Empty Nest Syndrome And The Eggs Of Memory

John, Sue and Bob entered the living room, turned on a side light.

“I can’t believe our baby is gone.” Sue said, her face streaked with tears. John embraced her.

“Yup, she’s grown up, that’s for sure.” Bob said, taking a step toward Sue then back again.

“Don’t worry. Thanksgiving will be here before you know it. We can talk to her on MS Teams.” Said John, stopping his embrace and shaking Bob's hand.

“Still don’t mean we won’t miss her.” Bob said, turning away.

“Yes, yes. It’s sad, very sad.”

“I suppose this also means we aren’t going to be seeing as much as you Bob.” Sue said, dabbing her face with a tissue.

“I always appreciated you letting me come in here when I come to pick up Scarlett. I knew it wouldn’t be forever.” Bob said, looking down at his socks.

“How about a toast then? To successful parenting? Shall we raise a glass to Scarlett going off to college?” John said, going towards the drinks cabinet.

“I was going to be heading home.” Bob said, looking over at the three glasses.

“Stay for a drink, Bob. He’s right, we should be celebrating our daughter moving on.”

“So long as that isn’t an imposition.”

“No, not at all Bob. You’re invited. Gin?” John said, holding up a blue bottle.

“You know, me and Sue used to celebrate with Wild Turkey, didn’t we Sue? You got any Wild Turkey there my guy?” Bob said, walking over.

“We drink Old Forester now.” Sue said.

“Three Old Foresters coming right up.”

“To Scarlett!”

“To Scarlett!” said the others. Bob downed his whisky in one gulp.

“Come on, we’re celebrating, right?” The others obliged and John poured another triplet.

“Shall we take a seat?” John said. The three of them sat on an L-shaped sofa, with Sue sat between John and Bob.

“Will her flight have taken off yet?”

“Not yet. Say, Bob, how’s that new girlfriend you got?” said John.

“Oh, we aren’t really going out.”

“Yeah? That’s a shame. Scarlett was just saying the other day how happy you seemed.”

“John, shut up.”

“Sorry babe, I just think Bob here needs a break. Like I got a break when we met.”

“Yeah, weren’t you like addicted to phone games?” Bob said, taking a drink.

“It was online gambling Bob, you know that.”

“Yeah, and Sue rescued me. She saw me for who I really was. She allowed me to bloom.”

John kisses Sue on the shoulder, looks at her, uses his hand to tilt her chin up so that they can read each others eyes. They kiss. Bob watches, sipping the whisky, turning away. Sue’s hand reaches across the sofa to touch his. Her index finger traces his hand, squeezing the muscle by his thumb. Their hands interlink. She stops kissing John, they look at each other before Sue turns, kissing her ex-husband on the lips. At first Bob doesn’t respond, stunned at what was happening, trying to process it. He then closed his eyes and started to kiss her back. John reaches over and started to undo the top few buttons on Sue’s top, pulling it up. For a moment the clothes were pulled up over her head so only her mouth was free. She felt lips against hers, whilst familiar hands stroked her body. When she could see again, she lay back on the couch as the men removed their shirts.

“Are we doing this?” Bob said, loosening his belt. Sue kissed John, he unclasped her bra, threw it on the floor. She felt two sets of hands on her, stroking her body, the taste of alcohol caught on her breath, between her lover and her ex-husband. John unzipped his jeans, she reached in and pulled out his dick. Sue looked up at Bob, watching his expression as she started jerking John off. Her other hand reached up to Bob, running a hand up his thigh, pausing, going further up and squashing his flaccid penis through his trousers.

“Are you not into this?” she asked, keeping eye contact.

“H-Hell yeah I am.” he said. Then Bob bent down and started sucking John’s dick.

“Whoa!” shouted John, backing away.

“Bob, what are you doing?!” Sue said. Bob wiped his lips.

“I thought we were having a threesome.”

“Yeah, we were about to.”

“I thought…I thought we all fucked each other.”

“No, no, no you both fuck me! That’s the idea!” said Sue, getting up to look for her bra.

“I can’t believe you sucked my cock man.”

“I didn’t know! I thought that’s what happened.”

“Do you…have anything you want to tell me?” Sue said, sitting back down.

“No! Nothing happened. Don’t tell anyone about this. Don’t tell Scarlett.”

“Why would we tell our daughter about this?”

“I don’t know. I think I’m going to leave.” Bob said. I cough. The three of them look over to me.

“You want me to drive?” I say.

“Who the fuck is this?” shouts Sue.

“That’s the guy we hired to film Scarlett’s trip to college.” John says, tucking himself away.

“Yeah, I think Bob’s had too much to drink. I’ll drive him home, get out of your hair.”

“You saying you recorded this?” says Bob, pacing toward me.

“No, no, not the whole thing, just bits. Different angles. Bloopers.”

“You’re meant to be on that plane with Scarlett!”

“Ah, no. Nope. Long way to go. I wasn’t going all the way to Denver. I thought it’d be more interesting to film her parents. I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Get the fuck outta here!” shouts Bob, throwing a cushion at me.

“We should call 9-1-1.” John says, trying to find his phone.

“Look, I’m going to leave. But before I go, I think you need to hear what I have to say. So how about you sit your stupid ass down and listen?”

“Can I get a burger?” Bob says.

“Yeah, grab us all a burger from the kitchen. John, pour me a glass of that Old Forester over there. Sue, can you put some music on? Listening to all of this in the silence has been ridiculous.”

“Alexa, play Katy Perry.”

“We aren’t listening to fucking Katy Perry, okay? Alexa, play Michael Nyman.” I say, taking the glass of whisky from John. Bob comes in with a plate of microwaved cheeseburgers.

“Okay, let me lay it out for you. Bob, you need to let the past go. You can’t keep turning up to your ex-wife’s house, especially now Scarlett’s gone. Sue, you need to cut that guy out of your life and move on. And yes, I’m talking about John. John, how can I put it? You’re not a likeable person. I get the impression you’re glad to see Scarlett leave and have this house to yourself, you bum. I’m surprised Sue is with a guy like you.”

“ha…I mean, what? Who is this guy?”

“You hired me to record your stepdaughter’s big move to college.”

“So what the fuck are you doing here?”

“Like I said, I’m surprised Sue is going out with you. Sue. Listen to me, you need to sell this dump and move to Florida. Scarlett can come visit you, you can hit the beach together, get tanned up. What do you say?”

