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Music
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Butterfly
KCcchhhhhhrrrrr.... Static from my bedside radio woke me up this morning. I'd dreamed that noise. And what a beautiful dream it was. My underground prize-fighting days. A crowd cheering another victory. Jean-Paul Chinchilla going down on the canvas where he belonged. Falling in stages, in a shower of blood, mucus, sweat and pus. When you see that stuff on the deck, pooling around the cadaver of your one-time opponent, you want to bottle it and take it home with you. Maybe keep try it in a few recipes later on, or try it neat after it's matured for a few months. For that liquid is surely the essence of victory. 1989. Semi-finals of the international elbow-boxing championships, Greenland. A warehouse full of Inuit roughnecks and international pirates. All of them baying around our cage. I supposed that the warehouse had been intended as a storage depot along the arctic shipping routes. On this night a soul had been dispatched. My opponent was prone. Oh, and the way I finished him: The Butterfly The move was my creation. I first tried it months before. Snug in my Manimal pajamas with a green visor on my head, I'd been leaning back at my desk after a difficult morning of personal admin, I linked the palms of my hands on my nape. My mind had wandered away from my monthly accounts to my legion of enemies. My mood lurched towards fierce anger. Rotating my shoulders, I brought my elbows together in front of my face at great speed and they crashed together like a machine crumpling a chassis at a car wrecking yard. Months later, Jean-Paul Chinchilla was that chassis... This morning I turned the volume up on my radio. The static filled the house and i drifted off to sleep once more - feeling warm and calm. |
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Non-Alignment Pact - A Message From Alex
Let's get it over with. I'm done with Hopper. Three or four times this month I've tried to sit down and write a new post and nothing's happened. It's too much of a chore these days and probably has gone as far as it can go. A quick (!) word count shows that I've typed 26,339 words for Hopper's cause. Now that's a ridiculous amount for something so completely made up - no planning at all (does it show?!). I've decided to save it all to my computer, for posterity at least. I've had fun making up stories, inventing characters and being silly. At times it's been a real thrill and I've been genuinely excited about seeing something I've put a fair bit of time into give a few people a laugh or two. Some of the emails have been enjoyable, including one from a guy called Chad Kaiser wondering why his namesake couldn't joing Hopper's crew. Some others thought that only real people write blogs so I've also had to delete a fair few comments from a few real life, weekend Hoppers. Realising that a few of my favourite jokes and storylines were almost completely plagiarised from TV shows, Films and Books was a pain in the backside. Also finding out how many times I've repeated myself down the months has been interesting - but also a symptom of the missing enjoyment factor lately. Thanks to any readers, including Miriam (while she was in Spain) and my friends Tom, Joe and Adrian. Cheers to Magnus Magazine and brother Louis for the cool header design. Also thanks to Pete aka millionpieces for all the html layout help, Jiltedbarfly and Menace for the linkage. Thanks also for putting up with a self-important "Thank You" paragraph! As for me, I think I'd like to do something with a bit more planning. I'm going to give it some thought, starting now. It would have to be on a different format mind - let's face it, Fictional Blogs have a few flaws, some of which I've already gone into. |
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Submarinean Concrete Shoes
D-Loc was first on the scene. The sun was setting behind his dominating silhouette and he knelt with me for a few minutes. We looked out at the ocean together and took the situation in, in our own time, next to the old docks on a serene Saturday evening. He helped me to my feet very slowly, after all, my centre of gravity was now at my ankles. So, I was on my feet. Now what? Nickolov had got the better of us on this occasion, but hadn't succeeded in his attempt on my life. I had been thrown into the water with my feet cast in concrete, but somehow, in the midst of an epic drug trip, I had remembered my concrete shoe training course from the year before and had managed to hop my way to dry land. Protecting Judge Reinhold had started to push the Birds of Prey into ever more sinister circles, so to accommodate the new threat we took the whole team to the Gangland Safety Workshop the year before for a kind of bonding exercise. If only 'Snake Eyes Mikey', the only other man to hop his way to safety, and my tutor that day, had survived for long enough so I could thank him. I was devastated to hear from his associates that he'd taken his own life a month after his miraculous hop to dry land. |
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Too Much To Dream Last Night
Delta Force had been left behind, but my adventure had only just begun. I was drawn away from the thrilling, twisted glamour of the nightclub and flew out onto the streets. Whisked into the back of a shiny black car, I slipped across sleek leather seats and sped with strangers through the town at night. A ghostly blend of grey concrete and tube-light banked up from all sides of the limo. My evening had begun in Sally's arms, but hours later she was no more than a vague memory. My new company, in sharp suits and fast cars, was far more engaging, but these guys weren't making sense when they spoke. The man in the front seat turned back to face me. Even in my confused state I knew exactly who he was - Tomasz Nickolov. He would be my guide for the rest of the experience, my tormentor, hell's rep on the night I discovered the painful truth. We travelled together. Nickolov looked on with malicious delight. I was slowly dragged to the depths of the city - harried down secret alleyways and forgotten service tunnels, to a man-made world of industrial monochrome, where no human being can survive. I'd found the unseen dominion of filth, where dense black smoke belches incessantly and all hope is drowned and buried beneath sluiced effluence. Piercing the crust of my world showed me nothing of meaning, no purpose, only darkness. The urgent scream of metal scraping against metal inflicted real pain, it knocked the wind right out of my body. I was left breathless, plummeting to the point of no return. Chugging machines and mills drove me down, the mechanical heart thumped away, kicked me deeper and deeper to the bottom of an endless reservoir of emptiness.Look for redemption in a place like this and you'll find only yourself floating in the city's waste with concrete shoes - the physical manifestation of a lifetime of sins slowly dragging you under. |
