Today Again
Memory is a Thing of the Past!
Flash. It has begun. Playing through at 10 times the normal speed, the Vycon Re-view 5000 Lifelogging system has started up. This brand new memory capacity system now comes with 100 years guaranteed of complete recall whenever you want it. As you wake up and your brain is still in a higher capacity from the dream state, all the highlighted memories - that you determine via the modem connected to your computer - will be played back to you so that you never forget a day!
Mrs Wilson lay still for the minute that the Vycon Re-view 5000 needed to play back everything that she needed to know for that day. This new system was far superior to the previous operating system that used to take 5 whole minutes just to recall the past month. But not anymore, oh no - now you can recall everything you need to know from your entire life in just 1 minute. Technology these days.
Mrs Wilson unplugged the earphones and slipped off the mask, her mind still racing with everything that had happened in the last lifetime and then she got a headache. She took her vitamins and waited. This was a standard side effect of the Lifelogging system, that amount of memories being relayed to you in such a short space of time was always going to have an effect. Mrs Wilson shook it off and walked out of her room and down the corridor to wake up her children to get them ready for school. After she had shaken them awake she carried on down the corridor to the exercise room where her husband was already on one of the running machines. Shortly after she had started her 13 year old son and 15 year old daughter had joined her. They all ran for their set amount of time and then went off to prepare for the day. For today was Friday, last day of work, last day of school before a long weekend.
Breakfast was delivered as per usual via the automated service provided for by our caring government, who also provided the Vycon Lifelogging systems to everyone over the age of 4, free of charge!
After a hearty breakfast of bran flakes, with raspberries today, and a glass of orange juice, it was time to be off. The horn sounded from outside and all 4 exited the house to go to the buses. Each smiled and waved as they greeted their friends from the neighborhood and queued up for the bus, discussing the activities of the week so far. Mr Wilson spoke to Mr Johnson, who had taken his family to Centre Parks to get away from the world for a little bit. He did not hesitate to pull out his Lifeblogger - the hand held device for sharing memories - input the date and time of the cycle ride the family had taken to the lake and they laughed together as Mr Johnson’s son had stopped paying attention to where he was going and cycled in to a bush. Mr Johnson’s children were off with the Wilson children meeting their other friends to talk about what they had been up to while Mrs Wilson was gossiping to Mrs Long about her planned vacation.
The children departed in the first buses to go off to school, the adults then got in the bus that corresponded with their job. Mr Wilson was off to his 3rd day at work as a security guard at the Plant, while it was Mrs Wilson’s 4th day at the work line, where she assembled exercise machines.
Mrs Wilson arrived at 9 and by 9:30 she was set up and ready to go. 4 days may not seem long enough to do something as complicated as assembling a high tech exercise machine, but due to the Lifelogging system, she just ran through the orientation that she had done when she started and remembered everything she had to do in a matter of seconds. In fact, the longest anyone had been working there had been a week, it being a new facility and the ability to change jobs is so easy and achievable that all you have to do is give notice and apply to a new job and it can be yours! But that was a rarity, as there was 100% job satisfaction. Always.
The bell for lunch went off and Mrs Wilson met up with Mrs Long again and they continued their conversation about Mrs Long’s vacation. She was planning to go to Fiji. She wanted to see the sea, feel the sand, hear the wind through the trees. Things she had read about as a child, in a time just before Lifelogging had been readily available to the population. It seemed like just yesterday.
Before no time at all and work was over and everyone was returning home. Home to their families, to discuss their day and the new and exciting things that had happened, to show each other clips of the day on their Lifebloggers, to laugh, to smile, to be happy. Mr Wilson mentioned that he thought that they should go away for the weekend. The children and Mrs Wilson agreed. It would be a great weekend.
And then Mr Wilson dropped his knife. It caught his leg on the way down. A small cut in his trousers. Blood. He swore and then rushed off to get a plaster while Mrs Wilson grabbed a cloth and wiped up the blood. It was going to leave a stain. No matter. She would go to the store tomorrow and pick up some stain remover and everything would be perfect again.
The family went to sleep at the regimented curfew time, all excited about the concept of the weekend to come.
As the lights went out a light mist filled the house. Smothering each of the members of the household. As it cleared the front door opened and in to the room crept 4 men in black uniforms.
“You two go up and deal with that leg, we can patch the skin so it won’t be seen, but he may still feel an odd twitching sensation so I’ll go increase the potency of his anti-depressants. Someones going to have a good day tomorrow. Not that he’ll know why. And you there, go sort out that stain. There can be no trace of it, you hear me? If there is I will have you tranquilized and you’ll be another drone on a bus. Got me?”
