Welcome to Acerbia; population: π
This is the archive of the many and fabulous adventures of . Like a hard-bitten son of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius taught to write by William S. Burroughs; continually reincarnated, debated over by intellectuals and literati at cocktail parties the author can't get invited to, the target of scorn and ire from women everywhere, frequently mistaken for a former member of the Warsaw pact, named after the Italian explorer Giuseppe Acerbi, slowly rewriting the Book of Cataclysm, this is postmodern fiction at its most playful and creative.
Trouble to the Cadmeans
The room is warm and dry when I awake. From the intensity of the darkness I can tell that it is still very late into the night and we have not yet tipped into the achingly slow return to daylight. My first thought is that I thirst for water, and my second is that I am not alone in the room.
I twist beneath the sheets and raise my head from the pillow, only to discover that there is one corner of the room that appears darker than the rest. I can sense breathing rather than hear it and there is the slightest rustle of feathers. I reach out for the light and the essence of a deep feline growl drifts through the darkness.
"I can be seen, but not touched, when I enter a room I make it lighter" purrs a voice from across the room and I take the riddle to mean that my visitor would rather I not switch on the light.
She is crouching on all fours and I hear the pad of her paws as she approaches the bed. There is the sensation that she could expand instantly and fill the room if she wanted to and I realise that there are enormous angellic wings on her back folded underneath each other.
"The more I take of them, the more I leave behind me" she whispers and her front paws take the next few steps up and onto the end of the bed. For a chimera she weighs surprisingly little. With a few more steps her paws have pinned the blanket around me into the mattress and her body is held inches above mine, radiating warmth. I feel the slither of her tail as it snakes over my legs.
"I am as light as a feather, yet no man can hold me for long" she advises me and I stop holding my breath. I've never been courted by a mythical creature before and I find myself fascinated by her silhouette, unable to make out distinct features in the darkness. I reach up and run one hand along the soft downy fur of her underbelly. I am reminded of leaning over the barriers in the British museum and touching the big cats who stand stationery, looking through mournful glass eyes, only this fur is warmer and less brittle to the touch.
"I am often returned, but never borrowed" she says as thanks and raises one paw. Razor sharp claw extended, she draws it down my body, sheering the blanket cleanly in two with a surgeon's precision without leaving a scratch on me. Her body presses down onto mine, in the hot dark room wings beat once with excitement before she shudders and we entwine on the bed.
"If you have me you want to share me, if you share me you won't have me" she warns and I promise not to tell.
The Deconstruction of Falling Stairs
We figured when the walls started to bleed brown goo that it was time to call in a builder. The house had a track record of ceilings caving in and walls crumbling at inopportune times so maybe not taking preventative steps was where we'd been going wrong previously.
The builder surveyed the gaping hole and the oozing brown scunge bubbling forth.
"Buggered if I know what it is mate. Cost you five big ones to get it fixed up though"
"How can you fix it if you don't know what it is?" I felt compelled to ask.
"Well if I say I can't fix it you get some other johnny-come-lately to show up and claim he can fix it without knowing what it is either. Easy job, clean out the gunk, blast the void with expanding builder's foam, slap a new bit of wall on, all done. Wonderful stuff expanding builder's foam" he said, raising an eyebrow to the audience as if this was the set-up to an obvious joke.
But I refused to play ball and instead he got to work.
The scream didn't come until maybe an hour later. The builder ran out of the house clutching his hand and leaving behind his expanding builder's foam in its compressed air gun, the camera lingering on it just long enough to clue you in that it might come in useful later. We heard the sound of a van tearing away down the street and went to investigate the structural damage he'd left. The gash in the wall was twice the size now and the ooze had started to harden. There was a bloody handprint slowly melting into the matte brown surface texture.
That was when my beloved noticed that the breadmaker fuse had shorted out, and that a packet of gingerbread mix was missing.
"Wait" she said, pausing to gather her thoughts in the cutest way possible (for she is not only terribly smart but also devilishly pretty), "if this was one of your stupid stories, what would the link be between brown goo pouring out of the walls and the breadmaker having shorted out mid mix-cycle?"
It didn't take us long to discover that our house had become possessed by a gingerbread demon.
"We need a priest" she said
"We need a baker" I replied
It was about this point when things got even weirder when two Eastern European children showed up at the door saying they had felt an uncontrollable urge drawing them towards our house. The little girl pointed to our house number and gasped.
