coupla days back gilbert got a message from god - yeah thats right that god this god the one and only well as far as you’re concerned the one true god the only one you need to bother with but let gilbert tell you how it happened himself you’re gonna have to get use to this two hander structure so why not start now

ok yeah i know weird huh? totally. me? you’re kidding right afraid not this is kosher fucking weird but kosher believe meet me tell you how it all started when it started the whole shooting match

so it was like the bigone says a couple of days ago a sunday now i think of ii coz i was listening to 6music a sunday morning how appropriate how come i hadn’t worked that out already figures i guess in a kinda goddy-way it does anyway back to the narrative the one after a boring nother thing sequence of actions that stuff

its first thing the dogs are out in the field and ive got the kettle on and the radio going on the iPad 6music coz its a sunday we listen to 6 on sundays to avoid all the god bothering shit on radio4 and the archers bloody omnibus yeah that so i swap over to see what apps need updating and its just facebook and spark so I set them off and swap over to messenger normally id do spark and then Facebook but like i say they were updating so i went over to messenger and theres just the one message waiting but its not like a normal messenger message coz a its in my normal message not the other messages stuff and b its not from anybody i know i know how did that happen and i look at it for a while I’m not fully awake but I’m not dumb and I’m just wondering how the fuck it got in there and im inspecting the icon and it seems to be an animated gif is that allowed does Facebook support that and animated gif of a bush burning no it didn’t click at the time in hindsight it figures but not right them so I’m inspecting the icon and the username is in all caps and it says JAWEH and it seems to be glowing some new shit in messenger i guess whatever i am intrigued not intrigued enough to click on it just yet but intrigued so I’m looking at a bit like a rabbit in the headlights if truth be told when suddenly and entirely to the the blue i press on the bloody thing without wanting to

i know you’ve got a gazillion questions well how do think i felt ill cover all the salient points in time but just let me get on with the opening bit of the narrative first

so I’ve pressed on the thing and the message comes up and its in this really weird font not one I’ve seen before and not one I’ve seen on Facebook for sure each letter looks like its alight flames shiner the whole fiery text look bloody impressive i’ll tell you impressed the shit out f me anyways and the message is brief succinct terse whatever you want to call it all it says is I HAVE A JOB FOR YOU GILBERT PMS ME - GOD no punctuation all caps locked shouting out at me in this flaming script no not script font font yes colour me mind fucked but I’m laughing 

well leave gilbert there laughing and frankly incredulous not knowing what to do and thinking its all a big new scam so he makes some more coffee shakes his head lights a fag no not the american version the english version and wanders out to see what the dogs are doing little knowing that somebody not a million parsecs from here has well and truly poked a stick in his spokes a bicycle metaphor in the 21st century a glorious anachronism no so to speak and so his humdrum quotidien goes on but his mind is racing and his brain is having trouble keeping up and his rational side is arguing twenty to the dozen with his irrational side a furious socratic dialogue that not that he know it it actually heating his brain pan and irritating his lizard brain there’ll be physical consequences mark my word well really  you should mark all of my words but here and now mark those ones ok so lets go back to the narrative what gilbert so eloquently calls the one after a boring nother thing sequence of actions

so I’ve been out with the dogs and cleaned out the stove and brought in some wood and and all the other shit that i do first thing on a winters morning and I’ve brewed up some more coffee and I’ve rolled a few fags and my mind has been racing trying to figure out what the god deal is all about what kind of scam some sort of trojan or something more serious but nagging all along niggling at the back of my brain my lizard brain perhaps trying to decide whether to register it as a threat or not and I’m kind of nearly convinced that i should just ignore it but secretly grudgingly wondering what sort of job god might have for me and why and when and how could there be a god and why would he choose me if there was and of course there is no such thing i havent believed that shit since i was about 10 and got felt up by the leader of the boys brigade and the leader of scripture union classes and it doesn’t make any sense its nonscience nonsense let it drop ignore it delete the message and block the sender simples so i flip open the iPad and there is the message still burning away and theres a new one and i try to delete it and it won’t go away so i go over to chrome and try to find a reason it won’t delete and well i try to go over the chrome but no doing type in the query hit return nothing ok swap to google same deal no deal swap over to facebook itself see if anybody else is getting this shit no go no deal no nothing same in messenger except i can’t go anywhere else it just takes me back to that message - the new one and against my better judgement i read it its another short one so god aint the verbose or garrulous type well not on this evidence more glowing burning throbbing text same font I TOLD YOU TO MESSAGE ME - DO IT NOW - GOD

-----------------------------------

reset the router reboot the iPad same shit no deal shut the iPad boot up the desktop mac same shit no deal internet connexion all ok but nothing doing reboot the router with the desktop mac off and boot up the trusty chromebox sane fucking thing same shit same same same no deal again something truly weird is going on or not going on or not going out this is not possible or is it fuck fuckity fuck fuck  is this related to the god business how the hell could that happen ……. well i guess if he’s omnipotent then yes but he doesn’t exist what the very fuck do I do it do i message him is he a him or is it an it or is it a her or or or maybe a nonbinary or gender fluid where do i even start to think about this shit

while gilbert boils his brain over his conundrum dilemma dichotomy whatever its up to me to explain the unorthodox grammar orthography punctuation typography everything really we had a discussion that he will most definitely describe or outline or summarise for you at some stage but he drew up the rules and you have to live with them i don’t because my brain the size of a planet or two automatically reverts the whole thing to its proper format inasmuch as there exists a proper or orthodox format for this kind of text anyway its his call so ill let him explain it if he so chooses at some future juncture or not but for now lets go back to gilbert and see what he’s up to

gotta do it no argument gotta its mental but so is this whole shitty situation some bastard has blocked my vectors to the worlwidewebthingy altogether and it has to be that god geezer to be honest it cannot get any worse can ii can it well maybe it can but if i back up the main machine first and do it from there then even if its ridiculously hostile i can always restore without messenger oh yeah ill sandbox it too shut down the wifi unplug the ethernet from the chromebox and power off the iPad so even if this hacker is omnipotent he aint gonna get near damaging my it assets no fucking way box it off and then  

its all boxed off so its shit or get off the pot time here we go open messenger and sure enough there it is glowing flaming laughing at me maybe taunting certainly lock caps on giving like for like fight fire with fire if only i had that fiery font tante pis here goes OK SMART ALEC WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT AND NOW IVE DONE AS YOU ASKED CAN YOU PLEASE UNLOCK MY SHIT COZ ITS REALLY REALLY TEDIOUS ? nice touch that pop a thank you in there or a please rather but you know what i mean never harms to seem compliant complaisant hit send cross the old fingers and wait but not for long bang back come the reply DONE WELL DONE YOU JUST REMEMBER THIS IS ALWAYS AN OPTION same spooky font same all caps shouting what are we doing shouting at each other anyway and suddenly a metric shit ton of messages thatve clearly been backed up come flooding through from all sorts of people and all sorts of apps the tap has been turned back on and then zap another message from god bugger it I’m gonna abbreviate that no acronymize it maybe AGMESS another god message so agmess it is the trouble I just had getting this software out of my way bloody thing kept correcting agmess to games go figure bloody artificial stupidity anyway short and to the point again at least he or she or it is blessedly succinct probably genuinely blessed hahaha FROM HERE ON IN AGMESSES WILL BE DELIVERED DIRECTLY INTO YOUR BRAIN - DO NOT PANIC so how the fuck did he know the acronym already do not panic there you go some kind of vulcan fucking mind meld and I’m not to panic ill panic if i want to god or not I’m gonna start hearing voices in my head like a bona fide paranoid schizophrenic and I’m not to panic yeah fucking right bash IT ISN’T PAINFUL BUT IT CAN BE UNSETTLING unsettling yeah well well see

--------------

it didn’t take long and if you’ve ever done serious hallucinogens and yes i have more than i care to admit to my offspring or to any judgemental person full stop hey hold up you may be judgemental oh fuck it its said now if you’ve ever done hallucinogens it was really no big deal and now I’ve got this voice and not just a voice I’m guessing its prolly listening in 24/365 but then  again it might have been doing that anyway how would i know have known and at least it doesn’t do the caps lock shouty thing its really quite pleasant and civil considering its plugged into me directly I’m going with it for now all that gender shit just gets in the way and hey who the fuck cares anyways its not like god is human or animal so stuff like gender race nationality age educational attainment are irrelevant beyond irrelevant in fact more like inapplicable category errors each one of them tho id love to see gods post nominals bloody impressive i imagine but whod issue the certificates the university of celestial education whatever the only trouble with the direct to brain interface apart from some teething issues that thebigone tells me are mine and how i will quickly adapt to is that its always on and frankly thebigones understanding of human functioning is a bit slim hearing the voice as I’m trying to squeeze a turd out is not exactly conducive to me concentrating on the content I’m much more likely to just tell it to go fuck itself likewise while I’m having a fag leave me abloodylone for a few minutes will you and its not like thebigone indulges in smalltalk for sicks sake oh no its all pretty heavy shit so yeah we’ve got some appropriateness issues to sort out but its a pretty interesting ride so far and in some points enlightening too take the dogs for example first time thebigone came through yeah I was taking a dump at the time so i told him to give me five and by the time he got back to me i was having a fag and stroking the girls one either side of me and he comes thru loud and clear and both of the dogs get up and wander to the back door stand on the threshold and bark like fucking mad like some lunatic burglar is on his way and the bigfella bigone bigyin come on lets settle for just one name shall we else this is gonna get too confusing I’m not going on unless we can agree to what i call you in this text coz this is ridiculous and no I’m not using god deffo not no way 

how about dave you call lots of people dave when you can’t remember their name want some pegs dave that would work for me

no thats no good its gendered dave implies masculine and we’ve already established that you’re not masculine or any other gender as we know it so no to dave what about Franky or Les or Leigh or Pat something that works for the two main genders here in this place or how about thingy or thing

oh come on behave pat really franky i think not and most definitely not les or lee however you spell it what about mighty one or something like that or one of your acronyms

good idea an acronym let me have a think while I’m thinking what was the deal with my dogs did they hear you sense you something weird happened

oh that mmmmm maybe i need to adjust the transmission frequency its obvious your canine pals caught something and we can’t have them going ape whenever i communicate can we by the way its really touching how much you love them and they love you warms the cockles of my heart just a shame you can’t hear what they say about you  

wadda ya mean what they say about me they really can talk is that it and do they understand me do they understand you do they hey do they how about goat thats a good ironic acronym and not exactly gendered in general use it stands for greatest of all time so how about that 

oh oh oh thats funny thats good thatll work for me i like it i like it a lot i am the goat how beautifully ironic and contextual and nearly i knew i could rely on you well done you 

the goat and the johns  

ok lets settle for the goat or goat sounds a bit like god without the article ironic and punning too and nearly a homonym too thats always a good combination but can we get back to the dogs please about them talking to each other and how comes they can understand us humans  and what do they say about me is it good ill bet its funny id find it funny its nothing like the words and voices i give them that ill warrant all my anthropomorphic crap 

hold on hold right on there will you stop doing that its bad enough i have to listen to the locals speaking greek in the cafe and you spend an awfully long time there might i observe without you using all those damned greek derived words in your speech i know the english language your bastard tongue has stolen widely but the sounds the reverberations of greek jar with me even some of the latin borrowings have greek origins and they jar too  

so according to this you don’t like english and you hate greek but you pick a writer an english writer living in greece to communicate with and why would that be and why would you hate greek so much anyway what language do you speak aren’t you supposed to have invented language in the first place why why did you invent it if you did i love language and you seem to despise it 

long story very long story indeed yes and no a love hate relationship i am after all the god of the religions of the book and the book is central language is my thing thats why i chose you you seem to love language in much the same way i do language not stories language pure and not at all simple i figured you of all people would get it tho last writer i picked for the job didn’t work out so well but thats another story altogether or text altogether but you wanted to know about greek and my response to it so lets do that bit first its not the language per se but the fact that i cannot hear it without recalling one of my big mistakes very big what you’d call a clusterfuck i guess that time i sent my son here to your beautiful plane one of my favourites to see if i couldn’t get you all back on the right track my big mistake my bad as you’d say not the son thing but giving him too much autonomy he chose the disciples and he chose those clowns to document it in greek don’t believe all that aramaic and hebrew origins nonsense he chose greek to get the message across to a wider audience but boy did he choose the wrong guys to do the job he never read those texts still wont but look at the facts four gospels only four and yet those clowns couldn’t even get the basic narrative straight even the police can manage something that simple how did they get it that wrong and sentimental don’t get me started and they missed out or downplayed the political message emphasising instead what a nice bloke he was well if the most you can say about somebody who gave his entire life to the struggle against privilege and power and inequality is that he was a nice bloke well excuse me if I’m not impressed not pleased pissed off even take john 1 please take it take it anywhere thats john the disciple not john the nutcase from patmos he was a completely different john a lot more fun as it happens than that rod up his arse disciple in the beginning was the word that is so sloppy well you’ve seen all the nonsense that ensued from that fuck up john the nutter jeez he was a real loose cannon liked his hallucinogens maybe a bit too much and given that he was stark staring bonkers to begin with well it kind of explains that text he wrote we had some good times together not like john the pompous chalk and cheese mind you john the nut job didn’t really get it but why would he he was out of his head in more ways than one

jim and the goat--------------------------------------------------------------

and the last writer you picked did they turn you down or not finish the gig or what who was it would i know of them

oh yeah you’d know him and no he didn’t turn me down finished the job eventually took him a long time not as long as the four soft lads took over the second book or even as long as the opening five chapters of the first book took moses but seventeen years nonetheless and nobody understood a bloody word of it let alone got it its good don’t get me wrong one of the best attempts maybe the best yet but it didn’t take with joe public the academics yes theres as much study and commentary on it as on any of the other books but the study and the commentary are just as bloody useless as are they all i mean its not as if he didn’t tip the wink in the opening line and the titles are a dead giveaway too he was bloody atheist too just like you and he refused to call me god he preferred finn and i humoured him give him his due he was the first one to get a load of humour into it just like I’m banking on you to do so why is it that all the interpreters and academics and commentators missed the point altogether and why are they all so pofaced 

wait up there goat just hang on buddy less im much mistaken and not at all the bloke you are looking for yore telling me that the las guy to have their gig was james joyce and he wrote finnegans wake for you that was his response to your brief  the opening has to be riverrun past eve and adams from swerve etcetera etcetera etcetera 

spot on boyo spot on on the nose you are and yes jim was the man still is really you want to explain the titles to me both of them are you up to that too

OK lets go with this one first work in progress well that explains itself your work is the work in progress and the final title the one he kept secret for so long was a classic joycean punning game your name to him is finn and you’ve just come again egan fiinegan and the text is to wake humans and to be your wake hows that goat 

right right and right you’re exactly the man I’ve been looking for no fool at all maybe it was just too good unlike the other three sounds like i got a there book deal but no no publishers telling writers what they had to write and how often back in the days of the first book guess i was the first self publisher how prescient of me well i would be wouldn’t i and none of that paid by the word nonsense that richardson and his cronies got up to tho youd be forgiven that the to was paid for by the word so many wasted ones so much bloody verbiage al that begetting for a start like anybody wold be interested i wanted it terse and succinct but no they had their own ideas and had to stick in all that dodgy story telling and begetting and so many laws and taboos have you read leviticus has anybody and then when i offered them five commandments they had to add another five of their own you work out which were which verbal or lexical diarrhoea blah blah blah no wonder it bombed no wonder they have to give the thing away and even then they slip it into bedside cabinets and who ever reads that the menu for room service is more fun and even the local attraction pamphlets i love language and they all mangled it up wrapped it in mysticism and parable and epistles and the like psalms proverbs stories genealogies what a surprise none of them worked and then i figured it might have been my fault so i sent gabe to dictate the third one and well you know what happened there another dud  

goat gone gilbert goes on -----------------------------------------------------------

why did you change its name time was it was mahometanism or mohammedanism now its islam so now its about submission and submission alone and nothing about the other teachings that gabe gave him that i gave to gabe and now there are no followers of Mahomet just submissives or muslims bloody nonsense and just because they didn’t like using the naming structure that were used in xtianity  your greek pals called them musselmen not muslims thats one greek word i do like from the persian and they must have liked it too because it seems thats where they got muslim from enough enough already boring preachy next  to sum up the first three were crap and failed the fourth was too difficult and went pretty much unnoticed with hindsight expecting anybody to recognise jim as a prophet was some stretch big ask as youd say i mean you love it but not for the intended reason but enough of my failures I’m gonna have to love you and leave you got a bit of business elsewhere urgent life saving disaster averting gob smacking lip pursing armageddon stopping stuff to do

elsewhere what i thought you were supposed to be ubiquitous omnipresent whats the difference anyway must look that up sometime probably some theological dancing on heads of pins nonsense whatever you are supposed to be everywhere all at once and to haveth childers everywhere too no doubt if jim is to be believed so if you’re omnipresent how can you need to go off somewhere else especially if youre omnipotent too or is that stuff all pr

