17th October 2008

So on wednesday I woke early, donned my camo pants and para-boots in preparation to attend my scheduled disciplinary hearing at Dystopia Cafe, clearly possessing little interest in what might transpire there - my intentions, will, desires and designs already fixed on terrains way beyond the insidious bureaucratic skullfuckery about to be, inevitably, metered out; got escorted round to the shop - The Nerve Centaur of the entire 'co-operative' and admitted, accompanied by my cafe representative; guied into a spare and anonymous-looking room and asked to sit. The three 'prosecutors' then produced sheaths of prepared notes and proceeded to gaffer tape my entire body in revised policy, to the end that I was granted a new skin,whose control cyphers I would obey completely, should I not want to run the risk of infection. I sat there, on a one-legged stool, lest a fall asleep, smothered in bureaucracy as the three of them took turns to assail me with news of my character dysfunction, ticker-tape spooling from their pursed, beak-like mouths, etched with the precise error code of my failings, which largely comprised a bunch of personal grievances held by a recent chef acquisition that they found on an internet auction site. This new chef model has already been proven to take itself excessively seriously (i.e. at all) and having instantly found my character to be too ingrained with contradictions and irony, has dismissed me as worthy of attempting to get to know, and has thus withdrawn any leniancy, kindness, empathy, with which it may have been initially programmed. However, I know that this anaemic, adenoidal prima donna is hopelessly unhappy, having alloted itself the Victim's position in life's Role Matrix, and while I'm no practicioner of schadenfreud, it does occur to me that the new Chef Model may well experience an increased production of alpha waves were it not a Screeching Ego Cunt of a specimen whose sole capacity appears to be the projection of her self-dissatisfaction onto those she deems uncomfortably self-assured; itself perhaps the crudest equation going.

So, upon having been trounced, lambasted and rottweiler-ed, I tumbled out onto the pavement, crackling with negative energy. My primary impulse; set fire to the various premises owned by the co-operative, my secondary impulse, go locate a piano and play it. The latter having been achieved, Bacchus phoned and explained that we'd be participating in an anti-arms demo and to meet him for coffee imminently. Met Bacchus, who was mid-comedown from a week of strip-club coke-bunny bacchanalia, he necked a flaggon, I mainlined coffee, and as I expressed my apprehension at participating in the impending protest - it being my first such event - he curled out the word 'Bollocks' and my fate was set. Ultimately, had a fucking fantastic afternoon, managing to collectively create genuine obstruction and cause major disruption to the traffic flow of the entire city, whilst avoiding getting sidled into a police cordon and/or arrested. Most of the roads were closed at one point. And ye, were it a simmering pleasure to see the quaintly myopic middle-class hippie mekons of the lanes all wonderstruck at the sudden manifestation of an immense fleet of riot police vans, and five hundred chanting protestors decked out in black hoods, red masks, blasting out digital hardcore from shoulder-mounted speakers. At the mouth of the pier, as the police turned their batons onto a sixteen-year-old boy who had, a rumour announced, thrown a stone (the riot police were, as you'd suspect, coated in kevlar, visors, armed with pepper spray, batons et al. The boy sported little muscle and a red sweatshirt.), tourists emerging from the amusements within were inadvertently drafted into the assembled cordon, creating the illusion of our numbers having doubled. Still, at this stage, having been marching for many hours, and the central thread of the deomo having dispersed, we excused ourselves for food and ultimately wound our way to the radical social centre in town, where as the protestors drifted in in clusters, food was dispensed, the energy of the protest tangible, thick in the air, as we, collectively elevated into a lawless and exquisite space, exhanged debriefings, 'war stories' and absurdly mused on ways in which we might eventually penetrate the walls of the munitions factory. Bacchus, in tweeds and cut-up on coke and ale, careening around, his wire-tapped spine lending a cockeyed amble to his gait, later expalined to me that he'd been the one to trigger fireworks outside the factory at previous protest. Having never before participated in such a thing - the extent of public dissent in the village that nurtured me (atrociously) through my adolescence amounting to 'Please don't shut our post offisce. Please?' - I rank it perhaps the first oaccion in which I've genuinely felt a sense of selfless community, in which everyone came together to exact an end beyond their own personal interests. Any other scene, community, with whose fringes I've flirted, i've found any potential energy to be instantly dissipated, all character impotized as soon as thier members number plural. It has to be truly confrontational I feel for a genuine and progressive - and tacit - bond to manifest, and what a luxurious, invigorating jewel this fucker is.

In my pursuit of freelance work in which I work alone and designate the working hours, I've uncovered a position advertising for as writer of obituaries, for a website based in San Francisco. I submitted my sample obituary and a hastily-assembled, and likely utterly incoherent, resume, mailed them off and awaited a response. i was hired. Essentially, the organization would provide biographical data of Bay Area recent stiffs, and the writer would assemble an obituary around this, in the required tone. When the first commission for Nick Hudson's obituary met my inbox, I dismissed it as coincidence, but after having written my own obituary seventeen times in week, each addressing a different set of character attributes, all of which corresponded very closely to my own, across various states of being, my suspicion became paranoia, to the extent that I even reported my own death to the local newspapers, thinking it was so, and subsequently volunteered a self-penned obituary explaining that Nick was driven to suicide through being forced to perpetually redraft his own obituary for a magazine somewhere in America, which he believed was established entirely to collate and compile obituaries for Nick Hudson, all written by Nick Hudson, until the genuine death of Nick Hudson had been attained. i began to suspect that this may have been the higher powers behind the riot police of the earlier demonstration, and discreetly contacted other protestors to pry as to similar persecutions perhaps having been encountered by them. Naturally, each systematized breakdown procedure would be tailored to the psychological frailties of the specific protestor. Still, apparently, nobody else has suffered any such affront. This being so, i elected to continue dismissing it as coincidence at all costs, and have since submitted fourteen further obituaries for Nick Hudson and am indeed earning substantially for this endeavour.