Its 05.52, I’m smoking a ciggy, listening to an interview with Alan Moore while my PC formats my soon to be travel hard drive and its Saturday morning, and I don’t have to go to work ANYMORE IN THE NEAR FUTURE!

And I don’t feel excited.

Yesterday I worked my last shift at work, which was a bit chaotic but a pleasant last fling at psychiatric nursing. But out of all the good lucks, hugs and general thanks from patients, it was a domestic that gave me the most pleasant compliment. She said quite simply that when I was on shift she felt safe. This really summed up everything I really aim for as a nurse. So that felt kinda good. And also made all the crap and stress and frustration involved in being a nurse, worth it.

It’s funny how these little pieces of validation come from the most unexpected places.

So, this week I have to sort all the remaining shit of my life while simultaneously seeing people who I won’t see for a while, if ever again. People asked me if I was coming back to my home town and the same job, because I guess in the mind of people who don’t pursue such a wayward life as mine, this is the norm. Because that’s what normal people do. They have holidays as a form of a break from their working lives, but then they come back and get back on the hamster wheel, until the next holiday. And I guess I do that, but in a more life shattering way. I give up my home; I sell or dump most of my belongings and leave the country of my birth to wander around some foreign land like an Alzheimer patient, waiting for things to happen.

This is not the norm.

In retrospect, it’s possibly insane in the context of modern society.

Now, I am not some hippy free spirit, who is comfortable living in a caravan or tent. I’m forty four at the moment and these things are not really me. I have my own weight of insecurities and personal fears, and I’m not a social animal by any leap of the imagination. Yet I am compelled to destroy and recreate my life on a regular basis, tearing my comfort zone into fragmented pieces and leaving them behind me as I move on.

I have a plan if you can call it a plan, in this present case, it will be to be free of mundane routine and allow myself the time to write and draw. I have a book to finish, and numerous ideas and beginnings to play with and discover any potential they might have.

That’s it.

It’s all about having psychic and spiritual space, which is a rare commodity in the life of a wage slave.

So I should feel excited.

But I don’t.

Yet I’m waiting for that pop, as I finally realise its happening for real. Then my survival instinct will kick in as it has in the past, I will stop thinking and just be.

That’s the real knack. Being willing to just be and let it all fall into place. On the outside, it looks insane or irresponsible thing to do, but I know from previous experience that it always happens.

Its kinda cool as life unravels about you alone in a strange place and you find your feet.

It’s an expression of faith in the Cosmos, like that scene from Dancing with Wolves, right at the beginning of the film where Kevin Costner suffers a personal crisis and decides to kill himself by riding his horse through the middle of the two battle lines, his arms out in cruciform.

Its abandon to the Cosmos with the faith that it will catch you. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t meant to.

Simple.

People need to give up on hiding from life, in the foolish hope that it will prolong their lives. It won’t.

Give it up and jump.

You will be surprised what might happen.

I am Theodore Veblik Von Clemberhom.

As such was the name I was given at birth at least.

And tonight I am going to die!

This will be the second time.

For the record, and of course posterity, I say now that upon both times I stepped, or was pushed across that shrouded, unknown divide between life and death, it was my choice.

I’m very proud of that!

It may also be of mild interest the sage minds of the future who peruse this austere memoire in centuries to come, that between my first death and that of my second, 520 years has elapsed, yet I was still a tall, slender man no more than 28 winters old.

But after 548 years of existence, in one shape or another, this night at the stroke of midnight, I will die, for the second, and final time.

Yet may I add, that this will be no feeble event worthy of nothing more than a byline in some tacky tabloid, destined only to be wrapping for chips.

No!

This will be an extravaganza of eldritch phantasms, a joyride for the demented, a garrote for the pious, a belly laugh for the silent and weird. This will make grown men cry and babies scream while housewives cower inbetween.

I-I!

Forgive me for writing verbatim as things float into my mind.

It unravels me so that SomETimes iT becOMes all toO mUch.

