Keeping In Touch

The new exciting lunch facility is worth a visit mate yeah. At the entrance you're given a disposable tunic. At the exit you're hosed down and congratulated by a woman with a tattoo of a pricey cupcake somewhere on one of her legs. Before the exit you sit at a picnic table, attacking strips of gifted carcass with your hands and teeth, euphoric slop squirting down your neck and wrists, thinking about Europe.

Progression Loops

You look tired, they'll sometimes say, somehow only ever after I've been to bed at a reasonable hour and am feeling like the minister for moderation, with a gleaming stomach and enamel-white eye-whites. They seem to expect instead of surprise a reply something like Yes, I am tired from the lack of rest, the lack of rest from the strain of the constant murky hullabaloo and three minutes' sleep before work. The days I turn up rum-shoed and giddy and say I'm a bit tired they say you don't look it, and well can I dangle out the window by my feet and swivel my head through the drizzle for a couple of hours or do you need me for something?

From Us At Full Pelt

Go on then.
Hi I'm here to bother you. What's harrowing?
I've been watching my toenails grow.
Take long?
Whole minutes.
Talons yet?
Yes. And my clippers are rusty and unusable.
No surprise there.
So I've bought these extra-long shoes.
Are there not health risks?
Health risks, shoe risks, sock risks. It's not in my nature to back down.
Dancing much?
As much as usual. But trying to let the others have a go, these days, and I was getting funny looks.
You get those dancing or not.
I've noticed.
It's your head.
Is it ever anything else?
It seems to be gaping, even when the mouth is closed.
Right.
You should cover it with something. Before doing that becomes illegal.
At least I don't have to witness it. The gaping.
Spare a thought for those who do.
What is it you're here to say exactly?
Forgotten now. Something about wounds.
Terrific.
Just something I'd heard, not thought of.
Could you have heard it without me having heard it?
Possibly. Never checked. Can't. No log, see. I'm logless.
Is there a chance it might reoccur?
It was a survey I'd glimpsed. A graph. One line was going down and another was going up. It was relevant, and then you put me off.
I was only responding to your jolts.
Well don't.
I have to, now. There were these women with a flipchart and columns and arrows.
And that's all it takes is it?
It's all there's been to take.

Preservatives Common

Two reassurance-faced women on either side of a flipchart kept thanking people for sharing. I was one of the people. I wasn't sharing. I was eating. The Pret A Manger Chicken Caesar sandwich is a sandwich I can rely on, believe in, and demolish, provided its bread has been baked in a way that maximises the crunchiness of its outer layer, removing the need to say "and some crisps please," when is-she-so-friendly-because-we've-done-this-so-often-or-is-she-so-friendly-because-I-might-be-the-monthly-mystery-shopper-who-affects-both-the-staff's-annual-bonuses,-if-they-have-those,-and-the-store's-standing-in-the-various-regional-leagues-and-graphs-they-quite-probably-have-to-refer-to-every-morning-or-at-least-every-week asks, at the till, if it's to have in or to take away and if, besides the Coke, there'll be anything else. The filling has never varied in consistency or emphasis, so I guess the section of the kitchen in charge of middle bits is a well-oiled hellhole, whereas the bread must be part-baked, then frozen, then activated in-store by early-morning enigmas with variable preferences and vendettas and physical indications of substance abuse, in unfamiliar or inconsistent ovens, resulting sometimes in a less-than-robust outer layer and the need to say "and some crisps please". Anybody who's ever worked in or ram-raided a Pret A Manger please let me know. A man on anti-depressants said "you really must try some."

Upped

The waitress thanked the living shit out of me and insisted that I have a great day, a great one, one of the top hundred days of the ten-thousand seven-hundred and thirty-six-ish experienced so far, three-thousand five-hundred and fifty-eight-ish of which you've pretty much just slept through, you cocky slob, she almost said, and turned towards the kitchen. I looked at her spine and said thanks and walked out with a double espresso twitching against my hangover. The words great day glided into my mind's eye in birthday-banner colours and danced while I looked for somewhere to relieve the despair of standing up and having to navigate through people and their lives and hats. I sat in the park and leaned against a tree that knew nothing of my predicament and tried to read. But the words in the book were moving far too quickly, while great day'd moved in closer to inflict a sickeningly jovial rhumba. I shut the book and closed my eyes and breathed through my nose and exuded slime into my best clothes. I wondered if this counted as meditation. And I thought I should really maybe make the effort again, really again, beyond just a book and one attempt again. Get absolutely off my swede on calmness. And it might help with one or some or all of the things I need help with. And it might make the walls of the house seem further apart. If I can make it back there without dying of agitation.
A breeze cooled the slime and I was seized by a non-specific shame-and-terror or the caffeine kicked in. I stood up and went to a bar and after a lot of humming ordered a soft drink with gin in it.

