Today is national word-coining day. So far today I've heard clumsome and predilectivity. How about you? Got any good words?
And now, for the fruits of a day off sick; I got a migraine, and then I was suddenly on a steep hill at a crossroads, surrounded by tall red-brick building. The streets were busy with traffic and the occasional passer by, but along the central reservation there were corpses lying; as I watched, one caught on the wheel of a car and flipped over. Wondering if I should cross to see if I could help, I suddenly found myself backing away from a large black dog, who was barking at me. His owner pulled him back on a lead, and gave me a conspiratorial voice, saying, "You'll be buying a house then." At around this point I wondered if I was perhaps in Edinburgh. I turned and walked quickly away, turning corners in what seemed like fast succession past big green garage doors and across broad streets; not really the pedestrian area of town, but following a series of turns that would allow me to circle back to where I started. I went further than I expected, and became anxious, and wondered what I was doing so far from home when I was ill. I tried to remember leaving home and concluded that I must be dreaming, although I could not recall falling asleep, and the city seemed extremely real. I had lost my sense of where I was, but persuaded myself to remain calm. I came to a blue door in a wall of weathered brick and went inside. Inside was a gallery, full of pictures painted on wood of women with blue hair and black eyes. As I looked at them, they seemed to recede and double, becoming both flatter and more three-dimensional, like a victorian vista-toy but fringed with colour and blur, as if there were actually two pictures, and if I could focus my eyes correctly, I would see the other. As I was trying to see, a large alsation dog came barking and snarling up at me, and the man pulling on his lead, smiled and rolled his eyes and made faces in a way probably intended to be reassuring but actually quite alarming. Then another dog, a gray greyhound of a sweet disposition, came up and started worrying at my hand, just after attention and love, but feeling quite surrounded I backed quickly out through double white wooden doors behind me into an enclosed quad full of large square tombs (the technical term is chest tomb) and green grass. I quickly jumped up and over one (the feel of stone under my hand determinedly real) then looked behind to check the greyhound had not followed me, but the doors were closed. It seemed very different weather out here, and the quad was not as small as I had supposed, more like a stadium, really, full of unmarked golden sandstone chest tombs and old, springy green grass, and the occasional tree, with white blossom. I lingered. Returned with anxious thought that the museum would be closed by now, and indeed, the strange blue pictures had been covered by dark wooden shutters. I went to the information desk, where there was woman with short blond hair who gave me a hard look, and said, "You're buying a house, then." Surprised, I asked her if she was doing anything after her work ended. She said no, and arranged to meet me outside, once everyone had left. I left by going down steep red stairs and out through an orange door onto a street corner on a crossroads on a steep hill. There were a bunch of geeks mithering about how to find out where they were using GPS and grid coordinates, some of them with handheld devices, prior to going for a drink or a cup of coffee somewhere. This despite the fact that we were on a street corner, where surely the streets were marked. I glanced around to see, slowly coming to the realisation that the pretty gallery attendant had probably left by another door, and realised that I had returned to the same street corner after all, and, as I glanced over to the central reservation, the boodies (now battered and bloody from having been knocked around by cars) got up and started to walk slowly uphill.
I could base a religion on that one. If I weren't taking up all of my time to paddyll in the myre, as duckes do or yonge chyldren.
Also, a funky found tape project. Remember them?
... and while I'm on the found sound stuff,