"an experimental approach to understanding burnt fish bone"

The rain threatened, a sickly purple glowering, and I was listening again to some Charles - Bukowski not Ray - while my wife dressed the baby between coffees. '90 Minutes in Hell', via Nothin' in Sacramento.

Three short damaged pieces. I did not get so far as 'May Make Paris Yet'.

The readings are almost perfect, the theatrics of the title forgivable, his delivery - the timing - telling. Charles was acquainted with his own failings more intimately than most.

The mildly wheedling Hollywood inflection reminds me a lot of Bernstein - Steven Jesse, not Leonard - despite the younger man's relocation to Seattle; a maladjusted adolescent in oversized glasses. Pimpled round the edges.

The tone of each reminds me of all that is fine in poetry.

It startles me greatly that some are quick to dismiss his writing as miserable, coming out the armchair with scalpel blade as bookmark in their 'Grapes of Wrath'. Stabbing at perceived haemorrhoids, 'Their Finest Art' made tumorous flesh. Carver, for example, strikes me as more acutley grim. Editorially concise. Even while I admire the economy.

I don't know. There is nothing so silkily noir in those utterances from a bungalow with the drapes half drawn. Just the sense of making sense of routine.

Restriction. Absurdity. Disability.

We bundled Milo into his buggy and set out for the second hand shops permeating Dumbarton Road. An outdoor market. The rain held off for a little more than half an hour.

I had the most peculiar dream much later, in the early hours of the morning, with our youngest son waking us for the third time before the grey of 5 AM.

I saw a book opened in front of me. A line or two in sharp relief.

"...Red on the outside with blackened channels, charred transgressions touching 1 mm at the bone."

I could not make sense of it. It conjured for me notions of plague. Bubonic transmissions. That "1 mm", though, seemed altogether too modern. Anatomically precise.

The metric overture to an excision.

I sat in front of the desktop monitor after I'd made coffee and punched open a tab. Googled the line as I remembered it. The computer is growing too sluggish to be smartly useful, the beach ball spins and idles. Like its operator, it may require therapy. Psychiatric intervention.

The search unexpectedly yielded more than one result. Nothing verbatim, but close enough.

"illustrate the taphonomic complexity involved in the formation of burnt fish .... transgression, supra-tidal berm building, ... fragments smaller than 1 mm in size. ..."

"DNA from burnt bone in the early stages of burial. Nicholls. (2000) also considered bone mass as a ...... in the site at all levels, particularly in the 1 mm fraction'. ...... transgression (c.6000 BP). Thus, the archaeological record ..."

More than a possibility, then. "An Experimental Approach to Understanding Burnt Fish Bone"; something more vaguely archaeological. Well. I am no chef. I might occasionally dabble with sauces on the side, but my capability with fish is strictly third rate. Raw tuna; a breaded haddock tossed under the grill.

I don't remember consulting any recipe. Less, any stone cold treatise. Locked in Mesozoic deposits.

This conundrum, such as it is, is more curious than debilitating.

King Charles' 90 minutes - 12-14 of them, at least - has again given me pause for thought. The finances are not good, but I am working up contingencies. Drumming up a sweat.

The poetry waits in its implementing.

The telephone rang.

"Hello, " a passive aggressive voice intoned. A woman's voice. Crisply officious, faintly bored. "We have your son here at the office. He does not look too good."

"Well, " I said. "That's a matter of opinion."

"No. He does not look good. Period. You will have to collect him."

I left for the bus stop with a bottle of Peptac Liquid in a plastic carrier bag. Aniseed. The Peptac Liquid, not the bag. There is a world of difference between heartburn and underlying condition. When I was a young man, I suffered from heartburn a good part of the time.

A little Milk of Magnesia always worked a treat.

"Hey," I greeted my older son. Bowed over on the bench and clutching his chest. "How are you feeling ?"

When I was staring at my teens, the notion of credentials got in the way. I decided I had not lived enough. That all good writers must first acquire a consumptive skin; tanned by alcohol, at least, like Kerouac. Yage, as with our more exotic Uncle Bill.

Except for Hemingway.

Even strawberry nosed bank managers, I knew, sought quite earnestly to emulate that inflated florid robustness. Right down to the ridiculously tidy maritime cap. Seemingly reserved for holidaying in remote Scottish parts; possibly called upon as an aphrodisiac where oysters failed.

The irony, of course, is that Kerouac - up on bricks - was more often off, than on the road. Visions of Neal. Cody. The train hurtling past his bedroom window as he sat at a desk and fed white paper in and out.

It was the rhythm which appealed to me, I think. The music of it. Before Eliot. Plath. Camus. Joyce. Stone. Trocchi. Ezra pounding.

An unabashed exuberance. Sharp creases duly crumpling.

"Listen," I said. "It's all simple chemistry. The litmus test."

Well. You are familiar enough with dipping those little squares of paper. Coming up red or indigo, occasionally a neutral yellow green. The rainbow in a bruise.

It's all the forensics I know.

