DON'T EVER CLICK HERE

DON'T EVER CLICK HERE

With the lights out/
It's less dangerous/
NIRVANA

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August is being followed by two members up the winding path towards the house. They have tattoos, green hair and give the impression of having the combined age of seventeen. I recognize them from somewhere. I think they're bloggers for B.A.M. I think they're the two trolls that got their accounts suspended after they bombarded McDonald's with pictures of dead goats. I can see them through the window while I cook. I'm making pasta, tomato sauce, beansprouts and lentils. No cheese. Jeffrey does not let us use dairy products. Occasionally I will go into Sainsbury's (not the two we firebombed, obviously) and browse the aisles wistfully. He would smell it on me if I ate a Baby Bel. Sometimes I dream of milk. I'm not joking. I dream of swimming with dolphins in rivers of full fat milk. Jeffrey would kill me quicker than a bus in Tavistock Square if I ever drank from the udders of a sentient being. I stir the pan and attempt to roll a joint in my free hand. I fail, and sprinkles of weed fall into the pasta. It doesn't matter too much. Phillip grows the most wonderful gear, which I've been smoking since whenever o'clock, since we don't have clocks in the compound, mainly to keep us in touch with the infinite world of nature.
August gets to the door and I open it, a filter tip stuck to my lower lip. She smiles, that horrifying, wrathful smile.
"What are you doing?"
"I saw you through the window."
The two kids are looking at me with barely concealed contempt.
"Did you?" August looks like she wants to eat my heart.
"I..."
"The secret knock is RAP. RAP RAP. RAP RAP RAP."
"Oh, but..."
"Did you hear what I said?"
"Yes ma'am. I'm..."
I follow her arching finger toward the sign painted above the door.

AT THIS STAGE YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO TRUST ANYBODY

"Barnaby, Jude," August says. "This way."
She does not look at me again and the two kids follow her up the stairs. I go back to my work, shaking slightly.

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After we've eaten, I am left to do the washing up for the compound. I'm hazy, stoned out of my mind. Felicity stumbles downstairs holding Eminem softly and cooing to her. Eminem. We found her in an alleyway with her tail ripped off and one of her eyes removed.
"Cha doing?" Felicity asks. Her bathrobe is open. She takes my hand and places it on her breasts. She hasn't washed in a while, her dreadlocks are matted and sweaty. We wind up fucking, but I don't remember much, just staring up at climax at the B.A.M mascot painted on the wall, a cow in militia gear holding an AK-47. I wake up staring at the static snow on the TV, hissing at me like a snake. Phillip comes in when I'm dressed and he's holding a bucket of blood and entrails.
"Darling," he smiles. I smooth out some blood on his eyebrows and he leans in and kisses me. When I was thirteen I went on holiday to Florence and mother made me stand next to the sign so she could get a picture and told me I was fortunate to be named after such a beautiful city, and father just nodded, a nod that meant this will always be our little secret, and when Phillip is finished he presses a card into my hand. It's the undercover journalist they uncovered a few days ago. He also had a camera, which we've been using on him.
They've been interrogating him in the work room for a few days now. He stopped screaming yesterday. All he does now is whimper like a wounded cat.
"Do you know where the shears are, Florence?" Phillip says, putting his member back in transit.
I pause. Eminem scurries past the hallway alcove. "Is this..."
I look down at the press card. The blood. "Really, necessary?"
He grins, relieved, points at the work room. "Darling, that man in there..."
I light a joint.
"Darling, that man in there is an animal!" He pats me on the head. "Get some sleep."
He finds the shears and goes back to the work room and I hear the reporter start to scream again. Eminem wanders over and I stroke her gently. No point acting on anything. Better just to see. In the morning nothing will have changed.

