ORIGIN'S HESITATION

A Survey

2011-02-22T11:32:00.000-08:00

1. What date from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

4^th August. This was the day when, in the blazing sunshine, I saw the councillor for Sutton Four Oaks sitting outside a pub. She was drinking a large glass of white wine. Two men and another woman were with her, and though I’ve done my utmost to research who they are, I have so far been able to come up with nothing. I bought a gin and tonic and sat at a nearby table. Though close, I was unable to properly catch their conversation, except in snippets. They were talking about house prices, of all things. Drinking, I looked over at the councillor. I am drawn – why am I drawn? – ineluctably to voluptuous, middle aged right wing women. Families milled around us, people were drinking and enjoying the afternoon sunshine. Between her and I there was only the wind. I swear, her eyelids dropped when I looked over at her. I swear her cheeks coloured. She became distracted, losing the thread of the conversation, then trying to laugh it off when she was caught out. And she looked back over at me. I was wearing a light purple shell suit jacket, and I undid the zip a little. Again she lost the thread of their conversation, and one of her compatriots made some remark about how quickly she had drank her wine. She had, she had. The glass was nearly gone. I drained my own drink. The gin put a burr on the whole performance. She was wearing a long peasant style dress. Utterly inappropriate, but it did the job. I walked towards her and stood just at her right side. She and the others looked up, confusion in their eyes, expectation, lust even, in hers. I put my left hand onto my balls and gripped them tightly. I pumped my right fist upwards and bellowed “Fascist!” into the sky, at her, and into the sky again.

2. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

I crashed over a hundred parties in Sutton Coldfield. Evenings I would buy a bottle of wine, put a shirt on and go walking down the hill, towards the town. I walked in whatever direction took my fancy. I was free. I kept mainly to streets of houses and I would look for parties. When I saw one going on, I would knock at the door and introduce myself to whoever answered, merely that. I would not say, unless pressed (though I rarely ever was), that I was a friend of someone, or that some other had invited me. Usually it was enough to be at the door, to give the wine over, to smile, to make some banal joke.

Once inside I would make for the toilet. Inside my jacket I would be sure to have a bottle of decent gin – none of your cheap swill – and at least two grams of ketamine. I would rack up a good sized line, perhaps a little under half the first gram, and take it, using a train ticket from Four Oaks to Shenstone that I bought for the purpose (what a dog of a place Shenstone is, my heart, my pity goes out to it).

Back at the party, I would try to corner a woman and be as boring as possible. To bore a Sutton Coldfield woman is by no means difficult. If I turned my discourse to art, to politics, literature, music, philosophy, her eyes would flit from mine around the room, looking for someone to discuss the quickest route to drive from Mere Green to Wyndley, or the Four Oaks pub with the comfiest chairs, how many weightwatchers points are in such and such a cake – topics that chimed with her deepest, most heartfelt interests. But I would remain steadfast. I perfected a way of relating the plot of Pasolini’s ‘Salo’ in excruciating detail, but without being too coarse or graphic. I would stress the film’s dense matrix of political implications. I would use the phrase ‘dense matrix’ over and over as the ketamine gained its hold on me, reached a crescendo, and fell away. It felt like a suitable phrase. Other times I would ask the woman meticulous questions about her life and her job. I would try to extract all the current gossip from her job. I would laugh heartily, and often. These women, when I did that, they loved it.

I would mingle. I have become very adept at mingling. It seems that I do best, socially, when I am among those I despise. One might see this as a cruel irony, but, no, I feel it’s something more. It’s a perversity of spirit within me that I now, after all this time, can recognise. I see now that my manner of interacting with the world is essentially juvenile. I reveal little of myself, I hold back, I take. I prefer to be cryptic than open. I prefer to wear a mask than show my real face. My emotions remain a mystery to me. My perpetual feeling is disgust, but a disgust that feels put on, that I could discard, that I don’t feel at all strongly about.

The best times were when I would go out into the back garden and see some of the men passing a joint around. I’d go over and, feigning meekness, request a drag. Then I would stand there with them, each of us staring up at black space, and I would gently probe them about their aspirations, their dreams. Each one of the dreams I heard was so petty – to have a better car, to get a promotion, to fuck some woman at the office, to pay off the mortgage – so small, that it made me feel a great warmth at how utterly dismal a place the universe is, and of all the many parts in it, Sutton Coldfield is its miserable nadir.

3. What was your biggest failure?

My biggest failure was not fucking G_______. What an utter waste of time that whole enterprise was. I almost feel like not talking about it. I first encountered G_______ on Facebook – the new work colleague of a friend, she began to appear in various photographs of nights out. Events unfolded in their usually, drearily predictable way. I have such perspicacity regarding the process – I can see it all, from the promising start to the disappointing end, as though I were a chess computer. And yet, the most important stage – what attracts me to one woman and not another, what makes me pick the ones I pick, remains entirely inscrutable. Some of the women at those parties I crashed, I feel strongly that they would have fucked me. But I wasn’t interested.

G_______ attracted me deeply though. After seeing her pictures, thoughts of her consumed me for several weeks. One morning I woke up thinking of her, and masturbated, something I haven’t done for some time. I didn’t even need to put the computer on to look at the pictures. I was reluctant to contact her; there is nothing like a Facebook profile to make a beautiful woman seem revolting, but after a time, as with all stimulants, I needed more. She accepted my friend request, which gave me access to some more pictures. Her profile was deceptively content-free. She listed no interests, she liked nothing, she made no status updates. She was tagged in a lot of pictures, and she occasionally chatted with her younger sister about the family dog. I was perplexed, but my ardour did not diminish.

Looking back, perhaps it is that blankness that attracted me first. She had, in the pictures, a quite stupid look on her face for the most part. She looked as though she had never been told how to smile at a camera, or how to stand properly. I can see that some men find that type of thing charming, a woman who does not know her own beauty, that type of thing. But for me it was something else, her demeanour held – or I thought it held – some contempt, some repulsion. Her hands, in every picture, or most at least, gripped whatever surface was nearby with an intensity. For me I think the erotic is found in desperation. I find the erotic in the daily struggle against bourgeois life, but especially where that struggle takes on some physical manifestation. I found – or I thought I found – such a manifestation in G______’s looks and her posture in those photographs.

I suspect that would have been it, I would have gotten bored with her after a time, except that one evening, after I had posted some withering status update on the subject of, oh, I forget, Sarah Palin perhaps, and G______ had clicked to say that she liked it. She was still online, so I sent her a message using the chat applet, and we began to talk. And she seemed a strange girl, lacking in self-confidence, but with a certain arrogance, or self-assuredness, that I recognised as something different from the generic Sutton Coldfield arrogance. She knew little, but thought that the little she knew was impressive. She derided the things she was ignorant about. She used her own ignorance as a badge of honour, as a way of staving off her own fears about death, hers and everybody else’s. She was a child, really, just a kid.

To cut a long story short, anyway, I never fucked her.

2010-04-14T15:50:00.001-07:00

1. What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before?

I slapped the face of one of the most prominent, no, I'll say it, the most prominent young conservative in Sutton Coldfield. She came away with just bruises. I found a skateboard in Sutton Park which I rode for a short time, causing severe grazing to my knees after I fluffed a tricky dismount. I threw that thing into a ditch. In March, I listened to Erik Satie’s ‘Vexations’ for eighteen hours and forty minutes. I sat entirely still, in the darkness, for the duration (I had put the Reinbert de Leeuw mp3 on a loop). I saw nothing meditative or transcendent about the experience. In fact, the experience brings into serious question the very notion of a meditative state. Throughout, I struggled, as any of my true brothers and sisters would, in fighting off a kind of trance state that emerges when the boredom of passivity and repetition gives way to acceptance and indifference. The mistake that Satie made, a mistake then repeated by the 60s dilettantes, who took the idea to its logical endpoint, was to assume that the transcendence of boredom is a positive thing. I am edified by my boredom. I want to destroy the circumstances that lead to my boredom. Satie wants to revel in tedium, to erase through sheer force the desire to change the state of the world. Anyone who sits down to meditate is gifting time to those in power, time that could be spent fighting against them. Retreat into boredom is the death of the revolutionary spirit, it is a genuflection to power. I also ate courgette for the first time. I found it mediocre.

2. Did you keep your New Year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I have never resolved to do anything, nor will I ever.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

I would never allow that. It’s not really my thing.

4. What countries did you visit?

None. I never visit no countries. There was an occasion in 1996 when I was invited to Burkina Faso, but you know what? I looked into it and it just wasn’t for me.

5. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

I lacked grace. I lacked the ability to laugh at my own mistakes. I lacked the ability to shake off defeat and the ability to be humble in victory. I lacked the competence to fully comprehend my own limitations. I lacked the meekness to apologise when I went beyond those limitations and caused danger or distress to other people. I lacked the character to see the value in ever apologising. I lacked the foresight to predict when my actions would upset people or when I would overstep the mark. I lacked the control to not seek revenge against those who wronged me. I lacked around thirty blowjobs, which I am sure I am owed. All those things, please, let me have in spades in 2010.

6. What date from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

4^th August. Several weeks before this date, I was contacted via Facebook by someone I went to secondary school with. They made a friend request which I, curious, accepted. His fat balloon head, which had been fat as a child, had grown even more rotund, vaster and more big, if his profile pictures were anything to go by. The dickhead was now an actuary, whatever the hell that is, and there were various pictures of him and his ugly wife – by and large unposed shots showing merely parts of their faces or bodies. More amusingly, the man seemed to think of himself as something of a music buff, listing bands like Elbow, The Manic Street Preachers and The Arctic Monkeys as bands he loved and even having a section in his profile of music he hates, which included manufactured pop, rap, dance, country and r&b.

During a particularly damp week, I began to engage in correspondence with this man. I asked him about his life, his loves, his children, his work. I did what most people never do for this man – I showed interest in him. He emerged, as all right-wingers inevitably do, as damaged and insecure, small minded, ready to strike out at anyone doing something he is unable or unwilling to do. The great disease of the right wing is this need to strike first, to strike at any difference from yourself, to strike in the sincerely held fear that you are about to be struck.

The man repeatedly joined Facebook groups dedicated to criticising and mocking popstars. He made update after update about his work colleagues daring to put a commercial radio station on in his presence, or of hearing a pop song in a supermarket, or someone even singing a bit of an ABBA song in a lift. Someone sang a little bit of the chorus to ‘Dancing Queen’ in the same lift as this man and he typed a complaint about it on his computer and sent it to all his friends.

After a couple of weeks of passing messages back and forth (messages where he asked almost nothing about me, such was his solipsism), I invited him and his wife round for dinner. I explained that my partner was away (everything on my Facebook is a lie) and that I would be glad of the company. Even before he accepted my message I began to work at the issue of what music to put on while they were round. By the time the invitation was accepted I had already burned several CDs of potential material. One contained turn of the millennium Ska Punk, mostly b-sides, but also included Less Than Jake’s magisterial ‘All My Friends are Metal Heads’. I made a CD with only cover versions of ‘In A Gadda Da Vida’. The issue was not to simply pick novelty aggravating music, but to choose something that I could present legitimately as my own taste, so that it would irritate this man, but not to the point where he felt he was being messed around. I made one of pop ‘mashups’ (the kind where you have the rap from ‘Straight Outta Compton’ playing over the instrumental from ‘Young Hearts Run Free’) and one which alternated between short free jazz pieces and high BPM techno.

He and his wife arrived and, though he had difficulty squeezing his fat head through my door, they were quickly seated next to each other on my sofa, a glass of wine in his hand and her, driving, with water. A light piano piece played on the stereo, the lights were dim. I decided that I would play, on repeat, Erik Satie’s ‘Vexations’ (the Reinbert de Leeuw version), for the duration of the evening. His ugly wife was the first to mention the music, saying, “This is nice, what is it?” as we tucked into our starter of very salty scrambled eggs. I sat back and began to expound on ‘Vexations’, its search for transcendence through slow, painstaking repetition. I told them about the performances of the piece in the 1960s by John Cage and all those people. Just as I served the main course, a pasta dish with far too much garlic in it, I told them about Satie eating only white food. I sat back, rapt, and listened to the music. One can only achieve transcendence, I said, by engaging with boredom, by entering boredom and recognising it as a beautiful state. As I said this, out of the corner of my eye I could see this man rolling his eyes at his wife. We sat in silence and ate. He forced the food down, and I could see that as the phrase repeated itself over and over, he got more and more wound up. He said nothing, but his wife tried to engage me, asking questions about the job I told them I have and so on. As I lied I would occasionally appear to become distracted by the music and I would again bring up its meditative qualities, its beauty, its importance, the questions surrounding interpretation, the various performances available on record and the merits and shortcomings of this version compared to the others. He drank faster and moved the food around his plate. I bought out a rock hard cake for dessert which he looked at with utter contempt. I said I had to go to the toilet and when I returned, his wife explained that she wasn’t feeling too well, and they excused themselves. He looked physically done in. I graciously accepted, saying that I would spend the remainder of the evening bathing in ‘Vexations’, becoming truly meditative, seeking enlightenment.

Unfortunately, two minutes later they were back at my door. I had known they would be, because when I excused myself to go to the toilet, I had in fact gone out the back door and slashed their tyres. “Someone has slashed our tyres,” said his ugly wife. I waved them in, explaining that I had turned the Satie up to truly abet my rumination. They sat uncomfortably as I invited them to try a succession of false taxi numbers. He accepted another glass of wine and she tutted at him. He glared at her. This moment between them was to me more beautiful and truly human than anything Satie and his bloodless ilk could ever concoct. The phrase played sweetly on. It was the soundtrack to their antagonism. I continued to chatter on about Satie’s collaboration with Jean Cocteau, the drawing Picasso did of him. I began to ask them questions about the phrasing of the piece, whether they thought de Leeuw brought too much warmth, about the curious intersection between modernist avant-garde practice and Eastern religion, but by then they were both spent.

Another ten minutes went by while I pretended to look for a working taxi number. I left the room and listened at the door, but they said nothing to each other for a full fifteen minutes. After that I called a taxi and they left. I’m still his friend on Facebook, he still talks a lot of crap about music.

7. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

After months of cajoling and supplication, P_______ finally sent me the nude pictures she had been hinting at. They were racier than I had ever dreamed. Opening my email that day was literally like opening Pandora’s Box.

8. What was your biggest failure?

The slow continuing death of socialism. It was my failure, it was all of our failures.

