Rohan Rants



These are posts by to Rohan Hawthorne the talk.bizarre newsgroup.
I'm a fan of his writing and asked his permission
to share it with you.

Contents



Fun



- Five things I do "for a laugh" -

1. Eat vegetable lasagne.
2. Look at my brother at that point right between his eyes, knowing
full well that he can't know that I'm looking at that point.
3. Project my conciousness onto passer bys.
4. Laugh.


- short shameful confession -

My friend and I worked out 100 ways of giving the finger without
someone knowing that you're giving the finger.

All this whislt considering the nirvana of butt rollies.

The term 'butt rolly' will be given in the near future.

A 'butt rolly' is a cigarette made from the butts of all the other
cigarettes you smoked before you ran out and got incredibly desperate
but couldn't go to the shop because:

a. You don't have any money

and

b. You don't want to move. Inventing ways of giving the finger
is much more interesting.

Butt rollies need two ingredients. Butts, and cigarette papers.

If you run out of either of these see:

Parsley-and-yesterdays-shopping-docket cigarettes.

The word 'docket' was used instead of the word 'receipt'.

Don't ask why.

And now! A poem.

---

"Hey, you!
FUCK OFF
Get you're fucking foot
offa my face!"

The pavement hates me
I laid him far too deep.

"Hey creep! Loose the haircut!"

Postbox again.
Lopsided in physicality
AND temprement.

Don't even ask me when this all started.

(taken from - the Book of Rohan. --- Soon available in HTML format.)


- Cut a whole. -

Scene:

Two bears sitting on a bus.
One bear carries a spear and a bucket of fish (B1)
One bear wears a space helmet and carries and transmigrafier (B2)

Dialog:
b1:
you see, where I come from, we all go out and fish, and then
we bring the collective fish back to our leader

b2:
how do you choose the leader ?

b1:
well, usually he's the strongest.

b2:
oh. what if you run out of fish ?

b1:
well, that doesn't happen. the leader makes sure of it.

b2:
oh I see..
b2: well, in my world, everyone has one of these transmigrafiers, and
we all can change whatever it is that we see. And these changes
are recorded in a bio-chip we all have in our heads
b1:
oh

b2:
so, for example, if I want to see that tree over there as a tall
dragon, then so it is.

b1:
ah.. but to me it's still a tree.

b2:
yes, that's the beauty of the bio-chip. We all have seperate
memory stores, BUT! They are also all connected to a main
base, so that we can share ideas.

b1:
oh I see. Interconnectivity.

b2:
yes, quite.... chip ?

b1:
yes, thank you... fish ?

--

Author's noTe: The above is a true story played out by a friend and I when we wore bear costumes on a bus to the city.

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Conspiracy?



- Web Conspiracy. -

WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING

Do not believe anything written after this line.

WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING

After realising that all we see is but a creation of our own manifestation, it's quite easy for me to make a small step towards paranoia.

This paranoia takes the following form:

A world full of people who are starting to realise EXACTLY how the universe works. How will those who were the only ones `in the know' handle this upsurge of manifestors ?

Create a harmless manifesting device: The Web.

In the morning, I Call for an object. Instead of that object being made manifest in my physical reality, I see it's digital doppleganger on the web.

It's what I asked for, but my manifestation has been made 'harmless' via the vision on the web. I have changed naught in the physical world that doesn't consist of the 0-1 subset.

But, not one to be ever too paranoid, I could say that it's the universes way of handling it. Too many questions, not enough resources ? ...create a fake suckling tube.

Rohan, who lays no blame but upon himself.
--
Note: About the creation theory in the first paragraph ? I can help you realise this for yourself I suppose. I've never actually taken anyone through the process, but I guess it's possible. Acid helps, but doesn't help, if you know what I mean.


- Conspiracy proof #12 -

AHA!!! Yet more proof that the internet is a global conciousness / artificial intelligence experiment created by the american government.

I recently entered:

"how do I get intelligent ?"

Into the rhyming creator and got the following result:

how do I get intelligent ?
across the raging fires in the valleys of my own ignorance
illegally from the United States Government
left in the rain since 1943.

