I love to read about military incompetence. It warms me from the cock up. If I had kids, I’d sleep well in my bed just knowing that a crack team of armed, moronic, dangerous, bumbling idiots was safeguarding the future security of all of the world’s stupidest nations.
Great to hear that crew at the Minot airbase in North Dakota slept like the dead while in charge of:
1. The control centre containing launch keys of ballistic missiles
and also,
2. Boxes containing the codes required for launching a nuclear attack.
Who the fuck are these people, and why are they safeguarding anything? We all want to go to sleep at work, and sometimes maybe we’re even lucky enough to do it, but most jobs don’t involve high-grade nuclear weapons. What kind of training programme were these fools given? Was basic health and safety even covered?
This is the same airbase that last year flew a B-52 across America without realising that there were six air-launched nuclear missiles on board. Considering we have to remove our shoes to even get on board a plane, or buy special small toothpastes to avoid an x-ray buggering, one can’t help but wonder how – in these turbulent times, all significance teetering on the edge of a hate-fuelled apocalypse – an aircraft can leave a high security US Airforce base and fly a military jet containing nuclear missiles up, up and away without being noticed. By the pilots, by their superiors, by hangar staff, by anyone. How does this happen? Were they waving it off with handkerchiefs like a departing ship in a black and white film? Had it slipped their minds?
These are nuclear weapons – don’t we have some protocols in place? Little things, maybe, like don’t fall asleep while guarding the codes that could launch the burning destruction of a chunk of world; or don’t unknowingly take a cargo full of nuclear missiles from a military airbase out on flights over America. I’m sure something clear and simple like that might make everyone feel a whole lot better. Common sense, call it, or some base survival instinct to not have our eyes melt from our sockets.
The very fact of nuclear weapons, on a fundamental level, makes most sensible people feel the occasional pang of paranoid discomfort. Add to that the kind of thugs and clowns lumbering around to keep a (closed) eye on them and that soon starts turning into a distinct sense of taut uneasiness. Furthermore and thricely, Bush is the kind of brainless trigger happy pervert who would agree to anything if the question was phrased in more than two syllables, nodding his head like a brainless defective doll.
It would be funny if it wasn’t serious. The military can’t even keep their eyes (literal and metaphorical) open for long enough to check the cargo of an airborne deathship in a world run by maniacs. Do we feel safe? Are we supposed to? Why can these mistakes happen?
Asleep, perhaps. Mass narcolepsy strikes US military in simultaneous danger nap. Must be Iran.
Minot airbase: unjustifiable idiots.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
bad experience in the underpass
The group of youths encircled me, their bizarre collective deformities creating this lumbering gait, edging heavily back and forth on in-turned feet. Their faces twisted and convulsed into hideous fleshy representations of the human image as they hulked further into my person, guttural groans echoing from cleft palates and around the
cold stone walls of the city underpass, under roads running like clogged arteries through the run-down 60s developments left rotting and empty and towering into the twilight with outdated aerials defunct and pointless rusting on their roof. I didn't know what they wanted, these primitive locals, still patiently waiting for an act of evolution to drag their hidden gills and webbed toes from their primordial residential steaming swamp, fetid subhuman stench, rooftops, windows dripping with
condensation and the colour of pain rich and alluring in the faded brickwork of factory exteriors.
One of them pointed at my pockets. I recoiled agape at the indignity, and grasped my heart as though it were broken by this merciless violation of personal space. A final rusted nail through the human condition. The bastards. Trembling of hand and clenched of teeth I delved into the pocket, its depths uncomfortable and inaccessible past the keys, my grasp locked rigid and ineffectual around the same few items, fingering tips of coins awkwardly, desperately. I tried to feel their shapes in my fingers and allocate them a distinct physical space built around their respective numerical values.
I couldn't bear to pull a pound out; issuing them with such significant fiscal value would demoralize the situation even further. I needed to plead poverty, to carefully select a low value of coinage, extract it fully from the pocket whilst secreting coins of any larger value in some dignified sleight of hand performance. The youths looked on, eyes widening involuntarily as I rummaged so methodically. They looked at each other and made sounds like animals. Eventually satisfied I pulled out six coins, one for each of the youths, which the deductive processes of my touch had identified as coppers of the two pence valuation. I held my hand out in front of me, between my body and those of the youths, and we all seven of us looked down at the palm expectantly. The coins looked tragic on my skin, their smell like blood filled my nose as I drew breath deeply and found my head nodding in encouragement.
"I think I have a little something you might be interested in," I said, rattling my hand slightly. "A little something for all of you." I rattled the coins again. "Take them," I said, to the confused youths. "One each. A two pence piece. Take them."
The youths peered hesitantly into my hand, their faces doubtful. They moved cautiously, as if they were nervous of the money, or in reverence of it like some strange arcane idol, the coins themselves possessed by the soul of a god, a spirit and a life, a being, of sorts, each with their own head and tail even, shackled to banks and treasuries and desecrated and blasphemed in pockets and purses and desired and manipulated by all who learn of them.
"We don't want none two pence," said a male with a thick, meaty neck. "We don't want none two pennies from you log."
My pride battered I poured the six two pence pieces into my back pocket.
"But I have nothing else," I said amongst swallows. I tapped my hand onto my pockets. "Keys, here, keys alone." I tried to speak firmly, a tone commanding and authoritative, but instead sounded as though I were conducting a caricatured impersonation of an abstract concept.
"Not gold for our wants mister," said another of the youths, his neck like dried steak, pierced with two metal eyelets through the coarse flesh from which he had hung lengths of thick security chain like braids. He pulled a sheet of plain white paper from the pocket of his tracksuit bottoms and scrunched it loudly into his mouth, chewing with concentration and commitment. "We none that interested in you fakkin pences or your leggish tappy tappin," he went on, past the A4.
"Then. What do you want? From me?"
The first youth leaned into me, the visor of his baseball cap jabbing the side of my head. "We wanting the whiteness," he whispered.
The second youth leaned in likewise, the visor of his baseball cap jabbing the side of my head. "The white juice," he said. He was licking his lips as he said the words. They were all licking their lips.
"Mister got the white fluids, got them for us eh mister."
