This post is arriving after noon so as to avoid the plethora of April Fools related shenanigans and totally not because I popped out to buy milk. The start of April is always a bit silly, hell the entire month is a bit silly. It rolls up declaring “Look! It’s definitely spring now! The weather is going to be so much better now!” And then it promptly tips it down for nearly the entire month. April is a month of lies and absurdity. Last Year I picked a fairly bizarre image for April’s Pictonaut Challenge, so I decided to stay in a similar vein this year. Combine this with the fact that today is one of the UK’s scant few public holidays, that means tomorrow the vast majority of us are back to work. So in keeping with that, and a desire for general absurdity we have Office Warfare.
Tag Archives: Pictonauts
Going For a Walk
It is March 31st and let me just say now, for the record, I am most assuredly not going for a walk. As fellow Brits are probably well aware we’ve just entered British Summer Time, BST, Bastard-Shitting-Timechange. Last night Time snuck into my room while I slept and stole from me an hour of rest. Now I’ve got a horrible fug in my head, a slight headache and a general desire to crawl under a particularly large rock and die. I have what can be best described as a case of temporal jet-lag. I can fly half way around the world and laugh at the mere notion of travel based jet-lag, but the minute the clocks change it comes and hits me, quite literally, where I live. But you didn’t come here to read about my dodgy circadian rhythms. You came here for stories. Or because you googled something seriously weird.
March’s Pictonaut Challenge
Time ticks ever onwards. The year fades out of February and into March. The cogs of causal reality whirr and click in the heart of the great and unfathomable machine that is the universe. Winter is petering out and the days are getting warmer. Spring is just around the corner. Spring is a time of change and of new beginnings. Admittedly, depending on how you look at it, the same could be said for all the seasons but that is beside the point. The last two Pictonaut Challenges have been a bit on the grim side. All dark and gloomy, a little bit lonely and depressing, more wintery moods. I think it’s time for a bit of a change of pace and a change of scenery. With the weather starting to get milder and the evenings getting shorter I think it’s high time we pulled on our boots, put on a nice, light and airy coat, because we’re Going For A Walk.
Dead Places
It’s a sad thing to come to the end of February. February is cool. Cool in the sense that fezes and bow-ties are cool. It’s cool in the temperate sense too, but that’s neither here nor there. I do enjoy February. But all good things must come to an end. I’m closing the month on something of a high-note. I remain physiological intact, if somewhat mentally disparate, and in the last week I have been spectacularly productive. So productive that I think I’ve been the victim of some cruel and insidious trick. An anthology piece is done, and against all odds I managed to finish off this month’s wordascope in record time. The blog is now a whole two years old and I’m still going. All-in-all I think a small “woohoo” is in order.
Woohoo.
February’s Pictonaut Challenge
January is dead. It’s corpse has been stripped of its clothes, jewellery, money and anything of even tenuous value. It now lies cooling in a shallow grave in the middle of the desert of time. That’s just how time roles. It takes you for everything you have and leaves you dead and forgotten. Time is the bastard’s bastard. Cheery today aren’t I? Things were looking up, things were looking good, but then last night dinner went a bit pear-shaped, though not literally, no pears were involved. The cheese sauce bubbled over, it was very messy, it delayed things, it was massively inconvenient. There were no words in any language living or dead that could adequately convey my profound and abiding sense of anger and sadness. It was, in essence, the human condition. These are the trials I face in my life and I am left the worse for it. I swear it was going to be all sunshine and lollipops, unicorns and gumdrop mountains, but now? Now it’s going to be all grim-dark misery and the palpable despair of life in a universe that is as cruel as it is cold. This month we’re going down the rabbit hole and treading where no man should ever set foot. This month we’re going to the Dead Places.
Plodding On
Down here in my neck of the woods the snow has finally decided to bugger off and leave us well alone. The British weather in its typical mercurial way has rebounded from the cold snap by swinging to heights of frankly terrifying mildness. Despite it being what I would term the depths of winter the temperature rose to an incredible 13 degrees Celsius, forcing me to forgo both jumper and hat. Even the gloves came off, my winter beard now feels entirely extraneous. This unexpected bloom of warmth fits rather nicely with my equally mercurial mood. At the start of the month I was not in the finest of fettles, but now the grim introspection has gone, although the existential dread remains. But I’m okay with that he’s a reasonably okay guy when you get to know him, bit misunderstood and maligned, but always does the washing up and takes his shoes off when he comes through the door. So January’s ending on something approaching a high. I remain gainfully employed, I’m not dead and I have a house with function heating. everything’s coming up rose. Though not literally, give it a few months though.
January’s Pictonaut Challenge
January the first, two thousand and fucking thirteen. Somehow, against all conceivable odds mankind has yet again managed to drag itself through a whole 365 and a quarter days without wiping itself from existence. If that alone is not cause for some small measure of celebration then I sure as hell don’t know what is.