“You need to leave.” Sue says, drinking the whisky. I shrug.

“Before I go, I gotta say one thing. You guys should be nicer to Bob. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a goddamn hero.” I say, leaving.

It was an ambiguous situation, one where nothing was said yet things were understood, albeit incorrectly. Incidents liked this played across all of the United States, with dad's walking into the kitchen of restaurants or an emoji taken the wrong way, friendships and affairs ending with the swipe of a finger. And these fingers were attached to yellow bellied cowards, balking at the simple joys of miniature illustrations to accompany words. Let us be fair to those that break the social protocol, as well as fair to those who strictly police it. Let's be fair to ourselves, as I'm sure each person is able to remember their own share of buffoonery years after it happened, playing on the mind as a sort of internal BDSM, though what some people are also calling a code. This code gave sense to life, helping to anchor those with a dark passenger to the world of the present, keeping us tethered to those around us through the worship of a totally subjective pain. 

"My house is that way." Bob says. I turn to him, forgetting he was there. We're driving in the Hyundai at high speed, slipping in and out of automated traffic like oil.

"We aren't heading to your house just yet Bobby boy. You mind if I call you Bobby?" I say, turning back to the road. In my shirt pocket I awkwardly dig around for something, my elbow keeps banging on the roof.

"Sure."

"We're going to hit the club. And you'll get the opportunity to be reborn." 

"Just don't tell anyone what happened earlier man, I can't believe I did that."

"Bobby, fucking relax will you? It's actually the chad move to suck a dick, shows you're comfortable in yourself, you get shit done, comprendez? I want to show you your potential. You'll rise like a fucking phoenix Bobby! Come on!"

"Fuck yeah! Let's go!" He says, clenching his fists. I throw him a bag of cocaine.

"Have a go on that, fucker. Tonight we party like rock stars!" I say, grinning at him. He snorts some coke and starts howling like a wolf.

 

Its 2am and we're at the rave dancing topless, lit by blue light, red light, blue light. Someone hands me a beer.

"Bobby, how you feel?" I yell over the music. Happy Hardcore is playing so loudly all voices are eaten up by the sound system. Bob is on a cocktail of alcohol, cocaine, 2C-B and peyote. I slap a few nicotine patches on his back for good measure, then go outside. I'd forgotten I was in L.A., surprised for a moment, almost panicking that I needed to escape, then regain my composure. The smoking area outside the warehouse rave had the illusion of calm, and so I acted normal, lit a cigarette, stood next to some people talking and nodding, smiling. Me and Bob had had a great night, we hit a few clubs, VIP style, before going to a casino, got turned away, ended up watching a street fight down by Venice Beach, met some cybergoths, now we were here. Bob runs out of the fire exit, looking from left to right like a cartoon character. His big black eyes finally recognise me and he runs over.

"I just smoked crack."

"Cool. You want a cigarette?" I say, offering him the pack. He takes one, smoking it energetically, telling me about how proud he was of his daughter going to college. I kept nodding, but my mind was elsewhere.

If we are haunted by our memories, yet we are our formed by our memories, are we nothing more than phantoms?

I clapped Bob on the shoulder.

"I'm going, do you want to stay or leave?"

"Ah man, are you sure, just stay for another hour or so. You ever smoked crack?"

"Nah it's cool man, I need to go. Had a good night. Look after yourself Bobby." I say. He embraces me as the uber pulls up. I wave at him through the window, then stare over the drivers shoulder as we go through the California night and all of the lights seem to bleed a rainbow storm over all and everything. 

 

The sun was coming up. For the last few hours I had been trying to edit Scarlett's last day at home, though the footage I had shot was heavily edited with special effects and I had saved over the original files, now trying to undo the artifice with inverted manipulations, whilst attempting to revert the clips back into chronological order rather than the mess I had created. I drink a cup of Valerian tea and reflect on the evening I had. As I had been editing the footage for so long, it had almost completely replaced my actual memory of the events and so I was utterly confused what was going on. I realised I had left Bob at a rave by himself, suddenly worried that he was dead, then I relaxed, laughing at my anxiety. If Bob had shown me anything tonight, it was his versatility. You could drop him into the core of Chernobyl and he'd live like Crusoe. I bet he was curled up in bed with a smile on his lips and would wake up feeling like a newly born man. All he needed was a good night. I looked back at the footage I was editing. Fuck it. Send it. I emailed it to Sue, slapped my laptop close and went to lie on the motel bed, looking at the beams of sunlight on the ceiling. Now I was lying still I realised I was still hallucinating from the drugs earlier, and I felt good.

Local Drinking Spot Hard Mode

A man walks up a dirt track, wiping his hands with a leaf. Up ahead is a bar, the car lot outside covered in chippings and weeds, motorcycles, a van and a few cars. Someone is being sick in the shaded side of the building, hiding from the security lights. At the entrance was a biker smoking a Newport down to the filter. The man greets him, speaking in thick Minnesota dialect. The entrance to the bar were a set of saloon doors that creak as the man enters, wafting shut behind him, pushing smoke out into the night. Thrash metal is playing on a broken speaker overhead, the lights were hazy in the cigarette smoke, giving a sepia tint to everything. Some locals are selling hillbilly heroin to a teen in a leather jacket, his face twisted up from the scars of a car crash. A few bikers stand round a pool table, a game unfinished on the felt, they drink neat whiskey, smoke meth and watch dog races on a phone leant against the cue ball. The woman behind the bar nods at the new arrival, going to pour him a shot of moonshine.

"Now then Barb, tonight I'm celebrating. Get me a drink of that absinthe you got up there."

"I already poured ya shine." She says, he drinks it in one sip.

"Don't mind the same glass." He says. She walks to the end of the bar, returning with a little wooden footstool that she sets down, climbs up and pulls the bottle of absinthe from the top shelf, knocking dead moths down by her feet. 

"Ain't you going to ask me what I'm celebrating?" He says, smiling. Barb pours the drink.

"Depends if that'd make me an accomplice." She says. The man's quiet for a moment then starts laughing.

"Haha, damn, an accomplice! You have a low opinion of me Barb. I'd never do that to you." He says, smelling his drink, mouth watering.

