MATERIALIST DOT NET

I've just eaten an entire box of one-a-day chewable vitamin Cs. = 6000% of my RDA. I'll try to keep writing as I go into shock, to give you all a clear idea of what complete kidney failure feels like from the inside. can't promise anything though.

also, a large quantity of red seedless grapes, and a litre of cranberry juice. breakfast for champions. or for feeble hypochondriacs with a sudden craving for wholesomeness, too lazy and too late in the day to develop this biological integrity by natural means.

----

I think my illness is receding. at least the lines of battle have been redrawn. from open warfare, it has become a war of attrition. my cough has withdrawn and ensconced itself in the farther unbesmirched reaches of my lungs, the bits where air never reaches because the free flow of oxygen is stopped by thick and impenetrable layers of tar. beyond this thick wall of budding carcinoma it sits, the fat yellow beast, biding its time... waiting to choke me in my sleep. the enemy inside. my Inner Strangler.

it has lost the dry hacking eagerness of youth, and ripened into a thick, chest-bubbling maturity; a one-night stand that never left the next morning, and several months later still hides in your bed, dissipated and unwelcome, growing ever fatter and more unwashed...

----

I've gone from shapeless all-pervading misery, to a series of identifiable and individually bearable symptoms. the path of most bouts of flu, in my experience. first you feel globally inflamed, ill 'everywhere' and then gradually the fighting dies down until there are merely handfuls of straggling surviving invaders fighting a losing battle in pockets throughout your body.

I shudder to think of the carnage landscape of exploded cells, drifting lymphocytes, viral remains that must be the inside of my body at the moment... how many millions of cells have died in the last few days?

amazing how you take your immune system for granted. every time you suffer an infection, or illness, you are, basically, wrestling for your life. the only thing that stands in the way of inarrestable death from the inside is a barrage army of white blood cells, produced by your body, that as far as I understand it sacrifice themselves to destroy the invader.

what if they failed? or if they weren't there, one day?

----

*brrrrr*. gonna stop being morbid, get up and go back to bed now I think. the Beast within me stirs. maybe it's the onset of kidney shock.

NB: I'm taking votes from today as to whether I should continue my highly succesful illustrated guide to me and my life here, or not.

jeg er forkjølet. jævlig forkjølet. får ikke sove, så forkjølet er jeg.

faen.

---

erkältet. resfriado. raffreddato.

---

faen.

faen. faen. faen.

---

*snufs* *host host* *surkle host* *hveees* *host host snufs*

---

faen.

FA-EN!

*hytter med neven mot himmelen*: hvorfor MEG, for pokker... *snufs*

faen.

---

*tasser over til badeskapet. grafser piller*

*moms moms*

---

*jevn tyggelyd*

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faen.

smaker dritt.

---

faen faen faen faen.

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*setter seg i sofaen, skrur på TVen, venter på at det hele skal gå over*

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*snufs snufs host hark hveees kremt host snufs*

---

faen.

don't know what my problem is at the moment. well, I do. I feel <i>ill</i>.

my body is the microcosmic metaphor of my surrounding environment: blocked-up transport sytem, crumbling houses and facades, congestions and arthritic pain, pollution and grime everywhere. strikes. simmering discontent. stress. no birdsong.

not to mention dim,grim&dysfunctional administration. breakdown in channels of communication. main difference is, I haven't got Livingston the Redeemer to make life tolerable and provide humourous asides.

clearly though, the City is an organism just like me. argument by analogy.

think me and mine fayre Citie both could do with a few weeks in a health spa. some hardcore hydrocolonic therapy to blow out ye Worme of Corruptione that wriggleth in our bellies. aromatherapy to drown out the methanic fumes of cars. loops of soothing dolphin songs in the background.

problem being, you might throw the baby out with the bathwater. if you melted the unhealthiness out of the City you might be left with a bare lifeless crater... same goes for me.

nay, say rather wholesale amputation. me and City both. in my case, whole body removed. would do me a world of good.

with the City, eradicate it, chop it into pieces and ship it off to the colonies. get prosthetic replacements. some sheep and fluteplaying shepherds, flamenco women and peach trees in. even if they're plastic they're bound to look better than the natural limbs...

in the case of amputation there are problems though. urban regeneration is one. the City might regrow its limbs, like the slimy mutant brackish-water salamander it is. what if it regrows like a starfish? chop a fragment off, drop it somewhere, and presto, another mutant City springs up in your back yard...

what if they use spores? you breathe some in on the air of the City, carry them around infested for years as they slowly grow, until suddenly one morning the newborn City erupts from inside you, ripping you open and gushing out across acres and acres of land in all directions, towering skyscrapers exploding up towards the sky from your helpless gutted crucified body...

probably its more subtle than that though. the City is a meme. the first city landed like an invisible virus from space, infected one of our poor little innocent treedwelling ancestors and mutated him forcibly into a vector for the growth of new Cities... opposable thumbs, social instinct, technological aptitude... all simply to procreate this race of gigantic inorganic lifeforms... we're all just vessels for the replication of a race of alien mineral entities, Cities, from space.

