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.
The Old School
"The Old School" originally appeared in the July issue of ByteMe magazine
These days it seems that every school kid has an electronic presence, your work colleagues have their Facebook profiles and every book, movie or band you hear about has emerged from the wilderness of the cyber-fringe and staggered out into the mainstream of culture with a fully-formed audience and identity. Somewhen the 21st century arrived and turned us all into icons and pixels and automatic feeds of information about where we've been and who we were with.
But it wasn't always like this. Some people find it difficult to adjust to the changes that a medium they helped pioneer have now left by the wayside.
------------------------
Peter Luxor was one of the first to start a blog when the fledgling Pyra Labs was still finding its feet and sending out personalised greetings mails to each new sign-up. Each new post would be quickly scanned through by the avid audience and linked back to by people with further commentary to make about it. Blogging was not a source of original content and most commentary was about found things, sites, basic games and articles in the popular media.
"People were just less smart than they are now" says Peter, toying with a Lycos beanie puppy, "we couldn't access wikipedia in a few clicks and maintain that we were an authority on the subject like we can now, you were either smart or you were out-smarted."
Originally having spent time in newsgroups, chatrooms and CompuServe USA forums in tightly knit groups of people Peter was in awe of the freedom and unlimited knowledge now available to him.
"We all came from these close groups of interests, the Star Wars fans, the Star Trek fans, and we shared everything amongst ourselves, the ten reasons why Kirk is better than Picard, the ten best movie one-liners, the urban legends and the sort of things you find debunked on Snopes nowadays which turn out never to have been true, everyone knew everyone else on the Internet, we were tight, yo."
Opening the borders and dropping the barriers brought new people with new opinions that would sometimes degenerate into violent clashes of words; flame wars.
"We were used to the occasional forum troll, someone just looking to make some noise and stir up some comments for their own amusement but I can still remember the first night I encountered Godwin's Law"
The now famous law, first coined in 1990 purports that the longer a discussion continues, the more chance that one of the participants or topics under discussion will be likened to Hitler and the Nazis.
"To us that was unheard of, until I found myself making the assertion one night in the Buffy forums about a goth kid who was too engrossed in vampiric lore and Anne Rice novels, it just blew me away to discover I was just like everyone else. I crossed a line that night."
------------------------
Another online denizen, Catalina LaSalle started off with innocent enough online pursuits; "I was just looking for recaps of Simpsons episodes, sometimes its really hard to catch them all"
With printed off text files listing production numbers, air dates, character first appearances and brief episode synopsis Catalina was quickly looking for the next fix. Soon she was downloading transcripts and jpegs from episodes that hadn't been aired on her local channels yet.
"Imagine you've got this hotline to a drug dealer and he never has to say anything, and you'll get everything you ask for without having to pay for anything except the telephone bill, well thats what this was to us."
Now a seeder of all 18 seasons on networks that make the episodes available to download illegally Catalina feels that she is giving something back to the people who never knew of the dark days when the only way to watch the Simpsons was on a television screen.
"There are people in England who haven't seen the season finale yet, and won't for weeks, I take a little pride in knowing that I am freeing them from that hardship"
------------------------
In England I meet with Tim Jackets, now working for the cowboy portal Yehaw! as their specialist on social software in the web 2.0 phenomenon and how best to capitalise and profit from the toilings of the masses. Tim had been a founding member of the community site Bearbarella and witnessed first hand the emergence of sites such as A1pha and PopCunt which now enjoy a huge public following and frequently break out into the general consciousness with hilarious Powerpoint compilations of funny images
"These days its considered a cliche, but back when I started people actually wanted to see pictures of my cat and be kept abreast of my cold situation and the bastard landlord" he pulls out a tiny digital organiser and clicks on a favorites link to show me, "today the cat's got his own MySpace and the landlord blogs about the deadbeats living in his flats"
Tim then turns his attention to the device in his hands, with it he can keep every one of his (at last count) 10,764,882 daily readers informed of what is going on in his life.
"Celebrities leverage gossip rags and paparazzi to let their fans know what's new with them, we've superceded them though; we've gone beyond super-celebrity and passed into super-mundanity" he types in a few characters and moments later my phone pings with an update to an RSS feed I am subscribed to informing me that Tim is being interviewed for a magazine article. It takes me a second to remember that I'm the one conducting the interview.