9. Did you suffer illness or injury?

It is rare a day goes by when I do not suffer. It is the same for every man and woman. To wake up and look at the hole we have made of the world is enough. I cannot love and that wounds me. The air makes me wretch. I stand in the air and I am afflicted. My inability to love afflicts me. And yet I look out at the mire in all direction, the mire that goes on endlessly and heaps up further with each passing year and I see nothing worth loving. The illness I suffer, it’s my own and it is heaped up on me by this dog of a world.

I had chicken pox too, for three weeks in September.

10. What were the best things you bought?

A tin of sweetcorn.

A Survey

2009-12-07T09:34:00.000-08:00

Have you ever licked the back of a CD to try to get it to work?

I struggle to see how this would improve the chances of getting a CD to work. In answer to the question though, yes, I have done that. It never works though, perhaps I should start brushing my teeth beforehand.

What's the largest age difference between yourself and someone you've dated?

I think it is sixty eight years.

Ever been in a car wreck?

I was in a car accident that killed my friend G_____, who was the driver at the time. I believe he was killed instantly. We were driving through Mere Green, I forget now where we were heading to, but we were on the road north, out of the city. The driver of the other car, whose fault the accident was, she survived. I should have decked that bitch at the time, but I was too out of it, I can’t even remember her face. Just as the other car hit us we were listening to Rod Stewart’s ‘Do You Think I’m Sexy?’ on the CD player and the impact of the crash must have changed the settings on the player so that for the hours I was trapped in the car waiting to be cut out by the fire brigade, G______ sprawled out dead on the seat next to me, ‘Do You Think I’m Sexy’ playing over and over again, blood flowing slowly but constantly from a wound on the side of G______’s jaw. It took a long time before I could listen to that song again, at least six months.

Were you popular in high school?

I was popular for about one week in secondary school when I stole a pile of my dad’s pornography magazines and videos and handed them out to people. I recall that he discovered they were missing, but couldn’t say anything. I recall also making speeches at dinner about how pornography degrades women and about all the filthy, depraved men who used it, my mother nodding along. That might sound a little cruel but, I don’t know, you try coming home from school a little early one day to catch your dad weeping and masturbating over a video of two women, naked apart from Darth Vader masks, punching each other in the stomach.

Have you ever been on a blind date?

Yes. Just one. I recall being guided in by the waiter, she was already sitting down. He had to read us out the menu so we could choose. That took a while, in fact there was an uncomfortably long period where she seemed unable to decide between two very similar dishes during which I began already to dislike her. I persisted though and we began to talk about this and that and she seemed very agreeable altogether. Naturally I held back certain aspects of my personality, as I’m sure she held back some of hers. This is the common way of going about these things. Eating was equally difficult, but with the aid of a bib I don’t think I spilled too much either on myself or the table. It was hard to tell how much she was drinking, but as the meal progressed she steadily became increasingly giggly, and the polite way she had begun answering my questions gave way to the kind of flimsy coquetry that suggests that her family have probably been pure whitebread English since the ice age and also that she probably votes for the British National Party. We left the restaurant together and took a taxi back to her home. Of course, I had no notion of where we were. I permitted her to remove her blindfold – she promised not to look at me – so that she could find her way down her drive and open the door to her house. I kept behind her the whole time, guided by her hand. She lead me up to her bedroom and we sat on the bed for a time and drank. She made me a decent gin and tonic as I recall (the secret is to buy very expensive gin). Gingerly we felt each other’s faces and arms with our hands. For the first time I felt her slender nose, her ears, her hair. And she mine, also, simultaneously. We fell together and I felt her warmth against me first and then again and again. In the indifferent darkness we came together, clothed only in our blindfolds (and I in a condom), again and again we came together, a realm of pure sensory ebullience, a realm of blissful unselfish partisanship. That night, we slept soundly together, soundly as good children sleep, still masked, still clothed in darkness.

In the half light of the next morning, early, I woke up with my mouth dry. Absent-mindedly I removed the blindfold and saw my companion for the first time. She looked so peaceful there, hair partially covering her face, one small foot poking out of the rumpled duvet. I left the room and scoured the flat for a bathroom. The light was coming in from the east, the clouds gently, so gently, empurpled by the white sun. I stood naked in the coming light and felt renewed. I got a glass of water and drank down its sweet life-giving nectar. I was so refreshed by it. I wandered into the living room and flicked through her bookshelf. I picked up an Ian McEwen book, still pristine enough to have never been read by her, which was comforting, and turned to the reviews on the first few pages. Unable to read them in the half light I pulled open the thin floral curtains. But before my eyes had chance to flick over to “McEwen’s political insights are brought to bear in this discomfiting tour-de-force all about one man’s lack of empathy for victims of war,” I noticed a shock of blue in the bottom corner of the window glass. This shock, both to me and in the gaudy colouring of the sticker (for that is what it was) were so devastating that I cast the book outside and came to rest, head first, on the leatherette sofa. When I was able to recover my composure I sat up and looked again at the sticker, hoping to Christ that I had been mistaken. I had not. It did say ‘Vote Conservative!’ Stricken, I returned to the bedroom. It was still not yet quite light. I masturbated, briefly and furiously, and came on her sleeping face and hair. Then I picked up my clothes and left the flat. This was the first and last time I ever used match dot com.

Are looks important?

Looks are important. Of course one might be lead to say these days that people think that looks are too important or that people care too much about how they look and neglect what they are inside. But, I don’t know, when I see people I often think, Yes, I would beak that person or No, I would not beak that person, based solely on how they look. That’s important, to me at least.

Do you have any friends that you've known for 10 years or more?

I don’t think so. I tend really to keep friends for far shorter periods. A week is usually enough with most people.

By what age would you like to be married?

Nah.

Does the number of people a person's slept with affect your view of them?

The more the merrier, I say.

Have you ever made a mistake?

I have made five mistakes. The last one, the fifth one, was disastrous.

Are you a good tipper?

My attitude is that tipping helps maintain the illusion that waiters and bar staff and whoever else you might tip are adequately paid by their shyster employers. It is my hope that by not tipping these people they will eventually see sense and rise up against their managers and wrest control from them.

What's the most you have spent for a haircut?

50p

Have you ever had a crush on a teacher?

There is something so vividly appealing about the profession of teacher for me. I think a true revolution, a clandestine revolution, on the part of teachers could be the first step on towards the overthrow of capitalism. I used to hang around a local primary school. At first the interest was in the children – I enjoy seeing these little bastards being manufactured – Sutton Coldfield turning them into what their parents are, it makes me sad. After a while I began to notice one particular teacher, a svelte redhead who possessed chic poise standing in the playground and managed to exert a measured control over the kids without resorting to the ridiculous and demeaning histrionics of her colleagues. Without much difficulty I obtained her name, and from that I tracked down her facebook page, which fortunately for me was public. I discovered one or two things about her. I discovered, for example, that she enjoys the music of that charlatan and impostor Tom Waits and the novels of that bore Toni Morrison. What, though, I asked myself, was such a woman doing living and working in Sutton Coldfield?

One evening I followed her home to an indifferent street on the Walmley side of the town, one that I had not been down before. Her house, too, showed no signs of the individuality and style so evident in her manner of dress. A couple of hours later a car pulled into the drive and a young man got out. Evidently this clown was her partner. He was pure Sutton, this guy, he looked like a hair-dye model that had been sexually repressed and beaten regularly as a child. He, surely, was the reason she was here, no other.

I lost interest in her then and didn’t think of her for some time. Then, one afternoon I spotted her in the big Sainsbury’s in Mere Green. It must have been the school holidays, I suppose. I followed her round. She bought a lot of vegetables, I seem to recall. I tried to look at her objectively, but I just couldn’t get out of my head the image of her and that man – her laughing at his jokes, her sucking his dick. The fact that she would degrade herself night after heinous night with that filthy man, that fact really turned me off her.

Have you ever peed in public?

What does public really mean anymore? I’ve pissed on golf courses. I’ve pissed in the back gardens of my neighbours. I’ve pissed on the platforms of train stations and up against trains. I’ve pissed against the side walls of banks and all over expensive cars. I pissed on a pile of Ian McEwan books. I pissed through the letter box of a local conservative MP. I’ve pissed on the graves of bad people. I’ve pissed in an alleyway in Sutton centre on a Friday night, when the piss runs out of every back street, so that my piss joined the common stock in the fecund drains and sewers that carry the human waste out of the town. I really felt like something then, I can tell you.

What song do you want played at your funeral?

Chick Corea’s ‘Return to Forever’.

Would you tell your parents if you were gay?

I don’t think things like that are appropriate to discuss with my parents. I would say that before my father died they knew around one percent of the things I get up to, around one percent of my true character. Now, perhaps this has increased to two, maybe even three percent.

What would your last meal be before getting executed?

A plate of dirt.

Beatles or Stones?

I have no particular liking for either.

Beer, wine or hard liquor?

Gin.

Do you have any phobias?

I have a phobia of cars.

A Survey

2009-05-06T14:31:00.000-07:00

1. PICK OUT A SCAR YOU HAVE, AND EXPLAIN HOW YOU GOT IT?

I have three scars. The one I choose to explain was caused by a shard of plastic hitting the skin just beneath my right eye and cutting it quite deeply. When the cut healed it left a small oval-shaped scar. I got this particular scar in 1997, in the car crash that killed my friend G______. Another car went into the driver’s side of the car we were in. G_____ was the one driving. I’ve never had any desire to drive. It always frightened me. I haven’t travelled in a car since that day and I have no intention of any subsequent travel in one. I no longer regard them as safe. I sometimes look at the scar. In certain lights, particularly the light of my bathroom, it appears quite prominently. I don’t attach any special meaning to it, nothing like that. I don’t think it represents anything. The plastic that hit it was from part of the car door I think. I heard the impact and instinctively turned toward the noise. That’s when the piece of plastic struck me. We were right in the middle of Mere Green, by the roundabout. I still have the plastic, I picked it up when I got out of the car. It’s a piece of grey plastic.

2. WHAT IS ON THE WALLS IN YOUR ROOM?

On the south facing wall I have a lot of photographs of horses that I have cut out of library books. The whole wall is covered in these horses. The books I borrowed from the libraries in Sutton Coldfield over a period of several months. Not all of them were to do with horses or specifically to do with horses. They just happened to have pictures of horses in them. Recently, having registered a new library card under a pseudonym (remarkably simple given the frankly antiquated system), I have been going to Mere Green library and complaining to the staff there about their corrupted and inadequate stock. Look, you chiefs, I say to them, all I wanted was a book with a photograph of a horse in it. That’s all I wanted. This book appears to have had photographs of horses in it but they have all been removed. What do you have to say about that? These charlatan librarians, these philistines, have so little of value to say about that I won’t even waste time typing what they have to say about it. Then I go home and look at all my photographs of horses and I have a bloody good laugh about it.

3. WHAT DOES YOUR PHONE LOOK LIKE?

It’s grey.

4. WHAT MUSIC DO YOU LISTEN TO?

Principally I listen to Chick Corea, though I do spend time listening to other things sometimes as well.

5. WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT DESKTOP PICTURE?

A big photograph of Chick Corea’s face. The picture was taken in the mid-seventies I believe. Chick has a nice beard in it.

6. WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE THAN ANYTHING RIGHT NOW?

Right now what I want more than anything is a good blow job. Sutton Coldfield is like the Death Valley of blow jobs – arid and sandy.

7. DO YOU BELIEVE IN GAY MARRIAGE?

I have no problem with the gays doing anything they want to do. They are a fantastic bunch of lads. All credit to them.

8. WHAT TIME WERE YOU BORN?

In the afternoon. I know that my mother had time to be done with me and to get ready for Coronation Street anyway.

9. ARE YOUR PARENTS STILL TOGETHER?

No, my dad is dead.

10. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO?

Currently the song I am listening to is Chick Corea’s ‘Captain Senor Mouse’ from the album ‘Hymn to the Seventh Galaxy’. The song deals with the themes of despair, alienation and worry from the point of view of the mouse of the title. I have always read the song as being an indictment of hierarchy. The mouse is torn between his role as a captain and his role as a man of the crowd, a senor. In this way Corea captures effortlessly the ambivalence we all feel about the gulf between our personal and professional personas. It deals with the schism between what we have to do to earn the money to live and our true desires about how we want to spend our time. For me this song addresses the key political question of our time, the value of work, the value of production over human desire.

11. DO YOU GET SCARED OF THE DARK?

I have been, sure. I have been scared of the dark.

12. THE LAST PERSON TO MAKE YOU CRY?

Sarah Palin.

13. WHAT KIND OF HAIR/EYE COLOR DO YOU LIKE ON THE OPPOSITE SEX?

I prefer them to be bald and blind.

14. DO YOU LIKE PAINKILLERS?

I take painkillers every day. I love them. I love what they do to my pain. I love walking around in their treacly haze. I might go now and bang a few ibuprofen then run down the golf course and take a piss up a tree.

15. COFFEE OR ENERGY DRINKS?

I tell you what, fuck the French for banning the Red Bull. What has he ever done to them? And you know what else? Fuck the Red Bull light, fuck the Red Bull sugar free. Fuck the decaf. Fuck the soy milk. You know? All that stuff is bullshit.

16. FAVE PIZZA TOPPING?

If this is some kind of innuendo then pepperoni. If not then I do like the ham and pineapple.

17. IF YOU COULD EAT ANYTHING RIGHT NOW, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

Sarah Palin.

18. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU MADE ANGRY?

I think it was J______. I first encountered J on the Twitter website. Her icon was a picture of her grinning. There was something about this grin of hers that attracted me. Her posts on the Twitter website were almost exclusively of asinine quality. I did this, I went here, that kind of thing. But still, that particular picture was something. I discovered both her myspace page and her facebook page and I added her as a friend on both. The pages revealed little about her that was attractive. She seemed educationally and psychologically stunted. Her spelling for one was appalling. She seemed reluctant to talk with me at first, but after a time I was able to obtain her email address and we began to chat over the MSN instant messenger service. By feigning interest in a terrible, horrible, awful band called Scouting For Girls (and pretending I was nineteen and attractive) I was able to win J’s trust. Each day I grew in her estimation. After about a month of instant messaging each other on and off (she was away on holiday for a few days and she had mock exams to prepare for) I was able to persuade her to make a short video on her webcam in which she took off all her clothes. She was nervous, you could see that, but it was good. I liked that she was nervous. At one point, while undoing the button on her jeans, she grinned like in her Twitter picture, which I did enjoy. Yes, I enjoyed that. More recently though she has become taciturn with me. She keeps asking me for another picture of myself which, since I obtained the original from a forgotten myspace account of some tattooed goon, I am unable to provide. She keeps pretending her webcam is broken. I know she is lying to me. Just today she appeared on MSN and then when I sent her a message she disappeared offline. I checked her myspace and facebook and she was logged into both. She has clearly blocked me. Why would she do this?

