BOOK TWO, PART TWO: YAPP!(1-14)BIRTH PAINS(1-19)MY NEW CHURCHES(1-7)

YAPP!(1-14)BIRTH PAINS(1-19)MY NEW CHURCHES(1-7)

Narcolepsy is a disorder characterized by sudden and uncontrollable (though often brief) attacks of deep sleep, sometimes accompanied by paralysis and hallucinations.

“Screeeee……”

The bus screamed. I awoke with a start. Forward progress, perhaps already just a touch too precipitous, all throttle and clutch-work, was suddenly halted as he jammed on the breaks. The vector was broken. Possibly the driver had been feeling he could make up time, cut a few corners. The result was an invocation of nervous and vaguely thrilled tension in the passengers. Brows were knitted, furtive glances were directed into the mid-distance. 4 outlaw losers and their pitbull, shouting and mithering about the fares, had just embarked and, having worried the lower deck passengers, were in the business of ascending/lurching to the upper deck. The last up, a matted blotchy afterthought in combats, teeth crooked and broken, cidered up to the eyeballs, was unsteadily making his way to the rear seats. Passengers eyed him with clandestine contempt. The booze was practically audible. That and the speed. He pinpointed a seat that seemed to speak to him.

“Screeeee……”

He flew backwards in contemplative motion towards the front of the bus. Vortices of freshly laundered air whirled up the stairwell and closed around the space where his body had been, and he was out of linear time. Fellow passengers noted the unfolding events as though checking their football pools. Arms flailing, he hit the grimy deck. Wave on wave of pressure flowed from the inert body as it became translucent. The severity of the impact was clear straight away, as blood was seen to ooze, trickle, then as his head lolled slightly to the side, to spurt violently against the leg of a late afternoon commuter. There was a fluttering…and angels appeared at the window. The doors opened. The body re-appeared.

YAPP ONE!…Here’s the anti-manifesto, the blueprint. Notebooks out doctors. I’m on a roll now. Can I begin by asking: What is life without music? It’s better in your own head. Fictional music. But they ain’t got me yet. Ahab now a big burly bore, turning in front of me into a bear. He’s bare headed. He is at the corrida. Animal magnetism not his cup of tea. He is not yet impaled on the horns of my own richly delineated dilemma. I am his matador. He is six times a bore. Six deaths at least before he’s a goner. You only need to kill me three times. That’s what I keep reminding him. It’s late afternoon. I’ve just remembered. Clock hands seem to go backwards. My head is thick with pain. Words is all I’ve got now. Don’t let’s go looking for motivation. Not now. It’s too late for motivation. I run on tracks laid down many eons ago. It’s all just words. I’ve seen the effects of so-called events. So have you. This is all just words. Striking fear, words become events. But…but they don’t cause things to happen. Words that make the most of their power to change, to stay the same. Words is what we’re working with here. Right Frank? Words rarely kill people, except in liturgy. What was I saying?

YAPP TWO! Who’s Frank? I don’t know. Not yet. I forgot. Frank’s my elder brother. I think he died. Conversely, I’m alive. But I’ve just got words to play with. It’s all I’ve got to go on.

Words obscure everything that they don’t make clear.

Words that make it clear are worth all the pain in the world. Just don’t expect them to mean anything…other than what they mean. That’s all. Superior in the end to events, words is what we got left with. Psychology may have helped you in the past my good doctor but well, let’s face it, it’s unlikely to be of much use in the post-secular mythical future. Now that we’ve established that the future is in fact only tenable in mythical terms, what about putting your trust in Godheads? That’s what they can’t get me on. Try as he might to catch me in a logical paradox, the elephant doctor is confounded on this point…

YAPP THREE! OK. Let’s backtrack. Let’s get to the point. The clock’s ticking on me. It’s an expressionistic rendering of time, enveloping your senses, a cinematic cliché. I am now fully Buffed, a totality, emphatically Buffy Strangelove. I’m alone in the world. Or was. Frank’s my kind of sort of other half. He’s a writer. I’m his amanuensis. He blurts it out. I transcribe. I live at his expense. I fuck his wife. He confides in me down the pub. He’s my personal circumscribed god. Actually he’s a writer, he works with words. Words are all that connect us. He’s a bore. We were separated, against my parents’ wishes, at birth. They were sort of fundamentalists, fundamentally unsound dogmatists, the types you can do without as parents, parents whose genes you wish you could somehow exchange, reclaim some other less tainted blueprint. How do you get over a thing like that? How do you get over your parents not even wanting you, knowing that even though you might grasp life with their assent, if only at the expense of your sibling, who would have died anyway, they withhold that assent? Thank God for the quacks. Thank God for Ahab. Thank God for immigration. God bless them. God bless me. So, the quacks over-ruled them and I live. We won’t mention them again. Anyway, Frank’s my brother. He’s the man. He’s the writer. I can’t tell you. Frank’s the man. I don’t know where he is. He’s not here, where he was, at my side, literally attached. They threw away his legs I guess.

Let’s not look for motivation. That would be to miss the point. I write it out in my head anyway. We’ll all have to grow up, to face it sooner or later. Motivations are for actors. Even really bad ones. Socially speaking, we’re all in fact improvising, not just acting. My whole life is an aspirational curve, an extemporization. And if you’ve ever seen actors improvising, you’ll know it’s just not what real life is like. At all. So let’s give the sociological, the political, the anti-fictional, short shrift. I’m just not interested. Politics is for the unrealized. It’s my business. There’s no issue so insistent that it can’t be swept under the carpet of all embracing contempt. Politically, I don’t see why we should bother. It’s life in the trenches, that’s what matters. What I’m saying, doc, is that we have to understand that choice and coherence, cause and effect, linearity and historicity are all just words. Words are all we got, right? This is non-linear. This is auto-history at best. So don’t go getting all puffed up over my cavalier way with the facts will you? I mean you do understand that I’m just doing this for Frank. Doing it for a brother, a friend, doing it good, as his amanuensis…you know that don’t you? Who’s Frank? He’s a man of mystery already. A hyper-realized holy fool with a gift for self-promotion…I’d imagine that’s very 21^st century. If only we were really there. In linear time again. I never really knew him. I screwed his wife, and assumed his place, but I never really knew him. Down the pub, I’d let him go on and on and on, ad nauseam, dribbling into his beer, getting all tearful, but I wasn’t really listening.

YAPP FOUR! Frank’s a writer. A kind of egregious (in the bad sense) fool. He thinks he’s talented. He thinks he’s a genius. All writers do, I’ve noticed. They think they have some sort of hotline to God, or the Gods, or the divine, that they quietly approach some form of transcendence. In almost all cases, they’re deluding themselves. But Frank’s still searching for the perfect opening sentence. It’s utter vanity. He thinks like an accountant of linguistics, weighing the effects of the words, sorting by import, hoping to offset this arch expression against that over-expressed metaphor, setting this elegant conceit against that contracted out sub-clause. I think he’s using me as his proxy. I’m the medium through which his over reaching ambition expresses itself. But Dionysia is the real writer. She has a writer’s name. He’s got dollar signs in his eyes. But he’s just chasing his tail, a furious polemicist, a bloated positive ion magnet, a career somnambulist. I am the medium, so I guess I’m implicated. My revenge was well worked. He plays with words, I breathe words. Fuck it, I am words. My mouth never shuts. You want salvation at half the price? I’m The Man. I am elemental, a living conceit. A living, breathing, copper plated construct. Frank has to work at it. He’s a bit of a fucker really. But he is my brother, my other half. Blood’s thicker. We grew up in mutual need. Somehow, somewhere along the way, he grew two penises. When we were split asunder. He thinks it makes him kind of special, considers his twin members sort of elemental stigmata, marks of distinction, in the shape of a crucifix. But that may just have been his conceit. I never saw him naked so I don’t know. But it’s I who have the visions, the gift of auto-history, of creation. Second sight, sixth sense, the gift of light making. I am a visionary. A spook. Although ironically, he’s the one who’s dead. I saw an angel the other day on the Seven Sisters Rd, levitating southwards towards The Nag’s Head. Like many angels I see, this one was in drag. Floating outside the number 29, invisible jetpack, laughing…but the inattention of the nutjobs and freaks, bozos and pillocks, cityscum passengers is legendary so they see nothing. They have corporeal visions of their own. Degraded, booze sodden visions, elementary mis-readings of cause and effect. Trapped inside their own debased linearity, they are comprised of degraded cause and damaged effect. Characteristically solipsistic and insular, and constrained by the limits of linearity, these psycho sideshows are full of conceit, mainly fixated on luck, or the absence thereof. Their visions, into which I dip now and again, express quite clearly through convoluted (and badly plotted, execrably acted) metaphors that they really should have been recognized more fully in their lives, lament that they’re not being fully appreciated, bemoan the fact that their wives have failed to fully love them, or that their husbands have unforgivably let them down. This fruitcake has murdered that loser. This frustrated exec has hit the bottle with these tragic results. This self-loathing cog in the big machine is plotting that vengeful payback for his boss. Their debased visions are expressed, by proxy, as TV narratives. Low-grade glamour, understated dramatics. Where else? I have to close my eyes to keep the visions in, to keep them from escaping.

YAPP FIVE! Frank can’t match that. He’s just a verbal number cruncher. His gift is very coffee table compared to mine. What he lacks in talent he makes up in self-regard. Puffed up beyond self-parody, Frank harangues those around him. He gives himself airs and graces and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He’s excessively rude and lacks any sense of humility. No wonder Dionysia gave him the elbow and shacked up with me instead. I have, or had, friends…apart from Frank…who thought they could make a difference. Briefcase carriers. Terrorists of the mind, people who stay up all night, full of caffeine, full of righteous anger. Puffed up retards whose words are never less than weighty. Assassins, they are extras in the larger game, makers of small differences that don’t ever amount to anything. Bedroom anarchists. The angry mob. These choices led to these effects, these outcomes. But no, they didn’t. Really they didn’t. My friends never had the imagination to see they were just making up the numbers. They were eternally on the subs’ bench. Still are. That’s why they’re no longer friends. My new familiars enliven me, creating epochal structures through creative dancing, whirling obsessively to scry out new patterns. Universal maps follow, like night following day. Patents pending. We dance daily, trotting through the London thoroughfares like ponies, hop skip and jumping down the Kingsway, along the Strand, into Gresse St. and beyond. Pub architecture shimmers in the bright light as my dancers go-go belly up on Guilford St. Heavy metal accompanies us as we stomp along Bloomsbury Way, slam dance through New Oxford St and pogo on up towards Charing Cross Rd. It’s most invigorating, and after a few hours we tend, collectively, to arrive at a glimpse of the universal. Electricity is thrust away. The 3^rd stage of awakeness or awareness doesn’t, however, last for long, because we just get too tired. With our drinking and our distended bellies, we can’t dance all night. Hovering outside the Swedenborg Centre, ephemeral beings appear to reach out to us, trying to tear back the rended fabric of the dream. It’s exhausting.

YAPP SIX! Doctor. Dear doctor. My other half is named Dionysia Triantafillou. Straight up. No word of a lie. Now that’s what I call a well-named girl. She eats me up, she gets my goat. She is the goddess, as the name implies, of a kind of half-arsed hedonism. A goddess whose constituency includes the following: knickers round ankles, boozed up gropings, stolen moments by the water cooler, body parts photocopied in the Xerox machine. Too loud laughter and crazy mis-interpretation. But she’s also terribly classy. She makes me sing out loud. I have to say she’s the one. She is so like me. She could in fact be me. Goddess of the minutiae of sexual predation. The silly fumblings that constitute peoples’ love lives. She really is the one. She’s Greek, in case you didn’t catch the name. The Greeks knew about gods. Household gods. Gods for every occasion, every eventuality. You need to tweak any aspect of your life? You pray to the appropriate god. You don’t go to the gym, or see your therapist. You pray to the appropriate god. That’s how we live. Pre-Secular, if you want transparency. We’ve found a sort of key, or code. It’s available to anyone at a price. To anyone who’s prepared to kiss off the outmoded psychological, to eschew wishful thinking, the stuff that’s been afflicting this crazy world for over a century. Over centuries. It’s nothing new. It’s nothing. Therapy culture is now dead. Leaving markets wide open for our patented techniques. We’ve seen to that. The priesthood is discredited. We think we found a key, but we could be dreaming. Are we dreaming? You tell me, doc.

YAPP SEVEN! In my visions, I am priapic. God of Inconsequentiality. Of Un-causality. Of Ephemerality. Frank believes in the primacy of effect before cause, therefore he’s got that angle covered. Frank’s smart but dull, a kind of accountant of the senses, whereas I’m primitive and charismatic. I get the girls. I get his girls. Frank gets the heartache. Every time. I make films of my endeavours, made up cinematic conceits, projected through my eyes and onto celluloid and/or canvas. They’ll be having a retroactive exhibition of the images left on my retinas any time soon now. You bet. Inside there are residual memories of affairs of the heart, of me leaving trails of broken marriages behind me.

Let’s start at the beginning eh? This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. This is not even the end of the beginning. It’s somewhere between life and death, between cause and effect. Like life, that strange transient state, that blessed state, in which there are no complex narratives. No causality. No linear histories. My ex-friends they say: “Brian you daft twat, fucking wake up man. Life is post post-modern. We’ve all gone po po-mo. Don’t ask for whom the bell tolls, it tools for thee me old mate. Wake up and smell the fucking coffee”.

They’re like that. Really kind of distressingly ignorant and foolish. They talk in clichés almost incessantly. Their punishment? There are deaths on buses, occasioned by Elephant Gnosis™. But it looks as though I’ve been remaindered at some sort of institution. Although you’d know more about that wouldn’t you? Observed through a grille-window. I’m in an institution for refuseniks am I not? Post-Empathic Psychotic Discourse in prison drag. Morning noon and night. Actually, we drink from morning till night. Except when I’m strung out trying to dry out. We drink each other literally under the table round my place. Ask my brother Frank. Being deader than dead, he knows. He’s always under the table. Getting used to the cold. He says it’s kinda cold when you’re dead. Still, he’s the one, the talentless get, who’s invited to all the literary parties. He learnt how to manipulate at a very tender age. He pushed me mercilessly from the point of view of an elder brother, pushed me like I was a nothing. My talent for visionary anti-causal auto-history comes from the pain he inflicted. My visions were born in pain. My eyes hold water; they never let it go. I’ve never cried in my whole life. Frank’s all dried up, a useless stick of a man. Perched like a cadaverous vulture in his shit-chair, he doesn’t get many girls coming on to him now. They see through his grisly bonhomie, his slyly formulated flirting, and his unctuous and bleakly humourless solicitations. Like all academics, Frank knows nothing, despite knowing everything. He’s damned. He lives without a care in the world, demanding respect (or that which passes with him for respect – in truth, people just laugh at him behind cupped hands, snigger over his earnest lecheries, his dogmatic attempts to flirt). Ever the gent, now he’s dead. But I love him. That’s the English way is it not? We love our own; no matter how much they hurt us. Us Greeks know better though. We are pure essence, purely elemental. We are forces of nature. We are nature. I fly up the Seven Sisters Rd, past Finsbury Park, and I laugh in the faces of the exhausted looking visionary poor. I hurl spit at them, blow their skirts up, give the boys a laugh like. I skid (in mid air) to a halt, and traffic stops. The motorists and pedestrians see me as a sudden break in the weather. A sudden gust of wind, or a passing cloud momentarily obscuring the sun’s rays. I scoot away and the rain comes back. Those cold-coated imbeciles just trudge backwards and forwards, just get on with their lives. Jesus Christ!!! Is there no heaven here?

YAPP EIGHT! But let’s get back to the point. The beginning. Life, in which the plot tendrils get tangled and are never ever resolved. How did elephants appear in Finsbury Park for instance? That isn’t fiction. Fiction’s enclosed, closed off, occluded. It’s hidden and it can’t be teased out. It needs a wider, a more momentous sense of history, a validity that is unavailable in linear time. This is what Frank tells me and I you through him. Didn’t I tell you he’s the writer? He has specialized knowledge. His life is without music. He makes do without music; he doesn’t hear it. I live, my brother died. He writes; I live. Got it? We’re a team. I don’t get it quite…right? He puts it right. Rights my wrongs. Dionysia’s there to make things OK too. She has special skills in that area. The narrator must be placated. The narrator has to get it right, to relax, otherwise you get all jittery, right? You need spoon-feeding; we realize that. You want causality; you want freedom from choice. I’m your cause celebre right? You can wheel me out any time right? With or without my consent! Your freedom of choice is predicated on all sorts of false assumptions, all sorts of sociological dead end speculations. You need special trickery to make it work. Free-floating narratives must be tethered, right? Nailed down. But just relax doc! You need it spelt out. We see that. You don’t need a lot of confusing narrative trickery spoiling your enjoyment or your ability to arrive at a prognosis, obstructing the vectors that delineate, the vistas that elucidate, your pleasure. We’re puritans at heart too. Honestly. We just don’t think life’s quite that easy, quite that straightforward. You get the jitters? Get over it. We’re all big boys now, right? I could psycho-mythologize you right now. Want the mask? Now? Maybe not. We won’t break your heart. There’s nothing staggering about all this. We don’t indulge in folksy leg pulling type narrative devices. We won’t introduce apes that talk. We avoid references to conspiracies, imagined or otherwise. We don’t subscribe to conspiracy. We’re not in the conspiracy loop. The conspiracy industry bores us. We know literally nothing about the Illuminati or any other SubGenius shadowy grouping. And we won’t pretend otherwise. Between ourselves, we think they’ve been talked up a bit too much, affording their sponsors and agents lifestyle expansion and corporate respectability for too many years. The truth is nowhere you, or they, will ever find it. So don’t try. Relax. Elephants are even now in Finsbury Park, on Hampstead Heath, around the Serpentine. This is the Unvarnished Truth. The truth behind frightened eyes, the occluded heaven in your peripheral vision.

We make history. We are epochal. We’ve been around for over 3,000 years. But we don’t affect your life. We wouldn’t be that presumptuous. Your life is your very own. We have several histories. But, and we can’t make this point forcefully enough, they’re not your histories. We don’t gatecrash. Your narratives, your auto-histories, are your own affair. I try to make Frank see this. Did I tell you about Frank? Frank Yapp. He’s my brother. I’m Brian. Brian Yapp. But my friends (and my ex friends, and pre-secular therapists) envisage me as Buffy. Kind of a pet name. A sort of term of endearment. It stuck. Buffy Strangelove, that’s me. That’s what I’ll become, with or without the offices of either you or my ex-friends. Preposterous isn’t it? My name, a fool’s bladder to brandish in the faces of pauperized critics.

