Ah, a challenge. The ultimate challenge. Is it a life-changing examination? A feat of acrobatic endeavour? Do 1500 words on the merits of hippopotami as pets need to be compiled at a moment's notice? Good grief, is a life on the line? No, it's greater than any of those, it's the annual New Year's Day banquet, and on this occasion the theme is Italian. Italian!
Putting together a menu is the second most difficult part of the whole operation, but also the most enjoyable. The enjoyment is in the theory, the exertion is in the sequencing of the different operations so that it all fits together, and the chaos is in the doing of said operations. Six different dishes to all be ready at the same time? Easy! You just need an intelligent octopus, five assistants who all follow instructions blindly, an instantaneous washing up machine, and a piece of string. To be honest I don't know why you need the piece of string, but it's traditional and expected.
Why do a mega-meal on New Year's Day? Not just because it's tradition, surely? Tradition is anathema to the logical mind. Is there a rational mind in the house? Eschewing all the major faith-based holidays leaves only the arbitrarily chosen New Year's Day and the ever so slightly squinky birthday. Why describe birthdays via the only vaguely defined 'squinky'? Why keep asking rhetorical questions? Rhetorical questions are the most fun. Birthdays are squinky because they they mark a person's emergence into the world, and into independence, but not their beginning. Birthdays don't even come along uniformly at 40 weeks of actual age. They're 'squinky'. Golly, I hope squinky doesn't have an actual definition!
One of those rhetorical questions didn't get an answer, at least not a whole one. We know why New Year's Day, but not why a super stressful mega-meal is to be produced. Maybe you have to give back sometimes, and so on this day I cook dramatically for the lady who cooks relentlessly for most of the other days of the year. A super-meal for the mother has to happen. It's time to pretend to be a nice person!
O.
Tuesday, 30 December 2014
Sunday, 28 December 2014
Questions of Reality
The things you see around you, the noises you hear, the textures you feel, the flavours you taste and the aromas or stenches you can smell, none of these things are exactly like that in reality. Every single person in the world experiences their own version of what that world is really like, and it might be close to what is really there but how close? The classic example involves colours: Light hits an object and then reflects into someone's eye, whose brain is keyed to respond to that frequency of light as 'blue' and so Bob sees some blue. Was the thing actually blue? Is blue even a real thing? We have no idea! 'Blue' may just be a human concept for making sense of the things all around us, just like all the colours!
If knowing reality seems difficult, then knowing another person is exponentially more difficult, a process which is far more complicated by the fact that you can never really accomplish that feat! You can get a perception and that's about it. Truly, you can observe and try to understand that perception of someone but is that actually worth anything at all? Consider the obstacles: You are trying to work out the personality of someone, based on the limited number of behaviours you've seen them exhibit, filtered through your own nervous system, and biased by whatever preconception you want to be true of them. On top of all those internal issues, the person you think you know might be pretending or hiding something, throwing even more spanners into the proverbial works and adding more complications by the moment. It's an exceedingly complex business, simplified by nothing except perhaps hiding in the library, and reading the collected works of Wilkie Collins under a giant Cone Of Silence.
That difficulty in understanding the wider world and other people is probably why television is so important to me and to the world. In a life that has been remarkably free of interpersonal reactions, how else to learn about that other world than through television? It's the microcosm that sits in almost everyone's rooms in some manner, feeding humdrum alternative lives during the daytime and larger than life dramas and comedies in the evenings, even though no-one can ever find anything to watch. Oh, what perils there are to modern existence...
Reality, that funny concept we use as a catch-all term for everything we sense around us, is a funny thing. We think we know it, but really we don't have the faintest idea what's going on. Thanks to Uncertainty, our very observation of what we perceive as reality alters it at the quantum level anyway. Is it possible that happens with people too? Of course. Talking to a person forces that person to think about something and thereby change, meaning that you then have something new to learn and so on, and so on, all the while changing yourself until the chain reaction theoretically builds up to the point of total insanity. On a more real level, we're packed full of mental safeguards so as to resist a lot of changes, but that's a whole other story, or maybe many many other stories.
