Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 70

Social fretworking

In the paradox of social networks, the more cyber friends we make, the less social, we become

Postcard from a Pigeon

 

I posted a thought,
it flew away
through dark, cavernous
cyberways,
to bump and grind
with other lonesome thoughts,
in the hotbeds of social fretworks
and worried then,
where it might go,
unguided, misunderstood,
to liaise, frolic and fret,
argue, debate,
opinionate
in a world of posts,
untethered,
away from me
gone, awaiting its return,
alone.

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Starman: Life on TrappistOne #4

https://silverthreading.com/2016/05/25/writers-quote-wednesday-writing-challenge-freedom/

 

The postBot caught him off guard. Notices are usually received by psychImp and directed, by GrUnCo, to individual Units, or generally, to every Unit. This PostBot has turned up, on his doorstep, unannounced.

He just had time to put the Tablet away in an alcove of the Craft, he was yet to explore. Turning up at his CraterProx dwelling was odd but at the Crater of Density, his workplace, that was serious.

The postBot brought a summons to ReAs. “What for?” he asked, saying he was busy, not to be disturbed, had to finish, but he knew the postBot wasn’t going to answer but was programmed to record and assess. “OK,” he said, “I must complete this task and I will follow.” The postBot wasn’t moving. This was serious.

Had he given something away? Were they alerted? Did they know he was not reassembled, that he broke the rules, made complications that will lead to contention? He measured his thoughts, carefully. He’s so outside the Unit life, he feels like an alien.

He needs to buy time. The dwarf star was already fading and the last of the full moons were already high, it would be time for ReAs soon, if only he can delay this summons.

The Starman wasn’t coming, he knew that now. He knew Major Tom was the first emissary. But Major Tom was lost. He wasn’t the last they sent. It was all recorded in the chronicles of the Tablet. Major Tom’s craft and all the other exploratory emissaries sent back what they found, even when their Units had expired.

By the time the information reached them, though, their own planet, Earth, was ready to implode, sucked dry and devasted by their own actions. So they built the Tabernacle and blasted into the void, their destination, TrappistOne, a final fling for survival of their species.

Their intention was not as blind as the stab in the dark it appeared. The craft, The Tabernacle was powered by one QuantumBot. This, the Tablet told him, was not just the mechanism to pilot their journey across the vast expanse of the Universe, it was also the failsafe they designed, to ensure their survival, in the event of a mishap.

To succeed, they would control memory and if they could control memory, they would control desire.

But QuantumBot, Abraham knows, is the same Bot mechanism that devises, controls, assimilates and assesses all activity, now, on TrappistOne. Something did go wrong and The Tabernacle crash landed here, in the Crater of Density.

The Tablet Chronicles was not just a detailed record of Earth’s story, it was also a blueprint of all the factors that led to its destruction and a plan for how these problems would be avoided, if and when they found a new home. The Earth people intended to work together to build a world where everyone had what they needed to survive, but that survival would be dependent on them working together. To succeed, they would control memory and if they could control memory, they would control desire.

Their objective was freedom, the Tablet Chronicles declare. And that was where Abraham was stumped and why he needed more time. but it was too late now. Unable to delay the postBot any longer, he followed it outside to the waiting truckBot. They climbed in and the truckBot sped off. In seconds the Crater of Density was a speck and within minutes, they were at ReAs.

TO BE CONTINUED

CATCH UP

TRAP1                 https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/05/starman-life-on-trappistone-2/

TRAP2               https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/12/starman-life-on-trappistone-2-2/

TRAP3                https://dermotthayes.com/2016/05/20/starman-life-on-trappistone-    3-obsession/

The Brutal Truth

＃everydayinspiration

Let the scene write itself is the prompt on Day 10 of the Everyday Inspirations course on Blogging University so let me do just that, except this time it’s not fiction, it’s mundane daily fact.

Today, I took a walk around my neighbourhood. I saw many of the same people I always see. There was a group of homeless people, in a quiet corner, on a side street, drinking cans of cheap cider. The hostels, and there are a few in my neighbourhood, had served them breakfast and turned them out for the day. They were the lucky ones. Some of them slept in whatever alcoves they could find, wrapped in cardboard.

Then there were the shopkeepers, opening up; the jobless people, wandering around, aimlessly; the workers going to work, the students going home. But all that is normal in this neighbourhood. Today, there’s something different going on.