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Astronomy Dominates
A few days later, while stirring from slumber in the mid-morning, I received a visit once more from my new memesis, The Unknown Quantity, Tomasz Nickolov. Instinctively I glanced at my left wrist. It is 2.30 a.m, Friday Night, Club Delta Force. I can sense Nickolov's crew and they're all around. Indistinct figures leap from the crowd, strike and then disappear back into the throng. The encounter begins with vague nudges, then shoving and before long heavy blows are arriving from the skirts of my vision. Each antagonist is long gone, camouflaged amongst the by-standers and disco lights before I can answer in kind. I release my massive cocktail, undoubtedly the cause of my clouded perception, it glides from my hand to the floor before erupting in a florid explosion around my feet. Glassy shards of light escape the gloom below and shoot wildly around the room. DJ Slick Sick Statix's music is wreaking havoc with my imagination. The nightmare is propelled by distorted guitar and ethereal vocals as they gain new forms, both becoming almost visible and tangible in the haze of the club. Pink neon starts to bleed from the walls. Suspended in the smoky air of Delta Force, electric, glowing orbs weave their way through the dancing masses and take on a life of their own. Fear is everywhere. In this fantastical world, danger is paramount. From somewhere in the endless sea of intense chromatism, a fist appears at flight, with its own vapour trail of wild technicolour. It arrives from a dark corner of the room, and blasts past my shoulder. I grab hold of the chimerical hand and fly off in its wake, floating gracefully towards the exit. |
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Something To Get Hung About
The last time I checked my Casio digital calculator watch that night it was 2 a.m and I was getting down on the Delta Force dancefloor, massive novelty cocktail in hand. Sally shouted something in my ear, I looked up to reply and found myself alone at sunset, washed up on a beach next to the old docks, oily water lapping at my feet. I lifted my wrist gingerly, tried to focus on my sand-caked watch again and after a few minutes was terrified to discover that it was 5 p.m the next day. It felt like a gallon of the noxious oil had permeated my skin and was in my veins and arteries, working its way through my organs. I tried to get up and noticed the bruise - my body. One massive bruise, my complexion was now purple. Where did it go? The events of that Friday night returned in the form of bizarre flashbacks during the weeks and months that followed. I pieced Sally's version of events with my nightmarish visions and slowly began to paint a relatively coherent picture of the evening that Tomasz Nickolov first came after me. My trusted ally, D-Loc was instantly on the case. His intimidating presence became a fixture for the staff at Delta Force. Girlfriends came to know him intimately and families had a place set for him at Sunday meals. He wanted facts. He cased out the club, interrogated the fuck out of them and identified two suspects. A shifty bartender who had quit town straight after the incident, and the man on the decks, renowned DJ Sick Slick Statik. They'd dropped the martial arts equivalent of a dirty bomb on my favourite nightspot. D-Loc found an acid factory at the barman's abandoned apartment, and then reviewed the DJ's playlist from the night I went nuts. The usual synth-pop and disco-funk until 2, before an hour of psychedelia. He'd accepted a wedge of notes to play an hour of mind-bending guitar solos and electronic bleeps as soon as he saw me hit the dance-floor. When I wasn't being visited by distorted, Dali-esque spectres resembling Nickolov and his hoods I was utterly insane with mind-altering rage. I needed time before we could plan a counter-thrust... |
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Drunken Arts - Make Mine a Double
Anyone who has been wise enough to study the van Damme film, "Kickboxer" will be well aware of the merits of the Drunken Arts. In a near perfect example, Jean-Claude's character, Kurt is having a wild time drinking at a local night-spot, getting ultra-familiar with the ladies. Trouble, never foreign to VD (poor bastard!), inevitably arrives in the form of jealous bar-flies who take exception to the one-man carnival smooching up the Thai-talent. So, a bunch of ruffians are getting ready to defend their patch against the van Damme funk onslaught. The numerous aggressors should know better, but perhaps mistakenly sense an advantage because their target is absolutley battered. Kurt is feeling the effects of some of that powerful Far-Eastern booze, which ironically looks set to go West projectile style. Miraculously, he wins this personal battle and keeps it down and needless to say the thugs are duly dispatched in typical fashion. That Kurt's a mean drunk, which wouldn't bode well for the film's love interest, assuming marriage is on the cards, but that's pure conjecture. Anway, I got carried away. My first encounter with the weasley villain, Tomasz Nickolov, took place during a heavy night of revelry at my favourite club, Delta Force. Alcohol alone wasn't enough for Nickolov to gain the upper-hand (Perhaps he'd seen "Kickboxer" at the theatre as well). My drink was spiked before the first broadside... |
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