These invisible lines

I attempt to lasso the world, twice daily or more. I draw ‘cut here’ dashes around my skull and invite all to delve, safe in the knowledge that anything remotely breakable has been removed for safekeeping. I rope in the sun and daub it with a soldier’s camouflage. I tear the clouds apart. I push back on the rusty arrows that emerge from my outgrown fingertips. I disconnect, I rip out the cord. I reconnect, I plug in and charge. I drift the oceans, entirely senseless, buoyed up by seasickness, salt and nothingness. I anchor myself to polystyrene rocks of make believe and gasp for your air. Hold, hold and thrice hold. I dream of locked chambers, and curse the keys that are hidden so far from here. I follow lines of all colours into the ground, tunnelling into you, then out again. I read words in black and white, on black and white too, while whispering to my pores to open up so that each one might soak into my scarred tissue. I tap nervous, stop-start rhythms across the warmth of plastic and wheezing technology, as I pray for rain and sudden electrocution. I wish for lines that go from here to there, there to somewhere, somewhere back to here. I wait for waking. Wake, wake and thrice wake. I whisper. I lasso the world, but it slips free of my pull and spins itself into a blur.

Words of little consequence #16

Unsent letter #9

Dear You,

What happened there? Was it the same that happened here? Did you go away? Taken leave of your senses? Have you been on holiday? I have. Months ago, I packed my single shabby suitcase and scarpered. I shrugged off this incessant whirl and joined the rat race. Have you ever taken a holiday with the rats? You should. It would suit your temperament down to the last gasp. No foreign travel required. Nothing to declare.

The rats and I, we scurried up through the drains and left our droppings in the four corners of your decaying basement room, in the wood and worn sheets that now comprise your fleeting history in dust. I will confess that such activities weren’t entirely pleasant, but it was a relief to be a creature of such disgusting, depraved habit: alive to my true nature, alive to the filth and degradation we could only ever allow ourselves to sink into after dark, long after midnight.

I am still away. Still biding my time and losing yours. I have not returned home. Yet.

My holiday routine is well established. I take my towel to the beach every morning, with nothing more on my feeble mind than soaking myself to the skin in the salty seas and the toxic waste. I sit on the sands to dry my outer layer to a thin crust, and contemplate the castles surrounding me, wondering if you are hiding in one of their turrets. I buy seaside rock and etch all your various given names and pseudonyms through it, from one end to the other, before greedily sucking the sugary sickness from it. I sometimes tell myself that this is what your bones might taste like. I must remember to ask the rats when they return with their bellies full of your flesh, but their eyes still red and ravenous for more.

I am mailing this to you on a picture postcard. Turn it over. This is the pier. That’s me, standing at the very tip and throwing a lifebelt into the sea below. Maybe I thought you were drowning. This is my deckchair. That’s me, sagging like a dead weight at its centre, and shielding my eyes as I squint out to sea in search of passing ships. Maybe I thought you were sailing somewhere. This is the view from my cheap and faded hotel room. That’s me, standing at the window whilst sipping a stewed English brew. Maybe I thought you were joining me for afternoon tea.

And this - this is the exact spot where I poked a stick in the sand and wrote a message. That’s me, watching it being washed away by the oncoming tide, only moments later. Maybe I thought you had already read such words before.

Weather indifferent. Sand in every crevice, every pore. Candy floss making small children spew pink vomit down their fronts. Family-run seaside hotel in fossilised state, circa 1950. Wish you were here. Or at least I would, but I have yet to decide whether that should be a question or a statement.

Yours forever,
An Unreliable Witness

And Lady Macbeth, she scrubbed until she bled

I am certain that there are purists amongst our number who will tell me, authoritatively and with an enviable certainty in their unwavering voice, that white is not a colour. As such, not a colour.

Whatever it may be then, the perfection of it irks me, annoys me, makes me shift uncomfortably in my blotchy, pasty, pink European skin. Which only the outdated curiosities of this language call white, too.

It’s that alleged purity. Stripped white bodies, stripped white bones, stripped white walls, even stripped white saints, reclothed in brilliant white robes and lying prostrate on crisp white sheets awaiting eternal salvation. The white light is the closest they get. It’s not quite heaven, but they let their spirit ooze with droplets of white as they edge ever closer to ecstasy, via temporary damnation.

