By Devon Daniels
--------------------
"Be interesting or be gone" she said while shaking the poorly made cocktail mixer, her long fingers becoming moist with martini that slipped through a crack where the body met the cap.
Wanting to stay, he had to be interesting. So he was.
Which was impressive, given that stories had stalked through their lives and rendered so much of what could be between them into stale stereotypes and cauliflower-flavored clichés. The stories stealthy hands stole and snatched and snapped their fingers to the beat of the soundtrack.
"I do something a little dangerous I guess you might say"
"Oh?" she purred as she poured "I guess I might say, if I knew what it was"
"Well, you know I might just tell you if you hand me one of those drinks you're laying out there"
"Don't be evasive, it's tedious" she replied, running her fingers along the rim of the olive jar.
Every human being on Earth was in some way contributing towards the death of the one home they have, including these two, but you can't think about that now.
Sitting on a stool, he looked up at her in a way that struck her just right. A couple of pleasant memories were unlocked by the angle of his shoulders as he rested one hand on each knee and this bought him some time, though he didn't know it.
Smiling, she let him know that "If you tell me a little then you can drink a little".
Coy at first, he told her all about some crimes he was involved in which brought a regular income he could probably have earned at any number of mid-level office jobs. But then those jobs wouldn't have brought him the scars along his forearms, some forming long streaks and others being the result of puncture wounds. A couple of scars combined along the left arm, near his wrist, to illustrate three shooting stars. Ignoring most of what he said, she couldn't stop wondering if this was a pattern that came from chance or if it was something he'd carved himself.
"Okay shut up shut up" she said as sweetly as you can say that "And, um, here is the thing...". One hand on the stem of her martini glass, the other found it's way along his thick neck.
It wasn't long before they were upstairs and she was finding more scars along his body, writing a story in her head for each one. She briefly wondered if he was writing a story about her body, but quickly decided that if so then it was almost certainly a six foot three exclamation mark laying in the dead center of an otherwise blank page that measured the exact width and length of a queen sized bed.
She didn't get pregnant, so she'd done her part for the green movement that day.
Sunday 7 October 2007
Monday 30 April 2007
Charlotte vs Style
Charlotte, sitting atop the bed “Indian Style”, looked about the room and thought that maybe she was being a little unfair to Clive. Every square inch of the decoration had been left to her and, as with most things left to her, it had wound up covered in Strawberry Shortcake paraphernalia – amongst other popular franchises from her childhood.
Gem and the Holograms posters (Ebay) covered the west wall while a mixture of Ms. Shortcake (Mostly Ebay, some from a car boot sale) and She-Ra (Presents from Clive) posters covered the East. The South wall had the dresser and the closet, both of which had an assortment of lunchboxes, action figures and the occasional, unusual artefact such as a My Little Pony Board Game or a Ninja Turtle. That last item often got used as evidence that not everything of Charlotte’s was explicitly feminine.
Picking her feet up with her hands, she swirled around on her bum to face the north wall. That held the only decoration that was contentious between Charlotte and Clive, a large oil painting of them making love. It had taken a good deal of marijuana to relax Clive enough to actually pose for the reference photo that her friend had used, but he’d been rather taken by the idea from the moment she’d proposed it. It was only once it actually hung on their wall that it occurred to Clive that visitors might wander in and see it. “Well the bedroom is our private space, they’ve no place to judge anything we have in here” she’d said to him “Besides, I’m sure their eyes will only be drawn to your winning smile”.
Since then, whenever Clive had talked about getting a lock on their bedroom door or maybe putting the painting away “just for a little while”, she would tease him and threatened to hang it up in the living room. “That’s where it is!” Charlotte yelled to an empty apartment. “I left the stupid thing in the living room…” she mumbled on her way down the hall and into a space which she’d let Clive define, for the most part. On the glass coffee table lay what she’d been seeking, a copy of Vogue which Devon had left behind the last time she’d been over. Clive was out with her now, no doubt making snide remarks between each other about everyone they saw over the rim of their martini glasses.
Charlotte knew Devon still hadn’t entirely approved of her being Clive’s girlfriend. Back when Clive had first introduced them to each other, Charlotte could see from the way Devon’s eyes moved up and down her body that every inch of her was being judged. Then again, the angle may have made Devon’s look seem worse than it was – Devon standing at a willowy 6’3 and Charlotte reaching 5’4 if she wore her thick soled sneakers with the Japanese cartoons along the side. The right side of the left shoe had a little boy being toilet trained, proclaiming that he wanted to be a “Pants Man!”.
Charlotte also knew that Devon had a habit of writing comments, notes and doodling along the margins of everything she read. This was her chance to see if there was anything past the mundane to discover in this “marginalia”, as Devon insisted on referring to it as. Twenty minutes later, Charlotte felt that she had only really gained a reminder of why she didn’t bother reading Vogue. Like most women, she didn’t have a frame that was suited to the latest fashions of New York, Milan and the other cities which she felt had become institutions simply by saying so enough times that everyone believed them.
The notes were mostly just catty remarks about various celebrities and models, with the occasional circling of something that Devon must have wanted to find an affordable knock off of. Some young Bulgarian woman in an ad for Clairol was dubbed “Horse Features”. A list of people Devon apparently needed to email was written in flat, robotic handwriting along the hem of a dress designed by a French man who seemed to have trouble buttoning up his shirt. Charlotte lay the magazine back on the table and sat back in the dark purple, suede beanbag chair she’d negotiated.
It was hard not to giggle a little at herself, thinking of what Clive would say about her looking for clues – though he’d probably refer to them as plot devices. It was such a gimmick with him, integrating storytelling into real life. Shrugging, Charlotte decided that she didn’t care what Devon thought anyways. If Devon was really Clive’s best friend then she’d not do anything to sabotage their relationships and, really, she’d try to get over her little prejudices.
Lost in thought as she had been, Charlotte’s shoulders tightened when she could hear the tell tale sounds of Clive scrabbling with the keys and Devon’s laughter, snorts and all. “In you go madam” Clive remarked as he held the door for his tall friend. As her long legs passed through the doorway, Charlotte crossed her arms to cover the Care Bear Cousin which adorned her lime green t-shirt.
Gem and the Holograms posters (Ebay) covered the west wall while a mixture of Ms. Shortcake (Mostly Ebay, some from a car boot sale) and She-Ra (Presents from Clive) posters covered the East. The South wall had the dresser and the closet, both of which had an assortment of lunchboxes, action figures and the occasional, unusual artefact such as a My Little Pony Board Game or a Ninja Turtle. That last item often got used as evidence that not everything of Charlotte’s was explicitly feminine.
Picking her feet up with her hands, she swirled around on her bum to face the north wall. That held the only decoration that was contentious between Charlotte and Clive, a large oil painting of them making love. It had taken a good deal of marijuana to relax Clive enough to actually pose for the reference photo that her friend had used, but he’d been rather taken by the idea from the moment she’d proposed it. It was only once it actually hung on their wall that it occurred to Clive that visitors might wander in and see it. “Well the bedroom is our private space, they’ve no place to judge anything we have in here” she’d said to him “Besides, I’m sure their eyes will only be drawn to your winning smile”.
