

Adjective Narcissism

John Carey

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 John Carey

Cover by John Carey

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# Adjective Narcissism

A Broken Polemic

By John Carey

### Contents:

Adjective Narcissism  
- Me  
- T.S. Elliot  
- Bob Dylan  
- Frank Turner  
- Plato  
- Leo Tolstoy   
- F. Scott. Fitzgerald  
- Alan Wilson Watts  
- Robert Frost

Honesty

Contact

Adjective Narcissism  
A Broken Polemic

By John Carey

Though I would desire to deny it, that I may be able to maintain any sense of humility, however false said humility may be, there is something undeniably satisfying in seeing those eight words finally positioned above this parody of prose. To know that I have struggled and, despite the fact that I have done so in adversity of nothing, have created something. I, me, have drawn something from some quasi-intellectual dimension, something towards which I cannot explain my compulsion, something which I cannot justify before my peers or my superiors, (for surely there are no inferiors to a creature such as I?), but can grasp at the trailing skirts of Understanding as she passes me by in smokeless bars occupied by hazy lights and wiser characters than I.

I can pretend to an intellect that I know I lack and, though I refuse the act in of itself, the very acknowledgement that such an option exists should, if you carry a similar stain of sensitivity as I am not ashamed to admit I possess, offer you some internal view into the text you are about to suffer through and then abandon to the empty corners of your memory; its temporary position on some ignoble coffee table, long-forgotten, or some street corner occupied by second-hand cigarettes and the occasional temptation of copper, before it ends.

But examples of literature, such as they are, which can be said to bear that execrable adjective of 'Experimental' carry with them a certain stylised stimulation, a noxious scent which can be said to possess more than a hint of failure's own particular brand of cheap eau de toilette.

Though I am not yet confident that this fragmented piece of prose possesses either the authority or the self-awareness to slot itself neatly amongst such other examples, in that virtually unattended festival of interesting folly, one headlined by such crowd-pleasing acts as Shields and Danielewski, I would position a warning here and now, penned directly for your benefit and not for mine.

This is not a 'work', ignorant of all those negative connotations which that vile word carries with it, which needs to be read. Offering little more than myself and my optimistic mediocrity an excuse for our intertwined existence, I would state now, in what meagre sense of honesty which remains within this shell of imagined authority, that this is something which needs to be written, not necessarily for, but rather by, myself.

This ostensibly linked series of typographical errors; each one refusing to be tied to a solitary failure, but, instead, a collective mistake of such lofty proportions that neither these lexical decisions, nor the lack of any encompassing theme, possess any redeeming features. It cannot be said to offer you innovative narrative discourse, it cannot claim to offer you dramatised monologue. Across these severely limited pages you will find no evidence of a literary upbringing, no clever imagery referential to a modern life and few shared experiences, ones designed to make you feel as though you are not alone, ones tasked with interjecting my personality into your solitude.

Within my words, or these words which once I possessed the audacity to call my own, you will not find wit, nor love of life or death or the grey existence caught in between the two, and nor will you find a purpose, an answer, or any fragmentation which could, through the wasteful use of a monarch's legions and the produce of dead horses, be metamorphosed into either. This is a text bare of emotion and fact, one empty of meaning and absent in it desire.

This is objective narcissism described in uncomfortably fitting, and deliberately ill-fitting, adjectives, given physicality solely for the purpose of the unnamed figure, for that Authorial characterisation, for that Worthless God hidden amongst the obvious truths, and yet, hidden all the same.

'It is easy to 'appear' intelligent when involved in the creation of any text, of any work, no matter the form it may decide to take. All you need to do is ask yourself 'why', 'why' you have involved yourself in such a thing. You take the absent question mark and, in your self-proclaimed genius, you hang it above yourself, like an empty noose awaiting a heretic.'

##  Me

#

Firstly, before what little impact the following text, this randomly-extracted honest account of self-abasement and composed, for the most part, of the theft of words penned by better personifications than I, can be allowed to launch its attack on those few senses of yours that you actually care to spare for it, as though it were a pauper slouching in the shadow of a doorway, I would pose to you a series of questions. I know you didn't come to me, if you actually believe that is what you are doing, to be judged and in a wholly physical reality I would have no right to do so.

But in this world, I am the author. You are a visitor into this, the subconscious of a man I have locked away, chained to a prose absent of narrative, in a maelstrom of deceit, alcohol, music and the cages of those humanitarian deities I have worshipped since I hid a refusal to utter the words of a Lord's Prayer behind the laughter of my peers.

Am I really the voice of the author, or the character dreaming of a man he could be, or some omnipotent narrator, one possessing a voyeur's perversion taken to the very limit of its ability? Is this, am I, the logical conclusion of an obsessive society? By what mythical authority do I, a man of such complex simplicity and simplified complexity that I cannot even begin to make sense of myself, possess the right to tell you any narrative, whether it is my own or not? Why would you let someone with just such a sickness of the mind as mine into your own consciousness, if only for these next few pages, tortured beyond all recognition?

Why are you reading this, this non-sensical series of queries, when you could be doing so much more? You could write as simplistically as I am wont to do, at the pace of a spavined snail and understandable even by the child. You could create a narrative with meaning, one containing purpose, something to set the world alight or to quench the collective thirst of a generation a hundred years hence. You could sit by the roadside, your head carelessly positioned against some crumbling brick wall, and learn more of the world than I can hope to offer you, even if I had the talent of Joyce, the contempt of Carlin and the longevity of Methuselah himself.

Do you trust me? And, if so, why should you? You don't know me, or the odds that you do are so fantastically small that the absence of our familiarity is all but a guarantee, and yet you would allow me into the world you have carefully constructed around you. You would let me, either by an apparent apathy or unhidden self-destructive desires, to have an impact, no matter how slight, on the life you live. A life immeasurably separate to my own, separated by the depth of a shadow, and connected through words destined to fade in the ether as soon as your idly spinning, though hopefully temporarily fixated eyes seek something with a more satisfying air, something that will offer you resolution. If we had not met like this, as I speak down to you from a position of assumed authority, in a uniform stolen from the anal annals of history, of course you would not.

However, there is an inherent code of conduct within this relationship of ours, that I will take you on a journey so fantastical that you know it could not possibly be true, however much you would wish it so, or it would carry such an air of depressing realism that any room for doubt at the veracity of my words would, instead, be filled with rotten streets, desperate buildings and a stale sense of outrage, a lone voice crying out 'We're not dead yet!', or something equally as pointless, something equally as untrue.

Though, in a similar way, I could ask the same of myself. And, in my purported honesty, I do not know what answer I could possibly offer you. How can I trust you? You, with such maturity and such common sense, could take my words and wring them by the neck, warp them into a meaning I have never intended, a message so far from these empty words which rattle like change in that metaphorical beggar's rusting can. Weddings and wars, revolutions and persecutions and religions themselves have begun over much less than the ramblings of a drunk, self-inflicting this unearned weariness of our symbiotically colourless existence.

And then, I must ask the question to which I know the answer, but I have no desire to share. Can I trust myself? Do I believe that this following narrative is the truth, as best as I can recall it, through the haze of self-abasement and the arrogance hidden behind that thick smog? But then, does a sense of self-awareness, one which I am confident that I possess, (or possess the mental faculties to falsify the possession thereof), make that arrogance seem less pronounced? Does it push it deeper in to the mists of metaphor, like the Ripper fleeing into the close of the evening?

Are my half-formed politics, the combination of my deliberate disgust and unconscious love for this society in which we live, the twinned driving forces behind this rambled nonsense? Or is this merely a plea for consolation, for acceptance, for someone to see through these overly-embittered eyes of mine, to assuage my loneliness? Is this refuse, or art, or a madman's scribbling, no doubt to be found lying on the floor of some ancient asylum in years hence, and to have too much read into it by the shadows of scholarly children yet unborn?

That will do. For now. At least until the seed of this message, conjured as it is by me, by this arrogant narcissist who dares to place himself so far above you, has taken root inside my own soil and can be nurtured it into some grand literary theory, some epoch-defining poetry or eternal piece of prose, one to match the wits of Yeats and Huxley, of Lovecraft and Shakespeare and all those other depersonalised shades I struggle not to feel in this encompassing solitude.

Who are you to ask me for anything more?

I will tell you, because I know who you are, even if you find yourself lacking in that knowledge. Because, in this idle vision, you are what I have decided you are, as I wish I had the authority to elect a different role for myself within this modern-day horror, within the confines of this narrative lacking in phantasm, absent in purpose and, instead, offering a paradoxical replication of this stranger's mentality.

As you are no idle prince on the outskirts of my scene, I am no hero with his shoulders drawn back, with carefully kept hair and eyes carrying some reminiscence of the sky. I am no prophet, as I was supposed to be, and you are no fool to be tricked and trapped in your own insight, no rogue to be led into the silken jail of a narrative to which I lay my claim.

Simply put, dear reader, you are the critic and I am the drunk.

## T.S. Elliot

It wasn't until I opened my eyes, peeling them apart like the tarnished steel of broken elevator doors trapped within some long abandoned mine, and saw the state of the vented metal below me that I realised the extent of the trouble I had ignorantly dropped myself in. My mouth or, at least, the mouth which spread a few inches below my blurred eyes, hung open slackly, weakly coughing out the hopefully final, spattered remnants of the person who had held possession of my body for the previous few hours. I saw the brackish, yellowish liquid, which seemed to disgorge itself from the depths of my throat without ever requiring the slightest amount of effort from myself.

Through a wave of nausea, loathing and, yet, an undeniable sense of pride, I watched it race its merry, self-indulgent way along the rusting steel, occasionally slipping into the black holes regularly dispersed amongst the warm metal. I don't know how long I sat there, watching my creation, my head pushed deep into my arm, knuckles tightening about the flaking paint of a twisted steel bar, slippery with a stranger's sweat. When, finally, I did manage to raise my head for something besides vomiting into the cowering dark beneath me, it took almost as long again for me to summon a single coherent thought into the maelstrom raging behind my eyes, fighting its way between the hammer of one personality and the anvil of another, until it reaches the broken piece of burnt steel I would call 'me'.

I think, looking back with what I would hope could be named a critical eye, the best description I can offer of the world outside that rattling, empty vehicle, was that it was a flashing darkness. The bruised sky offered no sympathetic brightness, and so the only light available came from the flickering illuminations which advertised failing business after failing business, supported by the terror of headlights glancing across the chequer board of water which now layered the bus' window. It wasn't, however, until I saw the irritatingly cheerful, unmistakably purple light of Lenny Henry's favourite chain of hotels some distance away that the terror struck. Colour, that sickly unfamiliar entity, has never forced any great emotion on me, besides the typical connotations driven into everyone's psyche by the swinging, Damoclean threat of advertising, but in that moment, that specific shade of purple drove tendrils of sudden, blinding, sobering panic through the thick cloud of relative contentment I had formed around my senses. It split apart, not quite fading, but instead torn by that ancient Royalist's colour, as though the roar of a thunder-clap through the silence of some undiscovered, unknowable tropic.

Pulling apart my dry, cracked lips, I found it to be my own particular contribution to the encompassing scent of the bus which slipped back into my throat first and, as though some ill-conceived defence mechanism, I returned my head to the crook of my arm, hiding the foetid air emerging from a pair of lungs which, if pressed, I would have hesitantly been forced to call my own.

I felt the pressure of public transport for the first time since emerging into the encroaching darkness hours before, felt that anonymous, eclectic gaze which falls upon you the very moment you emerge from your front door and, unusually, welcomed it as a weakly flattering symbol of sobriety. With the overly careful movement of the quite incredibly drunk, I turned my head to gaze out of the window opposite me.

I saw her reflected in the darkness, too far behind me. Despite the blur, a mixture of the sheeting rain on the window and my own incoherent pupils, I could see her carefully not staring at me. I would have like to have said that her mouth was the first thing I saw, that those lips, twisted into a sneer of disgust, was the thing gave me control of my own body, that sent the boiling personification of inebriation in my veins back to a gentle simmer. I would have loved that to be true but, instead; it was her forearm that drew my attention. Her skin was plainly suffering under the same delusion of the mind that was infecting an increasing proportion of the women, and an admittedly uncomfortable percentage of men, who would call my home-town the same, that exposing genuine flesh to a 'surprisingly' unhealthy amount of radiation created a more attractive tone, a more approachable complexion.

However, squatting over the orange dust clinging to her skin was a hand-print. Not one of her own unique shade, as though she slept in that hot, claustrophobic capsule with one hand unintentionally tightened around her arm, but instead it was red and raised and ugly, with thick fingers that left little more than a molecule's breadth of un-bruised colour between their incongruous absence.

* * *

Had her disgust been as strong as I consciously desired, this narrative would have ended here. It is where it should have ended, with our protagonist begging for forgiveness from some physical representation of an imagined God, with our Author leaving some basic morality at the end of a pointless text. The story could be wrapped up with, perhaps, an additional paragraph about how he changes his life, free from this authorial influence, and goes on to enjoy great success as a legitimate businessman, that vague phrase of ultimate aspiration. Some morally unquestionable employee of BCCI?

Or the CEO of Dignitas, perhaps?

Then, it could be submitted to some respected literary magazine, or some general, widely-read tabloid. Neither would allow this narrative to become that which I would blatantly and egotistically desire, but it would allow me to feel as though I were a success, if only for a few days, before the doubts and the self-deceit return in some silent, unnoticed invasion.

Had the world been different, and the sight of a youth caught in the waterspout of his own destructive tendencies been a more shocking image, then how our protagonist's future, now an unalterable past, could have changed!

