I’m a Thought-Train Hobo

No matter where I am or what I’m doing, when a train of thought rumbles through my mind I pick up my bottle and jump into the box car.  I ride the train until it stops somewhere, I hop off and I look around.

It’s a compulsion.  I don’t realise what I’m doing until miles of landscape have rushed past and I’m making myself comfortable among the crates.  And hell, when I’m on the train already I might as well see where it’s going.

I’m a transient by nature.  Without a home, but at home anywhere the train pulls up.  Just like a swallow migrates and salmon swim against the river to breed, I ride the thought-trains.

It’s why I have such trouble being in the moment.  I’m always on a train, always moving somewhere.  It’s the only life I’ve ever known.

Like any Romantic lifestyle, though, it takes its toll.  When you never settle anywhere, you become isolated from everywhere.  And you become isolated from everyone because, at the end of the day, it’s only ever going to you in the box car.

Eunuchs drink decaff

Let’s be honest:  decaff coffee is emasculating.  It’s drunk by thin, weedy people with nasal voices who drive G-Wiz’s and insist on speaking about a girl’s right to have pierced nipples for her twelfth birthday at the local P.T.A. meeting (it’s empowering).  They’re not new-age crystal waving hippies, though:  They work in offices, have granite work surfaces and still drink coffee, dammit!  They just think caffeine interferes with their chi... and their heart.  I may be a vegetarian, a card-carrying member of the CND and increasingly convinced that the Lib Dems are too right-wing, but there’s a line.  I spend my life terrified of crossing it.

Yes, I have gender roll issues.  I grew up in the eighties and nineties, which meant that when I was forming my (very important) ideas about gender identity, mainstream media was constantly telling me that every natural instinct I have is Bad and Wrong and solely responsible for every Evil of the World.  It’s lead to a man approaching thirty who feels the primal need to go out and kill wolverines with his bear hands, and then come home and cry his guilt into a cup of peppermint tea.  But I digress.

I like the taste of coffee and that’s why I drink it.  That’s why I have it so strong.  Does decaff taste the same?  Well, over the next few days my SO will be making my coffee for me.  She’ll be making cups of decaff, normal cups and cups which mix both.  She’s not going to tell me which cup is which. With a little luck, it will eliminate the bias I have against decaff and allow me to judge empirically.

Meanwhile, Evis has been generous enough to bring his Amazing Tea Stash in for shares.  I had a cup of Earl Grey just now.  It was quite nice.  Tasted a bit like tea (normal tea), with a slight aftertaste of pizza.  Tea is a whole world to itself, isn’t it?  I never realised.  Dare I venture into this brave new world?

From My Cold, Dead, Shaking Hand

I like to imagine my physical self as a sort of see-saw.  One side is labelled ‘health’, and the other ‘unhealth’.  On the health side, we have exercise, nutrition... all that boring stuff.  On the unhealth side, we have my vices.

Each of the things on the see-saw has a weight, and that combined with its distance from the fulcrum determines its affect on my physical self.

I used to have a lot of vices that sat a long way from the fulcrum.  These vices weren’t indulgences, but things which were a part of my lifestyle.  Whenever I sat down to write, I’d light a cigarette.  It got to the point when I was smoking in my breaks at work, when I was taking shopping in from the car, when I was laid up in bed and the room was spinning.  So, I quit.

When I was a student, I drank to excess.  After I graduated, I drank to be social.  For the last two years--apart of a very small sip when someone orders something interesting and some liquors around Christmas--I haven’t had any alcohol for almost two years.

And meat!  I don’t eat meat and haven’t for a year-and-a-half.  It’s harder than it sounds, because I can’t eat Wine Gums or Liquorice Allsorts or Pick-and-Mix any more.  I can’t have bacon sarnies or black pudding.

Those are three pretty big vices, and they sit a way from the fulcrum.  Now, I have a pretty sedentary lifestyle and exercise upsets me, but taking those three off the unhealth side surely more than balanced things out.  It left me with two vices (just two):  food; and coffee. 

Food loves me.  Food is always there for me, and never judges me.  Food makes me happy.

I take my coffee black.  I take it strong enough to stand a spoon up in.  Where as most people have their instant coffee ‘strong’ and ask for a full teaspoon, I’ll have two-and-a-half.  On an average day, I’ll have six of seven of these cups.  Whenever I write, I have a hot steaming cup of Jackson by my hand (as in Samuel L. Jackson:  Black; bitter; and quad-hard).

My heart’s been doing funny things, recently.  Walking across the room makes it beat so hard it feels like it’s about to burst out my chest.  Stairs are a problem.  Lying in bed sometimes feels like it’s going to be fatal...  Apparently, my heart can’t stand the shocking facts of grave robbers from outer space any more.

