Specifically, old chum of mine David Maybury. You may or may not know him. You may wish him no ill. But that’s all right, because it’s all just (victim-endorsed) fiction. It’s not really happening! If it was, I probably wouldn’t be blogging about it. I would still tweet it though, because #lolmurder, and because I have to break that stubborn three-retweet barrier some day.

Details, then: I’m collecting stories in which Dave dies in some campy, outrageous fashion, to be published here. There’s no restriction on length or format (short is fine, illustrations are more than fine). There’s a rudimentary back-story on the site, but don’t worry about that – for the time being at least, it’s just a gag setup to justify a bunch of standalone stories.

Do head over and have a look, and if you’re at all interested in creating fiction of whatever stripe, I’d love to hear from you.

What’s worse is that I got to the stage of knowing I was dreaming, and standing in my bedroom in the dream wondering what might be the best way to break the cycle. And then getting Lynchianly paranoid about whether or not I actually might have already done so, and is my vision hazy because I’m asleep or because I’ve just woken up or, oh, maybe that’s just my very self evaporating before my eyes. I don’t mind telling you that this is some heavy shit to be wrestling with on a Friday morning, especially when the “normal,” properly dreamlike dreams that acted as a prelude to these fiendish recurso-shenanigans involved

1. creating and then being stalked by a psychotic character called “The Painted Man” and
2. walking into my bathroom and immediately having a panic attack because everything was mirrored and there were three times as many doors as there should have been, none of which led back out to the hall.

So. The only sensible conclusion I can draw is that the subtle mind-trauma wrought many years ago by the magnificent House of Leaves is finally catching up with me. Now that the absolute dissolution of my psyche is proceeding at a decent clip, I can move on to phase II: fall in love with a stripper and have the shit kicked out of me by a man from Gdansk. Stay tuned, Bat-fans, for more exciting updates from the mouth of madness!

magazine safety brake system to control the ejection of the front-loading magazine

Not just a stapler, this, but seemingly the most badass stapler in the world. The kind you’d find behind the blast doors of CTU’s supply cupboard. You can hear the chunk of the payload sliding home. You can feel the weight of it. Right now, you want to dive out of your chair and roll into cover behind the nearest filing cabinet.

And yet, and yet, it’s still not enough for me. I’ve written to the manufacturer inquiring about the possibility of throwing some thermal optics on there for late-night operations, and possibly a suppressor for when you’re hiding out in a foreign embassy and need to stick some pages together on the down-low. What pages are you stapling? Top fucking secret pages.

Don’t mistake this for sarcasm. I once closed a staple remover on my fingertip, so I know god damn well how much damage casually wielded Tactical Desktop Instruments can inflict. Safety measures are not to be poo-pooed. I reiterate: poo-poo will not be tolerated.

I.

You end up data-mining conversations, mostly without realising it, so that out of the blue you mention some obscure aspect of someone’s life that you’ve inferred from various off-the-cuff remarks they’ve made over the past however many months, except of course they don’t remember making any of these remarks, nor any conversation where the fully formed detail might have arisen, and all of a sudden you look like some kind of stalker.

II.

The best-case of (I) above is that you get a reputation as someone with impressive recall, which is a fun little detail and maybe decent at a party (if you go to that kind of party, which I don’t think anyone outside of a Woody Allen film actually does), but also be aware that no one in your direct circle is probably out doing brain scans and reviewing the literature and making distinctions between different types of memory, so in the end all you’re left with is folks getting bunched up over stuff like how you forget their birthdays and their names and things they asked you to do two minutes ago.

So here you are… approaching your 26th birthday, standing beside a bin, tie askew, jacket missing, wild-eyed, spraying wet specks of salty potato at passers-by. Pay close attention, children: dreams do come true.

1. Do people still keep appointment diaries? Or does everyone just use their phones now? I tried that, but I end up never checking it so it’s kind of pointless. Whereas if I see an object lying around that looks like it might be some kind of configuration of words and paper (delightful!) I tend to flick through it out of sheer muscle memory.
2. I put the original outline for this post in my phone, which it turns out is an uncouth bloody yahoo and doesn’t recognise the word “concierge”. However, after foundering a bit it does leave you with “bombieri,” which sounds like a kind of roguish Italian fighter pilot. So that’s all right.

All of which is to say: what a gig. I saw em a couple of years ago at Oxegen and they were so-so, which I now reckon was more down to the crowd than anything else (plus and also, I was pretty sober… textbook error). The crowd in the Point²  ranged from hugely enthusiastic to not-quite-as-enthusiastic-but-willing-to-stand-aside, which is a-ok in my book. Age-wise, about half the people there were thirty-year-olds pretending they were 16 (as my brother put it). The rest were wans and young f’llas who assumably listen to Rage on account of they’re a cool band from back in the day, much as my generation listen to Iron Maiden. I’m somewhere in the middle, but it pleases me that I’m on course to becoming a middle-aged rocker.

One thing, however… whenever a mosh pit formed near us, not only did the bouncers not stop it, they actively helped people who lost their footing. I’ll reiterate: the bouncers contributed to the crowd having a good time. Is this a thing that happens now? Concert security have always been, and are supposed to be, the worst people in the world. If you pull that out from under kids’ feet, what the hell are they supposed to believe in? The goodness of humankind? No fucking thank you. These people’d want to sort themselves out reet smart before we all start getting notions.

1. Or, as I said in an IM conversation, “Tonight I’m going to Rage Against the Machine”. The ambiguity of that makes me want to start a band called Bang a Donkey.
2. IT IS CALLED THE POINT