“WETBRAIN JIM” Chapter 1

1.

Harry Heiner had his back to the door of his shop, hunched over a bundle of that mornings newspapers when Old Wetbrain Jim staggered inside, opened his pants and began to masturbate over by the cooler where the deli meats were kept, next to the cheeses.

Harry didn’t even realise Old Wetbrain Jim was there until Jim had already worked himself up to a climax, shooting his load over a packet of mortadella and then screaming “EEEEEEEE-POCH!!” at the very top of his voice.

So Harry grabbed a broom from behind the counter and ran over to beat Wetbrain Jim about the head and shoulders with it a few times and shoo him out of the store, not the first time he’d had to do so, but he’d be damned if this old derelict was going to come into his shop now and start emptying his fucking tubes all over the fucking smallgoods.

Wetbrain Jim stumbled out of the shop, stood and swayed back and forth on the footpath for a bit, then opened his mouth in mock indignation, raised his hand in a mock salute, and blew a long, wet raspberry back at Harry. All this time his cock’s hanging out of his pants, lolling back and forth like a long-preserved and now reanimated shrunken lemming looking about blindly for its specimen jar.

“Nooooooooooo-booooooooooooo…..!”, yelled Jim at Harry, “Noooooooooooooo-boooooooooooo……!” just as Harry was about to walk back inside and get down to the business of cleaning Jim’s jism off the stock before a customer came in. That’s when Harry realised that Jim had probably left his notebooks, the bundle of fourteen A4 sized, ring bound notebooks he carried with him everywhere over by the cooler. Sure enough, he had, so Harry picked up the bundle, which was tied together with bits of old plastic bags, and threw them out the door at Jim, half-hoping he might knock the old masturbating bastard off his balance in the process.

But Old Wetbrain Jim artfully (albeit a little unsteadily) dodged Harry’s toss, picked up his bundle, and bowed deeply at Harry in a sarcastic gesture of thanks. Then he tucked his cock back in his pants and began to wobble off in the general direction of nowhere in particular, something he couldn’t quite figure out burning with some intent he didn’t quite recognise about something he couldn’t quite remember picking at what was left of his damp old mind.

Something about the notebooks.

He had started out, he couldn’t remember when, with one, and now he had fourteen. He was sure of that much. Fourteen notebooks. Fourteen.

Yesterday morning, he had twelve.

That was it.

The other two notebooks.

Someone had taken them. He had no idea who this could be, or why they would want them, but they were his, and he was going to get them back, goddammit.

With that sorted out and patted down in some (hopefully) not-so-foggy recess of his addled and oft-drowned brain, Jim walked over to a bench at a bus stop, sat down, pissed himself, and began to think. And think deeply. Or as deeply as someone like Jim could manage given his shaky predicaments.

Now, aside from getting thrown out of shops on the odd occasion for wanting to have his way with chilled packets of cured hams, Old Wetbrain Jim was not the type of man who normally attracted much in the way of trouble. But what Old Wetbrain Jim didn’t realise at that point in time was that a whole shitload of motherfucking trouble was about to find its way to him and find its way to him with a stone cold killer vengeance.




To be continued …

CREEPY CRAWLY

When I first thought of the name for this blog, I realised it might, to some people, imply something weird, as in sexual weird. As in, some strange fetish or whatnot.

But it’s not that at all.

The name is the title of a song from the early 1970’s by San Francisco pop nutjobs The Residents and later covered by their frequent collaborator in crimes against music, Snakefinger (who is now dead, just in case you didn’t know).

It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I love The Residents to bits and have done for over 30 years now. And I realised that the name would allow me to do silly things with puns and plays on words and such, like Tongue-In-Chief and The Tongue Commandments.

Okay?

Fair enough.

But fuck me if some of the things people are looking for, some of the search terms people use that seem to bring them (very briefly) to this place are just plain creepy, in a chilly, shiver up the spine way. Variations on the two words in the title of this blog. That make me wonder, “These people should be in fucking jail”.

