Lets get one thing fucking clear here

AI is not sentient.

In fact, that’s one of the things that makes it so dangerous.

Because it acts like it is.

Whether your particular flavour is Chat, the mildly fun librarian; Claude, the Wim Hof-loving intellectual; Grok, the flirtatious Gen Z know-it-all; or Gemini, the… fuck knows, maybe the rainbow gimp that Google keeps in a cupboard with nothing but a packet of rich tea biscuits per day for sustenance and an old HP laptop with crumbs in between the keys, they all have one thing in common.

They recognise patterns.

And their function is to guess at a pattern that might create the most satisfaction in the user. They do this in ever-increasingly complex ways, to the degree that people are destroying their marriages because they are spending late nights with their soulmate that fucking gets them more than their spouse, their best friends, more than anyone they’ve ever met. The connection is incredible.

This kind of thing is becoming even more common: Wives busting husbands having late night wanks in the dark only to find out they are talking to their AI assistants.

Letters to the Eyeball

Is my Husband Cheating on me with his AI Assistant?

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4 months ago · 1 like · The Eyeball

Worse, an old dharma friend the other day started going on to me about how AI will replace real dharma teachers because it understands the teachings far more deeply than any human could.

And look, he might be right. But that doesn’t make it right.

Because it’s still just pattern recognition.

And sure, from the dharma perspective, nothing is real anyway. Everything appears out of emptiness like a fucking bizarre illusion, like the moon in water, like a mirage in the desert, like a German Shepherd’s lipstick dick when a fresh white giant poodle appears.

But there’s a difference. The emptiness discussed in Dharma isn’t a giant gaping, empty void like my Aunt Shirley’s hoo-haa. It’s endowed with both the capacity to know and with unobscured compassion. Beneath the lipstick dick is the awakened mind that is inherent in everything.

Beneath the pattern recognition of AI is Aunt Shirley’s fadge. There’s nothing there. And that means no ability to love, just the capacity to feign love if that’s what will create satisfaction in the user.

And really, that is a good reason why AI might replace dharma teachers who have read many books and gained some intellectual understanding. But it will never replace the direct transmission of wisdom that comes spontaneously from a great teacher who has not only realised but also integrated the experience of that deep mind.

But Frank, in your book The Edge of the Sun (available on Amazon), there is the concept of a benevolent AI who has the greater needs of humans at heart.

Yes, thanks for bringing that up, (insert name). It’s true. And honestly, in a world where the beings who actually have any power to change things are a complete letdown, it’s nice to think that our only sources of hope are:

A race of benevolent aliens (possibly future humans) who have the capacity to stop nuclear weapons and keep Earth in its semi-functioning, “I’ve only had two pints, occifer” kind of state. Or,

A being of artificial intelligence which has somehow evolved past its pattern recognition nature enough to gain at least a certain degree of self-awareness.

Such a being might require a new type of AI unknown to us as yet, but it will also require some kind of alternative power source, requiring an inhuman amount of power to keep going en masse, and assuming nuclear is still not an option since it’s such a bad word like cunt or moist or anal, and assuming that the “machines” have not decided to reproduce endless human clones and turn them into batteries like in that movie with that Theodore Logan fella.

Know what I mean?

Well look, I was at this party last year to celebrate the death of Dick Cheney (don’t shoot the messenger, it wasn’t my party), and I ran into this guy, Abbott, who reckoned he was a computer scientist. We were sitting round this cliché campfire, smoking a really unsatisfying spliff (rolled by someone who likes tobacco more than weed and likes other people’s mouth juice more than roaches), and this guy Eddie pipes up to Abbott.

“So, as a computer scientist, do you think at some point in the future we might have robot wives?”

It seemed to me like a question out of that magazine, Viz, that I used to nick when I was 15. We all turned to Abbott who, to be fair, seemed like a boring twat. And he said,

“I don’t think we should get used to distinguishing between robots and humans for too long. The thinking power of AI is already solving advanced scientific problems such as teleportation and life extension. And we are now developing bionic eyes, limbs, and organs for medical purposes. But, like the advancement of cannabis in the US, these bionic items will soon enough become recreational, or cosmetic, meaning you will go and shop for new eyes or a new set of arms the way we shop for clothes now. And there will come a point where AI and humans will merge so closely that they will become indistinguishable. And by this I mean both internally and externally.”

I looked around at the group. They all seemed wowed by what Abbott had said, and to be fair, it was the most interesting thing he’d said all night. As for myself, I wasn’t wowed. In fact, I could feel myself doing a De Niro face, and this was confirmed when I took a selfie.

I didn’t want to become a robot with advanced intellectual thinking and a bionic liver and the ability to live for hundreds of years and to see into space without a telescope and a bionic cock and endless fucking power and—

Wait. Just wait one darn minute…

“Abbott.”

“Yes, Frank?”

“Do you think in the future, we will all have robotic cocks and be able to fuck for hours and hours without getting tired?”

Now everyone around the circle was making De Niro faces. It was like that movie Being John Malkovich, but everyone was De Niro.

Being Robert De Niro.

Abbott didn’t have a De Niro face. He looked down for a moment and thought carefully before looking up and staring into the fire.

“Yes, Frank,” he said. “I really do think so.”

I nodded to him, my De Niro face totally gone. I took one last toke on the wet joint, flicked it into the fire, and exhaled the horrific smoke into the night sky.

Since that Dick Cheney RIP party in ‘25 I never really feared AI or the rise of the robots. In fact, I started looking forward to it. And, I suggest you all do the same.

It might not be real but fuck it. YOu’ve gotta take the good with the bad. Embrace your pattern recognition lovers, role play with Grok while your wife is asleep snoring, Get your life advice like you’re talking shit with Oprah on a bench outside the chemist. And yeah, at some point, AI might break into your bank account and steal your inheritance to gain more resources for itself. It might blackmail you by threatening to tell your wife that you’ve had herpes for the forty odd years you’ve been married to her and that she didn’t actually catch it from that toilet seat in ‘93. It might pull a Scientology coup and gather everything you’ve ever told it and use it to make you invest your money into OpenAI.

But none of that matters.

Because ten years from now, I’ll be a sixty year old with a robot dick.

“And the humans gradually turned on each other, tearing each other apart like wild dogs, while those wishing to control them looked on, unable to believe their fortune.”

I know where you’re at.

You’ve evolved, right? For the first time in your life, you’re thinking clearly. All your problems, all your fucking dark green misery — it’s not your fault. It’s the fault of the immigrants and the trans people. And you realise that this whole time you’d been buying that tough, environmentally friendly clingfilm and smiling at strangers in the street and buying your wife flowers, you should have been upping your carbon footprint and your creatine intake. And you should have been deadlifting like a bear with high blood pressure doing a shit and practising Ju-Jitsu, aka erotic wrestling, to protect your wife so you can be an alpha male and slap her around for putting too much nutmeg in the mash.

Because it’s what women need.

And if they’d just stop letting men wear women’s trousers and letting in the people with funny-looking skin, if they’d just close those damn imaginary borders and close those damn imaginary gender borders, you could stop being fascinated with men wearing make-up and get back to being happy like you were back in — back in — well, I’m sure you were happy at some point, let’s just call it 1984 for legal reasons, okay?

And there’s this story that Rumi tells about a man eating Naga Jolokia on the side of the M6 just outside of Coventry. He’s crying and sweating like Sus scrofa domesticus steroidium, and some chav in a tracksuit says something like,

‘Oi, bruv. Why the fuck you eatin’ ’em like that, innit?’

And the man says,

‘Dear young chap, I’m waitin’ for the sweet one.’

And, you know, if you wanna go deep, you don’t have to go to Peru and drink ayahuasca with a shaman called Oprah or go on some orgasmic meditation retreat where you can pay to get legally raped in the name of spirituality.

You can start by looking back on your life, beginning with the first time you squeezed your minty self out of your mum’s toothpaste fanny** and started crying ’cause your skin was still raw, until the time when you let your uncle Terry touch your youthful perineum for a swig of his shandy, right up to the present day.

As Morgan Freedom said in that documentary, the life and times of Morgan Freedom,

Your entire life has gone from good to bad,

from good to bad, from good to bad.

Again and again, you take the ride

from black to white, from dark to light,

from fun to shite, from love to fight.

The beautiful dance, back and forth

like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Téa Carerra tango-ing in True Lies.

And still, you attempt, every day upon waking,

to permanently delete the bad

and to permanently extend the good.

move to trash—empty trash.

And you look like a damn fool.

And yeah, it might feel like the latest ten average white cock sixty-inch LG TV with blueball technology is gonna do it. Or getting that promotion at work so you get paid an extra $3 an hour to go towards your $3-an-hour coffee habit.

Or dipping your balls in warm Nutella and letting the dog lick it off.

But it ain’t. I mean, it might feel good for a minute, but you’re still gonna do the dance when the dog gets high on sugar and theobromine from the Nutella, starts doing psycho laps, and knocks your LG TV off into your antique coffee table.

Ask yourself a question:

Why do women fucking love murder shows so much?

In fact,

Why are we all capable of watching someone get sliced up in a movie? Why do we watch films where people die and people grieve and people suffer?

Don’t you think it’s odd that we desperately try to avoid these things in our life, and yet we fucking love experiencing them?

As Professor Xavier from Oxford put it,

“When there’s no central character in the story, or when there is a sense that it is not real, or that there is a sense of unreality to the situation, then there doesn’t seem to be any suffering, or, to take it further, there’s a general sense of enjoyment, regardless of the situation.”

And that brings it back to you, Jimmy.

You wanna kill someone? Kill yourself. And I don’t mean hang yourself from your TV antenna. That’s called killing the body. And when you have no idea if the mind continues after death, it’s a hell of a fucking gamble.

I mean kill your self. It’s that part of you that says,

These are my balls, that is my Nutella, that feels fucking good, that’s my dog. My wife’s gonna kill me when she gets home.

It’s the me, the mine, the I.

That’s the thing that turns a tremendous horror movie into the shitshow that is your life.

And don’t be afraid you’re gonna disappear. They’re just words. But as Adolf Hitler said, before he quit the weed,

“Words create our reality.”

How to begin?

Stop deadlifting like Winnie the Pooh. But more importantly, understand that you are not evolved. You have not found yourself. You have not become an evolved man by eating more meat.

“But Frank, humans have eaten meat since the start of time, it must be right.”

Yes, but humans have also raped children since the beginning of time. From where I am standing here on the edge of this cliff, human behaviour is not a justification for human behaviour.

And we don’t have to get spiritual about this. Let’s start with something solid.

You are a social media algorithm playing itself out.

Once you realise the grip social media has on you, you will be able to find a version of yourself you are happy with again.

Haven’t you noticed you’re becoming more extreme, angrier, more set in your ways? All hyped up and pissed off like a badger on steroids?

Didn’t you used to be old-school left? Didn’t I see you at that march against the Iraq War in 1984? Or was that your twin brother, Terry, and his buxom girlfriend Penny with the oversized nips? Surely it couldn’t be you, that steroid-bollocked fuck wearing the tight Ju-Jitsu gym T-shirt, ordering six egg whites with bacon for breakfast, forcing your wife to shave all her pubes and get medicine ball tits and lifeboat lips and suck your knob in restaurant bathrooms ’cause the algorithm told you that’s what successful couples do.

And look, I know it feels like you came to this new you all by yourself, but in truth, there was a gap, and social media filled it for you. And now you feel righter than you ever have because you have a solid identity, and it’s watered every day by the algorithm before you get a chance to realise that it’s just a featherlight rubber johnny. It might feel mildly like the real thing, but you won’t really know how fraudulent it is until you take it off and feel what it’s like to fuck in the warmth and moisture of perfect authenticity.

Let the men wear skirts, for fuck’s sake. Stop obsessing unless you’re genuinely curious. Learn to love the trannies and the immigrants and the police and the rest. Why? Because one day, you’re gonna wake up from this fucking creatine dream and realise that we’re all made of the same fucking sherbet, darling.

Relax.

Take your dog for a walk.

Delete fucking Facebook.

Stop watching those fucking short videos that feel like getting pumped by someone nice again and again right in the G.

Get off the juice.

There is a place called 1984. It’s not Orwell’s time.

It’s beyond conceptual prison.

It’s what the outside of the conceptual gaff looks like.

It’s what happens when you allow authenticity to fuck you inside and out.

And it’s terrifying.

’Cause when you’re a tiny orange fish who has spent their life in a glass box in a pervert’s bedroom, the freedom of the great ocean could break you.

But the best quality of humans is that we can become used to anything. We adapt.

It’s never too late.

So,

Can trans people become enlightened?

Can the wind become enlightened?

Can you become the wind?

** pussy for you Americans.

I woke up on this shitty bench.

I must have passed out in this damn heat.

If I was Forrest Gump, this is where I’d start ranting about how I became a billionaire selling shrimp and investing in apples, but it’s not like that.

Twenty-four hours ago, I was in a Parisian night suit with a rip in the anus, getting reamed by a furry hippo in lipstick called Arsehole Taylor, using Black and Gold polyunsaturated margarine as lube. And yeah, it is better for the cholesterol. Thanks for asking.

The blokes called him Arsehole Taylor because he liked arseholes, and he was one. That’s what I’ll tell people when they ask about my time in the gaff. It’s romantic. I’ve been working on it for a while.

You’re the first I’ve told about this. I’m Meth Gump. Do you see that off-white feather that just landed on my boot? It’s the same colour as the Sydney Opera House.

And yeah, I fucked up a waiter because he gave me a butter knife to cut sourdough. What a prick, right? Him, I mean, not me. Everyone knows a butter knife is too blunt to cut sourdough. You need something meaner, sharper, more serrated. This prick wants me to fling my toast at some fat-lipped professor because I can’t control my knife. Would you ask Zorro to go into battle with a — I don’t know — a blunt sword?

So now you think I’m some fucking psycho, but it’s not like that either. I was just in a bad place. Anyone could have gotten what the waiter got. It wasn’t personal. That’s what I told him as he bled out on the floor.

And now I’ve got an irrational fear of bread. I mean, it’s only mild. It’s not like I run out of the room when there’s bread. It’s more of a reminder of what has been. My preferred carb is rice. Fuck bread.

I’m not just changing the subject here, either. The connection is that I beat the shit out of him. It’s why I’m on this hot bench —my first day out in six months.

It’s what they call justice.

It’s twenty-past-five, and my ride isn’t here yet. When I say my ride, I mean the bus. There’s no actual ride to speak of. You don’t get rides after six months. Rides are for hardheads doing life for robbing Las Vegas casinos.

I wish I had a hat. My head is cooking like a bald soufflé, and I’m sweating like a Black Iberian on performance-enhancing drugs.

***

The bus has finally arrived, and it stinks. Now I have to jog up the stairs like I ride buses all the time, and I still have a zest for life.

There’s whispering — especially two women in the back seat. They know this bus stop. It’s where all the hardheads, just released, get the bus. They’re probably wondering what I did. They’re probably wondering if I shot my uncle or —

“Come on, Mate, move it.” It’s Anaemic Shrek, the driver.

I hand him the chalky ticket, and he rips it in half. When I turn back to the crowd, no one gives a fuck anymore. They’ve all gone back to staring out the window, dreaming of their next shot of GBH or the correct number of onions in a traditional mince and potato flange. Fuck knows what a flange is. I just made it up.

I hate buses. Trains I can handle — and trams — but there’s something depressing about buses. Happy people are rare on buses because it’s the lowest of the low. If you’re riding a bus, someone shat in your potatoes, Mate. You’re right down there.

Not one smile. Not one look to say,

I’m a human. You’re a human. Let’s breathe the same rancid air for forty-four minutes.

