tired fools

when i saw the initial pictures of saddam up to the moment of the hanging, i wondered how long it would be before the net spewed forth the whole thing. well, here it is.

In a precurser to what will surely come, the Nintendo Wii promises to get a little more NSFW in future. Leisure Suit Larry is coming to town.

With the Wiimote strapped firmly on your hips, you must thrust and gyrate in a “pleasing” manner. For the sexually inept, your conquest just may fail and she will fall asleep, turn the TV on or just get up and leave. Those that you satisfy will earn you libido points and help you as you go along. But enough bad reviews and the girls will be laughing and pointing at you as you walk by.

Beta testers for the new release have had nothing but positive reviews so far. “Other than my mom wondering why the sofa cushions are such a mess, there is no downside to this game,” said one enthusiastic player.

Another said, “No wonder I can’t keep a girlfriend. I had no idea that was how it was supposed to work.”

I bought Zac a PSP on the first UK release date from Game, a chain of video game stores in the UK. One of the buttons got stuck. We took it to the store in Bromley yesterday. The PSP is well over a year old now, and my hopes of an easy resolution weren’t high. Zac, unbenownst to him has a couple of PSP games coming his way next week. Having the PSP off for repair over the Christmas period would be unfortunate. What did Game do?

They took the old PSP away, popped a new one in a bag and handed it over with zero fuss or comment. Zac left smiling from ear to ear. Nice one.

The problem: many countries prohibit animal sacrifice
The solution: buy an animal over the net, then watch someone else kill it.

“We have a dedicated IP address and people can watch the sacrifice no matter which country they are in,” said organization official Shakeel Dehalvi.

Animals are available on the Web sites for between $100 (6,000 rupees) for a goat and $450 for a cow.

I found a collection of buttons on the bottom of a blog post today. You’ve probably all seen something similar. It’s the same issue as with RSS (no longer just a link, but many links to RSS readers). In this case you click one of the buttons and effectively recommend the post to the social site. Hey why not click them all?

Add to Social Site: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

* digg
* Reddit
* del.icio.us
* YahooMyWeb
* De.lirio.us
* blinkbits
* BlinkList
* blogmarks
* co.mments
* connotea
* Fark
* feedmelinks
* Furl
* LinkaGoGo
* Ma.gnolia
* NewsVine
* Netvouz
* RawSugar
* scuttle
* Shadows
* Simpy
* Smarking
* Spurl
* TailRank
* Wists

Question, is this list going to get longer or shorter?

the 2nd installment:

tried fools (cont.)

HARLING
Brigitta called early today, around lunchtime I think. I was half-asleep and my conscious was filled with Sartie’s Gnossiennes. I didn’t want to be disturbed and I let it show. She cried.

We made up with a cuddle. Her hair carried a hint of the meadow I lived beside when I was a child. Everything about her reminds me of when I was a young man. I hate that.

Her father, John, was like a brother to me. Not that I didn’t have one already, though he and I were like strangers. But John died. I was with him, I saw him die. His face turned a deep red, he coughed fighting for breath, he checked out. We were roughly the same age, early forties, and Brigitta was yet to reach puberty. It came as a huge blow to her, losing her dad. Her mother had fucked off long ago. She went to find herself shortly after the millennium and ended up losing everyone she knew. She didn’t leave any contact details and we didn’t try, not even when Brigitta was left on her own. I was the sole constancy in Brigitta’s life, the replacement father. She went to live with an aunt in Deptford but I kept my promise to John.

I forget myself. I made no such promise, and no request was made. I invented that for Brigitta, and it made her feel better. But I did keep in contact, and as she grew up we saw more and more of each other. I watched her blossom. I watched her hair grow, her angularity soften into gentle arcs. She is more beautiful than her mother had been when I had known her, but she carries the same insecurities and my magic works just the same.

Brigitta hated the harshness of her aunt’s manners. She was tolerated but not loved. Everything she needed came from me. I funded her education, her wardrobe, set her up in an apartment not too far away, but not on my doorstep. She adored being a part of London and I took her everywhere. Arm in arm we’d walk across Waterloo Bridge as the sun set. I’d ask her what this and that building was. She learned the names of all the bridges. We still do it today, although the skyline changes so often that I don’t carry the answers to my own questions. She, however, is au fait with everything that is going on. She is my access to the emerging world.

When we go out to dinner I notice, with absolute satisfaction, the looks that we get. I stride as well as I’ve ever done, but I carry a silver-topped cane as an affectation. As we walk she smiles. She smiles more than anyone I have ever known. She takes my coat as we enter the restaurant; she ensures I am comfortable before she sets herself. She is an angel.