“My God,” I gasped, my anus clenching like a fist. “Surely you don’t mean?” I tried to step backwards, but could only move as far as the youths to my rear. “Oh Jesus no,” I went on.
They were nodding, nodding and licking their dirty lips. “White mate,” they said, as though unanimously be-struck by a debilitating speech impediment.
I grabbed my balls like a knee-jerk reaction, some desperate clinging to self-preservation, shreds of dignity, something.
“It ain’t goina hurt you like log,” garbled a youth’s voice. It came from behind me, and I was glad I couldn’t see the mouth from which it came, for fear of punching it. I thought about the two pence pieces, idly wasting in my back jeans pocket. Such a meticulous plan. The little shits.
“Nah mistah an we is in appreciate.”
“Yeah mistah.”
“Yeah.”
“You is an urban hero of the east anglan skies me mate.”
“Bona fide.”
“Pistachio!” they chimed harmoniously like some two-bit MC outfit out of the Norfolk flatlands.
Even as my horror rose in the form of bilious expulsion to the very tip of my throat, I knew that I became fragile in confrontation with flattery, even incomprehensible flattery such as this. I could feel a sweat breaking across the breadth of my white forehead, my pupils dilating at the very tones of their slurred voices.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s do this. You need what I’ve got. Let’s play some ball, motherfuckers, play it up.”
They started clapping, not as applause, but unpredictable, arrhythmic, spontaneous, piercing claps, perhaps a further extension of their building excitable frenzy.
“You getting the gazebo!” whooped he of thick neck, more boy than man with his eyes electric like a Christmas morning.
I unbuttoned my fly, rubbing the frontage of my jeans with an open hand to stimulate the hardening of the shaft within. Recoiling the youths hit me once in the face.
“You terribly fucken faggut queer bastard!”
“Of all me fucked plops!”
“What in fuckin you doing and on, you crazy gay nonce?”
“Fuck I puked inside of my head!”
I gasped desperately, apologetically, my tone begging for quiet in case anybody heard this exchange and thought to come and investigate. “But you asked for the whiteness!” I said. “As in the molten white love juice. As in…”
“You fucken people is all the same,” said meat neck. “Perverts and animals.”
“Don’t yo see bull this is the white juicea life we wanna feel in the side of us?”
Juice of life? I reached again for my genitals, pale with concern but sweating heavily. The youth’s hand struck my face again, and again and again, and I fell into a taut heap on the floor, approaching foetal but without space, quivering in the cold tiled indignity of the urban underpass, smelling well of urine and disaster, of family breakdown and wet blankets. I felt a little like all of them.
“But please but!” I urged. “You tell me the white juice of life, you tell me the white fluids, and yet here you strike me when I proffer said globes of goodness from the nurturing warmth of my sac!”
“Shat your snakes cunt you don’t listening, observamation? We ain’t for your cock or you bollick or even your wordsearch.”
“Contrarywise an sunder, we come here for milk, sir, and you goin get us some.”
These calcium crazed hoodlums running amok in the city centre! In my head I shook my fist to the heavens of the twenty-first century and its terrifying regimes of antisocial maniacs, by-products of commercial development one and all!
“Milk?” I said. “You just want milk?”
Like Catholics they crossed themselves as I said the word.
“Fuck mistah shhhh your flaps up!”
I didn’t want to question this ritual, and I imagined milk-drenched sexual rites, milk intersecting through vaginas and anuses and a milky hip-hop undercurrent.
“Fine,” I said, getting to my feet. None of them helped me up. They had a look of milk in their eyes. “Follow me, we’ll go to that shop just down the way.”
And off we walked together, back out of the underpass and towards the shop. The youth’s kept a distance of a few feet behind me, making heavy disorientating tribal beats with their mouths and screeching unintelligible words over the top. They sounded like pack animals and spoke the language of the future.
In the shop they knew exactly where to go, pushing past me and running to the aisle housing the dairy refrigeration units. They each grabbed a four pint plastic jug of milk, full fat, unscrewed the blue cap and peeled off the plastic stopper, and drank, heavily and with such determination into a blissful silence. A shopworker looked on, face frowning and gruesome under strip lights, a bitter face, hard like a frozen turkey that would never thaw.
“Hey shoppy,” I said, throwing my wallet at his feet. “They’re with me.”
And they drank and drank, pint after pint, neatly piling the plastic jugs at their feet, thick white moustaches left on all of their lips. A wholesome drink for strong bones and teeth. They sure loved milk.
They weren’t mugging old ladies or taking drugs or doing unprotected sex with each other. They were drinking milk.
Struck like a car accident with a sudden feeling of clarity I cracked open a four pint jug of my own, so cold and creamy. It was a school night after all.
cold stone walls of the city underpass, under roads running like clogged arteries through the run-down 60s developments left rotting and empty and towering into the twilight with outdated aerials defunct and pointless rusting on their roof. I didn't know what they wanted, these primitive locals, still patiently waiting for an act of evolution to drag their hidden gills and webbed toes from their primordial residential steaming swamp, fetid subhuman stench, rooftops, windows dripping with
condensation and the colour of pain rich and alluring in the faded brickwork of factory exteriors.
One of them pointed at my pockets. I recoiled agape at the indignity, and grasped my heart as though it were broken by this merciless violation of personal space. A final rusted nail through the human condition. The bastards. Trembling of hand and clenched of teeth I delved into the pocket, its depths uncomfortable and inaccessible past the keys, my grasp locked rigid and ineffectual around the same few items, fingering tips of coins awkwardly, desperately. I tried to feel their shapes in my fingers and allocate them a distinct physical space built around their respective numerical values.
I couldn't bear to pull a pound out; issuing them with such significant fiscal value would demoralize the situation even further. I needed to plead poverty, to carefully select a low value of coinage, extract it fully from the pocket whilst secreting coins of any larger value in some dignified sleight of hand performance. The youths looked on, eyes widening involuntarily as I rummaged so methodically. They looked at each other and made sounds like animals. Eventually satisfied I pulled out six coins, one for each of the youths, which the deductive processes of my touch had identified as coppers of the two pence valuation. I held my hand out in front of me, between my body and those of the youths, and we all seven of us looked down at the palm expectantly. The coins looked tragic on my skin, their smell like blood filled my nose as I drew breath deeply and found my head nodding in encouragement.
