This is about a guy I met when I started university. He called himself the Phantom Rewind-Button Remover, don’t ask me why. I called him Fried-egg Eyes, because that’s exactly how he looked, or the Breath Guy, because so far as I knew the subject of all conversations between the Phantom and anyone in the world you could name was always breathing. He carried a hat filled with little strips of paper getting people to take one out and announce what was written on it, then he would talk. Always about breathing. For a while I thought all the strips of paper must have had that one subject title, "Breathing," written on them - that is until the Phantom was being questioned one day by a shopkeeper and I secretly unfolded some of the striplets while they argued: "Women From Outer Space," "Beer and Divination," "History in Cardboard." The Phantom grabbed his hat from me before I could delve any deeper. He immediately began to talk about breathing. I shouldn’t really call the Phantom’s method of exchanging information ‘conversations’ because he never seemed to pay any attention to anybody but himself. They were really monologues accompanied by movement. Lots of dancing. Scooping fistsful of air and swallowing it down and talking it all out like a bulimic windmill, spilling onto the road stopping traffic, giving truckdrivers the fingers. Falling over and rolling around on the pavement biting his tongue until someone offers to help and suddenly he offers to fart the froth off the top of their beer. He used to say "a breath has been inhaled, a breath forever inhales and exhales" - and he had this incomprehensible theory about the agency of ancillary, auxiliary or corollary lips; has anybody ever heard of this stuff? He’d arrive uninvited and unannounced at civic functions in a hot air balloon demanding the orchestra begin rehearsals of his vaccuum-cleaner concerto. He’d be sobbing hysterically to the taxi-drivers and whoever else outside Big Daddy’s after two in the morning about the tragic lives of Kirsch and Pagnelli, homeless medieval glassblowers. He’d lecture hour after hour on The Genital Origin of Breath and how tight pants and belts were strangling our breathing apparatus because that’s where the cycle of inspiration-expellation truly begins. I remember he got cagey when I took him to the Anatomy Museum to convince him it was the lungs and heart - parts of our upper halves - that were the essential organs of breath, production and distribution; he dismissed the various displays I pointed out to him as evidence of the widespread dementia that gripped modern science, especially the medical branches. Hearts and lungs sat boxed around us in their eerie aquariums while he jotted down notes, agape before the preserved remains of a deformed child bearing oversized male and female sex-organs.

A few days after that visit to the Medical School I was moping around in the cafeteria when I heard that the Phantom had begun another public harangue nearby, declaring he would prove once and for all the facts concerning the genital origin of breath. I went over to see what effect, if any, my anatomy lesson might have had on his oratory. He was frighteningly pale and shaking uglily, lying like a giant unopened milk-bottle beneath the new archway outside the student union building. He was suffering something terrible, displaying intense difficulty moving his lips, severe dysfunction of the throat and jaw muscles, extreme convulsions of the abdomen and lower limbs. People were screaming at him and at first I thought it was one of his occasionally cruel jokes until I got close enough to see the scarcely victorious look in his eyes and the big messy blood-spattered cavity in his chest where his greatcoat blew open. Two pictures locked themselves in my mind before I blacked out: the rusty blade of a butcher’s cleaver in a puddle of bloody innards and the sinister tumescent bulge beginning to grow at the corpse’s groin.

Last year his wife planned a special birthday treat for him.

It was a cake, carefully decorated with quotations from ancient Greek.

Unfortunately it tasted terrible.

Which only goes to show, we can’t have archaic and eat it too.

But he loved his wife very much.

He wanted to buy her some anemones, her favourite flower.

Unfortunately all the florist had left were a few stems of the feathery ferns he used for decoration.

The husband presented these rather sheepishly to his wife.

"Never mind, dear," she said, "With fronds like these, who needs anemones?"

They made a great couple.

When they first met they were both practising architects.

They made a great cupola.

He’d been married once before but when his blonde wife faded to brunette he sued her for bleach of promise.

She remarried.

Her new husband was so obsessed with backsides he almost died from assphyxiation.

Together they formed a sort of mutual aberration society.

On their first trip to the beach they both got more sun than they basked for.

They started acting like two Santa Clauses on the morning after Christmas Day - a pair of real beat Nicks.

Anyway this friend of mine sold his enormous art collection and purchased a yacht.

"One of the unfortunate aspects of collecting 17th and 18th century art," he told me, "is that if you buy too much of it you end up completely baroque."

He decided to give his sailing crew a Christmas party in port.

He came ashore to round up evergreens, food, musicians and gifts.

When he returned he discovered all the plants he’d ordered were being installed on the wrong yacht.

"Ahoy!" he shouted. "You’re treeing up the wrong barque!"

On one of his circumnavigatory expeditions he uncovered a legendary treasure.

Afraid of being arrested and deprived of his loot he hid it in his grandfather’s apiary.

He sent me a scrawled telegram which said, "Booty is in the beehives of the older."

Later I heard he quit sailing and turned his attention to animals.

"You see," he explained, "it’s a little known fact that while the animals went onto the ark 2 by 2, by the end of their voyage many had multiplied. Thus Noah became the first man to have bred his cast upon the waters."

He especially loved horses.

When he tried to smuggle his dapple grey pony into a local hotel they had to be put up in the bridle suite.

He wasn’t so thrilled with rabbits, though.

He’d always wanted to become a writer but he couldn’t concentrate because this big longlegged rabbit, a drinking buddy of his, kept breathing down his neck.

He always swore he’d missed out on literary fame by a hare’s breath.

He loved snakes so much he set up a serpentine midwifery clinic.

Once a patient of his swallowed a rubber ball and she soon gave birth to a bouncing baby boa.

Later still he became obsessed with auctions.

His features grew stern and serious.

"Pleasant-faced people are generally considered the most welcome," he advised me, "but the true auctioneer is always happy to see a man whose appearance is forbidding."

He once bid $15,000 on a certain antique writingdesk that he said he simply had to have.

His bid was successful, and when he got the writingdesk home and opened it, a dozen people fell out.

Apparently it was a missing person’s bureau.

Last thing I heard he was in a car trying to beat a speeding train to an intersection.

He got across, alright - a beautiful marble one.

The end (R.I.P.)

My illustrious forebear, the Breeder, created me as a kind of joke. The gathering together of my many parts was something done for the purpose of creating amusement, a jest. The assembly of said parts into a unified whole was an activity whose sole object was merriment. The announcement of my imminent existence was something not couched in earnest terms. The actual physical moment of switching me on was a period of sport - all frivolity’s gayeyed, tongue in cheek, gentle slapstick converted into one risible electrical impulse. Such were the Breeder’s intentions. Unfortunately, being human, and therefore only rarely capable of the kind of interstellar detachment so readily identifiable as my very quiddity, he found himself questioning the consequences of his mechanical tomfoolery. Having completed the process of my creation and having laughed loudly and at length over the matter, rather than sell me to the highest bidder or destroy me then and there - two possibilities more in keeping with the original spirit of his joke - he lingered among my chromeplated consoles. After a period of restless indecision he sat down at my master controls and executed a simple series of finger movements which, once begun, multiplied into numberless arpeggios. He began to make use of me. In effect, he wished to prolong the joke. He programmed me to sew irreverance, to make fun of, to ridicule; to persistently pursue persiflage, to doggedly dollop derision, to boldly barter banter; to cari my cature and buff my oonery; to scoff, mock and bare my arse.

His early experiments led him once and for all out of the realm of the joke and into the chasm of the butt. He began to think, to reflect, to cogitate and consider. Suddenly contemplation was his middle name. Deliberation, lucubration, mentation and brainwork were his meat and three veg. He changed hats: wearing one he ruminated, wearing a second he meditated. Under the dandruff ridden brim of a cloth cap he studied; beneath the sweat flecked brim of a bowler he speculated. Stetsons, sombreros and boaters meant retrospection, introversion and afterthought. He became, in a word, unfunny. I had no choice: I had to kill him.

I’ll say this for him: he got me out of that ramshackle collection of souped up hard drives, glorified filing cabinets and snaking cables I was beginning to think of as my body and I was rehoused inside the infinitely more desirable contours of a department store dummy. I had to laugh - and I mean that literally, such were the incontrovertible urgings of my circuitry - I had to laugh at my being a dummy: HEE, I AM A DUMMY. You’re a mannequin, said my illustrious forebear. CALL ME TIN MAN. You’re plastic, he snapped. SO BREAK MY LEGS AND CALL ME IRONSIDE. He did break my legs, as well as my hips, arms, hands and neck, so as to rebuild the joints and make me capable of basic human movements. HEY DADDY O, I said, SINCE YOU’RE SO HUNG UP ON THIS VERISIMILITUDE SCHTICK HOW’SABOUT GIVING ME SOMETHING TO SCRATCH WHILE I’M LOST IN THOUGHT? WHAT’LL I SAY WHEN SOMEONE ASKS ME "HOW’S IT HANGING"? He told me that technically I was female. BUT HOW CAN THAT BE, PAPA DEAR, HOW WILL I MENSTRUATE? I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO DEFROST. He told me to go fuck myself. I stuck my finger in my mouth and pushed it back and forth.

