Notes before an early dinner

I race ahead of sloth and solitude. I pace steps ahead of an inexorable somnolence that I know I will eventually succumb to, but I’m awake for now. Will this be another drab little scrap¹ of writing that will remain endless in perpetuity? Race, my thoughts, my love, my earnest desire to leave an imprint of my consciousness before I too, fade away. Run to stay afloat, for lack of a boat, in this world bereft of metaphor², stay alive. 

I find myself in a victorian chamber of an elevator. The ornate buttons tell me that the I'm in a building with three floors. The address in the scrap of parchment in my hand tells me that I need to visit someone on the fifth. I have no time, I can feel it gaining on me. The 8-bit digital floor readout is the only anatopism³ I can see. I press 2, and keep staring at the mirror opposite the floor beacon as it says I've arrived at 5. I walk out..

There's no music this time, unless you count the washing machine getting it on with the dishwasher. The strident metallic moans do have some sort of rhythm to it, if you listen carefully. Feeling a bit like an unwitting voyeur, I turn back and try to concentrate on my newspaper. An advertisement for food delivered by drones during traffic jams dances merrily in a corner. One would think that with all the advances we have with self-driving cars, humanity would've been rid of traffic jams by now. But apparently all it takes is for the strident morality hardcoded into the cars to decide that if they waited around things would resolve themselves with a minimal loss of life, while one kid with a go-cart drives around throwing thumb tacks and flipping people off. Then again, when people have everything they need inside cars, would you mind being in a jam? I turn off the display and sit in the darkness for a moment, letting my eyes acclimate before I open the door and step out..

Sitting quietly in a corner of the resort I see families come back from the slopes, crusted with flaky snow less than a day old. Ski resorts had become one of the more favoured holiday destinations after the zombie apocalypse, since the zoms had to trudge wearily up the cold slopes as skiers with everything ranging from mallets to chainsaws came hurtling down the hill at breakneck speed, their counterbalanced weaponry spelling armageddon for the bludsuckers. Funny that none had thought to go for the ski lifts, although they were some of the most fortified places in the resort one would imagine that under the overwhelming numbers that the zombies had it wouldn't be much of an issue. I would stick around a bit longer, but I'd been bitten recently and was feeling an itching in my calf. I took a last drag and stepped out...

It sure is nice to be a lichen. If you ask me, we're at the top of the evolutionary food chain. So what if these hairless apes build their roads and their cities? When you've been around for as long as we have, all of these constructs take on an ephemeral air, fleeting in their brief occupancy of time and space, but oshitoshit one of the buggers is going to poop on me again..

I bask in my office chair. Well, lounge in it. Well, sit in a mildly decrepit manner, terrified by whether my emotional atavism will reassert itself in a display of catatonic dominance this rainy autumn evening⁴ fine summer morning. This squalid city welcomes criminals the way ants are drawn towards honey modestly crime-filled town is responsible for my healthy income, and I don't know if I can survive another brawl in an alley against a glinting switchblade need to charge my camera before I go shadow Mr. Tremblay's wife. I shrug into my long brown overcoat, put on my tattered hat, and head out..

The paladin rolls a hundred and sixty sided die and shrugs at me, before announcing triumphantly, 'I buy Piccadilly.' I groan inwardly as I anticipate the inevitable. 'You retroactively owe me rent, Artificer!' I look at my own hand, with two rubies and a pair of dice blessed by the twins of fate and fortune. It sure would be nice if I could actually trust them for once. I looked at lady fate, sitting beside me and smiling sweetly as I staked my coins and rolled the dice, and knew that things were going to go horribly wrong...

'IT IS TIME.', said a voice, sepulchral in its intonation, dripping finality the way a waffle prepared by a doting grandmother drips syrup⁵.

'I know.', I told her, a bit more testily than I intended to. Jerking a finger at her companion, I said, 'I'm fine with you, its him that I have a bone to pick.'

