In the Region as Predicted

The ear man phoned and said he'd have to cancel because he had an appointment at the doctors. I thought it was me who had the appointment, with him, so he couldn't have any appointments, he'd be at work, assessing all the local ears. Give me a number, I considered saying, and I'll explain to them that it's me who has the appointment, with you, at this time, and that therefore no other appointments involving not both of us are possible.
I agreed though, instead, that we postpone, and I stayed home, with my ears, unexamined.
At the rescheduled appointment he said it was his son who'd had the doctor's appointment, really, and I'd misheard, ha-ha, ha-ha, I don't have the kind of phone where you can tell what people are saying. It would encourage me to speak, and there's no telling where that might lead.
He dredged my canals and asked me how much Hawkwind I'd done. He measured my cranium and threw some twigs at my neck. He printed a graph and amplified the areas of concern with his most serious finger. It was a bit worse than I expected.

Furtherance Merger

Anyway we saw some music in a field and would not stop banging on about it with unruly mouths and screeching ears for days afterwards. It was noted that banging on about it won't bring it back, unless the banging on about it is kept up until the moment the same thing begins again, which from a look at the tour dates is either a very long time or an expensive distance away. In response to this being noted it was noted that if we're going to be noting things then the function of the banging on about it was to confirm and describe the enormity of what'd been heard and seen and detected, rather than to somehow resurrect the experience through nerdish incantations and slow shakings of the head, so there. I left to spend three days in a popular northern hill factory, eating fish and chips and slowly shaking my head. While there I saw this. It was very good. When I got back to the south they'd thoughtfully put piles of speakers on every street and were playing different musics through them, and we gathered at a few of the piles and did things worth banging on about.

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.

Now Don't Be Alarmed

The crisps really look like they're having a great day at the pool, leaping from the diving board into the sour cream and the spring onion confetti, with a cosmic slipstream stretching up through the three in the air to the last one left, on the board, clearly trembling. Maybe having realised that after the cream comes being smashed between teeth and swallowed out of existence. It's hard to tell. The peppercorn-eyed and mouthless overseer at the top doesn't seem surprised by either the leaping or the trembling.
I phoned the info line and crunched worriedly at them. All they said at first was sir, sir, sir. It was remarkable how they could tell my gender from the I'm not sure but probably tone, frequency, and rhythm of the crunches. By the time I'd eaten half the pack I'd been passed to a manager, who sang a de-escalatory lullaby that had a list of compensations for its chorus. I couldn't get enough.

Turns Out It's People

If everyone in this cafe right now formed a band, we'd be called Loudmouth Donny and The Cosmic Douchebags. It's unfair, but accurate. Like this pen would be named The Clicky Bulbous Struggler, at the South-West Pen Afficionados' annual pen-naming convention and hog roast, to which I've never been invited. There's a stupefying mismatch between its shape and its purpose, like someone's stuck a nib to a balloon and said well boss we've made it user-friendly for people who don't want to use it too much, the fuck else you want? And using it solely to make complaints about it was what qualified me to become a member of The Douchebags, Donny-less and non-cosmic until four minutes ago, when a young spam-cannon wrapped in a woollen rainbow walked in, enunciating into his phone and dragging our futures behind him, and instantly we realised our purpose. We haven't, strictly-speaking, practised, or met, yet, but we've definitely been brought together.

Jaws

In St Ives there are crowds in thin lanes and when a bus goes past everybody faces the wall. We are looking at the sea and through gallery windows at pictures of the sea. Tiny dogs ride around in handbags. A few of the shops sell fudge, and one of these shops is very keen to let you know, in an underlined and laminated sign, that the fudge on offer there is in no way affiliated with any of the fudge on offer elsewhere, you got that? All the other fudge is full of broken glass and lies. The fudge game must be no joke round here, many a life having been torn to sweet tatters by the retailing of inferior fudge under the superior name of, I forget what this shop is called. I hope they can find peace before any blood flows into the sea.

Giedra finished. I’ll miss her. Jose Saramago arrived, beeping and jiggling, with his Blindness. It has funny bits, at first, dollops of ha-ha in the worsening squalor. (So far, that is, by page 109, who knows how it’ll progress. The outlook is not good.) I like that Jose doesn’t have time for speech marks. 