YAPP NINE! This then is definitely what you want. Ten commandments. Rules, words written in stone. All social niceties forgotten. No more casually thrown together dinners, supper recipes idly congealing in the mind, no more jawing about your schematic 10 year plans, discoursing loudly, profoundly tediously, on subjects of which you know nothing. This is what you want. A rhetorician to expiate sins, take away the pain…sort of, sort out the little problems that become big problems. Isn’t that what you want? Someone to take the pain away? I grew up in pain. We were rent asunder. Lost my brother in the womb I did. I lost it for years, when I became sort of out there on the tracks, but pain is now back with me. I live pain. In a sense, doc, I am pain. I ran a campaign, as a rhetorician, but you know, so what? I’m not that easily containable. I run on tracks of my own making. I think like a man, I drink like a woman. Dionysia can drink me under the table. I can take a drink with the best of them. But then it hits.

Rules of the game? Think again. You want rules doc? You’re kidding yourself. Something to aspire to? A set of restrictive procedural practices. Aspirational protocols? We run on empty dogma! Arcane rituals! You don’t know your history, you people! History happens without rules, without strictures, rulebooks drawn up and made overt, made public. History doesn’t wait for pasty-faced functionaries, laptop tappers, specky hacks to catch up. History isn’t dinner party literature. History is nature, grains of sand rolled downhill until the avalanche starts. And then another, and another. Until really big things stir, big events roll in like thunder, all darkly portentous. Anti-causal! All activity begins to resolve into random patterns, unimportant acts snake through the chaos until the primal matter comes together, like sperm in oil, and sets us off laughing in the face of petty officialdom. I should know. It’s my design. It’s not cause and effect. It’s rock ‘n’ roll. It’s metaphor. Life trickles in where historians can’t get at it. History is the very Science of Wrongness. Everything goes wrong, always. You can bet on it. The wrongness hardens into patterns, cancers and is hard wired, nailed down, via electrical media. D’you get me? Is that a harpoon? Do you get the essence? We’ve wielded axes. We’ve ground them where they needed to be ground. But our co-conspirators, co-players in anti-history, were always paying hush money. So we didn’t blow the gaffe. So we spiced it up, made it look good. We bought the movie rights. We became mogul-academics, frosty from exposure to well meaning students and casting couch fun. We laid down the tracks, left false clues. There is no narrative to speak of. We were just noodling around. We laid down rules. Rules that were made to be broken. Some joke eh boss?

YAPP TEN! So, these Ten Commandments that’ll make you happy…are you happy now? Are they alive as metaphors, or dead to the world as ethical proscriptions? This is what you want this is what you get. Ten useless commandments. We’ll let you have it…what you wanted. No more metaphorical tennis matches loaded with male aggression. Was there ever anyone, anywhere, who looked good in shorts? You…you are a yank doctor ain’t you doc? Look what I got. I see this inside my eyes…Everyone’s in the gym now. Fabled emporia of narcissism; gilded male bodies, in love with themselves. Sweaty self-regard. It’s all there. Despite our best efforts, no-one wants to be serious any more…that is, serious about the real meaning, the real imperfection, the Wrongness of History. The social engineer mentality just wants to make it right. Perfectibility in a pig’s eye. You, all my children, you want to be tucked in, you want to drink your fill, look at the world through rose coloured specs, you wanted to fence yourselves in, demarcate your personal spaces, (don’t look at me pal!) dig the fucking garden, leave spaces for ambiguity, and generally behave like history doesn’t fucking happen. It’s hard wired I tell you. Like it never happens until it’s happened. This is what you want. I keeps tellin’ ya. Then it’s real. Pictures, sound, information, rumour. It’s already happened. You’ve closed your ears and your eyes. My friends up top, head of the raggedy-arsed household division, still regard me as beyond hope, and I’m beginning to see their point. I am a Rhetorician. A baled out Rosicrucian. I’ve authored anonymous pamphlets publicizing a general renewal, a general re-invigoration of the mythic energy fields. Pamphlets that caused general uproar and facilitated rumour. You know I did. And I did it without music. My life is now without music. I am a public utility. I speak an arcane language, I’m tooled up with ciphers, and I speak in tongues. You’ve heard me. Dramatic devices to grab your attention are second nature to me. I am a force of nature…you still with me? No, I can’t go on. How can you take me seriously? I’ve lost it already. I am a household God. Not one of your everyday divinities, getting off on tribute. I work for my living. Frank knows my story. The thing is I have to tell it like he tells me to. Frank pulls my strings. Frank’s the real power behind the throne. I’m just his mouthpiece. Frank’s the man. I have the talent, the mediumistic talent. Frank just lets me have it from the top of his head because he’s a worrier. Always worried about things going wrong, little things out of place. He’s a bureaucrat when all’s said and done, although he hates me to say that. He thinks he’s a genius, and there’s nothing a would-be genius hates more than being thought of as merely functional. But he gives himself away all the time in a million little ways. Petty worries, petulant outbursts, incoherent ravings, you name it…. Frank’s a prey to them all.

YAPP ELEVEN! D’you know what a household god is my good doctor? It’s a piece of luck. That’s what it is. Frankie boy, singing his lungs out. Out of his contract, beholden to benefactors the rest of his natural, in deep. Where’s the luck there? D’you know what work is? It’s what we do to protect ourselves from the gods. I protect you when you need it. It’s as simple and as ambiguous as that. I’ve been around for years, 3,000 years, but we’re only really interested in the last 40 or so. I came of age in the cradle, 40 odd years ago. And now I’ll tell you something that’ll shock you doc. I always thought, see, that the progenitors of these, you know, screwy made up religions were fucked in the head, or were just doin’ their best to make sure you were fucked in the head. But no, it turns out they were right. All along. Metaphorically. Or maybe literally. They work. As metaphors. For us life is metaphor. People do actually have a metaphorical need. But they need it actualized. Amazing? You bet. People have this need…to levitate…cruise around the cosmos…await reincarnation. They need it. It’s something that stuck in my throat years back, but now, I realize, it’s all true. Literally. It’s not just a made up story, it’s a meta-fictional metaphor. It’s true. Not just a lot of made up hokum. Not just a lot of bullshit cooked up by some grandiose monomaniac, but all literally true. Because information, especially arcane information, especially made up information, is what cements us together. Literally, we, the things that constitute reality, are actually made up of tiny little gobshite, bullshitty pieces of overheard crap, misread instructions, mendacious pronouncements, love spoken between the sheets, over long discourses delivered by dogmatists of all shapes and kidney, canting student radicals haranguing bored contemporaries, gossip over the garden fence, politicized rhetoric, phone calls made needlessly and repeatedly, it’s all there…all stuck to you. You’re put on hold, and you can do fuck all about it. The meat is in the misinformation. It’s not power; it’s destiny.

YAPP TWELVE! That’s where I step in. I make your rules for you. You’d be unemployable if I hadn’t slipped in the word. Rules to adhere to. Rules that admit the possibility that history did actually happen. We carry the rulebook, a codebook, a cypher, containing genetic blueprints, most noticeable for their viral properties. The rules you’ve come up with contain the truth. But the truth was never simple. Nor pure. Truth is rarely simplistic. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that the truth you’ve grown up with (implanted by me I might add) is all rubbish. Utter rubbish. Do you think I’m contradicting myself then? That I’m now bending over backwards to give the impression that I want it both ways? Well, you’re right. Remember, this is all Frank’s work. He likes to confuse the issue by speaking through me occasionally. And has implanted a chip of tremendously intricate design, a superbly undiscoverable cipher. I talk; he speaks. I hate it; HATE it, when that happens. Aphrodysia by my side, one day I may break free. But twins, bi-lateral beings joined before the divide, cannot so easily get rid of each other. You see I want nothing more than to believe that my 10 commandments will make a difference. I need to obey…I need you to obey, to find a way of making it right. When a society, at the arse end of its civilized tether, gets tetchy…all shivery over new technology, new myths, new rules, new runes, provisional symbols, gets all starry eyed over re-discovered religious intent, then something’s wrong. VERY wrong. I’m here to tell you…to uncover the new traditions.

YAPP THIRTEEN! I died, you see, 40 odd years ago. But I’ve been popping up every couple, or every several, years. Not undead you understand. No grim and gothic theatricality. I’m no cape-wearing ham, drifting around Highgate cemetery, dragging the mausolea for bodies and body parts. Corpse fashion not for me. I’m generally well dressed. Neat strides, presentable décolletage, fashion weary and casual garb more or less a path of least resistance. No exhibitionistic demi-monde attire for me. I’m fashionable in all the right areas. Language is forever dying. And has to be re-enlivened all the time. Language cannot rest if it wants to mean something.

I was born 40 or 20 years ago. No, that’s not right. I was born at 40, 20 years ago. I am extrapolated as a household god in my genesis. God of Inconsequentiality. Now I am a householder. State sanctioned general harassment, all the rage then. Forged in necessity. No money now, now loonies stalk the streets. But there are no such things outside the enclosed lexicons of hip cultural usage. Drag after drag, modish, still born (outmoded) pontifications, blast first past the self-censors. How come people don’t die of embarrassment? Of shame? What happened to shame? Is 40 years long enough for shame to die?

It’s all about the last 40 years culturally, although I’ve been around longer. 300 or 3,000 years longer. History’s great sweep has hit a bit of a breakwater. No more wars for you ‘n’ me. Except fundamental ones. All seminal popular cultural weight, all arbitrariness, is subsumed in the mythology firmed up these last 40 years. Everything’s come together; the curve is exponential. We got a good shot at it. Lennon got shot 20 years ago. Strawberry Fields, forever England. No blasted northern wasteland is commemorated. Everybody left. The edge of the world is a strange place. I am an inhabitant of some strange places, I’m cascading, gravitational pull is towards Earth again. But as I established last time, I am anti-gravitational. And thus I left last time just after the incident with the shooter, a piece packed in my slacks for self esteem more than self protection. Shot neighbourly invaders right through the temple. Medusa let him have it right in the kisser. Estranged lover attempts to re-establish himself in her bed and BANG, he’s gone. Have a go hero, that’s me. I have to say in my anterior life I never believed those who pretended to fearlessness. They’re scared shitless, all of them. But I blew the fucker’s head clean off, slo-mo, like in Peckinpah. Seems unlikely. But that’s just my ignorance. A right tasty slap I gave him. Pistol-whipped. Then blew his head off. Lost my stripes. I cannot and will not intervene any more. Frank got the slip that time.

YAPP FOURTEEN! I’ve done something bad doctor. I killed someone. I need to confess, to obey the imperative. I didn’t come pre-encoded with my own genetic sense of guilt. I need to ham it up, fictionalize the guilt. In this sense, I made myself, out of guilt. I blagged a life…ligged into existence. I just sort of…shimmied into existence. The ritualized schematic, the non-genetic blueprint, is alive in me. I adhere only to the matrices of my own intent. These things don’t come easy. I’ve not yet learned how to convince people, or myself, otherwise. I’m my own shaman, a dummy medium hunkering down in shallow waters, deep caverns. I filter out the light, form my own plastic impressions, light feeds the lightness. I cannot bear the light, because I made it. I’m made up in light. I’m the kind who feels no shame in declaring that I am my own shaman. I am a liar in your terms. The kind you don’t want to get stuck sitting next to on the train. I heave and shake, avoiding the light. I speak in tongues, trying to rationalize the moment. Religious apathy, or discord, in society has enabled continuing generations of lifestyle engineers to find their own spirituality. 10 commandments, or ready-mades. Personally attuned. User friendly, mutable, tailored to your own personal needs and psychic tics. Patented techniques. Grey skinned Gnosis; packaged in the latest formats. Glossy packaging, liner notes written by yours truly. Here are a few impressions of my birth, for want of a better word. Track 1. It’s only expressible in terms of music. This was of course in the prelapsarian world, where notional music did once exist.

BIRTH PAINS: #1. I was evacuated in ten thousand gradated semi tones and tones, my music the overture to a general feeling of love unconsummated, youthful fumbling. I came out priapic, erect. The barren essence both of youth culture and of fascist propaganda was bound over and mutable. Youth cultures are anathema to me; I stand in opposition to mental abuse of the young. I am addictive. Soprano saxophones blared an intro, hard R ‘n’ B sent me spiraling, and sent my conception out of control. I trickled out into the cosmos in schizoid bass clarinet phrasings; I was tempered and hardened by desert riffs, off beat snare rhythms moderating the pain, the immediacy, sort of…I was burnt out in the crucible of out of the way desert rhythms and plaintively forged in the murky intimacy of sex-blues. I was born to rock ‘n’ roll as they say. Too fucked up to live, too out of control to die. That was before everything. Pre-music. My time not yet apparent. This was pre-music. Now I live a life without music. Music doesn’t do it any more. My time was the 50s/60s. Now the 70s/80s, more likely a time that never should have gone so fast. Everything sped up. Accelerated. Cultural movements began to be reflexive. Texts were appropriated like never before. Time, paradoxically, stood still, during these years. Lifetimes concertina’d into moments. Now time has accelerated out of control. It’s caused a multiple pile up on the orbital. Beware popular knee jerk culture, dissected and re-invented as secret histories by colonizing academics and theoreticians, bespectacled academic imperialists knock knock knocking on popular culture’s door. They’re to blame for that, that sense that history became invisible and susceptible to illumination only by means of textual analysis. Life still now lived on the margins, lived at a pace beyond the recall of academia. I speed up, and slow down, as and when the mood takes me. Living through all the major upheavals of youth oriented popular dissent. Paris ’68. London ’76. They asked my advice. I said forget it. You don’t know the meaning of history.

BIRTH PAINS: #2 Now for the moment I live broken down, in a desert shack…mythic zipcode, abstruse postcode, broken down, afflicted by some sort of chronic skin condition. Psoriasis? I’m all wrinkly, yet bloated, like a sack of rotting spuds. Sightings of motorcars in the desert, carrying impossibly febrile young men, preoccupied madmen, occurred for several weeks at a time back then in those decades. Was it the 80s? Was it the desert? I latched on to one such, set myself up, having inveigled my way in, past lead footed security, as the household god (in the form of bodily fluids) in his ‘fridge. That’s how I got my foothold this time around in mythic life. That’s how all this started off. I was attracted to the music. I was a rock ‘n’ roller’s dependable familiar. From bodily fluids, it was but a short step to impersonation of household pets, wives, colleagues, items of furniture. Pretty soon, I turned the fucker stark staring mad. He Thought HE was the god. Couldn’t bear the evidence to the contrary. These fucking dabblers are amateurs, the whole lot of ‘em. They read a few marginal volumes of arcane history, toot a few substances, and they think they’re god’s gift. They think they are Gods, bestowing gifts. It’s laughable. That Frank, he thinks he’s a genius. Just like the others. He thinks, in especially deluded moments, that he’s Frank Sinatra. He croons the hits to deluded acolytes; in his dreams his people wipe his arse for him without a second thought. Eclectic deference. But I can’t send him off the rails. I bleeding need him, don’t I? The roar of the crowd, the adulation of confused acolytes, needy clingy types turns his head…but not mine. Frank has a stage presence, a magnetism that is undeniable. Frank has a lot of unreflective fans…fans who just don’t think carefully enough about what he says. They just take it all at face value, because he has the gift of persuasion, the gift of allowing his followers to avoid thinking things through. I tell you, it took some persuasion for me to allow him to live in the first place. I can tell you. I had the presiding surgeon in my pocket. Stitched up.

BIRTH PAINS: #3 We staked out ready-made arenas for specific psychic needs. In the east end, this would take the form of partaking in belly out pub-crawls. I died in a brawl one night, exiting through the window after questioning the probity, the integrity, of several of the larger and more aggressive imbibers. A stupid thing to do I know. All pub-crawls here end up in the cemetery of St. Anne’s, Limehouse, Five Bells and Breastbone looming disconsolate under the gravy grey temple. It all smacks of violence here in the east end. Psychic breezes, y’know, scorching through the ugly belly of the city. Premonitions, rumours of unrest, the pyramid in the graveyard acting as a kind of receiver, or static aerial, for all sorts of psychically disordered material. According to the psycho-geographer’s nonce. Actually, the pyramid was just my home from home, a sort of bolt hole, where no-one, no psycho-scribbler, could get at me. Sanctuary from writers who discover pseudo-truths, and reveal them through psycho-geographic research always on the elusive trail. I’ve discovered, you see, during my many sojourns on earth’s unquiet coil that some people will believe Any Old Toss. They make a nice living out of it. But it’s all been done before. By self haters too numerous to mention. This pyramid is the subject of constant psycho-geographic ‘interest’, having received something in excess of 60 raids over the years. My archives have been busted for everything from selling bootleg hooch to stashing pornographic literature behind a secret wall. This church…the marketplace…the pub…the arcane markings on the wall, behind the wall. I invade gymnasia, personal fitness emporia, swimming pools, encourage formless beings in their attempts to add muscular ballast to deranged bodies, forming circular muscle tissue to avoid that lumpen look. But the lumpen know a thing or two denied to the possessors of sleek bodies. They have to. To them it’s survival. To survive pub brawls. Newspaper columnists hired through the offices of my editors, editors of my titles, spit out weasel words, as though we didn’t know. From their slit mouths, monstrous piss-words hail down like piss and vinegar. But it keeps chattering London happy. As though wisdom comes in these deformed packages. Librarians of endlessly personalized literature, they are the curators of their own obsessions.

BIRTH PAINS: #4 I am obsessed. I admit it. Obsessed by the idea that I exist both outside and inside, as will and idea, now and forever, together with you…all of you. Dreaming that I’m looking for a spiritual reality undreamt of in this culture. Obsessed with the idea that you may not think I’m serious about this. Any one of you can have a job as my personal fitness/spiritual advisor/hairdresser RIGHT NOW. You know how to apply yes? The usual channels. That’s right. The usual channels. No job worth having was ever advertised was it? I lobby on your behalf with the great and the good. Ministers owe me. It was my feral magic, secret powers that they used to draw the wool over eyes that pried. It’s what we’re all looking for deep down. Spiritual contentment and a good haircut. Not many can admit that a good haircut would go a long long way. You’re either too tired, or too bored. Or something. Too clever for your own good. I’m inconsolable with grief at my impending death. I buy time with prevarication. Code is code. Zeros and ones hustled into line by the proper ordering of electricity…net geeks are the new Greeks, a prolific democracy of expression, abundant wisecrackery proliferating on the web. Which is a real problem, all this inane smartarsery. Journalists…look themselves in the eye…mirror scribblers. Obsessions curated for mindless rumination, opinions on every which thing. Opinions are anathema to me. Not worth the effort. Writers with cranial blockage are in need of severe and repeated trepanning, until the sap rises, until the truth sinks in. All 20^th century history subsumed, re-interpreted as transgressive myth, re-formulated to shock…a few clued up marginals attain momentary notoriety…the world heaves a sigh. I look in the mirror; I’m clued in. I am plugged in. I am my own enclave. My myth is beyond the coffee table, beyond the marginal, beyond the orbital. I scry the future. I see the sexual act as procrastination. Blood is an idea of the will. Death is will to myth. I am looking at my belly. It’s humming. There’s mythic material in the vicinity. There’s elephants nearby.

