This Is 4am vol: 5
This is the average appearance at 4am, just without the
graphic and unsettling nudity and pants on head.
We’re headed somewhere deep, dark, dank, and truly grim… some deep cosmo-karmic heaviness is lingering in the air and telling us something, somewhere, died a long time ago. People are starting to begin to look for the source, well, some are at least… There’s a certain unsettling knowledge that when we find it it’s going to burn itself into the retina pretty bad, every time we close our eyes we’re going to see it hovering, a ghostly after-image of brutal truth. It’s just not something we’re designed to take in without permanent damage and, if you can come away with it unharmed, you weren’t looking in the way you must. You have to pry so many sets of eyelids open to get through to that dark core of brain that cowers from the light that it’s a commitment nobody who wishes for a grand solution should ever undertake. It’s not an answer you find, it’s not a question, it’s just a merciless realisation that takes your legs away from underneath and leaves you bleeding on the ground. It’s not an end, it’s a entirely new and raw beginning. Whether this is theory or truth is not something I’m going to be certain about, no neon lit sign under anything I saw ever screamed “this is it”, all of it merely kicked hard and left me to judge.
Sometimes you find yourself wondering about the validity of any belief you may hold… well, you should if you’re holding it correctly… four in the morning, burnt out from coffee and every other merciless shit-kicking that a human body can absorb without entering a full-on psychedelic or one of many illegal narcotic-warped states, is a time to look, whether it’s any more valid is a matter of opinion. There are different filters depending on the time of day, the level of energy, happiness, misery, confusion, and the pressure-level in the hormone tank. It’s much as in photography: regardless of what pieces of distorting plastic you place over the lens, somewhere amidst the haze is the reality… how do you want to see it? Which distortion of traditional perspective allows you to see to the core meaning? Different for every bag of blood, brains, and bile, that walks upon two legs… If you think you’ve picked the right one, run with it, just decide if you want to keep a contingency plan somewhere, or whether you’re going to leap, screaming, into a balls-to-the-wall plunge of intensity and possible insanity. Soundtrack carefully and make sure the cupboard has what you need for those snowbound winter nights.
This is why every time I wake up I look in the mirror and say one thing to myself:
“Oh fuck, I died during the night.”
There’s a whole load of pasty son of a bitch staring back at me every morning, an albino under a whole load of dark hair, the result of careful experimentation involving the absence of sunlight and a perpetual caffeine intake that, if you out there think you drink a lot of coffee, would just make you realise what feeble amateurs you really are. It’s not a boast, nor an admission, it’s a statement. You’d be dead or chewing off your own face if you hit the kind of pace I achieve on a weekday afternoon. Which may explain why I look like I’ve spent four years being kept awake by repeated electric shocks to the groin… I can’t find a pulse no matter where I look, which may explain a lot, and I swear to god that Smurf’s pistol whip my eyes while I’m asleep, it’s the only explanation for two orbs that look like Sam Peckingpah has shot a movie on them and failed to clean up afterwards.
So here’s the point of all of this: Quit expecting perfection world, quit expecting sanity, tidiness, glorious logic, and anything other than a bunch of raggedy-arsed shit strung together on a thin stretchy band of time. Existence is a candy necklace: You chew the fucker, some bits are tasty, some bits are bland, some bits are foul, then you choke on the elastic at the end. Distance yourself from the fuzzy perspective, just take a look at some poor, dumb, random son of a bitch on the street… you don’t know anything about them… well, odds are they ain’t going to cure cancer… round here it’s more likely they’re going to steal your fucking television… see… it ain’t goddamn Lassie anymore folks.
Now this raises an interesting dilemma… you’ve got a few distinct approaches to how to proceed:
1: You sit at home by your television every fucking night for the rest of time, or warranty whichever runs out soonest, with a baseball bat and take down anyone or anything that violates your personal territory. Sure, you’re going to bludgeon or, at the very least put off, a few innocents and well intentioned souls… but, hey, you’re going to be able to watch Trisha on 28” of pride and joy.