Since then, whenever Clive had talked about getting a lock on their bedroom door or maybe putting the painting away “just for a little while”, she would tease him and threatened to hang it up in the living room. “That’s where it is!” Charlotte yelled to an empty apartment. “I left the stupid thing in the living room…” she mumbled on her way down the hall and into a space which she’d let Clive define, for the most part. On the glass coffee table lay what she’d been seeking, a copy of Vogue which Devon had left behind the last time she’d been over. Clive was out with her now, no doubt making snide remarks between each other about everyone they saw over the rim of their martini glasses.
Charlotte knew Devon still hadn’t entirely approved of her being Clive’s girlfriend. Back when Clive had first introduced them to each other, Charlotte could see from the way Devon’s eyes moved up and down her body that every inch of her was being judged. Then again, the angle may have made Devon’s look seem worse than it was – Devon standing at a willowy 6’3 and Charlotte reaching 5’4 if she wore her thick soled sneakers with the Japanese cartoons along the side. The right side of the left shoe had a little boy being toilet trained, proclaiming that he wanted to be a “Pants Man!”.
Charlotte also knew that Devon had a habit of writing comments, notes and doodling along the margins of everything she read. This was her chance to see if there was anything past the mundane to discover in this “marginalia”, as Devon insisted on referring to it as. Twenty minutes later, Charlotte felt that she had only really gained a reminder of why she didn’t bother reading Vogue. Like most women, she didn’t have a frame that was suited to the latest fashions of New York, Milan and the other cities which she felt had become institutions simply by saying so enough times that everyone believed them.
The notes were mostly just catty remarks about various celebrities and models, with the occasional circling of something that Devon must have wanted to find an affordable knock off of. Some young Bulgarian woman in an ad for Clairol was dubbed “Horse Features”. A list of people Devon apparently needed to email was written in flat, robotic handwriting along the hem of a dress designed by a French man who seemed to have trouble buttoning up his shirt. Charlotte lay the magazine back on the table and sat back in the dark purple, suede beanbag chair she’d negotiated.
It was hard not to giggle a little at herself, thinking of what Clive would say about her looking for clues – though he’d probably refer to them as plot devices. It was such a gimmick with him, integrating storytelling into real life. Shrugging, Charlotte decided that she didn’t care what Devon thought anyways. If Devon was really Clive’s best friend then she’d not do anything to sabotage their relationships and, really, she’d try to get over her little prejudices.
Lost in thought as she had been, Charlotte’s shoulders tightened when she could hear the tell tale sounds of Clive scrabbling with the keys and Devon’s laughter, snorts and all. “In you go madam” Clive remarked as he held the door for his tall friend. As her long legs passed through the doorway, Charlotte crossed her arms to cover the Care Bear Cousin which adorned her lime green t-shirt.
Thursday 5 April 2007
Nathan the Non-Descript
His teal and honeysuckle yellow spaceship cutting through the dark void of space between his home on Mars and his University on Earth, Nathan Paxton looked about the vast piece of consumer goods which sheltered his wet little human body from having all the blood boiled out of it. As spaceships go, this one was alright. The on board AI which ran everything had a few tenacious pieces of ad-ware wedged in it, but otherwise did a competent job of helping Nathan out by facilitating all sorts of functions. It did everything the catalogue had promised – such as being able to record Nathan’s thoughts directly onto the inter-trans-pan-galactic-o-net. Turning to the microphone, Nathan seemed to recall that this process had once been referred to by some offensive term known as “bogging” or maybe “lerging”….at least until the great Minutia War in which a monomaniac by the name of Oliver Brackenbury had ignited galactic conflict for the express purpose of changing terms which got on his nerves.
Brackenbury’s campaign had been a long and strange one whose pinnacle had been the herding of every individual who misused the word “theory” in their arguments through a long tube – the wrong end of which lay in a six mile deep pit filled with rampaging, thick necked, salivating Coulter-Beasts. Conventional forces were unable to stop him but eventually a brave resistance cell cobbled together an ingenious plan. Utilizing the expertise of several physicists, cyberneticists and deus ex machinists, the resistance constructed a cunning trap for First Citizen Brackenbury (As he had eventually dubbed himself). A prosti-bot that was able to change its density and weight at will, in a range from 120 lbs to the approximate weight of Iceland. After being smuggled into his private chamber, the robot had set about crushing the First Citizen's pelvis into fine, pink and white powder when the opportunity had presented itself. Recalling this historical detail, Nathan exhibited the natural reaction of his gender by instinctively shivering in horror at the image.
Yet this paled in comparison to the archival footage of the First Citizens cremation. A handful of file photos revealed that before his crusade, Oliver Brackenbury had been a slender young man – somewhat over six feet tall and a shade under two hundred pounds. But within the first week of his biblio-fascist regime he had swollen to 450 pounds and, mysteriously, grown a foot taller. When the Firemen came to douse his body in napalm, they discovered that he had swollen to approximately two metric tons in weight and was roughly the size of a modest cottage. A cell sample, taken just before the burning, revealed that his every cell membrane had become utterly saturated with a strange cocktail of brandy, vodka martinis and righteous indignation. This is suspected to be the reason that his body, lit some five hundred years ago, continues to burn to this day and has been harnessed to provide electricity for several million home entertainment systems across the Earth.
“Sometimes a man just has to do what needs to be done” he said to an empty bridge “There, that’s suitably authoritative without really saying anything”. Nathan was trying to think of what to do when his author rapidly lost interest in his current situation and decided to scrap the story. Nathan wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve being tossed into literary limbo or to be the subject of such ham-fisted post-modernist tripe…but here he was, frozen in amber (and grey matter), floating somewhere between thoughts of what the author was going to cook for dinner tonight and a dormant flashback to a particularly callipygian young woman he’d seen on the tube three weeks prior. His eyes boggled at this strange fate, but only because the image amused the author as he allowed Nathan one final thought.
Brackenbury’s campaign had been a long and strange one whose pinnacle had been the herding of every individual who misused the word “theory” in their arguments through a long tube – the wrong end of which lay in a six mile deep pit filled with rampaging, thick necked, salivating Coulter-Beasts. Conventional forces were unable to stop him but eventually a brave resistance cell cobbled together an ingenious plan. Utilizing the expertise of several physicists, cyberneticists and deus ex machinists, the resistance constructed a cunning trap for First Citizen Brackenbury (As he had eventually dubbed himself). A prosti-bot that was able to change its density and weight at will, in a range from 120 lbs to the approximate weight of Iceland. After being smuggled into his private chamber, the robot had set about crushing the First Citizen's pelvis into fine, pink and white powder when the opportunity had presented itself. Recalling this historical detail, Nathan exhibited the natural reaction of his gender by instinctively shivering in horror at the image.
Yet this paled in comparison to the archival footage of the First Citizens cremation. A handful of file photos revealed that before his crusade, Oliver Brackenbury had been a slender young man – somewhat over six feet tall and a shade under two hundred pounds. But within the first week of his biblio-fascist regime he had swollen to 450 pounds and, mysteriously, grown a foot taller. When the Firemen came to douse his body in napalm, they discovered that he had swollen to approximately two metric tons in weight and was roughly the size of a modest cottage. A cell sample, taken just before the burning, revealed that his every cell membrane had become utterly saturated with a strange cocktail of brandy, vodka martinis and righteous indignation. This is suspected to be the reason that his body, lit some five hundred years ago, continues to burn to this day and has been harnessed to provide electricity for several million home entertainment systems across the Earth.
