I believe – 53 and imploding

Posted on by Opher

I wrote this antinovel as a flow of consciousness. It was a spotlight into the convoluted internal world of a mind. All life and death. Everything. This represents a position on a map, fixed in time. Nothing more.

Excerpt – 53 and imploding:

I love those Neolithic mounds, shrouded in mystery.

I believe in love, laughter, awe, wonder, friendship, fun, respect, empathy, craziness, sex, help, friendliness, highs, contentment, change, responsibility, tolerance, kindness, happiness.

I believe that if we were able to build a mound based on these sorts of things it would be a truly happy fulfilled mound.

It’s just a list but it’s what I build my life on. I don’t have to think about it, plan it out, or strive towards it; it comes naturally to me. I don’t have to form a sect, join a cult or follow anybody, believe in the divine or the mystical – I merely stand back and look around me.

I am the watcher.

I used to believe in spirituality but that’s been replaced by a sense of wonder and mystery. I try not to hold it against anyone but I don’t want it shoved down my throat or imposed on everybody. I am angered by the blatant indoctrination of children. If you believe it then accept that it’s a personal thing – write it in a book, talk to anyone who enquires but shut the fuck up when you’re on my doorstep, in my schools or running my mound! Keep your fucking endorphin rushes for your own junky heaven leave me to my own dope!

I don’t believe in violence or retribution even though I feel them strongly enough within myself. I often want to kill the people who are carrying out the barbarous acts and not one of them has killed one of mine! I can’t imagine. I am infuriated constantly by cruelty and selfish greed. I am infuriated. WHY WHY WHY!!!! There has to be a better way. Hurting doesn’t make you happy. But it seems to for a lot of people. We love pain!

I repress my anger because I have no wish to be consumed by hatred. I have no wish to become violent.

I hate religion. Religion is probably equal with nationalism as the joint most evil inventions of mankind. Sure it would be nice to have a purpose in life. But a special, personal relationship with God – the chosen ones, the true believers, the spawn of the deities – come the fuck on! Hasn’t history, littered with dead religions, chosen ones fallen by the wayside, decapitated statues of gods, taught us anything? Religion is made by people for power.

It makes me laugh when I hear the twats talking about the mighty Allah giving them victory, God wills it, and all that ridiculous shit. You don’t hear them asking why God hates them when someone else bombs the fuck out of them and they lose. You don’t hear the ones in the mine say ‘why me?’ – ‘Were my prayers not good enough?’

Ha.

I love friends, conflicts and argument but I feel the need to be alone a lot of the time.

I’m 53 and have discovered that age brings some perspective but not necessarily any greater clarity. The complexities you discover cloud the certainties you used to hold dear.

Every second ticks. Every step is closer to the final step.

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53 and imploding – I believe in fairness

Posted on by Opher

Every day is a critical time in life but some days, some years, feel like watersheds. 53 years of age was a watershed. At least that’s how it felt. I wrote this novel as a biographical antinovel – a journey into a mind – a stream of consciousness. I wanted to destroy all structure.

Excerpt – 53 and imploding

I have decisions to make. I am making this up as I go along but the ideas are beginning to gel. I have a lot of anecdotes and ideas that have come together. The rest of the book is coalescing in my thoughts. You see I am conceiving this as a book. I can already visualise it sitting on the shelf with crappy photocopied cover that I will design, spirally bound on the cheap binder and arranged along with all the other ‘books’ I have produced. Jan views them as more clutter, junk and dust gatherers. I view them as accomplishments.

I conceive chapters. I have already placed this in a period of time. I have selected characters. They are real people – my friends and acquaintances. Real places, real anecdotes. The time sequence is a little jumbled up. The problem is the names. Should I stick with them or change them? Some of what I am going to describe might not be considered flattering or accurate. It can’t be accurate. I am describing a poorly remembered event. I am embellishing without even being aware that I am. In trying to be accurate I am bound to misrepresent. I am already working out how to simplify the myriad of possibilities by amalgamating things. The chronology is hopelessly jumbled. Should I use their real names? I cannot use real names because I am going to jumble things together. These characters are amalgamations. None of them are real.

I have just taken two annadin extra for my hangover that is busily getting worse. I have made a coffee and have a plate of bread and humus. I have no hope that the headache will ease in the foreseeable future. These sorts of headaches rarely do. It will go when it is ready. I should be fine after tea.

Jan is tidying her room next door. My sister arrives tomorrow evening with my mother. There is much to be done in preparation. I should be helping. I am writing.

