58 Time Fly

There was a time when all he could see was cabbages, fields of cabbages. Now it was mostly low density residential communities. Some of the last farm buildings would likely be demolished in another summer or two. There was one across the street, plucked out of time like an insect in amber, The fence was high and in any case, it would've been trespassing, he walked past those farm buildings almost every day, rocks in the river, the time within their walls as obvious as the sun in the sky.

He didn't think to remember overcast days, when the sun in the sky is taken on faith. He forgot somehow that you never went out the same door you came in, he had lost track of how many times he'd done the trick in the past, so much easier after the first time, It was like breathing, it happened all by itself. When he dropped the disguises and witnessed, when the life of inanimate objects flooded forward, when the doors could be seen, when he stepped through.

He knew intuitively which doors to use, which gates, he used the terms indiscriminately, some were as large as a city, they needed no special goggles to recognize, some were as subtle as going around the left or the right of certain trees. That farm out of time across the road tempted him endlessly, from the perspective of eternity it was saturated; drunk with time.

However tempting, he knew to leave it alone, some gates took him to better worlds, some took him to other worlds, most times, he knew the difference, they smelled different.

That farm, he knew if he crossed there he would never find his way back.

So he never went. The farm was demolished on schedule, He made no plans to visit.

The rock had remained but he was far downriver, with no plans to swim against the flow.

59 Running from the Guru Monsters

Sister Mary Janice Magdalena Missouri clucked at the article she was reading about Australia. At the moment, the article was relating the wonders of Ayer's Rock 'which the Aborigines call Uluru.' This irritated Sister Mary, she knew that Uluru, the largest rock in the world, had been there long before either Aborigines or Colonials had 'named' it.

Sister Mary was one of those rare people, when she spoke you heard the quotations.

She pencilled out the offending passages and rewrote them in the margins to emphasize Uluru.

She realized it was like being called Janice for your whole life and then suddenly being called Sister Mary.

It happened.

The coffee was hot, the day was hot, Sister Mary felt the weight of her habit suddenly burdensome. Many years later, she would refer to what had just happened as the experience, never 'my experience' or 'an experience' but only the experience, no quotes required.

Doctors would call it a whiteout.

A blackout can happen after too much to drink, a person wakes up the next day and has to be told by her friends what she did last night. A whiteout is the opposite, an awareness so sharp that you can experience it but it cannot be pressed into words; a person may as well press butterflies into a book with about as much success.

Mystics would not call it anything.

It happened.

Sister Mary eventually left the order for a flesh and blood husband and together they carried on quite naturally.

60 First among thieves

Freddy Arbuckle was a thief, a good thief, he only stole from those richer than himself, this included almost everyone because when you got right down to it, Freddy was a bad thief.

One day, Freddy found himself stuck in a difficult situation involving stolen children's toys, Freddy wasn't above it, and as the snow fell on the roof of his van full of toys he felt a sudden twinge of guilt at what he'd done.

Christmas was around the corner and here he was, Freddy (Fatty to his friends) was sitting on top of a mountain of toys which he'd duly stolen and duly planned to fence.

A sudden explosive detonation happened inside him: This once, because of the season and because they were toys, Freddy decided to give his haul away. It would take all his breaking and entering skills (of which he had few, thus almost all toys ended up at the front door and not under the tree; except for one family whose door had been left unlocked) but he would find a way...

Shortly after Christmas that year, the parents of 73 children were arrested and charged with theft when the RFID tags of their children's toys set off the alarms as they entered shopping malls across the city.

Ho ho ho.

61 Where's my medicine?

Once upon a midnight dreary
As I pondered, weak and weary
There came a rapping a not quite tapping
Upon my chamber door

Stumbling from my broken slumber
Quaffing down a wooden tumbler
I made a grabbing, a not quite stabbing
under my chamber door

Left alone that endless tapping
Would've wrecked my evening napping
Now there's murder soup galore
To feast upon beyond my snores

Crows shouldn't tap at poor men's chamber doors.

62 The only way is my highway way

Running through the jungle ahead of the gun-running colonials, one local noticed his thoughts taking a decided left turn: what was this whole sad business about? He realized that running had become tiresome, he gave in to the nonsense, he lay down to sleep and despite the danger of imminent death, found he was successful. He slept, buried by the underbrush, as the colonials ran past, no one who noticed him decided to put a bullet in his eye for good measure because given his rag doll appearance, there was little chance he wasn't already dead.

Certain colonials noticed he was alive but spared him regardless.

A strange compassion happens.

When the chase was well beyond him, the local woke from his deep sleep and gave himself a new name, to remember the day.

"Oko-Jumu" which means the dreamer.

