Spines Out

The numbers people will want to see my research before they give me any of their numbers. I would like you to be part of my research, please (hello). The aim is to see if opening a book shop is possible. Or it's to see if it's possible to convince the numbers people that it's possible to open a book shop. I need your honest hands:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6QPJHH3

Something At Least

The underpass has been turned into a bath, with cement soup for water and just enough room between its surface and the tunnel ceilings for a human head to gasp and remember its swimming lessons, when Mrs Fuck Knows kicked it into the leisure centre swimming pool on primary school afternoons, for it to do spluttering widths in the shallow end while at the bottom of the other end the kids with gills were having underwater conversations before wrapping their mouths around black bricks and shooting into the air like buttered dolphins, and landing, on their hands, on the edge of the diving board.
Fill the pool with cement, Mrs Fuck Knows, I used to think, and we'll see who can follow your strict incomprehensible instructions.
So far nobody's surfaced in this particular bath. The lack of fanfare surrounding the project makes me doubt that it's art. But it follows on from all that fog that hovered around one end of a footbridge a couple of weeks ago, which I didn't see but was certainly a big fan of. I'd go as far as saying that that was the best thing I haven't seen all year. Its only flaw, which no-one seems to be willing to talk about, is that it didn't appear on any of my ways to and from work. Unlike Giant Public Bath of Wet Cement. Also unlike Never Open Bagels and The Pickled Athlete, though neither of these are really works of art, which isn't to say they're not putting any effort in.

Okay But We'll Have To Discuss

Here is what to do on Monday December 1st in Leicester: See Buddy Wakefield in a large old bright arcade. He's been on tour for the past three hundred days. He'll big you up. He'll redeem all your coupons and put diamonds in your cupboards. He has lasers for eyes.
Local support will involve three voices voicing a three-voiced thing I wrote. I can't be there to see this happen but I am excited about it and maybe you can go instead and tell me how it went, please, thanks.
Buddy is also in Bristol on December 3rd at The Birdcage, and most of the other places in the UK afterwards. Have a look at the tour. See him. He's good.

 

https://factoryroad.net/shop/products/buddy-wakefield-ticket/ 

Participation

I requested and paid for a piping hot sandwich and the man said I'll bring it to you and I sat down. I read the paper given away on raining morning corners by the evangelical ponchos who've lately begun unzipping my coat and tucking it under my armpit while saying paper, paper, paper, you will not live without this news. And you get it indoors and it's three-quarter page adverts for slightly larger phones and pictures of professional disgraces with incomprehensible teeth.
The sandwich didn't appear. I put the paper back on the shelf and tilted my head at the man. He asked if I was the man with the sandwich and I wanted to say no, I'm the man without the sandwich, my popping up here with an angled head ought to make that fairly clear, wouldn't you say, but I just said yes. He said he looked everywhere for me. I told him I was starving to death, and he threw four pound coins one by one at my face, screaming well here's your bastard money back you filthy haddock. I couldn't help thinking his response was disproportionate, and was reassured by the next day's free paper, which contained news of his protracted and gloopy end-of-shift kidnapping, opposite a full-page advert for a better kind of water.

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.

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?

Minor Crimes

The freezing jungle wants us dead but before that some news:

Mail Me Art is a thing where people do hand-art on envelopes and send them through the actual her majesty's royal post office mail to be collated and displayed in exhibitions and a book. The Factory Road Gallery are hosting one of this year's exhibitions and have parachuted in a few people they know, including Teratogens, who has universes seeping from his East Midlands fingers all the time and at night stores his eyes in a jar of unfathomable syrup.
It all starts in London the first week of August. Everything's very nice and you should go. The brief mentioned fun so I bought a scalpel and some exotic glue and put a lot of fun in there. But then I had to remove it all because it didn't look like fun, it looked and smelled like a baffling accident. I then put some words on the envelope using a biro.

