New_best_6

a mixture of wishes exit poems

david merritt

ISBN 0 9583256 0 X landroverfarm press Creek Road Mangamahu Aotearoa po box 243 whanganui also by david merritt in overdraft at the bank of human kindness gung ho 1987 big on old cars gung ho 1988 which one is the shark? gung ho 1989 55x5 minute poems gung ho 1990 hasty notes frantic scrawl gung ho 1990 no cup of tea at the railway station gung ho 1991 good new friend goes swimming gung ho 1992 big book for 14 letters onecent press 2002 the end of the beginning selected writings gung ho 2004 under wraps the game is always for 3 players, eh? gridlocked in grids onecent press prayers for the geeks this is the book of chips

gung ho 2009

copyleft david merritt 2009 Authors assertion: Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio and television review, no part of this work may be republished, reproduced, reperformed, redistributed or retransmitted in any form or media or by any other means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information data or retreival system now known or yet to be invented, without permission in writing from the author, his authorised agents and his hiers.

a humble prayer for geeks number 4 lord, when we sucessfully reboot the network gateway, please restart the tcpip shaping script and lord, when we use emacs, make our cat and grep scripts work fine and lord may we never have a kernal panic over pci resource allocations and lord when we ping we are able to ssh tunnel and lord through a pinhole port in the firewall, we may see the router and lord if we mount dev slash hda3 as home then please lord make all the chom permissions work out fine

amen

speed of sound request I hope I will be able to hear the sounds of the arguing loudly late at night. I hope the sound of smashing crockery is plainly audible. I hope you save your best emotional scenes for the still of the middle of the evening, when the noise of your constant fights will travel best across the road to me and then go up the misty river valleys, where they will scare THe native birds into noisy flight, scatter the cattle and induce terrible nightmares into the peaceful sleep of small children. Can you do that for me? Conduct all of your fight sequences when atmospheric conditions are best suited for listening and recording. Cheers

bigger picture It takes a big picture of the soul she said, the hard baked earth, cracked windows with views of the sea and the city and the mountains frosty topped in the distance. No dreamers allowed here. As a scientist she only dealt in the practicalities of physics, when some days it all comes down to a simple question of hormones and water based bacteria, enzymes and chemicals or the positions of the stars at night and the size and the shape of the moon overhead.

ill wish list 12 I hope the newboyfriend sniffs and wipes his nose across the back of his sleeve. I hope he dries his hands after the toilet onto the front of his jeans. I hope you find the smell of his post coital sweat repulsive. I hope he never puts the toilet seat down for you. I hope he is sloppy with condoms and terrible with pregnancies both real and phantom.

not sleeping, eh? I build hearths and mortar and paint. I write, smoke a little dak and drink a lot of coffee. I chainsmoke tobacco if I can, all brands. I stand up at my desk to write. I move boxes and books, make piles of papers, shift the furniture constantly, grapple with hardware and software and long pieces of broken cat6 100megabyte ethernet cable. I wield crimping tools and am constantly fixing the leaks and cursing the plumbers. And I read and I read and then I read some more. History, politics, litcrit, autobiographies, war stories of wars long past and forgotten but strangely fought over the same patches of dirt from one millennium to another. sameasiteverwas. sameasiteverwas.

good wish list number 8 I hope he shaves and bathes everyday and I hope he never wears plaid shirts and I hope he can return a top spin off a forehand smash doing the ping pong ping and I hope he doesnt snore like godzilla. I hope his bed is comfortable, not too soft and huge, fucking enormous, so that you can sleep with him spread eagled like a small starfish, akimbo and askew.

tepid pool 11 There is a sterility of environment present here a cleaness to the air, dissolute, clinical, not much humour, this is serious work, the pursuit of health and happiness. 27 she rests at the end of the pool she appears small and diminutive she is in therapy and this place is a part of it. for the moment she glides effortlessly, easily through the water the sum total of her problems is to get to one side of the pool to another, which is how it should be. 34 the chinese women in the spa pool watch me wiith open mouthed disbelief for it is written that one day a barefoot man, unshaven, will turn up at the pool. He will move a bench seat up against a wall. he will look but not speak. In time he will make eye contact with every individual and then leave without anyone noticing his departure.

