Race to the bottom

Last night I saw two rats wrestling in a yin-yang harmony, each with its teeth around the other’s neck. How were they doing that? And why? They were making these horrific screaming noises the entire time, too. And it wasn’t just two rats, it was America and England, it was Cain and Abel, me and my old landlord and me and my current landlord, it was me and you. It was everyone else who’s ever been born, the story of humanity told in two rats, each trying to be the first to kill.

 On my birthday I accidentally sat in front of the Nama stap tapestry for 43 minutes thinking about Gestalt theory, about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts and how there isn’t a single thing that this doesn’t pertain to. I switched leaning arms throughout, because of the bench with no back and I thought about how even in a museum of acquired taste, admittedly easy to make fun of, it still felt like a lacking experience without him being snarky and pissing me off. I would have traded my perfect museum day, alone with no headphones and dancing with my thoughts, to be pissed off and angry and exasperated, surely paying less attention to the actual art, surely getting kicked out for whisper yelling. I was just sitting there looking at this tapestry which might be my favorite piece I’ve ever seen in my life and I was wondering what he would say. I hadn’t responded to his last message. Thinking about what he’d put into my birthday card last year. Wondering if NASA takes astronaut volunteers to shoot up into space and never come back. 

 I was painfully sober with the kitchen light on, naked on my back with his sweaty red mop of hair on my chest like a fur coat. The bubble wrapped moon like a button fastening the sky together, barely visible through the window. My eyes full of tears focusing on my breathing pattern. My eyes full of tears and the moon zinging at me like a bullet and the kitchen light too bright, flies taking turns killing themselves on it. He’s tracing my stomach but it feels like he’s disemboweling me. He’s tracing my stomach and it feels like a lie, my head is turned away from him and it feels like a lie, it feels like a lie that I’m even in bed with him pretending to enjoy this (definition of lie), it feels like a lie in a Poe short story that’s going to rot under the floorboards and drive me to violent insanity. Given what I know now, about myself. Given that no one can ever go back no matter how hard they kick and scream. 

 On the dock, drunk, socks off feet swimming with the ducks. On the dock, open bottle, three cigarette butts. The sun drowning behind the science museum. On the dock, have to pee, she asks me if I think I’ve met my twin flame. She looks at me like she knows the answer and is waiting for me to choke on it. 

Marseille, August 2nd 2025

So, I just…I just, uh, I just finished reading uh, the book A Portrait of Jennie. 

I don’t know what to think of it, because you see I’m a painter myself and I did have some models sitting. I actually had a relationship with one of my models that lasted for six years. So, I know what it’s like. It’s a weird novel and. I’m not sure that the ending is correct; but it says something. I saw the movie too, but Joseph Cotten isn’t any credible in the movie as an artist. Actually he’s totally fucked up.

After closing the book, I thought for what purpose should I make up a story? What is it to write a story about love, love lost and found, etc…growing up with love, balding with love! hahaha…Well I don’t know. It’s funny. You read the book, you find it fine and you close it and it’s not so good anymore. 

Right now, I’m in Marseille, in the south of France for a week. 

And there’s a bright Summer Sun. And the sky is 

crazy blue. 

So, some swifts are still out there flying. And, you know, there are a bunch of trees too that I can see from my window, shivering under the summer wind.

Well, I’m French. I’m not American. So I’m not sure whether I know English very well. It is funny to write this. 

I don’t know if it is still possible to write fiction anymore. What does it mean to write fiction? To invent characters or even your own self-fiction, you know, all this crap. 

I know, I know I sound bitter and I just took one Prozac and one antipsychotic just in order to be able to drag myself out before night comes. I have my paintings hanging around me in the room…most of them abstract.

What is abstraction? I guess abstraction is the footprint of the mind left on canvas. I just saw a painting by André Masson recently at the Museum here. I felt that even if Andre Masson was not a very good painter he did really influence Pollock a great deal  (Just as Robert Nathan was not a very good writer). 

I still don’t know.

