New English Word Proposals (Neologisms), Part 1:

This is the first in a series of words I want to invent and, both aggressively and subliminally, foist onto the English-speaking world.

"UNTERESTING" : definition = a light proclamation of disinterest proferred in an ironically encouraging manner.
Example: When someone is rattling on about, say, colour therapy or what courses they wished they'd taken at University instead of taking hundreds of drugs and dropping out of environmental studies, you can maintain attentive eye contact and deliver the faux-bolstering, "Unteresting... do go on". Keep doing it until they notice or don't. It's fun - and fun is anything but unteresting.

TV Rant - "What Happens When Consciousness Ends"

Did anyone see that documentary last night, "Life After People", on Channel Four? It has to have been one of the biggest wastes of time, money and concentration ever. The only reason I was watching it was that I'd just done a twenty-five minute run on the back of a toxic weekend and I felt pinned to the bed with a poisoned feeling.
Among other things it was perhaps the zenith of that always astonishing quality known as "stating the bleeding obvious". It was essentially about what would happen to man-made structures and the human legacy on this planet if mankind just, well...disappeared. It was quick to point out from the start that it was not going to be about how we might disappear or why we might - oh, that's handy - it just wanted to focus on the immensely intriguing issue of how the stuff we make will decay without these strangely absent, jumped-up bipeds to maintain it; and, of course, it was all narrated by that familiar, coldly dramatic voiceover artiste whose doomsday declarations crash down like a meta-tsunami of Old Spice all over our cosy bank holiday evenings.
I watched and watched out of sheer amazement - what was I seeing here? Well, without any real flannel, I was seeing obvious C.G.I. of buildings and structures gradually falling into ruin - that's right, not being blasted to dust by atomic explosion or levelled by earthquake or terror-tide, just...slowly...falling...into...disrepair.
"Wooden structures will be the first to go", barks the fat-voiced oracle of all our tomorrows. Luckily he allays my perplexity by informing me that wood can be destroyed by not being varnished by humans and that this fragile flesh of trees can go in two ways: by something called "rotting" and by "woodworm" - apparently worms that eat wood. Well fuck me backwards.
Then he broadsides me with the crashingly unforeseen, "Metal constructions will take longer to decay". I can't believe I'm really seeing this: suddenly I'm looking at a graphic of the Golden Gate Bridge's distinctive orange vermillion slowly and boringly turning grey and brown and becoming sort of mottled and weedy. Then I'm witnessing some rusty cables snapping - apparently it's not good for the cables to snap.
What stunned me also about this programme was the amount of experts they wheeled in, however briefly, to tell you things that even a five-year-old would say "No shit, Sherlock" to. There was some authority on celluloid sitting at a table with four bubbled, blackened and warped bits of film in front of her giving us the damning news that, without this magic called "maintenance", film is vulnerable to the elements and we would lose all our visual history. What, you mean we can't watch "Black Narcissus" or our old Super Eights when we're, er, basking in the toe-tapping boredom of... not existing anymore!? And this of course brings me to my final beef with this ludicrous waste of televisual possibilty, namely, "Who cares what may happen after we all cease to exist?!"
After all, it's not as if it could be something that would impact on our children or great grandchildren. They ruined the point right from the start by stating that this is a vision of what may happen when all humanity has vanished off face of the Earth. I didn't watch it all - I couldn't - but after every single "revelation" I felt so desperate to hear the dark proclaimer intone the other hideously obvious truth that, "luckily no one will be there to give a flippin' toss".
What happens when something occurs that simply can't affect you? Nothing. What happens when no one can consciously perceive something? Nothing. What happens when you don't watch or even hear about a documentary about something that will never affect you anyway?
It would've been more accurate to have shown a black screen, soundlessly, for an hour and a half, as that is closer to what happens when all consciousness ends.

Extract From My Bleedin' Novel No.1

Within my blog of varied writings I want to offer up extracts of my bleedin' novel (which, by the way, has such a great title that I'm not going to reveal it until it is absolutely necessary in case of theft).
The work itself is largely about a character, called Dean Evering, who lives in East London in the present day and who greedily drinks in all the hedonistic experiences he can - with little regard to tomorrow and career concerns.
He narrates the story to an imaginary friend in his head - a sensorially-deprived, irridescent, little ghost called Squeekorre who thrives on his depraved accounts, but can only ever remain silent. Effectively the reader becomes Squeekorre.
Exuberant, melancholic, daft and profound, Dean I hope will confound expectations about who he is and what he might do. But to quote him briefly to indicate a strong aspect of him:
"Life is so much better when you give yourself up to the higher truth... that you are nothing more than frogspawn with the ability to grin stupidly and disrupt the plans of others."
This extract catches Dean in low-key moment of boredom and frustration...