"You have a good night now." Says Barb, going over to serve a woman with an eyepatch. The man smells the drink again, holds it by his mouth and dips his tongue in, soaking it in the green liquid before lapping it back into his mouth, rubbing his tongue against his inner cheeks, tensing it so that it concentrates the taste of the spirit. He savours it, closes his eyes, then takes a deep drink, inhaling through his nose so that he gets the scent of it as he gulps down like a pelican. He slams the glass onto the bar top so hard it cracks.

"Oooh momma!" He screeches, tensing his neck so the roots of his skull still out across his shoulders. The others in the bar don't react. He slaps the bar.

"Nurse! Another!" He shouts at Barb.

"Make that two." I say. He looks over to me, leaning back on a bar stool and against the wall, a cowboy hat tilted over my face. I look up, nudging the rim of the hat up. 

"Sure, make it two Barb! You celebrating with me, friend?"

"That depends. What we celebrating?" I say, leaning forward, picking up the barstool and setting it next to him. He laughs, looking me up and down 

"Ain't you friendly, coming and sitting here. Hey!" He says, turning to the rest of the bar.

"We got ourselves a friendly guy here!" He calls. Nobody reacts. They know better. I take up the glass.

"Here's to celebrating." 

"Here, here!" He says, toasting me before we both drink the absinthe. He goes "Wa-ooo!" whilst I look through my pockets for a cigarette. 

"Name's Jim. Nice to meet you." He says, offering his hand. We shake. I tell him my name, feeling the knuckles in his hand, strangling my palm, his black eyes look at me like he was imagining violence.

"What you celebrating tonight, Jim?"

"My freedom. My liberty!" He says, laughing again, looking round the room. "Get this fucking music off. We need to play my song."

The music cuts out. I look around the room and realise everybody has stopped talking. They are remaining still, trying to. A few keep wobbling back and forth. Barb goes over to a laptop with a cracked screen connected to the stereo with a filthy cable. Music comes on and Jim starts dancing.

"Can we have another round, Barb?" I say, motioning towards our empty glasses. She refills, steps back.

"I like you, kid. You're my kind of guy." Jim says, putting an arm round my shoulder, pulling me close to his damp t-shirt. I push his hand off, taking my glass.

"Fuck you doing?" I say. 

"Relax! I'm just fucking with you." He says. I down the drink, he catches up.

"Another." I say, motioning to the glasses. They fill again.

"Slow down friend, we got all night." He says. I take a bag of ketamine out of my pocket and put it on the bar top.

"Let's do some lines." I say. He dries the bar with his hand beneath his t-shirt, ghostlike. I rack up four chunky lines of the ket, its shards reflect the christmas lights hung behind the bar. I snort a line, down a shot, bang the empty glass on the table twice. Jim follows, I snort another line, take another shot, he follows. 

"Want any?" I say, offering the bag to Barb. She takes out a cluster of keys, taking a bump from a brass one, passing me the packet back. 

"You like absinthe?" I say, tucking the bag back in my inside pocket.

"Haha, you're funny. Yeah man, I like it. The green fairy. You know people used to drink it, it made them high. A drink that’s a drug."

"More drugs should be drinks." I say. He bursts out laughing.

"You're funny man. Hey, hey, here, do you want some?" He says, taking a bag of white powder out of his pocket. I look into his eyes, pupils dilated. For a moment we are both captivated, the drink and drugs catching up to us. I lick my index finger, dip into the bag then back in my mouth. 

"Coke?"

"Yeah man, go on, have some." He says. I lick my finger again dip deep then rub it onto my gums. The bitterness makes my lips tense, I ask for another absinthe, watch Jim tap some out on the back of his hand and snort it.

"You like knives, Jim?" I say, taking a switchblade out of my pocket. He looks at the blade, gurning, reaching for it. I place my hand on the bar, spreading my fingers out.

"I know this game." He says.

"Do you?" I say. Then I start bringing the knife down, stabbing each of my fingers one after another. Jim looks on amazed as I go back after reaching my thumb, leaving two small stabs in each digit as if I'd been bitten. I then swing the switchblade around, pointing the handle toward him.

"Haha, okay, okay, I like this game, yeah." He says, spreading his hand out. The first stab was perfect, bouncing easily out. The second he missed. Tried again. Deep cut along his ring finger. He cursed, making a fist, it pulsed with blood. He kept going.

The atmosphere in the bar had changed from trying to avoid what was happening to absolute focus on what was happening. 

"Fuck!" He shouted, stabbing his thumb too hard, a few drops of blood hitting his face and dribbling down. 

"Want another drink?"

"Let me fucking finish!" He says, stabbing down, missing again. His hand was bloodier than mine, it rolled off his fingers and started to spread across the bar, whilst barely a drop had been spilled from my neat wounds.

"The trick is accuracy. You should aim for the bone, bounce when you feel resistance." I say, hovering behind his shoulder.

"Get the fuck off me." He says, stabbing the remainder of his fingers, throwing the switchblade on the bar and downing another shot of absinthe.

"Do you need a band aid?"

"I have an idea for a game. How about we stab each other?" He says, picking up the knife again.

"Here, have some more ketamine, it'll take the edge off." I say, throwing the bag over to him. He dumps it all out onto the bar, burying his nose in it, licking it up.

"Yee-haw!" He screams at me. His nose starts bleeding. I tap my nostril, the universal sign that something was wrong, but he doesn't seem to care. 

"Can we have another round?" I say, motioning to the glasses. Barb pours one, but Jim sweeps them both away, they fly through the air, sound of the breaking glass makes someone jump. Jim point the knife at me.

"Any more games, funny boy?"

"Do you like rock, paper, scissors?" I say. I check my pockets for another cigarette, finding a bag of ketamine. I look at the empty bag on the bar. "Oops."

"What?!" Jim screams at me, leaning close, gritting his teeth.

"That was concentrated hydrochloric acid." I say. "I use it to pickle my steel." 

He snorts, a jet of blood spraying down his clothes. He grips at the flesh of his face and starts screaming.

"Do you have any vinegar?" I ask Barb, as Jim collapses, screaming out blood on the concrete floor. After some quick discussion, I take a drink from Barb and throw it on Jim. Its milk.

"I'm going to need another milk, Barb."

"It’s only UHT." She says, pouring out another glass. I hold Jim.