The Humus is delicate and tangy. The dog waits patiently for a tit-bit. He has his head on my thigh and he is drooling. He never takes his big black eyes off me.

We are products of our culture and our upbringing. We are taught, no – trained, to believe and do what we do. Even our rebelling is programmed. We have no escape.

Religion is hot-wired into our very cortex’s. When we pray and worship chemicals are released that alter our brains, our states of being. We are biologically programmed to worship. That’s very worrying!

I’ve just returned from New Grange, near Dublin, I’ve seen the Mexican pyramids, the cathedrals, temples and henges. Is nothing sacred? Is nothing more holy than a fix? Is there nothing behind that enormous expenditure of energy involved in the construction of such monumental edifices?  The universe seems such a cold and empty place.

There are things I believe in with religious fervour.

I believe in fairness.

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53 and imploding – Work/life balance.

Posted on by Opher

This novel might appear disjointed but it isn’t. It is a stream of consciousness that revolves around my life and reflections. What holds it together is my mind. That is the anchor.

What is important in life? What can be put to one side?

Excerpt – 53 and imploding

I smile. I did not realise that there was a competition.

Eternity smiles with me. It is a condescending little smile. I detect a little compassion in it. It is a little arrogant perhaps, a little superiority. I am being patronised.

In a billion years time my words will still be among the best but, just as today, no better than the worst. But at least Jesus will have been proved wrong – the poor will not still be with us!

I have to stop this now. Jan has come in. She is increasingly irritated with me taking time for this writing. I should be doing something. There are rooms to tidy, birthday presents to buy and send, and work to be done. She resents me spending time on this. She regards this as a pointless pile of egotism.

She is usually right.

I should be scurrying through the mounds of marking. I have a pile of work awaiting my attention but no desire to tackle it. We are off to China next week. I will be viewing walls, temples, terracotta armies, squares, and sailing up the Yangste. I have taken my first anti-malarial tablet today. We decided against the Japanese Encephalitis jabs and the Hepatitis B. The nurse explained to me that you catch Hepatitis B the same way as AIDS inferring I would be OK if I didn’t shag any Chinese babes while I was over there. I assured her that I didn’t think that particular jab would be necessary. Babes of any variety do not find me particularly magnetic these days.

I ache. My joints are seizing up, my waist expanding and my hair receding. Perhaps Chinese babes are impressed with these characteristics. After all they are signs of success. I have achieved this vast age, am obviously fact, and have wealth enough to travel. I am a biological success. They would covert my genes for their offspring.

Somehow I can’t see them falling over each other to fight Jan for my affections. Life has its phases. There are some compensations.

I will eat Chinese delicacies, drink slightly different alcoholic beverages, meet up with old friends, talk and reminisce, watch the sights, takes a million photos and come home.

So what is this all about?

I am sitting here in front of this screen. I have tidied my desk and put my heaps of CDs away. I counted them. I have about 3000. I am a collector. I am not sure why. It displays some psychological flaw.

Rog phoned and wanted Nick’s number but I didn’t have it. It is raining outside, grey and dreary with no prospects for improvement. Cars are passing along the road feet away from me and making a hiss as they spray water. Tom is at work in an architect’s office. He has a future designing mounds for the establishment. My dog sleeps at my feet contently. He does not like rain and has a bladder that was designed for an elephant. I have a hangover from drinking too much beer and wine last night. I am still tempted to roll a joint.

I haven’t quite stopped yet. Jan stomped past. I want a piss again. I have nothing to report. Life goes by.

I am a trifle bored. I intend to shut this down so that I can do the required work. It is only fair to do my bit.

Fuck it. I decided to go on. I am enjoying myself. Jan can go fuck herself and take her stomping elsewhere. After all, tidying can wait. You can never get a mound too tidy. I am aware that this could have fucking repercussions later.

I am compelled to write. Sometimes it flows as if I am connected to something inside myself and it is just using me as a conduit. Idea follows idea. I am not saying that they are brilliant. I am aware that it is all the same junk. It is just that it gets in a groove and those connections spark and I am pulled along.

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53 and imploding

Posted on by Opher

I wrote this when I was fifty-three years old. A stream of consciousness, an antinovel. I still like it. I’m visiting with myself.

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Excerpt – 53 and imploding

I am a watcher, a commentator, and a masturbator in the winds of time. I am an idealist and a dreamer. I am the ultimate optimist and the perennial pessimist. I write to change the world and I write even though I believe nobody will ever read anything I’ve ever written.

