Riding home the other night by the cold river I wanted to be a river too

Riding home the other night by the cold river I wanted to be a river too and so I was, for a little bit, a river on a bicycle, running through the streets. I had things living in me and trees were happy I was there. I poured myself downhill into the world.

Then yesterday in the hall I got bored of not being a mountain: "Fuck this not being a mountain shit, I'm gonna be a mountain!"

And so I was a mountain. I liked it. Time was different. Birds flew around me and found little holes in me and laid their eggs and raised their young and shat on me. I had things living in me and trees were happy I was there. The wind was just so: whoosh. It was pretty cool. You should have been there.

 Then today I was in the mall. This little red-headed kid was just staring upward, face all screwed up, looking amazed. I looked up to see what all the amaze was about and there was the sky: huge as a motherfucker, just there. I was like fuck yeah kid, I know how you feel. Look at it all full of clouds and such. That's where the oceans go when they get hot or when they just need a holiday. Whole oceans just hanging up there, taking in the view. X

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

a reunion

she goes with me to a blossom world
- the beach boys, 'good vibrations'

SOME DAYS AGO i found a message on my phone from the police.

'we've found your car,' they said. 'call us,' they said and so i did.

they told me where she was. it sounded like a half-hour bike ride away. i had a shower. i wanted to smell nice. i looked up the address and realised it was only a few blocks away, on a little side street i have no good reason to ride down usually.

i hopped on my bike and rode along in the evening air. my feelings were mixed: since my car left me i'd spent a lot of time with my bike. i'd gotten to know my bike a lot better and we'd had some good times. we'd gotten pretty close and i may even have told my bike i loved her. now my ex-form-of-transport had gotten back in touch and so all these old feelings were being stirred up.

would i feel the same? could i keep things going with my bike? would i get seduced by the comfort of the familiar? why had i had a shower? what was that all about?

reader: one thing was for sure and that was that i'd find out soon enough because it wasn't far away. my bike nestled loyally between my thighs. i felt a little bit guilty. i'd promised my bike a new coat of paint and some oil and now here i was going to see my car. the sky was darkly orange around the edges with the just-set sun.

i found the street and my car was there, beneath a tree. she'd gone native, as colonists used to say, and was becoming tree, was thickly spread with leaves and blossoms. the earth was gradually reclaiming her, invoking the car cycle which is like the water cycle but involves cars instead of water: metal is mined and smelted and turned into cars which are driven around and then abandoned and return to the earth slowly as new ores and are maybe one day mined again and turned back into cars. ah, she looked so different and yet underneath it all i could see the old car i used to know.

i opened the boot and put my bike inside.

i walked over to the driver's side door and opened it and climbed in myself. she cradled me in velour. i tried to start her but it didn't quite work. there was a spark of something there, but it wasn't quite enough. i tried again and then again but each time she responded more weakly.

i guessed she needed something more from me. she was out of petrol, after all. the thieves had taken her and drained her and left her here and now here i was trying to start things up again as though nothing had happened: fool! i would have to do something.

the thieves had been thoughtful enough to abandon her just round the corner from a 24-hour petrol station. there was a jerry-can in the back and i grabbed it. i walked to the petrol station, which took maybe 25 seconds. i couldn't help thinking that abandoning an out-of-fuel car with a jerry-can in the back just 25 seconds from a 24-hour petrol station showed a DISTINCT LACK OF INITIATIVE on the part of the thieves. nonetheless: they'd made it easy for me: nice of them.

people kept looking at me funny. was this because i was unshaven and wearing a t-shirt with a snake crawling through a skull's eyesockets? i guess we'll never know. i got petrol and walked back and poured it in the tank and climbed in again and tried to start my car again. it didn't work. i tried and tried and then gave up and decided to try a roll start. i was on a faint incline.

i pushed and pushed and pushed and got a little momentum and then jumped in and tried to start and wrrrrrrrrrr the car shuddered to a stop.

