He’s not replying. He always replies. But tonight, with a wet fog slithering through the stones that in no way resemble fairies, I can’t raise him anywhere. I used to worry I wouldn't find him online when I signed in. I didn't know where he lived — most CL posters are American, Californian. But he never seemed to sleep, never seemed to log off.
No reply has come yet, though. I tried shaking the phone. I checked the bars — still low, but steady. I clicked through another message. His log-in name is grayed out, which means he’s offline, or that he's made himself invisible. He could be sitting there in front of his machine, reading my messages, rolling his eyes at me, clicking them closed as soon as they popped up.
Tears burn my eyes. I blink.
Really? I’m this pathetic? Crying over a friend who exists only in 1s and 0s?
Apparently I am. I’m sitting on the fallen stone in the middle of the fairy circle, writing this post, making it way too long in the hope he’s only in the bathroom, or attending to some other physical need I never imagined he had. Waiting.
I didn't bother changing shoes when I left the pub — my internet-sale Doc Martens, 90s cliché that they are, can still handle anything from Bryn Davies's sheep pasture all the way up the wet slate trail to the top of the mound. It takes 35 steps, give or take, for me to reach the edge of the speck we called a village. Most of the windows are dark at this hour, and the village has never been big enough for streetlights.
I stopped at the gate that would let me onto the public walking path up the hill, and checked the mobile again – no bloody service, as usual. The hill schmoozed toward me out of the mist. It’s not much of a lump, not like the snowy peaks of Snowdonia to the north, but the mist still strangled its summit, shielding it from view. The walk to the stones is a bitch in the dark, and took a lot longer than I'd thought. I stumbled once, gashing my tights at the knee. Fuck. That’ll be another £5 on eBay. With my crap luck, the mist will block my reception, too. I touched the phone on — service, but not steady. IMing would be touch and go from here. I'd have to climb all the way to the top.
I paused at the base of the hill, staring up at its soft head, crowned with bristling chunks of granite. It would only take me another five or ten minutes to get up there, to get those few measly bars that represent a connection, a lifeline out of this toilet bowl. The climb always makes me feel like an ant, struggling against the swirling tide flushing us all down into ancient history. I started up, my boots squishing over the damp sod.
Halfway up. Flickering service. The IM app was nearly loaded.
One precious half a bar of service popped up as I topped the rise, breathing a little hard. When I was fifteen, I used to run up this hill. Now, at the ripe old untrustworthy age of 25, I practically need an airlift. Christ.
The IM app finally finished loading, and I pinged him, waiting.
And that’s when the cabrón insisted on not replying. And still hasn’t, even though I’ve written a fucking novel here already.
The stones peer sadly at me, stretching their shadows to blanket me. They’re nothing compared to Stonehenge in the south, but neither are they the tiny little rocks used to form most of the fairy circles in the region. This standing circle took some serious theological freaks to build. The mist is too heavy to inch its way up the hill, and above the stones hangs a rare clear night. The moon is absent, letting the stars preen in the black. I stare up at them, waiting for them all to fall at once, lighting the sky on fire, exploding through the atmosphere and wiping us all out like the soft sacks of water we are.
I’m sending one last message. Come on, Tal. Please don’t leave me dangling here.
Saturday, 22 September 2012
Another Night of Drudgery
I’m considering chucking my bloody mobile at the wall. It would crunch against that fucking cold Welsh bluestone, and even in a thousand electronic turds it would be as useful as it is in perfect working order.
The Carlsberg clock seems to be stuck at ten to two, over the heads of the last bums left in the pub. I’ll have to hike up to the stone circle if I want even half a bar of service that’ll give me a couple of minutes of connectivity, barely enough to publish this post, much less talk to anyone.
“You goin' to hang about all night, lookin' sour?” My grandfather just tapped me gently between the eyes, smiling. “That mug o' yours flattens the lager.”
“Nothing happening here, Taid,” I reply, swiping at his nicotine-stained fingers (and keep typing — I can at least pretend I’m connected to the outside world).