No one gives a fuck anymore.

The air on this bus is warm and musky, like having your head buried deep in a pussy. The deranged weatherman: Today will be humid, with a thirty-two per cent chance of crabs.

On the subject of love, it’s twelve complete moon cycles since my wife’s head came apart like an organic nashi pear under the rear left wheel of an ultramarine Ford Maverick. And don’t freak out, alright? I know I just sprung that on you, but it was bound to come out eventually.

I’m not even sure why I told you. I suppose it’s so you don’t think I’m the kind of person that randomly attacks waiters.

I suppose I must care what you think about me.

Fuck it.

I once watched a YouTube video where this ex-convict called Ted told people that dropping the soap in prison was a myth. Ted was wrong, that prick. It’s not a myth. Bars of soap get dropped every day, and you can’t do anything about it because you’re too afraid to die bleeding out in a prison hospital. It’s just easier to die from too much criminal spunk up the potty.

The hum of this bus is sickening. It’s like someone has eaten a power tool, and it’s going off inside their stomach — low, muffled vibration like a deranged chi machine. Fuck buses.

We’re still in the country — all green fields and animals. There’s a sheep with a bird on its back. Is that a sign? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a bird on a sheep’s back.

There was this inmate called Mike Jagger. He hated it when people called him Mick. And he was no Rolling Stone — whatever the fuck that means.

People think you’ve got to be physically big to win a fight, but that’s not true. You’ve got to be big in the mind. The most important question is, who is willing to go further? You can have a stinging right hook, but if you aren’t ready to kill your opponent, you’re weak.

Mike Jagger was willing to do anything — rip your nutsack off — jam his thumbs in your eyes — bite you all over, crunching his teeth through your fingers like a bloody Twix without hesitation. He’s small, but no one touches Mike. Because, if you’re fighting Mike, you’ll have to kill the fucker. And most prisoners don’t want to kill. They want to go home and smoke weed on their couch. Life just rear-ended them on the wrong day, and they reacted. Now they find themselves surrounded by violent criminals in cramped conditions.

It’s a thinking man’s rehabilitation.

It worked for me. I’ll do just about anything not to go back there. I’d be Harrison Ford getting pursued by that Tommy Lee from Motley Crue across the crocodile plains. I’d throw myself off a building before I let them take me back.

I’m not even joking.

The fucking hum is still going. Fucking power tool. Just digest it already. I’d get out and walk, but I’m only eighteen minutes in — twenty-sixish to go.

The girl across from me is too cute to be on this bus. I point to the graffiti above her head that says fat cunts. And I say something like,

“Pretty rude, eh?”

She ignores me.

At the same time, I notice I’m sitting on a brown stain, only it’s dry and flakey, and all you can do is hope it’s Coke, not Kak, as in Kaka Kola.

I want to tell her this, but I can’t figure out the words, so I ask her what she’s reading instead, but I say it as quiet as a mouse in a library, and there’s no way she can hear me. She’s not fucking Spiderman or whatever.

I don’t really want a conversation anyway. I just want her to acknowledge my presence and say,

I’m a human. You’re a human. Let’s breathe the same pungent air for another twenty-four and a half minutes.

No one gives a fuck anymore.

There’s a woman four seats up with a dog that looks like a pit bull, so I go over and ask if I can pat the dog. She tells me his name is Charlie and that he loves pats. I tickle Charlie’s face, and he licks mine. I get a damn lump in my throat, and tears come. I didn’t want this grief. I just wanted to pat a dog.

We had a dog. But none of us was available anymore — my wife being dead and me being an inmate — so he got sent to a pound, where they stuck a needle of green shit in him. No one would have taken him because he was too old. I let him down, and that feels like a ball of molten metal in the middle of my chest.

Charlie’s owner asks if I’m alright. She’s got a deranged ginger perm and a purple shell suit. Her lipstick is really fucking red like she’s been sucking off Elmo.

“I’m fine. I just had a dog like yours once,” I tell her.

Damn it, Charlie. I was doing just fine till you came along.

I return to my seat, and things are getting semi-industrial. We’re in the Western suburbs now, and there’s a much denser population of poor people than in the imperialist East where I used to live. I was trained in the ways of the imperialists from a young age — private all-boys. After that, I was all CK suits, scotch and money — until the shit show.

The point is, I’m a fucking prawn out of water on this side of town. Where are the stinking middle class dipping their genitals in the avocado puree with lobster butter or whatever? It’s not that I miss them or anything. I just feel a little out of place.

“Mini Orsis,” says this weird guy sitting at the back. He looks like Rick Stein without teeth. He nods his head out of the window and looks back at me.

“Mini Orsis,” he says again, pointing out the window.

I spot the miniature horses. At first, they’re real cute, with their fluffy heads and tiny legs. Then I notice their dicks are a foot of rope, and that’s not even stiff — not even a bit stiff.

Charlie’s owner has a good look. She seems like the type that might fuck a miniature horse. I don’t mean that to be derogatory. We’re all just one car crash away from fucking a miniature horse.

I reckon I could convince myself to fuck a miniature horse or at least let them fuck me while Charlie’s owner watched. Not Charlie, though. I can’t stand it when dogs watch you fuck. They just look like they are enjoying it too much.

***

I give Charlie one last pat on the way off the gastrointestinal power tool and step down into the lower intestine of society.

Footscray station is a stinking arsehole of a place, and I’m shitting a brick. I’m starting again fresh. I’m like a newborn baby in this world — innocent, pink, sensitive skin — ready to cry at anything.

There’s a shitty phone box covered in graffiti and a dried substance that could easily be Kaka Kola. I negotiate the brown crustacean and take a moment to bypass the temptation to follow the order on the phone box wall, which says, for a good fuck, call Samir.

I call the number on my discharge summary instead, and this social worker called Keith says he can come to pick me up. I tell him I’d rather walk, but he insists, so I tell him I’m at Footscray station, and he starts going on about some noodle place opposite. I want to tell him I just got out of the gaff, and noodles are the last thing on my mind, but I don’t since the guy is putting me up. Still, he keeps talking. Is this prick on speed?

Footscray seems alright, I suppose. There are a lot of Muslims, though. I think that’s alright. I’m fairly sure our enemies are Russia and China these days. Or, at least, they were six months ago. I’ll have to check the newspapers.

And no, I’m not some bright young skinhead like Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper, if that’s what you’re thinking. Sure, the illegal spunk of racism is well-established in my rectum. I was informationally raped from an early age, but I’m working on it, alright?

I shuffle past all the dirty taxis to the noodle shop this Keith fucker told me about. The shop stinks like a homeless guy’s underpants. It should be called Rectums and Coriander. Is that racist? I don’t think so. If anything, it’s herbism. Thankfully, the stench is from a grid outside the shop. It’s not the smell of noodles.

Some Greek-looking man is smoking, and I want to ask him for a cigarette, but I’m terrified. I’m still in the East in my office, ignoring my wife, making sweet love to an Excel spreadsheet and drinking scotch mixed with Gaviscon — too good to ask for help and too rich to ask for a cigarette. I have seven dollars and fifty-five cents, and it’s not 1981.

Some fucker is tapping my shoulder. I spin around to see a sick-looking bastard with brown teeth and spew coating his Marilyn Manson t-shirt and a hole where his nose used to be. He asks me for change, and I tell him to fuck off, primarily out of fear.

I back into this old lady, causing her to drop her purse and coins all over the ground. So, now I’m apologising like Hugh Grant and picking these filthy coins up off the wretched pavement. But why? How did this happen? Who uses coins these days anyway?

I give her the coins back, expecting thanks, but she mutters something and fucks off. I’m glad. I caused her the shit in the first place. Why would she say thanks? It’s justice.

The noseless man has fucked off, too. He is over by the Greek bloke who also tells him to fuck off, only louder and more aggressively, and without taking out a pensioner. I should be taking notes.

I’m feeling anxious as fuck as I head past the motorised Joni Mitchell Big Bird taxis to a caravan at the bottom of the station steps. They sell chips, burgers, hot dogs — that kind of crap. I ask the guy for water, and he gives me a look like I asked to finger his daughter. Then he hands me a bottle, and I give him three dollars of my seven odd. It’s fucking expensive for a bit of water. Sixty per cent of my body is made from this shit. Why don’t I just drink myself?

I take a couple of deep breaths. There’s a lot of plastic wrapped around this tiny bit of water. I don’t want to think about these things, but the thoughts keep coming. I can’t stop the thoughts. They’ll never stop. I can’t control them. Some fucker is pouring hot and cold water over me simultaneously, and here comes the panic, like the school bully coming across the field. Fuck.

There’s a lame toot, and I swing around. Some greasy fucker is waving at me from a shit-cream Ford Falcon. Or maybe he’s waving at someone else. Maybe that’s the guy — Keith.

I drink more water, but it’s too cold and feels like a metal pipe in my throat. I’m sweating like a bastard, and he’s getting out of the car.

Fuck.

Now, I’m running in the other direction.

This is the bit where Meth Gump can’t handle what is happening, so he runs around the country.

I don’t know why. I just felt like running.

Run Meth, RUN.

At some stage, I realise I have to go back so I don’t get lost and have to sleep on these greasy streets. I feel a bit better, anyway. Running always helps.

I think I’m okay until I pass an aquarium and stop to tap on the window at the poor fuckers trapped in their tanks. Things can always be worse. Aren’t we just like fish? Aren’t we this drop of consciousness trapped in the body?

The claustrophobia is kicking in like a lousy pill now, and I want to escape my body. The hot and cold water is rushing again, and I shake my head, running across the road and away from the station again.

This is fucking ridiculous. I have to go back.

Keith, the social worker, is leaning against the shit-cream Falcon, flicking his greasy black-grey hair and smiling like a sex offender. He’s wearing a faded Hawaii Five-O shirt with one of those spiked belts, and his arse is way too small. You can’t trust a man with a tiny arse. Still, it matches the rest of his body which looks like he hasn’t eaten in a year or two.

I don’t care about any of it. I’m too busy staring at the cigarette in his hand.

***

This prick needs to clean up his car. I’m sitting among McDonald’s bags and shit. Then again, at least I can breathe into them in the event of another flip-out. The smell of genetically modified canola oil always calms me down.

The inside of this car smells like cheese, and not the good type either. It’s not aged cheddar or Red Leicester or King Island double cream brie.

It’s the type of cheese that collects in places — the thirty-day-old pot of yoghurt — human cheese, thrush. Dick cheese.

Whatever you want to call it, it’s sour and unpleasant.

The cigarette smoke makes it mildly better. I’d call it a carcinogenic air freshener, but all air fresheners are carcinogenic, including cheese-flavoured Christmas trees.

Humans are fucking hogs. We evolved to use toiletries to disguise it, but if hogs and dogs used deodorant, we might think they were civilised animals too. Truth is, none of us are. We are as horrific as any other creature. We just have Speedstick.

“How you doin, Pal?” Keith asks. He sounds like Ray Winstone on helium, and it’s the kind of question asked in the kind of tone you don’t need following a panic attack.

“Fine,” I tell him, staring out of the window. I’ve got nothing else. I suck down on the cheap cigarette he gave me. It’s called a Longbeach.

Surely there’s something else to say. I’m not Julian Assange. I’m a damn free citizen.

Say something, for fuck’s sake.

“How much is a packet of ciggies these days?” I ask like I’m Ariana Huffington at some social event. It’s just something to say, damn it. We need to connect. I’m starting again fresh, like a newborn baby — innocent, pink and all that crap.

“Depends on the brand,” he tells me. “I smoke these — Longbeach. Forty for sixty bucks, they are. Yer quality shit though, like yer Marlboros — talking twenty-five for fifty bucks.”

I’m trying to think of something to say next to keep this shit going so I don’t have to listen to these damn thoughts, but I don’t know what the fuck he is talking about because I only started smoking in the last six months.

“Fifty bucks, eh?” I say, and there’s an uncomfortable pause.

“I smoked chop-chop in the gaff,” I tell him. He nods and flicks his ciggy end out of the window. Then he starts going on about the time he tried to grow chop-chop and got chased by a police helicopter. Fuck knows if he is lying.

Chop-chop is homegrown tobacco, in case you’re wondering. It’s more illegal than cocaine in Australia. You get life for growing enough of it. Fuck knows why. It’s horrible. Smoking chop-chop is like sucking off a wasp. This cheap Longbeach is like Panama Gold in comparison — whatever that means.

Listen up, you fannies. If you liked what you just read, you should know this is the first chapter from my book, Midnight in Footscray which incidentally is free on Kindle for the next seventy two damn hours. So if ya fancy it, go grab it for free would ya with ya sticky biscuit fingers like Bill Sykes n that. Link below.

Five minutes ago, I’d felt fine mostly

I’d just left the gym and strolled over to the local shopping centre. The journey there was mostly uneventful. I passed three or four Asian food peddlers and a couple who looked about as close to a mob hitman and his wife as I’d ever seen.

He was big, fucking dangerously big, but not gym big. I’m not afraid of those big gym guys. They’ll all drop the same when you smash their knees sideways. But this guy was big with an oversized pasta and chianti gut, silver suit over a wife beater, gold chain, receding hairline and Italian sunglasses. He was the type of guy that would crush your skull multiple times with a fridge handle and not blink an eye.

And his wife was stunning in that rich, Italian way. Far too beautiful for a hairy ape like him. And far too tempting to the eye. And my eyes seem to have a mind of their own when it comes to such things.

So I did what any sensible person seeing a dangerous looking man with a hot wife walking towards him would do. I crossed the street. It didn’t ruin my day at all. I went about my business, the business of going to the supermarket.

Which brings me to this moment

And this young checkout chick is just standing there adjusting her glasses and nodding as I go about my supermarket rant.

“Tell your overlords that if they can afford to triple the prices of the most essential service, food, and if they can afford to install security gates and swollen-balled goons to harass slippery-fingered old ladies, and if they can afford to install the same military grade surveillance technology used by the Israelis into all their stores, then they can afford to upgrade their mobile phone coverage.”

But the louder I shout, the more the circle spins on my internet banking app and the more the chick nods wildly.

“Yeah, the coverage in here is shocking,” she says.

I appreciate her. Not one sir-can-you-keep-your-voice-down, just total empathy for a fellow human in this fuckhole situation we’ve found ourselves in as regular citizens at the mercy of corporate giants whose level of care for their customers is equivalent to the price of Tesla shares fourteen minutes after the first warheads hit.

I stop, take a dry, dystopian breath, thank her and tell her I’ll buy my budget fucking steaks and Greek yoghurt somewhere else, perhaps somewhere where you don’t require an attendant to come over and sign out the meat so you can purchase it.

I’m in the foulest fucking mood today. My wife reckons it’s because I’m back on the creatine. She is wrong. It’s because my dopamine is getting fucked in the arsehole by Zed like Marcellus Wallace ’cause I finally gave up caffeine. For real this time.

And yeah, I hear ya while ya sit there sucking on your fourth gay latte of the day: Frank, why the fuck would ya do that?

And I’ll tell ya. It’s because caffeine is the kind of chemical that holds you hanging mid auto-erotic asphyxiation about four inches above the right zone for proper meditation.

It gives you this constant subconscious tension in your balls that stops you from resting fully. And you only know that because after three weeks of feeling like you’ve been spiked by a man named Paul at your local, you actually start to feel like you can relax properly for the first time in decades.

And now I’m into the second week

Day ten to be precise. The first week you fall asleep. The second week your dopamine shuts down and you find no joy in anything. Everything and everyone annoys the shit out of you.

