16/12 The 12 Days of XMAS - Day 3
LIBRARY artefact #033
ON THE 3rd DAY OF XMAS…
Comes this Xmas oddi-tee…
Deck the halls with Satan’s balls!
Today’s daft historical misshape has been lightly exhumed and adapted from the red-shifted-into-yesteryear grantmorrison.com website entry from Christmas 2000!
The dismantled narrative on the slab below is a self-identified ‘Christmas Ghost Story’ starring the Future Detective. Why this incredible fin de siecle character find never caught on BIG can perhaps be swiftly intuited from a light perusal of the following non-sequitur blather.
With its strange swirl-of-consciousness booms and reverberations of a near mythic New Year’s 2001, and its liquefied references to real places and news stories, this bright and blinding seasonal curio makes an unforgettable addition to any outdoor manger scene! And with both ‘color’ and ‘black and white’ modes, comprising three ‘holiness’ settings, you’re sure to impress the envious bastards next door on both sides and in front when the dazzling voltage of your family’s piety is visible from the moons of Neptune!
And don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten all you fans of the quatrains of Nostradamus; there’s a terrifying prophecy in each and every line if you’re prepared to snuffle for the truffle!
Welcome, my friends, to the ugly last hour or so of the Teddy Bear’s Picnic when the fighting starts…
SPEED ON SCHOOL NIGHT! SPEED ON SCHOOL NIGHT! SPEED ON SCHOOL NIGHT!
‘To think I gave up the drink to please the Jesus this Christmas,’ the homeless man on the steps said to no-one in particular. ‘What’s the point of anything?’
Me, I felt like an intelligent CCTV camera, recording everything in front of me with the same flat disinterest.
Was I hungry?
Was I thirsty?
BALLISTIC
Unplugged, stripped bare, ‘Come Ride My Column’ hovered in the forecourt of the Museum of Forgotten Art. The gross conceptual piece chameleoned wildly, reflecting the afterglow of a magnificent fireworks display commissioned by the local council to welcome the so-called ‘false Millennium.
The ballistic exuberance of Roman Candles, rockets and bangers which filled the sky around 12 with a fusillade of percussive lights had, by 1am, expanded to a rainbow firestorm which microwaved a young Romanian refugee family in their beds and left hundreds of buildings ablaze and businesses ruined.
VULNERABLE
Barely moments old, the New Year lay curled in its wet, sticky cocoon. It was at its most vulnerable, still unable to screech or to attack its nearest living host. For now, it simply yawned and began to stretch from its slumber.
Snow came and snow went, ensuring that no-one could ever validate the outrageous claim that no two snowflakes are exactly alike.
Christmas lights flickered and were gone. The garbage bins filled with wireframe trees and sparkly paper that disappeared. Drab newsprint and food wrappings came back into season. All this activity revved-up, like the stripteasing fashion mannequins and quick-changing furniture in The Time Machine film.
SELF-NEGLECT
‘2001. Take a good look around. It won’t last long. None of these new years are bred to last anymore,’ thought the miserable Future Dick. The Future Dick had reasons to be mournful; it was his birthday, and he was 47. The thing he did with his face when social situations called for a smile was now unacceptable to most men, women and children. The Future Dick was certain he was smiling but others saw a different significance in his ghastly tormented leer…
BACK IN GREAT SHAPE AFTER BABY!
www.com.com online once more after a tense fact-finding mission to several deserted and semi-deserted islands in the Indian Ocean!
In one sense, our trip was an attempt to help men like the miserable Future Dick (Detective) in the captivating Christmas ‘ghost story’ into which our company advertising has been lovingly embedded like a jewel set in finest 1 million carat gold!
We like to get about in our seaplane, you understand, just to see how things are doing! As the fastest growing micro-corporate website in the known galaxies, it’s our job to keep in touch with what the ordinary man worldwide is thinking - and then double it for monetary gain!
SUFFERING FROM STRESS
Christmas and New Year was a blur of weird news and toxic parties for most of us, wasn’t it?
A madman stabbing at the first Q-President with a balloon animal? Who’d believe it?
The American States splitting apart to form a 21st century archipelago of independent island nations in the Atlantapacific Mega-Basin. Impossible!
Murderous supercomputer HAL 9000 revealed as secret chief ‘Number 1’ of the invisible global order! Man known as ‘The Prisoner’ refuses to answer police questions!
The Great Red Spot on Jupiter - a storm 36 times bigger than the Earth and it’s headed OUR WAY! A five hundred-thousand-mile atmospheric mega-tsunami of corrosive methane, like The Perfect Storm squared then squared again then aimed DIRECTLY at dear old Planet Blighty!
And to think some idiots are still trying to start an ‘80s revival!
Boy George is the man leading them and no good can come of it.
HOW TO STOP SMOKING
The hysterical voices faded. Someone had given the volume control a mercy twist to zero. The Future Dick thanked his strange, impotent gods and lit a cigarette for warmth.
Down by the traffic lights, the homeless man had returned from his miniature odyssey. Shouting in barbaric Greek, he ran around punching the cash machines to make them puke notes up.
‘Invest, invest in lightning rods!
Jupiter is god of gods!’
Each bloodied knuckle seemed to make him richer, more crazy.
UGLY
‘Come Ride My Column’ spun on one of its many ugly axes. It looked like a major road accident on the highway to hell and was supposed to represent a day in the life of the city.
There was a good Samaritan helping his fellow man be sick against the non-sculpture when the whole thing rotated mindlessly in the wind and slashed the do-gooder’s face with the edge representing ‘Participation in Local Government Safety Initiatives’.
I watched him howl like a pup, fingering the strips of skin together as if they’d stick. The Samaritan knew then that the universe simply hated him. His shirt was all sick and blood.
But I wasn’t hungry. Not just yet.
COP
The skate kids were performing late night ice-trickery on their bladed boards, watching the clock as the crowds dispersed. The only cop for miles pretended to have back-up round every corner by talking loudly into his lapel.
Forgotten Art Square was never still. Even the autumnal blue smell-clouds of spent fireworks came and went like foreigners with odd habits.
MUSEUM
And me?
I am the man who comes here often, just to watch the grotesques. I’m sure you’ve seen me.
Every time I catch someone’s eye going in and out of the museum, I know they too have come to look at the grotesques in the forecourt of the Museum of Forgotten Art.
Perhaps, in the end, we are all grotesques in one another’s eyes, unless that is too obvious a thought to be thinking on the cusp of tomorrow.
I have always hated the double absence of my reflection in someone’s spectacles, but I’ve noticed that it happens a lot and I’m slowly coming to terms with the phenomenon.
There are worse things than ‘death’, you see, for I…
I AM THE GHOST OF A VAMPIRE!
MMMM! Duck and clementines!
This year’s Millennium Ghost Story has been brought to you by www.com.com
And please… try not to feel TOO nervous if you live alone… remember, there are no such things as ghosts or monsters.
It’s the PSYCHOPATHS, isn’t it?..