BOOK ONE, PART TEN: IN THE BROADWALK OF AUTO-EROTIC LOVE AND GRIEF (SHITKICKER’S DEMISE).

IN THE BROADWALK OF AUTO-EROTIC LOVE AND GRIEF (SHITKICKER’S DEMISE).

Immigration Control CCTV recorded footage: B. Yapp again out of subjectivity, lost objective, head down, head in hands, moved to recapitulate, mask slipped…papier-mache crumpled…Again…he said to her and I said to you…

…I love you because you’re like me. Like me! I hate anyone younger than me, those who appears to be younger, fresher, more robust, whose DNA doesn’t appear to have careened out of control. And also I hate those older ones. I hate anyone older than me, closer to god than me, more stigmatized than me. (He looks for an age at the elephant tattoo on his shoulder, in the mirror) It’s people of my exact age to whom I really relate. Unfortunately, there aren’t many that ageless. Anyway, I love anyone who aspires, with a passion, to agelessness. In constructing a personals ad I might suggest that I’m exceedingly charming in person and likely as not to convince you to have sex with me. My trunk is fully priapic. I furnish them with the old joke, the old line…but this sort of attention seeking artlessness won’t necessarily put them off. I am Devilish. Arched eyebrow charm, that’s me, minus the arched eyebrows. I have to paint on the eyebrows. And affect the trunk. I look better in make-up of a kind that’s verging on the theatrical. Strongly etched lines, shading where necessary…coarse boned limestone tundra face, gray and wrinkled, frozen skin under mottled and warty make-up. A paintjob that shows me off to best effect. I’ve been in trouble with jealous husbands many times before, and need an effective disguise. On being disturbed at my cuckolding, I invoke lovehate. I affect a ready made masquerade stratagem, as enraged proprietorial cuckolds trip over upset trash cans, cleverly manipulated standard lamps, tipped over chests of drawers and chairs…all strewn in my wake as I beat hasty retreats from the boudoirs of my inamoratas. The anguished cries of enraged husbands and the thoroughly modern scorn of my lovers for these same husbands comfort me as I speed away on winged feet through the night. I levitate at full power outside other bedrooms, looking on with callous indifference at previously vacated love-scenes. My cheating disciples leave emotional distress and crocodile tears in their wake. I see boozy middle-aged women stocktaking lifetimes of accrued unhappinesses. Cynical, manipulative men-boys minutely calibrating moments in time, nano-computations, how long to hang around…ensure maximum emotional payoff is achieved, that the agonized female/male maelstrom is stirred up, that the gender matrix is breached, is fully milked before splitting to other unsatisfactory love-scenes. Sob love. It’s all in the wrist action. Porno scenes of emotional distress imagined and story-boarded. I get my leg over for no pay. Movies circulate on the exploitation circuit, except no-one’s exploiting me except me. I don’t need to pay for loveaction. I inveigle my way into previously solid relationships by flirting over water-coolers with the objects of my especial desire. And pouring discreet scorn on the cuckolds. And then I’m away, over the fence and down the alley. I then sell the rights to the higher bidder. Budgets aren’t big; I don’t need a full crew of technicians, key grips and gaffers, soundmen, knob twiddlers, just in voyeuristic mimesis an imagination. My eyes hold the images literally until I forget them, which isn’t going to be in a hurry.

My ambition is to die before I get older. Older than I already am that is. The compromised moment, the bridge between past and future. I hold it like ejaculate in my hands. I can’t get any older. I’m re-treading. Re-entry. I’m stuck in more senses than one in this demi-mode. Until re-entry. I’m due a skin sloughing. Shuffle off into some other cauterized universe. In love with youth, my youth and my inability to become youthful, except in love-scenes, I see possibilities opening up before me. I have tended in the immediate and mid-past, in anterior lives, to wake up screaming NOOOOOOOO!!! In the wee small hours, in the dark watches, the long dark night of the soul. By morning, I’ve usually fully regained my composure. But it takes a while. I mean this entirely seriously. The Panjandrum of Happiness fears death. Despite my suicide-assisted re-births, I fear and loathe death. There. I said it. And death comes to us if at all in the small hours. Thanatophobia is especially chronic after love-exertion. Lying there post-prandial, death visits in the small details. Apocryphal household gods get disturbing psychic visitations from past lovers, spectral figures, and are obliged to take deep breaths, to get a grip. Sometimes I see inside me and don’t know what I’m looking at. Dionysia, will she stay with me, like me? Forever? Eternally? We’re in it together, for the duration, for keeps, we’re in it. When I look at the blank wall in front of me, eyes turned inwards and away, I fear that I’ll always be like this. I worry that I’ll lose the ability to re-energise; that re-birthing therapy, gnosis therapy won’t be enough. That death really will mean death this time. It’s insane I know but sometimes I really believe that the gods within and without are in tumult, that they’re preternaturally incensed. I believe that the karmic flow has been dammed, that there won’t be any more suicide therapy. I conjecture that my time will be counted in seconds. I am a doomed worrier, awaiting re-invention. A compromised and fretful banality at these moments, that’s me. That’s what I’ve become. In the long watches, a dead leg sickening for re-invigoration, watching the spotter choppers as they circle overhead.

