Empty Space

In the aftermath of M John Harrison's Empty Space, I dreamt a strange reversal of my own. In my dream, I was cleaning up the rheumy eyes of the very young and the very old, and a voice whispered to me, "Remove the dirt from others' eyes, now that you have cleaned your own."

And the world overflowed with people with dirty eyes, and my own eyes overflowed with tears.

The Discworld and the Singapore MRT System

I was just looking through a bibliography of Terry Pratchett's wonderful Discworld novels. That's when I noticed that the titles have an odd synchronicity with the stations of the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit System.

I am quite certain that if Pratchett lives long enough, every single one of his novels will match up, one-to-one, with a station on the Singapore MRT network. If I disappear one day while on the MRT, you will know why.

Ideal Gas

I think my brain functions like a gas. The hotter it runs, the greater the concentration in memes per volumetric unit, the greater the intracranial pressure. Like a gas, it needs a pressure valve. This I know from the throbbing in the support structures around my skull.

At the same time, it is a very non-ideal gas. Its contents are not easy to compress. Its particles occupy space and deny it to other particles. It is not susceptible to simple equations of state. It drive me nuts. Then again, since this is my brain we're talking about, it must be driving itself nuts. It must be carrying out some sort of Carnot cycle.

But it is also the apparent source of my creativity and my ideation. It spawns ideas. It shuffles them around and synthesizes new ones. Just as the mens rea gives rise to the real, so the mens idea must give rise to the ideal. Haha.

Phantasmagoria

Had a very peculiar dream last night. I dreamt I was a private investigator looking for a data dump from a spurious educational institution operating from a container complex near a rapid transit station. That's the gist of it. Some vignettes follow.

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I remember walking through the containers and realising all I could hear were distant cackles and hoots and the sound of busy secretaries. A little girl kept popping up and saying, "There's nobody there!" The containers were all beige with grey highlights. They had once had other colours, which had been whitewashed over.

=====

I found myself at a hospitality office. The hospitality officer said to me, "Why did you pick up the ten-cent coin and put it on my desk?" And i replied, "Because you need it..."

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I remember walking through a crowded transit area, reminiscent of a cross between Grand Central Station in NYC and Raffles Square in Singapore. People were hawking things everywhere. On closer inspection, a lot of them were artifacts looted from an educational institution I used to know.

=====

But the punchline just before I woke up was a man named Kani saying to me, "Sir, you have to stop this! The X-Men are buying up all our paintings and getting away with it!"

Weird.

Self-Medication

Today I took the brave step of scrubbing part of the old programming and replacing the nanobots. Years of caffeine dependency don't peel easily away from the walls of the mind, but once you begin to peel, all you have to worry about are scabs. I am no longer dependent on caffeine. Rather, I have weaponised it. My nanobots are continually destroying caffeine dependency plaques and replenishing caffeine levels.

I am now a stainless steel cafetierre. I admit that the image of being a stainless steel cafetierre is not as appealing to the rebel mind as that of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat, but it is a step up from being a mere vessel to both vessel and source (or at least, intermediary).

At the same time, I have scrubbed all semiotic greenery from my heraldic codes. All you people out there who think my heraldry contains any tinctures save azure and gules, and any metals save or, should go scrub yourselves too. I am not one for the vertical or viridian. Sometimes I despair at the intelligence community; signs and symbols are not so difficult to read.

Yes, it does seem as if the caffeine boost has made this posting a tad jumperitical, but I assure you I am not channeling the ghost of Robert Silverberg the Science Fiction Writer of the 1960s. I am just doing what comes naturally when one's blood as significantly deviant in content from the norm. Three cheers for serratiopeptides and capsaicin oleoresin. And another two and a half for the nanobot collection I inherited from my precursor entities. Hoo-hah!!

The Silliness Of The Cat

Sometimes, you sit in the world which is the world of a kitten. It is full of spiky things and interesting things and thread and balls of wool and stuff to bat about. And it is all a game and in the end you curl up in it and pull it around you and fall asleep. Then everything is all right.

What does the kitten dream about? It dreams about more wool, and more interesting things, and saves its energy for the real version of its dreams. And at the back of its mind, it begins to dream the dream of the cat, and perhaps in its primordial Nimrod myth, it realises it will one day be a mighty hunter.

Then again, some day it might grow up to realise it has hunted nothing but string, chased nothing but little chittering lizards, and terrorised the odd bird or two. It will on that day grow wise in one of two ways. The first way is that it will realise it is still big in its own way, and decide never to grow up.

The second choice is harder. It can decide to go off and die, knowing that out there, God will make it into a Cat; not just a cat, but a Cat. It's harder, and most cats take at least 9 years to get there, one year for each of their lives. It is surprisingly very difficult to give up a life that you cannot keep for one that you cannot lose.

But there you have it.

It's been a funny kind of afternoon.

Morning Has Broken

I woke up all over the place this morning. In one ear, a ringing noise; in the other, a cold blast of air. I was on the left side and it was not the right side, being the wrong side. Sometimes you have mornings like that: unsettling, disjointed awakenings with pains in odd places.

