Man Arena

The title's supposed to be Manchester Arena, for whatever reason it won't allow me to type it. Maybe it doesn't agree with the word chest?

I would occasionally purchase flower from a store in Aloha. I liked to variate the routine so as to prevent robotism and so that the budtenders didn’t become overly familiar with me, some would ask too many questions. It seemed a busy body snooper society to me and most if not all individuals I saw on a regular basis monitored my online Facebook posts. In addition habitual flower smoking seemed to be frowned upon by the budtenders, probably because they were working all day and would rather be doing something else. It wasn’t like purchasing milk and cigarettes from the local convenience store which contrarywise was met with discontent if one abstained from frequentation.

 

Aloha provided some great flower, often it would be priced at a lower cost than elsewhere, and I particularly appreciated and valued their eight dollar grams and I would travel to the town by catching the Trimet 57 bus from outside of the wide vacant parking lot across the road from the law office on 19^th Ave.

 

I had begun to notice over the previous months that there appeared to be what looked to me like bright vibrant circular bands wrapped around the trunk of a fat old tree further up on the hill. I wondered what the bands could mean and signify and I procrastinated for a relatively long duration with the curiosity satiating action behaviour of freely inquiring.

 

On Sunday the 21^st of May 2017 I said to the wife, “we should go out”.

 

“Where are we going?” she asked, and I didn’t answer with words, but I grabbed the camera from the sideboard and we went out.

 

We walked up Main Street, and on a strip of grass that separated the sidewalk from the parking lot was a playing card laying face-up, it was a seven of hearts and I took a photograph of the white card against the green. We crossed over Pacific Ave and down the hill onto 19^th and then up the hill toward the tree with the coloured bands. I quickly learned that this was a primary school and I decided not to take a photograph of the tree because the school was placed directly behind it and the locals seemed to me to be paranoid and hyper-hysterical enough as it was to have a foreign immigrant living in their small conservative town. Instead, I took a photograph of a small rock or large pebble that had a love-heart painted on its surface which was situated at the foot of another tree. Then we walked back.

 

We had decided between ourselves that we would stop at the English pub called the King’s Head on Main Street that was owned by a Yorkshire man from Hull, we had eaten here on two occasions before. They made cheese n’ onion pasties and one couldn’t find such English cuisine in stores across the Portland region it seemed. I often baked my own and sometimes had the family over to introduce and familiarise themselves with the pasty. Sometimes there seemed to be comedy value, like when my step-daughter and her husband had no idea how to eat the meal and scraped out and ate the fillings and left the entire crust casing on the plate.

 

I was never one for public houses, not since my teens, they seemed places to contract influenza or other contagious diseases to me, I was also somewhat introverted and shy, so I didn’t know the regulars, or the staff. On our way back up the hill toward Pacific Ave we passed Forest Grove Fire Station and the Firemen were either testing their hoses, or else having a display and I could see a miasmic cloud of water vapour against an otherwise clear azure sky and I took a photograph of this.

 

We had booked tickets to see the local amateur dramatics group perform the Oscar Wilde play, the Importance of Being Ernest at the theatre in Forest Grove and I took a photograph of the building with the name of the play in clear lettering that banded across the lower quarter of the venue above the main entrance.

 

We then called into the King’s Head pub and I ordered a pint of lager for myself and half a Strongbow for the wife as she seemed to have developed a penchant for English cider. I took photographs of the glasses and a photograph of the blackboard next to the bar area that had the word Yorkshire written across in blue chalk and there was a white rose emblem in white chalk which has been a symbol of Yorkshire since the first Duke of York in the 14^th century, I believe.

 

We finished the last of our drinks and when I got back to the apartment I plugged the camera into the hard-drive and uploaded the photographs, before sending them to my Facebook profile. My friends and family on Facebook, being from Yorkshire would appreciate the images, I thought, they would see that I was happy and settled, we also had friends visiting so I could show them the local pub, they were proper English people and loved pubs. Maybe we could go to the theatre too?

