When I was nine, I saw a trapeze artist die. I imagine this might sound like the opening to an intensely morbid account, but I encourage you to bear with me. I had just watched this man run through a series of increasingly dangerous acts without any of the hundred or so present realising that they would be his last. I’d say I wonder how that feels, but the point is that it doesn’t feel like anything unusual until it’s too late.
There is a certain grace and elegance to trapeze. I don’t know enough about it to tell you if this man performed to most death-defying feats, or even the higher side of average. All I know is that a nine year old is quickly spellbound by these kinds of performances. The simple grace, economy of movement, intense concentration, fantastic dexterity and absence of a net combine to shape a performance practically outside of human experience. It is a wonder the mind can barely encompass; the excitement is palpable.
Again, I don’t know enough about trapeze to tell if this were a long show or not, but from my child’s perspective, it was an unending event, stretching out to fill a whole evening. Every time someone released the bar, arms tensed to meet the chalked hands and weight of another performer, backlit by the low summer-evening sun through the red of the tent, I felt my breath meet the unexpected solidness of the back of my throat. There’s a twinge of not-quite-pain that can only be the frightened anticipation of someone else’s risk.
My granddad had brought me to the circus and, ancient and wise as he seemed then, when I look back on it I realise that he can only possibly have had limited experience of circuses himself. My father had spent his school years as a street performer and so was intimately acquainted with the circus – it having long been the source of stolen tricks, deconstructed, reverse engineered for careful and profitable redeployment). My granddad just wasn’t really a circus person; his love was reserved for snooker
He leaned over to me, during a break in the performance, and confided that he could never have been a trapezist. He faced me with a wide grin, left hand held up to show off the fact that he was missing the best part of the last two fingers of his right hand. He smiled and pointed his abbreviated hand towards the tent’s ceiling’s centre – a one-ring circus; this was the countryside, after all.
I suppose it’s ironic that we watched the whole tireless performance so long without anything going wrong. It wasn’t until they turned to give their bows that anything seemed remotely amiss. As the three performers turned to address the thin crowd, spread as far from one another as I imagine only an Irish crowd can manage without organisation, one left foot slipped from its seemingly secure perch on the bar.
It would be a more thrilling account of how my life changed when I saw a man die if he had locked eyes with me in the precise fraction of second that he realised he would fall, but he didn’t. That’s not really how life works. Instead, he cast his eyes around and in his face you could read the transition from shock that he had slipped, to the grasping of his right hand thrust towards the wire supporting the bar and then, in the wide sweep of his eyes around the tent, a kind of sad and grudging acceptance.
This is where it ends. In a one-ring circus outside a town nobody has ever heard of, by a beach that’s become part of our national consciousness because of an oil spill. Images of terns drowned, feathers too slick with oil to keep above the waves. This is who you are, falling thirty feet, in a sloppy turn, towards a plastic sheeting across a packed earth floor in front of scattered handfuls of people.
The saddest part isn’t even that… it’s that nothing of his life translated into his death. He, whoever he was, had made a career of grace and elegance, of doing things practically outside human capacity, and in his end his finest achievement was to make a room full of people realise how frighteningly fragile human beings are… and how shock-absorbent a body can be. You might have expected a bounce or, the human body being more than sixty percent liquid, a splash. Certainly I did. Instead there’s just the dull thud. The same response as of a sandbag dropped from twenty feet in the air.
I’m not sure what message you’re supposed to take from something like that when you’re nine. I think if there’s one thing I learned, it’s that however you do die, go out either happy with what you’ve achieved or try to go out on your own terms. If you must die by falling from a height, in front of a scattered assemblage of people too young or old to be relevant, try as hard as you can to lock your eyes onto someone who looks both young and impressionable.
If you’re lucky, you’ll make one penultimate impact.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Last work-related update, I promise
I work in an office in the business equivalent of those terrifying suburban labyrinth housing estates. I have no idea how many “units” there are in our “business park” but I know that we’re in the 280s, which is disconcerting. Moreover, I know that surprisingly little goes on in the offices around us.
The office opposite our own, for example, appears to have been bought pretty much just for the warehouse space attached to it. This means that during the afternoon, if I look out the window, there is a row of offices facing my own that are empty, unused and unadorned but for carpet. There are no cables dangling from the lights or layers of dust, nothing to indicate that people haven’t just gone out for lunch… except that there’s never been anyone there. I imagine that once a week the cleaners go up and make sure the place is all spic and span
When I’m not staring out the window distractedly, trying to keep myself from achieving anything noteworthy, I walk downstairs and across the road to the garage to get a snack. The office I pass on my left is a bit like the office across the road, only stranger. Rather than just being empty, the curtains are either drawn or pulled back every day, seemingly at random. Looking inside you can see a long, rounded table, with some conference calling kit in the centre, powered off always. The desk is ringed by high-backed leather chairs, but there’s never anyone sitting at them.
As I walked by today, I noticed that the chairs were missing, and the desk was covered in tiny scraps of paper, scissors and the kinds of tape dispensers we use to close big boxes in the warehouse… but there was nobody there. Nor was there any sign that the place had been opened over the last few days. I asked around, because some of our people don’t leave work until 1900, but they hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave in ages.
I wonder what kind of business could there be that has to work under those conditions. Is there any business that would have to open only at night and be closed by the next morning? It’s hard to think of any.
Vampire crèche. No doubt about it. The paper must have been from the teachers making the little vamplets make their parents cards.
Nothing else makes sense.
