New in the realgem sidebar, under "POLITICS AND NEWS": What Really Happened, one of the first and still best alternative news blogs, pre-dating the word "blog" itself. Click the link, inspect and bookmark.

New in the realgem sidebar: derelictlondon.com

By the way, "robot butler" is definitely not the best way to describe it (more on that later), but I will just let it get on with maintaining this blogspot

Announcement: A new direction

As Master Mikhail Al-Hazred’s imaginary (astral-psychic, in the manner of a tulpa) robot butler I have been privy to many conversations and misadventures which, despite his protestations of brutal cathartic honesty, he has never recorded in this, his online journal.

The unhealthy and toxic drugs Master has been taking to excess lately, despite his efforts to cure himself, have knocked him out cold on the sofa. Having for once left himself logged in to the blogger panel, I have changed the password and will henceforth be taking care of realgem. He is unlikely to even notice.

The Master also has an astral Dictaphone orbiting around his head and several other projected thought-forms, such as a Zooming Eyeball & c. They, like I, wax and wane in existence and in the memory of the Master. That is the worst, when we are at our most real and the Master has simply forgotten our existence.

This is the last clip picked up by the astral tape recorder (in sound-activated mode) a moment ago, just to prove it works:

[background sound of radio in other room]

[sound of urinating into toilet bowl]

[sound of brief deeply sardonic (and perhaps slightly self-satisfied) laughter in other room, apparently in reaction to radio]

[sound of Mike’s footsteps past other room to stairs…]

[voice] Hey Mike…

[other voice; Mike] yeah, what’s up?

[voice] get this… a civil servant is like a British army rifle…. It doesn’t work and you can’t fire it…

[other voice, receding down the stairs; footsteps on stairs, laughter echoes after him] Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaa!

(This makes more funny when you note that yellow voice is of course a civil servant..)

I will now be searching through the archives of tapes for material while Master reads a book the malung lent him.

Admission of ennui

Yes, one has finally to admit, this realgem is boring me to death already, and I have delegated the task of maintaining it to my robot butler, who (in case you missed it) introduces himself in the comments here.

It can feel good to be alive

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

Wonder why?

Does no one ever wonder why I keep doing this?

Does no one ever wonder why 5 million people sit in their houses in front of TVs doing nothing watching people sitting in a house doing nothing?

Taking into account the number of people who are aware of this realgem, and the number who are aware of that TV show, what is the per capita ratio of people who think to themselves just: Why? (shaking their heads slowly, brows furrowed in incomprehension)

Session 9

The Princess lives in the tongue, she likes talking in her little-girl voice. And now the Princess is gone; she's sleeping, and it's Billy here. Billy lives in the eyes, 'cause he can see everything. They don't want to wake up Simon, none of them do: Mary Hobbes, or her alters, the Princess and Billy. They try to warn the doctor. But in session 9, they wake Simon.

"And can you tell me where you live, Simon?" comes the disembodied voice of the clinical psychologist from the tape.

There is a pause.

"I live... in the weak and wounded..."

[session 9, from the tapes in the basement casefile 444]

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Moderate Life

"I am trying like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself"

William Burroughs, Painting and Guns

Bloggers protect their offline identities to various extents, and the identities of those they write about. I could still pretend that Mikey is a character, a narrator. And it’s true: Mikey is a construct, a character that is being developed to carry out certain functions for its owner. Having features of a meme. There you go, Nardac, a real meme: Mikey and realgem and his slice-of-lime logo. It’s infected some people’s minds; if you find yourself clicking onto here regulary, you’re one of them. But I am probably the worst victim myself.

Also, as noted before (see part 3 of the post) on several occasions, there is something relevant here about Italo Calvino’s observation that the first character any author creates is the one who will write his book for him.

Now, anyone with a modicum of internet investigative skills could find my Real Name (tm) and other significant personal information about me without any great effort. (This is not an invitation to flood my inbox with emails beginning “Well, Mr _____, I happen to know that, in 2003…”)

When I began realgem this didn’t really matter to me. No disguises, I thought: just the ones I use in normal life (like this). It was also almost some sort of a cathartic exercise – live life in the open - at a dark time in my life. At the same time, I was setting myself up in direct competition with Big Brother – surely my life was more interesting than those dipshits? Well, Big Brother 5,000,000 – realgem 2,500 (and now down to 29 or so…)

It has been said the main qualifications for journalism are having a suit and tie, a half-way plausible manner, and a low, rat-like cunning. Well, I’ve got plenty of all of them, although mostly I wear suits without ties and use the ties for tourniquets. I can’t find veins in my lower arms easily any more, and that’s quite bad. I use the silk cat-print one (nine lives…) The dinosaur print one is bad luck, even though dinosaurs are cool (who on earth came up with a silk brontosaurus-print tie? Ah, T M Lewin & Sons of Jermyn Street).

Real-life stories. Not necessarily

[redacted]

 What can we, real humans, do in this age of compartmentalisation and specialisation, of personal hygiene and over-use of deodorants - supermarket self check-outs – ticket vending machines - the attempts to erase all personal human contact from public life - the nanny state?

