Elsewhere (The Walrus's Story) Part One

© 2011 David Jasmin-Green.

My name is Will Schreiber, and I'm aching to tell you about a certain talking, non-walking midget giraffe that recently became the bane of my life. My conundrum started in a strange and unexpected way, so for starters I need to relate the details of that. Then I have to tell you how I eventually met Clarence – that's the disabled giraffe - or sort of met him. Does that make sense? Yes? No? Maybe?

What the hell am I waffling on about, you're probably wondering, or at least I hope you're wondering, because there's no affront in the world worse than indifference to the plight of others. I'm an other, and I have a plight that I urgently wish to communicate, so kindly put whatever it is you're thinking of doing on the back-burner and pay attention. Don't worry, I'll explain myself more clearly in a mo when I've finished making my introductions, beating around the bush and talking what will sound like an awful lot of bollocks, but the 'bollocks' I'm about to dish out actually happened to me and it's essential to the whole, do you understand? Yeah, I admit it's partly for my own amusement, writing all this unbelievable crap down, but it's mostly for your elucidation, so take that scowl off your face and bloody well listen. And don't dare to scuttle off and abandon me, please.....

No, I can't give you an abridged version. Why is everyone so bloody impatient nowadays? Who in their right mind would want to eat an abridged five course meal in a fancy restaurant or take an abridged holiday in the Caribbean or have an abridged shag with Beyonce Knowles or Jessie J (or whatever the bodacious equivalent is in your case) instead of taking time to savour the whole, variegated experience? Why would anyone want such a thing - to save time? What's so special about time all of a sudden? “Why do Readers Digest sell so many condensed books?” I hear a little voice grumbling sarcastically in the background. All right, so people lead busy lives, and even when folk crave a dose of escapism the bulk of them demand a wham, bam, thank you ma'am literary experience, but it still doesn't make sense to me. Why sniff the knickers of a stunning Thai whore when you could just as easily shove a drip feed in your arm and fuck her non-stop until her eyes pop and her brain closes down and her pussy juices run dry? I don't know what the world's coming to, I really don't.

This is complicated, OK? If I give you an abridged version of my story I'll probably miss out some crucially important detail. What, you want a clue? A fucking clue? You want something to chew on to keep your interest going while you laboriously put up with the assorted sludge I insist on dragging you through before I get down to the nitty-gritty? You cheeky bastard..... Right, if you want a clue I'll give you a clue, but you won't believe me, mind, so I don't know why I'm bothering.

Have you got a Facebook account? Hasn't every fucker, you say. As a matter of fact, no, not everyone has a Facebook account. My missus hates Facebook with a vengeance, she thinks it's a waste of precious time and a tool that the government covertly uses to spy on people, though she's perfectly computer literate - and my mum wouldn't even know how to turn a bloody computer on - but I know what you mean: most people have a computer and most people are on Facebook or Myspace or bloody Twatter or whatever. Right, we're getting somewhere now.

Have you ever had your account hacked? You know, when some prize twat, usually but not always of your acquaintance, somehow gets hold of your password and posts a load of gay porn or a collection of obviously spurious but nevertheless embarrassing shite in your name:-

'I've just had a good, stiff wank over Anne Widdecombe on Question Time, and my white hot load, which quite possibly approached the speed of light, blinded the cat, vaporised the budgie and shattered our brand new 56 inch flat screen TV.'

'I blithely sucked Tom Cruise's little dicky on Hollywood Boulevard last Saturday afternoon, and he fucking loved it,'

'I fancied Miley Cirus a whole lot more when she was under-age.'

Or (this one's a cracker) 'I fancy shafting the Queen Mother in front of her Maj and Phil – that little twist really turns me on. And before you ask, yeah, I know she'll be a bit ripe by now.'

My so-called mates were bastards for pulling stunts like that until I grew wise to their little games and seriously upped my security settings (with the help of our friendly neighbourhood computer geek, who just happens to be my twelve year old son). After a couple of years of maintaining a veritable fortress, though, some fucker jumped straight over my digital battlements, or else tunnelled under my castle walls – don't ask how, because I haven't got the foggiest – and that was how my troubles started. Only the posts that appeared in my name were a damned sight weirder than I could possibly have expected, and the hacking was just the beginning of my problems.

I intend to open up a writhing can of worms and spill the beans of what I could perhaps describe as my mental disruption onto my soiled duvet for your painstaking inspection, or whatever you choose to do with it (for some reason I almost said 'disgrace' instead of 'disruption' just then, but somehow I managed to control myself).

But maybe we won't get that far. Maybe the beans of disruption and the anguish stricken worms will get hopelessly mixed up along the way and my narrative will be lost in translation. Maybe the worms will devour the scrumptious beans when I'm not looking so that I only have half a story to tell, or maybe the beans are toxic and the sneaky little shits are planning to poison my precious worms. Perhaps some other sundry, unforeseen fuck-up will crawl out of the woodwork and prevent me from telling my tale, and if that happens, well, tough titty, as my dad used to say.....

Life seems overfond of punching you in the mush when you least expect it and kicking you in the balls while you're down, he often grumbled when I was a kid. Life's a low-down, two-faced bitch nearly but not quite all of the way through, and then you fucking die, usually horribly and in tremendous agony – this isn't my dad speaking any more, by the way, it's me elaborating the gist of his rabid though somewhat monosyllabic outbursts for my own amusement - life's an inconsiderate, cock gobbling (and in many cases cock wielding), won't take no for an answer bastard that shoots its slimy, stinking load all over you whenever it has a hard-on and an irrepressible desire to come, which of course renders the unfortunate recipient of its nastier surprises unsuitable for public consumption. No, that's a horrible thought, the public unknowingly ingesting the putrid man mess of life - I meant to say 'unsuitable for public appearance.'

Perhaps this unlikely sounding (but nevertheless true) story is destined to stay here with poor old me in this information overloaded limbo, in this crazy, godforsaken concentration camp where situations reach the most unlikely conclusions imaginable and opposites conspire to achieve totally unexpected conjunctions. There are no rules here, or at least none that I can grasp, and the various batty juxtapositions that I've witnessed so far don't make the slightest bit of sense. Maybe I'm the butt of some sort of wicked cosmic joke..... And how am I going to get my story back to humanity? I've only just thought of that. Perhaps there's a postal system of some sort here.....

I'm constantly shitting myself, because I fear that everyone and every thing consigned to this place ends up torn and bleeding, hanging from the razor wire of the invisible perimeter fence that keeps the inmates confined. But maybe that's just the cowardly part of me speaking; I have no reason to suspect that such an awful conclusion is my actual, unchangeable destiny.

Maybe the gast of whatever audience I'm hoping to reach will remain unflabbered and my tale will never be told. I'm unsure about my target audience to say the least, and perhaps reaching an appreciating audience isn't the most important part of the exercise - maybe what I really want is just to get this crazy mess recorded and put it into some sort of perspective, if that's possible. I don't want my experiences to fall on stony ground or float across the mind-numbing void of indifference forever, unrelated and unconsidered. If that happens I'll be rather peeved, I'm telling you, because though the wormy, bean tainted shit that's invaded my mind is crazy and illogical and I probably have a whole jumble of screws loose it comforts me to think that my story deserves to be told, otherwise I wouldn't even try. So here goes, folks. Grit your teeth, fasten your seatbelts and pop on your goggles and safety helmets, because I've stopped fannying around and started starting – with a big, fat 'fuck you' to literary tradition, at long last I've reached the beginning of the walrus's story.