I often tell people that when I die they will make a huge funeral pyre out of my books. They will burn me with my own words. I write so that my flaming voice will roar me higher into the heavens in one last spectacular display of ineffectual verbosity – one final impotent gesture of defiance.

That’s all we have – gestures of defiance!

I am a watcher.

If only I believed that there was a part of me able to see that last dramatic gesture. I would love it. But I don’t believe anything will remain. Life is ultimately futile. Yet in defiance and idealistic struggle there is substance and worth.

I am standing on this mound surveying the plains before me. Society, with all its control and expansion is consuming the natural world. The forces of the establishment, with their mantra of growth and greed, are like a forest fire sweeping down to destroy the whole planet. I see the scurrying of helpless individuals and species defenceless against the holocaust of mindless progress. I see the entourages careening off each other like terrified billiard balls. I see the luxurious penthouse suites towering imperiously above feeling they are immune to the destruction. We are impotent. Even my funeral pyre of a lifetime’s words isn’t going to create much of a fire-break. What the fuck!

Semaphore messages across enemy lines. Are you out there? Can you understand me? Do we share a language? I think I am alone.

If you could see me now I am smiling ironically.

None of it really matters. If not this fire then it will be the next or the four billionth. What does it matter? Eternity looks over my shoulder and is smiling with me. She likes what I am writing. She knows it ranks among the very, very best. There is none better.

I am happy that there is none better.

All these symbols I am arranging. No other mind could do it the same. No one has. I am unique. The conveying of meaning, the portraying of scene, the characterisation, the pace, the setting. There is none better. This is as good as it gets. My words are right up there with the very best. Roll over Shakespeare your time has gone.

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My spaghetti life – 53 and imploding

Posted on by Opher

I wanted this novel to be gritty, involved with the bits that other novels leave out, the toilet, the pain and grubbiness of normal life, the boredom and mundanity of existence. I don’t know how straight straight is. I don’t care what is cool. I wanted to describe the reality. However, you’ll be pleased to know that in these extracts I am missing out some of the more vulgar parts. Am I censoring myself? I wonder.

Excerpt – 53 and imploding

Perhaps there is no sense to it or order in anything? The order of our everyday life is a superficial structure we impose over the chaos. I seek to only sip the spice of the sauce as I slowly suck a single strand of life into my mouth. It is so rich that it addles the palate. I wonder what my work colleagues would make of this? They seem to suffer the same scabby little existences, lusting after each other, living in their squalid small lives and narrow horizons as I peer out at them through these slots into the universe from my own limited perspective. I live inside my head where my inner life is a seething spaghetti seeped in rich sauce. They see a funny little fat man. I smile. I whistle. I talk. I teach. I manage. I feel my incompetence. I do them an injustice. Perhaps the piquancy of their sauce is every bit as rich as the flavour I am sucking out of life; perhaps their heads are as full of spaghetti as mine; probably I see as little of the icebergs of their existence as they see of me. I have little desire to share it all with them. I save that for my few true friends. I am not sure what constitutes a friend – probably someone you can fully open up to.

Tom has gone to bed with his pasta. I no longer need to piss. It has passed.  I am tired. I should stop and go to bed. Jan is asleep. I have to be up tomorrow. I will be dead. Fuck tomorrow. My coffee has cooled and is drinkable. Tom makes crap coffee. I don’t know why. He makes it the same as I do. I am holding a gulp in my mouth. It is warm. I move my tongue through it. I taste it at the back of my mouth. I swallow a little. If I move my tongue through it it feels warm. It is cooling. I swallow it.

This is an anti-story. It will confuse and exasperate as I slither from one thought and experience through this mess of juice. I am unravelling spaghetti and allowing each strand to slither down into my gut as I suck the flavour out of it.

I have no interest in the neat little lives, the tales of the city. I want to describe the things between. I want to dwell on the mundane; the chaos of real life; to interlope along unplanned meandering intersections.

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Shamen, campfires and me – 53 and imploding

Posted on by Opher

I have to laugh to myself. I am reading extracts from the past – some kind of memoir/diary posing as a novel. I’ve changed the names to protect the guilty. Is it a novel? Is it an antinovel as I imagined? Is it anything?

Excerpt – 53 and imploding

The phone rings.

Tom has just rung and I have to go and pick him up. He is working at a pub a few miles away. I will be gone fifteen minutes.

……….around camp fires, our ancestors…………

It is twelve ‘o two. I have brought Tom home. He was chirpy.

