Everyone has to download and listen to this radio show as soon as they can! Get if from here:
http://dot-alt.blogspot.com/2009/04/night-slugs-south-crazy-cousinz-sub.html
Scroll down the page a bit. It's Alex Bok Bok on Sub FM with guest dj L-Vis. I downloaded this show soon after it was posted up, when it appeared in my blog updates, but then didn't get around to listening to it for a couple of weeks. I was missing out! These couple of hours pretty much sum up what I think is exciting about new British music right now. Even if you're not familiar with the type of music being played, just take a wander in, you honestly won't regret it. You can catch Alex on Sub FM every alternate Saturday from 5 - 7 pm, links to the stream on the above page.
Edit: as some of you may have noticed, I had the time of the show completely wrong the first time around. Lol. Thanks to 4linehaiku for the correction!
Friday, 24 April 2009
Thursday, 23 April 2009
Initiation in bass weight: DMZ
So last Friday, I finally made it along to a dubstep night. DMZ made the trip up from London to play at the Art School, and they brought along their core crew: Mala and Loefah djing with Sgt Pokes on the mic.
Over-preparing for any potential queues or complications, I arrived at 11, with the doors to the union just freshly opened and only a handfull of people about. I was flying solo for the night, which tbh I'm starting to find a bit of a drag these days. I mean, I long ago got over being self-conscious about it and I nearly always manage to have a good time regardless, but it just feels unnatural and adds an extra layer of stress to preceding. In fact, sitting on one of several empty and extremely comfy old couches along the side of the union's main room, I felt strangely like I could have been relaxing back in my living room. A version of my living room with a collosal soundsystem freshly installed, however, as Electric Elimantors, the night's regular residents and a more than worthy opening outfit for the night, were already banging out tunes on the decks.
One of the bonus benefits of the night was the way that it gave me, after a long abscence, an excuse to experience just how fun and well-equipped a venue for a night out the Art School can be. The soundsystem for the night was simply but expertly organised, with a hefty bank of speakers placed haflway between the stage/dj area and the bar, providing everyone in the main dancefloor area with deep, enthralling surround sound. The Eleminators stretched out for a good couple of hours, and were a worthy opener to the line-up. As far as I could tell, they operated as a kind of revolving team, with about four different people taking turns on the decks. Their early material was closer to instrumental hip-hop than dubstep, but after about 20 mins, as people steadily streamed into the room, I first heard what I'd come for: the bass.
I may as well get if off my chest at this stage: prior to this night, I had been a sub-bass virgin. Well, sort of: it had been a part of much of the music I know and love, and for some time I’d roughly understood how it worked in principle, bit I’d never experienced sub pressure out over a big system. My speakers at home clearly couldn’t compare. Sub-bass produces a rich, unusual sensory response; the sound is physically felt as much as it is heard. Sitting there, adsorbing the music, it felt as if each bass note was pinpointing and focussing in on me directly, in a similar motion to the stroboscopic lights beaming across the dancefloor. As the Eliminators’ set continued, and the room began steadily to fill up, I made my way over to stand by the speakers, and from there gradually found myself starting to dance in what I hoped was a nicely inconspicuous spot of my own. Nothing but good things to be said about the rest of the crowd though: as far from oppressively student as was ever going to be possible for a night held in a student union, there was very little of the ‘professionally scruffy’ stereotype for which dubstep fans are sometimes slagged off on display. Another nice blow against the preconceptions was the healthy proportion of females in attendance, at least 40% of the crowd in my estimation, all totally into the music.
