backpedal
Playing a lot of basketball recently and suddenly, somehow, I can shoot.
I plug in my earphones, ignore everything around me and run around like a tit, working up a sweat and a decent shot percentage from outside the top of the key.
Turns out, my local court is run by various interlinked groups of ripped teenagers, all of them topless and jacked. They are always present, if not playing on the court, camped out around the outside, smoking weed, listening to music and spectating – a ghoulish jury summoned directly from my adolescence.
Feeling senior to these boys/men (who could honestly be anywhere between 15 – 30, thanks to looking a lot cooler than I ever was), I am able to play around them without paying any mind, often fucking off to the least populated half of the court to be on my Todd.
This week I found myself shooting up one end whilst the beefed up cool kids were down the other, not playing, just watching. Judging.
This was when a new group of three people entered the court, more my age, maybe older.
Airpods in, I give a cursory nod to the guy at the front with basketball in hand. He looks through me with a vacant stare. Fuck it, I play on.
It is only when I notice that this group have not decided to venture down into the empty half of the court, replete with its tanked baby vultures, that I become suspicious.
Now their leader, just straight up sits down on the free-throw line. A blatant act of aggression.
I respond to this by playing around him, shooting shots near him, throwing looks on occasion, still being met with a blank stare. Getting a little edgy now. I look over at his two pals, who I see now are clearly older. One of them has taken out his phone and is filming in our direction.
I don’t trust this at all and so stop playing, to stare at the guy holding the phone. Music still blaring in my ears I want to make sense of what’s happening.
He’s smiling. I notice that around his neck he is wearing a lanyard, a picture of himself, identifying him as a carer.
I look back to the tall guy sat on the court and his vacant expression hits a little differently.
I unplug an earphone, apologise and fuck off down to the end with the hench toddlers. The guy, the assumed aggressor, stands and starts playing on the hoop whilst his carers film and encourage.
Choose your battles carefully…
I’m 1 for 1 baby
Doon
On the Edinburgh to Kings Cross I avidly read through Book 2 of Dune.
I follow Paul as he is tested by the Fremen, the mysterious tribe of the desert. He is challenged to a fight to the death, and despite having a vision of himself dying, is victorious – fulfilling yet another of the religious prophecies that foretell him as their saviour. Paul and his mother Lady Jessica are then taken to their new sietch – the underground collective of Fremen to whom they have banded.
Now, we have only heard about the sietches on the planet, and heard rumours about how many Fremen there actually are and so as I change trains, and a bunch of several dickhead children and parents alike hop on board, I scramble for my headphones and my iPod nano, because apparently I too have ancient customs, in the hopes that I have some appropriate music. Evidently I’d cleared off my frightfully perfect Clint Mansell scores and the only relatively instrumental music I find is Four Tet’s Randoms from 2016 – a compilation of odd tracks.
It begins electronic, clanky and thumping, giving enough noise to cancel out the tinny phone videos that are playing throughout the carriage. Good stuff.
The sietch! There are many thousands of people. At the heart of this meeting, Lady Jessica is partaking in a ceremony, the details of which remain unknown to her, and us. Only that it involves meeting the Fremen Reverend Mother, a wise and wispy mystic. We are told she hasn’t long to live. Lady Jessica is then presented a sackful of water and told to drink, she is hesitant but can’t stop it from happening. We are in Lady Jessica’s thoughts as time slows down.
At this point the track For These Times comes on in my ears. It is up tempo and industrial, not necessarily something I’d have chosen for this scene. But then the vocals fade in, simply repeating the word ‘Time’. Lady Jessica perceives that the water is drugged and is poisonous, but she feels the effect of the drug allowing her to perceive time much slower and is able to force her body to react to the water she is ingesting. The beat drops, the vocals persist: time, time, time. This is perfect, I am wearing a shit-eating grin and feel a contact high, a rush of psychedelic symbiosis.
Lady Jessica is not only protecting herself from the water, but taking in this psychoactive drug and experiencing many sensations. As the Reverend Mother touches her, they speak almost psychically, and begin to merge – Lady Jessica takes in all of this woman’s life experiences, and the Reverend Mother’s that proceeded her. These are ancient people, that have lived long before the Bene Gesserit, her own bloodline of witches.