* * *

My imagination, what little of it remained amidst the feverish remnants of my mentality, stricken down by the dark Irish malady I had welcomed and, indeed, paid for the privilege of, took control of my flickering eyesight then. I saw, as clear as I had seen the vomit sinking into the metal beneath me, as clear as the disapproving glare of the bus' driver and the uncomfortable shifting of my subject, a creature's huge meaty paw swinging drunkenly around the dark and foetid room. Something of such a demeanour, of such an easy contemptibility, does not deserve the same title of humanity as the grey-faces, those one struggles to see against the replicated pavement, wandering the dead street.

Smoke hangs heavy in the air, against which the light of the television screen is, not reflected, but at least defined. One collective of exotic foreigners dressed in the uniform of Mancunians fails against a perversely inverted image of themselves, and it roars out its rage like the Minotaur, like some terrible Lovecraftian deity. It takes another drink, little less than a mouthful of some cheap, individually sold can from the eastern European-import shop situated around the corner to the west. And it hears the door creak open, the simple sound spitting nervousness into the ignoble air, into his ignoble air.

With a character at once a stranger, an intruder into their idyllic lifestyle (one reminiscent of some Irvine Walsh fantasy) and yet as well known to them both as the child which gently thrashes itself to life amongst the neatly folded shirts in the open cupboard drawer hidden in the corner of their room, it pushes itself to its feet. She flinches as the hand grabs at her, pulling her into the clean smoke and the foul stench of the monster's poisoned breath.

It takes another swig, and the fist moves through the air in one long, drawn out scene, all black and white stop-motion imagery, with the contrast turned up too high and the Instagram filters shifting with every third shot. It roars like a hyena, part sorrow, part laughter and part evolutionary desire, and she slumps to the floor in silence. The baby starts to cry, as it always does. She crawls across the stained carpet, rich with the stench of her own impotent efforts, her head carefully held below the smoke expelled from the beast's nostrils in huge gouts, absent of the flames they deserved.

There would be no apology for her tomorrow, no embarrassed, plastic roses in a nervous hand or some pitiful explanation to their mutual friends, with regards to the dangers of staircases or the aggressive nature of doors.

It was that contribution, that concoction of testosterone, something approaching adrenalin and a sense of disgust not as great as I wish it were, which added the brief, flashing dream of sobriety to the smelting pot of my consciousness. That dream was ignorant of the rain lashing down around our rattling cage, which stank of my vomit and the human refuse amongst whom I had cowered for the last hour.

Despite what little poison was left swirling in my stomach, it was the sight of that disinterested woman, with no expression on her face and a mark on her arm, pretending that I had made her day, her very existence, one measurable iota worse, which made me wince my way into relative control of my body. The self-loathing was, as a tool to awaken myself from the stupor of the drunkard, more effective than any Starbucks coffee, any over-the-counter medication or late-night, dramatised back-alley deal. I stared at her for a few moments more, feeling expression return to my decreasingly numbed features, feeling each strained breath in a body ill-designed for the life I bullied it through. I am certain my dull gaze, full of misdirected anger, made her uncomfortable; she must have felt it like a doe feels the coming of the storm, or the fire which eats at the forest after it has made its desperate escape. There was rage on that rattling, stinking vehicle, and it was a rage in which I, the recluse, gloried.

* * *

How is it going so far? Can you understand what I am trying to say, what I am trying to do? To lead you by one of these clammy, cold hands into a world of failed Romanticism, into an existence filled with the echoes of industries, dead or dying, and the ghosts of stronger, simpler men? To show you the undesired Heaven that I, or this caricature whom I would present to you as truth, was raised in, moulded by?

Can you imagine it to be different? A place where the gritty world of the North, the once industrial capital of our supposedly 'Sceptred Isle', lacks the things that made it so, all sold out to the gods of Health and Safety, of an equality only enforced when it is suitable, and nowhere else? An existence where a self-proclaimed 'Northern Playwright', that character whom, in their pride and their arrogance would dare to think of themselves as the 'Natural Genius', cares more for the reviews of the solitary? Yet somehow failing to realise that the stoically silent crowd is the critic? When they take the ghosts of better men, of Baum and Dickens, the heritage left behind by those whom would call themselves artists, and plagiarise them with a careful eye and a shaking hand.

Can you not see them, checking over their shoulder to make certain their infantile doubts remain undiscovered? When they sup at their white wine in the sun, and their mulled variation in the increasingly deniable bitter chill of winter, congratulating each other on their publicly lauded and yet, wholly imagined, successes?

* * *

The look the driver gave me as I muttered 'Cheers mate' and lurched gracefully off of the bus' bottom step, could only be described as pissed off.

I could hardly blame the man.

As the hiss of air announced the doors closing jerkily behind me, I stretched my back, feeling my slightly-oversized coat shift across my shoulders, sending a chilling breath of air sweeping into the back of my collar. In a battle which would have been noted as one of the greatest wars of history, it met the warmth escaping my flesh halfway down my spine. They swirled together; each one curling their writhing tendrils around the other's gasping form.

In the aftermath of that great conflict, I shivered, and stepped under the relative shelter of the bus-stop. It was one of those that appeared half-built, with half of said half corroding faster than lead piping by the sea, than teeth in a fat child's face or those lodged in some methamphetamine addict's slack maw, offering protection from the direction of the slice of grey that signified freedom, from the army of paratroopers dropping from the bruised sky, and little else. The timetable, one which would normally offer such invaluable information as '5, 27, 43 past every hour until 18:00', or the names of places which, in my imbecility, appeared to be torn straight out of some Grimm Fairytale or child's fable, whether it be Hag Fold, Daisy Hill or Cedar Grove.

Unfortunately, thanks to the whims of whatever being who so dares to call itself God, whom dares to operate in the cold, grey North (or the lack thereof), the plastic panel hung open and empty. No, empty is not the right word. It was filled with other information, much of which I have little doubt is normally privy to only the select few Scientologists, those who pay inordinate amounts of soft-earned wealth to have the secrets of the universe revealed to them. Information, in a mixture of red, streaked marker or carved into the greyish, purpling plastic, such as 'Gernie is krap', 'i luv it up the bum' (followed by a picture, of a character I assumed to be said poetic genius, taking what looked like an out-of-scale drawing of the Challenger straight between a pair of bulbous arse-cheeks), and an out of place heart, offering the complex romance, with echoes of the greatest Shakespearean Art and the tragedy of the last days of Troy, gathered together by some genius' knife and hewn into the machine-made tapestry to form, 'Gazzz + Ur Maaaa 4ever'.

Right. So I was definitely somewhere between Manchester and Liverpool, lost in the depths of that suburban sprawl of dull green and exciting grey. That mess of invention which marks the presence of those rapidly de-evolving creatures that I would no doubt feel obliged, albeit with a twinge of guilt, to offer the description of humanity to. That was okay, I remember thinking naively; I can deal with that. As I began to dig in my pocket for my phone, the thought which marched smartly to the forefront of my brain calmly informed me that I should 'ascertain as to the present location of my physical form', rather than incoherently babbling 'somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester', to any taxi or other form of transport I might manage to board.

The rain seemed to slacken, as though it approved of the incompetence in my logic, the marching host above me shrinking into the remnants of some great defeat, each light rap the tramp of a deserter's dishevelled boot in the mud. I stood perfectly still for the briefest of moments, enjoying the first glimmerings of sobriety in the chill air, the faint spit of the rain as it clapped against the pavement around me, passing me by, leaving me untouched and unsoiled in the darkened evening of a place I knew not. I smiled a genuine grin, despite how pained I imagine that expression must have appeared stretched across my lips, had there been another soul brave enough to venture out into that torrid night. I stepped out into the tears of a non-existent God and, for the first time in hours, perhaps days, I felt good. I felt alive. I opened my mouth, the words of a prayer that I had no belief in, to a being that didn't exist, hanging off my pregnant tongue like stalactites in some hidden cavern, water-logged and dark.

So I threw up again.

* * *

I remembered the heat, the breath clasped tightly in white-knuckled fists, as though its possessor was unwilling to let that one gasp of cold air, which grew warmer and warmer between her sweating fingers, into the relative rattling, ponderous bullet within which they waited. They waited, their thoughts already on the possibility of existence at the end of this short captivity, with eyes darting from blank space to blank space, neither sharing the same patch of tepid air, despite the obvious fact that they have been surviving, I would certainly not categorise what these 'people' do as 'living', on each other's breath for the better part of an hour already. In a mixture of rattling rails, hushed phone calls and the all too common huffs of irritated air, we made our stately way towards the old Town, a place devoid of personality and filled with the ghosts of the idealistic purveyors of consumerism.

I didn't want the journey to end; no more than Odysseus; in his deepest, darkest thoughts, those that twisted like coiling serpents in the dead of those ancient oceanic nights, desired his own pathway to cease. I didn't want it to end; no more than Alighieri, on his tenuous pilgrimage through the gates of Hell, through the hanging threat of Purgatory, wanted his worn feet to finally reach the foot of St. Peter's watchful workstation. That is one of the few memories which has stuck with me and has replicated itself. I close my eyes, and shallowly breathe in the stink of the pensive, worrying mass, and I tighten my lips around the thought. I feel (as rare an occurrence as that is) the world move below me and despite my knowledge that, in truth, I am moving above it, I feel peaceful.

The sounds are blotted out, reaching me warped and dazed around the headphones I have buried deep into my mind, as someone infinitely greater than I, greater than the thinly veiled parodies of personality crowded around me, journeys with me to a place they will never reach. They question me, and I have no answer for them, as they shallowly reply to my queries, to the warped logic cowering behind my own brow.

I close my eyes and tighten my jaw, an attempted compensation for the incredible, man-made overbite which plagues me, though I know the expression it forces onto my face. A misery, a failed contempt hangs in the air before me, kicking out in disbelief at its own mortality, its own realised intangibility. In my ears, a man who does not even know his own name, a man so warped by the years and the song and the dance that every word carries the weight of gold and yet remains half as comprehensible, replies to the questions of his companions with a self-referential epiphany of his own.

What other kind of epiphany is there?

##

## Bob Dylan

The night, no doubt weary with my idiocy and despite what I am sure was an intense search into the depths of its unknowable heart had clearly run out of any remnant of its previously piteous nature. It opened its eyes in some grotesque parody of myself or, perhaps it would bear more honesty to say the reverse, lest that former offer some insight into the deep-seated arrogance which forms a part of even the most humble drunkard's personality.

I pushed the panel shut. Leaning against it, my shoulders dug into the plastic frame. My lungs shuddered and my eyes, caught halfway to shame, filled with tears. The aftermath was always worse, when the recovery and the fire in the throat struggled, each warring for dominance in the cold dark. The plastic felt warm against my skull, a contrast with the chill air lapping at my face, as though my paled flesh were the white sanded shore of some ancient Mesopotamian isle.

I tilted my face to the sky, the rain rattling on the assumed Perspex roof of my tentative shelter. I remember a sense of disillusionment, a sense of... guilt, that I had some shelter from the weak ravages of nature, whilst the world around me was washed clean. As the thought struck me, I struggled to focus my eyes on the black streak which, still, marked my emergence onto the street. It had thinned beneath the pressure of its peers, fellow liquid biting into the bleak colour, spreading it across the paving, seeping into the cracked stone as though it were the rushing regurgitation of the Red Sea, filling in that holy, murderous valley.

Behind me, ripping their way through the spray, sets of headlights too-bright, of blinking taillights like the eyes of politicians, of dull faces as featureless ovals, overjoyed that they possess a shelter superior to my own tore along the road, with less freedom than I possessed, despite what Springsteen and his spiritual successors would have the world believe. They made their ponderous way across deliberately uneven ground, the lies of freedom emerging from every stereo, from every twisted knob, worn away by the monotony of the same station, by the sheer unpredictability of the same choices, the same ignorant acceptance of the obvious truths, by Einstein's clichéd definition of insanity.

I watched them for a while, my eyes flickering from vehicle to vehicle, searching for some example of assumed freedom, for some notion of originality amidst the monotony of high-speed persuasion, for truth, however maligned, however unreliable the source. The rain slackened and resumed whilst I stared out, answering questions no one but I had asked, and no one but I would ever ask. I thought of Rorschach and Manhattan and the definition of villainy, of Motorhead and money and sex, the overwhelming desire to be 'cool' and the sounds of distant ships docking, of the violent grass floating on an ever more aggressive wind and the breath of the trees in the depths of night, and how each had sent inspiration hurtling out in the stratosphere of collective creativity. I thought of everything and I thought of nothing and the similarities between the two, whilst my pupils continued to twist, to writhe and dart within the hazily-defined parameters of my skull.

* * *

There was a chill in the air that night, an indication, if any was needed, that none of my actions for the last several hours had been ones I would repeat if only the collected coherence of my thoughts would resurrect itself from a self-inflicted semi-stupor. My body, my physical shell and little more, was in a bad way. Exhaustion and misery warred together for dominance. Looking back, pain should have entered into that same grudge match, but the air was so bitter and my mind was all but numb, and so the agony I expected must have simply washed over me, tepid bathwater over some sudden and undesired, unattended erection.

* * *

The room isn't silent, it isn't possible with even such a number of people, but it is closer to it than any gathering I had heard before. The old men, bent forward over the bar, didn't appear to hear the floor creak as I stepped through it. In an ideal world, the door would have been a pair, and both would have swung open, dragging in the refuse of the weather I had summarily abandoned. The cold air would have rushed around the room, announcing my arrival even before I said a word. I would have paused for a moment, savouring the air, the relative warmth seeping into my unfeeling bones. I would have strolled straight to the bar, and ordered a whiskey. Something straight, something Eastwood would have sipped at, his enemies drawing in around him before, with a tip of his hat and a flicker of his poncho, he leaves the undertaker more business than he could otherwise have dreamt of, a little piece of economic stimulus in consistently hard times.

Unfortunately, due to some selfish architect, the door was single and, due to the incompetence of the owners, already open. The fake yellow light spilled out into the rain, the little influence it enjoyed extending no more than a foot before it failed against the night. The jukebox was hidden away in the corner as though the place was ashamed of it, ashamed of the very idea of variation it suggested.

