The Blue, My God The Blue

Walking home today I was reminded of that story by Issac Azimov where, on a world in the middle of a star cluster where at least one of the six suns is always shining, a perfect eclipse event every two-thousand years causes everyone to go mad when they see the depth of the night sky for the first time. Right now the sky is having a similar effect on the people of Derry, as it is blue.

It is blue it is blue it is blue. There is not a cloud in it. Not a one. I stood on a hill and looked around; I saw no hint of cloud on any part of the horizon, even over Donegal, where clouds are born.

The heat is amazing. In the middle of the soul-gouging blue is an impossibly bright and hot thing. I'd seen it on TV, and read about it in astronomical literature, but that was no preparation for the sheer majesty of it. I am told it is the sun. I felt like falling to my knees and worshiping it. A collie dog trotted by; the urge was to sacrifice it in full view of the Bright One, and so win His favour.

But I could not catch the dog.

This is what I suppose they call "big sky", though I think that only applies to unfinished landscapes with featureless horizons, like they have out in America. This place is too hilly to have truly big sky. So we need a new way to describe a cloudless day in Northern Ireland. I suggest unlikely sky. It's the polar opposite to the sky we endure most of the time, which is a brightish blanket of unbroken grey. At times it looks like the sky has simply not yet loaded, but you wait around and it still doesn't appear, so it dawns on you that it's meant to look like that.

If ever there is anything interesting going on in the sky--an eclipse, or the peak of a meteor shower--you are guaranteed the sky will go blank like this, and the blankness will last for exactly as long as you are interested in whatever is behind it. It can wait. Sometimes it waits for weeks. A solar burp could scorch the biosphere off the rest of the planet but Derry would survive, safe under miles of cloud.

Okay. I'm going to get some ice-cream and stare at the unlikely sky.

My My That Is Sharp

Astonishing pain. Just astonishing pain. I am drumming my fingers and pacing about. And this is me after consuming all the pills I can reasonably consume.

Went to the dentist today to have a molar removed--upper jaw, left-hand side, right at the back. An awkward tooth. An awkward, awkward tooth. A head all cavernous and rotten, buried to the neck in bone and gum. After drugging me with some careful and painless needlework my dentist took to applying every single instrument of extraction known to the tooth-drawer's art, some even that were not in the immediate vicinity but which had to be fetched. After exploring every possible angle with her various tools, my dentist resigned from the task, exhausted in body and spirit. I think the poor dental nurse may have been holding back tears, so traumatised was she by what she had seen.

No charge.

The tooth remains. Shifted but not uprooted. I am referred to a specialist, a surgeon of the mouth, who I will see for a consultation in some six week's time, assuming I make it that far.

EDIT: Just a gentle ache now. The gum has cooled down and I hardly feel the tooth at all. Only hurts when I knock the tooth. Knocking the tooth occurs with some regularity during eating and talking, but I can deal with that.

Paramilitary Love Match

Saw an advert for something harrowing on TV the other day--Uniform Dating. This is a matchmaking service specifically for people who like people who wear uniforms to work, and people who wear uniforms who like the adulation of nurse fetishists and girls with daddy issues. This is greatly amusing to me. Do they accept applications from priests, I wonder? Or McDonalds employees? I am tempted to create these profiles and see what happens. I want to know how many people are interested in Starfleet ensign Mathus Green and his love of "Sherlock Holmes holomovies, amusing transporter accidents, avoiding death during away missions."

I thought I might corner another niche market by stealing their premise and taking it a step further: I will create a Paramilitary matchmaking service. Is your uniform an old German army jacket, a full facial scarf, beret, aviator sunglasses? Are you all about separating from somewhere, uniting with somewhere, or are you a freedom-fighter, an insurgent, a mover-and-shaker in student politics, or an ex- variant of any of these? Or are you interested in meeting someone who has shown a firm commitment to a cause? Paramilitary Love Match dot com is the place for you. You'll be able to select your ideal love match by ideology, narrow it down to your favourite splinter group, find your match (all faces redacted, of course) and all whilst listening to a bad pan-pipe midi of The Crying Game.

The Dentist

Went to a dentist today! And not just some softly-spoken guy in a back room at a tyre and exhaust centre, I'm talking about an actual dentist, working in a surgery in an actual street in an actual town!

