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.

Examples Quite Excessive

Johnny Cash sang about Christmas. A History of Bombing described innovations in missile stability. I sat everywhere in a succession of childish chairs, trying to concentrate on the bombing, but anywhere I went the CD started skipping, although I didn't think people used CDs anymore, and none of the other customers anywhere seemed irked, so I never asked the staff what was up with their music, or the customers when they planned to begin to be irked, Johnny isn't half going on about this pudding of his, do you not think? In case they said it's not a CD, it's not Johnny Cash, it's not even music, you're in the hospital, your head's come off.
A History of Bombing finished, and I burped and started on Martha Gellhorn's History of Aftermaths, which isn't what it's called. The music dissolved into something small and nervous, and Martha went round talking to people and looking at stuff.

Hold It Hold It Yeah Nice

I looked at the pictures of faces in the exhibition of pictures of faces. Two of them were so bad I wanted to phone some kind of very specific hotline and tell them it's their fault I'm infuriated and demand that they compensate me in ways it's not my responsibility to imagine, except to say that if they're not at least prolonged and terrific they'll be no compensation at all. I knew why I disliked these pictures, both at the original viewing and when I went back during lunch to check that I was still pummelled into froth by absolutely every aspect of their existence. But the good ones just made me think things like: yeah, good that, tones etcetera or: that's a really nice fence in the background there, a decent arrangement of shapes and colours, and I like shapes and can tolerate colours. For the bad ones I thought: these pillocks look like they've been asked to look like they're feeling the feelings people in compelling photographs feel, but all they seem to be feeling is the hope that the photograph might be good, which it isn't, because the hope for a good photograph is getting in the way of what's worth photographing, or is this actually the whole point and it's actually very successful, hence its inclusion in this travelling exhibition of successful large photographs, I wish I was looking at something less complicated. And when people asked how the exhibition was or why I'd been on lunch for ninety five minutes, you're not in France anymore mate, I didn't say anything about my detailed dislike of the things I disliked, for fear the amount of detail in the dislike would reveal other unpleasant character aspects, ones I don't cultivate on purpose, which might then ruin my chances, of what I'm not exactly sure.

Right of Way

Drizzle soothed my warm ham face. I ate a sausage bap and got wet. The bus to Land’s End was open-top, but nobody’d brought their goggles so we all sat on the lower deck peering at the bottom half of some green and grey views for an hour. I wondered about the first-and-last pub at our destination, I vaguely remembered its existence from a school trip or a family holiday or a film or a dream or a newspaper article or an episode of Michael Palin's Affable Wayfaring or a hallucination or absurd wish I had once. The drizzle stopped. The bus stopped. The pub was still standing, but it seemed like some slobbering maniac with a hammer’d boarded up all the windows. I checked round the other side, thinking maybe there was some kind of sunlight tax in operation (if you want natural light you'd better go outside and fucking work for it, explained Mr. Osborne, not just loaf around in booths and nooks, drinking yourself gormless and sucking away the sunlight from hard-working British outdoor family units, before laying down a classic slide show about how the way to solve a problem is to make it worse, to a theatre full of thieves and ghouls, naked except for hoods) and they’d covered up all but one of the windows to keep the overheads down and pass on their savings to you, the valued customer, in the form of competetively-priced while still independently-owned pints. But no. There was a man pulling things out of the front garden and putting them in a bucket. It’s closed, he said.

I turned around and strode and wept manfully towards the westernmost shopping village in England. Tears slid down my neck while I looked at jumpers and sweets and wondered what this tiny mall had to do with the demise of the pub. Probably everything. Maybe I should snap all the sticks of rock in half and start eating the fudge without taking it out of the boxes until someone views my thirst and anguish seriously. French children threw soft toys at German children. I went and stood on the edge of a cliff.

It was a good cliff, surrounded by other good cliffs, and I walked towards Sennen Cove wondering if there are people who grow up without cliffs like there are people who grow up without snow, and thought I might write the word cliffs down as a note to myself, and discovered I’d lost my pen.

I walked up the hill to the Sennen post office bus stop and waited for the bus to Porthcurno. It arrived exactly on time but on the opposite side of the road to the one advertised, and for some reason didn’t take my slightly narrowed eyebrows as an indication it should stop. I waited a bit longer and got the bus to St Ives, thinking how many times can a man accidentally arrive in St Ives in one holiday, but I haven't been to the Tate yet so I guess I'll do that now. 

