Welcome To Hellville - Part 8 contd By Rich Mills

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Mind now set adrift on a tranquil flood-land, the task ahead now floated effortlessly alongside, bobbing to and fro just within his limp grasp. Characters started to appear on the screen in front of him, like an exercise in automatic writing. Time was? Time was becoming increasingly irrelevant as time passed onwards. In fact Alan hated the whole concept of time. He knew that it didn't even really exist at all. Time was no more than a way of measuring the length of transition between one static snap-shot moment and another.

The unseen white-out between the frames of celluloid, too fast for the untrained eye. A system of measurement, not a system of belief as many saw it.

Some had a belief in time as something substantial, something important, just as something worthy of recognition, as opposed to the actuality of it being a tool of human invention and no more than that. This annoyed him constantly. Alan only owned one clock, and even that he would purposely set to the wrong time. The clock was set to approximately the time he thought it was in accordance with whatever programme was on TV at that particular moment. Even this felt deeply wrong and somehow restrictively conformist, so he'd often close his eyes and set the clock to an unseen approximation of what the time might be, and most definitely was somewhere in this 24/7 world we all live in now.

This was his concession to the world out there, the one invaded by and constructed around the nanosecond. Hours passed in minutes, minutes stretched out for hours and days blurred into distant memories when in a satisfyingly statuesque state of soft sensual surrealism.

Hot rocks had replaced his marbles long ago. Tiny holes peppered the fabric of time, the escaping flow could not be stemmed. A simple logistical problem of too many holes not enough fingers. After all he thought, as an idea entered his head, he was no boy and she was no dyke. Not quite sure what that fleeting thought meant but he'd liked it all the same.

He felt the corners of his mouth twitch upwards in an attempt at a self-indulgent smile. He stopped. Smiling to yourself was a waste of energy. The thought in itself was sufficient, it needed no-frills. Plus the likelihood of a strained facial muscle wasn't going to enhance the thought process, just detract from it.

Now fully submissive to this passive state of being and able to ignore the inner turmoil going on inside of the plastic and metal casing, he teased the one hundred and one erect nipples he felt before him. Like a blind man who has wisdom at his fingertips, Alan became at one with his instrument, manipulating the input so that he could attain a life affirming output.

Composed in the knowledge that he would be putting his life in the hands of others once this piece of work was finished.

He preferred the use of direct contact with the computer keyboard, as he never truly trusted the speech recognition software that everyone seemed to be using in such strange daze. He felt he had to extract the essence of himself from the oral world of language he inhibited. Having found no suitable means of expression across the soundscape of that world beyond his cranial walls, he and only he alone knew it was left up to him and him alone, to define his own words in an encyclopaedic dictionary of his life so far.

And so as the cloud of Paradise-laden smoke lost itself in the darkness of Alan's tardy lungs, he began to let the fables of his new found land escape from their darkly recessed confines and into the world of others.

Continued Welcome To Hellville - Part 9 By Rich Mills.. Next Page

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