Texts to Zero

There's a chair fallen over in the garden I've been meaning to pick up for a year. Quiet now and listen to how enlightened I am. I never buy a car I wouldn't be happy to crash. Stop bullying yourself and bring me a sandwich at once. When I die I want you to have my feet. Sorry, we never hear the doorbell, but the smoke alarm goes off if you open a bag of bombay mix. I've tried telling her. And the news just keeps getting better. Minidiscs were always my favourite except for before they existed and after they became unwieldy. I have a lot of explaining to do I guess. Nah shaving isn't one of my interests but have you seen what happens when you don't do it? Well she tends to remember things, I think it's one of her hobbies. Usual, but I did this course, how to live with yourself, it was alright. If he's gonna be a big shoe about it tell him I'm a very busy man with a lot of things to do. It's about a comedian but most of it isn't funny, I think you'd like it. I know, she has me on the wrong list. There was no-one official to sign our timesheets so we just got the tallest man in the marquee to do it, hope that's alright. Two weeks in a room with the lights off, yes, but with more powerpoint than there'd be at home. Mostly a cross between a cashew and a Nik-Nak. Have one installed in the garage if you like it so much. Thanks, if anything changes I'll extremely let you know. We're letting the side down but I still haven't done anything about it.

Doubt Corral

There are a lot of Post-It notes on the wall in front of me and the wall to the left and the bit of wall that sticks out to the right. They've all got vague things written on them in capital letters and are arranged in groups in a way that's supposed to seem methodical. Behind me is the door and sometimes I leave it open when I go out so that anyone walking past can look in and think of incremental potential fulfilment and move their mental image of me a bit closer to their mental statue of Winston Churchill. One of the Post-Its says ELBOWS, one says RICHARD GERE, one says STOP MAKING SENSE with SENSE crossed out and JOKES written underneath. I sit down and look at them and tell myself I know what it all means and I'm really onto something and have a good haircut. There will be nothing to compare the result to so I'll be unable to think it wasn't a successful arrangement. A major breakthrough. An ivory trench. Please send me a photo or pickled head or drawing of your own system along with ten thousand letters about how it is or isn't helping.

Suspect Beef

Royalties arrived in my inbox and a few clicks later were in my bank and I spent them immediately on a bag of bags of small things to put in my mouth. Thanks for that. A lot of the small things were spicy and/or or or hot. I've got this invisible swamp donkey using the front of my head as its arsehole, which, amongst other things, has caused some tremendous nasal disquiet. The spicy hot small things help to simplify the nostrils and promote a brief feeling of faciocranial justice. The hairs that would usually be creeping out of the conk-holes in order to form, if left un-destroyed, I can only assume, tusks, have relocated to the ear-holes where, against a black background, they resemble forked lightning. I sit in a booth in the weekend clamour outside Pret A Manger and auction off the chance to remove them. This week a guy did it with a roundhouse kick in them shoes that have blades that sching-glint-whoosh out from the toe-end when you tap the heel on the floor. He ate the hairs both at once and sprinted off to another appointment. The four hundred quids he outbid dozens with were donated to victims of poor judgement.

But Does It Float

I found a desk on the street. The pavement. In the rain. It had a few dozen eye-sized puddles on top, but smelled of lasting relationships. There's a small space in our house that's had the absence of a desk in it for months. But the ones in the local furniture shops wouldn't fit and Ikea is a disappointment factory disguised as an agitation encouragement playground. So I've been walking round thinking: I'll wait til I find one on the street. Or the pavement. I don't lack ambition. I got help to get it back and got it back and wiped it down and cleared the soggy leaves off the bottom shelf and slapped it around a bit to see if it'd confess anything. It didn't. What if it'd caught a disease that wooden things get when they spend who knows how long in the rain on the corner in full view of the post office or someone'd say it's theirs and in the rain on the corner in full view of the post office is where they keep it or it'd been gushed against by a police horse. But the internet bellowed concern yourself with something else or put up a sign that says found: desk.

