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.

To Help

I go to the section where the magazines about books live. I ooze hope. The American ones - Onslaught, Paragraph, The Wagon - twitch their corners and rustle their edges. The English ones - Mmmhmm, Apt, The Brow - stare at my mouth and sniff. I take all six to the counter and ask the fragrant young waltzer which one will make me feel like its purchase is a small part of what I should be doing with my life. Halfway through the sentence she puts one hand on my collar and the other on the back of my head and says it's all on the internet, everything is on the internet, if it doesn't light up it's not worth looking at, get out, get out of my area.

Manual Handling

Would you mind, I said, at all, if I have a listen to your conversation so if it's any good I can reproduce it when I sit down later and try to think of something interesting to write about, which is certainly not the best way to proceed, I know, if proceeding's what you want to do, in that particular realm, but bad habits do drown thrashing, as they say, don't they, or something, almost, or I've failed once again to seize clarity by the arse, and to turn this lack to my advantage, which, I'm led to believe, is a trick I ought to be able to dazzle myself with, regularly, by now, much like I dazzle myself whenever I discover I've left the house in clothing appropriate to the season, and carrying all the items I might want or be required to produce, to boot, which is about sixty percent of the time, I'd say, if pressed, under oath, or exactly one hundred percent, if asked by an online form to list the behaviours and preferences that might help my application, for the position of vacillating supplicant, to the virile and delicious institution of whoever's offering me a bit more money or sanity, they don't half corkscrew deep these days, these application forms, you know, it's no longer enough just to say you own an alarm clock and your carpal tunnels are peachy keen, they want to know what kind of thoughts you're trying to avoid and how successful you've been in doing that, though I don't spose you need to hear that from me.

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.

Skyline Comb Tomorrow

I won't bore you with the details (I'll bore you without the details). It's all gone a bit quiet and vague what with the sky crisis and the pub about to change hands but not quite yet for the last hundred weeks and a long line of hunches and inklings for the same as usual to feed on while it burps out the uncertainty we dance around like insolent chihuahuas and still no actual date. I just watch the other halves of the long sufferers smash towers of liquid into their cleverness and wonder when the TV will die of a golf overdose. I've been encouraging the garden to express itself and holding poorly-attended midnight dictionary readings on the motorway footbridge. I can't believe you haven't turned up.

Must Haven'ts

Simple things followed simple things until an effect was produced. The effect was a bit boohoo. The things were manufactured torrentially and distributed in battalions and dressed in gowns and left in places where people might pick them up and buy them. After a while a sticker was added to the front of them and people almost couldn't not buy them. Eventually so many people had bought them and talked about them that anyone who hadn't bought them felt sick at the thought of doing so, because everywhere they looked they saw people with them, and in the other direction was a bright animated advert for them, and in the papers were discussions of them and of the people who owned and were talking about them, or hadn't yet bought them but planned to or hadn't yet bought them and did not plan to, because of all the hectoring and boofboof.
There were attempts to turn the things into a film. The first one failed because of weather and no money. The second one failed because of two deaths and no money, but raw noisy footage exists. The third attempt is being made in secret, by a web of people who know how to keep secrets secret.

Dinard Boredom Avoidance

Opera in the empty airport Irish Bar. Strange soundtrack for a view of a runway and a new windsock and six small propeller planes being watched by a flourescent man in a perspex box.
A yellow plane lands and five couples emerge. Balding men and cake-faced wives, laughing, maybe about the size of the plane or its resemblance to a banana. It is tiny. They could probably drive it along the road. The flourescent man strides out of his box waving a black hoop on a stick. The plane trundles away into a shed-for-planes. Hangar is not the word.
The bar gets easier on the ears and worse up the nose. In the toilet someone's been making brown thunder and someone else has tried hard to cover it up with chemicals. A bad combination to smell on an empty stomach gradually filling with six-Euro Heineken nearly-pints because it's not yet sandwich selling time, though the ingredients are surely there in the kitchen and the barmaid is surely sat there doing nothing but getting lost in the tumbling-wriggling piano-violin music and maybe wistfully recalling the events of the day someone left a bag unattended or flourescent man was late for work and in the absence of a hoop on a stick being wafted at them all the little planes got confused and scared and ended up at the McDonald's drive-thru begging for something familiar.