South American readership plug

Statistics show that I do not have a high enough readership in South America. After extensive research, I have decided to fix this problem by posting a picture of a llama.

The Quintessential Voodoo Cowboy

I walk across the burgeoning desert of my own consciousness as it breaks apart and shifts beneath my feet, leaving little breadcrumbs dancing across the browned lawn of rock and scree beneath my heels. I am alone. There are dust-devils dancing on the wind, playing their havoc games helter-skelter with little mind for mortal woes. Tortoises are trudging on their way, dragging their great bellies along the ground as they go, little walking worlds with wizened faces and unknowable thoughts. I tip my hat to them, and trudge onward. I hold my own world, though here it’s inside out. That’s what makes this place. It’s outside-in. All those pouring sensations shoved in a grinder and blitzed down to spiritual matter and thought-stuffs. The inverted tortoise shell. The desert on the interior.

Some call this place Void. That’s one name. One road of many which a cowboy can walk. And walk I do. Sometimes in many directions at once.

The desert is circular in every sense. A great orb that is impossible to escape with logic alone. That’s where it traps me. The ground bulges and threatens to burst and swallow me up in blackness and negation, so I deny its ability to do so. I insist upon a linear world. A hexagonal chessboard made of equal parts and joined facets. One great obsidian jewel, all at once denying its chosen shape. My coat swishes in the wind as I traverse the glassy and reflective facet I find myself upon, and as my boots press down on it, slapping loud and clear, I think myself transported to some place safe. Somewhere ordered and calm.

Oh, but nightmares await after staring too long across the void, for it stares back into you. I see the craven reflection of my dream-form, my boots, my long coat, my wide-brimmed hat, tall and magely. A fastened shirt of an eastern style, silk and tightly drawn up to the top of my neck. And beyond that, no face. Six searing blue pupils set into vestigial darkness. The Voodoo Cowboy.

The glass cracks evenly into a million little hexagons, and there are new reflections in each of them, forcing me to look. See the visage walking on, pointlessly towards another identical facet. It questions. It laughs.

And one questions what it was that tore at the void. Is it the tap of my heel? Or is it something outside? Or is it that too much order throws the reflections into sharp relief?

Before long, it does not seem to matter. The reflections peel themselves off the glass and emerge as shadowy wraiths, hungry and eager. My six eyes flash. The wraiths converge and tear at me, tattering my clothes in seconds. My fingers pluck for the tools at my belt, and pull golden streamers of sigils from their holsters. I whip them through the air, and the wraiths burn at their touch, pulling away, unable to bear the constructive sparkling of the written word. Known Truths. That is their fear, and I use it. A faceless grin comes over me as they tear apart.

They limp away, and I show no fear, though the ghastly revenants have wounded me. Their venom is tribulation. That is their way. They attack from without, infect, and harry. They would see me stumble and lie helpless against the glass before coming back to tear flesh from the visage. Insidious, as all monsters of the mind are, upon reflection.

A great eye watches from above. An empty glass with mere darkness beyond. Their Eye. They would have me, if I stayed in the void. There are no cures to this place. No plants or sacred stones, no external magic or hoodoo to do the healing I need. Void is a place to end chaos, but it is poison itself, when too long is spent in the realm.

My six eyes gleam, and shut. I fall inward.

I am a great jungled psyche. Delirious, I tear my way through the green cleft of organic sensations. The grand and grotesque Id at the base of my skull. I arrive in this place, and I feel the melange of upper and lower spaces melding together. My visage burns with holy fury, emotive and certain. Here among the pale white roots of titanic trees and the cyan thrush of fungal weeds I gather together a perfumery, plucking sensations from their stems and mashing their petals and fibres together into a bitter elixir. I shudder at the wraith-venom pooling in my veins, and pluck a long, bone scalpel from my belt. I press its needlepoint to my skin and etch an opening in the hexaemeric language, pull another bandage of sigils from my bandoleer and stain it with the potion. I wrap it around the fresh wound, and lie back as I feel the antitoxin doing its work. Bright, hopeful thoughts fill me up. Half-remembered sensations dredged up from the chaotic moil. They collide into new stories and revitalising epiphanies. Illogic. Will and wisdom are far removed from the ordered hexagonal jewel that is Void.

There is light pooling in the wound. It enters my bloodstream, tingling and cold. Moonlight. Soft, happy, brilliant. It gushes into every other system in my body and drives away the demons where they lurk, whispering dark nothings and lies into my collective being. Some parts of me have already given in. The organisms in my stomach and my kidneys ache from the feel of mortality. They cease to be anything more than human, and suffer human pain. They become barren, swept moors filled with dark gases and black waters.

But stories cure them, just in time. Moonlight falls upon the swamped participles that are my composite and regenerate them, clearing the waters, seeding the lands with fresh hopes and air. The magic of it runs its course, and I sleep in a wreathe of moonlight, hat tipped over my eyes.

When I am wakeful and healed, I leave the Melange, snapping the clinging tendrils of the subconscious with a few brisk motions. This place may seem tranquil, but it is just as dangerous as the last. I could lose myself in its psychotropic mnemonia, and just as well dream forever of burbling and quixotic worlds. I pull myself back, because Melange is not all I am. There are other lands to walk, and I am never about one place. We split ourselves up so that we have somewhere to travel to. That is the nature of cowboys and wanderers.

I stand at the stone face of the gorge, and begin my ascent. The air thins and becomes warmer. The stone cuts into my fingers as I climb, though it gives way beneath me easily, and at times I stroll vertically, and there is no struggle in it. There are wind-carved pillars of stone expanding outward in all directions, and I find myself cresting one in the baking sun, the wind whipping at my clothes. I hoist myself up, stand a moment, and then sit cross-legged, observing the canyons and gullies that lay out before me. Every shadow gleams with purple light. Kangaroos play leapfrog with one another down below. It is like surveying a great stone forest with branches made bare, so that I might observe all the happenings between them. Caravans kicking up dust on the horizon. Long-tailed hawks sailing on the wind like kites.

