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.
El Armpito
My morning has been dictated by the interference of others. For some reason I just haven't been "on the ball". Everyone else is working at 45 rpm and I'm stuck on 33.
I was early at the bust stop, but the bus arrived eight minutes later. I had no change so I had to get off and get some, the next bus was packed with little schoolgirls all crowding the lower deck and making it impossible to get upstairs. I got off early to take the Tube and the Tube was packed. I changed lines and ended up standing next to a guy who smelled like he was sweating out a cheese casserole, I still have the stink in my nostrils even now and I'm worried I've somehow been infected.
I wish there were a way to stamp the back of people's heads with "bimbling points". Like people needed a license to be a Londoner. Dithering at the entrance to a Tube station? SMACK! Two points off your license. Standing in the middle of the escalator? SMACK! One point. Blocking the way out of the train because you're engrossed in some pastel-covered trashy secretarial novel and your iPod mini is blasting Beth Orton into your ears? SMACK! License revoked. Stinking like you're oozing Limburger cheese from every pore? Uh... just move along; I'm afraid to touch you.
The fun doesn't get any greater once I arrive at work however. Of an already heavy workload I am expected to be at a moment's beck and call of any number of blithering idiots who have failed to grasp the vaguest concepts of what this company does and how it acheives its goals. Maybe I'm the one at 45 rpm and everyone else is slowing down for Christmas. But then I'm the one writing a blog post instead of getting on with work...
Slumming It?
I'll never be a proper revolutionary. I'm far too comfortable as I am.
My girlfriend bites her tongue when it comes to highlighting the paradoxes in my life.
My favorite book is Fight Club, and yet I owned an Ikea coffee table for the longest time.
My favorite old band is the KLF and yet I get peeved when someone reuses my work without permission.
I have a coffee table book of Banksy artwork and yet I wear Nikes because army boots used to tear the skin off my heels.
My friends and lover are heavy body modders and yet I shirked at the idea of getting my ear pierced.
Do I represent the ultimate counter-culture hypocrite? Is the joke actually on me or is the joke on them because I understand what they're trying to say and yet Chuck Palahniuk, Alan Faulkner, Bill Drummond, and Banksy all make a living from their work, nobody can be expected to do it for free. Should I feel guilty that I agree with them and yet enjoy having money?
Instead of actually offering any sort of introspective soul-searching revelation I'll sidetrack the topic with a little anecdote. I know a white guy in Florida who drives a Lexus with the full options package. He likes to listen to his music loud but when he drives through certain neighborhoods he triggers the locks and makes sure the windows are up. The music of course is hardcore gangsta rap. Somehow I don't feel so bad when I think of that.
Deep Throat
Albert smacked his flat palm firmly against the area between my shoulder blades and I duly coughed up and expelled the mouthful of sandwich I had been choking on.
"Good God man, don't you chew?!"
I tried to explain through the tears and gasping that I had toothache.
"So chew on the other side."
More tears, more gasping to point out that the cold slices of ham and tomato made my entire mouth sensitive and I was avoiding chewing because the sharp electric pains in the jawline take away all enjoyment of a good ham and tomato sandwich.
"So go visit the dentist."
More mouth pain is just what I want at this moment as I clamor for air and my lungs dance around the insides of my torso in rapturous joy at being full of oxygen again.
"Well you should be going regularly anyway."
I gave Captain Stating The Fucking Obvious two thumbs up and a sneer as I dropped my head between my knees again.
"And what's that dark yellow paste?"
Either bile or mustard, I couldn't tell. And by that I mean I couldn't pronounce either word fully through the wheezing. It had tickled my throat anyway and caused me to choke in the first place.
"Well thats where you went wrong obviously man! What are you doing asking for English mustard? You wanted wholegrain."
Which of course made everything alright again.
Pearly Gates
"I don't want no part in this crazy love, I don't want no part" I warbled to myself into the thick glass tumbler I was drinking from. The surface of the JD and coke inside trembled and wavered with each lyric. The level in the glass was dropping rapidly as I tried to get myself drunk at a medium level. I wasn't exactly depressed but I felt the urge to slip into a mirthful coma was high on my list of priorities.