Four Supremes

I’m in Cornwall. (Not now. I’m copying out what I wrote in a notebook and then changing it). Seaweed skulks and mooches and flops in the bay. (It doesn't, it just sits in water and on rocks, doesn't it, yes, there's no need to pretend it has motives). The sun squints behind clouds. (Maybe this is accurate). In Mousehole there are two headlines either side of the swinging local headline display unit: Mousehole Man Recalls Role In Car Prank. £20M Of Cocaine Found On Yacht. (Sometimes it's hard to know when exactly fun turns into crime). 

I’ve come on holiday on purpose, I’m going to experience a thing or two. I’m sposed to be starting the finishing of the first draft of a book, but two weeks ago when I gently placed my laptop back in its position something inside the screen exploded and the only images it now displays are meaningless. And how can I start the finishing of the first draft of a book on paper when the rest of it’s trapped in a useless beloved machine, I dunno. When the Greatest Hits of Motown is the only thing that’s playing on the café terrace, there’s no way of knowing whether or not it’s stuck on repeat. (It’s been stuck on repeat your whole life, this is just one more moment in which to be unsure whether or not Diana Ross is still alive, and what she might be up to, either way, right now.)

Things I haven’t brought with me to the café or the holiday include a hat, suncream, shorts, flip-flops and the iPod charger, because I left in a hurry, because I always have to manufacture a minor crisis, because I dunno. I did remember to bring some books and my eyes, though, so that’s a relief. (How long after we’ve invaded Mars will it take for someone to put on the Greatest Hits of Motown? What sort of objections might there be? Will it sound fresh, again, finally, over there? Is there a sound art piece that’s every Motown hit being played simultaneously, like there was with all the national anthems a while back?)

While I was walking to Mousehole this morning, to learn about what vehicles they use for pranks and cocaine, I passed a garden full of scarecrows with plates for faces and bottles for arms and bits of old rope for hair and then one of them was a dolphin on a stick. (Half-hour interlude for relocation here because Motown stopped and Simply Red came on, and while I was scattering tables, shattering bowls and sinking boats in my desperation to get out of earshot or die, I was regretting everything I’d just written about Motown and promising, internally, to you and whoever else, that I’d never be ner-ner about a good thing again, because of brain-consequences, like after I wrote about the bird foetus I dreamt someone gave me fifteen budgies, but they lived with their feet planted in little pots of soil, and I said thanks I’ll look after them, and the giver went away, and all of the budgies very quickly one-by-one died quietly gasping, and I shook them all out into a bin bag and held the bin bag to my chest and it started squirming, and I woke up with the feeling I should stop being flippant about gestation.)

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.

Regards

Instead of a tremendous fuss we shared a sandwich. The straighten-up machine looked at me like finally, what fucking took you so long. And I thought that's odd because your function is to always have the answers. And here you are emitting surprise and pungent relief. Maybe you want oil.
We crunched and gulped and wondered at each other whether it's the better standard of graphic design on the packaging or a genuine improvement in the quality of the fillings that has led to the furtive ballooning of our appreciation of the Tesco meal deal. A combination of the two didn't occur to us. I put my empty bag in its hatch.
It sniggered. All the straightening-up I'd never got round to. Jesus. And with all my training as well. But now.
Somewhere a swamp hog claps its trotters.
While it glockenspieled my vertebrae I thought about the man I used to think I was going to be. The sudden lack of a depthless future exploded in my wardrobe. The machine said the problem with most people is they're not hardcore. I told it to get its tickling implements away from my fancies. The real problem is I don't know how to recalibrate. There's only one button besides the on-off switch and I'm still unsure what it does, although I press it more than a few times a day and believe there must be a consequence.

New Marrow Blimey Fanatic

You should see what they've done though. Jesus it's unspeakable. The furniture. You sit on a couch and the table's higher than your head. And when the food comes it's an extra quid for the use of a lunch-funnel. And christ the sandwiches, leather and brasso and toenail mayonnaise and eight quid for a bowl of chips and they're not even chips. The service is exceptional but y'know. Afterwards you need at least two showers and a good solid discussion with yourself. I would stop going only it's on the way home from the new place.

Off We Pop

The words same again sound a lot like San Miguel. If you were only drinking San Miguel it would be no problem if when you said San Miguel the barman heard same again or if you said same again the barman heard San Miguel. It becomes a problem when you switch from buying rounds to getting just your own, and you want a San Miguel but the barman hears same again, and makes you the three drinks you'd spent the last two hours buying, none of which was a San Miguel, and you watch him doing this with a look on your face like an android seeing a mirror for the first time, and he puts them down in front of you and says nine ninety please and you say no, San Miguel.
The job centre and the tax woman didn't get together and hand-write me a welcome-back-to-the-valued-side-of-society poem, nor did they fill my cupboards with olives, drugs and exotic cheese experts, so I did all that myself and invoiced them. I'm beginning to think we're no longer friends.

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.