I’m not going to list the terms.

Use your imagination. Use your imagination in a way that you normally wouldn’t want to use it.

And then go a bit further.

Sometimes, it makes me want to give up the internet altogether, to shun it, and go back to entertaining myself by reading more books and seeing more movies and eating out more.

To stop writing this blog, and maybe try my hand at writing something real for a change. You know, writing something with an intent.

I thought all the stupid, creepy people were over here.

But no they’re not.

They’re every fucking where.

I suppose I could just not look at my blog statistics any more. I have no idea what half of them mean anyway (Bounce rate? Huh? Bouncing from, or bouncing to? Whyfore you bounce? Boing, boing. Honestly, the internet has some stupid bloody names for things).

Maybe I’ll just do that.

Or maybe I should just get a life.

SENDING A MESSAGE TO THE KIDDIES …

You’re all a pack of raving fucking morons and retards.

Why?

Experts tell us so.

Your brains, resembling nothing so much as a sucked out sultana ricocheting wildly around the dark vacuum of your tiny skulls, are so underdeveloped, so meager, so inadequate, that you are completely incapable of making a rational decision about anything, or holding a point of view and arriving at that point of view through the application of logic or observation, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves to be so arrogant as to think anything you say, think or feel could possibly hold any water at all.

Idiots.

You’re all fat, you’re all stupid, you’re all illiterate, you’re all on drugs and you’re all drunk all of the time and you’re all having sex at the age of 12 and having babies at the age of 13, you read the wrong books, you wear the wrong clothes, you listen to the wrong music, you watch the wrong movies and the wrong television shows, you’re addicted to the internet and violent video games and you’d like to stab us all to death in our beds and run rampant through the streets every night to pee on our rose gardens and hump like rabbits behind the school toilet blocks while smoking ice through a home made bong, only then to stagger home and foolishly allow yourselves to be groomed by pedophiles in chat rooms because you’re so astoundingly dumb, it’s a wonder you can figure out what shoe to put on what foot on any given day.

In fact, you probably can’t even do that and, until you turn about 25, you will remain such a vacuous, drooling imbecile that your mother will have to lay out your clothes for you every morning and feed you baby mash with a plastic spoon from a big double handled Snoopy cup because if you tried to do it yourself you’d probably put your own eye out.

What a load of crap.

I swear, if I’m looking for examples of witless stupidity and crappy decision making in the world, I only have to bone up on the latest antics of the NSW State Labor government, none of whose members could run a lap around a wading pool without drowning a couple dozen people let alone run a fucking government. Or those Masters of the Universe, those infallibly gifted men and women who work the financial markets and have run it so far into the bloody ground that we’re all going to have to work until we drop dead at our desks or fall into the ditches we’re digging for council. And if I’m looking for examples of sexual infantilism and immaturity writ large, any press release or pronouncement from those mad old male virgins in dresses from the Vatican will do just nicely. For examples of the most extreme forms of base cretinism at large, popping over to Andrew Bolt’s blog of idiocracy and the pinheads that lurk there will suffice if one wishes to acquaint oneself with the unhinged, the deranged, and the dangerously underdeveloped mind.

And, I promise, if I keep hearing again and again and again, over and over and over, this bullshit, this utter, utter fucking bullshit about the inability of young adults to make their own decisions and to form their own opinions on things on an independent basis, I am going to seek out the offending party or parties and bash them over their withered, gray, balding fucking heads with a fucking big mallet until they promise to cease and desist, shut the fuck up, and go home and clean up their fucking rooms.

Honestly.

TONGUES ON FILM – APRIL 2009

Depending upon I-don’t-really-know-what, I shall endeavour once a month to provide a brief wrap-up of all of the films I have watched during that time …

Isn’t that sweet of me? …

“DELIVER US FROM EVIL” (2006)

Academy Award nominated documentary concerning the exploits of one Father Oliver O’Grady, a Catholic priest who, over more than two decades during the 70’s and 80’s, abused dozens of the faithful, leaving nothing but shattered childhoods, abandoned trusts, and deep emotional trauma in his wake.

