Concrete/Abstract or ..mumblemumblemumble..

Sitting on the floor in your boxers and hoodie loading Stones Doors and Zep onto mp3 for tomorrow. Sips of Miller. Only one bottle left in the fridge. Sucks. Fashion TV on the boob tube. Pretty girls walking and 60s rock on top. Jumpin Jack Flash. butitsaaalriiightnow-infactitsagas. You couldnt be arsed making the stew so its baloney and cheese again. Bowel cancer. Yum. The bread is wholegrain with loads of sesame seeds and you are eating an apple for dessert so you dont feel that guilty about your unhealth. Jackson 5 now. You dont recognise the song and you realise that most of their songs sound kind of the same. Your heart feels really heavy all the time now. Theres a weight on your chest and your breathing is heavy but you know it isnt just the empty calories. Maybe its the new year. Maybe you feel this way with all beginnings but you forget within 365. Like a case of the Mondays but its a case of the Januarys. 1^st of 12 not 1^st of 7. You arent broke as yet so it isnt money. You can usually distract with the small things. Beers. Football. A good cheeseburger. Right now your eyeball is glued to the big picture and its heavy and its ugly and you cant shift perspective. Youll listen to Kid A in the morning and the heaviness will still be there but therell be a cathartic warmth that accompanies and it wont be quite as bad. Or maybe it will. Nevermind doesnt help anymore because you arent angry anymore and youre too far away to feel one way or the other about them. Pity. Empathy. But not quite sympathy. Not quite compassion. Windows are the eyes of the house and youre staring out from behind them and its such an ugly day. You try not to speak or write to anyone you know in case your mope is catching. Nigella has epic tits but she wont contribute any cleavage FTW. Close-up of her hands as she separates eggs. Male models on Fashion TV. Greasy wrestlers grapple in tights. Youd watch The Shield but youve missed the first 6 seasons. Back to Nigella. The muzak is awful. Dont like marscaponi (sp?). But I do like the leopard print sweater. Jerked chicken. Winning. Meet Joe Black is a very long film. Cant think of many men beautiful enough to play Death. The cruelty/unfairness/random nature of beauty carries so much of its appeal. Like unearned wealth. The small things distract for a few minutes at a time. Hypochondriac. Emotional retard. Obsessive compulsive. Neurotic.  Bipolar. Lazy. Selfish. Long-winded. Narcissist. Incoherent drunk. Vergingonsolipsist. Fuckerupofgrammar. Irony/selfawareness/individualism bring on a downward spiral into gazing so far into the navel the speech blurts out of the arse. Arse. Arse. Arse. Peach. Lovebite. Perfume. Hair hanging down into your face and then brushing over your neck and chest and stomach and yes. Winning. I am no longer fashion forward. Get no kick from the mens designers. Wont wear these clothes. Not even in the ‘future’. Bluetooth stopped working and Kid A copied without Everything In Its Right Place. Hate the world. Hate technology. Hate alone. Too much of me is bad for my health. Too much of you is bad for your health. A little bit of you makes me your man. Gonna watch Cheaters. Do You Think That Youre Better Off Alone? by Alice Deejay. Yes I do when I watch Cheaters. Love the stupid host Joey Greco. Wish I could stay up long enough for Springer. Definition of alone is the rambling innermonologue/livetweetofcrapTV via MS Word. Think maybe humour as a defence mechanism is overrated and played out. Hate when my laugh comes out desperate-sounding. Should maybe try to be more like Tyler Durden. Maybe start fights with my friends even though I dont see the point in fighting. Will maybe make me feel ‘alive’ and unemasculated. You were on your way to being a supermodel and dated counts and ambassadors but it was shallow and so you married Lance instead but then you got fat and Lance started cheating on you. Love this show.  Youre a heavyweight. You look hardbody. Hope you kick Lances ass.

 

…approx eight hours later: the Radiohead worked.

