Creature of Darkness

Being the Christmas period, work has become quite busy, so in lieu of a proper post I give you the following:

 

In the shadows I live. In the quiet and darkness. I creep into your dreams when I can, but my favourite thing of all is to touch your skin while you sleep; my nails, long and sharp, scoring thin red marks on your surface. If you wake, if you open your sleep weighted eyes, you will not see me. There will be only a soft whisper as I slip back into the shadows, unknown by you.

You will not know me. I am too fast for you, and I live in the moonless night where your eyes cannot penetrate. Your electric lights will not banish all the gentle dark, and I can wait for the time when they are gone.

 

Dreaming

There she sits. From the outside, it appears as if she works. She is typing; her keyboard clicking gently as each key is depressed. Occasionally she sips coffee from a large green and white mug, gripping it around the body rather than using the handle. If you were asked, you would say it is probably cold where she sits, under the bright light of a fluorescent bulb. She wears dark jeans and a leather jacket, the only touch of colour the bottom of a very short dress, or long top, which shows as a strip beneath the jacket.

As you cannot see the screen, you guess that it is work she is doing, because she also wears a frown of concentration. The desk she is seated at stretches out on either side of her, cluttered with papers and other items. She pays no attention to them, or to her surroundings; you can see they are not important to her. She stops typing for a moment to work her shoulder length hair out from the neckline of her jacket, then resumes.

But that is all from the outside. It is impossible to see what she is typing, and again impossible to tell what thoughts are provoking that intent look. You would like to ask, since she has piqued your interest, but she is a stranger, and you are only dreaming.

There she sits. She is typing, and hoping it appears that she is working. She is frowning; frustrated. The boredom she feels sitting here is not easily dispelled, although writing her stories goes some way towards that end. She is not quite warm enough, but the coffee, and extra layers she has on under her jacket help. Her jeans are a little too tight, and make it uncomfortable to sit at the desk all day. Her hair is irritating her; it won’t grow fast enough, and gets into her jacket.

As she stares at the screen waiting for inspiration, she can feel her frustration building. She feels as if there is a small incorporeal version of herself banging around inside her skull, beating her fists on the inside, and yelling into the dark pink ether of her brain, trying to escape.

She wonders if others feel this way, or whether she is slowly going mad with boredom.

And as she sits, and as the feeling of madness creeps through her body, she has the distinct feeling that she is being observed. She is being watched. She can feel invisible eyes crawling over her body.

And as this feeling settles on her, as she becomes more sure of it, irrational anger replaces the boredom, perhaps exaggerated by it. She stills, but doesn’t look around. She knows it is not something she will be able to see. And that small self inside her head, that incorporeal body stills too. With both her selves she reaches her senses out, feeling the air. And the feeling dies. There is nothing. She is only dreaming.

The Wednesday Big One - Goat Getting!

 I’m going to rant today about something that really gets my goat, and which I have trouble explaining exactly why it bothers me so much. It is the donation gift card.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with anyone donating to charities, and I have no problem donating myself (I currently have three different charities taking money out of my account monthly), but I absolutely have a problem with these cards.

My feelings are that if you don’t want to give me a Christmas present, but want to donate to charity instead, that is absolutely fine. No worries. I have no problem with that at all.

What I have a problem with is you donating to charity and then telling me it was in my name.

And this is where I come up against a mental block. I don’t quite understand why I find this part of it quite so offensive. Perhaps it is a matter of free will, either in the matter of donating at all, or choosing who I want to donate to, I’m not sure.

I know I’m not the only person who feels like this, and yet I can’t quite grab hold of the reason why. And that bothers me almost as much as receiving one of these cards.

All that said, I also applaud the charities for coming up with another innovative way of getting more money out of greedy rich people to help their causes. This fact that I agree with the reasoning behind the cards also bothers me. How can I agree with the idea, and find it so offensive at the same time?

But either way:

If I want to donate, I will.