Then, of course, there is the hierarchy to whom O’Grady was, or should have been, accountable, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Despite knowledge of O’Grady’s behaviour, the extent of it, and how long it had been going on, next to nothing was done, next to nothing acknowledged. In more than a few cases, the only action taken was to move O’Grady to another parish and, on these occasions, this rarely amounted to more than a move some scant fifty miles away. They may as well just have spat in the eyes of the parents and raped their kids all over again for all the good that did.

More than once while watching this, I had to punch the pause button to spend some time muttering darkly at the walls, a fairly inefficient way of expending some of the rage I felt over the way these people had been, and were still being, treated by the church, that faith in which they had placed such significance, such meaning.

There is one couple who welcomed O’Grady into their home as a friend, had no doubts or qualms about his behaviour (had no reason for any such doubts), and entrusted their daughter to his care. This is a couple who have been together so long that they have grown into that quaint habit of being able to finish off each other’s sentences. As the father comes to recall the time, the number of times, the moment when O’Grady’s betrayal became fully known to him, his voice, choked with anguish, blurts out that he should have known, that he was the one who trusted this man, and how could “he have let it happen?”

Imagine … To be a father who thinks himself a “failure” at his responsibilities because a pedophile abused his daughter.

Thus does a parent’s prime, primeval, duty of care to their children, that is, to protect, come to be shabbily thrust aside and trampled upon as one selfish other chooses to indulge and inflict it’s penchant for furtive spurts of sexual subterfuge with no regard, no sliver, no glint of understanding as to the consequence to anybody of their actions. And then to scuttle behind a church pew and be assured protection simply because you are clothed in the dark rags of this absurdly popular cult.

O’Grady spent some time in prison for his crimes, but that is due in no part to any action from the church. Today, he is free and living in Ireland, the country of his birth. He willingly takes part in this documentary, where he speaks freely of his actions, his desires, his (so-called) motivations.

Remorse eludes him.

When one considers that many of the most devout proselytisers of this faith consider the “evils of homosexuality” to be the frontier most worth fighting on, and then one considers the subject matter of this superb film and the seeming insignificance of it to the architects and defenders of this belief system, one could be forgiven for thinking the whole Catholic Church is not just out-of-step with reality, but so far out of time they make the Amish look like The Jetsons.


“TOKYO GORE POLICE” (2008)

Utterly incoherent, yet oddly compelling. Makes no sense whatsoever. Blood gushes from severed limbs like water from a fire hydrant. There’s an English dub that sounds like it was performed by graduates of the Ed Wood school of vocal technique back in the ‘50’s. Some of the prosthetics are quite good.

You could try drugs. Some drugs and beer. That might work.


“QUARANTINE” (2008)

Jennifer Carpenter (from “Dexter”) is in it …

The next time I see a movie shot like this, I’m gonna go out and buy a fucking tripod and send it to the fucking director as an act of fucking charity. I’m fed up to the fucking back teeth with this fucking shaky-cam shit.

Just fuck off.


“FINDING AMANDA” (2008)

Dialogue, for example …

- “How you doing?”

- “I’ve got no legs, I’ve got no balls, and I piss through a tube, how the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

And …

- “She’s probably at the Thaiger Club. It’s not spelt “tiger” but. It’s Thai, like the food.”

- “Like the country?”

- “There’s a country too?”

Good, yes?

The eternally youthful Matthew Broderick plays a “reformed” alcoholic and gambling addict who finds out his niece (Bettany Snow) is a hooker in Las Vegas and, to prove to himself, if not least to his long-suffering wife, that he has the stamina to resist the temptation to drink and gamble there, he pops off to Vegas to find her and drag her to rehab.

Very funny, very sharp, no soap or sap. Think “After Hours” and “Something Wild” and ignore the horrid poster art and byline which seems to indicate some sort of sexual thing may arise from Broderick and Snow’s relationship. There’s no such theme, and nothing of the sort happens.