Excellent Bits of Writing By Other People

Jimmy Chen Flash Fiction (quick reads – a little absurdist, a little bit sad and lonely and a lot funny):

Me and Me

Conversations with Beautiful Women about Other Men

The Woman Who Took Off Her Pants

The Impotence of Reading Ernest

Also:

An Excellent Defence of Freud by John Gray in Prospect Magazine

 

‘Beach’ by Roberto Bolano (Genius)

 

‘Real Madrid’ – a story about a Michael Jackson impersonator

 

Turkey Sandwich

“being alone is harder than being in a relationship, which is why every1 likes/wants to be in one, but once u acclimate to being alone, there is a sense of empowerment and freedom that is perhaps more ‘real’ than a relationship, at least this is what single people tell themselves whilst eating a ‘dry ass’ turkey sandwich on a saturday afternoon inside their condo with a light rain tapping ‘you piece of shit’ in morse code outside, the leafless birch clawing at nothing, the nothing pulsing as a rave for the slowly dying”

- Jimmy Chen

Wrong Side of the Bed

‘There’s no sense or meaning in anything. It’s nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressure. It’s only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of decay. There’s no escaping that, stupid.’

- László Krasznahorkai

Gmail

think if you live in/come from a poor country you’re always going to take an interest in current affairs because you can’t really avoid them. it was kind of what drove my uni studies, but I’ve kind of lost whatever it was that made me feel a connection with the rest of
humanity. still have some degree of empathy, but not so much sympathy for the plight of next man. think I’d benefit from being in analysis, but don’t think I can afford it. or that we have any psychiatrists here. and if we did, they’ve prob ditched to go and work for the NHS or something. read a report saying there are more Malawian doctors in Manchester than in Malawi. sucks. guy on Facebook suggested that the skills drain from African to Western countries is beneficial to the poor countries because of repatriated funds… complete tool. I’m very pessimistic about my country making any kind of progress in the near future. there are hardly any educated people and there’s no willingness on the part of people who can change that TO change that. it’s very depressing. I’m very cranky right now. think I’m always like this early in the morning. prefer not to speak to anybody until 10 or 11, but we’re in the office at 7.30. want to find out more about Salinger. kind of taken an interest in his hermitude and also in his experiments with different religions, trying to find meaning. but failing I think. he even hung out with L Ron Hubbard at some point. friend’s mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer. will need chemo. guy I hung out with a bunch last year collapsed and had a stroke, out of the blue. needed to transfer him from one city to another because the local hospitals didn’t have the resources to treat him properly. he died en route. thinking about mortality. about the inherent aloneness of the human condition. about how nobody ever really knows anybody and how alone I will be when I die. and how little value anything I can ever do or contribute has in the grander scheme. so that the best that I can do, which I guess is what everyone does to get by, is create my own subjective illusion of ‘meaning’ and ‘what matters’. but I feel that would be like deciding to believe in Santa just because I know it makes kids happy and promotes good morals. feel disillusioned. think maybe love and intimacy would provide a welcome distraction, but then that’s not easy either. at least not for me. wish I didn’t have to come to work. just want to read depressing novels and think and write. been quite productive last couple of weeks in that regard. find French writers like Camus and Houellebecq really helpful when I’m down (though I think Sartre’s overrated). great James Ellroy interview on one of the podcasts I sent you a link to the other day. he’s so cool. and such a great writer. LA Confidential’s the only one of his books I’ve read, though. can’t find any here. hope to find pdfs on line. will stop rambling now. rgds.

Time

PSA

 

Best Thing I’ve Read In Ages.

Prologue

One Friday evening Golden Panda decided to go over to Clint Eastwood’s house for a few drinks. They sat on the living room sofa drinking Mexican beers and watching TV and chatting shit. At some point Clint Eastwood pulled out some hash and they smoked some of it from a bong while watching the English national football team play an important qualifying match.

About an hour into the game they decided to head out into town and look for something/one to do. They started off at an opening party for a trendy new bar. The whiskies were overpriced and there was no Jack to dilute their Coke and ice with. They drank many sugar-rimmed glassfuls of complementary pink punch and then even tried a couple of glasses of green non-alcoholic punch, which was surprisingly no more sickly than its sister bevvy.