Dear Rockstar Games

Today, on a whim, I visited by local computer games shop, and saw LA NOIRE down from £35 to £20. Now Rockstar Games make good fun sandbox games. They have a solid rep and produce hours and hours of game play, and I have played every one of their better known games…up to a point.

The point being that in every bloody game, there is always a flying quest, which is bloody impossible on a PC. At that point I stop playing that game. So, in fact, I have never completed a Rockstar games product…ever.

But brushing this aside, I brought LA Noire, some beers and settled in for a good old night of gaming.

What I should have done was take that £20 and eaten it, there on the spot.

That way I would be guaranteed to get something out of it, even if it was shit.

The game loads, but doesn’t start beyond the game itself giving you the option to play the game, which of course, doesn’t work.

Now long, long ago, in the dawn of home PC’s, you used to get these posters that hyped up a certain game on one side, and on the other was the code for the aforementioned game. It was down to you to type the code in and debug it as required.

Here we are over 30 years later, with technology spewing out of every orifice and I can now buy a computer game and then have to search the internet for other poor bastards who were foolish enough, like me, to buy the sodding game only to find that it didn’t work and so had to search the internet…..and so on.

And hope that one of them has found a way to play the game that we paid good money for.

Now, most newly released games don’t have this problem.

Skyrim for instance just took auto updating over the net and Steam to play it.

Other games haven’t really been what they could be until the first patch, which is all the work the designers wanted to put in in the first place, but ran out of time.

Fair enough, at least I get to play the game prior to the patch.

LA Noire seems to have opted for the ‘FUCK YOU consumers. We’ve got your money, now you’ll just have to wait until we acknowledge the need to let you play the game.’

Releasing a game that doesn’t even start. Hey I know that consoles were your first choice but fuck me, can you really get away with such poor examples of commerce?

Thanks a lot you bunch of dickheads!

PROLOGUE

The Logon civilisation was at one point in their own history, very much like us.

They inhabited what we would say was a bleak planet, in an equally bleak system, much of which they had inhabited because for the Logon’s, bleak was good because it showed progress, and the Logon civilisation was all about progress.

But like us, they were trapped there. The technology they possessed could aid them within their home system, but the exploration of anything further away, across the vast distances of space, was closed to them.

They could scan the heavens in exquisite detail out into the furthest reaches of the universe, even divining the very chemicals and molecules existent on other worlds through what they called Orgospectular Ananomitry, but at that time they had no way of stepping out amongst those stars and planets, so all they could do is watch.

But they were a long-lived race and knew that one day, their reach would grow with the discovery of higher technology. It was all just a matter of time.

The problem though, was that the Logon system didn’t have much time left.

To us it might have measured in roughly a century or two, but the Logon civilisation saw this as merely decades in their perception. They were faced with the total extinction of their race, as their mother star would go supernova in those decades and make its system uninhabitable for any form of organic life.

Many theories for deliverance from this disaster were postulated in the highest levels of government and science, but in the end, everyone had to admit that the solution was simple. They would have to find another potential home world and leave the doomed Logon system behind.

It was an extremely tenacious young astrologist named Beesum Oi who discovered the planet that soon overwhelmed the hopes of the Logon race. It was named Oi, and was 205,000 light years away. Obviously the distance was a problem, but taking on an attitude of blind hope and natural confidence, the Logon scientific council declared the ability to reach such distance was only a matter of time.

The other problems, as discovered by hundreds of Orgospectular scans, with the planet Oi was its prolific covering of a strange organic infestation whose dietary expulsions took the form of a vile gas that was toxic to the Logon’s. Also the indigenous population of warm blooded hairy creatures who appeared to be the dominant species on Oi did pose some concerns, but this was something that started off as a problem but soon became the solution to all their problems.

And finally was the envelop of radiation that seemed to form an outer barrier against biological matter, that effectively sealed the planet Oi from any plans the Logons might have about physically landing on the planet.

It was an insanely annoying paradox.

A perfect but poisonous planet.

