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.
Aliens
Xavier and I sat on the barstools, overlooking the beach with a beer each. Occasionally one of us would take a sip, pacing ourselves to some imaginary timetable that involved the tides and the changes of the cool evening sea breeze.
"How long d'you reckon she's been standing there?" Xavier asked, breaking the silence permeated by the perpetual fizzing of ocean on sand.
"Her? She's been there since we arrived this morning. Didn't you notice her?"
We looked at one another, then at the solitary female figure with her feet almost entirely embedded in the wet sand at the tidal line. Like synchronised drinkers we both took a sip at once.
"D'ye reckon she's single?"
"Zav, she's been standing in wet sand for eight hours, she has sunburn across her entire torso and I'm quite sure she's catatonic."
"Aye, but is she single?"
I went to take a sip and the clear glass betrayed the absence of any beer remaining. I turned round in a practiced movement and lifted two fingers to the barman.
"Dos cervezas, por favor." The guy behind the bar had rapidly become our favorite person on the island and I was already convinced that we were his; he had two of our credit cards behind the bar.
He said something quickly to us, indicating the woman and opened another two beers before wedging freshly sliced lime in the necks.
"What'd he say?"
"I don't know, all I can order is beer, peanuts and hookers. I thought you did language classes."
"I did language classes cause Miss Collins was fit, not cause I wanted to speak to bloody foreigners."
"No comprende."
The barman gave us a look of exasperation that I could remember giving a thousand technophobes before when they asked what the Internet was for. He leaned over the bar and spoke very, very slowly in perfectly good English with only a hint of an accent.
"The chica is waiting for her lover to return"
"I'm up fer a bit of that." Xavier jumped down off the barstool, kicked off his sandals and pulled his shirt over his head exposing more hairy flesh than a hirsute steak. He charged down the soft dry sand until he was right beside the statuesque girl and puffed out his chest comically. She didn't move.
Somewhere a gull squawked.
Xavier trudged back to the bar, his shoulders at a desultorily oblique angle to his temperament.
"Must be a lezzie."
I had to offer a smirk. I had already decided to take a swim out into the ocean and come back ashore just in front of her, to see if that would trigger a more favourable reaction.
Vocab
I am so pissed off that I missed this argument as it was taking place and now can't add a comment anymore. The article is fine, whatever, who cares. The comments are your usual online argument that even borders on Godwin's Law, yah, whatever!
The really great thing going on here is that one moron uses the word "acerbia" to another moron as if it were a real word! Whee! I've made it!
I'm #1 So Why Try Harder?
I realise this site comes up as result number 1 on Google.com for "bitter boyfriend" but its just a coincidence. Honest.
Oh fuck off.
Curses!
I realised on my way home the other night that I'd used up the last of my deodorant bodyspray that morning, so I nipped into a local convenience store and bought some more. These places are notorious for buying in products from the mainland and shipping them over rather than buying from the UK-based factories. I guess it works out cheaper that way.
My usual spray is Lynx. Only over in France they call it Axe, not realising the comedy value of placing Axe in your armpits. Exact same packaging, same color schemes, same product really, just a different name. The one I bought seemed to be the Serbian or Bulgarian equivalent called Vedma.
The next morning I sprayed it on and thought nothing more. Then I sprained my ankle running for a bus which I missed. The next one took fifteen minutes to arrive and was full so I had to stand all the way on a sprained ankle. When I got to work I spilled milk down my jeans that soaked into my socks. After a nightmarish morning of never-ending work I went for lunch and was stung by a wasp. The afternoon was worse than my morning and when I got home I discovered an unpaid credit card bill and the penalty charge awaiting me.
Bad things continued to happen until yesterday when I forgot to use the spray and everything was fine, albeit slightly funky smelling. As illogical as it seemed I took the bodyspray back to the convenience store last night and the clerk behind the counter, a kindly old Slavic gentleman called Mr Chernobog, looked at it and apologised for selling me a gypsy curse in aerosol form.
I got my money back too. Yay! Although he did scratch my palm as he was giving the money back which wasn't so cool...
Stirring the Blood
At 9:05 this morning when I went to the fridge to add milk to my cereal the proverbial chiller cupboard was bare so I sent an e-mail to the receptionist:
K, don't know if this is anything to do with you but there was an acute milk shortage in the kitchen this morning. I was forced to subdue a cow who just happened to be passing by and milk it myself to splash its cold bovine lactations over my cereal.