Yes, just like with the glasses, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet (but gently, so as not to break my teeth) and go get my mouth sorted. There is a credit card put aside for this process. By the time this is over I will have the best mouth in town. The best mouth in town! I think I will get a t-shirt printed up now.

The good news is that my teeth are in excellent condition for someone who hasn't been to a dentist yet in the 21st century (I just haven't had time). Just a few small fillings, an old filling to be replaced with something more modern, and a tooth at the back that has to come out before it explodes and takes out everything in a five-foot radius. Also my dark front tooth (aforementioned hickmouth) can apparently be fixed quickly and cheaply.

Upon reflection I realise that I am a strange and disfunctional man and this is not something people usually get excited about.

Post 700

How about that then--700 posts! Perhaps about 500 of those are actually online. The other 200 are doomed to fester in obscurity until my third son Rupert runs out of intellectual property to ruthlessly exploit and convinces his fey twin sister to give up her half of the ornate brass key to their dead father's digital vault.

"But whass in dere, Rupert? Whass in the special machine?" Her eyes follow something imaginary snaking its way up the wall and across the ceiling. "Cold machine...dark and clean."

"Our birthright, dear Miranda." The vault opens, microfine petals shifting and sliding, then peeling away with a cool belch of nitrogen gas. The nut within is a dark metal ball with a single USB slot in front. "The Various Half-Baked And Unfinished Trials of Sheriff Red. The first few thousand words of a mystery story about clockwork extradimensional beings. Also a story called the Long And Winding Choad. We will begin there, darling. We will add...elves. And vampires. No--vampire elves!"

You're a sick puppy, Rupert, but I always liked your moxie, and you work a lot harder than I ever did. If you can sift the semi-precious metals out of all of that muck you are welcome to it. Just leave your sister alone. I want you to go far away from her, Rupert.

Far away.

(And stop luring backpackers to their deaths. Stop luring things in general, Rupert. No, I don't care that they're only Australians. Australians are people too.)

Anyway yes, post 700, about a month shy of four years on. Things have slowed down lately, obviously. I think this is because I have stronger filters these days. Back in '05 and '06 I would blabber about anything. Or maybe it's linked to solar activity. Impossible to know. Is it time for a redesign? Get rid of the necrotic yellow? The title is unwieldy and means nothing but I can't change it now. The title image took about fifteen minutes to do.

What else?

I'd actually come here tonight to express an idea about infinite monkey/typewriter pairs and one monkey typing out the digits of the Gödel number that encodes the entire universe as it is now in this instant and thus bringing this instant into being, and another quite unrelated monkey a few trillion trillion cubicles away typing out the number that represents the entire universe as it was fifty years before. Once you apply infinity to any sort of random generative process you're going to get all possible variations of and iterations of existence sooner or later, and within those variations some reflective intelligence might manifest that observes what it believes to be cause and effect, when in fact nothing (nothing but the anthropic principle) actually connects one moment of its existence to another.

If the universe-state could be encoded in a single number, of course, then a single monkey would express every iteration and variation of the universe (in no particular order) simply by counting up to infinity over infinite time.

Count to ten: at ten you are just as likely to turn into a vase of flowers or a flash of nuclear fire as you are to continue as a human being. Of course that's never happened to you or anyone you know. But if the universe can be encoded in a number then you have to expect that there are other values out there that express these (relatively mundane) possibilities. There are probably far, far more of these terrifying alternative existence-values than there are values that express something sensible like cause and effect.

Yes, as I said: filters.

My parents are back from Crete--they had a grand time. The child and the hound are gone. The dust is settling again, and now that dust is mainly small white hairs, and probably will be forevermore.

Trial By Small Dog

I'm looking after my sister and the family dog while my parents sun themselves in Crete. My sister takes virtually no looking-after; she's thirteen and now more or less an autonomous agent. The dog, on the other hand, is not yet two.

It's been a week now. One week. For a couple of weeks before that I was busy, yeah, busy as a blue-arsed fly, built a shed and rearranged the house and painted the upstairs room (previously the Temple Of Clarity, then the Hall of Christmas Past, now The Spare Bedroom) in one weekend, but this is different; this is Trial By Small Dog. Please understand if I have been disengaged from the process lately, abandoning Twitter, not answering emails, and so on. These eddies of quiet between wild currents of dog and dogshit-related events are fairly unusual.