I need someone exactly like me, some mirror image, a blueprint for Mythic Rejuvenescence. Will she stay with me forever? You are like me aren’t you? Aren’t you? Which is, I know, a preposterous question. We’re all like each other. No difference essentially. We are now all together in the piss bowl, in civilized retro-chic. It’s a question based on a misconception…I’m no longer here now…Frank – where are you? There is no such thing as unmitigated love of the unmediated self. No-one’s going to stay behind, clearing up, making do…Dionysia has her own life to lead, her own spells to cast. Only one alter ego? Preposterous. And based on a 40s Hollywood romantic perversion. Dr. Jekyll as seen through the distorted lens. The Wolf man, Chaney transmogrifying into the other. The beauty of the beast. It’s all so simplistic. The beauty within is burnished, without tarnished. I’m a composite, but I would say that. I’ve had so many chances at love. Loveaction is a prime motivation. Other peoples’ wives. Repeatedly spurned. Feral couplings outside and inside, day in and day out. Now I literally cannot love, unless the object of my love is myself. I overlap, a convergence of interests. I refer to myself often enough in the 3^rd person, like he said this, or she did that. It’s difficult to maintain integrity in these matters. To remain grounded. To achieve subjective closure.

We (I, you) lose ourselves in subjectivity. There’s no such thing as fakery. Real life and imagined life converge at the creative source. Give a man a fair chance and he’ll invent a decent enough person to be – I have invented passable imitations. With horns. My friends and doctors regard me through quizzical and gently amused eyes. When I shapeshift in front of their very eyes, they affect not to have noticed. I’m humoured, big time. You give a man No Chance, and you’ll end up with a monster. I am not a monster. I invented the image. I am the image. I speak in tongues as follows…

The self is clearly fragmented. Human beings are inveterate fictionalizers and our greatest creations are ourselves. Which by no means implies that these fictions are therefore somehow falsely realized. We create illusions…of all kinds…to make life… bearable. Those who inhale too deeply, indulge too fully, are called mad. Our ability as household gods to fictionalize is what separates us from the animals. Who have no notion that they belong to different genii. We are a genus apart…

…I say this in all seriousness, upon surfacing from unusually tedious dreamlife sorties, and I’m regarded – I regard myself – with amused contempt. Because of course I’m wrong. I couldn’t be wronger about this. My associates look at me as though I’m taking the piss, having a laugh. Strangers make haste to cross the road as I move on caged feet towards them. Levitating over and beyond them, I observe quaint look-the-other-way denial manifesting itself in their brains. In the functional degraded hippocampus. They don’t like the look of me, and I am therefore denied. I’ve achieved a kind of invisibility. People look the other way. They can’t bear to see me up to my tricks again. I can levitate at full power for hours at a time and barely attract a second glance. People affect a studious indifference. Glances are shot, if at all, surreptitiously, candidly. But I don’t have any treats, just a gift. A heaven sent gift of deniability. I am never where I’m claimed to have been, cuckolded husbands look in vain for forensic evidence. My thoughts are soon crippled if I try to force them in a direction that flies against their natural inclination. My dreams likewise. My dreams are full of pain and denial. My dream thoughts turn in on themselves.