Electric Eliminators stetched out for a good two hours, and played a varied selection which reached beyond strictly dubstep. To my delight, there was grime in the form of Wiley’s Bow E3 ( possibly in remix form, I couldn’t be sure), which drew a great crowd response, seemingly telling against the perception that grime travels less well outside of London than dubstep. We were also treated to some dancehall, with Warrior Queen’s anthem Almighty Father getting a play (I only realised recently just how filthy the lyrics to this song actually are, luvvit though). And perhaps best of all, I was very pleased to hear the appearance of some UK funky house, as the Eleminators dropped NB Funky’s big current tune Riddim Box towards the end of their set. I have a lot of hopes that this sort of music could do well in Glasgow, given the city’s longstanding appreciation for soul. Certainly, there were plenty smiles around me on the floor while it played, although many people still seemed to be learning how to dance to the new kinds of grooves. Riddim Box was also important for marking the first rewind of the night. Indeed, this was the first time I’d heard records being rewound in a Glasgow club, but the crowd seemed to get into it straight away. Over the course of the night, the djs seemed to strike the right balance between hyping up the crowd and interrupting the flow, with about 5 of the big tunes getting pulled back.
With the dancefloor now increasingly busy, the DMZ crew finally took over the decks at about 1 am. I was to recongise only a small fraction of the records that they played, but this element of surprise only seemed to add to the experience. Mala was up first, and it quickly became clear that he had an expert grasp of how to structure a set. Although the majority of the tracks that he chose fitted into the half-step format, he seemed to know exactly when to switch it up by reaching for some, erm, ‘full-step’. I was impressed by the flexibility, complexity and enthusiastic energy of the percussion on the more uptempo tracks, provoking plenty of rapid hand movements and upper-body action from the dancers. Just seeing and experiencing the particular type of dancing that this music enforces – a strange, somewhat jerky movement equally balanced between skanking and moshing – was a revelation. His selections with a slower feel were dark, appealingly so from my perspective, but also contained plenty of breathing space, and featured a certain sort of sonic depth. Both of these factors seemed to demonstrate a flourishing of the ‘dub’ aspects in dubstep in a way that avoided being strictly imitative.
Along with the music, the other key factor in the performance was Sgt Pokes’ MCing. As with the rewinds, to the best of my knowledge this was the first time I’d experience someone chatting on a mic over records. Pokes worked up the crowd with ease, his controlling impact aided by his imposing physical presence. His repeated catchphrases – ‘original skankage’, ‘this one’s industrial’, ‘eyes down!’, ‘fortified!’ and others which were sadly half-forgotten once the night was over – often helped set the tone for appropriate type of dancing to match each tune. My one gripe with him would be that he repeated his cackling, demonic laugh to the point where it became a bit corny – although I was certainly impressed by the perfect accuracy with which he reproduced it each time.
Slightly over an hour into proceedings, Pokes began to chant ‘last one Mala’, and with applause for all involved, Loefah seamlessly took over control of the turntables. It quickly became clear that his set would focus more closely on the ‘standard’ half-step sound with which dubstep is now widely associated, and sometimes criticised for. However, his particular take on it appealed to me a good deal, as it tended to center on the caustic, heavy, bordering on industrial textures which represent one of the substyles within this template that I find more exciting (the other being the tunes that take the wobbling basslines in a more fun-centred, jump-up direction). Around 30-40 minutes in, there was a short spell where he seemed to be losing us; the tune selection shifted more into the sort of buzzing mid-range riffs combined with uneventful beats which have drawn some legitimate discontent. You could see the change on the dancefloor; it might have been the time of night as much as the music, but the energy levels dropped, people began moving in a more sluggish, trudging fashion.
But Loeafah must have quickly noticed the change in vibe himself, and he reached for an anthem, dropping the Bug’s collaboration with Warrior Queen, Poison Dart. This received the biggest crowd reaction of the night, with cheers and a huge surge towards the stage. For the next 20 minutes in he kept the energy level right up, with a continual flow of bangers. The Bug’s album London Zoo must have made an impact up here, as Ganja, his b-side featuring Flowdan, garnered another strong response from the floor. As the immediately following tune entered into the mix, we were already beyond 3 o’clock, and so were treated to the house lights being turned on, in combination with various organisor-looking types wandering on to the stage and gesturing to DMZ to start wrapping it up. This seemed merely to work up the crowd even further, with one lad even leaping up to dance on stage. As Loefah finally wound to a stop, he was greeted with cheers, hearty applause and chants of ‘one more tune’, but I decided that with licensing laws involved an encore was unlikely, so began to make my way home (would love to hear from someone if I turned out to be wrong!). The end to the night strengthened my longstanding conviction that extended licenses ought to be granted more readily in Glasgow for these sorts of events. But I’m not going to let a moan spoil my judgement of a fantastic night. It was a night of important musical firsts for me, and well worth the wait.