If you want to donate, feel free, go for it. Just don’t do it in my name.

So here are some questions for you. Do you feel the same way, and can you explain it? Or do you disagree, and why?

Zombie Rabbits

You've probably guessed by now that I have a small obsession with all things zombie at the moment. Here's a poem a wrote a while ago, somewhat inspired by Monty Python and the Holy Grail...

Zombie Rabbits

Fluffy rabbits, bunny rabbits, hopping through the air

Catch them quick, catch them hard, catch them if you dare.

Fluffy rabbits, bunny rabbits, tangling in your hair,

They bite your neck, and blood spurts out, it’s going everywhere.

Fluffy rabbits, bunny rabbits, chasing you so fast

Run from them, run so hard, run until they’re past.

Fluffy rabbits, bunny rabbits, special zombie caste,

They’ll eat your lips, and eyeballs too, but save your brain for last.

Sunshine

The lethargy is upon me. It comes as now with gentle fingers, caressing, seducing, sending my thoughts into a paralysis of anti-motivation. The day crawls by and I cannot find any focus; have no desire to even attempt focus. The world passes by my blank stare, coaxing no participation. I fold into myself, distant emotions washing around me far away. Eventually this will end, but for now, the world is grey.


I wrote that yesterday. I'm very lucky I never actually feel quite that down, and even when I do feel vaguely like that it doesn't last very long.
Not long at all. I woke up this morning and ST told me I shouldn't be so happy because it was too early. As I was driving along on my way to work I was as happy as I've ever been. The air was crystal clear, and everything around me had such a vibrancy to it I could barely breathe. There was a sense that everything was almost too perfect to be real.
I drive to work at the best time of day in Summer. It's not long after 6am and the sun has just risen. On a bright morning like this morning you can just feel the life in the trees, and even the cars on the road are beautiful.

It's a very distracting feeling to have when driving on the freeway.

The Wednesday Big One – Grammar Nazis!

There’s one thing that really bugs me on the internet, and that’s a Grammar Nazi. I don’t have a problem with helping others who don’t know their semi-colons from their apostrophes, but I also don’t mind if you don’t want help and you don’t particularly care if you’re using the correct punctuation or not.

I can just hear the cacophony of Grammar Nazi disgust over that comment, but let me explain.

Our written language is (or at least was initially) simply a visual representation of our spoken language. As such, as long as you are making yourself clear to your audience, surely it doesn’t matter exactly what form that representation takes?

Yes, we have our standard spelling and our standard grammar, but we also have constantly changing spoken language. Should our spelling and grammar not also be allowed to change with it?

I have heard it argued that correct spelling should not be changed because it reflects the etymology of our language, that is the origins and history of each word. As someone who is fascinated by etymology and often noticing new connections between words I never realised were related, I do like the idea of retaining this resource. However, I also feel that new changes are important, and will in future reflect a more recent part of the history of our language.

I find it interesting that the same people who can argue in favour of retaining as many languages as possible can also be the same people who argue for a lack of change in our own language. To me, the main reasoning for keeping alive as many languages as possible is to promote diversity in thought, since language has the ability to affect thought processes. If we don’t allow any change in our own language, how can we be expected to be able to diversify our own thinking processes to cope with a changing world? And if we do allow change in our spoken language, shouldn’t that be reflected in our written language?

Another point I would make is that with the internet becoming a larger part of our communications, and therefore the written language gathering more importance in its own right (rather than simply being a representation of spoken language), I think it’s even more reasonable for there to be change. I would expect this change to be even faster, since it is not written language catching up with spoken language change, but actual change in written language.

Our culture isn’t static, our language isn’t static, and so our written language should also not be static.

So to all you Grammar Nazis out there; when it comes to making niggling little comments about a probable typo then all I can say is ‘Get over it!!’

Thoughts, anyone?

Most of the zombies had limbs missing...

