Friday, March 17, 2017

Halfway Inbetween

SAME WHERE ELSE PART THREE
| AS FAR AS I CAN SEE |
Episode Six

Moment ~ Brooke Shaden


“40 years of incrementally ramped-up capitalism had brought us to this. The rumbling of discontent that was characterised by the much-increased membership of the Labour Party on the wave of Corbyn’s rise has served to expose the rotting flesh around Labour's wound: Blairism.
The Blairites have a symbiotic relationship with the Tories, so when the calls to get rid of the Tories rise from the ranks, the Blairites who in all but name hold control of the labour party, when faced with this call to arms, instead choose to attack Corbyn.
Let’s face it, the Tories are sitting ducks for any party that can drum up enough noise to beat them in an election. The stick insect Teresa May has only one task set for her: do nothing! Hang on until it’s impossible not to concede to an election.
The only party with enough noise to do so is Labour: yet neither faction chooses to call for an election, each afraid they’ll blow it – to be beaten by Cameron’s caretaker government would be as nothing in the shame league tables compared to being beaten by the Insect’s invisible gang of bitter bureaucrats.”
@IngrateAl 20.01.2017


As they were snuggling the knot against the base of my skull I was haunted by the thoughts of our honeymoon daze.
Well they couldn’t fire the whole department, that would’ve made too much noise, especially in the middle of such a ‘lucrative and sensitive project’, so only Atom and I were fired from !.com.
Perhaps using !.com’s stationary and printers to kick-start Ninja Office Worker #1 DEBUT ISSUE! wasn’t too bright on our part. Who knew that each individual page in an A4 pack of printing paper would carry an electro-statically implanted version of !.com’s iconic logo. But hey! We were revolutionaries! And we did manage to publish and distribute N.O.W. #2 and #3 before getting caught.
The rest of the department were permitted to stay on the straight and narrow, given that all eyes were on them, it must’ve been hellish. Jimmy Mac managed to keep himself invisible; somehow his role in the production of N.O.W was not noticed.
So here we were – Atom and I - sole remaining members of the Pointing Finger, stuck in that tiny flat that I was renting via the Rentitorama down the road.
Atom wasn’t house trained in any way and as anyone knows it’s important for people to keep out of one another’s hair. We had some days of keeping up the pretence that we were not going to end up together and then it just became our reality.
There were times when I wondered whether they’d lobotomised him during his ‘retraining’ in the Logistics section; nothing really phased him, always optimistically ready to move forward.
He wasn’t averse to learning though, so the toilet seat kinda stuff was relatively easy to establish. Cleaning up behind himself took a little longer.
I’m making it sound like I was just another ‘re-trainer’ in Atom’s life – no, we had good times, we laughed, we argued, we drank and smoked and enjoyed the mutual treasures buried in our young bodies.
Through our time in the flat Atom remained unshakable in his belief that to understand a thing is to be free to move forward and learn the next thing – he accumulated ideas and they clung to him like barnacles on a pier leg – rough-edged and safe below the waterline.
He still had that old bike that they had given him in the early days; back when !.com still pretended to give a shit about anything but the yellow brick road; and he used it check the city’s pulse. Like some alien he observed the ebb and flow - where people still made eye contact in attempted civility and where it was best to follow an ‘eyes down’ policy and pretend that the world doesn’t exist, the walls being built to protect ‘what’s mine’ and the rising paranoia that hung over everything like a bell jar - pedalling around for hours on end gathering ‘data’ for Jimmy Mac’s master-code-fuck.
I’ll be honest: we didn’t have a clue what we were doing; we were young and idealistic; we knew the system was wrong and we could feel the change coming. Like I said; we didn’t have a clue.

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