slaves to the City.

do Cities reproduce asexually? underground roots and tendrils... maybe the tube systems. cars are red bloodcells, streets are veins and arteries. buildings are the skeleton. people are the nervous system. armies are the strong arms of the cities. countries are just groups of Cities banding together for mutual protection...

ever wonder about this 'progress, technology, economic development'-thing? why aren't we happy just the way we were, sitting around, eating fruit, mating, swinging from tree to tree?...

very simple. we're enslaved by the alien virus from space. we have to build Cities, because the City Virus forces us to. the alien virus has taken over our brains to the point that we don't even realise that we're slaves. we think we're fulfilling our own purposes, our own goals when we build cities... but nooooooooooo...

suddenly, a little urban sprawl will pop somewhere unexpected, complete with lame transport system, rats, traffic... do Cities pass through the fetal stage? do they have babies?

yes. hamlets, settlements, villages... sometimes a village starts growing, eats up the surrounding villages. turns into a City. sometimes they die, sometimes they mutate or split or evolve... pure Darwinism.

humans are expendable, like skin cells. how many of your cells die every day? how many do you destroy simply by scratching your face, cutting yourself while shaving, getting drunk, just for fun!!!

suburbs are satellite Cities. babies still attached to the mother City. autobahns are the pulsating giant veins of the global City network superbrain. like umbilical cords.

what's the next stage you ask?

space. the final frontier. colonisation.

they'll eat up this planet, destroying all life on it, then move on to the next one... leaving nothing behind. taking all us poor assimilated humans along, cells in the twisted, sick body of gleaming new Space-Borne Cities... floating out like a swarm to find new planets to colonise. or maybe just subsist in space.

MIR was the first of the new breed. an experimental mutant baby City sent up to check out viability. just wait. they're changing themselves, becoming smaller, efficient, lithe, autonomous and self-contained. finding new means of sustenance in space: solar power, hydrogen scoops... maybe even becoming independent of humans.

Machine Cities. eternal structures, fully in control of themselves, having shed the weak and mortal Flesh in favour of electric, replicating Metal...

science fiction writers are the propaganda organ of the Cities. making space desirable, making human beings heroes in the race to space... obscuring the fact that the drive to space is not our desire, but the desire of the alien City Virus.

our radio waves might even be the intangible spores of the City. one day they'll bombard a planet way out there, twisting and altering and curdling the life on it into subservient new slave organism. soon, Cities will start to pop up on the surface...

no, that's not sarcastic for once. well, maybe a bit...

I've decided to stop being misanthropic for a while. stop cultivating my oh-so-modern image-overload sickness, stop thinking-writing about burning cattle and global deterioration all the time, and start trying to be cheerful. turn myself around like a ship, stop chasing sunsets and oil spills, and head for new, brighter, untouched horizons.

the world is, after all, what you make of it.

so bye bye Untergang des Abendlandes, hello Mr Men, positive thinking and cosmic love...

and here's a few reasons to be joyful on this hazy, foggy, toxic, grey, dismal London morn... erm. forget that. this beautiful, mysteriously shrouded morning, fragrant with the bright promise of spring... *cough cough*...

My company's weathered the storm and I have a job for the time being, a job where no one minds if I come in an hour late in the morning as long as I get the job done. I can work 4 days a week and live a reasonable lifestyle, including insane expenses for my digital camera that always seems to crave new accessories to provide maximal consumer satisfaction and optimise performance...

My digital camera works again, and I have such sights to show you... once I get my bloody PCMCIA compactflash adapter-card so I can get the bloody pictures OUT !!! and onto a harddisk. Which will happen on Friday payday.

Friday is payday, for all the nice people in the office. The office is full of nice people.

I'm sleeping ok now, I've gotten rid of my demon mattress.

I had a really nice coffe this morning. large mocha with extra espresso shot and whipped cream, two sugars. and a brownie.

I might be going to Rome to kiss the Pope's feet for an Easter press trip.

I'm young, unburdened and with bright prospects. not married, no kids, no mortgage. no limitations except the ones in my head. I could travel, I could work, I could teach...

as I wrote this, the girl that works next to me, I'll call her Clever Nasty Biscuit, told me she's resigning and moving to Paris.

erm.

I think that is a sign from the higher powers, but I'm going to ignore it for the time being. *sigh*... she's my only fellow dark cynical bitchy creature of darkness here, my companion in misery at the office...

maybe I ought to move out. 'd hate to leave the flat though...

*sigh*. ought to get back to work now...

but hey, at least I'm not contributing overmuch to the destruction of the rainforest. in fact, I'm supporting the transition to a world of digital literacy, where trees are no longer mashed into pulp to make useless scrappy tabloids...

as you'd expect, there is much cattleslaying afoot in the British Isles at the moment. numbers are in the millions, and frontpages seethe with apocalyptic images of limitless fields of blind burning shrivelled fuming carcasses, bodies and bodies and bodies and bodies as far as the eye can see...

the isles are shrouded in miasmic fumes and the crackling sound of burning flesh.

or should I, perhaps, say meat.