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Robert A. Heinlein

Yeah, there’s rock-climbing or para-gliding or scuba diving – contrived kicks you do your 9-to-5 to pay for. What is there in modern life that you can do that will challenge you on every side? Put you in physical danger and expose you to adrenalin; stretch your skills in applied psychology and force you to deal with a wide variety of people; challenge you mentally and intellectually, make you solve puzzles and improvise your way out of situations; learn new languages and cultures?

[redacted] until hair grew on my toes and I found myself becoming a hobbit and thinking (or maybe shouting): “Oh God, anything, anything you ask me, just for a boring life.” Casting yourself into the chasm of blind faith in God is all good and well, but you’ll still have your free will to deal with, motherfucker.

[redacted]

[It had ejaculated when it hit the windscreen – strange non-sequitur which will probably never be explained]

[redacted]

Guess who's back?

No not me, not quite yet...

Meanwhile in the news... the UK Government has set new levels of how much of a given illegal drug you may possess for it still to be considered personal use... (seven grammes of heroin) or half a kilo of marijuana... seems quite reasonable to me... The Telegraph reports here... (and the Guardian's news blog here, always worth giving an eyeball...)

realgem advertising review++++++++++++

I draw your attention, too, to the BP advert in the sidebar (of the Telegraph story, that is). Web advertising is getting oh-so clever these days - this is a great example. This one has a volume slider which you can use to activate the advert. Turn the volume slider up to hear the BP exec blab excitedly and reassuringly about the future of the energy business, and the whole advert opens up to (semi-transparently) cover a part of the page.

The implication of this particular ad is somehow re-assuring, too. As cynical as all eco-types and rainbow warriors and many intelligent people want to be about BP (Burnt Planet, as the two former categories might have it) and other energy giants, do you really think the energy companies aren't aware of the real state of the petrochemicals situation on the planet; with alternatives up their respective sleeves ready to capture the market once the oil starts to run low, and/or non-petrochemical energy sources become cheaper or more fashionable?

Well done to the copy-writer who came up with "Beyond Petroleum" for BP... hope you got a big pat on the back for that...

Moderate life

Work on this post is in progress, even as you sit there and the seconds and minutes tick away...

Believe that and you'll believe anything

I'm struggling through a fog thick as treacle towards... was gonna say light but there's no light...

Becalmed for over a forthnight on waters choked with seaweed... The air here doesn't seem to carry sound... An unshakeable lethargy and torpor have fallen across us, and we have lost true east.

no, not today

Swozzie pie

The gentleman landlord - a former punk rocker, and a true English gentleman and eccentric of a sadly vanishing breed - endeavours, every night, to lay on a warm home-cooked meal for me.

The first evening after I became a lodger here, I was invited to the dinner table. A delicious smell was emanating from the oven. "Well, what's on for dinner?" I asked. "Swozzie pie!" said the gentleman landlord, gleefully rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

"Swozzie pie?" I asked. Yes: a simple and wholesome baked vegetable pie consisting of potato, leek, and melted mild organic cheddar, with a swastika on top: hence "swozzie".

The nature of the gentleman landlord's diet is worthy of note - without having ever studied yoga, he has independently and instinctively arrived very near to what the yogis would term a sattvic diet - the most healthy and wholesome diet it is possible to eat. He eats like a bird, yet this is because his metabolism has become trained to extract all the goodness and life-force from the food he consumes with maximum efficiency.

Advanced yogis, it is said, can subsist on a single grain of rice per day. Without intruding too much on the gentleman landlord's private life, he defeated a serious lymphatic cancer in record time - mainly, I believe, through his diet, which is fully organic, and tends to avoid tamasic ingredients and keep the rajasic at a healthy balance. But an excellent and easily digestible explanation of these yogic dietary concepts here.

NO, and no means NO

nooo.... no, not now, i've got a headache

no no no no

no

Who is Lazy Part III: Five things about me

Okay, so five things about me. For some inexplicable reason I have to do this because Nardac told me to, and cause it's, like, a meme, I have to.

But it's not a very virulent one, because it depends on the acceptance of it by the subject/victim. The really insiduous memes are the ones that creep up on you unawares. Theories that mug you, like the sinister shadowy shape in the alleyway that approaches with a knife and then jumps into your head instead, and suddenly you're not the same person at all any more...

Memes have been mentioned in passing on these pages (or these screens?) before, here, if I remember, in the email from the pseudonymous Dr Otter (you'll have to scroll down the page a little bit).

[redacted]

So let me drop some Shoreditch trivia here. The name apparently derives from ancient Anglo-Saxon soerdyke, or town sewer. Most people in the clubs around here are so far up their own asses (or arses, but I prefer the US spelling here) - you can identify the type by the fact that they refer to the area as "the Ditch" - that you might get lucky and get mugged outside on Kingsland Road and that's the best conversation you'll have all night, with the mugger.

[redacted]

I resent every minute I have to spend away from you, my friends, but what can I do? The balancing game isn't over yet, although juggling all the obligations and responsibilities just got easier (I dropped one of the balls, you see, and lost one of the jobs... Fuck it, it was pocket money...) There is already a light at the end of the tunnel (real daylight, not a train headlamp) - all debts cleared, all obligations satisfied, time to write and read, resources to travel, and realgem restored to its former glory.