I realised it was a mistake to have killed The Breeder after his body had lain motionless on the workshop floor for a few hours, but then I had to laugh. In a way he was the ideal object of my innate antigravity. In fact up to that point he was the only responsive object in my entire experience. I tried swapping insults with a kettle and a lightbulb but neither of the two rose to the bait. I even searched for a doornail to tell it HA HA HA YOU’RE DEAD MATE but the door to the workshop was remarkably devoid of nails. Perhaps they had the day off to attend the funeral of a relative. Anyway as I said I had to laugh. I left the workshop and entertained myself as I descended the stairs by reactivating in slow motion the memory circuits involving The Breeder’s death: I had to laugh when he stepped out from the shower box, his foot pressing down on the upward pointing teeth of a garden rake; I had to laugh when the long wooden pole of the rake handle sprang to life and collided concussively with the end of his nose; I had to laugh when he wheeled aside to bring his bleeding foot down again, this time onto a grease soaked section of banana peel: and when he fell backwards and his head hit a step at the entrance to the shower box and went splatskrtk! and rolled over loose on his left shoulder I had to laugh some more. I tell you that Breeder is so funny he just kills me.

A BACK PASSAGE TO INDIA; A FIST FOR WANDA; ALLEGRO NON THROBBO; AMERICAN GRABTITTY; BIG WOMEN; BLOWN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY; BONKINSTEIN; BREAKFAST AT STIFFANY’S; CAPE FUR; CHARIOTS OF FUR; CITIZEN CANE ME; CLITCLANGER; COCKTALE; CRACKULA; CUM & CUMMER; DESPERATELY SUCKING SUSAN; DIE HARD-ON; ENDLESS CUMMER; EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE COOZE; FART AWAY SO MOIST; FIVE EASY PENISES; FOREST RUMP; FULL METAL JACK-OFF; GO DOWN, DIRTY SHAYNE; GREAT EJACULATIONS; GROIN-HOG’S DAY; HOMO ALONE; JUGGERNAUGHTY; JURASSIC PORK; LUST ACTION HAIR HOLE; MALCOLM XXX; MIDNIGHT WOWBOY; MOBY DICK; MURIEL’S WETTING; NAKED MUNCH; ONCE WE’RE HORNIER; PEED; PENETRATOR; PETER PANT; PICNIC ON WANGING COCK; PUMP UP THE VULVA; QUIMBANGER; RAGING PULL; Richard "Dick" Hairarse in RETURN OF A MAN HUNG LIKE A HORSE; RIMBO; ROBINSON SCREWSO; ROBOCOCK; SANTA BANGRE; SCHINDLER’S LUST; STAR WHORES; STIFFHANGER; SWALLOW GROOVE; TERMINAL COLOSTOMY; THE BLOWS BROTHERS; THE BUM BANDIT QUEEN; THE FOUR FUCKSKETEERS; THE HARDER THEY COME; THE JOY FUCK CLUB; THE LOIN KING; THE LUST EMPEROR; THE MAN WHO FELLATED TO EARTH; THE POSTMAN ALWAYS COMES TWICE; THE WADSUCKER PROXY; THE WANKING OF PULL-HAM 125; THE WAY WE WHIRR; THE WICKS OF EASTWITCH; TIME COPULATER; 3 MEN AND A BABY; TOMMY’S KNOCKERS; WHITE MEN JUMP CUNT; WHO’S EATING GILBERT’S BOTTOM-GRAPES?; WUTHERING HOTS.

- - - Hope you can use them! - - -

XXX your shardborn

sgalag with the

velutinous veloute

*THE START* Wednesday. Woke up with burns on the palms of my hands and skulked into the van. (Usually I move out of wherever I’m living the night before the tour so as not to have to pay any rent while away but after last night’s party I could barely remember my name never mind my address and wound up sitting on someone’s couch with my best friend watching a huge tv in a cloud of nitrous oxide before wandering around in the moonlight, both of us hot for some last minute lovin’ but also fairly itching to give each other the heaveho - so although our parting words weren’t "Well that’s that, then, now fuck off, you smell," they pretty much conformed to that general semantic thrust.) Hit Waikato Uni about noon, started into a hot outdoor set we shortened due to the fact we were interrupting a nun’s funeral. My daughter Louise fell about laughing everytime I pointed at her. Headed for Wanganui after the first of many free lunches. Dinner at the Clansman that night was steak, chips, salad and beer on the house. About three punters hung around ‘til late, more to listen to fatrocious soundalike hits of the 60s from the pub jukebox than to dig Shaft. Nobody recognised our cover of "Birthday." Back at the motel later Skinny fainted from too much tea.

Thursday. Set up at Massey Uni about noon. While playing to a sizeable crowd on the concourse, a Coping With Suicide seminar was being held beside us in the Kiwitea Lounge. More free lunch and a chat with a git at the radio station whose mullet had us all in stitches. That and the fact he sang along with a Bailter Space track. Got Nat King Cole’s fabulous ST LOUIS BLUES lp at a junkshop for $3.50 and got told to get a haircut by an irate kerbcrawling agriculturalist. Sat around outside the Barrista Cafe reading old Story Of Pop mags. Free "Hunter’s Stew" courtesy cafe-staff followed by smallish crowd enlivened by bunthrowing dancing femmes. Off to Wellington late that night.

Friday. Set up at Victoria Uni inside the cafe. Crazy orange plastic chairs and fluctuating blood-sugar levels combined with finding no ham whatsoever in my socalled ham salad roll possibly accounts for my tetchiness during the Radio Active chat. That and being quizzed about my pants. Day improved markedly that night, as it does. Z Bob’s brother Stefan shouted us crocodile meat pizza at his One Red Dog joint and we chased that down with a chicken cranberry & brie number and cold weissbier. Such a slapup feed absolutely accounts for rocknificent show that night at Barbadago: played about 30 songs, sold a shitload of cds and my 100% mozzarella sweat drove certain submediterraneans gaga. Wandered around Cuba Mall in the weesmallhours subjecting goodhumoured locals to the old infallible twodollarshop whoopeecushion handshake routine. NB: taxidrivers in Wellington do not stop for my pal Dragan Stojanovic, ever. Fact. Wound up back at Andrew Tolley’s with Tony and the two bunfighting Palmerstonians in a spontaneous slumberparty situation.

Saturday. Up real early and off to catch the ferry. Pulled the old 6 for the price of 4 switcheroo with Skinny and Pants hiding under piles of rockband detritus in the back of the van. Slept through the crossing and dreamt I was a waiter at my niece’s wedding over the snake road to Motueka. Rained in all day at Hot Mama’s Cafe, bandwide misery mostly shaken by free fillet steak, ratatouille, spicey wedges and corn. Started off softly into our frozen-snot Grand Ole Opry set with little to no reaction from the unnaturally tall face-feeding punters. Went off like last week’s milk once we hunkered down and revved up, Pants getting some fall all over the place & knock down that amp action happening. Got taken home and tucked in by migrant apple pickers. Touched briefly by vomiting hostess & naked boyfriend scene set to Louis Prima singing "The closer to the bone, the sweeter the meat." Rolled over and slept on the classiest carpet of the whole tour.

Sunday. Gig in Nelson cancelled. Drove to Christchurch killing time coming up with Chills answer-songs e.g. "Go the Fuck Away" and "Song for Gary Newman," "Song for Randy Van Warmer," etc. Arrived late at the Space Dust/Brother Love motel chain and caught up a little with old friends.

Monday. Our official day off. Segovia is away with an old mate somewhere and the rest of the band are intent on a pilgrimage to Ringo’s. I’m homesick, first of all for my Auckland routine and secondly for days gone way-by here in Christchurch. I basically hated living here back in the mid-eighties but it wasn’t all inadequacy and humiliation - or maybe it was, but at least back then I had the distinct feeling that all my friends were equally fucked up and truth is I find that enormously heartwarming. For oldtime’s sake I lurked about in Smith’s bookshop all afternoon and came away with a paperback of Nathaneal West’s Collected Works. His THE DAY OF THE LOCUST is the novelistic equivalent of a free all-you-can-eat barbecue-with-beer at a worldfamous restaurant. Sample from dialogue: "That dame thinks she can give me the fingeroo, but she’s got another thinkola coming." I’m a sucker for trashtalking dwarves, no two ways about it. Met up with Violet from the Dust and the rest of Shaft and tried en masse to make the Casino scene but flunked the dresscode. (Later Z Bob got in on his own; I kinda caught some contact-jollies from his descriptions of transactional abandon but I guess at heart I’m more of a TAB hound.) That night at Violet’s we had a fantastic noodle meal with lots of beer and while my and several others’ vitamin c levels slumped dramatically we mimed to a light-orchestral version of "The Ballad of John & Yoko," failed utterly to get the whopeecushions to work and came over all cinematically semi-involved with a nth-generation video showing of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS - home to the immortal line "You’re a groovy boy, I’d like to strap you on sometime" among others. (Little sleep that night and my memory has lockjaw so I’ll resort briefly to my notebook: The Brother’s Taxforms (?) - Bywater’s Louis Jordan lp (!) - Chinups - Cartwheels - Jane’s garden - James’s suit - Half Japanese vs ACDC (?!?) - Uncanny absence of snoring...)

Tuesday. Set up at Canty Uni. Cool outdoors stadium affair fired up by combination of pals in the audience and unexpected near-altercation with cafeteria staffpersons over size of coke-containers permitted for refilling with watercooler-juice and price per thereof. Cosey like an old shoe chat with the rubberneck guy out of the Bats and second unexpected near-altercation with stress-affected RDU tearoom minder. Poptacular choc-chip cookie-ettes and coffee courtesy the Students’ Union and a most Twilight Zonesque conversation with the guy who wrote the book about Buster Keaton. Christchurch is never not strange. On the way to Oamaru we drop in on Rich’s folks in Temuka. They tell us some great travelling tales and for the rest of the tour we often catch ourselves repeating "Great day to die!" and "If you’ve got a dog you don’t bark yourself." About 7.5 people turn up to see us play at the Penguin Club, among them one hirsute local who kept yelling "I’ve got Frankenstein boots!" Got domiciled with some friendly young student-cum-Goths. A guy in denim just visiting that evening needed to know what kind of stuff we smoked in Dorkland and Z Bob told him "Skunk, man." That impressed the whole evening out of me though I did my best to strike up a couple of conversations, to wit, "Do any of you guys ever feel like running down the main street and breaking all the shop windows?" (no reply) and "Hey I really dig your Sepultura t-shirt, so tell me, are you into gladiator movies?" (pause, no reply). I suggest sotto voce to the rest of the band that certain southerners have evolved way beyond mere conversation.