Later in life he became an infrastructure developer and private contractor and helped create some of the prettiest roads in the world.

63 My Generation

Last night, she waited quietly in the bar, surrounded by laughing people and happy music, colour and substance, neon and noise. She waited, patiently for the musician to arrive.

Can you imagine? her husband had died in a motorcycle accident two days before, leaving her alone with a young son.

She asked the musician to play at his funeral. All of this happened quietly, the air of unreality around this woman blurred her edges, at the time, I admired how she could pull herself together, her stoicism impressed me, later I told myself it must be shock, no one can imagine what's worse, to lose a father or a son, a husband or a brother. Regardless of gender, loss is loss and the world moves on. Quickly or quietly, it moves,

When she left, I did not see her go, I thought of her husband, a man I had never met nor would ever meet, dead in circumstances most vaguely defined. Regardless, I felt certain he'd died having lived.

Having lived his life as he had conceived it, death in the process of living his ideal was far better than the alternatives.

The courageous man dies once, the coward dies a thousand times a day.

Having no choice about the timing yet having choice in so much else, he lived according to himself until the end.

64 Rhythm Monkeys of the End of Night

The moon eats us, hmm?

Those were the last words my long legged friend Cindy Canvas spoke before she drove off in Agnes Sherman's car. A dusty wreck which even Agnes didn't want. I never heard from her again, she did that thing, a cat's goodbye, and I got on my bus and headed back across the country. On the way I watched the mountains appear in reverse and kept my hand on the seat until it was numb and in those young days full of nothing but hope and cinnamon buns I never bothered to ask myself the question: was I good at this?

Writing. Righting. Making what is wrong, right in the act of fiction, lies that speak the truth, famous for buffoonery, the best comedians have a dark tract of inscrutable philosophy under their beds of a degree of seriousness so profound and disturbing they haven't let anyone, even their thesis advisor, see it.

It doesn't matter since everyone retires and the moment is long lost, the final product of the page is not the ink blasted into its fibres. A book is a blunt instrument, the mind is where the final product blooms and if that's so, the final product is nowhere for nowhere can the mind 'be' which is. It needs the space of formlessness to make it's mark. How can a thing be bounded by nothing? That is the way of the mind.

So I understood why Cindy drove off without a single backward glance. It had all been for the journey, the destination had been a pretext, Cindy, Agnes and the whole sad affair in the hills had left me with a single idea:

Happiness for no reason at all was best, Cindy had suffered for the conditions she'd placed on happiness, Agnes had come out of it the best, because she had avoided conditions entirely. As for myself. I came out in the middle, sometimes I forget that it is never me who suffers, I can watch my mind suffer, I can watch my body suffer, I cannot suffer except when I forget and my attachment becomes inappropriate.

To tell the story of how these realizations leapt out of the night and into our lives would take a great deal more time and space than a single night's experimental fiction.

The novel is not the product, it is simply the occurrence, from time to time, of a creature which exists in many places at once, the author is a part of it but not the whole of it.

Tired and sleepy, I watched the rain fall horizontally across the window of the fast moving bus. Gunship metal clouds attracted lightning and I was afraid to sleep. People had been killed that way on the bus. The chattering in my mind faded as I imagined every thought being left behind, a psychic trail of breadcrumbs, for Cindy to find me someday along the edge of the future. There was a battered old structure there, built of dead memories, windows of distortion, lit by vortex, where insects made meals of men.

Wherever my bus went tomorrow, I knew that was where I was headed in the end.

65 Crack the drums and beat the splintered desk

Stone beds. There are cultures where the traditional bed is a clay or stone platform with a woven rug on top. Sleep on such beds is deep and restful, they can be warmed from beneath in the winter and remain cool in the summer. How much technology must be created for the West to enjoy such simple comforts on their individually-pocketed-coil orthopaedic beds? An incoherent flood of words mixing fragments of theology, science, history and culture is better with a little pesto. Troublesome fictions all.  Music has better sense, much can be made, as much to fill a lifetime, without necessarily any material waste. A guitar has a lifetime of music in it the moment it's made, a library necessarily reflects its passage through time. Sense is tiresome however, sometimes, the rut out of rhythm is the solution without a problem, a taste of a psychoactive thought can be more devastating than any drug; One's night of fire and revelation is another's pink laser is another's burning bush is another's mild stroke is another's benign tumour.

All interpretations to explain an experience, what if, just for a moment, focus were to return to the experience? If insight is worthwhile, would there be any in such experience?

For the sake of argument, we will say no, it is only a distraction from production, from creation in this world, from the building. Building what? who knows? Only we will not desist, our companion may not come but there is satisfaction in keeping the appointment.