Maybe next week my affection for the dog--which is there, don't get me wrong--will overwhelm my desire to disappear him. Actually I am considering a visit to eBay to buy a few stuffed and mounted Jack Russells to sit around the house. I imagine those proud companions of the long-dead watching him with their glassy eyes as he decides where in my house he's going to piss next. I imagine him finding a carved mahogany dog-mount and a five-pound bag of cotton wool in the prime urination spot under the kitchen table, and then deciding: no, I'll wait until Neil and Fiona come back from work and I'll pee outside.

The brass name-plaque on the dog-mount starts out blank. Then the dog pees in the hall. I let the dog finish, then I invite him to watch as I bring out my hammer and chisel and with them engrave an ornate "O". Four letters left, Ollie. Four letters left.

It's not so bad, it's not so bad. The dog is a lot of fun when he's in the right mood; all mad energy. He sat himself at my feet earlier and stared at me with this slightly deranged look on his face. I said "do you need to pee?" and he shot to the back door, a white flash. By the time I made it to the kitchen he'd come back to find out where I was. He gets all excited. Attaching the lead to his collar requires great dexterity. It's not that he doesn't like his lead; he loves his lead. He is greatly enthusiastic about it. Sometimes he loses sight of the goal and lets out a little dribble of pee.

Sawed through my left forefinger a bit on Monday while making the "Ollie-gater", a movable chickenwire fence that jams across the hall to stop the dog from getting upstairs. It is a fine piece of bespoke carpentrymanship. Now the dog has no access to carpet while we're out and he can't scoot out between your legs when you open the front door. He hates it. I am greatly proud of it.

Eyeballs And Whatnot

So I went to the Optician on Friday to get my eyes checked out. Lately things have been less than great; there's the void-coloured tentacular smudge in my left eye which comes and goes, and lately I've noticed I've been straining to see things more than usual. It seemed like a good idea to get things checked out as almost everything I do involves processing light in one way or another.

The news: my retinas look fine, so that's a relief. The multicoloured smudge is just the desperate clawing of an extradimensional entity of some sort, or a software glitch, depending on your world view. Right now I can't see it so I consider it a temporary quirk. But I have astigmatism, which is when the eyes can focus more clearly along one axis than another, giving everything a slight vertical motion-blur effect unless I strain to focus. Picked up my glasses today; the difference in clarity was immediate. The edges of things are razor sharp. The one drawback is that the vertical axis of the world has been corrected, meaning that I feel about a foot shorter and everything feels slightly disembodied and unreal. I'm sure that sensation will fade.

On the plus side I now look terribly serious and grown-up.

No, I'm not Neil but if there's trouble I'm sure I can contact him for you

It's Happening Again

So I'm about 20 years old, half asleep at 4:24pm on a bright July afternoon. A weak blue light struggles past the thick tartan-pattern curtains of the little room at the back of our garage and fails entirely to make it past my eyelids to penetrate the warm green-and-purple dark of my brain. A cool breeze and the curtains billow, the light swells and retreats. This is where I am. This is my eternal now. A moment of perfect peace and clarity. There's nowhere I need to be.

I take a deep breath and some dim background process thinks: I wonder what things will be like when I'm in my late twenties? Then

*FOOTAGE MISSING*

I'm turning 27 in a couple of days. That's late twenties. What that is, my friends, is just plain mad. I'm stuck in this increasingly dystopic vision of the future and I can't wake up.

Many of you are older than this, of course. Significantly. You will say: lucky bastard is only 27. I know this. And I know I probably complain that time is going too quickly every year. When people say that of course, that time is going too quickly, what we're really expressing is a sense that we're not making optimal use of our time, or more precisely that time is a sort of rough rocky mountainside that we're tumbling senselessly down, all bare arses and broken limbs, reaching wildly for twigs and roots that yank loose or rip our palms without ever slowing us down. There is no stopping to smell the flowers and there, that sharp rock just inverted your face for you anyway, all you'll smell from here on in is muck and blood.

27 will be a good year though. I'll have a story in print this year. Also I am now a proper published artist, or will be in a few day's time when the good folk at Murky Depths run off issue #8 (I've done a double-page illustration for them) and I will be published again, and have many fine things to show you all (that's where I've been lately, by the way, slaving over a hot wacom graphics tablet). So things are progressing well. I feel a change upon me. The art has taught me patience: I sunk every spare hour (and--according to Fiona--a great number of hours that weren't actually spare) for nearly three weeks into that one image. The result was pleasing, if maybe a bit static, and I learned an awful lot in the process.

