A King For Paradise Flora

A King for Paradise Flora

Published by Mymy Mclusky at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 Mymy Mclusky

http://www.mymymclusky.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table Of Contents

Chapter 1 - Mission Statement as I Survivor

Chapter 2 - My Home

Chapter 3 - Suburbia -The Backbone

Chapter 4 - Sunday - Easy like Sunday Morning

Chapter 5 - Monday -Workin 9 to 5

Chapter 6 - Tuesday

Chapter 7 - Wednesday

Chapter 8 - Thursday and This Is Justice

Chapter 9 - Friday - The Day of the Mouth

Chapter 10 - Severed Heads as Trophies and Hoopleheads in General

Chapter 11 - Saturday and a Different Kind of Work

Chapter 12 - Sunday - Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

Chapter 13 - Funeral to Confirm

Lyric to Song Listing

About and contact Mymy Mclusky

Chapter 1

Mission Statement as I Survivor

It is a game I a play now, looking at everything and wondering how zombie proof it is? Structures, people, clothes, cars, tools, food, attitude, behaviour, everything. I have a little formula that I run through which determines survivors from waste. My formula is indiscriminate and arbitrary, and is probably informed quite a bit by my mood for the day. I have judicious fun applying it to people. Oh, the people I would waste. Of course, I am a survivor and so is my hammer; no moving parts see. It is best practice to be as economical as can be in these times, the survivalist times. As I commute in and around the city, lost in thought and making lists, I too see dead people all day long.

My zombie apocalypse is coming, just a matter of time. For me that time is drawing nearer. The apocalypse should not come as a surprise to people that are tuned in. There are people in the know and they have been tasked with informing the world. A hard task because they are not to cause mass panic. Their message, their signal is subtle, but it is there and it is constant. They have ramped up the message of late with all the TV shows, movies and what not. These flag bearers are usually based in the entertainment and creative industries, as these tools can be kept at arm’s length from the government and military. If the latter were to broadcast such a message it would only be swallowed up and shat on by conspiracy theorists, screaming they only what you to buy more stuff.

The Panic Room movie was great signalling and still greater advice for surviving the initial collapse of the world as we know it. There are two modes for survival when the world’s people first hit the fan. One, you bunker down and wait out the initial panic and brutality. Two, you go all berserker and take what is now yours and defend yourself and carry on like that. A gang strategy will probably work best when adopted for that mode. I know the message is getting through as there are ever increasing numbers of survivalists and folks coming off the grid with increasing degrees of self-sufficiency. I think the former will be the berserkers.

We have had some false starts of late. The pandemics and epidemics have failed to push through. Virus will just have to do better. People will inevitably assist and corrupt the viruses. There will be more than one at the tipping point, as people continue to live and breed in their own filth and that of non-human animals, some of which they have not learnt to eat as yet. Not to mention fucking them, as a lot of individuals have little to no fitness indicators within their own species. Air travel and the global push of high density living will be a massive assist for the new normal. The viruses, the zombie viruses, they will come.

About to hit send, I pause and then add a post script–how is the family? I have sent the email to my brother, who has a wife and three small children. He was enquiring after my welfare as we have not spoken much of late. I tend to keep to myself these days. I am in training. For some reason I could not respond with ‘not well’ in answer to his question regarding my current health status, especially as I have in front of me sheets of paper where I have scribbled and coloured in shapes. I was scribbling people coming apart. Broken, dead, ugly, redundant people, but they have now morphed into shapes. Just shapes. Random, abstract shapes doodled on paper in pen as time wasting and distraction. No batteries, no screens, all turned off as life is tactile for me. I believe that will enable me to get my hands dirty when the time comes.

I wonder if my shapes were people. People that have died and lay where they have died. Rotting or rotten, losing their peopleness to become a shape surrounded by a stain. A stain that was once a life. I see the stain as a soul that goes nowhere but back to dirt. My numerous shapes begin to form patterns, perhaps camouflage patterns, but patterns nonetheless. We are a pattern animal. We go looking for them everywhere and most of us only encounter or can only read the noise, not the signal. The noise is entertainment, the signal is neo-industrial survival.

It is 4:30 pm. It is Friday. I have had enough. My shapes are now stating to depress me as I see them as bruises in a job that slowly kills you, bruises that will not heal. I have time wasted enough and call an end to another week of grind. I am truly a wage-slave, with the mistaken belief that I now have some time to myself. My serfdom is written in the furrows of my brow with a wooden stake tethered to an ox, and even its hoofmarks are present. Another incessant noise tells me there is a cream or day surgery for these marks of life, but the uptake of one or both would only indenture me further. Circular begins with C, so does Capitalism, Conspicuous and Capture. Yep, the little big man is constantly whipping me for his own good. But hopefully not for much longer.

