Just pipping my horn

Febrile: of or relating to fever, indicative of a malaise. Maybe that’s why the Jaguar pulled out of the side road in front of me this morning?

I’m not driving my own car at the moment – sold mine, but that’s another story. My current ride, a six year old Corsa has a leisurely way of doing most things, including an emergency stop. In fact it didn’t really stop. It just slowed sufficiently to allow the Jag get away with it. Pip my horn? Didn’t have time to think about it really.

But then it was the ubiquitous white van-man, weaving about at great speed on the motorway, undertaking, overtaking, ducking and diving across all three lanes, narrowly avoiding clipping my nearside front as he made a last second lurch for the off-slip – I think they call this manoeuvre ‘cutting up’. It caused another alarmed stamp on the brakes and a rise in heart-rate and blood pressure. But pip my horn? Didn’t really have time to think about it.

Then there was the BMW that pulled into my path as I was leaving the motorway, and with a Juggernaut full square in the view mirror, barely inches behind. I only half tested the brakes this time, sufficient to allow the BMW to get away in a cloud of tyre-smoke and stupidity, but not quite enough to have the Juggernaut ram me – just back off in a startled squeal of brakes and an alarming little wobble. He was as surprised as I was (a) at the sudden out of the blue manoeuvre of the BMW, and (b) that he’d managed not to ram me.

Pip my horn? Well, you know,…

And then, finally, there was the industrial estate, a sensible twenty mile an hour limit, and not difficult to manage, but a frequently vexing experience with aggressive vehicles glued to my bumper wanting to go much faster. This morning it was a brightly illuminated “Boss Class” Audi. As I slowed and filtered right to make my final turn of the morning, he vanished with an angry growl, a blared horn and a jabbed finger. “You slow coached, goody two shoes, penis,” he was saying, “take that: PAAARP!”.

It took a cup of tea and a good ten minutes to get my arms back in my sleeves after all of that, I’ll tell you. My commute is definitely getting harder.

There are a number of factors at play here. For one it’s the steady, year on year increase in the volume of traffic, which in turn increases the percentage of aggressive, or simply reckless personalities on the roads. Then there’s my age – one cannot react as quickly to a sudden stimulus at 57 as one did at 17, and too much erratic stimuli can leave one reeling when, at 17, it would be dealt with and dismissed merely as superfluous noise.

But there’s also something in the air, something fragile in the Zeitgeist and I feel endangered by it, glad to arrive safely in the mornings, now, and get home at night without mishap. And if it’s true we create our own reality, the universe is providing the white vans and the Jags and the BMW’s and the Audis to confirm my own sense of the febrile nature of things.

I therefore need to take steps,…

I’m not without my own faults of course. Slow, yes. A little overcautious,… and prone to the occasional muddle, at times> Yes, yes, all true, but also I’m prone to a certain cold eyed vindictiveness. Oh yes, really!

Since much of my commute is spent virtually motionless, sitting in heavy traffic, I have often had the opportunity to observe evidence persuasive of the maxim that money makes you mean. With the traffic control systems so regularly overloaded and spilling into commuter chaos, it falls to individuals to organise themselves and cooperate in allowing other drivers to filter in ahead of them, or no one would get anywhere. And I’ve noticed it’s older, cheaper cars, that are most likely to allow another to go ahead of them – the more expensive the car, the less likely. No, seriously! You can test this phenomenon for yourself the next time you’re creeping nose to tail with traffic filtering into the stream, from where it would otherwise not have right of way.

But I’m as guilty as anyone else here – at least in a topsey-turvey sense. If it’s an expensive car stuck for someone to let them in, I’ve noticed I’m less inclined to be courteous. I make an assumption regarding the kind of person driving that kind of vehicle. I assume they’re arrogant, over-brimming with a sense of their own entitlement, and in the main I feel justified in nurturing such prejudice on the basis such vehicles are also more likely to be reckless and aggressive when driving against me at speed.

