Fresh from a stinging encounter with a dead man’s genius, I am rushing to answer questions to which I have no right in fielding. Such exchanges are facilitated thankfully in the form of coded forums, where injured would-bes can salve their wounds with the delivery of off-hand blends of wisdom and knowledge. One can be sure of their compositions garnering the requisite levels of praise and recognition with an accumulated rating, whose accruing is shadowed in mystery.

Should these harmless offers fall short of silencing those deafening screams of inferiority, the injured party can always set about taking down their silent assailant with a dry, pedantic listing of their superior’s faults. It might well be advisable to shroud any such critique using clever methods of distraction.

Anyhow, we can’t all be Jesus. I once spent a year trying to contact the ghost of Samuel Beckett, blundering into a haughty misunderstanding of what a ghost writer actually is. The executor of his estate wasn’t in the least bit amused having received my dictated stream of consciousness. I do suspect he got a giggle at my insistence on pronouncing that ‘S’ with a lisp however, a slip in his otherwise impeccable hand hipped me to the game.

It’s all very petty anyway, us sensitive artistes, with our barely-concealed egos, remorseless in our envy of the corpse. I suppose it’s a compliment really, not to us of course, that is unless you compromised your creativity for the basic sense to guide it. One shouldn’t nip to the shop in a state of undress, but you need milk, and a quick shock of reality to inform the next artistic foray. One can achieve unlikely feats with a shirking of the bare minimum of common sense. The enlistment of sensible friends is crucial since your social lack is showing. Have fun.

———————————————————————-

Edna O’Brien would
Write of the smell
Of pea green soup

Joyce likewise insisted
On detailing encounters
In a lurid manner

Synge wrote wild
The islanders’ patter
Tale was fit

Kerouac’s antecedents
Spelt Keltic as
Waves of experience

No leash for Miller
A mad Parisian
Ideas for days

Journalistic Mailer
American quintessentially
In manhood relished

Introducing DeSade
A shame for them all
Le Frere Grotesque

—————————————————————-

‘The Gutter,’ is really an impossible concept. The idea that homeless drunks are apt to scale precarious pipes of plastic in order to access a soot-filled ledge is temptingly ludicrous. What’s that, ‘unfair misuse of grammar?’ The idea that something both tempting and ludicrous, when considered a possibility worth investing with imagination, maybe even full-throttle belief, results in a conceptual flavour, replete with texture, colour, and shape, I thought was obvious enough in its conceptual availability. Perhaps the unwieldy expansion and dissection of the thought seen its coherence succoured by grammar-wanking academics, whose patched-up jackets fooled us plebs into funding their whims. You should really try wearing a likewise jacket, give a lecture on till-operation and first-hand poverty. They might offer you a job, scrubbing the shit from some professor’s latrine. (Just to note: Charles Chaplin, previous to Communist conversion, was tried daily by the talentless regulars who had simped their way into an occupancy on the set of some clueless approximation of the working class experience. Chaplin’s initiative prevailed in the end when he slept with their wives, in an Oscar nominated scene. The relegates were sent to play in a Navy band, where their homosexuality was welcomed and taken much advantage of. These hapless few fell to their deaths on a concrete harbour and never played again.)
Let’s resume our Inquisition. What further tries the reader is the suspension of condescension necessary to enable them to see clearly that their socially defunct cousins are indeed capable of entertaining such feats of wordplay, with the attendant appreciation of the end product thus achieved.

Now, nobody here was promised a story, this is merely a wafting of some drying skulls. The 78.5 or so milligrams that escapes apparently the stiffening human cadaver is said to cover the soul’s essence, though your spirit might well be mistaken for a fart. The etheric body, its several layers beyond, pulse in such a fashion as to trouble the step of a dull, enduring uncle. His ranking as a chartered voyage around in a circle has confounded what previously amounted to his character into a numeric listing of every wilting leaf in the family bible, whose tatters are smeared by raging toddlers, which goes without saying, of course. The generations-old tradition of triangular-cut sandwiches is under threat from the prevalence of the air-fryer, you can frame this symbolically should you wish. Regular staples like the spud, or ‘potato,’ persist in spite of Mediterranean imports, along with something called ‘burgers’ from the New World. Probably there’ll be a joke at some…juncture.