"This seat taken?"
"If it was... no wait... you're supposed to ask if its busy."
"Scuse me?" She said, sliding her curved ass up over the edge and settling it into the padded top of the stool before hooking her high-heel shod feet onto one of the stool supports.
"Ask if the stool is busy"
"... you mean it is?"
"No, no, no... its not, but ask if it is busy" My mind was slightly fluffy on the insides like I'd been used as a hoover for all the vague and loose ideas floating around the bar and I was having trouble remembering why it was so important that I get drunk.
She tilted her head sideways and affected a peevish voice, stressing the first word uttered "Is this seat busy?" Her voice went up at the end of the query as though she already knew the answer.
"If it was plaid it would be busy!" I gave her a massive shit-eating grin and applauded my wonderful display of free-form wit by clattering the tumbler repeatedly against the bartop. This was the pre-arranged signal with the barman for her to give me a terse look with pursed lips and then to come take my next order for the same again. Barwoman... whatever.
"That was terrible" said the woman occupying the seat next to me. Where did she come from?
"Things can only get better from here then. What'll you have?"
"Cosmopolitan please. Thanks" she blushed and looked down as she said her please and thank-you, I had no idea why.
"Barkeep, same again please and a Coslomopitan for Ms..." I faltered but kept up the pretense I needed to know her name before completing my drinks order. A cunning technique I'm sure you'll agree. I had to prompt her further with a raise of my eyebrows but she eventually relented and introduced herself.
"Land. Grace... Land."
She had to be shitting me.
Hibakusha tsuru
It might interest you to learn that at one point I was well on my way to being declared international origami under-18 champion of the world.
It started when I was little and I would occupy myself folding colored pieces of paper into planes and animals. I would dapple yellow card with brown paint and fold it into giraffes or speckle white on green and make jumping frogs. Frequently my mother or father would find that all their paper money had been transformed into characters for a storigami play I was in the process of telling and would have to hand over twenties shaped like people or tens shaped like bears.
Tragedy struck when I was fourteen though when a freak accident involving a brick of butter and a screen door chopped both my hands off at the wrists. There was only one compatible donor; a wisened old origami master from Japan who was adept in the ancient Egyptian and Chinese methods and would regularly fold his tatamis into giant sphinxes in his sleep. He heard of the accident and had his hands flown over especially.
Unfortunately the air freight company put the medical container beside a toxic drum of undisclosed origin and the hands took on a life of their own once they were attached to my stumpy wrists. I had overall control but my hands were diagnosed with Alien Hand Syndrome and accute personality disorder. This led to a flair and presentation style hitherto unseen in the origami championships with one hand scoring the folds to a paper dragonfly while the other would tuck and nip and pinch the corners into a perfectly crimped crenelated edge.
The British Origami Society hailed my valley folds as an act of unconventional genius and I could fold mathematically optimal polygons with my eyes closed.
As I say, I was well on my way to being the grand master of all paper-folding across the globe when one day short of my seventeenth birthday NASA knocked on my door and chopped off both my hands so they could be used to fold up solar sails for their satellites and I was left with a pair taken from a Floridian death row convict. Which could go some way towards explaining why they attacked each other recently.
Mano a mano
My left hand crept dexterously across the crisp white duvet, careful not to wake my beloved. My right arm was under her neck and embracing her close to me and my left moved ever closer as if to link with it. As my left hand got to within a palm span of my right it reared up and poked furiously at the soft fleshy palm of my right. This is when I got my first inkling that my left hand was becoming jealous of my right.
I've always been right-handed and its never been a problem for my left hand before, he just gets called in whenever something requires a two-handed approach. I assumed it was what was best for the left. I wear my watch on the right, I hold a fork with the right, I open doors using my right hand... and a door-handle... and sometimes a key if called for. If my hands were a ballroom dancing couple, the right would lead.
Increasing my left hand began muscling in on rightie territory; grabbing the change from my right pocket to pay for lunch, picking my right nostril, hitting the enter key on the keyboard. Eventually I relented and picked up a pen in my left hand.