For now, it's probably easier to do as we do every day, and just accept what we see as the truth. It's as close as we will ever get in any case. What you see is what you get.
O.
PS There is a pseudo-follow up to this post entitled 'Mental Safeguards'.Thank you!
If knowing reality seems difficult, then knowing another person is exponentially more difficult, a process which is far more complicated by the fact that you can never really accomplish that feat! You can get a perception and that's about it. Truly, you can observe and try to understand that perception of someone but is that actually worth anything at all? Consider the obstacles: You are trying to work out the personality of someone, based on the limited number of behaviours you've seen them exhibit, filtered through your own nervous system, and biased by whatever preconception you want to be true of them. On top of all those internal issues, the person you think you know might be pretending or hiding something, throwing even more spanners into the proverbial works and adding more complications by the moment. It's an exceedingly complex business, simplified by nothing except perhaps hiding in the library, and reading the collected works of Wilkie Collins under a giant Cone Of Silence.
That difficulty in understanding the wider world and other people is probably why television is so important to me and to the world. In a life that has been remarkably free of interpersonal reactions, how else to learn about that other world than through television? It's the microcosm that sits in almost everyone's rooms in some manner, feeding humdrum alternative lives during the daytime and larger than life dramas and comedies in the evenings, even though no-one can ever find anything to watch. Oh, what perils there are to modern existence...
Reality, that funny concept we use as a catch-all term for everything we sense around us, is a funny thing. We think we know it, but really we don't have the faintest idea what's going on. Thanks to Uncertainty, our very observation of what we perceive as reality alters it at the quantum level anyway. Is it possible that happens with people too? Of course. Talking to a person forces that person to think about something and thereby change, meaning that you then have something new to learn and so on, and so on, all the while changing yourself until the chain reaction theoretically builds up to the point of total insanity. On a more real level, we're packed full of mental safeguards so as to resist a lot of changes, but that's a whole other story, or maybe many many other stories.
For now, it's probably easier to do as we do every day, and just accept what we see as the truth. It's as close as we will ever get in any case. What you see is what you get.
O.
PS There is a pseudo-follow up to this post entitled 'Mental Safeguards'.Thank you!
Friday, 26 December 2014
Movie: 'The Incredibles' (2004)
The 'greatest hits' sequences of movies continues as we stroll through a week of peerless films here over the festive period. 'The Incredibles' was the sixth Pixar animated feature, and is probably still the best, lacking any of the saccharine qualities of other Pixar movies and turning out a story that is part 'James Bond', part 'Fantastic Four' and all incredible.
'The Incredibles' was a non-typical Pixar movie from the beginning, its brain trust being built around the director and producer of 'The Iron Giant', Brad Bird and John Walker. Those two, so specifically not of Pixar, infused a whole new sensibility to the studio for this film, also written by Bird, and no end of brass instruments. It's a fantastic ride from beginning to end, powered by a fantastic jazzy brass score from Michael Giacchino, and essentially reinventing the superhero movie for the modern age. Forget 'Spider-Man' or 'X-Men', as it all began here, done better than in the vast majority of the following mass produced superhero movies, and with far more heart.
'The Incredibles' boasts an impressive voice cast, magnificent visuals, superb virtual photography, one of the most gorgeous scores ever committed to an animated movie, more spy and adventure references than you'll find in any other film, and some of the most enjoyable spotlighting of comic book tropes on record, but what is it about? At the most basic level it's about a father missing out on the opportunity of being with his family while he longs for the glory days of being a rough and tough superhero, before all the 'supers' were driven underground by lawsuits, and it's about the difficulties they all have in trying to fit in and be normal while repressing the super parts of their characters. It's also about the story that unfolds when that dad, Bob aka Mr Incredible, falls into a new adventure and ultimately allows them all to embrace who they are and each other. Oh, and there are masses of jokes.