Many years ago, I kept an appointment with someone I knew for certain would never come, I sipped my espresso alone and ate my almond and chocolate pastry alone and knew for certain the person for whom I was waiting would not come, it was a delicious experience, a promise made and kept after so many years.

Year later I am overjoyed that I kept that appointment, the one for whom I waited had become a cowardly, shabby echo of the person I had kept the appointment for. A nasty disappointment, had I to do it again I would not, we were none of us ourselves. That old bargain had been flushed down the toilet of time.

Now, I crack the drums and beat the splintered desk, my pen draws meat in flecks and bone is showing.

Rambles land on pebbled shores.

I cannot cross the border but it's well worth the journey to the edge.

Sunlight makes the flowers bloom.

Nightly though, I'm eaten by the moon.

Half hearted shocks.

How any man leaves effort tenderless.

Collapse is a construction too.

Bent but not broken, borrowed but not blue.

A character in search of six authors.

The creases become grooves, the grooves become roads.

Charting the hits. Taking stock of nothing.

Full of idiots, tellers of fury, signifying sounds.

Playful apocalypse.

It's all here.

What gymnastics must be done, to secure a long hour's sleep?

In my pocket.

66 Entropy

A riddle:

What is bigger on the inside than the outside,

includes the outside on the inside,

can easily be in two places at once,

can only be here now with effort,

is rarely at home, yet the lights are on?

Musical numbers dredged up from a parallel universe did the nervous thing they do down the hall and into the reading room.

The reading room was a fictitious place at my university where people went to listen to records, nobody had read a book in there since Sir Wilfred Laurier was the Prime Minister of Canada, bookings were made in advance and you had the privacy of its plush leather couches and oak panelled walls and vintage audiophile sound system all to the privacy of yourself or your small circle of friends. multiple booking were forbidden, you would not be disturbed.

Luxury!

Naturally it-was-and-it-wasn't free, its maintenance was paid for by university fees, naturally, I wonder if I was the only person who ever booked it just to hear a good vinyl album on a beyond-my-means-hence-out-of-this-world sound system.

Most people didn't even bother to put on a record.

It's different now, I hear there have been changes, I avoid learning more, I don't want my history interrupted by rude facts. For example, it was called the record room, not the reading room. It doesn't matter, I would go there to listen and read, so for me it was the reading room, clearly, from the fixtures to the furnishing, in some legendary past before records had been invented it was a reading room.

In my mind, the shape of time is already slouching towards legend, past becoming prelude, the story of what we were and where we were and why we were there and what we were doing there is losing, if not its vitality, at least its authentic reality.

The audience has left, the curtains are drawn, still we play.

Sometimes naked, sometimes mad, now the scholar, now the fool, but are we free? Are we men?

I wrote a novel as a teenager, about an assassin and story collector who wants to hear a story before killing her greatest target, a sort of 'Arabian Nights' in reverse, she asked her victim to tell her a story, so it didn't die with him, to tell her of his cities, of all dimensions; he did, and because I lacked the skill at the time to lead the plot organically towards their role reversal, I made it a serial adventure. I can not say I finished it, I did, however, abandon it, not a wise move, the abandoned worlds are those which grow most in the imagination. Finishing a story is like giving it a border, a barrier, here and no further, without this wall, the stories just grow and grow.

My punishment was to become a character in my own fiction.

Now the Piper has come for his wages while in secret he schemes with the rats.

Abreption means never having to say its done.

It's just done with you.

67 Waiting for the Hesitants

Maxine Recluse, a girl born of an idiot, signifying nothing, emerged with a frightening intelligence hence her parents abandoned her almost immediately. Raised by the state, she escaped again and again only to be captured by the electronic bars that marked her meals and residences wherever she went.

In plain English, Maxine lived in a networked world and a cashless society from which she could not escape so long as she was a minor. Her choices were suffer until she legally became an adult or find a way to live without leaving a trace of herself in State databases.

She made her choice.

For two years, Maxine became a model inmate of the state. studied industriously, allowed state education to happen to her organically, meanwhile spending all possible free time researching her own projects. Naturally her sponsors were anxious at her choice of reading materials but they were limited in their discretion by the standard operating procedures of the state. They could worry but since she wasn't learning how to make improvised explosives they could do nothing.

Maxine confined her research to biology, chemistry and physics, in its pure forms, with applied studies restricted to gardening and landscaping, she knew the extent of her prison, she stayed within its bounds and they had no pretext to circumscribe her.

In any case, Maxine wasn't interested in bombs, the state in its paranoia had blinded itself to other means, peaceful, however illegal means:

Means of escape.