While you all rise, sleepy and rheumy-eyed from the fug of a hangover for which you have no one else to blame but yourself, I am not with you. By means of ancient and secret manipulations of technology and time itself, I, your benevolent and gracious blogger, am still mired in the last plaintive death rattles of two thousand and fucking twelve. I’m drinking single malt whisky from a cracked glass tumbler that I bought from Marks and Spencer’s 5 years ago. I’m thinking, wondering and generally pondering upon the nature of things. I am, as ever, alone. My sole company is my own thoughts, both my best friend and my greatest nemesis. By rights I have probably had too much to drink, and so do I sidle down into the dark and foetid recesses of sentience while gazing into a fluid the colour of gold. There’s probably a metaphor for avarice and rampant consumerism in there somewhere.
As with the end of any year I find myself looking backward to what has gone before, it’s only natural at such a calendrical milestone. A stock check if you will. In my case I find, once again, that some one’s smashed the big glass window at the front of the store, piled half the stock into a rusty old shopping trolley and done a runner. There are so many things that remain unfinished and incomplete. It’s the nature of things, nothing is ever quite finished, something always slips through the cracks. There’s things which you just never quite manage to sort out completely and/or to the best of your abilities. Things which you’ve left unsaid or opportunities that have been left untaken, things which leave a big yawning hole somewhere deep inside, a hole that no matter how hard you try, you just can’t quite manage to fill. It’s always like this, this is how all years end. Northing is ever finished, not even at the very end of all things, that is just a stop, a big black line under everything. It’s not a finish; finish implies completion. No matter how hard we try, no matter how much we gird ourselves, put on our war-face, arm ourselves to the teeth and threaten to fuck life up something proper there will always be things left undone. All years are a war, the months are campaigns, the weeks are battles and the days are bloody skirmishes. We are nought if not the sum of our mistakes, alloyed with our regrets.
What matters is how a man (or a woman, or non-gender specific entity. Let’s not discriminate here) weathers the assault of the years, how they traverse all the myriad of pitfalls, spike traps, trip-wires and shit-flinging monkeys that life puts in front of us. How against all the odds, no matter how battered and broken we get, we manage to muster up enough strength to raise one single, solitary middle-finger to the world. What matters is how we manage to keep ourselves going, how we keep Plodding On.
Plodding On
Leviathan
Another month down and another 1,000 or so words churned out for the faceless masses of the internet to ignore. As ever the end of the year has been a hectic time for me. The jaunt back to the northern homeland always takes a massive chunk of time out of the schedule and as ever travel over any appreciable distance usually leaves me feeling like someone’s stuck a hosepipe into my soul and siphoned my life essence off into a jerry-can. Add to that all the other writing work I’ve gone and committed myself too: two pieces of anthology work, a short screen-play, a guest blog post, the pictonaut challenge, a new blog project, all my weekly blog posts and then a few odds and ends here and there. Needless to say I’ve been getting a little snowed under. For a little while it even looked like I might not get anything written at all as I sank further and further into a pit of my own ennui. But then I pulled my finger out and managed to crank out about 700 words in a night and all was well. So to business, Leviathan.
December’s Pictonaut Challenge
And so we reach the final month of 2012. This is the home stretch, the swan song, the last hurrah, the end times. December is what I would call a proper month. It’s got 31 days, the weather’s usually cold and about as awful as it’s ever likely to get, there’s holiday time; things happen in Decembers. You’ve got Christmas, you’ve got New Year’s Eve, you’ve got the inevitable fight with your family. It’s all of the things which fundamentally characterise a whole year squished up into one nice, parcelled up, 31 day period.
I’m coming to the end of a week off from work, using up my remaining holiday allocation before year’s end, pissing it away doing nothing in particular. This has been a week of rest and relaxation, a recharging and revitalisation of my mystic energies after a trying couple of months. I have done more or less nothing, and achieved more or less nothing, and this has left me utterly exhausted. Never underestimate just how tiring inactivity can be. Writing has kept me at least moderately occupied, preventing me from slipping into a coma constructed from my own listless ennui.
Anyway, enough of my ramblings, I should probably cut to the chase: it’s Pictonaut time, this month we square off against Leviathan.
The Grid
And at long last November limps its way to the finish line, finally collapsing to the ground. November is dead. Stone cold dead and along with it many other things. The latest pandemic of winter-writing-fever should now be in remission and this years flock of moustache’s wither and curl beneath the ministrations of the razor blade, gone until next year’s season. The end of November sees a return to normality, we are now safely out of this autumnal twilight zone. The normality we now enter is of course a sham. For the normality we now embrace is that of tinsel and snow and cheery faces, of panicked buying and dashing hither and thither to find just the right material expression of our love to foist upon family and friends. With such a prospect in store part of me will miss November.
The end of November brings with it the close of Pictonaut Challenge number 15, the sci-fi bonanza of The Grid.
The Rogue Verbumancer 