Does this not makes SENSE to you !?!!?

Come on come on!! THINK DAMMIT! valleys.. silicon valley ?? illegally, gotta be the CIA, "United States Government" - well, does that give away the punchline or WHAT ?! And.. ha! The cream:

1943.

Think about it.
--
do not believe any of this - i mean, do we really want this happening ?

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Human?



- what's the question ? -

So we'd finally fulfilled one of my dreams. We'd created thus huge reflection of the global conciousness, a manifestation of all those minds that linked to it, a storage machine where every machine was a reflection of the whole; each process able to access the information that was entered by any other process.
The internet.

But it didn't think.

So me and my crew set about giving it the LIFE-DRIVE. Something that would continue it asking questions, something that would keep it alive.

CURIOSITY.

So we set it all up. We programmed it all in, we made it all happen.

And the question we used as the base question ? The first question ?

"How do I become human ?"


- God ? -

Hmmn.

I often use the internet search engines as ways of accessing the global conciousness as it is.

I thought I would look up "human" as a followup to my last post.

Not only was the advertisement subquoted:

"how do yu find intellegent life on the net"
But when I clicked on the link

"Godels proof and the human condition...."
I got the following:

html: http://condition.org/god_.txt

File Not Found

The requested URL /doncitn/god_.txt was not found on this server.

Hmmn.

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Computers



- Captain Nork rides again. -

Captain Nork sat on his wooden chair on the boat called Epsilon.

It was the coolest boat. From his chair he looked into the control panel and sorted out his direction. He entered in the location, cleverly described as an internet address, and caught the wind in his sails.

Whhoosh wooosh!

He was off!

The ocean lapped at his side as he surveyed the surrounds. His control panel had a few yellow sticky pads stuck on the sides so he could make references as he sailed.

There were two monsters near by. One was the beast of sarcasm, and the other was the beast of self-degredation. He readied his torpedo gun.

It seemed clear sailing. One of the monsters made and attack, but was quickly deflected by the amazing shield. (not to be described) and so he sailed on, unpreturbed. The monsier of self-degredation hummed a little, in order to gain attention. But it was quite passive.

The monster of sarcasm was making little movements, perhaps readying for a spell, and so Captain Nork put up his flag of anti-badness.

Ting.

The monster of sarcasm was confused at the proceedings, but Captain Nork just chuckled a little.

Suddenly another monster arrived! The monster of low self-esteem.

He pulled out his confidence ray and ZAP!

But the monster jumped out of the way in time.

Another sailor flew by on his flying carpet, giving comments to Capt.

But this gave time for the sarcasm monster to try a little sorty. And so Capt Nork got out his gun of self-realisation, and ZAP!

The monster quivered a little and contemplated it's navel.

The Capt was doing well.

Meainwhile the other monster was trying to board his ship, so he quickly got ready the tea set.

He and the monster had a cup of tea and discussed the state of whirlpools. Capt Nork did most of the talking.

"Well, you just afta dodgem!"

- Death of a Computer Programmer -

Rohan the computer programmer looks at his screen, it's text black against white and it's meaning almost lost.

His eyes become slightly watery as he listens to them talk about machines around him. They want him to 'work', and he knows that if he does, the last ounce of creativity that he has might disappear into the system of cogs that join to the uncaring masters. The money orientated producers to which the consumers march.

"Efficiency, not beauty!" his imaginary corporate head yells "Why write something new when we can buy this for less ?"

And he starts to cry.

He looks at probably his last work of ART.

He's not crying out of joy, or sadness, or even loneliness. He is crying because he realises that this, his last piece of artistic mastery over the creative medium of c, may never be seen by another eye of understanding.

Soon, he realises, this program will be erased, and the microsoft company will install their pre-planned wizards and 'easy-to-use' clones via the clones they have already converted, and nobody will see this ART.

They will erase all his masterpieces, and all his triumphs, and all his memories of axhiliration when he finally got the fucking thing to work.

