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Those who know me and who are familiar with my writing won’t be surprised to discover that Steve Jobs doesn’t appear in this new, previously unpublished short story. It doesn’t include his much-reported last words, either; so if you don’t know what they were, I recommend the search engine of your choice. The first ‘chapter’ follows, by way of a teaser.

I.

WHILE CUTTING BACK the flat-leaf parsley today I discovered a South American rainforest tribe living in the vegetable patch. I know they’re from the rainforest because a couple of weeks ago I saw them on the National Geographic channel. One of those nature programmes. Pretty much naked apart from the body paint. They don’t believe it’s good to age so they kill themselves before they become a burden on the tribe. Good on them, I say. Virtually unknown to science and now living in my vegetable patch.

One of the young tribesmen led me in amongst the parsley. He seemed nice enough but there was an unusual smell about him that suggested he might be best left untouched – although that may also have been the compost I’d just put down. I couldn’t believe how much wildlife there was in the bin when I opened it: maggots, earthworms, woodlice, earwigs and beetles. That makes for good compost, I suppose.

My dreams used to be like epic movies. Now they’re like infomercials. But you don’t want to hear about my dreams any more than I want to hear about yours.

In any case, this wasn’t a dream.

There was sandalwood incense drifting out of the Shankars’ house as I came down the steps with my secateurs. For the briefest moment I felt at peace, satisfied with my lot, until our toddler started shouting at me to stop making a racket. Where does the little shit get it from?

I banged my head on the lintel under the house looking for my trowel. There’ll be a jumbo egg the colour of a bloody great bruise on my forehead tomorrow – or “four heads”, as the toddler would say. He ran off, thinking he was going to get the blame, with his hands clamped over his ears because a police car and an ambulance went screaming past the house with sirens blaring.

Noise pollution everywhere: prattle on TV, chit-chat on the internet, the endless babble will overwhelm you if you let it. It’s the sound of the Earth’s engine red-lining and I feel it getting faster and more out of control until eventually it reaches its threshold and ends in an Almighty Crunch.

Social media should be a distraction. It may be media but it sure as hell isn’t social. Nobody replies to my tweets, nobody replies to my replies, nobody re-tweets my tweets. Don’t even get me started on Facebook. Sometimes I’ll click the wrong link and have no idea where I was going or why. The rest of my life has gradually come to feel this way, too. A Japanese MP drinks Fukushima water, millions of children starve to death, more than one third of the seven billion people on the planet struggle from day to day, the media blather on about Kim Kardashian.

I saw a comment on a blog: Some degree of self-delusion is required to maintain a human ego in a world with seven billion strangers living in it. I endorse that. At least I do if endorse still means what it used to.

A friend of mine told me in an email, Don’t let the online world drain you – people are energy and everything else is a heat-sink. The only energy I have is negative. I sit alone most nights, stewing in my juices, whatever that means. You can’t get the goodness from here, it says on the flap of this box of crackers I’ve just opened, try the other end. I think I know what they mean if they’re talking about crackers but does it have some otherworldly significance?

And when it says Sealed for freshness on food packaging, does the manufacturer mean Sealed in case some psycho poisons it, kills your kids and you try to sue us or does it mean Only remains fresh as long as seal is intact – don’t blame us: you broke our freshness seal?

The other night at dinner I told the teenager he’d make a good homeless person because he was talking gibberish again. I can talk. Anyway, for some reason he took this as a slight. A kind of phobia of his, apparently: becoming homeless. I tried to make amends by asking him if he’d seen the movie The Road but by then it was too late. He says he avoids depressing films, which is weird because he listens to the Smiths all the time. What is it with kids nowadays, don’t they have any of their own music to get weepy over?

There was a kid of about his age at the Occupy protests with a marker pen and a whiteboard – a bloody whiteboard! On it he’d scrawled Kids being entraped in the poverty cycle due to lack of effective govermental actions. A comment on declining standards of education or postmodern irony?

Nothing makes any more sense to me than this.

The house is full of toys and odd socks, like it’s been hit by a bomb that preserves buildings but messes up the clothes. It doesn’t bother anyone else but it makes the noise in my head even louder. I don’t mind chaos as long as it isn’t in my head.

Julie says I need to get out more. “Get a life,” she says. Where are the clichés of yesteryear? Round here somewhere, under all this crap. Get a life! That’s easy for her to say – she has all the quality time. On the bus home today I caught sight of the homeless guy who sits on a piece of carpet outside the cinema complex on Queen Street with a cup and a mangy dog. Today his cardboard sign read:

MY NAME IS RILEY
AND YOU TOOK MY LIFE

(continues)

• The “Steve Jobs’ last words” (e-book) is available now from the Amazon Kindle Store, $0.99
• Find other wordsSHIFTminds e-book titles here

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