GUILTY PLEASURES (?)

GUILTY PLEASURES (?)
Couple of idyllic days spent down in Sydney with Karen, sis-in-law, Lez and her fiancé, Paul. Sublime. Mostly.
It was all about fireworks (that paradox - wanted to see the famous Sydney NYE pyrotechnics yet abhor crowds and have issues with the effect of fireworks on animals) - bucket list stuff versus that mentioned.
And while the fireworks display was memorable and the sense of community synergy palpable across a sway of ethnic diversity (the view on TV would have eclipsed what we actually saw though), all of the questionable aspects rose to the surface and, for me at least, assumed prominence and sadly remained as the lasting taste.
The utter bedlam leaving the place smacked of a city that no longer cared now that the cash had been counted and the 12 minute crescendo was over. For a country that is ordinarily so regulated, organised and safety obsessed, the withdrawal of hundreds of thousands of people from the public viewing sites over unlit kerbs, plants, obstacles and a sea of garbage, was a case of - every-man-for-himself (in this age of PC fucktartedness - this applies to females too, as it always has). In short, the officials, mounted cops et-al really didn't give a shit as to who, how or why we stumbled out of the various venues. They'd had a long day. We all had. Just go.
Oh, and happy new year...yawn.
Make no mistake, there was the usual upbeat sense of celebration (for many) and the ubiquitous doof-doof cacophony that passes as a contemporary ritual soundtrack, was thrumming in the background. But I couldn't help feeling, the people (the majority of them who began to head awkwardly exit wise as soon as the last pyrotechnical reflection had faded from view) were exuding an overwhelming sense of relief. But glad that what was over? The event, the year, both? Who knew? But people just wanted to get out of there.
As did the flocks of flying foxes who'd been terrified into flight by the booming explosions and light show.
Which got me to thinking of the thousands of animals unable to quit the city environs, pets and wildlife and feral creatures collectively. They must have been terrified beyond measure. And for what? 12 minutes of multicoloured incendiary displays along a stretch of the river accompanied by loud, percussive blasts so that we could all get our aws and oohs on while flicking through several thousand selfies and a shitload of booze and food that we ordinarily would avoid in those given quantities at those inflated prices.
It's an arbitrary line in the chronological sands of time that we have drawn to mark the "end" of this solar cycle. We could just as well have drawn it at the end of any other seasonal quarter or Gregorian month - we just happened to choose December (originally the tenth month of the year - it's that arbitrary) and now we celebrate the closure of that cycle and the commencement of another in the hope that we may be able to change things about ourselves, many of which we've probably just perpetuated during the ritual annual closure event, euphemistically called New Year.
Which begs the question - why can't we just be better, kinder people all the time?
If we were, we would be lighting a simple ritual flame on the Harbour Bridge, perhaps, donating all the taxpayers cash to worthwhile humanitarian endeavours and certainly not terrifying the bejesus out of the animals we purport to love so much with our cacophonic explosive light show - all 12 minutes of it.
I came away from it all feeling relieved yet empty. Guilty. Guilty pleasures? No, not even that. Just like it was a checked box that could have and should have had another label next to it.
I won't be doing it again and while I don't imagine anyone in Sydney City Council is going to cry off their famous NYE event any time soon, I certainly won't be supporting it in years to come.
The surprise bonus - both Karen and I, caught up in the swarm mentality of the occasion, completely forgot our own wedding anniversary. We woke up this morning to this wonderful surprise and the quiet sparkle in my beautiful wife's eyes outshines any fireworks display on Earth.
Subliminally I had felt the sense of occasion (not new year, something more intensely visceral) the day before and had bought her a stunning opal ring. I don't know why.
At least I didn't.
I do now.
It was important.
The other stuff is not.

ODE TO A CHOOK

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

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.

