G*d, The Devil, and Th*m*s M*gn*m (or, Why I've chosen to grow a moustache)

Dear G*d, 

I am a fraud. 

Now, in exchange for a confession, I request a transformation. Turn me into a swimmer. Let me take one drink, and then, G*d, lead me through your old and winding streets, all the way to one of your fancy-ass hype man priests. I'll bring my pistol and my flask. 

Churches make me queasy. Idiots singing poorly. 

Father (you remind me of Coolio), I confess. I'm one of those pricks who pretends to speak French. I'm a victim of Being There and always saying Yes. I confess. There's a sweetness in my soul. 

Don't tell. 

I did not grow up in the church, and, as such, I do not understand it. Do you, G*d, get off on people's secrets (I do)? Does it keep you from rifling through drawers and medicine cabinets (I do that too and have made many great discoveries). Man, I imagine, with all you've seen, you could write some incredible erotic fiction. I like your house. It's a speakeasy. You say the magic words and boom! the expanse of the universe opens up and yields itself unto you. You're such a lucky bastard, aren't you, G*d, you omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent asshole. I'd like to be your friend, although you come across a tad needy. 

Earlier I ate some drugs. Now, here I am, confessing to Coolio, nodding off to the distant hooting of an owl and the purr of a sports car. You must think I'm a mess. But I feel like a summer's breeze. 

Would it be rude if I peeled and ate this hard-boiled egg in front of you? 

There we go. Yummy, yummy. Now, G*d, I'm in heaven. 

I'm all heavenly with my egg, that is, until I try to conjure you, G*d (not Coolio), in my mind. It does piss me off that you are invisible. Seems like an odd decision on your part. Surely you could have made yourself cooler. You could rave and howl, a compound beast; an awesome creature with a donkey dick. But instead you chose to house the essence of an owl. 

Hoot hoot. 

Do you want to flap your downy wings and open a new door? I'll lend you my pistol and my flask. The only way out. 

I'd kill you for justice. You know I would. To save the world. 

Here, Dear Baby, I took a piss outside and fell over on the lawn. Up became down. Drunk and deranged, my mood flipped. I walked back into the church angry as hell. 

Seeing red, I shouted. 

Fuck you, G*d! And fuck your fancy-ass hype man priest! I've got tickets to see Rodriguez and don't have time for this shit. Cold fact. Just remember this. The howl is mightier than the hoot. 

Oh, shit..... I've made a bad decision and now I've got the spins. I am a mixture of alcohol and regret. I wonder, Am I just a toy to keep G*d from fidgeting? I am a wheel within a wheel, a howl within a howl, a whimper within a wimp, as my shape, it shifts, and like Alice I shrink. 

I lose all my body hair. 

I re-acquire my conscience. 

Squeaks stick in the cracks of my voice. 

Oh, G*d, I am in puberty once again. Oh no no no. 

I shift from blackout into a garden at dawn. Welcome to the fucking pleasure dome. Welcome to fucking Eden. Tiffany swims in a pool of Green Chartreuse. Well, I think we're alone now, but we are in a very sticky situation. 

I take a drink of the water and it tastes like fire. 

Tiffany, naked in an emerald pool, her smooth chest rising and falling from physical exertion, swims toward me, eyes full of lust. She warbles a deep cut from her second album. I intuitively recognise it as a veiled ode to sex. My brain swims with chemicals.  

I murmur softly, mournfully. Tiffany I am so horny right now. 

Talk about a shitty time to revert to adolescence. I don't know what to do or where to put it (this was before the internet). And I'm very, very spotty. 

Dear Baby, I hated being a teenager. I stayed in bed and never left. I'd watch action drama comedies from the '80s (it was the '90s). I wonder if this is where the sweetness came from? 

Tiffany, being with you is absolute torture on my balls. Forgive me if I act like an ape. Get me out of this damned pleasure dome. 

And look who it is, grinning and giggling behind a bush, eating a peach with his donkey dick out. Ah, yes, it's you, the moustachioed Mephistopheles. Hello Satan. You are a g*d-damned bully, aren't you? But you are much cooler than G*d (it even says so on your t-shirt--you've even included the "o". Naughty). 

