Skullthorpe's Blog

An investigator hired by a boy trying to find a father who is alleged to have run off with another women abandoning his family discovers a conspiracy.
There is an organisation of women that can be hired to murder unwanted husbands and create the impression that the man has abandoned the family.
Just as the investigator is about to reveal the truth he is murdered in the same way.

It seems it is not to be quite yet. The weather has intervened again. Hopefully the result will be huge patches of burnt bush on our NW flank reducing the danger of a major event fire storm.
The volunteers who work on our behalf in times of natural disaster do much to help to undercut the growing sense of social disillusionment.

I can smell smoke. This Is not comforting. There are fires West and North of here that could join and create a fire in excess of 500,000 H. We have been talking for some years now of the inevitability of ‘der tag’ . It has happened everywhere else it must be our turn soon.
So we are waiting. If a fire should come by we will have no hope. One road in, inadequate water-supply and a town full of tourists. In “The Color of Magic’ by Terry Pratchett’s the definition of a tourist is an idiot.
Anyway I have market in the morning. If there is going to be one. I can still smell smoke.

The impossibility of now.
A bit of a stopper in the path of the endless drivel generated about ‘uncertainty’ is that the probability of the string of events delineated to have allegedly lead up to any given sense of ‘now’ are vanishingly improbable. However something had to happen. The notion that the ‘something’ being contemplated is seperate from the total ‘something’ occuring everywhere at once in an ‘infinite’ universe is an artifact of human limited capacities both sensory and conceptual. To attach any universal importance to it is ludicrous in the extreme.
I think I just arrived at existentialism by a rather novel route.

Some sort of darkness lay like soot over the world. Or at least the world visible through the crack between the shutters.  How had the shutters had come between her and that world? Where before there had been the anonymous cafe and an undistinguished cafe latte there was now a disordered broken bedroom blurred with cobweb and stained the colour of old cold tea.

I get the sneaking and undeniable feeling that 21st century culture is becoming increaslngly styled by the dead hand of Philip K Dick. Not that Dick as a ‘sci fi prophet’ (ugh). Science Fiction writers are notoriously bad at prediction. Think of a single pre 1960 story with mobile phones, PCs or the Internet. They were big on ubiquitous flying cars, ESP and conveyor-belt pavements. What makes the 21st Century Dick-ensian (sorry)  is the tone and atmosphere.  The style of his quirky details glitters everywhere.
My son Taliesin is a ‘Brony’. He is a member of an internet based sub-culture central to which is a set of toy ponies made for little girls and adverized through the medium of a tv cartoon series. These cartoons have become the philosophical underpinnings of a credo centred around friendship and loyalty and other positive life messages. Eerily Dick.
There is the continuous dumbing down of media, education and political discourse. The increasing use of anti depressive drugs with their slightly psychotic alienated disengagement with externalities is common theme in Dick’s worlds.  Consumer driven cultures like the ‘New Age’ with its gimcrack ‘alternative medicines’ and pseudo spirituality is very ‘Perky Pat’. Shopping Malls with their surreal over abundance and faux choice seem straight out of a Dick psychotic episode. Just like many of Dicks characters we are all emersed in a collective hallucination.
Corporations, freed from social restraint by their global positioning, on the one hand develop drugs to curb curiosity and concern and on the other market goods to glut the third chimpanzees insatiable appetite for novelty, alcohol, sugar, salt and fat. Largely undoing progress made in universal education and general public health, fortunes are being made in consumer media products that gain greater and greater monolithic controls of our life choices, while at the same time trivialising them. The medical profession and the pharmaceutical companies are heavily investing in geriatrics, a guaranteed market, where deteriorating minds and barely functioning obese bodies are kept suffering for as long as possible. At the same time sports and other outdoor activities are being presented as spectator activities associated with advertising for alcohol and fast food.

She was speared, stradled, on the prong of his gaff. Landed in a flurry of rent lace, her cries rang down the valley, twisting the willows on The Genoa Flats. Desire crackling the air with summer lightning.

Image pf a pub with skeletons piled out the front and in the foreground starving, squabbling and begging children.

A series of mouths emiting different sized and different colored empty speech bubbles.
A pair of scales with a seedy looking infantryman on one pan and a pile of consumer goods on the other superimposed on a background of devastation.
A montage of the world help.
A cut out of the word ‘help’ filled with images of children playing and the natural world.

The other day  I had a sort of epiphany. I want to share it with you.
I was at the school  and a window broke.  So it goes. I volunteered to fence off the area to make it safe during imminent recess till it could be repaired. Off I went with a roll of the plastic tape with the yellow and black diagonal stripes that declare an official danger.  Up went the tape.  The window was repaired. At the end of the day I took down the barrier. It was like nothing had happened. When I was  checking over the site to make sure nothing was left undone I had my thought.

Millions of years ago our planet teemed with life. There was more oxygen and more carbon dioxide and the biosphere thrived. It was then that this story  really started.  The seas were rich with micro-organisms and as they died their bodies rained down over millions of years forming deep beds of sludge that were subsequently buried, compressed and cooked to create the vast oil reserves that have fueled progress for the last 150 years.

The oil that comes out of the ground  after countless millions of years of natural processing is amazingly useful.  From it we get drugs, plastics, fertilizers and of course petrol.

There is now less than half the oil in the ground than there was when we first made those amazing discoveries in Texas.  Nearly a billion years to produce and less than 200 hundred years to consume (at present rates).  So desperate are the greedy and the rich to continue this process that they are destroying the bedrock beneath our feet and threatening the integrity of our ground water.

What has this got to do with a broken window and hazard tape?  Consider – the strip of plastic tape that I unrolled, used and threw away in less than a day had taken a billion years to get there.  Once the resources have been drained there will be no more.  I threw away the plastic tape and it made it’s way to the tip where it will remain for another billion years polluting the subsoil.

Then I thought about Christmas and  the mountains of plastic junk being produced by the worlds factories and given as Christmas presents that will break or just be thrown away in the next twelve months. I thought of the pollution going into the biosphere from their manufacture, the persistence of the junk in the ground and the sheer waste of this precious resource for the manufacture of trivia and to drive us all around in our little tin boxes.  It was quite a thought.

I have resolved this year to try and only buy presents that are bio-degradable, hand made and/or of lasting value and durability.  Vouchers and digital memberships are good.  It is vastly less than a drop in the bucket for our poor struggling planet with its poor struggling billions but as my bumper sticker says – ‘There are no jobs on a dead planet!’

Don Ashby