"Zuh number auf zuh yeast!" she said in a thick Lithuanian accent.
"Oh God, this is one of your stupid stories!" wailed my beautiful girlfriend "will it never end?"
So it did, just as I was about to implement my plan to use the builder's expanding foam mixed with icing sugar to tame the gingerbread demon.
The Consistent Rules of Virtual Violence
Having thought long and hard about it I have decided to bump breasts down from the top spot of what I look for in a woman. Anyone who has seen the many iterations of the design on this site and met any of my girlfriends is going to be utterly stunned, but I really have discovered that, amazingly there is something more important to women than breasts. And look, this is just going to floor you, but it isn't any other part of their anatomy either.
Recount! I hear you cry. He's lost it!, the Greek chorus sings in lament most solemn, Gay! the ego berates me. And I say to you that it is a narrow victory and breasts are still way up there in every way possible, its just that there's something else I've thought long and hard about and it's won at last: understanding.
Any woman can have breasts, but you have to go a long way to find understanding. Double-whammy if you can find a woman with breasts who understands why breasts are important, but even better if she "gets you" so to speak. I have to figure that women know guys like breasts, otherwise they wouldn't buy those bras with the lace that peeks just over the edge of the low-cut top and tantalizes and teases and says these look splendiferous and we know it
What, you might ask does this, the hell have to do with anything? Well see, I got a Nintendo Wii this weekend. And this isn't a post about how my girlfriend understands I need to get my Wii on, this is about how my girlfriend found it for me, notified me that HMV had a limited stock of them, and came back with me to exchange the games when I discovered a few hours after buying it that they'd messed up the discs, and then how we Wii'd together all weekend.
The Wii is the most physically demanding console I've ever played, and somehow it is also the most satisfying. I'm not just playing these games I am defining, through my interactions exactly how my avatar deals with the situations that are thrown my way. I am in utter immersive control and the need for photo-realistic graphics has, like breasts taking a back seat to understanding, been cast aside for this utterly immersive control scheme.
I've played games that have scared the crap out of me (Thief 3, System Shock 2, Doom 3, in that order of pant-wettingness) and games that have thrilled me but I have never played a game system that has let me control it like this.
And the other factor that has made me fall so much in love with the Wii is watching my beloved, with all her body and all her focus, fishing fish, returning power serves, hitting home runs and beating down digital characters in seconds. Finally we have found the way for her to understand and participate in my love of gaming and never before have we had this same frame of reference.
When I watch her standing like some Amazonian warrior woman, following three left jabs up with a powerhouse right hook, knocking her opponent off his feet flat onto the canvas I shudder at the thought of what will happen when we go head to head. I am in little doubt that where in real life she can command my attention with the merest flash of cleavage she will now destroy me in the virtual world with her understanding of this new form of video gaming.
The Whale
As I reclined in the leather upholstered chair nearest the fire Mrs Kibble brought over a mug of warm milk and asked how my day had been spent. I bid her take a seat beside me and began to tell of my explorations along the Massachusetts coast and how I had driven throughout Lovecraft county for hours without seeing another living soul until I came to the port of Kingsport, bathed in an eerie fog.
The local tavern was the only abode with any lights on so I entered and was amazed to find my old shipmate Richard Tobias Green sitting at the bar enjoying a flagon of beer. When he saw me he greeted me with open arms and ordered another flagon of what he called Shoggoth's Old Peculiar for me. The bitter taste did not appeal but I felt it would be rude to order anything else without finishing so I drank and my friend spoke.
Richard spoke of a recent journey where he had encountered an old sea dog, a twisted and withered man who was as old as the sea itself and put him to mind of Hemmingway's Santiago, verily did his knowledge of fishing and sailing put Richard's, a seaman I admit to be far better than myself, to shame. And just as Santiago had struggled with his marlin so had this man struggled through gales and squalls with his own nemesis; a white whale.
In the darkness of the room the man spoke quietly of his life story and occasionally tried to soothe an ephemeral pain in his leg. He spoke of long voyages across treacherous seas and of great hauls of fish and whale carcasses, but always was he hounded by his lust for revenge on the creature he called Mocha upon whom he heaped all the misery and misfortune he had ever experienced as sole responsible.