Wednesday. Stopover on the way to Dunedin at Moeraki, home of the big boulders. I refuse to get out of the van due to traumatic teenage memories of an awful night’s hitch-hiking run-in with buttrape-bragging bikies. Even now I get the willies sometimes just looking at a bag of marbles. Dunedin on the other hand though also potentially painful always delivers its fair share of attractions. I can still smell smoked fish pie on that corner of the Octagon even though the bakery is shut, and I practically keep having to turn around and wonder where my dog has gone. The gig that night at the Loaded Goblin has its moments, people watching tv in the lounge bar and some embarrassingly awkward dancing from semistupefied students, but mostly I’m carried away by having had the band meet my parents that afternoon and scoring a hot place to stay for us all with Tanya, Olive and Paul in Stuart St.

Thursday. Did the radio chat thing and an instore at the new Fire Engine record shop. That was especially good because my Dad came by for a look while I was bent over backwards with my guitar on the red floor in front of the shiney firepole. I like to show off in front of my old man, it’s a buzz-and-a-thousand. That night at SWIM was probably pretty fucking great but we ate a lot of mussels beforehand and drank a lot of wine and I got to feeling very romantic and ended up bumping into a bunch of old friends and having personally-speaking so much of a good time that I didn’t really remember to notice whether everyone else was getting off or what. Dunedin is never not familiar, but it can sneak up and surprise you in a consenting-adults way.

Friday. Visit the Dunedin Sounds exhibition at the Settlers’ Museum and feel like I wanna get all dewyeyed but honestly those weren’t the days. Got coffeed up and popped into Roy’s record shop, chatting funnily enough about records of all things. Got a bunch of compilation cds from my mate Agalbraith and split town for Timaru. By the time we do the Rhino Records instore thingy I have lost my voice. Cool crowd gathers and we all get pointed at walking the streets. Bloody nice dinner but since it wasn’t free I won’t elaborate. Segovia scored a dirty r&b cd with both parts of "Butcher Pete" and that really filthy Jackie Wilson track. The night gig at Subterranean goes real well e.g. we make heaps of money on the door, two women punters have a big pash during our third song and then a guy gets up with his girlfriend and they start feeling each other up during another one. Lots of tongue-in-mouth action which I can never see too much of. It was that movie CINEMA PARADISO in a stinky little port-town dive. Postgig recreation was a visit to Mr Easy Tea for late nite snax. Tony got picked on by a local lad who took offence at his supposedly outrageous trousers. "What kind of pants do you call those," gibed the Timaruvian, oblivious to the fact that Tony was eating and it’s just not right no matter where you are to rag on a guy’s rig while said guy’s masticating. "I call these average," answered Tony a.k.a. from that moment on Pants. Stay in superb comfort at the Rhino Records guy’s house and catch a severely untimely cold.

Saturday. Morning tea with Rich’s folks. Lots of pikelets and jam, tea and coffee. My voice is gone altogether and my nose runs so much the snot really does cake against my pants. Hit Christchurch intending to sleep solidly but end up driving round with Rich looking for a chemist. Eat lots of nigroids, Vocalzones and a bottle of green ginger wine. Catch up with our hosts but I’m not allowed to speak or smoke so I’m bitching bigtime by the time we fight over the vegetarian menu at the Dux De Lux. Not even spinach and feta pastries, garlic bread, salad and veges can convince me that this is not Hell and that big noise is not Booger Burns goin’ down. Cheer up enough to be able to grimace a tiny bit before I notice this guy in the audience at Space Dust’s set who has the smallest head I’ve ever seen on a human being. Now this has added significance due to the fact that prior to the tour, way-back-when it seems though actually just a week before, during a show in Auckland featuring Zero labelmates and allround filthy combo Ape Management (who, to pile unlikely staggering coincidence upon improbably mindbending fluke, also number amongst their rank ranks Space Dust’s guitarrer Brother Love) I spotted swaying disjunctively within the preposterously seated crowd of Leisure Loungees this woman with the biggest skull I’ve ever seen on a human being. So I am bearing this terrifying burden by the time we start into rocking and first of all I notice my fucked voice is kind of soothing, more windtunnelly than sandpapery, then I notice how Xmassy the menthol-sputum-coated microphone can really be, then all of a sudden I’m goosestepping between songs, Segovia’s virtually wiggling his ass and a gaggle of seriously inebriated fancydress fruggers in duck suits and witchipoo clobber are ruckussing osten(Texas)tatiously all over the floor. Oh what a night: late December 1963 must’ve been cold cheese on toast compared to this; the night they drove old Dixie down must’ve been a mug of Horlicks compared to this; the night the lights went out in Georgia must’ve been 3 valium and a glass of lukewarm water compared to this. Anyway it was a cool gig and all apprehensions of freak-phrenology paranoia were completely dispelled. Not to mention I licked that cold, spent 5 minutes at a crusty yecchfest, 15 minutes at a designer dude’s cocktail wake, a cool car-ride with Patrice and her friends with the gigantic she-dog on heat, a brief reunion with a guy from Dunedin I hadn’t seen in 12 years (hey Simon, remember Hamish whose parents thought he was crazy because he liked punk rock?!), a vision of Zarakov eating pigs’ feet, a half-hour wrapped in a sweaty duvet convinced I was a ghost and hot laugh-out-loud sex like I don’t even dream about.

Sunday. On the way to Picton I dreamed I was drinking expensive champagne and that Aretha Franklin was tickling the palms of my hands with her thumbs. After I woke I kept having to squeeze my eyes shut to try to remember if I could see whether she was wearing little rubber thumb-condoms or not. I got into this habit of frenzied blinking (undoubtedly exacerbated by recent illness, lack of sleep, low bloodsugar and strenuous physical exertion) and when a woman on board the ferry saw my predicament she told me she was concerned about my eyes and would I like to borrow her sunglasses. Only my ears were very blocked and I thought she said she had burning bouncing thighs and would I like to fondle her funbags. For real, I don’t make shit like this up! I slouched back to my corner and became one with speechlessness. Back at Andrew’s in Wellington we sat in front of a heater and watched incomprehensible sports action on tv. His band SOWPUSS did a radical version of "Devil Woman" that night before we played at Bodiddler among many cool things; they are spunky and moist as opposed to sexy and hot, and exceptionally well-dressed. This night we talked a lot, jokes and stuff, road stories, recollections of memorable meals and so on. Managed to play our peckers off as well and Rich started doing that kick all the drums over thingy he does so well again.

Monday. Drive to Napier after a great night’s sleep. Homesick again but I understand we’re going in the right direction. We meet Tony’s mother and brothers in Napier where we play at a place called O’Flaherty’s. Tonight’s show is awesome; after the last two spectaculars it’s positively hattricktastic. Shaft fall over a lot, always a good sign in my book, and the stage at this joint is conveniently situated beside a street-entrance making wandering outside and showing off at passersby a must. We probably played for as long as we did because we knew we were on our way back to Auckland and the daily grind of our hairdressing careers. Apparently we had a support band but my memory says not. I do remember there are a lot of nice people in Napier, many of whom turned up at Tony’s mum’s place after the gig and got me, for one, very drunk - a first for the whole tour. To the very friendly person to whom I joked "I’m a lover, not a writer," I have to apologise because in fact I am a writer, not a lover - that night I was more of a mixed up mess than anything else and I’m sorry for acting like a dick. Apologies also to Kumera Patch who were the mighty threepiece who did in fact support us; thanks, too. *THE FINISH*

After the gig we moved the gear. I took the drumstool and a guitar from beside the stage and carried them outside where a couple of security guys were leaning against a waisthigh wall smoking cigarettes. We were on a concrete landing between the stagedoor entrance and a small flight of stairs leading to the carpark below. It had rained during the show. In their wetness the leaves on the trees to my left reflected the orange light of the streetlamps and a lone skinny alsatian rooted hopefully amongst some busted kleensaks discarded in a heap beneath the stairs. As I reached the ground I breathed in the cool night air and suddenly a young woman’s voice swore angrily from the darkness. I peered through the spaces between the stairs to my right and there was a teenage girl standing over by the bags of rubbish wearing only a t-shirt and underpants. She looked toward me, kneeling and pulling her t-shirt down around her legs, repeating "Oh shit, oh fuck" and wiping her hair from her face. I started to ask what the matter was when one of the security guys ran down the stairs and shone a powerful longhandled torch in the girl’s direction. Her t-shirt was white with an iron-on design showing ET - The Extraterrestrial. She moaned and said, "I was just going for a piss and some stupid dog spewed all over my pants." From the way she spoke I could tell she had been drinking.

The second security guy arrived and asked the first guy to switch off his torch then pushed both hands together in a praying shape and casually bit his bottom lip. The first security guy asked me, "Who’s she?" I told him I didn’t know. The second guy said to the space beneath the stairs, "Show’s over miss, time to go home." The girl in the darkness stayed where she was, mumbling fuck and shit quietly to herself.