Scumweb Ballyhoo Assessment Datum

I heard the Tory candidate is going to make dancing illegal. I'm not saying it's true but it is what I heard, on the street, from what I spose is called, although I'm by no means a journalist, my own mouth. At the party junction, while everyone else sauntered through the cavalcades and played trans-tarmac catch with their babies in the gaps between cornering juggernauts, we turned to each other and nodded and she said what about this election then, are you voting for common sense or me-first? And I said I don't know and it's never that simple but have you heard... and I told her about the dancing ban and it was no surprise to either of us. What sort of world are we living in, she asked, where this can be the sort of thing you hear on the street, just on the bollocking bastard street from some slime-faced chancer with no sign of a death wish? And I said I don't know, the trouble is I've never been able to sum anything up... well, the trouble's much bigger than that but that's one of the most troubling things within it. I can't even sum up the weekly shop. I don't even do it weekly and could this be where I'm going wrong? And she shrugged, and I took that as an answer.

Ponds

Up some stairs there's a room about the size of a basketball court with the floor painted black and water all over it and slices of large log in the water arranged so you can go from one slice to another in non-mortal delight. The water is oily from the log juice leaking into it. The whole thing is a recreation of the opening scene of a film that never got made or nobody saw or both. There's a man in one corner who I don't think was in the film but needs to be there in real life to make sure nobody gets despicable. Some of the slices are big enough to sleep on. Some of them wobble. The worst that can really happen is you get wet and cry about it for a week. I'd imagine this isn't what the artist intended but it's definitely a possibility he's introduced. I took the A4 photocopied explanation home so I could read it at leisure, but leisure hasn't arrived. One day I'm going to have an exhibition of sentences found in the descriptions and explanatory notes of galleries and museums. I just need a snappy title and I don't know if An Exhibition of Sentences Found in the Descriptions and Explanatory Notes of Galleries and Museums is it or not. It probably is, but also what about Mind Puke? Please advise.

Must Be Off

I had this whole big thing in my head about the watchability of Taken 2, it was really going to highlight the something something paradigm something, but when I started to write it I realised it wasn't going to make any sense or be the kind of nonsense that's readable, and I tried to come at it from another angle and it ended up just being about boozing, and not really very whoa hey wow that's raw, so I put it in the pile of things that didn't work and went to a talk about self-publishing, where three people said keep going, champ, in three different ways, and you'll either find a publisher or realise you're not very good, and they asked for questions, and there should be a rule where if someone has asked for questions, and you've put your hand up, and they ask you what your question is, and you just go on about yourself so much that everyone else in the room begins hoping you either already have a terminal disease or contract an extremely meticulous one before dinnertime, and you have to actually be prompted to ask the question you were supposed to ask before you started saxophoning your brilliance, as if your question would be incomprehensible without the entire audience having a solid understanding of your cavernous potential, even though we can all tell your self-improvement will only begin with the removal of your ridiculous hat, and would you like us to remove it for you, with our feet, as part of a blinding assault, I've forgotten how this sentence was supposed to end. One of the questions was what am I doing wrong, and the answer was you haven't stopped doing what you always do.