The order had been set and the men got to work. In no time at all they had finished and filed back out of the house and into their car, the leader checked his clipboard and told the driver their next destination. Apparently one of the Johnson’s kids had run away again. One more time and more urgent action would have to be taken.
Upon finishing for the night they headed back to the Plant, their leader was summoned to see the boss as the rest were leaving to sleep through the day again.
“Give me a status report of the Johnsons child” demanded the Boss. The man in black told him he had been found, captured, drugged and placed carefully back in his bed. His anti-depressants had been increased and a mind wipe pill had been forced on him upon capture. They had replaced the one he would take in the morning with a placebo that they would have to go back and switch again the following night.
“That boy is causing me problems. Whats the point of them all thinking that its a new day over and over again if we are going to have obscurities like this one?”
“We could always just get rid of him, its not like anyone would know?”
“No, no, no. Do you have any idea how hard it is to do a memory reset of that scale. We would have to take everyone in his class, his teachers, everyone that is supposed to recognise him in the school, neighbourhood and home. No, we will have to take a different approach to this one. I think we should implant him with some sort of feeling of guilt, but not have him no why. It will make him think that he needs to work harder to please his parents. That should stop this running away habit of his. That will be your job tomorrow night, I am sure that you can come up with something good.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Anything else to report?”
“Well, Mrs Long is still having memories of Fiji sir. Its most peculiar. We thought we had wiped everything from her of that last year, but it has come back to her yet again. It has troubled me all day sir. She isn’t showing signs of remembering day to day processes but what happens if she starts to remember more of it? What happens if she is the first to realise it has been Friday 24th of May for 15 years?”
“That won’t happen. A subject hasn’t remembered the previous day since this project was started. And you know that not even I am allowed to know how we got to this day.”
“Okay sir, we will continue as per usual.”
postmehome asked: ...I dont know if you got my message before. That is my name but how do you know my name? how do you know me/of me? haha I do go to PCAD though. xx
thats kind of a funny story - I was really high and did a bit of random stalking as you were the first person to give me any feedback and I was interested to know a bit more about you - I am a big fan of your letters by the way
kill me
I am sat in a lecture about contact prints. For those that don’t know this is a photographic tool used to view your negatives when you have processed them. I don’t know why we are having a lecture about this. All we are doing is looking at a load of examples and everyone seems to be ridiculously fascinated by it. If you can’t select the best photo from a negative of 12 by the time you’re in the second year of your degree then you have issues. Am I doing the wrong degree? Most probably. Would I do more work if I was doing a different degree? Most definitely not. But thats not the point. Last night I spent 3 and a half hours using a pair of tweezers to pull dead flies off of fly paper. I used over 250 flies for my project. It was disgusting. But I still did it.
But everything COULD be worse. There is one scenario that can ALWAYS be worse than any situation that you are likely* to be put in.
*(when I say likely, this is presuming that you are not the sort of person that regularly gets in to trouble with mobsters that are going to semi-drown you in an acid bath full of genetically modified piranha…)
This is the story of Jamie (Not his real name - I wouldn’t want to personally embarrass him and remind him of the horrors that he went through. Poor boy)
Jamie was at a music festival somewhere in the middle of Eastern Europe. He was having a great time with all of his friends. The time of his life he may have said. Drinking for 20 hours a day and passing out in river for the other 4 across the middle of the day as it was about 35-40 degrees and you didn’t have much choice with what you did. Now don’t get me wrong, Jamie was one of the funniest people I have ever met. He would maraude around the camp ground with a tool used for gardening that would spray a fine cold mist of water. What did he do with this? Make friends. He just walked around spraying anyone that came within a meter radius of him.
The Europeans would do something that I can describe no other way than “The Peacock”. To do this all you need is to be a male, being thin is better, and a speedo. The smaller the better. But it can’t be a borat thong or a g-string sort of thing. It has to be a speedo. You then lie on the beach for about an hour or two with your sunglasses on, before standing up and stretching, walking down to the edge of the water leaning back slightly with your hands on your hips to project your crouch and slowly rotate from left to right and back again. Do this for 5 minutes. Then go back to your towel and lie down, going in the water is optional.
Now, when we had worked out the setup for “the Peacock” we would prepare ourselves for the bizarre act. But this was not enough for Jamie. He stripped off into his superman tightie wighties and followed them down to the water and exaggerated the act to such a degree that he almost fell in the water. His only comment upon his return was “Yeah, I can see the appeal of that”.
But what happened to him on the 3rd night of the Festival was wholly horrific.