The strength of the movie is really in the Brad Bird influence, which permeates the whole enterprise, marking it in a very non-Pixar fashion. I am in no way saying that regular Pixar is bad, but it's not quite like 'The Incredibles'. This was very much the movie he wanted to make, and his passion for it bursts through both in the excellent filmmakers' commentary on the DVD and the audacious Giacchino score. It's the kind of spy and superhero caper that doesn't get made any more, indeed the kind that never got made to begin with! It's heartfelt where it needs be heartfelt, earns every emotional punchline, pushes the style up to maximum while retaining a charm and solidity, and all while maintaining arcs for four separate characters.
As 'The Apartment' plays to the side, it's becoming clear in retrospect that a vital aspect that it and 'The Incredibles' have in common is a punchy lack of schmaltziness. Is it possible that Brad Bird and Billy Wilder have a lot more in common than we think? It's clear they both wished there was more sneaking in movies in general.
Apart from the gags and some incredibly energetic action sequences - including one spectacular running chase sequence - there's something special about 'The Incredibles', something intangible and insubstantial, some style long unseen in film and not seen since. It's the 1950s fused into James Bond and international globetrotting, superheroics and fallen idols, hero worship gone bad and life renewed. Or it's a massive action romp with just enough plot to keep the whole thing running smoothly. You decide.
O.
'The Incredibles' was a non-typical Pixar movie from the beginning, its brain trust being built around the director and producer of 'The Iron Giant', Brad Bird and John Walker. Those two, so specifically not of Pixar, infused a whole new sensibility to the studio for this film, also written by Bird, and no end of brass instruments. It's a fantastic ride from beginning to end, powered by a fantastic jazzy brass score from Michael Giacchino, and essentially reinventing the superhero movie for the modern age. Forget 'Spider-Man' or 'X-Men', as it all began here, done better than in the vast majority of the following mass produced superhero movies, and with far more heart.
'The Incredibles' boasts an impressive voice cast, magnificent visuals, superb virtual photography, one of the most gorgeous scores ever committed to an animated movie, more spy and adventure references than you'll find in any other film, and some of the most enjoyable spotlighting of comic book tropes on record, but what is it about? At the most basic level it's about a father missing out on the opportunity of being with his family while he longs for the glory days of being a rough and tough superhero, before all the 'supers' were driven underground by lawsuits, and it's about the difficulties they all have in trying to fit in and be normal while repressing the super parts of their characters. It's also about the story that unfolds when that dad, Bob aka Mr Incredible, falls into a new adventure and ultimately allows them all to embrace who they are and each other. Oh, and there are masses of jokes.
The strength of the movie is really in the Brad Bird influence, which permeates the whole enterprise, marking it in a very non-Pixar fashion. I am in no way saying that regular Pixar is bad, but it's not quite like 'The Incredibles'. This was very much the movie he wanted to make, and his passion for it bursts through both in the excellent filmmakers' commentary on the DVD and the audacious Giacchino score. It's the kind of spy and superhero caper that doesn't get made any more, indeed the kind that never got made to begin with! It's heartfelt where it needs be heartfelt, earns every emotional punchline, pushes the style up to maximum while retaining a charm and solidity, and all while maintaining arcs for four separate characters.
As 'The Apartment' plays to the side, it's becoming clear in retrospect that a vital aspect that it and 'The Incredibles' have in common is a punchy lack of schmaltziness. Is it possible that Brad Bird and Billy Wilder have a lot more in common than we think? It's clear they both wished there was more sneaking in movies in general.
Apart from the gags and some incredibly energetic action sequences - including one spectacular running chase sequence - there's something special about 'The Incredibles', something intangible and insubstantial, some style long unseen in film and not seen since. It's the 1950s fused into James Bond and international globetrotting, superheroics and fallen idols, hero worship gone bad and life renewed. Or it's a massive action romp with just enough plot to keep the whole thing running smoothly. You decide.
O.
