Thursday, December 20, 2007

Jennifer's Stockings

I'm afraid I live in a keepsake-free world. My parents and grandparents have not seen fit to pass anything down to me save varying degrees of love and disappointment, and a rickety compliment of genes. A large square jaw for example, has been handed down the male side of my family like a slab of beef for three generations. I keep it fenced off behind a beard, where it cannot harm people.

Jennifer was a woman I met in the year before I left the country. She was tall, almost matching me for height in her heels. She had a funny way of walking: a defensive strut that reversed the usual tits-out/tummy-in/ass-out elongated 'S' of walking womanhood. Jennifer would fold her shoulders around the front of her rib-cage - hiding her breasts, and then lean way back, cantilevering her pelvis forward and scrunching her butt away into nothing. Her chin she would bury into the hollow of her throat; her eyes tucked away behind double fortress walls of fringe and brow. When she walked, if you were squinting from a distance, you'd be reminded of a heron poised to strike.
...Continued...

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

An End to Evolution.

I think quite frankly, that I'm sick of hearing the word "evolution". It's such a fucking hooker of a word - every Tom, Dick and Hitler has co-opted it at some point.

To my mind, Darwin, or at least misunderstandings and misapplications of his ideas both in the social and eugenic arenas, have caused more deaths in the past century than the atom bomb.

At the very least, the term evolution has become so ingrained with anthropomorphic overtones that I think in the grubby little mind of your average secular humanist, it has simply jumped into the hole left by the absence of God. Chop off God's beard, blind him and make him a little more slimy - ét voila - hello Captain Evolution.

...Continued...

Progress and Invention.

Truly, nothing mankind has achieved in the span they have existed, can be classed as new. Newness, true originality, is impossible to the conscious seeker. It is impossible to create something that bears no relation to anything that has gone before, from material already extant. It is impossible to have an idea that bears no relation to anything already imagined. Originality, in its pure form, cannot exist.

Try it if you don't believe me. Do this simple thing for me: Remember something. Right now.

Did you draw a blank..? I did - without any prompt to spur a particular memory, there are no memories.

Now, try think of something that is truly unrelated to anything you have previously experienced....Continued...

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Negative Spaces

I'd been checking my e-mail when my son's lego tower had toppled.

"Daddy" he'd said. "When you gonna finish lookin' your 'pooter..?"

"Soon" I'd said, for the umpteenth time. "Soon."

So he rebuilt his tower, this time the design both higher and even less structually conventional than its predecessor. The tower teetered... It swayed... And then collapsed in a multi-coloured rain of plastic bricks. The architect began to wail. "Daaddeeee..."

"Don't worry." I'd said to him.
"I'll stop." I said.
"I'll help you."

And with that, with those eight simple, everyday syllables, my life started to unravel.
...Continued...

Under Pressure

The Champagne designed to be sipped at twenty-thousand feet is different from the stuff mere mortals slurp at sea-level. Less gas. Drink it on the ground and it tastes flat, like day-old Cola left tepid in the glass. But let it flow over your tongue while you watch the clouds scatter beyond the plexiglass windows, and it is once more, pure heaven....Continued...

Spring-Heeled Jack

It's not the start of the story, but rather the end, the part I always remember. It reminds me of a big musty bed shared with my little sister in my Grandparent's draughty old house, where we would cower and clasp eachother giggling like fools - half scared, half delighted, as Granny told stories in the dark.
____________________________

"This isn't funny Josh, it's getting dark already and I can't get my mobile to work - are you going to be able to get the car started or not..?"
____________________________

Granny would never start her tales in the traditional way, but rather she would start with "When ahh were naught but a girl." and then unfold the story from there. She was awful old my Gran. As wizened as an orange left out in the wind, she'd never admit to an age and yet, for all her claims of aching backs and ricketty knees, she somehow remained as and spry and hearty as a hawthorn bush, all whip and prickle.

She told us many stories over the years: stories perhaps that parents now would shudder at and not permit - penny-dreadfuls and burlesque - the big bad wolves always got cut in half and those stupid, bone-grinding giants would slit their own stomachs as Jack laughed. River sprites and leering elves and goblins and golems and gollywogs.

And of course Jack.
Jumping Jack.
Spring-heeled Jack.

...Continued...