…………passed on their tales and metaphors while we listened in awe and ran our own pictures in our heads. They embellished life with gods and power and sought to understand the weather, seasons, heavens and life. They failed miserably but they did shed a little light and make it all seem so feasible and interesting. We all loved it – the mystery; the wonder; the answers. It made everything so neat and tidy. It was structured, salutary, educational, practical and made sense of the awesome chaos of the universe in which we tenuously teeter. It made us feel protected and secure.

The shamen had immense power because of their supposed knowledge. People were in awe of them.

But this is an anti-novel. I am no shaman. I offer you no comfy solutions or havens, no eternal life or nurturing gods. If you find yourself tied to the rails with a steam train thundering towards you awaiting the intervention of a hero the express train will certainly decapitate you. This is reality. I write of a heap of tangled spaghetti that inevitably twists, knots and breaks. I slide along the slimy entrails of life, real life. I realise that I have not had a piss yet. Ironically Tom is cooking pasta. That is one of those coincidences. He has come in while I type and complained that there is no fucking food in the house. Have I got any goodies? I have two kit-kat chunkies hidden in my drawer but I keep quiet. He went off to cook pasta. He is coughing and clattering in the kitchen even as I write that he is coughing and clattering. He is making a coffee. I wonder if he will make me one? I call out ‘Yes please’. He grumbles. But I think he is making me one.

This is a heap of life served up with a mess of sauce. Fuck knows what is in the sauce. Everything is in the sauce. This is no delicacy served up by a chef, arranged on a plate with a garnish of fresh parsley and a twirl of rich sauce. This is no result of following a recipe. This is a mess of whatever comes to hand. This is how I live.

Tom brings me a coffee. He asks if I have any dope. I have not. The dope has been smoked long ago.

I am making no sense of this. It is twelve twenty and I am getting tired. I am also approaching the end of the first page of red scribble. This is the scribble that I wrote yesterday morning when I arrived at work. I conceived it in my head at about 8.00 to 8.30 as I drove in to school. Unfortunately I forgot most of what I had mused over before I came to write it down. It seemed interesting to me at the time, interesting enough for me to write out here. I am sure that the stuff I forgot was even better but none f us will ever know. Us. You see – I am presupposing an audience. After twenty eight books and no sign of a spark of interest I still imagine someone actually reading this. In reality I am both the recorder and the audience. Even my wife gave up on me years ago. She would not deign to even glance at a single sentence I have produced. This is some stupid hobby, an indulgence, a pointless exercise I go through. She does not even bother to question it any more. There is no logic to it. I am satisfied. Strangely, knowing that nobody would ever bother to read this, gives me a freedom I would not otherwise have. I do not have to worry about the effects of my words as they rattle other eyes, jiggle neurones and skid across synapses. Are they clear? Do they convey? Will they change anything? Do I create empathy? Who gives a fuck! I can write what I fucking like! There is no audience.

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53 and imploding – a slice of reality.

Posted on by Opher

I’m finding it interesting to visit myself from twenty years ago. This antinovel is a slice of reality.

Excerpt – 53 and imploding

You can already discern from the way I meander that life is not very organised. There is nothing neat about me. Around me, on my desk, are stacks of unsorted CDs. And junk. I type in the midst of this chaos. My dog sleeps beneath my desk with his head on my feet. He is thoroughly content. He does not have to ponder the state of the world. He will know if I move. That is all that is important. As long as I am there, there is food in his belly and he is warm he has everything he needs.

Life is not like some well-constructed tale. I do not see things clearly. I do not understand too well. I see life as convoluted spaghetti of intermingled lines. Each strand’s a life. Each has two ends but they are so intertwined that this is not obvious or important. And the sauce is a corruption of greed, avarice and cruelty but worst of all indifference. No. This is no novel. This, if anything, is an anti-novel.

53 and imploding – Me

Posted on by Opher

Incredibly, I wrote this novel twenty-three years ago. I was suffering some kind of mid-life crisis in that I was questioning what I was doing. We have 4000 weeks of life (if we’re lucky). I had spent twenty-eight years teaching. I’d become a Deputy Head. I had spent twenty-eight fighting the system, pushing the limits, in order to make education vital – to bring young minds to life, to broaden their perspective. I was tired. I wanted my life back.

I had started out in my teens full of radical enthusiasm. I was jaded. I was looking to get out. Little did I know I was on the brink of change. Instead of retirement I took on headship and really changed things. But that’s something else.

This ‘novel’ was my antinovel. I had no structure to work on. I just wanted a stream of consciousness that told it as it was.

This is me. You are in my head.

53 and imploding – Me

I am no writer; I am a liberator of ideas.

