Popular Portals

It seems the world is trying to eat our reporters. Terence Gunboat was kidnapped and bravely rescued by myself, Oscillation Jones, the greatest interviewer, editor and sniffer of truth ever to walk this pre-heated oven of a planet. Idle Vendetta has gone AWOL, seduced by the erotic promises of a pack of feral Conoctopticon Industries’ Meat-Droids. And, now, Martha Fugnugget, mythoghrapher, ghost whisperer and Lubricator of Gaskets (an honorary title bestowed by the South Ruislip Lubricator’s Guild) has vanished off the face of the Earth while following a lead in Edinburgh.

I was penning verse, my mind-blade piercing into the gushing depths of the sumptuous open thighs of the universe’s creative Ju-Ju, when a rat no bigger than a can of cherry Fanta hopped up onto my desk and delivered a small, greasy package. I tipped the rat, as is customary, giving her a few slices of Emmental I found in my desk fridge, and opened the package as she scurried away. Inside, I found a bundle of notes in small, compact handwriting, hasty diagrams that looked like maps, and a USB containing gloomy photographs of Edinburgh’s sewers and the echoey recording of a rather tedious (by my standards) interview. It was coincidentally from Martha, which was coincidental because I was sat in her chair at her desk, giving out gifts from her desk fridge (which, by rights, is mine while I sit here). I use Martha’s desk because it has the best view of the cryogenics repository across the road from the Concrete Octopus offices, and I only adjust her chair so as not to agitate my sciatica.

I selflessly ordered Ken ‘When?’ Wheezy to produce a transcription of Martha’s notes and the interview as he was sat at the closest desk, which is a rarity for him as he is usually swanning around with all his famous musical friends in some version of reality that doesn’t obey the rules of our own. Once Ken had typed it all up I did a quick proofread. What follows is Ken’s transcription of Martha’s notes. I took out all Ken’s asides, left well-alone the atrocious punctuation he had slavishly copied, and added a touch of product placement to keep the sponsors happy. What follows is something close to journalism, in the same way Southampton is close to the centre of the Earth when you take in the size of the universe, slick thighs and all. We have yet to decide what to do with the fatberg interview, though, much to my amusement, the way Martha talked with the fatberg did seem to get Charlie Mongoose’s hackles up when I played him excerpts.

1.

I have been investigating the edges of the city. Not the periphery or the suburbs; the roads that peter out into country lanes; arteries that become capillaries that become pores opening dustily into the hinterland ringing the urban sprawl. Neither am I investigating the out of town shopping centres that sink into the death-filled abyss of the spirit world when the doors clang closed, or the industrial parks that gutter and chime with undead nightshifts labouring in somnambulant loops of numb indifference awaiting the wet comfort of grave-soil. These places I mention, that encircle cities within the rune-shaped roads of industrial parks hold their own kind of power; portals, immortal entities, badly lit cults and regular, everyday ghostly protrusions; they are within my realm, though they are not the edges I am currently in the throes of investigating.

The edges that intrigue me are the literal edges of things in the urban landscape; curbs, railings, the stone-clad corners of steel-spined skyscrapers, ledges and lintels, the platform edge made famous by the tannoys that urge and warn not to step near; warnings to be heeded even when no train approaches and no third rail lies live; the urban predator with the patience of buried iron; these are the thin places.

I do not want to cause distress. Most of these edges are harmless. They are the visual sign that one thing has ended and another has begun, nothing more. Yet, there are other edges that are more than borders and more than functional lips denoting changes in use, in purpose; it is these lips that transfix me for they are being lost through some force of defence, becoming serrated, bumpy, indistinct; and in becoming so have become less. It is this lessening of the city that I am chasing.

You have seen these defences. They are not designed; you will find them on no architects plans or civil engineers computer. They are not manufactured by those who live within the vast, living machine of the city. They are visible signs of the city’s own indefatigable immune system; a way for the city to maintain itself and keep itself together; to stop us foolish humans tearing it apart and, in the same instant, losing ourselves to rifts in reality.

I am talking about what is often described as ‘hostile architecture’; skate stoppers, homeless spikes, bolts that ridge once-smooth bannisters, humps and bumps in once uniform curbs, the cut-outs and protrusions that pixellate the high-definition of a concrete verge; any small way that the city defends itself against dimension-slippage inherent in areas of concentrated human imagination.

