My hand whips back on the wax and produces a fat asteroid buzz as I viddy the needle skating and snatches of surface noise sparking and exploding PING! CLANG! FUZZ! like the tiny blips of sci-fi fire in anti-alien arcade games. Should I put on the white-label imported Japananalogue thing? Another burst of video game noise... God, oh, God, my hand is hot, I mean, I can drop anything here and it's fine, it's fine. My hand is made of pixels under this light: a single stuttering bulb is forever overhead. Is that siren on the track or outside? My friends might be kissing pavement or hawking on cars or trying to cop a feel on that thunder-struck tree made out of kitten fur. The sky outside is aching. Look at all that light pollution, all that crackling and crashing in the big, big black clouds. That was a real siren and I can't cut to it now because it's too late and its scream was at the wrong frequency. You know when glass breaks it screams exactly like a siren. I don't dig this one- go, dissolve, cross-fade, switch, sneak that back, cut up... the sky's gone all starry and goldy. My tummy's rumbling: I want some toast but if I go downstairs all that sound will thunder into my face too fast. Probably not toast, probably soup. A nice hot bowl of Jupiter-coloured soup... the TV's sick, it's fuzzing in and out and in out, image up and down and down and down, scanning for signal from different stations. Too many cables! I'm noosed by black spaghetti wires, my headphones making sullen puddles of sulking noise. I correct: a glorious beast of bass shakes his splendid head. Feedback is out, out, out. Woof! All the waves come down over my beaten head. The light in the room is the colour of rust. That girl is asleep. Look, you can see the Lucky Strike target on her tummy getting tight and getting soft. Is she dreaming, am I in it, am I awake? The sky's not like that: it looks like a million bits of black card stuck together, covered in licked silver stars and sequins. The snoozing girl is curled up and a cat oozes over her and slums into a corner and starts darning its black socks with its cold tongue. An ambulance is howling around outside. Bodies coming and going like an airport: everyone X-rayed in the freezing light. Styrofoam snow starts falling. Snow is falling all the time. Someone shouts out in a staticky megaphone voice and everyone goes deaf. I'm OK in here: I'm not as bleary-eyed and broken-tailed as everyone else. I'm an astronaut at the controls, I'm alive, all the sounds, all the data belong to me, I'm awake, like the wolves, like winter, like Superman, Moby Dick... I can come out from the rabbit hole. Bristers, sothers, come up! Curiouser and curiouser, on and on, for we are like angels, for the sky hasn't caved in yet. Next track, next track. Then go to sleep.
'Doll' by Ed Ruscha. No copyright infringement intended.
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