The bar was upscale and the majority of attendees wore suits and tuxedos and evening gowns. The women especially were dressed to the nines and even the unattractive ones looked or at least smelled somewhat doable. Golden Panda liked to think his ragged jeans and undersized tee were boho and rebellious and that some of the rich women were secretly eyeing up the skinny punk sipping punch. These were the kind of women you only ever saw driving in and out of office car parks or occasionally holding up supermarket queues with packed trollies. Too classy/mature for plebeian clubbing/seedy bars, this was a rare opportunity for them to drag their husbands out and cut a rug to ‘80s pop songs that people still listen to which therefore qualify as ‘classics’.

Billy Ocean and Kid Creole and Whitney Houston and Madonna and Spandau Ballet and Hall and Oates and Eddie Grant and Culture Club and Howard Jones and Human League and Kool and the Gang and Milli Vanilli and Cyndi Lauper and Billy Joel and Wham! and Michael Jackson and Belinda Carlisle and Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Flock of Seagulls and Phil Collins and Morris Day and the Time and The Police and Lionel Ritchie and Miami Sound Machine and UB40 and Cameo and Chaka Khan and they even played Kajagoogoo. As a fan of the ’80s pop songs his parents used to play on vinyl and VHS and audio cassette, Clint Eastwood enjoyed the music very much. He danced with great energy and exchanged grins with the other people dancing, mostly ladies in high heels.

At some point the DJ decided to up the tempo and played a contemporary hit song by LMFAO and the younger/trying to be younger people all got very hyped. Some of the ladies were dancing in their heels right next to a swimming pool and Golden Panda sort of hoped that they would wobble and fall in. Maybe he would have to rescue them and perform mouth-to-mouth. At the least he might see their boobs through their wet tops or dresses. He was sitting with his friend Bob, who had recently converted to Islam and given up drinking. Bob cut a forlorn figure, drowning in sobriety, sipping his green bevvy from a sugar-rimmed glass. It made Golden Panda sad. Maybe Bob would need to make new friends, with cleaner habits, like when people join Alcoholics Anonymous and cut ties from all of their drinking buddies.

Golden Panda went for a pee and was amused to find the urinals packed with ice cubes. This, he may have felt, was the sign of a truly classy establishment. Even if they didnt stock Jack Daniels. When Golden Panda came out of the toilet, Clint Eastwood and Bob said they were ready to go and the three of them left. So it goes.

Foreword

Hope: I do all my writing on my laptop, lying in bed. I want to put the laptop in my lap, as was intended, but that would lower my sperm count.

I hope this becomes a book, becomes a bestseller that many thousands pick up on their e-readers and many millions – who haven’t bothered to read it – loathe for its degradation of characters and lack of plot and wit and heart. Then I’ll use my advance to buy a top-of-the-range laptop that doesn’t radiate heat into my balls. I hope a few pretentious cretins defend this as experimental fiction, hope I’m able to achieve momentary notoriety and then retire to the life of a recluse, in a remote log cabin somewhere that’s next to a Chinese takeaway and a liquor shop and has access to high-speed wireless.

The Spoon is Not Enough

Jane Seymour’s hips are wider, her arse is bigger to the touch than I had expected. I guess when your eyes are closed and you see with your fingertips and palms the picture is more detailed. She was happy enough to share a bed with me, but convincing her to share anything more has been a thankless task.

Just the tip.

I should have tried harder to ply her with alcohol. Instead I plied myself with alcohol and now I am slurring my sweet nothings. I have probably long since passed from suggestive to whiny and now I’m questioning at what point I just begin to sound creepy.

I kiss the back of her neck and my hand brushes her stomach and then I let my fingers crawl under her t-shirt. She swats me away again. The sun is up now and I am tired. I should sleep and let her get some sleep. I roll over to face away from her and I reach under my pillow for my mobile and my earphones. I listen to Shirley Bassey and log into gmail chat. Q is online, always online, and I complain to him about my predicament. I tell him I have the bluest of balls. Q shows little sympathy and talks about the specs of his new motherboard. I log out of gmail chat.

I pause Shirley Bassey and turn over to face Jane Seymour’s back again. She turns over and I look at her face. I stare until she opens her eyes and then she stares back at me. I can’t quite read her expression, but it is intense. Is she angry or horny or disappointed that I am not less of a dog. I am too tired and drunk to think or speak so I lean in to kiss her but she pulls away. She only moves her head back a few centimetres, but there is a gaping chasm between us.