“DANCE OF THE DEAD” (2008)

Another bloody zombie movie. Is there anyone who isn’t making another bloody zombie movie? You probably shit another bloody zombie movie for breakfast. Even I had an idea for another bloody zombie movie. And someone actually expressed an interest in making the bloody thing.

I should probably get around to writing something resembling a bloody script. YA BLOODY RECKON????? Bloody oath.

Anyway, this one is set in a bloody high school.

And there’s a bunch of bloody zombies about.

What a bloody surprise.

Fuck off.


“END OF THE LINE” (2007)

Independent Canadian horror film.

The leader of a religious cult, a Rush Limbaugh lookalike, gives the word and his acolytes scoot about in a righteous frenzy attempting to “save” the souls of non-believers by stabbing the shit out of them. Takes place in a subway.

Very well done, no CGI (hooray!), good story, quite effective jolts. Ends well, too. Original. Good. Yes.

Yes, you may watch this. It has a brain and there was talent involved in its making.


“DYING BREED” (2008)

“Your testicles are tacos!”

That’s not a line from the movie, but I wished it had been.

Inbred cannibals in Tasmania.

Who’d have guessed?

“Deliverance” … meet “The Hills Have Eyes”.

Animal traps. Teeth. Retards.

Full of surprises, this one.


“THE WACKNESS” (2008)

“Quirky”.

In that “I’m so quirky!” way some independent films irritatingly insist on being at times ...

- “Hey, Brent! I took all these QUIRKY people and put them in a movie together!”

- “That’s brilliant, Gavin! We’ll call it “WHEN QUIRKS COLLIDE!”

Ben Kingsley plays a pot-smoking psychiatrist who offers counseling sessions as payment for dope to his emotionally constipated young dealer who then ends up falling in love with Kingsley’s daughter.

Life lessons are learned.

Gee, I didn’t see that coming.

Mary-Kate Olsen’s in it. I thought she was a “tween” phenomenon, not a legit actress.

So. You see? I have learnt something. She turns up here as a zonked out bar and party slut. She’s not too bad at it either.

Fancy that.


“DONKEY PUNCH” (2008)

There’s a cover blurb that quotes a review something like this, “The Most Sexy, Shocking Thriller of the Year!!”

No, it isn’t. There’s some sex scenes in it. Big fucking deal.

A bunch of girls join a bunch of guys on a boat and have a party. A girl dies. Everyone tries to extricate themselves from being implicated in her death and ends up turning on one another.

As you do.

Half way through watching this, I began to think, “I’d really like to see “Shallow Grave” again”.

So I did.

“THE WAVE” (2008)

German film. Based on a true story, or parts of one.

Firstly, you have to accept the premise that a group of well educated senior students would, in the space of only five days and as part of an experiment on autocratic society, enthusiastically transform themselves into a bunch of robo-fascists at the behest of a rather uncharismatic lecturer.

I didn’t.

Ay, there’s the rub.

‘Cause there ain’t no “secondly” if that don’t happen.


“DEATH PROOF” (2007)

Tarantino’s contribution to the “Grindhouse” experiment didn’t work for me the first time around but after reading this re-evaluation on Bright Lights recently I thought I’d take another look.

As the reviewer notes, the half-way point massacre, Stuntman Mike’s “vehicular homicide” takes out those protagonists in whom we’ve just invested time and attention and leaves us with no choice but to callously discard our empathies for these characters and start over again. It’s an alienating experience, or at least it was and may have been one of the reasons I found the film initially resistible. I didn’t want to start over again on account of I’m bone lazy and impatient and get cranky when I’m asked to make an effort. And, at the time I was far more impressed by Robert Rodriguez’s sublimely unhinged “Planet Terror” and it’s “why the fuck not”* attitude to story-telling.

Another thing, Tarantino’s habit of having his characters lapse into fanboy enthusiasms, such as the name-checking of “road” or, to be more precise in this case, “rod” movies which happens here is getting a little too self-consciously twee and I wish he’d knock it off. I get the point, get back to the movie please.