I hold her in my arms, the meadow wells up in my memory and I see my brother and I hurling clods of earth at each other. I carry a scar to this day, more visible than ever now that my hair has thinned and lost it’s colour. A stray piece of flint and my ensuing scream, more of outrage than of hurt, despite the blood from the open wound. I can feel the ridge of aged scar tissue, smooth amidst the dry leather of my skin. Brigitta looks up as I finger my skull and swears that she has never noticed that ridge before. I tell her of the clods of earth in summer and the snow in winter, how my brother and I fought until we left home, and have neither fought nor seen each other since. I don’t tell her how I revenged myself for that hurt, but I can see it clearly now. Odd how so many things we have gone through but of which we are unaware until moments like this. I can see him on the swing poking out his tongue. What is he? Seven or eight, perhaps. That would make me just ten. That ten-year-old barks for him to get off and do it now. Or what? He says. The rough plank I held behind my back now whirls through the air. I see a nail standing proud as it spins. Did I know, then, that there were nails in the wood? I can’t recall. So much blood.

It is okay now. Brigitta slips off to the kitchen and emerges with tea. I settle in my chair by the fire. There is a lamp on in the far corner of the room but it is not bright. The flames from the fire light her eyes as she talks to me from the floor, her fine fingers cradling her mug for warmth. She likes it here; she says it reminds her of home. I know that this is wrong but I know what she means. This is, or rather, I am, her home.

She wants to tell me something, that much is obvious. However, it’s part of the beauty of life to receive information on one’s own terms, hence the slight contretemps earlier on. But we are settled now and she may begin. Did I mention that she had a sweet voice?

BRIGITTA
You know that I applied for a position with the Bureau? Well I got it!

HARLING
That she is thrilled is obvious, that my approval is important, even more so. That education I had paid for, Oxford then United London University, all exemplary grades. She has a PhD and I half-fancied her remaining an academic. After all if she looked up to me, which she undoubtedly did, and if she were an eminent Professor somewhere, why, didn’t that say something about me? Not that her area of expertise in any way reflected my own, not at all. She majored in History and Archaeology and went on to study Genetics. I had a more humble background in Literature and Music.

BRIGITTA
Harling, . . .

HARLING
She called me by my surname in the same manner as her father, the two of us having left Lancing College suitably prepared for the previous century.

BRIGITTA
. . . you know it’s what I wanted all along, what I’ve worked for since I was fourteen. Now I’ve got it, aren’t you pleased? Really, I’m too excited for words.

HARLING
Me too, I assure her, and I demand to hear all about it.

Of course I knew of the Bureau, pretty much known as that because no one could remember quite what it’s full name was. Like every other organisation it had the letters U and N in there somewhere. What was it? UNBBM, or was it UNBEBM? What did it matter? I remember it being set up sometime after the millennium, a body to look after the public genome projects that were being undertaken. As far as I could recall they searched out malign genes and instigated programmes to eradicate them from future generations. They were variously hailed as being at least partly responsible, amongst other things, for the fall in infant mortality and the reduction in violent crime in recent years.

So, I say, you’re going to find all those nasty genes that make the world a rough old place?

BRIGITTA
Not at all. I’ve been selected to join the investigative department, ensuring that gene sequences which are identified as being ‘nasty’ don’t have any beneficial characteristics. We don’t want to wipe out a future Raphael or a Mozart do we?

HARLING
Apparently, and I didn’t know this, the Bureau employs several hundred archaeo-geneticists who trawl through archives. They look for traits and behavioural patterns that can be attributed to one gene or sequence. Fascinating stuff, if not without some inherent problems.

Does it pay well, I ask, as any avuncular figure should at such a time.

BRIGITTA
I’ll get by.

HARLING
She smiled a beautiful smile and I quite lost the urge to argue personal freedoms. Another time, I thought, another time. Right now she was happy and I was content that that was the case.

I proposed an immediate celebration and we agreed on The Lansborough. I ask Brigitta to call a cab as I busy myself with an old man’s fear of the cold.

BRIGITTA
You really must do something about your house, Harling, I can get someone to sort it out for you.

HARLING
We have discussed this a thousand times. Albeit with some affection, Brigitta sees me dwelling in some antediluvian hovel. In Brigitta’s apartment you only have to mention a cab and, by the time you got to the door, there would be one waiting. It’s not that she minds getting out her phone to hail a taxi, more the incidental things like light-switches. She can never find the one she’s after and she flaps her arms in frustration. Light switches, I guess, are intuitive when that’s all one is used to. Not that Brigitta gets mad. Emotional yes, angry no. But, when we walk out, it is she that checks to see if the door is locked. Not anger, just fear.

