What Could Happen to a Psychic Detective

A short fiction piece, the first I've written in a long time.

I'm a detective. At least that's what I call myself , and it's only really for the look of the thing. John Doe, Psychic on the business card doesn't attract the kind of custom I need; or want. I get a really nice feeling when the Blue-Boys are all steamed up over me. They dont like it when some no name makes them look stupid The unsolveable cases are my favourite, but never tell them how you knew. The mystery keeps them wondering rather than thinking. Still there's nothing sweeter than the feelings of frustration I get from the Blue-Boys when I announce a killers identity before they have their caps on straight. They're stupid caps they wear anyway, a proper hat needs a hight top and a brim all the way round, always hides the eyes. Windows to the soul, close but way off. Doors to the mind maybe.

Like these big brown, smokey eyes looking at me now. I don't even need to look into them to know she wants me; and these visions of crumpled clothes and tangled bodies I'm getting from her... Her arousals really getting me down. I don't understand it but I always feel the opposite to what I'm sensing from someone. It's some kind of yin-yang thing with the empathy. Pain in the ass more like, the only worthwhile sex I get these days is from hookers and happy housewives but unfortunately this mark is neither. She's as remorseless as they come, pure succubus-golddigger. A little more button pushing at this dinner and I can make those visions of hers com true. Push some more buttons in the morning and wracked with guilt at last, she'll write a full confession, to her husband. Then he can get the divorce he always wanted and live happily ever after with his beau. Kinda sweet really except that I've met the old man's boyfriend.

He really thinks he's in love with me. I like to do this sometimes when there's no good crimes going on. The closest thing I have to a hobby really. I find a nice juicy private gig and work an angle on it. If this whole plan comes together right once the client catches his new boyfriend cheating he'll be so crushed a little push will send him over the edge. In his will he'll leave everything to his last survivng relative, a distant nephew by the name of John Doe. So maybe I wasn't born his relation and maybe he had over a dozen close relatives until he hired me but like I said, I'm a psychic detective and I can forge memories as easy as bits of paper, and that's all your life really is; memories and bits of paper. I wanted to be thorough with this scheme, I've never erased a bloodline before. I could retire then, on the old mans money, move to some idyllic tourist trap and live off of holiday misery. Rejig some poor saps expectations when he arrives and even if the experience excedes his wildest dreams he's too miserable to even wear sun cream and goes home feeling and looking like a dried onion. Oh the misery of it could keep me happy for weeks.

This chick must really be getting me down if i'm thinking of retiring. I should wrap this up and get her back to my place. No point in putting it off any longer, whenever we do it the sex is gonna suck. I have to resist the urge to stab myself in the arm with a dinner fork when I suggest we skip desert. Her happiness is making me nauseus. Sure I could shove her down these steps, catch her hand in the car door but that won't be near as sweet or as long lasting as the misery when her husbands business shut down. The last feature done on him said he employed 1,500 people just in this city! How many mouths are gonna go hungry when I shut everything down. I could probably move to Australia and not worry about all the happy people getting me down. That's the funny thing about this empathy no matter how many happy individuals cross my path in a day they just can't bring me down when I'm high on one great prolonged misery.

Cigarettes give me a reason to get away from the sweaty, tangled mess we made of the bed. I did my best to get the crumpled clothes just right. Her red dress at the foot of the bed under my shirt, the bra draped wildly over the head board. Oh yes, I have to keep reminding her how she wanted this. It's not that people want what they can't have, it's that they don't want what they have. They're always settling and moving on for seemingly greener pastures. Still stuck in the mold of hunting and gathering and consuming and hunting and gathering and you get the picture. We consume everything we come into contact with, even our experiences. Well, yours in my case but it's the same principle. I pull on my pants and hunt out my socks when she falls asleep. It's dangerous for me to be around sleepers. The dreams can be over powering sometimes. Once on a plane the kid next to me was dreaming about being an Action Ranger so at 50,000 feet I start battling the evil Zog in the aisles. Luckily the screams woke the kid up. I had to keep pinching him awake the rest of the six hour flight so it wouldn't happen again. Now I make sure I have some valium whenever I fly so at least if somone falls asleep and I do start freaking out I'm too melted to act on it.