People give me a wide birth, as you may imagine. I scry the future in plate-glass windows. Shop window displays delineate subdued, compressed, two-dimensional futures from whence all life has departed. But I see the shapes of future things in these flat-planed reflections. My distorted belly, phallus extended, acts as a kind of transmitter for future shocks, projecting me into my own visions. I’ve seen myself tomorrow and again lifted up along the Euston Rd, towards Gt. Portland St, flying horizontally, trailing whispers of visions behind. Traffic comes to a halt, or maybe is already stationary. Cars, trucks, buses, all bumper to bumper as I discern the patterns denied to everyone else through half-unseeing eyes. I see the way people avert their eyes, as though the better to hear. Listening in to the radio, vainglorious prattling and condescension of my voices a curiously comforting diversion from my reality. People in gridlock affect indifference as they’re driven mad, and my salvation is literally metres away. The verdant green of Regent’s Park, a clandestine destination, stone creatures stalking unreflective lunchers…advancing at a slow waddle, two rose sellers (£3 a bunch, £5 for three) are approaching me, elbowing aside pedestrians in statis. Spitting through swollen lips, emitting electricity, they make haste for the central reservation, brandishing the livid flora like sabres. The importunate motorists sit motionless, randomly fiddling with radio dials, stimulating voices, simulating diplomatic repose, glad to be out of the cold, a real bonus of private motoring…and at the same time fearing, mindful of the vulnerability of windscreen wipers. Impatient, lifeless with ennui, eyes glazed and fixed on the mid-distance, fingers tap tap tapping on the window frame, I like to think that I am in some small way responsible for the misery these motorists suffer. Because they don’t think they’re like anyone else, they think different rules apply. Their main lesson, still unlearnt, is that everybody is exactly the same. In all particulars. Their vehicles are 2-ton lies, shiny, beastly untruths. They’re breaking the rules I set down eons ago. Rules I didn’t make for my own benefit…And we hear the rumbling in the sky. I levitate again. A mechanized hum, pressure eases, I raise myself up. The rain comes down anew. Clouds scud past as time speeds up. Baker St is awash with beetle-like Sherlockians, attempting to divine the true location of the meta-fictional 221B. Further down near Portman Square, or up near the park? The Abbey National the most likely meta-fictional detective house or merely a frog-like cancerous lump? I’m drawn up and above Baker St because it’s Regents Park where something is happening. Some filmable event, a suicide or something…

…(Shitkicker) Here. There’s plenty here too…activist…strange old world – keep in touch…they’re fucking…have a drink mate…nothing much happening yet…fucking the buildings…this is activism 21^st century style…Distorted faces, fenced in and away from the main body…the police are charging, batons raised…buildings are distorted…away from the main thoroughfare…it’s going down, going under…main chance now the buildings are fucked…gotta go to work, away from the main action…slip in the back way, over the fence…I can hear the elephants, trumpet…(Shitkicker, what’s going down there?) Here. I am right here, right now. The cameras are in place. (Shitkicker, get out of there mate. Get out of there. Think of your family, your kids…) The elephants are charging…trampling activists…the carnage is indescribable…there’s a camera pointing at me, I’m online…Here. Right here, right now…there’s a tear, a tear in the fabric. This could be my last report from the front line. This feels like the last time. This is carnage…I haven’t been here before. This is all new…a TV camera invading my privacy. Where’s the therapist? Where’s the producer? I am in front of the building…I can’t get out…it’s in front of me…the walls are collapsing…traffic is stationary…the cars are honking, the cars are trumpeting…I see the walls are coming down…any broadcastable material must be saved…but I’m here with a skeleton crew, no technology, old style box cameras, the police are going in batons raised. (Shitkicker…….SHITKICKER……SHITKICKER!!!!!!!)

Jim Shitkicker, the BBC’s own correspondent, outside Broadcasting House, reporting on the embellished lunchtime hordes, the high priests of Masonic building-love, making with the buildings on Oxford St, was trampled to death in a stampede of elephants who’d been foraging on Hampstead Heath. Their instincts honed over millennia, alerted by sudden tumescence in the hippocampus, they were drawn as though magnetized to the heavily psycho-religious, pan-sexualized, happenings in Oxford Circus. They’d stampeded south through Belsize Park, down Haverstock Hill, turned right by some arcane instinct across the railway bridge into Primrose Hill and then on down into Regent’s Park, hedges and bushes trampled and stamped on. The denizens of the zoological gardens became alarmed and set up a caterwauling, a grunting, a twittering, a bellowing and a roaring. This music of alarm was adjoined in rhythmic intensity by loud atonal guitar riffs, parts played in different keys and time stamps, played as though learned from transcribed improvisations. The ground had rumbled and rocked. Shitkicker had been on top of Broadcasting House. Some cameramen had observed him, seemingly in conversation with a masked figure, one of the building fuckers who’d gained access to the roof, we thought at the time. In his excitement leaning out over the parapet apparently to achieve a better view, so we thought, he’d suddenly seemed to lose his balance. He’d been a much loved correspondent…richly gravelly in tone, at once avuncular, cod-curmudgeonly and yet archly impertinent and abrasive in dealing with recalcitrant and evasive politicians and other degraded public figures. A correspondent at heart, however, his elongated nose for the real news always seemed to lead him to the heart of events. His devotion both to a fine sense of duty and to the sound of his own voice will be missed by all who knew him. A statue to the memory of Jim Shitkicker will be erected on Broad Walk in Regent’s Park, in sight of the elephant enclosure. Those who were in the park at the time have testified in writing to the overwhelming feelings of emotional bereavement they experienced in that wide thoroughfare during these events.

