Compulsory Consumer Choices Ceaseless Even Unto Death - Friday Flash

He hadn’t been shopping in a store like this for years. The last time must have been when he and his wife bought a king-sized double bed. As newly-weds they had ensured to try every mattress available, lying down and making out on each one. All in the name of test driving the springs. When his bride to be donned that Learner plate for her Hen night, she had already been thoroughly road tested. But their bed was one-sided now. He got lost in its voluminosity. The only place in this satellite system world where it was still possible to become lost. That is until they invented a GPS of the emotions. They probably already had, but presumably there wasn’t much call for it in this hurly-burly world. People were perpetually on the move and had no time to ascertain how others were disposed. 

She must have undertaken her own version of this shopping trip without him knowing. When it was still voluntary perhaps. She had opted for being dumped at sea and becoming fish food. A second mode of human transport sending her into the beyond after she had died in a multiple pile up on the motorway the size of a back alley. However the immersion in a flotation tank which he had just undertaken, had only made him throw up. He had never been terribly comfortable in water. And with this experience, he had certainly not fulfilled the brochure’s promise of losing all sense of his bodily boundaries and just gently flowing with the pacific swell. Nor had they introduced any fish to pluck at his flesh. But then the brochures never advertise that do they? 

So he wasn’t likely to be buried alongside his beloved. Even though a GPS could probably muster the location of her remains. These days humans were tagged like biological specimens in the wild. Now that they had no actual creatures left to tail after reclaiming their habitats for tarmac, leaving a mountain of tracking tags going spare. It wasn’t clear to him if the push for cars led to the upsurge in GPS devices, or the other way around. He was tagged of course, under the shoulder. But there would be no one interested in picking up his path now. 

The heft of this actually felt okay. None too weighty. He couldn’t sense the touch of the wood against any part of him. He hadn’t expected that. Maybe the wood was coated with some mild neural numbing agent. A bit of a cheat to encourage sales. Somehow he was possessed of the perception of a ton of earth on top of him, but he wasn’t experiencing it pressing down on him directly. The wood must be bearing the brunt. He could smell it though. Redolent in his nostrils, clammy, like potato skins. But he knew that he must have that inverted, tubers smell that way because they spend their whole growth in the earth. What did any of this matter anyway? He was only afforded his senses because this was a dry run.

Since he wouldn’t be able to feel the sides of the coffin’s wood when he was gone. Soil would possess no smell for his corpse to inhale. He wouldn’t be imagining he could feel the weight of anything by that point. And the contrivance of an ambient temperature, controlled by the store for the recumbent comfort of customers, would be irrelevant whether it was purchased for eternity, or not an add-on feature purchased for greater outlay. Besides, everyone knew this was a con trick. There were no cemeteries any longer. Devoured like the rest of the land beneath the ever hungry demand for roads. The human delusion of rushing around somehow forestalling the abrupt cessation brought by death. A coffin purchase could only entail a cremation, though he wondered how the authorities advised their authorised death service dealers to allow the customer to sample an incineration.

He reckoned that the ever more frequent motorway pile-ups, which had led the government to demand pre-planning with regards to body disposal, were also prompted by the car manufacturers. After all, the GPS devices should have been able to forestall most of the crashes shouldn’t they? But he couldn’t figure out how if the numbers of drivers were reduce by crash culls, how that could enable them to sell more vehicles. But what good did any of this speculation do him? He’d had the same car for a couple of decades now, so he was not a target customer dead or alive. He’d taken his wife’s wreck to a chop shop where they’d merged it with another chassis. Just so he could stay close to her. Inhale her dying breath every single day. 

Next on the menu was an air funeral. He had always liked buzzards and vultures at the zoo. Maybe there might be some spiritual communion to be had here. At least they wouldn’t try and hide the incontestable fact of your flesh being devoured by creatures with this one. He was shown into a gallery with a glass screen as a carcass of some poor animal was wheeled into the room beyond the glass. All he could see was his wife’s broken body there on the trolley. He was sick again. 

Songs About Cars

The wide open road, symbol of freedom and narratives just waiting to be written or sung. If you live in America that is. What could be more of a contradiction in terms than a british road movie? London to Manchester in just over two hours. To Glasgow adds just another four and a half hours. Endless vistas not of the ocean, but of oil seed rape fields and graffitied concrete bridges.

Still, I suppose rock band tour buses still have to make those journeys, so here's 10 of my fave songs about cars and the magic of the road. or not, seeing as I have never learned to drive and fail to see how there can be any attraction.

Start your engines...

1) The Clash - "Brand New Cadillac"
For a band who'd sung on their debut album "I'm So Bored With The USA" and also penned "London's Burning" opening with a whinge about the concrete flyover that dominates West London, here is a song that seems to repudiate both of these sentiments, plus Joe Strummer's voice is lilting over to embrace the American a tad. Soon enough after this album they hightailed it to live in the USA anyway.



