You haven't got a chance

21 September 2000
See what happens when James' pen doesn't work...

He hates it when pens only half work. Tried everything - licking the nib, vigorous shaking, scoring endless blank grooves on the back of a notepad. Finally, he resorted to trying to draw small circles on the palm of his hand. That didn't work either. Then, with a sudden spark of inspiration, he stabbed the pen through his left palm until it stuck an inch out the back of his hand. The pen finally wrote again, and he finished marking the rest of the kids' books in a slightly darker red than he had started.

His head hurt worse than his hand. The six million monkeys in his head were working feverishly at their six million typewriters, trying desperately to eventually finish writing the Bible. What frustrates him the most is that he's just realised his mind-apes can't even come up with anything original. Typical, put ten million people in a swamp, and they'll make a city and call it London. You just watch.

It is all just pure accident waiting to happen. The huge inflamed white-headed boil on the chin of the universe is waiting to be squeezed, but you won't know what pattern the pus will make on the mirror. Until you've squeezed. And when you do, destiny squirts out into space like last night's wank.

Clever people will come to scrutinise the pattern of the stain, like all the other Rorschach tests they've done. This one is more pleasingly curious for them because it will hardly ever be totally symmetrical, but they'll try to read symmetry into it somehow, because that is all they can comprehend. But whatever they see tells you nothing about the stain itself, only volumes about how people peer at the speckled pattern of love-pus. It's like they all have to use colour tinted glasses, all the time, like their eyes are too sensitive to bright light, or something.

The only problem is, is that you realise no-one is wearing those lovely great hippy-ass plain pink or pale blue round lenses any more. The only ones you can find nowadays is your-dad's-sweaty-vest brown lens glasses that get darker when you go outside - economical, because you don't need to buy two pairs. So, now you see that the way they see is totally dependent on what is going on around them - each observer is but a tiny rocking rowing boat on the great swirling sea of uncertainty. Tossed about with zero control over which way their toss will be thrown.

Until, that is, you realise that that lovely, rolling, although obviously potentially violent, oceanic mega-beauty is actually purely made up of other rowing-boat people, each crawling over the other for air, fat pink maggots jostling to be the one picked to be skewered onto the hook, the fly-spawn's heroic revenge against the malicious fish of oppression.

Now the chosen one patiently waits, dangling naked and unsure as a babe in the mid-waters of chance, waiting to be gobbled up by the next hopeful predator waiting for the free-riding easy meal. And then it strikes, the bastard trapped on the steel hook of irony - caught in the act of catching. There is NO such thing as a free lunch, you see...

And once he is finally captured on the line, being reeled up struggling towards the surface and deliverance, there is little chance of stopping the locomotive chain of events from there on, charging down the track, ready to destroy the helpless maiden of childhood innocence.

But before he can charge down the hill and race rampant huge and shining towards the last seconds of precious beauty below at the bottom, there is this tentative wait at the top. Waiting for the rollercoaster to begin its final thrill-run, held back by the shoulders, aching to be released.

And it is anticipating the anticipation that excites him the most. The knowledge that what he does today, every day, will be one more nail in the child's coffin, which in turn will eventually, when him and his colleagues are finished with them, be silent and buried under the headstone of adulthood.

He greets Music as she arrives for work. As he holds the door open for her, History offers her a cup of coffee. Coming back to the table, he sees that she is holding her bandaged hand. "Couldn't get the pen to work?". He passes her the drink, which she takes gingerly.