Issue #57 - Noverber 21st - 28thSister Janice, the Planetary Priestess
THE LAST NIGHT BEFORE WE FLEW TOGHETHER
The Great Lake Powell Escape
Tales from the Front Line - Part 4
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Sister Janice, the Planetary PriestessSister Janice is the Friends Of The Heroes agony aunt. She used to be a nun, but after becoming involved in an accident at her convent involving a papal emissary; the mother superior; the convent dog and a bottle of 'citrus fresh' bleach, she decided it was time to find herself a new career. These days she travels through the galaxies in a converted garden shed. Write to Sister Janice Slejj care of Friends of the Heroes. She will answer your problems and questions with the insight unique to a disco-loving alternative-gardening defrocked clergy member and cosmic adventurer... Hello there my little cosmonauts of contemplation, Welcome to The Space Shed. Grab a bean-bag, help yourself to a glass of Plutonian Punch. Make yourself comfortable. But be quiet, if you would, we don't know who is outside. The Space Shed drifts out of the solar system, engines turned down as low as possible, all guiding lights switched off. Even the internal lights, utterly invisible from the planet below, are dimmed so that we can barely see the control panel. We are taking no chances. Our little craft cannot be spotted, until it is far out of range of...whatever they have got on that planet that they might be able to follow us with. This is how it started: I lost Roger, my travelling companion, on a dubious planet somewhere in the belt of Orion. I decided to set out to find him again, only to crash-land on the planet of Pluto, once deeply unfashionable but now undergoing something of a rebirth as a 24-hour party planet (and managed, it turns out, by some rather shady characters, but that part of the story comes later). I was dragged from the middle of a Plutonian rave, to meet a mysterious character who was running the planet at that time, and was, perhaps, a little surprised to find out that this mysterious character was none other than Roger, my travelling companion, who I'd been trying to find all along. You think that's strange? Try living the bloody thing. Ten minutes later, he's told me he's getting hitched to some alien bird that he's known five minutes - the love of his life, apparently, and he's ordered me out of his office with an unlit cigar bearing the message: 'Please, help me. Meet me tomorrow, get me off this planet. Can't explain. Destroy this note.' And, for some reason, he's singing the words to Lady Marmalade in his office, to no-one in particular. But I'm not worrying about that, just yet. Not at this point. So, anyway... back in time....There I am, back in the Space Shed, contemplating Roger's impending marriage to an unknown being named xffrxrovvv - presumably someone he met when I accidentally flew off and left him on the planet of the dancing girls. I'm drinking the Plutonian Space Punch that I managed to blag off the staff at this wedding-preparation-thing and I'm..... ....waking up a what seems like a few seconds later, with a stinking hangover, to the sound of someone banging on my door. What the f---? Has the sun risen? I open up, and there's some great big pink hard thing standing outside. No, not one of THOSE big pink hard things - although, frankly, right now nothing would surprise me. This thing looks more like a.. well, imagine a yeti, only uglier, with worse odour and... well, imagine it even uglier than you're already imagining. And pink. 'You're late. Ceremony started two hours ago.' 'Two hours?....but I only......' With a grunt, the being elbows me out of the way, and pushes into my spacecraft. Usually, I'd protest at this but now doesn't seem like the time.... The .... thing is strolling around my home; picking up furnishings; studying the ornaments which were placed here, mostly, by the group of nuns that decorated the place (rosaries, pictures of jesus, statues of jesus, more statues of jesus...you get the idea) and sticking its nose in my punchbowl. One big sniff, and the contents are emptied.. 'hey...that's my -' 'No good for your sort. Your sort too weak. Puny. Get ready. Ceremony needs priestess'. And I'd had a horrible feeling it was going to say that. So, I pick up the rosary (the only one I have left, since I swapped the other round the back of a dodgy space-bar with some little blue fella who kept stroking his chin) and I pull out my habit, long discarded under a pile of Parliament records, and I hope I can fool them. How hard can it be? Spout some shit, mention God, look like you know what you're talking about... that's what vicars do at such occasions, isn't it? The yeti is looking at me, scratching an armpit with an electric-pink paw: 'Priestess ready now. Ready for ceremony. Come' What the hell, go with the flow. I shut the door, and head after my visitor, hoping that there's some way to halt this wedding, and get my friend; my self; my ship and, with any luck, another bowl of that punch off the planet, and away from...whoever we've got to get away from. And...if it doesn't work...then at least the poor boy gets hitched. I mean, he could do with a bit of female companionship, and if there's someone who actually wants to have a Close Encounter of the bird kind with him, well, there are worse fates. They might be very happy together. And he's got a steady job here, people look up to him, there's plenty to do, and if he gets bored I'm sure he can - My thoughts are interrupted by the pink thing: 'You come, you make everyone happy' 'yes....thank you.....' 