It was a few solar cycles later that the Scientific Council were approached by a group of theologists called the MindSet, a largely dismissed section of the scientific community that had invested their efforts in psychic research. They claimed that they could project the mind over great distances, and according to their research, would be able to touch the minds of those on the planet Oi.

It was a startling claim.

But Breod Hinster, Chairman of the council gave them his support.

His theory being that they could use this research to control the minds of key figures on the planet Oi, with the ultimate aim of having the inhabitants of the planet terra-form it themselves by systematically destroying their own ecosystem through unsustainable resource harvesting, consumption of natural resources and pollution, and so making it habitable for the Logon’s.

The Logon’s meanwhile would increase their space travel research and so by the time the terra-forming was practically complete, would have discovered the ability to reach Oi, pass or remove the planets radiation barrier and colonize it, eradicating the remaining organic problems and the original inhabitants in the process.

It was a master stroke.

And so the whole of Logon society switched to scientific research of both mind projection and the ability to move between Logon Prime and the planet Oi.

The initial mind projection tests were not promising, and it was noted of interest that most of the Oian’s, as the furry warm blooded dominant species of Oi were now known, who succumbed the projection either went insane or killed themselves.

For a brief periods, some played with the idea of mass mind projection as a weapon, but this was quickly dropped when some of the more vocal members of this theoretical idea died in blatantly unforeseen circumstances due to having gone over their ‘freespeech’ allowance for that lunar month.*

Logon society as a whole throughout the system turned their attention to this one great purpose. The destruction and colonization of Planet Oi.

SUBSECTION ALPHA  - The Long Dark morning of Beesum Oi

It was a warm evening, the moons of Logon Prime gently rising above the dark horizon which took the form of a long jagged line, revealing the distant mountains.

Beesum Oi padded softly along the path and then took the stairs to the dome and its long balcony terrace. A few figure above turned as he reach the terrace, but disregarded the younger scientist and returned to their conversations. Beesum weaved through the small crowd and entered the dome, the gentle hum of the air con greeting him as he entered. The rooms lone occupant turned and strode purposely forward extending a hand. Beesum took it and briefly shook it before letting go self-consciously, his head slightly bowed.

‘My young friend! Why the look of one first meeting another. Ha! I might as well be your uncle with all the attention I’ve placed on you. Your work…what joy it is.’

Beesum bowed a little lower.  ‘I am…’

‘With one exception Beesum’, the other speaker added abruptly.

Beesum forgot protocol and looked up at his opposite. ‘What exception?’

The other Logon frowned slightly and turned away walking back to a large desk, where he stopped and held up a number of data disks. ‘Your quarantine theory…most unfortunate my dear Beesum.’

Beesum quickly held up his PDA, his fingers momentarily flickering across the touch screen. Then he sighed briefly with satisfaction and once again confronted at his companion.

‘I feel that my data is correct and that my speculations, though subjective at times raise a very important question. If, as I have discovered, that the bio toxic radiation layer around the planet Oi, is in fact artificial and beyond the planet Oi’s inhabitants at this phase in their technological understanding, who put it there and why?’ he blurted out.

The other figure turned slowly and glared at him.

Beesum swallowed.

The other figure dropped the discs on the table and almost ran up to the now trembling Beesum. His only action was to raise the PDA and turn its screen towards the rage contorted face of his companion, who in turn glared at the screen for a moment and then appeared to make a conscious attempt to regain his decorum and pose. Then a thought seemed to occur to him and with a slight tilt of his head he looked at Beesum and asked. ‘You have actually managed to accumulate over 200 hours of Freespeech?’

‘I don’t talk much!’ the young astrologer answered quietly and with a hint of pride.

Working

To be frank from my personal experience, I believe profoundly that you live longer subjectively when you’re not working. To be precise, when you’re not working and not sitting at home playing on the computer, or watching TV or sitting about thinking how good it is that you’re not working. Even more precisely, when you’re travelling or engaged in something that you haven’t done before.

Here’s the deal.

