Excerpt 146:
Foolfilled Stupidiocity
I’d paired the words of the paperweight sumo wrestler, clearly a man of Japanese extraction and yet pulling off a viable Chinese impersonation, with memories of Judith that were beginning to resurface like parachutes opening from a dim snowy sky in a world war two movie. I multi-glimpsed a clip from when she was at her happiest, (from my perspective but perhaps not hers), when she was proposing opening the canal marina cafe as a going concern. Reusing remembered physical Judithness gave me a tallful & wideful Judith experience, except there was stuff going on that eluded narrative inclusion as anything other than subtext. Some data went over my head and some data went beneath my feet. My foundations were leaking, giving me a slightly puddled perspective. But nothing that didn’t look like it might dry up in clement weather.
I heard, ‘You and I both are under attack from foolfilled stupidocity,’ thought I did, and, ‘everyone is, but it must be resisted… Resist!’ but more than that defied capture.
The spoken aspects of Judith’s communique were obviously being treated as sensitive. If I heard her words they disassembled before cognisance could adopt its administrative functions.
The words said I didn’t hear, lodged in unconscious pockets, were going to come back round the track to haunt me like a field of prefabricated sprouts. A mind-encroaching-skiddadleagitation burst into operation; physical sounds mimed what words they were screeching from behind soundproof glass enclosures.
I was making out with words as they rushed past avoiding my unwanted attention. I was like a one man football team playing a thirty-two personned opposition in an empty stadium, with two left feet, wearing a deep sea diver’s suit: I was not going to win…
One small part of the data feed; fuelling my unconscious, but bypassing my conscious self, that I did get an eye-ball’s blink and squint of, presented its extraction as gameplay. And being a sucker for gameplay, I ignored how a person ends up feeling when tons of liquid knowledge is delivered but they can’t locate the storage vats, no matter who they text or phone, and concentrated on my eye-on-the-prize reflex…
‘…sauerkraut, sea scout: seek out… snork, snorking: snorkel.’
It took a while, but it lead to a new beginning. I sought out and bought a goggled snorkel package from Mrs Broughton’s Snorkel Emporium on the promenade. I also bought two buckets in a deal at Bucket World (buy one get one half price) even though I only needed one, and a spade from Spades R Us who had a closing down sale and 20%-30% off everything. I just got the one spade (still wrankling from bucket-over-purchase regret syndrome) and made a mental note to return for some bargain hunting when time decided to present itself with more tenable prospects.
I was set.
Not sandcastling, though, because unfortunately the absence of sand and presence of large pebbles on the beach leant itself to pebble towers more than bucket-based castle construction… If I’d metatangled the code I’d stored with the data Judith had provided, correctly, and a lot of trust in my inner workings was demanded here, then what I needed to do was wade out to sea, swim for some time, and then dive hard and deep. The pre-conceptual prompts nibbling at sentience led me to believe I would not drown but find myself in a safe space where the reason for such dramatic marine immersion would become apparent.
Why a safe space? I knew damn well why; suppressed it just below the level of detection. I wasn’t going to let the entities whose job it was to manipulate and monitor my every thought, from whim to solemn conviction, to know what they needed to know over what I wanted them to know. For that was my true mission in life: find whatever power you are entitled to and use it; don’t let them make you lose it.
My wet pursuit was all out to sea. The land became an after thought. I was becoming unstranged with the area and that set off death knell warnings in my campanology department.
Preparation was handled via unconscious impulses and culminated in a rally with myself on the beach, in which I undressed and snorkelled up. The sea was rougher than it had been and although better in sync still out by enough to cause a mild nausea. I said farewell, hoping the bitter goodbyes would be sweetened by some advantageous helloes. Consciously trying not to be self-conscious; I wished I’d taken advantage of the sale at Swimwear City or the stores: Tog Town, Aquatic Attire Village, Speedo heaven; Ropa de Mare or Secondhand Trunks Alley, among others with less pertinent nomenclature.
Onward, to the sea, the sea! Waves splashing chaotically, the cold; sharp, intrusive; like a bad surprise in an intimate moment. Awkward… An awkwardness blossomed and bore fruit.
The ‘getting into the water’ avenue closed off due to temperature malfunction; if the painkilling numbness that clogged-up my legs was a thermometer of what was to come I would not have wanted to be my upper body in such cruel artic ravaging. High summers and hot days would maybe grant me access but as things stood I would have to find another route.
The very near to next morning; out early, contractually observant, I observed a lifting mist that had hung around for some time after departing fog… A pier appeared. The pier had not previously been apparent; it’s end still not in sight, fog persisting further out giving the pier a postcard photogeneticism and the illusion it was a bridge leading to whatever lurked on the other side of the smoked-pea-soup low-cloud cover.
I made a few things up as I went along…
I imagined walking to the bridge’s finality and finding myself back at the entrance, but it would not be the same beach, it would be a parallel alternative… My imaginings did usually influence certain outcomes, although I never remembered whether they had, as a rule.
