My bf's best friend is mad at him, because he wants to move closer to me. What do i do?

Signed,
Best friend's best friend's GF

Dearest Girl Friend of the Best Friend to the Bestest Friend,

Dark and recent happenings in my lab through the essential nature of your query into stark relief. Permit me to elucidate.

Over the course of this last week my lab assistant, Rob, worked himself into a tizzy. He was much excited by a rant, published in this fair Almanac(k), on the topic of certain occult operations as presented by an apocryphal voice who claimed the name Solomnis Rex. Throughout Thursday this essay was the subject of several rambling discourses, initially taking the form of questions about some word or detail, then launching along their own vector of rumination.

Friday, he arrived not for to work, despite the fact that it was Free Pizza Friday. Saturday, he returned. His face was brilliant like the sun, and his eyes filled with the conviction of a man on the verge of making a dreadful error in judgement. He had upon his back a restless satchel, and there was a crisp white paper hat atop his head.

Meanwhile, I could espy, through the arched doorway, our own young Trael in the Entertainment Lounge, mashing of the buttons of the PlayStation Three-Six-D. Upon the plasma screen robots exploded, and the unfolding flowers of fire depicted there reflected upon his whetted young lips, and in his sharpened dim eyes.

"Man, you know how fucking hard it is to skin a fucking frog, Tray?" Robert muttered as he circumambulated the floor, "S'like the lil fuckers are made of wet cotton candy," then crouched, shucked off his satchel, and began scribing with chalk here, there, and everywhere, "Don't know what Piggy saw in those lil jerks."

I did recede into my tank, into the dimness of the Saturday evening, and gaze down upon the man, and upon the boy, and upon the unfurling pictograms charted with white chalk.

There were several frogs which had escaped of the satchel, and one was damp and upon its back was a small wisp of paper stuck to its slime, and each frog did hop away into another direction. Rob clutched at the graygreen skin of one of their dead brethren, and he paid their escape no mind.

Rob presented, for my inspection, a small figurine of the type GI Joe, black and apparently eyeless.

"Got no cavern, Lord A.," Rob asserted, and he did approach the tank without taking my eye in his. "Got no yellow wax figure, but ole SnakeEyes's been my boy since I was a in elementary, you know?" He gripped the little man firmly between his teeth as he ascended a wobbly rolling office chair so that he might attach the figurine to the ceiling by way of a small white string. The figurine hung upside down, one leg bent backwards at the knee. Sharpening my gaze, I did discern that part of the skull of the object had been scraped flat and on it, carefully, there were sigils and symbols inscribed.

Understand, I have lived years, and further years within those years. In that vast arc of time, punctuated with ghosts, curses, betrayal, and the hermetic arts, I have learned caution and precaution. So, as a precaution, I had the foresight to have etched into the glass of my tank certain charms and protective inscriptions. As with autos, health, and flammable homes, one cannot have overmuch insurance.

Rob dismounted the chair with a flourish nearly resulting in a sprained knee. He spun once, stood at the edge of his pictorgams, and then made many exclamations to leap from his throat. He called upon beings both ancient and modern, making much to embroider and embiggen his conjurations, pacing the white circle, inscribing with candle wax around several of the important sigils, occasionally only being interrupted by the soft hiss of Trael as he intoned and exultant "Yessss!" when a Level of the Boss was conquered.

And then, abruptly, there appeared in Rob's circle a naked pre-pubescent girl with the head of a monkey and the feet of a salamander, and about her waist their hung a miasma pale yellow and sickly, from which erupted a blue light. And from that cloud there flowed flames, and bolts of small lightnings, and as she rose up through the pilar transcribed by the circle, she did shimmer, and I did see that she was covered in scales, but they were not scales, but rather a billion wet eyes staring out, and in my mind's inner realm, penetrating even the finest and most expensive of the inscriptions upon the tank of my residence, I did hear a legion of voices command:

"YOU SHALL WATCH 30 ROCK ON NBC! IT SHALL OPEN THE SIXTH CHAKRA!"

And then, inaudibly, Rob did bow at her dangling and glistening lower appendages, and make to her his profound request. But as he was mumblings and making his eye-closed ministrations, there came a resounding explosion from the surrounding sound speakers, and Trael did leap up with exclamatory joy, turning about, smiling — and stopped, the scene arresting him perfectly and completely, like a crystalline bullet to the brain.

At that moment one frog leapt atop another, and both did slide through the white chalk circle, and the monkey-headed demi-being hissed out like helium from a burst tank, filling the room briefly with the miasma, which did then dissipate.

And there stood Rob, frozen, and parts of his body were rendered invisible in sequence, the fingers, the palms, the feet, the shins, the knees and elbows, the chest, the eyes alone, the ears, the nose, the waist, and so on and so forth, parts blinking out and then back, like a great polychromatic mating display from deep in the benthic black, except without any light — so then, truly the equal and opposite of such a display, an unmating display, and aborting display — and cutting cleanly through the body such as to reveal the internal workings of the man as the horror unfolded.

And here, at this moment, is that which is most instructive:

Rob did turn to Trael, but while the miasma had visibly cleared the space of the lab, it did still somehow hang between them, a great Veil of Truth that connected each to the other, and from the depths of the earth to the height of heaven, did bind all in a singular moment. Trael did take a step forward, Rob followed suit, the frogs were suspended in the air mid-leap, and each being seemed to move half of the distance they wished, and then half of that distance, and then half of that distance again, Zenoically, as Rob's exhalation ground slowly to a halt.

And it was then that I was thankful to find that some portion of my magical protection was still intact, for I could move freely and happily about the tank as all about was slowing, halving, and the halves halving again.

And to this I come now to my advice for you, Girl Friend of the Best Friend's Best Friend:

The wisdom of Parmenides tells us that there is, in fact, no movement between points. Movement is an illusion birthed of the flawed conceptions of human language. We see light and we see darkness, and we refuse to reconcile them into one state. We have visibility and invisibility, and we demand that they be opposite one to the other. We have heterosexual love, and homosexual love, and we are trapped therein by a dichotomy most profound and troubling.

There is no division in this world, only the illusion of division. There is no movement, no change, only perfect unfolding stillness.

Rob thought that he might render himself invisible and retreat to the ladies locker-room of the YMCA. I know this not from his direct testament, but by virtue of having been subjected, several hundred times, to repeat viewings of The Porkies.

But this is his own persistence in the error of the world.

We are all one, my dear. There is no moving away, and no moving toward, for we are each of us entangled in the other, and for this we must render unto ourselves a great and relieving joy.

Now, please enjoy The Rock of the Ages! Open your sixth chakra, and untangle yourself from yourself!

I Yet Remain, Whole and Visible and
Your Giant Squid
Editor-in-Chief
PMjA