transparency I can tell by the way things are shaping up already, any fool, especially this old fool, been around the block a few times or more, knows whats what. For a start, a reasonable distance. I shall not call unannounced, nor will I even call fullstop. There will be no more clunky messages left on answerphones, no more mail, no more parcels, no more money, no more presents, no more awkward silences and embarrassed moments. I withdraw. Nothing is worse than a young fool, except an old one endlessly repeating mistakes with high maintence capricorn wives. I hurt easily now and I think that I dont want to be in a position where anyone is able to hurt me any more. Im being smart, calling a spade a spade, protecting my own emotional instincts which I know oh so well are prone to running haywire at the best and worst of times. Im not here to do coffee at your call, what Ill do is wait, sit tight, be quiet. Nor will I see you around because there is no around in this blasted city that I want to participate in. So this is a see you later poem, how much later is now out of our hands. Ive just shifted my orbit and am pleased its moved 500kms away from your centre of the universe. I will, as always, end up a little sadder than normal, bruised from my clumsy attempts and inopportune advances. Ill be licking my wounds and hiding out here in my cave, a sorepaw bear with a long winter of lonely hibernation stretching out once again, barren around me on all sides.

Curious diets of the poor, down trodden and the so called mentally ill. Large pepsi max and big tins of tuna Listerine and caramello chocolate Free range eggs, oranges and heroin Pork bones and basmati rice Single malt whiskey with ripple cut sour cream potato chips Hastily microwaved steak and cheese pies with bournvita Curiously strong peppermints and 2 minute noodles Over boiled cabbage on extra thick white bread toast Tetrapak custard, chocolate fish and pineapple lumps Cans of fruit salad and low alchohol beer Fried white flour and water mix, topped with strawberry jam Roasted mutton flap with low calorie spearmint chewing gum Hydroponic skunk marijuana and budget tinned spaghetti Lime flavoured dairy food and malt biscuits Hot water, soy sauce, sugar and marmite Badly mashed potato mixed with more badly mashed potato Instant macaroni mix and yesterdays left over muffins Stewed cooking apples and edible wax birthday candles.

A poetical aside All good poems will have joints rolled on them and circular stains from cups of black coffee and many mugs of tea and weird pencil annotations and marks, scribbles in three different pen colours of notes and reminders and improvements, post production fixes and DIY. There will always be two phone numbers on any manuscript by the time you move onto the next and you never have any idea who they are and how the hell they got there.

Rural interlude rocks, mud, farmgates, native bush, bumps, ruts, tortured pinetree forests stretch for miles around the pastures of gorse and thistle, slips, gorges, tracks, streams to creeks to river, always water flowing,

we cross a muddy ford in flood. And water is suddenly a liquid

swirling representation of gravity in a horizontal direction always in movement, downwards and sideways to the sea.

The locks have been changed and the police have been called So you had better move your sorry and sad arse out of here. Dont try and talk to me or ring or write or email. My lawyer will no doubt be in touch. If you want your things you will find them where I left them, thrown onto the lawn outside. and; when you wake up in the morning, doused in sweat inside an old sleeping bag, uncomfortable from the couch and; the locks on your life will have changed and the police will have been called. and; did I tell you that you are a horrible, mean discpicable shitty excuse for a man and; For the rest of your life you are going to wonder about what has happened in this house over the last 100 days and; You will find yourself, years later, replaying the events over and over in your mind and; You will want to find reason and cause, you will want to apportian out blame fairly, you will want to understand. You never do.

motherly advice number 11285 I burn rosemary in my room, to absorb bad energies, negative thoughts and wasted emotions. The rosemary smoke then settles to the floor as a powdery dust and you can sweep it up and put it all in the trashcan or use it to help the silver beet plants to grow better. Nice.

a fool, blindly, wishlist number 15 I hope he burns rosemary in his fireplace and buys you all your special, favourite food items. I hope he knows what kind of biscuits you like and when its culturally appropriate to eat pork I hope he knows how to use chopsticks and has a taste for your kind of asian eating I hope he is sensitive and kind and I hope he has endless patience and I hope he has boundless enthusiasm for you.

life gets much better without you Tonight I sit in the company of neat people, three generations worth, we sit in the glow of the huge open fire and I realise that I no longer watch TV alone for an hour a week and miserable but now in good company, with friends, in an excellent, warm, no stress way. Cheers!