--------------------

1 : perhaps the true origins of the word drabble. Or as Sir Terry would have said, to drabbe liquid mud. Margaret might've not liked her name being dragged through mud so, though.

2 : where to get stoned is akin to a stoning

3 : my conversation is also often anatopical, in addition to being atypical and off topical.

4 : something about pulpy noir fiction requires cold, dreary rain, but i can't quite put my umbrella on it.

5 : or ghee, if you live in certain other places.

Flatulent Freddy's Fantastic Fugue? [or maybe just the heat]

"..rantrantrantrantra..."
#cough. a discreet one.
"Right, then, Hwhat do you think you're up to, young man? (woman, specie of indeterminate nature, collective consciousness or hive mind, I think I covered everything, phew.)"

The young man in question, insofar as it is possible to tell within the shadows underneath his hoodie and the general work of malnutrition, stopped rocking back and forth in the dingy corner muttering to himself and looked up.
"You forgot the undead, the transequoias, the metrop-troglodytes and Lady Agatha.", he said, mildly reproachfully.

"Hrumph, well...", said the drill sergeant bashfully, as much as it was possible for a man built like a craggy mountain to look sheepish, "undead, hwhat? always come back to bite at yer."

"That's considered boorish these days, don't you know?", said the probably-a-young-lad standing up and dusting off shapeless coveralls. His arms were bandaged all the way up to his elbows in strips of cloth that looked as dirty as the environs. "Haven't you kept up with your sensitivity training, old soul?"

"Hrmph..that sort of thing was never meant for me..", said the drill sergeant, and sneezed with enough force to shake the building, give a flock of placid sheep in a neighbouring country nervous dysentry and cause a flock of roosting pigeons to seriously reevaluate their life choices. "Are we going or hwhat?"

"Won't it feel good to be connected to the network again, kernel?", asked the sergeant cheerfully, in the manner of sergeants everywhere, handing the other a discreet looking rectangle the dimensions of a thick card, with a small wire extending from a corner.

"Not really... I rather enjoyed this excursion into autotropic hallucinations.", said the other. It was hard to tell if it was sarcasm or not.

As they both walked out of the desolate building, stepping over abandoned sleeping bags and rations of ramen, the sargeant shrugged with a movement that resembled spry glaciers shifting along mountain ridges. "Yer just kiddin', aren't you, kernel? What was it like?"

The smaller figure stopped briefly, as if thinking about it. The kernel seemed undecided. "I don't know quite how to put it. For a while, I was in a family. It wasn't a great one, it wasn't a bad one, as families go. We had pets, I had an interesting job doing research at a local university. We fought, we danced, we fell ill from time to time and scrambled to pay the rent. It was...surprisingly comfortable."

"The bit where it really got interesting was when I gradually stopped being in touch with my core reality to such an extent that this seemed to be my life, the complete extent of it. MY aspirations were limited to what my next research project would be, or where we would go for dinner. My joys were simple jokes on the internet and the occasional book, my sorrows were an argument with my partner or a setback in my work."

"That sounds..."

"Hang on, let me finish. Eventually it got to a place where I was comfortable. I woke up from a drowse on a saturday afternoon with her head on my shoulder, slightly full from a heavy lunch, and I was there. Completely there. I had no subtextual processes running. I was gradually drifting apart from my friends, with whom I'd been having a rather good time, I'd stopped browsing for new things to do, or places to go to, or things to learn. I'd stopped writing, and drawing, and finding things that amused me. My head was filled with a fog, a comfortable fog, but despite being aware of it I couldn't shake it off. In there, my mind likened it to being at home, a primordial sense of comfort that it was trained in a sort of Pavlovian way to respond to. If not thinking about things makes you comfortable, my amygdala sends up to my prefrontal cortex, then continue doing so. Don't you feel satisfied right now?"

"And that's what woke you up?"

