Ye Olde Terminator

My head spends an awful lot of time on idle thinking. Such things may or may not include...

1) - A meeting at the Bond Villain's volcano headquarters. Blofeld type chap sits at the end of the table, stroking his squashed face ugly Persian cat with one hand while fiddling with a cigar cutter with the other. Henchman sit around, fat ones, thin ones, scared ones, oriental ones, ones missing eyes, ones missing limbs. There is a solitary woman amongst them, sporting the correct number of eyes, arms and legs, but looking rather chubby.

"Gentlemen, before we discuss the implementation of "Operation Terror" can I just take this opportunity to give our best wishes to Jacqui from HR, who is going on maternity - and by the way, it isn't mine! Seriously, we wish you all the best, and enjoy being a mum!"

The fingers sporting rings containing poison pick up an envelope from Clinton's Cards. A factotum with a claw for a hand passes a bunch of Waitrose flowers over. A tin of Celebrations is opened, everyone goes straight for the malteser ones.

Well, it happens like this in every fucking workplace I've been in, why not Doctor Death's?

2) Due to navigation error, the Terminator goes too far back in time and finds himself having to kill a 13th Century ancestor of Sarah Connor. Naked, he first has to cloth himself.

"I want your jerkin, your bootikins, and your donkey" he announces to a passing peasant, before taking himself off down the Blacksmith's to get tooled up.

"I want a phased pulse rifle in the 40 megawatt range"

"Prithee Sire, only what you see!"

"The sword, the dagger, and the mace"

"A fine choice young master. All these weapons would surely grace a stout castle, which art thine fancy?"

"All of dem."

"Crivens! Thou shalt not do that, my liege."

"Wrong."

SWIPPPPPPPPEEEEEEE....kudummmmm

Amy Winehouse plus Nick Cave equals…?

...Kai, the cottage loaf headed dead assassin of the 90s sci fi weirdathon “Lexx”.

Played by Canadian actor Michael McManus, this pale skinned proto -blood needing member of something called “The Brunnen G” was merely one of a cast of oddities populating the living ship Lexx, the others being a platinum haired sex-slave lizard hybrid called Zev Bellringer, the accidental captain Stanley Tweedle, who always wanted to get it on with Zev but was more likely to end up being hung upside down by bondage loving cannibals; and a weird disembodied robot head 790, also much in love with Zev and occasionally inclined to babble poetry to that effect.

Michael McManus as Kai

It used to be on “Sy-Fy” a lot. I used to see it occasionally. I understood it never.

I can’t remember any plot at any point. I can’t remember any guest stars apart from the compulsory appearance in crap of the latter-day Malcolm McDowell. I can’t remember why the original Zev - Eva Habermann - turned into the ferociously be-lipped Xenia Seeberg.  Above all I can’t remember why a series set in a largely CGI universe suddenly found itself in what looked like a Toronto car park.

Eva Habermann as Zev. "If you do this, I will do it with you Stanley." She never did.

 I am not bothered that I can’t remember. I just liked the undemanding madness and imagination of it, which was the best way of coping with the fact it was impossible to follow even if you were a Cray 2 supercomputer on brain pills. You just loved Eva Habermann and Xenia Seeberg even though you had no idea what they were doing. You loved Kai singing the crazed Brunnen G anthem as he crashed his spaceship into whatever he was sacrificing himself to defeat.
And poor Stanely, his creepy sexual failures always brought out a chuckle, as Lexx the big space dragonfly flew ever on. 

Xenia Seeberg as Xev. There's a reason for the "X"

  Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23.06.14

Lord Moth Sends out his Moon-a-Mucks

Lord Moth has settled in, and after an evening of rain so heavy the droplets cratered the roads and pavements and a mist formed at ground level you couldn't see through, the moon is out and he is sitting with a up of tea in his garden.

He has an art deco table next to the hidden entrance to his black crystal cave, and the Hawk Moths circle protectively above, watching out for intruders.