You remember when you were young, and the summer holidays felt like they lasted for months and months. That’s because when you’re young, some much is new, so subjectively time passes more slowly because you’re experiencing new things.

As we get older life becomes routine, we’ve experienced everything in our own mundane sphere of experience and so, subjectively, time speeds up. When you’re working, life becomes about the next month’s pay day, so not just days flash by but months and years do too, after all, there’s only 12 months in a whole year of our working lives, only 12 paydays. Time speeds up, purely because of routine and lack of new experience. We’re not making new memories anymore unless something major happens and that’s rare. We perceive our lives based on our memories. No new memories, no personal perception of longevity of existence.

I heard long ago that if you try to have a new experience every year, you will feel like you live longer.

I took that to heart and it’s true.

Which brings me to traveling? If you travel, you’re a five year old again, seeing everything as new and fresh, with untold opportunities to gain new memories, and so, perceive your life as being longer.

It’s important to make new memories.

People

Listen, most people are fine, some are great, but they’re not the ones who piss you off. I have lived in rented accommodation for all my adult life and I came to the conclusion early that people in the UK, especially family life, is populated by women who swear at their children and men who rant and swear like rabid eunuchs. And for what? Their kids have made a mess – THAT’S WHAT KIDS DO YOU FUCKERS! Or their dinner isn’t ready – DO IT YOUR FUCKING SELF YOU LAZY SODDING RETARD!!

Everything is everyone else’s fault nowadays.

NOTE – The reason theyre called YOUR problems, is because THEY ARE YOUR PROBLEMS! You solve them, and you’ll be suprised how satisfying it makes you feel.

And the development of the nanny-state is fully to blame. We have so many rules, made by other people that we are no longer accountable for anything, because everything we do has guidelines and protocols and rules saying how to do this or that, leaving things like personal choice and accountability obsolete. The only choice is whether or not to break the rules, which of course you’re not supposed to do. To make a choice is risking being found guilty of something. So ultimately, it’s better to simply not make choices. Blame other people!

Psychology has a description of basic human survival techniques. The 3 F’s – Fight, flight or freeze. In many cases, Western society is also governed by these rules. The only problem is that it seems to have chosen the Freeze one. Its safer to just play possum, to not move in the face of all the crap we have to deal with, including the breakdown of aforementioned Western society. The really fun part is when it goes Fight or Flight.

Being in mental health nursing you tend to see the worst examples of such personalities, but sadly, they are becoming more and more apparent.

You know, long ago, I used to think that British societies answer to the useless, pointless or criminal elements by shipping them off en massto Australia, was a cruel thing to do, but over the years, I now see it as making perfect sense. Nothing better than a bit of  deportation and indentured servitude or a long holiday courtesy of Van Dieman’s Land to give someone a sense of purpose in life.

Its not a new idea fair enough, but John Carpenter liked it so much that he may have actually seen the future, he just got the date wrong.

Make them find a purpose, if only to stay alive. Make them have to answer to themselves.

Human beings in these situations tend to shine, to find purpose and a goal and become something so much better, when faced with adversity. So much more than whining, useless wastes of oxygen, going through their lives thinking the world owes them something (which it doesn’t btw), contributing nothing except a walking funnel into which we pour our time, patience, resources and ultimately our souls, when we could be doing something a bloody sight more productive, for people who don’t have the advantages we have, and certainly don’t sit about bitching that its someone elses fault.

Let people have comfort and they become lazy, moaning bastards who like greedy infants just want more and more and cry when they don’t get it. Everything becomes someone else’s fault. It’s your fault I haven’t got a job. It’s your fault I’m drunk or stoned 24hrs a day. It’s your fault I’m hungry, it’s your fault my 72” plasma screen TV isn’t big enough.

Sadly, we don’t have Australia anymore. But there’s always the Moon?

Besides, British society is constantly taking a turn for the worst, because it’s so comfortable. We had a gang related stabbing outside an off license in my home town last week. What the fuck! And half the people arrested are under 20 yrs old…ones 15! This speaks volumes.

