a thought, a wisp of smoke, a thing without substance

There was a logic to nobody. A good deal of it was due to the shedding of things: from the warehouse workshop/apartment, to the selling of the machinery, the motorcycles, the furniture - to living out of a suitcase in Japan, China, and Italy, and finally to the old man's shoebox apartment in tourist town. Was that really ten years of living out of a suitcase? Unbelievable.


And through it all, the shedding of friends. So many people who don't want to talk to me anymore - too much of that crazy conspiracy talk. My favourite Jim Jarmusch movie, Dead Man, made more and more sense.

Once they realised who I was the stories of my adventures angered them. They called me a liar. Exaybachay. He who talks loud, saying nothing. They ridiculed me. My own people. And I was left to wander the earth alone. I am nobody.

Melodramatic sense but whatever. Everyone gets it I'm sure. Not forgetting the old chestnut: if you're going to steal an idea (or a name, ha ha), make sure it's a good one.

And so I barely existed. At least in the sense of interaction with anyone in the real world. With the old man so sick and mad there was no hospitality to be offered - no visitors, no friends, no sensible conversation. But it's alright, you get used to it.

Thus un-named I became a voice in the ether divorced from the real world. And I liked that. When I'd been in the real world my presence had been acceptable but my voice hadn't. And so I flipped it. Freed from the constraints of the real world I could be nothing but the voice. My name was gone, my identity, my physical appearance - all as nothing, what did it matter?

I was a non-sectarian Banquo's ghost free to take on a world of Macbeths. I could say what I wanted and be untouchable. I was a ghostly un-psychopath. With psychopaths being all about their five senses, their bellies, and their cocks and cunts (with their thoughts unspeakable apart from lies) I was the other way around - nowt but thoughts and wondering, with the physicality neither here nor there.

Well, that was the theory. The real world never goes away and there are always people and they'd ask me about my blog. I'd refuse to tell them. I figured having people know would be like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters.

"There's something very important I forgot to tell you."
"What?"
"Don't cross the streams."
"Why?"
"It would be bad."
"I'm fuzzy on the whole 'good/bad' thing. What do you mean, 'bad'?"
"Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously, and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light."

Did somebody say 'melodramatic' before? Oh, it was me. Still it would be bad. Sure enough, what with me being pissweak I didn't stick to it. I told some friends, maybe half a dozen, no biggie but I always regretted it. It meant I wasn't truly free - not if I wanted to write without fear or favour. It was a sullying of the nobody concept.

Up until now this was just a niggle at the back of my brain. It didn't really check anything I wrote and nor did any of these people blow the gaff by lobbing in and turning the house lights up. Regardless, it was a carelessness that was bound to come a cropper sooner or later.

And it did. The inevitable occurred and the streams crossed. But rather than an explosion the opposite occurred. The voice of nobody is now merely me, same as I ever was, tied to the real world and its nagging concerns. For the logic / idea / concept that was nobody this qualifies as a fundamental, existential failure. Without this separation from the world, nobody is nothing.

But it's no big deal. The thing is, nobody was nothing. It wasn't real - it was just a thought, a wisp of smoke, a thing without substance. I have nothing invested in it. Why would one invest oneself in something that was only ever a figment of one's imagination, a name pinched from a movie? A fig for the figment, ha ha. It's not me and I'm not it. Not really.

And so for me the gig is blown and I walk away. Time to start again. This is not a crash and burn - no Sargeant's Inn, me. I'll leave everything standing just as it was. I have no problem with any of it. And let no one be confused about me fleeing something I wrote - I'm doing no such thing. I stand by everything I said and to prove it I'm leaving it all here. Me, I'm proud of whatever this was, this experiment, this art installation, this place. I liked it here and I shall miss it. But we've all moved house and we all know that feeling. You get over it.

I expect that there will be people unhappy about this. I apologise to them. I never wished to make anyone unhappy - except for the Macbeths, ha ha - it just is what it is. And speaking of which, I also expect that there will be people who are exultant. Three cheers and what does it matter?