It's why the Latin crash course feels so apposite. I am less taken with dispassionate bebop, possibly, than the heat of the rash. Heartburn. Thrush. Immediacy.

'An anger which moves', emphatically.

Maybe a Pablo could make sense of it all.

And my older son ? Thank you for asking, he's doing quite well. A lukewarm glass of milk was all it took. At a pavement cafe. Stay with me awhile, and we'll maybe figure it out.

Cold suite to follow.

incremental air strikes

Incoming.

It had all the ingredients of some kind of coup d'état. What began with an 8:30 AM jaunt to the labour exchange - "wash n' go", the knives safely locked away for sharpening - saw me madly waving in the coordinates for an air strike less than one hour later.

Cellphone in hand. Leaning out over the geraniums on our balcony.

There was no rumbling approach of tanks. No three-wheeled baby carriages, even.

While insurgents were busy strafing Gaddafi's compound with heavy calibre machine guns mounted in flatbed trucks, an old friend of mine had lost her bearings.

"What's that ? " I screamed into the phone. "Just follow the road straight on down. No, no. Right, I said. Turn right."

My wife left the baby with me to go and intercept my friend and her four-year-old daughter. Needless to say, they missed each other by a couple of streets.

I windmilled my arms and paced back and forth like Fidel on his mountain in 1957. I lit a cigarette. It has been years since I have been close to a good cigar.

Fidel might have been dribbling a basketball, still, in baseball shoes.


We met up. We drank some coffee and ventured back out to collect my friend's five-year-old from school. He has just completed his first week there; my older son, his first out of the primaries. One through seven. Not an election in sight.

On the way there, her daughter stumbled and split her knee. The blood was streaming into her shoes. She did not cry. She is made of sterner stuff.

Her five-year-old was immensely affable. Dispensing observations on the nature of the duckbill platypus. And snakes. The hooded cobra, to be precise.

His sister imprisoned Milo in a chalk circle. Fitted dancing shoes on his little sockless feet.

We made our way home in the middle of the afternoon. Stopped off at the supermarket for groceries. The leaves on the trees have not begun to redden quite yet, but it is coming all the same. We turned the corner and caught up with our three older children, in time to redistribute the weight.

The key had scarcely turned in the lock when my stepdaughter stepped on the mail. Airmail, at that. Incremental Decrepitude. #1.

All the way from Connecticut.

Well. It's author, Dave Brushback, claims to have borrowed the title from one of my posts. I don't know. I'm immensely flattered, of course. I'm astounded that he managed to turn it around.

It has been a while since I've fallen back from the monitor into hard copy. The issue of obsession. Photographs; copy; the works.

"This issue was made entirely by hand.
Which is why you probably didn't get one."

The digital revolution has been something of a godsend to all manner of peons, the world around, on and off the bleachers. One base on an overthrow. The elimination of the need for camera ready artwork. Paste-up. The prerequisite to get to grips with paper; to wrestle with pagination.

A staple through one's index finger.

Newspaper is all but finished. News International, PLC. It strikes me, though, that should it all come down - incrementally, all at once - the digital paragraph will be the first to fail. SMS; ADSL.

Just goes to show. Don't throw your hat in the air next time those NATO jets scroll by. Or raise a clenched copper fist. How does one know if the postman knocks a third time, if nobody's home to hear it ?

GET YOUR COPY HERE.

book of job

leonaert bramer, circa 1630.


Good things, it is said, come to those who wait.

In my experience, it is more often a case of the postman's second knock. A bum rap. Seldom - if at all - a welcome intrusion. Chinaski in tissue overshoes.

And puddles on the stairs.

Our mail, it is observed, largely arrives by brown envelope. From somewhere in Manila. Unwanted circulars. Bills and warrants, more commonly. Harbingers of farther ill tidings.

Knock-knock, the door goes. The letterbox.

In the absence of the giro - an anachronism - it is safer to remain in bed, the kitchen, to wait for the kettle to boil out the dread. The toast to pop. Or steam seal the cigarette paper, still on tiptoe, a resting bus conductor driven by fears.

No news is good news, they are wont to say, too, fudging the issue.

In the event that first avalanche of mail drops like a stone; ill met by a sneer or ritual sign of the cross, the expected lottery result.

An ashen face fallen to scowling. A fermented apple, sourly caving in on itself.

I mention this, by way of habit. Better by far to prepare for the worst.

There is no mileage in premature ejaculation beyond the inevitable anticlimax, the disappointing end to a coveted false start. Better by far to dress for a funeral when all are making wedding plans. Better to buy in a litre or two of lamp black paint.

Then again. One would not want it said that one was parsimonious. In terms of casting runes.

Ejecting the unsolicited.

Even druids must have good days, though the very sound of it seems a contradiction. A sacrificing of verisimilitude.

I know of one druid at least who was always smiling, through one catastrophe to the next, it was his preordained lot to nod where others might wince. It was in his nature. The first time the mob turned on him he embraced it quite affably, the fool, they turned him upside down and the idiot grin did not falter. Without a hint of the Biblical, let's get that straight. He was as heathen as they come.

