Search Results for 'tin'

#1198

Al woke up deranged. He was in the middle of the bushes, unable to move and scantily clad.

Good thing too that the joggers in the park noticed!

Embarrassing, he reckoned.

Moments later, after some voice messages on his telephone from Becky, he was still incapacitated.

Just as Becky was retorting to Al to please become completely transparent, Becky giggled, suddenly seeing the Wet Tarty Nun.

“My God, what the fuck is that?”

(same random quote as above link #87)

Actually, thinking of Dory made Quintin remember:

“They are really bit rude around here”.

Dory stretched and yawned, and took in in a cloud of dust.

Dory wondered out loud if she should have an older man with curly grey hair and a long maroon djelaba and a tall narrow brimless black hat and watch him get laid.

I am so easy really, she thought giving it a last fond stroke. She finally surfaced from the flapping tangle of cloth just in time to see a group of people squatting next to a large oblong hole in the ground.

PFFFFFT! Deserted again.

Dory was getting bored waiting for this motley crew, looking slightly bemused, but smiling happily, she set off in search of Dory.

#87 Quintin had a woman near London ~ a strange small replicate, put here for gracious officials. Strangely linked to the story, was Dory. The other participants didn’t really expect this quaint dream…

Dory made Quintin in Madagascar for the first time. Funny, but now they seemed to connect to Arona. Malvina disappeared, and once again Arona found this quite irritating. She could barely remember the music.

Really, things are shifting. In the name of heaven use magic I Scream or something!

A Man emerged from Arona’s lap. This is great, more comfortable than the ground.

Oh cute, said Arona, a talking Man, love your cape by the way.

Arona stroked Man. It was all feeling heat and humidity… and especially her hunger. Man sighed in an eggs sort of a way. She exclaimed delightedly, hugging the Man.