"I think I have a little something you might be interested in," I said, rattling my hand slightly. "A little something for all of you." I rattled the coins again. "Take them," I said, to the confused youths. "One each. A two pence piece. Take them."
The youths peered hesitantly into my hand, their faces doubtful. They moved cautiously, as if they were nervous of the money, or in reverence of it like some strange arcane idol, the coins themselves possessed by the soul of a god, a spirit and a life, a being, of sorts, each with their own head and tail even, shackled to banks and treasuries and desecrated and blasphemed in pockets and purses and desired and manipulated by all who learn of them.
"We don't want none two pence," said a male with a thick, meaty neck. "We don't want none two pennies from you log."
My pride battered I poured the six two pence pieces into my back pocket.
"But I have nothing else," I said amongst swallows. I tapped my hand onto my pockets. "Keys, here, keys alone." I tried to speak firmly, a tone commanding and authoritative, but instead sounded as though I were conducting a caricatured impersonation of an abstract concept.
"Not gold for our wants mister," said another of the youths, his neck like dried steak, pierced with two metal eyelets through the coarse flesh from which he had hung lengths of thick security chain like braids. He pulled a sheet of plain white paper from the pocket of his tracksuit bottoms and scrunched it loudly into his mouth, chewing with concentration and commitment. "We none that interested in you fakkin pences or your leggish tappy tappin," he went on, past the A4.
"Then. What do you want? From me?"
The first youth leaned into me, the visor of his baseball cap jabbing the side of my head. "We wanting the whiteness," he whispered.
The second youth leaned in likewise, the visor of his baseball cap jabbing the side of my head. "The white juice," he said. He was licking his lips as he said the words. They were all licking their lips.
"Mister got the white fluids, got them for us eh mister."
“My God,” I gasped, my anus clenching like a fist. “Surely you don’t mean?” I tried to step backwards, but could only move as far as the youths to my rear. “Oh Jesus no,” I went on.
They were nodding, nodding and licking their dirty lips. “White mate,” they said, as though unanimously be-struck by a debilitating speech impediment.
I grabbed my balls like a knee-jerk reaction, some desperate clinging to self-preservation, shreds of dignity, something.
“It ain’t goina hurt you like log,” garbled a youth’s voice. It came from behind me, and I was glad I couldn’t see the mouth from which it came, for fear of punching it. I thought about the two pence pieces, idly wasting in my back jeans pocket. Such a meticulous plan. The little shits.
“Nah mistah an we is in appreciate.”
“Yeah mistah.”
“Yeah.”
“You is an urban hero of the east anglan skies me mate.”
“Bona fide.”
“Pistachio!” they chimed harmoniously like some two-bit MC outfit out of the Norfolk flatlands.
Even as my horror rose in the form of bilious expulsion to the very tip of my throat, I knew that I became fragile in confrontation with flattery, even incomprehensible flattery such as this. I could feel a sweat breaking across the breadth of my white forehead, my pupils dilating at the very tones of their slurred voices.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s do this. You need what I’ve got. Let’s play some ball, motherfuckers, play it up.”
They started clapping, not as applause, but unpredictable, arrhythmic, spontaneous, piercing claps, perhaps a further extension of their building excitable frenzy.
“You getting the gazebo!” whooped he of thick neck, more boy than man with his eyes electric like a Christmas morning.
I unbuttoned my fly, rubbing the frontage of my jeans with an open hand to stimulate the hardening of the shaft within. Recoiling the youths hit me once in the face.
“You terribly fucken faggut queer bastard!”
“Of all me fucked plops!”
“What in fuckin you doing and on, you crazy gay nonce?”
“Fuck I puked inside of my head!”
I gasped desperately, apologetically, my tone begging for quiet in case anybody heard this exchange and thought to come and investigate. “But you asked for the whiteness!” I said. “As in the molten white love juice. As in…”
“You fucken people is all the same,” said meat neck. “Perverts and animals.”
“Don’t yo see bull this is the white juicea life we wanna feel in the side of us?”
Juice of life? I reached again for my genitals, pale with concern but sweating heavily. The youth’s hand struck my face again, and again and again, and I fell into a taut heap on the floor, approaching foetal but without space, quivering in the cold tiled indignity of the urban underpass, smelling well of urine and disaster, of family breakdown and wet blankets. I felt a little like all of them.
“But please but!” I urged. “You tell me the white juice of life, you tell me the white fluids, and yet here you strike me when I proffer said globes of goodness from the nurturing warmth of my sac!”
“Shat your snakes cunt you don’t listening, observamation? We ain’t for your cock or you bollick or even your wordsearch.”
“Contrarywise an sunder, we come here for milk, sir, and you goin get us some.”
These calcium crazed hoodlums running amok in the city centre! In my head I shook my fist to the heavens of the twenty-first century and its terrifying regimes of antisocial maniacs, by-products of commercial development one and all!
“Milk?” I said. “You just want milk?”
Like Catholics they crossed themselves as I said the word.
“Fuck mistah shhhh your flaps up!”
I didn’t want to question this ritual, and I imagined milk-drenched sexual rites, milk intersecting through vaginas and anuses and a milky hip-hop undercurrent.
“Fine,” I said, getting to my feet. None of them helped me up. They had a look of milk in their eyes. “Follow me, we’ll go to that shop just down the way.”
And off we walked together, back out of the underpass and towards the shop. The youth’s kept a distance of a few feet behind me, making heavy disorientating tribal beats with their mouths and screeching unintelligible words over the top. They sounded like pack animals and spoke the language of the future.
In the shop they knew exactly where to go, pushing past me and running to the aisle housing the dairy refrigeration units. They each grabbed a four pint plastic jug of milk, full fat, unscrewed the blue cap and peeled off the plastic stopper, and drank, heavily and with such determination into a blissful silence. A shopworker looked on, face frowning and gruesome under strip lights, a bitter face, hard like a frozen turkey that would never thaw.
“Hey shoppy,” I said, throwing my wallet at his feet. “They’re with me.”