The office opposite our own, for example, appears to have been bought pretty much just for the warehouse space attached to it. This means that during the afternoon, if I look out the window, there is a row of offices facing my own that are empty, unused and unadorned but for carpet. There are no cables dangling from the lights or layers of dust, nothing to indicate that people haven’t just gone out for lunch… except that there’s never been anyone there. I imagine that once a week the cleaners go up and make sure the place is all spic and span
When I’m not staring out the window distractedly, trying to keep myself from achieving anything noteworthy, I walk downstairs and across the road to the garage to get a snack. The office I pass on my left is a bit like the office across the road, only stranger. Rather than just being empty, the curtains are either drawn or pulled back every day, seemingly at random. Looking inside you can see a long, rounded table, with some conference calling kit in the centre, powered off always. The desk is ringed by high-backed leather chairs, but there’s never anyone sitting at them.
As I walked by today, I noticed that the chairs were missing, and the desk was covered in tiny scraps of paper, scissors and the kinds of tape dispensers we use to close big boxes in the warehouse… but there was nobody there. Nor was there any sign that the place had been opened over the last few days. I asked around, because some of our people don’t leave work until 1900, but they hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave in ages.
I wonder what kind of business could there be that has to work under those conditions. Is there any business that would have to open only at night and be closed by the next morning? It’s hard to think of any.
Vampire crèche. No doubt about it. The paper must have been from the teachers making the little vamplets make their parents cards.
Nothing else makes sense.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Water-Cooler Talk
Since I started working (I can’t name the place I work in because they don’t read this and don’t know I keep a blog, but if I did they’d find out just what it is that I do and maybe start offering advice on what else I should do) I’ve been getting on well with the people who work in our office. I can’t name all of them, because some have particularly usual names that’d be very easy to track. I spend the vast majority of my time sitting in the upstairs office, writing up the news or keeping our main page content up to date. It’s all very dull, but at the same time, it’s work I can manage without freaking out at all so I won’t complain.
I tend to spend most of my time with a set of noise cancelling headphones in. It’s helped me construct an entirely unapproachable air that I’m quite happy with. This is a big help because (as many of you may have noticed) I’m a far more competent communicator in text than in person. What’s strange is that, partially because of this, I seem to work more closely with the people from the lab downstairs than the people in the office upstairs. The upshot of this is that when I decide to work from home, which I usually manage one or two days a week, people I work with often don’t notice.
When someone does notice, it tends to be Ross. Ross uploads all of the content that I write to the page, makes sure it’s all neatly aligned and nicely assembled. In short, he’s one of the people in work I talk to most and he’s generally very forgiving about my tendency to send eight or nine emails before he shows up for work in the morning.
Where all of this comes together is in the few minutes a day during which I actually talk to the people I work with. The water cooler happens to be upstairs, near enough to my desk. Whenever people come upstairs to grab a cup of water, I shout, “No! WAIT!” then tear out my headphones and charge across the office (I’m sure rattling all of the various business types around), often scattering the files other people mistakenly stack on my desk as I go. I don’t deal with any files – they are there in error. I am not responsible enough for files.
When I arrive, usually skidding across the cheap, rough-ridged carpeting, a little breathless and definitely in need of a drink, I get a chance to engage one of my favourite conversations. Ross and I have “water cooler talk” most days of the week. I stand, trying to look much more composed than I really am, and he stands opposite me, pretending the whole idea isn’t fundamentally ridiculous. Then we open the dialogue; it always begins with something entirely silly, like, “So, did you catch the game last night?”
From there though, we proceed to try and narrow the subject as much as possible, without knowing where we’re going, what sport we’re talking about, whether we were playing in the game or not. Often we’ll push through whether or not we were playing, whether or not our side won, whether or not I was responsible for a win or loss directly and whether or not it was a good match before either of us is quite aware of what sport was supposed to have been played, if any.
Sometimes it’s all a big euphemism.
Anyway, Ross was on holiday last week, so I would toddle over to the water cooler a few times during any given day, hold a paper cup between forefinger and baby finger, depressing the blue “cold water” tap while I waited for my cup to fill. It’s strange the things you notice when there’s nobody about to distract you.
Below the taps there is a grill, through which errant water might find its way without getting all over the carpet. It’s a pretty much perfect system… except I have no idea where that water is meant to go. The pipe leading to the cooler seems thin enough that it could only possibly be one way. I stood there for a few minutes staring through the grill, able to make out dimly through the grate the reflection of the lights above and my silhouette. I wondered how long that water had sat there – would it be a corrupt and stagnant pool? Was it black not just because it was in shadow but because it had grown brackish as all standing water left long enough tends to?
Then my boss walked by and asked what was up, and why I was staring so intently at the water cooler. I responded as I probably would anyway,
“Just thinking about the game last night.”
Then I wandered off to my seat to update the news.
I tend to spend most of my time with a set of noise cancelling headphones in. It’s helped me construct an entirely unapproachable air that I’m quite happy with. This is a big help because (as many of you may have noticed) I’m a far more competent communicator in text than in person. What’s strange is that, partially because of this, I seem to work more closely with the people from the lab downstairs than the people in the office upstairs. The upshot of this is that when I decide to work from home, which I usually manage one or two days a week, people I work with often don’t notice.
When someone does notice, it tends to be Ross. Ross uploads all of the content that I write to the page, makes sure it’s all neatly aligned and nicely assembled. In short, he’s one of the people in work I talk to most and he’s generally very forgiving about my tendency to send eight or nine emails before he shows up for work in the morning.
Where all of this comes together is in the few minutes a day during which I actually talk to the people I work with. The water cooler happens to be upstairs, near enough to my desk. Whenever people come upstairs to grab a cup of water, I shout, “No! WAIT!” then tear out my headphones and charge across the office (I’m sure rattling all of the various business types around), often scattering the files other people mistakenly stack on my desk as I go. I don’t deal with any files – they are there in error. I am not responsible enough for files.