poetical mission statement number 12 I look even more gnarley in middle age, grey bearded and nuggety, creased and crinkled in all the wrong places but pleased. Ive been hanging around with pasty faced geeks, religious Samoans, commercial pot growers, the sculptors, painters, writers, the seditious types and troubled law breakers, the usual suspects, not your normal movers and shakers but renegade cash under the table workers, toiling away in the black economy, living in cars and hallways and under the overpasses, cooking at invisible campsites in breech of the open fire bans all year long. They are anticelebrityists, cynics, sceptics, vegan antiwhalers, economic disbelievers, green party retroenviroactivists, global warming pessimists. None of them ever watch tv. And the the the

then there are those at the mercy of the state; spongers, the bludgers, the poor by choice anticonsumerists, sick and tired and worn out, the ragged prophets, permaculturalists and

the hackers, ahh, the hackers in all their shapes and forms, chipping away at bluetooth phones and ATMs, logins, passwords, packet sniffing and magnetic strip copying straight off your credit card and sold for two dollars each to shadowy, former soviet state eastern block europeans, with short term memory loss and rock strong sicilian and eastern seaboard US connections. My peers are the fiscal envelope trickledown cellardwellers, the scrapmetal scavengers, the dumpster divers and the avante industrial pastoral sound makers, the V8 petrol heads wanted by the police, reformed exsmokers or mysterious men who look like the stunt doubles or refugees straight out of ZZ Top, Slayer, Megadeath or Meatloaf. Its the decile of society who own and drive cars without current regos and warrentoffitness. They are bereft of turbo blower valve big bore exhausts. A quick glance will tell you I am no consumer driven materialist with access to hair product by the truckload and no need for twee air freshners made of chemicals which smell of pine glade, lavender fields or citrus grove. I am not made by child or slave labour in china and then bought on special during the once a year redshed boxing day sale. My carbon footprint is too small to be noticed and I have a distressingly short battery life coupled with a fragmented and somewhat overexcited brain. My self imposed poverty means that my 8 year old cellphone is not an object of end of capitalist epoch consumerist desire nor an extension of my masculinity. Nor is my 40 year old car and my 5 year old laptop; both so called obsolete. And how I dress exclaimation mark and how I look, how I look, permanently awry, besplattered and unkempt by bloody choice much to the despair of the exwives. So there.

Lots can happen in 50kms All the drive down from Auckland I am nervous and tense, running over history, reviewing events and trying to patch up emotions. I am full of dread, not looking forward to this at all. Surprisingly it is not up to fearful expectations. I am polite, distant, avoid eye contact. They all reckon I have changed, how and in what way nobody ventures to say needless I dont stay too long, 20 minutes at the most for a cup of tea and biscuit, pack up the kids stuff and off. Your place is the same old same old scene, the empty kegs, the boozing and smoking out the front of the house, the lawns lank and the vegetable gardens overgrown. I am glad to be out of this I think. I silently curse all the way down the coast but by Thames everyone is feeling better, eating icecreams and singing songs. Our holiday starts now I say.

Watching things fall apart in phone booths on the main provincial street, one boxing day, a distraught German couple, travel plans in disarray, spend forty minutes waving hands and seeking some sort of explanation from a higher up sentient being call centre operator. their rental car is down, he waves the agreement as if it was a stone tablet and thus must be obeyed as opposed to being reworked and misconstrued. To the background of bikes blasting past at regular intervals I watch their travel plans and lives and futures disintegrate and fly apart.. In translated slow motion, interpreted and reinterpreted, laid bare in two different languages.

Retrospective Six years ago I was a lot fatter and smug. I thought I knew shit and was shithot. I spot an old ID photograph from back then and see myself, jaw jowelled, confident sly, cocky and smug. I was unknowing that shit can and will hit the fan at any point in the future, repeatedly, for the rest of our lives and we never know when that future arrives,

do we, eh?

Home I like it here with the gentle sounds of the refrigerator, a cup of tea on the chair beside me, a quiet night at home. theres the clock on the wall marking out the passing of time washing dishes washing clothes picking up kids toys off the floor making the beds doing the vacuuming

perhaps I can read... these poems one night from my roof to you or one day you will hear them on the radio or even worse, there they will be on some poxy, late night arts programme on the telly or they tour the country and then they end up overseas at many differing addresses in berlin, moscow, prague, amsterdam, london, edinburough, the states. Finally they migrate back home and nest forever in my rafters. These poems also like their new life as spoken word CDs and mp3s and oggfiles. They end up in the hands of diverse fans from all over the world which I dont mind at all.