It didn't take long before she replied back:
Following your last e-mail, it has been agreed that the company will no longer be ordering milk in the morning but rather making use of your agricultural prowess (we had no idea you were so talented in this regard), milking will start at 8.00am sharp, please don't be late, oh and bring an extra pail.
I have to admit, there's something stimulating about being given a faceful of sarcasm right back.
Marionette
Reg and I suspected Mr Wilkinson wasn't everything he seemed to be from the beginning. As soon as he was appointed as manager of our team of two we could tell that he was under the control of a darker, more sinister influence. How right we were.
Our first sneaking suspicions were raised when I attempted to trip Mr Wilkinson as he carried a lot of heavy paperwork past in the strange walk he had. He would sashay his hips and pivot his entire body as he walked past, Reg said it reminded him of how his Nan walked after her hip surgery but I wasn't convinced.
Concentrating on my screen, I stuck one foot out from my alcove and waited for him to walk straight into it. The papers were piled up too high for him to see it at that angle. Wilkinson passed my alcove without tripping. Reg had been watching from his cubicle and said that Wilkinson seemed to glide over the top of my foot as if he knew it had been there. In Reg's words; he physically levitated over your foot, man.
At my next coffee break I decided to try and get to know Wilkinson some more, all the better to plot his downfall. He held his arms out ahead of him in the uneasy sway of someone with Parkinson’s and gripped the coffee mug at an awkward angle that belied arthritis. But I was shocked to watch him taking sips between bouts of conversation, his lower lip seemed to flip down and up again with coffee spilling from the corners of his mouth and dribbling down the slick pink sheen of his skin which seemed solid and unyielding at this close range.
Wilkinson held my gaze with the same glassy-eyed lifeless stare he always had and a thought was triggered in my head, a plan to put into action, but I would need Reg's help. Either Wilkinson was an unfortunate character with hip problems, Parkinson’s, arthritis in his hands, a mechanical lip and plastic skin and the ability to levitate or there was something going on.
Reg and I worked out the plan that night. The next morning we set it into action. I sent an e-mail to Wilkinson, asking him to come over. As he stood, nay, hovered in the doorway to my cubicle Reg stood on his desk and swiped at the air above Wilkinson's head with a pair of gardening sheers. Sure enough, Wilkinson fell to the ground in a bundle of limbs mid-sentence.
"I knew that middle-management bastard was just a puppet on a string. But the real question is, who was holding the strings?"
We knew the answer to our question would be a long and arduous quest for truth that would likely involve knocking out some ceiling tiles...
Hell on Wheels
I went looking for a small compact car over the weekend. I need a town car and although I'm very intruiged by the new BMW 1 series I still wanted to shop around in case I got a bargain. Remembering there was a dealership not far from me I took the bus there, but upon arriving discovered that the glass windows had all been boarded over and a sign proclaimed that there was a clearance lot round the back for the remainder of their unsold inventory.
Although the warning signal of a bust dealership was there, I figured there was no harm looking around and walked round the back of the building and through the gates to see an array of their best-selling models at rock-bottom prices parked beside a single beat-up shitpile of a car with no price on it. I figured it belonged to the slick salesman who walked up and introduced himself.
"Hey there, I'm George, although my many satisfied customers tell me I should change it to Saint George cause my deals are just so good. What are you looking for my friend?"
I'm just browsing.
"Browsing, there's no such thing as browsing when it comes to buying a car, you need to feel the car beneath you, try it out. You look like the kind of guy who... no... nevermind."
What? Go on...
"Well I was just looking you over and you don't look like the kind of guy who'd want a regular car, identical to thousands of others driven by thousands of other people. You look like someone who wants something unique."
How very astute of you. What do you have?
"Right here my friend, is a custom job." He indicated the shitepile. "It might not look like much, but... and I say this as a devout Christian who has never had anything to do with the occult, this car is possessed."
Possessed. Like in Christine?
"Exactly, exactly like in Christine. Only its a compact, not a classic, which makes it easier to park and less likely to be stolen. Also, you've got the next best thing to cruise control and power steering."
Let me guess, poltergeists in the steering column.