In that sense things aren't so bad. Just rough edges to polish off now: I need to get a driver's license at some point (should really take up lessons again...), I need to improve my general health a couple of notches (or else I'm middle aged now), there are vital things to do around the house, and the house I'm talking about here isn't actually mine, I'm 27 with very little accumulated wealth to show for it, and so on. The usual mess of Earthly bullshit that follows you from one week to the next, things I know I should deal with, but I really don't care that much about. Hard to convince myself to invest in a pension when every fibre of my being knows I'll never get to retire, and that there's a good chance that pension money will end up getting reappropriated to buy sonic truncheons for the fascist SocioTechJunta that takes over in 2015.

Didn't mean to get all angsty on you there. 27, fair enough. Plenty of stuff to do.

EDIT: Should have mentioned, my parents are on to a good thing with the birthday presents; last year they bought me a barbeque, this year they bought me a giant clay chimenea. The possibilities are now endless: as soon as the weather picks up I will be in the back yard setting multiple fires. Large blazing fires that singe the hair and dry out the eyes. Chimenea!

It Worked!

The star chart confirms it; I've skipped past February in its entirety and it's now the 3rd of March, 2009. The device is in ruins, of course, the precious time core at the heart of the machine crushed beyond recognition by the nightmare pressure of shifting 8,987,551,790 gigajoules of manflesh through time. I have no spares. I'll have to wait until my great-great-granddaughter's tech people perfect the technology so that I can steal it and send it back to myself. I'll try my best to make the thing target March '09 but according to the scribbled note I found with it, "rearward branch traversal is notoriously unreliable, oh and don't let that quack bastard take your leg above the knee nomatter what he says" so it might end up anywhere, even materialising in my shoe cupboard sometime last month and causing this whole damn mess.

I've been busy with this and that. Normal order will be restored soon. New art to show off.

The Devastating Tale Of Quan Li (Scraped From Twitter)

I have a story for you--bear with me for a moment. It is a devastating tale that ran on the front page of Friday's 'Derry Journal'.

A grim Chinese backwater. And there, a village. It is a godawful place made of concrete and bamboo. Quan Li--our hero--lives there.

Lived there, I should say, because the village was razed to the ground by an earthquake a few years ago. That is where the story begins.

With the destruction of his village, Quan Li found himself homeless, unemployed, and walking around knee-deep in dusty, blank-eyed dead.

Reedy thin, his simple peasant's clothes in tatters, Quan Li stumbles past the marker at the edge of town and just keeps walking.

He meets a monkey, a pig, and an effeminate monk. They smack bandits and drink rice alcohol from gourds, until one day he zigs and they zag.

Alone again, Quan Li finds himself at the edge of the world. Gulls and grinding industry. Great shapes shift in the cloying smog.

He finds a community of people living in windowless metal boxes of various colours stacked on the slowly-heaving deck of a docked ship.

The Crate People tell him where they are bound. A land of wealth, of decadent abundance, of loose, loose women. The West.

"I would follow you," sighs Quan Li, "but I have no money to pay for my passage." "Hush now!" booms a well-dressed man. "That's no trouble!"

"Why, my associates here will front you the money, and you can pay us back as soon as you find work!" The Associates giggle and chew beans.

Nine months and three ships later, Quan Li arrives in Derry, Northern Ireland. Men pull back the doors and he comes blinking into the rain.

"This...is the West?"

He is immediately truncheoned over the head by one of The Associates, bundled into the back of a Volvo, and driven to a council house.

He lives in the hot shiny attic with the plants. He can never ever leave the hot shiny attic. He tends to the plants. He dries the leaves.

Men sometimes leave food for him. Sometimes they don't. His skin turns to leather under the UV lights. He chews the leaves for relief.

There's shouting below; Li hardly notices. The hatch splinters open. Men in black uniforms take pictures of him and carry him to a van.

Now he's in the dock. His translator explains to him that he is a criminal, but not to worry. Two years behind bars will cure him of that.

Thus ends the story of Quan Li. Until he contracts a flesh-eating virus and they add a few years to his sentence for incorrigible bleeding.

( There may have been some exaggeration involved there. Source: http://tinyurl.com/cq8gxq )