Monday

 In the interest of not feeling like a complete (insert nasty word) every time people mention how hard they are studying at university or whatever, I've decided to make a record of this week (in those moments I have access to a computer) as an affirmation that I don't actually just sit around staring at the walls all day.

Today isn't the best start for that, because it's half-term and I don't have any actual money-making work. This leaves me with the option of reading or writing. YAY!

Okay.

Coco Pops. Crunch crunch. Blaurgh! What an aftertaste!

Writing this intro to Amethyst Rock Star. I'm feeling a bit hazy.

Am I awake? Did I even sleep? Not quite. I'm wandering the borderlands again. I reckon a shower will help. As the argonian proverb goes, “Water purifies everything.”

Aaand the geyser is cold. I can't shower yet. Fine. Moving up the list. I meditate.

Music off.

Light off.

Mind on.

I'm picking through the detritus and rubble of half-spoken things and thoughts that won't quit. Someone is sweeping steadily in the background. The titanic rush of traffic down at xxxxx Avenue flows and thunders like river rapids. The light cutting at the corner of my curtains plays at murdering my eyelids. A cat curls up in my lap. A phone rings. Alex's morning dump outside my window is just another smell I'll never come to appreciate.

Fade away now. Fade away.

It's okay to think this. Stop dwelling on that. It's okay. You're wasting time agonising over things you can't change. You did well there, and I'm pleased with you. What do I write next? Hexaemeron. Symbols splashed across your wall. Just think of it. You'll get there, I promise. Smile a little. Go on. Just for yourself.

Paging autopilot. The conscious self is now free to walk about the cabin area.

Am I awake? Did I even sleep?

Who cares? You can stand. You can write.

I unpack the dishwasher. I feed the dogs. “Sit. Stay. Good banderbeast. Stand. Away. Eat your food.”

Alex stares at the bowl, and then turns to me forlornly. I'd be worried, if he didn't do this all the time. He's built like an insect, his hindlegs attached to a wafer-thin thorax at the point where his sternum and his spine almost seem to touch. My anorexic snapdragon.

“Eat,” I encourage him, and he lowers his head into the bowl. I turn back into the house, away from the excruciating morning light.

46 degrees Celsius and rising.

I ablute.

Skin. Hair. Teeth. My inescapable physicality. Hello, I am trapped in a sack of meat.

I sing songs to help me forget. Billy Joel, Running on Ice. Saul Williams, Talk to Strangers. The Heroes IV Chaos suite. I have no I-Pod. All I have is the gramophone drone of memorised chords inside my head. Copies of copies of copies, made mine by parts I have forgotten, spliced, misheard and added.

I stand over the sink and breathe heavily, catching a glimpse of my eyes in the mirror. My irises swell and retract.

What the heck are you looking at?

The 1.2 metre space between the bathroom and my bedroom door tumbles madly, like a revolving tunnel. My feet slip sideways. Practice ensures I stay upright, and cross the gap. Towel-wrapped, I land in my chair.

I try to write an invoice. Please type in your Microsoft Product Key, you slithy freeloading bastard. I try again with Open Office. I can't find a way to change 'x' to 'x'. I slap a large 'X' next to the Total bar. Success.

E-mail. Sorry it's late. Staccato symphonies play across my keyboard. Click. Send.

Clothes. I have 7 billion pairs of socks. They clog up the empty spaces in my closet; a dark, writhing mass of tentacles. I have 3 pairs of underwear. Facepalm.

Black pants. A long-sleeved black shirt. My self-imposed uniform. There is a hole in the baggy shirt halfway down my abdomen, and a rough-edge of skin peeks through. A starless void. This is me: The Midnight Man. An open space, ready for the universe to rush in and nebulise me at any time.

The kitchen. Kettle hiss, the alchemy of sugar, milk, and bergamot. Cup the first. Too hot to drink.

Back in my room, I turn on my fan and rejoice in the ecstasy of cool air. The fire horses sleep. I write.

An essay on Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. That was a good one. Type type type. I suffuse his world with reason, and this pleases me. Everything in its own place. Every instant catalogued, and filed away.

