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.