“Nothing's happened here since your mama flew off to South America, Amelia.” He pours an umpteenth round for the craggy bastards at the end of the bar. “Ever since then, the mams and dads keep their children locked away at night—”
“—and their secrets they whisper only to the stove in the empty first light of morning,” I finish, rolling my eyes. I dump a sack of peanuts into the empty bowl. “I'm not my mom.”
Gwyn Jones downs half his pint in one gurgling swallow. “Too right. Your mom were the sweetest thing ever walked the shores of Anglesey.”
I grab his glass and tug it out of his reach. “Gwyn Jones, you tell me one more time how you snogged my mother in high school, and you'll not get another pull from this bar so long as I'm behind it.”
He has the presence to look abashed for a moment, his graying hair falling over his soft pale face. Then he lurches for the pint in my hand, yanking it away like a triumphant child. He eyes my grandfather. “Nope, not a drop of yer mam, but you sure got a bucketload of your granddam in you, chit.”
Taid Gwion laughs behind me, joining the rest of the middle-aged peckerheads in the place. I mutter in my native Spanish, knowing none of them understand a curse word unless it’s filled with the ratcheting sounds of Welsh, and my grandmother isn't here to thwack me on the back of my head. She's sharp in any language.
I slump back on a stool, tapping my smart phone next to a soggy beer mat on the bar. “Taid Gwion, I believe these old buggers have had one too many, and are in danger of committing acts of public drunkenness, drunk driving, or being just plain unmanageable unless we cut them off and send them home to their wives and children.”
Taid raises a white eyebrow as the drunken idjits spew beer-frothed protestations in my direction. “You sure you want to inflict them on their innocent wives and kids?”
“Better them than me.”
Taid Gwion sighs, pulls me back through the bar to the tiny kitchen, where he fries fish and chips and not a damn thing else, no matter what the fancy pubs closer to the mainland serve. “Take the rest of the night, hey?”
I drop my head and start to stick my phone in my pocket, a strand of purple hair covering my eyes. “Sorry, Taid. It's okay. I'll close up.”
“I'm 63 years old, not 90. I don't need you here every night.” He pats my cheek and kisses me on the forehead. “Go on, go wherever you go when you're ready to scream your little Latin head off, and come back fresh tomorrow. Maybe plan a weekend in the city soon, huh?”
I nod. “Thanks, Taid.”
So now I’m off, up the hill, to those three precious bars of mobile service, to broadcast publishing capabilities, IMing, and Tal.
Hasta pronto, sheeplovers.
The Carlsberg clock seems to be stuck at ten to two, over the heads of the last bums left in the pub. I’ll have to hike up to the stone circle if I want even half a bar of service that’ll give me a couple of minutes of connectivity, barely enough to publish this post, much less talk to anyone.
“You goin' to hang about all night, lookin' sour?” My grandfather just tapped me gently between the eyes, smiling. “That mug o' yours flattens the lager.”
“Nothing happening here, Taid,” I reply, swiping at his nicotine-stained fingers (and keep typing — I can at least pretend I’m connected to the outside world).
“Nothing's happened here since your mama flew off to South America, Amelia.” He pours an umpteenth round for the craggy bastards at the end of the bar. “Ever since then, the mams and dads keep their children locked away at night—”
“—and their secrets they whisper only to the stove in the empty first light of morning,” I finish, rolling my eyes. I dump a sack of peanuts into the empty bowl. “I'm not my mom.”
Gwyn Jones downs half his pint in one gurgling swallow. “Too right. Your mom were the sweetest thing ever walked the shores of Anglesey.”
I grab his glass and tug it out of his reach. “Gwyn Jones, you tell me one more time how you snogged my mother in high school, and you'll not get another pull from this bar so long as I'm behind it.”
He has the presence to look abashed for a moment, his graying hair falling over his soft pale face. Then he lurches for the pint in my hand, yanking it away like a triumphant child. He eyes my grandfather. “Nope, not a drop of yer mam, but you sure got a bucketload of your granddam in you, chit.”
Taid Gwion laughs behind me, joining the rest of the middle-aged peckerheads in the place. I mutter in my native Spanish, knowing none of them understand a curse word unless it’s filled with the ratcheting sounds of Welsh, and my grandmother isn't here to thwack me on the back of my head. She's sharp in any language.