I’m at a table on a balcony. Having spent an hour looking at the sea and beach to the east, it might be time now to spend an hour looking at the sea and beach to the west. If I close one eye and tilt my head a bit, I can make my nose replace the land on the other side of the bay, and the waves trundle up it and it tickles.

By page 173 there’s no more room for joking. Maybe the jokes went in at the start to make the eventual lack of jokes seem more serious by contrast.
A sign advertising boat trips lists one of the destinations as Hell's Mouth (no mention of death’s door). For booking information phone Derek. Now I’m in a craft beer/hot dogs type place. You know: a Ruby Jean’s Burger Garage, a Betsy Turnpike’s Chow House, and it has a balcony with a good view of the harbour and the bay and the hills and the balcony I was on earlier. David Gray or oh god it might be James Blunt is playing, and I’m pining for Motown. I could run and launch myself, wailing, off the balcony and over the road and into the water.
Out in the bay a rumour of dolphins emerged and was blown into Derek’s ears and out of his mouth, opposite, but nobody’s biting. I’d like to see a dolphin but he hasn’t offered to bring one to me, and I don’t want to end up in Hell's Mouth, I’ve been there before and only a fool’d go back on purpose, and now The Killers are playing, Jesus, put James Blunt back on.

In between these balconies I walked to Carbis Bay, the next one over, behind the hill my nose was, it was big and quiet, blue and beige, you know what a beach looks like. At the back of it a man sat drinking rose (ay, rose-ay, where's the button for e-garnish on this Mac?) from the bottle, a pink umbrella obscuring his face, but you could see a grey cone of beard tickling his chest, and three small dogs sat watching him.

I’m facing east again. Soon it’ll be time to face west.

Oh here’s Jack Johnson, my life is fraught with invisible peril, won’t be long before Laura Marling’s here, this soundtrack doesn’t seem to go with the hot dogs and craft beer experience, shouldn’t we be having Huey Lewis or a Bill Cosby monologue or something, why’s nobody consulted me on this, it’s as if they don’t value my many balanced opinions at all.

It must be time to go elsewhere. This pint is reluctant to disappear, I don’t know what the music is now but it’s obviously meant to induce contentment, which I’ve always found obnoxious, like a stranger squeezing your hand, here’s Redemption Song, it’s time to go. 

Yesterday's Mistakes

We saw a sparrow foetus in the pub. In the garden, by the hedge. Some people were screwfacing away from it and some people were, having heard about it, sprinting towards it. It fast became a must-see foetus. And I don't know if it was a sparrow or not, but sparrow foetus sounds a lot better than boring old non-specific bird foetus. And if it's not a sparrow then it must be something like a brown shrieker, lesser privet bellower, or beige nuisance, which are the three species most commonly spotted in that hedge, from the nearby tables, at which we've all spent entire months drinking oceans of booze a pint at a time, listening to the high-speed metallic quarrelling of these birds without ever finding out their proper names or what it is that makes them so angry. Maybe it's that we'd been ignoring their foetuses. No more. It lay in the sun with a crowd exuding scrutiny at it, pointing out each feature with a my god or a fucking hell, eyes, gob, hands, are those hands, they're not sposed to have hands, while the other crowd, a few yards away, groaned as it heard each new detail, and became a support group for people who didn't anticipate this kind of thing landing in their Sunday roast, especially if they'd opted for the chicken. We love nature.

Texts to Zero

There's a chair fallen over in the garden I've been meaning to pick up for a year. Quiet now and listen to how enlightened I am. I never buy a car I wouldn't be happy to crash. Stop bullying yourself and bring me a sandwich at once. When I die I want you to have my feet. Sorry, we never hear the doorbell, but the smoke alarm goes off if you open a bag of bombay mix. I've tried telling her. And the news just keeps getting better. Minidiscs were always my favourite except for before they existed and after they became unwieldy. I have a lot of explaining to do I guess. Nah shaving isn't one of my interests but have you seen what happens when you don't do it? Well she tends to remember things, I think it's one of her hobbies. Usual, but I did this course, how to live with yourself, it was alright. If he's gonna be a big shoe about it tell him I'm a very busy man with a lot of things to do. It's about a comedian but most of it isn't funny, I think you'd like it. I know, she has me on the wrong list. There was no-one official to sign our timesheets so we just got the tallest man in the marquee to do it, hope that's alright. Two weeks in a room with the lights off, yes, but with more powerpoint than there'd be at home. Mostly a cross between a cashew and a Nik-Nak. Have one installed in the garage if you like it so much. Thanks, if anything changes I'll extremely let you know. We're letting the side down but I still haven't done anything about it.

