Gameboy and SMS



And Duke or Dave or so-and-so is cut out, made for love he thinks for saving Daisy, to keep her safe from bombs and bombs. In the rainbow there are a billion colours and in those hues I saw Zellaby and his daughter separated from the world and all those fags and crop-tops. Just them and happy in their quiet, frowning company.

“Come on Stupid” – forget the stupid others and all their stupid tech – the old world is destroyed by all this. I heard one more say :-

“A shower unit without electric circuits” while all around, the DNA of everything faded into the sad animals left unhappy and ignored for ten pounds and ten punts and ten Euros. There are bored parents with their ersatz text affairs, all that long-distance negligence and gloss to make them forget the kids.

At the door tonight, a squeal of daily recognition, like that man who lost all his memory and can just remember his wife. The last two years have gone by; progressing the last, modern decade into what has just gone. All those years I lived through and the world seems older. 1980 always seemed so much more modern than 1970 but 1979 was after punk, all narrow legs and sleeves and sharper hair cuts. The black years, when only short, meaningful songs mattered and anything flowery was out and irrelevant. They wanted you to think they wanted to die when they just wanted to be loved like all their predecessors ten-years before. So passive in this jungle, I think I might just go to sleep and wake hours later dripping and curled up stiffly in the rain.

Now in the studio, there comes a sound of nothing, an ambience so deep that the presenters sleep on through it, knowing nothing of the dead air and rapid switch-off. This room makes me happy, just imagining it, the wall of tapes and microphones, the mellifluous voice of the presenter swallowed by those strangely shaped walls, brought to heel and made into light. Somewhere beyond this room, a million people listen to this music and are happy, far away from the mess of what they have to face, back in the days of baroque and earlier music. The strings in their unfamiliar keys, over the drones of weirder instruments make something that despite the gap of years and lack of common language, speaks meaning to everybody. The no-worry decades of before sweep back, undoing all those petty deaths, and we have a world where only now are doctors beginning to realize that no one is dying. When would someone first notice? Who would it be? The busy doctors might see a lull in their full lives and but it would be the morticians, sat around in empty rooms who would be first amazed. Every malicious bullet would miss or just not be fired at all; all those with anger and weapons just not bothered any more and the would-be dead would pile up living until we had hell, a mess of people crowding out the world and squeezed and in pain but without the release of death.

Dreams end, nightmares end. The village sleeps as before, the radio just sweeping over it, mostly absorbed by soft ground and mountains but occasionally sparked into voice and music by the odd antenna, active and listening in these hills. It mixes with all the other things out there; the propaganda from parts of the world so unfamiliar and violent that it would be hell to us just as out world would be hell to those it is aimed at. Here are musics we have never heard, built of languages that we just cannot guess made to touch emotions in brains wired up differently, and like in some book I read, radio sweeps over every grave, every cemetery and the lost pilgrim sunk for ever in some bog they thought an easy short cut. The missing found again by broadcast and bounced back like radar to tell their loved ones of a spark of hope that they will one day be found.

This is an illusion of intelligence, this program that aims to tell me when I am wrong. This mess of words is just too much for it, a wall of meaning that it can never get or understand. The emotion in the sentence has need of embellishment but no electronics can touch it