In this particular case, the papers were keen to point out that the young man who died (aged 21) from the stab wound was a father, with another child on the way. But he was still outside a booze shop late at night and still a member of one of the opposing groups, so he really wasn’t thinking about either his future, his girl friend or his children now was he?

I don’t mean to sound harsh, I just feel the same way Bill Hicks felt about the two kids who listened to Judas Priest and then went out and killed themselves.

On the topic of crime, social decay and generally fucked up behaviour, I personally think we just need more vigilantes. A few single minded, coldly rational, consistently commited Charles Bronsons, Travis Bickles, Punishers or even Rorschach. People with a purpose. Yes I firmly support the cold blooded serial culling of the worthless and violent members of our society who pray on the weak, the fearful, the vulnerable or just the poor bastard whose simply trying to make the best of his life and finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the words of Joseph Conrad, “The Horror…The Horror…Exterminate all the brutes.”  

The Food

Now I like British food. I mean the stuff you actually cook, not the artery garroting crap you can buy in takeaways…the only exception being fish and chips, because they are always better than anything you can cook yourself. To me, the great English Breakfast, despite its terminal health content (no you can’t cook it healthily!) is a cornerstone of food as a whole.

But now, everything’s supermarket mass produced shite. Eating organically is something only rich people can afford, when actually it should be cheaper. In fact, super markets should be MADE to sell organic produce cheaper than the other crap. It might encourage the growth of organic farms, rather than them being seen as oddities. But then again, the human food problem is a wide spread thing, lurching across the whole of so called civilized Western society and has nothing to do with choice…otherwise I could choose to eat organically, which I can’t.

And don’t even get me started on the bloody packaging that this country feels compeled to produce and discard in the name of culinary eye candy. No wonder we’re facing global shortages of oil, given the amount of plastic and plastic covered card we throw away on  a daily basis. Its bloody rediculous. I personal foam at the mouth when I come across a shiny plastic coated cardboard packet, with a plastic inside container with enough space around the actual food inside to have put double in, in the first place! Why not just make the containers smaller FFS!!

As of 17/12/11  – 19 more shifts at work to go………………….

As a result of revisiting my HST issue, I got from Amazon a copy of Ralph Steadmans book The Jokes Over – Memories of Hunter S Thompson.

And despite only reading 43 pages at the time of this blog post, I am glad I got it.

I discovered Ralph Steadmans work long before I found the connection with Hunter, or Hunter for that matter! I found a copy of I Leonardo in a second hand shop for a fiver. His work is just so wonderfully alive and chaotic, his characters grotesque (much like my own) and his style hard to beat, and so utterly heretical compared to my own illustration style, which leaned towards obsessive Durer engravings in biro.

It was about 1990, the second hand shop was in Canterbury where I was homeless at the time, and I got a copy of Animals by Pink Floyd at the same time. (As you might note, being homeless didn’t stop me shopping)

Steadman joined my list of favourite artists, along with Patrick Woodroffe and Alan Aldridge.

I was overjoyed when I finally made the connection between the good Doctor and one of my favourite artists. It seemed almost instantly a match made, if not in heaven, them some liberal part of hell, where naughty rock stars and people of bugger sheep go after death.

But, at the point of starting to read The Jokes Over, I was engaged in a personal struggle with a portrait of a friend and enjoying the struggle as I always do. Its a weird thing for an artist. You want to create something and its like trying to hold an eel with your bare hands. It wiggles this way and that, especially if you are desperate to achieve a recognisable likeness and avoid insulting the subject. Its a battle between you and your medium, your skill or talent and the physical reality you  are trying to create. Personally I feel that artists are the actual medium and a truly inspired idea is something living, alive and waiting to be created.

It already exists, it the artists job to facilitate this birth.

