From gentle thoughts to the violent truth

JULY 24 06

No sooner does the dayshift of bees and bumblebees about the sweetpeas end than the nightshift comes on, dozens of pollinating hawkmoths. It's a very exact changeover, I've been watching it for a week and a half now. Other flowers are closed, all scrunched up telling night pollinators they're just not open for business, but the sweetpeas get double service even though they must be sucked dry by now. Reading W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn in the garden as the sun goes down, and thinking about a few things.

There was a kid in Sainsbury's karate-chopping the courgettes, and given that this is the first time in a while they've had a big box of courgettes without the usual fingernail nicks I took some exception to his behaviour and called him a dickhead, thus inducing him to stop. He gave me a surly look, brave enough for that but not brave enough to continue. Sometimes you look into a person's eyes and know their whole life. This kid will be blinded in one eye when a Bic biro is rammed into it when he's thirteen. I felt like telling him his fortune. I do sometimes. But I let him walk by without leading him to experience the violence of the truth.

Cause and effect. I looked at the broken courgettes, juicy, full of sap, a couple of good courgettes ruined. Walk on, Blind Kid.

As for the Middle East, am I the only one who hopes it really escalates? I've noticed this feeling in myself and I think it must be more common than generally supposed. I think we have a taste in us for it to get really bad. Don't look to us to care holding up your bloody ragdoll kids. We don't give a fuck. We've had enough. We just want to get a ringside seat to watch your destruction, all of you, and your kids. Bye bye. Does this need explaining, I think it speaks for itself as the truth. Look around, it's in everybody's eyes as they go about their business of not giving a fuck, not caring. The rest is just the expected opinion, from both sides. The usual dross. But I think I've got my finger on the pulse of this baby a whole lot better. Give us the whistling nukes. Haven't seen a good mushroom cloud in ages. We're so up for it. We want death. We want death. We want death. This is the chant that's beating through human skulls at the present. You know it. You want death too. We're like kids who've built a big sandcastle, and now we're going to kick it to smithereens. Oh yes. Look at the glee in our eyes, you haven't seen us as happy as this in a long time. We smell death in the air, and we want it to be a big one. Like you, I don't care either. I'm ready for it to all explode. I want this to be World War III, and so do you. You know you do. Why pretend to care when you don't? Well, let's hope it spreads to all of our cities, this fantastic madness. Haven't you ever wanted to kill a lot of people? Now's your chance.

Copyright © 2006 Biroco