The gunfire was endless last night.
Each night this week, and last, at roughly 8 o’ clock, a barrage of what sounds to be small-arms fire begins to flare up just over the hill, possibly emitting from the tenant housing several blocks away. As the evening wears on more noises persist, and the relentless crump of gunfire begins to sound like it’s coming from rifles and possibly mortars.
The first time I heard the shots, I figured that there was just some shooting happening. Noting unusual about it, although the sheer volume of it made me question myself. Gunfire in Glasgow? God damn it, man, this is the stabbing capital of Europe, not guns! Nevertheless. I was not so much scared for my own safety as I was annoyed at the persistence of the noise. Here I was trying to write and these hooligans kept on taking pot-shots at one another.
As the night grew into nights, and the gunfire always returned around the same time, I managed to work myself into a habit of ignoring the artillery bursts and blasts, still getting down a good few thousand words each night. I am, after all, a professional, and my work is very important to me.
Last night that all changed. I was secluded in my room, as is my custom, finishing the day’s dispatches, and beginning to make some plans for a trip to the local pub when a knock came at my door. What could have only been the military occupation of the last week or so had made me wary, and I always checked though the peep-hole before releasing the dead-bolt and letting any hooligans in.
To my delight, it was two neighbors from the floor below, with a bottle of good £5 wine; far better stuff than the cheap swill I usually drink. I let them in immediately, and closed and locked the door behind them.
“Keeping a tight ship tonight, eh, Benzo?” one of them said.
“You know it. Goddammit, if you don’t keep yourself locked up at this hour, only God knows what type of trouble you’re inviting,” I said.
They laughed, and we went into the kitchen to set about working on the bottle of wine, which I said needed to be done relatively fast so that I could finish my writing and manage a trip to the pub for a few pints before midnight.
And so the next hour went merrily past, all three of us indulging in the wine, a crisp red, Spanish in origin, I think, and discussing the weeks events in politics and film. As usual, the Democrats manage to muck everything up that’s been handed to them, and the Republicans continue on their path of world domination and Righteous Oppression. Tony Blair still seems to be wanking in power for as long as he can, and various people in both his own and the opposition parties are champing at the bit for a taste of power. The elections in both the US and the UK are going to be marvelous bloodbaths, and I, for one, can’t be bothered to make a guess at who is going to win what. All I can say is that we’d better not expect anything, because strange and horrifying stuff is going to happen.
After a while, and half the bottle, a magnificent *CRUMP* filled the air, and right outside of my kitchen window, a giant red phosphorus arrow pierced the sky about a mile away.
“Holy shit!” I cried, hitting the deck while managing to spill only a little of my red. War or not, I wasn’t going to go about wasting fine drink. “The artillery is here. They’re launching flares! This means that there’s a helicopter landing. Infantry is coming! Martial law over the entire West End by sundown tomorrow! God DAMMIT, why aren’t you fools on the floor? The mortar fire is going to start any minute… we need to get to be basement, somewhere safe. Bring that wine.”
And, as I predicted, several seconds after I said that, another and another bang filled the sky. Flares were going off everywhere, I could tell from the floor, and artillery rounds were smashing the very foundations of the earth. A foreign country invading? Couldn’t be possible. This had to be a terrorist attack, some fools had gotten their hands on second-hand Soviet mortars for sure and were going to town with them. What has this world come to?
But my compatriots just looked down at me and laughed, drinking more wine. Were they too drunk to grasp the situation, I thought? Fair enough, the situation was too far progressed for me to do anything about it on the floor. I rose up again and joined them above-decks, refilling my wine and looking out the window, looking at the flares, which seemed mighty inefficient and looked a lot like…
“Fireworks, Benzo,” one of them said. “People have been launching fireworks all week over on Maryhill. There’s a store you can buy them at, down in City Centre. We’ll go get some tomorrow.”
And that was that. Now it’s Saturday afternoon, and it’s high tide I make it out of my flat in search of some Commercial Grade Entertainment Explosives and a bottle of whiskey- I have a party to go to tonight, and I think it’s only as fair that they get as good a combat experience there as I did last night.
April 14, 2007
Listen. Kurt Vonnegut has become unstuck in time.
Selfishly, the first thing I thought when I heard that Kurt Vonnegut had died was that I would never be able to meet him in person, which depressed me a lot. Certainly, I felt sympathy for his family and loved ones, and I wish them all the best. But, having been a Vonnegut fan ever since I was able to think critically about literature, I had always hoped that I would be able to meet the man who defined a whole new realm of thought to me- cheerful pessimism.
His books are full of sad characters making their way though a life that has not exactly treated them how literature should; neither glamorously nor ruinously. He dealt with people that seemed – despite his simple and sparse descriptions of them – real. The dramatis personae of his works, many of whom were recurring and became friends to me, were old men with nowhere else to go, women whom nobody loved, misfits and losers all around. Yet there was something lovable in the way he treated all of them, like a creator looking over his flock, and while unable to change their lives for the better, always gently leading them through the toils of life.
Edward Abbey once wrote that “a pessimist is just an optimist who is well-informed,” and this is, I think, an apt description of both Vonnegut and his literary works- someone who wanted to see the world through rose-coloured glasses, but knew too much to take that plunge. Probably his experience as a POW in World War II and his witnessing of the fire-bombing of Dresden were enough to put him off of sugar-coating anything for the rest of life. His work traversed some of the darkest spots of human existence, yet still even the most depressing facets of life he treated with the gentle cynicism of “so it goes.”
So while I’ll never meet you, Kurt, I can take solace in what the Tralflamadorians in Slaughterhouse-Five have taught us: that you and your universe of volunteer firemen, intergalactic travelers, smut sci-fi writers, industrialists, and madmen are, and always will be what they are when they are, for all time. You live on and in your works, and will continue to make me think and laugh.
“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” So it goes.
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