There is no end to this story. There is no destination to sate the wanderlust that keeps my legs kicking and my brain thumping on its grand engine schemes. There are voyages west, there are voyages within, and once in a while, there are adventures to be had on the sharp-edged world that exists beyond the mind. I welcome them all. Mine is a restless existence. There will always be another frontier.

Small souls, big souls, great souls, new souls, come hear the music of thought playing for you in these  quiet places, slip between the scene and the solidification of your own serenity. For now is a time of peace, if you did not feel it already. There are slow souls too, though we are all moving in one way or another. Just close your eyes, open your heart and know it, eat it, read it, swim through it until you find your answers. If you do not like the ones you find then forget them and find some others. There’s no one way to reach yourself, but a billion strings wrapped around your heart and pumping it. Split yourself and walk all of them, or rush headlong down just one. I do care, but I don’t judge. This is a collective agreement: We all think you’re special. Sometimes it’s just hard to see the wood from the trees from the branches in the leaves without considering that we might be looking down on you. It doesn’t make you less by making yourself different. This is the truth.

I’m not sure if I’m making a mistake by reading so many books. Not for my time or profession or anything like that. I’m worried for my soul. I’m worried that every time I get into a really good story it’s like I’m living someone else’s life for a while, and being pulled into these serious and desperate matters that feel like lifetimes lived over the course of a few days. It ages me. It makes me tired and sick and worn out. But happy, too. Kind of like a drug.

I have this theory on post-traumatic stress and war bonding. It isn’t that people are terrified of what they experienced and relive it out of fear that it will happen again. It’s that in those few moments of tension and intensity, they felt more real than they’ve ever been. What’s happening on the outside doesn’t really matter. They don’t have to like or enjoy that part. What they like is what it does to their mind. How it hones it and makes it sharper, lends them focus and control, the power to fight without holding anything back. That’s why they get flashbacks. It’s the same drug. They need to feel alive like that again. And the only people who can really understand that reality are those who have sat down in the same trenches, and read the same books.

Every book is like throwing myself back upon the steeple of that reality, and I do it so gladly, because I need it so badly. I have to feel that sense of life and death decision, and the automatic follow-through of events. I need my life to be more real in that sense, and less Real in this.

Slowly but surely, it will wear me out, and I wonder what that will feel like in the end. I bet I’ll be ancient. I bet people will look me in the eyes and think “Jeez, where’s he been?” or know just enough that something’s off that they keep walking. I’ll be an old, paper-thin junkie, still jonesing for a fix, well aware that this time, it might push my sanity too far over into that side.

I know this, but I can’t help it. I can’t live without being in at least two places at once. And though I may try do without for just a little while, I keep getting pulled back into just one more story.

Hexaemeron v1

HEXAEMERON

Behold

THE SUNDERED TRUTH

Play now as

SACRED WITNESS

Bask in

THE CHOSEN REALITY

of

WORLD SIX

The driving force, the untiring demesne, the restless world,

REL’TASH

Abhor all other teachings,

WHAT IS WRITTEN HERE IS TRUTH.

Volume 1:

I

VOLIANOR was the first, spiralling away from The Womb with a distasting tongue, hoping to find the-reality-that-was-not. Five times he severed an eternity from the Womb, and he named all the pieces with immutable words. Five times he failed in his intentions, and drove endlessly on towards the chasm of Void. The SIXTH time he paused, as his words had shattered eternity and they were beautiful.

From the empty spaces between his words came NISHARO, who loved all things made and unmade, and hoped Volianor would love her back. For a time it was so. He and she soared through the heavens exploring the grey face of the sixth world in all its cold magnificence, and Volianor was pleased by what he had done. He wrote the forms that would keep the world whole, and came to understand the relationships between all the quarters.

ETERNITY

That hated thing, by which existence would pander forth faceless and boring. It was eternity Volianor sought to end, and it is eternity he has chained the fastest.

Floating in the Not-Between place of his Sixth World, Volianor found eternity seeping into the corners of his house and cast it out. He could not imprison it within a cage, but rather chose to destroy it outright. Its splintered fragments became the SIGILS, the governing form of Rel’tash’s laws, and spread out across the void he hoped they might never unite.

Its pieces were incarcerated by his will lest any fraction of eternity came from The Womb to release them, and from the still pieces he crafted imperishable designs. Some Sigils he named the captors, LEGIONS of which bound the largest fragments, those captives held in place by their own brothers. By forcing them to choose sides he ensured that divided neither would ever be free. For truth was that

ONE was the LOCK

THE OTHER was the KEY

And yet neither could bear the other’s touch.

Twelve times the generation of Rel’Tash were spent by Volianor in residence, watching and hoping to find his downcast-eternity. Yet on the thirteenth turn he could not bear to watch any longer. Nisharo pulled his face to hers and their energies joined, and from this joining was born

THE MYSTERY

Rising like a wave, an unanticipated feeling carved from darkness and light. Her name was

SELAYUTH

And she was the first child of the Sixth World, restless in her desire to understand her father’s work.

At once Volianor saw his mistake, and gathered the void-energies necessary to negate his daughter before she could contaminate his world. But she ran, aided by the guile and guise of her mother, and vanished into the realms beyond physical creation.

Here she stole the hidden territories of her father and built a new house for herself from which to study his destruction. In secret she foundered TWELVE DOORS

And in fascination she cut duplicates into the walls of her house. She grew practised in opening these doors when it suited her, and with the eternity that entered her house she rewrote Volianor’s laws as her own. By this act she discovered

SENTIENCE

And infected the coldness of Rel’Tash with living warmth.

Volianor watched as Selayuth’s house appeared above Rel’Tash within the Heart-Dimension, and prepared his annihilation. As his wrath gathered Selayuth presented the

Truth of Life:

THAT SENTIENCE SEVERS ETERNITY INTO LOCKS AND KEYS, AND ONCE BOUND ACROSS A MILLION WORLDS, ETERNITY WOULD END.

As Volianor saw this truth he attempted to cast aside his wrath, but it had grown too strong to dissipate entirely. He and She held it between them, unable to let go or divert the cataclysm without destroying Rel’Tash. For millennia Volianor held the energy still while Selayuth doctored its form with laws, giving it mind and bearing. After eons it became

DARKER-THAN-NIGHT

The undying death that was

VISCEPTOR.

