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.

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.

Refinery

Thank you for applying for the position of Incidence Participant / Smooth Running Officer / Facilitation Enabler. Your warped and howling brains did not, on this occasion, after careful consideration, etc. The questions you answered less correctly than was desirable were: If a man tells you he's just eaten a kingfisher, who do you phone first? What demographic has the highest incidence of scurvy? And which mediocrities do you say you admire in order to reduce the chance of being thought of as pretentious?
Your details have been passed to the Ministry of Explosions, who will be in touch shortly.

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.

Took Me Ages

Concerns have hatched: Your last entry fell into some kind of hole shortly after its appearance. Could you bother us with an explanation?
It was a durational text not designed to be viewable for any longer than five minutes.
You could perhaps have announced this.
I didn't realise that that was what it was until I realised it was over.
We brim with suspicion.
Also there was a particularly bad comma. And two phrases that seemed to demand a semi-colon be inserted between them. But when the semi-colon was inserted, it looked completely unnecessary. I was signed off work for two weeks with acute perplexity while I added it, looked away from it, looked back at it, removed it, looked away from its absence, tried to think about something else, looked back at its absence, then re-added it, over and over again.
We detect a lack of commitment.
Fortunately a film was made of this interlude, a sort of tedious crescendo which is lapping up the plaudits in niche cinemas nowherewide.
Had you considered either releasing the thing in both versions or choosing to care less about piffling trinkets?
No.
We believe the content of the thing contained regrettable details.
Not true.
And that there was never a semi-colon or (or nor) the glaring absence of one.
Hogwash.
Could you then enlighten us on the subject matter of the thing?
No.

When Public Facing

I put my expensive but not really when you think about how long the blades last and how little blood they shed shaving device in my ear, to see if it could discourage the twigs and parsnips that've lately, sorry, begun to think they live there, because I'm ninety five years old now and this is the kind of thing that happens, or it's a thing that happened ages ago and I only just noticed it after a couple of what may or may not've been ear-directed quizzical micro-glances my way at work, or whatever, I'll take it over wisdom teeth any day or night of the rest of my life thanks.
The blade didn't help the removal though. It helped me to bleed from somewhere I've never bled from before, known to specialists such as myself as the I'm not exactly sure although I studied the bastards at university sir, call it the non-flappy outer ridge shall we, alright yes, this wasn't important to start with and it's only getting less so.

Yeah Not Bad Mate

The toothy young barber did not want to stop. I'll go at your eyebrows, he said, no thanks they're not really something I get involved with ever but now you've highlighted their lack of splendour maybe I'll give them a once-over in the bathroom mirror although if you start on that path where will it end, in fact just get the machete out and I'll swap heads with somebody I can stand to look at, and that's not anyone in this room right now, so you're going to have to take to the streets, I said. And he for some reason took this as consent, and slapped a comb against the left eyebrow and made some sweeping stabs with the electric thing, then removed the electric thing and the comb and held them in perfectly still hands while he tilted his head as if to invite me to stop him, giving me the opportunity to say yeah don't bother with the other one I prefer a fucking mismatch above all things, which I didn't, so he went at the right one, then threw his tools down on the counter and with his back to me dipped a fist-sized black brush in white powder, turned, breathed in, and Zorroed me about the face with it. I can only assume it was essential to my recovery.

Everyone At Some Point

Bournemouth was dark and breezy and trousers-wise I was strictly business. Because I forgot to pack the jeans. I've never been casual below the waist anyway. It's hard to find the town centre if you walk in the wrong direction. The first night there was silent lightning below the clouds above the sea. Lone cars stopped on the road to watch it. Lone men sat at tables in bright pubs watching the lone cars watching it. I lone sat in Wagamama at a table with twenty-five absent people. I got smiled at a lot, by the staff and the people at the other tables. I couldn't help thinking this wasn't necessary. Maybe the smilers were somehow vicariously amused by the amusing book I was reading, maybe the brisk dialogue was blasting out of my scalp. More likely the smiles were acknowledging the blue ink that'd gone from my pen to my pocket to my fingers to my face without me noticing until hours after, in the hotel room, burping. Wagamama: you should've told me. They'd've told me in Tampopo. They'd've rushed over with some helpful fluid to wash the stain or drown the sorrow in Tampopo. And then they'd've asked me what I was even doing eating evening bowl-food without a zesty and mysterious companion. I rang them to verify this and they said A: where've you been lately, and but before you answer that, where has she been lately, and B: we welcome any facial blemish regardless of hue, as you well know, your face having displayed many alarming and unnatural spasms of colour in the long but not long enough time we've known it, sir. And the hues, lately, have been intense, we've heard, please accept our vigorous sympathies and consider buying a gift voucher for your famished pals this Christmas. And before Bournemouth I'd been swept up in a compressed-head delirium and spent all night believing my eyes were about to burst like squeezed peas, and every change of position made it worse, and all I'd wanted to do was to hammer nails into my face until whatever was in me was gone and I could enjoy a wet heap of something with not too much coriander in it. Wagamama didn't press me for these details. Their dish of nuanced liquid, tender dead things and small long hot things was fine, but in and around and during and amongst and after it I couldn't detect a single concern for my wellbeing.