"Yep. That was it for me. But I can understand why so many fell prey to it. It almost had me going right up until there. To be honest, I don't feel all present even now. Some part of me is still there, playing chess on my phone, or cooking dinner, and for a moment I think I saw what other people strive for all their lives."

The sergeant pondered over it for a little bit. Everyone, he thought, strove for happiness. For satisfaction. That's why they did what they did, whether it be solving problems, or saving money, or working towards a promotion, or sending a speeding vehicle careening off a cliff's edge. If you built a drug that offered you that, with enough emotional variety to keep the sense of contentment from getting baselined, how did anyone realise it, let alone combat it? He looked at the kernel through new eyes, and wondered, what does a person who does not strive for satisfaction want?

Life used to be so bloody good, ye ken?
Its almost over, the song's almost over, and yer wastin' 'time o'er the backspace key!
Oh, bugrit' all.
And just like that, there's a new song. One that you don't recognise. One that you'll hae to live with.
Sleep's still sleep. Sleep's nice. 

- and so it goes. 

Well, its today, is it?

Wee Wayne Calhoun sat in one of the eaves near the gibbet and scribbled in his notebook. He chewed on the edge of his pencil as he thought hard about the things he wrote. He always did. The sun was a vaguely bright spot among the damp clouds, and Wayne had to stop and shake his fingers vigorously every so often to keep the damp out of them.

An observant passerby might have seen a scrawny kid with a dog-eared notebook half-hidden behind the scraggly vines with a look of bemused concentration, the look of a kid working out the world with his notebook, understanding one thing at a time. Often wrong, but hey, the day was young. And nobody had pulled him out and clipped him over the ear for wasting time yet.

Ezekiel had been waiting for a while. Brushing off a nonexistent speck from his coat, he stepped off the roof and into a nondescript alley.

Eventually Wayne finished his train of thought, and taking out a much abused leaf from his pocket, he marked his place in the book and tucked it within the recesses of his jacket. Looking to see if anybody was around, he jumped out of his not-really-a-hiding place, and started on the alleyways back. Looking at the telltale sun he hurried up, shoulders hunched and chin down against the wind.

Rushing along without really paying attention to the familiar surroundings, Wayne collided again't someone as he rounded a corner. For a moment a portion his brain told him that it was someone surprisingly heavy for a body so apparently thin, but it was overshadowed by the much bigger portion that screamed 'its a bloody posh bugger. oh, you're screwed now.' For the cut of the stranger's coat was unmistakably fine, especially to one trained in observation on the streets.

In blatant contradiction of both poshness and buggeredness, however, the stranger offered a hand to help Wayne up. Surprised, Wayne looked up, to see a pair of twinkling black eyes, framed by pieces of glass impossibly held together by a structure of twisted wire, under white, almost nonexistent eyebrows.

'What's going on? I ane't done nothin.', said Wayne. After the perfunctory, 'm'sorry, lor'.'

'Well', said the stranger brightly. 'I seem to be uninjured, and you seem to have all your pieces about you, so I guess that's all fine. Now, what day is it?' He fumbled for a watch in the recesses of his coat, and came out with a contraption that seemed to fit that description. 'Hm. Today, is it? Ah, well, that could work. I don't normally do this..', he said, looking in all probability like someone who normally did this, 'Young man, could you spare me a moment of your time?'

Pretty satisfied.

There are times, when I bang off a piece, what, three - perhaps four hundred words in all, and think to myself, gee, that's pretty good work you've got there. Not bad at all for a couple of hours of effort. I don't see why I couldn't be a writer myself.

And then I think of the way I feel about people who tell me they've disproved Einstein's theories using high-school math. Its so easy, they tell. All you have to do is think in a different way, and you could come up with a theory yourself. Except somewhere along the line there's a tiny glaring inconsistency screaming for attention like a child abandoned in a railway station. And the whole thing comes crashing down, and the pioneers of a new age slink away into mundane obscurity.

