Life with the Apocalypse
The problem with going to bed with a small pink hellhound* is that you lay her down on her shelf next to your glasses, you turn the light off, you roll over and snuggle down in your pillows, and all in the same motion you continue rolling till you’re facing the frelling shelf again and utterly without motive force or direction your hand reaches out, plucks her small pinkness neatly out from under your glasses and—because by this time your other arm is free too—you flick the nice pink case open and push the slider over and . . . you’re in business. All while your Higher Self and your Superego are yelling, No! No! No! No! It’s already past mmph o’clock because you were reading in the bath again and you have to get up tomorrow** before Niall and Colin show up for handbells*** because you have a novel to write!† Meanwhile my Lower Self and my Underego are arguing about whether we’re going to play a game or cruise the web†† . . . The situation is aggravated by the fact that not only is Apocalypse’s††† screen beautifully lit, of course, but most of the default settings of itty-itty-bitty are more easily read without glasses than with. I’m already blowing up enemy aliens‡ before my responsible adult synapses have had a chance to marshal their arguments. Have you noticed the way your flighty, impetuous side keeps the response times of a six-year-old while the sober, conscientious side that earns your living and puts chicken in the mouths of your hellhounds gets all elderly and creaky as the years pass?‡‡
The iPhone. Whose idea was an iPhone? Okay, where do I start? With Raphael and Gabriel. My own Computer Men.‡‡‡ I’m going to have to downgrade them to demons again.§ It all really began several months ago with that half hour on Raphael’s mere paltry iPhone3 and Angry Birds.§§ And while I didn’t get around to buying my own Angry Birds till after not only Fingerzilla but the Chambers Dictionary and Thesaurus and the Oxford Medical Dictionary, I nonetheless did buy it§§§. And I sailed through the first four or five levels of the first set and then started . . . slowing . . . down, because the truth is I’m an old retro fogey and all this hand-eye coordination stuff is kind of beyond me. I stuck on level ten for about three days, and then last night, HURRAH!, I did it! I flattened the sucker! Pigs and timbers everywhere! Yaaaay! . . .
And I still got level failed!! What do you mean, level failed, you . . . contraption? FAILED? If that was a failure, I’m a . . . well, angry robin is perhaps a phrase that oozes to mind. . . . So, having scorned Raphael’s suggestion a few days ago that I CHEAT and google angry birds walkthroughs, tonight, when I find myself mysteriously clutching Apocalypse after I’ve turned the light out and taken my glasses off, I’m going to zap on google and . . .
* * *
* Aside from making the original hellhounds JEALOUS, but fortunately they don’t recognise Apocalypse as a member of their clan. They haven’t heard her bark yet however.
** Er—today
*** At 5 pm. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Wait a minute, aren’t authors supposed to keep strange hours? Raphael rang me at nine thirty yesterday morning. Nine thirty! What does he think I am, a butcher, a baker of cinnamon rolls As Big As Your Head, a candlestick maker? No, but I am a bell ringer, and I have considered just staying up through service ring on Sunday morning and going to bed after. But that would make Sundays when we ring again in the afternoon somewhat challenging. And it would probably confuse the hellhounds.
† And hellhounds to hurtle. I’m trying to decide which would shorten my life faster: ignoring hellhounds or ignoring Story in Progress. There would probably be a tiny inverse pop^ and hellhounds, SinP and I would all disappear, and a microscopic sucking void would materialise, if materialise is quite the word I mean . . . and it would all become very Lovecraftian, or possibly Ripley’s Believe It or Not.^^
^ Sort of a . . . opo
^^ Did anyone else have the crap scared out of them by Ripley’s, passed around the playground at recess or the park after school? When I was a kid they were both in the Sunday papers and in horrible cheesy nightmare-inducing paperback books. When you’re nine years old your grasp of what constitutes ‘scientific method’ and/or ‘reliable witness’ may be a little wobbly. Fairy tales already gave me the whimwhams because they contributed too much range and detail to the things you knew lived under the bed and in the closet+, but at least you could tell yourself they were fiction.++ But Ripley’s was science fact!! It said so! And Ripley’s monsters were notoriously resistant to the standard repertoire of garlic, silver, buckets of water, etc. People disappeared a lot in Ripley’s too.
+ It occurs to me this may be where my habit of keeping the spaces under furniture tightly wedged with All Stars and boxes of books originated. Monsters, like the rest of us, prefer to be comfortable. Any sensible monster would look elsewhere than under any of my furniture. And I’ve already told you about the lack of closets in English houses.
++ Even if the best ones were hundreds or thousands of years old, and retold and retold and retold all that time, and where there’s smoke there’s fire. And yes, when I was nine, I still believed in monsters. I’d wised up to Santa Claus when I was four, and I never did believe in the tooth fairy, although money is always good. But monsters: I totally believed in monsters. Sigh. Life is not fair.
†† Or check frelling Twitter. Why did I load Twitter? GEEZUM. I can spend hours clicking through to other accounts, seeing who other people are following, checking out their web sites, reading excerpts, reading blogs, lengthening my wish lists for the next time I just happen to be on a book-selling site, and generally wasting time—while feeling as if I’m expanding my professional knowledge and savoir faire. It’s totally the 140-character limit that makes it so dangerous. You can skim forever, and . . .
††† AKA Pooka. Sometimes screaming APOCALYPSE, while it has an excellent way of clearing the road before you of superfluous dweebs bumbling about their unnecessary business, is just too many syllables. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pooka http://www.irelandseye.com/paddy3/preview2.htm , http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pooka
I prefer the benign but mischievous version myself, and something that might at any moment turn itself into a prancing steed of course is very popular with me.
‡ Earth Defender. Not really satisfactory. I bought it because the customer reviews all said it was too easy, and I thought, Great! That’s for me! Unfortunately it is too easy. And if I just want to blow stuff up, well, Fingerzilla is my shining paragon. Although . . . I think I posted here that I’d bought an add-on that was going to give me six new levels and new stuff to blow up. So last night—having tortured myself for a couple of abstemious days with pleasurable anticipation—I barged (Roar! Stomp! Crunch!) through the (apparent) hooking up of the six new levels, with various headlines witnessing my success appearing between games and urging me on to ever greater feats of destruction and depravity and . . . I got to the end, was congratulated for being a monster of monsters^ and . . . nothing has changed. No new stuff to blow up. No new cities. It’s enough to make a genocidal leviathan cry. I suppose I will have to email the proprietors and ask them what they’re doing with my 59p.
^ Ripley’s hasn’t contacted me yet. I can’t imagine why.
‡‡ Wasn’t I just saying something about unfair?
‡‡‡ It’s not like I bought her from them! Noooooo! They ensorcelled me from pure disinterested wickedness!
I am proud to say that I am passing the contagion on however. Fiona showed up this week with her apocalypse, I mean iPhone4, named Tilly, for PesTILential Device. Fiona, however, says she had to give up Fingerzilla because it was giving her repetitive strain injury. Oops.
What she needs is to take up bell ringing to strengthen her hands.
§ Exposing an innocent to the iTunes store alone is worth a Dantean circle or two. GAAH.
§§ http://www.rovio.com/index.php?page=angry-birds
§§§ Also the Screetch, Earth Defend, Plants vs. Zombies, and Osmos. If you’re counting.
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