Sparks flew off the gravity wheel as I lay still and hungry in the dark. Couldn’t sleep, or thought I wasn’t dead. The sound of Jay Leno made me want to throw my crash test dummy away, buy a car and drive it straight at him (sans headlights). Lying there with the earplugs drilling deep into my brain, monitoring my heartbeat for irregularities. The caustic combination of vodka and soda water, that grumbling fountain of bubbles and home remedies. Homeslick. Barren graves and sudden power. The special aura created by dancing children. The eternal street, of which Pynchon wrote, stretched out before me like a body. Minions dealing insults, pizza shops that never seem to close, or sell pizzas. Groups huddled in cars, wolfing down space food meals. Robotic marsupials performing their own special Chipmunk version of my life story, featuring two banjos. The pantomime’s intermission that allowed me to sneak backstage and find out just what “behind you!” actually meant. Then it was one in the morning. The woman behind the bar was calling me “honey” and did so again as I left. She’d asked what kind of gin I preferred and then added “don’t say Bombay”. I said, “okay”. It wasn’t for me anyway. I bought it as a bribe for the man who introduced the world to Catholic Autistic Terrific. The man who bought a badge-making machine and started pumping out tiny tributes to David Niven during his “kif” period. But back to the hunger. The invisible evening meal. Something Phillip K. Dick might have invented, were it not for his epiphany (which we mistook for the complete breakdown of moral order). Well, despite the radiant glow of the moon this morning I awoke, as usual, in Switzerland. Nothing unusual there. My body clock, however, had turned to wood. Damn worms. But back to sleep. To speed and sage. To parlour games and snorry mouths courtesy of Mercury Rev. To tumbles and whipcrack nouns. My name translates as “solemn nonsense”.