[¹] Note from the editor: Man being a noble reader

~~~~

Dory was dry, with strange hard shoulders and face. Her shawl finally surfaced flapping in time to a cloud of dust.

PPFFT! I’m all on my own. Dory was momentarily speechless.

Unbeknown to the young Goldie, weeping at the Fluboat terminal in Gibbonsville….

(Ann had to laugh at the typo. She had just hard a joke about ‘catching swine flu’ being a code word for shagging a fat bird)

……there was another probable self of hers already at the Worserversity. Harvey Tater would recognise this other version of Goldie when he met her, and although he would be confused as to where she came from, or who she really was, or where he’d seen her before, he would sense a feeling of familiarity. By the same token, the Worserversity self of Goldie (who had been stolen by itinerant French potato pickers shortly after her birth, and renamed Pomme de L’Air) sensed the same feeling of recognition, but had no knowledge of her, er, roots, so to speak, or any of her other potatable selves.

When Harvey Tater left Idaho, he left his childhood sweetheart Goldie Cabillaud behind. Goldie was distraught, having been led to beleive that a lasting union for the pair would result from the many years they had been freinds. There were aspects of Harvey that stayed in Idaho, or probable selves, and some of those probable selves did indeed wed the young Cabillaud girl; however, so as not to confuse the reader, we will henceforth concern ourselves with the Goldie Cabillaud that wept as her beau, Harvey Tater, boarded the FlyBoat at Gibbonsville , for parts unknown.

Though the more Ann thought about Monica, the funnier it seemed. Guilt was such a tiresome emotion.

“Fancy old Bronkel deciding to go for a sex change! I must have sensed something when I wrote him in as the crazy, brilliant, cross dressing Dr Bronkelhampton in the Island novel!”

She thought for a moment, “did I ever finish that novel?”

Ann sighed. What was she like eh! Always starting novels, never finishing them. No wonder old Bronkel, ahem, Monica, got so fed up with her.

Anyway, perhaps she would give Monica another chance as her pooblisher? He … she… was certainly much kinder and easier to deal with now. That Godfrey, or whatever the heck his name is, wasn’t doing much for her career.

The writer wondered again how to strike out text and correct the inadvertent slip into the Ooh dimension.

An idea for another novel was forming in the murky convoluted depths of Ann’s brain, something about a gorgeously cuddly big teddy bear man, with his unruly tumble of brown curls and his colourful FairIsle sweaters, who had flown the nest from a potato farm in deepest darkest Idaho to pursue his dream of being an Elsespace Guide at the Worserversity.

“Brilliant, Moonica will loove it!”

Ann had to admit it wasn’t a bad idea. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of that herself. Why haven’t I been expressing more of the perecption in front of my eyes, I wonder? The more she thought about it, the more confused she became. It did sound like a good idea, and she was pleased that she had created another ‘her’ as it were, to mention it.

On the other hand, of course, there was nothing stopping Walter (or was it Gordon? No, Godfrey…wait, wasn’t it Al?) from creating another one of his ‘hims’ masked as an Ann to express more of her perceptions in HIS own ‘It’s All You’ story.

Am I getting this right? Ann whispered to her left ear.

Ann spent the morning (or a mere half hour, if truth be told) enjoying her physicality in the gentle autumn morning sun before returning indoors. The drop in temperature was still new enough to remember to appreciate fully. She felt at peace with her world, a happy balance of words and sunbeams, that is until she perused the latest additions to the BA (Bash Ann, by the looks of things) group project.

Ann frowned. Who the heck was Harvey? It was almost the last straw, despite Ann’s sunny mood. The very idea of trawling back through the paperwork to find out who he was, and indeed who everyone else was, was too daunting. “If it’s not fun don’t do it!” That’s what they all said. Over and over again they said “if it’s not fun don’t do it”.

The writing was fun, and the random reading was fun, but it wasn’t fun ~ in fact, it gave her a headache ~ to try and remember who and when and where everyone was. Perplexed, Ann wondered if she simply wasn’t cut out for working in a group. On the other hand, she simply wasn’t a loner either.

“Be remebering,” the disembodied voice whispered in her left ear, “That they are all YOU.”

Oh! Right, yes….herm….well where does that leave me?

“Right at the centre of it all, as always,” the voice replied.

Er, so it’s all MY story, then? The whole thing is all me, all mine? All the characters are ME?

“Quite!”

So I can do whatever I want, then?

“Of course!”

Right then, so I can write whatever I want, which is fun, and not write what I don’t want, which isn’t fun, and that will be quite alright, will it?

“Correct!” the voice chuckled indulgently. “And it may behoove you” it continued in a conspiratorial tone, “To remember than any flak from the others in the group, is in fact, YOU giving YOURSELF a flakking reflection.”

Oh. Well Right Ho, then. Toot! Toot!

“So how was your lunch date with your new best friend?” Harvey sounded distinctly sarcastic, even to Lavender’s forgiving ears.

“Oh, you know …”