19. DO YOU SPEAK ANOTHER LANGUAGE?

Yeah.

20. WHAT WAS THE LAST GIFT SOMEONE GAVE YOU?

Someone gave me a handful of dirt.

21. ARE YOU FINDING YOURSELF INCREASINGLY POLITICISED BY THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CLIMATE?

What a troublesome question. Yes? No? I don’t feel that the recession has hit Sutton Coldfield yet. The people still get up, get in their cars and drive to their jobs. They bring back bags and bags full of stuff from the supermarket. They sit in their gardens and drink. They go to the pub. These guys, the rich guys, they aren’t affected by the things that affect the poor. The poor continue to fester in the mire created by the rich, only the depth of the banks of that mire changes, sweeping a few people in or allowing them to climb out. This has been happening for centuries, why should it politicise me now?

22. ARE YOU DOUBLE JOINTED?

No, but I have seen some very agreeable videos of people who are.

23. HAVE YOU EVER WATCHED PORN?

Yes I have watched it for fun and for pleasure. I have watched it for emotion, for humiliation, for desperation, for sadness, for joy, for clarity. I have watched porn for people and for objects, for violence and for tenderness, for money and for charity, for things that are owed and things that are given freely.

24. WHAT'S YOUR DREAM CAR?

One car that is continually smashing into the face of Sir Fred Goodwin.

25. DO YOU BELIEVE IN AFTER-LIFE?

Certainly not.

26. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF MARRIAGE?

I think it is a disgusting institution formulated by the Right to keep the working classes bickering with each other and hence forestall glorious revolution.

27. WOULD YOU FALL IN LOVE KNOWING THAT THE PERSON IS LEAVING?

Usually this is the only way to make it bearable.

28. WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO TELL SOMEONE HOW MUCH THEY MEAN TO YOU?

I think it’s a text message containing a link to your twitter account where you’ve put a link to a file on rapidshare which is an mpeg of you miming and dancing to ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’, the superior Herbie Hancock version from his 2005 album ‘Possibilities’.

29. MUSICAL GUILTY PLEASURE?

I like to put ‘Grease’ on and shout racist abuse at John Travolta.

30. WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE DOING IN FIVE YEARS TIME?

I have no fucking idea. I don’t think about the future in such an asinine way. People who do are people who end up as managers or bankers or policemen. I stand against all that.

31. WHAT IS THE ONE PHONE NUMBER SHOWS UP ON YOUR PHONE THE MOST?

I don’t understand the question.

32. WHAT ANNOYS YOU MOST?

Man’s inhumanity to man. Unequal distribution of wealth.

33. WHICH FOREIGN COUNTRIES HAVE YOU VISITED IN THE LAST TWELVE MONTHS?

I have not visited a single foreign country, no.

34. YOUR WEAKNESS?

Thinking at length about the terrible prospects in store for any kid that I see. I look at a particular kid walking around on the same street as me. A kid with a backpack and an ipod and jeans and all that junk and I think about the world that this kid is part of and what the world is going to be like when this kid gets to an age where it has to work and how terrible that moment is going to be for that kid. If I am feeling particularly weak I will give up whatever destination I have in mind and follow this kid and think about all the terrible things they are going to have to endure. Just think about it. One day your son or daughter will have to get up early in the morning, dress in clothes they aren’t comfortable in, go to a room containing one or another dickhead in a suit. This particular dickhead, whichever one it happens to be, will ask them all kinds of questions, pretending (both the dickhead and the questions) that they mean anything or have any significance. The dickhead will pretend, for example, that he or she really wants to know what your son or daughter’s weaknesses are. But they don’t really want to know what your son or daughter’s weaknesses are! The question is really asking your son or daughter if they are able to come up with a fictional attribute of theirs which might on first examination appear to be negative but which can be subsequently elaborated upon to make it seem not negative at all, perhaps even positive. Don’t let this happen to your kids! The dickhead might ask them to relay a situation in which your son or daughter has worked in a team. Do they want to really know what it is like to work as a team? No. No, that’s not what this dickhead will want to know. Do they want to know what it is like to interact with another man or a woman with a collective goal? Do they want to know things that your son or daughter really think? Their fears, their desires? No. What they are asking is for your kid to tell a fictitious story that makes them look good involving at some point doing something in a team. This is what is really being asked for. I follow these kids around and I think about them in these terrible situations. That is my weakness. Your son or daughter will have to somehow gain the ability to parse these bizarre and banal questions and discern what is really being asked for and then lie to make themselves fit that subtext of the question while ostensibly answering the real asked question. One day soon your child will have to do that. What are you going to do about it?

35. WHAT WAS THE LAST GIFT YOU GAVE?

This one particular guy I see around fairly often, he lives just at the bottom of the hill here, there’s something I really dislike about him. That dislike has recently turned into hatred. It’s difficult to say why, I just see him around a lot, he has this ridiculous little dog that he’s forever walking around. It has seemed to me of late that he is absolutely archetypal of the Sutton Coldfield resident: sexless, bourgeois, poorly dressed, conservative. But more than that, he is archetypal, I think, to the point where an archetype reaches such a pitch of intensity that it becomes devoid of any personal characteristics. There is honestly nothing about this man that is distinctive except his absolute homogeneity. How, I continue to ask myself, can he live as he does? How can he walk his little dog around, wear his flat cap, drive his red car all while being what he is? About a week ago I saw him out walking, without his dog this time. He had a Marks and Spencer carrier bag full of frozen food. I went up to him and asked him for directions to a nearby road. It’s quite a big road, this road I asked him about. It has a couple of shops and a garage on it. I’ve seen him on that road several times. He looked me up and down before answering that he was sorry, but he had no idea where the road was. I thanked him and walked away. I am fairly confident that he does know where the road is. He has a satnav in his car, he walks around the area a lot, despite his uniformity, he does not seem to be braindead or stupid. So this act, of looking someone up and down and deciding in that act whether you are going to give them directions to a place, to me, is a quintessentially Sutton Coldfield act. It’s an act that fits the hemmed in urban landscape, the neat pavements, the shops that sell riding equipment, the ones that sell nail extensions, the ones that sell you holidays, the ones that sell you houses.

I think about his face, this man. I think about his face all the time.

Yesterday at around 5am I went to the bottom of the hill and dropped a note through his door simply saying “I think about your face all the time.” It was written on a piece of cardboard box cardboard in red crayon.

36. WHAT WAS YOUR FAVOURITE HOLIDAY?

Weston Super-Mare.

37. EVER DONE A PRANK CALL?

Last year I went through a phase of prank calling particular places in Sutton Coldfield. I would go to various phoneboxes (of which there are sadly fewer and fewer in the district) and make the calls. I would often call the Little Aston golf club. I would begin by asking various ordinary questions about the facilities, the prices, the membership, that sort of thing. I would then follow up with a question about what sort of membership base they had outside Sutton. The person on the phone, usually a woman named Tracy, would answer that mostly people came from Sutton but they did have several members who travelled in and the club was easily accessible from... I would cut her off at this point and ask about inner city membership, how many people they had on their books that were from Aston or Erdington or places like that. She would politely tell me that she couldn’t give out that kind of information. I would then ask what proportion of the membership were members of the conservative party and, before she could hesitantly respond, I would begin to shout a mixture of abuse and revolutionary slogans at her, trying to cram as much information down the phone as possible before she hung up.

There were other places I would call, but it was mostly the golf course. I put on a range of different accents. I got bored of it after maybe forty five calls.

38. WHAT WERE YOU DOING BEFORE THIS?

Before this I was watching the Hitchcock film ‘North By Northwest’ in which Cary Grant becomes embroiled in international espionage after being mistaken for a non-existent spy. It includes the guy who played the twins in the ‘Double Shock’ episode of Columbo as the villain’s right hand man.

39. IF YOU COULD GET PLASTIC SURGERY WHAT WOULD IT BE?

I suppose I would have my face reconstructed to look like the man I talk about above, the Sutton Coldfield man. Perhaps I would also change my name to Sutton C. Oldfield. If I could afford it I would certainly think about doing something like that. Once I had properly healed I would once again approach that man and ask him for directions, to see what his reaction would be.

Perhaps I could study his habits, learn to mimic his voice and mannerisms. I could eat more so I fill out around my stomach as he has. Then one day, when he’s out walking his dog, I could follow him into the park and then knife him. Then I could take my place in his house. I could fuck his wife. I could fuck his kids! I could take his dog out for walks, go to his job, sleep in his bed, be him. I could be him.

40. WHAT DO YOU GET COMPLIMENTED ABOUT MOST?

I think the last compliment I received was back in the nineteen nineties. The last one I felt was genuine anyway. It was from a woman called I______ who I had been exchanging emails with on a regular basis. I believe we met in a chatroom. The level of sophistication in equipment that was affordable back then meant that the pictures she had sent me were heavily pixelated and poorly lit. They were of mediocre quality. I was somewhat repulsed by her body too, now that I remember it. Something about her breasts, the colour of the areola perhaps. I must dig out those pictures and examine them again. Anyway, this technical lack meant that we often simulated sex through the chat application, we would type what we would be doing to each other if we were really having sex, which took some skill in coordination but otherwise was not too dissimilar from the act itself. I would blu-tak onto the wall by my desk a frieze of her photographs and use those as a basis for what I typed. The images I came up with and the words I used to express them so moved her that, one hand in her cunt and one on the keyboard, she once breathlessly told me, typed to me falteringly, that I was the best cybersex she had ever had. The very best. I blocked her email address not long after that.

43. WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF ALCOHOL BECAME ILLEGAL?

I suppose I would end up paying some dealer for mediocre gin probably cut with white spirit, probably imported into the country in the hollowed out craniums of Sri Lankan babies, probably containing the jism of some bloody Mexicans or Chineses just like all the currently illegal drugs that I buy.

44. WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY?

Plastic surgery. I also want to meet Sarah Palin.

45. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE?

I was named after a footballer. A goalkeeper. Thanks dad.

46. DO YOU WISH ON STARS?

What?

48. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE 'CELEBRITY GENERATION'?

I bloody love them all, whoever they are.

49. WHAT UNDERWEAR ARE YOU WEARING?

Currently none. I rarely wear it. I don’t see the point.

50. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING?

I have a diary which I kept between 1991 and 2000 which is almost entirely illegible to me. The only word I was able to write clearly during the period with any kind of regularity was ‘dickhead’ which appears multiple times on each page. I can’t decipher any of the rest enough to be able to discover who any of these dickheads are, perhaps they are all the same one.

51. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE VEGETABLE?

I can say with some certainty that it is the carrot.

52. ANY BAD HABITS?

I pick my nose. I rarely wash my hands after going to the toilet. I brush my teeth just once a week. I bathe seldom. I pick my teeth when conversing with people. I chew with my mouth open. I lick my plate once I’ve emptied it. I lick my knife and fork. I chew on my fork. I lick the peel off lid of the yoghurt.

53. WHAT IS YOUR MOST EMBARRASSING CD ON THE SHELF?

I suppose it would be Damon Albarn.

54. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON, WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU?

If I was another person, would I be friends with me? No, I don’t think I would. I think I would find myself boorish, arrogant, stupid, lazy, intolerant, inept, creepy, uptight, remiss, intransigent, obsequious, tiring and depressing. I would run out of things to say in my own company, I would find my responses to me taciturn, cagy, guarded, blank, haughty, furtive and creepy. I would find my style of dress baffling, alarming, disgusting, creepy, worrying. And so on.

55. HAVE YOU EVER TOLD A SECRET YOU SWORE NOT TO TELL?

Of course I have. I recall the time T______ drunkenly told me about her long term attraction to V______. V______ at the time was engaged to some other woman whose name I can’t remember. I remember going up to V’s fiancé about a week later and telling her exactly what T______ had said to me. The fallout from that evening lead to the breakup of the engagement and the commencement of a violent short term relationship between T______ and V______ , ending after just a couple of weeks. Both T_______ and V_____ were in emotional states after the breakup and naturally I was there to pick up the pieces with the two of them. Good times.

56. DO LOOKS MATTER?

Looks do matter. Look at a man like Stringfellow. That is a man that you have to have respect for. And that respect is based largely on his looks. Look at a man like Rod Stewart. A man like Stewart is a man you cannot help but respect. You can’t help but respect these guys because they turn up in public and each and every time they look good. They look classy. They don’t overdo it. One thing you can never say about Stringfellow is that this is a man that overdoes it. One thing you can say about Stewart is that he never overdoes it. He’s never crass, he’s never gauche. That’s what a man is. Well turned out, smooth, loquacious without being domineering, bawdy without being insensitive. Stringfellow, Stewart, these guys prove that looks matter. They prove it.

57. HOW DO YOU RELEASE YOUR ANGER?

I lure it into a cage with a bit of chicken leg, then I cover it over with a blanket and take it out into the countryside. I carry it all the way up to the top of a hill. Then I set up my ipod speakers and play an hour long recording of white noise right into the cage. Then I lift up the blanket and, while my anger is momentarily blinded by the sunshine, I hold it down and pour water over its head to simulate drowning. Then I put the blanket back on the cage. Then I kick the cage down the hill. By this time my anger is confused and disorientated. I take this opportunity to remove my anger from the cage and mutilate its genitals. I continue this process over and over for around seven years until I release my anger into the countryside on the understanding that it never speaks of this time again.

58. WHERE IS YOUR SECOND HOME?

I’m not sure where my first home is, particularly.

59. DO YOU TRUST OTHERS EASILY?

I trust dogs more than men. I trust women more than men. I trust horses more than sheep. I trust sheep more than dogs. I trust women more than horses. I trust dogs more than horses. I trust women more than sheep. I trust eggs more than legs. I trust cogs more than logs. I trust bacon more than bread.

