Posts

29.05.2020 - Dystopia porn. Black lives matter.

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Big week. Wow. I’m noting things here to keep track more than to craft a good piece of writing, so apologies if it’s a bit clunky. I’m also going to try and keep it short. I spent the last few days working on a piece which partly drew from this blog and have been speaking to the editor of a small magazine who are interested in publishing it. It was a lot of work, but I’m proud of it, got the gubbins of the idea out, re drafted it a few times, and I hope made it into a coherent, entertaining thought. If it does end up in the magazine it will be my first published piece of work so I’m very excited. I wrote it under my real name so I won’t link it here yet, because at the moment I’m still keeping this blog anonymous. But you might know me, in which case you may have seen the piece. So shit, yeah. Fuck. America is really burning now. There’s big riots in Minneapolis because the police killed another black man. The officer just kneeled on his neck till he died while the

21.05.2020 Boris Johnson: a hideous accident of mutation, inbreeding, weaponised misery and industrial nihilism

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“Look at your body – A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings” -                The Dhammapada A protoplasmic invertebrate jelly. That’s Boris Johnson's favourite insult. But what is he? A vertebrate jelly? Yes. A slab of decay hanging off an impossibly upright creaking bone scaffolding. A haunted marionette. He’s ten miles of entrails and a syphilitic liver in a saggy bag on stilts. He’s a hideous accident of mutating evolution and inbreeding. He is, like all of us, a conscious nothingness. A sentient butcher’s bin that's quickly going off. The true horror is that he’s awake, cursed with existence and knows it. Swamp Thing We are all what Swamp Thing, the ghost dressed in weeds, calls screaming meat. The root of all supernatural horror is paradox. Things that shouldn’t be but are. Like Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Frankenstein’s monster and the undead. Th

20.05.2020 – The danger of normal and 'progressives'

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Aside from all the horror, things are blissful. I’m not getting far with job hunting, but I have enough furlough money to get by for now and there’s nothing to spend any money on. I spend my days working on my course (I graduate in two weeks), reading, writing, doing a few job applications. Then we wonder down to the river, wine in a coffee keep cup, past the lads who’ve improvised a gym in the park with bench press weights, then stroll back through the mostly car free streets as the sun sets. It feels like how life should be. Like the spell is broken. It would be different if I couldn’t pay the rent. The approaching economic devastation seems preferable to our old high paid, high cost lives. There was always a feeling that you only lived in London so you could get work that pays well enough for you to live in London. I am London as much as the buildings, even your life, history and identity was becoming unaffordable. You, or I, did a miserable, meaningless, stressful, ethic

14.05.2020 Omphalos, the demon of fiction

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An idea for this blog came to me in a dream last night. In previous posts we talked about the line between fact and fiction often becoming blurred. In my dream I summon a demon called Omphalos, who I’m not sure existed until I dreamt him up. Omphalos, the demon of fiction and deception. Omphalos could be a fallen seraph who attempted to remove the barrier between the corporeal physical realm and the ethereal of ideas in order to create a single perfect omnipresent truth, both real and unreal. There’s no way of knowing if he failed, or the experiment is still going on. The name Omphalos, means centre. It’s a concept of reality you can hang everything else off, a belief system. Omphalos could be thought of as the centre or cross over between the two worlds of our reality and the fictional one, or of spinning lies and carving delusions in the minds of humans, depending on your point of view. It manifests, from one angle as a scruffy imaginative child and from another a gian

11.05.2020 VE Day and the once and future king

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Arthur Uther Pendragon lives in a caravan just off the A303. He likes a drink, he’s been arrested a lot, he’s our genius loci, spirit of place, and I believe a more rightful king than the ruling monarch of our state. My first draft opened with a few thoughts about the mess our government has got us into, and the failure of Kier Starmer’s opposition. I didn’t want to whinge and moan, instead to offer a mythology to guide us while the our current one lets us down so badly. There’ll be an enquiry and hopefully manslaughter trail, which will analyse this better than I could. I’m too angry and sad. I’ll leave it to saint Bill to sum up. — To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a

07.05.2020 - Take a shit Tesco.

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On a motorbike, in order to survive you need to assume every car driver wants you dead. They’re reckless, careless, aggressive, stupid, inconsiderate, irritable, drunk more often than you’d think, and just generally dickheads. Near death experiences are a daily occurrence. A black cab, indisputably the worst drivers in London, might, probably will, do a U turn from a queue of traffic you are filtering past without checking their mirror, or going the opposite way, will swing a right in your path, or maybe a late delivery jumps a light, or a rare courteous driver, waves a car on a side road into the line of traffic, they assume it’s clear so don’t bother looking, and bang. Any of these things could easily do you in, or a lot of pain. You learn to keep one eye on the direction the wheels of parked cars face, filter very slowly past busses, people step out, keep a lot of distance from the car in front and when you over take or filter, go out as wide as you can, space around yo