Cigarettes are another wonder drug for someone with my condition. I try to find a smoke free bar so I can really enjoy them but there's none open at two a.m. I decide to try a dive instead. No one's ever happy in a dive. Now my favourite psychic trick is precognition. It's not the kind where I can predict the lottory numbers but I usually know about it if something inconvenient is going to happen to me. Like a lead bar to the head, that would have been inconvenient. Thanks to my neat little trick though that lead bar is lying on the ground in a pool of its owners blood. I really don't like people trying to attack me. It usually means someone wants me dead and now I have to find out who, so I can want them dead too. This dip stick on the ground won't tell me anything. He's not dead but he wishes he was. I check his wallet and the five hundred in cash is both welcome and informative. The pay off was made by some dip stick Blue-Boy but the order could only have come from the chief. The fat bastard had me dragged into his office so he could yell at me from behind his desk the last time I was in the papers. I was in such a good mood I couldn't help goading him on. Suppose I'm going to have to deal with that now.

I pick up some things on the way to the cop shop. The twins; Betsy and Betsy, a gas can and some rope. She's still asleep while I get what I need and I'm trying not eat all these candy cane flamingos I'm seeing. I'm tempted to throw back some valium but I need to be functional if I want to handle this cop situation tonight. First I take a drive through the slums and push a few buttons to get people steppin' on each others toes. The fireworks will get the blue boys out off their asses while I get some work done on the chief. Then I need the Mafioso to get all nostalgic about how it used to be in the old days, when they owned the town. I make sure they're in a creative mood when they hear about the slum riots. Place must be more strained than I thought. All I was expecting was a couple of gun fights but civil disorder is much more fun. While the mafioso are thinking about how to get the power back from the cops and snakes and their heads I move on.

I walk into the cop shop and ask the desk dork about seeing the chief. He hates me and I love it. If he knows his plumber friend failed then he'll probably try kill me himself here. I check on the girls again while the desk dork is telling the captain I'm here. While I'm waiting I start sinking into the floor. There must be a meth head or something in the cells. I stamp my feet a couple of times to remind my brain there's a floor there but it doesn't help. I'm going to have to do something before I start turning into a pink elephant again. I throw back some pills and start to relax. The abilities start switching off and everything's normal for a while. I have to get this done fast now and get out. I don't even notice the duty dork come back until he's right on top of me. I'm spaced out and he claps his hands to get my attention. I head upstairs to the chiefs office. There's no empathy to screw me over now and I know I'm safe. The fat bastard won't know what hit him. I slide out the twins and kick open the door. Bettsy says hello and Bettsy says hello too. They're big girls and the two of them destroy the window behind the empty desk. Empty desk. The fat bastard is sitting in the corner. He's got his own Bettsy. She says hello.

Toilet, Brush, Bandito

Made in Borris, Carlow one night long ago. The score was performed while I shot by my good friend John Doran, the man who makes me want to make films. It also features Eddie Murphy who's willingness to strip off on my insistence is always appreciated.

http://openbook.org/ Oh the lulz!

ANONYMOUS IS NOT A DIRTY WORD

A social psychologist by the name of Stanley Milgram wrote a very good book once called The Individual in the Social World. In it, aside from tricking people into thinking they’d helped murder a stranger he did a lot of good work about the difference between city and rural life. One of his better hypotheses therein is “urban overload”. Simply put we are bombarded by so much information in the city that we must employ a whole bunch of time saving processes, called heuristics, in order to deal with it all. A lot of these heuristics result in some pretty unpleasant interactions between city dwellers. Mostly it comes down to cutting out the people around you so you don’t have to process them, even just recognising a face is a big cognitive task.