"Snort this." I say, holding the glass against his philtrum. He snorts, sneezes, snorts again, drinking the milk through his burning nose. I decide to leave the bar. I drive the cherry red Sonata through the night, drunk, high, I switch the lights off and let the car roll down the road, picking up speed as it dips downhill between the trees. I use the steering wheel with my elbows as I dip the tip of the switchblade into the bag, snorting from it quickly, focusing on driving in the dark. Overhead the stars seem to rush away from me.

Gen Z Party Recollection

I go to the mall to buy the latest clothes. Hot Topic. Albert and Crombie. Urban Outfit. G*p. I buy the fashion, the accessories, the footwear. I am reborn as a 19 year old in the United States and I am ready.

I go to the local attraction, a fake sitcom. For $10 you’d buy a ticket into the Sitcom Experience, similar to the Escape Room craze, though requiring less effort. The $10 would buy you seats to the audience of a fake sitcom. You would watch the actors say the lines and laugh at all the intonations, the improvisations, the nervousness. The actors would go through a generic sitcom scenes and all the audience would laugh. And then the actors would leave the stage, they'd join the audience, being replaced with fresh members of the audience. Round and round it went, with particularly likeable/hateable actors recurring now and then to standing ovations and light heckling. It was the perfect hobby for the current generation, combining the narcissism of the internet with the ironic deconstruction of media. The sitcom itself is obviously a vehicle for upholding the status quo through audiences reacting to the stalest situational juxtapositions you could imagine, a kind of fentanyl for people who didn’t take drugs, and therefore lent themselves to fascism. The fake sitcom nights were how many local neo-hipsters would celebrate the best years of their life, acting out the archetypes of characters with names like Larry, Joey and Mary Albright, all instantly recognisable in the evolution of Punch and Judy content. Entertainment slop was big with people under the age of 25, the issue with marketing to this age bracket was that they didn’t have enough money to buy the things advertised at the shows. The next step was for audience members to go into debt, buying today and paying back tomorrow. There was obviously no flaws in this model, Capital was based entirely on the idea of credit and imaginary money, but as I watched the young people buy a drink for $12, I can’t help but feel an element of sorrow for the accrued debt this generation would generate because they wanted a drink when they left the house.

I storm out of the fake sitcom, marching off stage as my Ross Geller impression didn’t land.

“And that’s how I met your mother. So sue me already.” I said. The audience didn’t react. All night they had been laughing at every smirk, pause, gesture, joke, but when it was my turn, silence. A silence so big it seemed to rip apart the air between us. I repeated my line, got frustrated, and was now stood in the parking lot outside trying to smoke a bong and coughing again and again as the smoke lazily wafted from the top. Each cough seems to intensify the feeling from the weed, sending lines of non-colour around the edges of my eyes, lightning across the retinas, the sign of bad times ahead. I threw the bong to the floor, smashing it into a million pieces.

“Why don’t this generation have an American Pie or Superbad? Huh?” I say to the shape in the corner. It acknowledges me, looking deep into my eyes and I know they are my own.

Time passes. I realised I had moved, in both time and space and intoxication. My recent memory had entirely disappeared, like trying to remember a cartoon in a newspaper. It didn’t matter. I felt like this most evenings. Often, much worse. Yet I had found myself holding onto the side of a dumpster, my trousers were wet and I didn’t know where I was. I lurched towards the end of the alley, though the speeding traffic made me feel nervous. I backed down, back into the dust and noticed there was a party down the way. I remembered that I was there. On I walked.

The party was busy. The busyness of a party was the main sign it was good, due to the prospect that you had attended. To attend a party with less than five people could barely be called such, though this was like a party in a film. I blended amongst the crowd and tried to remember what I had taken. There was a bright light. A phone. It was recording an interview between a scrawny wretch with a mushroom cut and a goth.

“So…do you like apples? What’s your favourite apple?” he says, faux nervously, glancing at the camera.

“Yeah I like apples…I was actually thinking…you remind me of an apple.”

“Gulp.” He says. He actually said gulp.

“Uh…yeah?”

“Yeah, you’re crisp. Sweet. And something I want to…bite.”

“Oh…step on me, mommy.” He says. I run into the frame, barging between them.

“I’ll step on your face til you look like that cunt at the start of Irreversible.” I say, slurring, eyes rolling in my head.

“Uh…okay, that’s a red flag.”

“Irreversible? The new Sabrina Carpenter?”

“No, the fucking film you dick. The fucking fire extinguisher bit. Gasper Noe? No-eh. Know. What the fucks his name?”

“This is actually a private conversation.” Says the tiktok creep. I look at him in the eye then my vision starts shaking. I can’t focus on him.

It was at that point that I realised I had taken a large quantity of MDMA.

“Fuck. This is actually quite trippy, you know? I’m fucked me.” I said, holding my face. I think back to the summer of 2008, my first experience taking ecstasy, a house party not too different to this. In fact, now that I thought about it, it was the same house. I had been in this room before. Had I even left? I look round, rubbing my hand against the wall, asking my friend if this was real. I needed a drink. Looking round, I see somebody had been holding my drink for me.

“Cheers. I’m fucked me.” I say, standing next to them, taking a long pull from the bottle.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“What?”

“Give me my fucking drink back.” She says. I remembered it was the goth from 2025. I take another drink, trying to remember what was going on. My friend was somewhere. I needed to find him and we needed to go home. I asked the goth where my friend was and she grabbed her drink back. The tiktokker was now shouting at me as his friend filmed us both, the camera light still on. I had mistook it for the sun before, but now realised I would be caught in tens of thousands of pixels, the light shining perfectly onto my face and I was out of my mind on drugs.I was going to be a meme.

“Can I ask you a question? Sir. Sir. Can I ask you a question right now?” they said. I look at him and felt my jaw grind, seeming to fix itself upwards. Was this jaw cramp? Was I a dinosaur?

“Mmmm?” I managed. What the fuck was happening. Where were the tunes.

“Why do you think its okay to just interrupt someone filming?”

“Where’s tunes? Somebody stick some fucking tunes on.”

“What?”

“Wha-…have you seen my mate?” I say. The camera was still filming. The people in the kitchen were all watching this play out. Somebody laughed.

“Here…who’s fucking laughing at me?” I say, looking round.

“Hey bud, do you need a glass of water?” says the tiktokker.

“War-der. Do doo wanna grab a glass of war-der? Do doo? Do, do, do. Proper fucked me. Eyyy?”

“I think you need to leave.” Says the tiktokker.