Second time around, however, it did work for me, there being subtleties and spaces throughout that become far more apparent when you pull it away from the immediacy of expectations that typically cluster around Tarantino’s work.

As a matter of fact, I think it’s a work of utter bloody genius.

The difference between the two groups of women became far more apparent to me the second time around. The first group, the victims, give the initial impression of independence, full of smart mouth sass and attitude. But no, they’re not that at all. They’re just in the process of becoming tomorrow’s housewives today, still looking to have their existence validated by some man, whether it’s the boyfriend who hasn’t turned up, or the film director who won’t remember a birthday, or some gormless sleazebags in a bar. Girlie girls all dressed up waiting to go somewhere with someone, to be courted and paid for.

Pfhht.

The second group, on the other hand, they’re the real deal. Beholden to no one, dependent on nothing, they live fast, for and in the moment. These women are cooler than fuck, as tough as nails and goddamn it if they’ll take any shit from anyone. But there’s no attitude here, no style that they’ve adopted to telegraph their individual philosophies, who they are.

Some guy tries some cheesy line on these women in a bar, they’d have his balls for breakfast. For tapas.

Kurt Russell, as Stuntman Mike, with the first group, he’s the bad guy, the mean, nasty murdering motherfucker. But against the second group? Nah, he’s just another lip-licking, toe-sniffing, garden variety crybaby creep. As are they all.

Fucking brilliant.

Where Rodriguez played his exploitation hand as fondly reverential spoof, Tarantino has played his by demanding the audience too fully immerse themselves in an “exploitation” attitude, dispensing with fashionably post-modern concerns about the fate and motivation of characters and asking only that everything put before them is fast, sexy, violent and fun. That there be no point, no lesson, no thing of learned value to be taken away from this experience other than, “Did you see how the car took the top of her head off?! Cool!” is all there should be.

And that was a fucking excellent scene.


* For example:

- Why don’t we throw this in?

- Why the fuck not!


“THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL” (2008)

I made myself a very nice bacon and egg sandwich halfway through this movie. With HP sauce. Four strips of bacon and two eggs.

I left the plate out overnight on the couch? And the next morning, there were ants crawling all over it ‘cause there were a couple of drops of sauce left on the plate.

It’s not the first time, either. They just come from nowhere and crawl over anything that may have a trace of food on it. It’s not like I leave stuff out all the time. There aren’t food scraps lying all over the fucking place. It’s respectably clean, my house.

It’s a weather thing with ants, isn’t it? Maybe they’ll piss off when the weather cools down.

Because it’s beginning to give me the shits.

THE SQUEALING OF THE SWINE

We knew it would happen. Those of us who pay attention to such things. I knew it would happen. The only question was when.

And so we prepared. We were always prepared, and they, people like you perhaps, thought us all fools for our cautious ways. Paranoid, you said we were. Some of you called us psychotic and stupid, hicks, halfwits, and my, how you laughed.

Well, well.

Are you laughing now?

I doubt it.

Most of you are dead.

But I take no pleasure in your misfortunes or the misfortunes that may have befallen your loved ones. It gives me no comfort. Perhaps you will listen to us in future. Should this happen again. And it will happen again. Mark these words. Or something similar, some variation on another strain. The same strain? Yes.

I had spent thousands, tens of thousands over the years reinforcing the house, the stronghold as I began to call it during the onslaught, to ensure it was bugproof. And that it could not be breached by any poor, desperate soul who may have been infected. Or, more importantly and most probably, a mob of souls. Angry souls. I had built, as a necessary backup, a bunker in the yard. Beneath the earth. I had stocked it well. That, and the central stronghold, the house, contained all those things that one could consider essential to one’s survival. In the short term, and the long term. It was the long term that mattered most, though.

