THREE OR FOUR BOTTLES OF WINE

....talk about pretty little girls girls about tasty boys boys about girls doing get down and dirty sex obsession with each other real or imagined did it five times more often desire and lust than real men about women women about men football no defence basketball second division lousy shot trainer lost match tits center forward cunts on television if it’s on there talk gossip cheap and nasty look at the cunt on that about last night’s telly downloaded porn cheap shot next week’s telly soaps soap powder don’t shift dirty stains lied last week’s telly the dirty rich the famous clean the infamous dead shot raped on screen twenty four hours hello the neighbours what the neighbours got normal kind of guy regular sort friends and shotgun family don’t talk to them no more fucking family stabbed in the back betrayed good exam results bad luck of the past how it was all obviously so much better back then sick present no future there is just simply none no respect nowadays not safe to be on the streets I mean it prices not what they used to be who’d of thought potatoes at that price per pound body functions dysfunctions who’s dead should be dead prick periods shit and piss and shitting skid mark fart wind the goddamned weather good morning rain lift stuck it’s never ever been so bad headaches drinking headaches beer twelve pints your round how's the migraines cars that he hasn’t got I got to get that's really nice stupid bus service take this it's stronger works better better work harder boss shithead hate it and work because I spent it all broke love it honestly you love it me too got to be done crisis five days a week eight hours a day weekends out of it bad beer bad wine bad music bad sex no sex at all sick and tired everything gone to hell train smells delayed overweight you too deadend life discotheque dirt box noise paracetamol two a day couldn't live without it shouts talks all at once and the same time are you listening no way she looked at me goodbye good riddance the young suck me off just wasted generations wasting away down the drain not like back then my father always said discipline back then discipline and order the pains goddamned cancer chemicals in all this prefabricated food when I was young you knew where you stood you see who died crap pension so sorry for them kids these days and oh my joints the aches and drugs goddamned drugaddicts everywhere you turn to take pain away codeine hurray cholesterol younger generation isn't she just so sweet goo goo kids look like slags real professionals prostitutes fuck them I would what's she called shit heads pissed as a rat see you tomorrow bye talk about girls girls about boys boys about girls doing it ten times get down and dirty sex late again never on time what's the time that's nice just your colour....

Round and round and round again and again and again forever and ever but, if you can join in all the din, find a corner in the conversation, be conversational, be talkative, it means you know you are still about, you can hear yourself, you, yes, your very self.

This is a big help. This means you are not dead. It means you are not dead, you have not already died and nobody from T.B.A.P. has come to take you away.

Yet.

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, in the hot summer of 1972, Sunday the sixth of August actually, a priest on a pilgrimage to Santiago was run over and killed crossing a narrow country road in Alava, Spain, by a tractor. Run over by a tractor.

Alava isn't on the route to Santiago from France via Roncesvalles, but he was in good spirits and so just wanted to take a day or two detour to visit a friend studying at the seminary on the outskirts of a small town called Vitoria.

Back in England his hobby was restoration, restoration of classic farm equipment, steam powered mainly. He was quite an expert in the material, both old and new, so he knew that what was bearing down on him, dodgy brakes and all, was a rather tatty old looking Hanomag Barreiros R438 Special. Made in Spain sometime in the early sixties. Number plate VI 17.

Trouble was that the left hand headlight was not standard to this model. The instant this oddity caught his attention, the priest lost the vital fraction of a second he would have needed to jump out of its oncoming path.

Almost exactly two years before, the sweating owner of VI 17 had hack sawn a headlight off an old abandoned fifties box van (A Citroen, perhaps?) and hashed together a replacement for an original headlight that had been destroyed by revellers enjoying the village fiestas.

Three or four bottles of wine can change history.

The young man was never born again, and, therefore, definitely never ever lived happily ever after.

EL AMIGO INVISIBLE

I have three books before me on my desk on this Sunday evening, the fifteenth of December.

Five years ago, before sweeping laws were put into effect to protect respect for the masses over respect for the individual, I received, on Tuesday the twenty fifth of November 2008, through the post, a second hand novel I had bought from an American seller via the World Wide Web three weeks earlier, “The Voyeur”, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Grove Press, NY, New Everyman Edition 1989. Flipping through the pages, the first thing I read was a dedication in black Bic biro ink,

To: The little man who wasn’t there From: you figure it out. 12.25.89

The smell of 1989. I smell the smell of 1998. Christmas day scents and the smell of roast and candles and see the deep green holly rich orange berries design on wrapping paper that is torn from a paperback given by “un amigo invisible” somewhere in New York.

I have a news headline which I printed out from The London Sun the other day (I collect this kind of stuff, all sorts of odds and sods) which reads,

Local recycling plant ransacked and vandalised. Anti system terrorists....