“Sometimes a man just has to do what needs to be done” he said to an empty bridge “There, that’s suitably authoritative without really saying anything”. Nathan was trying to think of what to do when his author rapidly lost interest in his current situation and decided to scrap the story. Nathan wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve being tossed into literary limbo or to be the subject of such ham-fisted post-modernist tripe…but here he was, frozen in amber (and grey matter), floating somewhere between thoughts of what the author was going to cook for dinner tonight and a dormant flashback to a particularly callipygian young woman he’d seen on the tube three weeks prior. His eyes boggled at this strange fate, but only because the image amused the author as he allowed Nathan one final thought.
Wednesday 14 March 2007
Clive versus Nothing In Particular
“Stop telling me” he said “Stop telling me, because I don’t want to know”
“Look” Devon replied “I just think that as we get older, our lives will seem blander and blander no matter what we do. The more we experience, the less that surprises or thrills us. With less of those high points to make us stop and stare, we’ll perceive our lives as progressing faster and faster until entire years roar by as we used to experience a fleeting half hour.” Sensing no desire from Clive to respond, Devon pressed on after a sip from her glass of wine. “That’s why High School, with all its first times and the rawest beginnings of adult hood, seems like a more exciting and story-filled time than now. I think it’s the real reason why so many people idolize those years…not because they were quantifiably better, but because they just seemed more remarkable”.
Clive took a deep sip from his thermos, standing out on the edge of the lake in silent mortification. Turning around to face Devon, he couldn’t help but feel like an army general, talking to a scientist out of an old B-film, as he blurted out “So what on Earth are we supposed to do?”. Devon shrugged her narrow shoulders, causing her to have to re-adjust a shoulder strap that slid down. Putting her now empty glass down on the dock made the left strap fall again and this time she left it there, indifferent. “Well I suppose we could desperately cling to the trappings of our youth?”.
Clive glared and said nothing. He knew this was a dig at a large group of society in general, but also at Charlotte – who had recently purchased a collection of Strawberry Shortcake dolls identical to those she’d had as a little girl. Luckily she was with Devon’s new boyfriend Tony, about a quarter-mile inland at the cottage they were all sharing for the weekend. Probably rolling her eyes at all the shark hunting anecdotes Tony liked to repeat ad nauseum.
“You never have been able to totally accept my girlfriends” Clive said over the rim of the Thermos. Devon thrust her arms out wildly before bursting into the truly Californian exasperation which had made her stand out from all the other intelligent women Clive could have befriended during those “story-filled” years of High School. “Jesus Christ Clive, could you ever be more boring? Speaking of running gags between us, I always love it when you ignore my big points about mortality”.
Standing at 6’3, Devon wasn’t built like an Amazon but she sure could carry herself like one. Striding towards Clive with an overdone swagger, she mixed humour with her anger so Clive knew he hadn’t hit that raw a nerve. Besides, they both knew he was just trying to redirect the conversation because Devon’s lectures on the brief nature of life terrified him – her calm acceptance of her fatalistic theories being the most frightening component of all.
Gesturing grandly with every other word, her voice boomed as she continued from less than a foot in front of Clive. “Do you want us to be those kinds of people, Clive? Do you want us to be the bored intellectual do-nothings who just obsess over minutia with their inter-personal relationships to avoid the really big thoughts? The really big problems? What are we, Woody Allen characters?”. Grinning, Clive made as to reel back under her volume and then snapped himself upright – throwing the thermos up and over into the woods. Now it was his turn in this little game they’d played so many times before.
“Well Dev-onnnn, maybe we should be characters from an Ingmar Bergman film? Maybe we should sink all of our rapidly fleeting time and energy and life and love into the unanswerable? What! Do you think of that?!” Clive had been mimicking her body language all the while until, punctuating the end of his sentence, he made an absurd crotch thrust as if to say “See what I have and you don’t?”. Calculated nonsense, meant to try and make Devon lose the tight grip she had on her point.
But he quickly pulled his hips away as she made to backhand his crotch. Chasing after him, she yelled “Maybe we don’t have to be characters from some other asshole’s film? Maybe we could be our own people, whatever those may be? Like, maybe you could stop being the worlds biggest cock while having the worlds tiniest?”
Between giggles, Clive kept backing away from Devon until he was at the edge of the dock. Then both of them really started to grin as it became obvious that the new objective of the game was to see if Clive would fall back into the water while fully dressed. Stopping in her tracks, his old friend began to move her eyes rapidly over his body as if trying to find a pressure point.
“Maybe” Devon said “We could live our lives in such a manner as to encourage the kind of high drama that makes for interesting stories? We could go out of our way to set up cathartic moments, climactic arguments and pseudo-ironic happenstances. It’s not like we haven’t watched enough tv and film to know all the right things to say!”.
"Haha, I'll be the promiscuous gay guy who is more stereotype than man and you can be the woman who eats chocolate instead of having sex, because apparently it's empowering to gain weight instead of meaningful human interaction" Clive lost a bit of his own focus while blurting this out and Devon, deciding that she had found a weak point in his defences, lunged forward with the cry of "Sooo tiny!". Clive leapt back off the dock and as he went towards the water exclaimed "It is so tiny!".
Much later that evening Clive found himself sharing a beer with Tony during a moment where the latter had, oddly, fallen quiet. But it wasn’t to last and Tony surprised him by asking “Hey Clive, you know I keep going on and on about what I do – but what do you do, buddy?”. Thinking about it for a moment, Clive then replied “I argue, mostly with women it seems, resolving little or nothing at all...”.
“Look” Devon replied “I just think that as we get older, our lives will seem blander and blander no matter what we do. The more we experience, the less that surprises or thrills us. With less of those high points to make us stop and stare, we’ll perceive our lives as progressing faster and faster until entire years roar by as we used to experience a fleeting half hour.” Sensing no desire from Clive to respond, Devon pressed on after a sip from her glass of wine. “That’s why High School, with all its first times and the rawest beginnings of adult hood, seems like a more exciting and story-filled time than now. I think it’s the real reason why so many people idolize those years…not because they were quantifiably better, but because they just seemed more remarkable”.
Clive took a deep sip from his thermos, standing out on the edge of the lake in silent mortification. Turning around to face Devon, he couldn’t help but feel like an army general, talking to a scientist out of an old B-film, as he blurted out “So what on Earth are we supposed to do?”. Devon shrugged her narrow shoulders, causing her to have to re-adjust a shoulder strap that slid down. Putting her now empty glass down on the dock made the left strap fall again and this time she left it there, indifferent. “Well I suppose we could desperately cling to the trappings of our youth?”.
Clive glared and said nothing. He knew this was a dig at a large group of society in general, but also at Charlotte – who had recently purchased a collection of Strawberry Shortcake dolls identical to those she’d had as a little girl. Luckily she was with Devon’s new boyfriend Tony, about a quarter-mile inland at the cottage they were all sharing for the weekend. Probably rolling her eyes at all the shark hunting anecdotes Tony liked to repeat ad nauseum.
“You never have been able to totally accept my girlfriends” Clive said over the rim of the Thermos. Devon thrust her arms out wildly before bursting into the truly Californian exasperation which had made her stand out from all the other intelligent women Clive could have befriended during those “story-filled” years of High School. “Jesus Christ Clive, could you ever be more boring? Speaking of running gags between us, I always love it when you ignore my big points about mortality”.
