14th September 2008

Returned from London at midnight, having achieved less than none of what I intended, but somehow not really giving a fuck, as I'd actually escaped Brighton for a few hours, sufficiently to have been reminded how urgently I wanted to return there. I called in at The Tavern, where some pageant of patriotism was occuring, every negotiable surface veneered in Union Jack colours, as 'Jerusalem' bellowed from the televisions, and staples of English cuisine were tossed around on silver terrines. My initial response was to sweep my hair back into a paedophiliac side-parting and goosestep around the pub, right-arm aloft, a a fixed, concrete gaze, as though to not blink connoted fascism in its unwieldingness. Then, bored, sat, drank, smoked a few lengths of crack and danced spasmodically to tenuously homo eighties pop hits, trying to discoordinate my limbs from eahc other with such apparent independence that they resembled each possessed by a different sprite. The Archangel evanglised on the necessity of fluid rotator cuffs, The Governess boasted of her newly plum locks, EJ and La-wa talked of their impending wedding, a conjunction only occuring for bureaucratic reasons, sad in its satire on the rumoured sublimeness of marriage, and inspiring in its ruthless pragmatism. The Mighty Lord Bacchus arrived, a phalanx of communists, anarchists, and Scandinavian giants in tow. Soon, the Tavern resembled a sociological zoo of misfits, flunkers, sexual deviants, tax exiles, drug whores, and panting reptiles, each as desperate to commit themselves to a night of formal annihilation. Outside, there danced a flotilla of freaks amidst a stonehenge of burning oil drums - an inverted cat, mewling to its insides, its organs borne to the street with pride, a child, open wounds across its arms, its hair bleached with petroleum vapour, a skeletal dog dragging a crazed Irish physicist along in his golden wheelchair, a Parisian hooker, skin glazed with dried effluent, pokes her head through a manhole, the wheelchair narrowly missing her shit-plaited locks, her eyes fixed on a middle-distance, an object not of this earth, and thus impelling her to perpetual pusuit; a woman, tanned, lithe, leathery, tells the whole bar of how, in opposition to her doubts as to her husband's fidelity, she had him grafted to her cheek ten years ago. Suddenly, absolutely certain of his faith and dedication to her, wholly, exclusively, all the frisson between them dissolved, the tension of uncertainty having been eradicated. Subsequently the divorce involved a surigcal severance on top of the legislatory one, the husband dying in the process through blood loss. The surviving ex-wife, bottled all of the available blood and uses it to dye her hair each week.