Never Too Late!

Never Too Late!
any resemblance to anyone real or imaginary is mere bad luck
we are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are trying to get up

24.4.07

Out on the night

"...write immediately, while the memory is still fresh, for it will not be the same a week afterwards..."

Early April. It is the "Reclaim the Future" party. The old showroom for black London cabs on Holloway Rd just off Highbury Corner has been taken over and turned into an immense party venue. There's a stage for bands, a few different-sized rooms with decks and DJs, there is a cinema room furnished with armchairs upstairs, and the glass-fronted showroom part has been turned into a lounge with a bar. A further labyrinth of corridors and glass-fronted offices offer spill-over space for little drug-taking circles to form. Happy chaos.

I run into an old friend who immediately offers me a line of ketamine (+ketamine video on SW.com). Against my better judgement, I accept.

The second-to-last time I took K, I could see microwaves... My mobile phone rang a moment after I saw the microwave beam establish the connection... As soon as I touched the phone, I was one with the electronic nervous system of London, my own neurochemical system melding with the network of optical cables; I am ten thousand electronic eyes watching the streets through cameras... I answered the telephone and said: "I can see you... through the train windows.... I can see you through the CCTV through the train window, you're at Euston..."

The last time, again the phone rang. I picked it up. It was God on the line. He told me not to do K.

But I couldn't refuse. So shortly afterwards I was stumbling through the chaos of the party with a taste of vomit in my mouth. I felt bad. I wanted to go home and lie down. I stumbled around looking for the exit, miserably lost in the party, snatches of overheard conversation lancing my suppurating mind...

"...my mate, he's a shop-lifter, yeah? So when he goes in to the JobCentre to sign on and they ask him what his occupation is, he says 'hunter-gatherer'. Hunter-gatherer, hahahaa!"

If someone tells a joke in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, is it funny?

"...I'm off then, gonna go home and bang up some speed and masturbate all night to porn vids.... both hands.... remote control in my mouth, like this: glglgrrrllmm..."

Finally I find my way outside and head for the exit gate. Very slowly, I become aware there is a mob of people twenty to thirty deep pressed against the fence with the gate in it. Some of them are throwing bottles or pieces of brick over the fence. Beyond the fence stands a line of riot police in full robo-cop gear. I gape: they seem to have blocked off the whole of Holloway Rd, just because of our little party...

For a moment it feels like a riot is about to explode. Some sort of negotiation is going on: the police back off, still sealing the area, and the music is turned down.

People wander around the suddenly very quiet party, wondering what to do next. One by one, people wander off up the road, the more suspicious-looking ones being frisked as they pass the line of police. We watch them in the street outside through the huge show-room windows, it looks like hundreds of them, go outside to shout friendly abuse at them from behind the fence and blow weed smoke in their faces. Several times, it seems like they are gearing up to storm the party or something and everything goes tense, but eventually they get bored and leave..

For a while, some people gather around the stage to watch three rastas skinning up behind a big speaker hopefully. Towards dawn, when the crowd has thinned yet more, some music comes back on.

Now, the old party circles... the easily-alarmed ones.... complain later about how the cops fucked up their party. But it was perfect! Usually, where everyone is wrapped in their own video reality, drugged-out and dancing to music, you don't get the opportunity for many intelligent conversations. But now, there was enough music for those who wanted to dance, and groups of people congregating to talk, talk properly without having to shout over the music.

"I think you should be shot," says the blue-haired Samoan girl disapprovingly, after thinking about it for a moment. (I had just sat down and loudly introduced myself to everyone and she had just asked me what I'm into. I gave my glib stock response of "guerilla warfare and heroin", and asked her what she thought of that.)

"I think I should be shot, too," I say. "On a daily basis. I think it might fill this gaping void in my life..."

[redacted] until afternoon the next day.... There are bands and great DJs, there are girls and glittering conversation, there are joints going around,
graffiti artists and little gangsters, the bar is free for me until I get embarrassed at their generosity and start paying... and there is even a heroin-using bearded Catholic who is meaning to take Holy Orders who sells Afghan hashish... tonight, once the K wears off, I'm a star and so is everybody else....

I need no wakey-uppey drugs to keep me going through the night, but the residual withdrawal symptoms are wearing on me... I lurch abruptly out, into the warmest spring day yet, after leaving my new beautiful people my phone number and address and invitation to come and chill out later... [redacted]











 and i have the pictures...


and i'm not the only one...

MORE POÉSIE - iambic fucking pentameter

Because my friend The Unholy Spirit bared his soul and courageously posted a poem, I thought to attempt a poem here myself.

An orange ball of flame suspended
Above the London haze. Now ended
An April day like one that may have gone before.

“We’ll play this game again in other times and other places,”
She said. “We won’t forget. We might wear different faces
Look through different pairs of eyes, with different stories
We’ll meet again, I’m sure. “

An orange ball of flame suspended
Above the endless sea. Now ended
Another day, like many that had gone before.

