“I only write about what I know” by Dresden Hypotenuse

CHAPTER ONE – A Brave New World

First of all I should tell you my name, although to careful readers it should come as no surprise. I am the aforementioned Dresden Hypotenuse, and recorded here, for posterity and some measure of ego, are the collected memories from my scattered years on this, the planet Earth.

I was born in Bridgwater, Somerset in the blazing summer of 1783 to proud parents, Hubert Hypotenuse and his lady wife, my mother, the honourable Lady Horatio Scrivens. My mother never took my father’s name, a matter of some contrition between the spritely young couple, despite their joyful union in December of the previous year. My mother, the heir to Sprugley House in the borough of Bridgwater, was of blue blood, somewhat at odds with my father’s employ as a rat burster. He would scurry with his small team of the disabled and dying at the vermin in the streets of the town with sacks of rice, exhaling mouthfuls of water and rice solution directly into the unsuspecting rodent’s gullet with the expected result.

My mother was a strange juxtaposition of personalities; an angry wasp in sheep’s clothing, vicious and brutal, yet compassionate and generous. She would often whip the servants of Sprugley House with metallised birch twigs whilst feeding them honeyed walnuts for offenses as minor as an untied shoe. She was shadowed everywhere by her loyal maid Dreseldeen, a woman who appeared consistently ninety years old from the moment of my birth to the present day, as I sit, writing this memoir with the rust of my own blood on old bits of tin foil.

My mother once told me that she had been rescued from wild foxes by Dreseldeen as a baby in a basket, in the woodlands north of Staines, and that Dreseldeen had been at her side since that day. Some evenings as a boy, I remember seeing my mother and Dreseldeen embracing deeply in the shadows behind the door in the scullery whilst my father picked the bones of the day’s rats from the raw skin between his knuckles. As the two women kissed and fondled each other, I wondered if my mother loved my father, or really did she love this mute old woman with a face like a boiled toad that groped her in dark corridors, and as I did, I felt something small, but significant, snap in the back of my skull.

My father hated Dreseldeen. When she wasn’t looking, he would pull offensive tongue faces and twist and contort his fingers into rude gestures, some made up, such was the wrath of his silent fury. He once told me that he would often imagine the rats that he burst had the head of Dreseldeen, and that he was really “bursting her fucking fat guts out.”

He had a quick temper and a rotten mouth, easily jumping to profanity in times of great emotional trauma. At the birth of my younger brother, (whom I will come on to in around two paragraphs time,) my father, who had been absent from my birth, ran screaming from the room past me in the waiting, room uttering the unforgettable; “Let me out! Her whole fucking arsehole just collapsed!”

I sat and pondered his words on many cold and lonely nights since that day. Of course, now I know the anatomical in’s and out’s of child birth thanks to my training in an underground Vietnamese tunnel hospital near Saigon, in nineteen hundred and seventy two. In those tunnels especially, his words echoed from the walls like the shells landing in nearby woodland. I had suffered terrible, crippling embarrassment around women since that supposedly joyous day. As the rumbles died away, I would lie still on my bunk and ask myself, God and nobody in particular if I would ever find love. The answer always fell immediately, an echoing vacuum of concussion.

Obviously, I was heavily hooked on opium throughout the conflict, often falling asleep with my hands inside a patient’s chest cavity and dreaming that I had opened my very own sausage factory as he lay screaming, awake and dying beneath my laughing fingers. I saved more lives than I lost, thanks to a mixture of Chinese I-Ching, common bleach and pure, magical luck. Before the conflict, I had received my First Aid badge at Cubs, aged nine, and this was considered more than enough proof of my medical credentials and prowess by the US Army. But I digress.

My younger brother was christened Timothy Jonathan Rosenbaumandsons Hypotenuse later that year in a ceremony that bored me very nearly to death, though I was always a sickly child to be fair to the vicar. Aged four, I wanted to be outside, kicking at pigeons and shaking sticks at the old and infirm with my friends from the house down the road, but instead my father would drag us to Church every Sunday and for special occasions like the christening. It was spoken of in hushed tones every day from Timothy’s birth as my father would meticulously plot the routes of guests, seating plan synchronisation and other such detail in his study, bare-chested and clutching at his St George pendant.

