January 2010
16 posts
FYI, Fluid dynamics is some hard fuckin’ shit. It’s the modelling of fluid substances, like air or water. It’s complex. It’s got a lot of coefficients, a lot of calculus. I met a kid who coded modelling systems for submarine hulls once, at some conference. The guy was so smart he didn’t even seem like he was part of this world, I couldn’t even talk to him. I...
I leaned back in my seat and looked at the window across the aisle. It was covered in scratches that were either graffiti or vandalism. I couldn’t tell which. The suburbs behind it were blurred into bands of green foliage and grey sky. Behind me a woman soothed a crying baby, rocking it back and forth in her lap and saying:
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,”
The universe tends towards averages. Almost all systems are in place to regulate. To smooth out peaks and troughs. The universe tends to diffuse everything. Distribute it as thinly as possible. A flat probability curve, an equal chance of anything.
“I mean being old and bitter is easy, it’s a piece of cake to be bitter...”
“Every moment that I feel pass I have to ask myself, and now? And now? It’s...”
“The kind of interface design you get when a smartass who’s never kissed...”
“It was possible to order a reasonable copy of anything.”
“You’ve taught me something very important this morning. I always thought...”
Playing against him reminds me of a childhood holiday to Portugal when some local kid schooled me at Marvel vs Capcom. I mean he destroyed me, he really fucked me up. Eventually, as he buffered some forty two hit combo I looked over at his face and realised he wasn’t looking at the screen, hadn’t looked at it all match but had spent the entire time staring at my hands, extrapolating my...
Run anyway, always run, you know why? Because there’s nothing that you can fight but you can’t outrun. Nothing. There’s nothing that will kill you just because you’ve run, but there’s a million things that will kill you if you stand your ground. You remember the scene in Jurassic Park where the T-Rex is staring right at them? And the guy tells them to stand completely...
“There’s two types of people in the world: The people who’ve always...”
Dawn was reminded of a time when Haswell had lived at home. She’d come downstairs on a dark winter evening and found him eating a batch of oven chips in the near darkness of the evening. It had had been early and both herself and Tom had been awake upstairs. She thought that he was sitting in the dark because the daylight had disappeared too quickly for him to notice. She flicked on the...
Small wet birds were everywhere, eating crane flies that surrounded us like dark clouds. There was record numbers of crane flies, apparently. That’s what they told me, the guys on television. The birds screamed and called and kept me awake at five am when the sun rose behind the cloud cover. There was no butterflies and no bees. The bees were dying, they said.
“For a second they both independently considered if John was religious. It would...”
“A spark that bridges the air gap of atmosphere and earth.”
December 2009
19 posts
Later on, he’d convince himself that this was the moment she’d fallen out of love with him. It was imperative to his well being that he could isolate these moments, the moments that the various women he met decided they no longer desired him. After a long enough time period it was almost always evident that they didn’t, but he didn’t want to imagine that they had always...
“The first thing you’ll want to know about me is my fears.”
“These are the kind of stupid things I would do out of fear. I’m pretty...”
"I can read this poster, look, 'Lost Cat, answers to Annabell, white feet, call 0121 377 7994 if found,' Fuck, they're never going to find it."
"Cats turn up all the time."
"They never fucking turn up, when was the last time anyone turned up?"
"They're smart creatures, I've got a cat."
"If they turn up, people should stick up new fucking posters. Cat Found. Instead of leaving us to feel depressed about the whole fucking thing."
Even if the man he used to be was unrecognisable from the man he was now, they were both still connected, there was some fault intrinsic to them, some inescapable flaw that they both shared. For a horrible moment he considered that maybe that was his only true self. The flaw.
"They say it's meant to feel amazing."
"How great could it be?"
"I don't know. They say it's amazing though."
“His brain, he was sure, was floating somewhere two feet above his skull.”
There was no sense to it, and this was the most harrowing thing, this lack of traceable causality. The absolute failure of his beliefs to maintain any sort of regularity, to rise and fall with any pattern. The pattern was the key. He was sure if he could isolate the pattern, he could engineer some form of relief. But without it he was lost.