"What do you want?" I asked it.
The resulting scrawl could have been egval cqpontnnly but I took it to be intended to mean "equal opportunity"
At first I tried to give it every opportunity to measure up to my right hand; letting it control the mouse during games of Battlefield and missing targets by a mile, using it to spoon soup towards my mouth before it would invariably pour it into my crotch, even taking over my nightly social agenda with unclimactic results.
My left hand became sullen and withdrawn, hiding inside my sleeves and refusing to come out or flipping off my right hand any time it tried to roll up my sleeve. Last night I awoke to find my left hand trying to choke the life out of my right and had to restrain it, however as the only way to restrain it was by using my right hand I fear I may have caused more damage to the fragile emotional state of my left.
What sinister machinations will my left come up with next? For the sanity of my right should I be telling my right hand what my left hand doeth?
Fondling My Muse
I'd just like my adoring public to know that my entire fee for contributing to this book went to the Retirement Home for Bloggers Who Were Awarded Lifetime Achievement Bloggies Before Their Time.
Oh, and cough.
Leader of the Pack
Its true that we did fire Josh up a bit and goaded him into it. We called him a "weak-o warrior" and a "pacifist fluffie". It was probably when Elspeth called him a "spoiled-little rich wannarchist" that Josh really blew his top. We disbanded that meeting of the Fifth Columnist's Project and all went out seperate ways at random intervals. Maria took a bus, I took the tube, Elspeth hitched a lift from a passing canal boat and Josh went directly to King's Cross station in a private car his father always kept waiting for him.
We didn't hear from Josh all week, he didn't respond to any of our text messages or show up for Maria's "Impeach Blair" bake-sale so it certainly seemed as if we'd managed to drive him away and stop his rich-boy whining dragging down our efforts to bring about a real social change through constant lobbying of various MP's assistants and our frequent protests outside Parliament (behind the barriers of course).
I was always the first to arrive at the meeting place above Kentish Town tube, but on this occasion the heating was already on, the four seats already folded down around the table and there on the table sat a huge object, covered with a British flag. I went to lift a corner of the flag and inspect the object when a raspy voice from the corner urged me not to. "Don't!" it sternly ordered.
In the shadows of our secret society meeting place was Josh, in black coveralls and a balaclava, mud smeared across him with occasional tears in the material showing blistered and cracked sores on his skin.
"Josh!" shrilled Maria as she and Elspeth arrived carelessly at the same time, "where have you been? You missed a monumental bake-sale, we raised £1.46 to add to the campaign to impea..."
Josh raised his hand to silence her. In a slow, deliberate, hoarse voice he began to explain where he had been. After our last meeting he had taken a train (first class of course) to Glasgow, then a taxi to the Faslane Royal Navy nuclear submarine base. With wire cutters and under cover of darkness he had penetrated the defences, evaded detection by the Comacchio Royal Marine Commando detachment patroling the base and slipped into the waters of the river Clyde.
Using an underwater oxy-acetylene torch he cut into the hull of one of the submarines awaiting refitting and made off with his booty. As he said booty he pulled back the Union Jack covered the object on the table. We were greeted to what looked like the hybrid offshoot of an espresso machine and an engine block. Glowing green fluid was leaking from cracks in some of the pipes and sizzling through the tablecloth.
"What is it?" asked Maria.
"Its the primary fuel injector and heat exchanger of a Trident submarine" replied Josh, scratching off several layers of crackling dead skin from around his eyes and exposing the raw supurating pink flesh beneath.
"Uh... those things are nuclear powered aren't they?" I asked.
"Oh Josh, I'm so proud!" said Elspeth as she embraced Josh.
So Josh was made leader of the group. I knew then that I'd have to do something jolly impressive to win back my rightful mantle...
Spiritual Theft
You don't realise your spirit animal has been kidnapped until you go looking for him on a day of angsty emotional turmoil only to discover he's not there. I hadn't seen him since he'd been convicted in the court of my mind for the brutal murder of Mr White. In a strange turnabout I had found myself making the occasional mental phonecall to try and cheer him up. Usually all I got was a dial tone though which can leave you with a headache.