My first mistake, approaching me as quickly as the enquiring gaze of the bartender, like the watch-light of some prison complex scanning for an escapee, was acting as though I was sober. I walked too straight, too carefully; too concerned with keeping my head down, too worried about the eyes I could feel on me, so I just walked. That journey seemed eternal. I walked, and I walked and I walked, straight into a group of young 'men', crowded around their half-finished drinks, their first round of the night.

They were young, certainly no older than me. Their hair was either cropped short, making them look like they were recently recovering from some kind of aggressive chemotherapy, or what they no doubt thought of as 'long' albeit gelled up, into some spiked mess more reminiscent of Sonic the Hedgehog than whichever footballer they were no doubt attempting to replicate. They wore the same shirts, Calvin Klein or some such, well made and fitted, but to a shape that clearly was not their own. Oh, they had rolled up the sleeves, to display their muscles and tribal tattoos, like peacocks fluffing out their plumage, to disguise the ill-fitting, semi-expensive material.

I could give you a detailed description of each, their faces ingrained into my memory, but, in actuality, they all looked the same. The same incredulous expression across the same features, chiselled in the way that a pigeon's shit is a rainbow of colour one would choose to decorate their child's nursery. They stank of cheap aftershave, evidently labouring under the belief that buying one relatively expensive shirt instantly made them undeniably appealing to women. They looked skeletal, despite the protein shake stains I could all but see on their lips, despite the regular trips to the gym I could see burnt across their forearms. They were the image of a lower-middle class youth, though possessing much greater aspirations, engaged in that most sacred of activities. They were 'on the pull'. Unsurprisingly, it hadn't entered their mind to go somewhere with an audience for their self-congratulatory attraction.

So, it wasn't much of a surprise when they crowded around me, each one attempting to loom over me, despite the fact that I had a good few awkward inches on them. Rather than threatening, it became almost homoerotic, a crowd of fake-tanned men in faux-formal wear, the culmination of which resembled something closer to the warm afternoon of a Clay Aiken concert, than some generically branded, foul-smelling pub in the North of England.

* * *

I should have been terrified and, believe me, under normal circumstances I have no doubt I would have been. I cannot, if I am at least pretending to maintain a sense of respectful honesty, offer the pretence that I am particularly brave, or confident, or in fact, a great example of humanity, some weak, shallow step in the same vague direction of evolutionary design. But then again, can't I? After all, I am the author and, in this world at least, I could be the perfect man. I could be a mixture of Stephen Hawking, Conan the Barbarian and Tom Cruise, or any triadic creature you, yourself, would prefer.

But then, should this thing attacking your senses offer you such a sense of interactivity? Do I leave blank pages, for you to fill in the narrative? A parody of the emptiness of my own thoughts, a criticism of some visual theory or a simple desire to add more pages to a text that I, myself, struggle to hide a lack of confidence in? Do I become who you want me to be, who I want me to be, or who the person across the way would desire me to be, were they holding this thin sheaf of paper, electrical or not, and not you?

Jesus, look at me, asking the questions I am supposed to answer for you. That IS why you're here right? Some obscure piece of nonsense, disguised as literature, promising you answers to either an existence of your own, or some widely applicable, wholly generic platitude, designed to make you aware of the facts that you knew all along, that most people in this abused world have it worse than you, than me? That we live in a time of plenty, whether we can afford it or not? That the coloured child with the distended stomach staring out at you from the depths of a silvered screen, deserves more sympathy than you can hope to garner for your self-inflicted headache, and the sheer exhaustion of the working life compares as nothing to the old man, his strength long failed, holding his pale wife's hand in a soulless room filled with reflections of themselves.

Ah well, just do exactly the same as the rest of us do. Turn your head away and think of something else, change the channel, lift a different book, play with a button on your coat, twist the ring on your finger. What scares me most is that I don't need to do that anymore. I'm little more than a child still, but I can stare at a starving boy, into the recorded eyes of its begging mother, and not feel a fucking thing.

That IS the next level, you realise? This world we live in now, it doesn't create the depressed, it doesn't form the angry young men that spit in society's eyes, with a fast song containing an even faster narrative, plucked with slow fingers incapable of conveying true meaning; it doesn't create outraged authors and artists with legitimate opinions. It forges people like I, the Walking Dead, the Zombie, the people who come alive only for the briefest of moments, and cannot understand the feeling. I may as well simply be another side character in a John Braine novel, for all this idealised humanity I have left in me.

* * *

The three of them laughed as if they had achieved some great victory when I placed the drinks before them. Their carefully, carelessly jelled hair standing above them like pricked hedgehogs, an intruder in the territory they saw as theirs raising their hackles. I smiled at them tightly, swaying back to the bar with the same peacock-assurance of my new 'friends'. I rolled my shoulders, swinging my elbows widely in the same swagger they employed.

As I imitated my way towards the solitary glass sitting atop the small, bronzed grate set into the notched wood, the jukebox cut out, whatever asinine tune it had been playing cutting off before I could even consider a suitable comparison. I had been thinking of going with 'The screeching of a spavined weasel, one with his balls caught in a weed thresher', but decided that may well be too 'high-brow' for the collected examples of humanity I was amongst. The silence stretched out as my hand extended towards the surface, twitching as though in the throes of some terrific war's aftermath, or the first sign of a premature stroke. I closed shaking fingers about the warmth, savouring the feeling of its texture, or lack thereof, in my hand.

Not a standardised glass, it had been blown with grooves moving from the middle of the walls down to the base. It was circular at the tip, running in a perfect ring as though fashioned from a Da Vinci doodle, but the base was squared, the corners cutting against my fingertips. I lifted it to my eyes, swirling the golden liquid within at a simple twitch of my wrist, one which had become a habit of mine even with an empty hand, the cracking of my joint a regular sound in the all too common silences. With pupils darting, following the wave as it rode upon itself, curving against the confines of its cage, I fancied some being huger than comprehension, swirling a glass and watching our universe turn, its eyes following the curves, as mine did, tracing an outline of the whiteness against the interminable grey of existence, as mine did. It closed its eyes, drew its lips back in a feral snarl, of animosity and depression and apathy and need, and downed the glass in one, an existence tumbling into the shadowy recesses of its throat, trashed against the walls of muscles and splitting, twisting and turning further down into the depths of that canal.

I became of aware of the silence again, and the eyes on me. My supplier, his hands moving stereotypical around a dirty glass, the grey rag in his hands achieving little more than to even out the filth, stared at me with an expression that even I, with all my descriptive genius, could not hope to comprehend the meaning behind. He looked like Napoleon, short and portly and dressed plainly, one hand invisible beneath the twisting rag, his eyes small and reminiscent of the pig heads Dad used to bring back from work. As the simile struck me, no doubt the very sight of that liquid evoking the talent of Hemmingway in me, I smiled, genuinely and honestly, raising the glass to an imagined personal history, though my hand was lifted towards the bartender. He nodded at me, no longer concerned at my odd behaviour, now convinced of the inebriation I had only shortly since tired of hiding, but lacking knowledge of my excuse for a thought process.

I turned away, fixing my gaze in the direction of the jukebox, the glass trembling weakly in my tightened grasp. In a few short steps, not all of them in exactly the right direction, I was there. The light was broken in one half of the frame, shattered, though the first bulb remained, the other swept away to some unknowable locale. The half that remained shone; intermittently yellow and red, and the colours were as familiar to me as home. I made to lay the drink down on the high table beside it though my fingers refused to unclasp themselves, as though Dracula attempting to pry the stake from his heart.

My other hand, ignoring the shame its twin brought upon me, clicked at the solitary button, sliding page after page of names and artwork, titles and legends chained to their own generations past me. And then it stopped dead. There. A name I recognised, followed by an army of more. I hid a genuine smile beneath a false grin and dug my hand into a pocket, searching for that small circle formed of I know not what combination of copper and zinc and silver, that meant nothing but joy for a few brief minutes, nothing but satisfaction for a few brief seconds.

## Frank Turner

I sang softly albeit out of tune, another man's words quietly directed to the room at large. I let my fingers flicker across the machine some more, eyes reduced to slights from a shameful sense of over-dramatised emotionality. On a more practical level, it reduced the blurring of my eyes to a simple haze thereby allowing me to pick exactly what was going to fill the stagnant air for the next few minutes, allowing me to neatly sidestep the incompetence of a drunk's eyesight.

I breathed around my stolen utterance, stepping back in satisfaction. I turned away, weaving back to the table on which my three new acquaintances sat, watching me with the surprised gazes of particularly aggressive, albeit surprised, pigeons. I sipped at the glass, feeling my imagined wit return in that warmth. Like the blurring in my eyes, causality straightened, and my ability to run my fingers over the thread of this narrative, smoothing out the kinks, flattening it against the pitted table, returned with an absence of fanfare.

'Any Narrative,' I began, pulling out the fourth and final seat of the small table, joining them like a druid late for a sacrifice, like a monarch late for an orgy, 'can be read out like a road map, every overly-expositional scene and fresh character built like a bypass around difficult terrain.' There was a moment of all but silence, save for the solitary voice murmuring in the corner, barely reaching to where I sat, though I had repeated the conversation many times before.

'I knew a writer a few years ago,' I continued, careful to avoid any hint of disgust at the title, one she deserved no more than I did, 'and she had a stratagem for delivering advice which had gone beyond the border marking obsession. First, she would pounce upon any lack of a narrative structure, divided into five parts, apparently believing that unless the contents of any plot could be firmly positioned above another, it did not constitute an entire story. I can't remember them anymore, no doubt a triumphant result of my refusal of her every word; but they were all given the most ignorant of de noms, A Call to Arms and Things Go Well, an' shit like that.'

I clenched my left hand tightly, keenly aware of the brief slip in my accent, hoping against hope that the three hadn't noticed. They seemed interested in what I was saying; eyeing me as though I had been provided simply for their own entertainment, each mirroring a grin of simple humour, as though everything I said was a joke, part of some overly-long set up.

'But throughout history people who think themselves experts on the matter, exactly the same as that over-indulgent cow, have struggled to drive a nail through the idea of what makes a narrative a narrative, and what denies any tale that title. Even Aristotle,' I paused for the briefest of moments, searching hopelessly for some sense of recognition in their shining expressions, 'even Aristotle had decided that a narrative had to have three sections.' The lad to the left seemed about to speak, as though inspiration had torn through the ages, straight from the mouth of that small, bearded man dressed in cloth, stained with democracy. I gave him plenty of time, enough for me to take another sip from my glass at any rate, but he seemed unable to organise that sudden burst of wisdom into any kind of understandable utterance.

'Of course, these are the beginning, the middle, and the end, and we all know that every narrative possesses these three, whether they abide by a sense of linearity, or the author finds himself desiring to forge a literary aroma of a more chaotic inclination. He had other suggestions of course, he was never one to leave things so simple, was our Aristotle; reversals, complications, discoveries and catastrophes, but resolution is the one believed to be the most important.' I grinned at myself, shaking my head gently. 'They,' my grin twisted in on itself, as though simply the thought of an author was a bitter taste, 'mustn't disappoint their fanbase must they, by leaving a narrative unfinished? There are few things worse than an unfinished story.'

I heard the scent of the image of their silent mockery, taking it in with something approaching pride, even as I raised my glass to block it out. The song, quiet and unheard throughout my equally muted, meaningless monologue, finally petered out. I shamelessly plagiarised a modern-day poet and muttered along with his last sorrowful statement.

'The next round's on me.'

* * *

How's that? Am I yet managing to 'tickle your fancy', 'get your goat', 'lure you in', or 'create an image in your mind'? Have I engaged you as though I squatted before you on bended knee, some symbol of a capitalist's love weighing heavy in my hand? Do you feel that if you can just follow through all this bullshit, all this realistically dramatised exposition, I will have some answer to provide you with? That some semblance of morality will emerge from such twisted ramblings as mine?

No, that is something you would expect from a writer, and I have already sworn to you that I am not any reasonable example of such. So, why are you still here? Is it from some simple desire to 'power through' something you have already sunk minutes of your time into? Self-abuse, perhaps, wrapped in I know not what petty justifications? A compulsive need to explain, even unto yourself, that you are so terribly Indie, that the Counter-Culture is where your allegiances lie like a hound at the hearth? Or is this a product of education for you? Is there some silhouetted figure who doesn't understand you, who was never young themselves, stood over you with the ghost of a cane, the spectre of a folded belt in hand?

Don't get me wrong, especially after that particularly aggressive line of questioning; I am extremely grateful that your eyes are still following these movements of my fingertips, that your conscience is still moderately engaged with what little intellect I possess, an intellect which appears to decrease with the break of every page, but I cannot pretend to understand why they are, why it is.

* * *

I staggered out of the archway, obscuring the light with my personality, gagging in the fresh air, sickly to my tongue. My right hand gestured vaguely behind me in a mixture of farewell and rejection, the past few minutes, since having turned into hours, failing to take root in the barren earth of my memory. It's incredible how little control I have over my own body, that long night a reflection of my own frailties, my own inconsistence in physicality and morality and any other '-ality' I can conjure, from the depths of an unheard mind against the scream of instantaneous desire.

The pavement looked different in the yellow light of the street, each crack and broken slab squatting on a layer of weeds and dirt. Before the road came, a slice formed by the cemented influence of some industry-obsessed God, there was a concession to nature. A plinth ran the length of the road, running perpendicular to the smoothed asphalt. Too long and thin to be designed with anything more than decoration in mind, its stones crowded loosely together, as though a crowd gathering for a sermon, some worthless collection of platitudes along the slopes of some Galilean Mount. Buried amongst this cacophony of stone, sat three patches of dirt, almost black in the half-light.

Wilting beneath that heavy, man-made light, I saw a pair of flowers, alone in each of their squares.