My mother has terminal cancer, she will be dead probably before winter . And for myself,  I am not a young man anymore. So, after closing the book, I remembered and mused on who I was twenty years ago and it doesn’t make any sense to me anymore, this life.

Slice of life, in Absentia

He had been inexpertly copied and pasted into this reality. That was how it felt. It was like playing tennis with one hand holding a racket and the other hand leaning on a crutch. People did and said things for reasons he could not understand. He was never 100 per cent sure when a conversation had ended. Or what delineated an acquaintance from a friend. He had worked in a library once. Someone had been there who tried their absolute hardest to err on the side of “acquaintance” not friend. It was as though there was a bar, or an invisible threshold, and this person had masterfully remained on the side that was not quite friendship. He had a best friend once. A kind, magical person who knew exactly what to say and do in any social situation. Who had chosen to be his friend, despite his dearth of confidence and social acumen. The friendship had ended. Fourteen years ago now. Depression’s crushing weight had proved too much for his best friend and just when he had finally got through it his best friend no longer wanted to know. He stalked his best friend’s social media. Sometimes regularly. One of his former best friend’s favourite films was Withnail and I. He could imagine his former best friend watching this film and thinking of him. As cowardly as the main character was; he still had what it takes. This thought comforted him and filled him with the same confidence his former best friend had instilled in him. That someone believed in him past the destruction of their relationship; when he had proved himself a failure beyond all reasonable doubt, meant more than he could ever say. His former best friend had such an insanely beautiful way of looking at the world. That was one of the reasons why he was so special to him. He imagined himself going to his old best friend’s wedding; and meeting him at the reception, and not saying anything, but for them to both understand and accept where the other was, and all that had happened. He knew this would never happen. But this dream comforted him and made the world seem more bearable. His former best friend had once referred to him as his Padawan. Back when the friendship had just started. It was the period in between the release of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. It was as if a door had been thrown open and beyond it lay worlds and worlds of exquisite beauty. But his mind did not do what he wanted it to do. It had tried to kill him. His former best friend, above and beyond everything and everyone, had helped him through it. And then he was gone. Like he had never existed in this world. The kettle finished boiling with a click. It was tea o clock. His former best friend had countless cups of tea with him; during the lunchbreak in the café where his friend worked. It was because his former best friend had seen him, really seen him, and decided he liked him. Despite his poor social skills and odd way of being. That was why he was so special. His former best friend was in two places now. In the world he could not see or touch or go to; living his life, and inside his heart. Which he had changed from a heart that hated into a heart that loved. He sipped his tea. It was going to be all right. Really.

COLONY

The Director of Good Ideas, Gregory Falter-Mountain, popped his head out from a trap door in the roof where they have been growing new Arts Council staff under hot lights, and asked me to come up and take a look. I ascended a ladder and entered a dazzling white room where row upon row of small people in pods lay perfectly still as if they were asleep. They were small, about the size of ventriloquist dolls, but Gregory Falter-Mountain assured me that they would grow to become full-sized members of staff. They all looked a little like Melvyn Bragg, even the female ones, with thick ruffled hair and an expression on their faces that suggested they had thought of something droll and would tell you later. Soon the entire Arts Council would be run by the creatures they were growing here. Smalls fan stirred the air about the staff member’s faces to help them get used to adversity, which they may meet in the real world. Lights were low, yet now and again, bursts of colour and fragments of film flashed across the walls and ceiling. Music and podcasts played to ensure that the subjects were equipped with good humour and imagination so they wouldn’t sound robotic like some of the earlier versions. I was told this was top secret. What was even more top secret was which previous members of Arts Council staff had been computer-powered hybrids of machine and flesh, who had since been decommissioned while we waited for this new batch. Maybe this was something we already knew, but weren’t aware that we knew, like the way the Chuckle brothers entered our consciousness long before they appeared on our screens. Mahler’s fifth was playing quietly out of the speakers and it reminded me that Mahler’s wife once worked as a lab assistant over-seeing a colony of praying mantis.