Years ago when I was in my twenties, I was travelling in Zimbabwe and growing more and more fascinated by the type of rock sculpting they do there. I was up towards the mountians in the East and pulled up at a shack where they were selling carvings. I said I wanted to buy some stone and one of the group of carvers there squated down in the dirt and showed by a big lump of Veridian, a beautiful green stone that he had just started working on. It didnt look like much to me. In the end there was me and about a dozen locals all squating in the dirt and the first guy turned it this way and that, chipping little pieces off what was actually a carving of a bird. They all in part explained to me that the bird was in the rock, it was already there, waiting. Its the carvers job to release it.

Thats why I always feel kind of a fraud when doing pictures on demand so to speak, for other people. Its forced, a caesarian rather than a natural birth. Its not inpiration, your making it up. I hate doing stuff like that.

It always feels better when you feel its something that has just come to you, gifting you with the opportunity to let it be born.

But it can still be a struggle and I am grateful to mr Steadman for expressing that within the brief part of the book I’ve read so far. Glad that I’m not just a daubing, stratching, scribbling freak you enjoys metaphorically wrestling with a notion manifest in art, hoping to cross the finish line with something that does the inspiration justice. If I dont some other bugger will I’m sure of it.

Thats the thing you see.

If you are inspired and fuck it up, that idea will move on to the next nerd with a scrap of artistic talent and give them a shot. Same with writing. Thats why you come across people who have ideas or write stuff or draw things that you just  thought of or are in the process of doing, or more annoyingly have just finished.

You fucked up.

You werent quick enough, you sniveling wannabe artist. You’re just dross, thick phlegm clinging to the back of inspirations throat. Can’t swallow it, can’t cough it up and purge it!

Inspiration pondered your inadequate efforts and thought “sod this, I’m off”, leaving you to continue pathetically while its finds someone who can get the job done.

Inspiration is a cruel thing.

Just watched The Rum Diary, based on the book of the same title by one of my idols, Hunter S Thompson. The book itself, for those who don’t know, was written when Hunter was 22, and was finally and thankfully published in 1998, thanks to the increasing level of fame and notoriety that he had cultivated and achieved in the intermittent decades.

The book is hard work, and as many will point out, so different to Hunters well known works. It has a solid narrative but is low and crazy in mood, like something played out under a rain cloud.

The film I think was an achievement, given its fraught production history, riddled with failings and setbacks, for Johnny Depp, who I feel wanted to get the film made for Hunter, not really for anyone else. A last goodbye from a faithful acolyte, and he deserves a pat on the back and a shot of Jack for getting it done.

But what about Hunter?

Let me say this for my part.

Hunter the writer, was a ten story, hammer fisted T Rex.

A thinly stretched genius, held, tensed to breaking point between the twin extremes of blessed oracle and poison tongued bastard.

One of the few people in a position to be heard, who had a battle axe to grind, not always against individuals but institutions and government, the voice that such institutions never wanted to hear, and they did hear, along with everyone else in those two prominent decades during which Hunter trounced over every contender with the single-minded ferocity of a rabid pit-bull, fed exclusively for the role on a diet of drugs, alcohol and blistering rage.

Human society needs these voices if the dream of freedom is ever to remain in the human consciousness.

But for me, forgetting about the big picture, for me Hunter continues to make me want to write better.

To invest my writing with a visceral element, something of me, something I feel….to paraphrase, to write like me.

So, cos I know her well, and know she could take a joke I brought her this…..

Now, despite NOT purchasing said penis shaped massage tool (no pun intended) from a sex shop, just a toy shop, the kind that open up in December and close in January, I did encounter a bit of embarrassment, because the shop assistant looked very very close to this….

I decided that being honest was the best policy and told her immediately that I would have been a lot less embarrassed buying this….

If she didn’t look like this….

She chuckled coyly as girls do when being told something they know already.

Then she asked if I would like a bag….I said, what a brown paper one?

Another chuckle and all my embarassment was gone.

Yes, I was comfortable with my purchase.

As I thanked her and walked away she happily called after me..”Oh and enjoy yourself!”

WTF!

EPIC FAIL!!