Here’s an interesting question for you: when most is used as a pronoun (ie most of the zombies had limbs missing, or most of the town was destroyed) what approximate percentage (of zombies, or of town area) would you assign to that meaning?  This is something I’ve often pondered, because different people seem to have very different ideas on this.

All the definitions I have been able to locate while sitting here at work seem to suggest that it’s a simple majority (in my basic examples this would be anything greater than 50%).

I don’t agree. To my mind majority and most are not exact synonyms. I see most as being closer in meaning to nearly all.

I mentally assign most to a range of approximately 70 to 90%. How about you?

Tip of the Day

Don't pay $40 for a cake just because you need to get up to the $10 eftpos minimum for that milk. It's not worth it.

Echidnas Are Cool

This is an echidna who used to hang around my place when I lived in the country for 6 months. He was right next to the road this time and, unusually, pretty much ignored me. I suspect he got used to the movement near the road, and didn't realise I wasn't a car - I don't think they're all that bright.
I love the size of echidna claws, and their tiny little eyes.
I think echidnas would be well suited to surviving a zombie apocalypse. 

In the Beginning...

The Dead Bird Saga

So, we’d been hearing noises in the Coonara flue for a while; the scratching of tiny claws, the chirping of a Starling. At first we assumed it was trapped, but as the days kept going by with that annoying metal scratching noise, we decided there must be a nest in the flue and the bird was making full use of a free warm dry house to raise it’s chicks. And then the noises stopped, and rather than this concerning us, we didn’t notice it at all. And we forgot about the noises entirely… until yesterday. Yesterday was the second day in a row of greater than 30 degree heat. I was loving it. I was loving it right up until I walked in the front door after work and was assaulted with the sickly sweet odour of rotting flesh. Cautiously sniffing shallow nosefuls of putrid air, we quickly tracked the smell down to the wood heater innocently sitting in the corner of the kitchen/dining area. Opening the door of the heater made it obvious exactly where the stench was emanating from.

We retreated to the other end of the house, opened some windows, and pondered the problem. How do you remove a dead rotting bird from inside the chimney of your so far purely decorative wood heater? Having investigated briefly we knew the baffle plate inside the heater box was rusted in, and not able to be removed, so of course we decided to burn the bird out. Not having any wood though, we were going to have to wait through the whole next work day, also forecast to be over 30 degrees.

So we waited, and arriving home today, car boot loaded with kindling and wood purchased from a convenient hardware store nearby, I was happy to find the smell wasn’t as bad as yesterday. I grabbed the local paper from the mailbox and made some twisted knots of it. I had just finished setting up a pretty little wood pile over the paper when the Storm Trooper arrived home. Together we started the cooking fire, full of hope that our problems would be shortly solved.

Unfortunately the dead bird had other ideas.

We closed the door of the heater and the fire, looking so promising for a good 5 or 10 seconds, suddenly went out and smoke filled the heater. We let it sit for a while, then opened the door letting the smoke pour out into the room.

With the door to the rest of the house closed and the two back doors wide open, we tried again, this time with the air vent open to allow more oxygen in. Clearly, we thought, that had been our problem the first time. But no. We let out more smoke and dead bird stench into the house. Through persistence, or perhaps stupidity, we tried again. Twice.

The bird was blocking the flue.

Then I noticed a couple of maggot cases (as they pupate into flies they grow a brown casing around themselves, and look like mouse pooh) sitting on top of the heater. Perhaps the stench-culprit wasn’t actually in the heater itself!

Next port of call; inside the roof cavity. The hole was small so I volunteered to go in instead of Storm Trooper. I also hadn’t been in the roof before and was keen to have a look around. In the roof it was cramped and HOT! I slowly climbed around the struts inside the roof, keeping to the beams, careful not to electrocute myself on the wiring for the down lights, and cautiously avoiding the spider webs in the dark. Actually it wasn’t all that dark. The tiles were letting a fair bit of  light come in, although not enough to see if there was a rotting carcass over by the flue. The torchlight showed me a rats nest, but no bird. Trekking back to the manhole, I climbed down, sweaty and filthy.

