A Horse on the Boat

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Charlie Horse set up the computer to watch a DVD in the top half of the screen whilst typing in the bottom. He watched Apocalypse Now. He liked the beginning. “Saigon… shit…” He was off to Saigon for New Year… shit… he lived there in 2001… shit. “Everyone gets everything he wants,” says Martin Sheen. “There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story is really a confession, then so is mine.”

Horse is not terribly interested in depth, or truth. Everybody lies. He doesn’t know who or what he is: he doesn’t even know how to know. You decide. Horse decides who you are. No one knows where he came from or where he is going. No one even knows what to think of his own mother. No one knows his son. No one could, would or should have been anything other than he is. There are no alternative pasts, just as there are no alternative futures. One Charlie Horse, one Charlie Chan. One past, one present, no futures. No ‘if’. Even in the simplest of matters - food - people rarely know what they like or dislike. They don’t even know how to like or dislike. But they know what to say about food, because they have said it before.

Earlier CH had watched Planet Earth. Animals pursued and killed other animals. Similarly creatures were chased and eaten. Animals competed in painful and expensive ways to fuck or be fucked. A couple of sheep knock their heads together; a wolf kills a caribou; a baboon kills a baboon; ducks are gang raped; a poor Burmese man kills a tiger and sells its penis to a rich Chinese man who eats it; sharks eat seals; pheasants have pretty feathers. It is all so entirely… normal, explicable and only interesting to a very slight degree (possibly visually) - the science is perfectly clear. Watching Apocalypse Now and he sees more or less the same going on. Drinking, fucking, napalming, dancing, drug taking, fighting, deception, smiling, fear and greed. He can’t generate any stronger an emotional response to machine gunning children hidden under canvas than to crocodiles and dogs tug-o-warring an impala. Why would he? How could he? He would have to be mad to and he's not mad. It was, however, interesting that man with fresh killed Cambodian child in his arms behaves as if he were unhappy, while a dog with a dead impala in its mouth exhibits doggy-style ‘joy’.

“Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamned right. Unless you were going all the way…”

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