It all began on September 24, last year, in the Angel de Miraflores apartment complex, near Marbella on the Costa del Sol, Spain. On that day, a young man, Gary Hutch (34) was murdered by assassins. Hutch was a drug dealer and armed robber. But worst of all, a rival gang, with whom he was associated, believed he had informed to the Irish police and because of this, a large drug shipment was seized. So he was killed.

Gary’s days were numbered, long before this, but because he was the nephew of another well known Irish gangland figure,one Gerry Hutch aka The Monk, his safety was bought with a six figure ransom. Unfortunately, for Gary, there’s no honour among thieves, drug dealers and murderers. Several key members of the Spanish gang, led by convicted criminal, Christy Kinahan, were arrested in police swoops in 2010. The Kinahan gang believed Gary Hutch fingered them. He was shot.

Flash forward to February 5, 2016 and five men, three dressed in police style combats and carrying AK47 combat rifles, plus one other with a balaclava and another, dressed as a woman, launched an armed assault on a boxing championship weigh in at a north Dublin hotel and shot dead 34 year old David Byrne, a well known member of the Kinahan gang.

Since then, there hasn’t been so much as a tit for tat gang war but an all out attempt by the Kinahans and their associates, to wipe out the Hutch family and their associates. Five more people have been shot since then, one of them an innocent man, the victim of a mistaken identity. More members of the Hutch family have survived botched assassinations.

The last one to die was another member of the Hutch family, another nephew of Gerry Hutch, the one they call The Monk because he never involved himself in drugs, just masterminded a series of multi-million pound robberies for which he has never been convicted.

Now, everyone fears the wrath of Gerry Hutch will be felt. Hutch is not known for erratic or fatally spontaneous behaviour. Indeed, when his nephew Gary Hutch first brought this trouble on his family, he bought him out of trouble or so he thought. Since then he’s buried close and life long friends as well as family members. Now there is a general belief that a terrible reckoning is coming.

The Kinahan gang runs a multi-million Euro drug operation, spanning at least two continents and they have incalculable resources, along with an army of soldiers ready to get a dip in the golden pot and make their names. But to continue to do that, they’ve reached the point where they must destroy the Hutch gang. Similiarly, Gerry Hutch and his gang have their backs to the wall and must come out blazing or die where they stand.

And that’s where my neighbourhood comes in. This is the territory of a Kinahan associate and gang boss in his own right, called Fat Freddy Thompson. His gang drinks in a pub, less than two minutes walk from where I sit here typing. All afternoon, there have been many patrolling police cars and the occasional armed police roadblocks. But, what is even more sinister, are the gangs of young men in fast, expensive saloon cars, speeding around the back roads of the neighbourhood, watching. Everything. Everyone.

When they bury their dead, they come in stretch limos and the deceased in a horse drawn carriage with feather plumed livery. The whole neighbourhood gets locked down so the hoods can bury their own.

So tell me, does this scene write itself?

http://www.herald.ie/news/hutch-pal-hiding-after-latest-gun-murder-bid-34737393.html

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/man-arrested-over-murder-of-gareth-hutch-1.2658793

 

 

 

Willesden Herald New Short Stories # 9

If anyone’s interested, the Willesden Herald New Short Stories competition is accepting submissions for this year’s publications. Full details are available at http://us13.campaign-archive2.com/?u=34a07b919242e240e64d09998&id=123ef45e3b&e=022b974896. One of the much coveted awards is a Willesden Short Story Prize mug, as well as the privilege of having your story read by actors in front of a live audience, international recognition etc.

This year’s judge is novelist and short story writer, Katy Darby of The Liars’ League (www,liarsleague.com)

What a day, what a meal

It’s a warm day so I got up, really early, don’t laugh, about 7.30am. Did my usual thing, medicine, shower, dressed. Then, coffee and some toasted germagrain, smeared with beetroot hummus and half an avocado. I know, get him. Then I sat down and tuned in, got Cab Calloway going on the stereo and, coffee in hand, entered the blogosphere, the Reader and found, therein, AngloSwiss’s Good Morning (always brings a smile) and Diary of a PorterGirl’s latest ruminations on James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. From a smile to a rib aching paroxysm of mirth.

Just the way to start the day. Now, it’s Wednesday, so that’s a double red letter day for me. First, there’s Signs of the Time, ＃4 and, happily, I was covered, having done a quick sweep (as quick as a 60 year old with a walking stick and an iPhone) of the neighbourhood, yesterday and second, Wednesday means Writers’ Quote Wednesday Writer’s Challenge, (just flows lightly off the tongue, that one) and for me, that means another episode in the Starman saga. Ha, y’see what I did there? Saga, got a Daily Prompt in, too. I’m on fire.

