Posted: January 18, 2012 | Author: kaputblog | Filed under: My Short Stories and stuff |
There is a cliff and the wind is furious but I don’t feel it. A blurred face across from me shouting and screaming but no words reach me. I try to speak but can only do so telepathically. The cliff starts to move closer bringing the blurry face ever nearer. I’m weightless and merely a pair of eyes, and as the figure comes closer the shouting becomes a song, now I know who the figure is and suddenly I’m in a department store, I’m trying on clothes and there is a giant mirror and a voice is calling me fat. I can’t fit in to anything and now the shop is getting smaller and I thought I was in a changing room but I’m actually in the middle of the street, and it’s busy but nobody stops, and I’m looking for a bus stop when buildings start to rise all around me.
The blurry face is behind me as my tarot cards fall from the sky. We’re back to back and I start my reading and it’s the two of cups, a recognition of love and the blurred face understands and relates it to their life and tells me about a love they once had, and it’s my love, and this makes it very easy to tell them about this love, and the blurred face is wowed by my gift and asks me if I can contact its dead father and of course I can, I tell them details about their father that nobody else would know and reassure them that their father is looking over them and wants them to be careful when buying that new car, and the face exclaims that it has been thinking about this and I’m turning over cards without touching them because I can will them to be what I want when the table starts to swallow me, and the blurred face laughs and tells me it was all a lie, that they knew the love they spoke of was mine and not theirs.
I’m getting ready for school and desperately trying to find ways to suck in the shape of my stomach. The frustration fills me with ideas of illness and my tears are soaking the floor. Suddenly I start to grow and feel a terrible pain as I expand to the size of the bathroom, and I can’t breathe properly as my family look on unconcerned. Their tutting noises echo throughout the neighbourhood and attract unwanted attention and now he’s there and the sneer on his face is immune to my silent pleading, I’m spiralling and whizzing above my house like a balloon that’s just had the air let out and somehow I know that he did this and there is nothing I could do to stop him and once it’s finished I’m tiny, so much smaller than everybody else, and my family tower over me and tell me it’s for the best.
Now I’m on stage and can feel a Kenneth in the room, without words I ask whether anybody knows a Kenny and the audience abounds in agreement and arranges itself into symmetrical rows and columns. As I infer Kenny’s comments from the ether I start to levitate on the waves of clapping I rightly deserve and suddenly I’m ranting at all those who believe my craft to be a fake. If only they were here now and could understand that their negativity interferes with the spirit world making it impossible for them to see the truth. The room becomes bright red based on my anger and I’m startling my congregation so much that they fall like domino’s and so I become a faith healer, and my arms stretch out, way out in to the auditorium only I can’t control them and they start to wrap themselves around groups of people and begin crushing them, only It’s I that can’t breathe and as I gasp for air the blurred face points out that Kenneth is my husband.
Suddenly I’m at the doctors reception and waiting for the appointment I have there next Tuesday. A song I heard earlier today is playing on the radio. There are children everywhere pretending to be aeroplanes and the noise they make reminds me of the flight I took last Wednesday. As I stand up I’m transported into the doctors office and surrounded by groceries. As I stoop to put them back in to bags the words ‘high blood pressure arthritis’ fill the air and I know the news is bad. The doctor is nowhere to be seen but there is a sphygmomanometer around my arm and it feels like it’s draining the blood rather than measuring its pressure levels. I pick up a family photograph and it’s a picture of my daughter surrounded by taunters. I try my hardest to erase them by rubbing at their faces with my thumb. It becomes very important that I find her and before I know it I’m stapling ‘have you seen this girl?’ posters to lamp posts and offering a reward for her safe return. Now I’m in a saloon wearing a cowboy hat and everybody else is riding about on horses. My posters are now detailing the problems associated with high blood pressure, and something in me knows I have to change my diet for my daughters sake.
I’ve been invited to appear on a national television show and display my gifts to skeptical hosts. I start by asking their star signs and relate mundane advice about what coat they should wear later on in the week. My daughter appears alongside me and a ouija board appears on a low coffee table. I sense discomfort in my hosts and it occurs to me how funny it is that people can be afraid of something they don’t believe in. I decide to put on a show and my eyes roll as my body shakes, I briefly speak in tongues before affecting my voice with a texture it never normally has. I am now the spirit of a man who died tragically on set several years ago, and to many gasps and gawps I relate my story accusing the hosts of being responsible. An apparition in the shadows merely confirms what I’m relating and a cacophonous cameraman gives everybody a fright. The male host turns in to that nasty boy from my childhood and I get to watch his eyes well up as he’s lead away in chains.
