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.
Archtype Post #2
Concept 1 is introduced, usually something typically mundane and urbane that we encounter in our everyday lives and take for granted, for instance; computers, furniture or pets.
Concept 2 is introduced, perhaps as an abstraction or a semantic observation of actions or thought. Examples include wistful nostalgia, hierarchical development of inner cities or dust mite philosophy.
Concept 1 and Concept 2 are bonded through wordplay.
A meandering paragraph is added to assuage the reader over this recent hybridisation and ensure that they are comfortable with the resultant conjoined concept.
Punchline!
Archtype Post #1
My girlfriend and I converse.
I make an observation that either involves punning or playing on general expectations of the topic being discussed.
My girlfriend makes a further conjecture or corollary based upon my free association which loops us back to the original topic and shows me up as an ass.
Embellish to taste with fluffy animals, obscure medical terminology, robots, pirates or monkeys.
The Max
So I used to live with this guy called Max, Max was like this total nut job. I once found possum feed under his bed and when I asked him what it was for he tells me its for feeding the possums. This other time we're all in the back of a taxi coming home from a drunken night out clubbing and he grabs Shelley, Shelley was unconscious in the back seat, and he pinches her cheeks together and aims her face at the open window, then he squeezes her belly with his other hand and she projectile vomits on command out the window. Un-fucking-believable.
Anyway, so Max, he's like this Everybody-loves-Maximillian kinda guy, he has tapes of the nightly chat show he used to host in New Zealand and gets occasional calls from minor celebs asking him what he's doing and if he's up for partying. He never says no and he never seems to stop. And everyone has their favorite Max story.
One time I'm at a party and Shirley Manson from Garbage comes over to me looking like an Emo goddess and asks how I got in with venomous hostility and when I tell her I'm with Max she starts telling me about the night he saved two prozzies and an undercover vice cop from a bouncer with a machette and when he was done he sat down at the piano in the bar and started banging out Dean Martin classics. Then she asks me if he still has Spiro Agnew's head in a jar.
Another time I've locked myself out and I'm sitting in the hallway waiting and a delivery guy hands me a bunch of flowers with a note saying "Call me, Joan" and when he finally shows up he explains that Joan Collins has been obsessively stalking him for the past two decades ever since he taught her how to dance the tango.
He'd pull his phone out when we were all watching some dross on TV and start talking in his own code language to someone, the entire code made from random swearwords from a dozen languages, then he'd close his phone, tuck it away and pretend like he hadn't done anything. He never had to fly anywhere in economy, he always somehow managed to blag a ride in first class.
So anyway, I used to live with the guy and not once did anything ever remotely entertaining or amusing happen between him and me. It was like I was his Kryptonite. Everyone else had their favorite Max story, but I never got mine.
Touchy
Through a quite contrived and surreal sequence of events I can't take the time to detail here I found myself bound by the caveat lector clause of donating my body to medical science before my death. I knew I should never have entrusted myself to the legal care of Drummond, Cauty, Sturm und Drang attorneys at law.
Medical science wasn't so bad once I got to know some of the people involved. Abstract concepts such as medical science can a priori appear faceless and uncaring, but one must always remember that behind the logo and the jingle and the surly receptionist on the front desk is a living breathing gestalt of an organism that breathes and evolves, staffed by individuals just like you and me. So I didn't feel too bad when they cut off both my hands with a machette; it was a medical machette at least.
I awoke slowly, without opening my eyes, to find that I couldn't. When I reached up to touch my face I became dizzy as I was bombarded with visions of my own face, a blank canvas of fresh skin, eyeless, noseless, mouthless, smells of disinfectant left a sterile and chemical taste on my... fingers?
A hand touched my shoulder gently and a distant soothing voice told me to reach out to the sound of her. I did so and the voice became louder and somehow I could see where she was, smell her perfume, taste the tang on the air, all through the proximity of my hands.
"You've had all of your senses grafted into your hands" she explained.