I slump back on a stool, tapping my smart phone next to a soggy beer mat on the bar. “Taid Gwion, I believe these old buggers have had one too many, and are in danger of committing acts of public drunkenness, drunk driving, or being just plain unmanageable unless we cut them off and send them home to their wives and children.”
Taid raises a white eyebrow as the drunken idjits spew beer-frothed protestations in my direction. “You sure you want to inflict them on their innocent wives and kids?”
“Better them than me.”
Taid Gwion sighs, pulls me back through the bar to the tiny kitchen, where he fries fish and chips and not a damn thing else, no matter what the fancy pubs closer to the mainland serve. “Take the rest of the night, hey?”
I drop my head and start to stick my phone in my pocket, a strand of purple hair covering my eyes. “Sorry, Taid. It's okay. I'll close up.”
“I'm 63 years old, not 90. I don't need you here every night.” He pats my cheek and kisses me on the forehead. “Go on, go wherever you go when you're ready to scream your little Latin head off, and come back fresh tomorrow. Maybe plan a weekend in the city soon, huh?”
I nod. “Thanks, Taid.”
So now I’m off, up the hill, to those three precious bars of mobile service, to broadcast publishing capabilities, IMing, and Tal.
Hasta pronto, sheeplovers.
Saturday, 23 June 2012
The Dot Matrix of Nowhere
This is my grandparents’ village. My village too, now, I guess.
It’s there. See the specks? All 5 of them? I swear, that’s a village. People live there. Really small, backwoods people. (I can say that, as none of them — or likely, the next 3 generations of their descendants — will ever master a computer to the point of reading some nobody’s blog.)
The bigger speck in the middle is the pub, where I am trapped, day and night, until either A) a meteorite hits us, B) the nuclear power plant on Anglesey melts us into gooey mounds of eyeballs and testicles, or C) some lotto-winning knight comes and rescues me. Or none of the above: I finally get up the gumption to leave the old-timers and have a life.
This is the village where my mom grew up. The village where she grew up and then ran away from as soon as she could legally buy the tickets to get the hell out. The village she'd told me about, that hangdog look in her eyes, all throughout my own childhood, until the accident. Until I'd been forced to move there myself, with the parents she'd missed but hadn't been willing to stay with.
By 15, the only big city my mom had ever seen was Chester. What, you’ve never heard of it? Neither has anyone else who doesn’t live in North Wales or the North of England. By 15, I'd seen Mexico City, Rio. I'd climbed Machu Piccu with my parents, tagged along on my dad's photography trips down the Amazon. I'd walked down the streets of Caribbean islands ripped apart by hurricanes. My dad let me smoke a cigar once in Cuba (that shit stays in your stomach for days), and we camped for two months in Patagonia while he read to me and mom every night from some famous travel book.
And then they died, and I came here, and everything paused and went to gray.
Saturday, 16 June 2012
Let's open old wounds, shall we?
Tal asked me something today, something about my parents, and I got all smarmy and 2.0 and told him to just read about it on my blog. Everything’s on here, right? I mean, I’m not so painfully honest that I put my menstrual calendar on here (F that), but I’m not really a secret-keeper.
Except it wasn’t here. I looked and searched and though surely it must be here. I even sent a kinda nasty email to Blogger about lost posts (sorry, Blogger, not your fault after all). Turns out I never wrote it down. Never sent it into the cloud. Which, by the way, is more likely to resemble a cloud of mosquitos shaped like 1s and 0s and buzzing like gangbusters around your head, than it is to look like a fluffy white wonderland. Twitter’s marketing guys are full of shit.
Ah. Avoidance tangent. Right on.
Anyway, Tal asked how my parents died. I didn’t want to tell the story again. I never want to tell the story again. Who would want to tell that story, over and over? Why do people always want to know? I always wonder why people ask that question. Does it matter to our relationship that they know how I became a fucking orphan? Does it make a difference if it was a murder-suicide, an earthquake, or some freakish cancer that takes people out two at a time? Will they like me more or less if they find out my parents were eaten by mutant iguanas?
So here’s the story. It was a car wreck. I wasn’t there. I don’t know the gory details. I wasn’t old enough to identify the bodies, and my parents weren’t into gawk-at-the-corpse funerals. I never saw them dead.