Visceptor’s malice was held in place with a grafted purpose, so that it would only strike slowly and at essential points in time to stunt the flow of eternity into Rel’Tash. This was its only will, and the Dark Orb of its power gloomed above as a watcher to the affairs of living souls.

Selayuth watched Rel’Tash closely, assisting her father’s design

THOUGH HIS PURPOSES WERE NOT HERS.

Nisharo’s joy was unmatched as her family gathered around her. She had a son and a daughter and a life-bond, and reeled in the ecstasy of their companionship. It was then that she named them

MAT’RU’EL

The Harmony – unaware of the troubles to come.

But this harmony was a lie, for Selayuth sought answers to questions Volianor had forbidden, and hid unspeakable truths in her house.

There are days that come around every once in a while that will validate everything you are. When the universe will peel back and reveal to you the glowing golden light at its core. When the trees will spray the sky with purples, and reds, yellows and greens from their flailing trunks like bizarre, octopoid elephants, when the skies will burn blue like fire, and your thoughts and wills shall be actualized by a world that often seems not to notice you. You will be complete. You will know that avoiding drugs, alcohol and medication all this time has been a great idea because you can definitively say, “This light comes from me. I put in there all by myself, and I can learn how to do it again and again until the day some wicked trans-dimensional necromancer sticks my soul in a jar and leaves it there for the rest of eternity.”

Today is one of those frabjuous days. I love my terrified, lazy, procrastinating self. Because I am so much more than that, and I know I will bludgeon those parts of me into submission with happy and determined rainbow-thoughts, in time. I am ever so fond of being alive and seeing all the strange and alien sights in this world. I love singing myself breathless in my car. I love my books and all the strangeness out there. I love saying “No” and doing things a little differently, and breaking all the rules that no-one ever made.

And I love that tonight I will whisper goodnight to you, and that will make everything feel okay.

Because this is me. I’m immersed in me, and I forgot how splendid that is, when I let it be. Not those cold, dead parts and mechanical pieces of wraith and void that, while a part of me, I myself can only stand with a certain mute horror. The Six, the glitches, the mélange of the many, many parts. I’ve always known who I am. It is mine to look inward. Grasping them is not so easy.

But today… oh, today…

Everything is so brilliant.

Kepler

It began on a night some months ago now. A simple question. “Do I know Kepler?” And since that night, I have felt that thought come upon me many times. While I tilled the soil in the garden as Winter loosed its fingers. Walking through an exhibit at the University, startled by the notion that it is spinning which makes the Earth a geoid as much as it is gravity that holds it together in a sphere. I did not know Kepler. That thought found its way into my head to occupy the space left empty by the departure of another.

Have you ever had the sensation that you are living a memory? That sometimes when you see things, you’ve seen them before? Not Dejavu exactly, but a memory of something that has yet to happen. I have those, at times. I’ve met people before I’ve met them. I’ve brushed my teeth in a perfectly ordinary way and felt the exact same feelings in two instants; first a memory, and then a reality. It is difficult to remember the future. Most of the time it is an act as unconscious as breathing. At others it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is going to occur, because the future blends together in many potential states, just like the past does.

But this night, the night I had that question planted in my brain, I knew a certainty in the future that demanded to be seen through. It haunted me for weeks. It kept popping up in my head like that one item on a shopping list you can’t seem to find even as your cart fills up to its brim. Don’t forget to…

And so I did.

xxxxxxx is a local sidewalk that gets quite busy on Friday nights. It plays host to several restaurants, Cafés, a club or two, and a Design College. On the corner is this carpet shop or art museum, I never quite know which, which displays these gigantic rugs in the window covered in crazy designs. Half of them look like they were once white and after having too much colour spilled on them they’ve been repurposed and sold as modernist exhibits. Others are geometric and squiggly. I love looking at these carpets as I walk by.

That night, I had one purpose wrapped up in others. A band I know played music in the College parking lot on market days fairly regularly, so I thought I’d drop in and show my support. At the time, however, they were running late, so I went off to see to my other business. I mused on the corner as I looked up at the carpets. I hurried along, past thin alleys that cut through the boardwalk and up into a little pizza place. I considered the menu very carefully. One pizza was a given, because I knew what I wanted. I did not really know what to put on the other. I think I settled for something with meat and mushrooms, maybe peppers, and two cooldrinks. I sat and read while I waited. I’m having trouble recalling the book. Something from Verne perhaps, or Fynn. It had that old, tough taste that can be hard to chew through when you are distracted. I don’t think I managed to read very far into it before the pizzas were ready.

When I had them, I returned to my car and put mine and the Crème Soda on the passenger’s seat. Then I took the other and the Sprite and walked them around the corner, past the carpets, past a leaky pavement and some orange construction tape, past three cafes and up to a bus bench. There was a man sitting there, wrapped in layer after dirty layer of clothes, picking through a plastic cart filled with junk. Possessions to him, I suppose. Not junk. Cardboard and trinkets of arcane potency, for survival in the city.

The moment exploded before me. Every permutation I had seen pass through my mind. Every response he made, every gesture and hour we could spend, sitting and talking, feigning some sort of equality or familiarity in our shared humanity. The possibility of me actually caring, and not just ticking one more thing off the to-do list in my head. They hit me all at once and they were so very heavy. So humbling.

“For you,” I said awkwardly, holding out the meal. That – just that – took up all the energy and will I cared to invest in the moment. It was all that was necessary. The other possibilities crumbled away. I did not want to talk to this man. That echoing sentiment of ‘Pass it on’ would happen with or without further prompting. His reply of ‘Thank you master” irked me, common though it is in The City. I am no man’s master. I do not engage in voluntary acts of charity out of some sense of responsibility or superiority. The idea of Pity derails my code more than I care to admit.

So I walked off, and left the potential of that moment at its core and brutal economy. Necessity, nothing more. A future remembered, experienced, committed to the past. Yet the night was young.