Encouraged by this start, I am inspired to attempt a grand epic, in the style of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

The air is thick, and does not seem to carry sound.
The sun-scorched earth is red, and all around,
Tall coconut palms, lush cashew trees, the haunt of snakes
Striped red and emerald green, among the lakes
Of polished opal, replete with multicoloured fish
Reflecting garnet-studded vine-leaf shrouded cliffs
Concealing caves. Among the leaves the sounds of hidden crows,
And further off, the ocean pounds the rocks with hammer blows.

Witness: a nameless town under ochre cliffs
Beyond half-sunk hulls and fishing skiffs
A church, stark white, thrusts a cross at the sky
Above the wine-dark sea mournful seagulls cry
A far-off sail in the sun’s last rays
A galleon lost in the distant haze

So far so good...

In.the mist above the surf colours bleed and run
The ship's lookout's glass catches a glint of the blood-red sun...

Come dawn a ragged crowd will gather:

Merchants’ agents, the harbour-master,
Whores, pirates, a priest; these sun-scorched faces
Remind of far-off times and places.
A Malay witch-man, a Sudanese
An Indian nautch-girl, a Nepalese
A spectacled Frenchman selling fruit
A secret agent in a suit...

Here things peter out a bit. I am thinking of the crew disembarking... the ship's master going to the brothel to seek audience with his courtesan, to present her gifts and declare his burning love for her (would definitely work some sort of "never fall in love with a whore" type theme somewhere into there)... then something about how men have fought and killed and died and crossed oceans to bring the scents that perfume her body and the silks that drape her hips and the jewelled pendant between her breasts... and I feel it is time to stop and bow out: to the real poets.

("inferior poets are absolutely fascinating... [they] live the poetry they cannot write...")

17.4.07

be ye like unto gods... completely arbitrary...

13.4.07

We've heard they come for drugs, dirty dancing, and pounding techno music

MySpace party leaves family's home devastated (news headline, uk.yahoo.com)

"Two parents were left with a 20,000-pound bill after a party advertised by their teenage daughter on the MySpace social networking site attracted hundreds of revellers who trashed their home.

Despite warnings from her mother not to have "any kids or drink in the house" while her parents went on a caravan holiday, 17-year-old Rachel Bell advertised her "Skins"-themed party, after a British television series about promiscuous, drug-taking teenagers, on MySpace for Easter Monday.

...more than 200 invaded the house in Woodstone Village, County Durham, northern England, some from as far away as London... wreaking mayhem in the quiet town..."


"
Rachel was staying with a friend on Thursday for a "cooling off" period which she agreed to with her mother, while her parents dealt with the devastation in their home.

Her MySpace advertisement for the "Skins" party was subtitled, "Let's trash the average family-sized house disco party," though the teenager denies posting the message.

"They've pulled light fittings from the ceiling and I can't believe someone would come in and do something like this," Alan Bell said.

"There's cigarette burns on furniture and mattresses and it's a wonder they haven't burnt the house down."

Durham police said the incident would be investigated..."


Hey Rachel, I couldn't find your profile (and I really looked for it too...) anyway add me, if you ever come to London, I'm sure we can find you a house or three to trash any time...

7.4.07

Easter

Easter. It's all about Jesus, isn't it? He was crucified on Friday, died the same day (most crucifixion victims take a couple of days to die) and was buried, and rose again in three days, on the Sunday. Oh, but wait a sec... You'd have thought someone would have noticed something here, like, about 1900 years ago.

Easter. Where does the name come from? According to the Venerable Bede, from Oestre, an ancient Anglo-Saxon/Germanic pagan fertility goddess. Easter, the beginning of spring, when the girls are suddenly all in short skirts, and people are smiling at each other, emerge blinking from their winter hibernation with their hormones stirring to life...

Easter.... Oestre... oestrogen... reproduction... sex... What, you never wondered why the symbols of Easter are chicks, and eggs, and... bunny rabbits? You must have heard the old expression "to fuck like rabbits", from your grandma or somebody.

Where does this all leave Jesus, then?

Just fuck Jesus, you might say...

Well yeah. Hell yeah, why not? Think about it... Gay Six-way Jesus Gang-bang Orgy! to celebrate this pagan festival of mating and sex...

Six-way, you ask? Well, count the holes...

So. Happy Easter, y'all, and Happy Jesus Six-way Gang-bang!


(Oh, and more on Easter... via malung-tv-news on the Dean of St. Alban's, the Very Reverend Jeffrey John's bizarre Easter radio broadcast: What sort of God was this, getting so angry with the world and the people he created and then, to calm himself down, demanding the blood of his own son? And anyway, why should God forgive us through punishing somebody else? It was worse than illogical, it was insane. It made God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this, we would say they were a monster.)

6.4.07


Cigarettes

(I don't trust air that I can't see)

I climbed over the bed and leaned precariously to put the other ashtray in its place on the window-sill. Ashtrays, too, must be placed strategically in order to support a pre-determined arc of smoking - like machine-gun nests, they interact with the topography of the environment in order to command a room, or a battle-field.


(-64? why 64?, i demand. -you know I don't like numbers that divide too easily into smaller numbers...
-they're strumpets, she suggests
-yeah... the way they squishily divide into lots of smaller numbers... it feels so horribly squelchy...)

4.4.07