"Liebestod" he said and I begged his pardon "Leibestod" he said again and explained that it was a German word for a love that is only consummated in death. This old captain had wished many a time that he could have found the fulfilment he sought in death after disappearing under the waves, entangled with his bete noire.
"He described a nightmare world beneath the surface that we have only seen as observer, floating atop that mirror, reflecting on the dark contents beneath. But Mocha had been badly wounded and died soon after, the Captain on his last breath finally broaching the waves and clinging to fragments of his destroyed ship dragged himself ashore and into a bottle. A broken man with nothing driving him anymore" Richard had left the man in his melancholy.
I looked to Mrs Kibble who had succumbed to the fatigues of her daily torpor running the boarding house and sat silently watching the flames lick around the logs in the hearth. Tomorrow I would return to Amity and spend the day preparing my fishing boat the Orca for sea; this idle sightseeing had gone on long enough and I itched to be away from dry land.
Showtime
Mickey and me would work the projectors at the local cinema. It was a no-brainer job that was being paid no-brainer money but we didn't care. We got to see every new movie for free as many times as we wanted and we got all the free popcorn we wanted.
If it was some hot new movie we'd get girls into the booth for free to watch it with us in exchange for a thrilling climax. If it was a bad movie we'd deliberately screw it up for the people watching. Make no mistake, we weren't just evil projectionists, we were pretty bad ones too. Mickey would frequently forget to open the curtains and wouldn't notice until the first reel change that everything was blood red. We'd mess with the sound mix and volume and for Matrix Revolutions we left out the whole end reel. Hardly anyone noticed.
One night as usual Ortiz was emptying out the snacks stand, slipping the occasional treat into his own pockets and filling garbage bags with the leftover popcorn. That stuff is a license to print money so we can afford to give away metric tonnes of the stuff before we start making a loss. Today Ortiz had obviously made too much, knowing that nobody would be coming to see Shawshank Redemption part 2; Hadley Gets Screwed and he already had six bags full.
Mickey walked over there and muttered something to Ortiz. Ortiz shook his head then nodded then looked around and nodded again. Mickey called me over and we walked out of there with two bags each full of popcorn. I couldn't have told you if it was salted or sweet. It was late; that damn movie's four hours long, so it was dark.
Our walk home took us over the freeway bridge and without saying a word Mickey and I both knew what to do; we both moved to opposite sides, standing over the dual lanes of oncoming traffic. He looked round at me across the other side of the bridge and when he nodded we both dropped our bags. Four bags, four lanes.
The effect was cinematic.
Of course it doesn't take the world's dumbest detective long to work out where that much popcorn comes from after he's picked it out of the broken glass and torn upholstery, so a few days later Ortiz was arrested and charged.
As I said; we were evil projectionists.
Meatheads
Watkins shifted in his seat and Smitty was looking up at the ceiling as I finished reading the marketing output the sales boys had brought to me. Slick glossy brochures with neat diagrams of double heli and pictures of beautiful people in white coats pretending to be scientists. Watkins and Smitty were anything but beautiful people, in fact I was quite glad that their laboratory was in the basement, however this seperation may well have been the cause of the current misunderstanding.
"So, how did this happen?" I asked. Smitty opened his lips but kept his teeth together, sucking in air between them, before looking over at Watkins. Watkins said nothing so Smitty started.
"We saw a gap... in the market. And the all-staff e-mails are always saying how we're an innovative company that strives towards the advancement of mankind in all endeavors and never stands in the face of progress when destiny calls..."
A blurb I had written after observing several 22-45 year old mixed sex focus groups.
"... so we added a new base nucleic acid to DNA."
Watkins, being Smitty's superior realised that Smitty was about to lose me and leapt in.
"You see Sir, our DNA is composed of nucleotides, which in turn are made from sugars and bases. There are four bases; Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine; they're heterocyclic compounds called purines, and pyrimidines. We just... created a new one."
I had to admit that despite being the owner of a biogenetics research company my grasp of the actual concept was vague. I was a money man, good with people, capable leader and excellent manager, at least so my recent personality consultant had concluded. All the same I was having some trouble already.
"So there are four building blocks to life and you've gone and made a new one. Like LEGO."