The news media told me what happened, what the news media thought happened. Taid tried to keep me from reading them, but Taid doesn’t know much about the www. The news, the tawdry little 3-paragraph articles, one the day after, and one when the police report came out, said they lost control on a wet road, hit a guard rail in a weak spot, tumbled about 30 feet, and hit a tree. No explosions. No race to a river to outrun goons with guns. No 007 on their tail. Was Dad drunk? they wondered. Were they fighting? Was he on meds or had he just found out about my mom’s torrid affairs with other tall dark and Latin men besides himself?
I used to get angry reading this stuff. Used to scream bloody murder at the boys in the village when they assumed there had to be some big fucking story behind it, that my parents were like TV couples, just sacks of shit and bile who once, a long time ago, had a crazy, bitch-ass day and said some offhanded vows. Because they weren’t. They fought and nagged and snapped at each other, but they loved each other. At least as far as I knew.
It was just an accident. Maybe Dad reached too far to change the radio, took his eyes off the road, his hand slipped on the wheel. Maybe Mom poked him in the ribs like she always did when he was being cheeky, and he flinched. A flinch could do it. A flinch, conducted in a __-ton vehicle, at 50 m.p.h., at the wrong spot in the road, can kill you. Death has played crazier tricks.
So that’s why I’m here, Tal. That’s why I’m stuck on an island in North Wales, with the sheep and the burial mounds.
Except it wasn’t here. I looked and searched and though surely it must be here. I even sent a kinda nasty email to Blogger about lost posts (sorry, Blogger, not your fault after all). Turns out I never wrote it down. Never sent it into the cloud. Which, by the way, is more likely to resemble a cloud of mosquitos shaped like 1s and 0s and buzzing like gangbusters around your head, than it is to look like a fluffy white wonderland. Twitter’s marketing guys are full of shit.
Ah. Avoidance tangent. Right on.
Anyway, Tal asked how my parents died. I didn’t want to tell the story again. I never want to tell the story again. Who would want to tell that story, over and over? Why do people always want to know? I always wonder why people ask that question. Does it matter to our relationship that they know how I became a fucking orphan? Does it make a difference if it was a murder-suicide, an earthquake, or some freakish cancer that takes people out two at a time? Will they like me more or less if they find out my parents were eaten by mutant iguanas?
So here’s the story. It was a car wreck. I wasn’t there. I don’t know the gory details. I wasn’t old enough to identify the bodies, and my parents weren’t into gawk-at-the-corpse funerals. I never saw them dead.
The news media told me what happened, what the news media thought happened. Taid tried to keep me from reading them, but Taid doesn’t know much about the www. The news, the tawdry little 3-paragraph articles, one the day after, and one when the police report came out, said they lost control on a wet road, hit a guard rail in a weak spot, tumbled about 30 feet, and hit a tree. No explosions. No race to a river to outrun goons with guns. No 007 on their tail. Was Dad drunk? they wondered. Were they fighting? Was he on meds or had he just found out about my mom’s torrid affairs with other tall dark and Latin men besides himself?
I used to get angry reading this stuff. Used to scream bloody murder at the boys in the village when they assumed there had to be some big fucking story behind it, that my parents were like TV couples, just sacks of shit and bile who once, a long time ago, had a crazy, bitch-ass day and said some offhanded vows. Because they weren’t. They fought and nagged and snapped at each other, but they loved each other. At least as far as I knew.
It was just an accident. Maybe Dad reached too far to change the radio, took his eyes off the road, his hand slipped on the wheel. Maybe Mom poked him in the ribs like she always did when he was being cheeky, and he flinched. A flinch could do it. A flinch, conducted in a __-ton vehicle, at 50 m.p.h., at the wrong spot in the road, can kill you. Death has played crazier tricks.
So that’s why I’m here, Tal. That’s why I’m stuck on an island in North Wales, with the sheep and the burial mounds.
Monday, 23 April 2012
The Magical Mobile Reception Circle
I thought I’d share my locale de inspiration, since I have to spend so much time here. If the library’s closed (which, depending on Bron Jones’s bowel schedule, it generally is), I have to climb this baby mountain and sit in a witches’ circle, to get that half a bar on my mobile that represents a connection, a lifeline out of this toilet bowl. The climb always makes me feel like an ant, struggling against the swirling tide flushing us all down into ancient history.