The sky is as black as his cave home, and so it is time to send out his moon-a-mucks, who are sad that they can't find any moonflowers to sing at to make the crystals grow. They are not sad for long however, for Lord Moth in his decadent wisdom has tasks for them to enjoy.

On the moon, the moon-a-mucks sing to crystals to make them grow. On earth, they make dreams grow and flourish by the same means, dreams that are broadcast through quantum space back to the observant mind of Lord Moth for him to enjoy. It doesn't matter who it is, the most unimaginative old catankerous whisky bibber, or a flighty 19 year old who has had nothing but joy rain down on her life. The moon-a-mucks sit outside their windows on their hind legs, and sing softly, reverberating window pane, sheets of glass, all in perfect sub atomic harmony.

The song penetrates the nerve systems of the sleepers, and no matter who they are, they find themsevles dreaming. They might be happy dreams, sad dreams, violent ones or even violet ones. Dreams of achievement, dreams of disappointment...and best of all the dreams that dreamers are sad to wake up from.

And when they start, Lord Moth puts down his book and his tea cup, relaxes back, and takes it all in. He watches every dream his twelve moon-a-mucks make every night, and he misses nothing.

He misses nothing, sees everything, and decides what to do about the dreams later, when the first rays of the sun begin to lick along the horizon, a solar cat with cream

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 03.06.15

My Secret Tunnels, my Secret Bases

I have many fantasies, a secret agent alt-persona, who is always needing to get away in a hurry from the scene of my assassinations and bomb based sabotagings.

Alternatively, I accidentally ran over an oldster on my bicycle, and need to get away in a hurry.

I have various imaginings on how this would work. On one hand I have secret dens in nearby woods, or even little stands of trees in town, amidst unsuspecting houses. After doing my mischiefs, I find my nearest hideout, and my individual heat signature pattern opens it up to me and only me…the doors slide back like a mini Tracey Island, brambles and nettles moving with it.

And then I jump in, and the door slides back as if nothing had happened. IR cameras and ground penetrating radar are scrambled. I am totally safe. I have media, books, and a huge supply of rum. I keep changes of clothing inside, and disguises; a machine can bleach my hair straw blond in 5 seconds – envious ladies? – and change my eyes.

I always pick black-brown and bright blue eyes.

All this in a room the size of a living room. Ultrasonic showers. Body waste teleported out of you to the nearest treatment works.

(Reflecting on this, I realise the sci fi novella “A Plague of Demons” has something similar)

The cycle escape routes are a network of tunnels that just open up in the road, and slide me down into 2 metre wide underground Sustrans routes that link up my secret bases.

One minute I’m being chased by helicopters, the next minute I am gone, cycling deep underground with nightvision goggles on, planning my next daring act of subversion.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 30.05.14

Gamma Ray Burst Creatures

At the time of writing, it seems the Gamma Ray Burst “observed” in the Andromeda Galaxy may be some kind of instrumentation artefact, but no matter.

It doesn’t change a thing.

There are creatures that live near black holes, neutron stars and other potential sources of super high energy gamma rays. They are intelligent yet tenuous, a loose collection of exotic particles with nervous systems based on the scintillations produced by hydrogen atoms emitting energy in transitions high above the Paschen and the Pfund. Their brains exist in the Plank fluctuations, and they “see” by registering energy transitions caused by these energy transitions I describe.

They enjoy nothing more than to observe the beauty of the hyper high energy universe, to us, I suppose it would seem as if existence was coloured in brilliant silver and glittering purple-violet.

Every time there is a cataclysmic event like a gamma ray burst, the tremendously energies cause these contemplative creatures to begin to sail the gamma breezes out into intergalactic space, communicating their happiness at motion to all their kind.

Each of these creatures, a hundred kilometres across or more, is encoded to breed by budding off in the 7^th dimension and so we don’t encounter their off spring for a thousand years or more, as they gradually drop back through the dimensions into our space.