THE SPIRAL STRAND - CHAPTER THREE - Jim

CHAPTER THREE
Jim

Fizz, or more accurately Franklin Fitzgerald, like all persons in my life hadn't arrived there just by chance. Synchronicity was a force in which I placed much faith but I had no truck with chance - things/events were pre-ordained in my worldview but the paths we walked were exactly like the strands on a spiderweb. Let me explain briefly:
There's this big spiderweb see - like it represents all pathways of life and the strands extend all the way outward to infinity while they also emanate from a central point. The radiating strands represent every possible aspect of creation and these are held together by a single spiral strand that interconnects them all, commencing from the centre and spiralling outward in an ever-expanding arc forever...
So we decide to manifest in the reality that we know (the spiderweb) and we choose a pathway to the centre (a strand) and we commence our journey. One pathway may be called Science and science takes you to the centre sure but the other strands called Religion, Satanism, Biology, Fantasy, Insanity, whatever your choice, also lead to the centre. All paths lead to the centre but they just as well lead away from it. And as we move along our chosen pathway, we are constantly meeting up with the spiral strand that magically links all systems and choices. So while we may be walking the insanity path, we can always take a detour on the spiral strand to wherever we wish - sanity and reason for example. And the people we meet on the journey are either on the chosen pathway or the spiral strand and they are there to teach us something even if it is simply how much we can dislike someone.
That's Jim's life analogy and I have yet to discover another system or philosophy that makes more sense. Everything exists in the spiderweb and has validity as a choice or experience but nothing exists without the validation of everything else and everything is linked to everything else. If you see what I mean. In other words - no system or expression of life is better than another nor can it exist without all the other system/s. I call it the everything is everywhere all the time philosophy and it works for me. Time is expressed the same way. You can move through time in any direction and its only a matter of choice how you do it.
Most people eventually find a strand that works for them and they travel along it to the centre, deviating off onto the spiral from time to time but invariably returning to the familiar. More daring people start on one and travel the spiral to a different strand and travel that route for a while hopping between strands on the spiral link until they reach the centre.
And then there are people like Fizz who aren't on a main strand at all - they travel the spiral for the whole fucking journey touching every strand innumerable times on the way so they experience tiny snippets of everything for the briefest of moments. It could be called the schizophrenic strand but I like to think of it as the Fizz Phenomenon or FP. People on the FP have really short attention spans and don't do well at school. Mothers bombard them with Ritalin or have them home schooled or just consider them impossible to teach like Basenji dogs learning obedience training - yeah right!
But FP's are the most interesting people on the planet. Why should they engage in other people's single strand worldview when they are moving between everyone's reality all the time?
You see, my spiderweb philosophy explains everything. Despite this, I still get surprised by FP's when I encounter them. Fizz was no exception.
He simply walked up to me in a coffee shop and sat opposite me, engaging me with his curious blue eyes.
His elongated face was styled like a Philip Bond illustration – a disproportionately large head on a thin, tapering neck - straight out of 2000AD, limp strands of soft sandy coloured hair bobbing across his forehead as he moved. And Fizz always moved. Fizz never stayed still - ever. Even when he slept (as I was later to find out) he twisted and turned or moaned and twitched or spoke or just rolled around. Stillness was to Fizz as Kryptonite was to Clark Kent. Fizz needed life to flow through him like the ever-moving shark relied on the water through his gills. Fizz was in flux.
He reminded me of an avatar I'd seen portrayed once - an Ascended Master - one of those religious paintings from the Renaissance all soft and mystical like. Could have been the Count St Germaine, Sananda - any one of those hypnotic countenances.
And he was dressed as curiously as his manifest energy: shocking-pink long-sleeved grandpa vest beneath a wrinkled ash-grey smock forming the topping to threadbare 501's that boasted patches, the origins and multiplicity of which defied description but melded into the form of a pair of pants only Fizz could have created or found.
"You're not what you seem..." he said cryptically through the rising steam of a skinny cappuccino.
I feigned aloofness.
"You a psychology major?" I responded. We were in a University town. This loon was probably on some new designer narcotic. I was nerdy enough to be part of the trip.
"I'm forty two," he said as if that clarified everything. "I'm not what I seem either. But I live on the spiral..."
That got me. He saw the stiffening of my fingers around the mug and the involuntary wrinkling of eyebrows.
He smiled. "Gotcha."
"Who the fuck are you?" I asked. Nothing could have prepared me for what he'd just said. "Explain the spiral..."