So I suppose my personal challenge, and a possible way to defuse the Zeitgeist’s current febrile malaise, is, the next time I’m locked in traffic, to smile, wave, and allow that pumped up gas guzzling monster of a vehicle to filter in ahead of me. Indeed, let us all drive with greater courtesy to our fellow motorists, regardless of the car they drive. Let us defy the Zeitgeist, and be kinder to one another, generally. And even if you’re cut up, provided you survive to tell the tale, resist the urge to pip your horn in retaliation. After all if you’ve time to gather your senses and pip your horn, it wasn’t really that close anyway. Was it?

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What if all you wanted to do was write poetry?

Imagine there’s this rich girl. Say she’s the daughter of one of these latter day Data Barons we keep hearing about. In older parlance you might have called her an heiress to an unimaginably huge family fortune. But there’s more: she’s beautiful, of course, wears beautiful clothes and possesses all the grace of a cat-walk model. She can have anything she wants but, get this: all she wants is to write poetry.

So what? She can write her little poems, then use her influence, her money to get them published – because publishing’s impossible without some sort of influence – I mean even if you can write, right? And if the stuffy poetry establishment are alone in being resistant to her charms, she can buy her own publishing house, print her own poems, have them distributed far and wide, and pay other rich and famous people to say nice things about them. Or people might hail her as a genius anyway, because she’s wealthy and beautiful, and everyone always says nice things to rich and beautiful people, because they want her fall in love with them and shower them with her money and favours in return.

The trouble is she’s a serious poet, and she knows getting published isn’t the whole story. It’s being taken seriously that’s the problem. So you can see the bind she’s in. She can’t help being born who she is. She can’t help her looks, her manners, her money, and she knows the best poetry isn’t born out of luxury anyway. It’s born out of struggle, out of darkness, out of poverty. So what she really wants to do is escape the money and the hangers on, and the false smiles and the parties and the exotic travel and the razzle dazzle, and just sit down somewhere quiet and write.

But when I say she’s a serious poet, I don’t mean she’s a good one – however these things are measured. She’s somewhere around the middle. A middling poet, let’s say, but one who takes her art seriously and is sincere in what she writes. Like anyone else who tries it, sometimes the muse comes through clear as a bell with flashes of brilliance and genuine insight. But even after penning the duff stuff, she can feel it bringing about a change in her, deepening her and she’s discovered all that seems to matter is having the time and the space to write it.

Perhaps she’s ill, or worse: perhaps if she doesn’t escape to write somehow, she’s going to be really ill.

So she runs away, hides herself in a big city, volunteers her time in a charity shop, rents a little flat over the top, begins to write. Everyone thinks she’s been kidnapped, or worse. Her father’s private security people and the press go mental. She’s also not been very skilful in covering her tracks, so they find her, drag her back to normality, incarcerate her in wall to wall psychotherapy and suitable boyfriends. She goes along with it, for a time, but only while she hatches a better plan, a better shot at obscurity.

Next time she’ll go to ground properly.

She’s read all the spy novels and knows how to do it now. She’ll buy a houseboat, putter up and down the canals, draw a modest income from a bank account no one knows about. She’ll give herself an arty pen-name, and use Createspace or some-such to get her books bound and printed, because she likes the feel of her poems in a book – no more than a dozen copies though, and she’ll give them to charity bookshops as a way of launching them into the world. No one will ever know who she is, or what’s happened to her.

Well, what would you do, if you were in her place, and all you wanted to do was write poetry, if all you wanted to do was grow some soul?

Does she stand a chance, do you think?

 

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Old Hat

Writing stories is old hat. They’re like a wind-up Swiss Watch; beautiful, intricate and hard to make, and no one wants them any more. Sure, you can still get them, but most mass market tickers are of the quartz variety. Technology has moved on. Like cut-throat razors, there’s no need for them any more and anyone still using them is seriously retro. In the same way, written stories died with the age of Television, about the time I was born, which makes it somewhat ironic I should have spent so much time writing them. I collect wind-up watches too. Speaks volumes.

