Welcome to Acerbia; population: π
This is the archive of the many and fabulous adventures of . Like a hard-bitten son of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius taught to write by William S. Burroughs; continually reincarnated, debated over by intellectuals and literati at cocktail parties the author can't get invited to, the target of scorn and ire from women everywhere, frequently mistaken for a former member of the Warsaw pact, named after the Italian explorer Giuseppe Acerbi, slowly rewriting the Book of Cataclysm, this is postmodern fiction at its most playful and creative.
Office 101
Symptoms:
1) You complain that you have too busy a lifestyle to collect your dry-cleaning
2) People are not answering your phonecalls within two rings and this angers you
3) You punch the air at the slightest hint of success, including managing to open a Powerpoint presentation on your over-priced laptop
4) Everything you present is a derivation of the work smarter people have done for you
5) Money is all that matters, if its not about the money then why should you care? Who needs friends?
Diagnosis:
Congratulations. You are now a spineless sales slug.
Prognosis:
Even if you survive it, you're still going to remain one of the planet's least fondly remembered sub-species of protoplasmic life. Eat salt and die, you won't be missed
We Shagged Here
In Brick Lane there is a small red circular poster proclaiming that "Ed & Kate shagged here on April 21st at 16:32"
What I want to know is how they managed to get so far up the wall.
Hall of Residents
In Camden Market at the weekend there are rows after rows of huts, within which people of various ethnicities cook up massive quantities of their cultural culinary speciality and serve it up to the passers-by.
That's *if* they can get your attention.
I wanted a bagel. Pix didn't know what she wanted. So we meandered past each hut. While the cook would be in the back of the hut slaving over a wok or pot, the nubile serving girl would try and catch your eye and peddle her wares.
"Very nice food, yes, you buy, you buy..."
"Curry yes? Curry good, you try curry, you want tikka, madras, korma..."
"Good chicken, maybe you like, pork stir-fry..."
I was half expecting Yoda to lean over one of the counters and in his inimitable Fozzie-bear voice say "For the Jedi it is time to eat as well. Eat, eat. Hot. Good food, hm? Good, hmm!"
The weirdest thing of course was that these people seemed to be activated by proximity sensors. As I walked back towards the bagel stand I would hear:
"Good chicken, maybe you like, pork stir-fry..."
"Curry yes? Curry good, you try curry, you want tikka, madras, korma..."
"Very nice food, yes, you buy, you buy..."
If I paused halfway I could hear the curry guy talking to me as the other two faintly continued their spiels.
None of them remembered me when I tried to jog past quickly to save them the effort a few moments later.
"Very nice food...
...good, you try...
...like, pork stir-fry..."
The sun never sets
Definition of irony:
My boss told me he fell asleep watching Insomnia
Join the Club
I've had a Sainsbury's club card for years now. Despite the fact that several UK companies banded together and formed Nectar. When Nectar arrived, Pix had me sign up to it... now! now! now! Whilst stocks last!
I realise that the entire reason behind a club card like this is to encourage customer retention and try and log what people are buying... you think I don't know that somebody somewhere is calculating what my Doritos burn rate is? Tutting over a spreadsheet because I'm far exceeding the per customer ratio of Cadbury's chocolate.
There was a flurry of advertising and branding when Nectar came about, but I think I missed the point where somebody was supposed to explain to me what the benefits of using the card were. I must have a few gazillion points on there now since I stop at a Sainsbury's almost every other night, but never have I seen an in-store offer that benefitted me or my needs, and yet every time I'm asked for the card I hand it over like a Hindu cow on dope...
...because I know that if I don't they'll try and sign me up for one.
Bread and Tanks
Driving into London late tonight, elevated freeway emblazoned in glittering yellow and red with Pix map reading, Pete driving and myself throwing in the odd comment between pages of Who Dares Wins.
Pix: "Oh look, I didn't realise there was both a Chobham and a Cobham"
Me: "Yeah, Chobham's the one famous for the composite tank armor"
Pete: "Whereas the other is famous for its bread"
Me: "It'd be a real disaster if those were ever mixed up"
Pete: "You'd have a tank that wouldn't withstand a butter knife"
Me: "And shit toast"
Is it any wonder Pix rolls her eyes so often?
Miro
You know, I have to wonder what I'm doing typing this content when there is no blog design around it for anyone to read it.
I mean... I could type just about anything here and be safe in the knowledge that next to nobody will read it, save for those few people who have been pleading with me to start writing Acerbia again (as if it was actually some sort of publication, its really just the embodiment of my temperament)
Okay, here's something you wouldn't read if my regulars were seeing this.
When I was sixteen I fell pretty hard for a very talented young artist from Lima, Peru, she wasn't the prettiest girl in Paris, but she could do things with charcoal and chalks that would make you sit up and watch. No, I don't mean anything kinky by that. You're imagining body-painting and stuff, I just mean that she was very artistic. Look, if you're going to imagine me with a Peruvian girl smudging charcoal across my body then at least imagine her to be slightly more exotic than that.
That's better. Shall I continue?
We had a strange relationship in that if there was one it was such a bloody good secret to everyone involved that neither of us knew about it. Then eventually at the party of a mutual friend we split off from the rest of the group and got talking, and then kissing, and somehow ended up under a quilt in the middle of the floor in that fully-dressed yet unimpeded way that is a skill worth learning (at the expense of being able to tie a bow-tie for instance)
At one point she poked her head out from under the quilt and realised that for some time now we'd been at the center of a ring of people either drunk or otherwise incapacitated, some of whom were paired off in much the same way we were, and yet despite the protective shield of quilty-goodness that we had going for her, I wasn't really in the mood for putting on a floor show, so we kept it PG-13.
She told me that she and her family would be leaving within the next two weeks to go back to Lima, so my feverish mind started trying to find ways of getting her alone and horizontal, preferably naked. Even alone and vertical, naked would have been a good compromise. Frottage in crowded Metro trains just wasn't cutting it.
The opportunity arose one day after one of my engineering classes (they teach lots of things in French secondary schools. I even did Thermodynamics and Quantum theory for a few months), she would be alone in her appartment and did I want to come over?
You know those moments? Those worst possible moments? Those moments where your brain has registered that if anything was to go wrong at *that* precise moment then it would be the worst possible time for it to happen? Can you see where this is going? In moviescripts they're called the point of absolute dread: when the hero seems beaten, all his friends are dead or in dire straits and the love interest looks like she's going to head off with the villain.
As we were trapped in a tangle of denims and cashmere sweater (hers, not mine) her mother came home and walked into the room just as my hands got inside her daughter's panties. Wow, not only can those South American women scream, but they're very protective of their daughters.
If you've got a missed opportunity story or a worst possible moment story, why not share it here in a forgotten archive?