And they drank and drank, pint after pint, neatly piling the plastic jugs at their feet, thick white moustaches left on all of their lips. A wholesome drink for strong bones and teeth. They sure loved milk.
They weren’t mugging old ladies or taking drugs or doing unprotected sex with each other. They were drinking milk.
Struck like a car accident with a sudden feeling of clarity I cracked open a four pint jug of my own, so cold and creamy. It was a school night after all.
this buckskin holiday
Pending doom of realisations! Hangs heavy, curdling the air like weird dairy products, aspyhxiating through air conditioning and convection heaters. Ticking clocks, long haunting dreams like an old TV serial, just waiting for the end to come and sweep us all away, and dancing with arms and arms only, and mouths an awkward splutter through evacuation from the bowels of Godhead. Like crooked and desperate lovers our lips meet again as the rain comes to wash my murky vest, murky with the life of another, and you and your soft linen trousers, and I make car noises because I never learned to drive, and steer my imaginary wheel to edge the world, and fall with breathless abandon and butterfly-tummy into the perils of ourselves, so far away.
The preoccupation of the endless grassway to the crest our crest, and salt tastes my lips and methodically perforates my elephantine fingers - textural consistency and never bulk - and so thrust powers through cracked circular wicker baskets in thrift shops piled carelessly with such careful postcards, other memories from other lives that really are our own and become one with us through our visits and our fictions and the poetry we never write and refuse to at that, and so with diamonds blazing sparkling over left hands and right hands we initiate tearful plans, tearful because there can only be so much joy before it overflows, and in the grey afternoon light our souls pour loose, one into the other, and we kiss until the night time.
The preoccupation of the endless grassway to the crest our crest, and salt tastes my lips and methodically perforates my elephantine fingers - textural consistency and never bulk - and so thrust powers through cracked circular wicker baskets in thrift shops piled carelessly with such careful postcards, other memories from other lives that really are our own and become one with us through our visits and our fictions and the poetry we never write and refuse to at that, and so with diamonds blazing sparkling over left hands and right hands we initiate tearful plans, tearful because there can only be so much joy before it overflows, and in the grey afternoon light our souls pour loose, one into the other, and we kiss until the night time.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
please take me with you someplace better than this
Jerry Mandible stopped the lawnmower with a sigh and, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun with one hand, turned back to look at his bedroom window. It was the middle of the day but the curtains were drawn, and inside the room he could hear his wife. She was receiving sexual intercourse from one of their mutual friends, an arrangement that had been going on for some time now. It wasn’t that it bothered Jerry as such, or upset him, or even made him particularly angry, it just seemed to leave a slightly unsavoury taste in his mouth and a nagging sense of discomfort about his person.
The sun was pounding heavily on his faded baseball cap, and Jerry wiped a handkerchief across his brow that glistened moistly under a film of sweat. He thought about his wife there, flat on her back with her legs spread wide apart to accommodate Bill’s salesman’s cock, gasping in a way that he had learnt over the years was almost definitely false. Should I feel stupid?, he wondered to himself. That’s my wife in there with another man, in my house. And Bill wasn’t the only one, not by a long way.
He could never decide whether knowing about all of this actually made it worse. It took away all of the deceit and the lies usually associated with such extra-marital liaisons, but still left him burning with the embarrassment of what other people thought about him. He daren’t even imagine how it must look to anyone else. They all knew what she was up to, everyone in the street (in fact she was up to it with most of them). How weak must he look? Oh dear, he said with a sinking despair, but he couldn’t tell whether it was out loud.
Carefully he started the ignition of his sit-on lawnmower and manoeuvred it dexterously into the left hand garage. He dismounted and pulled the door down behind him. It was stifling in the darkness, and he could see thick particles of dust illuminated by the erratic shafts of light that broke through the slit windows running along one wall of the garage. He pulled open the fridge, his fridge, and stood in close to its feeble coolness. He could murder a beer, but when he crouched slightly to see what the fridge had to offer he felt his heart sink a little when he saw that it was empty. Completely empty. He pushed the door closed, his fingers resting on its rust-flecked white frontage for a few seconds longer than perhaps they usually would. He caressed the empty fridge as though it were his empty life.
It smelt like mild labour in the garage. Jerry pulled of his cap and hung it up on the allocated hook. He felt suddenly nauseated by the meticulous organisation of the workspace. Screws were separated according to size and stored in individually labelled boxes. Hammers rested with hammers, screwdrivers with their kind, a variety of handsaws were organised according to the dimensions of their ascending sizes, and all there under his own stringent regime of clear and comprehensive labelling. He yearned for chaos, felt it boiling up inside of him like a pending volcanic eruption, as though it might explode from him at any moment. Looking at the cap he felt his breath quicken, a slight tremble initiating in his biceps. He grabbed the cap with a quick rough yank, and threw it defiantly to the floor. With a breath, as of an almost erotic release, he walked through the side door and into the house, but was back in the garage and had replaced the cap with the exaggerated gestures of a scolded child before the door had even had a chance to close.
Bill was in the kitchen drinking milk out of the carton, naked apart from a small pair of underpants. He saw Jerry walk in but didn’t seem surprised, or perturbed, despite the underpants. Bill knew Jerry, knew that Jerry knew about him, and knew that Jerry wasn’t the kind of guy to do anything about anything anyway. He took another long swallow of the semi-skimmed and slung the carton back into the fridge. Jerry saw that the lid was still left on the surface and narrowed his eyes.
“Jerry,” said Bill, as if he were greeting an old friend.
“Bill,” said Jerry, coldly. “How’s Susan?” Susan was Jerry’s wife.
“Fine, fine.” Bill lit a cigarette from a packet he had set down on the top of the fridge. He offered one to Jerry, but Jerry didn’t like to smoke. “She wanted you to know that she won’t be in for dinner.”
“No?” said Jerry. He stepped past Bill’s bare flesh and pulled a beer out of the fridge, which he opened up and drank from thoughtfully.
“No,” Bill went on, eyeing Jerry with a look more of intrigue than concern. “Bit early isn’t it, Jer?” Jerry looked at his wristwatch. It was lunchtime.
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Whatever you say buddy, whatever you say.”
