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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Saturday, October 11, 2008 - 04:47 pm:   

It was the name of a product of two numbers. He peered closely at the packaging: COOL SUNLIGHT: he carefully unwrapped it. Beneath the inner layer of tissue there were a six and a seven manufactured, judging by the smell, from coal-tar soap. He opened the next package of ‘Cool Sunlight’ and it contained two different numbers. Other identical packages had different and duplicate numbers inside them. The previous evening, he had tried using an eight in the bathroom sink, whipping up a rich face-lather that rather belied the otherwise less than promising unproductiveness of the hard soap from which the eight was manufactured.

The outer packaging was well-designed: a low sun on a lemon-tinged horizon with picture-book beams radiating geometrically from it. An inspiration of dawn in a brisk climate. Or sunset, depending on one’s mood. As an Advertising Executive of several years’ experience, he could not help trying to fathom reconciliation between the package and its contents, but he had not yet been able to mind-read the creative juices lying behind the concept.

His personal assistant sat in the desk opposite. She did not want her presence there to make things more contrived than they already were. She knew, however, she was only allowed the position in the office so as to be a gender stereotype and his sounding-board. Otherwise, his thought-process would have remained simply that – a thought-process privy only to the thought-processor.

“It’s a clever idea, do you think?” she said, meaningfully confusing a question with a statement.

“Yes, but I can’t for the life of me get why it is so clever!” His voice was pitched at such a register one could only guess he thought he was talking to himself.

“Hmmm.” She took up one of the packages for herself.

“I know what you are thinking,” he said. “It’s a gimmick so impenetrable, it’s tempting customers simply by appealing to their sense of life’s intrinsic mystery.”

“Not sure.” She adjusted the decorum of her skirt as she swung the chair round further into the window’s natural light. “I can just make out other smaller numbers on the big number. But they are so lightly indented, they would vanish after the first wash, no doubt...”

“It’s a bit like the whole concept of us discussing such a concept in the first place!” He smiled as he said this. She was a dish. He knew, however, that sounding-boards, like washboards, were not meant to be sexy, but simply practical in the skiffle noises made by them or the creamy suds generated to help shed light upon darkness.

“This product,” she said, “may be an allegory for a new purity that only mathematics can provide. A new dawn. Or a new end of day promising a new dawn of clean beginnings. A cool concept that is only cool by keeping its intentions to itself. An Adam and Eve binary system.”

She was aware that she was speaking his own words, to allow him to think of them in the first place. He, in turn, counted on her ability to feed his originality. Advertising was never straightforward. Customers were different from each other. No sales campaign would ever be wide enough. The secret was to create a combination of high and low common denominators in an attempt to optimise reactions to them as an overall pattern of desires and resistances rather than specifically targetting any one of them.

He turned away, knowing when he looked back, she would be gone, fearful of his intentions. She had done her job. Yet why had she not mentioned the fresh black marks on his face or was it an overnight growth of uncharacteristic beard-hair stitched into his jowls and chin rather than having ends to cut? Packaging, it seemed, had become the wherewithal. The product itself need not move sweetly along with the grain of the concept as long as the packaging of the product created the concept it was meant to perpetuate. She had not known he wanted to be told what he didn’t want to be told.

He swivelled his chair and idly watched the sweaty bankers outside the window in the new dawn of a new day slump in near-drunken figures-of-eight towards their exchanges. Each with a five o’clock shadow. They’d no doubt left their wives squatting beside newer more rocky banks to rub their husbands’ skid-marked smalls on washboards by the sluggish suds of sewage.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Saturday, October 11, 2008 - 06:29 pm:   

I should have added that 'Cool Sunlight' is a take on the Global Financial Crisis.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Sunday, October 12, 2008 - 09:41 am:   

pairs
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Sunday, October 12, 2008 - 06:18 pm:   

A lot of nice cool sunlight today as it happens - here at least in Essex. :-)
des

PS: Pairs' Soap?
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Monday, October 13, 2008 - 05:35 pm:   

Sequel: BY A WHISKER: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/10/by-whisker.html
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Monday, October 13, 2008 - 06:27 pm:   

I'm mad. But I'm old enough to be able to write things all day as if I'm at work but knowing nobody will pay me for this work...nor want to publish more.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.157.114.136
Posted on Monday, October 13, 2008 - 07:13 pm:   

I've found the secret to writing is not wanting money, or to be published, but to be appreciated by the right people. To be understood.
I don't think your work was mad
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - 10:00 am:   

Of course it is, Tony - I learned that the first time I ever put a pen to paper. It's why it took me something like ten years of practice before I even submitted anything.

And of course Des is mad. But in a good way. :-)
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - 12:00 pm:   

Thanks, Gary. Well done on your recent successes.

