But what are you talking about ?

Posted on by inkbiotic

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I look at this advert every morning while waiting for the train, but it’s nonsense, isn’t it? Can anyone give me a hand? Does it have a subliminal message? Or had they run out of ideas so decided to blurt out any old bollocks?

It’s for the bank HSBC. Maybe it’s like adverts for alcohol – they aren’t allowed to say a highly toxic product is nice, so they go all surreal instead. Or maybe they feel such contempt for the public that they believe we’ll be humbled by whatever they say.

The text:

Keep an open mind because being open minded has opened doors to talking bears from darkest Peru Kiwis who can coach lions and Portuguese chicken that’s cheeky. Now is not the time to batten down the hatches, it’s time to stay open. Except on bank holidays. Because we are not an island we are part of something far far bigger.

Thoughts that have occurred to my morning addled brain as I stare across the tracks…

  • Is Peru dark?
  • I like to think I’m open minded, when am I going to open a door to a talking bear?
  • Is this about a circus?
  • If that’s a Brexit reference, it’s only going to annoy people.
  • Most things open on bank holidays now. Are they thinking of decades ago?
  • Is this supposed to make me want to open a bank account? It doesn’t.

So anyone got any ideas as to what this might be on about? Does it make you want to switch to HSBC?

The Alley of Sinister Children

Posted on by inkbiotic

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I stumbled down a back street today and found myself in a tiny road with many flowers and statues of children hanging from the balconies. Each one was dangling from a different house, so this is a small of community who got together and all agreed to decorate their homes with strung up children. At first I found it interesting, but I didn’t like the one with no hands, bit too much like a Saw movie to me. I didn’t hang around very long after that, the vibes were not reassuring.

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Frieze! Or I’ll shoot!

Posted on by inkbiotic
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A handy scarf hugging a tree

Alien Resort was asking about the picture I put up yesterday. It was one of the sculptures from the outdoor art Frieze at Regent’s Park (I turned the picture upside down because I liked the way it messed with perspective). Anyway, I thought I’d put up the other pictures from there, since it was an interesting exhibition.

Quite annoying though, despite cordons around most of the art and signs saying Please don’t touch, people were lifting their kids over the ropes and letting them climb all over the art. I like that the public feel less intimidated by art and rules now, but it seems like only the intimidation was stopping us from trashing everything.

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Ivan Argote – Bridges (We Are Melting)

^ This is part of the sculpture that I used in yesterday’s photo, there were four of these bridge-like structures with words that didn’t make much sense on them.

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Jaume Plensa – Laura Asia’s Dream

I thought this was beautiful, so peaceful ^

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Tracey Emin – When I Sleep

^ I’m not usually keen on Tracey Emin’s art, but I thought this captured a feeling well. And I liked the way she was just lying on the grass, as if she’d collapsed there and didn’t want to get up.

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Barry Flanigan – Composition

^ A rabbit, leaping through the air on the back of four elephants. This looked like the penultimate scene in a kid’s book.

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Huma Bhabha – Receiver

Well, this disturbing hunk of chunk looked like it would step down and start thumping people. Just looked up the artist, and she’s great. May do a blog about some of her art soon, it’s the stuff of creepy dreams.

There were other sculptures too, which I’ll probably post up at some time. I hope you enjoyed these!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve dissolved!

Posted on by inkbiotic

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Hello lovely people! I haven’t been around for a few days, which wasn’t planned, but sort of essential. Doing a physical job in heat way above what I’m used to (nudging 37°C yesterday) reduced me to a sweaty, clumsy wreckage incapable of thought. If I’d tried blogging I’d have written only letter sludge.

The good thing is that all us gardeners were in it together, propping each other up, finding reasons to hide under trees or floundering as one.

Interesting fact (that I’m fairly sure I’ve got right): temperature is measured in the shade, otherwise the direct sun would distort the readings. This means that being in the sun feels 10-15° hotter. Which means it was really 50° last week.

Anyway, the heat, the trains shutting down with requests that commuters ‘avoid travel except where absolutely necessary’, and poking myself in the eye with a twig, meant that I thought I’d best leave it. Now we’re back to rains and thunder, I’d should be posting as normal. Speak soon, Ink x

 

 

 

Me vs. reality

Posted on by inkbiotic

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Shaily Agrawal made the suggestion that maybe our impossible-to-set clock was tuned to the wrong timezone. Aha! I thought, that’s plausible. But having fiddled around with it today, I see that every time it’s reset it chooses a different time. Sometimes ten minutes out, sometime six hours, sometimes three hours and twenty-four minutes. As a kid, I had a digital watch that was erratic like that. Every time you pressed the light switch the time changed. I even wrote it into one of my books. I assumed then, and am assuming now that it’s some kind of code. A way that technology can communicate with us.

