RuKsaK

Everyday I take a taxi to and from work. I always sit in the back. No matter what time, what the weather, there is one stretch which never looks or feels different. It’s a tunnel with an indiscriminate end and beginning, dotted with thousands of perfectly spaced yellow bulbs and white lines. The driver usually hits a hundred in the tunnel and the lights stream and sputter enough to induce a five-minute, dulled level of meditation. It’s in the tunnel I usually get ideas for what to write about. The car slides in at one end and I come out of the other with a phrase or two, an idea, a buggered memory. I revere the tunnel for its concrete dumbness and refusal to bend to anything natural – it’s a stubborn, ugly fuck of architecture – purely manhandled and devious.
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I figured that certain adjectives and hacked verbs are stuck in the bulbs. ‘Lurid’ flashed at me from bulb no.642 on the left and it ends up describing a mum’s lips. In bulb no.45, a dead guy on a bench three years ago, flickers back at me. Another winks to me that life is a journey, words are motion. They change each day, these orange blips.
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At the end of the tunnel where I live the hill has homes rattling down it. It looks like an avalanche of brick and concrete, messy, tumbling in rubbish, gnarled roads which are whoring themselves lazily to all the cars. There seems to be more corners than turns, all rounded and careless. The same road can be plump and weedy in the same view.

At the other end it all changes. It’s suddenly massive tower blocks which Superman would be happy to fly past. Many of them are gridded mirrors which reflect another building of gridded mirrors that reflect the next. Hangeul hangs off the cheaper ones, but it’s so regimented I miss the rubbish of the other side in a second.
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I miss Superman. I’m sorrowful for his death. The side of the tunnel where he still flies is where he still flew in my life. It’s uncluttered, uniformed, straight and organised. The other side is just a crap actor, dead after a horse ride, wearing cock-denying tights. It's the other end of me as well.
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RuKsaK is 6-months-old today and that’s the only reason I’m posting this messy post. My head is locked in hard wood this week. If I can see the lights clearly, through the belated tears for Superman, I’ll post the next part of Stink and the suicides by Friday.

If you want more in the meantime, I’ve sent a guest post to Shitty Blogs Club which may or may not appear there soon and is also fairly crap.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Six lit months only