Harvey raised his eyebrows. No mean feat when you have a book balancing on your nose. He sighed, and let the book fall. A few months ago he was balancing four poster beds, and now he could barely manage a Lemoine novel. Heavy as they are! He sniggered to himself. Oh well, at least I havn’t lost my sense of humour, along with my sense of smell!

“Well, to be honest Harvey .. I think I may have been possessed by those pesky aliens. I suddenly came to and I was talking all this rubbish about ‘random quote generators’ and using words like ‘dear’.

Lavender shuddered in horror at the memory, and then rolled her beautiful eyes and sighed. “Poor Ann, I think she is a really tortured soul.”

The writer wondered if it was time to add a dark side to Lavender’s personality. All this beautiful eyes business was getting a tad irritating, the beauty of Lavender’s eyes not withstanding. Not to mention her lips which she painted a bright shade of amaranth for every day wear, and on special occasions, rose madder. The writer wondered if the last thought made sense and wondered again how to strike out text. The writer decided to try that last line again.

Lavender shuddered, and then with an enigmatic smile which even her good friend Harvey found hard to decipher, she said softly, “I ate olives for lunch. They were yummy.”

The writer sighed and then noticed the random quote generator said “mean cleaner coming soon.” The writer wondered if it was a sign.

“That perhaps is your task” Virginia was whispering in Ann’s ear”…to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist’s way…”

“Did you catch that, Walter? ‘Not spun out in the traditional lengthy continous way’ she’s saying.”

“…but condensed and synthesized in the poet’s way—that is what we look to you to do now.”

“I didn’t know you channeled Virginia Woolf, Ann,” replied Walter. “Doesn’t mean she is necesarily right, though, notwithstanding.”

“I didn’t say she was ‘absolutely right’, Walter. I’m just pointing out what’s right for me.”

Walter popped another anchovy stuffed olive into his mouth.

Ann slapped her forehead when she realized her mistake, notwithstanding that there were no ‘mistakes’ as such.

The story is for the writer that writes it, not the reader.

What the repercussions of that were for the future of publishing, Ann wasn’t quite sure.

“Oh, I can answer that for you, dear” Lavender responded. “On my recent trip to the future I went to the Pick Your Own Pages book store. There’s a wonderful Pick ‘N’ Mix section, and a Lucky Dip. You can pick various quantities, such as chapters, pages, paragraphs or sentences, and you arrange them yourself.”

“What a wonderful idea!” Ann replied.

“Oh, the idea was an old one, very old!” Lavvie explained. “People were doing it all along, though they didn’t realize it. The idea of being spoon fed an entire story went out with the Ark. It was the advent of random quote generators that started the ball rolling.”

Ann beatled off to check the random quote for the day….

“Arona! Sanso! Oh, how wonderful to see you guys again! Come and meet Lavender and Walter, we’re discussing continuity….”

“Let’s put it this way” Ann continued, “Tis better to allow the snippets to flow out than to bottle them up, which is where the expression ‘to rack ones brains’ comes from. Rows and rows of bottles of thoughts on metal racks in a dusty cellar, contained within the confines of the glass, denied freedom of expression, and all because the Bottle Rack Attendant, or BRA for short, refused to set them free to find their own way in the world of infinite individual storylines.”

“You see, by no manner is it an issue if things aren’t continuous” Walter was saying, which immediately brought to Ann’s mind the latest development at her end of the group project. For some reason lately she found that she was permanently signed in, as opposed to previously, when she’d had the dickens of a job to stay signed in long enough to make an entry. Permanently connected, as it were.

“….and I know it’s almost blasphemous to say that” Walter continued, causing Ann to raise an eyebrow, “…but the crux of the matter lays in the measure with which things are expanded and linked together.”

“If I may be so bold as to interrupt, sir,” Ann couldn’t restrain herself from interjecting, “Surely that is what readers are for? Is not the purpose of the writer, or indeed any artist, to simply offer particles, or pieces, for the viewer to add, or not, as they choose, to their own continuous storylines?”

Walter opened and closed his mouth like a godfish. (Ann had to laugh at the typographical error.)

“For example” Ann continued, warming to the subject, “When I random read book pages, then channel surf the TV, followed by a random roam around online, interspersed with perhaps a few phone calls, or various incidents throughout the day, I’m making a continuous story of my own, with pages and screenshots and conversation snippets borrowed, if you like, from many external sources (and before you say anything, I am aware that no source is external, but don’t let me start digressing). The era of being ‘told’ a story to beleive in its entirety is over! Everyone knows these days that we each make our own story, with a bit of this, and a bit of that. It’s The Age of Random Tips & Snippets, after all, everyone knows that! It’s T.A.R.T.S. time now!”

Luckily for Walter, Ann realized she was late for her Flimsy Unravelled Continuity Knowledge class.

“Walter, I am so releived to see that you’ve finally seen how flimsy continuity really is,” Ann said, and flung her arms around him.

“Steady on!” he gasped, trying to extricate himself from her clutches.