"I see into people," he continued. "Like I see into you... Your worldview is quite refreshingly free from guilt and you see life like a..."  He paused.
"Like a what?" I prompted wondering why I was even talking to this strange dude. But his disarming peculiarity had hooked me - I was squirming on the hook.
He sipped the coffee, forming a smile through the foam on his upper lip.
"Like a spider's web," he said, scanning my face for the awe he knew would be there.
I hunched forward conspiratorially, as if unseen forces were eavesdropping on this bizarre encounter. Why would they be? Why was our autopilot instinct so defensive? Was there some cellular incipient memory prompting us to return to the lower chakras and simply survive first then ask questions later?
"How the fuck do you know that?" I hissed. I hadn't shared those thoughts with anyone. "Who are you?"
The remains of the cappuccino was quaffed and an absent pink cuff  mopped up the foam moustache.
"Frederick Franklin Fitzgerald at your service - Fizz. Fizz to my friends," he said with a pseudo serious look in his eyes, extending a foam-flecked paw expecting a reciprocal companionly shake.
"Okay, Fizz is your name, buddy but who are you?" I asked ignoring the horizontal hand.
"So damn suspicious, Jim. So defensive..."
"Wouldn't you be if the roles were reversed?" I said. He knew my name?
He stowed the hand below the table and rocked back on the bench. He began to move in a systematic rocking motion, backward and forward reminding me of a friend’s autistic child who frequently and inexplicably disappeared in the same way, sometimes banging his head against the wardrobe door over and over again in about the same cadence as my visitor’s movements.
I shivered.
Fizz’s eyes had glazed over at the outset of this activity, far away – absent.
Just as suddenly, he returned from this momentary hiatus to say, "Hell, I don't rightly know about that," Pause. "Y'see I'm in as much of a quandary as you. But for different reasons."
"How do you know my life philosophy - um - Fizz?" I pressed, skirting the crypticism with which he chose to respond.
"Let's just say I have inner vision. It's my gift or curse - just like yours is thievery..."
I gulped on my own coffee almost choking as I swallowed.
"Can we get out of here?" I said, rising from my chair. "We need to take this away from here..."
We did. We left the coffee shop and hit the mall where the cacophonic hubbub offered my jangling nerves a measure of anonymous security.
I steered him to the fountain in Mandela Square. The disproportionate statue of Madiba towered over us, static and much more devoid of animation than I'm sure the sculptor intended. It was a fucking horrible piece and had I been Mandela, I'd have had the prick redo it until it looked like me, exhibited some form of sensitivity and was at least in proportion. Curiously perhaps the old man had liked it. Every time I set foot in the square I took a spare moment to hate it.
I wasn't sure what I was feeling toward my recently established acquaintance, however.
"Talk to me about the spiral," I hissed at him over the noise of the dancing fountain. "What do you mean by that? And where do you get off calling me a thief?"
Fizz was still smiling but given the colour that had begun to creep into my face accompanied by a scowl descending my mouth into a portcullis, he pulled his own lips straight and began to talk.
"I told you - I see into people... and things...bit of a curse really but has some merits of course..."
My eyebrows descended into deeper vees as I augmented the already established scowl.
"Okay already," he tutted. "I hang out at the Mocca Jive quite a bit and your aura kinda intrigued me. I try not to invade people's space but you have a very curious vibe about you so I kinda found myself probing. It just kinda happens sometimes...
"And I saw that you were - well - not what you made out to be - let me say nearly all of us aren't - but you were pretending on purpose. You were leading a real double life and that intrigued me..."
I'd lost the scowl by now and was mesmerised by his soft drawl.
"Go on," I urged.
"I locked onto your thoughts once or twice at the coffee shop and then got really excited..."
"Excited?"
"Yeah for sure. I saw you picturing the whole spider's web thing in your mind - y'know your worldview. And that just blew me away because it made so much sense of how I am and why I experience what I do."
I didn't know whether to feel violated by his psychic voyeurism or flattered at the complimentary way in which he perceived my life philosophy. I guess I was experiencing a little of both.
"Explain," I said.
"Well, Jim, I travel the spiral strand and never really spend any kind of time on the main ones. It just kinda made sense to me y'know. But more than that - it just feels right."
I didn't know what to say. It was all too strange.
"And besides," he said, "I can help you."
"Help me?" I sneered. "I don't need your help. Help to do what?"
He was smiling again.
"Help you to get rid of all that valuable inconvenient stuff you dunno what to do with."
"What - I - um - how?"
"How many times do I have to tell you - I see into people. I can find the right person to fence it off. Just got to get the right vibes and bingo we're home free..."
It was insane, I know, but he'd just proven to me that he could do what he said. And the "we" he'd elected to use clearly indicated that there was a budding symbiosis in the offing.
"Exactly," he said. "Symbiosis. I can do what you cannot and vice-versa so why shouldn't we both gain from it?"
And that was my first encounter with Fizz.

