Fist: on holiday

Starting with this painfully-large, repetitive, and boring sentence, I, Fist, am exiting the blogosphere for a holiday (for two weeks): BUT, if you are in New York or nearby, and would like to meet up with me some time next week, do let me know: And then you can judge for yourself how the blogosphere imitates life, as I bore into you repeatedly with such a painfully large fist.

Here are two jokes, to keep you laughing hysterically while I'm gone:

"There go my aims in life!"

"If I've said this once, I've said it five times a week. To my mom. For the past thirty years."

Don't miss me too hard.

Clearance

"Fool," flicked the lips with a spit - as I, Fist, cleaned the desk clear, clear of the debris of these past few working years.

"Fool! Look: buried in a box under the table, way over two years of filing, simply not done. And simply not checked for, not asked for, not missed, either. Not even a single sheet of it. Not one.

"And all the unanswered letters, and deleted unchecked emails, and half-scanned memo's - the corners perhaps showing a blue-biro doodle, da-da. All nonsense going nowhere making nothing, all.

"And so what: the tick boxes of your moronic manager, at the door grinning with a bad joke each morning? While the beautiful temps have floated on through, and are now gone, your name and face for them forgotten.

"To spend your time here, like this - fool!"

The body took a pause, here amongst drifting piles of shifting paper, behind the usual closed door, up on the fourth floor. Then:

"What clearance would you have instead, O lips?" asked, I, Fist. "The whole clearance of this sweating city, its spires and crowds and towers, to run once again in the blue-bell beds of a forest, there amongst the meandering fingers of Spring's first luminous light?

"That the curl of a yes? But to face away from doings and searchings, lips, into that daydream begs another question: how then to sleep well, in the deep, dark, dead of the adult night?"

Victory.

The life-changing luck of a lottery ticket. A genie's lantern ready to rub. The blubber-balloon boobs of Ewa Sonnet. The controls of a playboy hot tub. Of all the usual things that I, Fist, have not fingered this week, add cigarettes to the list.

So! Time for the pub and its blokes, time to stay out late, time to drink and to celebrate - perhaps with a smoke.

I want your advice

At the end of this month, Fist is going part-time in his office job. In the extra time, Fist is going to pursue a career in writing - of fiction, probably. Fist is seeking advice on what's good in contemporary fiction, to see what the competition is like, that kind of thing. Fist has tended to avoid contemporary fiction, largely because most of it looks rubbish. Tell Fist why he's wrong in the comments box below.

BUT, please only suggest books if you have similar tastes to Fist or have read widely and are thus qualified. The below are examples of Fist-taste in prose.

Fistingly great:

Sherlock Holmes stories
Lolita - Nabokov
Dubliners - Joyce
Chekhov's short stories
Doestoyevsky
First 4/5ths of Jane Austen novels
Kingsley Amis letters
Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriella Garcia Marquez

Ok by Fist:

The Corrections - Franzen
Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
Kafka
Ian McEwan
Madame Bovary - Flaubert
Italo Calvino
Hemmingway
Steinbeck

Should get fisted:

Portrait of the Artist - Joyce
Last 1/5th of Jane Austen novels
Philip Roth
Don DeLillo
Kingsley Amis novels
Martin Amis
Iain Banks
Terry Pratchett
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriella Garcia Marquez
Margarat Atwood, and up the crapper too.

The next post will feature a short story by Fist from a while back, if you're curious about that. Normal service will resume on Friday.

Bathing last night

Glowing from the window to the floor, then to the towels hung up on the door: orange street-light streams in a dense diaganol. To the side, the shadows of splashes wave back, from white enamel. Fist gives a finger to the sky of night and city light outside, drops deeper down in the width of warmth.

The demands of the day almost are past. Silent, still, alone at last... Only for a moment: and there was the tomato, the corner of a cherry tomato, slipped out from the well of the anus, circling the tree of the leg, dragged by the plash of current to the land's-end of the toe, before dawdling along to settle up, on the plain-like expanse of the gut.

Beautiful thing! It had survived the gang-bang of the stomach, and the teeth falling down like grand-pianos, and the thundering highways of the internal tubes, and the blood at the wall of the gut - baying like the obese for their burgers - to emerge red (reddish-brown) and dancing, drifting then darting, before nestling by the cave of the belly button, in the end, as if to say: hello, friend.

