Try a little tenderness, you magniloquent bastard

It is Sunday evening; I am not the same man I was Friday night. For it was in the witching hours of Freya's honoured day that Nigel Tewksbury as you know him died in a Soho brothel. I had spent the day smoking hashish and reading Le Petit Prince while languishing semi-nude (no bottoms) beside a secluded rill. The drugs had almost tricked me into believing I was inhabiting some kind of earthly paradise, but then, all of a sudden, there was a windy chill that awoke me to the weird horrors of reality. I suddenly remembered it was garbage day and that it was my responsibility to take the rubish to the curb (as Helga is in Las Vegas or God-knows-where).

And thus Harmony was destroyed by Noise (it is certainly one of history's sad trends, wouldn't you say?). Anyhow, I was so upset at being awoken to Facts that I decided, To Hell with it, Nigel, let's go to the brothel--and let us make love to the most deformed prostitute available. Life is a freak show--let's bring the carnival into the bedroom.

(Forgive me for using the royal "We," but I was feeling rather bombastic at the time).

Her name was Chastity--can you believe it?!--and she was barely four foot tall and had no teeth. She was one of those whores who liked to talk afterwards--I normally despise the kind--but for some reason I listened to her because I was so full of boredom and insomnia that I couldn't even be bothered to ignore the bitch. She informed me that she was married to some fat dullard and that she had a teen-aged son. She said she prostituted to buy her son a computer as he was technologically-inclined. And I responded by saying, "Where can I reach him? He can have a go at fixing my printer."

And the worst thing happened here. I actually cared! I could afford the best fucking technician on the continent but instead I hired the son of a freakish whore! And as I let Chastity go down on me a second time--more out of charity than desire--I thought to myself, "Try a little tenderness, you magniloquent bastard." And at that moment, I experienced a profound jouissance--damn it, it was terrifying. I fell asleep wanting to be a better man, and I realized I can be a real asshole sometimes--for God's sake, I decapitated a gibbon not too long ago! And that night I dreampt I reassembled old Harold and he went swinging through the trees like he was new. His smiling gibbon's face will haunt me forever, the damn ghost!

And as I left in the morning, I gave the sleeping Chastity a kiss on the cheek that may have even been sincere.

Dear Abby, I am full of confusion.

Getting to know me

Dear Reader, do you think you know me, Nigel Tewksbury, Recluse/Aesthete? Are you so bold? Have you read all my mad ramblings? Still, I dare say, you know me not. It is not all opium and absinthe, you know--I put my bespoke trousers on one leg at a time like the rest of you. But just for fun let us here put down a virtual interview for I am feeling rather madcap. Perhaps the questions will sound familiar. They were originally used by Bernard Pivot who semi-derived them from that memory-obsessed man Marcel Proust. I have heard that some fat American has adapted them for a television show in which he interviews celebrities--how positively dreary! Let us for a moment pretend that Americans don't pervert everything good and true and get on with the questions, shall we?

(To make this even more fun, let us imagine that the interviewer is Shakespeare's puck, Robin Goodfellow).

RG: What is your favorite word?
NT: Juvenillia. Always I have wanted to be a great author with a tenured position at Cambridge. At the end of the day, I would say to my students, "Now go home and work on your juvenillia, while I work on my masterpiece."
RG: Hahaha. You are quite the wit!

RG: What is your least favorite word?
NT: Syphilis.

RG: What is your favorite drug?
NT: Oh, that is like asking me my favourite child... And the answer to both is, Opium.
RG: Oh my!

RG: What sound or noise do you love?
NT: Moaning.

RG: What sound or noise do you hate?
NT: It is a tie between the chewing of gum and the death rattle. Both are awful, yet oddly if a gum-chewer were to suddenly switch to a death rattle, I could not help but smile. Puck where did you go?
RG: I'm over here... (throws voice). Over here! ( throws voice). Over here!
NT: Gasp!

RG: What is your favorite curse word?
NT: Oh, you're back. The answer is "shit." I love the toilet and how it perns in a gyre.
RG: Ah, a Yeats fan?
NT: Indeed. He wrote some cracking verse. I'll often read him in the loo.

RG: Who would you like to see on a new banknote?
NT: I despise the idea of money as art, so no one I respect. Oh, what the hell, let's use Spongebob, for he is as nonsensical and beloved as money to both lowbrows and middlebrows.

RG: What profession other than your own would you not like to attempt?
NT: Profession!? Perish the thought. All of them are so... vacuous!
RG: Tell me about it! Oberon and Titania won't let me rest.
NT: Hahaha. Oh, Robin, you are an imp.

RG: If you were reincarnated as some other plant or animal, what would it be?
NT: Titania's animal lover, of course.

RG: If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
NT: "Tewksbury, you make for a fucking gorgeous corpse." And I would say, "But I'm a damn ugly ghost, I'm afraid."
RG: Oh Nigel, you don't even give God the best lines!
NT: Yes, well wit was never really His thing. I have Him pegged as a bit of a moralizer.