THE SPIRAL STRAND - CHAPTER TWO - Jim

CHAPTER TWO
Jim

The Gallbladder incident was the seminal moment in a life of mediocrity, transforming me from non-achiever to untouchable in a heartbeat. From that point onward I would never be accused. I would hone my skills, whatever shape they took, and ensure that I was above and beyond reproof.
I had no idea then, of course, that this pathway would meander through the garden of illegal temptation and follow the banks of the River Theft in the dictatorial kingdom of Capitalist Excess.
Yet through this opulent terrain it led me. And being somewhat opportunistic and daring of spirit, I learned how to lightly lift things that didn't belong to me, adeptly acquire goods, professionally purloin and pilfer pickings of a personal persuasion previously possessed by privileged people. And more than asinine alliteration I found myself curiously inspired by my actions - a dog that had just mastered a new trick and had to do it repeatedly rather than simply wag a glaringly obvious tail.
That was how my life of crime began but the route it followed was filled with glamour and excitement, the like of which far surpassed the rush I'd gleaned from any drugs sampled through my anarchic adolescence. And there had been a few.
But the best cocaine, albeit hyper-inspirational at times, fell way short of the heart-thumping waves of anticipation I'd experienced time and again as I stole furtively through a manicured garden on a moonless night clad in matte black and packing the tools of my trade. This sensation only grew as I scaled a drainpipe to a first floor balcony and silently alighted on synthetic soles that failed to raise even the slightest of squeaks on the highly polished flagstone finish. It had taken months of searching before I found shoes with grip and no groan. To this day this remains a trade secret as I'm sure the designer hadn't aimed his application toward activities quite so nefarious.
Then the thrill of gaining entry to "secure" buildings and bypassing sophisticated intrusion systems thanks to intelligence, research and after time - experience gained in-situ - remains my all time high. Aside perhaps from startling sex experienced from time to time with certain select partners who shared my passion for things - shall we say - different. But burglary of this style was an orgasm you could have on your own without touching yourself and it ran on and on. Put you in the zone.

The fruits of my labours had returned wealth far beyond that of my peers, colleagues and friends. As far as the world at large was concerned, Jim Juno was a broker of sorts who freelanced in stockmarket enterprises using other people's money to grow wealth while extracting generous commissions for his efforts. I mean, let's be honest, that sounds totally plausible doesn't it? And it is. But I didn't. I couldn't. Not that I didn't know how. I just didn't want to...
It did, however, involve countless hours of research and I even put myself through a financial futures course at a local college so I could display a diploma on my office wall pronouncing my meritorious graduation achievement from this little known school of commerce. I could talk the game you see. I followed the markets and to be honest (and I am - I steal, I don't lie) I even dabbled in the world of speculative investment returning fairly admirable results for an amateur. I followed the stock market so I could advise or counsel mates who were always on the cadge for free tips, intelligence they would usually have to buy from genuine stockbrokers with far less integrity than a self-confessed thief such as myself.
The cover worked and I could believably work from home armed with little more than a laptop, a few well labelled files and a mobile link to the Internet. No-one asked about my clients. They were private individuals and their personal investment information was sacrosanct. Even my most probing of friends realised this and grudgingly respected my wealth as it grew over the years, never suspecting for a moment that I was robbing the elite blind as voraciously as a piranha with an eating disorder.
By the time I was twenty three I had amassed a considerable amount of money and resellable trinkets, many of which weren't even reported missing as they themselves had clearly been obtained through questionable means.
This lifestyle forced me to study art and keep abreast of high societal foibles - what was in vogue, who was buying what, whose names appeared on the boards of which companies and where their personal passions lay. I got into the heads of my victims and even befriended a few. I could quite easily break bread one day with a corporate executive with fingers in many pies while on another day I would be discreetly removing a priceless Gauguin from the frame in his drawing room. It was business not personal and I never robbed anyone who couldn't afford the money or whose portfolio was on shaky ground.
The insights I gained into the murky world of blue chip commerce and ersatz sophistication was invaluable and I could easily flit between the worlds I had created - the high flying yuppies and the childhood friendships - like flicking a switch.
The biggest problem I had ever faced was establishing a reliable network for passing off the stolen goods. Money was kept (obviously), bonds traded, certain goods hoiked on e-bay and other more obscure Internet outlets. But artwork, coins, collectables and jewelry were another problem altogether.
Until I met Fizz.