"Just remember, there wasn't such a thing as a meme or a metareference until we started doing them."
It is not at all uncommon for those few who were there at the start to have capitalised on their presence in the caldera of the blogosphere and turned their sideline passion into a full career as either a technology pundit or a genuine journalist.
------------------------
At a recent conference held for bloggers by bloggers an estimated 86% of those in attendance were in fact journalists trying hard to drown out the attempts of these citizen-writers to render their editorialised and source-confirmed articles obsolete. In this day and age of instant information availability through 24 hour news channels and newsfeeds direct from Reuters, where even the laziest slob in his basement in Tucson, Arizona can add three words of value such as "Greatest. Movie. Ever." and package the entire thing instantaneously to a willing and eager audience how can official and traditional outlets continue under their current model?
"Gone are the days of Cindy Crawford" jokes Robbie Smithson of the London Guardian paper "I think our current model is Kate..." Rumors persist that Robbie's articles are actually authored by his more prolific but socially inept partner Joanna Kirk which Robbie refuses to comment on publicly.
After some polite insistence to continue the interview his expression grows stern and resolute;
"Well I for one welcome our new blogger overlords" he says ominously.
Is this the secret to the silicon tsunami we find ourselves swamped by; to embrace it and go with the flow, allowing it to sweep us past digital content rights, intellectual properties, downloadable podcasts and devices that track and announce where we are and what we are attempting to acheive at all times?
Has it now become our God-given right to know who is where with who else and what they were doing at all times? The people need to know and their voracious appetite for triviality never ceases to expand.
A Giant Leap
I am sitting on somebody's front doorstep. In central London you can't normally get away with this, doorsteps are narrow and uninviting. Some of them are wide and very inviting but this one I can sit on for free. As I run one hand along the fine hairs of my arm I notice that more and more of them are greyed through almost down to the root, it makes it look as though the hairs are vanishing into my arm. I think of a doorstep from my youth in Scotland, cracked in half from a minor earthquake, it had been a massive block of stone firmly embedded in the ground, rough all over except for the smooth shard that had shattered during the tremor, impossible to replace.
There was a house I lived in with two cats who were not allowed to venture outside for fear they would be shot by the neighbor or poisoned, or run over, or catnapped. These cats had no faith in their instincts and were timid housecats, fragile fat balls of fur. You stepped past the front doorstep and closed a screen door behind you before opening the inner door, like an airlock, protecting these innerspace cats from the hostile environment outside. There were occasions when I would sit on that first doorstep, steeling myself for the situation inside and taking the time take a few deep breaths. I hated that house.
I've sat on doorsteps for courage, inspiration, or just to pause and think, they seem to embody beginnings well. You can sit on one and imagine that this really is literally the first step.
The weather has turned cold and a breeze cannons down the narrow London street. The hairs on my arms raise and lower like fronds and I decide it is time to stop thinking and time to get back to work. I leave that first step behind and walk away back to my office.
Your Mission...
Agent Jack, sit down and pay attention. There's a madman out there who has taken control of the iBus network and is delivering false information across all of our routes. Its chaos on the buses and only you with your inate knowledge of the London Transport System can save thousands of passengers from getting off at the wrong stops.
No, there are no bombs involved, just incalculable amounts of frustration and the risk that Londoners will completely lose faith in the bus network. We can probably scrounge up a comedy sidekick who was formerly a bus driver but was fired and will end up saving his ex boss from certain egg on faciness in one of those contrived ironies movies love to include.
Now, go out there and restore order and sanity to our buses!
OK, fine, there is no conceivable exciting way to turn a freakishly accurate knowledge of the London bus network into an interesting action movie plot, I will concede.
The Man With No Mane
The thud of a heel and the jangle of a spur. The Cohiba kid pushed his way through the swing doors and threw back his long duster showing off the shining hilt of a perfectly maintained Colt Pacifier sixgun.
"Phineas Rattlesnake, I've come for you"
Phineas drained the shotglass in one smooth motion and the thick syrupy bourbon slid down his throat, warming his insides.