Phones ring, but don't ring. My teacup is empty. It is 10:04. When is ten oh four? Another moment, floating between all that came before, and all that is yet to be. Structure is a temporal anomaly. You'll find that out yesterday.

I recycle the teabag, prodding what flavour I can out of it with a spoon. Cup the Second. Someone finished off the Kitke (me?), so I scrounge in the pantry and find a solitary chocolate chip cookie. Crunch crunch. Thank you for putting up with me, liver. Thank you for facing a horrific genocidal beheading in the wheat fields, cookie parts.

Oh look, a message. Can you take so-and-so from here-to-there? Yes, my life is sad and empty. I'll be there. Cha-ching.

I look at the JTHM Essay. My eyes glaze. I need to shoot something. 10:33.

Mount ISO. Hellgate London: the game for people who liked Diablo, but felt it was lacking something in the way of in-game narration. I sit through a whirl of flashing logos. Intel: do do do do. I whisper, “Invidia”. And at last, I hear Murmur's polite narration:

“How little men know. About worlds. About light. About the great dark that boils behind all.”

Esc. I've heard the rest a few too may times.

I surf through a few half-attempted single player profiles, and I feel like cleaning. Me, a Level 6 Engineer. Click. Are you sure you want to delete Me?

What a concept. Yes, I'm sure. Let it be as though he never existed. Click.

Sigh. I'm still here.

I settle on Shaera, my Level 32 Evoker; a demon-exoskeleton wearing ash-blonde capable of slaughtering things 100x her size with rays of purple energy. The perfect woman.

Rampant violence. A coiling vortex of riven flesh and a carpet of lifeless limbs. It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. Voltaire.

Sascha Dikiciyan and Cris Velasco are my trumpeters. All this destruction, faceless from the deep well of midnight that drives through my being. I am become death.

Exit game. I drink the last cold dregs of my tea. Now I'm feeling much more in touch with Johnny. If Vasquez created him as a means to express his violent desires, Hellgate was made for those sad individuals who lack the spark of creation. For that, and for the prose of an apocalyptic world.

Click-clack gears and grinding thoughts. My mechanical mind runs one thought into the other, and churns out something relatively whole. One essay, served cold. Hurrah for me.

Cup the third, hammered out of the last soggy twigs of my teabag. The concoction is pallid and unhealthy-looking, like a geriatric on its deathbed. Slurp.

Blogification time. Cut. Paste. RAR. Cut. Paste. Repeat.

Gah. Time to work. Curses.

Where did my boots go?

Oh. Right.

Grabba book

Swish!

***

I get into my Jason Vorhees Toyota and cringe as I turn the key in the ignition, surprised to hear no devil squeal of glee as the fan belt rips into action. I open the window. I navigate the driveway. I crank up the volume on my mix CD, and listen to faceless Swing as I zoom to xxxx. The Love Hina theme song. The Syncopated Clock.

Brake. Pick up [Midget No. 3]. Banter. “Did you know?”, “You know what?”, “Can you guess?”, “Hey?”, “Hey?”, “Hey?”. One of these days I'm going to force him to read Dianne Wayne Jones (which even I can't read) and he'll develop a complex with the realisation that he's just asking questions I can't answer because he's an insecure little berk who needs to feel superior to everyone around him. Maybe that's not fair. Maybe I should just wear earplugs.

Let's go Sunning...

Hydepark. Brake. Fifteen minutes early. How did that happen? I can't seem to get a firm handle on time. I grip it too tightly, or not at all. “Bye [Midget No. 3].” Have fun waiting. I'll just go writhe in my own incompetence now.

Swing. Voodoo Cowboy. Gods, I wish I'd cornered the potential in writing about a voodoo-wielding cowboy. Another life, I guess.

Craighall. Brake. An errand at Postnet. The parking lot is wobbling like jelly at a disco. I need copies.

“I need copies,” I say.

I hand over the forms and wait, staring at stationery. A pile of CDs has a note saying x7.00 on the front. I need CDs, but I have no idea if it means x7 for one CD or for fifty. I'm not really any good with money.

My copies are ready. I pull x200 out of my pocket and the girl at the counter stares at me. I smile. Teeth and hair and skin.