A life governed by butlorial oppression had its ups and downs…In one way I was protected from the potential scares and terrors he’d created to keep me under the diaphragm of safety. In another I was exposed to potential terror and horror to urge me not to wander from the designated safe path. Quite which one was the up or the down was to be dukeofyorked afterfactorially…so to speak.
The electro-butler, who never revealed his name, had a policy of obscuring the true effects and side-hustles of time and used every move in the chronological (chronically illogical) almanac to hornswoggle and perplex. Time would race sometimes with number one formulas and othertimes like it hawked around a shell and competed with robotic hares. Outside, under contract, time went back to normal, not that that was wholly fulfilling either. So much so, that my main gauge for time served was the dwindling biscuit stock. And then, in one failing moment biscuits galore transmutated into wailing sirens; a lone town crier boomed a three minute warning, ‘Oh yay, oh yay, oh yay…Get to the shops and buy more biscuits…Get to the shops and buy more biscuits…Get to the shops and buy more biscuits…’ Before crumbs began to take on an importance hunger they were never designed to nourish, I needed to act.
‘For sure,’ he said, ‘the consciousness is beamed here, played on our brains like they are radio sets. Don’t ask me where from, another planet, a simulator’s test bed beaming station, we can’t know that, we don’t possess the equipment; that information is controlled, by them, obviously.’
I’d forgotten I was standing inline for biscuit rations, had been for too long; my craving crisis salved momentarily by a fellow queuer who seemed to know everything there was to know about existence. Another queuer piped up without so much as turning in the direction of the victim of his jangling wordspray, ‘Riddle me this then, buddy, riddle me this,’ he said, going silent, whether for effect or sentence preparation and pre-execution, ‘if time travel is not possible, why do we sit, as viewers, through the countless TV and big screen depictations of it, eh?…well?…eh?…’
‘You are confusing time travel with mind travel. When it’s in fiction some scribble-scratching keytapper has imagined it and recorded the resultant convolutions to facilitate the film-makers to allow you, as a viewer, to witness what would otherwise be witnessless due to its non existence.’
Though clumsy the general sense came through hit home and left a mark no one could ignore with any credence. The other, questioner/queuer, man said nothing, as the queue progressed in inches and minutes, but a few sigh-like noises and grunty frustrationals, as his admittance of altered perspective creeped round his natural defences and set up shop. By the time biscuits could be smelt he’d ferreted away his new found knowledge and felt all the better for it, no doubt.
I, for my part, gathered what I’d been listening to into files that seemed to fill an imaginary half-size filing cabinet. At first the queue environment had seemed like a dumb and trivial phone-in radio show that was instrumental in helping time pass without frustration continually shoulder tapping… But as a bustling market of ideas evolved; shipping lanes of thought had to be diverted to Athens…
An epiphadawn rose majestic within my mind’s paradome. I put a stop to action-reaction-interaction imperatives until my frenzied workings-out tallied, then burst in a diarrhoea of realisation: Fuck the biscuits…that was it! Mind travel! I had been in the, maybe-time-travel-was-possible misconceptionsphere…but the mind was the new time.
I lost the concept momentarily but clung to its warm essence, chased it as if it were a dissolving dream. Then I anxiously awaited its return from a cliff-diving weekend…not knowing whether we would ever meet again.
The problem with such depth of observation is that my mind had to see the mind; to venture further towards wherever the impetus was taking us: the collective mind. The collective mind, entered by an individual mind is both a privilege and a prospective nightmare; only treading the thin line of great respect can one negotiate the elevated walkways and climb and descend the rickety ladders of its being.
I don’t mean to confuse you…I mean, I don’t want to, but I must…
‘Hi…!’
Hi, not from outside in the world informed by the writer’s office, but from the recognition dawning from within, you, us, it… This is not just feckless mind-travel but connections in the darkest dark of the imagination-ready mind.
The mind’s next step: to share and co-exist…
Outside the normal facade and missed matched understandings compromise and inside we will become a true global community…
Then the fog lifted revealing that the pier was not a bridge and the sea at the end was colder than on the beach, so I called it a day. Subsequently I found myself calling it a week, a month and even a year.
Was I now so unstranged, my defences were lowered lower than a basement mezzanine; was I a sitting duck in a waddling parade?
I was waiting for incoming, a narrative pep-up, just like the previous incumbents of the apartment, except I had the secret weapon of an e-butler, although whose weapon it was I was unable to unearth.
I watched, I waited…
I slept.
And I nutritionally walked a tightrope over a diet of biscuits and more biscuits and vitamin pills.
But the sea air had an edge that no dust could settle on. And what was behind me, once accessed, had the spirit and mustard to project itself on to my future dealings, perhaps all our futures, if played adroitly it would defeat all the right foes; right all the right wrongs, and open a path to a human existence that is better all round, for all life, on and off the planet Earth.
I juggled biscuits as I jumbled slumber… Gauging with a constancy and certainness that I was edging inexorably closer to my goal with all the evidence of an empty file; empty, save the smell of stale sleep and the gentle snoring of contented biscuits.
