Fort Awesome

I had been thinking about how out of touch with nature I am. I drive to work in my metal car. I watch computer-generated films on my DVD player at night. When I sleep, it is on a bed of circuits and lies.

I suppose that’s the reason that I first started to eat handfuls of dirt - to feel more at one with nature. It was only one or two a week to start with. After a long day, I’d nip out to the back garden, before my wife got home, and help myself to a lovely mound of moist soil.

At first you think it’s not all that nice, but, let me tell you, it grows and grows and grows on you. Soon you’re appreciating the nutty, bitter nuances of it’s flavour, and comparing different sections of your garden, to find which has the best bite to it. And the way it makes you feel - wow. I can’t really get it across here. It’s as if, your whole life, you’ve been living in orange packaging, but now the packaging is green, and it’s good for the environment. It as no artificial colours or flavours.

It didn’t take long for me to work up to a good two handfuls a day - one first thing in the morning with my coffee, and then another after my working day was done. Those were some of the best days of my life, really they were.

Of course, I couldn’t stop at two handfuls a day. Not with soil so good. I got so I would sneak it to work worth me, in my coat pocket so that I could chew on it as I typed. It attracted many stares. My colleagues started to ask questions, and were never satisfied with my answers.

Eventually my wife caught me hunched over her pansies, stuffing fistful after fistful of rich earthy goodness into my gaping, salivating mouth. For a long time, she said nothing at all. We just sort of stared at each other. Me, with the brown wrong of soil all down my chin and shirt, looking up like a child caught in the clandestine act of onanism, and her, with her woman’s face and ways, looking back on me like a disgusted, disappointed parent.

After what seemed like forever, it was me who broke the silence. “Oh Daddy,” I said through teeth caked in mud and worm-halves, “Oh I’m so sorry”. As I started to sob, and reach up to those hands, those hands that had caressed me in happier times, she moved away from me, her face sour and twisted beyond recognition. “You fucker…” she said “…you fucker”. And she walked away.

More fool her, I say. Now I have my pick of the soil, and I can eat it whenever I like. I don’t even go to work any more - who needs work when you have all the food and love you need in the fields and in the grass verges of any town in England?

And that’s where you’ll find me - the grass verges - digging up handfuls of wonderful, wonderful soil and scoffing it away, pausing only to vomit or sing a little song now and then. That’s where you’ll find me - the fields - pressing my body against the earth, licking at the bounty it has laid before me and sobbing great big, blissful sobs. Living as nature intended. That’s where you’ll find me. Yeah…

An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman walk into a bar. The Englishman goes up to the barman and says: “I’d like a pint of your finest beer please.” The barman says: “I’m sorry sir, we’re only serving shit beer tonight. Can I interest you in a pint of something that tastes like a homeless man’s sweat?” “No thanks, I’m good,” Says the Englishman, and off he goes to a different bar.

Next the Scotsman goes up to the barman. “I’d like a pint of your finest beer please,” he says. “I’m sorry,” says the barman, “we’re only serving shit beer tonight. Can I interest you in something that tastes like it sputtered out the back end of a sick horse?” “No thanks,” replies the Scotsman, “I’m good.” And off he goes to a different bar.

Finally, up goes the Irishman. “I’d like a pint of your finest beer,” he says to be barman. “I’m sorry,” replies the barman, “we’re only serving shit beer tonight. Can I interest you in something that tastes like raw egg that’s been sitting in the sun for seventy two hours?”

And the Irishman says…

…something really stupid.

I was sat in town the other day, munching on a baked potato, when something really incredible happened. It didn’t seem like much at first - just your bog standard blue-green vortex opening up in the middle of the pavement and belching out a giant, mucus coated crab-beast - but then I noticed something really special. The colour of the vortex was an exact match to that of a car I had seen drive past only five minutes earlier!

This can’t just be a coincidence, I thought. Sure of the significance of the vortex’s hue, I put down my potato and leapt into it, bawling like an ape.

Of course, once I was inside the vortex, my eyes were opened up to the astonishing truth of existence, and I began to see things as they really are - not just as the pale façades that we all accept like beggars on a cold winters eve. And in that moment of absolute perceptual clarity, I realised the vortex was, in fact, a slightly different shade of aqua-marine to the car that I had seen earlier.

I felt so foolish at this revelation that I leapt back out of the vortex - (not bawling this time, that’s for children and the Irish) - and landed with my arse right in the potato I had left on the pavement. Upon seeing this, some nearby chavs started to laugh, and shouted “Potato Johnson! He’s a Potato Johnson!” at me.

Since this event I have become addicted to pain killers, and now attend group therapy twice a week.

Some day you’ll find it. In the cracks between your teeth maybe. Perhaps under that man there. You know what I’m talking about - your real self.

What’s that you say?

“Your real self -
A simple mirror
In a house of

Disfigured clowns?

All spewing it out
All vomiting

Their own

Inwardness?”

What?

Moment 1: “Lemon and Lime”

“Lemon and lime!?” he asked, his face a plastic twat of incredulity.
“Lemon and lime!?”

“Lemon and lime.” I said.

“…Lemon and lime?”

“Lemon and lime”. I said. For the final time. And it was.

Moment 2: “It”

The four of them stood there, in front of It, awed by It, afraid of It. Kevin, Michael, Sandra, Pritesh - those were their names, you have to believe me. If you don’t believe me, I’ll fucking kill myself, don’t think I won’t.

Moment 3: “The Girl who Couldn’t”

She stood there, her hands all a-twitch, all a-twitter, stood there and shivered like a ropey dog in the Arctic. Could she? Did a thought pulse through her brain in that infinite moment? Did she hear, somewhere, a million miles away, the echo of her proud father’s voice, from beyond the grave, from beyond the edge of time: “You can!”. Did she feel his guiding hand in this, her lonely midnight, her exile, her reckoning to end all reckoning? No.