The Plague Man that I am

I can't remember when it started, this increasing set of blotches, scales and scabs advancing up my right ankle. I think once upon a time it was some harmless but distinctive dark splotches about ten years ago. Day followed day followed day, and soon, the area began to itch, a firey insistence to dig jagged nails into the flesh and scratch.

The satisfaction lasted barely seconds before that burning came back. I don't know what the cause was, for once, I never thought it was due to infection by scabies, parasites, noro-viruses seeking to reach my intestine through my skin. I knew it was excema or psoriasis or both, but a form so painful perhaps it had afflicted me from the stars, a passing Andromeda Strain as envisaged by Fred Hoyle, freeze dried alien contaminant blown in, on the space breezes, lodging itself into my bones.

It spread up, over the lumpy bone both up and down, onto foot and calf. It bled raw, no matter how much cream, oil, or coal tar found its way onto it, just like my hands, my horror gouged out hands only not just in winter.

Parts of it turned purple. Parts of it turned green, the unttractive green of the mould you find on bread after a few too many days in a hot sun in a sweating bag. Sometimes it would be hard to move the ankle, the scales of flesh were so dry and thick. In better periods, like now, it merely looks inflamed, witth the occasional eruption where it has bled.

This alien plague, et-excema, extra-excema, can only be controlled by steroids, cortisone, betnovate, the war zone moves up and down the botom of the limb like General Haig's front line in World War 1. But take the steroids away and the alien skin toxin is back in a weeping flash.

It is not just in my head that my body is at war.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 30.04.12

Tsar Bomba – How I Met Kuzkina Mat

I was a writer. I was a dissident. A refusenik. An uncooperative.

They sent me away to the East, to mosquito tormented summers, and freezing winters, and there I became a killer as well. I came back from a day's forced labour to find a guard trying to sodmise my friend in our barracks. I stove in the back of his head with a shovel so hard his brains came out of his mouth.

After I was beaten nearly to death in a punishment cell, it took some time for the authorities to debate whether I was to be executed or not. While the maggots set too in my wounds, ironically saving my life as the ate out infected flesh that I had no hot tea spoon to cautheterise, a train was summoned to take me North. No such line was supposed to exist here. No matter, it did.

Further North, all the trees disappeared and the ground was hard permaforst. I was thrown down onto this concrete grass, and rifle butted onto a boat of low quality, yet full of important looking officials. They removed my shirt, at fingertips to avoid any lice. They then took readings, ran a strange clicking instrument on me, then attached monitors to my chest and head. They never looked in my eyes, with their red starred caps and epaulettes.

We soon arrived at an island, an island filling the horizon, and rising a fair way above it, but devoid of no other features at all. We got closer. It had no trees. No life. Black ground and vulcanised glass for some reason unknown to me.

Then the guard said the only two words that were spoken to me all journey.

“Novyaa Zemlya.”

It was done with a humourless smile.

I was ungracefully clubbed onto a makeshift jetty, and shivering cold struck me as hard as the rifle butts. A vehicle awaited, again unmarked, and drove uphill onto the frozen plateau of the island that a low sun taunted with hollow warmth. After an hour of an ever unchanging scene, a low tower came into view, and beside it a metal pole. Humiliatingly, a metal chain was attached to my neck, and I was led from the vehicle to the pole, where the chain was affixed. Another humourless guard looked me at last in the eye, and spoke as he lit a cigarette then spat on the ground.

“Kuzkina Mat.” - “Now you will meet Mat's mother.”

Whatever could this mean?

A scientist checked me over one last time, and then all got back into the vehicle which then drove back the way it came, emitting harsh sounds and thick pollutants.

Hours passed, the sun circled a horizon it would never set beneath at these latitudes this tim of year. Why I didn't pass from exposure I don't know, the extra coat they gave me was not up to the task. My breath sank to the ground crystallised.

An aeroplane was overhead. I hadn't heard it in the wind shrieking across the barren uplands. From its pregnant belly something dropped, something huge and black, floating gently earthwards on a parachute of mothly silk. It came closer, slow as a first kiss. And then, it became as a second sun.