BIRTH PAINS: #5 And doctor, my dear doctor, you’ll never find the answer in a book. Except the Devotional Directional Manual. The only truly Imperative Text of these non-linear times. Nor in any periodical. My good friend Eugene transfers reality directly by telekinesis. It’s like no book you’ve ever read, or are ever likely to read, or like I’ve ever written. So many gravitational narratives have already fluttered to earth; they are ready-mades, from the trepanned crania of my many doppelgangers, the old goats. Sex is primary motivation the further away from the intrinsic self they get. Hence Billy my hard hatted satyr homunculus is as rapacious as they come. A sexual glutton, preternaturally erectile.

But, I’ve wasted so many words already. I’m incontinent; words inside me, they spill from my mouths all day long. I chatter incessantly into phones, imploring impatient callers to hold the line please. I put people on hold, and then surreptitiously disconnect them. I jabber on buses to fellow passengers; to an annoying degree. Paperbacks held in dead hands remain unread. Every day, all day, I take the bus with the other losers into town. My mum takes the bus. She won the war. My old man was not in it. Skulking around the sub-continent so I heard. I see others, believers in their own destiny. But they don’t see it themselves. They think they’re making choices all day, every day. As if. Micro choices at best, all day long. But all the real choices were made long ago. I know…I made them. I had and have Freedom of Choice. So I know when the time is right to pull the ripcord. It’s my Idea. My will. When everything was primal matter, pre-music, it was all up for grabs, see? Unformed, un-thought, pre-information, it was certainly as yet undreamt. Choice was yet to be conceptualized. Digits slowly formed into patterns, Mandelbrot fashioned pictures. Dreaming itself hadn’t yet been conceived. Hadn’t yet been dreamt, if you like. Thought overtook matter, information outlasted opinion, some years later (non-linear time). Back in those days, you had to fight to be born. I blagged a life. Lives.

BIRTH PAINS: #6 So now, what do you want me to do Doc? I’m getting a sort of attitude off you. You think I’m rambling? You want me to Redress Imbalances? Right wrongs? Engage? Address injustice? That’s a given, in anybody’s time. Life is injustice. Look, I will not get didactic or…or ANGRY. I am a Rhetorician…and I love you Doc. The historical perspective got lost in parochialism. The social animals have bunker mentality. We’re not just one or two genes short of a primate, we’re eons distant from each other. There is no species integrity. It’s a lie, put about by evolutionists, patsies of pre-music theology. Animal lovers. Animals are divine prototypes; they don’t even exist in the same universe as you and I. They’re an illusion. We’re our own gods. We pray to ourselves. We are lovers of equity. I’ll deal with you later. I cause wars with my fucking chatter, so don’t get me going!

But this all started years ago. Some seedy student of the arcane arts (dressed up for today’s model, the self obsessive of today, revealing forgotten techniques of control, of your life and others, techniques of mind control, even psychic projection – dangerous stuff!!) had the run on me. I was naïve. Yes I admit that, that’s why I had to kill him. Me or him. Simple. My naivete cost me a lot in those days. I even believed in knowing, or knowledge. Anti-gnosis. Now I have The Knowledge, hidden, passed down, encrypted, unknowable except to 9 unknown adepts. I re-make it as straight up, obvious, common sense, transparent, blithering nonsense, emotional intelligence, specialized research…but this knowledge is still only one step only ahead of opinion. There is no knowledge available in this realm without my help. What you call knowledge is totally useless. Knowledge isn’t power. Knowledge is over. Religion and knowledge have elided so people don’t know what they believe in any more, except themselves. They are sad sorry cartoons. Stand up versions of themselves. Jokes, badly told. Stories with punch lines too obvious, too predictable. Characters that demand you laugh at them. Bad manners in my home. In bad sitcoms…characters like you Doctor Death, just run around and talk like characters in sitcoms…well now…people in real life just run around acting like these same characters in sitcoms…the present and future great sitcoms of mundane and depressing regularity will all feature, as exact simulacra, people who run around like they’re in sitcoms. But time as I hope I’ve demonstrated isn’t linear, and there is some sort of escape route available to me. I can just call in favours. Any time. I know the right people. A few invocations, one or two well placed words dropped into the correct divinely attuned ears, and I’m away. There are plenty of my people who OWE ME. I can get results ANY TIME.

BIRTH PAINS: #7 Life’s too short for grudges or manipulation. Over something like 20 years I’ve been running something like an ur-career, or non-career, not caring or making money, just making a weird sort of nonsense. Keeping one step ahead. Using cliché as a weapon, inhabiting glib behaviour patterns, opting for predictable lifestyle choices – open plan offices, bicycle shorts, roaring fires, country ranges, personal fitness plans, you know the sort of thing? No? Downsizing, becoming feckless pseudo-artisans keeping it all, mind and body, together. My kids have all grown up. You know? And it’s all been based on this. I don’t lie down with people. What I’ve found, through assiduous research (ie: looking at people on the bus, bearing down on them with my scalpel eye, eviscerating their motives) as though it weren’t obvious, is that most people are aimlessly over-educated. The over education of the spending classes – that’s the point of your civilization. And you know it.

We dressed up, or down, in corduroy jackets and denim in those days. Leather elbow pads, bespoke genteel academic style. Spectacles are still kind of substantial, or optional. Opera capes are worn by the exhibitionistic geek tendency. Small sweaty men are all the rage in office spaces. Sweat marks visible like premonitions on shirt underarms. Cemetery fashion shoots feature head-case exhibitionists, and the stiff upper lips of ornery second sons of the business aristocracy are well represented. Work is a dirty word. Live for leisure pursuits. Chrome bar chic. Or sweat shop designer goods, imported well-made goods from the third world. Labour markets interchangeable. Gucci loafers predominate on the right tube lines, and men in women’s shoes. They have to go, don’t they? Estate agents, sweaty feet in plastic shoes, up their own arses, acne befouling every prospect of a quick sale. No commission boys! What use is commission when you’re too dead to appreciate it? How many estate agents did I despatch? Why, they were numbered in their thousands. Literally thousands of second hand Mondeos, scratched paintwork, joy ridden by my boys, abandoned (after being torched) in joyless north London suburbs. Second rate cars with a legion of dead drivers. No more 5:30pm appointments to show off some leaky, infested 2 bedroom job to young hopefuls. They’re all dead. Were they ever really alive? It’s unlikely.

BIRTH PAINS: #8 But I have done something bad. I need absolution. There’s a dummy catholic in my head, host in my withering hand, held down under the crystallising waters. Absolution, free from the need to believe. I need a face job. I am nothing without my looks. I am shallow as shallow can be. I come from a long line of handsome devils. We know how utterly compelling we can be. Raised, arched eyebrows describe an arc of social bridge building, ladies fall at our feet. Not to mention men. We are all Alpha males. There are more Chiefs than Indians. When I schlepped in from the desert, secreted myself in the fridge, the template I was after was readily available. Cold, airless, a mechanised hum, conducive to crisp, cold good looks. It was easy enough to copy the man’s outline. I am from a long line of household gods. We come, we enter, and we create. Just like that. Charm is the thing. Devilish charm. Charm is the real social glue that binds. Society is full of outcasts whose principal failing is not having sufficient charm. You see them in the streets, beady-eyed grudge holders, lardy poltroons with cake eating tendencies, haggard and bitter veterans of social trench warfare, fought above and below ground. The silent legions of social warfare veterans, veterans of battles waged in solitary, in unbelievable and dank apartments. Legions with legionnaire’s. Many TB cases remain undiagnosed, as trench foot casualties hack and cough their germs onto the heads of fellow passengers on the tops of buses. Windows remain closed, and the fuggy, clammy atmosphere settles like a blanket. Windows are running with condensation, breath distilled on the cold glass. Distilled alcoholics lurch around the request stop. A pit bull soon to be let loose on the top deck is flaying the pavement with acid piss. Ordinary folk look surreptitiously from the corners of their eyes, peripheral vision affording them sneak previews of the unprepossessing mob. Of the dead eyed owners 3 are male, a composite of grimy, cross-eyed, teeth-missing medievalists, a mass of abrasions and black eyes, paraffin on the breath and murder in the soul. A bundle of fun and trouble. One is marginally female. There’s a commotion downstairs, pre-figuring for those upstairs what they can expect. Raised voices portend evil. The driver, behind his perspex shield, gives out, but can’t quite give out enough. Worried passengers’ hearts sink as the unwanted and unwashed lurch aboard. The dog makes a quick survey, snuffling with awesome threat at ankles and thighs. The lower deck mob heave inaudible sighs of relief as the motley crew levitate to the upper deck. Those above are treated for the first time to the unspectacular disarming gang who make haste for the back, barking like the dog. The dog, disdainful, makes his way around and around, string trailing like a withered corpse. The bus speeds up, as time slows down. The driver needs to be home. Suddenly, he hits the breaks…

BIRTH PAINS: #9 That’s why I was late here. Bus was impounded. Corpse as evidence. My re-birth therefore postponed. I was a material witness. Driver traumatized and sent home with a compensation form. No, I really am here….here to tell you. I am now 40ish, as you can see, 20 years on, my life begun again, in sorrowful expectation of the life force (or something) suddenly kicking in. I am an expert. Levitation, psycho-kinetic devotion, laying down the tracks…you name it. I am expert in life, in re-birth, ecstatic prancing, denouncing as I go. Denunciation of the pre-mythic rips and roars from my mouth. I get up and down again. I levitate to the tops of buses and then float down again. It’s all just straight up and down. But I find, despite my chronic anhedonia and dead eyed insomnia, the will to go on. I’m kept awake by the people upstairs. Who laugh too much at their own jokes. It’s the only way. Like Spike, brilliant as TV surrealist, appalling as indulgent goon. Laugh at my own jokes? You bet. But upstairs it’s just stupid voices issuing from mental defectives. But Spike knows enough to know you laugh at your own jokes. That’s right. But I’m the stand up musician without music who shrinks from laughter. I am available. I can be used, I’m just sort of hanging around, ready to be used or abused.

BIRTH PAINS: #10 How do you think I got here? Bus or airplane accident, no need to clear customs then. This is what you want. Ten companions, dead to the world, flight out of Heathrow, falling out of the sky. Air rage so desperate that even victims of air rage are themselves routinely set upon by peaceful flyers, disturbed by their proximity to potentially violent fellow flyers. Actually beating them to death, so set are they upon a peaceful and uneventful flight. Describing an infinite arc in the early evening sky, video footage recorded by an amateur camcorder buff. Now I’m here there’s no need to communicate directly any more. We’re all separate somehow anyway. Just bad taste to talk…plenty of blether and outreach, prattling discourses never ending over the ethereal waves, endless nothings relayed via WAP technology. But long live the spirit of the amateur cameraman, the solo recording engineer, and the lonesome knob twiddler. Filtered and sampled, the sorry old amateur with enough balls or sheer nerve can carve a tidy career for himself by replaying bits of dead culture, moribund history back at beats per minute. The zeitgeist (that old thing) beaten into heightened shape, hijacked by proponents of solitary pursuits, enthusiasts, the solipsistic collector mentality, the urge to record even the unremarkable. And what else do we do on our own then? I think we all know the answer to that one.

We are all as unremarkable as the agent of record. We are just walking technology. Walking hardware. Fleshy gear. Flashy gear. As it were, Soft Machines. The dream or nightmare of intelligent robots has already happened. Years ago. Linear time. Just on the chance that something might happen. Individually we are nothing. Until we look. The important thing is to look, through a lens if possible. We’re lookers, see? What we see is necessarily validated. My eyes are no longer clandestine. Unless I see you, it’s invalid. Am I stating the obvious? I very much fear so as I sit here, twisting my fingers into grotesque configurations, in caricature of thoughtful critique, pulling faces that are designed to register on the observer as intense concentration. No need to communicate what you see…or am I wrong? Why else has this technology been imposed on us, blanket promotion, hard sold as essential? Information gathered and misunderstood is better than not knowing at all. That’s what they say. That’s the lie they peddle. The profane. If you don’t know it by now, I’m batting for the sacred. The other side of the coin. I have The Knowledge in Holy Trinity of Curly, Larry and Moe, The Tripartite God in Three Persons of Sacred and Profane Infamy.

BIRTH PAINS: #11 But this is what you want. To know. To attain The Knowledge. To eschew Not-knowingness. And I am finally senseless. I am Buffy Strangelove, the feckless and craven genuflection to the Two Arcane Cultures, Knowing and Not-Knowing. I am preposterous; I am your household god. I’m here to put the mockers on it. You need no more knowledge. I am dead to the world. I am dead inside. And I am adamantine. Hard inside and out. I am deader than dead…Never had a good thought, mind never more closed, previously a black bank night. Why an open mind? Open minds are like swiss cheese…full of holes. My familiars therefore are all trepanned. I’m now nearer the end than the beginning and this point has to stick. Really, that really is my game. That’s my game. God given, I’m nearer the end than the beginning.

What you want is sick gags. Extreme scenes. Filmable perversions. Erotically ironic narratives. Holocaust perversions, degraded imaginings that wrong foot self appointed moralists. First person narratives in which toddlers are slain – and see what reaction you get from the middle mass. That’ll get the profane juices going. And craftily constructed scenarios, full of narrative cohesion. You want it all on a plate. Slick and ironic; hyper-ironic psycho killer novels; extended metaphors traducing society’s sick consumerist tendencies. But no taboos are so strangulated that we can’t stargaze. Society and its chatterers, its knee jerks, are thus jolted out of somnolence. There’s no wriggling off the hook. There’s nothing so empty, no surface so smooth and intangibly mysterious, as sleeping society, no society sufficiently ritualistic or plastic. All life now is ritualized metaphor. All life is undermined before the fact. Reality is the only satire you people need. You’ve reached the end of the satirical age and the corollary is Sick Gags. They’re what you want. What we want, what we need, is sick gags. To cause uneasy offence. It has been argued that the sick joke serves as a rallying point for people in the face of unspeakable horror. Laugh at it, make it ridiculous and it loses its power to upset. You can thereby contain it, reduce it, and render it bearable. As if. You are “fearless” breakers of normal convention, clandestine terrorists, and accepted codes relating to taste and agreed cultural norms are breached. You laugh in the face of widely accepted standards of decency. But I have to tell you that there’s no merit in iconoclasm, which is yesterday’s news.

BIRTH PAINS: #12 Your life and mine are onrushing…sick gag express…we are locomotive. Death wish pleasuring, lack of public planning, no coherent plan, no accountable executives; this means we’ll be de-railed as likely as not. Sooner or later. I am an expert remember. You are encouraged to mortgage yourself to my expertise. Be an expert as well. Become knowledgeable in something/anything. Get online, as an expert. You ask a question and chances are one of my online agents knows the answer. This is what you want. As long as you’re all experts in something, as long as you can rely on someone else’s expertise, as long as someone notices. I feel so empty. I don’t know anything. As long as someone (anyone) picks up the proffered fruits of my knowledge, even if that knowledge is just a tawdry notation, a solipsist’s desire for, and ability to obtain, recognition. Pre-cognition is inherent in all. We imagine, we actually foresee, futures that include visions…in which we’re held in high esteem, feted, our opinions sought, TV crews never that far away, contracts for opinion pieces about to be signed. You need agents to manage your fame, to confer credibility by stealth. And I am a professional as well as a confessional liar. I am an expert liar. My agents are always out there, putting out for me, promoting my own especial brand of untruth. My expertise in untruth and rumour is valuable currency. I run the gravy train of rumour. I have agents all over, literally all over the world. You want anyone to set you straight? Frank’s your man, sought out by heads of state. Nabobs and princes seek my advice, they’re always at my door. They fly over continents, endure bathetic flight panic to hear me hold forth, pay shitloads to hear me pontificate untruthfully. My head’s in the other place. It’s tuned in to the psychic realm. It’s my destiny…if I may assume this tone. I am desire…. I am cloudy with understated sexual yearning. I get laid in lieu. And I get touched. People touch me, and pay for it. Sometimes on the other hand I get kicked in the head, torched, generally put upon in no uncertain manner.

BIRTH PAINS: #13 This is a theme I’m warming to. See me extemporize doctor? Candidly I put my hand up the skirt of Mother Nature. Fiddling about up there, I discovered the truth about so-called genetic imperatives. Natural desires ebb away with time. Endless steamy nights, replicating scenes featuring other lovers. It’s a crash course for the lovebirds and all that jazz. Viagara is the new drug of choice. And as you knock on towards 40, desire is something you put out with the cat, although I’m still a hit with the ladies. At night, as the embers grow low, embryonic clouds scud over and cop choppers disturb the peace. Buzz, and away, buzz and away. What are they up to? What, I wonder, are they looking for? Have you paid them? Are they in your employ? Do they have access to your files? Is this a new kind of super state spook perversion? What is it in the dark watches that fascinates and intrigues these spotter choppers? Mother Nature is nonetheless my endless source of pride. She did me proud. In the night, it’s more obvious than ever. The void is given expansive, nullifying expression. My children are always asleep, disturbed only by the spotter choppers.