'You come, you make everyone happy, you make sun come' 'I....do what?' 'You make sun come close, across space. You make us warm, make things grow, change the air.' 'I.....I can't do th-' 'You make everything different, and new. And then we don't eat friend's brain'. Oh....good....Lord.... As we get closer to the chapel, I find myself doing something I haven't done for many, many years. Not since I was at the convent. Not since before that - I never did what they wanted me to at that place. I find myself praying. More next week, my little rainbows of reflection. Until then, I'm a little distracted. The ship drifts away, away from the...well, I suppose you could call it a building...where the ceremony was to take place. Away from the planet below, aware that one of us very nearly found himself as part of the ceremonial banquet. Not much further, and the lasers won't be able to reach. A dim light from a lava lamp shines in the centre of the craft. We stare at each other, unsure of what to say, unsure of whether there is anything that can be said, not knowing where we go now, the three of us. Me, and Roger, and xffrxrovvv, his bride. Until next week, my dears, be.... Hell, be whatever you want. Just don't end up stranded on some strange planet, guided by an evolutionary mishap and expected to perform a miracle and to simultaneously wed and rescue your friend, to save him from being eaten. Not if you can avoid it. xx
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THE LAST NIGHT BEFORE WE FLEW TOGHETHERI was in the bath. The kid was in bed. It was late and I was fucked in both body and mind. Elisa came in the back door. With the water being so warm, I just couldn't bring my self to get out. Sooner or later we all surrender to nature. I heard the old leather chair scream, Elsia was in the other room, TV blearing out the usual shit. I was thinking about the old days, and how age had just crept up on me. The damn thing grabbed me by my bollocks and every fag, drink and lover was now etched in my face. Under the eyes and my receding hairline. I was once beautiful, so very very young. Splashing the water over my face, I just couldn't get those years back. Elisa walked in the bathroom. She was amazing. All ways they're for me. Her eyes so warming. Like when a child, and at school when the shit happens, all you want is your mum. The warmth, the smell of dear old mum. I touched her face. She looked at me. I looked at the packed bags. Smiled as I turned off the light. Laughed as I turned off the radio. I woke up at seven. We flew at twelve. The kid was up. "Dad, dad where's Elisa." Rolling a fag, I got the boy some juice, kissed him and told him to take a wash. Well I looked everywhere. The bedroom, the boy's room, in the car, under the stairs. Not a sight. I went in to the back garden. I felt like shit. I wanted my mum. Where the fuck was she? I walked down the garden. Elisa had always been so happy, she had been a little ill the last day or so, but nothing too bad. I don't know what it was, but something forced me to the green house. Elisa was there. My heart, what was left of it, sank. She lay dead on the floor. Stiff and cold. I waved the flies away with my hands. Picked her up and kissed her. Putting her down, all I could do was look at those amazing eyes. Thinking about the past three years with her. The boy broke down when I told him. I was fighting back the tears. He ran upstairs shouting. Telling me he felt sick knowing Elisa had died in the cold night, alone and in a green house I never used. He told me to fuck Prague right up my arse. I rolled a fag. Turned on the radio. I went outside. It took me twenty minutes to dig the hole. As I put her in it I looked up. The boy was in the window. Crying. I was crying. Elisa was the best cat we ever had. I walked back in the house. The boy was still crying. He told me all he wanted to do was to go to Prague, to get a stray cat. I knew then that I never ever wanted to die in a green house. I knew then, for the first time that we might just have a chance of pulling this world around, the whole bloody mess. I picked up a stone and threw it. It smashed two plans of glass. I was, for a brief time, alive again. Thank you Elisa.