2: You just take a casual attitude… if he takes it, he takes it, not really worth making life hellish about… heck… he might even be the repair man and solve your exploded television woes.
3: You hunt, kill, skin, wear, the fuck, you take his television, you marry his wife, you sell his children, dog, grandparents, and any other genetically-linked substance of his into slavery. You crush, maim, stamp, burn, gouge, disembowel, sever, and generally unleash every orifice upon anyone who you wish to crush beneath your mighty boot. You are KING/QUEEN amongst men/women. All shall be harvested and used as rich fodder to feed your churning digestive tract of life… you will leech what’s necessary and expel the rest into a heap that will dwarf mountains.
Which approach appeals to you? Do you even care? Do I care? The answer to all these questions and more is: NO. This explains why the following quiz involves you counting stuff up rather than clicking any fancy buttons and answers and shit… because, you know what, that would require a hell of a lot more effort and learning than I consider worthwhile for the electronic equivalent of one of those schoolyard foldy paper things where you pick colours, numbers, A-team members, or whatever until finally you’re told you’re a poo… and… let’s face it folks, we’re always poos in the end… whether that’s down to the kid administering the test being a dick, or whether it’s down to the circle of life, it’s pretty accurate.
In order to possibly impress you for reasons I cannot fathom, I just looked up some way to make the following quiz pretty. Google gave me many useful sites explaining how to easily do this and it gave me many answers I needed, all of which are “screw you, get a goddamn pencil”.
The Ultimate Psychological Profile Quiz. Version: Only one you’re ever going to get you whores of my meaningless time.
This test consists of however many questions it takes for me to get bored. Note the letter of the answer you get and then work out your total with the formula I might, or might not, remember to include at the end. If the formula is missing, assume you failed.
Q1: You find yourself alone on a desert island for reasons you can goddamn well make up for yourself at this time of night. For similar reasons you find on the beach the following items:
A pencil,
A small plastic doll,
A pound of lard,
The meaning of life.
You can carry two of these and yet, for reasons of me really not being too bothered, you can only carry certain combinations. Do you do the following:
a) Do you take the pencil and the small doll and perform arcane voodoo rituals for a while until you realise the only person you’re hurting is yourself and making the baby Jesus cry at the same time. Then you get really bored and find a flat surface and draw round the doll with the pencil and pretend you’re Columbo at your own little crime scene. You arrange a line up of a crab, a monkey, a turtle, and coconut and try, via interrogation and torture, to ascertain who murdered the doll. You realise you have far too much time on your hands.
b) You take the lard and the pencil and then wonder what the hell you’re meant to do other than fry the fucking pencil.
c) You take the doll and the lard and you are one sick son of a bitch.
d) You take the meaning of life and the lard and you’re one sick existential son of a bitch with issues that will lead to even the people who picked c) to look down on you.
Q2: You are walking down the street and somebody walks straight into you while they’re texting away on their gimpy, tiny, bastard, mobile-phone/wanker designation device. In your pocket you have a blade. Do you:
a) You grab their shoulder, spin them around, and cut them… you don’t waste time, you don’t think about it, you just take their nose off with an upward slash and walk away… perhaps kicking a little dirt at them with your heel as you step over/on them.
b) You apologise quietly and continue. They walk on, loudly declaring you to be a “blind fucker” while texting your girlfriend/boyfriend telling her/him about the “blind fucker” and asking whether they weren’t kidding about letting their twin sister join in this time.
c) You take their thumbs and big toes. You then tell them that they have one minute to walk to the hospital or text for an ambulance before you start taking whole arms. You cover their phone in salt, super-glue, and broken glass and take the battery out.
d) You do the same as c) but you cut their guide dog loose, lock them in a dark, lead-lined, room with the animal after feeding it the thumbs and big toes to allow it a taste for human flesh. Every so often you rush in, scream in their ear, and push them over.
BONUS FIVE SECOND ANSWER QUESTION!:
(You have five seconds to answer after reading the options. I’ll know if you cheated. You’ll regret it.)
