Distant.

She takes a distant and forced interest in other people's lives while remaining immune to fresh experience. She doesn't want to be part of a team, but doesn't want the rest of her team to know this.

Actinic word sequence.

Penchant.

He frequents cocktail bars and has a penchant for women of scant virtue who laugh at him and tell him he is repulsive. Some people have a large circle of enemies; some have only friends they dislike. He doesn't even have that, is alone.

Truly.

(Insert non sequitur), nonetheless (insert a further non sequitur).

Pseudohaiku for you.

Haikus are simple; but
some they lack the sense,
cumulus clouds.

Plasma.

The correlation between the origin of an objective universe and the phenomenal world may or may not be naïve realism. Huge filamentary currents sweeping through a protogalactic nebula pinched plasma into the building materials of the sun and stars. Heisenberg probably knows; he might have been there.

Sibilance.

Extract from 'Bed. Time. Story.'

A plane throbs in the distance many miles above. Long past now. Fifth form science says so. Sound waves dispersing more slowly than light waves. His penis shrinks away from the space in his fingers. 

This silent sibilant speech, he thinks. All these ‘esses’, they make him want to piss. It’s like onomatopoeia of the mind. He really should write that down. What day is it? Tuesday. Need to get a warrant for the car he resolves. The car.

***

Long drives on tarseal roads. The engine hums vibrations through soft seats and Julie babbles excitedly about her first family holiday. Tearing past sports grounds and small towns and tussock paddocks full of sheep and cows and, if the fences give it away, deer, even though he never sees the deer. They don’t like standing near the road, maybe. 

Grey.

I recognize nothing about us anymore. We require reprogramming. Cognitive incongruity, flawed philosophy, neurotic pseudoneuroscience and the weak links of linguistic determinism corrupt our software. The failed hardwiring of the grey cells instruct us not in ones and zeros but in couplets and triplets, in black and white, in the cold sharp light of painful memory.

Be.

We sampled the future
in echoes of the past,
made is were
before are even was.

Reasonable.

He did a wonderful impersonation of a reasonable man.

Actinic word sequence.

Think.

I often think therefore I frequently am.

Foible.

Do the flaws and failures of those in whom I place trust (they having asked for it) more clearly exhibit their or my own foibles? We want those who purport to be authorities, advisors, friends, to not be hopeless underneath it all; and especially not to leech hypocrisy through a regretfully thin veneer.

Julie.

Alistair, who once won advertising awards and is now constantly anxious, ducks around the corner to smoke a large bowl of crack. Sweating, he returns to his spot on Queen Street and delivers his speech for the 100th time that day. He eyeballs people going about their business. “Our time is up. Do you know who I used to be?” He spits menacingly at all who would avoid his gaze. He used to be the small boy who’d fall asleep with his head on his sister’s lap, he remembers. But Julie was taken away somewhere because dad molested her and Alistair hasn’t seen either of them since.

Drown.

As he lost the ability to concentrate at length, his brain attempted to imbibe information while his spirit drowned in it.

Behaved.

He was unsure if he suffered from Whorfianism (he'd never heard it said); nevertheless he behaved as if he thought he did.

Sentence.

Ventured.

'Nothing ventured, nothing gained', some people liked to say. However, he was at a stage in life where the things he wouldn't get around to doing outnumbered the things he intended to do. He ought to feel unfulfilled. Instead, he feels himself pleasantly unburdened. Nothing ventured, nothing strained.

Ability.

Her ability to self-sabotge was limited only by her lack of confidence that she would do it properly.

Decree.

I don't have delusions of grandeur, she decreed, I have the blueprint for grandeur.