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Bedraggled research laboratories produces Skazz: a spinoff of the genre Squirming Realism, the device that draws attention to the biological and social grind of everyday life, producing an unvarnished account of an individual on the city’s fringe, what’re called men in whirlpools: tedious jobs, petty-manic obsessions, small rented rooms.
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Watching dead empires in decay, March 1922. On the walk to scoring a twenty bag I went over a bridge, dunno the name, on the Landwehr canal. Free Corps dumped Rosa Luxemburg’s body in here, I considered at the water’s glint reflective of the dark and chillier, evening trying to seep into your bones but cos I used my calf muscles and the tendons in my toes and feet to propel into a trot, basically cos I walked fast it felt warmish. I wasn’t cold anyway. Bit bored yeah, using too many words, I followed the U1 with its v-shaped legs going east.
I have a kind of mystic connection to this Elevated railway.
As an electric what-are-called IK trains and then another, I remember two, as one and then after a minute another of these IK trains rumbled along the tracks above I had ideas: How edgeways it goes deep below theory but if somebody asked who’re your top synth-philosophers I’d say first it’s gotta be WS (who synthesised everything he could get his hands on: his family life, his little library, for history and mythology, his dreams, London’s street language, Warwickshire’s meadows and woods, using concepts like the stage to say life is bound with fiction and wearing masks). First it’s WS and then it’s Joyce and Beckett who’re on one shelf (1882 to 1989) and they’re followed by three below: Nabokov who wrote a few self-begetting works on a level with Bellow who wrote mostly self-begetting works and Konrad who wrote just one-or-two self-begetting works from what I know but he pioneered the English sentence. They form a pyramid. A triangle inscribed in a circle. All six, applying different formulas, synthed their lives via the spine and brain and fingers, they produced massive bodies of art I was unthinking under the U’s steel tracks: and imagine, can you, one of them, any of them, designing the map of a labyrinth on an early Factory sleeve? No but I’m very unread. Let’s pause. Fuck.
Every few paragraphs I’m putting these one line breaks, like here now, so the eye (and all the gunk inside of me while doing this) can take a breath.
Misled by a great ability to introspect, I was just thinking is all. Might kill myself eventually: not yet: in 2044. The neon of the chicken takeaway on Prinzen Street is some of the bluest I’ve seen. How the electric glints off black leather and puddles, off of tarmac like gas aflame, as I squinted down the pavement to a curved block of flats bearing dozens of satellite dishes, the bays of balconies repeated below the sky. Draped in dark another towerblock looked like the Nostromo spaceship but not manmade more insect it felt. While reaching into my jacket for tobacco, a pouch of AMERICAN SPIRIT, I stepped thru the shadowline behind these caged wastebins. A rat jogged across the floor and its tail slurped under a fence. Yes: slurped was the noise as I pushed my right hand into the pocket holding a few euro notes and the crab pulled out a twenty. There was this steel door that I didn’t knock cos they say don’t knock when you knock. I coughed. A hand tapped a window. The door opened, a little screech, a tall outline of a man, a voice beckoned to come deeper into the gaping black stairwell and I did and in a stilted croak said: Zwanzig bitte.
Ganja enables to hear feedback sonically. So I mooched homeward with a ziploc inside my jacket smelling of Lebanon. Lemons I mean. The citrus.
Between the U1’s steel-riveted legs along the slabs to Hallesches I strolled. Some tent was erected near the canal, one of those domes. And I thought about this and paused on the Athenian platz where vaporwavey statues loom at night above the water. The oily smell from that kebab shop I remember: July 2017, sweltering: a busride from here to Kotti with many seats taken by hardened Berliners, hot and frazzled, everyone silent when Kendall said: You can now tell people you’ve lived in Berlin. You can now say: I’ve lived in Berlin I have. Like Vladimir Sirin and Kevin Shields, both moved to this city and made art. I wonder if The Gift song is inspired by The Gift novel. Noise is the street. Noise now in March 1922. Specks of rain fell when a kid between Mehring and the abandoned railway path on Yorckstrasse, he said hey have I got a cigarette and when I said yes and halted he had more questions, wanted my name, my nationality, age, time since being here. Said he’s from Syria but speaks fluent Teutonic. Why, he asked, if you lived here five years do you not know the mother-tongue? Because I’m an intellectual maggot, would’ve been an apt reply and he insisted he roll his own cig so I gave him a strand of tobacco in a skin, dropped into his palm a GIZEH slim filter.
Like a clueless dork I said: Survival yeah.
Survival, he said and we grooved apart.