Its last ordeal was yet to come. I, Fist, would decide what to be done. Tease out the seeds, and add to the garden a new breed? Or to avoid waste, season to taste? Or evacuate the thing, here from its new city, to the waste land of a rubbish dump, along with plastic wrappers, disintigrating toothbrushes, and probably a tampon, via the bin?

The Pianos of Destiny

Each person has a file. Each file a number. To be put in order. All afternoon. The Left Fist lazes louche in a pocket, is laughing a little, and mockeringly muttering. Eventually says,

"... Monsieur le Fist, tonight the stars will fall out of the sky, will they, like you said yesterday? In the form of grand pianos, as if in a Tom & Jerry cartoon? No, night shall fall without unusual incident, and you shall blush for speaking too soon..."

Back into the pocket he retires. I try to say this answer:

"Each person here is a number, on this or that file, this form or that office, a million and one times over. To speak a truth is to say: they're each as detached as each other, as detached as the moon. Yet the moon is laced with lines of stars, who sing around him a different tune: that we are not all alone, but all joined up, as if on one whole painted canvas, or a child's dot-to-dot."

Even a silly song or post or horoscope can sing, I know, of such a thing. But he will not listen, and anyway, is it true? So instead, I Fist, shall wait for nightfall, and see if that does in fact come into view.

Your Horoscope This Week, by Fist-O-Futures

Aries (March 21 to April 19)

A balcony, canapés and cocktails circulating, the moon coy behind the distant clouds, and cool figures drifting amongst each another. But shouldn’t someone shut that “music” up? Take a risk. You’re Aries, after all.

Taurus (April 20 to May 20)

Like Shakespeare you’re reliable, also with a sentimental attachment toward certain people, like Hitler had toward his Aryans. So what? you’ll ask at least once this week, predicts Fist-O-Futures. So what? (Maybe twice.)

Gemini (May 21 to June 21)

Impress your friends today with your unique wit and wide-ranging knowledge. You’ll want pleasant eulogies on Friday, after Tuesday surprises you with a freak accident involving a piano falling from a party.

Cancer (June 22 to July 22)

Nasty Master Mars this week will fire thick, fat, hard and 14-inch-long fists of rock and flame into Uranus. But it could be worse: think of Gemini, think of the dinosaurs, think of cancer.

Leo (July 23 to August 22)

Look: How supremely striking, the stars streaming through space! Alas a lost spanner, dropped by a spaceman’s weak fist, has just floated into a corner of your chart. Suddenly you picture boobies. Vast, blobby boobies.

Virgo (August 23 to September 22)

One in twelve of your friends will die on Tuesday, approx. What an opportunity to buy a brand new black hat! Or a new black suit, black shoes. And perhaps some novelty cufflinks (not of musical notes though.)

Libra (September 23 to October 22)

Despite your pleasant manner and decent mind, just like my Libran mother in fact, you will not remotely comprehend the imaginary lesbians that flow around a shuffling fist this Thursday.

Scorpio (October 23 to Nobarnum 21)

Amongst the usual stuff Fist-O-Futures forecasts for Scorpio this week – shopping, shitting, sleeping, and a certain quota of funerals – I see a secret that will be kept secret. Wow!

Sagittarius (November 22 to December 21)

This week is not a good week to try out a new musical instrument. Especially when you’re somewhat drunk, at a party, a floor or two above the street, and there’s a piano over by the window.

Capricorn (December 22 to January 19)

I – Fist-O-Futures, Seer of Secrets, Finder of Fates, Surfer of Stars, Master of Motions, Scanner of Skies, Zeus of the Zodiac – and, incidentally, a Capricorn too – am convinced this week that, at long last, all Capricorn genitals will, once again, finally, be licked into loveliness by lesbians. Possibly on Thursday.

Aquarius (January 20 to February 18)

One of you regular websites will load so slowly on Tuesday. What could be worse! But on Wednesday, you’ll see something there that you really like. Isn’t life grand!

