31st August 2008

Ok, so I died back there. So desperate was I to escape from the mindless churn of work's grind that I protestingly abstained from relieving myself of piss to such an extent that three days in, my irises flooded with a rancid yellow ammoniac dye, my kidneys heaved and wretched and quivered, my skin pustuled into a doughy, porridge veneer, and as general fatigue toppled me, my body handed in the keys and whacked out. They found me with my head in the dishwasher, having just completed cleaning it upon dying. But that's all absolutely fine, because I've found a new narrator to guide you through this panopticon of oubliettes. His name's Nick, I found him the pub last night at the after-show party - I played a gig last night, highly successfully. One can generally gauge a character by the nature of the stories they spin within the first five minutes of conversation, we all have them, the definitives. His was especially uninteresting - a few years back, after five months of solitude and speed addiction, he wrapped up work on an unauthorized autobiography and proceeded to sue himself for libel. I figured he'd be ideal to take over from me, being a) alive and b) interested in suspending his life and living exclusively through the medium of his own unauthorized memoir. Apparently, he'd won the libel case and been awarded three-hundred-thousand for damages, and had spent the last three years dealing in bad drugs and his own drooping, abused arse to earn the money with which to afford himself this damages payload. I fucked him myself right there in the pub, shot a wad, tainted with soluble low-grade explosives, right into his vile, stinking hole and sat back, awaiting detonation. When his eyes burned up from behind, all halloumi moons, I stapled his nipples together, stole his ideas and wrote a haiku on a beermat, alluding to the awkward situation I'd manifested. He burned to death before even reaching the age of thirty. But that doesn't make him a bad person.

Advertising gurus have it easy. Being cultivated into a condition where literacy is deemed superior to illiteracy, from a tiny age, we're compelled to read every sequence of juxtaposed letters presented to us, in the pursuit of this superior state, to such an extent that when literacy has been attained, it's almost instinctively embedded that everything that can be read, should be read - aside from literature, which nobody anymore patronises than they do masturbate over Tarkovsky's desolate cinema - hence the maniacal proliferation of advertising, particularly in musical, rapt, neat slogans. We're doomed to be sold ourselves unless we rear a generation liberated from literacy. Aside from Bulgrakov. He requires literacy. He's an author.

So I'm going to present a production of a dismal, low-grade Ibsen play cast entirely with the mentally retarded, but only those stymied with such an affliction that their symptoms kick into pause when they take to the stage to deliver a line. I've started auditioning with very specific demands in mind - I'm hunting out the most deliriously crippled, club-footed, spasticated, dribbling, incoherent morons across the country - fine, abundant, you might say, but they each have to possess the very rare, fleeting capacity to deliver high-brow Scandinavian dramatic works with great passion, empathy, clarity of enunciation, grandeur and conviction. I can net retards in any pub in town - but to snare one that can render theatre's driest texts captivating, takes some rigorous persistence. So far I've found two, and I killed them both. Boringly.