things move around

: and how would you like your steak, sir?

: in a bundled offering, please!

: very good, sir

: oh, and waiter -

: sir?

: make it seamless

: yes, sir

Rewind to 1998…

Clinton’s dick, Chinese in Indonesia, Miss Universe, the decline of civilisation, wonders of Macromedia, ballroom dancing, baseball, Spielberg, nuclear proliferation, Steffi Graf, unproven child molester Michael Jackson, Y2K doom, Mexico’s dwindling forests, sea lions, IMF / NWO, Viagra-death, the infuriation of shoddy warranties, Steve Jobs, bad grammar, cantankerous SF bus drivers, how to kill someone with one punch, 200 million ignorant hoodlums, Sharon Stone, stock-tips, riots, I could go on.

Martin Eng. How have I lived without you? You are all my favourite columnists in one madheaded ungrammatical cataclysmic soft-focus domm-mongering prognosticising profiterole disaster.

Eng’s most recent pronunciations seem to be here, where he moved after 9-11. Eng is truly the news to end all news.

“He pastied away peacefully in his sleep.”

is what the engraver may soon be engraving, after my epic, day-long attempt to “do a yard of pastie.” That’s right, you’ve heard of the yard of ale, much beloved of rugger-buggers and forty-stone binmen; well where I live, they sell pastie (meat or cheese) by the yard. The office, in honour of a birthday, having taken delivery of four yards (three meat, one cheese) this morning, I set about my Herculean trial. I knew that should I succeed, the honours bestowed upon me would make Perseus feel like the lowliest of serfs, yet balancing the rewards were the risks of failure: certain mockery and possible death. I started well, wolfing my first two tranches in classic style, unperturbed by the enormity of the rigours ahead. Over-confident, I slipped up at lunchtime and branched out into cheese, which curdled in my belly with a too-weak cup of tea. It was touch and go for a while but I wrested my appetite back from the brink and applied my snout once more to the trough. The afternoon was a haze; at times I fell prey to hallucinations and thought myself buried alive in a puff-pastry tomb, assailed by maniac baker-boys with little pinnies on. As I write this I am close to success, yet never have I been closer to failure. The last remaining slice sits resolutely on my saucer, oozing baleful defiance, goading me with the spectre of self-doubt. But I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. The fanfares of victory call me from the harbour of despair. The yard will be mine, for good or ill.

Now I fall back to my task. My stomach revolts against its gross maltreatment. But the grim reaper won’t be breaking pastie with me just yet.

Went to the store today for to git me some slacks.
‘Cause I like a nice pair of slacks.
Ah sure do feel good pulling on a brand new pair of slacks.
So ah went to the store today for to git me some slacks.

Someone’s stocked the can-machine with a hyperactive batch of Dr Pepper. I’m the only one who drinks it, so each lunchtime I am stupidly taken unawares by a fountain of the sticky sweet black stuff midway between the machine and my desk.

I reckon it’s a personal vend-etta.

Is there anything purer or hornier in this world than the girl you fancy without warning mooning in your direction? Perhaps from a distance of twenty yards or so? And then acting like nothing happened?

No, there is not.

It’s the grown-up version of sticking out your tongue. It’s where love and lust melt into one.

why don’t bed be crawling into me?

the told-you-so scrawled across the walls from Pontypridd to Porthcawl and the flaky upbreaking north shore, the irreligious inland see, the what might have once been what might be

broken down rugby goalposts; a shotton field

out back a migrant, his only posession a sack, and a shovel for shovelling shit, stumbles and stoops in the filamental rain, a badass brigade of druids gibbering out their lineages, a suit of surnames an unshuffled deck an acre of bracken leaching spores in autumn a watersource a huddle of squat stone derries, and out back of that a migrant, his only posession a sack

a rock band every five years or so, like an affair. fizzling flare of a jet a leaky biro in the sky

best do up our buttons for the long hungover crawl back home tonight

Blogcrawling, my seedy, beady eye chanced across Window Into a Blonde Head. I must be sick, because straightaway I thought of a bloody defenestration; plate-glass falling full-force onto the cranium; a spurting jugular; a stifled howl. But no. That wasn’t, after all, what it was about. I think for a moment my eyes glazed over.

“Possibly the vilest travesty of a cake it has ever been my misfortune to eat” - Cakes & Cakemen
“Enough to drive a man to blueberry muffins” - Cake Review
“A hideous weeping lesion on the face of cake society” - The Spectcaker
“This is a black day for cake-lovers everywhere” - Jane’s Fighting Cakes
“Shut yer cake ‘ole!” - The Daily Cake