Night Machines

They used an easy cipher requiring only card stock and a knowledge of 80s American family sitcoms. It was so simple the first lead investigator was too late for them but their connection was early so they caught it.

The investigators knew their business. Their last known address was a tourist motel across the street from a gothic cathedral.

An accomplice rode their torpedo motorcycle from the scene.

Philip (number 11: the Florist) investigated. the singular lead to their whereabouts was a parking ticket but the plates came up stolen two nights ago from a caterpillar scooter.

The plates smelled of coriander leaves and burnt honey. It was on the tip of a fleeting memory, caramelised onions and sharp chutney on the tongue.

In time, it would rise.

Spring Flutters

Damp wool,

metallic pine,

candle flicker,

eave sparrows,

creaky couch,

old fire,

cold mountain.

Start reading a book from a random page.

picked it up and a familiar voice spoke to her.

    "Can you hear me?"

    "You left this behind on purpose."

    "I did."

    "You're in exile, that means every part of you, you don't get to be a voice in my house."

    "You could turn off the comm."

    She said nothing, but he could see her pulse and heart rate through the comm sensors.

    "Why did you leave it behind?"

    "In case I got lonely," he lied.

    "Do you, though?" she asked.

    "These horse pirates your people dumped me on say so."

    "Because you're not playing any of their games?"

    "I won't dignify what they do as any sort of game."

    "Is this what you missed?"

    "Me getting pin-cushioned by you? Yeah, I guess it is."

    "I'm shutting you off now."

    "That's your choice, goodnight then."

    She clicked the comm off. The screen went dark. But was it really off? She didn't bother to tinker and dropped it in her shop box and shoved the box under her work table in the barn. 

    Tomorrow would be soon enough.

    Somewhere past Great Bear Lake, beyond the finger cities, he returned his comm to its holder and listened to the strains of an unfamiliar melody in the dim light of the horse pirate camp.

Proceed.

 Wolves and doors.

Grizzly Bears Don't Fly Airplanes.

This year has been one with many reasons not to write. However the listener hears and makes sense of this, I did not listen. One hand wrote purple prose. Porch doors, all screens and slap and springs that need oiling. One hand pressed delete. Receptive. Dreaming. Release. Cinnamon and camphor. Five minutes was more and less than what could be spared. Still your heart, breathe, do some exercise but nothing strenuous four hours before bedtime. Wear sunscreen, that song still itching under the frosting of my cake. Unliving, it spreads through willing hosts. Speaking plainly is for tomorrow. This is boxing day when servants voyage home to families with boxes from their employers. Fingers are limber. On to the work we can neither finish nor desist from and all this jazz.

Write Five Minutes, Edit, and Post

A Five Minute Free write example:

From time to time, I free-write if only to get the bad ideas out of the way. Spelling and grammar don't count in a free-write. The point is to have something to say and then saying it. Later, you can return and find the best way to say it.

Recently, I have been podcasting about storytelling and the process of telling stories. There is increasingly a difference in my mind between stories and their tellings. I have read highly engrossing papers on folklore which are almost entirely story with little to no telling and I realise now how far from stories the tellings which have been collected actually are.

This is especially relevant in our society today because we seem to be dominated by narratives. The way stories get told impacts our lives, our governments, our police, and our marketplaces. Every part of our daily living is in some way immersed and saturated in tellings, in narratives; and people are more or less beginning to realize how sensitive and permeable human beings are to tellings.

The only way out is to generate counter tellings, counter stories. Truth which is based in happy accidents, deductive tinkering and empiricism is fragile and must be defended. Stories are both the weapons and the walls.

Free-writing

Free-writing loosens the hands and the mind. Beginning a writing session with a few minutes of free-writing is a lot like a climber stretching their joints before starting on the mountain. If this simile is too strenuous to contemplate, imagine a cat going to sleep; before they enter the dream, they stretch.

Stretching and free-writing have another quality in common. In addition to preparing the hands and mind for more strenuous labours, they can help with anxiety.

The calming properties of free-writing can be augmented by starting with a large font size such as 48pt. Writing with big letters at the start of a writing session can make the process feel accelerated; as though magnificent quantities of work are flowing effortlessly from your fingertips so that, for the first minutes of your writing session, the promise of the writerly fantasy of effortless productivity is fulfilled.

This also breaks the white wall of the blank page which writers through the ages are continually finding new ways to avoid confronting.

Confront. Smash.

Your free-writing session at the very least will leave your fingers limber, it may also leave your mind freer with many ideas which have appeared in the wrong place at the wrong time now safely captured, contained, and out of the way for future perusal like a private magazine counter at a secret store open only between your ears.

At best you’ll stumble on something  within which is the germ of what may prove to be your lasting contribution to your area of specialisation.

Five to eight minutes of free-writing can do all this for you. It can unburden, unclench, calm and inspire you.

To quote the green owl (Duolingo), what can five to eight minutes of social media do for you?

Two degrees from midnight.

Ban commercial air travel.

Place a moratorium on commercial fishing.

Boycott fast fashion, especially denim.
Boycott pulp paper printing.

Buy used.

End linear economies.
Start cyclical economies.

Be reasonable. Demand the impossible.™

Fragmentarium

Awake, staring at purple night clouds from eleven until closing on two. Binoculars used for stars.
The faintest of glimmers of which could just be seen through cloud holes in an eigengrau sky.

They say 'good, words express self' but did I, did they? Unwilling to sleep and unable to be meaningful.

A clap against the ear with a firm flat palm, now a whisper in that same ear. You cannot resist by resisting, only by counter-programming.

Disperse and Coagulate

Solve  et Coagula is a phrase we learned in the context of alchemy.

Gold could not be made from Lead using the recipes of the alchemists. It can be done today but not profitably. As metaphor however, the process arguably worked. The self could be transmuted through a series of dissolutions and reassemblies. A digressive dispersal followed by a cohesive return to coherence.

Fighting the ebb and flow of focus presents difficulties. Preparing for the tides is reasonable, fighting them is not. Routine and structure and ritual are needed but also novelty and chaos and impulse.

Who is satisfied by their ability to swiftly modulate between an expansive unfocussed awareness and a narrow hyperfocussed needle of concentration?

Terry Jones is dead and we heed his admonition not to take life, or any of the above, more seriously than its due.

Disperse and Coagulate.

Reminders

One of the most common excuses for procrastination is 'I'll do it later' but when is that exactly? Recently I am having success with scheduled reminders. When something I want done pops into my head (usually at an inconvenient time to act on it) I think of the soonest time I could do it and then summon the nearest virtual assistant and speak the reminder with a date and time attached.

Summoning Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant has finally gotten easier than entering the data by hand. I wish I could say 'Duplex, set a reminder' which would save two syllables but I can't, yet.