He spent some time in dharma. Absconded from it quite unpenitent.

"I don't know," he said, coming up for air on the Ducking Stool. "It's all so much water under the bridge."

Well. Such was his crime. When it all came down, he was unable to relinquish the predilection to paint a good face on it. An Easter egg. A beating.

In much the same way, it might be argued, I am inured to all talk of frogs; boils; gnats and lice. Staff and rod, and smiting.

Let my people go.

A caravan of wind-up amputees falling down. Marching off the table.

goodbye blackberry way

montage by ib.


While the bleachers blistered through July into the beginning of August, it was never going to get hot enough to legitimately demand intensive care. The contrast of just a few degrees makes all the difference.

I largely avoided commentary on the London riots because, in common with most of those people who immediately started banging on the pots and pans as luncheon vochers spontaneously smouldered - erupting in flames from one borough to the next - my perspective on it seemed indelibly coloured by what I watched on TV. As close to 'live' as it gets. From the comfort of my greasy spot on the carpet.

In short, I was not actually at the game; I had little enough foresight to even book a seat.

The temptation was there from the outset to lay claims that those tensions ignited by the shooting of a twenty-nine-year-old man in Tottenham were somehow inevitable. Darcus Howe, a shade hysterically, played the disaffected race card as invited by the BBC in the televised autopsy which (inevitably) ensued, but his exaggerated wielding of a scalpel - to seek to draw parallels with events in 1985 - seemed ill-advised and hopelessly out of touch.

Neither did he seem in possession of incontrovertible material facts.

The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan by police no doubt sparked unrest; the wholesale rioting which followed directly on its heels was wholly cynical and opportunistic.

Engineered by a welter of Fagins on Blackberry phones. A closed network choreographing its own closed network of very damaged children.

It is ironic that the very device which proved so effective in galvanizing support in the election campaign which would return the world's first black president - Obama might have lost the race to the Whitehouse if not for his Blackberry - should, three years later, play a key role in such meticulously orchestrated looting and civil disorder. Adopted by every Artful Dodger seeking to grab a slice of pie before the authorities fell out of bed. The last gang in town.

It is not remotely credible to attempt to politicize events, none of which have even spurious parallels with civil unrest as reported elsewhere in the world. Greece. Syria. It has nothing to do with the overturning of an inalienably corrupt regime; it has little to do with the post-apocalyptic living death of capitalism. Unless one digs deep beneath the rubble.

There was no targeting of government collateral, here. No attempt to besiege fiscal infrastructures, beyond the occasional corner shop ATM.

Plain and simple, those London riots in 2011 were nothing more than an unexpurgated shopping spree: the sociopathic desire to line the pockets of a purloined pair of Georgio Armani slacks.

Should a mother and her children accidentally burn to death in the process, should local businesses fail, it is of no consequence. Like hooded rats, the tide of lobotomized youth simply out-pedals the screams; returning home to their lairs by bike to deposit the spoils.

Mick Farren made an enlightened stab at it, but got it only partly right:

"A tribe of Sids Vicious without a Joe Strummer among them."

John Simon Ritchie might have been empty as a hole without a Lydon or McLaren, but Strummer, too, had his Simonon and Rhodes. Uncle Bernie. There are a million Sids in tens of thousands of decrepit council estates - from East London to Merseyside, Wolverhampton to Easterhouse - but the element of iconic nihilism lacks hard currency.

This isn't a youth movement. It's genocide in the waiting.

Consumerism in extremis, a plague of locusts operating with impunity.

In this era of bland conformity, hive mentality, the events of last week are nothing more than England's 'Trumpton Riots'; as superficial and lacking in substance as any cretin mugging his way vacuously into this year's final of the X-Factor.

An audition. An experiment in CCTV containment.

Flummoxed ?

Don't be. In the final analysis, this is England's just reward. No future. No vision. No hope for evacuation.

Police and Thieves, with scarcely a unform in sight.

London may have burned for three and a half minutes, but the object of its charring was not a tinderbox of parliamentary misrule, so much as a sofa on Reeves Corner, Croydon. Too unwieldy - or just plain ugly - to stash in the back of a ringed white van.

the grape, the grate, and me

photograph: the old kichen window, and others, by rosa b.


Me and the grape appear to have come to a parting of the ways.

Whether we are finished, or whether he is merely on holiday, is cause for some debate. A sobering thought. Either way, our rules of engagement - the gushing over that till death do us part - are on ice.

I was turning the bacon. Musing on the convoluted paths we've trod. We used to get on together so famously, stopping some way short of setting the house on fire, but lately things have turned a little sour. Routinely I might wake in the morning, sharing the outline of a long-running joke into the pillow, only to find he'd fled.

Closing the door mid conversation with a whisper.

Bedroom. Kitchen. The parlour with its shades of the morning after partly drawn.

