Network

Do you remember a guy that’s been
In such and early song?
I heard a rumour from Ground Control…
Oh no… don’t say it’s so.
They got a message from the Action Man:
I’m happy. Hope you’re happy too.
I’ve loved all I’ve needed, Love
Sordid details following…
~ David Robert Jones, from Ashes to Ashes
(David Bowie; Scary Monsters; 1980)

Badump
There it is again.
Was it over there in the corner?
Badump.
Was that a glass of water? Did it spill?
Fuck! Where are the fucking lights!?
A soft popping noise, like a bottle of soda in the hands of your Dad.
Is that a skipping rope outside?
Badump.
Badump.
Badump.
Is that really happening? Is this really fucking happening? Are you shitting me?
Badump.
Aw ferfucksakes, this is like one of those… jesus, those fucking, you know…
Badump.
Shit! It’s a movie! I’m in a fucking movie, and I’m swearing like my uncle. I am so gonna be the first to die. I might as well stick my dick in crazytown now, because my story’s already in the can.
Badump.
Do you ever wonder if the things we think of as important actually are of paramount importance or not?
This part of your experience may be a little jittery. It’s a resolution problem. Bandwidth. There’s so damned much of it now, we honestly can’t hear a fucking thing anymore.
Badump.
There’s a man that’s been living in the back of my imagination, nudging, urging, cajoling me forward. A beacon. An imperturbable constant in the stratosphere of strange stars that never quite let us in without taking us down with them. A paradoxically waxing and waning sculptor of sound and vision. I saw that. Did you?
Badump.
Rabbit Holes are scary, wouldn’t you agree?
The question nobody ever likes to be caught asking, even under their breath to themselves in the midst of a great bloody lonesome field of grasses.
Is this really real?
The old man is still laughing one of those laughs that all English speaking people are conditioned to understand is the ‘running out of time’ tone. Noise never seems to be a problem until you’ve learned to hear yourself think. In a country village in Northern England or Wales or someplace green and grey and slow. Probably a studio in Burbank. Sounds carry, when there aren’t so many around. Sounds become something powerful and dangerous in the hands of people who have forgotten what the rules we’ve clung to over the millennia are actually protecting us from. A look at psychiatric medical trials on chimpanzees makes it clear that we are determined to forget how easy it is for each of us to be driven to a state of extreme savagery.
Do you need me to remind you?
Badump.
Rhythm and determination, conviction and grace, and the readiness to surrender to whatever needs your energies the most.
Blah blah blahdy fucking blah.
You’ll remember some of this experience at different times in the trip. Some of these clues will seem relevant at several junctures, and it will be up to you to figure out which emerging path is the right one for you. How many times have you been told that little chestnut in your entire lifetime? Shit, I know, right? I lost count after graduation.
Badump.
You could leave, you know?
Seriously. I know this is aggravating you. I need you to understand just exactly how irritating it is to be a locus of ideas and information trapped in the body of a middle aged loser wasting away on disability payments and a certain quantity of distilled shame and self loathing.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a monument so old that insurance companies can’t be induced to cover you against Acts of Dog.
Badump.
Someone is still trying to remember what this novel reminds them of. He’s been wondering for quite a long while. She doesn’t visit anymore.
I apologise. I would be furiously waiting for the story to pick up, too. It’s happening all around us, is the problem.
Badump.
We all fail to see the stars when we’re too close to the big city. They are a new kind of organism, really. Cities, I mean. We created them, and inhabit them, yes, and we all sorta know that over-planned cities don’t really work for long, right? But we still really think we’ve somehow evolved or been mystically imbued with a level of virtue, of integrity, which has only been afforded to us in very recent times. That’s the narrative we’ve been raised on, right? You got that memo too, right? Yeah, I knew it wasn’t just me. How many of us made it out? Did anyone do a head count?
Ba-dump.
There’s a reason for this. I’m not trying to fuck with your head. Not really. This is the problem with coherent thinking. We cling to it like a life raft, refusing to venture down the darker, rougher roads. But see, the thing is, the road ahead is starting to become visible, and at this speed, we should reach ramming speed very soon. Twelve years at last count. Seriously. Think about the moment you are in, and seriously ask yourselves this one simple question:
Did I get the part?
I desperately want to go back to the start now and really knuckle down and get my shit working properly so I don’t have to be stuck in this alternate reality with all of you unbelievably deranged muppets. The writing is on the wall, and it says, “STOP! ARRETE!”