60. WHAT WAS YOUR FAVOURITE TOY WHEN YOU WERE LITTLE?

My favourite toy when I was younger was an adult-sized crutch that had belonged to my dead grandmother. She died before I was born and had lived with my parents, in what was to become my bedroom, and died there. Some of her stuff was still in the house when I was growing up, the crutch was one thing. Other toys that I had seemed brittle in comparison. I used to use it in the garden as a gun or a sword. Later on, as a teenager, it became a prop during masturbation. My bedroom, at the back of the house, looked out over our small garden and into the gardens of the houses on the road behind. Our house was at the top of a hill so from my window I could see almost the entirety of their gardens. One garden in particular held my interest. The daughter of the family that lived there, she was probably sixteen, I was around seventeen at the time I guess, she used to go into the garden at about midnight, after her parents had gone to bed, and smoke. By the small security lights I could see her. In the darkness of my bedroom she could not see me. She would stand out in her thin pyjamas, her hair unbrushed. It was an entirely private moment that I intruded on. She would look up at the purple sky and I would take the crutch from under my bed. She would light her cigarette, the yellow flame would turn her face momentarily yellow and I would hold the crutch in my left hand and brace it against the far wall of my bed. She would stand with her left hand on her hip, her right hand sheltering the cigarette, taking occasional drags, thinking, ruminating, considering what her life would be and I would take my tumescent cock in my hand. She would walk up and down the garden, feeling the cool grass on the soles of her feet and I would lean heavily into the crutch and masturbate, trying to spin the process out so that I came at the same time her cigarette finished. I rarely managed to. She would tap the ash into the soil underneath the privet hedge and I would watch her body. I watched for moments when her shirt would ride up and expose the flesh of her stomach. I watched her breasts move under thin, taut fabric. I thought she had great tits. I always thought that.

I recall very well one occasion when she was standing out there and the light from the kitchen behind her went on. She froze. She flicked the cigarette away but it was too later. Her mother came out onto the grass and they squabbled and remonstrated for several minutes. The mother, I had always had a soft spot for her, she was dressed in a long white satin nightgown that she generously filled. That night the crutch wore away the wallpaper at the end of my bed right through to the plaster.

61. ARE YOU AFRAID OF GROWING UP?

Always. It is what I fight against with every grasp of my quavering hands. By fear I struck at the bank statement. By fear I curled my lip at the estate agent. By fear I cringed at offers of employment. By fear I turned my face away from the car. By fear I clawed at the suit. By fear I ran from the payslips and the handshakes. By fear I cursed policemen and civil servants. By fear I shook my fist at taxes. By fear I ripped up paper money and ate it like a cheese.

62. DO YOU USE SARCASM?

Everything I say is to some degree sarcastic. It’s ascertaining the degree that causes people the trouble.

63. ARE YOU RELIGIOUS?

As you can probably tell, I was raised Catholic. I quickly was able to shake it off though. I am not religious.

64. IF YOU WERE LISTENING TO MUSIC BEFORE - WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO NOW?

Before when? Now I am listening to Bobby Hutcherson’s album ‘Total Eclipse’ which features Chick Corea on piano. The track is ‘Herzog’, perhaps named after the Saul Bellow novel. There is something yearning about the track which Corea’s lucid piano deftly underscores.

66. DO YOU GET ALONG WITH YOUR PARENTS?

No, I never particularly did. I always felt that there was some gulf between us. I still speak to my mother now and then. She calls me up and we speak quite cordially to each other, but we both know that our conversations are just a ruse to hide our antipathy for each other.

67. WHAT IS THE MOST PAIN YOU HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED?

I think it is any time I see an image of the face of Margaret Thatcher. All my fingers begin to hurt terribly.

68. DO YOU UN-TIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF?

In all our lifetimes we get maybe ten minutes which are truly great. Ten minutes. I don’t want to miss out on any of them by wasting time untying shoelaces.

69. LAST THING YOU SPILLED?

I believe the last thing I spilled was a container of water.

70. DO YOU HAVE ANY PETS?

Not currently. I would like to have the dog of that Sutton Coldfield man. I would beef that dog up, I would make it desperate.

71. WHAT IS THE LAST FURRY THING YOU TOUCHED?

I suppose it was a small cloth ape that I have here.

72. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE COLOUR?

Fleshtone.

73. WHAT'S THE LAST BOOK YOU READ?

Gareth Gates autobiog.

74. HOW MANY WISDOM TEETH DO YOU HAVE?

Zero.

75. DO YOU WANT EVERYONE TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS?

I would certainly read the answers if they did. Were these questions exported to Malawi, to Uganda, to Beirut, who knows what answers we might see.

76. WHAT'S YOUR DREAM VACATION?

The last one I dreamed about was that I was on holiday in Aldridge, a town just outside Birmingham. The town is kind of depressing. You can walk there from my house, it takes around an hour and a half. I’ve done it a couple of times but there is no reason, really, to ever go to Aldridge. There is nothing there. My dream takes place on a grey afternoon. A lot of people from my primary school are there, in Aldridge. Though there is no beach in Aldridge T______, from my primary school, keeps talking about going to the beach. Eventually we enter a building and join the audience of a meeting that is about to take place. The building is cavernous and I am unable to properly see the stage; it is obscured by the backs of the heads of others. I can hear T_____ shouting something to me, I strain my ears but I can’t make out his voice. His voice echoes all around the hall. Other people don’t seem to notice. I recognise all of them. I stand up and try to shout out to T_____, I can tell from the tone of his voice that he is danger. I try to call out to him but I find myself unable to make sounds. Nonetheless everyone turns around to look at me, T____’s voice stops. Everyone is staring.

77. LAST THING YOU ATE/DRANK

A tumbler of water.

78. LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE PHONE:

The last person I talked to on the phone was a man who wanted to offer me a deal on cheap phonecalls. I took him up on his offer.

79. WHATS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ON THE OPPOSITE SEX?

The first thing I notice is whether or not she has braces on her teeth.

80. HAVING A DINNER PARTY AND CAN INVITE FIVE FAMOUS PEOPLE (ALIVE OR DEAD)...

Chick Corea, Sarah Palin, Washington Phillips, Patrick McGoohan, Buster Keaton.

83. ARE WORMHOLES POSSIBLE?

Categorically no.

84. IF YOU COULD TRAVEL BACK IN TIME AND CHANGE ONE THING TO CHANGE THE PLANET FOR THE BETTER

I would punch DW Griffith in the cock.

85. WHAT IS YOUR HAIR COLOUR?

It is grey.

86. EYE COLOUR?

It is grey.

87. WHAT SKILL WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO HAVE?

I think I would most like to be able to, in situations where people voice any kind of bigotry or ignorance, take a moment of silent rumination and then stand up and loom over them, narrow my eyes and just look at them in such a way that they knew they were wrong and they reconsidered their actions.

I would also like to be able to do backflips.

88. LIST THREE THINGS THAT YOU LIKE ABOUT YOUR PERSONALITY

Prurience, indifference, obsequiousness.

89. IF YOU COULD ONLY GIVE MONEY TO ONE CHARITY IN YOUR LIFE, WHO WOULD IT BE AND WHY?

Probably the Catholic Church.

90 DO YOU LIKE SUSHI?

If this is some kind of innuendo then yes, if it’s a straight question then yes, I do like it raw.

91. LAST THING YOU WATCHED?

The last thing I watched was the Kubrick film ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. To me, the combination of Tom Cruise and women is utterly baffling.

92. ARE YOU ON TWITTER?

Yes. I’ve been on twitter for some months now. I use it chiefly to cyberstalk particular bloggers I’m interested in. There is one woman on it, her blog is mostly long essays about nineteenth century literature and so on, but on the twitter she is a different person. Her use of the smiley – so deft, so particular – moved me immensely. From the twitter I was able to access her flickr account (she has the same username for both) and there I discovered some superb pictures of her sunbathing on a beach on holiday from sometime in 2006. Her figure looked fuller then, or at least that’s what the pictures indicate. Perhaps she wears concealing clothes these days. I messaged her on twitter to ask which it was, but so far no response.

93. ARE YOU TOO SHY TO ASK SOMEONE OUT?

The last time I asked someone out on a date was in 1994. She and I were working together in some office in the city centre. She was called W_____. We used to go for lunch most days. We both used to bring in sandwiches and I would swap half of mine for half of hers. She told me she had a wooden leg, so we used to go for very slow walks around the office carpark, or I would stand with her while she was on a smoking break. We used to talk about all sorts of things, our families, television shows we liked. I made her a mixtape of Chick Corea classics and she made me one which had, among other songs, Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’ on it. Despite this I really liked her. After a few months of back and forth I started to consider asking her on a date. It did seem like she liked me too. She would sit really close to me at lunchtime, our legs practically touching. I even found that if I sat on the right side of her and engaged her on a topic she liked I could surreptitiously remove my shoe and rub the socked foot up and down against her wooden leg. She didn’t seem to notice that at all. So eventually, one Monday, I waited for her as usual by the lifts and we rode down together. It was a nice day, so we took our lunchboxes outside and sat on a low wall overlooking the carpark. “W_____,” I said to her, “I really like you. I enjoy spending time with you. Would you like to go on a date with me? We could take in a film or go for dinner, then perhaps dancing. How about this weekend? What do you say?” She looked at me with her soft nice face for a long time and said, “You’ve been rubbing your foot over my leg every day for the past three months. I’ve been waiting for you to say something about what the hell is going on since then. You think I would go out with a creepy bastard like you?!” I was admittedly perplexed at this, but I parried her question with one of my own. “But I thought you said you had a false leg?” I said. There was a long pause. “No I didn’t,” she answered.

94. SUMMER OR WINTER?

Who gives a shit?

96. RELATIONSHIPS OR ONE NIGHT STANDS?

Both have their downsides.

97. WHO IS THE MOST LIKELY TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS

I couldn’t care less.

98. WHO IS LEAST LIKELY TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS?

Peter Brotzmann?

99. BIGGEST REGRET

Not drilling that bitch.

A Survey

2009-03-25T08:05:00.000-07:00

First thing you wash in the shower?

I don't have a system, if that's what you mean. Some days it might be the head, other days the hands. I would rarely start with a leg and then not move straight on to the other leg. There are times when I miss certain parts altogether, out of forgetfulness. To make it up to them the next time I might wash them first.

What color is your favorite hoodie?

Grey I guess.

Would you kiss the last person you kissed again?

She was mostly responsible for me losing my job at the time. I actually found this job palatable. I found it bearable, at least. She is entirely responsible for my current estrangement from my mother. My mother and I had been getting along alright before then. She, my mother, still calls me up now and then, but if there is noise in the background, maybe from the television or radio she will always ask me "Is that woman there with you?" Things haven't been the same since really. It's a basic lack of trust that she has around me now, a constant sense of suspicion. She also cost me a lot of money, which I no longer have that money and won't again most probably. But, I would kiss her again. I would kiss her again, and the rest. Yeah.

Do you plan outfits?

Seldom. Ever since I began to dress almost entirely in clothes bought from Sutton Coldfield charity shops I find that all my clothes match each other. It is a very undemanding kind of look. Little or no concession to complementary colour or style is needed. Today, for example, I am wearing blue/grey trousers in an irridescent, almost shiny fabric, teamed with a fuscia shirt and an oversized tan jacket. I am also sporting large white no brand training shoes and a flat brown tweed cap. Because it was cold today I wore my Adidas black, lime green and purple skiing jacket.

How are you feeling RIGHT now?

I don't feel too bad. I walked down to a nearby pub. I seldom go in there, but today felt like that kind of day. There, probably taken in by my style of dress and taking me for another flat-capped Sutton loser escaping from his wife, this guy challenged me to a game of pool. Normally I abhor this game, but I decided to play to see what bullshit this dickhead would come out with. I think he must have thought I was older than I am, he kept talking about television shows from quite a long time before I was born. He told me the entire plot of a play he had heard on radio four. The play, from what I could make out was about how bad the weather is getting. The weather, it seems, was getting bad. He bet me a fiver on the game of pool, which I stupidly accepted. He bought me a pint of real ale, which I drank some of. I could have murdered a gin and tonic, but he didn't ask, he just bought, so there you go. We tossed for the break and I won. I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to the game of pool. I hit the white and four of the reds went in. A couple of others hung near pockets. I potted every single red and the black without letting him have a shot. He did not look happy, but he gave me the note anyway. I made some excuse and left. I might buy a new pair of trousers with the money.

What's the closest thing to you that's red?

It is a scab.

Tell me about the last dream you remember having.

I was born out of the mouth of a horse. As soon as I came out I was afraid. I ran alone in the woods, pursued by the horse. The motives of the horse were difficult to discern. I came across a building in the shape and aspect of a tooth. An incisor. I went inside it. The horse was there but now it was benign. I kept on singing an irritating phrase and the more I didn't want to sing it, the louder I sang it. Everyone there was pissed off with me.

Did you meet anyone new today?

I suppose so. I met that man I beat at pool. He told me his name was G_______. In the play he told me about, the weather got so cold that workers were forced to take a day of annual leave because they couldn't make it in to work owing to the fact that public transport workers were forced to take a day of annual leave because they couldn't make it into work owing to the weather.

Where were you three hours ago?

I was sitting silently in my house listening to Washington Phillips singing 'What are they doing in heaven today?', the single greatest musical work by any man who is not Chick Corea. I am no religious man, but there is something in this song which impels us to consider our departed in a way that never fails to arrest. This song, this wound, this cadaver cannot but speak clearly to us of what we have lost and what we will not be able to recover. An evocation of the sweet release of the grave after all this toil. I could crassly list the lyric here, but it's the performance, the performance that makes it. The way Phillips introduces the song, "What are they doing in heaven today? I don't know boy, but it's my job to stand here and sing about it," and then simply, without pause launches into the song. This lack of speculation, this rushing into the void, destroys me utterly each time.

Are you wearing socks right now?

Right now? Right now yeah, I am.

When was the last time you went out of state?

If this question means in terms of mentally then last week. If it means geographically then last week.

What was the last thing you had to drink?

It was a glass of water.

What was your last purchase?

A tin of egg.

Last food you ate?

It was egg.

2009-02-01T16:01:00.000-08:00

What is on your bed right now?

On my bed right now is a plate of beef. On my bed right now is some false teeth. On my bed right now is a plastic man. On my bed right now is a map. On my bed right now is a picture of a woman. The picture shows the woman looking out of a window. The picture shows that the woman is wearing just some underwear. On my bed right now is a trousers. On my bed right now is a knife coated in grease. The grease came from the beef. On my bed right now is a cup. On my bed right now is a picture of our lord cut off at the navel. In the cup there is some water.

When was the last time you threw up?