I wonder if one can be sane in a bad way?
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.3.65.135
Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - 12:09 pm:   

Bruce Forsyth?
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - 04:59 pm:   

I liked him in 'Educating Archie'.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 - 05:00 pm:   

It looks as if October's cool sunlight ended today. :-(
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - 01:22 pm:   

The Ghost's Doll: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/the_ghosts_doll.htm
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.5.5.153
Posted on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - 04:45 pm:   

I should have added that 'Cool Sunlight' is a take on the Global Financial Crisis.

Hey Des - I'm curious - what is your solution to the world financial meltdown?
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - 04:58 pm:   

Hey Des - I'm curious - what is your solution to the world financial meltdown?
================================

No pressure? :-)
I'll be back later with the solution. Others may want to intervene with their own solutions in the meantime?
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.5.2.96
Posted on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 - 05:46 pm:   

I'll be back later with the solution.

Wonderful. I'll send Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Gordon Brown, George Bush, etc., word to keep posted.

Get ready for some new members, Gary....
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 12:55 pm:   

I have been asked me above to ‘solve’ the current crisis caused by the Global Credit Crunch etc. For me, money is a fiction, and, at best, a potential magic fiction, whereby belief or ‘credit’ makes money what it is. Otherwise it is worthless. We need, therefore, to create or read more 'magic fiction' to bolster the diminishing money credit (and I have already started with the 'Cool Sunlight' Syndrome) – and fiction the darker the better, because it will show up the ‘money fiction’ as not as dark as we are currently assuming. Once this new fiction (that lacks positive confidence in itself) kicks in, we shall see the money fiction repairing its own negative confidence, by allegorical symbiosis. A leverage beyond that of hedge funds.

Decay & Rot within fiction, too, can be efficacious. The Doll's Ghost Syndrome.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.23.233.246
Posted on Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 01:53 pm:   

I keep walking around and thinking I'm poicking up news from a parralell universe. Credit crunch? no jobs? I've seen loads of jobs advertised in my street, and Madonna and Ritchie have billions for making a so-so Contribution to the world. And I'm ok. What's going on? I keep expecting things to look all Gustave Dore London everywhere, but it doesn't.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.23.233.246
Posted on Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 01:55 pm:   

It took years to shake my feeling that toys had real lives, and it still nags.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.241.139
Posted on Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 05:03 pm:   

For me, money is a fiction, and, at best, a potential magic fiction, whereby belief or ‘credit’ makes money what it is....

That is a fascinating bit of truth; because if you follow the course of the mighty rivers of this current financial crisis, you do eventually come to their trickling sources, and those sources are - individuals, scattered hither and yon, yoked to home loans. The world rested their faith on a market that had gone insanely exuberant, but specifically that the owners would stay and pay off their interest-high loans on speculative-bloated tangibles - the whole crazy model was hinging on the mere psychology of strangers, everywhere.

There was a time before sub-prime loaning, when such faith-based financial ventures was sound; but when they relaxed those lending requirements, they tipped the domino that sent the whole system itself cascading down to nothing. Because the "mind-set" at the source, proved to be unstable: when the people decided to opt out of Des's money fiction, and foreclosures mounted, the gates were opened.

So now the money everywhere is rotted-through because of (as Des implies) a lack of belief: no one wants to touch these plague-ridden financial institutions with their unknown number of disease-festering corpses stacked up in their bowels, because no one trusts anyone anymore - we are back in the Middle Ages, where every smiling neighbor might be hiding the Black Death behind a gentle smile... safer to lock your doors against all the pleading supplicants, and wait for the masses outside to simply die off.

Someone has to "die" because of this crisis - Lord Death is prowling, and He's waiting to be thrown his due. The rich are now scrambling to ensure it's not them, I'm sure that's what all this hullabuloo is - they're leaguing with governments, to make sure the unwashed masses are instead handed over to His tender mercies. The problem is, their whole pyramid scheme was too vast, too large... the little people it turns out are too enmeshed; they have too much power (the homeowners that remain especially: their sound psychology is literally-figuratively balancing the weight of the world right now)... nothing is working to restore the system, to convince the little people to stay in their chains before (Tony) the plague spreads from the mountains to the valleys, where you will feel its effects. We are but a few simple breaths away from the next natural step... the drying up of credit cards, of unsecured debt... it's already just beginning, like THE HAPPENING's whisper of the wind, before the horror hits... and when that happens, watch everything go to Hell....

Yes, this is all semi-mad and tropey and sh*t - in keeping with the flavor of Des's thread (); and because no one can make any sense of this insanity anyway, so I'm about as clear as anyone else is....
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 06:02 pm:   

Bravo, Craig! Spot on.

I'll remember this whole thread for the rest of my life. Which is not saying much. ;-)
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Albie (Albie)
Username: Albie

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.50.191.46
Posted on Friday, October 17, 2008 - 03:13 pm:   

Enjoyed the WHISKER tale. A good use of confusion and imagery.
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Des (Des)
Username: Des

Registered: 06-2008
Posted From: 86.156.32.207
Posted on Friday, October 17, 2008 - 06:21 pm:   

Thanks, Albie.
des

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