THE SPIRAL STRAND - PART ONE - A LIFE OF CRIME

PART ONE
A LIFE OF CRIME

CHAPTER ONE

Jim

It all started at school when I'd been told I couldn't attend the rock music concert. That sucked.

It was the only time that the musos got a chance to play stuff other than classical pieces, which while being - well - classic, bored the shit out of the average teenage boy who'd just discovered Hendrix and Zappa. No offence to Wolfgang and Ludwig and the various Johan Sebastians who'd penned many a fine tune - even Jimi and Frank would admit to that - but I used to think they'd have taken a different direction if they'd had access to a Stratocaster with a whammy bar rather than tinkling on harpsichords in musty drawing rooms hung with heavily draped brocade in burgundy paisley. But hey, who was I?

Fact was, I'd been framed. Just like one of those pasty-faced tarts in the paintings in said musty drawing rooms; bemused ladies with more petticoats than virtue, witnessing, with the same dispassionate expression, each musical recital or the music teacher rogering the eager pupil on the velvetine piano stool. If Leonardo had only done a full length portrait of El Giaconda I reckon he'd have been dubbed one of the earliest pornographers. You might think that's just down to my own twisted mind but I swear the Mona Lisa wore the same expression as my ex-girlfriend Mary Manson when I was diddling her pink bits with my snakelike tongue. Still, we'll never know unless they miraculously turn up his secret sketch book - the one he used to practice proportion and human anatomy - nudge, nudge, wink, wink...

Speculation aside, I was in the frame, snookered and fitted up.

Someone had been smoking in the boys' room and no one was owning up to the deed. No one was being freed up from class either for the first and spectacular high school rock concert starring our own budding virtuosos. And it would have remained a deadlock if old Gallbladder Gilbert, our Maths teacher hadn't received the crumpled note from an anonymous snitch. 

He unfurled it with relish and as the ferrety eyes scanned the words before him, I could feel the perspiration trickling into my arse crack like an icy eel of guilt. Which is weird because I hadn't done anything to merit the discomfort. But there's something that tells you you're fucked even before the accuser makes eye contact with you or hisses your name which is precisely what Gallbladder did as the gnarled fist dropped to his thigh, telltale flashes of feint-ruled exercise paper pushing between the folds of flesh.

I heard my name spoken but I didn't register the implications of the sound as if someone was asking me for directions in a foreign language. It was only when it was repeated with the balance of the sentence - a command - that my synapses fired all at once like an anti-aircraft salvo on an average day in the Middle East.

"Jim Juno, come to the front of the class and bring your rucksack with you!"

"Sir?" I croaked. "Me, sir?"

It was pathetic but what could I do?  

What was more demoralising? Being framed as a filthy smoker? Or having homo Pirelly filters planted in my rucksack?

Either way and both ways it looked bad and I had a good idea who'd done the deed.

Elizabeth Miller, troll bitch from hell's shithouse!

My discomfort was amplified by the weird dynamic experienced by most people when the Damoclean finger of guilt veers away from their own little personal bubble and condemns some other poor sap thereby creating a knee-jerk judgement in the exonerated whether the patsy is guilty or not. Analysis and logical thinking is eclipsed by relief. Absurdity takes over. "Glad it's him not me" kicks in. "He always looked a bit dodgy anyway...." is the thought pattern created in the regional collective unconscious of teflon, omnipotent peers.

All this energy exacerbates the situation and seeps into the demeanour of the accuser at some subtle subliminal level.

The pack of Pirelly being crushed by Gallbladder's knuckly digits was akin to digging a condom out of my arse in front of a lynch mob of homophobic psychopaths. 

"Those aren't mine!" I said weakly. It was true but singularly unconvincing. 

Gallbladder beetled his hairy caterpillar brows at me.

"This is, however, your school bag." It wasn't a question so much as the sword that severs the last sinew holding up the exhausted bull's head. Unlike the bull though - I had never been in a position to gore the embroidered performer in the pantaloons. I'd had the butcher's cutting schematic tattooed on my hide even before the matador had entered the bullring.