I recovered my own pizza, and not feeling particularly hungry after a few mouthfuls, shared it with some of the groupies who had set up at the café across the street from the College until the band was ready to play. I listened to them talk, mostly. I do not generally engage in conversation unless I am questioned directly.

Time passed, and the band eventually had their turn to play. Old songs. Familiar songs I had heard them play many times. They were new, and so they didn’t have much variance from those few good songs. What to call it… Indie Rock, I suppose, though this Indie concept still escapes me since it refers to Independent music rather than a specific kind of music. Still, it had all those light inflections of something not quite refined or mind-blowing, but still beautiful. A Shade of Memphis, perhaps, stuck between prompting personal appeal and an urge to be on a bigger stage.

As the same tunes went on, one of the groupies I had been sitting with said she was going to get cigarettes, and asked if I wanted to walk with her. I said ‘yes’. I didn’t, of course, mainly because at the time I wanted to be anywhere and anyone other than myself, but there are many parts of the code that deal with honour, and when a lady asks to be escorted along the street at night, honour is certainly called into question. So we went along the street past many cafés and restaurants, past the blue-dyed mess of carpets, up to a corner store so the girl could get her cigarettes. She asked me questions along the way, and I answered. The usual ones. Where is that accent from? How long have I been in The City? Have you ever gone back to The Old Country? [incredulous surprise] And you still have the accent? We bump into two of her friends, and after being introduced they ask the same thing. This scares me, all the time. It is the big bogey behind the bedsheets of the human experience. The shadows become a million things when you put a light behind them, but take away the sheet, and it’s the same pair of hands dancing in the glare. So many faces, but one solid mind operating in all of them, so that to a point you can predict what they are going to say, what their reactions will be, all their thoughts and opinions which exist simply because they are fashionable and easy to think. Gods, that scares me.

When she’s done getting her cigarettes, she asks me to go with her to a nearby bar/club/thing called The Office, and thinking of the return journey to The College, I agree. We are absorbed into the amorphous cloud of 20-somethings. Noise is blasting from the speakers almost too loud to hear people speak. Someone puts a hand on my shoulder and I let them turn me around.

“Hey there,” she says.

“Hello,” I say, inclining my head by the slightest degree, not really looking at her. I turn back and walk off, following the one I came here with. We stand a bit back from the bar, where there’s enough space for the people around us to thrash their arms and call it ‘dancing’. She peers up at me, oddly apologetic. Not long after, we leave. Just outside, we bump into one of the bartenders, who she knows, and who I know from school. We reminisce for a while. He comments on the hair. Everyone comments on my hair, as though it is a unique animal I am carrying around with me as a social icebreaker, but not nearly so affective as a chinchilla or a bushbaby. He has to get back to his shift. We mercifully begin the trip back to the College.

And then past the carpets, past the orange tape, just outside a café, a man walks up to us, leaving one of the cafés. He walks strangely, drunk or tipsy, or perhaps simply inspired, and he says to me, “You!”

“Me,” I agree. “How do you do?” I say.

“Very good this evening, sir,” he says to me. “You remind me of someone. What was his name?”

“xxxxx?” I suggested, out of habit.

“No, not xxx,” he says. “Do you know Kepler?”

And here, in this morass of an evening, I find something else to grab my attention and fill the newly emptied space in my mind. Do I know Kepler?

“I have never met him,” I reply. “But I know of him. He’s up there with Newton.”

“Yes, that’s right!” he laughs. Then he turns to the girl. “Listen to me now. This is a very good xxx you have here. You must not let xxx go. xxx is a good, good xxx. I can see it! You will be very happy together.”

“Okay,” she says.

‘Do I know Kepler?’ he said.

“Promise me now you will stay with xxx. He is good, do you know this? Promise me.”

“I know. I promise,” she says.

Do I know Kepler? I wonder.

He laughs again. “Thank you, my friends. Goodbye.”

“Good evening,” I say. We walk away.

“Well that was odd,” she says.

“Yes,” I agree. We arrive at The College, and she tells a few of the groupies about the strange encounter. I stare at someone out of the corner of my eye, wondering if I know them. I don’t. No more than I know Kepler.

My duty done, I quietly slip away, and drive home.

Do I know Kepler?

It is now months later. ‘Good’ I may be on the lips of drunken prophets, but I have not seen that girl since. Instead, I kept on looking out for Kepler, wherever I may find him. I am meeting Kepler for the first time, today.

Johannes Kepler was born in the sixteenth century in Germany, an astrologer who dreamed of the idea that planets may yet be alive. He saw Earth as a colossal whale, whose breathing drives the tides and the winds, and who swims through the heavens as a gigantic organism in its own right. Kepler was a dreamer. He lived at a time when astrology and astronomy were virtually inseparable, and mingled in their mid-section with theology. One of the early supporters of Copernicus, who challenged the idea that Earth was the only ‘central’ planet in the universe (where in actual fact we now know that all planets can only be seen as moving in relation to another cosmological entity) and upgraded the telescope developed by his contemporary, Galileo. As a man, Kepler was cursed with frailty and myopia – he could not actually see with any particular clarity the stars he had committed his life to studying. The result of this was that he could focus on the mathematics and geometry of his craft by interpreting the research of others. His work with telescopes and optics actually led to the realization that images are inverted and flipped by the retinas. For his efforts he became Imperial Mathematician and served under many rulers, giving sage and trusted council in the courts.

In addition to his many scientific works, Kepler had one perspective piece that followed him throughout his life. It is a short novel called Somnium, and recounts the voyage of a man to the moon, the society he finds there, and how his relative perspective of the Earth and the sun change due to his position. Originally put down by his heliocentric lecturers, Kepler held on to the manuscript to publish at a later date, refined it, and in its initial printing found it put in as biographical evidence against his mother during a witch trial. He ceased his cosmology for a time to defend her case in court, and was successful, though the stress of the proceeding killed her shortly after. The full Somnium with its complete notes was only published post-humously with the aid of two sons (another dying before its completion) and at last, the story was immortalized as the very first in the science-fiction genre.

On Kepler’s grave was writ:

I measured the skies, now I measure the shadows,

Skybound was my mind, Earthbound my body now rests.

