Success

Mouth-fuck, bum-fuck, fist-fuck, prick-fuck. Ear-fuck, hair-fuck, nose-fuck, toe-fuck. It's all I think about when I'm in my room. Bed-fuck, floor-fuck, desk-fuck, sill-fuck, rug-fuck.

And in the streets. Tarmac-fuck, lamppost-fuck, shopfront-fuck. Bike-fuck, car-fuck, bus-fuck. Rampart-fuck, railing-fuck, rubbish-fuck.

Pen-fuck, clip-fuck, paper-fuck. (I'm at the office now.) Char-fuck, sec-fuck, temp-fuck. Salessheet-fuck, invoice-fuck, phone-fuck.

And everywhere else. Land-fuck, sea-fuck, air-fuck, cloud-fuck, sky-fuck. In all kinds of moods. Hate-fuck, rage-fuck, fun-fuck, sick-fuck, sad-fuck. In all kinds of contexts. Friend-fuck, kid-fuck, niece-fuck, aunt-fuck, gran-fuck, sis-fuck. Fuck-fuck.

The world is boiling. You hardly dare open a paper these days: the news is all of cataclysm and collapse. Tempers are threadbare; the yobs are winning; everybody accepts the fact that they’ve got to get nastier in order to survive. The world is going bad on us. I’m having nothing to do with it.

I try to like the way the world is changing, but there seems to be no extra room for me inside.

I think I'm losing my bottle. I think I'm going tonto.

I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bear to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there’s nothing for you here.

The past weaves round all this; we still duck in and out of its lost but shimmering kingdoms.

My calculations about how to stay alive and sane on this particular planet have clearly been at fault. Lots of people are plenty uglier and poorer than me without seeming to mind, without the self-hate and self-pity – the sentimentality, in a word – that makes me such a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude.

We kept nearly bumping into each other, unavoidably. I wished we could stop avoiding each other long enough to agree to avoid each other properly.

The night was electric — the night was in italics.