Explain

How is it 2007 already, then?

It can't be, seeing as it turned 2006 just a couple of months ago.

It...can't be.

I wish there was some kind of consciousness-altering machine that let you perceive the entirety of a given period of time all at once--I'd like to be able to view everything from last January until now. Some sort of big memory shoehorn. I'd like to see if then, taking everything into account, it would feel like a year. Right now, running through each memory in isolation, it doesn't.

EDIT: On a less depressing note, it's 2007 and we're all still alive! Goodbye, 2006. It was nice knowin' ye. Resolutions? Yes: learn to drive, lose a few pounds of extraneous subcutaneous, write something that gets in print. Who knows, eh? Sharpen up a bit, is what I need to do. Be a better man. There have been requests for more of my old vitrol and spite in the blog (in particular, to quote half my readership, "less of these shite stories"); I'll see what I can do. It's a question of adjusting ratios.

I'm actually surprised that this thing is still going. Couldn't do without it now, you know. As long as there's dirty laundry to be aired, I'll be there, big smile on my face, flapping. That gives me a weird image in my head, actually, not sure where it comes from: there's a little house, a little wooden shack, right up on the edge of a big sea-cliff. Surrounded by bright green grass and a great drying breeze. I'm there with a big white sheet, flapping away, and it's got this big streak of brown right up it. Where do these images come from? Some random noise generator deep in my brainmeat? I love it.

Going to play some Super Monkey Ball now with The Girl.

Great Men Like Him

His crime had been a terrible one; he'd known it when he'd planned it, he'd known it as he'd done it, and he'd known it afterwards, felt it most keenly, in a way that only a great and gentle soul like his could. He'd known that it was wrong to lie to the police too; to say that it was poor subnormal Franklin, to have him brought in for it, to cook up a lie so real that boy's own mother spat and clawed at him as he shambled into court -- betrayer, she'd said, you filthy betrayer, no better than your bastard father.
     He'd been brought up right. He'd known the right thing to do, and he could have done it at any time, stood up and said no, it was me, not Franklin, it was me who hurt that girl. But he hadn't, of course. He'd let it be. Soon, the distant numb sensation of wrongness became a distant numb nothing, drowned out along with everything else in the relentless background noise of daily life. After all, it was too late for the retard; Franklin was dead, but he had a valuable job to do -- a vital role, a glorious quest, a place in His grand scheme.
     Thoughts of Judgement Day came to him as he untied his clean white shoes.
     He liked to imagine Judgement Day exactly as his grandmother had described it to him: the city crumbling and burning with tongues of white fire, cool to his touch, but bringing the most awful agony to sinners. He'd hear them hiss and wail as he made his way past (a sound like frying bacon and howling dogs, she'd said). Sinful and saintly alike would part before him, clearing his path to the great doors of the Creator's Court.
     Great men like him would go first, you see.
     The baliff would know him by sight; he'd nod and let him pass. In the Court would be a jury of all-seeing angels, and they'd be sat around him in a great semicircle, three rows deep. They'd nod and whisper to each other for a while--his would be a tricky case to call. Like most great men, he'd made decisions that weren't always black and white, and done things that were often shaded a very dark sort of grey. In good time they'd huddle together around their spokesman; he'd stand, and point his finger, and say yeah, you've done wrong in your time, but in our estimation you've done a helluva lot more good: on you go, son, on you go, be cleansed, and take your place at His right hand.
     The Preacher undid his collar and poured himself another drink. He closed his eyes as he put the glass to his lips, savoring the smell, and then the sting.

---

This is here because it has nowhere else to go. Currently munching on crackers and working on this evening's Flickr Fiction.

Some Small Strangeness

A bit weird this; terrestrial Channel 4 is acting up tonight; the picture is skipping, and if you look carefully you can see some fella's face, with a microphone in front of him, addressing a seated crowd. There's no sound interference but the picture's fried; if you look carefully enough you can see the numeral "2" what would be the upper-right corner of the shifted ghost image. This is no channel 2 that I know of, anyway (for our US readers; in the UK we have about five terrestrial channels, and about four more that come across the waves from Ireland) . It must be skip. There's something goin' on in the upper atmosphere tonight, folks, that's all I'm going to say.

