NAKED OPENING LINE (# 74,952)
This post has been written in stages of getting dressed.
With each sentence I have put on an item of clothing.
One sock off makes me lean to side of the sock that’s on.
I’m not sure why I’m doing this until I turn round to see Constance, a work of art by my best friend.
In this performance piece she undresses and dresses while a drummer drums.
I thank you Jonathan Ellery for inspiring me this morning.
Even if you’re still asleep.
If this is to become a novel, I will be wearing around 20,000 items of clothing by the time I’m done.
Or dead.
Through suffocation.
REVERSE WRITING (# 74,953)
Write the title last. We may be onto something here. Many films and books fail in the predictability of their ending. You smell it coming. If they were written back to front, scene by scene, screenplay writers and novelists could avoid letting their audience down. People could die in more imaginative ways. Consequences could lead to less obvious actions. Effect could finally drive the car with Cause in the back. The result might be a wonderful dislocation of logic, surprising the viewer/reader far more frequently than the traditional method. Now, where did I put that epilogue?
MADE IN TRUTH
I have just drunk from a glass, an Ikea glass. On its base, it says MADE IN RUSSIA. That makes a sweet change. Not China. Or Portugal. Or Indonesia. Or even England. Then it occurred to me that the provenance of manufacturing is too linear. MADE IN HELL would be a more honest admission of a product that cannot be recycled, or a product that was simply a bitch to make. MADE IN DEBT would pass the Trades Description Act for a failing company, or help to get struggling people back in the black. MADE IN LOVE feels too familiar and is a bona fide lie. MADE IN TRANSIT fits honey. MADE IN AWE also fits honey, although if bees had their way, they’d frank their produce with MADE IN PERPETUITY. And if you don’t know why, watch Bee Movie.
THE END OF TIME ZONES
I’ve just woken up. My fingers can barely see, let alone hit the right keys. I feel like a hamster fresh out of hibernation. Ahhh, there, that’s it, the cure to the world’s energy crisis. We all need to ration our waking hours over a year. I propose we 9 billion humans hibernate for a few months a year on a rota basis, waking fresh to take on the baton of keeping the world spinning. It will work. A city gull just cried. Only when a gull cries far inland do you know you’re onto something.
While we’re at it, we may as well abandon time zones and celebrate the oddity of sleeping in dark daylight. No gull cry there. Titles are a misnomer anyway. When did last listen to a song because of the title?
FLY IN HOB NAIL BOOTS (# 74,954)
There is a fly over there, on the edge of the bread board hoovering crumbs.
He’s got a nerve.
I say he, he could be a she.
S/he is now on my page.
S/he moves to the gentle vibrations of the hard drive as if s/he is being held captive at a Lilliputian S&M chamber.
If s/he were to wear boots, heavy boots, hob nail boots, i wonder what s/he might type?
I P U K E Y O U perhaps?
Or maybe J E F F G O L B L U M S T O L E M Y L I F E S T O R Y?
S/he now sits on my hand, rubbing her freshly soiled six legs over my knuckles.
Sorry, it’s doing nothing for me.
It’s October – isn’t it time s/he died?
Anyone know an old lady with a good appetite?
JOG ME (# 74,955)
If you attempt to commit to paper what is on your mind while you are on a train on Cornish rail tracks, the words and their clarity will be thrown wildly, they will be derailed, as if someone has jogged you. Except this disruption is spontaneous and beautiful in a way a schoolchild’s elbow isn’t.
Looking now at my notes I can barely decipher what I felt, such is the scrawl of the pencil. Crossing the Brunel bridge, the interference shifts from horizontal to vertical. The ground below has gone, the train is airborne, 80 feet above the high water mark of the River Tamar. Despite no increase in overall height on the train, the world’s mildest case of altitude sickness is now knocking at my aerobic door.
GOING UP AT THE END OF A SENTENCE
Is annoying, false, sad and smacks of desperation. Not every line has to be interesting, as faithful readers of thisness know only too well. Not everything is a question, is it? If you can sustain that level of revelation with good cause, you should not be reading this but running an impoverished state or eradicating bigotry.
This urge-to-like-me affectation is not an age thing, mature adults do it too. Well, on behalf of people who listen without trying to sound too interested, please stop doing this, it’s worse than interrupting. If you want to make what you say interesting, don’t use intonation, just be interesting. Or, study the Birmingham accent.
A TOAST TO HALF EMPTY
They called him Mary, such was his contrariness for contrary sake. But today, this day, he was on to something. Something true, something that made the consensus sit up, turn round and walk the other way. His thought was this:
The tide half empty is a glass of hope.
He was the first. Others followed. He knew how to fend off global warming and tested his method twice a day in a one on one with the sea. Remarkably, the sea acquiesced. Meteorological peace broke out. Sea level agreed to relax its monopoly on land and from there on in, they shared the role using the double entry bookkeeping technique.
Tune in for the next episode – the woman who re-calibrated time.
BIG TREES CLOSE TO WATER
This is as close to porn as nature gets.
LONG HAND BREATH (# 74,956)
The hand has a rhythm, a flow, a skate on ice with natural breaths as it leaps from the page between words and the dotting of i’s. This conducts our lungs to go along with the show. The minute the pencil/pen gives way to the keypad, this natural tempo suffocates into an asthmatic wheeze which is then forced to play second fiddle to the typing, whatever the age, sex or posture of the typist, whatever the typing tool. If you are reading this on Ventalin, (long pause), you are lord of your own inhalations.