The reasons may be simple: lack of proper sleep, a thermostat set too low (or too high), the dogs having a fit downstairs at 4 am, the cat having a hissy fit at the dogs, the wrong coffee (or too much of the right one). But the effect is to parlay a normal day into a surreal one, one in which a layer of magic realism seems to loom all over the quotidian landscape.

Well, I've had enough of this. I'm going back to sleep for a few minutes, and I hope that when I wake up, everything will have reset itself back to what it ought to be. Or something else less disconcerting. Heh.

Cheers For Fears

Cheers to the first, who will not be last.
Cheers to the thirst for the things of the past.
Cheers to the eminent and the misused,
For things both evident and somehow confused.

Cheers to the forgotten ones who have left,
Though we are not always the ones so bereft.
Cheers to Charisma, elegant, wise;
Cheers to Christina, for strength in disguise.
Cheers to Chanticleer, for chortlesome glee;
Cheers to the Phyllum, for iron and tea.
Cheers to the Steersmen, that group no one knows,
Who never will sit in their former repose.

Huzzah, I say, huzzah! And more huzzahs yet!
And let us be humble, lest we forget.

=====

This is what happens when you do your best:
You drink like a fish and pass out with the rest.

Numerology

"Seven is perfect," said the Old Man. "Six is not so good; it is the mark of mortal men."

Glaring a little in the dim light, he looked down upon us from his place at the bottom of the room. "Five," he said with an air of doom and apocalypse, "is not good at all."

Deja Vu

Someone I know pretty well once said, "Deja vu is French for tha syme auld shaiyt in some Northern English dialects." Not being from that part of the world, I find myself inadequate in offering a suitable translation. But what really rocks my boat, rocks my cradle, rocks my tenuous hold on my bad temper, is that so much of what I'm supposed to do nowadays could have been avoided, ameliorated or accelerated if some people had the foresight to adopt certain practices earlier.

I mean, if you were running a multi-million-dollar customer service company, you would surely create a department to keep track of all your clients' details and ensure that this department was able to deliver any data product required on any aspect of the customer base. You would create a training department to ensure that your customer service officers were able to deliver the products that you offer your clients in a stable and relevant form. And you would make sure to deliver the things you said you would deliver, instead of using bait-and-switch tactics.

Thank goodness this is only a simulation game. Wow, those software engineers are pretty ingenious at creating simulations of faceless bureaucracies, aren't they. Aren't they? Hey, why isn't anyone providing me with some service support here? Anyone?

Vignettes

These are little glimpses into the secret life of us all.

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Morning meditations. The tale is a familiar one. The leader of the people vanishes up the mountain to commune with his God. His people fret in his absence. They indulge in abhorrent practices. The leader returns. He mobilises a few hundred of the sanctified to kill three thousand people in the name of his God.

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The end of the day at the College of Wyverns. Gathered in the scriptorium beneath the aedificium, the warrior monks and nuns of the Grand Order are engaged in serious philosophical debate. Today's topic: ethics and discipline. This is how the conversation ends.

"I, sir, am a paragon of moral rectitude!"

"Moral turpitude, more likely!"

"My rectum is perpendicular to the ground!"

"So is your turpentine!"

"Gentlemen, you're all being a bit..."

"Sorry, madam."

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In quite another section of the College, fifty young men and women – some of senior and exalted station, some of junior and less exalted estate – stand in wait for the mysterious Knights of the Old Republic, servants of the Black Order. They will wait for a long time, but they do not mind, for they also serve who only stand and wait.

The lines stretch out forever, orderly, active, disciplined. They wait, they wait. Is there any use to the waiting? They assume so; their faith is like armour.

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The Grey Man walks the white corridors and appears in the Plaza. Students call out to him, "Sir, entertain us!" It is an unusual request, but the Grey Man is feeling uncharacteristically beneficient and he complies.

"Entertaining yourself is very simple. You need to start with boredom. Perfect boredom creates heightened self-awareness."

The students quieten, realising that one of his rare public performances is in the offing.

"You stand upright, life and death in your hands, left and right. It is at the moment of equilibrium that you will realise your hands are different."

They stare at him. Is he serious? The Grey Man is not known for straight talk.

"Left and right. You will begin to see that they are different, feel that they are not the same."

He sees that some of them are looking at his hands, or at their own. He lifts his hands: plain, ordinary-looking hands.

"Select a hand and look at it. You will suddenly know that it is not your hand, that it is an alien object, separated from you, not you at all."

He takes a breath, and so do they.

"And at that moment, you will have entertained yourself."

He smiles, steps away, and vanishes.

=====

He has a daughter. She has a father. When did they grow to be this far apart? Not that far apart though; merely at arm's length. But far enough. He is feeling old; the white hairs depress him, with their little antimelanic messages. She is feeling old because things irritate her which shouldn't. She shouldn't feel old. She is less than half his age.

But it's there, and what can you do about it?

500

I had a 500th post, but it got too big. It's escaped, it's out there, and it thinks it's a book. Worse, it thinks it can compete with Deathly Hallows. It calls itself Lively Goodbyes.