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.
Forced Upon Me
I was making coffee when I heard a voice in my mind, a mystical ancient voice of wisdom and sagacity.
"Use the Force" it said.
So I concentrated real hard, I felt the eddies in the cosmic energy fields, the ley lines and the karmic powers of every living thing in the surrounding area. I felt the bond between the coffee grounds and the carton of milk, the steel of the teaspoon and the ceramic mug. Then I poured the water from the kettle and you know what I got?
Cold coffee.
Lesson 1: The Force does not boil water; electricity boils water.
Later that week I was standing in an aisle at Sainsburies, trying to reach the last bottle of balsamic vinegar on the top shelf right at the back. Even at six foot two and with lanky long arms I was unable to reach.
The voice returned, dripping with lost knowledge and with all the warmth and comforting embrace of a favorite uncle imparting hard-won advice.
"Use the Force" it said.
So I closed my eyes, and I focused on levitating, lifting myself up just those few inches required to reach the balsamic vinegar. Swirls of energy enveloped me, the air around me crackled with static and ozone and I took one step up and felt my hand grasp around the bottle. Then the shelf I was standing on broke free of the wall and the bottles of olive oil that had been sat there slid off and smashed onto the floor.
Lesson 2: The Force does not make you levitate; the laws of physics are inviolate.
That weekend I went out with the boys, we were out for a bit of hell-raising so we decided to attack the local imperial space station in our snub fighters. I was Red leader and as I approached the exhaust port to fire my photon torpedoes I heard that same damned voice.
"Use the Force" it said.
Not a chance, not this time. I kept my targeting computer switched on and fired when it told me to. Unfortunately the torpedoes just packed in on the surface. Shortly afterwards I was blown out of the sky by Darth Vader.
Lesson 3: Sometimes the Force works, how you're supposed to know when though remains a mystery.
Pause for Thought
I found myself observing people on the Tube this evening as they distracted themselves with various gadgets. I no longer try and read the pulp novel of the month over the shoulders of other passengers anymore, they're all still reading Dan Brown.
One passenger was playing a PSP, tilting it this way and that as he attempted to corner the perfect corner. Another passenger was using stylus on screen to drag solitaire cards to and fro.
And suddenly I remembered myself holding a SNES controller, sliding my thumb from the X button to the B button, holding down the right shoulder button and executing a pixel-perfect braking-corner manoeuvre in F-Zero what must have been more than ten years ago.
A little later I remembered an impressive bit of shield/engines/laser management that segued nicely into an all-out rocket attack on a cruiser in Freespace 2, the joystick responding perfectly to a split-s in a tricky dogfight situation.
And most recently a case of hands instinctively sliding across the keyboard into the old familiar WASD and number pad configuation required to pilot the Apache gunship across the streets of San Andreas, over the rows of palm trees, under the freeway bridges, letting loose volley after volley of firey missile death and chain gun slaughter.
The best games make you forget that you're trapped using a fairly inefficient input device to acheive spectacular things.
Ridiculously Long Songs I Like; Estranged
Among the kids I grew up with you either had Use Your Illusion Part 1 or you had both. I didn't know anybody who only owned Illusion 2 (and yet supposedly it was the better seller). So anybody who heard Estranged (9:23) had already heard the vastly more frequently played November Rain (8:57), both tracks parts 3 and 2 respectively of the Don't Cry trilogy that spanned both albums. An overblown hard rock power ballad that I discovered only after Illusion 1 snapped in my Walkman and I had no other GnR to listen to, these days I find I would rather listen to Estranged than November Rain.
You expect a quiet and meek start, with Axl's lyrics and whispering faking you out before pow, there's Slash and the piano chords you're going to be hearing for the next ten minutes. Even Axl drops the whiney whispering and instead wails again like the true rock crooner god that he was (is?). Military drumming and a valid use of the tremolo arm take us through several verses where we're led to understand that yes, he might *seem* to be a wild child but actually he's a fragile little wuffly bunny wabbit who seeks the love of a... well, a complete sex goddess like Stephanie Seymour if you don't mind.
