#tim barrus book intro

[timbarrus]

Comments Are Not Unlike Hieroglyphics

They’re often stories in the same way snapshots are but brief moments in time. This would be the conventional thinking. It has not kept up. There is no such thing as time. It’s a social construct. An agreement to agree. If we can all agree that our planet revolves around the sun, it’s only consequential that the sun revolves around the galaxy at close to the speed of light. Cluster galaxies seem to be traveling around something that appears to be faster than the speed of light. How can that be. No one knows. Homo sapiens always have to know why. Why is there a God, Mum. Because if there was not a God, our God, no one would be up, high up, on golden thrones with naked angels with wings. I have a theory. Most of the bad things that have ever happened to this particular edition of the species, has to do with the UK being grey, wet, generally miserable, and they’re always fighting the French. Someone please say: I. Give. Up. It’s gloomy in the UK. And that is why we have these problems. There were three witches from Scotland who could not make up their minds. Should we stay, or should we go. Such is the life of a comment. This is the stuff of local journalism. This is the stuff of pitting one hood against the other, then, do it on a national scale. Weaponize reality, equality, economics, real estate, and religion. Comments are not obliged to be correct. Satire is protected speech. Many comments are reflecting where we really live. A Man Walked into a bar.

You take a trip. Or the stranger comes to town. Sometimes you do both. I want to be invisible. 

Local means only a few writers tell the story. Of anything. The rest of us left in the dust but to defer. I would argue that the only appropriate way to tell a retell a reblog blog with video, a band, dancing girls, flashing lights, prizes, weekends with movie stars, is to move to California. I am not allowed to tell the story of Sunset Boulevard, 1969. You must be born on Sunset Boulevard, right there in the middle of the street, before you are allowed to articulate any of the story of it. I am only a Small Journalist, disgruntled, washed up, but I am here to tell you there are hieroglyphics on the wall. It’s disconcerting because the number of voices alone. So, who and what do you filter out. Nothing. I filter out nothing. I am just telling you the story about traveling at the speed of light. Or faster than photons. We are already traveling at the speed of light in a dozen different milieus that are in all likelihood of different dimensions. I am becoming convinced that going forward may have no relationship to traveling back in time because what exists is existence if you can grab it. Going back would rip your atoms apart in the solar wind.

I run a physics blog on Pinterest. I do follow the comments. I try to understand them. If I can read an equation, am I required to put the image of it into a written language. Comments are what ants and witches live on in holes of roots and boiling snags of onions. There is something -- at least for me -- about this version of life where the timeline of inflation becomes another timeline on the way down, with subsequent relases would rival the big fucking bang. My analysis only, and I write fiction. I am not King Lear, but I am him. Holding skulls with spells that reminds me of Let's Away to Prison. Who loses and who wins (no one).  And take upon what mysteries men trust to time. Or do they die with their arms around the secrets they have kept.

That is what comments are. They are the whispers of secrets. All that diplomacy is based on. Jesters do not prove prophets. A clown cannot be the King. Richard fell and lost the war. Most clowns become tragic clowns. They are. They become irrelevant except in Ireland. Waiting on a country road. Tired as a tree. Poking at the British butts. I think I know what brutality means. A homeless man is beaten in a ditch. But I do not know what chemistry means. Who else would sell his luck or compel it to perform. Godot will not be arriving tonight. The tree grows leaves. I have always thought this play had to do with hope. The Wizard of Oz was not about the dog.

Or. Maybe it was. About the dog. The dog was there.

Richard murdered children in their sleep. He slaughtered them. The slaughtering will be what is known of us. They will go through our garvage, and whan they do, it was be an indictment, and no one will archive or speak of us because we were an aberration. We either do or we do not possess resilience. Estragon's focus is his boots. Everything happens. Nothing occurs. Do I react to a review or to the review of it. The review becomes the play as the author of the powerful review reads the actor on the stage of the character's possibilities or none of it. Chicken bones or money. Rhetoric becomes entrapment. It's entrapment that terrifies. The writer is correct to wrap it up with a surrounding brutality. We dream. Perchance to occupy someone else's thoughts. Prescient identity. Memory crumbles. It's the critic who reminds us as to who and what we really are.

We are all suscepticle to comments. A writing on a wall of mirrors. Condemning us as witchery. Not so much as an abstraction. But one with a brain that thinks. At least, we are real. But no. Probably not. Our second selves will never understand. Are these two on separate sides. What I hear when I close my eyes is Finnegan. Embrace your conventions, and then abandon them.