Excerpt Eighty-Six:
‘Nothing’ Cannot Have Happened!
KB’s Intergrationary Realtime Behaviour (IRB) had been a big Plate of Promise with a gargantuan side order of Potential, and a soupish gravy of Ambition sauce, but his (IRB) was no longer extending itself into the outer reaches of the Doingosphere.
The ‘Doing’ thing was reverse-winding, unintendingly and against all available will, into unactionable intent, NO READ, storage and binnage…
The sea water of KB’s power had been sucked out to sea as though feeding an incoming tsunami but without the tsunami, just sea water, sucked out to sea…just sucking and sand drying in the offshore breeze…
KB strove to elect innovative adaptations to the fluid ongoing situational problematics, mentally downsizing from a tool warehouse to a bag of making-the-best-out-of-what-tools-he-had-left…a small bag, compact and convenient, and yet relatively toothpicky…and toothpicky-lite.
Half, or a percentage, at least, of word availability had been cut, funnily enough all the cuts were in the vocal department, the written word storage facility was unblemished and the supply chain undaunted; if anything, more words were appearing every two or three to four hours.
KB had something and ‘something’ is not just better than nothing…’something’ is wheels on your vehicle at the start of a journey with consequential mileage up ahead and ‘nothing’ is a wheelless, hubfortunate-diswheelment-predicament, a nadaplex of ho-ho-hoplessness symptoms, revealing a traction deficit with a hundred percent trip of a lifetime cancellation certainty.
KB still had the architectural foundation of words…to build a word-castle, defend the word-ramparts with word-arrows; to nurture (with words) the inhabitants of the secure citadel until the wordy, writerly, propagandery force of biblioexpansionism could splurge forth to destroy the world…no…wait! To relieve the World’s malicious and benign word twisting for the good of evilness…and create a more goodful and less evilonian World Word Web hyperhighway mindoxygen.
KB’s (copyrighted) Wordspace was the only remaining domain to persist with input/output traffic. Otherwheres, it was all walls, closing in…doom followed gloom and they did a victory lap holding hands…skipping in unabandoned abandonment… But KB still had viable philosophical consolation because KB could write on the walls, with his mind, as the cubic displacement narrowed to the innards of a kettle. His ability to grapple and hold even his weaker strains of power had dwindled to a limp saunter and was looking for a place to sit down and stagnate for the duration… But the stagnation could be fought off by graffittiola (microscopic wordaubings, undetectable to the human eye), and word sponges; dabbling on the wounds of myopic ambition parameters…so to speak…revivifying, spontificating, enervatorily veinlining…Etc, Etc, Etc, etcetera, etcetera…there was manifold and myriad scope within the crushingly arid scopelessness. Scopehope stayed back after class…for a cheery beer and a snubbing of the drubbing fear…and fear…and fearful fearlessness…
There was no need to panic: a phrase that is only uttered when Panic and her myrmidons choose you as their dancing partner, to dance in a straight jacket and stilts.
After the dust had settled…(In the intervening time KB pushed and heaped the dust around the surfaces of the interim in a luckless attempt at imitating the act of dusting)…and the picture came back from the chemists… clearer than anticipated, stark even, instructional…obvious now, in the way the clouds move away and the Sun reveals itself: it was there the whole time…
KB had been arraigned, juryfied, sentenced and trussed up in somebody else’s alien justice.
But, anyway…
Leading up to this…
KB had been fighting, in the most fundamental way, the delusion that he no longer existed. The ‘other guy’, a metaphorical cross between Special Forces and a streetfightingnun with psychic-psychotic-psychedelic eyes and an ill-intent that died and went to Hell taking a chunk of Heaven with it, swung a length of ineffectual looking tubing, but, as the ‘Metaphorical’ was shouting out the dictatorial narrative, the tube was as deadly as a flame-thrower to an overinflated balloon made out of marshmallow skin.
KB and Positivity had one last shot at keeping the dream going…
Little intellectual spanners thrown into the works started nipping thorny issues in the bud; deadheading opponentry. KB’s bird in the hand trumped the Delusion of Not Existing’s bird in the bush. But KB was in the bush and the bush’s thorns made it hard for him to kick against the pricks…KB felt alone and a hundred million angels were singing, which is never a good sign, well maybe on the odd occasion.