This is just as well, because sadly, though these beautiful creatures mean us no harm, and would be highly distressed to think that they were, every time they encounter a planet of sentient life forms, as aetherially as ghosts, their Plank energies cause terrible damage to living beings. It causes the nervous system to spasm, causing Tourette’s and other worldly analogues in some creatures, but death in others.

Who it happens to is a matter of pure chance, as by a lucky quirk their Plank fluctuations are only in phase with living matter on rare occasions. But when it happens, it can be devastating.

 

And every time we observe a gamma ray burst, they are passing through something. And someone. On our world.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 28.05.14

A Bed of Butterflies

You can make a bed of butterflies you know, I've done it. And it requires no cruelty whatsoever.

You need butteflies, obviously, as many as you can get, big ones, little ones, bright and dark. I attract them into a room by leaving a window open on a sunny day, in a room with felt walls soaked in nectar. The butterflies drift gently in on flittering wings, and settle on the felt to drink the sweet nectar.

As they move up and down on the felt, the butterflies begin to get statically electrically charged, and thus they start to attract each other as a jumper rubbed balloon does a wall. Their delicate wings begin to align like molecules in a crystal...to align...to stick together softly.

Eventually, after a day or three, each wall should be turned into a veritable sheet of butterflies. Gently detatch them, as gently as stillness, and place them atop your base sheet. Add other sheets as required, depending on ambient temperature. The butterflies will flap their wings in resonance, keeping them from settling on top of each other.

As night closes in, settle under your butterfly sheets, and sleep the stillest sleep of all, warmed by gentle downdrafts of air. As dawn breaks, lift delicately your butterfly sheets up, and place them back on the nectar walls to recharge, ready for another nights peaceful sleep.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22.05.14

What "Really" Lies Within?

My hometown, like many others, is full of strange little old brick buildings that seem little used, and never have any visitors going in or out.

The old bowling green pavilion. Various perma-locked old public toilets. Outhouses on the edge of public parks. Car park attendant shelters no longer used since automation - the old man in the orange flashed donkey jacket kicked out onto the street to slowly strave to death while being taunted and urinated upon by passers-by in favour of non-functional ticket machines swallowing nickel coins for no sticky paper prize.

By the cemetery, a plot of land with a brick structure stands next to undistinguished housing, a “For Sale” sign flapping in heavier breezes. Still there. Still undeveloped.

They must still be standing for a reason, otherwise greedy councils would flatten them – every tiny little space has a value. I wonder why. Who really controls them. What really are they used for. What “really” lies within?

They are obviously control rooms, observation posts, and the likes. The forces that would infiltrate our society and act for powers beyond our solar system – in one case, within it – use the apparently unused old buildings for their own nefarious purpose. The perma-closed public lavatory, for example, is run by human-cultivating carnivores from Tau Ceti, who monitor the vital signs of folk walking past, and pounce on those with the nourishing characteristics required.

Seeing as they like meat rich in ethanol, the mortality statistics of street drinkers are explained.

The worm-men of Triton, our only solar system based visitors, live in bowling green pavilions all over the United Kingdom. They are secretly digging our our richest and most fertile soils from underneath the surface, and exporting them back to the homeworld to wriggle in. Soon, they will no loger be able to conceal their activities, as our huge tracts of our farmland will cave in on itself, and we will begin to starve.

Parkland outhouses are home to mutants from a waterless world monitoring our political instability, awaiting a time to pounce when we are at our weakest. Empty houses house the empty skulls of the watchers of Vega, living cameras with no thoughts of their own, they seek to collectivise all. These mindless space communists have fascist rivals, the disused telephone exhange dwelling Maggotoids of Mizar, and even as they vivisect the homeless, the Vegans seek to start a war with them.