We had all taken the marathon trek to the castle in which the music part of the festival took place and it was about 1 in the morning and Jamie has disappeared. We didn’t see him until the next morning. What had happened to Jamie? He had fallen asleep in possibly the worst place. In a portaloo. How? Why? What the fuck? these are some of the questions we asked, he had no idea as to any of them. But while he had been asleep, there had been - as there always is at anywhere when lots of people are drinking - a man who had drunk too much. This man was running to find a toilet to throw up in and the first one he grabbed the handle too and flung open just so happened to be the one that Jamie was asleep in. The smell of the toilet filled with 3 days worth of alcohol slurry was too much for the chap. He threw up all over Jamie. Which just happened to be enough to wake him up. Now, I would have loved to been inside the head of the guy that had just thrown up on the poor lad because what he did next was ridiculous. He knocked Jamie out. Smacked him straight in the face. And then ran. Door wide open. Jamie didn’t come around for another 2 hours and when he did, he had been drawn on, posed with and worst of all - he had been robbed.
So if you are ever in a situation when you think this situation couldn’t get any worse, well - it could. You could be unconscious, been thrown up on, drawn on and robbed in the middle of Eastern Europe.
old ways
So I decided that I would write a more comical story as that last one wasn’t exactly my normal style.
I went with my housemates to McDonald’s today, or more accurately, I looked after their sorry hungover states and babysat them in McDonald’s while they fought off what they describe as “how the end of the world would feel”. I felt that this was an exaggeration. They told me to fuck off.
But as we were sat there, enjoying our premium meat chicken burgers, we heard the most horrible squeaking noise, like when you wore a certain type of trainer and caught it on a certain type of floor and you get all embarrassed that you have made a horrible noise and you look around to see if anyone has noticed it was you and, of course, EVERYBODY knows it was you, you feel like a penis, queue shame spiral. But this noise, this horrible horrible noise kept coming, closer and closer, up the stairs and I turned around to see what the hell was going on, half expecting to see a physically handicapped person and then accept that they couldn’t help it and put up with it. But no. What I saw was something that near on gave me a stroke. And I’m not even 20 yet.
What I saw was a 12 year old with his mate - who was grinning so widely that I thought the Joker had told him how he had gotten his scars - and with every step that that child took, he was kicking his DC trainers in to the floor to make an incredibly loud, high pitched noise that I have now come to associate with the fall of society.
And why was this kid making this noise? Because he found it amusing. Did he care that he was annoying everybody? He did not GIVE TWO SHITS. But then I started thinking more into his actions. I started thinking why wouldn’t I have done that when I was 12? In fact, why wouldn’t anyone I know have done that when they were 12? It was only a 7 years ago. So whats changed? And then it hit me. I knew EXACTLY what it was that caused such a genuine lack of respect from the youths of today towards ANYONE else. Its because that kid has never had his face punched in by the school bully.
Today’s schools have such a strict regime over bullying that no-one can ever get away with giving some dweeb beats every now and then. 7 years ago, when I was in my first year of secondary school I was shit scared of a 15 year old called Elliot who was THE school bully. If you did anything to annoy him he would not hesitate to wind you, then wedgie you and then everyone would laugh at you. And that taught you not to do annoying things in public - because you didn’t want to offend anyone that was going to kick you in your prepubescent nut sack.
Back to MacDonalds and I probably didn’t react the best way to this sudden epiphany. The police certainly didn’t take well to my story that “it wasn’t me sir, honest” when watching the CCTV footage of a young man who holds astonishing resemblance to myself run up to the little twat and kick him straight in testicles, hoping to halt his ability to reproduce, while screaming “THIS IS FOR THE GOOD OF SOCIETY!”
Argh well, there was a good 50 kids who witnessed it, maybe they will learn better than to make horrific squeaky noises while I am trying to enjoy my Sweet Chili 90% water Chicken Wrap. Maybe.
not successful
Well after asking for people to send me a message with something or anything to write about, I will be writing about…nothing apparently. So lets give that a go.
Nothing is incomprehensible to the human mind. When a person tries to imagine nothing, they are most likely to think of, say, the vacuum of space - which isn’t a bad attempt. But this is still not nothing.
Nothing would be to say that there is no colour. The human brain cannot contemplate that because, as far as our current understanding of viewing colour goes, there is a colour to everything. Now back to the vacuum of space, the nearest to nothing we know of, its black right? Its a colour. Therefore there is always something.
So in actual fact, by not responding to my asking to give me a topic - you have set me the task of writing about the only thing that is impossible to write about.
different direction?
