santa
"Take it in, that's right. Slowly, slowly. Hold it. Okay, now let it out slowly. Ok, just one more breath. Lovely, lovely. And relax." I would have happily kicked the medic in the face if I'd had the energy but the asthma saved his self-satisfied visage. Maybe next time eh?
Driving through the small village, a dog jumping to avoid my swerving car, I realised that I didn't care, that arriving at a brick wall with my faculties intact would be the one principal on which I could base my life. And for which I would die. The knowledge that I died knowing what I was doing.
I am so tired. Every bone aches like I've gone 14 rounds with a demented tumble drier. My mouth feels drier than a lizard's chuff and my eyes burn in sympathy with the pain in my gut.
I'd still flirt with that giggling, blond apparition over there though. Why? Because I'm a real man and real men have absolutely no sense whatsoever in the wide world. Evolution? It just passed us by.
The reason Mark couldn't get the engine to tick over was due more to his lack of charm than his lack of mechanical know how. If he had been nicer to the lady at the scrap yard she might have given him the right part. Instead she had purposely given herself extra work to find the most useless carburetor, the one with the large crack in it, which she had covered with a finger of grease. She then charged him three times the price she charged anyone else which he paid with an ostentatious handful of bills.
The sad part was she knew he wouldn't have a clue. About anything. Ever. The dipstick.
And that's my living. When I'm out there, looking down the lens of the camera, videoing the people, I feel no shyness. Because I am looking at the world through a television and I am at home and they are not there. So when they smile or frown, they are not making faces at me but at my flatscreen other, the confident one. And I smile back.
"There are times, Higgins, when you are truly, awfully, historically annoying. This, sadly, is one of those times. Here we are, utterly lost, a dozen miles from anywhere and you tell me that we're out of champagne. In all your years of servitude this must be the singular, most epic mistake you have made. Kindly go behind that rock and shoot yourself quietly while I figure out how I'm going to survive the next two hours. And don't sulk. It's not attractive."
One thing that touring taught me was that, if you have to be at a festival, the place to be is backstage with an Access All Areas Pass. One might think this is because of the girls, the nice food, the ligging, the posing, but I liked it mainly for the clean toilets.
Growing old is a crock, isn't it?
Stalking a Brown Bear whilst wearing a giant beehive on one's head might not, at first hearing, sound like the most intelligent of ideas, but one must remember that bears are inordinately fond of honey and one must bait the trap with something.
The buzzing also helps to drown out the sound of one's screams when the bear bites one's leg off. This is, of course, the script to a bee movie.
I felt really sorry for the poor fool. It's not an imaginary recession here, it's absolutely real. People are scrimping and saving and trying to make their meager savings last just that little bit longer.
I find myself at a wedding fair filled with chauffeurs, cake icers, florists and your man, Mr. Ice Sculpture (with his swan carved by some other poor creature in China), on a hiding to nothing.
If it was a carving of the Celtic Tiger being run through the heart by a rusty screwdriver, someone might book him, but Mr. Ice Sculpture spends his afternoon watching his career melt away, to puddle at his feet like cold pee.
It was a tight squeeze but Harry felt he could make it. If he could only find a decent toehold somewhere it would allow him to adjust his belt just enough to get past the last bend. It did strike him, as he swallowed another mouthful of soot, that trying to impress his date by offering to clean her chimney may have worked in Dicken's time but was probably a mistake in Manhatten in 2011. Still, who looks at the fireplace when they're cleaning the chimney... as his dotty Great Aunt used to say.
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