The first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup

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I faxed my answer to El Segundo

I have a plane to catch, but not for hours. So I call and say: MIT. Aerospace Masters and PhD. Mathworks now. In the area. 

She says: Come straight over. 

A warehouse on East Grand Avenue. Like everything here, about twenty years old. Around 27,000 square feet. Nothing special at all.

A German man greets me in the bare bones shed. We sit. Plastic chairs on a concrete floor.

Second in command, he says. Unfriendly. He grills me on code, on simulating trajectories from scratch. They’re using MATLab. I know what to say. I pass his test. 

He stands, leaves. Footsteps, then a sticky echo, like the floor is still wet with Rust-Oleum.

Two younger guys approach. Mark? Phil? Very smart. Nice. Both have black, up all night eyes. I like them. We talk simulation loops. They love MATLab. Geeks.

Then the founder. Face waxy like Madame Tussauds. Affected shuffles and tics. Smiles. Sits. Asks: You walk a mile south, a mile east, a mile north, but you’re back where you start. Where are you?

I tell him: North Pole.

He smirks. Says: Yes. Anywhere else? 

I’m tired. This will take time. I tell him: I'll get back to you. 

He’s ok with this.

He stands, asks: Your thoughts on the ISS?

I say: Amazing. Love it. Cooperation. Inspiring.

What about Munich?, he says.

I don’t understand. The Olympics, you mean?

He walks off. Mumbles something. Maybe thanks. Soft shoes. No echo this time.

On the first plane home, I dream the answer to his compass riddle: just north of the South Pole, where the Earth's circumference is exactly one mile. 

During a stopover at Dallas, I fax the answer, with workings, and call. Make sure he gets it, I say.

Sure, she says.

My next plane is boarding.

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“I'll pull the damn thing down brick by brick” – Jacob’s Room (Virginia Woolf, 1922); The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, Matt Damon, 2026)

In the newsroom speakers come and go, talking not of Michaelangelo but of an older fabrication: do we allow enemy soldiers to debauch the women and children we brought back from the town square, or do we allocate fresh misery to those at home who – good taste concurs – push their luck by continuing to breath? 

The war markets are restless, insisting on new areas of valuation. The ongoing abomination distorts time. Clumsy ironies and dull foreboding attach themselves to unremarkable days; attention offered with no thought of violence is made significantly trivial in the aftershock.

The first world war isn’t in the pages of Jacob’s Room; arguably not a single page of the novel is about anything other than the first world war, not the ones about women or politics, and certainly not the ones that yearn for ancient Greek clarity. Denied full resolution the novel’s subject – Jacob Flanders, his surname perhaps Woolf’s most “I know writers who use subtext” moment – exists in protean form, which doesn’t mean that he lacks solidity in any given year, from any given perspective. That any of his selves aren’t.  

You can dream on the leaps between subjects and tenses for days. Every semi-colon is a protest against the annihilation of life. 

Dreaming of Greece, experienced war accountant Christopher Nolan is here to tell us the volume of piss and shit to fill the horse’s belly, the turns to unlock the gate, lotus petals to quiet the sad lad fury of an unravelling empire. The fights are mere headache but when the city burns you experience calamity as a pulversising wave. 

In this telling, home is no sight for Odysseus; like Jacob, the returning soldier lives only in journeys recollected or speculative – “What did he expect? Did he think he would come back?”

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The Pilman Radiant 6: Life

There are six sites in the world impacted by The Visitation. They become named after the scientist who researches it. Each is referred to as a Visitation Zone.

In Harmont, a town in Canada, Redrick Schuhart works by day at the Institute, investigating their Zone. By night, he acts as a Stalker. Exploring and stealing from the Zone. An entire black market has sprung up around the artefacts found within. After eight years he finally journeys to the Golden Sphere, an object that may grant wishes.

The fiction of the Strugatsky brothers often deals with the absurdities of overgrown bureaucracy. A system unable to cope under the strain of its world, losing and dehumanising everyone trapped in it.

Frankly, I’ve always found it absurd that they could get away with this type of commentary within the Soviet Union, given how it’s not even remotely subtle what they could be getting at.

Andrei Tarkovsky took the Strugatsky’s book and turned it into 1979’s Stalker. It had to be filmed twice. Improperly developed film rendered the work useless. It’s believed that the toxicity of the filming locations could have contributed to the cancerous deaths of cast and crew.

The Stalker guides the jaded writer and scientist through The Zone to The Room, where wishes are granted. He believes in the beauty and wonder of The Zone. He is mocked for his messianic pretensions of his self appointed mission.

The Zone is a strange industrial ruin, reclaimed by the Earth, haunted by the unseen.

My father died from a battle against two forms of cancer. I wonder if perhaps working in the shipyards of Glasgow contributed to it. I worry about a genetic timebomb I could have inherited. The very act of existing dooms us, but the machinations of our living unwind the clock of our lives.

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Planks Constant 

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Summer Fun: Chaos 

Summer. At least 25 years ago. Rich and I decide we need to get out of Brighton, that thrilling expanse is a trap. We have made poor decisions, destroyed relationships we should have nurtured. Our solution is to go into the countryside and do some big ritual magic. A ceremony to get right with the chaos we feel around us, the chaos we have largely caused. 