Of course. Many sip their share of one-night-stands. Illicit slumberings between the decades. The grape slowly maturing. We took comfort in each other's arms, certainly, neither one of us giving the advantage. Shook hands quite amicably in a gentleman's agreement; while the hands simply shook in the morning.

The times we had.

I remember when we both fell out with cousin jack - sometimes 'Jack', more often 'Mr. Walker'; what's in a name ? - his humour ran a little dry. Shallow as a snorting drain.

"What's that all about ?" me and the grape exclaimed, in unison, when jack fell heavy on a curse. And did not make it up off the floor again.

Well. We gave that bum his marching orders. Sent him to Coventry before the quarter broke out in flames. Again. Let's not split hairs; we met up occasionally from time to time, Mr. Walker turning up unannounced in that awful raincoat peppered with holes - bowed over with heartburn and remorse - but things seldom flowed quite the same. Too dark and unsavoury by far, for my liking. Blood in the urine. Staining the bowl.

Me and the grape frequently argued about it. The easy option, to forgive, forget.

This was something which was spoken about at length. Never resolved. And, too, there was that small matter of walker's continuing peccadillos behind our backs. Nothing wholly outrageous, true, but a source of irritation nonetheless. Extramarital affairs. Innuendo. It did not sit well. Untidy as the wrong bottle cap screwed down at sixes and sevens, a dribbling tap which could not be turned off. No matter how determinedly one went at it.

He never could exert one ounce of self-control.

That is not to say we did not miss him. I did not miss him. We exchanged letters all through that winter he was in stir, but I refused to visit in person.

And let's not forget to consider how we were always moving in opposing directions. All the way back to god knows where. In the rain. The snow. Throughout it all, me and the grape remained tight. Thick as thieves. If jack fell asleep at the wheel of the getaway car, we two were never at fault. Of that I am more than certain.

He ought never to have fallen in with us in the first instance. We ought to have been more careful.

Of course, it's easier to read the bluff when the cards are finally laid out for all to see. Palms up, hands raised. Hindsight is a peculiar thing. Like taking aim through the back end of a telescopic sight, tracking a bead straight along the barrel to where the eye yawns huge; unblinking.

I think on this as I ladle the bacon over on itself, the pools of crackling fat.

It has been some time now, but I cannot say I miss the grape. Not really.

Sometimes - fixing breakfast, for example - I wonder if the grape and jack might not have been in cahoots all along. Conspiring against me. Enjoying a laugh at my expense. That is the problem with people like that. One might spend all one's years in and out their company, for better and worse, but one never knows for sure.

Oh, we were tight alright. You can't take that away.

But how well does one ever know what makes another person tick ? Especially in a bind. For all I know, the grape and jack are living it up with ginnie, mary - the hired help - while I am alone here in the kitchen. Pouring over a mess of scorched flesh. Eggs breaking wind.

When all's said and done, people like that are no end of trouble. Jack shit. The grape included. And you know how much I loved him.

Come here a moment. Listen. Did I ever tell you all about that one time me and the grape and mean jack black got ourselves in the most ridiculous scrape ?

milo

milo, by rosa b.

three from the tombs

the gorbals, 2008. photographs by rosa b.


Of course, this is not the first that I have pried up the corners of anonymity. Cautiously. An ill advised act of self sabotage, I am inclined to believe.

The faint waft of marzipan. Imagined sulfur.

The forensic evidence - provided by my now wife - is of your sibling from a period sometime in 2008. Or 9. Broadly coinciding with the first phase of 'regeneration' which prompted my wandering out onto the bleachers. Driven by the starting pistol in a convoluted demolition derby. At first glance, it appears to capture the no longer quite so young bohemian in pensive mood. Hangover is by far the safest scenario; the attempt to memorize a shopping list, windows ablaze, the greenhouse effect. Nothing of substance can be seen through the fragment of glass between lower face and shirt cuff. A bottle. A four storey blur down on the street.

On the whole it is a quite flattering representation. I have come across much worse.

The second photograph in the above series of three opens a window on the universe we inhabited until September last year. The third, by its nature, is more easy to document with confidence: a little after 9:30 AM, July 1st, 2008; south west as the crow flies, shot from my kitchen window. They did not bother to evacuate us that first time. The building rumbled up through our feet, the panes rattled.

When it was done, I may have curtsied like a fighter in the tenth round. Glass jaw exposed. Weaving back to my stool after a mandatory count.

Our very diluted Hiroshima.

We breakfasted and dined on dust. Teeth rudely pulled. Marveling at the cavities.

Three from the tombs, midnight to six.

For lack of USB support, nothing was uploaded.

Our camera - my wife's camera, to be precise - met its end sometime over Christmas that same year. The result of a tumble, I am told. Did it fall or was it pushed ? The former, I suspect. We did not replace the camera until very recently. Either way, that the flash card survived is some cause for relief. Perversely more robust than those undeveloped spools of old. I have allowed too many memories to wither and fade. In and out their can. The fridge. A stretched canvas paling over sprockets.

