have you ever stood outside a room and listened to the people inside it bitching about you?
temporal_tech, 243 words.
It is the biggest weapons haul Harris has ever seen. There are crates as far as he can see, crates stacked on crates behind crates holding guns, mines, and grenades. Sitting on the bonnet of a brand new jeep in the umpteenth of the hangars he fiddles with Lydia's iPhone and tries to make the calculator come up so that he can work out exactly how many tonnes of instruments of death they are now in possession of, and how many hired hands they'll need to move them, never mind use them.
Maybe NATO have seized bigger, but they're not a governmental organisation, they're a "security company". On the tax forms, at least. Not even a very large security company. A security company consisting of five people, one of whom is underage.
Harris watches the underage member of the security company as her scrawny shoulders bulge and strain, and she brings the stock of a sniper rifle down onto the face of the already-unconscious and bleeding guide. He winces.
"Have you finished fucking up my phone yet?" Lydia calls, smacking the stock down a few more times, grunting breaths between each blow. "You can't get proper signal out here, I checked when I was trying to upload that photo -"
Harris leaves the phone on the jeep, sliding onto the floor. He will just catch his breath outside, he thinks, and wait until Lydia has finished mutilating people before he does any calculations.
The Whiteboard House
It begins with mishearings;
a slipped vowel here, a crooked
consonant there; the incontinent drift
of sound from meaning as words
begin leaning from what was said
and became, in the whorls of the
baffled mind, misread. Misleading
utterance gives way to utter invention,
from things divorced from intention
to entire imaginings; you said nothing
but that's not what I heard.
Each morning, every minute, a
mystery tongue speaks the half-
decipherable to me and to no one
else; by myself when instructions com
and while I'm half-listening nothing
gets done. Some conversation to which
I'm not invited and my lips bite back
replies because you can't hear, only
me. Just I.
When I dine on batteries it's no longer
a surprise; the poison came in a
subtle disguise of television
voices and poster faces, teaching me
from sequestered places about the
attempts the world was making on my life;
when I took up the knife
there was no pain, I was relieved; I'll
not be taken in again, I shall not
be deceived.
I am too buggered to think properly any more but there were a couple of things that came up which I should talk about and one is my utter loathing of the words "future [X]". There are circumstances under which I don't mind them, like when someone is being self-consciously hyperbolic about a celebrity crush - "the future Mr Des Anges" - or something which is inevitable - "the future corpse, Delilah" - but on the whole I kind of prefer it if people don't go the short-hand route but actually said "I hope/plan to be [X]". There are a number of reasons - one is possibly a slightly superstitious feeling that you're tempting fate with your cast-iron certainty which also gets marked down on the chart of my irritations as "arrogance". Don't be so sure, buddy, you're not an anything until you're *there*. With nebulous "there" definitions like "writer" and "comedian" you can, pretty much, abandon the "future" part of the construction as soon as you start writing/performing. You don't have to be making a living from it to define yourself that way if you don't want to wait that long; you ARE writing, you ARE performing, call yourself a writer or a performer. Lose the "future" part, because in those circumstances rather than arrogant it just sounds fucking coy. Aside from the arrogant-presumptuous/coy dichotomy depending on your circumstances, the other objection I have to it - and one which brought it up in the first place - is that it reeks of hippy bullshit.
First let us not forget that there's a lot of hippy bullshit I'm perfectly at ease with. I'm down with marijuana, awful clothing, bicycles, recycling, reduced carbon emissions, alternative energy, lentils, hemp, the fact that your house smells like fart, bartering systems, Woodcraft Folk, and all that jazz, and your persistent appropriation of other people's cultural signifiers are for more angry middle-class white academics to piss themselves off about even if having some earnest white dude in is 60s eagerly telling me to read "Mutant Message Down Under" with a kind of wide-eyed evangelism makes me deeply uncomfortable in my spleen and twitchy around the eyes.