2) Tubeway Army - "Cars"
Ah dear old human android Gary Numan with his second smash hit song that aped Ballard and all things dehumanising about technology. An effect utterly subverted by his twee shaking of a tambourine. maybe he should have blown into a melodica or something.



3) Janis Joplin - "Mercedes Benz"
A song protesting the consumerism of America, subsequently reappropriated by the brand to advertise their wares. No wonder she drank herself to death she could see what was ahead.



4) Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers - "Roadrunner"
If there's a voice you want to suggest a certain ennui and distaste behind the thrust of what the lyrics purport to be saying, then it would be our Jonathan. This is a cover of a Bo Diddley song, the man who also wrote a paean to Cadillacs.



5) Ministry - "Jesus Built My Hot Rod"
And now for a complete change of gear... This quotes lines from the very offbeat road movie "Wiseblood".



6) Buzzcocks - "Fast Cars"
See we in the UK can crank it up to well over a ton too, but the power of the engine sounds a whole lot reedier than American models. And anyway, Pete Shelley is singing his disapprobation for going over the speeding limit.



7) Dead Milkmen - "Bitchin' Camaro"
Oh my aching sides, this is cabaret rock. An ex-girlfriend of mine put this on a mix tape for me. not quite sure what it says about me. I dunno, must have seemed funny under the influence of sensi...



8) Adam & The Ants - "Car Trouble"
see now somebody had to keep it real and this song talks about the downside of motoring when the machine goes wrong. Well keeping it as real as anyone from England dressed as a Native American with warpaint and feathers while brandishing an electric guitar can...



9) Tom Robinson Band - "2,4,6,8 Motorway"
This anthemic song almost made we want to learn to drive. There's something about its appeal I can't quite put my finger on, but there you go. I sued to hate motorway journeys up to visit my grandparents in Manchester. They were so boring and predictably none of the music for the journey included top tunes like this. Yeah I know it's a trucking song not a car song, but they're all the same to me anyway. Killing machines of steel. Or sumptin'. I used to wear badges like theirs back in the day. It's what punk was all about. That and sugar soap to make your hair spiky.



10) Billy Bragg - "A13"
You might have detected I'm losing a bit of interest in the subject matter, but this song spoofing the US song "Route 66" always puts a smile back on my face. Nicely done Billy, even if you are patronising the German audience with your English as a second language patter.

Microclimate - Friday Flash

The wind was blowing the sheet rain away from the vertical. Where the trajectory propelled through the wash of the streetlamp, it was briefly illuminated like tracer fire. Then it dived back out of the spill into the blackout just above the ground. Only the bombination of their report against the concrete, evinced their persistence.

The occasional dipped car headlamps bounced their skittering rays along the slicked road. Cast an illusion of the rain recoiling upwards off the tarmac, spiting gravity. Even from those headlamps with their own runty wipers to keep their lenses clear of waterborne refractions.

The cars precipitated a further, less transient coalescence in their wake. Those miniature rainbows formed in oil stained puddles by the kerbside. Molecule to molecule interdiction with the forsaken slick perdus, while the rest of rainwater sped by through the gutters plunging towards the storm drain.

As with the car headlamps, the mound of matter on the pavement was wreaking a distorting effect on the local meteorology. Its bulk served as a levee, damming up the water coursing across the paving flags. Until the flow reached critical volume and spouted like a cataract, inroading the gutter.

The blood running with the runnels of rainwater failed to break up into any rainbow spectrum. Blood being thicker than water but not oil, it just sat there in its own immiscible layer, gradually diffusing through the sheer volume of the rain.

The blood was seeping from a body. Where the bullets of rain hit that body, their soft-tipped heads penetrated the sodden clothing and bit into the flesh. In the dark, it appeared that the lump of flesh was being riddled by gunfire.

As the body lay there with its mouth draggled open, the rain zeroed in. Maybe the corpus would be extinguished by drowning rather than exsanguination from the hole in its gut. But the water kept sluicing back out through the downturned corners of its mouth. The body seemed like it was trying to speak, but only liquid words poured out.

The wind was also whipping through the body. As if the skin breach was a vacuum sucking in the air trying to staunch itself. The street litter propelled along in the gusts brushed the body, but none would stop to seal the hole. The magma eruption of blood that had attended the initial piercing, had ebbed as the tectonic waves of pain subsided into equipoise. The body's internal pressure now effaced by the sensation of the driving rain against the numbed flesh. The body's temperature had dropped closer to that of the surrounding atmospehere, so that the weak puffs of expiration emerging from the mouth no longer condensed against colder air.

Inside a building, another body was drumming its fingers against the window sill in syncopation with the rain striking the pane. A cloud had descended upon that body and occluded the previously warm front. A storm was surely building.

This story is published in my third collection

available from Amazon