"You read my mind. Ectoplasm in the shocks too, and I tell you what, who needs a horn when you've got the tortured banshee wails of lost souls clearing a path for you?"
Sounds too good to be true. Can I get it resprayed?
"That's not a paintjob my friend, that's blood and ichor directly splashed onto the metalwork. The seats are upholstered in human skin too, heated from beneath, wipe clean too."
I don't know whether to take it for a test drive or to a consecration derby. Does it have cup holders?
"What demonically-possessed second-hand car wouldn't have cup holders? It might only have two seats, but its got six cup holders."
I'm interested. How much?
"Lets not talk price, just sign here and let that detail take care of itself."
Cleavage
I was riding into work this morning on the top deck of the bus. I love the bus. I used to take the Tube to work despite the detour it took because I was living in London and damnit I was going to take the Tube to work, until it became apparent that the bus was direct door to door, half the price, and I was guaranteed a seat all the way. This morning I had another good reason for taking the bus.
"Are you looking down my top?"
No, of course not. I was reading your copy of The Financial Times.
"You're sure you weren't looking down my top?"
I promise you, I was reading the article about the disgraced CEO being exonerated by the Securities and Exchanges Commission from any wrongful doings.
She folded the peach pages down into her lap like an origami master and gave me a squinchy-faced look.
"That could be any page of any edition of the FT, that doesn't mean anything. Look, if you want to see them then just say so, otherwise quit looking."
I have no interest in seeing the curves of your chest at all, I assure you.
The bus continued its jilted stop-start progression through the streets of Northern London and my eyes wandered again.
"Look, I can see the reflection of your eyes in the window, you're checking my puppies out! My milk-pillows, my bazookas, my mammary glands!"
You're insane; I'm reading the legal brief you're holding in your hands! Shall I move to another seat? Is that what you want?
I looked around the bus and everyone looked right back. There were no empty seats.
"Just admit it, just admit you're gagging to see them, you're consumed by this desire to watch them and imagine what it would be like to touch them. Admit it, you'll feel so much better about it!"
I've seen plenty of breasts in my life, yours are nothing special.
"Nothing special? Nothing... how dare you! I'll have you know that these breasts have been passed down from generation to generation. My mother was a stripper, renown for her firm yet svelte bosom. My grandmother was a nursemaid in high demand with the richest echelons of the London gentry. These are the pinnacle of breast evolution! See?!"
She pulled the neckline of her top out and away, displaying in all their glory her beautiful fleshy melons. She gave them a jiggle and they trembled like kittens in a meat locker. With a single kick of her leg she pivoted into a straddling position over my lap and hefted her breasts in her hands.
"Go on, admit it. Admit it!"
Madam, I'd appreciate it if you'd kindly refrain from displaying yourself in such an overt fashion. This is public transport, not ladies night at Stringfellows. I don't want to look at your breasts, I was simply engrossed in the legal document you were looking over and before that I was catching up on what's going on in the world of finance.
"oh. I see. Well fine then."
She climbed off me at that point and I knew that my ruse had been successful. Heh.
Leporidoxurus Hermaphroditus
I was going to start this post with "I had a friend called Rob who" when I realised that to call him my friend would imply that I liked him. I didn't. So instead I'm going to start it with "I knew a guy called Rob" and work on from there.
I knew this guy called Rob. I met him when I was working as an assistant in a pet store. He'd come in every few days and buy as many rabbits as we had. We never could work out what he was doing with them, but like clockwork he was getting through about five dozen a month. We were constantly having to apologise to mothers and kids that we had no fluffy-wuffy bunny-wunnies available and would they like a chinchilla or kitten instead?
Fiona (who incidentally lasted three weeks before she was taken to hospital with an iguana hooked to her bellybutton piercing) was convinced he was experimenting on them or sticking them up his ass. We couldn't work out why he wasn't just breeding them to replenish his own stocks instead of continuously buying new ones. He always paid in cash though, crisp twenties and fifties.
I had quit the job but was still living in the neighbourhood when I had to collect a package from the post office one morning. Standing in the line ahead of me was Rob, hopping from foot to foot, clutching at a delivery slip. When he stepped up the counter he tapped his fingers on the countertop and jiggled his feet one at a time like they were wet or something. He was a mess and looked like he hadn't slept in weeks.
