Maude

Not many people are called Maude these days, so when you have one in your family you treasure them.

Nobody really knows, or knew, how old Maude was, but she was definitely an auntie, a cousin, not so distant as to be a rumour and close enough to qualify for friends status on Facebook.

Maude looked old, when you were young. But when you turned 30 Maude looked 50, and when you were 50 she looked 55. If you thought about it, it seemed that she’d been around forever but nobody could remember first meeting her.

Maude, my sister said, once was married. But her love died in a fire, and now she doesn’t talk about it. My sister didn’t tell me how she knew, but I knew she was exactly correct. I never mentioned this to Maude when I saw Maude, which was often enough to update on college or work or kids but not often enough to hold hands.

You wouldn’t call her an old lady if you saw her up close, you just wouldn’t. But from afar, yes, in a certain light, from a certain angle, here was a weariness to her gait. And you wouldn’t want to, dare to, stare into her eyes for too long. My sister said she did it once, and she would never talk about what she saw there.

My sister says a lot of things like that.

What was undeniable about Maude was that she was probably the richest woman the world had ever known. Maude owned her house, never seemed to be troubled by gas or electric or petrol or utilities bills, meaning that all her money was always hers. The fact that she didn’t have any money to speak of didn’t seem to bother her. So she was rich.

Her house was warm, and she owned no television. Maude was one of those that said things like ‘nothing good will come of a word that is half Latin and half Greek,’ and then tell you who’d first said that. She liked the library, did Maude. Even these days. There, she could listen to music on a borrowed Walkman, CD, Minidisc, MP3, neural-implant, depending on which timeline she was in.

Her favourite bands included Mahler, All Time Low and Adam and the Ants. She didn’t care much for Mozart, who she always said was a twiddly-iddly little sop whose PR game was stolen from Saatchi and Saatchi down a wormhole.

But then, Maude could be obtuse.

My sister has gone to see Maude today. Maude, she says, is feeling low. I hope my sister phones soon, because I’d like to know the latest news. My sister came to my wedding and caught the bouquet from me when I married Severiano. Seve is a good man and works hard and wants six kids, four cats, a couple of dogs, but is against caging birds up and hooray to that say I. Life is full of these little compromises.

Seve doesn’t get on with Maude. He says she reminds him of his own aunt, or cousin, who he finds creepy because she lives in a cave-house in the south of Spain, and doesn’t seem to ever want to engage with the world all that much. Seve says he asked her once why she never married, but her eyes glazed over and he knew that was going to be the end of that conversation. He never brought it up again. His own aunt – Marisol was her name – just wanted to sit and watch the sun rise, the clouds cross the sky, and the sun set. She never seemed to have any food in the house, but she never seemed to be hungry either.

My Seve says that once he visited her and made sure he visited the Mercado, where he bought some beautiful, beautiful fresh fish and some fennel and herbs. He cooked them lunch, and they ate without speaking. Marisol didn’t touch the fish, though.

The next time he visited – maybe a month later, he thinks – Marisol had a pond, in which you could swear that you’d see hake swimming about which made no sense at all when you thought about it.

So Seve, being a practical chap, didn’t.

He has gone to visit Marisol this week too. I have sent her some of the flower seeds she so loves. I wonder if begonias will thrive in Clint Eastwood-land? That’s another favourite of Maude’s. Clint Eastwood. Not as an actor, just the way he stares beyond the horizon. My sister says that Maude says that Clint knows.

We don’t know what that means, but it seems to make sense if you don’t think about it too much.

I hope my sister rings soon.

I hope Seve travels safely. Before he gets back I need to find the wedding album - it's the only shots of him that I've got. He doesn't much care for Facebook and such. He says it's not real. Of course, I say, that's the point. But he doesn't bother and well, to each his own, and all that. He's a good man.

One day, we hope that Maude and Marisol will meet. We try and tell them both that they would be happy and have lots in common. Maude is prone to nodding just enough to make you believe she’s heard you, and enough to make you think that she’s on board. Marisol, I’m not so sure about. My Spanish isn’t so great and her English is.

Her English is.

Marisol told Seve once that there was a place in every town where you could stand and watch the world spin against the sky. He is trying to find it in our town. But he can’t. Marisol says that the trick is not to look too hard; everything is always moving, she says. All you have to do is move a little the other way. Cameras can see it, she says, but only until they have stolen enough parts of people’s souls away.

There aren’t any pictures of Marisol, anywhere.

__

My sister rang. She says Maude has gone. There will be no funeral, at Maude’s request. My sister says it is all taken care of. She will be staying a while to sort it all out and there’s no need to come down. I could hear her voice was tired. She seemed a little intense, now I think about it. The line was bad; she was calling from afar. It was crackly. She sounded ancient with all the pressure.

I hope Seve travels safely.