There were not many of us who did this. Who went to these lengths. We were not a “group” or a “force” or a “unit” of any kind. We were scattered throughout the country with little, if any, ability to communicate with each other. We were not going to stand as one, for to do so would be a fatal error. If one became infected, there would be nothing to stop the spread among the others.

And so, as individuals, did we take our stand and vow to resist, to fight to the bitter end if need be.

And we had no guns.

Goddammit.

Howard, that bastard. He took our guns away. 1996, 1997, I think it was. Cheap political ploy, a stunt that was. I never liked Howard. Pissweak, he was. To take a man’s gun. What type of “man” would do this to another? A coward, that’s what type. A girl.

And so, we stocked what we could in the way of knives, bats, power tools, whatever we thought may help us through the darkest days we knew were coming, whatever we could lay our hands on. Some improvised.

We didn’t really have much time.

And then, time ran out.

People dropped like flies. A cough, a sneeze, that was all it took. Within minutes, the disease would tear its way through the most able-bodied of men and women and reduce them to shuddering lumps of virus-ridden flesh and, in hours, death would take them. The children went the quickest, a small mercy, to be spared the prolonged agony afforded the strong and the capable.

In two weeks, eight million had died.

In three weeks, forty seven million.

In four weeks, two billion.

The world went to rubble.

Yet, through it all, I, and those like me, prevailed. We stood our ground, defended our territory, made ourselves deaf to the entreaties of those who tried to worm their way through our defences and take advantage of our stocks, our supplies, of food, of drugs, of anything that we had because we had had the intelligence, the foresight, to prepare for this exact moment in advance of the moment coming.

The fools. The poor, poor fools.

By the time it had become clear to those in charge, supposedly in charge I should say, that the human race were facing such an implacable, invisible foe the likes of which had never been encountered before, a confusion of so-called “advice” tumbled from their lips, “do this”, “do that”, “don’t do this”, and so on and so forth. None of it added up. One piece of advice contradicted another, one “expert” clashed with this other “expert”, one minute it was a call for calm, the next, some piece of information caused thousands to panic.

I ignored it all. I knew, people like me knew, what we needed to do to survive. We had our own code to follow and we weren’t going to throw that overboard on the say so of some fucking politician, some bureaucrat, some statistician.

They had never listened to us. Damned if we were going to listen to them now.

Ludicrous, yes? That one third of the world’s population would be decimated because a bunch of goddamned pigs got the fucking sniffles.

Well, no, not ludicrous. Not at all. Probable, that’s what it was. And it was probability that we, people like myself, concerned ourselves with.

Listen …

They told us to stock up on dry goods. Rice, pasta, beans and such. Stupid. You need water to cook these things, precious water, and you’d have to be a fool to waste such a resource on the preparation of a bowl of fucking pasta. I had 100 eight-gallon drums of water stocked. It was for drinking. Not cooking, that’s for sure. What was I, Jamie fucking Oliver? No.

I stocked tin foods, frozen, stuff you could microwave (we all had generators and we all made sure to have enough fuel to run them indefinitely) and if water were needed for its preparation, it would be only a minimal amount, a half cup perhaps.

I had 200 cans of goddamned baked beans. Among other things. Jesus, did I ever get sick of fucking beans.

But those damn things saved my life one night.

Listen …

When it seemed the worst of the plague had played itself out, as we knew it would eventually for that is the manner of such things, I went to the fortified observation deck of my stronghold. I could see, in the distance, smoke, small fires, nothing unusual in that. There were no emergency services anymore and so, when a fire started, it just burnt itself out. God only knows how many poor souls got caught in them. If it wasn’t the sickness that got you, it was a fire, or starvation, or, in the worst cases, some bastard stuck you in the ribs ‘cause you had what they wanted.

Law and order? Not anymore. Not in this gutted new world.

But that night, I heard a rising sound in the near distance. A sound I hadn’t heard before and it seemed, to my ears, like the sound of some strange new mob and not at all human.

I quieted my breathing, deep, slow breaths and focused my hearing, trying to identify this noise.

What fresh new hell was this?

