If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next
“Square.”
“No – it’s a star. Next.”
“Cross.”
“Sorry – circle. Next.”
“Wavy lines?”
“No – it’s Debbie Gibson in a concrete mixer. Although it is a little wavy, I suppose. In a bad 80’s perm smothered in cement and gravel kinda way…”
“It’s no use. No way I’m gonna learn ESP by this time tomorrow. It’s hopeless.”
“Well, if you take that attitude…”
“…”
“Didn’t it ever occur to you that the day might come when your turn at the 24 hour deadline coincided with Louise wanting to go away for a Sunday night?”
“I thought I might get lucky.”
“Well, Louise certainly won’t—“
“Oh. Ha. Aha ha. Ha. Thanks. I thought you were supposed to be helping? Thanks a bunch.”
“Well, I don’t really see what I can do – whatever you write has to be based on the picture Xander posts Sunday lunchtime, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you aren’t going to be here Sunday lunchtime.”
“Not long enough to write a story, no.”
“And now we’ve established ESP isn’t going to allow you to predict the contents of Xander’s image…”
“Well maybe if I wrote something based upon the universal constants that all images have in common. Like, you know, the platonic ideal – that somewhere there exists an abstract ideal of everything you can imagine – a chair, a cat, a bottle of Schweppes Low Calorie Indian Tonic Water—“
“I’m not sure that follows – is ‘picture’ itself a strong enough concept to reduced to an abstract form? Surely it’s always going to beg the question: picture of what? I don’t think you can easily reduce it to a set of criteria that all pictures have in common without first knowing—“
“I could write something clever about the composition… light and darkness… the striking use of colour—“
“Yeah, and what if Xander’s image turns out to be black and white?”
“Since when are black and white not colours? Grey? Grey is a colour. There’s no such thing as colourless—“
“Unless it’s transparent.”
“He’s not going to put up a picture of something transparent. Besides, wouldn’t that just be a picture of… whatever was behind the transparent thing.”
“What if there was nothing behind it?”
“So what you’re suggesting is that maybe for this week’s image, Xander is going to post a picture of a transparent object in a featureless vacuum?”
“Well, it’d be different.”
“You’re really strumming my pain with your fingers right now, you know that?”
“Whatever. He’s just as likely to put up an image like that as he is to put up a photograph of a cat, or a bellydancer, or a crude line drawing of a cloud in a—“
“Not another bloody cloud! Tell me he’s not going to give us another bloody cloud!”
“My point is: his choice is entirely random. As such, you’ve got more chance of picking this week’s lottery numbers. At least there you only have to choose from a limited number of possible combinations—“
“Define limited.”
“A choice of any six from just forty-nine possibilities – as opposed to one from an infinite number of possible images. By comparison, odds of 1 in 13,983,816 sound pretty good to me.”
“Great. I’ll buy a ticket on my way out.”
“Let’s look at it another way. Most of your stories follow a pretty similar – one might even say, predictable – theme and structure, right?”
“Well, I do worry that I’m a bit of a one-trick pony compared to some of the other guys…”
“Right – so why don’t you just cobble together some old tat based on your usual mix of angsty protagonist, vaguely magical-realist plot, sarky dialogue, and exclusionary pop culture references—“
“Yeah, but I was thinking of maybe dropping those. Chev says I always mention music—“
“Hmm. What was that whole ‘strumming my pain with your fingers’ bit?”
“Come on, that’s Roberta Flack. Nobody’s going to notice that.”
“You don’t think maybe they might remember that bloody awful Fugees cover?”
“God, I’d forgotten that myself. Eughh. Thanks.”
“We in the house – busted! Yeah! Yeah!”
“Stop that. Please. Besides – Stephen King always mentions music, and Chev loves Stephen King. (Most of the time.) And Nick’s favourite book is Hi Fidelity…”
“And Douglas?”
“Douglas is working for Marvel now: he’s beyond reproach.”
“You mean you’re jealous.”
“Well… duh, yeah. But jealousy is a petty and ultimately futile emotion—“
“You’re a writer. It’s all petty and ultimately futile.”
“Good point. Well made.”
“Still, what are you always telling me’s the most important piece of advice you got from all those writing books up on your shelf?”
“’Don’t write what you think other people want to read. Write what you want to read.’”
“So maybe you don’t have to drop all the references?”
“But…but… but then the other week, Josh called his story ‘I Had Some Sort of Long Witty Title Here, Like a Modern Band’s Song Title, But I Forgot It’—“
“You don’t think he was taking the piss out of you with that, do you? It was just some cute post-modern–”
“I don’t mind if he was. I like stories that use song titles. I like reading them, I like writing them. Even if they don’t have anything much to do with the story—“
“That explains one thing…”
“Anyway. I suppose I could just cobble something together… I do have plenty of ideas I just haven’t found any way to shoehorn onto this site as yet. Like the scientists employed to resurrects mass murderers from their DNA, purely so the government can put them on trial for their offences…”
“You’re waiting for a picture of a mass-murderer?”
“Or a DNA strand.”
“Or the War Crimes Court at The Hague.”
“Then I suppose there’s that thing about answerphone roulette… Or ansaphone – I never know how to spell it. Or—“
“I dunno. Maybe you ought to hang on to those. You never know when they might come in. Besides, they’re not going to be relevant to the image, unless—“
“Unless I write a story that includes every single thing in the world that could possibly be posted on this site.”
“Well, that’s one idea.”
“OK – let’s try that. Once upon a time there was a giraffe, or it might have been a gas fire, or a rug that really tied the room together, or a sexy woman on a Kawasaki, or a table tennis table, or an autographed copy of Harry Nilsson’s rare 1962 debut album, Hollywood Dreamer, or a nipple clamp, or a koala, or the—“
“This could take a while, yeah?”
“The Empire State Building at sunset, or six bananas and a rancid lemon—“
“Or an old woman.”
“Or the bladder of an orphan…”
“Or an old woman.”
“Or a spotty teenager in a video shop putting forward the opinion that A Nightmare On Elm Street Part IV is the high point of the trilogy, or—“
“Or an old woman! An old woman! An old woman!!!”
“Will you stop it with the ‘old woman’ now?”
“The image, dicksplash – it’s up already! Xander must have posted it early!”
“Phew. At least that gives me an ending…”