“Yeah, who are you?” says someone in the crowd.

“Fuck said that? Eh?” I say. I step towards the people and they move.

“Just get out of here. I’ll call you an Uber.”

“Look. I’m not leaving. Til you put some fucking tunes on. So fucking stick some tunes on. Now.” I say. The audience start whispering to each other. More people start jeering, getting their phones out too, catching this whole disaster from multiple angles. A muscle-bound hard nut appears at the door. I start dancing.

“Hey, waaay, we’re having a party are we? Wow, yeah, fucking great party. Stick some fucking tunes on then, eh? Go on then. Fucking go on then.” I say, leering close to the tiktokker, my lips pulled back and my eyes wild. He pushes me away. People start booing.

“Fuck all of you. That’s what I think. Here, before I go, listen to this.” I say, getting my phone out. I spend too long trying to find YouTube on my phone, mistyping song names a few times before finally finding Scooter – One (Always Hardcore). There was a five second advert for laundry detergent.

“Get lost!” someone shouts, but it no longer matters. Nothing ever mattered. The first guitar strings begin to play. The drums. The vocals. Then the bass. I’m dancing. I’m dancing to music I'm playing from my phone. I’m the oldest one at the party. I dance and start singing along as I exit the backdoor, back out onto the alley. It is night time and I am lost. A few punks were stood in a circle, the quick hiss of nitrous hitting a primordial response, I grab myself a balloon and hit the streets.

Mobius Party

I had been at the world’s longest running party for four hours and was beginning to feel sluggish. The bubbly acid yiddish funk thumped in the speakers as an M.C. ironically scratched the records and made a podcast. The party had been continuing since the first of January in the year two thousand. Fourteen years of non-stop nonsense. The host, Gary Faberge, sits on a smashed in couch trying to separate cigarette papers from each other.
“How can you afford this?” I ask. Gary gently peels a paper away and straightens it with his thumb and forefinger.
“I’m sponsored by Red Bull. Can’t you see the signage?” he says, nodding around at the huge company logos stuck on each wall. There were also thousands of empty red bull cans dotted throughout the building like spent ammunition, along with empty nitrogen canisters and bottle lids. The walls are patterned with graffiti, chemical frescoes. The guests stagger around like somnambulists, mumbling to each other about green energy and the illuminati. At least three people had to be awake and music playing at all times for it to be classed as a party, although that was simple enough that the party had been going on for a while.
“How did it start?”
“Well, in 1999 I had a big New Year’s Eve party, it were mad. I had fifty people in my flat, this were before we knocked through, so it were packed. People kept coming and going at all hours and that’s been pretty much it ever since.”
“What’s it been like to have been living in a perpetual party?” I ask, watching a cockroach make its few last steps before dying of old age. Gary roots around amongst the empty cans until finding a pouch of tobacco and sprinkling it along the fold of the paper before rolling it up.
“None stop parties forever!” shouts a girl, her makeup mostly snot and cocaine.
“Sometimes it has been hell. Sometimes it has been good. But it’s always been a party.”
“Doesn’t every party have to end sometime?”
“I don’t see this ending any time soon. I’m having an extension built on the roof, it’s going to be a big magnet that will turn the entire house into a speaker.” Says Gary, lighting up the cigarette wearily. “What is most remarkable is that I have survived my own life. I had my first cigarette when I was nine, took pills before I left high school and had a crack addiction for the last twenty years. And I can’t leave this party.”
“Why?”
“I…I don’t know how.” He says, looking into the distance. We are interrupted again by a spokesman from Red Bull wearing a silver suit, honking an air horn all around us.
“Do you guys like to party?! Can I get a hell yeah!” he shouts. I take out a can of expanding foam and spray it into his mouth before turning back to Gary.
“I can get you out of here. We can escape.” I whisper. Gary looks at me with the eyes of an abused dog. Too scared to act. An untenable position. I don’t need to hear his reply, he was always at the party and will never leave. The party and the man have become inseparable, the lines between the two have become blurred. To stop one would mean to stop the other, just as sometimes when an elderly person dies their partner does soon after. The redbull spokesman has managed to pull most of the expanding foam from out of his maw and so I refill it for him before making my way downstairs, past fire damaged walls and across urine soaked carpets. The amount of cigarette burns everywhere are reminiscent of the surface of the dark side of the moon, black on black on black. I descend into the depths of the party, copulating couples and people caught in an overdose. True debauchery, akin to that of any civilization tipping over the edge, just as different species of animal would begin to fuck and eat each other just before an earthquake struck. Unrestricted pleasure often resembled pain, just as every opposite is more alike than the state in between.

The Farage Conspiracy

The silence penetrates the city street like imaginary snow, a pataphor for the homogeneous white washed England Nigel Farage is supposed to wish for in his uneducated dreams. In one hand I am holding the latest smart phone; a Samsung G-26 with twenty gigabytes of Wi-Fi. In my other hand I am holding a briefcase containing one hundred pounds in a variety of denominations, it weighs heavy. Footsteps. I look up, at the end of the alley appears my anonymous contact, he resembles a diabetic John Hurt. Looking over his shoulder as he walks down the street he jumps at the sound of my voice.
"Deepthroat?" I murmur.
"Are you the journalist?" he says, tilting his head back to peer at me through half-rim spectacles. I nod, showing the case in my hand. "Let's go somewhere more public." he says, leading the way down the road.
"Were you followed?" I ask.
"No."
"What is it you had to tell me?" I say. We are walking at a fast pace, past the rumble of buses and a construction site. Anyone trying to listen in will struggle to hear what we're saying.
"There's a conspiracy at the top layers of UKIP. It changes everything." he says. UKIP. The four letters that mean more to the future of politics in England moreso than any other. The party was a hard right neo-conservative grass roots amalgamation of bourgeois soft nationalism and anachronistic jingoism lead by a cabal of ridiculous husks of men. And of course, they were gaining popularity.
"How so?"
"We were wrong...so wrong." he says. We begin to cross a road and he stops, turning around. "Look, if I'm not alive by the end of this will you promise me-" a gunshot echoes from above. He looks down in slow motion and watches as a bullet sends his shirt flapping apart. And a truck hits him. I run over to his mangled body and pick him up by the shoulders, trying to shake him awake. I check his pulse, after finding nothing I bow my head.
"Goddamn it...you sons of a bitches." I say. I look up and notice the sniper on the roof of the Arndale centre. I begin to run.

