Karen talked me into the idea of adopting some battery hens which, through their inability to "produce" sufficient quantities of eggs for our ravenous species, were destined to be exterminated by the thousand as they were deemed not to be worthy of life...
Such is the nature of our society's cold, denialist underbelly. We rescued four of them and there were many other compassionate souls who did the same thing. God bless them all.
This isn't a rant, however, about our widespread and disturbing lack of humanity, it's about how I, once skeptical of the notion of 4 chooks scrabbling around our backyard and wreaking chaos among the plants and plopping a neverending supply of poultry poo about the place - it's actually about how captivated I became as I met each of our girls and got to know their little wiles and foibles. Enter, Harriet, Hilda, Hester and Hermione...
Their endearing personalities soon shone through after they had settled into the refurbished chook shed, were ensured that they were free from draughts and predators (7 bewildered cats notwithstanding) and when they realised they actually had freedom - freedom to roam the garden, walk where they pleased, hurdling little fences, flapping their small wings as they endeavoured to propel themselves forward on their pumping, running legs for the breakfast apple shreds or lettuce leaves, they just became a part of our world and our family.
None more so than little Hermione, who was the slightest of the four but by far the most approachable and we were getting to a stage where the original innate cowering squat that hens adopt when they are startled or when you tower over them, Hermione was starting to enjoy a little cuddle and fuss whenever I would let them out in the morning prior to them haring after me as the breakfast treat giant. I would pick her up and give her a kiss, tickle her chest and stroke her neck - she enjoyed the attention.
In short, I was really bonding with these delightful, amusing and affectionate little beings.
It was to my stark horror, however, that I received a distressed call from Karen today informing me of little Hermione's demise in an elevated fish pond in the form of an old bath. The poor girl somehow hopped up there, fell in and simply could not get out.
Karen was too late to save her and I have just completed the distressing task of laying our beautiful little girl to rest in one of her favourite scratching spots in the garden.
A hydrangea has been planted over her remains as a memorial tribute - life from life...
The other chooks paid their respects to their sister and I could not hold back the flood of tears as I laid her shimmering copper body to rest as reverently as I could.
It may sound so very silly for a grown man to be this distraught over a damn chicken - I mean we slaughter millions of them every day for God's sake... and that's just the thing - we don't do that for God's sake - we do it for our sake and if we only took one moment to get to know the creatures we share this planet with from a bond of love and companionship rather than as mere commodities - product, I believe the planet and the human race would be the richer for it.
I am leaking tears for this wonderful, harmless, affectionate creature who deserved a life of freedom, companionship, compassion and love and we certainly gave her that in bundles in the latter stage of her life.
Rest peacefully, little hen, we loved you dearly and are forever grateful for the simple joy you brought to our lives.
With love...
US
Friday 21 September 2018
Thursday 6 September 2018
THE SPIRAL STRAND - CHAPTER FOUR - Jim
CHAPTER FOUR
Jim
My association with Fizz grew exponentially from that point onward.
We met at least three times a week following that first encounter and I came to realise just what a phenomenal power this guy possessed.
It was like something out of the X-Men – a mutant superpower – seeing into other people’s heads.
While on the topic of X-Things, I’d grown up on a diet of tv shows like The X-Files and Fringe and had been familiar with the background on black ops projects like MK Ultra, Paperclip and all of the famous so-called conspiracy theories that accompanied them.
There had been a plethora of books on these topics that I’d read, about remote-viewing, telepathic connections – the experiments that the Nazi scientists had conducted on twins during World War II to see if they could unlock the secrets of their obvious synchronicitous relationships, research which, we were told, had continued unabated when certain key German scientists had been granted asylum by the US government.
There had been the experimentation with psychotropic drugs in an attempt to understand our link between the physical shells we occupied and something less corporeal that older writers such as Dennis Wheatley had explored in his occult adventure novels expounding on astral travel and suchlike – all tied in with the concept of remote viewing and being consciously distant from oneself.
I’d always found paradoxical the idea that governments, intent on promoting an exclusively materialist scientific worldview that brooked no discussion around the possibility of anything whatsoever existing outside of that solid, matter-based paradigm, had the brass balls to involve themselves in research that focused specifically on the very “pseudoscience” they took such pains to dismiss out of hand.
It was clear they promoted one agenda for the rabble and explored a world using an entirely different set of rules for themselves. One didn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to perceive this, one simply had to live on planet Earth in this era and watch what was being spun through the media as factual reporting. It beggared credulity.
It certainly beggared mine.