The clerk came back with an enormous wooden packing crate on a trolley and dumped it in front of Rob who had no idea what to do next. The crate was obviously too big for him to lift on his own and when he saw me his hollowed, dark eyes lit up.
"Buddy, I'll pay you �500 to help me get this crate back to my flat"
Not only was this too good an opportunity to pass up but it would answer the question of what the hell Rob had been doing with all the bunnies for the past six months. I forgot all about my own package and we hefted the box between us the three blocks back to his top-floor flat. The stairs almost killed us.
Gasping and panting as we arrived at his front door I stepped into a room that looked decidedly normal. Looking around I couldn't find anything wrong with the place until I stopped looking and started listening. The room was on the top floor, but there was a constant pitter-patter of tiny feet coming from the attic space. Rob reached for a crowbar and from the murderous sleep-deprived look on his face I thought he was going to cave my head in, but instead he hooked the claw into the crate and prised the lid open.
Inside were sacks of ripe Sumatran coffee cherries, red as a hooker's lips.
Rob pulled on a hockey mask and full helmet before leaping atop an identical but empty crate I had mistaken for a table. I passed him one of the sacks of cherries and he lifted the hatch in the ceiling to the attic space. Instantly there was a frenzied flash of fur and a flurry of furry attackers smacked Rob in the face and head as he threw handfuls of the Sumatran coffee cherries into the attic. The bundles of white fur continued to bounce harmlessly, however energetically, off his protective gear until he'd spread the entire contents of the sack throughout the loft space and closed the hatch.
Like a man who's just run a marathon Rob crumbled into a hunched over position of utter exhaustion as he sat on the empty crate.
"I can't keep this up man, I just can't. They never stop until they're dead. Only then can I harvest them."
My expression of abject horror and utter shock must have prompted him to explain further.
"Have you ever heard of Kopi Luwak? It's a kind of coffee made from beans digested and excreted by the Indonesian mongoose. Only I discovered that regular rabbits did just as good a job for a fraction of the price. The problem is that the rabbits aren't immune to the effects of the caffeine and they end up almost homicidal.
I've been harvesting the excretions only after all of the bunnies have suffered crippling strokes or brain embolisms from caffeine overdosing, bagging it up to preserve the freshness and selling it to London coffee houses for �100 a bag. I'm turning 1000% profit on this. But I can't keep this up alone; I need help. I'll split the profits with you 70/30 if you help me..."
As he made his offer I watched him from the corner of my eye as he dragged the shredded fingernails of his left hand across his right wrist in an unconscious suicidal impulse and I knew that very soon Rob would be dead and I would be able to take over the entire operation.
As Needs Arise
My contract includes the clause your role may include further duties as needs arise which is a simple and effective way of dumping problems on someone and telling them it is now part of their job despite the fact that the job description never made any mention of hand rearing your boss's collection of rabid weasels whilst fetching coffee and dry-cleaning and continuously fanning them with a fresh palm leaf.
Fortunately they're not taking advantage of me to that extent here, however the incident related below was delegated unto me because I have four seasons worth of CSI on DVD at home and I'm a bit of a science geek at heart. Plus I love a good mystery, such as the eternal one of "why are the girls I'm interested in never interested in me?" (as an aside, if you are interested in me, let me know, cause it could just be that I'm blithely oblivious and that's the answer to the mystery)
The timeline of the incident was the first thing to be established, based on eyewitnesses and aural testimony.
Seconds Out
My boxing promoter called me up last week and told me that Monday night was going to be a fight night. An exhibition match had been organised and as the holder of the Northern Hemisphere Junior Scrawny-chickenweight Title I was being hotly tipped for the main event. Hollinger, my promoter, explained that the point of the exhibition match would be to give the bookies a chance of working out the odds for the next title fight. For the first time in two years there was a new challenger and I wouldn't have to go through the three-ring circus of fighting myself sixteen times to hold onto my title.
For the purposes of the event though it would be the same old routine. Fighting myself was now as commonplace as tying my shoelaces and just as mentally challenging. I'd been in counselling for a few months to assuage any fears the punters might have that my resolve was perhaps weakening against my determination.
I sat on the wooden bench, psyching myself up. It was a shared locker room as the events hall was fairly small and by invitation only. In he walked; my new rival for this season, Luigi Guisti. A spry Italian, bony and lanky, he had limbs like Twiglets wrapped in swathes of pink silk and the most ridiculous glistening slug moustache and thick black Groucho Marx eyebrows I was convinced were painted on.
