Quiet Magic. I wrote it again in my notebook. It's hard to say why. I was hanging around in the backgarden, watching the trees slowly fall to pieces in the autumn bluster. Again, later, drinking coffee in the same spot, the same words came to me.

The wind had fallen with the dimming of the sun, and silhouettes of bare trees trembled like static. I felt a bit dizzy. I had been cooped up all day - fuck: all week - reading on the sofa, my legs stretched over the side, my shaky prospects disappearing from view. I hadn't spoken much recently. It's true, I could recall with fondness the conduct of polite checkout girls (which, frankly, made the gruff efficiency of bus drivers seem terse and insignificant by comparison: pompous, even)... but little beside that. I always enjoyed television most on foreign soil, alien syllables congealing like notes from Trane's sax. Same with radio.

Out here, a few footsteps from the doorway, light from the kitchen at my back, was poor recompense for my hours of study. Finishing my coffee, I resolved to take a stroll in the nearby woods. I had my .mp3 player with me: and it's true, 128mb is scant storage space - inadequate, really - but the accordance between this tiny, rewritable data tub and the endless iterations of discrepant sonics articulated on the same reel of tape (typical of beloved c90s) was all the seduction I needed. I fantasised about a market leader alternative with a grossly indulgent capacity: but the fantasy depressed me slightly, I still had no money. Besides, the fantasy of 80gb, of (essentially) everything in the same place, lacked refinement.

It was also disquieting to discern in my fantasy an often obscured kernel at the core of most hardware purchases: that I wasn't shopping for products, still less for services, but for images. My daydream, however tenuously, tied me to the consumption of images typical of the age: "indoctrinated daydreamers" all of us, or rather, the human animal daydreams, but he has only recently learnt to manipulate the daydreams of others on a popular scale. Perhaps what I wanted, in a temporary fashion, was to be somebody else looking at me using my piece of sophisticated gimcrackery, seeing my hands brush against the aluminium controls without feeling the blood within.

Perhaps not. I was finding it hard to distinguish possibilities from reality (the purest expression of doubt? - Or delusion?). It had to be said, the latest spec appealed to me with an immediacy absent from the realm of reverie.

Anyway, shopping for images, is that really so bad? If we do indeed shop for images, and not for products, surely we're at a level of critical analysis where the moral dimension applies only to methodology and not conclusions? It seemed that an entrenched Protestant pragmatism, and that alone, could posit a rugged, common-sense shopping-for-products in place of a hedonistic, impossible shopping-for-images. At least, it would be more accurate to say: where the necessities for survival are secured, even guaranteed, shopping according to need gives way to shopping according to desire. At least on some scale, however tiny, the Utilitarianism of previous industrial regimes had been eclipsed. Were Utilitarian values to be placed upon a certain product, it would only ever be in the service of a profligate economy of desire and dismay.

But what I really wanted to tell you about was the girl I met in the woods, and all I've done is waste your time thinking about .mp3 players, the consumer society; typical bourgeois Western travails. She was still dressed from work and I recognised her from the bus. She looked like she knew me, she must have thought I was someone else. She wasn't pretty, she looked hesitant and slightly awkward. She touched me, apart from the sofa the only thing all week, and kissed me too. "I don't know your name," she moaned.
"It's Kenneth".
"Hmmm, Kenneth".

It was all pretty idiotic really, but it felt great. She pulled me off near the brook, and I swear as she tugged away my length glowed, first fluorescent pink, then green, then orange, till i splattered my semen over her pinafore. It felt great, really good, I would probably have fainted if it wasn't for the colours, I stared horrified at my cock as the orange died like fading embers. I rubbed my eyes. I think she thought I regretted it, because she became distant afterwards. She gave me her number and we said goodbye.

I Cube - Un Proton Pour Toi Un Neutron Pour Moi (from Acid Tablet)