As SCI-FI EYES metamorphosises into its own futuristic and mad thought experiment, I thought short, looser pieces might be needed to bridge the gap while I wait for my muses to rain their inspiration down upon me like drunks pissing over a balcony. As with all my trials and errors, I shall observe which direction the winds blow them in the frenzied gamble that is creativity.
And it starts with the name – DAMNED FINGERS
When I was young ratbag of four years old or so, I was struck down from above by an odd stutter of sorts, the root cause being the jagged edge of a broken chair leg slammed down my throat by an unfortunate trajectory along with the force gravity as I one day took a tumble. Why I was hurtling around the house clutching an object with which a fully grown adult could have quite easily taken an eye out with, is a mystery to this day. Little boys can sniff out anything to hurt themselves with is the only half-arsed explanation that I can come to. To be honest, besides flashes of the consequential gargled and bloody screaming, along with the sharp tearing of flesh and me being bundled into a Morris Minor by my poor panicked mother, my mind is a complete blank on much of the painful experience.
I awoke to find that my ragged mouth and throat had been stitched back together again by all the King’s horses, and as the process of that particular operation wiped clean from my memory, the evidence leads me to assume the gory needlework was all carried out under a high quality anesthetic. I found that it was not be the last time that flesh of my head would be sewn and stapled back together, but that, dear reader, is a story to be told face-to-face over a stiff drink.
The aberrant consequence of that accident being, that for some time, I physically could not speak. I was unable to communicate verbally and I had by this tender age innately understood that the world was a dangerous place for little things. Not only was world predatory – as could be seen by the crows pecking out the eyes of lambs on the Welsh hillsides – but I had no way to express myself in it in the violent and immediate outbursts of those other howling pygmies of my age.
As the medical thread slowly dissolved inside my patchwork mouth, and I began to talk again, I was troubled to discover that I had developed an unique form of stutter. The condition seemed to produce blank thought bubbles as my sharp, yet conflicted brain sent ideas out into my mental world faster than my mouth could interpret them. In the clash of received signals, the sensations and sounds became jumbled, staggered, white noise.
I eventually learnt to control the rewiring of this disrupted signal, yet even now, an echo of the past event in a form of interruption happens when I am in the flow of writing. I leave out whole words, sometimes a couple in one sentence as my mind races the ideas out of me. In emails or chat, the words following the error-ridden sentences are invariably the corrected mistake, followed by “Damn fingers …“.
It hardly took much of an infernal leap of the imagination to change “Damn fingers” to DAMNED FINGERS – an allusion to my past, and possible future.
Think of DAMNED FINGERS as the empty thought bubbles between the explosion of SCI-FI EYES. Think of them as white noise. Think of them you want.
Think of them how you want … Damn fingers.
~Laughing at the Death Grin~ 