secret:

The first 5 chapters of

The Three Bears

Before you think I’m going to continue rambling in this irrelevant way, don’t worry, I’m not, and anyway these rambles are not irrelevant, otherwise they wouldn’t be here, would they? I’m just trying to tell you that the last two or three years of my life have been hard – very hard. I’m only just beginning to realise what stress I’ve been under. And before you think this is just a diatribe from a moaning old git, I have to tell you that there are other people involved, people I love who have suffered more than I have.
But that’s all by the by. This is a story after all, and you are a reader and there are certain expectations, certain rules that have to be obeyed if our relationship is going to have any sort of validity. I’m telling you a story so I have to obey the rules of story-telling, otherwise you’ll get bored or frustrated or just plain pissed-off and I know how bad that can be, so I’m with you there.
So, this story has to have a beginning, middle and end. Fine, I can go along with that, especially now the beginning’s done, well, it’s begun anyway. The middle? Not too difficult – just throw up a few obstacles, write around them or through them or over them and, and well it sounds easy doesn’t it? It probably is easy, relatively easy; when compared to what I’ve been through over the past two or three years.
Normally I’m a man who can handle everything; it’s a curious mixture of Eastern mysticism and Western machismo. Come on you bastards, throw it at me. I can take it. I can take the deadliest disease in your power and absorb its evil energy. I can use my intelligence and charm to avoid the maddest madman. I can sit and smile with equanimity while discussing the utter meaninglessness of existence and the complete irrelevance of the whole of human history in the scheme of things, while blissfully tuning into the absolute oneness of so-called love that is so-called God. But these last two or three years have been a mare, a fucking nightmare.
OK, enough digression for now. I’d better get the beginning of the story started before you piss off and re-read Jane Eyre or something else, equally mind-numbingly mainstream. Mainstream, mainstream, bollocks.

o n e

It’s over. Her face sinks slowly into the black pool. It’s the end.
But where did it all begin?
~
I look at her and wonder what it is that has kept us together all this time. I wonder whether she thinks the same way.
“Is everything all right?” I ask.
“How do you mean?”
“You know, we haven’t had much chance to talk lately, what with your work taking it out of you, and most nights you’re too tired to talk and the television is on all the bloody time, and on the weekends I’m pretty useless.”
“Well, I’m here now, I’m talking now. What do you want to say?”
“I thought you said you wanted to talk to me?”
“OK then, tell me about Annie.”
“Annie’s dead,” I say.
“Yeah, but what about when she was alive? You haven’t been the same since she died. Was there more to your relationship?”
“What?”
“You and Annie, was there more to it?” There is a distant chill in her voice
“Well no, not really, not at all.” I feel myself flushing red. I look at her and I think: Who is this woman?
She looks determined; as passive as a statue, yet as unchallengeable as an angry gorilla. I stand up, it’s a natural reaction to threat I suppose, I’m bigger than her, taller and fatter and heavier and I’m a man for fuck’s sake.
“Sit.” She says.
I sit.
“It’s obvious there was something going on – obvious.”
“She was just a friend, just another fucked-up human being who I met along the way, someone to share a coffee with now and again, that’s all.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I never did anything, we were just friends.”
“You’ve always been the same, looking for someone else; I’ve never been enough for you.”
“What’s going on? Are you all right?”
“Never been better. All these years I’ve looked after us; looked after you, and now I realise you’re not worth it. You’ve never been worth it. I’ve given up my life for you. The things I’ve done for you, don’t you see? Can’t you see?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s too late anyway. Too late.”
~
Or did it begin here?
Cardiff, 1971. Somewhere in Canton, a side street off Cathedral Road. I’m not sure who’s living with me, not sure if I pay the rent. There’s something about Hendrix’s death, or an anniversary of Hendrix’s death. It could be 1970; I’ll have to work it out one day.
I’m 18, sharing a house with a few others. There’s one or two Cardiff boys and one or two Llanelli boys. Perhaps I’m crashing on the floor in Mike’s room.
Been here for a while, a few weeks at least, because I know I’m claiming the dole, ambling down to somewhere near Westgate Street once a week or whatever frequency it is now, popping into the chemist on the way back for cough medicine, or nicking a pint of milk off a doorstep.
Living on chips and cornflakes; chips, cornflakes, cough medicine and stolen milk.
~
Tenby – 1971. I’m sleeping on the beach in a beach hut that isn’t mine, or in a tent with Bill. Good old Bill. Trawling the streets at dawn, stealing milk from doorsteps, peaches from outside Woolworth’s. Begging when the tourists wake up. Begging with Jimmy, a scally from Birmingham.
~
Leaving Bill behind, going to Torquay, the same year, soon after. Sleeping on top of a shed, eating chips for breakfast with Jimmy. In a café, paying with the cash earned from half a night of peeling/picking/stabbing the eyes out of potatoes.
~
Glastonbury 1971. Definitely 71. Acid-Freaked. Seeking Release. “Fuck off,” they say. “We’re having a good trip.” It isn’t a bad trip, just intense, spiritual, deeply mythic. Spiked with acid. A lost tribe. Coming together – smiling. Not hallucinating, apart from the bus coming over the hedge, and Melanie singing. Free food and camp-fires, a glimpse – that’s all.
~
1961; a recurring dream. The Three Bears playing touch, Big Daddy Bear’s teeth. Panting for breath. Release. “There’s no release in this game boy.” He says, Big Daddy Bear says, biting a chunk out of my arm, and I wake up with a pain in the right place.
~
2002. A new world all right – a global village on the Internet. Two black cats in the kitchen. Bed Time. Must go to bed. 1:08 am. 1:20 am – up again. Things to do. Things to think about. Cardiff – Tenby – Torquay – Llangennech. Mostly Llangennech.
~
Cardiff 1972, 1973. I’m in a small house in Butetown – Pomeroy Street. Old Sea Captains used to live here, they say. We’re sharing a house with a woman called Delilah and her children – Bilbo and Janet. Her boyfriend Ali Baba (his choice) – an Arab Prince out of place. We use a pressure cooker a lot and make lentil and vegetable soup.
It’s later – a few months and we’re in Canton again. Conway Road, a leafy street, a nice garden, but too many mice.
Riverside – a smelly flat and more mice – even more – mice, and prostitutes living upstairs and drunks trying to break the door down and useless one-eyed cats and working in the steelworks, buying small tomatoes and wheeling them home in a pram.
~
1974. Manchester. 2 large semi-detached houses on 3 floors with attics and basements. This is the place. The Holy Place. 27 adults and 17 children.
~
And some other time. That’s when I noticed it first. I’m sure it had been going on for years before that, like the way your gut gradually grows as you get older. Not my gut, maybe not even your gut, you specific reader, but you know, most people’s gut, some at least. But you know what I mean. Something insidious and slimy has got into your life and you don’t notice it, you don’t see it coming. One day it’s just there like a boil that erupts on your face overnight. Not my face, maybe not even yours either but you know what I mean.
He was like that; like that insidious boil, and he needed lancing. Should have done it straight away I suppose, you know, I should have recognised the inevitability of it then, but I didn’t. I’m not saying I thought he was OK or anything, oh no, I knew straight away he was a bad one, I just didn’t realise how dangerous he was, and he had charm.
Have you ever been asked that question? The one about if you knew Hitler when he was a child and you knew what he was going to do, would you have killed him? Slit his throat with a scalpel or pushed him under a bus? Thing is, science fiction apart, there is no way to travel back in time, you just have to accept what is.
One thing you can influence though, without any danger of fucking up the time-space continuum, is the future. It’s easy to influence the future, putting aside all that stuff about fate. But then I didn’t act and now I’m sorry. What I should have done is to walk away from him then, when he was relatively harmless. I should have picked a fight or something, created an argument, then he’d never have been my friend.
What is this? What story am I telling? It’s beginning to sound like Frankenstein, but it’s not like that, I didn’t create my monster, not consciously anyway.
My monster came disguised as a well-off businessman, an old friend; the owner of a small but very successful car hire and taxi firm, and a night club and other shady businesses. He was a bit flash, a bit crude, a bit misogynist; he always was, but he was easy enough to get on with, a laugh.
He, let’s call him by his real name – Bastard – no, that’s not it, it’s Ken. The bastard was called Ken.
I had a successful business as well. I wouldn’t go so far as to say very successful, but successful enough.
He came into my office one day, the bastard, and he said:
“Do you want to make a lot of money . . .” He paused, smiling, waiting for my reaction. I just lifted my eyebrows. “Legitimately?”
~
Place: Llangennech. We’ve all done that haven’t we. Haven’t we? When we were young. On the inside cover of a school exercise book or a perforation-marked form in a comic. Name ____ Address _____. Name is simple enough but the longer and more unique the better. The address is another matter, 42 Something Road, Somewhere, Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, Wales, United Kingdom of Great Britain, Europe, the Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way, The Universe.
The exact place, the uniqueness of your identity and the fixing of your non-uniqueness in one. Position yourself in the universe. Here I am. I was here. I belong yet I am more than this, more than mere belonging. And the time? It is now 4:24:07 in the afternoon of Thursday June 6 in the year 2002 AD. (that’s the number of years since a man called Jesus was born – on the planet earth in the solar system etc . . . )
It’s not 4:24:07 of course, because now it’s 4:26:14, or at least it was when I looked at the clock on my computer 25 seconds ago.
Fix me. Fix me in space and time, and out of the infinite number of other actualities in space and time there are (Were? Will be?) I am here, look I’m here, I’m now. I’m the one that’s waving this fucking flag at you. Place: Llangennech. It’s already late. There’s no more to say, except, except . . .
~
This is my reality. July 13, 2002. This is my reality.
This is my reality. I don’t know if I like it; it’s got something to do with confidence, ego if you like. And why not? Ego, I mean. Why not ego? This is what I mean, about not knowing if I like it or not. But there’s more than that to it. There are moods; deep blue moods, aggressive red moods, incandescently brilliant white moods and occasionally dark black moods. There I go again. I want to talk about the light so I will:
~
“I’ve got to put some form on this, some shape that can be identified, otherwise it would never sell, never pay the rent.”
“But it’s beautiful as it is,” I said, “maybe a coat of varnish will finish it off.”
So banal, these conversations with artists. How many is it now? 45? 50? Over 4 years at least once a month. Perhaps I’ll publish them all in a book one day, some of them at least.
Artist number one did all right for herself. Suppose I did all right out of her as well. It was that interview that made my name (for what it’s worth), made her name. Then she was some nutter of some interest in North London. Now she’s loved and despised, always in the tabloids. She does sculptures – men’s cocks mostly. They’re not rude though, not erotic either. They’re just good. One day they’ll be the definitive artistic definition of penises.
When I first met her she was into very beautiful busts – busts of famous people, people in the media, people who had or seemed to have power, like the Prime Minister or the head of MI5, even the editor of the Daily Mirror for fuck’s sake.
I visited her in her studio.
(This is hard, this kind of writing. I can do it but it’s hard. Is that right? Should it be hard? Might as well work in the computer business. Who cares anyway. In a hundred years we’ll all be dust. Mind you I suppose her cocks will live on for a few hundred, a few thousand years even – so what.)
She said: “My heads will live on after I’m dead.”
I think she meant her busts, but then she moved on to the other kinds of heads, and she was right – her heads will live on – both types probably, but the first type will only live because of the second type.
What happened to my mortality?
What’s happening to yours?
~
“It’s a bit like a jigsaw puzzle.” She said. “As if, all you’ve got to do is find out where the relevant bits should go and voila you’ve got three or four, at least, separate objects.”
“Sort of,” I said, “but saying it’s like a jigsaw puzzle implies that it was once a whole and was then deliberately split apart in order to confuse and pose a challenge. What I think is that it was never a whole, there’s no point looking for that sort of pattern in it. I think it was a deliberately random outflow of creativity, albeit confined to a particular point on the continuum between the birth and the death of the artist.”
“Now you really are taking the piss.”
“No, I’m not, I read it over there, on that panel to the left.”
She laughed. It was nice to see her happy in my company, it was nice just being with her. Isn’t this what the middle-class aspire to? A debt-free, stress-free, life of Marks and Spencer comfort with enough left over every month to add a few quid to the retirement fund in the building society. God, I wish I wasn’t so cynical. It’s not easy being a cynic you know, you have to work hard at it, or else you simply get branded as an embittered old twat, poisoned by your failures.
“It was a nice thought,” she said, “coming here today. I know it’s pretentious but it makes a change, and some of the stuff is OK.”
“Let’s go and have that coffee.” I said.
We walked through the town away from the exhibition and looked for a coffee shop. The one we chose had a narrow windy stairs that led to a cosy, private landing with a few empty tables.
“This is lovely coffee,” she said, smiling as she sipped.
At last, I thought, at last we had our lives under control, at last we could enjoy each other’s company. This could be the start of a period of  . . . .
~
Well you know what happens next; this idyll is shattered by the arrival of a force so strong that it blows the life of our hero apart like so many bubbles in a bubble bath.
Truth is, I don’t even know if I want to reach that plateau of comfort and stability. Pass me my pipe and slippers for fuck’s sake.