The last time was December of last year. It was early December. I had been doing a lot of walking around that time, despite the inclement weather. It had been cold all week. I seem to recall that there was a great deal of frost on the ground. I had gone walking in the Little Aston area. I had walked down the long Clarence Road, through Mere Green and all the way into Sutton Coldfield shopping centre. Something was up with me; it had taken me far longer than usual, principally because I had had to stop and retch several times on the journey. All in all I think it took me about three hours to reach Sutton that day. Usually this walk takes a little over an hour. I felt - rather foolishly as it turned out - that I should get something inside me, that I would stop retching if I did that. I walked around for some minutes before deciding to join the queue for Greggs, the bakers. The queue was interminably long, as it always is. I queued for something like thirty minutes, during which I retched bile and spittle onto the Greggs floor four times. People behind jostled me, but I refused to give up my position in the queue. When I reached the front I ordered two chicken and mushroom pasties. I paid for them and left the shop. Outside, I leaned against the wall outside of Boots and, despite their temperature, I bolted down both pasties. I scorched my tongue and the roof of my mouth on the pasties. For a few minutes, I felt a little better, but then I began to feel unwell again. I began to burp a sick taste into my mouth and, below my tongue, I was creating pints and pints of saliva. My eyes streamed. I took deep breaths and staggered along the pedestrianised area. Outside the Waterstone's I could hang on no longer and, my eyes wide and frightened, I vomited. Unfortunately, a woman was just leaving the shop as the sick left my mouth and a lot of it went into a plastic bag she was carrying which contained a copy of Ian McEwen's 'On Chesil Beach', making the book slightly more unreadable than when she had bought it.

What's your favorite word or phrase?

Just over a week ago I was taking the 902 bus between Erdington and Sutton Coldfield. I had decided to visit Erdington to look at the new Tesco that has recently opened there. A disappointment. On the bus, which was crowded, I was sitting next to a very fat old woman. Her bulk necessitated that my right leg was sticking some way out beyond the seat and into the aisle. Some kids got on. They were wearing school uniform. Walking past to get to the back of the bus, despite my efforts to retract it, one of them stumbled over my leg. "What the fock you doing you chief?" he said to me. For the rest of the journey I savoured that phrase. Should the occasion ever arise that I have to cuss someone, that's the phrase I will use.

Name 3 people who made you smile today?

Sarah Palin, Chick Corea, Johanna Sigurdardottir

What were you doing at 8 am this morning?

I couldn't sleep last night, so I banged some lines of ketamine and watched episodes of The Prisoner on my computer using a proxy server to get into the American website. The Prisoner is a show that aligns superbly with the drug. In my case, my sense of depth perception was sufficiently altered so that Patrick McGoohan's head was further elongated and all of his features crammed into the centre of this long face. This made him look even more cynical and suspicious/amused than usual. The different parts of the plot interlocked in pleasingly geometric ways that made the often flimsy sequences of macho banter or the action set pieces seem more serious, perhaps even moving. I was not surprised to find my eyes growing damp at various points as McGoohan's escape attempts were once again foiled.

What were you doing 30 minutes ago?

I was continuing to write my Sarah Palin slash fiction. Here are a few sentences:

She had filed down the antlers on the stag head into a long, slender, phallic shape. I was to be deer and she the stag. Did I have a problem with that? No ma'am. I didn't have no problem with that. I bent down and exposed myself to her. Turning around I saw her pushing her glasses down her nose to get a better look at what I was showing her. "Nice ass," she said dismissively, turning and fitting the stag head over hers like a mask, pointing the filed down antler right at me and making terrible, guttural noises. Then she took her gun and

What is your favorite holiday?

I recall a time with my family in Weston Super-Mare. I was only a young kid, something like nine or ten years old. We had come on holiday to Weston and were staying in a caravan. One morning, we came through the drizzle onto the beach. The tide was way out, barely visible from the promenade, but I walked out to it. It felt like miles. It was very blustery and the only other people around on the beach were my parents, just blobs behind me struggling to keep our stuff from blowing away. The sand had been forced into troughs and ridges by the waves. I stood and looked in the opposite direction from England. I stood and looked in the opposite direction to home, out at the sea. For a long time I stood there until my dad came up and asked me what I was doing, breaking my reverie. It was the first and last time I ever thought the ocean profound.

Have you ever been to another country?

No. I never have. Some time ago I was considering Belgium, but it never happened. Money, you know.

What is the last thing you said aloud?

"What the fock you doing you chief," to nobody. I said it a few times. I rolled it around my tongue. It felt good in my mouth to say.

What is the best ice cream flavor?

I suppose this is some sort of euphemism. What can I say? I like chocolate and vanilla in roughly equal measure. Neapolitan I have never really dabbled with.

What was the last thing you had to drink?

Some water.

What are you wearing right now?

Some brown shoes.

What was the last thing you ate?

It was a plate of beef.

Have you bought any new clothing items this week?

I bought four shirts in a charity shop last Monday. One of them is what one might call a Hawaiian shirt. It has a picture of a sunset and a beach and some palm trees on it. It is very lurid. Partly through fiscal necessity and partly through fascination, I have begun to build up a wardrobe of clothes bought only from Sutton Coldfield charity shops. I enjoy stepping into the clothes of the dickheads who have lived here and perhaps even are dead now. The clothes of my enemies. These shirts I bought in Mere Green. The old woman working there tried to overcharge me by sixty seven pence when she rang the shirts up on the till. "What the fock you doing you chief?" I asked her, much to her chagrin.

Who is the last person who sent you a message on msypace?

It was a self-styled neo-fusion band who list Chick Corea as one of their influences. They must have contacted me on the basis that I also enjoy Corea's work very much. I went to their page and listened to their songs. Unfortunately it turned out that this band was of asinine quality. It pained me to hear their pathetic doodling. They were a travesty to the name of jazz fusion. I wrote them a message to let them know my opinion. Such people would probably listen to Corea while smoking cheap Pakistani hash mixed with poor quality brown rolling tobacco. They would probably talk over the solos, masking any nuance with their banal chatter. While playing, instead of thinking about the vastness of the cosmos, they are probably just thinking about the fanny of a woman. While playing, instead of thinking about the majesty of mountains, the serenity of the clouds or the wonder of an oak tree they are probably thinking about a banal pair of tits printed on grubby newsprint. That is the last message I got.

When was the last time you ran?

I suppose that it was around a month ago. I saw the bus in front of me and I ran for it. That's all there is to it.

What's the last sporting event you watched?

Last summer I attended the sports day at a local primary school. I do not have a kid, let alone one able to do sport, but nobody questioned me when I took my seat. It was not much of a spectacle. The kids could barely stop thinking about spiderman or pogs to keep a simple egg on the end of a spoon for a short duration. The kids could barely stop picking their noses or picking bits of cheesy wotsits out of their teeth to stay upright in a sack for a few yards. And yet, when it came to the very littlest kids trying to push a plastic hoop along the course, a hoop that vexed them, a hoop that was capricious in its movements, I became so involved. At each nefarious turn of the hoop, as it got away from the little girl pushing it I would half rise from my seat and scream and stamp my feet in encouragement. My favourite, a little blonde in a yellow dress, pushed her hoop entirely off the course and it fell spinning on the grass. I was distraught. I am not ashamed to admit that I wept a little for her shattered dreams. The girl who did win, all I can say is she must have had the first pick of the hoops, and intimate knowledge of their caprices, because for her the course was easy - perhaps too easy. Her smile when she crossed the line was bordering on guilty. She knew something. Her breathless countenance concealed something. The other parents didn't agree with me, in fact they seemed unhappy at my accusations, but I know a cheater when I see one.

If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?

I suppose I would go back to Weston Super-Mare. I would probably go look at the sea there and see what it stirred up. I hear it is full of heroin addicts these days. That's what I hear anyway.

Ever go camping?

Never.

Do you have a tan?

I do not have a tan.

Have you ever lost anything down a toilet?

Only things that were once part of me.

What is your guilty pleasure?

All my pleasures are guilty. Especially though, I almost always feel guilty after looking at pornography. In particular when this pornography has a brutal or violent quality. The guilt is often proportional to the pleasure that, only moments before the guilt comes, I was enjoying with such abandon.

Do you use smiley faces on the computer a lot? I do. I find in particular that ':( ' conveys so effortlessly a feeling that could otherwise take several thousand tedious words to properly explain. It is something like a joke versus the rote explanation of why a joke is funny. I believe them to be one of the most powerful new tools in communication. It is so quietly, so lospidedly desperate, so stoical, so brave.

Do you drink soda from a straw?

Sure, sure I do.

What did your last text message say?

It said: I dnt kno. It up 2u. u decide.

Are you someone's best friend?

Nah.

What are you doing tomorrow?

I thought I might take a walk out in the direction of Lichfield. If you walk about a mile and a half down a big road with no pavements, then you reach one of those pubs that does carvery food. It is just a building surrounded by countryside. I will probably go and eat a carvery lunch there. The food is entirely disgusting, too rich, too overcooked, the vegetables done and done until they are practically just mush. Nothing there tastes of anything. Still, it seems to me that there is something in the fake rusticness and overdone bonhomie of the place that tells me about Sutton Coldfield. Seeing the miserable faces forcing down their hunks of fatty meat, barely talking to each other, having nothing to say, the brown tables and the beams of treated MDF, this is what it's about, for me.

Where is your mom right now?

Alone in her house on the other side of the city, the television on.

Look to your left, what do you see?

Just the wall.

What color is your watch?

I don't own one. If I did I suppose it would be colour yellow.

What do you think of when you think of Australia?

I don't know? Animals?

Ever ridden on a rollercoaster?

I have. I rode on the big rollercoaster at Drayton Manor Park in Dudley. I think the name of it is Shockwave. It was terrible. A terrible time.

What is your birthstone?

I have no focking idea.

Do you go in at a fast food place or just hit the drive thru?

If this means what I think it does then I hit the drive thru. If it's just a straight question then the answer is that I don't eat fast food and I have a phobia of cars.

Do you have any friends on myspace that you actually hate?

Yes. I hate Y________, he is a prick. I hate L____, I find her company deplorable. All she ever wants to talk about are her children. I stopped answering her messages after she made a blingee of her children which managed to make the whole blingee enterprise seem entirely tacky. Also I hate A_____ who, though she has sent me a variety of topless shots, refuses to move on to full nudes out of some prudish, possibly even quasi-religious impulse that frankly sickens me. There are some others, but they are barely worth even going into.

Do you have a dog?

I did have a dog. I did have a dog and his name was Roscoe. Roscoe and I used to go walking in Sutton Park. I had him for about a month before he ran away. I still have eight or nine cans of dog food. His favourite was chicken. You can have them if you want. Get in touch.

Last person you talked to on the phone?

The last person I spoke to on the phone was G_____. G_____ is a staunch and rather humourless left-wing activist and I spent about forty minutes extolling the virtues of Sarah Palin to him in an attempt to get him to admit that there is something exciting about her. He was very resistant at first. I read out some of my Sarah Palin slash fiction to him, claiming that it had been emailed to me by a former work colleague. He claimed to be disgusted, but I'm sure I could hear him beating his meat with his free hand. After a while you get to recognise the signs.

Any plans today?

It's eleven thirty six. What plans I might have had have long ago fallen by the wayside.

Are you happy?

Am I?!

Where are you right now?

In Sutton Coldfield.

Biggest annoyance in your life right now?

The plight of the world's hungry and downtrodden. The unequal distribution of wealth.

Last song listened to?

Chick Corea - Theme To The Mothership. It is the sound of a community coming together. It is the sound of Zen laughter. It is a sound that acknowledges children as our future. It is the sound of races casting aside their differences and uniting. It is the sound of animals growing as sentient as humans. It is the sound of the abode of stones. It is the sound of nature burgeoning. It is the sound of ice in a drink. It is the sound of man, the sound of woman, the sound of child.

Last movie you saw?

It was the Buster Keaton movie Steamboat Bill Jr. Keaton was the first man that I was ever attracted to, in the homosexual sense. Something about his movement, his fragility, his grace, his serenity, stirred my five year old mind's nascent sexuality. I still wank to his films all the time.

Are you allergic to anything?

Hot dogs.

Favorite pair of shoes you wear all the time?

These brown ones.

Are you jealous of anyone?

I am jealous continually. All the time I find things to be envious of people for. That man's face, that woman's fingers. Ideally, I would be a constantly mutating composite of all the people in my immediate vicinity. I feel that this is the only way I could achieve true satisfaction.

Are you married?

It would take a great deal to prove that I am.

Is anyone jealous of you?

Yeah, yeah. I'm sure they are. Yeah.

Do any of your friends have children?

They do!

Do you eat healthy?

I blame my mother for my poor diet. She never encouraged us to eat healthy. I was always a fussy eater as a child and have never grown out of it. I abhor any kind of sauce. I do not like different foods intermingled on the same plate. I can't taste anything without a great deal of salt on it. It's been hard for me really. I get such little pleasure from food.

What do you usually do during the day?

I toil. I think. I walk. I play. I am alone.

Do you hate anyone right now?

Steven Dudderidge and Professor David Reilly.

Do you use the word 'hello' daily?

I suppose I use it with some frequency. Daily might be pushing it.

How many kids do you want when you're older?

No.

How did you get one of your scars?

I stood up and I said back "Nah man, you're a focking chief. Back the fock up."

What do you want done with your remains when you die?

2009-02-01T08:49:00.000-08:00

My head I would like to be placed on the top of the carpark in Sutton Coldfield town centre, that I might always be looking over the town, seeing the people and judging them. I would like to have my eyes facing the McDonald's so that I can chiefly see the place where all the kids hang out during the day and where all the fights are during the night. Ideally I would like to be at a vantage point where, though I will no longer be able to throw a punch or kick someone in the shin, I can still spit and shout with the rest of them. The head should be allowed to decay at the pace the environment sees fit.

My left arm I would like to be delivered to a tattooist who is to be paid to cover it with specific designs that I have chosen. These are: A full colour picture of a horse in profile, the sun shining on its noble back, this would go on my bicep. On the palm of my hand, a line rendering of Chick Corea's face, smiling and benevolent. A representation of my primary school reception class photograph is to go along the length of my forearm. While the other childen children are to be in monochrome and somewhat blurry, the part of the tattoo which is my picture is to be in full colour and bathed in glowing sunlight. Along each finger I want one of my five secret words. These words will not be revealed until after my death, lest their power be compromised. On the back of my hand, the tattooist is to print the headline from the Daily Mail from the day of my death. The arm, once completed, should be preserved in formaldehyde and sent to my friend J____. Each year, on the anniversary of my death, he is to bring the arm to the top of the car park in Sutton Coldfield town centre and reunite it with the rest of my body.

The right arm should be taken to the house I grew up in. All the women I have ever slept with should be gathered at that place. They should take the arm to the garden and there light a fire. The arm should be placed in the fire. Each woman should subsequently prick herself with a needle and allow the blood to drip into the fire. The fire should be allowed to burn itself out. The resulting ashes should be placed in a suitable container and retained, for one year, by each of the women in turn. On the anniversary of my death, the current holder should take the container to the top of the carpark in Sutton Coldfield town centre, to reunite it with the rest of my body and to pass it on to the next woman.

