Good Vids

Here's a video attempting to lay out the truth for you in simple layman's terms. It's awfully kind of someone to bother trying to do this for us. We're born and we live and we work and all the rest of it but when was the last time anybody stopped to tell us what the purple plague is going on, eh? Any instances come immediately to mind? All we want to know is the story so far. That's it. Not a lot to ask. Who we are, what we've done, who's in charge, and so on. Add some powerful male narration, stirring animation... and bingo, you have a recipe for enlightenment. Not hard, is it, and yet there is sooo much ambiguity out there that sometimes we can watch an advert and not know what is being advertised. ADVERTS DIE!!! Why teach us geography in school when you could be educating us about the dangers of gambling addiction? The point is this: In a world of contradictions and blurry fuzz, sometimes all it takes is a few minutes of  awe-inspiring reason, skilfully depicted on screen to rebalance the books. Funny how even atheists can't help getting a few cheap shots in at religion though... Everybody whose anybody knows the absolute truth and the absolute truth is that it's nothing but a grand scale slanging match. Take Tom Jones as an example and "listen to nobody but yourself".

“And if I gotta die tonight, if this weight is gonna kill me tonight, then so be it.” Somebody commented that this was the most inspirational quote in Bodybuilding History. Er—no, don’t think so, it’s actually corny as hell. Okay? This kind of thing would sound bearable if spoken by a Green Beret behind enemy lines, not a heavy-duty bodybuilder in a cushy gymnasium. No disrespect to Kai, mind, because he has arrived from nowhere, can’t really imagine him doing a Jay Cutler and showing you around his crib, bragging his head off. Listen, some of these guys need a whopping 300 pounds plus of muscle just to house their world-beating egos. They are bloated and proud and awesome. Kai, artist and body-popper extremo, is undoubtedly the most talented of the bunch when it comes to jaw-dropping antics on the stage, although Marvellous Melvin Anthony and Darren Charles deserve a mention also. As for classical no-nonsense posing, manly posing, Nasser El Sonbatty and Dennis Wolf get hollers. Some of them dance around and shake their ass. C'mon guys. When you're wearing citrus-coloured knickers on stage, it's not a wise thing to do.

Multiverse, Millenia, Movies, etc

...When the Writing gets tough, the Photoshop gets going... 

The novel’s on hold. Been shelved for a month. But there’s absolutely no problemos, because the path and plot are kinda set, and the outlook is special. So let’s not get our frilly pink Asda knickers in a knot about that. More worrying is Mr. Ridiculous, a side project that is only 10,000 words in after over a year. The average must be a paragraph a week! Half a page every now and then is good going. It was always going to be slow because it’s unique, and relies on notes. You can’t make notes up. They arrive every now and again. Sometimes 3 a day. Sometimes none for 4 days. I text myself notes, on my portable mobile telephone. But still, progress at the moment, in all written endeavours, is snail-like. 

Even editing the backlist, which was like a breeze for the first 2 books, has run into a wall. Exhausturbation is proving to be as much a headache to sift through as it was to write a draft. As Michael Douglas says, in the writing film Wonderboys (2001), starring Robert Downey Junior of Iron Man, Katie Holmes of Batman, and Toby Maguire of Spiderman...phew...much of it was written ‘under the influence’, meaning a tipple of premium Dutch lager by the way, not Valium crushed and snorted through a blunt. His unfinished script in that film takes up a couple of boxes, and in loose pages to boot. And like the Constant Writer Steve King says about his doorstop tome The Tommyknockers, “It wasn’t so much written, but gutted out.”

In Exhausturbation, at a part where the story goes into the main characters mind, describing the makeup of his psyche as an actual physical place, very much like in The Cell (2000), guess who was shatted on by a dollop of writer’s block, regarding this particular work, that lasted 3 whole years? Yup, yours truly, who else! And alas, at the same place during editing, guess who has been stuck again for several weeks? The passage is about a metaphysical dome called THE LOBBY OF HIS PERSONAL HELL, an enormous cathedral-like structure of bio-mechanic matter like that godforsaken sludge pit where the robots feed off humans in The Matrix (1999). Basically, it has just dawned that the book fleeces (rips off) movies from around the millennium...although of course it is ten times well better than all of them combined.

Exhausturbation is so far the most difficult story to ‘make work’. And in a way, the most exciting. It went on such a tangent that the only way to wrap things up was to include a black hole/multi-verse/parallel reality. This abstract diversion would give way to the kind of dreamscape prose that would rise in The Violent Arsonist, 2 years later, although because of the long gap, I came back to Exhausturbation after The Violent Arsonist was finished and did the 36,000 word flash fiction collection Kixter in between (the titles Exhausturbation and Kixter are words of my own making...voila). And that’s how the themes of books interlink, see? Because at times you juggle and flip from one to another, taking with you what you learn in each...

At times even I, the dude who wrote it, thinks wowsers, gracious me, what the frig is going on in this man!? I can’t believe or remember what I’m reading. It's a pwopa (proper) mental journey. I killed a main character for no good reason and introduced a giant child in a force field as big as the Marshmellow Man in Ghostbusters (1984). All good zany fun, if nothing else! The plot literally fell apart at the seams and had to be stitched up with alternative drink thinking. Martin Rees, eminent cosmologist and astrophysicist, has been discussing dark matter and multi-verse theories just this morning on BBC Radio 4, which is doubly-fitting after the meteor on Friday night, which, for dangsakes, I missed. There was a new programme called Orbit aired on Sunday night too, and the skies have been clear over here in Northern England, so inklings of space are in the old grey matter, like – cliché alert – distant jewels. Or sequestered sequins.