2.

Pin Pin Pin, the great Vapian philosopher, is recognised by many as the first matter-mind to disclose the true nature of cities. Pin Pin Pin’s Nth century olfactory limericks created popular awareness of cities as behemothic, trans-dimensional beings that use humans to help them manifest in physical reality. Translations of Pin Pin Pin’s limericks from the original smells, works such as Foldy Foldy Weave and Foldy or Crab-Ways Minuet, talk of how infrastructure such as buildings and the street furniture that make up a city grow through infections in human imagination. Invasive dreams manufacturing desire, ideologies such as religion and social constructs such as justice or economics are simply dimension-hopping informational viruses that cities transmit; humans, due to our consciousness riding trans-dimensional frequencies shared with these infinite creatures, are the perfect carriers. It also helps that we have opposable thumbs and an abyss within our souls that needs to be avoided through busy-work.

In 1984 the Chaostic academic Dr. Cranston Pickle, building on the work of Pin Pin Pin, wrote many rants on how hostile architecture relates to the city’s own immune system in her seminal text They’re Fucking Alive, People!. She recognised that the inexplicable eruptions of hostile architecture were created by cities to protect our fragile matter-based reality from Swiss-cheesing itself into a singularity soup of non-existence.

“It all sounds so mushroomy,” writes Dr. Pickle. “Not really the type of thing that scientists should be going around thinking due to the need for experiment and excrement to meet in the mouths of white coats. I’m just saying. I just say. I was saying. I will always say. I continue. This architecture bubbling from the bowels of dimensions unknown protects the cities from our inherent creative needs. We abuse. We are abusers. We are transformers. We are subverters. We are detourners. We are agents of change. We do not agree. We fuck the world and birth new ones from the corpses of the old ones. They don’t like that shit, cities. They fucking hate it. They are torn asunder by it. By us. By our competing dreams. They fight back.”

3.

My interest in Chaostic thinking and Vapian philosophy found me knee deep in shit traversing the sewers of Edinburgh following up a lead on an unexplored and unprotected edge. The edge was tragically discovered by Basildon ‘Baz Slaz the Slaz’ Slazenger, an up-and-coming sewer canoeist who apparently blipped out of existence a few weeks back. He was executing a Twisted Lip Lick on the edge of the Duddingston overflow weir when he hit a patch of biofilm, putting him in an unnaturally fast flat spin which winked him out of existence faster than the regret of a tongue burnt on the lava-hot mozzarella of a microwave-fresh Chicago Town pizza.

I spoke to Basildon’s partner, Juff Supra King, sewer canoeist and part-time egg watcher who witnessed the whole thing. He said, “Ah jist sees the gadge spinning fucking crazy, likesay, but he cannae fucking move at aw, jist spinning like a fucking radge way oan the ledge, ken? Then he jist blips an he’s goan, not a sign jus this smell aw welding. Mad, pure mad.”

Luckily, I didn’t have to translate what Juff said as he had filmed the incident which, as of my writing, has gained over four billion views on SluiceTube, the dedicated sewer canoeing video hosting site. The video shows Basildon in perfect form riding the edge of the weir on his hull seam, paddle parallel with his leg position, when he seems to lose control, pulling his paddle down before beginning to spin on the spot, looking to be still twisting around the weir edge while staying completely stationary. This optical illusion persists for two seconds while the spinning increases to a blur. A sound is heard, like an anvil being struck with a wet potato, and the rising pitch of Basildon’s scream is cut as he, his canoe and a small amount of the waste water he is riding implodes like someone sucking air out of an empty Lucozade bottle; he is gone.

Anyone who has ever travelled via a dry riser inlet will recognise the anvil/wet potato sound and the smell of welding described by Juff. These are the signatures of intra-dimensional travel. Basildon, it seems, had inadvertently found an edge that the city had not deemed accessible enough to protect.

4.

Hostile architecture has always been part of cities; segregation walls such as Eight Mile Wall in Detroit, or The Berlin Wall allowing the consciousness of a city to remain relatively stable during times of mass transformation such as post-war or changes in population characteristics and density; ideological and cultural frequencies coming to some form of consensual equilibrium through the city’s manipulation of human motion; the Walls of Jericho or Troy, or the walls around any early city state; physical and psychic defences; cities grow out of these, their bodies spilling out like so much spilled ink, blood and apple Tango; the people are assimilated, no longer able to wreak destructive forces of wild imagination and dangerous ideas.

