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.

A Burbling Old Sausage

A small delay while I had my chakras resurfaced. It took a while to find them, first, and then there were complications, as you'd expect, but I was eventually able to trouser a queen's pittance by flogging the full set to a wispy gentleman who insisted both he and I knew what we were on about. I didn't really believe him, but that doesn't mean he wasn't right. It took a few weeks to sharpen all the scissors and marinate the doctor's hands etc, and after the operation I woke up in a season of necessities where it rained capital letters and the wind tied knots in space and the internet completely froze over not entirely unwelcomely. So I was able to finish another book-length heap of sarcasm, and when I say finished I mean I stopped bothering with it and moved on to other nothings, and when I say book-length I mean short but double-spaced. I pressed the sequence of buttons that turned the file on my computer into a cardboard-coated rectangle on my doormat, next to and on top of all the adverts for potential politicians, all of us repeating ourselves, and I'm not sure what I'm doing but what they seem to be doing is using dead language to kill hope. Not really, no not really, no really. It's a lot more colourful this time, isn't it, with all the new squabblers blinking at each other and the hairy clown interrupting your morning flapjack to tell you voting's daft, and what would be much better is I don't know, I haven't read his book because the front cover highlights and reverses the word love within the word revolution, which indicates amongst other things a lack of terrific ideas, although I'm willing to believe he didn't scoop all his language from the mouths of boring corpses like all the people on my doormat did. And a Monty Python keeps e-cajoling me in bold yellow underlined writing to make a donation to the least credible mammal in existence, which will enter me into some sort of tombola that may result in a dinner date that neither of us or anyone else has ever, to my knowledge, expressed the slightest interest in.

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.

Less To Go Wrong

I went to Liverpool to learn more about how to help people respond to failures in managerial procedure. Fleetwood Mac were playing as I wrote notes in a modern wood/pork boozer on the following. [Jesus, you write notes for these things -  yes - and then type them up, later - yes - that's a lot of effort - not really - for not very much - yes]. If I had to introduce a fictional musical accompaniment that embodied the concept of error, I thought, it would be them, but luckily, unhappily, there they already were. One of the two other customers loudly asked me and the bar staff if we thought he gave a shit. About anything. My no was lost beneath that song about going your own way's insufferably well-recorded slop. The other of the two other customers was saying vacate, vacate. Vacate, vacate. It was possible that both these people were finally taking a stand against the cultural atrocities regularly delivered by this band, who I feel've lately, and also my whole life, been lurking amongst almost every public playlist, like hairs in a sandwich, which people tell you you're overreacting to when you spit them out, either through a lack of good judgement, or the wish to appear different, and both of these are things you will outgrow eventually, until, like the rest of everybody, you will admit that before this group came along, the entirety of human musical endeavour was undeniably lacking a pinnacle, and you will then start ordering sandwiches that consist entirely of hair, for delivery, nightly, to your plateau of refinement, for you to enjoy with a straight face and the usual vague but persistent thoughts about getting something done someday, so it's no use insisting that the thought of this band induces panic, the sight of them induces nausea, and the sound of them induces terminal emphysema, because you'll be like all the rest of us soon enough, us for whom not a hint of insincerity could come anywhere near our professions of love for these gutsy and melodic leviathans, and [you should've stopped at emphysema, we think - alright - there's a distinct negative bias to this whimsical bile that seems quite unwarranted - that's all I've got - right, but, please, onward, to more pressing matters].
I did a radio show the other week you can listen to here. There's nothing wrong with it.

Our Thinking Equally

The advertising-enhancers have been quiet lately. I hope they're planning something gigantic. For a good month I've not seen a single thudding obscenity scrawled across an immaculate chin, no happy genitalia slapped across a logo, and no oh for fuck's sake smeared over a slogan.
For the summer, the billboard by the roundabout showed a blue sky with popcorn clouds behind six towers of silver squares that spelled out HATE.
Somebody used to tear down the new posters on the billboard on the corner as soon as they went up, a knack for disfigurement that gladdened the spleen and made questions grow: do they climb up there somehow or use a thing on a long stick or what? Are they one person or a few? Are they afraid of getting caught? Have I met them and not known?

Microconch

Outside the front of the train station in a place I wasn't expecting to visit, a man walking a hammerhead Labrador asked me if I knew what time it was. I looked behind and above me, having assumed there'd be a big accurate clock there and that we might then have a terrific little chinwag about how we don't look up enough when we're in cities, it's nice to notice the good bits every once a year or so, isn't it, god you're so right, nobody has ever met an architect. After I'd untwisted my neck and looked into his baffled eyes, I took out my phone, and it wasn't displaying any time because the battery'd gone. I looked at the Labrador's two-foot wide head and back at the man and said no. He said thanks for trying.