It was the Broad Walk of Love/Grief. Many witnesses have attested that they personally were, inexplicably, consumed with intolerable and heartfelt grief for a figure they knew, and could only know, by proxy. His martyrdom to the cause of promoted life struck a chord within them so deep and reverbatory that they were quite overcome with grief. They saw the herds that lumbered southward taking Shitkicker with them. He was borne away by the herd, a spectral trumpeting presence, an ethereal emanation of mammalian numinosity. There was an electrical surge as they passed, short-circuiting all power supplies in the immediate vicinity. They were passing through the fissured space, drawn there by the re-birthers’ building-love, a viable conduit to the future or past. The fissured space of the present suddenly tangible to all who witnessed the event. Not sex magick, but sex-elephant love. The transcendence of the moment was palpable. Heavily modulated and overdriven blues, slide guitar phrasings up in the mix, bass clarinet call and counter call, was heard as though in a dream. People looked at each other, fell into reveries, devotional trances. A window similar to that last seen at the airport was opened, a moment when the fractured past co-mingled with the profane present and the numinous future. Love was in the air. Frank was heard to croon a tune or two. A broken cracked voice wilting in the burnt air. Partners re-affirmed marriage vows, spontaneous copulation was non-judgmentally observed to take place between in-love couples, snaky trunk coils were entwined, and the trumpeting in the air was mixed with the keening of those who had just ditched unfaithful girlfriends or feckless boyfriends. Loveless cynics wept openly. It was an Arcadian scene, a prelapsarian dream. A Gnostic devotional template.

We bottled it. I bottled it. I am already in love. The population in trance, a chance to re-configure. Lost almost immediately. A potentially cinema friendly experience, the elephants were nonetheless un-filmable. No camera crews present at the time were able to catch the moment exactly as it happened. Exposed footage was revealed as an aphasic blur, soundtracks were drowned in white noise through which could be heard a faint but largely indecipherable trumpeting. The strangeness of the day was felt for some time afterwards. The civic authorities bottled it. The whole mood of the country underwent a change, as elucidated in the park, which could never have been predicted from the limited popularity of a much-loved broadcaster. The buildings in Oxford Circus that had been host to the erotically aroused re-birthers were enshrined as places of religious retreat. The BBC was re-consecrated as a Holy Place. And the crowds of baseball capped would-be starlets and ghosts began to retrace their steps, negotiating a widdershins course down Portland Place, back up Great Portland St, returning into the dark night whence they came. The age of the megaphone personality is dead upon us. The lease for religious revival meetings at Wembley stadium has been renewed, thus saving the uncomfortable pile from demolition. Sports take a back seat, as does corporate mid-Atlantic rock. It is now host venue to weekly Elephant Gnosis revivals and happenings. The agents of religious learning and theological teachings and pitchers of sitcom ideas to the networks are quids in. Educational courses based on the new mood abroad are advertised and parts are available in new plays and films, hurriedly scripted to capitalize on phony mammalian religious devotion and attendant ironic takes on same. White elephants are rife, but it’s a start. People look at each other and they look into mirrors. They see themselves and they see themselves transformed. They see haircuts for which they never asked. They hear the buzzing of electric razors and the swish of barbers’ tunics. Time to clock out. It’s love, because you’re all like me. I am the sultan of seismic love-action, mashing up the over emotional pulp, of change for change’s sake. I open the gates of the kingdom and everyone is changed. The mask is slipped.

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.