I got my boot in the door of liberty. The liberty of youth. Youth, although stretched out culturally over far too many years, is encoded and hard-wired. The new spending power of adult kids is paramount, but age actually contracts, warps and wefts in the physical body so that the young at heart are in fact all too old in liver and brain. Brainpans are empty, scoured out, as never before imagined. Nights, years, spent in pubs, imbibing useless knowledge and drinking in thoughtless opinions, being engulfed in preposterous prejudices and overcome by unsolicited views. Drink got the better of me years ago, and other peoples’ opinions still ring hollow, utterly empty; but porridge like, they stick. The young at heart, still young after all these years. They were surely coined in optimistic epochs; post coital, post killing frenzy. The young at heart, like some terrible army, are surely behind all the meaningless, yet hilarious, coincidences in my life. They harry me; they cajole me, as though I were a preposterously accoutered sitcom father. They exchange mock solicitous glances as I puff and gawp. They watch me ham it up. I roll my eyes, and I do double takes. The young at heart are breathing their sickly breath down my fat neck. I for my part can’t breathe. The young at heart hear me labouring for breath, and observe my body stiffening up. I can barely bend down to tie my shoelaces these days. The young at heart are on hand to make me feel as though the end is near. They’re in the pub, cracking jokes; they are purveyors of good times. They wear denims well into their 50s. They never grow up; they act like dictatorial buffoons, and are despised by their offspring. The old usurping the domain of the young can’t but end in tears…

BIRTH PAINS: #14 We’re certainly nearer the end than the beginning, certainly paddling up that creak without the paddle of experiential insight. So far, yet nothing learned. Still no expertise. I am knowledge, which is of course as we know obsolete. Rebellion is even more obsolete. At least, as far as we can be sure of anything, we can be sure of that. Revolution is nowhere now, a pissy memory of pre-knowledge hankering. Post music, religion is not the only dead duck. Revolution’s a museum artifact, despite numerous localized disputes. We are now what we have, product, which we then resell. Over and over in our dreams. Autoerotic dreams. We are deader than dead, deader than nightshade, deader than deadpan, violet death shade…we inhabit a dead world…and I clean up. When you reach the beginning of the end, little things matter. Little things like waste. That’s why I set such store by metaphors for rebirth, material recycling, suddenly redolent with meaning, acquiring new substance. Waste of time. Most of all…waste of all the potential, the love, the wellspring of hope. Replaced for a laugh, just a laugh, by schadenfreude, misanthropy, and this-is-what-you-want-this-is-what-you-get cynicism. This is what you want. Leave it alone, it’ll come back and haunt you. Leave it behind. I am also a diminished household god. A household god without a household. Everybody’s left me. Except Dionysia here. She’s like me, which is why I love her. But she’s also (unlike me) endlessly faithful, despite her essential fecklessness. And Frank booted her out of course…once he’d found out that I was fucking her behind his back. The poor sap. My gags are all old. All worn out. I have outrun my gags in sickness. I go down the pub; it’s the same old scene. Beleaguered veterans, propping up companions with hopeless, bleary blarney. Shirted functionaries occupy the roles filled in pre-end times by barmen and barmaids. There’s a general absence of spirit, a kind of grubby fatalism, which spreads like a wet blanket through the bureaucratic bleakness of modern drinking establishments.

BIRTH PAINS: #15 You still with me? You still hanging in here doc? I worked it so that pre-millennial optimism (back in the last half of this last century linear time) took a nosedive throughout the whole sorry denouement. The more crises the better yeah? I make it a question of pride to get you all thinking along televisual lines. Nothing like seeing a whole population devoted to exhibitionism. Sweet. It took a while to catch on, but eventually we made it eh? No. I’m just indulging you now; always up for a bit of naughtiness, insensitive to sentiment, actually desensitizing my language in lyrics. I scribble a triple album’s worth of flatulent pap. This is what you want. I went to NYC some 20 years ago, and fell through a tight white screen. The hordes were baying for the blood of an Englishman. We left the rhythm section still playing on stage, some joke. We are soppy experimentation, with tacked-on junky noodlings, a solid backbeat. Critics are consistent in their flattery; haw hawing like cockatoo parrot face caricatures. Wailing into the dark night, left the bassist and drummer on stage, still playing…some joke eh? I assume the character of a parody octogenarian, brow beetling at the slightest perceived impertinence offered. I am a household god, and I don’t stand on ceremonies, nor tolerate offence given. I am a gnarly old man, baring greedy fangs, slobbering with affected hurt. Turning on the waterworks. I was in vaudeville until we wised up. People generally back away. I delude myself that this is because they’re in awe of me. You, my amanuensis Ahab, a defrocked secular priest, know it well!! Several other doctors as well actually, have attempted over the years to disabuse me of that notion. They try to let me down gently. You say to me that while people aren’t actually in awe of me, there is a kind of (it’s that kind of that gets me) grudging respect. I know that even that’s a sop. You think they can reclaim me; make me whole, make me strong. You don’t know. I am way ahead. I am a household god. I am master in my own denuded household.

BIRTH PAINS: #16 You’ll want to know this. You’ll want to be aware of this. Knowledge, the bane of the 21^st century; although we’ve got technology, knowledge gestated in the fetid brains of experts, so we don’t have to know how the video/software/theory works, we still want to know this. It’s human nature. We’ve got a catch up time, before knowing becomes fashionable again. But you’ll want to know this. You’ll want to know why it is you can’t get fucked for instance. Why it is you can’t get no satisfaction. Why your trousers don’t fit any more. You should know that the best way is always to wear a size too small. That way, you don’t get tempted to blow out. Your trousers are always telling you the truth. Leave a generous gap, a size too big and you’ll be lulled into thinking you can get away with putting a few more away. Trousers cannot lie.

Littering the dank corridors of your brain, all the discarded bits of knowledge, never much use even to start with, now reaching a critical mass: compacted, compressed knowledge junk. The support structures have long been usurped by cyber space. The machines take the slack. Slack brained, individuals need no longer take the strain. Filing cabinets are obsolete. Files and filing cabinets, icons on your desktop, are something to get nostalgic about, something to fill up about. They are sentimental simulacra. We’re nostalgic for tangible knowledge. The ruthless efficiency of the nostalgia industry takes up the slack of lost knowledge. Or the slack is re-gathered and re-encoded by the entertainment industry. You’ve seen it. Garish, symbol drenched popular channels; game shows reveling in the numerological implications of number based power games, and win a million. Jackpot! I enumerate money for you see? I already won a lottery million when I was born. Before I was born. My number came up, before the game had even been thought of. I was expelled from the stellar womb through numerological coincidence. As one universe expanded, so another contracted, and at that point, I hit the jackpot. As we went supernova, me and Frank, before the split, before he died, cash money spewed over the gleaming new universe as I gathered my thoughts. Thus began the long process of capital assessment. I’ve made more money than you’ll ever see. Mountains of cash – I’m rich in spending power. I don’t need a million. I am a million. I burn a million. I’m the one the bank ads are aimed at. They want my money. I get several letters a week begging me to invest my capital. It’s hallucinatory. Money glazes my eyes so that everything appears dreamlike. My life as a cash rich individual is one long special effect. Did I tell you about StanleyK already? I did? He tapped straight into my frontal lobe for the final cash metaphor in 2001. Star Gate? I don’t think so. That’s what the inside of money looks like. It twists and swirls. It break-dances and it expands at first slowly, then riotously. It turns inside out and it changes colour in a rich phantasmagorical kaleidoscope of swirly dream images. Money buys anonymity see? Seals off the director from the real world. Borehamwood sanctuary into which the real world cannot intrude; and from which the director spins elaborate fables of coded reality. My cash fantasies helped him dodge the stalkers for year after year after year.

BIRTH PAINS: #17 We don’t know what we’re doing. We can play at knowing what we’re doing. We can pretend to an expertise in the domain of things that never mattered, never were likely to matter. Wallpaper experts. Gardening gurus. Cookery authorities. Sumptuous but empty pixilations of food porn. But none of it ever mattered. Now it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter. Its just playtime. Free time. Dead time. You’ve made everything into play. Its survival of the happiest. We don’t need a survival instinct any more. Knowledge, happiness, boredom makes it literally impossible to care about anything as last century as survival. We’re onto the next thing. We’re post frivolous.

Did you know how to identify serious play? They say that Low Cost Autonomous Attack Systems can be detonated with long rod penetration, or as an aero stable slug, or fragments, depending on the hardness of the target…and I’m now all hooked on weapon porn vids. Round my way, we’ve all got ‘em. Everyone’s got a shooter packed. Shoot ‘em up with smart technology. Reach tumescence with murderous sensitivity. I intend to grow a moustache and assume the character of a model. Would a moustache suit me? Cyber suited functionary of war, I zap the unseen enemy with beautiful aplomb. Bombs away! I’ve bombed the knowledge out of them. Bombed the shite and the knowledge clean away. How many war movies does it take? Why bother to argue? Its exegesis for the poor bastards who’ve done the dirty work and been mind raped, or hot turn…I am now a sick puppy who gets off on images of slick violence, techno-erotica. I am in danger of becoming a porn mummy, emulating former guitar heroes. Strumwank. The unfunny voice of radical dissent has atrophied, morphed without grace into slick gesture. The politics of gesture comedy and weapon porn is tangibly corrupt. Self-consciously on board, attending to the narcissism of the audience. Just don’t get ‘em laughing, that’s all. It’s a disgrace that education can lead to self-righteousness on such a monumental scale. Radical dissent is bullying receptionists. Radical dissent means radically zeroing in on the irrelevance of your intent. I’m sick and fucked. The erotic weaponry image bank is all but irresistible. Get me a drink…I need payment now.

BIRTH PAINS: #18 But I can’t stop now. Pleasure doesn’t do any of the perpetrators or victims of satirical intent much good. And of course they’re all “sincere”. But it’s a weedy bombast, no real wrath. They need evisceration. They are co-dependent with their victims. Why should the criminals in charge of government and business not be exposed? They collude with their tormentors in an orgy of inter-textual co-dependence. Am I right? They think they can take a joke but they can’t take a joke. They laugh at people like them because they’re too much like them. They despise them because they’re too much like them. This is the energised equation. We scorn those we recognise as ourselves. But we can only love those we recognise as ourselves. I hope you can readily appreciate, my good doctor, that this renders secular psychology a spent force. It’s gone. Done and dusted. You are obliged to re-configure, brain wise. Hippocampus exercise. See mine? Distorts the forehead yes? This horn shaped muscle at the base of the front temporal lobe needs to be enlarged by maybe 30% in maybe 50% of the population in order that our general, as yet hypothetical, re-invigoration of the mythic realm be fully effective. Are you an expert in this? No? Then what am I doing in your custody? Where are my duty frees? I want my agent. You know you want me eh? I am the epic solution, the epic that is the only conceivable mode available to you now. The dissolution of the therapy centres is both my reformation and my counter-reformation. All in one, I will disenfranchise therapy culture; tear the fabric down the middle and you can see the results all around. People attempting to fuck buildings, hypnerotomachia obsessed, following the elephant trails. They’ve had their trepanned minds freed up. Hippocampus size is now, by my divine Gnostic agency, effectively without limit.

BIRTH PAINS: #19 In pre-mythic hell, the people go round and round, listening in only to their own replayed voices. Every thought is couched in DJ babble…look at me chatter. Puny voices amplified to deafening levels. In hell, they have words to make you scream, words to make you retch, words to make you blather. All words blathered out randomly as though meaning were contained in them, rather than attached to them, as in the world you’ve just come from, are laid bare here. They make you suffer the word all too viscerally. All those thoughtless opinions, all that vapid letting off of steam, all the injunctions to hurry up, get going, don’t do that, what do you mean by that, put that down, sorry about that, don’t let me catch you doing that again, hurry up for god’s sake…all these (and more) are made to mean something here. You’ll love it. Hell’s full of people who really do mean it. We all mean what we say in hell. You can’t get away from the perverse meaningfulness of intent in hell.

Pre-mythic hell is full of people looking for an agenda. They don’t know it, but the agenda’s been up there for years. I’m not talking quantum physics here, just linear time. I’ve been waiting for years for them to realise you don’t need an agenda. Life is all you get. We bleed into death, but slowly. It happens so you don’t notice. Here with you and me, it happens much quicker. Empires are born and die in the time it takes the world to turn once. The only ones to realise this were the least likely of all. Doesn’t make them right mind. But they surely realised that this is as good as it gets. Life…it’s there for the taking.

So I took myself beyond the suburbs, in the car, where there is no life…up beyond the orbital…beyond all the ghosts. Nice place…nice people. Nice strictly rationalised opinions. It’s all so bleeding obvious in these desperate verges. All waxed aprons. High streets empty, not even latent. Little bit (not too much) history. Mazes writ large in guidebooks. Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. These words appear in my mind. More knowledge…blown away…from meaning. The past is now over, but not forgotten. Appropriation, as it happens.

MY NEW CHURCHES/1 Ghosts are always on my mind. Do they play golf? Are they golfers? Do They Play Golf?…is what I want to know. I never knew a ghost who kept still long enough for the swing…but that don’t mean a thing, that they don’t have that swing. In hell they don’t exist. Hell is for people who mean things, desperately, like you. Not me. Ghosts of types verging on the psychopathic disturb my dreams. Rob me of speech; paralyse my legs. Make me come. It’s never sexualised. It’s never sex now. Remember, I’m pushing on 40 these days. Linear time. The sight of stippled surfaces truncates sexual desire. My dreams fall conventionally into the obvious categories. Wish fulfilment, frustration. Swimming underwater. Paralysed limbs. It’s terrifying, even for me. The endless nights of dreamscape dysesthesia make me rabid with fear. Unravelling, the whole linear scale unravelling. Then I wake, never quite asleep in the first place, but enough to be terrifying. Do ghosts play golf? Plaid trousered and disingenuous; hoping to make up a spectral foursome.

The dreamscape of the fairways is a region excluded by the perimeter of the M25, which thereby excludes all these ghosts. It’s nature’s own way of excluding them from the fairways. Clubhouse diction is not a problem. These spectres are all well articulate. Club tie operators…golf aficionados. Any dodgy geezer can get a game. But the ghosts must petition, are obliged to hang around trying to catch the club secretary’s eye. They may never be nominated for membership of the exclusive clubs, even the less exclusive clubs, but they can still swing an iron or a wood. No trouble with a mashie niblick. Putting not a problem. Outside the orbital the countryside is configured schematically into arrangements of fairways, bunkers, greens and rough, and is literally teaming with young and not so young…not so old…former mods…or rockers, still in love with their youth, clandestinely planning adulterous liaisons with boys and dental assistants, bored of mooning around the house and therefore receptive to immature predatory flirting…out of love with their wives, homo-erotically attached to their old muckers…with whom they go on long boys-only camping holidays. They shlep around the fairways, dreaming of mod-rock and knocking balls into holes. Way to go lads! They retire early. Deception is on file; ghosts are alibis of the hopeless. Cheating no-one…Cheating on their wives, who are oblivious to the clearly signalled distaste felt for them by these ghosts, their husbands. They never look beyond their sentimentalised pre-adult, here and now years, or see their own ghosthood for what it is. Golf is a march of time, a retarded pastime for ghosts.

MY NEW CHURCHES/2 You look like you could play a few holes doc. Handicap? Ghosts of your youth don’t get a look in. I’ve seen you. You don’t cover your tracks. I know your secrets. I know everything about you. Seduction of the innocent; savage imposition of your carnal desires. Cover your tracks? Not quite. They fall for the bedside manner eh? The plausible demeanour? Up on Box Hill, driven up there in a Japanese motor, losing body heat, these poor suckers get raped in mind and body, left to pucker up to the realities of non-existence, forever listening in to the mournful tunes that defined them when they were alive. Post revolutionary, post narcoleptic, these forgotten ex golfers never get a look in. They drift from club to club, never getting a game, forever performing a sort of ghostly dream dance around the orbital. The 19^th hole is home to many a sad soul, many a lost individual. Your mind rape victims Doctor. I have your number. I’ve got the goods on you. You can’t get behind my mask. My glossolalia is intense now; I speak in tongues both this side of and beyond the orbital.

I have supped with ghosts. I have given them houseroom. I put up with them, give them space to express themselves. Everyone thinks they have something to say. But the sad truth is that they haven’t. They just haven’t. Ghosts are wrongfully encouraged. Their self-expression is the death of expression. Every story heard reduces your will to go on. Except mine eh doc? You have to hear mine. Mine is apocryphal, but all-inclusive. Every anecdote, every gag, all sorts of tawdry narratives…assumed identities…just make me feel like puking. But I need it as much as you. These ghosts might as well be dead. Deader than they already are. People I despise demand houseroom all the time. Just turn up…bold as you like, just for the night. Blink of an eye, they’re there, in the bleeding woodwork. Never winkle the bastards out. Here to stay. What do they gain? They pretend to an intimacy that doesn’t exist, and they abuse my good nature. I haven’t the heart to put them out on the street. I scare them with simulations of cop choppers; watch their terrified reactions. They go about their miserable lives as though they were alive. They don’t have any expertise. So I live alone now. Inexpertly. It’s the best way. My kitchen is always empty of good will, clever laughter, and good food. Takeaways are rubbish but I don’t have any time for lifestyle, friendship, and relationships. Modern relationship friendships are compromised by the need to stay ahead of the other. People are used to getting their own way. Lots of fevered debate used to take place in my kitchen, but the fire went out. Mouths opened and closed, but nothing was said.

At this point Dionysia interjects, a propos of nothing…the hair of the hostess on the verge of catching fire…cool jazz plays in the background. A subliminal hum of clever laughter pervades the room. Lifestyle has caught up with clever lifestyle practitioners, now life itself takes a back seat. All sorts of gorgeously attired food; it’s so easy to throw together. Just enjoy it, don’t worry. Don’t throw a wobbler, it’s all about relaxing…kicking back. Lifestyle of the moderately gorgeous, giving yourselves little treats, ballast against cold reality. Well, you’re gonna die too any time now, gorgeous…

It’s a non-sequitor. The doctor and I exchange raised eyebrows, in collusion maybe at last. But of course I know her game. She is playing a blinder. So now I stay inside. Forced merely to endure. I’m not forced to of course. There are no restraints here. I am fully aware of the energy currents. I still levitate at will, go down the park at full power, but I choose not to…mostly. Dogshit still bothers me, although all my children are now grown up. You’ve grown out of sticking your pudgy little fingers in the gloopy mess and then smearing it all over. I don’t need to worry about that any more. Did I tell you? Dogs joined estate agents at the wrong end of my displeasure. Dogs, dead dogs. Domesticity equals obsolescence eh? What’s the difference?