Movie: 'The Music Man' (1962)
Now that was a great experience. We're kicking off a 'greatest hits' sequence here at the Quirky Muffin with one of the greatest, and now least talked of, musicals to ever roll out to theatres: 'The Music Man'. Yes, let's roll back to 1962 and this movie adaptation of the super-hit Broadway musical, both featuring the incomparable Robert Preston. The stage version of 'The Music Man' is the musical that Baxter tries to use as a date for Miss Kubilik in 'The Apartment' and was apparently a sensation, but you might be wondering how I eventually came to see it so late or at all. The stage version is well known, but the movie?
The obvious route into watching 'The Music Man' (TMM) is the star himself, Robert Preston, who featured very memorably in the great (and underrated) space adventure 'The Last Starfighter' as interstellar huckster Centauri. We'll get to that movie one day, and appreciatively, but it does serve as the classic genre route for getting to TMM. As a secondary route you can follow Paul Ford from 'The Phil Silvers Show' where he unforgettably played Colonel Hall in his continuously bewildered state. Getting back to hucksters, though, it's Preston's movie from beginning to end, befitting his status as the stage lead and the character's status as the eponymous lead, Professor Harold Hill the Music Man and travelling con man.
The movie is the story of Hill's visit to stubborn Iowa town River City, where he plans to repeat his longstanding con of pretending to set up a boys band before skipping town with all the money and not having taught anything musical. In short he's a charlatan, maybe one with a heart of gold, but it's buried so deep as to be invisible and only Shirley Jones as Marion the Librarian can dig deep enough to reach it. Shirley Jones is brilliant, and played her role on stage too. Her songs may tend to the annoying warble, but she's every inch the actress for the role, unbearably lovely, tough, and vulnerable once reached. A lovely performance. Preston lives his role as if he was born to play it, on the other hand, dancing around while high on life, and finagling for all he's worth. He plays the very model of the scheming trickster, and one supremely musically gifted while not knowing a note of music. He should have been in more things, and probably was on the stage.
The true test of a musical is in whether the songs and dances fit organically into the story or stop the narrative dead, whether they add anything or merely function as decoration, and whether they distinguish themselves from those in other musicals. 'The Music Man' has songs that hit in places that other musicals fear to approach, except for perhaps 'How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying'. TMM has a feel of locomotion to it, probably inherited from the opening number on the train, and pulls you along breathlessly when it goes into a quick number and manages to remain visually interesting when in the middle of a slow warbler. It also features the most wondrous sequence you will encounter in a film musical: A song and dance sequence in a library, which doubles as a seduction scene for Hill trying to steal the heart of Marion, madame librarian. A totally magical sequence only matched by one of the most still moments at the end, when Marion reveals ... Well, I won't say what she reveals.
A good musical oozes glee, a wonder at the sheer joy of being alive, and this is one of the best big musicals. It's just strange that I've never heard anyone ever refer to it.
O.
PS Great Honk! Ye Gods!
The obvious route into watching 'The Music Man' (TMM) is the star himself, Robert Preston, who featured very memorably in the great (and underrated) space adventure 'The Last Starfighter' as interstellar huckster Centauri. We'll get to that movie one day, and appreciatively, but it does serve as the classic genre route for getting to TMM. As a secondary route you can follow Paul Ford from 'The Phil Silvers Show' where he unforgettably played Colonel Hall in his continuously bewildered state. Getting back to hucksters, though, it's Preston's movie from beginning to end, befitting his status as the stage lead and the character's status as the eponymous lead, Professor Harold Hill the Music Man and travelling con man.
The movie is the story of Hill's visit to stubborn Iowa town River City, where he plans to repeat his longstanding con of pretending to set up a boys band before skipping town with all the money and not having taught anything musical. In short he's a charlatan, maybe one with a heart of gold, but it's buried so deep as to be invisible and only Shirley Jones as Marion the Librarian can dig deep enough to reach it. Shirley Jones is brilliant, and played her role on stage too. Her songs may tend to the annoying warble, but she's every inch the actress for the role, unbearably lovely, tough, and vulnerable once reached. A lovely performance. Preston lives his role as if he was born to play it, on the other hand, dancing around while high on life, and finagling for all he's worth. He plays the very model of the scheming trickster, and one supremely musically gifted while not knowing a note of music. He should have been in more things, and probably was on the stage.