The world went white, like an endless photographic flash. I was frozen, and I was hotter than could be imagined. The earth shook shortly afterwards, I saw it ripple like waves in the sea I swear, in negative. The air blew itself away, there was nothing to breathe.

And yet I was still alive.

Now flames came, flames of a rich orange beauty I had never seen before. Down they came from the sky, nearer and nearer, yet not nearer. They only got so close.

In the distance, low wood and concrete structures slowly, and then slower, collapsed like a tower of cards made by a sickly child. The blast came lower and lower, but it never reached me. I could all but touch it, taste it. My shadow was burnt away, but I was unaffected.

The buildings stopped collapsing, and just hung there, wreckage suspended in nothing but time. The flames did the same...they came to touching distance and stopped.

Far away, the sea was a lake of lava. Steam arose, things were still happening far away, but here, on this wasteland, all had come to a stop. A seagull was devoid of motion, half incinerated.

And that is how it has remained ever since. Whatever time means now. I have written this tale on the ground, etched in the frost with a stick, that only a sharp eyed god might see. For you to read this, you must be one of the Valhalans, and I salute you Sir.

As you should salute me. For how many have survived the strike of Thor's Hammer?

Kuzkina Mat.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25.04.14

2010 – The Year We Make Contact

I'm going to commit a few, unforgiveable, burn-me-at-the-stakes heresies here.

This is another of the sequels that is better than the original.

“How can you say that” you ask, as you stack the wood up and soak it in oil. “How can this workmanlike picture starring hammy old scrotum Roy Schneider be better than Kubrick's mindblowing spectacle.”

The truth is, very easily. Everyone likes 2001, because it is Kubrick, because it has got some spectacular visuals, but because IT IS A FILM YOU MUST LIKE IN ORDER TO LOOK INFORMED – AND OF COURSE, COOL.

This is bullshit. Hardly anyone really likes hard sci fi, and this movie is leaden with it. The film essentially boils down to:

Act 1 – Monkey's throw sticks at each other (witness opening of Star Wars Holiday Special for similar Simian grunting fun). For ages.

Act 2 – Endlessly praised match cut leads into hours of boring space ship stuff set to music by proto Nazis. The most noteworthy event here is a man visiting a toilet upside down.

Act 3 – Two very wooden astronauts do very dull things while watching themselves on “BBC12”. Computer eventually gets so fed up it kills everyone until its building block brain is removed.

Act 4 – Man goes down cool space tunnel while eerie Ligeti music plays; eventually he meets an older version of himself with a face covered in plasticene.

The End.

2010 has some cool spaceships, fantastic sequences involving aero braking around Jupiter, a bit of action, some hard sci fi elements that aren't as dry as dust, Helen Mirren, and John Lithgow playing a homosexual space engineer – this element of his character however is excised from the movie, although it is explicit in the book. OK it also has terrible voiceover exposition from Schneider, a horrible hokey cold war plot, and Helen Mirren doing a terrible Russian accent even though she is Russian while other members of the cast opt for Mr Chekov style “Nuklee-ar Wessels” tomfoolery.

But at least things happen!!! It doesn't bore the arse off you. 2001 is the world's most boring film ever, making Solaris look like Toy Story, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

And what other sci fi film can boast having a future Queens of the Stone Age keyboard player in the cast?

The young Natasha Scheider in 2010

And here with QOTSA for "Lullabies to Paralyse"

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.04.14

The Horrors of Catheterisation

Laid up, sick in every part of my body I was. I could lie half on my side in one precise, impossible to maintain position, that would stop me vomiting. Any other and I would hurl thick green bile out in to the charmless papier mache kidney bowls, as vomiting into a kidney will make you feel better.