Next up was something I’ve had on my mind since I read a post by thelittlelai, https://jauntingandmusing.com/2016/04/22/tears-are-also-the-voice-communication-and-everyone-understands/ that touched on the pain of growing up and discovering the world of adult life. So I posted a short story I wrote a few years ago, Commandoes in the Dunes that, I suppose, tries to tackle that very problem from a young boy’s point of view.

Now, I haven’t got round to Starman, yet, but that will come, a little later. The next thing I wanted to post was a stirring and powerful performance by the Palestinian poet, Rafeef Ziadah that was performed in Ireland’s National Theatre last Sunday, as part of the Dublin International Literature Festival and recorded, for posterity, by my good friend and award winning film maker, Terry McMahon.

All that brought me up to lunchtime, although, in the interval, I took a short walk into the city centre to visit the bank, buy a shirt for a wedding and then some bread and other essentials, before walking home. I didn’t dally. I could’ve stopped in a few watering holes to wet my whistle, so to speak but therein lie dangers and, most likely, dragons, too.

No, I was a good boy and got myself home and fixed lunch and oh boy, what a lunch. I was watching tv chef, Rick Stein the other night and he was on a Long Weekend in Bologna. During the show he made a dish that left me drooling. It was pasta with a sausage sauce. I know, I know, it sounds awful but when you call it ragu salsiccia, it sounds so much better.

The ingredients are simple, you need one, proper, Italian sausage (Stein used local pork sausage stuffing and I don’t think it could’ve been half as good as mine), half a spoon of crushed fennel seeds, chilli flakes/fresh chilli (I used fresh chilli), fresh rosemary, a stick of celery and half an onion, both finely chopped, a glass of white wine, some chicken stock, some cream and finally, some parmigiana reggiana. And here’s how it turned out.

 

 

 

We teach LIFE, sir

PALESTINIAN refugee poet and performance artist, RAFEEF ZIADAH got a five minute, standing ovation for her show in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin on Sunday, as part of the International Literature Festival.

Her performances were captured by Irish film director, Terry McMahon.

Do yourself a favour, watch this

 

and then this, Shades of Anger

Commandoes in the Dunes, a parable of puberty

I was shocked when I learned girls grow up faster than boys. While I worried about how to buy the bone handled penknife in the souvenir shop on the Main St my sister and cousin linked hands and giggled. It was like they were sharing something to which I was excluded. It wasn’t as though I paid them much attention. They were girls, after all and I had more important things on my mind.

Our annual two week holiday in the seaside town on the northernmost tip of the country was two weeks of small town life, playing on the putting green or hanging out in Bertie’s Amusements with the one armed bandits.

There were long walks around to Father Hegarty’s Rock where the stone had split into the shape of a crucifix after the soldiers had slaughtered the poor priest. We loved to hear the story and in the evening twilight of a saffron sky, we’d squint and point at the rock in the distance and draw the line of the giant crooked cross on the shoreline rocks.

I loved to play in the old fort, a remnant of the British occupation and one of those handed back to the Free State before The Emergency. I was never sure what that meant but I loved the sound of the words so I never tired of hearing them. On those long walks when the grownups would pause for a flask of tea and a few scones, I’d stand on the crumbling ramparts and scan the horizon for enemy invaders.

Two rivers ran to the sea from either side of the town. One was at the bottom of the Main St hill, the residential end of which, my uncle never tired of saying, grew mainer the further you went up it. That river was behind a walled orchard and there were rocks, fish pools and a waterfall.

Every summer I scaled the walls of the orchard with my two friends, local lads, and dared each other to make the leap into the garden below to shin a tree and scobe some apples. We never did it because of a neurotic dog who barked at the rustle of leaves. We satisfied each other with tales of adventure and mishap, especially the one about the boy who made the leap, got savaged by the dog and beaten senseless by the owner, a bearded, friendless ogre who lived a solitary, bitter life tending his apples and chasing children.

The other river ran through a park and was packed with nooks and copse. The water flowed fast through the shallows and there were stepping stones for rushed crossings. There was an old stone keep on one bank, rank with rotting seaweed and human excrement. We fought battles there, held the banks, chased raiders, rescued helpless villagers and stalked monsters from the deep.