What the heck are you looking at?

It costs x30. I pick up the copies. I leave.

Drive. I whistle along to the same songs I heard earlier. Ragtime. Those Dear Hearts and Gentle People. A phrase written on a piece of paper found in the pocket of a dead jazz player half a decade ago. Sunny smiles and close harmony. xxxx. My hometown.

My tea died some time while I was out, and it is corpse cold. I drink it anyway. I can live with entropy. It tastes like dishwater. Who defines what tastes good anyway?

Clickety-clack. Words. Now launching my essay into the Blogosphere. Three, two, one.

Jeez, my boots smell funky.

I honestly have no idea what has gone wrong with the font sizes, but I'm feeling inclined to leave them in their Wonderland state to get back at Jhonen for making his comic so difficult to read. That and I have absolutely no idea how to fix it.

2:28. Another moment, now vanished. I'm tired. I could lie down and close my eyes right now. I would, but I know I'll be just as tired when I get up.

I douse my boots in anti-fungal powder. Filthy, filthy footwear.

I put them on a windowsill one room over.

I read. I analyse. I find something worth saying. I say it.

Universes expand.

Hungry now! Feed me, please! Gau gau!

Satay noodles. I pierce the film on the lid seven times, because 'several' and 'seven' sound the same, even though 'several' comes from 'seperalis' and 'seven' comes from 'Septem'.

Microwave whirrs. Kettle gurgles.

I visit Alex. “Good bandicoot.”

I fetch my noodles and Cup the Fourth (fresh teabag). Crunch crunch nibble. I tuck my elbow into my hip and hold my fork like a claw, pretending I'm a dinosaur. Gnash. I may have tiny arms but I am ancient and fearsome. Feed my quaking belly, puny chicken meat. Gnash gnash.

All done.

Bumbling around on Facebook. Surprise! Nothing's happening!

Right. Semantic Constituency. Divining the nature of each singular letter in the English language.

Okay, what's the word, what's the word. Word... word... word... Heroes Season Three, those Japanese guys, red lightning – booster? Close, but not right. Augmentative. That's it.

Word... word... word... ivory towers, shaped resources, worked things. Artifice? No, that implies deception. Structure? No... Construct? Close enough.

“N.”

“Okay”, enough music for now. Concentrate. What does 'N' imply? Naughty, negative, intergers –

Rebellion. Renegade. Yes.

“O.”

Orbitals. Spheres. Space. Numeric and geometric duality. Cosmic. That's it.

P

Pharoah. Pens & pencils. Legislature. Law. Science. Principality. Presidential. Governance. That doesn't have a 'p' in it, but it is the right word.

An E-mail! Could it be –

No. Junk mail.

Q

Question. Equation. Query. Inquisition. This one's pretty clear.

R

Hmmm. Rodents. Rats. Rebellion. Rage. Revenge. Rotation. Revolution. An aspect of nature that demands change. Force and motion. Perfect.

S

You know, writing down everything I think isn't such a bad idea. x3.x6. Why do I keep repeating this to myself? I'm not an idiot, brain.

Oh, S. Right.

Sly. Stealth. Seduction. Secret. Smooth motion and deception. Subtlety.

T

Terrain. Traverse. Transportation. Travel.

Tired. So tired.

Motion.

U

Unctuous. Disgusting. Repulsive. Umbrella. Umbrella?

1. F12 puts in bullet points, apparently.

Yes , umbrella. Wetness. Discomfort. Under things.

V

Vivacious. Vitality. Victorian. Elevation. High, lofty things.

W

Question words. Where, when, why. Which. What. At first I'd bunk it with 'Q' as an inquisitive force, but perhaps...

Words. Worlds. Vowels. Communication. 'W' is Instigative.

X

Explain. Extraneous. Expansive. Explosive. Hex. Complex. Yeah, 'X' is a growth force. 'Expansive' will fit nicely.

Y

I close my eyes.

Some time later, I open them.

Am I awake? Did I sleep? Have I

Ah, shut up.

