A buckarastano is the long, hard process of separating the cherries from the pearls. It is the earthquake that combs an eye into stone with a strange joy.
At the top of the pyramid, you can see for miles. You can flip open a box of gorgeousness and glimpse the undiscovered country.
A buckarastano is a business card printed with special ink. When you read it, you will see the red strings of human relations and realise that Heath Ledger is omnipresent. Om nom nom nom.
If someone tells you a story about a pine needle in a new life, that is a buckarastano. If you use a search engine to find your tongue, that is a buckarastano. If you see a calling card for UNO WHO while on public transport, that is the happiest buckarastano of all.
An Englishman needs to ruin an expensive taste to feel satisfied…
‘Life.exe’ is a novella which explains more about what a buckarastano is, and is also a buckarastano itself. It is out now, published by Philistine Press.
The RSPCI intends to create a world in which humans respect and live in harmony with our friends in the insect kingdom.
The RSPCI as a charity will, by all lawful means, prevent cruelty, promote kindness to and alleviate the suffering of all insects. The RSPCI considers anyone who torments insects to be nothing more than a cockroach.
The RSPCI intends to achieve its mission by:
educating the public on the misery that insects face as a result of abuse, neglect and systematic torture
violently enforcing the law with regard to insect abuse, and publicly naming and shaming repeat offenders
providing insects with a safe place to recuperate from their abuse
The RSPCI does not support spiders in any way whatsoever. Spiders are arachnids and therefore not under the jurisdiction of a charitable society dedicated to insects. In fact, the RSPCI is officially scared of spiders and would encourage you to destroy them.
In spring, the RSPCA receives many enquiries about baby insects. In most cases the following advice is given:
“Abandoned” bee cubs
During spring and early summer, RSPCI wildlife hospitals and insect centres are inundated with bee cubs brought in by well-meaning people who believe the bees have been abandoned or orphaned. It is perfectly normal for bees to buzz around by themselves. Please don’t be tempted to “rescue” them. The Queen Bee is probably nearby and the sight of one of her children being taken away may cause her to inject venom into the honey supply out of spite. 170 people were killed last year by venom-filled honey.
Abandoned baby stick insects
Please leave abandoned baby stick insects alone. If you find one out of its nest, it has probably been rejected for being incestuous. Young stick insects have a tendency to show an excessive amount of affection to their parents or siblings. If they are developed enough to do this, they are probably also developed enough to trade affection for food in the outside world.
Beliefs are like dogs. Everyone’s entitled to have one, but you need to be a responsible owner. If you take your belief out for a walk and it bites another belief in the street, it’s your fault. If your belief repeatedly attacks others, your credentials as an owner will be called into question. Ultimately, if you cannot keep a dangerous belief under control, you forfeit your right to own one.
Owning a belief is a big commitment. Before getting one, make sure you are intellectually capable of looking after it. Beliefs are not status symbols. They may appear cute when in their infancy, but some can grow up to become large and demanding. It is also important to remember that if you don’t get your belief from a reputable source, it is likely to be prone to health problems. A sick belief can be extremely costly.
I spent most of yesterday airbrushing photos of celebrities in order to replace each famous conk with a flat area of skin. I had just read Gogol’s The Nose and wanted to see exactly what a snootless person looks like. I was so delighted with my first Photoshop experiment that I quickly set to work transforming the faces of various public figures in order to make a Celebs Without Noses gallery for this website. After hours of toiling away like a rhinoplasty surgeon, it occurred to me to check online just in case someone had already done the same thing. I really didn’t think I’d find anything along the same lines, so the discovery of an entire website and a number of other galleries dedicated to noseless stars really knocked me for six.
I always find it equally encouraging and frustrating when I come across a twin of one of my ideas. The knowledge that there are creative agents stationed all over the globe working towards filling the Infinite Library with weird and wonderful things is encouraging, but the thought that my attempts at originality aren’t good enough is frustrating. Discovering, for instance, that my hard work in my teenage years replacing each noun in famous texts with the next noun listed in the dictionary had already been done decades earlier by the Oulipo writers felt like my creativity was simultaneously endorsed and ripped to shreds by literary celebrities.
When Captain Scott found a Norwegian flag flying at the South Pole, it made his expedition seem pointless but also proved that he was on the right track. Removing a celebrity’s sniffer and finding someone else’s flag waving me away is therefore not such a disaster, provided I don’t die on the journey back from the idea (the more “out-there” a person’s plans are, the greater the likelihood of them meeting their end in a hostile wilderness).
If at some point in the future I am found frozen in ice after a doomed expedition, I hope that my death serves as an inspiration rather than a deterrent to potential explorers. I realise that I’m comparing an afternoon of Photoshop masturbation with a heroic Antarctic mission, but at least that’s something no one has done before.
Today I drank the best cup of tea of my life. Before I’d even taken a sip I knew it was going to be special. Having observed myself working up a head of steam while preparing the drink, it was clear that I was ready to punk in with all my being to rescue joy from the bottom of a ceramic cup.
The beverage itself was a simple solution for a complex problem. I still don’t know exactly what sorts of issues were swirling in the air at that moment, but a pour and a stir blew them straight out the window.
The most important thing, however, was that I was completely immersed in my role as an absorber. There was a tea-shaped void in my body waiting to be filled. The countdown to the correct temperature and the launch of the first quantity of liquid into my mouth felt like a list of reasons why time would never pass, but when liftoff finally happened I knew that a great cup of tea had chosen me as the destination of its magic saucer ride.
Aaaaaah.
The experience was over all too quickly and the realisation that all future cuppas will be inferior hit me hard. There was simply no hope of topping it because what I had just enjoyed was, to all intents and purposes, perfect. Every living being has a best and worst version of everything – from teas and cakes to conversations and orgasms – so my best tea had to happen at some point.
The truly dramatic thing is that I recognised it as the definitive point at which my pleasure from tea drinking will begin to decline. I’m not saying that the drink will end up tasting insipid to me or that consuming it will become a chore; I simply mean to point out how the human brain compares like for like until it becomes a dislike.
So, while I was sipping from a cup that was very much half-full today, I was also partaking in some negative drinking that resulted in a “half-empty” label being slapped on the Cosmic Teapot. Of course, the way around this is to allow the fragmented nature of reality to define your experience – Zeno’s arrow splitting your brain into smaller and smaller compartments containing ideas such as “the perfect cup of tea drunk from a red mug” or “the perfect cup of coffee on a winter’s morning” – but at some point you will find yourself throwing parties on a subatomic level, which is not as fun as it sounds.
I’d like to think that perfection doesn’t exist because that would be the same as everything being perfect, but the problem is that I’m hardwired to look for it everywhere. By imbibing perfection and labelling it as such, I’m shooting lasers from my eyes that destroy a line of teacups stretching from my kitchen all the way to the sun.
There’s a chance that what I experienced earlier was, because I was alone at the time, the perfect moment of isolation. It could even have been the perfect moment of delusion…