Standing at 6’3, Devon wasn’t built like an Amazon but she sure could carry herself like one. Striding towards Clive with an overdone swagger, she mixed humour with her anger so Clive knew he hadn’t hit that raw a nerve. Besides, they both knew he was just trying to redirect the conversation because Devon’s lectures on the brief nature of life terrified him – her calm acceptance of her fatalistic theories being the most frightening component of all.
Gesturing grandly with every other word, her voice boomed as she continued from less than a foot in front of Clive. “Do you want us to be those kinds of people, Clive? Do you want us to be the bored intellectual do-nothings who just obsess over minutia with their inter-personal relationships to avoid the really big thoughts? The really big problems? What are we, Woody Allen characters?”. Grinning, Clive made as to reel back under her volume and then snapped himself upright – throwing the thermos up and over into the woods. Now it was his turn in this little game they’d played so many times before.
“Well Dev-onnnn, maybe we should be characters from an Ingmar Bergman film? Maybe we should sink all of our rapidly fleeting time and energy and life and love into the unanswerable? What! Do you think of that?!” Clive had been mimicking her body language all the while until, punctuating the end of his sentence, he made an absurd crotch thrust as if to say “See what I have and you don’t?”. Calculated nonsense, meant to try and make Devon lose the tight grip she had on her point.
But he quickly pulled his hips away as she made to backhand his crotch. Chasing after him, she yelled “Maybe we don’t have to be characters from some other asshole’s film? Maybe we could be our own people, whatever those may be? Like, maybe you could stop being the worlds biggest cock while having the worlds tiniest?”
Between giggles, Clive kept backing away from Devon until he was at the edge of the dock. Then both of them really started to grin as it became obvious that the new objective of the game was to see if Clive would fall back into the water while fully dressed. Stopping in her tracks, his old friend began to move her eyes rapidly over his body as if trying to find a pressure point.
“Maybe” Devon said “We could live our lives in such a manner as to encourage the kind of high drama that makes for interesting stories? We could go out of our way to set up cathartic moments, climactic arguments and pseudo-ironic happenstances. It’s not like we haven’t watched enough tv and film to know all the right things to say!”.
"Haha, I'll be the promiscuous gay guy who is more stereotype than man and you can be the woman who eats chocolate instead of having sex, because apparently it's empowering to gain weight instead of meaningful human interaction" Clive lost a bit of his own focus while blurting this out and Devon, deciding that she had found a weak point in his defences, lunged forward with the cry of "Sooo tiny!". Clive leapt back off the dock and as he went towards the water exclaimed "It is so tiny!".
Much later that evening Clive found himself sharing a beer with Tony during a moment where the latter had, oddly, fallen quiet. But it wasn’t to last and Tony surprised him by asking “Hey Clive, you know I keep going on and on about what I do – but what do you do, buddy?”. Thinking about it for a moment, Clive then replied “I argue, mostly with women it seems, resolving little or nothing at all...”.
Tuesday 13 March 2007
Animis Opibusque Parati - Intro
Titus Livius sat down with his blank book and opened to the first page. He’d been working on his history of the Roman Empire, “From The Founding Of The City”, but after having filled 80 books and seeing no end in sight…he needed a break. Lately at the bath house he had been talking with a friend of his about how he wanted to try writing fiction, yet every time he’d tried this he would always find himself drawn back to history. His friend, a politician, had just been talking about all the ways Rome might have been different in the modern day if it was still a Republic, if Augustus hadn’t come in and changed everything eight years ago. Combining the two threads of conversation, Titus’ friend suggested that he write a fictional history of the Roman Republic where Augustus lost to Mark Antony and the Republic had stayed a Republic.
He may have only been a historian, but Titus knew what kind of stories would get him lynched in a hurry. But the idea of writing a fictional history had truly intrigued him. To take that history and project into the future was even more intriguing, for who knew what strange new corners of the Earth might be discovered or even what the Empire’s men of science might bring into the world?
Maybe if the Carthaginians hadn’t been conquered, but had expanded across Africa as the Romans did the same across Europe and areas of Persia. What if the two great powers found themselves in a terrible stalemate for centuries to come, continually matching each other man for man, weapon for weapon, struggling to win a race of development which would break the stalemate and allow one empire to conquer the other?
Pretty soon Titus had lent quill to parchment, starting one of the greatest epics never discovered by 21st century historians. Titus began to write…
Animis Opibusque Parati
The Deus Ex Machinists had done a marvellous job of whipping up whatever revolutionary developments were needed for anything the architects had wanted to build. Thanks to them and their wondrous tools, the city of Helvetica had been able to rise from the middle of the North Atlantic and spell out for the world which of the great powers would be victor in this centuries old war – Rome…
He may have only been a historian, but Titus knew what kind of stories would get him lynched in a hurry. But the idea of writing a fictional history had truly intrigued him. To take that history and project into the future was even more intriguing, for who knew what strange new corners of the Earth might be discovered or even what the Empire’s men of science might bring into the world?
Maybe if the Carthaginians hadn’t been conquered, but had expanded across Africa as the Romans did the same across Europe and areas of Persia. What if the two great powers found themselves in a terrible stalemate for centuries to come, continually matching each other man for man, weapon for weapon, struggling to win a race of development which would break the stalemate and allow one empire to conquer the other?
Pretty soon Titus had lent quill to parchment, starting one of the greatest epics never discovered by 21st century historians. Titus began to write…
Animis Opibusque Parati
The Deus Ex Machinists had done a marvellous job of whipping up whatever revolutionary developments were needed for anything the architects had wanted to build. Thanks to them and their wondrous tools, the city of Helvetica had been able to rise from the middle of the North Atlantic and spell out for the world which of the great powers would be victor in this centuries old war – Rome…
Thursday 1 March 2007
Sweat
Eugene slapped a fiver down on the café counter to pay for his bottle of water. He got back far less change than he remembered from his childhood, but then that’s always the way innit?. You’re not going to pay the same for something in the summer of 2018 as you did in the spring of 2006, are you?
Stepping out onto the Camden high street, Eugene spotted a really fit bird across the street. The warm weather meant she was showing more than she was covering and that suited him just fine, until she looked his way. A downside of the same weather was that he couldn’t get away with wearing his favourite denim jacket, which would have made him feel confident enough to return the look. But as the only armour he had on was a slightly damp t-shirt advertising the Snooker club he belonged to over on Holloway…he pretended not to notice and threw back a good portion of his water.
Luckily, she looked away rather quickly and so he didn’t have to rush the bottle. He didn’t have enough change for another one. It could be worse, Eugene supposed, he could have had to kill a man for it like those poor buggers in Africa and the Middle East. Plus there was some of that going on in the middle of the U.S. wasn’t there? He’d have to look it up online, but he didn’t feel like figuring out the settings on his new watch. But then, maybe things would be a bit more exciting. Nothing much ever changed in London.
“Oh don’t be stupid” he mumbled to himself while crossing the street “You don’t need rocket-propelled grenades going off left, right and centre to make things interesting”. He was still mumbling a little bit as he entered the unisex hair salon where he paid more than he ought to for the little pleasure of the managers company. After being a patron for three years and making the effort to be sociable, Eugene had earned the privilege of being able to always get his hair cut by a woman he should have asked out ages ago. “Oh hello Eugene, how are you darling?” Charlotte greeted him “Just grab yourself the third seat down and I’ll be right with you”.
