My Little Bulldozer

There’s a bulldozer that follows me around. The eras of my life in pieces at his feet. The smash and crash and vibrations through the earth as memories fall, crumble, disintegrate. Are trodden down into the soil ready for new foundations. For someone else’s memories to smother the land and chase through freshly made corridors.

The long corridors of my youth stretch out before me with bleached histories fading with the echo of laughter. The rooms where I made friends are all gone. Good friends and bad friends. Those I still exchange birthday cards with and gossip over coffee once in a while. We know each other like two backwards hands that can nonetheless find each other in the dark. But our memories have been smashed into the soil. The benches we sat on in the schoolyard, sharing music through earphones on old walkmans. The tuck shop snacks of iced buns and chip cobs. The places where we witnessed fights and fires, young energy and destruction in minute forms. Spreading through the concrete yard and squeaky classrooms with a furious futility that would soon dissipate to nothing. Another identikit housing estate and my memories bulldozed.

My 6th form college. More concrete yards and playing fields with hidden smokers’ corners. Stone age teens talk of blazing and we laugh afterwards, mimicking demented enthusiasm. More classrooms with new friends made. Bonding over hatred of Tony Fennec. Watching horror films at 9am for Media Studies. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre burned onto my early morning retinas, while other memories fade. Trampled down by the bulldozers which eventually demolished it all. Another identikit housing estate and my memories bulldozed.

My university campus out in the leafy suburbs. Light passing dreamlike through foliage and Victorian houses with curved glass windows. And the building which housed us a Brutalist shadow against blue-grey skies. More long corridors and endless stairwells splattered with paint, the legacy of careless art students. Climbing to better views and brighter rooms, cold with single glazing and the pinch of morning frost. More friendships formed and funny stories exchanged. Bonding over hatred of pretentious classmates who would no doubt succeed in the art word while we were still shopkeeping and bartending. The echo of those high, bright rooms towering above a northern city remind me of a special time. Maybe the best of times in my rose-tinted nostalgia. An age where the possibilities were endless and friendships would last beyond the final bell. Before the endless possibilities became mounds of impossibilities. Before the hills became too steep and slippery in the pinch of the morning frost. Before the bulldozers came and knocked down my Brutalist dreamscape. Another memory smudged into the soil ready for someone else’s foundations. No identikit housing estate to replace my bulldozed memories, just luxury apartments adding insult to injury. The paint splattered stairwells with ascending views fall away. It’s someone else’s view now. Smug above the city in fancy boxes.

And there’s a bulldozer that follows me around.

© Kirsty Fox 2017

 

Note: This particular prose poem is memoirish. The true weird fact about me is that my comprehensive school, my 6th form college and the university campus where I studied art have all been knocked down. I may be jinxed.

It’s too early for it to not be dystopian

I was born in the back end of paradise at the foot of a wall. Now I’m old enough and ugly enough to fend for myself. But I don’t. This morning I’m attending a conference on survival. Not survival in the wild, but survival in the arts. It’s much the same. It’s the end of the world as we know it right in this moment here and also the one you’re in now. So in the post-apocalyptic landscape, all forms of survivalism are valid. Dystopia is handed to you in the pages of the morning Metro as you hurry for your first coffee of the day. A man in a woolly hat stands still amid the human traffic of morning commuters. He studies the ground in a hazed oblivion searching for stray cigarette butts. He looks pleased and surprised when he spots one. As though just realising the answer to a puzzle. Automated voices announce train times and reality fades to a veil of early morning hysteria. Crisp packets rustle and work acquaintances make polite conversation. Struggling with weak smiles that seem heavy and irrelevant given the state of things. We have become like coral or a yeast. A living thing en masse teeming with anxiety unable to separate our consciousness from one another. The survivalists try to predict which apocalyptic scenario will get us first. Stocking their bunkers with tinned food but also learning to hunt and forage. But the apocalypse is here. It is this slow death. A slow death of knowing that it is all so subtly wrong but being powerless to change a thing. In the distance, a boat with a broken sail floats idly on flood lake in the midst of chaos. The scene fades out.