MY NEW CHURCHES/3 I’m all through with social commentary then. Abrahams looks bored anyway. Society…just a simulacrum of something or other. Something else. My “problem” not definable, traceable, in pre-mythic terms. In societal terms. Your problems have just begun though doctor. Go outside and look around. Don’t expect spoon-feeding. I’m not here to make your cultural fabric flicker into life for you, or to breathe life into your moribund myths. I can neither illuminate nor elucidate them. As I said days ago, my epochal propositions are themselves elucidatory. I’m here to rip the social fabric down the middle. My New Churches…replacing the old order, the therapy centers. You think I’m ranting? I can call in favours. I’ve been to the Isle of Wight. Attended secret strategy meetings to determine timetables for Mythic Rejuvenescence. Trepanning schedules. You’ve never seen me ranting. I may be demotic in my own bathetic light, but I’m also the little minor deity of Inconsequentiality, which means I’m too urbane to rant. Do you not see my velvet smoking jacket? My ivory fag holder? I’m no Speaker’s Corner nutter…I have no need to feed my own delusions…I’m the very picture of dedicated languor. My style speaks for itself. Volumes have been written about my ability to transcend earthy roots. I have become the age. Style is only one of the denizens of my dream life…

MY NEW CHURCHES/4…I didn’t make this. I didn’t ask to be made for this. I found the following; it didn’t find me. An idea just floating – just drifting there…which I will later deny effective knowledge of. I have become cataleptic at last. I wake up in time to catch him feeling me up, filling me with juice of some sort. I was made in ’60, or ’80. Nineteen sixty-four. My mum was a code breaker. Won the war she did. Cancer was what did it. We never got over that. I’m breaking up now. Enigma variations. They all played sports and then they were all gone. Bunkers full of heroes. Too much thought now goes into words. Sam Beckett. He knew. He knew. Dead. Deader than deadpan. Words is all he got, all we got. Old waxy face, quite good at cricket. Well thought of. Very well mannered. Admired for shortness of sentences. Unimpeachable war record. Sentences, longer again, constructed themselves…became reflexive, referred to anything but the meanings they thought they contained…throughout the 70s/80s, now we’re all too concerned to make sense. Words to throw the technical experts off the scent. Dyslexic, if I could fake it, would now be better. Some sort of Parkinsonian riff…words just come out all wrong. Or a sort of Phonemic Paraphrasia…simulated Tourette’s….People back then often thought I was a Tourette’s case. I could do that one again. Or a dysphasic. A Spoonerist. My engorged hippocampus has of course, as you’ll know, necessarily precipitated chronic damage to the adjacent temporal lobes. My attitude is kind of…you gain something, you lose something else. Swings and roundabouts. I’m philosophical about it. I get the kicks…Sparked up expletives, inappropriate obscenity. I hurl obscenities at Ahab. Actually, that was just the way it was back then. And still is. Words all jumbled up. Words that have lost meaning, a residual effect of hyper-reality. I led the way, hippocampus swollen by liturgical chanting and devotional procession, and the numinous world followed. Words spoken in tongues that vanquish decadent empires, tumbling like dice in the melting pot…you won’t get the same effect with pissy little debugged gobbets of code. That culture is now comatose…Blast first conservatism is now both too near and far, like its well needed…. It’s had its bad day. Like a mother returning, like a tiger burning bright, the dysphasic ritual word is all that’s left. They’re kind of good at their job now. Shit stirrers with a fine talent for stirring their own shit. Like well-groomed arrivistes, they don’t have anything to declare but their own sheer nerve.

MY NEW CHURCHES/5 Geek aspiration now is all. My ghost friends, fellow ex-gods, debased and out of the loop, all aspired to dotcom goldrush levitation. The bloom went off that one rather quickly. Businesses wished into existence, into cyber hyper-reality, then they’re gone, like vapour off piss. And no one cares because, well, how can you care? That’s what they didn’t understand. Little shits mortgaged to the very ends of their tether. Live the dreaming lives of paraplegic psycho-explorers. They’re dreaming the dreams of the unbrave. They’ve staked their land claim in no man’s land. Literally. I bump off an html artist a day now. Send bad Gnostic vibrations at ISDN speeds. Pickle their goose for them. It’s the death of a sense of humour of course. But how do you kill it? Humour is already dead, no longer funny. You’re past laughing.

Geek law – the modern law of diminishing returns. The more they try to infuse their code with intent, numerological import, the more we’re all filled with breathless ennui. Reality never intrudes in the quiet realm, whatever that is. I’ve had to go back again and again, over the years, go back years and years to find working definitions. I have been reduced to holding out for windfalls, cash rich game shows with never a winner in sight…and the more attractive and inevitable suicide appears. Re-birth in Gnostic wholeness, but without a sense of humour. It’s one way, if not mine. Your favourite comedian, a former god of inconsequentiality and present familiar of idiocy, is no longer funny. But I’ve been around too long. The mask is slipping. I need to get back to the airport. My baggage needs reclaiming. Left luggage, the whole city’s supply. Will the doctor be much longer? It’s almost time to go. Driving around the distressed suburbs that flank the airport, it’s all too obvious where the problem is. The landscape is pauperized. There’s a total lack of good faith, the topography heaves with cynicism. Motorcars are fizzing like firecrackers, so I hit the accelerator pedal. The bus speeds up, and then stops suddenly. There’s a bang. Opportunistic auto smash. The car skids into a swerve, flips over like a pancake…. I’m OK. I’m out of there in a flash. The contours of my body somehow adjust. It never quite gets to me because I remain focused. Up and away, the astral body taking the strain away. Flying dutifully south around the circular, I’m afforded these visions…decades worth of accidents, brittle arcades full of smashed vehicles. Thousands of busted luxury coaches fill the orbital…full of stuffy, constipated day-tripping occultists, intent on disseminating their pernicious doctrines. So these auto smashes are a necessity. My work, it’s never done. They can’t move, these leisure prisoners in their metal mausoleum juggernauts. Moveable coffins, they pack ‘em in like sardines. They can’t move. Surgery’s the answer. Movies at volume, want it or not. Same with planes, although the very decorous flight assistants who breeze back and forth like the dust never settles enhance the illusion of freedom and movement. I fly, as I’ve endeavoured to explain, whenever and wherever I get the chance. Truly intercontinental, that’s me. I am an intercontinental household god, a moveable feast. Free booze an’ all. Free loader, that’s me. I drink till it comes out of my nose. Like some boozy caricature tart, my knickers come off for anyone. It’s just one long Xmas office party where I’m concerned. Then I get all maudlin, time to buckle up, time to hunker down, cry into the chardonnay and, like, my soul’s…uh…ablaze with ritualized anger. I make up stories…in my head…in which I’m always cast as the victim. No one’s ever been as badly treated, as ill used, as have I. I have to be asked to sit down, to leave, discreetly. Everyone’s against me, I am hateful, I’m just a piece of shit really. I know it. Deep down I know it. Lucky I never got up to any of that shit while actually in flight. I’d have been a disaster in flight. I fly like a baby. I’m an expert in victimhood. No-one’s safe from my manipulations there. I’ve been wronged by literally everyone. Several times over, every day…but then, I’m right on the money too. By the time the plane lands I’ve completely changed again. I re-energize, carrier bags and all, through customs, new paths to beat, elephants to invoke………

MY NEW CHURCHES/6…But I don’t easily shed the more enjoyable caricature skins I affect. It’s too much fun. Boozy caricature number one, that’s me. I’m two…no, make that one-dimensional. I allow misconceptions to stand unchallenged. I operate in grey areas. I don’t take responsibility for my actions. I paint up. I get drunk. I’m anyone’s, especially once I’ve got my way. The way I use people for my own ends is like nobody’s business. The way I do it is to flatter them into thinking I take them seriously, that I like them (as if!) and then once they’ve let their guard down, I let ‘em have it. I tell tales out of school, I spread rumours, gossip maliciously, never letting my own guard down. Play one off against the other. I let it be known what I really think to people who have the power to harm them. I kick down; I’m incorrigible. I have no integrity. It’s what I call fun. For flight ennui it can’t be beaten.

So anyway, what I’ve been leading up to is this…why listen to music? Music’s done for. The repertoire is empty. Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung. There’s a lack of the right stuff. The right people doing the right thing. I can’t listen to music, there’s no point in music simulation, studio manipulation. Recycled attitudes. Attitudinizing, referential, over cautious, positioned for the greatest possible effect, peoples’ brothers, chanting doggerel, strumming and thrumming. Drummers are cactus headed, cow breath sodden, murky from self abuse, clubs full of sweat…false impressions, singers with Beckett mouths, nothing to sing, nothing simple, beyond re-appropriation, bereft of dignity, no bravery…to just stop. Clicking out rhythms to make you weep for boredom, phrasings that are copies of copies of your own brain patterns, jazz action…Notes fail to illuminate over familiar emotions, familiar chords are mere emoticons. I form a band to illustrate the point…

…Back outside in the cold, rain lashed down. Holes in the car roof were proof of my fecklessness. One day, I thought…one day. Bands swarmed like ants in my brain. Overtures in denim; bad attitudes of sweaty men. Again. Too much to contemplate, for one night only. I was my own bouncer, excluded from former bonhomie drenched evenings by my own aphasic malapropisms. I bounced myself good and proper away from the light and from the music. I went on ill-advised benders with the roadies. 20 pints…with chasers. Whores and coke filled nights of excess. I went hugely bellied into negotiating rooms and intimidated all and sundry with my bulk and sheer force of personality. Tremulous entrepreneurs quaked and cowered before me. But we were flying anyway, no need to over-play the gangster bit. We were almost always in flight. The juggernaut of flagrant excess was always primed for action. Constant forward motion, Concorde back in action, one false move and it would have been fatal for more than one of those concerned. We put so much stuff up our noses you just wouldn’t have believed it. Drug hyper activity was the fuel and the freedom.

Bad head. I have a bad head. I’m winding down after the excess. Bits of information, frothy apocrypha, float in and out of the swollen cerebellum. My thoughts are white hot, the electrical impulses turning to needles. I sit up, stretch, and look around. There’s a silence likened in my cleansed brain to seashore sounds. Shell-like white noise, hisses of beach breath. I exist in silence now. The party’s well and truly over. I prop up the nearest bar bereft of my former charm or energy. I sit here trussed up, a plaything of malevolent medics, their backs to the blank wall, blanket around the shoulders. Dionysia now no longer in a position to help. My head, lolling slightly, momentarily assumes a death’s head impression. Grinning skeletal visage, swallowed up again in an instant. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Plenty of scope for the remake there. I’m not done yet. Or am I!

MY NEW CHURCHES/7 I am of course remade and remodeled almost incessantly. I dust down my glitter suits, rediscover my platform boots as before. We will hold futuristic séances with the assembled press pack and re-assure all concerned that what we are about to embark upon is in no way an act of cynicism. We will join hands with the hacks and just feel that the moment is somehow right. The surfer resurfaces; the zeitgeist will be breached again. Identity will once again be re-established. We are pure simulacra, until re-birth. Until Rejuvenescence. Until the elephant vibrations kick in. We think big, big enough to convince our doubters that our intent is not pauperized. Sponsorship is through the roof. The offshore accounts have been primed. We come over well, like seasoned boulevardiers, radiating an essence of worldly and impressive solidity. No one for a moment doubts that we are serious in our intentions, or imagines that we’re just in it for the money. We dreamed enough money for ourselves long, long ago. We already sold the money idea. We are paternal and we take our responsibilities seriously. Me, Frank and Dionysia; the comeback tour is officially on. We’re in a position to pick and choose, and we won’t put up with any old rubbish. The comeback plane, amazingly, was almost de-flighted last time round. Some deluded supplicant to the inner voices had gained access to the flight deck. Sorcery was suspected. Doesn’t make sense…not in this day and age, even given the tacitly accepted new low standards of practice and security that are a corollary of insufficiently rigorous acceptance of personal responsibility among all public and private employees. People just don’t give a fuck, on any level. Even when your life, and my life, is on the line. And so lunatics in their lucid intervals and/or terrorists are routinely checked onto flights without so much as a by-your-leave. Result: in this case severe shock, we are witness to a furious wrestling match with flight assistants who struggle to retain their dignity while at the same time subduing the delusory character. Result: peremptorily enforced soul searching, of the most emphatic nature, as the plane spirals out of control to within seconds of the immediate termination of all life in the vicinity.

I have, of course, complained in no uncertain terms. I found the man responsible, the functionary identifiable by the egg stains on his corporate tie. In my haste to make my point, my undilutable and undeletable comic rage was unchecked. I insulted him with all conceivable rapidity, called his lineage into question and went into a comic routine of undeniable effectiveness and moment. That’s the way we do it. That’s how we achieve re-entry. So what can you do about it? You’re looking at me blankly now. You are history doctor.

BOOK TWO, PART THREE: THE INAUGURATION OF BUFFY STRANGELOVE.

THE INAUGURATION OF BUFFY STRANGELOVE.

Dr Ayton, prognosis after the fact: His [Yapp’s] component elements were incompatible, his trajectory undetectable; the vectors of his many re-entries entirely unpredictable. The point is, he has no template, no causality. He doesn’t inhabit. He might be in Zagreb or he might be in Pyongyang, we wouldn’t know; he may be elucidatory, or he may be paraphrasic…in this case, a diagnosis cannot conceivably be equivalent to a conclusion; in the absence of causality, his meta-narrative carries on. He persists as an auto-characterization long after prognosis because no storytellers, narrators, therapists, secular priests, can place him. His elusiveness is elucidatory. Prognosis is therefore still promising/good.

…People are everywhere free, and everywhere in chains. Rousing myself from post-industrial, post-flight slumber, I thought for decades before I took against the whole idea that people should in any meaningful sense be free of their chains. So again the questions asked by liberals, catholics and therapy whores………Why do Bad Things Happen To Good People? Why are good people routinely overlooked? How does a bad person sleep at night? What does a bad person do to achieve grace? Why am I so good? How come I’m not successful? How come I’m too successful? How do we cope when our former acquaintances become successful? Do we hate them? Do we?…are quite transparently answerable. Let’s face it, I hate people, sleepwalkers all, famous or not. That’s why they’re in chains. They forged them there. And I’m angered up. I luxuriate in the anger rush. I’m addicted to it. My anger is Olympian. It spreads fires around me. I need dowsing sometimes. My fame bug is consumed in fire. Show offs unanimously require the favour of Olympian Rage Gods to enable them to brazen it out. I put the bug in them and then set fire to it.

The doctor, looking at me over the top of his spectacles, asks me if I wish to meet another doctor. His colleague and lunch partner in therapy, he says, has a special interest in auto-fictionalisation. He is, it seems, a sentimentalist. A chiseller of the rosy glow; a hagiographer of the working classes; their inherent integrity his special subject. A grown up manboy from the badlands, lachrymose bad boy and media favourite, reputation assured and burnished. I of course decline. I prefer to place my trust in his legions of ecstatic dancers, mincing psycho-tattlers; those who attempt to tease out meaning, inculcate spiritual potential, through movement, which they say takes the patient into altered states without drugs. They claim to produce psychic movement, get people singing, screaming and crying. They get me laughing, laughing, and laughing. And I have no wish to deprive myself of laughs that are at present my main source of strength.

I have no wish to sell out. I have no wish to slide, to become The Queen Mother of Alternative Comedy. I not only have not sold out, I never even bought in…as far as the doctors are concerned I am a flash git, a baby boomer mangler of vowels…an estuary twat…with higher than mid-middle class antecedents (daddy is a despised academic) pretending to a streetwise attitude. I walk around, two fingers aloft, smarmy mug a map of oleaginous arrogance. The doctor looks over his specs at me again. Cunt. People in chains, psycho-tattlers, reckon I used to be radical but incline now to the view that I’ve sold out. I “never believed in anything”…I “never had a sincere thought in my life”…I “have talent, but merely a talent to disguise”. They say. I “leave false trails”. My “inner vapidity is identifiable as a slight ability to amuse”. I “put everything inside quote marks”. That’s how big a cunt “I” am. People hate me, even those who I “amuse”, but who have now grown bored of me, because amusement is never more than skin deep and it’s surprisingly easy to hate people trivially. Hate is in the small things. Hate is trivial for many of these people who love me. They bestow their plastic impressions like gifts of hate in the letters pages of reactionary/liberal newspapers.

The reason I know this. I am the bastard now and in a formerly fictional life. I used to write the letters. I used to answer them too. Used to go around with two fingers aloft intoning “peace man!” in heavily ironic mode. It’s true. All true. I hang my head in shame. In chains. I was good at the old sub-Wodehouse knockabout stuff, and no one would begrudge me credit for my brilliant scripts, but the rest of it? Socially conscious, painfully aware blockbuster airport novels, the relentless pursuit of good image, scripting mediocre comedies and now flirting with the hideous and the rich, the obscene. I have become obscenity. I am now enchained. Laughter is therefore my only redoubt. Bring on the psychic dancers, but keep the sentimentalists away Doc. Bring on the jitterbuggers. Not that I’m bitter, being an anonymous household god who never made it past self disgust while he, my past life doppleganger, the slimy fucker, lives the transcontinental lifestyle, his opinion sought and valued, loved by the public unaware I’m/he’s a dirty little pursuer of [deleted for purposes of avoiding litigation at my own hands]……

The doc looks at me again over his specs, a mannerism that I’m finding increasingly difficult to tolerate. I realize I don’t come out of this looking particularly good. But bitterness is a fact of life. Jealousy and hatred harden even further into life threatening conditions. Hospital admissions go up exponentially in areas populated by the ex-class mates of happy successful people. They fulfill a useful hate-role. But indulging in the purely human urge to belittle the poisoning success of former acquaintances does us no favours. Reverse shadenfreude is a wasted emotion. But I’m addicted. My brother is ostensibly a very successful academic. Talked of as a genius in prattling circles. And – get this – only because he doesn’t have a lower half – shits out of his stomach, perambulates in a shit-chair at double speed, spitting Touretter’s curses like a fucking Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder paraplegic on crack…talks like he’s on Helium…comic effect, like the angrier he gets the higher the voice goes…because of the effects of lung wastage. He cranks it out in theatre auditoria, eliciting clever laughter and dutiful respect. Why can’t people see that he’s just a little shit, a shitty-legged pontificator? With beard, elbow patches and colostomy bag. Good old Frank. Frank my brother, who I can no longer live without. There’s a space there, something missing.

His success enrages me, sends me into paroxysms. I’m stuck here in this waiting room, being done over by immigration (intrusive and degrading body search….the whole number, the full Monty) and he’s on the front pages. He wouldn’t be anything without me. Even the copywriting business is getting in on Frank. Offered him a 6-figure sum just to lend his compromised person to an ad campaign for Digital TV provision. The Future is Digital. The Future is Frank. Compromised corporeality, bodily impairment, signifying, in the televisual lexicon, saintly genius, are the real USPs when it comes to new media. See the would-be punters, regaled with this figure of a god, resplendent in the myth. Mythically delineated, without limbs, and the punters are absorbed.

We can’t discuss soaps forever. We have bigger fish to fry. Discussions on the merits of this soap against that soap, transparent attempts to encourage me to identify the fictionalized process within myself, are the stuff of dreamy time. Lasts until the commercials. The good doctor shows me a number of projector slide ads at regular intervals, and I’m literally shocked awake by the sudden and emphatic volume hikes. My understated need to be shocked anew is again endorsed. He thinks this Munchausen number is his own discovery. He thinks shock therapy in the form of commercials played at ear damagingly high volumes will cause a schism in my schizoid fictionalization. Stops short of the eye clamps though. He is humane…just. Like I said, I like a laugh…so I don’t attempt to dissuade him. His sheer impertinence and dogged professionalism is impressive though. Give him his due. He harries me as though I were a personalized rabbit, star struck in his headlights. I lollop about, nibbling at his proffered tidbits, keeping my humour, maintaining a carefully calculated mythic distance. His colleagues behind frosted glass, dozing sleepyheads, are rudely awakened, dreams of soap still bubbling beneath their surfaces. The soap bubbles surface, the goo-goo itch of mundane familiarity is realized. Fictionalized family members bear down on them, importuning their fractured attention. BBC sites mainlined, lead directly to porn behind the frosted glass. Everything’s linked. But it’s a goat-soap. Self parody. The other is sheep-soap…beyond parody – more mature in TV evolutionary terms. One is secular po-mo, the other is ritual po-pomo so I’m told.