Anyone got anything that I should write about? I like a challenge, drop me a message with ANYTHING that crosses your mind and I promise to have a crack at it
60 minutes
So I used to get 40 minutes to make each pizza delivery, but when you get given 2 deliveries for one trip you get an hour and 20 minutes. The majority of deliveries took about 10 minutes, so on a double I would get about an hour of ‘me’ time before having to go back to the store. Now normally I would spend this time chilling out, reading a book, listening to music, running some personal errands, but on one particular occasion things didn’t exactly go to plan. This is how I found out that you shouldn’t stay outside the customers house after making a delivery.
So I am chilling in my car, music up, catching up on some Sherlock Holmes, reaching for a bad order pizza (this is a pizza where something went wrong, wrong toppings, didn’t get delivered or was made twice) for my dinner - I am a student so a free meal is a free meal. I have been there for about 30 minutes when, all of a sudden, out of nowhere a pizza box (from where I work), still with most of the pizza inside lands on my bonnet. I fucking shat myself. I jumped out of the car and looked around as I was in quite a nice part of Plymouth where the houses have drives to the houses so it couldn’t have been thrown from a window. Or could it?
While I am still stood there baffled and confused, a VERY angry woman is approaching me with great haste. What the fuck do i do? She DEFINITELY knows who I work for so I can’t drive off, besides, there is pizza all over my car. She marches right up to me, hands me £20 and this is exactly what she said “I have just caught my husband cheating on me with the maid, that £20 is for a lift to the train station…what happened to your car?” I was stunned in to silence. All I could say was “I was actually hoping you could help me with that one, I thought you may have something to do with it?” She told me that she had no idea, but promised me another £20 when I dropped her off at the station. Amazingly I somehow forgot the mystery of the flying pizza and we set off.
Now, it is about this point that I should mention that I had taken off my hat, and put a jacket over my uniform shirt so that people would spot me as a pizza delivery boy. You may be wondering what this has to do with anything, but we’ll get there.
We have been driving for about 5 minutes when a BMW comes roaring around a corner. I can only describe the driving style as that of a maniac, a drunk one at that. My passenger politely informs me that that BMW driver would most definitely be her husband and most probably would be intoxicated. Great. This is exactly what I need. She tells me to lose him. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever been asked to “lose” someone in a car, but I ignored the cliché due to the fact that I would probably have my face kicked in if I didn’t. So I drove through a maze of rush hour traffic, using one way systems and a knowledge of the traffic lights to my advantage. I pulled in to a parking lot and he eventually sped by none the wiser. I almost wet myself with the relief from escaping.
I finally drop my passenger off at the train station where the lady politely pays me and then something QUITE peculiar - “I really should start using your taxi service more often, I had expected to be waiting at least a few minutes for you to arrive, but nope - you were right there mere seconds after I called. Incredible.”
….what?
….Do I tell her that I am actually a pizza delivery boy with a jacket on? Well, I didn’t need to. It was in this moment of my confusion that the BMW screeched to a stop behind my car.
“What the hell are you doing with the pizza delivery boy?!?!?”
I jumped in my car and drove off. In hindsight I see this as my wisest decision. Ever. I arrived back at the store shortly after this transaction to find out that I had been 2 minutes over my set delivery time and got a warning about running late. I just said “Yeah, sure, whatever” and went to get my next delivery.
A hand grabs my shoulder.
“I didn’t know she didn’t know that I wasn’t a taxi driver!!!” I yell.
“What the fuck are you on about?” Its Liam, a friend of mine, another driver, “I just wanted to laugh at you for having pizza all over your car, hahaha…”
To this day nothing more came from the crazy couple.
And it was only a few weeks ago when I had delivered to a completely different part of town that I found out how I had ended up with pizza all over my car. It was Liam. He had driven past me and thrown a pizza out of his window at me. How did I find this out? He did it again. Bastard.
worthy mention
I quit my job as a pizza delivery boy - just thought I would mention that, which (as of tomorrow when they pay me my final paycheque) I will be able to talk about some more of the things that happened in my 7 months there that I wasn’t able to mention before now…
reading people
I first discovered that I had a knack for reading people when I was about 4, which you may think is incredible for such a young person. But what can I say, the things you need to see are right there in your face. I wowed my parents at first when they caught me for the first time. I was able to tell them that Michael Jackson had just had a child when I saw a short video clip of him on the news. My parents asked me how I knew this and I just replied “I just read it”.
I grew up being able to read people on a day to day basis so much that I stopped recognising when I was doing it. Sometimes I could read people multiple times and it would just phase through my mind settling in to my subconscious.
My girlfriends loved it at first, thought that we would be able to have deeper, more meaningful conversations. This was wrong of course as the awkwardness would always hang in the air with the fact that I knew more than her.
I only recently stopped reading people. I decided to get all my celebrity gossip from Hello.