[...]

obviously, I can't and I shouldn't draw very strong parallels to the Holocaust here, for many reasons.

because these are animals and the Jews were breathing feeling speaking human beings. the analogy works one way, in that the demeaning cattlelike treatment and dehumanisation of the Jews (and gypsies and dissidents and POWs amd homosexuals and <i>Jehova's Witnesses</i>...) offends our sense of human dignity and worth. but the horror lies in the analogy, and it's not an analogy that we as observers are making, it was an analogy that was put in practice by the Nazi regime. we merely observe this analogy and see its obscenity.

which is a good and necessary thing. the capacity to be outraged and horrified at this, and the ability to comprehend the fact that the event was incomprehensible in its magnitude and sheer horror is an endemic faculty of the human mind. I think the lack of this capacity indicates a form of stunting...

all well and good; pompously highminded, pontificating and bladibladibladiblah....

but is this 'ethical', moral response naturally anthropocentric? is a genocide on this scale a <i>morally</i> acceptable fact when it happens to non-humans? I'm not talking about the practical acceptability of it (though why they have to kill all the animals... obviously not for the sake of the animals. foot and mouth has mortality rates of down to 5%... economic interest, pure and sheer and simple...), but the <i>moral</i> dimension, the question of empathy. can we legitimately exclude the suffering and death of millions of animals from our moral equations?

no one has mentioned it!!! in any newsflashes, articles... systematically and without question, commentators have treated the animals as a given, and focused exclusively on human suffering!

this whole entry boils down to the question raised by one sentence from a paragraph in today's guardian:

<blockquote>"Vets were authorised to slaughter on suspicion to speed up the killing once farmers had called to say they believed they had an outbreak. This is to fulfil Mr Blair's pledge to cut the time from diagnosis to destruction of animals to less than 24 hours"</blockquote>

Ok, maybe I'm funny in the head, but I see an animal I see maternal instincts, I see levels of intelligence, I see a lot of things I see in myself when I look in the mirror...

and part of me objects VIOLENTLY to the language of this crisis. particularly the constantly used term 'destruction'. 'destruction' is something that happens to inanimate objects. a table is destroyed, a human baby is murdered, killed, dead. animals are slaughtered, which is bad, but destroyed is horrendous.

it implies a whole world of unsouled animals, flesh robots seen simply as an expendable resource for use and consumption by human beings, the souled gardeners at the top of the pyramid of being... a hypocrisy and lie that has led us into mindless natural destruction, engendering what is possibly the world's most critical extinction-level event so far... human society.

the bottom line is, I think the treatment of animals as a natural resource, as objects to be grown and then slaughtered is horrific and repellent. I don't think this attitude is something that was precipitated by the crisis, I think the mindset is a prerequisite for the possibility of farming the way it is practised today...

and to be honest, with all due respect for farmers and their poor distraught families, ... if the entire agricultural infrastructure, what with grass-eating cattle being fed the dead bodies of their fellow cattle, cows eating cow-flesh, pigs eating their own dead piglets, animals pumped full of growth hormones and mutant antibiotics, chickens with no legs because they live and die four to a cubed foot of cage and excrement, cows chained to endless rows of machinepumps milking and shitting and dying on their feet without ever seeing the light of the sun, calves kept in dark locked rooms and slaughtered for gourmet prices... all of it made possible by that ridiculous self-lie of mankind, that we are somehow different and chosen and elevated, that nature is to be tamed and controlled and exploited, and that animals don't have souls or minds or any form of intelligence...

...if the entire agricultural industry collapsed, I think the sum total of suffering on this planet would diminish considerably. even if all the mass-farmers and cattle-brokers starved to death.

had a seriously weird dream last night. not so much for its content, though that was strange enough. rather, it was one of those dreams that you suspect gives you a glimpse into the far reaches of your brain, and the dark hidden things that go on there without your knowledge (or approval)...

the dream was quite simple. I discovered, somehow, that Will Self (for non-brits and those who can't be bothered to look up the guy: satirical fiction writer, former junky and oxford student, professional thesaurus: a verbose but funny dinosaur..)... that Will Self the junky oxford don had met Jesus Christ, in the flesh, and that far from being 'just stories' his writings were the most accurate modern interpretation of the teachings of Christ... a desperate attempt to communicate the incommunicable truth of God's teachings-made-flesh...

in the dream, Will Self was the true apostle, and John, Mark, Luke, Thomas, all the others had failed to grasp the true core of the Christian teaching...

