Chap1 of Life through a laid-back lens

Chapter 1 of: Life through a laid-back lens
(My second novel)
By D. G. Lennon-
You see: life could be confusing sometimes. If at no time could life be
confusing,
you would never experience confused. You would miss out.

Take the entity that Dave was or take more accurately the entity that
was Dave and was so
labelled. A mental entity that may or may not take physical form in
these post-Cartesian
times Here he was standing in a sitting room that had standing room
only. Near-
neighbouring narcotic life forms watched a wearily whirling world in
soft focus from the
smoke-soaked sofa. The room was a squalid ill-lit filthy untidy
scum-hole that daylight only
ever glimpsed in vile, bright, piercing spears through the drawn,
discoloured curtains and the
slowly shifting smog. The air was of a rich, smoke-creamed apathy that
only slowly lingering
over a long, needlessly alliterative description of dull d?cor could
ever give sufficiently
shallow breath to. Life here was, in brief, an unpleasant, dull and
senseless oblivion set in a
heavily infested slum with the wallpaper torn and peeling all around
it.
'Please, man, I need it. Like, y'know?' Said a thickly accented voice
from a mouth not
overlong post-pubescent.
The hood of the speaker's pale-grey, numerically-adorned, soft cotton
top cowled a thin
and spot-spangled face like Dopey from Disney's Snow White. His dim
eyes were
shrouded in shadow by virtue of his two hands weighting down the
pockets to hip level. A
thin and sickly dopey looking dope-head, acid-casualty and speed freak
with occasional
ventures into horse, the poor posture and dumb attitude belied an
imagination that thought:
"Look at me, I'm a rebel". Think James Dean, think Marlon Brando, but
picture a
pathetically adolescent thick fuck with a downy, light-brown wisp of
beard. Dave
considered. On the one hand he was his brother. On the other hand he
was a cunt. Dave
didn't trust Gary one little bit. This was money. Gary was the moronic,
gibbering idiot
Dave used to be before Dave had calmed and settled and discovered other
hobbies and
interests to complement and intersperse his psychedelic foraying and
puerile pursuits of a
cool vibe. Dave was a much more holistic person-a maturer and
more-rounded, gibbering,
moronic pillock.

This was money. This was giving the brother that Dave didn't trust an
IOU: a promise to
pay the bearer the relevant quantity of gross domestic product. Dave
and Gary inhabited a
mental product economy. Gross domestic product was largely intangible
and frequently
instantaneous. Some items were manufactured within the economic entity
that they lived in.
Some food was produced, also. Mostly however the GDP was that of a
mental product
economy. At the lower end, commercially speaking, mental product was
intellectual and
easily transmissible. What we're talking here is services. Services
were things like
information technology. Solutions provision in the IT sector was
devised and sent abroad to
people who manufactured goods and produced foods, so that they in their
turn could better
sell their wares to the people whose product was the IT services. And
not only to them, the
people who designed, invented and genetically engineered the things
that the manufacturers
and producers were selling inhabited the same echelon of the mental
product economy as
the IT guys and so, the things they designed, invented and genetically
engineered they later
bought through the web sites of the solutions providers. Higher in the
wealth creation chain
came the sportsmen and entertainers. These could not, in the main, be
said to peddle
intellectual product. These acted on the mind differently. These acted
on the interactions of
the brain with the nervous and endocrine systems. This was mental
product. You take a
performance artist, you watch and you throw him or her some cash-some
IOU's. Some
promises to pay the bearer some quantities of gross domestic product.
That is a mental
product that the guy has sold you. It's not on paper, it's not on tape,
it's happened and
gone. They earn a fortune. You watch a match that isn't televised. Your
adrenalin soars
for ninety minutes. You can't replay it, it's gone. Transitory mental
product. Dave didn't
trust Gary, his brother. He was reluctant therefore to hand over a
receipt from some
honest-Eddie or other. He didn't know the signatory-never met him,
never wanted to,
never likely to. He trusted honest-Eddie implicitly. He didn't trust
his brother Gary. And
this was a fair few IOU's for a fair old whack of gross domestic
product-much of which
existed only internally in the mind and was of a temporal and fleeting
nature. It was stuff that
Dave needed. Dave thought about some of this. He thought of how
desperately he needed
his money and how he didn't trust Gary and about all kinds of issues
related thereto. Dave
took out his chequebook and wrote Gary a cheque. There were moments of
doubt in the
hand-over.