The flesh should be stripped from my torso and given to dogs to consume. The remaining bones should be hollowed out and cleaned and then given to A_____, a sculptor I have specially chosen for her dexterity and knowledge of form. She will then follow instructions already supplied by me and create a sculpture from the bones. The sculpture will be a representation of man's inhumanity to his fellow men and will be dedicated to the poor of the world. The sculpture should be displayed publicly around Sutton Coldfield as a reminder to the people there of what they are and what they have done. Each year, on the anniversary of my death it should be taken to the top of the carkpark in Sutton Coldfield town centre to be reunited with the rest of my body.

My left leg should be skinned and all blood drained from it and saved. The remaining material may be fed to dogs. The skin should be dried and flattened out to form a kind of parchment. Upon this parchment a text is to be written. The text will be supplied by myself and will deal with an apocalyptic scenario. The parchment and the blood should be given to a barely literate child who, using a quill pen, will copy my text onto the skin using the blood as an ink. The completed text should then be sent to Sutton Coldfield library where it is to be permanently displayed in the ever-diminishing fiction section except for once a year, on the anniversary of my death, when the head librarian of the day should take it to the top of the carpark in Sutton Coldfield town centre, where it will be reunited with the rest of my body.

The hairs from my right leg should be shaved off and preserved in any suitable container. The remaining leg should then be taken to the coast at Weston Super-Mare, the site of many happy childhood memories, and placed in a buoyant, watertight container and, at high tide, let out to sea. If still alive, my mother should complete this task. The container with my leg hairs in it should be kept in a dark cupboard, except on the anniversary of my death, when it should be taken to the top of the carpark in Sutton Coldfield town centre, to be reunited with the other parts of my body.

My cock should be removed from the torso. A plaster cast should be made of it and from this a hard rubber replica should be constructed. The cock should be preserved in formaldehyde. Both the cock and the replica should be sent to C_________, who should be instructed to use the replica to pleasure herself whenever she sees fit. She should take the preserved cock once a year, on the anniversary of my death, to Sutton Coldfield town centre, to the top of the carkpark there, that it might be reunited with the rest of my body.

At each anniversary, the persons gathered at the top of the carpark should, on a portable ghetto blaster, or similar device, play an album of Chick Corea's, in a cycle which I have spent some time devising so that it might accord with the numerological significance of each anniversary. After the music has played, they should together recite a short poem which I have composed for the occasion, which will be revealed when I die but not before lest it lose its potency. Subsequently, they should place a thin blanket on the ground and make love to each other. For that time, what remains of my head should be revolved so that the eyes look in the direction of the lovemaking. At the moment of climax, each should scream my name at the top of their lungs.

Have you ever taken a picture in a bathroom?

2008-09-21T13:19:00.001-07:00

It’s funny you should ask this. I always carry a camera around with me. A few years ago I switched to digital photography. My hobby as a teenager was taking photographs of bathrooms. I think it stems from my mother’s nosiness. She would always be asking me, if I visited a friend’s house, what it was like, what their furniture was like, what kind of kitchen they had. I became very interested in bathrooms around that time. When I got given a camera for my seventeenth birthday I began to document each bathroom I visited. If the bathrooms were crowded I would get uncomfortable stares and even threats when I took my camera out. On two occasions I was beaten up, both in pub toilets. I lost sixteen photos that way. I went back to the relevant bathrooms and took them again afterwards, but they lacked a certain authenticity that I value. A selection from my albums:
· A hand and a portion of arm (not my own) obscures the right two-thirds of this picture. I had brought my cassette of jams to this party, but it had been taken off the stereo halfway through the first song. Someone had replaced it with some kind of rock music. I couldn’t get with that. The hand belonged to S____ P____, aged eighteen and four months. We had gone into the bathroom to fuck, but she, already unsteady on her feet, fell into the bath and cracked her jaw before we could do anything. I remember her smile from before, she never really looked the same afterwards, and she would never look at me either. She blamed me for her disfigurement as if I had inflicted it. I had not inflicted it. But I did worry, when I saw her fall, that people outside would think it, when I opened the door to them and they saw her. It didn’t look good. This photograph captures a happier moment, before that fall, though after my cassette had been switched off. I looked around for it afterwards, but the tape had been all pulled out and crumpled.
· You can see a long urinal trough. You can make out a cubicle with the door shut and a red dot by the lock in the door which denotes that it is occupied. There are white tiles with a blue filigree pattern. On the back of this photograph it says that this was taken in 1999. Fox and Goose Pub, August 5th 1999, is what it says exactly. This is confusing to me because, to my recollection, I have never been in that particular pub. Similarly, the paper on which the photograph is printed, the colouration in the shot and the decor of the bathroom suggest a time much earlier than the late 90s.
· This bathroom is very clean. It belongs to my former friend E_____ J_____. It is sumptuous. When I first printed this photograph I thought there was a new development in printing that had come up with a new, more brilliant white. It is, sincerely, the greatest bathroom I have ever been in. Unfortunately it is one I will never visit again. The Party that E_____ was hosting at her huge house had not been, in my opinion, going well. E_____’s parents were incredibly rich and they had bought her this huge house. She had just moved in and decided to throw a party. I brought along a CD of my favourite Chick Corea tunes and I was sat with my head tilted towards the ceiling, my eye closed, listening to ‘Crystal Silence’ coming out of the ten grand conch-shell speakers when this guy taps me on the shoulder, I just want to put this on bruv, he said, It’s like breaks but deeper. You know. Harder. It’s kind of like drum and bass. He kept talking as he pulled my CD out of the player. It’s kind of like, he pressed play, it’s kind of like early, like really early jungle. It’s kind of harder but at the same time it’s not really hard, y’know? It’s more like... it’s like it has a groove but it’s not obvious about it. Someone else had come over by this point, so I left. A while later he and his friends sat in a circle and performed some kind of chant along with the music while slapping the wooden floor with the palms of their hands. I don’t recall too much after that. I reasoned correctly that if I drank enough quickly enough I would wake up the next day in that beautiful bath.

Who was the last person's voice you heard?

2008-09-21T13:18:00.001-07:00

Robert Mugabe's. I had bought a new clock radio and I forgot to change the alarm time. It went off at midnight while I was sleeping, but didn’t wake me. The station it was tuned to was playing an all night marathon of Robert Mugabe's greatest speeches. I woke up just as the show was ending, around nine am. He was in my head all day. I had dreamt of him.

Was your last kiss a mistake?

2008-09-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

The last one, three and a half years ago, she had white patches of raised skin on her face. Her tongue flailed inside my mouth and as it flailed, her hands, skin that was bright pink from the cold, raised into the air in celebration. Afterwards, her chin slick with my drool, we looked at each other. Her eyes were stuck together with yellow sleep. The room we were in had no wallpaper and there were animal shapes in the dark damp plaster. It was cold enough to see her breath, her breasts rose and fell as her hands, still raised above her head in celebration, shook in the cold and in her triumph. I took off my white coat. Her skin was puckered pink and there were red spots, hives perhaps, all over her thighs and vagina. She turned from me and lay down on the bed. My dear, I said to her, We can't. Please. Be reasonable. She turned over on the bed so that all I could see of her head was curls of black hair. She put the stereo on with her red fingers. I stood there in my white suit. I rubbed my eyes with two curled up fingers. She was humming along with the radio station. I bent down and began to unlace my white shoes.

A Survey

2008-09-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

Initials of the person you like?

SP

First person under ' J' on your cell phone?

Jeremy Vine radio talkshow call in number.

What's the most interesting thing that happened to you today?

I rewatched the Alfred Hitchcock film Rope, a perennial favourite of mine. If I ever had the opportunity to make a film I think I would remake Rope, except that my version would differ by there being no body inside the chest. Jimmy Stewart’s character would return after the breakup of the party, suspicious, and open the chest, only to discover no body inside. How then to account for the absence of David Kentley, the murder victim in the original film? How then to account for Philip’s nerves and uncharacteristic heavy drinking? While watching the film I spent some time considering how I would shoot my version and who I would cast. I’m definitely thinking David Schwimmer. He’s a terrible man for the acting.

Name 4 people that you can tell ANYTHING to:

I can tell anything to anyone. I don’t have no qualms in that department.

If someone hit you, what would you do?

If someone hit me, what would I do? What would I do? I don’t know. What would I do if someone hit me?

Do you know anyone whose name starts with a Z?

I don’t know anyone whose name doesn’t start with a Z.

When is the last time you touched drumsticks?

If you mean the chicken variety then earlier today. If you mean the variety you use to hit drums with then earlier today.

Who was the last person you talked to on the phone?

The last sixteen people I have spoken to on the phone have all been at various call centres for the company which supplies my internet connection, which there is some kind of problem with. Whenever I phone them they uniformly deny any record of my having phoned before. They have no record, that’s what they tell me.

Whenever I phone up the people who provide my internet connection, after pressing a lot of different option buttons (all of which take you to the same call centre and the same operatives by the way), I tell them my problem and I also tell them that I have phoned many times in the past. Each time they are surprised by this and they tell me that there’s no record of me having called previously, no record at all.

Each time I call up to try to sort out the recurring problem with my broadband, I’m told that the call centre have no record of me having called before and so no action is being taken to fix my problem. Each time I take the name of the person I’m talking to, ask them to record the call and ask them to do something about the problem. They tell me that they’re doing all this, that they’ve ordered a test on the line and that they’ll call me back. When I call again, the process starts again from scratch.

The last person I talked to on the phone was my internet provider. I’m having trouble with the connection you see. I’ve called them sixteen times and each time they claim that they have no record of the call and so I have to explain the problem again. I have to go through the rigmarole of the operative insisting that I unplug everything from my modem, switch off my computer and restart the connection. When that inevitably doesn’t work, they say that they’ll order a test on the line and call me back when the results are in. This should only take a day or so, they say. After a few days I call back.

Who did I last speak to on the phone? I phoned up the call centre of the company that provides my internet connection. It’s been playing up recently, the connection keeps dropping out, and it’s much slower than it ought to be. Despite having called them many times in the past weeks, the girl I spoke to said she had no record of any previous calls. I rejoindered with the names of several call centre staff that I have spoken to, but she batted them away indifferently, saying that she didn’t know of anyone with those names that works there. Despite my protesting that I have gone through the procedure over a dozen times before, she made me disconnect my modem, restart my computer and then load it up again. Still the connection is only intermittent and slow when it is up. She sounds perplexed. There is an accusatory tone in her voice when she speaks. She says that she will have to order a line test, but it’s ok, that will only take two working days at the most, and she or another operative will call me back when it is done with the results. The line test should identify any fault she tells me. I ask for her name and she gives it to me. I write it down on a piece of paper along with the time of the call. What have I become?

What are you listening to?

Currently I am playing a disc called Early Circle. Circle is the group that Chick Corea had with Anthony Braxton, Dave Holland and Barry Altschul. Circle is most often seen as Braxton’s group but for me, no, that isn’t the case. Just listen to how Corea gets all over the keyboard on 73 Kelvin, he dominates the piece effortlessly. This is part of Chick’s so called avant-garde phase, a piece of terminology which I happen to detest. I see no logical break between this work and the later ‘fusion’ records. Nor do I see this work as being of greater significance, either to the history of jazz or in terms of so called experimentation or intellectuality. What I do see is a lot of people on a lot of messageboards, most of them with a lot of stupid facial hair talking a lot of shit about one of the greatest composers and players of our times.

What are you excited about?

While unable to sleep I began to write some slash fiction involving Sarah Palin. She was recently described as a ‘vast female plenitude’. I am excited about the direction it is taking. Here is what I have so far:

It was one of those Alaskan nights that people talk about, but when it comes down to it, they’d rather be by the fire or watching the tube than actually out there among it all, in that bleak black wilderness she called home. Cold? You bet it was cold. My eyelashes kept freezing together and I could feel my toes turning ice- blue. But her? She didn’t even seem to notice it. “Cold?” she said to me, looking at me from behind those hard eyes, “Ha! Cold’s when your spit freezes before it hits the floor.” And then she spat right onto the snow between her brown fur boots. The spit hissed and cracked on the cold surface before burrowing a steaming hole right down into the cold wilderness beneath us, who can say how far down. I was cold, but she was steaming hot. She took her gun and [...]

Last movie you watched?

Rope.

Has anyone ever sang to you?

Once my mother sang to me. She used to sing it so beautifully. How did it go now? I can barely remember. Only a wisp of a tune it was. La, la la la, la la la, la la la.

If you were abandoned in the wilderness, would you survive?

What kind of wilderness are you talking about? Grimsby perhaps? Rotherham? I survive well enough in this one, why should any other be different?

Last text you received was from?

It’s from S_____, it says: 'She is a paradessence, and hence a wildly popular commodity, because she combines the family-centeredness of the ideal suburban Mom with the ruthlessness of a corporate "warrior" in the dog-eat-dog neoliberal economy, or of a hard-core ideologue/foot soldier for the Far Right.'

What is your favorite color?

Oh, blue.

What colour are your eyes?

They are several different colours. There is white, offset by a pink hue. There is a chestnut brown with tiny golden brown striations and then there is black on its own.

Do you like your parents?

I have felt a whole range of emotions about them, over time. To say ‘like’ is to do them both an injustice. I like milk. I like sand. It’s a paltry way of talking about people.

Do you look more like your mom or your dad?

My hands are very like my father’s, I think, I have the same big nails that he does. My face, I think, is more like my mother’s. There is a softness to her features which she still retains. I like to think that I have a similar softness. My mother was always a more attractive person than my father. Physically I mean. I don't know.

How long does it take you to shower?

The longest shower I ever had was for four days and seven hours and eighteen minutes.

Are you flexible?

Oh yeah!

Can you speak any other language than English?

No. My hopes of ever mastering French were quashed when, during my A-level oral exam I unfortunately contracted a laughing fit by thinking about a really funny part in the show One Foot in the Grave, the part where Victor and Margaret get caught in a shed surrounded by bees. Margaret says, I wish we could call someone and Victor replies, And tell them what? Send more bees?! I still chuckle when I think about that part of the show.

How many hours of sleep did you get last night?

One hour thirteen minutes.

Do you wear your seatbelt in the car?

I no longer travel in cars after I was wounded when a car hit the car I was once in.

Are you scared of flying?

Do you think humans will ever be capable of unassisted flight? I do.

Do you like funny people or serious people?

Do you mean funny like Tom Cruise or funny like Keeping Up Appearances? If the former then, no, if the latter then, yes. Do you mean serious like Noam Chomsky or serious like a terminal illness? Either way, no.

What do you have planned for tonight?