t w o

Cardiff 1971. He came back one night with a stolen car. I can’t even remember his name – Alex? Fred? Dennis? What’s a good name for 1971? Something weird, something a bit hippy. Probably a nickname then. Because if he was of that sort of age in 1971 he must have been born 1951, 1952 something like that. That would make him a David, always a favourite, or a Paul, or maybe even an Eric or a Kevin. Let’s call him Gammy, Gammy will do, not that he had a gammy leg or anything, not that I can remember anyway.
Gammy came in pissed, he always was, he was one of the local Cardiff boys, thought they were a bit hard, coming from the city and all that, but then the Llanelli boys had a reputation as well. That’s why it was OK for us to live together, couldn’t imagine Cardiff boys living with Swansea boys – even then.
“Who wants to go for a spin? Come on boys.”
“Fuck off. You’re pissed.”
Gammy sighed and dropped into the empty armchair, wood shavings spilling out like a soldier’s guts. “Got any shit?” He asked.
Mike chucked the end of a joint at him and turned up the volume on the stereo. Graham Nash – Songs for Beginners. ‘We once had a saviour, but by our behaviour he’s gone.” Something like that. Gammy puked over the side of the armchair. I nearly slipped in it on my way to bed. Bed? Floor? I can’t remember that much detail.

He came to visit me there, that fucker, that bastard Ken. Stayed one or two nights and then left with a smile. I remember it because he took me and Mike out for a curry, a very rare luxury for two unemployed drug addicts. That’s not really fair, I was never a drug addict. But I think Mike got close with the cough medicine. I remember once, the parents of another of the Llanelli boys came to visit and they brought some bin bags. They cleared the kitchen: four or five bags of empty cough medicine bottles, another couple full of empty milk bottles, and a few bags of scummy mess from the cupboards – mostly almost empty cornflakes packets.
The curry was gorgeous, they’d done something with the cubes of meat, it was as if they’d injected a series of unique spicy flavours directly into the cubes, flavours that did something to the pleasure centres of your brain – a memorable meal indeed. Ken was on form, he was a together sort of guy, always a pocketful of fivers and a newish car to boot. He made you feel special, a special friend.

Gammy woke me up. When he eventually persuaded us to go outside, we saw it.
“Shit Gammy,” Mike said.
“Fucking wanker,” I said.
The car Gammy stole, it was Ken’s. Ken’s father’s to be precise. But it was done, so we went for a spin, but Mike drove, he wasn’t pissed and well on his way down from the cough medicine.
Ken knew about the car, he brought it up during the curry that night. He wasn’t pissed off at all, he laughed about it. Fucking smug bastard.
Come to think of it, Gammy wasn’t from Cardiff at all. He was from the Valleys, Ystrad something-or-other. Don’t think I ever got to know any genuine Cardiff boys – not then anyway.
~
Tenby 1971. Her name is Greta and we’re sharing an omelette on the beach. She’s brought me a cold cheese omelette and some half-warm chips. She’s a nice girl but I’m not really interested, got to get on with my own life, I know it’s out there waiting for me – there’s something important I have to do – but I don’t know what.
Jimmy’s good at begging, he’s exactly the right distance between pathetic and threatening so that the punters play safe and lob him some decent denomination coins. I’m not so good, but I try and that’s all it takes, we are a mini-communist state, we share the pot, we do our best, at least that’s the principle, but I’m sure he slips a few silver shillings into his back pocket now and again, how else would he always find the cash for fags, drugs or chips when we should be broke? Or is it my maths?
This is how you beg.
You hang about in a place where there’s a good steady flow of people, not the same people going back and fore, that way you’ll exhaust the position very quickly. No, you have to be cleverer than that. Outside a railway station’s good, if you’re in a city that is, it’s not so good in a small town like Tenby, where the trains, even in the busiest season, only come every couple of hours. In a city, near a train station, travellers equal money. You can’t travel without money and everyone takes a bit spare.
You find somewhere where you can stand back occasionally and sit on a bench or lean on a low wall, somewhere to retreat to, and somewhere to launch your attack from. You wait for a fresh face to pass by, avoiding the hard looking men and the obvious grumpy old gits of course. With a bit of luck they haven’t spotted you before you move into position. When you do you have to be polite; say something like: “Excuse me.” For fuck’s sake don’t say “Excuse me sir.” or “Excuse me madam.” That’s much too sycophantic, nobody likes a sycophant, especially a sycophantic beggar.
Don’t bother with long explanations or sob stories, they don’t want to know, just cut to the chase. People appreciate directness, besides they want to keep the exchange as short as possible, they’re on holiday for fuck’s sake, or travelling, or going to meet a loved one, or even rushing back to their poxy offices. “Can you spare some change for a cup of tea?” I know it’s a cliché, but who’s kidding who? They know you don’t just want the price of a cup of tea and you know they know and they know that you know that they know. So keep it simple. Simple and quick.
Don’t give them time to think. “Excuse me. Can you spare some change?” See, you don’t even need the “for a cup of tea.” explanation. The hit rate isn’t brilliant, but it’s good enough to eat well and have a few bob left over for a couple of beers, if anyone will serve you that is, otherwise it’s the off-licence.
Jimmy’s all right, although he’s a bit scary, unpredictable, but in a conventional sort of way. To him, everything is fair game; he’s like a clever kid scrumping for apples; he waits for the fruit to ripen and just when it’s at its peak he moves in. Like the time he nicked a handbag left in a pram when the parents were perusing some holiday crap in a tacky shop.
“Stupid fuckers, they’re lucky I didn’t take the baby as well,” was how he justified himself.
There’s two of these valleys boys here, in Tenby, amongst the motley crew of dossers and seasonal workers, Serge, and somebody? Can’t remember the somebody’s name now, but he’s tall, long dark hair and long dark coat, the type that Mike used to nick from charity shops. Or is it a military uniform? It’s too hazy from this distance.
Now they are real nutters, don’t give a fuck about anything. One day we sat on some rocks overlooked by groups of tourists and we ripped live flatfish apart and ate them raw, all the time grunting and spitting to freak the onlookers out. Serge and the dark one light barbeque fires on the beach and cook stolen potatoes and sausages. And then there are the drugs.
Greta comes to see me again, but it’s too late, she doesn’t know it yet, neither do I.
~
My mother-in-law likes structure, she likes to know what she’s supposed to be doing and where she’s supposed to be going at all times. She hates waste, that’s why she freezes empty margarine wrappers, the foil kind that cover blocks of margarine for cooking. She uses them to grease cake tins and tart dishes; handy I suppose, not just thrifty. It’s got something to do with growing up during the Second World War.
My mother grew up during the war as well, though she is younger than my mother-in-law and lived in a different environment – a poor working class area of Llanelli called Seaside. Sounds nice doesn’t it. My father came from another poor working class area called the Morfa; it means something like Marshland, a soggy place.
July 29th, 2002, around midnight. I’m 50 now.
Place – Llangennech. Nowhere. This is what I was meant to do. This is what I was meant to do? I don’t know, but this is where I am and this is what I’m doing. Bastard Ken. Bastard Ken.

