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Earth: Boy
Installment One

The boy sat at the table in the kitchen eating cereal, his mother’s laptop open on the table before him, NASA’s website opened to a page about space travel. His mother found him like that. The sun was barely risen and the chill of night still blanketed the world and the birds were singing insanely through the open window.

“It’s a little chilly,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

He never lifted his eyes from the computer screen to see her standing in her grey robe, her hair wet and her face weary, her eyes barely open and bleared with sleep.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“NASA,” he said.

She inhaled and exhaled slowly through solicitous nostrils and walked barefoot across the kitchen linoleum and leaned over the sink to close the window, flicking the lock under the catch and resting her hands on the countertop when she had closed it. She stood like that a moment but she couldn’t tell if he had taken any notice.

“You love your space, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Don’t be smart,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said.

She began to make herself breakfast and while the bagel was toasting, she packed his lunch in the brown paper bags she used now he and his friends were too old for lunch boxes. A sandwich, an apple, crackers, crisp carrot and celery sticks, a small pot of peanut butter for dipping, a cold box drink wrapped in paper towel and tin foil so it wouldn’t sweat and wet the rest. She buttered her toasted bagel and poured a glass of orange juice and, seeing that he had none, poured another. She sat down at the table and set the glass by him and he took it up without looking and drank deeply.

“Thanks?” she said.

“Thanks,” he said, gasping, wiping cold juice from his chin.

“Any news?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” he said. He looked up as she frowned and he added, “We’re still waiting.”

“You’re a devil, child,” she said.

“I can’t help it,” he said. “Dad makes me say it.”

“I know, your dad insists. But you can leave that stuff at his place. When you’re here. You know I never liked it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Just be free. Politeness should be about real kindness and gratitude. Not code words and catch phrases.”

“I’ll tell Dad that,” he said.

“You better not,” she said. “He’ll be here at five-thirty so come home right after school so you have time to get ready. I won’t be home until five so I expect you to be all packed and ready to go.”

“Okay.”

“Just tell your friends you can’t play after school,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Now remember that. You know how he’ll be if you’re a mess when he shows up. It puts him in a bad mood and the ride to his house will be bad.”

“I know.”

“It’s a long ride, you know,” she said.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

“So come home after school and don’t mess around. Get your stuff ready and if you get dirty at school change your clothes and take a shower.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I’m not going to make excuses for you if you set him off,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Sarcasm. You’re already using sarcasm with your mother? Where does the time go,” she muttered. “What are you reading?” she asked.

“Venus,” he said. “The Soviets sent like eighteen missions to Venus in the twentieth century. Isn’t that amazing. They even sent back pictures from the surface before they melted.”

“What does it look like?” she asked.

“Here.” He turned the computer to show her three strips of pixellated photos in black and white, a dull grey surface with nothing but flat broken rocks as far as the horizon, where a tiny rise implied a possible descent on the other side.

“It looks horrible,” she said.

“It is horrible,” he said. “It’s 860 degrees on the surface and the atmosphere is all carbon dioxide and there are clouds of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid. The probes only lasted like thirty minutes on the surface before the heat destroyed them.”

“It sounds awful,” she said.

“It is.” He turned the computer to face him again and he began to brush his fingers over the trackpad and to click.

“You better save what you’re looking at and get ready for school,” she said.

“Okay, just a minute,” he said.

“No,” she said, “Not just a minute. Save it up and go get ready for school.”

“I just want to finish reading this one thing.”

“Thomas,” she said and his head snapped up at the sound. “I want to check my email.”

“All right,” he said.

“Go,” she said.

“I’m going,” he said. He busily swiped and clicked, swiped and clicked, then jumped up and left the room.

“Dishes,” she said faintly, but without any heart, and drew the computer across the table towards her. “If I could afford it, I’d buy you your own,” she muttered. “But then I’d never see what you did on it.”

Half an hour later they were both in the kitchen again and they were both dressed. She was neatly and subordinately attired. She believed a secretary should never be untidy, but also never dress in a manner that excelled the manner of her boss. Inconspicuous was the watchword. The boy looked like a slob. She tucked his shirt in and twisted his pants until they sat as straight as they would sit on his wiry frame. She pushed down one sock that he’d left pulled right up his calf and retied the knot in his right shoe. She took a brush from her purse and fought for a while with his hair, threshing it mercilessly until it sat somewhat composed upon his head. “Unruly shock,” she kept muttering and he winced with every stroke.

“Don’t forget your lunch,” she said.

“It’s in my backpack,” he said.