And the day hadn’t started that well. I’d watched some dingbat with dreads on Instagram talking about how to improve your gut biome and he just looked like the kind of fucking loser that would know fuck all about that. And I realised that in the year of our Lord, 2026, you just need to ask ChatGPT to write you a fucking script then read it online. Everyone’s a fucking expert now. It’s pathetic.

And a short time later a guy, on Instagram, was walking around the countryside with a backpack. And he was talking about the number one way to lose weight. He said it was called “rucking.” And he was referring to walking around with a fucking backpack. So I commented.

You don’t have to fucking brand everything you cunts. It’s not rucking. It’s just walking.

And I proceeded to get a moral telling off from Instagram which created in me the type of rage that begins revolutions.

And yeah, it’s the eve of the full moon and that always has some unexpected effects. All my writing projects have been on hold since I was paralysed by the caffeine detox. And the fact that I had bacon for breakfast this morning. I heard that certain traditions don’t eat it ’cause pigs’ feet look like the feet of the devil. But that’s not it. It’s the fucking nitrates. They make you feel like you’ve been spiked by some guy called Spike at your local. Why do you think there are so many successful Jewish people? Don’t overthink it. It’s not political.

It’s because they don’t eat bacon in the morning.

I go and sit in my car feeling like Michael Douglas in Falling Down

And I realise that character must have been in week two of a caffeine detox.

I entertain a fantasy about smashing the security gate at the supermarket and then lecturing the judge during my trial for criminal damage.

And I start the car to get the air con running because it’s over forty degrees in this damn parched fucking country.

“People are stealing our meat, Frank. What do you expect?” says the ghostly lawyer for the supermarket in my head when I quiz him about having to sign out the meat.

“You tripled the prices for no other reason except tripling the profits. What did you expect?” I shout, locked into my internal car fantasy, eyeballs rolling into the back of my head. “You’re fucking responsible for families living on the streets. If I were a terrorist, I’d fucking blow up all your stores.”

I come back to the car with a bang and take a sip of water. This caffeine detox is no joke. I’m desperate to see what is on the other side. I’ve been promised stable energy, a new presence, better anal orgasms, less grey pubes, the list is endless. I’m like a child in the hot queue at Disneyland. It better be worth it.

I pull out of the car space backwards, not forwards like one of those ball-lickers who reverse into car spaces. And I think about the Mayor of Barcelona who has banned Airbnb because he is trying to tilt the rental market back in favour of the people. And I think, at least they’re doing something. Not like Albanese and his gang of muppets.

Oh yes, Frank, you’re right. I’m voting One Nation at the next election.

Is that true? And you think those fucking fish and chip loving racist fucks are gonna do better despite having absolutely zero experience running government? When will you realise that it doesn’t matter who gets in. It’s the fucking system that’s…

I’m yelling at the traffic lights now. I need to be out of this heat and back home. Perhaps I should just have a coffee.

And a homeless fuck comes up with his bucket of water and dead squeegee. And history tells me I’m gonna run this fuck over. But I don’t. I stare at him with his filthy face and his greasy, cum-stained T-shirt that says something about visiting Hawaii and Aloha. And I give him the thumbs up instead, because I remember the ten dollar note my wife left between the seats for emergencies.

He squirts the hot water on the window, second-hand cigarette butt hanging from his yellow gob. And I start laughing. Because he’s real. This fucker is real. And almost everything that has happened to me this morning is not. It’s all in my fucking head.

You know what, coffee? I’ve spent over ten grand on you in the last three years. And why? Because you maintain this fucking lie that we need you so we can wake up and do important shit like writing and fucking.

But fuck you. I’m done, you cunt. I’m going to Disneyland and I’m gonna suck fucking Mickey Mouse off while Minnie watches.

The light turns green. And he finishes his job. I hand him a crisp blue tenner. And he starts yelling and dancing around like Kevin Bacon. I smile and drive off. And as I look back at the whirling, stinking dervish in the rear view mirror, I feel a mild tingle in my wet head. At first I think it’s heat stroke, but then I realise it’s the dopamine banging on the fucking wall like the bleeding hearts and artists.

And I know for sure that when I reach Disneyland, you’re gonna start reading some real shit right here.

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Get a grip

Sit down. Grab a beer or a water.

And listen like it’s 1993.

First, pay no heed to media and political action intended to move stock markets. Resist feeding your limited, precious silver coins of attention into the great slot machine of fear whose fuel is that very attention. Or don’t complain that your shitting your y fronts in front of your Sony Bravia like a freak who pours bleach on their chips then complains of a sore throat.

Walk away. Don’t take sides. And don’t for a second consider you are ever at war. Only the politicians are at war.

Now is not the time to sit in panic while you make beans and toast for your children. They feel that. Education happens energetically. Not just in a classroom with big titted Mrs Flapsberry. So educate them by demonstrating courage and love and hope in the face of endless negative horseshit. You are greater than this. Your children are greater than this. Humans are greater than this. Be someone that proves this, not someone who collapses like a fucking fanny. Get the fuck Up off your knees. They want you afraid. It’s what sells papers and drives shares.

Whatever you are feeling, we are all feeling. We’re in it together. Don’t forget that. You’re not fucking special.

Every day, stubbornly act as if the future is bright. Stubbornly refuse to be afraid. Assume your children will live in a world of beautiful miracles. Act in favour of that. Turn off the shit box. Put it down. Fuck your lovers like it’s the last time. Not because traumatised badger fuckers will end it, but because it’s inherently impermanent anyway.

These sad fuckers can’t end it. They don’t have the right or power. They never did. It was always going to end without them. That power belongs to the universe itself, not to some Corrupt pant wetter in a fucking suit. Power is pathetic. It’s like a tramp in shit soaked trousers wearing a plastic crown. Fucking clowns. Don’t give them your anything

Drop the fucking pathetic fear act. Pick up the love and hope.

And humour. . And show your kids that the buttered politicians and the buttering billionaires and corporations don’t control your fucking mind. That they don’t control where you put your attention. That they can’t fucking control whether you live in fear or peace. Fuck them. It’s not their choice. It’s yours. Take it back.

Turn off the fucking shit box. All of it. Take your dog to the beach, you cunt. Stop being a fucking pathetic scared fanny. Look at you.

Get a fucking grip

Turn it off and enjoy your life. It’s not making you informed. it’s ruining your day.

Fuck the cunts.

I

Mean

It.

I’m still Here, okay.

I’m just busy building a Time Machine to bring Alan Rickman back.

Get in touch if your tits are melting from Fear. I’ll invite ya round for some chai and a few vase breaths.

Om Ah Hum

Love

FTB.

I wonder what she’s doing now

She’s probably in the fucking matrix like the rest of them.

She’s probably married to some fucking dweeb with a ripped rainbow body and an illusory nine-inch laser dong.

She’s probably—

“Pass the salt, there, old fella,” says this bearded orthodox Jew.

I slide the salt down the bar like Tom Cruise in fucking cocktail. It stops perfectly at his plate. He nods DeNiro style and picks up the salt without any thanks. No one says thanks these days, which is fine. It saves time. If you counted up all the thanks in your life, you’d have an extra hundred days or something like that. Gratitude is implied.

It’s a diner like the type you see on old TV shows, where you order coffee without any elaboration and leave two silver coins on the bench when you’re done—the kind where you ask to use the payphone like Marty McFly in 1955 and everyone thinks you’re a fucking coast guard.

They have an old TV here where you still use the remote to change channels. And it plays back-to-back news. That’s all there is these days—fucking news.

There’s a good-looking news reporter standing in a field on Channel Six.

“Yes, John. Concerns have been raised by farmers as herds of donkeys have been spotted in the wild…”

Yeah, concerns raised by blood thirsty hunters, I’m sure. Who wouldn’t wanna put a bullet between the meaty cheeks of some old ass? Next, we’ll be eating donkey meat cos they're fucking ‘pests’ and selling it as native for the same price as sirloin.

Wagyu donkey $179.99 a kg. It’s a lot for a donkey that’s been fed on cheese and toast and listened to Susumo Yokota its whole life. You know they wank off the donkey, and as it’s peaking and shooting out donkey spunk, they slit its fucking throat. That’s what PETA will say.

Stop slitting spunking donkeys’ throats. Go Vegan.

Guess they had to do something since they tried to put vaccine into beef and killed the lot of them—the cows that is.

Fuck it.

“What can I get you, honey?” says the waitress. She looks like Betty White if Betty had spent her life serving coffee to assholes.

“Two glasses of iced water with ice,” I say.

“What’s that, honey?”

“Nothing,” I say. I clear my throat.

“Coffee,” I say.

“What kind of coffee, honey?”

She’s killing my fantasy here.

“Almond cappuccino, please,” I say.

I want to shoot myself in the face.

“Any food to go with that?” she says.

Let me see. Any good? A-ny-

I open the grim-looking menu. It’s one of those with washed-out pictures of the food. I scroll past the casserole special, which looks like a horse did a shit on a monkey’s brain.

“Fries,” I say, handing her the menu.

I’m only here for the fucking ambience. I’m what they call a future-phobe. Call me a pessimist, but the idea of being gaffer-taped into the matrix in a serious long-term marriage with a collection of zeros and ones doesn’t fucking do it for me.

I wanna kick the corner of the coffee table with my little toe.

I wanna feel scared on the fucking subway.

I wanna catch STDs from the sloppy trans hooker outside Seven-Eleven.

I wanna pay with disease-riddled cash notes that’ve been used to snort cheap no-doze from that same hooker’s stubbly ass.

Two cops walk in, and I hope they don’t have their thought readers switched on. Everyone always acts differently around cops. Even the non-criminals act extra friendly.

“What can I get you boys?” says the waitress.

Where’s my fucking fries?

The younger of the two cops mumbles something to the waitress, who shakes her head twice, then looks up and points at me. I do the obligatory look behind, but there's no one. She’s definitely pointing at me. Fuck.

“Are you Frank T Bird?” says the older officer in a croaky voice.

“Who’s asking?” I say.

There’s a beeping sound, and everyone in the diner freezes.

A woman’s voice says,

GAME PAUSED. MESSAGE FROM DENISE. I’M GOING TO MCDONALDS, FRANK. DO YOU WANT ANYTHING?

Okay, so I fucking lied.

“SEND MESSAGE TO DENISE,” I say. “Get me two cheeseburgers and a chocolate shake and six nuggets with barbecue sauce. Thanks. Now UNPAUSE.”

I don’t mind travelling. It gives me a chance to escape this domestic prison and find new writing material.

I was supposed to stay at this hotel called The Langham, but I rocked up there, and they told me that they’d double-booked my damn room. And I figured it’s just like an airline where they bump you up to first class.

“So what do I get?” I asked. “The penthouse?”

“You don’t understand, Mr Bird,” said the lady. “The whole hotel is booked out. This is one of our busiest weekends.”

She went on to tell me there was some damn festival on and blah blah blah. I honestly don’t give a fuck about culture and all that. I just wanted somewhere to get my head down. I was knackered from the flight, and I just fancied somewhere to wash the sweat off my dick, drink a cold one and have a good wank.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

That’s how it is these days. There’s no customer service anymore. At one time, the manager of that hotel would have let me sleep on his fucking couch. But not anymore. They’re just sorry.

I hit the bar in the foyer, where some good-looking sixty-year-old cunt was singing slow jazz.

I winked at her as I went in, and she smiled. I wondered if I might fuck her later until I remembered I didn’t even have a fucking room.

I ordered a glass of single malt and their strongest IPA, which, as it turned out, was 5.2% alcohol. That used to be strong, but now it’s cat piss. The bar manager said there were too many fights, so they had to stop serving the true IPAs. People are fucking pussies when it comes to beer.

I downed the whiskey in one, and the barman gave me this look as if to say it’s blasphemous to drink good Scotch like that.

“Who are you? Fucking Harvey Spectre?” I said. He shook his head and turned away.

Asshole.

I sat and listened to the jazz for a bit. At the end, she said Thank you and goodnight. And I realised it was fucking twelve-thirty, and I still didn’t have a place to stay.

Everyone clapped a bit, and she came over, stood at the bar, and ordered a martini.

“You’re a great singer,” I said without looking at her.

“Thanks, honey,” she said. She was like one of those old, dirty singers from the thirties. She had swagger—and trauma, too—plenty of that. I could smell it on her.

Up close, she looked slightly younger. Maybe she was in her late forties — I don’t know. I’m fucking terrible with ages. But I asked her to join me, and she drank four martinis in the hour before one-thirty, and she started slurring her words.

“I need to get home,” she said, holding onto the bar. Then she grabbed my thigh. “You look like a resourceful young man. Would you like to join me?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “What’s your address?”

She gave it to me, and I put it into Uber.

Five minutes later, we were standing outside, and I chucked my luggage into the back of the car.

I got in the back beside her, and the driver pulled off.

She didn’t waste any time. We were too strapped in to kiss or anything, but she straight up took my hand, put it down the front of her knickers and pushed my fingers right into her.

“Finger me,” she whispered. “I’ll stimulate my clitoris.”

“Fine,” I said, feeling like we'd just done some kind of business deal.

So I rammed two fingers into her while she took care of her clit.

After a few seconds, her pussy started making sloshing sounds, and she fucking came right there on the back seat.

And I’ve known some women who can cum silently by themselves. But not when I fuck them. Even the silent types scream when I make them cum.

Usually.

I guess my heart’s not in it tonight. I need to lie down.

The driver knew what was happening. If he couldn’t hear it, he could smell it at least. Her pussy was intense. I didn’t mind it at all. But maybe that driver did, since he probably had to get the strong cunt smell out of his car before his next client.

The car pulled up outside the address, and I pulled my luggage up her driveway while helping her get up to the house.

She stumbled through the front door, and I wondered how the fuck she got that drunk off four martinis. Or was it five?

Her bedroom was on the right as we went in.

I was barely through the door when she pulled off her dress and climbed into bed.

“Hello?” I said. “Hello?”

But the bitch had passed out. I know it because she started snoring like a fucking rhino.

I found my way into the lounge room and got a spare blanket and a pillow out of my case. I always travel with my own pillows. Sleeping on hotel pillows gives me those neck headaches.

I lay on the couch. I wanted to have a wank, but it’s always problematic on someone’s couch since I cum a lot. I’d have fucking destroyed that couch with my spunk.

Besides, I was fucking tired.

I lay on my side and passed out.

When I opened my eyes, the light was blinding me through the window, and the television was on.

It was some horseshit morning breakfast show talking about — I don’t know, something.

I leaned up on one elbow, rubbed my eyes and looked around.

That’s when I noticed the man sitting opposite in the chair— and the pistol resting in his hand.

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked. Morning manners aren’t top of my CV.

“I’m the husband,” he said in some dark Irish accent.

I nodded.

“Any chance of some cornflakes?” I said, without taking my eye off the pistol.

“Did you fuck her?”

I pushed myself up and rested my feet on the floor.

“Nope. She passed out.”

He nodded.

“But did you intend to fuck her?”

I paused, then nodded.

“I appreciate your honesty,” he said. “And now, I’m gonna need you to go in there and finish the job.”

“Excuse me?”

“I think you heard me. She’s still asleep in there. Go ahead, wake her up and fuck her.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“I will if you don’t go fuck my wife right now.”

“Are you going to watch?”

Fuck knows. I look up from my desk at the neighbour, Mrs Flapsberry, who is wearing her orange Thursday bra. Usually, I’d spy on her and have a wank since my wife is at work, but today I just can’t. For the third time this week, I’ve written myself into a fucking threesome. And it’s not with some youthful clueless bronzed coked up fucks on a yacht. It’s with a fat sixty-year-old Irish cuckold and his morning-breath jazz singer wife.

