stayed relatively free of injury (although my father would certainly disagree with this claim).

The Food

Directly before reading each morning, the reader should undergo a full-body flush, drinking at least one gallon of reader’s water. Warm-up exercises should be light: basic limbering stretches, but nothing to increase the heart rate. If desired, a language enema might be taken (speak spontaneously until exhaustion, and your body will purge all of its unspoken messages and sentiments. It might prove useful to record this ceremony, as details about yourself can be discovered). Throughout the day, feeding can occur on fibrous vegetables and fruit, with occasional yogurt gargles and snacks of hard bread and butter. Since it is not recommended that this book be read in the evening, neither should any food be consumed during that time. Total rest is suggested and motion of any kind is discouraged.

For Advanced Readers Only

For those readers looking to optimize their time with this book (or people reading the book for a second or third time), the eyes should be masked in black cotton during the daytime hours of the fasting procedure and no other written language should be regarded. Thoughts, if necessary, should be conducted in shorthand or steno, and if communication is required, though I cannot authorize it (and in theory oppose it), a set of flash cards should be used, with easy-to-understand pictograms that will satisfy the demands of the basic interactions: commerce, expressions of love, hunger signals, and warnings of impending disaster. At the time of this writing, images are far less taxing than words and should be deployed anytime the head needs relief. If another book or pamphlet is placed before you and you are required to read it, which I cannot recommend, or if navigational messages are presented to your person during a period of travel (also to be avoided), a simple technique of nodding, squinting, and ducking should be used to quickly scan the message, which you would then do well to vowelize before it can take hold of your thinking in any substantial way.

Who Were the Jane Dark Gods and What Did They Want?

The first Jane Dark gods were invoked by members of Team Quiet in Ohio to solidify Dark’s authority as a silence expert. Most organizations require a deity scaffold to boost their veracity with recruits. The deity referred to as Thompson has been used in fiction and nonfiction alike, and is not scheduled to die, or to suffer myth remission, until certain concepts have fully integrated the culture. The Jane Dark gods were never described physically, and they had no special powers.

Why Cloth?

My family believes that the inside of the mouth is equivalent to a cave. Words accrue and marinate as pockets of vibrational sound, changing the delicate structure of the palate, which influences the acoustics of spoken language, inevitably launching speech wind — an early form of menacing weather — into the atmosphere or deep into someone’s body. Cloth is used not only to pad the surface of this cave but to absorb speech residue, to store the elemental messages of a person and delimit personal wind output (the Barking Quota). If every person carried a language towel such as this, much preliminary misunderstanding between people could be avoided. People could simply exchange language towels and chew them for instant, intimate knowledge of one another, rather like a peace pipe was once used, no doubt.

Does the Skin Eat?

It would be foolish to simplify the role of the skin in reading, thinking, and eating. Nearly everything that can be said about the skin can be disproved or at least convincingly denied. For the purposes of this book, once the fast is completed, the arms should be wrapped in the cloth you had stashed in your mouth. You are training your body to be a full-scale receiver of language, to feed on the noise of words as it does with so-called food. The sooner the head is decentralized in the nutrition-intake process, the more ripe the body will become to decipher nonlanguage communication streams like wind and electronic women’s frequency. The skin should be frequently brushed with a wire scrubber to clear the pores; the skin of the arms might further be primed with a sixty-minute daily bath of high-volume radio static.

Why Nuts and Milk?

When milk is understood as animal water —a nutritive liquid produced by nonlanguage creatures enduring their brief term on earth — it becomes clear that this edible product of creatures allows us access to the bodies of strangers without risk, to steal their life information and expand our own possibilities as people. In this sense, milk is probably the primary learning water, a deep liquid that tells us how to act. It is precisely when I feel estranged from myself that I drink my own milk. Most men won’t have this option. Their first choice should be another man’s milk, or to cultivate milk from one of their male children. Nuts, on the other hand, can be derived artificially by a Voice Blizzard, in which hundreds of people speak rapidly (hark) into the same container until the vocal waves congeal, or “nut.”