“Legitimately?” I repeated as a question.
He winked. To be fair Ken had never really done anything that could be classed as evil, not that I knew of then anyway. When we were teenagers he led me into multifarious petty-criminal escapades; the worse was when we broke into a cockle factory and robbed the safe. We got less than two quid out of it but it was a hell of a buzz.
He must have thought all those years that I was like him, just like I thought he was like me. But he wasn’t. He is an evil bastard and I’m not. I know it’s no big deal, the world is populated by human beings whose ethics and morals range across the whole continuum from absolute evil to absolute saintliness, and I’m just one small creature scrabbling for survival just like the rest of them. I mean, coming across an evil bastard like Ken is fuck all in the scheme of things, when you compare it to the vileness of war for example. I could have killed Ken after that, but before then I still thought of him as a friend – dodgy but still a friend.
~
Friday January 11, 2002. Do you know? Describe the place where you live.
I live in a village. It’s called Llangennech. The name probably comes from Llan, i.e., the church of, and Cennech or something, meaning Saint Cennech. So it’s the church of Saint Cennech. Anyway, that’s all been done in a book called “The History of Llangennech” so I won’t bother with all that.
What I will do is to tell you what Llangennech is like now. It’s a bit of a sprawling village with over four thousand inhabitants. There’s a co-op mini-market, a family bakers, a newsagent, a petrol station, a Chinese and an Indian takeaway, not to mention the bookies, the garage, the pubs, the chapels and the church, the post office and the rugby club. There’s loads of other stuff going on of course, down alleys, up side streets, at the back of houses and so on, but it’s all too much and too complicated to go into here.
But I will mention the schools and the nursery and the park and the train station and the old Royal Naval Establishment warehouses now filled with paperwork and caravans.
As far as I can tell most of the people of working age and ability leave the village each day to earn their living. Apart from those and the rugby and cricket types and the townies and the alternatives and the nerds and the petty gangsters (we had a murder recently), there is a massive contingent of old people – mostly old women.
If you drive into the village from the east you’ll probably leave the M4 motorway at junction 48 and head towards Llanelli. Turn left at the lights and you’re in the village. At that point, by the traffic lights, on the hill, after climbing up from the motorway for about half a mile, you can see most of the village as you look down into the river valley on the left. The river Loughor is a tidal river that separates the village from parts of Swansea on the other side, but the river is too wide for that to matter.
It’s actually a very nice welcoming view over the soggy marshland and onto the grass-encrusted mud banks that make up what is known as “The Tide”.
You can see a similar view as you roll over the hill from the south-west on the old road from Llanelli.
Llangennech is like the bit that’s left after you’ve removed a scoop of ice-cream from a tub of Neapolitan, but mostly brown with green instead of pink.
Enough bollocks about Llangennech.
~
I’ve been trying to write a poem about Christmas for years. I’ve finally come up with the first line, it’s:
Christmas glows in the dark.
~
There’s something about the smell of a city; not the fresh coffee, like fragrant earth, curling into the nostril, inviting indulgence and satisfaction. Not the sweet antiseptic of expensive perfume in the city centre department stores; not even the accumulated newness of plastic and metal, freshly machined and polished and hung like Aunty Betty’s curtains against the grime of visceral life in the computer games’ shops.
The smell of the city, the real smell of the real city, hovers like mist on a windless day on the paving slabs, the door handles and the goods in the corner shop. It lives in the long terraced side streets and the twee green avenues of the inner suburbs. It smells like bad breath, like blood congealing on a butcher’s slab, like fear, like stale adrenalin sweat. It smells like birth and death; most of all it smells of raw, exciting, energy-charged life.
~
About 5 to 9.
Things to do/get with a hundred quid. That’s what’s available to me after the debacle of my birthday and the trip to London that never happened because of sickness. One hundred pounds equals ten times ten pounds equals one hundred times one pound equals two hundred times fifty pence.
Could buy loads of paints and canvases? Or buy plain canvas and make my own? Or frames? Or? Let’s think . . . . . . .  (still thinking, just can’t be bothered with the dots) One hundred pounds? In some ways it’s a lot of money. I could get 5 of the radios that she bought me for Christmas. (I found the receipt so I know it cost £19.99) In some ways it’s very little money. I could get 0.5 – 1 per cent of the cost of a new moderately priced car. Twenty odd packets of tobacco or packs of fags. A couple of ounces of hash. Nearly an ounce of skunk. One week and a bit’s worth of Tesco shopping. A couple of nights on the piss for a piss-artist. Two or three Playstation 2 games. A goodish second hand camera or a mountain bike. Membership of a gym for a couple of months. A bloody big box of Lego.
5 past 9. So – what do I want?
Paints and canvas? A foray into oil painting. The start of a savings account towards openingchapter.com? A Zip drive and a Webcam? One hundred things from the pound shop? Drawing pens?
11:37 pm – no closer to deciding how to spend my hundred pounds.
~
A Week in Bed. Friday night. Indian takeaway. A week in bed, puking and aching. It wasn’t the food. Some bug. Some stomach bug. What a bug. What a week. Lentils and spinach like mud splashed on a tyre, lining the ceramic. A week ago, I was a man. Not old. Not young. Healthy. Stable. Comfortable. Naïve. Cocky.
Old women, shattered and bitter. Small hurt voices, looking for affirmation. I think they know what I know, feel what I feel, see what I see; but they don’t. They don’t see, feel, think; they just hurt and they don’t know why. Puzzled and wounded, falling over like dying primroses, wanting spring, getting only cold winter. It hurts too much to pretend any more.
At first it’s just unpleasant. Someone has poured castor oil down your throat while you were sleeping. Then you wake up, clutching, rubbing your stomach, moaning – no one’s listening. It’s 4 o’clock in the morning; they’re all asleep.
Puke – cold, sweaty, bitty sleep. More moaning and clutching and rubbing, then puking again and again and again until it’s only bile and an intestine like a grammar school science specimen.
This goes on for days and it hurts and aches in the joints and the small of the back and the muscles in the legs and all she wants to do is talk about the garden and what annuals we’re going to sow this year and whether we’ll get a new cooker or a new back door first.
Until she goes down with the same thing two days later, and that shuts her up and I’ve got to get out of bed, or off the settee and deliver cool crystal water and hot lemon drugs because the worse is already over for me.
She makes a big deal out of it and hates it when she can’t go to work, because then she’s stuck at home with me and I feel fat and useless and she’s crying and talking about divorce.
A walk to the Co-op to top up the paracetemol stocks, and I see old men, wiry old men, late developers, smoking, walking dogs, crying with pain because they don’t see or feel or think either. And I know I’m going to die, I’m an old man already and without memory, I would be nothing.
That’s what stopped me going to London for my birthday.
~
The things you try to avoid: reminders of your mortality, dog shit, and Songs of Praise. Why?
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do old women try to push in front of you in queues?”
“They don’t.”
“Ha, ha, you haven’t shopped in Marks and Spencers.”
“Shut up.”
“Ha, ha.”
“OK, what succeeds?”
“Me.”
“No, a gummy budgie.”
“Ha, ha. I am going to succeed though, you know that, don’t you.”
“I know that if anyone will, you will Ken.”
“I will. I’ve been thinking a lot lately and I’ve decided that this world is a pile of dog shit, I’m not going to be the one to step in it. I’m going to be like one of those Lotus flowers you always go on about – floating above the world, sitting pretty on top of the stinking pond.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to take it like that.”
“That’s what you said didn’t you? That you had to be in the world, but you don’t have to be above the world.”
“Shut up Ken, if you weren’t stoned I’d fucking clatch you.”
“You won’t be doing any of that.”
“I was only joking.” His mood had taken a turn for the worse, I told him not to touch those pills. Graham, Ken’s cousin, a boy I hadn’t met before spoke up.
“I believe that life is like a railway track. You can see the path clearly, disappearing into the distance. The only thing you’ve got to do is follow it. It’s easy.”
“Shut up Graham,” Ken said, “you’re a boring bastard.”
“But I only want the same things as you.”
“Take it easy boys.” I said. “Lighten up, for fuck’s sake. We’re wasting good grass. This stuff wasn’t cheap.”
“Who cares,” Ken said, “who cares about money, except the poor. I’m not going to be poor.”
“Nor me.” Graham said.
“But why do old women push in front of you in queues?” Ken said.
We all laughed.
~
We all laughed.
This was a rare treat, being in the pub with her and some good company. It takes two to tango, and I suppose it takes some effort to make and keep friends. I’ve never been very good at it. I’m too intolerant of other people’s foibles and bad manners, and if I’m honest, I’m a bit embarrassed about being a bit scruffy and overweight. I should be more like Johnny Vegas, he obviously doesn’t give a fuck, but he’s still got friends, at least in the TV programme ‘Happiness’, which is what I’m going to watch later on tonight.
But, hang on, I can’t, I’m in the pub, and it’s not tonight, this was last week, last Saturday night in fact. I think the difference is that there were more of us than usual. We were in a group of eight. There was me and her, then there were two other couples, couples from the village, couples we’d known on and off for years but had never thought of socialising with before; and then there were two of the regulars from the pub, again we had seen them about, especially on our occasional visits on a weekend, when we invariably ended up bored and going home after two or three pints, stuffing ourselves with Chinese chips on the way.
Tonight was different; tonight we had friends.
She was enjoying herself, on her fourth or fifth glass of red wine, and showering her charm over five-eighths of the group. I was chatting to Frank, a man in his forties and someone who I’d always admired in a reluctant sort of way because of his ability to hold a good job down, and dutifully report to some manky establishment, five days a week for most of his useable life.
“I don’t know how you do it,” I said.
“What?”
“You know, go to work every day, slave away at some boring desk so that you can bring a good standard of living in for your family.”
“My job isn’t boring, we have a good laugh in work, and there’s always some scam going. Last Christmas, me and the two guys who work for me did a roaring trade in copied CDs and men’s underwear that we got from the warehouse. You wouldn’t believe how many boxer shorts went through those factory gates.”
I was surprised. “I thought you worked in an office.”
“I do,” Frank said, “but the office is attached to a factory full of women who haven’t got time to go out and do Christmas shopping because they’re in work; and of course, because they’re in work they’ve also got money burning holes in their overalls.”
“But that’s only Christmas,” I said, what about the rest of the year?”
“I enjoy my work, it’s what I do.”
“Don’t you mind the driving?” I asked.
“You get used to it, it’s only thirty-odd miles, I can do it in less than half an hour on a good day, as long as I get a clear road to the motorway and then past Port Talbot. It’s all about timing.”
I’m afraid to say that the novelty soon wore off and after another hour of listening to him droning on about work, boxer pants and the dismal performance of the Welsh rugby team I was nearly ready to take an overdose of heroin.
On the way home with her, I said: “Boring lot, weren’t they?”
“Oh no, I had a good time, it’s interesting to see how other people live don’t you think?”
“I suppose so.” I said. “Do you want a bag of chips?”
Who needs friends.

