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Thursday, July 06, 2006 13:33
Notes from the train So. Here we are again. Not a plane this time — a train. Winding sinuously in a lazy serpentine on a core sample of the eastern United Kingdom; burrowing through stratified layers of agriculture and hedgerows punctuated by dense, brief plugs of urbanisation.I like the train. I much prefer taking the train to flying. There is something about the desiccated air and constant whine on a place that places me in a state of subliminal unease. It's a stress-position for the subconscious. Train journeys are tiring and dehydrating, but there are at least diverting scenery, the joys of flirting with the buffet staff and the low-level interest provided by the regular flushing of passengers. I'm a long-distance train traveller, you see. Short journeys are just as well done by bike. I get on at one end, find my seat and watch the people getting off and on at the various stations we pass through on the way. I watch them, wondering if the next stranger to sit down next to me is going to have an impact on my life. You have to watch the ones who don't mind sitting in the aisle seat even if they reserved the window seat. Window seats have a better view and are more comfortable for sleeping, but it's much harder to get up and go somewhere. Today I am travelling from Auld Reekie [ObNonScots: Edinburgh] to the Big Smoke [London] in order to participate in the Dunwhich Dynamo 2006. I know I said I wasn't going to do it this year, but I haven't done it on a fixed yet. Travelling with a bicycle is as good as walking a dog when it comes to provoking conversation. It's rare that any of the various conversations will avoid the usual "Keeps you fit," but this is, however predictable, preferable to the usual reserved silence one meets when travelling. Not only am I travelling with a bicycle, but I'm travelling equipped with specialist kit. No jeans and trainers here. I am a lone woman in expensive gear that includes skintight lycra [ObUS: spandex] and shades that look like something out of the Marvel Universe. All of this seems to make me stand out as something different. Plus I'm the sort of person who makes an impact anyway. Already today I've had several men strike up conversation, one of whom offered to go above and beyond the call of duty to help me get my connection when my first train was seriously delayed. Then again, from his use of language and the way he presented himself to me, I'd say he was one of ours. Nice guy. Wish I'd had time to talk to him properly. If, by some quirk, you are the nice man with practically no hair (very loud orange t-shirt, tasted of BBQ sauce) on the 1057 Kirkcaldy - Edinburgh on Thursday 06th July 2006 who offered to help the woman with the powder-blue (tastes of Remegel) bicycle meet the 1200 to London (platform 19): thanks. I hope to run into you again sometime. On today's journey my reserved seat is the aisle seat, #38. #37 is the window seat, where I am currently sitting. #37 is also reserved but its passenger is not due to join the train until York. No one has yet attempted to sit next to me. I am a little disappointed, but only a little. We've just left Newcastle, next stop Darlington. Then it will be York, where I will find out who my travelling companion is to be and whether he or she is the sort not to bother claiming the window. In three hours and twenty-eight minutes, four hours and forty-eight minutes after departure, the train will reach Kings Cross where it will terminate. Why do they say that? Terminate. Terminate what? Will it turn into a giant robot like the car in that advert for the Citroën C4 and go on the rampage? Will it start hunting for someone called John Connor in the hope of winning the machine war before it has even started? Anything could happen in the next three and a half hours. Anything could, but most probably what will happen is that I'll get another coffee, drink it and then snooze for the rest of this trip. GNER does good (relatively) coffee by the way. My advice is to use GNER for any trip to Embra, even if that means going via London. The food is better; the staff friendlier and more helpful; and the bike facilities are superior. We like GNER. I don't think the guys from the Ultra-Black Weapons acquisition team are on the train today. My fellow passengers seem to have a modal age of around 103 and are deeply engrossed in the business of being old. Suits me fine. I have spent too much of my life trapped in a giant articulate cigar tube with the entire output of a hospital maternity ward. Last time I had to call in a favour from Hell to shut up one particularly persistent screaming brat. That's not as cruel as it sounds. Babies haven't learned about good, evil and abstract scary. They'll eat worms and spiders and if you call up some minor demon who looks like he's been through the business end of a meat mincer and then had a major anaphylactic reaction to whatever went through before him, your average tot will not scream, cry and wail for Mum. He'll want to know if he