Through the shops and sets of doors, I take the stairs two at a time as I reach the roof. The sniper is a good distance away from me and so I begin to sprint after him. He suddenly spins around and begins to shoot at me, though I do a forward roll and dodge the fifty millimetre teflon-coated bullets. He runs to the edge of the roof and jumps! He just about clears an alley and lands on the roof of the next building. I am not too far behind him, easily leaping the gap and running. We then begin a rooftop parkour chase across Manchester until we run out of buildings.
"It's over." I say. The sniper looks at me with scared eyes. There's nowhere left to go, unless he was just mad enough to jump down. The sniper turns and begins to run in slow motion. "Son of a bitch." I say to myself, running after him. Just as he's leaps off the building I reach forward and grab his ankle, swinging him down through the window in the floor below us. He crashes through the glass and disappears from view, though once I've swung myself down it doesn't look like he's going to run again. My expensive shoes crunch fragments of glass into the plush red carpet as I walk towards him.
"Looks like you need an ambulance." I say, looking at the lacerations all over his body.
"Leave me alone!"
"No way pal, we're just getting to know each other. Now how about you tell me who sent you to shoot Stuart Wheeler and I won't break your face! Quid pro quo motherfucker." I say, kneeling down.
"Nigel sent me."
"Farage?" I say, eyes narrowing.
"Please...kill me." he says.
"With pleasure." I say, picking him up and tossing him back out of the window. Turns out Farage had sent an assassin to kill one of the members of his staff. But why? What secret did my informant have for me? I flash back to earlier that afternoon, for some reason everything is white and blue and all the sound is really echoey. I replay my meeting with the snitch. "Deepthroat...conspiracy....changes everything....wrong...promise me...deepthroat...promise me...wrong...throat...everything...everything changes...deepthroat..." I focus more, putting my fingers to my temples. I remember what he was wearing, zooming into his inside jacket pocket. There was the menu for a takeaway tucked in there, I knew it as being close to a budget hotel in the area. Seemed like as good a place to start as any.

Half an hour later I am emptying out a suitcase belonging to my contact as I stand in his hotel room. After rooting through his dirty laundry I manage to find a keypass to a UKIP facility just outside of Manchester. I drive as the sun sets, listening to a shitload of retrofuture cruelpop.

I enter the compound, flashing the keycard to the guard on the gate and park up outside. The night is a cool turquoise around, the lights from the city twinkle like distant nebula clusters against a cubist backdrop. There is a soldier stationed on one of the doors.  
"Hey bub, you got a light?" I say, taking a Lucky Strike from out of its packet. He nods, taking out a zippo and holding it out, shielding the flame with his hand. I give him an uppercut to the jaw and knock him out. 
"Didn't anyone tell you that smoking is bad for your health." I say, giving a little 'heh' afterwards before taking the uzi submachine gun off him and checking the ammo. I go through the door and do this weird sidestep sort of skipping as I dodge from crate to crate, stopping once I reach a corner and peeking around it, sweat gathering on my brow. Two guards are quietly talking to each other in the middle of the corridor. At the end there are a set of double doors with radiation signs printed onto the windows. I tap on the wall. 
"Huh?" says both of the guards at the same time. They begin to walk towards me. Just as they're about to turn the corner I leap out and bang their heads together.    

I pause just before I enter the next room. Who knew what secrets this facility held? Toxic waste mutants, cyborg animals, a clone army. I cocked the uzi and burst into the room. Farage was stood in the centre, lit by a single spotlight, drinking a pint of bitter in the darkness.   
"Farage." I growl.  
"You should have let me know you were coming. I'd have got one for you." he says, taking a sip of his beer. I walk up to him and point the gun at his face.  
"Give me one good reason not to blow you to kingdom come dirtbag." I say.  
"Just one? How about...five?" he says. Behind him a wall of televisions turn on, showing a map of the UK. There are five atomic symbols marked in the same places as London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast...and Manchester!  
"Is that what I think it is?"  
"If you think that I have five nukes hidden in the most important cities in the UK, then yes. You're right."  
"Why I oughta-" I say, though Farage cuts me off with a flourish of his hand, revealing a detonator.  
"Now now, no need to lose our temper. Let's talk, shall we?" he says. I notice he sounds similar to Jeremy Irons in Die Hard With A Vengeance.  
"Sure...let's talk." I say, lowering my gun. Farage takes a sip of beer and begins his monologue.    

"The United Kingdom Independence Party is my child. Literally. I gave birth to a conceptual humanoid that has over one thousand heads, although those are attached to the bodies of actual people. Are you familiar with mind control? I am...a puppet master. I was trained in the KGB then sent undercover to England to pose as a right wing politician, although my true mission is to separate the UK from the EU, destabilising the continent for Putin to come and take over. England is the anus of Europe, everything ends up going through this country before crossing the Atlantic. An excellent place to launch an attack against America from, wouldn't you agree? I am not a politician for pot smoking I.T consultants to complain about on the internet, I am who your parents vote for as they get older and more racist. I am the most important person in European history since Franz Ferdinand. I hope a future band names themselves after me too. I am the alpha and the omega. I am the one who knocks." he says. I look behind him at the map of the UK. Maybe five cities were worth trading to stop this maniac. But I wasn't a murderer. I simply lean forward and spit in his beer. 

    

