A Fish Called Terry (Asian Lamb)

It's a full Moon in Virgo, you virgins

I made asian lamb, you cunts

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.

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