Personal Blogs

[this is something that I did a while ago and have a sudden yen for finishing. The what tag should bring it all up. You should realize that it is the wrong way round.]

I began to see that it was pointless talking to myselves, I don't listen. What else am I supposed to do here then? Figure this out? All the rest of the mes, that I had to assume are me, haven't.

Am I so up-myself (this one) that I imagine that the only me (this one) can sort the world out?

I suspect that I'm a wee bit further forward than them (the others), but then I would wouldn't I?

And then there's the awful suspicion that your life/mind may be regressing. Was I a better person at twenty,? or am I a better man now? And why are there no girls?

In this whiteness there isn't any high-ground. Just a hell of mes squatting around a nothing sniping at each other with a bit too much knowledge of ourselves. The me three weeks ago looks down on me now but then he hadn't suffered the thing that I had. So I look down on him.

"This is hell?" I ask.

"When did you ever think that you were hell?" One of the mes asked. This was rhetorical, I always felt this.

"Whatever it is, we are us, I, we. We should stop being so up ourselves and do things!"

A young me then.

This will never finish. It's lost in a lost/prisioner fashion; there's no way I can wrap this up into meaning

Still I'm not going to stop writing it, meaning is so overrated.

[wanna see what? Go to my blog and click on what in the tagcloud to the right]

Nothing, of the dark, hunts humans, unless opportunistically. We have fire, tools, parrots and dogs. At night we are well protected and artistically scared. Because we are basic feardies and lovers of the movies, we know what happens...

It is during the day where we must watch our backs. For only humans hunt humans. With knives and words. And light features in both.

So I was OK in the dark, it was when I began to see light that things got iffy.

Shite.

Right.

Same fucking total whiteness, this time with actual black beaked birds heading my way.

"We can escape", someone said from behind me. I turned around. I saw a me with an index-finger straight upon his nose. He did something snakey with his arm.

"Notice how now you can hear them?"

"And yet they don't smell"

I disliked the sneer on my other face and I'd had enough of this crap, so I threw myself backwards. Which as I discovered later may not have been the best thing to do.

It started slowly, a few black flakes that disappeared randomly. Soon it began to get heavier, and it started to lie. It was lying on...

That was the problem, it fell in what looked like the way that regular snow falls but it landed in a peculiar way. Two flakes that seemed to be near to each other when falling, for the want of a better expression, fell very far apart from each other. Or at least random apparent distances from one another.

The world soon looked like a haphazard lattice of black dots, above and below, near and far, moving and stationary. The snow was getting much, much heavier and I was losing the ability to discern individual flakes.

"You'll have to clear a path", a voice behind me said. I jumped and suddenly I was facing him about fifty feet away. Him was my ex-boss and he had an orange plastic-shovel in his mitts.

Next thing I knew he was beside me and the shovel was in my hands.

"But...how...?"

"Surely I don't have to tell you how to clear snow".

He was gone.

Great! I made a tentative poke at nothing with the shovel, there was a terrible smell and nothing that was black [or white] moved in the least.

"...", in frustration I slammed the shovel into where the ground would be if this was our world. It felt like I'd tasted an electric shock, I fell, or bounced, down hard.

I lay there sobbing. My legs felt damp, I was freezing, my hands...my hands felt snow! I raised an arm, my hand was covered in what looked like soot. Soot that rolled down into nothing.

I grabbed snow with both hands and rubbed them together. The soot was now on both of them, and behaving the same. So there was stuff that worked properly here.

Which gave me an idea.

Landed.

They had carried two Tishes to four neils. [Tish is my wife.] Neither of the two Tishes looked happy as they clambered off their beaky friends. Neither the owls or the Tishes appeared to be aware of the other pair.

Now there was going to be trouble.

"Wait a minute, owls in this whiteness? Does day look black?"

It's the sort of cretinous thing that I say, and one of me had said it.

"Never mind that crap, what are you wearing? You look like a marsh-wiggle. You aren't fit to dress yourself..", she paused at this point, she'd clocked that there was more than one of me. "Yourselves...", she clocked the other her. Who was expressing similar sentiments to another me.

"What the fuck is this?"

I began to hope, four mes, two hers...

We were in with a shot.

We were sitting in our new hut eating eel stew. The stew was quite nice, although as I'm a vegetarian ceoliac I was a wee bit unsure about it. I could see that the other mes were having similar difficulties, still needs must. Least of our worries so to speak.

"Why is it that zero point nine nine recurring and one are the same number?"

"They're both rational, right?"

"And there can be no irrational number between them, yes?"

"So they must be the same as two different rationals always have an irrational in between."

"I've never seen a proof of that."

All our heads went down, we were thinking. Our spoons [where did they come from!?] flopped into our bowls.

"Lets do a triangle argument, say we have two rationals, one bigger than the other, they're repeating decimals that differ at some point in the mantissa." [We knew what we meant.]