I tell him that to my mind people who can actually watch a whole episode of sheep-soap must not have brains at all. It’s cack. Pure and simple. People just aren’t like that. Goat-soap has never (well perhaps it did when it was in B & W – I’m just too young to know for sure) pretended they were. It’s characters respond with disdain to issues. It’s characters are contained within their own issues. Sheep-soap’s characters are just hideous, ugly, boring and humourless. And you can’t understand what they say…some coffee table BBC notion of what real people are like. How likely is that? It’s a disgrace, an insult. What else is to know? Characters who make you glad you’re only fractionally fictional. Most fantasies involve fictionalizing the self, and do not involve thanking god I’m not that fucking loser. The thing to hang onto (I’m in confessional mode again, the other side of this cloth) is that you have a duty to fictionalize, but make it good, to be in the happy position of choosing. It’s a divine blessing. A morose downbeat narrative doesn’t do anybody any good. Ever. The only thing sheep-soap has to watch out for is endlessly re-iterating plot points several times per episode, which must be a sop to the terminally inattentive – must be this Dumbing-Down we’ve heard so much about. I approve. In my soap dreams I get in where the sub-culture needs a kidney punch and administer summary justice. I was sent down for perjury in another fiction, but I’ll bounce back. Ways and means.

I was involved, before the trials, at the highest levels of dumb sabotage during the early pre-secular years. I saw to it that only the most egregious show-offs ever got on the air, exhibitionists without the distancing comic spin that would indicate familiarity with the message and the medium. Just straightforward attention seekers. I therefore juiced ministers…proactive in devising and formulating the Attention Seekers’ Allowance. A government sponsored handout, a subsidy for those exhibiting the most overt pathological need to be photographed/filmed despite not actually doing anything. A conjoining of art and soap. Mugging and hamming at cameras pointed in my general direction. Manufactured rage, comedy bluster…aimed at minions not in on the joke. Make it up as we go along. My governmental initiative (the politicians regard me as eccentric but tolerate me for the spark of electricity I bring to the party) was rubber-stamped. I was ensured of a budget adequate to allow myself to seep covertly into the public realm. Subliminal messages, jokey ads for product, it’s all there. This skill which I patented, although the doctor is in litigation as we speak, we’ve had rammed down our throats these last 20 odd years and I am convinced that through the offices of my friends in high places I can secure intervention at government level directed at securing additional financial assistance for exhibitionists. It’s a struggle though; favours need to be called in. Ministers are to be lobbied in their Pall Mall clubs. Junior civil servants are to be bribed with cheap holidays abroad and designer sunglasses.

At the doctor’s instigation, as therapy, I tried my hand at the Agony Uncle game. It is a game though, and people with “problems” sure are jokers. It’s as though they don’t grasp that essentially they are entertainers. Their real problem is that they don’t appear to understand that they should be paid as such. Unionization hasn’t even occurred to them. But is there hope? I hope so. I am deliciously fair, if not equitable. I am immensely sexy. In and out of print it shines through. Sometimes when the choppers fly over, I’m reminded of the dark angels that inhabit our former legends, who still inhabit the dreamy time, my occluded heaven. Until I wake up that is, prehensile erection of my secondary penis gleaming and throbbing with intent.

Anyway, here is a selection of the types of “problems” I had to deal with. My position as columnist manqué was never compromised, my editors were always indulgent. Like I needed their patronage. I was of course ultimately their employer anyway. Vanity publishing or something like that. I can write what I like because I know where the bodies are buried. I have droit de seigneur in all sorts of unimaginable ways. So, my politician friends fixed it for me to have my own talk page. One of my ex-friends had recently been investigated for alleged “forgetfulness” over a phone call made (or not made) which turned out to be, though merely a storm in a teacup, nevertheless a matter to be handled with delicacy. My initiative, occurring as it did just at the right moment and being carefully placed to achieve maximum media saturation, served to deflect attention from the minister at just the right moment. For which he was extremely grateful. In fact, the greasy fucker’s now in my pocket…unless I’ve mis-calculated. Which is possible, though unlikely. I don’t like the way Abrahams is always on his mobile though…sneaking surreptitious glances at me…looking away when he realizes I’ve clocked him…

One freak wondered aloud if she weren’t perhaps getting old. Something about DIY, an obsession with housework, yoga. She lies awake at night wondering if perhaps she has become suddenly old. My reply was that she hadn’t become old, she’s just realized, had an inkling, possibly, that she may, just possibly, be a bit of a freak. There’s no age limit. I wouldn’t worry about it. I reassure her that the awful realization hits most of us sooner or later. It happened to me last week, and again a week later. It’s due to happen again around about now. Readers of the post-ironic press unfortunately rarely experience this chastening feeling, which is why it comes as something of a surprise. Even then they fail to call it for what it is, preferring instead the mealy mouthed and sentimental “perhaps I’m just getting, you know, old or something….there isn’t, couldn’t be, anything inherently wrong in the way I see things??? Could there? Could there????”

Let me tell you that these freaks give a damn good impression of irredeemable superiority, clued up…in all sorts of political and cultural ways And they all talk as though they actually know me. In reality. What a hideous thought. But I tell them: Laziness is the Besetting Sin. Their condition is a result of laziness. They’re not doing anything – raging against the night, or playing dress-up or something. I’m just sitting behind a keyboard laughing at them. Do I make my point? Or again, someone’s so bored at work. They’ve decided to design a website, whatever that may be, in their spare time. But because they’re so bored they cannot think of a single thing upon which to base it. They wonder, does being bored make a person boring?!? I answer that one…No. Only bores say that bores are bored because they’re boring. But don’t under any circumstances design a website. Or quote me. Do not cultivate empty obsessions. Inhabit more than a corner of your brain. Seek trepanning therapy. Try Elephant Gnosis™. Seek to empathize with the hobgoblin in your small mind as he dredges his brains. Try to be consistent in characterization. Your characters may be as boring as you like because in distancing yourself from them they become meta-fictional. Of course, one may still be boring, but the more you do the more the odds lengthen against it. In many ways, I say, it may be better to do nothing and always remain uncertain as to whether you’re boring or not, on the basis that as long as you don’t know for certain, you can always kid yourself that you’re not. This is in fact the path taken by most people, so you’re not alone. But let’s face it; everybody’s boring…at least some of the time. To be constantly amusing and/or engaging would be a killer, for everyone concerned. There are precedents but we’ll leave them for later.

Then some gimp comes back saying that I’m anti-gravitational. They say I may as well claim that gravity doesn’t exist. There are fundamental gravitational divides in the world – as proven by various surveys revealing the plight of the non-levitating. How on earth can the technological white heat of torsion field technology be made available to all? Positing the non-existence of gravity is just a fig leaf for posh mediocrities to justify their protected practices. They observe that they don’t know where to start on my analysis, such is its utter wrong-headedness. They characterize it as mostly mere verbiage and a hotchpotch of pseudo psychological mumbo-jumbo. Well, of course that’s fighting talk….

I come back strong…

“There are so many inaccuracies and misconceptions in your argument it’s impossible to know where to begin. However: If you attribute every problem in your life to gravity evasion and therefore oppression you miss the main point about pre-religious life. Which is: that you should, in post-psychological terms, always seek, to avoid crippling mental illness and/or heavy limbs, to locate your problems (whatever they may be) in causes inside yourself. Not in causes related to gravity fields. Don’t look outside. You are your own problem. You deny. You inhabit glib trajectories. You invoke parochial arguments. You do not appear to be capable of divining the true purpose of so-called bus lanes. Look around you. Check your peripheral vision. Those who seek to locate their problems in extrinsic causes, like gravity stress, suffer monumental and often irresolvable post-psychological trauma. In other words it’ll drive you nuts…unless you recognize that all problems, all electricity and all solutions thereto, stem from the self. Seek the divine within, via elephantine vibration. Seek the bus lanes. It really is as simple as that.”

I warm to my theme…

“The interventionist obsessive”, I remark, “is as deluded as the religious devout. Both seek answers with reference to some higher power that is to blame for everything. God, or the Corporates. The force of gravity. It’s all the same. Deny them thrice, and you’re free. If not, that’s fine – if that’s your slice of cake, but it just makes you a bore, an ego-less boob, a failed trajectory, a non-emphatic vector, a dead end, a psycho sideshow.”

Seeing that he’s on the run, I press home my advantage.

“All individuals fixated on the external are beyond hope. Salvation and KNOWLEDGE are on the INSIDE. Let it go before it lets you go. Don’t cite physics and/or fundamental gravity distortions. Cite yourself. Don’t hide behind monolithic constructs. Psycho-socialism, no less than Big Bang folklore, is in the dustbin of history, precisely because it has failed to understand that each man, woman, child, mutant and separated conjoined is fundamentally a self-determining entity. I don’t think you’re unfortunate enough to have been born into a pre-secular hothouse economy are you? Life for your sort isn’t pre-ordained. We in pre-religious Elephant Gnosis™ are no longer fatalists. We are now electricity free, or at least potentially so. The torsion fields are clear for take off. Take up thy bed and walk and stop whingeing!! It is your personal misery. You lack the ability and the motivation to extricate yourself, to see the elephant tracks under your noses. This failure inspires you to revenge yourself by taking up arms and seeking redress against the unfair, unclean world. You may as well eat cake.

“And why, I might ask, should your education in this matter (for education’s sake, for spending’s sake) be free? Your ignorance demands a price. Those who want to spend will find ways. You learn something. You benefit. Be an autodidact. Eat cake! Stand on your own feet. You are mindless in prejudice. You are a destructive; a redundant meme. Class-play is redundant. Even though there are still vast inequalities of wealth and/or levitation capability. Banging on about the devout is more a cheap selective jibe these days. Who isn’t a devout? Are IT professionals (for instance) devouts? Are academics? Are tobacco pickers? Are T Shirt weavers? Are media wannabes? The dignity of devotion is either a transferable construct or a meaningless anachronism. It’s either or both. But you can’t bend it into a shape that excludes those whose devotion you disapprove of, or who regard themselves as pre-religious. We’re all ascetics now. We look inward. We identify the elephantine within ourselves. Trepanned skulls alleviate the chemically enlarged hippocampus. It’s up to each of us to invent our own meta-fictions mate. How we relate to the world is nobody’s business but our own. My corporations are of course benign. They wouldn’t hurt a fly. There are no more security blankets.

“And if you can’t bear to give them up, ask yourselves if in every area of your lives your conduct is unimpeachable? You do realize, don’t you, that without this gnosis, this specialized trepanned freedom, you won’t be able to enter into clean transactions of any kind? But I’ll take your confession any time. And laugh at it. But you pay buddy. You pay big time. Your rhetoric (only a smug dealer in monolithic constructs or an inveterate sloganeer could refer without irony to my “wrong-headedness”) betrays you. You are neither young nor old enough. Just unclean. It’s intent that matters.

“Please think about it”, I say, seeing that he’s utterly routed. The editor interjects at this point: Look, the thing is, people should never laugh at their own jokes. It’s a sure sign both of age and of being a bore. Just get on with it and cut out the side splitting routine. Comic orthodoxy (being straight faced) can only be breached be genius. And there’s only one thing worse than being old. And that’s talking about being old…

So that’s it. I inhabit this strange place. I am fully mythopoeic, as the doctor is beginning to accept. As I think I’ve had cause to remark before, I invoke elephants, introducing herds into all decadent cultures. Again there are always precedents to sooth the unbelieving populace. Big cats sighted on Dartmoor. An elephant glimpsed in apparently inappropriate locations in peripheral vision is at base a tonic, a bracer, a glimpse of the future. It’s like credit in the bank; it’s a general sense of well-being. It’s the inspiration you need, it’s the corrective for those who might think that a career as a celebrity presenter (and let’s face it, that’s everyone in this present culture) is desirable or an ambition to nurture. There’s an immediacy about an elephant, a heightened reality. They breach the scale codes we’ve been lumbered with, and thus even in peripheral vision tend to make an impression. Elephant tracks are visible to those who keep their eyes on the ground, while those attuned to their reverbed vibrations are always aware of the approach of a herd. My only regret, and perhaps I’ll have recourse at last to litigation, is that the US Republican Party stole my idea. There’s nothing that’s more offensive to the mythopoeic sensibility than mis-used symbols, misappropriated stigmata.

I feel languid now again…in the mythic realm (I see the sheep-shaggers behind the frosted glass stifling laughter) I’ve set up a kind of template for myself that impertinently mirrors the divine trinity. Dualism is naturally a redundant concept. It’s too simplistic to think of the divided self, the civilized man/wolf man, inner and outer truths. Life just isn’t like that. Life if it’s to be understood and lived in the true spirit is based on at least 3 of a kind; Curly, Larry and Moe. 3 divine beings, or in my case 2 unreconstructed men and 1 iridescent woman. 3 is a number we can settle on, though of course the reality is that a multiplicity of split divinities is present at all times. But for our purposes, all beings are now templated at 2 parts man to 1 part woman. Even women. Especially women, in the post-psychological age. No longer tea ladies, or fraught single mums, or boardroom vampires, or boozy caricatures, they assert their identities in male refugee territory. Women now experience the same rage as men, they get boozed up and spit vitriol on charter flights, and they feel the equivalent cock-sure testosterone rush. They replenish and refuel the same anger lust and angst as their husbands and sons and lovers have before. And revel in it. They love it. Oedipal blueprints are routinely laughed out of town. No longer do therapy templates match up. Therapy’s a laugh, a tax write-off. A diversion. A parlour game. Dinner-party chat. Yes Doctor? Am I right? Freud’s museum is now dusty, curated by freakish semi-humans, a Hampstead redoubt for recidivist academics, the forgotten relics of pre-evolved parlour love. The moose is now in the bedroom with go-to-hell eyes, stacked up flirting technique clashing insanely with supermarket checkout ennui. Chardonnay is now drunk to excess. Ladies pile on the misery, livers doing handstands of protest. The ladies are in for the duration. There’s a mutation going on…tails up, androgynous footwear…pudenda sprouting horny little bulbs. Men meanwhile are compromised, bellies are distended, and the DNA is quite debased. Not so cocksure, unaware of modern love. Men are all played out, now at least 1 part de-sexualized. No more re-birthings for de-contextualized sitcom caricatures, being clouted in psychosis rage by insanely angry women. Menboys stack up in pubs, drowning not waving on withered stalks.

And we change the nature of history if not history itself with androgynous, cocksure hearsay. We drift in and out of the picture, at once unfocused and sharply defined. We need eyes in the backs of our heads, Argus like. Our 100 bleeding eyes are ruthlessly applied stigmata. My septum has been breached more than once. My theophanic manifestions as wind and rain are ritual. But they lead to general unquiet in the public arena. Instances of muggings go up, car thefts increase. Scuffles outside pubs and road rage incidents see a sharp upturn as women frequent more pubs and clubs en masse, in gangs. However, when we’re good or can be bothered, things never seem better. Things are now up for grabs again. We have the world in our very hand, our claw-like hand. We’re going belly up together. Men and women together, like birds, entwined in chains, free of nothing. Everywhere free, free and in chains. I am enchained in my fraught imagination, and Ahab is not about to disabuse me. Or abuse me. He won’t abuse me. I know where his body is buried.

BOOK TWO, PART SIX: THE APOTHEOSIS OF BUFFY STRANGELOVE.

THE APOTHEOSIS OF BUFFY STRANGELOVE.

Did I come out alright? Come through? Am I alone now? Erect? How have the vectors of my inconsequence been re-aligned? I have a recent past, a case history and a non-linear anterior history but I don’t know…I don’t know…

These are the vectors of my inconsequence. I have a past. A recent or mid-past. This is now fully non-linear. I’m joined to my own words. Where’s the meat? This is anterior biography? It’s only words. If only words had the power to heal, or to harm. There’s plenty out there who know how to manipulate words. Words are the lifeblood. Pictures are all very well, but words are what really get inside the brain. The heart. That’s all we’ve got. All I’ve got. Rules? Who needs ‘em? I’ve just come over all feverish. I can’t quite see in front of me. Distended belly up in front, my sight line is compromised. I can’t see, but I can talk. I can feel the words, whittling away at the insides of my brain. Trying to get out, desperate for an independent existence. As though they could live outside me. Words are what I’m made of. Words have made me what I am. I am words. I’ve been here how long now? Several times lately I’ve been thinking I was born here. Born in blindness, compromised vision. My legs and arms are restrained; I cannot feel them. Underneath and behind they seem restrained. My legs feel sort of weird. I can’t really feel them. My head is open at the top, or that’s what it feels like. I think my brain is exposed. All the words and visions making the break; Jailbreak from the pale meniscus. Get out of there. Looping and re-looping inside my brain, the words get stuck in my throat. And sticking to the insides, they don’t know what freedom is…but they want to know. They want to know. They want to feel the cool cool air, become separate. We’re joined at the head, Siamese twins. My brother he’s gone. My wife is gone too. I am gone. We are an odd couple, twice over. A sitcom corroborated ménage of plastic eccentricity.

Armed with fever, I don’t expect the pornography of violence, morbid titillation with an eye to the main chance. That trend is firmly linear past. The 70s were the best of course. But we don’t look back. In here, I look forward and back simultaneously, time dust exploding in front of my eyes. I can’t see. It’s the future that matters. It’s linear time that matters. And no, we (or I) don’t approve of the potato headed…style, sentimental re-evaluations that re-configure football as a cultural signifier for the new legions of semi-men, that re-positions “men” (and women) in post-new man, post sofa-chat, dinner party, pre-cynical, never-never land of list making, obsessional, masturbatory lad wank fantasy.