"No Sir, not like LEGO, the building blocks analogy is really just for idiots. Imagine instead a kitchen with every spice, condiement and ingredient you can think of but you can only use four different types of meat to cook with. We've just brought a whole new kind of meat to the kitchen."
Just what I needed was another Frankenstein Foods public relations disaster. Half my staff quit the last time we tried to market some new genetically modified food and we were boycotted by every major supermarket chain in the UK.
"It was fairly simple to block the telomere degredation using enhanced green algae sequencers and we discovered that palindromic hairpin loops created themselves without any involvement from us, the Bydenine took care of it naturally."
The what?
"You created a new building block to life and you gave it an unsexy name that we can't trademark?" I sat aghast in my chair, hands clutching the edge of the desk.
Wiggins leant forwards and removed something from his pocket.
"Sir, I think you're not really going to give a shit about that when you see what we've created..."
Guy Talk
I sat down on the steps next to the Super-Death Uber-Kill Destructo-Bot and took a sip from my Coke and a drag from my cigarette. The Destructo-Bot fumed without saying anything and I imagined I could hear a furious whirring sound from inside the impenetrable neutron-deflecting ablative carapace that protected its core systems. One lethal bladed mandible tapped the granite steps sending occasional fragments flying.
"Fucking women" it finally said through an aural vocoder box behind a mesh in its upper torso.
"Tell me about it mate" I replied rhetorically.
"Fucking... fucking... god damn them all"
It didn't look like it was crying but then I couldn't see past the shielded polarised lenses that covered the variety of sensorial equipment and cameras it used for navigation and target acquisition.
"You want a cigarette?" I lamely offered, hoping to draw it out further.
"Nah. Thanks anyway" There was a lengthly pause as we both watched a few pigeons fight for a scrap of crust before it added "You got a woman in your life?"
"Yes indeed. Brilliant woman, full of life, lives for the moment, body to die for, smile worth killing for" I responded slightly too enthusiastically.
The Uber-Death Killbot flexed one hand full of foot-long eviscerating blades and shrugged slightly, shifting the shoulder-mounted Multiple Launch Rocket System and Electronic Counter Measure package on its back with a clank.
"Course its not all roses" I added quickly "she can be infuriating at times too and a little impulsive"
For a second I thought the mechanical genocidal construct was about to let fly with a hail of bullets and blades that would leave me a squidgy pile of spaghetti sauce. The lumpy kind. Instead it raised one manipulator pseudo pod clad in interlocking panels of titanium and appeared to rub beneath its visual sensor array.
"Yeah, they can be like that" it finally admitted "but good for you mate. Good for you"
Stuck without anything left to say I stood up and made a show of dusting myself down before stepping on the glowing end of my cigarette. I held the empty can in my hand and pursed my lips and raised my eyebrows in a weak expression of camaraderie, nodding ineffectually.
"Well, you take it easy big fella" I hazarded and turned to leave.
"You gonna just toss that?" asked the machine and there was the twinkle of a malevolent red glow behind the polarised lenses. It extended the pseudo pod and I didn't resist as it took the empty Coke can from me. A tiny hatch opened and the can disappeared inside the hulking mass of armored plates. There was a sound like foil being torn and the Super-Death Uber-Kill Destructo-Bot nodded his thanks.
"I can always use the raw materials"
The Golden Hammer
Bernice and I were hunkered down behind the sandbags, watching as the alien prince tore the airstrip to pieces with his dimensional warping powers. The sandbags offered no actual protection as our alpha waves would betray us the second either of us lost focus and stopped thinking Dr Auric Asparagus' cloaking thought sequences but they were a physical presence and immediate comfort to us.
"Christ that thing is unravelling reality around us. Pink potato, green banana, blue strawberry. What are we going to do?" Bernice asked, sweeping her auburn hair out of her firey eyes.
I slapped a fresh magazine into the G36c assault rifle that had conveniently been left nearby in perfect working order, oiled and greased atop a case of 5.56 x 45 NATO ammunition which just happened to be the exact calibre the rifle needed. Had the alien prince gone on his space/time twisting rampage in the 90's I would have expected to find an MP5k, or if it had been the 80's it would probably have been an AR-15. Hollywood had a way of following gun trends that way.
"Shoot it? Yellow beetroot, red artichoke, purple cucumber. Shoot it lots."