I was also electrocuted by the lightswitch in our living room, just a little jolt.

There's something up.

Anyway: today it's exactly 100 years since the first audio radio broadcast. Coincedence or conspiracy?

Probably just coincedence.

My first thought, when I saw the ghost-image of the man with the microphone, was that some underground organisation were trying to take over the channel to announce some hideous truth that lies behind this decadent Western lifestyle of ours. Like, the UK is not powered by coal, gas, oil and enriched uranium; no, it's powered by the crystalline tears of some sentient energy-being from a light-year away space, something that Reggie Fessenden tempted down with his broadcast in 1906 (remember Tunguska? that was touchdown, two years later), and we keep it good and miserable by using a brutal range of really harsh EM waves to torture it night and day, from machines which are (somewhat ironically) powered by its tears. And now these madmen (are they right? are they wrong? it's ambiguous!) are going to set it free to wreak its terrible electric revenge on us. But you know what? First thing it's going to do is go to America, to find its children, which the British sold to the Americans back in 1942 in exchange for a bit of a hand with the whole 'Third Reich' thing. Pearl Harbour? It wasn't the Japanese; no, their fledgling Empire was just on the wrong planet at the wrong time. The incident at Pearl Harbour was all down to the energy-being's child, tired of being all cooped up in the hold of a little ship called the Philadelphia, trying to escape and taking half the US fleet with it. Until they defrosted Edison and brought him in to sort shit out with his hulking electric mecha. There's a theory that one Nicholai Tesla, a little-known engineer on the Philadelphia, might have had something to do with the creature's release from the EM containment field; they say he took pity on the thing after listening to its pitiful pleas through his radio set, and attacked the field generator with an axe, at the same time becoming the angry young E-being's first victim.

There's no such thing as nuclear power, no sir; everything they taught you, for three generations now, is a lie. Nuclear bombs are made of concentrated E-being shit. Fast forward to the current day; Iran are trying to get a 'nuclear reactor' working. But they can't be allowed to build it -- not because they'd represent some terrible new danger in the world, but because they'd discover that their stolen Russian reactor designs didn't work.

And then the shit would really hit Tehran.

HA!

Really hit Tehran!

Anyway, yeah, that was the first thought.

How Many Things Can You Do With The Head Of The Tunnock's Tea Cakes Boy This Christmas

Well, at least two.


He can be a little salesman, with shirt, tie, and pinstripe trousers. If you ask me, it's his first job, and he's trying hard to impress.


Or he can be a fierce samurai warrior, with razor-edged katana and a fixed, murderous stare that says I will chop you to pieces before you can think up a clever thing to say about my huge child-like head.

There were other things, of course.

Terrible things.

Headbrain Hurt, Dire Agony, Want Sleep

If I sit still enough in my seat, I get a feeling like I'm not really here, like I'm hovering about half an inch above myself. But I know that's not true: it's just some old survival mechanism, some small kindness of biology, keeping me distanced from the pain that is my entire physical being.

Please go and read this. Same idea applies. Work night out; every type of shot under the sun; an excess of beers, of three kinds throughout the night as the madness took me; bit hard to wake up this morning. Drank three pints of water--each pint was immediately absorbed and offered absolutely no comfort. I've force-fed myself a banana. Apparently they have healing properties. Worth a try.

Jesus.

Your Nightmare For This Evening

Now, I'm not a religious man. But now and then I read something that makes me whisper oh, holy Jesus with genuine reverence--my sense of reason falls away, stunned, and for just a moment, I share in the dearest hope of professional holyfolk and chain-smoking pensioners everywhere--that everybody's favourite Israeli Superman really is out there somewhere, looking out for us.

Because there are terrible things in this world.

LIKE MOTHS THAT DRINK THE TEARS OF SLEEPING BIRDS WITH THEIR HARPOON-LIKE TONGUES.

If there is a creator-God, posessor of the awesome and incomprehensible mind within which all things reside, then somebody needs to go have a bit of a chat with him about, you know, things like this. Because that's just not right.