I was hoping I had angina.  Or a valve was faulty.  Or that maybe I needed a whole new heart altogether.  The doctor did some tests, took my blood pressure, booked me some blood tests and an ECG.

But you can see where this is going.   After all the medical niceties were out the way, ‘Cut down on the coffee’, she says.

Haven’t I done enough?!

Surely, surely the booze, the fags and the flesh balances things out.  Surely coffee is a light weight, close to the fulcrum.  A vice, sure, but a small and almost harmless one.  Right near the centre, keeping the pizza and cookies company (we know how easily they get lonely).

~sigh~

Yes, it’s a chance to embrace change and discover Brave New Worlds.

I don’t like change or Brave New Worlds.  I like routine and places I know.

Somewhat prophetically, the last time I saw her my mother said that she’d learned the dangers of drinking strong, black coffee, ‘too late’.  She has a liturgy of health problems and I was scared to ask which one the coffee was responsible for. 

But yes, I’ll do the right thing.  I’ll embrace this growth experience and discard yet another vice.  I’ll give up the coffee. 

Right after this cup.

The Sordid Topic of Time

Well, one of the terrible things with life is that when you have something to talk about, you have little time to talk about it in.

Since pay day (believe me, I haven't been so relieved since I was getting paid weekly at KFC, and smoking 20 a day), I've been doing many mundane things.

Most of my online time has been spent looking at the Espresso Book Machine. The essence of it is that you can order a book, wait ten minutes and then walk out the shop with your freshly printed volume. I'm very excited by the idea; when I have the time, I'm going to talk about it in depth. My nature of living somewhere other than the here and now gives me occasional glimpses of the future. I suppose that's why I write sci-fi instead of fantasy. The EBM gave me a (naïve and misty-eyed) glimpse of a soon-to-come time. Believe me, it is a beautiful place.

Most of my writing time was going into Bambi's second story, Space to Breathe. I've been feeling it's something of a weak link, and I put the third draft to bed with a little flutter of excitement: It has some teeth. Now, with the deadline approaching, I'm now turning my focus to Of Mice and Journeymen, my magpie attempt at pre-industrial steampunk. A story I left with bad feelings on the second draft, and came back to a different story to the one I remembered. It had some teeth, some dirt and some grit.

And my remaining time has been spent on Whitby. I've been sewing myself a sash to go with my magpie uniform. I'm very bad at sewing and haven't done any since I entered double figures. Still, it only has to last three days. I have an advantage through my persona: Mister Elijah Quinn. He's a cavalier, a rogue, a Victorian Gentleman Explorer through time and space. No matter what the truth, he'll have a truly fantastic tale to tell about any subject. That includes bad sewing.

After the weekend, maybe he'll have a story or two to tell about his adventures among the 'Goths' of the early twenty-first century (“far more make-up than my last encounter, far less beer and less sacking of Rome... but at least you could dance to the music this time”).

From the Department of the Obvious

I've been doing my best to practice with my drum.  I am the rhythmic equivalent of the number zero (thank you Mr Pratchett), and so I've been sitting with my metronome and playing at 80 bpm for five minutes a day.  Well, for five minutes some days.  Regular practice, I think, eloped with my sense of rhythm.  But I figure little and often is better than trying to do it all in one go.  If I can beat a steady rhythm, then I can concentrate on the journey and not have to worry about anything else.  I can only do that when the beat becomes instinctive. 

I have found the practice to be somewhat soothing and hypnotic.  Who'd have thought that, hey?

The other thing I've noticed is that I have real trouble, 'being here now'.  My mind is always somewhere in the future or the past, and is terrified of the prospect of the present.  I'm thinking about what's going to happen when I meet X or go to Y, and I find I'm wound up about it.  And when I get to X and Y, I'm upset when things don't go as planned.  I ignore anything which I don't want there.  Why is it so terrifying to just let whatever will be, be?

Easter weekend was nice, although very, very poor.  There's something deeply wrong about an Easter with no Easter Eggs.  Or hot-cross buns.  The weather was lovely, though, and we took a walk up the mountain outside our house.  We passed a farm with some free-range laying hens, and I indulged my fantasy of roast chicken.  They looked like the sort of hens they put on the front of egg boxes.  Then we came home to minced Quorn pie and mash.  Nice but... roast chicken?

Still, pay day tomorrow and cheques cleared today.  That means I have pizza for tea.  I've also brought myself a gadget which will plug into my mp3 player and play it through my car stereo.  Saves on CD's and on long car journeys, I can just put the player onto Play All, and not have to worry about changing CD's when I should be changing lanes.  Of course, it's just going to transfer the argument from, 'who's CD do we play next', to 'who's mp3 player do we plug in'.  Maybe I'm old, but that's what real progress looks like.