27/11/2015

BREAKING NEWS - French Polishers Ad Kid “Still A Twat”

STAFF, AGENCY REPORTS - 

RESEARCHERS have concluded that the kid from the Yellow Pages ad where he phones up to fix his table is ‘still a twat.'

The discovery was made by boffins from Hoegaarden University of Popular Culture in Groenigen, Netherlands after years of painstaking study of the available material.

Professor Cornelius Funk said in a paper published in Journal Of The Culture that, “We first studied the phenomenon through his stupid fucking monobrow and  his dickwad hair,” which alerted scientists to the possibility of arseholery.

He explained that the teen dingbat appeared to have woken up in the aftermath of a party, albeit a tame-looking one given the lack of any evidence of proper fun.

“His nobhead shirt simply added to the pile of data but our suspicions were finally proven by the fact that this obviously spoilt little fucker immediately knew how to search for a French Polisher when he noticed a poxy little scrape on his wanky fucking table,” said the Professor.

Since the ad was first aired in 1991 the Internet has revolutionised the way people communicate but Professor Funk said that even had the polisher been summoned virtually, the findings still would have been the same.

“The way the French Polisher was contacted was studied but proven to be irrelevant to the context,” he continued. “We had no other conclusion than this kid was, indeed, still a twat in 2015.”

"He is no doubt still a virgin," added the boffin.

He revealed that his team Hoegaarden University was now poring over initial data which seemed to indicate that, ‘The bird coming out the shower,’ was ‘Still fit.’ 

Full findings are yet to be announced.

And the winning numbers are...

Nearly done

You know that feeling, when you're near the edge of a cliff, or walking on a high bridge, or even at the side of a busy road. You know the voice?

The voice saying: jump.

Every other fibre of your being and your brain and your body knows not to do so. But there's a compulsion, somewhere, deep down, that shouts to be acknowledged.

You never do, of course. But there is a what if... somewhere, and it rises and wiggles and tickles until a car beeps or a seagull cawks or you feel a rivet under your steps. Then things snap back into place and self-searching is replaced by talking or thinking of where you're going or what's for tea instead.

This is how I feel today about work.

I've written 85k in about six or seven weeks for a book project and it's all reasonably serviceable stuff. Maybe even good. I think it's not too bad.

And I think I'm going to be able to finish the writing phase today. It's definitely only about four hours' more of work. I have the research and the ideas and the rhythm all down. Just really allowing all that to percolate and make itself ready.

And I've got this voice saying: Why not just delete those emails to myself with the drafts; delete all the bookmarks; delete all the research; throw out all the albums and the music; set Word to 'replace all' with the text of a Snoopy book?

God it's a rascal feeling that. You know the one. I think I've proved I can do it so why bother actually finishing? Keep it pure as an idea. Stop it now, whilst it's still just me and a computer and songs and interviews and research. You know?

I am so seduced by the nihilism of this that I have allowed it to flourish in my head, even whilst every fibre of my being, and all that, knows not to do it.

I'm going for a cup of tea. Then I'm going to finish my book.

But first, I'm going to pretend that I'm going to delete it from existence. What japes.

Two Thousand-Fifteen

People talk about feeling the walls closing in on them. But it’s the opposite. 

The Internet is a vast expanse of everything and nothing and meanings everywhere.

But everywhere you stand the meanings and everythings shift and are different. It’s endless strands of nothingness; a mulch, a mush, a mashup of moments divorcing and remarrying at every instant. It’s endless snakes around your ankles, a mobius Ourobourous of patterns that make no sense and all sense at the same time. To stand up amidst this multidirectional, multimetan infinity is impossible.

The walls don’t ever close in: That’s the problem. Walls would make sense of it. Enclose a space. Define something. Allow the unpicking of some of the living tangle. Bring time to it.

Instead, the data does not flow but cancers itself through every possible atom there ever is or ever was. And it’s always moving, always mutating, always self-reflecting and spewing itself back out again in infinite copies of itself.

You, too, are data. You are tangled, mutant, strands of nothing. A double helix is nothing against such infinite power of averaging, of flatlining, of the race to a million billion shades of the same grey mush that was so seductive before it began; before we truly worked out that our worship was as useless as the god we created.

Deifying data killed information. Meaning is nothing. Everything is there, ready to be dislocated and briefly believed before being cast away in favour of the next shard, the new speckled lie. The trumpets of Jericho hailed nothing but the deluge. You can’t drown in it but you sure can’t swim. The best anyone can hope to do is to float, eyes open but mind shut against the constant frazzling ordure of meaningless input. Input, input, input, and there is nothing you can do because you invited it over the threshold.

Consumption has been replaced by infinite doses of data dressed in whatever flimsy masquerade suits the moment. The moment has been destroyed by the repetition of the infinite copy, the final and the perfect divorcing of linearity from humanity. Data units so numerous that they choke all meaning, that they bury context in a damp dust of input, input, input.

If you want an image of the future, imagine a lorryload of sand flowing into a human mind, forever.

Xmas gifts special (1)