Unbuffering

Gonna dig up that new site from somewhere soontime. It'll be so menthol and moreish. It'll be Jenny Holzer meets Kool A.D. It'll take me another fifteen months and still be ahead of its bloat.
I can't thank-bomb you all enough, whoever you all are. While I've been away from here working on things I've also been working on other things. Here is one of the other things.

Blip

I do yes I do apologise for the plummet. I plan to re-emerge writing only in capital letters on an uninvented format. I'm getting married and we're moving to Aberystwyth. All my jars are tasty.

I picture it like a quarter-screen block of text on the left and some limited options on the right. The block of text would be different every time you loaded the page but there'd be no chronology, title, date, etc.

Helicopters / Wagner

Evidently change happens in the background:

Getting married Septmber 3rd.

Applying for MA anywhere.

Moving house to wherever anywhere ends up being.

Would like to meet affordable future.

Most people I work with = six years no pay rise.

Submitted a petition to UK government titled "Privatise the royal family".

Rejected on grounds it was a joke.

I failed to mention I wasn't joking.

So what could they do.

Their hands were tied.

When someone says their hands were tied they mean they didn't want to voice an alternative for fear it might affect their status.

You hear it a lot in the Civil Service.

I'm off.

I thank you for reading.

I hope to re-emerge soon with something gobby and less comprehensible.

Catastrophic Towel Approval

My computer exploded. Luckily I was wearing the full-face helmet I always use when internet shopping. I haven't been able to leak any words onto this page until now, on a borrowed Apple "Macintosh", a cold and bastard-shaped horror-box it's impossible to think with. But I should tell you there's a new book out that I wrote, that I mentioned a while ago:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/yet/14266100

Herewith In Respect Of

The workflow management spreadsheet. The performance improvement plan. The good-enough register. The fishbone diagram. The likelihood predictor. The degradation forecast. The snack matrix. The talent bugle. The resentment pipe. The multi-skilling index. The uncertainty tracker. The obedience league. The overtime conundrum. The arrears fudger. The contradiction infuser. The hangover poem. The pay freeze. The patience margin. The flexibility insister. The morale barometer. The fridge.

Thin Jacket

When pretending to read my work emails I mark a few as unread as if what with one thing and another I haven't had chance to catch up - people mate, yeah gone right off em, was experimentally enthused for ten years but lately it's been - the screen doesn't stare back and I move the cursor when I hear team player footsteps approach and recede. I maximise the ancient database thing and input one of the three reference numbers I've memorised. B2YG39X is my favourite.

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.

Feroglobin

-Yeah basically a claw scooped me into a situation where I sat watching parcels of time pass unfilled by events.
-Thick disbelief oozes out of our ears.
-And I was supposed to review the parcels but I couldn't really tell one from the other.
-Terrific suspicion billows from our head-holes.
-So I just made some stuff up and gave it to the claw when it came round. And then it stopped coming round so I left.
-And you haven't seen it since, we'll venture?
-I've been avoiding it.
-You can't avoid what doesn't exist.
-Quite.
-We will re-scrutinise your arsenal and formulate a bollocking.
-You can't bollock me as much as I bollock myself.
-We suggest that remains to be seen.

Spines Out

The numbers people will want to see my research before they give me any of their numbers. I would like you to be part of my research, please (hello). The aim is to see if opening a book shop is possible. Or it's to see if it's possible to convince the numbers people that it's possible to open a book shop. I need your honest hands:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6QPJHH3

Week Month All Time

I applied - this might take a while but you'll barely feel a thing - for a job and was interviewed in a glass-walled corner-booth in a small-town thousand-person office complex. I sat down and showed them my hands and asked them when I'd be starting and if I could have the first couple of Fridays off, whenever they are, for some crucial appointments. But they wanted me to answer their questions first. And I didn't get the job despite all the lies I gave in response, such as:
I can be relied upon to care about targets. I care about targets all day and all night, I think of them as a kind of powerful sauce that I can't get enough of, can't actually eat without.
Or:
I am subjectively, objectively, rationally, emotionally, historically, romantically, obviously, and chemically the strongest member of any team I'm in or on, whilst I maintain an alluring indifference to accolades and a robust but nuanced lack of smarm.
Or:
I can prioritise tasks in a unique manner that has caused more than one area manager to describe me as the auto-acknowledged yes-bulb of self-propelled co-operative procedurality.
I could go on, I'll not go on. It was remarkable, at the start, in the booth, that both my hands remained unshook. That was the verdict. We might've ended there.