A war that will kill us all in the process, even if they don't kill us first. So remember, watch those funny little buildings. Ignore them at your, and our, peril.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28/10/2013

The Magic Book

In every library there is a magic book. You just have to find it.

It’s different in every library. It might be a book on new styles of management in one, a camping guide in a second and a large print copy of a Jackie Collins in another.

Its magic properties vary too. Sometimes nothing happens other than all the text in every other book in the library turning dark green. Sometimes it transports you to another library where the magic book begins with the same first letter as the one you touched. It could make you a Prince or even a King of the land that you live in, or it may turn you into a rat.

The method of magical activation is never constants. Touching the book’s spine may be enough to invoke the power of wizardry, but in other cases you may have to lick page 39. In general, the more powerful the magic invoked, the more extreme the method of initiating the spell. There is a book in the University of Ougadougou that makes 85 golden cows out of nothing if you slam your genitals between pages 283 and 284 of the manuscript – Volume 15 of the Encyclopaedia of Bacteria. All spells found in romance works are activated by pressing your nipple to every instance of the word “the” on the blurb on the inside cover.

It is always fun to watch people look for magic books. Especially the most dedicated of seekers.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 26/10/13

Three Blades???!!! The Sword and the Sorcerer

“Um, I don’t think this film is really suitable” said the soft dad, the former failed labour candidate for the town, as his two children and I watched “The Sword and the Sorcerer”. He evidently thought it was a Disney fantasy romp, safe for us to watch on his toploading VHS. When he saw the breasts, he realised he was wrong.

I have seen this film essentially twice, on the occasion mentioned above, and again when ITV broadcast it late one night in about 1986 and my folks taped it for me on our FRONTLOADING video recorder.

The plot, which I can’t remember in any case, is entirely irrelevant, featuring the medieval Nazi Titus Cromwell kidnapping heroines to slake his foul desires and engaging a nasty wizard-monster to help his drive for world domination. “Tonight I will make love to you as no other man can” he informs the Princess, before her meaty thump reveals he routinely has to wear an armoured codpiece when seducing wenches. The wizard, he rather stupidly double crosses, and it kills him. Probably.

No, it’s not the storyline that grabs you, essentially yet another in the Conan / Krull / Beastmaster Fantasy boom of the early 80s. It’s the sword. Where the other films had to make do with single bladed weapons, Talon the hero acquires a magical sword that has THREE blades. And not only are these blades capable of slicing other swords in two, they can be fired like bullets into the guts of an enemy at the touch of a button.

"Cease your wrongdoing, or face my triple bladed wrath unleashed!"

How I wanted one when I was a child. Instead, I had to make do with a stick.

The film stands out in others ways. It is full of nudity, with gratuitous visits to the castle brothel aplenty. It is also staggeringly cruel, with the hero crucified at a banquet at one point before freeing himself to stick nails in the faces of the per-usual clueless enemy soldiers. Other scenes feature one of the great characters of Fantasy cinema, the shaven headed palace torturer, as he chews his way through his pain dungeon shouting lines like “These two didn’t have any more to say, so I cut out their tongues” and “Don’t worry little girl, it won’t hurt until I hit the bone.” Classic.

For some reason, I can’t remember the film being shown on British TV for well over twenty years, and the DVD is pricey. Come on Horror or SyFy, get your finger out!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 09/10/2013

T'was a Doubly Dark Afternoon

I am in passing, flying through my blog en route to my film script, but my DVD watching activities on Monday must be commented upon, etched digitally into memory for interested parties to see.

There is a very good, very low rent, collectors stall at the market on monday, and as well as plastic buckets stuffed with Star Wars figures with varyingly correct numbers of limbs, it has a lot of decent DVDs on sale for one English pound each.

It's a bit of a crap shoot, folk buy and sell DVDs there in batches of twenty or thirty at a time. But, if you have the patience to flick through the films in their slightly broken and jagged containers, there are gems to be had. And on Moday, I found two.