If I remember my MTV days there was lots of running around on rooftops and SWAT helicopters in the video, but that was back in the days when MTV would show music videos instead of Pimp My Sister
This is a song that just doesn't give up on you, it gives you verse after verse and guitar solo after guitar solo. If you like the Roses then you're well served here and don't need to have any other helpings of Sweet Child or You Could Be Mine and it even has dolphins that were drawn into the recording studio by the high pitched whining of, no, not Slash's guitar work, Axl's voice. Either that or they got Celine Dion to lay down some backing vocals.
Y'know what, I think I'm on verse seven by now and to tell you the truth I am so utterly bored of this now that I'm going to give up on it. Let me just smash up this hotel room and perform a shameful cover of Bob Dylan before burning out every session musician in Hollywood trying to make a comeback album...
Ridiculously Long Songs I Like; Mona Lisa Overdrive
Named after the William Gibson novel and used in the soundtrack to The Matrix Reloaded (ah, we weren't to know the trilogy would cop out on us before the end!) for one of the most thrilling car chases ever put to digital film, this is a collaboration between the composer Don Davis and the tribal fusion band Juno Reactor. I doubt I would enjoy this track half as much or for half as long if it didn't evoke the visuals of the movie every time I hear it's entire 10:09.
Better yet, one of my favorite all time pieces of television, the Top Gear challenge to see whether a bobsled or a Mitsubishi Evo Rally car is faster over 2 km of ice, mashed this in with other tracks including Rob Dougan's Speed Me Towards Death (a weedy 4:30) to produce two minutes of footage that to this day, two and a half years later, still gives me goosebumps whenever I see it.
Juno Reactor's work is distinctive with the tribal drums and percussion blending in with cinematic musical score that Don Davis provides. The opening hails you with trumpets blaring and a thumping pulse of a beat cut with the rattle of drumsticks, there is no doubting that this is a slow burn start.
After two and a half minutes of undulating, throbbing foreshadowing there is a lull, a ping, and the beat takes off at a breakneck pace. Just as in the movie the scenes shift from city streets to the freeway this track is now up into top gear and barreling along. Beat and accompaniment are brutal and urgent, rising fast and repeatedly with each seemingly suicidal impending derailment being brought back down with a crash.
Six minutes in something new arrives, despite the panic attack of the beat, angelic voices and a Gregorian chanting choir rise to a crescendo, this could be climactic, this could be it, this could be the reason we're being bundled along without a chance to catch our breath and then, no, we're back into the beat and unrelenting drums. Its hardly surprising this fit so well into the ADD techno-manifesto of the new millenium, it just never gives up and is all about raising the tempo of your pulse.
Twenty seconds from the end we're still being battered by the beat and there really is nothing else for the track to do than just sto
Ridiculously Long Songs I Like; Page One
I almost feel that one of the ground rules for this stupid endeavor should be no drum and base, and no electronica. The longest tracks on my iPod are all Orbital and the KLF, weighing in at things like 14:35 for Lush, and even 29:21 for The Rites of Mu, it seems unfair to compare pieces composed against those that are looped or copy and paste jobs. Although some of their tracks could be accused of being paste and quote jobs (I'm looking at you 93 - Don't Stop Now) Page One, cannot.
Penultimate track on their debut album lemonjelly.ky, Page One is a fabulous arrangement at 9:12 that takes you to the bleak empty wastes of the beginning of time as though you were sat in some sort of history/biology/geology/astrology class being lectured by the sort of boring old fart who has leather patches on the elbows of his sleeves and thinks that the best way to keep everyone's attention is to draw... out... his... sentences... for... emphasis!
From humble beginnings of distant echoes and a drum track being layered on you're taken to the chords and scales of someone still learning to play the piano. They've got the basics and they fit well into the beat, but its simplistic and more elements are piled on to keep the track progressing. As each cycle repeats, as is the mantra of an electronica track, the combinations and hybrids that arise through the variations define each iteration.