The Great Lake Powell EscapeIt might as well be the desert moonscape view Kepler dreamed of. Just add water. Nowhere has there been such a stark contrast of desert-like death surrounded and filled up by the water of life. With one foot you can stand on the dry red-rock desert shore and the other foot licking fresh water. It is a place where water ski's slalom and skid and their motorized contralto echo-hums ricochet into a thousand pieces off each cliff wall. It is a place of lakeside campfires, houseboats and rafts. Boy Scouts make sand castles, earn their lifesaving merit badge. Fisherman smoke and catch bass. It is a place of honeymooners. It is named after a one-armed explorer who would have never envisioned the land filled with water. But filled it was to be, not only with water, but with a surreal magic I can't wait to revisit. Construction started on Glen Canyon Dam on October 20, 1956. With a smile, President Dwight D. Eisenhower remotely pressed a button from the White House. The blast that was to follow had nothing to do with anything nuclear, but rather had everything to do with the beginnings of something altogether political, yet something ironically beautiful. The detonation that followed set off the first powdered charges that would begin a partial blockade of the Colorado River, the building of the Glen Canyon Dam, and the subsequent formation of Lake Powell behind it. The damn would generate most of the electrical energy for nearly all the southwest United States. The side effect for such energy pursuits? You get a lake. And the lake is big, real big. It has a surface area of 266 square miles with about 1,960 miles of undulating shoreline exposing (and hiding) some 96 major side canyons. The water depth at the dam is 560 feet. Now, years after its birth, the reservoir itself is twice my age. For the first time I headed to that labyrinth of rock pillars, profiled cliffs and winding waterways collectively known as Lake Powell. I didn't really have a reason to go except to momentarily break away from my own life. I had just gotten out of a relationship a few weeks before. True, I was running away from something, but I didn't know what. Some friends invited me to there. They had a boat and four jet-ski's. I hesitated. Go, I said to myself. Go without her, go with them…belong. Go. So I went and vacated. My recreations pulled me, thankfully, from a downtown nightmare into a wispy country dream. I'll tell you why. Set the way back machine for the year 2000. Some twenty-five twenty-three year-olds crammed into a Jeep, a Toyota and a corroded Dodge van. It was almost a five hour drive from Salt Lake City with ski's and ship in tow. When we arrived the magic began. I remember getting down there an hour or two after the sun had gone down, the sky gradually fading from a bright amber beer color to the baby of blues, eventually shifting into a royal navy ink painting the sky. I was sitting back-seat-middle staring at the horizon, oblivious amid the post-pubescent laughter. We turned down a dirt road toward the shore, and without sun but the ambient light of the stars to take her place, a glare was cast, which fell softly on the shoreline. Suddenly, fields of small fragrant summer flowers, initially hidden from view in the soft darkness, lofted a sweet aroma into the air. I climbed over somebody, lowered the Jeep's window as far as it could go, climbed out and sat on the door. We sped toward fresh water leaving a pluming dust cloud behind us. The wind was in my hair and that sugary scent climbed down my throat. I tell you my nostrils surged. I closed my eyes, took off my hat, breathed in the sweetness and felt the broken parts of me gravitate back together again, and for a just moment, I felt complete. I soared. We set up our tents on the quiet beach. No waves lapped ashore. The water didn't speak, but remained silent. A girl named Alison sat next to me. We both smiled. So far the vacation was a success. Come midnight, amid a dying campfire and a half-sleeping camp, a faint noise echoed through the air as if from a dream, then subsided. We all dismissed it as the screaming ghosts from the same city we had just fled. Somehow we knew they would follow to haunt us, like memories do, but we didn't care. We were now here. I climbed up a cliff-side to piss. I walked far, perhaps half a mile through the dust and flowers, in order to find a moment of relief, solitude. Unzipped, I suddenly looked up. That faint sound came again, gradually amping up into a thunderous crescendo. Louder and louder, the screams culminated into a burst of sonic waves falling on me like curtains. I staggered back reeling from the shockwaves. A single F-16 Fighting Falcon parted the sky, like a finger across a lake. The fighter was close overhead, but only for a moment. It blazed its afterburner in an extremely fast low-altitude cruise, darted ahead at supersonic speeds due north toward Hill Air Force