I’m not much into stone circles, never cared about fairy stories or tales of witchcraft or druidism. People believe some batshit crazy stuff, especially when they’re in the ass-end of nowhere with nothing to do. They probably even did some of that batshit crazy stuff around here, dancing naked and brewing potions and praying to full moons at harvest time or whatever. At least till TV came along and they found a less strenuous way to worship crap. I've never messed around with paganism or incense, never sat in this circle and wondered if the stones hid magic and spirits. They’re rocks in a circle. Woo-hoo.
A few months ago, I only bothered to make this climb once or twice a week, when the boredom crested into a continuous, barely repressed scream in my throat. I'd found some American chat rooms, the time difference meaning they still had people in them once I'd kicked the old codgers out of the pub. It had been hard to find sites that were anything more than horny nerds trying to hook up, or horny pedos trying to fish personal details out of kids who had too much computer time and too little parental supervision.
Sometimes, when I found a site that wasn't all about the hormonal urge to mate, even through cables and wireless signals, I just sat there and lurked. And that’s how I met Tal.
Huh. This post turned out to be about something way different from where I started. There you go.
I’m not much into stone circles, never cared about fairy stories or tales of witchcraft or druidism. People believe some batshit crazy stuff, especially when they’re in the ass-end of nowhere with nothing to do. They probably even did some of that batshit crazy stuff around here, dancing naked and brewing potions and praying to full moons at harvest time or whatever. At least till TV came along and they found a less strenuous way to worship crap. I've never messed around with paganism or incense, never sat in this circle and wondered if the stones hid magic and spirits. They’re rocks in a circle. Woo-hoo.
A few months ago, I only bothered to make this climb once or twice a week, when the boredom crested into a continuous, barely repressed scream in my throat. I'd found some American chat rooms, the time difference meaning they still had people in them once I'd kicked the old codgers out of the pub. It had been hard to find sites that were anything more than horny nerds trying to hook up, or horny pedos trying to fish personal details out of kids who had too much computer time and too little parental supervision.
Sometimes, when I found a site that wasn't all about the hormonal urge to mate, even through cables and wireless signals, I just sat there and lurked. And that’s how I met Tal.
Huh. This post turned out to be about something way different from where I started. There you go.
Friday, 10 February 2012
Romance and Other B.S.
Here’s a line I didn’t think I’d be writing. Not now, not for years. Maybe not ever.
I met someone.
Urk. Talk about a fucking cliché. Especially when it’s so pathetic. I mean, “meeting” implies a handshake. Being able to read one another’s facial expressions, body language. Being able to hear their voice, get some clues about how much they’re lying. Whether they have an excruciating laugh. You don’t get that when your only knowledge of the person is what they type, what they publish online. Publish — that’s the word for it. Composing, drafting, reviewing, editing, crafting who you are before you hit enter.
I was lurking, again, when I first saw him. We were in a public craigslist forum on women's issues. I was just watching the bitches catfight — for a women's issues forum, it was mostly full of teenage girls trying to figure out if they were pregnant/diseased/overdosed, and over-the-hill divorcees whose standard piece of advice was “dump him.” On that night, the tabloid personality of the forum was in full blow, as the regulars ripped apart the latest celebrity infidelity.
Tal was trolling — not your standard sexist taunts, either. He knew each and every handle, knew their history, knew when to call them on their bullshit, to trot out their hypocrisies. In the space of an hour he'd enraged no less than five posters to scream at him in all caps and storm out of the forum in a text-based tantrum. I'd nearly wet myself laughing.
Then I got an email. From him, asking me over to a “secret forum.” Which was weird, because I don’t actually post all that often — I lurk, and I laugh, but I’m not about to dip my toe into that pool of piranhas. And because the secret fos are generally full of whiners and pouters who can’t hack it in the public fos, or asshats who got banned. They’re not even that secret anyway.