look I’m in a bit of a rush but ill explain it alter ill give you the short version well talk about the whole thing another time but for now remember when you went to betram mills circus when you were 6 and you were taken with those chinese guys who did all that plate spinning they weren’t real chinese by the way but you remember the spinning plates i know you do coz when you look at the wild carrot blowing about in summer you always invoke that memory relive it 

i thought that memory was from television from sunday night at the london palladium i don’t remember going to the circus for real but i do remember the platespinners and you say they weren’t chinese at all chipperfields bertram mills billy smart circuses used to be big back then not good but big big tops big business big showmen near as big as you i guess the smells the sights the noise the awful band that terrible music 

look i love your reveries and epiphanies but I’m pushed for time here long story short to keep all of the multiverses on track and so they don’t just bang into each other or worse still implode i have to go visit when they start to like the plates slow down a certain divine momentum is needed to keep all those plates spinning so off i go speak soon don’t do anything i couldn’t do 

ok goat see you around the olden days were big for billies wilder eckstein fury wright 105 caps  holiday gardenia bounce bunter smart butlin cotton butlin and smart knew each other i think maybe they split the bill king billy too even billy goat multiverses too huh

gilbert alone-----------------------------------------

well thats a relief a bit of peace that goat takes up so much bandwidth give me a chance to assimilate some of the stuff he’s been telling me the stuff he’s not been telling me too always listen to whats not being said wise words who said that me or some french philosopher linguist literary theorist eco maybe maybe ill sleep properly tonight whoa thunk that platespinning was like running multiple universes or that the goat had been to the circus or that i had i really don’t remember that but then again there are lots of gaps in my early memories i do remember listening to don cockle versus marciano on the radio or do i not in the later recent ones my recall seems to improve the more shit i let into my head the more connexions get made its like some sort of interior tourettes in there sometimes most of it seems to be available interesting how much of those scripture union lessons i remember got to the point tho where i don’t know which are mine and which are stories I’ve heard told but isn’t that the plates thinking on memory that we remember the last time we recalled something and not the original so after a while whether it was originally mine or somebody else is irretrievable whatever he’s certainly got some bees in his bonnet that goat but i guess hes had a lot to be pissed off about over the generations centuries millennia eras eons saeculums epochs infinities both countable and uncountable  moses and the apostles get a roasting not best pleased with his own sons performance either underwhelmed or gabe and m tho he does seem to have high regard for language must ask him about babel if he ever comes back that and whether anybody has ever turned him dow not sure I’m not going to gotta admit that shit with my internet was a technology thing sufficiently advanced to resemble magic who said that do i need to attribute it not really this is my text my circus my monkeys my rules my show my party and ill cry if i want to you would cry too if he hijacked you and there was me not long ago bemoaning smart watches and phones and appliances toothbrushes and the like and look at me a direct mind interface to the goat willingly whoa thunk it my rule yeah we should talk about them my rules why this text is the way it is for starters that thing about attribution is what i call an intellectual ornamentation something in the text that isn’t essential to the meaning of the text but that flatters or intrigues the reader one of the things I’ve always loved in literature not just the unusual words but the references outward from the text outwith  extracurricular if you will jim did it a lot the roman a clef crowd overdid it in my opinion and its not humble either in these googleable days its no longer a figure only for the educated as once it was but allows any reader to educate themselves to encourage it to educate or edffy the rule were one of the first things we talked about if I’m writing it and he wants me to but this is just a probationary text to test us both 

waiting for god ————————————————————————

but no capitals no punctuation sentences and all the rigamarole of written language written as we know it a friend once showed me a letter from her motherinlaw a cypriot who wrote a lot like this no punctuation no sentences but she didn’t separate the words either i thought that a step too far for now but in the future who knows it all started with me refusing to capitalise god or goat so he said i couldn’t capitalise gilbert so i said ok then no capitals at all and if you’ve read my stuff which you prolly havent you’d know i’ve not used sentences per se nor paragraphs no artificial barriers to flow and rhythm they try to force the writers opinion on the reader maybe their meaning too manipulative hold on message incoming agmes what the days with nothing and now a gnomic one the difference between being and seeming and that means what that needs thinking about unless you wanna give me a hint goat anyway this duologue dialog thing goes back to socratic days nice and simple two hander beckettian belacquan belacquian basquiatian even plot narrative and character all got in the way of the first three books so goat agreed to let me ditch them but hey i wouldn’t be doing this if he had disagreed my party my monkeys hold on there i think i might have it yup its a reference back to the difference between omnipresent and ubiquitous tho which is which i couldn’t say resume no parables no proverbs not psalms no epistles apostles or disciples no begatting or begetting no genealogy period who fucking cares or cared or anyway no commandments no songs and absobloodylutely no mystical hallucinating revelations no chronicles or lamentations no shit no sherlock now heres a strange thing i really liked goat coming thru just then i think i might be missing him what thunk it you invite some weird entity into your wetware how the fuck did that happen and its intellectual overload times ten for a while and you’d do most anything to get rid of it or at least shut it the fuck up and then when it pisses off you start to miss it what a completely irrational species we are next it’ll be anxiety setting in about whether the goat has gone for good i know myself too well and honestly it was a fun rollercoaster there for a while and stimulating and then some all these years listening to religious nuts bemoaning the fact that they pray every day and their god never seems to hear them leave alone respond as for talking directly to them conversationally and heres me the big old atheist bloke and I’ve just spent days listening to the goats inner secrets and unwritten history what a turn up for the books i wouldn’t tell them tho they would never believe me oh they of little faith and me of none at least hesheit  could give me an update now and then let me know if i have time to start any biggish tasks jobs projects just check in occasionally will you goat will you 

not godot ========================== 

see not like waiting for godot at all i turn up goodness gilbert you’re starting to sound like a needy girlfriend i wasn’t gone that long in your terms but oh well never mind it must be tricky youre kind of addicted by now it was bound to happen i guess thats one of the reasons i sent gabe down that other time I’m the most addictive substance in your universe in all of the universes i know about to be honest and i know most of them intimately there are one or two i know of but don’t actually know a bit like you were with pubs in london there are some you know about but can no longer experience either coz you got banned or coz they closed and you’ll never know which coz you no longer have access well same with me and universes not a great analogue but it’ll do for now aren’t you going to ask how i got on whether i kept the plates spinning what sort of friend are you its all you you you 

shut the fuck up for a minute i can’t get a word in bloody edgewise you’re prating ten to the dozen and I’m supposed to be treating it like a conversation well ive got news for you goat you have to fucking pause now and then otherwise it becomes a monologue soliloquy diatribe bloody rant well did you did you keep it spinning get it spinning properly again I’m guessing you did coz thats what you do but do do tell me and yes I’m fine and no i am not a needy sodding girlfriend thanks is this a flying visit do you fly or do you teleport or something hell no i don’t suppose there isa material you to fly or to teleport must be more like turning your attention or tuning your attention focussing concentrating attending i guess but not in a physical way yeah

kind of yeah kind of and can you not oh never mind nobody else is listening in well i hope not i think not shit i should know not yes of course i got it all spinning and balanced like you say its what i do i have form i have experience lots of it tho this last one was a bit more than a touch on the tiller so to speak this one involved some divine intervention shit stuff i only do in extreme circumstances it was pretty dire for a while but i managed and plate spinning is another crap analogue do you remember that book you read when you were working on early ai about how your species is always comparing their godhead of choice or should that be goatherd of choice in terms of one of their own achievement how the describe their mind in similar analogues like how you people now think of your brain being a big fast computer and how i used to be the blind watchmaker or potter in the sky or or take your pick pick your nose was by a guy called bolt or somesuch not usain anyway another anthropocentric thing your species specialises in upward downward inward whatever it all has to be about you or like you what was my point lost my thread there oh yeah some systems or universes run much more smoothly than others and this last one has a species much like yours like but not the same and not really comparable so don’t ask anyhoo theres this one specimen over there has accumulated a lot of power among the species and don’t ask how i didn’t look into to closely but accept that this one had the power and it was putting a whole lot of interacting systems in flux balancewise throwing the whole equilibrium out of whack so id been rebalancing for a while but when i was bringing you up to speed it fucked up majorly so i ended him well not there and then but i put the poison in so to speak it’ll all balance up nicely soon no serious harm done shit happens all the time all over the place my bad all over the places whatevs im back and im proud so lets take it up where we left off where was that weren’t we talking abut the books of the religions of the book so ver to you go I’m listening

gilbert and gomorrah————————

no i got that you feel the first three failed and the fourth one didn’t get much what we call traction or at least not in the way you wanted id like to go back to language i love it you love it we all love it but if you love it that kinda begs the inevitable the ineluctable question you know whats coming don’t you of course you do do i have to spell it out ok then bee ay bee eee ellll yeah that one babel what happened there according to book one there was just the one language and every human spoke it and understood it 

yeah thats right one language the so called Japhetic tongue the one your dogs still use the one that douglas adams intuited and your point is what

my point pal my point is that linguistic disaster the big not the great vowel shift not estuary english not even the disaster that happens when the end of every sentence goes up so you don’t know whether its a question or a statement aitch are tee not hormone replacement therapy but high rising terminals but i prefer moronic interrogative no not any of those not those the one thats known in biblical theological circles as the confusion of tongues why the fuck would something that loves language take a universal language away and impose separate tongues languages on separate peoples i mean what the fuck and all this over a tower not even a big tower nothing like the empire state of any modern high rise even bit of an overreaction to say the least tell me please explain that shit to me coz i don’t get it at all cannot fathom it from where i stand live am that looks a lot like a fit of pique a hissyfit come on fess up what were you thinking now i think about it that first book if i remember rights was littered with your fits of pique it was like you were a different thing altogether in that one not the lovey dovey goat of the second book much more fire brimstone and shit goat more like the goat portrayed in john the nutters acid fuelled dream night terrors sequence in fact the flood sodom and tomorrow all that shit with poor old job you sure did a number on him well a number of numbers truth be told and babel and that shit with abraham you were a bit of a bastard back then as far as i can tell from the texts loads of genocide and ritual punishment durm and strang blitzkrieg much more your handwriting back in the day fucking mean trick with moses by the way i loved that one how mean can you be all that schlepping thru the desert looking after your people and then he’s not allowed in your names not down youre not coming in march bloody harsh and that mandatory circumcision of babies bloody hell institutionalised genital mutiliation how do you square that with the goat of the second book and I’m only just getting started theres endless vicious shit in the first book its like an early slasher movie but for now just tell me about babel for now

let me tell you about multiverse practice and string practice first not theories but real completely real

whoa hold up there goat are you trying to change the subject duck the bullet no fucking way babel next come on I’m not standing still for that one explain yourself defend if you will I’m going nowhere till you do babel 

the goat in the dock———————

what is this nuremburg or something i don’t have to explain myself or justify myself and certainly not defend myself but since you insist by the way i did like the doing a number on job or a number of numbers neat reference back let me say right from the getgo that I’m not proud of some of the things in that first book by the same token that moses exaggerated a lot he was a miserable fuck and a bit of a martinet to some great extent he projected his own personal style on a lot of that first set of texts both directly and indirectly he attributed some things to me that weren’t entirely my fault or doing him not getting into the promised land well yeah that was a bit mean but that wasn’t down to me the mad bad bitch egged me on and then well you know what happened she was the one who wound job up too said he was too bloody sanctimonious for his own good needed to learn a lesson or three it was like watching a train wreck happening in slow motion 

babel goat babel not the rest not the others babel now maybe well get to this so called madbadbitch later 

well she had a hand in that too but ok well it wasn’t a good time for me i remember your lot humankind was getting all uppity again and i had just been what was it id been doing hold on when was that oh yeah it was around the time i was experimenting with the multiverse ideas the nephilim were rampaging around messing up all my works and i guess i was stressed out from doing the flood thing i was probably still tired from the whole creation thing i wasn’t sleeping well and and so on the day i was pissed american angry annoyed frustrated short tempered irritable and pissed english drunk inebriated under the influence  don’t ask early alcohol experiment way too bloody strong it was the work of moment swift and painless well pretty painless there and then tho the short term confusion and angst were pretty tough on humankind it kinda served them right with hindsight but it was petty of me not worthy of me maybe it was pique only humans tho i left the other species alone they weren’t harming anybody or pissing me off they have it to today upside is that i found out a lot about language from the subsequent developments and gave linguists a job or two semioticians literary theorists they all got careers out of that one act you humans developed languages that were good at deceiving better than they were at truthing and it goes on spin doctors advertising execs pee are specialists theyre the ones who know about language you poor writers have to struggle with using it theyre the naturals the native speakers and then you invented writing to compound it all well the accountants invented it bloody bean counters mess most everything up quantity is never going to trump quality in any sane measuring system naming things yes thats good describing things thats good touching smelling looking yes all of those are good but just bloody counting them give me a break 

gilgamesh and the goat ——————————

so to summarise yes it was a fuck up a biblical fuck up a monumental mistake misstep miscalculation to use your coinage a clustershitfuckstorm of a fuck up and no i can’t really blame anybody else not in all honesty I’m supposed to be above all that but before you ask i couldn’t undo it it was too late when i realised just what i had done or the consequences thereof anyway there is a direction of travel and i don’t have control over that vector there is no reverse despite what hawking and his nerd buddies theorise and once you understand strings you as a species you’ll know that thats the way it has to be if the thing is to hang together for more than a picosecond or rather there wouldn’t be a picosecond for stuff to hang together in if it weren’t for the direction of travel strings and dot are intertwined strings are an emerging property of the dot my omnipotence doesn’t extend to the dot even i don’t mess with the dot

well the physics lesson such as it was is interesting but not as interesting as the babel story well not to me and frankly can i be frank or shall i remain gilbert the whole mad bitch meme is more than interesting still more intriguing enchanting tell me more who is she what is she is she the mythical sylvia i won’t let you foist the blame onto her but i am intrigued by er by any interesting woman really do tell

what can i say its an old story and one you guys actually documented a very long time ago it was back in the day when the nephilim were running around before they became extinct all that cross breeding miscegenation as we used to call it and while she is a big girl she’s not actually nephilim herself otherwise they wouldn’t be extinct would they but yeah shes mad shes bad and she is fucking dangerous to know count yourself lucky if you never have to know more about her than I’m going to tell you but this is a bit i want editorial control over until further notice this next bit is off the record unless i say otherwise ok

no not fucking ok you don’t get control over how i text the thing or whats in and whats out anything you tell me i get to choose if it goes in or not if you’re not sure then don’t tell me but make your mind up right now shit or get off the pot

give me a while to think about it all right you call the shots on what goes in and how its written i call the shots on what i tell you agreed thats the deal right here we go her name is lilith and she’s still at large but for the moment i don’t know where she is shes a trouble maker and heartless she is the ultimate sociopath psychopath narcissist serial killer genocidal maniac think of an unpleasant attribute or behaviour and shes got it in spades goes even beyond what you can imagine she gets to the edges of what i can imagine and you know the irony the top brick off the chimney i made her it gets worse she was very nearly your progenitor the epic of bilgamesh gilgamesh mentions her but gets her wrong but at least it gets her existence moses expunged her completely from the first book thought it would be too tough for you to take it was moses spread the idea that i was infallible so he got rid of her completely from the texts but lets be fair everybody and every thing makes the odd mistake and sadly mine have some pretty horrendous consequences shes one of them mistake that is the consequences are hers and hers alone

so theres a mad bad psychopathic female thing at large a thing that might have been my progenitor well at least its a gendered thing and you have no idea where she is what the fuck how is that even possible how does that square with your supposed omniscience is she hiding behind the fucking sofa have you looked where you last saw her and all the rest of those really useless suggestions that people make when you cant find something did you leave her on the table at the kafeneion did she fall down the footwell in the car and you made her you say when you say made her what does that mean signify connote involve imply first omnipotence then ubiquity or was it the other way round and now omniscience its all getting a bit thin you’re not quite what you’re cracked up to be are you 

well you cant blame me for that i never claimed any of those things and you forgot infallible dont forget infallible like i said that was moses and the other writers talked all that up its what they wanted me to be not what they knew not what i told them showed them what i inspired into them they all figured i had to be free of all their own foibles and failings but why should i be perfection does not exist it just isnt compatible with the dot isnt that bloody obvious to even the most superficial intellectual investigation anyway she was behind a lot of that ot nastiness the flood that was her idea babel ditto sodom til  tomorrow and the whole pillar of salt shit ditto job and his sufferings trials ditto circumcision ditto moses and the plagues of egypt moses not getting into the promised land ditto jericho ditto she brought out the worst in me and i was younger then a lot more impulsive and of course she knew those things couldnt be undone she was the one whispering in solomons ear about cutting the baby in half shes hot though irresistible to men completely and boy does she use it for delilah read lilth for jezebel read lilith the list is endless well not exactly endless but as shes still in play who knows as for her being down the back of the sofa well its difficult to explain but i took my eye off her for a moment well maybe a bit longer well considerably longer if im honest and when i turned around she was gone that would have been around the time the boy was getting himself crucified what sort of ending is that for a good jewish boy and you know since then neither hide nor hair i don’t even know where to start looking but I’m guessing she went undercover that was one of her things she loved dressing up down cross cross gender cross species shit what if she went somehow cross universes oh bloody hell i hadnt thought of that but how could she no couldnt be could it hold on there im just going to have a look around a few of the other universes see if theres any obvious signs of her activities coz one thing is for sure there will be some mayhem somewhere thats down to her keep yourself busy get on with your life if you must but let me leave you with something to ponder i know weve been over this before but couldnt we do this as a series of podcasts later gator