Bearable Onslaught

The weather got in bed with us and would not respect our boundaries. Weekdays we all worked beyond our thresholds in breezes bought from Wilkinsons that made an office-wide soup of our deodorants. Widened margins of error let photocopied rectangles land on previously unthinkable desks. Chiming phones were gripped in sweaty trepidation. Remarks were made. The customers were hungry for rain.
In the unwaged hours we groaned in parks showing our feet to each other and suffering leisure. A frisbee is a machine that takes away from the people in its immediate vicinity the ability to fully relax and replaces it with the faint but persistent worry that at any moment some jovial wrist will launch a silent disc at your favourite nostril irrevocably.
A memory wails: before a P.E. lesson in the gym this tall guy was spinning round under a basketball hoop with a rounders bat in his left hand. Others were gathering in a bored and fragrant murmur in the middle of the court and under the far hoop this older tall guy was stretching and doing smiling older tall guy stuff. The first tall guy increased the speed of his spins until he felt queasy and then stopped spinning and also stopped gripping the rounders bat, which was then launched across the basketball court in a dead straight untumbling line towards the back of the other tall guy's head, past and through and inbetween everyone else's white-clad adolescent necks and foreheads and oozings and worries, and as the other tall guy tuned into the collective clench of expected horror he turned to receive the fat end of the bat with his mouth half-open at first and then shut just before it bulleted into his face. Half the audience looked at the other half for an indication of how to react appropriately.
He staggered into the changing rooms and leaned on the sink and spat out a tongue of blood and shattered tooth. The bat thrower stood just inside the doorway, unsure of the etiquette, crying. The teacher picked the tooth fragments out of the sink and took the boy and his mouth away. The rest of us played games with no projectiles.

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.

Oi Oi Oil

I threw three people out using only language. I had to abandon subtlety. While I was bellowing I was thinking of Top Trumps. There was a pause and I re-bellowed the one demand in case they thought it was negotiable, which it wasn't. Their faces were all marshmallowy and they were very young. They left in a meek huff. If they'd been older and had faces made of oak or marble I wouldn't have had the Top Trumps score necessary to throw them out. It takes ages to throw older people out because they stand there saying things like come on man and what have I done, to which the answer is always you were being a cunt, but you can't say that because no one ever takes it the right way, for some reason they always feel insulted, it would be nice if when you said it the other person winced and went oh cripes I must've had one too many, I shall leave forthwith, just let me find my shoes. But they always want a detailed explanation of their faults, and when you give them a brief rundown of the fifteen least acceptable things they've done since they arrived they try and put together some kind of round-table discussion. So I usually just squirt lime juice in their eyes until the police turn up. Most people are largely nice.

Other Operators 1

Twice now some people I've never met have printed something I've written together with other things other people I've never met have written or drawn and distributed it to other people I've never met. I haven't thanked them for this yet, because I'm a fucking monster. And monsters get scared of confronting reality. Ask anyone (who's a monster). They're at Darklane Quarterly and also some of them I've been led to believe sometimes do stuff with words on the first Wednesday of every month at The Thunderbolt in Totterdown, which is an area of Bristol very close to Temple Meads, which is the train station, which is what people used to call the railway station until that began to sound silly, which is a shame but we're not going to fucking cry about it are we? Like they do in the Letters page of the fucking Guardian?

A Simple Excuse Me

The new Stella glasses arrived. They're big news. They have a gold rim and a red logo and a stem and a flat bit on the stem with magic on it. And if you put one round each ear you can hear Belgian angels getting to know each other. Stella already has these egg-shaped glasses with lovely mess all over the outside like something you'd give a dying prince for Christmas. Sometimes a manly man asks for a pint and you get one of these glasses down from the shelf and before it's under the tap he's halfway to tears and begging for a normal glass in case anyone sees him and concludes he's significantly less heterosexual than he was before he drank from a fancy thing. We're not giving the new ones out yet.