Sounds Amazing

The cinema has a bin and after you throw your money into it one man kicks you in the base of the spine while another one laughs at your wallet. You are given twenty minutes to recover and then you thank them and carry on with your life. When I worked in a cinema it wasn't like this. To get the comforting blend of humiliating pain and disgust you had to actually see the film. But hard times promote innovation and it's good to have your foibles serviced. Now you still have to pay, but it takes far less time. And there's no fuss. You could go on Gumtree, for example, but it's impossible to get someone to do it for free unless you're filming them, and I don't have a camera or a phone with a camera, and if you offer cash you'll end up paying far more than you would at the cinema before they'll do it anywhere near hard enough. Even the Special Brew guys in the underpass lose their nerve just before they connect, and they'll often offer you a Valium afterwards and say perhaps you ought to attend an evening class on how to make better decisions. Maybe meet someone. So it's only the cinema you can rely on to dish out a proper good and ruthless steel-toed shit on your life. All you have to do's turn up with an hour's wage in one hand and the expectation of a pleasant time in the other. They'll take care of the rest. With encouragement, you can drag yourself so far through despair that you come out the other side of it onto a plane of devastating joy. A good way to do this is to put your head in the bin and weep on all the money. I've seen some people ask to be smashed in the stomach or the balls, but they are clearly new and will soon be tired of childish agony. The spine's where you want it. You'll think you don't, but they'll insist that you do. During its first week of release I was employed to see Dude, Where's My Car at least seven times in full. I know what I'm talking about. My managers were angry about my habit of reading books and eating hot dogs in the corridor, instead of sitting in the back row making sure everyone was satisfactorily traumatised. You're being paid for this, they said, and you act like thirteen hours a day might be slightly too much. We've given you a torch. Little did I know that one day I'd be paying my own money to experience tiny fractions of global torment, beginning with the Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man and continuing most recently with Looper. I want to go back to the cinema I used to work at and thank them. With my fists. But it went out of business in the first wave of the recession, and by now it'll've been turned into a Wetherspoon. There's no hope.

Not The Best I've Seen Him

I had some orders and a gate. People weren't allowed in through the gate but were allowed out but not back in unless they were wearing something that made them look like they might have a job to do. Outside the gate were other larger gates that I had no control over and car parks and the sun. Behind me and my gate and along a corridor and up some stairs was a football stadium with people and a football match in it. I could hear a lot of mouths and feet and see nothing happening on a screen that didn't work. Fifteen thousand breaths became a balloon of long low vowel sounds and an ambulance went to the gate adjacent to mine and I wasn't sposed to let anyone out until it'd gone. Half time happened and it still hadn't left and while I was telling people who wanted to go out that they had to use another gate they were telling me that the ambulance was there because a football player's ankle had failed and the noise I heard was the reaction to the ankle failure's unexpected amount of exposed bone and consequent gruesome angles and bright afternoon blood hitting thirty thousand eyeballs at an unavoidable plethora of trajectories and this-can't-be-happening instants. People in the closer rows had heard the sound it made and weren't smiling while they tried to describe it. I winced and said I was sorry they couldn't go out the gate yet. Some angry men were angry about this and as soon as I sent them away the ambulance left and I opened the gate and everyone else went out and smoked and talked about the score and the likely result and the other times they'd seen the structure of the human body rearranged. The second half started and I let everyone in. It was noisier than the first half and the wrong team started winning and the angry angry men started leaving through the gate and I was obliged to tell them they couldn't re-enter and they said things like I wouldn't fucking want to. One of them said this and walked away just before there was another colossal ballooning noise and he turned around and walked up to the gate and I didn't open it or say anything. He listened to the way the noise was changing and concluded a goal'd been disallowed and the wrong team was still winning and went away.

Gentleman Practice

They told him he'd be doing a show at their gallery/house. There'd be an invited audience and musical support and a keg and fine times and popcorn. They hadn't told him that sixteen people from a variety of universes'd spent months disgorging their art into a whole big actual situation based entirely on his words. He'd been in a car having not the foggiest, with one of the pillars of the gallery/house next to him, driving, every day somewhere else and every night a gig, while the gallery/house behind them hoarded all the look-at-thats. When they finally got to the gallery/house it was late and he didn't want any tea. He had a look at what was stuck to the walls and hanging from the ceiling and settled on the floor and began to realise they all existed only because of his words. He'd sent sixteen people into various raptures and crises and puzzlements and they'd emerged thank-eyed and gladstruck, some of them through side-doors they hadn't known were there until they pushed, and the next night quite a few of these people and their friends turned up to look at the look-at-thats while fractured drones and glistening kicks crept into their ears and fifty mouths gobbled popcorn hot out of cones and yes pleased ale out of any available vessel until a writhing silence erupted and it was time for him to speak.

