Diary of an unborn writer #15

Space.

I've made some for myself having cut down the five days a weekcommute down to four. I enjoy the travelling - I read, write and doze - but after a while it wears. The coarseness of incessant interaction. Man sits opposite with mouth gaping open in sleep teenage girl on phone (mercifully in Dutch), neon strip lights accentuate the grey.

We're desperately trying to be private, claim a pocket of seclusion while pressed up against each other's thighs. Initially you're easy but there's a drip-drip-grind in discomforting parts of the brain - on the peripherary of awareness you know this is not OK.

~o~

The job is simple and there's not very much to do. I'm able to work quickly and touch the lives of thirty to forty people in a day with motivational emails full of get-up-and-go. In slack times I invent tasks for myself - research studies of behavioural change, write articles on stress reduction and invent seminars to present to colleagues.

The beauty of these is that my manager believes me innovative and dedicated. This is not the kind of job one easily drops.

~o~

Nonetheless, I've cut down to four days. it;s a regular thing in Holland and I believe a mark of civilisation. The 5 days squeezes from you too much creativity, nails you with exhaustion and causes my body to physically ache.

"The body holds wisdom greater than thy deepest learning" said Nietszche and the whispers of this delicate frame are telling me to slow.

So we've got some easy time back again, drifting contentedly on the early week's graft. I'm in danger of getting carried away with the satisfaction of the situation.

~o~

The UK governement announced today a shock measure to restore people's confidence in themselves.

"The Banks have given us a stark lesson in self-castration" said Alistair Darling at a hastily assembled press conference "so we've decided to save ourselves a lot of money and give £5,000 to every man, woman and child irrespective of wealth, job status or legal recognition as a UK citizen."

The £300bn reappropriation - which represents approximately 25% of the UK median wage - signals recognition by the government that the fundamentals of the economy are shifting and in ways too unpredictable and complex for one government or sector of sperm-bloated irresponsibility to decide on its own. It is hoped that by diffusing the bailout in a series of lump sum grants the decision will help shift the economy onto a footing that people would rather see it go.

"For too long we've been behoven to a bunch of public school schisters deciding the fate of humanity. It's time for a squeeze of economic democracy" Darling added, himself squeezing Gordon Brown's knee.

As well as extended binges, mass polo matches and clumsy street parties, the decision is seen as a test of whether people really knows what's good for them.

"Everyone knows the UK public is brainwashed to the eyeballs on a daily diet of talent contests and bullshit propogated by the overly paid and morally destitute. What we're interested in seeing is if people cast off the shackles and work together to forge a society that is a little more human and a little less grimy" A leading psychiologist noted before ripping off a lab coat, shitting in his hand and smearing "You've no self knowledge" on a nearby Mercedes.

Optimism has reached the UK from south west France where a similar scheme was launched to bribe people into not voting for far-right leader Jean-Marie LePenn. "We took it hook, line and sinker" said Jacques LeFruit "alzo' instead of spending money ourselve we combine in a mighty collective way and invest in projets de communites."

Much of this, M. LeFruit describes went into the highly successful Marechal Petain appreciation society with the slogan "Les 68ards ne savent pas de quelle cote leurs baguettes sont beurres" therefore conflating two episodes of history into a single prescient political point. "It was a great example of somezing people really want to see and most important it come from ze people."

Humanist optimists on this side of the Channel are hoping for savings and loan trusts, rural commerce and indigenous welfare to thrive.

"Yeah, we're all for an Indigens revival. Never the same since they broke up in the 70s" said Spinal Pete amongst the wafts of a fan shirt that hadn't been washed since then either.

Not surprisingly Darling's announcement caused a storm in the Commons, with several MPs astonished at the diminuation of centralised control. A refutation to which Gordon Brown was scornfully smug "I've spent a lot time telling the public that no one knows how to spend their money better than me. Besides, we've undereducated folk for long enough now that they understand that collective voluntary actions are the stuff of tooth fairy idealism and can never really actually happen."

Nevertheless, a poster campaign encouraging community investment will see the soon-to-be-not Prime Minister winking from a thousand 30 foot blilboards "Remember your schools!"

Other initiatives belied the government's professed faith in the will of the People. "What we're trying to avoid," boomed Alistair Darling from the loud speaker of a helicopter specially comissioned to fly over middle and lower England "is that people think that this money is in any way enough. For goodness sake, do not stop working, drinking or ignoring each other five days of the week "your Economy has never needed you more than now!"

A bout of non-descript warbling could be heard from the direction of Hazel Blears until fascist Terrier was scissor kicked in the jaw by a protestor now flush with legal expenses.