Seems like I was born too late.

In the UK it died early. America hung on for a bit. Indeed, over there, it was still possible to sell fiction, even really poor fiction, well into the seventies. But now, like us, they don’t read stuff any more. It’s all visual drama, and most of it’s so up itself the only thing it teaches us is the art of celebrity.

In the UK you had a few women’s magazines and you had the People’s Friend. They’re still around but they weren’t an easy genre to figure out. I did try, but they get thousands of stories a week showered on them and they have to pick just one or two. Even if you’ve got what it takes it’s still a lottery. No room for also-rans. There were some London literary rags as well, I recall, still are, but you’ve only to read one to see they’re seriously off the strangeness scale, that only very clever people could fathom, so I never wasted stamps on them.

For Science Fiction and Speculative you had Interzone and The Third Alternative. They supported a lot of big names back in the day and were great magazines to read, with engaging and intelligent fiction, but I guess like the rest, it was just too competitive, again no room for second best with those boys. And if you don’t know your cyberpunk from your whatsamacallit, then seriously, don’t bother, you’ll just look like a fool.

I know I did.

I had some luck with Ireland’s Own, a Wexford based publication, quite old fashioned really, like something out of the fifties. I wrote traditional Irish tales for them, which was weird because I’ve never been to Ireland, and they say you should always write what you know, but they didn’t seem to mind that. They had about twenty stories off me, the sum total of my published opus, in fact, and all of them lost to obscurity now. I’ve published nothing there in ages because the market dried me up completely. And what I really wanted anyway was to publish longer stories – novels and such – the pursuit of which finally wised me up to the whole damned publishing business altogether.

I’m reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut at the moment – most recently a book called Timequake, published in ’97, part weird, zany fiction, also part autobiography, in which he was already lamenting the end of the era of pop fiction, the one he grew up in, the one that enabled him to quit his job at General Electric to write full time and make a decent living at it, just like I wanted to do. But Vonnegut was a generation ahead of me and had already concluded it was over at the same time I was still trying to doggedly break in. He was a real writer’s writer, Kurt Vonnegut, God rest him.

When I say writing stories is old hat, I don’t mean they’re no longer relevant or enjoyable, it’s just that fewer people bother with them, that’s all. Stories used to pass the time at a time when we all seemed to have more time, when the evenings after work seemed longer and there was time to just – I don’t know – just be. Nowadays by the time we’ve finished commuting and had our tea, it’s time for bed and work again. So it’s all too easy to pick up your phone in the bits of time that are left and play Candy Crush than it is to immerse yourself in a work of fiction.

Me? Guilty as charged your honour. I can lose myself for hours in Survivalcraft instead of reading or writing. See pic – that’s me! But it doesn’t exactly teach you anything of use outside the game. I’ve built an entire world in it. There are farms and mines and homesteads, and remote islands, all interlinked by tunnels, so I can get about without running the gauntlet of hungry wild animals. Years and years it’s taken me, just tunnelling away, piling up the earth to build more farmsteads, plant more crops, round-up cows. I’ve only to drop my phone and it’s all gone. But it doesn’t matter. It’s just an escape, like doing Soduku.

Stories are an escape too, yes, but they are so much more than that. In the main they present an experience as if it were shared. The writer beckons you in, and says come along with me for a bit. And along you go, finding yourself on a journey peopled by characters as real as any you’re likely to meet in real life. And they talk to you, show you things. They ask you: what do you think of this? You always come away from a story, a good story, with your soul changed in some way – a little deeper, a little wiser.

That’s the way I see it anyway.