Sometimes I think that my brother was born to make up to God for me. My father was a deeply religious man, but my mother said that he only been that way since my birth. Before, when they had first met, my father had been a deviant, full of cheek and pranks and crude sexual needs. He had a tattoo on the back of his neck that read “God is Dead. Thank Fuck,” that he would later grow his hair into what would become known, in his honour, as the mullet, to cover. This had always confused me as my father would dress us in our Sunday best and drag us, sometimes screaming, to the little Church at the top of the hill, a smile on his lips, but a cold intensity in his eyes.

Something had gone wrong at my birth. The only thing my mother would say, once, with a shudder, was something inaudible except the words “the fire.” She couldn’t abide anybody screaming in her presence and once drop kicked a six month old baby through her bedroom window for crying as she “looked after it” for one of the serving girls. She had turned to look at me sat aghast, lips quivering on the chaise-lounge with a look that told me how close I was to a nice drowning in the moat and I quickly buttoned it.

As she hugged me and cooed about my curly hair, I resolved to never cry in her presence again. This philosophy served me very well, until one black day that will become apparent through the art of narrative at a time of my choosing in our joint future. That is correct, I, Dresden Hypotenuse, control the destiny of time and space itself in our literary marriage. I wear the trousers and cardboard crown in this relationship. You, reader, would do well to remember that. You are my bitch now. Unless of course you stop reading and throw the book out of the window and go and slander me to all your friends in the critical media like Garry Bushell and Piers Morgan. But, if you do go to do that, know this. You shan’t be missed.
Now that we have sorted the wheat from the chaff, I shall continue. You, my sweet, loyal friend, are to become privy to my darkest secret. After the following commercial messages, that is

Snow

A single flake falls, freezing a trail,
it lodges, pitched upon the wall,
icing uneven grey stone defiant,
it waits for its brothers, alone.

Not for long; a flurry of activity
follows and they hurry along,
drifting in winds, winding down
to settle, together, a new home.

They blend together, stronger
to cover the wall and spill over,
to erase frozen leaves and mud
and to make a child’s day

and they all come out, hollering
and happy, rolling balls of snow,
they play where we see misery,
laughing as they become men.

Pedestrian-Iced

Walking in a winter wonderland is a terrible lie,
we remember slipping and sliding along paths
as cars, bikes and buses flew by, roaring past
expelling hot gases that melt further the roads
whilst Mr and Mrs Pedestrian fall on our asses,
bruising our dignity as engines laugh past us,
ruing that salt, peppered thickly across two lanes,
that leaves us, high and icy and stuck in last place.

“Use the buses, use the trains, they’ll be fine,”
yeah, if they actually ran on time, or in snow
but we all know public transport slides to a halt
and it’s your fault you’re late, you should’ve left
home yesterday to get there five minutes before
your shift began, and you arrived broken anyway,
useless and sodden, while out of their cars step
those bastards that left you to die in the mist.

Bhavana

Bhāvanā (Meditation)


Buddhist technique #1 – Palm descending from Heaven

My stomach sinks. I am falling; incredible speed smashes against my ears. I spot a far-off spark and spy a single star. A comets trail catches at me and, suddenly, enveloped, I am still. I push and punch at my prison; the walls respond and retract. Looking up now, I feel weightless as a chink of light appears, opening. I crawl out, on to a great golden palm that quivers beneath me. Gigantic glinting fingers crease, and fold back, to form a clawed cockpit. I step forwards, reborn, the pilot of the hand of God.



Buddhist technique #2 – Void and diffusion

Sailing into night, all is silent as it stretches away forever, the vast black frozen sea. Time seems spurious as all is speed and void, all is silent as it stretches away forever, the vast black frozen sea like sleep with lucid dreaming, and all is silent. A vast sea, black frozen time silence, all is spurious and void. All is silent, and still, and then, suddenly, from eternal darkness, springs forth a light. A coloured pinprick, blinking, beckons me in, the great whim; a simple request for investment of consciousness that must be answered.