"Yes," I said.

"Yes was it, Juno?" the nauseating little fart mocked.

"Yes sir," I said. "It's my bag but..."

He raised a knobbled claw to silence me while pantomiming his speech to the class.

"Let me guess - someone planted the evidence then tipped me off to your crime... How am I doing, Juno?"

When it's presented in such a ridiculous parody of reality then you're on a hiding to nothing. People want to believe the bullshit. People love entertainment especially when it's at someone else's expense.

"I guess," I sighed. "I don't smoke those..."

I faltered as his eyes lit up like a slot machine hitting jackpot.

"So you admit you smoke - just not those?"

The slimy fuck was enjoying this and judging by the partially suppressed tittering, so was the audience.

Fuck it, I thought, I might as well get it over with.

"Yes sir," I said, "I smoke forty or fifty a day when I've got no doob or smack or can't get my hands on a half-jack of brandy. It's just that my home life as a sex-toy for sexually repressed homosexual maths teachers is so stressful that I have to do something to relax me. Is my latest Hustler magazine still in my bag too?"

I don't know why I did it but it was worth the single moment of awe that enveloped the classroom. The swing from miscreant to martyr was instantaneous from the peer perspective. The effect my little outburst was having on Gallbladder was even more gratifying. His complexion was shifting through a spectrum of colours that would have done tribute to a gay convention's paint swatch booklet. The chameleon impression was accompanied by bulging eyes, engorged neck veins, perspiration beads on a rumpled expanse of forehead and a deep rumbling from within his carcass, a sound not unlike a drain gurgling as it struggles to flush excessive effluent. It was truly beautiful.

THE SPIRAL STRAND - PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE
Jim

I've been told I'm not a nice guy. That's probably true. The fact that I don't care would seem to reinforce the evaluation.
It's not that I go out of my way to hurt people - not in the physical sense anyway - but I steal from them so that does kinda hurt I guess. But where's the harm when the victims can afford it and the stuff is just sitting there looking pretty?
My mom always used to say people would find ways to justify anything they did and the more they did it, the more they would justify it. I'd love to say that was a load of bollocks because my mom was delusional but fact is - I can't because it's true.
From politics to religion to wife-bashing, the perpetrators all have arguments to support their case. Mostly anyway.
Me, I'm no different. Instead of languishing in squalor, living off state handouts and drinking myself into oblivion every day, I feed off the private sector like a ramora on the underbelly of a lazy shark.
Maybe you think that's a bad analogy. I mean there's supposed to be a symbiosis in those kinds of relationships but if you offer me some latitude here, I do provide a service. While I might not be freeing the mink and manure sharks of parasites, I am liberating them in another sense - and I don't just mean by purloining unnecessary assets - I am unburdening them from onerous attachment.
Yeah, I know. Sounds like bullshit and probably is but when you see how these sparkling-eyed socialites get hooked on material trinkets, it really shifts their focus from the more profound aspects of existence such as their emotional and spiritual needs. They're so wrapped up in the outer image that their inner selves are starving. It's a nauseating circus of nips, tucks, sports cars, lavish houses, designer labels, over-refined foods that are cooked by underpaid servants and expansive, unvisited gardens that could provide accommodation to thousands of underprivileged souls across the country.
And it's not just sour grapes either. They've got it so I wanna take it away. No. The backlash from disgruntled men who've cultivated a hatred for all things opulent and blame it on the previous regime, has resulted in mindless rape and murder whereas I rob the rich and it takes them until the next time they check the safe before they find out. I don't need to unload y'see. Even though the old man, I’m told – he left before I even knew him – wallowed in a morass of loathing and self-pity for most of his life, my mom still managed to give me a solid upbringing with a balanced set of values. Values, that is, that conform to a middle class, middle of the road, don't challenge the system kind of mindset.
I watched and I learned and ultimately I chose.
Not a career in medicine, nor in law (not in the conventional sense that is), nor in construction or in engineering (although I was adept in many of those areas) - I chose a career in property: other people's. And I acquired it through unlawful albeit creative, innovative methodology.
I was a thief. A damn good one. Or had been until now.
Let me tell you how I got here.
Where?
Standing over a corpse in a darkened bedroom - someone else's bedroom - with all escape routes cut off.
 Fuck!