snakebite

I think it was a viper. My tongue went numb. I knew I had to keep still but panic rose as though my entire cellular structure had run amok and mutinied so that there was no longer a common goal, only attempts at individual, sub-organism survival. I wanted to scream, to talk to someone. I suddenly realised that there had never been someone there for me who I could talk to, that I'd always been alone, that any common thread in my life had been self spun and connected in no intimate way to anyone else. I found myself imagining my mother as another kind, my kind, real kin to me, opening to me like a flower but as I reached for her in my mind my clumsy mental fist crushed the blossom and I howled, I mean howled. Then I sat still for a moment. I remembered a man in a bar, leaning on a stick while he sat forwards, hat pulled low over his head, one of those drinkers that shrivelled into himself. Them things don't sting. They's only scarin you. Makes sense: takes so much out of em to sting ya.

Why focus on the boys?

Alvarez and drugs. What other choices did he have? He was an innnovative boy, wanted to make good, wanted to escape the dire predictions of statistics which saw him dead or addicted within three years of leaving home. He was just a kid. He saw money and he saw white trainers, a car, a laptop, friends, good food, somewhere safe to live. what would you have done? There was a guy in a stetson in a bar, chewing a cocktail stick and talking on his mobile and Alvarez (I don't know his first name yet. I can see his mother being asked and looking puzzled and a little scared as she comes down from her mescalin high. He's, uh, ...
But walking through the desert in the dark that first time changed everything for him. For a start, he'd never had any dealings with horses before then. He thought they were a kind of machine. The guy had given him the horse which he'd fed little bags of powder, along with handfuls of oats. The horse had suddenly stopped, just south of the border, and begun to froth and shake. He lost control of it. It jerked and reared and the last he saw of it was its back legs kicking into the air as it galloped away from him through giant cacti. He'd followed the trail wearily for three hours before finding its corpse lying by the side of a stream. He'd looked around. The sound of cicadas and the water made him dreamy and he dozed for a while, his head resting on the side of the dead animals ribcage. He'd though about what to do, thought about slitting the animal open to retrieve the drugs, but his problem was solved, to an extend, when he noticed that the dung the horse had made as its last act contained some of the little bags. Some had split open but half a dozen were still intact. He washed these off in the stream and without thinking, swallowed them himself. A strange buzzing sensation as he walked reminded him of how the horse had died. He didn't know if the guy would take the price of the horse out of his earnings. he didn't know if the bags would burst inside him, killing him. he didn't really see what other choice he had. He ate some bread to stay the churning in his belly. He came to the river and waited for a long time before stepping into the cool flow.

Wild

Fragments unedited stories connected Iknow not yet how. Yet here is a beginning to it: in Mexico, a boy has found a way to smuggle drugs under the belly of his pony. He crosses the line six times before he is caught. Alverez. The country of the mind. The dry moonscape, always in the dark. Always hunted. His little moments of triumph and grief. He has nowhere else to go but here, crossing and recrossing. He is treated with great brutality by some but with dignity and curiosity by others. Where can he possibly turn to? He is caught in this no man's land between states. He is not one people or another. He is utterly in between. Meanwhile in Kenya a boy has befriended an aid worker in a refugee camp and now receives oranges and bread and sometimes coffee and cigarettes from the woman for whom he cleans the room. He shares a hut with another boy who is older and stronger and more experiienced than his, and who is from a different tribe, who is a pure blood Dinka while there are questions over John's parentage because his mother was raped. John is gentle, though. He remembers being loved. In another place in northwestern Europe a mixed marriage couple are having problems with their son whom the mother wants to understand his mixed heritage - his parents married across the Catholic-Protestant divide - but who finds himself caught between her contempt of the church in all its forms and his father's far genttler more conciliatory approach to the church and the community which still holds the church at it's core as a foundational authority.

Alvarez. The name was Argentinian, wasn't it? Or was it just Spanish. Through the dust bowl he rode along a road so narrow and unkempt it seemed even the trees had forgotten to leave the way open and now there grew some shrubs in places down the centre so high there was difficulty distinguishing way from the surrounding wayward desert. Bush. Scrub. Sand. Rough stones in piles. Dry hard soil. And not a house or village or homestead, though occasionally the piles of stones might signify the ruins of a dwelling. It was hard to dwell and Juan, at 16, was a mover, a vagrant, not willing to stop still unless he had to having found that staying in one spot inevitably meant the beginnings of a trap, like being caged in a room by his stepfather in the suburbs of Oaxaca and fet dried beef strips without water he'd felt himself shrivel, a small scareed scuff footed boy, so lonely he'd howeld until a shoe flung in through the door caught him on the cheek and he'd sunk back next to the filthy matress on which he could not sleep, infested as it was with 'biters'. Moving, you didn't give them a chance to gather round you. Moving, you knew you were alive. And so he'd stolen a wad of cash from his father's wallet and crept out, aged twelve, not knowing where he was going, just knowing he had to keep moving to keep alive. He remembered a time when things had been softer, more secure, but he didn't know if those memories were a part of a dream or something which had actually happened. He thought about it a lot, the half formed notion of warmth and softness. Perhaps it had been the womb out of which he'd burst into the ugly world only to be tossed aside as soon as his sister had come along. His father? Maybe he'd been Argentinian. A sailor, he imagined, who'd come to the bar where his mother said she'd once worked - as a barmaid? He doubted it. Too clumsy. She had nervous hands, always fumbling, trembling. Men might once have found that attractive, while she still had her teeth but now, no. He couldn't imagine what his stepgather saw in her. Except that perhaps his stepfather was even more desperate to escape loneliness than his mother. Juan didn't care about loneliness. He prefered it to company. The idea of having to talk about things made his knot up. He prefered to let his mind go quiet and just walk. Of course, he had to communicate to get food sometimes. And later, as he realised he had a skill for silence, and that it might keep him alive, he offered it to a man he felt sorry for, who needed aspirin from the chemist's shelf but who had no money. Juan knew very few people who had money. Which is why when the priest offered him a bed and a sage place to stay, and pocket money for some small chores around the house, on a day when he had been running and running so hard and fast from gangs and the guardia, he said yes. Fatal mistake. Better to have run until the blood frothed in his mouth and his lungs burst than be subject to the brutality of that luminous lump of sineyey flesh shining above him in the dark.