Dancing In Blood

A crystal interface is embedded into the plastic molded counter. Tablet computers secretly read your fingerprints and transmit them to large police organisations. I select the options and look at the rotating wire-frame humanoid begin to morph.
"It uses sixth generation DDR-RAM in a java environment, vintage-fitted to deliver an optimal end user experience." says Boff. I nod, face lit from below in a shade of blue. I look up at the OHP screen and see my creation come to life, Gene Roddenberry takes off his clothes and begins to slow bang Liza Minelli.
"What kind of algorithms are you running here?" I ask.
"A basic MySql hack modded onto Marionette. It's what Pixar uses."
"But..the chip set for this app must need...gigaquads" I say, turning away from the screen momentarily.
"Not so. It uses white space and a simple gaussian noise recombination. It's streaming data from the cloud auto-authed through a 16x DVD drive." he says. I turn back to the tablet and smear my fingers. Gene Roddenberry is replaced with Channing Tatum.
"I think I've seen enough." I say. We walk back outside and stand by the kidney bean shaped pool.
"There's still some bugs I need to grind out, but I think we'll be ready to go live Q3 2014."
"What gave you the inspiration?"
"Well, I started off wanting to make a really in depth cataloging system for porn. I'd spend hours watching clips, taking notes. I wanted to do it mostly for myself, I had quite specific tastes, but I thought it could be used by others. A truly in-depth search engine for any pornographic image or video ever recorded." he says, smoking an electronic cigarette. I look out towards the Hollywood hills.
"Then what happened?"
"Well, I checked the analytics of the search engine, looked to see what people were looking for and try and direct my analysis more towards trends. Turned out a lot of people were looking for actors I'd never heard the names of. Wasn't until I cross-referenced this with Facebook and made an infograph I worked out most people were searching for porn stars that had some kind of resemblance to someone they knew, consciously or not." he said. I shivered lightly.
"Creepy."
"I know. This data alone could predict porn, fashion, taste, style, whatever, it was like a weather report. I then thought of what to do next. Why not take the people out of the porn, make it more eco-friendly, more now? So I set about working on CGI porno where people could specify what exactly they'd want to see. That was the first prototype of that thing in there."
"Sure, makes sense. Make porn more family friendly by taking out the exploitation."
"Turns out equal rights are making a big resurgence, and people hate porn. But they also love porn. CGI porn makes it so anyone can watch it without feeling guilty."
"So what made you have it so you could change peoples faces?"
"Evolution. Why not watch Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon take turns on some robot? Even better, why not import some photos from your phone and watch your friends have sex?"
"Well...I dunno."
"Think about it. You could watch yourself having sex with anyone...without using your imagination!"
"Sounds like the future to me." I say, spitting into the pool.
"Hi-Def CGI dicks of any size fitting in any hole of any one. It's a cybersex future cumming at your screens!" he says, throwing his arms up in the air and laughing, his testicles vibrating like electric eggs. I kick them off before leaping from the balcony and running for a car.

The high speed chase begins in West L.A. and takes me bouncing over small humps in the road as I'm chased by jeeps. I swerve between traffic as an Asian man pops out of a sunroof and begins to shoot an Uzi. I do a hand-brake turn and the car scrapes through an alley at ninety miles per hour. I drive off a bridge and into the aquaduct, tyres spinning across the dry concrete. One of the jeeps hits a shopping trolley that gets caught under one of it's wheels. There is the sound of an engine revving down and I slowly turn around. Silently the jeep flips into the air, flips over twice and then hits a concrete barricade. As the metal and meat crash together loudly time and sound return to normal. I look in my rear view mirror momentarily and jam the car into a higher gear, taking a plywood ramp up out of the aquaduct, flying over a small house and back down onto the street. The other jeep hits the top of a palm tree and explodes. I drift around a corner, slam the brake on and manage to parallel park it between two other cars. As I get out the door falls off. A homeless man who has been watching the whole thing then looks down at the empty bottle of whiskey in a brown bag and raises his eyebrows.

I stand on stage with a punk band I had joined early in the week. I go up to the microphone.
"We are The Shit Wolves and we hate you!" I shout, hitting the strings of my guitar. The crowd starts to pogo as I shout into the microphone and the band plays around me.
"Come on join my frozen anarchy,
She said la la la
The police put you in jail
So they can fuck you
Ooh ooh
Oh oh woah-ho, ho!
Frozen anarchy across the states!
Frozen death blows across the states!
Oh, oh, oi, oi, whoa-woo awoo woah!" I sing.
Half an hour later we are backstage drinking warm beer. The band talk about whether it was punk to promote yourself using the internet.
"I still think we should send those cassettes to the radio station, with fuck you written on them." says the bassist, laughing at his own joke.
"We should go to Palestine and play to the soldiers fighting over there. It's like we're saying to Obama, we're a punk band playing in a war zone. You got a problem with it?" says the drummer.
"Well, I got my girlfriend to make the next poster anyway." says the keyboardist.
"Again? I thought we agreed to use that picture of that man who shot himself?"
"She already had 'em printed up man. They're pretty sweet."
"Yeah but that picture is fucking horrible." laughs the bassist. I take out a glass pipe and stuff it full of crystal meth.
"Boys...how about we make a Vine?" I say, lighting up.

E-cig review

Like many other smokers I can't help but begin to feel the adverse effects smoking has had to my health. I struggle to run up the stairs, I cough in the morning, I sometimes don't like it and generally wonder what I'm trying to achieve in life. After trying to quit a handful of times with various methods in the style of Wile E. Coyote, I have decided that smoking is going to be a lifelong habit for me. But what if I could smoke a robot? Or maybe look like I was from the future? All of this could be achieved through smoking. But not in the sense of burning plants, but electricity and liquid. Smoking for the new millennium has arrived with the advent of electronic cigarette machines, or e-cigs for short.

The process of smoke delivery is quite simple. A lithium ion battery cylinder is attached to a short cartomiser in which a mixture of Propylene Glycol and flavouring is ignited through a heated lattice, vaporising the e-liquid and delivering a lungful of cloud gently into the body. This vapour is itself made up of hydrogen, oxygen and nicotine, a much more benign substance than the old fashioned cigarette or cigar. It dissipates quickly in the air and remains odourless, allowing e-smokers to puff away happily anywhere in the world. Now that sciencey bit is out of the way I'll get on with the reviews! I have chosen a collection of starter kits from a variety of suppliers and spent the afternoon trying them out.

JACVAPOUR V1P PCC STARTER KIT

This e-cig is a handy little device. It's just a little bigger than your average cigarette and when you puff away it feels like a genuine smoke! The end of mine has a blue LED in it, which is cool. Makes me feel like Harrison Ford in Blade Runner. I often smoke my V1P quite happily at work, at home or relaxing by the sea. The 'juice' or PPG liquid is quite tasty. I got watermelon, bubblegum and mocha flavour. I can mix and match the various liquid in the style of a kind of alchemist. This is more steam-punk than cyber-punk! I have tested this kit to great extent and highly recommend it to the casual e-smoker.

E-LITES E-PRO 4 E-CIGARETTE KIT

What more can I say, this is a fantastic starter kit. It comes with a USB charger, not one but two battery packs, 32MB of disk space and a special black cloth to clean your e-cig. Sadly the flavours I received turned out blank, so taking a hit was like washing my mouth with diluted milk. Still, this e-cig really packs a punch! It can deliver over 23mg of smoke in each puff, making this little thing into seeming like something better than it first appeared! I rate this kit 3/5.