When I arrive, usually skidding across the cheap, rough-ridged carpeting, a little breathless and definitely in need of a drink, I get a chance to engage one of my favourite conversations. Ross and I have “water cooler talk” most days of the week. I stand, trying to look much more composed than I really am, and he stands opposite me, pretending the whole idea isn’t fundamentally ridiculous. Then we open the dialogue; it always begins with something entirely silly, like, “So, did you catch the game last night?”
From there though, we proceed to try and narrow the subject as much as possible, without knowing where we’re going, what sport we’re talking about, whether we were playing in the game or not. Often we’ll push through whether or not we were playing, whether or not our side won, whether or not I was responsible for a win or loss directly and whether or not it was a good match before either of us is quite aware of what sport was supposed to have been played, if any.
Sometimes it’s all a big euphemism.
Anyway, Ross was on holiday last week, so I would toddle over to the water cooler a few times during any given day, hold a paper cup between forefinger and baby finger, depressing the blue “cold water” tap while I waited for my cup to fill. It’s strange the things you notice when there’s nobody about to distract you.
Below the taps there is a grill, through which errant water might find its way without getting all over the carpet. It’s a pretty much perfect system… except I have no idea where that water is meant to go. The pipe leading to the cooler seems thin enough that it could only possibly be one way. I stood there for a few minutes staring through the grill, able to make out dimly through the grate the reflection of the lights above and my silhouette. I wondered how long that water had sat there – would it be a corrupt and stagnant pool? Was it black not just because it was in shadow but because it had grown brackish as all standing water left long enough tends to?
Then my boss walked by and asked what was up, and why I was staring so intently at the water cooler. I responded as I probably would anyway,
“Just thinking about the game last night.”
Then I wandered off to my seat to update the news.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Never Write After 00:00 – It Will be Garbage
I’m often struck with the idea that I should write something at around the point when I should be considering going to sleep. I’m not sure why it is, but it seems that the portion of my brain that would normally say, “You’re a hack and will never produce anything of consequence,” seems to fall asleep a good deal earlier than the rest of me.
I’m not complaining about that, it’s fine and dandy to have a small portion of your brain that’s good and critical of your work – it keeps you on your toes. What gets to me is that, once its asleep, I’ll happily sit down and write up a few thousand words in a night, ignorant of the passage of time and breaking only for trips to and from the kitchen – kettle, mug, tea-chest, drawer, spoon, milk.
Eventually I’ll shamble into bed, tired as much from the process of writing as from being up too late and burnt out from the constant rewrites and edits. The problem with these edits is that they’re not born of some internal critic; there’s no element of my brain that tells me, “This is not good enough, succinct enough, comprehensible enough,” there’s just the constant struggle to effectively communicate an idea that just plain won’t make sense to anyone, myself included, who happens to be awake when they read it. If it’s after midnight, I’m not changing text because it’s not good enough, I’m rewriting my rewrites through a tea-soaked haze because I think there’s a neater way to say whatever it is I was trying to say before, but which I’ve probably by then forgotten.
The worst part is that I know I’m doing it right now, as I write this, and I’ve decided that this is the only way to sidestep the whole tedious business and not write some convoluted mess that I’d either forget all about or be dimly aware of in a vaguely embarrassed sort of way. It’s not that the things I write at night are bad necessarily, it’s more that they’re like dreams; they hold themselves together only for the duration of the experience and afterwards, thinking about what I’ve written, they’re just a strange insubstantial slush.
I’ve created entirely ephemeral text and that saddens me.
Moreover, I think I’m like this in general after midnight. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being around me at night when one of these moods takes me (and here I would look pointedly to Ross and Kev as much as anyone else) then I’m sorry if I go a bit strange sometimes. I’m not editing myself effectively, so you’re just getting whatever is on the surface of my brain, most often.
I’m not complaining about that, it’s fine and dandy to have a small portion of your brain that’s good and critical of your work – it keeps you on your toes. What gets to me is that, once its asleep, I’ll happily sit down and write up a few thousand words in a night, ignorant of the passage of time and breaking only for trips to and from the kitchen – kettle, mug, tea-chest, drawer, spoon, milk.
Eventually I’ll shamble into bed, tired as much from the process of writing as from being up too late and burnt out from the constant rewrites and edits. The problem with these edits is that they’re not born of some internal critic; there’s no element of my brain that tells me, “This is not good enough, succinct enough, comprehensible enough,” there’s just the constant struggle to effectively communicate an idea that just plain won’t make sense to anyone, myself included, who happens to be awake when they read it. If it’s after midnight, I’m not changing text because it’s not good enough, I’m rewriting my rewrites through a tea-soaked haze because I think there’s a neater way to say whatever it is I was trying to say before, but which I’ve probably by then forgotten.
The worst part is that I know I’m doing it right now, as I write this, and I’ve decided that this is the only way to sidestep the whole tedious business and not write some convoluted mess that I’d either forget all about or be dimly aware of in a vaguely embarrassed sort of way. It’s not that the things I write at night are bad necessarily, it’s more that they’re like dreams; they hold themselves together only for the duration of the experience and afterwards, thinking about what I’ve written, they’re just a strange insubstantial slush.
I’ve created entirely ephemeral text and that saddens me.
Moreover, I think I’m like this in general after midnight. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being around me at night when one of these moods takes me (and here I would look pointedly to Ross and Kev as much as anyone else) then I’m sorry if I go a bit strange sometimes. I’m not editing myself effectively, so you’re just getting whatever is on the surface of my brain, most often.
The horror...
It’s been a while, but it seems that I should only really blog when I have something to write about. Otherwise I end up tangling myself waist deep in a sea of atrocious half-metaphor and poorly constructed part-fiction. I want you to keep that in mind as you read this, because when I tried to explain what had happened to me to Colin and Adam (@oldmanrodgers and @AtomCan respectively) they both looked distinctly unimpressed. This story is absolutely unembroidered fact.