Deeply disturbing stuff, particularly since I don't like Will Self that much, I certainly never thought of him as being religious, in any sense... I do admit to owning two of his short-story collections, but still... maybe I should re-read them...

or maybe my subconscious is telling me to stop pondering theology and get on with things...

physically sick that is. but I'm not in the mood for scatology, and hence, I won't inflict on you the graphic details of my illness. suffice to say, I'm ill. and sick. I am sick, and I be sick. and I've got a plane to catch this evening. argh. in the contemporary sense that is. not in the ornithological sense.

going home for the week-end, back to ole Norge for a few days of sleeping, beachwalking, good food and sitting up all night with friends. and playing roleplaying games... *grins*... my brother's taken up a biannual dungeons and dragons campaign (during summer and winter breaks), so there'll be a substantial share of silly latenight elving and wizarding and mindless geekery.

this game takes the place of our old campaign, a vampire game that ran from 1995 til last summer, when my 1200-year old shapeshifting tzimisce character "Alex" precipated the victory of the powers of darkness and the coming of gehenna by cannibalizing the woman who carried the reincarnation of jesus in her womb... a very long story. bit of an identity/ethics problem. immortality'll do that to some people...

prime chance to spend quality time with friends. I've been playing with most of these people since 1990, on and off, and I'm always amazed that we still manage to squeeze in a few hours of lightminded madness whenever enough of us are back in the country at the same time - silly, but great fun. nostalgic, curious, intriguing: we watch each other across a table full of dice and esoteric character sheets, growing older, planning to get married, buying flats, getting first jobs, second jobs... no longer the shapeless bundles of fearful, excited schoolyard energy we used to be... and yet, at 4am they (we) 'll still be excited about rolling dice and battling imaginary creatures of evil (or being imaginary creatures of evil, for that sake), and don't forget that sparkling magic sword in the corner...

[...]

love going home. I can regress completely and act in most respects like a kid, catch up with family, friends, local ex-lovers and other people I only see every six months, have my food prepared for me, lie about and read and go for long walks, and not worry about rent or bills or work or lifeplans or anything... for a few days at least. lie back and sleep in the safe hand of a greater power. an apparently greater power, maybe. a power that is beginning to recede in the distance, leaving you with the unimaginable task of trying to be a 'greater power' to others, maybe your own offspring, at some point in the fairly near future.

crazy stuff. but like everything else, I suppose it'll all make sense when it comes around to that point. maybe...

life perhaps, but not intelligence.

undergoing a spell of sheer and unconditional mediocrity at the moment. the muse of inspiration has left me for a series of simultaneous affairs with everyone else in the office. and all my friends.

judging by the steady keytyping clatter of copywriting that surrounds me, and the equally steady barrage of enlightened and mindblowingly witty conversation I am subjected to in all my spare moments...

friends. acquaintances. vendors. cleaners. bus-drivers. old ladies rambling in albanian as they pick goodies out of trashcans in the street. dogs... all of them bantering wittily away. all tapped into that ol' unbroken river of talent in the sky...

leaving me dry and gasping on the dry land of boredom and pathetic self-pity.

[...]

I do however invest a lot of mindless energy into e-mails. prompted by one of 'correspondents' I post an ad-hoc poem I wrote, which I think expresses adequately how I feel at the moment.

dyingbitbybitandnotadropofgold

dim&slow&growingold

tearingoutmyhair.

lostmymarbleseverywhere

andnotasingleoneinsidemyhead.

tiredboredandlivingdead.

[...]

 

so there. no entertainment, no wit, no profundity. just a sad, bored, frustrated conveyorbelt auteur with too much downtime.

suddenly it was brash's birthday (1am march 19).

I confess it took me by surprise. I'm notoriously bad with birthdays. hence, no present. ever inventive and ready to improvise, however, flutter and I skulked out unseen in the middle of the night to gently pillage a patch of sleeping daffodils at a nearby intersection...

probably the only patch of growing living earthy goodness for miles around, but hey. it's a birthday. another solar year for brash. solar yellow flowers were required.

the natives didn't catch us, and the traffic thundered obliviously past on the lit tarmac while we skulked warily around under the dark trees, harvesting our floral bounty. we then pranced and danced our way back to the warehouse, feeling every bit like Julie Andrews transplanted to the outskirts of NeoTokyo...

brash was very happy.

not sure why I wrote this. not particularly interesting. it just made me smile, at the tail end of a boring and pointless week-end spent in the sign of sloth, sleeping 18 hours a day and feeling like a braindead hibernating lump of wood... suppose I wanted to remember it, one day when I'm browsing back through this diary, amazed at my turgid lack of wit. at least, I got daffodils for brash on his birthday...

got up today at 4pm, feeling like roadkill, went off the supermarket to get breakfast (apricot yoghurt, chocolate croissants and fresh apple/mango-juice: one finds what solace one can in the urban wasteland...). on the way through the living room I picked up something to read in the queue (there are days when I crave constant mental stimulus; inversely, I can spend weeks in intellectual torpor when life is good: sunshine+sea, good friends and family dispel my need for escape very efficiently...).

eyeing the bookshelf-dresserbeast my eyes fell on a pocket-sized reprint of the Bible, divided into books, and I pocketed the Book of Job, one of those hundreds of books that malinger on that Great Unwritten List in the Sky of 'books that ought to be read'.