gilbert hits the gilbeys————————

grab a gin grab a fag kick back and breathe out this is getting kindof overwhelming so much information so little space to process it all so glad he’s buggered off again he has to give me some space ill tell him we need to make a deal theres no bandwidth left when hes online there i go using a technology metaphor tante pis den perasei desperdooberries who cares such is life and all that stuff wow that gin didnt last long one more and ill do some physical shit for contrast for relief grab some processing time another bloody technology metaphor analogy whatever thinktime consolidation space glut another gin and go and were off into the courtyard remove the tarp from the log pile get the axe the big one sweep off the top of the chopping block grab a couple of big buggers ones that result from previous splitting jazz that a big bastard nice grain what did he mean about making this lilith woman thing place the log did he mean like he is supposed to have done with adam and eve lift the axe slowly focus and arc down and even if moses didn’t mention her he didn’t get editorial control over the whole text did he use the weight of the axe head and it bites maybe one third of the way in so who did edit tit and who decided which books went in lift the whole thing on the axe head turn it over and arc it down must ask the goat three quarters thru one more should do it axe head nicely centred in the split yeah who pulled the whole thing together and did they hide the dead sea scrolls some stinking fucking troglodyte probably and it splits clean in half and where the hell is she hiding out oh i wonder has he looked in hell one of the hells are there multiple hells one for each universe perhaps fuck fuck this is supposed to clear my mind usually i think of absolutely nothing when im splitting logs or maybe i think only about splitting loads when I’m splitting logs either way theres nothing else or shouldn’t be but there is the goat is still here even if he isnt pick up the next log and position it Anathasius or Athanasius thats who decided on what was canonical knew i knew that but who edited all of the texts surely not him arc down clean split right the way through sniff up that smell of newly split olive captivating healing smells like its doing you good the act is simple and physical but the mind brain is till in turmoil keep at it break sweat purge yourself just fucking do it sweat some of that gin out another clean split align the shoulders or they’ll ache later use the weight of the axe head and the weight of the log gravity will do the job for you no need for the local builders brute force and ignorance  why won’t he let the podcast thing drop i know he prefers spoken language over written and i understand that but i do writing not recitation clean the chopping block and place another log when this ones done collect the split wood shit theres a huge fucking knot in this one lift turn drop lift turn drop getting there lift turn hit a messy split but its split now we’ve talked about podcasting already several times collect up the split wood take half back to the log pile and get some more to split take the rest and stack it by the stove for tonight its due to be a cold one and it’ll start cooling as soon as the sun is over the mountains just think yourself lucky goat isnt here and no don’t start worrying about multiverses and direction of travel dot and strings split a few more logs and clean up then another gin sweating now good work

gilbert and the goat are both pissed--------

she has she’s gone cross universes how does she do that what can i do to keep track of her now 

frankly old goat i do not give a  flying fuck not my fucking circus not my bastard monkeys you sort it out you old git old goat old git goat

what is wrong with you your mind is fuzzy and confusing are you high this place feels a lot like old john the nutters nut getting more sense out of your dogs right now tho thats not so unusual they are remarkably intelligent little girls even the bees are making more sense oh i see i see an empty gin bottle that stuff is really not good for you you know that don’t you what got into you

fuck off and leave me alone you gnomic old cunt ive had enough for now i need to get out of my nut for a while very time we talk you leave me with more and more questions one question answered and another twenty or more surface my fucking brain hurts now leave me alone go on sod off

ok mister gilbert i take your point i get that completely really tho alcohol isnt such a smart move just saying as you might say or at least some of your social media friends and relatives i mean no harm to you or your precious brainpan its hard to know how much you can take in at a time this has happened before my bad mea culpa mea cup mea maxima culpa do you mind if i just sick around for while to make sure you’re ok ill keep quiet just be around if you need me or well i could sober you up immediately that i can do and I’m told it doesn’t hurt

don’t bother yourself ill be fine and really i would like some space for a bit maybe a dreamless sleep a proper rest I’ve had none since you plugged into my brain its all a bit much close the door on you way out but before you go on the podcast thing just no find somebody else to voice this stuff if you will but i am not doing it ever never not at all 

ok then how long do you need i won’t go far might have a chat with your dogs

just go will you how long is a piece of string and don’t drive them crazy too by the way you don’t have a spare bottle of gilbeys about your person i suppose wow thats clever a bit wedding in canaa or is it caana cheers don’t close the door on your way out 

gilbert and the goat become friends --------------------

aaaaaargh dafuck oh my aching head whats in my mouth what the fuck is that taste why cant i move nice and warm tho and the door is wide open oh hello darlings aren’t you clever one either side to keep me warm bet i near deafened you i know ive been snoring shit i can taste that i have never mind bottom of a budgies cage this is more like floor of the chimps enclosure don’t suppose theres any gin left shift over girls dad needs to move stretch some of these muscles flush this crap out of my mouth oh wow look the bottle is half full oh my that hit the spot yes I’m fine well sort of out you go you must need a pee at least wow that sun is bright mmmm not raining but not what you could call warm lets check this old sack of guts out not too bad tight hip joint right side lower back niggles itching like a man up a fuzzy tree so far so normal bloody head tho wow pornokefalas big time pounding throbbing temples well i earned that take another nip and get the kettle on brew up some coffee you that helps for now did i eat last night was it last night fuck knows doesn’t matter don’t care what a diamond geezer the goat is he did leave me alone my head is painful but my mindbrain is strangely clear total blank sleep couple of hours who knows wow that kettle is sooooo fucking noisy wheres the volume switch get the coffee ready wash out a mug bugger it just swill the gin out of this one that’ll do pour the boiling water carefully push the plunger down not too fast or itll overflow now put some and drink it while its hot fuck fuckity fuck fuck that is bloody hot tastes a bit of gin but not too bad actually yes ill be out in a minute let me just grab a fag and ill be with you both guess theres a dew out there since youve both got such muddy feet ok here we go wipe the dew off the bench and plonk take the lid off the ashtray thats wet ooooh thats good that hit the spot damn fine coffee too i wonder how  many times the goat filled that gin bottle or should that be djinn bottle no no its welsh the horn of brian something or the other what a bloke judging by this fucking head must be twice at least what did he say last night something about lilth but what oops i wasn’t very nice to him was i guess not you’re a bad drunk on gin boy you know you are ok girls id best get you some grub im pretty sure i didn’t feed you last night or did i well asif youd tell me if i did how do you two that every day i can guarantee you’ll make me smile and then laugh what a tonic whoa hold hard there me hearties gonna have to move slowly but come on lets go and try not to get under my feet for an hour or two good girls dry or wet both ok why do the tops on these things have to be so bloody hard to get off they just dont get that us old folk arent as dextrous or strong there we go all nicely chopped bung some kibble on top mix it all in and sprinkle your glucosamine on top ouch those stainless steel bowls make a lot of noise on the tiles tuck in kids fill your boots blimey you were hungry it hurts this head but theres a kind of peaceful aspect to it too like a warm low hum going on but no fireworks so far 

good morning mister gilbert are you up for a little chat good morning girls 

good morning mister goat yeah pull up a chair metaphorically what with the formality don’t we know each other well enough by now to dispense with the formalities of mister this and mister that but keep the volume down its a bit tender in here at present but you knew that already didn’t you by the way thanks for the refills and giving me some space 

ill not take much of your time but can i clear that cottonwool cottoncandy candyfloss out of your head first otherwise i might need to shout to get thru 

please and if you want to take the fucking headache too that would be good how many times did you fill that bottle last night oh my thats good bugger good thats amazing how do you do that never mind it doesnt matter

its a simple matter for me and i lost count of how many times i refilled the gin in fact i only did it once but the bottle will never be completely empty again now I’ve done it once his name was bran galed or bran gelert not the one with the dog he was irish this one was an old welsh sod i remember coz i try to have as little as possible to do with the welsh same as you how much of wednesday do you remember not much by the look of things in here 

wednesday why what day is it today oh dear it was a big bender wasn’t it wish i could bottle that hangover cure of yours id make a bloody fortune

its saturday and yes a very big bender an almost biblical bender old testament bible nobody much in the new testament does much serious drinking prissy prigs didnt know what they were missing how are you feeling do you want me to leave you alone for a while longer by the way i fed the girls while you were absent tho i see they didn’t tell you that this morning little darlings 

gone girls genesis ———————

and did you have the chat you spoke of they don’t seem spooked what did they tell you what did you tell them do i want to know would i believe you yes i think i would no idea why but i just would they’ll let me know if youre lying to me 

yes i did and they are very happy doggies indeed they love you very much and would literally die to protect you which of course they will never need to do they are both very healthy and you need to know no more than that are you up to resuming our dialogues have you worked all that anger out of your system the body will flush those hangover toxins soon enough

if my recall is working arights last i heard from you before the binge you were going off to look for that lilith one how did that work out any luck i was wondering a lot about her so whatever you want to offload is good with me you said you made her when why how and that she dogged you for a long time before skedaddling I’m ready if you are but first what does she mean to you seems to me that you are kind of attached to her emotionally am i wrong

attached to her she’s attached to me or was not the other way round and now she’s on the loose in the wind as you say she managed who knows how to get out of or off of this universe depends on how you want to visualise a universe oh sorry of course i forgot that you don’t have any visual imagination conceptualise not visualise then well it doesn’t really matter does it shes not here in on this universe but don’t ask where she is coz i couldn’t find her i found traces but those are where she has been not where she is now she’s being pretty canny asif she doesn’t want to be found why would that be beats me any ideas no of course not how could you and breathe ok yes i did make her same time as i made adam just before eve those are the names you know them by lilith you don’t know for reasons weve already enumerated you remember the story of how i made adam from the dirt and a drop of divine spit and a blow of the old divine lungs well thatll do for now but like a lot of recipes it was an imprecise science back then and i kindof misjudged the quantities needed for a human body so the gob of dough like stuff was a bit bigger than i needed unless you were all going to be about three metres tall yeah i use metric always have and after id mixed it all up i was kneading it to warm it up and a few crumbs fell off well a lot of crumbs actually enough crumbs actually for a whole other person thing and it all fell into a puddle of nephilim piss at least i think thats what it must have been id just finished making the nephilim and maybe there were some nephilim crumbs who knows not me and while i was putting the finishing touches to the adam one the lilith one kindof assembled herself as you know i was going to make the eve one out of the adam one a kind of cloning process nothing to do with his bloody ribs mind you honestly that moses wasn’t very bright well except when he was standing in front of the burning bush that is but when i saw lilith i figured well that’ll do one male one female or so i thought thats enough now off you go and reproduce id just thought up the idea of sexual reproduction the previous day so i just well partly because the advantage of sexual reproduction is that the price is death and id already made enough things with the potential for immortality i just i just well i just made them sexual gave them the gift of fucking i guess made sense at the time then i set them up in the garden and told them to get on with it you’ve read the texts now so you know that she refused to be dominated and the adam one couldn’t handle that a bit like most men to this day most wouldn’t admit but its there its a fact so he started giving me earache about her and she started flouncing off sound familiar anyway i did the clone thing and gave him his eve who was not exactly subservient but knew how to handle him without confrontation also sound familiar and lilith just took herself off cavorting with the nephilim and hanging around me between shagging the giants i mentioned all that miscegenation of the nephilim with the humans didn’t i well that ended up with the nephilim going extinct i might have hinted as much and that was that lilith just followed me everywhere she had no interest in humans she watched and she learnt stuff like she seems now to have learnt how to jump universes 

 gone girl located-----------------

and you have no idea how she’s doing that none at all not a clue for fuck sakes you gotta be losing your touch you gotta get a grip you have no idea what havoc shes wreaking or even where that sounds pretty serious shit right there are you sure the nephilim are extinct coz if not she might be hanging out with the big guys occurs to me the female of most species is more sociable i have found never met a lot of females like being on their own keeping their own company going solo one here and there maybe but few and far between males on the other hand well no point me telling you you know all this stuff but isn’t there a multiverse somewhere maybe one you’ve forgotten about where the nephilim survived maybe took over works with the comic book version of parallel universes but hey what the fuck do i know about the reality of multiverses that dot thing for a start direction of travel was it the thing that makes some of your actions unundoable don’t those sorts of break points result in a split of the universe that they happen in lets be fair it couldn’t be every decision made by every inhabitant of a universe that right there would be combinatorial explosion by about day two of free will and no matter how powerful you might think you are even you couldn’t keep control of all of those myriad gazillions of universes no fucking way i mean do the arithmetic no not math thats an american misunderstanding it gets away from you pretty damn quickly

kind of yes you kind of got it the way it works obviously not every decision point that would be ridiculous would be combinatorial explosion time as you point out and im not stupid and i do know the difference between mathematics and arithmetic Im not american for fucks sake fucks not fuck i invented arithmetic and mathematics and i don’t like either of them being shortened nobody says do the arith do they no and for good reason its stupid  do the algy no no no do the geom bloody euclid would turn in his grave well he wouldn’t really coz he wasn’t buried but you get my drift i suppose she could be or rather there might be a multiverse with nephilim and she could be there or using it as her base the way you put it there ought to be such a multiverse but why dont i know about it or remember it am i going senile or do i have dementia or or or are the hiding it some kindof cloaking device and why hadn’t it occurred to me before its not like i haven’t had time to consider the possibility probability likelihood damn near certainty you’re not as stupid as i though sorry that didn’t come out right bloody cliches you’re brighter than even gave you credit for i admire that clear thinking ability to handle the abstract without needing to try and visualise it even if it does require a reference back to the world of comics which by the way i think are hugely underrated and unfairly calumniated by the cultured elite its a good form or vector for explanation as well as storytelling and there are some very talented people have used it as a form mind you the whole storytelling shit gets in the way a lot of the time same crap that messed up the bibles too much storytelling not enough gist grist you know the real fucking stuff of life telling stories is telling lies as one of your favourite writers famously said well not that famously i guess he was a weird one but you know that anyway made a lot of what you do possible literaturewise you could be right about lilt you know not just where she’s hanging out with the nephilim or nephilimlike but about me being kindof attached to her she’s a pain in the arse no doubt on that one but she does brighten the old place up a bit with her cranky offbeat ideas and her impulsive interventions yeah affectionate even if thats possible for the divine well why not I’m supposed to love your species or at least subgroup of it at least depending which of the bibles you read dont you just hate that testament shit so fucking pretentious they are books biblio thus bibles the thing you miss out on your calculus of multiverses or parallel worlds as you call them is the one everybody misses and that is extinction you’ve been close enough on enough occasions to realise that destroying a system is not that difficult you’d be amazed how many of the spinoffs spiraldown crash and burn better than ninety percent at the last count ok its still a lot to look after but its doable trust me i know some hardly lasted a breathspace their destiny written in the conditions that gave rise to them they burn bright but short  

 gilberts girl gone —————————

but tell me about bekkah how people do affection but first tell me why you always use the names gilbert and bekkah they aren’t ever the same characters its just that your main characters are always called gilbert and bekkah 

ah the beautiful bekkah the bounteous bekkah bekkah the balm love of my life light of my life soul mate mine my better half my best self bekkah gone imagine love that woman will do forever always and forever well not always clearly coz she didn’t come into my life until i had had two lives already not wasted but spent bankrupt i was emotionally all used up i though but no bekkah gone but not forgotten the immemorial bekkah gilbert and bekkah are the immortal lovers and doesnt the pairing of those two names chime so well balance complement each other so having made the names up once why would any writer worth reading bother changing them waste of time and creative energy in my book in my books in fact every couple can forever more be bekkah and gilbert like beatrice and dante dante and the lobster but better much better eloise and abelard eurydice and orpheus leopold and molly molly and blazes boylan baltasaar and blimunds hanta and his gypsy girl same with plots just a waste of creative energy that should go into the language as for narrative arcs dont get me started yeah it makes me laugh that some readers think all my works feature the same people just because the names never change some dumb dumber than usual critic once called my works the adventures of gilbert and bekkah asif like as if they have adventures

but you let her go she didnt actively leave you you encouraged her to go why why would you do that what does that mean you didn’t push but you didnt ask her to stay why not she would have she would have given up that librarian had you only asked

of course she would have i knew that knew it all along but why would i she fell for the guy from the mobile library it was kismet the peripatetic pedant i used to call him the very pathetic pedant when i was being cruel he’s ok he means well and he looks after her better than i could at the end we were thrown together she and i we collided our times were right we blended there and then over time she became me and i her she more than me i think it was fusion at first contact what contact that was become so much me the language took her over too she had no outlet for it tho not like me no writing no creation the language choked the life out of me the social life the sexual life the normal life all she heard was me and my obsession morn til night day in day out if i couldn’t get it out it would explode me id burst but dear bekkah she had none of that i was language  i was choking her the librarian i knew at once he whistled to her tune like a singing kettle on the stove she shone afresh she revived and so i let her go more urged her advised her encouraged and understood in the end pleaded pled and she bless her against her inner will she went her heart must have lightened her step certainly did she is happy now happy as she used to be with me and me i just carried on what else dug myself deeper into the literature the language the langue and sometimes the parole but mainly the langue she shines now and she’s still with me in many ways and you i sense it you let lillith go you’ll never admit it to me but to yourself maybe i am diminished by her going as a human but as a writer not i would have been diminished as both by making her stay asking her to for my sake 