The first, its leaves spread in a plea for respite, forced open for what little natural brightness reflected from the incomprehensibly close surface of the moon. Its stem was thick, though it was clear that its resilience to the biting cold was starting to falter, the green tissue sagging and paling from the hue it must once have enjoyed. Whether it be the fragmented design of nature, the brief hobby of some religious vandal with a flair for the dramatic, or the hand of our industrialist God himself, it had been crucified. Behind it, dug deeply into the dirt, was a wooden cross with thin sections of wire wrapped tightly around the protrusion, holding the flower to it like a lover, or a rapist. The shadow of the crucifix stretched out across the filth, possessing a twisted lack of proportion to the object itself.

The second flower appeared as little more than a haze in comparison to that brutish, albeit fading, solidity. There was a hint of translucence about its ethereal whiteness. Its stem thin beneath a heavy, intellectual head. Despite this, it stretched taller and prouder than its tortured brethren, as though it remained unstained by the dirt in which it stood, by the chilling air of this Northern Hell or the crushing pressure of the humanity I assume planted that angelic flora in such an obviously unappealing place.

I found myself filled with a sudden desire to rescue the thing. To wrap my hands around it and carry it away from here, from this place, this prison of dirt and stone beside a grey streak of flashing darkness and spitting water, away from the purveyors of poison behind me. I stalked towards it, my breathing quickening at the thought of such a good deed, at the hardening of such an unfamiliar desire.

It was only when I neared my target that I decided to look towards the third flower, set in the final patch of earth, as though the sudden shift of my gaze was the ethereal plant's first defence against such a well-meaning aggressor as I.

It was empty.

My pace slowed and stopped until I was barely a foot away from that pedestal, staring with open-mouthed shame at the small hill of disturbed earth, which acted as my tentative evidence that, at some point in recent past, an organism had stood there. Someone like me, perhaps with motives similar, had stomped here like a leviathan and torn something from its resting place. I could imagine some great, Herculean hand enwrapping the delicate flower, a twin to the ethereal, crushing it beneath humanity's good intentions. Leaves crumpled beneath coarse flesh, petals tumbled to the earth, curving around unfeelingly generous fingertips, thorns pricked as hard as they could, resolutely ignored in the midst of righteousness.

I backed away, the movement swiftly turning into a fully realised retreat. Without desire, my eyes twisting between the three, disgusted by the physical, amazed by the ethereal, and horrified by the absence of what should be.

* * *

Here, caught between two phrases of nothing, I would ask you to leave. Put the book down and walk away. Ignore the pages your eyes tell you are still in place, trailing after this like increasingly lost children behind a rat catcher cheated of his prize, like the throng behind a union leader or a swarm of businessmen behind the prospect of pointlessness. Leave on this half-realised metaphor, this quasi-imagery with uncomfortable overtones as though the very numeric itself is owned by some religious sect simple in its mystery and blatant in its lack of morality. Walk away, dear reader, walk away and live this life you would call your own without this approaching disappointment, without this encroaching absence of satisfaction, without me.

* * *

'Of course,' I continued, settling back into my seat, interrupting the brief, no doubt pointless trialogue, 'narratives are also often designed as a shallowly disguised reflection of a journey that we, ourselves, as real people, must undergo in order to live what the Author would like to believe to be a full life. Typically, this takes the form of some kind of unexplainable love interest, often with a character that there is no reason why he or she should feel so strongly about them. But then, perhaps, that is part of it? Love is not there to be explained by a narrator, it is something to be tasted, discovered, touched upon and, ultimately, lost, forgotten, replaced with bitterness.' I shrugged, the lack of a drink weighing heavily in my hand. 'Narratives are not positioned to describe love to us, but rather to explain the destructive or increasingly rare creationist aspects of that supposed enigma.'

'You know, I read once that when someone is in love, or at the very least involved in that juvenile crime of infatuation, the chemical balance within their brain is warped. In fact, it becomes warped in such a way that it bears a closer resemblance to the minds of those poor individuals suffering from OCD.' I shook my head, as though I could shake those vile chemicals out of my own mind. 'Does that not explain the beginnings of it? Does that not show you how understandable love is, and yet the individuality of love can never be comprehended by a separate person, at least, not in the same way as its original perpetrators?'

'The trouble is, in this world of sheer, soul altering modernity; love is already an outmoded concept. Love tends to be forged in drama, of which there is very little of any consequence in our personal lives, no matter what those bitches posing in a hotel mirror seem to believe, no matter what those bastards whom seem to think that their entire life belongs upon the stage may hold to be true.' The three of them no longer looked even the remotely bit interested in the stream of contentious nonsense spewing from my bile-branded lips.

'Well, Rush said that 'All the world's a stage, and we are merely players', I paused, hoping, praying one of them would recognise the saying and correct my falsified idiocy or, at the very least, perk up at the mention of the band 'but that is bullshit. Personality, I will agree, is an act, something which our minds throw up to defend ourselves like a wall around a bottomless well. Love, when it is real, when it is the kind that keeps you awake at night with unnecessary talons across the flesh, ignores those moss-covered stones. It plays the part of the stereotypically incompetent, evolutionary dead-end that culminates in a variation of little Timmy, and plummets straight down into the shadows of the water below.'

'Whether that is a good thing or not, I honestly cannot say. I have heard and forged arguments for both sides of the line. I have listened to men saying love is non-existent, and I have listened to women state the chemical properties of the emotion. I have sat in corners whilst men declared it the greatest thing in their lives, and how they would starve without it, and I have known women who believe it to be nothing more than a cheat code, one designed wholly to get them into a man's bedroom, or he into hers.'

'Ah well,' I ran a hand through my hair, allowing myself to scratch at my jaw before I returned it to its ignoble position in my lap, 'who am I to say, either way?'

## Plato

Until recently, I had considered myself part of the increasingly attainable Counter-Culture, a term which means less and less with every passing declaration, every twin chord song with a lyrical glorification of some inane segment of a modern day life. It appears to me now, after long, depressing periods of examination, both internal and external, that everyone feels as though they are part of this idea, that they are a cog in the ever turning machine of revolution. Everyone above a certain age, or below a certain age, with a certain amount of wealth and without a penny to their name, wants to play the part of the rebel, to be individual, and they scream this desire out with their every movement, their every mind-rotting word. Hell, I'm no different, even now I'm placing myself outside this cultural analysis, an outsider looking in, when in actuality, I am as deep in the waters as you. The only difference between us, if indeed we both agree that such a difference exists, and is not another example of my awkward self-positioning, is that I can't swim.

Whilst remaining a pretty damned good metaphor, it is also true. I simply never learnt. Not through a lack of trying, of course, I love being in the water, I love the feeling of forced, relative weightlessness, of being carried along by the whims of something bigger than myself, of being little more than a miniscule collection of carbon drifting on the waves. And then I sink, choking for breath beneath the calm waves, thrashing like a condemned man at the noose, my actions invisible to anyone besides the strangers alongside me, the air weakly escaping from their lungs, as it weakly escapes from mine.

Well, that is what I always thought. But the 'Counter-culture', this rejection of the ideals of the 'mainstream' in favour of a set of values I am supposed to define for myself, which are to be astonishingly in concordance with those of my peers, as though we all read from the same script. Well, people my own age are, typically, scum, the legacy of a Thatcherite generation, too far sold into a lack of community, a failure of an education system and a government exposed as corrupt, whilst still pretending to a moral standing.

Okay, so perhaps my politics, those half-baked, burnt out ideologies of mine, are creeping in, but would you expect anything different? Perhaps if I had a greater mastery of language, a more standardised feeling of pacing and the narrative trickery designed to keep your eyes flickering from page to page, then my semi-political rambling may have some attraction to it. I could take the form of a 1984 for modernity, or a Brave New World for a language developing into hash tags, replacing standard and law with one designed for the living human. Whatever that word may mean.

* * *

The jukebox spat out the last words, spluttering around them indignantly, some one-hit wonder overly-enthusing the fact that the singer, or some characterisation he present as truth, is trapped between a pair of comedic terrorists. I finish nodding my head idly along with it moments before the song ends, pushing open the door to the bathroom with one hand. The wood was cold, and its surface felt almost aqueous beneath my fingertips, as though it sweated under the pressure of its role. The handle was gone, to where I never knew, but instead it left a gaping hole, just big enough for an eye to comfortably glare past the splinters. I squeezed past it, allowing it to swing gently backwards. The little definition of masculinity at the centre of the rectangular portal was missing both his legs and one of his arms, the deformities revealing the pale texture beneath, mocking the once richly-painted, naturally manufactured wood with its sudden exposure to Northern air.

The door was little more than a precursor to the kind of room into which I had entered. The floor beneath my boots was stained, a panoply of the black of vomit missing the obligatory stereotype of yellow, the cream of piss derived from an over-abundance of sugar in the blood, the crimson of a fantasy writer's image of old blood and the universal brown of unhealthy shit. The smell had been dressed up in some cinnamon scent, the nasal equivalent of an oversized bruiser wearing his illegitimate daughter's leaver's-do dress, the obvious effort involved completely failing to hide the natural strength of a working-class existence, and certainly failing to hide the hanging bollocks. The air felt oily, as though the small room, tiled and mirrored and hung with the uniquely flickering lights which only seemed present in the grotty bathrooms of grotty bars, no matter how much make-up and concealer the temporary management applied, was in desperate need of either a shower or a Molotov cocktail or, preferably, some combination of the two.

The place appeared empty, save for the only cubicle door closed, the little indicator in the greying plastic clearly fulfilling its purpose and indicating that, indeed, someone was present within the small cage of privacy, and he would thank you to mind your own fucking business. I passed it by, heading straight for the only intact urinal, the twins on either side of my target hanging off the wall like forgotten Christmas decorations from a tree, jagged edges sticking out into the thick air, cutting it as it steadily trudged past. As I began my ablutions, I allowed my eyes to wander, something that it typically inadvisable in a man's bathroom, particularly if they begin to wander downwards but, alone as I was, wander they did. I saw the cracked ceiling, the whole mirror coated in greased fingerprints which would probably be extremely useful to the police's database and the broken mirror, lying in shards in one of the yellowing sinks, with its tap still dripping out a solid rhythm no doubt capable of topping the charts with its dullness. Huddled onto the narrow counter, coiled like a serpent caught devouring its own tail; sat the real indication of humanity and existence in this semi-urban wasteland of grey-faces, grey-fields and grey-days.

It was a bracelet, for a given value of the word. It was black, and well-worn, and mass-produced, but meaningful. It was the mark of civility and understanding, of the kind of life that I dreamed the imagined Counter-Culture meant. It was the one shared cry of outrage from those I would have thought to call peers. In letters and punctuation twisting around the plasticised material, white as empathy and a sin against the darkness, ran the legend:

S.O.P.H.I.E.

* * *

I fingered the wristband, slipping my crooked, bony index finger beneath the elasticised material, taking my frustration out on the small patch of skin beneath the circle. The crowd was getting on my nerves, I don't mind saying. Why, in the name of Yahweh, Dagon or any other creature born from the phosphorus of human imagination, do people feel the need to ruin the atmosphere by whipping out their needlessly expensive, fruitfully branded phones and turning the glory of a shifting shadow into a parody of an incredibly distant urban skyline?

Even the most 'hard-core', the one's with the tattoos, the ripped, fading t-shirts and wrinkling mouths spread open to scream along with the lyrics, all pause in their thrashing movements, raising hands unburdened by self-loathing to record the event, preserving it in their memory at the cost of the present enjoyment, sacrificing the event they were attempting to capture to the gods of posterity. I shook my head sadly, aware that even the rattling, spitting cacophony, which formed my current Northern-line of thought, was taking me away from the euphoric state in which I should reside.

The men upon the pedestal, a wooden stage whose metaphorical existence they had made with their own hands, but whom would have had less than no idea how to literally craft, either loved the view of a hundred blinking lights dotted amongst the dark, or they hated it. Either way, it drove them to greater and greater heights of performance, the pressure of a million YouTube viewers pressing down in uncomfortable places, particularly where the few thousand people in the crowd had failed to create any significant weight.

The cameras shifted, stray reflections of light caught in the waves of some shallow, black ocean. I tried, again, to lift my head above the water, to breathe the chill air in the warmth of sweat and spilt booze, of the overflow of urine and the sickly breath of the 'Alternative'. Every second hand raised, either to support their phone or in some variation of the twisted goblet so favoured by Dio, had the same wristband hanging off it that I had, the thing that had become the mark of individuality, of presenting yourself as whom you are inside, instead of conforming to some massed stereotype. As I thought that, I raised my own hand, fingers extending like a striking serpent towards the stage, so that my uniqueness could be expressed in a replication of everyone else.

* * *

My stream ended, both that of consciousness and that of a liquid physicality, with the last few droplets hitting the ceramic target, as the last of those cameras snapped and flickered and faded in my memory. As if the sky shared my needs, I heard the rain resume, rattling against the opposite side of the wall I faced. I hid myself, zipped myself away and turned from the half bowl, moving towards the mirror. I avoided glaring too deeply into the reflection, despite feeling those hungry, desperate eyes boring into my bowed forehead. If I didn't stare at myself, or rather, at him, did that simple act deny him existence? Just as a tree in the forest may make no sound when it tumbles to the dirty ground below, would a reflection be refused physicality, if that is indeed what a mirror offers such a thing, if it simply went unseen?

But even emerging from that, we could ask ourselves that, throughout history, if a person does not leave a lasting impression on the course of human events, so that they are remembered long after the last of their ashes are spat out of existence, can they ever, truly, have been said to exist at all? Or do they open up themselves to becoming somewhat of an easier target for whatever the real world variation of the Ministry of Truth will become? But then, by making such an impact on humanity, do they make themselves greater targets if said ministry ever comes into existence?