can eat that too. Baby-bothering keeps both child and demon amused. Minor squibs like that aren't educated enough in human psychological development to realise they are not causing lasting damage; and babies don't know enough to be traumatised, or to know that they're not supposed to be able to see shit like that. Fun all round. But today I won't have to do that. It's possible I may have to perform CPR should one of the old dears keel over and turn rancid, but I'm trained for that and it doesn't involve dipping into my carefully-collected credit. This Is A Good Thing. Ah. Darlington. Here's the plan: once the train leaves the station and the new passengers are settled, I'll go to the loo and get another coffee, maybe a biscuit, and that means I don't have to get up again. York boy might want the aisle. York boy might be a girl. I hope not. Girls aren't as easy to talk to on trains and I'm not after a challenge, just a chat. Unless, of course he or she happens to be in the market for a prototype from Raven Special Products Division. (0) comments | links to this post
Tuesday, July 04, 2006 12:39
Fellow travellersA long time ago...That doesn't really cut it. I'm not sure where this story starts. Let's go right back to university. For me this was, erm, the early 90s. I was totally screwed in the head, having been set up to take a fall during the nightmare years of boarding school. By the time I got to Southampton I didn't even need a push. In my first week at university I experienced full-on, ride 'em cowboy possession by an entity it has taken me years to recognise as being Snake — who saved me from rape one evening because it wasn't time for that yet — and thus began a slow spiral in which the psychosis previously kept in check by the rigid discipline of boarding school gradually took over. I tell you, when you're a 17 year old virgin whose first sexual experience is standing naked in front of a man who is on his knees at her feet and who is literally begging to be allowed to fuck what is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen and meaning it, because he's seeing the power and serene stillness of Asp and it doesn't occur to him for a moment to try any other method of persuasion, it does something to you. Especially when you're a 17 year old virgin with self-esteem issues. I felt that power. I was, for as long as it took to protect me, one of the Prime. He was just a boy himself, and he slept in my arms that night. I surrounded him the way a serpent coils around a warm rock in the sun and I did not at any point feel fear because I was infinitely more powerful than him. By about 6 months into my first year I was, to use Bob's technical terminology: royally fucked. There's no need to look quite so smug, Bob. I stopped eating. I became anorexic. Rather trite, I know. I ended up pretty close to hospitalisation and then came the point at which I reached the early stages of liver failure and they diagnosed glandular fever (Epstein-Barr). I got over it, but I had to repeat a year, and the psychosis shimmied into the back row rather than departing entirely. I had, by this point, pretty much severed voluntary communications with my parents. I don't think I ever really appreciated the whole Millfield thing, and the Easter break when I was at home in the early stages of being incredibly ill, just before I turned yellow, was not great. My family is very active and my parents didn't know I was ill. Every day they would be harassing me to find out what I was doing, suggesting I go for a walk or get out and do something. I just wanted to sit home and read a book. By the end of that break I was jaundiced and Mum tried to persuade me to stay home. I refused. As Frood and I were getting together at that stage Mum assumed, or so she said, that I wanted to get back for him. In actual fact I was pissed off by the incessant aggravation. So anyway. After university Frood got a job as the GIS specialist on an archaeological dig in Lincolnshire. Obviously I wanted to be with him rather than at home, so I went down for a two-week break and stayed there. This led to me discovering Cranfield University and thus my Masters but in between times there was a job temping at Elsevier Science in Oxford, which is where I first discovered the joys of the internet. There was a guy at Southampton who occasionally got seriously freaked out by the thought processes inside my head and one day gave me the Illuminatus! trilogy in the hope that it would keep me quiet. His plan backfired when I figured out that George Dorn and the dolphin were the same person by page 3, but there you go. That sparked my interest in Discordianism and led me to Hyperdiscordia and thence to the Weird list — my first experience of mailing lists, even before Urbancyclist-UK. Which is where I 'met' Flagg. So, to put this into context: There are three people on the Weird list who made all the various gun-control debates and Adam's air-conditioning sagas worthwhile. One isn't on there any more but I still count him as an absent friend and include him in my toasts at Hogmanay. I