Stretch a Frog Today

Today’s entry is dedicated to all those who weren’t at the Manchester Free Trade Hall and are quite happy to admit it. They were all too busy at home practising herpetology.

Listening to Meds by Placebo

Some voice in my head told me to but this. Not sure why.

Empty days these days! Maybe it’s the music up there but something seems strange. It’s growing on me anyway, in a sort of resigned manner, regretful of what I’ve not done over the years. There is a lot I haven’t done which I should have.

I seem to oscillate over the edge of a boundary between the dark stuff that makes such albums as Meds and the light and sunny plains that make up the suburbs that I live in most of the time. The places most people live are just the local bits of a giant map of low buildings and rushing traffic. Sometimes we get those steamy days where the sun drives us all into shade and sometimes we get days of grey skies and rain. But mostly we get ‘no-weather’ days when commerce and education and leisure create an infra-sonic hum of activity that is all we can find to define our reasons for being here. Think about the effort humans have put into organising themselves to create these grids of roads and pipes and wires with all their pulsing layers of information, rushing from brain to brain via the bright and shiny conduits. What is it all for? At the blackest worst, we have no reason for being here beyond the accidents of evolution that have turned a few complex molecules into the machines that we are. If you want a positive spin on it then we are just here to dance and sing. Any more than that I cannot offer? We are not like Owen Meany (and if you do not know this book do not expect any further explanation from me) though maybe the conclusion offers some hope that we do have a purpose. The detail of the physics of our existence offers us no explanation, only diversion. Maybe one day, someone will link our machine bodies to our soul minds and in that link we will have all the spirit we will ever need. I have mentioned before that I think we may just keep understanding the complexities of both brain physics and the operation of the mind to an increasingly deep level, but that we will simply find that the complexities of both will simply retreat away into the distance, a fractal never quite ending and linking, an exponential tendency towards a zero we never get to. Maybe tending towards a Zeno we never get to.

I once bought a book of satire from the school book club. I was far too young for it though some of it was quite good. I haven’t seen it for years and wonder if it still exists somewhere under the old suitcases at my parents house, next to the ZX81 that my dad just found again. The book had many cartoons and one of them was an official looking man behind a desk talking to a cowed sub-ordinate. His speech bubble was full of elaborate copper-plate writing that was always just beyond comprehension. However, the speech bubble was in the shape of word ‘no’. Maybe not quite Newspeak I suppose but maybe a bastard son. It was the seventies when I bought the book and most of the content which I can recall seems to suggest that it was written in the sixties. It did have Little Boxes which was sung by Pete Seeger in 1962. The only other bit I can remember in any detail is the correspondence between someone pestered by computer-generated letter. The only bit I can remember is that the cards from the computer had "do not spindle or mutilate" written on them. What has just come back to me with some horror is that I read out one of these diatribes against the conventional in a school assembly some years later. I can’t actually remember which one it was but it was something designed to tease the staff. It is I suppose a plus for the teachers in that they did not veto this. Which sort of stuffs ‘Porla’, our resident punkette who took delight in pointing out my conventionality whenever she could. Where is she now? She only baited the staff with coloured hair and concealed safety pins. I won't say where she concealed them. Well Ok then! They were in her locker!