Over-preparing for any potential queues or complications, I arrived at 11, with the doors to the union just freshly opened and only a handfull of people about. I was flying solo for the night, which tbh I'm starting to find a bit of a drag these days. I mean, I long ago got over being self-conscious about it and I nearly always manage to have a good time regardless, but it just feels unnatural and adds an extra layer of stress to preceding. In fact, sitting on one of several empty and extremely comfy old couches along the side of the union's main room, I felt strangely like I could have been relaxing back in my living room. A version of my living room with a collosal soundsystem freshly installed, however, as Electric Elimantors, the night's regular residents and a more than worthy opening outfit for the night, were already banging out tunes on the decks.
One of the bonus benefits of the night was the way that it gave me, after a long abscence, an excuse to experience just how fun and well-equipped a venue for a night out the Art School can be. The soundsystem for the night was simply but expertly organised, with a hefty bank of speakers placed haflway between the stage/dj area and the bar, providing everyone in the main dancefloor area with deep, enthralling surround sound. The Eleminators stretched out for a good couple of hours, and were a worthy opener to the line-up. As far as I could tell, they operated as a kind of revolving team, with about four different people taking turns on the decks. Their early material was closer to instrumental hip-hop than dubstep, but after about 20 mins, as people steadily streamed into the room, I first heard what I'd come for: the bass.
I may as well get if off my chest at this stage: prior to this night, I had been a sub-bass virgin. Well, sort of: it had been a part of much of the music I know and love, and for some time I’d roughly understood how it worked in principle, bit I’d never experienced sub pressure out over a big system. My speakers at home clearly couldn’t compare. Sub-bass produces a rich, unusual sensory response; the sound is physically felt as much as it is heard. Sitting there, adsorbing the music, it felt as if each bass note was pinpointing and focussing in on me directly, in a similar motion to the stroboscopic lights beaming across the dancefloor. As the Eliminators’ set continued, and the room began steadily to fill up, I made my way over to stand by the speakers, and from there gradually found myself starting to dance in what I hoped was a nicely inconspicuous spot of my own. Nothing but good things to be said about the rest of the crowd though: as far from oppressively student as was ever going to be possible for a night held in a student union, there was very little of the ‘professionally scruffy’ stereotype for which dubstep fans are sometimes slagged off on display. Another nice blow against the preconceptions was the healthy proportion of females in attendance, at least 40% of the crowd in my estimation, all totally into the music.
Electric Eliminators stetched out for a good two hours, and played a varied selection which reached beyond strictly dubstep. To my delight, there was grime in the form of Wiley’s Bow E3 ( possibly in remix form, I couldn’t be sure), which drew a great crowd response, seemingly telling against the perception that grime travels less well outside of London than dubstep. We were also treated to some dancehall, with Warrior Queen’s anthem Almighty Father getting a play (I only realised recently just how filthy the lyrics to this song actually are, luvvit though). And perhaps best of all, I was very pleased to hear the appearance of some UK funky house, as the Eleminators dropped NB Funky’s big current tune Riddim Box towards the end of their set. I have a lot of hopes that this sort of music could do well in Glasgow, given the city’s longstanding appreciation for soul. Certainly, there were plenty smiles around me on the floor while it played, although many people still seemed to be learning how to dance to the new kinds of grooves. Riddim Box was also important for marking the first rewind of the night. Indeed, this was the first time I’d heard records being rewound in a Glasgow club, but the crowd seemed to get into it straight away. Over the course of the night, the djs seemed to strike the right balance between hyping up the crowd and interrupting the flow, with about 5 of the big tunes getting pulled back.