20 minutes in the Sainsbury's check-out queue confirmed my suspicions regarding the nature of the Godhead.

synopsis: job is a righteous man. satan wagers with g-d that if deprived of wealth and health, he will curse god. god accepts (G-D GAMBLES!!!) and proceeds to let satan have his way. two pages later, broke and covered with pustulent boils, family largely dead, job predictably doth curse G-d. the Lord then appeareth in a whirlwind and proceedeth to give job a comprehensive CV of his accomplishments. job surrendereth and repenteth his sins.

bottom line: 'haw haw haw: I can beat the living crap out of you and f**k you over, and you can't do a thing about 'coz I'm intangible, omnipotent and belong to another order of being. haw haw'.

so much for kindness and love. innit.

forget the transcendental agent. the bottom line is that G-d is the transcendental bully. insecure and in need of approval from his little homunculi...

He dismisses philosophical arguments, speculations and justifications with a simple appeal to raw power. "I am glorious and greater than you, so worship me even when I'm wrong". speaketh the voice from the whirlwind: "gird up thy loins now like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me: where wast thou when I laid the foudnations of the eaerth?"

Job, the noble philosopher 'dude with the atti-tude' only surrenders his justified skepsis and repulsion in the face of the direct manifestation of an irrational, egocentric, homicidal and most importantly omnipotent deity... when he realises that G-d exists and will continue beating the crap out of him in ever more inventive ways if he doesn't surrender unconditionally.

'I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes'.

[yeah right. a white lie. pragmatic hypocrisy, that's called.]

G-d proceeds to give job much wealth and a new family. never mind the six dead sons, the dead servants and dead livestock that died to prove g-ds point. casualties of g-d's fickle little pride, one assumes.

[...]

intriguing little book. most enjoyable and to the point, perhaps, was the final sentence of the introduction:

'we miss Him... but we admire tyranny no longer, and we desire justice more than we are awed by asseverations of magnificence'.

so, question time: is G-d a playground bully?

or, a rather academic question: do religious paradigms reflect models of social organisation? a feudal lord, preaching ideals of obedience, for a simple society where survival in adverse environmental conditions, and hence group loyalty and strict, efficient organisation under a central leader-figure, is paramount...

if so, what do ideas of G-d today reveal about 'our' social structures, or the social structures of groups that entertain these beliefs?

personally, I think my favourite g-d is anarchic, incomprehensible, random, perpetually surprised, with a good but bizarre sense of humour, a sympathy for weirdness, a cruel streak and probably co-extensive with the entire universe and all that is in it. including my idea of g-d. :-)

...to make me smile at the moment.
 
I'm back at work, still ridden with traces of yesterday's viral infestation.
eyes puffy from lack of sleep, body aching... my level of job security is as
neurotic as ever, thanks to the pre-programmed flight into bankruptcy that lies
at the heart of the high-risk new economy... outside the window, distant
skyscrapers loom, grey and shrouded in thick choking industrial mist. a few
weary-eyed stragglers slumped round the office, an ambience of fear, dull
frustration and entropy...
 
and yet it only takes a few notes of the chorus line from ATBs '9pm (til I
come)' to make me smile again, and to transfigure the world with sweetness...
:-)
 
sweetness. my life certainly needs a soundtrack. even the most mundane thing can
be tinged with greatness by the right soundtrack. brushing your teeth, cooking,
even writing tedious mundane copy... particularly the last one, these days...
 
generally speaking, the right soundtrack is a sweeping melodic trance anthem.
works every time.
 
either way, thought I'd give a quick update on my present condition. yah. and
guys, BTW, do try to keep the hyperbole under control. I find CAPS-LOCK
allegations of overwhelming genius really difficult to digest. :-)
 
besides, however much I keep trying to combat my monkey mind and stay in the
calm zen eye of the storm, there is still a sick little puppy clamoring for
approval inside me, and it doesn't take much provocation for it to burst through
to the surface. and with it come inflated sense of importance, arrogance,
self-consciousness, complacency, gigantic messianic ego-inflation complex etc.
 
and really bad, pretentious writing.
 
much as I detest this aspect of myself, it still rides along in my head... and I
still haven't managed to negotiate a fruitful settlement with it...
 
so keep it real people. :-)
 
yah. sweetness: now for some items of update.
 
item 1. I was struck down by the angel of pestilence yesterday. a glancing blow.
same illness as I nursed ?gf through last week, but I came down with 24 very
mild hours of sweat, confusion and throatache, rather than six days of flailing
agony, dysfunction and sleeplessness... a tribute to my indestructible
Scandinavian metabolism, I figure. sweet.
 
item 2. I spent the night yesterday at ?gf's house, being 'nursed' in a rather
tantric fashion, and I have to say if we're breaking up we're not really acting
the part at the moment... *hmmmm*... suppose one'll just have to see what
happens. still, sweetness. :-)
 
item 3: Rustpot and Cheeky Cow are getting together!!!
 
