But Instead it Just Kept on Raining

Listening to - Progressive Rock

Reading - Experience - Martin Amis

Hoping - for snow, like my daughter.

Neutron Bomb

I could now choose a long list of unconnected phrases and you might think they were the lyrics to a track by Yes. Somewhere along the Yangtze River, people are trying to make sense of the world in the sort of Pre-Post-Modern way that we seem to have forgotten about. Whole towns have been flooded by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Try and make sense of that. It happened here I know but on such a small scale. Every time we have a drought, the local news shows pictures of the villages once flooded and now exposed by the low water. One village came up so often that souvenir hunters were endangering their own lives by going into the church which then had to be blown up.

In a Spanish garden, the mild winter weather makes flowers come out at any time. The town below this village is full of foreigners, elderly English and Germans with their shuffling indecisive walks and bad attitudes. Shining, Flying, over the arid hills, through the watery sunlight of the afternoon, comes the missile that will end it all, the bomb to kill all people and yet leave the buildings standing. It is only in my head so no one dies here. I see the glint off its silver sides, the red glow where re-entry has heated it to some high temperature. How fast is this weapon. Fast enough darling! The water vapour in the air has cooled it down now as it piles un-armed into the sandy hillside. Sometime in the future, the local children will find the crater and the bits of scrap; It may turn up as some small news story in the local paper possibly picked up by a foreign paper and turned into some alien myth.

We are all gone, all memory and thought and idea faded into dust. The good stuff of science and art, wasted in a second. Some madmen lose themselves and yet some become our masters. One button is all we think it takes but it is so much more than that. This man has to show himself to be sane before they let him fire these weapons. And yet how could he be sane to wish this fate on the world? For years, I lived like everybody else, sure that our lives were just the gateway to the horror of the war that seemed inevitable. Music and sex was our escape from this certainty. Now they just want one city to send us scurrying back the shelters. We just want to dance and forget about it all. The sky will vapourise our nerves before we have time to realise. The way to go; No pain or anything else. The terrorists and hackers fail, are voided like the rest of us. No seventy-three virgins waiting for you like some bad movie. That building came at you and took your head off. At that moment, your fragile mind emptied and came to earth with the dust. You are floating round the city like everyone else you killed but they lie inside us all and you are forgotten on the sidewalk. I am the first person to remember you. Maybe some faint remains of memory lies in these streets, enough to see what happens following this. We take pictures back through time, intelligent missiles capable of conversation, to show you what happens. God could not gather you up. There is not enough to make a decent soul for any purpose.

We are machines, machines with fragile minds. We are machine, are machines, are machines.