APOLLO SMART LITES 4400 ELECTRO-CIG KIT

The 4400 is the ultimate in vapour tech, infusing each bauble of liquid with a tiny hint of flavour amongst the great lungfuls of black vapour. I tried making a cocaine tincture by dissolving 2g of the white stuff in a VG based liquid over a two day period. This thing was like smoking crack, and quickly ruined the small bauble that came with the kit. Still, I highly rate this experience.

NU-SMOKE 60/40: THE REVENGE STARTER KIT

Nu-smoke 60/40: The Revenge starter kit is a surprisingly unsatisfying piece of mechanical engineering. American boffins have been tinkering away at this new type of e-cig for the last few years, creating an energy efficient vape that delivers both satisfying hits and versatility. Customisation is key in the 60/40, with different cases coming with the kit as if they were important. It comes with several different mouth pieces, batteries and half a metre of ethernet cable, although I'm unsure why. I smoked this e-cig underwater whilst searching for scrap metal and found it held up, though didn't work after a major car accident. A poor show by the Nu-smoke team, though shows great promise. Might be worth purchasing this one for the ipadness of early adoption.

LIBERTY FLIGHT LITE XP PRO KIT

What more can I say, this is a fantastic starter kit. I took a toke of this sweet smoke and thought I had reached Nirvana. I imagined the great Ganesh covered from head to toe in the finest golden finery, his red skin seeming to glow from within like the underside of a finger covering the sun. With one tusk broken and the other proud, he speaks to me in Hindi.
"I don't understand." I say. The vision dissipates. I am alone.
I give this starter kit 5/5.

Organ Gorgon

I am riding in the back of a taxi with my assistant, Penny Naknamura. She's wearing a torn One Direction tee, orange zebra print spandex pants with a boot on one foot and a high heel on the other. I point at her feet.
"What's the deal with that then?"
"Asymmetries in babe, didn't you know?"
"I know everything, just not all the time. Doesn't it make you stand funny?"
"It's fash, saw it in New York last week. And New York last week is London next week, comprendez?"
"Yeah sure, looks stupid to me. How we doing for time?"
"We're ten minutes late." she says, taking her ipad out of her bag and looking at some nonsense site. It's what I have an assistant for, to check all the blossoming fat that is growing on the world wide web. I start to get a bit nostalgic for the glory days of the late nineties when my phone goes off. I pick up.
"Where are you?!"
"Relax, almost there."
"You're an hour and ten minutes late?"
"So? We're already late, stop worrying about it. Here, talk to my assistant." I say, handing my phone away. I've lost my train of thought. The taxi stops at some traffic lights and I get out, leaving Penny and the taxi driver shouting at me from the black cab. I pretend to have one of my episodes, though to be honest I feel much happier outside. I step in between the cars and make my way down the road, popping into a cafe, past the counter and kitchen and out into an alley, much to the chagrin of the staff there. The alley seems a lot more quieter though. I walk over to a bin and begin to practise my yoga.

I wake up a few hours later, I must have dozed off after finishing my asanas. I wonder if my assistant made it to the fashion show. Or was it a film premiere. It didn't matter. I had been pretending to be a journalist for GQ for the last few weeks and had found it all quite dull. They hadn't been interested in my stories about the snake infestation at a nearby orphanage or the series of grave robberies taking place in Yorkshire. It had all been style, surface, a thin veneer of lies masquerading as something of worth. I now felt foolish about getting all those tattoos, but still, 'yolo'. I walk out of the alley and back onto the street. This was where the action was, this was where the juice was at. I felt as though I could somehow read minds as I stared at people making their way up and down. Maybe that woman was trying to juggle a career and children whilst going through a rough divorce. Maybe that man was addicted to heroin. Maybe that group of teenagers were planning on murdering me. Variety is the spice of life, but what exactly is being spiced? They keep meat in the ceiling. I walk back around the corner and back into the cafe I had entered earlier, although this time the staff are shouting at me and blocking my way. I go back out onto the street and start to walk again, as if I am lost. I am lost in fact. I'm unsure of which city I'm in. I start shouting for help and for somebody to save me, but everyone walks past as if I smell of piss. I do this for a while then start walking again, but not before rooting through a bin to find a newspaper to stuff down the front of my trousers. I have always been hyper-sensitive to touch and the scratching and folding of the newspaper against my skin causes me a great deal of uncomfort. Somebody shouts my name and I look through the faces. It is my assistant.
"Where've you been?"
"I saw one of my friends I haven't seen for ages, I owed them some money."
"You missed the show. I took some notes for you, but you'll have to write the rest up yourself." she says.
"Thanks Penny. I love you." I say. I wince.
"What?"
"I said I love you by accident, on account of you resembling my departed wife."
"You're a widow?"
"It's widower. And yes. At least, I think so. She went missing a few weeks ago and I'm assuming she has died. Though now I come to think about it...maybe you're her?" I shout, pulling at her wig.
"Get off me!" she screams. It isn't a wig. And she's not my wife. I start to cry and run away again, ashamed of myself. How will I finish this story for GQ now?

It's several hours later and I'm frantically trying to guess what happened earlier. A film premiere? A fashion show? Maybe an art opening. I decide to mix them all together and have written about a film about art with models that are holograms or something. So far I have three thousand words and a few diagrams. I stuff it all in an envelope and post it off, not really giving a shit. I have some other stuff in the pipeline anyway, probably. I scratch at the tattoo of a monkey on my neck, wondering if it has become infected. I probably shouldn't have been climbing in and out of those graves in Yorkshire after all. I go to a petrol station to buy some flowers for Penny as an apology, then post those off as well. With all that done I decide to call it a day and head off towards a nightclub, ready to dance the night away and get powerfully drunk. Maybe I'm not cut out for a career as a journalist, at least in such an upmarket magazine. Better off to follow my own path. Maybe I could be like Hunter S. Thompson or something? I laugh at myself. How ridiculous and pathetic. The sudden urge to stab myself in the neck with my belt overwhelms me and it takes every ounce of willpower not to end my life right there on the pavement.
"Are you coming in mate?" says the bouncer. I look over and nod.
"I am."