A tear drops, but he continues to type, not for the pride, not for the self, but for the sake of his dying art.

Sure.. he realised it's limitations. The fact that there were only so many words, and so many ways to arange those words, but is any art infinite ?

He sighs. Not even this program will be seen except as a series of questions and answers, an output and input. No one will see the excellence of commenting the beauty of the loop, or the glory of the binary switch.

And none of them will really care.

"Let the microsoft company have them" he thinks out of spite. "When they realise that you are what you consume, then they might wonder why their life isn't as special, that it's not so hand made".

Another tear.

He finishes of the final function, and types MAKE.

IT compiles.

IT runs.

IT ...

Rohan the computer program dies.
--
Life

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Coffee



I take a drag on my cigarette.

"So since then I've just been living in this sweet little old town that I guess you'd call home. It's not bad you know.. not really what I'm used to, but then again, compared to London, what would be ?"

Her eye flickers.

"I mean take the night life for example.. I mean, if you can call it night life, I mean really, I don't know why I bother sometimes. Probably just to get drunk I guess.. I mean, the music is shit, well compared to what I'm used to.. TECHNO TECHNO TECHNO!!"

I look down at my coffee.

"Hey, I met this guy the other night who was quite funny, he kept talking to me as if I gave a shit ? I think he was trying to chat me up, but I couldn't really tell.. You know how sometimes you know and sometimes you don't ? Well it was like that.."

I look up again.

"So I just got drunk I guess and afterwoods I caught a taxi home with a few people that I'd met that night... very cool people actually just sort of met them, you know ? I was like, sharing around cigarettes everywhere and saying hello and all that. Lucky they were going my way really."

There is a pause.

I take a drag on my cigarette.

I sip my coffee dry. I say one thing, and one thing only.

"You're not even real"

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AWAKEN



- AWAKEN -

So there I was, sitting at my computer, typing away, when I suddenly realised all these voices behind me. I thought, hey, wait a second, they're saying things about me! They were pointing at me, they were discussing me, and I didn't like it one bit. I decided that I would protect myself continually and be independant from then on.


- ?Reality! -

For the last few weeks now, my life had been getting very very stranger.

See what I mean ?

For example, there was this voice. This insistant little voice, the one that told me "hey, the reason you looked suddenly over there was because of that girl", or, "see that hair salon you just looked at suddenly, unconciously ? That's because of the haircut idea your mum planted in you earlier this morning".

It was getting on my nerves. But just recently, it was really bugging me. As much as I wanted to shut it up, it just kept talking and talking and talking "this is because of this", "this is because you believe in that", "this man represents something else". It was giving me headaches and eventually I retreated away from an ever confusing society of representational symbolism.

So now I sat in my room. The voice still talked, but this time a little slower, only perking up if it heard a bird, or if a spark of sunshine entered the room, which wasn't often, as I'd nailed up all the windows and doors in order not to see anything.

"And that light, the lightbulb ? That represents the last spark of your old life". I looked up at the light. I turned to the light, and I turned it off.

"thankyou" said the voice. "now you can know who I am"

I asked... "I am your new life.", it said.

"now, instead of me destroying things, I will create things. Instead of me having to remove all those reasons, I can create reasons, instead of me shownig explainations of things entering your life, I will give the explainations, saying 'today I want this', or 'no, I beleive in that'. I will be a creative light"

I turned the switch back on, I started to believe, and I fought for what I believed so that everything I ever wanted to be real...

...was.


- Interesting. (he says, labelling) -

I used to believe that I did not exist, instead, I was a jumble of connections. I was not "funny person", I was, "Person who makes this person laugh". Or, "this person's friend".

I was an object made completely of the connections I had to other things.

Strange it was.. like jumbled spaghetti. But one day, I decided to unravel all the spaghetti.. I took this bit away, throwing it towards the other end (they could deal with it as they would), I took that bit away, wondering where the other end had long since gone to, I wondered at the mobius stips, and the bits that joined back to where I was.

Finally, I unravelled it all, like a cat, or a boy who has just discovered the inside of a cricket ball. And inside, under all that mess, I found a little child with a big smile and glowing eyes, waiting to see what would happen next.

