for the first time since january of 2020, the germ of the covid-19 pandemic, i am back in my
hometown of dublin, ireland. four years is a long enough time, plenty of things have changed.
my baby cousins are all grown up, people have new jobs, new partners, new tattoos...
some have aged, some are no longer with us.
i met a friend of the family for lunch today, partway through the conversation he said:
"we're going to a funeral tonight". he paused and smiled like it was the punchline to a joke,
i wasn't sure if he was messing with me.
we are, in fact, going to a funeral.
one thing that hasn't changed about this country is the ever present atmosphere of mourning,
memorialising. even outside of towns, in wild places, you would struggle to go in a straight
line for very long without encountering some kind of grave site or ruins. neolithic cairns and
burial mounds, or city streets lined with plaques "in memoriam" festooning derelict buildings,
we mourn the dead and the dying. we wear black. the sky is grey, light rain expected.
ireland is a place with entirely too much past. like a graveyard constructed ontop of the
ruins of an older, deader graveyard, which in turn was built on the ruins of another ad
infinitum. parts feel like the bedroom of a dearly departed family member, still as they
left it; inexplicably, i feel the pressure to keep my voice hushed.
when you mourn the dying, you're essentially mourning everyone and everything.
i was walking through the dublin hills, high hedges on both sides of my path, feeling a great
distance between myself and the "new world" or "modernity" or whatever. further along i saw
a worn celtic cross monument, about four metres high. at its side was a series of steps,
urging you to climb up. at the top you can look out over the hedges out onto a vacant exurban
housing estate. the new development terrace homes all surround a green. near its centre, some
kind of standing stone or vestige of old ruins, fog hangs in the distance.
~
i was going through my parents' garage about two years ago end ended up uncovering
a dusty old digital camcorder. from what i recall it was a birthday present i got
in '09, i got some good use out of it for a few years there, making amateur clay-
mation videos and clips of my friends eating shit at bmx tricks, but eventually it
ended up gathering dust at the bottom of a crate of Columbo DVDs. so i dusted it
off, charged it up, and to my surprise it worked perfectly fine, albeit lacking a
bit of visual fidelity.
a few weeks later i decided to take a trip. i spent a couple days staying with a
friend who had been living rural for farm work, before hitching up to Queensland.
on my vision quest, I brought along my little camcorder, not wanting to risk my
nice lovely DSLR getting broken or falling into the hands of roadside bandits. Along
the way I recorded just about everything i could. upon later appraisal, the bulk
of the footage ended up being fairly useless and boring. but in the heap of low
quality .mp4 i found a couple of quite striking images.
i've assembled some of these images, along with a few notes about my journey and
thoughts on the medium of digital video, into a photo book/web zine-
friends, i present to you: THE ROAD WARRIOR - A PHOTO BOOK BY NORMAL
~
have you ever been inside a chemist warehouse?
if you're from overseas it's unlikely you have much experience with the discount pharmacy
chain, but in australia new zealand the aggressively colourful rectangular prisms are
a fixture in most major cities, to the point that most of us hardly pay them any notice in
passing. but as striking as their exterior might be, inside is where the real chemist warehouse
experience begins. past the metal detectors and the steely eyed powerlifter checking bags at
the door, you enter into a technicolour consumerist nightmare, like if the cube from Cube was
built in an airport duty free, exacting the same psychic toll as a trip to IKEA with none of
the swedish nazi minimalism. loud price tags boasting impossible discounts, television screens
playing CW TV, shelves upon shelves of perfume and cologne locked behind bulletproof glass.
in the background, a speaker system plays FM radio just a little bit too loud.
it is the nature of this system we find ourselves in that I am forced to subject myself to this
discount hell on a semi-regular basis. from a combined however many hours waiting chemist
warehouse prescriptions desks all across the country, i think its safe to say that if my brain
was a mid sized regional australian city, it would have a sizeable chemist warehouse location.
side note: when i was a teenager i used to enjoy getting high on DXM based cough syrup. it
happens to be that the chemist chain in question used to have the cheapest going rates on the
stuff. when i felt the trip coming on i would lie down in bed, shut my eyes, and have visions
of walking down the aisles, stretching out forever.
over the past couple of weeks i have worked on putting this space into my favorite tactical
shooter/economy simulator Cruelty Squad. from hours of tirelessly labouring with custom
quake mapping software, interfacing with the extremely small CruS modding community,
and reverse engineering a game which was never designed to allow custom content, i am now
able to present a few early screenshots. i plan to publish the map online in the coming
weeks, so that consumers from across the planes can share the experience of picking up your
meds from australia's largest pharmacy chain.
