theresaholeinmyheadwheretheraingetsin

I finally managed to leave the house.

I took the last of my money and purchased an ancient red Raleigh bike. I named her Laura, after Laura Palmer.

Now I spend my mornings riding across London at breakneck speed, helmetless, rude and feckless.

(Still drinking brew for breakfast…)

Pink petals shoot up from my tires. It was the bike or a 4-track. I couldn’t decide so I flipped a 50 pence coin.

I take Laura to the Thames everyday. Sometimes Jules gets on the back and we cycle down there together. She prattles on endlessly about books; I think she’s read even more than Fitz. But only fiction—god forbid she put some facts in her pretty head. She seems to think I should write one. I told her I don’t have the stamina. I can’t deal with plot and I can’t deal with any of that postie-toastie, meta-writing wanking. I want to tell a tale with stickers, and put them up on bus stops and those red royal mailboxes across the city.

On Monday there was a carnival. Black and Indian families gathered by the water and cooked food on filthy grills. I bought a gigantic plastic capsule filled with ground up mushrooms from a skinny, shirtless American reading On The Road. He wore hobnail boots and turned out to be a Californian. Big surprise. He gave me the rest of his Newcastle to wash down the shrooms.

“That will be the best 20 quid you ever spent,” he said with a wicked glitter in his eye.

“Don’t say that,” I said. “It’s bad luck.”

I pulled at the long reeds on the shore edge and watched the Ferris wheel rise and fall in the sky. “Just like the magic number itself,” I said, not because it meant anything but because I liked the sound of it.

Suddenly there was a commotion as some drunk guy fell into the river and had to be pulled out. The wave vibrations looked like white lines of TV static. I stood there, swaying slightly, lonely as fuck.

A song came into my head, just as the curtain started to fall:

“And the sky was made of amethyst. And all the stars were just like little fish.”

The next thing I remember I was in a plain white room, looking out an open window. The view down below was of a garden in bloom.

ultrablognetic