hamburger meditations

I've been thinking a lot about hamburgers lately, I guess because it's been so long since I actually last ate a really good hambuger. I often feel that when you've had as many hamburgers as I have, and when you spend as much time thinking about them as I do, the process of actually finding one that will really blow you away is pretty difficult. I often think sadly back to the hamburgers of my childhood, and how every one was a delicious surprise that was just waiting to happen, but a surprise of meat and garnish, all the colours of the rainbow. But the last one I had tasted odd, as though the garnish was good and the meat was good, but together they didn't work at all, like a broken watch. It was a disappointing day all round, and my mind wandered with fantasy.

the angel of life

The angel of life visited me and said:

1. Everything will be okay sometime.
2. Stop cutting your arms stupid.
3. Shouldn't keep on drinking so much.
4. By playing your music so loud you have permanently damaged the speakers of your home stereo system.
5. You cannot smash the screen of a modern television by throwing the base of a red angle poise lamp at it.
6. Look outside.
7. You should dance on that log more often.
8. Get over her and let other people know you.
9. You do still have emotions.
10. Stop fixating on your own death.
11. Man cannot live on bread alone.
12. Forget the job.
13. Sit quietly in the rain because it doesn't matter.
14. It doesn't matter.
15. Kiss me on the mouth.

So I did. She was very beautiful and had short dark hair, which I always found especially attractive. Later some friends told me that the angel of life was a guy, which confused me greatly.

dreamed

More dreams felt very vivid at the time. I took some cocaine and some ecstasy, just right here in my house with my oldtime buddies, doing not a whole lot but guzzling a whole bunch of beer and feeling pretty good but I got sad towards the end because even happy days can't always make you happy, so I was very glad to get to bed and the dream was weird, like it was Brighton seafront but no real access to the beach, just these long wet tiled corridors like in the baths in the citipark in Budapest, and I'm walking around in my red and white striped boxer shorts with a pair of transparent plastic boxer shorts over the top of them, just wandering and looking for the beach.

The corridor comes out on a train platform that also doesn't exist, but an attendant tells me I can't wear clothes out there so I strip but then I notice that everybody is way out of proportion, like they are my height but their legs are only about a foot long and the rest is torso, and between their legs are these loathsome penises, real long and scraping like old garden hosepipe along the shingle of the platform.

Slightly perturbed I go back into the corridors and there are probably hundreds of these odd human beings with their odd long penises and I walk past a phone booth where two beautiful girls are standing - perfectly in proportion - and for some reason I was so proud of my cock that I walked past them over and over, smiling a little harder every time.

Then later Liam is running around screaming excitedly, I never found out why, but he has shaved his head and is wearing a yellow paper crown from a cheap Christmas cracker. I don't know why I dream so much about yellow. This is a fragment.

Why is there machine gun fire coming from downstairs?

Whatever happened to my zombie dreams? I want to wake up scared again, but not about real things like dying alone or rubbish bank debts.

What a messy situation.

goldfish

I wonder what the goldfish do when we are asleep. It's easy to imagine them carrying out profound conversations regarding the state of the world, as knowledgable as they are from the scraps of newspaper they can read from the carpet of our living room, or from the halfwit conversations I have about postmodern thought. They talk about how we will all be washed away by the great storm, every single land-dwelling beast, and the world will become water in which they will govern, pioneers of a new exciting land, boldly racing towards the future with an ethos of peace and renewable energy, and as evolutiuon slowly kicks in the fish will attain the complexity of an advanced spiritual plane and probably be enlightened. The saviour of the universe!

Or perhaps they just climb out of the tank with their small fins and use the record player to listen to the Great Gatsby, waltzing slowly along the length of the mantlepiece.

Or maybe they just struggle for breath in the water we forgot to clean again, desperately hungry (for how easy it is to overlook on so busy a day) and hoping we get up soon so they might live another day.

I love those damn goldfish.

welcome

out of a country town we created it, just 18 yr old long hairs with too many jeans and too many dreams, in our image we created it, jumbled mess of awkward gestures and shared woes and it got swollen and stretched past the town borders, past the churchyard whose bench we burned and whose door we puked on drunk some nights with port wine and fast cars, past the grass we sat on and smoked cigarettes like they were our last, past the house we stole and held parties in before they knocked it down and built three houses in its place, past the hills we'd camp in all night and watch meteor showers from sleeping bags with slugs on my hat in the dewy night, past so many meaningless loves and secretive seductions, past concerts and bedroom with yellow walls, past first floor flats and basement flats, past bakeries and coffee pots for one and picnics, past long walks and the flowers picked on them and a girl kissed on a log after she missed school to spend the day with me and I loved her at the time I think, past nearby towns and the old fort by the sea and the countless sad days we spent there, past crashing waves on winters nights with a girl wrapped round you, past inflatable dinghys and LSD amidst husks of watermelon, past spraypaint and hamburgers on nights that never ended, past busking beat poetry and making enough for chewing gum, past sleeping on the beach or in cars, past stupid ideas and brilliant ideas, past road trips west racing the sun all the way and making it in record time, past video cameras we used to record friends buried in grass or removal lorries in transit, past endless talks, past all the trousers I remember taking off, past the book I wanted to write and finally did, past dancing in the street in the middle of the night until the police told us to stop, past broken feet and broken hearts, past sisters I fell in love with and maniacs I fell in love with and girls I shouldn't have fallen in love with, past the coast and the countryside, past all these memories, it stretched with us when even the fields weren't big enough anymore, and north to the city where just maybe it could manifest itself again, or at least we could live, and through lethargy and week long drunks and sadness and hardship and just enough joy it stayed together and the theoretical peach got to epic proportions and its tangible sibling got spewed onto the page crudely with stolen photocopying - and busy complications and depressive fantasies and waking dreams haunted by zombies and the soil cucumber - and now we are here and older and on it goes:

one huge peachy