Snowmageaddon has hit Jersey, a good two inches of the stuff. I've already been out with my four year old son making the obligatory snowman, a dwarfish and mai oui carrot-nosed monstrosity that I look forward to watching melt in the days to come. Of course the camera came out and of course my instant thought was to upload said picture to Facebook, accompanied hard on by its sister thought disgust (the two occur almost simultaneously these days) and yet another rumination on how our entire lives seem to have bifurcated into two distinct strands - experience as we are living it and the burning desire to somehow document the moment and share it with others on the internet.
Sure enough within a few hours my timeline was clogged with the snowmen - sorry, snowpeople - of my friends, and what lovely snowfolk they'd created. And photographed. And uploaded to the internet.
I have a lovely idea for a short story featuring an alien race that descend in their big glowing ship and ask a group of humans to be taken to their nearest leader. The humans instantly get their smart phones and laptops out to begin the inevitable process of uploading pictures of the aliens to Facebook and Twittering about the #alieninvasion and making extraterrestrial fatties on Fat Booth and sampling the the noise of their spaceship as a clip on Soundcloud etc until the aliens get so bored and frustrated that they simply climb back upon their craft and fly away again.
Anyway, in an attempt to counter these cynical thoughts I decided to log on to this blog and talk to no-one about stuff that no-one yet as heard of. And what jolly good fun I'm having.
The multi-faceted mission that is Coyote Jack and the Bluebirds moves into its final stages. My lovely wife is doing a slow but painfully precise proof read for me, and thank goodness for that - it's amazing the errors that slip through. Enquiries into a cover design have lead me (via a series of mind-blowingly expensive quotes) to an old friend with a talent for graphic design who for a nominal fee is currently working on a 'deconstructed bluesman' graphic. I'm looking forward to seeing how that goes.
Speaking of short stories (as I believe I did earlier) I've just written my first few in what must be nearly ten years. A.Po's Trophy is a short first person piece about a serial killing teacher with an apostrophe fixation, whereas Our Daily Bread is a ten thousand worder featuring two priests at feud. I'm pretty pleased with both, and may well send one or both of them off to see if I can't get myself published somewhere nice and sexy.
Been reading lots too. This past few months have seen me smash Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (amazing book, stylistically deranged though featuring some exquisite moments and utterly memorable scenes), Sam Mills' The Quiddity of Will Self (enjoyable yet more a linguistic exercise in metafiction than anything I really cared about), and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (love that man). Currently I am reading Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs and enjoying it very much, for all its existential bleakness and comma-less gloom.
Right, that will do for now. Time to turn the video camera off and upload this video of myself blogging about internet fixation to Youtube.
Stay warm people.
