John Walker's Electronic House

So the wretched Stephen Green rears his hateful head again, and once more manages to receive astonishing amounts of attention. The Co-Op’s decision to refuse to act as a bank for his hideous organisation has caused the more stupid and reactionary Christian groups to flap around. But none so appallingly as the CPA (Christian Peoples Alliance (sic – they refuse to use an apostrophe)).

In a press release today, they announce a “disinvestment campaign” against the Co-Op. Of all the moronic, spiteful and cruel responses, this has to be the lowest. Such pitiful ignorance, and such a grotesque response, makes me want to scream.

Here is my letter in response to their press release:

____________________________________________________________

Your behaviour is utterly dispicable.

Perhaps the most immediate warning should be that you are siding with the cruel hate-mongerer at Christian Voice. His appalling racism and cruelty would be something I would hope any Christian organistion would distance themselves from, rather than advocate via his nonsensical, attention-seeking campaign.

But that aside – to attempt a boycott of the Co-Operative Bank! Have you given any thought to this reactionary behaviour at all?

The Co-Op is the only major bank that does not invest in arms manufacturers, despotic regimes, or corrupt businesses. It is the only major bank that campaigns for liberty, that invests in projects aimed at improving the lives of the developing world, that attempts to make a difference and manage their business in an ethical way. And you wish to launch a hate-campaign against them.

You have attempted to make this a matter of “The Co-Op are refusing to support Stephen Green because he is a Christian who disagrees with homosexuality.” This is a deception of the highest order. Stephen Green’s awful behaviour has already caused the police to have to shut down his site. His campaign against the Gay Police Association was viscious and deceptive, showing nothing of Christian love, but only earthly hatred.

It is utterly disingenuous to create the impression that the Co-Op’s actions are based upon a Christian stance on homosexuality. It is a stance against vile hate, and as a Christian I am delighted that they are willing to take a stand against such a person.

I dearly hope that you will reconsider such an awful campaign. To attempt to boycott the Co-Op makes me mourn for what has happened to a Christian voice (sigh) in public. Not only does it demonstrate a gross ignorance as to the nature of Christian Voice and the reasons behind the Co-Op’s decision, but it states that Christians are hate-mongering and cruel, willing to crush and destroy anyone who dares disagree with them. Your obfuscation of the issue only further ensures that this is the impression put across.

Please, withdraw your press release, and withdraw from any campaign against the only half-decent bank on the planet. I am embarrassed to be a Christian in the face of such a site. I beg you to reconsider.

John Walker

Well, that’s it. I’m not a youth worker any more.

I’ve finished college.

Um.

It was my last day of youth work today. This morning was a family service, in which we had lots of the young people involved, and an amazing number attending. Apparently somewhere between 30-40 young people were there. Compare this to a regular family service where there are at most about eight.

I did the talk/sermon – whatever you want to call it. It was weird, trying to think what to say as a last thing ever. And I realised that I didn’t want to do a talk aimed at the young people attending. I wanted to do a talk to the body of the church, when they could see all the young people in front of them. I talked about how a Christian is someone who doesn’t judge by appearance, but someone who welcomes strangers in. And then into what? The body of Christ – something I described as nothing more complicated than a group of people, who love God, and love people, serve God, and serve people. How a body of a church is made up of people who never assume that someone else will check that someone’s ok, but checks themselves. People who never assume that someone else is helping, but help them themselves. People who never don’t ask for help when they need it.

And then I had the young people come and stand at the front of the church. I had planned to do this. I hadn’t planned for there to be so many, and it to look so awesome to see them all standing there. It made me gulp. I told them that they were servants to the people in front of them. A few parents mumbled “yes!”. I then turned around and told the church, “and you are their servants.” I then asked for anyone who was involved in the youth work, who led a group of any age, from Sunday School to Quake (our teenage group), who had ever helped out in any way, to stand at the front with the young people. Wonderfully, more people were stood up than sat down. I told those people that they were the servants to the church, and that they had already served so much. I then turned to the rest and told them that they were servants to those people. And, “It’s time to start serving.”