If Dave had thought about this a little more clearly at this point
things might have turned out a
little better. Dave didn't. What he was doing here was suicidally,
stupidly insane. He was
writing a promise from himself that his bank manager or someone else
delegated-either way,
someone Dave trusted but didn't know-would transfer (from one sector of
disk space to
another) imaginary IOU's for quantities of fleetingly experienced and
probably imagined and
intangible domestic product, signed by someone Dave trusted implicitly
but whom he didn't
know. It was the act of an imbecile to write out a disclaimer that said
that the imaginary stuff
owed to Dave by a person whom he didn't know but fervently believed to
be on the level
should (via an executor whom Dave was perhaps at best ill-acquainted,
but whom he
believed to be straight) should now be owed to his closest relative
Gary whom he'd known
all of his life but whom he did not trust. Had he really thought about
it, he must surely have
realised this. But still the deed was done. The cheque wended onwards
and upwards from
bank clerk to branch manager to thingy and whatsit and after all kinds
of scrutiny some
bloke went and presented the IOU's to honest-Eddie. Of course being a
trustworthy
individual and not one to renege on his debts he realised that as
trustee of a nation states
wealth he must distribute accordingly. Eddie consulted with his
calculator and figured out
what fraction of a transfer-listed athlete this represented. Not an
easy calculation since the
transitory mental product produced on the pitch can further generate
sponsorship and
advertising revenues. With a burdensome sigh, Eddie chopped off the
relevant number of
the athletes fingers and paid off the bearer. The bearer thanked him
politely and raced back
to place the fingers in the account of Gary- the account an entity that
formed part of an
imaginary directory in the mind of a computer. He deducted the relevant
number of digits
from Dave's account in similarly surreal fashion. None of which
genuinely happened even if
this were not a work of fiction- a mental product.

Previous to and partly consequent with the none of which that genuinely
happened as stated
above, Dave left the ugly, sleazy terraced, red-brick house and sloped
off down the trash
blighted alleyway onto a road in a warren of roads that labyrinthed out
onto a main road.
Along it he trudged until he reached the bookmakers wherein he had
hopes of making a
quick buck. He filed past the urine-drenched, elderly, flat-cap topped
drunkards with their
pantellas reeking disgusting fumes into the general atmosphere of
low-living. At the counter
Dave held brief and slobbishly encoded utterances with a disinterested
individual and
eventually handed over an IOU for a certain amount of GDP. On his way
out he looked at
the numbers he had selected. This could give him the entitlements to
tenuously existent
mental product receipts that would put him in clover. This was his bet
on a different
country's national lottery. Not an active participation in it, a bet.
Dave was only able to
play by betting on which numbers he thought the winner would have
picked when he won.
There were large odds against Dave getting it right. The odds
translated into a multiplier of
what he had spent in IOU's. This was perhaps irrelevant because the guy
who won it later
that evening picked a different set of numbers from the sets that Dave
had picked. Dave
had never met this winner and would probably never meet him.
Nevertheless he owned a
malevolent dislike and a vicious intent towards the fortuitous bastard.
A couple of weeks
after the day on which these events were set in motion, Dave received a
piece of paper with
words and numbers encrypted onto it by a medium of written language,
which involved
pictorial representation of alphabetical and numerical concepts. He
looked askance at his
statement. He would have to stop doing these things. It was costing him
money.

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