Archive for December, 2007

One minute passed at one minute past

Where does all the time go? Sixty seconds have already happened, lost back there somewhere, and I’ve barely begun. Damn this ceaseless, onward march.
I know, I know it all very well, via more years of experience than I wish to catalogue right here and right now, since we’ve only got a few minutes left. I have […]

Footprints in Snow

Caught, trapped, wrapped and woollen bound in a complete whiteout, a winter wonderland of sorts, with my fingers little more than a faded monochrome mere millimetres from my face. I can almost believe that nothing else exists - that nothing else ever existed - beyond my protective wall of rusting wire.
The ever-buzzing hive, the thriving […]

The World’s Worst Eskimo

The World’s Worst Eskimo was sitting in my living-room, sipping from a mug of cocoa clasped between her trembling, frozen hands. The chattering of her teeth quite drowned out the reassuringly dull drone of the passing traffic, five floors below, as it headed for the consumerist bright lights and a frenzied bout of last gasp […]

Unsent letter #8

Dear You,

Give or take a day or two, and more or less half a memory away, it struck me this afternoon, like a forceful blow to the back of the neck from a malevolent spirit, that it has been a full year since this still regrettably one-sided correspondence began.
Such thoughts frequently occur to me when I am […]

Dancing about architecture

Here begins an urban fairytale.
Staying in is the new going out. It’s the new black. It’s what everyone’s wearing this season. I don’t get out much, as a rule. Out is overrated. Too much of a muchness. I prefer staying in, carefully tending to small outcrops of dead skin cells as if they were plants, watching […]

Work and non-work

It is going to be a long day. A very long day indeed. As I sit here, mentally steeling myself for a five-hour ‘business event’ that is surely going to be the 21st century equivalent of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s films of a Nazi rally - only slightly less enjoyable, and with none of the […]

Skin-written

I cannot control my skin, so I etch on it for temporary relief. Scratch out the feverish, black-bloodied letters onto the milky white. I should get out more, or else fade into so much greying and decaying and gone, finely dusted.
The nib bumps over the dry, flaky surface. Don’t scratch, don’t itch, don’t retch, don’t […]