I’d walked both paths though – had been the hardcore materialist skeptic, fringing on misogyny – had something, I’m sure, to do with being brought up in a male dominated society that saw physical might and domination as empowerment when it quite clearly was anything but.
I discovered the truth of this illusion during my thirties when it came home to me (in a drunken reverie, it has to be said) that the truest, most profound associations I’d had through my life had all been with women – they’d been more substantive relationships that hadn’t relied on muscle-flexing and seeing who could piss the farthest.
In the same epiphany I realised just how shallow my male friendships had been, almost to a man…not quite but damn close.
It wasn’t merely a moment of enlightenment – it was fucking depressing because it spoke volumes about me – volumes, full of chapters and pages that I didn’t really like.
When you get right down to it – in any of life’s revelatory moments – the common denominator is always you – or, in this case, me.
Damn!
And boozing didn’t help.
Had it not been for the singular focus of my alter-ego’s nefarious and insular activities, I don’t think there’d have been any core on which to rebuild myself but I reasoned that since I’d discovered I was a douche, it said something positive and indicated a chance to reinvent myself. So I did.
I wore a mask, like some fictional superhero (sans cape and spandex) for a great deal of my life but there was no reason I couldn’t evolve and adapt myself into a more wholesome human even if I was a cunning thief by night.
Everyone has to have secrets and mine was one that had to be kept – my very livelihood relied upon it. Besides, as much as I might hold disdain for the Jim Juno who’d run with the rat pack of douchery through the late teen and twenties, I kinda liked the Jim Juno cat burglar persona I’d created and there was no reason not to think that that might just be the real me. Hell, it was when I was my happiest…
When this revelation had crystallised within me, I began to read voraciously – so-called esoterica which explored the realm of the unexplained, inexplicable and overtly rejected theories of people who, unlike the establishment scientists – the cautiously compliant ones – elected to explore every avenue of Earthly and unearthly phenomena that the conventionalists couldn’t or simply wouldn’t explain. If it didn’t fit the established paradigm, it was rejected out of hand, evidence notwithstanding, which to my mind (and any scientific mind worth a wank) is about as unscientific an approach as one can take.
So I’d read about people like Fizz but as with most of us – had never met one. Until I met one – him, Fizz.
While initially straining all credulity, it was soon very apparent that he was no hoaxer. He could do exactly what he said he could do and demonstrated it time and again.
It started in the coffee shop but as that had been a common haunt for some time, I arranged to meet him in diverse locations where I’d plant a stooge, unknown to Fizz…except that it never was.
On one occasion, he walked in the door, clocked the stooge having a skinny cappuccino at a remote booth and asked me why I’d arranged this deception and that I’d be even more annoyed if I had any inkling of how envious the stooge was of my inexplicable good fortune. He then went on to relate a story to me involving the conspiring parties, a dark and dingy memory that we’d never shared – like that.
He did this on several occasions where there was no possibility of preemptively researching the background of my co-conspirator of the moment.
It was empirical. I could not catch him out and I had to be cautious what I thought around him too – it’s hard not to feel like you’re being tested the whole time.
As scary as all that was, it was irrationally satisfying – it confirmed unequivocally that it could be done and the materialists were all a bunch of dogmatic myopes. It saved heaps of time in online debates which I simply avoided now. With living, breathing proof beside me, there really was no need. No longer would I require to debate with those excruciatingly arrogant and annoying militant materialists who brooked no discussion on any subject involving invisible forces which were immediately assigned to the domain of impossibility, delusion, fraud and superstition. Fizz kinda fucked that all up for them and it always made me smile – probably in that smarmy, self-satisfied way that the materialists did – only I wasn’t smug about my “theory” – I had living proof – so fuckem!
It reminded me of the famous Rowan Atkinson sketch where he’s playing the devil and welcoming a new intake of souls to Hell. He’s splitting the intake into various groups and one of them is atheists – “Okay, atheists,” he says, “atheists – over here, please.
“You must be feeling like a right bunch of nitwits….”
Then sotto-voce, “…never mind….”
Beautiful.
Here was Fizz and here was I and here was our partnership.
It had flourished and grown over a period of twelve months where all the “difficult” stock was moved effortlessly through a network of contacts that he’d established.
Another bizarre and handy facet to his gift was that he could “read” people who were online or speaking to him via phone – as long as there was some connection – he could read the people.
He interfaced through electromagnetic fields somehow and I suppose just as our usual human musings are holographic in nature with an audio track as and when appropriate – well this strangely gifted man could do that limitlessly.
