I wanted this novel to be gritty, involved with the bits that other novels leave out, the toilet, the pain and grubbiness of normal life, the boredom and mundanity of existence. I don’t know how straight straight is. I don’t care what is cool. I wanted to describe the reality. However, you’ll be pleased to know that in these extracts I am missing out some of the more vulgar parts. Am I censoring myself? I wonder.
Excerpt – 53 and imploding
Perhaps there is no sense to it or order in anything? The order of our everyday life is a superficial structure we impose over the chaos. I seek to only sip the spice of the sauce as I slowly suck a single strand of life into my mouth. It is so rich that it addles the palate. I wonder what my work colleagues would make of this? They seem to suffer the same scabby little existences, lusting after each other, living in their squalid small lives and narrow horizons as I peer out at them through these slots into the universe from my own limited perspective. I live inside my head where my inner life is a seething spaghetti seeped in rich sauce. They see a funny little fat man. I smile. I whistle. I talk. I teach. I manage. I feel my incompetence. I do them an injustice. Perhaps the piquancy of their sauce is every bit as rich as the flavour I am sucking out of life; perhaps their heads are as full of spaghetti as mine; probably I see as little of the icebergs of their existence as they see of me. I have little desire to share it all with them. I save that for my few true friends. I am not sure what constitutes a friend – probably someone you can fully open up to.
Tom has gone to bed with his pasta. I no longer need to piss. It has passed. I am tired. I should stop and go to bed. Jan is asleep. I have to be up tomorrow. I will be dead. Fuck tomorrow. My coffee has cooled and is drinkable. Tom makes crap coffee. I don’t know why. He makes it the same as I do. I am holding a gulp in my mouth. It is warm. I move my tongue through it. I taste it at the back of my mouth. I swallow a little. If I move my tongue through it it feels warm. It is cooling. I swallow it.
This is an anti-story. It will confuse and exasperate as I slither from one thought and experience through this mess of juice. I am unravelling spaghetti and allowing each strand to slither down into my gut as I suck the flavour out of it.
I have no interest in the neat little lives, the tales of the city. I want to describe the things between. I want to dwell on the mundane; the chaos of real life; to interlope along unplanned meandering intersections.
53 and imploding eBook : goodwin, opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store