Next song is Pockets, opening with an alien whining, a tractor beam that comes in waves, fading to digital twinkling notes and a repetitive beat that take me deeper in. Lady Jessica is not only protecting herself from the water, but making it safe for others to consume; through this ritual she is becoming Reverend Mother, but something is wrong. She is pregnant, and this stream of information is passing through her and her unborn daughter without protection. Those alien waves again. This unfiltered surge of information threatens to make Jessica’s unborn daughter insane and so she must do whatever she can to protect her – finding the best way is to send her thoughts and feelings of pure love.
The music stops suddenly and there is the sound of one voice. A young girl sings a phrase that repeats. Gradually other voices speak in the breaks as a subtle synthetic wave washes underneath. It sounds like call and response. A young girl repeats the words ‘I love you’.
Lady Jessica offers the water out to everyone so that they may share in its effect now that it is safe. Paul retreats with a young Fremen girl that he recognises from a dream. She shares in his visions as they make love.
Book 2 ends and I am left electrically charged. I look at the iPod to the name of the track: Gillie Amma I Love you. We arrive at the station and I practically float home. Once in, with all of our luggage, I rush to look up the song. It is in Tamil, and performed by the Light of Love Children’s Choir from Southeast India. And only just now as I write this did I Google translate the lyrics from Tamil:
Oh mother…mother…mother you are You are the embodiment of love Belong to the world like you No one
Some people think God talks to them through the synchronicity of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz.
Pretty sure he just licked my face.
Marilyn
Dancing in ankle-high mud with only a book to shield me from the rain, I am joyful and careless, surrounded by friends at some sort of music festival where I feel a sense of belonging. I stroll straight from this scene into my conveniently nearby home, the sprawling party outside could very well be in my garden.
Up the stairs and into my room an almost naked Marilyn Manson calls me over and points to some books on the shelves over my bed. He pulls out one covered with satanic symbols, turns to a page and finds what he was looking for, an intricately illustrated demonic figure. He points to the page and then to the space above his heart, and then to that self-same space on my chest.
Marilyn puts an arm around me, cradling my head with his chest and we lay back on my bed as his tattooist emerges from the corner with the loudly buzzing gun in one of his black latex gloves. He copies the image directly onto Marilyn, before me. It feels extremely sexual – I am uncomfortable and uncertain about what follows, but dismiss these feelings thinking that either way it’s pretty cool.
On the drive back from this festival a sudden commotion is diagnosed as the result of a flat tyre. We hop out and examine the damage.
… All of this I tell Noah as we drive to work. I have forced him out of bed very early to accompany me on my drive to work so that he can take the car back for me. A real beauty who would jump at the chance to play in someone else’s car.
I reward his kindness by telling him of the bizarre dreamworld I had inhabited moments earlier. This unsolicited monologue ends just as there is a loud crash and jolt, and the sound of metal grinding on concrete as we start to lop to one side. The giant pothole that I had not seen until too late has torn my tyre apart.
…
A few days later I wake to see a message from Noah at 2.30am, he is stranded on the way back from work. Two nails have puncture his tyre. The very next evening, at 1am, my colleague messages to say that she is stuck on the side of a road with a flat tyre.
A spooky coincidence that we all drive on the same fucking poorly maintained roads. I should start hovering.
Rotten
I was up early yesterday taking the boy to school, and getting myself over to the polling station before work. A long day that ended in bed watching the live election results until the early hours.
I woke up at 3.45am in excruciating pain, feeling as though something were trapped between my teeth cutting into my mouth. My television remained dimly and audibly insistent at the foot of my bed, respectable journalists walking over giant colour coded maps, gesturing to an enormous digitised swingometer.
I stand in front of the mirror outside of my bedroom in this haze poking, proding and flossing in an effort to clear the invisible dagger that torments me. It sounds as though the exit polls were right and there’s a large Conservative majority. I stop and just look into my mouth and see there is nothing there, except for the fact that my back molar along the bottom of my jaw is missing a corner. This had to have been gradual but I’m only noticing now, part of my tooth has rotted away and is leaving exposed a part of my gum, a blackened crevice tucked out of sight
Nothing I can do about it now. I throw the floss away, turn the television off and try to get back to sleep.
samcooney 