Twelve years ago, when I stepped out of the elevator onto the 22nd floor, I was of a mind to establish a dark room of sorts. In two minds, more accurately. The walk-in cupboard never proved inviting enough. The electricity meter jostling for supremacy from behind the coats like drapes.

So it is we resurrected something of the path between Bridge Street and Partick, and several stops between. The stuttering trajectory of a clockwork orange.

Ripened. Squeezed. Poured.

Well. The temptation largely prevails to bombard one and all with snapshots of Milo. My youngest son. To blow the lid for good. For various reasons, this unsettles me vaguely. I might ask him, of course, to waive all rights; I might take a wobbly grin as tacit consent.

Tottering without guile as I ink his little thumb on a plate of pureed tomato. For the record.

For better or worse I have resisted the urge.

Some time last year my wife encouraged me to apply to the Creative Writing Programme at Glasgow University. Much of the material which formed the basis for my portfolio submission was culled from pieces originally published here. It is quite some time since I have dabbled in academic circles. A quarter of a century. Their offer of a place took me a little by surprise.

So did the announcement that my wife was pregnant. Those routine demands of a baby. A move across the city, fortuitous though it was.

I deferred until this year. I accepted a renewed offer.

Well, wait just a second. While I am elated to have at least secured the opportunity, the end result is far from a foregone conclusion. Not even here is funding at postgraduate level a given. The not insignificant cost of tuition fees.

All the thornier when one is seemingly unemployable, a burden on the public purse.

Am I boring you yet ? Is that cr@ss enough for you ?

Still. I have determined to somehow do it. This may be my last stab at turning things around. I have applied to an assortment of trusts, of course. Those ones for which I am even shakily eligible. The activity of drafting 'begging' letters fills me with dread. Some days I have embraced it quite enthusiastically, some days I am given over to crippling anxieties.

A general proclivity to fall in line with the great economic downturn of our times.

I mention this merely as a means of belatedly lancing the boil. To spill my cards out on the table.

I have never been much of a one for poker.

The wise money, granted, may predictably ride on those who play their diamonds and spades close to their chest. Red and black. The short odds.

Frankly, I am sick and tired of the yellow.

Better to let it all hang out. Better to deck the empty bleachers with steaming crimson coils.

family guy

I picked up two books
from the 2nd hand store.


Kinky Friedman;
Early Dashiell Hammett.
A zippered jacket for Milo
with embroidered dogs.


It is much too big for him,
Still.


Of the two exercises in
Running to Seed,
I prefer the Hammett.


Hard Spined.
Hard Boiled.


Not quited there yet,
Flawed,
better between Sacramento
and Tijuana. The Hop.


My older son's hair
has grown way past
Shoulder-length.
All but half way to
His ass.


I am itching to cut it,
to escort him to the barbers.


Such are those mundane
Things
which prompt me to
Log in. Out.


I creak, and I cough, and I pace.
Quite the
Old School motherf@cker.

@sshole

A couple of days ago, I was deliberating on the apparent demise of certain voices. Some articulate pockets of resistance. Querulous individuality.

"The curious vilage of Blog houses a fragile temple. Twatter made a dent on it. Bookface corroded its foundation," I wrote.

Of course, that is only part of it. The relief is that quite so many voices persist.

Well. I was cataloguing those both currently above and below the radar - outlining the beginning of a tentative line of enquiry - when I inadvertently hit the 'publish' button. A case of spastic finger, no less. My surety of touch is slowly failing; along with my once adequate vision. My gums. My teeth.

The error was quickly contained, I thought. I killed the wayward article and promptly set out to the park to feed some ducks. A ballet of swans, I am told. Dispersing stale bread with impunity.

I had not counted on the RSS feed, though. I was too embroiled with tagged birds. Beaks. The blanket tucked over my baby's feet.

In my own absence - again - my in-tray has become so coagulated, that I can no longer depend on automated devices. Bells and whistles. I scratch my head and dither this way and that. Sniffing my underarms. Following partial scents.

"Sometimes I have questioned its will to live - in and out of DMCA pogroms; snideful interjections - but mainly, I feel, it is the case that every voice is finite. I am not so fond of Social Networking sites, admittedly, I like to hang my own shit out like a flag. An upended bag of washing. If one rallies around it, fine and dandy, if not I'll still wring out the stain of it in the morning. Mark my last stand with (territorial) pissings."

You get the gist. Nothing substantial enough to warrant publication. The sort of inane rant I am often sadly prone to in unguarded comments, but generally try to avoid up front.

"Shall we gather at the river ?

Only should the washing machine fail. The tumble dryer fuse in the wall."

Still. I got back from the park to find my laundry had been snagged. The sole good thing in this was that it might have prompted the odd hippie bus driver to blow the dust off between the chickens; the hawks; the castrators of prose and poem. The ineffable attraction of cue and recoil.

I have missed the clarity.

Still unresolved is the stubborn silence - too many months now - from @eloh.

There. I have said it, finally.

I hope that you are well. In spite of your daughter's assurances, I have worried. Sometimes it is hard to begin from where one last left off. Chew on the rust.