So now, I have met Kepler. I like him quite a bit. He lived at a time when magic and science were oddly clasped, and died when science was at last gaining an upper hand. It is difficult to say anything of his character but that he was a hard worker devoted to his craft, that he was a dreamer and as such, a visionary. I would be honored to share any association with him.

And now what new thoughts may fill my mind, I wonder?

Once closes one’s eyes, and the universe rushes in to plug the gap.

continued...

Tuesday II

I haul myself out of bed and into Tuesday in a flurry of activity; reading messages, opening doors and gates, making my bed, putting away laundry, eating my breakfast. My pursuit of these matters is fluid and mechanical, blending into one clean motion.

Good morning, N. Good morning sky pirate hordes. Good morning, good book.

After letting in the domestic worker, my morning is almost totally consumed by reading. Even my customary tea breaks (which are often as frequent as breath) are reduced by my urge to unravel this story. I am strongly reminded of Dracula, but with more warmth and perhaps less true character. Dracula’s letterhead style always stuck with me. It made it real. It explained the difference between what I was feeling and the true horror the characters felt themselves. Some of that is lost in ‘salem’s Lot. In this direct storytelling style, there’s this expectation of being terrified first hand. I am not terrified. I am morbidly intrigued, and perhaps a little disgusted. It is enjoyable, but I think the letter style is better, under the circumstances. It worked for Stoker. It worked for Lovecraft. If I ever write a horror story, I think I shall try and make it work for me, too, unless I am good at emotional conjuration to an ungodly degree.

I eat a pie creature and three strawberry babies. I let out the domestic worker and drive around the corner to do my lift.

“Hi J!” I say.

“Hi 6,” he says morosely. I wonder if this is just because he’s back at school or because his budgie died while I was looking after his house. This is my first time seeing him since then and I’m a little nervous.

“How was your day?” I ask.

“Okay,” he says. Goodness, I’ve conditioned these kids well. Now I’m the chatty cathy and they’re all sullen and silent.

“Well that’s good. I think.”

“Happy birthday,” he says.

“Thank you,” I reply. “I already feel like it was ages ago.”

I chat a bit more, a little nonsensically, as I drive him home. We get in just as his sister arrives.

“Happy birthday for Friday,” she tells me.

“Thank you,” I say. “Enjoy your afternoon.”

I drive off.

I sing ‘The Middle’, whistling the musical bits. I stop around the corner from my house, where municipal devastation trucks are tearing up the sidewalk. I drive a little further. I park on the curb at a four way stop. Shopping bag in hand, I approach an overhanging mulberry tree. With tentative and surgical care I pluck off leaves from the tree, feeling terrible about myself, like I’m some horrible pancreas-eating monster. I don’t want to damage the tree’s growth. I pick the shadiest leaves, or those that are too close together. I even consider coming back here with a bucket of water and some fertiliser. When the branches close to the road are practically bare, I cast my gaze over the low brick wall to the desolate garden beyond. The house looks abandoned. There’s trash in the yard.

Forgive us our trespasses.

I scoot over the wall and fill up the rest of the bag, and then pick up three or four cans from the base of the tree and return to my car. I return home.

It my room I find 30 or so balloons lining the floor, leftovers from my birthday party.

I text xxx. Very funny.

I boot up my pc and launch into a more detailed pirate raid. I take down the Gilmore Girls boxset from my shelf so I don’t forget them. I nab some cake. I check on my cockroaches.

They like carrots. I’m so pleased.

More pirate administration, a flurry of balloon popping. Fear my teeth, ye bloated and rubbery demons! My room is cleared. I pack more clothes and food for housesitting. I go to the garden, see the cracked earth and dry dirt, and begin hauling buckets of rainwater from our defunct pool to pour life into each corner. Half of the time the music from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice plays in my head. The other half is the suite from Plants vs Zombies. I haul uncounted buckets up from the bottom, and empty out about half the storm water that came a week back. I go shower, hot and moist with sweat.

I emerge clean, and dress. Navy blue jeans. Short-sleeve black top with a swirl pattern.

I occurs to me that I may be rushing through this today. Maybe I’m just having less deep thoughts... but no, I’m just having more personal thoughts. There are some things I can’t share with you, dear reader. Happy things, hurtful things (to me and others) and hopeful things. I have a future now. Every day, in every way, I get better and better.

I pack up what I need for now, get in my car, play with traffic. I try to remember the name of the right road, and succeed on the second turning, spotting the white griffin at the gate. Moments later, N and D pull up behind me.

A lets us in, I park, desperately gathering up everything I need before I go inside, and finding myself four arms too short in doing so. I manage, awkwardly, though I don’t get to D’s door before she opens it herself. Darn. I’ll do better next time. Librarian knighthood is a difficult and not always successful pursuit.

Hugs all round. I hand N the bag of mulberry leaves (which we supplement quickly with ones from A’s garden), as well as plastic tubs, and the Gilmore Girls box set.

We go inside. More ‘hello’s. Booting up my laptop at a snail’s pace, provided the snail is moving backwards on an escalator. Chats and things.

I open my latest story, and crawl through to the completion of a dialogue. It’s difficult work. I enjoy dialogues, but they aren’t easy for me. Goodness knows I’ve spent enough time watching them, but being part of one – both parts of one – requires innovation and effort to a degree I don’t ordinarily exercise. Which is kind of sad.

I don’t like talking about people. That’s another reason you won’t get much out of reading this. I even hesitate to use other people’s names. People have their own business, and for the most part I am happy leaving them to it. For the most part. Sometimes it’s just a matter of choosing who to hurt.

After study group, I head on home, pick up my hissing cockroach colony and some food, and hurry on back to P’s. I let everyone know I made it back okay, and they do so in return. It’s late, and we’re all tired. I talk to N a little more, and then collapse into bed. I sleep clear through to morning.

Wednesday II

I wake up yawning. This always strikes me as an odd thing.

With reeling limbs and ambulatory slowness, I bumble through to the kitchen, get a bowl of cornflakes, move my car.