The true test of a musical is in whether the songs and dances fit organically into the story or stop the narrative dead, whether they add anything or merely function as decoration, and whether they distinguish themselves from those in other musicals. 'The Music Man' has songs that hit in places that other musicals fear to approach, except for perhaps 'How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying'. TMM has a feel of locomotion to it, probably inherited from the opening number on the train, and pulls you along breathlessly when it goes into a quick number and manages to remain visually interesting when in the middle of a slow warbler. It also features the most wondrous sequence you will encounter in a film musical: A song and dance sequence in a library, which doubles as a seduction scene for Hill trying to steal the heart of Marion, madame librarian. A totally magical sequence only matched by one of the most still moments at the end, when Marion reveals ... Well, I won't say what she reveals.
A good musical oozes glee, a wonder at the sheer joy of being alive, and this is one of the best big musicals. It's just strange that I've never heard anyone ever refer to it.
O.
PS Great Honk! Ye Gods!
Thursday, 25 December 2014
Ink on the page
There is something very personal about writing a letter, an unusual effort in this day and age. A letter is not disposable, endlessly editable, or renewable like the ubiquitous e-letters that amass to form e-mail. A letter has weight, substance and an emotional substrate to all written in it. It's not just ink on a page, but sweat, and mood indicated by the handwriting and the phraseology and the words erased. In short a paper correspondence is a totally different beast. The Quirky Muffin as mailed in physically would be a totally different beast to the one we have now, maybe not better but definitely different. There would be more poems, for one thing, and rather alarmingly.
As Christmas Day wafts by fairly unconcernedly and irrelevantly, I can look back and think about the letters I've written and how they linger. Just today I wrote a Christmas missive for my friend code named Cookie Monster, who lives far far away in a land beyond the closest horizon. Will she enjoy it? Hopefully, but if nothing else she'll love to get the letter itself, assuming it doesn't get eaten by the baby or accidentally thrust into a dark pit by spouses or vengeful cleaners. Oh, the horror of having cleaners for enemies on two separate continents, and only due to a beetroot stain incident in a conference four years ago! You would think that herbalists would be used to such things, but no... You pay, and pay, and pay...
Words are special, as I may have said repeatedly before, but words inscribed by hand on a page are more so. Not just handwritten letters, inscribed with curls of ink carefully addressed to the people that matter in the world, but pencil scratchings in fronts of books explaining gifts and adding emphasis, and journals describing people's innermost thoughts and never intended to see the light of day. Printed books are valuable in a different way, but mass produced and valueless until they're personalised in some way. A handwritten note can elevate a tome's personal value to priceless, while years of ownership can render a volume so recognisably yours as to be irreplaceable, whether it be by accumulated mutilations, annotations, or just those signs of use peculiar to each reader. However that emotional content of the handwritten note, lasting long beyond its author, can be so affecting even in mundanity as to be overwhelming. Some of the best parts of 'Due South' revolve around the entries in Benton's late father's journal, for example, which are either notes to himself or to his son down the line.
It's ironic that I would write this on Christmas Day, when all the greetings cards that have caused the felling of several forests are finally at their destinations with all manner of utterly uninteresting token messages. In my upbringing we never did Christmas, and such things passed me by. Now people get letters instead, a tradition that hopefully will catch on again. A token Christmas card with a ubiquitous message? Never! Several sides of composed and illegible text, well-meaningly crafted but incomprehensible? Yes, all the way! Now, that's more Christmas like, even if you're a non-believer like me!
O.