I’m sitting in my bedroom with a glass snowball in my hands and it occurs to me that as the scene begins to shift I can see in to the future. My father walks through the door and I blurt out that the news from the hospital was bad and that it’s cancer isn’t it?With nodding confirmation he comforts me and tells me how everything will be OK but I know it won’t and why is he comforting me and not the other way around? His hand on my shoulder turns to ash as I look into his eyes and the cigarettes he smoked for fourty years start to fill up my room. The boy band posters on my walls stretch away and I grip the snow scene harder and harder until it becomes assimilated in to my hands. I want everything to be as it was and determine to live my life this way. My gift of fortune telling allows my father to never really die and for life to be as simple and carefree as when he was alive.
I’m dressed as a dominatrix riding a surfboard waving at passers by. I see the cliff in the distance and the blurred face is frantically trying to gain my attention. I ignore it, I have no need for that part of me anymore, and resolve to keep it as far away from my daughter as possible. As I begin to awaken my thoughts merge with the bleating radio and start to become led by it. I’m thrown in to a cabinet meeting with various dignitaries asking if anyone wants to ride the waves. Everything starts fading when it’s announced that a celebrity has sadly passed away and I knew this, I knew this before anything was said. My stomach starts to rumble and just before my eyes open I realise I will contact them at my next séance.
Posted: January 17, 2012 | Author: kaputblog | Filed under: Book reviews, Philosophy |
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
For a long time I was unsure about reading this book because I didn’t think it could tell me anything I didn’t already know. It was only after his sad demise that I found myself watching many of his brilliant youtube clips and was reminded of his exceptional argumentative skills and clear passion for learning. I basically read this for fun because of the his easy on the eye writing style and ability to keep the reader interested beyond the point where they should be putting a book down and getting on with other things.
It owes a huge debt of gratitude to Thomas Paine’s ‘Age of Reason’, none more so than in presenting the absurdities contained within the bible and wondering why on earth anybody would consider it a special book. The Koran gets some of the same treatment and Hinduism and Buddhism are not spared either as the atrocities committed by their adherents are detailed – although they are not tackled in scriptural form which was a great shame.’Yeah but what about the crimes committed by secular leaders?’ Well actually he goes in to some detail about that too, particularly with respect to the Nazi’s and how the Catholic church colluded with them to a rather shameful level.
This is written in a very personable and engaging style. I’ve never understood how people can believe Hitchens and Dawkins are too inflammatory and disrespectful. I’ve always thought that both of them come across as rather charming, they just don’t think religion should be given the special respect it is afforded and treat it as a subject for discussion in the same way they would science or politics. Religion really should be robust enough to handle the arguments thrown at it by atheists without crying about how unfair it all is. This is a point made far more eloquently in God is not Great where Hitchens argues that all religions seem to contain a deep level of uncertainty about themselves, because they are, purely, about faith, and so feel the need to constantly prove themselves.
This was one of many salient points that I think makes it more readable than Dawkin’s God Delusion or Sam Harris’s End of Faith. Some of the same ground is obviously covered but I think this book also brought some relevant and interesting points of contention to the debate.
And now for one of my favourite gripes. It’s absurd to conflate fundamentalist religion with what is called ‘new atheism’. This book makes clear that you are free to think whatever you want about religion, it’s up to you decide for yourself – he actually says that more than once – it gives nothing more than some arguments as to why you might not want to believe in it. That’s about as far removed from fundamentalism as you can get. I’m not sure however if this book will really change peoples minds, but as part of a recent plethora of literature on this subject maybe it will at least get people thinking.
The breadth of knowledge in this book is impressive. I don’t think I’ve ever read one his works without becoming interested in learning more about some of the people and topics he talks about. Lovely stuff.
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Posted: January 14, 2012 | Author: kaputblog | Filed under: Book reviews, History |
Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney by Anonymous
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I do enjoy ancient historical accounts because what they might lack in accuracy they usually make up for in good old fashioned bitchiness towards certain characters they’re not fond of. Actually this one was a little light on the slagging off front but it still gives a good overall picture of how important the Orkney Isles were during the Viking era, situated as they are between Norway and Scotland.
Naturally this tale covers plenty of backstabbing, double dealing, fighting and folklore, but by far one of the most important aspects was that quaint Viking tradition known as plundering. I’m actually amazed that farmers and landowners in some areas of Scotland and Ireland ever bothered get out of bed so frequent it seems were they subject to pillage from the Earls of Orkney.
I was slightly disappointed that some of the main characters in this tale were not fleshed out a little and given a bit more personality since books of this type often rely on them. However I still really enjoyed reading this and I thought that some of the Norse poetry was a brilliant touch, and surprisingly good.
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