Buddhist technique #3 – The hand that feeds

The hand agreed, wordlessly. Vibrations quicken, ear drums quiver. I crouch low as colours grow and blossom: great pink and yellow space-orchids spinning red and blue. We approach as petals part; an interwoven helix of paint box strands unravels. Psychedelic spaghetti twisting past a dislocated prism and we are speed now as we fly through the heart of the matter. A camel squeezed at terminal velocity through the eye of a syringe.

Film Reviews

The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone – 2010)
Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge, Explosion.
by David Sealey

Sylvester Stallone’s magnum opus has finally emerged from the flash-bulb lit cave of its inception to a frenzy of media anticipation. Stallone and co-writer Dave Callaham don’t have much to fear however. Whether good or bad, “The Expendables” is a guaranteed big earner thanks to the comprehensive headcount of Hollywood’s finest action heroes on display, including Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke and Dolph Lundgren to name just the top dogs. People would pay to see them doing just about anything, especially TOGETHER for the first time ever. But are they still vivid expressions of man, stripped of his moral compass and to the waist in a quest for justice, or have they simply become morose pop-up waxworks of themselves, best left in a dusty dungeon for tourists to photograph?

The film starts off with five helmeted motorcyclists thrashing at the speed limit in a deserted street. The camera zooms in to show the words “The Expendables” on the gas tank of the lead chopper. At first, this seems like a clever way of announcing the film’s title and the identity of the leading men, but as the film progresses, you will wish that every scene could be followed by as clear an onomatopoeic subtitle. It continues as most classic action romps, with an incomprehensible scene involving a large force of armed men rushing around angrily by torchlight, clanking down stairs busily. They are aboard a ship in the Gulf of Aden, Somalia.

The Expendables arrive by boat and board stealthily. They intervene as the leader of the “pirates” is making an Al-Queda style home movie and the team are revealed to the audience for the first time. There’s Jet Li! There’s Stallone and Jason Statham. There is a shootout initiated by “crazy” character Gunner Jensen, played by Dolph Lundgren, in which he blasts a man in half with his shotgun. The action feels like an 80’s action flick with a modern budget and effects, like Stallone’s previous update of the “Rambo” franchise, all meaty chunks and visceral explosions. For a minute you almost forget the promises made by the trailers and media machine. But then you realise; where are Arnie and Bruce?

Jason Statham and Jet Li are both awesome throughout this film, with Statham’s character an adrenaline shot away from his lead in “Crank” and Jet Li’s stereotypically named character Ying Yang begs for more screen time as his martial arts prowess and acting ability transcend the limitations of the script. However, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, big draws for the action enthusiast, are conspicuously absent for the majority of “The Expendables.” They do both appear in this film, in the same scene, a brief dialogue with Stallone, all tongue-in-cheek references that feel laboured. This scene contains no action at all, just the three Planet Hollywood owners themselves, and that is your lot. No more Arnie or Bruce for the duration.

“The Expendables” is a film that should have been made 15 years ago, when the leading men were still action heroes, not Governors of California or making recurring cameos on “Friends.” The action sequences are lavish and reminiscent of the glory days, but I for one was acutely aware that CG was actually performing most of the action. Jason Statham and Stallone appear in the most ridiculous and therefore, best scene involving a plane, but all I could picture was them sat in front of a blue screen with Stallone mumbling incomprehensible dialogue; a sad image. The action scenes never top the car-through-a-helicopter scene from the recent “Die Hard 4,” or the sheer brutality of Stallone’s own “Rambo” reboot, but they are a fond tribute to former glory days. Stallone himself lurches around the place like an animatronic Frankenstein’s monster, his movements now as stiff as his acting. Now in his sixties, Stallone sustained 14 injuries making “The Expendables.”

The plot is entirely ludicrous as the all-stars fight their way through a “Commando” style scenario to rescue a girl, killing probably thousands of men along the way, but it was always going to be. It is meant to be. “The Expendables” is a romp, a blast even, but it is not better than any of the films that it evokes. It is barely better than “xXx,” but thankfully, it does not star Vin Diesel. But neither does it star Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis.







