…Listen
…sometimes
…all the time I gotta always be up—I’m working’ the kitchens all day and hittin’ grosvenor all night and there’s no time to sleep—bubs keeps me there…level. Got it, got it, you fucking justified yourself to yourself but not to me so don’t feel better mate cos’ I don’t validate nothin’ of yours you fuck up, you mess ‘ead. But, but…you don’t understand what it’s like. Oh but I more or less do cos this is self-justification by consultation with another and I refuse to approve. My life’s hard, harder than yours, harder than most. I highly doubt that. Doubt what you want mate. Watch your hand and pay attention to the game. You should pay attention to the game of life. Hold on, hold on…I’m gonna…have ‘nother line…hold on. God it’s dark, dark, don’t you forget how dark the countryside is? And still there’s a glow somewhere from the new housing estates. They sold all this for houses mate, all of it. For me…alright fuck give me a line, but I’m no mess-head like you…for me I think that’s the future of this place, just houses as far as the eye can see, people like the greenbelt I get it, but your house is not a fucking investment, ‘s not a commodity like zinc or software but a place to lay thy weary head…ok…build build build, fuck the nimbys I hope we build over their very graves. Final solution for nimbyism when? Dark mate. Countryside is always dark, hidden lives playing out in the long flat dark…
—NO….well what else is there after the boundaries of the fields and the valley ever flat to the river and the other way green all the way to city where more and more houses appear each day there’s nothing there so why should I leave instead I better just stack and stack and not ask anymore questions cos most of what I do is out of work right? I mean, I just can’t stand it when they ask the question: what do you do? At like parties or whatever, ahh nothing it’s boring right, well it’s… I just stack at Tesco and I’m nearly thirty and I’ve never…forget it. Still—I took her on what was more or less a date and we made out in the car and she touched me and used her mouth then shut me down saying she didn’t want..the bitch I…no no no. So it’s dead and apparently there’s a certain code for gypsy attack if you can even believe that, but I’ve never heard it, though the travellers have come down from the field and raided this place, taking whatever they could manage form the warehouse. Stack the bread, stack the bread, stack your life away without even getting your end away. And moving out…the bare essential for gettin’ anything—impossible, say how’s that even wen they buildin’ so much, ’s a stacked deck the whole game. There in the wild edge of things, God, God I’m boring, they say life is short and you should make the most of it, but actually it’s so fucking boring and still I want to die…hmmm…seventy percent of the time…
—Wind turbines…all along the coastline fucking wind turbines, ‘sss alll I see these days. And I listened to him, talking and talking about wind turbines, looking at the huge graffiti monkey grabbing a wad of cash which seemed to have appeared overnight on the horrid 70s parking blocks and thinking of getting off. Turbines, part of the GREEN INITIATIVE; but actually it’s corruption innit carbon offsetting—moving one thing from one place to another and shitting over my view and the value of my house. Well…nimbyism extends to the ocean blue apparently, this guy’s pissed at turbines in the sea, what is he appealing the planning permission to fucking Poseidon or something or somesuch? Well kid, then the erosion and subsidence and the council say it’s not worth saving, I paid my tax, I paid in and I demand a payout. Cept that society isn’t a fucking investment scheme, though at times it does have pyramidal structure I guess. For ain’t that just a generation, I won’t say which, it rhymes with tumour (apt: see Goya’s Saturn devouring his son for an accurate depiction of their impact on every generation after) for in all the optimism and liberalism and hippyism(??) that flowed from their souls, their hearts were that of bureaucrats and bean-counters, they have paid into the Ponzi scheme and demand their payoff…Saturn devours his son. Okay, okay but we gotta generate power don’t we, I mean we’re not gonna pull this planning, nuffin’ to do with the commission anyway. Well, see…can’t they generate it elsewhere? What about solar, more nuclear or just build the bloody things where they aren’t an eyesore. Funny mate isn’t it, funny, that it’s never an eyesore if it’s by the homes of the poor. You’re so fuckin’ fired kiddo…get me the manager now! No, I’m actually not obliged to do that. Then…son…pass me on to somehow HIGHER who can deal with IT…deal with it…I pay my tax and fucking demand that it’s dealt with…what’s your name…where do you live, get me someone higher! Higher, the highest on high. Oh i’ll pass you onto the lord sure…but that won’t be where you’ll go…Dante ready a new Canto in book one sir…
—Corruption—Corr-up-tion, is one corrupt, am I corrupt? For my function is naught but to move information from point A to point B without loss or interception, aye I’m but a proverbial cog in a machine…my best beloved: heed this, I have been intercepted and have sold said information for monetary gain…my dearest and most loved one. Soon I must slip unto the night, as the function in the algorithm I am…for my dearest angel…my best beloved…the time for deletion is soon. Dearest heart, husband of mine, what silly nonsense have you gotten yourself into now, is this one of your delusions, are you sick again? Or are you toying with me only to leap upon me with surprise romance as we flee, dear sweet man if this is the beginning of some romantic adventure I advise you of my reaction last time, I shall not be swept off my feet mister, instead I shall be very cross indeed…No sweetness, all of this is of the most blazing reality, for years we have chased targets and cut corners, I’ve strived to be a moral man, but when the opportunity came I lapped it up with relish…I was to leave it on the train like a f—iddling spy, upon an empty seat where they’d come, whoever THEY are, men in dark suits I do imagine I do my best beloved. For my dearest you know that I am naught but a conserver of information [ohhh did my thoughts speed by as the level country passing the window] for I may have peaked and it revealed itself to be some mechanism from those on high, some legal course of action about planning permission. You dear sweet paranoid thing, all your days on this great green earth, you have imagined forces to be working against you, perhaps catalysed by all the wacky tobaccy you smokered as a kiddie, but if this time this is true then you are a fool indeed and I do not see a course of action where you emerge unscathed or even emerge as the same person, though much and much that is the same for any event or occurrence in the flickering shadow show of life…
…So it’s like this, these days, it’s like this.