Without Which We'd Be Finished

After you submit the book for e-sale they mull it over. I imagine they have a mulling machine. I imagine the mulling machine makes sure that the book is legible and unlikely to start a riot. Obviously you hope it'll be loudly denounced as obscene and banned in at least one territory and a few of your favourite booksellers will be very publicly arrested and the shame will blight your family tree and people will not touch anything you've touched and the shop will charge you extra and the postman never knock again. But all our freedom has taken away that sweet and eventually lucrative ostracism. And it's only about a man and a seagull and a young woman and an old woman and a series of very short-term jobs and some inexplicable music. And it's self-published which means it's for a daring and cleverly-dressed and wise-smelling, especially today, few. It's not like those books you see piled up on retail plinths with their covers all clamouring at your poor hobbled bank cards. It's in the gutter getting nuzzled by abandoned kebab-scraps and all it really wants is to be looked at.

If you bought or buy the physical one you get the e one for free. That's the future. Email me at ed dot garland at gmail dot com with the last sentence of the book as the subject line and I will email you right back with the whole business. (I hope that works). Thanks again for everything.

Ill Bill It Isn't

Could you do us a thing they said, and I did them a thing and they put it up in English and Greek and you can go here and look at it and the other words and photos they've got all having a go at each other in capsules politely. It's only two lines. Afterwards I pasted the Greek version into Google and made it go into English and it was arguably better than the entire output of James Joyce, but too late for that now it's been chiselled into the internet. Cheap shortcut to a snazzy ha-ha though.

Substance Misuse and Tennis

Good god a new Job Centre. What a postcode we've acquired. Trees out the window. The hum of opportunity. Men in small cubicles screaming hopefully into phones. Being told to go to one floor, then another, then back to the original one, apologised to, adminned at and ejected. She was a fizzy whirlwind and had nice-smelling teeth. Appointment next week and everything. Didn't ask me what I was reading, disappointingly, because it's a large book and after saying its title I was going to say usually I read books that weigh less than my head and we were going to laugh like dolphins and slap our fucking thighs off. It's the little things. But no.

Associated Slice

(Stop going on about it). If you bought one thanks very much. I'm working on a downloadable version to appease our robot overlords and by working on I mean intending to work on, after the weekend, it's important to have something to dread while retching yourself awake at the stench of Monday's dawn-crevice and just because I'm between jobs doesn't mean I'll be going without, and by dread I mean pleasantly expect. If you'd like to borrow a physical one because you've run out of ways to get your hands filthy you can do so by moving to Bristol and visiting bloom & curll. It should be in the cupboard at the back where he keeps all the local things. Unless after reading it he decided to put it in some kind of capsule and bazooka it into the graveyard. I haven't checked. You might find James Collett's diaries there and that will be excellent also. Anyway go there and buy a book. And while you're at it stop being told what to do. Or don't, I'm not the leisure-sheriff, normal service will be exhumed when I remember where I've put it.

I Couldn't Agree More

It's here. Here it is. Click here for a copy. I've been poking it with a stick for ages and today it finally asked me to leave it alone. A pungent glut of whimsical despair. A king-size bag of peculiar crisps. A lot of blank space and very little action. A series of one-day jobs.
One page of it was adapted from a bit of this blog, so I owe you 10p if you feel like that's cheating, but it's woven niftily into the rest of the story, a story so incredibly adequate that after it's over you'll think it was almost worth bothering with.
Thanks for everything and if you'd like to come to the launch party there isn't one, but instead of that if you buy it and dislike it I will personally drag it from your house to the Clifton Suspension Bridge, no matter how far that is, kick it into the air, murder it with a war-axe and buy you a pint.

Tax Credits Could Top Up Your Earnings

I'm in this thing with them ones at that place. I sent my doings off today, in a tube. Zoosh.

New Marrow Blimey Fanatic

You should see what they've done though. Jesus it's unspeakable. The furniture. You sit on a couch and the table's higher than your head. And when the food comes it's an extra quid for the use of a lunch-funnel. And christ the sandwiches, leather and brasso and toenail mayonnaise and eight quid for a bowl of chips and they're not even chips. The service is exceptional but y'know. Afterwards you need at least two showers and a good solid discussion with yourself. I would stop going only it's on the way home from the new place.