“It’s on the counter,” she said.

He put it in his backpack while she watched him and then she surprised him by asking, “Do you think he made it?”

“Who?” he asked.

“The space man,” she said.

“The astronaut. He’s called Silas Cole,” he said. “Of course he did.”

“Then why haven’t they heard from him?” she asked.

“How should I know?” he said. “They’re getting data back.”

“Isn’t all that automated?”

“A lot of it is, but they say he’s there. He has to override the computer sometimes. Sometimes the computer encounters unexpected parameters which require operator involvement. Problems,” he translated for her carefully, “Sometimes the computer has problems it can’t solve on its own. And he has to help it.”

“So you think he’s there?”

“I know he is,” he said. He could see that the evidence of human intervention in the automated sequence didn’t really convince her, so he just said, “He has to be.”

“I hope so,” she said.

There are a few people who read this website but aren’t on Facebook, so if you’re one of those people, I have set up a donations page for Water Aid, so sponsor me for the Bristol Half Marathon!

Go Donate!

The Swedish chef says now that the website is back I can put up our pics from Uppsala and Stockholm! Here they are…

There are some great pictures of Clem in here, so be warned, you will encounter extraordinary cuteness right from the start!

A few months ago my website up and died. I don’t know what the problem was, but any entry that had HTML tags in it (most of them) wouldn’t display.

So I’ve arduously upgraded WordPress and the requisite database and I think we’re flying again now.

Hopefully I can ditch all the spam now, too, with WP’s new and improved version.

New photos and posts coming soon!

From my father…

“Beware Toyota. We bought a new Venza from them, drove it 600 miles and the first time it rained the engine sucked water in through the air intake and blew up. Toyota would not stand behind their product and our insurance is paying for a replacement block.

“So instead of a new factory built vehicle we now have one with a shop built replacement motor. I asked to trade it back to them for a new car which is what I contracted for and they’ll give me a generous $18K for a $34K vehicle with 600 miles on it. That won’t even come close to paying the $25K note.

“And to think, I traded a perfectly good Mustang GT with 73K miles on this shit. Shame on me, I’ve heard all the stuff in the media about Toyota’s QC problems and went ahead with this plan. Boy did I get burned.”

Awaiting your thoughts…

We returned from Becky’s conference in Sweden yesterday where she was delivering a paper. It was a beautiful country and Stockholm is an incredible city. I’ve got lots of pictures and will put them up when I get them sorted. But what an expensive place. Highlights include two sandwiches, four bananas, a bag of potato chips, two small bars of chocolate, a soda and a small yogurt… £23

We had some deliciously warm weather in early to mid April, but the cold snapped back and since then it’s been pretty chilly most of the time. An unexpected and happy result of lingering cold weather — as long as it’s not too cold — is that all the common plants around here seem to thrive on it. They also seem to thrive on a cold winter.

I haven’t done any research on this issue but it seems highly likely that very cold winters and mildly cold and sunny springs knock down the parasites that attack plants, giving them almost ideal conditions. I’m sure plants from warmer climes aren’t digging it too much, but the natives and species from similar latitudes seem to be loving this year’s weather. In fact I would venture to say I haven’t seen the countryside so pretty in the last five years or more.

Another suspect is the rainfall patterns. We’ve had pretty normal rainfall this spring, but it has come in bursts with lots of sunshine and dry weather between. I think plants like this, too, probably because it allows them to draw up and store moisture while starving parasitic fungi, microorganisms and insects that would otherwise affect their health.

If present trends continue, it’s going to be a gorgeous summer. Here’s betting they won’t!

Becky suggested we should change the dog’s name to “Dave” but I don’t think we could stand it.

I’m disappointed that people were too scared and weak to vote Lib Dem in greater numbers and that so many people turned on Labour unnecessarily. It also irritates me that people took against Gordon Brown so much. He’s not a smooth politician in the way that Blair, Cameron and Clegg all are, but I think he was arguably a better man. I don’t believe he ever really had a chance to run the country the way he would have wanted, because he spent his time in office being assassinated by the right wing press and assaulted by the insidious idiots in his own party. A party that has some annoying figures in it but which has done a lot to push this country forward economically, to make it marginally more fair and caring. I don’t think their methods were flawless, but I think we will all see in the short to medium term how much better they were than what is to come.

Luckily, we have an economic nightmare which will fuck the Tories for a long, long time if they fail to deal with it incredibly well. And they will fail. So we should see the Tory party fall apart and then die.