Fanboys
By David Sealey

"Fanboys" is Kyle Newman's first major film project, but the rookie director has performed some sort of cinematic miracle. "Fanboys" shines with the kind of Hollywood sheen you would find in any Kevin Smith or Seth Rogen project. The cinematography and editing style brings to mind the recent "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," and tone-wise, "Fanboys" covers the same bittersweet fairground and emotional minefield. The film follows Linus, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and his close Star Wars obsessed friends Eric, Hutch (Dan Fogler doing a Jack Black impersonation,) and Windows, a superb turn by the up-and-coming Jay Baruchel, as the friends journey to Skywalker Ranch to steal a look at the then-unreleased “Star Wars Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace” before Linus' premature demise.

"Fanboys" is peppered with cameos, with Princess Leia as a doctor (Carrie Fisher), Lando Calrassian (Billy Dee Williams) as the fantastic Judge Reinhold and Darth Maul (Ray Park) appearing in minor roles, as well as Seth Rogen's superb Star Trek arch-nerd/Las Vegas pimp double-act. William Shatner, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes also appear in some of the film's funniest moments.

It is clear that George Lucas and the Star Wars team must have had at least some input into "Fanboys," the premise alone demands it. This, perhaps, is the reason behind the unanswered central question; “Star Wars Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace” - is it actually any good? The posturing around this question is used to fine comic effect, with more said through silence than any actual condemnation of Lucas' comeback.

Undeniably hilarious at points, the humour is reined in by the dark premise, ensuring the film never reaches the point of farce. The ending is a poignant and heartfelt tribute to the fragility of the human condition. Check it out.

New Labour Saving Device

Darkness fell in through a lead-lined window,
he sat alone, his grey head held, firm in his hands,
at a paper strewn desk, amongst empty seats,
counting each breath as it came and went,
came and went, he ignored the telephone.

Darkness fell in to his heart and it was heavy,
sat alone, sinking, his heart a lead balloon
weighing down his forced smile at the sides.
Soon it would all be over; it came and went,
came and went. He answered the telephone.

A voice buzzed at him from the receiver, stinging
he held it away from his ear, sighed in soft defeat,
as it flapped at him angrily, landed a blow deep
and the man sobbed then, deep red and brazen,
a flood of rust he exhaled in to the telephone.

Sparks spat and zapped past his grey face
searing, spearing bolts of voltage scorched ears,
pink and blue blossoming burnt bruised flesh.

Spitting and gurgling, he reared back in his chair,
heft the laughing telephone back, and released it,
up, into a bust of King George III, clad in a toga,
that teetered on the brink, and then, dropped
and consciousness went, and came, and went
as pink and blue flowers rushed up from the floor.

PMQ

They all wore grey carbon copy suits
with their own unique choice of tie,
propped up on shiny green leather
they took it in turns to shout.

It was Prime Ministers Question’s
and the grey Scot addressed the room,
a dull rumble that sent some to sleep,
pounding the desk, he made his point.

A whoopee cushion face rose in riposte
shouting insults across the room,
a good solid mocking written by the Mail
and on cue, the rabble jeered and groaned.

They shrieked and cackled,
and they slapped their knees
and each other’s sweaty backs
as their hard mates fought it out.

The Speaker was not amused.
He raised his voice over the braying.
“Keep it down you animals,” he bellowed
“This is why the public want us dead!”

There was a silence in the room,
brief but sobering. The Speaker cleared
his throat. Just then, somebody farted
or perhaps David Cameron spoke.

They all fell about laughing then,
sloshing each other’s gin about;
their red nostrils whinnied and wept
at the rich smell of booze and farts.

Post Room Rights

The post room was overflowing with politicians.
They were silent, crouched with closed eyes
facing the walls in coned hats that read “D.”
All of them had been very bad, Gordon said.

