StoRy TiMe

See Harley Quinne, hisher hair of marmalade, hisher eyes of honey, hisher skin of milk. Eyes slied down, a figure thin as a needle, a figure thin as a rain, stepping slow yet moving fast. At times, both hisher feet leave the ground at the same time, yet still Harley Quinne strides on... a shadow full of purpose.

All is stuntered silence quiet... All is glitchless still...

"Quickly now..." heshe whispers, in a voice like ice melting in hot whiskey, "Hop on up into my pocket... we've no time to lose..."

And so you do.

And all is the richness of tinned-goods and glittering lips, saliva rich, saucy, opaque, vague.

"You know," heshe says, norrow eyes smiling, silvered teeth gleam "if you end up in prison... they don't even let you out for Christmas... Can you imagine that?!"

And no you can't.

The night is all frozen-food goodness and flaming pie. Oh the flaming pie of the evening! And oh how the air is sharp as a knife, sharp as a gleaming spitmask! By fuck sir that is sharp, oh that is!

Musclemen stricken with muscle wasting diseases, shuffle on snow-tuned corners. Short, short peoples with dark eyes and secrets, smelling of the earth and sweat, moving out of sight. Female performers with one leg shaved, framed by elongated doormen that flow and flood the doorways of blackened doorways shining. Faces gone wrong.

And Santan, a misshapen wreckage beneath red and ragged clothing, breathing hard, making his way between the naked animal complexions of the spindled things that waddle in gutters that rain grey-brown water in turn. All milky eyes turn to admire Santan's steaming, threadbare sack, that sags exhausted,like a bruised gonad, over Santan's vast, misshapen shoulder.

Kneecapped urchins carved from spuds and spud sacks leap from the windows of gleaming, amber inns, encircling him. Their hungry, animal eyes pierce the air like pools of oil in their ashen, ruptured faces. Bruised harlots loiter in phosphorescent doorways, like bruised, over-ripe fruit.

Inside, Gents with indecypherable voices and cider ruined features, spill their flesh over chairs and children alike. Their cancerous complexions are fly-haired, their dribbling teeth carved from chunks of pure nicotine. Eyes astray as overcooked fingers fumble for the windfall flesh of over-ripe barmaids.

Santan moving through gutted tea-bag streets, his coughing a contaminated brook damned by a brace of rotting hare, as splintered, limbs snapped urchins flicker and retreat beneath the wide-screen gaze of Harley Quinne.

Season's greetings, Rollo

"Another blow smashed in the poor sod... silently he begged me to save him from the raging Hard Bastard..."
Sunday People, December 9, 2001. Not The News Again!

It was never very unlikey that Madonna might become a star. But no one could have predicted that she would grow up to be English.

"Tolkien's stated aim was to tell fairy stories, Peake's stated aim was to break windows. Tolkien has mass sales, Peake has more likelihood of longevity. For Peake was an original visionary where Tolkien was manipulating existing images."
Michael Moorcock

Rollo

How many of us went to college with this guy?

And I've certainly met a few "Trustafarians" in my time. Ha!

I can't tell the difference between the ads for deodorant and hair dye, and the trailers for the latest Hollywood Blockbuster.

Rollo

"He was constantly smoking."

There was this person in the woods up there who I saw who used to-he was like a child. I mentioned him in "Breakthrough." I saw him sitting under a tree, and I went up to him, and he made a growling sound. It scared me so bad that I ran all the way back to the house. And I've found places where I've found weird things in the woods. Like a little basket-type thing that had been made of twigs. It was so skillfully woven together, it looked like a woven basket, even though it was made of windfalls and twigs. It was just amazing. It had old, sort of discarded children's toys in it, and there were also lots of cigarette butts in it. This little creature or person used to smoke all the time. He was constantly smoking.

Now you would think that that was all sort of strangely dreamlike. And it had a very dreamlike quality to it, but then we moved down to San Antonio. The neighbors began to complain that there was this strange, like eleven-year-old child who smoked constantly and was climbing up the walls of the condo and stuff. There were very strange complaints coming in about this kid, to where people called the Social Services in San Antonio to say that there was this child who was being left to run wild.

Then we noticed there was someone standing in a little corner beside our condo. They would be standing about three feet from the head of my bed, but outside. We could see that they'd been standing there all night because we could see all these cigarette butts lying there. So we put in a motion sensitive light to drive them away from that corner, and everyone said it was this kid who used to stand out there and smoke. They used to see him standing there in the night. Then the condo behind us, it turned out, was being lived in by squatters who didn't belong there.

So the lady who owned it got the sheriff to clean the squatters out. This kid apparently was involved with them, because the day the squatters left, I was working in my little garden there, and suddenly this person-I had never laid eyes on this kid before-comes bursting around the corner of the building and goes starting off down the street. It was the same person who had been in my woods. The same blonde kid. I mean the same exact person. Even walked the same. And he goes off down the street and has never been seen again. Then they went in to clean that condo out, and they found that the place was dirty and filthy and full of M & Ms and pennies. Now you put that in your pipe and smoke it. I'm telling you, that is a weird story.

Q. It is.

Strieber: But do you see how it turns out that something that I would have kept questioning because it was just so weird turned out to have a totally physical reference? In other words, there was really somebody there. And in this case, the person the kids used to see in the woods is sort of the reverse. I mean they just took it as a person. The thing I'm trying to get at here is that I keep these things in question because I think it's the responsible thing to do. But in this particular case, I would be very surprised if that man wasn't as real as you and me.

There are things about this experience that imply that we don't see the complete world. That there are parts of the world that we're blind to, and that there are people living in those parts of the world that are not like us. They know more than we do. They live on a bigger scale than we do.

But there's something about some of them that's completely sinister and terrible, like that supposed eleven-year-old kid. When I saw him up close in my woods, you know what he looked like? Not like a child, but like someone whose body had quit maturing when they were about eleven, but who was now fifty. In other words, it looked like a weathered child. It was real weird. That kid in those woods looked at up close was real weird.

And what happened in San Antonio, although I never saw him that closely, so many other people saw him that it was weird, too. Very weird. The whole situation. He was kind of like an interloper. And the two men who lived in the condo with him, I talked to them. They chatted with me a couple of times. They must have known incredible secrets. They were living with someone from another dimension or something. That really creeps me out to think they were right behind me.

You know, Sean, I wonder who the hell I am. I wonder who I am. If I went back across my life, I could spend hours telling you stories like this. There's many things that have happened that I've never even put into books. Just incredible. It's like I live with my two feet in two different worlds. And they're both equally real.

Q. I know what you're saying. If a voice were to ask me who I am, I think my answer would be "I don't know."

Strieber: Well, exactly. We're all in that position here, aren't we?

"The essence of reality is not fact but question.
Fate is life lived. Accident is life let pass." - Whitley Strieber - The Key

Rollo