Subject Matters

I anonymously published, in a quarterly workplace journal, distributed only to members of a particular sub-group within those workplaces, and read by a sub-group of that sub-group presumably in idle moments between obligations, let me be clear, an account of an event: the twice-yearly conversion, by their line manager, of a working human's current value, potential value, and behavioural desirability, into a dot on a graph. The account's tone was one of inquisitive sarcasm. It ended with three questions. The last word of the last of these questions was: sinister. The use of this arguably overly-dramatic or maybe even paranoid adjective was proportionate as a response to the emergence, during the twice-yearly conversion, of a queasy situation regarding the crusading-and-prevailing new business doctrine: if you don't say you love the doctrine, if you say you don't love the doctrine, if you scamper about the office pointing out the doctrine's snags and foibles, your dot will never be placed in the upper third of the graph, because your questioning of the doctrine that produced the graph counts as undesirable behaviour. Never mind how well you perform in the day-to-day tasks, you will never be deemed excellent unless you learn to say you are a fan of the compulsory one true path.
Shortly after everyone'd had their twice-yearly conversion, and before the doctrine's implementation-assessors visited, to convert the whole building into a multi-million pound dot on a self-congratulatory ideological conquest display unit, there was a noticeable office-wide increase in I-heart-the-doctrine pomp and fanfare, and judging the sincerity of this here grisly flag-waving, and those there frantic declarations of fervent belief, became impossible.

Guided Distribution

We practised our huffs and laments in the medicine queue. The clocks were no help at all. When the next appointment was due, the name-display thing let loose a biblical alert-shriek which did nothing to soothe the anxious or calm the infants. The leading edge of the cloud of the mutterings of the man behind me slurped the top of my spine. The noticeboard said not to worry, none of these things are new or exceptional or temporary.
When the receptionist handed me my prescription she said here's your dinner, tasty bit of dinner, you're gonna eat it all up, with some water at a table for one, and tell me how it tastes.

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.

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.

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.

Inexpensive Holiday In Other People's Enthusiasm

Impossible not to think of that Sex Pistols song when you're in front of the Berlin wall. It's very tall and close and forms an impression in your mind and neck. There are many murals or one big mural, and signs asking you not to write anything on anything and a lot of writing on everything, thoughtful things like fuck yeah and woohoo and security round these parts is not what it used to be.

Hell Maybe

I'm growing extra heads. They're very small and pink and never say a word. I try to scrub them out and collar them off. They're bald and prone to weeping and huddling. I'd rather they shared some knowledge or went elsewhere. Maybe there's a pill. If not I'll have to get a neck transplant. Like some kind of guitar. And then there'll be talk, and constant jokes about fretting.
My thumbs aren't mutating and because of this I have been preparing food in quiet kitchens. The first pay packet will arrive just as I set off for a selection weekend elsewhere. If after the selection weekend I am selected then there'll be an evaluation week. If I'm of any value I'll be going back to France in January.
If after the selection weekend I'm not selected then I'm coming to stay at your house.

3

We thought it'd be fun because it couldn't possibly be what it said it was. It's a cautionary to scare the kids with now. Just recalling out loud the number and shape of the balloons terrifies them. And the music: I still have the Roger Bingbing live album, and I only have to threaten to show them the front cover to get them to obey. Their healthy aversion to niceness somewhat makes up for their lack of actual interest in anything. Any tips?
The last thing I built for them was the Neckhorn. It wasn't much of a hit. I think I gave it too many necks. A bit Medusa-like, but you could get inside it and each one made a different noise. Getting out without a scrape or scratch was hard though, and once Optical got stuck in there for half an hour and was rescued by the man in the tent across the field, who'd heard this whooshing mournful S.O.S call and wanted to know where it was coming from. He'd've got there sooner except he spent a while spellbound, "unable to believe morse code could be so beautiful". I sold it to him, after Optical was out of hospital, and he installed wheels on it and trundles it into the woods now to practise. Since then I've had no new ideas and not really looked for any material. I miss our hammering collaborations, really, I feel we had more to do.
Good to hear about Shuttlecock. He sounds more coherent than usual. Did his shoes match? There was a time when he refused to wear a matching pair, said it stopped him going stale and "makes hopping easier". This was before his wife stopped talking, and I rode to his place with some shoes I'd found in the rubble of a house and all the doors and windows were open, "to let the rain in", though it wasn't raining, "yet", and he'd just started collecting incomplete sets of things. The best was a little jigsaw-postcard of a cat, complete except for the eyes, and he'd taken two photos of his bad eye and stuck them in the space. "Cats", he used to say, "are fucking twats". And "a goat is a hairy dustbin". You won't regret getting to know him, which may well happen now his life's taken a turn for the better and worse.
Good to know you're good. Come round sometime and we'll make something. The Bald Mutineers are playing next month and they've asked me to help out. I'd have to shave, again, but it's an option...let me know.