The Watchful

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetant

Isaac Asmiov 

Everything… is merely the envisaged product of infinite chaos.

Chapter One
2071 AD

Nuclear War is imminent.

The final attempts at Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, have failed horribly. The annihilation of the sole sustainable life-system on the planet, is minutes away.
The United States starts off with nukes sent to Russia, Korea, China, and India. Russia retaliates in the nick-of-time with nukes of their own, sent to the United States, and Israel. The rest of the world watch, and wait, in implausible horror, as they observe Dust-storms, Cyclones, and Floods occur as a chain reaction to these events. Plant and Animal life alike wither away, leaving vast amounts of decaying matter all around the globe. Until the planet is left pretty much a smoldering, flooded junk pile of rubble and phosphorous. 

Culture Shock

I was twelve, when we were liberated from the death camps in 1945. What I watched for five years in those camps probably changed my perspective on human beings. There is no such thing as humane concern. Either humans indulge themselves in exploiting and damaging nature thoughtlessly for their own needs, or doing the same to themselves. What a remarkable species; we seek comfort in knowing some other person hasn’t got the same opportunities as we have, and hence, we’re happy with our own pathetic lives in knowing we’re at an advantage to survive, thrive and prosper in self-importance. Perhaps I just understood the concept of Success wrong.

Bedtime Stories

Chapter One
The Show

Producer: I’ve read your idea. Very confusing, and disjointed. And for a children’s show, the material’s full of anarchic humor. Could you elaborate?

Writer: Well, you’ve given me five episodes… I have five different ideas.

Producer: The more the merrier, and all that… However, there’s bound to be a pattern in even the strangest of ideas. What’s the angle here?

Writer: Well…

Producer: Is it some form of storytelling?

Writer: I suppose…

Producer: Animated?

Writer: Some of it.

Producer: Is it educational?

Writer: Probably not.

Producer: What about set design?

Writer: We need one set. A library.

Producer: I see. So is the show entirely narrative?

Writer: The start of every episode may be. The rest of it is either filmed on location, or animated.

Producer: Do make this easy for me, will you?

Writer: I’m not surprised at your response, it’s written in such a way as to confuse both parents and kids…

Producer: All right, but you’re going to have to explain this to me. Selling an original idea to a corporation isn’t exactly child’s play. What’s the format?

Writer: I introduce each episode like I’m reading from a children’s book, then the camera pans out, the visual fades in and out to reveal the story I’m reading. Sometimes filmed, sometimes animated.

Producer: I’m going to have a long day straddling executives with this one, I just know it…

The Bohemian Inflictive (or) Commonalities

I look out into an infinite universe and know just one thing for certain - We’re never going to know all the answers, ever. I watch political strife, and know a political system that’s applicable to all could simply not exist, because every single person thinks of his/her selfishly-motivated gains at some point, while drafting a manifesto by which the rest of humanity ought to live by. Values are required by its own nature to constantly change with the times, otherwise they become self-imposed, segregated, static morals. I watch the celebration of mediocrity and banality in education, arts and culture, and consider suggesting to ill-informed, self-proclaimed guardians of future generations to come, that aggrandizing narrow, set processes and shunning genuinely unique, remarkable achievements would perhaps contribute in ruining wisdom and higher learning and progress as we know it, but I digress.

Romanticism

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement 

Oscar Wilde

 
“Hello…”

“Penny, it’s me…”

“What is it?”

“Grandfather’s dead.”

“Um… Well?”

“Well, you need to get here for the funeral.”

“Yes, and I have a job to do.”

“I think that charity organization could function a day without you.”

“That’s what you think.”

“Penny, I’m serious, you need to get down here ASAP.”

Monument

The searing white light woke me up from my uneasy slumber. It’s difficult, perhaps, to know for certain what’s going on around me, when I experienced indescribable pain as soon I opened my eyelids. Minutes later, I manages to pry them open, and instantly wish I didn’t.