And then he speaks. Wherever this gent is sampled from I imagine an Open University program, with this man sitting on the edge of a desk with a blank book, open to Page One. he asks us to imagine having no possessions, and likens this to the void that presaged time. And then... and here we are tricked by the looping, instead of the big bang that we are expecting he says "nothing". We're halfway through the track and where we might have been ever so slightly interested in this attempt to teach us something, instead we are returned to square one.
After this moment of deception the layers are slowly stripped away again, until finally we are left with a dull explosion and the sombre strings of violins. Nothing to see here, its all over. Is it perhaps a statement on the futility of progress in the face of cosmic timescales? Or did they jjust need a ten minute track to pad out the end of the album? I'm guessing the latter.
Ridiculously Long Songs I Like; Bat Out Of Hell
More Mike's sort of thing, but I'm going to take a stab at it myself.
First up is Meatloaf's signature track from his 1977 album of the same name. Although the radio edit is a respectible 4:54, the album version weighs in at an operatic 9:51 so this certainly qualifies as ridiculously overlong, and yet you're given a full narrative and sweeping strokes of emotion and power chords.
Opening with a frenetic pacing of keyboards and staccato machinegunning of electric guitar with occasional wails and whines it builds and builds to a crashing announcement of a genuine hair-rock epic. 2 minutes in and you still haven't heard a lyric until everything slows and Aday himself sets the tone.
The urgency imparted in the first verses before the chorus kicks in evoke images of teenage rebellion and anti-establishment sentiment. Things slow to a choral admission of vulnerability before we're back into the immediacy of instant gratification, for one night only, and if he's gotta be damned then he might as well be damned with her. Maybe the bat in question is actually his batshit desire to escape and tear out of there on his bike.
Switching between the slow church organ admissions of guilt before tearing into more road racing rock keeps the track from becoming repetitive and more like a road journey. Just try and avoid thinking of being on that hog with your arms wrapped around Meat Loaf's waist.
And then the crash.
The inevitability of it and the resignation to his fate, almost welcoming it, knowing that this was his destiny, to die young and hard and fast after one pure experience turns tragedy to triumph and as the young lady croons in the background and the bells toll you almost feel like going and doing something incredibly foolhardy and stupid yourself.
Cosmopolitain Jungle
I stayed home sick today and got dilligently to work on making a small cocoon out of mucus-absorbant Kleenex with the occasional sneeze just to keep the furniture from feeling left out. Of course being a 21-century guy in an 18th century body (christ, you should see my teeth!) crippled and riddled with the plague, black death and all these other symptoms women will dismiss as "a man-cold" I still had to log in and deal with all the usual crap I deal with, only at a fresh and exciting new location; my basement.
When my girlfriend got home I asked her how her day had been.
"My day? Let me tell you about my day. First I get on the bus, alone thank you very much and I'm trying to read the free paper and every time I turn the page I hear this huffy sigh from behind me, inches from my ear. I thought it was coincidence at first but I turned two pages in quick succession and got two of these disapproving sniffs.
I glance behind me and there's a bloody tiger leaning forward in his seat trying to read the paper over my shoulder. He keeps making his annoyance known because I guess he can't read the paper as fast as me and I keep turning the pages while he's still mid-article"
Christ, so what did you do?
"Well I gave him the paper of course. But things got even worse when I got to work. You remember I was saying how the security staff where I work are always really anal about you wearing your ID pass somewhere visible? I had it in my bag and this new guy, a hammerhead shark, he waddles up beside me in the hallway and as I'm getting the pass out he gets his snout all up in my face and gives me a really toothy mouthing off about how the security procedures are for our own protection and how I just seem to go out of my way to make life difficult for them and would I please put on the badge before I arrive"
Yeah, but if you do that out in public its like, everyone knows your name and they have you at a disadvantage.
"Exactly. Anyway, he keeps fixing me with one eye then the other, zig-zagging his head in that way they do when they're looking for prey in shallow waters. I felt like a silver tuna being sized up for a feeding frenzy. I wanted to bop him one on the snout right there and teach him a lesson, but instead I put the badge on and apologised. I can't believe I apologised"
Still, you made it home. Its nice to have you home.
"Yeah, but an hour late, and do you know why?"
No, tell me.