This generation will change us, as every generation does, and there will be no turning back. What confuses me is the extreme pace of it all. Life seems pretty much the same on a day-to-day basis; indeed, it doesn’t actually feel any different to my youth. However, one glance with the benefit of hindsight and one becomes aware of the vast differences.

I play this game with myself, and have done for many years. I stand before my bathroom mirror, an old-fashioned one, one I would recognise from my childhood, and I pause. I find that I can bring my twenty-year-old self forward. I always start with the mirror but I can exist in that state thereafter for quite a while. Why do I do this? I allow my young self to be amazed at the lifestyle changes that have occurred, at this almost fantastic technology that surrounds us, me, even in my semi-luddite manner of living.

There is also another aspect of it. Some part of me believes that by bringing forward that young man, I am also passing something to myself as I was then. Years ago I thought that I was saying ‘it’s okay, look, everything works out just fine, you’ve got all this to look forward to’. Now I suppose my attitude has changed slightly. It is more that I am still alive, that there is a future of some kind. I find it difficult to make any kind of judgement at all. In fact I pretty much think that any course I had taken would be equally as valid. The signal, I think, is just one of ‘keep on’. I have often found a sense of familiarity as I manoeuvred myself about life and found myself in new situations and places. I put it down to this practice of pre-warning.

So it is that Brigitta and I climb into a cab, she from one side, me the other. Her lithe form is settled first, my entrance met with a sparkle of sapphire. And on.

i looked at the referrers data for this blog today. i got a hit from a query on jamespot. The search was for “porn OR countryside“.

being quite drunk, and with a combination of other circumstances (chiefly people asking and realising i’m not going to do anything with it in the short term), i’ve decided to blog my book. well, we’ll see how it goes.

so, from the beginning:

tired fools

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth have hardly any existence, and that the true nature of reality is found only in dreams.

FRANZ KAFKA
Don’t fools get tired?
How could fools get tired!

***

1014337
.
. .
. . .
. . . .

she is here.

***

A pair of eyes, improbably blue, scan the horizon.

Vacron thinks.

Once, there was a world. From the flatness of this space, these few miles, to the whole globe. A globe of business and pleasure, of life being as it was.

Now we wait. One day to the next.

They, the ones who had come before, thought they were headed somewhere. A future, good or bad. But always ahead. Does anyone, now, look to a future?

There was a time, he knew, when it had vexed many. Wars even, had been fought. There had been a misapprehension. The future would not always lie ahead.

What the billions that had come before him would make of it’s final manifestation, Vacron is unsure. That there would, or could, be no other, he was certain. He had been taught that everyone gets what they want. When he looked backwards, at what had been aspired to, he guessed that had always been true. Everyone gets what they want.

Vacron waits.

Not an aspiration, an interval. In twenty-nine days he would be fifteen years old.

Vacron crouches down and begins to mark the dust. With a finger he traces out four vertical lines, then cuts them with a diagonal. A five-bar gate. Steadily he repeats the process until there are five gates. At the sixth he ceases before the final line.

VACRON
Twenty-nine.

Then adds the diagonal with a flourish.

VACRON
Thirty! Fabian.

Vacron considers.

In a ceremony, held on the next full moon, the villagers would sit late into the night and bid him farewell. Last night it had been Fabian.

There wasn’t anything in particular that bound them, it had just always been easy. From the time when he was seven, Fabian had mattered. But it was over now.

Everyone would still be moping around the village. Ordinarily Vacron liked to avoid it. The villagers’ brand of earth and toil, is a throwback of incredible proportions, back maybe a thousand years. Against his better judgement, he had stayed. Curled up against the outside wall of Noma’s house he’d fallen to a fitful sleep. It isn’t something that he’s made a habit of, and he’s glad that he’s not there now.

Noma comes to school only occasionally. It’s clear that she is going nowhere. Her father’s doing. Seelan, as near to a leader as the villagers can manage. On the few occasions that they had spoken, it had always been pleasant enough. It was what he stood for that Vacron abhorred.

Never overestimate humanity, thinks Vacron. Here is mankind delivered of a future in which each participant chooses their own way, where their needs and wishes are met without obstacle. The sages and the dreamers of the millennia that had passed had all seen such a place, yet each saw something different. And now all of these visions had been proven. All. Man could have what he wanted. The sole remaining choice was whether to take part. Seelan and his small band of followers, no doubt mirrored in other parts of the world, chose against. Fabian and Vacron put it down to poor genes, the inability to differentiate between realities. Fabian used to say that it was like taking off the blindfold and keeping your eyes closed.