A Series of Cants

Neo-parable Two

I met him around the street corner, I think I was about eight at the time.
He was a twenty year old street comedian, covered in rags, with dirt caked onto his skin like a face-pack. Broke and starving. The neighbors constantly remained pissed off with this deplorable, unemployed excuse of a young man, and tried driving him off with a garden hose. To their minute astonishment, and immense irritation, he stayed right there, getting drenched on their lawn. Later on, I remember overhearing them talking to my folks about it.

Neighbor: One would imagine that he would be scared of water, judging from what state he’s in, when he comes around the block for his “performance”…

Yes, quite, One may… I heard my bored Grandfather reply.

Tuned

Is it too much to think everything in nature has a balance and rhythm to it? Is it stupid to think every mood, every emotion, every instance, every example, and every other little thing could be captured in music? The answer to both these questions - Yes. However… Is it moronic, eccentric, or indeed, psychotic, to try doing exactly that?

No.

Black/White

Catherine Huff is known to readers worldwide as a writer who’s managed to break the last barriers of publishing material. Which was detailing the horrific, in the middle of children’s literature. Black Humor in the middle of a moral anecdote. Arachnids, her short-story for children, managed to do exactly that, by introducing disturbing humor without the use of symbolism to cover up the more disturbing details contained in the story. Needless to say, more parents were up in arms about the issue. The children hadn’t lost their innocent little minds reading this story; nor did they kill anyone, as most of the Schools and Parents claimed they would.

Somehow, the idea of Culture Shock always ends with the conclusion, that it would desecrate the traditions and sensibilities of established norms. In all probability, I suppose Establishment Types do not, ever, find faults and fallacies with their own rules, regulations, and rationalizations.

Huff has recently published her autobiography, with detailed descriptions of her career shift, from Law Enforcement to Writing, her subsequent three-year spell at a minimum-security prison as a result of her writing, and certain details about how the autobiography itself took shape in prison.

As a book reviewer, it is absolutely pointless to introduce a review with personal details of the author. Call it editorializing, but what follows is the short story she published first, followed by the Prologue to her autobiography. Combined, they form a potent insight into the mind of the author. I hope.

Abode

I write.
I draw Buildings.
I’m Twenty-Three.
I’m now on a local Panel Show. Stoned. And, oddly enough, attentive. For a live show, though, too silent, and observant.
And, for the third time this month, I’m feeling sick, looking at people always coming up with the attitude, and belief, that being in an agreement with each other always, or fighting each other, should be the either existent choices for settling any-fucking-argument.

Life. Splendid. Seems like abrasive nonsense to me, maybe that’s the reason why I live in a constant state of incredulity, curiosity, and despondency.

In conclusion, I started to write original stuff for a professional reason, which seemed like a hobby to everyone else. My career was really on iron-bolted halt, to put it mildly, even my life. Something changed with one idea, then everything did. So, I built a house, and continued with minimal recognition, ending with a rant on a Panel show, which very nearly ended my even otherwise snail-paced, slouching career, into a new dimension - Mental Inertia. No, not writer’s block. Get my condition, and you can end up for months with no clear thought, or any thought at all really. Fortunately, looking back at a condensed version of the entire three years before, I think it was a life, which was at least interesting to observe, and oddly funny to exist in.

Interviewer

Para-Normality

Ghost: You people piss me off…

Me: What are you talking about?

Ghost: You’re obviously bastards…

Me: Look, I can think of a million other things a ghost could do to me. Verbal Abuse never really crossed my mind. What the fuck?

Future(d)

Technology is an extended frame, into conscious processes we've used up in our evolution of survival techniques through the ages, incorporating these into cultures to form customs... And now we perform them dogmatically, sub-consciously knowing there's something wrong with it, yet engaging in it because of some vague, cryptic social connotation.

Out-of-bounds Realism

Life is meaningless at the end, death is inevitable.

In most cases, life cannot be more pathetic or forlorn or despicable. Yet, life can only be as glorious or futile as we want it to be. If we're individually gifted in some respect, which we all are, recognizing what it is, is half the battle won. The rest of the effort, a genuine effort, mind you, should be focused on how to not squander the same gift, instead of engaging ourselves in some mindless, unenlightening exercise we undergo, supposedly to fulfill some vague, social purpose. We don't need that, it isn't vital to our existence. It doesn't define us, it doesn't enlighten us, it teaches us nothing, and yes, serves no genuine purpose.