Y

Yo-yos. Adverbs. Eyes. Yolk. Transcendent geometry. One word, please. Transform. It's the only thing that comes to mind.

Z

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Lazy. Hypnotize. Zebras. Haze. Freeze. Breeze. 'Z' is sleep, and dreaming.

Only a few hundred more combinations to go.

But I need to rest. This lethargy is intolerable.

5:03 PM

Cough cough.

I'm lying down. I'm lying down. I have lost feeling in my spine. I have lost my sense of gravity. I am lost among the reaches of variable syntax pushed forward in ever reaching eddies of thought that scatter stars like dust with my passage through the dark places of time and space an reason time and season hours minutes days reaching ever outward with elastic legs firmly rooted to their whatever and lengthening by the hour to the power of infinity bars bending across the winding spherical shell of by turtle consciousness swimming along with the currents of never before seen things into the hereafter without rhyme nor rhythm but just as a single flowing free-form being of nonsense whose neurons have fired simultaneously and left a swirling residue of thoughtpowder and ringing headaches that quake through the whole uniform scattering without distance or direction and clash upon the hard spaces with the sound of scraping metal and breaking glass sending me falling forever through my naval into unwritten spaces so loud and insistent I can't hear what I'm saying but I have this idea that it has something to do with nothing or was it anything whereby I've killed off parts of myself and scattered the ashes it the infertile gardens of my mind and bred phoenixes from the moonlight and the arid phantasms of things long forgotten until they burst into flame as the torchsong grows wilder and razes the whole place like a helium balloon put to a match and I watch the greyscale explosions over and over and this is me by any other name.

I think these things for hours.

5:47 PM

Was that sleep?

Gods, I hope not.

Facebook. Talking on the internet. What a novelty. People are billions of centimeters away and I'm talking to them. I'm not crazy. The world is crazy.

Hmmm. Apparently I'm feeling snarky. I am pleased to associate myself with such a thrilling word.

S. Sharpener! Where did I put my sharpener?

Looong conversations with many many 'ooo's. Healing the world, one person at a time. Or trying to, anyway. Synaptics, synaptics. I am the Last of the Jedi. Watch my midichlorians dance.

I am awake, right?

Goodness knows.

I read your blogs, because I care about you and your life has meaning.

I write in silence, because I care about Hexaemer and it gives my life meaning.

The rattle of my computer in its iron skin. A pitched frequency shooting a laser point through my ears. The rattle of my world in its skin. Lights bright as UFOs shooting through the dark.

Shh. I'm ignoring you, world.

On with my ceiling fan. Begone, foul, living warmth.

S is for sharpener. x5

Plegh. Graphite tastes horrible.

Oh. I fed the dogs again, by the way. Ages ago.

Knoffel. Giggle.

Transcription complete. Ready for phase 3, commander. Commander? Are you sleeping?

Bugger off.

Sometimes I'm such an a-hole.

I go to the bathroom. I set the alarm – after going to the bathroom. I switch off lights and close doors. The hall is spinning again, and my feet dance to keep up with the involuntary motion. My head keeps rolling off balance like a ragdoll's. I could really use a stick and some twine.

Touching surfaces. Prod this, prod that. Make sure it's all really there. Good. Thank you.

Archive, investigate, read things. Chew up the hours. Did that reply I wrote earlier go through? No idea. I send it through again. Well, it still isn't there. Who knows? Who am I to judge blog management? A mortal thingy, that's what. We're all just mortal thingies.

My words are so wise and descriptive. I'm so glad I'm a writer.

Cut the sarcasm, me.

Time for a little retrospect. What did I do today...

Hmm. Not bad. Not terribly good, considering the best part was written about three minutes after I 'woke up', but today was fairly productive, given what I'm working with. Yes, I spend a good deal of time staring at the walls, but they do dance so beautifully.

You know what, I'm going to get this over with. Stop prodding me, 6li7ch. I'll change it already.

There. 'Sixth World Librarian'. Are you happy now? Geez, that was pointless. Nobody reads your profile anyway, you know, except me, and I already know we're the Sixth World Librarian. The pretty photo of the hill from The Wild Coast was a good idea, but this

Stop being so hard on me. I just need to do these things sometimes. Haven't you ever wanted to feel normal?

