2nd Part of Flicker and Two Photographs

Wandering around Cumbernauld with my camera occasionally turns out to be a fortuitous experience. I assume these were either added for Cumbernauld Park, or are a harking back to the long lost Cumbernauld Castle. Answers on a postards... (hell, even just tell me what the crest is).

From the Cumbernauld News: "...the Dovecote which took pride of place in the grounds of the long-disappeared Cumbernauld Castle. When the ancestral seat of the Flemings, Cumbernauld House was created, there it remained. It was in its own way a symbol of power as only landowners were allowed to keep and kill birds."

I'll insert merely a section continued from the last part of a short story I had on here called "Flicker". Anyway, you can see for yourself:


The Diary of Jacob Strachan - Day 2 - Voice Recording (vocals slightly garbled, but still audible above a track behind it - Coriolan by Beethoven)

The monster at the centre of the Milky Way is a serene, apocalyptic novelty from the beginnings of the universe.

First, let me take you past Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, through the Ice Giants and past that shard of frozen methane, Pluto and on, into the darkness, through that void until we pass the vast spears of Alpha and Proxima Centauri…

Continue, further, until we reach the chaos and wonderment of our Galaxy as we spin into the gravity well of the supermassive Sagittarius A Black Hole. The beast, unkempt and isolated and the centre of the dance ring, twirls like a performer and waits until straying asteroids, comets and stars find themselves slipping and fall, descend, plummet into the archaic void and breathe the stale, crushed air and dark light of the centre, the beginning, of the antipodes of our home.

All of this, crushed beyond the repair of even the most advanced civilisation.

All of this, a Ballet to your worthless heritage.

One day a brother, a remnant of long dead heavens having bred a civilisation of its own, too immense to survive for any sustained era went Supernova, collapsed, and drew the rest of the universe into itself. There were no seasons, no winds, no snow, no icy Armageddon here, but death and fear. However, it will stray into our Solar System, and on day one, swallow Pluto with little more than a smile. Day Two, it will draw Neptune and Uranus out to it with more violence, but still, no apparent regret. Inexorably drawn to the leviathans of our Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn, they will swirl and disintegrate away before your telescopic eyes, and it will be the end of time and hope. By then, we will have nothing, no hope, no fear, no four-minute warning because everything is doomed. If we are lucky, we will merely disintegrate on our own, instead of surviving the melancholy firestorm of Solar Flares previously unimagined.

The thing is, though, your civilisation will not be remembered when the Sun is pulled apart and the atmosphere ripped from the Earth in little more than an hour. Everything you have fought for, campaigned for, worked for, is now nothing but the swirling dust clouds disappearing beyond time, beyond the event horizon of the last Black Hole your civilisation will ever witness, and you will disappear into that un-calculating Id void. It’s laughable, but you are now little more than an atom, where once you were Gods.

It is cold, it is terrifying, but it is the basic building block of the universe. An example of Gravity at it’s most malingering and violent. There is no sentience; it is merely a universal law ripping a hole in space-time. It merely exists: thoughtless, cold, persistent and inevitable.

Rape the sweetheart you’ve been too shy to talk to; masturbate over the cold, dead eyes of your employer. Quickly… try to find the meaning in the novel you never read. Beat the worthless souls of your enemies to a pulp.

In the aimless brutality the universe concocted at its conception, all peace is pointless. Every second is the Revelation of Saint John. You should climb onto the stage and stand, be a preacher slamming his fist on the pulpit. Taunt the crowd with your unsatisfactory truth. Everything is disappearing into the void, and you, clearly, are nothing within this bright, beautiful, brutal cosmos.

It is your last chance to avoid being the worm swallowing earth for meaningless microscopic tunnels, your last chance to evolve, to be something more. The pretty ones want the pretty ones, so you may as well have what you want since the universe did not create morals or vague, delightful rules for a better ascension into a greater, more energetic realm. Your pretty friends created that when they lied to you. The universe wants to slam giant slabs of ice the size of your town into gas giants and water worlds. This is the meaningless heritage of your nation; it is your heirloom, your reward for sitting through your lawyers numb words when he reads you the destination alpha of the Will to the Hyenas you call your Brothers and Sisters.

I speak, humbly, as a witness.