Shoeboxes

The secret to being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
George Bernard Shaw

Excerpt from Box 305: I want my idols to beat the fuck out of them

Emptiness shrouds us. To my way of thinking, emptiness is easier to handle than obligations. Emptiness makes it possible to tread along the line of insanity; obligations envelop us in a gateless circle of insanity. I wish I had people I looked up to, who would come to my rescue and kick the shit out of those people I hate. Odd, this rationalization coming from a pacifist. I wish there was some guitar hero or writer who could help. This is reality, though. There isn’t one soul I would like to harm, save for a handful of cretins. I wish it was more simple - reason is harder to generate than brute force. I suppose it’s difficult for people who're used to employing brute force as a solution to everything to understand this analogy. Trust me, it isn't to condescend any of you. You people, quite plainly, are a virus. Even if I was born because of you. Possibly, it partly is because I was Born, that I posess an everlasting contempt. Isn't it nice to see a moral idiot, and a sexist idiot, fight to the death, to gain the Superior hand in inconsequential Cattle Crap? And, even more dementedly, I have to pretend what they do is something rather cloy and innocent? Get real, for a microsecond, Stupidity isn't my forte.

Cruising

Personnel Decisions ~ December 2012

Me: I love this copy machine. This copy machine defines this work environment pretty well. Everything’s copied to the extent, that given the right amount of time, every employee looks like a clone of each other. The same walking-dead expression. It’s like an organization of zombies, servicing the general living population. The shop has this sinister white light throughout, the surroundings are white, the things we sell are white, the furniture is white, and the telephones - yes, white. Amazing, isn’t it?

Parlance on a Bench

We’ve lost the old one. Another member, of whom we genuinely thought of as family, gone.

Clarity in Regular Irregularity

1. DRIVE

Eddie: We’re bored, aren’t we?

John: You’re telling me? I was dozing off, and you call me out for a drive… And here we are, staring at automobile butts for an hour. If this is your idea of entertainment, I don’t know what gets you bored…

Eddie: What would you rather do?

John: I don’t know… A concert… A burger, perhaps… Anything but this.

Solitude

Happiness is a myth. After months of broken sleep, that’s the only rational thought I’ve had. Every single day is the same, consisting of a random order of bizarre memories, endless pacing within this room, and suicidal thoughts. And panic attacks.

Hypothetical

God created the Universe.
Most of the world accepts that.
Not many people know, that human beings, were created twice.

On Valentine's

I'm not exactly sure of the outcome of this article, nor do I think there's any value to it. The passages that follow may lead readers to believe that it's all about refuting the concepts tied to this day. I can assure you it's the result of an objective outlook at the topic, not a subjective one.

Bipolar

Here's the endless cycle for Manic Depression.

A Personal Manifesto

There exists a mental state, set for a stage within an author’s head, where the sole thought is writing. Not the focus of one’s being, the Sole thought. It comes down to a schizophrenic mental urge to do little else. A point, when everything else, even those elements that form inspirations to induce ideas, like music, idols, drugs, reality, alternate work, the pointlessness of life and satire, transform into mere distractions. Until, the self is the only inspiration, and working at producing more material isn’t merely an obsession, it’s a necessity.

The Soliloquies Rhyme-less

6 months earlier

Elizabeth: I’m going to be a call-centre supervisor someday.

Me: High ambitions, no doubt…

Elizabeth: I know when you’re mocking me, you know… Better option than you, isn’t it?

Me: You mean more successful? Sure

Elizabeth: And you still don’t care?

Me: Nope

Jester to Jape

The birth of Andy Williams was faced with some dread, because he showed all the signs of a still-birth. His vitals weren't responding, his eyes were wide-open and no one heard a sound from him. The doctors were astonished to find no movement or sound from a seemingly healthy baby, but then they were reassured when the baby broke wind at the appropriate time, when the doctor decided to take a closer look. It came to be known soon enough, when he had driven his parents to the end of their tether, and was sent to school in order to allow his parents to recuperate their way into temporary sanity, that he was a natural prankster. 

tRi

Chapter 2. Lost Creativity

Prologue

There’s a difference between feeling an exuberance for life, and loosing all interest in life.
Both these views, though, are equally valid.