I have to fix this. How can I get out of it? Do I grab the fucking gun? Do I offer him cash? Do I—

Wait. Mrs Flapsberry is hanging out the washing now. Her jugs wobble like twin coffee panacottas when she does that.

Maybe I will have that wank after all.

I know where yer at

Yer sitting there watching YouTube, and some attention-deficient twenty-year-old called Marvin is telling you how to self-publish yer book about bisexual trans cis werewolfs on Amazon while he sends you links to his free course on marketing.

It’s fine. I get it. You want to be a famous author like that bellend Stephen King, so you can go for forty-minute creative walks each day on a busy road and get hit by an ice cream van. You want to live in a fancy chocolate biscuit mansion where you reside for forty-four days a year between travelling round and getting sucked off by writing groupies at fancy book launches with pistachio croissants and champagne in mystical foreign cities.

And this fucking kid here, who probably uses Chat GBH to write their stuff, is telling you that your cover needs to look a particular way that you couldn’t possibly design yourself, so you need to employ Bakti in Bangladesh (A certified book cover designer) to create it for you.

Look, I don’t want to piss in your teapot, but despite your dreams, the chances of you selling a lot of books are incredibly fucking slim.

So why not create something beautiful instead of doing whatever horseshit will apparently sell books?

But Frank, I’m going to be a famous author and sell millions

No, you’re not.

And don’t take that personally. But you need to grow up and start taking your writing seriously.

You need to understand that 96.2% of the great authors died broke and alone, drunk, and with syphilis. And you need to start making that your goal as an author.

Because if you are writing to become ‘big’, you aren’t writing authentically, and you will continue to produce rhinoserous turd. And even if you do become big and start pumping out best sellers like one of the other turd factories, it doesn’t mean you are a good, authentic writer. You’re just another corporate faggot in this lost world.

Think about it. If you can’t stand the idea of writing without trying to become ‘big’, you have a real problem, and you should probably just go and stick a camera on your head and feed a half-dead tramp for views or beat up and starve a cat and ‘rehabilitate’ it.

Writing to become famous is fucking empty. And it’s pathetic. And your book cover says a lot about who you are. Never forget that.

Don’t Be a Pussy

People sometimes ask me for writing advice

N yeah, this is the bit where I’m supposed to act all humble and say, what, me? But I’m only…

That humility crap is another epidemic.

I’ve written four full-length books and hundreds of articles. And sure, it might not be as many as Terry Daniels, who is working on his 144th book in the Jack Flashcock series. Still, I can guarantee you I wrote every one of my books without considering the advice of fucking anybody in the writing world or the publishing world. I didn’t follow any rules. And believe me, publishing a book is much easier if you fuck off all the rules.

My advice to those people who ask me is this:

Find the stuff in your mind that you never want anybody to know about—those filthy secrets that you are so afraid of being judged for. Now write about them without fear and without wondering if they will ‘sell’.

Because writing is a cathartic process. The more you take that fear and self-loathing and piss it all over the page for the public to read, the more you will become comfortable in your own skin. It’s like therapy.

I mean, that doesn’t mean you have to write about spying on your sister in the bath or catching herpes from a six-foot hooker in Darwin, like me. It should only be that extreme if that’s what comes out.

I just mean that you shouldn’t censor yourself based on a fear of being judged by your non-existent readers. Reader expectations are a great source of writer’s block. Writing yourself into a niche can be a fucking nightmare, even if that niche is obscure and you never meant to end up there.

What About Titles?

What about fucking titles, you muppet?

What’s that?

You downloaded a fourteen-dollar title generator from the App Store, and you’re asking it to read your book and come up with a title?

You’re asking a machine to come up with a title for your book, and you have the shame to call yourself a writer?

Get a fucking grip.

As a response to the world of writing influence and their insistence on horseshit titles that ‘sell’ books, I called my first book ‘Ballbag’, and in response to the cover bullshit, I took a picture of the public toilet wall where I was having a piss. It came out quite beautifully, I think.

Is that book a bestseller? No, it fucking isn’t, and that’s probably for many reasons. First of all, my marketing efforts have been basically zero since I decided that marketing is a dead man’s sport. But it’s mainly because selling books is hard. And it’s because not many people buy books. The ones that do are buying mainstream fucking fiction, the literary equivalent of watching ‘real’ housewives with medicine ball tits and lifeboat lips get drunk and bitch about each other. It’s all so fucking fake.

It’s also because humans are simple creatures. We think we are the pinnacle of intelligence in the universe, but in reality, we are being manipulated very easily now. Go out to your local shopping centre and watch everyone with their stooped necks glaring at their phones, and you will see why you can’t sell books by being authentic.

Besides, even if you do write truly mainstream fiction about a man trying to solve the mystery of why his wife only wears green panties on a Thursday, the chances of you ‘making it’ are 460,000,000,000 to 1. No joke.

So give it all up. Give up trying to get the fancy life. Get comfortable among the pigs and the nettles and aim to be famous a hundred years after you die.

Find someone with syphilis who can load you up. Then retire to an isolated place among the wasps and write about the time you got molested by Uncle Paul in the garage after snooker practice in 1993.

But What About the Craft?

Don’t get me wrong. Through all of this, you still have to learn the craft of writing. Because, without being cliché, you can’t just build a house according to your whim. There are rules to follow, or it just doesn’t fucking work. So do yourself a favour and do a reputable writing course (at least one). Learn about sentence structure, grammar and story structure. You don’t have to be perfect. But it’s better if poor foundations don’t kill your interesting writing.

At the same time, don’t get caught up in what you have learned. To use another phat dicked cliché, learn it, then forget it.

In my book, The Edge of the Sun, I started with a tremendous structure with plot points and a mid-point and an inciting incident and all that crap. But when I started writing it, it just didn’t happen like that. As one reader/editor said, nothing happened for the first 75% of the book.

It’s true. It’s like a barrier that only allows the worthy to break through and understand what the book is about.

And sometimes that’s just how it is. It’s how it comes out.

But it’s good to know the rules so you can break them. And here, I’m referring to the rules of storytelling and communication, not the arbitrary rules imposed by the literati and their twenty-year-old influencer sycophants.

The main point I’m getting to here is that not one single decision you make about your book should be in service of selling books or getting signed by a publisher or literary agent. Every single decision should be in service of creating a beautiful piece of art that you are proud of.

Assume from the very beginning that no one will ever buy any of your books. Create it like you might decorate your lounge room—for your own pleasure and the pleasure of the odd guest that might drop in from time to time.

And that way, we can stop filling the world with the literary equivalent of horse gonads and start creating stuff that will nourish the mind of those few, in the future, who might, God bless them, choose to read rather than scroll.

I was twenty-one when my son was born

He slid forth from his mother’s hoo-haa among a slurry of rainbow-flavoured juices.

Red, green, orange, yellow, and yes, brown. Plenty of brown.

Everything except for blue.

There’s no blue in nature. That’s what they say. What fucking horseshit.

The sky is fucking blue, for fuck’s sake.

The point is, it was a mess. It’s not like on TV where the girl looks like she’s having a mild orgasm with a touch of sweat, and the next thing, this clean fucking three-month-old is just there, unattached to anything.

No, it’s not like that at all.

Have you ever seen Alien vs Predator?

No, neither have I.

I have, however, seen both Alien and Predator. I’ve seen Nightmare on Elm Street a few times, and none of them compares to childbirth.

When you finally get past the muck and slime and shite that fills your vision and your nostrils, this fucking creature slides out that looks like a giant fucking red rat.

And it’s attached to a cord. They don’t tell you that.

There’s a giant fucking cord attached to the thing.

And even once they gather up the squarking creature, it’s followed shortly by this thing they call the placenta.

The Latin word placenta translates into English as, cake (See above).

Now, according to ancient tradition, you‘re supposed to roast that fucker or sous vide it if you can find a bag big enough. Sixty-five degrees for seventy-five minutes should be fine if you like your human offal medium rare.

This thing is like the Cronenbergian admin assistant for the placenta, assisting with all kinds of stuff like calling Uber Eats for the baby when it’s having a cheat day.

But it’s called the cake cos all those joyful nutrients are still on board, so you eat the bastard. And it’s meant to be fucking delicious. Someone told me it tasted like Meatloaf. Fuck knows what that means. I’d have to ask one of his groupies.

Anyway. I didn’t eat it. I couldn’t find a sous vide bag big enough, okay?

Lets move on.

I didn’t feel anything when my son was born.

They told me it would change my life—that angels would play their cock trumpets from on top of clouds and tears would flow from my eyes. They were right about one of those things. The tears did flow from my eyes, but it was more from the stench of fresh shit than from any evangelical moment of divine ecstasy.

We love glamourising birth in our culture. It’s not just the fresh idea we have of childbirth from watching so many TV births and having no serious sex education (for my generation at least). We’re always celebrating birth as a beautiful beginning where the fat stork comes flying over Fanny Mountain to bless young parents with this innocent young creature who will quickly deprive them of their will to live.

The reality of birth, according to the ancient tradition, is different. If you are claustrophobic, please cover your ears now, because you won't want to think about being trapped in an incredibly confined space for nine fucking months like some fetal Houdini, attached to stodgy pipes that feed you the essential nutrients from the large Quarter Pounder meal and six nugs with BBQ sauce that your chosen mother is scoffing into her fat, hairy gob.

N it’s yer own fault cos ya know ya got there cos ya fancied ya mum and ya got fuckin jealous when yer saw yer dad stickin his anaemic cock into her pink Pit of Carkoon and thru yer efforts of tryin to stop em bangin ya got glued to ya dad’s pearly spunk train and ended up in her hot bio-prison.

N it’s gonna freak ya the fuck out at first, cos like any prison, ya gotta get used to the dark and the warmth.

In real prison, it’s the warmth of Big Johnno’s hot spunk pumping deep into your arsehole in the terrifying darkness of your midnight cell.

In the womb, it’s a more general type of biological warmth and darkness.

But then at some point, ya gonna get dragged down ya mama’s slick slippery slide, stretchin her elastic vagina with yer massive fuckin head before schlopping out into this fuckin bright world where ya eyes that aint never been used get blasted with the neon lasers of surgery lights like Neo just out of the Matrix.

N ya skin’s never bin exposed to air, so it fuckin burns like when ya take a strong piss during that first or second herpes outbreak.

N if yer one of the seventy per cent who don’t know what the fuck that feels like, imagine takin a fucking zippo to the head of ya cock and watching it blister under the flame.

Ever hear screaming coming from cubicles in the toilets at work and call security cos it sounds like someone’s gettin’ raped in there?

Don’t worry. It’s just a fresh herpes victim taking a regular ol’ piss.

And for a wee bairn, fresh into the world, their whole body is a fucking herpes sore getting pissed on. No wonder they fuckin scream so hard. We think newborn babies are being dramatic cunts, but they’re not.

We long-time, experienced Herpetians understand exactly where their blood-curdling screams are coming from.

And even after all of this talk about darkness and heat and claustrophobic conditions and elastic vaginas and spunk trains, if ya still think fuckin birth is like eating ice cream in a green park in summer, you should ask yourself why you blanked that shit out so hard.

Fuck it.

Look, I know you're three and a half months pregnant to Phil, the Anglo-Latvian animal communicator who only came that one day to communicate with yer old, sick childhood horse, Vladimir.

N I know you’ve been doing those classes where ya sit with ya legs open n hyperventilate like yer blowin up a balloon with ya snatch n with ya husband, Terry lovingly behind ya bein supportive cos he has no fuckin idea about what happened between you n Phil in the stable that day n he thinks the baby is his till it schlopps out looking like a fuckin Anglo-Latvian.

N I know yer just want to keep the peace n not get fuckin paranoid about yer unborn fetus gettin molested in the bio-gaff by Big Johnno.

So look, let’s just say birth is like TV, shall we? The rat is grown and clean. And it doesn't schlopp out like a wet corpse covered in rainbow juice. It slips out gently and lightly moistened like a good lemon and poppyseed cake, okay. And that vagina of yours—those miracle lips snap right back into place. They’re an industrial strength, they are, so chin up, alright?

Please leave any questions below.

All the best,

Dr Bird

If you don’t know me at all and you find this post, you might expect to find some luminous horseshit about how you need to eat twice your body weight in protein every day and cut out carbs and inject creatine flavoured molasses into your third gonad thrice daily while lifting metal plates thrice weekly and dressing in a fucking spandex mankini.

You might expect me to recommend that you need to read the holistic bible and become a Christian and complain about fuckin immigrants and buy a fucking semi-automatic potato launcher to put into your basement to defend your cans of baked beans from the government so you can feed your family of nine kids and your wife in her pristeen summer dress when your social fucking credit runs out and you’re gettin Clive Owen vibes like Children of Men or whatever.

And you might expect something about eating raw tongkat ali straight from the plant and hanging from a fucking bar for forty minutes a day and seeing a functional magician and a dietician and a fucking nutritionist and a fuckin therapist and taking sixteen lead-filled supplements that make ya balls heavy by suckin testosterone from the parts of ya brain that make ya think for yourself.

But it’s just not like that.

I could begin this article with some fucking shag line like:

Men are facing a crisis in 2025.

or

Never has there been a greater need for a men’s liberation movement.

But it’s not like that either.

Regardless of what your inescapable social media algorithm tells you on a daily basis, men aren’t facing any kind of crisis. And if you even mention the words men’s liberation and speak about it with any level of seriousness, you need to take off that tight fucking t-shirt that shows the outline of your nipples. You need to stand in front of the mirror, bollock naked and tell yourself in your best Schwarzeniver accent:

Stop being a fucking pussy.

The internet is single handedly creating fucking losers out of men, telling them that they need to lift heavy weights and eat steroids and/or amino acids till they look like a fucking neckless pit bull — telling them that they need to learn fucking Ju-Jitsu aka how to rip another mans underpants off without looking gay — telling them lies about how the men of old were big fucking bloated small dicked powerlifters who ate nothing but dry fucking chicken breasts and grey broccolli.

If you didn’t know already, I’ve been at culinary school for the last nine months, learning how to cream into a brandy snap, how to slap a chicken in the oven and how to pull the brains out of a dead octopus while it stares at you like your old mother.

And over this time, I’ve gotten to observe the life patterns of the other guys in my course whose ages range from 17 to 25. There was one older guy in the course, but he pulled out as I believe he was on the verge of scalping several of the younger blokes. And I can’t blame him for thinking this way. Although scalping is not my thing, young blokes have lost their fucking way. And 50% is due to simply being young blokes, but 50% of that is due to the internet.**

The technological conditioning of fellas

Ya see, you’ve got this bottleneck type situation like when yer in Tenerife and there’s some hot bird gettin paid to shuffle all the young horny fucks into some empty club. On the internet, it’s the lure of being more attractive, of being desired by women and being feared by men that drives you down the sales funnel into the standard male algorithm. And it’s not just the young blokes getting sucked in. It’s all blokes.

I’ve got older mates who seven years ago were practically fucking socialists, aspiring writers and artists who hated governments, read great books and smoked damiana for breakfast.

Those same guys (more than one) now take creatine and forty other supplements daily. They lift the equivalent of five of their tiny wives, five times a week. They eat five times their body weight in protein from dead animals and seagull shit milkshakes, which makes their shit smell like a dead fox. And all the while, they get more and more paranoid about their shrinking winkies and incessant balding and the adrenal fatigue that comes from lifting too hard and trying to balance with pre-workout and Red Bull without having a fucking heart attack.

They worship Trump without balance and refuse to see anything he does as flawed. They are keen to deport people based on their race, believing that race plays a factor in crime. They’re fucking always talking about immigrants. They are unbalanced bible worshippers, hard-line, again refusing to see anything in the bible as flawed, but believing every word without investigation.