But positive thinking BS and anything which leads down the road of manifests or fucking hope=actuality or You Can Change The Univers By Thinking Real Hard sets me off into the kind of frothing rage I've seen in ex-Catholics when asked about, y'know, horrible Catholic stuff. It doesn't matter how you think as long as you go for the shit you want anyway, but gambolling around in public squawking "I AM A FUTURE PRESIDENT" stops being adorable or excuseable when you are about six, maybe seven. After that it becomes gross, coy, self-congratulatory hippy cuntsludge and it makes me want to curl up in a ball and bite my own tits until the murderous feelings go away.
So, anyone have brainworms? I have brainworms. Brainworms are these things people say to you once, maybe a few thousand times, but then they loop around in your head forever and determine how you automatically respond to things.
Like if you have a brainworm of "you smell bad", even if you smell utterly delicious you will be constantly worried and trying to shield people from your stench. You will assume that when someone comments on your perfume they are making a snide reference to how badly you stink, and that any remark pertaining to smell or an expression of disgust that might be linked to an olfactory experience is about you, a sideways, passive-aggressive you smell bad.
One of my friends got a brainworm about her sexuality. A nasty, insideous beast that only needed a couple of repetitions at key moments to become a proper fucking parasite on her thoughts. It's one whose reaffirmation might count as a compliment to some minds, too ("But you don't look like a lesbian!"), so it's likely to come back.
I have several brainworms, some of which I suspect I share with a lot of people; "you are too weird and no one wants to talk to you because of it" is one which I know is as common as rain. There's one which gets a lot of reaffirmation from people in a lot of forms and which has shaped quite a lot of my development, which is "everyone is scared of you".
It used to be used as an explanation for why I should be locked up/shunned/not have any friends/had been excluded from some activity/class/why people had not brought up before their overwhelming hatred of me and why the "everyone" who "doesn't want you here" had never asked me to gtfo before. People now give it a different gloss: "I have never spoken to you because I find you intimidating" may well mean just that to the people saying it, but it merely translates into the shite of the brainworm; everyone's scared of you. go away. you are spoiling everything.
It is the biggest weapons haul Harris has ever seen. There are crates as far as he can see, crates stacked on crates behind crates holding guns, mines, and grenades. Sitting on the bonnet of a brand new jeep in the umpteenth of the hangars he fiddles with Lydia's iPhone and tries to make the calculator come up so that he can work out exactly how many tonnes of instruments of death they are now in possession of, and how many hired hands they'll need to move them, never mind use them.
Maybe NATO have seized bigger, but they're not a governmental organisation, they're a "security company". On the tax forms, at least. Not even a very large security company. A security company consisting of five people, one of whom is underage.
Harris watches the underage member of the security company as her scrawny shoulders bulge and strain, and she brings the stock of a sniper rifle down onto the face of the already-unconscious and bleeding guide. He winces.
"Have you finished fucking up my phone yet?" Lydia calls, smacking the stock down a few more times, grunting breaths between each blow. "You can't get proper signal out here, I checked when I was trying to upload that photo -"
Harris leaves the phone on the jeep, sliding onto the floor. He will just catch his breath outside, he thinks, and wait until Lydia has finished mutilating people before he does any calculations.
The Whiteboard House
It begins with mishearings;
a slipped vowel here, a crooked
consonant there; the incontinent drift
of sound from meaning as words
begin leaning from what was said
and became, in the whorls of the
baffled mind, misread. Misleading
utterance gives way to utter invention,
from things divorced from intention
to entire imaginings; you said nothing
but that's not what I heard.
Each morning, every minute, a
mystery tongue speaks the half-
decipherable to me and to no one
else; by myself when instructions com
and while I'm half-listening nothing
gets done. Some conversation to which
I'm not invited and my lips bite back
replies because you can't hear, only
me. Just I.
When I dine on batteries it's no longer
a surprise; the poison came in a
subtle disguise of television
voices and poster faces, teaching me
from sequestered places about the
attempts the world was making on my life;
when I took up the knife
there was no pain, I was relieved; I'll
not be taken in again, I shall not
be deceived.