She was chewing gum, naturally. Someone had left a newspaper on the seat and Eugene feigned reading it for a moment as cover for admiring the wiggle in Charlotte’s walk as she headed over to the cash to ring the last customer up. His pupils slid from the corners to the centre of his eyes and focused on the latest headlines. Armageddon abroad, annoyances at home and celebrities misbehaving all across the globe. Things seemed pretty much as they should be until he came to a small article on page five.
“This is a bloody outrage” Eugene half-said to the room. “What’s that then?” Charlotte inquired as she began to moisten his hair. “Well, according to this article here” he thrust his finger at the page the same way he might try to provoke a fight with someone on the street “Council tax is no longer going to cover garbage collection. I mean, why do I even pay the sodding thing?”. Charlotte peered over his shoulder to read the article. She didn’t need to, but this way she got to put her face right up beside Eugene’s. “Ah” Eugene thought “Cherry flavoured gum this week”.
“Ohhh I’d say that’s worse” Charlotte pointed to a different corner of the page which announced the death of the last two Polar Bears still living outside of captivity. Remembering what she was being paid for, she set to cutting Eugene’s hair while he read the article in full to her. Apparently the two bears were mates and had been tagged and monitored by wildlife organizations from five different countries. Realizing that they would not likely be able to cope with the further reduction in the arctic ice shelf, the Canadian government had dispatched a pair of helicopters which would airlift the bears to safety in Nunavut. But by the time the helicopters arrived the bears were both dead in the water, floating just below the surface where they had simply collapsed from exhaustion at trying to cross the growing distances between sufficiently thick ice masses.
“Christ, makes me cold just thinking about it” Eugene exclaimed, shivering as much from the cranked up air conditioning as anything else. Charlotte bent his ear forward to get in with the trimmer. “I think it’s quite sad, actually. I know it’s not quite like Romeo & Juliet but you can see why I might think of them” she said, bending the other ear. “Yeah, I can see why you’d think of that” he replied while having loose hair dusted off his shoulders. He wasn’t sure but he thought he heard her make a small noise in the back of her throat. A choke? A sob? Or was she just clearing her throat? God he wished he hadn’t damaged his hearing at all those Blave shows he used to go to.
Charlotte surprised Eugene by swinging him around in the chair and placing her hands on his knees, looking him dead in the eye as she fulfilled a fantasy that had kept him going through many a bad day. “Eugene, I think death is a terrible thing that can creep up on you at any moment. I think we’d be fools not to make the most of the time we have, don’t you think?”. Eugene nodded uneasily, wondering if this wasn’t some kind of trap – despite the years he’d known her. “Wait a moment love, don’t you have a boyfriend?”
“Do you really care?”
Forty minutes later the two of them lay in bed, staring at each other. Charlotte couldn’t afford air conditioning for her apartment as well as her salon. The sheets were soaked with perspiration but the two hadn’t quite made love, underwear hadn’t quite been removed. It was just too hot and now both man and woman had a serious dehydration headache.
They both tried to say an apology, but their mouths were just a little too dry.
Stepping out onto the Camden high street, Eugene spotted a really fit bird across the street. The warm weather meant she was showing more than she was covering and that suited him just fine, until she looked his way. A downside of the same weather was that he couldn’t get away with wearing his favourite denim jacket, which would have made him feel confident enough to return the look. But as the only armour he had on was a slightly damp t-shirt advertising the Snooker club he belonged to over on Holloway…he pretended not to notice and threw back a good portion of his water.
Luckily, she looked away rather quickly and so he didn’t have to rush the bottle. He didn’t have enough change for another one. It could be worse, Eugene supposed, he could have had to kill a man for it like those poor buggers in Africa and the Middle East. Plus there was some of that going on in the middle of the U.S. wasn’t there? He’d have to look it up online, but he didn’t feel like figuring out the settings on his new watch. But then, maybe things would be a bit more exciting. Nothing much ever changed in London.
“Oh don’t be stupid” he mumbled to himself while crossing the street “You don’t need rocket-propelled grenades going off left, right and centre to make things interesting”. He was still mumbling a little bit as he entered the unisex hair salon where he paid more than he ought to for the little pleasure of the managers company. After being a patron for three years and making the effort to be sociable, Eugene had earned the privilege of being able to always get his hair cut by a woman he should have asked out ages ago. “Oh hello Eugene, how are you darling?” Charlotte greeted him “Just grab yourself the third seat down and I’ll be right with you”.
She was chewing gum, naturally. Someone had left a newspaper on the seat and Eugene feigned reading it for a moment as cover for admiring the wiggle in Charlotte’s walk as she headed over to the cash to ring the last customer up. His pupils slid from the corners to the centre of his eyes and focused on the latest headlines. Armageddon abroad, annoyances at home and celebrities misbehaving all across the globe. Things seemed pretty much as they should be until he came to a small article on page five.
“This is a bloody outrage” Eugene half-said to the room. “What’s that then?” Charlotte inquired as she began to moisten his hair. “Well, according to this article here” he thrust his finger at the page the same way he might try to provoke a fight with someone on the street “Council tax is no longer going to cover garbage collection. I mean, why do I even pay the sodding thing?”. Charlotte peered over his shoulder to read the article. She didn’t need to, but this way she got to put her face right up beside Eugene’s. “Ah” Eugene thought “Cherry flavoured gum this week”.
“Ohhh I’d say that’s worse” Charlotte pointed to a different corner of the page which announced the death of the last two Polar Bears still living outside of captivity. Remembering what she was being paid for, she set to cutting Eugene’s hair while he read the article in full to her. Apparently the two bears were mates and had been tagged and monitored by wildlife organizations from five different countries. Realizing that they would not likely be able to cope with the further reduction in the arctic ice shelf, the Canadian government had dispatched a pair of helicopters which would airlift the bears to safety in Nunavut. But by the time the helicopters arrived the bears were both dead in the water, floating just below the surface where they had simply collapsed from exhaustion at trying to cross the growing distances between sufficiently thick ice masses.
“Christ, makes me cold just thinking about it” Eugene exclaimed, shivering as much from the cranked up air conditioning as anything else. Charlotte bent his ear forward to get in with the trimmer. “I think it’s quite sad, actually. I know it’s not quite like Romeo & Juliet but you can see why I might think of them” she said, bending the other ear. “Yeah, I can see why you’d think of that” he replied while having loose hair dusted off his shoulders. He wasn’t sure but he thought he heard her make a small noise in the back of her throat. A choke? A sob? Or was she just clearing her throat? God he wished he hadn’t damaged his hearing at all those Blave shows he used to go to.
Charlotte surprised Eugene by swinging him around in the chair and placing her hands on his knees, looking him dead in the eye as she fulfilled a fantasy that had kept him going through many a bad day. “Eugene, I think death is a terrible thing that can creep up on you at any moment. I think we’d be fools not to make the most of the time we have, don’t you think?”. Eugene nodded uneasily, wondering if this wasn’t some kind of trap – despite the years he’d known her. “Wait a moment love, don’t you have a boyfriend?”
“Do you really care?”
Forty minutes later the two of them lay in bed, staring at each other. Charlotte couldn’t afford air conditioning for her apartment as well as her salon. The sheets were soaked with perspiration but the two hadn’t quite made love, underwear hadn’t quite been removed. It was just too hot and now both man and woman had a serious dehydration headache.
They both tried to say an apology, but their mouths were just a little too dry.
And this is what you get
I’m so tired.
This is news.
This is news that I am so tired.