Dr Artichoke had developed a mental screen that required us to think of oddly colored fruits and vegetables. Providing we filled our thoughts with images of such incongruous pairings we were safe and could approach the alien prince. At this distance though the focus required was incredible. One slip and it would pounce on us instead of the various jet fighters and ammo dumps it was currently tearing it's way through.
"Typical male reaction! Not everything can be resolved with the application of a bullet. Beige apricot. Just because you can shoot straight you think all the problems of the world can be solved with a gun. Indigo cabbage. You're only going to be happy if this all ends in some massive fireball explosion or nuke mushroom cloud that obliterates that thing. Amber tomato. You'll probably be expecting a kiss or a shag afterwards."
Truth be told I had sort of thought things would go that way. I didn't really know of any other ways to end this.
"What else can you suggest? Cerulean fig"
"Less guns, more brains. Silver lettuce. Stop thinking with your penis substitute; use empathy. Turquoise lemon. It obviously has huge mental capacity and telepathic powers, so lets find common ground and reason with the thing. Lets go for the female approach. Orange orange... oh fuck."
Reason is always overwhelmed by panic and before I could stop her she was up on the sandbags blazing away with the rifle as the alien prince stalked towards us.
Surrounded and Out-Gunned
I've spent three days wanting to puke now after one violent bout of total stomach content reversal that regressed me to the primeval form of one cell trying to expunge another; gasto-mitosis. I slept through most of Sunday and woke up when it was already dark again with a strange disoriented feeling. Why do I only ever feel that I've lost time, never made any?
I used to think that the trick to saving time was to prepare ahead. Envisage your day and all the pitfalls you'll have to deal with and employ methods in advance to sidestep them. This is like the paper, scissors, rock method of movie plotting. If you think you'll encounter a pit, a spikey whipsnare and a tiger you take a whip, a leather jacket and a revolver. And you don't trust your South American guide; he's going to sell you out to the Frenchman. But thats not how it works, is it. If you leave for work with a flashlight, a key and a can of anti-freeze you're going to discover that your pitfall for the day is a twenty slide presentation to an ungrateful client.
I don't think I take very good care of my body, and this is perhaps where the theory of preparing ahead falls down. If I took better care of my body it would take better care of me and I wouldn't get sick as often. But its too much work to stay fit and healthy; being sick regularly is easier. I'd save time if I went to the gym, but then I'd be watching my life disappear on a treadmill instead of over a bucket.
Ever get the feeling you're playing some vast and useless game whose goal you don't know and whose rules you can't remember? Ever get the fierce desire to quit, to resign, to forfeit, only to discover there's no umpire, no referee, no regulator to whom you can announce your capitulation? - McKenzie Wark
I'd ask to reboot but I spent Saturday doing that already. Humans should have the option of hibernating.
Extra
I found myself, completely by surprise, in someone else's anecdote the other day. To be fair it was a very comfortable anecdote with a very good bar but the room was being dominated by the conversation the narrator was having with two of his friends and he was doing all the talking for them. To all intents and purposes he was leading the conversation in such a way as to make himself look good with one friend acting like an idiot and the other simply the foil for all his best lines.
I sipped at the beer and munched on a few handfuls of peanuts that had thoughtfully been provided, wondering how I could extricate myself from the whole situation without causing a fuss. I was having a devil of a time trying to figure out how I had arrived here and it seemed like I had perhaps begun a digression in one of my own stories, lost my way somewhat and ended up a bit-player in this anecdote.
What could I do? The only reason you ever get included in an anecdote is because you did something worthy of inclusion, and with a set up like this I was going to have to draw attention to myself in order to become the focus of the anecdote before I could leave. So I climbed up onto the chair and starting scratching at my armpits like a monkey, throwing peanuts like it was monkey poo and saying 'ook' as I danced from one foot to the other.
There was no response from any of the three gentlemen at the bar and I sheepishly climbed down, finished my pint and left, taking the anecdote with me to use on my own website.
Recap
Previously on Acerbia...
"Damn it Jenkins, we can't cut the blue wire there's a feedback loop that will kill us all! Time is running out, what do we do?!"
"You'll have to torture me first..."
"With pleasure!"
"No! Not with pleasure, anything but that!"
"I'm pregnant... its not yours. I'm not even sure its human"
"What are we going to do? Brad will be here any minute and we've run out of weenies!"
And now the continuation...