There will be a new thing but I've no idea what it will be or what I will call it. Sure enough, it will not link to here. If anyone wishes to find it I can offer you no assistance. The idea of starting again necessarily precludes it. Were I tell everyone, the slate would not be clean and the experiment would be as doomed as this one was.

So, off I go now. Thanks boys and girls, you've all been brilliant. All my love to you, and you never know, maybe I'll see you again sometime in the funny pages.

ciao ciao

n

Les, I'm asking you directly

Hey Les,

Just lately I had a fellow in my comments section who wanted to tell me I ought not to trust Dave McGowan because he refuses to acknowledge the banking/zionist arm of the twin pillar death cult. Actually, to be honest he didn't use those terms - that's just me. In fact I suspect that he'd be of the opinion that the PTB are entirely Jewish and that there is no second pillar.

To a certain extent I can understand this what with it having been my position back when I took my cues from WRH and Smoking Mirrors, which is to say before I discovered McGowan. But I've broadened my horizon since then. Now I hold to the view that there are two sides to the death cult. Actually, now that I think about it, they're more like two snakes intertwined, with each declaring the other the villain and all the while ignoring their own serpentine nature.

And in amongst a reverie about the it's-the-zionists crowd who hush up all talk of an MKULTRA satanist pedophocracy, and the it's-the-MKULTRA-satanist-pedophocracy crowd who don't want to hear about Jews, banking, and zionism, I had a flashback to me wondering at you as the former. And I thought about how nothing came of that. Everyone ignored it and we all went on like nothing had happened.

I realised that this was probably because I'd written it in such a way that I'd effectively addressed my thoughts to the ether. And the ether sure enough felt no need to reply. So it occurred to me that what I should have done was to simply ask you directly. Okay, so here I am asking you directly:

- Given your near perfect resemblance to what I'll call the McGowan template ie: the military childhood; the violent abuse throughout it; your own time in the military, in jail, in psych wards; the pharmacopoeia of drugs; your proximity to other spooky Laurel Canyon characters; your resemblance to such musically; your assertions of supernatural abilities; and the fact that your blogs come as close as blogs possibly could to resembling the guru/follower vibe perpetually present in all those other MKULTRA end-of-the-world cults,

- Given your solid association with Mike Rivero who not only completely (and impossibly) ignores the concrete reality of the pedophocracy, but has actually stepped well into the territory of pedophocracy disinfo, so much so that under the rubric of 'if you got the game you may as well have the name', that I call him on it,

- Given your own complete and tireless focus on the Jewish half of the twin pillar death cult, to the near complete exclusion of the satanist / MKULTRA / pedophocracy wing, all the while without apparently having to take a break to earn a living,

-Given your devotion to, and promotion of, the occult and all that quasi-satanist, kabbalistic, Blavatsky-esqe gear that so perpetually features throughout Laurel Canyon, the pedophocracy, and numerous MKULTRA autobiographies like Brice Taylor's etc,

And finally - Given the fact that MKULTRA subjects don't know that they're MKULTRA subjects, here's the question -

How do you know you're not an MKULTRA subject?

Have you ever asked yourself that? I would if I was you. I'd have to - I couldn't not do it. This is not an attack. It's a fair question. And I ask it with a straight face and unblinking.

MKULTRA exists. MKULTRA subjects exist. And they resemble no one so much as you. How do you know you're not an MKULTRA subject?

Crop Circles - Doug and Dave and their Grand Hoax

Doug and Dave, eh? What are we to make of these two? They're the chaps who lobbed up in 1991 and not only said that they'd invented crop circles but had in fact done them all. To be honest I can find no glaring holes in their story, at least not of the stand-up-in-court variety. But nor can I find anything that makes any sense either.

The story was that these two blokes, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, had been sitting in a pub one evening and, what with Doug having lived in Australia and being familiar with 'saucer nests' (that appeared in Tully, Queensland in the mid sixties), thought it would be rather jolly if they did something similar. And off they went.

It certainly must have been very, very jolly because they went on to do it hundreds of times for the next thirteen years. They did it right up to the point where they realised that there was money in the caper and that they weren't making any and how dare anyone else. That's why they went on the media and effectively announced their retirement. Curiously in spite of being driven to take credit for the whole thing on account of others making money, at no point did they ever try to make any themselves. No books, no t-shirts, no nothing.