I should probably also report, that I found no evidence of a portal opening or mysterious happenings at the time the clock chose. And no further evidence of a zombie apocalypse occurring. In fact it felt like a completely normal day, as if no doom was impending at all and only ineptness was lurking round every corner. But that can’t be right.

Word of the day: Fey/fay/fie – doomed, under the shadow of a violent, foreseen death

Have an escape plan…

Posted on by inkbiotic

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Having a wander, I came across this vehicle. Odd decoration, I thought. I walked around the side and found this.

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Ah, a zombie outbreak response vehicle, I thought, handy. I carried on up the road and came across this huge bone just lying on the pavement, flesh all chewed away.

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Luckily I’m not particularly scared of zombies, they’re very slow, they can’t be that difficult to avoid, but I know where the zombie response vehicle is if I need it.

I used to have a boss who had a phobia of the zombie apocalypse. He had escape plans worked out. Whenever he stayed in a hotel he figured out where the exits were, where he could lock himself in safely and where food could be found. We once asked him if he had a plan for our workplace, and yes, he said he would barricade himself in the staff room, grow food in the glasshouse and use the tool shed to stock up on weapons. He had it all figured out.

‘And how about the rest of us,’ we asked, ‘do we figure in this plan?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘sadly you all died in the initial attack.’

‘Right,’ we said, ‘nice to know where we stand.’

 

Anyone else spotted signs of an impending zombie attack? I feel like there should be other signs.

The Secret Garden

Posted on by inkbiotic

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I think, think, I just caught a bumble bee trying to lay eggs in the crack in my window sill, is that possible? She was sitting on the crack for ages, waggling her abdomen about. I helped the fluffy lady out the window and couldn’t see any actual eggs, so I filled the crack in with bathroom sealant. Not exactly high-class DIY, but it’s all I had and the whole window is such a mess anyway, I can’t make it any worse.

There’s a small road off the main road near my house that looks like it might be a short cut to town, but whenever I spot it I’ve been in too much of a rush to go down there. Finally today, I did.

It contains a beautiful, cared-for garden, filled with flowers and mosaics. A small oasis in a grotty street off a grotty road that I had no clue was there. It was like cracking open an ordinary stone to find a carving inside.

Whenever I take the time to go exploring I always find amazing things. That’s one thing I  like about this blog, it makes me look.

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Freaky deaky Clematis

Posted on by inkbiotic

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I’ll be honest, this photo was taken a few weeks ago. Or months. I don’t really pay attention, time does its thing whatever. Anyway, I found this while weeding in one our more exotic gardens and asked around my colleagues to see if anyone knew what it was. We thought because of the leaves, it must be a Clematis, but none of us had seen a flower like this.

After I got home I did some googling around and discovered this photo, so the centre of Clematises do do this, but is it normal to do it this much?

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The Googled photo From here

 

Like the segments of an orange. Barely a flower at all.

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This has just been a week when I’ve proved how little I know about plants, right?

I’m attracting trouble again

Posted on by inkbiotic

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This morning I was making my way to the station, when I think a guy threatened to punch me. It was very odd.

I was walking beside a main road, when I saw him coming towards me on my side of the pavement. He wasn’t big, but he was wiry, tense and with a look of utter rage and hatred, staring straight at me. At about fifteen feet away, he began punching at the air in front of him, all the while looking at me. I stepped to one side so that I wasn’t in his path, he stepped to the same side, still punching. I stopped, not sure what else to do. He kept coming, still punching, I didn’t move. Finally he stopped and stood in front of me, fists flailing in my direction, but not quite reaching. I stared at him trying to find an expression that didn’t look scared or aggressive, I probably just looked blank. Then with a jabbing finger he pointed to one side, presumably to suggest I walk around him. I did, waiting for him to thump me as I walked past, he didn’t and I caught the train. Too strange to deal with at seven in the morning.

At work we got guilted into using the new mess room.

‘We redecorated this for you all! Why aren’t you in it? Don’t you like it?’

So the smokers sat outside the new room on rocks (no benches here) and the rest of us sat inside on the most uncomfortable chairs in the world. They have some fancy new ergonomic design (remember they were acquired from another business that was throwing them out) and they slope downwards. So when you sit on one, you slowly slide off. The only way to stay on the chair is to constantly press your feet against the floor. This is fucking up my back. I’m going to pinch an old, battered wooden chair from one of the gardens and put that inside.

