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.
Gone Quiet
I could claim to be hunting wabbits, but the truth is that there's too much going on in meatspace and I haven't the time to write it all down. Also there's the etiquette to consider when your ex-partner is also prevalent in the online world and read by a similar audience. I don't want to be stepping on any toes here.
Suffice to say there's a lot of change going on behind the scenes and when they all come through for me and I can unclench maybe I'll start writing about them. And don't try telling me there's no audience out there, I know there's at least one of you, you finished the milk. In the meantime excuse me, I have to make an important phonecall or thirty.
Hypocritica
I sat and watched a program this evening called "The Bank of Mum & Dad" about a thirty-something guy who has racked up over £100,000 of debts and is living off credit and his parent's goodwill.
I sneered at the pitiful bastard and called him every name I could imagine.
When the program was over I came online and ordered four DVD boxed sets I've been meaning to get this past month but couldn't afford to until tonight.
I'm not an addict, it's cool. I just need more shelf-space now.
Fag Hag Inc.
Tricia had a special skill. I first discovered it when I met Arthur and his best friend John. John was one of those guys you spot in the background because you hang in the same circles but he never joins in. John was most definitely gay. Gayer than a big happy pink puppy with paws that bent both ways in a field full of pink toilet paper and pot pourri. Or at least that had always been my impression of him until I met Tricia.
She was all over John the first time I saw her, they were trading saliva like it was the hottest commodity on the market. He had his hand up her skirt and his body pressed right up against her, I was mostly shocked and just a little bit jealous with a smidgeon of suspicion thrown into the mix. Arthur stood beside me at the bar and just shook his head like "Dude, the guy's a chick-magnet" and I'd was stuck wondering what John's secret was.
I took my chance when John and Arthur went to the restroom. Somehow John would always follow after Arthur when Arthur needed to take a piss, weirdest thing really.
"So come on, what's the story?" I said, confronting her.
"I don't know what you mean" she tried, but I was now even more convinced.
"Look, you're some sort of fag-hag or something right? Cause John's more bent than Yuri Geller's cutlery drawer, somehow only Arthur doesn't see it."
"Okay fine, but don't tell Arthur this..."
Tricia proceeded to explain the range of services she provided for gay men looking to impress their straight friends and pass as straight themselves. From basic breathy phonecalls left on answering machines for friends to "overhear" to lingerie tucked down the back of the couch for flatmates to find, Tricia would also offer the premium service of taking the guy out and flaunting herself in front of them as the girlfriend every red-blooded guy wants cementing them as the luckiest guy they all know.
"Do you do straight guys too?" I asked as innocently as possible.
"Good God no! That would make me a prostitute!"
Flat Hunter
"Hey there is that D?"
Speaking.
"Hey buddy, its Warren, you came to see our place on Abbey."
I remember. Nice place.
"Yeah well look, we've got a problem. we rated everyone out of ten, tallied up the scores between us and you tied for top with another applicant for the room."
I see.
"Yeah, and we were wondering if you'd consider coming back..."
Sure thing, for another interview?
"No, no, nothing like that. We figure if you want it you'll fight the other guy topless in mud for it, right? That's the girls' one and only condition."
...
On The Pull
You take a breath and hold it, then close your eyes. You endure a few moments of imbalance with your head struggling to determine up from down, left from right, forward from backwards. Your own personal gyroscope has the pitch the roll and the yaw all fucked up. You open your eyes, let the breath out and she's still there across the bar from you. You're dizzy already.
Your cheeks have flushed with blood and they tingle to the touch, you press the cool glass of beer against them and you imagine you can almost feel your whole skull cooling down, transferring the heat through the magic of thermodynamics. Heat dissipates, that's the law, and heat wants everything else to be hot too, to the point of vanishing into thin air. You feel too hot.
She's looking again so you try to be nonchalant. You lean against the bar top and feel the spilled beer soak into your shirt sleeve. Very nonchalantly you slide your arm off the bar top and splash beer dregs down your trousers. The Fonz learned everything from you obviously. She wasn't looking at your arm though; she was staring intently at your eyes. Maybe you have something on your face.
You disappear off to the men's room, talking yourself down in the mirror. If she's still there when you go back you'll talk to her, only then. God you feel pathetic, you were five pints in when she appeared out of nowhere and now you're having trouble thinking of a single line to open with. The polar bear one? The pickle one? No, no, the one about the rabbits and the mirror ball, that one almost worked last time.