I asked him how he quelled the chatter – there was chatter, right? There had to be chatter? We all have our own internal dialogue which can be exhausting and relentless at times but when you’re reading all the people around you – that must be beyond comprehension.
Again, my movie analogies drives to the Bruce Almighty scenario where, Bruce (Jim Carrey) becomes God for a while and the prayers of countless people all over the planet are assailing his senses in one cacophonic barrage incessantly.
“Is it like that for you?” I asked, having just concluded the movie analogy.
He smiled.
“Kind of….but I have learned to zone out chatter much like one does when meditating – I can pigeon hole it and stash into a soundproof box in my mind..”
“All of them?”
“I build an internal deflection system that channels the hubbub directly into Pandora’s box, as I like to call it. Then I can focus on what interests me.”
“You could always do this?”
No, it took time. Years, in fact. Initially, I was put on meds to zone me out – the doctors thought I was schizophrenic, which isn’t too far from the reality, I guess. It’s just a different portal into the field of the collective unconscious. And it’s ugly – fuck man – a lot of it is so very, very ugly…”
“ I can imagine,” I breathed. “You never really know people do you?”
“Most don’t. If I look – I do – sometimes it’s better not knowing…”
I was silent for a bit.
“Can you ever switch it off entirely? When you sleep, of course…”
“When I sleep I can be more active than ever but as my time-space relationship is different to this physical realm – it’s not tiring at all. It’s refreshing.
“The same I imagine for anyone who gets a good night’s sleep. We can have wild, weird, incredibly active dreams but we still come out of them refreshed. That realm is paradoxical and it’s limitless as is our capacity to exist in it…”
I didn’t quite understand what he was saying but I got the gist.
Fizz was equally invaluable in the setting up of jobs when we didn’t just case a joint, to use the classic old robber parlance, but we’d “case” the marks as well.
Establish their routines, habits, favoured haunts then hang out in those places, close enough for Fizz to engage remotely and pick up the essence of their lives, the secrets and most gratifyingly – what they would be doing with their ill-gotten gains or what their PIN codes and passwords were. As I say, invaluable information.
Once the intel had been obtained, I’d plan the job which relied on my skill and stealth to bypass security systems, guard dogs, security personnel and suchlike. All the telepathy in the world didn’t help you scale a drainpipe or sneak past a shift of guards when the real stealing had to be done.
We optimised our collective skillsets and the crooked cabal grew in efficiency and fiscal worth very rapidly.
Would it ever be enough? I wondered.
Sure, at some point.
But where was that point?
Fizz had moved into a more lavish apartment in the affluent northern suburbs of Johannesburg, a penthouse to be exact, something he’d never aspired to in his life before but, as I had gently pointed out – he had become a successful investment manager in my organisation and it would look strange if he remained in a cheesy little bedsit in Rosettenville, the squat in which he’d crashed for the last four years.
He had the suits and the car, the social circle (into which I’d insinuated him) so it remained only for the address to be appropriate now.
And paradoxically, as hypocritical as that may sound (and, of course, it is) one has to assume the mantle of the animal with which one is coexisting. For some reason, they begin to trust you more when you’re one of them – at least in appearance.
Our private lives were another story though.
From four thirty on Friday through to Monday at 9 am, our lives were our own – unless there had been a heist planned that suited a weekend timeslot – then we would work “overtime” to get the job done.
Opportunity is everything in this game.
But I did prefer to work during the week and when I say work I mean rob and steal. When the other corporate folk were doing their own version of robbing and stealing from their clients and the general public and smiling all the while as they did so.
It might have been over within thirteen months – I had amassed enough wealth here and abroad to live in luxury anywhere I chose to hang my hat but Fizz had found a delectable score that got me intrigued.
It was a challenge all right and if there was anyone I knew who was up for a challenge it was yours truly.
And so the preparations began.
Jim
My association with Fizz grew exponentially from that point onward.
We met at least three times a week following that first encounter and I came to realise just what a phenomenal power this guy possessed.
It was like something out of the X-Men – a mutant superpower – seeing into other people’s heads.
While on the topic of X-Things, I’d grown up on a diet of tv shows like The X-Files and Fringe and had been familiar with the background on black ops projects like MK Ultra, Paperclip and all of the famous so-called conspiracy theories that accompanied them.
There had been a plethora of books on these topics that I’d read, about remote-viewing, telepathic connections – the experiments that the Nazi scientists had conducted on twins during World War II to see if they could unlock the secrets of their obvious synchronicitous relationships, research which, we were told, had continued unabated when certain key German scientists had been granted asylum by the US government.