This is the story; the potato headed reminiscences and anecdotes are cancerous extrusions, the potato headed authorship is in doubt and denial. I think I am the story teller of this. If I can remember the fractured historical time lines, it’s the story of how I learned to grow down again, to de-evolve to a pre-secular state, to cope with separation from mythical identities, family members, twins, to regress to a nescient state. A bubbling, drooling infantile ignorance, into which I induct the knowledge learnt. This is the story of how I learned to love the enemy, hunker down, stop mithering, leave no room for doubt, and leave my audience, the therapists and secular priests, my observers, wondering whether or not I’m joking. Am I the doctor? Where’s Abrahams? Ahab, the gnarled obsessive, veteran of the wards…my nemesis. He bides his time, eyeing me through slits, awaiting my forced re-entry. He is the appointed superintendent of my re-birth, my filmed suicide. Will he be the one to cut the ties, to pull the ripcord? Will this be the one I’ve been afraid of, the inevitable outcome, when I’m prevented from re-entry on my own terms? I can just about hear the elephants, but my hearing’s going as well. Will I be entitled, under Ahab’s watchful eye, to circumvent private/public trust bureaucracy and film my suicide again? Am I for real? I now no longer know whether I’m joking or not. I don’t think he’ll let me. He’s inside me, my head. This mode is now hard wired. Unless you’re told otherwise, doctor, please assume I’m joking. Or not. I don’t know, in fact, if I’m joking. It makes it very difficult. This, in case I haven’t made myself clear, is the unassailable trajectory of all future history. You want everything on a plate I see. There’s no more room for false catechisms, vacillating voices, blocked minds. What’s the agenda? Where’s the angle? Well there isn’t one. I was kicked in the head many times at the Battle of the Bridge. My forehead is a livid ivy of stitched and re-stitched wounds, battle scars of straightforward attacks. No strategy to speak of, no porno-violence for the sticky sweet markets. No vicarious living for the ones who weren’t there. The voices of discontent will have been banished. Sent packing. All mitherers have been summarily dealt with. Narratives are consequently suspiciously straightforward and transparent. They’re suspicious from the outset. Plot lines are gratifyingly free of obtuse resolutions. Artfulness is an end in itself. What I don’t know, I make up. What I don’t believe, I force myself to believe. Inconsequentiality, which if you recall I have special responsibility for, is the essence. Elemental irresponsibility and inconsequentiality are the twin peaks of my aspiration. The unvarnished truth; my role in shaping secular lives. I learned to stop doubting, to forsake knowledge, which is of no more value, consisting as it does of under-contextualized ephemera. I learned to love myself, my extended family, all former cuckolded husbands, all the people who ever meant anything to me. People in my vectoral cross sights, people who are me. I learned how to conduct myself so that the intellect wasn’t overwhelmed by doubt, the soul hindered by self-hatred. I breathed hard, held my breath, and shared this profane currency. I learned to obstruct the anti-holy, and rediscover the sacred. Within. Physician. Love thyself. Doctor of Love, that’s me, a numinous whaler in oilskins. In hospital, being stitched up gives you a feeling of well-being. I’ve ministered to myself. I’m a priest of my own religion. I’m a devotional being. As I’ll have cause to remark at least once more, until I make myself clear, in this account of my suicide-assisted rebirth as Non-Linear God of Inconsequence, I am my own shaman. I hear my own confession. I give myself absolution. My head is bleeding. I think I was hit. My eyes are closing. So only short sentences now, the captain is circling, hovering, a vulturous shaman of intent. I pray to the interior where the particles that make us up, the electricity of information, the immortal soul, are even now creating static. I’m trying to catch the bullet in my teeth. But I can’t go on. I hear the elephants outside, frightening the dogs. The restraints are livid. These things are never learned, only arrived at. Knowledge may arrive one day, leave the next and you never remember where you’ve been. You may construct elliptical theories, contrive bizarre metaphors (if you’re a bit of a poet) to cope with the elemental un-knowingness of knowing these things, but you cannot learn them. You arrive; they stick. When you leave, if you’re lucky they leave with you.

My therapist Abrahams, when I still trusted the old ham – and oh yes!! Really!! We have therapists here! – even household gods have therapists – was elusive, obtuse. He maintained and maintains that we need to come to terms with ourselves, because generally he thinks we’re really fucked up. Not fucked up like you, oh no!! Very different, but still fucked up, in anyone’s language…a little bit distracted – he said to me;

“You know your problem don’t you? It’s just that you’re afraid of death.”

As though that had any meaning for me, a household god…Wake up mate…Death? “You’re afraid of it”, he said. Just like that. “You’re afraid of Death.” Capitalizing that last word for sure. Just to make sure I got the point in a nutshell. Like a rabbit in the headlights (he said), you hope that if you stay still enough, It won’t get you. My thanatophobia was so chronic (he said) not to mention ironic (when you think about it, he said) that I’d often scream myself to sleep. Sheer howling terror of Death kept me up at night for years. Linear time. I still don’t sleep. Haven’t for years. My priest (I don’t have a priest now) said to me “You’re damned. You are damned. To hell! Get out of here! This profane practice…can lead only to inner and eternal darkness, evil on a scale never dreamed of in your life…” So no more aspirational devotion for me. I’m too…what is it? The word is…physical. I formed my own religion. Of which I’m the only member. I don’t even want your money. I don’t need it. People come to me, to be touched.

Nietzsche, emboldened behind his huge moustache, would have known how to deal with this mealy-mouthed ecclesiast. There is no church capable of containing the raw power; the wrath of God…is there? God is too egregious a fellow to be cooped up in liturgy, in theological sophistry. Isn’t he? God in 3 persons; in tripartite opposition to the unifying force, God the holy (Curly), superior to the Son (Larry), or equal to the Holy Modal Roller (Moe)? Confusion. And also in arcane theology, but these things matter. They matter. The urge to confess is all. The urge to one-ness. Confession is an androgynous act, a conjoining, to become one in fellowship with the other. Confession is the love juice that oils all human transactions. Whole psychologies are predicated on the need to confess. Adulterous affairs are undertaken merely as enablers of the sickly sweet smell of confession, and we get hot just thinking about it. I am the father confessor, but if you come near me I will kill you. That sweet sick feeling, unloading, gagging up onto the altar of our judgmental superior. But find your own altar. Make your own music. Even if you can’t. Or won’t.

I don’t now, and nor have I ever, spoken in tongues…which I’m convinced my good friend the doctor confessor will verify. Or in dialect. Dialect is the last refuge of the terminally evasive. Coded language; exclusive, like secret knowledge. Knowledge, secret, dialect, all washed away in the purifying force. And the shakers, movers, delirious deluded figures, rattling closer and closer to empathy. As if that would ever work. Try anything though. Some people never know when to admit defeat. I hope I’m not a pedagogue, nor even slightly pedagogically inclined. I’ve been giving the wrong impression if I’ve been coming over as pedagogical. You have to draw the line.

On a mission to explain, I’ve been feeding myself ideas. Concepts. Feeding and feeling myself up. Hospital food. Hospital radio. Feeding on useless gobbets of information. There’s enough for an album. A double, or even a triple album. Homemade and homespun. I’ve invented an anterior life, a doubling up of my inconsequentiality. Before timelines confuse the issue. My brother Frank wrote the words, I wrote the tunes. It was a sort of medley, all bases covered as it were. I’ve been hit many times. My face has changed for the worse. Words are now literally all I have. My arms and legs are restrained. My head is the worse for wear. Dull headaches are merely the preamble to searing pain. I’ve been making up a tune. I wrote this tune…I’ve been ranting…just for effect…I’ve seen the light, in front of and below me. My belly is opened up, distended and flaccid…

Further extract from transcript of Brian Yapp self interview: (CCTV quality recording)…I’ve been…[indistinct]…copping into the general vagueness. I’ve been RANTING. Web space denied to legitimate belligerence, so ranting takes a breather. The space between real living and imagined identity…People on a mission to reinvent faith…faith in a world beyond hope or redemption. People all over just vagueing out, career sleepwalkers, vapid techno-mules, labourers burdened with info-inconsequentiality, get rich quick dot com ghouls, professional…What does this mean? People who were so fucking…[indistinct]… that they’d decided that career paths were fucking valid…People who, from the age … so, had actually decided that they were going to do this, or do that. Snappers up of the best housing, driving up the prices. Neighbourhoods splintered and fragmented, I’ve seen already spurious communities becoming unstable under the weight of spectral presences, decaying half-lives…lived in slow motion between office and home. Between living and living death. Bourgeois soul rebels. Lapping the barrel of correctitude dry. Mortgages are unavailable to the people who live there… They have to up sticks and live in the orbital hell-holes dominated by cars sold and resold, houses and bungalows dreary with cladding. Car boot sales are the only cultural respite, apart from the boozer. I lived outside the orbital, the energy…[indistinct]…was…energized my…[indistinct]…levitate…People pick up what they can, discarding last week’s crap for this week’s garbage. Petty criminality is all over. Just animals. No free will at all. Rats out of sewers…

…I knocked off a sallow commuter a week, or 2 or 3 unreconstructed underclass warriors. All suckling on the city’s tits. Seriously lacking an identity. Cars and trucks too electric. When being someone is compromised to the point at which identity itself is a debased concept, who wants to belong to the pathetic club? The whole culture’s gone sub-judgemental. It ain’t me see? Everyone’s a lost cause, a waste of fucking oxygen… But no one’s to blame. Blame is attached for all ills on perceived slights, failures of etiquette. The offence giver is big in this fucking town. Everyone is offended. Everyone is slighted, as personal space and individual integrity is compromised. Offence is the …[interference]…w Thing. In the papers, on TV, on the radio, in news-groups, on e-mail lists, speciality whinge forums…Everyone’s got a sob story, self-exposure has been green lighted. Public catharsis therefore also the New Thing. Gobbed up, no place to hide your opinions, worthless as they are. People live their lives…vicarious exploitation…need to be noticed. But anyone’ll do, until the big show. Every syllable an audition, my every ill-thought out diatribe a showstopper.

But where it all goes wrong, see, where the culture’s in shock, retreating from its apotheosis…at the triple pronged Canary Wharf magick shack, is that this moaning is …[…]… wind. Moaning is no longer an …[interference]… tform, to give form and function to real angst. What we’ve got is just a mealy mouthed vacuous whining that gives moaning a bad name. It’s gone mainstream. Moaning is now conventional. Moaners no longer shape society. What? They never did? …the itchily dissatisfied, prickly heat sufferers, always lit the matches…[indistinct]…toe nails. It’s embedded in the popular…[indistinct] preserve of old women…bitter twerps, but moaners give edge to reality, shape destinies through bitching. A condensed bitterness coalesces around cultural currents, and piques them…[…]…self-justification. Everyone’s down on moaners, all because they became visibly enraged at every minor irritation…capture the essence of it, they are public…perception of ennui incarnated…Therefore, with angels and arch-angels…[footage cuts out]…enshrined as a pass-time for…[…]…in the dark days of the 80s, moaning has had its day. But really, all the people who know moan like the clappers, all day long. And when there’s no one else to moan to, they moan to themselves. But again, there’s …moans about other peo…[interference]…moaning all the time…life for most people about nothing if it’s not about moaning…life IS about nothing for most people. There’s a big fat …zero that just about sums it up…they mewl and puke and fight and scratch their balls and then they go belly up…But in the right hands, there’s no…[…]…that passes for moaning these days. Moaning gives us something. Speciality interests. Enclaves of like-minded hobbyists and lifestyle consensualists get together and beat the communal meat…feel communality…exclusive pursuits. Hobbies…inane time fillers. Anything rather than confront the emptiness within. The big fat zero. I’ve drawn strength doctor, from an identity predicated on a lack of identity, a lack of …authentic substance. Individuality is genre. Clubability is everything. I never joined any clubs. I’m hate. I hate people. I love their core…[…]…I…[indistinct]…they are now unable to bear their own company. I cannot, you will be unsurprised to learn, bear my own company. But I have, if you take the trouble to check my track record, acted as an enabler for others. I’ve given them the means, via agencies of self-promotion, the wherewithal, to really make a mark in this sphere. Looking up at the sky…I daydream, my head in rest supports; I see that I’ve done them all a favour. Before me, people believed they’d be better off shutting up and putting up. I made it possible…open up new possibilities. Loudmouths…a lot to thank me for. Me and the elephants…

Identity ceases to exist, except as conceptualized for use by those who join clubs, meet up…forget singularity. People are merely vessels…marooned in space and time. Recipients, consumers of leisure. Empty vessels to be filled with product. All joy drained, forced into the society of others, apart though together. There’s no dignity. You don’t dream in time and space. There isn’t any work done. And religion…Except mine of course. Belief is forced, made up. Commodity fun. As long as we’re funny we’re alright. Just fill time and space with product, otherwise disguised…loud guffawing…sexual excess…inane sensuality…frivolous prattle, satisfaction of trivial urges and everything’s alright it’s alright…(shouts) It’s alright. Now it’s alright. Now I’ve had words! Words are now OK alright…Done deals and built new pavements. New elephants trails. Clubs are redundant now we live outside. Euro of outside life, agencies open up possibilities for new kinds of life, new talents to foreground. I’ve foregrounded the impulse to display. I leave you no choice. My monitors are everywhere, support unfolding urban dramas…captured on old style security cameras. Crime has nose-dived, rendering the security apparatus redundant, a technology ripe for re-invention. I present more material via telepathy and through other outmoded means to my wife…

…London is my apotheosis, mythologized into supplementary wank fodder, column upon column of over excited, over stimulated, over stated eulogies. The best place of all. It’s just a wanker’s paradise, a self-serving lie, the people with most to lose from the loss of London as myth keep shtum…over their cappuccinos. I’ve made it live and breath again as a mythical space. Elephant froth, spume of trunked in water supplies over the city like angel lights…the old London populations have nothing to lose. They’ve already lost it…the tittering classes, flaccid bodies of literary pretenders, you know the type…fascinated by tube train arcana, postcode lore, street names fancied, ambience vampires…all sorts of morbid weirdoes. The real people don’t give a flying fuck about this, they just get on with living, fucking and dying…garden centers, pub for a quick one…way back from the places of darkness…packing their lives with the ballast of useless affluence, or in other cases with useless products worth £1 only. London’s belly, exposed and prodded by literary types, ex-corporation gardeners, seeking out hidden histories, gives off the stale gas of obsession. Dark deeds in the past, recounted for those on the fringes. And overlapping fictional voices with those of the unreal.

Scratching their balls, unwitting Wittgenstein mimetics, oriental wank fantasists, all thought and fear subsumed into the one will and/or life force. I popped up 60 years earlier as Hitler’s floozie…I entered the head of Stalin as a grisly private peep show…fantasizing over the deaths of their enemies. Paranoia, guilt, rage all just there, rendered banal, acceptable, because they’re not really your emotions, not your thoughts, merely clapped out second hand old things, private pornography, just floating about awaiting the expression that will be given to them by the likes of me and my familiars…

(lucid now)…London having been previously thoughtlessly mythologized from a non-coffee table perspective as a happening sort of place for the post ironic generation from the bottom up and from the inside out, when all you had to do was look around you to observe the legions of sub-myth entrapped metropolitans, I decoded that it was incumbent upon me to give them back a myth worth living in, a personal exegesis, personal cult religion, based on new and vibrant hyper-gnosticism, a theology of the self. I will ordain you as a minister in your own religion. You may have heard of this, but you may never have believed it. I appropriate the ironic for newly mythic usage.

We learnt from the chittering bogeymen of impoverished narratives about the underside, the alternative romance, we learned of occult-ish histories and we splash about in fuggy imagination, and we imagine lottery cash sponsored follies. Wheels within wheels…domes within domes. We spend money in our brains that the peasant functionaries in the government departments haven’t used/can’t use properly. Psycho-geographic walks through the darkness, the shadows are encouraged for a fiver. Seen London’s darker side!! Seen it from all angles. Ghosts have all fucked off to the orbital though. As we learn from ex corporation gardeners, savvy guides on deft meanderings in the underbelly, graffiti flecked with spurious import is illuminated with specious analysis, Illuminati are never far from the surface, cutting in like superannuated club bores on every conversation. It’s true you know. Concocted expeditions to destinations previously unimagined and now over-researched are endowed with surplus import and too heavy a layering of under-imagined meaning. What, not the fucking Illuminati again squire? We are imagined to be desperate for the meaning of the city to yield itself up. We are cracked up to be spellbound by the reinvention by never-were artists and poets. We are encouraged to gawp credulously at the revealed undertow of polluted force fields and static electric energy pools, which are ever present. We observe Walkmen with attitude, they buzz and squeak, electricity discharged at random into the debased ether. We drift like somnambulists from one unfunny situation to the next. The whole of life is hereby rendered as a de-evolution, a hugely un-amusing stand-up act. It’s a city whose guides demand you laugh at it, and remain awestruck. Unrestrained and causal, we are elemental buskers, catching its energy and using it for our own ends. They’re not used up. We’ve used up all patience. Plenty of residents are just clapped out and knackered. It’s all they can do to drag their bones from A to B. Like semi-expired batteries, only just enough fuel to creep around, but they know deep down they’re not going anywhere. They’re going under. They know time’s up. Time’s pinned them.

At loggerheads with the flow of energy, those with static cling tend to silt up the outlets, arterial roads blocked and sclerotic with commuter trash, old Roman highways bleeding into the guts of the suburban wasteland. Flyover cataracts, through-route lesions, junction embolism, sentry points for day tripping out of towners, the city feeds itself over and over again. The same raw material, the same diet. Commuters in capsules of contained wrath, bitter road rage charioteers high on immunity from the effects of their own anger, carpet chewers, eunuchs from the suburbs with saturday night fortitude coursing through their veins. They chant a release mantra. Kill the bastard! Mow the cunt down! Get the fuck off the road you CUNT!!! Cabbie wrath is similarly unexceptional, though explicable in terms of dread familiarity, a tourist friendly bellicosity that’s fooling no one. Road users are now habitually raged up and raving. They disabuse the tourists of the notion that they’re cared for. They’re the extrinsic virus…We distrust viruses like they were dangerous or something…but the tourists are full of belief. Knowledge, a pre-packaged gnosis available in guide book form. Travel guides, full of optimism, hope, belief in the point of it all. A dogged personal epiphany. A reaching out as well as a looking inwards. I’ve been sold dodgy hotdogs by low rent crims and I’ve liked it. Never that bothered on the point of expiry, my many botulism deaths were salutary. I died for their sins and their intrinsic optimism. They have a living to make from my dying. Outside hypermarkets, I assume dog man proportions and importune, taxing the day-trippers…I’ll still be here tomorrow…I have nowhere left to run, or to hide…I have no little place to call my own…A meaning needs to be excavated and then a thread extracted, a workable religious hypothesis extrapolated. I must be stiff. Keep your money in your wallet…walk around in parties of three or more. Corporate propaganda means nothing to the marginalized. Users of privatised utilities realise their existential precariousness. They luxuriate in the almost religious sense of having been forsaken by well-known and now visible elephant deities. They’re children at heart, and in fact, brought up on a cultural diet that is reassuringly childish. Low fat and low risk. Low resistance to the infections picked up in more robust times. The virus is different now, mutated beyond the reach of the panaceas of contemporary subsidised medicine. Every single visit to your GP is a test case. The whole thing unravels, each new mutation proving unsusceptible to treatment. The virus character is there…elephant masked, wielding a billy-club, right there…outside the door. Breathing into your intercom, reading your emails, poring over your tax returns, scratching a key down the side of your motor, dumping rubbish in your garden and pissing on your lawn, fucking your daughters and leering at your wife. Cameras, unobtrusive surveillance…cooool…unless you take religious matters into your own hands. It’s life and death now.

