Blind.Faith 2.0.50. Tomasz Tatum

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СКАЧАТЬ THE CRASH

       PLAYING TO WIN

       A FACE IN THE CROWD

       WHOLE LOT OF SHAKING GOIN’ ON

       BARNZ BEFORE THE BENCH

       LUNIXX LIBERATED

       DEAD DOGGIE

       A GIFT OF MOBILITY

       ORJEMA

       FORCED RETIREMENT

       THE LONG MARCH

       THE ARK

       NEARER, MY GOD, TO THEE

       KINGDOM.COME

       LADIES NIGHT

       GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL

       THERE’S A BETTER HOME A-WAITING

       THE CUTTY.SHARK

       BENEATH THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN

       TAKE ME TO THE RIVER

       KEEPING HIS HAT ON

       DEAD WATER

       WATER LOGIC

       WRESTLING BULLS

       THE BOATHOUSE REVISITED

       STREET TALK

       LAST SUPPER

       WALKING ON THE WATER

       THE KEY

       OPENING THE CAGE

       FULTON’S ENCOUNTER

       FINDING FREEDOM

       SETTING THE BIRDS FREE

       Thanks

      PART ONE

THE BIRDS

      The velvety dark of night commenced its unhurried morning retreat just outside the bedroom window. The deep inky thick blackness of the night sky, seemingly impenetrable just a short moment prior, seemed to yield silently but visibly to the next turn of some eternal cosmic cycle. It appeared almost as though an immense black bolt of fine silk had begun to unravel, wearing thin and ultimately fraying at its now-opaque eastern fringe. The quiet and seemingly stagnant void of the nocturnal sky at this moment grudgingly acknowledged the first fleeting touches of ash grey and, shortly thereafter, reddish-violet flourishes that heralded the imminent arrival of dawn.

      All was quiet now. The muted energy of an insistent low breeze that had tapped the steady rhythm of time’s passage, almost as though it were a metronome punctuating the seconds, minutes and hours that the earth spent enveloped in darkness, was now finally spent. It no longer ruffled the building’s slipshod tar paper roofing. It no longer tugged steadily at the rain gutters, causing them to rattle and sometimes creak ominously at odd intervals throughout the night. The resulting exhausted calm was somehow reminiscent of the fitful sleep of an asthmatic.

      In the gloomy obscurity of the bedroom, directly adjacent to the bed, stood a narrow hardwood nightstand. But for the still unfathomable darkness in the room at this moment, one might have noticed or even appreciated its fairly ascetic clean lines as well as the slightly Spartan waxy appearance of its timeless Industrial Age imitation beechwood finish. Perched precariously atop this piece of modern utilitarian furniture, standing next to a near-empty water glass smudged with fingerprints and a plastic vial containing a few generic aspirin-ersatz tablets, was a clock whose alarm began at this very instant to buzz offensively, thereby signaling to Ch.ase that it was once again time to rise and shine. The sound that this device produced to underscore its unhappy message at such an inhumane hour was, probably like that of any given alarm clock anywhere else on the face of this planet or thereabouts, as thoroughly obnoxious as it was stubbornly unrelenting. The clock buzzed its vicious buzz with such a supremely assertive–even repugnant–air that it might easily leave a more gullible observer wrestling with the impression that it derived its sense of urgency not through some fallible, fickle human hand but from someone or something vested with a degree of absolute authority that was nothing short of astronomical.

      This clock had a real attitude.

      Under any other circumstances, any display of a similarly dogged persistence at this early hour might well have given cause to stop and think. Was it an exaggeration to regard it to be as compelling and dynamic as a surge of lunar gravity, perhaps inexplicably set in gear at the very dawn of Creation? Where did it derive its authority from, commencing its rude exhortations at the emergence of the first traces of daybreak on this particular morning, much in the same fashion as the ancient Nubians eons ago meticulously aligned their temples at Abu Simbel to allow the first rays of the sunrise, on two sacred days of the year, to illuminate the two middle statues–out of a row of four cosmic VIPs–tucked away in its rearmost chambers? It wasn’t entirely implausible to reflect that it might lead a person of more unstable persuasion to assume that perhaps this clock was somehow synchronized by some higher force, taking its cue from some ominous linear constellation of planets so breathtaking that it would leave a modern-day Copernicus with an uneasy frown frozen on his puzzled face. If it were indeed so, then a mere clock might well be sufficient to inspire a small crowd of lunatics of the likes of Nostradamus elsewhere on the planet to conjure up yet another beanie full of dismal prophecies, thereby managing to successfully scare the collective wits out of humanity for countless ages to come.

      The possibilities were nearly infinite, but only if one were really foolish enough to simply allow the mind to wander at random to think through them, repose in the gloomy pre-dawn darkness wondering whether it is really necessary to get out of bed. Was it just because something as trivial as a clock suddenly demanded it of one? Or if the person in question happened to possess the inclination to believe in the kind of things best defined as supernatural by the numerous Ethernet tabloids that continued to dominate the many screens strategically positioned in the checkout areas of mega.Marchés, virtual or not: that ubiquitous netherworld where the purported virgin birth of domesticated hammerhead sharks in a saltwater basin in places as inauspicious as Omaha still effortlessly qualified as breaking news.

      But in reality, however, things were nowhere near being this extraordinary on this particular morning. This was a rather simple, regular, unremarkable, run-of-the-mill alarm clock owned and armed by Ch.ase before he retired to bed on the evening prior.

      The motive behind this therefore rather unremarkable action was actually quite plain and straightforward as well. Ch.ase had manually, and thus quite deliberately, set the alarm because he simply could not afford to be late to work on this particular morning. In actuality, it was just like every morning, more or less. In the vast majority of modern societies which continually and ceaselessly pride themselves for their advanced level of social, economic and technological development, this, from the earliest days of so-called modernity onward, has always been a sufficiently driving force behind the collective effort of devising, manufacturing, selling, purchasing and arming products as seemingly innocuous as these mass-produced alarm clocks, however СКАЧАТЬ