But it’s like being the quiet girl in the corner at a raging party. Nobody ever notices you, and you keep sitting there, hoping that by some sort of magic some Romeo’s going to see how beautiful you are, even though you’re buried and antisocial and intimidating. And you go home most nights alone, having only used your voice to order drinks or to say “no, that seat’s not taken. Go ahead.”
So I went. To the secret fo.
And no, I won’t give you the address.
I met someone.
Urk. Talk about a fucking cliché. Especially when it’s so pathetic. I mean, “meeting” implies a handshake. Being able to read one another’s facial expressions, body language. Being able to hear their voice, get some clues about how much they’re lying. Whether they have an excruciating laugh. You don’t get that when your only knowledge of the person is what they type, what they publish online. Publish — that’s the word for it. Composing, drafting, reviewing, editing, crafting who you are before you hit enter.
I was lurking, again, when I first saw him. We were in a public craigslist forum on women's issues. I was just watching the bitches catfight — for a women's issues forum, it was mostly full of teenage girls trying to figure out if they were pregnant/diseased/overdosed, and over-the-hill divorcees whose standard piece of advice was “dump him.” On that night, the tabloid personality of the forum was in full blow, as the regulars ripped apart the latest celebrity infidelity.
Tal was trolling — not your standard sexist taunts, either. He knew each and every handle, knew their history, knew when to call them on their bullshit, to trot out their hypocrisies. In the space of an hour he'd enraged no less than five posters to scream at him in all caps and storm out of the forum in a text-based tantrum. I'd nearly wet myself laughing.
Then I got an email. From him, asking me over to a “secret forum.” Which was weird, because I don’t actually post all that often — I lurk, and I laugh, but I’m not about to dip my toe into that pool of piranhas. And because the secret fos are generally full of whiners and pouters who can’t hack it in the public fos, or asshats who got banned. They’re not even that secret anyway.
But it’s like being the quiet girl in the corner at a raging party. Nobody ever notices you, and you keep sitting there, hoping that by some sort of magic some Romeo’s going to see how beautiful you are, even though you’re buried and antisocial and intimidating. And you go home most nights alone, having only used your voice to order drinks or to say “no, that seat’s not taken. Go ahead.”
So I went. To the secret fo.
And no, I won’t give you the address.
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
Freaks and freaks
Step right up, folks, see the oddity. The oddity that has astounded entire villages from here to Penmaenmawr, from the North Stack to the South Stack, from that old Roman brick in the ground to this one over here. Just two quid gets you five minutes to stare, to gawk, to judge this freak, this human personification of what is wrong with our children — and speaking of your children, best keep them away, lest they become freaks themselves.
“What made you do that to your face?” Gwyn Jones says to me today. I kept pouring his pint, trying to figure out what was wrong with my face. “You ain’t got yourself enough holes, you have to poke more, do you?”
I should know better. I should shrug. I should wipe down the bar somewhere else. But instead I said, “They help me pick up the signals from my mother ship.”
Like a UFO, it flew right over his head. “Your mother didn’t need decorations, did she, Gaz?”
“Sure didn’t,” Gaz agreed. Gaz would agree if Gwyn commented that England sure was an all right place, and Wales did all right by losing to them.
“How many you got on you, anyway, girl?” Gwyn drained his dregs, froth clinging to the stubble dirtying his droopy face. He elbowed Gazzer hard enough to make him dribble. “I hear they put metal in all kinds of places the sun can’t reach.”
“Nor you, either,” I snapped, yanking his new pint away. I ignored his stupid face, with its candy-less baby expression, turning to pour the grog down the bloody drain.
“Look at this, a homeless pint.” Taid Gwion lifted the glass from my hand and returned it to Gwyn. “Last one. Bron’ll be callin’ for you if you don’t get home soon.”
I scowled at him, hoping my mascara was still black enough to make me fierce. I hate thinking I’m fierce, then looking in the mirror and discovering my makeup has melted in a pathetic wad down my face.
Taid winked. “He’s less troublesome on the soup than off.”
He patted me kindly, as though I were still fifteen, still needed that fatherly comfort I lost when my parents’ car went into that mad tumbling spin on a deserted road in Peru. Two years gone, and the only things that’ve changed here are the colors of my hair and the number of decorations I've managed to sneak onto my body.
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