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To play the game you need to logon. To logon you need a MOOSH account. To get a MOOSH you have to piss about a bit. You gotta buy from a supermarket or the petrol station over the bridge, the JET on the bend near that mossy lion statue, they stock these scratch (in-the-shape-of-a-shark) cards you need to set up an account and for the price of an O-without-a-figure you input the alphanumeric code I thought. You can (then!) sign into the spiritual-dub refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by WSX. This essay presents a few facts that gnaw, that suck to the marrowbone and today it’s the barren state of my curriculum vitae and a letter’s expected soon from the German employment office who pay my eight-hundred rent until August. Game over is when I’m homeless. British citizens are now third-country nationals in the European Union. The clock on my screen says Monday. 2am. I plan to cook a few sausages and hash browns in the oven, a tin or half of HEINZ beans sugar-free, boiled on the hob which I cleaned tonight after it was splattered with two month of daily meals so I wiped most of the gack from round the cooker’s four rings. Got an old sponge, a few squeezes of scourer: AJAX. If Shakespeare was alive in the 2020s he’d be writing skinny anti-novels from some bended memory of a street. He’d be published by an unknown print-on-demand press. He’d use protean names and do poems about hauntology. Shields was born in New York. 21st of May 1963. Aphex in Limerick, 18th of August 1971. This squirm in beta was called Bohumil: The Videogame. I was reminded of this reading In-House Weddings, the first ten pages I’ve been flipping thru cos you need a break from Shakes and Beckett and Joyce, from all those vortices so I picked this simple-skinny Czech novel up, hundred-and-seventy-odd pages in this white edition. Spoken in the mask of first-person by the blurb says it’s Hrabal’s wife, she’s the storyteller. Like a Nora Barnacle. The opening is in a courtyard where we meet a man referred to as the doctor scrubbing his room’s floorboards. He uses soap and water, takes satisfaction from the task and does it again, washing the wooden surface a few times and I reckon this represents the writer redrafting his bricks and it inspired me to clean the bathroom, my toilet, the bog I rent in fact, not my property but the white-ceramic-squared walls, the grey floor, the china sink, all stank of dried piss.
Loads of marks dotting the tiles had hardened into brown resin. Why cos when I nip for a sleepy 6am pee, the end of my dick malfunctions due to the banal realism of the hood being infolded and it disrupts the outflow and I’m all for outflow as opposed to inflow and perhaps sometimes I’m all for overflow but sometimes in the dark yeah: my piss jets at an angle away from the pan and splashes the tiled-floor-tiled-wall. Some of the grout lines look sticky. And to another’s nose it would smell a bit pungent, like I say. Thus I disinfected it using bleach and BREF Power spray, tonight I watered it all, got a PANASONIC sponge and a PANASONIC mop and scrubbed like the doctor in the Hrabal book, like he went-for-it, got totally rid of the smell. Yeah. Reeked a bit pissy. I unashamedly admit: cos I’m anon. The smell entered my snout in occasional wafts when I stood over the loo and its kick inspired my imagination to see the ammonia creeping (via diffusion) into the passage out there like turd-brown smoke pouring under the gap of my front door and swirling in the public stairwell. And that’s it: happens every time I take a dump, nearly every time I am seated on the toilet, like clockwork-voodoo, these people upstairs know I wanna relax so the footfalls bang, the voices drone: constant. I sit and within seconds outside there’s other peoples’ noise, which I hate. You can get good ideas about prose while defecating.
I dunno fuck it.
Bodily functions and the roots of international dreamwave are married in Finnegans Wake. The aesthetics are combined. Professor McLuhan said it’s the one true psychedelic novel and reading it is semi-comparable to dropping LSD. I read it on acid once. The words became like opening-closing doors. Page 169 starts my fave chapter. Shem Penman, the lowlife dub poet is said to be a drug addict and thief and DIY-style he makes ink out of his own urine and faeces. He uses it to write letters about his dream life and mad dream family: Humphrey his dad who landlords a pub but falls and dies of what’re made out to be weird sex rumours: the mum Anna is a river and flows endlessly into the sea: Sean the bruv is a kind of thuggish postman (who delivers Shem’s cubist letters): the sister Lucia is a ballet-dancing butterfly: from what I can make out anyway.
While I make English breakfast, it’s 3am and I’ve got a holy mushroom to fry not in butter but oil: ugly rapeseed. Slowdive have that video of singing in a blazing field of rape and I remember Jack my friend, June 1993, the time Slovaki was released, him saying that his dad reckoned it uncanny how a picture of thousands of hyper-yellow flowers on a summer’s day, weird how it shares a name with the brutalist act I was thinking when suddenly the radiator pipe growled from an air-pressure vibration. I’d popped out the kitchen to fetch my white mug, what I use for tea. And the hot water pipe started clattering like a broken machine: ancient metal on ancient metal. I’ll listen to it rumble into a pinpoint. And when I make my full-English, hash browns and sausages in the oven, when chopping the holy mush and when simmering the baked beans, when frying two pelican eggs, I’m gonna divert my thoughts from words and noisy pipes to that geometric shape in FW. Page 293 has two overlapping circles, two triangles making the points: ALP. Wake theorists say it represents Anna’s vagina. See in the undermargin on that same leaf, the word Dreamcountry.
They say out-of-print, out-of-mind.
Sez who?
Dunno, it’s an old saw.
Unsealing the package with wet hands I dropped the bacon. All five slices landed on the skirting board near where a spider webs and the ledge below was specked with dots of his shit so what you gonna do, are you gonna throw it in the rubbish? After a couple of seconds of panicking and growling, saying you-fucking-bastard, I grabbed the rashers and put them under cold flowing tap water. I washed them. Still cooked the rinds crispy and ate the lot, accepting I’m cosmically doomed and clogging my heart tubes. Now I expect tiny spores in one of the spider’s turds to grow kind of Dreamcountry-style in my stomach, a living spaghetti, it’s breeding with another living spaghetti to produce more living spaghetti to produce more living spaghetti, colonising my gut, controlling the maggot of my universe.
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Scratching your arse raw, unable to sleep, you cried late at night as a kid when you had worms. Little parasites eating inside of you, they itched so bad for the wriggling. Next day you went fishing on the River Anker with Murphy and caught nothing. Not even a gudgeon and you’d always catch a gudgeon or two. Got home that evening and the mothership inserted a suppository up my bumhole. Said Lynn the neighbour heard you crying at 4am. Yeah: burning memories: Jawbone: the Shakespearean dovecote behind the library.
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