The range of the effects of urban overload would bore both of us so I’ll just give you the example of Kitty Genovese. A young woman who when attacked one night in New York, surrounded by apartments full of people, cried out for help. Everybody looked but nobody went to help, nobody even called the police. This bystander effect comes from two attitudes; that somebody else would do something and that it was none of any one individuals business. This irrational contradiction applies to all sorts of altercations, have you ever weighed in on a public, inappropriate argument between a couple? Obviously these are slightly extreme examples but the fact stands that in the city we don’t get along as well, it’s not our fault it’s the cities.

An idealistic solution to this problem I like to indulge sometimes is if we all just up sticks and lived in the countryside, it is lovely after-all. Unfortunately that’s a completely ridiculous proposal. The fact is cities are as much a part of world now as the countryside, and their proliferating. Urbanisation is a result of a bunch of things not the least of which is globalisation.

Another theorist, this time a sociologist – there’s a difference – noticed independently from Milgram that people’s social networks were disintegrating. His book Bowling Alone, talks about, among other things; the decline in American bowling leagues but an overall rise in the number of people bowling. Like urban overload this degradation of “social capital” – Putnam’s term for the visible effects of social networks – leads to a whole bunch of negative consequences. Less social interaction and community involvement unfunnilly results in less political participation and general civic engagement.

Like most sociologists Putnam is quite boring and his work seems if not obvious, irrelevant. He gets a mention here because he somehow managed to inform a lot of the research social scientists are doing into social networks, facebook in particular. This semantic coincidence has generated lots of academic literature where researchers compare Putnam’s social capital index against peoples facebook. Unsurprisingly the correlation is usually negative meaning the social networking site facebook fails as a social network.

This isn’t facebook’s fault, or the researchers, or yours or anybodies really. It’s just this problem people, particularly academics, seem to have of not being able to think about new things in new ways. It’s a bit of trend in social research that deals with the internet to assume that things online are just reflections of something in the real world. And so with this thinking we get “facebook is a social networking site, it must be a social network”.

Now I’ve tried facebook out and discovered it wasn’t for me. I also don’t think it’s a social network the way Putnam meant it. Partly facebook doesn’t work for me because I’m not very good at putting myself out there but I also feel that between google and X-box live I have enough creepy corporate influence in my online interactions. The new “people centric” ads, the ones that let you share your favourite ads with your friends – peer pressure ftw! – sent me running and that worrying page you have to go through before you can deactivate your account sealed the deal.

Just because facbook isn’t for me doesn’t mean I don’t like it. I actually think it’s very clever and maybe has some useful potential, I’m just not arsed looking into it. Where facebook’s use may lie is in overcoming some of the disconnect we’re experiencing while we’re getting connected.

I like to think of individuals in society as blobs, and all of our needs, desires, means and motives protrude out from our blobby selves. Now some blobs will fit together and others won’t, that’s where we get harmony and conflict. Sometimes some protrusions have to be suppressed for an easier existence, that’s where we laws and norms. Facebook as way of communicating over the internet is like splatting your blob onto a webpage. It’s there for all to see and sometimes it might not be fully representative of your whole blob. But if you had a place where you could extend just one of your protrusions, maybe into a place designed to fit those exact protrusions well you’d only encounter others like you. And if it’s just that one protrusion you don’t have to worry about your other protrusions coming into conflict. Places like this exist online for free, you just have to look for them.


One of the positive things Milgram found in his work on the city was that the lack of involvement and relative anonymity means that people in cities feel much freer and are better able to express themselves, publicly at least. facebook on the other hand tells everybody everything, that’s why frapeing is so funny! You don’t have to worry about walking down O’Connell street in a funny outfit as much as you have to worry about a photo of you in a funny outfit getting onto facebook. I’m not trying to turn anyone away from their social networking sites I just wanted to make people a little aware of the alternatives and the value of those alternatives considering all of the above. I’m sure I could be more specific about these alternatives but it’s generally better if you discover these things on your own.