"Fucking turtle hatchling migration on the entire Jubilee line, billions of the little fuckers, every platform rammed full of them, all trying to get out to the suburbs"
The Shadows on my Fingertips
I have very poor emotional instincts. I'm also a terrible ballroom dancer, but thats not really the point of the post. At some point in my childhood the body switched off and the head took over and did all the learning, rationalised everything, collated, categorised, dictated how I should feel by committee rather than allowing my gut to develop. For everything a reason, until I became crippled with the need to over-think and analyse every aspect of a situation before making a decision, so terrified was I of making the wrong choice, unable to trust my own instincts.
I may be using the past tense, but this is very much still the situation today. The difference is that I am working with my therapist to liberate "what I want" from the shackles of what I think I want, or what I know I can easilly acheive with a minimum of fuss. This has paid off dividends recently that defy explanation though.
I like to write in threes. You may have already noticed this, however I will give a brief explanation for those who haven't and are maybe just scanning through looking for something about exploding rodents or zany characters eating wasabi. A good idea will last you about a page before your reader has grasped it, chewed it, swallowed it, digested it, and given a crap. To keep someone entertained you need to keep feeding them ideas, and in the format I write most in, three ideas will usually see me through to the punchline or denouement. Pope abolishes limbo, Pope declares Hell a real place, Pope denies conspiracies of apocalypse foretellings being obfuscated; three ideas that bind together into a single cohesive piece.
So without any fluff, here are the three that would have been sewn into the fabric of this piece were I in a flowery mood;
Asked what I wanted early in the process I paused and consulted my tongue (rather than my gut). My tongue said "soft Mr Whippy ice cream" before I said "soft scoop ice cream". This was lunchtime in the flat and there was unlikely to be any available, but I said it nonetheless. The next day we found ourselves at Ikea for an entirely different reason and there they sell soft-scoop whippy ice cream with chocolate sauce. The need was fulfilled and I got what I wanted. For the rest of that weekend I was somewhat in awe of this ability to get what I wanted; it seemed alien.
Monday morning I had a little bit of a breakdown and called in a sickday so I could sit in a park for a while. I sat on a bench and wanted Krispy Kreme so badly, some guilty pleasure to make me feel better. My darling girlfriend arrived to take me home and was carrying in her left hand a box of twelve. I was again in awe that what I had wanted and only declared to the cosmos had appeared again.
I spoke to my therapist about these situations, where I express what I want, either to the world or to myself, and they appear. She claims this is a perfectly natural phenomenon as we shape our own fates but I remain unable to correlate this to the logical pattern my mind has assigned to the world all these years. I cannot come to terms with the idea that instinctual living produces better results than rational thinking.
There is a third thing that I want, very, very badly, but the world cannot be told what it is yet or I know that I will spoil it and it will never materialise. If it comes to pass though I vow to become someone who acts on instinctual urges (within reason) when they surface in my subconscious instead of someone who considers all the outcomes and picks the path of least resistance.
The Breadth of Wonderment
I had intended to write about the majesty of our fragile planet, of the way that David Attenburough's voice turns everything into a thrilling voyage of discovery and how if we ever were to establish an exploratory galaxy-spanning force to go boldly where no man has gone before that I would want David to be the narrator of every single trip.
But instead, instead of talking about polar bear cubs tumbling down steep crisp snowy embankments or about gazelles leaping and prancing and defying the predator's jaws with glee, or the albino troglodytes that surving in sulfuric acid and have never seen the sun, instead of talking about any of that stuff, I'm going to talk about the unapologetic sadistic bastards that are dentists.
Bastards.
And I should know, my dad was one before he retired.
Doctors want to heal people when they get sick or injured. Dentists want to lord it over you because you had a few too many sweeties and now you've come crying to them with a toothache. Doctors provide a sympathetic ear and if you're lucky a nurse tucks you in in a starched uniform (her, not you, you've got a gown that shows your bare spotty arse), while dentists get medieval on your skull and the nurse is just another sadist in training.
Lets compare the medical advice from my last check-ups;
Doctor: "You should really drink more liquids, you need to stay hydrated."
Dentist: "Stop drinking fucking fizzy drinks, this is your own fault."