I say if, but already the Conservative government, albeit with a few yellow-tied cowards amongst their ranks, have removed a decade of speeches from their official archive. This, of course, comes after the words of the Mandela-hating Prime Minister, who once claimed that the Internet's archive would add a further degree of democracy to the business of politics. I found my eyes, clearing from the haze of the last glass of whiskey, drift towards the mirror filled with a sudden, twinned desire to offer the helping hand of existence to my reflection and, in some way so minor as to be barely worth mentioning, to cement my own existence through a sensory input relying on myself, and no one else.

As I caught sight of the lower half of my torso in the mirror, I heard the sound of a thousand rushing canals, the sound of rapids crashing on stone in the rivers of the ageing, distant British Columbia, the waves in the dead of night and most accurately, albeit lacking in a certain poetic imagery, the rattling of ponderous waste spilling through a sewage pipe.

I don't know about you, despite my apparent profession to understand everything about everything, to be the Alpha and the Omega of this entire narrative, but I have an image of the Counter-Culture. An image which has been no doubt impressed upon me by the overreaching presence of the entity, despite my experience informing me otherwise and I expect this image to be one you share.

Perhaps hair grown overly long, in some manner which clearly states to the world 'I am in no way prepared to take on a managerial position', clearly disregarding any sense of obligation or justice to whatever talents may lie beneath that mass of dead protein. Whether it is grown wild or oiled and lacquered carefully into some overly-feminine bob, dyed at the fringe, and more referential to some steam-punk version of Thatcher than the Rock icons they claim to understand. Some vest, displaying an obscure Punk band 'you've probably never heard of', whilst remaining famous enough so that you are completely certain to understand exactly how obscure their t-shirt is.

Thin and pale, dressed almost exclusively in black, one arm heavy with armbands displaying all those 'Alternative' events they have attended. Surly and angry, lacking in emotional maturity and, instead, locked in a permanent haze of middle-class teenage angst.

When the cubicle swung open, I caught a glimpse of the man whom I immediately and slightly ashamedly, assumed could not possibly be the bracelet's owner, before my habitual insecurity took control and my eyes twisted downwards like the spiralling wreckage of some horrendous, internationally tragic mid-air collision. I moved to the side, leaning my hands on the chilling sides of the next bowl, the ceramic biting into the tightly sagging skin between my thumbs and index fingers. The mirror, half fractured, shards lying in the sink below me, glared back with startling animosity, as though every foul thought, every supposed sin and guilty memory hiding within my subconscious had materialised, had attained physicality in the over-used metaphor of the shattered reflection, no doubt karmic retribution for the ignorance of my reflection in the whole mirror.

The strangest thing about him was, simply, the lack anything strange. His hair was a dark brown and cut in a way which, whilst not exactly rebellious, possessed little more than a suggestion of sensibility. He had broad shoulders, in relation to my own, and stood a little shorter than I did. His features, as far as that fleeting sight offered me, appeared honest, though his eyes, hooded like the more intellectual cunt during a riot, and the hint of stubble hanging from his jaw like the mark of Cain, offered a paradoxical explanation to the cut of his smart black trousers and well-fitted blue shirt. His collar was undone, and the black tie had been stretched out, hanging around his neck like a well-made, expensive noose. I caught sight of his hands as he moved to the basin, watching the white water run, like a lake in the district of the same name, over his reddened knuckles and the silver of a wedding ring winking at me from the refuge of his fourth finger.

Right, this looks weird. I'm half bent over some filthy sink, staring at a hundred fragmented reflections of myself, each one blinking back with undeniable curiosity or, in the cases of those imagined reflections hidden beneath their peers, a deserved animosity. I back away from the ceramics, heading into the cubicle this respectably disrespectable stranger had so recently vacated. As I gently pulled the door towards me, I saw the stranger pick the wristband up in solid, confident fingers, and slip it over his wrist. I drew my lips back in a tight, unseen smile which felt more like a grimace, and my trembling fingers slid the bolt shut.

## Leo Tolstoy

Are you beginning to feel a little more comfortable now? That the shift from these randomly positioned interjections from the keyboard of a stranger towards a narrative style more simplistic, one easier to read without wincing at the ego within the mutterer's words? Did you like the whole 'Counter-Culture' thing? The tentative presentation of the idea that this international community, within which we wallow like abandoned shit in some Skelmersdale pond, will allow even the possibility of an alternate existence?

Is that the overarching message which I desire you to take from this? That the sub-section of society that I have, naively, judged to be the place where I had found a place to of belong, a group wherein lays the opportunity for my personal acceptance, is not what I thought it was? That Punk, that Goth, that Rocker, that all these other titles, tossed around like leaves on an old man's lawn, do not actually mean a damn thing? Is it to bridge the divide, like the unwanted attentions of a Caesar, to knock down the fence like an overly-aggressive child or to salve the wounds of the last generation by pointing out, as though I were some sick combination of an elder, loving Brother and the Conservative Party, that 'We Are All In This Together?'

But then, who says I must have a reason for writing? Why can it not be something spontaneous, something heartfelt and sudden and striking with the previously professed speed of an Obsessive-Compulsive Infatuation? I had intended to lash out at planned prose here, though, with the level of literary devastation I can bring to bear; it would be more like the semi-loving caress of a teenager releasing herself to supposedly healthy desires at a Year 10 dance, than the splintered teeth of the leviathan I would hope to emulate.

But Orwell said we have four reasons for writing, and to a greater or lesser extent, all writers possess these qualities. Whether it be the result of sheer-egotism, the aesthetic enthusiasm, a sense of historical impulse or some twisted desire to express some political proposition, they all suffer from one of these motivations. This tenuous, matchstick world in which we stride like rats and gods and the gods of rats, cannot handle anymore motivation.

He evaluated his own reasons for writing, at a level of self-reflection which would make a poor, failed imitator like myself visible for the charlatan I am, stating that he was a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth but that he had been forced into becoming some sort of pamphleteer, because his era was not a peaceful one.

No offence Orwell, old son, but if that is really the case and you could see exactly what kind of legacy that you have left behind you; you'd roll in your fucking grave, as though your abused skull were attached to a rotor. The last words I've heard you say told me to look out for the boot on humanity's face. And, like some advocate of the party you warned us against, you commanded me, begged me with a voice unchanged in emotion, not to let it happen. You told me, that it all depends on me.

Ignoring the fact that, despite your genius and your apparent ability to view the future, you have no right to put such a burden on the shoulders of a simple, talentless drunk, of an egotistical maniac, with a personality forged around the rusting iron of my arrogance, I can only respond in one way.

I'm trying George. I really, really am.

* * *

'That last one may,' I heaved again, feeling the well of tears in my eyes, my left hand moving involuntarily towards my chest, fingers in the shape of talons digging between my rib cage, my right locked onto the rim of the bowl, as though the material could be bent if I forced enough of myself against it, as though I could alter reality by the non-existent, shaking strength of my arms. My hair hung limply around my face, framing my world into the merciless image of my own produce squatting like scum on top of the water. I felt the burn, the orgasm of my throat shooting out its load, resulting in a half-satisfaction, revolting in the sensibility that I could yet do more, that the petulant demands of my physicality had yet to be sated.

It didn't matter. I knew the cubicle around me by now, the brief glance as I toppled from my upright position as the doorkeeper of my own privacy to the barely humanoid figure slouching across my throne, like an undeserving king wrenching a stolen metaphor from a desecrated stone, cementing the knowledge I had already foreseen. And, just like that ancient, proportionally fantastical monarch, I believed that fate had positioned me there.

But that is a coward's excuse. It wasn't fate that forced the poison on me, left me half-kneeling and sitting on a stained tiled floor. It wasn't fate who wrote the moans emerging from my throat into existence with a flick of its overly-ostentatious type-writer. It wasn't fate which had led me into the cubicle covered in the marks of civilisation, covering the natural, weakly plastic walls in crude drawings and misspelt poetry. It wasn't fate that drew my eyes to the long paragraph, carved into the wall with careful hatred, the paragraph ending in the simple query 'What iz Art?'

And, through distance and tentative materiality, through our grasp on the concept of distance, through our brief understanding of how it may be tricked and cheated by the desperately wilful, I did my best to answer him, this logical successor to Banksy.

Art is, perhaps, not as difficult to define as it should be. Certainly, you could ask anyone on any street and, forgetting for the brief moment that most people would think you insane, or a prime target for a mugging, and be offered as many different definitions as can be imagined. 'Art is a process between the Artist and the viewer', 'Art is something with a deeper meaning', 'Art is what you want it to be', or, as some clever self-assured Bastard always claims, 'Art is indescribable'. I thought, for a long time, in ways similar to that, varying from each definition depending on the weather, the time and the questioner. Even the meaning I go by now will have no doubt shifted by the morning, warped into some supposedly original copy of a stranger's idle thoughts.

Art is meaningless, and self-indulgent. It is weak and pathetic, it has been beaten and bruised like the woman on the bus until it was malleable, warping with everyone's desires into the form that it believes will engender it to a reduction in torture. Like the sacrifice to the cage of rats in a room of blinding light, it abandoned any meaning it may once have possessed; it sold its integrity for a salve on its broken limbs and, instead, found a way to love our society, pandering to its every need as clearly as I do.

Art is superfluous. It is an excuse for mediocrity and for those who would pose themselves as unique thinkers, despite their simplicity, or for those who could be doing so much more than scratching half thought out metaphors on plastic walls in the midst of an urban sprawl.

'Art is dead.' I whispered to myself, or I would have, had the vomit not returned to blot out the blasphemous speech. 'Art is dead, and we are its ghosts.'

I gagged on the thought, spitting out the last of the blackened bile from between my rapidly breaking lips. I slumped further towards the ground and, with a lack of awareness to put even Orwell's animals to shame; I replaced my thoughts with a single utterance.

'That last one may have been a mistake.'

* * *

We're hitting out at some heavy subjects now, aren't we? I say we, though I am well aware that you are involving yourself in this horror show with as little activity as can be achieved, but if we share the blame, you can hardly dub this an act of literary terrorism, can you? Or maybe it is because the dawn is, less breaking than piecing together those shattered pieces of a broken night, and, in my rising exhaustion, I need someone's hand to hold?

Metaphorically anyway.

* * *

'Art,' I remarked as I returned to my seat, the word thrashing in my subconscious like some deep creature abruptly torn into shallow waters, once again interrupting the three, 'like literature, demands a certain amount of interactivity from the viewer. But even that holds a curse, simply dubbing him, or her, the base title of viewer.' I was becoming increasingly aware of their gaze, each pair of eyes locked on my forearm with desperate, almost pleading disgust. 'Why do we differentiate different forms of viewer into sub-categories? Why does each medium require a different sensitivity? This cannot, of course, be submitted as fact for every variation of the given definitions of Art. I lack the,' here I pause, almost as if falsified, to stress the point I struggled to make, to teach these three strangers, 'the lyrical poetry to make a viewer smell the sight of a word, but I would hope they could at least taste the word.'

'Why can we not hear a segmented piece of prose as though listening to a song, or read a song with the taste of the lyrics upon our lips, or touch the trailing strands of spoken word? Because that involves a particular lack of sensibility? Because these over-pretentious, barely completed thoughts of mine have been floated a hundred times before, by better men than I? Or are these actions impossible, simply due to the imposed confines of science, materiality and even Goddamn common sense?'

'Y'know, that writer,' I stressed the word, mockery thick like honey around my tongue, 'that one I told you about, that writer who seemed to believe that creativity could be mapped out, could be written down like a recipe.' My hand became an imaginary checklist, and I methodically began to strike away imagined letters with an over-exaggerated flourish. 'A given amount of plot, a portion of narrative drive to knead and punch into the desired shape, the sweetness of human relations, mixed with the bitterness derived from the same, a dash of reference to greater works, so that the audience finds such arrogance palatable. A sprinkling of political or religious discourse, only a sprinkling however, anything more and it becomes sickly and difficult to swallow. A hint of character development, enough to make the consumer feel that the food is wholesome and filling, when in fact the sweetness describes the onset of a diabetic thirst.' I snorted at the last, the sudden sound making my own head spin with the resultant lack of force and yet the throbbing of my conviction.

'She said that we had to have a character whom we understood, one whom we would find relatable and would side with. No matter his actions, his thoughts, as long as he is capable of justifying them to himself, and his self-righteous knowledge of his role as the protagonist. Like the Bride and the Groom atop a tiered wedding cake, we need something understandable amongst that mass of ingredients; we need a point to begin with, to admire and state that 'This! This is where our narrative lies! This is where we are!' In the expression that was becoming synonymous with my disposition, I repeated my shrug.

'Maybe I'm taking this cake metaphor a little too far; it is no doubt due to my naturally sweet and childlike disposition.' I paused, waiting for the guffaw of idiotic laughter, and was almost surprised when the silence resumed after my lips locked together. 'Anyway,' I tilted my head back, 'I'll let that one lie, just like every other word which has emerged from my mouth.'

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## F. Scott. Fitzgerald

Alcoholism was never the malady I supposed it to be. That is not, of course, to refute the definition of an elevated content level as a necessity, as a malady but rather to scorn the dramatisation of such an illness. I assumed that, as an alcoholic whom aspires to the role of writer, or at least one of those bordering such a status, I would instantly emulate someone such as Hemmingway, downing whiskey after whiskey, each only serving to salve my troubled genius. Much like this romanticising of poverty, to be the starving artist, it is nothing more than a lie purported by insecure writers themselves, with some desire to make their own dull lives grander in the sickly glow of nostalgia. Even King was once asked if he drank, to which his only response was 'I just said I was a writer, didn't I?' What a line! Pretty fucking funny, at least for a man of a semi-psychological horror mentality, but, to me, it is as scary as Cujo or The Shining ever managed to be. There was a lot I never knew about alcoholism.