As Christmas Day wafts by fairly unconcernedly and irrelevantly, I can look back and think about the letters I've written and how they linger. Just today I wrote a Christmas missive for my friend code named Cookie Monster, who lives far far away in a land beyond the closest horizon. Will she enjoy it? Hopefully, but if nothing else she'll love to get the letter itself, assuming it doesn't get eaten by the baby or accidentally thrust into a dark pit by spouses or vengeful cleaners. Oh, the horror of having cleaners for enemies on two separate continents, and only due to a beetroot stain incident in a conference four years ago! You would think that herbalists would be used to such things, but no... You pay, and pay, and pay...
Words are special, as I may have said repeatedly before, but words inscribed by hand on a page are more so. Not just handwritten letters, inscribed with curls of ink carefully addressed to the people that matter in the world, but pencil scratchings in fronts of books explaining gifts and adding emphasis, and journals describing people's innermost thoughts and never intended to see the light of day. Printed books are valuable in a different way, but mass produced and valueless until they're personalised in some way. A handwritten note can elevate a tome's personal value to priceless, while years of ownership can render a volume so recognisably yours as to be irreplaceable, whether it be by accumulated mutilations, annotations, or just those signs of use peculiar to each reader. However that emotional content of the handwritten note, lasting long beyond its author, can be so affecting even in mundanity as to be overwhelming. Some of the best parts of 'Due South' revolve around the entries in Benton's late father's journal, for example, which are either notes to himself or to his son down the line.
It's ironic that I would write this on Christmas Day, when all the greetings cards that have caused the felling of several forests are finally at their destinations with all manner of utterly uninteresting token messages. In my upbringing we never did Christmas, and such things passed me by. Now people get letters instead, a tradition that hopefully will catch on again. A token Christmas card with a ubiquitous message? Never! Several sides of composed and illegible text, well-meaningly crafted but incomprehensible? Yes, all the way! Now, that's more Christmas like, even if you're a non-believer like me!
O.
Tuesday, 23 December 2014
The First Inaugural Story Jam
It's Christmas, that massively confusing time for the more agnostic amongst us, and in a bid to escape thinking about it too much and relax from dog-related stress it might be time to do a story idea jam! For the record, Tess the venerable wacky sheepdog now has a funky blue bandage with red trucks emblazoned on it, and is making me very jealous. I want a funky blue bandage with red trucks on it!
Story jam, story jam. What is a story jam? On this occasion it's a session wherein I let loose every story idea that's rumbling around in the head and throw them down on the page, noting the best ones for future stories. For example, to recycle one idea from another post:
1) What if there were a group of mythology technicians who pulled the mythology for each civilization on each planet from a filing cabinet of templates, and what if one time you got it wrong and all mixed up?
Now, for an actual story jam. Even now I'm coming up dry, but let's keep going.
2) What if you were a bad guy and found out you were working for the good guys all along?
3) 'Detective, Detective', which I'm not allowed to talk about.
4) A correspondence story between twinned people in different dimensions.
5) The Jacques Cousteau of space.
6) What if your life took the form of a movie serial?
7) Scarves. The scarf-ocracy. Everything determined by scarves.
8) The world really is a great big onion, with different lives and peoples on different levels.
9) The modern world without combustion (but not Steampunk somehow?)?
10) Ghostly wanderings in the 9th Dimension.
11) Why, why, why are there never enough clothes pegs?
Now, having idea pumped for a while I got all these... things... some of which are just a bit terrible. However, there is hope, because they could be mushed up together in different ways and there is at least one really decent science-fiction idea in the list. Will a story come from it all? You will have to wait and see! More story jams will follow.
O.
Story jam, story jam. What is a story jam? On this occasion it's a session wherein I let loose every story idea that's rumbling around in the head and throw them down on the page, noting the best ones for future stories. For example, to recycle one idea from another post:
1) What if there were a group of mythology technicians who pulled the mythology for each civilization on each planet from a filing cabinet of templates, and what if one time you got it wrong and all mixed up?
Now, for an actual story jam. Even now I'm coming up dry, but let's keep going.
2) What if you were a bad guy and found out you were working for the good guys all along?
3) 'Detective, Detective', which I'm not allowed to talk about.
4) A correspondence story between twinned people in different dimensions.