determination allow it to govern and drive. it comes from the heart and can be recognised by the icy feeling ive alluded to here many times before. respect and follow in footsteps and traditions. At no time try and reinvent the wheel unless of course the wheel is completely buggered and needs to to be respoked, rerimmed, have the discs shaved and finally rebalanced back into trueness. remember respect. It is the thread of society that is woven into all of us and which may at anytime show signs of unravelling and although the unravelling is very painful much good will come of it in the long run and although it is a long run race, remember that it is the stayers, the players, the creatures with the big hearts that last the best over long run races and will win them over great distances.

machine shop the smell is so familiar of oil and burning metals and I am in an engineering workshop with merlin fixing his landrover gear stick swivel ball locator pin, where the machines sit squat, solid, metallic, green, they carry the names of english engineering equipment manufacturers from manchester, sheffield, bradford, wigan, leeds, they sit in serried rows, quiet for now but with an unexplored kinetic menace I remember how easily they would cut crush nick mangle maim innocent digits and flail raw skin raw, pinch, burn, bruise, tear my father daily each and every item of equipment is designed to mould or transform metal in some way to bend twist pound press drill cut thread crease cast bolt rent and join but there on the floor cast down into the oil ingrained by various spills and accidents decades old are the spiralled shavings swarfs thinned down into small representations of reverse opposites negatives in a parallel universe they mimic and complete twisted threads of bolts and studs, grindings of countless rusty sheets and plates misplaced welds and burning molten metal droplets

These are the things that you are to me but there is no blame because these are the things that I am not You are the email that never arrives, oft talked about but never sent. You are the letter that is never posted yet is still long awaited. You are the walk on the beach but never conversationally side by side next to each other. You are the phonecall that never comes for a moment which will never arrive. There is no blame. But mark my words. One day you you find yourself walking down a long hallway with no end in sight. Eventually you will notice that you have been walking in a curve and have turned a long gentle corner and you will have passed from being young with every possible reason in the world to being older where none of your excuses are valid any more. On that day you will understand this poem for the first time.

start of the maths equation analogy You said once that there were 20 warning signs, that we fly off in five percent chunks, the slow erosion of potential friendship into a spiral of ambiguity and doubt and fear and cruel, calculated hate. Simple maths says this five percent erosion will happen over an eighteenmonth period twenty times and then overnight all love for each other will apparently be gone. Cha!

Mixed intellects Although Im pretty smart I am also pretty stupid, maybe its a tragic flaw, a curse, some small split in my genetic makeup of chromosomes and dna that has made this so. mum tells me I come from a long line of eccentric yorkshirepeople including white witches and agoraphobics and manic compulsives and depressives and the just plain strange and weird.

A good time to start the music is by Mozart. Its the concerto for clarinet quartet in A minor which consists of allegro, adagio, larghetto, menuetta and allegretto movements. Sad and yet uplifting at the same time. Benny Goodman plays the clarinet with the Boston Symphony, conducted by Munch. It makes me whistle, not that I have a lot to whistle about at the moment eh?

