Folded Arms

I finished Don Quixote and thought: now I can start reading again. This was an unfair, dismissive, glib, ungrateful thought, but there it was at the front of the queue, ahead of: it was great, fine, it's over, I recommend it, unless you don't like books, because they make you tired, because at school their launched corners hurt your skull, it's not going to help you out of your predicaments, I dunno what is, it's none of my business, there's nothing we can do. The donkey was my favourite, probably. If you only read one 400 year-old elongated piss-take this'd be the one. And obviously make sure you choose a translation that's lucid, supple, clear-eyed and bulbous, or you'll be wasting your time. Like if you're picking a biography, or the history of a place, or the life of an idea, you'd better make sure it's magisterial. If it's not magisterial it has no value at all.
I saw a book cover today that told me to GIVE IN and read the book it was covering. GIVE IN. Like it had me at gunpoint. I slapped it onto the floor and instructed it to reconsider its approach. The bookshop's staff escorted me to the pavement.

Built-in Stick

One seventy-nine.
Is it?
Is late night price.
Impressive.
Round corner they charge two.
It must be Christmas.
Like gangster. But queues for it.
I'll get you a queue.
They scared to come.
You seem quite friendly.
Is bad area. Students get hat punched.
That's terrible.
I try make peace. I lose courgettes. What can I do?
You can give me the penny.
Sorry.
So I can start saving for next time.
Sorry. Because conversation.
It's okay, it's okay.
I think sometimes not well.
Me too.
Have a good night.
I have.
In your home now.
I'll try. There's a mouse though.
Oh fucking shit.
I'm worried it wants to sleep with me.
You need trap. You send it to God.
I'm trying to attract a cat.
You have a good night.

The Mechanics of Collective Consultation

[spare me the specifics] it's basically March tomorrow, which is when the contract ends, which is why I'm tobogganing through the application process in a slightly dishonest helmet, hoping at the end there'll be a lake of gold or at least a [if you say sandwich one more time on this thing I'm cancelling my subscription and giving you a taste of my fist (is it possible what you think is a lack of imagination is really a focus?) I, if it was a focus, no, I'm not getting into this, a focus would be a great help, in most of your areas, you could admit that, in your applications, when they ask for your most appealing lack, though you'd have to doff the helmet, as it were, which'd be dangerous, while you still don't know what's at the end of the chute] bucket of hot peanuts with my name on it. The walls of the chute are festooned with rejection notices, slightly like tube station escalator adverts minus the electric hyperbole. It's good to have something to look at.

Fine, I'll Tell Him

Some people don't use the underpass on the way to work. They don't save any time by doing this. It's large and arena-like, with indirect paths, but on the roads above they have to wait for a gap in 40mph traffic, and get through it without the help of stop signs or pedestrian pomp. There's a story going round I haven't heard.

A man rapped his head off right in front of us. It tumbled to the front of the stage and was picked up and passed, rhyming the whole time, between three hundred pairs of hands raised high in disbelief. His body stayed onstage in a floor-length black gown, shimmying and jerking with a microphone held to its neck.

All We Had Was Like Two Pot Noodles

Out the other window, looking to the left, there's the car park of a funeral shop, where sometimes white vans squeak in at night to disgorge unoccupied coffins wrapped in clear plastic and parcel tape. The two men moving them from the van into the shop never seem to get the balance right. It's always a struggle. The wind doesn't help. Neither do I. It's none of my business, but I've thought about wailing some helpful hints at them, such as slow down, it's only a box, I used to drive a van full of items myself you know, and there's a scar on my arm from where I didn't slow down once, while taking the items from one place to another, I was hungry, it's best to pick the items up when at least one of you has exited the van, rather than both of you stumbling out at either end of the item, looking like some kind of unlicensed gothic wrestling fiasco. But the coffins go in and the van goes away, and there's never really an incident that requires my input.

Vision Kings

I asked the neighbour if he wanted to swap sofas. We'd been trying for a hundred tubby minutes to pummel mine up the stairs and round the corner and my lips were full of sand and I was wheezing out of my ears and my friend was sat murmuring things about folly. Stallone was at the door, clamouring for the film rights and saying there is a problem with the dimensions and not doing a single thing to help. In the morning the man I bought the sofa from'd said he could tell me its measurements and I said nah you're alright, indoor furniture goes indoors doesn't it, and indoors is where I'm taking it, I know perfectly well what I'm doing without the need to show off any instinct for precision I might have. And I drove round town loading the van with matter, and to get rid of the unwanted bits we stopped at the tip, or tried to, only the tip-staff blustered fluorescently out of their hutch to explain that the van was too tall to make it under the barrier, and this didn't register as an omen. They let us put the matter round the side, "neatly, so The Machine can get it later", and explicitly forbade us from returning in that vehicle, on that day or any other, and maybe there was an index finger pointed once at each of our foreheads while this was being said, which made it extra memorable when we'd finally given up trying to hog-shunt the sofa into place, and were wondering what the next steps might be, before the swap was mentioned and agreed to and we kicked the neighbour's couch, the plain Ikea kind and the cat's added some detail, like a square balloon up the stairs and round the corner.