I got off the bus and bought a chicken pasty to eat on the walk to the gallery, and it tasted good and made me think that I was doing the right thing and that all my hopes and dreams were perfectly valid and in no way unattainable, and on the final stretch, gallery to the left, sea in front, last bite of pasty in my raised right hand and me looking at it thinking we were fucking made for each other, you and I, there was a ripple in the atmosphere and the sudden sense of an uninvited presence and no noise at all and then I was looking at the ascending behind of a seagull with my food in its beak, clearly unwilling to negotiate or apologise, and an American couple in white baseball caps asked me if I was alright, and I said I spose it was my turn. I was still hungry.

Finger

Three rolls of new carpet arrived and were immediately left in the hall for a week, taking up all the space and fulfilling, brownly, none of the functions of a new carpet except the smell. We would get back from work having forgotten about them and open the front door and they'd lurch at us, softly begging to be nailed to the floor, or however it is you install a carpet. But that's not our task, we'd say, patting their rumps and shaking our heads. Until the landlord gets her shit together you're just three colossal air fresheners.
And every night there'd be a long face to long face about the staggering untogetherness of the landlord's shit. And phonecalls and promises and apologies and Polish lagers, which on a weeknight is reckless and not to be encouraged.
And after three or four we'd sit on the floor in the hall with our backs against the carpets, reassuring them that any future spillages will be dealt with promptly, efficiently, and possibly erotically, but we can't promise the boiler won't piss its pipes off again because of the aforementioned widely-strewn condition of the landlord's dutiful cack. And you ought to be aware of that. And we'd sleep and wake up and work and forget and get home and there they'd be. It wasn't a satisfactory arrangement for anyone.

Booking Form

I wrote a thing on paper and put the paper on the bed and went in the other room to enjoy a few cold premium yeah go on thens and a fucking adequate sandwich. Two hours later everyone was dead. No, water came from the ceiling like in that film about terrifying damp patches and turned the paper into paste and the ink went into the bed and my mattress was full of nonsense and we mangled the landlord. A drunk plumber arrived and laughed into his toolbox and we tried to forget about everything. I slept on the couch and woke up to find my upper left eyelid'd become a little sausage and everyone I saw at work offered remedies: punch yourself in the other one so at least they match, wash it with boiled salted water, rub a gold ring on it. A gold ring? Yes a gold ring. Are you a fucking warlock? No my gran swears gold rings are good for it, she's always having trouble with her eye-flaps. Could that be because she keeps mashing her filthy jewellery into them? Could be, yeah.

If You Don't Count The Duplicates

We saw the oldest thing we will ever see. It was some white powder at one end of a clear plastic tube. White powder from space and the past, back when the past was an enormous now and space was wall-to-wall everywhere. The tube was on a stand in a perspex hutch. Other perspex hutches stood to its left and right, housing their own big and small things from the universe. We were in a fucking museum, is what I should be saying. Until that moment, the oldest thing I'd ever seen was a group of kind and intelligent South American blobs using telepathy to tell me all about the mushrooms I'd just eaten. I could tell they were South American by their hats. So this powder being there all warningless and tiny was a nice surprise. A lot of very young people added fizz to the experience through inexplicable roaring. I don't have the official figures but I think there were four million of them, and it was my birthday and I forgot to get a vasectomy again. There ought to be booths for this kind of thing. Maybe I'll do it myself with a craft knife and a couple of bulldog clips. It's important to think about the future. I've been practising, which is why I haven't updated in a while. I've reached no conclusions. I still have a job.
The Pulitzer Smackdown is going fairly well and people are being nice about my efforts. For which I thank them. A lot of the stuff there is good. And are you well?

Suspect Beef

Royalties arrived in my inbox and a few clicks later were in my bank and I spent them immediately on a bag of bags of small things to put in my mouth. Thanks for that. A lot of the small things were spicy and/or or or hot. I've got this invisible swamp donkey using the front of my head as its arsehole, which, amongst other things, has caused some tremendous nasal disquiet. The spicy hot small things help to simplify the nostrils and promote a brief feeling of faciocranial justice. The hairs that would usually be creeping out of the conk-holes in order to form, if left un-destroyed, I can only assume, tusks, have relocated to the ear-holes where, against a black background, they resemble forked lightning. I sit in a booth in the weekend clamour outside Pret A Manger and auction off the chance to remove them. This week a guy did it with a roundhouse kick in them shoes that have blades that sching-glint-whoosh out from the toe-end when you tap the heel on the floor. He ate the hairs both at once and sprinted off to another appointment. The four hundred quids he outbid dozens with were donated to victims of poor judgement.