They watched her carefully, they watched her build a model garden behind the state home, grow herbs, even erect a small garden shed. Her garden occupied her to the point of singularity, or so it seemed, as if by accident, her radishes and carrots sprouted together, her sponsors. They did not hear her muttering under her breath to her newly sprouted root vegetables. If any of them had, they might have heard:

"Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved, do not presume, one of the thieves was damned."

Had they heard, it may not have come as a surprise that in her over-abundance of intellect, Maxine had chafed at her bounds so long she'd rubbed her soul raw, she clutched at hope where she found it; moonlight sparkles on worn black pebbles.

She didn't go so far as to call her radishes 'Luke' and her carrots 'Augustine' but the idea was there.

Her sponsors watched her miniature world unfold with increasing fascination, between meals, sleep and school, Maxine spent all her time in her little garden. Radishes and carrots gave way to tomatoes and peppers, they watched her measure nitrogen levels, pH levels, organize her planting schedule and over two growing seasons she occasionally provided her sponsors tables with delicious produce. Maxine had found a calling, said her sponsors, she had become adjusted, said her sponsors, her journey towards full membership as a law-abiding and productive citizen of society was nearly complete, said her sponsors.

Maxine considered herself an iconoclast, not in the old sense of image-breaker or destroyer of sacred images but in the modern sense as one who creates original images without references. Not satisfied with received fashions, she carved her own.

There would be no one to stop her this time.

Her second garden, in the woods near school had yielded two harvests of prepared food. Stacked neatly in jars in the basket of a hand rebuilt motorized tricycle. Straddling the bike with the motor running she exhaled a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding inside and remained where she was, engine idling.

She shut off the motor and dismounted the bike, walked on to school, went home to her sponsors, stepped mechanically through her role. No one had guessed the extent of her ingenuity, she could have left, she told herself, she really could have done it.

In bed, pretending to be asleep, Maxine shook with rage, rage at the world, rage at herself, she could leave! She could! Why wasn't she leaving? Exhaustion eventually drove her to unconsciousness. In her dreams she was in prison but there were no bars at the gates, only rows of planted carrots and radishes and tomatoes and peppers. She couldn't pass through the gates without stepping all over the plants, destroying them. Maxine couldn't do it. beyond the gates she saw enormous fields of crops. She knew, with the strange logic of dreams, that those crops were but a small part of her highly industrialized, scientific and productive agricultural enterprise, she need only destroy the little plants in her way to claim her future immediately.

She couldn't do it. Not a step. What her sponsors had failed to do, Maxine had accomplished by accident.

Unconquerable, she had conquered herself.

In bed, Maxine sighed in acceptance, in her dreams, she nursed the plants that barred her way.

68 Wedging in a life between obligation and responsibility

Welcome to Chaos Bar. The owners' table can only be reached by cartwheeling over the heads of the regular patrons and somersaulting into a seat next to the proprietess, she rules the owners' table and by extension much of the world. Murders are not common and even suspicious deaths are rare however last night, a patron was having himself serviced just as a glass jar of scalding hot prepared mushrooms in oil was placed nearby on one of the many marble windowsills by a member of the kitchen staff and the cold marble and the hot jar contrived to shatter the jar and send hot oil and glass shards in every direction, the patron, a British tourist, was badly burned at the point of ecstasy and his service, down on one knee, got up so quickly she accidentally kneed him in his most private area which sent him through plate glass windows into Dining area 3 and that's the best anyone can do to describe it. The paramedics assured us the ultimate cause of death was myocardial infarction, heart attack, they went on to explain the shock had probably killed him long before he went through the glass, every male winced at the thought. It happens.

I come here from time to time and tonight, I'm here with company, it's not much company though, they float from one table to the next, one distraction to the next, when it's time for me to exit stage right, my company appears to want to enter stage left. It happens. Perhaps I'm not much company either, seated at the axis while the whirl revolves around me. 

By contrast, I've seen floor shows at Chaos Bar that make me feel decidedly insignificant. They have truly amazing performers. Schoolyard scenes with angels and demons. All done with lighting gels and leather jackets. Sometimes, in my nightmares, these theatrical cruelties become exaggerated to the frequency of a pure and natural horror and it feels as I might spend the rest of my life trapped inside the Chaos Bar.

In the end, I somehow manage to succeed in my escape, although I always forget my jacket at the coat check and have to go back for it. High tension! However shortly afterwards in my recurring dream, Chaos Bar has once again assumed it's real world aspect, the bouncers and barmen know me again, I take my jacket without incident time after time.

Early morning sunshine finds me on the cobblestones. Fresh air and spilt beer in my nose.

I leave Chaos Bar and my company behind. If they want to stay, let them stay. Chaos Bar is haunted and I'm the last in the circle still alive.

I'll probably be back tonight.