“Yep.”
The two men looked at each other, one with his beer, the other his cigarette, one in his house clothes, the other his underpants. Bill dragged hard at his cigarette, trying to finish it up without losing face, which he did, letting the smoke trickle from his nose. He put the butt into the sink, and Jerry flinched.
“Well,” said Bill, running a confident finger under the elastic leg band of his underpants, which seemed to be digging into his thigh, “Good seeing you, Jer.” He extended his hand for Jerry to shake. Jerry shook it very slowly. “I better get back up to her.” Bill spoke as if he were talking to a raunchy pal in the office about some mindless physical conquest, not the husband of the wife he was screwing. Jerry picked the butt out of the sink, turned the tap on it and threw it in the dustbin.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “I need a word with Susan anyway.”
“Hey, you’re the boss buddy,” said Bill, clapping a hand on Jerry’s shoulder. He started off for the stairs, and Jerry watched his buttocks and their hair walking off ahead of him with waves of vibration from the footsteps. Bill then stopped, as if he had suddenly been struck by a single thought, and turned to Jerry. “After you sir,” he smirked, like everything in the world was his joke.
Jerry walked silently past him and up the stairs, past the photographs of their little boy, his beautiful smile. They shouldn’t have lost him. It wasn’t fair.
In the bedroom, Susan was reclining on the bed also smoking a cigarette, gazing out of the window. Jerry would have said contemplatively, but he knew she wasn’t that kind of person. He didn’t know she smoked, or rather he had never actually seen her smoking. It made sense. She had a light sheet pulled half over her body, but her breasts were exposed at the top of it, the nipples still dark and hard following Bill’s efforts. They looked somehow different from the way Jerry had remembered, heavier, like she was getting older too. She turned to the door when it opened and saw Jerry, with Bill grinning behind him, but she didn’t say anything, just sucked on her cigarette in a way that Jerry thought made her look profoundly unattractive, that limp-wristed way that smokers tend to hold their cigarettes, as if their whole body has been overtaken by a ghastly debilitating nicotine paralysis.
“Can I just squeeze past?” asked Bill, shuffling past Jerry. Without shame or thought he slipped out of his pants and under the sheet, right there on Jerry’s side of the bed, next to Jerry’s lamp and book and reading glasses. He dick had looked thick, heavy and red, and Jerry found it odd to imagine it nestled between his sheets.
“Susan,” he said quietly. She didn’t speak, dropped her cigarette into a used teacup by the side of the bed. It hissed acutely as the residue of the morning tea extinguished the life of its burning tip. “Susan,” he said again, a bit louder.
“What do you want, Jerry?” she asked. Her voice was nasal and sour, and she and Bill looked at Jerry with equal measures of amusement and thinly veiled disgust.
“I…” he said.
“You what?”
“I think you might need to talk to someone. It’s okay to miss him. I miss him. I miss him so much.”
“Shut up Jerry.”
“But it is,” he persevered. “It’s okay to miss him. It shouldn’t ever have happened. God shouldn’t have let it happen but…”
“God!” she snorted.
“We need to talk about these things,” he said. He sounded like he was going to cry because he was trying to stop his bottom lip from quivering. Bill just sat there.
“We don’t need to talk about anything.”
“We have to, Susan. I can’t do this. I… When I see his pictures hanging on the stairs I… I miss him so much.”
“Then don’t look at the pictures,” she said, so coldly. When did she become so cold?, Jerry wondered. Had she always been like this? She was running her hand up Bill’s leg on top of the sheet, but she looked Jerry dead in the eye.
“Just don’t look at the pictures Jerry,” said Bill in his salesman’s honk. “Think about something else.”
“Think about something else?” said Jerry.
“He’s gone Jerry. He’s dead,” said Susan. Jerry bucked with the tears that he cried. In front of his wife and her lover his shoulders jerked with their sadness.
“But I miss him,” he mumbled between the sobs.
“Just go, Jerry. We’ll talk about it some other time. When we don’t have company.”
Jerry wiped his eyes with his sleeve and raised his downcast gaze to the bed. Susan was frowning with such hatred and Bill was smiling. He would relish telling his friends in the pub about this, thought Jerry. About old Jerry the loser. The crying loser.
“Right,” he said. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, and threw it onto the bed. Then his car keys and his house keys. He unbuttoned his blue overalls and stepped out of them, unlaced his shoes and tossed them into the corner, took off his grey slacks and his comfortable shirt and put them all on the trunk at the foot of the bed. Finally he removed his cotton boxer shorts and his socks and stood naked in front of the two of them. Bill’s face was turning red as he struggled to hold his sniggers in.
Jerry turned and walked out of the room, pulling the door behind him. He could hear the terrible drone of their laughter as he took a picture of his dead little boy from the wall on his way down the stairs and, still entirely naked, unlocked the door to the garage and mounted the hot leather seat of the lawnmower.
Jerry drove slowly as the equipment demanded. He had balanced the photograph by the steering wheel, and he looked at the picture as he drove. The sun felt good on his body, and he didn’t have to pass many people on the quiet residential streets that neighboured his own on this short drive to the cliffs. The few people he did see would only stare in disbelief, before picking up the phone to regurgitate the gossip. Jerry Mandible, nude on a mower in the afternoon sun. Hadn’t been the same since the incident. They couldn’t say it, couldn’t even say the word. Accident.
It wouldn’t be a police issue though, which suited Jerry. He didn’t want any trouble now.
Turning off of the quiet cliff top road and into the primary car park, Jerry edged his mower past the parking attendant, whose eyes couldn’t help but drop to Jerry’s genitals with a blush, even a grown man, and rode it to the farthest parking spaces, right by the edge of the cliff.
He shut off the engine and climbed from the mower, taking the photograph with him. When he peered over the edge he could see the brilliant blue sea below, crashing with minimal force but maximum constancy onto the sheerness of the rocks. It was a pretty straight drop.
He could hear the muffled shouts of the parking attendant, who was running across the length of the car park towards him. Jerry’s bare back was glaring white in the brightness of the day, white like the milk that Bill had swallowed, white like the door of the empty fridge in his garage. Distorted by the wind as his voice was, Jerry thought the attendant was shouting “goodbye! goodbye!”. Jerry turned and waved, waved the photograph of the little boy high in the air.