With the dancefloor now increasingly busy, the DMZ crew finally took over the decks at about 1 am. I was to recongise only a small fraction of the records that they played, but this element of surprise only seemed to add to the experience. Mala was up first, and it quickly became clear that he had an expert grasp of how to structure a set. Although the majority of the tracks that he chose fitted into the half-step format, he seemed to know exactly when to switch it up by reaching for some, erm, ‘full-step’. I was impressed by the flexibility, complexity and enthusiastic energy of the percussion on the more uptempo tracks, provoking plenty of rapid hand movements and upper-body action from the dancers. Just seeing and experiencing the particular type of dancing that this music enforces – a strange, somewhat jerky movement equally balanced between skanking and moshing – was a revelation. His selections with a slower feel were dark, appealingly so from my perspective, but also contained plenty of breathing space, and featured a certain sort of sonic depth. Both of these factors seemed to demonstrate a flourishing of the ‘dub’ aspects in dubstep in a way that avoided being strictly imitative.
Along with the music, the other key factor in the performance was Sgt Pokes’ MCing. As with the rewinds, to the best of my knowledge this was the first time I’d experience someone chatting on a mic over records. Pokes worked up the crowd with ease, his controlling impact aided by his imposing physical presence. His repeated catchphrases – ‘original skankage’, ‘this one’s industrial’, ‘eyes down!’, ‘fortified!’ and others which were sadly half-forgotten once the night was over – often helped set the tone for appropriate type of dancing to match each tune. My one gripe with him would be that he repeated his cackling, demonic laugh to the point where it became a bit corny – although I was certainly impressed by the perfect accuracy with which he reproduced it each time.
Slightly over an hour into proceedings, Pokes began to chant ‘last one Mala’, and with applause for all involved, Loefah seamlessly took over control of the turntables. It quickly became clear that his set would focus more closely on the ‘standard’ half-step sound with which dubstep is now widely associated, and sometimes criticised for. However, his particular take on it appealed to me a good deal, as it tended to center on the caustic, heavy, bordering on industrial textures which represent one of the substyles within this template that I find more exciting (the other being the tunes that take the wobbling basslines in a more fun-centred, jump-up direction). Around 30-40 minutes in, there was a short spell where he seemed to be losing us; the tune selection shifted more into the sort of buzzing mid-range riffs combined with uneventful beats which have drawn some legitimate discontent. You could see the change on the dancefloor; it might have been the time of night as much as the music, but the energy levels dropped, people began moving in a more sluggish, trudging fashion.
But Loeafah must have quickly noticed the change in vibe himself, and he reached for an anthem, dropping the Bug’s collaboration with Warrior Queen, Poison Dart. This received the biggest crowd reaction of the night, with cheers and a huge surge towards the stage. For the next 20 minutes in he kept the energy level right up, with a continual flow of bangers. The Bug’s album London Zoo must have made an impact up here, as Ganja, his b-side featuring Flowdan, garnered another strong response from the floor. As the immediately following tune entered into the mix, we were already beyond 3 o’clock, and so were treated to the house lights being turned on, in combination with various organisor-looking types wandering on to the stage and gesturing to DMZ to start wrapping it up. This seemed merely to work up the crowd even further, with one lad even leaping up to dance on stage. As Loefah finally wound to a stop, he was greeted with cheers, hearty applause and chants of ‘one more tune’, but I decided that with licensing laws involved an encore was unlikely, so began to make my way home (would love to hear from someone if I turned out to be wrong!). The end to the night strengthened my longstanding conviction that extended licenses ought to be granted more readily in Glasgow for these sorts of events. But I’m not going to let a moan spoil my judgement of a fantastic night. It was a night of important musical firsts for me, and well worth the wait.