So what is this I am doing? Can you imagine me sitting here? It is eleven in the evening. Outside it is dark and raining. It is pleasantly warm. I am sitting at my desk, a burnt out old 53-year-old small guy with longish thinning hair and a threadbare ambition. I have standing in the community. I am a deputy headmaster at the third oldest school in the country. Some would envy me this position. I spit on it. It keeps me warm, well fed, and comfortable. It pays for the wine, the music and the car. It has enabled me to raise and care for my family. It takes time from my pointless writing. It is a noose around my neck strangling the vitality out of my ageing synapses. I am suffocating in this shit. It is true that it affords contact with some extraordinary young minds, as well as a larger number of less extraordinary young minds, but it is none the less a role I go through; a set of challenges I have to rise to. It eats away at my nerves and erodes my mental health. It robs me of time, ease, friendship and thought. It buys that with money and comfort. This is addictive but probably not a good trade. Who can say? It depends on what your purpose for living is. It depends on your ethics and morality. Ha!

Can you picture me yet? I am sitting here at six minutes past eleven in front of a computer screen typing in Microsoft word. This is page five of Chapter one. I have two sheets of A4 paper in front of me. One is covered in my own indecipherable scrawl in red ink on both sides. The other has black scrawl on two thirds of one side. They are the only clues I have as to where the next pages will take me; that and some weird idea that I want to explore the reality of life and delve into what is really important. You see – I do not lie when I say I have no plan or structure. Life has no plan or structure. We impose that on it with hindsight and the absurd need for order.  We are programmed to look for the patterns and meaning. That is the secret of our evolutionary success. Why should life have meaning? I do not believe in destiny. I do not believe in God or some equally absurd after-life. I believe in haphazard circumstance that leads from one thing to another. Sometimes this serendipity is fortuitous. When remarkably unlikely events conspire to occur we marvel. We proclaim them miracles or mystical intervention. They are merely life. That is what happens when you throw seeds to the wind – they sometimes fall to create a picture.

53 and imploding – a novel concerned with the reality of life

Posted on by Opher

I wrote this novel in an attempt to capture reality. A stream of consciousness about the things going on in my head, life and death. This is what reality looks like. This is life.

53 and imploding

I live in a nice house that is three hundred years old. The doorways and ceilings are low because people were smaller back then. Even I have to occasionally duck. It used to be a farm, a pair of two-up two-down cottages, and a shop and now it is my home. The mortgage is completely paid off. I own it. Except in reality I am merely passing through. I will leave it to my wife and then my children. It will be lived in by others after me. It will be altered, decorated, knocked around, improved and no evidence of me will remain. I am passing through.

I love this house. It is warm and cosy. It has room to stretch out. We have invested much time and energy into making it a home. It houses my books, records, CDs and computers. I am comfortable here. There is a sense of history in the walls. They lean and tilt, the floorboards creak, and the ceilings sag. It is happy with the way it has settled into itself and redolent with the memories of unseen people. I have grown into it and lean and sag to the same extent in sympathy.

I am passing through.

Some people are artists with words, creating pictures and stories out of static neuronal sparks. They structure and craft their words to tell tales and plug into that primitive need of all humans. But I am no artist. I have tried that and failed. I admire their skills. I enjoy the stories they weave. But to me they are sanitised. No matter how intricate or complete they cannot capture the real textures of life; they cannot even capture a brief moment in its entirety. A novel is a distillation; at best a selection of highlights. I am no storyteller, wordsmith or creator of tales. My words are not crafted, not honed; they escape on the run. I let them free.

I am no writer; I am a liberator of ideas.

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Another short section – 53 and imploding Kindle/Paperback

Posted on by Opher

I wrote this novel out of rage. I had reached the age of fifty-three and was taking a real hard look at the world, humanity and myself. There was an element of despair. What came out was a vitriolic howl of fury!

Excerpt – 53 and imploding 

Bear baiting, cock fighting, dog fighting, bull fighting, gladiatorial fights and stoning to death are all cruel activities carried out by evil fuckers in the past or evil barbaric fuckers in uncivilised countries. Except these evil fuckers are or were considered ordinary people by everyone and themselves. Those cruel displays were eagerly visited by the masses of ordinary people. They sat and ate their equivalent of popcorn and oohed and aahed as the victims got ripped to pieces before their eyes. That’s real. Our civilised revulsion is a thin veneer covering a festering propensity towards violence.

There are no rules.

We make it up as we go.

We probably need the rules because deep down in our genes we are all evil fuckers.

I have to check down into myself to see if I can find the symptoms. I crane my neck at accidents.

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