In the desert sands of my psyche there was a half-buried brick with a note wrapped around it. The kidnappers had probably attempted to throw it through something fragile only to discover that there was nothing breakable in my head. Badly cut out words from stories in my head had been used to write the ransom note.
"If U ever want 2 C the runt Alive agaIn bring a moose Juice Cocktail 2 the Medulla Oblongata Coral"
Moose juice, if ever there was a clue as to who the kidnappers were that was it, very few aspects of my mind would want to inject themselves with the blend of oxytocin, phenylethylamine and acetylcholine. I filled a flask up with equal parts of the neurotransmitters and headed over to the multistables.
I saddled up and invited my inner monologue along for company to chronicle the journey and fight ahead. Aspects of my mind were obviously out of control and I would have to deal with them one way or another. As I rode out of town on the back of my trusty steed Motor Functions, my feminine side bid me goodbye and tried to explain to my inner child why I was heading off into the bleak wilderness of aphasia.
As we crossed the dusty plains wild Id roamed free, rutting and indulging their basic primal instincts every way they could. I became more and more anxious as the herds began to gravitate closer to me. I tossed a few visually ambiguous patterns their way to keep them occupied and spurred Motor Functions into impulse drive and on through the conscious landscape.
We crossed through the stream of consciousness and ascended to the supervenience plateau. I pulled my poncho round me tightly as memory clouds gathered and IQ points fell from the sky. I felt my sense of self waver as we pushed through the multifaceted fields of dendritic spines and finally reached the outskirts of Olivary Nuclei, last town before you leave this great state of Cerebellum. I dismounted and walked the rest of the way.
There, standing in the middle of the road just outside the Medulla Oblongata Coral was my Ego with a wry smirk on his face. Without giving him a chance to say anything I charged in with all synapses firing, I wanted my spirit animal back!
The Melancholy Death of Nobody
Why must I do this to myself? Why revel in the misery and make it worse? Listening to R.E.M. and Radiohead, each soaring chorus drawing out what I hope will be the last sigh of pain, what the French call a soupire. I'm dwelling in the heartache, positively wallowing in it like a pig in shit. Nobody has ever experienced such utter dejection as I do right now, I won't allow it. This is the end of a relationship to end all end of relationships.
I'd like to thank the Academy for recognising this death aria as the only story I had within me worth telling. She was my moon, my stars, my hyperbole of human emotions bundled together in flesh and bone and spite. See me contort with each passing thought of her and know that right now I am the most pathetic human alive. These tears are real, I forced them out myself. You wish you could cry as convincingly as this.
She no longer loves me. The heavens open on cue and I stand on the island of a pedestrian crossing, staring blankly at the faces in traffic. Ask me what's wrong, I dare you to, give in to the pity you feel, the waves of empathy positively resonate from you all and yet, its simply not the done thing. Better for you to imagine the worst; that I've been dumped, fired, repossessed and I'm on the knife edge. You'll scan the papers for the next few days looking for mentions of someone fitting my description ending it all horribly.
I revel in the sensations, the arthritic pain in my fingers that can no longer touch, the rotten taste on my lips that can no longer kiss, the dead feeling inside that can no longer soar in your presence. She's left me and its the most exhilirating feeling I've felt in years. We must do this again sometime.
Gunner
He screams with rage and his voice is drowned out by the fury of the gun spitting round after round into the night. The bolt clanks back and forth with mechanical repetition, severing the links of the ammunition belt, ejecting the casings onto the floor, venting his anger. The barrel blazes tracer rounds out across the hillsides, tearing through the undergrowth, hitting nothing but trees and unfortunate waterbuffalos.
He screams at his parents, he screams at his highschool coach, he screams at his recruiting officer, he screams at his drill sergeant, he screams at his L.T., to all of them the same recrimination; why does nobody tell me why I must do these things? When do I get my chance to think for myself? And the chatter of automatic fire is the only answer.