Being not a mile from the sea, the village is cruelly exposed to the elements. The salt air renders cultivating anything an extreme act of defiance, yet it is done. Vacron watches twenty or so men and women, dressed in drab cloth, walk out along the unmetalled road carrying hand-made hoes and picks. They would pass the near-empty dorms in which food could be had free of toil and which would provide clothing designed for the conditions in which they lived. But no one could be coerced. What would be the point?

It had taken many years for Vee to become accepted. And even then it wasn’t that everyone suddenly decided to go along with it. People are inherently conservative. Gradually more and more stations were built, blocks and blocks of them. An air of finality must have overcome those remaining. They grew older and the young grew to maturity then disappeared. Skills were not passed on. Through Vee, people lived far longer and the world’s population grew to extraordinary proportions, but effectively the outside world became depopulated. Trans-national structures deteriorated then disappeared. Almost the last act of true governance was the formalisation of the universal right to access at the age of majority. Within a hundred years Vee had replaced society almost entirely. Those, like the villagers, were a tiny minority, operating in isolated pockets. Man is stubborn. Perhaps, thinks Vacron, these odd groupings will survive for some time to come; yet he knows that finally they, too, must succumb.

The present future, the future present. A destination reached. The failure, of some, to disembark could not negate that fact.

Without Fabian, Vacron is alone for the first time in years. As far as he is aware he intends to head east, toward the sea, but he finds himself walking north. To the north and west lay nothing except station upon station, vast rectangular blocks that seemed to act like pillars connecting earth and sky. Everything is quiet. Away from the dorm, and from the village and fields, Vacron can be sure of being alone. There is simply no reason for anyone to come here. Yet he knows he is surrounded. Countless souls wander unseen landscapes. In the stillness he half fancies he can hear an echo. Some activity lying somewhere just below the surface. All else is still. He aches with the proximity.

He makes his way between two stations now, barely fifty feet separating them. He has no idea how the buildings were planned or are maintained. He guesses that the same kind of regime operates here as it does in the dorms. An automated system took care of everything, largely unseen. He knows that there are automatons, which conduct repairs when necessary. He and Fabian had seen one. That was many years ago, perhaps he would have been nine or ten. They were out west, probably two or three hours walk. The metal-backed creature was scuttling up one of the huge edifices, pausing every few feet. They watched it for a while, threw stones at it, but it never seemed aware of them. Finally it climbed to the very top and disappeared from view.

He skirts around the northern edge of the village a few blocks inside the array of stations. He wonders where his body will come to rest. He knows that, when the time comes, he will be given the block address. These numbers appear at the ground level of each building, standing an inch proud of the mottled grey-green cladding. Vacron is before block PP239 right now. He runs his fingers over the letters. The cladding seemed slightly sticky. He knows that if you look closer you can make out a hexagonal pattern under the surface, like a honeycomb. Quite how you gained access to the inside he wasn’t entirely sure. He had heard that the door just opened, although how it knew you were there, or recognised someone as being authorised to enter, was a mystery to him. Many times he and Fabian had tried to force sharp stones or twigs into half-imagined gaps, which they took to be the outline of an opening. They had hammered their fists, shouted, spat and urinated against the walls, all to no avail. But it won’t be long now, thinks Vacron. For Fabian the time had already come.

Vacron remembers.

Last night, in the village, sitting under the moon, Fabian was set on his way. Seelan and some of the elders talked in half-whispers about living a true life. Odd how two groups of people can attend one ritual yet relate to it in such different ways. For Seelan’s people there was sorrow, for everyone else a celebration of majority. They had sat with bowls of foul-smelling plant-extracts around a large fire. There had been music, fiddles and a guitar, others danced and sang. At the end of the evening, in the small hours of the morning, Fabian stood to go. As he walked away, Vacron too had risen. Fabian grabbed his hand. Vacron remembered his eyes moisten but tried not to let it show. His last memory of Fabian was of him walking away in a blur shouting out “PP239.”

Vacron sits with his back against the edifice and completes his tears.

place a guy in total sensory deprivation for three years and see what happens. yes, it’s been done.

How about a trip to the dentist:

A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.

and the result:

He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.

and who would perform such an experiment? why, the US government, of course.

there’s a new ripper abroad. this time he’s in Ipswich, suffolk, five bodies and counting. last night there were four bodies and prostitutes were urged to keep off the streets, the bbc interviews a girl going to work as normal. she has to feed her heroin habit, she explains. today she turns up dead.