So you stroll out of the men’s room. You're in complete control of at least three of your limbs at any one time and your brain has almost got a handle on the opener with the bunny disco... no wait, that's not it, its a hare and he's dancing like Travolta and he says... no, that's a different joke, the line is...
"Hi" she says and gives you a smile, a flicker of eyelashes and the most painful immediate erection since you were thirteen and Laurie Jordanova let you cop a feel.
You open your mouth to say something, but only one thing comes out. Well, lots of things, but part of a common theme and the theme is regurgitation.
The End Of Suffering
I suppose one of the plus sides to being single now is that if I fancy take-out I can order it on a whim. Or on a phone. Phones work just as good as whims. Last night was such a night as ever a night there was for I wanted beer and pizza and trashy mid-week television (thank you Channel 4 for NY-LON).
I live in a block with a mailroom. To get to the mailroom you have to type in a four digit code to first get into the building, you then have to get past the porter's desk which is manned 24/7. Somehow the junk mailers still manage to get in there and slip their fliers into our mailboxes. I imagine the porters chase them out of there with brooms, or maybe flamethrowers, flamethrowers would be more exciting and satisfying. As such there is the occasional pizza flier, but never a charred corpse.
Dialing the number without really looking properly the other end picked up before I even heard the first ring.
"You are suffering."
Uh. I'm suffering from sore feet and a need for pizza.
"The cause of your suffering is a craving for pizza."
You got it. I'd like to order a...
"Truth and Enlightenment shall be forthcoming."
I was hoping for meat feast.
"You shall be left neither wanting nor overindulged."
Then the line went dead. I checked the readout and it appeared that I had phoned the wrong number so I started dialing the pizza place again but before I could push 'connect' the lobby phone buzzed. I wasn't expecting anyone.
Hello?
"Pizza, dude."
What kind?
"The one you just ordered."
Sure, come on up.
I buzzed him in and soon after he arrived at the front door.
"Here you go, that'll be three smiles to people having bad days, a £5 donation to charity and a promise to help a friend in need."
I beg your pardon?
"Zen Pizza, dude. Paid for with good karma."
I tried giving him a smile but he was having a good day, content with his lot. So instead I checked the pizza.
Hey, this isn't meat feast.
"It was meant to be. Aw dude, we made you one with everything."
Lobster, Tiger, Lizard
We were in the boardroom; one from senior management, two from technical production, an engineer and me, with an external vendor trying to convince us that we needed his product at the price he expected us to pay. We were overstacked on our side I'll admit, and we didn't convey the epitome of cohesion somehow. Blood was in the water and the vendor could smell it. He had pencilled a few "additions" to the deal that none of us were happy about and it seemed that every time one of the production boys said something he would add a mythical feature to the product.
We had bartered everything down to two possible outcomes, one where we got everything we wanted for an exorbitant price and another where we got most of what we wanted at a price we could accept.
That was until I stuck my fist out in front of me across the boardroom table.
"Best of three. If we win then we get your product at our price and free tech support for the duration of the contract. We lose, we pay you whatever you want for a cut-down version and no tech support."
He didn't answer, he simply put his fist out in front of him.
One, two, three. Both came up scissors.
And that was just the start.
One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three.
Half an hour in I had won my first round with a cunning psyche-out after matching him scissors for scissors, rocks for rocks, paper for paper throughout. The odds hadn't been in my favor as it seemed he was leading me on a series of bluffs and double-bluffs, but always keeping pace and never breaking the stare. We would take a few seconds between bouts to remoisten our eyes with furious blinking.
One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three.
Three hours later we were at one apiece after he had made a controversial move that we had to check the security cameras before agreeing that he hadn't in fact switched from paper to scissors in a split-second response to an unexpected three-in-a-row paper from me. I wasn't happy about it, but the decision came from the senior manager.
One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three.
By this time everyone else in the office had either gone home or was gathered outside the plate glass wall to the boardroom, watching the furious parry-riposte as we matched each other time and time again like a man playing against his reflection.
One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three.
My arm muscles were cramped up and felt like they were made of lead, my eyes were swelling and my cheeks felt puffy and warm. My concentration levels had unbalanced the chemistry in my brain to the point that I was borderline hallucinating and convinced I was somehow telepathically influencing my opponent.
One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three.
Perhaps I imagined it, perhaps it really happened, I can never know for sure even in hindsight because the manager vehemently denied it forever after but I could have sworn I heard him whispering to me; whispering a decisive plan that would propel me up through the echelons of the company to the highest inner cadre. In a moment it would become action.