The bleak day gave way to a restless evening. I was trying to steer clear of any drugs as possible entertainment. I wanted to focus on song writing. The band had been complaining lately of rehearsing the same material over and over. We were losing the original intended spirit. I had to write something, but my pen was as dry as my over-shot nuts and my guitar sounded like it was being played by a sixteen-year-old girl whenever I touched it.
I smoked my umpteenth cigarette and stared down onto the main drag to see if anything down there would move me - in any way. It didn't.
I sat on the edge of my bed, slowly tapping my feet on the carpet as though walking. A doppling cascade of sirens squealed out down Kingsland Road, followed a bit after by the lone wail of some cops who'd been caught napping and were going to miss the action.
I felt the desire rise in me. Thank God, Squeekorre, yes, some desire. But it was the desire to take my bodily chemistry and hurl it into a reservoir of unknown ingredients. I wanted to take "lucky dip" concoctions and end up in random-character-generated company. Preferably female. Preferably preferring me to other men.
I thought again about the untried whore route. But I wanted to soar over the night with willing participants, not emaciated witches thinking of an hourly rate.
To think, Squeek, so many people soundlessly blow through life with their tethered, narrow tent of an outlook, not feeling the urge to batter down the walls and escape into the unmapped beyond. I'm always rubbing up against the edges of ordinary consciousness, finding it all a bit too dry and pokey. I want my world vast and wet with lubricant. I want to crash through the TV screen and out - into the TV studio, then splash through the studio windows and out into another time; then I want to burst out of my eyeballs to see further and farther - and I want to see myself doing it, from a distance, watched up close by another me, who's being monitored by yet another from above. Monopoly, anyone?
Actually, yes - but Monopoly played like a giant stooped over the real London; owning whole roads and stations at a sweep of my hand; tossing huge, speckled dice cut from mountains down the length of Oxford Street; relocating houses and hotels with considerable loss of life and immense craters, to reorder and redesign my own urban catastrophic fantasy. Then, when I'm bored, I'm going to boot the whole sorry board over, devastating centuries of order and architecture.

Z-Lister at the Door

"Hi, my name's Blumquist Hellzapoppin, y'all. You may know me from the Blah Channel's quiz show 'Loss Of Face' or Humma TV's 'Indignity Rules' and, if you don't, where the flip have you been?!"
"Last year, as you should know, I took part in the hugely viewed bizarre endurance show, 'Wingnut Fortitude', and came a highly respectable seventh overall - although you'll do well to remember my barnstorming second place in the 'gravel-in-face-whilst-eating-your-own-chods' round."
"Anyway, I was wondering if anyone here could lend me twelve pounds for a taxi to the hospital as I urgently need to get to my badly injured three-year-old daughter's bedside. Oh please, please, you're my only hope, she's crying tears of real blood for me and I only live round the corner - actually I've just moved in, you've maybe not seen me yet (apart from on the telly), but I've seen you many times already, looking all helpful and upstanding, oh please, Christ, please! I swear I'll get it back to you on friday!?"

Roughage

So many shouting voices
On my street today
Echoes of the inner roar
Of all their frustrations
"Sell out! Sell out!"
The black woman screams
To the air, not really the people
Holding scrawled placard
Something 'bout racism
Then a young lad
Upstaged by a turning car
"Come back here, you pussio,
Come back see what I do to you!"
As the man encased in metal
Speeds away oblivious.
So many shouts on my street
Today in the bright, cold light
I watch from the upper windows
Like an inbred and bonkers
Royal mishap
Stashed in the tower
To save embarrassment.

The Last Hours of Sunday

Oh my friend, here we sit again,
In the last hours of sunday.
Still staving off the monday
By what began on friday.
You laughing through a haze of amber,
Me falling over in the bathroom,
That phone call! The cab that never showed.
What night was that?
Oh God, I didn't!


But now it's all burned out to cinders.
Warm spirits turning pale and numb.
Encroach of monday drains the fun
And our frequent chatter begins to stall,
Becoming clearly less and less.
"Maybe it wasn't such a great idea,"
"Perhaps I'm not that able after all."
Defeatist feelings
Forlorn and creeping.


And oh my friend, my dear here friend,
Though we've had such laughs this weekend,
I know so well it will end,
And I'm longing for someone other than you
To be by my side tonight,
To feed my soul with love,
To remind me what I lost
And end all my confusions.
But it's impossible.

The Artist's Prayer

Power Father,
Whose art is Heaven,
Let us be hollow to ring thy name,
Thy colours come,
Thy sounds be sung,
In grounded ways
As it is ethereal.

Give us this day our streaming thread
That will lead us out of stagnation
And deliver us like new-borns.
Your rhyme is in sing-song,
Empower me with stories,
Unsevered forever,
Amen.