Pisces (February 19 to March 20)

What will your 1,073,394,145 fists have in common, even the 178,899,024 fists in absolute poverty, this week, O fishy Pisceans? The widow of the late King Nairatsif of Suomynona, and the bank account she emails about.

No

train-track veins on the naked arms - late last night on channel 934 - and no scars on the arse, no scratches or scabs, no blotchy patches or sags around those straight hips, no flakes of skin irritating the nips, and not even a hint of boredom in the smiling eyes, as the phone again rings and she, the pornostar, licks her lips, while some stranger cums on the other end of the line, somewhere amongst the beauty of Italy.

4am. Flowing along the flesh-flute, the usual rhythms of Fist. The connosieur Eyes inspect the scene on the screen, and then ask: "Where are the usual hints of drugs or rapes? The background of damaged life expected, there behind the leisuerly surface of self-pleasure? Such an unharmed angel! She of self-love and luxury! Money and endless nudity! She of such fresh pert breasts, and that all-body tan!"

"But look at that firm chin, those flat feet, that knob of a nose," say, I, Fist, as the spunk-javelin fires along the fingers, and then up past the wrist. "She used to be a man. A man," I add as the white slick reaches the chest, the whole body squirming in a brief and vast yes.

Tonight's The Night

where I, Fist, will find between my fingers and thumb, this: a remote control. News from today will trickle in, until the early hours and the declaration of a win. The fifth day of the fifth month, two thousand and five. Day of power, day of fate for our future lives, spent for fist meandering amongst such numerous marvels as this.

Or perhaps I will reach higher and higher, to 934, where flickering Italian porn stars undress, a caller panting in their ear-piece, the screen scrolling with numbers to phone, as she touches her hard lumpen breasts with a moan, and where the winners and losers aren't announced, although the reflection on the glass hazards a guess.

Enough

of the cities falling into ruins, enough picturing the last human standing of all of us ever, as the universe of man dies in the dot of his eye, or hers, enough of finitetude and failure, enough seeking of the skeleton beneath the sight of the skin, or looking for the essence of a lover in lost hairs, lazing about on pillows in the daze of morning afters, enough seeing time as many false roads with only end: I am bored of it. Bored of blogging and the whole damn hearing of it. Bored, bored, bored.

- so say the Ears. They would rather hear the melody of an ice-cream van, the giggles and babble of the children outside, buying lollypops, dressed in superhero costumes, and so endlessly innocent that a blogger cannot capture it.

Cloud Faces

“The gods up in the clouds again are laughing: yet another human city has fallen! Yesterday Atlantis, today Baghdad, tomorrow – who knows! Was it statistics and studies that convinced the warriors to march? Or an argument couched in their names – the names of imaginary friends? Next it might be a giant wave, a jumbo loaded with plutonium, on fists of fire bolting from an open sky – who knows where, how, or why! But bets, for fun, are still placed – on vast ranges of volcanoes, the cracking of continents, on the unnoticed error of some well-quiffed architect; on New York, London, Paris; on Cairo, Jerusalem, Athens; on Tokyo, Moscow, Manila. O there is much laughter up in the clouds, as on they spin, without end, around and around.

“Hilarious, says some immortal, gazing at a blurry telly, that still it happens! The praying and lovemaking, the handholding and hoping! All those builders and all those bombers: What belief they have in rumours of us, and whatever remnants they’ve dredged up from the past! How hilarious, that on they learn about family planning – planning! And that they have just paused, for that swirl of sweat designated ‘dancing’ – for it has arrived again, the first day of May, that arbitrary date. And with such different maps and mausoleums to the last! Ha ha! Their eyes, how they still admire stretches of steel and concrete, the museums, and their luxuries of office space! Still they tend to the cities of gravestones, ridiculous!”

“It is true,” answered some mystery part of him, “that like you, ticklish little toe, curled up in a cloud of hair, travelling teller of tiny tales, that on your non-existent gods run, babbling and laughing. Also that we, fated to be here, with fists raised, or standing side by side, with all our homes to be undone by unknown hands, with all our deeds unready for the next deluge of the tide, with all the others as secure as scattered sands – that still we uniquely go on, doing and thinking and doing and thinking. That is to say, living.”