Present.

The seats of the car smell like the promise of childhood. During those early endless summers he can’t remember it crossing his mind that he would like to be a father. Now it is such a responsibility. It daunts him daily. He wonders if his father thought about the things he does now. If so, he never let on. Simon remembers John always just getting on with life. No soul searching or crises of confidence. He recalls once reading a pejorative reference as to how an idle life can too easily descend into the existential and the metaphysical. He sees those philosophies as an ascension, a positive. But if that’s true, he puzzles, why does abstract consideration of past and future render the present terrifying?

Asemic continuum.

Poem.

From the collection '8 poems about me and you'.

0

I embraced mitosis from an early age

surely to be the death of me;

cascading cells of coded future,

misspells my life: G, T, A, C.

A death professed on line 13

until such point perfection; then

as certain as it was random,

a frail, flawed, faulty gene.

What hope to live and love and laugh

when the elements which conspire

to steal my fragile existence are 

not water, earth, nor wind, nor fire

but abstruse elements of chance and luck?

Pre-determined by evolution:

the science of obscure abstraction

concludes free will is chemical fiction.

With future knowledge of what will pass

there's one present choice that's still my own:

suffer the truth – its time its place;

or to not carry on?

Strife.

Duncan's life seems to tangle with other’s lives, and it feels like this means his death will too. The nexus of friends and family, the strife and drama they visit upon him, will eventually bind and strangle him. Of that he is convinced. He oscillates between acquiescence that these tiny threads of the universe are connections to be celebrated, and the suffocation he experiences from his proximity to humanity. Are others oblivious to the stresses they impose, or do they thrive upon crisis to counter the fear of ordinariness? He just wants to be alone. Sal, Brad the cat and he. Sometimes. Not forever. Mostly. 

Actinic word sequence.

Significant.

Nothing's significant but everything's matter.

Pseudohaiku for you.

There is no hope
and no despair;
I'm nothing if not a nihilist.

Names.

Authors do not give characters names. The character's parents name them. An author should know their character's parents intimately. It also helps if they know the grandparents, but sometimes this is not possible due to whatever reason an author decides to invent. Some authors choose not to know the parents of a character before assigning their name, again for whatever reason they decide to invent. They can do whatever they like actually. That is the beauty of omnipotence.

Venn diagram.

Traderighted.

She stood and stared, stiffly wide-eyed. I'd just suggested that imagination relies on knowledge of generic convention. 
"If an author is not careful," she added unhelpfully, "their innate intertextuality will consume every original thought they've ever had. They may become a writer who 'lards their leane booke with the fat of others' workes.'" 
"I might, I might," I concurred, refocussing the conversation from authors onto me (as I'd intended from the beginning of this discussion) "In fact, plagiarising others in my attempt to draw attention to the effort I make not to plagiarise, is arguably a worse wrong." 
"Be honest about it then," she said. "Draw attention to all its instances and then none can accuse: Anonymous Author, they are the words of another."
"But so much has been written over the years by spurious imitators and attributed to me, that despite the fact there is only one Anonymous Author, there happens to be a little bit of Anonymous Author in all of us," I claimed, quite possibly inaccurately, at the very least lacking evidence to support the assertion. I was excited now. I carelessly plucked words from the air and combined them in ways that may or may not mimic language that had occurred before these implausibly original sentences were written. Thrilled with the idea of forbidden facsimiles and wrongful copyright I decided to let them lie on the page where they fell, unique or not. TM ©*


*This piece of intellectual property can be neither trademarked nor copyrighted as it has been plagiarised. TM ©

Ambition.

Quite ordinary circumstances most people take for granted, such as the notion that fractal geometry is intrinsically linked to matter and sensation, regardless of what Plato had to say, and that there are phenomena which exist outside of one dimensional space but in somewhat less than two dimensions, are puzzling to me. 

I become overwhelmed with the ambition to find something supremely unimportant to do.

Asemic continuum.

Inertia.

Time has no cause for nostalgia; time is what people are not: reliable, efficient, accurate and ceaselessly progressive. People stuck in the past are the loneliest people. His superior, a heavily oiled fat man, was such a person. Noisily opinionated and in possession of the grotesque habit of clearing and swallowing a throat full of catarrh prior to interrupting conversation, he often wondered aloud that time and opportunity had passed him by. It instilled a distinct lack of confidence in those unfortunate enough to work for him. The man's ability to make good decisions in the future was apparently as lacking as his alertness to the passage of time as it raced by his inertness.

Flaw.

Everyone is flawed. If your flaws do not affect anyone else then you are living well.

Vignette.

Anthony placed one leg on the railing and leaned forward so that it took all his weight. His crotch became elongated and he held this seam-bursting pose with the permanence of a bronze sculpture. "It must be disheartening for you to be a writer with nothing to say" he said. Zoe winced and turned splendidly florid. "It's not that I've got nothing to say," she said, "I have. I was once a future writer and now I'm the nemesis of current living writers – I'm the former future author of the great literary vignette." She laughed and stared at his tight pants and the ridiculous position in which he'd cast himself. "You can't do anything these days without someone thinking you're a creep, can you Anthony?"

Actinic word sequence.

Blame.

Blame requires a resting place. Far away from where our blameless lives play out. We fuss around allocating it a town, a home, a bed in which it can settle. Nobody likes to see blame aimlessly wandering, peering around corners and through windows into our lives. We don't want it brushing against us as it drifts by. We prefer it to be still. Silent and inert so we can measure our own distance from it and how close others are to where it collapses. Then we're able to give it a wide berth. Blame, we say, belongs somewhere else.

Colour Plate.

Time.

At our annual meeting concerning year end accounts, Simon would allow me glimpses of his obvious frustration. It was as if a year's worth of numbers and columns and bottom lines had exhausted him of the ability to maintain a charade; that over the seasons of calculating profit and loss, all the while with bigger questions racing about his head, he'd decided to just come out with it.

Every year, without fail, he'd tip back on his cowhide executive chair. Tilting his head towards the ceiling, looking for answers in the light dancing on his closed eyelids, he'd question me on a recurring theme:

"Why do we experience things now but only remember the past? What is the present, and what is the process of metamorphosis that causes this shift from a stream of experience to memory of experience? What is experience and what is memory? Is time the absolute that governs all aspects of the physical and the intellectual?"

Then, leaning forward across the wide kauri desk, first blinking and then staring at me as if I had the answers, he'd sigh and slump his shoulders before apologising and returning to the figures on the spreadsheet in front of him.  

I believe that he truly believed that I had the answers. He was fascinated that I was comfortable with the living I made as an existentialist literary voice suffering from an identity crisis. Fascinated yet perplexed. He struggled internally with the idea, and then expressed it every year on March 31. As if by stumping me with metaphysical conundrums I'd see the error of my woolly-headed ways, eventually committing to a career that involved fixed income and projected dividends. As if my tax return was a personal affront to his entire world view. 

I saw the young me in him. Sadly, he was twice my age.

Commute.

the footsteps of the wind

approach at altitude

signal their arrival

these plastic bags in trees

announcing their intent

the needles in the breeze

poke holes in the gaps in the silence

which melts into

the grey white noise

of tarseal pressing tired flesh

and then it stops

and starts again

and leaves me thinking

of whether this is good and great

or can never be that way

this weary sense of now and forever.