I had a long, large carving knife at hand. I had a heavy, six-pronged fork, its tines fashioned (by myself) to the sharpest tips I could manage. I had a pocket knife.

Downstairs, power tools. If I needed them, I could have them to hand in 26 seconds flat from where I stood. I left nothing to chance.

The sound grew louder. It seemed to be coming straight for me. Still, I couldn’t quite make it out. What the fuck was that?

My stomach growled, my bowels seemed to shift. From fear? No. I’d been eating goddamned beans for the last two weeks now, twice a day. I hadn’t shit in a fortnight. I’d deal with it later. After this thing, whatever it was, was dealt with first.

And just then, I saw them. The things that had been making that sound. And yes, they were coming straight for me, straight for the stronghold. Hundreds of them.

PIGS!

Goddammit.

All of them gone feral and looking for a kill. This was no random mob of brainless animals. They knew what they wanted and they were working as a group, a gang, to get it.

And what they wanted was me.

I felt my stomach groan again, louder this time, longer, a massive shudder went through my bowels and then, that’s when it struck me.

What I had to do.

They got closer. Fast.

Not close enough, though. Not yet.

Hold.

Hold.

Hold.

Hold.

They were one metre from the front wall of the stronghold. And that was when I blew the whole lot of the oinking little fuckers to hell.

I turned my back on them.

Dropped my trousers.

Shifted my arse over the side of the deck.

Grabbed the cigarette lighter from my pocket. Flicked it to life. Held the flame to my anus.

And let nature take its course.

The methane that had built up in my body the last two weeks would’ve gassed a small country. My anus flapped like a bust balloon for what seemed like an hour, and the flames lit up the night sky and obscured the stars, the roar of the fire drowning out the squealing of the swine below me.

Nothing sweeter than the smell of crackling in the morning. The smell, that sweet pork smell. Smells like victory.

And that’s what it was. Victory.

When the plague was over, or rather, the worst of it was over, I told others of my tale of survival. They called me a hero.

And when the world was stable enough that some forms of manufacturing could resume, some forms of commerce, the people at Heinz, they called me, they said they were repackaging their most popular product, renaming it.

Victory Beans.

In ham sauce.

They put my picture on the label.

Goddamn, if that didn’t make me swell up with pride.

I wished the old folks could’ve been around to see it, but, fortunately, they had passed several years before the plague hit.

One thing for sure, they didn’t raise no nancy boy, no sir.

They raised a man.

Damn right they did.

Illustration courtesy of c N m © 2009 c N m. All rights reserved. Reproduced with kind permission. Ta very much.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE DISAPPEARED CAT

The next door neighbour’s cat has disappeared.

Its fate concerns me.

You see, over the last 18 months or so, the next door neighbour’s cat and I have become … friends.

This, despite the fact that I’m not overly fond of cats, having always regarded them as rather dumb and stupid. Dumber than a box of rocks, in fact.

Yet, over time and beginning from kittenhood, this creature has wormed its way into my affections, paying regular visits (morning and night) to demand my attention, to eat bugs from the balcony, and to play with my shoes, the latter being an activity that appeared to amuse it no end.

I have never fed the animal. It has an owner whose responsibility that is, and the cat always appeared healthy and untroubled. To feed it again would be an act of cruelty and negligence on my part. I did, however, leave a bowl of water on the balcony for it should it happen to be over my way and fancy a drink after a bug-eating banquet.

Wouldn’t you?

Anyway.

Over the recent Easter long weekend, the next door neighbour and her son went away for the break. I expect they made arrangements with some friend or whatever to have the animal fed and watered during their absence. I would hope so.

Wouldn’t you?

But the cat, confined to a limited area in which to roam (the neighbours flat and balcony and my own), has become a socialised animal and it knows only the company of other humans.

Therefore, its own humans being absent for an extended period of time, it sought my company throughout that weekend and spent most of the four days sleeping on the various chairs on the balcony or, when it was raining, coming inside to sleep behind the couch.