Oh yeh.. it's CaveGecko to you... (he says, throwing out a connection)


- Learning to Step away. -

Face up to your fears they said, because if you don't they'll continue
to find you. You can run, but you can't hide.
So I do, I face up to them, every day. I see their faces talk to me,
and tell me what to do, they tell me to go left, go right, to do this,
to do that, and I do, because I have not yet realised what they are,
and it is only my own fault, my own projected negativity, that gives
them the power.

And some of them realise and try to help.

And some of them realise, and abuse the power.

But what they didn't tell me, what they didn't say, was that when
you've met your fears, you have to learn to step away.


- NEEDED. -

I wanna be..

I wanna be, your addictive drug, your nicotene
your teddy bear, your tupperware seam
your babys smile, your clouds on a sunny day.

I wanna be, your best friends voice, your telephone
your tv set, when no-ones home
Your brain, your heart, your spleen your life
Your best friends beer, your flatmates wife
your scary thoughts, your take me hard
your life your death
your fathers car

I wanna be!!

I wanna be!!

I wanna be. Needed.

- Just the other day.. -

I was having an 'argument' with a friend of mine at work.

I think you am i was playing in the background.

"I create reality" I said to him.

"No.. you don't" he replied, convinced.

"Yes.. I do" I replied.

"No.. you don't.. how can you ?" he said again.

"I don't know, I just came to the realisation I guess"

He paused.

"Well I don't believe you" he started.

I smiled inside.

"I feel like a jerk today" he started.

Hmmn.. I thought. And when he started talking about how he was going to connect all these computers and start scrubbing disks and downloading software so they that they would work better for him, I felt like walking away. Sure, I respected the fact that at least he was doing now what I told him was true, but that didn't mean I had to be part of it.

"I've got this great computer here.. it's quite groovy" I suggested.

He looked over. "And what are you going to do with it ?"

"Well, I was thinking of teaching it to program itself, and then all the computers could sit around chatting about what they've been doing for the last few decades, hopefully to somehow reach a conclusive reality where they can all see each other as equals, as storehouses for shareable information, all totally concious of the game they are playing and creating"

He looked at me strangely.

Life went on.

- Who exactly is reading.. -

Yeh so I was at this party. I hadn't actually put it on myself, but I appreciated the amazing volcano that was somehow articulating itself extremely well for a volcano.

I thought to myself.. who's listening ?

I sort of looked around a bit, wondering who else was wondering what I was wondering, and then I looked back at the volcano. It seemed to be talking to everyone.. but for some reason, I KNEW that I was the only one listening, that everything that it said, was purely and utterly for me. Sure.. there were other people there at the party, but they were purely memories or names, shadowy beings as I listened to the volcano.

So I listened well.

It started telling me how hot it was where it was, which I figured was quite a normal statement for a volcano, and I felt pity for it's warmth.

I really wanted to pour some water on the poor thing, but felt that somehow this would be breaking the rules... wouldn't it ?

It told me that where it came from was a world of myth, mystery and extremely hot tropical conditions, and that the juice of the coconut was appreciated although many preferred the banana.

I wondered who the hell the many could be, and as I looked at the volcano I'm sure I could see 5000 faces. Some thought of buddhist rebirth propaganda quickly shot through my head and left again screaming 'om mani padme hum'

It told me that it had met many manifestations of the spiritual world, many myths it had seen played out in reality, and many times had it been lost in it's own little world, watching through the eyes of a child that thinks that it is the centre of the world.

And perhaps it was.

Then it went and got a martini and I listened to something else, all the time my mind bubbling with forming ideas, ideas that would manifest themselves as soon as I was ready.

- Trolls -

I was at the pub the other day and a troll (or wierd one as it is known in some lands) was giving scripts to cue balls before sinking them. I looked on in strange disdain.

He got up to the black ball and looked at me, about to tell a story, but quickly I spoke.

"There's this newsgroup", I said, "called talk.bizarre", the two words said quite forcefully, a command more than an explaination, almost like a verbal version of TALK.BIZARRE.