If the last thing I do encourages some people to start looking out for each other more – recognising that being a church means being a body of people who love and serve each other – then I leave happy.

Except I don’t. I leave sad. The truth is, I’ve been looking forward to leaving for a long time. I need a break. I love youth work, but six years of it without a pause, with a degree at the same time, and of course the writing: I’ve exhausted myself. But of course, now it’s over, the reality that I won’t be working with those young people any more sinks in. I will miss them a great deal. Even the horrible ones. Who are never really all that horrible.

So, as of tomorrow, the weird thing is I don’t really know what I am. I’ve given myself the summer to figure it out.

This arrived a couple of days ago while I was away:

—————————————————————————-

Hey

Seems to be some kind of form, but I don’t know what is means.

—————————————————————————-

I’m not going to print the guy’s email address unless he gives me permission (or indeed exists).

If the second link could contact me, either by email or commenting here, we can see what’s happening.

If anyone’s following, these are the sites that appear to be linked to the email I received:

http://www.whatisthiswhyareyouhere.net.tc/
http://enchantedforums.tk/ (the result of the morse code translation)
http://sixdoorsago.blogspot.com/

The UnFiction thread about all this:
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11246

I don’t know if this has anything to do with anything, but someone posting on the blog above has the link:

http://thestrangestoriesofsarahkiddo.blogspot.com/

The Enchanted Forums has the following posted to it:

—————————————————————————-

You are getting Closer to the Truth
Must be quick.

__________________
“What’s the question you want to be answered?” she asked him, as I stalked from behind, taking pictures of the beautiful woman with him. They looked happy together.”

—————————————————————————-

So, um, yeah. This is all weird.

This arrived in my email this morning:

____________________________________________________

Good day, Mr. Walker (or the appropriate time for when you are
accessing this email).

CONGRATULATIONS,
YOU ARE THE FIRST LINK.
YOU MUST HELP ME ANSWER THIS MYSTERY.
THE CONSPIRACY OF B IS TOO MUCH FOR ME.
WAIT FOR IT.
. _ . _ . _ . . . . . . _ _ . _ . _ . . . .
_ . _ _ _ . _ . . . _ _ _ . . . _ . . _ _ _ _
_ _ . _

Excuse me. There is a slightly eventful happening that is about to
happen I must attend to. I would like you to post at your esteemed
blog this email. Even you are a pawn to the rest, Mr. Botherer.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Six Doors Ago
“Open. Close. Open. Close.”
http://sixdoorsago.blogspot.com

____________________________________________________

So far I have:

ENCHANTEDINORUMSDOTTK

And now I must go away until tomorrow.

Even though I’m well aware that my spinny, comfy office chair (forever indebted to David “Anti”Never Phones”Chaos” Burleigh) only goes back so far, it still remains a tummy-turning thrill every time I lean back, feet off the ground, and allow it to catch me.

Life on the edge, ladies and gentlemen. Life on the edge.

Seagulls, or ‘gulls’ as they should more properly be known, since there is no such
thing as a ‘seagull’ (you’d think that the lack of sea would convince most people,
unless they happen to live by the sea, I suppose), are utterly great.

Charadriiformes, as a word, should be enough to convince you of this. Although,
actually, gulls are just one type of such creatures, with waders and auks
muscling in on the sesquipedalian fun. The Herring Gull is the one mislabeled by most
people as this erroneous ‘seagull’ nonsense. It itself is the subject of some controversy,
bringing naturists to battle. Its taxonomy is hotly debated, with between two and
eight different species identified, and no one sure who’s right. Some are adament that the
lesser black-backed gull is in no way the same species, despite sharing very close
links with the more common herring gull.

It’s hard for me to express why I feel the need to tell you all this information,
so I shall leave it as a random treat, a strange nugget of knowledge to carry with you.