Castlevania: Opus of Awesome

Konami are releasing a new Castlevania game for the Xbox 360 and PS3. SO is a huge Symphony of the Night fan. I mean, really huge. She has a beautiful piece of Ayami Kojima Alucard flash art tattooed on her thigh. Okay, she doesn't, but it's the sort of thing she might do.

Having looked into the 360 and PS3, we've decided to invest in a 360. The PS3, frankly, is still over-priced and sucky. It's badly supported and the announcement of text chat kind of put the nail in its coffin for me. We're going to have to have an extension built for the 360, of course, due to its vast size and set up an alter with dribly candles to ward off the red ring of death. We're also going to have to start rescuing kittens and helping small orphans with huge, innocent eyes to off-set the evil we'll be accruing by owning it, but I'm assured that this is all worth it.

The Castlevania franchise is the sort of thing I grew up with. Platforms, bad guys, power-ups, bosses. I completed Curse of Darkness a while ago, and I'm pleased they've kept true to the original intent. Games that require a significant portion of your life are fine, but not for me. I found a Chuckie Egg game yesterday, and it's the best game I've played in years. Sure, nostalgia all you like but it's just me, the eggs and the birds. None of this fancy graphics or silly plot lines or anything like that to get in the way. Just pure gaming experience. Castlevania's like that, for me, but with better graphics. It's a game, not a life-style choice. It's good to know that someone still remembers us.

It does make you wonder a bit, though...

DRACULA: Prepare the Castle! Summon the evil minions!

EVIL PRIEST: Erm, my lord, the other evil priests and I... we've been thinking...

DRACULA: Thinking?

EVIL PRIEST: Yeah... I mean, we went through a lot of trouble to summon you. Finding a comely seventeen-year-old virgin to sacrifice isn't easy these days. John--that's John, there--he had to get married, have a child, and keep her locked in a cellar so we'd have a virgin to sacrifice--

DRACULA: And I appreciate your efforts. Really, I do. It's good to be back.

EVIL PRIEST: It's good to have you back. And that's just it--every time we summon you, we do the whole evil castle thing, and then a Belmont comes along and kills you.

DRACULA: It will be different this time.

EVIL PRIEST: We want it to be different, too. So... that's what me and the other priests were talking about. I mean, the whole 'evil castle' thing... we were thinking we might skip that.

DRACULA: Skip the evil castle?!

EVIL PRIEST: Yeah, it's just it... I mean, you know. We've done it, what? Thirteen times? Fourteen? It's never worked. So, we were thinking--

DRACULA: Prepare the castle! Summon the skeletons!

EVIL PRIEST: My lord---

DRACULA: Destabilise the ledges! Take these bags of money and hide them in the light fixtures!

EVIL PRIEST: (sigh) Yes, my lord.

DRACULA: Take this one item which can defeat me and hide it behind a cracked wall! Summon the succubus!

EVIL PRIEST: The succubus is busy, my lord. She has her own YouTube channel on growing and making her own natural remedies.

DRACULA: Summon her I say! We don't pay her a retainer for nothing!

Meanwhile, in a faux-medieval village somewhere...

COMELY MAIDEN #4: My love! Strange portents are abound!

BELMONT: Hush wife! I'm working on my speech for when I fight Dracula, just like my father and his father before him.

COMELY MAIDEN #4: I feel an abhorrence in the generic mystical forces...

BELMONT: You think I can quote Shelley? Or is that too much? I just want to get across this feeling of the grand cycle of the years, how everything turns to dust, even unimaginable evil.

COMELY MAIDEN #4: My dreams tell of dark forces moving against us, my love.

BELMONT: Day follows night... I am the sun, and you are the moon. The moon only reflects the light of the sun... hm, that's good. I think I'll use that...

COMELY MAIDEN #4: I'm going out into our garden to pick flowers, or sit on our garden swing, or something equally twee.

BELMONT: Mmm.

After a few moments, there's a scream from the garden.

EVIL PRIEST: Belmont! We have captured your wife!

BELMONT: What?!

EVIL PRIEST: We've taken your wife captive. She's in the evil castle.

BELMONT: How can this be?!

EVIL PRIEST: (sigh) Just... come and try to rescue her.

BELMONT: This can only be Dracula's doing! Wait, my speech! Dammit, I'll just have to ad-lib something...