As the evening drew close to teatime and we had our dip and a go on the swing boats, we wound our way home with a stroll on the upper end of Main St ogling the huckster shops and the souvenir treasures like that bone handled penknife that became my holy grail that summer holiday by the beach.

When it rained I liked to stay indoors in the front room of my aunt’s house, playing the gramophone, the lacquered oak case with the turntable and the bakelite knobs and the lit up coloured display of radio broadcast stations like Hilversum and Athlone. I played my cousins’ record collection until I knew all the songs of the first four Beatles’ albums off by heart and Elvis Presley and Marty Robbins’ Gunfighter Ballads and Skeeter Davis singing about silver threads and golden needles and how they couldn’t mend that heart of hers. I wasn’t entirely sure what they were singing about but I could feel their pain and  shared their hurt and confusion.

Friday night was cinema night. I sat with my little cousin and bought him drinks and popcorn and bags of sweets while my sister sat with our other cousin, whispering and giggling through the show, watching everything going on except the film. We never sat in the back row because that was where the older boys sat with their girls and they didn’t watch the film either.

When the girl with the tray around her neck came out at the intermission the boys got up and bought their girls an ice cream, usually a tub with a wooden paddle spoon. You had to be quick and get to the girl before the boys because they spent all their time giggling and whispering in the queue and bought all the ice cream. So every night it was a race to anticipate when the girl would come out and when to make our run for the ice cream line.

One day my cousin and I took a stroll  to the beach where we weren’t allowed to swim, the beach where, every summer, people drowned. The tides are treacherous , my uncle warned. But the older boys and girls went there and spent their sunny days in the sand dunes. They looked like fun to play in so we went there because there was nothing else to do we hadn’t done and we didn’t bring our towels or our swimming trunks because that way we weren’t breaking the rules. And no-one would know where we’d gone.

We played ‘commandos’ and hid in the dunes and tossed grenades at the enemy we imagined were lurking over the next hill. And so it went on until the enemy really did appear from over the sand dune and it was the dune we were attacking. And he was angry and waved his fist about while he held his towel with his other hand. So we ran and ran and laughed and ran some more until we collapsed, exhausted and scared and then we laughed and laughed, again.

We went back. Not that day because the chase scared us enough to hide for the rest of the day. We went to the other beach and when it was close to teatime we played on the putting green and before we went home to our uncle’s house I went to the toilet beside the fairground.

It smelled of sour pee and the wooden door, painted white and green, was cracked and rotting. There were poems on the walls and dirty words. There was a drawing of a girl with no clothes and a boy who was bare too and his willy was pointing where she didn’t have a willy. So I finished my business fast and walked home, quiet and didn’t tell my cousin what I saw because I didn’t understand it. But I couldn’t get the image of the girl on the wall of the toilet out of my mind because she was all spiky there, between her legs, like she had hair or something.

So the next day we went back down to the beach with the sand dunes only this time we played a different kind of commandos. We were on a secret mission and sneaked to the top of the dunes instead of storming them with a frontal assault and all guns blazing.

We peeked over the top into their sheltered golden valleys rimmed with spiky sea grass and we watched the couples grappling together on their towels and  wondered why the boys lay on top of their girlfriends.

We soon got bored with watching them and went back to playing real commandos only we sneaked to the rim of the dune before we attacked so we could be sure there was no-one on the other side who might chase us away.

Our summer holidays were split in three. For the first few days we’d do everything — the amusements, the shops, the parks, the rivers, the beaches, the fort, the walks. When we exhausted those possibilities our aunt put us on the Lough Swilly bus for Derry and we bought a return ticket and travelled in to the city. We went to the pictures in the Strand cinema and visited all the shops we didn’t have at home like Littlewoods and Wellworths and Woolworths. We walked up Shipquay street and though the big arch at the Diamond to Bishop street and our uncle’s shop and he gave us a bag of sweets and a ten shilling note. Then we walked down the hill and along the Strand again, stopping at the fish and chip shop with the black and white tiles and the wooden booths to get a fish supper on a milky white plate before we caught the bus home.

A sort of ennui set in during the last few days of the holiday as we felt by turns homesick and regret for going home. Our cousin put us to work in the bakery because twice a week their vans delivered the bread to the shops in other towns and the night before they worked late in the bakery, baking the pan bread.  Before they could do that the loaves were laid out on giant bread trays in the yard to cool. We were given pennies and when the bread cooled enough we scraped the tiny black crusts off the bread before it was sliced and packed.