Books versus Vignettes

I wonder how long I drag out the self-referential fox jokes for. Until they’re as frayed and meatless as scraps of dried up kebab dragged from a 6am takeaway by hungry urban vermin. I light a fire which consumes discarded snot rags and street wood. My housemate pours me a glug of Laphroaig whisky and puts a Tom Waits record on. It is raining outside but also not raining. Water cascades off the roof and dries mid-air as though it had never been. Never reaching the ground which is dry cold and aches with a sadness belonging to more troubled souls than you and I. The lights inside flicker but don’t quite go out. The bulbs uncertain as to whether their time is up and they should take a long walk into the darkness. I read a book because it seems like the right thing to do with the music and the fire and the whisky. There was a TV scene I watched the night before in which a teenager explores his estranged father’s house for the first time. The first few rooms are typical Californian beach bum novelty, but when he enters the final room there is an entire floor to ceiling wall of vinyl records and on the opposite wall facing it a floor to ceiling wall of beautiful books. Life goals, I think. We gradually build up a pattern, one healthy glug of whisky per side of a record. Chapters of books fall out of sync with this, however. Disappearing into a broth of eloquent prose and non-existent plot. Time passes and pages turn. Tom Waits becomes Neil Young and books become cigarettes rolled up and smoked beneath the spotlight of a winter moon. Wild flames turn to hot coals emitting white heat and heavy thoughts. Cigarettes become books once more. Unraveled, unsmoked. Words return faithfully  to the page, climbing inside eyes which transmit them into language for a wet warm brain of pink. The fire and the vinyl crackle briefly and fade as one. We fall seamlessly into the sleep of winter, born away on soft dreams with the promise of spring.

© Kirsty Fox 2016

Auburn Against the Green

In the park I am a nobody. A nothing. A part of the foliage, the cut grass, the dirt and twigs. Invisible to the human eye as they pass by with pushchairs and dogleads or sit on the bench midway round hunting Pokemon on their pocket computers. My attention rarely lingers on these hopeless creatures unless a particularly special moment catches my eye. The woman blowing bubbles for her German Shepherd to catch while a small girl watches. Or the elderly lady I saw in the spring sat so quietly and contemplatively on the bench beneath the cherry blossom tree, a confetti of pink showering her delicately with each small push of the breeze.

But no, the people are to be casually avoided with their nuisance and noise and peculiar ways.  It’s the canine and tree population I wish to capture in memory. I watch the dogs play and interact with one another, baffled by the wonder in the face of an animal enamoured with a smelly coloured ball hurled down the hill. The hurtling energy of beast in pursuit of rubber prey. Or up on the path the small dog greeting the big dog with a wiggle and a nuzzle, then waiting so patiently and politely while the big dog sniffs his bum with unrestrained attention to detail. He is collecting your stories – what you ate for breakfast, what the neighbours cat smells like when it sits on the fence with a haughty stare, what illicit salt n vinegar treats the toddler lets you slobber on before eating herself.

But I am most happiest when amongst the trees. They overwhelm me with their calm, measured presence. The play of light through foliage. The creeping signs of autumn told to me by the auburn against the green. I listen to the wind rise through the leaves like  distant applause. I enjoy the crack and thunk as the horse chestnuts throw their seeds to the ground. Shiny brown conkers encased in spiky green shells. The trees throw this perfect ammunition at us for fun and we laugh obliviously, collecting them for our children, so that they can join us in playing a game as old as time.

Eyes Open to the Elements

Snatches of conversation as we fade in and out of conciousness, echoes of San Soleil. The cinematic touches the everyday. Fiction and fact are just library tags, they don’t separate the fake from the real. The sleepy heat draws slumber compared to the wide awake cold outside. Eyes open to the elements – the sleet, the fog, the sheet rain quivering like flying arrows in the light of a solitary street lamp. We are and we aren’t there now. A whisper in the shadows, slipping effortlessly away from outstretched fingers tips. The footfall of a fox at dawn. The intangible belongs to the dreamer snoozing against a black window pane. The pages of a book are audibly turned and we know from the pause a new chapter has begun. A new era is about to write itself. If we pause too long to dwell on what we leave behind, we’ll lose confidence to make the leap into the unknown. Every story starts with transition, an equilibrium unbalanced, scrambling off the cliff into chaos. The train pauses at the station. Someone steps off and checks the sky. We wait. The engine rumbles back into action and we set off again. Onward.