don't want to know what happened there as it's probably none of my business. The other two are Joe (sorry I missed you the other day when I called) and Flagg. These three people entered my life at a critical stage, between the overwhelming psychosis of my undergraduate degree and the getting my Real World act together during my Masters. Before Raven. Around the same time as Ben. Flagg is... How do I put this? It's probably better if you take a look at this website. He reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson — if Hunter S. Thompson had belonged to Snake or even Spider rather than Coyote. He is, from what I can gather, considered to be one of the best at what he does. Our paths didn't exactly cross, but a loop of his crossed a loop of mine for a while, two threads coming at the same concept from entirely different directions. He found the whole Core thing interesting, rather unsurprisingly. All human beings can be programmed on that level, given the right technique. The difference in what Flagg does is that it's done by other humans and is done consensually. As I've said before, the issue of free will where Cores are concerned is moot. Family just reaches right in there and flips a few switches. They can still do that to me. It's just these days they're into the fine tuning rather than the major behavioural modifications [Ha! You say that, but we’re just lulling you into a false sense of security - the PG]. A while back a young man came to me for help, claiming to be the next Core. I got talking to his putative Key. I advised them both that if they were not being forced into those roles then they should do their damndest to find another relationship model because the Core/Key thing sucks chunky goat vomit unless it works absolutely perfectly. Yet Flagg exists in a world where this is desired. And half of me can understand that. I do understand the attraction of being in servitude. I'm a Gimp — how could I not? The one thing about Core I still miss with a deep ache that will never go away was that moment of connection, when my will was swept aside and I felt safe. Looked after. Valued and treasured. At the end of the day Gimps carry on because they are all their patrons' special little boys and girls, into whom so much time and effort and love have been invested. They are eager to please, and pleasing their patrons makes them happy. The similarities with the 24/7, contractual D/S life choices are glaringly obvious. A friend of mine recently asked why the PG always uses sex. I was raped — twice — and my most shameful memories involve sex. What's the big deal? Why bother with something so biological when what they're after is your soul? I think Flagg could probably answer that question, and if he were anyone else I'd just ask him: but here's a thing. There's a set of Protocol going on with him that's like nothing I've come across with another human being. The formality of it is exquisite, like the facets on lead crystal goblets in which is swirling some fine old French cognac. It started with a fight. I'm not sure whether he remembers and I'm not in a position to ask. I have no idea where that conflict came from or what the fight was, but there you go. Lost in the mists of memory in the in-between time, just before Core. I remember snippets and impressions but nothing more. I tried asking the Hollow Man, but while I may know his true name and what his skin feels like to the touch — the corrugated herringbone of his cadaverous chest — and while he holds in bondage a tiny fragment of me in payment for something I am unable (rather than unwilling) to discuss: he won't talk about Flagg. I wouldn't ask the Hierophant. The Gentleman doesn't discuss past favourites with dogs like me, and Flagg was one of his favourites. I can tell from the shapes his face makes. The prodigal son. He doesn't even seem to mind that Flagg didn't come back. So our threads crossed back then. It makes me think of two rivers, twining along near each other in a landscape, forming two inchworm loops that briefly touch. Then one river leaves behind its loop in an oxbow lake, slithering away into a different catchment while the other progresses by splitting into a myriad of ribbons. Too many fingers in too many pies. There's nowhere I can't go. There's nowhere I can't go and there is no one permitted to prevent my entry, as long as I am doing my job. And, while the Gentleman would never try to bar me entry, for he knows the Rules as well as any, he is under no obligation to treat me with respect and he doesn't have to like that I have free access to his Realm. That makes him dangerous. Because once I was the most powerful weapon in existence and I threatened to tear him apart. I could have done it. He had crossed the line, and back then it was my job to police the line. None of which explains this need for formality. No, need is the wrong word. Need was one of my progenitors. Need and Service. Flagg would like that, I think, and appreciate the permanent reminder of why I was created that is now inked into the top of my spine. No, the