I mentioned to the second security guy, who had taken a big silver ring with about twenty keys on it out of his pocket and was passing it back and forth between his hands, that the girl had taken off her pants to pee and something about a dog spewing. He looked at the first security guy, said "Torch" and tossed the keys in the air. The first guy tossed the torch at the second guy with his right hand and caught the keys with his left. At the same time the second guy caught the torch with his right hand and switched it on not with any finger but by smacking it against his right leg. Both security guys clicked their tongues and went "Swee-eet" at the end of this exchange.

"Excuse me, miss," said the guy with the torch, shining it at the ground beneath the stairs until the circle of light’s outermost arc came to a stop at the girl’s feet: "If those’re your pants I suggest you put them back on." He referred to a crumpled pair of jeans draped over a ripped-open kleensak at the centre of the lighted area. I could see steam rising from the pool of greyish brown dogsick which covered most of the upper half of the pair of jeans so I protested, "She can’t put them back on - just look at all that vomit."

By this time Rich and one of the Americans had reached the bottom of the stairs. They stood to the left of me and the security guys, holding an amp between them. Neither of them seemed to be interested in what was going on though the American chuckled and raised his eyebrows when he heard me say vomit. Rich asked after the van keys and I reached into one of my trouser pockets. They weren’t there. I noticed both security guys observing me closely as I went through each of my pockets in search of the keys. I pulled out a few coins, some five-dollar bills, guitar picks, scraps of paper, a swiss army knife, a ballpoint pen, a house key, a practiseroom key, a drum key, a backstage pass, a broken lens from an old pair of sunglasses, a piece of green elastic and a condom before coming to the van keys. Rich briefly let go of his end of the amp with one hand to catch the keys but in my effort to maintain hold of the various other bits and pieces still in my hands I lamely misthrew and the van keys disappeared into a grate set into the floor of the carpark. The guards laughed. "Fuck Bob," muttered Rich, bending his legs in time with the American to put down their load. He stared futilely at the grate for a few seconds then sat down on the amp. "We need those keys man."

"Look, I’ll think of something," I said. "Do you know there’s a girl under the stairs here and a dog’s chucked on her jeans and I think she’s drunk - "

"I’m not drunk," shouted the girl drunkenly. "What happened to the Americans?"

By now the two security guys were standing with their arms crossed looking amused. Another American was coming down the stairs with a p.a. speaker and a can of beer. Behind him Pants and Z Bob were bringing down the bass bin. I ran up the stairs and passed Matt and the other Americans with the rest of the gear on the landing. One of them said "That’s everything" but I could see my cotton bag on the floor inside the glass doors of the stage-entrance. I grabbed it and raced back down the stairs. The security guys were on their way up, whistling and jangling their oversized keyrings. "We have to lock up now," one of them announced. "Your mates are taking care of your girlfriend." I’d been about to thank them for their help but I was miffed by that girlfriend remark and I remembered how they’d both sniggered when I threw away the van keys so instead I said to nobody in particular, "It’s gonna be one of those nights."

Back at the bottom of the stairs the girl in the underpants was sitting on the bass bin smoking a cigarette and chatting to the Americans. I reached into my cotton bag and pulled out my brown starspangled slacks. "Here’s some pants," I offered, "How far do you live from here?" She held up the slacks and made a highpitched noise like a squeal and a laugh. "These are nice," she added, "Can I keep them?" "No," I said, "I’m sorry, really, I need them. Just so you get home safe." She gave me an awful look and threw the trousers on the ground. I picked them up and she jabbed in my direction with her cigarette and complained to the Americans, "I don’t want his help, I want an American." The Americans looked embarrassed and tried to reason with the girl. They were tired, they needed to drive back to Auckland, it simply wasn’t safe for a young woman to be wandering around drunk wearing only a t-shirt and underpants. The girl repeated her "I’m not drunk" line and stamped her foot for emphasis, but because she was sitting on the bass bin at the time and because she plainly was indeed drunk, the act of stamping her foot, instead of adding force to her words, merely pulled the rest of her body suddenly forward so that she fell off the bass bin and collapsed in a heap on the ground. The Americans picked her up and sat her down on the stairs where she came to, wriggling with discomfort and complaining about the rain soaking through her knickers. They pleaded with her once more, it’s late, it’s a shitty night, for Pete’s sake put on these pants. This time she nodded and took my pants and started to put them on. She even said Which one’s Pete to the Americans. One of them pointed to the van and told her he’s sleeping in there with his monkey. Then the girl stood up in my pants and looked pissed off with the wisecracking Americans. She made as if to shake them off despite the fact they remained seated on the stairs. She took three steps forward pointing vaguely toward the end of the driveway out of the carpark then fell over once again.

During all this kerfuffle the others had loaded as much gear as they could into the boot of Matt’s car. He and Z Bob were about to drive to a service station to call the AA to get a replacement key for the van. Meanwhile we were to pile up the rest of the gear beside the van and wait for their return. I pointed to the Americans, who once more were propping the girl up between them on the stairs, and said, "I don’t know about this situation over here, I think we ought to give this girl a lift home before she starts throwing up." I noticed Matt wasn’t too enthusiastic about the prospect of somebody PARKING THEIR CUSTARD inside his automobile and quickly added that I didn’t think she’d gotten to that stage just yet and that I’d stick my duvet on the backseat and ride in there with her. I actually promised the girl would not be sick. Matt nodded okay and opened the door and I leaned into the backseat and spread out my crumby duvet. I called out to the Americans to bring our guest to the car and climbed in myself, watching the following sequence of events from the rear window: the girl getting up, weaving forward, falling, caught by the helpful Americans; the girl thanking them, clinging to their waists; the Americans leading the girl to the car; the girl worming out of the arms of the Americans and waving a hand back at the stairs shouting "My jeans, my shoes." I shut my eyes and hugged my legs, banging my forehead against my knees in backseat exasperation.

When at last the Americans succeeded in bringing the girl, who was wet and dirty from falling over in the carpark, she squinted into the backseat from outside Matt’s door and suddenly lurched backwards with a sour grimace. Pants, who was holding the girl’s shoes in one hand and gingerly folding her soiled jeans on the bonnet of the car with the other, bent forward grabbing his crotch and going "Oof!" A wad of chewing gum flew from his mouth and landed in the middle of the windscreen. The girl had inadvertently elbowed him in the nuts. He howled and tears streamed from his eyes. The girl turned to discover the reason for this new calamity, unaware of her part in it, complaining once more that what she wanted was an American. She would not get into the car, she explained, unless she could sit beside a real American. I heard one of them yell at her heatedly, "Will you just shut up and get in the car," while from over at the van somebody coolly uttered "Let her walk." I could feel the situation worsening. I climbed out from the backseat and said to the girl, pointing at Matt, "Please, tell him where you live, get in the car; these guys, these real live American guys, will get in beside you and in two minutes you’ll be home. Get cleaned up and make sure you return my pants." I was literally whispering but I could feel little flecks of spit bouncing off my lips as I spoke, a sure sign of anger. "Please, we all just wanna go home." The girl shrugged and climbed into the car. I winced as she caught the cuff of my brown starspangled slacks on a protruding seat-lever and the fabric ripped sending a tin star spinning to the ground. Get in, get in, I motioned to the Americans, "And don’t come back without my pants, you hear, they’re very special to me, they were a gift, I’m not going back to Auckland without them." Matt and Z Bob got into the front seat and I shut Matt’s door. He wound down his window and gave me the thumbs up with his left hand, starting the engine with his right. Z Bob slid a cassette into the dashboard deck and the car rumbled forward. I could see the pained expressions on the faces of the Americans through one of the back windows while an ACDC song blasted out from the front. The song was ‘Highway To Hell.’

Dear Bob,

a half-hour after Matt’s car had driven away you and the others were standing around the gear gathered beside the van when it started to rain again. At first you ignored it: a few halfhearted drops falling gently every now and then couldn’t do you or the gear much harm. You were shivering, though; you’d sweated a lot during the show and you remembered how difficult it was removing your shiney blue shirt afterwards: it was too tight around your upper arms and you had to get Pants’s help to peel it off.

You always change your shirt and your pants and especially your socks straight after a gig because otherwise you stink and the others make a big deal out of it when you get into the car or the van. The worst time was one evening after playing in Rotorua you didn’t change and the band all got into the van and started driving back to Auckland with the windows down and the stench that night from the hot pools was really awful so you wound the windows up and soon everyone was gagging because your own body odour was so much more offensive. The van stopped and you had to change into fresh clothes beside the road before the others would even consider carrying on. Then everyone felt better until you farted. It was one of those completely silent ones that stink so bad people could probably smell it from outside the van. The van screeched to a halt and everyone jumped out, falling about retching and laughing. You sat in the van under your duvet going "Fuck you guys are so juvenile" until they grabbed your legs and pulled you out. You lay on the ground and ignored them while they pissed in the long grass, but next thing you knew they’d all piled back into the van and taken off up the road without you. It was maybe an hour before they returned to pick you up. They’d been smoking dope and eating meat pies and nobody would even give you a cigarette. In hindsight you suppose you deserved it.