Very obviously, this is a people cat. And, being a people myself, and a people who has no objection to its presence and wishes it no ill will, it seemed happy in my world during that time. And I was happy for its company.

It’s a nice cat.

And then, when the owners returned from wherever it was they had been, the adult owner went out to her balcony and called for it.

But it was at my place.

Inside. Asleep behind the couch. And it didn’t so much as lift its head in recognition at its owners voice.

And so, I picked it up and put it out on the balcony so that it could go home.

It didn’t seem particularly keen at first, but eventually, off it went.

And I’ve not seen hide nor hair of it since.

Which is strange, don’t you think?

What has happened?

I would inquire of my neighbour as to the animals wellbeing, but I’d rather not. You see, she has one of those voices, those voices that seem always to be teetering on the edge of hysteria, do you know? As if, were you to inquire perhaps, “How are you?”, you would receive a catalogue of petty concerns and worries and problems that she feels she is besieged by in response. And, having thusly exchanged words, she would consider you a “friend”, or at least an “acquaintance” from thereon. And you would be bugged endlessly by this, that or the other thing from thereon. Good grief, no.

I live in a block of flats, for God’s sake. I do not want to get to know the fucking neighbours. To do so is to invite oneself into a world full of pain.

If you are my neighbour, mind your own damn business and I’ll mind mine. “Fuck off” in other words, got it? I don’t want to be your fucking friend.

Nevertheless.

Would I be far off the mark to assume that the owner, disturbed by the fact that her cat has been in my company during her extended absence, is jealous of this? And has confined her animal to quarters, has somehow managed to restrict its movements outside so that it can no longer roam of its own free will? This strikes me as cruel.

Or, perhaps, has she surrendered the animal to some pound, some refuge and that she did so due to some perceived infidelity on the animals part?

That would be extreme, don’t you think?

And disturbing.

Very disturbing.

It disturbs me.

Would it disturb you?

Yes. Yes, it would. Of course it would. Unless you are mad.

For it would seem I have lost a friend. And to what and why it has been lost, I do not know. I don’t have that many friends left to lose (refer attitude to neighbours).

This saddens me.

I even looked on a number of animal pound and refuge websites this morning to see if a picture of the animal in question may have been there.

No.

Nothing.

Where is it?

I am worried and I keep asking myself this question. Again and again.

Wouldn’t you?

And I don’t even know the animals name.

I used to call it “Cat”, as in, “Hello, cat. How’s things?”

He’s a cat, for Christ’s sake, why would he need a name?

But where has cat gone?

Cat?

Cat?

Hello?

Cat?

Come back, cat.

Hello?
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Ah, crap.

I’m definitely going soft in the head.

Definitely.

Goddammit.

Goddammit all to hell.

GOD TAKES A HOLIDAY

Now that I’ve been a God for a bit now, I thought I’d take a break and go down to Sydney for a visit.

But then I realised that being a God means you’re everywhere all at once and all at the same time, so I must’ve already been there when I arrived.

I could have saved myself the fucking air fare.

I’m so dense at times.

Anyway.

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Food tastes the same when you’re a God. You’d think it’d be spiffed up a bit, wouldn’t you?

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I had a burger with cheese for lunch yesterday. And a Coke.

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We have a vending machine upstairs. You can get Coke for a buck forty a can. At the shop it’s two bucks.

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That’s sixty cents.

Difference.

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If you had, let’s see, if you had a can of Coke every day of the year for lunch, and you bought it upstairs instead of the shop, that’d be, it’d be … about two hundred bucks a year.

Difference.

Saved.

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I did that without a calculator.

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We’re good at stuff like that. Gods.

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I might have a pizza today.

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Or a pie. And a sausage roll.

There’s a good pie shop the other side of the station.

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It’s okay, I mean. It’s not fantastic. What I mean by “good”. You know?

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I must be in a mood.

Do you think?

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It’s not easy being a God. Lots of stuff to do. To think about.

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Lots.

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There’s a curry house up the road.

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I like curry.

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