Yes, our approach to magic is as ill thought out and cavalier as our approach to the rest of our lives. We are ignoring the advice for disciplined yoga, meditation and an independent therapeutic practice, but quite keen on the use of drugs as a cheat code. We load up the work’s van with athame, tarot cards, Crowley and Carroll and Hine, psychedelics, weed and booze. I can’t remember if we packed food. 

Petrol stop in a small town. Coming out of the garage we smash into the wing of a car we haven’t seen. Everything is fast and slow. We punch him into the opposite lane and thank the gods nothing is coming the other way. 

He gets out the car and it's all wrong. There’s a way a 40 something man would get out of a car and walk towards the people that nearly killed him. He’s not doing that. He’s calm. My brain recognises the body language and is spiraling trying to connect the memory. He takes his wallet from his pocket and holds it loosely at his hip. My brain is screaming because I know what this is. I’ve seen my dad do this. He’s walking the walk of a man who knows you are about to have an infinitely worse time than him. Shock makes Rich rude ‘We’d better swap details’. 

‘It’s not that simple lads’ still holding his wallet by his hip he does the flip revealing his warrant card. ‘I’m a policeman.’ 

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THIS THING CALLED LOVE REAL HARD FOR ME/THIS THING CALLED LOVE IS A GOD TO ME

The Sam Gellaitry extended cut came out yesterday, and that’s how you can tell he is an upper echelon pop star like Dua Lipa or Kylie or ehh Troye Sivan, and of course as he is a wee Scottish Stirling sassidge it is chock full of more of the hetero-sentimentality it seems the working man can only turn to he or Miguel Jonté for. Pop has a lot to answer for, not least among it from this perspective my ballooning and ridiculous expectations for a romantic love which I have only ever experienced in slivers but has been thoroughly, religiosely articulated over 60 years (sometimes incorrectly or unhelpfully, Hit Me Hard and Soft yes Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) no, it’s a tricky and ephemeral line)

ARTICULATE THE SHAPE OF THE LACK

Nonetheless I absolutely refuse to give up, and maybe if you see the lacuna it is on the horizon and not a mirage this time. A detail amidst the horrors of the Gaiman exposé that continues to strike me, and I think I noticed this in another abuser testimony recently can’t remember where but fuck them anyway, but I think a cosmological, Lovecraftian detail (+ offence) was his insistence love “doesn’t exist” - not sure how treating teenage lassies abhorrently and ruinously is any substitute for the notion really but I may lack the imagination of a dream king, as all I really want is one (ideally buff) woman to go to bed with every night and do nice things with.

Beseeching final paragraph follows

Really, to the haters and losers, who are one and the same in any case because precisely because they don’t love anything what I want to say is: Get a hobby, do something you can improve at, you must like something, please please pursue that instead of inflicting your misery on people, invest time in yourself instead of gassing out online like carbon monoxide. Love is real x

Bonus tale: the more you write about your own life the more made up it sounds… so I am catsitting for my neighbour (quite into this, may get cats and name them Ferenc Puss-cat and TIGRESS or something) and he actually does have an astonishing collection of primarily LeGuin, Tolkien, Baum and I think Carroll books that I was so overawed by I immediately lost the key and couldn't recover in this sea of paper - readers what is my life a metaphor of [bonus points for Library of Babel or minotaur references]

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Mama-say, mama-sa

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Best Spider-Man film 

The superhero is an errant thought experiment native to the 20th century United States. Hypothetical position solving the demand to apply Darwinian mechanics and reverse engineer an answer: what possible creature could evolve to live inside this?

Force bred from the environmental imperatives of Manhattan, animal men appear, trapezing the handmade canyons. But the urban circuitry was never only a city, standing equally for the networks, vectors and media spaces etched into the world by industrial America’s unprecedented capabilities. 

In our universe, when new lifeforms arrived to fill these niches, we don’t get heroes.

Primarily a construction of image over matter, the aspirational city was never an authentic reflection of American experience. Broad and flat, decorated by sniper-scope roundels, the heartland megamarkets generate their own masked adventurers, verticalities compressed inside gridded avenues of shelving and price points. There’s the sound of brushed drums pushing into each other, familiar movements like a robot set free on the moon.

Like fellow monsters of pop Savile or Glitter, Jackson never hid but outshone the obvious, overlaying the plane of visibility with smears of malefic charisma. With father’s eager help he drilled his generational gifts of music, dance and song into the weapons of a criminal mastermind - cover personalities, bizarre costumes, hunting ground disguised as a fairfield. Webs of melody, rhythm and image spun over radio, television and hi-fi. Snared families who needed money or craved attention and used their weaknesses to lever their children into his bed. Over time, sins multiplying, fortress of wealth undermined by dogged lawmen and opportunistic scavengers, he turns skeletal, sepulchral from scalpels, bleach and osteotomes. Propofol hibernation to complete rebirth into pure media.

Years later, in the matrix of screens, faced with a villain-assembly of such perfect force, the ghetto spider must cleave the music from its maker and save us from our memories of the star that fell. Performing the ritual postures, breathing the infectious rhythms into his mask, fully possessed. Rewriting signature moves in red, step-by-step on the overlit megastore floor, the hero eats the virus with his whole body.