The only thing to hope for is that we get PR before it all goes belly up. Then you can really vote for the person you want to serve as your MP, and we can start to dissolve the tyranny of the party-political system once and for all!

He undressed mostly and lay in the bed in his boxer shorts. The TV was off now and the bedside lamp was on and he was staring at the ceiling. She won’t be back for a while yet, he thought. He thought of Frances Talbot rising from the pool. No. He lay still for a few minutes, not exactly trying to go to sleep, but hoping for it, before he gave in. A wash of images flooded his mind as he did it.

Looking down her top as she leaned over to him in the cab of the truck. Her lower back and the swell of her hips as she twisted out of the seat and dropped to the ground. Her belly as she stretched on the bed and her shirt rode up. The flash of her naked side he had seen in the mirror when she got out of the shower with the bathroom door half open. Her thighs wrapped in the white towel. Her thighs scissoring under her black skirt as they walked up the street to the bar. The white towel sliding off as she sat on the bed looking at him. Sliding down over her breasts and off around her waist and up over her thighs. Her mouth as it had been when they sat in the first bar, painted and pouting, her cheeks firm and pink. Her mud colored eyes. Her blue nails drifting over the flesh of her belly and breasts. Then with will he concentrated his mind on the curves of her hips rising out of the back of her shorts, the dimples on either side of her spine above her butt cheeks. He groaned and flexed his whole body as he finally reached orgasm. Then he lay panting and cleaned up with a dirty shirt and turned out the light and lay for some time with an empty mind before sleep took him.

He woke again at four. She stumbled back to the room and threw herself sprawling across her bed. He was quiet.

“Why don’t you come over here,” she slurred in the dark.

“You don’t want that,” he said.

“Come on,” she said. “We could be together. That beady eyed fucker doesn’t know anything. He’s just a fucker.” She tried to reach out to him and encountered the corner of the bedside table with her forearm. “Owwwww,” she whined.

“What did you do?”

“I hit my arm trying to get you. I wanted to touch you. Come on. Come over here. You know it’d be nice.”

“I’m not saying it wouldn’t,” he said.

“Then come on over to me,” she said. “I hurt my arm. I need a hug.” He could hear her pouting in the dark. She chuckled. “Maybe more, baby!”

“Did you have a good night?” he asked.

“What?” she said.

“Did you have a good time out?”

“What are you talking about? It was awesome. Don’t you feel close to me? Don’t you want to be closer?”

He waited a moment before venturing to answer. He knew that drunks often become obsessed with seeking uncomfortable moments of emotional revelation which they themselves are not capable of handling. Nor are they usually able to return the honesty offered to them in these moments. So he wanted to remain honest, and yet cool.

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” he said. “We’re not anything more.”

“We could be closer if you’d just come over here and take me,” she said. “We’ll be together. You’ll be inside me and I’ll be around you. I’m still tight. I’ve only been with like less than ten guys. You could just lie beside me. We don’t have to do anything. Just get in the bed with me. I don’t really want to be alone.”

“You’re not alone,” he said.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Come on.” He could hear her drifting in her voice. Her voice in her throat and her tongue lying down in her mouth like a settled dog. “Come on,” she said again and he knew she was so close now.

“Let me get a drink of water,” he said.

He went to the bathroom and he ran the tap and looked in the mirror and thought about her body and what would come of it all and shook his head and sighed. The difficulties life presented were never the ones expected. The thing to learn was not how to predict the weather, but how to alter course and adjust the rigging when the weather changed. Not to avoid, but to cope.

She was asleep when he returned to the room. She had pulled her shirt up clumsily over her bra with one hand and was still holding the cloth of it. Her belly was soft and white and the blue nails of her other hand lay rising and falling there as she breathed. He stood listening to her breathing and gazing on her collapsed shape and, when he was sure she was sleeping soundly, he removed her shoes and shifted her so he could cover her. She was lighter than he expected and she slept perfectly without stirring as he made her comfortable.

He was glad she slept. Her offer was almost more temptation than he could resist, but he’d had enough of that sort of love. Every single mediocre short-term love affair was time wasted not finding the real thing. He’d decided some time ago that he didn’t want to waste any more time on relationships he knew were going to fail. She was young and attractive and he liked being with her when she was sober, but he could never really love her. They would never last more than a few months. Her partying alone would see to that.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed looking at her face in its totally relaxed state. He reached across the gap between the beds and touched her hair and felt the buoyant young skin of her cheek with the back of his hand. He could smell the close sweaty cigarette and alcohol reek of her drunken night steaming from her skin.

“We are together, girl,” he said. “And alone. I’m here and you’re here. That’s as together as it’s going to get.”