Word of the day: orey-eyed – expressing anger through the eyes

No more Jack

Posted on by inkbiotic

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For the past few weeks I’ve been investigating Jack. He wrote in a letter, found in one of our gardens, that he’d been abused by the Illuminati (see my previous posts for more details). I’ve been trying to work out if the letter was a joke or the Illuminati attack was real, or just real to Jack. Now I think I know the answer.

Searching around online I found a comment he had made on a blog called Synthetic telepathy and psychotronic weapon tortures by 100,000 FBI and NSA secret spies.

Synthetic telepathy and psychotronic weapon tortures

This is the introduction to the blog

“Pervert FBI and NSA psychopaths are secretly and illegally conducting non-consensual, sadistic, synthetic telepathy experiments and psychotronic weapon attacks on hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens in the United States and elsewhere.”

This is a site to provide information for people who believe they are being remotely abused by the FBI (or some other government body) through psychic means.

There is a list of symptoms on the blog for people undergoing these attacks, it’s very long so I won’t copy it here, but some of them are what a schizophrenic might experience:

  • Artificial “bee stings”, especially while trying to get to sleep.
  • Voices, either very insulting, or telling you things that indicate you are under surveillance.
  • Very unnatural inability to sleep, as if large amounts of caffeine have been consumed.
  • Reading and broadcasting private thoughts.
  • Frequent break-ins and poisoning of food.
  • Has no privacy even for his/her private thoughts.

There are nearly five hundred responses to the blog from desperate scared people, describing their attacks. And Jack has written one of these.

Many of the replies are heartbreaking and odd, such as this one

“I woke up one morning and my face had changed into an old lady’s face and my body is not my own. My skin is gross! like old lady skin. My boobs are completely different like they deflated. My mind is tortured 24/7. I hear voices and they’re terribly rude and talk shit all the time. Its normally my step brothers voice. Things go missing all the time, its like a funny joke to them. I don’t have ovaries anymore. I woke up and they were gone. I got it checked it out. I’m only 29 and my entire life just vanished one day. My days are pre recorded like clock work. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I just dealt with the weird stuff going on hoping something would change me back. My soul left my body. I know this asssholes play games with me. I’ve tried killing myself but there’s something holding me back. wtf. I know this isn’t real. It should be easy to kill myself. Conspiracy theory. Has anyone else gone through something like this?”

This blog showed me there a lot of people like Jack, who believe they are being tortured from a distance, but their accounts only read like mental illness to me. I know I could be wrong, but with the brain injury I experienced paranoid psychosis for about five years and I recognise a lot of the thought patterns.

This is from Jack’s long reply to the blog (most of which is a repetition of the letter):

About 8 years ago he [Oliver] began forming an abuse network and handing out super high level computers with pretty much all the freemason/illuminati technology there is on them under the condition they do what ever he says, abuse anyone he wants to and tell any lies about anyone he tells them to. Either positive lies to get him and others in his group more power or lies to dishonestly degrade anyone he wants. His group began treating me badly in the real world and mistreating me (these are people I new from a young age.).While they planned my abuse.

This maybe explains more about the man who abused Jack’s father:

At first they began pretending they where helping me by making me a big man. They hit my brain and my body with ‘funny radiation’ twice and began influencing my mind while giving me a hard time. I ended up in a mental health ward. They also began abusing my father who is a really good man. They gradually began abusing me more and more. After about 2 months they where constantly verbally abusing me, controlling my mind to mess me up, hitting my brain and body with damaging cancer causing radiation.

After looking at his Facebook page and the reply, I am finally convinced, this is not a joke or an art project. Jack is a seriously ill guy who has built up a whole paranoid narrative around people he has known for years. It is possible for psychosis to build on real life experiences, but I don’t believe Jack actually knows anyone in the Illuminati or the Freemasons, certainly there’s no sign of this on his Facebook page.

Now I’m sure that this is illness, I think I need to walk away. Much as I enjoy exploring a mystery and sharing it with you all, somebody’s mental health and suffering aren’t something to play with. I’ve done my best to be respectful of Jack’s situation and his privacy, but I don’t think that is enough anymore. I won’t shy from writing about mental illness, but it has to done in the right way, to be helpful, and I don’t believe this is.

I’m not saying this will be gone forever and forgotten, sometimes little mysteries end up connecting in unexpected ways, but I’m going to stop poking around and just hope that Jack gets whatever help and peace of mind he needs.

I’m also probably going to take a break from blogging this week. I’m not sleeping and when I do I have too many nightmares, it’s all making me sluggish in the day. Once I’ve finished work I’m only fit to stare into space. I reckon I need a week off to let my head settle, then I’ll get back to it. See you all soon, inkbiotic x