"So at some point we have something like 1234 as opposed to 4321."

"Change the 1 to a to a 2 and the it's bigger than the first but still smaller than the second."

"Then you can change everything that follows up or down as you like..."

"So you have an irrational between the two numbers."

"Very well done boys, but how does that help?"

For a while all was chaos.

Suddenly we were being attacked by what looked like big black strings of text. They were rushing out of nowhere, ribbon-fashion, from every angle, they appeared and disappeared randomly.

They, I have to say they: for they seemed to have purpose, screeched like seagulls, tasted of raw fish and seemed to be able to go right through us. When they went through words, strange, unknown, oddly elegiac, words, filled my mind.

Strangely they didn't smell and I didn't really feel them in any physical way. It was as if I was standing in a thunder storm watching the rain, listening to the thunder;without getting wet or seeing any lightning.

I lost sight of the other mes. I was flailing my arms in a forlorn attempt to keep the things off me. I was just fighting empty air. Except not quite, there wasn't any resistance, but I couldn't go through them like they went through me. Me arm just stopped.

After what felt like five minutes they went away. They just went away. They were there one minute and gone the next.

"What...?"

"That's new."

We got to meet them, well some of them, from what the other mes say they aren't countable. Whatever that means here.

They were all puddle-glums who don't look like us, and who don't think like us.

It was the strangest thing: google translate your thoughts. They were listening, never mind dancing, to the beat of a different instrument, never mind a drum.

"What do you know about this place?"

"It is mostly left inclined, until."

"How many of you are there?"

"One and three."

There was much like that.

"See. It makes potential sense, they, the others, may have seen something that we don't. Do they hear what we say in the sense that we say it?"

We were back in our place, where our legs could dangle.

"It's not that you can't get any sense out of them, it's that you can't understand the sensible things that they say..."

"What do they think about us?"

"How would we know?"

"So in a sense it, whatever this is, is what we decide that it is?"

"No!", I looked at me, "well, maybe. But you know that you are being a stupid shithead there. You can be clever, or you can be realistic."

"Does this weird distance stuff mean?"

"We aren't sure, after a while you get used to it ... have you two done the topology course?" We nodded.

"You can move from A to B, if A and B are different in some way but we aren't certain that you can get to everywhere. After all it's all so bloody white, how can you tell? Apart from a few places it just the same fucking white ... space." I [another I] glared around angrily at the whiteness.

"Maybe connected but not path connected?"

Us n00bs had arrived here on piggy-back. The journey had taken some time and although [the other] I'd been upbeat I was pretty certain that there had been some mis-steps along the road.

"So we don't know if it's continuous?"

"Would it help if we did?"

"And what about us? Are we all the same?"

"We seem to be, none of us has ever spotted another acting out of character anyway", he fluttered the fingers of both hands. "We all miss pencils." We all grinned.

"So what about the fishing rod thing...?"

"Probably an extension of the fact that we don't have fishing rods and yet see our other selves as having them. Our minds struggling to make sense of something in a way that we can comprehend. We're desperately seeking rules."

Our mobile phones started to ring.

"What do you mean they don't understand one? What can that possibly mean?"

Two other mes made wavy circular motions with their left hands, heads down, eyes averted. Another me looked as annoyed as I felt.

"Wait a minute, what hands do we use?"

"The same mixture, just the opposite."

"..." I didn't know what to say.

"Everything is messed up here, the stuff that we did with our right hands we do with our left hands. And the stuff that we did with our lefts..."

"You won't have noticed it yet but we think different too. We're a lot less logical and way more emotional."

Four blue eyes fastened on my face. I must be frightening in real life.

"That can't be right", the other new me said. "For if that was the case we'd all be holding our fishing rods in the same way."

He was right.

"Yes, that's a wee bit worrying. It's not as if we ever liked terminated decimals,"

"Are they...?"

"Well they don't seem to be transcendental, they all seem terminated, and none of us has ever seen a rational, never mind an integer."

"They are all real?"

"But they aren't all the reals"

"Hell?" said another me, "doubt it. Rather too interesting for it to be a punishment to us."

"Besides we weren't that awful", another me said.

I wasn't so sure; to be locked up forever with another three of me? A lot of people might consider that cruel and unusual.

There were four of me including me. Two had been here for, "a while". They weren't specific. Another had just arrived.

We were perched ... on something, our legs dangling into nothingness. We hadn't been introduced to the others, that was the tradition, apparently, we had to get to know ourselves first.

"Why don't I...?" I started to ask.

"Have a fishing rod? I see you as having one. I don't have a fishing rod..."

"But..."

"Yes. The way we perceive reality doesn't match up with how, what appears to be another me perceives it."

I looked at a number scrolling somewhere off at who-knows-what distance, there was a slight feel of something brushing my left arm but mostly I was just seeing it.

"Are we supposed to figure this out?" I asked.

"Who knows but it isn't as if we aren't going to try", another I answered.