He grunted in my direction to at least signal that he was aware of my presence, perhaps as a mark of respect for my achievements over the last two years, and the accomplishment of being able to knock myself out and still stay standing to be declared the winner. His eyes searched every corner of the room and he shifted on the bench as though the wood was burning his skin through his shorts before there was a muffled announcement and he ducked out into the corridor leading to the ring.
Hollinger came in and sat next to me.
"Kid," he drawled around the fat cigar he always chewed on without ever lighting "you've got nothing to worry about. This guy may look tough (he didn't) and he may have a 100% hit accuracy (he did?) but you've got this made. All you have to do is aim the punches away from you and he'll go down."
I leaned forward, my brow furrowed with this realisation that for the first time since becoming a boxer I might have to hit someone other than myself.
"I dunno Holly, he looked about as mad as a sack of weasels in a Joan Collins bubble bath."
"A what in a where with a who now?"
"Exactly"
"Kid, this guy is an underground boxer, he's been practicing in a room with a single light bulb against a stuffed bag. Come on, I'll show you why you'll have no problems."
He put an arm round my shoulder and led me out of the room; we walked down the corridor towards the roar of the crowd. The sound of several hundred bookies and professionals all shouting at once, all jeering and taunting. There in the middle of the ring, floodlit from above was Luigi, staring gormlessly down at the canvas, bereft of an opponent.
"You see kid? He's a professional shadow boxer."
Bully For You
I spent Friday evening at Waterstones on the corner of Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street behind a small display of copies of my latest published collection of short stories Its Behind You!. The signing was an impromptu favour to the manager of the store who was foolish enough to order twenty copies due to overwhelming interest in the book; a variety of e-mails, hand-written letters, phone calls, telegrams and a hand-reared carrier pigeon sent from Ark Royal.
Two hours in and my hand was cramping up from lack of use as I twirled the beautiful fountain pen the store brings out for such occasions around my fingers when a dog-eared and worn copy of my last book, Limitless Internet Prawn, was thrown down onto the desk in front of me.
"I'm sorry sir, I'm only signing copies of my new book" I held a copy aloft and posed in a manner reminiscent of old Pepsi commercials, only my teeth didn't cause a whiteout and blind the poor bastard.
"You don't remember me, do you?" there was an intensity behind his eyes that reminded me of wildlife programs where the lioness looks at the cameraman and estimates if he's worth the effort after that big juicy antelope she's just eaten.
"Sorry, can't say I do, but you're obviously a fan."
"Stark"
It wasn't a statement. It was the full frontal assault of childhood memory.
"You used to beat me up after school! How are you?"
"Can't complain. Well, actually, I can... I've read all three of your books now and not once have you mentioned me."
He drew his thumb across the side of the book, causing the pages to flicker past like a riffled deck of cards, there was the fwip sound and my eyes watched the page numbers flash past on a countdown to the acknowledgements at the start.
"See? You thank your parents, you thank your ex, and you thank Mark and Steph for many drunken nights of drunkenness. You even have a thank you to someone I'm sure is an anagram of your muse. But where am I?"
"Why in God's name would I thank you?"
"Your writing belies a passive aggressive nature brought about by years of suppressing your emotions. Bubbling under frustration has been distilled into the cynicism you view the world with and its all because I bullied you in school."
The store manager walked over to see why the only person to approach the signing table all evening was now having an argument with me. He arrived just in time to hear me disputing Stark's claims.
"...parents divorced and we were living in a council-owned flat. Afterwards there were all the medical problems and the head scans for my migraines. I was awkward around girls, albeit very popular with them because I could make them laugh. I used humour as my defence mechanism and I was always able to entertain people. Its not right to think that just because you bullied me for the first ten years of my life that I owe you anything."
Stark remained unconvinced. He nipped over to the Science section and scanned the spines before removing a reference book and dumping it on the table.
"Open it to the acknowledgments page"
I did so, lifting back the hard-back cover and flipping through the credits. As I did so I recognised the author's name as someone I had also been to school with.
There before the introduction to Quantifying Quantum Lattices and Matrixes by Dermot Walker was a single line acknowledgement; To Stark, who's the loser now?
"What have you got to say about that?"
"I dunno, is the book any good?"