Must Be Off

I had this whole big thing in my head about the watchability of Taken 2, it was really going to highlight the something something paradigm something, but when I started to write it I realised it wasn't going to make any sense or be the kind of nonsense that's readable, and I tried to come at it from another angle and it ended up just being about boozing, and not really very whoa hey wow that's raw, so I put it in the pile of things that didn't work and went to a talk about self-publishing, where three people said keep going, champ, in three different ways, and you'll either find a publisher or realise you're not very good, and they asked for questions, and there should be a rule where if someone has asked for questions, and you've put your hand up, and they ask you what your question is, and you just go on about yourself so much that everyone else in the room begins hoping you either already have a terminal disease or contract an extremely meticulous one before dinnertime, and you have to actually be prompted to ask the question you were supposed to ask before you started saxophoning your brilliance, as if your question would be incomprehensible without the entire audience having a solid understanding of your cavernous potential, even though we can all tell your self-improvement will only begin with the removal of your ridiculous hat, and would you like us to remove it for you, with our feet, as part of a blinding assault, I've forgotten how this sentence was supposed to end. One of the questions was what am I doing wrong, and the answer was you haven't stopped doing what you always do.

The Things You Should Have Handy

A spider descended at my bed and face, just after I'd won another snooze, at about eight fifteen, to congratulate me, I imagine, on the ease with which I wake from nightmares about the real-life situations nightmares frequently precede, and mid-turnover we were eye to eye to eye to eye and so on and I realised it was bigger than my hand, and I immediately tried to re-feel my fear as something like familiar delight at its resemblance to the last spider of similar size that had been so close to my mouth, which was the one I used to share a caravan with, back when I ate cheese four times a day, but I didn't manage to fool it, and it wouldn't stop approaching, so I got out of bed and waited for it to land, and then I gave it a fiver and told it to get a fucking taxi.

Gesture Average Grandstand

After I went to the laundrette our washing machine at home turned peculiar. The next time I used it, it span all my clothes together into one big sock. I threatened it with the scrapheap, told it it'd end up as the insides of a post-apocalyptic clown-car on some zoom-boom TV show with everyone laughing while it became smithereens. That night we left the back door open and it waddled out from under the counter, through the garden and into the alley. We later heard from the neighbours that it was trying to form a gang with all the homeless devices. But it was unsuccessful and in the morning I coaxed it back inside and apologised even though I hadn't done anything wrong. I fed it some bedsheets and it sloshed them around all day and started beeping just as I was going to sleep. I apologised again and said the going-to-the-laundrette thing was a one-time-only deal, I was desperate, a bit drunk maybe, it's not the kind of thing I usually do, ask anyone. And it just beeped and beeped and beeped. And I unplugged it and it began to screech. So I dragged it into the street and destroyed it with a sledgehammer.

Why Would There Be A Button for That

Apologies to anyone who witnessed the scattershot gobbledyhate of yesterday. It published itself while I was waxing my toes and having it deleted caused me a great deal of relief. Basically it was a cavalcade of reputational besmirchment. My hairdresser will never speak to me again and the daytime regulars are exuding frosty auras. The phone hasn't stopped being silent and my housemates won't look me in the eyes. The rain avoids me and the forks all refuse to be wielded. My clothes have stopped fitting and the man in the shop is pretending he's sold out of samosas.

Bafflepig Surplus

We've started paying the TV Licence again. We don't watch it. We're the maverick idiot platoon. They haven't thanked us, they've just stopped threatening to fist us to death. They were sending two letters a day and they all said things like if you don't give us cash now then Graham Norton might have to start paying for his own snacks. Obviously the guilt became unbearable and every knock on the door caused nauseating premonitions. So it's worth it just for the relief. I have requested itemised bills so we can know where our money is going. We don't want it spent on anything twatty. But they have other incomes so I imagine it's hard to pinpoint exactly who's paying for what.

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.

Home to Great Fanfare

From the balcony I saw two hundred bald white serious heads nodding in unison. They were there to see an original line-up. The air was full of flabby doom. The song ended and the singer said there are concentration camps... being made, and another song started and the heads all agreed with it, in the smoke and lights they looked like they might hatch. The singer did an impression of being electrocuted which caused a lot of aggressive delight to surge around the room, but I didn't feel like if it repeated itself any more I'd understand it so I left. The support band had been really good.