I twisted my hands back and looked down at them, only, the scene was shown from the perspective of the palms of my hands. I held them apart as if to start clapping and saw each hand had an eye embedded into the flesh. Blinking. Blinking in time to my blinking. I screwed my fists closed tightly and opened them again, watching as the iris of each eye shrank and adjusted to the light again. Being able to see my own eyes caused a wave of discordance through my senses.
Examining the tips of the fingers of my left hand with the eye in my right I saw that the whorls and spirals of my fingertips now included tiny aural and nasal cavities and dotted across the skin were taste buds coating in a thin film of saliva. Pinching my fingers together tasted of earwax and snot.
"You've become the world's first synthetic synæsthetic lifeform" she said before elaborating, "your senses combined into your limbic extremities you now taste what you touch, hear what you feel, smell what you're seeing. You've become the epitome of the senses and we hope that through you we'll be able to study sensations that have previously been disassociated."
All very fascinating really, but I didn't know what I was going to do about my itchy balls...
Man/Machine Interface
A few months ago I arrived home and kicked a new doorstop. It beeped at me and immediately tried to eat my shoes.
"Oh, I see you've met the new Roomba" my beloved said as she greeted me. I tried to lean in for a kiss but the giant hockey puck-shaped device had started trying to crack my ankle bones like rotten walnuts. I gave it a firm kick and it whirled around and departed post haste.
Before I could even ask, my sweetheart explained that she'd had enough of vacuuming and invested in an automated system that would periodically scoot out from its docking/recharging station, suck up any dust and hairs in the carpets and then go back to its station to sit and wait.
"We only have to empty it ever weekend or so. Look! It even comes with a remote in case we think it missed a spot. And you set these nifty perimeter devices up so it won't stray off course and fall down the stairs into the basement."
The basement was my domain, with my desktop PC and desk down there. It never needed vacuumed, being the bachelor den that it was.
I agreed to give the Roomba a fair chance only to see it scurry off along the skirting with a comic book I hadn't read yet, snickering to itself with mechanical glee.
Weeks passed and my little pork chop of eternal delight became more and more enamoured with the squat little vacuum cleaner. Her side of the bedroom was spotless, mine had started to develop some sort of fungal growth between the floorboards that wouldn't have appeared naturally. When sat watching the TV the Roomba would zoom in with a cup of tea for her and a crack in the shins for me.
I picked a copy of I, Robot from my bookshelves and checked Asimov's laws of robotics. Sure enough the Roomba was in clear violation of the first law; a robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
I showed it the book but it snorted and wheeled away, splashing hot tea on me, when I told it to come back it violated law two; a robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
I chased after the Roomba and tripped over it in the corridor where it had deliberately stopped. I decided there was nothing for it and broke law three; a robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law by introducing it to the irresistible force paradox; what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?
Answer; it gets shattered into tiny little plastic pieces and broken cogs while bleeping pathetically in surrender. Never forget the first law of humanity; woman creates, man destroys.
Super Furry Animals
Say stoat, I instruct.
"Stoat" she says.
Utter otter, I direct.
"Otter" she says.
Mutter marmoset, I command.
"Marmoset" she says.
Perorate polecat, I demand.
"Polecat" she says.
Vocalize vole, I order.
"Vole" she says.
Witter weasel, I adjure. She says nothing. There are no weasels in her verbal petting zoo.
In Situ
The Oblivious Passenger;
"Well yes he had been jiggling for a long time, his hand bouncing up and down under the blanket, but I thought he was a pervert, not a terrorist. I dunno, it was strangely flattering to think that he just couldn't stop himself, despite the fact I hadn't fixed my makeup and the ground security staff had confiscated my eyelash curlers and nail clippers so I wasn't looking my best."
The Air Hostess;
"I didn't really know what was going on, it looked like the Air Marshall had confronted the guy and had already drawn his pistol. I thought the guy looked suspicious when he asked for extra peanuts. We don't even serve peanuts anymore, just those god-awful pretzel things that have to be doused in chili powder to give them any sort of taste. Life was more interesting when we could expect someone to choke of a peanut or maybe go into anaphalactic shock. I miss those days... when flying was still such an innocent pastime for most people."