With new technologies comes new threats to the cities stability. The invention of the skateboard and the subsequent forces of wild imagination that it unleashed almost sucked the entirety of Southern California into a reality-vortex in the summer of 1978. Some say California never recovered; some say it never existed before that summer; others say other things that are best not thought about. What is known is that in a small, drained swimming pool in a backyard of Watsonville, California became a portal through dimensional space; a rift through which nefarious forces began to emerge; a gate opened by the playful actions of a small group of proto-skateboarders who had discovered something new; the city-subverting power found in the heady mixture of re-appropriation through imaginative play, and the reality-carving power of flow-state consciousness.

The young men on their planks of wood with wheels affixed weren’t trying to change the world, but change it they did.

The pool self-healed; filled with concrete; the house raised itself; the neighbourhood congealed into a mall; California and the world was saved. The city evolved a new mechanism for defence. A quiet war began between the wild power of human imagination and the functional body of the physical city.

5.

The sewers of Edinburgh are a labyrinth; I was Theseus; Juff my thread, both of us drinking Lipton Peach ice tea to stay hydrated. Deep in the centre of the dank tunnels lay a greasy minotaur; their presence squelched at the edges off my mind; a voice in legion.

The brickwork of the tunnels was ancient, almost older than the city that weighed heavy above; pressing down with the weight of not just the lives that were now held within the warren of teetering buildings, but also those lives that had spilled through the centuries. The spirit world may be one which requires an effort to reach, but it is always in reach. Whispers and tracings of limbs flickering at the peripherals of my sight; invisible in the weak torchlight. “Fuck off,” I muttered under my breath.

“Wassat?” Juff was failing to keep his feet dry. He wasn’t the best guide. I felt he was as lost as myself, if not moreso. If anything, I could tap into the spirits around me and, with a bit of a harangue, get one of these wastrels to show me the way out. I’d have to listen to one of their boring stories; the dead tend to talk mostly about how it was so much better when they were alive, or fucking, and there is nothing more boring than listening to someone with all their best years behind them describing meeting Simone de Bouvier while they grimaced through a wank-centipede with a bunch of other transparent twats.

“Are we close?” We weren’t close. There were ripples in the relative reality, trip-trappings that hinted at the thin film of reality that separated the space of the sewers from the void that sucked toward dimensions unknown; sewers are the subconscious of the city, it is the closest they get to dematerialising without breaking apart.

I wondered at the lack of protection the city had developed in the sewers. Why was this place such a blind-spot for a city? Why was there so many developed above when down here, where the city was weakest, it lay unprotected? This was the soft belly of the beast; armour needed to be developed.

One thing I do know, the sewers are not well populated; they suffer little by way of incidental traffic. The city may dream down here; no one else does. The sewers are their own protection; full of shit and piss and rats and bugs and deadites and all the festering ooze of humanity waiting to drip into your open eyes and mouth and cuts; myths of monsters; a labyrinth is a prison, after all, no bars only endless walls; try the old trick of only turning left, trailing a hand long the wall; this only works if the wall won’t bite the hand; nibble it to pulp and fill it with puss; to skin a knee down here is to french-kiss a facehugger; your body will erupt with new life destroying the host. Nevermind the minotaur warden that patrols the shadows held behind every corner.

Who would come down here? Who would find new stories for these slick walls? Who would forsake sunlight to create new forms of play where any trip, spill or fall could be your face in a medical journal? “New skin melting virus disintegrates young canoeist.”

“Ay?” Juff looks lost.

“Just thinking out loud. How far to the weir?”

“Jus roond this neuk, like.” His aura wasn’t as certain as his voice.

Around the corner was not what Juff had promised. More darkness, more dripping, more echoes, and something else; a whispering tumult coming closer; the pressure of dead voices popping my ears. Juff walked ahead seeming oblivious to the torchlight being swallowed. I reached out to him; too late; he slipped, reached out to the wall, held onto nothing and fell into the darkness with a GLOMPH!

“Oh shit,” said a thousand voices in my head. “Not another one.”

6.