There’s a spot on Blake Street where you can break into the golf course, a gap in the fence. Recently I have taken to walking around it at night. If the rain holds off I’ll probably return there. A few nights ago I walked all the way up to the first hole, virtually to the clubhouse. It was only recently dark, and through the windows I could see the people drinking in there, having a laugh, having a good time. I took my spray can out and, on the side of the building I sprayed IF THE CREDIT CRUNCH DOESN’T GET YOU THEN HEART DISEASE WILL. Regrettably, when I returned the next evening, they had already painted over it. In the right light though, I think you can still see it, underneath the paint.

Is the last person you kissed older than you?

I have no idea what their age was.

Do you have a favorite item of clothing?

I have this one pair of trousers that a woman once said I looked good in.

What was last thing you drank?

A big bottle of Doctor Pepper.

Are you happy right now?

I go up and down, you know. Just a moment ago, thinking about that episode of One Foot in the Grave I was happy. Now, just a few moments later I’m thinking about Condoleeza Rice and I’m much less happy.

What were you doing at midnight last night?

I don’t recall exactly. I spent much of that time walking around Sutton town centre, so I suppose I would have been there somewhere. In the eyes of those people still around at this time, the people leaving the pubs, the people with nowhere to go, the groups hanging around, those waiting for buses, you can see the fear and longing. I think that’s what you can see. They slump as they walk, as they consider the days, the years, to come.

Are you left handed?

It depends really. If I wanted to slap your face I would probably use my right hand. If I wanted to punch you in the cock, I would probably use my left.

Do you want to get married & have children one day?

I really don’t. It’s difficult for me to imagine anything worse than a child with my own face and hands. A Child that had my mind. The things it could do to me! Or that I could do to it!

Do you regret anything?

I regret buying this pair of shoes, they were too expensive. I regret not returning J_____’s call. I regret not having the money to visit S_____ when she asked me to. I regret not making the time to read more. I regret refusing those horse riding lessons. I regret not washing that sheet quickly enough, the stain dried on and now it’s ruined. I regret calling B_____ an ugly fat cunt.

What was the last thing you ate?

2008-09-17T04:57:00.000-07:00

I last ate half a spider. I was asleep in my bed early this morning and I was woken, either by the heavy rain outside or by the movement of the spider on my cheek. I was immediately frozen by its tickling, unable to move as it put its legs into my open mouth. Unbidden, some synapse in me fired and I bit down, hard. Given time to consider my actions in advance, this is not what I would have chosen, but in the moment, it was what my body chose for me. I could feel broken off pieces of leg on my tongue. I sat up in alarm spitting and coughing. In the gloom I watched the spider lope down from the bed, dragging its wounded side along with its four intact legs. I put the bedside lamp on. There was an odd taste in my mouth, I couldn’t decide if it was real or imaginary. I felt nauseous. Reflecting now on the events of this morning, it is not so much the spider that causes revulsion, but the cruelty of my own instinct. Despite all the people that I have met, all the books I have read, the places I have been to and the philosophies I have allied myself with, in a situation of mild panic my body does not consider any of those things and I become no wiser and no less brutal than a child. I admit this brutality, I acknowledge it as a part of my character. It is an unhappy acknowledgement. It is the acknowledgement not only of cruelty , but of a loss of control, of something less than sentient inhabiting part of my consciousness, ready to pounce in my most vulnerable moments.

Would you rather have sex with a dog or give a dog a blowjob?

2008-09-15T14:21:00.000-07:00

I would have sex with a dog. It’s less intimate and it’s more about your own pleasure than merely giving pleasure. If you were having sex with a dog, you could shut your eyes and imagine any hole. It could be any woman that you are fucking then. You can focus on the attainment of your own pleasure, you can focus on achieving orgasm and finishing the job quickly. In this scenario the pleasure of the dog is irrelevant. You might hope that the dog enjoys it, but this is a side issue. Contrarywise, to give a dog a blowjob is a proposition that truly disgusts me. One of the benefits about having sex with a dog is that throughout your face will be some distance from the dog. If you are giving a dog a blowjob then this will not be the case. To put the dog’s penis in your mouth, your face will have to be right in the dog’s most private places and you will have to smell and taste those places. This kind of intimacy, where a dog is concerned, holds no interest for me. In fact, there is something repulsive about that kind of proximity to those parts of any dog. But for me the bigger issue is the aforementioned issue of pleasure. To perform oral sex on a person, or an animal, is to be solely concerned with their pleasure. My concern is that for any dog, to have a human male perform oral sex on it would be unusual at best, perhaps even worrying. My concern is that you could be plugging away, the dog’s penis growing ever limper in your mouth, just willing that dog to come. Imagine the ignominy that would come with being unable to make a simple animal like the dog ejaculate. The dog, whose life has so few and so straightforward pleasures, and you are unable to complete one of them. Or worse, you have frightened the dog, made it unhappy. You have put your mouth upon the penis of a dog and neither you nor the dog have received any pleasure from it.

A Survey

2008-09-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

Where were you at 2:02 AM this morning?

I was watching the Fassbinder film Fox and His Friends. My sleeping pattern has become so erratic recently that I’m only awake for a few hours of daylight each day. In trying to rectify this, I have started waking up later and later. I watched the film right after my alarm went off, as a kind of palliative. I have seen it over a hundred times previously. It’s not so much that I identify with Fox, who is the main character of the film, but rather that the central conceit of the film – that no amount of money can help you break through class barriers – is one that appeals to me on some very deep and profound level. At 2:02 I would have been watching the scene where Fox, suddenly realising how thoroughly he has been swindled, goes to Eugen’s office and shouts about smashing it up, but only manages to throw some papers on the floor and something through one of the windows before he is held back and made to leave. It’s a good scene, I like it. Increasingly I return to old and familiar films, records, books – I don’t feel that this is some kind of conservatism on my part, nor an unwillingness to experiment or consider new ideas, but rather an attempt to engage, with depth, in things which have previously appealed to me, and to puzzle out what constituted that appeal in the first place. I have watched Fox and His Friends many times, as I have said, and I am still unsure whether I like the film or not. There is something unappealing to me about Fassbinder’s slightly over-saturated colour palette and all the ugly clothes and houses that populate the film. Less superficially though, it is tiring to watch, again and again, Fassbinder’s decaying dream of transgression. As much as the film seems profound, as much as it seems important, I don’t think Fassbinder realises how lucky he is, to be doing what he did, to be given money to do that. One cannot conceive of a cinematic equivalent being made today, in Germany or anywhere. I don’t just mean that a film like Fox and His Friends could not be made, but that the transgressive spirit of it seems to have been lost, or at least replaced by other notions of transgression, ones which do not interest me. Perhaps this is why I return to familiar films. I like them and I dislike them, but it is a familiar and a comfortable liking and disliking.

What was the first thing you thought this morning?

I believe it was the word ‘bollocks’.

What are you doing tomorrow?

My conception of ‘tomorrow’ is a little frazzled at the moment. There is a particular cul-de-sac that I want to visit again, I may do this tomorrow. It seems to me that this little street has something to say about Sutton Coldfield. I regard it, perhaps a little too seriously, as a beacon in this wilderness. I first turned onto this road while walking one afternoon, thinking it lead up this hill and onto the main road further north, but it did not, it stopped at the end in a neat curve of bungalows. As usual, I saw nobody out on the street that afternoon, only a few cars and, through the window of one house, a white-haired decrepit old woman sitting in a high backed brown chair watching the television. I think it was the show Car Booty that she was watching. This is a show where people sell a lot of the stuff they have spent years collecting at a car boot sale so that they and their kids can go and kick a ball around on the pitch at Anfield one afternoon, or go go-karting or something like that. The street was therefore solidly ordinary, just a regular Sutton street; money and crassness. I thought this until, on the way back down the hill, I noticed that one of the gardens contained something out of the ordinary. I could call it a sculpture, I could call it a shrine or I could call it an interesting piece of gardening. In the otherwise empty garden of an utterly bland looking house, there stood a dead tree. The ends of the branches of this tree had been sanded down into smooth bullet shapes and those shapes had been painted silver. I stood, for a moment transfixed by this unusual sight, and gazed at it. The tree seemed an act of defiance against the usual insipidness and uniformity of the Sutton landscape and I had a deep respect for it for that (my own house, by contrast, is deliberately as characterless as all the others on my street. I have no desire to announce myself as being anything other than anyone else here). Several times in the following weeks I visited the site, examining it for clues, hoping that the owner of the house would emerge so that I could see them, but the house remained dark and inscrutable. The tree too was determined to hold its secrets from me. Was it calling something down from the heavens? Were the silver tips a locus for the interplay of light and shadow? Was it a message, some hieroglyph I could not decipher? I took photographs of it, brazenly, hoping to entice its owner from their house, but the owner never came out, of course. After a period of some weeks where I visited the road almost every day, I realised that this kind of pilgrimage (if I may be permitted to use such a grandiose term) wasn’t going to yield the answers I was hoping for. The tree’s meanings weren’t going to suddenly coalesce – what I came to realise was that the tree was both none and all of these things – like Sutton Coldfield itself, its blankness could be read in any number of ways. But unlike Sutton Coldfield it was blank in a way that the town never could be: ostentatious, camp, pretentious, sacred, uncomfortable, artificial. To me, it spoke of my own malaise: of being here in this town but being the enemy of every person and thing in it, to others, who knows? Anyway, I still go there from time to time. The last time I was there the silver paint had been touched up, and even under the grey sky the tree had a new, irresistible sheen.

How's your heart lately?

Not too bad since I seriously cut down on the cheese.

Do you think you will be in a relationship 3 months from now?

Doubtful. Though my libido is still incredibly high, my patience for the constant presence of another person is particularly low at the moment. I have certain things that I like to do, the complex meanings of which would be difficult to explain to someone else. The currently socially acceptable boundaries of what constitutes ‘a relationship’, meagre as they are, could not sustain those things, those things that I like to do.

What are you listening to?

I’ve put on Miles Davis – Live at the Fillimore East on as a bit of a treat. Of course, this group features Chick Corea on keyboard. His chance stabs, his splenetic runs, his woozy, swimming slurs: I feel this to be one of his key performances. And the sounds he wrests from his keyboard! From murky bleat to ecstatic ululation. He weaves a thin music, deeper than jazz, deeper than funk in and out of the greyness of Davis and Shorter’s blowing. It’s a hard music, wrought from challenge and vision. All credit to this group, they did it, it is music.

Does anything hurt you?

Man’s inhumanity to man, the unequal distribution of wealth, the collapse of international socialism. Society is literally in the gutter. A child used to kick a ball. Now what do you have?

Do you need to say anything to anyone?

To M______ I need to say: I’m sorry, I never even meant it. I didn’t.

What were you doing at 7AM?

I was out on the heath. I was going east, to toil

Where is your bf/gf right now?

What?

How do you feel?

I’m gaining weight, my teeth are terrible, I don’t understand harmolodics.

Have you ever driven without a license?

I have never driven, either with or without a license. I had a phobia of cars between 1998 and 2004. I’m still not comfortable with them. I walk almost everywhere, I only get the bus or train if absolutely necessary. I guess the phobia stems from the time I was in a car and that car was hit by another car and I was wounded.

What is making you happy at the moment?

The drizzle, the perpetual concrete slab of grey sky. These are things that I enjoy. I was walking around Sutton Coldfield town centre a few days ago, around the new retail park and up onto the high street. It was just after four o’clock and the town centre was crowded with school children making their way home. What is making me happy? Their potential for resistance. You can see it in their scruffiness, in how they adapt their ugly uniforms to their particular styles. It doesn’t make me all that happy, but happy enough.

Have you ever cried while in the shower?

Never. The only places I ever cry are bus stops and shopping centres.

Do you trust people easily?

One of my greatest faults is trusting people too easily. I am instantly taken in by any kind of charm, by anyone showing the remotest interest in me, whether they are doing it genuinely or manipulatively, whether they are really doing it or I am just imagining it. An attractive woman in a television advert can make me instantly want to buy whatever product she is selling (I have around twelve boxes of tampons at the back of one of my kitchen cupboards – so far I’ve found no use for them – contact me if interested. You can have them for nothing). A singer’s tic, or the slight movement of a limb or the hang of a shirt can make me go out and buy any mediocre record.

Some years ago, at some party, I was introduced to A_____. She reminded me a little of that woman from that TV show – it had something to do with horses, I forget the details. Not Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman, the other one. The cocaine that she had was superb. If there’s one thing I cannot stand it is cocaine of asinine quality. She had on this tight jumper that made her tits look amazing. We talked about everything that night, our life, our loves, our aspirations. We went walking just as the sun was coming up. We were in the park, up on the hill, and the light was just cresting over the houses below, illuminating the dewdrops on the grass and crowning the trees with golden haloes. She took my hand in hers and held it up to her chest. She looked into my eyes and said, “Let’s forget all this. All this bullshit. England is some bullshit. Let’s go away together. Let’s go to America. Will you go with me? Do you trust me?”

I wish I hadn’t fucking gone to America.

When was the last time you were given roses?

I think my mother had a tin last Christmas.

Do you drink tea?

Never. I would not touch that crap. Everything to do with tea reminds me of work. Reminds me of work in a room. Work in a shirt. The smell of tea reminds me of it. The condensation on the window from the kettle boiling reminds me of it. Tea is the death of English optimism.

Whose car did you drive in last and where to?

The last time I drove in any car was in 1997. I was wounded in an accident where a car hit the car I was riding in. The car I was in, that got hit, belonged to G_____ who was killed because the other car hit his car on the driver’s side and he was the driver. G_____ and I were driving around Sutton Coldfield. Specifically we were driving through the Mere Green shopping centre. I think G_____ was one of the few people that I knew that understood Sutton Coldfield in the same way that I do. We used to go for drives around it fairly frequently, though G_____ unfortunately had a job at the time and so was only available for a few hours a day. Or on weekends. His particular interest was a road in the Little Aston part of Sutton which was supposedly one of the wealthiest roads in the country. It’s called Roman Road. He would park his car at the eastern end of the road and we would get out and walk west, down the road. The road does not have any pavements, because nobody ever walks down it, so you have to walk in the road and frequently step aside to allow big cars past. The owners of those big cars, whether they were visitors or residents I don’t know, they would always give you querulous looks as they went past. They would always be wondering what you were doing, walking down this road. What were we doing? We would talk about the wealth that surrounded us. We would peek down the long drives at the huge houses among all that leafy opulence. The general theme of our conversations on Roman Road was how awful it was that there were people this rich in the world – the rest, the specifics, was just window dressing: counting the cars in various drives, guessing the number of bedrooms in this or that house, commenting on the membership fee of the local golf course (the entrance to which is on Roman Road), considering the voting habits, the moral and cultural viewpoints, the tastes of the residents – all negatively.