The gun continues to jerk within the mount like an unruly child and his hands are tight around the wooden grips, unyielding, his arms working like shock absorbers. He sweeps back and forth, expending round after round uselessly, deafening himself with the noise, numbing the feelings within. This lethal catharsis as pointless as his rage at never being able to say no to someone, never understanding his place in life or saying what he wanted to do.
The ammo runs dry, the gun hisses and steams, the tip of the barrel glowing faintly in the cool night air. He has black tears streaming down his face, the sweat and cordite fumes mixed together, smeared grey across his cheeks. He wipes his nose on the cuff of his uniform and slumps back against the wall of the emplacement, picking a packet of smokes from the front pocket of his shirt.
As he lights up a cigarette, drained from the effort of holding the gun steady and blazing at his emotional demons a single shot rings out through the valley. The high velocity sniper round tears through the air and impacts against his face in a puff of flesh and cartilage, vaporising his nose and coring his skull like a rotten apple. The lifeless body slumps like a discarded puppet over the .50 calibre gun, its final sensation one of deep-seated satisfaction.
Burger Me
Sitting at a table in an up-market gourmet burger place in Soho, Pepper looked around at the other tables and leaned in close.
"Don't look now but there's an albino tomato behind you"
One of the torturous things you can do to someone is say don't look now but and then add whatever ending you like, that guy has ketchup all over his face, or that girl's come out of the restrooms with her skirt tucked into her panties, or Cindy Crawford is felching hamsters from Richard Gere's butt. For etiquette's sake a brief pause is left where the instigator can look elsewhere while the instigee verifies the information. Oh look, matching moles...
Why I wouldn't be allowed to immediately look round at the albino tomato I didn't know but I paused all the same and as Pepper looked down into her Diet Coke and sucked greedilly on the straw causing her eyes to bulge slightly I feigned scratching my neck and turned my head sideways enough to spot the white tomato from the corner of my eye.
In a restaurant full of tables, each table had a bottle of French's mustard, a salt and pepper pot and a red tomato full of ketchup. Sure enough though the table behind us had a white tomato.
"See? Albino tomato. Probably the runt of the litter. Struggled and fought to be like its brothers and sister and finally acheived its dream of being a ketchup dispenser despite its rough upbringing and a world full of superficial values."
I twisted round and snatched the albino tomato from the next table which was fortunately vacant.
"I wonder if it squirts albino ketchup?"
The mental image wasn't terribly appealing but I squirted some onto the corner of my plate. Sure enough; white ketchup. I dipped a fry into the mound of glutinous white sauce and bit it in two.
"What does it taste of?!" she asked excitedly, already reaching for the albino tomato to add some to her own plate.
"Mayonnaise"
Payback
Big Wing stalked around the hut as I hunkered down just inside the tiny opening. He kicked at some straw idly and poured some grain from wing to wing. Then the mood darkened in the hut and he came over to stare me in the eye, his brow furrowed with consternation, his sharp beek scant millimetres from my nose.
"Buk-bu-buh-buk, buk-buk-bukk-buka-buh-buh"*
*You insult me like this, taking my money then telling me you can't pay me back?
"Buh... but, Big Wing..." I stammered.
"BUK! Buh-bu-bukka-buk-Buk-Buck"*
*Silence! You dare do this to Big Wing?
I cast my eyes down at the rotten wooden floorboards in shame. The chickens run this business. You've propbably heard of the geese who lay the golden eggs, well its a lie. The chickens lay the eggs, the geese are the front, monitoring world gold stocks and prices, brokering a little here, selling a little there, making sure that the golden chicken eggs bring in the best prices. Big Wing used to be a layer, one of the best, back when he was just called L'il Chicken. Then he predicted the collapse of global gold prices and knew instinctively how to corner the market and bring it back up. Since then he's been running the whole show.
"Buk, buk-bukka-bukka-buka-buh-bu-buk-bu-buk... buk-bu-buh-buk-bu-bukka-buh"*
*But, I'm not an unreasonable chicken, I know what it means to be poor... so I'm going to make you an offer.
He must have seen the glimmer of hope in the corner of my eyes as I looked up gratefully.
