August 26th 2008

So last night saw the opening of my new club, The Abattoir, just off of Marine Parade in Brighton. There's no DJ, all four walls are giant speakers, pumping musick of a fixed harmonic value, perpetually, albeit with a fragmentary delay between walls, creating a clockwise quadrophonic revolution. This musick is manifested by a piece of software wired up to sensors monitoring the heartbeat rate of every dancing punter, an average is calculated, this being the tempo at which the musick pounds; naturally, this tempo modulates constantly. One thing I've recognised is that this synching of tempi, this synergetic feed of rhythm certainly ensures the punters remain ours for the duration of the night. Anyway, my involvement in this club encompasses only financial and conceptual capacities. The day-to-day operation is manned by disenfranchised Aboriginals whose dependency on the drugs I feed them has been delicately measured. Employees for life.

I think I've contracted spinabifida. Having just concluded eighteen consecutive days of hardcore physical labour at the organic wholefood cafe where I've toiled now for two years - and this eighteen day stint incorporating a Bank Holocaust weekend - I've noticed my shoulders coagulate into calceous yokes, chains dangling from the rotator cuffs, chilling sinews of kelp snacking on my back. Impossible and worse - difficult - to raise my arms above my head. And then as I near the end of todays shift, in my catatonic and unballetic fug, my head collides with the corner of the dishwasher, the subsequent aggressive retraction, slamming my elbom into the main chef bench, a deep nervous seizure ensues, my entire right arm quivering in bodyshock, three of four fingers heading numbwards. I'm weeping, then, cursorily dragging my left hand across my back, as though in a surrogate embrace, I notice my vertebrae are starting to protrude through the skin, desiccated welts having formed at the base of these protrusions. Apparently in my habitual codeine stupour I'd been anaesthetized to these eruptions. Having never directly touched my own skeleton before, teeth aside, temporarily distracted from the pain of my elbow blast, my headspace folds into a coccoon dissolve, a pocket of contemplative calm, where softened tv static permates the texture of every image, insufficiently to obscure its form, but present enough to soothe and disengage from every tangible hurt. Perhaps tomorrow I might wake with my bone and flesh inverted, viscera borne externally. I wonder how feasibly and to what extent we might evolve within one incarnation if our physical developments are directed with tungsten will and the visionary clarity of a mountain spring. I'd gladly invoke the tail I lost some millenia ago, and perhaps too my gills.