‘Non-existence’ as a ‘state’, KB jotted down microscopically, was an impossible paradox… Verification attemptation was absurd because ‘feeling’ would have to exist for ‘not existing’ to be detectable, ergo: there is no such thing as ‘non existence’, it simply, (read: complicatedly) can’t exist. Does a bear ride a unicycle, while juggling pine cones, in the woods, after the trees have all been exploited into treelessness? (If a man, tough and strong, and full of entitlement dictates, ego flapping about like a savage pillow of murderous intent, then, yes… Yes! is the answer…)
He had to accede though to the apparent paradox of him plying his mind in a non-existent space, because, although it spelt synonymical variations of ‘Fatal’; the paradox also insinuated the potential of windows of opportunity to escape, even a local metaphorical escape could lead to a corporeal escape to a less ‘non-existent’ space, and then, an even more metaphorical hierarchy of extended fantasy…up, up and away, to super-reality, hyper-reality…the Universe and beyond. That way freedom lies.
Good talk…
With Angst Lessening Clarity, KB righted his wrong-doing sense of self-evaporation… The only problem left was his current predicament which, positively spun, looked like a Panopticonal, vice-like tyranny of counter-sense; logitrariness…
KB, had nowhere else to go, so he swam in the eye of his captor, or captors.
He imagined the blurb for the App in the App-store: ‘Want to Panopticon your enemy into stagnated snoozing? Hear them squeak and warble…Free Trial.’ It wasn’t much of an ad, but its promised consequences were dense and massive, if one could read between its seemingly innocent lines…and slip out to sea on the undertow.
A quick auto-orientation check later: KB lined up his assumptions, paired them with some Devil’s advocates who didn’t get out much and set them the task of learning to dance a mimed version of the Everyman (Everyperson, Allpeeps) Waltz… In quicktime, and slowtime, and every time in-between…
He had, as defence, (or maybe had been, by an attacker or attackers), minisculed-down to a kettle in the kitchenette of the Narrowboat Theatre, but he had not, yet, minisculed-down enough to constitute the vapour coming off the kettle in the kitchenette area of the Narrowboat Theatre. Not yet. Not that vapour was any less worth anything else in the universe, not this universe anyway…
If the canal had been set up as traditionally intended the accommodating narrow hull would’ve given in to the rise of water, as the Mission Team climbed on board, and sunk below the Plimsoll line. Muscles were tight and weary and ready for a rest, the team found perches and bumparkingsurfaces and began the delicate process of unwearying…unwearifying… and as with all, or most, ambush enclosing circumstances, in retrospect; too much weary and not enough wary.
There were no human or human looking entities aboard but the host tannoy erupted with audio frequency mayhem as soon as they had reached a conducive seating orientation.
‘Tea? Anyone? Tea? Does anyone want tea? Would anyone like a cup of tea?
‘Coffee?’
‘Sorry, but scientific research has shown that coffee is the work of Satan.’
Blank expressions…
‘You know… Satan?’
‘What?’
‘If we served coffee it would look like we were in league with the Devil. Which we most certainly…’
‘I am confused…aren’t the Devil and Satan the same Beelzebub?’ said an additional, unexpected Tannoy voice, in a badly Irish imitation, introducing a mysteriously creepy vibe.
‘Nobody want a hot drink then?’
‘No,’ Judith said, wariness rising, ‘we’ll forgo the hospitality. Perhaps you could tell us who you are and what you are doing here?
She had her suspicions; they were reflected in sideful glances from Kirk, who, wariness-wise was right with her.
KB was saved for now. The kettle would get too hot and…what? He was curious and yet never wanted to find out.
Screens lit up with background Muzak videos…clips and streams and pop-up messages, subliminal and liminal…adverts and infodump-mind-irritations-and-soothings. None of it designed to clarify…It was as though confusion had filled the canal and the narrowboat was now sinking in it.
KB got some control back, his inner Botface’s Torso had botcloudgang assistance, no direct communication but a restoration of some power; he just needed to adapt to the ways of using it…
A plan formulated. He’d message Judith, somehow, to link up with the Stockholm Munchaus Judith version and complete a Backstrain Topdown Hodcarry Wornbracket Undercharge Loop (BTHWUL).
This was next level stuff; this weird and wonderful universe that was imposing itself on KB, overriding his own perfectly, relatively acceptable universe. The marvel at being inside a kettle in a kitchenette, not even really a kitchenette on a narrowboat; a Narrowboat Theatre, no less, had its qualia of exhilarationary gravity.
Games were being played: a football match and a tennis bout; on the same area of play, at the same time. A sort of referee-cum-umpire was developing inside KB’s workings…