Curiosity is the only state of mind and hallucinogens the only vices we need, to walk through life, as if within a dream - experiencing everything, learning anything, and contemplating, rather than allowing baser emotions control the way we act and think. There’s definitely more value in the lateral elements in life than the visceral. Possibly, these would provide people with a lucid, logical, interesting perspective of life. 

Based on Nothing

It seems like humankind has retreated so much into self-absorbed narcissism, as a form of self-preservation. Safety as an illusion isn't genuinely safety, but it's the best we can muster in oddly paranoid, hateful times like these. The human race functions on two things in modern society  - Ignorance and Greed. Ironically, we've begun to contemplate galaxies and microbial organisms, yet we still profess a strong belief in burning bushes, holy rocks, virgin births and a distorted idea of success (which is measured, weirdly, in accumulated wealth, and the number of people who respect you based on that same wealth).  We indulge ourselves insatiably in empty symbols like flags and empty slogans like "No Pain, No Gain". We function within a monetary system that has no valued attributes; meaning, every currency in the world is worthless paper backed by nothing of value, except, perhaps, the infallible word from our beloved institutions like banks and schools that money possesses value. 

Chaotic

It's fascinated me how the most chaotic ideas ever proposed in our history could reshape our world. It's also interesting how the most stationary ideas led us to ruin & destruction over the millennia. Which is ironic. 

Warpath Crudeness

Being air-dropped into some remote region in the Amazon was the worst mission ever. It was also the first. We were told to protect America from the forces of evil, and it required us to track and kill a group of terrorists who were head-hunters, cannibals and nuclear scientists. Quite a Curriculum Vita, I might add. Seemed unlikely at the time, but we had to go with the flow. Having doubts & asking questions are the worst characteristics to have when you're in the military. Work has been steady. So is recruitment.

The year is 2015 AD. America's efforts to arm every country in the world was effective - unfortunately, efficiency in this case were followed by repercussions. Every nation in the world had nuclear science, energy and weapons manufacturing plants for the last 2 years. Every country has the capability to launch nukes to any destination in the world. This is solely about government agencies. Ever since governments all over the world were armed with nukes, so were splinter groups. Thus giving the word Democracy a new, warped meaning. This meant any social strife within a nation, and disagreements among nations were answered by one simple stratagem - bomb people. It sort of goes against the idea proposed at the start of the millennium that our nation was arming people to the teeth for protecting them.
Effectively, we have changed civil liberties overnight to vigilante justice - thus enforcing our primal instinct of survival in a way more brash and brutal than any previous war in the recent past. If everyone possesses power, it means power will result in obliteration. If we continue to propel citizen ownership of WMD's, we'll die out before we start to realize what was wrong with that initiative to begin with. 

The Sea Monster

They gathered their fishing equipment - which consisted of a gigantic net and oars.

Dawn.

They were simple folk with simple troubles, simple ambitions, simple beliefs. Simple living. As was the custom, they prayed to the goddess of the sea. The goddess protected them from storms & sea monsters; and she provided them with an excellent catch if they worked hard enough and treated each other justly.

A good day. Calm sea, not a bad catch so far. And no casualties. Yet. They began to sing their folk songs to appease the goddess to get more fish. It worked, so they sang more vigorously than usual. When the sun broke over the horizon, they began to collect their net, and row back to the shore. With this haul, the village would not remain hungry for weeks. They were content.

Then it happened. 

Copyright Us [an addendum to Slicker]

Blog Entry 1_August 5, 2008

There have been countless arguments and counter-arguments on the real identity of Dan Burton. Indeed, the speculations on the supposed Rock-God’s identity and whereabouts exist, simply because both the identity and whereabouts appear to be unknown. Dan Burton, as this anonymous entity claims to be, is a rock star who creates his/her music , and writes articles on what Music is truly meant to be about. The fact that no one knows his/her real identity, or indeed, if all the content posted on his/her website is from one sole source, remains to be seen, and presents ample uncertainty. 