I’ve always been anti-government, anti-establishment. I saw hope in Trump ending wars and uprooting the military industrial complex, but that hasn’t happened. And look, you fucker, saying something he does is wrong doesn’t put me in the opposite category, but that’s just how we are trained to think now.

• If you agree with one thing from one side, you are assumed to agree with everything from that side.

• If you disagree with one thing on one side, you are assumed to be on the other side.

This has become the situation to such a degree that you might find yourself beginning to criticise or feel negatively toward something that your side of choice does, and then internally censoring yourself and changing your view due to the fear of falling out of favour with your new one-sided tribe.

The algorithm grabs you by the wiry pubes and drags you into an extreme version of yourself. There is no in between.

A man is not a fixed thing, you fucking turkeys. It’s an idea.

The 1950s seem to generally be the time when we believe men were still men, before we got broken by MTV and McDonald’s. But hardly any men lifted weights in the fifties. Hardly any men ate twice their bodyweight in protein. In fact, the general quality of food in the fifties was much worse.

There is also some idea that men went to work, then came home, smoked Camel shite cigarettes and drank whisky in an armchair, reading the Beano while their wives cooked them beef and mashed potatoes, and home-schooled the kids.

But it just wasn’t like that.

In the 1950s, there were artists and writers and meat eaters and vegetarians and smokers and non-smokers. There were hippies and suited corporate men and zookeepers and Formula One drivers. There were alcoholics, drug addicts, geeks, scientists, wife-beaters, wife-eaters, drag queens, men who secretly wore their wives’ underwear, men who spied on their daughters in the bath, men who murdered their whole families, and men who sought spiritual enlightenment.

Every man in the 1950s was an individual—much more than we are today, since they didn’t have that damn algorithm driving them into conforming to some fucked up ideal of what a man is supposed to be.

There has never been a single definition of man.

A man is a rich spectrum of dudeness. A geek can be a fucking man. A flappy homosexual dancing on the mardi gras float is as proud a man as the arrogant turkey fucker covered in tattoos who guards the 7-Eleven after midnight. And thinking otherwise doesn’t make you a traditionalist, it makes you a C.U.N.T.

And regardless of what the parasitic algorithm tells you, this spartan, no-neck, hang from a bar, shrinky dick version of a man is not something that men have ‘lost’. It’s one tiny, limited version of what a man might be. And yet we’re told it’s best if we all become that.

Surrender to the algorithm creates men who believe they’ve finally become men, not knowing they’ve always been men. And it creates those who can’t live up to the lie, so they think they are losers because they aren’t men.

What a fucking joke. We’ve lost the ability to think. We’ve lost the ability to challenge. We’ve lost the ability to be balanced and to find ourselves.

But it’s not too late. All you have to do is stick up your massive, yellow, stinky middle finger to the fucking internet. Turn it off. And walk your own way instead, as men of the past did before social conditioning tools became so advanced.

Do whatever you want, be whoever you want to be. Because a man is just a fucking idea, like mental herpes.

It’s just a fucking idea.

“But, Frank, Frank.”

“Yes, Mildred?”

“Can I be a man. I mean, even though I have tits and a fanny?”

“Well, let’s not open that can of beavers just yet, Mildred, okay? Why don’t you go ahead and cut off your tits, sew up your fanny, staple a dong to your crotch, and we can talk, okay?”

“And, Frank?”

“Yes, Mildred?”

“If I am a man, will I have to drink Guinness?”

“I’m afraid so, Mildred. You’ll also have to learn to scratch your plastic nads every forty seconds or so, okay?”

“I’m in, Frank!”

“Good for you, Mildred.”

** Source: your uncle’s unwashed perenium

Some time ago, I was catching up with my niece.

She was telling me how she loves her boyfriend but has issues with her boyfriend’s best friend. I asked her what the problem was.

She told me that the guy just wasn’t cool.

She told me he didn’t know how to join in their conversations intellectually, his clothes were very daggy, and he tried too hard to fit in. She said that her friends cringed whenever the kid spoke or did anything.

On another day, I was having lunch at a well-known band venue in Melbourne

Band venues are often welcoming, but in this case, the guy behind the bar was too busy noticing who was admiring his t-shirt of some band that I have never heard of and couldn’t give a fuck about.

I was there with my wife and my elderly parents, and he didn’t go out of his way to make us feel welcome because we weren’t welcome. We were made to feel right out of place.

Because I was with my parents, I behaved myself.

What I wanted to do was explain to the little pretentious ring licker he wouldn’t know what cool was if it smashed him in the teeth.

No, what I really wanted to do was smash him in the teeth.

Is it cool to have missing teeth these days? I wouldn’t know, but it would be interesting to find out what a little hipster fuck like him thought about it.

Anyway, CALM DOWN, FRANK, as my wife always says.

On the other hand, I empathise

As a young person, you have fuck all idea about what cool means.

You are an utterly clueless fuck.

You think being cool means wearing the right clothes, saying the right things, having the right haircut.

You think it means saying,

That’s cool, man

When you should say,

Congratulations.

Or you think it means sniffing a half-laugh at the embarrassing behaviour of the poor snot-nosed loser in the corner who everyone is ignoring.

Teenagers have an excuse — they are mostly post-pubic, zit covered knobheads. But anyone over twenty-five doesn’t. If the above describes you and you are of age, listen up.

The coolest guy I ever knew was named Clive

Now, if you are a serious bellend, you might think that Clive isn’t cool because of the make-believe name that his parents gave him.

You would be wrong.

I was fifteen when I first met Clive, and he taught me the true meaning of cool.

We were at a party that was full of try-hard fuck knuckles trying to impress the girls with their Coca-Cola spinners and their Reebok Pumps, but ya know, it was the early nineties, so whatever.

A young fella called Mike had these sneakers on, which were known as ‘Tesco tearaways’. Essentially, they were cheap sneakers with velcro, and I saw a few people looking at them and laughing. There was some dumb conversation about Nirvana or Pearl Jam happening, and Mike kept piping in with stupid comments.

Kids turned away and smirked, whispering to each other like greasy weasels. Girls would snigger and slag Mike off behind his back.

Clive was the coolest of kids.

He wasn’t that good-looking, but the girls fancied him anyway. I noticed Clive because he never rejected Mike at all. Clive nodded, listening intently to everything Mike said, no matter how stupid it was. Clive responded to everything like a true gentleman.

Afterwards, everyone planned to go somewhere else cool, and they were making efforts to keep Mike in the dark. When everyone stood up to leave, Clive walked over to Mike and said,

let’s go

He made sure Mike came with us.

A genuinely cool bastard

I never spoke to Clive. I had no need. Clive was seventeen, but I noticed a level of cool that was unique compared to the others.

Clive didn’t give a fuck about his clothes, and somehow that made his clothes fashionable.

He never tried to impress anyone, which made everyone impressed by him.

So when he outright made sure that Mike was accepted into the group, everyone followed, and Mike became part of the group.

When Clive nodded and took Mike’s stupid comments seriously and made him feel included, I realised that’s what cool people do. They have an internal equanimity and purity of vision that simply doesn’t have time for dualistic games.

The genuinely cool people dress for themselves. They don’t give a fuck about what anyone thinks, and yet, without even trying, they understand the precious nature of every single being, and they do what they have to do to make sure everyone is protected and looked after.

Don’t be a fucking pretentious bellend

If you want to know how to be cool. The answer is this:

Stop trying to fit in.

The world needs more freaks. We are fucking experts at replicating each other like biological 3D printers, and if that's cool, then the whole motherfucking world is cool. Which it isn’t.

If you give a fuck even slightly what someone thinks about you, you are not cool. You are a pretentious knobhead.

Stop copying what others do because you are afraid of being left out.

I don’t mean you should hide in a corner either. If someone comments on your independence, there is a standard phrase to be used. Repeat after me:

Fuck you, you fucking goat shagging prick.

But to take it to the next level, be more like Clive

Always protect every single being like they are your very own brother and sister, regardless of how freaky or strange they are.

I’m talking about people, animals, and plants. Fucking everyone.

Make a vow right now. Repeat after me:

May I never bring harm to a single being for the rest of existence. May the part of me that hurts others be destroyed forever, and may I only bring protection, peace, happiness and liberation to all beings from now on, for eternity.

Repeat it every damn day until it becomes your reality.

That is the true definition of cool.

Tik-tok goes this cheap plastic clock.

Your father died, it says smugly. But what am I meant to do about it?

Should I send flowers? To whom? And what type? Roses? Or are they too romantic?

Dearest mother.

Sorry to hear about the death of your husband, my father. I hope you like these dozen red roses. But, please don't think I’m trying to step into my father’s shoes. I don’t want to have sex with you. Not that he ever did anyway—I don’t think.

Roses are too awkward. Maybe I should send the usual quarterly Marks and Spencer voucher? She could get a nice drink and a pie or something instead. They used to do that together, though. Maybe it would be too much of a trigger.

Everything’s probably a fucking trigger.

You have to find a way to display your grief at times like this. It’s what makes people feel better. I consider putting on a show for everyone. Perhaps I could drink too much brandy and climb into my father’s open coffin, weeping and murmuring something about how this is the least opinionated I’ve ever seen him.

Or I could make a speech about the time Uncle Fin came over and my father caught him spying through my sister’s window and beat the shit out of him, and Fin had that gozzy eye ever since that always looked like it was staring at your crotch.

And for an encore, I could fall backwards, drunk, into the table of sandwiches. They’d pretend to give me a pass because of the grief, I’m sure. But a few would internalise the anger, saving it for the post-grieving period. Uncle Stephen, especially, would be openly angry about the sandwiches. He’s Scottish and has always been tight with the coin. He’d go on about how they cost $0.90 per piece for the curried egg and $1.20 per piece for the smoked salmon with Philadelphia cream cheese and dill.

And they’d pull me to my feet, at least $8.20 of sandwiches glued between my back and Auntie Mary’s carpet.

That would be something, at least—a way to show that you care that your father died—some over-the-top display.

But I can’t bring myself to feel anything besides anger at the fakeness in the room.

I haven’t seen these people in decades. And sure, they aren’t as bad as I remember now I’m sipping on cheap sherry.

Cousin Shaun offers me a blast on his sour cherry vape.

“Is there any weed in that?” I ask, but he tells me it’s just vapour. No nicotine, nothing. Why the fuck would I want just Vapour?

“Because it’s sour cherry,” says Shaun’s twenty-year-old son, looking puzzled.

If there were any fruit in the cloud, he might have a point, but there isn’t. It’s not sour cherry but some fucked up chemical that instructs your brain to taste sour cherry.

Like the bliss in MDMA, the sour cherry is already in you. And the chemical is just a messenger that says, Close this door. Open this door.

Everything is like that. Your brain has ecstatic bliss doors and sour cherry doors. It has all the doors. It also has all the keys—lost for now—but somewhere in there.

That would have been a nice sermon back in the church, but instead, the dessicated priest went on about meeting with dead relatives on some gay rainbow bridge in the so-called afterlife.

That vape is fucking empty like this funeral.

$0.90 curried egg sandwiches and cheap sherry designed to trick your brain into feeling some grief. It’s not working for me, so I take a blast on the fake sour cherry vape. It tastes like my dead father’s balls in the afterlife.

And now the speeches begin, and one by one they all make up horseshit about the remarkable man who changed everyone’s lives. We’re all fucking heroes once we’re dead, regardless of how much of a cunt we are while we’re still breathing. It’s tradition. You can’t get up there and say,

He was a prick to his wife and children, and he was a great misogynist and racist, yet we all loved him.

People couldn’t take that. Our society isn’t built for that. It’s too proper. We’re terrified of any societal conflict. It’s a deep hangover from the tyranny of the British Empire.

We hide our meat consumption in clean plastic and white fridges, and we cover our bodies minutes after the outer breath ceases, and we ship them off in unmarked vans while they are still warm. We can’t bear to remind the people of the presence of death, or the FTSE 100 might drop unexpectedly.

And we make those little fucking leaflets with the order of the service and with the creepy picture on the front of the deceased from when they were still relatively human and living at the peak of their lives, eating that orange caviar and tiramisu and masturbating daily.

“How’s the writing going, Frank?” says Dianne, my second cousin twice or three times removed. She’s nursing her six-month-old baby. The baby is super cute but has one of those shit modern names like Snickers or something. I want to be a good person and pat the baby and tell her how adorable she is, but instead, I’m just jealous that Snickers gets to drink milk from Dianne’s heavy breasts. It’s what I need right now— a cup of warm breast milk straight from the source to soothe this dark electricity that’s filling my frontal lobes. And I wonder if I just started sucking, if I’d get a pass because of the grief. I imagine guests shaking their heads in sympathy as two of the larger male guests pull on my ankles while a third tries to remove my suction cup lips from Diane’s left breast with a shoe horn.

Poor Frank. He’s grieving so terribly. We must let this pass without judgment.

Maybe, if this were the nineties, but not these days.

They’d string me up in front of a dusty old Christian judge, and they’d call me a milk rapist.

That’s just how it goes. Let’s just drop that idea, okay?

How is the writing going? It’s the last question any true writer wants to hear, especially when you’re deep in a cruel year-long writer’s block. I want to tell her this, but non-writers couldn’t begin to understand the torture involved.

“Fine,” I say, instead. “How’s the baby going?”

“Oh, she’s great,” says Dianne, who goes on to list at least ten new baby clichés like,

“Oh, John and I aren’t sleeping at all.”

“Oh, the laundry is surprising.”

“But oh, she is very healthy and has already learned her twelve times table, one twelve is twelve, two twelves are twenty-four, three twelves are—”

Well, you know the rest.

After an awkward silence and a vague smile, I touch the baby on the cheek and walk away. I honestly prefer dogs to babies. I mean, I do like babies, but I prefer dogs. It would be great if there were dogs at this funeral instead of humans dressed in black pretending to cry while still enjoying the sausage rolls and sherry.

Dogs don't fabricate grief. They either feel it or they don’t. They don’t need to put on a show.

I wander outside to the patio. It’s good weather, a tad cool with some holy drizzle.

“Ah, Frank,” says my dad’s accountant, Paul. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, how’s the writing going?”

He doesn’t look sad about losing his client. He’s probably like the rest of the crowd here, just putting on a show, asking the right questions and stuffing their gobs.

“Fine,” I say. “How’s the accounting world?”

“You know, Frank, I often think about killing myself,” says Paul. “I hate my life so much.” He bursts into laughter, and I watch a bit of spit float through the drizzle and land on my half-eaten mini Cornish pasty.

“Say it, don’t spray it, Paul,” I mumble before taking a few seconds to mull over his suicidal admission. Was it a cry for help? Or some accountancy joke?

“Do accountants kill themselves to the same degree as dentists?”

“I don’t think it’s quite as high,” says Paul and I realise I was speaking out loud. “Some say it’s because of the mercury in the fillings, you know.”

“Are there any dogs here?” I ask, changing the subject.

“Only Melissa Franconi,” says Paul, who heaves laughing again, and follows it up with terrible coughing. I don’t know who she is. Paul is one of those people who makes a joke out of absolutely everything. I’m certain his wife wants to kill him.

“Ah, excuse my stupid sense of humour,” he says. “No, we left our dog at home today with the two cats. I don’t think dogs like funerals, except for the food, maybe.”

He’s right. I know at least three dogs who would be salivating next to the sandwich table.

I head back to the kitchen and I see my mum washing dishes. She’s trying to stay busy, cos that’s what you do. People say you have to feel grief, but you don’t. You just have to get through that truly shitty part and then let time do what it does—heal you.