"Get out of here kid, I got nothin' to say to you"
Another few thuds on the wooden floorboards announced the kid's approach. Phineas didn't turn to confront the kid, but kept one eye on the reflection behind the bar, if he went for his guns he wasn't going to go down as easy as that gutrot he'd just finished.
"You know what you promised, and you're going to make amends"
The bartender was long since under the bar, already telling himself that he really should add another thickness of wood to the back of the bar for that little extra protection from ricochets and misfires. Phineas reached for the bottle in obvious disdain for the kid and poured another shot. He moved the shotglass to a position beside himself and took a swig straight from the bottle. The kid stepped up and stood in front of the proffered shotglass but did not drink it.
"Alright kid, tomorrow. Noon."
The kid looked down at the glass.
"Can't do noon. I'm supposed to be reroofing mama's house at lunchtime"
Phineas sighed.
"Fine, eleven"
The kid cleared his throat
"Choir practice"
The older man took another swig from the bottle.
"Two?"
The kid was now toying with the full shotglass between his gloved hands.
"I'm due out on the ranch to help shoe a few new horses Eastwood's gotten in"
With blazing eyes and a mouthful of tobacco Phineas X. Rattlesnake swung around and grabbed the lapels of the kid's duster.
"Well son, soon as you're done with your chores and helped repair yore mama's roof, then I'll take you to see the circus, okay?"
Indubiously
Setting: a large airy sitting-room in Upper Baker Street, furnished with a disparate selection of comfortable chairs covered in scarves and blankets, a man paces around the tall double bay window as he attempts to resolve an internal conundrum. Another man sits on a couch and waits patiently for the other to finish his ponderings.
Watson: One thing I just don't understand Holmes
Holmes: Yes?
Watson: If the neice knew all along about the timepiece and where the swallow eggs had been kept...
Holmes: Faithful companion, you are forgetting about one thing.
Watson: Great Scot! Of course! But then...
Holmes: Indeed
Watson: And the...
Holmes: Correct
Watson: But then that means...
Holmes: And furthermore?
Watson: That she, and he...
Holmes: Yes, an obvious conclusion to draw
Watson: With one left unaccounted for in the...
Holmes: My first assumption
Watson: Which leaves only...
Holmes: I daresay
Watson: And the pen which ran dry...
Holmes: A ruse
Watson: But the raging incontinence at Scotland Yard!
Holmes: Yes?
Watson: Impossible!
Holmes: Incontrovertible
Watson: With the writer's block...
Holmes: And the colour blue
Watson: Thundering Betsy's britches! It all points to one clear culprit!
Holmes: Yes
Watson: But how...
Holmes: I was bored.
The housekeeper enters with a tray of tea and biscuits, as is customary, one of the biscuits is laced with strychnine. She hasn't killed either of them yet but she'll get one of them eventually, these chauvinistic woffling junkie nancy-boy detective poofs who think they're so clever.
Fireless
When they extinguished the foundry it was as if they had capped my soul. When the foreman told me that they would be phasing production to India and letting the steel workers go I didn't care about the redundancies. This fire had been burning for decades, it had burned through wars and it had burned through natural catastrophies, it had remained a constant in my life. I had never felt the cold until the day the foreman said they would eventually have to put the fire out.
With the slow relentless pace of molten steel seeping along funnels and oozing through channels the crew were driven out of their alcoves, out of their corners and asked to leave one by one until only myself and the foreman remained. There was a party arranged at Brewster's but I didn't intend going.
"Time to go" he said, but I moved closer to him "I know you're worried, I know."
He put an arm around me and we moved closer to the lip of the recovery boiler. The refuse slag would finish here in a huge tank that I had always believed would remain unopened.
"You're worried about the bodies, aren't you."
I nodded. He gave a laugh that rang through the empty plant, bouncing off steel mesh walkways, ringing around empty smelting furnaces and filling the air with noise again, but then his face took on a hard expression.
"They'll never be found because nobody knows they need to be looked for. Only me and you know. And pretty soon, it'll just be me."
He gave me a firm push and the barrier behind me gave way. Below me the last of the molten metal bubbled and spat. I knew that I would never feel cold again.
Trouble
I've been growing my hair out long now for a few years, mainly at the insistence of my girlfriend who likes me to have long hair, drink beer from a glass, sit down to pee and call her Steve during sex. Some of the previous sentence may be utter fabrication.