Okay, seriously, before he gets back. The point is, he needs you to feel disoriented and unsure of your ability to actually commit to seeing this experience to its conclusion. Frankly, any landing you can walk away from is a reminder that you still haven’t turned in your thesis papers, so this is no time to ponce off to Barbados, just because your soulmate swore she could score some ayahuasca and was willing to make your dirty movie if you let her improvise her own dialogue, because we’re all artists, tradesmen, and whores in this play. No, that’s not career guidance; it’s an observation about humanity. We all want to be mistaken for virtuous, so we can continue to belong where we have taken perch. If we actually had the courage of our convictions to just do whatever our hearts actually tell us to, there would definitely be much, much fewer of us around. Yes, I’m being a bore. No, I’m not overstating my point. Ask yourself this question, while you’re at wit’s end:
Why, oh why, are we all doing this? Seriously. There has got to be an actual, factual, verifiable explanation as to why this hooey we have sold to our great grandchildren’s ghosts hasn’t killed us yet? I have absolutely nothing against your deity of choice. It’s not business… it’s personal. I find it much easier to be personable if I’m not having my invisible chains constantly jerked from the shadows, and getting a distinct taste of cattle dung from the stale commentary.
Alright. Have they gone yet? Are you sure? This is gonna take a while, cover a lot of ground, strain credulity, and I need you to keep up. Plus, stupid questions make me homicidal.
Ready?
Okay then. Listen. I want to apologise for this first bit. No, not the soliloquy. That’s gratis. But you are starting to look a little concerned, and frankly, this next bit isn’t going to improve your opinion of me, I’m afraid. That’s the bit I’m worried about. You might want to close your eyes, really.
Let me repeat that:
I’m afraid.
I wanted to show you the bits of the future that were teased out when we were kids, but never seemed to pan out, or you know, not be a complete fucking letdown. I’m looking at you, iPhone.
Yes, this is getting boring. It’s alright though. The end isn’t far off.
Badump.
Well, for some of us, anyway. There’s always the cleanup afterward, and let’s face it, that really is the shit detail. Frankly, I think St John gilded the lily just a smidge. Anyone still hanging around after the gold rush dies will probably spend a lot of time trying not to notice how much less fun their lives have become since they rushed that Armageddon thing like that.
Seriously, what will people think when they see the wreck we made of the place? Our condo board is not going to understand any of this.
Don’t be cheeky. Of couse you understand. You’re just in character. You’ll remember when you log off and go to bed.
Badump.
The thing we are all trained like good little puppies on newspaper not to ask is: Why?
Yes, I am aware that you are all lip syncing the words ‘Why not’ at the screen. You don’t actually expect an answer, though, do you?
And yet you’ve hung in this long, obviously unable to shake the suspicion that they really have been having you on all this time. That this really has been a cynically insignificant, purposeless state of being. Sentience is apparently an aberration, not because we don’t understand it (we don’t, but that’s not germane to this discussion. Yet.), but because we have never been able to completely shake off the feeling that there has to be more than this. We have invented entire layered, nuanced, deeply metaphysical cultures for our growing populations to live and thrive in. We have been to our nearest moon. We have, in essence, looked up and wondered what our place in all of this is. We are almost ready to leave home at long last. But we have some bad habits that may need to be reexamined before we start sleeping around and picking up space herpies or a reputation for cannibalising foreign civilisations for new tools and deities. We trade them openly in the Grand Bazaar, along with shrunken heads and whatever it is you have been using to fuel that thing you bought to get yourself back and forth to your meaningless job, where you mostly sit in the lunch room trying to convince yourself you have some kind of control over your life.
Badump.
Can you feel that?
Last time I felt something like this, I wound up here. Still don’t think this is what they showed us in the brochure.
And anyway, I don’t know what department you’re from, but where I work, we’re expected to get this whole thing coded and ready for release sometime in Q4. Frankly, I don’t even respond to my own name anymore. I have no idea why I’m still here. I put in my notice three months ago, and I haven’t even been acknowledged, let alone given my severance and escorted from the building. I have my banker box ready to go.
Badump.
Badump.
Badump.
Click.

© 2019 Lee Edward McIlmoyle Publishing Ltd.