© Kirsty Fox 2015

Nocturnal Ponderings

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a writer and publisher over the last few years it’s that selling books is hard. Really hard.

Both from the side of pitching to agents and publishers and the other side – getting people to part with money in exchange for a bunch of pages into which you poured hours of grueling-exciting-wondrous work. And once they’ve bought that book it may well sit on their shelf for months, nay years, before they tuck into it. I say that as a person who owns more books they haven’t read, than books they have read.

It’s understandable. A book isn’t a throwaway thing. A book is a commitment. A good book that you take your time over is a relationship all in itself. It’s a personal thing and an act of solitude in a world that bombards you with bright shiny distractions every five minutes.

I’m currently trying to sell a book to people. A book that I feel deeply passionate about, in a very personal way. It’s strange to be in the position of editor and and publisher when you’re used to being the writer. It’s a whole different relationship because you’re a reader, but more than a reader, because you were there. You’re the damn midwife helping that beautiful babe get born. You can’t take credit for the genes, but you can still be super proud.

I’m proud of Darren Simpson. He’s a great writer and it’s fascinating the way he pours his personality into it. As I said in this recent interview about the project –

“I like Darren’s writing because he’s not afraid to take risks and have fun. There’s a rawness which traditionally published books tend to lack because they’re edited differently and are too self-conscious of their market. It’s like when you get a really good piece of music that’s overproduced. The Dust on the Moth takes an idea and runs away with it in ways that are both incredibly silly yet also still profound. It makes you laugh while also potentially giving you an existential crisis. I think that might be my favourite kind of art when it’s done well.”

I published my novel Dogtooth Chronicals a few years ago now. Someone came into the shop where I work today and bought a copy, not knowing I was the writer until I awkwardly told him. It feels strange and alien to talk about it now, the questions people ask are still the same – ‘Wow, it’s a big book, how long did that take you?’ It made me feel a little strange.

After he left I kicked myself for not mentioning The Dust on the Moth. After all, he was clearly a man of fine taste. And therein lies my issue. I’ve never been a good salesperson. I am zero-sales-patter-fox. From days of bartending, to these new days of funding applications and crowdfunding experiments. I don’t have the elevator pitch down, I can’t sell you a book or a really great social enterprise in one snappy sentence. I don’t lack passion or bloody-minded self-determination. I just lack swagger and effective punchlines that make you feel like the product I’m pushing will make you’re life better.

I do have some sales patter, sure. It just takes seven or eight paragraphs of your time to emerge. I’m all about the super soft sell. I want to empower people to spend their money on products made or designed locally. On stuff that is meaningful, rather than meaningless. On things they feel like they’ve ‘found’ all by themselves. Like wandering up some weird little alleyway into Cobden Chambers and finding a book in a shop you’d never been in before by a writer you’d never heard of. And then you meet the writer and she’s socially awkward, which is how all writers should be.

It’s a nice story. But it happens so rarely. And when you have a book to sell, time is never on your side. Especially when you’re running a crowdfunding campaign with only four days left. But to hell with it. If I was afraid of failure I would never have quit a wage slave job to become a social entrepreneur. As Vin Diesel once said as he pretended to roll out of the back of a plane “I live for this shit!”

So, I watched this video again tonight, despite it containing both my face and my voice. And I felt that even though we might not quite make it. I’m still pretty flippin proud of what we’ve achieved.

Someday I hope that man who bought Dogtooth Chronicals today will accidentally happen upon The Dust on the Moth, and get that nice feeling you get when you find hidden treasure.

#KickStartMoth

Frank City Film Club – Episode Twelve

Brian Snuff – Platonic Superstar

I opened Nikita’s fridge in search of milk. All I could think to do was make her a cup of tea. There were eight rolls of camera film, one beer, half a bottle of wine and a lonely scrap of cheddar. My kind of girl. Except tea would’ve been good right now.

Being the trust-able male friend I’ve seen many women cry, but not Nikita. Not before now. Her face had fallen so suddenly, or a shadow had fallen over her face.

SNUFTY: What can I do to make it okay?