Some mornings I molt more than others. I tug on the elastic that binds my hair into a ponytail and let it all float free before tying it up again and I end up with strands of long blondish hair, what is a boy to do with them?
I liberally sprinkle them onto the shoulders and backs of men in smart business suits when pressed up against them on the Tube on the off chance that they have dark-haired, paranoid girlfriends.
The Good 'Ol Rads
Well y'all let me tell you how this here came into being, there was me over on my side of the river where we had ourselves the re-ac-tor and I got me a job hauling the waste barrels and dumpin them where the foreman din't care. One night I goes back to my sweet Bethy-jo across the other side of the river and I had me some of that gick on my work gloves. Bethy-jo she was cooking up some of her famous creole citrus buns for the county fair and she's been looking out for something that would make them stand out other than the usual strings of fairy lights and spotlights.
Bethy-jo, she sees that gick there on my gloves and she notices that its fair glowing orange and green and all the colors of the rainbow. "Otis" she says, "Otis, where did that come from?" She don't talk right but we can'ts all be purfect and she sure is pretty and a little wildcat in the sack. "Otis, this could be the answer to making my bakesale this year beat all previous years records!" Then she gone done one of them evil laughs like you's only seeing on a James Bond movie. I asked my Bethy-jo what she meant and she said back "For God's sake Otis, my name is Elizabeth, I don't have one of these awful hick double-names. Christ why did I drop out of law school? Listen, go back to wherever you were and get me more of this glowing ooze, I'll need it for my frosting"
And then she gave me the sweetest peck on the cheek and promised me a handjob later, so I got right back in my truck, spun them wheels and headed back across the river to the other side. Took me a few tries to find the bank where I'd done dumped them barrels but luck was with me, one of them suckers hadn't even burst yet. Some gick sloshed over the lip and down my cover-alls as I got it back onto the bed of ol' faithful, but a few ropes and it was lashed down tight and secure like.
I dialed into KBRX Shocked and turned the volume right up, driving along the river bank with the thought of Bethy-jo's firm grip on my mind, so much sos that I din't hear them sirens until the flashing lights were right on me. I done pulled over just like Daddy always showed me to and slicked my hair back just like he woulda done too and I practiced my "is there a problem officer" as that trooper done walked up the side of my truck and when he shined his flashlight into my window I kept my hands well on that wheel.
"Step out of the car boy" he said with authorotee and spit a long stream of brown into the dust.
"Is there a problem officer?" I asked and smiled real nice hoping I'd be spending the night with Bethy-jo and not as some fat boy's Mary-beth.
"Boy do you know why I pulled you over?"
"Was I speedin' officer?"
"Boy, you are spilling ionized radiation all over this road, why by my count you are exceeding the permissable rontgen limit by at least a kilogray. My own counter here," at this he brought forth a yellow box with a needle that was spiked way off the scale "is showing you as being the single most radioactive thing in the state. It is a miracle on God's green Earth that you are still standing up on your own limbs boy with any teeth in your head and hair on your scalp. Your internal organs should be pissing out of your a-hole any minute now. Christ boy, you must be too stupid to drop dead or summin."
Well my daddy always told me from the other side of the glass that providing you don't admit to nothing and you can gets your hands on a half-decent lawyer they can gets you out of anything with their silver tongues. Bethy-jo knew some good lawyers from way back so I din't have nothing to be scared of. I just wiped the gick off my hands onto my cover-alls, ran a hand through my thinnin' hair and gave that trooper a half toothy smile.
Outside Context Problem
Mister Truth puts one wet grey webbed foot on the warm surface of the marbled rock. His tail flicks lazilly between his legs and the wide base of his fluke fans his skin as it slowly dries.
"I have traced it back to this point. This struggle." he chitters into the labyrinth in my inner ear through a combination of equilibroception and biosonar; beaming his thoughts directly into the liquid at the front of my brain and putting me slightly off-balance.
The bastard hadn't thought to bring me here with any clothing and already I can feel the burn across my shoulders from the harsh Precambrian sun through an ionosphere severely lacking in any protective qualities. No plant life at this point in time means that the gases that would normally have been funneling out and into the atmosphere have yet to be appear. Still, he's out of his element too; standing on rock doesn't come naturally for a cetacean.