formality is required rather than needed. A difference in terminology that makes all the difference in the world. Did you form your own House, Flagg, is that what it is? Are you one of the Hierophant's favourites because you sliced open a vein in his world and made it bleed into this one, standing there under its coppery, igneous flow while it seeped under the soles of your bare feet? Is that why, even though I'm the one doing his dirty work these days, he considers me not fit to speak your name? Ah well. I'm not even sure that this is a story. It has a beginning and then segues off without bothering with a middle and I don't know how to end it. I would have liked to attend Flagg's Mindfuck seminar. I would like to see whether there are echoes of Flagg's realm in what the Bods do to us. Does he rip his slaves apart and rebuild them using psychological torture and the motivation of love — a love that is unintelligible to anyone outside that world? Do his slaves come out of his training feeling numb and bruised? If they do then I expect he's there with a mars bar and a space blanket. There was a time, I think, when I would have been apprehensive about meeting Flagg. I was too malleable, in the wrong way. Not any more. I have given up too much to my rightful owners to be vulnerable to anyone else. One day, maybe. One day I'll get across to the other side of the vast Atlantic Ocean and meet, in the flesh, some of the people who have provided a virtual counterpoint to the journeys I have made over the last half of my life. One day maybe I will get to find out why Flagg sits in a crystalline network of required etiquette that registers on my awareness as clearly as do the requirements of my approach to the Old Man's clients, while I've always considered Joe to be someone I could talk to about anything. Now that should prove interesting. (0) comments | links to this post
Monday, July 03, 2006 15:42
Just one of those days It is odd, sometimes, how it all seems to catch up with me.The journey of friend of mine, recently crawling her way out of a hole in much the same way as I have had to do, provoked another bout of retrospection. Imagine, if you will, that you have clawed your way out of some Dante-esque personal hell: your fingers are torn and bloody; your fingernails shredded, cracked and peeling away, black underneath from dirt and speckled with the crazing of grit damage; your mind numb with shock both from the experience you have just been through and the sudden, unexpected release. Imagine being institutionalised to a place that has been designed for maximum efficiency in placing you in a position that you find instinctively intolerable, only one day to find a crack in the wall that allows you to push your way out, scraping through a hole so narrow you leave some of your skin behind, even though you're not sure you want to or are capable and are driven only by an organic need for survival that demands you get out. And you sit under a cool night sky, your breath rasping and catching on the back of your throat, your tongue and lips sticky and gritty with dried saliva and particles of dirt that stuck there when you were burrowing out. Your feet still dangle in the hole because you don't have the energy to pull them up after you. Around you, in this blasted landscape, you can see the black shadows of other holes, separated from one another by ridges and banks turned silver in the starlight. Some of them show the claw marks of other escapees, now long gone. Some of them appear to have been blocked off, sand already scattering across them in drifts. Yet you are still too tired to wonder even idly about where those holes lead or how old they are. All they represent to you at the moment is a change of scenery. Sitting on the edge of your hole, you can look down. Looking down is like looking into the past; the way that cosmologists can look into the past by looking at distant stars. Everything that you were and everything that happened to you is still there, still viewable, recorded on some invisible ætheric substrate. The further down you peer the further back you go. Closest to your feet are the damp, desperate fingertrails of your recent escape. Today I was looking at the part between the bottom of the hole, which is where the escape tunnel finally turns towards the outside; and the area just below my dangling feet, where I realised I might actually make it, fuelled by biological urgency alone. I chronicled that portion of the escape in a series of fictions, only the last of which (as it stands so far) I have made public. Today, because I wanted to share some of that with my friend, I went back and reviewed them. It wasn't clear to me before today just how exhausting it has been. I am tired. I just clawed out of a carefully designed hell using my own grave as an escape route — and that's not entirely figurative. Whole portions of my personality have been killed off, sacrificed to the gaolers in a plea bargain for early release. Emotionally I'm what most people would consider to be a wreck: largely unfeeling, occasionally