I am too buggered to think properly any more but there were a couple of things that came up which I should talk about and one is my utter loathing of the words "future [X]". There are circumstances under which I don't mind them, like when someone is being self-consciously hyperbolic about a celebrity crush - "the future Mr Des Anges" - or something which is inevitable - "the future corpse, Delilah" - but on the whole I kind of prefer it if people don't go the short-hand route but actually said "I hope/plan to be [X]". There are a number of reasons - one is possibly a slightly superstitious feeling that you're tempting fate with your cast-iron certainty which also gets marked down on the chart of my irritations as "arrogance". Don't be so sure, buddy, you're not an anything until you're *there*. With nebulous "there" definitions like "writer" and "comedian" you can, pretty much, abandon the "future" part of the construction as soon as you start writing/performing. You don't have to be making a living from it to define yourself that way if you don't want to wait that long; you ARE writing, you ARE performing, call yourself a writer or a performer. Lose the "future" part, because in those circumstances rather than arrogant it just sounds fucking coy. Aside from the arrogant-presumptuous/coy dichotomy depending on your circumstances, the other objection I have to it - and one which brought it up in the first place - is that it reeks of hippy bullshit.
First let us not forget that there's a lot of hippy bullshit I'm perfectly at ease with. I'm down with marijuana, awful clothing, bicycles, recycling, reduced carbon emissions, alternative energy, lentils, hemp, the fact that your house smells like fart, bartering systems, Woodcraft Folk, and all that jazz, and your persistent appropriation of other people's cultural signifiers are for more angry middle-class white academics to piss themselves off about even if having some earnest white dude in is 60s eagerly telling me to read "Mutant Message Down Under" with a kind of wide-eyed evangelism makes me deeply uncomfortable in my spleen and twitchy around the eyes.
But positive thinking BS and anything which leads down the road of manifests or fucking hope=actuality or You Can Change The Univers By Thinking Real Hard sets me off into the kind of frothing rage I've seen in ex-Catholics when asked about, y'know, horrible Catholic stuff. It doesn't matter how you think as long as you go for the shit you want anyway, but gambolling around in public squawking "I AM A FUTURE PRESIDENT" stops being adorable or excuseable when you are about six, maybe seven. After that it becomes gross, coy, self-congratulatory hippy cuntsludge and it makes me want to curl up in a ball and bite my own tits until the murderous feelings go away.
So, anyone have brainworms? I have brainworms. Brainworms are these things people say to you once, maybe a few thousand times, but then they loop around in your head forever and determine how you automatically respond to things.
Like if you have a brainworm of "you smell bad", even if you smell utterly delicious you will be constantly worried and trying to shield people from your stench. You will assume that when someone comments on your perfume they are making a snide reference to how badly you stink, and that any remark pertaining to smell or an expression of disgust that might be linked to an olfactory experience is about you, a sideways, passive-aggressive you smell bad.
One of my friends got a brainworm about her sexuality. A nasty, insideous beast that only needed a couple of repetitions at key moments to become a proper fucking parasite on her thoughts. It's one whose reaffirmation might count as a compliment to some minds, too ("But you don't look like a lesbian!"), so it's likely to come back.
I have several brainworms, some of which I suspect I share with a lot of people; "you are too weird and no one wants to talk to you because of it" is one which I know is as common as rain. There's one which gets a lot of reaffirmation from people in a lot of forms and which has shaped quite a lot of my development, which is "everyone is scared of you".
It used to be used as an explanation for why I should be locked up/shunned/not have any friends/had been excluded from some activity/class/why people had not brought up before their overwhelming hatred of me and why the "everyone" who "doesn't want you here" had never asked me to gtfo before. People now give it a different gloss: "I have never spoken to you because I find you intimidating" may well mean just that to the people saying it, but it merely translates into the shite of the brainworm; everyone's scared of you. go away. you are spoiling everything.