You are on fire. Do you:
a) Jump into the polluted river and hope for the best
b) Allow orphans to light their cigarettes from you and cook food rather than cardboard for the first time in their lives. Then claim that it’s a protest against something.
c) Call up the person who dumped you last and go “This is your fault” and refuse to be extinguished by them if they offer. You’re proving a point here.
d) As with c), but you rise above cheap point scoring and give them a big hug.
Q3: You happen to be around when that whole Second Coming thing happens. You have the following in your pocket:
Two pencils,
A pint of cider,
My will to continue with this,
Anything else you bloody want, at this point I could not give less of an impeccable toss. Seriously, bite me.
Do you:
a) Put your head between your legs and kiss your arse both goodbye, and best of luck when it comes to the forthcoming red-hot pokering it’s going to receive.
b) Scream whatever bloody religious salutation you wish or feel applicable to the moment before dancing around going “I have seen the light.”
c) Turn to the nearest person of appropriate gender and make a really bad joke about “give me five minutes and we’ll try for a third.”
d) Drink cider, stab with pencils, nick his sandals. EBay.
MYSTERY MAGIC EXCITEMENT ROUND!:
Look in my pocket. Take a big sniff as well. Yeah, I don’t know what the fuck was in there last either.
Q4: You are (insert appropriate deity yourself to avoid me getting in the shit). You’re creating the Earth… we’ll not mention what you’ve been doing beforehand, that would just be plain rude to ask. Oh, and we’ll not ask where you came from either… again, I’m sure you know, and that’s enough for me. It turns out you work on a weekly schedule because it just seems a logical time-frame to build a planet in that’s going to run for a length of time based on whether or not you think the dinosaurs were just put there to fuck with us.
After spending six days creating all the light and shrimp and all that other stuff, along with a possibly infinite number of stars and planets and other stuff that is there for decoration purposes only, you’re feeling a bit sleepy and in need of a rest… because all infinitely powerful deities require a bit of a kip every so often. (Oh, by the way, I know the applicability of all this depends on which deity you picked at the start, but my research into all worldly religions got disrupted when I discovered to my horror that there’s pictures of naked people on the internet). However, you manage to score some godspeed, do you:
a) Snort a line of the swine and, grinding your teeth wildly, spend the day getting a bit paranoid and just making loads of extra stuff to distract the little people things that you’ve made/will evolve/wove from cosmic arse hair… like those fish that swim up personal parts and lodge there, wasps, and guaranteeing Chris De Burgh will come into being.
b) Leave the devil-wizz alone and just put your feet up, gently dicking with people in a way that is entertaining but only really malicious if you don’t think that, for some inexplicable reason, “shit happens”
c) Get truly off your tits, start manically just throwing lightning bolts and comets at anything you don’t like the look of. Torture the odd random soul with boils and anything else you find funny while trying to find me and inflict that list of people I have somewhere with the words “They will pay” written at the top on me. With the last couple of minutes you’ll also create Godzilla, blame him on nuclear power, and hide him somewhere, just waiting to burst out and start ruining my day in about six months time.
d) Snort the whole lot, spend the day building a cosmic meth lab and filling your cosmic cupboard. You make the week an extra day longer because you’re all-powerful and can fuck up my calendar as much as you goddamn please, in fact you make it nine days long, just so that people have an extra day to say they’re busy and make sure I run out of all things important to me necessitating a miserable walk on a Sunday that I really can’t be arsed with. While you’re busy screwing me over with one hand, you make the world spin in the opposite direction to the one it really should have, thus making me have to walk much further. That math makes sense to me now, if you think I’m going to try any harder, just close your eyes, and sniff right here… smells of arse doesn’t it? That’s what I think of your logic. Why don’t you sing a little song to yourself? Do you think I care any longer? I’m praying for death right now… hold the door (insert deity here), I’m a’comin’
e) Yeah, e) why don’t you pick this… you can feel all special.