He filled one of the hotel glasses with water and set it by her head on the bedside table. Then he lay down and slept again.

Hella Wow! You too can view the unbroken narrative — complete to this very entry — all on one page! Reread this marvel. Get caught up. Enjoy walking in a queer garden of delicious language. Go There!

From before it got cold again! Click below to see a few more…

Spilling oil in my Gulf right before I go back there. BP, you dastardly white devils! I love the new plan to fix it…

Go to CNN report about huge box dropping.

Dropping a huge metal box on the pipe! That’s awesome. I can see the engineers busily calculating just how fucking huge the box has to be to equal the pressure of the oil being squeezed out by the massiveness of the EARTH. Good luck with that one. What is it we need to pray for, a north wind?

I was reading earlier about the suspected Times Square almost-bomber. I suddenly felt — not depressed exactly — but despairing. The whole world and every country in it are full of stupid disaffected little shits like him. And now that there’s this trend or meme or trope or whatever you want to call it for these guys blowing up themselves and other people… well, it’s never going to end. I fully believe I’ll spend the rest of my life hearing about silly bastards like this guy trying to explode the human race because their typical human problems are so vast and incomprehensible and they are so alone.

Empathy gun set to disapprove this morning.

For some reason I had never seen Eyes Wide Shut, so I put it on our Lovefilm list and it arrived yesterday — on BluRay — a big plus for the work of a master filmmaker. People seem divided on the film, but I liked it a lot.

First off, I don’t really know what all the fuss was about. I remember the storms of controversy when it came out. Maybe I have been desensitized to nudity and sex over the years, but I didn’t find that aspect of the film’s content shocking in the slightest. For one thing nudity and sexual activity only occupied some ten or fifteen minutes of a two and a half hour film. For another, the nudity and sexual activity was physically raw and emotionally complicated, like real sex. And from the camera’s perspective it bordered on grotesque. It was far from sanitized and titillating — the same cannot be said for most film sex.

What was shocking to me in the film was Alice’s revelation to her husband. Or, really, her attitude towards her husband and towards her own feelings. She could have made the same sexual revelations but with a completely different attitude and they would have had a completely different meaning. As it was, her words were emotionally devastating and deeply disturbing.

The film was more akin to some of the Arthurian legends or The Fairy Queen or The Parliament of Fowls or The Inferno or medieval morality plays than it was to any pornography or any of the hundreds of films that depict sanitized, titillating, romanticized sex scenes. The story of the film was Bill’s temptation and desire, his reaction to his wife’s betrayal, his disgust and obsession with a sexual and social world outside his understanding and experience, his descent into confusion, his attempts to debase himself, his eventual break down and his and his wife’s eventual uptake of a pragmatic, worldly perspective. It’s not about sex at all, in a porn sense. It’s about innocence, adolescence and maturity.

And, for me, it worked. I’d be interested in hearing any thoughts!

In the hotel he sat at the foot of the bed watching the twenty-four hour news anchors repeating the same story for the twentieth time, though he had never heard it. A woman had turned up somehow, having been imprisoned by a man and his wife for almost twenty years. She had been kidnapped in 1991 when she was only a little girl. She had borne two children by the man, both of whom were older now than she had been when he had taken her.

He was both surprised and unsurprised by the story, but as he thought about the life of the kidnapped girl, who had lived in a tent in the man’s backyard, her bizarre life, he thought, almost facetiously, how it mirrored his own or anyone’s life. He could remember 1991 — the year she was taken — beautifully. He’d been at college and in love with Frances Talbot, an unrequited love that lasted the better part of three years, with time off for various flings and two girlfriends. She had kissed him once, in the college swimming pool, but it had never gone any further than that. He could remember her look of careless indignation when he went to her room and asked her why she had kissed him if she didn’t want anything to happen between them. Her brown hair had shook like the actual manes of horses he’d once seen frolicking in the cool morning at a campsite in New Mexico. “I don’t know, do I?” she said. They stayed friends, which surprised him.

He was young then and everything was ahead of him.

Like that little girl standing on the street, waiting for the yellow bus of her open future to pull up to the curb, he didn’t know what was coming, but he could see many possibilities. But not the one that actually took place. The girl was forced into a grey car and he had left college to live on his own for over fifteen years, failing to find work that satisfied him, often struggling to find any work at all. He’d had irregular and brief relationships with women. He’d drunk too much and done too many drugs. He’d lived in a couple of nearly identical, dingy apartments. He felt like he’d fought with every ounce of spiritual resolve he possessed just to keep his body fed and his mind occupied, to stop himself from sliding into eternal, unforgivable despair.