Tales of escapades, not my own

Over the last several months I have received a number of letters from Myoki and Helga. The letters are always written on crumpled up paper that is covered by patchwork stains of what I hope and presume is wine and coffee. The letters are typically in the vein of the braggart and always written in Myoki's barely intelligible English made worse by what seems to be perpetual drunkenness. Upon opening the first missive with my elephant tusk letter-opener, there was a sharp pang in the chest when I was exposed to the sharp juxtaposition of Myoki's sloppy oriental style and what appeared to be the ink from my most valuable Mont Blanc fountain pen, which I just noticed had disappeared from its velvet sheath. And I collapsed on my bed in a state of indolent fury, wondering if Myoki's placidity was destroyed by my bad influence or if it had been feigned from the get-go. Regardless, he is a devil for whom I have no respect.

The letters--from what I can make out--describe exotic, whirling escapades. Myoki and Helga have moved from the syncopated jazz rhythms of Paris cafes to the beautiful shores of Algiers to the hidden Hashish bars of Hamburg and finally to the remote fjord-town of Akureyri, Iceland, the place of Helga's conception and birth. And in all of these epistles there is not a peep from Helga, and I confess to feeling a tinge of human emotion for her, even though she blatantly disregarded her duties in favour of roaming the world with a potbellied guru. The final letter I received described a journey to the Icelandic interior where the lovers supped on rotten shark meat and got drunk on cod liver oil spiked with vodka. Myoki says they then passed out on a glacier while the northern lights vibrated above them in the absolute cold. He writes that they would have died were they not saved by a band of nomadic gnomes searching the interior for a hidden musical note. His final sentence was a haiku:

left interior
though small, gnomes' jealousy, big
Helga caged bird

And today I received a postcard from Vegas simply saying, "Just Married." Oh Hell!

An open letter to The Baron of the Trees

Dear Baron,

I thank you for your comment. It is nice to know there is at least one maniac who reads my words. You see, in all your omniscient posing, you seem to have missed the blatantly obvious: I live a rather scandalous lifestyle and am unafraid of Death and his shadowy train of followers. Rather, I welcome them. My psychologist/lover tells me this rather fiendish aspect of my character is my dramatic way of laughing at the Dionysian aspect of the World. Sometimes I wish I had let her expand on that thought rather than expanding myself and mounting her on the chaise longue. But I digress...

What I am trying to say--rather sententiously, I confess (forgive me, for I am feeling languid)--is: Bring it on, Baron. Besides your threatening words and your apparent hackery of of the estate's sophisticated wireless Internet connection (By the way, I am close personal friends of both webmasters and centaurs), I see no evidence of your power. Consequently I think of you as some kind of impotent Satan with a course in Computer Science under his gaudy country-and-western belt.

So please, go ahead and attempt murder, because often I dream of death and find it a rather peaceful alternative to the hustle and bustle of the world. Truly if you wanted to shock me, threaten appearing at my door in a black belt and brown shoes while devouring a McDonald's cheesed Hamburg sandwich open-mouthedly and eructating between gluttonous swallows, for that is a more fearful thought to me.

If you are serious about this murder thing, stop by for a spot of tea first and have a go at fixing my printer.

Sincerely,

Nigel Tewksbury

P.S.
I have left you a gift by the fountain. One of Santa's elves told me you wanted a bloody gibbon's head.

A blogger's jeremiad

Good Morning, I suppose. I awoke, unfortunately, to the ringing of a telephone. Upon picking up the receiver, I mumbled a groggy "Hello," and after an unconventionally long pause, the voice on the other end uttered a similar "Hello." I immediately hung up because at this rate our conversation would go nowhere--it would be an endless string of meaningless greetings. I pinched myself to ensure I was not having another dream in which I am the sole performer in one of Beckett's lost plays. Oh how awful to wake from a sweet repose with a reminder of the world's vacuity! No doubt the disembodied voice on the other end was trying to peddle some of his useless wares.

I have grown sick of the world's money fetish and how money is our dreams and buys our dreams and how money buys other money which is merely money which is merely paper and ink. For some sick reason our Desire as humans has become this paper and ink, and the whole world moves like a mass of automatons, powerless over their collective fate, on metaled rails, in pursuit of this paper-desire, and when it finally achieves it, hoping it has finally found satiety, its desire paradoxically grows, and the mass of automatons builds new, bigger, better, more conductive metaled rails on which to ride in its meaningless, impotent pursuit of mass-produced paper and ink. And on and on it goes, straight into a sterile Hell.

And who am I to pen this blogger's jeremiad? True, my desires are not utterly tainted, for I desire Love and Creativity above all. But I wonder if it is because--through the lucky accident of primogeniture--I have so much of that paper and ink for which the common world longs (and I must admit I spend a great deal of it rather frivolously). No doubt I am a hypocrite. Damn this toilet-world, spinning and whirling down, down, down into the rat-infested sewers of which I am the king (or at least a powerful lord).

Oh well, I suppose I must arise and face the day, though I fear it has been completely ruined by that dimwitted telemarketer. My only consolation is looking forward to a suitable hour to get drunk. Let us say 10:00 A.M. (though I confess I keep my clocks a little fast because I often cannot wait).