For a time, some time post 2008, when our devices became portable and powerful, they seemed the perfect medium for written stories to migrate to, and that’s pretty much where I’ve been as an amateur hack since then, basically giving stuff away, and why not? given that most publications don’t even pay for it now anyway, what’s there to lose? But I’m not so sure about this any more. All I seem to be doing is creating reams of content for others to pepper with their advertising, or to content scrape, or simply bare-faced pirate, all of them like parasites picking at my brains. And then we’ve had the scandals of election meddling through nefarious psychological means, served out of our devices and pretty soon you come to realise our devices are not so much full of wonder any more, as full of shit. Apologies for the “S” word – Vonnegut is a bad influence, but you’ve got to love him.

So is it time we set our devices aside? Sure, if you go searching online you might find some decent stories, like flowers growing on a dung hill, but you’re not going to manage it without getting a lot of muck on your wellies too. We’d all be better going for a walk, a real walk, in the sunshine because it cheers you up, you know? Or go for a coffee and spot how many people still have their heads stuck in their phones and up their asses. Best of all buy a paper book from a charity shop, then sit down somewhere comfy and read, like we did in the old days.

I’m coming up on retirement soon, thinking to duck out early while I’ve still got breath in me for climbing a few more hills. I’ll have all the time in the world to read and to write then, but I’ll probably just sitting flicking listlessly on my phone like everybody else, or ordering tat off Ebay, or playing Survivalcraft. Then I’ll finally have become one more zombie, good as gold, incapable of stringing two coherent thoughts, or words, together.

I hope that isn’t true, but fiction is definitely niche these days, reading it and, I suppose, writing it too. Like Dandelion and Burdock pop, it conjures up memories of long ago. But, like those childhood summers, golden age of the written word isn’t coming back and, like climate-change and Neo-con economics, it’s probably too late to do anything about it. But that’s fine, because it’s still possible to find pleasure in really small things. And it’s just as well, because small things is all we’ve ever really had, or needed in the first place.

So,.. sun’s coming up. Let’s saddle up.

And ride!

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The fractured shore

In this last settled hour before the dawn,
I dig my heels to slow the flow of time,
And with each measured breath,
Embrace departing ghosts of dreams,
Until at length, and with sad smiles,
They waste into the thinning night.
And the sun rises,
Ignites first light of trembling day,
And burns to clear blue,
Somnambulant mists of sleep,
From whence souls crash their dancing flight,
Become flesh again,
Fallen in this deep befuddled mess,
Of pillow, sheet, and creaking bed.
Then here am I once more,
Slow ache of a man, rising,
Washed back upon this fractured shore,
Of life.

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How much strangeness are you wanting?

An excerpt from “Notes from a small bookshop” by Michael Graeme

Available from all good bookshops no time soon:

I don’t know how much strangeness you’re wanting, or how much you can take. It’s a genre thing, I suppose. You come in expecting one thing, like this dusty old geezer sitting in a second hand bookshop pontificating on how things were so much better in the old days, then here he is showing you another thing entirely.

We’ve already had the spy story, the mystery police thing, the love story, a bit of crime thriller – I mean if Milord Milner isn’t a crook, then who is? We’ve even had a little bit of bonk-buster, though I admit I glossed over much of the animal fervour of that in favour of the romantic angle, out of respect for Magg’s privacy – and it just seemed like the decent thing to do.

But this is something else entirely and you’re most likely going to find it really, really weird. It’s something you might think is even verging on the speculative, or a bit science fiction-ish, but it isn’t. Trust me, it’s already obsolete, technologically quaint.

Most of us don’t want strangeness do we? We want our days predictable, punctuated by three square meals. We want a thirty minute commute, and a nine to five, then a couple of hours after tea collapsed in front of a predictable Soap while we shovel crisps into our mouths and wash them down with cheap wine from the corner shop.

Then bed and dreams.

Dreams we can do. Dreams are okay, I mean for all their strangeness – and it’s mainly because we forget them so quickly. But that’s about the size of it, isn’t it? Any real strangeness in our waking lives and we’re covering our ears going: Nah,nah,nah,nah,…

But strangeness is everywhere. Every story ever written came out of someone’s head. Did you ever pause to think about that? Isn’t it weird? We make stuff up, make believe it’s real, and it’s okay – people still want to know what happens to these other people, people like me, who aren’t actually real.