first friday out in 15 years The youngsters, drunk as rats one and all, cue like cattle at the entrances to the nightclubs and bars. It is 2am and I am an anthropological fly on the wall, engaged in the practice of watching and writing. Amongst the facile made more stupid by booze, I am, to the best of my knowledge, once again the only sober poet in the middle of a rolling ocean of pissed youth, half my age. Fifteen years have passed since I last did this. The language is coarse, staccato, full of vernacular, interspersed to the sound of braking glass and the doff-doff-doff of modern music. I am thankfully unknown, unobserved and completely alone. I am not hunting for anything here on a cold and windswept and busy alleyway in Christchurch. I am out, with all my senses and synapses firing, wearing the big yellow anorak from Julian, warm and content, happy at this current state of affairs, at least for now, surrounded by the glazed eyes, the stagger, the lurch, the hair toss and brastrap hitch, the shrill, the stupid, the underage juice freaks, the machismo grunts and yells of intemperate men, the healthy lust of youth tinged by uninhibited optimism. Through the throng you notice the by themselves, the alone, the desperate and the disparate, the malcontented, those way outside their comfort zone. They are not having a good time this time around. I see the skimpy dressed shiverers, the fraught, the try-hards, the fucked up on E and P and coke, the high on lifers, the calculators and the appraisers, the bottled blonds with their dark roots showing, the pickup one liners repeated over and over and over again endlessly along with the sad and singular, the unhappy who are disintegrating into despair. I see the bolshie, the aggro, the simply obnoxious, the foolish, the thoughtless, the revolting, the cunning and the scheming, the brutal and the callous, the non-thinkers, the obese squeezed from both ends into too tight clothes which burst and swell seams. Then there are the constant texters on their cellphones, the sly groggers from their hip flasks and paper bagged bottles, the dorks, the jerks, the simpleton show-offs and the look at me, look at me undulations of the public attention seekers, the hunt in pack blokes, the over dressed and the over fleshed, the brash and the crass, the constant preeners and the cop a feelers. I see those looking for trouble and those being dragged along for the ride, the socially adept firm on their social feet and the insecure and the inept, still finding the meaning of the word balance while they painfully crawl their way through the night. Then there are the jealous, the envious, the flabby and the waifs, the quiet and the born again sreechers, the wrinkled and the svelte, the glancers and the watchers, the jigglers, the charmers, the stuckup haughty, the proud, the young, the aimless, the fat thighed deserters, the arms crossed defensives, the staggerers on their high heels, unbalanced, the old enough to know better and the youngsters who impatently do not. Everybody looks but few, only a tiny fraction, notice. I see the seekers, still seeking and the content who are happy with their lot, the teasers, the appeasers, the private jokers and the public humiliators, the appraisers and the appraised. I see the lost and the try hards, the blow hards still blowing, the fat arsed and the blushers, the cuddlers, the snugglers, the hand holders and the arm tuggers - stretched, grasping, reaching. Then there are the public pasher-uppers, tounges lashing and saliva slobbering for all to see, the well matched and the odd pairings, the clingers-on and the above it alls, too cool, too aloof to give a hoot. I see the lost sheep huddled in a corner with the wolves circling, the end of the nighters, the helpless and the angry, the at-ease weird, the malcontents, the public grapplers who like to wrestle each other, the whistlers who smatter oaths and curses. Then there are the cold and shaking, goose-bumped, the warm who are secretly pleased, smug and replete or the unhealthy and the ill at ease, sick and disappointed, interspersed with the minimum wage slaves of the bar staff, the security people and the cleaners. I see the shrews, the shrill, the belligerent, the bored all rolled up into one feisty female package, the flash us your tits and the show us your growler brigade, yobbo yelling, the trashed, the toasted, the proud and the over-dressed, the whisperers and the surruptitious phone number exchangers, the calculating and the simply horny itching to scratch. Its a wonder how we manage to ever procreate given this randomness, this mess of our meetings in the first place. Enough.

First the process Dont be afraid of anything and watch for kids and parents and grandparents, the minutiae of life and all it holds in every little detail. watch for the small things, the tiny things that dont usually get mentioned or recorded or documented. Follow your gut feelings and instincts about everything but be prepared at all times to admit ignorance and lack of knowledge. If you dont know something then always say so and try and fill in the gaps in your understanding.

Prayers for geeks number 22 Lord, may my outlook express addressbook never be subject to a visual basic script and spam three thousand others with malignancy and lord may malware and spyware from distant balkan states never keylog capture and spit my banking details to the Triads of Hong Kong and lord may I never receive zillions of weird and curious emails extorting me to increase my breast or penis size or transfer funds to bogus nigerians and lord may i never click on an unknown jpeg attachment and end up in the land of beastial pornography and lord may my virus software never allow my registry files to become corrupted, snafu and then completely fuck my partition table and lord may direct marketing, customer loyalty programmes and data mining companies nor organs of the state never capture my entire personal web and financial history, burn them to DVD along with 2 million others and then leave them on a wellington bus and lord may my bit torrents never loose their encryption algorithm and render them naked and visible to the project echelon dish at tangimoana. amen

A list of nice things that could happen in our lifetimes The red cross become funded entirely from the annual proceeds of the sale of hot cross buns and easter eggs. A backyard scientist in Blenheim invents a method of making cheap ethonal fuel from the biomass of pinetrees. People everywhere start vegetable gardening on the grass verges outside their houses in suburbia In low decile state housing areas, new collaberative spaces are created by tearing down the backyard fences and making larger, communal and more human spaces. Computer games manufacturers start to incorporate standalone libraries, wikis and centres of education into their products and over time these become more popular than pimping the ho, drive by shooting and running over the pedestrians. A japanese bioenzymeist invents an ozone replacement which when released into the atmosphere fills the holes above the poles forever. Total disarmamant takes place. Weapons manufacturers retools to make ultra-cheap solar and wind power generators, water pumps and desaliantion devices and green bombs containing seeds and watering gels which are propelled into arid regions to make the rainforests and tundra grow once more.