It occurred to me about three days ago that if I were to leave work just as I finish, at 1500, then I can make it outside to the 1508 bus and be home before about 1545, which shaves about an hour and a half off my average work day. It’s not life changing, but I’m very pleased with the arrangement. This new timetable has given me a great opportunity to stop at the shopping centre on the way home from work and have a poke around to see if there’s anything there on which I might spend my hard-earned job-money. I am a man of few enough vices that pretty much all of my income is disposable… it’s a pleasant way to be.
Anyway, I had skipped lunch so that I might read my book and was deciding that, on reflection, it may have been a poor sort of strategy for the day. I decided that, it being only twenty past three, I might reasonably pick up lunch on the way home, still be back by 1700 and sitting pretty.
I picked up a lovely roll from the deli and, it being a bright and sunny midday, wandered down to eat it beside the shallow fountain. I read a book as I ate, enjoying the sunshine, water and general atmosphere, before realising that the entire time I’d been dripping various dressings all down my shirt-front. This is how I eat; I’ll make no apologies for it. I did some quick and flexible mental arithmetic (with an abundance of rounding up and down) and figured I’d be able to excuse picking up a new t-shirt, running to the bathroom and putting it on.
While I was in HMV, buying a truly lovely Mr. Men t-shirt, I happened upon a pair of unmistakably mispriced Sony headphones and, my doddering EX-71’s long since overdue an upgrade, picked those up too. I got a bemused look from the girl scanning my headphones, clearly aware of what I’d noticed the same thing I had, followed shortly by an understanding smile at the t-shirt that clearly took in my spattered shirt. I wandered down a floor, barely catching the lift as a man who looked to be in his fifties hammered the “close doors” button. You know the one: it looks vaguely like this “>|<”. On the way down, I swapped out my headphones, appreciating the new depth of sound, the bass lower than before without the distortion I was clearly used to but had never noticed. I was pleased.
I exited the lift swiftly, still feeling his disapproving bespectacled glare on the mess soaking slowly into my t-shirt, walking directly to the bathroom. There’s a corridor leading off the body of the main room – banks of urinals gleaming too-white in the perpetual post-daylight of fluorescent lights designed to make you feel bad if you make a mess – and lining this corridor are three stalls. The door of the first had swung half open, and I can see that it’s unoccupied, so I stepped in.
I swung the door shut behind me and turned on the heel of my right foot, coming face to face with one of the most putrid stools I’ve ever seen. There aren’t words yet designed to describe it, but I’ll do my best to do so a little tastefully and still communicate the shuddering sickness I felt on looking at it. It’s important to know that all of this happened to the tune of the Autokratz remix of La Roux’s Quicksand, the bass drum a kind of ultimate too-fast heartbeat pressing at the inside of my head. When you’re listening to something like that you think to the beat. Single words spring to mind more than descriptive terms – a kind of musically perforated stream of consciousness from the event:
Yellow (yellow was first, and perhaps most worrying)
Bass-drum
Splash
Bass-drum
Grainy (I was tempted to write dusty, but it doesn’t carry the right viscous connotations)
Bass-drum
Tortured
Bass-drum
I’m not sure I’ve ever been so struck in my life by something so mundane; I turned immediately and walked back outside to the corridor. I would wait for another stall, that couldn’t be hard and it couldn’t possibly be any worse than the first attempt. Never.
The next stall down was occupied. I wish I could say there was some reason not to have waited to enter that one – a scream, muffled gagging, anything. There was no reason not to wait except that I’m impatient. I walked past instead, wandering on to the next stall, door hanging limply, not quite on its hinges, not quite off enough to qualify for any kind of maintenance. It turned with an ominous creak.
This toilet was similarly occupied – not by some clawing monstrosity, barely inanimate like the last – by a tiny sample. I considered myself lucky, stepped up to the plate and depressed the ‘flush’ button for a few seconds. It always takes a few seconds. I can never explain why I did what I did next, but I did it… maybe out of a sense of morbid curiosity, maybe out of a sense of gratitude that it wasn’t as inhuman as the last stall’s occupant. I looked down.
It was streaked with blood… and not even in a manner that might be mistakable. It was lined crimson, like the glow of magma through the convergence lines of tectonic plates on an early earth. I was taken aback, mostly because somehow this was still better than the alternative. Everyone has blood, what’s there to be afraid of?
Then, of course, the flush hit it and it immediately shattered, revealing innards that could only have been predominantly blood. Panic stricken, I shambled through a change of t-shirt as quickly as possible, unlocked the door with the least grateful twist possible and wrenched at the door, an unforgiving creak issuing from its clearly abused hinges. As I walked past the door of the middle stall I wondered why I hadn’t just waited to use that one; it’s door was hanging open now too and it would have been easier for all concerned.
As I walked past it, I suddenly felt that feeling that you get when you’re forced to interact with something you’ve never interacted with before. I’ve tried to explain it a few times before – the feeling of your brain trying suddenly to deal with an entirely new sensory input. Sometimes it’s something that makes you feel insignificant (the pre-romantic ‘sublime’ springs to mind) and sometimes it’s just that your brain has so much new to process that it just has to shift back a bit and deal with it all while you’re on auto-pilot.
This time, I felt that same feeling, but the reasons were entirely different. My father once described the feeling of being tricked into smelling the outlet from drum of ammonia as “like being punched in the chest.” This was a bit different, but similar. It was like smelling being punched in the face.
If you’ve not been punched in the face recently, there’s always a split second where you respond without being aware of it (if it’s hard enough, your legs manage to move themselves around so that you don’t fall over, for example). You just suddenly are aware that some small amount of time has passed and you’re in a slightly different position than you were a second ago, and then your face hurts. This was the smell equivalent of that.