The gardener arrives. I let him in and exchange pleasantries about the weather. I make him a cup of coffee, and return to bed. There I read the introduction to a book on speeches I received for my birthday, and when it’s done, I boot up my laptop.

Sky Piracy. Again. I read a wonderfully descriptive chapter in ‘s Lot. I chat to N.

I then prepare to watch Gilmore Girls while writing, and find the dvd player won’t recognise the dvds. I guess that’s the universe’s way of telling me to get my nose to the grindstone and do some actual work today. I take a frozen pie out of the fridge. I return to the bedroom/office. I open up the continuation of the Shadowolf story, and I write.

Temperance sacrilege

I left the gardener out. I eat the pie. I pick up J, drop off J, and drive across to xxxxxxxxxxxx. Along the way I am thinking of what it means to be Wild. To have some sort of holy force that governs you past law, holds you back in some ways and sets you free in others. I grin madly at the onrushing traffic as I head off to xxxxxxx, a far distant corner of the city over the horizon. My memory fails just as my GPS did and I have to rely on my phone and my luck to get back on track. Both of them pull through in their way, and get me there. I park my car and walk up to the castle-facade that fronts Hollywood’s Costumes, and get hit by a wave of rubberised plastic as I go in. I return the costumes. One jumpsuit. One corset. One red shirt. One pair of tights. One black dress. I pick up the deposit and head back along the motorway to N’s. When I get there, we sift through a large black crate of Dubia Blatsica, recording their lengths in centimetres. They look like large woodlice, armoured with scales like armadillos. This is a difficult and often nose-curling process. The dubias live in a mushy spread of their own faeces, and produce more when they are picked up. I don’t mind. We work while watching Gilmore Girls (the current flavour predominant in this week) and count out around a thousand. We clean out their crate. N then goes off to her dancing class, and I go to fetch D. I get horribly lost. I’m not yet used to the area, and somehow I manage to make the same wrong turn on the freeway three times before backtracking and finding my way to the highschool where D works. It’s dark by the time I arrive, and my stomach feels ulcerous with the stress of being late. I don’t like being late. I apologise to D when she comes out, get the car door for her. We head out to R’s place just over the nearest mountain, and when we get there, we arrive almost as N does.

Together, we set about packaging the roaches into tubs. Today I have the easy job of preparing their habitats, putting in half-cartons, wheat bran and carrots to tide the little crawlers over until someone buys them and feeds them to their pet lizard. The process is getting more efficient by now, and we finish off fairly early. We have some tea, and set out. Back at N’s I’m starving, and she graciously gives me some food. We then feed her roaches, and I head back to the house I’m looking after. My mind keeps wondering, reflecting, glistening brightly. But it is late, and I sleep well.

Thursday II

It’s hard to recall Thursday now. The world has moved on. I have become lost in it, slept, reawakened, had time deluge me.

Thursday I was alone. I started watching Gilmore Girls from the first season while searing ventilation holes into the plastic tubs we use to package the roaches. Two and a half hours later they’re done. I keep watching while doing exercise, sit ups and pull ups, then relaxing. I write. I read. I immerse myself in the world of this show. Fast talking, obscure cult references. Intelligence and charm. It’s definitely my favourite TV series. The world doesn’t really need action or adventure of the dramatic sort. Just honest human contact. Arguments and apologies. Love and compassion. The quiet unity and merge of many lives.

At one point, I move to the bed and read ’S Lot. I finish a chapter, and close my mind and eyes for a moment.

I awake four hours later, groggy and out of place. I feel like I’ve been drugged. I have to relearn to use my limbs, to type on my phone, to do everything. 4 hours of nothing. It’s like I fell through a crack in time. True sleep. Sheer nothingness. Not sleep as I generally know it, but as I’ve always imagined it is supposed to be.

It is unnerving. I do not like it.

I watch more TV, lethargic and mentally wrecked. Eventually, just after midnight, I collapse.

Friday II

After a more natural, churning, thoughtful sleep, I awoke to a bright morning of swirling cornflakes and ideas. They burbled and clogged, and swiftly disappeared. That morning is lost to me now.

But I spent the afternoon with N. We talked about everything as she drove us around the outskirts of the city,

Entropy. Moments spiral away from me, and are lost to the ravenous beast that is history. Ah well. I tried. In part I succeeded. That’s all I wanted.

Monday II

I’m doing this again. I feel things have changed a great deal since early March, and I want some kind of mental assertion of those changes. I want to see if the good things in my life extend to my mind, or if I’m pretending as I became so used to doing. I don’t want to pretend. I want to feel, and love, and live. And write. I definitely want to write, and not only a little.

I woke up late this morning with a stabbing pain in my left shoulder. This is what age feels like. Last Friday was my xx birthday. I feel yy, or even zz. I’m worn out to an extent. My mind holds up a mirror to my body and tells it it can’t do things. 6li7ch waves back and tell it to stuff it.

I roll and stretch in the ecstasy of half-wakefulness, letting my conscious mind slowly dredge itself out of a mass of twisted dreams. Maybe my head hurts a little. Maybe that has more to do with keeping the radiator on all night than the babel of meshed thoughts that ran through me last night. The fact is I don’t mind. I’m past seeing it as a bad thing. I’m past the misery of it.

By the time I’m up, it’s 8 o’clock. I’m house sitting again, a small sanctuary down in xxxxx, crammed thick with books and age. I’m here for almost an entire month. I intend to spend a great deal of that time reading.

I waddle off to the kitchen in my underclothes and make myself a bowl of cornflakes and a cup of tea. I boot up my laptop (which scarily enough takes longer to wake up than I do) and read through a chapter of ‘salem’s Lot, crunching mouthfuls of roasted and smashed corn corpses as I do. They taste delicious.

When my laptop boots up, I remember I wanted to do this account, and I hurriedly write everything down before I can forget it. I get all of it. In the mean time N has woken up (somewhere in her car in The City, I imagine, and am proved correct) and we chat about our plans for the day. I connect to the internet with a portable modem and despair as I realise the automatic updates are draining my bandwidth with vampiric verve. I try to deactivate them. I restart my pc and return to ‘salem’s Lot. Small town America. Ghostly decay. An apocalypse of a different sort to his Dark Tower books, perhaps; a more local, manageable apocalypse. Any less horrific? No. Even beauty can die, and strut about in grim leathers and a death mask. That’s her by any other name.