t h r e e

So where are we?

Cardiff 1971: Gammy, Mike, Ken.
Tenby 1971: Jimmy, Greta, Bill.
Torquay: Jimmy, potatoes.
Glastonbury 1971: Release, Melanie, a bus coming over the hedge.
1961 or earlier: The Three Bears.
2002: Cats, Internet, Llangennech.
Cardiff 1972: Bilbo, Janet, Delilah, Ali Baba, one-eyed cats, mice.
1974 Manchester: 27, 17, Holy.
NOW: Nightmares and Jane Eyre, Ken, Bastard. (mentions for Hitler and Frankenstein)
Llangennech: Here and now. This is my reality. The first artist. Cocks. Some places, some people, sometimes, but only a tiny bit of one man’s life. It starts to get very fucking complicated when you start to analyse it. Take what you want, spin out a particular thread, follow one path. I promise you it will all make sense in the end.
Ken of course is the villain (at least for the time being). I’m the hero. We, that’s the hero and the villain, are surrounded by lesser forces – this is my reality after all, I’m allowed to take centre stage.
~
The next passage is optional, (but it will give you an insight into the mind of the hero), you can SKIP it if you like.

START SKIPPING NOW
The World is Mad. A quick stroll around the town and I came to the conclusion that the world is mad. This is serious stuff; this world, that is the world that we people who live in the affluent west as it is known, live in, is completely and unashamedly off its trolley. We like to think that society is an ordered, cohesive whole, but in fact it’s completely cracked. People are utterly lost and alone, without hope, blindfolded, buffered, sheltered, or simply hiding from the truth. This isn’t real life, any more than the false glitter of Hollywood is; this is just another part of the same thing. The Neanderthal from the rugby club getting pissed on a Saturday night and puking up his Chicken Korma against the chemist’s wall is very closely allied to the fat producer in his open topped Corniche and the gorgeous-bodied starlet whose picture is pinned to the office wall of the manager of the motorway services near London.
This town that I’m in is mad anyway, even if the rest of the world isn’t. I’ll give you an example: here we have a chip shop; it’s a very famous chip shop, in this town at least. This is the type of chip shop that serves very traditional fare. This is the type of establishment that is looked back on with sentimentality by fat middle-aged men who used to pay frequent visits there in their youth. The chip shop has been there a long time, ever since I can remember and I’m a fat middle-aged man myself. The service is fast, faster than any of your new-fangled fast-food hamburger joints. The main item on the menu is of course chips, oblong chunks of potato fried in what I assume is cheap vegetable oil. This is a perfectly acceptable food in this part of the world. A steady stream of people leave the chip shop holding yellow polystyrene cartons containing soggy, fatty, oblong lumps of potato sprinkled with salt and sprayed with acetic acid or non-brewed condiment as it is politely called. The more affluent in the community don’t just stop at a packet of chips, they proceed to add even more exotic delicacies to their cartons.
How about Gravy & Chips, Peas & Chips, Turkey Burger, Meat pie, Pastie or Battered Mushrooms?
OK I think I wrote that last Saturday. It’s now Tuesday June 18, 1997 3:20 pm. I think it’s me that’s mad after all not the rest of the world. For example I dialled a number in the Midlands and I dialled it wrong 3 times. That doesn’t happen to me usually.
Now it’s Saturday September 27, 1997 – 12:40 am, in other words it’s actually Sunday morning.
The world is still mad. I’m a part of it of course, part of this world and I suppose I must be mad too. The point is that it doesn’t matter that I am mad or that the world is mad, as long as we can keep it just within the bounds of normality and don’t let ourselves or the world slip into chaos. That is if we have any control at all, perhaps this is actually chaos and being conscious beings we have to make sense of the chaos in order to survive.
So what is it all about? Alcohol, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and death. There are so many ways of coping with life. Some of us need, or think we need alcohol to survive, or drugs, illegal ones like cannabis and speed and heroin, and legal ones like prozac and valium and god knows what else. Some of us are do-gooders or entrepreneurs or fire fighters or policemen or gangsters. Some of us bury ourselves before we’ve left our teenage years and emerge with a pension at sixty-five. Some of us end up sleeping and dying under motorway bridges or getting blown to bits by a terrorist bomb. Some men shag women, some shag other men, some women shag other women.
What motivates us? Is it our genes as some claim? Are we are merely hosts for the genes that influence all our actions? These genes drive us; they are the real masters of the universe. Genes have an overriding priority to procreate and then to protect the results of that procreation. Thus we find a genetically suitable mate and then have children and then nurture those children merely to ensure the survival of those genes. If we’re lucky our children have children of their own and we can then help another generation of genes to survive and continue the race to eternity. But what of the disabled, the mutations; the weak genes you could say. No these genes are not weak; even our genes must change in order to survive, therefore anomalies only serve to strengthen the gene pool. If I thought that scientists would eventually achieve the supposed goal of stamping out all illness and disease then I would believe that the end of the human race is in sight. But I do not believe this. Our genes are stronger and more cunning than we think. There will always be these outsiders, the freaks, the mutants, the rebels, it’s what keeps the human race alive. OK, like the dinosaurs, one day humans will face extinction but what then? How will the all powerful genes survive. Some say that the dinosaurs evolved into birds or reptiles. Will human genes take on a different guise? What will it be? We can only speculate.
One thing is sure – whatever I do now during my life, whatever Shakespeare did or Da Vinci, or whatever the combined genius of all of mankind over all of its past and future history does, then one day it will all be only so much dust.
These then are my pathetic scratches in the sands of eternity. There is however one tiny glimmer of hope, that is that whatever else has happened or whatever else will happen we have the now. In the end it’s all that means anything. I’m writing this now, you’re reading this now. Be happy, be here now.
One o’clock in the morning – twenty minutes later.
~
Sunday September 28,1997 – 8:27 am
Before I start to play any games I must write. Let’s put some words into the mouths of characters. What do I want to say? How about the ridiculousness of life, but the sense also of keeping a routine. Having a set of values and mores versus exposing the hypocrisy. What wins in the end is art. A way of expressing these ultimate ‘truths’ or questions in a beautiful and challenging way, the skill of the artist. Artist = one who paints a picture using paint and canvas, music, words, sculpture or any other medium. Without art (in this sense) life is a meaningless pile of rotting material. Another question that could be asked, though with very little chance of being answered, is – is religion a form of art in this sense?
All this has to be set against a background that the reader has to be able to understand. The reader must also get some kind of understanding and joy from reading the piece or watching any subsequent play or whatever that is developed from the writing. The piece must operate at several levels and across a wide field. It must be deep and wide. These should be the underlying principles when writing the piece. What comes out is unknown at the beginning but by always keeping these principles in mind then there must be some of these truths in the finished piece.
So now the practicalities – who, what, when, where, how etc. The story. The characters the plot etc.
Perhaps a discussion of a piece of modern art a la Damien Hurst or whatever his name is. That adds another dimension – discussing a piece of art that already exists to illustrate these deeper points of what art is.
Clues – leave clues planted in the text to point to the real meaning of it.
Exciting – it has to be exciting and dramatic.
Characters – the characters have to be interesting.
Situation – the situation has to be familiar.
Humour – there has to be a strand of humour.
Satisfaction – the reader must feel satisfied at the conclusion.
~
Now it’s Sunday September 28, 1997 – 11:30 pm
Let’s change the script –
Time to
A: (Rhetorically) I don’t want to smoke any more. I don’t want to eat, I don’t want to drink, in fact I don’t want to do anything any more. I don’t want to live any more.
B: (Absent-mindedly) That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?
(C Enters)
A: (Addressing C) Hello.
C: (sniffs as if offended and ignores A) Did it come? (Addressing B)
A: What?
C: (Again) Did it come?
B: Ssh!
(Doorbell rings – C dashes to the door opens it and takes a parcel off someone)
C: Thanks. (Closes the door) It’s here. It’s bigger than I remember. (Struggles with the parcel – puts it across the coffee table and unwraps it – a large painting emerges)
(A, B, and C gather around the painting laying on the coffee table – it consists of several deep-coloured squares, the paint thick and textured)
B: It’s a bit abstract isn’t it?
A: It’s meant to be. It’s supposed to represent the harmonisation and the clash of sentient beings. It’s an expression of human consciousness.  It’s actually quite beautiful. See the way the colours overlap and yet maintain their integrity.
B: It’s beyond me. Give me a portrait any day. Take Van Gogh’s ‘The potato eaters’, now that’s a good painting. It means something. It’s not afraid to come right out there and shove it in your face.
A: That painting sends shivers down my spine, it’s so dark. It’s not a celebration of life, it’s more like having your head pushed down a toilet. That’s the sort of painting that would really make me tired of living.
C: (Nods, but will not look directly at A)
B: Isn’t it about time you two stopped this nonsense? For god’s sake it was only a joint, it’s not like it was food or something.
C: (Sniffs)
A: I’m sorry OK? Next time, I’ll make sure you get double shares.

