The Beast is Loose

Announcement:
I wrote a story for Inkymole, who made it into a tremendously-illustrated book-and-record package and it's out now, right now, all over your town like rent and right angles. The record features B. Dolan reading the story over Buddy Peace's music. B has an all-time classic voice and is good at words, Buddy makes proper wholesome sauce.

This feels huge, a bit like I went through a wormhole.

It's available for sale from Unearthed and Juno
And in Germany from deejay
And it's in the internet (yeah in) here.

Thanks for reading.

A Seal Around The Top

My appearance at the lung-judging festival was a year overdue. I knew this from the notes on the bottom of my repeat prescriptions, which had said bold and ineffective things, involving the words "must" and "essential", the last few times I'd collected my medicine from the chemist. I'd correctly assumed that the doctor wouldn't refuse to give me any, but hadn't thought the nurse would leave a voicemail full of antiseptic concern. We need to measure the capacity of your pipes. Your graph is full of gaps. Help us. Help us. But the last two times I'd done this I'd had index fingers wagged at my eyes, because I'd told them about how I inhale the fumes of burning money. And I find being judged to be a waste of my time. So I went with reluctance. But there were no fingers, I was surprised, just a flat statement of the capacity, four or five hundred lung-units, and I was weighed and measured, and found to be seventy or eighty of one thing, and a hundred and something of something else.

By The Minute

I went to the higher education facility to watch four women dance in salt. It was in the next town over. It was about rituals and saturation. I left work at lunch and on the top deck of the first bus I ate a meal deal and all its packaging and the bag it came in and the change from the fiver. The next town over had been straightened and polished since my last visit and I could see my face in the pavement. I spent one pound seventy nine on two books and went to catch the second bus. It drove with its door open, and when it turned to face the way it came I began to suspect I'd assumed too much about my ability to follow basic instructions. I told the driver all about my problems, using small words that fit through the holes in the perspex. I'd meant to catch the fifteen but ended up on the five. I was now late for the thing I'd set off two hours early to be early for. He cackled and burbled and said he hadn't been this amused since he found out his energy provider was the French government and he'd been giving them four or five pints' worth of his sterling every month for the honour of electrifying his hard-working British hovel. He said he couldn't help optimistically remembering that this didn't used to happen when we lived in the past like total idiots who knew nothing about how things were going to have to be in the realistic future. He naively syringed his memories of the public ownership of essential services into my astonished ear canals, then immediately realised he'd have to bury the bus with himself in it under the nearest rugby pitch to atone for this heretical sharing of fact. By this time I was disgracefully late, so I told him I couldn't stick around to help but that I hoped I'd never see him or his opinions again. The third bus took me to the higher education facility, where I crept obnoxiously into the theatre in time to see four women kneeling on a bed of salt scooping air into their mouths.

Fruit Beyond Price

I'm reading a book that cost seventeen quid and I'm not sure what fifty percent of its sentences mean. The first of its two introductions says style is a complicated terrain. Everything in the following two hundred pages sounds absolutely something. The style is uphill underwater. The plan is, after I'm done, to read an article about the book that sums it up in five or six sentences, and adopt these, garnished with a couple of go-to obscenities, as my uncompromising and sexy opinion, should I ever be asked what I learned from spending nearly five pints' worth of quids on a rectangle full of words, and what on earth the point of all the effort and expense might've been, and whether or not I'm sorry.

Less To Go Wrong

I went to Liverpool to learn more about how to help people respond to failures in managerial procedure. Fleetwood Mac were playing as I wrote notes in a modern wood/pork boozer on the following. [Jesus, you write notes for these things -  yes - and then type them up, later - yes - that's a lot of effort - not really - for not very much - yes]. If I had to introduce a fictional musical accompaniment that embodied the concept of error, I thought, it would be them, but luckily, unhappily, there they already were. One of the two other customers loudly asked me and the bar staff if we thought he gave a shit. About anything. My no was lost beneath that song about going your own way's insufferably well-recorded slop. The other of the two other customers was saying vacate, vacate. Vacate, vacate. It was possible that both these people were finally taking a stand against the cultural atrocities regularly delivered by this band, who I feel've lately, and also my whole life, been lurking amongst almost every public playlist, like hairs in a sandwich, which people tell you you're overreacting to when you spit them out, either through a lack of good judgement, or the wish to appear different, and both of these are things you will outgrow eventually, until, like the rest of everybody, you will admit that before this group came along, the entirety of human musical endeavour was undeniably lacking a pinnacle, and you will then start ordering sandwiches that consist entirely of hair, for delivery, nightly, to your plateau of refinement, for you to enjoy with a straight face and the usual vague but persistent thoughts about getting something done someday, so it's no use insisting that the thought of this band induces panic, the sight of them induces nausea, and the sound of them induces terminal emphysema, because you'll be like all the rest of us soon enough, us for whom not a hint of insincerity could come anywhere near our professions of love for these gutsy and melodic leviathans, and [you should've stopped at emphysema, we think - alright - there's a distinct negative bias to this whimsical bile that seems quite unwarranted - that's all I've got - right, but, please, onward, to more pressing matters].
I did a radio show the other week you can listen to here. There's nothing wrong with it.

To Be A See Also

Here is a few slices of what we did last Christmas. (It's still basically August and you're going on about December already are you, you rotten bollock, while we still owe the butcher a grand for the outdoor meat marathon, and the pineapple wallah's got his wide tangy blades at our necks twice a day saying pay up for Pina Coladamegeddon or I'll really set the fucking juice loose? Sorry. I just wanted to share.)
This Christmas we've formed a cross-continental task force to assault all eleven of your seasonal senses and you'll be like Christ that's nice. In the meantime the rejections from agents make me feel like I'm progressing with the second book, while the third book is still a festival of detritus awaiting a suitable container. I really appreciate you putting these things in front of your eyes. Thanks.