I never dry heaved, as there was always some part of my stomach lining to tear out and disgorge, probably reaching down into starved duodenum. No food or liquid could be kept down

Veins had collapsed due to dehydration, re-acquiring line for fluid an endlessly painful series of stabs, infection setting in rapidly so the initial welcome coolness of the perfusing water was replaced by the hot inflammation of hungry bacteria. First patient opposite was dying, sharing a room with a nice old chap who's body was slowly shutting down. Second room-mate had a tracheotomy tube that spat out of the vagina like incision in his throat and bounced around the floor like a pen-top.

Defibs whining in the dead of night, woken too early. Could never rest. Forced upright for examinations, vomited immediately.

Through all of this my bladder would not function. The discomfort was unreal, underneath, alongside and above the nausea. I would drag a drip stand to the lavatory, begging for relief, and nothing.

The Emperor Tiberius, I recalled with no satisfaction, had executed men using a similar procedure. Sweating, near crying.

No relief.

I confessed all to the doctors. I had given up. I was now willing to undergo being touched; to undergo the most horrendous procedure I could think of.

Catheterisation.

Catherisation. The touching of my genitals by persons unknown, and then, the hideous, agonising violation by plastic tubing into my insides, a nightmare creature made to hurt men and women, and humiliate them, puking up my insides, puking out my bladder by force into some fucking bag, dangling at the end of my bed, symbol of internal failure, the young man so shit he couldn't even piss himself.

I was offered this stark choice, when I didn't think I would have any. Catheter? Or megadose of valium?

Easy,no?

I took the valium, and for the only time in my hospital stay, I was happy. The old men dying and ejecting breathing aids were forgotten...the nurses complaining about bed wetting patients, my own vomiting, all gone. Afternoon drifted by in haze, march sun drifting across the curiously barred window.

And as it passed into shadow, the problem was resolved

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 12.04.14

Poets in Space

Is there a use for poetry in space?

Can the language of apogee, perigee, declination, right ascension, thrust vectors, newtonian mechanics and lagrangian points harbour those for whom words are a means to an artistic end? And not a means of requesting more oxygen be let into somewhere from a valve to ensure the survival of pocket humanity against the vast all but emptiness of space.

Space loves capital punishment, and is the harshest of hanging judges. Who can need beautiful wordsmiths where a single mistake of prosaic human or engineering frailty results in certain death.

Everything is checklist, double checklist, instruction manual and zero gravity suction lavatory. The incredible Commander Hadfield took beautiful photographs and sang a little Bowie, but if he had started declaiming Homer while bowing on a lyre, his fellow astronauts would have bundled him out of the airlock faster than you can say “tin can”.

Yet, when humanity does colonise the stars and planets, the arts will have to play a part. A society will surely go mad without them, without an outlet to perform and express. The all encompassing sterility of space must have an antidote; steel domes and plastic furniture won't be enough.

And so, in addition to the square jawed heroes, science nerds, brilliant women, engineers, doctors and folk who's hair looks good in zero gravity, so there will need to stained trouser artists, dusty sculptors, and lank haired writers in tweed jackets with elbow patches. And the poets, space berets and polo necks, astro beatniks, will have to go to.

It seems strange to think of it, but it is true. Mars needs poets.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05.04.14

My Own Fantastic Voyage

Discovered that the classic sci fi movie "Fantastic Voyage" is available entire on youtube at the moment, and settled down to watch it in Starbucks, the screams of young children in my ear disturbing me from my contemplation of internal butchery by a sub microscopic submarine.

I wonder what a voyage into my own body would be like; a desperate risk probably. Trips through a heart that even slowed down would occasionally thunder with anxiety, double systolic beats crushing the hull of all but a virtual internal dreadnaught. Fancy a trip to my brain, my carotid would always be tying itself in knots as my tics throw my body into convulsive, wrenching poses.

Tourettes, that would knock any submarine in my bloodstream about like you would not believe, the aquanauts would be concussed out of their minds as I sometimes feel I'm out of mine.

Get to the brain. Find the damage. Repair it. No chance. Electric impulses a-randomly firing frying the Raquel Welches trying to fix the damage. Which is a pity, maybe they could use their laser beams to activate the bit of my brain that might get me a better job.

No chance.