STOP SKIPPING NOW
~
I’ve got to keep Ken going until the end of the story, otherwise what would be the point? I have right on my side and I will eventually triumph over that evil bastard Ken. I need to get to know him a bit better, find his weak points, push and prod him until he disintegrates like an old wasps’ nest.
Oh, what’s the point in fucking about, Ken is already beaten, he’s history, I sorted it out, I killed the cunting fucker. There, I’ve done it now, I’ve confessed. I did it. I fucking did it. It wasn’t hard, the murder I mean. The killing itself wasn’t hard, but afterwards, it’s been a fucking nightmare. Take my advice, don’t do it. It’s not fucking worth it. Change your identity, move to Iceland, just don’t kill, there’s always a better way.
~
I remember once, when I was about seventeen or eighteen, I took some speed; they were probably tablets that one of my mates used to nick off his mother, who was a big fat woman with a penchant for swearing at children. Anyway, I took some speed and went home. It was probably about eleven o’clock or something, because it would have been difficult to justify getting in any later on a weeknight, since nothing went on after half past ten in the town anyway.
So, I went home and my parents were just going to bed; probably waited up for me to come in, since my father had to get up for work in the morning and my mother always got up early anyway to tend to my younger brother. I managed to hold it together until they went to bed by pretending to have a headache. I said I’d have a cup of tea and would go up to my own bed soon.
After they went to bed I was downstairs, in the living room, on my own, in the quietness of the night. I wanted something from the top drawer of the sideboard. I can’t remember what it was now, a pen or something, so I opened a drawer and started rummaging. Seven hours later, my father got up for work and I was still rummaging, or rather rearranging. I’d gotten so engrossed with the task of sorting the mess in the drawer out that I’d forgotten to go to bed, I wasn’t tired anyway.
When my father saw me, he tutted a bit before taking advantage and sending me to the newsagents for a packet of fags and a newspaper, while he made his breakfast. By the time I got back, the comedown had started and I went straight to my room pretending to be tired. I cried for most of the day, ostensibly about the girl who had dumped me a few weeks earlier.

That’s why the work of John Treorchy interested me so much. When I first saw it it invoked a sense of loss and pointlessness that at first made me want to run straight back out of his studio in Morriston, Swansea. But I didn’t run out, I stuck it out, and I’m glad I did, because this artist is extraordinary. He’s extraordinary in the way he uses everyday objects to make ‘moments of frozen time’ as he puts it. for example the work that provoked those reactions in me was based on a drawerful of objects almost exactly like the drawer I had so meticulously tidied up thirty years earlier.
“All my pieces seem to do things like that to someone or other,” he explained, “and I don’t know why. It doesn’t seem to matter what I do, sooner or later someone comes along and tells me a story like the one you’ve just told me. I like to think that I’ve somehow tapped into some universal truths and can create works that somehow channel that truth directly into the soul of the viewer. You can have it if you like.”
“Oh no,” I said, perhaps a bit too abruptly. I didn’t know how many useless pieces of art I’d had thrust on me during my time as an art critic for the Internet site but I knew I didn’t have any more room for them, besides I didn’t really like the piece personally and the negative feelings it evoked.
What he’d done was to take an ordinary drawer from an ordinary house, that was full of a jumble of ordinary objects and pieces of detritus, like hairpins or staples or half-chewed biros or half-dead hairbrushes, complete with wisps of hair, and he’d encased the lot in thick clear plastic. It looked simple enough but it must have taken an age to tease the molten plastic into the correct nooks and crannies to avoid destroying the obviously meticulously planned composition. The objects were so common and so unreachable at the same time, the plastic was so transparent and so unbreachable that the conflict caused in the mind of the viewer was enough to call his creations works of art.