Astoundingly the otherwise hard-bitten hacks of Fleet Street who reported the whole thing never so much as cocked an eyebrow at two jumped up Johnnies who were unambiguously declaring themselves as hoaxers. Madly, between the two possibilities of a hoax involving: a telephone call and five minute demonstration; and a hoax involving thirteen years of anonymous, unrecompensed labour for no clear purpose, the hacks gave no thought to the former.

Never mind me being surprised last week that no one on QI was interested in the question 'why', it seems that when it comes to crop circles this failure to ask obvious questions is as traditionally English as thrashing fags. Almost no one asked the question and those that did, did so in a very cursory fashion, which is to say, any answer would do.


Apparently Doug Bower was appointed main spokesman. Dave Chorley's gig it seems was to smoke cigarettes and glower (presumably at the stupidity of all the people who fell for their trick - but more on Dave later). This is pretty typical of Doug's answers to the unasked question of why did they do it:

"I said why don't we put a circular depression in this corn field the same as they had out in Australia. I said the UFO society out here, which was at its height at the time, Warminster especially, I said that they will probably think that it is a UFO that had landed."

And I don't know... that's not so terrible is it? I'm prepared to buy it. It sort of reminds me of us as a bunch of uni students drunk at a party one time and coming up with the brilliant and very jolly idea of stealing the garden gnome from across the road. The only problem was that the owner of the gnome had somehow attached it to a square metre of concrete slab that was buried underground. So there we were drunk and gnomeless standing in the by now destroyed garden as various house lights came on. Run away! Run away!

But now that I think about it, I don't recall us doing that a dozen, two dozen, three dozen times a year, for thirteen years. Once is fair enough, maybe even two or three times, but beyond that you'd really have to wonder at someone wouldn't you?


Thankfully Dave Chorley, on one of the two occasions where he actually spoke, sort of addressed the 'why' in terms of doing it more than once (sensibly avoiding the phrase 'hundreds of times'):

"And when you get in one of these fields at midnight, or two in the morning, we would rather, I'd rather be out in one of these fields than a week away in the South of France or something. Anyone that's not been out in one at midnight in the English countryside with the moon up, and you're doing that, and a few beers and a couple of cheese rolls - Absolutely wonderful. Absolutely wonderful."

It's poor of me I know but I think a perfectly reasonable reply to this assertion would be 'You're joking surely? You'd rather be crashing about in a field in the pitch dark than spending a week in the South of France?' Perhaps the journo he said it to was deterred by his somewhat aggressive if-you-haven't-done-it-you-can't-comment gambit? Who knows?


Yours truly falls asleep and dreams of a spiffing new game show...

"Okay Janet, you've already won a week in the South of France but how'd you like to trade up to A 2am walk through a field in Hampshire in the pitch dark with a pint and a cheese roll!!! "
"Gosh Simon, that does sound tempting... I, er... sorry, did you say 2am in a field in Hampshire? With a pint and cheese roll? Are you mad?"

But our Dave wasn't mad. He was English! And proud of it. Why shouldn't a man love his country at two o'clock in the morning? And like the best sort of mad Englishmen nor were he and Doug to be deterred by a complete and utter lack of success for the first two years (or three, it depends on who's talking). Here's Dave again in a really curious telephone interview that he did with a Canadian radio station late in 1991:

"We did this for two years... and nothing came of it. So we decided then, that what we'll be doing, is putting them down in sites right under the view of the general public."

Wow. Talk about undeterred! They did it for two years and no one noticed? Sorry, but wasn't that the point of the exercise? To trick UFO people? For over two years they went out week after week, with dozens of repetitions, before they realised that maybe they were doing it wrong?

Ha ha ha ha, never mind shake my head, I just have to laugh out loud. Here we have Doug and Dave as a magic act that never advertises and only performs in empty halls. Or something. Most people would be disheartened after the first, second, third, fourth, fifth effort - hell, pick a number - but not Doug and Dave. I doubt that there's anyone in the history of Mad Persistence in the Face of Constant Failure who could even come close to them. Except Charlie Brown perhaps, with the old snatch-the-football gag. Mind you he was six years old. And fictional.


