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Things on my Desk
(desk, well; it's actually the kitchen table. I've been relegated to the kitchen. It must have been something I said)
Potato..
about four inches long, three wide, one and a half inches thick. The colour, averaged over its entire surface, is red:10, Green:7, Blue:6. Its general shape is that of four oblate spheroids pressed together in a flattened version of the structure of carbon tetrachloride. It has a thin rime of dark brown dirt along most of the seams and nine spots, four of which aspire to being eyes.
Stained Glass Jesus..
is what the small white label on the back of the structure says. It doesn't look anything like Jesus; I have identified the figure as a stylised version of a character named Thorn, from a comic called Bone. Very few people could mistake a thirty-three year old male religious dissenter for a twelve-year old female waif, and I am not one of them. She is stepping out of a pair of baggy pants, with her left leg suspended over a bucket. She has an enigmatic smile on her face. This design would make a damn good T-shirt.
Ancient Scroll..
it is paper, or possibly parchment, white, pale yellow in spots, folded in such a fashion that reveals its size to be eight centimetres wide by fifty centimetres long (when unfolded). It is curved around, as if it had been rolled into the shape of a bracelet, or (most likely) confined within a tibetan prayer-wheel. It is unevenly folded; a strip two centimetres wide along the back reveals a line of characters in pale brown ink, or possibly blood. They are Sanskrit characters, descending from an uneven line that rides the folded edge of the scroll.
Shannen Doherty..
the blue-black dye is beginning to grow out; there are mousey brown roots showing. For a change, she isn't wearing any make-up, and she looks considerably more attractive for this. She sits on the edge of the table, swinging her bare feet back and forth, the torn patch in the left knee of her faded jeans threatening to spread all the way around and convert her pants into assymetric shorts. She is wearing a new leather jacket that smells of some perfume, like rotting gardenias. Every so often she sighs, leans back and stretches, a flash of the curved underside of either breast, depending on which arm stretches first, revealing that she is wearing nothing underneath the jacket; the top button of the jeans has been torn off. Under the perfume, I can just make out the scent of her underarm perspiration, like pepper in a peanut butter sandwich. I think that sometime in the next few days, she will be moved to make room for my Deskjet printer. Maybe not.
Necronomicon..
it's one of the Greek translations, and therefore useless to me. It's about the size of the Amiga Rom Kernel manuals, and about as much fun to read. Pictures are few and far between. Bound in old leather the colour of Shannen's tawny midriff, the pages are only slightly lighter, not very well put together (typical ninth century workmanship) with some pages hanging out, dog-eared, fragmenting. I don't read it much, because it falls apart every time I turn the pages. It's open to about one-third of the way through, where Shannen has been reading up on Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. She's found a picture, and has made some notes in the margin about how this figure is obviously a corruption of the Horned God.
Solderomancy Reading..
I made this one up. You get a frying pan full of old lead scraps, melt them down over the stove and pour it into a sink full of cold water. You then divine the future from the shapes formed by the lead. So far, no lottery numbers, although I did predict that the batteries in the TV's remote control would go flat.
Hybrid Poplar Forest..
at first, I thought this one was an illusion. I've been for several walks in it, and it's at least sixty hectares of regularly-spaced poplars, all of them planted at the same time (I guess, because they're all about the same size). They've been planted in rows, six metres apart and no matter how you look at them, they seem to stretch off in lines, hundreds and hundreds of ghostly white columns, like an ancient pagan temple. Their branches meet overhead, making a canopy that hides the sky. Well, ceiling, anyway.
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