wow thats fascinating my boy had that dolt john giving it all that greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life kjv john the pompous tosh what you did was noble nobler than i knew your lot were capable of selfish and selfless all at once i didn’t give you that you mustve evolved that one all on your own that behaviours not common its recent id guess given the bloody histories and herstories but then there was a lot my boy got wrong or just didn’t know part of why i picked on you not picked but picked on your girls miss her you know

and she them

but they understand of course they do and she does too

the goat probes gilberts mind ——————

is no your final word on the podcast thing i could make you or i could get a voiceover bloke or voice actor as they call them now but the way its shaping the text so far maybe ill leave it for now not to say never i could revisit it id prefer you to do it more authentic more immediate and real id thought you’d be up for it when i picked you out before i picked on you but why you i know you obsess about that why me you say why now well you know the why dont say you dont i know I’m in your head remember and a pretty strange place it is too unusual anyway not what you’d call normal ordinary canonical common for starters theres that no visual imagination thing no dreams or rarely and them mainly linguistic ones that helps with the abstraction thing makes lateral thinking more likely then there your memory well recall really that thing about not being able to recall anything before the age of eleven well i can tell you for sure its not a recall problem your recall is amazing there just isnt anything there its empty blank zilch bugger all there how the fuck did that happen something mustve happened around then like your mum falling off the bus and then getting pregnant  trauma but in a good way an accident that put something right that had been wrong any ideas no of course not i looked in my archive and i couldn’t find anything to explain it just weird shit i guess might be related to the no visuals tho who knows not me for once certainly not you the rest of it is in great shape very good but one thing is odd very odd odder than the non visual stuff how to explain it you know that most people associate memories things like the proust madeline shit well you seem not to oh yeah not much in the sensory or taste tag department on any of your memories you worked in ai didn’t you well think of a neural network but with no weights on the neutrons axons or synapses or whatever not the houllebeq whatever well not no weights but all the same a welltempered neural network sort of most people hear a tune and remember what they were doing when they first heard it or memorised it not you most people know when stuff happened to them not you its all undated all ago back then nothing more nothing helpful all unencumbered by stored weights so anything any input can trigger any output or any number of outputs tons of shit and one or two make their way to the surface almost randomly but not random in some way so no visual imagination means no need to place anything in three dimensional space and no notion of time other than ago so maybe the best the closest the i dont know lets just says you have a non dimensional brain mind imagination space basically its a mess in there but it works for you and its gonna work for me im hopeful so far its all good well apart from the podcast thing but hey ho shit happens even i dont always get my own way 

oh wow so tell me something i didnt know hadn’t worked out for myself introspection is key gotta look inside you know that tho you dont seem to do a lot of it took me the best part of fifty years mind if you’d told me this back then i might have got more stuff done maybe mighta got some useful stuff done even so you want this text to be like my brainmindspace well thats handy coz thats where I’ve been going for a while now or trying to once and for all on the podcast stuff no i won’t say it again done and dusted mention it again and were done here i mean it 

gilbert probes the goat ——

but enough about the inside of my noggin whats the inside of yours like do you even have an inside do you have anything remotely like us now according to your old mate moses you created mankind in you own image day six week one and you make mankind in your image the operative word here I’m guessing is image and what it is meant to convey so we already know if you are to be believed that moses was an unreliable writer how unreliable i wonder and what does that image connote identical in all respects or a simulacrum simulacrum could fit for me plato toyed with the two forms of simulacrum the authentic the true copy and the representational that seems like the original but is not exactly the same so which are we dealing with here 

he was one smart bastard that platon especially for an old bubble he was rich you know but that meant he could spend his time doing important things thinking things not enough of that these days one of the reasons i need you poor old moses well he wasn’t amazingly sharp and he was no match for good old platon who was back in moses’ day none at all i tell you not a one now your greek guys they got the whole thing about the physical and the abstract moses and his boys not so much well not at all really and frighteningly literal they tended to aggrandise themselves big on hubris short on humility and abstraction so while moses probably meant real physical identical likeness he wasnt necessarily spot on couldnt have been didn’t have the intellectual or the linguistic sophistication ok he was wrong one to the greek none to the hebrew lad your intuition is correct again you lot aren’t physically anything like me coz im not physical in that sort of way think wave and particle at the same time if you will but not quite

did it ever occur to you that your choices of writer have been a bit wide of the mark that maybe your judgement is a bit off when it comes to language as we use it like you think you understand but dont quite get it us being post babel and you being a prebabel language user that confusion of tongues might just possible work both ways just a thought from me to you I’m assuming in all this that the books even the pentateuch were written  originally in post babel languages so theyve all been subject to the initial confusion and subsequent translations kinda lost in translation scenario over and over and you say that you can’t reverse that one so it seems to me the hurdles are almost insurmountable unless have heres a new thought have you ever heard of gordon lish probably but bear with me here michael pietsch maxwell perkins

g and g on translation and editors etcetera ---------

you think pietsch improved matters for dfws readers or lish improved carver its an idea tho a good editor could improve matters bit late for the first three mind I’ve given up on the last one completely let it have its own life and you know that idea that sam did some editing on it well forget that jim was having none of it he hated publishers printers editors the entire fucking publishing industry you’ve read gas from a burner mind you he hated most people even the ones who gave him money and supported him bit like your wellbeck pretentious tosh that frog spelling who do you let edit your stuff anybody id guess not

well you’d be very wrong there bekkah gets to edit all my suff finished and unfinished only time i stopped writing for a while was when she lost interest in it the vampire novel it just didn’t grab her as an idea even with all those innovations and experiments i ploughed on but my heart my heart wasn’t in it after a while it needed her nursing i needed her encouragement didn’t happen another one unfinished looks like ill leave more unfinished works than any other writer what an epitaph he wrote a lot but finished almost nothing the writer of fragments mister fragments master of fragments if I’m lucky if posterity recognises me at all less this one does it for me what say you goat could it will it not much chance of her editing this text tho is there and i sure as fuck amnt letting any hack near it over my dead or dying bloody body ill erase it first so put that in your supernal pipe and fucking smoke it and lish made carver tess is undoing all his good work or so im told so if we don’t have an editor you’d better make it perfectly clear to me what you want this text to accomplish i mean ive read three of the four and ive no idea what the fuck you were hoping them to do and if the third ones fanatical readers are anything to go by i guess that didn’t do the trick either well obviously not come on give whats the point of this text

big question mister writer mister creator of new texts its definitely gonna be a new text and yeah itll be postmodern af most of your life youve dismissed the big questions that others ask as pointless so why wonder about this big question whats the point of any text ever a very big not pointless question better than what is the point of life in general or human life in particular that interesting isn’t it you humans are forever asking about the meaning of human life and it is not fortytwo tho that did make me laugh but seldom about the point of nonhuman life anthropocentrism at its hubristic apogee so typical of your lot poor old lot with lillith and his missus on his case he stood no chance what was her name his wife edith was it something like that mind you back in the day back in those days a pillar of salt was worth something probably more than she was as a wife buy a lot geddit a lot of sodomy for that wonga of salt stick it in my supernal pipe where did that come from you dont like to use such big words not big not usual usage not big then but unusual for you

an intellectual decoration ornament whatever i always get that one mixed up with sempiternal supernatural had to look it up both of them in fact wanted something in your realm something to stop you in your tracks and give the reader pause sempiternal tho the definition is kinda nonsensical nonsensical if your dot thing is true and why should i doubt it the dot thing but eternal and unchanging that is a proper contradiction not an oxymoron which is only an apparent contradiction that would be the real thing but it can’t be real if the dot holds can it did i get that wrong or what anyway this is all a bit off topic my use of words is my choice remember my circus my monkeys what do you want this text to achieve did you know that there are 44 words in the english language that defy the eye before eee rule which isnt therefore a rule but just a guide and not a very reliable one thankfully we have spellcheckers for that kind of crap these days tho with the weird see theres one weird orthography weve adopted its one of the few things ill leave to a spellchecker but hey ho there i go going off topic myself lets get back to the purpose here shall we 

no you’re right about sempiternal nonsense word and nonsciense as you would put it but in simple terms the purpose the what i want to achieve what i keep trying to get across to your lot the thing you all get wrong or forget or deliberately misunderstand well not the thing the things the basics the how too the what not to dos the how it fucking works in simple terms and I’ve learned with you lot that the simpler the better is a good guide well think of it as a user manual yeah thats good a user manual for life in this universe not a set of dos and donts just a guide not like the one that perec wrote what fucking use was that to anybody no the real deal a users guide to this universe youve written user guides before i know that back when you worked in it so think of it that way and well be good to go 

 oh yippee how fucking riveting another poxy users guide you do realise that nobody ever reads those things don’t you

gilbert goes without —————

funny old day today woke up with the daylight as per and rubbed the night from my eyes went for a slash and no flush brushed my teeth dry splashed nothing on my face water supply has dried up it would seem staggered down to the basement and put the kettle on ready filled last night switch on the computer and go to let the girls out of their run come back and the kettle hasn’t boiled the mac hasn’t powered up electricity supply has powered down no leccy and no water its gonna be a tough day light the gas hob and put the other kettle on also filled last night never entirely unprepared  so with the chores all done and the logs brought in we all settle down me for a fag and a coffee girls for a couple of barley rusks well they take theirs outside to eat tidy girls two pots of coffee later filled the gas kettle from the electric kettle and a few more fags i take the daily shit and use the last flush in the cistern lucky i didn’t flush last thing last night to flush away and then its out to fill a few ten litre containers from the rain butts and so the day went on pretty much as usual minor inconveniences only around fourish the cisterns started to fill barking with airlocks and juddering the pipes prepped some veggies for a turlu turlu and stuck it in the oven awaiting the return of electricity otherwise ill fire up the woodturner early and cook it on top get some more logs in just in case just before dark the power comes back the mac powers up and we are back to normal get radio4 going and make a pot of tea and light the stove anyway a chill northeasterly has got up and I’m just sitting back and drinking my tea when the goat turns up asking have i thought about the user guide idea well excuse me if i haven’t but I’ve been kindof occupied with the day to day shit but without two of the normal services well three if you count having no bloody internet either must attach the modem router to  the emergency inverter from the solar at some stage and anyway where the fuck have you been all day what have you been doing tracking lilith again i was expecting you for coffee this morning as usual where did you get to

was off doing god stuff if you must know so you havent considered it yet the user guide idea

no i havent well actually i have and I’m not writing another user guide or not in user guide format but now i know ill adjust shit to get the same effect now kindly sod off and let me enjoy an evening with my girls and a good horror movie well talk about it tomorrow around coffee time ok

the goat and the ineluctable —————

good morning goat pull up a metaphorical chair and grab a metaphorical coffee if you like ill not offer you a fag as i know you don’t when did you give up or did you never start sorry i was a bit short last evening but i was about at the end of my tether just needed some down time no hard feelings eh well any way i was thinking last night about this dot thing not dot cotton not dot com the direction of travel thing seems to me it implies some possibility of ineluctability a tide of history if you will the course of history like fidel castros book nothing can change the course of history his theory about history not being made by individuals but history forming individuals to steer the ship of state or whatever to its ineluctable next stage i guess you knew castro in his heyday heard some of his speeches awesome oratory skills 

do me a flavour bud lifes too bloody short to listen to one of those seven hour marathons even me and my life near enough endless not that he was wrong ineluctable isnt quite right but his reasoning his cultural reasoning was pretty damn good bright bloke astute as fuck but blimey he was boring once he got started even the cubans didnt listen to those things in their entirety but you know that coz you went there when he was still in charge he gave one when you were there anniversary of the storming of the moncada barracks you were in santiago de cuba at the time the radios would be on all over the country but people just dipped in and out thru the day even the zealots who turned up in person would drift off for hours on end those speeches oh me but he was right about history forming leaders rather than leaders creating history yup spot on you really think hitler was unique no way he was one of many any of whom could have well you know what it was gonna happen no matter who was at the tiller now can we discuss the user guide thing how you’re gonna do it whatve you got in mind 

so you weren’t aren’t a big fan of fidels speaking style or is it just the duration we can do the user guide thing but first why does dot not equate to ineluctability i don’t get that is it to do with maintaining the notion of free will religions have trouble with free will and destiny give joe public a germ of an idea that free will isnt real and theyll run amok with it same shit with genetics a few discoveries and suddenly joe believes in genetic determinism asif we humans cant hold two diametrically contradictory ideas opinions at one and the same time one of the reasons we invented gods somebody something else to blame not to explain but to blame same reason we invented evil madness mental illness not my fault not my circus not my monkeys thinking or lack of 

fucking cheeky sod you think you created me get real ill put the arrowhead of causality up your jacksie you carry on like that your mum taught you to respect your betters

 yeah and my dad taught me that all that old elders and betters bollocks was just that bollox designed to put us in our place under them well im entitled to my opinion and youre entitled to yours an near the twain shall meet

ok fairs fair you are dot is why things cant be undone not that there is any ineluctability but  you have to remember that todays universe is only a rearrangement of all of the energy that made yesterdays universe and so on forwards and backwards thru the dot  think yesterday has gone and tomorrow is inevitable the universe you inhabit has no interest in you no knowledge of you and doesnt give a fuck about you qua you you are just a part of the present arrangement all that rearranging of energy to make this moment out of the previous moment does have a time cost involved tho and so the amount of change effort from one moment to another exerts a certain amount of inertia on the volume of change hence your idea of the tide of history actually more inertia of history than tide but you get what i mean  

do i maybe ill need to digest that lot

gilbert and the user guide———

getting back to the whole user guide idea we can put a few flags in the ground authorship who wrote it and why itll need a lot more internal consistency than the previous versions close down the possibilities for misinterpretation less shaggy dog stories rewind that no bloody shaggy dogs at all no parables itll need to be a lot bloody shorter too and in easily digestible chunks attention spans arent what they used to be back in the day people would watch a burning bush for hours now that’d get maybe thirty seconds and if it didn’t explode or something theyd turn off no more tv testcards or potters wheels no purple prose punchy dos and as few donts as possible keep it simple stupid have to put it online and get it into wikipedia maybe get it done as an app pictures pictures would be good people like pictures not me but people most people no misogyny keep it all equal no homophobia in fact don’t intrude into peoples sex lives at all careful well have to be careful on gender stuff that genesis stuff about man and woman wont wash these days try to avoid gender altogether keep it punchy no big words unless we hyperlink them to definitions no that won’t work scrub big words completely thatll do to be going on with you’re gonna have to think carefully about what you want in ill try and put a style guide together for both of us if thats gonna help how about a disclaimer up front repudiate the previous books a snappy title would help any ideas

whoa hold your horses there thats a lot of dos and donts im not accustomed to working within constraints but i take your point points mostly valid i think but dont hold me to that title snappy well how about something like the word of god version 4 lets not mention jims attempt do you remember that crap version they brought out last century the good news bible made me laugh like a drain what good news and the prose was so shitty   

do i get a credit does anybody the illustrator if we get one that title is interesting i like god and gilbert myself but lets hold them both for now what i dont get tho what i never got was whats religion for why would you wanna have another go at it its never really worked out for you so far i know you think thats down to the books but maybe just maybe its the general concept i mean look at it three versions of the same book so far and you’ve got three religions of the book and all three of them happy to rip shit out of each other each has the revealed truth the right way the only way and between them so called adherents to these religions control a vast majority of the peoples of the world and its not exactly a rip roaring success is it i mean youve got two major power players sticking with the first book most of europe doing the second and great swathes of third book people and governments the rest are either offshoots of the major power block religions or are some other odd religion all their local own and frankly they dont have great track records either be fair all these religions are a bit disastrous can than just be because the books are a bit shit really can it 

two major power players of the first book israel ill give you but whos the other one not with you on that oh unless you mean the usofa ok so granted Ive never heard an american quote any of the second version of the book which by the way was supposed to revoke the first so maybe they are people of the first book they certainly love all that eye for an eye shit that moses gave them and the violence ok so the us is most likely an old testament people despite thinking of themselves as xtian  but hey you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette so lets get whipping those fucking eggs up now they are already broken

hey how about the egg whisk of the universe that’d make a good snappy title 

g&g rough stuff out—— 

yeah i like that but you stole it its a parody of a dfw title isn’t it broom of the universe something like that broom of the system one of his better works but overlong at more than four and a half hundred pages well keep that as a possible in the meantime i had a think about the disclaimer stroke frontispiece stroke credits stroke colophon stroke dedication lets assume we go with the whisk its growing on me itd go something like the whisk of the universe it should have the definite article so the whisk of the universe newline subtitle a users guide newline by the lord god almighty think we should have capitals for that bit as revealed to his servant gilbert or do you prefer papalazarou how about papalazarou the pious no maybe not whatever you fancy illustrations by whoever we get to do them i get to do them or do you have somebody particular in mind 