And they should be ashamed, like he was,
they’d been stealing from the piggy bank
with nasty receipts. Jack Straw was patrolling,
smacking his cosh in his hand with abandon.

He was in charge now, him and Mandelson,
the dark lord and the demon headmaster,
flushing the dirty dregs. Milliband was crying,
letter mountains piled up around them.

Harriet Harman had worked an eye loose.
She scrabbled at the envelopes until there it was!
The Legg Report. She ate it, but Straw saw
paper crumbs at her lip. He whirled the truncheon.

Blair watched the private feed, laughing in his yacht,
having just sold sole rights to his mate Murdoch.
He opened the Budweiser fridge, there they were,
golden quail eggs. He gobbled them. They were free after all.

The Theory of Chaos

The big bang is universal point zero,
the epicentre of a feedback loop,
a cosmic pendulum swings through it
that we follow without a clue.

The fast elapsing of the present
in an instant becomes our past.

Our futures are unwritten chronicles,
we measure our progress as time,
gravity, the constant driving force,
powers pumping pistons along the line.

Mutation of patterns shift atomic structures
to create complex systems from simplicity.

We judge imperfection as humans
with our five senses we are blind,
we stare at our watches obsessed
while fractals fracture inside our minds.

The theory of chaos.

Recommended Reading

1 -

2 -

3 -

4 -

5 -

6 -

7 - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

8 -

9 -

10 -

Hollywood Abridged

xXx

A bald man thrashing;
a muscle tattoo
punches a man
things explode.

Legally Blonde

A blonde woman
isn’t stupid;
she is instead
an attorney.

The Fast and the Furious

Some people go fast
in Hot Wheels cars.
Vin Diesel sports
a grappling hook.

Under Siege

Steven Seagal
is not a chef, oh no.
He kills, things explode,
with no expression.

Rocky

A squared circle, a newcomer
with a face like a stupid cliff
steps in and takes out the Champ,
incoherently mumbling a name.

The Day After Tomorrow

A father and son kept apart
by the world’s biggest storm?
America doesn’t think so!
Do wolves live onboard ships?

Richie Rich

The boy is loathsome;
stuffed with golden cheeseburgers
he fights robbers and buys friends
in his own private American Dream.

Moonwalker

Michael Jackson fights
drug gangs and Joe Pesci
to save kids; he turns
in to a freaking robot.

Con Air

Imagine the acting in TV’s Casualty
in an world in which John Malkovich
hijacks an aeroplane and Nicolas Cage
has long hair and an appalling accent.

Titanic

Leo Di Caprio fucks
Kate Winslet.
I think we all know
how this one ends.

Terminator Salvation

A great war between man
and machines rages brutally
unseen, unheard and unfelt
beyond a gruff Christian Bale.

Lethal Weapon

Riggs!
He’s crazy!
I am too old
for this shit.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Scenes fly by, claws scythe
Logan drowns in introduction.
Hugh Jackman is unmasked,
Stan Lee burns the family tree.

Night at the Museum

T-Rex skeleton stamps marble hallways
where the indigenous live behind glass.
Robin Williams is an American hero
heartstrings drip acrid schmaltz.

The Yes Man (Based on a book by Danny Wallace)

Everyone’s favourite rubber-face
Jim Carrey, shouts and gurns throughout
mawkish Yankee hawk shit carved
from purebred British horse-cock.

Hot Flirt Prime Silk

Hot
Flirt
Prime
Silk

Hol
Furt
Plime
Sick

Hel
Fuct
Plimp
Suck

Hem
Funt
Plump
Sock

Hen
Fust
Slump
Pock

Fen
Lust
Stump
Pork

Fem
Lush
Stomp
Fork

Humonkey

Aged twenty-five, bedtime is all arm-swinging
and ball-scratching, increasingly aware of ape-like ways
scrabbling low at beige carpet, grunting and lazy,
cold and naked, close the door to my own cage
with a raging erection which requires reaction
but my mate is so far away so, frustrated and alone,
beat out the rest of this metaphor before falling
snoring asleep; just five short evolutionary steps
short of flinging shit with my sweet prehensile tail.