Homo Suburbia

The baby wakes him, chuntering in her crib - the little teeth pushing slowly through the thin of skin her gums making her short-tempered and fractious. Silently beside him his wife rises to offer her breast. Grey light slides uneasily behind the curtains, he doesn't know wether to get up or not - the alarm clock says it's five-thirtyish - he's got the option of another hour or so's sleep. Then the baby vetos the decision by refusing to return to the land of nod. A ball of softly flailing limbs pushes him off the edge of the bed and into his slippers.

The baby's wails awaken him. The fire has burnt down to a dull orange glow amid a heap of blue-grey ash. His woman shifts under the heap of furs and draws the infant closer, pushing her chapped nipple to his fumbling lips. The baby's cries soften and cease. An ember pops and hisses. At the cave-mouth the cold dawn sky brightens the rock and air sharp with Autumn grazes his cheeks. He rolls out of the furs and stretches, sinews popping in his neck and old scar-tissue across his back twanging tight. Strapping his feet and ankles with swathes of hide, chewed and pissed on, he strides out to the mouth of the cave, to consult with the other men....Continued...

Triptych

Playing Chicken

I itch when I see them; their clucking and scratching and flapping and strutting makes my skin break out in hives. I hate the way their movements are so twitchy - all stop and go - no interim of speeding up and slowing down just a sudden walk/not walk, turn/not turn, peck/not peck - mechanical somehow, sinister. But still, fascinated, I have to look - little dinosaurs, do they remember us..?

I've been working in the battery chicken farm for the last seven years. A hundred thousand saw-beaked birds all squashed into one great hanger sized building, the air heated by their own scrawny little quill-bristled bodies; the air filled with the phosphate guano-stink of chicken shit and rusty cages. It gets under your nails and into your skin you know, rubs itself into your bones over the years, that greasey chicken stink....Continued...

Dance Hall Days

We were drunk as fuck. Five quadruple vodkas-and-orange in different pubs around central Nottingham were as cheap a way to jump-start a Friday-night as we could find.

Don't get us wrong, we had class, we were just too poor to express it in our drinking habits. We were young then and always in a hurry - we drank as a means, rather than as an end in itself - a means of losing the part of ourselves that stopped us from taking risks; a means of eluding our self-consciousness, of drowning it out under a layer of cheap supermarket booze and a couple of ice-cubes. A means of becoming something both more and less than ourselves for one night a week.

And meeting women of course. Let's not get too poetic here. We drank mainly as a means to a leg-over....Continued...

Silence in Cacophony

It is a great pity that silence is not a tangible thing, rather than simply an absence. Imagine silence bottled, powdered, weaponized. Imagine riot-police hurling quiet-bombs at political rallies. Imagine immensely silent football matches, after mutually-assured-dumbness exchanges across the terraces by rival fans. Open-mouths endlessly filled with completely soundless curses; bruised lips stretched and tongues tie-twisted around syllables of taunt and chant. World-cup penalty shoot-outs acomplished in a divinely perfect hush.
...Continued...

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Dawkin's Legacy

The first thing to remember about evolution is that it doesn't exist. It's a none-independent term, like calling a place where two roads meet "the corner of 5th and main" or whatever. The road is only the fifth counting from some arbitrary starting place, the other is the main one because for some reason it's wider, the name would be meaningless without the roads, the roads undistinguished without a name and everything meaningless without cars or people to drive them. Nothing stands alone, it's all a bunch of dominoes piled one against the other. ...Continued...

Friday, June 01, 2007

Sexual law.

There is something fundamentally wrong with using morality and sexuality in the same sentence.

Perhaps we should take things right back to the beginning and build from there..?

There was a bang, and a lot of energy got very energetic all of a sudden. It wasn't too happy about this. It decided to do something about it - all the concentrated energy in this baby universe decided to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity. Entropy. It came up with some ingenious ways to do this. Planets for example, suns. All wonderful ways to spread useful energy around in a thin layer of useless heat. And Life. In a large enough support medium, any event that does not contravene the extant physical laws inherrant to that medium, becomes inevitable. Amino-acids form spontaneously in-vitro, if the right chemical pre-cursors and conditions prevail. And later, replicators, DNA strands, single-celled lifeforms... And much much later - Us. Each wiggle and thrash of lifes' fledgling limbs and pseudopods adding a little more entropy to the pile. Complexity out of simplicity, bought at the price of increasing heat-death that much faster....Continued...