Ironically, I don’t like the purity. I don’t follow the purists. I rarely wear white unless I am sure that I have scrubbed myself as religiously clean as an agnostic can ever be. For me, a white sky begs to be daubed with smashed clouds and vapour trails, splattered with storm fronts and tumultuous greys. Whites of eyes make me nervous, and the white of spittle foaming at the mouth makes me retch. Even off-white - the off-white of those curtains fluttering in the longed-for breeze, the off-white walls that tell of hurried decoration by get-rich-quick landlords - just makes me wish it could finally achieve the unsullied virgin state it so desires, so nearly reaches.

Even this white page is sullied. I have been attacking it with every substance, every cleanser, every detergent, every active agent within reach, and yet it’s still blackened with specks of filth, grime and depravity untold.

We are all off-white here. We can’t go back to the white shell, the white of the egg, the white stains on the bedclothes. We might want to return to the once upon a time, to where we began, to whatever we were before the dirty reality of discolouration and overuse set in, but nothing washes whiter than white except in advertisements.

Scrapings and clippings

• Lists of directions
• Lists of instructions
• Lists of nothing in particular
• Must tell him that from her
• Must tell her that from him
• Latest news (allegedly)
• Open close open close open close
• Code for this, that or the other
• Proposals in triplicate
• Refusals in duplicate
• Meeting requests
• 140 characters or less
• Status updates
• Interface next interface publish
• Applications
• Declarations
• Selling self by the pound
• Spiel and spin
• Emails smothered in blandness
• Emails dripping with sarcasm
• Link link link link link link link
• Messages I do not want to send
• Words I do not want to write
• Punctuation I do not want to use
• Air, nothing but air
• Fingers, click fingers
• Press button to resume
• Please wait
• Processing

Words of little consequence #15

Words of little consequence #14

Words of little consequence #13

Dropping an E

Great Mysteries of the Internet Universe #326: why do web and social media applications insist on deliberately spelling their names incorrectly? No wundr ver kidz today carnt spill propr like wot we cud wen we woz yung. In particular, I cite those that think it’s somehow clever to omit the final ‘e’ from their titles. It’s not big, and it’s not clevr. I mean, clever. But never mind the complaints of such a grumpy old man, because having spotted a passing bandwagon and noting the number of geeks clambering on board, An Unreliable Witness now has a Tumblr. Or a Tumbler. Or, as we in the ‘old school’ might call it, a list of links and pictures and videos and stuff that do not merit full posts. This sideline thus leaves me free, in this humble online abode, to continue the obtuse, obfuscated and verbose navel-gazing you have come to know and love, without the interruption of troublesome other destinations that might tempt your mouse cursor away to some distant site at the other end of the internet, where you could watch kitten videos to your heart’s content.

Words of little consequence #12

Words of little consequence #11

Do make say think

I want to be a blogger. [Pause for effect.] Yes, you heard.

Let me clarify that grandiose and possibly foolhardy statement. I want to be a normal blogger. No, really, I do. I want to post long-winded entries about my day at work, about getting so drunk last night that, like, I don’t even remember getting home (right?), about going to the local DIY store at the weekend, about putting up some shelves, about what was on television yesterday evening, about the hilarious activities of my cat (I do not have a cat) - complete with photos and embedded Youtube clip, about going to the garage to get my car fixed (I do not have a car), about Big Brother, about the crunchiness or non-crunchiness of the toast I ate earlier, about listening to the sonic cathedrals of sound and meaningful lyrics of Radiohead (man). About about about. And then I would have something to (not too). You know. Bits and pieces. Leftovers and remains. Oddments. Detritus. Stuffed cupboards and overflowing drawers. Of whatever this is. Whoever I might be. Wherever I am.

If I was a normal blogger, I could just. Somewhere. Else. Someone. Else. Someplace. Sometime. At some point. I could simply. Simply this. Simply that. Simple. And then “[insert statement here]”.

I am home and hearth and unholy hovel to a ragtag army of caterwauling angels, wearing red devil horns for a taste of the other, and flagrantly reeling their danse macabre over mass graves inside my head. Snapping bones and shouting. Unintelligible rhymes. Animalistic cries. Speaking in tongues. Your tongues, not mine. My voice is coughing. Coughing from hoarse to mute and back again.