So I’m telling all my friends and relatives and co-workers and maybe this big guy sitting beside me on the bus. I’m telling them online, in-person and I’ll even pass a little note under the table if that is your style. One way or another, the world will be informed. Rain will fall, children will be born, entropy will take its course and you will know that I am tired.
Your problem is that you don’t respond positively to my highly engaging stories, sorry, anecdotes about how last night I was playing a videogame and something happened in it which made me laugh. Almost, it almost made me laugh. Maybe if there had been someone else in the room to hear it, I would have. I have a very charming laugh, you know. I’d compare it to that of a celebrity, but I don’t think we grew up on the same shows.
My problem is that I don’t have any particularly interesting problems.
Don’t cry for me, Argentina.
Pop culture.
The world’s problems make fine diversion from my own. I know what should be done about all of them. I know I should exercise more. I know what I need to do to improve my life. I know everything, you can just stop telling me please. So here we stand in front of each other. Tell me, if you could hold up a cliché in front of another cliché, would it be like holding a mirror in front of a mirror?
That was profound. I know this because I read it in the lyrics for a song I listened to when I was a teenager. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hold up under analysis. Nothing much matters, when you shrug at it with the nonchalance that comes from not feeling particularly engaged by the world around you.
I’d like to be more articulate, I really would. I’d like a lot of things.
I can feel it you know, your judgement. I didn’t ask for it and nobody handed you a set of black robes and a gavel. This is who I am and what I do and what I say and what I aspire to and how I go about it. I am entitled.
I don’t like it, but I can’t imagine anything more.
The world is filled with people like me and we shall be accommodated.
This is news.
This is news that I am so tired.
So I’m telling all my friends and relatives and co-workers and maybe this big guy sitting beside me on the bus. I’m telling them online, in-person and I’ll even pass a little note under the table if that is your style. One way or another, the world will be informed. Rain will fall, children will be born, entropy will take its course and you will know that I am tired.
Your problem is that you don’t respond positively to my highly engaging stories, sorry, anecdotes about how last night I was playing a videogame and something happened in it which made me laugh. Almost, it almost made me laugh. Maybe if there had been someone else in the room to hear it, I would have. I have a very charming laugh, you know. I’d compare it to that of a celebrity, but I don’t think we grew up on the same shows.
My problem is that I don’t have any particularly interesting problems.
Don’t cry for me, Argentina.
Pop culture.
The world’s problems make fine diversion from my own. I know what should be done about all of them. I know I should exercise more. I know what I need to do to improve my life. I know everything, you can just stop telling me please. So here we stand in front of each other. Tell me, if you could hold up a cliché in front of another cliché, would it be like holding a mirror in front of a mirror?
That was profound. I know this because I read it in the lyrics for a song I listened to when I was a teenager. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hold up under analysis. Nothing much matters, when you shrug at it with the nonchalance that comes from not feeling particularly engaged by the world around you.
I’d like to be more articulate, I really would. I’d like a lot of things.
I can feel it you know, your judgement. I didn’t ask for it and nobody handed you a set of black robes and a gavel. This is who I am and what I do and what I say and what I aspire to and how I go about it. I am entitled.
I don’t like it, but I can’t imagine anything more.
The world is filled with people like me and we shall be accommodated.
Thursday 22 February 2007
Clive versus The Slug People: Round One
“I can’t believe the things you say” Charlotte turned from the kitchen counter as she said this, lending a kinetic energy to her statement as her eyes settled on Clive. “I can’t believe the things you say!” Clive replied, struggling for more than mimicry in his defence.
The young couple had just returned to their apartment from a party where only one of them had been having much joy. It had been in a townhouse out in one of the newer suburbs and almost everyone there had been Charlottes friends long before she’d become involved with Clive.
Ignoring his paper thin remark, Charlotte pressed on. “I simply cannot believe that you got pissed…”
“Three pints is hardly getting…”
“You got pissed and started talking to your friend Greg about how you thought the rest of the party were all snails!”
“Slugs, love, I referred to them all as slugs. Snails at least have the foresight to invest in a portable home.” Clive had no idea why he sought to clarify this point. The overhead light dimmed slightly, obviously on the way to needing replacing. Hands falling down to her thighs for emphasis, Charlotte let out a huff of exasperated air as she leaned against the counter. “Slugs it is then. Why do you have to be so judgemental?”
“Alright, fair play, I was judging. But I wasn’t being judgemental in that I wasn’t trying to bolster my ego by pointing at all the shitty people. I was just trying to articulate a feeling is all.” Clive took a seat at the kitchen table. He knew Charlotte already had the moral high ground so she might as well be physically looking down on him too. Taking her silence as a cue to go on, he did. “It’s a feeling I’ve been having more and more ever since we got out of school. The feeling that I’ve no more time to waste and it repulses me, fills me with a kind of fear, when I am wasting time.”
“Okay…and spending time with my friends is a waste then, is it?” she said with a shallow calmness. “Yes, for me it is. I get nothing from them and I don’t care how mercenary that makes me sound. How self interested. How diabolically…”. His voice was rising, his left hand tensing slightly for a fist when he didn’t want to hit anything that could be touched. “Alright” his lover replied “Then how does this lead to you insulting them all? How does your disinterest and fear make them slugs?”
“Because that’s precisely what they are! That and an assortment of gimmicky, put on personality traits and problems which are forever being maintained as the most interesting things they have to offer! All they do is pass though life leaving nothing but waste product behind them. Fucking. Slugs. ” Darting in while he took a breath, Charlotte said “You know, I’m being entirely too polite with you considering what you’re saying about people who’ve been quite kind to me for some time.” as she stepped over and behind his seat. Placing her hands on his shoulders and looking forward at the clock on the wall, Charlotte thought “It’s enough hearing him get wound up, I don’t have to look at it as well….and I hope he winds down before it gets too late. I’ve got to open the store tomorrow.”
Clive noticed his left hand’s behaviour and he steadied it by curling the index finger around the one on Charlottes left hand, then letting it hang limply as he continued. “That may very well be but…the negative aspects positively drown the positive”.
“You’re being quite the little accountant Clive. Does it comfort you to think that others might not weigh you as being in the black on their own little ledgers?”
“Of course it does. It’s happened, I’m sure of it. But that isn’t relevant and if someone doesn’t enjoy my company then why should they be forced to be in it?” Charlotte waggled her left index a little, playfully swinging Clive’s forearm back and forth. He let her. “Alright Clive…I suppose you felt forced to be in the company of my sluggy pals then?”. “Well” he muttered towards the linoleum “A little bit, but mostly I was hoping that it might be a fun and rewarding time after all. But I was kind of fooling myself since I’ve never really enjoyed myself at those parties before.”
Charlotte slid her hands down to gently rest at Clive’s waist and playfully dug her chin into the top of his head. “Right, then when you were disappointed yet again you decided it somehow wouldn’t do any harm to tear into these people since you didn’t care if you ever saw them again…forgetting to consider my feelings.”
She was right on the money but not the whole of it. Clive really did find these people disturbing. Disturbing in how they seemed to throw away great swaths of the most precious thing we have, time, with total indifference. Disconcerting in how self-improvement was less important and valued than self-indulgence. Distressing in how they would talk about serious problems, like depression or chronic health issues, with the kind of wide eyed vigour usually reserved for telling people about your achievements. Discombobulating in how…
Okay, there wasn’t really anything about them which upset his sense of balance and it was getting late besides. Best to push it under and remember what’s really important. “You’re right Charlotte, I was disappointed and I did forget your feelings. Let’s just go to bed and forget the whole messy thing”. He gently slid Charlotte off of him as he stood up, but she had her own ideas and spun him around to face in her direction as he did so. “Well Clive, you might be on to something. I’ve been having my doubts too, though I don’t entirely agree with you. Stacy has been talking about her low metabolism way too often for my liking. But whatever, I have to open up tomorrow and I want to get to bed. I also don’t want you to just push this feeling of yours under and stew.”