Thursday, 26 March 2009
Glasgow writers: taking over the interwebs
Well now, just as I'd got over the shock of EGJ's increased on-line presence, I was thrown into excited delight by the sudden arrival of......
..... MISS LOGAN!!!
(Bells, whistles, sirens, airhorns, foghorns, trumpets, gun shots, bomb sounds, claps and cheering etc. You get the picture)
http://kirstylogan.com/
Seriously, please give the site a look. She's a very talented writer, and the site contains links to several on-line texts of her recent publications (and she's been on a bit of a publishing blitz of late!) along with up to the minute info on her current projects.
..... MISS LOGAN!!!
(Bells, whistles, sirens, airhorns, foghorns, trumpets, gun shots, bomb sounds, claps and cheering etc. You get the picture)
http://kirstylogan.com/
Seriously, please give the site a look. She's a very talented writer, and the site contains links to several on-line texts of her recent publications (and she's been on a bit of a publishing blitz of late!) along with up to the minute info on her current projects.
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
Yet more silliness
courtesy of the Ghetto Puppets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmbiji_uP6c
Great for when a cheer-up and/or boredom-killer for a few minutes.
How brilliant is the actual song btw? Yet another one I must have missed at the time.
(Proper post coming soon, promise, it's been a busy few days at Andy Towers. Likely topics - Skins, prequels, the postal privitisation).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmbiji_uP6c
Great for when a cheer-up and/or boredom-killer for a few minutes.
How brilliant is the actual song btw? Yet another one I must have missed at the time.
(Proper post coming soon, promise, it's been a busy few days at Andy Towers. Likely topics - Skins, prequels, the postal privitisation).
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
Let The Sunshine In.....
Hahaha - from today's horoscope which pops up on my Google homepage - "The metaphysical sunshine has returned ". What a wonderful turn of phrase! This should become an established philosophical position I reckon - metaphysical realism, metaphysical skepticism, metaphysical idealism, metaphysical sunshinism. :D
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
An intro without a story
The following was selected at my last workshop session as the best of two possible short story openings. (Much love to all of my fellow workshoppers btw, hopefully we'll be seeing more of them on here in the future.) So have a read, let me know what you think if you feel like it, let me know where you think it should go next if you're really interested. Been going through a fairly serious spell of writer's block so hopefully this will be my route out of it.....
Only In Dreams
Sleeping in novels is a funny thing. It turns up, it turns up a lot, but only in a particular way. You only get the kind of sleep where the dreams are really clear and lucid, you only get the kind of dreams that are symbolically important to the development in an obvious, and therefore the sleep-time, the sleep-world always follows the lead set down by the events of the waking-world, never the other way around. This story is an attempt to see what things might look like turned the other way around. This is how it goes –
One day a man lay down on his bed, drifted into sleep, and dreamt of a land in which he was the only person. It startled him, right away, being in this world, and yet he immediately recognised it as inevitable according to the logic of the dream, as if the world has always been like this and always would be. He had found himself walking down a long straight road. In the distance was the skyline of a great city, but it seemed to move steadily backwards with the horizon as he tried to progress towards it. To his left, he passed a solitary tree, its branches bare of any leaves. He passed over an enormous flyover junction, feeling himself become engulfed in the geometric lines of dark concrete, but there were no cars to be seen. After further walking, a row of shabby brown tenements appeared on his right, which at least gave him a hint that he might be getting somewhere. At the end of the row was a little shop.
The man had the instant realisation that he was hungry and must do something about it, so he wandered into the shop to look for a snack. It was one of the places that seemed to have about three too many shelves, piled high with newspapers and cheap biscuits and endless old tins of soup, meat chunks, fruit chunks, pet food, with barely enough room to squeeze between them. The man grabbed himself a chocolate bar, packet of crisps and a decrepit looking sausage roll in a wrapper. Inevitably, there was no-one behind the counter, so no need to pay, but he had to clamber awkwardly halfway over it to peel himself off a plastic bag.