This really is an item. yet another success story in my practice as luuurvvve
facilitator *grins*... (myn mei: hmmm?) they met for the first time in venice, 3
weeks ago... and now it looks as though they're getting together. they've been
meeting up every day this week after work, exchanging red-hot sizzling e-mails
and tonight they're blatantly ignoring the party simply <i>everyone</i> is going
to, in order to spend some quality time getting to know each other...
 
sweet. they're a strange match, by any standard. can't wait til poor ol' quiet
and contemplative Rustpot meets Cheeky Cow's jovial-but-absolutely-barking-crazy
Nigerian papa... I met him a few years ago; he laughed like a cackling barytone
jackal all night, backslapped me senseless and almost drowned me with mad
camaraderie... should be interesting.
 
more updates on this item of spring sweetness and fertility later; gotta go work
now methinks. big financial heavyweights are coming in to root out the rot at
the heart of the company, with injections of cold gleaming liquid cash.
 
and vast quantities of champagne, for everyone.
 
about time. spring is here, and all is well with the world.

even demon warriors miss their mums... - 3/16/2001

don't know if anyone followed this story, but about a year ago there was a quite a lot of noise in the media about two 14-year-old Burmese kids, twins, who led a 150-strong group of guerilla revolutionaries called 'God's Army'. they were secessionists, I think, a splinter of a mainstream group called the Karen Liberation Army...

they hid in the jungle and claimed to be emissaries of God. there was much talk of magical bullet-repelling powers, fateful prophetic dreams and their mystical Destiny, and they completed efficient raids against military and civilian targets, like hospitals...

the most striking thing at the time was how skilfully they seemed to manipulate their own mythology. they slipped with natural grace into complementing positions; one of them, Johnny, was cherubic, slightly chubby, timid and good-natured (if still a guerilla mercenary idologue), with long flowing hair and a slighly apologetic expression on his face; the other one, Luther, was a ruthless chainsmoking freak with a shaved forehead, vicious animal eyes and a perennially hostile, angry expression.

Johnny was the angel to Luter's demon, making them a perfectly balanced mystical microcosm of the dual nature of the universe...

at the time, I was afflicted with ennui, terribly disllusioned with life and the universe. I was growing older, my imagination was slowly burning out, my mind choked with the rubble and flotsam of everyday existence, surrounded by grey secular skyscrapers and tedious everyday routines...

I was clutching at straws, basically.

and at the time, the story struck me as a sunshine ray of mystical irrationality in a world threatening to turn into a dead mechanical lifeless shell... I cut the picture out, pasted it in my diary, spent hours deconstructing it semiotically...

[...]

and now, the twins have surrendered and come out of the jungle. starved and weak and emaciated, all pretense of mystical warfare abandoned. they've confessed their lack of supernatural powers, they just want 'to live with their parents' and 'study'...

my disappointment is tangible.

they won't give up their cigar-smoking, and Johnny the cherub won't cut his hair. 'I'd die' he says.

but the war is over, and the kids want to lead a normal life now.

imagine them going back to school. who's going to make fun of a former spiritual guerilla leader in the schoolyard ???

ok, this is it. we're officially entering a tremendous new age, stepping bravely into a future of psionically operated machines, mind-reading, brainwave IDs...

todays metro newspaper states matter-of-factly that scientists have 'linked a person with sensors to equipment which recorded alpha waves in the brain. The waves ... are used to trigger a switch electronically...'. ('Turn on the TV with your mind', p.14)...

just pause for a second to think of the possible implications of that.

machinery that is, however crudely, operated directly by manipulating your own brain frequencies. alpha waves are produced when the brain relaxes... so you have to relax to turn the tv on...

immediately, I envisage a future caste of highly skilled biofeedback trained mental operators, able to control complex machinery by subtly manipulating their own brain activity... those of crude brain-control, or inadequate brain activity would be excluded from the job...

with refinement, the process might become indistinguishable from telepathy + telekinesis... manipulating keyboards with brain-frequencies? typing? driving cars, performing neurosurgery, playing music, controlling household machinery...

entire castes of people permanently linked to their machines, not through invasive implants, like in run-of-the-mill cyberpunk, but through incredibly subtle and sophisticated external equipment that reads brainwaves, and through years and years of monklike self-discipline and rigorous training...

inside and outside meet. religion and technology reconciled. buddhist technomancers! heavy.

it's 5am here + I'm still up. mysteriously.
 
not so mysteriously actually. just had one of our dinner parties, 3 courses this
time. I cooked one of my usual midnight pasta sauces. midnight because I start
them at twnety hundred hours and they're ready to eat by the time all my guests
have turned into pumpkins again...
 