On our last day that summer it rained. And as we waited for our parents to collect us, my sister and my cousin, took off up the town, their arms linked giggling and whispering together again as they had for the entire holiday. I guessed it had something to with the loose elastic in my cousin’s knickers they joked about before they went out. They asked me to go with them but I wanted to stay to listen to the music for the last time that summer. And as they walked out the door I saw my cousin’s knickers slip to her knees and the pair of them, my sister and my cousin, creasing up with laughter as though there was nothing funnier in the whole world.

And later when they came home and Skeeter Davis was singing ‘Your Cheating Game’ they sat in the front room where I was listening to the music and chattered so loudly they annoyed me. They chattered and they giggled and they chattered and giggled even more when I told them to stop. And they giggled so much my cousin said she was likely to wet herself and I didn’t know where to look except as she splayed herself on the settee my sister hiked her skirt up and pulled my cousin’s loose knickers aside and I was transfixed because she was all hairy there and there was nothing else I could do but look and stare.

That was the last holiday I had there. The next summer I was too grown up to play commandos in the dunes anymore.

Signs of the Time ＃4

Finnegans Wake: Book 1.4 — Secret Diary Of PorterGirl

This chapter finds our eponymous hero Here Comes Everybody seemingly having a dream that he is dead, or a dream that he is Finnegan (who may or may not be dead, despite the fact he has clearly had a wake). Could be both. There is mention of traitors at the wake and HCE is conscious of enemies, […]

via Finnegans Wake: Book 1.4 — Secret Diary Of PorterGirl

The Whys and Wherefores of Writing

The very first story I ever wrote was about a bar of soap. It was a school essay task. The teacher asked us to write about cleanliness, which, for me, a 13 year old adolescent exploding into puberty, was like asking me to count the sugar granules on my cereal, tedious and boring.

So I wrote a story about a bar of soap, where it came from, what it dreamed about, its fears and expectations and its career ambitions. Of course, this bar of soap got around. But first, it was conceived and packaged and then sent out in the world.

Plucked at random from a store shelf, it had no part in determining its own destination. It gets bought and then, unpacked and so begins a whole new phase in its life. I won’t tell you the rest of the story because, for one thing, I can’t remember it and, for another, I’m sure it’s story would be different if I told it again.

I bought a collection of short stories last night by the American writer, James Lee Burke. It was the last of Mr Burke’s books, to complete my collection. It’s called The Convict and Other Stories. In his Introduction: Jailhouses, English Departments and the Electric Chair, he writes about his own experience as a writer; the rejections, the defiance, the drinking, the teaching and then his inability to learn.

James Lee Burke is not only one of the most successful detective crime writers alive today, he’s also one of the best living American writers. His powers of description are breathtaking and he can stop you breathing with the emotion of a moment. He stands with John Steinbeck and Kurt Vonnegut Jr as my all time, favourite American authors. Alright, I love Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Flannery O’Connor, John Barth, Harlen Coben, Michael Connelly and Sam Shepard, too.

I’ve learned from all three of these writers and many more. One of the first lesson any writer learns, is to become a reader, then, an observer. Sometimes, after reading someone like Burke, I’d begin to think there was nothing I could write about to match someone like him. Louisiana, Texas and Montana – his favoured locations – just seemed to have that much more going for them.

John Steinbeck wrote about hobos and the dust trail from the Texas panhandle to the Californian fruit fields, migrant workers and underground agitators. Kurt Vonnegut wrote about soldiers and aliens. Desperation set in if I thought about my own paltry settings.

Then I realized I wasn’t looking at things from the right angle. I could say James Joyce taught me that, but I won’t. I’ve read big chunks of Ulysses and the short story collection, Dubliners. But it took me four weeks to get through 15 pages of Ulysses on my first attempt. Brendan Behan and Sean O’Casey taught me a valuable lesson.

Stories are not just on your doorstep; they’re in your head. You have to get them out. I’ve got more pleasure out of reading John McGahern, William Trevor, Sebastien Barry and Joe O’Connor. These are writers who understand scene and setting. Roddy Doyle has the same talent.

Reading can satisfy writers, but it also makes them restless. Restless, to get their own words and thoughts down in print. And that makes the difference between a reader and a writer. Every reader will entertain the thought of being better and more able than a writer, to capture the moment of their lives that encapsulates their thought processes and sums up their existence. It is the writer who writes it.