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Diary Entries and Exits, by John Greenwood

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I haven’t been sleeping very well after all of these bad dreams, and I’ve started taking a lot of sleeping tablets. Sometimes when I’ve been asleep for a long time, I wake up and the light outside is very dim, and the streetlamps are on.

I came across a problem today; Jason The Melt is supposed to have got all his special powers from the radioactive sewage that the overlord is polluting everything with, so what happens when Jason defeats the overlord and stops the pollution? Does he lose all of his special powers? It doesn’t show that bit when you finish the game. It’s inconclusive. I talked to Lisa about it and she said I should write to Miasma Games and tell them about it.

I’ve got some sort of disease on my hands. They look like someone else’s hands. It doesn’t hurt, but I rubbed some cream on them that I found in the bathroom cabinet. Maybe I need more fresh air.

The police have found a body under some rubbish on the wasteland behind the building site. It was like one of those scenes where the police are searching around somewhere, and they’re all talking, and you don’t think they’ll find anything, but then someone moves an old car bonnet out of the way and there’s a dead woman underneath it, staring up at the camera with all dust on her face, and dark, bloody stains on her white jumper. It’s a frightening thing to happen.

I’m watching one of the soaps that Lisa Zielinski is in at the moment, The Best Days Of Our Lives, and after the credits they flash up this number you can call where you can actually talk to Lisa herself. It’s quite a pricey number, but I call it anyway out of curiosity, and video the call so that I can watch it again later. It sounds like Lisa, and it looks like her, although I haven’t got a very high definition on my phone. I chat with her for a while, and ask her some questions about the show and stuff, but she seems kind of stupid, so maybe it’s just some sort of interactive answer-phone program.

On the news they’re showing a bombed out city with people running about with guns, and old women and children wandering about in the rubble and smoke. It’s the human tragedy of war again. There’s one shot of a man no a rooftop firing a gun at the side of a building. He has a blue scarf wrapped round his face, and it’s exactly like a scene in a film I once saw.

I think the phone lines are messed up, because Lisa hasn’t called me at all today, and I thought she would. It’s probably something to do with the building work going on around here.

It’s morning, so I’m watching cartoons, and I start to notice some things about Jason The Melt. There’s a lot of differences between the TV show and the game. Some of the things are the same. For instance, the way he changes from being solid to a liquid to flow down tubes and things, and then changes into it gas and float up into the air. And it all looks the same, and the same characters appear in both. But when you watch the TV show, say he’s in the arctic level, the one where he’s stuck in solid form unless he finds one of the little fires, he just goes through the level once, and that’s it. You don’t see that one again unless they re-run the series, or perhaps you could video it. But even then he’d complete the level in the same way every time. He doesn’t even die. When you play the game it’s a different story. Sometimes he goes through the same level over and over again, until he reaches the end, and then he can go back to the start and do it again, even though he’s completed it. And every time he does it it’s slightly different. But it doesn’t matter how much he does it, because he always has to collect enough doughnuts to be able to turn off the sewer pipes, and then go and fight the android overlord who’s polluting the world. But it’s a totally different story. I mean the overlord is still there whenever you turn the game on, so how many times do you have to defeat him before he really stops polluting the world?

I keep trying to call this girl I know but she won’t accept my calls. I wonder if I’ve said anything to upset her. I met this girl once in a bar who bought me a drink and said, “Hi, I’m Lisa”, and I got angry again and said to her, “No, you’re not Lisa. I know who Lisa is.” And I walked away without finishing my drink. But later I went back to the bar, and she’d gone, and I tried to ask the bartender whether the girl had drunk my drink as well as her own after I’d gone. I thought that if she had drunk it, then it really was Lisa, because she was always drinking other people’s drinks whenever we went out together. But the bartender didn’t know, and said that lots of people came into the bar, and all the drinks had been cleared away.

I found that my coat pockets were full of rubbish and bits of metal, which I threw away, and then I put my coat in the washing machine just in case. It’s something that occasionally happens to me, but nothing to worry about.