While a doctor might pussyfoot around delivering a diagnosis and offer a comforting hand, knowing full well that nobody wants to hear they have cancer and being generally nice to you, because, well he's a doctor and he's sworn to uphold the caduceus of truth, justice and a second medical opinion, a dentist will instead give you complete no nonsense balls-to-the-wall frank opinions; "its pus" or "hurts, doesn't it?" or even "this'll teach you to not floss, bitch!"
Bastard.
Ow.
I have to go back next Monday though and I will of course say nothing of this to him directly. Instead I will grip the chair and I will wince every now and again to make him maybe doubt in his head that the local anaesthetic has taken full hold and later when he's not looking I'll poke him with his own pokey pokey tool. In the eye. In my mind...
Fusion
The day he had been accepted to Caltech had been the happiest day of his life. When he pioneered the field of gravitational lensing and the microscopic fluctuations in the neutrino fluctuations of distant galaxies his father rang him up and congratuilated him, telling him he'd always known that his son would amount to something big. When he discovered the settings necessary in the positronic collider at CERN necessary to create something that nobody else in the world had ever seen he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in physics. But when he was caught buying a reinforced lace girdle with eight garter straps in coral pink in a lingerie store in western Texas he became a global laughing stock.
"White coat, no knickers" ran the headline in What Physicist
"Something the matter?" asked the Daily Bunsen Burner
"Grubby Pervert Ought to Return Peace Prize" demanded the Nonsymetrical Gravitational Theory newsletter
It mattered not however, for despite being exposed to the world he continued with his research, now openly, bringing in sewing patterns for bullet-cup wide band strapless brassieres and devising experiments to discover the perfect tensile strength and girth required of a gusset. All the while his colleagues watched him supiciously as he manipulated the Riemann-Higgs field modulator, looking for the tug of a suspender strap under his trousers.
The only person to stand by him was his girlfriend of six years, who had gone from being the proudest girlfriend in the field of physics to a cocktail party punchline at soirees she no longer attended. She still had an unshakable conviction that he wasn't a frilly woofter who liked to prance in sheer peignoir sets while theorizing. One night, her convictions were proven right.
He entered the house in a flurry of excitement, babbling about the underlying structure of the universe.
"Only 4%, do you realise, do you?"
He was carrying with him a flat white box that he tore into and started rummaging through folds of soft fragrant tissue.
"96% of the universe's composition is completely unaccounted for, and now I've done it, I've created something out of that most elusive of material... I present to you, the world's first set of dark matter lingerie..."
He held up several garments on hangers and his girlfriend knew that they'd just hit the jackpot.
Joseph and Me
Credo in Duem Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem coeli et terrae;
Et in Jesum Christum Filium ejus unicum, Dominum nostrum;
qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria Virgine;
Joseph pranged the cap off another bottle of beer and dropped into the lounger beside me. Throwing his head back he drank greedily from the cold bottle, to the point where I could see him almost choke as he stopped and gasped in air like a dog, his tongue lolling out over his teeth. His face contorted up as his throat constricted and there was a sudden flush of purple through his cheeks before he belched loudly and gave me a big grin.
"That hit the spot"
"Joe, you've got to be more careful. At your age all it takes is one little stunt too many and bam, you're flat on the floor with a ruptured spleen or embolism. Take it easy will you? I'm six beers down on you."
"Pffft" he mocked and waved his hand at me, showing off an ornate gold ring. "I'll be fine, I'm practically indestructible now"
passes sub Pontius Pilato, crucifixus, martuus et sepultus;
descendit ad inferos, tertia die resurrexit a mortuis;
"How do you figure that Joe?"
"Well, first I confirmed that Hell is a real place to instill a bit of fear in the doubters, get them thinking about that eternal hellfire and damnation instead of their cute secretary or their daughter's best friend's father. Then I go and abolish limbo so there's no room for doubt that I'm serious, even when it comes to little babies..."
ascendit ad caelos; sedet ad dexteram Dei Patris omnipotentis;
inde venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos.