N sounds almost shocked to hear about me writing down my week, and tries to recall when I did this before. I explain to her as I push my legs into the floor and make them vibrate up and down. Mini-exercise: for lazy people. The smell of staling milk in the bowl next to me is gorgeous. I love that smell.

A message from J’s mom. Lifts start tomorrow. Money! I’ve had a slow August, and haven’t made much of an income. The future looks promising, though. I’ll get by.

N and I continue to chat. The internet continues to elude me. ‘salem’s Lot grows a bit friendlier as I get to know it.

Now it’s working. I slowly manage to send N a link to refresh her memory and then organise some troop movements on Iron Grip Marauders. Arr! I am a steampunk sky pirate. Fear me! I boot up my imagination and see tanks dropping from my airship to go and perform mischief in the Kathos countryside. Click. Click. Click. Action points spent. And I wait for reports on the success of my raids to return.

I message N. I’m rolling through ‘salem’s Lot. I send out more pirate troops to rob a bank. I revel in the simple motions of it all.

‘salem’s Lot’ is strange. I’m curiously reminded of Lovecraft, though in a modern style that is far more familiar and personal, as though the Dunwich Horror or the Colour out of Space curled up and mated with Pride and Prejudice or one of Tolstoy’s babies. It’s early days yet. I carry on. I received more books than I can read in several months for my birthday, and now I feel crowded by their unread being. I must cut back the obscurity. I must bond. I must gain a clearer picture of Totality.

I, Librarian.

I get up to make myself some tea, now wearing yesterday’s shirt and underwear. I pluck a sushi roll from the fridge, douse it in wasabi and ginger, and plop it in my mouth. My sinuses alight. The sensation is rapture. I could live on this stuff. It’s magical.

Sugar, milk, Earl Grey, water. I stir it six times clockwise, six times counter clockwise, and six times clockwise again. Perfection. I return to my chair, wrap myself in a blanket. I read.

It suddenly occurs to me that I may have become boring since March. I... am okay with this.

Mmmm. Sleepy. Sleepy. It’s 11:08. What was that about Circadian Cycles? It’s way too early for a siesta. I check the contents of my e-books folder with glee. I message N. I return to the book with my mind drifting here and there. Moose. The music from Dollhouse is playing in my head. I could go to sleep... just for a little while...

Facetious.

Hmm... I load an episode of True Blood onto my pc and the music from that starts playing in my head. I tentatively approach an episode. Swearing, violence, spatter. Not particularly interesting. I pause after ten minutes and read another chapter. message. Repeat. Jerky loser sex and violence. Read, Tea, messages, repeat.

I find myself dwelling on the idea of the Marsten House, and Ben’s proposal that rather than being haunted his imagination is acting as lubricant on the emotional charge left within the house to produce supernatural hallucinations. This is, of course, absolutely plausible. I should know.

I remember Matheson wrote something similar, about a writer (they always write about writers. Why don’t writers write about readers? Readers are more openly identifiable to the reader than the writer. Lazy sods.) who becomes suicidal and has his house and possessions attempt to kill him out of a sense of self-preservation. There are, in fact, places that come alive in our minds, and through them in our lives. A sixth sense. A haunting.

And as ever, I think of death, and I ponder what it entails.

Yeah Suki, don’t go to the hospital or anything, drink V-blood. That’s better for story progression. Idiot. You can read minds, for goodness sakes. Who cares if your spinal cord is severed? It worked out for Charles Xavier.

La la la... chatting to N about the act of indiscriminate human genocide, its benefits and detriments. You’re so smart. :)

There’s one very loud clock tick-tocking in the background, mingling with an electrical signal so that is smashes into it like a sharp ocean rock against a continuous wave of noise. Tick-bvuuus-tock-bvuuus-tick-bvuuus-tock. I consider removing the clock. I leave it for the moment.

They always start by killing animals, and move on to bigger things. Writers are no different from serial killers. We lose our humanity piece by piece, until we at last feel brave enough to set ourselves aside and commit the act of murder. They welcome us to the idea of horror slowly... desensitise us. And that’s the real horror. Not the bodies or the gushing fluid or tentacles or heaps of skin and muscle and bone, but the moment in which they make us feel that all of that is normal... acceptable.

I have a handroll for lunch, squishy and partly frozen. It is still good. While I’m up I take the three clocks nearest to the bedroom and put them in the lounge. Now there’s just the regular ‘bvuuuuuus’ of electrical signal. I wonder if I can find the source and disable it...

Not if it impedes my work. I shall sit here and bear with it.

Good boy.

Messages. Existentialism! Fun. Book. True Blood. The cycle goes on and on. It is welcoming, ordered, clean. I love getting myself into these little cycles, and avoiding all else. I feel like a miniaturised Phileus Fogg, reducing my day to a manageable course of events, and ever approaching mastery of them and my self.

It’s rare to meet someone why behaves like the stereotypes on TV. What are we doing here? Creating some kind of mental avatars of our best and worst characteristics? Why not just portray normal people doing extraordinary things? Plegh. Drama. Curse you, Shakespeare.

It does make me wonder about the aim of Dramatism and the whole ‘Guilt Purging’ thing achieved by adhering to the Pentads of believable action – at what point was it decided that we needed to be shown what we want to believe over what we generally would believe? There’s a thick margin between the two. It’s like that part in the Matrix about how humans rejected the first model of reality because it was too perfect and happy. We reject that too with Art. Maybe it’s easier on us to still be able to distinguish it from reality, because it makes it simpler to say that valour and heroism are impossible and we shouldn’t feel bad about not striving for them in real life.

What guilt are the AI purging anyway? What were they trying to teach humans by exposing them to the Matrix?

Someone is playing loud electro-zap-disco-pop next door, so loudly it sounds like it’s in the room with me. This is what happens when people don’t eat their children. Despicable. I counter in with Ben Houge’s Arcanum Suite.

