Get her to tell her own fortune, my dears

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D20 Candles

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Bonbons

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Unsuitable Boys vs the Sun 

“Wonderful threshold illness you got yourself there’ says the magician. Spending too much time writing about death and ghosts, I thought I’d challenge myself by writing about romance. My ultimate aim comics criticism as erotica, we are still very far from that. But I did write about Robert Fludd and the sun and the breath of gods in our blood singing to each other. Rosicurian chat up lines. 

Newly single. The oldest I have ever been. Extremely conscious of all my failings  in relationships. I try exorcism. Stare into the fragmentary mirrors of unsuitable boys from the pages of 80s’ romance photo stories. Life as sequence of stiff pictures in bare rooms and street corners. Moments caught, preserved but damaged through bad reproduction techniques, yellowing paper, the threat of mildew and all the things that happen between the frames which we cannot speak of. A way to deal with my own unsuitability. I’ll spare us the details. Passive and aggressive in the wrong places. Self-obsessed and careless. Over sensitive and callous. You’ll have your own list. 

And the breath of god in my blood has its own ideas. My leg explodes. Bulging veins, hard and hot but not in a sexy way. Thigh like Cthulhu. Limping to the hospital like Steptoe lost a boot. The ultrasound reveals a pulsing black hole in a psychedelic Doctor Who howl-a-round.  

“Is that bad?’ 

“Yes’ says the sonographer. 

A large blood clot in my groin perilously close to the deep vein. Literally wounded in the thigh. Old man blood thinners, try not to drink, try not to bleed. Definitely don’t wear shorts. Hopefully the clot will calcify or settle down and become part of the vein. It just seems to be a thing that bodies do. Your defences, the mechanisms that protect you go off half cock and do some damage. 

“Useful if highly unwelcome opportunity to reflect on the path ahead” says the magician. “All part of the process”. 

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Devotion, Bravery, Sacrifice, Death

On Thursday it was announced that the video game Destiny 2 would receive it’s final update, bringing twelve years of the series to an awkward close. I have complicated feelings about this game. At the height of Destiny 2’s run, it was a weekly science fantasy series you felt actively a part of. Mixing elements of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Mad Max, and you were, naturally, one of the heroes.

It was also the game that resulted to me ending some long friendships, contributing further to feelings of isolation, feelings of an inability to make myself understood or connect. I turned my back on people I’d known twenty odd years because a principle’s only a principle if it costs you something. They wouldn’t grow up.

I continued to play without them, sometimes hoping I could make the people I felt closer to understand the joy in playing, but they were weary of the addictive trap.

What I came to understand was that I felt the absence of the primary school playground. Tabletop role players might understand this best. Taking on a role with your friends and going on adventures. Then as children, play acting what we saw on the telly, but your own story but, importantly, your own camaraderie. I didn’t necessarily hate team sports, I hated being treated like a pawn rather than a brother. 

I have often berated myself for these feelings. Childish. Will you ever grow the fuck up? A few years back, I listened out my window to the local addicts square up to one another and it hit me. Theirs was playground behaviour. The inability to reason successfully, to only have violence as an option. Maybe none of us truly grows up, it just manifests differently. Or maybe I’m just another fucking addict.

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“Should have hung around the kitchen in my underwear” - Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (Sam Rockwell, George Clooney, Charlie Kaufman, 2002)

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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers

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Old enough to remember halfpennies 

It’s a truism that all nostalgia is fake. A yearning for something that never was that speaks more to our present dissatisfaction than any historical reality, and yet the personal variety seems like it comes with more guarantees. I can still smell the sweets in their plastic tubs and feel the delight of the halfpenny price tag.

Perhaps it's just the modern mode of being, where memory is substituted for an always accessible digital present (Proust, gripping a madeleine instead of a bag of sweets, would contend that it is) but my experience of aging is that we lose a sense of self-continuity. Instead our memories are revealed as conspicuously constructed things. 

At 50, despite the smell of those sweets, my past has lost much of its vividness. To remember has become work. Increasingly, if I'm honest, a labour of creation. This must have happened this way, I decide. Or it was probably like this. So I keep picturing the foam shrimps and cola bottles not because I'm convinced things were really like this or that, but out of habit. They're familiar flavours. 