At All Possible

I'm sending this from one of those chain pubs where all the lights are on all the time. In traditional pub symbolism this would indicate that it's time to leave. In this one they're right, but less for that reason, and more because it's a sanitary shitehouse and I can smell J2O from sixteen feet away and violently sensitive beef-droids with footballs for eyes are assessing my manliness and my opinion of their manliness and by god there's nothing more important to a manly man's man than making sure everyone agrees with your own opinion of how manly you are, sweet stinking Nelson we'd better put that concern above everything else forever lest anyone get the wrong idea about how well we're coping with our gender. I've had a lot of fun recently and none of it was in here.
Now, why come at all if you're just going to whinny and gripe, etc?
Because I don't feel even slightly bad about sitting down to hoover up the wifi without even pretending to buy a drink from the joyless characterkilling motherfuckers who dump these blaring hells onto every street in England, is why.
Now, why not get the internet installed in your new quarters, old chap?
I dunno maybe I can do without it for a while, like I can do without furniture and intimacy.
Now, how did that glitter get onto your pillows?
That's a good question. Maybe it was on somebody else's face, which was then on my face, which was then on the pillows, I could be wrong. A human being fell on my head last week and I've lost all interest in the truth.

An Announcement

Altar Ego Radio asked me to be on it a bit this weekend and I said uhuh, uhuh, when? and it said Saturday morning three til five and Sunday evening six til eight. And I asked it what else is on and it said shitloads mate, DJ Food, Old Apparatus, Miss Pink, Sage Francis, Solo One, Stanley Chow, a squadron.
So on the Saturday I'll be playing things that ooze and twitch, and on the Sunday I'll be merrily butchering your ribs with blades of black noise. There's much good stuff happening all weekend. Here's the line up. Listen in and shout at us.

Relish Lack Be Enjoying

Situations lunge. I said yes to a three-day course in a town by the sea. The Union will welcome me and I'll be fully informed and riled up for baptism. I've put a toothbrush and all my prejudices in a sack made of high horse leather. I'm already practising responses to being called comrade and hearing it spoken between respectable folk. Weeks ago at the sixty-thousand people thing I couldn't stay for the speeches. We shuffled and whistled and listened to the chants. I found it hard to want to start chanting, after listening to the chants. I smiled at the bits of the air the chanting was in, and at the helicopter above it. The Union had a large yellow balloon and a band. Back at work I was interviewed for the same job as now but for forever. The questions were the questions for when the job was for six months. As soon as I noticed this I made up a rule that I couldn't use any of the answers that I'd used the first time. This was unexpected. I spent so long answering one of the questions that I forgot what it was.

Fact Is

Scarcely credible at first. Fevered blather, I thought. Dropping from his chops like the spells of a sick wizard. Told me he was all set to sue the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Hyper-Specific Tinnitus and Related Inconvenience.
Can't be done, I said. Flea's swapping cheese with Radiohead now. God knows the power of those two combined. Drive a mournful juggernaut straight up your guts. Never tango in this town again.
But total unconcern.
Ball's been rolling for decades, he said. Calm as a dead dog. And there's a peculiar extra feature.
He waved me towards his head. I leaned in. Round the side he said, ear to ear. Quizzed his muncher and he nodded. So that was it, flap to flap we dallied.
Rum future brewing in the man, I thought. Imagined the swift sink into gathering tics, erratic hours, lengthy corridors. How long before I'd start opting not to visit? Poor tosser. And with little Stanwix on the cusp of the academy... But you know: Wind. Caution.
And he held his breath and put out his hand. I followed suit. And what I then heard fairly scrambled my marrow.
Tinny and gruesome it sailed from his canal to mine: Neh-neh-yer message on the pavement, neh-neh-neh, neh n-neh-neh neh wave meant.
Feather daggers up my spine. I withdrew. Advised the unwiseness of tricks. Law-dodging. Hollow gold. Nodded my finger. But back in he beckoned me.
So I went ear-to-ear again and it hadn't bloody ceased. Neh-neh-n-neh-n-n-neh answers jer-jer-juh jer-juh-belly dancers. Incontrovertible. Obscene.
I stood up. Eel-mouthed. Molten. He laughed his hat off.
You've got them downright spatchcocked, I said. You'll not even need a lawyer. You'll be a bastard made of money.
A stammering set about me. An urge. Shameful, but I have to tell you now as I had to ask him then: How do I get in on this? I must have the method!
He drew his chin to his chest. Waggled his cabbage.
Can't say it's worth it, he said. Worse than the Meatloaf poltergeist. Man of your constitution'd be smashed into paste within the week, lucky I wasn't mangled gormless myself. But Stanwix.
He inhaled deeply.
The injections and the talking cure'll cost us half the settlement at least. I'm not sure why we bothered.

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.

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.

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.

Distraction

The circus is in town, so the Llamas are on the football pitch. They are near the goal. Ponies and horses are over by the halfway line. Camels are behind the hedge, keeping an eye on things. The elephants are elsewhere.
The whole show wurlitzed into town yesterday, five hundred fat honking lorries blocking the road for a good half hour and blasting our ears with sickly circus music and roll-up roll-up gibberish. According to the gossip of yesteryear: The Circus Folk Will Rob You So Thoroughly You Won't Know What Your Name Is Afterwards. The grapevines are bursting with tales that end with a Circus Type being chased away by One Of Us wielding a tent pole and screaming "NEVER!". Some exaggeration must've got in there somewhere. All that separates them from us is the football pitch / zoo. Which isn't any separation at all. The soundtrack for the week will be oompah-oompah and whinnying.