Life is not an article for a silly little magazine*; ignoring the twists and turns of a journey to try and fit the experience into a pre-conceived hypothesis is anathema to my soul’s imperative; allow me to swerve along this path; sticking to the tarmac like a Goodyear all weather tyre; let us go where the road takes us.

What I know about fatbergs is little in the way of facts; superstition, rumour, fable, myth, parable; I can fill a ditch as deep as the Mariana Trench with these; they are the crushing depth I labour beneath; yet fatbergs do not have much of a place within even this realm; what is known is mostly very recent and this knowledge is controlled by a small group. Would it be too obvious to say that this group controls the information for their own benefit, spreading lies that bolster their cause; diminishing the truth that does not fit with their goals to elevate a self-serving narrative?

I am aware of the recent Berlin Incident in which six world-class sewer canoers were killed, absorbed by the fatberg which dwells under that city of tumult. My fellow reporter and long-time friend and companion Charlie Mongoose has told me much about this complex event (see CO, Issue#3).

As with any cult, it is safe to assume that the Minions of the Most Moist, those that have made an industry of the worship of fatbergs, are not what they seem, even to themselves. This much I discovered after Juff, my helpful-if-slightly-useless guide met his mis-stepped fate.

7.

“It happens all the time, it is so frustrating. I would estimate that over the last two hundred years near 90% of the people I have absorbed have been completely by accident. It’s been getting worse recently. I blame the youth. Which, I suppose, is my fault.”

Every labyrinth has a minotaur. This is the minotaur of the Edinburgh sewer system, one who has existed since the first panful of gristle-laden grease was poured down The Foul Burn back when Edinburgh was known as Din Eidyn. This minotaur calls itself Wilson, a name it inherited from one of the many people it has absorbed over the past eight hundred-odd years; it uses his voice; other voices sometimes break through as, without a mouth, vocal cords or any type of bodily apparatus at all, the only way for it to communicate is through a strong telepathic presence.

After Wilson accidentally absorbed Juff (“It’s no sa bah, bit roomy, like. Thair’s lassies in ere ah naw.”) we became acquainted; in my experience ghouls, monsters, apparitions mostly just want to have a biscuit and a chat when they aren’t lusting for blood, fresh bodies or vengeance; Wilson is no different; by most monster’s standards he is very civilised; the refinement that comes from age; he is, conceptually, as old as the idea of a city; in his current form he has existed for centuries.

After the pleasantries and casting a few wards I put on my reporter hat and interviewed Wilson about his life and what it means to be a fatberg in this strange, unpredictable world that has emerged from the smoke and dust of the Industrial Revolution. The insights he provided and his personal story can be found in the full transcript of the interview provided with the text of this article; it was possibly one of the finest conversations I have ever had in a sewer and by the end I felt we had a real connection; a connection which found us exploring an inter-dimensional rift in time and space together.

Wilson, like most of his kind, is sensitive to the dimensional fluctuations of the material realm, what with him being a creature that exists on several planes of existence at once; the physical plane, the spiritual plane, the V, F and Z planes, the sexual plane, the dark plane, the darker plane, the void plane, the pain in the arse plane, the plain plane and, of course, the constantly flickering on and off like a lightbulb that is about to go plane; his ability to locate thin edges makes him the perfect tool for the city; he is part of the immune system that the city has developed to protect itself from falling out of existence; a white blood vessel that grows with the city, protecting the soft underbelly; he’s pretty cool like that.

8.

I have transcribed this article and torn the thin leaves from my notebook along with my notes, observations and the full recording of my conversation with Wilson; I attached it to a rat and gave it strict instructions to deliver the package to the Concrete Octopus offices; this is a precaution I must take as Wilson and I are going to enter the dimensional rift that swallowed Basildon ‘Baz Slaz the Slaz’ Slazenger and try and locate him. Wilson has assured me that the rift will eventually open somewhere on this plane, somewhere on Earth; he does not know where before we step in. I have cast many a ward, bedecked myself with protective sigils and am carrying a small tank of oxygen just in case Wilson’s trajectory is off; my aura-bubble has been reinforced with a Betterverse Aura Shell** that comes in a handy, back-pocket sized aerosol spray utilising the patented Aura TUff formula that is also available as a hand cream, shampoo and eucalyptus flavoured chewing gum***, for all your aura protection needs****; I am ready.