I never knew it included vomiting on the previously stained floor of a public transport, of passing out in a stranger's bathroom, only to wake up tired and broke, the entirety of my week's funds flowing into the pockets of some skeletal barkeep, with a grin as acidic as the liquid in his grasp, in my hand, running down my throat. It is only when deep into someone else's cups that I begin to realise what kind of existence I, for lack of a word laden with the poetic sorrow I would desire to convey, exist in. The physical space in which I inhabit could have so easily belonged to a more advanced variation of myself, to someone smarter, more gifted, someone who would be more than capable of providing a boon to our collected lives, opposed to this solitary hermit scrounging survival within this body, had they only been better at swimming through some judicial fluid as thick as jelly, sitting solid and tensed in a Creator's womb.

Self-pity and abasement. I never know if these two are symptoms of the sluggish alcohol, reminiscent of the fat child in a foot-race, in the blood, or the crippled mentality of the drunk we see with his hands splayed around the glass as though it were the Grail, and the certainty of the knowledge that the liquid it contains is more valuable than that belonging to some oft-quoted Jewish hippie in desperate need of a razor, but fortunately possessing an amazing public relations team. After all, I imagine it is difficult to deny someone's divinity when there is less than no reason why one should believe in the divinity to begin with. Arguments based purely in the mind can have no logical response, there can be no evidence brought before those confident that their weakness will create any new train of thought. The mind-railways of these folk are already filled with obsolete engines, lacking the possession of even novelty to support their maintenance on modern tracks.

Whatever, judging yourself by your pain, even if that pain emerges from the active idiocy of others, is never a solid idea; it is never a means of creating sympathy for this character I so desire you to find some relatable quality within. Of course, there must be heart-ache, heart-ache and blood in any narrative designed to maintain your interest and this time when I speak, know it is the author of the character's destined fate, whether that be God, or the character himself, or some ancient foreign civilisation running the character through some impossible game.

There is heart-ache coming. As surely and certainly as this narrative is guaranteed to offer a satisfying resolution, heart-ache and blood prowl in the character's future as though a modern-day equivalent of the knife, awaiting the whore in Whitechapel's overly glorified past.

* * *

The bartender glared at me. Again. Somehow, I was starting to think he had some kind of animosity towards me. Maybe it was the fifteen minutes in which he must have thought I had exited his bar, that I was no longer the thorn in his side. Or, just maybe, it was the amount of time he had spent in the bathroom. Despite a lack of cemented knowledge around his secretive activities, I assumed that the rubber gloves and the bucket of gently sloshing water meant that I had, at some point during my urinary or vomit-based adventure, missed one of the twin targets.

Ah well, what else was he being paid for? He wasn't helping prop up the drunken elders whom belong at the empty bar anymore, he wasn't listening to their lamenting stories of such youths as I, of how we spat and pissed everywhere, of how we had no moral compass, about how we had been given an education denied to the generation that had earned the right to be called the greatest.

Stupidity is one of the many, many things I cannot abide. But stupidity in a sickening marriage with self-congratulatory dishonesty is perhaps the greatest 'trigger' to alcoholism. They may not have been present, but the absence of the old guard made more of an impact on my mental state, caught somewhere between self-obsessive emotion and unjustifiable logic, that their presence would have done. Whenever I had the confidence of the drunk, it never went right. Every opportunity I had to take when sober, I lacked the will and the wit and the eloquence within the borders defined in a drunken illness of my carefully Northern tongue.

Alcohol is a poison, and the illness, if your carefully prescribed dosages are kept within hazily-defined borders, is peace. If you stray from either of these divides, you may as well forgo the treatment all together, if you can. Less will not satisfy your needs, and more will only gentrify your brain, like some polished, ungraspable ball floating in acid. It is not an honest peace and, like every magical promise of religion since the first invention of the lie, it is ultimately meaningless and, if easily achievable, would certainly not worth the pursuit. Real peace is, simply, unattainable, even if we were to transcend to a state of eternal wisdom and geniality, with no threats, no fears, no fantasised horde knocking on imagined gates, would swiftly devolve into an even greater kind of Hell, than that which already stalks the mountains and forests, the oceans and the deserts and all the land caught in between.

I like the Pogues. Not just for Fairytale, though that is certainly the most well known, but for almost every song they have done. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, as an album, as an existential device for the advancement of both musical genius and lyrical emotion, is amazing. But to see McGowan now, to see him wheeled out like a decrepit replica, like a mock Santa dragged from the bar to keep the children entertained during a parody of stolen festivities it, in all honesty, does naught more than conjure another drink from my dwindling funds.

I wonder whether he has achieved peace, in his gently tottering manner. Has he taken to the dream of drink and drugs and simplicity, or has it simply taken him? I would like to ask him one day, when in actuality I would stutter out a tentative greeting and his hand would shake in my trembling grasp, and then one of us would be gone. He, into a world I can only imagine in a mixture of loving dreams and waking nightmares, and me, into a world of grey, leather-coated, tweed flat-capped mediocrity.

* * *

Sobriety, for the second time that evening, began to run its crooked, sensible fingers through my hair, scratching at the thin layer of flesh around my malformed skull. I had, despite my professed apathy, felt a semblance of guilt at returning to my previous spot of emergence out into the chill of an undisclosed seasonal evening. It was probably a decision marred with both intelligence and stupidity, the bus stop I was directing my feet towards being one that is visited by those baby leviathans of modern transport far rarer than my original position, but it meant I was less likely to stagger into my own vomit.

It occurred to me, during that long walk, come stagger, which probably took me longer than I can recall, that if I were to beg forgiveness for my activities that night, exactly whom would I kneel before? When you vomit on broken paving, filling the canals like rotting water, to who would you address a grovelling letter? Could I sneak into the warren of Downing Street, slipping past incompetently unaware watchmen, rolling through irritatingly unbroken window panes, and leave a gently apologetic note upon the Prime Minister's Fisher-Price politics set? Or do I genteelly wake him from his slumber, a hand gracing the edge of his shoulder, before I scream into his fluttering, uncomprehending eyelids?

His wife, her hair hanging about her face like dust about an aging rat in an abandoned maze, screams. His children, rushing in from a room unseen, join in the cacophonous noise. I wonder if he knows what it is like to lack ability to feed your children. This man whom, in his youth, wore a shirt that commanded us to 'Hang Mandela', and yet he sat in the quiet dignity of a childish picture at that figure's memorial service. But, of course, we cannot hold that against him. He was under the spell of Thatcherism, in much the same way that no one in Germany could have been held accountable for the atrocities of a War impossibly separate and, yet, as real to me as if they fought over some twisted ring of engraved gold and fire.

Would I see humanity in that oiled face, synonymous with greed and with idiocy? But then, when was the last time I actually saw this imagined face of humanity? Where is the great idea that the Homo Sapient is a creature capable of Love and Understanding, as opposed to the realised world of Greed and Cruelty, simple selfish Desire and utter Contemptibility?

Now, this is not a personal attack on the man. It isn't, in actuality, possible to offend the Prime Minister as a person, simply because he is nothing but a replication. You see, in this 'oh so democratic' civilisation of ours, we have three main political parties. Each one headed by a black-haired, greasy-faced mannequin, as though some factory in the depths of Westminster churns them out en masse, their opinions and viewpoints screwed into them by uncaring workmen, each enjoying a quick smoke between replications.

Is it possible to maintain humanity in a position of power, whether that position be a queen, a pope or a CEO, a politician or even the arrogant solitude of a bus driver? Can it survive under the weight of those in your care, or if it does remain, will it remain in its entirety, or instead will it shrivel like a surplus fish in the sun, crumble like ancient marble beneath the hammer or weep like the broken protagonist at the close of this prose? History, theology and, indeed, common observation of the world around us warns us that, despite what the rest of us would desire, the answer is a resounding no.

And who has more power than the writer?

Even the lies of God speak of free will, but they have no chains around their wrists, nothing shackling them to the hint of morality.

* * *

'However, one thing which she never warned us about, despite her self-conceited role as the font of all creativity in our turgid little worlds, was the danger of creating a character whom will attract a... a following. Whether he, or she, be a protagonist, an antagonist, or some unnamed, unknowable character who is visible for less than the heartbeat of a corpse, the Author must be aware of the threat of Hero-Worship.' I felt their gaze shift from me and, turning, I saw the bartender advance towards me with an unfamiliar expression, ill-fittingly hewn onto his craggy features. It wasn't anger, and that was a surprise to me. Surely, if he had been cleaning after my toiletry debacle, he would be pretty damn pissed off?

His feet slapped against the faux floorboards, some ill-reflecting laminate, cuffed and marked with work boots, trainers and, recently, the influx of supposed dress shoes, which bear a closer resemblance to the style of pump I had to wear in Primary School. I pitied him, as he stomped his way towards us, in the manner of a man used to slipping on the ground beneath his feet, his lack of balance replaced with a tread an Abram would be proud of.

'Here,' he said curtly and yet with a great of degree of kindness, arriving at our position, 'you, err, you missed a bit.' He gestured at my sleeve, his hand hidden beneath the relatively clean rag he appeared to pull from the thin of the air, like a twisted, overpaid magician with a preference for jerking off when he should be practicing his childish lies and the trickery of an educated former genius. I, after a moment's worth of momentous pause to comprehend the broadly Northern words which spilled from his tongue and into my ear; I glanced at my own arm.

And there, like a contract with God, like a penance enforced upon me by Darwinian evolution, a result of the fickle influence of black-eyed Fate or the shadow of Chance's unknowable desires, squatted a speck of vomit. I recollect, despite the increasing amount of poison in my bloodstream, that my face flushed like the light spitting from a vivarium.

Apologetically, I stared up into his all-knowing, sickeningly aware eyes and, under that ungrudging watchfulness, under that lack of judgement, I felt ashamed. So, with a combination of self-loathing and rage at the man stood over me, I reached out and plucked the cloth from his grasp, muttering a graceful 'thank you', the words possessing an unsurprising lack of grace. He walked away then, leaving his gift in my hands, as I dabbed at the vomit on my sleeve. The three were silent, again. Unmoving as though possessed by the villain of some Doctor Who episodic adventure, trapped in plain sight.

'Hero-worship, you see,' I returned to my topic, desperate to forge some space between the all-knowing narrator I desired to be, and the scared little boy beneath the eyesight of a god, 'is the most dangerous result of personality that we can imagine, whether that personification be kind and callous, or generous and cruel. Whether the protagonist is a pope bearing the opinions of a sane person, though those two ideas may be oppositional, a politician designed by his PR team to be viewed as a 'Man of the People', or simply a World War warlord, whom limps through the oceanic residue of the deaths he has caused, the lives he has snuffed out like candles within the pathway of a breeze, or simply the remnants of those 'uncivilised tribes' he sent to the gas chamber, whilst condemning the same action mere years before.'

'Because, in time, we all come to hate the hero. It may only be for a moment, but at some point we will see him, or her, as all that we wish to be. And we will think, 'if only they had not existed, or taken some other pathway! Then I could be there, with all that fame and money and integrity, and I could be happy.' I chuckled to hide my embarrassment, still dabbing at the vomit, throwing a caustic glance after the suddenly broader back. 'I could be happy, if I were him.'

## Alan Wilson Watts

I had so many plans. To finally earn the title of 'Author' or even that lower-class recognition as a 'Writer' was that my main aim? Perhaps, if criticism suddenly relents, even to offer me the role of 'Experimental Writer'? To receive a publicised invitation into the same category as Johnson and Danielewski! Imagine such a world! Where the title I carry around with me, though it is one I have earned, is something to be proud of! To become an arsehole of such magnitude that when someone asks me what I do, with the faked sincerity even the most uninterested can offer, I could say 'Experimental Author'!

'Experimental'. To a character, still a boy in a man's body, though both are beginning to show signs of wear, the very word smacks of arrogance and the contemptibility which comes as easily as a priest towering over a choir boy. 'Experimental' literature is simply failure, much like 'Alternative Medicine', or any youthful sub-culture fading beneath self-delusion and the simple passage of time. Whilst some things may well be eternal, nothing lasts as it is meant. Everything is torn from its context; it is adapted by wit, abused by idiocy, worshipped by the ignorant and hated by those who believe it to be fact.

But then, perhaps, it would be honest to suggest that 'Experimental' is little more than an excuse for mediocrity, for that heinous word to be a replacement for talent, for imagination. I could present this to you in a box, offer you an interchangeable narrative lacking in meaning, as simply an exercise of possibility, an exploration into the carefully stylised treatment of literary prowess.

I have tried, within reason and as made possible by the constraints of this narrative, to maintain my honesty. More for my own sake than for yours, that I may be able to fool myself into believing, for one single moment, that I haven't already wasted this life of mine. That this personal disgust, ignorant of self-abasement, is a mere delusion. Whether I am the character, the Author, the Narrator, that does not matter, whoever this is, I hate him.

I hate him for the waking nightmares, for the rats in the cage about my face, for the unspoken screams of condemnation, for the rope tying me, naked, to my chair. I hate him because, in my head, I ride his coattails like a publicist to an author, like a groupie to a musician, only to find my face scraping away on the jagged cobbles he walked. I hate him like the alcoholic hates the wine.

No. I am lying to you again. I don't hate him, how could I? I know I should, but for this alternative persona, I cannot even begin the pretence of emotion. It is needlessly cruel, creating such a text as this. It walks with head held down, with limbs slowly and methodically crippling themselves, with a self-destructive instinct carefully lacking in heroic honesty or intent.

* * *

'Despite the inherent lack of meaning in all of this,' I spoke into the rapidly-filling emptiness behind my eyes, 'I cannot pretend I haven't enjoyed this role. This pretence at the knowledgeable stranger, the dishevelled wanderer haunted by his own failures, driven by his genius into the arms of substances designed to make such an existence bearable.' The glass was cold; it was my only real sensation, the one thing I held onto as solid in that shifting darkness. My previous glass had long since been replaced by now, those harsh grooves shifting into a circular frame, despite the chip my clenched hand found itself digging into.