Clive cocked an eyebrow as he said “Okay”, like it was a question. “Okay” Charlotte answered “We can talk about it some more another time, but I still might want you to apologize to some of those people. I’m not going to just saw off a huge branch of my social life because you got scared”.
“I wouldn’t say I got scared…”
“Yeah well don’t worry, I’ll say it for you. You got scared of your own mortality and took it out on these people as vengeance for their boring you.”
Clive shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Well you seem to be halfway towards getting what I’m saying. Now let’s go to bed and if you’re well behaved I just might let you play with my body”. Then it was Charlottes turn to roll her eyes, just before turning off the kitchen lights and making a mental note to change that light bulb.
The young couple had just returned to their apartment from a party where only one of them had been having much joy. It had been in a townhouse out in one of the newer suburbs and almost everyone there had been Charlottes friends long before she’d become involved with Clive.
Ignoring his paper thin remark, Charlotte pressed on. “I simply cannot believe that you got pissed…”
“Three pints is hardly getting…”
“You got pissed and started talking to your friend Greg about how you thought the rest of the party were all snails!”
“Slugs, love, I referred to them all as slugs. Snails at least have the foresight to invest in a portable home.” Clive had no idea why he sought to clarify this point. The overhead light dimmed slightly, obviously on the way to needing replacing. Hands falling down to her thighs for emphasis, Charlotte let out a huff of exasperated air as she leaned against the counter. “Slugs it is then. Why do you have to be so judgemental?”
“Alright, fair play, I was judging. But I wasn’t being judgemental in that I wasn’t trying to bolster my ego by pointing at all the shitty people. I was just trying to articulate a feeling is all.” Clive took a seat at the kitchen table. He knew Charlotte already had the moral high ground so she might as well be physically looking down on him too. Taking her silence as a cue to go on, he did. “It’s a feeling I’ve been having more and more ever since we got out of school. The feeling that I’ve no more time to waste and it repulses me, fills me with a kind of fear, when I am wasting time.”
“Okay…and spending time with my friends is a waste then, is it?” she said with a shallow calmness. “Yes, for me it is. I get nothing from them and I don’t care how mercenary that makes me sound. How self interested. How diabolically…”. His voice was rising, his left hand tensing slightly for a fist when he didn’t want to hit anything that could be touched. “Alright” his lover replied “Then how does this lead to you insulting them all? How does your disinterest and fear make them slugs?”
“Because that’s precisely what they are! That and an assortment of gimmicky, put on personality traits and problems which are forever being maintained as the most interesting things they have to offer! All they do is pass though life leaving nothing but waste product behind them. Fucking. Slugs. ” Darting in while he took a breath, Charlotte said “You know, I’m being entirely too polite with you considering what you’re saying about people who’ve been quite kind to me for some time.” as she stepped over and behind his seat. Placing her hands on his shoulders and looking forward at the clock on the wall, Charlotte thought “It’s enough hearing him get wound up, I don’t have to look at it as well….and I hope he winds down before it gets too late. I’ve got to open the store tomorrow.”
Clive noticed his left hand’s behaviour and he steadied it by curling the index finger around the one on Charlottes left hand, then letting it hang limply as he continued. “That may very well be but…the negative aspects positively drown the positive”.
“You’re being quite the little accountant Clive. Does it comfort you to think that others might not weigh you as being in the black on their own little ledgers?”
“Of course it does. It’s happened, I’m sure of it. But that isn’t relevant and if someone doesn’t enjoy my company then why should they be forced to be in it?” Charlotte waggled her left index a little, playfully swinging Clive’s forearm back and forth. He let her. “Alright Clive…I suppose you felt forced to be in the company of my sluggy pals then?”. “Well” he muttered towards the linoleum “A little bit, but mostly I was hoping that it might be a fun and rewarding time after all. But I was kind of fooling myself since I’ve never really enjoyed myself at those parties before.”
Charlotte slid her hands down to gently rest at Clive’s waist and playfully dug her chin into the top of his head. “Right, then when you were disappointed yet again you decided it somehow wouldn’t do any harm to tear into these people since you didn’t care if you ever saw them again…forgetting to consider my feelings.”
She was right on the money but not the whole of it. Clive really did find these people disturbing. Disturbing in how they seemed to throw away great swaths of the most precious thing we have, time, with total indifference. Disconcerting in how self-improvement was less important and valued than self-indulgence. Distressing in how they would talk about serious problems, like depression or chronic health issues, with the kind of wide eyed vigour usually reserved for telling people about your achievements. Discombobulating in how…
Okay, there wasn’t really anything about them which upset his sense of balance and it was getting late besides. Best to push it under and remember what’s really important. “You’re right Charlotte, I was disappointed and I did forget your feelings. Let’s just go to bed and forget the whole messy thing”. He gently slid Charlotte off of him as he stood up, but she had her own ideas and spun him around to face in her direction as he did so. “Well Clive, you might be on to something. I’ve been having my doubts too, though I don’t entirely agree with you. Stacy has been talking about her low metabolism way too often for my liking. But whatever, I have to open up tomorrow and I want to get to bed. I also don’t want you to just push this feeling of yours under and stew.”
Clive cocked an eyebrow as he said “Okay”, like it was a question. “Okay” Charlotte answered “We can talk about it some more another time, but I still might want you to apologize to some of those people. I’m not going to just saw off a huge branch of my social life because you got scared”.
“I wouldn’t say I got scared…”
“Yeah well don’t worry, I’ll say it for you. You got scared of your own mortality and took it out on these people as vengeance for their boring you.”
Clive shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Well you seem to be halfway towards getting what I’m saying. Now let’s go to bed and if you’re well behaved I just might let you play with my body”. Then it was Charlottes turn to roll her eyes, just before turning off the kitchen lights and making a mental note to change that light bulb.
Tuesday 20 February 2007
Manlyfesto
Why a third blog?
I want to do something which I would not want to do in Straddling The Atlantic and which Dirk Hardwood is too constrictive to allow.
So...what is that, exactly?
Artists doodle. Photographers take throw away pictures of their breakfast at an odd angle which makes it resemble the obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think that those who engage in either of those artistic endeavours have a certain privilege in that they can just throw shit down and not have to explain where it came from or where it is going. Meanwhile, non-poetic writing has a much stronger pull towards expanding in either direction along the line of teleological development.
But sometimes I get a burst of inspiration and all I want to do is write a page or two of a specific moment in a story without attending to anything but that one moment or scene without any snaky tendrils of continuity pulling at my heels. This is a desire I tried to articulate in the beginning of my Dirk Hardwood notion, but which I can more properly explore in something far less structured than good ol’ Dirk.
Why not do it on paper or in a word file?
As anyone who shares my interests and has known me could say, I not only like to share but often feel compelled to do so. Comments have been placed within reach of whoever wants to post them and all levels of reader participation are encouraged. Hell, if you feel inspired to write what came before or after something I put here, wing it up in the comments and I could very well post it in the main body if it tickles me just right.