And then quickly, without delay, or consideration, or fear, Jerry stepped over the knee high wire fence that ran along the cliff edge and threw himself over, still clutching the photograph, and even as he fell he didn’t feel like he was falling but soaring up into the sky, through the clouds and to heaven itself.
He was flying at last.
The sun was pounding heavily on his faded baseball cap, and Jerry wiped a handkerchief across his brow that glistened moistly under a film of sweat. He thought about his wife there, flat on her back with her legs spread wide apart to accommodate Bill’s salesman’s cock, gasping in a way that he had learnt over the years was almost definitely false. Should I feel stupid?, he wondered to himself. That’s my wife in there with another man, in my house. And Bill wasn’t the only one, not by a long way.
He could never decide whether knowing about all of this actually made it worse. It took away all of the deceit and the lies usually associated with such extra-marital liaisons, but still left him burning with the embarrassment of what other people thought about him. He daren’t even imagine how it must look to anyone else. They all knew what she was up to, everyone in the street (in fact she was up to it with most of them). How weak must he look? Oh dear, he said with a sinking despair, but he couldn’t tell whether it was out loud.
Carefully he started the ignition of his sit-on lawnmower and manoeuvred it dexterously into the left hand garage. He dismounted and pulled the door down behind him. It was stifling in the darkness, and he could see thick particles of dust illuminated by the erratic shafts of light that broke through the slit windows running along one wall of the garage. He pulled open the fridge, his fridge, and stood in close to its feeble coolness. He could murder a beer, but when he crouched slightly to see what the fridge had to offer he felt his heart sink a little when he saw that it was empty. Completely empty. He pushed the door closed, his fingers resting on its rust-flecked white frontage for a few seconds longer than perhaps they usually would. He caressed the empty fridge as though it were his empty life.
It smelt like mild labour in the garage. Jerry pulled of his cap and hung it up on the allocated hook. He felt suddenly nauseated by the meticulous organisation of the workspace. Screws were separated according to size and stored in individually labelled boxes. Hammers rested with hammers, screwdrivers with their kind, a variety of handsaws were organised according to the dimensions of their ascending sizes, and all there under his own stringent regime of clear and comprehensive labelling. He yearned for chaos, felt it boiling up inside of him like a pending volcanic eruption, as though it might explode from him at any moment. Looking at the cap he felt his breath quicken, a slight tremble initiating in his biceps. He grabbed the cap with a quick rough yank, and threw it defiantly to the floor. With a breath, as of an almost erotic release, he walked through the side door and into the house, but was back in the garage and had replaced the cap with the exaggerated gestures of a scolded child before the door had even had a chance to close.
Bill was in the kitchen drinking milk out of the carton, naked apart from a small pair of underpants. He saw Jerry walk in but didn’t seem surprised, or perturbed, despite the underpants. Bill knew Jerry, knew that Jerry knew about him, and knew that Jerry wasn’t the kind of guy to do anything about anything anyway. He took another long swallow of the semi-skimmed and slung the carton back into the fridge. Jerry saw that the lid was still left on the surface and narrowed his eyes.
“Jerry,” said Bill, as if he were greeting an old friend.
“Bill,” said Jerry, coldly. “How’s Susan?” Susan was Jerry’s wife.
“Fine, fine.” Bill lit a cigarette from a packet he had set down on the top of the fridge. He offered one to Jerry, but Jerry didn’t like to smoke. “She wanted you to know that she won’t be in for dinner.”
“No?” said Jerry. He stepped past Bill’s bare flesh and pulled a beer out of the fridge, which he opened up and drank from thoughtfully.
“No,” Bill went on, eyeing Jerry with a look more of intrigue than concern. “Bit early isn’t it, Jer?” Jerry looked at his wristwatch. It was lunchtime.
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Whatever you say buddy, whatever you say.”
“Yep.”
The two men looked at each other, one with his beer, the other his cigarette, one in his house clothes, the other his underpants. Bill dragged hard at his cigarette, trying to finish it up without losing face, which he did, letting the smoke trickle from his nose. He put the butt into the sink, and Jerry flinched.
“Well,” said Bill, running a confident finger under the elastic leg band of his underpants, which seemed to be digging into his thigh, “Good seeing you, Jer.” He extended his hand for Jerry to shake. Jerry shook it very slowly. “I better get back up to her.” Bill spoke as if he were talking to a raunchy pal in the office about some mindless physical conquest, not the husband of the wife he was screwing. Jerry picked the butt out of the sink, turned the tap on it and threw it in the dustbin.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “I need a word with Susan anyway.”
“Hey, you’re the boss buddy,” said Bill, clapping a hand on Jerry’s shoulder. He started off for the stairs, and Jerry watched his buttocks and their hair walking off ahead of him with waves of vibration from the footsteps. Bill then stopped, as if he had suddenly been struck by a single thought, and turned to Jerry. “After you sir,” he smirked, like everything in the world was his joke.
Jerry walked silently past him and up the stairs, past the photographs of their little boy, his beautiful smile. They shouldn’t have lost him. It wasn’t fair.
In the bedroom, Susan was reclining on the bed also smoking a cigarette, gazing out of the window. Jerry would have said contemplatively, but he knew she wasn’t that kind of person. He didn’t know she smoked, or rather he had never actually seen her smoking. It made sense. She had a light sheet pulled half over her body, but her breasts were exposed at the top of it, the nipples still dark and hard following Bill’s efforts. They looked somehow different from the way Jerry had remembered, heavier, like she was getting older too. She turned to the door when it opened and saw Jerry, with Bill grinning behind him, but she didn’t say anything, just sucked on her cigarette in a way that Jerry thought made her look profoundly unattractive, that limp-wristed way that smokers tend to hold their cigarettes, as if their whole body has been overtaken by a ghastly debilitating nicotine paralysis.
“Can I just squeeze past?” asked Bill, shuffling past Jerry. Without shame or thought he slipped out of his pants and under the sheet, right there on Jerry’s side of the bed, next to Jerry’s lamp and book and reading glasses. He dick had looked thick, heavy and red, and Jerry found it odd to imagine it nestled between his sheets.