One, two, three, I slammed my right hand on the table, fingers splayed out in a wide fan and my left hand came crashing down holding the product specifications bible by the spine, leading edge down. The blunt corner of the binder sliced through my right pointer finger at the first knuckle, brutally bludgeoning through flesh and bone until the entire digit rolled with a tiny spurt of blood to rest under the outstretched closed fist of the vendor and the horrified gaze of all present.
"Stick...
Of...
Dynamite"
The Other Fella
When sitting in a beer garden with a friend and you recognise the guy across the other side from you with a friend of his own and you make visual contact without remembering his name and you start to tell the funny story relating to this person to your friend because you've just realised this guy is doing the same with his friend, is there a word for the resultant outburst of laughter from the respective friends and is it a good sign that my friend laughed longer and harder than his?
Punchline
We're sat in a hide at the edge of a Siberian forest when Sir Ranulph breaks the chilly silence of the early evening. It's not so much the way he says it as the fact he says anything at all that surprises me. We've spent days trudging through blizzards and icy fellfields sharing only the odd comment and I had become accustomed to being alone with my thoughts. His hostility to the entire endeavor is understandable, he didn't believe that the Acerbia Alpina tiger moth still existed, until now.
"There it is."
Imperceptably he lifts the field glasses to his eyes before passing them over to me in one smooth motion.
"Yes, that's it exactly, the wing markings match the diagrams from the Lepidopterorum Catalogus. I think we've managed to rediscover an otherwise extinct species, Sir. More importantly I'll be able to file my report with the British Museum meet my deadline."
"I met a deadline once." Sir Ranulph says whilst looking wistfully to the horizon.
"Oh?"
"Yes, I hit it with my Land Rover in the desert."
My Father's Shadow
We trudge onwards forever lost in the snow, uncertain as to direction or pace, distance or destination. I have become entirely dependent on Sir Ranulph's internal compass and clock. He assured me this morning that by nightfall we would be close to the last known breeding grounds of the Acerbia Alpina; the Siberian tiger moth it had seemed like such an enchanting idea to capture and write about.
"Keep up, son," he doesn't even look round to see me falling behind.
The word burns into my skull in this desolate land of eternal white light and the paradoxical complete absence of warmth. Sun. Son. A bond that ties tighter than most but cuts deeper than others. I drift back to pop-culture philosophy from my favourite author, Chuck Palahniuk;
"What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God. [...] And if you never know your father, if your father bails out and dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God?
What you end up doing is you spend your life searching for your father and God.
What you have to consider is the possibility that God doesn't like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that could happen."
And what if it turns out that your father neither hates nor loves you, but regards you from a detached perspective. A failed venture he embarked upon with a woman he couldn't get along with, does that brand me a failure? Does his failure tarnish my chances of being a good father? When it comes down to the bonsai-child rearing test will I make as big a mess as he did? I know I'll want children one day, but will they want me?
It would probably be easier to rediscover an ancient lost city than to get fatherhood pinpoint perfect and I was lucky enough that another man came along to take up the mantle otherwise my headstrong mother would have been the only father-figure in my life.
And yet when I say or do certain things, react in a given way to a new situation, I can feel the influence of my father through some distant genetic teleoperation as if his shadow is encoded into my very being. I have his acerbic cynicism and a variety of his gestures and mannerisms. And yet I'm probably spent less than six months of my life in his presence all told.
I think of Denis Leary aping celebrities from dysfunctional families and wailing "Well you know, I became an alcoholic because my parents didn't love me enough. [...] And I went into hypnosis and therapy and I found out that my parents used to hit me." Whereas if anything, my strong sense of independence has grown from my family dysfunction; an empirical conclusion that ultimately you can only rely upon yourself.
There is a flicker at the corner of my vision and I spin to face it, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Acerbia Alpina, but it is just a stark black skeletal twig protruding from a snow bank, trembling in the wind. As I turn back to the path my companion has chosen I notice that in this bleak world of reflections I cast no shadows.
Explorers Club
A brief respite in the blizzard and I find myself sitting across from Sir Ranulph in our tent. I want to ask him about his seven marathons on seven continents in seven days, about his OBE, about his family, but to conserve what little energy I have I stay silent. He is intent on melting some snow down for fresh water; this is still just a daytrip to him. I feel so unfit when I look at this sixty-year-old man and yet he thinks nothing of it. Searching the Siberian hinterlands for a tiger moth that is surely extinct by now is his idea of fun.
"You've got your skills, and I've got mine," he grumbles through a beard flecked with white patches and frozen patches. "Every human is good for something."