DIARY OF A TWITTER TROLL

"You're so vain/ I bet you think this song is about you/"
CARLY SIMON

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Every morning I have to remember to smile. Recently the dreams I have been having cause me to wake up with the fear that I am having a heart attack. I went to A and E last week, but they told me I had Post-Traumatic-Stress. They got me to clench my fists and smile as wide as I could. It snapped me back to reality.
I've just returned home from the West End. The mate of mine who texted to tell me yesterday a girl we knew had killed herself took me to see "Looper". I'd already seen it, but liked it more this time round because I wasn't paranoid or drunk. Total Film (or Empire, both are interchangable now) called it "This Decade's THE MATRIX *****" which immediately put me off. I fell asleep during "The Matrix". Also, film criticism is a notoriously unstable artform. Eli Roth called "The Innkeepers" the "scariest movie I've ever seen!" but for this lame attempt at making "The Shining" without knowing how to operate a camera led me to dub this dud as "Normal Activity." I wonder if the fact that Roth was friends with the director had anything to do with his review. Who can say?
It rained today. I love walking in the rain. Piccadilly Circus was flashing adverts for "Skyfall" and Big Macs and brave looking hookers were taking brazen photos of their world with defiant cigarettes clamped firmly between their lipstick grimaces. I had a couple of Budvars in the cinema. It's a nice beer, and almost worth the £9 I spent on the bottles. I'm now back home with my own album "Your Only Friends Are Make Believe" (named after a Bloodhound Gang epic) with a JD and Coke, writing this to put off having to wash up without heating. I have to call the Housing Department to switch me back on, and try to disguise I ripped out all three fire alarms from the flat when they refused to go off, no matter how many windows I opened.
I have a stalker now. I met him in a psychiatric hospital about a month ago, and for some reason I actually thought he could rap. The first three times he turned up at my flat he drunkenly started crying on each occasion, and now brings his hoody mates round because he's convinced I want to "fuck" his "bird". The reality is because I quite literally "fuck" Eminem on my album (possibly the reason for my panic attacks, LOL) I am going to be writing and recording a song about this person. I was composing a catchy hook in my head while we wandered through The National Gallery today, humbled by the Vincent Van Gogh masterpieces and Renaissance depictions of Golgotha. Most wannabe rappers will never understand how I see them. Just more illiterate, ignorant, cowardly and sexually submissive fools.

19/10/2012 Andrew Moody

SUICIDAL DREAM

BLACK HOLE SUN/
WON'T YOU COME/
AND WASH AWAY THE RAIN/
Soundgarden, "Black Hole Sun"

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A mate of mine just texted. He told me a girl we know/knew just committed suicide.
He didn't know how she did it, just that she'd been smoking Crack very recently. I used to smoke Crack. If you're a psychiatric patient under the care of the NHS, it's not exactly difficult to find.
I'm a suicide survivor. The reasons for my attempt (and yes, the intentions were very serious) are too wrapped up in my artistic persona that all I remember is that I couldn't bear the thought of having sex again, so essentially life was not for me. I tried to understand why during the writing of my debut novel SMOKING IS COOL, but no answer was forthcoming, only more questions.
I was first sectioned under the Mental Health Act of 1983 in 2002, just over a year after 9/11. I'm not American, but I remember sitting on the bonnet of a friend's car, smoking a joint, staring up at the empty sky at two in the morning (Tony Blair grounded all flights) and wanting to join the army. I got into work the next day okay, but I was as paranoid as everybody else. Every Muslim I saw wanted to blow me up. Unless they were as scared of being lynched as I was of them wandering up to me and flicking a detonator.
I actually missed the live TV coverage of the second plane. I have a habit of missing things like this. I was in a secure psychiatric hospital during the London Olympics, doing press ups in my room and hallucinating that Absolute Radio worked for MI5 and were sending me subliminal messages. Most of the other 'clients' (the PC way of referring to the patients) were sex offenders and murderers. Unlike them, I have no history of sexual assault or violence on my record, which is why "The Shawshank Redemption" is my favourite movie, even if I share this view with Moors Murderer Ian Brady, possibly the most horrific killer in British history.
I woke up today and the first thing I did was have a JD and Coke. I suppose I'm an alcoholic now. In my defense, so was Charles Bukowski, whose wry, 1989 autobiography "Hollywood" is resting under my sunglasses on the windowsill as kids with Dr Dre headphones wander past, oblivious to my introspection.
Who was this girl? I won't tell you her name, that's the least I can do for her. She loved Eminem. She would obsessively listen to nothing else. I shared a house with her in supported accommodation. She had the downstairs flat, and when I would go for observed medication, all I could hear was Slim Shady screaming from her room. She was a sex abuse victim, had been raped by members of her own family and self-harmed on a serious daily basis. Every time I would see her she was a different person. She dressed like a boy. She had half-hearted tattoos of flowers and teardrops. She had no idea how to be human. She never had a chance. I have tears in my eyes right now, because the weight of her unfortunate life has hit home. I have known a lot of suicides. Maybe twenty? If you're a psychiatric patient it goes with the territory. I'm going to pour myself another drink.
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I've been listening to Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" on repeat for about an hour now. I used to play saxophone. I took it with me to Amsterdam when I was 19, six months before I was sectioned, busking for beer money by Centraal Station. All I could remember were the opening notes to the Pink Panther and the E-Minor scale. The sax is mainly down to breathing and knowing how to tongue the reed, so I would scratch enough to get a room in a hostel and a bag of weed. All I wanted back then was to be a writer. I obsessively fetishize everything, I've been doing it since I was a kid. I was writing sex scenes when I was eleven. The worst part about this news is that I will forget about it. I am no longer shocked by death. Think about Tony Scott. Michael Winner. Heath Ledger. Kurt Cobain. Amy Winehouse. Jim Morrison. The members of the 27 Club. How is one supposed to react to these things? The answer is there is no answer. I've tried to deal with this girl for a long time, we all wanted to help her. One thing you learn after you understand the basic tenets of psychiatric hospitals? You can't save them all. What else can I say?

Andrew Moody, 18/10/2012