“Susan,” he said quietly. She didn’t speak, dropped her cigarette into a used teacup by the side of the bed. It hissed acutely as the residue of the morning tea extinguished the life of its burning tip. “Susan,” he said again, a bit louder.
“What do you want, Jerry?” she asked. Her voice was nasal and sour, and she and Bill looked at Jerry with equal measures of amusement and thinly veiled disgust.
“I…” he said.
“You what?”
“I think you might need to talk to someone. It’s okay to miss him. I miss him. I miss him so much.”
“Shut up Jerry.”
“But it is,” he persevered. “It’s okay to miss him. It shouldn’t ever have happened. God shouldn’t have let it happen but…”
“God!” she snorted.
“We need to talk about these things,” he said. He sounded like he was going to cry because he was trying to stop his bottom lip from quivering. Bill just sat there.
“We don’t need to talk about anything.”
“We have to, Susan. I can’t do this. I… When I see his pictures hanging on the stairs I… I miss him so much.”
“Then don’t look at the pictures,” she said, so coldly. When did she become so cold?, Jerry wondered. Had she always been like this? She was running her hand up Bill’s leg on top of the sheet, but she looked Jerry dead in the eye.
“Just don’t look at the pictures Jerry,” said Bill in his salesman’s honk. “Think about something else.”
“Think about something else?” said Jerry.
“He’s gone Jerry. He’s dead,” said Susan. Jerry bucked with the tears that he cried. In front of his wife and her lover his shoulders jerked with their sadness.
“But I miss him,” he mumbled between the sobs.
“Just go, Jerry. We’ll talk about it some other time. When we don’t have company.”
Jerry wiped his eyes with his sleeve and raised his downcast gaze to the bed. Susan was frowning with such hatred and Bill was smiling. He would relish telling his friends in the pub about this, thought Jerry. About old Jerry the loser. The crying loser.
“Right,” he said. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, and threw it onto the bed. Then his car keys and his house keys. He unbuttoned his blue overalls and stepped out of them, unlaced his shoes and tossed them into the corner, took off his grey slacks and his comfortable shirt and put them all on the trunk at the foot of the bed. Finally he removed his cotton boxer shorts and his socks and stood naked in front of the two of them. Bill’s face was turning red as he struggled to hold his sniggers in.
Jerry turned and walked out of the room, pulling the door behind him. He could hear the terrible drone of their laughter as he took a picture of his dead little boy from the wall on his way down the stairs and, still entirely naked, unlocked the door to the garage and mounted the hot leather seat of the lawnmower.
Jerry drove slowly as the equipment demanded. He had balanced the photograph by the steering wheel, and he looked at the picture as he drove. The sun felt good on his body, and he didn’t have to pass many people on the quiet residential streets that neighboured his own on this short drive to the cliffs. The few people he did see would only stare in disbelief, before picking up the phone to regurgitate the gossip. Jerry Mandible, nude on a mower in the afternoon sun. Hadn’t been the same since the incident. They couldn’t say it, couldn’t even say the word. Accident.
It wouldn’t be a police issue though, which suited Jerry. He didn’t want any trouble now.
Turning off of the quiet cliff top road and into the primary car park, Jerry edged his mower past the parking attendant, whose eyes couldn’t help but drop to Jerry’s genitals with a blush, even a grown man, and rode it to the farthest parking spaces, right by the edge of the cliff.
He shut off the engine and climbed from the mower, taking the photograph with him. When he peered over the edge he could see the brilliant blue sea below, crashing with minimal force but maximum constancy onto the sheerness of the rocks. It was a pretty straight drop.
He could hear the muffled shouts of the parking attendant, who was running across the length of the car park towards him. Jerry’s bare back was glaring white in the brightness of the day, white like the milk that Bill had swallowed, white like the door of the empty fridge in his garage. Distorted by the wind as his voice was, Jerry thought the attendant was shouting “goodbye! goodbye!”. Jerry turned and waved, waved the photograph of the little boy high in the air.
And then quickly, without delay, or consideration, or fear, Jerry stepped over the knee high wire fence that ran along the cliff edge and threw himself over, still clutching the photograph, and even as he fell he didn’t feel like he was falling but soaring up into the sky, through the clouds and to heaven itself.
He was flying at last.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
the dogshite
the dogshite was the short lived bastard of the one huge peachy moniker. it started as a juvenile parody of a low-grade, toilet wall mounted mag produced by morons within the cambridge university system, and climaxed as four A4-sized humour documents with an almost non-existent readership. I'll post some pieces up here from the peachy archives over the next few weeks.
otherwise, during casual office-based research into necrophilia, I came across an incidence of a male mallard engaging in coital acts with another dead duck. a dull thud at a window in Rotterdam was followed by discovery of the dead male mallard, who had flown into the glass. to the surprise of dutch onlooker, Kees Moeliker, another mallard of the male gender proceeded hurriedly to first pick at the corpse and then mount it, sexually, in an act of copulation that lasted for 75 minutes. one must wonder why this Mr Moeliker felt the compulsion to observe the sex act for the full 75 minutes, but his exhaustive research into the necrophilic impulses of the common mallard have proved to illuminate significant points of interest in their behavioural exhibitionism.
firstly, the duck apparently took two short breaks during the congress, each time returning to finish the job. in other words, it had more than sufficient opportunity to think about what it was doing and the inanimate state of its lover (and the subsequent immensity of the argument from consent that would accompany any discussion of necrophilic persuasion within the sphere of humanity).
secondarily, both ducks were males. necrophiliac and homosexual. that particular duck must have had a hard time as a kid. while all of his mallard buddies were shooting the shit and waxing lyrical about guy stuff, he was looking at their beautiful green heads, their full plummages, their bright bright beaks in the sunlight, and wondering "what if?". tragic really. the only way he could get them interested in his package and introduce them to this whole other world of sexual exploration was by waiting for one to fall prey to an accidental death.