midnight that is. my guests are werepumpkins. when I pathetically asked my fairy
godmother for some friends, she showed her dark sense of humour.
 
anyway:
 
<i>our living room's a battleground \ with scattered bodies all around</i>
 
two people on the sofa, one cheeky but very attractive friend in the attic,
which overlooks the living room. + me in the corner by the fridge, writing
sleeplessly on my webbed-up laptop, with a touch of the hyperreal about me.
 
all lit by the steady Christmas glow of fairylights, draped around pipes on the
wall; accompanied by steady waves of thumping thunder from the rave across the
courtyard, and the yells of excited kids and yobbos waving beer bottles.
 
whew, I do surround myself with attractive friends don't I... (readers all nod).
or maybe it's all my lurid mind. (readers all probably nod again). this one in
particular attracts me, like a deep-sea thermal spring attracts the blind
writhing little worms that live off its heat *grin*...
 
not the best image really. what me trying to say is, she's damn alive. a quality
that is always attractive. not necessarily in a sexual way. but that too.
 
this one in particular. let's call her Cheeky Cow (in an affectionate manner, of
course) I used to live with a few years ago, and I used to be in awe of her. she
was funny, sorted, organised, well-adjusted... yet cheeky and irreverent, and
utterly... what's the word... 'real'? lovely person, with a darn beautiful face
and the easiest, most contagious grin in the world.
 
[...]
 
my flatmate Rustpot just padded past in his dressing-gown. his poor old
metabolism can't digest the thumping bass that seeps in through the concrete
walls and he can't sleep, from a sonic indigestion. poor chap.
 
[...]
 
my mind threatens to fall into the stream of consciousness. not sure I could
swim very well in my present condition.
 
[...]
 
keep having weird deja vu echoes these days. scenes and situations strike me as
long-lost and familiar. maybe because my faulty memory abstracts certain
features of situations and identifies them when they recur again.
 
or maybe because time-space is actually a vast solid pre-ordained object. that
just exists, already crystallised. and what we think of as our perception of
time, as the potential to act and freedom of choice in a vast unthinkable
uncharted cosmos is simply --- our steady trudging path tracing across a surface
of this cosmic jewel-object.
 
it all exists, past and future, as it has for all time and will for all time.
because the passage of 'time' is just the accidental byproduct of this bizarre
thing that is human consciousness. a necessary feature of human perception.
 
or maybe it's a glitch in the matrix.
 
or a glitch in my brain. like the uncontrollable glitch-twitch I'm experiencing
in my left eyelid at the moment... weird. convinced my brain is being eaten by
slowly hatching maggot larvae, yet I seem to have come to terms with the 'fact'.
(which is only a fact in my head. probably).
 
as Rutpot once said, I seem to function remarkably well, given what goes on in
my head... :-)
 
dinner conversation was good tonight. thanx to my fit lesbian friend, (I'll call
her Little Tiger, one day I'll also explain why), it veered on our side of the
table almost immediately, and with great precision, into the maws of waiting
Darkness.
 
'what do you guys think of anal sex?'. Flutter fluttered, briefly, and I leapt
onto the subject. turns out my friend's experienced a fistf**k in the first
person, something I never thought of any of my friends doing... I suppose one
doesn't, really.
 
ah well. my mental horizon broadened one tiny fraction of an inch today too.
good good.
 
from then on it moved to necrophilia, bestiality, pedophilia, sex with dead male
puppies (combining all of the above), with great ease...
 
then we finished off, and played Mah Jong after dinner. (from about 2am:
remember the midnight pasta sauce?)... I lost, but I beat Cheeky Cow. *grin*. By
a small margin. but enough to satisfy.
 
and now I'm about to log on, press enter to save, and then go to bed. quietly
and with no fuss. light dawning outside, and even the most harcore ravers going
going gone, gone home...
 
good night.

 ... it doesn't want to let me go in the morning.
 
is it really a demon bed? I suspect it is. it's not the bed actually, it's the
mattress: a deep (blood) red double futon mattress, with (weird) (eye-like)
buttons placed at regular intervals. and it troubles me.
 
it looms. it seems to move in the corner of your eye, yet it just sits there
when you confront it.
 
not just that. it's rude. it never talks back.
 
and the mice have disappeared from my room now. no squeaking, no rustle. just a
deathly quiet. the occasional whiff of scared pheromones, a bit of hair or a
dried-up shrivelled little ear under my bed. fading footprints.
 
as I said, it troubles me. when I sleep on it I have blurred, troubled dreams. I
wake up in the middle of the night, bathed in anxious sweat. scare the beejeezus
out of my flatmates when I stumble (float) through the flat to the shower in the
morning, ranting to myself in Sumerian in the voice of an old woman, face
contorted and with weirdly smoldering eyes. they hide and cower in their rooms
until I leave for work.
 
wake up two feet above the bed bathed in strange light, head spinning. vomit
small livid hairless cretures that scuttle off into the corners of my room.
 
not that my dreams are usually not troubled (won't even go into that, as  I
know there are psychologists reading this...).
 
but these are anxious, weird, breathless dreams. not intellectually troubling,
physically troubling.
 
and the funny thing is, my flatmate Flutter also has an identical mattress. and
identical problems. not just that. she is growing more aggressive. bloodshot
eyes. hungry look when she sees nappy adverts with glowing little happy babies
on TV.
 