a bakers observational dozen 1. Michael was dating a real estate agent twice his age who sat, reptillian and appraised his youthful vigour like the fittings in a freshly renovated kitchen or bathroom. 2. Anne changed her hair colour to blond so that no one, especially her exhusband, could recognise her when he was dating his new girlfriends at the Christchurch Cup race meeting. 3. Over a lunch of pumpkin and feta pie, Shelly realised that her recent lipo and collagen and cut and tuck boob, bum, belly and face surgery had been money well spent which more than compensated for the nagging feeling of waste and loss she felt after the eighteen year marriage breakup. 4. Phil was unable differentiate the age of women, often mistaking daughters and sisters, siblings for mothers. His inability to read the situation would on a regular basis see him attracted to both mother and daughter with the inevitable tragic consequences. 5. Ruth disliked her breasts so much that she wore a perpetual arms crossed over the chest stance, she frumphed and humphed her way through life, aware at all times that her deportment was contributing to her appearance driven misery and heartache. 6. Sue wasnt one to complain, picked out from a website lineup of Phillipino teen brides and effectively sold off by her family to a useless fat slob of a drunken husband three times her age whose favourite recreational activity was rewatching the all blacks win the 1987 rugby world cup on a big screen plasma tv while engaged in unrequited and often sadistic sex. 7. Claire drew the line in the sand at regular intervals and predetermined points. Fearful of emotional intensity, she drew short term sexual satisfaction from a never ending succession of one night stands with dreary noncommittal professionals, married men mostly, chartered accountants, lawyers and property speculators. 8. Sharon was a social gusher, a hearty greeter who in public appeared totally happy, content, upbeat and at ease. At home alone however she reviewed the events of the day with a tired cynicism and an unrelenting, nagging feeling of envy and sadness. 9. Johns partner was an unrelenting nasty bitch who he was sexually addicted to. The only moments of consistent joy, happiness and bliss he achieved on a day to day basis arrived sweat soaked and humid, exhausted and appalled as he matched the libido of the bitch blow for blow in the bed of his own making. 10. Barry worked hard as a small scale commercial fisherperson, captaining a trawler with an authorative air. His three teenage daughters, whom he treated with blind fatherly love, paraded next to their dad in all their slatterly, Paris Hilton lookalike glory.

pause that refreshes Its dinner, once a fortnight, youve smoked your first joint in five days and are a blathering, running off at the mouth fool. Words trip and fall from your tounge without forethought or malice. You realise that in this life you are alone at all times even when in good company and its as if you have a tattoo on your forehead, a branding that says only visiting. You will never settle and be at ease like the rest of these strangers. So he was the one that drank coffee all night. He was good at that. He revelled in his awkwardness, with his back turned he didnt care who or what he offended. It was all of no consequence to him because he felt the fear and the freedom, the fear and the freedom both at the same time. He was simply what he was. Change came but was immaterial, around him people swirled but like the glasses he had borrowed for the night, nothing came into focus. He blurred and in turn those around him blurred. Finally he left.

prayers for geeks number nine or lord please make the digial swiss army knife with a; 2 terrabyte usb flash memory and a wiki tarball of everything an lcd video projector and gigabyte wireless ethernet cb and sw and fm and am radio cellular phone and paging mp3 player, digistll and video camera microscope and a telescope with a connection to the hubble, and a microwave for cooking food. a dictaphone and a microphone and an answerphone, swipecard and magnetic strip and barcode reader, g.p.s. and emergency locator beacon, universal t.v. slash car alarm slash door opener remote, torch and mirror and cigarette lighter and can and bottle operner, a toothpick a laser pointer and a plasma cutter. and lord this device is no bigger than an iphone, there are no cables on this device and lord may its black gunmetal titanium case be both solar powered and leech its electricity out of the static charged cosmos fog and lord may it seek its own video device nearly or use a h.u.d. to a cool pair of geek glasses which gives me as much or as little digiglitch info as i need. and lord may i type and play a keyboard on a pressure sensitive hologram as well as speak to tell it what to do, and lord this device should be an electronic encrypted wallet, emulate every sytnthesiser, game console and computer and o.s. ever, be an interweb and realtime streaming metadata server, an alarm clock and barometer, a kickarse drum machine and 64 track recording and playback studio. and lord it must suck data from everywhere around it like a vaccum cleaner and it should open every filetype known to computing, ever and lord this device must last at least 35 years, always be updated for free and working always as perfectly as the day it was first made. cheers lord.