Sinister: Have you ever written an obituary for a friend?

[Abrupt to the point of rudeness]

The language of rapture, huh, I'll give you rapture, I'll give you nothing
you wanted to know and everything you didn't, I'll tell you how things are
really run, who's the Daddy?  I'll give you love and death, war and peace,
Morcombe and Wise.

Laura was the same, before she left, before she stopped, she blew her brains
out in a suicide machine.  She now only lives in a faded newspaper cut out
kept by her mother, next to her picture as a girl on sports day.  But God
dam it, she was a rebel.  She did everything before everyone else, even
death.

Have you ever written an obituary for a friend?

I shouldn't worry about writing the ultimate text.  I shouldn't worry about
being Joyce or Dostoyevski.  I even shouldn't worry about name-dropping
either.  I think that a modern text needs name-dropping; there are no longer
any good names in the world.  There are no more Oppenheimers, no more Merry
Pranksters; no one holidays in Monte Carlo any more.  Erica would agree that
there is no more class.  She would say that there is no one to take up the
baton and run, no one willing to hotwire the Bentley, tear up the lawn in
their bold escape to the coast and fuck the consequences, no more brutal
teenage suicides.  There are no heroes anymore.

I shouldn't worry about this coming anywhere near the ultimate text, I am
fully aware that it can be nothing but an insignificant text, touched up by
a drunken author over the years until he finds a wife or some other
distraction, that he forgets about this text and fills his now adult life
with taxes, mortgages and many other things which I cannot even think of
right now.

I must apologise.  I am not writing this in the best of circumstances.  It
is two in the morning and I am, ever so slightly intoxicated by cheep wine
and my fathers' even cheaper whisky.  The truth is that if I was sober I
could probably think of a third millstone, which shall deservedly occupy my
marital neck in years to come.  Perhaps I should stay drunk.  At least if
I'm drunk I don't think about marriage, about mortgages and jobs for life,
except they're not for life:  they are for as long as the company can stand
you or you can stand the situation.  If I was sober I could think;
Drunkenness is bliss.  Ignorance is truly bliss.  If I was at work I
wouldn't know what was going on, I would be kept constantly busy by my
demanding and fearful (demanding of me and fearful me and all those in my
department) boss, so busy I wouldn't have time to think.  Perhaps that's for
the best.  Perhaps I should get a job. At least then I wouldn't mull over
what I know, there's no way to go back and un-learn what I have come to
understand in these last few weeks.  I wish there was but there isn't, and
that's the problem: it's all about reality, or rather the perception of
reality, the same reality that interrupts my sleep, the same reality that
interrupts my workless day to bang the truth home.

Come on, hug my soul.



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