Outside, the dream no longer had any need for him to eat, so soon he had forgotten the food and it vanished from his hands. A little further down the road, he came to the start of a long bridge, over the other side of which the city seemed to have finally settled into position. As he began to walk over, however, the consistency of the bridge’s surface became unpredictable: gaps began to appear, inclines would suddenly rear up, sometimes the tar of the road would drag him to stop like quicksand, other times it would become slippery as ice. The man wasn’t so much alarmed or scared by this, so much as he was just frustrated. There was the city within reach, but he was having to jump through all these hoops to reach it. After a couple of minutes of struggling on, though, the city began to disintegrate, de-realise in front of him just like the bridge was, until gradually he was left in an empty grey-brown surrounding, and then nothing.
******
The man awoke, morning outside, his dream buzzing right through his brain, but keeping him puzzled completely as to what it meant, what it could be telling him to do. Like most people in these situations, he didn’t spend long scrutinising it explicitly to himself, but instead got up and started to go about his daily routine.
The man worked a very ordinary job, in a very ordinary company. It was based around buying and selling, managing people’s money. The man’s specific tasks, though, You might suppose that the man felt himself as a drone, just going monotonously through the motions of his job, but that wouldn’t be quite right. He add all kinds of justifications and explanations for doing what he did, most of which made the work sound quite a bit more dramatic that it actually was. He often found himself, though, holding these views rather half-heartedly, certainly not in the strong way that his co-workers seemed to. When they were about, spouting their ideas, this usually sufficed to give him the confidence to keep going, but when working in isolation, the confidence began to sap, and then he indeed felt himself as drifting along without meaning.
That morning, they had all been in full flow, pretty much as soon as he’d got in. It seemed to have started with a run-in one of them had encountered with a cousin, a high-school kid who thought he was smart.
“It’s the same old crap I hear all the time”, complained Jim, the colleague in question, perched on the corner of his desk with a mug of coffee in hand. “Having a go about how all we’re doing is ‘exploiting’ people, whatever that means. The problem these lefties have is, they can’t understand that there’s no way you can exploit someone who’s freely entered into a financial agreement with you. The market is just a method for individuals to exchange things of value with each other. And that’s the other thing they don’t get, that when you slice it right down, the basic level of humanity is individuals, not collectives. The kid kept going on about ‘group rights’ like they all do, as if they could even exist.”
The man nodded his agreement sagely, as he usually did, but this morning there were doubts at the back of his mind. The world Jim had described, of solitary individuals trapped on their own, concentrated on satisfying their personal needs, sounded a lot like the world he’d encountered in his dream. And he’d yet to decide what he thought of the dream-world, whether it was welcoming or frightening.
And so the man set to his daily tasks, but with the anxious feeling of something indefineable creeping up behind him. It was there, leering in the background, as he talked to people over the phone and tried to fulfil his role of blandly reassuring them about everything. The hours passed quickly, and soon he found himself sitting back on his couch, guzzling a couple of beers and pushing some tasteless food into his mouth. He slept early, barely managing to force himself through to his bed as the eyelids began to draw together.
*******
The man found himself on the road again, but this time he had an immediate awareness that he was further along
Only In Dreams
Sleeping in novels is a funny thing. It turns up, it turns up a lot, but only in a particular way. You only get the kind of sleep where the dreams are really clear and lucid, you only get the kind of dreams that are symbolically important to the development in an obvious, and therefore the sleep-time, the sleep-world always follows the lead set down by the events of the waking-world, never the other way around. This story is an attempt to see what things might look like turned the other way around. This is how it goes –
One day a man lay down on his bed, drifted into sleep, and dreamt of a land in which he was the only person. It startled him, right away, being in this world, and yet he immediately recognised it as inevitable according to the logic of the dream, as if the world has always been like this and always would be. He had found himself walking down a long straight road. In the distance was the skyline of a great city, but it seemed to move steadily backwards with the horizon as he tried to progress towards it. To his left, he passed a solitary tree, its branches bare of any leaves. He passed over an enormous flyover junction, feeling himself become engulfed in the geometric lines of dark concrete, but there were no cars to be seen. After further walking, a row of shabby brown tenements appeared on his right, which at least gave him a hint that he might be getting somewhere. At the end of the row was a little shop.