I holla out for attendees as the ritual must began and it begins with drinking, binge drinking. I go out for beers with whoever is available and only two of my colleagues put their hands up. The rest home to feed the kids, watch their shows or they have better options. In the city, the three of us walk to a small bar that this week is generating all the right press across multiple platforms to excite the bright young things. I fear this press as the place will no longer be ours until the media induced, cretinous mob migrates to the place a block away that is only a week old. Where the staff feature in blacksmith’s aprons to hold their tools, devices for ordering and financial transactions, it is as de rigueur as de rigueur itself. I am so tired.

Our bar is crowded, but we still get in for standing room only. As one of us ventures to the slab of wood, which is the bar itself for a deep pocket experience, I scan the room and see the ‘now’ hairstyles on the men and boys. I'm just a boy with a new haircut, and that's a pretty nice haircut, suits, ‘IT’ bags and grunge. Grunge has never gone out of fashion because it is a style. You know it is a style because it persists and you don’t need to open your mouth and explain your poverty, anti-whatever look. I wonder if grunge people have picked up the signal.

I like how the corporate set accepts grunge. They want to be it, which explains the prevalence of and for tattoos, also highly visible in this little arena. It is an arena because the punters are competing. I think they are competing for the best aesthetic life as possible as prescribed by the noise, relentless for pawing after the new. The noise brought this waste drooling here to my place. I know this because I watch this mob post selfies and Capricious begins with a C.

It is not like that for us three, we work around the corner and soon these people, clients and customers will be gone, but we will still be here. Convenience has a lot to answer for. I hear in my mind I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black and that tells me I am not like them and that, at least, is satisfying. Pale ales and a porter have now arrived. Head like a hole, black as your soul, that one is for me, it could be me. We raise our glasses in a salute to the end of the week. The week of work that gave us the disposable income to be here in the first place, to pay these prices for malt, hops, water and the look.

I tune in and out of my colleagues’ conversation as the background noise and laughter penetrates above and beyond what I can hear from them. It makes me look disinterested, bored and I constantly have to shuffle about to let punters past. The two beside me, or are they in front of me now, another quick step and things are back in alignment. These two are part-time students and full-time grunts – well, so am I. They quickly arrive at discussing their aspirations and goals, in short, their future. I would not waste them, but others would and will. They are both studying traditional courses and I imagine them graduating, landing their dream jobs, marring and producing offspring only to watch themselves and loved ones die. I say traditional in contrast to those studying communications and paying fees to learn how to multiplatform their awareness and collect wrist bands. Ribbon culture, it is a thing now, or has been for a while. The real winners are in the armed forces who will feed off the traditionalists and narcissists. You reap what you sow, so it goes and I head for the bar.

As I make my way I come face to face, or thereabouts, with a female model or model female. Dressed in flowing colour blocked layers, she glides across the floor with immense ease with the suggestion that everything else in her life is the same, or is acquired with such. She looks me in the eye for a second and then drops her gaze to my shoes for two more and then moves on. I have been summed up and dismissed within three seconds. I return with more of the same and the week is dissected before plans for the weekend are laid out, as detailed as a map in a theatre of war office. We shuffle and side step around the map as we question each other’s decisions, motivations with regard to filling in and acquiring cultural capital over the next forty eight hours. We are at this for a while and then I notice the level of background noise has dropped. We are now at the point where those after work for one or two have reached their quota and are moving on. There will be a thinning out of the crowd for a couple of hours, before those heading out for a big night arrive and excite the staff. Who will then turn on the music and completely kill the atmosphere. All three of us leave for home shortly after and once outside I smoke up a storm - fuckin do-gooders.

Saturday afternoon I run into one of my neighbours in the corridor of our building. He has an aura that you can only read as that of an arsehole. This arsehole would be well suited to last night’s establishment and then some. I am not particularly fond of this neighbour, as his aura competes with my sense of self. I am not competitive. Well not yet, therefore l lose. Lose what I often imagine. You know he is an arsehole because of his undeniable sense of entitlement coupled to a belittling ego to elevate himself above you or a target. You begin to understand this when you realise that he is not smiling at you, but rather relishing his shit eating grin at yet another opportunity. This grin is like a chasm once a bargain has been found or struck and he will seek you out to hammer you with the details of how canny he is. It’s a oneupmanship kinda thing.

What he doesn’t understand is that I can see his aura and I can see through it. If I was competitive I would take him to task. His aura is a jigsaw, or a paint by numbers picture. All of those little bits coming together under the market’s instruction. I can see the individual pieces and see how they come together to make the whole. In essence, his being is a checklist. A checklist cumulating in an advertised, fake prosperity of stuff and experiences - this is what a bucket list is. He is a lowbrow type of arsehole because one of his little pieces, maybe a bottom corner piece, or the white space numbered five, says loyalty cards.

I have finally worked out why I hate those things. They have always presented to me as if they were the collar-monkey equivalent of scratching in the dirt for two dollars. I hate those fucking things because they are