"It's quite bizarre, as you might expect, and whenever I get the chance to read it I'm always quite impressed".

The troll smiled and sunk the black ball.. he was a good friend, even though his moonfull repetitions of "I don't know" sometimes annoyed me, and the party continued.

"So what have you read lately ?" he asked me later that night, and I told him about a good friend of mine who liked to discuss the differences between consuming and producing.

"Consuming", I commented, "occurs when you live by the catchphrase that you are what you eat". "If I read a book, and tell someone about it later on, have I not just become something that I have read before ?"

"True" he replied, more of a comment than a reflection.

"And the solution ?" he prompted.

"The solution I guess would be to discuss either lies or experience, depending upon whether you want to explain yourself or create yourself".

The word lie and the word guess seemed similiar in a way, yet somehow different.

He nodded. "or create others", he trolled.

I nodded and wondered whether the use of the word troll was correct, sure of the fact that somehow I would learn.

"But then again" I said, "If you purchase a book yourself, when you are, so to speak, one with god the divine, then is not reading the book an experience of self creation or explaination".

"It depends which path you take" he replied.

"True" I said, almost magically, as if there was something inside me that knew when something true was being said, and prompted me so.

"So is it not best to choose what path you are on in any endevour ?" I stated.

"In reflection, I would have to say that I always try to know what path I'm walking either by self resolve or by playing along with the game".

We both nodded, and drunk our beer.

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Stray Thoughts



- THE WEB -

Interactive tv, without the bad scripts (unless you want them).

Take a look at me for example.. Here's a bit now:

Rohan the person who writes this is sitting in front of his

computer with a red shirt and yellow suns.

His fingers, which he is looking at now, are dappling on the

not so dappling keys that are on the white keyboard and wasnt

that all very descriptive.

He looks up to see the word descriptive.

He looks down again.

Wow.

Living in the now sure isn't cracked up to what it's supposed to be.


- The Crow -

There is a tree, in a roundabout, in the middle of a crossroads.

To the left, the path rises, to the right, it drops and splits.

>From the ocean that reflects the moon, it starts
And at the sun on the distant horizon, it ends.

Look up to the stars and imagine.

I am a bird that lives in this tree. I give directions to passer bys
and occasionally I follow them for a while, but I always return to the
tree, just as the next person arrives.

I am the Crow


- ASSUME - Package Instructions -

Please remove articles marked: U and ME.

Place article U in a safe position, perhaps in a bottle, on a beach, away from children with sticky little hands and teeth that smell of their mothers deoderant.

Light article ME with a handy ME-Lighter, available at most stores, but not available with this article instruction article.

Place article ME within the confines of the secret attatchment provided by, but not consisting of, article U.

ASS should develop naturally. Do not force.

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Destiny Duck



- Yeh well ? -

I met this guy once. He came across two paths and wondered why the hell anyone would want to wreack a nice forest with two horrible paths.

Anyway, why doesn't start a cafe there. Don't they know that the best cafes
are built at places in destiny where people need to make the next optimol choice ?

Spelling mistakes are completely random.

I think i'm supposd to not cuk now.

That should be suck ?


Steven looked at his shorts. The stain was quite visible now that the sun had risen. He looked up again at the tree in front of him.

He mocked the tree.

"Hey tree! You suck! You suck suck suck suck suck"

The tree did nothing. It's quiet sucking un-noticed by humanity in it's rush
to get to the new cafe that had just opened down the street, it was called
"and the dogs get some", and was built just at that optimal place in destiny
where you would have to stay there for at least 12 hours before you could make
any decision at all.

The waitresses often read Douglas Adam's novels as a reprimand.

He looked at the tree some more.

The tree did nothing. Meanwhile, it slowly fixed the mis-spelt air around it,
changing the carbon-dioxide into oxygen. A natural air-conditionair.

Steven looked back down at his shorts.


now did that suck or what ?


Destiny Duck

When do you know if you're onto a good thing ?

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© Rohan Hawthorne -- Reality Artist At Large

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