He was grateful now, not so much for what he had, but for his perspective on it. He could look at his life, as imperfect as it was, and say it was all right. There were better lives and there were worse ones, but this one was his. And so he had emerged from the mental captivity of his youth and stood a free man in the world. Possibly more confused than ever, but not about himself.

He could remember the way Frances Talbot’s pale skin looked, so much of it offered to his view by her one piece bathing suit. He could still remember the way her backside had looked as she hauled herself from the water to go to the diving board again, the water rising with her perfect hips as if to hold on to her, her skin taut and the water beading on her impenetrable flesh. She had laughed and looked at him with her pale blue eyes and he had never understood what she thought about him or wanted with him. She wrote to him a few times after college. Then when email became general, she sent him a few emails. He still heard from her once or twice a year. He always wrote back. He had no idea why she maintained this contact. It was a total mystery. She lived her mental life behind a veil that he would never sweep aside. She had married years ago and moved to Oklahoma City. Her first child was severely retarded and after two more kids, normal ones, she left her husband. She lived on her own and raised those kids on her own. Why did divorced couples always have so many children? Did the children drive them apart or did they have the children because they were drifting apart? He still loved her in a way, but their kidnapped lives meant they would never meet again in the way it had once been possible that they might. Or had it been possible after all? Maybe what is is all that can be. It was hardly a question, because he didn’t have the audacity to answer.

He snapped off the television and swore in an angry whisper. He stood up and went to the door. As he opened the door, the hot air rushed in and the conditioned air inside was immediately falsified. Street sounds leapt into the enclosed silence, the sealed and humming blank of the hotel room, and insect song danced violently about the enshrined loneliness of the chamber. He stepped into the living night and he walked back down to the main street and up along it towards the bar. He looked for her in the leaning places but he couldn’t see her. There were others and they called hey and waved to him and asked if he wanted some company but that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to talk to her, not sleep with her, just to be with her. Maybe sleep with her. Maybe not. He wanted to be near someone and she had seemed real enough and right enough. Maybe they could go for coffee. He imagined himself explaining this to her and he imagined her nodding and saying, “Riiight,” and starting to slip to her knees in an alley. He pushed the image from his mind and looked for her. She could not be found among the whores and the drinkers as the street dwindled to urban semi-sleep down off the river. He just wanted to talk to her.

“You want some company?” said a voice behind him. He turned to see a different girl looking at him with seemingly great amusement.

“I’m looking for a girl,” he said.

“You found one,” she said.

“She was wearing a puffy white vest,” he said.

“Oh. She’s gone. She saw you coming and split. But I can give you better than her. Why not go with me?”

“Gone? Well, if you see her tell her I’m looking for her. Tell her I want to talk to her,” he said.

“Talk to her. Okay. You sure you don’t want some company, honey?”

“I’m sure,” he said.

“All right.”

She moved away, looking around carefully, and he walked a few side streets looking for her again before he stopped and stood shaking his head. “Oh God,” he said, “What am I doing?” Restless, though, he walked back down to the drag and looked at the cars and the neon and heard the loud garbled music spilling from the bars. He went to the bar where he had left her but he couldn’t find her there. He ordered a beer at the bar. “God damn,” he said.

“What’s up, buddy?” said the bar tender.

“Bitch stole my wallet,” he said.

“Who?” said the bar tender.

“This whore on the street. It must have been her,” he said. “She fucking picked my pocket when she hustled me.” He must have looked convincingly injured.

“I’ll give you one on the house cause I remember you was in here before,” said the bar tender.

“No, that’s all right,” he said. “There wasn’t any money in it.” He laughed. “I always keep my money loose.” He took his cash from his pocket and paid for the beer.

“Oh right,” said the bartender. “You lose your cards?”

“I don’t have any,” he said. “I don’t like debt.”

“I hear you there,” said the bartender. “ATM card though?”

“Left it in the hotel.”

“Your driver’s license?”

“In the hotel!” He laughed triumphantly.

“Well, if you don’t mind me asking a personal question, buddy,” said the bartender, leaning over the bar. “What was in your wallet?”

“Nothing,” he said. “A picture of my ex-girlfriend. I guess I just sort of carried it from habit.”

“I’ll be damned,” said the bar tender.

Damn, sucka! You too can view the unbroken narrative — complete to this very entry — all on one page! Reread this marvel. Get caught up. Enjoy walking in a queer garden of delicious language. Go There!