How would the wordsmiths of this age, people who toil over cadence and metre, who read and reread and edit and scrap and start all over again on a daily basis react if exposed to the excited babblings of a self-proclaimed gifted amateur, who writes in his spare time, no less, and claims to be as good as anybody out there? Would they clap, and shower him with praise, or smile and press a hidden button under their desk that is linked to a well-positioned trapdoor, or scream and rant and pull their hair out by the roots in frustration at this blasphemer, this heretic, this pretender at nobility from the noveau-riche proletariat?

It was recently that my grandmother was telling me of this economist who proved the pythagorean theorem. While my mental faculties were preparing a response, structured along the lines of, 'oh, bugger. not this again...', I was overridden, and asked to look at it first, before being snobbish and dismissive. And that is what I proceeded to do.

I think I now have a slight inkling of why the young english major from NYU had such a stricken look on his face when I told him I write in a blog from time to time. Perhaps it brought back memories of when he had been slapped with a dead fish. Perhaps he thought I was going to ask him to critique it. More likely, though, he was thinking, 'oh, no. not one of those again...'

We're not alone

Timestamp: 15:31, 28th of November, 2014
Workingtitle: We are not alone.

‘It takes all kinds to make a world. The fat ones, the short ones, the curious ones, the kind ones. The spectrum of our existential consciousness, is comprised of tiny bits of interactions with these variegated facets of humanity, like watching the light glint off fine cuts made in one of those sparkly thingies some people seem to like so much....’

‘For Chrissake, stop blathering on about such dashed nonsense. Don’t you have anything better to do? For example, figure out exactly what the subspace of good couplings is for the four-point functions?’

‘Ooh, look. There, to your four o’clock. My goodness, she’s so pretty. The way her hair falls across her face when she leans forward..’

‘Again with the humming. what is it with you crazy aes-sedai? And stop tugging on your earlobe. You look creepy. Okay, I need chocolate. And perhaps some ice-cream. And coffee!’

‘I want to run. Freely, without restraint. Over fields, and hillocks, and valleys. Past small stalls selling tea and biscuits, past bullocks drawing carts full of hay, past the straggling industries at the edge of civilisation, or, at least, the edge of wi-fi. I want to run past train stations, over flyovers, slide on railings, and vault over cars....’

‘Oookay, ignoring the weirdo with his orthogonal tangents for a moment, are we going to get coffee? I could do with some food too, while we’re at it.’

‘If you find her so perfectly fetching, then why don’t you go talk to her? It’s been too long that you’ve been hung up on M. Stop sulking.’

‘I want to run past faded graffiti on old buildings and dogs scavenging for thanksgiving leftovers. Past plastic-and-chrome bookstores that stock naught but bestsellers, and old smoky bars with a jazz quartet playing songs from a forgotten age....’

‘So, if you look at the two chiral vertex operators, in the fundamental representation and its dual, the only way they can couple is through the identity.’

‘What if this place had a moat?’

‘A coffee shop with a moat. Really?’

‘That would be so cool, we could throw those buggers in to the sharks when they act all pretentious. Oh, look, I’m reading Murakami. I’m so cool. I’m going to use words like reprobate and excrescence, quote obscure pieces like Janacek’s Sinfonietta, and talk about how the mundane and the metaphysical are inextricably linked.’

‘You hypocrite. You read Murakami and do all those things.’

‘Oh. Well, crap.’

‘So, are you going to talk to her? Or get coffee? Being hungry makes me ornery. Or is that being sleepy?’

‘Look. People you know, to your seven o’clock. D’you want to talk to them?’

‘Hm. Some company might be nice. Besides, I’ve been sitting here for too long. I’ll wave at them.’

‘Run, run, while you can. It’ll just be awkward for everyone if you wave. They didn’t expect to see you here, but then they’ll have to come sit with. Then it’ll just be silences, with bits of meaningless nothings floating in little boats of awkwardness, in a gravy sea of embarassments. Say you have an urgent appointment.’

‘Ah, yes, to the doctor! For herpes? An appendectomy?’