The Air Marshall;
"I had to contain the situation and keep the guy focused on me. He had his finger on the ringpull and even shooting him directly in the head and stopping his brain functions could have led to an instinctive muscle spasm that would have pulled the ring. We use special bullets that penetrate flesh without coming out the other side, but the risk is still very high that it won't work out."
The Terrorist;
"I was trying to drink a can of Orangina. The side of the can said to shake well before opening..."
Dope
It is perhaps only fair that I address the comments of my detractors and the accusations of elicit substance abuse used in the production of this site that I have loved ever since I came up with the name Acerbia, long before any other pretenders to my throne.
As has been shown time and time before in the past, the writing of pieces on Acerbia can become scatty and haphazard, and this has nothing to do with long bouts with gurus or hypnotists in vain attempts to unlock the secrets of my mind. No, in fact as many people are often surprised to learn, the majority of pieces on this site are in fact made up through free association.
Rumors that acid trips have left my eyes with a faint radioactive glow and steroids have pumped my typing fingers up to the size of toulouse sausages abound in the blogosphere and I have to wonder how those accusors would feel were I to cast my glowering eye upon their activities and point a porky digit at their own works.
So lets hear no more about this and let bygones be bygones be bygones.
Ungrateful Bastards
Acerbia is pretty popular with people looking for painless suicide methods or advice. I could joke that reading the archives can lead you to a euphoric stupor that facilitates popping off, or that there are hidden messages in the monthly archives that you have to read vertically in a double-spaced text editor, or it could just be that I once wrote about the last thing I ever played on a piano being "Suicide is Painless" and Google indexed me for it.
All in all it’s pretty thankless being one of the top results for painless suicide and this post isn't going to improve upon that situation. It does remind me of the other futile jobs I've held though.
When I was just starting out and my agent hadn't yet got me the gig writing Acerbia on a regular basis I was the desk clerk at the Hotel California, such a lovely place. We had mirrors on the ceilings and pink champagne on ice, but the wine cellar wasn't as well stocked as it could have been. The real frustration for me was always when I had to tell people that they were free to check out anytime but they could never leave.
That ranks a big second though to the really thankless job I had a few years later as ferry ticket salesman on the bank of the Rubicon, boy those were some pissed off passengers who had bought return tickets, I tell you.
Dog Bites Man
To say that Burt had a smart dog would have been an understatement. Burt's dog didn't just fetch, it arranged logistical support and filled out the shipping manifest. Burt's dog buried bones in hermetically sealed containers and left post-it notes covered in scribbled maps with dates for retrieval.
One weekend Burt showed up with his dog at the park we were hanging out at. He sat down on the blanket and brought out a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. At first we mocked him until it became apparent that the book was for his dog. The dog browsed the book and turned the thick pages with the tip of his nose. When he was done he wuffed quietly and Burt brought out Goodnight Moon. After Goodnight Moon came The Tiger Who Came to Tea, after that came Fox In Socks. By the end of the afternoon Burt's dog had read its way through every book Burt had brought.
By wednesday Burt was telling us that his dog had read all the Roald Dahl books it could find and was reading at the level of a ten year old human. By friday it had devoured The Da Vinci Code and shat it out in disgust. On sunday afternoon Burt came to join us in the pub without his dog.
"Can't get him to leave the house anymore. He's got himself a library card. Last time I saw him he was reading something about Heuristic Analysis of Social Interactions in Man/Machine Interfaces or some such thing.
Behind us the football was interupted for a special news broadcast but we were more interested in our drinks.
"I tell you, he's just not as much fun anymore, like he's given up trying to be man's best friend and would rather be doing something else. I'm just not sure what..."
"Burt" I interrupted "isn't that your dog?"
Burt looked out of the window but the street was empty.
"No, on the TV" I added "delivering an ultimatum to the United Nations to disarm or face the wrath of canine-kind?"
"Oh no... bad dog... bad dog!"