Since my last post I have been rattling my brain trying to conjure up an idea that would inspire like my Pulp idea but have come up with nothing.

So with this in mind I decided just to write. Write anything. A page, a paragraph, even just a line to inspire something out of me. I came up with something, not necessarily inspirational but at least it was something. It was probably the result of me thinking that my imagination and inspiration had died with my last idea but death has been on my mind recently.

Death interests me a lot, not because I’m sadistic or psychopathic but because death is what makes us alive. Obviously not just us but animals, plants and whatever was on that plate under my bed for 6 months. As a result it ended in these monologues:

The PRAGMATIST

It is funny how cynics and modern philosophers think that we have become enslaved to technology. It is funny how analogue is seen as beauty, how people find the sound of static and purgatory erotic. As we now live in a digital age, an age of off and on, they say we are now less human. The truth is life is off and on. There is no in between. There is an on button when your mum takes the seed of your father and then there is an off switch that takes your last breath. Humans have not become digitalised. We have always been enslaved by the on and off of life. It’s just now the world is too.

When you are alive you are on. You have the power running through you, the power of life. You function, you perform tasks, just because a computer, a machine, a fucking spatula can do the same thing, twice as well, twice as fast, does not mean our bodies were not once able to do it, or that they now can’t. When you are a sleep you are alive, you are functioning. You feel. You breathe. The programmes and systems in your mind that make you “human” are still crunching and grinding away to give the visuals to your closed eyes.

When you are in a coma you are still alive. You are still functioning, you still have ability. Your machine is still ticking it is just in sleep mode. Not to recharge, no, but to repair. When you are on life support the off and on is now a visual and you now have no control of whether it will be pushed. When you have cancer… when you have this disease riddling your body clogging up your system like a virus taking over destroying everything, you may be hindered, you may be a shell of yourself you may not be able to do the tasks or function as the machine that you were turned on to do, but you are on, you are alive. This is not a dream.

 

The HUMAN

They say in life only two things are for certain Taxes and Death. Now to me these are not great things but they are the two things that control my life. I pay taxes with every penny I spend. It may not be income tax, council tax, or any tax worthwhile, but VAT is everywhere like a propaganda campaign. But then what you going to do? Occupy Wall Street or Oxford Street like those dumb hippies did? Nah, of course not because London and New York are the two fucking coldest places in the world.

The fear of death controls me just the same. The constant fear that I’ll be hit by something, that I’ll eat something that will root around inside me or something. But also the fear of others dying. Not in front of me because that I could possibly control, but people dying away from me. Out of my reach. The phone call or text that signals the end of someone’s life. Yeah, that’s what I fear.

The CHILD

 Err yeah. Yeah, yeah I learnt that quite young.

Err it was my dog.

No it was not my dog, it was the bird that was trying to take my dog’s bone. It was called Sam.

My dog, not the bird. The bird was already dead so I couldn’t name it.

My dad ran outside and said eww Sam you dirty c…, but I didn’t know the last word he said so I don’t remember it OK? So I thought that Sam had done a big poo. Poos are funny so I go and look. But it was not a poo. It was the bird. The bird was laying asleep. But it was not asleep but I didn’t know.

Dad showed me this mangled shredded torn up carcass that had flies chewing its flesh and defecating on each other to make a mosaic of disease and rot. But he had not seen this before picking it up and as I screamed he was made aware and threw it and Sam jump like a gazelle clearing the attack of a lion and caught it in his mouth ad swallowed it like a skittle.

That was the first time I found out what it was. The second was at his funeral. Not Sam’s. Not the bird cos you can’t have a funeral for something with no name or no body. It was my dad’s.

 

The idea was to present different people’s response to death. How they felt about it and its inevitability. I wanted to channel different viewpoints, different stages of life and their reflection on death. This will not necessarily form my final performance but it at least proves my imagination is not dead. Yet.