Unexpected Gifts

I managed to cheat death for the second time this year. The NHS gave me an early Christmas present and I finally had my offending gall bladder removed. It had started to cause me some pain again and was described as 'filthy' by the surgeon and 'ready to burst' by the anaesthetist. This time I was barely in the hospital for 24 hours but it was just in time. Now just over 2 weeks later I can drive again, experience a little discomfort from time to time and can't lift heavy objects.

My house has recently been invaded by beautiful, sweet things with barbarous names, except Asura, who is beautiful and sweet but not in the least barbarous.

After an otherwise crappy year things are looking up.

Let Down

So there I was, secreted in my model of an ancient aeroplane, suspended from the ceiling of the Musée National des Arts et Metiers, in Paris, at the stroke of midnight on Saturday the 13th. And nothing happened.

When I got home, I discovered that the Vatican is releasing a special edition of a papal finding of innocence of heresy, which came a little late, if you ask me.

Deus Vult

In 1307, Friday the 13th of October, to be more precise, Philip IV of France sent his agents to arrest members of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, or Knights Templar for short.

The 700th anniversary, the quick of you amongst you will have noticed, falls a week on Saturday. I wonder if anything interesting will happen?

Paper

I've just about finished Stone. Just need to do another couple of passes through it. Either it is a work of astounding genius or a complete failure. Or perhaps just a story :)

Living in a twilight world of waiting, as I still don't know when I have to go back into hospital. It makes organising anything more than two weeks away rather tricky. I guess I was lucky not to get those Led Zep tickets after all.

Started proper Japanese lessons last night. 80% of the class is made up of students studying animation at the Art School!

Stone

Having completed the first third of the new novel at the weekend (my original holiday plan was to complete the second third - destiny takes its own course), I've forged onto another quick side project that has been gestating for a few weeks.

Unlike many other stories I don't want to say too much about it as there is, perhaps, a mystery or a twist (we'll know better when I finish it). Suffice to say it is currently called Stone and concerns a young woman's problems getting close to people. I don't think I've written exclusively from a woman's perspective before. At first I was surprised by the 'voice' - it felt different to my recent writing - but have got more comfortable with it afk. And, inevitably, it has all started to come together now the keys are depressing.

On the subject of which, I have received a rather swiftly delivered Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I dropped a book on my trusty old MS 'gull-wing' style ergonomic split board, which has lasted me three PCs (it wasn't even a USB board!). Haven't had a chance to plug it in yet. The dropping of the book was precipitated by my moving a lamp, usually used as a bookstop on the shelf over my desk, in order to see if there was a footprint in the dust on my window ledge. You see I thought, but wasn't sure, that someone had broken into my house on Saturday afternoon. (I came home, the alarm was going, the internal doors were ajar and the back window was thrust wide open - they had been firmly shut when I left, and there were some muddy marks on my front bedroom floor. But nothing appeared out of place or missing, like the MP3 player sitting on the sofa in the backroom.) Anyway, satisfaction bringing the cat back, I found a footprint and it wasn't mine. The next morning I found one on the front window itself, that I had washed earlier in the week. So I figure the alarm spooked my burglar when they got into the hall and they scarpered out the back window. Nevertheless, my habit of leaving the windows at the front open, to prevent damp on the walls, is now cured. What I'll do now about the winter mildew is another matter.

September has been fun, hospitalised, burgled, and got a year older to underwhelming recollection (although my star of a sister did pull out all the stops), and still a few days left.

They're Here Already

Now that I'm out, albeit 'on pass' temporarily, the strangest part of this whole adventure is how unreal the 'real' world seems. I keep having to resist the urge to go up and pinch people to make sure they're actually there and not some kind of projection. Also I very quickly got institutionalised. You know what time of day it is by when your pills turn up in a plastic cup and your drip gets changed.

I feel like I'm sitting in command control of some kind of robot colossus that looks like me, but somehow doesn't quite move right or feel right, a slowed exoskeleton with delayed responses and sluggish controls. To cap it all I suddenly can't stand milk in my tea and can barely tolerate sugar. I'm still discovering the other surprises in store for me.

Maybe the MRI scanner has transformed me into some kind of mutant (or perhaps back into a normal person). I happen to know the guy who looks after the one in the Southern General they used on me - I may have to have words with him :) If the crime-rate in Glasgow suddenly falls due to a mysterious vigilante it's nothing to do with me, right?

Carry on Nurse

I dropped off the planet recently.

After a long week of pain ended with an even longer night of agony I ended up visiting an out-of-hours clinic a week last Saturday and before I knew it I was in A&E, followed quickly by a bed in Ward 5 in the Victoria Infirmary here on the Southside of Glasgow.

I was disappointed to find that morphine didn't get rid of the pain, it just made the rest of me detached so thankfully a heavy dose of anti-biotics began to make some progress after a couple of days. Really though I put my recovery down to getting some Oxygen on Monday morning.

I am amazed by the things I saw and learnt in just one week on the ward. I saw doctors, and not just junior ones, be doing rounds at 7am and checking up on patients after surgery at 8 or 9 at night. Nurses, from the Sister down, pulling 12 hour shifts. The dedication was something that makes any job I've ever felt challenged by pale into insignificance.

I also learnt more about life in a few days than I have in years. The tales other people had to tell, and those I witnessed, from the guy stabbed 14 times, to the amputee who was up and about barely two hours after getting his leg taken off, to the total crazy hard-man from the Gorbals who wouldn't co-operate with anyone with enough tranquilisers in him to put down two elephants.