Pestilential Swank

Debated whether or not to fill a box with cobwebs so at the new place I can recreate what I'm used to. But they're difficult to put back up, so just I stood on a chair and snorted them right off the walls. No, I binned them, then filled half a box with stuff I haven't looked at or thought about since the last time I moved. And the music-playing cube that works plus the other one that almost works.
Next Monday there'll be a different underpass to swoop through and an impossible-to-tell-if-this-is-quicker route to the keycard thing next to the door to wait for the formerly green but now just absence-of-red light to signal it's still alright to clock in, sit down, sneeze, finger the computer and slaughter the inbox.

Gisting

I went walking round a potential new postcode. I'm going to live on my own, in the special home for irritable bachelors. I just haven't found it yet. Soon though. Requirements include: the bed not being in the kitchen, the rent not being more than half the monthly income (ambitious, this, but not impossible), and the distance on foot to town being not more than twenty-nine minutes. This postcode turned out to not be good for aimless scuttling, but it did have a shop called World of Doors.
Later, in a crowd, I hit a man in the eyes with the back of my head and he insisted I not worry about it, and we carried on being riffed senseless by american hands.

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.

Zero Fucks

The DJ thought it was important that we saw all of his teeth. He was displaying as many of them as he could. You couldn't call it smiling. Maybe he couldn't close his head-flesh around them all properly. He was on a stage at one end of a stone-floored batshit palace. There were more teeth in his head than people in the room. He played doof-doof chipmunk music. We nodded. A large-haired man in a Subhumans t-shirt rode a yellow spacehopper back and forth in front of the bar. I want to say back and forth across the bar itself but on this occasion that wouldn't be accurate. When the DJ stopped we went upstairs to the big room where three normal-faced men were playing loud scraps of yesteryear. The air gleamed and pulsed, we could taste sweat, and voices behind us politely asked whether or not we'd like to buy any enhancements. An hour passed and the normal-faced men stopped and a golden-toothed man with very recently-washed hair played some hard fast excellent everything. During the intense bits he would smile, and punch his left wrist with his right hand. At the back of the room, on the bench, against the wall, a man in a tracksuit had a nap. A security guard aimed a beam of light at him. The napping man's eyes remained shut, the security guard brought the torch right up to his eyeballs. The napping man writhed and insisted he was, considering the circumstances, fine.

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.

Comprehensive Information Really Good

We ate elaborate breakfasts and walked round looking at stuff. Some of it was art and some of it was architecture and some of it was peril and one bit of it was a blob in a jar. It used to be alive. I think it had a mouth. There were very many other things in jars and we were hungover.

Must Butter Noggin

Now the hotel is finished they've reopened the 24-hour Spar. But they haven't closed the temporary Spar round the corner, so there is a two-Spar situation. It's the talk of the north-west. The new one has a better range of beers but a brutally narrow selection of crisps. You'd only go there when Sainsbury's is closed, though. Unless you're an absolute fucking nutcase.

I’ve been moved from a tent now and not up or down but side-graded into a haunted caravan with a south-facing quarry and a room just for spiders and a view of three moons, two of which are on sticks attached to the earth and unmovable while the other one cheesewheels and thumbnails in the usual manner.
There’s a green L-shaped bed and a fan and no bother. It’s a reward for something. I should share it.
Not long is left. It’s gone well and will go well. We eat many buttered sponges. There’s a shortage of everything else.
I went to knot school and could now tie one with my arse if necessary. I need to at the top of the tower, which people in harnesses climb up so I can clip them to a rope and kick them off. I’ve stopped doing the involuntary dance that made me appear less than fully comfortable with the situation. We tell them it’s not that bad and they get to the top and their knees turn green and they step off and leave their stomachs behind. After everyone’s had a go they gather at the bottom and I throw the stomachs back down thirty feet into their gobs.

1

It's been a few whiles and I saw you with Johnny Moccasin the other day, scheming, I'll bet, and thought I'd write and check what's what and who's how and why. I went past on my bike. The big one, with the chair. You looked different but I can't say how. Were you wearing an invisible hat? Has your neck been growing? Have you lost a rib? It's an improvement anyway. My own appearance is beginning to scare the kids. They beg me to take the goggles off, and to stop sneezing so much. They said it's ruining their equilibrium, but they had no answers when I asked what do a pair of six-year-olds want equilibrium for, you should be into carnage and volume and pranks, go to your tent and ruminate.
Your book about corners: any progress? I'm sure with the right title it could sell trillions, wish I'd thought of it. New genre maybe. Let me know how it goes and please, if there're any spare advance copies...
Shuttlecock stopped by last week. His goat's giving up. I told him maybe you'd have some tips and techniques, so don't be surprised if he turns up sweating on your porch. His eye is getting worse but his wife's started talking again, so he's peculiar and giddy and might want a Valium, especially if it's before noon. I mean, even if he doesn't ask for one...