Okay, now they’re playing Daft Punk. At least they aren’t total idiots.

Suki’s shirt looks so good with blood on it. They should make a range of spatter-themed shirts.

Read, read... meditate. It’s about the right time. I set my alarm, crank up the volume, and lie back in bed.

I stretch out as much as I can, scrunching together all of my muscles and letting them go in a single glorious wave of release. I focus on the golden glint of a hook holding a puppet secure above my head, and I stare at it as I drift into the afternoon heat.

Every day, in every way, I get better, and better, I think to myself, reciting Coue’s formula. My thoughts are quicker, my memory sharper and longer lasting, my pursuit of excellence swift and conclusive. My stammer is fading away with each and every day. The pains and aches of mortality that once troubled me are becoming insignificant in the wake of my transformation. My body does as it wills, no more, and sculpts itself as granite and steady, liquid motion as it does so.

I drift into a deep, dreamless trance. The buzz of my thoughts do not trouble me. My consciousness is serenely wrapped in the blanketed layers of my inner thoughts. I heal.

A quarter of an hour later, I rise, and greet the world renewed. I struggle with the chaotic lethargy of my laptop as though I am battling the meanest of all Decepticons, shutting off its update function for good. It is fine where it is, for now. Try again later, you electronic vermin.

It is strange. I haven’t felt anything approaching anger in a long time. Annoyance, on occasion, which is definitely part of the genus, but this is something else... frustration, maybe? I don’t enjoy it at all. There’s a vile sensation combining with it in my gut, acidic and nasty. I push it down. I haven’t vomited since I was 11. I’m not about to start now. The same goes for losing my temper. It’s foreign to me.

I read more. I send out more pirate troops. I send messages. I get a message from the past which I’m quite pleased with. Today is all about comparison with February 27. And I read it clearly: things have gotten better, saner, (faster, stronger, more than ever make it better do, do do, do, do, do do do, do).  I’m in a happier place. I’m healing. The voodoo cowboy has descended into a green valley and found respite from the desert glare, and a place to snooze. To sleep.

Cycles, cycles. Frozen feet. Tea! A gulp of tea and a frozen strawberry. Everything here is frozen. The thermostat in the fridge is broken, and sits permanently at maximum. The frost kills my teeth. I let it sit on my tongue, and feel it melting. I gulp it down. Rawr. Sorry little strawberry creature.

People have no respect for police tape...

Cordon

Messaging D. Messaging A. Happy happy. Having friends is an odd thing. I’m glad I let it happen, though. Sometimes I still worry with a bit of Roarkish egoism that I spend too much time analysing and judging them. I’m not quite sure if I’ll ever be comfortable with the idea of other people thinking about me, making decisions based on what they know of me, being a part of my everyday life. It’s just a level of humanity that’s difficult to adjust to. I am a reader. An observer. Writing fiction is all well and good, but writing reality? I have to be so careful. I don’t want to hurt anyone.

I’ve never had to worry about books.

I’m still learning.

I exercise (sort of). I shower. I spend an ungodly amount of time trimming my hair, and use the time to slip into contemplative solipsism over recent memories of things that did and did not happen. I shiver. I wonder if I am ever going to finish this episode of True Blood...

I am surprised when it has a part that makes me laugh. Clean, honest laughter. Not at something funny, exactly, but at empathy. Feeling what others are feeling, or at the very least pretending to feel. I enjoy this moment. It is strange and beautiful.

I feel cut off from the art I love, sometimes. I get analytical and contemplative, and I forget to feel. This is one of the things I’ve been relearning from N, in the past while. Watching her react to a movie, or the passion with which she approaches a book... it moves me. It makes me hunger for the simplicity of such things. It makes me think losing myself to them may not be such a terrible waste of time and subject matter. It’s okay to be out of control, sometimes.

‘salem’s Lot progresses well. At this pace I’ll be done within the week. I finish the episode of True Blood. I take out a roll of sushi, wait for it to defrost, eat it.

It’s late. Time to review. One or two mistakes, but mostly good. I am, perhaps, feeling less abstract than I once was, but I have retained my humour and occasional weirdness. This pleases me. I want to change a lot of things, but I have never wholly hated being who I am.

I am retiring to my bed for now with a cup of tea and my book, so goodnight, dear reader. Whoever you are. Probably Gabby. Whoever you are. Sleep well.

See you later, alligator.

Beyond Everything

Mine is a homecoming. So many worlds. So very many worlds I feel like collapsing before my voyage is done. But sleep does not exist in the real world. Nor does death for one who clings on to life.

A ladder extends vertically into the air. At the base of the ladder are gray waters, and death. Every rung on the ladder is a world. I stand on the Seventh, and I wish to descend. I wish to fall asleep. Just for a little while.

I put one leg down. My toes touch the Sixth rung. All my weight is still resting on the Seventh.

Which ladder am I climbing, I wonder? Volianor’s? Some other archon retched from the void?

I can feel my legs tingling. I can feel the Sixth World run through me. It is so clear in my mind, sometimes I forget which rung I’m on.

I so badly wish for sleep. For descent.

But then all of a sudden I find the soul of the Seventh rung, and I am unsure what to do. I feel so at peace with Six I long to leave Seven, but now I love Seven, too. I am caught between two worlds, and I don’t know where to go – down, or up.

There is time for all of it, my heart tells me. Six, Seven, and every divisible of the two. If the time is not right now, it will be in a billion years, so hush, and live this one out. Enjoy Seven. Become Six. Become Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Eternity.

Become One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven. Find it again.

I’m scared. It’s such a large Totality and I’m afraid to lose you in it.

Your heart will lead you back. Anywhere But Here, remember?

Somewhere. I want to be somewhere.

That too is allowed.

Martian Babies!

Everyone should be able to find pictures of martian babies if they so wish, so here they are. Nisharo bless the internet.

Keywords: Barsoom Thark Jeddak Tars Tarkas Sola baby hatchling nursery egg John Carter puppy puppies tusk green

Thank you Edgar Rice Burroughs. Thank you Walt Disney Production team. All credit goes to you and yours.