A tear sat close to the tip of her nose.

NIKITA: Churn out some cliches about him not being the right one, it not being the right time. That I’ll meet someone else when I least expect it and forget I ever felt this way.

No mention of an empathy shag. Probably for the best.

SNUFTY: Well all these things are cliches because they’re true.

Pause.

NIKITA: Do you think I use you as a substitute boyfriend?

Well you did fall asleep in my arms the other night. In fairness though, it was me that asked for a hug.

SNUFTY: Maybe we both do that.

NIKITA: (EYEBROW CROOKED) You treat me as a substitute boyfriend?

SNUFTY: You know what I mean.

Another pause.

SNUFTY: Shall I go and get us takeaway or something?

She shook her head.

NIKITA: No, let’s get smashed and have adventures.

Nikita’s idea of adventures seems to be getting in fights with men.

SNUFTY: Are you going to get me in a fight?

She isn’t listening. She’s dashed off to fix smeared mascara and put on a skirt.

Her phone is ringing. It’s Leon. Leon the heartbreaker.

I almost press Ignore, but instead I answer.

SNUFTY: Hi Leon. It’s Brian.

I imagine the camera cuts to him. He is stood in the doorway of the flats where he lives. Traffic humming somewhere nearby. He is tearful too. For an emotional retard, he cries pretty easily. He looks surprised and annoyed that I answered.

LEON: Oh.

But he’d never act annoyed or fazed. Why should anything faze him? He’s a cool mother fucker.

LEON: Hi Snufty, where’s Niki?

SNUFTY: She’s getting changed, we’re going out.

LEON: Oh.

SNUFTY: You want me to pass you over?

Nikita is back in the room. Sensing him like a cat. Her face is hardened like sculpted bone.

LEON: No, it doesn’t matter.

The line goes dead.

Earlier episodes of Frank City Film Club

Frank City Film Club – Episode Eleven

Brian Snuff – A Potted History of Hardcore

I go through phases with smoke & alcohol. Like an emotional history that ebbs with the tide. Like how some days listening to Autechre is life-affirming and other days it makes me feel like I’m trapped in a cellar full of zombies.

I push the window out and open on the nighttime and then light my roll-up. I can see the reflection of my lighter sparking to life and disappearing again close to my face. I lean out a little.  The air is cooling on my face but the back of my neck is still weirdly warm from catching the spring sun.

NIKITA: Snufty…?

SNUFTY: Yep.

I have a wary tone. I don’t know why.

NIKITA: You know that thing that you said you’d do?

I take a long drag, searching the clouds for stars.

SNUFTY: Yep.

NIKITA: I don’t know whether you should…

JEANIE: What thing?

They’re both sat on my bed, cross-legged. I can’t sit like that anymore. I’m only 29. How did that happen?

SNUFTY: One of those things that women ask men to do. Even feminists apparently.

JEANIE: Get rid of spiders?

SNUFTY: Don’t bring me spiders. Scuttley fuckers.

JEANIE: Are you a feminist?

I’m not sure whether she’s asking me or Niki. Niki doesn’t answer, neither do I. Or maybe Niki nodded but I didn’t see.

JEANIE: Is it a sex thing?

SNUFTY: Yes. She asked me to never ever have sex with her.

NIKITA: He’s joking.

I sometimes think she underestimates Jeanie’s ability to pick up on my sarcasm.

SNUFTY: Oh, but you did. With your eyes.

I remember the first time I kissed her in a moment of drunken bravery. No tongues. Nothing to write home about. I ran away straight after, or at least walked away quickly. I didn’t wait to see her face. I wasn’t ready for the knowing apologetic smile. I’m sorry I made you infatuated with me. It was an accident. I was just being me. I don’t regret it for a moment. I’m so rarely brave.

NIKITA: Did you watch that film?

She pointed to her copy of Upstream Colour which was sat on the table.

SNUFTY: Yeah. You were right. I have a new affinity with pigs.

I stubbed my rollie out on the ledge and pulled the window shut.

JEANIE: You’re changing the subject.

Nikita smirked, her eyes flashing with bewitching secrets.

NIKITA: You don’t know what the subject is.