I have no idea whether you might read this or not.

Don't let the @ssholes grind you down.

falun gong | falun dafa

As I mentioned by way of aside, our recently expanded family of six chanced upon some volunteers and practitioners of Falun Gong in the park.

Actually, there were seven of us. Less than magnificent. Enticed there by the spectacle of carnival atmosphere, our minor logistical nightmare was all but devoured by incipient rainbow of colour. A tattoo of voodoo drums. 

It is something of an annual event, the opening Mardi Gras parade. We do not always make it a date.

I plucked Milo out of his stroller and bundled him to my chest. The path was a scrum of knees and dubbined boots. I feared for his safety this close to the ground.

His stroller is not robust. I envisioned it disintegrating into so much kindling.

An older Chinese woman approached my wife. Three yellow robed devotees of Qigong were engaged in a conspicuously public sitting meditation just feet away from where we loitered.

"Hallo," the woman said to us. "Are you interested in Falun Dafa ? Chinese history ? The Buddha Showing a Thousand arms ?"

Her voice was naturally pitched for intimate conversation. There was a deal of noise in the air - Samba; a welter of Jazz - but in less than two minutes she cut through my Sunday hangover. In less than three, I concluded that I liked her.

She was born some decades before Mao's Year Zero. When the Kuomintang and the Communists were still embroiled in hostilities, quite possibly. 

When she was just six, some party officials took her mother from her and imprisoned her next to her school. She and her siblings made a daily pilgrimage to visit her and speak to her through the narrow windows of what was effectively her cell; to pass her what scraps of food they could gather. After several weeks of this, the party faithful boarded up those windows. Incarcerated and tortured her in the dark.

They kept her like this for several years. When they finally released her - this woman's young mother - she was quite broken. All light in her extinguished.

She told us this and stroked Milo's curious hand. He warmed to her immediately.

Falun Gong is the world's most popular expression of Quigong, an ancient practice flourishing only behind closed doors until recently. In 1992, Li Hongzhi brought it to the public in China. Similar in principle and visual expression to t'ai chi - yoga - by 1998, official reports estimated that between 70 - 100 million Chinese citizens had embraced the practice; a figure intolerable to the Party, not least because it eclipsed CCP membership.

I looked at those people exercising in our Glasgow park.

The practice has been outlawed in China since July, 1999. Relentless persecution since then has not altogether undermined its influence. Such a public display, however, would be unthinkable. Internationally corroborated reports attest to routine organ harvesting among those detained, in addition to wholesale torture and disappearance.

"They take both kidneys, then the heart and the skin and the corneas and the liver, and your body is then thrown into the incinerator"
- David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State.

 "More than 40,000 additional unexplained transplants have been recorded recently in China since 2001"
- Edward McMillan-Scott, European Parliament Vice-President.

We signed the petition.

We queued in front of a studious looking man bowed over a table with ink dipped brush. He translated Milo's name into Mandarin with painstaking precision. Impervious the older kids' awkward push and shove. Extraordinarily focused.

Later that same evening, I watched the first hour of a five part BBC documentary chronicling the rise of the megacity.

Shanghai featured prominently. 

Andrew Marr contends that it now boasts 7,000 billionaires. While those figures have been condemned as wildly innacurate - one report I have read claims there were 'merely' 66 documented billionaires in China in 2010 - it seems to me sadly incontrovertible that while human rights abuses persist on an epic scale, the wider political agenda appears to have been rewritten to accomodate China as economic superpower. 

Its unqualified rehabilitation as free market bedfellow.

Please give your attention to some of those very real case sudies as cited here. Reflect on the calamity in that.

revolution .000

The revolution is not so much on pause, as riven by incertitude.

The click track - you may have observed - has fallen foul of synchronization: Stalling; Steiner, and Bradley. As unreliable as Ukrainian trains. Between Kiev and October.

Burrowing under creaking autonomous sod. Moles. Metro gnomes. Travelling in fits and starts; co-opted SMPTE time.

1/4; 1/8; 1/16.

Incremental decrepitude.

A tree leaning into the broken tooth of a circular saw, filmed for posterity in crackling stop motion.

June 1883. The Chautauquan.

"Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion."

Naked science.

An old African proverb tackles the nature of suddenly uprooted trees with telling prescience:

"Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped."

By extension, keep one foot in front of the other. And don't forget to tie your shoelaces. When not dancing barefoot; or broadcasting 'Radio Ethiopia' before a lolling wave.

Lumberjacking; sawdust traumas; pissing in the river in a force nine gale.

Of course. Mixing metaphors is similarly as perilous, mixing metaphors while mixing one's drinks - injecting intravenously - an ill-advised taboo.

It was not Bill Burroughs who remarked "If we can hit that bullseye then the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards..." but Zapp Brannigan.

Zip gun boogie. Billy West. East. North and South.

"Checkmate". I digress.

The revolution is not so much on pause, as low on ammunition.

One month blurs into another as camel charges in Cairo's Tahir Square give way to rocket salvos over Bin Jawwad; the waters recede in Fukushima to expose fuel rods in meltdown.