At the water's edge I watch as a flat and wide armor-plated trilobite crawls through crystal waters towards the surface. The slick water, devoid of algae and other fragments of animal detritus parts like mineral oil and the creature drags itself up onto the rock.
"This one" announces Mister Truth and waggles his snout towards the trilobite. "Does it not feel truly magical to witness this?"
I am getting a headache from receiving his thoughts and rub my brow. I really couldn't care less about witnessing the birth of my species, it really just feels like he's rubbing it in that the cetaceans have managed to develop time travel before we did.
"I imagined something more epic, and with a decent soundtrack" I tell him, using my mouth so that he has to process and understand before he can respond. "Maybe some Strauss, or something with a backbeat. Slow edits and pace and eventually a big build up as..."
"Hush" Mister Truth says hard enough to make my skull pound.
The trilobite is not alone, it has been followed by a creature I've never seen before, a sort of translucent lizard with pink organs showing through. The lizard slopes out of the water and tracks the trilobite across the surface of the rock, following the contours and remaining almost completely invisible. The trilobite has evolved a carapace that will protect it from the sun and maintain its skeletal integrity, but this lizard oozes and dribbles its way like a jellyfish.
The lizard catches up to the trilobite and envelopes it, knocking them both onto the trilobite's shell with a slick pseudopod. I watch, fascinated as they struggle. The trilobite's legs claw furiously at the air and it twists and wriggles as best as its segmented body will allow.
"Ancestor of yours?" I ask Mister Truth, this time using the crude but effective method of humming my words into the forefront of my mind for him to detect and respond.
"Of course not. We evolved from the same mammals that you did. The trilobite is as much your ancestor as it is mine," there is a snort of derision from his blowhole. "You do not wish to see the creatures that would evolve in our place should the opponent win this fight"
The lizard is smothering and crushing the trilobite at the same time, but to do so has reduced its thickness to be as thin as paper. There is a shriek and a gurgle as the sharp tips of the trilobite's legs pierce the thin film in a hundred places at once. The lizard is slowly and methodically shredded, with gobs of wet see-through flesh tossed away. The trilobite rests on its back, the struggle over.
"Should we..." I start to say but stop and purse my lips, humming inside my head instead; "should we flip him back onto his front?"
Mister Truth looks down at the trilobite as it wriggles and squirms in an attempt to right itself. It balls itself up.
"Oh... um... I don't know. I don't think we can interfere, we might change the entire course of evolution."
We stood there, a human and a cetacean, on part of a continent that would one day be China, if we could just work out whether flipping this damn bug back onto its feet was the path to evolution or mass extinction for us.
Gordian Swimwear
I was taught a number of relaxation techniques and in the interests of avoiding a life on lithium or ritalin or whatever the cool kids are doing these days I started putting them into effect during moments of stress.
Like take lunchtime today for example. I was stuck in an interminable line of people waiting for the sushi guy to chop up enough tuna and salmon pieces to put on top of little bundles of sticky rice and I'm checking the girls behind the counter to see if any of them are missing the ends of their little fingers and were maybe Yakuza molls before they came to London, no luck.
Deep breath one, deep breath two. I think of a beach somewhere. The queue goes nowhere.
Deep breath three, deep breath four. I might sound like I'm hyperventilating but I'm actually attempting to add auditorial stimulation to the daydream and the breathing should sound like distant waves.
I imagine The Girl. She walks towards me. The queue resolutely stays put. I can smell fish and salt, is that the fantasy or the sushi? There is the slightest gust of wind and a stream of hair covers one cheek. She lifts it away from her eyes and lifts the corner of her mouth in a smile.
One hand sweeps behind her neck and I draw her close. I feel the press of her body and there is an uncomfortable moment as I step back a pace in the queue and excuse myself to the woman ahead of me. Behind my eyes her lips part and they are moist and welcoming, her eyes close and my fingers start to undo the knot at the back of her neck.
I'm... having a little... trouble with the knot. Damn thing is... wow. Um... ok, just try again. One handed, behind her neck, unable to see what I'm doing I feel my blood pressure start to rise. Stay calm, its just a stupid knot.