I was watching a re-run of the first series of The Best Days Of Our Lives today, with Lisa Zielinski. She was playing Jackie then, but she plays Claudia in it now. Jackie is in this bar, and Jamie, who’s the bartender, sees her talking to someone on the other side of the room. The scene is shot from the back, and at a distance, and you just get to see this person get up and walk out, leaving their drink behind. But you never know whether she drinks both the drinks left on the table or not, because then it cuts to another scene, with Jamie and Jackie talking outside.

In the newspaper there’s an article about how they found this diary that a politician had written hundreds of years ago. They found it in someone’s attic, only it had come apart and all the pages had got mixed up. But now there’s a team of experts who’ve put it back together in the right order. It all done scientifically, with computers.

I thought all the machines and things I keep seeing on the street were because they were building something, but this morning I see that one of the houses at the end of the road isn’t there any more, and some local kids were messing about in the ruins, filthy and shouting at each other. Unless that pile of stones has always been there and I just haven’t noticed. I don’t know how many houses there are supposed to be in this street. I never counted them.

I’m watching one of those things on TV, the ones they have on all the time about two women who go off in a car and have an adventure, and they’re just laughing at everyone, and all these men are coming on to them, but they’re just driving away, and they’re supposed to be in loads of trouble but it doesn’t matter anyway. They’ve got this big red car, and they’re driving down long, straight roads.

When I get inside, I take my coat off, and then try to rinse the blood off the knife under the tap, but the water is coming out all brown and disgusting. I think that it might not be hygienic, but I need to clean the knife properly because some of the blood has sort of soaked into the wooden handle. I tell myself that I should have used the one with the plastic handle, and I decide to put the knife in the dishwasher, and clean it with the rest of the washing-up later. When I shut the door and go out of the kitchen, there’s one of those shots where the camera lingers on something for a split-second, and you know that that little detail will become quite important later on.

I was playing Jason The Melt, and I suddenly noticed these little signposts they’ve put into the backgrounds, quite inconspicuously. They’re all different colours to show you which routes they take you. Like, if you follow the white signs, you eventually get to an extra life, and if you follow the green ones you find more time bonuses. There’s some black ones too on the harder levels that just lead you into dead-ends. You can’t help but admire that sort of consistency and attention. It’s moments like that when I realise how much of my trust and love Miasma Games really deserve.

I’m walking through rubbish and broken stones or bricks, with rusting parts of machinery, perhaps from cars, all around me. A piece of wrapping paper blows against my feet, and I stop to pick it up, but the writing has faded so much that I can’t make out what it is. I look up, and see a figure running away from me across the broken ground. In front of me all I can see are mounds of discarded objects stretching out to a black wall of building on the skyline. I turn around, and the view is exactly the same.

Next to the building site there’s a patch of green grass, and a little bird comes and lands there just as I’m watching, and it starts pecking around, looking for things in the grass. Suddenly loads of birds appear from somewhere. They all look the same, and they all start pecking around in the grass too. I feel that it is a lovely pastoral scene, and a moment of serene contemplation. They are a happy little family feeding at nature’s table. There is a big noise from the building site, and then they all flyaway in different directions. I wonder if Charles Manson ever sees birds like this from his cell.

I got a phone call from Lisa, but she just tells me the same old things every time she phones me now. She may be going crazy, and I think she needs my help before she does something stupid.

It is a nothingy sort of day, so I am sat looking out of the window for a few hours in between doing two things. Outside there’s a red car parked, and two women come out of somewhere and get into it. I am staring at the car, but not really on purpose. The woman in the passenger seat starts looking in at me, probably because I’ve been staring at them. She has a white woolly jumper on and dark sunglasses. After a while they drive away.

I’m reading this book about the Manson murders. I started reading it properly, but there’s nothing in it about what it was like before the murders, with Charles Manson going round with all the rock stars, and getting all his ideas. They don’t tell you what it was really like then. Most of it is about what the police found out afterwards, and what happened in the trial, things like that. They just thought, well it probably happened like this. So I skip on to the photographs. There’s pictures of all the people who did the murders; before when they were just normal teenagers, and then afterwards when they had gone mad and started killing people.

John Greenwood