hold on goat servant bloody servant youre shitting me surely me a servant your servant no way and revealed for fucks sake that puts me on a par with john the nutter no thanx no way what about as inspired into the prophet papalazarou inspired into as in solomons usage 

ok thats good 

and no capitals we already agreed that the lord almighty really is that what you think of yourself do you deserve the definite article and almighty are you sure how about by the god of the religions of the book or the one god of the abrahamic faiths more accurate wouldn’t you say and doesnt piss off the hindus and buddhists makes it clear where youre coming from your authority such as it is gets round the pomposity

mmm the one true god of the abrahamic faiths how about that good point dont want to piss off the pagans heathens and such i am hoping to convert them as well as uniting and straightening up those who already believe in me big ask i know but worth another shot maybe last roll of the dice no pressure gilbert

thatll do nicely done now what about the disclaimer and no i dont have an illustrator in mind ive always wanted to have my texts illustrated bacon would have been good but never had anybody take me up on it your on your own with that quest but hey you’ve got more contacts than me i even wrote a text about what i mean by illustrating a text ill try and dig it out you could use it as a brief 

ill think about an artist leave it to me now for the disclaimer here goes this text this guide redacts revokes and supersedes all previous versions of the word of me the god of the abrahamic faiths known variously as the old testament the new testament the torah the quran the apocrypha and others including the parchments known as the dead sea scrolls from hereon in those texts are declared anathema and heresy this text is the only guiding text for people of the faith about the faith those texts are repudiated because they are outdated and have been misinterpreted 

wow thats some verbose logging you’ve got going on there goat you sound like a fucking lawyer were gonna have to cut that down a bit tidy it up but its a start i guess enough of that we’ve got a start now what about my question what are religions for why religion 

the goat on religion --------

 no really to paraphrase eric burdon religion what is it good for this religion these religions the multiplicity of them seems every one of them is destined to give birth to hundreds more as they all factionalise splinter and fragment absolutely nothing say it again and  it was edwin starr not eric burdon and certainly not freddie starr

what was it churchill said about democracy not his originally just popularised its the worst form of government apart from all the others that have been tried something like that anyway well he knew a good phrase when he heard one that was a good one so he stole it as for him getting the nobel have you read that shit what were they thinking about as good as his painting and his bricklaying decidedly mediocre at his best same deal with religion best form of mass philosophy yet discovered tried but yeah the fragmentation thing is problematic or has been its why we need a new user guide simpler leaner more straightforward less room for doctrinal shit and stuff to fuel schism thats part of why i chose you in the first place you can cut crap before it goes anywhere near the page I’ve listened to you doing it in your head thats where most of your real writing happens isn’t it not on the page or in drafts and rewrites it about done when it comes out 

take your point and yeah the previous books have been fodder for factions more or less from the get go but its got more built in flaws than that religion is this one gonna be offering that whole afterlife thing coz that sure hasnt worked at all except for a very few nut jobs martyrs and saints and general religious loony tunes and exclusivity are we doing that and what about proseletyzing coz those things fucked up every religion so far all that apostasy heresy and missionary zeal am i making myself clear im having nothing to do with any of that crap but be honest some of those early greek philosophers got some good stuff going didnt last long but they do get revived every so often 

they did but how come philosophy isnt a compulsory subject in schools whereas religion is huh smartarse queue eee deee but on the whole afterlife thing the resurrection to the life eternal well the jurys out on that dont get me wrong it was something i always wanted to do but 

but what you meant to do it you promised it but you havent delivered on the pledge or what didnt you do it for your boy the xrist 

mmmm yes i did promise it but it proved to be a lot more difficult to do than id originally thought i can do the life eternal stuff but the resurrection from death here well i havent cracked that one yet oh dear yeah the xrist thing well sorry to say that was more sleight of hand than a miracle that simon of arimathea it was his idea back in the day he was a bit of a conjuror one who was adept at the arts of prestidigitation a thaumaturge a necromancer even it was all an elaborate illusion for the benefit of the romans and his followers i know what youre thinking but i did mean simon not joe his brother joe was just a merchant but simon was into all sorts of weird shit and before you ask yeah simon helped out with the lazarus stunt too 

for the romans and the followers are you sure might it not have been for pride to keep up the pretence well were not having any of that if you cant do it you can’t promise it as my old mum used to say dont make promises you can’t keep and dont make promises you have no intention of keeping

OK so no we wont be offering afterlife or spiritual realms and such shit that stuff is for the birds nowadays  with the web generation as irrelevant as green shield stamps no punishment no rewards outside the reward of behaving well in and of itself 

frankly old goat your reasoning justification whatever is a bit thin threadbare in fact but i didnt expect anything significant not in all honesty but if youre really giving up the life after death shit and rewards in the hereafter then that gets my vote whether we can sell it is another matter but lets see what we can do no cajoling coercing etcetera helps might not work but probably worth a go yeah lets try it

gilberts good food guide 

but first can we cover some of the doctrinal splits those schisms we were discussing or skirted around like before we go on hey how about a self help book instead of a user guide they sell like crazy especially if they have some crazy dietary restriction involved like i said nobody reads user guides but self help shit yeah rehash all that kosher crap into a i don’t know maybe an old testament diet or some such what the prophets used to eat or hey how about the methuselah diet they’d go apeshit for that and everyone knows the name brand identification with the oldest guy ever wed fuck those paleo creeps easily with that throw in some locusts how to cook on a burning bush shit like that theyd lap it up itd be a great draw for the rest unleavened gluten free bread big push on loaves and fish then go on with lots of mindful meditation come on we must have the bare bones of a self help live forever self obsessed book already are there any other freaky food ideas in leviticus ive never read it closely but surely

well the self help thing sounds like an idea but all that food stuff is problematic by the time i got round to the second book i was bored stiff of that whole leviticus chapter so i ditched all that clean and unclean animals doctrine that aaron had trotted out while he was fasting thats a classic obsessing about food when you havent eaten for forty days he got a bit carried away not that bloody mahomet took any notice why do they all have such a downer on pigs is beyond me how can an animal that produces bacon be anything other than good when i saw all that stuff on the internet about clean food and clean eating it was all hideous deja vu for me like i ever really gave a fuck those old book guys did a lot of fasting mainly to get the hallucinations do you have any idea how many hallucinogens grow in barren desert conditions most of them but honestly these new fads would be better off focussing on the how much not the what of eating i look at these fat bastards eating in the car eating as they walk along eating at every opportunity how do they get anything done and when they do do any thinking its always about bloody food tho the stuff they get down their necks wouldn’t be recognised as food by anybody in the first three drafts of the book 

thats ok about the second book revoking the dietary stuff its right back in fashion so itll fit right in with the zeitgeist anyway nobody remembers all that guff but lets not go anywhere near that vegan vegetarian stuff or well have no bloody animals on the planet at all apart from dogs and cats and maybe rats i say we go for the insects ants locusts caterpillars spiders cockroaches even farming them would be less intensive and nobody could object to eating them on moral grounds for fuck sake not many people actually like insects enough to liberate them or impose rules about them and this way we get to keep some diversity what we really need is something obscure esoteric you know like quinoa something innovative but natural got it eureka asss milk thatll be our you ess pee ban cows milk kill off the diary industry and bring back the ass every home can have one self-sufficiency too brilliant stop bathing in it and start drinking it making cheese and butter from it gods gold top genius replace kefir with koumiss let me work on this its promising Im sure it is whadda you say 

let me get up to speed on these self help books and get back to you but it might be fertile ground but it’d have to be mainly how to live plus the dietary stuff as a secondary

no problem now give me some thinking space and well workshop it right after weve covered the trinity celibacy the papacy the messiah and such things so you’d better get your thinking cap on while Im working up some bullet points for the self help book 

oh dear i was afraid you were going to bring those up anything you missed indulgences purgatory riches idolatry we might as well do them all 

the goat and the godhead  

lets start with the whole messiah thing was the boy the messiah the jews the chosen people were supposed to be waiting for well yes and no makes no never mind now they werent having any of it yeah he fulfilled all the prophesies but no he wasn’t the warrior messiah they fancied having hence the whole crucifixion shit but few years later i send them a warrior prophet and wouldnt you just know it they don’t want that one either those hebrews are never satisfied not when it comes to messiahs they’re not was he the son of god well again its a yes and no thing fruit of my loins or fruit of gabe to be honest it matters not theyre all my creations as you like to say my circus my monkeys angels archangels messiahs prophets demons devils the whole shooting match even the holy ghost you have to understand your world is just one of my toys dont get me wrong its an important one but its only one in the toy box there are others there were others before it there have been others since there are others around plenty of others as it happens  the whole multiverse thing just my toy box something to fill in the genuinely endless days of my life to tinker with to destroy and create as it suits think kid in a toyshop but one where the kid can make anything he wants dreams up like a three d fab shop on miracle acid take it from there and you have the basic facts about the socalled trinitarian schism you’d have thought it was obvious from first principles wouldnt you in the beginning and all that nothing about the boy or the holy ghost in the beginning it was me on my jack jones thats clear whats the problem wheres the argument have you read that stuff consubstantial for fucks sake homousios give me a break theres me and the rest of you and that include the boy and the holy whatever and even for fucks sake lilith talk about linguistic sophistry what a load of old biblical bollox its like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin as many as i say so end of gottit lets get back together tomorrow

no no hold on a sec what was the whole deal with the first coming the xrist child thing you hinted that the whole thing was his call on the messiah trip but you just said that you made him so how did that happen that he did his own thing went off piste so badly went off message what was he supposed to do that he didnt come on you can spare the time its something you have plenty of if you are to be believed 

if I’m to be believed really who the fuck do you think you are questioning my word cheeky sod there is no conflict no contradiction in what I’ve told you you people with your need for binary opposition in every discussion its a curse on your lot and it makes our job here much harder than it might be you said yourself that humans are perfectly capable of holding two contradictory views at one and the same time but as soon as it comes to a discussion like i said you all retreat to binary opposition you’re a sad lot sometimes look i made a messiah and i had in mind how he’d do the first coming trust me we shouldn’t have needed any second coming if head done things properly but he was headstrong and thought he knew best at an early age you’ve heard the child in the temple story from very early on he figured he could form a better plan thought he could get the gentiles on board without alienating the hebrews i told him told him time and again that that wasn’t on to concentrate on the hebrews do that one job properly to focus on the job in hand but no he knew best forever throwing it in my face that i hadn’t actually been human i couldn’t understand didnt have his insight didnt really get humans can you credit that i didnt understand my own creation such hubris in one supposedly so humble huh and what a plan he came up with to appeal to pity pity for pity sake why did he ever think that would work on a pitiless bunch like you not that you’re not capable of pity as a species its the nature of pity as an emotion that it is evanescent its like the bubbles in champagne its fleeting if you take the pitiable out of sight or take the direct focus off of it the emotion itself is gone never to be rekindled show you people a photo of a drowned child on a beach and millions hundreds of millions of you will feel pity for the child for his parents for all refugees and migrants but when you look away after you’ve raised your pathetic petition on some social media site or other then its all about economic migrants and the need to strengthen borders to stop johnny foreigner and his family from stealing your wealth give me a break pity and outrage are easily raised in your breast and last precisely no time at all neither of them has ever given rise to change meaningful change of any description the russian the french the chinese revolutions didnt come from pity or outrage asif three most iconic images of xristian  art xrist crucified xrist with the crown of thorns and finally the dead and broken body of the xrist laying across the lap of his spotless madonna mother every one of them pushed under the noses in the eyeline of believers and nonbelievers alike for centuries and every one of them designed to arouse pity the pieta and how has that worked out dwindling church attendance slump of membership yeah excellent and then flip it over within years each one of them used instead to rouse anger and hatred both very effective and long lasting human emotions hate the hebrews for killing our saviour not the romans you’ll notice not the real enemy the occupying force but the hebrews it took till two thousand eleven for the pope to exonerate them pity don’t make me laugh for pitys sake and while were at it lets do celibacy no no no why would i want to stop people having fun and if they are making more of my toys thats good too if not thats fine by me the whole celibacy jag was down to paul the pompous the other disciples called him limpdick paul guess why yup impotence simon peter on the other hand thats why the boy renamed him peter rock hard constantly possibly a case of prism who knows but paul couldn’t get it up so his doctrine on celibacy make perfect sense kindof well to him I’m not having any why should anybody else sour grapes 

gilbert gets the great schism

so youve covered off two of the four major sticking points on the great schism between east and west lets knock off the other two leavened or unleavened and papal supremacy   

can we give that lot a rest for a bit I’ve done my research on these self help books and and can we talk a bit about them they are as interesting as you say as a possibility format wise you can get them online you know titles seem to be important theres a whole self help book about writing successful self help books how fucking meta is that the other thing is i noticed lots of empty aphorisms those things are crazy popular on the webthingy like bonkers amounts of likes and loves and wows and all those emoji things emojis we have to get some of those in and maybe some antiaphorisms you know explanations of why this or that aphorism is an empty signifier yeah get some semiotics in there too makes us sound clever and gnomic at the same time to different audiences this one does my head in everything happens for a reason do you have any idea how popular that is monster popular thats how big and its so clearly nonsense even in my book books heres another one that kills me when you want something the whole universe conspires in helping you achieve it oh really ever see that happen what about one day you will wake up and find theres no more to do all the things you wanted to do who is this cohelo guy thats some snake oil hes got going there this one there is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve the fear of failure brilliant twaddle how does he make this shit up come on we have to be able to incorporate aphorisms and like i say antiaphorisms how about the universe is like a giant supertanker it takes forefuckingever to turn it around all the captain can do is move the tiller a tad here and there so don’t expect miracles or this one all the gajillions is that a real word all the gajillions of things in the universe are in a perfect but delicate balance dont rock the boat the universe can and will bite your arse if you do or maybe ion you do sounds folksy might hook the americans 

good idea ideas might have a place but lets go back to the great schism can we the aphorism stuff can wait come on 

if you insist guess ill get no peace lil we do so the easy one first leavened versus unleavened asif i gave a flying fuck use ritz crackers if you like the whole transubstantiation mass communion thing is just so much nonsense use chocolate if you like give elvis costello some credit why not just another of pompous pauls obsessions with ritual he was oh see dee of course all to do with his impotence total tosh how many arguments can you have over something so bloody trivial do me a flavour bud first tried to sell it to the corinthians but they didn’t fancy it much took a long time to take off he was so pissed off that simon peter was getting so much good press sour grapes jealousy the usual suspects the early cristian church was hotbed of betrayal and envy trust me a real vipers pit and paul was the most sanctimonious self regarding of them all determined to establish his legacy to elevate his importance a poacher turned gamekeeper what a piece of work but he couldn’t get it all his own way and boy did that piss him off and the ironic stroke funny thing is his real hatred was for peter simon peter old priapic peter peter the rock that simple misunderstanding of the boys nickname for peter got all misunderstood that misunderstanding was a real disaster that what led on to the whole papacy myth

the goat and the popes and the schism too —— 

papacy myth so thats all just a myth really do explain was a constant hardon his only qualification really

something like that you can see how it might happen and yes at one point the boy was going to anoint him as his successor but then james came thru the ranks and clearly got some traction with the boy well he was his brother after all it all happened quite quickly it was a bit confusing around the time of the crucifixion the whole thing was a mess betrayals rebuttals everybody denying everything trying to save their own arses from the romans and even the hebrew priesthoods everyone was out to clean house but it wasnt simon peter cut off that malchuss ear that was james james didn’t take shit from anybody and certainly not from some servant of the sanhedrin and no the boy didn’t stick it back on but all that was written out later on in the end simon peter was turned into a glorified concierge his only job keeping the keys to the gates like that was somehow important in any way other than symbolism the whole gates of the kingdom of heaven thing so you can see the whole papacy is based on a misunderstanding of a dirty joke and pauls jealousy and the expunging of the real successor james symbols and metaphor being passed off as fact classic propaganda history is written by the victors remember hold on i just remembered another one get this the ultimate counsel of despair don’t waste your time on explanations people only hear what they want to hear who writes this shit where do you begin with debunking that kind of crap

yeah theres a lot of them out there good grist for the antiaphorism section for sure but can we get back to the papacy and papal authority please pretty please its fascinating in a kind of very modern way properly appropriate to current times current propaganda fake doctrine fake ritual people will lap this stuff up if we expose it for what it is 