The Plans Upstanding

The next thing has been applied to the old thing and now we wear better shoes. I can't say I'm qualmless. Lucky something new found me right after I wondered aloud what I might fall into. I was going to get a career demolishing orphanages with my pelvis. But I accepted a new bar job. But only because there's less paperwork. And the bar is new so it'll be a while before I can be the cause of its ruin. And this might not terribly happen. And soon I'm going to try and sell you a book. I'm going to get zesty. Maybe you should get some goggles or something. I hope you will also sell me your output. My pillows are full of malice, for example. I'm trying to be polite about it. It's possible you're excited about the forthcoming Swans album. We could endure it together. I'm generally busy on Thursdays.

Soonly Near

One more delay to go then no more delays and the thing will be available by the end of the month and it's going to turn your life around or not adjust it at all.
Simon Reynolds and Alice Ball did the cover. This is the front of it. It also has a back. The back will have you foaming at the eyes. It contains a commercially suicidal but very accurate description of what's inside. I'll attempt a more sensible version on here soon. But in a word: entertainment.
Simon's unlabyrinthine website is here.
Alice's doesn't exist.
Thanks for snailing with us.

As Well She Might

A sign went up. It had all the information on it except that what was on it was all the information available. So a lot of questions were barked onto our shoulders and shrugged at the future, to be converted into answers on the unspecified date mentioned before the apologies.
So there's a bit of leisure this week. Possibly too much. Can you have too much leisure, a child once asked me, and I said yes, and he said really, and I said yes, and carried on with the safety briefing.
And a cat has come to visit. It roosts on the kitchen floor staring at phantoms, wondering where its owner-operator has gone, unaware that its thoughts are visible. It hates hip-hop.

Skyline Comb Tomorrow

I won't bore you with the details (I'll bore you without the details). It's all gone a bit quiet and vague what with the sky crisis and the pub about to change hands but not quite yet for the last hundred weeks and a long line of hunches and inklings for the same as usual to feed on while it burps out the uncertainty we dance around like insolent chihuahuas and still no actual date. I just watch the other halves of the long sufferers smash towers of liquid into their cleverness and wonder when the TV will die of a golf overdose. I've been encouraging the garden to express itself and holding poorly-attended midnight dictionary readings on the motorway footbridge. I can't believe you haven't turned up.

The Things You Should Have Handy

A spider descended at my bed and face, just after I'd won another snooze, at about eight fifteen, to congratulate me, I imagine, on the ease with which I wake from nightmares about the real-life situations nightmares frequently precede, and mid-turnover we were eye to eye to eye to eye and so on and I realised it was bigger than my hand, and I immediately tried to re-feel my fear as something like familiar delight at its resemblance to the last spider of similar size that had been so close to my mouth, which was the one I used to share a caravan with, back when I ate cheese four times a day, but I didn't manage to fool it, and it wouldn't stop approaching, so I got out of bed and waited for it to land, and then I gave it a fiver and told it to get a fucking taxi.

Monophonic Dreg Embellishment

Weather made sitting on the hill an option and I did it. I couldn't convince anyone else to do it. Sometimes I lie down on the hill. But not if I'm on my own. I fear getting kicked into a shallow grave by liberal toddlers. This time I looked at a book and watched some hot-air balloons and tried to ignore the sentence Eel-haired Roustabouts Lament Death of Pendulum, which was mincing back and forth across my mind behind the sounds of the words in the book I was looking at, because the death of Pendulum was being gang-lamented behind me by a bunch of somebodies. I didn't inspect the haircuts of the lamenters, but applied our location and the tones of their voices and their reaction to the hot-air balloons as they passed and the general subject matter of the conversation afterwards to my prejudices, mood, ego and residual bigotry to build up a picture of what was on top of their scalps that I was too arrogant to turn round and confirm.
On the walk home I sniffed around the local front yards looking for an excellent plank I could add to my bookshelves. People leave a lot of things on the pavements round here, you could find yourself a board game or some boots or the complete works of absolutely everybody. And there's a lot of wood and when it's not the wrong length or width I pick it up and then I have a new shelf to put books on and I take it home and put books on it and watch the books being on the shelf and the shelf being underneath the books, and the dirt on the shelves that I haven't cleaned and the dust on the bricks holding up the shelves, for days, it never gets less exciting than it is.