…Nothing much of us remains these days, these days
…Nothing much left but fragments
…Of which you find me (us) in
…So—we need to carve out meaning piece by piece every moment
…But there’s nothing wrong with
…Fragments…more meaning there
…Than holding onto old notions
…That we can even still tell a fucking
…story
—even in a lot ways I wonder how a literature of reality; by which critics actually mean a literature of people talking in rooms can still exist and mostly cos people don’t talk in rooms anymore so if you base a novel on characters moving and talking then burn that book hitler style cos people don’t do neither anymore. But there’s something to be said of lived experience isn’t there…isn’t there of women and people who aren’t white and like queer or whatever isn’t there? There’s something to be said of representing life I think, but through he did this and said this and she did this and said that, I think not, cos’ dats the worst thing literature can be…boring. Mabbie, but that’s inherently female don’t you think? Trying to represent a lived experience, ’s why chicks write so much of that kind of stuff, so we get the artificial separation between chick lit and stuff people deem to be too introspective and masculine, so what masculine is…is ideas led and introspective and chick lit is talking in rooms… is that right? Fuck- you’re such an obtuse dick, I mean, maybe there’s something to be said of fucking talking to each other and dealing with our problems like humans instead of moping internally, so take me to fucking lit-prison if that makes me feminine…shit…don’t you think the divide between men and women’s literature is just…in one people solve problems by talking and in the other they just think about it and solve nothing, mope around fumbling with grand ideas, overtly concerned with a place in history, but never resolving the major fucking problem which men can never solve; how to fucking COMMUNICATE and solve problems human being to human being. Well…you’re probably right, you’re probably right as always. So like—this whole idea of a novel of ideas, you know big-fat-dick-size postmodern tomes—not the size of yours mate—is a whole literature of know-it-all blokes, who don’t know nothin’ just milling over ideas in their heads, Joyce isn’t clever he just knew a lot! Back up now girl…don’t be raggin’ on my James now. Matey boy, I’m not raggin’ on him just sayin’ he’s not all that. No one’s all that. I mean ya know, just shows he knows all this stuff, who’s impressed, not me. Lot of academics impressed that’s what. Yah. Yah, yah—here’s the wind of tradition and the stopping break of innovation; for what’s wrong with novels that are about connections between ideas and not character; for what’s character anyway—aren’t we all the same?….
—SO I have this recurring dream right? Right, tap, tap. Are you listening, do you care? What am I your shrink? Do you expect me to cure you of insanity. No I just expect you to listen, tap, tap: enter the new address on the system: tap, tap whole lot of them and the light is low at this basement level of the council. Then listen I will girl, tell me your dream(s) tap, tap: removing the old acres of farmland: tap, tap, unless the dream is you getting dicked by Charlie. Sigh…that is my real dream. Knew it. But here’s the one that’s been bugging me, so I have this recurring dream right: in the dream I’m some nameless, amorphous, genderless creature trapped in a grid or maze or even an electronic circuit, but I’m pretty sure it’s a grid of some kind and I’m either entirely two dimensional, or microscopic so I’m some kind of flatliner or bacteria, wandering mindlessly for my whole life around some clinical grid and I feel the presence of an all seeing observer maybe human eyes from the higher world or a god or a superior intelligence and I know as I wander the cold grey maze as I navigate my life, that the whole of my existence has been some experiment or even a hobby to a greater creature of cold malevolence. Hmm…listen, I think maybe you should get yourself dicked by Charlie to be honest. There are others too and we wander the grid as wretched flatliners sucking up, maybe moisture, maybe electricity, maybe just fucking energy and looking, ever looking for a way out and an explanation of our condition, but in whatever passes for a heart in our feeble brainless forms we know the superior truth that no such way out exists and no such explanation exists….I think I’m having a panic attack…haha…haha…I’m having a panic attack that I’m just some two dimensional microbe in the experiment of some empathy-less god…I… god…I’ve been panicky as a little girl even, the slightest test of nerves, an exam, a cute boy talks to me, my blood flows, my heart rises, I sweat like the miller in Chaucer and my breathing hits a staccato rhythm and I talk in one word barks and never have I been able to breach such lame anxiety. Bwah…the grid dream is iconographic pathology for sure, don’t you see that you feel trapped or whatever babe… (panic, panic, panic, panic, panic, panic)