Base. I could tell it was an F-16 because it trailed a single wispy line of gray silhouetted against the creamy rich array of the Milky Way galaxy seen edge on. One engine. I looked up, and this lone fighter transected the sky like finger or knife drawing itself over the surface of a lake. It was fast. My head turned to follow it streak across, then it was gone over the northern horizon in less than a half a minute. I wondered how it would be sitting in that fighter, leaning back on that tilted throne, peering out a crystal canopy a mile up and glancing down onto all of creation, punch the afterburner and streak across a night sky. Its velocity was at least Mach one, if not twice the speed of sound. It was a climactic moment of vacation, the apogee of my escape. Caught with pants down on a desert plateau-cliff, I witnessed a bird leap up into the feathered blue night and with its golden trails and sidewinder missiles, kissed the moon. It was then that I knew that I wasn't running away from something, but toward it, and that this was that something, a remembrance of freedom, peace and simultaneity with the purest form of the world, somehow at peace with a forgotten past and memories, with a clear view on the future ahead and below from a bubble canopy on top of the world. The hiking, water sports and cliff-diving were fun as hell to be sure, but Lake Powell is special to me beyond recreation or recognition. I can still smell those flowers, and the distant roars still rumble and resonate in my bones. Only one can experience peace oneself. There are many Lake Powell's, strewn about the world next to your place of escape. There's one near you, waiting for you to leave behind what you need to leave behind. Go.
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Tales From The Frontline - Part Four
The Story So Far: Bob and Paul went to Nottingham to watch a football match in a pub and Arab Strap respectively. They are still in the pub. It’s half time in the match. Both are drunk and Bob has just vomited. We continue…. Bob was a long time in the toilets. This wasn’t entirely unexpected seeing as he had just vomited the best part of God knows how many pints of lager onto his shoes and jeans. I tell a lie. What had actually happened was that Bob’s vomit had actually hit the tiled floor of the bar but then the force of said vomit hitting the floor had made it splash back up and over his shoes and, let’s be fair, merely the bottom third of his jeans. These things happen and, in our perversely English sense of mind, a good day out wouldn’t actually be a good day out unless we had either a) Been subject to an alcohol induced Vomiting session b) Got into a fist-fight with a stranger or c) Got off with a stranger. The ideal day, of course, would involve all three, but such heights are rarely scaled. Still, one out of three (thus far, I hasten to add) isn’t at all bad. And there’s plenty of time left yet… Bob emerged from the toilets just as the second half of the match was beginning. It was uncanny, almost Shaman-like, how a man is able to pinpoint to the exact second the time that he has from the last ball of the first half being kicked to the first ball of the second half being kicked. It’s is if he is bequeathed some sort of psychic power that alludes to, and is controlled by, the kick of a football. “You can see the fuckin’ telly from the bogs if you leave the door open.” The second half became a dizzy salvo of ‘whiskey nowt in it’ as Bob and I hurtled into the past-caring stage of inebriation. There’s a point between, let’s say, your third and your sixth drink, when the sober realms of logic and common sense remain like that irritable second cousin you always end up sat by at family engagements. They don’t drink, they gorge on tofu, and they take great delight in reeling off statistics that ought to frighten you into giving up the bottle. What actually happens though, is that you resort to the bottle in order to tolerate the oh-so-righteous cousin. And the more you drink, the more that the second cousin recedes into the background until, eventually, they make no sense at all. So here’s Bob and I, now onto doubles because the singles were sinking too quickly, leaning nonchalantly against the pock-marked bar, trying to make sense of the big screen as it began to blur, whilst at the same time making heady plans to roam once more the four corners of the earth, to contact all of our old lovers and long-lost friends, to finally write the last great novel, to make the pilgrimage to Monty Clift’s grave, and to remain what we were until they took it all away. It’s fair to say that, as the final whistle went (thus confirming England’s qualification into the Euro 2004 finals in Portugal) we were incoherent, drunken wrecks, babbling nonsense and ideology. I’m sure that Arab Strap (who we were still to see that day) would approve. To Be Continued…
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