Trounced Haddock, Gloomy Cod

The staff performed welcoming and efficient routines to an intriguingly non-confrontational soundtrack in Damien Hirst's cafe. One of the spot paintings ogled me from the opposite wall, bravely ignoring the butterfly wallpaper behind it, and echoing the thin cabinet of small fish in perspex coffins next to the entrance. A popular song minced from the speakers, in which an optimistic boy sings about a new pair of shoes, followed by several hundred thousand other songs of similar shapes and colours. There were no other customers. It was obvious: this playlist was an unannounced piece of never-stopping art, repelling locals and tourists alike, more baffling and visceral than any number of formaldehyded animals, and disappointingly audacious in its resemblance, like the spot painting, to a machine-generated array of squibs. I wrote that sentence across three packets of white sugar and used it to pay for another coffee. The barista smiled at me through her completely transparent motorbike helmet and said you're right, it's called The Joy of Not Giving A Shit.
I'd come to Ilfracombe to see the statue of the pregnant woman you could see the insides of, standing on some law books and thrusting a sword in the air. Later, in the very good chippy, the chip man described his first encounter with the statue. It was lying down, having a rest next to some concerned people, who said they were such big fans of Jesus that they found it nigh-on impossible to approve of anything that wasn't Jesus. And this statue wasn't Jesus at all, not even lying down, not even slightly, and how could he stand here not disapproving of it.
He boxed and bagged the fish and chips and said it's nice to have something to look at.

In the Region as Predicted

The ear man phoned and said he'd have to cancel because he had an appointment at the doctors. I thought it was me who had the appointment, with him, so he couldn't have any appointments, he'd be at work, assessing all the local ears. Give me a number, I considered saying, and I'll explain to them that it's me who has the appointment, with you, at this time, and that therefore no other appointments involving not both of us are possible.
I agreed though, instead, that we postpone, and I stayed home, with my ears, unexamined.
At the rescheduled appointment he said it was his son who'd had the doctor's appointment, really, and I'd misheard, ha-ha, ha-ha, I don't have the kind of phone where you can tell what people are saying. It would encourage me to speak, and there's no telling where that might lead.
He dredged my canals and asked me how much Hawkwind I'd done. He measured my cranium and threw some twigs at my neck. He printed a graph and amplified the areas of concern with his most serious finger. It was a bit worse than I expected.

Sclatchy Rigmarole

- A lack of visibility.
- I've been tending to the ghouls.
- On a volunteer basis?
- It's not very clear.
- Under a powerful timetable?
- They keep long hours and set no deadlines.
- I expect the results will astonish and repulse?
- I'm not sure results are a decent expectation.
- The executive committee disagrees.
- They haven't got a constitution.
- They still have eyes.
- I agree.
- I trust you gather my berries, here.
- I smell a crumble full of meaning.
- There'll be a review period. A good long stare at your bollocks.
- I'm flattered.
- Followed by a focussed discussion.
- Absolutely.
- Topped off by a verdict, the weight of which will vary according to -
- I'm sure.
- Good luck.
- Yes.

Select From Popular Items

- You can mute the self-checkouts, my precious little battered sausage.
- I'm ecstatic.
- Civilisation has really gone up a notch.
- You never stopped striving for justice.
- I have decommissioned my ballistic vengeance.
- I am delighted beyond belief.
- I can process my bargains in beeping serenity.
- I am a ten-floor four-star hotel of satisfaction.
- And do you know what else?
- I have no knowledge of anything at all in this world.
- The security hawk has ended his campaign of unreasonable scrutiny.
- I am smashed by a joyful hammer.
- Our dreams have entered reality by the medium of triumph.