As I watched him preach about the certainties of faith and the findings of the International Theological Commission I became suddenly aware that he was sitting in the same seat the Devil had sat in as we watched DVDs together a few years before. I hoped that he wouldn't notice.
"...and then just to get all those X-Files freaks interested in religion again we flattly deny that we have any advance knowledge of the coming apocalypse. How smart is that? By denying we have any such documents we spark off furious interest and a conviction that the Catholic church knows exactly what's coming. And the only way to save yourself from the impending doom that we know nothing about? Join our church!"
I had to admit, as popes went, this one was a winner.
Credo in Spiritum Sanctum: sanctum Ecclesiam catholicam;
Sanctorum communionem; remissionem paccatorum;
carnis resurrectionem; vitam aeternam.
Amen.
Live And Let Die
I once met the other man, he wasn't what I had expected. In my head I had conjured up someone with better hair, better teeth, better dress sense than me. Someone who was funny and intelligent and everyone's best friend. He turned out to be a lot like me. I never understood why the other guy would be just like me. The next time I met the other guy he had terrible hair and I felt much better about myself, I likened him to a pencil-topper troll.
Years later my parents seperated and I got to meet the other woman; she was just like my mother. Again I found myself watching and recognising all the similarities between her and my mother and I couldn't fathom why you would leave someone for someone exactly the same. Everything this woman was my mother had been and had done it better, or at least so it seemed to me.
It took a long time for me to realise that I had been looking at the whole process as if there was a single unchanging factor in the equation; the person being left behind. It hadn't occured to me that I had changed, or my mother had changed, or everyone was constantly changing, to my eyes I was always me.
And then one day I was the other fella, I was put into the very situation I had demonised and I found myself face to face with someone who, again, was just like me, was just as normal, just as screwed up, just as funny, just as witty, different and yet the same, now on the opposite side of the mirror.
I learned a very important thing in that short space of time, something I can't put into words, but the image in my head is of thousands of baby crabs clambering out of a hole filled with sinking sands. Sometimes you clamber over one of your brothers or sisters, sometimes you pull one up behind you by the claw, but we're always just beneath the lip of the hole and even those at the top can't get over it.
I'll bet that mental image has brightened your morning.
Soft Center
I went for a job interview the other day which meant wearing the suit and the smart yet torturously uncomfortable shoes. Worse still I got off at the wrong stop and had to walk 45 minutes around to get to the place. Once I was there I was fine, but on the walk back to the station something in my heel burst.
I limped to the train, limped from the train to the bus and limped from the bus to my front doorstep. Once inside I removed the shoe, which someone had once stared at aghast that I was wearing $300 shoes in a scummy London neighborhood (I didn't tell him I'd been given them for free), and slowly peeled away the sock.
My girlfriend came into the room and winced when she saw the raw pink flesh and the look of agony on my face.
"Thats a nasty water blister"
I cursed the shoes and she brought me a large fabric band-aid. Tearing off the strips either side she was about to secure it over the raw blister when she noticed something.
"Wait... what is that?" she said, pointing at a yellowish-white patch exposed by the burst folds of skin. "Is that... oh my God, you've torn right through to the bone!"
We were both icked out until I realised that it couldn't possible be bone. Gritting my teeth I prodded at the exposed smooth patch and discovered...
"Its... cheese"
"What?"
"Its cheese. White cheddar I think..."
We sat there for a while staring at the back of my heel. My head was filled with confusing signals. Had I eaten so much cheese in my lifetime that I was now partially composed of it? Was I maybe some sort of Bladerunner-esque simulacra of a human being only made from pasturised bovine lactations? My God, maybe I could live forever providing I just ingested lots of milk. My girlfriend stood up.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"I'm going to get the crackers and a knife..."
Unlockable Content
When I saw Reservoir Dogs I was awstruck by the whole thing, but one item came back to niggle me and eventually I too had a large bowl that I filled with spare change, keys and rings, nails and even a dozen empty ten millimetre shell casings. The bowl fills up, and fills up with coins that are poured out of pockets on a regular basis, a few pennies at a time, but as Greenspan once said; "A trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you can't find your keys anymore and you get locked in your own house and have to eat the carpet for sustenance, befriending small animals and beetles to get news from the outside world and eventually you die but Disney options the rights to your life story and they give it all a happy ending."