I'm only out for a couple of days, but hope to get discharged properly tomorrow. But if I'm ever in a hospital again I hope I'm in a place as good as Ward 5. They may never read this, but I'd like to thank all the staff and doctors who have looked after me there.

Globalisation

I guess its a sign of changing times: apart from the occaisional work permitting attendance at the GSFWC I don't seem to know anyone British anymore. Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, German etc

Consequently there are some evenings when I feel my head has been hacksawed open and exposed to so much 'otherness' that the brain will dry up and crack. Now to Google Zizek, apparently something to do with Marxist psychoanalyis or something.

Blimey!

Finished the last Harry Potter book a lot quicker than I had intended. Thought it was a damn fine read as a reader and a writer. I would love to be able to tie up a story so well, give everyone a bow and do it all while filling out the background mythos.

I was still struck with one image afterwards, which almost seemed to sum up the whole book (I don't think it could be a spoiler): Papa Lazarou sqwarking "You're my wand now!"

More Dogs

Our next WordDogs event is on this Wednesday (9th May). Like before it is in the basement of the 13th Note on King Street. Starts at 7.30, £2 on the door.

First Release

After a very long slog in the dayjob we finally launched our first product yesterday:
www.osicus.com

Meanwhile, after cases of insomnia and blockage I now can't keep back the flow of words in the novel. Yay!

Extra Curricula Activity

Not content with getting on with the novel, I've started musing on a story. I can't help it if these images pop into my head and demand attention, an airing at least. Here's how it goes so far:

"I stood with the Sabatier knife held above my head like some latter-day Excalibur. The King lay dead at my feet. The King was dead, long live the King!
He had been due to die today anyway, just on a suitably consecrated altar not the kitchen floor."

Somehow, and I'm not sure how, yet. This takes place today in a world in which a form of volkish tradition rose up in the UK and embraced the Celts as a pure race.

I'm still working it through, and it may be too big for a short story, but I like my background to be sound. Already the parallels between the Red Clydesiders in Glasgow and the events in Munich in 1919 are rather astonishing. Glasgow didn't have a Thule Society and nascent National Socialist group fighting back the Communists, that I've found, yet.

For Relaxing Times, Make It Satori Time

In a circuitous way I discovered this week that I'm an Existentialist, a Romantic and an Anarchist. I prefer to use Gnostic as a short hand, but that does have the added connotations of demi-urges and other mythic entities. Not that I'm averse to that association, but it does blur the image.

But also I'm not an Artist. Something I had been laying claim to. The parallels are strong. I make marks on paper; these marks are images that I collect together in a way that aesthetically suits my need to convey a message. Some of them, this one, 'A', for example, were once closer to a more obvious picture of a cow's head.

I am also much more pleased with the fact that the images I create give many different readings and interpretations to the observer. Pleased because I feel these interpretations involve the observer much more than photographs or paintings. There is, in my opinion, a deeper reaction. Most art is passively passed by, ignored or interacted with in a >blink< level response. Maybe my work requires the observer to stop a little longer to truly see what is there?

Technology has affected my art in the same way as it has all fields of endeavour. It has allowed me to more readily arrange my shapes into the collages I want and to have them distributed further.

I think we have established that my art is the equivalent of oil paintings and sculpture. But I am not an artist. Not even, as I had amused myself with the idea, an out-sider artist (I have no formal training past an 'A' in English Higher). The reason, pure and simple, is that I do not live the life of an artist. I have chosen that instead of living in penury, eeking out an existence eating stale bread and whoring with prostitutes in my absinthe riddled insomnia, I would hold down a 'regular' 9to5 job and practice my art, like some furtive secret vice, in the evenings and on weekends. I haven't given myself over wholeheartedly to my muse, nor nobly sacrificed the balance of my bank account to writing sketches of verse for tourists on the banks of the Clyde.

So the official representatives of art, who rolled up in their fat, black pickled-in-formaldehyde half-limousine, hair coifed just so, wearing factory-worn black Armani denim suits handed me an official cease-and-desist order, then crapped into Jesus-shaped cookie-cutters and left the contents in my garden. So, just so we're clear, I'm not an artist.

Perfect Wakefulness

Well I think the reading went down well, despite only having 5 hours'
kip in the previous 4 days. I even beat my previous record for staying awake by six hours; 
I'm now up to 66, yay! The thing that I really hate about staying 
awake too long is entering the state of being 'perfectly awake'. This is where you are beyong sleep and enter a hyper-reality. Everything is increased in sensation, while at the same time seems like it is hidden behind a warm, damp cloth. It is kinda cool and kinda creepy.
I am now having difficulty remembering how to sleep. I go to bed anxious I'm going to stay awake, which means that I do...

Unleash The Dogs Of Havoc

 I have something to confess, it's part of my messianic complex - it's all my fault. A throwaway line leads to the theme. And so on Wednesday the Word Dogs are running a reading event, and I'm somewhere in the line up. 

Where: The 13th Note, Glasgow
When: Wednesday the 24th Jan, 8.30pm
How much: 2 quid

8 writers, 8 tales of high adventure, pirates, pestilence, and general havoc.

Website Upgrade

After happily converting the khaibit.com site to CSS 
sometime in the recent past, I have now upgraded the design. 

Apart from a sunnier spring clean to the design I've also converted all the stories to PDF format and uploaded two new ones: Search Engine and Clatty Pat's Needle.

I think all the links work (except to the Adocentyn area), but if you find a fault, flaw or bizarre browser rendering (this last one took me all morning to fix) it would be kind of you let me know about it.