The man from 41C stood on the platform, and looked up at the dirty orange LED display. The wind and drizzle made a light haze of colour around the sign, and turned the reading of “18:02 to East Grinstead” resemble something more akin to “18:85 to Bast Grlnstead”. The sky grew darker, and people poured out of the Tube station after the crush on the Victoria Line an hour before. 41C tucked the end of his scarf into the top of his overcoat, and walked slowly up the platform, bundled up as though in the depths of a Midwestern winter, with the top of his head and nose peeking out of the roll top of the woolen sweater. He reaches into his pocket as he pushes the button to open the door, and pulls out his mp3 playing phone^[i], and wiggles the ends of the headphones into his ears as he walks into the carriage. He finds a seat, and kicks up his walking boot covered feet onto the hot air vent under the little table by the window. Bag by his side, he pulls out the newspaper for the day, and a bottle of water.
The train, late as always, pulls out of Victoria, and rumbles through the City and a snail’s pace, heading southwest from Victoria to Croydon and Clapham, passing the towers of Battersea. The working lights shine up the chimney stacks, and makes the dirty white paintwork burn brightly in the early evening rain. The phone bleeps softly in his ears, and he reads a message about runways and sheriffs. The man from 41C sits back and thinks of the girl on Flight AA 3676. He wonders how it’ll go, and where she’ll end up. And where, in a few months, he’ll be. 41C leans back and listens to the clatter of the carriage over the rails, and the rain on the windows. The train rolls on into the evening, and the dirty orange of the station fades away. It’s time for another journey.

1. an iPhone, but it sounds silly in the context of the story [↩]

<p ALIGN=CENTER><img SRC=”http://matcatastrophe.com/media/images/US8.jpg” BORDER=0 ALT=”On the road to the Crystal Frontier”/></p>

He tore the wrapper, and wound down the window. The paper fluttered from his hand, and was sucked out into the cold air as the truck thundered along Interstate 8. One hand on the wheel, he wiped the other on his jeans. <p>

(more…)

It’s under my bed, it’s never been read.
It’s in with my school stuff and my mom never cleans in there.
From my first little fib, when I still wore a bib
To my latest attempt at pretending I’m someone
Who’s not seventeen, doesn’t know what you mean
When talk turns to single malts, or stilton, or

While not seventeen, there is a shoe-box under my bed. It used to contain a pair of dark blue Vans; now it’s filled with notes and letters, an armband from the National Trust, a box of crayons, postcards, receipts, some old photographs, too. The sort of thing one keeps in a shoe-box under the bed.

There is so much in that shoe-box that I would love to keep. But there’s also a lot of pain attached to it. Things best forgotten, things I’d rather not remember. It’s like being force-fed tales of a Geo-centric universe, wooden spoon down the throat, as if my liver were being fattened up for some cannibalistic Foie Gras treat.

All that ever was good about the shoe-box I still have elsewhere.

Today, the shoe-box burns.

The office was finished today. The chaps came and lugged half-inch deep pile up to the top of the house and into the loft, and spent a good part of the morning cutting it all to shape and fit. Now that it’s reasonably habitable, I’ve been slowly filling the shelves and such with notebooks, letters, journals; even my old copies of Creative Review have found a space there, as has my Minolta XG1, and the lenses.

My desk has grow a large coffee mug, filled with about 30 different shades of Sharpie and assorted markers. The top right drawer, once my smoking drawer, now is filled with scraps of paper and notes and pencils and Mont Blanc Ink. Two PowerBooks sit in front of me, neither one doing very much of anything. Behind me on the shelves are books I’ve amassed over a few years, and always meant to read. But never quite gotten around to doing it.

I used to churn out reams of stuff. Most of it was, by my own admission, utter tosh. But some of it was decent. I could sit for hours, sometimes days at a time, just writing, or drawing, anything and everything. Even if I were not churning out gold any more, I’d still like to be able to create trash. As it stands, I’m having trouble doing even that of late. Just this one entry has taken an hour already.

It’s not right. Time was where I could have hammered this out and done a few revisions in under ten minutes.

I think perhaps I need to take a pen and paper with me to a Royal Park sometime soon, sit, watch the world go by, and find some of that missing ‚Äúoomph‚Äù - even if all I get in return is some hackneyed old tosh about heliocentricity (a favourite of mine while sozzled) then it’s a start. It’s got to be better than this sordid existence of supporting morons for clients.

Quite possibly, the prettiest cardboard box I’ve ever seen.

Well, it arrived. A few days ago, in fact- I’ve just been waiting for Melissa to post about the 9500. My initial battle with HM Customs ended with me losing, poorly. To the tune of about $145 in Duty and VAT. But it was quite worth it. I have to say, this is the my most beautiful object I’ve ever seen. There’s something just so utterly simple and yet evocative about it; it’s like a giant black cucumber. But without the sexual innuendo. Almost. The sheer size gives an impression of it weighing about half a pound, but the resin it’s cast from is amazingly light. The filler system is so utterly simple to use but has gears and wheels embedded in the body so that when the back of the filler goes up, the plunger goes down. That means screwing it back down, ready to use is the action that fills the vast ink chamber inside. And the resin it’s cast from; it’s not black. It’s blood red. Hold it up to a strong light, and the edge of filler mechanism, the ink chamber and the cap explode with deep Shiraz tones; you could just drink it in. There’s even a an individual serial number laser-etched into the top of the cap clip.

Downsides, the Fine nib is still too wide for the feed, or the feed is too fast. With the standard Mont Blanc ink, the delivery is just a little too fast. Solution, get a narrower, EF (Extra Fine) nib, get a OM (Oblique Medium) nib, (both free under the initial Mont Blanc Nib Exchange Program) or, find thicker, non MB ink, which would kill my warranty.

But above all, it’s forced me to slow down my life; ditching the 9500 means I now write everything when on the move, not type. And that makes me think about what I take down. That’s not something I’ve done of late when typing, it just goes from sound to letters on the screen. When writing, everything has to be processed before my hand can even begin to manipulate the pen on paper. And on a commute in the morning, that’s awesome. Less time on IRC on the train, less GPRS data getting burned, and taking in more of the stuff around me. There’s so much stuff out in the world to be seen, and this helps me take notice.

And finally, some real pictures.