Throwbloke

We went to see a man use words good and he did and it was good. Loads of other people were there and we all went woo and pointed at him and he carried on being good. Everyone agreed it was agreeable. He put the words in an order that made them rhyme. I can't remember his name. We drank four thousand great ideas. Afterwards we maybe burgered ourselves senseless and the morning was full of non-negotiable tasks. The birds all had megaphones and the sun was cacophonous. I bathed in Baileys and washed my hair with black sambuca. At work nobody knew I was thinking in rhyme and cleaning tables in italics. A soggy man hollered about the great words in the play he'd just seen and yeah right. You must. You absolutely must. Total completely something. Absolute triumph. Large red wine and a lime and soda.

Ghoul Provided

We went to see some very clever men sit in a line and refer to themselves. An audience of seven hundred gained no knowledge and reassessed their priorities. After fifty minutes a microphone was thrown around and some cheap coats made daft noise while the very clever men attempted how-bloody-interesting faces before boldly responding to the questions that hadn't been asked. We had paid money and booked time off work and travelled hundreds of miles. It was a plan. Afterwards we drank dark things and ruminated. The sky had been cancelled and the river came up to your balls.

Gesture Average Grandstand

After I went to the laundrette our washing machine at home turned peculiar. The next time I used it, it span all my clothes together into one big sock. I threatened it with the scrapheap, told it it'd end up as the insides of a post-apocalyptic clown-car on some zoom-boom TV show with everyone laughing while it became smithereens. That night we left the back door open and it waddled out from under the counter, through the garden and into the alley. We later heard from the neighbours that it was trying to form a gang with all the homeless devices. But it was unsuccessful and in the morning I coaxed it back inside and apologised even though I hadn't done anything wrong. I fed it some bedsheets and it sloshed them around all day and started beeping just as I was going to sleep. I apologised again and said the going-to-the-laundrette thing was a one-time-only deal, I was desperate, a bit drunk maybe, it's not the kind of thing I usually do, ask anyone. And it just beeped and beeped and beeped. And I unplugged it and it began to screech. So I dragged it into the street and destroyed it with a sledgehammer.

No Doubt Note

They made a pool of jelly for a famous boat to float on. It was green and people came to say blimey at it. It was the most jelly that had ever been directly underneath a boat. At night they illuminated the whole imbroglio. It wasn't edible. I didn't see it. I didn't research the second sentence of this entry at all. But it's probably quite accurate and who's checking? Right. My town briefly had more jelly outdoors than yours. I think that's something we can all agree on and intensely care about. I missed it all gladly in a faraway field watching a handfasting. The hands were fasted and drinks were had. Music was flailed to and a hot hog gobbled.

Call It What You Like

Sometimes you're an alarm clock as well as a postman.
Good night was it?
No one got hurt.
Sign there.
Your machine isn't sensitive enough. You can't even tell it's a signature. I might as well just be pressing a button.
But then there'd be no proof that I hadn't pressed the button myself.
There's no proof you're not a forger.
Impossible. It doesn't respond to my actions.
It can't be that sophisticated.
It wasn't at first.
Blimey.
I had to teach it who I was.
Was it very disappointed?
Your hair's looking less unacceptable than usual.
Thanks. I just had some of it removed.
I hope no money changed hands.
I did it myself.
By accident?
I wanted to look like a better version of me.
Not one that knows what it's doing?
You don't seem to be in much of a rush.
Time and a half today.
Divorce to pay for?
Your flies are undone.
I'm glad you've noticed.
I couldn't help it.