I try to cover the beast up, appease it, sweet-talk it. but nothing seems to
help. it rejects my atonements, and quietly clamors for more blood, more blood.
the vampiric essence it harbours, whose tendrils feed on my lifeforce at night
seems unbudging and unshakable.
 
and that is why I can't get out of bed in the morning.
 
yup. nod. 
 
not because I'm a lazy useless latenight person who can't adapt to any
remotely functional pattern of life. nonono.
 
because my bed is possessed. obviously.

I've just had an insanely productive day; blitzing through days and days of work
in the space of hours. typing fingers sweaty, mind is numb-dumb, but workload
eased and I think I can take my well-deserved half-day off tomorrow...
 
chilling. present mood reminds of an impressionist image someone I read used to
summarise Heidegger: tired teutonic peasant walking back through the fields at
twilight, coming from a hard day's work ploughing the earth, rucksack on his
back, going home to a hearty meal and a crackling fireplace in his cottage.
hence, the title.
 
except, I've got sonique 'it feels so good' in the background *wide lazy grin,
stretches, pops fingers, leans back in chair, hums annoyingly to irritate
co-workers*...
 
faced with a quandary tonight. ?gf
(maybe-ex-girlfriend-come-back-from-trinidad-on-saturday) wants me to come over.
went over on tuesday, as she said comecomecomecome... turned out she was
feverish and ill, and I spent the night rubbing her back, punched by randomly
flailing feverish limbs, getting up at 4am to fetch more paracetamols, and being
woken up every 20 minutes by weird hallucinations about games and 'arrgh! it's
like torture, like torture', in a dark damp room permeated with sweat and the
smell of feverish illness...
 
miracle I didn't die *rattle rattle cough wheeze slime*... testament to my solid
scandinavian genetic stock, I figure. I mean, we survived the plague, didn't we?
(actually we didn't... my family came from Germany in the 17th century...
AAARGGH!! I really <i>am</i> of teutonic peasant stock...)...
 
either way. now she wants me to come. again. and I'm not sure. because it took
me two months to rebalance myself to the point where I was contented in myself,
with my centre of psychic gravity firmly centered in me and not leaning on
happiness caused by significant others...
 
now she's back, and we kind of decided that we're going to break up. gradually
though. there's no hurry. simply put, because there are too many long-term
issues and questions here. though we like each other and enjoy each other's
company, we leave each other unsatisfied on a deeper level. I think.
 
so as I said we're having an extremely civilised, not entirely chaste break-up.
so civilised I'm not even sure it is a break-up... but deep down I feel we're
not right for each other. and I think she feels the same way. we're not exactly
burning with soul-consuming passion for each other. more like a quiet autumnal
fire you can roast marshmallows on. that crackles occasionally.
 
which is all fine and dandy, but I'm not 60. neither is she. so maybe one ought
to look further afield? the world is young and so are, hate the oyster analogy
but there is something to it (what, the world is a slimy, grey, slippery thing
you should rip out from its shell and gulp down alive? *yew*)...
 
so on the one hand, it would be nice to see her. not just the lure of the flesh,
but see her face, chat to her, chill out with her... I really do enjoy her.
 
but on the <i>other</i> hand, I can kind of predict what'll happen... I'll come
over, there'll be lots of people I don't particularly know, though I do get
along with them; + she'll be in 'broad social front mode' +'ll socialise with
all in generic 'egalitarian fashion', sharing her time out between everyone,
partly because everyone'll be in the same room all the time...
 
...which really doesn't suit my solitary social predator temperament... ideally
I like to spend high-intensity time with a few people, the better I know them
the more people... never lots though... I'm not one to keep large-scale
conversations going, the ones where people perform and parade their wits in
front of each other...
 
and I'll get a bit bored + restless. + she won't be able to do anything about
it, because that's just the way things are, the way they work...
 
and she'll be ill and tired, and apologise for not being entertaining and not
getting to spend time with me, and I'll go 'no, no, stop apologising, you're
mad, I'm happy', as one does, while deep down I'm actually really bored, and
just waiting for friends to leave; which they never do til it's too late. by
which time she'll be tired and I'll have to get my rationed sleep to function at
work the enxt day. and we'll both be a bit 'numbed', a bit frustrated, a bit
bored, a bit jarring, and certainly not turned on by each other enough to chat,
much less descend into maelstroms of lust or wander through gardens of earthly
delight...
 
so we'll both be kind of unsatisfied. and a tiny tiny layer, a touch of not
exactly bitterness but discontent and mild claustrophobia will have descended on
us. again.
 
which is