'I'm not the person I have proven myself to be this evening. Never before have I simply strode into a bar, albeit with the hint of a stagger, and began a conversation with anyone besides myself and the glass before me, about anything. Whether Liverpool played well last night, whether the winter is growing colder or finally beginning to relent, how to fix the hole in the frame of my window, or the nuances and unrepeatable aspects of narrative presentation and execution.' I lifted the glass, my arm making it halfway to my lips before I froze it. 'I have had intense arguments, ones which have gone on to cause my complete re-evaluation of all I previously held to be true, without hearing another person's voice. I have fought both sides of the same coin, argued and pleaded with myself to understand the nonsense twisting in the maelstrom of my monologue.'

'Even whilst living out this narrative, this 'experiment' for the pleasurable abasement of those I will never see nor meet, I am not the same person who awoke to find himself vomiting into the heating system of an almost empty bus mere hours before. How could I be? When you pour your every effort into a work, even if that work is simply the education of a tripled shadow in some religious metaphor, it is quite simply exhausting to near the end without a single shred of purpose, without anything profitable, to any definition of the word, emerging from the ashy texture of an alcoholic's subconscious.'

The glass made it another few inches towards my lips.

'I had hoped, despite my protestation of innocence from that ever-present crime of purpose, to find something here, something close to the end that made this experiment worth experiencing. To find some meaning somewhere other than the bottom of a glass, the bottom of a page or the bottom of a painting.'

The glass had warmed now, trapped as it was beneath my sweating skin although, perhaps, it may well be more honest to say my fingertips were trapped around it. With every breath I wish I could describe as tortured, I could feel it curling back from the rim, the sickly stench that was me returning to itself, much like a dog sniffing at its own refuse.

'In this role, as Narrator, Author, Character, alcoholic youth and dishevelled, broken stranger, I will make you one final promise, an addition to the increasingly lengthy list of those I have already broken. We are close to the end now, nearing the end of the end of the journey, the one you had all but completed the very moment you first allowed your eyes to crawl across these empty words originating from my hands. I swear to you, with as much honesty as a coronation oath or a marriage vow, that there will be blood before this existence is done.'

I laid the glass against my lower lips, holding my breath against the poisonous stench emanating from the clear liquid.

'As Creator, I tell you, there will be petals falling in a spotlight, there will be red running in the streets and there will be broken limbs arranged like a serial killer's masterpiece.'

I opened my eyes to the empty seats, smiling tightly as I threw the liquid back in one sickening motion. The water filled my mouth and ran down my throat before I even had the chance to gag, burning at the ravaged muscle within my throat, ignorant of whom it had entered.

* * *

How does my honesty grab at you? Like a lecher in an alleyway? Like a drunk or, more accurately, a drink at a bar? Like an aquatic hunter and the slim piece of bait the supposed prey is offered? And, if you truly believe it to be such a thing, is it preferable to the technically genuine narrative I could have offered? Is this, in anyway, a triumph? Even a triumph despite its ever-present, all too noticeable failure? Destined to go down in history amongst such great disasters as Thermopylae, or the Light Brigade's imbecilic charge? Or to be forgotten by all but the few, to be remembered with half-affection and easy contempt in some darkened corner of the internet? Down amongst the Bronies, amongst the closet paedophiles, with their ethical outrage, and the failed Memes?

Do you know what it is that makes a Creator a success, in this modern world? It isn't really the ability to weave a clever narrative, to express realistic emotion or present witty dialogue. Instead, it is the ability to make and, subsequently, break contracts. Eisner asked 'Is not all Religion a Contract between Man and God?' and I, in my arrogance, would twist such a line of questioning with the query, 'What are Creators, but the Gods of their creations?'

But to break a contract is to make a tragedy. It is that assumed promise which has made the miniscule proportion of modern entertainment possessing the rare value of emotionality. It is that ability to sacrifice conscience and, at times, even your own desires, which makes genius. In this context, Creators may, instead of being Gods, be regarded as Slaves to the whims of their Creation, as malnourished workers chained to their profession by steel, as physical and destructive as any other addiction.

* * *

The corpse below me was nothing but a replica of what could have been and a parody of what has been. The actuality of what was offered me no respite from the intangible horror of possibility. Naught but a lump of meat and bone and tendon, chained to the ground by death, soulless and empty of promise. It stared towards the road, no doubt following the direction of a murderer, one whom did not even stop to check if they left their victim still alive.

Its eyes still held life within them, as though the spark of existence, that series of chemicals which was the essential cornerstone of personality not having burnt out its last yet. It could have been anyway. Perhaps it was nothing but the reflection of innovation flying past, leaving burning after images in the depths of an abandoned retina. Despite this, it was already dead. Nothing could be done to save it. No last, desperate twitching shook its body. No tortured breaths emerged from its slim, still throat.

Its feathers, all mottled grey and white and black and brown, had huddled together under the rain, as though attempting to cower beneath each other in a silent, desperate war for warmth. The pigeon's stomach was cracked open, nothing but a thick line of blood emerging from that once pulsating breast.

I watched it for a few moments more, God damn me, but I did. With hands bundled deep into my coat pockets, my hair sagging around my macabre fascination, with the increasingly potent ghost of sobriety heavy on my breath, I stood in the rain and watched a dead thing bleed into the space between pavements, into the microcosm of a gutter and the emptiness behind humanity's dull design.

* * *

There cannot be compromise. You realise that now? I cannot meet you halfway, because that is not how the story goes. I have warned you, time and again, that this is not only a failure in terms of narrative and 'experimentation', but is a failure for narcissistic self-abuse, for idiomatic semantic choice, for literature and life and existence. And, seeing as these words are still haunting your eyesight like a spiritualist's lies, I can only assume you have ignored my advice to walk away.

Very well, it is clear that the only success here is the self-abuse emerging from you, whilst my metaphorical wrists remain firmly intact. I didn't mean this to happen. You were supposed to abandon this horror on my first insistence, or at the very least my second! Now I have an obligation to offer you an ending to a narrative without either an end, or the very possessions which would actually make this a narrative.

Somebody once said, quoted by every faux-writer and delusional critic since the words emerged from their mouth, that the Happiness of an ending depends simply on when you end it. And they were right. But you have gone beyond the short story, beyond the novella, beyond the experiment and beyond this obsession with the self. Am I supposed to thank you for that, for tearing through these conventions of mediocrity despite my protestations, despite my will?

Fine. You keep reading these pointless words; you keep your eyes fluttering across these pages like moths towards a flame. I would wonder, of course, does the Moth realise that death is the only possible ending to that story? Or is it simply so concerned with reaching its objective, that the fear and the threat of death simply fall away by the roadside? Perhaps we, perhaps I, should revise the original opinion of our roles here. Whilst I am still not an Author, nor am I merely the drunk any longer.

At this marked point within this failure, with sobriety and self-awareness finally passing from lips to brain to fingertips, I would state with as much empathy as can be mustered, that I am simply the Moth, and the 'Experiment' you see before you, is nothing but a candle to you something to light your way for a few hours only but, for me, it means acknowledgement. For me, it means existence.

##

## Robert Frost

You may have noticed that, much like the prodigal alcoholic, the man or woman who cannot function at their apex without some warped desire for self-destruction floating in their veins, as the narrative progresses in leaps and bounds over dog shit, broken brick and the jagged edges of the post-industrial estate, that He, or Me, or They, or It, becomes more jaded, more bitter, more like a reflection of some Angry Young Writer sitting on a rattling train, caged in the cage of his own design, placed in the place he dreamt and dreaded, as a remuneration of his own consciousness.

But, in an example of the residue our consumerist past and present has left us, it must twist and turn like the rat in the hole, like the bayonet in the innocent man's gullet or the flash sale in the poor man's balance. That is me, I am the weakness supported by the admitted lack thereof, I am the plot holes filled with the voice of an enraged shade, and, my dear reader, I am the voice within your head, spouting these words as though they were the lyrics of a forgotten song, some nonsense scratched upon the stone.

I have tried, despite my education, (which lacked a great deal more than I would now have hoped), to avoid the idea of Religion when my voice is carried directly to you on standardised coloured pages, tinted with black ink or electrical stains. I had wanted to lie to you, to say that, after all this, I do believe there is a little man squatting on a cloud somewhere. In fact, there may well be. Even as the Author, I am not privy to the secrets which the moral authoritarians of great wealth and little consequence seem to be. But if He is up there, the replication of a Greek God, then he certainly is squatting, because all that is raining down is shit.

These contractual observations of ours have not been upheld. But not by us, of course, despite what the beasts incapable of coherent thought may well believe, as they cower behind placards proclaiming that, in the end, they will be proven right when the Rapture comes for us poor sinners. Well, I don't know about you, dear reader, but if your experience of Religion has been anything like mine, then I would rather burn for eternity than to spend a second amongst those morally pious outcasts of thought. Not that I bear any aggression towards the self-denying worshippers of a Jewish Zombie and the virus that birthed him, but the only explanation one can realise, in order to maintain one's sanity, is that they are either lying to themselves and, by association, us, or that they are mentally ill, and should be treated as such.

* * *

'Remember, if you are going to express your own personal hang ups, then be sure to do it in such a stylised way that the reader has no way of realising you hate the thing.' Her broad Salfordinian accent was jarring in the partially hung-over segment of my brain, which I had agreed to sacrifice to the meaningless explanations of the morning. 'You need to trick the reader into sharing your opinion, to provide a world where the unthinkable is simply anything that goes against your descriptions. To the reader, whether you are speaking in Fiction, Non-Fiction or some variation between the two, you cannot offer them honesty. They will take your honesty, and they will use it to break you.'

She seemed to sag a little, her lank blonde hair falling around her as though broken by the words she removed from her mouth, as though a surgeon carefully cutting around a cancer. For the first time in months, I pitied her. She had an impossible job to do, to turn this crowd of dishevelled youths and the world-weary advanced students, into something resembling writers. Her lack of talent as an educator was a barrier enough, but the impossibility of her task toppled down on me as I looked around the small, cold room high in an aging building's rafters.

To my left sat one such 'advanced student', as vile a person as any I can recollect. Her hair was in a strange kind of bob, in particular, that stylised variant which seemed crossed with an afro. Her sagging, wrinkling flesh bore a startling resemblance to Churchill, all jowly chops, slightly slurred speech and big, drooping eyes. Whether the image of a transvestite prime minister, or a cruelly dressed up bobble-headed dog tore its way into your mind then, probably says more about your character than any description I can offer. Despite opinions which you may, or may not, have gleamed from my barely coherent ideology, I actually bore her very little ill will for the abhorrent appearance she cultivated, nor for the age which hung from her creaking bones like scraps of flayed flesh, like a torn banner fluttering in a bloodied breeze. It was her attitude which I could not stand.

The very first time we sat together, I mean the group as an entirety rather than the two of us as a coupling, she petulantly demanded of the tutor an explanation as to why her and the few other advanced students had to 'babysit' people of a much younger age which, of course, translates to several degrees less talent, as though age was the marker of skill, as though the failure of the flesh indicated an increase in wit. From then on, the decrepit bitch was already a corpse to me, a state of being which she was rapidly approaching in the eyes of everybody else anyway.

To my right was a more pleasing sight. Odd, that sentence carries undertones of uncomfortable sexuality, doesn't it? As though the mere act of pleasure, an emotion which should be cherished in the grey days, has to be tied into to some thin, big-titted blond teenager in a low cut top. Well, in actuality, the character sitting beside me is a man. His hair is cropped short, and the almost laughable attempts at a goatee, the long, curling hairs scattered about his face in a manner resembling weeds on a mountainside, puts paid to any possibility of femininity in his appearance. His hoodie is thick and plain black, wrapped around a Family Guy t-shirt with the Baby and the Dog lounging against each other in a setting of clear Latin origin. Ripped jeans, but those ripped from a year of rough wear, rather than an attempt at faux-punk, cover up his short legs, all the way down to a pair of scuffed trainers.

In a brief flash I catch a glimpse of the idle pen work he leads like a pet across the notepad. Song lyrics, poetic quotes, a scattered narrative in the shattered mind of a character, carefully and callously sectioned from a fully realised personality, I cannot say, but it looks interesting. Better than the meaningless scribbles across my own, all torn images of half-realised patterns and the beginnings of abandoned plagiarism.

I was almost certain that he shared the same opinions of our creative advisor as me, but I never knew for certain. We never shared our thoughts and dreams; we never crossed quills in place of blades, nor drank whiskey together beneath a Mancunian moonlight. There were too many barriers in the way. Of course, they were barriers I had built so tall and so thick that I never knew if he had raised any himself. Isn't that a depressing thought? People raising walls to each other, so that they never even realise if the other person did the same?

* * *

Well? How many times did you roll your eyes during that last paragraph? Did your pupils spin like revolving worms at my overused, hackneyed metaphor for isolation in the modern world? If they didn't, if you felt that it actually managed to fit into the tone of this prose, would that make me happy? Knowing that an entire phrase of this experiment, isolated by nothing more than a half-built wall of asterisks, was sacrificed to the meaningless deity of the Idiom?

A phrase of Eight-Hundred and Fifteen words, born like a child destined to give life to a sibling, desired at its culmination but its origin lost in the midst of enforced generosity? That phrase gave itself so that a simplistic metaphor could be thrown into the winds between us, safeguarded by nothing but the goodwill of strangers.

Eight-Hundred and Fifteen words that will live eternally, or as close to it as I can dare to comprehend, though they will be forgotten by you in less than a sparrow's heartbeat. Damn you, metaphor. Another child lost to your whims, damn you.

* * *

Some songs, whilst on a loop in your head or plugged directly into your senses, affect your perception and interaction with the world around you. Not simply emotionally, any kind of input can alter such malleable affectations as those, but literally. Simple things like the speed of your pace subconsciously matching the beat, your hands flickering like butterflies or, more realistically, the furtive motions of the shame-faced public masturbator in your pockets, the nod of the head despite your whole being attempting to refuse the action. In this instance, in engaged in the long-term futility of removing Dylan's Desolation Row from my head, a Punk Poet muttered in his place.

