Deep Features

William Blake went to bed with a pig because of the distress caused by seeing a serpent gush-up its lunch on the altar of a golden chapel. It's unclear what the relevance of this image is, to anything I've been doing lately, but it's been waiting to get a mention for about eight months, sticking its ancient neck out, presuming I'd eventually contrive a charming little foxtrot for it to underpin. While I've been avoiding the chapels, the pigs, and the beds, as much as possible.
There have been serpents, mind. Unavoidable, but they never have anything to say. They just moan, and mumble things, like come into this cold and lightless precinct, from which nobody's ever emerged. I don't fancy it.

Extract From Fuck Knows What

"I've just realised you've had a haircut. You're likely to already know this, but I'd like you to know that I now know it too."

"Thanks. I wasn't going to mention it, but then if you didn't mention it I was going to mention that I hadn't mentioned it. Your above-eyebrow area looks much the same as it always has to me, unless you've recently changed it and I haven't noticed, in which case it looks tremendous and very you."

"Thanks. What're you doing with the weekend?"

"I am going to reject mediocrity."

"How long'll that take?"

"My entire life and a bit of yours."

"What?"

"You're going to live longer by not putting any effort in but when I die you'll decide to wear a heavy helmet of guilt which will deflect the suggestions of other people trying to persuade you to stop doing things like producing a magazine that reviews all the other magazines and is called Not Quite Good Enough."

That's Nice Dear

A narcoleptic phone is barely any use. It won't be coming wih me to the land of the lunch break. I got back a week ago and go forward in two. I will be spending a lot of time in the cave and phones are inappropriate there. You can get right up to the bats while they sleep and they don't seem to mind but probably you shouldn't do this too often.
While I'm away there'll be a disastrous election. And the new government will not let me back in for being too foreign and I'll be forced back to the Calais roadside ditches trying to jump onto lorries bound for ferries like those people we saw when we went there. It looked slightly dangerous. It's a good thing I just learned first-aid in a day. Call me doctor. Get your finger off that 9, I can bandage your head wounds and leave you in a position ideal for both breathing and vomiting. If you're a bit dead I can cardio-wallop you until the electric pads arrive. Why they didn't drill this into us at school I do not know. They do in Seattle and now people go there just to have heart attacks.
I missed the deadline for the Bristol story prize, which is a shame because this year I was definately going to come first, second and third. I'd only written one thing though, about a man who thinks the newspaper is his life story, ish, and then I got called away to Phrance at very short notice, and writing in the outdoors is difficult, and where we were the outdoors featured heavily, so I didn't have a chance to write the one about the woman who can't control her own face or the one about the man with no genitals whatsoever.
I did have time to read the SAS handbook and Callgirl. Both were good.

Tuna Club

I lost a quite good thing. I'd scratched it into some bark with a fingernail. Bark is plentiful since we're murdering all the trees. For safety. They've done nothing yet. But the obese ones could fall onto our tents and skulls if the wind gets pushy.
Obviously we've tried putting them on diets. Special K for breakfast and milkshakes for dinner and 99 pushups at noon and all that. But before you can change you have to want to change, apparently, even if you're a tree. And they just wanted to carry on warping themselves. So we chainsawed their arms off and crippled their trunks and yanked them to the ground with a tractor and butchered them where they lay. Naturally we turned the good bits into stools. A foot of snow came and covered up the rest. It'd been on the weather forecast for a week but we still managed to not expect it.

Don't Look Now, Now, or Now Either

I'll have twelve pages of nonsense to give away at the upcoming event, but it won't be what it was because the untrusty laptop has finally died, of complications, it was a simple beast. And I am also a simple beast, and not the kind that backs anything up in any kind of regular or systematic way. So what I was preparing is not what I am now preparing, and I wonder what it'll be, and how to print it without spending more than the few chunks I have left.