Apparently, “increasingly desperate subversive attackers” had made off with various boxes of “materials prepared for recycling”. Now, in the name of the respectable and respected masses, resources are no longer burnt in public squares in rituals overseen by men in black uniforms or white robes or thousands dressed in suits and caps all the same grey, but “dissident materials” are recycled to produce clean energy to light the paths of respectfulness and the politically correct.

The smoke and ash and the reappearance of London smog do, however, make some, and I count myself among that number, wonder how clean, exactly, all this energy is.

I have, here on my desk, in front of me, three books considered by those in power to be worth no more than a calorific statistic from government heat generation figures, “The Voyeur”, of course, and also two others, a 1998 Thames and Hudson paperback compendium of the work of the English artist Francis Bacon (excellent quality reproductions) and a catalogue from the Bacon retrospective in The Tate, 11 September 2008 – 4 January 2009. They were rescued, along with piles of other essential reading (and seeing and hearing) matter, by agents under my highly indirect orders, and put into safe hands.

So close was that exhibition to the enactment of the Alliance of Civilisations’ new Laws of Respect, I often ask myself what has become of the paintings in that exhibition. I’d like to know in what dark vault or government employees’ or ministers’ back rooms all these paintings are locked away and hung in because, they might be seditious, but I am sure they are safely guarded. They are, after all is said and done, worth money, a lot of money, if only on the black market.

Francis Bacon, an invisible friend, beautiful, twisted and tortured, but beautiful, a voyeur to instants in time and I’m inside his mind inside the paintings under the glass (I know about the glass. I saw one or two of his works in real life when I was young and there I was wondering about and wandering about in the images) reflected and reflecting, and the paint is organic material fleshing out my Ray Harryhausen sword and shield wielding seed sown skeleton until my pen is mightier and I am complete! Whole!

Culture, these books can do that to you.

In warehouse K.U.T 25 there were no Alliance Constitutions, no Red Books, no Bibles or Korans to be saved. No need, that stuff is all government endorsed reading with instant subsidised distribution sales and downloading. That’s just common sense.

....the Islamic Higher Council hereby communicates that no girls will be allowed schooling from this time on....

Inside “The Voyeur”, pages 148/149, by way of a bookmark (I use it for that), is a receipt from J & R Music World, 23 Park Row NYC. NY. Dated 24.05.99, MON, for a CD collection,

BURROUGHS/BEST O. $62.99 ALL SALES FINAL: NO CASH REFUND

These are thoughts, scraps and coincidences for naked, empty days and nights and evenings like this. These books, these thoughts, could get me “recycled” but it’s worth the risk. So many things have gone these last twenty years, too many persons, all sales final. Too many important things, too many little things gone too, and there’s no refund. Where’s Virginia (Jone) Johnson and the Blue Roadsters’ version of Lou Reed’s “A Sheltered Life” disappeared to? Where’s it gone? Where’s the film, “Interview with Beauty”, the song was on the soundtrack, where’s it all gone? The song’s been vanished from the World Wide Web, there’s no result for a search for “Interview with Beauty”, it’s gone, gone, like so much else you supposed was there but can’t find anymore. I can’t even hum it anymore, it’s as if it never ever existed and a flake of organic material has been picked away from my flesh, and it itches, and my pen is slightly less mighty.

Someone’s sold out. Microsoft, perhaps?

Who keeps an eye on the voyeur? I do, your invisible friend. My invisible friend, the little man who isn’t exactly there. When the smog comes rolling over the towers it’s best to keep your eyes wide open. Someone said something twenty five years ago and they’re still saying it in 2013. It’s written. In black ink. Here,

you figure it out

On the twelfth floor of a tower block on The Cambridge Estate the neighbours and I hear the sound of the heavily booted feet of operatives from the T.B.A.P. (Tactical Bureau of Applied Politics) in the stairwells and hallways, then a short silence followed by a loud knocking and sounds of a short, but violent scuffle .

(P 149) The girl’s body was discovered the following morning at low tide.

Half past ten in the evening and I’m wandering about my twelfth floor flat shuffling papers and books and CDs about here and moving things into the sink there, and wiping the day’s stains from over there and I’ve finished with the internet and the screen’s blank and I’m talking to myself again and I’m shuffling my papers about. You figure it out.

....evening a large piece of M. Barceló’s “Ocean” fell onto a Delegate Representative of the Taliban Higher Council chairing a meeting of The Alliance of Civilisations in its Geneva headquarters. Said Representative suffered a heavy concussion and the dislocation, in his fall, of his right shoulder. His daughter, currently studying at a British Government funded Madrassa in Kingston upon Thames, is quoted as having called on the European Union to designate more funds for the conservation of religious properties since....

Since the smell of 1989. Christmas day and I sense the scents of all these vital scraps, thoughts, odds and sods and coincidences for naked, empty days and nights and evenings like this. My collections of materials, flesh out my Ray Harryhausen sword and shield wielding seed sown skeleton until the pen is mightier!

Concussion? Why couldn’t they all have just drowned? Drowned in an ocean of acrylic paint.

You figure it out!