The shed

Inside the shed it is usually close enough to light, a constant twilight that its depths are never of any concern to the insecure. There are small but harmless rodents inside and above the floor Swallows have constructed nests of mud for their young. Between them they pick among the fractured debris of coal and decaying matter for small insects and unrecognizable sources of nutrition.

Not far below the surface there exist invisible turbines of a very fine construction and supported by a skeletal core not at all unlike the fragile web of arterial leaf systems. Its fabric merges faultlessly with the surrounding matter of the earth, running through it, absorbed by it, its structure unlike any mechanics that we know. It moves through the soil like a shoal of fish.

If you were to take a slice down into the earth and then watch very patiently with the help of a very sensitive camera running at very high speeds for many hours, it would be possible to perceive subtle tonal shifts that reveal this imperceptible machine. Also, with great care and silence it is possible to discern the tiniest sounds of occasional shifting grains like the acutely inaudible movements of beetles or worms.

Inside the coal shed all of this is impossible to know.

Catching cooler

I've been painting all day, covered in it and I'm trying not to get the insidious stuff over everything when I go inside the house to get another cup of tea. I drink tea like a smoker has fags, like a smoker has fags to peruse work done, to stand back, consider, labour the process, deal with fear before the surface gets touched again; a dangerous time.

Anyway I get a call in the studio from my friend clint. He's out in the fens and he's spotted another fridge. Around here you get a small but reasonable price for a fridge so I agreed to meet him. Half an hour later we're standing shoulder to shoulder and pearing around a hedgerow through a pair of sports binoculars. The fridge is alone and leaning against an old and abandoned out building and it's drizzling, a typical situation. Fridges hate this weather and they'll seek shelter straight away, out buildings make perfect cover and so there we have it.

We move off slowly, Clint first and then I in the opposite direction keeping low to come around the other side to flank the fridge as Clint flushes him out. We've done this a thousand times and frankly without the income it brings me I could never carry on as an artist.

Anyway everything was going like clockwork when I hear Clint slip, startling the fridge, it comes out on it's little fridge wheels fast. After years in this landscape the fridge population has adapted itself remarkably well and has this incredible traction. I was caught offguard and darted after it, pounced, slipped and fell face down in the mud. Quickly I rose again to the chase with Clint hot on my heals, our adrenaline firing us forwards and making chase for a good five minutes or so before we saw the fridge go down, exhausted. Clint fell upon it and held fast as I pulled open the door to disable it whilst he, fast as lighting pulled out the CFC cable at the back, job done!

So I'm drinking tea again, typing this and turning to my right from time to time just to clarify whose shooting at who. I know nothing more.

The stupidity of pictures

Mr Kalashnikov and his amazing rubber weapon

I think that it's time to unearth a frankly unbelievable fact, namely that the AK-47, standard issue for a plethora of happy armies across the globe is, in fact, completely made from rubber. Huge chorus of laughter errupts! I'm used to this response and people say that I'm mad but seriously, really, really really.

I know that they don't look like rubber and the very slim possibility that they might, this feirce, insanely reliable beast of killzone burden, be made of something other than wood/laminate and gun metal, might, just might be made from rubber, might be a little crazy. This can't be you say, how, what about all the deaths and stuff? All very odd, very hard to explain, a shot in the pants for those stung by this fiery jester!!

Mr Kalasnikov (tiny above) was made of rubber and so was his mother and her mother before her and so on all the way back to the very first rubber of them all. The Kalashnikovs are the children of a most unlikely evolutionary path throughout the five million years since we climbed down from the arbors and crossed newborne grassland plains in search for alternate snacks. Whilst Erectus honed his senses with the pedantry suitable to branch swinging survival, the Kalashnikovs meanwhile found ways to absorb the energy of impact. Their freak genome allowed for a reduction in cerebral mass otherwise required by erectus to hone precise distance and object recognition. Less brain mass meant a more energy efficiant hominid and one that bounced.

So millions of years later Kalshnikov gave birth to the AK-47 and naturally it too was made of rubber. As for the outrageous range of fatalities metered out by this finely calibrated anomaly over the years? Mind over matter folks and those people, the ones that don't bounce, they'll believe anything.

an alternative to the real thing: http://www.magnum12.com/rubberbandgunsAK47.htm

Just now

Where are you?

Somehow

Somehow I'm still here, a little creased, a little grazed.

Leaving a 'mark' behind me

It's raining! It often rains at the begining and infrequently rains at the end (unless of course it all starts with the sun shining and then...in this case however-RrrrrrrrrrAIN!!) So, rain, not heavy, 'Christ no way, not going out in that!' rain but the steady, grey continuity of the 'I've got a job to do and I'm going to just get on with it' kind of rain. I've been painting grey too, painting a picture of an Iraqi militiaman to the sounds of American country music...ah, sweet irony!

That's it today then apart from a mention of the 'mark' in the title of todays offering. I was going to describe how my feet, trailing with the weight of disagreeable being, left 'marks' like tyre tracks down the street. I decided that that might not be a good idea though because it's a greater and more rewarding challenge to make positive my utterunce, my 'mark' (also, I was on a bike!)

Distillate

I had been experimenting with a number of different resources, all kinds of possibilities to get across the notion that I had a really difficult time expressing myself. Rummaging for hours in the shed I found a bag of rags that had been sealed with a small length of hessian bind. This bag itself had been hidden within an old Adidas sports bag, the exterior of which had begun to crumble as it responded to inevitably tireless campaigns of damp.

When I removed the rags from the bag they were bio-luminescent. They had devised a way to see in the dark, they had needed to see so that they could make things. The rags had rolled fluff and small particles of dust into forms that resembled little people. None of the dolls had eyes; they hadn't needed them, the rags did all the seeing.

I had found my grail! Keeping the dolls hidden carefully amongst the folds and scruffy womb of the old material I placed them together in my top pocket and began talking, talking into a mirror that had lost nearly all of its silver. I had become circuitous, that is to say that I had looped without the need for outside intervention. I had become like the Alchemists pelican, an endless and possibly dangerous seal of metabolising bio-luminescent rags, their doll babies and I, I plugged in without further want, purifying and purifying; vaso circulatorio.

Down

But also up.

Rising

Standing at the wall, hearing the rasp of some perilous note fall as a curious bow swings across a violin.

Epiphany

All the insects around me are Angels and they contain within them the messages inside my heart. As I sit here and see them in front of me and at the borders of my vision I feel as if I'm bathing for an instant in an ethereal sea of love. I have killed Angels and I have stripped myself of wings but sometimes, just sometimes I can fly again.