Slicker

The soundtrack of their life.

Essentially, that's what good musicians do. They interpret their mood swings and trials by making noise. The poignant noise is Music. Maybe musicians could be looked at as the deviant, stubborn kids who made a lot of noise when they didn't get what they wanted - somehow, armed with a different spin. If this was truly the case, these are the same ones who never got their opinion heard while they were little, and as they grew up, they created a way to make people listen to them, as if to say, "You have no other option other than to listen to what I have to fucking say..." And it's an amazing feeling when you totally nail it and get that appreciation. 

Paranoia

We have nothing to fear, but fear itself

F. D Roosevelt

2020 AD - The Surveillance Age

For the last 2 years, surveillance has been ushered in with political & ideological support from fanatics running the government. The advent of street, home & other forms of security footage has reduced the world into 2 camps - the safe & the watched...

Increased tensions between self-proclaimed moral police & libertarians have purely been a one-sided dispute; reducing libertarians to minor factions & are increasingly on the verge of becoming extinct. Rebel factions no longer fight for better politics or better wages - because they are powerless to do so. Instead, it's the fight for choices - Drugs, Music & Cultural Rot have become the problems governing the age. Any group or enterprise with 10 people or less have automatically attained the tag terrorist. Free Speech, Free Thought, Free Expression - have been suppressed to the extent of there being no other opinions, besides nationalistic ones.

This is the world we live in.
The people who have the audacity of attempting to dissent are detained, tortured or terminated.

Welcome Note (Reader Discretion Advised)

The Imagination imitates. It is the criticial spirit that creates.
Oscar Wilde

The Mediocre teacher Tells, the Good teacher Explains, the Superior teacher Demonstrates, the Great teacher Inspires.
William Arthur Ward

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Oscar Wilde

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde

Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.
Bertrand Russell

Work is more fun than fun.
Noel Coward 

Every imaginative thought has some amount of mixed curiosity and humor within it.
Each of these aspects are captured from time to time in lucid dreams, which are rare, granted.
Adding structured and unstructured detail to conscious imaginations, or subconscious dreams, and turning them into very unlikely, yet rationally-possible fictional realities is a fair description of the formulation of a Plot.
Detailed Characters in plots are derived in a parallel brain-wave, using certain facets of real-life examples and constructed environments. Playing these characters into awkward, or harsh, or any other types of situations, into a slightly twisted form of reality which these fictional characters inhabit and call abnormal, lends an endless stream of Improbable Progressions to their respective Behaviors.
Vocalizing these behavioral patterns with body-language, while adding constructed base emotions these characters might be feeling at the time, result in conversations or Dialogues.

All these tiny bits of frantic detail are laid out, in no particular order, perhaps. But all that’s required to make the material genuinely interesting, is to present the said material in the most engaging way possible, as the story permits. Writing isn’t to dazzle or impress the reader, not even to appeal or disgust readers, but to draw in people for that limited period of time to an alternate world, and letting the readers emerge at the end, understanding what was presented. The sharp detail of the fantasy trip, and the subsequent understanding, matters. Ideological agreement with the idea, or Likeability, does not. Success, Failure, Acceptance, Criticism, Monetary gain - are of no genuine, meaningful consequence. Eventually.

This is one of an endless stream of individual view-points one could assemble, to collectively create a story.
Just one of those ways, to come up with a creative idea.

Having said this, I must digress slightly, to address people, who think the Human Imagination is useless and practically futile. They may be right, if they choose to live life through a narrow, goal-oriented lifestyle. Not that party animals are any better. They’re both examples of Existential Waste.
Not out of condescension, but there’s some truth in thinking the obsession with any specific thing, does not enrich or educate Human Experience, and it’s even more tragic, when we know We have a mortal coil around us, but we live uneventful, unimaginative, irrational lives; just to fit in, or to be able to achieve some vaguely asinine, brain-dead idea of Success or Perfection.

Therefore, I honestly believe, that ignorant, unimaginative citizens ought to be Shot.

Sincerely,
Lord Giles Featherhorn Lumpbucket