~
haven't posted on here in a minute so i thought i'd stop by and share this video i found.
it appears to be stitched together VHS footage of a few different noise shows. i assume
it dates to some time in the '00s but the quality makes it hard to place. anyways, it's cute.
i love the quirky improvisational vibe of DIY noise, and this video really captures that.
~
//whenever i run into a close friend i've not seen in a significant amount of time it always feels odd.
not awkward per se but i feel a conflict between the desire to pick up where we left off and the reality
that the two of us have likely changed as people since we last met. sometimes you've changed so much that
you don't recognise each other. sometimes it feels like i hardly recognise myself. this is a short story
about that. it's called simple simon.//
*
the second last time i saw solomon was almost a year and a half ago. despite him being one of my
closest friends, we were both transient types, rarely finding ourselves in the same place at the same
time. it was around christmas and he suggested we "catch up over lunch", at that point he had been
living in an off-grid cabin way out in the bush, i myself had come from a spell in the psych ward.
needless to say this pantomime of how normal people spend time together felt organic for neither of us.
we ended up sitting in silence in the window of a souvlaki shop.
there wasn't much catching up to be had.
*
a few weeks ago we both found ourselves, by wild coincidence, in the same tiny coastal town, staying
at the same youth hostel. he had been driving north, me south. it felt fortuitous, to say the least.
i arrived in late to see my friend cross legged on the floor of the common area, hunched over a game
of cards, solitaire, by the look of it. dropping my bags in disbelief, i called out to him:
"solomon!"
his eyes darted up, he raised a bony index finger to his lips:
"you'll have to keep it down in here, it's late, and the walls are thin."
solomon spoke like he had been expecting me for hours, i almost wanted to apologise for taking so long.
he quickly packed up his deck of cards and stowed them in his jacket pocket. as he stood up, his body
language suddenly shifted, angular face breaking into a warm smile.
"sorry, you startled me, it's good to see you."
*
we spoke frankly after that. joking, discussing the events of our lives the past few years. he had spent
the past season working on a cattle station, he told me about life on the continent's arid interior, i
told him about my writing, we even made plans for the future, a big trip, like the kind we always talked
about when we were younger, before the weird, complicated stuff of life got in the way. i was afraid
that the two of us had drifted apart, that fear felt distant now.
i was happy to see my friend again.
yet somehow, i felt like he was still holding out on me. a nagging paranoia that he was steering the
conversation away from discussing... something. i don't know what.
as i was thinking this, it occurred to me that we seemed to be the only people in the hostel. it was a
small board, but still, we'd been talking for the better part of an hour and no drunken backpackers had
stumbled in from the neighbouring pub, no one had shuffled out to the bathroom or the shared kitchenette.
i inquired about this to solomon. he furrowed his brow;
"there's a young english couple staying in one of the rooms, nice people, but we'd better keep it down,
it's late, and the walls are thin."
his demeanour went all cold and edgy again, like he had been when i came in. an awkward silence hung in
the air.
i changed the subject:
"what was that game you were playing when i came in?"
"it's not solitaire"
"oh."
"a lot of people see you playing cards by yourself, they assume you're playing solitaire. it's not their
fault, but i always thought that solitaire, in its various forms, lends itself towards incurious minds,
the object being to sort the cards into tidy, discrete catagories. never appealed to me."
i asked him if he thought i had an incurious mind, he said he didn't, he said writers can't afford to be
incurious. i felt like i was being pandered to. i quite enjoy solitaire, ever since the hospital i've
always carried a deck of cards with me for that purpose.
"it's called simple simon."
"simple simon?"
"it's quite unique in the world of card games. you can play it by yourself, or with a friend."
"i see.
do you want to play against each other."
"you don't compete, per se, nor can it really be called cooperative. there's an element of strategy and
lateral thinking, but for the most part you're just sharing the experience. in this sense, no one really
'wins'."
solomon sat down on the floor of the common area, crossing his legs, and began shuffling the pack.
"now first of all, simple simon uses a slightly modified fifty-four card deck. with one of the jokers being
omitted in favour of a new card: 'the crow'."
he produced a playing card depicting the silhouette of a corvid mid caw, the corners adorned with black,
inverted triangles.
"what does the crow do?"
he chuckled, like i'm missing out on something glaringly obvious.
"it's quite intuitive, really, but you have to get it first."
"well i don't see how i'm supposed to get it if you don't explain it to me"
this smug obtuseness was classic solomon. time apart really has a way of making you forget what an excruciating
prick someone can be. i considered the idea that he had come up with a fake card game just to infuriate me,
that's absolutely the kind of thing he would do as well. christ.
"just, please, hear me out for a second."
he took a more sympathetic tone, seemingly taking note of my frustration.