Fresh for Eighty Eight

I wake up at seven with my phone jumping up and down on my forehead deleting the dreams about slug-snakes in the garden and violence in the future. And I mumble to the bathroom about breakfast and freedom while the rest of the household goes one by one to work. My day shifts have vanished while the pub suffers refurbishment by pastel-brained interiorists. They're trying to sell it. It's a mystery how much the new paint splatters on all (all) the tables add to its value. I should've paid more attention in business studies. Then I could make the big, lengthy decisions. The biggest decision I make is how many cubes of ice to put in the ice well. Tuesday to Thursday it's about two hundred and fifty, and by Friday I'm usually optimistic and go for four hundred, but Mondays I like to gamble because it's always very quiet and I once got away with thirty, and when the evening shift came in at six there was only one cube left and I felt like a genius from the future. I couldn't communicate my exhilaration. It's harder to gamble with the lemon slice and lime wedge totals because you're better off just lasering up a whole fruit at a time, so every day you start with roughly the same amount and the way to enjoy an element of risk in that area is by offering people garnish where they'd not normally expect it, and they're usually happy to be asked and say yes, I will have some lime for my cranberry tremendous customer service arousal thanks, and you deplete your stocks at an unnecessarily fast rate, becoming insane with delight as the numbers approach zero and the clock approaches armageddon. Instead of all that I've been on the couch.

Why Would There Be A Button for That

Apologies to anyone who witnessed the scattershot gobbledyhate of yesterday. It published itself while I was waxing my toes and having it deleted caused me a great deal of relief. Basically it was a cavalcade of reputational besmirchment. My hairdresser will never speak to me again and the daytime regulars are exuding frosty auras. The phone hasn't stopped being silent and my housemates won't look me in the eyes. The rain avoids me and the forks all refuse to be wielded. My clothes have stopped fitting and the man in the shop is pretending he's sold out of samosas.

Bafflepig Surplus

We've started paying the TV Licence again. We don't watch it. We're the maverick idiot platoon. They haven't thanked us, they've just stopped threatening to fist us to death. They were sending two letters a day and they all said things like if you don't give us cash now then Graham Norton might have to start paying for his own snacks. Obviously the guilt became unbearable and every knock on the door caused nauseating premonitions. So it's worth it just for the relief. I have requested itemised bills so we can know where our money is going. We don't want it spent on anything twatty. But they have other incomes so I imagine it's hard to pinpoint exactly who's paying for what.

Oi Oi Oil

I threw three people out using only language. I had to abandon subtlety. While I was bellowing I was thinking of Top Trumps. There was a pause and I re-bellowed the one demand in case they thought it was negotiable, which it wasn't. Their faces were all marshmallowy and they were very young. They left in a meek huff. If they'd been older and had faces made of oak or marble I wouldn't have had the Top Trumps score necessary to throw them out. It takes ages to throw older people out because they stand there saying things like come on man and what have I done, to which the answer is always you were being a cunt, but you can't say that because no one ever takes it the right way, for some reason they always feel insulted, it would be nice if when you said it the other person winced and went oh cripes I must've had one too many, I shall leave forthwith, just let me find my shoes. But they always want a detailed explanation of their faults, and when you give them a brief rundown of the fifteen least acceptable things they've done since they arrived they try and put together some kind of round-table discussion. So I usually just squirt lime juice in their eyes until the police turn up. Most people are largely nice.

The Hype Fist

Also I wrote a book and so far have tricked three people into reading it. It's full of pauses so you can put it down without too much trouble. It's very small and short so it can fit in most things that carry things. It will be available somewhere from soon and everywhere from never. All of the words in it are words you will have heard before and many of the situations similar to situations you've experienced or will experience. It will not destroy your life. It's not a compilation of bits of this blog. I can't tell if it has a plot. It just needs a small amount of tidying up and a front cover and then what? Then what? Advice welcome. (Sought).