So I tried. [Pause for effect.] You can’t say that I didn’t try.

Six forty-eight sixteen degrees sunny intervals

I just went to see if the pair of cooing, lovesick pigeons who have been renting space on my balcony were up with the lark. As I am. When did I start envying birds that so many consider to be little more than troublesome vermin, riddled with disease and pestilence?

I just went to see if life was still twitching its feathers outside my particular goldfish bowl - the glass sphere that I find myself carrying with increasing carelessness, so much so that the water is slopping, splashing and spilling over the sides. Evidently, I kill harmless fish in the same way that I murder harmless plants. The natural world is my unnatural home, it seems.

I am not a violent person. No, not a violent intent or a violent bone in my body. And yet. As each sixty second spurt passes, I want to take that minute by the scruff of its neck, dig my pudgy fingers into its creeping, sweaty, heat-stung skin, grasp and twist a handful of scraggy hair, and then smash its head clean into the table top until it bleeds. I want to render it immobile, leaving it juddering its last gasps on the unswept tiles. I harbour an insane desire to kick it in the chest for good measure. Are you winded yet? Do you relent? Do you give in? Plead for mercy, you poor fucker. Plead for fucking mercy.

I am not a sensible person. I am not a rational person. I am not a breathing person. I am a mere grain of existence, a momentary aberration on the tired face of this long and ‘will it ever end?’ day. I have turned this infernal egg-timer on its axis, and am waiting to slip through its tight gullet. I live in hope, I breathe in potential lost, even if potential found eludes me.

You never know. You never know if the way back into your imagination - our imagination, my imagination - into that yearned-for pause for thought, might linger and gleam in the sandy peaks and troughs that are slowly gathering below. So far below. Not too far below. Not so far now, not so far.

Down, down, let me fall down and out. Through and gone. Merged and emerged. It’s just deadness to you, maybe. It looks like nothing but dust to the unbelievers who circle me during my waking hours, as I wrench my eyes open with an endless supply of matchsticks. But to these weird, feared and blurry eyes, each grain of passing sand holds all the promise of life hereafter.

Picture book

Send me a photograph of the inside of my head. Take a step back, a step forward. Back again. Forward more. Snap. Shoot. Click. Shutter. Whirr. Throw caution to the wind, to the four points of the compass. Let your imagination run wild, because I know mine does. Give me a grain of colour, a ray of light, a moment in freeze frame. What can you see inside here, inside there, inside? Imprint me in a split second, in a stray pixel. I’ll be waiting. Here: mail at unreliablewitness dot com.

The gallery
(Click for full-sized versions and the highly deserved photo credits.)

Click to view the whole image Click to view the whole image Click to view the whole image Click to view the whole image

Seven seventeen fourteen degrees overcast

Don’t tell me that I don’t know what I’m doing. I know precisely what I’m doing. I am grabbing the moment, seizing it with both hands, twisting and strangling it until it lies limp, cold and unmoving in my arms.

These few words are the deliberate, conscious act of taking an inward breath, whilst I hold myself all stillness beneath the watery surface. This is what I’m about, where I’m at. Very much of very little. Overwhelmed by the otherness, the other. Except. Except that seconds crawl into minutes, which stretch into hours and last into days and I’m still here, no longer peddling but still conscientiously pedalling. Backwards, forwards, anywhichways. Walking just to stay in one place. Running to stand still. Not just metaphorically either.

So I whisper my mantra, holding it like a pill under my tongue for safekeeping, because it will make me better and eradicate the sickness, the fever. I whisper my mantra, hoping that the hush can overpower the din of the constant of the rushing of the ceaseless, of the hordes and their constancy, dialled up to eleven. I whisper my mantra in grasps and clutches and hold hold hold. Yes, I’ve still got this single breath in my lungs. It’s mine, all mine. Not exhaled yet. Not exhaled.

I count these moments all in and I count them all out again. Totting up, tallying, crossing them off. Chiselling them in the stone, notches in the wood. And I wonder, because wondering is what I do when the moment allows. I wonder what happened to make me such a person who lives for the precious days, lazy days, when we unravel together, listening to the dull roar of the world weaving back and forth some five decaying floors below.