beset by a sharp spike of agonising emotional hurt that comes out of nowhere like the sudden pain of a bashed humorous or a bad paper cut. Pain, said some athletics coach preparing a runner for the Marathon De Sables, is a sign of weakness leaving the body. I don't think it's just the tiredness that leaves me so numb. I am numb. It is more that I have forgotten how to feel, that it is one of the aspects of my life that I sacrificed to gain that escape. Bunny training. They use me now to say the cruellest things to people. I am the terminal Clue By Four at the End of the Universe. I am the Cosmic Slap In The Face. I'm the one people trust as a friend who then turns round and hits them upside the head with a whammy of Cretaceous proportions. The Metatron was the Voice of God — some say because God's actual voice would have killed any who heard it. So God had an angel to speak for him (it's more complicated than that, but anyway). I thought that the Prime were going to use me to tell people things. To talk to other humans from my knife-edge position between them and Them. To understand what the PG wants and pass that on in language that others can comprehend. To take the edge off it. Inject some humanity. I think I was wrong. I recently sent an email to a sibling in which I told him I would lie to him if that's what it took. I can't even find it in me not to like that I did that. At one point I would have found that appalling. Right now it's just one of those things and while yesterday I considered apologising to him, by this morning some tweak had occurred and it seems less than redundant somehow. I was not sent to care. So why do I? I gave them that part of me. I faced the most heinous act I had to offer: I faced up to the memory I had worked hardest to bury. I suffered while the Russian's clinical successor rubbed my nose in it and then went in and burnt out the shame. I went through the bunny training and learned to switch off on Family; and I learned how to switch off on me. As I look down my hole and wonder at what I've been through, I can't find it in myself to be proud of having survived that. I should be. Before all this happened I would have been proud. I can't find it in myself to hate that it happened. I can't even find it in myself to be disappointed that it isn't over yet; that there's still a vast acreage of desolate land to negotiate and I don't know in which direction I should head. I find myself giving advice to people I have no hope of following myself. Because that's my job. A messenger. Apparently it's not hypocritical when it's personalised. Mostly I'm numb. Mostly I'm numb in the way some parts of my damaged elbow will always be numb, or the way a tooth is numb after root canal work. If the nerve is dug out or smashed or burnt away then there's nothing left to do the feeling. Then there are days like today, when that thick, hard spike of emotion comes hammering through my chest to press against the back of my throat and it's all I can do not to burst into tears. There are days when I am filled with longing and mostly I don't know what it's for, but I know it's not for pistachio ice cream. I think it's for Family. For the last week or so my radar has been tuned to hyper-pitch, the gain turned all the way up so that people who are probably just aware of having a bit of a thing for a particular animal are blaring brightly on my awareness like phosphorus grenades. It's all I can do not to run over to them in the street and just start talking at them. I could do that. I have an amazing facility for striking up conversations with total strangers. But where would it get me? Nowhere, probably. I've just crawled out of a hole and maybe I was expecting there to be someone waiting for me at the top. Maybe it was because some part of me thought that this was where I got the clap on the back and the 'well done' and the Mars Bar and the space blanket around the shoulders. Maybe I was expecting there to be someone up here with a hug that squeezed me tight and said 'hush, you're safe now.' But there isn't. And today looking down the hole isn’t just a reminder of how far I've come: it makes me think about how far I still have to go, and wonder if it will ever truly be over and I'll ever be given the opportunity to be comfortable. Today I want to cry on someone's shoulder, but the person on whose shoulder I would most like to cry most probably doesn't exist, and the only person there is on whose shoulder I can cry doesn't understand. Worst of all is the sensation that a monster like me, who doesn't care about this sort of pain in others, doesn't deserve that comfort. I'm not supposed to feel: it's my fault that it hurts. Why should I get the sympathy and understanding that I can't offer others? Maybe that's a lesson too. If you don't feel it can't hurt, which ordinarily I'd have said was a pretty rubbish way of dealing with it; but if the one person who can relieve the pain doesn't exist, what else are you supposed to do? (2) comments | links to this post
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