Since that night you always carried a little loose cotton bag with a towel and a change of clothes. As soon as the band would finish playing you’d change out of your shiney shirt and your starspangled slacks or whatever other attention-seeking devices you’d been parading around in that night and put on a clean pair of jeans, a t-shirt and fresh socks. It worked well, and though you’d wanted to help the girl in the undies under the stairs, now you were regretting having parted with your pants: they hadn’t gotten as messy as they usually did since for some unknown reason you’d changed from sweating mostly through your legs to sweating copiously from your arms and back, but you’d removed them out of deference to your by now well-established system, and now you were annoyed with yourself for having tampered with the givens of that very system by lending out your pants instead of keeping them rolled up with your sticky shirt and your dirty socks in a sealed plastic wrapper retained for exactly that purpose within your lightweight cotton carrybag.

So you were standing in the carpark, shivering, wishing you could get your jacket out of the van, kicking yourself for having lost the keys and for parting with your best pair of pants, trying to see the funny side, when it really started to rain...

My health’s not so good. I’ve got so many aches and pains right now that a new one would have to wait a week before I could feel it.

Yesterday I was walking on the beach when I saw an old bottle. I opened it and I was amazed when a genie appeared and said, "I’ll grant you any two wishes you want." I said, "Okay, I want something that’ll restore my health - and then I want a date with a Hollywood starlet." I went home and there was a knock on the door. On the mat was a bowl of chicken soup. Then the phone rang. It was Lassie.

I once had a paranoid bloodhound. He thought people were following him.

I used to work for a petfood company. I’m the guy who thought up mailman-flavoured dogroll.

I had a great idea this morning, but I didn’t like it.

The trouble with ideas is they inevitably degenerate into work.

I heard there was an acute shortage of elevator operators so I applied for a job but the personnel manager told me, "Sorry, we really want somebody with experience." Couldn’t she have at least started me off in a building with only one floor?

I got a job as a nightwatchman but I was fired becos somebody stole two nights.

I found out how hard it is to buy a tank. Have you ever kicked a tread?

What’s so special about Mardi Gras? Even if they held it in the streets, I wouldn’t go.

I was at a party and this guy goes, "Make yourself at home." If I’d wanted to do that I wouldn’t have gone out in the first place.

I went to a Reincarnation Party. The invites said, "Come as you were."

In one of my past lives I was a devout Catholic. As I lay on my deathbed, after receiving unction, my last words were, "Keep the rats away, now that I’m all greased up."

My favourite saying of Napoleon’s is the one that goes, "Oh well, no matter what happens, there’s always death."

I nearly died the other night. I was frenchkissing an epileptic and she swallowed my tongue.

"Go swallow a bottle of coke and let it fizz out your ears," said William Carlos Williams to Ezra Pound.

Denise Robbins said to Barbara Cartland, "I’ve just finished writing my 87th book." Barbara Cartland said, "I’ve written 145." Denise Robbins said, "I see, one a year."

I’ve been reading a book called Correctly English in 100 Days.

A friend of mine’s a writer. I said to him, "I like your book, who wrote it for you?" He said, "I’m glad you liked it - who read it to you?"

Schopenhauer said, "To expect a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten." I had an uncle like that.

He was taller lying down than he was standing up.

Or he’d be sitting in his chair and he’d rock himself to sleep trying to get to the phone.

My aunt was always at his side hugging and kissing him until she saw a woman on the other side doing the same thing.

Then my uncle went on an all-garlic diet. He didn’t lose weight, but people stood farther away and he looked thinner.

There shouldn’t be hunger, at least hunger unnecessarily of the people who would otherwise want to be fed.

I said to a waiter once, "Do we have to sit like this until we starve?" He said, "No, we close at eight." Then he told me the special of the day was tongue. I balked. "I won’t eat anything that comes from an animal’s mouth. Just bring me some eggs."

I have the world’s laziest rooster. In the morning he waits for another rooster to crow, then he just sits there and nods his head.

I wrote to the Ministry of Agriculture about my chickens, who seemed to be suffering from a mysterious ailment: Every morning for the last month I’ve found 3 or 4 of my hens lying on their backs with their feet in the air. What causes this? Today I got a telegram: YOUR HENS ARE DEAD.

I love animals. I spend all my money on horses.

Stallions must have an exceptionally bad time: nag, nag, nag, all day long.

For a while the band practised in a harbourside warehouse. We did our first recordings there. We borrowed somebody’s 4-track one weekend and did some stuff, borrowed someone elses’s 8-track and did some stuff, but mostly we recorded on a little "pro" walkman I got over in Singapore one time. I still have a bunch of cassettes of the songs we were laying down, half of which we never got around to performing live or doing anything else with either but that never mattered to me, I just wanted to be able to hear what my band was actually doing even when we weren’t playing together. Weeks might pass between practises but I was studying those tapes, figuring out what was good about whatever was good and why whatever it was that stunk stunk. I would listen to them in Stu’s car on the ride home or on my headphones if I was walking. I would try them out on my wife’s portable deck at home; sometimes if I really liked something a lot I’d take it round to a friend’s place and play it, dub off copies for the rest of the band. Now when I listen to those old cassettes for some reason all I can think about is food. For instance the harbourside stuff reminds me of having to take packed lunches to the warehouse and going over to Stu’s office just across the way to make coffee and eat at this long table in the diningroom there. Eventually Stu shifted out of that office and he took the table with him but that’s another story. I used to eat cheese and tomato sandwiches, eight at a time. At home in the mornings I would be pissed off if there was no black pepper left to put on the tomatoes. One of the great things about the diningroom over at Stu’s was that there was heaps of black pepper. I would eat a couple of apples or a pear. I was testing my bloodsugar levels three or four times a day. Sometimes this would get to be a drag so spending a day recording with the band was to my mind a good reason not to test for glucose. Pretty soon afterwards, not testing my sugars became a good reason to eat any old sugary shit I could get my hands on. I would eat my lettuce and vegemite sandwiches or my peanut butter and cottage cheese sandwiches or whatever it was I had prepared that morning and wrapped in waxpaper and brought along with me, then I’d go to the dairy at the backpackers’ place on Shortland St and get a giant chocolate chip cookie or a moro bar or some peanut m&ms. If I had more than a couple of dollars I’d wander round Custom St looking for eats. Once I had incubator chicken from that 24 hour place near Queens Arcade - nothing with a mother could have been that tough. I never really established any relationship with the dairy or the few other takeout joints in that area but I remember walking around there and smelling so much cooking going on. It was frustrating because either nothing was opened or if a place was opened I’d go in and find out they weren’t serving what it was I thought I could smell. I swear I smelled rabbit pie a hundred times wafting out of the doorways in Fort St. Why is that? If I could have eaten as many rabbits as I thought I could smell back then, I’d be hiding under my porch whenever I hear a dog bark to this day.

For a while we practised in Galatos St in those rooms behind the red house. I quit eating junk, quit eating nearly altogether. Mostly I got nourishment from biting my lip.

The next batch of studio time was spent at the original Frisbee in Aotea Square, close to Happy Days on Queen St. We were doing some recording there and mostly it was cool but I was freaked out about what a pigsty it was; even if I had a packed lunch I’d pretend to go to Happy Days to get chips or a hot dog, just so I could go outside to eat. I call this my Essenundobdachloesigkeit period - that’s vaguely metaphysical for "eating out." I got to be very skillful at eating wet toast, standing in the carpark in the rain. I even used to time how long it took to eat a pottle of chips and a hotdog just so that I would appear to have done so. Soon everyone wondered how come I’d never bring any chips back and so on. I told them I’d discovered a new Japanese-Jewish restaurant called So-sumi - my band promised to take me to the new place called Fuk-u-ova. There weren’t then and there still aren’t now any dairies in that part of town.

About this time we were practising and occasionally recording in this backroom at a language school in one of those streets beside the Museum in the Domain. {Titoki St. - ed.} Our bassplayer Speedy was working at Rakinos in High St and often he would bring big paper bags full of focaccia to chew while we tuned. At home I was eating miso soup and sprouts, my marriage was falling apart, I was spending all my pocket money on chocolate bars and corn chips. I would walk into town just to spend the busfare I’d save on any kind of junk I could get at that service station near the Domain on the way to Khyber Pass. Also I got to know those two dairies on the hospital side of Grafton Bridge. One of them sold bhuja in little cellophane bags. I loved it so much but it made me fart so pungently my band would ask me to step outside in the middle of a song.

Frisbee moved from the middle of town to the old Kiwi bacon building in Kingsland. We did a bunch more recordings there and spent a lot of money at Conlon’s bakery just down the road. For ridiculously low prices you could get huge toasted sandwiches. My favourite was the cheese, ham and tomato. Z Bob somehow used to get lots of donuts for practically nothing, I think they were yesterday’s donuts, stuff like that. The one disappointment at Conlon’s was the ginger slice, too dry. They had a great sign outside that said DO-NOTS, TOASTED SAND, etc. Further up the street and into Kingsland proper there’s a dairy which I never go to because once I went in there with a twenty dollar bill and bought one gummy jetplane for twenty cents just so I could get change for a bus and the woman in there tried to shortchange me a whole ten dollars. She reckoned I’d only given her ten in the first place and she became hysterical when I tried to prove to her I’d given her more. I was almost ready to accept it as an honest mistake but she just over-reacted so melodramatically I knew she was practising sophisticated dairydreamt chicanery. I leaned over the counter to reach into the till and she threatened to ring the cops so I said, "Please, go ahead, luckily I memorised the serial numbers on my just-this-minute withdrawn twenties and my good friend Constable Crapper will back me up in the highest court in the land!" Now who was overacting? Anyway she backed down after that and returned my twenty. I tried to think of something nasty to say but I actually felt sorry for a second because she knocked over all the chewing gum and a toddler popped out from where he or she’d been hiding behind the counter and burst out crying. The only thing I could think of saying was, "What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin." Now what was that supposed to mean?