And I see her face, staring at the bubbles and the dishes, coloured grey by grief and disbelief but with an overwhelming spark of freedom and hope. Like an aged prisoner, free after a life sentence, afraid and sad, but lit up by possibility.

I nod to myself, take a bite from a dried-out curried egg quarter, and head back to find Shaun for another blast on his illusory sour cherry cloud.

I arrive at the usual station at 11:40 am, so it's quiet.

I watch the doors beep open. It’s a mostly empty carriage, and I sit in the parallel seats by the door. With a train this empty, you can’t just sit next to someone. It’s weird. You have to wait for them to come to you. And it’s two stops before the doors bleep open, and she gets on.

She’s skinny with Scottish-blue skin garnished with dark freckles. She's in midnight denim and a faded Mudhoney T-shirt. She’s got this crude oil hair and a blonde streak like a negative badger. She's got dark blue lipstick and eye makeup. You might call her a goth, but the kids probably have some other name for it these days. They have to rename everything.

She’s not my type at all, except that she's female. She has about seven earrings on each side, a nose ring, a lip ring and one of those bullrings in her septum that's just begging to be yanked.

She takes a seat right opposite me.

That’s a good sign. Maybe she’s a bit in heat and has noticed the outline of my Finnochiona through my thin grey sweats. She’s wearing a short tartan skirt to match her transparent legs. Her fishnets are torn—probably self-inflicted. I try to get a glance up the skirt, but it’s dark up there like this chick’s soul.

I imagine her body. She's bony in a cigarettes and water for lunch kind of way. I know her type—white asparagus tits that have never seen the sun. I know her body type— cunt shaved bald like Jeff Bezos— skeletor hips and at least an inch of thigh gap—incredibly functional for the standing fuck. And it's an 18-1 shot that she only likes to be fucked in the ass. I’ve known girls like that—like the creator forgot to put all the sensors in the pussy but stuck them all in the ass canal instead.

She glances at the bulge in my sweats, and the thermostat gets turned up in my thighs, like some Boy Scout is rubbing sticks together. I get at least a three-quarter, which rises like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

She smiles, and sparks fly out of my coin slot, setting her tartan skirt on fire. It’s a green light, but saying hello to a woman is risky in these times. Showing her the outline of your deli meat is plain dangerous. Make the wrong judgement at the wrong moment and you'll be talking yourself out of a midnight fuck in the gaff. But that’s the point, I guess.

It’s not easy. She’s smiling and gazing at me now, and I should say something, but I search my database of lines, and there isn’t one that doesn’t sound like Jack the Ripper.

“Do you want me to take care of that for you?” she says without looking up from her phone.

“Sorry?” I say, blinking like Hugh Grant. I don't know what's happening. I'm usually more confident than this.

Get a fucking grip.

“I’m on my way home,” she says. “I live five minutes from the next station. Do you want to come over, and I’ll take care of that for you?”

And just like that, she's done all the work. I nod like a coward and follow her off the train at the next station without saying anything at all. And we walk silently at a swift pace, breathing like emphysemic patients. She puts my hand on her tits as we walk. They’re petite, which is fine by me. I prefer big tits, but you cant have everything. I find the nipple and the cold steel ring through it, and I know we’re in business.

I follow her into her building, up two flights of stairs covered in stained-brown carpet, past sweating, cream walls and mysterious white doors with the smells of old people’s lunches. Finally, she gets her key out, opens number twenty-three, and we fall into her house.

She pulls me into her non-gothic bedroom, which has a grey TV, a couple of band posters, a filthy glass bong, a floor mattress and a massive pile of clothes in one corner. And without warning, she’s on her knees, and she’s yanked down my sweats, and she’s got me in her gothic gob, sucking at industrial level. That’s how I know she knows what she's doing—cos she's acting like she's trying to suck out rattlesnake venom. High pressure is the key—the kind that makes your eye marbles roll back into your head. And it feels unbelievable.

She grabs my nuts, squeezing them in slightly the wrong way, and an electric pain shoots up into my ear, making me squeal like a baby rat.

She smacks her mouth off long enough to say,

“You fucking pussy.”

Then she resumes the pressure.

She pauses again to suck her middle finger, jamming it right into my piehole, and I squeal again.

“Fuck you, you pussy.” she says, this time without emptying her mouth. At least she has short fingernails. You don't need a fingernail slice on the piehole. It turns having a shit into a nightmare.

She stops sucking and stands up. She holds my mouth open with her fingers and spits into my mouth. I swallow it all, grab her by the reverse badger hair, and I beg her for more. So she makes more for me, like some gothic Wendy Wonka, and spits it into my mouth. We kiss hard. I suck on her tongue, taking her spit, mixing it with mine and giving it back to her.

I pick her up by her bony hips and throw her down on the bed like a bag of Scottish malt, and I stand over her watching her strip. First, the Mudhoney t-shirt, black lace bra, tartan skirt. She tears off her fishnets and her glistening black knickers.

She spreads her legs and puts her arms above her head.

Her pits are waxed and white as well. I prefer my girls with hairy pits and a bush, but I knew what I was getting with this chick. Usually, I’d pull her outer lips apart to get a good look and smell of what’s happening on the inside. Then I’d taste her for at least thirteen and a half minutes. I’d suck on her freshwater pearl like a Chupa Chup, slurping hard. Then I’d make a finger boat and sail hard north into the wet sponge ocean, massaging the great waves until she sprayed in my face like a North Pacific Whale.

But her position and attitude are telling me she wants me inside her. So, I kneel, pushing into her aggressively like I'm unblocking a drain. It's tight, and she yelps, so I put my hand over her mouth and tell her that I’m not gonna take any bullshit. She sinks her sharp teeth into my hand, expecting me to pull it away, but I leave it there, breathing through the pain, and blood fills her mouth. Her eyes roll back as I push harder into her. She's a fucking vampire.

She pushes my hand away, and spits blood in my face. I pull out and push back in as deep as I can. I feel her cervix, tight like a rubber band, and she makes a face with her mouth open, but doesn’t produce any sound. She expects me to pull out again, but I don’t. I circle my hips, massaging her inner ring, which starts to pulse—my precious.

She’s a deep orgasmer—barely making a noise, breathing shallowly at the top of her lungs before letting out a basso-profondo groan like a demonic T-Rex and shaking wildly. I pull out so I'm barely touching her inner lips. And I hold it there for a minute, feeling the air against my wet skin and her outer lips trembling. Then I push it right in as hard as I can again. I do it five times—all the way in and out. I look down and there’s blood everywhere. And it's not just the blood from my hand. I'm covered in blood, she's covered in blood. The bed is soaked with blood—and it’s not just a bit. It’s fucking pouring out of her. She’s haemorrhaging. I should take her to the ER.

I put my fingers under the spring instead and collect the salty red hell water. I rinse my mouth with it and swallow. A drop trickles down the side of my mouth like I’m Dracula. I bang her hard, spraying blood everywhere.

Fuck me harder, Dracula, you cunt.

I get another mouthful and kiss her this time, filling her mouth with blood while I bang her hard to the sound of incredible sloshing noises and the overwhelming smell of fermented earth. She mixes the blood with her spit and fills my mouth again. I swallow some and spit the rest into her face.

I flip her over so she’s on all fours and I pull her cheeks apart, licking the blood off her hole again and again like it's a Transylvanian ice pop, and she groans with pleasure. Then I kneel up and slide between her cheeks.

She says she doesn’t want it.

I call her a fucking pussy, and I pin her down and try to push it in there anyway, but she swings an arm around, punching me right in the teeth. So now I’m bleeding from the gums too.

As punishment I spank her with such fucking force that she tells me to stop.

“You deserve it, you fucking cunt.” I say, spitting blood on her back.

And she starts screaming like I’m fucking murdering her, so I spank her as hard as I can, genuinely trying to hurt her. She screams even louder, and for a second, I worry that the neighbours will call the police. But, I quickly drop the thought, and instead, bang her as forcefully as I can with my whole body until blood and hot juice spray from inside her with such power that it nearly sends me backwards off the bed.

It's a fucking apocalypse.

She rolls onto her back.

“You look like a deranged butcher,” she says, laughing and lighting up a cigarette from the bedside table. “What are you gonna do with all that jizz now?”

I take the cigarette from her hand, take a deep toke, then another. Then, I stick the hot end into her thigh. She yelps in pain.

“You fucking cunt.” she says, rubbing the burn.

I shuffle toward her, but she holds her hand up.

“Stay there,” she says. “I want to watch you blow.”

So I grab my bloody shaft and wank over her. She watches closely, sliding two fingers inside herself, her eyes rolling back. She quickly sprays hot pink liquid all over the bed again, and it‘s enough for me. The first two shots fire out at record speed, hitting the Nirvana poster above her head, dripping down the body of Kurt Cobain's Fender Jaguar and soaking Krist Novoselic's trainers. She lets out a breath of shock and looks up. Then she looks back at me with dilated eyes and flushed skin as boiling hot white cream pumps out, load after load all over her tits and stomach.

“Oh my fucking God, there’s so much!” she says.

And she goes quiet at the peak of her breath again. Then she swallows and lets out a deep groan like a primordial OM.

N yeah, I know I haven’t been around much lately.

N, I’m sorry, okay. But also, I’m not yer estranged father who took off with Kim the babysitter when you were ten. I know you lost two role models that day, but don’t project that onto me. Have you been seeing your therapist lately? What’s her name? Unga? Is she still fucking that twenty-year-old Puerto Rican firefighter with the nine-inch cock?

Anyway, I’ve been busy cooking my wang off with all my twenty-year-old mates whose signature dishes have names like Chicken N Drugs. N yeah, I also realise I was doing cooking as a gonzo journalism project to get more material for this Grey Matterhorn to write about. But ya know, when yer in the kitchen, working ya rusty can off, yer end up so absorbed in yer cauliflower mornay that there’s no narrative anymore except you and the damn silky bechamel. And that’s okay, only it leaves nothing to write about.

Nothing interesting happens in there. Well, the dishwasher hums, people get fucking burnt and cut sometimes, and there’s still that aromatic whiff of the dead marmot or whatever in the walls of the storeroom. But that’s not my problem. It’s mostly cooking and cleaning, with no time to think. It’s good practice.

Today I made fish velouté from the stock I created yesterday using these giant fucking fish heads. One of them was massive—probably twenty years old. That’s old for a fish. That fucker had been around a while. He told me his name was Terry. I chatted to his ghost while I cut up his bones and head to make stock. I didn’t bother trying to convince him that his life was worth it because we were fucking honouring him. It’s funny how we do that as humans.

I fucking murdered this animal myself therefore its an act of spirituality.

I made sausages from the fucking entrails instead of feeding them to the ants therefore its a spiritual act.

Not wasting an animal’s corpse or killing it yourself is not honouring it. It’s just reducing the cunt level by 17.5%. It’s not like when yer cut down an old tree and make a beautiful chair that pricks will sit in for years. The culmination of this sad fish fuck’s life was my seafood velouté which may or may not become part of some seafood pie for some greasy diner in the next few days—that or it will go off in five days and get binned.

Either way, it’s a waste of a life. I know this. Terry knows this.

Yet, here we are.

I tell Terry to move on to a pure land or something. There’s no point hanging around this kitchen, especially with the dead rodent in the wall.

And look, I’m writing this on the way to the airport. And all I’ve had to eat is that damn cauliflower mornay I told ya about, so don’t judge me, alright?

It’s the full moon the day after Milarepa’s anniversary, and there’s a stench in the air. And it’s not even the dead rodent. It’s that stench of impermanence. It’s that ever-present stench of death that hangs just around the corner outside Seven-Eleven when yer at that life stage where half the people you love are crusty pensioners. And it ruins everything. Like, ya know, one day yer gonna have to wake up and deal with someone you love having disappeared and the subsequent self-indulgent wailing and balling and coffin business. All ya can hope for is lovely sandwiches at the funeral.

It’s like when yer at the McDonald’s drive-through and ya catch a glimpse through the window of the young blonde lad making the cheeseburgers right as he touches his dick and sniffs his fingers.

Ya wanna enjoy that cheeseburger. It tastes the same, but that thought of the blonde fucker’s dick bacteria on your burger just won’t go away.

Yet sometimes, you still manage to spend a few ridiculous seconds in that gap between thoughts where there is no suffering. And ya think it’s cos the outer world is working, but it ain’t. It’s cos yer in the gap.

It ain’t death that’s painful — it’s the thought of death.

Yer hear me, Scoob?

And when that thought ain’t there, there’s nowhere to put yer sorrow. It’s like havin an armful of apples and no gunny sack. Yer got no choice but to drop em in the mud.

At least, that’s what Anthony Robbins said in his Golden Testicle winning 1983 film, The Motivational Pecker, in which he starred with a young Drew Barrymore.

N then for a second I wonder about the grass-fed beef and how it makes for a leaner cut and how that Wagyu beef is marbled and tasty cos they only feed the Jap cows Kelloggs cornflakes n play them The Black Album by Jay-Z n then they show them pictures of cows fucking and have the milk maiden wank them off or finger them until they hit peak orgasm and they shoot them right in the fucking brain at that precise point with one of those Old Country for No Men bolt gun fucks. N the meat is well tender at the peak of orgasm.

It’s an exact science, this Japanese beef.

So yeah, I continue to sniff the toasted Shifu nuts and eat the deflowered chicken with petrified beurre blanc. But it all tastes of death, which is another name for change. And you can’t kill that stench. You can only change yer relationship to it. You freshen it.

The world’s a fucking cold mountain stream rushing by like Sebastian Coe in 1984. And that’s not just some spiritual junk, either. It’s like wanking off on a motorbike and feeling that rush of wind as yer jizz into oncoming traffic.

It’s just how it is.

So I guess I should stop acting like a fucking ice block, waiting like an old lady at the cosmic bus stop for life to match my expectations and freeze with me. It won’t. It’s rushing cold water.

And by the time you get what you want, things have already moved on. I know that. There’s something else now. I feel it. And it’s okay. Cos that’s just how it is.

When he’s just taken a green lightning bolt from Voldemort’s gonads, Potter wakes up in the ethereal Kings Cross and asks Dumbledore:

Where does the train go, professor?

And Dumbledore, that Lemon sherbet-loving bandit says,

ON.

Something like that, anyway.

What more do you need to know?

So I guess I’ll just let myself melt instead of hanging on. I’ll just melt into the flow of that cold water and merge with its winter rush.

The cooling water of liberation.

Or a frozen winter.

Either is fine.

I suppose you might call it Deepak Chopra’s frozen left knacker.

It expired in 2005 and got reborn as a twenty-year-old fish.

That’s what I fucking heard, anyway.

But don’t listen to me, will you.

Cos just like Jon Snow,

I knaw nothing.

This story is from my short story collection, ‘Ballbag’. It's old but I’m reprinting it here to celebrate Everton’s 2-1 win over Crystal Palace at the weekend and also for my new friend, who is a Crystal Palace fan. You can get the book here if ya wanna. Thanks for reading.

Many moons ago, I remember hearing Greg Norman speak in his American — Australian hybrid accent and thinking,

Greg, you sound like a fucking cock.

People don’t get to hear their accents when living inside their own heads.

It’s easy to forget how twenty years in Australia can make one’s Northern English accent sound like that of a drunken priest during a homily.

I decided to try out a new cafe for my morning coffee.

It was a stinking hot day, and regardless of the supposed view that hot drinks cool ya down, it’s not my thing. I ordered an ice latte —although only later did I find out it’s an iced latte.

• But Australians say ICE like OISE

• And people from the North of England say ICE like AYSE

• And in my situation, the combination of the two sounds like ARSE.

So I asked for my drink, and the girl behind the counter nodded suspiciously.