In their TV appearances it's perfectly evident that neither of them are stupid, but to repeat an exercise dozens of times for two years for zero results speaks of what? Some kind of mental retardation? And Murdoch's hard bitten hacks bought this and thought nothing of it did they? Yeah right.

Mind you, Doug and Dave were 'artists'. And as we all know, artists do things for 'art's sake', which is to say 'the hell of it'. They care not a whit if anyone pays them any attention or not. Ha ha ha, good joke! But let's carry on. What kind of artists were these two? Water-colourists or so they say. Whilst I admit that this story predates the internet, in spite of a dozens of searches involving every possible permutation of their names +art +artwork +painting +water-colour +gallery +exhibition +catalogue I couldn't find a single thing apart from one painting that I suspect is by Doug Bower. It sold for £20 and it probably only got that on account of his fame for crop circles. Whatever, we'll declare them both amateurs.


I'll admit that the absence of their art is no killer blow argumentatively but I bring it up because both Doug and Dave mentioned it, and they did so in what I would declare a very curious fashion.

Doug - "we used to go out on Friday evenings, to have a drink in the pub and talk about paintings."

Doug - "and we used to go and venture out on Friday evenings and have a chat about watercolours and things and have a pint of beer."

Dave - "So we were out one night and we discussed, whatever, about watercolor painting, and having a beer together."

I don't know if that's worth mentioning but I just can't help feeling that the constant superfluous mentions of what they talked about rings a false note. Would one ring the other and say, "Hey, let's go down the pub and talk about painting"? Why would you mention it? Keep in mind this wasn't a single event pivoting on a single germane topic - the topic wasn't painting, it was crop circles, and the event was a weekly Friday night usual. To me, these repeated mentions smell of rehearsal. It reminds me of those extraneous facts that bullshit artists throw into a story to make it more believable. Or so they imagine. But whatever! I just wanted to mention the art because it kicks in big time in the next piece.


But why don't I wrap up with another really curious exchange from Dave's Canadian interview:

Interviewer - "How do we know, Mr. Chorley, that your are not hoaxing us now about the hoax?"

David Chorley - "You don't know, do you?"

Interview - "No I don't."

David Chorley: "You don't know."

Interviewer - (laughter)

David Chorley - "You don't know!"

Is it just me, or does he sound exultant there? It's as if he knows he has one over the interviewer and he doesn't even need to bother with any window dressing. Safe in the knowledge that no one can disprove him, rather than protest his innocence, or declare that there are photos, or witnesses, or any other to-be-expected thing, he instead crows at the perforce ignorance of the mug at the other end. He reminds me of no one so much as a spook.


* One last thing. In 1993, Doug Bower gave a talk at the Nafferton Hall in Marlborough so that he might put paid to the criticisms of crop circle believers. Never mind Dave Chorley's absence, nor the fact that it was run by a fellow named Ken Brown who did a very fine impression of a handler, the extraordinary thing is that it featured a display of never before seen photos of Doug and Dave actually making the crop circles. Apparently they were quite convincing. One wonders why they weren't produced the first time round. Still, they exist now but astoundingly (given the insane interest crop circles garner on the net) are nowhere to be found in google.


Or is this one? Are they making a crop circle? Where are they? Does it predate 1993? And who took the picture? And why wasn't this person offered as a witness as to their veracity? As Dave himself said, You don't know, do you?

Crop Circles - QI and the absent Why?

Hmm... crop circles, eh? They were something I never bothered pursuing. Certainly they were curious but nothing I saw or read about them ever gave me pause. Maybe they were real, maybe they were fake - who knew? Thus I'd filed them under the category 'things about which I have no opinion'. And then QI lobbed up.