But not all strangeness is made up.

I was reading the left–leaning news this afternoon and it was telling me of a town in America, all the jobs moved out and those nine to five people with their family SUVs and their cute little clapboard houses now living in tents along a bleak riverside on the outskirts of town and going hungry. No more wine and crisps for them. This is their new normal – discarded, like waste, scrunched up and tossed into the bushes, their own Milord Milners caring little if they live or die. But these are not empty beer-cans. They are people, indeed more than people, they are, in the philosophical, and even in the existential sense, just different versions of you and me.

It will kill us, you know, this thing we have created. And only those of us capable of sustaining our Milord Milners will be allowed to survive, all be it barely. In this respect then, we will be farmed like cows. Some for milk, some for slaughter.

How the Milord Milners are made these days is open to speculation. They are no longer born to it like they were in olden times. I suspect rather they are merely psychopaths, that the system favours their emotionally insensitive natures, and the rest of us are just too passive or too stupid to prevent them gaining power. Shall we merely go on allowing it then? How can we? How can we not? I mean, if we are to survive.

But what is surviving? It’s a subject that needs redefining. And while we’re at it, what is living? I mean truly living.

You can forget the notion now that through diligence, the dream of middle class semi-detached suburbia, and 2.1 children is still attainable. And the working class too, you can forget the notion of meaningful work and ample playtime for afters. You already know this. You’re all in the same boat now, your bright young ones with degrees in this and that, rubbing shoulders with you bright young ones who don’t, and all of you chasing nothing-Mcjobs in the murky, shark infested pool of the precariat, all of you filling in here and there on poverty wages until you’re automated out of existence. You own no capital, you have no provision for old age. Do you think you can still run around a warehouse when you‘re eighty five with cataracts and a dodgy prostate?

So what am I saying here?

Beyond stating the problem, I don’t know. It depends what you want, what you value, or can re-evaluate in your life. Whether we go on pursuing the thrill of those dubious stimulations promised by Milord Milner’s ultimately empty mouse-clicks, or we set our devices aside, and do something else, something that does not involve staring at a screen and adding to the sedimentary layers of data for others to mine and profit by at our considerable expense and ultimate enslavement.

I have a feeling the answer lies in rediscovering that truer sense of the ordinariness of the world, the purer treasure of it, and yes, the sheer grace in all of that. Only there can we recapture our souls, and live as we should. And be happy.

I don’t know what I mean by any of this exactly, only that in common with the rest of us, I’m working on it,…

Do not go gently.

Be careful what you accept as normal.

No one is a waste of space.

https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/139757309-notes-from-a-small-bookshop

 

 

 

 

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In the barber’s chair

As I sit in the barber’s chair,
This sunny autumn afternoon,
My hair fast tumbling to my lap
In short shorn clumps of steely fuzz,
The barber’s nimble clippers buzz,
Tracing out the shape of bone,
Vibrating deep into the well,
Of thoughts and other things unknown.

And in the mirror opposite,
With spectacles removed I see
A blur that looks a bit like me,
Turned back now to a smoother flesh,
And freshly spun naivete.

A young man in the barber’s chair,
A sunny autumn afternoon,
His hair fast tumbling to his lap,
A blonde and honeyed fuzz, lit gold
In sunlight slanting bright and low.
And with much clearer eyes than mine,
He spies himself grown grey and old,
Upon the treading mill of time.

I wonder what he sees in me?
If after all these years at last,
Are we become in later life
What we both thought by now we’d be?
Or does my portrait disappoint,
This face, this hair of thinning grey,
Our path subverted and waylaid,
It seems with every single step.
And even now, come autumn’s turn,
How precious little have we learned?

And me, regarding him?
Do I consider my self now,
No wiser than I was back then.
Am I no more than old and thin?

