AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the last episode, the birth of a nation. Don’t fail to miss the de-briefing epilogue tomorrow...

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 73: The Final Chapter

‘So that’s was how it all ended?’

‘Yeah, pretty much.’

‘That’s amazing! I mean I’d have never have guessed… never!’

‘No, nor me. And of course you know the really odd thing in all of this?’

‘No. What?’ …

THE END

WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the last episode, potential survivors gather for the denouement at Dddwwchyllff’s as waters rise and land sinks. HERE – the END of the penultimate chapter, soon to be followed by a short final chapter and a surprising epilogue, so now on to the apocalyptic hoedown at the plas y Ddwwchyllff!
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 72: LAST PART!

The Vice Chancellor was nobody without Everyone else. He was a broken man, a husk of a shell of a shadow of his former self. Now Everyone had gone and there was nobody left he became an insignificant figure. Stripped of his influence, his power, his underpants and socks, the former dictator was left to rattle around the now empty corridors of the now subterranean top floor of the Welsh University. Would he ever recapture his former position? Was there any way back for the man so forcefully sidelined by Everyone else? Would he find some new underwear?

It seemed a lonely, chilly existence awaited him now.

Tuesday, July 25 2006

8:10am. Eight O'clock. Hate O'clock. Time to spend the next eight and a half hours hating myself or else zoning out until I forget who I am.

11am. Imaginary conversations. things I should have said to so and so back when something happened. Revenge fantasy. Things I'd like to say to so and so if I ever see hir again. Responses to anticipated questions from so and so if I ever brought up the topic of such and such. Counter-arguments to declarations made by so and so about - whatever. What I'll do if such and such ever happens again.

Schemes and quests and projects, the labor given as little thought as a sports movie montage sequence, the fruits of my imaginary efforts envisioned in glory and perfection. The triumph of the future self in some golden parallel universe. MVP of failure.

Monday, 24 July 2006 12:30pm

I hate you. I fucking hate you. You are a withered elephant with a flaccid penis for a trunk and a hollow, rotten squash for a head. Butternut. Every time I walk past you I feel an urge to cave your rotten melon with my fist - an urge so strong that I actually see a translucent 'ghost' of my own hand come out of my body and clock you in your gurgling, whimpering skull. I can even feel the moment of contact. There are parallel universes. In one of those parallel universes there is a man with a bloody, broken hand. He has just lost his job, and he is about to be arrested.

Monday, 24 July 2006
8:45. I can't believe it's the 24th of July already. I can't really remember anything that happened this month - that I did, that anyone did.

I didn't make anything - it's insane. It's absolutely insane and terrifying that I can just blow through 24 days with nothing to show when I come out the other side.

And what really happened last month, for that matter? Well OK, last month was a wonderful and memorable time to say the least, but it was all stress and hedonism. There was no creation going on then either. At least I made it to my studio. Once.

It feels like being perpetually on the edge of something. For three years now I've been eternally 'almost ready to get started'. There's always been just one more duty I need to fulfill, or thing I need to get set up, or tool/material I need to acquire, and then I'll really be able to do what I want to do. Then I can get my life started.

19 July 2006

4:15 p.m.

Fifteen minutes to go. It's amazing how hard it is for me to do this job without an iPod. I can't even really think anymore. It's like the monotonous repetition of tasks, combined with no outside stimulus, has deadened my brain. This must be how my fellow employees became such sad sacks of nothing.

Usually this job makes me feel irritable and restless. Right now I just feel hopeless.

Always is. Always was. Always will be.
I really hope I can get this thing fixed.

No thoughts. All I can think about is that I have no thoughts. Did the fire go out? Maybe it went out long ago, and I'm only just coming to realize it, as the last heat radiates from the hearth, leaving cold stone and ash?

WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the last episode, the old Bangladeshi punts off into the sunset, Samantha climbs out of the George Walker home in pursuit of Lassie, Ddwwchllyff shows off his suitcase-in-a-suitcase-in-a-suitcase ad infinitum. The chapter charges along at top speed in search of closure...
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 72; Part II

When Rhoda Crwys’s new companions Schumacher, Plenty Capable, Sunny Quito and Short Mat Bowls stepped into the room with everyone else, they were not surprised to see Wolfcastle and Ddwwchlyff arguing with two identical cherry-lipped assassins over the matter of hypo-superficial channels. They’d been told to expect something like this. They’d undergone a grueling seminar on the bewilderingly contentious topic of underground tunnels. They’d heard how the validity of a proposition on which public opinion fell evenly into two camps led to a statistically expressable likelihood of each side being exactly half-wrong. ‘My problem,’ Rhoda had alerted them confidentially as they entered the third floor window and stampeded over to the winding staircase leading up to the fourth floor and the professionally disembodied voices, ‘is that I can’t think of any ramifications. What is the way forward?’

So it says I'm supposed to post a little about myself and such. Being the ultra-mega-busy person that I am, I don't have a ton of time to do this, so you'll have to settle for links:

www.rtfmrecords.com - our indie artist label collective
www.artemis.fm - my best friend and musical cohort
http://people.tribe.net/bombastique - my profile on Tribe.net

I'm involved in a million things at a time - my fingers are in many pies. Music is my life, but I love photography, graphic design and making stuff from tables to theremins to clocks. I read incessantly (yes, even manuals - especially manuals!) and dig long talks about life outside the ordinary.

WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the last episode, Wong and a very special wolfhair rug, Peppet’s surviving brother Wonce, the Vice, and Snought all have roles to play while most everyone else except everyone else gathers at the Largest Hill house as if drawn by a mysterious force... and NOW – everything else happens, finally, at last!
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 72; Part I

Things began to happen quickly. Single paragraphs bulged with the events of three or four, their contents spilling out onto the floor. Later, no one would be able to say what happened when, or in what order, or to whom. Somebody somewhere sneezed. A dog barked. Everyone else listened intently. Was it him? No, it was coming from the ranch-style attic of the old George Walker, home for Partially ndented and Criminally Not Quite Righ. Professor Erm paused between rungs. There was something missing... what was it? Something to do with a box, yes, that was it – a box. A box filled with hundreds of tiny pieces of oddly shaped colour-splashed pasteboard. But what was it? Erm couldn’t figure it out. It was a puzzle, he thought as the ladder fell slowly backwards. A figure possibly resembling Professor Snought seemed to hurry across the grassy knoll on his way to an apparent meeting with the vice. It was not to be. Wong felt the wolf hair rug with practiced fingers – an unusual feature in any rug, unheard of in wolf hair! Behind the sheltering Buddleia, Wonce Peppet quietly and without fanfare re-opened the case. Sixteen members of a delegation, there to discuss academic opportunities for Arcorgian exchange students, were ushered by somebody else into the office of the ALMIGHTY VICE CHANCELOR OF THE WELSH UNIVERSITY. He was in a bonecrushing mood. Soon there was just a handful of people left. He squished it until they oozed out between his knobbled fingers and trickled down his ghastly carpus. ‘Why is Colonel Wence Peppet malingering behind that concealing shrubbery?’ Snought never inquired of a passing figment of his imagination. It never hurried past him, not avoiding his glance. Well, he’d find out for himself, he would, he would! (He would, were he not already to be found clutching at straws in a concrete and black gold grave.)

19 July 2006 8:30 am

It happened again. Or rather, it didn't happen again. I came home from work, and from that moment on, I may as well have been asleep, because nothing really happened. I made dinner and watched a movie that I didn't really need to see. Then I surfed the internet for a while, and went to bed.

There was the most beautiful electrical storm going on outside. For the longest time, no rain or thunder, just blue arcs of lightning in the clouds.

So bright. So blue. So quiet. And then the first crack of thunder as the sky broke and rain came down in sheets, tapping out its staccato on the air conditioner sticking out of our bedroom window.