"remember when we were younger, we'd go walking?
we'd set out from your house, or my house, and we'd just walk. we wouldn't go in any particular direction, we'd
just take whichever path felt natural. i've come to realise that we were following some nebulous flow of energy.
now that flow of energy isn't something you can tap into when you walk with purpose, to work say. same as you
can't process the meaning behind a book if you focus on the mechanics of moving your eyes left to right. do you
understand?"
solomon had set some of the cards in a triangle pattern, at the centre was a stack facing down.
"the game begins when you draw the first card. it ends when either one of us loses."
"i thought you said there were no winners or losers."
"it's important to relax, you'll figure it out i promise."
i began brainstorming escape plans. i had a full day of driving to look forward to the next morning and very much
didn't feel like depriving myself of sleep to play pretend card games with this asocial lunatic. i thought about
excusing myself to take a shower and then slipping off to bed.
the floor was cold, and my muscles ached, a shower sounded very nice right then, or a bath.
i thought about sinking beneath the water, drifting further down into the warm, womb like perfumed darkness.
solomon's carrying on faded into a peripheral drone as my attention waned and i allowed myself to indulge in the
comfortable daydream. could it be called a daydream?
i thought about turning up the hot water as far as it would go and letting the steam carry me away, beyond this town,
beyond the sea.
it must have been past midnight by now.
i found myself above the icy, churning waters of the southern ocean. in the distance, a speck of light. i went
towards it.
had i dozed off at some point?
the light was a small fishing vessel being battered by angry tides. the warm mist took me closer, i spied the
boat's captain. an elderly man, his hands bound to the helm by rotten rope. though weathered by toil and time,
his angular features were as sharp as they had been when he was young.
*
the fog cleared, for a moment, and i was sitting on the cold hostel floor again, the game was in play. for how
long we had been playing i wasn't sure. i looked down and saw in my hands i held a single card: the crow.
~
so, i'm moving out of my current residence in a few days time. in the process of packing up my
shit i feel like i'm erasing all of the evidence of my presence here. this room was my home for
a not insignificant amount of time, and in a few days it will be like i was never there.
this is kind of the idea, make the place a clean slate for the next person, i wouldn't want
every space i occupy to be frozen in time after i leave, but this kind of glaring impermanence
still freaks me out. so i've decided to leave a few things behind. alongside a rude poem hidden
under the hideous linoleum floor of my old bedroom, i've stowed a set of "divination tiles" in the
condemned section of the house.
divination tiles is a game i invented on an amphetamine bender earlier this year. it consists
of seven hand painted tiles, each tile an element with a discrete meaning. the basic idea is
something similar to tarot. i like the idea of someone finding the tiles a few years down the
line and not being sure what to make of it.
~
well it's come to this, the last of the con fund has run out, and i don't have a dollar to my name.
i lost my job a while back so i don't know when my next payday is going to be. considering the fact
that i've got court tomorrow, and i'm considering skipping town sooner rather than later, i feel like
an old outlaw country singer, a rogue with ten different flavours of trouble chasing them... forgive
me if i'm talking like a cowboy in this one. when you're in a shitty situation it can help if you
mythologise it a little bit, the only thing worse than suffering is suffering pointlessly. needless
to say i've had an eighteen-carat run of bad luck lately.
sorry, i'm doing it again.
really, my current situation is thanks to a rash of profoundly reckless decisions leading all the way
back to this time last year when i decided to quit my job and move across the country on a whim.
it's a miracle i've made it this far without having ended up dead, injured, imprisoned, or homeless.
well, i don't want to speak too soon on those last two.
when you're broke, like really properly down and out, you learn a lot more about yourself, how
you operate under certain restraints, what you do when there's nothing *to* do. one thing that i've
learned is the psychic utility of shoplifting. pinching pennies has a way of bearing down on your
conscious, making you feel powerless. analysing the price disparity between root vegetables is a
demoralising experience, it corrodes the soul. by stealing a milky way from the checkout line, you
take the power back.