Why not do this in Straddling The Atlantic?
Because I don’t want to dilute STA. I feel that right now it has a good structure and I want to keep it on target with posts that primarily relate to my ladder climbing in England and the sort of conversational posts which, I’d like to think, are akin to having a natter with me. Finally, there is a healthy possibility that what I write here could alienate some of the people who read STA and I’d like to show those readers a bit of respect.
So…you talk about being unfettered and possibly alienating people, does that mean this is going to devolve into a load of tripe with no relevance to anyone but you? Are you going to swear and use racially charged vocabulary because that’s “edgy”, you pretentious bastard?
I hope not! As with any exercise with a minimum of structure, that is a danger. I do feel that swearing only has as much power as the reader gives it and that large swaths of society have become afraid to discuss race (amongst other things) to the detriment of common discourse. But I plan to be vigilant and I have no delusions about being a crusader of enlightenment, bringing brilliantly polished insights from the lofty cliffs of my mind down to the swarming, sweaty plebeians below.
I just….I see the things that more unrestrained individuals like R. Crumb do…or I read something anachronistic, like John Jakes The Asylum World which shamelessly posits a future split entirely along the white/black racial divide…and I envy their freedom. But envy isn’t satisfying and I would like to explore Bill Cosby’s style of finding humour without cruelty or filth just as much as I would also like to free myself from the bullying brand of political correctness which I know I have at least partially ingested over the years. That’s what I’m getting at when I talk about being unfettered and I mention potential alienation more because I know that people come to STA for the kind of content I’ve stated, not for what I will be doing here. I want to remove barriers so as to allow my mind to wander into new fields, not as sloppy justification to press the big red button labelled “Offend” over and over in teenage masturbatory provocation.
Okay, but you know that anything you put on the internet is basically there forever? That at some point in the future anybody could use things like that Internet Archive Project to dig up something you said and perhaps use it against you in another setting?
Well, they’re welcome to try. Outside of this first entry, I don’t plan on qualifying or justifying a damn thing unless it interests me to do so. I’m disgusted by the lazy pundits who trawl through the lower intestines of the internet to find ten year old forum posts by which they think they can crucify public figures. Anybody who tries to pull that nonsense will get both barrels straight to their sense of self worth.
Right, one last thing, why the name? Is there going to be a lot of content to do with religion?
Well the name means something one way but I’d argue it means nothing of consequence at all. The point of origin, from my perspective, would be Richard Dawkins as it is a way in which he referred to the world’s most popular invisible friend that made me pump my fist in the air and execute a saucy, 35 degree swing of the hip. It’s stuck in my mind for some time and it seemed as good a name as any for this endeavour since I will be somewhat playing the role, whipping small worlds into existence and snuffing them out at a whim.
But I’d argue that it means nothing at all as it will in no way dictate the content of the site. When it comes to titles and names of works (or bands, for that matter) I am coming more and more to the line of thinking that we need to stop plumbing them for such depths of meaning and simply accept them the way we accept the names of people. There is such a deluge of content in the world, one which is getting stronger and stronger, that to get hung up on titles is to waste a good deal of energy and thought. Something something “book by its cover” right?
Right.
Let’s get started then.
I want to do something which I would not want to do in Straddling The Atlantic and which Dirk Hardwood is too constrictive to allow.
So...what is that, exactly?
Artists doodle. Photographers take throw away pictures of their breakfast at an odd angle which makes it resemble the obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think that those who engage in either of those artistic endeavours have a certain privilege in that they can just throw shit down and not have to explain where it came from or where it is going. Meanwhile, non-poetic writing has a much stronger pull towards expanding in either direction along the line of teleological development.
But sometimes I get a burst of inspiration and all I want to do is write a page or two of a specific moment in a story without attending to anything but that one moment or scene without any snaky tendrils of continuity pulling at my heels. This is a desire I tried to articulate in the beginning of my Dirk Hardwood notion, but which I can more properly explore in something far less structured than good ol’ Dirk.
Why not do it on paper or in a word file?
As anyone who shares my interests and has known me could say, I not only like to share but often feel compelled to do so. Comments have been placed within reach of whoever wants to post them and all levels of reader participation are encouraged. Hell, if you feel inspired to write what came before or after something I put here, wing it up in the comments and I could very well post it in the main body if it tickles me just right.
Why not do this in Straddling The Atlantic?
Because I don’t want to dilute STA. I feel that right now it has a good structure and I want to keep it on target with posts that primarily relate to my ladder climbing in England and the sort of conversational posts which, I’d like to think, are akin to having a natter with me. Finally, there is a healthy possibility that what I write here could alienate some of the people who read STA and I’d like to show those readers a bit of respect.
So…you talk about being unfettered and possibly alienating people, does that mean this is going to devolve into a load of tripe with no relevance to anyone but you? Are you going to swear and use racially charged vocabulary because that’s “edgy”, you pretentious bastard?
I hope not! As with any exercise with a minimum of structure, that is a danger. I do feel that swearing only has as much power as the reader gives it and that large swaths of society have become afraid to discuss race (amongst other things) to the detriment of common discourse. But I plan to be vigilant and I have no delusions about being a crusader of enlightenment, bringing brilliantly polished insights from the lofty cliffs of my mind down to the swarming, sweaty plebeians below.
I just….I see the things that more unrestrained individuals like R. Crumb do…or I read something anachronistic, like John Jakes The Asylum World which shamelessly posits a future split entirely along the white/black racial divide…and I envy their freedom. But envy isn’t satisfying and I would like to explore Bill Cosby’s style of finding humour without cruelty or filth just as much as I would also like to free myself from the bullying brand of political correctness which I know I have at least partially ingested over the years. That’s what I’m getting at when I talk about being unfettered and I mention potential alienation more because I know that people come to STA for the kind of content I’ve stated, not for what I will be doing here. I want to remove barriers so as to allow my mind to wander into new fields, not as sloppy justification to press the big red button labelled “Offend” over and over in teenage masturbatory provocation.
Okay, but you know that anything you put on the internet is basically there forever? That at some point in the future anybody could use things like that Internet Archive Project to dig up something you said and perhaps use it against you in another setting?
Well, they’re welcome to try. Outside of this first entry, I don’t plan on qualifying or justifying a damn thing unless it interests me to do so. I’m disgusted by the lazy pundits who trawl through the lower intestines of the internet to find ten year old forum posts by which they think they can crucify public figures. Anybody who tries to pull that nonsense will get both barrels straight to their sense of self worth.
Right, one last thing, why the name? Is there going to be a lot of content to do with religion?
Well the name means something one way but I’d argue it means nothing of consequence at all. The point of origin, from my perspective, would be Richard Dawkins as it is a way in which he referred to the world’s most popular invisible friend that made me pump my fist in the air and execute a saucy, 35 degree swing of the hip. It’s stuck in my mind for some time and it seemed as good a name as any for this endeavour since I will be somewhat playing the role, whipping small worlds into existence and snuffing them out at a whim.
But I’d argue that it means nothing at all as it will in no way dictate the content of the site. When it comes to titles and names of works (or bands, for that matter) I am coming more and more to the line of thinking that we need to stop plumbing them for such depths of meaning and simply accept them the way we accept the names of people. There is such a deluge of content in the world, one which is getting stronger and stronger, that to get hung up on titles is to waste a good deal of energy and thought. Something something “book by its cover” right?
Right.
Let’s get started then.
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