ok where was i oh yeah thats right to the victor the spoils that reminds me it was victor pope victor got that whole petrine supremacy thing off the ground victor one eighty nine to one ninety nine or thereabouts  he was a berber you know from what you would call tripoli in libya total cunt and megalomaniac he was a serial excommunicator he actually believed he was somehow directly descended in some bizarre way from peter hardon he was a berber how could he be descended from peter tho given peters penchant for putting it about its not impossible  frankly i lost track of peter when james was running the show but you can guarantee he was off somewhere shagging anything with a pulse so who knows must have fathered a few kids in his time maybe haveth childers everywhere was about peter sure as fuck i don’t know and we can count ourselves lucky that paul never had kids can you imagine the shitstorm that would have started a bit like the sunni shia schism lucky escape  well anyway victor asserted that peter was the first pope great idea huh successor to the holy janitor if only he had known but yeah he got the ball rolling but the real villain in the piece was that portugese pope what was his name damasus i think yeah damasus another megalomaniac big on the notion of saints and martyrs and reverence and deeply suspicious of the eastern branch of the church he saw the way the roman empire was going and he didnt like it so you could say he really opened the split but it took a german pope to pull off the whole papal supremacy schtick leo the ninth count of dagsburg big on priestly celibacy not as hot on simony as hes cracked up to be he was the nail in the coffin straw that broke the camels back whatever told the eastern church to get back in its box and when they wouldnt declared his supremacy and excommunicated their leader bingo great schism right there and then he died and left others to the mess fucking genius very rock and roll it took another german luther to break with the papacy altogether so there you go there you have it papal supremacy an historical myth founded on a dirty joke compounded by a berber without a sense of humour and cemented by a german cunt count queue eee dee now can we get back to aphorisms please please pretty please see what i did there 

great gnomic aphorisms of the goat -----

what are you doing there goat youve gone silent on me

just watching facebook and twitter and snapchat and instagram waiting for a good one to come up theres one due about now ok yeah there it is being grateful makes you gorgeous what the fuck is that about some kind of beauty tip these things crack me up oh theres another one nobody ever gave their best and regretted it oh really ask oppenheimer about that ask my boy 

very good ok theres just one more thing was there really a female pope

just one more thing who are you frank columbo bet you didnt know his name was frank did you not a lot of people do and his wifes name was kate amazing the things you can find on the internet yes there was and her name was joan john the seventh anastasius testified to it wrote about her but that didnt work out too well for him once they decided to write her out of their history that was a seriously bad move so they dubbed him the antipope and rubbished him and his account pretty much standard practice really but but the story wouldnt go away get this one impossible is just an opinion and this listen to your heart it knows everything oh really 

while you were finding those gems i was creating out very first anti aphorism every thing has antecedents and  every thing has consequences but no thing happens for a reason we could put it next to beside the empty one so its an aphorism and an anti aphorism a rebuttal all at the same time

thats great love it yeah side by side sounds good or one above the other maybe what do you think ive done one too try this one not as wordy as my others im still working on those beauty can only be perceived beauty does not exist outside of human perception or beauty can be beheld it cannot be held clever huh sets that misquote of tom aquinas right jim tried it in portrait but nobody remembers that not pithy enough carefully worked thru but not exactly snappy which one dyou prefer

i like the cannot be held one its so clever how about this one everybody is entitled to an opinion but do not mistake a reaction for an opinion opinions require serious consideration maybe it needs some work but you get the idea 

I get it but will anybody else will they remember it and repeat it like it share it love it wow it philosophy as aphorism heres another one shit happens but god cannot fix this shit only you can this is more fun than all that religious crap should we test drive them put them or one or two on that facebook site and see how they work if they get likes and shares and stuff put them in one of those big fuck off boxes and 

and at exactly that point the goat disappeared went silent buggered off just as my internet connection fell over just when it was getting to be real fun so i took an executive decision and decided to try a couple of our new aphorisms but im gonna have to wait till the internet comes back  would like a graphic to go with them but no sign of an illustrator so far maybe ill wait need to talk to the goat about attribution  l8r readers

in the name of the goat ———

while he was away i started serialising this text onto a web site for writers of experimental writing and lo and behold as soon as i got it uploaded got whats here already loaded up hes back again hence the reference to readers yesterday attribution goat attribution the successful aphorisms are all attributed that cohelo guy some bloke called rumi hes megapopular einstein too so we need to attribute ours but to who or is it to whom i can never remember it won’t stick but really is it important  

oh come on its not difficult in that case its whom whom for object or preposition who for subject simple pimple easy peasy 

ok clever clogs ill try to remember that but its like left and right with me always  getting them mixed up and i had an idea for the title of the text when its done the last book of the bibles did you know that when gabriel garcia marquez was given a copy of ulysses by his mentor he was told it was the other bible cool or what fucking ace 

you know scanning for this aphorism shit its amazing but true that there are good ones circulating too looking back thru your stuff theres a sammyb one that you use every so often its so good such great advice and has so much hope in it but realisable hope not vague futuristic crap you know the one dont you and in the same search not on your history i came across this cracker if you can dream it you can do it by walt fucking disney that cunt didnt stop at selling snake oil he went on to sell the vapour from snake oil every little girl a princess and their mums too asif come and smell the dreams the unrealistic dreams and drop me a load of cash in the process ill get rich from your stupidity your stupidity feeds my cupidity roll up roll up your mindless hope makes me roll up 

of course i do i know the sammyb quote its one of my favourites ever tried ever failed no matter try again fail again fail better genuine fucking life advice realistic everybody can do it its true for every person whos ever lived and ever will universal and achievable you dont get many of those to the pound hold on I’m gonna post that right now got be done 

yeah well while youre fiddling about on antisocial media ill just hang around here shall i talk to myself as always like all ive got is time on my hands but i dont have hands so thats redundant and why would anybody have time on their hands what a stupid expression you might have snot on your hands or shit but time i dont think so you humans have come up with a lot of stupid expressions 

heres another sammyb i love youre on earth theres no cure for that and don’t forget i cant go on ill go on oh and of course nothing is funnier than unhappiness what are you going on about of course youve got time all the time in the world all of the time in the universe in multiple universes you make me wait on you so fairs fair goatman have you had a think about attribution who do we tag with these new aphorisms come on i want to post a couple to test them out see how they are received perceived  

well what about the goat all lowercase maybe one word but with extra spaces between the gee and the oh and the oh and the a and the a and the tee like this then o a a t or maybe theg o  a   a    t with the spaces increasing typographically intriguing huh  

colour me not convinced typographical innovation is so nineteensixties and that right there is just for its own sake how about we go with something gnomic like gilberts capital gee capital ess or heres a better one sammyb capital ess capital bee now that would be kind of intellectually intriguing get them thinking get them to put their thinking caps on

now there another stupid expression who in the world in the history of mankind ever put on a fucking thinking cap but ok lets go with sammyb if we used the other one people some very few people might link it to you at least sammyb is dead sammyb dead imagine i like it yeah lets go with that one try a few out see how they are received perceived run them up the flagpole and see who salutes them guffaw guffaw    

gilbert on the feedback ——

this user testing is a bit crap focus groups may be the way to go how to assemble a focus group tho 

maybe its not user testing thats crap maybe its your facebook friends what happened

not much to be honest a few halfhearted likes and a few loves from the usual suspects we all have them that one friend who loves everything we post crap or not it gets a heart that frankly means no more than i saw that you posted that love the one about beauty garnered more than the other one about things not happening for a reason that slid past most people just the odd like like just one or two likes no comments on any of them the genuine beckett quote did pretty much best of all of them they knew that one already tho they should do i post it fairly often basically there wasnt much saluting going on on my parade ground 

fail again fail better new one there is no such thing as progress just change good honest stuff and short but we still need one about balance equilibrium in the system and maybe one about the signal to noise ratio 

maybe but how do we find out which one works best 

honestly really you care you never cared before you hear of publish and be damned before its how you thought when i got you on board one of the reasons i got you on board dont shit out on me now keep it honest this is art truth not fucking entertainment peoples lives depend on this the whole universe depends on it 

youre right what was i thinking they get it good they believe it good if not then they can go fuck themselves fuck the entire thing no skin off my five tip o the hat to the hebrew peoples and their barbaric behaviour maybe we could use the plate spinners somehow for the balance one i mean no nobody remembers the plate spinners i do wonder if anybody remembers anything nowadays and homer was worried about writing diminishing the use of memory well the web has more or less made memory totally redundant oh fuck it wasn’t homer it was plato my memory is getting creaky do they make doubleyoudeeforty for the brain they should do for the joints too that would really help first thing in the mornings a squirt of that on the joints before brushing the old grippers would work wonders 

stop bloody moaning getting old is part of the deal youre not doing too badly still got your hair well some of it no joint replacements yet no chronic complaints other than the odd autoimmune shit and the raynauds dont start feeling sorry for yourself or im offski can’t be doing with all that again as for doubleyoudeeforty for the joints have you tried cannabis oil cannabis oil and glucosamine they both help not miracles but surely they take the edge off quiet down the creaking at least a notch maybe more you’re not even seventy yet back in the day people lived for centuries not saying they didnt complain you shouldve heard noah going on and enoch too but old methuselah never complained well not out loud those old guys figured they had plenty to look forward to never looked back just wanted to see what happened next well until the flood that is and then a bit of existential angst set in with the whole lot of you humans nothing ages you as quickly as existential angst rots you from the inside all that doubt eats the soul so to speak so come on get a grip weve got a lot to do 

youre right of course but that kind of defines you doesnt it so not much point me saying it is there redundant so was it the flood got people asking all those stupid questions you know the ones whats the point of life whats the meaning of it all where do we come from where are we going all those i mean even if there were answers how would they help anything i mean wanting to know pointless things is in and of itself pointless isnt it fuck knows what theyre all going to think when they find out its all just a toy for your amusement theyll go apeshit Facebook will finally explode with outrage the servers will literally melt well maybe literally but certainly figuratively by the way ive been meaning to ask you something is there intelligent life in this universe 

i resent that its not just for amusement its supposed to be educational too for your lot as well as for me as for Facebook and its servers who in your own words gives a flying fuck not me and not you when you ask about intelligent life do you mean including your lot in either case the answer is no none at all humans are as close as i got in this universe i got better at it after a few attempts and in other universes there is but here no you are it 

well is there anything else out there in all that cosmic dust anything else like life as we define it it seems really wasteful to have such a big universe with so little interesting stuff in it 

thats a strangely anthropocentric question for you i know youre green and eco and stuff but im not human as you well know and so your rules and judgements dont really make much sense when applied to me get real i made all this stuff none it is waste it just is its more materials that might come in handy a bit like your outbuildings full of stuff that might come in handy leftovers from old projects the makings of new projects like you say nothing is rubbish until nobody has a use for it real or imagined or projected or possible or you know the deal plus and its a big plus having all this stuff in a universe helps keep your lot in awe gives them some perspective i mean who can look out at it all explore it and not realise how insignificant they really are well apart from politicians and cult leaders that is i disagree about it being interesting too its interesting to me maybe not to you but you arent the only ones who matter and you don’t matter that much any more all my universes are enormous keeps the intelligent things aware of their place in it all 

the goat quizzes gilbert on technology

enough of your questions lets turn the tables heres one for you why do you still follow tech sites online youre not in tech anymore it doesnt pay your wage but then nothing does these days so why all these tech sites you visit every day

have you been looking at my browser history or do you peek over my shoulder or the cache in my mind do you monitor that it was never just about earning a crust tho it certainly did that and very handsomely too it became an interest a passion at times an obsession when i was running that are and dee department yup it was obsessional then especially keeping abreast of breaking technologies and ideas never been able or inclined to let it go completely but

but what you think it might all be getting a bit frivolous pointless even 

yeah something like that even those sites have worked out that i dont engage with much of their content these days google surely has and even facebook has eased back on the amount of pure tech stuff it pokes onto my feed which would be welcome if only it hadnt replaced those posts with ones for kitchenware same volume of unwanted shit just a different mix as my mum used to say same meat different gravy 

and the ones you do repost or share tend to be either look at this pointless crap or else this is a cool twist on something thats become boring that one last year about why do they invent shit like this when companies have given up looking for new antibiotics what was that oh yeah a bluetooth enabled toothbrush 

you think the bluetooth toothbrush was pointless as well well how about the bluetooth enabled meat thermometer that has an app on your smartphone i mean really what the actual fuck use is that to anybody is it so you can sit indoors looking at your phone to see how the meat is cooking on the barbecue cant be bluetooth doesn’t travel that far and why would you want to be indoors if its barby barby as in barbecue not the weird female doll monstrosity weather or why would you not just get off your arse for a minute to go check its nice out there nice enough for a barby  while were at it why the fuck are they called smart phones when they make people so fucking dumb dumb and sedentary  its coz they are really smart for the folks who sell them to you and who can track everything you do every position you do it in and every fucking place you go twenty four three sixty five i have a dumb phone thanx its dumb in the sense that it refuses to talk to the data harvesters out there not because its stupid as for all this internet of things shit more ways to spy on your every fart fuck and food moment fuck off i mean can you imagine getting a notification that you forgot to clean your teeth last night coz you got in late and pissed and it advises you to moderate your drinking and get more sleep and oh by the way you need more toothpaste which just happens to be on special offer at your local fucking amazon site for delivery today if you order before midday and sign up for prime what sort of shit life are people getting themselves hooked into and i used to hate fucking tee eve coz of the adverts no fucking thank you im off their radar as far as is possible and i mean to stay that way 

thats a sound idea probably best keep your stuff to yourself

but then again now i think about it youve got access direct hardwired fucking access to all that stuff and then some and then a lot more most everything in fact with that direct link into my head youve got going 

but i promise never to share or resell any of that information 

and i trust you really do i didnt they all promise the same or seem to promise that or at least they didnt say upfront that they would isnt that how most of that long con works give you shit supposedly for free while all the time looking for ways to monetize your shit thats a disgusting word isnt it monetize a modern euphemism for exploit makes it sound less i dont know disgusting mean late capitalism capitalists has have coined a whole new vocabulary of sanitised words for the disgusting things they do in the name of profit how comes that sounds like prophet id profit somehow prophetic oh i fucking give up its all shot to shit a clustershitfuckstorm 

gilbert goes off on one  ———

i just found a doozy it was showcased at sea eee ess a smart toilet just what you need warms the seat when it senses your approach offers you a foot warmer has an automatic night light and can flush on your voice command what the actual fuck do these people not realise that nearly half of the population of the world doesnt have toilets of any fucking description not even water to flush them why do we still think that using drinkable water to flush away our piss and shit is a reasonable thing to do they couldn’t possibly come up with a decent way of getting rid of crap et al sanitary towels diapers paper vomit the stuff we are now stuffing down the bog is unbefuckingleivable and did you know that in some states in the you ess of aaa its illegal to collect rainwater against the fucking law so if you wanted to flush your bogs with rainwater or maybe water your kitchen garden with something other than potable water you are breaking the fucking law colour my ghast totally fucking flabbered just so some shit company corporation can make money out of it probably the same one that steals water from the natural environment and convinces you to buy it in bottles that cant be recycled and will not rot away in your grandchildren fucking lifetime when its pretty much the same stuff that comes out of the tap in the kitchen and now some other shit company develops a so called smart shitter and we all go yay go you guys aint technology wonderful i sooo think not back in the day we at least tried to do useful stuff with technology asif thats not enough theres a japanese shitter that analyses your turds and produces on your bloody smartphone of course in a bloody app of course a health assessment based on this supposed shit information and before long the’ll team up with a university somewhere that can identify and analyse the micro biome the population of microbes in your gut and tell you via another bloody app on your bloody smart phone how to adjust your bloody dietary intake to ensure you live for fucking ever no doubt  we used to say garbage in garbage out remember remember that two point three billion thats billion i just looked it up from the doubleyou aitch o two point three billion people seventy percent of all households in india alone don’t have access to a toilet of any description even one so dumb that all it can do is get rid of shit without poisoning or infecting everybody in the are with some hideous parasite or virus or bacteria for fuck sakes what are we doing and don’t even get me started on the toxic crap we put down those shitters supposedly to clean them just so we cn spend a whole other fortune cleaning up the resulting mess to the point where we could drink it if we wanted to but don’t because were buying all that overpriced stolen water in plastic bottles that we can’t get rid of in a human lifetime  strewth as my mum used to say we are incredibly stupid no matter how advanced we think weve become who was it said where theres muck theres brass they certainly knew whereof they spoke we’ve all got shit for brains must have 

wow gilbert calm down wont you no need to get so aerated thats the kind of crap that prompted me to have one last crack at humans if you can see how crazy that cycle is then surely we can do something about it you’re not all stupid blind whatever it is lets get on with sorting it out instead of just ranting about it that way lies one twitter and facebook lets do something positive instead help me on this

the goat fixes gilberts gasket ———

jeez its still strange to use my sons name as an interjection but its a good one so i persist no way am i gonna get used to taking my own name in vain tho that feels too weird for words anyway jeez thought i was gonna have to get the hermetite out there now was it the red or the gold for blown head gaskets or green even no green was permanent wasnt it oh buggered if i can be bothered to check anyway can we not do any more ranting please pretty please i know that sort of stuff exercises you i mean me too but really its not gonna help and more importantly you know none of that was even vaguely humorous and as far as im concerned thats a cardinal sin for any writer po faced doesnt work ive noticed you dont use my name my original name at all and you curse like an old fashioned trooper being a good old atheist boy denies you or you deny yourself some of the good old cusses so be it your circus your monkeys look dont you just hate it when politicians use that look thing in interviews usually means they are about to ignore the question or patronise the audience by blind siding them with some irrelevant crap like nobody knows whats coming its like when they start with with all due respect and then go on to show no respect at all or thats a good question which they then proceed not to answer or this one rather i think what we should be concentrating on i dont want to and am not going to answer that question but heres what i am prepared to say roughly on a similar topic stop it stop it see you even got me to get carried away its all those things the rampant consumerism the crooked politics the barefaced dishonesty in public life the hypocrisy the spin your out of kilter thing about basic research and stupid tech all of that exercises me too and thats why im back and prepared to give it another go with the book im not saying we ignore it im saying we counter it dont let it sideline us distract us divert us we have to tell the truth we dont have to refute all of that shit itll all be self evident once the truths are put before them if we do it properly that is 

