“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...”.
Wednesday 14 March 2007
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.
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