Interzone 221's fiction reviewed

About 20 minutes' walk away from where I grew up, there was Pineridge Driving Range and Bowling Alley.  When my uncle came down to visit, he'd sometimes take us down there to whack a few buckets of balls, and bowl a couple of games.  One time when we were down there, a few allies down, there was a guy there with his kid.  The kid couldn't have been more than eight.  They were both kitted up to the nines:  shirts; their own shoes; silly bowling gloves.  The kid was throwing gutter balls almost every time.  He had this really weird way of throwing the ball, sort of twisting his hand and only taking a step before releasing.  If he bowled like a normal person, he could be getting strikes and spares.  But he was doing this weird twisting hand thing.  Every once in a while, though, he'd throw a perfect ball.  Straight down, pins to the wind with more accuracy and strength than an eight-year-old should have.

I think about that kid quite a lot.

Interzone 221 didn't have much for me.  The cover was absolutely beautiful but the fiction left me luke-warm at best.

A Clown Escapes from Circus Town, by Will McIntosh, followed Beaners the clown as he escapes his own circus hell and wanders through various themed villages, looking for a Truth.  The world seemed a bit like Westworld drawn in crayons, so maybe more like Red Dwarf's Waxworld.  The characters, prose and plot all seemed to be going through the motions, which is a shame because the Truth Beaners finds is an interesting idea.  It just gets a bit mangled by the story.

Al Robertson's Fishermen is an evocative story which reads like poetry.  In a renaissance-era world, an artist gets captured by savage pirates and forced to painting their church.  The artist discovers that the pirates aren't savage and, through living with them, discovers the true face of his faith.  It's just as long as it needs to be and makes a worth-while read, but I'm still trying to work out why it was in Interzone--there's hints of something extra-ordinary at the end, but other than that it seems pretty straight-forward and mundane.

An ex-junkie drops his dead-end job and travels across the universe to help a friend from his high-days get clean in Matthew Kressel's Saving Diego.  Set on a world that boarders on a stereotypical Mystical Middle-East (kind of like Tatoonie with daily prayers, bazaars, socially isolated locals and mystical herbs), the titular Diego has become addicted to the mind-enhancing substance the locals use as part of their religion.  His friend, Mikal, slowly weans him off while getting addicted himself.  If we assume the visions the herb induces are real, and not just hallucinations (which is what we're told is happening), then this story of co-dependants becomes a bit more interesting, but not much.  There's no big ideas and no empathy with the rise from and fall into addiction.  (Maybe that's because I'm holding it up Aerosmith's Walk This Way autobiography, which hits me like a cannon ball in the gut every time.)

I was worried that Alaya Dawn Johnson's Far and Deep was falling into the same cultural stereotype habit as Diego for a while.  Island culture, diving for precious gems, all a bit Philippines without the grinding poverty and human rights abuses.  A rebellious elder is murdered, and her daughter sets out to find the killer.  No, she's no Philip Marlow.  Johnson spends her time showing us the island and it's relatively complicated culture, it's social divisions, expectations and rituals, and I came away glad I'd read it.  It was sort of like eating a Bounty bar:  Sweet and tropical; and wickedly indulgent.

Paul M. Berger's Home Again sees a traveller return to his family after a long space trip.  The hook is the ships travel the interstellar distances by altering reality somehow, allowing the pilot to just think about being somewhere, and then the ship is there.  It's an interesting idea, but the story felt like it was missing a couple of hundred words somewhere.  The idea, the family, or the world isn't given enough space to breath and I'm not sure which of those the story was about.

The headline piece for the issue was Bruce Stirling's Black Swan.  Yes, BRUCE STIRLING.  I'll confess my sins and admit that it was the first piece of his I've read.  I have the Difference Engine in the bathroom, waiting to be read...  The prose in Black Swan was a pleasure and the plot took the reality hopping computer geek trope for a spin.  It was all going great until the end.  Then it all went a bit wtf. Massimo, the geek with the magic laptop, takes our narrator through the looking glass, explains the differences between the parallel worlds and then gets killed so he can pass the baton on.  The story didn't prepare me for an ending I'd have to re-read.  It's probably just me being stupid, but it's my blog, damnit.  With a different ending, this story could have been great.  As it is, it feels like a vehicle for a great idea which is dumped by the roadside when it's served its purpose.

#

I don't know where the kid from the bowling alley is right now.  I don't know if he's even still bowling.  I just remember him doing his weird twisty-hand thing and throwing gutter ball after gutter ball, maybe hitting the odd pin.  When he scored a strike, though, it was a blinder.  Interzone could consistently print good fiction that gets warm reviews every time.  But they have their own style, their own twisty-hand thing.  When they hit a strike, it's amazing.  All the gutter balls are forgotten.  What's the point in being good, if you can shoot for brilliant?