I hereby confess to being an absolute QI tragic. I've downloaded every single ep (nine seasons' worth) and have watched them all at least twice. For those who don't know, QI stands for Quite Interesting and is an English post-modernist quiz show hosted by Stephen Fry. It's post modernist insofar as: no one gives a bugger if you get the right answer; the scoring system is by way of I Ching; and the only thing that counts is being funny. With Fry at the helm, it's all very English Public school, which is to say lots of classical references to Pliny the Elder, Euclid, Linnaeus etc. and all of it interspersed with more lavatory humour than you could poke a toilet brush at. I don't know about proper intellectuals but for smutty-minded pseudo-intellectuals like yours truly it is the only show worth watching.


But adoration aside, this is the BBC we're talking about and what with QI's insane popularity there's no way it was ever going to be left alone as a mechanism for propaganda. Thankfully they keep it to a minimum but every now and then it goes into overdrive, and its Hoax episode in season eight was a perfect case in point. I'll skip their flings at Apollo loonies apart from saying that between footprints and flapping flags, and the fact that NASA lost: all the plans of Saturn V; all the telemetry records; all the astronauts' biofeedback records; as well as all the original footage, we got the f-words. I'd have thought that the absurd and otherwise impossible loss of all historical data from mankind's single greatest moment was Quite Interesting. But at Auntie's animal farm some animals are more Quite Interesting than others it seems.

But never mind, hardly surprising really. Somewhat more curious was their treatment of crop circles, or more specifically the three blokes who allegedly make them all. What with having been commissioned to make a crop circle of the QI logo they were brought in so that Stephen Fry could ask them to enlighten us all.

Fry - Can you tell me how you did yours? Without giving away too many trade secrets. What's the most technological item you need?

Bloke - We need something called a stalk stomper, which is a plank of wood and a loop of rope that you put under your foot to flatten the crop. And to actually mark out the design you use a surveyors' tape so it's very, very, kind of simple techniques and very simple tools.

That may not seem too radical but I thought the use of the words 'trade secrets' curious, particularly in light of the obviousness of the answer. But we'll let it pass and likewise the idea of 'simple techniques and simple tools'. I'll be breaking this up into several pieces and come back at it later. They go on:

Fry - So how many do you do a year, in the season?

Bloke - We don't say how many we make but we've made hundreds over the years that we've been doing it.

Fry - And do people, are there still people who believe, who refuse to believe that it's all hoaxers like you?

Bloke - Absolutely...

...as the panel takes it sideways into inanity with Fry finally bringing it back to the topic of thanking the blokes for coming, with the audience giving them a big round of applause. Hurray.

Nowhere in amongst this was the obvious question, why? Why, do these blokes do this? What's the point? Week after week, year after year (!), these three go and spend all night crashing about in complete darkness to make an endless series of what are essentially glorified geometric doodles.


And there's Sean Lock on the panel, who's funny in spite of being a nasty piece of work, and for whom 'get a life' is never far from the tip of his tongue, and he just sits there schtum. Hmm... okay, so why don't I write his lines for him?

"Yeah, boys, you ever heard of Spirograph? Yeah? I had one when I was ten but somewhere along the line I'm not sure what happened but... I got over it. But not you blokes! You're the only guys I ever heard of who embraced it all the way through to adulthood. Have you ever thought of, I don't know... getting a life?"

But seriously though, huh?! Me, I'm speechless. As far as I'm concerned the three of them may as well have just stood up and declared, 'We don't make a lick of sense'. In Urdu! Morris dancing makes more sense than this. And you'd get laid more often. Okay so, seriously - who are these guys?

Bear with me for a second here as I take a detour with the wrong blokes. This came about by way of me missing the spokes-bloke's name during the show and instead looking it up at the episode's wikipedia entry. There, (and you can't blame me for being confused) our three chaps aren't mentioned but two others are, they being Doug Bower and Dave Chorley. So off I go to hunt down the wrong people. But, as luck would have it the legendary Doug and Dave were exactly the chaps I was looking for - I just didn't know it yet.


This is a longish piece and so I'm going to split it into several parts. Next up, Doug and Dave and another truckload of 'Huh?' And following that, don't worry - I'll be coming back to the right bloke as it were, Doug and Dave's annointed successor, one John Lundberg, next. I swear it just gets weirder.