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There are worse fates than falling in love with a tightrope walker
but I don’t wanna hear em. My third wish was that I wanted
to be really, really stupid. And hideously ugly? And hideously ugly, yes.
Like statues offered to the dead, statues of chimneys, dreams nursed in the limited world, dreams
slapped out of our mouths like cigarettes in a dressing down –Hold on that expression, cut to the
window. Back to the bed. Arm draped across the balustrade. Deep in the gulf of vice and woe –I
dropped you off an hour ago.
We’re very concerned and amused by your actions,
a waiter eating our orders in the houses of illusion.
Let’s say you’re so lonely you hire a professional friend for £28 an hour. After several hours driving
around with him in a van, selling limited edition denim from industrial estate carparks to queues of
worried looking men, it occurs to you that you are paying £28 an hour to work. Worse yet he’s not
even particularly friendly – when you try to start a conversation he makes a little talking mouth signal
with his hand and shakes his head. So you ride in the back with the rare jackets and jeans, some of
which retail at thousands to the right buyer. They smell of oil, they smell embalmed. They have names
like Lost Circus and Instant Princess and Sore Afraid and Sufficient Boyfriend. At the end of the rail: a
pair of dark grey jeans with rusty studs and a patina of red dirt. The price tag says £15,800. They were
buried in the Colorado Mesas. You ask your professional friend why people pay so much and he says
They just want something real and slides up the divider.
The first thing a narcissist will tell you is that you’re such a good judge of character.
The best protection is total silence.
The difference between a smile and a grin.
The van has been motionless for some time. Your friend has fallen asleep at the wheel. You open the
back doors of the van and you start sliding the racks of denim onto the road, over the verge and into
the river below. You watch a bleach-washed jacket float away then collapse on itself like an ice shelf.
You must go and meet some real people – it was your second wish;
The first was to be lonely. An establishment folk hero
in the advert before the advert. But I do love life, I do.
It is possible, with a little discipline, to replace suicidal ideation with a long-term inner life as a space
pirate. Picture instead pulling back on the thrusters, the ship wobbling as it leaves the bay, leaning into
your massive chair as you cruise past Neptune, jettisoning eight hundred tonnes of nuclear waste near
the Kuiper Belt and then being gunned down by police ships. You ruined it.
It doesn’t matter. We’re all a little torn
between the sermon and the ode,
hagiography and reprimand,
It’s the same whenever we have the microphone, as if there were a record to set straight; let me tell
you about what he tells you about, what pleasures he shall ever find, his brands and sorrows. When he
wakes up he will scream, My jeans! My jeans! What have you done? And you will say, I had to get the
jump on you, I thought I did, I knew I did, I had to get the jump on you – besides, betrayal is so
beautiful.