Always a bit dreary, this Twixmas period. 'Specially so in Kirkwall, the day after the Ba'. The Ba' boards are still up, which makes access to the miserable sales a little tricky,
the petrol pumps are boarded up,
the Council appears to have removed all the street litter bins, so the streets are littered with the debris from the pack and its spectators.
We've had snow overnight and the harbour,
into which the Ba' players hurled themselves joyfully last night, is cold, with a greasy slick.
One year, the roof that the enterprising players were standing on collapsed under the weight. The Ba' is no respecter of private property - a friend told me he was standing in his living room and glanced through the window to see heads popping up over his garden wall, followed by the pack milling around in his treasured garden.
Shop windows are protected by Ba' boards, at the owner's expense and the Council protects windows and doors of the buildings it owns - but if the pack gets round the back of houses, windows will be broken, dustbins overturned, gates and fences knocked down.
They're at home or the hospital now, recovering, ready for the New Year's Day Games.
I've been digging around in the Drafts archives and found these author's notes from mr ishmael.
NOTEBOOK, JUNE 2014
Thirty nine steps, that's enough, thanks. I don't come here to be praised; a Zen-Presbyterian-Marxist, it makes me uneasy, I am unaccustomed to it and my young friend, stanislav, never responded to it - is fucking plumber, not in fucking showbiz with arsebandit and fucking babyfucker, not want fucking BAFTA - but then he seldom responded to anything, there would be yards and yards of stan's the man stuff, stan for prime minister, stan made me laugh so much my wife had to call a fucking ambulance. And there would be other stuff, serious, lit-crit analyses by serious lit-crit people. I am not sure that I can speak FOR stanislav but I do know that he only existed within that brief, noisy milieu, and was unable, therefore, to respond to extant, corporeal third parties, woulda been stupid, really, wouldn't it, like talking to a character in a book. stanislav's name, was never capitalised because he wasn't a proper noun, not a proper person just a visiting voice but pay no heed, that's just me being the apostrophe jihadist whom I normally condemn, the empty headed, nit-picking, cheese-paring, hair-splitting grammacist-policeperson of cyberspace; never managed to stamp him out, he is alive and well, all over the place, smug and stupid, holding Ruin's jacket for him. Inasmuch as he said anything outside of his missionary-noir rants he did try to raise the tone, reproving commenters for their discourtesies one to the other - even if bloke is cunt, is best call him mr cunt, is only fucking polite, proper english way, best is to play ball and not bloke. It surprised me just how quickly people did start pre-fixing the most unlikely tags with a Mr or, rarely, a Mrs.
The fingerbells of the Incredible String Band jingle through these lines, through my life; here and there, a little, joyous ping of punctuation, a note of completion, affirming a sentence here, a paragraph there.
Back when Bob Dylan was something special he had a song which included the lines:
...and here I sit, so patiently,
waiting to find out what price
you haveta pay to get out of
going through all these things twice.
For years mr mongoose and I have traded obscure Dylan lines and phrases all across these telegraphs and he will know; mr verge, the house filthster will know, ms lilith, sad-eyed lady of the wetlands will know, mr pt barnum, mr mothers ruin, mr young anglo-Irish catholic, mrs narcolept on her cemetery walks, with her kitchen filled with motorcycle parts; mrs raft, tugging on reality's mooring line.
I am none of these names you call me.
I thought that I had impressed upon you Fawkesians the nature of polite salutation, that it is mr dr klondike, mr the yellow emperor. The @, although a now common delimiter in email adressing, separating addressee from domain name, does not mean to, it is a misuse of the word at, meaning each, at a cost of x each. Your salutation to me, therefore, at best, means at myself but is actually gibberish. You talk an awful lot, boy, for one who is so fucking stupid.
Fawkes, now working for Murdoch, shall never sleep again, doth murder sleep.
But I must sleep and so must you, that's enough for tonight. I command it. Remember, an emperor can send a cyber ninja warrior to delete your very thoughts, feeble and lacklustre though they are.
I don't moderate, I don't edit, I don't link, I don't advertise and in five years I would be surprised if I had deleted one comment per year; I don't like to do it, it is against my instincts, I especially don't like and try not to do it in the wee small hours for fear it might add to another's, what, discomfort, loneliness, whatever it is which fuels the lonesome, insomniac obsession to which I sometimes fall victim.
I have said this to you previously, dr klondike buzz, and I will repeat for the last time - your multiply-tagged, repetitive flights of fancy rapidly irritate; they are unquestionably delivered with some linguistic finesse however they do underscore the adage that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, something which, before encountering your endless, snide bullying, I would have questioned. Your comments may amuse you but I suspect that you will be your only audience; tortured, exaggerated wordplay makes slave of its author and creates enmity in its readers. I have, therefore, deleted your last half-dozen posts; they add nothing to anything, I hope that your participation in the wider public discourse is less self-obsessively negative, less preposterously clever, I would guess, though, that your life's purpose is to disrupt any continuum in which you exist; here, you no longer exist at all. Any effort at having the last word will only exhaust you; it will take me a second to recognise you and a half a second to delete your comment.
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