If I do not return before the next issue don’t let Oscillation take my chair***** and tell Charlie I love him.

*OJ: Concrete Octopus is not a silly magazine. It is an island of truth and pure investigative excellence in a vapid sea of falsehoods and baseless mediocrity. That we allow Fugnugget to get away with this type of slander is testament to our mission to be free of censorship and to show the thinking public the world as it truly is. Fugnugget is an excellent investigator with knowledge of the esoteric that makes the ghost of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa sound like a scabby-elbowed toddler with an inability to pronounce consonants, but I will be taking her to task at her annual review if she sticks with this kind of attitude.

**Use the code ‘Concrete Octopus’ to get a 10% discount when buying through the web portal.

***Not to be swallowed, discard only when wrapped in a disposable magic circle- sold separately.

****Aura protection not guaranteed against true-name-based psionic attacks or level 3 and above entities. Always read the label before applying. Hand cream not to be applied to open wounds, bruised egos, or feet. All self-inflated cranial cavity fillers should be covered before applying shampoo. All products not suitable for those with suffering from eczema, psoriasis or parasitical possession. Consult your astrologist before use.

*****OJ: Too late.

Hostile Architecture - A Practical Guide for the Discerning Urban Explorer:

1. Skate Stoppers: Almost infinite variants; found mainly on ledges and bannisters in public spaces. The act of ‘grinding’ ledges and bannisters, when done in the right flow-state of consciousness can tear seams in reality that are incredibly destructive. At best, they merely take the one who has opened the seam. At worst, whole neighbourhoods are consumed, pulled into fathomless voids of hostile absence where nothing can live. These rifts when left unattended are often mistaken for gentrification.

2. Homeless Spikes: Almost as varied as skate stoppers, these usually manifest as concrete spikes used to repel the socially disturbed: When a human mind free of social constraint dreams in a city’s weak-point; often a thin, liminal space; open to all but not quite a public space; it can create trans-dimensional gateways that allow infrastructural infections to grow, often physically manifesting as temporary shelters built of the city’s inherent flotsam and jetsam; pallets, plastic sheeting and tents with broken spines. These rifts, if left unattended, devour vast numbers of lives.

3. Anti-Graffiti Paint: Permanent coating on a city’s vulnerable surfaces usually based on polyurethanes, nano-particles, fluorinated hydrocarbons or siloxanes that prevent the adhesion and absorption of paint and inks: Graffiti creates unsettling chaos in areas of a city that rely on visual uniformity to suppress destructive imaginative reactions that twist the melons of occupiers. These twistings are infections that can manifest in many forms, from community maker’s markets to block parties to anti-consumer riots. Unprotected surfaces in thin areas such as those where a large amount of social housing is developed can spread to infect entire cities, mutating them, shifting them dimensionally. There is nothing more dangerous to relative reality than a city detourned by graffiti as they create human spores that easily spread to other cities unimpinged by time or distance.

4. Excessive Armrests on Public Seating: Benches segmented into individual seating units to stop people lying down on them: Much like homeless spikes, these types of intrusions on social furniture protect the city from concentrations of errant dreamers. The human mind, in the right places and times, can manifest great change in the fabric of the city, opening rents and tears that can subsume entire neighbourhoods. Balance can be found by segmenting spaces so that True Dreamers are tempered by True Believers. The cutting-up of social seating is a defence that makes it difficult dangerous consciousness types to melt through a thin zone.

5. Speed Bumps: Bumps in the road that slow down traffic and damage vehicles if they go too fast over them: Much in the same way that skateboarders, BMXers, etc. can open rifts with their flow-state creative consciousness, the same can happen with drivers. Speed bumps make drivers slow down both physically and in their mind. Drivers are often used by cities to keep them temporally positioned. Most of the high-speed roads that ring cities are used in this manner as a form of defence, but drivers in flow states in thin zones can cause all sorts of destruction in the city’s positional frequencies, which is how the city of Goddlington, just to the north of Birmingham, became un-anchored. A race between a group of joy riders in 1992 popped the entire city out of the temporal loop and it now wanders nomadic through both time and space, much to the chagrin of the population which were popped out with it. This also explains the entries found in the Vindolanda Tablets that mention how much Julius Verecundus enjoyed doing donuts in his Vauxhall Sierra.