No.

Well, its a good thing too, because that job description makes you sound insane.

Says the guy talking TO HIMSELF.

Grumble.

15 minutes until your designated down time. Plus whatever for however long you slept between 5 & 6.

Ah, Six.

Let's read a book. Vox. An adventure in Screetown. Ghoulish happenings. Goblins and plots in Undertown. Once again, the word 'acrid' does not fail to appear. It's almost as frequent as the word 'Curious' in Alice in Wonderland. What was it that essay said? 'The spirit of a book can be summed up in the single most frequent word to cross its pages'. In War & Peace, that word was 'Impetus'. In this series, it just has to be 'Acrid'.

10:31

I am awake. I think. I'm certainly not asleep, and I don't need to sleep. I have to try. 7 ½ hours. Just do your best.

Scanning for errors...

/

\

/

Done.

Now launching into the blogosphere.

Three

Two

One...

Death

I have a bit of an unnatural obsession with death, not so much as a physical concept (though at times, yeah) but as a spiritual one. I adore death. I see it as the big, friendly sledgehammer waiting at the end of the rainbow.

It started its current incarnation, methinks, around the time I played through Arcanum for the first time, and encountered the gruesome philosophy of the necromancer Kerghan the Terrible. His soothing certainty still flows through my mind, each time as clear as the first:

“Death is the natural state of things.”

For those of you who haven't played this charming 2001 video game (hello, world!), you are a person who has survived a blimp crash running around trying to stop an evil sorcerer returning from another dimension to commit racial genocide in a variety of different flavours. Goodness, that sounds cliché.

Anyhow, at the end of the game you find out that the 'villain' has been locked away in a tiny cell for a thousand years, and the real nemesis is a necromancer named Kerghan who has pushed the forces of the spectral realm to their limit and in doing so decided that life is evil. As such he wants to kill absolutely everybody in Arcanum, which is slightly different to what the first villain was doing.

*Spoilers Over*

Kerghan makes a great deal of sense, as well as being a snappy dresser. He identifies Emotions as a negative effect which distorts the soul when it is stimulated by the natural world, and the lack of them – a great, unending river of peace – as the pure state in which they truly belong. While Arcanum holds no concept of metempsychosis (reincarnation for Greek people and learned death-seekers), it fits in pretty well. Referring to Socrates' theory of forms, we are incomplete elements desperately striving to become 'true' elements, needing and wanting nothing. If that sounds familiar to those out east it is because Buddhists preach practically the same thing: an end to desire (a magnetic attempt to structure and complete a form), and the state of bliss that such a thing allows.

Babble babble. I really do get ahead of myself sometimes.

After years of imagining the future and missing out on the actualisation of those musings completely, I have decided upon one thing: death is the only certainty¹. It is the only outcome we mortals can definitively prepare for and, if you'll excuse me for saying so, one that we cannot prepare for enough. Thus I have done away with thoughts of living the dream, of romance and of fame. And I have replaced them with death. Quite simply the idea of death, and preparations for the happy day when I will die.

At this juncture I am forced to consider a question some might be asking:

What exactly is Death?

To which I shall reply with the symbol:

and its meaning: 'The separation of the soul from a body.'

That's all very simple at its basis, but as with all definitions (that ocean I drown within) it demands others.

A body is the most immediately identifiable. They are the physical compounds that surround us. I won't say anything as definitive as that they are the organic cell-structures we have direct control over, nor will I say that they extend to every attribute of the physical world. I shall stay up here on my uncomfortable palisade fence and writhe in the agony of mortal perspective, because as much as I want to die, I want to live as well. It is kinda sorta entertaining.

What we do know about bodies is that their most immediate perceptual centre (you) can be destroyed¹. The general assumption is that this is death, but we don't really know. Maybe the soul just sits around waiting for another controllable vessel to step into its negative-space and resumes what it was doing before, because it is as much a part of the world as the world is a part of it, and only by destroying the universe can you bring about an actual 'death'.

