In a rare display of tact, I’ve ummed and ahhed about this one. Dan Curtis Johnson came up with the marvellous notion of Livejournal Rabbit Hole Day, and I immediately decided to take part. Very much my sort of thing.
So I wrote something. And I was about to post it, when I checked my friends page, to find anw reminding people that (rather more importantly) it’s Holocaust Memorial Day today. I’d forgotten. Yes, I’m a terrible person.
This wouldn’t stop me taking part in Rabbit Hole Day, because there’s room for the two things in my life. However, I looked twice at what I’ve written, and concluded that the little bit of biological apocalyptica I’d decided on seems a bit, well, tactless to put it mildly. I thought about not posting it.
And then I thought: no. One does not honour the dead by doing anything but living one’s life. And, yes, this is a small, stupid, and inconsequential thing, but so’s more or less everything that makes life fun. Understand: I’m not claiming that posting it is a mark of respect, or anything stupid. My head is not that lodged up my own arse. It’s just that I personally do not believe in doing (or not doing) anything in the name of the dead.
But, as I say, the tone, imagery and words I chose for this may not be for everyone, given the day. Hence the cut. Proceed with caution.
The sky was a marvellous ballet of eschatology this morning.
I woke to the strains of a fine blues – organs sliding into the grinder, a symphonic sausagemeat of steel quitar and easy bass. Just what the doctor ordered.
The commute was the usual smouldering inferno of repressed icebergs, humanity’s ghosts barely tethered behind masks made of foil and silvered glass. I lost myself in my book, a little blister of mad language and electric ideation.
Acton breathed in and out, a steady flow of terminal gases from a plague patient. The pavements rippled, a peristalsis of diseased meat. Vehicles made of gristle and sinew twitched spasmodically forward, driven by the post-mortem tremors beneath the streets.
I sat there at my desk gazing into the cold black plate of the monitor, roping frayed electrons together in a rapidly disintegrating mess of code – a fog of indecipherable half-language.
My plans for the day weren’t dramatic. A little fetishistic ritual murder, a dischordant harmony of blood and noxious fluids, then home and a trip to the gym for a short masochism of bruised and punished meat, before the brain lesions forced me into a coma, and a slow decline.
I don’t think I should have eaten those mushrooms, though.