~
//this one is a piece of short fiction i wrote a while ago based off of my experiences with night
terrors as a child and manic delusions as an adult. going to periodically upload my backlog of
spec-fic .txts under the "archives" title from here on out.//
*
when i was a small child i used to have night terrors. around once a month i would wake in the
night, screaming and crying. ma would come in to console me, shush me back to sleep.
in the morning she'd ask me what i woke up so scared of. half the time i didn't even remember
the dreaming, nor the waking up, only the fear remained.
at a certain point i got it in my head that my dreams were prophetic, not just the terrors,
but other dreams too. these ones felt more vivid than usual, more like visions. when i was
twelve i spent three nights at my grandfather's wake, the family home became a twisting
labyrinth of rooms and hallways filled with distant elderly relatives, their faces obscured,
bony arms reaching out like branches snagging my clothes, trying to snare me into dull, sad
conversations. eventually i would find the sitting room, where my grandad lies in his wooden box,
i would reach out and touch his cold hand.
he passed away not a month later, at three past midnight on the feast of st. stephen.
usually my dream visions would be a lot more mundane than this, events barely worth foreseeing
but the rule was always the same-
when i was a teenager, learning to ride a skateboard. if you manage to do a trick once, or even
twice in a row, you haven't necessarily "learned" it. it could easily be a fluke, to really lock
it down they say you've got to be able to pull it off three times without fail.
that's how the dreams work too.
the terrors have been coming back recently. more frequent and vivid now. it's starting to affect
my waking life. when i was young, the bad dreams would only happen every few weeks at most, now
it's more like every few days. last night, and the night before last, i had the same dream.
finally, it feels vivid enough to put into words. it's pure annihilation;
peering over a cliff that goes all the way down and keeps going still, a one hundred sided coin, turning,
twisting in on itself, a child holding its breath for as long as it can bear, a static buzz, and in a copper
steppe stretching over a parabolic horizon, i wait for the dying of the light, trapped in the belly of
a colossal machine, i am alone.
for the first time since i was little, i am afraid to go to sleep.
~
branching off what i was discussing at the start of my last post, i was surfing the web the
other night when i found the personal blog of a person called lepht anonym.
have a look through, it took me a minute to figure out what was going on, the reverse chronology
and tech speak makes it hard to get right away, but essentially what's happening is this person
is implanting technology inside themselves using DIY surgery techniques. now i've been aware of
the concept of 'biohacking' for a while now, i remember reading an article many many years ago
about people who implant neodymium magnets in their fingers in order to sense magnetic waves, but
that feels distant from what lepht is doing here, while the former is done under anaesthetic by
professionals, the blog goes into detail about the pain, injuries, and complications of implanting
improvised cybernetics inside ones flesh. this practice occupies a strange space between Tetsuo:
The Iron Man style fetishistic body horror made incarnate, and neat DIY electronics.
i should add, i'm not personally or morally opposed to this practice, i think it's extremely cool.
and in a way, the hormone therapy i'm undergoing serves a similar end, the flesh is flawed, and
weak, and we can, should, seek to improve upon it however we see fit. but personally, my masochistic
penchant for suffering does have a ceiling. i'm yet to reach it, but i reckon it's somewhere before
recreational autosurgery without anaesthesia.
~
something i enjoy doing from time to time is finding people's old blogs, or personal webpages
from the 2000s, usually long abandoned, and scrolling through them. being able to look back at
someone's life at a fixed point in time, what they were thinking. the person who wrote these
words and published them online, if they are even still alive, has most likely long forgotten
who they were on the third of april 2009, but i haven't.
trawling through these blogs, geocities archives, erowid, these precious weird corners of
the internet, i feel like an archeologist of the old web, something that i was too young
to appreciate at the time. i'm sick to death of the skull-rotting mainlined content slop
of the social media industrial complex, i'm tired of having to seek out weapons grade
adblock software just to make the online legible, i don't want to hear about the metaverse,
web 3 is a scam to sell you cheap plastic crap. so that's why i've decided to make a blog
in the year of our lord 2023.
all that complaining aside, i don't want to be a luddite, i've got nothing against new tech,
as much as i dislike how it gets used by capital to fuck us, and i don't want to get bogged
down in y2k nostalgia. so i figure i had better write down a few objectives i aim to achieve
with this page:
1. ARCHIVE OF SELF: first and foremost, i want to make this an outlet for my inner monologue,
my interests, the way i fill my days, miscellaneous tangents. there's a lot of things
that i think and do that never get written down and end up being forgotten. so i want this
to be a space that records the person i was at a specific point in time.
2. SOVEREIGN INTERNET: i aim to establish a presence online that is entirely independent.
i've been banned from enough forums/social networks/discord servers/facebook groups to
know that anything of mine that exists on someone elses service is forfeit. this is
going to be an ongoing non-exhaustive process, starting with getting this site hosted
outside of neocities, i plan to eventually migrate all of my creative projects (music,
film, art, etc.) to here. i don't see me considering my work "done" until i'm running
my own seperate internet outside of the power grid.
3. WHATEVER I LIKE, REALLY: i don't really care if anyone reads this, in fact i kind of hope
no one does. i'm going to post whatever the hell i want to on here, i will make posts as
frequently or infrequently as i please, and i fully expect that this project will be a
waste of time and money, i think that's a good thing.
~
