Archive for the Reversioning life category

Caffeine suicide

An over­whelm­ing sense of self-loathing makes me want to shoot myself in the head in the middle of Star­bucks, spray­ing slith­ers of my brain and skull shrapnel into the Soy Lattes and Tall Skinny Hold The Froth No In Fact Give Me More Froth Give Me More More More Froth Until I Froth From The […]

Three-ring circus

Down on my luck, with a few scrap­ings to my real name and even fewer clip­pings to my vir­tual one, I took myself off to the end of that slow and once grace­ful meander, where the well-heeled lux­uri­ous palaces — built in styles of archi­tec­ture bear­ing their regal inspir­a­tion and car­ry­ing blue plaques pay­ing testament […]

Wake me when the world ends

It’s late, and there’s noth­ing hap­pen­ing here. It’s early, so there’s always some­thing hap­pen­ing over there. Send it down the wires into my lap. At the push of a but­ton I can start a chain of events, unfold­ing them in a far-flung corner that could so eas­ily be the next street. All it would take […]

Thoroughly lost to logic

I have sub­sumed my true iden­tity into an art­fully con­struc­ted ball of elastic, elab­or­ate con­fu­sion. A ball of insist­ently burbling com­mu­nic­a­tion, fol­low­ing hot on the heels of non-brief brief­ings. A ball of incon­sist­ent and even ragged semantics that makes no sense in any lan­guage, be it artistic or tech­nical.
I am play­ing part(l)y polit­ics, even though […]

Unphotographable

I am an imper­fect pho­to­grapher. Impre­cise and imprac­tical. Unprac­tised and ama­teur. The frame that I form between my out­stretched fin­gers is incon­sist­ent, unevenly shaped, plain wrong. My astyg­matic eyes fre­quently fail as a pin-sharp view­finder. My nervous bal­ance and lack of poise turn the focused to fuzzy.
I prefer a statue to a liv­ing and breath­ing entity, […]

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 […]

Gone fishing

Kick off my shoes and go out­side. Grass, gravel, dirt, dust: feel them all sur­ging and stick­ing between my toes. Head down to the dis­used canal — more pic­tur­esque than such an unin­spir­ing loc­a­tion has any right to be — to find my favour­ite bench along the quietest stretch, just before the incline, and sit. […]

A purple shade of sabotage

Up and over and over and out. Diving from flesh I emerged freshly spittle wrecked, chased by creatures con­jured up by the warped reflec­tion of someone I no longer regard or recall, and a someone from whom I would no longer recoil if only I had the strength. But not me, right? Never me, right?
I crashed […]

Soulweaving songs

They dis­ap­peared when I couldn’t sleep or when my slum­ber was chem­ic­ally induced, but now, dur­ing these warm nights when everything phys­ical rests as other scur­ry­ing foot­steps turn my mind’s fix­tures and fit­tings upside down, the soul­weavers come to me on a fre­quent basis.
I wake in the cradle of dark­ness, my can­opy briefly illu­min­ated every few […]

Clicks and buzzes

Time is of the essence, and it would appear that I have fifty-seven minutes of essence remain­ing to me. Fifty-seven minutes. At the third stroke. Pre­cisely.
There is a great tempta­tion to use it all up at once, repeat­ing famil­iar key pat­terns until they die out on the line, obsessive-compulsive in the extreme. Instead I ration […]

Tomorrowing

So I’m look­ing before I leap, before I strike, before I dive. This is one of those even­ings where I feel as if I’m about to go down in his­tory like a lead-weighted grand piano, down to this Devil-forsaken town. Hold my hand as we take to these litter-strewn streets together.
The way you speak to […]

Sentences seeking approbation

I would like to say that there is a snak­ing queue of words here, with each noun, verb and adject­ive wait­ing to make its pres­ence felt upon the clean white sheet of this vir­tual page. But there isn’t.
I had a brief dream, an even more fleet­ing vis­ion, of groups of let­ters leap­ing into the blue — […]

Daubed in timeless town

I need to go to Paris in the spring­time. I am under strict self-instruction to search the alleys and back streets, just as the winter chill is turn­ing to mild warmth and the rain­drops chan­ging from spit­ting to sooth­ing. I need to solve a mys­tery. My mis­sion is to find a mes­sage left for […]

Scrawl me sometime

No no no, you mis­un­der­stand me. Hav­ing always had a repu­ta­tion for pos­sess­ing the most impec­cably neat hand­writ­ing, it’s sur­pris­ingly encour­aging to know that when I write on a screen using a mouse or in the con­dens­a­tion of a wintry win­dow using my right index fin­ger, I have the unleashed and mani­acal scrawl of a […]

Too much real life

‘Blog­ging is all about real life.’ Dis­cuss this state­ment point­lessly, mak­ing detailed ref­er­ences to your own drab exist­ence. Sharp imple­ments may not be used. Write in blunt crayon only, please.
My favour­ite people — those I call friends, some whom I call con­fid­ants — all pos­sess an uncanny skill of mak­ing a seem­ingly innoc­u­ous state­ment worm […]