National Poetry Month is all over the USA in April and as part of it The Found Poetry Review assigned the eighty five Pulitzer Prize for Fiction books to eighty five people. Each of the eighty five people then made thirty poems out of words they found in their book. One poem from each book will be posted on each day of April. I am one of these people. How the fucking hell this happened I don't know (I mean I asked to do it and they said yes and then I did it), but it's happened now and there's nothing we can do about it. I was assigned Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I changed my name to Chutzpah Limey and polished my butchering goggles. Now there's these thirty squirming blobs on my desk. They're a bit twitchy, I've given them all haircuts and I'm going to have to dress them properly. I'd be grateful if, if you look at them, you could tell me when their flies are undone.

It was after reading Brooke Valentine's blog just now that I thought I should stop wittering on for a minute and maybe deliver some information. She's good at drawing and cutting things.

Thanks for reading.

Within Working Days

A thing continues not to happen. It's up to me how often it hasn't happened because I find out whether or not it's happened by checking my email. So lots. For a while I was checking it fifteen times a day. Although I hadn't heard the new message ding I thought one might've snuck in while I was thinking about all the insurance I'd have to get for all the stuff I'd be able to afford if the email contained the right kind of news. And then I started imagining I'd heard the ding while staring into the potato cupboard or rearranging the cobwebs in the bedroom. And I'd hurtle to the computer but the thirteen thousand unread emails hadn't turned into thirteen thousand and one. And I'd leave the house and trudge up hills and waddle along ridges and plod down slopes and pinball through copses and springbok over trenches under overwrought javelin rain, hearing the ding come out of passing cars and handbags and tanks twenty times a minute thinking one of these must be a sign, and I'd get home and towel off and microwave a plate of the dauphinoise of the week and kick open the computer, drooling, and the number at the top of the leftmost tab'd read thirteen thousand and one, and I'd click on it, and there'd be an email from someone I'd never met, asking me to throw woe at an overlord to raise its awareness of a disease bonanza or boring old massacre, and I'd eat the dauphinoise thinking things are bound to get better.

First I'd Heard

There's a new cash machine in the neighbourhood and it doesn't charge one ninety nine. It doesn't charge anything at all. It made the news, obviously, and in the queue we lamented all the one ninety nines we've slaughtered in the name of cider binges and new crisp flavours and emergency unnecessaries. Who did we think we were? Who did they think we were? Who did anyone think anyone was? A feeling of relief slithered round the postcode and the mayor stood by the machine for an hour at dusk to wink at people and pat them between the shoulder blades and say petitions work, petitions fucking work, and we all smiled and punched him on the shoulder and wept.

Same Species Head Biting

Efforts have been made. But we can't get an ear into every mouth.

I'm not prepared.

This could be ideal.

You sound uninterested.

We emerged did we not?

I'll be wanting proof.

We can do a spectacular receipt. May we suggest you begin before we finish?

Well, waking up and having to shower. Couldn't the showering be done while the dreams are occurring?

Better hygiene is one of our priorities going forward.

And a reduction in things to look at and think about.

We express alarm at your estimate of the girth of our remit.

And is it alright if I'm not perpetually astonishing myself?

A morsel of gentle improvement is the suggested weekly dose.

Who's doing the measuring?

It's a sort of consortium. We will send you a notched stick to aid you in what people will soon be calling the getting the hang of things thing. Put it in, remove it, return it using the pre-paid envelope and relax.

I don't remember signing up.

May we remind you of the frequency and malignity of your episodes?

And everyone else I know can only remember a lack of consent.

We have lately been skipping it, in certain cases, in order to better quicklify things.

So what were you insinuating?

It was simple concern, sir. Perhaps there was a context issue. For which, in the event of the need arising, we will apologise.

Thanks?

It's a long game and we're in it to win it. This is a notion on which you might dwell.

Have I mentioned my pulverising schedule?

The post-dwelling remains will be far better spent. Might there be something else before we recede?

A red light in my mouth that flashes when I repeat myself.

A similar thing is in the works. It will be on sale as soon as we are politely distanced from all the chokings.

I didn't really mean it.

There's no need to tremble about innovation meeting convenience.

