The Final Countdown

I suppose you might like to know where I was born, God knows why as even biography does not seem to bother with precedence. After all, most people probably don’t even know that Jordan flows into the Dead Sea not amongst the bugs of Australia. Anyway, this birthplace, this beginning, wasn’t one of the Top 100 Places to be born. Perhaps it might be. In many ways it should be. Not because of me. But because its fame comes not from births but from deaths. All we really need is a DJ to do a countdown to those mythical places and perhaps then Xanadu would be the best place to start.

Anyway, I don’t feel like going into it. Call it slight of hand if you like but David Copperfield was a magician to me not the beginnings of autobiographical intrigue. One married to Claudia not Cordelia, someone who perhaps loved wisely but clearly not well enough – and certainly not too well.

Although some may find progeny boring, the place we’re born is more than a name. Parents can be touchy as heaven as well as hell, but the name of that particular moment is indelible to them. We do seem to be bothered by biography too. Anyway, it’s Christmas so let me tell you a little of a man who just got a Jaguar.

Wasn’t that a car everyone wanted to drive at some time? I doubt it features in many Top 100s now but that’s the nature of fashion. We wonder why beautiful and rare things were destroyed but they were no more fascinating than a Daewoo Matiz at the time. Fashion is not unique to the moment. In fact it begins whenever anyone leaves their Pencey Pep and only becomes worthwhile once we start missing its imitators.

Quod erat demonstrandum

There was no hope for him this time, it was the sixtieth time espionage had not been beaten. Night after night he had studied the lighted square of PC monitor; and night after night he found it to be lighted with the same faint and even error message Ip0 on fire. Is it dead, he thought, if it were, surely the reflection of its miraculous fire would be clear on the darkened screen; for he knew there must be two bulbs within this monitor. It had often said bad command or file name, but he thought these words idle. Now he knew they were true.

Every night as he gazed upon that screen he said softly to himself the word sophistes. It had always sounded oddly in his mouth, like the word dunamis in the Apology and the word perithean in the Book of Revelation. But now it seemed to him like a taunting jackal plotting to raid a 1960's block in Vienna. It filled him with bathos, and yet he longed to be nearer to it and move from the dunces.

The One was sitting on the desk, taunting, when he went back to the desk. While his Facebook page promised another vampire bite, as if returning to some former promise:
- No, I wouldn't say I was exactly Bond....but there is something afoot.....something uncanny about this plan of Ulysses'. I'll tell you my opinion. In fact I fear you should've listened to dear old Laocoon in the first place. He had some good insights you know.

233 Degrees of Separation

Are we becoming more akin to a Dodo? Not the spikes in fuel costs clipping our oil-rubbed wings but rather becoming so lazy as to not bother with the perils of leaving the ground. Like Antaeus so strong when afixed to the earth but now in danger of being beaten by Heraclean loftiness; we stumble on our island of poreless faces, hairless expressionless and aspire to create flower upon flower. Is it new that politics and public pronunciations can no longer go under the microscope to be discussed and digested? It is as if the display is enough. Even fireworks, unless you’re a Chinese bureaucrat, are formed from the chemistry of the earth. 

The public, if there is such a thing, seems content to wait for the salamander to arrive. With the Internet proving to be a conduit for the emergence of designer religions that mix science and science fiction, racketeering and psychobabble. 

All fixated with celebrity and waiting for their Mephistopheles to lead them closer to utopian myth. A world in which there are no wars, no holocausts, and no persecutions because they have finally defeated the yearnings of people and established millenarian paradise. Complete with small buzzing earphones from the good people named after a certain forbidden fruit.