There had been the experimentation with psychotropic drugs in an attempt to understand our link between the physical shells we occupied and something less corporeal that older writers such as Dennis Wheatley had explored in his occult adventure novels expounding on astral travel and suchlike – all tied in with the concept of remote viewing and being consciously distant from oneself.
I’d always found paradoxical the idea that governments, intent on promoting an exclusively materialist scientific worldview that brooked no discussion around the possibility of anything whatsoever existing outside of that solid, matter-based paradigm, had the brass balls to involve themselves in research that focused specifically on the very “pseudoscience” they took such pains to dismiss out of hand.
It was clear they promoted one agenda for the rabble and explored a world using an entirely different set of rules for themselves. One didn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to perceive this, one simply had to live on planet Earth in this era and watch what was being spun through the media as factual reporting. It beggared credulity.
It certainly beggared mine.
I’d walked both paths though – had been the hardcore materialist skeptic, fringing on misogyny – had something, I’m sure, to do with being brought up in a male dominated society that saw physical might and domination as empowerment when it quite clearly was anything but.
I discovered the truth of this illusion during my thirties when it came home to me (in a drunken reverie, it has to be said) that the truest, most profound associations I’d had through my life had all been with women – they’d been more substantive relationships that hadn’t relied on muscle-flexing and seeing who could piss the farthest.
In the same epiphany I realised just how shallow my male friendships had been, almost to a man…not quite but damn close.
It wasn’t merely a moment of enlightenment – it was fucking depressing because it spoke volumes about me – volumes, full of chapters and pages that I didn’t really like.
When you get right down to it – in any of life’s revelatory moments – the common denominator is always you – or, in this case, me.
Damn!
And boozing didn’t help.
Had it not been for the singular focus of my alter-ego’s nefarious and insular activities, I don’t think there’d have been any core on which to rebuild myself but I reasoned that since I’d discovered I was a douche, it said something positive and indicated a chance to reinvent myself. So I did.
I wore a mask, like some fictional superhero (sans cape and spandex) for a great deal of my life but there was no reason I couldn’t evolve and adapt myself into a more wholesome human even if I was a cunning thief by night.
Everyone has to have secrets and mine was one that had to be kept – my very livelihood relied upon it. Besides, as much as I might hold disdain for the Jim Juno who’d run with the rat pack of douchery through the late teen and twenties, I kinda liked the Jim Juno cat burglar persona I’d created and there was no reason not to think that that might just be the real me. Hell, it was when I was my happiest…
When this revelation had crystallised within me, I began to read voraciously – so-called esoterica which explored the realm of the unexplained, inexplicable and overtly rejected theories of people who, unlike the establishment scientists – the cautiously compliant ones – elected to explore every avenue of Earthly and unearthly phenomena that the conventionalists couldn’t or simply wouldn’t explain. If it didn’t fit the established paradigm, it was rejected out of hand, evidence notwithstanding, which to my mind (and any scientific mind worth a wank) is about as unscientific an approach as one can take.
So I’d read about people like Fizz but as with most of us – had never met one. Until I met one – him, Fizz.
While initially straining all credulity, it was soon very apparent that he was no hoaxer. He could do exactly what he said he could do and demonstrated it time and again.
It started in the coffee shop but as that had been a common haunt for some time, I arranged to meet him in diverse locations where I’d plant a stooge, unknown to Fizz…except that it never was.
On one occasion, he walked in the door, clocked the stooge having a skinny cappuccino at a remote booth and asked me why I’d arranged this deception and that I’d be even more annoyed if I had any inkling of how envious the stooge was of my inexplicable good fortune. He then went on to relate a story to me involving the conspiring parties, a dark and dingy memory that we’d never shared – like that.
He did this on several occasions where there was no possibility of preemptively researching the background of my co-conspirator of the moment.
It was empirical. I could not catch him out and I had to be cautious what I thought around him too – it’s hard not to feel like you’re being tested the whole time.
As scary as all that was, it was irrationally satisfying – it confirmed unequivocally that it could be done and the materialists were all a bunch of dogmatic myopes. It saved heaps of time in online debates which I simply avoided now. With living, breathing proof beside me, there really was no need. No longer would I require to debate with those excruciatingly arrogant and annoying militant materialists who brooked no discussion on any subject involving invisible forces which were immediately assigned to the domain of impossibility, delusion, fraud and superstition. Fizz kinda fucked that all up for them and it always made me smile – probably in that smarmy, self-satisfied way that the materialists did – only I wasn’t smug about my “theory” – I had living proof – so fuckem!