Two Fingers To The Yuppie Christmas Experience

Christmas is about two things that begin with g: glitter and good-eatin'.

I'll start by addressing the first point: glitter. There will be none of your abstract black-and-white sillhouettes of fir trees in my house this Christmas, let me tell you.

I've found some things in the pound shop that I didn't think they made anymore. Ah, the joy that filled my heart, after having just spent days trudging around the big stores looking grimly at aisle after aisle of hideous phallic tree-things made of blood-red feathers, and pink -- yeah, that's pink -- trees, buckets of special rhodium-coated baubles (because you wouldn't want any colour polluting your perfect Christmas scheme, would you?) or at the other extreme, chameleon-coloured fibreoptic nightmares that look like they would consume your frontal lobes as soon as look at you.

This year we're gonna party like it's 1989. I have glittery danglers, long thought extinct, but coming back from the brink in a new wave of backlash against the bullshit.


That's my bedroom ceiling. Oh yes; it goes everywhere. And what else; oh yes! The little tree that could. We've no room for a big tree in our living room (that is, the room we actually live in, as opposed to the spacious 'back room' where we don't). So we got this.


The lights might be a bit big for it. But that's part of the little fella's charm. If you say anything bad about it, Demon Robot Drinking-Glass Santa will get you. Who is Demon Robot Drinking-Glass Santa, you ask? Well...


It was about a year ago now; I bought a pack of six glasses for the princely sum of eighty-nine pence; it wasn't until this year, when I unpacked them with the rest of the Christmas paraphernalia, that I noticed that Santa had blood-red eyes and fixed, murderous limbs that spoke of some deep and heinous malfunction in his crazed robot brain.

Which brings us neatly to good-eatin'. You may remember last year I promised (but never did actually provide, if I remember correctly) a recipe for Reindeer Balls, my super-special post-Christmas treat, made of leftover stuffing and blended-up bits of dry fridgemeat, compacted, and fried. Essentially, that's the recipe, right there, in that sentence. Anyway, as is the way with all my best culinary ideas, some mad-eyed bint by the name of Bessie has gone and put Reindeer Balls into production, under a marginally more marketable name.


You can imagine my shock when I saw these in Tescos. You can imagine the puzzled looks on the faces of the other shoppers as I pointed, shouted, and took out my phone to snap a picture of the offending sack of shite.

I mean, hell, she can have 'em. Go on. If they bring happiness to folk at Christmas, then so be it. We'll call it my super-secret Christmas gift to the world. But...this makes it look, to my valued readers at least, like I didn't invent these for myself. This leaves me open to all sorts of ridicule.

And so, Bessie, for that thoughtless slight, it's war.

Flickr Fiction -- The Dark Before Dawn

Hey folks. I've been invited by Donal to join his Flickr Fiction group; so I thought, okay, sounds like a bit of fun, as well as something to keep me working on something at all times. The idea is straightforward enough; every week, somebody chooses a picture from Flickr, and everybody has to come up with something. 'Sposed to be for Friday but, you know me. Busybusybusy. It doesn't help that we have clean the house from top to bottom this weekend. Anyway, on with the show.

Okay, so it's not finished, but you'll find the story to go with this here. I've been drafted into the Pre-Christmas House Cleaning Service today, so I've had to write this in short bursts between ironing the bloody curtains and dusting the windows and doing things like that.

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This weeks Flickr fiction was brought to you using this picture taken by Flickr user Madeira. Other participants this week are Elimare, Teaandcakes, Tadamack, Aquafortis and Donal.

Shocker

Look at this! They recorded it there on Wednesday. NewScientist article here. Imagine the sort of energy it must have taken. That's all. No further comment. Just interesting, I thought.

I'm off now for four whole days. This is going to be good. It's The Girl's birthday, so I have to think something up, probably soon. Probably tomorrow.

Not Dead, Only Sleeping

I know I haven't updated in over a week.

This is due to a number of things: (i) I bought Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus, which I had to complete (ii) I've been doing a bit of reading, (iii) my mind is a creative desert this week and (iv) I'm knackered. These points may be related.

I've been having some crazed dreams which may be of interest; I'll tell you about 'em later.

For now -- Neil out.