Wednesday 4 March 2009

Fifty Pence to Stop!


[First published on LiveJournal, November 2005:]

In common with [my friends Fran and Sandra], I've somehow slipped onto the Penknife Press e-mailing list, the company's name presumably arising from the item you grab to slash your wrists when the latest teaser chapter arrives.

Sunday's extract was from The Last and Final King by Obi (sorry, who?), ominously entitled "Book I, Chapter I":

Life is a f***. In and out, in and out, over and over again. Like a sine wave. Like a wave good-bye. It feels good to push it in, but the feeling doesn’t last. It fades like the sound of a plucked guitar string, or a train whistle breezing by the station. Good-bye! You have to pull it out just so you can push it back in, just so the feeling will be intense again. And there you are again as the feeling fades, and you want it to last forever, so you pull it out again. Your rear end is bobbing in the air, and to what end? The feeling that fades and keeps you bobbing? Is this what forgetting history is like? What about your own personal history? In and out, in and out, over and over again.
Sorry, your arse is bobbing in the air whilst you wave goodbye to a train whistling through a tunnel and try to remember how to play the guitar? Is this death by a thousand similes?

I want to forget, but I can’t.
Try harder. I certainly am, right now.

2 comments:

  1. Well, I'm not sure about the "enobi" suffix, but the rest sounds about right.

    ReplyDelete