Fresh for Eighty Eight

I wake up at seven with my phone jumping up and down on my forehead deleting the dreams about slug-snakes in the garden and violence in the future. And I mumble to the bathroom about breakfast and freedom while the rest of the household goes one by one to work. My day shifts have vanished while the pub suffers refurbishment by pastel-brained interiorists. They're trying to sell it. It's a mystery how much the new paint splatters on all (all) the tables add to its value. I should've paid more attention in business studies. Then I could make the big, lengthy decisions. The biggest decision I make is how many cubes of ice to put in the ice well. Tuesday to Thursday it's about two hundred and fifty, and by Friday I'm usually optimistic and go for four hundred, but Mondays I like to gamble because it's always very quiet and I once got away with thirty, and when the evening shift came in at six there was only one cube left and I felt like a genius from the future. I couldn't communicate my exhilaration. It's harder to gamble with the lemon slice and lime wedge totals because you're better off just lasering up a whole fruit at a time, so every day you start with roughly the same amount and the way to enjoy an element of risk in that area is by offering people garnish where they'd not normally expect it, and they're usually happy to be asked and say yes, I will have some lime for my cranberry tremendous customer service arousal thanks, and you deplete your stocks at an unnecessarily fast rate, becoming insane with delight as the numbers approach zero and the clock approaches armageddon. Instead of all that I've been on the couch.

Lugubrium

We went to a small drinking-music place and three and a half hours later I went home and everyone else including the local MP went to get their faces clobbered by shield-wielding flourescent brutalists or their ribs rearranged by the batons of those special beserk officers they have nowadays, the ones with no number on their shoulders, shield or helmet, I think they came from Cardiff and must've been told it was a war they were off to and nobody should be left un-screaming in surprise agony especially the ones walking home in high heels trying to avoid the action, they must be crushed, and then it was on the front page of a national newspaper but I couldn't face reading the article because it was all anyone was talking about all the time afterwards anyway and every new person had witnessed another unspeakable thing.
Walking through it before it became what it was there were maybe two hundred people milling around between lines of police confused about their presence waiting for their shift to finish without getting a breezeblock dropped on their head and Everybody Loves The Sunshine was playing from somewhere and it's impossible to be rioting while that's on so no one was.

Windermere Behemoth

A beast in the lake. The size of three cars. That's a quote. Skin like a seal and humps like black rainbows. Reclusive, the eighth sighting in sixty years. Lazy you might say. Dossing about underneath all the tourism. A customer this morning bought five copies of the local paper and told how she had seen the monster yonks ago with her ex-husband and she'd been telling the story for years and today's the day people are going to stop disbelieving her after they see the one blurry photo of something that could be anything. It was good to have not-the-weather to talk about. I asked a few people what they believed. Is it going to eat the village? Will there be hullabaloo and t-shirts? If we all got on its back could we ride it out of the recession? There was much discussion, but in the end what people wanted to know was how much their shopping cost and whether or not they could have a bag to put it in.

Clusterbobbins 2010

28 days left in the race between doddering old ghoul and young blue menace. A reset button is begging to be pressed. I'll be away on the big day. I'm going to sell my vote and put the money on the greens getting at least one seat.
The papers are full of what might happen, what might happen if what could happen happens, what happens if what is happening continues to happen, and what happened in the past when what might've happened did happen, though a lot of people said it wouldn't, while fearing that it would. There isn't a lot of news.
Apparently the voting cards will have just two boxes: one for wrist deep and one for up to the elbow. The man on the last train home told me so. I called him a cynic. He said sinner mate, sinner. Fair enough. Yes, he said, and another thing you young shiny bollock: I used to have liquid light for brains, but in order not to dazzle people I had a dimmer switch installed, and now the knob's popped off and to buy another one I only need an extra 20p, have you got 20p?

Removal

While I wake up there's a voice in my head speaking a language I don't understand. Every morning so far this year it has said the same thing. It wants me to learn what it is saying and say it. It knows my life would be pineapples and thunder if I could say this thing. Then I wake up fully and it goes away.

On the news today underneath a picture of a grey-haired man feeding a dog were the words EXAM CHEATING.