My Cuntry, My Col

Oh, dear. In a moment of madness, I flung my idea that we need to reform the education system and elicit change so that children learn to think and respect for nature becomes a central pivotal notion from which ecological notions of community and economy will evolve. Now I see it's a business venture. They want me to keep most of the idea 'private'. Fuck that. Fuck the fuckers who think that it will benefit anyone to profit individually while the globe succumbs inevitably to the greed and meanness of those of the species who have most control. We have a choice. We can behave morally or not. We can be open, or not. I choose openness. Look. I have warts and snot and shit and a history. Fuck, so do you. None of us, none of us can stand in white and demand admiration for our illustriousness. I'm going for a drink. Fare thee well.

Bulimia and the flu

Years and years I went without getting significantly ill, apart from the sickness I imposed on myself 'from above', as it were, through my mental tortures, my, 'too fat' squidge of a layer of skin between fingers leading to 'too weak' and the gorge filling the abyss, the numb throb of heartbeat, pointlessly underpinning the rhythmic thrust of fingers into throat. Now my heart's arhythmic and instead of my habitual imperviousness to all disease apart from the inevitable drip at the end of the nose, I'm vulnerable to thumping headaches with causes other than alcohol, to the groggy cottonwool disjointedness of a heavy winter cold. Primo Levi springs to mind: solve one crisis and another quickly slots into the vaccuum.

Virtue, evolution and the environment

Someone said to me the other day, you don't have a typical approach to ideology. You seem to contradict yourself: on the one hand, you are egalitarian; on the other, you're an elitist, in the sense that you think that you need a certain amount of education to appreciate art or asthetics. On the one hand, you're into self responsibility, total responsibility for your actions, on the other, you think there needs to be strong legislation to control, for example, the impact of big business and how much power they have over the environment.
The truth is, I think contradiction is inherent in ideology. There's a dual process. Not dualistic in the Cartesian sense, not even opposite, but pulls which effectively contradict one another and which we have to recognise in order to live better. The first is the short term pull - the motivation to react now, urgently. It's what I'm often subject to. It's the emergency response, getting out of the way of a bus, telling someone not to step on my toes, and it's root is anger or, more fundamentally, fear. The need to survive NOW. Often, I'd contend, it's illusory. We're stressed out because we run on adrenalin because we perceive ourselves to be in emergency situations when we're not. The other drive is longer term survival: in fact the motivation in both cases is survival but the drive that allows us to survive better, to live the right way, is one which takes in a bigger picture, sees what will work in the longer term. And guess what, what works in the longer term is a more inclusive view of what matters when we're weighing up interests. Not only our own interests matter, but the interests of the wider community, the interests of the non-human environment. They matter because our survival is social, given the nature of our species, and it's inter-species dependent, given the nature of evolution. Evolution didn't create seperate levels of interests for different living things. Of course there's competition - when things are in short supply. But for much of the time, it's a better survival strategy to exist symbiotically. We do it, whether we like it or not, with viruses. We are not parasites on the earth any more than viruses are parasites on us. We are in a mutually beneficial relationship - potentially. It's a balancing act, of course. But we can choose to live in greater harmony, and we'll reap the benefits longer-term. Or we can choose rape, fragmentation, destruction, distrust, and we will survive short-term, but at greater cost to our own wellbeing and with an ultimately self-destroying end to look forward to. More anon. Too beautiful a day to be in.

All Rights Reserved

All Rights are Reserved on the stories published below. Reserved for me. This is my little field and I'm putting a fence round it. Work is ownership according to Locke, so since I worked on this, this must be mine. Or must it? Is it just me, dipping into the zeitgeist? I can't see how my stories might be able to help someone, but if they did, would that person then owe me their gratitude? It seems unlikely. OK. Rights reserved because I would like to make a living from this. Send me money if you like. Otherwise, use these words for your own dark purposes, or bright dreams. Or fuck off. Up to you, porky.