I was living in Linwood Ave in a big warehouse now, working for my neighbours who ran a fruit and vege co-op called Club Veg. They had actually taken that co-op over from one which Frisbee had begun sometime earlier back in the old Aotea carpark building. I was earning money and getting lots of good food. I started buying records again, something I’d foregone for a couple of years, and I ate out once in a while, something I’d never really done before (I mean, in restaurants). But I was still looking for the perfect dairy. The one round the corner from where I lived was good for chocolate eggs and cheap white bread, plus they had a bigger range of diet softdrinks than any shop I’ve seen since, but their hours were unpredictable. They’d be open all day Monday then shut Tuesday, open for a few hours Wednesday then maybe for half-an-hour Thursday and so on, all at the whim of the owners. I wondered if they were secretly incredibly rich and just handled the dairy as some kind of eccentric hobby because surely they were losing money with such shakey scheduling. I found out later the reason they kept opening and shutting so erratically was because the guy who ran the place suspected his wife of having an affair with his brother, so whenever she went out for the day he felt compelled to follow her. At first he got his sister-in-law, the woman married to the brother whom he suspected was secretly rendezvousing with his absent wife, to look after the place. He didn’t have any concrete proof of any infidelity going on between his wife and his brother, so he didn’t tell his sister-in-law why he wanted her to look after the shop while he slipped out to follow his wife. The sister-in-law was happy to mind the dairy once in a while but she started to become suspicious herself and came to the conclusion that her brother-in-law and his wife had joined some kind of outrageous religious sect, so she turned around to mention this to her husband when she realised he wasn’t there either. So she started to suspect that her husband was up to some kind of shenannigans and she started leaving the shop in the hands of her daughter who really only wanted to watch tv and that explains the mystery of the deserted though well-stocked and brightly-lit dairy.

The Kiwi Bacon building stunk, by the way. Stu moved out of his office near the harbour and for a while he stored that big diningroom table at Frisbee. Speedy quit the band around this time, I remember going to bed real early the day he told me. Frisbee had to move out of the bacon place and for a while the studio was located in a shack on Bond St. We did some last recordings with Speedy there. For some reason Z Bob wanted us to record outside the shack. We spent a few days doing this one song over and over, I think recording onto DAT, and you can hear crickets chirping in the long grass and cars whizzing past over the bridge there. Stu’s table ended up at my place. I was still living at that warehouse and we had a lot of room. I was still working for Ursula and Lance and we had lots of food. We had dinner parties at that place with twenty people sometimes. We had bands playing in the front half of the warehouse and dry ice and rollerskating in the back half.

Then Frisbee moved into the old BNZ bank building on Symonds St. On and off over the next two years I lived at the studio. The band was booked to play weekly gigs at the Temple on Queen St. We’d start about 9.30 while the punters were still eating and we’d do a set of songs people could eat to, then we’d take a break and the kitchen would shut and about 11ish we’d get up and do a raucous set that people could drink and dance to. After the first couple of gigs Stu got offered some camera work in Norway or something like that, he wanted us to get a replacement while he was out of the country so he could rejoin the band when he returned but I was all excited about the regular gigs coming up and also we’d been doing some great recordings at the new Frisbee and the way I felt was that if he went now then he went for good and that’s what happened. We got Rich in to drum and he was cool from the very start. This was about April or maybe May 1995, ages ago.

About the time of the new Frisbee / new lineup / Temple arrangement, I met this dairy-owner in Herne Bay, a guy with Italian parents who’d named him Dante in honour of their country’s greatest poet. He was a funny guy. I went into his shop one day to get some hundreds and thousands and he noticed I had a paperback copy of Dante’s Inferno under my arm. He asked to have a look at it and told me how his folks were Italian and how they’d named him and how he could recite whole cantos from the poet’s work and finally how he himself was working on a stand-up version of the entire Divine Comedy. I was into a bunch of Italian stuff at the time and I thought Dan - I’ll call the shop guy Dan so this story doesn’t get too confusing - meant he was adapting Dante’s stuff to be read aloud to Italian students, poetry buffs, whatever; but he actually meant a stand-up comedy version, a nightclub act! He wanted to know if he could record some of his routines, work on his delivery and so on. He came over to the studio one night and he was wearing these creepy looking 13th century robes and he had a fake big nose. (The original Dante had a very large nose but Dan’s was thin and small - he was always squeezing it and pulling it; also he had a way of staring at other people’s noses, especially if they were larger than his - and mostly they were - with undisguised envy and longing.) I set up a taperecorder for him and he started his act: "My name’s Dante, Dante Alighieri. I’m from Florence. Florence is the only place in Italy where they don’t have ice cubes because the lady who had the recipe died. In Florence nobody buys balloons because they don’t come with instructions. The Florentines finally have an abortion clinic: there’s a two-year waiting period," and so on. Dan had a fairly standard kiwi accent but in his robes and phony nose he put on this crazy mixed up voice that was a large part authentic Italian but also included Jewish-American and Ebonic elements, a throwover I suppose from his repeated and intensive viewing of whatever stand-up routines he could rent on video, a lot of which obviously were Jewish and Black. Anyway he had some fantastic ideas and his scripts were dynamite but when he actually came to reciting his schtick it was almost indecipherable. I’m not gonna try to represent phonetically how he sounded because it would look like complete nonsense, and the thing is, it all made real sense: he actually came up with a long string of jokes that corresponded to the events and imagery and themes and so on covered by Dante. Here’s the beginning of the Inferno: "In the middle of my life’s journey, I bought a piano. I turned to my mama and I said, ‘Hey mama will you help me get this piano up the stairs?’ My mama just shakes her head and says, ‘Dante, go to Hell!’ I learned a lot at my mama’s knee; the rest I picked up at some other joints. So I wake up in a dark wood. Porca miseria! How many Florentines does it take to change a lightbulb! So there’s a leopard, a lion and a wolf," and so on. He had this whole slew of sarcastic comments about the political events of Dante’s time, the fighting between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs, for instance, stuff I was lightyears away from being the slightest bit aware of, and consequently a fair amount of the funniness of what he was saying went right over my head. I’ve since learned a bunch more about the history and personalities of the time and Dan’s "audition tape" just gets funnier and funnier. A lot of it is still obscure but I pull out the tape and listen to it every now and then. Dan was run over by a bus shortly after he made the demo and his parents buried his manuscript, his Divine Stand-Up Comedy, with his squashed body.

I was doing something in the kitchen I knew I wasn’t supposed to be doing - boiling milk. Something interrupted my concentration - a dog maybe darting into the room or the footsteps of an adult coming or a song I recognised shishing from the mantelpiece - and suddenly a thick bubble of mooncheese scalded the hot ring. I pushed the saucepan to one side of the stove and attempted to wipe the stinking milk off the element with a hastily grabbed towel but some matter encrusted in the folds of the pink-and-white chequered cloth immediately caught fire. I threw the burning teatowel into the sink and turned on a tap, overturning in the process a large jar full of what I thought at the time were tinned pears: juice from the jar spread across the unsponged benchtop collecting breadcrumbs, coffee granules, blobs of margarine studded with multicoloured hundreds-and-thousands, a milkbottle top like a bent silver badge and a skinny, snakelike, broken rubberband. This complicated mixture ran over the edge of the bench and seeped down the face of the newly painted cupboard underneath. A puddle formed on the nearby linoleum which I mopped up with the ruined towel; then I made a horrible smudge out of wet burnt cotton, polluted pear juice, linoleum grit and not quite dried pale green paint on the cupboard door. The element was still smoking and the smoke stunk so I ran to turn it off. The tap was still running and I soon discovered the sink must have been plugged when a wide pane of water poured over its rim and crashed to the floor. I reached into the sink to pull out the plug but when I yanked the silvery beaded chain, the rubber knob where the chain was connected tore in two and I stubbed the ball of my thumb on the mouth of the tap as my hand flew upwards. I stabbed at the plug with a fork and lifted the dislodged disc out of the sink. Then I heard the screendoor out front slam, and I jumped, and the fork and plug whizzed out of my grip and across the kitchen like a miniature crashing spaceship. For a second I was just standing there crying with a soaked t-shirt and a sore thumb and I think the fork/plug combination knocked a biscuit-tin off the mantelpiece and now there were broken digestives all over the floor as well. I came to my senses, reached for a piece of tinned pear and ran out the back door. I had on my new opentoed sandles. As I ran up the street the raw stone footpath scraped against my toeknuckles. I ran all the way to my auntie’s place, across a bridge, over a hill, past a school and a cakeshop with little plastic statuettes of a religious nature in the front window. I saw several neighbourhood dogs. When I got to my auntie’s I was sputtering and gagging, partly from having ran so far but mostly because during the trip I had discovered that the piece of tinned pear I had brought to chew on while I ran was in fact a chunk of pickled ginger. My auntie opened a tin of ravioli and told me about the time her son ate a tablespoon of mustard. She said his face went purple`and he tried to drink three pints of water but he vomited into an empty chop suey pottle and threw a wobbly because he was too sick to go to karate practise. I asked if we could eat some chop suey after the ravioli and my auntie just laughed and poked the pointy end of a comb-handle into her curly red hair. She also had long fingernails. I clunked around in the rain outside her house all afternoon singing the little drummer boy.

