UNDER GOD'S CAR

The invisible confines of your perceived freedom: The body you inhabit. The landmass that restricts your movement unless you have the money and authorisation required for foreign travel. The languages you speak and your inability to speak. Your need for air and nourishment. Your fear of opprobrium. The ideas that come out of the telly, the awful fuckin telly. The ideas that come out of the mouths of your friends. What your parents told you. What your parents failed to tell you. What your teachers taught you. What your teachers failed to teach you. The money you save. The bills you pay. Your responsibilities and your irresponsibility. Those new shoes you have your eye on. The people you have your eye on. The people who have their eye on you, or keep an eye out for you, or the people who might scratch your eyes out. Your eyes. Books and magazines and papers and the words in those books and magazines and papers. Street signage. Streets. Road signs. Roads. Gardens. Buildings. Rooms. Houses. Cars. Car alarms and house alarms. People who are easily alarmed. The alarm on your clock and the clock itself. Especially the clock - the big hand, the little hand, all the numbers they point to and what they mean. The places you should be. The way you get to those places. The time it takes you to get there. The guilt you feel when you don't go. The guilt you feel when you don't go anywhere. The shame of loitering. Your dirty secret life of taking it easy. Your need to contribute. Your unease at accepting contributions. Your tolerance of frequent acts of officially sanctioned theft. The benefits this theft brings you. The things that are stolen from you. The myth of the meritocracy. Your utter mediocrity. Your hypocrisy and your inability to see that you are a hypocrite. The threat of heavy fines or custodial sentences. Guns – even if you never see them, you know that they are there.

But the waft of ineffable liberation is occasionally detectable, in the quieter moments. Fully asleep or half awake. Day dreaming under a dead tree - gazing at stratocumuli drifting above a crooked creaking lattice – floating beyond the bars of a cage. Stuck here but it's not so bad. It's a bit of a laugh. The holidays are coming up. You might win some money. You might 'get lucky'. You could go to the movies. Maybe there's something on the telly, the awful fuckin telly. Did you see the thing that was on last week? It was mad. The Devil put a bomb under God's car.

FATEBOOK

I’m setting up a social networking site called FATEBOOK, a new online space where you can get together and chatter away, post pictures of yourselves doing dynamic things and generally make out like you’re all well adjusted and successful. ‘Hit the gym before work then closed a sweet deal’. ‘Saw a darling pair of Jimmy Choos going for a song, soooooo happy.’ ‘Check out my beautiful and intelligent children enjoying a party in the spacious/tasteful décor of our family home where we live with our good genes.’ Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

As disciples of the mutually alienating façade, I’m sure you’ll enjoy availing of this opportunity to keep up with the Joneses to the nth degree. Come to Fatebook and sell yourselves to each other like pieces of Tupperware. Human Tupperware. Insincere Tupperware. You’ll all be so busy showing everyone who hated you in school how great your life is these days that you’ll not take the time to ponder why I have gathered you all one place. There is a reason. One reason and one reason only.
. . .I’m turning on the gas.

‘But Mr. Fugger, why do you hate us so?’ I hear you ask and I’ll tell you: I hate you because you have chosen perception over reality, because you communicate in a manner more suited to a PR company than a human-being, because you make out like you want to socialise but you really want to make each other feel alone, because your aspirations are adapted from tacky commercials for toothpaste, life insurance and automobiles, because you degrade the facility for genuine human communication and instead embrace a dead eyed demon with a rictus grin called consumption. Finally, and most of all, I hate you because you are boring me to death.

‘Why is the site called Fatebook Mr. Fugger?’ I hear you asking now and I’ll tell you this too. As lord and ruler of Fatebook, I have possession of the Ultimate Control Panel (UCP). Like all Fatebookers, I’ll be able to send a smiley, nudge, poke, tickle and do all the other things users can do (and will do, ad nauseam) but my UCP will also offer me an exclusive extra option, the Destroy option. I’ll be checking out the exhibitionist little displays and updates of your pseudo-lives and, when you have roused my ire to a sufficient extent, I’ll click on ‘Destroy’.

Fatebook will possess occult properties (you’ll be able to tell from the little pentagrams and goat head symbols that litter the interface) and these properties will enable me to place curses upon users. You’ll spot the cursed Fatebookers when you notice their pages slowly transforming into catalogues of disaster. Pages, that once portrayed contrived exuberance, will chart personal failings, insecurities and admissions of dishonesty. Eventually, I’ll destroy every single one of you until you are united in humility. The only way to transcend this humility will be via honesty, mutual understanding and genuine empathy.

I know what you’re thinking, ‘I’m not signing up to his social network’ but you will, believe me. The lure will be too sweet. The chance to passively, indirectly but effectively thumb your noses at each other and make out you're something you’re not will be too irresistible to ones as petty and relentlessly egotistical as yourselves. The image of yourselves as beaming charity paragliders (or whatever persona you’ve selected) will fracture and the truth will come pouring out the cracks like wonderful puke. It’ll be for your own good. Your fate will be in my hands. DESTROY!

In other news: check the RDC update! A delightful 3 Page Origin story from All Rise.

Missing: Little Agatha 'Aggie' Bainbridge!

I'm really engrossed in the unravelling tale that has followed the disappearance of Little Agatha 'Aggie' Bainbridge from her home in Basingstoke one month ago today. It is a true tragedy but it is also so much more than that. I couldn't say it better than Take A Break magazine when they wrote of events, 'if you wept for young Maddy then you'll bawl for Little Aggie'. TV Quick agreed saying, 'it's devastating, tears are streaming down my face, I can't turn the television off'. But it was The Star that reminded us of the gritty yet equally relevant aspects to the case when they wrote 'Child Cannibal Claims Fifth?' All possibilities must be kept open. This is a sorrow shrouded in mystery.

Sky News featured a lovely piece about a young girl, around Aggie's age, who made an ingenious diorama of the crime scene in the hopes that it would refresh the memories of those who were in the area that day. She won a prize. We can only feel for the British nation as it clutches its commemorative dolls and tea towels to its chest. (Besides the sad image of little Aggie and the words 'bless her little heart', the tea towels are also helpfully emblazoned with the phone number of the confidential police hotline.) Little Agatha 'Aggie' Bainbridge truly is this year's Holly and Jessica.

Of course, I'm beginning to slightly resent the mother, Janet Bainbridge. I hate to say it but she doesn't seem that bothered. Where are her tears? Where is the anguish? They say she bought new shoes for the press conference and is selling pictures of her new patio to Hello. Where are her priorities? I would never come right out and say that she had something to do with Aggie vanishing but she has the look of a woman with secrets to hide, a bit like a murderess might.

'You'll come for the sadness but you'll stay for the mystery of Little Agatha 'Aggie' Bainbridge', reads the blurb on the back of a new book entitled Missing Angel that has been appropriately prompt in reaching the market. Tony Parson's concurred when he described the events as 'fantastic viewing' on BBC2's Late Night Review. On the same show Ekow Eshun said the coverage was 'tawdry' but 'a guilty pleasure nonetheless' before saying something about the semiotic significance of Aggie's Peppa Pig hair clip that was found two days into the exhaustive search.

Let's hope there is a breakthrough soon. Little Agatha 'Aggie' Bainbridge TM will remain in all our hearts for the next good while at least. I better stop typing now because I want to log on to the littleaggie.co.uk forum and see if anyone has replied to the remarks I left about Janet's choice in blouse when she gave today's statement.