I muttered Beasley Street into the cold, shrugging my coat tighter about my shoulders, still uncomfortable at the slight stain left upon my sleeve, unable as I was to remove its ineradicable mark. I clamped my lips tightly around powerful, plagiarized words when the silhouette appeared, hiding my slight jump in one step's sudden acceleration. In the distance, flickering from between streetlight to streetlight like some leftover villain from a Noir horror, a shape was approaching me.

It was humanoid in its dimensions, though it appeared as a shadow, as a spot of blackness which suggested the passing of emptiness through space otherwise occupied by light the colour of urine. My hand, the one hanging below the stain of my discomfort, shook gently, though from a sudden, otherwise unfelt, blast of chilled air, the onset of hunger scratching at my strength or an outlying symbol of my fear, I could not say.

It was tall, taller than me, and its gait was warped, as though it had to drag a foot behind it. Somehow, I know not how, the idea that such a creature could be so crippled and yet remain at such a height, that it could possess such an ominous air despite its assumed injury, only contributed to the tremors which twisted my curled fingers into a shape beyond recognition.

We drew together as though locked on course, trapped on immovable, fundamentalist railways. The figure's head shifted slowly from side to side, more beast than man. A bloodhound with the scent of its prey. A jackdaw with the sight of a worm far below. A snake with the man's ankle mere feet away.

It came past me in a matter of moments, though amidst its heavy-breathing, the thud of its flat foot fall and the scrape of its boot against the pavement, it seemed to stretch on and on, until the moments filled the world around me, blotting out the unnaturally yellow brightness, the faint glimmer of light hanging over the horizon like an echo of Hiroshima. Even the air shrunk, compressed into a burning heat which settled around my shoulders and crept into my tight-lipped mouth.

It was not, as I had believed, dressed wholly in black, but it may as well have been. An oversized green coat hung limply over several layers of shirts and woollen jumpers. Its hood was pulled up, but a few trailing strands of hair were visible beneath the tattered, dirty rim. It stank of cheap beer, and that heady mixture of weed and month-old sweat which seem to go hand in clammy, dirt-ingrained hand.

Moments after it... after He passed me, I forgot myself and froze to the spot, staring after him. There had been something grasped tightly in one clawed hand, something white and cold to the sight. His shifting back hid it from my view now, as the hand holding the thing moved to his face, as though he whispered to it, or could not resist tasting it between his ageing, broken lips. Ignorant of my tired, complaining muscles, I fell to one knee. I must have looked the fool, in the middle of that sickly circle of man-made light, my shaking hand picking something up from the floor, careful not to crush it in my own twisting claw.

I opened my hand slowly, staring down into it. I, like a newly-appointed father holding his child for the first time, ran a finger along it slowly, holding back tears as my dirt-covered nail scraped gently across the white petal.

* * *

A petal? Such simple, childish imagery! You swore us no resolution, instead you give us this, a half-cut imbecility? You have lied and cheated and stolen from real writers throughout this drivelled piece of prose, and this is how you decide to thank your audience? Those whom have abandoned their doubts by the side of this road, this path proud of its anti-literature, have burnt their criticism due to an over-stylisation?

We agree with you now though, you certainly ARE no author. The author is as accountable to the actions of his people as is their God, and you entered into the same contract as He! You told us yourself, or the man you pretend to be, in black and in white, in italics and in plain text, that you would take us on an honest journey! Well, a journey has an end! A journey has a beginning! And nowhere, nowhere amongst this alcoholic self-obsession, have you offered us either of these!

* * *

Here, at a first ending of this horror, this mangled narcissist's narrative, a worthless God leans back in his chair and, with the idle forefinger and thumb of his twisted right hand, pinches the bridge of his nose. The movement is so normal, so simple in its humanity, that it ill-suits the gigantic figure in a squeaking, worn black leather office chair, with wheels hidden amongst the thick carpet. He leans forwards, resting his elbow in the cup of his left hand. The rattle of heavy metal on heavy metal comes with the movement of his limbs, as though chained to the text before him.

The computer screen before him is white, with small, increasingly unnecessary black shapes forming some poor copy of literature. He traces a hand across the last three words, as though mimicking his characters actions, hoping for some inspiration, for some symbol from the God he refuses to believe in. With trembling hands, stained with a lifetime of relative leisure, He reaches out and types a series of words, separated by twenty one hard stabs of a space bar.

'Whilst a standard Journey will have a beginning, and an end, the only Journey worth travelling is nothing but an empty metaphor.'

He feels his exhaustion in those words, in that full stop with its sickly sense of closure, feels the weight press down upon him, tastes the disappointment of ill-formed words, and hears the laughter of the crowd at his every motion. His world flickers black as heavy eyelids drop like a theatrical curtain, its arrival announcing the end of a first act, a necessity it had provided innumerable times before, by its tarnished and frayed existence.

Thank you.

# Honesty

Today, I have been productive. Even proactive, one might well be generous enough to say, though in nothing besides idle musings of half-formed opinions, abandoned before they can gather any momentum. Some sectioned segments of rock, tumbling from their mountain laden with metaphors. I have heard it said, heard it shouted from the mouths of wild-eyed devotees of ignorance armed with theory, that a rolling stone may gather no moss. Is that necessarily true? The moss it gathers may not begin as its own, but instead a product of all of those brambles, of those fallen branches and, even, other rocks which have long since stopped their own tumultuous passage down this jagged slope. Every new rock, one could say, becomes entangled in the moss of a previous failure, in the lack of momentum offered by those it uses as passage, to carry it further and further, before it too falters beneath the threat of emptiness, of solitude and knowledge beneath suddenly foreign skies. These same issues repeated over and over again as though an interminable circle of rolling stones which, we can only hope, are slowly moving their way towards some inevitable resolution. Our hope must then be stretched, like an elasticised band stolen from a first love's hair in the cage of playground, that we may ask whether this resolution is one worth the passages of all these fragmented mountains.

But today, ignorant of such lazy idioms and idle opinions, I have been staring out over the semi-folded screen of my laptop, past the dying books and the dog-eared aspidistra on my windowsill, past the sudden dust and through the sun-soaked glass. Today, I have watched the people walk, run, drive and leisurely ride their way past me in complete ignorance of my existence. Even had they known I watched them, that my gaze judged them in some semi-liberal alternative to Big Brother, would they have been able to fight through their apathy to react, if it is even apathy which allows them to watch their parents' world crawl further along the gutter of natural existence?

But here, in this continuation of supposed honesty, you find yourself in a different place, not so far from that tortured figure kneeling on the pavement like Caesar on the Ides of March as I would desire, though certainly further than the 'writer' of this text, if we can give him such a term, would have thought possible in the bright lights of recent history. I would ask you what, exactly; do you think he should do? When the petal is tossed aside as the pitiful imagery it is, when the dirt is brushed from his hands as a chain to the earth, when the poison of an 'artist's' influence has drained away with his desperate need for a piss against a rusting fence, what do you think could possibly be left for him?

Nothing would you leave for him, no secrecy within his malignant breast. You would use me as a blade to cut it out, as a cheap, uninterested whore to peel the clothes from his body as though flesh was honest in of itself. Even as I abuse you, as an audience for my narcissism's culmination, you abuse me in manners at least a volatile, though lacking the honesty of my own admission.

I need you. We're in this together, you and I, though it is my name which creeps through the gaps in these opinions, my officious title which is used to block the holes in my arguments, no matter how ill-fitting it may be. I need you, to act as the crowd raising my name to the phantasmal hovels of the Gods, both Old and New, to carry my palanquin through the streets and to whisper in my ear 'Remember, thou art mortal'. For all that I profess to place myself above you; I am more than aware that I am unable to thrive within the confines my own pretension without you wasting your wealth on my empty words.

Who can say why I write them, if not I? Perhaps some amongst you have some deep understanding of the simplicity of the human mind? Maybe you can steadily advance through the previous prose and know my character from the lack of individuality in the narrator's voice, by the lack of unique stylisation?

'Perhaps', 'maybe', those words fail to inspire any hope I might have enjoyed had I kept that thought unwritten. Even now, the ominous failure of the 'BACK SPACE' glares at me with punitive demands, with its constant companionship on the impossible journey towards perfection. How I do hate that key, with its lack of contribution, with its presence as a niggling doubt like some rotten molar amongst a set of perfectly maintained teeth.

So, why do I write?

Is it that any sense of respectability the newborn body of mine may have contained has been driven out? Starved and beaten as though it were a Leper without a lie's healing hands against its rotting flesh? Is it that this increasingly frail cage with which I am intertwined, like vines around some primitive jail, has done too much and realised too little to allow that smooth presentation of the 'self' to exist, at least in the description of me?

Is it, simply from my inadequacy to fulfil any role, and that this self-aggrandising pretension is the one which appeals to my failures the most? Part of the childish whim, that if I can but master the confines of this language, then I will be able to go to my grave with something besides regret in my mind? That my final words are not some long-winded message of my useless opinions, and instead are focused around telling the vultures to piss off?

Or is it fear? Fear of the idea that I need to work that I need to whore myself out with practicality, that I may possess a life I which could dare to think of as my own, rather than simply existing as a louse, as a parasite, on my creators' hard work? That this 'profession' to which I would aspire is, so I believe, the last one to carry with it the promise of freedom, if not in a professional manner, at least in a personal one? That I am not tied down by the ponderous weight of a 'job' and, instead, remain chained to this place by other factors, those of Love and Hate and Family, of Friendship and memories forged in my 'private' history's gentle simmer?

Who can say, if not I? All I know is that I am suffering under this compulsion, under this delusion that anything I could have to say is worth someone else reading, that if I can but surrender myself to this addiction, then I might be able to look at myself in some reflective metaphor and realise that I am happy. As though acceptance, as though understanding or, dare I dream, acclaim could be enough.

But still, the sun sets in the north and rises in the south, the lies spit from the east and the bombs fly from the west. And here, in the centre of a world immeasurably different from your own and one I lack the talent to honestly express, I sit with the sounds of the street failing to break through the music spitting from these weak speakers, through the thoughts which whirl in stagnant winds in my idiocy and the clicking and clacking of my fingertips against these keys, as though if I merely keep them moving, keep them active across these white letters on black plastic, I can hold back the ravages of time, that I can keep them alive for as long as they need to be. If I keep writing, if I keep chaining these words together, am I likely to find some meaning in them? Will some otherwise hidden ideology emerge from my stead-fast refusal to acknowledge my weaknesses, and will, as though I had a legion of primates tied to typewriters at my beck and call, some masterpiece emerge from these ramblings?

Here, I will speak honestly. How do I see my writing? I see it as a pedestal, one which I have built myself from a hundred, hundred bones from as many sources. I see it rising from the floor of my seminars, pushing ill-fitting desks and uncomfortable, impractical chairs to one side as it emerges. Though the brief wonder as to how, exactly, it managed to raise itself to the first floor so easily does cross my mind, it is soon gone again as I witness my arrogance manifest itself.

Though it is hidden from my view, I see the core of the monument and I recognise the bones with which it is formed. I see the skull of Orwell, the limbs of Joyce crushed to a paste which holds it to the femur of Elliot, entwined with the spine of Danielewski and the ribcage of Varley. I see the sternum of Wells and the mandible of John Cooper Clark, the metacarpus of Beckett and tibia of Bradbury. The clavicle of Eisner rubs against the scapula of Spiegelman, mere inches from the splintered canines of Stoker and the tarsus of Huxley.

The visible sections of my rising arrogance are no quite so grand, the addition of cheap dog toys and souvenirs from anthropological museum exhibits positioned to increase the mass of my metaphor. They squeak as they move, and crack as the weight shifts around them, but the core holds them in place even after they have crumbled into dust. Seeping from the cracks and moistening the dust, marrow with the stench of whiskey adds a touch of yellow to the already off-white admixture, the addition making the pedestal breathe as it raises itself, bones slipping around each other in some sickly silent parody of a student's club night in the heart of Manchester.

They coiled around each other, alcohol in place of sweat, lubrication for the friction between the two, like the studious serpents they bear likeness to. My bones, those within my own body, were absent from the mess before me until I climbed to its apex. My hands, drunk from contact rather than a distant ingestion, slipped around them as though I were attempting to molest them, each one nervously shuffling away from my touch.

Such a good metaphor, one even I am proud of. One wasted in this addition, in this ill-written section of honesty meant to explain myself to you, in hopes that I am not misunderstood. No doubt, at some point in the future, I will find this metaphor recycled in my own writing, at such a point that I will lack awareness of its existence until I come to read this again.

In a way, I will admit that I hope someone might be able to translate this into a language I can comprehend, into one designed for my self-satisfied simplicity, one were the adjective's crumble away like besieged cobblestone, one were my narcissism can falls upon itself, when it reconciles with my self-destruction and I can call myself a man or, at least, a mediocre example of humanity. Not just another character come narrator for you to pick apart with sharpened tongues and witty teeth, but a physical representation of this psyche I would describe as shattered, though no force has struck at its manufactured solidity.

And so the Novella, a medium which speaks of experiment in of itself, ends in an experiment of self-reflection and a parody of an essay combined to make more eventual ash atop my grave. When my stone is tilted at an odd angle, through the subsidence of the earth around me, and my limbs are breaking through the cheap, pauper's coffin I will no doubt inhabit, at least my borrowed creation's will hold my corpse down, they will stop me from rising again to face any judgement that something forged from fear of the unknown may deliver.

That is enough, for me.

I suppose it will have to be.

#  Contact

If, for whatever reason, you'd like to get in contact with me then you can reach me at johncarey@gmx.co.uk, or, alternatively, you can visit my site over at jcdefixio.com to check out some other things I've written.

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