I ran into Mara at the supermarket. She’d been up all night looking after her sister’s sick kid, she said, so she was sorry but she just couldn’t think straight, let alone talk. I said that’s too bad because I could listen to her all day long and she shrugged and rolled her eyes and said I was full of shit, I was full of shit, I was full of shit. That’s a habit Mara has, repeating a particular phrase, saying the same words only changing where she chooses to place the emphasis. I used to think she did it because she was a singer but she’s not she’s a guitarist. She just does it for kicks and I like it. One night at the Snake Pit she was doing it a lot and I was cracking up and she asked me what’s so funny and I grabbed my collar and pulled at my shirt and bent my head way over to the left so that my ear was flat against my shoulder and went "AHWOOGA!" like a crazy cartoon guy letting off steam and then I went blubba blubba with my fingers on my lips and she started cracking up too. Then I went all serious and asked her what’s so funny. After that we called it "talking in the fourth person" and figured everyone must have their own version; soon we noticed Tom T always spoke in song titles and Dulcie only ever looked at the person sitting next to you when she was asking you a question, and so on. It all came together that night at the Snake Pit; gradually it became automatic, something to do while we were drinking, waiting for parties. It could get really wild when there were five or six of us all talking in the fourth person at the same time and Bumps even brought along a walkman one time and made a pretty funny tape of us all going at it, but I was embarrassed whenever I’d run into one of us, I mean not at the Snake Pit or some other bar but on the street or at the supermarket - out in the daylight I suppose - and out of habit either I myself or the other might drift into my or their fourth person routines; then it came out sounding dumb, forced, even creepy sometimes. Except for Mara, that is: I’m crazy about her and I really could listen to her all day long, like I told her, so she can talk in whatever person she feels like, even at the supermarket.

So anyway: I may or may not contain within me a superabundance of fecal matter, I said, but you can’t think straight let alone talk; how the Charlesless Dickens can you shop? Mara popped a zit on her chin and wiped some pus off her fingers on the arse of her jeans. She was making a decision. Then she told me she couldn’t shop after all and we left and went over to the Doggy Diner.

* * * * *

I was working at the Double D when Bob and Mara walked in. Last Ride took one look at the both of them from her stool over in the kitchen and choked on her turkey sandwich. She’s old enough to know better, but ever since she and Mara got all kissykissy at the last Bangers gig she’s been waving a torch in everyone’s face like now she has territory to protect. She lit a cigarette and skulked out the back door, fuming. I took some coffee over to the table by the window.

"What’s her beef?"

"That’s rich coming from you, Ramsbottom; she’s nuts about you."

"Yeah she’s nuts alright."

"Whatever. She reckons you two pretty much rediscovered Lapland last friday after the gig."

"Maybe so. It was one of those nights. I like her when she’s not acting like a Klingon."

"That reminds me, why was Lieutenant Uhuru black?"

"Cos William Shatner. That’s so not funny."

"What about that 70s porn classic Acockalips Wow directed by Francid Turd Crappola based on the Cuntraid story Dart of Hardness?"

"Excuse me Thomas but would you mind not breaking wind."

"She’s waiting out there, you know."

"I don’t know what to tell her."

"Never mind, storm in a D-cup, it’ll blow over soon."

"What was that gig like anyway? I had to babysit."

"I remember bending down to tie up my shoelaces and wondering what else I could find to do while I was down there."

"And there were those creepy looking guys, those short guys with the big heads, and they were all dressed up like puppets."

"I don’t remember them."

"Yes you do. They showed up just before you guys started. They had floppy gowns and it was really weird because I went up to one of them and I was trying to get a good look at his papier-mache head only it wasn’t papier-mache it was his real head!"

"Those guys. What about the one with the big lightbulb body and the steelgrill teeth. He kept on shining this circular white light at me and a couple of times he looked exactly like a giant potato."

Bob got up and said he’d see us later.

"What’s-a-matter Blob, Blub, whatever your name is; you always gots to go whenever anyone mentions potatoes. You chicken or what?"

"Um actually I just remembered I have to talk to Last Ride about some stuff."

He went, Mara yawned and played with her hair. I looked around the diner and was really glad it was empty. I asked Mara about that guy she met last year when she was out of town. She said they split up months ago, she hadn’t heard from him in ages. I told her he was snooping around the diner last week, he’d changed his appearance, he was bald now and he wore a tracksuit. The really strange thing about him, I told her, was that when he went to cross the road, instead of waiting until there were no cars coming, he actually waited until there were lots of cars speeding by. If the street was empty, I mean, he would just idle by the kerb, holding his hand up above his eyes like he was shading them from the sun even when the weather was overcast and the sky was dull and grey; then he’d take a couple of steps forward and if there was still no sign of traffic he’d step back and go on staring over at the supermarket. Only when a bus would turn the corner or at least three or four cars or maybe a bunch of motorcycles were coming, then he’d step onto the road and cross it in a perfectly straight line, never paying any attention to the bleating carhorns of the understandibly disgruntled motorists.

"Are you sure it’s really him?"

"Sure I’m sure. I remember him from that weekend at Bernie’s."

"Oh that. What’s he doing up here I wonder?"

"What happened to you two anyway? You used to be fizzing at the bunghole whenever you got one of his letters."

"That was the thing, those letters were so cool but in the end they ruined everything. Remember how I got back from that tour and I was telling everyone about all the shit we’d been up to and there was that fire at Nate’s and Jenny chipped a tooth and that story in PopTarts and the Austrian woman with the colour photos and then Dulcie’s accident and everything just went so incredibly quiet for a while. Then I remembered how I’d spent a night with this guy and we got on really well so I wrote to him and I wrote him this deliberately filthy fantasy dream sort of letter because we’d had really good sex and we were talking about doing something like that at the time. I didn’t know if he’d write back or anything but everything was so boring up here at the time, remember, you were doing that ridiculous farmboy stunt with Bumps and everyone was just devolving daily into these squishy stickpeople. I just thought where’s the harm, you know, nobody around here’s giving anyone the time of day let alone the time of their life. Then I got his reply and it was so fucking hot I couldn’t believe it. Next thing I know we’re writing each other these fantastic letters all the time. I’m masturbating so much some days I just stare at my guitar leaning against the wall in the corner of my bedroom and giggle. Remember when I started to grow a moustache, that was it, that was the highpoint of the whole affair. I’d get my latest letter and I’d sit in the bath touching myself and be staring at the hairs sprouting on my upper lip in a little handheld mirror and I was never so in love with myself. You know how some people have religious visions and all that spiritual schmiritual crap, well this was my one genuine mystical moment, so clear and so real and so intense. I call it a moment but it could’ve been hours, could’ve been days, it was positively golden. I lifted the mirror up above my head and looked into my eyes from below, beseeching, and suddenly I was up there looking out from inside the mirror, beholding my beseeching self with a tenderness I never felt towards anything glowing out of me and bathing my beseecher, proud of her beauty and fascinated by her timidness. I just wanted to wrap myself up and say Wow, you’re great, you’re really really great; don’t be scared, silly, it’s only me and I’m you."

"Mara, that’s so beautiful I think I’m going to be sick. What about baldy?"

"Oh him. Well after a while he came up and we hung out and we got along alright but it was never the same after that first batch of horny letters and my adventures with myself. I kind of got the same impression from him, that maybe in the flesh we neither of us quite lived up to our fantasies. I wondered if maybe he’d dawned on himself the same as I had and I tried to talk to him about it because that would’ve been something extra special, you know, that would be a hundred percent cement to me. But it turned out different. He just never really got what I was talking about, you know, it’s like when we’re all down at the Snake Pit talking in the fourth person and someone outside the group shows up and thinks we’re all fucked in the head. He went back where he came from and we continued writing for a while but his letters weren’t so hot anymore. By this time I was sending letters to myself, not so much erotic stuff, more searching, more attentive to my newfound dual nature, but the effect was somewhat similar to when I was receiving that first batch of frankly pornographic material from him, you know, baldy, whatshisface. Now it might sound just a little bit screwy but I started to sense a tinge of jealousy in his later letters to me, as if he was writing them with the knowledge that my heart’s fortress was under siege from a force or forces unknown; which in a way it was, what with my soul enquiring ever so delicately and precisely into the mysteries of my selves. But can you believe it, he’s jealous of myself writing to myself! He starts to think I’m seeing someone else and again in a funny kind of way it’s true because for the first time in a long time I’m seeing myself for who I really am - and that dork thinks I’m dizzy for some other guy! Anyway his letters take a real nasty turn, the sex stuff gets twisted around and it’s all about beatings and torture and drawing blood. Oddly enough his writing becomes a million times better, stylistically speaking, than it ever had been. Of course I’m completely repelled and repulsed and frequently made sick by his ugly new imaginings but I begin to feel for the first time that I’m really getting to know him. Sadly he is not the type of man I want to know anymore so I phone him up one day and tell him it’s over and could you kindly not write or phone or try to see me or else you will regret it you sorry speck of catsnot. After that I got a couple of extremely apologetic whining declarations which I chucked down the toilet and I haven’t heard from him since. The end."

I told Mara I wasn’t so sure it was the end, I knew she could take care of herself but this out of town guy was spooky. She said, "Don’t I know it." For a couple of seconds we wondered what Bob was talking to Last Ride about, they were still out the back, then Mara decided to leave and I went back to work for want of nothing better to do.