i pushed and pushed again and got a little momentum again and then jumped in again and wrrrrrrrrrrrrrr exactly the same thing happened.

i was worried now because i was near the bottom of the hill. would i hafta abandon my car again? now that we'd been through so much?

i pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and jumped in but we were going too slowly for it to work. fuck it: i tried anyway and she shuddered and shuddered and spat and hacked and sucked in air and came to life again and i drove her home. we haven't talked too much since then. there'll be time for that later. she's resting in the driveway now.

xxxx
mike

i was later i look! pepper-trees!

o my heart which i have from my mother!
o my heart which i have from my being!
do not rise against me as a witness!
do not turn against me in the tribunal!
do not tip the scales against me in front of the keeper of the scales!
- the book of going forth by day

1. i was
I WAS TIRED this morning. maybe i'm not getting enough vitamin b. maybe the puppy is getting it all. i think the puppy is getting enough vitamin b because when i walked into the kitchen this morning he was looking at me and i looked at him and then i saw behind him a small pool of puppy piss, cartoon-sun yellow. it was a hallucinatory yellow in fact and the world's intelligence was moving it downhill. it was becoming a slow stream because our floors are not flat.

i cleaned up the piss. i do this a lot at the moment. i'm also home a lot just now working on music and so is the puppy. home, i mean. the puppy is not working on any music. stop trying to confuse me with your suggestions and, frankly, innuendos. thanks.

when i walk he spins like a satellite around the planet of whichever leg just hit the ground. he twines around my legs like bolas . i hafta be alert lest i fall.


2. later i
LATER I WAS on the train. a woman and a little boy came and sat across from me. the boy's hair was the colour of burning butter. by this i mean that some of it was a pale yellow and some of it was darker.

the boy was excited to sit by the window and gaze out at the world: the world always new and surprising. i'd guess he was four. to be that young is to know you don't have the measure of the world: you want to keep looking at it out the window because it's full of surprises: look! a truck! look! a helicopter! look! a horse!

we didn't actually see a helicopter or a horse. i am just giving an example.

none of the rest of us have the measure of the world either but we forget, maybe, and instead of looking out the window we think about other things but the world is always new. it's always being put together just in time for us to look at it. the woman wasn't looking out the window. she was yawning and rubbing her eyes.

some people can get fucked. no, wait.. that came out wrong.. i meant to say some people think it's funny the way kids have more energy than the adults who look after them.

'isn't it amazing,' they say, 'how much energy kids have! and look how boring their parents are!'

but see, the parents would have more energy if someone else was cooking them food and paying their rent and cleaning up after them and so on. kids are like rock stars. other people attend to their needs and they get to throw tantrums and jump on the furniture and look out the window at the world always new: look! the sun pale behind clouds! the sun paler than my butter hair!

i don't mean to imply that the little boy across from me was some kind of prima donna. i was just making a more general point. he seemed in fact like a total sweetie and he was happy to snuggle up to the woman when he got tired so i guess they knew each other from before the train.

there were things lying around on the banks by the train tracks. everything had an air of magical decay.


3. look! pepper-trees!
WE PASSED BY pepper-trees. look! pepper-trees! something pale and generous was flowering the pines, too.

xxxx

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

grin

and what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
- bob dylan

1. power
I SAW DUCKS with tiny eyes, beer-bottle brown.  the water combed the reeds that sat beside it in simple friendship.

(on the way home i saw an avenue of trees.  the central boughs had been cut out so they wouldn't interfere with the power lines overhead.  they looked like an avenue of open hands passing the power along like life-savers do.)


2. grief
I SAW MODERNIST buildings streaked with grief, the grief of grieving weather.


3. thick
IN THE MORNING the mist was thick with light.  later on the train i saw ghost gums like plaintive hands reaching out of the earth.


4. four
FOUR NIGHTS LATER i stepped out of the caravan.  there was a cheshire moon just above the horizon: a tilted grin shrinking with the days until saturday.

xxx