It’s probably a sales call, you know one of those auto-diallers that so many companies use, they just go off sometimes, as if they have a mind of their own, clicking and whirring away and somehow ending up at my number. Still they let me have last week off, which was nice seeing as my father was down for the night, drinking his Stella, complaining about the Monarchy, complaining about the government, telling me the country has gone to the dogs. I nodded.

The clues are:-

It happens at 3:30am and only ever on a Friday Night.

The number has been blocked, it’s untraceable, god knows why British Telecom do that, it’s only going to be some freak hiding their number, or of course a corporation and their sales machines. Don’t get me wrong, they by law have to make someone talk at the other end, you don’t get to talk to the machine, but the silence just before the drone starts to speak, it feels like, well forever really.

I am not important enough to be bugged, I haven’t done enough to warrant the expense, I’ll tell you when if I do, it’ll probably be when I’m living somewhere other than this dive for a start.

I used to get them far more often, I think a local taxi company used to have almost the same number, just one digit out, I called them accidentally one night, that was strange. My partner, Christina, her voice had dropped and she wanted to know where I was going. I was stumped, a philosophical darkness fell around me, then I realised, it was a cabbie.

Well I don’t have any clues I suppose, I just like to think it’s a mystery, it’s what you do when you’re an insomniac, well at least I do, I imagine plots thickening. Most likely it’s a drunk, an old friend, a drunk old friend, or then again an  old drunk enemy. Perhaps a Christian fundamentalist, I’ve had some hate mail regarding Black Christ. Simply a matter of miscommunication. I suppose that’s why we have art.

Right now I’m two-thirds through my latest work. It’s called Bill and Ben, and it looks something like this:-

If you don’t know what this is about then you’re not British, I can tell, most British people will tell you exactly why it’s called ‘Bill and Ben’, and I myself will probably delve into it deeply soon. All I know is that after 24 hours without sleep, at 5:30am on a Saturday morning in November, it’s too cold to type, think, or even breathe.

Of course I’m asking for trouble, I know, I’m almost begging for it. I think all ex-suicides have a fantasy of being knocked-off, it takes the weight of responsibility off their shoulders, should karma ever intervene. No, I know I don’t know what comes next, I’m just hoping it doesn’t involve a physical body, bodies are after all depressing. You can eat as much health food and exercise all you like, but eventually you will rot like the best and the worst of us.

The most you can hope for is some kind of fitting tribute at the end, I’d like an unmarked pile of ash scattered at the local tip if possible. It isn’t me, it’s just carbon. Besides I’ve known crematorium workers in my time. They scoop up a little of the charred remains and mix it with a pile of ground up bones, any old bones, and that’s if they’re professionals. The others would rather feed them to stray dogs.

The most fitting memories we have are in our minds, or to be more precise, in our brains. Unfortunately our brains will die, and so our best course of action is to use them, to what purpose, I don’t know to what effect, for the majority of us, very little most likely. Still thought and the resultant emotion is all we really have. The ability to reason, and the hope that we can communicate a slither of those ideas to other brains, like a virus if you will, or if you won’t. Some ideas live on, they are fitting memories.

I’ll just sit here now and stare at this page, and smoke, and in a twisted sort of fashion, hope the paranoia machine calls me again. You never know, it might happen. Good night, good morning, good grief.

This post is tagged art, auto diallers, big Ben, bugging, cabbie, christian fundamentalist, conspiracy, corporation, depression, drone, freak, god, government, Graham Bell, hate mail, insomniac, miscommunication, monarchy, old bill, paranoia, sales and marketing, state, taxi