Random Thoughts in a week of a discombobulated mind
Random One
Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie
Start burning stars
Envious of alien worlds
The finality
gulped by a black hole.
People have always been a little strange. Ploughing the fields of expectation. Wondering through streets seeking a desire to desire. Only to end back where we start, more confused more oblique. When our fantasy is buried under failure we fall to our knees and try and cry.
Dates
Seventh of March. Fourteenth of February. Eleventh of January. Fifteenth, twenty-first, and twenty fifth of February, fourteenth of May.
We mark dates on an earthly calendar. But the numbers and the months are arbitrary. Just the thoughts of a pope, a clock maker, a decision of power.
My mother used to circle dates on the calendar. Every January 1st, she would sit at the kitchen table with four calendars. One for the kitchen. That usually had dog pictures. My mother liked dogs. The dining room was usually buildings. One for the sitting room was very random and I never noticed any pattern. The final one, that was always the smallest and mainly had modes of transport, sat on the wall in the hall at the top of the stairs.
With a cup of coffee for company she would just go through each month and circle random dates. The dates were never mine or my siblings’ birthdays. She knew those. “How could I forget that day of pain and joy when I birth each one of you.”
She never told me why she circled the dates. They were different on every calendar. Not simply different every year. I was young when the curiosity got me and never had the memory to keep that many dates in my head for a year. The dates were different on every calendar in the house. The calendars always disappeared sometime in December, long before the 31st.
The life we have distilled in the great vats of a breath. Regulated for production. Be here. Be there. Be nowhere.
We can be ourselves. It is harder to be you. But there are times when it is hard to just be. We can love everyone. We can hate the entire world. But hate is hard, and love is for religion.
The totality of being gone in a century, a few a little longer. Erased from memory a century later.
A plain text marking a date. Four short words.
I love you baby.
Molecules broken down by flame and soil. Soaked, eaten, regurgitated, reformed. Endless life. Till cast from gravity. Floating alone or connected. It is what it is. Becomes what it becomes. Darkness, light. A new sun or a new planet revolving around waiting for a spark. A new golden zone. A new form of existence. It is life, captain, but not as we know it.
After nineteen years, still waiting for oblivion.
Random 2
Enough of that this instead
Onwards. What a great budget from Jeremy. Fresh, decisive, almost making me want to vote for anybody but the current crap on offer.
If politicians were a crop in a field the farmer would burn them as mutant diseased failures.
(My current read is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham)
Clone the Clone
I was told.
Kanye West face has changed. He has been cloned by dark forces.
Or has he just had a facial reconstruction surgery?
Cloning is more interesting. Despite many western countries – including the USA, UK, and Canada – outlawing human cloning, it is possible to clone a human. On some random industrial estate, shrouded behind large fences and guarded gates, is a nondescript warehouse type building containing secret labs for an experimental medical company. Owned by several shell companies that if you dig deep enough you find the owner is a rather secretive aging billionaire. Inside that building human cloning.
The secret to eternal life may not just be a religious promise to keep the masses pacified till death. It is already possible to take a cell and extract the DNA for injection into an egg for a surrogate womb to gestate. Inside these secret labs they have manufactured wombs with feeds of hormones and nutrients to successfully grow a human being. Brave New World.
Beyond Aldous Huxley and enter Rick Smith. The growing vat. A body, an unstimulated vassal, reaching maturity in a whisker of linear time. As the aging white male billionaire feels his century plus is finally reaching the totality, the singularity he will visit his vats to choose the next vehicle. An exclusive showroom, warped reflections to inspect minor deviances of nature.
In steps Medula Sinclair. The empty brain ready for transfer. A dream machine, or experienced surgeon, to transfer the thoughts and personality from one brain to another. Complete, complex, to experience another century of life.
Let us bow our heads and pray that this planet never reaches this brilliance of technology.
Random 3
Walking through Queen’s Park on a dark misty morning just short of 6am. Hearing the ducks calling and mimicking out of bored stupidness. To be chased by three till I reached the bridge. Sorry boss can’t come in to work today I have been pecked by angry ducks!
Missy is developing a weird streak. She now understands the word fetch. Three balls are the right size to play. But if it is not the red one, she will not play. She will chase the white and green one but not return with them! Or is it just some audacious plan to teach me to play fetch!
The three balls Missy loves to play with.
Thoughts like phantoms hover in the space of atoms. The part where the electrons and neutrons and protons roam. We breath them in. Soak them in blood and carry them to the neurons and synapses. The unwanted ones have carbon attached and expelled as waste.
Transient Life
You know that feeling that you don’t belong. Or do you feel the ground under your feet? The roots of your history. I was chatting to an old-timer the other day. A man well into his eighties. He was well, just a few age-related aches and pains. He told me of the sense of self he had finally found. He felt the tether, he said, of all his relations. Not particularly the ones he had produced but the ones that came before him. His fondness for his parents and grandparents. Naturally, at his age he had outlived them. All lived withing a mile of his house. It made me consider my transient life.
Back in the high unemployment days of the eighties, Norman Tebbitt advised the unemployed to ‘get on their bike’ and go to the places where the job vacancies were. Stick that which is precious in a ruck sack and search. Break the tether. Isolated, in tatty cheap and disgusting rooms, where the fake wall intersected the window. A lovely half window to stare out. And Saturday night is spent listening to those on the other side of the plasterboard have sex. The serf earning serf wages, only entertainment is walking the streets with a hunting knife inside a leather jacket. Saving up enough money for train fare out.
Deserted, detached, secluded and remote. Another brick, another wall and anther street all looking familiar with the absence of mundane intimacy. Another new town, another serf job. And so it goes. Locked inside a choice of this nothing or that zero.
Just keep breathing serf. Fortune will change.
That interview. The textbook questions. Been on a course Mr Manager? This serf has been through many of you. In your grey suit, and your weak handshake. Serf does not want to work for a corporate robot. What are my weaknesses? I could say ‘not suffering the weak minds of corporate managers who learned their technique on a course. Bet you made lots of notes didn’t you. Be real, fool. They write songs about you.’ By this point in the interview the serf is so fucking bored he wished he still had the hunting knife so he could clean his nails on the blunted point. My greatest weakness? Hmmm. ‘I used to be bad at sex. But I worked on it, and I am fairly good now.” He blushed. The woman laughed. But him, the buttoned down, man with the manual inserted …. You know where – he blushed a deep red. Gottcha thinks serf. He won’t be giving me this shit job now.
Joke was on serf. He fucking did! Serf was stuck there for a decade.
Life is just random.
Thanks for getting to the bottom of the page.
This was originally posted on substack on 10th March 2024. Substack.com will email my post to my subscribers’ email address the moment I post. Subscription to my newsletter will always be free. You can subscribe here. The newsletter is entitled Scribing Serf.
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Nigel Hare 
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