"Bukka-buh-buk-bu-bukka buh-buk-buk, buck buck buck. Buk, buh buk-buk"*
*We forget the remaining interest on your loan, you pay back the balance on time. But, you owe me a favor
"Anything" I foolishly said without thinking, so utterly relieved that Big Wing was throwing me this lifeline.
"Buk. Buck. Bukka-buk"
I blanched at what he wanted but had no choice other than to concede to his request. I could only hope that my meeting with Charlie Big Bananas would go as well.
Aerodyne
"It floats, see?" said James, poking at the small metallic disc as it hovered over his desk. "I managed to de-ionise the underside surface without polarising the reverse magnetic field and we have anti-gravity!"
I poked the disc and it moved like an air-hockey puck, remaining upright.
"Do you realise what this means?" I asked James with eyes beginning to bulge out of my head.
"Yeah, it means I've discovered anti-gravity... of a sort..."
"Fuck that! You've discovered anti-gravity racing!"
I grabbed the desk fan and balanced it on the tiny disc. The fan dipped down and floated a few milimetres from the desk. Switching the fan on it began to propel itself along the surface away from us until it reached the end of its cord and toppled into a buzzing metallic mess on the floor.
"Get on ebay, right now. We need a jet engine."
Within two months Team Acerbia was up and running.
Sure there were some problems, such as there being no other competitors, we weren't street-legal and we were having a little trouble synchronising the airbrakes to the reverse thrust giving the craft a turning circle of about a mile. Oh, and the problem of having nowhere to test the thing. In the US there are the salt flats of whereverthefucktheyare and the wide open middle bit of the country, but here in the UK there's barely enough room to fire the damn thing up to 100 mph.
That was until we discovered that they worked over water too...
A Massive Dong
To mark our one year anniversary I intended contriving a situation that would require us being on the east bank of Westminster bridge in front of the London Aquarium, waiting for Big Ben to strike 1 in the morning, one year to the hour that we first kissed.
Fortunately early in the day we caught a news report that said that Big Ben was offline for the entire weekend for refurbishing otherwise I could have been waiting all night for that kiss. Although I doubt it.
HuGe@home
Peter wasn't exactly someone I considered a close friend, but when he asked for help I could hardly refuse. What do you tell someone when they plead with you to help them stop sweating honey?
In the late 90's Peter was into SETI@home in a big way. He networked the college machines to all run SETI@home all the time, even locking some students out from using the machines at all for study and research purposes because he was always on the brink of discovering alien life, or so he claimed. Peter loved concepts like parallel processing and neural networks, and had a picture of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation as his desktop wallpaper.
The honey, yes, I'm getting to it.
Seven years of not finding intelligent life despite exhaustive resources being poured into the project can leave a man feeling slightly disillusioned. The flaws of the project started to gnaw at Peter's resolve, flaws like the fact that civilizations will probably only use radio waves for a very brief period in their evolution and the needle in the proverbial haystack is suddenly turned into a universe of haystacks where you're only given 20 minutes to dig through each one.
But then the Human Genome Project culminated two years ahead of schedule. Here was something tangible, something concrete, and something right in front of our faces. Our own genetic structure, 25,000 genes with 3 million chemical base pairs and little to no clue what they all did. Were there genes for curing cancer? Genes for preventing hair loss or even aging? What if there were ways to unlock the untapped potential of the human brain and turn us all into those freaky big-headed creatures from the Twilight Zone? All topics that Peter churned on about endlessly in the pub over a pint until we'd all given up and gone home.
So Peter developed HuGe@home, or Human Genome at Home, a program that came with a small USB device used for injecting new protein combinations into your own body to test theoretical changes to gene structure. Its a fantastic project and he's had a lot of success. By processing great big chunks of data across massive networks of PCs he's helped with break-throughs in Phenylketonuria, Thalassemias, Telomere regression therapy and even developed a way to change hair color at the genetic level, a patent he is still waiting on approval for.
Peter's biggest problem though was that his e-mail outs for new additions to the network were invariably catalogued as spam due to the spam filters connecting the name of the program HuGe@home with viagra and penis enlargement programs.
His second biggest problem was that he was dumb enough to insert a gene sequence that made him sweat honey.