—Either way muted and subdued panic is the name of the game, the game being life. So we sit tight and hold our place like the uhh…like the counter culture of old but now, and block gates and access routes and private roads and fields and say no no to any building in what (was) an absolutely lovely little greenbelt town. Cats, dogs, husband, got the lot, check out my insta or facebook, though Zuka can suck my cunt I’m probs gonna delete… and they simply are going to have a reduction in quality of life if it all goes ahead, so I say no, hehe..civil disobedience is that it? Like Gandhi and Mandela, but uhh…you know…stopping houses being built near my garden, okay I take it back that makes me sounds like a pretentious bitch. But you are. I know I am. The art, the self published genre stuff. Twitter profile listed as author and blogger, but actually you just have enough money to not need a job. Hey not cos’ of my husband though I made that money! Yeah in accounting software, so stop giving off this free creative vibe, you just sold a product to major entities. Plus there’s plans in action, gotta contact in the commission who’s leaking, just in case this protest angle falters. Remember, way over there, past the forest where as kids we said the evergreen tree monster lived, there where as teenagers the flames licked the sky, there where you touched me for the first time and I realised how effin’ good it is to have someone else do it. The little lake, the woods, the meadows, all turned to shitty new builds for the ambition-less middle class and culture-less wogs and nogs…cmon fight with me. Fight, what? Population rise, globalism, the idea that you deserve to hold on to anything? Fight the world, fight everything, rise up in knight errantry and fight the failures of modernity, to turn to madness and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be! Yes fuck them, fuck them all, fuck a world ruled by only economic necessity, where tradition, heritage and community mean nothing forever and ever…
—Impressions Rousseauean and beamed from heaven, platonic faint shadows of deranged giants, there go I, flickering and half formed images of the to-be. Here on the cresting rise where already we phase the green way to Gloucester we can see new worlds forming the ever-estate of gormless autocrats, insurance workers and plumbers, filling all the great valley all the way between Bristol and Gloucester. Yes yes, we see it rise in the historical peripheral of the mind’s eye, falling to future app developers building nothing on the fundamentals and yes we select few see the faux-period constructions appear from the earth with the passing of the hours and the words of authority…watching the clock, which now is permanently marred on the mind, reft from their essential rhythms and lost in the endless low builds with no sense of a history at all…a final skipping stone cast to the void…—God, ’s me, and what was once the industrial estate is now daycare; a gin bar; a gym attached to some cult-like workout routine; a vegan cafe, a veritable alternate high street and the regular high street is dead; and they came when they were all built; all of them foreign; all of them richer and they bought the lot; became our new lords and masters; and here comes the rain and where the fuck should I live and where will I shelter for the night; we’ve no place to call our own. So somehow I think history ends here with the literal land generating income as in the time of serfs and peons where the Normans stood above rendering domesday in dominating towers of stone. Nothing ticks that does not prick; a good historian skims over peaceful times, as over stagnant water or a still sea, to return to seditions and wars, to which he knows we beckon him—fuck how true Montaigne—the gradual charge of peace can be shattering to the soul. God I’ve a vision or a premonition where… the society of the 21st century collapsed pretty easily I suppose, marked initially in severe decline of vocabulary—annihilation of the visual imagination; an apocalypse of the spirit, aye; generational normalisation of avarice and corporatism…they accepted all this as did the greeks the threads of fate—Atropos who wields her abhorred shears rules my days—and thus their world was subject to equally vengeful sallies of foul providence and how long ago? Did he not say in those Pynchonian rants that it all ended April 1784 when that infernal machination first wrenched the life force of long ceased monstrosities? Specu—Am I a nihilistic postmodernist or a New Ager in academic drag…
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the temples of his Gods?
-BABS
…So I picked up the keys and they said the door was open only to you (yep Kafka) and god here comes a storm, the storm to end the world, worst than any I’ve seen thundering upon the tropical surf. And I worked, also like him (yep Kafka) I stuck it out—cos it mostly kills you but the name of the game is sticking with such an unbearable situation until you have annihilated the rest. No no, my unseen angel upon my side; the time’s not now!…I don’t want to live but: you misunderstand me if you think it is altogether darkness I see…All mystery, all hope, all disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here, beyond those swinging doors—’s in him I see myself and through those words I can give clarity to my shame, though we are such a wretched and terrible creature are we not? Still we are marked with the insignia of hope in our perpetual overcoming of ourselves. Such was his intention in the emergence from inferno through purgatory to paradise—see there is the ultimate purpose-redemption, not in a religious way of course but to redeem the horror from the place of residence—The FUCKING SOUL—The FUCK-Here’s my day of the dead-sept’ I don’t have a vice like drink or drugs-just the worst fate of being thrown into a body I despise with the wrong junk and the wrong FUCKING everything. I’ve no excuse ‘sept useless nihilism —God. Here’s the door only open to me, and no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to me. I’m going now to close it. Bye…