5) The Jacques Cousteau of space.
6) What if your life took the form of a movie serial?
7) Scarves. The scarf-ocracy. Everything determined by scarves.
8) The world really is a great big onion, with different lives and peoples on different levels.
9) The modern world without combustion (but not Steampunk somehow?)?
10) Ghostly wanderings in the 9th Dimension.
11) Why, why, why are there never enough clothes pegs?
Now, having idea pumped for a while I got all these... things... some of which are just a bit terrible. However, there is hope, because they could be mushed up together in different ways and there is at least one really decent science-fiction idea in the list. Will a story come from it all? You will have to wait and see! More story jams will follow.
O.
Sunday, 21 December 2014
Story: The Glove, X [Obsoleted]
An abbreviated story segment this time as we begin to work through the morass that is 'The Glove', and work out the motivations of all concerned. Yes, that's right: Motivation! Ha! The vow is that we'll get to the end of this story or try to do so for all the remaining lifetime of the Quirky Muffin! Actually, it's a very interesting voyage of discovery in learning the importance of putting some reason into why people do things. In 'Wordspace' there is an external motivating factor, and each of the character's literal definitions is itself motivation, but here... Well, we'll find out as we go, and that's all part of the fun. In fact, that discovery is why I began all this in the first place. The circle is complete once again.
----
The Glove, X
(Part I , IX , XI )
Edin the techno city reared up into the sky all around him, shiny and new and emblazoned with all the clan markers in lights. Over there the Mackay building, and there Anderson Park, and behind them all the Kirk of St Andrews, a historic anomaly in a metropolis otherwise pushing into the future constantly and relentlessly.
Once again Steffan stepped off the train and looked all around pensively. The city was just as rushed and worrisome as it always was, nothing like the bucolic peace to be found commonly back in Burgh. Returning to his lodgings, and waving at his young landlady as he went up the stairs, he entered and lay in his bunk. Shock had set in even as exhaustion loitered on the edge of his awareness. Sleep didn't come.
It was only late evening and not yet night. Steffan looked out the window. Somewhere out there there were answers; details that would let him know what to do next, should he do anything at all. Yes, that was the question: "Why should I do anything?" What gave him the right to go snooping and prying, seeking to change things that had been for a long age? On the other hand, why were people killing each other in the middle of the country?
When he had first arrived here in Edin, on this moon Ganymede orbiting the planet Troos, Steffan had found no mentions of rebellion or dissidence amongst the people he had talked to. Now he set out to find some, and if not successful then make them instead. He set out for the nearest cantina, one right in the shadow of the Kirk itself, and readied himself for gossip mongering of the first order.
To be continued...
----
The Glove, X
(Part I , IX , XI )
Edin the techno city reared up into the sky all around him, shiny and new and emblazoned with all the clan markers in lights. Over there the Mackay building, and there Anderson Park, and behind them all the Kirk of St Andrews, a historic anomaly in a metropolis otherwise pushing into the future constantly and relentlessly.
Once again Steffan stepped off the train and looked all around pensively. The city was just as rushed and worrisome as it always was, nothing like the bucolic peace to be found commonly back in Burgh. Returning to his lodgings, and waving at his young landlady as he went up the stairs, he entered and lay in his bunk. Shock had set in even as exhaustion loitered on the edge of his awareness. Sleep didn't come.
It was only late evening and not yet night. Steffan looked out the window. Somewhere out there there were answers; details that would let him know what to do next, should he do anything at all. Yes, that was the question: "Why should I do anything?" What gave him the right to go snooping and prying, seeking to change things that had been for a long age? On the other hand, why were people killing each other in the middle of the country?
When he had first arrived here in Edin, on this moon Ganymede orbiting the planet Troos, Steffan had found no mentions of rebellion or dissidence amongst the people he had talked to. Now he set out to find some, and if not successful then make them instead. He set out for the nearest cantina, one right in the shadow of the Kirk itself, and readied himself for gossip mongering of the first order.
To be continued...
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