Really, it’s difficult to put into words how important it is that I make sure that all
understand my deeply held love for all gulls, and this is not limited to the Herring
but also so many other species, like the dolphin gull, the sooty gull, the lava gull, the
brown-hooded gull… I could just go on and on and on, as they are all so wonderful, and
it’s possibly the most important thing I could ever think to write about. And now that’s
said, I feel I can finally move on in my life, look at things from top to bottom, and
have a complete understanding of what this is really all about.

It’s the closing stretch of college time, and like an angel descending from the heavens, our final two lectures are from Simon Perry.

It’s really quite sad that Simon (Siiiiiiiiiimon) takes the stunned silence of the class to be some sort of negative, rather than the overwhelmed sound of a people processing so much extraordinary information in such a short space of time. (It would be too easy to say that this is further exaggerated by our sheer bemused reaction to being taught… at all).

Anyhow, as with the last time we were lectured by Simon Perry six weeks ago, all the ideas I based a recent essay (or indeed that time, a dissertation) upon suddenly seem either intellectually trivial or grossly wrong. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry when in a dismissive, throwaway remark he says, “Well, you’ve just studied personhood, so you must have been told…” and then goes on to say more useful information in a single sentence than in the previous thirty hours of lectures we had on the subject.

Anyway, enough grotesque sycophance. The point of posting is to offer up something I recently put together for the essay handed in this morning, for the said personhoodityment-ness assignment. A sort of audio collage. The Latin word for ‘person’ is persona (crazy), at one time meaning ‘a mask’, and then later in their Crazy Empire Mayhem, ‘the role in the play’. So what is our part? I wanted to make the familiar unfamiliar, and at the same time try and literal-ise the madness of the media. And then bring in the calming sense of Negativland (I hope this is the first time they have ever been described in such a way) to offer some hope and a challenge. However, all that said, it’s a bit abstract, so I might be talking like an idiot.

It’s called In The World, and it’s here.

On June 7th, Two Secret Service agents showed up at my place of employment and asked to speak with me. One agent said they wanted to talk about something I posted online. I asked what, he one responded “You post a lot of stuff online, don’t you?” and then showed me some color printouts of my “Bush and Guns” pictures. I was as helpful as possible, and explained to them the about the incident in Chicago, and the context of those pictures.

Walcot Nation Day.

First, let me explain Walcot Street. It is one of the parts of Bath that makes me love it so – it’s the place where the knitted toilet was found, along with favourite coffee shop, Doolallys. It’s also one of the places I can really dislike, especially the lame-ass top end with its “ooh, look at us – we sell thing with marijuana leaves on them, and mushrooms, and we’re so terribly cutting edge and naughty.” No you’re not – you’re a pathetic Glastonbury stand writ Bathstone, and the only people you impress are those as embarrassingly naive as you.

Walcot Nation Day is: The Day Those People Take Over.

It’s the close of the Bath Fringe Festival. The festival is a great thing, lots of interesting events and smaller bands playing even smaller venues, but it reaches its self-celebrating climax by closing Walcot Street to cars, and offering people the chance to spend the day feeling oh-so terribly maverick in the way they really just don’t care about the rules! Man! And if only this were irony. On the small stage near the bottom, a sad, charasma-free man stood shouting into a microphone, encouraging the dwindling crowds to shout “WALCOT WAIVES THE RULES!” Do you see what he did there? This is made only more sad by the whimpering dishcloth of a t-shirt he’s stretching over a body that years ago might have fit within, bearing the very same child’s-play on words, scrawled at a jaunty angle across a red brick wall. They’re just WACKY!

If you’ve ever hurried through the Greenpeace fields at Glastonbury, you’ll know exactly what you managed to avoid. Middle class, middle aged couples, breaking out the tie-dye a whole fortnight early this year, the nasty little ratty ponytail pulled outside of his collar this afternoon, both in the sandals they think demonstrate their wild abandon. Everyone’s looking so very pleased with themselves, and you know why? Because they’re smoking a joint, AND THEY DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS! Except, of course, they care very much who knows, frantically looking around to make sure everyone’s noticing their brave flaunting of the law.