Peak Times

In the pond in the park the fountain stopped. Swans slid across to investigate. A van crawled towards the pond's edge and stopped next to the fisherman. Three men in overalls all different shades of orange exited the van and unloaded a cement mixer, a spade, a pneumatic scoop and four yellow plastic sections of fence. While one of them plugged the cement mixer in at the cafe and mixed the cement the other two fenced off a small area at the edge of the pond and attacked the pavement with the pneumatic scoop. Dust settled on ice creams. Dogs conferenced. Picnics succeeded. The scooping men returned the scoop to the van and took out a tarpaulin-covered box attached to a black pole. They carried it to the fenced off area and set the pole in the ground with the box on top. The scoopers held it upright while the cement man cemented the base. When this was done he used his spade to flick the rubble from the hole into the pond. All three stood and inspected the box on the pole, looked at each other, and removed the tarpaulin. Children screamed. The box had a coin slot at the top, a note slit in the middle, and a change tray at the bottom. They loaded the fence and the scoop and the mixer and the spade and themselves into the van and drove away slowly with the hazard lights blinking. A woman in a Nirvana t-shirt approached the box and put 50p in the slot. The fountain came back on.

Full Cost Recovery

- and there's a decrease in intensity sometimes?
- nngh.
- is it both elbows?
- always.
- and any other symptoms?
- the sky is full of graphs and charts.
- bar? pie?
- the gamut.
- you ought to've mentioned this at the beginning.
- I ought to've a lot of things at the beginning.
- yes.
- but that's not what the beginning's fucking for.
- if we can just focus on getting a full description. is there anything else?
- the graphs and charts smell like airports.
- thankyou very much for coming.
- I arrange my shoes in chronological order.
- we'll have the results in fourteen days.

Disruptive Obedience

...would be better than whatever what we're upto now is, although it's a spicy proposition to get anything through the bugle on a schoolday these days. The moguls have iron elbows and scrutinise non-verbal expressions for whiffs of sass, which can result in any respectable clam-head you care to mention being trounced into the nudge-tunnel for the required probe into whether what their visible parts recently exuded was agonised wonder about how to galvanise a breakthrough in The Year of The Fist, or a deplorable lack of exuberance, both of which have near-identical appearances, and we find it best to find out as soon as possible which of these it might have been. We want big swigs of happiness during choppy times. We're only breaking ribs by accident.

We Had Plans To Ignore You

A selection of cold slurpers and a device that drapes a fine frozen mist over my head and neck and someone playing the soothing end of the Nick Cave spectrum on a nearby marimba if at all possible buttercup, I said in sweltering German to a foamy-bearded waiter who'd come to repair my mojito. I didn't tell him that the largeness of the ice cubes had led to a horrifying inconsistency of temperature within the drink which jeopardised the entire 23 remaining hours of my holiday, because I didn't want to sound out of touch with world events.

Disaster Magnets

Everywhere was hotter than everywhere else. The bar's walls were tiled up to head height with patterns like illustrations of non-existent plants. We sat on a hundred year-old couch drinking white russians. Murky declarations floated off the tongue of the man opposite, through the blob of smoke above the table and into our perspiring ears. The Cunt has removed democracy in Europe, Berlin is dead, I have to say this quietly or my listening countrymen will have me crucified. He described what things were like and we described how they seem now. We asked about the tiles, he said the place used to be a classy something or other, before the tiles were covered up, abandoned, then rediscovered and polished when this place opened, the last proper old new bar in poor old dead new Berlin, soon to be devoured by the unstoppable crushing jaws The Cunt calls prosperity.

Keeping In Touch

The new exciting lunch facility is worth a visit mate yeah. At the entrance you're given a disposable tunic. At the exit you're hosed down and congratulated by a woman with a tattoo of a pricey cupcake somewhere on one of her legs. Before the exit you sit at a picnic table, attacking strips of gifted carcass with your hands and teeth, euphoric slop squirting down your neck and wrists, thinking about Europe.