It reminded me of the famous Rowan Atkinson sketch where he’s playing the devil and welcoming a new intake of souls to Hell. He’s splitting the intake into various groups and one of them is atheists – “Okay, atheists,” he says, “atheists – over here, please.
“You must be feeling like a right bunch of nitwits….”
Then sotto-voce, “…never mind….”
Beautiful.
Here was Fizz and here was I and here was our partnership.
It had flourished and grown over a period of twelve months where all the “difficult” stock was moved effortlessly through a network of contacts that he’d established.
Another bizarre and handy facet to his gift was that he could “read” people who were online or speaking to him via phone – as long as there was some connection – he could read the people.
He interfaced through electromagnetic fields somehow and I suppose just as our usual human musings are holographic in nature with an audio track as and when appropriate – well this strangely gifted man could do that limitlessly.
I asked him how he quelled the chatter – there was chatter, right? There had to be chatter? We all have our own internal dialogue which can be exhausting and relentless at times but when you’re reading all the people around you – that must be beyond comprehension.
Again, my movie analogies drives to the Bruce Almighty scenario where, Bruce (Jim Carrey) becomes God for a while and the prayers of countless people all over the planet are assailing his senses in one cacophonic barrage incessantly.
“Is it like that for you?” I asked, having just concluded the movie analogy.
He smiled.
“Kind of….but I have learned to zone out chatter much like one does when meditating – I can pigeon hole it and stash into a soundproof box in my mind..”
“All of them?”
“I build an internal deflection system that channels the hubbub directly into Pandora’s box, as I like to call it. Then I can focus on what interests me.”
“You could always do this?”
No, it took time. Years, in fact. Initially, I was put on meds to zone me out – the doctors thought I was schizophrenic, which isn’t too far from the reality, I guess. It’s just a different portal into the field of the collective unconscious. And it’s ugly – fuck man – a lot of it is so very, very ugly…”
“ I can imagine,” I breathed. “You never really know people do you?”
“Most don’t. If I look – I do – sometimes it’s better not knowing…”
I was silent for a bit.
“Can you ever switch it off entirely? When you sleep, of course…”
“When I sleep I can be more active than ever but as my time-space relationship is different to this physical realm – it’s not tiring at all. It’s refreshing.
“The same I imagine for anyone who gets a good night’s sleep. We can have wild, weird, incredibly active dreams but we still come out of them refreshed. That realm is paradoxical and it’s limitless as is our capacity to exist in it…”
I didn’t quite understand what he was saying but I got the gist.
Fizz was equally invaluable in the setting up of jobs when we didn’t just case a joint, to use the classic old robber parlance, but we’d “case” the marks as well.
Establish their routines, habits, favoured haunts then hang out in those places, close enough for Fizz to engage remotely and pick up the essence of their lives, the secrets and most gratifyingly – what they would be doing with their ill-gotten gains or what their PIN codes and passwords were. As I say, invaluable information.
Once the intel had been obtained, I’d plan the job which relied on my skill and stealth to bypass security systems, guard dogs, security personnel and suchlike. All the telepathy in the world didn’t help you scale a drainpipe or sneak past a shift of guards when the real stealing had to be done.
We optimised our collective skillsets and the crooked cabal grew in efficiency and fiscal worth very rapidly.
Would it ever be enough? I wondered.
Sure, at some point.
But where was that point?
Fizz had moved into a more lavish apartment in the affluent northern suburbs of Johannesburg, a penthouse to be exact, something he’d never aspired to in his life before but, as I had gently pointed out – he had become a successful investment manager in my organisation and it would look strange if he remained in a cheesy little bedsit in Rosettenville, the squat in which he’d crashed for the last four years.
He had the suits and the car, the social circle (into which I’d insinuated him) so it remained only for the address to be appropriate now.
And paradoxically, as hypocritical as that may sound (and, of course, it is) one has to assume the mantle of the animal with which one is coexisting. For some reason, they begin to trust you more when you’re one of them – at least in appearance.
Our private lives were another story though.
From four thirty on Friday through to Monday at 9 am, our lives were our own – unless there had been a heist planned that suited a weekend timeslot – then we would work “overtime” to get the job done.
Opportunity is everything in this game.
But I did prefer to work during the week and when I say work I mean rob and steal. When the other corporate folk were doing their own version of robbing and stealing from their clients and the general public and smiling all the while as they did so.
It might have been over within thirteen months – I had amassed enough wealth here and abroad to live in luxury anywhere I chose to hang my hat but Fizz had found a delectable score that got me intrigued.
It was a challenge all right and if there was anyone I knew who was up for a challenge it was yours truly.
And so the preparations began.
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