It’s over ten years now since G_____ died and now when I walk down Roman Road, as I still frequently do, I continue to think about our theme. I continue to think about how terrible it is that there are people in the world who have so much money, and how this road with its big cars and big houses is a of representation of that. At G’s funeral I spoke with his mother, who was very upset, and she asked me about the trips we used to take together and so I told her about Roman Road and the things we used to consider while we were on it. “And did you ever ask yourselves if those people were happy?” she asked me. No, I told her, no. That’s something we never asked.

Do you wet the toothbrush before the toothpaste?

I have no idea what this question means. Is it some sort of slang for penis?

Where do you like to keep your money?

I don’t keep it, it keeps me.

Do you watch the news daily?

Sure. I have four televisions, constantly on, each tuned to a different news channel. I read over seventy news blogs. I subscribe to eight national news papers and three local ones. Ask me anything – Darfur? Georgia? Zimbabwe? Sarah Palin? I know it.

What are/were you doing at 12:00 this afternoon?

I was reading an article about Sarah Palin which posits the idea that she knows that ‘the phallus is a semblance’. About how she ‘ brings a new Eros to politics’.

Are you wearing socks?

I rarely wear socks, except in extremely cold weather. Today I am not wearing socks. Tomorrow, who can say?

Would you ever dye your hair blonde?

I don’t see any reason why not.

Are you single?

We’re all alone, if you think about it for long enough.

What's the closest thing to you?

A half empty glass of water.

Are you wearing anything you borrowed from someone?

No. My personal theory of style would not allow that. I wear only new, synthetic fabrics. I wear nothing that has buttons – they have been supplanted by zips and are just useless relics now. I wear nothing that is brown or green. I would never wear anything second hand. As a child I was forced to wear foetid hand-me-downs from my elder cousins whose own mother had despicable taste. At one primary school own clothes day, I was forced to endure prolonged mockery over this heavy polyester sweatsuit that I had been given. I think it was from C&A. It was a two piece affair, the trousers and the jumper were matching, both had three large horizontal stripes in burgundy, dark green and navy blue. The jumper had some kind of gold crest on it and some nonsense gold script underneath that said something like Athletic Division 49. The crest and writing were repeated on the right knee of the trousers. While most people at school were wearing jeans, or fashionable adidas tracksuits, I was there in this bulbous, sweaty monstrosity which can only have been produced by the right in order to lessen the morale of working class children and so forestall a revolution taking place.

Do you know anyone who's pregnant?

Nobody. The last person I knew who got pregnant went to Scotland to have her baby.

Is something bothering you?

“The real world of men and money and power [...]the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

Do any of your jeans have rips, tears, and holes in them?

They do not.

What are you wearing?

Just some slippers.

Could you live without a computer?

I’m a terrible one for the old computer so I am.

Have you ever kissed someone with braces?

Yes, several people. In fact, I have an unusual attraction to braces. If you were to take the strict definition of a fetish – that the object of the fetish must be present, at the very least in thought, to achieve orgasm – then I do not have a fetish for braces. I can happily ejaculate without them entering my head. But if you take the looser, more common definition of finding braces incredibly sexy then, yes, I do have a fetish for braces. One of my best memories, one which does still feature in my mind during masturbation, is of L_____, a girl I went out with for a few months. I would stand behind her and my right hand would cup one of her generous breasts, while my left would gently feel around the inside of her mouth, languorously trace the spikes, feel the metal on enamel. It’s hard to describe the pleasure that this simple act gave me.

If you could change your eye colour what would it be?

What a curious question. I don’t see what I would achieve by doing that.

How many pillows on your bed?

One.

Is there someone you can't stop thinking about?

Sarah Palin.

When was the last time you cried from laughing so hard?

Barely a day goes by when my eyes don’t get damp from merriment at some stage or another. I’m a great terrible man for the craic. A holy terror! I’d have you mithered. I’m a beast for it. A sheer beast. The last thing I cried for laughing at was that Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller fellow. They’re a terrible man for acting the goat. And what about that poor Owen Wilson? He’s a terrible one for the suicide. I’ll tell ye something about Owen Wilson. He’s a terrible man for the suicide so he is. Sure, he never tried the suicide on another man though. Fair play to him sure, he’s only ever after doing the suicide to his own. The poor wee craturine. And he's as clever! He understands every word you're saying to him.

Who was the last person that made you laugh?

Sarah Palin.

Do you use big words?

2008-09-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

I have used them. Sometimes the biggest words are deceptively small. It seems to me that the word Yes is the most intellectual in our language, and the word No the most ignorant, the most small. I try to say Yes, the biggest word, as often as possible. This philosophy, if you can call it that, has lead me to a great deal of misery and injury, but also to triumph, also to delight.

When did you last see your father?

2008-09-12T13:21:00.000-07:00

April 16th, 1994. My mother called me from the hospital, he had deteriorated further, I should come home. His kidneys had failed and this had lead to major organ failure. More and more frequently he had been staying in intensive care, and for longer, and with less and less time at home. I took the bus from town. I rarely visited this side of town anymore. The road from town is one long dual carriageway, past the Birmingham City ground and the sculpture of the head on its side with the nose painted blue, past a giant Netto that used to be an industrial estate and what used to be a library but is now an insurance office. South Birmingham’s squalor is made all the clearer by the occasional survival of Victorian architectural detail – the wall of a snooker club with carved out fruit and leaves, a bad school with the heads of romantic poets carved into the window arches. On the occasions when I return to south Birmingham, it’s these details that I seek through the bus window and I sought them then.

He was on the ward at the Renal Unit at Heartlands Hospital. On previous visits, my father had seemed bright and optimistic about treatment, but this time, there was a maudlin cast to his grey face. It was rare for me to look at his eyes, but it seemed they swam, they struggled to focus. He was sleeping when I arrived and my mother met me in the corridor. She did not look well herself and was reluctant to embrace me, as though it meant something more than usual. We’ve decided to go home, he wants to be there when he dies, she told me, sounding weary and uninterested. The ward he was on was loud and crowded and he seemed uncomfortable in the bed. They were giving him morphine for the pain and after an injection he was able to speak to me. He told me he was happy, that he had enjoyed his life, that he was glad. Throughout, speaking out of the slack corner of his mouth and in a clipped voice not really his own, he interspersed his speech with odd, uncharacteristic little interjections like “O boy o boy,” and “Gosh,”. He told me how lucky he felt to have had a marriage that had lasted. He told me how he missed his work and he talked about the road, now demolished and the site of a Matalan store, where the factory had been. My mother sat in a chair, seemingly indifferent and we waited for the ambulance to take us home.

My parents had always lived in the same house. The walls in their bedroom were painted yellow. My father had been put to bed by the ambulance men and my mother had been given a syringe full of morphine. That evening, while my mother slept, I played his favourite record: Phil Collins, ‘In the Air Tonight’. He could not speak, but I spoke to him. I told him I remembered the holiday we took to Weston Super-Mare. My mum and my brother were down on the beach, he was having a donkey ride. My father and I stood up on the promenade. I saw him look over in the direction of what is now the old, derelict pier, and beyond it, up at the wooded hill that rose above the seafront, dotted with large pink houses. Without turning, not exactly to me, just a child at the time, though not to nobody either, he said, Imagine living there... a completely different life... This remark has always stayed with me, though I had never spoken to him about it. As a child it had seemed bizarre in its open rumination. It was not how I was usually spoken to. As I got older it took on more significance and seemed a key to my father’s shyness in public situations, his perpetual tiredness, his occasional temper, the distant conception of his work, what he did all day. I told him all this then. I did. I told him, I wish you had had a different life. A better one.

Early the next morning my mother woke me up. She was with a nurse. She tearfully told me that he had died in the night. Then she hugged the nurse.

What's the biggest lie you've ever told on a job application?

2008-09-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

The biggest lie is that I want a job at all. That’s the biggest lie. Beyond that, since everything that one writes on a job application is a lie it’s hard for me to extract one lie that seems greater than another. To extrapolate further, any satisfactory method of filling in a job application (unsatisfactory methods: just writing the word ‘please’ in marker pen across the form, writing using any bodily fluid, inserting pictures or video clips of yourself) entails lying. Is that a bigger lie than any untruths which I have written on those forms which would also be untruths in any other context? It’s hard for me to say. It’s hard for me to remember all the lies that I’ve told on various applications for various jobs that I’ve had. It’s difficult because, when coming on occasion to apply for new jobs, or send my CV to people, I look at the information there and wonder if I really did work at this particular place during this particular period, if I am really “adept at any basic application of Microsoft Excel” – a sentence which seems, upon rereading and rereading it, to make little or no sense at all – whether I ever did “deal quickly and effectively with a range of public enquiries,” while temping in a call centre during a ‘fallow period’ between jobs a few years ago. My CV contains ghosts, things I don’t remember happening to me and don’t remember ever needing to lie about. I have certainly never worked as a proof-reader for a small Leeds-based company specialising in New Age products, and yet my CV attests to this fact. It provides, presumably fictional, contact details. I did not even live in Leeds during the period. I have never worked as a proof-reader. And yet each company I have worked for has received this information and so it has, in some sense, become true. Perhaps the biggest lies are the ones that have gone on for the longest and the ones that everyone believes. I’m sure that even a mediocre detective could quickly go through my CV, my job applications, even this blog, and discover what I did really do and what I have lied about. These are surely concrete things. But, in the absence of that, they remain facts about me. If I were to pass today and in the future some biographer wanted to write about me, he might concede that it is likely that I did not work as a proof-reader in Leeds. He might say that while I claimed to work as a proof-reader in Leeds, no evidence can be found to support this claim. He might well also say that for a period I did work as a proof-reader in Leeds. The decision of what to write would be on his conscience. In that sense, the lies I tell on job applications, though merely for convenience on most occasions, become part of my history. Though they are rarely well considered (except in the sense of making them easy to get away with), they form part of the important documentation of my life. That, I guess, is the biggest lie.

What song would you like to have played at your funeral?

2008-09-09T13:24:00.000-07:00

The song that I would have would be Chick Corea, ‘Return to Forever’. It is the sound of the cosmos shaking hands with itself. It is yoga flame forever. It is a transparent bass note throbbing through the universe forever. Each sound is a step on the rainbow road. It is origin’s hesitation.

Do you like the place where you live?

2008-09-08T13:25:00.000-07:00

I first visited S______,l a former girlfriend of mine in this area, which is in the very northernmost part of Birmingham, close to the Lichfield border, and became fascinated by it. Prior to this visit, I feel that I had only ever seen the inner city. The part of South Birmingham where I lived with my parents at the time was very urban, very cluttered. It was, it still is, the kind of area where you can walk down a street of pretty Victorian houses and then turn out onto a dusty duel-carriageway or into an industrial estate with pre-fabricated warehouses. Sutton Coldfield, this north part of Birmingham, was not like that at all. Nothing built there was from before 1960. Or very little anyway. During the visit, on a fine day, we walked out of her bungalow, to the end of her road, turned left and in ten minutes of walking we were out of the city and into fields. And though the fields contained no crop, they were still fenced off. The golf course was fenced all the way round, and I bored S______ by making her accompany me on an entire circuit. It seemed to me, though at the time it was no profound realisation, that despite the appearance of the landscape: the trees, the grass, the sky, the city had permeated this place as much as it permeated Yardley’s industrial estates and light warehouses. Perhaps not as much. But nonetheless, it did. Even though I broke up with S______ after just a few months, I continued to visit the area, despite its distance from my house. I would walk around and look for places where the city seemed to end and something else began. Years later, when I was able to, I moved out to the area and continue to live there now. Do I like it? No, no. I live among enemies, but I am absorbed in scrutinising their behaviour, watching how they construct their environments, seeing what they do with all that money they have.

Do you have any odd nervous habits?

2008-08-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

Yes. Whenever I’m particularly nervous I lose control of the motor function of my right arm and hand. Unfortunately, in extreme situations the arm raises itself up and starts slapping me repeatedly in the side of the head. I recall one particularly onerous presentation that I had to give at university on Foucault’s conception of prisons. I began by outlining Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the panopticon. As I bent down to place my acetate picture of the panopticon onto the overhead projector, my hand, which had already been shaking, shot out at a wide angle and then came towards my head at great speed, knocking me sideways into the projector, which rolled out towards the aghast audience. Its rolling caused the plug lead to tauten and I, veering towards it, tripped and fell, pulling the plug out as I went. The panopticon picture had been growing larger and more blurred as the projector rolled forward, but when the plug was pulled it fell in on itself to form one single point of white light on the screen, which itself disappeared moments later. By this time people had got up from their seats and were helping me up. I stood awkwardly, my notes in a complete mess, still hitting the side of my head with the flat of my right hand, though gentler now, gentler.

What is bothering you right now?

2008-08-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

I got lost today. I was walking out in Sutton Coldfield, far out, somewhere around Little Aston. I passed a church. I passed a tennis club. I passed a golf course. It took some time before I realised I was lost. It seemed to me that the appealing thing about this place was its stillness, perhaps its blankness. I was trying to get back to the main road. I was on a street. It was the middle of the day. In some of the houses I could see television sets playing music videos, cartoons. There were no cars visible and no people. That is to say, in the drives of a few houses there were stationary, empty cars, but none drove past me in either direction. Distantly, I could hear the barking of a dog in some distress. I came across another tennis club. The courts were surrounded by high wooden fences. I could not see in, but I could hear a tennis ball being batted gently back and forth and the scrape of feet on gravel. I moved along the fence to roughly where the sounds were coming from. Excuse me, I shouted. Excuse me. I heard the ball hit racquet strings awkwardly and bounce and dribble to a halt. Then I could hear nothing. Or rather, I thought I could hear the sound of people trying to be still – a nothing sound punctuated by occasional ambient noise: a scrape, a dull thud. Excuse me, I shouted again, I’m sorry to disturb your game, but I’m afraid I’m lost, could you help me get back to the main road? I waited for a reply, but nothing came. I thought I could discern the sound of someone trying to control their breathing. Please, I shouted again, I’ve been searching for the main road for over an hour, could you just point me in the right direction? Again, I waited and again there was nothing. I banged on the wooden fence in frustration. I strode around the perimeter of the tennis club, seeking an entrance. But the wooden gate was bolted from the inside and too high to climb. Crestfallen, I walked away. Halfway down the road I thought I could hear the sounds of the tennis game restarting. I considered going back, but I managed to control my frustration and continued on. It took me a further hour and a half to get back to the main road.