The man had the instant realisation that he was hungry and must do something about it, so he wandered into the shop to look for a snack. It was one of the places that seemed to have about three too many shelves, piled high with newspapers and cheap biscuits and endless old tins of soup, meat chunks, fruit chunks, pet food, with barely enough room to squeeze between them. The man grabbed himself a chocolate bar, packet of crisps and a decrepit looking sausage roll in a wrapper. Inevitably, there was no-one behind the counter, so no need to pay, but he had to clamber awkwardly halfway over it to peel himself off a plastic bag.
Outside, the dream no longer had any need for him to eat, so soon he had forgotten the food and it vanished from his hands. A little further down the road, he came to the start of a long bridge, over the other side of which the city seemed to have finally settled into position. As he began to walk over, however, the consistency of the bridge’s surface became unpredictable: gaps began to appear, inclines would suddenly rear up, sometimes the tar of the road would drag him to stop like quicksand, other times it would become slippery as ice. The man wasn’t so much alarmed or scared by this, so much as he was just frustrated. There was the city within reach, but he was having to jump through all these hoops to reach it. After a couple of minutes of struggling on, though, the city began to disintegrate, de-realise in front of him just like the bridge was, until gradually he was left in an empty grey-brown surrounding, and then nothing.
******
The man awoke, morning outside, his dream buzzing right through his brain, but keeping him puzzled completely as to what it meant, what it could be telling him to do. Like most people in these situations, he didn’t spend long scrutinising it explicitly to himself, but instead got up and started to go about his daily routine.
The man worked a very ordinary job, in a very ordinary company. It was based around buying and selling, managing people’s money. The man’s specific tasks, though, You might suppose that the man felt himself as a drone, just going monotonously through the motions of his job, but that wouldn’t be quite right. He add all kinds of justifications and explanations for doing what he did, most of which made the work sound quite a bit more dramatic that it actually was. He often found himself, though, holding these views rather half-heartedly, certainly not in the strong way that his co-workers seemed to. When they were about, spouting their ideas, this usually sufficed to give him the confidence to keep going, but when working in isolation, the confidence began to sap, and then he indeed felt himself as drifting along without meaning.
That morning, they had all been in full flow, pretty much as soon as he’d got in. It seemed to have started with a run-in one of them had encountered with a cousin, a high-school kid who thought he was smart.
“It’s the same old crap I hear all the time”, complained Jim, the colleague in question, perched on the corner of his desk with a mug of coffee in hand. “Having a go about how all we’re doing is ‘exploiting’ people, whatever that means. The problem these lefties have is, they can’t understand that there’s no way you can exploit someone who’s freely entered into a financial agreement with you. The market is just a method for individuals to exchange things of value with each other. And that’s the other thing they don’t get, that when you slice it right down, the basic level of humanity is individuals, not collectives. The kid kept going on about ‘group rights’ like they all do, as if they could even exist.”
The man nodded his agreement sagely, as he usually did, but this morning there were doubts at the back of his mind. The world Jim had described, of solitary individuals trapped on their own, concentrated on satisfying their personal needs, sounded a lot like the world he’d encountered in his dream. And he’d yet to decide what he thought of the dream-world, whether it was welcoming or frightening.
And so the man set to his daily tasks, but with the anxious feeling of something indefineable creeping up behind him. It was there, leering in the background, as he talked to people over the phone and tried to fulfil his role of blandly reassuring them about everything. The hours passed quickly, and soon he found himself sitting back on his couch, guzzling a couple of beers and pushing some tasteless food into his mouth. He slept early, barely managing to force himself through to his bed as the eyelids began to draw together.
*******
The man found himself on the road again, but this time he had an immediate awareness that he was further along
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