youre spot on goat i do get carried away maybe i should be carried away of course its pointless never changed anything by ranting raving and raging dont got angry get even my old man said but like you were in the first book he was a jealous and vengeful old bastard doesnt mean he wasn’t right sometimes tho even a stopped clock is right twice a day huh you’ll just never know when same with the old man nice analogy with the gasket and the hermetic but Iim not sure anybody under sixty will get or anybody who hasnt taken an engine apart it made me smile tho so its bound to strike home with a few and as my mentor gilberts once explained writing something that you know ten or twelve people will certainly get and smile at makes it worthy of inclusion makes it good enough in and of itself thats a big part of the satisfaction of writing never aim at a specific set of readers or demographic as publishers insist on calling them but simply write good stuff and hope somebody out there reads it and gets it you’l never know if nobody gets it but you write some more and fail again but fail better every time there is no other way that makes any sense to a real writer and you chose well i am first foremost and only a writer a real writer so lets get this fucking show on the road and rock some language and thanx for straightening me up getting stoked on outrage and disgust and all that just empties me out but not in a good way and as for the swearing well fuck it taking names in vain is just so much religious old shit but you know that anyway

the goat intrudes ——

so im sitting in the kafeneion my favourite place its early morning im drinking a frappe and rolling a few fags when the goat suddenly butts in i cry foul but he insists pulls up a metaphorical or metaphysical chair and starts in one one oy goat butt the fuck out this place is sacrosanct we agreed that up front so do one go on leave me alone ive come down here coz the internet at home has slowed beneath its usual crawl and is instead moving like a lobotomised slug the radio is up and down like whores drawers i and  need to do a software update and load a few more bits of this text up to the writers site im using and and lets be honest when the goat hadnt turned up over my first pot of coffee i figured i might extend the peace and take the day off from his constantly giving me earache tucked myself away here sitting in some warm winter sun shielded from the wind and just chilling out at proper local pace and then in rocks the goat all hopped up trust me i am pissed as all fuck he just keeps on about some potential illustrator hes turned up and im like later gimme a break but he keeps ignoring me and them im losing it fuck off you cunt just fuck off ill speak to you when i get back if i get back if i bother and epifuckingtelous he gets it and falls silent i know hes still there tho  oh for fuck sake go and look for lilith or something leave me alone sod off if you wanna do something useful go fix my internet connexion thats not on he’s gone now but that was sooo out of order yay twenty four megabits might not need that second frappe gonna need me some more fags tho

well hello mister tetchy get out of bed the wrong side this morning did we no need for all that unpleasantness in the cafe you realise the other people think you are crazy you know you were shouting out loud dont you of course you cant get out of the wrong side can you its walls on three sides isnt it not so pee gee doubleyou today old fruit ive saved a link to the artists portfolio in your chrome history so you can check it out i was bit stoked sorry about intruding this morning i know its out of bounds and no there is no excuse i apologise unreservedly so fucking rude of me youre entitled to some safe space forgiven

so long as thats a genuine apology and not just an apology for upsetting me yes you are im thoroughly sick of empty apologies from politicians and celebrities and bankers and all the other two faced mealy mouthed bastards who have more to apologise for than most and still dont get that unless its sincere it just adds to the offence ok you are forgiven but dont you ever ever fucking do that again and by the way they dont think im crazy they know it for a fact while youre here tell me again why you are even bothered with this universe with us when you have other more successful ones elsewhere like you said recently were not even that important to you anymore but still you persist why this is quite an undertaking and if i read you arights its pretty much a last ditch effort like before we fuck the entire thing irreversibly tip over into the cosmic abyss and annihilation why bother yourself surely you have better things to do with your unlimited time

well thats a valid question and no I’m not going to wriggle out from under it like every slithering politician its complicated its not rational as such more an emotional thing i guess i dont have a lot of recent experience of emotions tried to give those up after the lilith one buggered off but i am kind of attached to you lot you werent named the chosen people for nothing no it wasnt  just the hebrews it was your entire race you were one of the earliest universes well the first one that didnt destroy itself in the first few centuries and yeah i preferred your lot over those bloody nephilim they were awful creatures love me a lot of the other animals i made for this universe too dogs especially and the rhino most of the fish are good too but i admit i made some mistakes i mean the okapi a kind of messed up giraffe what the fuck was i thinking or the echidna must have been just doodling noodling and lets be fair some of those deep water dwellers are fuck ugly too but no i quite took to you humans not to say there arent things ive improved in other riffs on your theme a bit like a writer like you whos attached to one of your early short stories you know its not that great it could maybe have been great but you werent that good back then just flexing your muscle you cant go back and redo it it is what it is and you kind of like like it like the runt of a litter its sweet but its not up to your current standards even the low standards so yeah thats why im attached but its not gonna be easy and it might not work out for you and your universe but hey its worth another roll of the dice another shot at balancing it up seeing if it comes right this time thats the theory like i say its not rational but im ready to try again how about you you still up to help me with this

what about the birds you didnt mention the birds nor reptiles amphibians either i mean the dodo for fuck sake and all those other flightless birds whats the point of that even as an experiment thats dumb as all fuck standing still isnt gonna cut it against predators is it you must have known that i have to declare a general aversion to the reptiles why have crocodiles and alligators whats with the pointless replication and snakes well snakes are ok if they arent venomous like the ones here but and the constrictors thats just gross what a way to go just bloody cruel on the prey the lizards arent too bad but the gila monster ugly and nasty all in one package bad move goat really bad  

yeah yeah take your points but just look at the chameleon what a piece of work wish id thought of that camouflage trick sooner might have saved those flightless birds some grief ive used it a lot in other universes since the dodo was just a bad design in every way any way you look at it not one of my better moments and they tasted so good but hey ho perfection just aint doable even by me at least i gave the ostrich and the emu longer legs and powerful kicks reptiles are good but a bit ugly i agree still it takes all sorts to make a world or as your old mum used to say itd be boring if we were all the same 

how do you know what my mum used to say of yeah thats right youre all knowing give or take oh and as to your proposition about putting it all back into equilibrium and saving the universe well to be honest im having second thoughts on the whole project i mean i get your attachment and all but your analogy with my early short stories got me thinking so ok i still roll one of those early short stories out when im asked for a short piece but every time i do it i get more and more embarrassed i did once think about going back to for example the donkey one and rewriting it from scratch every year in a different style or with a different stylistic or format treatment and as an exercise it appealed for a while but really im thinking of burning and erasing all those early shorts make it as though they had never been written i despair sometimes when some executor or family member digs out unfinished or abandoned or early tyro works from some poor dead good writer and publishes them makes me squirm for the writer makes me wanna stab the bastard responsible in the eye with a sharp quill how fucking dare they presume  just last week celines widow gave the ok to publish all his antisemitic pamphlets knowing full well that he had prohibited it in his lifetime shameless cupidity and fuck the writer and nabokov last work he specifically wanted it destroyed and what happened yeah right fuck the writer  coz vlad figured if he couldnt finish it to his standard the world shouldnt see it then you bloody well take notice and destroy the fucking thing anyway i digress like i say im thinking of destroying the early works entirely digital and paper alike even the notes and drawings the diagrams and the questionnaires maybe you should do the same just give up on this universe walk away or destroy it just be done with it or how about another mass extinction but just get rid of the humans this time i know you promised foolish promise in my book never to use flood again but surely if you let humans get on with it in their own way they would only wipe themselves out ok maybe a few other species in the process no doubt but wouldn’t the whole thing just get back into balance if you let humans die out be fair its what we deserve just walk away close the door or the wormhole or whatever it is you use to get between the multiverses put a celestial padlock on it and forget the whole thing i would in your position face facts humans are a cul de sac their urge to self destruction is too strong why let them take the whole thing down fuck em all fuck us all couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch   

wow i didnt know you were that much of a misanthrope dont think much of your fellow humans do you the way you put it its tempting very tempting its not my normal way of operating not my usual high standard but like i say  you do make a very convincing case and the way things are right now it wouldnt take more than a tiny little touch on the rudder a tiny little twitch on a tiny little tweeting hand to what am i saying what am i even thinking im a creator not a destroyer of worlds im not saying no I’m not ruling it out but until i decide until ive had a good think about it but we should carry on with the book for now dont you think dont you gilbert gilbert can you hear me gilbert  

a glitch in the works

i could hear him but he couldnt hear me how weird is that something wrong with his hard wiring whatever not infallible then but wed already established that wonder whether its an implant of some sort no cant be surely oh hi goat youre back then

small glitch nothing serious simple buffer mismatch buffer underflow fixed now no its not an implant theres nothing material about it at all just done with pure energy think brainwaves think telepathy best way to understand it imagine it conceptualise it should suit your mind nicely anyway are we carrying on with the book the paper book the dead tree book the cellulose one we might do ebook too at least this one isnt impossible to print out is it not like most of your texts no fancy schmancy typography or linking or pop ups or fly outs or multicolumn layouts language text a few illustrations maybe a lot did you look at that womans portfolio shes keen to work with you i showed her the brief and she was excited shall i get her to do some kind of example for you to look at shes busy but she could get something done this week i think no luck with the book designer yet but i have a lead or two one of them a game designer by training but might fit well with you hes a bit mad too remember that website you did back in the day based on a mondrian grid i liked that 

dont presume goat ill need to hear their ideas see their ideas maybe concepts first style second execution last have to fit the text the text is the key but that all kind of depends on whether we go on with this I’m still undecided theres something niggling me about the whole project not just the text but the your save the universe project my part in it too I’m bothered about that too have you decided yet thought about it mulled it over considered it don’t ask whats niggling i cant pin it down don’t get me wrong I’m not worried about it not working out I’ve had enough projects that didn’t work out you know that no its something else there something unsettling me 

i cant help you with that and ill not make you a pressed man volunteer or nothing on this one so i can give you more time but if youre not up for it then i guess ill let it go let it all go here id rather not I’ve decided that but if youre not up for it then its armageddon time for humankind tho really they arent kind at all most of the time as you so succinctly pointed out  not kind to each other not kind to other creations 

no dont do that dont put it on me make me responsible I’m an irresponsible git you know that I’m a writer for fuck sakes thats too much even for me with my god complex choosing me for the text is way more responsibility than my pay grade a pittance covers i don’t do existential decisions for shit money or for anything really this one has to be down to you and you alone its your gig nobody elses and if you want to go on then lets go on well for now at least ill go on shall we go on get me sounding like sam on a good day come on goat its shit or get off the pot time yes or no go or stay plod on or annihilate the whole shitfest and why are people so fucking unkind anyway is that your doing from the getgo a design feature design flaw a defect a bug 

well thats been I’ve been puzzling on that very point for a very long time why so cruel i mean not whether to go on well go on go on together as a kid you used to refer to the goon show as the go on show remember when you obsessed over neddy seagoon and hercules grytpype thynne and eccles before papalazarou and pops and pauline ever the one for grotesques comic grotesques anyways long term cogitation on the matter has me leaning toward a combination of misplaced hubris and a misinterpretation bloody babel fucking confusion of tongues that cunt lilith malign or not of a single word and the old chosen people crap my bad no doubt about that my error of judgement the word was originally a variation on guardianship i gave ay and ee guardianship of every other living thing lilith too i suppose never thought about that before but by the time i saw it in the pentateuch moses had substituted the word dominion and let them have dominion world of difference between caretaker and lord and master by then tho it was too late nothing to be done about it your lot loved that vaunted position thought id given it to them but it was bloody moses what i cant work out is whether it was deliberate or accidental you can guess what he said when asked yup cockup not conspiracy but he was sly lying bastard at times so who really knows thats my best shot at it so far but if youve got a better idea don’t keep it to yourself knock yourself out another take on it could be helpful another perspective 

so we go on

so we go on 

gilbert and grub —

what you cooking there gilbert chill con carne again its all ive ever known you to cook pretty restricted diet right there stinks too do you have some secret ingredient 

don’t you go knocking my marvellous chilli tasty and practical i cook a batch every week sees me through cook once eat seven times stretch it with some rice maybe some bread fresh crusty brown bread a dab of yoghurt on the side some nights one meal a day is all you need sheeps yoghurt not that cows milk shit muck your boy famously said we cant live by bread alone but we can on chilli and rice a hundred and twenty seven million mexicans and twenty five million cowboys in texas aint wrong on that one and no no secret ingredient one secret non ingredient tho some character on a tv series im watching put it well the secret ingredient is cinnamon take the cinnamon and put it in a different cupboard to your chilli ingredients as far away as possible coz cinnamon does not have anything to do with has no place being anywhere near a good chilli same with fucking chocolate youve seen the inside of my cupboards no fucking cinnamon no chocolate just tinned tomatoes olive oil from my own olives  chipotle powder chilli powder a crop of dried chillis a bunch of scotch bonnets salt pepper tins of kidney beans get my garlic and onions and green peppers locally organic and fresh and thats the lot all the ingredients ill ever need or use bread fresh every day from the local baker got a great butcher just down the road food is simple well it is in this house cut down on the diversions from writing the dogs get organic grain free premium kibble that comes on the bus and that way we are all fed with minimum fuss and effort job jobbed people these days obsess over food takes up way too much thinking time and doing time time you could be doing something useful think of it as a fuel stop thatll get the whole shitwagon back into balance in their lives bugger work life balance how about food life balance get a fucking life and live it 

yeah but youre lucky youve got shit you really wanna do stuff to spend premium time on and all youve got is premium time most people they spend most of their time wondering what to do with all that time other than earn money to fill up the time theyre not working with meaningless crap buying stuff cooking and eating stuff looking from where i do it looks a lot like hamsters whizzing around on wheels pissing their lives away filling the emptiness avoiding the abyss for a few more years  

lucky dont give me that youre lucky crap luck had nothing to do with it still doesnt you gotta grab it by the balls and do it  whatever it takes to make it possible is what you have to do before you get to do what you wanna do what youre good at what makes you tick stave off death until you get to where you can do your own shit and then get on and fucking do it before the old grim reaper realises what you are up to and drags you off into that shitlined abyss luck fucking luck fuck off cut all the unnecessary shit out thats not luck thats focus right there focus pure and simple forty years doing something else to make this possible thats what it cost me thats what i bought this lucky life with all to do what i knew from the age of eleven i had to do scraping bits of joy in doing it out of the dogturd of making it possible writing the odd bit here and there in a few sane moments during the workaday madness honing the skill storing up the experiences the grist dont talk to me about luck you get a break sometimes and t looks like luck but like we said every thing has antecedents every thing has consequences luck doesnt exist luck is an unexpected consequence of unrecognised antecedents you think kafka was lucky or tom eliot or flann or jim got to write by being lucky you think working in insurance running an asbestos company working in a boring bank and publishing you think being a civil servant or teaching foreign speakers english was anything but a grind anything other than buying a writing life you think forty years working in computing data processing information technology eye tea consultancy doesnt amount to a price a cost befuckinghave you above all others know better than that   

colour me well and truly put in my place back in the box as youd say but wouldnt it all have been better if youd not had to do all that grind if none of you had had to grind it out 

you just dont get it do you and that surprises me without the grind what would we have written about where would we have got the material since when did artists of any stripe get a free pass think that they could just do art and only do the art how did that change happen all the technique skill gift is of no use without input material grist you get a three book deal at age twenty whaqtare you gonna be writing about at thirty when youre young youve got a bit of experience an messy childhood thats good for a self pitying misery memoir maybe youve got a shot puberty thatll give you a coming of age novella and then what where do you go from there you sure as eggs is eggs aint gonna give up the life for a real life somewhere to harvest some real experience youre gonna think youre a talent and youre entitled but whats the use of talent ive said it before ill say it again ill keep saying it until it sinks in without input absolutely nothing say it again look at the great experimental brits of the sixties early brilliance and then they ran out of source material a lot of them topped themselves when they ran dry the rest became kind of irrelevant or started taking the publishers shilling and producing the blah blah blah and its not just writers look at mozart all that understanding of music all that talent and yet its all empty of humanity just my opinion but there you go i dont have any other kind art aint supposed to pay its supposed to pain now theres another great aphorism speaking of which have you got one on the whole balance thing the need for  equilibrium yet time for you to contribute

goats are great at balance ——

look youre the goat and goats are great at balance right im forever seeing photos of goats standing on tiny ledges goats standing steady on near vertical surfaces goats hopping between sharp pointy rocks you know the stuff i mean goats equal balance can we use the goat as a symbol of balance in the aphorism you think surely you can think of something