Cesium-137. Iodine-121.

Tsunamis. Turbulence in Syria.

A changing of the guard on the road to Damascus.

Four horsemen on overtime. Double time. A plague of Sundays.

Somewhere between one month and the next, the bleachers fell into disrepair. The fiddles went quiet.

The ferryman sailed by, empty-handed. Lantern-jawed. Granite sprung.

The emails gathering one on top of the other like so many dessicated leaves.

Well. I have lost the will to rake the ashes. I began one post and could not see an end to it. The music is of saws and knives. Scraping knotted bone.

Paul of Tarsus can keep his fine opinions to himself.

hypnotizesomeoneforbeginners

My wife seized the wheel
of the skillet,
I took the stool and nursed
a glass of wine.

" You like risotto ?"
she asked.

"I don't mind paella,"
I said.

"It's the same thing, without
the seafood," she went on.

I took a sip.

"Well. I don't care for
anything with peas throught it."

"That's right," she said,
"you like plain rice."

"I like that red and white shit
Better," I allowed,
Admiring the mushrooms as they
Snuffled around the pan.

Noses. Brown leather buttons.

"Yes." she smirked. "And saffron.
Nothing but the best."

I sat a while. Considered this.

Rolled the grape,
Round and round.

"Well. I hope to get a taste again.
Before I kick the bucket."

The mushrooms sizzled.
The baby hiccuped.





It did not seem to go down well.

bounce and rhyme

"Bounce and Rhyme,"
the handbill reads,
"FREE for
Babies under Three!"


So we bring ours.


We arrive at the library
ten minutes late,
The Reading Room
filled with noise,
Cleared of books,
Smoke,
An ocean of mothers
cross legged
on turquoise carpet,
Gurgling parcels
Dangled in velour lap.


Thank god, I am not
the only man in here.


There is one. Two.
I am possibly the oldest.
But freshly shaved.


We double park
the buggy under a
Frieze
of grazing elephants,
and waste no time
in squatting down,


"Wind! the Bobbin in..."


a guerilla battalion of
Mothers
well versed, armed
to the teeth,
with loaded gesture.


"Pull, Pull, Clap, Clap."


The rhymes are more
or less
Uncharted territory,
Forgotten,
I might have been
Schooled
in another country, a
Dialect modelled on
Quite the wrong note.


Our son leers up off my
knee with hobbled
optimism as we busk it,
grumbling,
Mincing over intricate
patterns,
Drawn in the air,
an orchestrated handclap
or two
to startle
an eye gone over to sleep.


What's that ?
he might be thinking,
You stitched
me up,
What happened to those
scratches
of Sesame Street we've
been busy rehearsing ?
The Count.
The modal jazz.


It's not my fault, kid,
I covertly sign,
We have to work with
what we've got,
a clouded palette,
Don't hold it against
me,
there's still a chance
we may
make it through.


"Wind! the Bobbin up..."


His mouth turned down.


And looks straight through
me, teary, crestfallen,
Lets go loudly in
his new corduroy suit.

triage

Christmas Trees
have taken over our
Pavements,
Creeping out under
cover of
Darkness,
Flood Warnings,
Dragged out out of 
bed to sober 
Up,
unwanted guests.


By morning they have
Succumbed to frostbite.
Shedding
needles like so many
Fingers. Toes.


Walking back
from the brink of
Shrivelling,
we step behind a
Dislocated limb,
allow a woman to
move past us,
Uninterrupted.


Thanks, she yawns,
Her breath a
Fog. Steaming like
Warm breakfasts.
Tea. Toast.


We nod and pretend
to examine the tree,
Stooping
like Undertakers on
The Job,
Measuring a corpse
left out in the rain.

1010011010:~$sudo su

There was a time when all was word,
from font of crackling spindle
Searing Moses ear,
to Albert James Freed on the AM dial.

Before that too, the coiled copper wire
of the fallen, whispering for Adam.
Serpents. Rose seeds.
Unplumbed wormholes in the garden.

The nature of the word is virus.
Binary. Hyperlinked. Self-replicating.
It will not rest, in cave nor cache,
what began as babble is storm, torrent.

philip kindred got it nailed, the sepsis.
Dancing round hospital in wheelchair.
Denounced as hack, hacked in turn,
Warding off infection with icthys palm.

What began with an apple
Scrolled on the Mainframe, vavvavvav,
Scripted on the backs of eyelids,
Blessed, archived, embedded in host.

The voracious appetite to overwrite, 1.1

fingers in the pies

Antonio Prohías, 1961.



"A Ha to Doctor Johnson
Said Scipio Africanus
Lift up my Roman Petticoat
and kiss my *@!$! Anus"

- William Blake, Complete.



The following (quoted) piece first appeared the day preceding Hogmanay; under a different badge. I promptly reset it to draft, given my alarmism seemed a tad overblown.

In hindsight, I'm not so sure.