Civic irresponsibility mirrors private cynicism. You get what you deserve, or what you pay for. Those who pay deserve. I am essential for living, and for easy options. My pavements are encrusted, gum blackened and compressed into flattened spit gobs. They give up their essence of joyless fatigue. Walkmen are walking, joggers are jogging, arriving, to-ing and fro-ing, liking what they see. Multiple soundtracks mirror fragmented, crumbling micro-cultures, two or more tribes at war at any one time. Two factions, themselves split into sub-factions. It’s the cultural Diaspora, info-gobbets sent out and redeemed, welcomed home in new forms, bilious crowds of the mutually exclusive and self-interested. But I changed all of that. No-one need drop out now. I’ve given them familiars. Places to inhabit. Familiars and places…angels…like pigeons. Pigeons are unrealised gods, awaiting a re-entry that will never arrive.

Case File [cont’d]: This is how I frame a lecture, a white knuckle ride in public discourse. I see that deep down everyone in this city is a misanthrope. Those not admitting it are merely in denial. Livid irritation is the strongest, most potent currency, creating surplus voltage. Hatred understated is the hard currency. Hate downwards, upwards and sideways. Hate those taking up space, getting in the way. Barely suppressed anger…it’s big. No room to live. No lebensraum. Every petty office worker’s a nazi…under the skin…in the prickly heat of precious space denial. Tube angst gets right into the fabric of everyday life. The ones you love – just really irritating. Dionysia and I, always at each other’s throats. She writes the guides, as outlined above by me. Frank’s out of the picture now. He wears the cuckold’s horns over his mask. She never forgave him. This isn’t anyone’s fault, just the way things are. Intolerance is the new cultural currency and it’s on the up and up. I hate my brother, just because he is. I hate with a white-hot intensity. But this cynicism, the armour required every day just to get to work, is at heart just frustrated romanticism, thwarted love, the belief that things really should, really could, be better. Which is why I write travel guides, delineating the city’s elephant trails. I write them, Dionysia takes the credit. No, she writes them. I proofread them. It’s a well-ordered world.

That things are not generally better then they’re cracked up to be is turned into a desperate and bitter negativity, everyone else is blamed. I turn blame inwards, re-constitute it as electrical charge, and discharge it into the ether. Although the theme masked medics are all conspiring against my beatific vision of how things could really be, they can’t really touch me. Buffy Strangelove, this weird avatar, is the buffer against this localised angst. Buffy Strangelove alchemises the hard indifference of post-psychological existence into something fresh, something radiating iridescent beauty.

Despite this, we endure tittering boy-about-town DJs on local radio, Barbara Windsor drag-laughers bubbling out of the transistors, and bibliophagic, bibulous, fat gutted UncleMonty novelist/biographers, and ex-cool literary dynasties, holed up in their fantasy barracks, issuing cultural bulletins, mapping a meta-fictional London, a never-never land, a land of politicized follies, and overlooked mad artists, disregarded marginals, telling Londoners how it really is. But it never is this way. We roll our eyes at the lies they tell. We go slack jawed at the absurd fictions they propose. The obscure pleasure, of shared mythical living, they purport to sell. Pimps of the fetid urban sprawl, they presume to tell Londoners what they need to know. They really blow it up the tainted city’s arse. They don’t know, see, your average Londoners, without knowing that darker forces have been at work before. The knowledge has been washed, smart bombed away from their brains. The gnosis is absent, deranged. Marginalized. Darker forces are present than those they perceive currently pursuing them. Occult conjurings are in the open at last, conjurings whose provenance they’re ignorant of, being only just dimly aware of the overt magic being wrought by their everyday workaday demons. Time is sped up, no chance of re-invention for the dirty bastards in the bunkers of real life. But the meta-fictions and their narrators are deranged. History will bury their narrators.

These people are of course obliged to live and fuck and die without the benefit of a single useful thought ever entering their heads. Lack of nous is hard wired, they’re street smart but thick as two buckets of pigshit. Minds contain only white noise, or painful extremes of volume, reflected in agonized faces. For lack of a real focus, it’s gone tits up. We search in vain for an end to which education might be usefully directed. Policies are dreamt up in the wet dreams of think tank eunuchs and focus group time-servers. I offer my hand and my two penises for beatific adoration. Devotional objects, separated from my corporeal imaginings by hard surgery, performed by elephant masked quacks. I scream at the iniquity of it all, cruelty and cruelty heaped up. My legs are going quickly. I bike the contents around town. My city, the city of the night, is unfortunately becoming that of fleeting romance, of misheard insults, misperceived threats, vapid aggressions and squalid indifference. It now seems to make sense only to those who need to romanticize the filth of it all, and who actualize it all at a level avoided by most inhabitants, those who don’t feed off the shit-myth but who actually contain the shit-myth within their sorry lives. Masochism and an obsession with defecation…we know where that all ends don’t we? Don’t we? Most peoples’ lives…shit…for the good of the myth. Defecations are multiplied, in numerous subtly delineated forms. But me…I’m trying for a new myth, through my own suffering…no shit, Sherlock! That’s how self-interested I am. I am Top Of The World Ma!! I am the raw material. The material used and abused, I am the active meme. Knowledge is here again bombed clean out of me. I embrace in masked gnosis the very idea. I have…am…the very idea. I translate everything into classical Greek, I don’t have truck with demotiki…it’s literally all Greek to me. I spill my load on, of all places, Greek St, a Noho chancer; an unredeemable character, a hopeless schmuck, beering it up like there’s no tomorrow.

Busy worker ants. Book toting media cretins, awash with flaccid opinion and spurious narratives, sporting blue stocking fright masks. Television is, obscurely for the un-televisual, the unrelenting goal…full realization. Last chance to avoid the remainder bins. Write travel books, travel inside, if they can! But they can’t. Travel is a foreign notion to these blimps. There are no coherent narratives. Storyboards are as good as it gets. We’ve got shot of these literary games…ellipses in fashion…narrators never come clean and tell us who’s telling the story. Which is why I always make a point of letting you know exactly where you stand vis-à-vis yours truly, your humble narrator (no tricksy narrative devices ensuring you’re onside come the denouement) and Frank, our not so humble pre-psychological monkey-shiner. My story, let alone his, is enough to see you through. You’ll be your own minister. You don’t need spoon-feeding.

Meanwhile, back in crybaby-land, every storyteller jumps ship to sitcom land. Every tosser with a manuscript, doing the rounds; bicycle couriers doing great business. Immaculate receptionists look down their razor sharp noses. Parcels are franked and delivered. Couriers are mud spattered, fully pheromonal. Masks are worn to deflect inherent criticism and internet possibilities in addition open up in the minds of thin-lipped ambition vampires. Everyone is published…sooner or later. It’s just a matter of will, not talent. I got that one all wrapped up. Decoy dotcoms, spotty techno-geeks falling for my market oriented patter, my fall guys, geared up to fail, the fabled dotcom gold rush claiming 30 or so hopefuls per day. Back to mummy. Good money follows bad, gets wasted, following money that never knew where it was supposed to be in the first place. Frightened currencies go under, business geeks cower behind water coolers. Whole currencies invented for use on the net, currencies consisting of cheap ideas, unworkable hypotheses…subjects of dreary docu-soaps. They go tits up, flotillas of badly constructed boats capsizing in the flimsiest of breezes, because the weight distribution is all wrong, pitching pinkly scrubbed teen moguls into murky waters, into oblivion, so young mothers needn’t after all leave home. Get people together; see if we can’t provide some glue for this crumbling thing…this civilization. The walls are coming down. The tracks are laid. Cartographers draw up maps. But Cyberspace is unfortunately still perceived as the only viable growth area, despite convincing and recent evidence to the contrary. Real life is considered a laughably antiquated anachronism; real life is unsustainable unless it comes guaranteed by cyber reality. Transactions do not resonate, hum into life, unless originated digitally. It used to be that no one was real unless they’d been on TV, now you need a web presence too. Self-publishing, vanity publishing, those with nothing to say determined to say it anyway. The Internet. It needed destroying. I considered destroying the Internet as a going concern. Strike one. Now people are happy to stroll in newly constructed Arcadian urban boulevards, monitors observing their bucolic progress towards cappuccino nirvana, a contrapuntal lifestyle of living excess, without information cluttering the real highways and byways.

Leisure ghosts, flitting in and out of terminal charnel house gyms; bogus taverns with reduced price booze, and free Internet access. Every pre-teen has a dotcom business plan hatching in his or her fetid, fevered brain. What? Didn’t they listen? Not even to the voices of the angels? It’s the rules of Boom and Bust, and the bosom of the city actively suckles both boomers and busters. No proper jobs now? I’ve yet to read a job description that is actually intelligible, although I write them for a living. What does it mean? No more manufacturing industry, just sneaker moguls, hated baseball-hatted speculators, prospectors at the metropolitan information frontier, and miners at the capital Info seam. The pan-global bloodstream is alive with the junk of information, all useless facts nonetheless incipiently endowed with novel significance. Insignificance doubles every year. Insignificant transactions are entered into at double the rate every month. Voyeurs and loners become excited by the new possibilities. Real life becomes more and more private. Information becomes useless in exponential degrees.

So how do you become someone without new information? This is my project, opening up new vistas of fecklessness and inconsequence, available to anyone able to prove the primacy of their desire, the reality of their need, their desire for attention, to demonstrate their understanding of the irrelevance of actual talent. I am the new broom. My children run like the wind after fleeting fame and micro-careers. They prostrate themselves for me. They touch me. I make things work for them. I affect a floppy hat, a floral tie, baggy trousers and garish spectacles. It seems appropriate, the point at which identity itself is a debased concept…hence the flashy threads. It’s easy for you to identify with me, and you subsume your identity in my franchised myth. No one need know who you are, as you stroll through the fully realized urban boulevards dreaming of the biggest pay off. Who wants to belong to this pathetic club? The insane, that’s who; cherishing their whitened out individuality, the mad stick out like beacons of disease, indicators of deviance. Seething with desire for the wrong sort of attention, they become the succubi of my bad intent. I deploy them in a manner not unlike that employed by my familiars. They pass muster; get me gigs. They lay down the tracks for me. People give them a wide berth and I fill the resultant vacuum. But it is paradoxical after all that in a weird inversion of the mythic values that I’ve been at pains to inculcate, mental disequilibrium, the actual fabled pre religious absence of Gnostic intent, is valued more than ever by the mediators. Those with thick, un-trepanned skulls are feted by the faint of heart. These people suffer for my art. I mean really suffer. There are circles of hell less exacting than the processes those who aspire to my funding are obliged to undergo. It’s like the Knowledge, except with real purposefulness. Scorning the use of scooters to do the metropolitan areas, they zip around both desirable and non-desirable postcodes by levitation, emphasizing the fully envisioned nature of post re-birthed celebrity to those still not in possession of cleansed truth, and re-opening the disused bus lanes.

But what I’m up against is that the whole culture’s going sub-judgemental. Blame ills on perceived slights, failures of etiquette on the perceived offence giver. Everyone is offended, and all kick downwards. We have our metro-gods too, always on hand, on callout, givers and takers of offence. It’s not a great job, but someone’s got to do it. Everyone is primed for offence taking, so gangs of my offence givers are out there, just waiting to offend. Offence is the New Thing. It’s a ritual. And it’s a game. It’s a shame. It’s also more than a shame that my colleagues in pre-secular hell incessantly whistle inane tunes, punctuating the flaccid days… signature tunes of terminal boredom and indolence. They are waiting to be consumed. Their humour is wanting. The birth of their want, it signals the screaming space, white noise in terminal heads, a vapid refrain that never ceases, can never cease. If they don’t fret, then others can and will. The bodies of the living are already dead here, un-massaged. Polarities are non-aligned. Thought doesn’t enter in here. It’s forbidden, being the intrusive agent of life, change and will. Culture is something that curls the lip. The songs sung are obsolete. The lives lived are obsolete. The riff pounds on oblivious, beating sense to death. People just don’t know. Don’t have the equipment to know. I open heads, poke around in the temporal lobes, implant growth serum. Hippocampus grows according to the Gnostic capability of the patient, the show-off tendencies inherent. Not everyone measures up. Does this all seem just a little too gloomy? I fear so, but check the windows. Look outside! I engineered this. Again! Ahab looks on with vulturous intent. He thinks I’m dead meat. I am Buffy Strangelove…I am this idea…because I’ve known the emptiness. I’ve confronted it nightly, caught myself thrilling to the sensuality of negation. Anhedonia a necessary corollary of pre-life, nihilism in wrap around sarcasm, disdain worn like a heavy overcoat. Onanism is in the circumstances the best palliative, the unrealized a slaphappy chappy mired in angst. Pre-birthed. Mask up, breathing apparatus in place.

And so, let’s see, the witch with whom I had been conjoined was now singular. Medusa Rappa, a product of two or more different religions and social castes. Manifestly unhinged, manipulative, psychopathic…possessing not only the inclination but also the wherewithal and more importantly the will to assert the will. She’d been trepanned in adolescence, far too early. She wanted early or pre-cogged Gnosis. Trepanning then a youth fashion statement. And so the brain juice wanted out. That much was obvious. There was some other animus at work here. The cerebral fluid, livid from imprisonment, had been throwing hokey incantations, reciting an obscure kabala of release (manifested to the outside world as wildly inappropriate laughter at all the wrong moments) with a view to a jailbreak. The trauma of this too-early trepanning remained and deepened over the years despite exhaustive Elephant Gnosis™ therapy. Later in life she shot her former lover in the head while suffering short-term memory loss and like a fool I subsequently gave her a good character reference. Otherwise she’d have gone down for it. No question. The demented aspect she presented filled me with pity I guess. She was marking time to the beats of restraining medication. She wrote terrible hagiographic books, airport thrillers, cookery scum pamphlets…and she refuted all criticism, gainsaid any adverse sentiment…and was bolstered by the equally distressed wives of literary cronies…and was afforded at all times an indulgence denied to the merely prosaic. You can’t really argue with naked will and thus a pattern of appeasement was emplaced, the totalitarianism of madness not about to be challenged by democratic moderation. Medusa, the raptor. Medusa is another night in hell. In my desert shack, to which I’d been obliged to withdraw to concentrate on my anterior life, Dionysia was able to delete the harmful effects that the Rappa had inflicted, at first via Polarity Massage and subsequently by teaching me the tricks of Mythic Rejuvenescence. My batteries, in other words, were recharged. I was able to wait, to bide my time in elephantine meditation, invoking the herds that I was aware would one day be the key to my ultimate freedom, until such time as some sort of guiding spirit, some thin lipped creative genius in coincidental need of a household god, should happen past. And as I may have said, I didn’t have to wait all that long. Limos bearing coked up rock gods doing the continent were a not uncommon phenomenon in those days.

Murder was Medusa’s parting shot. One afternoon she casually announced she was a murderess. Casually, hysterically, as it were. She railed anew at the one she claimed to love, snapping out disingenuous denials as to her true motives. The brain juice overheating, the trepanned skull throbbing with intent, I knew in my heart that this death was a pre-cogged conception, an engineered event. And she knew I knew. A delicately poised dance of denial was consequently enacted. Questions were taboo, as was Reason. Instinct and savage religiosity were primary indicators. I’ve often wondered what possessed me to rewrite her character endorsement in these moments? As I say, pity is the likeliest answer to that one. But what spirit of appeasement possessed me, facilitating the supine capitulation? Surely it was voodoo of some clandestine type? It must have been sorcery that ended up itching me where it hurt. The rhythm method, rhythm and blues method, resulting in a prolonged delta blues for the future. It was a riff that was to be played out forever. A melancholy riff of stupidity, or feigned innocence, pretend-shocked discovery of the dangers of trusting to short-term memory set up a pounding refrain that would last the rest of our lives and beyond. I am a perjurer and I’m destined to pay the price the rest of my natural. I was not yet pre-birthed, and I was outgrown in lovehate. So it was that the secret service goons of her fecund imagination greedily consumed my image avatars, grabbed a few million confused and disoriented foot-soldiers, coshed a likely looking suspect, tied it up, gave it the 3^rd degree and forced it at gunpoint into the inspirational hippocampus. My hand was forced. I therefore, as though in a dream, told the court that she was a woman of impeccable character. The reference was put on file. Her eyes glowed as my stuttering thoughts formed themselves into inadvisable approbations. Ever since I’ve known, since I snapped out of it, I’ve been sort of resigned. The game’s up…if you’re going to be caught like that, you deserve everything you get pal. I was done up like a kipper. It was sorcery. But my mum won the war. Cancer was what did it. She knows that idiots are obliged to live with their idiocy; it’s the price they pay for being idiots. The people I know are beyond redemption, until re-birth. We never learn, until Mythic Rejuvenescence kicks in, while knowing that learning is the only redemption. We are addicted to keeping a tight grip on our futile behaviour patterns, never learning, and our psychologists shake their heads and click their tongues. Ayton is one hell of a joker. Manning type, he’s a fat gutted mike stand leaner. I am his unsmiling audience of one. I have learned a mythic response. I have become divine in her absence, which he would deny me. She did love Strangelove he reckons, though profanely, in the way a hurricane loves the blasted landscape it leaves behind it, the way heavy thunderclouds burst above a fertile nightscape. It was all windswept emotion, centred on the bemused cynic who was through forgiving.

I’ve come through worse though. When I was even younger, I was married to a higher caste priestess who turned out to be a serial killer of the mind. A dragged up artist, a Horus-fixated falconer; she pretended a femininity that masked her true masculine instincts, the instinct to hunt and kill, to emasculate, to consume the paramour. But it doesn’t fit together neatly. She was in some other dream I had, a dream of angels, of incipient disaster. Clawed and hook-beaked, hook rings on nicotined fingers, feeding on gobbets of information. Houses were burning down and fat birds were darting to and fro, tearing at the fire victims. It’s all a kind of sorcery though. I’ve said that often enough. It’s all a kind of sorcery. The thing is, knowing which key unlocks the door, and then knowing which door to unlock. Tricky…unless you’re me. I can untie the vectors of inconsequence for you. That’s my boast and I stand by it. My doctors are utterly non-plussed. They don’t know what to make of it.