The Beth Gibbons Forehead Approach

We ran out of some stuff and told people we were out of some stuff and the most miffed asked questions that revealed a lack of understanding of the information delivered two seconds previously, even though the information delivered two seconds previously was very clear and delivered two seconds previously: It is all gone. You have as much of it as we do. There is none of it left. Where it was is now where it isn't. I mean everywhere is now where it isn't, but where it was is where its where-it-isn't-ness is most apparent, what with where it was being where you'd look for it first if you didn't know that that's now where it isn't, like everywhere else always is except the depot and your stomach and the other places it gets delivered to, if there are other places it gets delivered to, I haven't checked. The bald wet red folk have demolished it all by eating half of it and leaving the rest for the crows, or are they ravens, I'm not an expert.

European Cinema

The Thor riots went largely unreported by the mainstream media. Thousands took to the cinemas to kick the piss out of Kenneth Branagh effigies. "It was his vision", they bellowed, "and he is therefore most blameworthy. But don't think we aren't also going to smash the teeth out of Natalie Portman's cardboard cut-outs, and the face and brains out of anyone who dares to go around resembling Anthony Hopkins."
And they did, and it went on for seventy five hours, and even those with no limbs turned up just to scream things like "Branagh is a wallet-raping dangleberry."
The cost of the damage is still being calculated, but insiders say the total is likely to be "nowhere near enough."
Hopkins has been fired into space, where he will be safe from the families of the goats, goblins and Cleveland Steamer enthusiasts who were slaughtered just for looking like him.
"I'm off", he said, in a statement read by his lawyer. "If I'd've realised how woeful the finished product would be, I'd've nailed Branagh's thespian ballsack to the wall of a public toilet and streamed his whimpering demise live on my website. Suffice it to say we are no longer on kissing terms. I hear the Chinese have had him placed under house arrest even though he lives in Suffolk. If you ask me, they should cover him in duck shit and stab his shins with a chisel until he's fucking dead."

Down and Right a Bit

We stayed in the peasant palace with the whole top floor to ourselves and six beds each. The other buildings were mostly roofs and the bank had a big mosaic of a wench on it. The shops were open for five minutes a week.
The site was placed between a lake and a prison for screaming geese. It was about the size of a large Tesco. We dug some holes and filled them back in again.
Then the drive to Hauteville. I used to work there. So did Shane. He is managing the site this year. I am not. We dug some holes and filled them back in again. What we filled them in with was better than what we took out of them. At one point one of the holes had to be moved to the left a bit. Then we went for dinner at the bar restaurant up the road along the beach round the corner. They know us and Hassan immediately made Geoff go behind the bar to pour us a load of drinks, flavoury ones with unusual aromas served in fancy glass hats. We drank them and some pizzas appeared, followed by more drinks and more pizzas and so on until everybody had had enough pizza and then more drinks appeared and I think he invited us to Morocco, I'm not very sure, one of his kids was there sat opposite with a shirt on looking like when will I see the end of all this hooting drudgery, they must think they're the magnificent fucking seven, and it turned out he was waiting to go bowling and had been since before we walked in unannounced and he was ten years old and we quickly departed shouting and demonstrating advice about bowling technique.
The next day we dug some holes and filled them in again, and there was a bit of a side-plot involving posts and screws and ropes and chainsaws and the sun behind us. Hassan dropped off some enormous ham baguettes and fizzy drinks and glasses. When we'd finished things off we went back for a meal, he'd bought us white fish, I can't remember its name, it was with potato and exactly right and there was a lot of wine and some beer and some whiskey and it became extremely difficult to leave.

Then the drive to Savane. It's almost the length of France. The length is like the width but longer. It took about forty years and the satnav lady has a patronising voice, did they hold auditions for it or did they already know just the woman. We went to a very tense service station and ate cheese. My phone stopped working while I was right in the middle of something and I realised the charger was the length of France away and I went beserk to myself and then calmed down angrily and then relaxed.

Bare Minimums

If you're reading this, thanks for reading this.

There is no news except that Sting has a cottage round here and his favourite hobby is to drive round in a small old car pretending not to be Sting. This is a fact so true that people are bored of talking about it. Unlike the cold and miserable future.

If I was to make something up out of slices of things I've made up that didn't make it anywhere it would look like this and be called some sentences taken out of context are a lot better than the things from which they've been removed.

#
The sand was havoc in our foldy bits.
#
The sun had arrived and was beginning to claw people's faces off.
#
I told her about what I would need to tell her about if I was employed to be doing the job I was pretending to be doing.
#
Oxgoctional bumbunctions.
#
The sun was throttling people with its nuclear hands.
#
I burst into the shop and composed myself.