f o u r

There’s a reason for every molecule of ink on this page, or every pixel of light on this screen, or whatever. So there must be a reason for everything. So, nothing is pointless, nothing is pointless.
~
OK, I did it. I had to fucking do it. The bastard had been shafting me all my life and for the first few decades I didn’t even know it. What would you do? He had to go. Now that’s a funny thing about killing someone. Sure, you’ve taken their life, extinguished their consciousness, but that’s only part of them. Mostly, these people, the people that you hate, or love – live in your head – and you can’t kill them – the bits of reality in your head – you can’t kill them.
Maybe if I’d done it twenty years earlier, maybe then, I’d have got over it in time to have some sort of life. But I didn’t and I suspect that if I had it wouldn’t have made a difference. I’d just have had twenty more years of this shit. Anyway, I didn’t know then and I’m glad, because at least I had a life. Now what have I got? How the fuck am I going to sort this out?
~
London – another perspective. An August Saturday in 2002. I gave the beggar-woman on the millennium footbridge two pounds and lost a twenty-pound note while having a sneaky one-skinner under the bridge, staring down at the Thames. A boat passed in the middle of the river, a sort of barge – but wide, with its cargo covered in green tarpaulin. It went quite fast and left a brown lapping on the rubble.
The power, the privilege, the clichés of the British era. One day, social historians will discuss the dark days of London at the beginning of the twenty-first century. London, it’s a big word, two big bass notes – Lon-Don, that boom with power and privilege. The way the Lunnoners say it, it loses its power and becomes instead a dirty, hard and noisy city, filled with poverty and stress, holding itself together by tiny fragments of the adhesive that makes everything move and keeps the status quo at the same time – money, the key to survival.
I came here with Ken once. (once with Ken that is). It was the Pink Floyd concert in Hyde Park at the end of the sixties I think. We scored some grass off a Spanish guy under the trees and lay back on our elbows to stare at a distant stage with sound coming from speakers behind our heads somewhere. I was not impressed; London has never impressed me.
That was the year Phil died, near enough. He was the first. He had a habit of driving his car too fast and too recklessly and flew over a hedge on the road to Llandeilo (he was going to score some acid). Hit a tractor thing and died in a coma two days later. His brakes were fucked, apparently.
~
August 2002. How fucking weird is that. I bumped into Phil’s mother today. She looks just the same as she did then only more wrinkled. She recognised me straight away and she said the same things she said about Phil she’s been saying for the last thirty odd years. We went for a coffee; it was strange, drinking coffee with an old woman, reminiscing about her long dead son.
But Phil was something special, the kind of guy you only meet once in a lifetime. Well, not a kind of guy, you couldn’t say Phil was a kind. He was unique, a one-off . . . what the fuck am I going on about, he was hardly more than a kid when he died, a couple of years older than me, but just about still a teenager, I think.
She can’t accept that Phil died because he was a complete head-case. She’s convinced that he was murdered. She’s blaming the police. Fuck that shit, you don’t want to go round calling the police murderers, they’ve got the power.
I promised I’d call in to see her sometime; she still lived in the same small house just outside town.
~
I’m on the train to London, minding my own business, trying to melt into the back of the seat and giving off a “don’t fuck with me” vibe when a man comes in and sits in the seat across the aisle but facing me, if you know what I mean. He’s staring straight ahead, upright, full of paranoia and tension. He’s in his fifties, but straight looking, straight casual though with blue jeans and an expensive white sports top.
I’m doing a good job of avoiding eye contact but it’s tiring and I wish he’d go to sleep or at least sit back and relax with a fucking book or something. Then, thank fuck, a younger man sits opposite him and they talk shit all the way to Paddington. I’m obviously listening but not listening obviously if you know what I mean.
These fuckers! They’ve got no more to say. Everything they’re saying has already been said. There’s nothing new for them to talk about. What they’re really doing is playing games of the ‘my cock is bigger than yours’ variety. The first guy was born in 1946, (do the maths yourself) and the other one is round about twenty-one because he’s in a drama school in North London and he talks about his parents a lot.
“I’m bigger/wiser/more knowledgeable than you.”
“My choices in life are well chosen.”
So there’s fuck all to say.
There’s a 21 year old moaning that young people today are only interested in pop music and it’s a shame that they’re not into Brahms or someone.
For fuck’s sake, make your own culture.
But I get to London unscathed and settle down with my lovely 30-year-old son, in his flat in South-East London, with a spliff, a vegetable biryani and Cool FM playing Jungle on the radio.
How lucky am I.
The next day I get up early and sneak into London while he’s sleeping.
~
London, Saturday Morning
I had a piss in the Tate Modern and gave the £2 “suggested” donation to a beggar on the millennium footbridge because she deserved it more. Saint Paul’s Cathedral was underwhelming and the bobbies looked like characters out of Fireman Sam.
London – towering buildings – modern art – small Asian men selling Guardians and phone cards. Sometimes I feel like a vaguely interested alien. The big city institutions, the monuments to tradition, the exploding sheds and large pieces of coloured paper – homeless beggars and the old River Thames – so what?
I had a thought about the beggars; this particular one, a grimy woman in her thirties, smiled with a light when I gave her the two quid.
I said: “Better you have it than that lot in there,” pointing at the Tate Modern.
She smiled the light again but I’m not sure if she understood the gesture, or even if she heard the words, perhaps the two pounds represented 29 squillion litres of cheap cider or something, but there you go.
The thought I had was:- We (that’s you and me, you know, the sort of people who go to the Tate Modern and read books like this). (I’d better repeat that because the brackets went on too long). The thought I had was: – we, feel sorry for the homeless beggars, or we feel pity, I suppose some of us feel disgust, anyway we generally feel something.
What do I say? I say, stop. Stop feeling sorry for them, or pity, and especially stop feeling disgust. Why? (Oh, by the way, I don’t mean stop giving them money). Why? It’s all about the light. I saw it twice today – once when I gave the beggar the money and once when I spoke to her directly afterwards.
And that’s what it’s all about. These people’s homelessness and poverty is a metaphor for their inner homelessness and poverty – it’s all about their need for light. Say, for every one thousand people that walk by a beggar, 999 of them do not react, or pretend not to have a reaction – well it’s still worth it to them (the beggars) because that one in a thousand delivers the light. And the thing about light is that it gets reflected straight back at you; it’s like instant good karma. We supply the beggars need for light and they supply ours, it’s a symbiotic relationship. And it’s not only about giving and receiving money, sometimes a guilty glance is enough. They’re laughing inside, these beggars, living off the light. Light bombs planted on the street waiting for your detonator.
And then there’s the Tate Modern – a groovy collection of the best of what’s known as ‘modern art’ in an even groovier building in a groovy groovy part of one of the grooviest cities on Earth – London. What could be groovier? Huge entrance hall of cathedrally majestic proportions. Me – unimpressed (I’ve worked in more impressive car factories). Hours long queues to buy tickets to see Matisse’s and Picasso’s work (of which I am a huge fan) – fuck that. Poncey café, half-baked exhibition pieces, two pound suggested donation – fuck that too.
I’ll tell you what’s groovier – it’s the light – the light – there is nothing else.
In the afternoon. Three women on the bus – figures like fifteen-year-olds, faces as old as their privilege. Hawk-eyed, high-voiced – pampered. Five hundred dollar jeans, two thousand dollar jackets (dollars sounds nicer than pounds – more international and sexy. Don’t you think?). From the trendy outskirts of Brixton to posh Dulwich, some drinkies, some posing, some men, maybe even some sex. They have the hunter’s look, alert to their own safety, focused on their prey, oblivious to extraneous distractions. I don’t register in their vision
“Skunk weed.”
“White.”
The dealers emerge from the mass of excited bodies on the streets of Brixton in South East London. Why me? Why are they targeting me so vehemently? Do I look like a drugs tourist or something? I wouldn’t mind but I’ll never buy dope off someone on the street, a complete random like that. I’m afraid I’ll get ripped off, a couple of grams of oregano or a lump of henna for twenty quid or so. Anyway, I don’t need any skunk, I’ve got my own, grown organically on a sheep farm in Wales (so they told me), and I wouldn’t touch the white shit, I’m too old to get into that now.
We sit in the gardens outside the Bug Bar and smoke a joint. The dealers leave us alone. We talk about London and free parties and Jungle music and jobs and art and I tell him about the shit in the Tate Modern. I don’t tell him about Ken, I’ve never told anyone about Ken, even her. They don’t need to share in that fucked-up shit. But Ken is on my mind, he always is.
~
Beetle stained custard. Chemically enhanced nutrition. Unnatural colours. Food that isn’t food. Food that is plastic. Consistency. Hills infested with fluorescent flora and dripping with blood. Baby food. Immaterial material. Artifaction. Acid dreams becoming reality. A manufactured world. A thin world. A light even in these darkest days.
These are just some of the themes running through Steven J Powell’s work. He was brought up on a dairy farm just outside Llandeilo and he noticed when he sat down to eat one day, that the food he was served by his adoring mother was not the same as the food that his father grew and produced. He noticed the difference between the sanitised sludge of the child’s dinner table and the congealing bloodiness of the cowsheds and the milking parlour where he helped his dad harvest the products of the animals that they nurtured from bloody afterbirth to bloody steak.
So, Steven J Powell started to create representations of the feelings he experienced, brought on by the juxtaposition of raw life and death with the homogenised, pasteurised, sterilised bottles of cows’ milk that appeared on everyone’s doorsteps every morning. As he grew up he experimented with different forms. He started by drawing farmyard scenes with wax crayons, using the most brilliant colours in the packet and ignoring what we would call the actual colours that we perceive.
This, in itself, was a great achievement for a ten year old, for that is the age at which he had this first epiphany, but his work even then, goes much deeper than that. He moved quickly on to attempting to make representations using the actual foodstuffs themselves so that by the time he was sixteen his mother nearly lost her mind looking in the cupboards for the custard powders and sugars, the colourings and fats of her farmer’s wife’s trade – the items he stole from the kitchen to use in one of the run-down outhouses that surrounded the farmhouse.
He soon came to realise that he was never going to be able to construct anything that lasted very long with the perishable goods he had chosen as his medium so he started to experiment with harder materials, like bits of wood and old milk churns, bits of electric fencing and corroded rubber teats. Some of his earlier works in these materials are now on show in the parlours of rich and slightly off-key farmers, but it is his more recent work that is receiving the most critical acclaim.
Now, nearly three decades after his attempts at permanence with food colourings, flour and milk, his work has evolved, so that it bears the assured sharpness of vision associated with a master of his medium. Now, he makes sensual sculptures out of plastics and paints, using the most fluorescent and brightest pigments he can muster. His latest award-wining piece is a triangular structure of three spheres that have the texture and colour of the bright green, pink and yellow custards and blancmanges you see at the best children’s parties.
~
Phil wanted to come to the Pink Floyd concert in Hyde Park but he never got it together. In the end me and Ken hitchhiked; good thing we went three days early, because it took us nearly that long to get there. The night before we left we were in the pub, that’s me, Phil, and Ken.
Phil and Ken didn’t really get on so I was surprised to find them sitting next to each other in the modernised upstairs of the pub. The landlord and his partner had made some concessions to the drug-induced unconventionality hard won in the sixties and had furnished and decorated the upstairs with more than a nod in that direction. I suppose that the main contributors to the room’s ambience were the lighting and the up-to-date stereo system. The lighting created a dim atmosphere that was nevertheless very colourful, with greens and reds and blues, yellows and whites; with flickers and starbursts, glows and sparkles. The music was well-chosen with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Jefferson Airplane and of course Pink Floyd among the offerings.
Phil said something to me as I sat down and he pulled himself away from Ken’s ear, they were both laughing, but I couldn’t hear him because the music was too loud. I stood up again, went over to the unattended bar and turned it down. There was no one else in the room.
I sat down again. “Can I have a sip?” I asked, pointing at Phil’s glass of coke.
He shrugged. “I was just telling Ken now,” he said, “I might be able to come with you after all. I might even be able to bring my car. But I would need you to chip in for petrol.”
“And I told him it would take more than petrol money to get that heap of his to London.” Said Ken.
I shrugged. There was no way I could afford to chip in for anything, let alone petrol to London. All I had was thirty bob and no prospect of getting any more. The concert was free and hitchhiking was free, so what did I want with a poxy car anyway.
Ken noticed my mood. When Phil went to the toilet he said to me. “Don’t worry about the money. I’ll lend you some.”
My mood lifted, even thought I had often ‘borrowed’ money off Ken there was never any pressure to give it back and it didn’t bother me. Phil took a while in the toilet and then we saw him, silhouetted in the doorway, whispering to someone. When he came back his mood had dropped to a point well below where mine had been earlier.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
“I can’t fucking go.” He said.
“Why?”
“It’s my fucking brother.”
“Paul?” Ken said.
“Yes, that wanker.”
“But you said Paul was cool.”
“Well, it’s not really his fault, it’s my mother.”
“What’s wrong with your mother?” I asked.
“She’s freaking out, Paul says she’s going mad worrying about me. He came down specially to talk to me. She’s convinced something bad is going to happen to me.”
“Fuck her.” I said.
“I’ve tried to ignore her, but Paul came looking for me. It’s that fucking gypsy’s fault.”
“You don’t have to listen.” I said.
“You don’t understand,” he said, “she lost my twin brother at birth, she’s never got over it. I’ll never be able to get out of this poxy town. Not until she’s dead anyway.”
“Oh!”
“Listen,” Phil said, “I’m going to have to get home. You two enjoy yourselves.”
After Phil left Ken went downstairs and bought me and him a pint of bitter each.
“Would have been a nightmare if he’d have come anyway,” he said, “can you imagine three of us hitchhiking, not to mention the broken down wreck of a car of his.” Ken laughed and took a big swig of the beer.
I walked home on my own to save the bus fare; I’d deliberately missed the last bus anyway. I enjoyed the half hour walk back from town to the estate, especially after pub closing time. It was even better after the discos closed down late on Friday night. Then you got to chat to all the random semi-drunk, semi-strangers; you got to know things about people you’d never have got to know otherwise. There’s something about a walk through quiet streets, along deserted main roads that brings out the confessional in people.
I got talking to a bloke who I think was known as Ferret, because of his white hair and skinny pink body.
“Where you been?” He asked as I drew alongside him.
“Just out.” I said.
“I’ve been walking my girlfriend home. She’s forty tomorrow. I’m only twenty-nine.”
“Oh yeah.” I said, slowing my pace, deciding it would be a reasonable way to spend the time during the walk home – he lived somewhere on the estate, I wasn’t sure where and normally I’d have avoided him, he was a lot older than me and a bit rough if you know what I mean, but he came across as harmless enough, at least he was in a harmless mood, so I decided to risk it.
“Where’s she live?” I asked, trying to be friendly.
“I saw you in the pub earlier,” he said, “in Station Road.”
“Yeah, I was there.”
“Saw that kid too, the one with the smart mother.”
“Phil?” I said.
“No, not Phil.”
Ken then?”
“Might be. Anyway I’ve always felt sorry for him I have.”
“Oh, why?”
“Well, his mother isn’t it.”
“How do you mean?”
“She’s on the fucking game isn’t she.”
“Nah,” I said, “you must have got it wrong. She’s posh, could never imagine her on the game.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are?”
When he turned and snarled at me I could see another reason why they called him ferret – the sharp white teeth that bared themselves against his pink gums. I decided to get the hell out of there and immediately started running. He tried to keep up with me for a few yards but soon gave up cussing and swearing. I reckoned he’d forget about it all after he’d slept off the alcohol so I wasn’t too worried.