The soul is more of an abstract concept, because it is only detectable as everything that reality isn't. It is not sensed, it does not change, it is intangible and incorporeal. Its existence is empirical: because every force in the universe has an equal opposing force, we assume the same is so for the body.

But despite the fact that it is not physical, it effects physicality. We know this because we respond to things which bear no reason, which are intangible and which STRESS IMPORTANCE are self-destructive. The body has demands to perpetuate its existence, and the soul acts against these demands, responding to emotions (wisely defined by Kerghan as a distortion upon the soul after reacting to an external stimulus) at the detriment of the body.

These two entities bring up another important question: if death is the separation of a soul from a body, what exactly does it mean to have a soul and body connected?

The answer is simply a balanced force held between them; one which is at its most basic level a contradiction. On one half we have the sensory engine that is the brain fueling 'the entity' with senses and commands: 'You must eat, because you are hungry', 'Move away. That object is sharp'. On the other hand we have the emotional engine that is the soul, telling us things like, 'Don't eat, because that animal suffered before it was killed', and 'Let the pain keep coming, it makes the anger and sadness so much less present'.

And by the very fact that we are thinking these things, we can define this paradox-entity as The Mind.

At this point everything begins to blur together. We know that emotions are accompanied by hormones, and many scientists make the assumption that hormones therefore generate emotions – skipping the consideration that it may be the other way around: why can't the soul be telling the brain what to feel, and the brain be interpreting that in a physical way? The simple answer is that if a system works with less pieces, then those unnecessary pieces can be removed. This is the sufferance of mainstream specialisation. Logically, when one considers forms and opposing forces, the soul exists.

Similarly we are given the reverse to consider:

Bodies ideally affect souls. The interpretive language of this is emotion.

The former generates the latter generates the former. A dynamic outcome.

Sweet Elias Canetti. I'm certainly long-winded, aren't I?

Death, then, can be seen as a dissolution of the mind. Two interacting elements are separated, and as such any sense of Self ceases to exist. I imagine it feels wonderful, once you get over the 'hit by a bus' or 'fell into a vat of eels' part. That constant struggle between one thing and another, the decisions, the sensations, the emotions – everything falling away to nothingness in one moment. If that is death, I'm ready for it when it comes.

HOWEVER.

There are other considerations to be made. For example, is Death the natural state? If so, then it means something must have occurred to end the natural state, and that implies a soul can be given direction and intention without actual consciousness. I call this their 'Anywhere But Here' component; a built-in boredom with their own existence which drives them to something else unceasingly. This would mean that so long as death is a natural state, it must also end periodically to satisfy the acting component of the soul. In a word, metempsychosis.

If Life is the natural state, then no direction or intention need to be placed inside a soul; we simply are and always will be. This gives credence to ideas of consciousness being a never-ending and linear path, and I'm just as happy with this outcome, too. At the point my body is 'destroyed' either I continue living despite all probability or the notion of body loses all meaning and I become A: a central godly figure attached to the universe or B: A mind without any external demands of 'feed me' or 'ouch'; capable of generating worlds out of thoughts.

The last would be particularly enjoyable, as I'd become a physical example of what I always have been: an Idea.

The conclusion: Life is grandish. Death is grand.

On that day and at that moment, my mind will blow open. Something will happen, and it will be different.

I can only pinpoint one certainty:

I will at last have reached that place I have been searching for; anywhere but here.

-----------------

^1: Quantum Immortality is an increasingly popular theory stating that at the point in which a person will die reality splits along two points: one branch in which the consciousness ends, and another in which it continues to exist. As such we never die: our consciousnesses (consciousni?) continue along the most unlikely paths despite anything that may physically happen.

While I am fully willing to accept this theory, I have to point out that reality is split into an infinite number of possibilities at every moment, and the limitations of dimension are the only thing holding our precise view of the world in place. As these parallel universes do exist, there are consciousnesseseses driving each of them, and those end. I guess they can't exactly be confirmed as soul-bearing entities just as I can't actually prove that you, dear reader, actually have a consciousness and are not simply an expression of my own. This is one of those rare cases where I avoid thinking about something because it discomfits me: I want you to have a soul. I think it makes for a much more interesting universe if you do.