I felt my brain try to divorce itself briefly from my senses, and then I was leaning up against the wall with spots in front of my eyes wondering what was happening, sliding my way gradually towards the sinks on weakened legs… then I was aware of what is probably the single worst non-chemical smell I have ever encountered. It was literally the kind of smell you might find in a nightmare – it had no texture, no material to associate it with, it was inarticulately bad, as though someone had leaned on a part of my brain marked, “smells awful”.
It was terrifying. I think a little bit of me died inside. I’m not really sure how to end this, but I thought I should share it with you all anyway, just so you’d know how awful it was…
The day was okay after that, but I think there’s a fragment of my soul I’ll never see again.
It occurred to me about three days ago that if I were to leave work just as I finish, at 1500, then I can make it outside to the 1508 bus and be home before about 1545, which shaves about an hour and a half off my average work day. It’s not life changing, but I’m very pleased with the arrangement. This new timetable has given me a great opportunity to stop at the shopping centre on the way home from work and have a poke around to see if there’s anything there on which I might spend my hard-earned job-money. I am a man of few enough vices that pretty much all of my income is disposable… it’s a pleasant way to be.
Anyway, I had skipped lunch so that I might read my book and was deciding that, on reflection, it may have been a poor sort of strategy for the day. I decided that, it being only twenty past three, I might reasonably pick up lunch on the way home, still be back by 1700 and sitting pretty.
I picked up a lovely roll from the deli and, it being a bright and sunny midday, wandered down to eat it beside the shallow fountain. I read a book as I ate, enjoying the sunshine, water and general atmosphere, before realising that the entire time I’d been dripping various dressings all down my shirt-front. This is how I eat; I’ll make no apologies for it. I did some quick and flexible mental arithmetic (with an abundance of rounding up and down) and figured I’d be able to excuse picking up a new t-shirt, running to the bathroom and putting it on.
While I was in HMV, buying a truly lovely Mr. Men t-shirt, I happened upon a pair of unmistakably mispriced Sony headphones and, my doddering EX-71’s long since overdue an upgrade, picked those up too. I got a bemused look from the girl scanning my headphones, clearly aware of what I’d noticed the same thing I had, followed shortly by an understanding smile at the t-shirt that clearly took in my spattered shirt. I wandered down a floor, barely catching the lift as a man who looked to be in his fifties hammered the “close doors” button. You know the one: it looks vaguely like this “>|<”. On the way down, I swapped out my headphones, appreciating the new depth of sound, the bass lower than before without the distortion I was clearly used to but had never noticed. I was pleased.
I exited the lift swiftly, still feeling his disapproving bespectacled glare on the mess soaking slowly into my t-shirt, walking directly to the bathroom. There’s a corridor leading off the body of the main room – banks of urinals gleaming too-white in the perpetual post-daylight of fluorescent lights designed to make you feel bad if you make a mess – and lining this corridor are three stalls. The door of the first had swung half open, and I can see that it’s unoccupied, so I stepped in.
I swung the door shut behind me and turned on the heel of my right foot, coming face to face with one of the most putrid stools I’ve ever seen. There aren’t words yet designed to describe it, but I’ll do my best to do so a little tastefully and still communicate the shuddering sickness I felt on looking at it. It’s important to know that all of this happened to the tune of the Autokratz remix of La Roux’s Quicksand, the bass drum a kind of ultimate too-fast heartbeat pressing at the inside of my head. When you’re listening to something like that you think to the beat. Single words spring to mind more than descriptive terms – a kind of musically perforated stream of consciousness from the event:
Yellow (yellow was first, and perhaps most worrying)
Bass-drum
Splash
Bass-drum
Grainy (I was tempted to write dusty, but it doesn’t carry the right viscous connotations)
Bass-drum
Tortured
Bass-drum
I’m not sure I’ve ever been so struck in my life by something so mundane; I turned immediately and walked back outside to the corridor. I would wait for another stall, that couldn’t be hard and it couldn’t possibly be any worse than the first attempt. Never.
The next stall down was occupied. I wish I could say there was some reason not to have waited to enter that one – a scream, muffled gagging, anything. There was no reason not to wait except that I’m impatient. I walked past instead, wandering on to the next stall, door hanging limply, not quite on its hinges, not quite off enough to qualify for any kind of maintenance. It turned with an ominous creak.
This toilet was similarly occupied – not by some clawing monstrosity, barely inanimate like the last – by a tiny sample. I considered myself lucky, stepped up to the plate and depressed the ‘flush’ button for a few seconds. It always takes a few seconds. I can never explain why I did what I did next, but I did it… maybe out of a sense of morbid curiosity, maybe out of a sense of gratitude that it wasn’t as inhuman as the last stall’s occupant. I looked down.
It was streaked with blood… and not even in a manner that might be mistakable. It was lined crimson, like the glow of magma through the convergence lines of tectonic plates on an early earth. I was taken aback, mostly because somehow this was still better than the alternative. Everyone has blood, what’s there to be afraid of?
Then, of course, the flush hit it and it immediately shattered, revealing innards that could only have been predominantly blood. Panic stricken, I shambled through a change of t-shirt as quickly as possible, unlocked the door with the least grateful twist possible and wrenched at the door, an unforgiving creak issuing from its clearly abused hinges. As I walked past the door of the middle stall I wondered why I hadn’t just waited to use that one; it’s door was hanging open now too and it would have been easier for all concerned.
As I walked past it, I suddenly felt that feeling that you get when you’re forced to interact with something you’ve never interacted with before. I’ve tried to explain it a few times before – the feeling of your brain trying suddenly to deal with an entirely new sensory input. Sometimes it’s something that makes you feel insignificant (the pre-romantic ‘sublime’ springs to mind) and sometimes it’s just that your brain has so much new to process that it just has to shift back a bit and deal with it all while you’re on auto-pilot.