Now Snappy Sometime

Argos phoned for a catch-up. I'd purchased something and instead of it arriving when they said it'd arrive, what arrived was a voice, through a phone, saying there's been an error, and why not spend the rest of the week nailing yourself to someone who gives a fuck. So I did. Then I emailed to complain about the delayed arrival of the item and the tone of voice used to deliver the news of the delay, which I felt did not tickle my fancy nearly enough and sounded if anything delighted that I'd been catastrophically inconvenienced. So the reader of this email had picked up a big red phone to tell me how entertaining my whinge whinge bloody whinge had been, well done for writing most of it in lower case and would I perhaps accept a refund of the delivery charge and a tray of figs. I said I was embarrassed slightly, not expecting any kind of reply really, certainly not one so personal and after dinner. I wrote the email on a high horse in the library and was shooed out before I had a chance to remove all the bluster. So sorry about that, but I am still angry, but not at you personally, and did you say figs or fig rolls, because I find a fig on its own is not worth the effort. She said she'd check, and everything's alright, and she was also a fully-trained psychiatrist. Fully-trained, she said. Fully-trained? Yes, a fully-trained psychiatrist. It was Saturday night and I'd just found some lager in a bin. I told her I had absolutely no other problems at all, so all that fully training would be wasted on me. But can I tell you the story of the rug my housemate ordered and which right now my toes are enjoying, he ordered it from you, not you personally, last month, just by pressing the screen of his phone, and it arrived at exactly the time specified and was delivered by a vibrating man just happy to be alive. Touched the screen on his phone a few times, I said, and then made some coffee and chuckled for three quarters of an hour in his dressing gown, whereas I've had to use my legs to walk to the shop, fingers to find the item in the catalogue, voice and face to arrange delivery, buttons to transfer money, and still the only thing I've received is a knife in the arsehole. And she said well how about a ten pound voucher then, and I said yeah alright.

Guarantee The Consistent Freshness

Samuel Beckett's face is advertising whiskey. Maybe it's not his face. It definitely looks like his face. Drink yourself clever, it seems to be saying. The actual slogan is something else. Something about a bard. Would you really call him a bard though? Maybe it's a coincidental face. A lot of old wiry white men end up looking similar. But it's got the same glasses and hair. It doesn't say his name. It's like you're supposed to see it and think wow the literary lookalikes agency is winning some major contracts, and then go and get yourself a bottle and hasten your own death. If a smart ghost endorsed it then if I drink it I'll become one of those fussy-tongued bon-vivants I've heard so much about. Not just a guy who enjoys a special offer like when they were hard-pushing Jameson's. He's come back from the dead to tell me about a liquid. He wouldn't do that if it wasn't good. It's a strange niche to go for. But it makes sense that it's only up at the bus stops.

All Straws Final

A queue sometimes forms. Of squashy red and orange people and their little gobshite squadrons. The queue eliminates waiting-time-based arguments at the bar. Which is handy because they all look the same out of your eye-corners and you have to decide who's next by who's being less of a cunt. And when they're hungry that's very hard. Then they find out we don't have Foster's. Sometimes you suspect that they suspect you of having previously had Foster's but removed it when you heard they were coming. I don't know why they're so angry.

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.

Solve

It was the type of selection weekend where you have to stand out and fit in and demonstrate a lack of over-confidence. I passed, so next Sunday is the start of evaluation week, where, who knows, you could be asked to demonstrate that you have the initiative to let someone else take the initiative, while also guiding them towards a desired outcome without actually giving them instructions, within a strict time limit, wearing a blindfold, in a potentially bruising environment, just before dinner. Should be a piece of piss.
I injured the soft bit of my right foot and both thighs don't quite work properly so now I walk funny. And slowly. Because if I try to get along at my normal speed it hurts a bit and I look like maybe I'm recovering from some rear-end trauma. The main disadvantages of going slowly are: it takes longer to get to places, and: people with clipboards have more chance to point their faces at you and stand in your way. On the way home from work a man being paid to collect money for a charity said "hey you look laid back today man", and instead of replying "yeah let's keep it that way" I said "thanks" because "yeah let's keep it that way" was not the first thing to occur to me, it was the second, and by the time it popped in I had left the man and his clean irking face behind.