I wanted to walk around handing out bras. For goodness sakes, stop it. You could hurt someone, or more likely yourself. It’s not a symbol of your freedom – it’s the reason you have sore knees.

So many people there look as though they might be really attractive, were it not for the fact that they’re clearly five recyclable cartons short of a low-wheat, alcohol-free six pack. That look of desperation to be a maverick, to cling on to some concept of the hippy they once saw on a documentary about Woodstock, and wished they could be like as soon as they could take a week off from the office.

Which is to say nothing of the belly dancers.

I have an instinctive loathing of so-called fashionable, zeitgeist weekday evening activities, that occupy those denied of imagination. While belly dancing manages to stop short of the pure, undiluted evil that is, bah, line dancing (It’s how Hitler would organise a dance. “YOU VILL STAND IN ZE STRAIGHT LINEZ AND DANCE ZE EXACT ZAME VAY”), it’s possibly far more ill-advised for the sagging parade who attend. Wherever music was played, the screeching gaggle of cellulite and sequins shuffled its way to the front, and began their foul writhing soup of jangles and squishing noises.

Wretched. I want to stress, as I feel my opinions could be misconstrued from the above: I think people should be allowed to wear whatsoever they wish, wherever they desire. My issue is with people who wear exactly what they so misguidedly think makes them interesting, as soon as they see something so exotic as a falafel stall. Go home. Get dressed.

In twenty five years of living in Guildford, the only really weird thing I remember seeing was a man driving around a roundabout on a sofa. Now, granted, that’s fairly weird. But living in Bath, I see something like that almost every day.

In fact, were I to get around to writing about these sights on every occurrance, I might have something approaching a regularly updated blog. And were I able to fathom how to transfer photos from my mobile phone to my computer, I’d be able to illustrate these things beautifully. I’m finally getting around to writing something about it today, because I’ve just watched, from my balcony, a group of eight hot-air balloons all attempting to bump into each other at once.

I love Bath. I really love it, in a genuine way. Nowhere else has thunderstorms like it. Nowhere is as capable of having every trend and anti-trend cohabit the same entirely peculiar places. And nowhere else, that I’ve seen at least, has full-size hot-air balloons flying as low as they possibly can, deliberately trying to bang into one another. Unless X-Ballooning is a new craze that has passed me by, I’m not sure this is the usual activity for what I had always previously perceived to be the most sedate form of travel. When I saw the first two hit, I gasped and wondered if they were ok. When I saw them coming around for another go, I realised all was not as it seemed. Another, higher up, immediately descended to join in, while another that had gone so low it actually landed popped back up to make four. They all drifted slightly apart, and then, with the sort of snail speed that made the whole thing a fantastic farce, collided in the middle.

Another example. A few weeks back I was walking back from the train station, and up Walcott Street (which I assume is built on the convergence point of about thirty-seven lunatic-inducing laylines). On the right, about two thirds of the way up, there’s a small, seemingly abandoned, chapel. There’s usually a black iron gate preventing any unsolicited prayer, but for the last few weeks it has been host to a series of increasingly strange art exhibits. For instance, a couple of weeks ago it played host to an array of entirely knitted items of full-size household furniture. Including a knitted toilet, sporting a knitted toilet roll. But that’s not the weird thing I bring this up to mention. He was far weirder.

On this particular day, before I’d known about any of the exhibits, I saw a man out of the corner of my eye. At first I thought it was someone in some sort of quiet distress, standing on the very edge of the pavement, face pointed at the gutter. But this was still just a corner-of-the-eye glance. A double-take later and I saw a man of indeterminate age, wearing a suit, long black coat and black fedora hat, holding a briefcase. He was indeed staring into the gutter, his face completely without expression. Motionless. And then I read the white writing on the briefcase:

this is | you
not a | are
dream | awake

And I began to wonder.

That’s my Bath. A place that offers things that might otherwise only receive their manifestation within dreams. But I am awake.