Diary of an unborn writer #14

The crunch, the crash, the confusing fusing chaos of it, the shift, the anxious wait for a clue to see way of the fall.

Beautiful.

The collapsing uncertainty of it.

I couldn't have known a meltdown would be so joyful. I love it. Pillars and monuments of tumbling. Dare we breathe to consider them in freefall?

Absolutely should.

Helps you enjoy the scrabbling, the laughable noise out of every politicians welping mouth that they know what they're doing. How seriously they can knot their brow this time when the worst case scenario grew a cousin that stank and heaved and hurled worse than its relative.

Dear times. Good times. Rollercoaster reasoning is required. So please read and follow carefully.

It's not that we're in a new world, just that our uncertainty is now cripplingly exposed, I heard a sage say recently .

The stock market, credit and bank collapse is irresolvable precisely because it is a systemic shift in the way people use and understand money.

There's been a sleeper sickness threatening unbridled capitalism for a long time. In the rush to manipulate the consumer the Big Boys gave usa lot of freedom, make them think they were making the decisions all the while mocking the perceived freedom with new brands and banana stands, more complex and absurd manipulations of What We value and What Is True.

The Spectacular Society had set in and thinking folk decried the sleep walk towards inauthenticity that humanity seemed destined to take.

Sorry was taking and just at saturation point opened up it's cruel devices and deception to the 17/20ths of the global population who hitherto thought they were missing out on the party.

~~~

Can we talk in this way about such serious macroendokaledeidoscopic issues?

Doesn't miss the gravity, this hap-clappy narrative, spilling its theorems in irresponsible fashion?

Might not someone get hurt?

~~~

But the free-walking people in their slumber began to wake up and breathed God Damn It!

They remembered those far off coloured days - the 60s - that thing their parents talked about and completely forgot about - apart from at $240 occasions when they got to see the Rolling Stones and remembered, smugly, what good times they had had.

Dear people, the lost began to find themselves! They shoehorned their choices towards wooly jumpers, vinyl recordings of Django Reinhardt and sang the songs of sweet freedom in appartment huddles in the manner of their forefathers all the while stepping the line of happy oppression. So unknowing but now beginning to know.

More importantly (seriously now) they began to buy organic food and fair trade clothes. Fig leaves in their significance but vital signs of the silent shift going on underneath.

The consumer had grown up, started tying their purchases to the concerns of people and planet and damn it, the workers started waking up too.

But not in a romantic revolutionary way.

Silently. Quiet steps and unspeaking. Making choices so loud The Banana Farmers had to listen.

And here it starts coming together.

The workers with their choices were fleeing the Big Boys Without Morals forcing the Big Boys to change, far more substantially than many of The Shouting Young Bretheren of the Outside dared admit.

But how to turn back to authenticity in a system designed to perpetuate illusion? The Magpie Greedy Cathedral Bankers forcing us to look up, up and away from dear Mother Earth and out to the ever widening sky, that could not be filled, only polluted with wilder imaginations about how the Flying Trough Eaters could be decieved into flying a little higher, a little more uncertainly and more reliant on The Great Cathedral Builders to guide them safely home (which, by the way, they'd long forgotten, so successfully had the Greedy Magpie Cathedral Builders carried out their work)*

Answer to the question way at the beginning of the previois paragraph: you can't! So hallowed had the Cathedral Halls become and so well tended to perform their purpose that they could not permit suggestion of the outside - an Untainted Earth or Unpolluted Sky. The Cathedral was designed to cater for both, give no hint that the others could be true.

But some had discovered and it was only a matter of time before the corridors began to shatter.

And they're shattering now, even as their hymns are most shrilly being sung.

You see now how the 'Crisis' cannot be understood in current academic terms?

Because the folk who wrote the rulebook never lifted their heads from the pew bench and realised what they were praying about, praying for.

The confusion's becoming unsewn.

And thank Fuck for that.

It'll come back again, settle amid the chaos again. Fall in furrows and hallways more suited to our time and custom until those too become obsolete and discarded** through a similarly chaotic chaos.

The time we're brewing up is not the conclusion of 400 years of market trade but MILLENIA, Aeons, since the ancient sands of Babylon when Man looked at the Earth and didn;t see a Mother or look at brother and didn't see his own frality gloried before him.

We forgot.

But what bliss to remember.


*Sorry by the way for the mixed up terminology. I am trying so hard to be academic.
** Schumpeter, by the way, when describing Creative Destruction was mis-taken for sermonising on the prayer of capitalism. He was referring to none other than the failing of static concepts in ever-shifting time sands. Clever man.