I’m only obsessed because you won’t leave me be.

I don’t think of you all the time but you’re never far from my thoughts. As though the air is part gas, part moisture, part you. As though my brain is part creative, part logical, part diseased. As though my life is part real, part dream, part delusion.

You seem contained inside images and everyday objects. Artificial faces, door jars, underneath bushes.  You seem not aware of this. You seem not aware of anything but I know this isn’t right. You are shrewd. Not like a liar, like a master of ceremonies. You know how this whole thing will end. These are the things I notice when I daren’t look at you too much.

And the jokes you once told return to my head like songs that catch in my ear canal. Yet the jokes somehow mock me, because I remember them and they weren’t that funny. It’s your intonation, the crafted slant of an eyebrow, the fact that you always smell so good. A bundle of pheromones drifting like the free spirit that my denial isn’t.

The rotisserie of unrequited love. I can guarantee you’re not that fussed, yet your friend is stepping up, ready for slaughter. He feels about me exactly how I feel about you. We make the same dumb jokes to try to make our propositions more casual. There is nothing casual about the future I try to wish you into, push you into with an imperceptible shove. But you’re stronger than me. You’re a lone wolf by choice not by default. Able to rejoin the pack anytime you please because you’re quietly confident. Not a stumble of tangled limbs. Yapping at unseen enemies as though that will drive them away.

So, I’m sorry for hanging around you like the ghost of hope. I’m sorry for ruining the friendship that was. I’m sorry for not taking a hint when I should. But I’m only obsessed because you won’t leave me be.

Frank City Film Club – Episode Ten

Brian Snuff – Forgot how to Narrate and now it’s just Mono-logue

Tiny droplets of rain sit on the bare tree outside the window. Wet night time chilliness drifts into the flat. Inconsequential moments shift awkwardly up against one another. An anxiety cuddle forgotten by tomorrow.

LEON: That Matilda. She’s pretty organised, huh?

I imagine her in animation form, with a church organ replacing her innards. Matilda has a thin nose, a thin face. Curse of the newbie.

SNUFTY: She’s training to be a producer, she should be.

LEON: Kind of bossy though. Taking over. Doesn’t it bother you?

Yes. Deeply. I feel ineffectual not just socially and romantically (the norm), but professionally…

If you can call Frank City Film Club a profession. It’s more of a hobby horse fallen off its tethers.

SNUFTY: Why would it bother me?

LEON: I’m not gonna psychoanalyse you, mate. You do that for yourself.

Do I? How does he know. I’ve long suspected he knows everything. Like when you look a small child or cat in the eyes. They know everything.

Leon is rolling another joint and spilling bits of tobacco into the newspaper on his lap. This is why the window is open and it is cold.

Kes watches us converse from his beanbag.

LEON: …Ratty emails. Don’t you think? She wants her slab of meat for the week.

He says these things gently, like they don’t really phase him at all. I hate how fucking cool he is. I hate how I think he’s really oblivious, and then he turns all shrewd, as though he’s been listening all along. Even when he seems distracted. I don’t really hate any of this, it’s why I like him. I just hate forgetting.

SHUFTY: It’s nice to receive emails rather than send them off into the abyss, never to return.

(Shouting into the silence)

LEON: I love your emails, man. They’re charming.

SHUFTY: Charmingly inept.

Leon smiles as his applies saliva to the strip on the rolling paper.

KES: And if I don’t answer her email, she phones me.

Kes looks thoroughly puzzled by this.

LEON: Whoah, doesn’t she know you hate people ringing you?

SHUFTY: That’s why we get on, Kes. You know I hate ringing people. Ying and yang.

Paranoia wrapped in the phonelines. The phoney lines. Customer service training – remember to have a smile in your voice.

Kes started a doodle three hours ago which sits discarded in the notebook. I decide to elaborate on it. I look for a pen.

Leon leans out of the window to smoke. He blocks my view of raindrops with a partial profile. Tight curly hair and an appealing crooked nose. The street light that lit the raindrops catches in his eyes. I wonder if Nikita could ever look at me the way she looks at Leon and then deny the answer like a hastily side-stepped crack in the pavement.

I turn neat squiggles into fish heads and fancy pipes. I digress.