Does space conflict with faith? Why is there a black hole in the middle of our galaxy? What is the universe expanding into? Are the aliens already among us? And most bafflingly of all, joking aside, just who the flying fook IS Carmen Sandiago? Answers in an email with the subject heading WHOCARES please. Danka.   

The Sweet & The Sour

Get ready to laugh, because I’m about to mention the word “career”. I’m not saying I regret not being a working stiff from the age of sixteen (although I think I am), but if I’d turned up for my work experience placement at Asda then imagine where I might be by now? I’d be able to fill the Citroen C5 boot up with Quaker rolled oats, reduced-fat mayonnaise, Onken Raspberry yogurts, and a whole heap of other codswallop every night, and all for free. The thing is though, I’d still be asking myself the same question, more or less, if I was a Regional Manager in an office equipped with window and mahogany desk: What if I HADN’T turned up for my work experience placement. What then?

It’s all about perspective. You wouldn’t know either way and you can’t settle for anything else other than what you have because the option simply isn’t available to you. It does help to be aware of what path you’re on. You can be on the wide path for forty years and not even know it. External events and internal hang ups can ostracise you from your perception of whatever “the loop” might be for life. The important thing is to either change your direction or lie in the bed you make.

One’s own random writing can be cringeworthy at times (although spitting it raw with no care for self-censorship can, frankly, be disturbing). Because it loses its truth over time. It can lose its meaning the next day. The spirit’s utmost belief one month can be a ton of cow dung the next. A matter of the heart one year can be a matter of pub gossip the next. Words can overcomplicate. They’ll never make up for actions (although they go a great way in explaining them).

We are all works in progress, for the most part, every single day. As wavering as the wind; as fickle as fog. Tumbling our way over pitfalls, setbacks, turnpikes, and greasy rungs; many of our own making. But the cream rises.

If you’re fortunate, someone will see yours.

Fruits of the Parallel

© Sharon Hood

Here's Sharon's latest piece. She can get them done in 60 minutes from start to finish (it takes A.T.D longer to provide a visual accompaniment than it does for her to jot the text down). Limit for all stories is 750 words. It's rather grand, calling them stories - some of them are mere flashes (hence the term 'flash fiction') and insights into snippets of isolated scenes or sketches, with no hint of a beginning, middle, or end - just a small segment from either one or all of these.

~

Kaydee died mid-sprint half a mile from her house, flat dead on the running track two thirds of the way through her second lap. She’d joined the local athletics club to lose weight.

She left behind no children, but both parents, two sisters, and a brother. She’d also recently started dating again after three years of being single.

The moment she died, she stood up like Patrick Swayze in the film GHOST and stared at her still body.

“You’re allowed in,” she heard over her shoulder. An angel who looked like Peter Andre with a white glow gave her a remote control. “Go home and turn on the TV until it’s time. There’s a two hour wait.”

She went home, noting the ambulance quickly on the scene, and plodded upstairs to watch telly. There were pears on the telly, which she started to eat. They were the nicest foodstuff to ever touch her lips, both filling and thirst-quenching at the same time. On Channel 1, there was a hippie woman playing a harp to a live audience. On 2, it was a woman in overalls fixing a flat tyre in a garage. On 3, it was a woman in a restaurant carrying a platter of food. All three women were the same: All three women were her.

She hardly recognised herself: different clothes, different hair, different demeanours. On Channel 4, she was a child at a friend’s birthday party. On 5 she was a multi-millionaire media mogul in a suit. On 6, she was rowing a boat in the Olympic Games. In two hours, she’d only reached Channel 23. There were hundreds, thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands more.

Thankfully, Kaydee had turned at 30. Before 30, she had only guessed at the presence of God or any other kind of power, bewildered and confused at certain critical moments of her life. Grief, shame, guilt and anger had dominated her twenties, but something changed then and she actively sought any kind of higher existence on a permanent full-time basis, rather than flirting with the idea when it suited her, in times of want and need. She changed herself, BY herself, and indeed found something that had always been there, and would always be there, now that she had opened her eyes and her heart to receive it. It was not the Lord Jesus Our Saviour, she didn’t think at the time, but it could have been. The important thing was not what it was or what it wasn’t, but what it did.

On every channel she had friends and family; on every channel she was enriched. It would have been so much different, if she hadn’t altered her mindset and outlook while she had still had the time. The channels might have been dark, solemn, and glum, showing her walking the streets, destitute, weighed down not only by the pressures of the world, but more so by the mistakes and regrets of her own soul.

Life is all about choices, she thought. A maze.... a sheer labyrinth of Cat & Mouse and Snakes & Ladders. Every wrong turn rippled along the Path of Consequence.

Kaydee heard her bedroom door open. She thought it was the angel to lead her to the next place, but it was another version of herself. This other one was dressed like a goth with black lipstick on, black mascara on, and covered in tattoos. The goth Keydee spoke into an earpiece. She said: “I’ve infiltrated purgatory. When St Peter comes to collect my inferior, I’ll eliminate him too and invade Heaven.”

The ‘nastified’ edition of Kaydee dragged the saved Kaydee to the floor, picked up a pear, and rammed it into her throat. “You have so many fruits of the spirit,” the bad Kaydee shouted, “you may as well have fruits of the parallel too...right down your gob!”

Kaydee choked and suffocated as more pears were stuffed into her mouth. The evil Kaydee changed channels when she was done, to enjoy herself shooting a speedball for the first time all over again, on Channel 66, and splitting up someone’s marriage, on Channel 69. She chuckled to herself.

MEANWHILE, BACK ON EARTH....The paramedic finally brought Kaydee back to life. The girl had been technically dead for two minutes. She became a celebrity of sorts among her close circle, known as the girl who had cheated death. Absolutely everybody knew, it seemed, after a while....but, in fact, they only knew the half of it, because she was sure in the knowledge, deep in her heart, that she had died not just once....but twice.

finito