Ian Patterson's Blog

The Cog that Spins the Wheel - 8

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Chapter 8 - Not All Who Are Lost, Wander

I float in the darkness. My brain spins. Another night, another empty bottle of whiskey. Another slide through zero gravity. My stumps ache. I slap at them and the motion sends me cartwheeling, I think. I can’t tell without light and I don’t care enough to turn them on. I’ll either crash into a wall or I won’t. Schrödinger’s drunk. Only the direct observation of the crashing or not crashing will resolve this.

“Life’s a blessing.” I slur th...

Don't This Look Like The Dark

Cover image from Raffaele Mainella’s Illustrations for Nos Invisibles (1907). Public Domain

Don’t this look like the dark?

I chop the onions and saute them in butter and oil and as they sizzle and effervesce I do not cry. I am cold. I am practiced in shutting my eyes when I feel pain so I stir the burning remains and listen to another news story about children starving, genocide, protests in the street, bombings, casual fascism so common it’s overwhelming but - I. Do not. Cry.

I look out into the s...

The Cog that Spins the Wheel - 7

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Chapter 7 - What Comes After The Dark

The tears of the moon gathered in the crater bowl of Luna One. The streets are filled with mooners. They came from all the other lunar cities to hold hands and signs and belt songs and slogans into the insufficiently filtered air. They took off their masks so everyone could hear them clearly, even if it killed them a little bit. It was important their overlapping, disparate voices were heard clearly. Like water, they ran down the hills of Lu...

My First Book Birthday

My hope with writing this was not to expose you to a long-format, self-congratulatory celebration, although of course I’m ecstatic with how my first year as an author has gone, but to give a glimpse behind the curtain of my successes and failures. I’m a rising tide lifts all boats kind of guy. If we don’t support the indie book scene around us, we’re all doomed to fade or get swallowed by AI slop. So as usual, maybe the stuff that worked for me won’t work for you. Maybe it will. The best I can d...

Your Death Five Years On

One of my favorite photos of my mom growing up. She was compassionate and kind and silly.

My mom died five years ago from cancer. It came back in January of that year, or maybe it never really went away at all. It ate her slowly, and then all at once. I sang her Simon and Garfunkel songs at the end. That’s what we listened to the most. My brother and I counted her pulse and tried to decide at which precise moment the dying happened. Afterwards, I wrote that grief was like an indent of something h...

On Technofeudalism in The Cog that Spins the Wheel

On Technofeudalism in The Cog that Spins the Wheel

Ask yourself, what is the product the company of the future produces? Amazon, Uber, social media platforms, what is their business model? As usual, if the service is free, you’re the product. Every minute you use them, you consent to give away your data. Producers pay for access to sell to you better, and consumers either pay unknowingly, or pay to access the convenience. This is the idea of technofeudalism. We all pay, producers and consumers, j...

Having a Hotdog at the Capital

Dialogue, Artist and Date unknown, from “A Slight Freshness of the Neck” (public domain). “I am losing a head” (left), “I am getting one” (right).Having a Hotdog at the Capital

The kids reclaimed hotdogs, changed the name and made them cool. They’re glizzys now. So while millions of children starve (insert: shot, maimed, exploded, crushed, tortured, orphaned, abused) in Gaza, while our own government supports these actions (insert: denies wrongdoing, produces misinformation, supplies weapons, mor...

The Cog that Spins the Wheel - 6

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Chapter 6 - The Last Race

In hindsight, after it all happened, the me of the morning seems a distant memory. A figment of my imagination, maybe. Did she ever exist, really? Was any of it real? There’s such ease in her, such lack of friction, such simplicity of purpose. She came to the moon to win. To remind people that she wasn’t done yet. I couldn’t be farther from that motivation. But I love her for it–for the belief that she could tear things down, that she could win one last...

The Cog that Spins the Wheel - 5

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Chapter 5 - Quiet Like a Bomb

When you drop a bomb, you expect the world to explode. Not that I wanted it to, really. I much preferred the steady beat of normality. The endless slide of unchanging days. I never wanted to stand on that stage and break with Blue Whale publicly. I’d dreamed of it, sure, rehearsed the speech in the shower every time I remembered how much they frustrated me. How much seeing their cans in the hands of kids on the moon made me clench my fists and teeth...

Summer Poems

Poetry doesn’t do well here on Substack, for whatever reason, but I’m still writing it. In creating shorter form, I’ve found it helps my natural flow and rhythm in longer form. I think of it as a basic building blocks of style, and I know I’m on the right track because the people whose prose I admire are also poets.

I was speaking with a friend of mine recently about how movement is a natural time for both of us to spin lines. For me, that’s usually on my bike, and I’ll repeat the lines in my hea...