This time, I felt that same feeling, but the reasons were entirely different. My father once described the feeling of being tricked into smelling the outlet from drum of ammonia as “like being punched in the chest.” This was a bit different, but similar. It was like smelling being punched in the face.
If you’ve not been punched in the face recently, there’s always a split second where you respond without being aware of it (if it’s hard enough, your legs manage to move themselves around so that you don’t fall over, for example). You just suddenly are aware that some small amount of time has passed and you’re in a slightly different position than you were a second ago, and then your face hurts. This was the smell equivalent of that.
I felt my brain try to divorce itself briefly from my senses, and then I was leaning up against the wall with spots in front of my eyes wondering what was happening, sliding my way gradually towards the sinks on weakened legs… then I was aware of what is probably the single worst non-chemical smell I have ever encountered. It was literally the kind of smell you might find in a nightmare – it had no texture, no material to associate it with, it was inarticulately bad, as though someone had leaned on a part of my brain marked, “smells awful”.
It was terrifying. I think a little bit of me died inside. I’m not really sure how to end this, but I thought I should share it with you all anyway, just so you’d know how awful it was…
The day was okay after that, but I think there’s a fragment of my soul I’ll never see again.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
General Update
I sometimes wonder just how Jane manages to fill her blog; she updates regularly and the updates are interesting and entertaining, but she works longer hours than I do. I think having a regular job makes keeping a blog a little more difficult from day to day. I can’t help but notice that the father seems to have fallen into a pattern of single weekly updates, which may well be the model I end up leaning towards.
I’ve done very little of consequence today – but for those of you who love me enough to want to read, I did have a lot of fun. I’ll give a few details about today; I’m under the impression that’s the normal format for a blog, as opposed to my nascent ramblings just stretching on for thousands of words.
I’m having issues with work. Don’t get my wrong; I like my job a lot. It’s a job I can do without too much difficulty and without hating my life. No, the issue is that I haven’t been paid in (quick mental arithmetic) approaching ten weeks. It wouldn’t be so bad, but I’m given to the understanding that this means I haven’t been paid in a little short of a financial quarter. That’s worrying. Admittedly, I do invoice at the end of the month, and if there are any issues they usually wait until the end of the month to be ironed out, but it’s become disconcerting. Disconcerting and hungry.
So, devoid of income, I’ve taken to not actually showing up to the office. This isn’t as poor a plan as it sounds; I used normally to work from home, so my job is possible to manage remotely. Today I worked from Adam’s house, which was a lot of fun. He played Starcraft while I wrote updates to the product information and recommendation pages for work. That’s one of the easier parts of my job – content that is fundamentally advertising is very easy to write and update.
Aside from the silly work garbage, I spent some time playing Guilty Gear against Adam and Ray. Ray was unexpectedly heroic, so it wasn’t like I was teaching people to play, there was a lot of challenge and enjoyment to take from it. After this break I went back to work and wrote up a blog entry. It feels good to be driving traffic up, and in that respect we’re succeeding without man site integration, which I think I’d like to push for. We’ll see how it all works out soon enough, I’m sure.
We played a quick game of squares before I returned to Gaelle’s house, which brings us up to present. I’m in a writing mood, but the internet is down so I can’t post things to my blogs for now. I’m not sure quite what I’d like to write, but I’ll think on it.
Terence has informed me that my blogs, while enjoyable, read like those of a woman from a century ago. I would like to quiz him in some more depth on this; I do deliberately keep my blogs quite modern, if not masculine. I seldom, if ever, refer to my fascination with the cinematograph, or even with the wireless, my shining Marconi being so sterling an example. Perhaps I should take chocolate with him of an evening and make some stern inquiry as to just what it is that has caused him to take so very strange an impression from my work.
M
I’ve done very little of consequence today – but for those of you who love me enough to want to read, I did have a lot of fun. I’ll give a few details about today; I’m under the impression that’s the normal format for a blog, as opposed to my nascent ramblings just stretching on for thousands of words.
I’m having issues with work. Don’t get my wrong; I like my job a lot. It’s a job I can do without too much difficulty and without hating my life. No, the issue is that I haven’t been paid in (quick mental arithmetic) approaching ten weeks. It wouldn’t be so bad, but I’m given to the understanding that this means I haven’t been paid in a little short of a financial quarter. That’s worrying. Admittedly, I do invoice at the end of the month, and if there are any issues they usually wait until the end of the month to be ironed out, but it’s become disconcerting. Disconcerting and hungry.
So, devoid of income, I’ve taken to not actually showing up to the office. This isn’t as poor a plan as it sounds; I used normally to work from home, so my job is possible to manage remotely. Today I worked from Adam’s house, which was a lot of fun. He played Starcraft while I wrote updates to the product information and recommendation pages for work. That’s one of the easier parts of my job – content that is fundamentally advertising is very easy to write and update.
Aside from the silly work garbage, I spent some time playing Guilty Gear against Adam and Ray. Ray was unexpectedly heroic, so it wasn’t like I was teaching people to play, there was a lot of challenge and enjoyment to take from it. After this break I went back to work and wrote up a blog entry. It feels good to be driving traffic up, and in that respect we’re succeeding without man site integration, which I think I’d like to push for. We’ll see how it all works out soon enough, I’m sure.
We played a quick game of squares before I returned to Gaelle’s house, which brings us up to present. I’m in a writing mood, but the internet is down so I can’t post things to my blogs for now. I’m not sure quite what I’d like to write, but I’ll think on it.