Memo-ir-ies

All the best ideas come when you're high. Which makes for a real pain in the ass when you're not high and you need an idea. Always when you're high and have an idea you think one of two things: 1. I just think it's good because I'm high so I won't bother writing it down or 2. I won't forget it. So this time I'm not gonna get high, have my great idea and write it down, just like the cake.
So I'm thinking about how to remember my great ideas when I’m high and because I’m not high my first instinct isn't to train a penguin/parrot/monkey to do it for me. I don't know why but stoners love these animals but we're always looking to train them into butlers/rollers/writers. Probably because they're all kinda human, but not. Like a kid, but you can smoke away without worrying about his mom callin' the cops. No my first idea wasn't stupid. I was going to get a dick-ta-phone. Pretty clever, huh? But of course those things have batteries and tapes that need changing (heh, kinda like a kid).
Problem is that sounds like too much responsibility for me. Ant-Farm was too much responsibility for me, fuckers feed themselves, don't shit and live in a sealed glass case and they were too much responsibility for me. Typical fucking shit though, was just looking at the little guys run a round one day (kinda envy their industrious nature) and some crazy fucker starts eating another poor little fucker. Two of 'em working away happy-as-larry-ants when the crazy one flips and starts munching on his little buddy. Freaked the fuck out of me. Especially when all the other little guys got involved. Jumping on the crazy fucker and munching his ass...
So anyway I freaked out, I dropped the ant farm on the floor and scattered crazy cannibal ants every which way. I vacuumed those suckers double quick. No way was I living with crazy cannibal ants loose in the pad. Yeah, ant-farm was definitely too much responsibility for me. So no dick-ta-phones, ant-farms or trained monkey/penguin/parrots for me. No I’m going to be sensible and get a girlfriend. One that doesn't smoke. The last... 3?... maybe 4 all smoked. They're hard to come by; smokey girls like me but it's nice how your weed doubles for a few months until... something happens, it's the same every time... ‘‘You just take and take and never give anything back!''... Yeah that's it: reciprocation. I'm really not good with that but I’m not going to be smoking my non-smoking girlfriends stash.
Now the last run of girlfriends I met through my drug-dealer but I can't ask him to hook me up with a non-smoking girlfriend, he doesn't know any and neither do I. So where do I find one? I could try a club but I really don't want to do that. I always get weird looks in clubs when I'm shining a torch in people’s faces but those places are dark and you can't window shop in the dark. I really think I’m just not built for clubs, I can't hear anyone and no one seems to understand me. It's like being submerged in really noisy water with bad lighting and B.O.... no, no I don't want to meet my girlfriend at a club.
I'd love to meet a girl at the zoo, the kinda girl who really digs animals like lions and shit or maybe penguins. Yeah I’d like to meet my girlfriend at the penguin enclosure at the zoo. The penguins always put me at ease, they look like people with none of the bull shit. A penguin would never tell me I’m not fulfilling its needs. Penguins barely have needs, food and no fucking sea lions and the penguins happy. The gaffs insulated so he'd love that. Yeah, why am I bothering trying to find a girlfriend when I could have a penguin. He'd listen to me, support me, remember shit for me! Yeah man, penguin's totally the way to go.
No! Not this bullshit. See what I mean about stoners and penguins. They're too chilled out I think, just too easy for us simple creatures to relate too. Not like women. Oh Jesus! I'll never understand them. A woman's a challenge, proper challenging like every day you wake up: what crazy shit's she gonna pull today. I spend most of my time fixating on not screwing up with a girl and it turns out that's screwing up with a girl! There's no logic to them I tell you, none! The paranoia they produce is worse than the fuzz. I can barely enjoy sex because of it, if I’m not thinking it was too short I’m thinking she's faking. Why do they have to turn sex into a game? It's supposed to be fun for Christ’s sake! Nah a girlfriend's definitely not what I need right now. That's a bad idea to get involved with another human being, especially a crazy one, when I can't even handle an ant farm. See I’ve got to stop gettin high to come up with ideas because they just never work out.

Help...

Spread some word, I need encouragement....