Electricity

1. I GOT UP and opened the door. The world outside seemed real, so I stepped into it. The resolution was amazing, the framerate too. I took a few steps - the ground held. 

2. THERE WAS ELECTRICITY inside the house, which pulled on me like gravity. Why leave the house, when all the stories in the world are available to you through the magic of electricity? I left anyway. Gravity is addictive but so is escape velocity.

3. THE SKY WAS radiant grey with a jagged white smirk, probably because from the looks of things it had pissed all over everything while I was asleep. Pretty childish really, but what can you say to the sky? Anyway, sky-piss cleans the dust off everything and if you drink it it cleanses you too. Some places it was traditional that the local visionary would eat something hallucinogenic and everyone else would drink their piss and partake of their visions, and the sky is the ultimate visionary, no? She sees everything. So it follows that drinking that stuff lets you in on what the sky sees.

4. I WALKED TO the creek and then ran up the path beside it. Everything was wet there too, everything drunk on sky-piss. The trees swayed gently side-to-side like Woodstock hippies. The grass lay on the ground in a wet stupor. We let each other be.

5. THERE WERE TALL electricity pylons running up the creek like me. They looked like wire-frame drawings of church spires, which made sense: this all happened in 2014 when electricity was some kind of religion. Because why leave the house? Why not stay home and commune with electricity &c &c.

6. THE CLOCK HAD fallen off one of these spires and turned into a football field. I could tell it was a clock because when I ran past it the other day there was a runner turning slow regular circles around it like a second-hand. The hours and minutes had turned into seven humans and seven dogs. The humans chatted and swayed affably like trees drunk on sky-piss. The dogs ran happily around like quantum weirdness. Today time had apparently stopped-

7.

8. -BECAUSE THE FIELD was just ecstatic grass, staring wetly up at the sky. Anyway it was fine with me if time stopped a bit, because this was 2014. In 2014 we'd invented this demon called climate change, and it was freaking me out. It was like a fist around the throat of my unborn daughter. I wanted to unclench that fist even a little but I had to talk other people into it too. This was a problem because I'd woken up in a death-cult: everyone had agreed secretly that we were going to kill ourselves and now no-one wanted to talk about it. They just kept smiling like amusement park clowns. It was creeping me out.

(I kept running.)

9. AND SINCE IT was all a trajectory, a certain movement through time, time stopping suited me just fine. It gave me a moment to think. I had this inkling there were gaps in how the death cult operated, a thermal exhaust port on the death star a skywalker could fly down, and that language had something to do with it. I thought if you could just find the right words they'd be like a bomb thrown down to the heart of the death star and the whole thing could be blown open.

10. THE HOLY SKY got cheeky and started pissing on me. I took it like a benediction, wet drops blatting on my red rainjacket. The trick was to cast a spell, that's what it was. There were demons all through us, they'd colonised us, turned us against ourselves. The trick was to shake the demons up but it was delicate. We had the guilt of an occupied people. If you said things wrong people thought you were attacking them, trying to make them feel bad, and they hardened against you and defended their right to die and the spell was wasted.

11. I TURNED FOR home, back where the electricity was, where I am now, typing. Electricity is good but it's good to remember your family name, and that's easier outside. Your family name is LIFE and so is mine. Our family is four billion years old. It made us. Thanks LIFE! You're the best. I am too small to find the spell but you are not. I am your sometimes-humble servant, drunk on the glowing world. Speak through me. X

rules for trees and grass, my people, the moon out of focus, the possibility of a vast network of tunnels beneath the earth.

hello
- lionel richie

why hello, lionel. how's the kids?

this is a funny little story. i'm not sure about it but i get the feeling it's time to let it go and find its fortune, out there in the kingdoms and prince-bishoprics and so on. it can cross streams and talk to magical beasts like for example unicorns and cicatrices and griffins and the enigmatic sphinx, the sphinx who knows all but speaketh in riddles &c &c. i'm not sure about it cos i sewed it up from the corpses of other things. dr frankenstein did this and look where it got him: running for his life across the icy tundras and floes of the arctic circle and if nothing else enters into the matter we should at least consider that the arctic circle isn't quite what it used to be back then.

nonetheless: i hafta let it go cos it's distracting me from the story i really want to write (which is about invisibility and has a spell in it and everything). hopefully it'll be ok out there in the world, the world all bright and radiant, radiant with the light from various motherfucking celestial bodies, bodies all burning far from the earth we wander and people will be nice to it. one thing in its favour is it's made of fragments, just like everything else in the world.

you: f-fragments?
me: yes! fragments!