Even those fragments about which I’m certain lack definition, and yet, precisely because of this, I cling to them, like buoys at sea, constantly dipping beneath the waves. This isn't a yearning for the past, it's a yearning for far distant selves. All who I have been - the boys, the teenagers, the fathers, the brothers, the colleagues, the child with his hand in the tub -  none of them, in a very real sense, who I am now. 

We are separated by vast gulfs: different bodies, different minds, different memories, and yet I recall these people. They seem desperately important. I want to return to the selves who spent halfpennies, but even if I could, I would only find strangers with nonsense money.

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LACUNA BOOK CLUB 

Well my book club didn't happen today - unfortunately my younger Australian colleague with a unique, special first name given her by a dad who was both a cultist and div had some issue and nobody wanted to work a sunny Saturday afternoon wouldja believe. That's okay, because neither did I! Shame tho because she introduced me to some good East Asian genres like ‘isekai’ that I was completely unfamiliar with last week - I do love my job when I am not getting harassed at it honestly - I sang to 200 babies in a hall this week and that is surprisingly personally fulfilling.

The group was going to be about themes, developments and preoccupation from the last 15 years of SF which is a development from gosh maybe four years now of running this, it's my belief SF - or the good not boring bogged in pseudoscience SF - is sort of inaccurate at prediction in terms of detail and mechanics but say, things like Valis or A Scanner Darkly are as much predicate of changes in human behaviour (the increased presence of the video camera; surveilling) as Harold Bloom would - quite convincingly - tell us ‘Hamlet’, in particular, was.

ANTHROPIC KALEIDOSCOPIC MIRRR (cf: LACAN)

Anyway this was my rough working list; I really had no idea NK Jemisin was so fêted - I enjoyed her Far Sector comic a good bit, and I think with the advent of Absolute Green Lantern I would probably say Sojourner ‘Jo’ Mullein is now my favourite GL, and she isn’t white and she isn’t heterosexual which is one sort of seachange in the field overall perhaps emblematised in Naomi Alderman's The Power somewhat too. That's good - I have Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase kicking about on a desk elsewhere and that's the first ever African SF I have seen, I am quite delighted to say from Botswana too. Yes the tiny African nation is not just about sprint champions folks. Other themes are basically: let's worry about AI and data fields and also environmental catastrophe; it's not very utopian at all! Suborned Frankensteinian birth processes like they Matrix pods?! We gotcha - anyway what do you think readers?!

Oh go on: one song from the future then - I SEEEE YOU BABY BOI

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Leap in the Dark: Jack Be Nimble (Lisa Vanderpump, Peter Redgrove, Michael Croucher. BBC, 1980)

Despite this auspicious early effort, it would be three decades before Vanderpump found her true television presence, with full 21st century celebrity striking in the scripted reality shows Real Housewives of Beverley Hills and her own running-a-restaurant fake-up show Vanderpump Rules.

This step into 21st Century tabloid, plus the full social media enhancement stack, effected the complete neoliberal transubstantiation that had begun shortly after Jack Be Nimble’s broadcast. Marrying a wealthy wide boy half her height and twice her age at the precise moment London’s development market sublimed into its continuing series of speculative investment instruments.

The suburban coven develops within three generations of the same family, Maiden, Mother and Crone coming together around the sofa, sharing the awakenings of their sexual bodies. While dad gently loses and finds his mind again, Vanderpumps’ ritual space bedroom conversion holds a multi-dimensional projection where her future career could manifest, the script’s exhortation to silence and service rejected, in reality, in favour of the Faustian lure.

Although Jackie’s teenage life feels vivid and authentic, suspended between Grange Hill (two years in), and Top of the Pops (new wave-electropop golden years), the screen-age event horizon outstripped anyone’s ability to anticipate. Redgrove’s broadcast obsessions, forcing the TV inside itself, sets a path the direction can’t quite realise. His intuition, derived from the like-is-like principle of sympathetic magic, that reproduction of the individual’s image over millions of screens would create bizarre aberrations in the human lifewave, exploded with a scale and velocity no-one could imagine. 

Though perhaps there are clues to be found here. It may not be possible to fully model or contain the digital curse-work glaring down from the tech pyramid. But we can see its designs most clearly in the semblance of Vanderpump herself: the evolution from her younger, elfin-alien image to the hairspray-hard statue of her later career. Frozen into place, ubiquitous but centreless, omnipotent but ineffectual.