“I realised I should have told him a joke or something. A real funny one....”
"Sorry."
"It doesn't matter, just-- Sometimes, after you've had a night out, do you ever feel like you've become a ghost?"
"I suppose it depends how much I drank."
"No, I'm not talking about hungover, I mean like a ghost, like you've turned into a very tiny ghost."
"Like no one is noticing you?"
"No, that's not it, just like you're a ghost, like you're transparent, like you're fading away from yourself, like you're just a little ghost all of a sudden. I can't describe it in any other way."
He remembered the first time he’d ever seen a Geiger counter, in physics class. He’d passed his hand in front of it and felt surprised that it made no difference. He knew he wasn’t radioactive, but at the same time he couldn’t believe that his presence was so inconsequential to the device. It seemed impossible that nothing would happen, that the device could ignore him to...
As a nerd I’m always attracted to slightly damaged looking women. It’s a defence mechanism, I assume, to shield me from the inevitable heartache of thinking I have a chance with anyone normal.
“I sat inside, working at it. Eventually, a fly flew over to me from my pot of...”
“He opened his eyes and closed them again, like a blink in reverse.”
Needless to say, the rain had totally stopped now. Every day when I checked the weather data I expected to see it was coming back, but it wasn’t. The puddles had dried up, except for a few truly massive ones which had been around for so long they’d developed a sense of permanence, but even these were shadows of their former selves. They shrunk more each day, decreasing the available...
“Soon, they’re going to put those warnings on the side of everything, like they have on cigarette packets.” said Haswell.
“Really.”
“I heard they’re going to have a picture of a blocked heart valve on packets of crisps. To warn kids.”
“Are they going to have a picture of a guy beating up his wife on every can of beer? Or an obese woman being...
We took a taxi home, and I found myself the last...
November 2009
8 posts
"Are you sure you're alright? You sound down."
"You know how you could make realistic fake plants?"
"Honestly Jerry, what's up?"
"You could make them look like they're badly cared for. You could give them dying leaves and a sense of overall malheur."
"You'd probably feel better if you told me what was the matter."
"Do you think they'll ever make fake dead leaves? The day they make fake dead leaves I'll buy a dozen to put under all my real plants. It's the only way anyone will know they aren't fake."
“Occasionally a weathered looking man in a football shirt or ill fitted leather...”
“Thanks a lot,” said Alderwood. He felt deeply grateful. “How’s it going?”
“I’m great, how are you?”
“Fine thank you, can I pay with my card?”
“Of course. I like your shirt.”
“Thank you. It’s just a shirt.”
“I know, but it looks good.”
“Thank you.”
He left the store and bought...
The party was being thrown by one of...
“I don’t think even a goddamn IMAX worth of tits would be enough to distract me...”
The road probably held no recollection of the crash, and the ocean could hold no trace of the body. The ocean could hold no trace of anything. There was no way to reverse its motion, no way to work backwards from its current state. The waves covered bodies the same way they covered boats and rocks. And once they’d closed in not even the most sophisticated algorithms could determine what...
“I see great excitement in your future, I see a terrified man seeking reassurance from you.”
“A divorce case? Great,” said Alderwood, but he was smiling.
“Don’t be so cynical,” replied Whitney. “Tell me, did anyone ever hire you to seduce his wife so he could divorce her?”
“That’s a job I’d probably have to...
October 2009
8 posts
“The kind of vulnerability that was most observable in people who had been broken...”
I staggered back to the train station and...
He lived with his parents, he drank too much and his ex-girlfriend appeared in his life just often enough to keep him in a state of permanent anguish.
There was something practical but soft about her. Her voice was like a nursery teacher who was on duty, and she never seemed to go off duty. She was always busy without seeming rushed. She had the air of someone who had matched every lottery ball except the last. For a torturous second she’d seen everything she might have had, before being awarded a consolation prize that satisfied her...
“There was a silence populated by ambient digital noise.”
I thought monsters were real, and there was one outside, and it was trying to get in. I ran out of the fuckin’ room, I could barely bring myself to come back in, I was ready to burn the fuckin’ house down and just start again in a different country.