(pause)

you: w-what about trees?
me: yeah! trees too! which reminds me:


1. rules for trees and grass
i've been looking at trees recently, at the way they extend through space and feed on what passes through that space. it's neat: they apply the same rules over and over, trees do: go this far (where 'this far' is a proportion of the distance between where you are now and your total height, like say 2/5ths of it or maybe 3/7ths) and then split into this many pieces (give or take 2) at around about this angle and then keep doing it again until you turn into leaves.

what ends up happening is that trees control a field, roughly barbell-shaped, around a central vertical axis. they leave a gap in the middle for the horizon to pass through.

grass, on the other hand, is all about occupying a plane. if grass has a rule it's 'go about this far and tie yourself in a little knot through the horizon. repeat until you run out of planar space.'

what ends up happening here is that grass has no trunk to cut: it's got no central point to attack: howabout that.

you: ok, but w-what about people?
me: wait, i thought we were talking about trees?
you: we were! but now i want to know about people!
me: well... howabout this:


2. my people

it is the right of every traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends. expect long descriptions of everything.
- jonathan strange, in jonathan strange & mr norrell, susanna clarke.

i went to the writers' festival the other day. i got there just in time. i was going to hear a talk about the creative commons. it was in a theatre. i walked in and sat down.

something felt funny and then i realised what it was and it was this: i had, gentle reader, the distinct sensation that i'd suddenly come home, somehow, that i'd found my people. i was.. uncomfortable. i wasn't sure i wanted to be having that sensation at exactly that time, surrounded by exactly those people. everyone was, well, bookish.. a little uncool perhaps. and surely, surely waaay less cool than me. surely. i was a little disturbed so i took a water bottle out of my bag to have a drink and then noticed everyone around me already had their water bottles out. my people carry their own water, apparently. i drank anyway. i wasn't going to be put off. i sat there for a bit. the speakers weren't there yet so i took a book out of my bag so as to pass the time and then realised of course everyone around me already had their books out. damn. however, women were wearing shawls and sensible jeans. i wasn't wearing a shawl. that was one point of distinction i could hold onto. i was dreaming when i wrote this. what?


3. the moon out of focus

i was dreaming when i wrote this
- prince

the other night i kept walking out of the house to look at the moon. there was a lunar eclipse and i wanted to see it. the first time i went out it was cloudy and so the moon was hazy. eventually the cloud cleared but the moon still looked hazy. it was weird. it reminded me of the actor who was always out of focus, a character in woody allen's deconstructing harry. one web site summarised the plot of deconstructing harry like this:

"..revolves around the problems of a new york writer's creative and erotic life."

gee, i thought. now that narrows it down a lot. doesn't it? hacks down the allen canon a tad, wouldn't you say? excludes one or two films, hm? or maybe not? perhaps? maybe i have my sarcastic voice on, hmm? maybe it's actually a pretty fucking succinct precis of the old man's entire motherfucking corpus, hmm?

but i am being unfair! it excludes all the films by woody allen which aren't about woody allen! which by a shocking coincidence are probably also my favourite of his films, like sweet and lowdown, or purple rose of cairo.

by the way: these emails are best viewed in html, if you have the option. if you wonder why i keep fucking up my formatting with <str> and </em> and shit like that, it's cos you're looking at them in plain text.

and you know what i hate? not much, actually: i ain't a playa hater. still, i hate comedians who feel the need to link all their gags somehow: "and another thing about squirrels..", say. steven wright is the perfect example of a comedian who doesn't do this and is very funny. why do the others bother? maybe they are distracted by the possibility of a vast network of tunnels beneath the earth.


4. tunnels
what was i talking about? i can't remember but it's possible there is a vast network of tunnels beneath the earth. underground cities and everything.

i wrote the other day about a hole baterz and some other people dug. i got some of the details wrong and benjow wrote to correct me. his story contains these words:

the smoke got thicker and thicker. they started to freak out and called the firemen (or maybe they arrived on their own accord), but anyway they turned up with some police, to help look for the fire. and they were all wandering around our house in their gear going 'wow you guys are really BUMS'. at the time we were all vaguely moving out and most of the rooms were full of piles of rubbish...it must have been a bit like one of those tenants from hell ACA exposes. anyway, eventually they kicked down the door to baterz's old room (or maybe they just unlocked it, who knows) and discovered the source of the smoke--the hole, which was now billowing blissfully.