Not The Best I've Seen Him

I had some orders and a gate. People weren't allowed in through the gate but were allowed out but not back in unless they were wearing something that made them look like they might have a job to do. Outside the gate were other larger gates that I had no control over and car parks and the sun. Behind me and my gate and along a corridor and up some stairs was a football stadium with people and a football match in it. I could hear a lot of mouths and feet and see nothing happening on a screen that didn't work. Fifteen thousand breaths became a balloon of long low vowel sounds and an ambulance went to the gate adjacent to mine and I wasn't sposed to let anyone out until it'd gone. Half time happened and it still hadn't left and while I was telling people who wanted to go out that they had to use another gate they were telling me that the ambulance was there because a football player's ankle had failed and the noise I heard was the reaction to the ankle failure's unexpected amount of exposed bone and consequent gruesome angles and bright afternoon blood hitting thirty thousand eyeballs at an unavoidable plethora of trajectories and this-can't-be-happening instants. People in the closer rows had heard the sound it made and weren't smiling while they tried to describe it. I winced and said I was sorry they couldn't go out the gate yet. Some angry men were angry about this and as soon as I sent them away the ambulance left and I opened the gate and everyone else went out and smoked and talked about the score and the likely result and the other times they'd seen the structure of the human body rearranged. The second half started and I let everyone in. It was noisier than the first half and the wrong team started winning and the angry angry men started leaving through the gate and I was obliged to tell them they couldn't re-enter and they said things like I wouldn't fucking want to. One of them said this and walked away just before there was another colossal ballooning noise and he turned around and walked up to the gate and I didn't open it or say anything. He listened to the way the noise was changing and concluded a goal'd been disallowed and the wrong team was still winning and went away.

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.

Honesty Rampage Ruins Community

I'm going to stand and point at the output of two people.
Sara
Chiv
I don't know if they're mortified by their own output. But if they didn't want it being looked at, they shouldn't've put it on the internet. They also shouldn't've, after that, told me where to find it. I might've had to do some mild wheedling. But I didn't cajole.
I look at their output and think two things. One is: I wish I could do that. The other is: output isn't a very nice word for what might've been decades of isolated creative anguish only broken up by the odd brief cloud of confused satisfaction that dissipated as soon it settled, leaving behind a damp-smelling emptiness larger than the space it filled and the vague but persistent thought that things aren't quite as they should be... But it's also the name of a colossal DJ Suv tune from 1997. And colossal tunes from 1997 don't get played much these days. Whenever they do, people who've heard them before but not for ages immediately begin screaming like derailed trains. Check out the other Saturday when this happened at Metalheadz History Sessions. At one point MC Moose has a sip of champagne and almost instantly does an impression of Alan Partridge. A bit later Goldie gets so boisterous that Moose gives him a red card, which makes you picture Moose, against your will, for the entire rest of the set, dressed as a football referee with knee-high socks and Adidas Predators and a tiny whistle-shaped microphone. What I'm saying is output is one of the best things there is.

Ankles On The Other Hand

Can I no. Is there a chance of no. I know it's not allowed but could we no. Have you got a bit more no. Are dogs allowed in the no if we're no. Last time we were here we did that so could we no. Have you got any more no. Could we have a no. Yes. What do you think. I try not to think.

Pick Up Nuts and Pop To The Pound Shop

The word scranige rhymes with damage and vanish, sort of, and means food and twelve years ago it was everywhere. We shortened it to scran, or fat scran for when there was more than you could eat, which for me was all the time since I used to have a shrew's bladder instead of a stomach and it was ages before I found a proper human belly on the NHS. There was a rapid transplant after the donor perished in a pineapple-juggling fiasco and when I woke up I had the uncomfortable sensation of digesting someone else's meal. There was a support group to cope with the adjustment and you should've heard the rumbling. Sometimes sea-lions popped up at the window and asked us to keep the noise down. They thought they were so superior.