I might be paraphrasing somewhat there.
Anyway, aside from the £61 in cash and the €20 and the $16 and a few Swedish kroner there were lots and lots of keys. Some were obvious keys, for small suitcase padlocks and bike locks. Others were what looked like old Secret Garden style black iron keys with very basic shapes and teeth. The sort of key you would expect an old wrinkled and withered man to have on a large iron ring he keeps on a hook underneath the stairs that he only sees each time he opens the door to throw the toys the neighbor's children have carelessly knocked over his fence down into the dank basement below, where he also keeps the children careless enough to try and retrieve said toys.
One I recognised as the key to the fireproof box I keep all my important documents in. I opened the box and found bank statements, employment contracts, refusal letters from publishers (they were important publishers) and stock options for companies that started up before 1999 and have "e-" at the beginning of their names. Meanwhile all the photos of me as a child, the ponytail I had cut from my head for my first job, the naughty polaroids of an ex, the hand-cut ransom-note style birthday cards and carbon sheet from my first and only arrest are all in a cardboard box under the stairs. I should really switch those things around.
There were keys for front doors to houses I don't live in anymore and I sat wondering if they'd ever changed the locks. What if they hadn't? What is the etiquette for walking in and saying "oh, look you moved the kitchen around, you should have left the fridge over by that wall to cover the brown stains we made when we played teabag baseball and is that my old TV?" And then I got to thinking about how many keys there are out there that would unlock places I thought were inviolate, maybe in bowls just like mine, on people's dressers or on their keyrings or on key hooks under the stairs...
The final question though becomes, what does one do with unidentifiable keys? Is it possible that I have a lock-up somewhere in North London that I've completely forgotten about? Maybe there's a padlock somewhere holding a gate together that I needed kept closed once upon a time and that now forces school children to take the long way round. Maybe... and then I remembered that there are things called bolt cutters and I tossed the keys away.
Auditeur
Overheard yesterday in Sainsburies in Camden, which was as deliciously normal as you would have expected it to be after a year of having online groceries delivered (I fear I may revert to a monthly trip back to the bricks and mortar superstores just because you find so many goddamned fun new things there);
Adult to child: "Sex?! No, you can't have sex!"
Child to adult: "please!"
Adult to child: "No, you can have four"
Cogitating Quicksand
Medication hadn't worked, meditation had been a mistake, and now I found myself resorting to extremes; surgery. The procedure took six hours, cost several thousand pounds and there was a one in five chance I would be left a vegetable but in the end I pulled through. When they unwrapped the bandages from my neck I had a dual status selector switch installed in the base of my neck, right over my cerebral cortex.
I was eager to test it out so I rushed out and sat at a bus stop, peering round at the people either side of me, hoping one of them would try and strike up a conversation. I waggled my eyebrows, gave encouraging glances and even coughed a few times but nobody was going to take the bait; they were probably terrified I was the sort of person who started conversations at bus stops.
Finally after a few hours I made eye contact and knew, just knew that this was the guy. He walked straight up and sat down beside me.
"Afternoon mate. Y'know, I was just saying to myself this morning when I got up that it was the perfect day to..."
And I threw the switch. My body remained upright but my eyes dulled and all spark of life disappeared. A rictus grin and blank expression held my face in place and an automatic nod and grunt response kept up my side of the conversation.
Eventually he finished and thanked me for a most agreeable conversation, stating that often people at bus stops seem hostile and so rushed and it was a pleasure to meet someone who had the time to spare. When he was out of sight I flicked the switch on again.
Success! Whilst my mental capabilities had been switched off to external stimuli and focused entirely inside my head I had discovered two missing elements from the periodic table, developed a plan for a more humane mousetrap that also de-loused, de-fleaed and housetrained the mice, and I'd come up with a way to stop dogs from licking you awake in the mornings.
Now I just needed to find situations where I could flip the switch and get serious thinking done for hours, maybe even days at a time, but where? Who? What? How?