..among others. it's very funny: go and read it .

xxxx

there seemed to be only one of me and

i got up. it was cold. i was vibrating with the cold.

i walked to the post office. it was still cold. the sky was clear. it was blue, because there were no clouds overhead. the only clouds in the sky were contrails from my jet mouth.

in the post office a man with a hook for a hand served a man with only one arm. i know the one-armed man. his name is joe. he runs the organic shop down the road. he has a sign on the wall:

DON'T BLAME JOE
HE SAYS WHAT HE DOES
BECAUSE HE LOVES YOU

'you don't want to lick the stamps,' joe was saying. 'they're full of toxins'. joe's eyes shine with the radiant loving light of someone who either (a) eats a lot of organic food or (b) is crazy.

outside the shadows were clean. they had clear, calm edges because there were no clouds between me and the sun. i walked on some of them. i walked on the shadows of some poles and some wires. the grass stood up straight.

i saw a tree. it had no leaves but it still had a lot of seed-pods dangling from the branches. i felt kind of embarrassed. it looked like the tree had let itself go some(naked)how and i felt bad for it. still: i couldn't look away.

i had contracted to a single point because it was cold. it was interesting. it made my identity easier to manage. there seemed to be only one of me and my body seemed to occupy a well-defined area, quite small.


xxxx

atop and about mt issues

i say keep writing them but if they start getting like lonely planet descriptions of alphington then stop.
- jason flaherty

near where i live there's a park. park is too short a word for it, really. it's glorious. really what happens is there's a fissure in the city. the city goes along and then it stops and there's a river and almost wildness and then the city starts again.

there are two installations there. one's deliberate and i don't think the other one is. i'll treat them in order.


1. the deliberate installation.
WELL, MAYBE IT'S not actually an installation. really it's more like public art. what someone's done is make up a path through the park with little spots to stop and do things. it's called a spiritual healing path. it's great. you walk along and then you stop and there's a little metal plaque that tells you how to think about the place where you are and what you might want to do there.

for instance, there's a lovely little spot where you can sit by the stream. the plaque says 'let go of everything you can't control'. nice.

anyway, in the park there's a tiny mountain. you might think it's a hill but it's shaped like a mountain, just small. on top of the mountain is a plaque that says 'READY TO GO!  you're on top of the world and on top of your issues.'

so in my house we call this mountain mount issues.

i climbed mt issues the other day. it didn't take long because it's so small but even so: you can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miiiiiiiiiiles, as the who say. then i walked around a little more.


2. early and bright
THIS MORNING I rode my bike there.  it was cold.  i'd been in the house too much lo these last few days.  it was good to be out in the colours of things again: the crisp colours of a cold morning.  each thing looked rained-on and clean and potentially bright.  they weren't bright yet, these things, because the sun was still low but they looked like they could be bright when the sun got a little higher and that was the main thing.


3. the unintentional installation
NEAR MOUNT ISSUES is a large pond. the water is green and streaked with tiny bubbles that won't burst.

in the middle of the pond is a pile of stones. on top of the pile is a little tower: a cage on legs, full of what look like spare parts for cars with engines made of metal flowers.

one of the legs of the tower has a pipe bolted to it. water flows up the pipe. it's filtered through the metal engine flowers and then it rains gently out the bottom and onto the stones.

the pile of stones is graduated: the top is dark dark brown, where all the water lands. further down it's lighter brown and then near the pond's surface it's grey.

i stared at it for a little while.


4. elegant
NEAR THAT WAS another pond.  ducks were floating on the sky's reflection.  they left wakes behind them, v-shaped like flying flocks.  maybe these wakes describe imaginary friends, the flocks who aren't here but who people our minds and hearts, migrating along with us, migrating through time: from the country of the past where we were born to the country of the future where we have to live from now on and where we don't quite speak the language.

i rode around.  my wheels wrote dark cursive on the pale paper of frosty grass.

the sun was coming up but still low.  my shadow was elegant and long on the ground.

xxxx