f i v e

1971: Serge and the other one. Faces from the tribe. An ancient gathering, the light forces and the dark. Our collective power, harnessed, we are warriors of the light.
“Where am I?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
Now, they’re gone, merged back into the Maya, perhaps they’re on the other side – the dark side. Fucking hell, it must be the acid; didn’t I hear John Peel’s voice warning about the bad acid? Or was that Woodstock? The bastards have spiked me – free food by fuck. There’s no such thing as a free lunch – “there’s no release in this game boy.” Help, I need help, I’ve heard that a couple of handfuls of sugar, or, failing that, as many fresh oranges as you can cram, will bring you down.
I know, I’ll go to the Release tent, maybe they’ll give me some Valium.
There’s a couple of freaks sitting on the floor inside the tent.
“I’m having a bad trip,” I say.
“Well fuck off, we’re having a good one.”
I fuck off, back into the battle; are they on the other side too? Or is it just a test?
It all started about three hours ago, I must have been coming up on the acid. Ken freaked me out. Nothing he did specifically; just something about the way he looked, the way he is. I think he thought it was a bit of a laugh, a joke – filling my head with his inane, insane face. I freaked and stumbled off and ever since I’ve been cutting criss-crosses across these fields.
Where am I? Glastonbury. Some farm in Somerset. Last night, was it only last night? Last night, Ken grabbed me outside the pub and stared into my eyes, a hypnotic stare. He showed me a magazine cutting about some free festival in Glastonbury. There was some buzz in the air, (do buzzes live in the air?) so we came. A magical start, a magical arrival (but that’s another story) – and now, this nightmare.
Hold on, get a grip, it’s just the drugs, this will pass, everything passes.
A holy voice like a sheet of fire splays over our heads like a giant golden discus, is it John Peel again? No, it’s a different kind of voice, it’s more of an inner voice. It’s probably the acid again.
A double-decker bus comes flying without wings over a hedge and Melanie’s on the stage, her voice like a sweet execution. Things are cooling down. I can almost breathe again. I’ll go down closer to the stage. Ouch – what’s that? It’s like a force field, an invisible electric fence. I can’t go that way. Ouch! Or that one, or there, or there. I have to climb the hill again, the forces have to be aligned correctly to kill the darkness.
The campfires are lit – time passes, hours, days, millennia, I can’t work it out. Arthur Brown is on stage – he’s the devil, he’s the one we have to vanquish.
The sun rises, it’s midsummer’s day and we did it, we did it again. We always do. Now we must reconvene in another hundred life times (it takes that long to recover).
I’m back in the tent with Ken. Now it’s only cannabis and deciding when to go home. Nothing else is mentioned.
~
The Three Bears. I painted a picture once, when I was less than seven years old. I know because it was in the infants’ school and you have to leave there to go to the big school when you’re seven. I painted a picture of the Three Bears in their living room with wallpaper and everything. I won a prize with it. It got hung up in Park Howard or somewhere.
I didn’t paint anything else except for doodles until about four years ago after I started interviewing artists for the Internet magazine.
~
The last artist I interviewed worked with straw. There are so many artists out there, even in a small country like Wales, so many that each one has to have some sort of gimmick. This guy is very clever. He can take a bale of ordinary straw and turn it into something that reminds you that you’re alive. On the surface they’re just randomly shaped balls of straw, painted in bright, almost fluorescent colours and hung from another piece of treated straw; like heavy mobiles.
You want to watch out for this guy. At the moment you can pick up his balls of straw for about thirty quid each in craft shops. But they’re not craftworks, they’re true works of art. His name is Dai Jones.
Dai likes to talk, to philosophise about his art, unlike many of the artists I’ve interviewed who just point at the art and shrug when you ask awkward questions. That art, their creation is what they want to say and how they want to say it. This is an excerpt from that article about Dai Jones but if the link is still working you can find the full article at www.openingchapter.com/daijones.
“Creativity is the first step to decomposition. The moment you create something it begins to fall back to the pool of molecules. Like gravity, it is an irresistible force. You lob your art in the air like a cricket ball; it falls back giving up its energy. Perhaps the reader (he called people who appreciate art – readers) gets the benefit of some of that energy and with it catches a tiny flash of truth that enriches their existence on many levels: mentally, emotionally and spiritually.”
Dai writes poems as well, they’re not as good as his coloured straw balls, here’s an excerpt from a poem of his that tries to describe his ideas about art as a giver of energy:

The Mona Lisa as a Raindrop
a bubble of precious water
like a river of love
rushing through the centuries
sustaining life
as it goes.
~
I forgot one place, one relevant place. London, 1969. A 17-year-old lugging speakers and drum kits up wavy stairs and along thin corridors. Working in a photography studio in the days, mixing with the peripheries of the late 1960s scene in London in the nights. A pub, round the corner from the flat, filled with transvestites. We think we invented this twenty-first century world in the twenty-first century, but let me tell you, WE invented it in the sixties, we planted the seeds.
Then – two lovers, a young Welsh man, eighteen or nineteen, with a roadie in his late twenties. Mike was with me there, (a different Mike); then it was only Mexican grass bought in Carnaby Street or off some famous rock musician, (I can’t remember that much detail and I’m not going to make it up.) We set up in the Marquee Club and devised a system for beating the traffic lights in central London by driving at a constant speed on the way to the studio. I made the coffee and went out for food and beer.
We had a thing going; I was Derek from the Humble Pie, Mike (the other Mike) was George Harrison and a guy whose name I forget (Alan?) imitated Jimmy Saville poor sod. George Harrison was the best. He waved at John Lennon once, in Soho – poor John looked confused. That’s the legend anyway.
The things I’ve lost – the people I’ve lost, we’ve lost.
~
NOW! I’m standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes and she’s next to me peeling potatoes. This ‘I’m’ shit isn’t a literary device by the way, nor is it fiction. I really am standing at the kitchen sink and she really is next to me peeling potatoes. What it is, is that I’m testing out a new top-secret product from one of those mega-rich multinational computer companies that started life in a garage in California or somewhere.
This device/product/gadget allows me to get my thoughts typed directly on to the PC in the other room via my super-duper, plastic-fantastic new wireless network system. The beta version that I’m testing has a large battery/interface attached to my waist that doubles up as a muscle-toning machine.
That’s why this is a bit of a ramble, but it’s still edited and sifted consciously by me before I think the command “SEND”, so bear with me.
Anyway, back to the dish-washing, potato-peeling, silent, contactless intimacy of this August (august?) evening in 2002. Washing dishes is a chore in the “why the fuck do I have to do this shit now when I’d rather be prostrate on the settee with a long spliff and a bottle of red” sort of way. Peeling potatoes is a chore but in the “this is a bit of a pain but it has to be done if I want to eat” sort of way.
The thing though, about standing here, with her, doing these banal tasks is that it’s not about the potatoes or the dishes, or even the expectation of a good meal. It’s about just being here, with her. There’s something about being a human being that makes you feel special. Part of it is the feeling that you can do anything, you know, given this and that and if this or that happened then you could go to the moon or sail round the world, or win the Nobel prize for literature (like fuck). You could be a lawyer or a teacher or a doctor.
I could easily have been a doctor. I’m not going to be now of course because I’m too old to start the training process and I can’t afford to pay for the years of learning. What it is is that I’ve suddenly come to a complete understanding of the human body. Obviously I don’t know all the details, and I don’t even want to know and I’m sure that some people or even the majority of people would look at me and say “so what?” if I explained my new understanding to them.
They’d say “so what, that’s obvious isn’t it?” and maybe they’d add “are you thick or something?”. But I’m not thick, and yeah, maybe I did understand the obvious before but now I’ve reached a much deeper understanding; it’s either that or I’ve finally flipped and gone mad.
Thing is, we’re independent creatures, we’re not directly attached to anything we can see, or hear, smell, touch or taste. We move through the universe in our curious animalistic way and experience it through our senses; the physical connections between out there and in here.
So, the body is a vehicle that needs fuel and maintenance, and doctors, are just the mechanics, the people who unblock a pipe here or weld a fuel tank there. That’s all there is to it really, the rest is just knowledge, and knowledge you can acquire easily through the aforementioned five senses. It’s just a matter of life, and death really.
So, here I am, washing dishes at the kitchen sink while she peels the potatoes. Don’t know if I like this Mentally Activated Device, So Hot It’s Terrifying (yes M.A.D.  S.H.I.T – don’t blame me it’s those fucking weirdoes from Silicon Valley). Don’t think I like it at all because no matter how hard you try to control it, it still picks up thoughts you’d never really commit to paper normally, thus exposing the thin hold you have on sanity as a human being.
Fuck – all this is being recorded on the PC and because it’s a Beta version and because I signed a consent form, it’s being internetted straight to the corporate headquarters in the USA and published simultaneously on secret web sites where the covens of million-dollar executives can probe it and analyse it and sell it to advertising agencies. But it pays well. I don’t have to work for a couple of years unless I tear this fucking contraption off my precious human body and throw it in the Salvation Army clothes recycling collection point in the supermarket car park, thus breaking my contract.
One good thing, I’m allowed 5 twenty-minute breaks a day and it switches itself off automatically when I go to sleep – that’s a godsend, I’ve never slept so much in my life. I’m switching off now – OFF – NOW.
“You OK?” She asks. “You’re very quiet.”
“Yeah, just thinking that’s all.”
“What about?”
“Oh, not much, you know, the usual stuff, you know, money, work, the kids.”
“It’ll be all right you know, we’ll get through this, I heard Roy Noble on the radio saying there’s no hole so deep you can’t climb out of it.”
I make a suitable appreciative sound, almost a laugh. Why is that funny? Except death, I think. That’s the trouble with truisms, they’re not true.
She doesn’t know everything about Ken. Well she knows he bankrupted me and nearly got me sent to prison. She doesn’t know I killed the fucker, or many of the details of our relationship – mine and Ken’s I mean.
Nobody else knows this shit, and I mean nobody, just me, me and you now.
“Think I’ll start a diet tomorrow,” I say “’bout time I think.”
“Yeah – could do a bit of exercise as well – get your metabolism up – I heard on the radio that once you’ve got it going it keeps on for a bit, it’s not just for the time you’re exercising.”
“I know what you mean,” I say, “after you exercise it’s like you glow for a bit, I suppose that glow is the heat produced by the energy you’re burning up.”
“What do you want with the potatoes?” She asks.
“Don’t know, how about some Linda McCartney sausages, some frozen peas and an onion gravy?”
“Do we really need the gravy? And wouldn’t you rather have some fresh veg – I don’t mind cooking”
“We’ll cook a proper meal tomorrow. Come on, how about it? You’ve done the hard work already, peeling the spuds.”
“Oh all right.”
I make the gravy anyway:- a whole onion, very finely sliced, I like the long strands cooked slowly in a bit of sunflower oil. Two large cloves of garlic chopped and crushed, flour of course, a dash of tamari, a couple of twists of black pepper and a teaspoon of marmite – lovely, but I made too much as usual. I ate it all though.
“I’ll start the diet tomorrow, promise.” I say as we’re washing the dishes again (together this time).
She tuts.
“It’s just been hard lately, that’s all, I can’t quite get it together, nearly there though. I can feel it.”
“Yeah,” she says, “I know, don’t worry about it. It’ll be all right, you’ll get over it.”
“Yeah, I feel a lot better actually, it’s just habits that’s all.”
“I’ve noticed you’re looking better, just keep busy – don’t dwell on things.”
It’s the truth; I am feeling better, ever since I killed that cunt (I don’t say this).
~
Do you find it funny that whatever you say, whichever way you explain something, the other person, or persons, you know, the ones on the other side of the explanation, never get it right? No matter how close you are to someone, no matter how long you’ve known each other, no matter how many secrets you’ve shared, they still don’t get it. In the end you usually just give up, not in a nasty or spiteful way, you’ve got it out of your system, you’ve had your say, now it’s up to them.
I’ve been having a bit of trouble communicating lately. Perhaps it’s me? Losing it? Lost it? I don’t know.
I suppose it’s my fault. What it is, is that I never seem to be able to give something one hundred percent. Don’t get me wrong; I can work hard when I want to, bloody hard, but it’s like I always hold something back; keep something in reserve. No one else can ever really know you, can they?
She’s looking at me as if I’m mad.
“Stop looking at me as if I’m mad.” I say.
“You are.”
“I’m not.”
“I don’t mean mad mad, I mean you come up with some crazy ideas.”
“Life is complex, and nobody really knows what’s true and what’s not, nobody really knows, with any certainty, that something is totally right or totally wrong.”
“But what you’re talking about is dangerous. Imagine living without law. I don’t think so.”
“It’s not about laws, I never said that it was about laws. It’s about respect. No, what am I doing getting dragged down to this level. What I’m talking about is what society, not just this society, but any society, even a chimp society has arbitrary rules, and that it’s OK to break them if you know what you’re doing.”
“So who decides where the boundaries are? Who decides that one person can break a rule and another one can’t? Is that you? Is it?”
“No need to get like that, I was only talking theoretically. Anyway, there are people who make decisions like that, they call them judges and politicians.”
“But they only operate within a system. They still have to obey the rules themselves.”
“OK, it’s like this, suppose it’s illegal to piss in the street, well suppose it’s only you in the street, what’s the problem? I mean, who do they think they are, as if they own the streets. If I want a piss, I’ll have a piss”
“Grow up.”
~
Now look, I don’t want you to think that this is a literary novel, literary in the sense that it is obviously based on a classical education and a penchant for the author to read copious amounts of other author’s books. It’s not about that. Nor is it literary in the sense that it makes clever intertextual references to other media products, whether they be old books or Hollywood films.
I want you to forget everything you’ve read before. Please don’t compare this to some other work, don’t say things like: “Well, I thought the style was a bit like Neville Shute.”, or “it’s like an extended short story of Italo Calvano.” Don’t even try to stuff it into a genre like ‘Thriller’ or ‘Mystery’ or ‘Epic’, because it’s none of the above.
This is the truth, the truth as it happened, and told with whatever skills the writer’s (that’s me) acquired in his life. I’m telling it because I’ve got to tell it, it’s as simple as that.
~
I get the feeling I’ve left something behind, or missed something back there in my past – something important, something crucial, to me and to this story. So, me, like a twat, goes looking for it – whatever it is.
I get a job for two weeks as an extra in a television series about a probation officer. The star of the show is Keith Allen, who used to be a good friend of my brother. (That’s not the reason I got the job by the way – it’s only when I arrive on set that I realise he is the man.)
So, the set is in Cardiff Bay; they’ve converted part of the old Coal Exchange into a suite of offices and this is where they’ll shoot most of the internal scenes for the series. I’m one of the office staff, meandering about in the background on instructions from the assistant directors.
You’d think it’d be interesting, what with famous faces like Andrew Sachs (Manuel from Fawlty Towers) sipping tea and eating cheese rolls across the table in what passes for a Green Room, but it’s not, it’s the most boring work I’ve ever done (including the time I fell asleep three times during an induction at GKN in Cardiff). Basically, you’re told nothing about what’s going on, you never see a script, unless you pinch one of the copies the actors and crew sometimes leave lying around. You have no idea of the story, the scenes you’re supposed to be in or whatever. You’re just told to go and wait somewhere until you’re needed; when you are you’re wheeled out like a prop, positioned and then shooed off set. You’re told to wait until the actors and crew have finished getting their food before you approach the catering truck and then it’s usually just the leftovers.
I stick it out for the required two weeks even though the pay is pretty shit, around seventy quid a day before substantial deductions, and anyway I won’t see the cash for a good couple of months. So, I’m broke and I’m mixing, (on the periphery), with a bunch of overpaid lunatics (actors, directors, etc.) and one of the days’ filming goes on too late and there is an early start the next morning, and I’ve got no money anyway, so I phone my beautiful, intelligent daughter. (Who happens to be living in Cardiff, doing a journalism course.)
She buys me a curry and lets me crash for the night.
I arrive on set at seven the next morning and do absolutely fuck all until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. Whatever I’m looking for, it isn’t here.
~
There are bits of me in every part of this world. In fact, I’m only borrowing the materials that constitute my physical existence. Every molecule has to be returned one day; but like Julius Caesar’s dying breath they’ll last forever in one form or another.
The truth is not out there.