FINAL INSTANT ELIMINATION ROUND!:
This has gone on…:
a) Too long
b) About long enough
c) You think I’ve read this far?
d) (insert death-threat/cheap slur/blunt object)
EXTRA FINAL INSTANT JOY-JOY SUPER-SATISFACTION MEGA UNARMED COMBAT ROUND!:
The meaning of life is:
a) Meaningless
b) A good movie, a nice bottle of wine, and a hug
c) A good porn movie, a nice bottle of fortified wine, and a shag
d) A snuff movie, grain alcohol spiked with PCP and adrenachrone, and sex of a kind that causes both structural damage to all buildings within a four mile radius, and gods to strike you down, with Helen Keller who suffers regular amnesia.
e) All of the above (quit fucking with my scoring system you greedy son of a bitch)
SUPERDUPER MEGAGHANDIULTRAEXPLOSIVEUBERICOULDINSERTANYTHINGHERENOBODYREADSALLTHISLOOKBADGERBONDAGEGAYFORMOTHRAIAMSOBOREDIAMGOINGTOSTARTDRINKINGHOUSEHOLDCLEANINGPRODUCTSATTHISRATEJUSTTOPUTASPARKLEINMYLIFEOHGODTHATWASCHEAPDUPERAMAZING ULTIMATE STOLEN ROUND!:
Right… this has parts and I’m realising this requires more effort than I ever thought should be put into anything that doesn’t end with someone saying “Oh… was that it………..seriously?” This will have as many parts as I feel necessary because I’m coming to the realisation that when I put this in a readable font-size, it’s going to take at least ten goddamn pages.
Okay, screw it, let’s just play and suffer the pain.
Marry, Fuck, Kill… or so that’s the way the game’s usually approached… but now I present:
Stroke, Smelled, Ate.
a) An ego; a rat; my hat
b) A kitten; a flower; a salad
c) A stranger’s arse on the tube; of whisky; some pills, a sheet of blotter acid, and some stuff I found down the back of the couch that seemed to be moving
d) Thora Hird; Thora Hird after the stroke; Thora Hird.
Right, THREE HOURS IS LONG ENOUGH… I shall finish this before dawn.
The results:
Mostly a): AVERAGE: Yeah, your brain isn’t tidy in the traditional sense, you possess a few quirks and a healthy degree of annoyance at the world. Nothing too much to worry about, you’re alright really, just try to resist the urge to stab.
Mostly b): SOCIOPATH: Well done, you can lie in a test to hide the fact you’re the worst kind of lunatic sadist who is wearing their entire family while reading this. Nobody believes you except those that did and elected you to power. You will kill again, there’s nothing we can do to stop you and a lot of us don’t really care.
Mostly c): I KNOW WHO AT LEAST ONE OF YOU IS: At least I know one of you when I see you coming. Not counting that person for reasons of anonymity, the rest of you are the kind of people who are entertaining from to observe from a distance as you get your arse handed to you by the wiry little fella/policeman/bouncer you have decided to try and “bring round to your way of thinking” ie: That he is a bastard. But look, I’m not going to mess with you, I’m just going to wait for you to mess with me and then bust out that Karate Kid balancing on one leg with the arms in the air kick thing. Then while you’re laughing I’m going to punch you in the balls or, if you’re a few woman from the past, date you briefly until you kick the crap out of me.
Mostly d): PSYCHOPATH/PERSON WHO GOT BORED ANSWERING THIS TEST HONESTLY: You’re either the type of person I’m not going to insult, or a lazy/sensible bastard. However, a friend of mine, whose email address can passed on to you, says you’re all a bunch of “inbred, slack-jawed, cow shaggers, and whose bones will be dug up and put on display in the British Museum to provide the missing link between Humans and those previously mentioned cock-lodging fish. Oh, and my friend wants their television back if anyone’s seen it. Apparently it’s quite recognisable as it was stolen in the middle of night where he was watching News 24. If you see anyone watching a television with the news on it, it’s probably his and thus immediately break in and steal it and deliver it to an address I can also pass on to you. He lost a 52” plasma screen TV, but the cunning burglar may have shrunk it to anything between 32” and 48”, although apparently it can look like a little less depending on the light, so bring it along just to be on the safe side.
Oh, and on a final note: Get a bloody haircut.