First up was "The Dark Crystal" - Jim Henson's wonderfully rich muppet fantasy full of vivid characters and design; the camply "Hmmmmmm-ing" Lord Chamberlain Skeksis is a character that has stuck in my memory since I first saw the film in 1983. And having enjoyed that, it was time for another Dark, and darker film - Dark City.

Dark City is a little seen dystopian fantasy from 1998, where a group of energy beings have reanimated corpses to act as a corporeal vessel from which to conduct experiments on un-knowing human abductees manipulated around a 50s film noir metroploitan environment full of Gilliam-esque mutating cityscapes. Shot in Australia by Alex Proyas, it boasts an odd sort of cast, with Hollywood stars Jennifer Connolly and William Hurt mixing it with a young Rufus Sewell, and Richard "Riff Raff" O'Brien appearing as well.

It is superb.

Watch it, and pay attention as the themes of Blade Runner get warped through space time into Dark City, and hence onto The Matrix.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 25/09/13

The Television of the Apocalypse

Watching films like "Deep Impact", where humanity is looking directly into the dark abyss of extinction, always makes me wonder.

Aside from solemn Presidential broadcasts telling us to keep our faith in God as humanity prepares to be squashed flat by an asteroid God himself could have stopped if He so chose, what is on television or the radio when the event occurs?

I'm sure plenty of people would just swarm out of their houses and choke the roads heading for the high ground while continuously screaming, but plenty of folk, perhaps the older ones without young familes facing immolation, would stay home. Surely caring, sharing governments (ha) with advance warning of the earth's destruction, would arrange for there to be media to entertain us in humanity's death throes?

No doubt, religious programming would take up a fair amount of scheduling; can you imagine the number of death bed conversions the various deities would be dealing with as firebrand preachers sounded their joy at the last trump being sounded at last?

Other programming would be more contemplative; gentle pastoral sounds on classical radio, scenes of cloud and sea on television, perhaps overlayed with a ticker of dedications to friends and families scrolling along the bottom, a veritable requiem of tweets as the St Matthew Passion gently poured from the speakers.

Perhaps some channels would just think "fuck it" and decide to broadcast the dirtiest pornography imaginable, figuring no-one would be bothered about hairy palmed deviant onanists as the sun set on life itself forever. No doubt ITV2 and BBC3 would broadcast the usual "100 Worst" type clips or rolling film of Del Boy Trotter falling through the bar to give mankind a smile on its face as it met icy cometary death from above.

Or, as is so common in our current age, would people decided to watch rolling news coverage of Armageddon? I'm thinking they would. Even in the darkest hours, there would be plenty of broadcasters willing set their egos above their families and the prospect of death, and see who could get the highest ratings - and who could go on the longest as the oceans boiled and lava sprayed from the fractured crust onto the sweet land of ours. And no doubt, folk would want to see how long they could go on watching. I know I would, if I was watching.

But I wouldn't be. I'd be outside, with a rum and coke and Radio 4, waiting with joy for the hammer blow from space. God bless it, and all it would bring.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 10/08/2013

Superheavy and Exotic

At the base of the existence, are the quarks, and the particles you create when you stick them together with the strong nuclear force. Mesons and baryons, hadrons all. Two quarks for a meson, three for a baryon like a proton or neutron. Up, down, strange and charmed.

That's in our tediously three dimensional universe anyway.

But there are places where this is not always the case. When a supermassive star goes not mere supernova, but hypernova, then the massive energies produced by the explosion fuse these particles into far more exotic and superheavy combinations, that are blasted through holes ripped in space time into dimensions that are rugged enough to take their weight.

For example, take 6 up quarks and 6 down quarks, and you get a tetrahadron. Tetrahadron matter is more solid that diamond, yet you can put your hand through it. In our universe, it appears as ghosts and spectres, which are actually the impression of lifeforms in dimensions 4,6 and 9 who's fantastic mass creates human like bumps in our space time, like pushing your hand underneath a drumskin.