Empty Squares With Numbers

It's been a while. Sorry or you're welcome. It's just the Dalai Lama's been persistently aiming his face at my life and when I wasn't busy cowering I was at work serving drinks to his followers. I stalked him to his house on one of the rare occasions he ceased explaining how good enough I'm not. It was a little glowing shed in a gated community and he went in and put the TV on and I launched myself arse-first through the window and would've snapped his neck but he's a lot more tense than he looks so I just bounced off and he didn't miss a beat and started softly laughing about happinness while I wept onto his sandals. You can only try.

Home to Great Fanfare

From the balcony I saw two hundred bald white serious heads nodding in unison. They were there to see an original line-up. The air was full of flabby doom. The song ended and the singer said there are concentration camps... being made, and another song started and the heads all agreed with it, in the smoke and lights they looked like they might hatch. The singer did an impression of being electrocuted which caused a lot of aggressive delight to surge around the room, but I didn't feel like if it repeated itself any more I'd understand it so I left. The support band had been really good.

Off We Pop

The words same again sound a lot like San Miguel. If you were only drinking San Miguel it would be no problem if when you said San Miguel the barman heard same again or if you said same again the barman heard San Miguel. It becomes a problem when you switch from buying rounds to getting just your own, and you want a San Miguel but the barman hears same again, and makes you the three drinks you'd spent the last two hours buying, none of which was a San Miguel, and you watch him doing this with a look on your face like an android seeing a mirror for the first time, and he puts them down in front of you and says nine ninety please and you say no, San Miguel.
The job centre and the tax woman didn't get together and hand-write me a welcome-back-to-the-valued-side-of-society poem, nor did they fill my cupboards with olives, drugs and exotic cheese experts, so I did all that myself and invoiced them. I'm beginning to think we're no longer friends.

Lionlike Unwifed

Next door like to scrape and knock. It happens at night and in the morning and they take a break when you leave the house. If you're lying in bed it sounds like someone you've wronged is at the back door. It's good to have a detailed fear. After a million tiny wallops there won't be a wall left. They'll get brick dust in the soup. We've drawn circles and times for when and where we think the first head or hand will burst through. There's good odds and a webcam and I think I might get rich.

Additional Seating Upheaval

A funny conversation happened near me the other day, you should've been there, I've forgotten it now, it was a right laugh. When I got home I was chortling myself rabid and made everyone pause the HBO drama and listen, by the end of it they were grinning and snorting and I was foaming at the eyes but I couldn't manage to get the punchline out, they said I should relax but I couldn't, and they had to airlift me to hospital, all the ambulances were busy at the aquarium, and when I woke up I couldn't remember the punchline at all, or really what the story was about or why I found it funny, and everyone who I'd told it to, as soon as they'd heard my lungs had been replaced, ran round to re-tell it to me hoping that the re-telling would dislodge the punchline which surely must still be up there somewhere, and they re-told it and re-re-told it and did different voices and mixed up the order and changed the locations but nothing dropped into my head, and they began a campaign to find the people I'd overheard, but no one else was really interested.

The Lots of Well Then People

This magazine is full of words and some of them this month are mine. Why not print it onto a quiche and funnel it down your tear ducts? There are worse ways to spend a day. The other folk have written things that'll dice your eyelids. You might cry but you won't blink. They paid me in words by JD Nelson and Chad Redden. They squirted these words onto little bits of paper and put them in a bag and this bag ended up on a plane and in a van and in a man's hand and onto the floor under the letterbox just in time for the rain and that was it for the morning. The washing stayed in the machine and the Labrador bollocked itself.

Abundance Somehow Crikey Furtado

The phone won. In the shop I'd gone for the cheapest but in the queue I looked at the shelves again and saw, for not much more, something-something free music and something-something touchscreen. And I thought I like music and I like touching screens. And who's next please and I pointed at it and said that sounds good, hurry up.
But the free music was like you call up your friend and she puts her phone next to the stereo of a deaf horse that doesn't have the internet.
And the touchscreen was like you try to make an omelette and end up snapping your thumbs.
And I can't destroy it because of the Congo in that documentary.
So there's a lesson there in making things do no more than they should.