I close my eyes and focus as my fingers slip and fumble with the knot. I take a deep breath, then another. I imagine myself in a perfectly ordinary London sushi bar, waiting in a queue that refuses to move forward...
Fear Is The Mind Killer
I'd been working as a surface dynamics technician at the White Savannah research complex for three weeks when Doctor Lazlow accosted me in the corridor. I was carrying out an experiment into what the perfect ratio of soapy liquid to linoleum was with my company-provided fluid displacement staff; a long two inch thick rod with a tangle of absorbent tendrils on the end that ensures maximum surface coverage within the accepted tolerances of chaos theory.
"Leland, stop mopping and come here, quickly" he said. I propped my equipment against the wall and mooched over to the doorway he was hanging out of.
"Can you drive, boy?" he asked, and I watched a bead of sweat trip off the end of his nose and fall onto my clean floor.
"Doctor, White Savannah only employs the most capable and studious technicians to..."
"I'll take that as a yes. Listen, we're in trouble here, there's a wet works squad on the way. The oversight investigation into our steering committee's ultimate motivations for conducting our experiments hasn't met with much approval and in the interests of maximum credible deniability they're going to eradicate all our good works here."
I was aghast. I couldn't believe that private contractors would be brought in to clean the floors I spent all day toiling over. My works were a labour of love, done in the purest conviction that without me the lab workers and professors would track dirt and grime into their experimentation rooms. Some KBR flunky would just do whatever he felt he had to in order to get paid his overblown daily rate.
"Oh please Doctor Lazlow, no! I'll do anything, anything!"
"Good man, now, we've got a brief window to get all the custodial staff out. The guards on the gate won't allow any of us research fellows past, but you can drive the laundry van through the service gate and take our precious work to safety."
Eager to keep my job I nodded vigorously to dispel any doubt that I was the right man for the job.
"It’s risky putting all our eggs in one basket, especially considering the nature of our experiments into consensus reality but we're left with no choice."
Doctor Lazlow led me down a corridor, then another and another. He swiped his pass, allowing him access to the research dormitories and was met by Doctor Kier. She had her hands resting on the shoulders of a small boy who clutched a stuffed badger toy.
"Are the others on their way?" Lazlow asked and Kier nodded. We stood silently for a minute and I hummed a little tune. Kier and Lazlow were obviously tense but the boy gave me a smile and I smiled back. Eventually several members of the research staff arrived from different wings of the dorm, each leading a child with them, each child clutched a stuffed animal as if their life depended on it.
"I don't like having them all in one place, you know what they can do when they combine their talents" admonished Kier but Lazlow waved his hand and led the way to the underground parking lot. "Are we really entrusting three decades of work to this simpleton?" she said.
Each of the children had met the others with a nod and a smile; they remained serene and passive, led by the firm grip of their assigned adult. I followed behind, spotting a grimy corner I would have to remember to come back to later.
There was a loud noise and a wall ahead of us exploded inwards, spreading a thick white cloud of plaster dust. I heard Kier scream, as well as shouts and cries from the other research assistants. There were dozens of popping noises and the flicker of laser beams sweeping through the dusty cloud. I rubbed at my eyes as I saw men in black uniforms firing guns over my head from my prone position on the shiny lino floor, now coated in rubble and wet splats of dark red blood.
Dazzled and confused I watched as the four men in black advanced on the children, huddled in a group together, their protective guardians all broken and twisted in lumpy meaty messes around them. The youngest boy stepped forwards to address the assault team.
"We've decided we don't like you. You did bad things."
There was a bright flash, a popping noise and the soldiers vanished from existence to be replaced by torn strips of black material, chunks of black metal and fragments of lumpy spaghetti sauce that oozed down the walls, as if they'd been forced into an invisible blender.
"Come Leland, we must escape or they all died in vain" the boy proffered a hand and I took it once I had stood up, he continued to snuggle his stuffed badger toy and seemed totally unphased by the dead bodies and gore covering the walls. He led me towards the stairwell that would take us to the parking lot below.
"But" I protested quietly, "who will clean up this mess?"
Entourage
Hardest job in Hollywood has got to be being Jeremy Piven's agent. How do you do a job that your own client does better than you do?