There exists a spate of reports out there documenting persons being locked out of their Google or Facebook accounts. Contact lists violated; emails circulating in the wild. The repercussions, when one pauses to reflect on it, are potentially grave enough to raise a code red. After months of plunging into the surf without a seatbelt, internet security is very much back on my agenda.

Legitimate concerns after the careless activation of a Java Applet.

Not content, then, on promoting catalepsy with my waxing lyrical on parenthood, I reinstate it now as a means of further cudgeling the casual wanderer onto the Bleachers. Or to merely propogate unwarranted dread.



"A curious thing happened on the way to the forum, today, to paraphrase Zero Mostel as Pseudolus.

Or Frankie Howerd. Chose your poison.

I was sitting in front of my portal to the world with the sound turned way down low and my browser open. My fly zippered. Out of sheer laziness, I left the tab logged into my Google account. Staring absentmindedly at the baby in my lap; daydreaming myself into a coma.

Well. An hour or two might have idled by. I did not notice whether the monitor drifted off to sleep. The grey afternoon licking at the window petered into twilight; the lamps up and down the close across the street stuttered awake like drunken fireflies. I could have leaned out to start a cigarette. I could have leaned out to start an argument, but nobody was listening.

I am still getting used to the change of water. A different sort of fishbowl entirely. If I ever move again it will be to a croft parked on the edge of a sheer cliff - a broken lighthouse - with nothing but glowering skies between me and the sea.

So. Mildly irrated at this slipping into genteel dotage without so much as a properly diagnosed seizure, I sidled my son into the crook of one arm and lunged at the keyboard for a timely interruption. I punched the volume up as far as it would go. And that's when I heard it. That's when I became aware of some kind of terrible intrusion.

At first I was tempted to dismiss it as a bad rip.

A sloppy stab at binary encoding.

I quit the file and the sound persisted. Keystrokes. F@ckin' keystrokes. Jamming away like a trio of ambidextrous Ukranian crooks. Or the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Dear lord.

Now, I am not so quick as to dismiss myself as wholly cretinous when it comes to desktop security. I have a modest grasp of the internet; those pitfalls to avoid. I laid my son in his crib and opened up my system preferences, navigated to sharing. Firewall on ? Check. No exceptions ? Check. Internet sharing off ? Check. Back to security. A cursory search to make sure passwords are enabled, then on to accounts.

The devious hacking of remote keys upped a gear and appeared to be reaching its crescendo.

I logged out of everything I could - force quit what I couldn't - restarted and ran a standard Symantec test for vulnerable ports; everything clean and stealthy. The keystroke noise, of course, had disippated. I logged into my router's firewall and closed down anything which did not seem essential. I did this, and I did that. Oh, yeah. So what.

Last, but by no means least, I logged back in to my Google account, changed the password, deleted an obsolete default email address, and made sure port forwarding was not enabled. Everything appeared to be as it should, bar the one lamentable oversight, which lay with the integrity of the original password itself, perhaps. A glaring error. Possibly.

Like Mr. Kurtz, at the atrophied epicentre of his heart of darkness, I have gotten lazy. Prone to infection and possession.

Like Marlon Brando in his precarious temple, I have gotten fat and routinely neglectful; complacent in the face of complexities. But not an inch too paranoid.

Apocalypse now ? Last tango in Partick, motherf@ckers."



postscript:

I habitually monitor downloads with Clam Xav; a freeware program. I monitor, too, inbound and outbound connections via the indispensable Little Snitch. As an added precaution, I installed Sophos Home Edition and scanned the entire volume for evidence of Trojans or Worms; in particular any DNS Changer which might have embedded itself somewhere in the directory. Nada. I also ran a subsequent fully authorised scan through a separate program to check for any Malware Sophos might have missed; specifically Keystroke Loggers. Nothing. Theories ? Spurious observations or informed conjecture ? Hit me with it. I'm all ears. Let me begin the new year with cigarette burns peppering the hood on my sweatshirt; a glass tumbler to bottle up the smoke.

the wrestler

Of all those odd jumbles of vowels
my son brings with him to the world -
the gurgles; yelps; indian war whoops -
broken consonants, riddles, squawks,
the strangest by far is that piercing
screech; a squeal of brakes on a
dodge scraping the corner, hubcap
flapping, all this accompanied by tiny
fists flung out over each shoulder,
as he comes to in his crib, half drunk
on milk, one expression after another,
mouth yawning; lips smacking in
a perfect 'o'; forehead furrowed with
all that effort required just to break
wind, squeeze out a fart: a pistol shot.

It is an undecipherable conundrum.

The letting go of past lives, the
slipping of an old soul into a new shoe.
The lacing and interlacing of self,
eyelash and fingernail, an epic struggle.

There was a free thinker named Boehme,
much admired by the engraver, Blake.

"Man must be at war with himself,"
he wrote, "fighting must be the watch
word, not with tongue and sword,
but with mind and spirit, and not to
give over."

Peaceful soldier. Wrestling with tigers.



image from the comic book,
"Fiasco Bombasco", by Ive Sorocuk.