I blink once and the blink becomes a nap, the nap becomes a deep sleep until Captain Robert Scott shakes me awake. Across from me sit three other men, all bundled up like babies in romper suits and all sporting the same patchy frostbitten face as Scott.
"You nodded off there, best to stay awake."
I rub at my eyes despite the sting of raw flesh but cannot cause the scene to appear in anything but black and white. Have I become colour-blind somehow? Or is it perhaps that I have only ever seen black and white photographs of these men before.
"Does anyone fancy going for a walk? Lawrence?" one of them asks the group, looking specifically at one other member.
"Why don't you just shut up Edward," replies Lawrence, wincing slightly as he shifts his weight onto his good leg.
Their conversation rings in my ears and I mentally block it all out, straining the muscles around my head, looking for focus. We are all explorers, constantly seeking something, striving forwards to a goal that is clearly defined and taxing to achieve. Nobody could feel accomplishment over something that was easy. I've heard it said by certain American soldiers that there are two ways to go about doing something; the easy way and the British way.
I think back over prizes, awards, rankings and grades from my life. There was a turning point in my early teens when I went from being a consummate slacker to an overachiever that nobody liked. It became obvious to me that I had the capabilities as those who had come before me; all that was required was focus.
A samurai called upon to execute a criminal was warned by the criminal that he would return to haunt the samurai with his last dying thought. The samurai told him that to prove his conviction he should bite the samurai's foot upon being beheaded. The sword fell, as did the severed head, and the onlookers watched as the criminal's teeth clamped around the samurai's foot.
When asked if he was not now terrified that he would be haunted for the rest of his days the samurai replied that the criminal's last dying thought had no longer been to haunt him but to bite him. A short-term pain to avoid a longer, more prolonged torment. You sacrifice the finger to save the hand, the hand to save the arm, the arm to save your life. Sacrifices to justify achievements, what you leave behind and what you gain.
I phase back in for a moment to see Edward and Henry pushing Lawrence towards the opening of the tent despite his protests, telling him that its lovely weather outside and he really would enjoy the supreme sacrifice of a long, long walk in the deep, deep snow. Robert Falcon Scott turns to me and says something that makes sense that I forget immediately, then like a thunderclap I'm back in living colour, with Sir Ranulph watching me.
"Where did you go?" he asks and I understand implicitly that he doesn't mean physically.
"I saw the last moments of Lawrence Oates."
"The supreme sacrifice," the old boy from Eton smirks through his beard "what a load of tripe. There is nothing worth giving your life for, it�s all about survival. I have Scott's final biscuit, bought it in an auction. Foolish man."
I begin to wonder if the Acerbia Alpina is worth the effort.
A La Recherche D'Acerbia
We lost the satellite GPS uplink in the first few days of the blizzard. When I say lost of course I mean Sir Ranulph dashed the handset on a rock before stamping on the thin circuit boards and shattering them beyond use. He then picked up the AA batteries and threw them far out into the whiteout where they sank without a trace in the soft blanketing layer of snow. He reminded me of Quint in Jaws.
"We don't need any chuffing GPS" he says in his distinctly upper-crust, yet man-of-the-world accent. Who am I to argue with the man? I'm simply an observer to this whole expedition to find the rarest of tiger moths, a 19th century anachronism in the Siberian steppes: the Acerbia Alpina.
"Could we not just have switched it off? What if we need it on the way back."
"You make one more complaint sonny and I'm turning this expedition round and we're going straight back to Britain. No knighthood, no celebrity dinner at the British Museum, no Parkinson and no sodding 19th century tiger moth."
When you're caught in a blizzard, with the wind pummelling your face, chilling your skull and cooling the thought process you find you think clearer. You're on the brink of hypothermia, the knife-edge of death and there is a simple, almost tangible sense of black and white. Black is death, white is life. You try not to close your eyes too often despite the prickling syringes of sleet, just to reassure yourself that you're still alive.
If there is a hell then this is the Earthly opposite, a bleak and empty place where you lose all sensation. You are pure consciousness, devoid of senses in a place where there is nothing to focus your thoughts on. I find myself reminded of Harlan Ellison's short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream where the narrator is kept alive by an AI that subjects him to sadistic tortures before transforming him into a gelatinous blob in order to prevent him from committing suicide.
Here in my head I construct a personal timeline. I count backwards through the years, marking off summers mentally but visualizing the winters without any trouble. I was born in one of the coldest winters in Scotland for a long time and my temperament always showed as much. Working my way through fifteen years of education and one year of national service I see faces of friends, rivals, teachers and officers. I think of my time in college, one of the happiest times of self-discovery, living under my own authority.