As Moeliker put it: "when one died the other one just went for it and didn't get any negative feedback".
negative feedback? for one, the fucking thing was dead, and probably wasn't going to start dishing out constructive criticism of the necrophiliac's sexual technique. for two, it sounds as though it's probably for the best. if you had added being bad in the bedroom to the poor fucker's already extensive list of complaints you could have probably added homicide (or at least suicide) to it.
again, I would have been curious to see what Mr Moeliker was doing while this was going on. face pressed against the window, tape recorder on, mood lighting, tie slightly loosened. of course we'll probably never know about all that kind of stuff. you imagine the guy who watches live gay mallard necrophilia probably wouldn't go around bragging about it, but there the poor bastard is, right on wikipedia.
I wonder if his wife knows the kind of thing he's into?
maybe that's why she married him?
does he even have a wife?
who is Kees Moeliker?
otherwise, during casual office-based research into necrophilia, I came across an incidence of a male mallard engaging in coital acts with another dead duck. a dull thud at a window in Rotterdam was followed by discovery of the dead male mallard, who had flown into the glass. to the surprise of dutch onlooker, Kees Moeliker, another mallard of the male gender proceeded hurriedly to first pick at the corpse and then mount it, sexually, in an act of copulation that lasted for 75 minutes. one must wonder why this Mr Moeliker felt the compulsion to observe the sex act for the full 75 minutes, but his exhaustive research into the necrophilic impulses of the common mallard have proved to illuminate significant points of interest in their behavioural exhibitionism.
firstly, the duck apparently took two short breaks during the congress, each time returning to finish the job. in other words, it had more than sufficient opportunity to think about what it was doing and the inanimate state of its lover (and the subsequent immensity of the argument from consent that would accompany any discussion of necrophilic persuasion within the sphere of humanity).
secondarily, both ducks were males. necrophiliac and homosexual. that particular duck must have had a hard time as a kid. while all of his mallard buddies were shooting the shit and waxing lyrical about guy stuff, he was looking at their beautiful green heads, their full plummages, their bright bright beaks in the sunlight, and wondering "what if?". tragic really. the only way he could get them interested in his package and introduce them to this whole other world of sexual exploration was by waiting for one to fall prey to an accidental death.
As Moeliker put it: "when one died the other one just went for it and didn't get any negative feedback".
negative feedback? for one, the fucking thing was dead, and probably wasn't going to start dishing out constructive criticism of the necrophiliac's sexual technique. for two, it sounds as though it's probably for the best. if you had added being bad in the bedroom to the poor fucker's already extensive list of complaints you could have probably added homicide (or at least suicide) to it.
again, I would have been curious to see what Mr Moeliker was doing while this was going on. face pressed against the window, tape recorder on, mood lighting, tie slightly loosened. of course we'll probably never know about all that kind of stuff. you imagine the guy who watches live gay mallard necrophilia probably wouldn't go around bragging about it, but there the poor bastard is, right on wikipedia.
I wonder if his wife knows the kind of thing he's into?
maybe that's why she married him?
does he even have a wife?
who is Kees Moeliker?
the andy letters: 12th august, 1997
Dear Andy,
It's been several minutes since I composed my last letter, and now again I submit my will to the near autonomy of linguistic representation.
I fear that the end is nigh for me, fear it with all of my heart. My legs are stiffening, I can feel them stiffening beneath my aged pinafore, as old as I can remember. It’s as though the joints are solidifying, fossilizing in their skin, preserving me as a hideous memorial to the self that still goes on. And my chest, oh how my chest hurts, tearing through me with every breath I can or cannot take, the lungs forced into a space too small for the fleshy scale of their once mighty bronchioles, my breath’s only a fraction of the necessary intake. My brittle fingers are dry like shortbread; I spend each second waiting for the break, the crumbs. I am malfunctioning, seizing up like poorly maintained machinery, and soon I will disappear. Perhaps with only an orange smear, trace amounts of rusted hopes painted in erratic flecks across my armchair, my tomb. I want to see blood pour from my fingers again, caught awkwardly on nails jutting, or hawthorns, or memories, but I’m afraid that only powder would poor from the crippling drought of my veins.
Time is perceived as such only with appropriate passage, of food, distance, conviction. I have none.
Did you find the treat? Originally it hadn't fit in the fridge, but I forced it, much to the joy of the children.
I will write again soon, if I ever learn what soon is.
Your ever fanatical
Ma
It's been several minutes since I composed my last letter, and now again I submit my will to the near autonomy of linguistic representation.
I fear that the end is nigh for me, fear it with all of my heart. My legs are stiffening, I can feel them stiffening beneath my aged pinafore, as old as I can remember. It’s as though the joints are solidifying, fossilizing in their skin, preserving me as a hideous memorial to the self that still goes on. And my chest, oh how my chest hurts, tearing through me with every breath I can or cannot take, the lungs forced into a space too small for the fleshy scale of their once mighty bronchioles, my breath’s only a fraction of the necessary intake. My brittle fingers are dry like shortbread; I spend each second waiting for the break, the crumbs. I am malfunctioning, seizing up like poorly maintained machinery, and soon I will disappear. Perhaps with only an orange smear, trace amounts of rusted hopes painted in erratic flecks across my armchair, my tomb. I want to see blood pour from my fingers again, caught awkwardly on nails jutting, or hawthorns, or memories, but I’m afraid that only powder would poor from the crippling drought of my veins.
Time is perceived as such only with appropriate passage, of food, distance, conviction. I have none.
Did you find the treat? Originally it hadn't fit in the fridge, but I forced it, much to the joy of the children.
I will write again soon, if I ever learn what soon is.
Your ever fanatical
Ma
a mistake in the print shop
Mr and Mrs Cecil Hamburger were both cremated after their deaths, lowered onto a man-sized grill.
They tossed a coin up: that or burial in a polystyrene box.
Everybody loves a hamburger, thought the town priest carefully.
It was an amazing funeral. The mourners had dressed for a dinner dance.
The invites had accidentally said that.
It was a simple mistake in the print shop.
Dinner dance.
They tossed a coin up: that or burial in a polystyrene box.
Everybody loves a hamburger, thought the town priest carefully.
It was an amazing funeral. The mourners had dressed for a dinner dance.
The invites had accidentally said that.
It was a simple mistake in the print shop.
Dinner dance.
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