Hoof Hoof

Asleep in the duty hutch dreaming horses I woke up to two of them looking through the open windows and I went whuh and they trotted off in the direction of everyone else. Which was troubling because although I am not a horse-wrangler I supposed I was supposed to make them leave. So I got out of bed and followed, and they were blurry and brown and part mammoth. And hungry. So I didn’t get close. And the whole camp was sleeping and I thought probably the best thing to do is not startle them into galloping over a marquee and chewing some child’s shins off. So I kept my distance and sent my thoughts out to them. And my thoughts returned with the message: GESTURES. So I moved round to where they could see me and waved my hands at them like they were vans. But they just stared and chewed and went further from the exit. They live up the road and I walk past them twice a day and I hoped I hadn’t accidentally invited them round to watch the sun rise. They were acting so welcome.
I woke up someone who isn’t allergic to horses and pointed at the horses and said is this unusual? And they said let them eat and they will go away. And I did and they did. And the following day was another green boiler full of screaming kids and I fell asleep in a hot hammock at 5pm.
Before the horses I’d been up all night with someone else’s face waiting for a diagnosis at the post-fiasco retina shop. It came over the phone and was good. Or do I mean prognosis, or both. We’d thought the victim might be losing a retina because of the wet red mess where their eye used to be. And the doctor saying the retina might be detached. But it was just wolf-crying and they were sent home with eye-drops and opiates and a list of things to do to the eye which included putting a grain of rice in there. Waiting for all this took a mountain of time and before the drive back I had to wire my mind to the moon to keep my lids up. So I had a cold can of muck and when I got back in the shed I could feel the brain jittering around in its holder, sweating thoughts through the third eye and murmuring how can a fizzy drink be so ruinous.

Your Massive Horrible Face

I've got to have a word with you about...you know. It's bothering the community. I bet you didn't know there was a community. There wasn't, before you arrived. Then: my god. They saw me with you a few times and one night demanded answers. Why does it drip? Why does it swivel and hiss? Who is responsible? They were all worked up and talked very quickly. I said I know who it belongs to, but I don't know who controls it. Maybe nobody. Mirrors and windows only reflect about half of it, so how is he supposed to know of the revulsion? And he doesn't have a radio, so he won't've heard the songs.

Occupation

The body of a woman with the head and tail of a dolphin. It's kneeling on a block of ice and looking at you with its pink-lipsticked mouth open. It has a yellow drink balanced on its left flipper. Beside it is the body of a woman with the head and legs of a zebra. The rare kind of zebra that goes about on two feet. It's looking at you and taking off its pink bikini one shoulderstrap at a time. Nipples imminent. You just paid money to see it, you lonely freak, because you were thirsty and wanted a can of Orangina and this is what they put on the side of cans of Orangina nowadays.

Besides the Dolph-maid and the Sexual Zebra there is a third creature, but it's so hideous my brain has deleted the memory. Maybe it's only in France, I can't be sure, having not left the land of baguettes and delicious cheese for nearly a full three months, but could this be a new Europe-wide strain of deranged soft-drink adverts?
I hope so, but only the future knows, and I don't want it to start arriving any faster than it already does, which is quite fast, with thirteen hours a day six days a week spent clipping kids in harnesses onto ropes and telling them all they have to do is go up the rock and come back down and be careful not to smash their face off during any of it, so it's important to listen to me and watch if you like and when you reach the top you need to lean back like this until your legs are horizontal and your feet flat against the rock and your toes point to the sky and shoulder width apart or wider and slowly walk down the rock like in the Batman TV Show you don't remember, except they were going up a building and you're coming down a rock but nevermind that just remember the further out you lean the more stable you will be and there's no need to look for footholds just keep those feet flat and if you don't keep them flat there's a small chance you might slip against the rock and smash your face off, then your friends will have to run around trying to catch your face, which may well've been whooshed away by the gusting sky and have landed on a cloud, up at which faraway people will look and say "look Pierre, a cloud that strongly resembles a face" and when we're back at camp I'll have to fill out a "Face Loss Form" and that's a lot of work, well not a lot of work but it's annoying so please just listen, I'm trying to get away from paperwork and photocopiers and where's-the-file-I-think-it's-in-the-office and the water cooler needs changing and numbers are god, is that clear?

I have never said this to the kids, because if I'm not instructing them I'm serving them food, or eating the food at their table, or working in the Tuck Hutch / Snack Shed / Magical Confectionary Wonderland, from where I can keep my eyes pointed at anyone sitting on the nearby fence and ask them to please not sit on the fence, just walk around, if you sit on the fence physically and/or metaphorically it will break and you may end up on the wrong side, having done damage to both, and yourself, and I will have to repair it and send you to be repaired, and not one of us wants that, just line up to make yourself diabetic on these here tasty fruits of child labour and human rights abuse they call cans of Coke and bars of Mars.