Sometimes the particles and matter created from them are so huge, they rip through our space time surface whenever they merely brush up against it. Archamesons, they make up the living creatures of these dimensions, and in their own environment they work as accountants and bus-drivers, but we see them as Loch Ness Monsters, Yetis, and Giant Octopus a thousand feet long. Our glimpses are fleeting, because they immediately rip again through our dimensional structure and land in another one, like Indiana Jones falling through the canopies in Temple of Doom.

22 strange and charmed quarks form meta-theons – the true god particles, they can only exist in dimension eleven. These are angels to us, cherubim and seraphim, although they have long since passed the stage of mere thought and drift through the multiverse uncaring, each wing of six comprising galactic superclusters that don't have to break through any intradimensional barriers, they just are!!!

There are petrons, sarcatrons, polyorthagonal-dynameons, and matter that is simultaneously larger than every universe put together, and smaller than nothingness. But my favourite is made of 7 charmed quarks, and one anti-strange quark, less paradoxical than sum. It is the hope particle, and it exists in the 5^th dimension, just beyond ours, and only science has the will to find it.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 08/06/2013

How to Breathe Forever

Long term deep sea divers do not breathe in  pure oxygen or air when operating at great depth - the oxygen becomes toxic at high pressure, and the nitrogen causes nitrogen narcosis. Instead, Helium is added, in a mixture known either as trimix or heliox depending on whether nitrogen is present in the mix.

This is what causes deep sea divers to have squeaky voices, and film-makers a problem if they don't want their cast to sound like chipmunks. In "Sphere" they invented some sort of "voice adaptor", whereas in The Abyss they merely ignored the issue altogether.

What the world doesn't know that in the 70s, a pioneering group of swiss led divers discovered that if you breathe pure Neon at a depth below 2000 metres, not only does it become possible to dive at great depth for an unlimited time, the inhalation of pure noble gas meant that biolgically, they had become immortal, and indeed if they switched to an Argon-Neon mix, aging was actually reversed very slightly.

Sadly this is only possible 2000 metres below sea level, and indeed the effects seem to be magnified the deeper you go. So this was immortality was only available to a very elite few, and the news of this discovery was greatly supressed. However, those in the elite diving community continued to be in the know, and since the early 1990s, greater and greater numbers of them have decided that the surface world is in such a state that they have migrated to the great depths of the abyssal plane, to join the colossal squid and oarfish in forging a new society.

In their small habitats, they glow green and blue like street signs as they live a life of oceanic contemplation while harvesting protein from sources unknown to us ignorant surface dwellers. They don't need to know about us, their society is impregnable and infinite. They will barely even care as we kill ourselves off up here. They create art out of lava flowing out of the sea bed, and smoke cigarettes made of kelp. They make an alcoholic drink out of distilled squid ink, and play chess with pieces sculpted from feathery starfish and creatures unknown to our science.

They need nothing we can offer them. I envy them.

A Kite of Jellyfish

Can you imagine a prettier thing, than a giant kite made out of jellyfish?

They wouldn't be nasty, horrible, stinging jellyfish like irukanji or Portugese Men'O'War. They would be large, floaty jellyfish with long tentacles that dangled harmlessly from their transluscent bodies.

The tentacles are painted silver, and decorated with gossamer bows made from dragonfly wings. The wind need only be as strong as the lightest breath to send the kite of jellyfish pulsating aloft to glitter irridescent in the sun.

I will take my kite of jellyfish to the beach to impress women of a literary bent, and sea creatures will be impressed with the care and lack of coercion I take over my jellyfish, who fly for me without any harsh words or threat of force.

My jellyfish will fly for me out of love, for they recognise I have a far greater empathy with gentle invertebrates than I do my fellow humans.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry

I'd trade my Glave for a Krull DVD

Krull is a very underrated film, I find. It crops up in sad unwanted corners, like the 5* channel on a sunday afternoon, confined to the 19th century syphillitic lunatic asylum of the media while inferior product gets it on on the proper channels.