Uncles have a certain knack of riding waves of soft applause with some care. I think the idea is for them to protect the build-up, that familiar (though never familiar enough) launchpad of vitality and shameless vigour awaiting their ascension. It’s a familial ritual, time-honoured, the easy send-up they embrace, knowing full-well the glory that lies in store, for any self-respecting uncle, really. Aspiring youths regard only their cocksure senior’s as capable pun-runners, the easy delivery with which ageing lotharios relate their exploits is plainly more accessible. Our sillier uncles are capable of a good telling though, if the truth here be told. That sense of the ridiculous could only be acquired with experience. It’s kind of a relief, to be honest. Women employ a different method altogether, should they be inclined to tell.

One of my guttersnipe street-creeping friends related to me a theory that I confess to forgetting, luckily I’d used shorthand on a matchbox, along with having sketched a quick portrait of the ailing gent. In the interest of brevity I’ll relate it back to you shortly, providing you promise not to publish it at the expense of my skeletal pal’s financial health. Yeah, so, basically, his theory, having survived seven sisters and a seriously botched circumcision, he’d observed a drunken surgeon flirting gently with the nurses who passed. The nurses soaked up the assertions of this senior lush, cooing as he used a bloody scalpel to peel his apple. Come the midnight hour, the surgeon carousing, on waves of raised brow and appeal, made his final crack, an uncertain gag of little substance, whose timing cast the whole scene in poor taste. The surrounding femmes, who had interred the neglected shadow of this hapless fool’s psyche, turning up several elements of dispute, with practiced nuance, decided finally that a comeuppance was due. The rest was left for me to etch in any fashion I fancied, up the pipe he had gone, chasing a suited broker who’d just scored horse, or ‘hearse,’ as the fresher mixtures have come to be known. Turned out this blethering philosopher-deviant was the very same surgeon, with his seven sisters unconscious nuns. They’d worn plastic smocks for years, torturing the shaking savant, in a manner that was not altogether displeasurable. According to one of his scrambling cohorts, he’d been the victim of a pernicious social experiment, and was now mispronouncing heroin as ‘hearse,’ with his dealer voicing concerns over the possibility of an unacknowledged deathwish. He made an attempt to score just last week, only for a celebratory wreath to be hung around his neck. I tried to assist yesterday with his connection, only for the bag to contain the ashes of an amputated foot. Now he’s wearing a plastic smock to mass, they’ve got him handing out communion. And you know the twist? That’s his favourite step, he once performed with Donny Osmond, who later died of ‘excess tanning.’ Anyway, I’m fresh out of matchboxes, and Eason’s is a rip-off. Former Prime Minister John Major due to visit in due course, details below.

————————————————————————————-

What numpties and the dull fail to accept, in their short-sighted inadequacy, is that any foray into fictitious invention must be preceded, and thus enabled, by an investigation, an exhibition of excellence in litigation, the where’s and whys of linguistic technique. Any further discovery may enable, or prevent, in some cases, an interference of inappropriate rhythm; visually improper, phonetically inferior or otherwise unwell wording. If you cannot see to the good health of your now personified toolkit, he’ll fall asleep at the machine, due a life-altering injury, sure to raise a laugh, buckling also your non-personified line of inherited machinery. ‘Inherited through ingenuity, of course, sir. Nice patches.’ Breathe life into him, he’ll birth the ideas for you, on his off days you can have a go yourself, I’m sure you’ll make a fine financier. One must write, express; failing the EASY availability of any creative idea, work that muscle in a different area. Chaplin was welcomed back to the land of the free, collecting some trinket or other, then cast under the proverbial bus, into eternity.

————————————————————————————————-