Our next plan of action: get up on the roof and see if we could access the bird from there. Storm Trooper is a lot more sensitive to smells than I am, so taking with me an old screwdriver (for scooping), I climbed the ladder and stood on the roof for the first time since we’d moved in. Slowly crabbing across the tiles on hands and feet I made my way over to the flue. The smell was definitely coming from inside it, as were a lot of flies. Removing the cap, holding my breath, and peering inside made it obvious our torches were not up to the job. All I could see was a slightly smoky black haze. I poked a broom down to no avail. I dropped flaming twists of paper down the chimney, which showed me that the bird must be right at the bottom.

I gave the flue a good jiggle and we tried to smoke the house out twice more.

Bringing the numerous tools down from the roof, we collapsed the ladder and discussed our options. I decided that we needed to somehow get around the baffle plate inside the heater and scoop it out from there. Maybe the poor rotting bird was runny enough by now that would be possible. I moulded a coat hanger into a special baffle plate scraping implement and got to work. Piles of soot, and numerous plastic icy pole wrappers started falling out. Perhaps this was what was stopping up the flue, and not the bird after all. We tried again to light the fire, and filled the room with more dead bird smoke.

Storm Trooper finally remembered that his Dad used to install Coonaras as a job years back, and called him for help. Apparently we should have done this to start with.

It turns out you can lift up the sleeve around the flue, then lift up the flue itself and get to whatever is sitting on top of the baffle plate. As soon as we had moved the flue aside enough it was quite clear where the bird was. Clouds of putrid air wafted out of the hole leaving both of us retching. Grabbing the bird in gloved hands and wrapping it in a plastic bag, we evacuated the maggot dripping putrescent corpse to the outside bin.

Finally the fire should work, we thought, and burn off any left over smell. We were convinced that the next 5 minutes would be the end of the problem.

Clearly we didn’t remove enough of the soot, and we got another heater box full of smoke in the house.

So now the whole house smells of smoke, and the saga of the dead bird continues.

Eventually we hope to be able to use the kitchen again.

I have been thinking for a long time about starting up my own blog, and finally, here I am.

I have a couple of different reasons for wanting to write this blog, but previously I’ve managed to come up with plenty of excuses for not starting.  I’ll give you a few examples, and maybe this will give you your first insight into who I am (or if you know me well, maybe you’ve guessed them already).

First of all; my reasons for blogging:

I love to write, but I don’t do enough of it. I would love to develop my writing skills, and I feel that this will help, since I’ll give myself a target and try to stick to that many entries per time period selected.

My job at work does not take up all of my time, and often not very much of it at all. This will help me keep my sanity, and allow my creativity some freedom which is currently lacking.

Sometimes I want feedback on my fiction, and somewhere like this seems a reasonable place for it (I hope).

These seem to me like fairly good reasons for a blog. But now for the excuses:

What if people find me totally boring?

What if I can’t keep up with my writing/entry target?

What if everyone just thinks I’m doing this because I reckon I’m fantastic and everyone should know what I think (this one is very strong in me – I don’t want people to think this, because it’s really not how I feel about myself)?

What if no one signs up?

And what if they do, and they realise that my writing is just crap?

Well, those are the risks of course. But they are risks I have to take to achieve my goal (or to fail to achieve my goal). 

The main reason I haven’t started this blog before now is fear of failure. I strongly tend towards avoidance rather than risking failure, and it is a mental habit that I have been trying hard to break for a long time.

Perhaps you will help.

[And as I’m writing this draft, trying to get up the courage to create a blog account I read back and think ‘no, this is way too boring, who would want to read this?’

‘But Hippofeet,’ I think ‘that’s the whole point! You can only care about that enough to add in something more interesting. You can’t fail to start because of some stupid little voice telling you it’s boring’… Aha! The saga of the dead bird should do it!]