“You’ve got to listen to me! Elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok in an orgy of blood and kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving.”
The Simpsons, Professor Frink
I’m not sure how long we’ve been in our new messroom now, a few weeks? I could look back, but I’m lazy. Anyway, after making a show of conforming to what the managers want (sitting inside, not messing around with the furniture etc) we have started to decorate and adapt, to bend our environment to suit what we want – after all, that’s what gardeners are good at.
I nicked a chair that was in one of the gardens, left there by a resident, and moved it inside so I don’t have to sit on one that slowly tips me off. We found two benches abandoned and put them outside in the shade. We emptied out the tin shed of bikes and unused cleaning products and turned it into a smoking room for when it’s raining. Mateo fixed a broken table and we put that between the benches. We even put a few paving slabs down, and added some plants, tinsel and an umbrella for decoration. It looks great.
The only downside is now the managers like to come and sit with us. Never more than one at a time, I don’t think they like sitting with each other.
Word of the day: labtebricole – living in holes
“Sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army Knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self defense and I won’t go to prison.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Today Mike found a drone lying in one of the gardens at work, under an Acanthus. I’m not sure if it got out of control, flew into the garden and then the owner couldn’t get in to retrieve it (the garden is gated) or if our residents are so rich that the owner couldn’t be bothered trying to find it. And I’m not sure what they were using it for. Do people fly them for fun like they flew remote controlled planes? Or only to take photos where they shouldn’t?
The managers in the office are trying to spread the rumour that they’re using it to spy on us. I really hope Barry doesn’t find out about this, he’ll probably assume that it’s mine and I’m watching him. If he can believe helicopters are spying on him, then being paranoid about a drone is easy.
Word of the day: Bombilate – to hum, buzz or drone
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.
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.
^ 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.
Jaume Plensa – Laura Asia’s Dream
I thought this was beautiful, so peaceful ^
^ 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.
^ A rabbit, leaping through the air on the back of four elephants. This looked like the penultimate scene in a kid’s book.
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!
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
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
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
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:
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
Continuing the investigation into Jack, who left a letter in one of the gardens I work in asking for help because a rebel offshoot of the Illuminati are torturing him. My original interpretation was this might be an art project or a joke. I’m always curious to investigate anything about the Illuminati though. Having found Jack’s Facebook, I spent the last blog looking at his Friends’ list (since there wasn’t much else on there) and these were the things I noticed…
The two people described in the letter as Jack’s father and his brother aren’t on his Friend’s list, although two other with his surname are. So he is in contact with his family, but perhaps estranged from his father and brother – his father is described as a victim of the abuse (although I found the Facebook page of the ‘main abuser’ of the dad and he is a young guy, in his thirties maybe, which is an odd dynamic). His brother is described as a member of the ‘growing abuse network’.
Nobody on his Friends’ list looks odd or even artistic (us arty types, you can spot at a glance) and Jack’s page shows no sign of creativity, which makes me think this is not an art project. And nobody looks rich or important, like the kind of person I imagine who would be in the Illuminati or Freemasons. These are just normal people going on holiday, meeting with friends and having kids. And there is too much tragic detail and effort to create convincing normality for this to be a joke.
I’m thinking this isn’t an interesting mystery at all, more a sad story of mental illness.
I have one more lead to follow, hopefully that will conclusively answer the question: what’s really happening to Jack?
inkbiotic 