"The Worwd Demands an Expwanation!" (bubble-wrap, coffee, tears, neon and death.)

(originally posted on myspace here)

We were tired at the Dungeons on Saturday, tired but happy, but tired. But happy. We would clean the mystery shit out of each others' eyes or retreat to the storage cupboard, where the tiny gusts provided by the popping of bubble wrap are our only source of fresh air.

The walls of our staff room were now papered with colour photocopies of actual injury, cuts, swellings, bruised ribs, evidence to any visiting nob that we really do take care over our make-up even if the whole lot's drained down our necks within the hour. And what else was new? We have a coffee machine.

The coffee only really kicked in about midnight though. I had wandered around Piccadilly after work, thought of catching "Elegy", but then staggered into HMV and saw a DVD of Xanadu. That might be worth a look, I thought, but resolved to head home and check it out on youtube first, and fell asleep on the tube. It was dark when I got home. A man stood beneath the lamp on the corner outside my house, staring at the pink hoardings. Then he walked off. I walked up, took his place, and saw that Morgan had painted a small mountain landscape on the broken shelf beneath (beneath the heads I posted here two entries back, or the space where those heads had been). And then I went upstairs, remembered I had to find some black articles for my Uncle's funeral on Monday, did nothing about it and logged on to youtube. The coffee kicked in round about the time Gene Kelly steps out of the pink cab in tassles and roller skates:

 

 

The excellent, now-defunct film magazine "Neon" once printed an article called "100 Things That You Don't Get In Movies Anymore", and one of those Things was a still from "Breakdance 2: Electric Boogaloo" with the caption "Everything in this picture". The same goes for this clip, which is ironic since the period it was trying to generate nostalgia for is itself so poorly served (this has to have been one of the films Paul Thomas Anderson showed his crew before they started work on "Boogie Nights"). It made me deliriously happy. And it made me go and look up every single musical number from "Animalympics" I could find, for some reason. Which then made me weep uncontrollably, for some reason. Which made me think, a 33 year-old man sat at a laptop at three in the morning, wearing headphones and crying over Dogra-La, Rene Fromage and Kit Mambo, is that hilarious? I thought so. Ollie had told me to go home and get some sleep and at the time that had seemed like a good idea, but I headed downstairs instead, turned on the real Olympics, and caught the end of what it turns out is a single-sex marathon. And then I got some sleep.

Loads of sleep. I woke up at five in the afternoon, sewed up the trouser-leg on my Italian double-breasted in front of Hellboy, and that's it. The funeral's tomorrow. I've been thinking a lot about what a bad idea they might be, funerals. I don't think I want one. I think if people want to meet up then they'll meet up, and I wouldn't want my corpse there when they do. Uncle David was a Warner though, and the Warners are very different. I'll be reading C. S. Lewis on the train on the way up. I think my Mum would like that. David would write extraordinary responses to anything I did, plays or stories. He's definitely not dead in my head. We'll see.