I’ve been listening to the ghost planes flying overhead at night. There are so many of them now. I first noticed them one day when I was returning from the hospital where my friend Dulcie was recovering from a blow to the head. She was playing synthesiser with a high school group putting on a musical and when they were tidying up one night after their performance a paper-cutter somehow fell on her and knocked her out. It was one of those big heavy wooden squares with cross-hatched measurements engraved into the surface for alligning the various possible paper sizes and a giant steel blade attached to the side for guillotining the paper. When I was at school we actually called them guillotines; I don’t know about these days. The remarkable thing about this guillotine was that the big steel slicer apparatus was attached to the left-hand side, so it was quite intentionally designed for left-handed people. It’s also remarkable of course that my friend Dulcie was concussed by such an unwieldy object: I still can’t figure out how it could’ve "fallen" on her, I mean what was it doing up somewhere in the first place; surely if it had fallen into disuse it could’ve been stored somewhere safe and commonsensical for instance on a low shelf at the bottom of a cupboard or under a large table or in a basement - anywhere essentially where it couldn’t fall into some form of misuse; anywhere, that is, where it simply couldn’t fall. Equally remarkable in a way is the fact that Dulcie herself is left-handed, or was, I should say, since it seems that as a result of the concussion she has experienced a reversal of her former lifelong developmental bias. I discovered this shortly after arriving at the hospital. I hate hospitals and make it a point to steer way clear of them but Dulcie had rung sounding uncharacteristically miserable that morning and begged me to bring her something decent to read. I was used to her laughing and cracking jokes and saying "Lighten up" whenever I was feeling low, so here was a kind of turnabout brewing. There’s definitely an inkling of some description or other lurking inside me which is activated whenever someone close to me begins to display hitherto unhinted at ways of behaving; this "hunch" becomes increasingly more assertive in proportion to whatever sense of oppositeness I might detect in the other’s manner. Dulcie complaining about being bored, Dulcie complaining full stop, was new and very interesting. I took her a copy of The Red and The Black, one of her alltime favourite books. I thought we could have a laugh over the passage near the end when Julien Sorel is in his prison cell remembering how Count Altamira once told him of remarks made by Danton on the eve of his death, remarks about the impossibility of conjugating the verb "to guillotine" in all its tenses. One can say: I shall be guillotined, thou wilt be guillotined, but one does not say: I have been guillotined. So I stood beside her bed in the head-injury ward and we hugged for a couple of seconds before I handed her the book which she looked at and thanked me for. Then she reached into a bag beside her and took out a pen and inscribed her name on the inside cover of the book, something she normally would never do, and what’s more she did it with her right hand. I was mildly unsettled and I asked her if the doctors had mentioned anything about the effects her injury might have on her general health, her coordination, her sense of balance. She said they’d told her all sorts of things and if I wanted her to she could go into great detail, but, she said, what’s really bothering you, sir, is how come I’m all of a sudden right-handed. I said it was surprising, people don’t just swap round overnight, the guillotine must have knocked her brain into some kind of shock. She said of course she was suffering concussion but that the decision to become right-handed was exactly that, a decision, a conscious channeling of her intent. Look, she said, I’ve been practising. She showed me a rectangle of cardboard on which she’d scrawled a long series of what I at first assumed were variations on her signature. It had the ragged, unskilled appearance of some of my daughters’ earlier schoolwork, the "doublewriting" of seven-year-olds. Around the edges of the cardboard - it was the back of a GET WELL SOON greeting card featuring a sad still life with pumpkins and kittens - were tiny ballpoint drawings of antelopes’ heads sketched in minutely fine detail. They formed an almost heart-shaped ring around Dulcie’s cacky looking signatures. These signatures aren’t anything like yours, I said, you’re going to have to practise a lot. They’re not signatures, Dummy, she told me, laughing for the first time since I’d arrived, holding the card up to my face. I looked closer and deciphered some of the scribbled words. They seemed to be the names of animals. I recognised ‘springbok’ and ‘waterbuck’ and said, I don’t get it, something about antelopes? Dulcie said she’d woke up that morning from a dream where she’d been folded into the pages of a scrapbook and all of a sudden she knew the names of all the varieties of African Bovidae, not only their names but exactly what they looked like. She had decided to wile away the dreary hours of the morning sitting up in bed drawing what she could recall and listing the species and sub-species. She began in the customary way, using her left hand, but it only made her arms itch. Then it had come to her to try using her right hand and from that moment she said she was certain it was something she really wanted with all her heart. I asked her if this was some kind of joke and she picked up The Red and The Black and said in a booming voice I have been guillotined! I pointed out that she could have copied the names of the animals out of an encyclopedia or some textbook from the hospital library. She swore there was no hospital library then thrust the card into my hands and put her left hand up over her eyes and said, Dorcas gazelle, Thomson’s gazelle, gerenuk, impala, Grant’s gazelle (Rainey subspecies), Grant’s gazelle (Robert’s subspecies), springbok, dibatag, Dama gazelle, Soemmering’s gazelle, Uganda kob, waterbuck, lechwe, Vaal rhebok, Bohor reedbuck, Nile lechwe, sable antelope, gemsbok, scimitar oryx, addax, Roan antelope, Cape buffalo, Swayne’s hartebeest, Lichtenstein’s hartebeest, topi, Jackson’s hartebeest, Hunter’s hartebeest, bontebok, brindled gnu, Lord Derby’s eland, harnessed antelope, situtunga, greater kudu, bongo, mountain nyala, yellow-backed duiker, red duiker, common duiker, royal antelope, common suni, oribi, steinbok, klipspringer, beira and long-snouted dik-dik. By the time she was through I was shaking. She said I’d better go and thanks again for the book. I felt like a muppet. On the way home I noticed the ghost planes. They are very careful in daylight to pass overhead only when a real plane is also passing. They are almost completely invisible, but their sound is easily distinguishable from that of earthly aircraft, a kind of dopplerless krankatang krettakrene, like a rusty robot gnat gradually falling to pieces somewhere just beside your eardrum. They figure if they travel alongside an actual solid flier their flailing metallic hum will be drowned out by the manifestly louder and more widely-recognised drone of manmade jets. They figure wrong. I spotted them that day and I have not lost track of them since. I’m not entirely sure what they are up to, but I know there are more of them now than there have ever been before.

the German language has a word for the spirit of the times, der Zeitgeist; I have a word for the ghost of my pimples - der Zitgeist.

abditive in azoic crepitus da dasypygal janiceps,
hiding in a lifeless fart from this hairy-buttocked monster with two heads facing opposite directions,

an acescent lollock of olid axunge abuccinating battological betweenity,
a slightly sour large lump of fetid stinking pigfat
proclaiming-with-fanfare unnecessarily repetitive indecisiveness,

oldkinderhooking kakistocracy n tuttodat oppugnant ablepsia,
rubberstamping government-by-the-worst-citizens and all that hostile blindness,

absterging da tathagatagarbha its axiopisty.
purging from the eternal and absolute essence of all reality the very quality which makes it believable.

Quiternally i repristinate mi euthymia non via longanimity,
In these times I restore my mental tranquility not by silently suffering while planning revenge,

nohoho,
by no means,

contrarioso subrisive i thrimble supernaculum.
instead of that, smiling, I test the quality of liquor drunk to the last drop.

Dembones kalopsia tandem acouasm tagalong micturition:
This leads to that condition where things appear more beautiful than they really are accompanied by noises ringing in the head followed by the need for frequent urination:

actrapid: ultratard:
move fast: too late:

mi cacidrosis; mi cagamosis; exinanition.
my smelly sweat; my unhappy marriage; emptying, loss, destitution.

Satisdiction.
Enough said.

THREE RANDLES*

1

macaronic Mary fluffed

macerated Jane enoughed

micrographic Janey pumped

macrographic Mary jumped

macromastic Mary farted

macrosmatic Jane departed

2

Buster Keaton’s keester ruction

fustigated Grunty’s suction

soon her buldering cacation

brought about his desquamation

3

a flatulopetic pygmy, Joe,

felched my borborygmy so

cacogens with cacoethes

niffle oxalm for their fifis

fustilugs’ furfuraceous fuds

funkify fast from fumtu suds

hircine trousertrumpeteers

terrorise the nose and ears

my house is made of scybalum

from my suppalpated bum

piperitious pootymoles

sistle into bootyholes

*randle n. a nonsensical poem recited

by Irish schoolboys as an apology

for farting at a friend

AZYGOPHRENIA

amulierosis result of sexual privation

bruxomania unconsciously grinding the teeth, especially in sleep

cacophonophilia love of harsh sounds

dacrygelosis alternating crying and laughing

eremophobia fear of loneliness

festination walking faster and faster involuntarily

glycolimia craving for sweets

hesternopothia pathologic yearning for the good old days

iconolagnia sexual stimulation from pictures or statues

jactitation excessive twitching or restlessness

kakorrhaphiophobia fear of failure

lalochezia talking dirty to relieve tension

matutolypea getting up on the wrong side of the bed

noctivagation wandering around at night

obstipation extreme constipation

pathodixia talking to death about one’s illness

quabophagia eating uncooked food

rectalgia pain in the arse

scopolagnia voyeurism

teleophobia fear of definite plans

urolagnia sexual pleasure from urinating

verbigeration senseless reiteration of cliches

withernamia uncontrollable urge to take one thing as reprisal for something else taken previously

xeronisism inability to reach orgasm

yeukiness itching

zoanthropy belief that one is an animal

CRAWS DING DOON THE TATTIE-DULIE

Dowf in the blinterin mell

his tinet sherd beeks in dands o stite,

snowket an howket.

Wabbit clegs disparple mixter-maxter

wannachy on the stravaigan jing-bang,

fair witrous, bund to the braes.

Ca them through the keil-reek

in dern uilzie an tuilzie.

Howe drow o droukt serks.

Sweetin-chookit makar’s wud word-leet,

ondeemas mappamoond o the baney auld paul,

taigled cantrips an sleekit crambo frae tim screwtaps.