I try to flex my fingers within the waterproof Goretex gloves but they don't respond. The accusations of people in my past rise to the surface of the bubbling mental bouillabaisse in my head and I hear them muffled through the howling blizzard.
"Anti-social", "Insubordinate", "Immature", "Cold and calculating", "Unemotional"
Feedback and abuse internalised for years, given a voice as I trudge through the blinding snow, with only the silhouette of my hero for company. I feel a tear duct swell in an attempt to generate a solitary tear but the wind-chill robs me of that singular drop of penitence. My conviction that we'll ever find the Acerbia Alpina falters for the first time.
Pause For Breath
Christ I've been writing this site for a long time.
Maybe I should have been doing something more constructive with all of that free time, eh?
Olé
For the longest time now I've had a love/hate relationship with coffee. Those of you who know about this already should skip to the end where I promise to include something about monkeys.
Coffee can pretty much be used as a default drink for any situation. Meetings, dates, dinners, Sunday afternoons with the in-laws, brothels (I assume) and everyone likes coffee. If they don't like coffee then they can customise their coffee to suit their tastes. Blueberry and chocolate mochalpacino with froth and cream is very popular these days because people are subjected to a ridiculous variety of equal choices. Of course, this is the same reason long-term relationships crumble and fall, but lets not blame Starbucks for absolutely everything thats wrong with the world.
I love coffee. I especially love fruity chocochinos, and lets be sure we understand that I'm talking about coffee here and not foreign rentboys. The problem is that not every organ in my body has been given the memo.
Heart: Wow, do I love chocochinos.
Brain: Its seems self-evident and logical to like them.
Tongue: Gimme more! Let me slurp it all up!
Stomach: Did somebody say something important? I'm sure if I was meant to have heard that somebody would have made it clear to me. Feed me.
Yep, coffee gives me serious digestive problems, maybe there's some bizarre previously undiscovered stomach acid variant inside of me that when mixed with coffee becomes a noxious biohazardous lethal gas. As if the ethereal caffeine-tinged death-clouds weren't bad enough, I also suffer excrutiating stomach cramps and sweat like a transvestite in a Jerry Springer studio audience.
So don't drink the coffee D says my Greek tragedy chorusline.
Well I wouldn't and normally I don't. Sometimes I do and I remember pretty quick after a few sips why I shouldn't drink coffee and I get a Coke instead but sometimes there simply is no choice, shikata na gai as the issei would say. Like for instance the two-day conference I attended this week which had me drowsy and dropping off by the first afternoon. I couldn't get a Coke or other caffeinated soft drink so I had to drink what was available; water or coffee.
Sitting at a long table with the key players in a global company and there I am fully alert and awake now, but during quiet moments my belly would make a noise like a rutting rhino and I was mopping at my brow furiously with a bandana and clenching for all I was worth. Not the best body language to display, I promise you.
I survived the conference, in fact I even enjoyed it, but not nearly as much as that one long and loud killer cloud once I was free and clear in the streets of London again at the end of the first day where, lets face it, nobody can tell the difference.
And finally, you don't know me very well if you really expected me to give out free entertainment regarding monkeys now, do you?
Furiously Fast
My foot is flat to the floor but there's one more gear to go. I pop the clutch when the rpm's hit the sweet spot and the car glides into fifth like it had always been its intention to. The engine's growl rises almost to a roar and I look over to see Cabot fiddling with the safety catch of his seatbelt.
"This is a really dumb idea you know."
He shoots me a look that says he's beyond reasoning with. The corner up ahead calls for a downshift and I tap-dance like a pro, the skill going completely unnoticed by my passenger, steeped in his boiling rage. The inertia pulls at us like a wanton lover as I take the corner at dangerously high speed and we're quickly back up to full speed.
"That's them, there."
Cabot has one finger pointing ahead like an alert sniffer dog, he's spotted the other car two lanes over and a short distance ahead. I tell myself we can catch it. They were lucky at the lights, thats all. It was luck. My feet didn't hit the pedals, I skipped a gear, I've been feeling a little off lately, the engine needs retuned.
We draw up alongside them a few interminable seconds later and Cabot opens his window. The drag from the bastardised airflow makes the steering less responsive and I gape incredulously as Cabot raises his arm inside the car. He lunges at the open window, hurling his strawberry milkshake in a cramped overarm throw. There's an explosion of pink thick shake across their windshield and the other car swerves in towards us, drawn into the slipstream.
This was a really dumb idea.