Me and the devil became fast friends. The rest of the night is a blur. I remember racing dirt bikes and jumping out of a helicopter that looked like an Easter egg. Satan likes X-treme sports, apparently. They aren't really my thing. And there were a lot of drugs. Uppers. Not really my thing, either, uppers. 

Here, Dear Baby, I vomited a long one. One where you can't believe your body can be so toxic. I felt like I'd been fighting in Vietnam. The acid destroyed my voice. Down became dawn. I looked deep into the emerald water, now stained with my bile, and saw myself, but not as myself. I was no longer an adolescent. I was bigger. And I had a moustache. 

I knew that enough had been enough. 

I remember all those hours in bed as a teenager, feeling sad and afraid about a girl. I'd watch you, M*gn*m, on the television, not realising I'd discovered the third way of existence. Now, via this incredible moustache, I have become you, Th*m*s M*gn*m, my idol (I do believe in idolatry). Now, let's crack open a beer and take a joy ride in our 1981 Ferrari 308GTSi Quattrovalvole.  

"Nigel," you say to me, you, Th*m*s M*gn*m, in a voice without pretension, totally accepting that you cannot, and never will, speak French. "I've been with you this whole time."

My eyes went misty and I wept. 

Hoot hoot. 

"The Ghost of Elle Macpherson"

Dear Elle, 

As your name implies, you have many manifestations. You are a letter; you are a woman; in France, you would be a pronoun. In Paris you gobble up your steak tartare, the beautiful raw yolk of an egg curving on the verge of spilling out all over that beautiful meat. 

Oh, yeah, that's it, baby. 

Who would have thought you were also an Australian? 

And you gave me my first boner, though I did not know at the time it had a name. All I knew is that, like rock and roll, I liked it. It was Scott Cochrane who told me it had a name: Boner. We used to hang in the suburbs, watching Top Gun, RAD, and Def Leppard videos. 

I thought Def Leppard was a band composed of disabled people. This was on account of the word "def" in their name (perhaps that was the singer) along with the presence of a one-armed drummer and the band name spelled in a manner symptomatic of a learning disability. "Pour Some Sugar On Me" was perhaps a sexual ode to the placebo. 

At the time I thought, "I don't really like this... But I suppose it's impressive, considering they are disabled." I was more into the impish athleticism of Gowan. 

Shall I compare thee, Elle Macpherson, to Def Leppard? You have both your arms, and, as far as I can tell, not a single flaw (but what hides behind those grains of sand sticking to your perfect breasts?). 

I remember the first time I saw you. It was in a magazine called "Elle". Puberty is a confusing time for a young man, and this didn't help. 

Anyway, what I want to say is, "Thank you for the warm and lovely boner, Elle." It was my first. When I compare it to my most recent boner, there are many superficial similarities. But, ever since I divorced your feeble replacement, Laura, they have lost their beautiful simplicity 

Yours, 

- Nigel Tewksbury

Madness returns

In 2007 a volcano exploded. Out spewed A Season in Hell. A whirlwind, composed of booze and Tatiana, followed, and, when the dust settled, I looked in the dirty bathroom mirror--lit, weirdly, by a desk lamp--and saw a thin grey cat. Part aesthete, part recluse, but cursed with a sandpaper tongue. 

Six hours a day I run, but can't escape confusion. Tired and twitching I dream of murdering aliens--brutally--a smashing of their spaceship, a slitting of their throats--but the world is angry with me because such brutalised bodies are of no use to science. Well, what I can say... I was caught in the moment. 

Last night I confessed to my girlfriend that I had sex with an elf. But it was purely psychological. 

I tried to write a saga but could not make it sensible as my reality is fragmented and backwards. I blame those little green messages pretending to be red. Instead of work I dream of being alone in volcanic landscape, the meaning deepening knowing there is no one to share it, except, perhaps, for some hidden folk in the moss and rocks. 

They demand no explanation and invite me to the party. 

There's little in the taste to distinguish the vodka from water and the madness has returned worse than ever. It does that. Between two worlds on a tourist's bus, Dante's midlife crisis is called to mind. All I can say is Alexandra Palace belongs to the people and Massari seems unaffected by the economic crisis. And I wonder why parting is full of ice and fire.