Terence has informed me that my blogs, while enjoyable, read like those of a woman from a century ago. I would like to quiz him in some more depth on this; I do deliberately keep my blogs quite modern, if not masculine. I seldom, if ever, refer to my fascination with the cinematograph, or even with the wireless, my shining Marconi being so sterling an example. Perhaps I should take chocolate with him of an evening and make some stern inquiry as to just what it is that has caused him to take so very strange an impression from my work.
M
Saturday, June 6, 2009
And Then There Was One
For a pronounced portion of my childhood, I would wake early and immediately rise. I had long since convinced myself that there was no point in trying to get back to sleep; I would wake at half past six every morning, getting out of bed shortly after sunrise in summertime and long before in winter. There was nothing unusual about this, I would watch TV or read a book until the rest of the family woke.
As a result, I suffered from headaches that got gradually worse throughout the day once every week or two. I still get them, but I at least have learned that better monitoring my sleep will keep my headache free. It doesn’t always work; there will always be late nights and early mornings I can’t help from time to time, but overall things are a lot better now.
One Sunday afternoon, when I was around ten, I was forced to retire in the afternoon, the light stinging my eyes so badly I couldn’t possibly have stayed up until a reasonable hour. I decided then that I’d be better off just sleeping straight through until Monday morning.
I woke at a little before seven the next morning and dressed for school. I picked my way quietly downstairs so as not to wake the family and grabbed a bowl of cereal and sat down to read until everyone else arose. It being summer, there was no need for lights. The heavy light of the morning sun cast strange shadows across the kitchen and I was struck by the thought that I should tell the others how it had looked – sunlight glinting off the row of mugs on hooks beneath the head height presses that line the kitchen. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day.
I don’t think I realised anything was wrong for fully an hour; they should have been getting up around eight or so if they wanted to make it to school on time. It wasn’t unusual for the father to get up late – all he had to do was get dressed and drive us out, he would breakfast when he got home, before heading to work. At about a quarter past eight I climbed the stairs and called for Seán but, he being a heavy sleeper, I got no reply until I got to our room. Whenupon I realised he wasn’t there.
I wasn’t too flustered really, until I noticed that Jane, Katie and the father were missing too. It’s hard to know what to do under those circumstances. Still, I thought, I had been sick. If they’d gone to the granny’s the night before, they might reasonably have stayed there and decided to go from there to school. It hadn’t happened before, but I figured it might make sense. Anything to cull the slowly welling panic… you’d be surprised what a ten year old dreams up to avoid the idea that they’ve been abandoned.
I thought to myself that the father would have to return to make it to work in time. I sat down, made more cereal, and continued to read my book. Looking for my schoolbag in case they dropped by suddenly hoping I were ready, I walked to the opposite side of the house, where it was still darker, and turned on a light.
Nothing – the power was off. In 1996, before everything cartographic was built on the idea of constantly available power to terabytes of storage, there was no emergency generator in the OS. I walked around the house, making sure the power was off and that it wasn’t just a dud light bulb. Nope.
Alright, checklist time:
No power.
No family.
No cars outside any of the neighbours’ houses (living as close as we did to the OS offices, there were only two houses that should have had cars other than our own).
I began to worry- that’s an understatement. I began to freak out. My options were limited. Margret and Brian, who lived to our left, had no car outside the house, but were gregarious enough that I felt I should knock anyway. No response. Eita Flood lived to our right – she had been old as long as I’d been alive and I wasn’t comfortable around her. House skipped. Next was Tom Shannihan – he should have been in work by now, but some elements of his family or menagerie of cats (14 at highest count) should have been present.
My worry shifted gears to “profound”. I walked to the house of a neighbour who, to this day, I have only ever known as Mrs. Crow. Mercifully, no answer. Last was the Kelly household. I held my breath and knocked. A shuffling sound, a blur seen approaching through frosted windows. A sigh of relief. The blur resolved itself into a cat… it did not answer the door. I panicked and walked to Ross’s house (talkingross.blogspot.com).
Observations from Ross’s house in this order: no car, no family, no cat. Doors locked. Panic setting in, I half-walked and half-ran to The Square as it was (and still is) simply known – a carpark designed to fit the three hundred odd cars of the OSi’s employees. Nothing, not a single car. I sat down on the concrete block that marked a fire hydrant long since submerged in the slowly creeping grass verge from the old administration building. Dragging in deep breaths, I sat there for fifteen minutes, taking stock. The big white clock above the archway into the square had been working then and hit nine o’clock with a kind of grim finality. There should have been someone there.
Checklist update:
No family.
No power.
None of six neighbours.
One cat sighted but not interacted with.
No audible sound at all beyond wind in trees.
No idea what I’m going to do with myself.
Panic.
I have never told anyone this happened before, because of what happened next. In a state of abject shock, I went to bed. I went to bed and eventually I slept.
I woke a little before seven o’clock and went downstairs. The morning sun gleaming off the counters and mugs was different this time, paler than before. I walked to the fridge to get milk for my cereal and the light came on; the power was back at least. I ate breakfast contemplatively. It’s funny what a good night’s sleep can do for you. Things didn’t seem so bad now.
After breakfast I walked back upstairs, not feeling good, but nowhere near as bad as before. I was greeted at the top of the stairs by the father and Seán, looking dazed, but otherwise entirely present. It’s hard to know what to do in those situations where everything is falling apart and you can’t trust yourself to rely on the world around you.
I pretended nothing had happened and dressed for school.
I would later convince myself that I had simply woken at 7pm and somehow not noticed that the sun must have been over the field to the west, not the offices and Ross’s house to the east, despite the clearest of recollections to the contrary – the kind burned into the mind by panic and fear. I convince myself because, once you’ve experienced the absolute terror of everyone you’ve grown up with an lived near having vanished, you want to believe you could never live in a world where that could happen.