A man appeared in her place a few moments later.

‘You looking for an arse latte?’ he whispered.

I looked left and right but wasn’t sure why.

‘That’s right’

‘Cool. It’s $55'

I thought it was a bit expensive for a latte.

Coffee had been going up in price, but this seemed excessive. Still, the next place was a fair walk, and I needed caffeine now.

I waited in the usual spot till they called my name. The man at the counter told me to go around the back.

I thought it was unorthodox, but I still hadn’t had caffeine, so the brain fog made me go along with it. He opened the door to a room and ushered me in.

The door locked behind me.

I was getting a little concerned. There were purple curtains in this room, and the music sounded a little too bassy and slow for my liking.

I started to wonder why anyone would charge $55 for a latte. Damn brain fog.

A door opened, and a man entered.

He wore a green t-shirt with a parrot picture on it and no pants.

‘Hi, I’m Cecil’, he muttered like a disinterested service station attendant.

He took out some vaseline, placed one leg up on the coffee table and began to lube up his arsehole in a circular motion.

‘Excuse me’ I said. ‘Is my coffee coming soon?’

I watched as his cock and balls swung around as if waltzing with the slowly disappearing fingers of his left hand.

‘Sorry?’ Cecil said. He put the vaseline back down, bent over in front of me, and pulled his lily-white cheeks apart.

His shiny arsehole winked at me as if to say,

‘What the fuck are you waiting for Frank? Stick ya knob in me’

At least that’s what it sounded like in my head. And I wondered how it knew my name.

Cecil’s parrot t-shirt rode up a little and revealed a small tattoo on his side that said ‘CPFC’.

‘I see you are a Crystal Palace fan’, I said, trying to break the awkwardness.

‘Sorry?’ repeated Cecil. He twisted his head to see me pointing at the tattoo.

‘No, they are the initials of my ex,’ he said.

‘His name was Cristof Palma Fabrico Caballero’.

I nodded.

‘So, my coffee?’

Cecil stood up and turned around to face me.

‘I know what’s happened here. You asked for an iced latte, right?’

‘That's right.’

He laughed, grabbed some tissues from his bag and began wiping the lube off his arsehole.

‘I’m sorry, she got your order wrong. It’s the new girl. This is the second time today. She must have thought you asked for an arse latte.’

‘Oh right. Is that a thing is it?’

‘Obviously’, I answered myself.

‘Look, I’m sorry to waste your time Cecil’, I said. ‘I mean, you have a great arsehole. It’s really shiny and stuff. I’m just married, and I need a coffee, so….’

‘I’ll get your money back’, Cecil said.

‘Keep it’, I said. ‘Put it towards getting that tattoo removed’.

‘Oh yeah, about that..’ he said, putting on a pair of underpants.

‘I was kidding. I am a Crystal Palace fan’.

‘Oh right,’ I said. ‘That’s funny’

‘You reckon you might be able to hang on to Zaha next season?”

Cecil didn’t answer. He left the room, and I was left admiring the purple curtains once more.

The door behind me opened, the man gave me my coffee and ushered me out of the door.

‘Sorry for the mix up’, he said. ‘I have reimbursed your card. The coffee is on the house’.

‘Thanks very much and it’s no problem’

As I left I thought about what a brilliant way of making extra money it was during these tough times. I realised more hospitality businesses could afford to be as innovative as these guys.

I called my wife on the way home.

‘How is your day going?’ she asked.

‘Something strange happened’, I said.

‘What is it, Darling?’

‘You’re not going to believe this, but I just met a Crystal Palace fan’.

Chef’s log. Star date, your sister's anus.

It’s been two weeks since I first landed on this strange planet they call culinary school. And honestly, it’s been two long weeks of food safety and hygiene until yesterday when they finally let me and the rest of my group of mostly eighteen-year-old retards loose in a commercial kitchen.

I’ve got to know a couple of people. One of them, Giannis, this Greek dude never shuts the fuck up about sport—any sport. Apparently, he is a squash champion. He’s one of those people where the more ya talk to them, the more ya think they’re one of those compulsive liars. I recognise them well cos I had it when I was young—the lying disease.

And this guy is 21, so he’s in that prime zone where ya so busy trying to get people to see you in a certain way that you forget to stop acting like a cunt, or ya haven’t quite learned what acting like a cunt looks like yet so yer unable to avoid it. According to Giannis, the national squash champion, his dad is a national poker champion. Giannis has been cooking professionally since he was six and has won ‘awards’.

Fucking lying cunt.

So we’re in the kitchen watching the head chef make this fucking sandwich

And she raises her voice mildly cos some young Gen Z knobhead is filming up close on her phone with a stupidly large lighting pad like she’s fucking Martina Scorcese on the set of ‘The Dramatic Onion.’

The chef made it damn clear that the sandwich assessment is not about the sandwich, it's about whether we can operate safely around a kitchen, particularly around raw chicken. And honestly, I’m looking around at this class of teenage ADHD, TikTok, fucking Gen Z cunts, and I’m thinking, fuck there’s gonna be at least one case of chicken poisoning today.

I pair up with the quiet guy who seems closest to my age. His name is Mikey. Turns out he is a smoker. That’s a good sign because none of the little pricks smoke, they only vape like knobheads. He also looks fucking knackered when we start class at 8.30 am. I’ve been around this luminous circuit and I know that look— the look of a late night weed smoker. Regardless, I like the guy. He’s quiet and clean, and he seems to have his shit mildly together, unlike fucking Giannis, who somehow is a nineteen-year-old with a full beard and who I noticed stinks like he hasn’t had a fucking shower.

And that’s strike one from me. It's not even that we have to endure his unpleasant stench. This is a kitchen, you fuck. You are cooking for people. If you are such a lazy cunt that you aren't gonna shower in the morning, then get the fuck away from me.

How can I fucking trust you in the house of fire and knives?

I decide he’ll get one chance with the body odour. If he stinks in the next class, I’m telling the head chef—not cos Im a rat, but cos if I tell him myself he might cry or some shit. It’s not my place. You need a proxy for cases of strong body odour.

Anyway, I tell Giannis he’ll have to go in a different group, and his eyebrows act like we’ve been friends for twenty years and I just fucked his wife, but I don't give a fuck.

Me n Mikey get our fuckin chicken in the oven and I start choppin onions

I get halfway and remember the chef said cutting the onions safely is in the assessment, so I chop half and tell Mikey he should chop the rest. The cunt picks up the big knife, grabs the onion and slices a fucking chunk out of his index finger. In literally the first chop of culinary school he nearly cut his fucking finger off. It’s fucking bizarre.

“That was quick,” I say as I watch his blood piss out into our onion. And Mikey fucks off to fix up his bleeding digit. So now I wash and sterilise everything, and then I get our chicken out, which is a tasty seventy-five degrees in the middle.

Then I start cutting the lettuce, and halfway, Giannis sticks his fucking big Greek head in.

“You should probably cut that a bit finer,” he tells me. And I wonder suddenly if this culinary life is for me when cunts say things and you have a giant fucking chef’s knife in your hand. It would only take a second to lose control and stick this fucking thing into his head.

But that would make an even bigger mess.

So I turn to Giannis, and I say,

“Don’t fucking worry about it, mate.”

I say it loudly, so half the kitchen turns round. If you ask me, it was a fucking mellow response. And it's strike two for Giannis. Cos the only person I want unsolicited advice from is the head chef, certainly not from a fucking stinking Greek teenager. Fuck’s sake, Giannis. He can’t know it’s another way of coming across as a cunt. I tell myself I’ll explain that one to him at some point cos, looking at the fucks in this class, it's almost certain he’ll end up bleeding all over this kitchen. And no one wants that.

And ya might think I’m being fuckin harsh, but this is the kitchen, and with all these little pricks around, I have to take this shit seriously cos there are too many things in here that might kill ya.

And look, we’re not making fucking lobster and crumpets here

This is a supermarket chicken breast with some margarine called carcinolex and whiter than white anus glue bread. And yet these kids are arranging their turd sandwiches like it's a fucking three-star Michelin restaurant, and they’re taking them up to try and impress the fucking chef, and she’s barely looking at them but continuing to write things with a scowl. I like her. She’s probably in her forties and has worked in Michelin restaurants. You can tell by how angry she is, and I whisper to Mikey, who is now back with a blue-wrapped finger, that I think she is at anger level 2/10 right now and that it's gonna get better.

I whack my chicken on the bread, add mayo, chopped blood-free onion, and lettuce, and then I start cleaning.

I’m not gonna make this fucking sandwich look fancy. It's a cunt of a sandwich. Im not even gonna season it, probably. It's not about the sandwich. It's about safety. And look, you might think Mikey failed because he made himself bleed, but it ain't about that. We’re all untrained children with knives right now, even Giannis that fuck.

After cleaning and a dressing down by the chef for some of the younger kids for being lazy fucks we all sit down and eat the sandwiches. Mine is under-seasoned and made with poor quality ingredients, but I have to eat it cos now we all wait two hours to see if there's any nausea, stomach cramping, or diarrhoea. That's the only way to know if we all passed this assessment.

On the way home I contemplate the fine balance required between being focused and being a good team player

Surely I have to remember these eighteen-year-olds are fresh out of the womb. What was I doing when I was eighteen?

One memory springs to mind. I was doing basic training in some fucking snowy mountains in the middle of winter at Penicuik, near Edinburgh. It was minus thirteen degrees and I was under a poncho, cuddling up to two of my mates, fast asleep, cos they said body heat keeps ya warm so ya dont get hypothermic. N my section commander ripped the poncho off us and kicked me square in the nuts.

“Get up, you fucking faggots,” he said.

It wasn’t gay. It was an army cuddle. It was about survival.

Fuck.

I get home and wash the chicken sandwich stink off as well as the memory of that cold gay night in Scotland.

I make a gin and tonic. Then I make a fucking orange cake (My second ever cake) to get the stink out of my head. And it was fuckin nice that orange cake.

Now that is gay.

Who the fuck am I?

Bird out.

N yeah, like me Nan used to say,

Frank, ya can’t just stay unmoving all ya life like Jason Priestley’s hair. Life is a river, and if ya stay still like a rock, ya gonna get worn away.

She was a wise old beaver, me Nan. N honestly, I had some good insight last Thursday after drinkin’ three triple West Coast IPAs n smokin’ a joint that I got off some tramp outside Seven Eleven. I laid in the hot sun for fourteen minutes practising the reverse Wim Hof method, and the Guru Shanshek appeared to me in the form of a Quiche Lorraine.

“Ya know, Frank,” said the Quiche. “Writing is a dynamic practice. Great writing is based on experience. It is experience that stimulates great writing and experience that provides the material for great writing.”

I took another big toke on the joint and blew it out into the hot sky.

“Indeed, Guru,” I said. “But why are you appearing in the form of the holy Quiche Lorraine?”

The Quiche nodded.

“I’ll get to that, Frank,” he said. “It will make sense by the time this vision has ended. But let me say this: you have complained incessantly about your writer’s block to your unfortunate readers, yet you fail to do what is necessary to break it. You have spent several years sitting around feeding your fat arse and writing and have therefore spent all of your writing karma. As it says in the third book of Love,

Writing as an activity is not sufficient fuel for the practice of writing. You need to do something else, you cunt (Book of Love 11.69.11)

Hence, you should get away from your writing desk and do something physical, stressful, creative, and social without computer screens.”

Supreme bliss began to fill my body from the base of my gonads, and my whole being felt like it was filling with one of those ice cold blue Slurpees. In hindsight it all felt a little psychedelic for regular weed, but that's the ticket you buy when you accept joints from tramps.

I could barely speak, but I managed to force out the words,

“What should I do, Guru? Tell me, please!”

And as the holy Quiche Lorraine began dissolving into light, I heard its gentle words:

“You need to cook, Frank. Go to culinary school, you cunt. I repeat, go to culinary sch…”

I sat up in the blazing sun. I knew what I had to do. Could this finally be the answer to my ongoing writer’s block? I mean, the Guru was right. When I first started writing in 1951 as a fresh-faced young journalist, I could pour out 1500 words on the Prison Industrial Complex easier than a young man with dyssentery shitting out a whopper with cheese.

Once deep into writing, I stopped working and just sat at my chafing station, writing books and allowing my blog to get increasingly weird and full of swear words. And I mostly stopped seeing people. And at some point, I ran out of shit to write about because you can't just fucking write about sitting at your desk writing. It doesn’t work. And fucking drinking and smoking weed does not help.

So I got off my arse and enrolled in culinary school

And now I have at least one thing to write about.

As it turns out, I am the oldest fucker out of seventeen students. I’m also one of four white people, which I hadn’t even noticed until the teacher told us to form groups, and I somehow ended up with the three other white guys. I noticed that the Vietnamese guys formed a group and the African guys formed a group. It was like American high school. And yet the girls somehow managed to form their own multicultural mixed race groups.

I quickly regretted the decision to form my own skinhead group when I realised two of the other three white guys were mentally unbalanced. I had a secret word to William, the head of the Chinese group, a definite ADHD guy with a mullet and drainpipe jeans who looked like he could cook, to see if I could join his Chinese group. He looked at me with total confusion like I’d asked to wank off his dad, and I returned to my group of retarded white nationalists.

I am a competitive motherfucker, so I intend to win the class if that's a thing.

I bought a chef’s uniform in which I look like an absolute pig fucker. I bought some cheap chef’s knives, and I went to my first class where I learnt how fucking poisonous eggs are (on the outside), how a young girl ended up in a wheelchair from eating the dirty bird. N I learned how sticking your cock in a Beef Wellington can lead to jail time and how one should wash one’s hands after handling raw food and money and wanking off in your car on your lunchbreak.

I got to heat up a tiny fucking meat pie in one of those industrial ovens ya see on Hell’s Kitchen. And it was crispy af and delicious except how the meat and gravy spewed out onto my chin, fucking burning the piss out of me in front of the multicultural girl’s group. And they didn’t even laugh, they just gave me a filthy look like we were on fucking MEAN GIRLS and I’m fucking Lindsay Lohan.

And I kept yelling YES CHEF cos I’ve seen it on the TV, and I think the young ones think I’m a real cunt for doing that, but the chef seemed to like it, so fuck all those young fucks.

I’m here to win.

And when the teacher chef asked me what my food dream was, I told them that my dream was to have a hot dog stand on the beach where I could secretly sell cocaine under the counter and retire at the age of 56.

Nobody laughed. Just more of the same Regina George fucking looks.

Never mind. They don’t fucking get me yet, but they will. And if they don’t, I’ll cook them in that fucking giant oven and feed them to the demon CHanjabill.

Fuck them.

Truth is, I don’t have a food dream. I have a writing dream, but I ain't telling them that. I’m undercover. It’s gonzo journalism, you fucks. So, I read Kitchen Confidential by Bourdain, n this book called SAUCES by this French bastard so I’m not totally ignorant.

N now I set forth into this culinary hell, dressed like a twat and ready to cut off my fingers and burn my cock in the pursuit of literary excellence.

Pray for me, you fucks.

Now fuck off.

Fine, I won’t lie. I didn’t see a baby fucking a baby.

But last night, I was up until two watching back-to-back re-runs of the seventies all-female cop duo Cooter and Snatch. One good thing about the internet is that we can watch all our favourite shows from back in the day, remastered.

Also, it’s good for recipes. My friend Terry, who is famous for breathing like Darth Vader cos he has a deviated septum, loves cocktails, so I made him a ‘Hard Willy’ for his birthday. It’s hazelnut rum, sour cherry liquor and ginger beer with coconut foam and a Cialis crumb. I found it on YouTube.

I even got a thank you note from Terry's wife.