As a series of events had previously been taken from my Facebook posts and become politicised as public propaganda in the tabloid press I made sure to mull over the images before going to sleep. I thought, it really seems as though nothing could be spun from these simple images. They all seem to be in perfect accord.

 

The following morning headlines had not been spun from my online images by the media-machine. Before going to the store I posted an image of the medical marijuana logo which was a green cross in a circle which I would see on a daily basis on signboards at the side of the road. I had wanted to ask Jeremy Corbyn if under his Labour government we could have medical marijuana in Britain? I worried that I may never get to ask him as I’d once dreamed of doing a long time ago, before he had even become a public figure. I posted his initials, JC. In the local Safeway store that morning the manager with the bald head looked at me all macho, like don't be going anywhere near our schools!

 

I had humorously thought of some of the events that the media had been spinning as Fortean events, I had been an admirer of Charles Fort when I was younger, and I found an image on Google of the front cover of a graphic novel and it featured Charles Fort, a cartoon representation of him holding a lantern looking like a sleuth investigating odd occurrences. The graphic novel was called Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained. I posted this to Facebook.

 

In the evening the first news like reports, which were really virtual reality media fictions and fabrications broke across the mainstream. It was presented that a suicide bomber had let a nail bomb off at an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena which they said had killed 23 concert goers.

 

I immediately suspected that this must have come from my Facebook posts in some way, but I wasn’t certain how and I opened up Facebook and looked at my profile and I saw what the media had done. They had turned the rock with the heart on it into a bomb, they had turned the water spraying into the sky into the nail bomb explosion, they turned the photograph of the blackboard in the King’s Head pub into the theatre foyer, and the outer building of Forest Grove Theater on Pacific Avenue had become the Manchester Arena venue. The medical logo was turned into a medical emergency and JC became Jeremy Corbyn on TV talking about the emergency services after the event. Fort became the location for the hoax as the word Manchester etymologically derives from the old Roman-Latin language and means a manned military fort. A “Chester” was a fort.

 

The Daily Mail created fictive tweets from alleged Isis terrorists from their propaganda and disinformation offices saying, “ARE YOU FORGET OUR THREAT? THIS IS THE JUST TERROR".

 

Sometime in the day I read that Trump was supposed to have said, “We were looking for someone to teach Sunday school to the children”, and I found an image on Google of a coffee mug with the words, “I teach Sunday school”. From this they created the first name of the alleged terrorist, Salman, which means, Sun man.

 

The following morning grocery shopping in Safeway it appeared the staff of the store had called the cops out to make a public investigation of me. The cops put on a show so they could act as a felt and seen presence and pretend to be concerned respondents to the needs of the community who had been observing my Facebook posts and seeing the correlations coming through on their television news. The police really knew what was going on.

Before this date a former military man who worked on the self-checkout had “woo-wooed” aloud and excitedly, so much so his teeth almost fell out and he had to capture them and slot them back into his mouth, on the morning the reports of the Russian ship the Liman had sunk. The Liman hadn't sunk outside of make-believe media which was forged after I’d posted images of the Nautilus from Jules Verne’s novel 20, 000 leagues under the sea which I had posted the night before to test the media’s response. I knew it was fake as soon as I saw the online tabloids in the morning, see what they can do with this, I had thought the night before. I was stoic in response to the military man. Similarly after the MOAB had been staged, one girl in Safeway had double-taked and gasped aloud, looking at me with complete shock and horror. For several days I thought I may have been responsible for the deaths of almost a hundred Afghans. 

 

An Irishwoman who worked at the store had once discursively called me a “Brit!” after I had pronounced “tomato” as an English speaker would and not an American, but on the morning after the Manchester Arena hoax she was walking toward me and nodding her head up and down enthusiastically and she came over and said, “hello” to me.