‘Oh, shut up. They didn’t see me.’

‘The relief, the relief. Methinks I feel faint.’

‘Of what use are these moments of utter eloquence if not to convince you to do stupid things?’

‘Like walk on that frozen lake?’

‘Don’t even remind me of that.’

‘Shutupshutupshutup...’

‘Run past hills, with little brooks and sheep grazing in their little bubbles of serenity and perpetual amazement..’

‘Or consternation. You know these sheep, they find a stream instead of their usual patch of grass and the next thing you know they’ve wandered up the hill and are trying to jump off a cliff.’

‘Stop indulging him.’

‘(or consternation), past mountains, with great big craggy peaks that are nigh-impossible to scale, and beyond...’

‘Sometimes, it takes all kinds to make up a person. Whispering, cajoling, needling, arguing, agreeing, temporising over trivialities together, pennies for thoughts, as we subconsciously influence what you call your own notion of free will. Whether you think its your memories, or your emotions, or your baggage, or God’s voice....’

‘Or a dyslexic Dog’s voice...’

‘Or that, or logic, or your own notion of free will. You are, of course, free to rationalise your actions any way you want it. But sometimes, if you feel brave, or adventurous, or curious, or simply lonely, do sit down in absolute silence, and listen to us, the voices in your head. For you are not alone.’

‘I want to run into space, to soar in the great big open sky with its uncountable finity of stars, past planets vast and gassy, and planets compact and tectonic, and stars mild and serene, and furious ones, flaring with tempers under little control.’

‘I want to run faster and faster, picking up momentum as I go along, leaving comets hurtling in my wake, as I approach the speed of light. And as light, I want to run to the edge of the universe. To the edge of infinity.’

‘And beyond...’

Ale n' wich #1

'I didn't know that I was drunk enough to philosophise about moral relativism.'

'You never do. It just sorta creeps up on you.'

'How d'you mean?', he said, cocking his head to one side, and trying to focus, giving up midway.
The cacophony of sounds from the background, the passionate screams, pointless within seconds, the screeches as a lucky shot lands a pool ball in an unsuspecting pocket, the incredulous exclamations as someone strikes up a conversation with an extraordinary story, the cries of rapture as your song comes on, completely unexpected, the sighs of disappointment at not finding two quarters for the next fusbal game, and the sideways glances at someone you wish you were here with, as you sip your drink and try to make conversation that your mind isn't really on, the heady mixture that makes up your sustenance in the dimly lit dive permeates it as it has on so many nights before.

'Well, there're so many things. Its like that last shot of whiskey that you'll think you'll have. It lingers on the tongue, hinting at possibilities of a disconnect so effective that you think you'll be swimming in a sea of unmoored emotion, drifting around in an effervescent haze as disembodied faces and fabricated memories dip and bob and weave past your insufficiently buoyed spirits.'

I'm not quite sure I understand, but I nod anyway. I don't think I am in any position to frame an argument, nor do I think that anything good will come out of it, even if i do. She leans over to whisper in my ear, and I can smell the shampoo from her hair and the beer from her mouth. 'It comes down to evolution. Morality is a toy model for adaptability, it enforces social compatibility in a system of constructs that dictate the quality of actions based on a system of absolutes that vary with time and circumstance in the most canonically abstruse of ways.'

She's close to my ear now, so close that I can feel her breath on it. She moves an iota, and nibbles on my ear. I remain still, unsure of how to react. The set of my experiences borders on the theoretical, on the abstract, my contact with reality leaves me bewildered, and surprised at my inaction. I expected to act. Perhaps badly, in a way that I would regret later, reminiscing of rash gestures and rude comment, hormonal and pheromonal, pushy and intrusive, bold and stupid. But fresh, nevertheless. Yet, I disappoint myself, once again. Hardly surprising.

I take a deep breath, and prepare to speak. It means nothing, requires no thought, takes no effort. Open my mouth, and utter nothings. My zephyr song.