That was when God smiled and my mother called, demanding that I spend the long weekend at her place.
Progressive, Recursive, Abortive
"Creep?"
Creep. You too?
"Yeah, Creep. In high school."
See, its just like the start of something new. You don't know what to expect. You've never felt it before and you find you like it, you want to explore it more and see if its something you could get a taste for, so you get the album when it comes out.
"Pablo Honey"
Pablo Honey, and you listen to the album, but the first time through you don't get the feeling from anything other than Creep. Creep is what you want more of, and as its the second track maybe you don't even make it halfway into the album before you go back to Creep.
As time goes by though you find you've had enough of Creep. You like the band, you like the sound, you're ready to give the rest a listen so you do. You find that the entire album is enjoyable. Highs and lows maybe, ups and downs, but the album is a once-througher, like Joshua Tree or Final Straw.
"Debatable"
Fine, suit yourself, but you know what I mean. Maybe you get a few B-sides and you find them disappointing, but you're a fan now, so you wait. You get The Bends and its a surge forward for you, you're convinced you're on the right track. By the time OK Computer is being hailed as the greatest album of all time you're established and looking around at everyone else just discovering this sensation and saying see? I was right, I knew all along.
"And then you have a Kid A"
Exactly. You forget that there's more than just you in the relationship and when something unexpected comes along, something you can't hold up to everyone and expect them all to understand, as they're shaking their heads and buying Muse and Placebo who are happy to fulfill those cravings like a true mistress or addiction can. But you stay true, to the point of not even remembering why you're doing it anymore. After being hailed as the savior of indie you're no longer on the cusp of the zeitgeist.
"I hate you for saying that sentence."
Apologies, what I mean is that you start to doubt, and Amnesiac confirms it, its not going to go back to the same feeling that you fell in love with. But something happens; you realise that you prefer the new sound, you prefer being the iconoclast again and the intimacy is stronger with less people scrutinising the sounds and lyrics; the bond grows deeper. They're singing for you once again. You become comfortable with the new sound and you're glad they changed and you're happy that they stopped pretending to be someone they weren't to get lots of fame and attention and exhausting themselves for all the wrong reasons. By the time people are remembering what they loved in Hail To The Thief you're centered and happy and confident that everything is going to be fine.
"And then?"
Well, either you maintain the relationship, staying true, pledging patience and waiting for the next album or...
"Or?"
You start looking at the solo projects.
Condimental State
"Lover, brother, bougainvillea, my mind twists around your name..."
Huh?
"Can you feel it? Can you feel it?"
What are we, the Jackson Two?
"Oh man, can you? Here it comes!"
Uh, yeah, yeah, totally, I can feel it... it feels like... ow, it feels like a seizure.
"Who are you tryin' to get crazy with, ese? Don't you know I'm loco?"
You certainly are, look, since you seem to be high on your own produce...
"There it is! The indigo bliss! Have you got that feeling? It feels like... it feels like... oh, what’s the word, it’s..."
Elusive?
"Nah, it escapes me."
Conversations like this had become the norm for me now that I was getting on the harder stuff. It had started innocently enough with horseradish on my roast beef sandwiches. Pretty soon I was nibbling on mustard seeds in the corridors at work, or slugging down shots of white wine vinegar followed by a piccalilli chaser. Where once had been tidy piles of neatly folded newspapers and cereal packets for recycling were now jars of Branston Pickle licked clean, and Patak's sweet lime chutney. I didn't ever care for popadoms anymore.
Weeks of this abuse had taken their toll though and my taste buds had suffered daily overloads, leading to the need for the thrill that had previously been so easy to achieve from a touch of Worchester sauce snorted from the back of a fingernail being sought at greater extremes like Sambal suppositories or the failed sweet chilli enema that had cost me my lower intestines.
And now I found myself in a rancid council tenement, surrounded by junkies, pleading with someone who seemed to talk entirely in music lyrics for just one more shot of his special homebrewed Tabasco mind rotter in exchange for sexual favors. My head hurt and my tongue was numb, I really didn't think I could sink any lower until someone pulled out a baggie of wasabi peas.