The trim is done, and parting slow,
I quietly beseech my past,
Keep faith, we’ll one day surely see,
Relaxing in this barber’s chair,
The man we both still want to be.

 

 

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Ahead of the times

Now and then you’ll come across one of my novels popping up on Amazon, even though I don’t publish on Amazon and prefer to give them away. Instead, someone calling themselves Michael Graeme, will steal one of my titles, stick it on there and charge money for it. I know,… I’ve talked about this before, but anyway,…

It’s a common issue faced by all creatives working in the digital sphere. Why? because our “product” is easy to replicate and distribute. You just cut and paste. And it’s not just text of course: music, photographs, videos, computer-apps, games, databases, information,… you name it, it’s all vulnerable to filching. But does it matter? Should we not be viewing this ease of reproduction more as an indicator of a strange but bright new future?

Those wealthy enough can protect themselves to a degree, or at least they can for now. Indeed there’s a whole industry built up around digital rights management to prevent file copying, but the ways of defeating it are morphing faster than the defences can adapt – that’s just the nature of digital technology. So, do we accept piracy as a hazard against which there is no realistic defence long term? And more,… is this an indicator of the changing nature of society, of what we understand as industry, work and value?

It’s hard to imagine a cultural shift when you’re still living in the last vestiges of the old one. Science fiction writers and futurologists can have a stab at it. The most I’ll venture with any certainty is that in fifty years our current era will seem like the stone age, socially, technologically and economically.

The shift began with the ability to “cut and paste”. It renders anything you create, digitally, worthless, at least in traditional money terms, even if you’ve spent years working on it. How come? Well, you only need to apply the basic rule of economics which states the price of anything is proportional to its scarcity, and anything so easily reproducible as a computer file isn’t exactly scarce is it? unless rendered artificially so by technological countermeasures, and they will always have the tide of anarchy against them.

So the future is looking like a place where our traditionally paid labours are worth nothing, and all information based “products” produced by those labours won’t be worth anything either, at least by contemporary economic rules. For a time I’m sure there’ll be an elite of celebrity artists who continue to be paid handsomely via the old model, their works protected by a stout, metaphorical ring-fence of barbed wire, but by then they’ll be servicing exclusively a societal elite holed up in their security patrolled mansions – these being the crooks and the psychopaths still looking for ways to game the old system for maximum profit at the expense of the rest of us. All this even as that old system atrophies around them. And in part, they’ll do this by hoarding and guarding what bits of tangible capital remain and renting it out to the rest of us.

Already we have a generation who own nothing. They rent their homes, their cars, their phones. There’s even talk of retail models whereby we rent the very clothes we’re wearing. Stop paying, pause for breath on that tread-mill of the damned, and you’ll literally be left naked and broke as the day you were born. But I’m sure that’ll just be a temporary end-phase, that it’ll last no more than a generation, a necessary period of reflection for impressing upon us the need to think differently about the notion of value, of what we value and how we value it. And then, all writers, like everyone else, will be producing stuff for free, simply because they want to. And whatever we need, even the clothes on our backs, others will produce for free as well.

The alternative, at least for the ninety nine percent of us who own nothing, is a form of unwaged slavery, but I don’t think that’s going to happen because when a man has nothing left to lose, he’s impossible to control. And the greedy freaks, the one percent who go on hoarding wealth will be reviled and shamed and shunned to the remotest desert isles with all the money in the world to play with, money that’s worth nothing any more. And then the very notion of piracy will have become a quaint old fashioned term, one we must look up in the OED, then shake our heads in wonder such a strange phenomenon ever existed in the first place. An egalitarian utopia? Unlikely, I know, but the opposite doesn’t bear thinking about either, though I admit for now it seems the more likely outcome.

I remain optimistic though, and if I’m right, the future isn’t what it used to be. But at least I know why I give my stories away – I mean apart from it being easier and less self destructive: I suppose I’ve simply always been ahead of my time.

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