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The first indoctrination involved heightened disorientation. For a man who likely holds a compass and cartography charts in his wet and pulsing brain, all of this information is scattered around like slamming fists on a Monopoly board. Where does one buy a decent meal? Where does one find that certain adapter that conjoins two cables that no longer have correct names here? Roads that form half-triangles and schizophrenic, chameleon-like names of streets Strand now Fleet now Ludgate). Former Roman Roads and their tarry surfaces stretched and brittle over a dense, never-ending metropolis of rats and metal cars. Cash points and “Yes, boss” and open electrical boxes that are left open begging to invite the public to electrocution.
It is somewhat of a mass red alert confusion. The adrenaline and adventure is there. He knows that at some point he’ll start piecing it altogether. Thinking these thoughts popping out of rabbit hole subway entrances realizing he is one too late/early. Heavy, swooping architecture brings in religious empirical imagery from one thousand years of manic culture. Streets strutting out the colourful, edgy children of a culture that may only stay on the surface. A peeled edge of a promotional music posterboard on a wall hiding the building of the city’s new elite on the inside. Designed by one of many. New paper thin computers smelling of take-out espresso. This one’s likely from a Goldsmith’s kid — maybe.
All in all there’s new games to be played and more homework to be read. Crack the caper. Sherlock Holmes did. Apparently he was doing his problem solving only a couple of miles away in Marylebone. This is it. Yes, this is it.
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A week in an artist flat, a month in a flat owned by wealthier artists than the first, and then the third was our outpost behind an elevated railway track. There was a small paradise in the back, buried in mud, in an earshot of the angry boys at the youth center down the street. It was a narrow place suitable for dwarves and hermits. Indiscernible, loud voices constantly in a doeppler effect outside the front window. From there they made something from nothing. A computer on the metal grate of a disused outdoor grill, tables from the neglect of a season to season culture tucked away in alcoves on the street, strange fabrics and attire exploded out of polyethylene bags shining in the midnight moon.
Live the example of a “what if?” — No books, no shoes — flushing and thinning out stories and memories out of a magnetized collection of personal effects and put in care of things you can carry all at once with backs and hands.
There’s a light that never goes out at the cash and carry diagonally across this intersection he has come personally bonded to. Crisp bags blow down the street informing complicated rhythmic “hi-hat” sounds. A pair of fashionable, art-school youths engage in synchronous texting; conversations furiously through fingers and not mouths. He can’t really make an entry point into these lives; at least not tonight and the dialogue always seems to come hours later anyway, long after the opportunity is gone.