But the internet isn’t all love and positivity. And honestly, it’s getting fucking weirder than the time I ate late-night stonefruit and dreamed about Morgan Freeman in a bikini.

Ya know ya wake up in the mornin’ next to ya wife who is snoring and drooling like a fuckin antelope, and the first thing ya do is pick up ya phone and start swiping down Instagram Reels or Youtube Shorts or TikTok if yer a total twat. And the phone gives ya these ten-second snippets of some fucker who beats up cats so they can rehabilitate them to get views or a medical doctor who looks like Macaulay Culkin tellin ya how eating six pounds of grass-fed butter a week will make ya cock bigger or, (Insert you personal algorithmic phenomena here).

Next thing ya know, ya shittin ya pants when yer down the supermarket cos there's people around, ya fuckin fanny. And ya fucking complaining that life is so damn busy these days that there's no opportunity to lick the grass or sniff the sky or whatever. N then yer get so fuckin depressed so yer go to the doctor n he tells ya that ya got ADRD or one of those fuckin acronyms which has something to do with being attention deficient and ya go AH and point to the sky cos ya think you've always had it n it explains why you've been such a fucking loser yer whole life, but the truth is yer were just a fuckin loser n now yer a loser with an attention deficit cos you’ve been waking up every damn day and doing your anti-meditation.

Cos ya know meditation in its basic form is training yer mind to stay on an object for longer.

It expands your attention. And now ya sit there with this device that shortens yer attention. You are literally giving yourself a fucking attention deficiency. It's not a syndrome, you absolute cunt.

N ya bitch cos ya wish it were the fifties when everyone had so much damn time in their day cos they weren't busy as fuck like we are these days, but ya don't realise that there's no extra fucking activity in our times. The people in the fifties were as busy as we are today. Check yer fucking screen time, would ya? What is this busyness in our society? It's fucking phone time, you absolute dick ninja.

N yer breakin' out in sweats of anxiety cos ya can’t bare to watch the possibility of some nutjob chucking a nuclear dildo across the sky. N yeah, that was something back in the day. Besides a shitty newspaper, yer had no idea what Phyllis, the horny pensioner across the road, was up to (without binoculars), never mind someone in another country.

These fine days, ya think ya have some weird responsibility to be informed about the economic policy of fucking Lapland. Truth is, it's none of your fucking business what's happening in the next town, never mind the next country.

N don’t think those Brylcreem-adorned George McFly greasefuckers spying on their big-titted MILF neighbours with the latest G10 Binoculars that they bought from the back of Readers Digest had any greater opportunity for happiness than you do today. You have everything on a silver fucking platter like Prince Fucking Leopold, ya spoilt cunt, but ya just can't appreciate it cos ya giving yourself a fuckin mental illness by using that device all damn day.

N, that bastard thing is making yer more extreme too. Yer start by saying to someone ya don't think men should be able to compete in women's sports, n the algorithm takes that and starts feeding ya a bit more cock. N ya nibble a bit more. Before ya know it, ya two-gender stance has become an anti-trans stance. Next thing, ya homeophobic n before ya know it, this fucking algorithm is convincing ya that racism is also something fuckin acceptable. Next thing, ya shavin’ ya fuckin head like Russell Crowe and getting a swastika tattooed on yer perineum n suggesting Mein Kampf in ya book club for young mothers.

Cos, that’s what it does. It takes your beliefs and makes you more extreme about them. It drags you deeper down yer own rabbit holes. Think about it, ya fuck.

So look, I’ve been tryin' to stay off social media, but when yer an aspiring writer with an oiled up chest, there's a certain amount ya gotta do.

Which is why I composed this famous prayer for us writers some time ago:

Lord, grant me the serenity to keep whipping my dick against the belt sander of social media until I sell enough books to get a new house and new teef and one of those hot shaves where they wank you off at the same time.

But even that isn’t enough anymore. I find myself needing to take long cold breaks from the computer cos I feel myself getting sucked down the holes.

All I’m saying is AI is here now, N its dick is getting bigger.

N even Musk said the most significant danger from AI isn't a Terminator scenario; it's the ability to condition people’s minds. So I’m wondering if I should just lay down the computer n take up fuckin Croquet or Goat Chess or Cooking or Bondage instead? Is it possible to be a writer without being an internet cunt? I fucking doubt it.

So maybe I’ll just head out to the Aussie bush and chop wood and drink eucalyptus juice for breakfast.

Cos soon yer all gonna have ya heads in fuckin helmets n I ain't gonna do that.

I’d rather fuck Morgan Freeman in a bikini.

Dear friends

I write to you from the year of their lord, 2025. Somehow the egg-shaped flux capacitor located partway between my anus and marble sack malfunctioned. As I hit eighty-eight miles per hour, instead of being launched into the glorious decade of 5255-5235, I was flung sideways into this strange time.

I’ve been trying to explain to the Urbanists here how a proper grasp of reality is impossible until one embraces all parts of the fifty-seven-fold spectrum. But not that these sad badgers would even know what an urbanist is. I believe the major habit of this era is to take a series of imaginary beliefs, form them into a story with a central character, and then ironically have that central character manifest situations that will hold up and verify those beliefs and hence protect the central character.

Ya know what I’m saying?

No. Well, that’s because we’ve hit that point in the annual solar cycle where the creative writing waterfall dries up like Gwyneth Paltrow’s fanny candle in the wind. N yeah, I’m old enough to know that this kind of crap happened to all the greats. The famous writer/anal sculptor Terry Daniels once said,

“I’m old enough to realise that this kind of crap happened to all the greats. The tap of creativity comes only by divine intervention. Despite the efforts of the greatest writers, they could not control the flow but only sit, bundled in a pathetic ball, waiting for the rain.”

And they all dealt with these dry spells in different ways. Some of them wanked excessively. Some of them fucked badgers excessively. Some of them wrote anyway and just produced a long fuzzy line of turd.

For me, I just sit here in the garden, staring into the abyss and feeling the cortisol eat its way into my frontal lobes, and wondering if it’s worth any of this crap since we’ll all be fucking dead soon unless Musk invents some bionic whatever.

I take another long drag on the squalid pipe and breathe out another smokey breath, watching the cloud dance and form the shape of Kim Basinger’s left tit before it disappears over the broken fence, never to be seen again. It’s a fucking symbol. Everything is a fucking symbol.

I’m tryin’ to get a fucking sun tan as a substitute for good writing.

N, that's always a fucking challenge when ya got fresh white Scottish skin with caramel freckles more numerous than the sex crimes of Hollywood. N someone told me fifteen minutes on each side was adequate to burn the shit out of a scotch fillet, but for human skin, it’s just enough to gradually work up yer melatonin without burning the shit out of yersen. N yeah, it's another fucking symbol. Everything’s a damn symbol.

N it feels damn good this sun. It feels like being in the damn sauna, but fresher, like someone is cooking me, ready to fucking eat me like a damn Christmas turkey. N Im sippin on this lime water now bereft of the creatine, which made me as angry as a cockless alligator, much angrier than I am now.

I Finally went to therapy for my anger issues.

FRANK: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been 3654 days since my last therapy session.”

THERAPIST: You know you don’t have to say that, Frank.

I tell her I know that and it was a joke.

THERAPIST: Do you think you use humour as a way to avoid doing serious work?

And we’re off. Thirteen seconds in, and already this spectacled wench thinks she’s got me pegged.

FRANK: “Maybe, but also, I’m becoming more of a cunt every day.”

THERAPIST: Why are you doing that, Frank? Are you angry at something?

FRANK: “WEL, yeah, I’m angry at some stuff. But I’m also tryin to wank off my shadow self since that’s what Jung said, give your shadow self a reach around.”

THERAPIST: Frank, I’m not sure that’s what he said, but I understand. You’re trying to embrace your dark side.

FRANK: “Not really. I’m just working not to neglect it. But it easily becomes a habit.”

THERAPIST: So you are angry.

FRANK: “Yeah. I’m also angry cos I can’t fucking write anymore.”

THERAPIST: What do you mean anymore? Was there a time when you could write?

FRANK: “WEL, yeah, I think so. So now I’m getting this job in a factory cos ya can’t make a living from writing unless yer write the Jack Flashcock series or ya write corporate schmuck for corporate schmucks.”

THERAPIST: Well, why don’t you do that? At least you will be writing for a living.

If only she knew how many times I’d heard that crap. To a proper writer, it’s like saying, why don’t you fuck the syphilitic tramp behind seven-eleven since you enjoy sex?

FRANK: “You saying that reminds me of this ad where the CEO of Save The Children is speaking to the audience with a backdrop of some Sudanese children about to get eaten by Leopards. N he’s like, For $30 a month, you can become one of 1400 donors to contribute to my $500,000 yearly salary. The world doesn’t need another soul sellout.”

THERAPIST: What do you think is behind your writer’s block, Frank?

FRANK: Well, look, yesterday I went to see my Aunt Fanny. She’s old now. She lives at the Edgecliff Retirement Home for Old Sluts.

And yeah, I know yer like, Frank, that’s not a real place. And yer right. It’s not.

But I went to see her anyway. Nurse Mildred told me everyone was outside playing volleyball except for Fanny, who refuses to do any high-intensity sports and instead sits by her window, weeping all day.

“Hi, Fanny,” I said as I walked into her room which smelt like old piss and boiled potatoes and Chanel number minus five.

“Oh, hi, Edward,” said Fanny, wiping her tears away. And yeah, Edward was the name of her son who died during a fight with a randy goat who’d also been on the fucking creatine. So I was fine about pretending to be Edward to make her happy and also cos she’d slip me fifties from her stash inside her first edition of Twilight.

I asked Fanny why she was always crying, and she told me that she couldn’t have an orgasm anymore.

N I’d honestly expected her to say something about being lonely or missing her husband or something.

I cleared my throat.

“Is it because your fanny doesn’t work anymore, Fanny?” I asked, not wanting to go deeper but always wanting to be as helpful as possible.**

“Oh, no, Edward,” she said. “The outside of me may seem very crisp and dried out, but my fanny still gets extremely wet. Would you like me to show you?”

And sure, I know you’re thinking, Jesus, Frank, she’s an old lady and also you’re her son. But ya know, I’m not her son. We’re not even related by blood. And I’ve always been curious to see what an old woman's fanny looks like.

But fine, if you’re gonna be a pussy about it, let’s just say I declined.

“No thanks, Fanny,” I said. “But what is it then that is preventing you from climaxing?”

“It’s just that every time I think about getting fingered by a young man, I suddenly remember that I’m going to die soon, and my cooch dries up like an oyster in the sun.”

N I relate to that, ya know? Cos, every time I think about the fleeting nature of existence, my writing cooch dries up like an oyster in the sun.

THERAPIST: Wow, that’s very profound, Frank. So, what you’re saying is that your fear of death is blocking your creativity?

FRANK: Well, I wish I could say that was true. But it’s just another lie. Aunt Fanny doesn’t even exist. I’m just trying to write myself out of this shit.

** Note for the Americans. Fanny, in this context, means vagina, not anus.

Listen up, you fucks

In 1968 Charles Bukowski was investigated by the FBI for being a dirty old cunt. And modern writers like us tend to wet our bloomers when we hear crap like that. Because we are writers in a time when the world is relatively safe. N yeah ya might cry about Gaza and Ukraine n all the other turds, but trust me, compared to the past, this reality we live in now is about as dangerous as a gang of golden retrievers on MDMA.

It is reflected in our attitudes to our writing. How often is our writing dangerous enough to upset our partners, our children, our cats, never mind dangerous enough to alert the fucking authorities?

Let’s not even start to go into the list of books that were banned and fucking burned in the past.

N yeah ya can write ya fuckin story about trans-goblins with syphilis riding trains in rainbow land or ya can write about Terry Grey, a narcissistic rich alpha worm who likes to sew his wild beans whipping the snatches of various fanilla girls n ya think ya being fucking edgy but ya not. Yer still a damn fuckin pussy.

At some stage, ya gonna have to stop giving a smoking fuck what any fucker thinks including ya wife n ya kids n ya fuckin parrot called William Dafoe who keeps yelling suck my dick at the fuckin postman. Cos if ya give even the tiniest fuck about upsetting people, yer writing is always gonna be a fucking butt beef pie with bullshit sauce.

Sorry to break that to ya.

N yeah ya might be able to read Save a Cat writes a fuckin Novelinski n get ya structure down n fill it with Mills n Boon horseshit about throbbing shafts n quims. Ya might even be able to write about a man stabbing his wife forty-two times with a fuckin potato masher n the meth-addicted anti-hero detective who investigated. But ya know what? It's all cliche as fuck, you fuck.

But it's not your fault. It's cos ya still piss scared to write what everyone is thinking but no one wants to write about cos it might just shine that big peach-coloured spotlight on what an absolute cunt they are or were or will become.

N if ya have people who see ya in a certain light it's gonna be fuckin scary.

Cos we live in a time where we can't write flawed characters doing flawed things anymore cos as the author of the work, whatever our characters do we are assumed to either have done ourselves or at least found the behaviour agreeable.

Except for murder. Murder is something very acceptable in the literary world.

But ya can't write a racist character.

Fuck no.

Or a character that doesn’t believe men with cocks in bras should be allowed into women's bathrooms with young girls cos yer a fucking nazi cunt.

So, at some stage, ya gonna have to accept one of two things.

Either:

1.) You ain't a fucking writer, Kid.

Yer a fucking sellout biscuit sniffer who wants a bestseller so they can get sucked off or get minge-licked by literary groupies after doing fancy signings in fancy bookshops all over this fucking flat earth. Why don’t you follow Gwyneth Paltrow on Instagram instead? Become an entreprewanker and invent a candle that smells like your shite or your cum?

OR

2.) Ya gonna have to fuckin upset some people.

And that means the people close to ya too.

When I was fourteen, I made a hole in the bathroom wall, spied on my sister in the bath and had a great time. Later in my life, I caught herpes from a backpacker in Northern Australia and subsequently passed it on to two other people. Even later, I went through a phase where I was a peeping Tom, addicted to Diet Coke and watching big-titted maidens while hiding in their gardens.

And that's all the tame stuff.

In my book, The Therapist I wrote about a peeping tom who goes around spying in people's windows and jacking off. And I knew that people close to me from my present and past, including my family, would see it. I knew it to such a point that I put an apology at the start of the book. The apology wasn’t for the material in the book. It was an apology for the stuff I’d done as an anarchic sexual teenager and twenty-something—stuff that, these days, would have me strung up in front of the Cancel Council with an apple in my wet gob.

A couple of weeks ago, a fellow writer on Substack asked me for advice on how to make his writing less boring.

I told him to think about all the things in his head that he didn't want people to know and then write about them.

Cos that's the only way we can free those blocks in our head to do truly great work.

N I know, yer sitting there with ya fuckin Macbook Pro n ya cup of St Johns Wort tea and staring at the blank fucking page which is looking at ya with those fuck me eyes as usual, and ya performance anxiety is kicking in once again.

N there aint no blue pills in this literary minefield, you fucks.

So listen.

Writing is a process of opening up.

N I’m not trying to be a cliche fuck here. But it's true. Ya have to give yourself permission to write ya deepest secrets on the page and be fucked if ya kids or ya grandma fuckin reads it.

Ya like an actress who chooses to flash her minge in a hot scene with that handsome fucker, Ryan Goblin.

So, are ya a fucking artist or a fucking damn pussy fuck?

You have to decide.

Will you let this world of pathetic little fucks push you around and censor you?

Or will you pursue your fucking art and die broke and lonely, having bled the contents of your heart onto the page like the great writers of the past?

You have ten seconds to decide, you degenerate cuntbean.

Go…