ronan-mcdonnell's notepad

Resistance

is puerile

Starting point for a story

A story around the guy looking ou the window of the photo.

"Jaysus lads! They're outside. The whole lot of them - Hilter, Roundstand and even that little fat fella, Mausoleum."

Fat People

Why can't I call people fat, if that's what they are?

They got themselves that way. They did it actively by making certain decisions - namely having a bad diet, doing no exercise and living a sedentary lifestyle. More often that not it is a clear choice that brought them to that point. It is rarely that canard that is so often offered as an excuse, a genetic result. It is not glandular.

I am skinny, even to the point in some people's eyes of being scrawny. And yet people see no problem in saying this to me, just as I have no problem in hearing it.

I too, have actively made myself this way, choosing to prepare my own food and eat well, being very active and keeping an eye on my health. It's my choice and I made it. It's no-one else's fault, certainly not my genetics which urges me to eat coffee slices and cake as often as I can.

Old Man on Street

I walked past an old man in the street. He was standing and staring, still holding on to the railngs which he had used to stop himself falling forward. His head turned towards me, his eyes entirely a deep wine colour. Tears of blood were forming on the brink of his lower eylids.

Credo

My aim is not to write florid complex prose. I want only to create worlds and serve a story in the flowing language of today.

Sequence

Life is just a string of impediments, injustices and inconveniences. The question is one of filling in the gaps between them.

Image 6

At the end of your life you will have nothing to show for it. You will leave nothing behind. Well, maybe you will leave a family, some friends who remember you favourably at best or some neighbours who would have recognised you in the street.

But at the end of it, after endless days of stressful toil, after putting up fight after fight and being knocked back time and again, there will be nothing left. Nothing that will cause someone, years after your demise, to say to themselves, "That! Now that really was the expression of genuis."

Image 5

I knew it was serious when I saw the same thing, at the same time, through the windscreen and in the rear-view mirror. The road strecthed away to the point where it vanished, somewhere far along the smooth arc to the left. I could see the same rear doors of the same van; disconcertingly in both places, in front and behind me. The letters were emblazoned across it in eggshell blue on deep brown; Hallstadt Haulage.

Image 4

Lank and passive, mincing along the street, his gently swinging limbs as limp as his sweep-over. It was as if he had no body, just a head and long thin limbs which met at some point under the two-sizes too big coat. His boots had more substance that he did, and seem to be doing the walking for him.

or

A lank, limp and spidery youth being taken for a walk by his boots

or

Looking at his inward-facing composure and limp hands, one could only imagine that his heavy boots were walking him (and not the more usual way round)

Image 3

There is a story to tell before I clock out. Although I am now bloodied and crumpled, a formless heap at the base of a bridge, I was once the container for a suicidal screwball. You probably didn't realise that we bodies are animals like any others did you?

It's just that us human ones have had the bad luck to be sequestered by alien operating systems. Souls, if you are kind of religious. Numbskulls really. These guys practically run us into the ground. Literally, in some cases.