Still, sometimes, just sometimes, that conviction isn’t enough. I wonder what would happen if tomorrow I woke and everyone but me was gone. No power, no family, no neighbours, no sounds. Just the slowly rising sun, an empty world and I.
All of this happened to me once already; it scares the living sit out of me. Still, it means I’m uniquely placed to advise. If this happens or has ever happened to you, the odds are that I am still around. Get in touch.
As a result, I suffered from headaches that got gradually worse throughout the day once every week or two. I still get them, but I at least have learned that better monitoring my sleep will keep my headache free. It doesn’t always work; there will always be late nights and early mornings I can’t help from time to time, but overall things are a lot better now.
One Sunday afternoon, when I was around ten, I was forced to retire in the afternoon, the light stinging my eyes so badly I couldn’t possibly have stayed up until a reasonable hour. I decided then that I’d be better off just sleeping straight through until Monday morning.
I woke at a little before seven the next morning and dressed for school. I picked my way quietly downstairs so as not to wake the family and grabbed a bowl of cereal and sat down to read until everyone else arose. It being summer, there was no need for lights. The heavy light of the morning sun cast strange shadows across the kitchen and I was struck by the thought that I should tell the others how it had looked – sunlight glinting off the row of mugs on hooks beneath the head height presses that line the kitchen. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day.
I don’t think I realised anything was wrong for fully an hour; they should have been getting up around eight or so if they wanted to make it to school on time. It wasn’t unusual for the father to get up late – all he had to do was get dressed and drive us out, he would breakfast when he got home, before heading to work. At about a quarter past eight I climbed the stairs and called for Seán but, he being a heavy sleeper, I got no reply until I got to our room. Whenupon I realised he wasn’t there.
I wasn’t too flustered really, until I noticed that Jane, Katie and the father were missing too. It’s hard to know what to do under those circumstances. Still, I thought, I had been sick. If they’d gone to the granny’s the night before, they might reasonably have stayed there and decided to go from there to school. It hadn’t happened before, but I figured it might make sense. Anything to cull the slowly welling panic… you’d be surprised what a ten year old dreams up to avoid the idea that they’ve been abandoned.
I thought to myself that the father would have to return to make it to work in time. I sat down, made more cereal, and continued to read my book. Looking for my schoolbag in case they dropped by suddenly hoping I were ready, I walked to the opposite side of the house, where it was still darker, and turned on a light.
Nothing – the power was off. In 1996, before everything cartographic was built on the idea of constantly available power to terabytes of storage, there was no emergency generator in the OS. I walked around the house, making sure the power was off and that it wasn’t just a dud light bulb. Nope.
Alright, checklist time:
No power.
No family.
No cars outside any of the neighbours’ houses (living as close as we did to the OS offices, there were only two houses that should have had cars other than our own).
I began to worry- that’s an understatement. I began to freak out. My options were limited. Margret and Brian, who lived to our left, had no car outside the house, but were gregarious enough that I felt I should knock anyway. No response. Eita Flood lived to our right – she had been old as long as I’d been alive and I wasn’t comfortable around her. House skipped. Next was Tom Shannihan – he should have been in work by now, but some elements of his family or menagerie of cats (14 at highest count) should have been present.
My worry shifted gears to “profound”. I walked to the house of a neighbour who, to this day, I have only ever known as Mrs. Crow. Mercifully, no answer. Last was the Kelly household. I held my breath and knocked. A shuffling sound, a blur seen approaching through frosted windows. A sigh of relief. The blur resolved itself into a cat… it did not answer the door. I panicked and walked to Ross’s house (talkingross.blogspot.com).
Observations from Ross’s house in this order: no car, no family, no cat. Doors locked. Panic setting in, I half-walked and half-ran to The Square as it was (and still is) simply known – a carpark designed to fit the three hundred odd cars of the OSi’s employees. Nothing, not a single car. I sat down on the concrete block that marked a fire hydrant long since submerged in the slowly creeping grass verge from the old administration building. Dragging in deep breaths, I sat there for fifteen minutes, taking stock. The big white clock above the archway into the square had been working then and hit nine o’clock with a kind of grim finality. There should have been someone there.
Checklist update:
No family.
No power.
None of six neighbours.
One cat sighted but not interacted with.
No audible sound at all beyond wind in trees.
No idea what I’m going to do with myself.
Panic.
I have never told anyone this happened before, because of what happened next. In a state of abject shock, I went to bed. I went to bed and eventually I slept.
I woke a little before seven o’clock and went downstairs. The morning sun gleaming off the counters and mugs was different this time, paler than before. I walked to the fridge to get milk for my cereal and the light came on; the power was back at least. I ate breakfast contemplatively. It’s funny what a good night’s sleep can do for you. Things didn’t seem so bad now.
After breakfast I walked back upstairs, not feeling good, but nowhere near as bad as before. I was greeted at the top of the stairs by the father and Seán, looking dazed, but otherwise entirely present. It’s hard to know what to do in those situations where everything is falling apart and you can’t trust yourself to rely on the world around you.
I pretended nothing had happened and dressed for school.
I would later convince myself that I had simply woken at 7pm and somehow not noticed that the sun must have been over the field to the west, not the offices and Ross’s house to the east, despite the clearest of recollections to the contrary – the kind burned into the mind by panic and fear. I convince myself because, once you’ve experienced the absolute terror of everyone you’ve grown up with an lived near having vanished, you want to believe you could never live in a world where that could happen.
Still, sometimes, just sometimes, that conviction isn’t enough. I wonder what would happen if tomorrow I woke and everyone but me was gone. No power, no family, no neighbours, no sounds. Just the slowly rising sun, an empty world and I.
All of this happened to me once already; it scares the living sit out of me. Still, it means I’m uniquely placed to advise. If this happens or has ever happened to you, the odds are that I am still around. Get in touch.
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