This is Memoir

This is memoir, assholes.

The street was dark and silvered like an unlit ship or the great grey
underbelly of a whale. Simon slivered across onyx water-sheened cobbles
round aching rain-soaked barrels and under slobbering blue pipes and
gutters. With map clutched damp like a sodden kitten, hand swipes dew
beads from patterned face and rain replaces it.

He really must remember to understand what he's writing this ever so
slow with the knitting needle clack clacking of nimble fingers against
keyboard of the gods. Pseidon rises sea-licked from toddler's paddling
pool flourescent orange with a row of ducks painted round the side,
quack quack quack quack quack, the quacks getting quieter as the pool
deflates punctured by trident and the ducks and ducklings get smaller
and smaller and their necks crumple in that classic bathos of
capitulation, the final indignity.

Credulous yes but chartering small yacht? He begins to think like
cryptic crossword clues but in this finds some kind of reflexivity
where he can bounce thought waves off the barrier swept across him like
an eyelid, and the thought waves come back and hit him and it's like
finding himself on a sonar and there he is, he's starting to come back
to something, to remember who he might be and build some kind of
self.

There's the bounce, it's like a heartbeat and when he feels it hit he
knows he is. So he sculpts like a moat of a castle it would be a
protection from the world and how he wants to grip the world. There's a
macaw across the way, perched in the forked larch limbs arch and black
and thin jutting out like the eye of the sky exploding in ice. Where
can he land?

He has louche, light brown hair and he walks with a stoop. The stoop is
god, or good, but he doesn't know which. An old hunchbacked lady knows
the difference, Jackie Onassis sunglasses discs round her eyes and
always the limp crumbling crag of a fag end drizzling slate particles
of ash down the front of her pale floral dress. She gives an address
and an address; she addresses the nation to release her address and
when it's released nothing happens. It's irrelevant. I don't know why
they put it in the film it was a shit film and the worst thing about it
was why was it on a chimpanzee but not and if the Japanese invaded
Thailand would it precipitate some kind of raindancing revolution
throughout the Western world because one of the things that's always
attracted me to transcendental meditation is it's close relationship
with truth.
If you could find lasting truth within the self then I don't know how
you'd find it or where the self is. There is no me. I know that but it
doesn't hit me like a mortar board slung by an angry poacher in anger.
Anchor. How many crumpets can you fit into a Jesus? What if the story
just came out of this&;#8230;

I'm walking down the righthand side of the street, hands in my pockets,
my back curved. My name's Leyland McGuffin, and five years ago I found
God and gave my life to Jesus. It seems he didn't want it, and just
handed it back a little embarrassed, and the faith and me just kind of
lost each other in the fog.

Vision's down to maybe fifteen metres. It's freezing fog, and the
street's silvered like it's Christmas, which in a few days, it will be.
I dig my hands deep into my duffel coat pockets and trudge forward,
scuffing my feet in the thin frost and watching the cracks in the
pavement roll under me and away.

Stepping off now. Stories drift in and out of me sometimes still, less
now, less and less as it goes on and flying thunder irises into navy
blue air. Stories are him rising and no no, not back to that and it's
better to cover and what you must realise is she's not a bad person at
all just very hung up over a few slights and slanders made about her
person and they were more than jibes, they were barbs harsh curled
spike that lodges in your cheek like a fish hook and tugs tugs at
you.

Coming lucidness I often reject it as the doings of the harlequin who
cowers like a lowly wretch then rises in an all-embracing lunge with
scowled hands and crescent scored undergrin. If in the poison he finds
a way up so be it but does he really think he can exist and not be
a-lunged at by the wiles of yours truly? It cannot be but the space age
holds many measures of trust and the anxiety generates enough energy to
power love. It warms up the aluminium hearts of room-sharing rotund
couples all across the nations of the world and there is suddenly
something to keep leaving for although they know at the back of their
minds from time to time that the heat from this furnace is making them
sweat.
Acknowledge if you will the supremacy of my technique and behold my
latest trick - synchronicity laced with the art of clarity; a sentence,
if you will, a syntax of sorts with substrata of subliminal subjugation
saturating Saturday's superb sealion soothing services so south senegal
substation summons supervisor since safety will break the sibilance
like the shaft of a lance shattering as the tip clatters against a
worthy rock.

Chalky hadn't taken his medication for two weeks, and so his thoughts
tended to wonder. It was nice at first - it always started out nice
enough - with all sorts of curly pink flowers and stripy patterns to
look at, but after a while he started to feel like he was losing
control, and the voice would start to boom and boss and fill his head.
It made him convulse like a live wire.

But now, for reasons he was unsure of, as he was unsure of everything
when in that garish noise-spattered existence, he had started taking
the pills again. They where large and white and round and hard to
swallow. They tasted bitter against his tongue. He was starting to come
back. He was starting to remember how it started.

The emergency summation started and all at once Randolph knew the deer
were loose.
'Jump to the honey machine!' he cried, with all the more exhaltation
for he knew the honey machine did not exist, and what can be more
arousing than that which does not exist?

Tacitly, the tour ended when they happened upon a rounded smooth and
loved gate and found themselves in the motley garden of a gnome by the
name of Darymple Tavish-Tavish Cluclu McYafferty. How did he come to be
tarred with such a beastly monicker? Ask! Ask him! As if answers could
uncloud you, you murky pond!

Twas a curse, he claimed, visited upon him by a malevolent
cancer-bearing beggar who when spurned from the lodgings of every
pillar mouth in town he squirreled like a quicksilver beaver writhing
like mercury up the centre of the street oh look at it flow! It dazzles
and somehow makes you want to cry.

You inhale and the musk of panic wriggles behind your eyesockets and
pushes pushes come on and push damn you! If the metaphor begins to
collapse we'd better get out but no they stayed in they thought they
could rescue the others and it's when you think of that and history our
personal history but you know perspective and most precisciently time
perspective is what it's all about don't you think you've rocked the
rottweiler who reviled her in denial yeah I demanded a retrial I'll
file for divorce from this debauched torched porch-dwelling humbug. And
I never knew his name, which saddened me.