Sad.

Krull, is of course a typical and utterly banal revival fantasy swashbuckler of the early 1980s - see also The Sword and the Sorceror, Conan, Ladyhawke etc - featuring the never seen again Ken Marshall, an uncharismatic pretty boy who at least isn't wearing a girls skirt like Tom Cruise in Legend; and also the English, but dubbed by American Lindsay Crouse, Lysette Antony who was seen to best advantage not wearing very much in the Depeche Mode video for "I Feel You."

The plot is of the typical "Rescue the princess from evil fascist lizard being" variety, with the usual "Oh no, our primary method of finding the princess has failed what can we do" "Well we can follow this extremely dangerous alternative that probably won;t work but just might even though it seemingly bears no relevance to our problem" "OK then" obstacle.

In the way, are snake brained Barabarellan leathermen called Slayers, who's reptile brain escapes are always censored out of matinee showings much to many a bloodthirsty child's disappointment. They have laser staffs (rather like the Gou'ald in Stargate) which happily can only fire once before they revert to a stabbier use. They serve "The Beast" who lives in a tormentier version of Howl's Moving Castle and who consists of a badly designed creature mixed in with close up library shots of an Iguana.

Yes, it's derivative, and silly, with mystically daft weapon, horrible comic relief and annoying basin haircut child - many of the rules of "How to be an Evil Overlord" have clearly been lifted from this film. But, it has a great strength, a fantastic UK and Irish supporting cast - ALun Armstrong, Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane, Freddie Jones, Francesca Annis an, err, Tucker Jenkins from Grange Hill. Their character banterings and bickerings make the film, and indeed save it from the more wooden leads, while "Carry On's" Bernard Bresslaw gets the more lumbering philosophical dialogue to show off his proper acting aspirations.

You can guess if it all ends happily or not! It doesn't for me, because Ive wanted to find it on DVD for ages. Yes, it's on TV all the bloody time, BUT I WANT IT FOR REAL DAMMIT. And I can't.

Tourettes and the Tunnels of Work

I work in a land fit only for escape; fit only for dreams day and night, dirty plastic floors delivering static shocks into the bodies of the otherwise waking dead. Cockroach traps are insectoid death trap christmas decorations in dark corners; sometimes a bird arrives through the lorry doors and can never get out again.

In the middle of is am I, stressed to the thirteens let alone the nines by the awfulness of it all, body flailing sometimes as somekind of electro chemical surge breaks the barriers of restraint and people try and ignore it and I'm not sure what kind of reaction I want. Not laughter. But not studied ignorance, the pretence of not being bothered.

I don't know what my own head is telling me, and I don't know what I'm trying to tell it.

So I head for the maze, the caves, the world in the racking created by creaking unsafe girders racked by the weight of stores and spares and topped by a thick caking of dust. You stand in the main aisle, it's like The Mines of Moria, stretching way into an artificially lit distance.

Within here the mind wanders and people can be hidden from until the crisis passes. Worlds are visited, words are written on invisible paper with invisible ink and stored until you can go home in a slanting rain. Imagine Maximillian from The Black Hole chasing you down here looking to gut you with his propeller fingers; can you find a turn off in time he'll ignore?

Vader may be awaiting next to the floor cleaning machines, and you won't know if he's being good or evil. Cryogenic suspension tubes litter the top of the racking and you wish you can climb in until the job, or more likely the world, ends in a salvo of violet lightning.

Fight the mech warriors, hide from demons of the darkness.  Or just stand there rocking back on your heels and looking at the radio speakers on the ceiling waiting for the escape route to be broadcast.

Here there are no managers, just other worlds far far better.

I'm creating them every minute.

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Copyright Bloody Mulberry 17/10/2012