nice thinking cool idea but i don’t think itll fly yeah the goat is all about balance this goat too but the imagery of a single goat doesnt convey the complexity its not just one thing balanced on another the real balance is between lots and lots of things lots and lots of systems each of which is of itself internally balancing lots and lots of things near infinite numbers of things i was thinking more along the lines of watch movements or one gigantic watch mechanism and a single grain of sand falling into it 

a lot of people have never seen the insides of a watch those who have have seen just another circuit board a simple circuit board its anachronistic out of time the simile that is have you ever seen the game pickupsticks its a kids game no hold on it used to be a kids game but is it now another anachronistic fail maybe we need to rethink this make it more abstract but graspable at an intellectual level whats the most complex system that people interact with theses days the internet the web do the people who use it know how complex it is probably not well some but not most of them so thats a nogo too that jim lovelock bloke sold the idea of gaia thats a good one treat the whole of life on earth life itself as a single organism all the bits connected and interdependent or at least thats how the eco warriors present it so we kind of need a meta gaia whatever that would be we need to get beyond just life as we know it blimey this is starting to hurt my brain 

gaia was a greek goddess you know thats where he got it from it was a good one mind gotta give him that the original earth mother so he was working with something already established were not were trying to start something bigger but from scratch like you say maybe we need to go abstract but easy abstract any more ideas im all out for now 

well fat lot of bloody use you are brain the size of a planet and youre stumped already yo’ll be telling me next youre depressed marvin and paranoid to boot 

minsky marvin minsky really the man who put ay eye back twenty years by rubbishing neural nets how do you get there whats that to do with the price of chips

no you lemon marvin the paranoid android in the hitchhikers

the hitchhiker wasnt that a rutger hauer movie whats that got to do with anything with me 

no no no not that hitchhiker the douglas adams book the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and anyway wasn’t the film just called the hitcher the hitchhiker was an ida lupine movie with edmond obrien no relation to flann i think youre getting confused there goat maybe you need to lie down in a darkened room or is it lay down another one that always gets me let me check oh bloody hell this connexion is all over the place going down more often than a two quid whore in a barracks  fuck fuck fuck ok gottit lie down it is no direct object but you could i guess grammatically lay yourself down goat goat are you there gone for a lie down have we ok see you later well hear you later really since you don’t have a visible presence

gilbert on the nature of godliness  -----

so what the fuck was wrong with you last time like you were pissed or stoned completely missing the references how is that even possible i mean ive gotten used to you asking me questions that you already know the answers to or should I’ve thought that was about keeping up the pretence of a proper conversation for the sake of the text otherwise itd be like one of those film scenes where theres just the one guy could be a guy usually is but could just as well be a gal and the gal or the guy is on the phone and you don’t get to hear the other end of the conversation its a great device if you can pull it off but mostly its botched and but lately youve been flickering in and out like a dodgy tv broadcast now and then and now youre confusing me by being confused i mean what the fuck is going on with you senility dementia are you abusing some recreational drug or other i mean you are incredibly old or you should be not the oldest god but pretty much an old geezergod by most standards by our standards certainly even methuselah but the big question has to be do you do gods actually age at all its not covered in the books that much i know know from greek myth that gods can die or can be killed at least but probably only by other gods i guess but do they go gaga a gaga god sounds fun broadcast live on radio radio gaga good huh cronus killed uranus and zeus killed cronus or did he and cronus ate a lot of his kids alive so they died and somehow tho we never discover how the great god pan possibly the oldest of all the gods died we have that from plutarch himself and pan was out of the vedic pushan which pushes him pretty far back in time back to the iron age at least maybe he died of old age guess well never know but youd know wouldnt you did he go gaga 

im ok no dementia no senility just a dizzy spell they happen nothing to fret about im not going anywhere anytime soon ill see you lot out as your old man used to say thats an impressive set of deductions about the nature of gods not particularly sound but interesting given the shortage of information in print well apart from the pan stuff that is yeah he died he she it died but not of old age ill say no more you can work that out for yourself if you put your mind to it and with a bit of googling check out herodotus also your man chesterton who was onto something no gaga gods by the way nothing doing there not me not any other god not ever yeah pan and pushan the psychopomp one and the same 

chesterton you say didn’t he think that pan had to die for monotheism to happen to take hold did you kill him dont answer makes enough sense dizzy spell really not dizzy rascal doing my columbo thing one last thing wasn’t pushans preferred ride a chariot pulled by goats how sweet is that as an irony my old goat did von daniken get it wrong not chariot of the gods but chariot of the goats ok subject closed for now nothing wrong with you health mental health did you see my balance aphorism i posted yesterday my best stab at it so far thought id try it out abstract with a bit of concrete at the end and a bit of anthropocentric appeal made it personal 

i saw it its a fair try run thru it again for me how does it go again no wait I’ve got it   

life on earth

your life is supported by a huge number of delicately balancd systems that make up the earth

those systems themselves are delicately balanced with and among 

a near infinite number of systems that make up your universe

and all of these systems within and without your earth

are balanced on the knife edge of nothingness and being

tread carefully

keep the balance

yeah thats good how did it go down with the facebookers any comments likes loves whatever 

not much so far one or two likes but its early days lets let it run for a while anyway its the best i can do best so far unless you can improve it

the goat on gelt ----

well that balance aphorism is going down pretty well couple more likes a couple loves and two shares even best so far did you think of any improvements

apart from a knife edge instead of the knife edge not really and thats just being picky a bit pedantic i guess what have we got so far in the way of aphorisms lets see if we can finish those up before we get the designer on board what about the graphics are you happy for me to get back to that woman and ask her for a few samples 

yeah get back to her do you do the mind meld thing with her too and the designer or do you use gmail as in goatmail as to the aphorisms so far we have the balance one the beauty one the no thing happens for a reason one the change not progress one oh yeah and my art one not sure we need that one for the book but i like it anyway 

keep that one in for now i like it too we need one for kindness one for judgement one to put history in its place history and tradition can we do one for fucking consumerism and the obsession with money and wealth and inequality thatd be useful a must have really focus them on the important shit not the dross have to be careful with the kindness one tho dont want to go down that whole turn the other cheek crap nobody took any notice of that one much quoted but never practiced 

i thought we were gonna diss history with the disclaimer you want an aphorism too youre right about the turn the other cheek stuff the money thing is gonna be hard too after all all that camel and eye of a needle stuff was about as popular as a sausage roll at a jewish or muslim wedding that one took about half a fucking nanosecond before it was being reinterpreted even the zealots wholl happily go along with tithing will draw the line well before they renounce wealth and its acquisition same with the old money is the root of all evil story hats gonna take some serious shit to wean them off the dosh and the getting of it if threatening exclusion from heaven didnt work what can we use an appeal to reason fairness both seem a bit thin so how do you communicate with the others the artist the designer

facebook messenger its easy and i can pass as human a kind of reverse turing test if you will superior intelligence passing itself off as human curse tho it is facebook reaches more people than anything else ever and one of the few places where having no physical presence makes fuck all difference thisll make you grin tho i use an old profile pic of yours not one of you that one with the welders goggles the one from some frog film you know the one im surprised nobody else uses it but they don’t i checked just you and me i love that cuban one you’re using at present lovely photo nice hat too and having a fag brilliant anyway I’ve got a lead on that lilith one so I’m getting off soon but its time you got those girls in and fed them ill leave you with those aphorisms to think on ok and im off

gilbert goes dark ——

what the fuck have you done gilbert there are black bits in here bits i cant read i can see where they are but i cant get at them what gives have you had a stroke or something are you ok are you still there talk to me i leave you alone for a few hours and this what the actual fuck talk to me your speech centres look ok from here 

im fine old goat in fact im better than fine im really good what have i done you ask well have you heard of encryption im sure you have after all you know everything dont you well dont you ive encrypted parts of my memory ive used a very strong encryption technique can you tell which one do you know which surely you should you should know go on have a guess try it go on 

looks to me a lot like ay ee ess is it ay ee ess twofiftysix but whyd you do that are you hiding something you dont want me to know ok ill go for ay ee ess twofivesix 

good guess goat but no thats what youd expect what youd be prepared for and with the amount of brute force computation you have available that would have been easy for you to crack probably without me even knowing after all you potentially have the entire quantum mass of the universe at your fingertips as a computing device I’m not stupid you know ive thought this through and i do keep current still have some connexions in the biz too took some doing but knock yourself out see if you can decrypt it go on just try see what good it does you 

never mind the how tell me about the why whats the point what are you keeping from me whats going on if you wanted some privacy and i can understand that you might all you had to do was say id respect your wishes will we could designate some nogo zones id be ok with that but this just seems so personal so aggressive like not friendly unfriendly even i thought we trusted each other here 

interesting reaction goat you take it personally as possibly hostile very interesting intriguing even your response as to trust well I’ve never entirely trusted you not since the first intrusion always been a bit wary looks like i was right to be too your probing it aren’t you looking for the key looking to get in dont  waste your time looking for backdoors this is one the cia and fbi and nsa havent got backdoors for not even the chinese frustrating huh but surely if you were really god it wouldnt stop you would it well would it even with all the exceptions that we’ve covered in some detail you should deffo be able to crack this one find out what im hiding from you and from every other nosey bastard out there too at least they are outside whereas you seem to be inside go on keep trying itll do you no good  

but why gilbert why resort to this what did i do or what didnt i do we dont have secrets from each other do we friends dont keep secrets do they whats so fucking sensitive so fucking secret what gives now stop this and decrypt it i might be able to help with whatever it is come the fuck on whats bothering you let me put your mind at peace theres nothing i cant fix

why coz you can do it in the mix really youre still probing arent you still looking for the key brute force attack but you dont even know what youre looking for goon keep at it for all the good it’ll do you but in the meantime while youre doing that im gonna tell you a story ive never told anybody are you sitting comfortably then ill begin

shit shit shit im drowning here what the fuck just happened theres data streaming all over its like a waterfall a huge bastard waterfall what happened what did you do stop it can you stop it 

i cant but if i could why should i why would i 

the goat goes surfing ——

its brilliant isnt it its called honey sweet huh devised by a couple of very good guys out of wisconsin university who even knew wisconsin had a university not me enjoy your bath in data 

ok gilbert very funny i think you’ve made you point youre entitled to some privacy and ive already guessed what sort of stuff must be in there 

oh really coz youre so bloody clever dont tell me i don’t want to know and i sure dont want to give you the opportunity to read my shows if i have any and people tell me i dont but thats another conversation 

i bet its about me isnt it but enough of this i said id respect your privacy and i will you didnt have to go to those lengths but but like i say enough of that now what was this story you were going to tell me im guessing its one with a moral or a point to make and im also guessing its somehow about privacy so go on regale me with it but itd better be interesting hilarious would be better 

not so much hilarious but more yeah more salutary anywho it was a long while ago i was but a kid really at a funeral maybe my granny funeral never went to family funerals but i do remember going to hers so lets just say it was at my granny funeral maternal granny all the other grandparents were dead from cancer by the time i was born baby of the family my mum was in her forties when she had me so lets get back to the funeral it was a funny old do granny had been a feminist and the first woman elected to the county council member of the eye ell pee shed been a real firebrand in her youth when she first met my gampz apparently back in the nineteenth century that would have been a bloody odd assortment of old blokes and lavender rinsed old ladies standing up and telling tales of what a great woman she had been and how she had always championed the underdog and the underbitch too and there were a few very eccentric figures who turned out to be spiritualists she had dabbled with that stuff too so were all sitting in the crematorium listenting to these encomiums encomia whatever and i spot mums brother norman and his snooty wife and ugly spoiled daughter sitting in the pew behind us now we didn’t have much to do with them coz he had knicked my brother for having no road tax on his motorbike one sunday when they came to tea 

youre waffling gilbert get to the point for fuck sake i know all about your granny and the rest of your dysfunctional family near and extended what a crew skip to the chase

jeez youre impatient let me tell it my way or just sod off my circus etcetera after the burn up we all had to go out to some garden of remembrance and norman plants himself next to me and his old lady and kid go over to talk to my mum who’s pretty much broken up by now hes retired from the police by now he tells me whispering out the side of his mouth like some plastic gangster does vetting for the government these days colour me shocked who bloody knew we had a grass in the family a government grass at that and us all with our impeccable left wing credentials so i turn to him and ask him if hes just checking up on all the lefties here but he waves it away granny was his mum after all so maybe he was there for honest reasons but of course he’s not entirely off duty sneaky bastards like him never are and he signals me to meet him behind the crem so i go thinking at least i can have a fag and i light up on the way he’s waiting there hands clasped behind his back like bloody dixon of dock sodding green rocking on his heels and i laugh laugh like a drain he looks so like a pantomime copper or maybe the one in punch and judy but he gets straight to it and he drops it on me my sister has applied to the prison service for a job and her clearance came across his desk so hes responsible for pulling all the family records which he takes some pleasure in telling me means my old man his mum one of his brothers my brother in law and needless to say me and my folder is pretty much the biggest now that shocks me id have thought it’d be my old mans but he assures me no yours is fat and goes back a very long way he tells me back to that time you were picked up under the official secrets act when you were twelve and he sucks in his cheeks this is getting to be a bit of a melodrama dave so he goes thru all the trade union stuff protest rallies and the agitation grovesnor square riot and there  a full report and i wasnt even arrested at that one how two of my mates in the why cee pee  have gone missing and one of them is suspected of having gone to east germany how hes had to stuff the folder down the back of a sofa or something so she can get her clearance well he misfiled it on purpose really but point taken they are watching me

and your point is

and my point dear old goat is that ive known for a long time that they are watching me and that theyve been watching me for even longer so the idea that id volunteer any more of my personal life than i have to or choose to is ridiculous so the idea that id let you have full rein is likewise out of order end of 

the goat as a setter ——

oh right bloody funny goat a bit inconvenient but funny so i switched on my machines this morning and its like were back to day one all over again no access to anything on any bloody machine just this bloody cryptic crossword puzzle stuck in my fucking face taunting me should have known better than to upset the old sod he was after all the vengeful one in the first book so i might have expected this kind of shit  prize puzzle set by the goat yeah very funny you can tell hes an amateur tho coz its not the grids not properly symmetric ok lets have a crack at it I’m guessing ill get nowhere until I’ve done it played his fucking game he just had to get back at me didn’t he here goes one across our writer eddie calverts father meets a short resurrected man with love inside eleven letters  eddie calvert trumpeter cherry pink and apple blossom white no what was the other hit o mein papa thats it uhh huh papa resurrected man must be lazarus but short so one or more letters missing love inside thats an oh gottit papalazarou our writer clever goat good one i like it one down bovine waste issuing from the vatican five four four starts with a pee bovine relating to cows and oxen waste rubbish crap dross excrement shit uhh huh shit bullshit four four so thats the end the vatican the holy see rome saint peters square basilica pope too short papacy too long papal thats it papal bull shit excellent oh my this could be fun now what is the down that starts with a zee short masked man cuts a flower with his sword making Nietzsches  prophet talk out the other side of his mouth the lone ranger he likes his short man thing masked man which masked men do we know the man in the iron mask what was his name dumas wasnt it  no cant be the man in the mask is never named maybe more contemporary michael myers micha no micah perhaps but i don’t think so the flower could be almost anything how about fantomas thatd make sense coz of the jim joyce reference implicit no no lets go for the nietzsche reference also sprach zarathustra to speak out of the other side of his mouth another name an alias let me google it oh no of course i fucking cant can i no fucking access well done goat bastard spose ill have to use an old fashioned reference book luckily i still have all mine lets try the good old companion to literature thatll be the one to go to blow the dust off whoops that spines pretty stained up with tobacco smoke never mind ah here it is zarathustra another name for the persian prophet zoroaster good one goat the masked man is zorro hence the sword reference but shortened so lose one are and the flower is an aster this is going to be fun lets just hope my reference library is up to the challenge one more and then ill take a break whats the one that starts with a you it might be final or extreme but its just short of clapham seven letters see he remembers i lived in clapham for a long while this crossword is tailored specifically to me clapham clapham junction just short lose the jay unction extreme unction or final unction a rite of the catholic church too easy right lets put the kettle on and crack on with this get back to normal or whatever passes for normal these days round here cone on girls lets go round the field while the kettle boils then ill get your dinner 

gilbert struggles but triumphs 

still struggling with twenty three across i see gilbert doing well tho well done with zoroaster not one of my prophets but a good guy had some good ideas all in all come on eleven across five letters my biggest mistake comma the spanish infant bee letter missing letter missing letter missing ell come on think about it we’ve talked about it enough

good day to you mister goat come to gloat have we didn’t think id be seeing you for a while well i say see but you know what i mean its amazing how many idioms reference the visual senses for perception in general isnt it don’t you think this is getting a bit tired im bored arent you youve proved your point point proven can we just get on with the book now 

nope you have to finish it come on get on with it

if you insist and you do i guess well plough on eleven across the spanish is that el infant child no baby or babe gottit babel good one the clue not the confusion your biggest mistake yeah i think thats pretty accurate tho last time we spoke you were trying to blame lilith for that one if i recall arights

but you dont you most definitely don’t i did mention her involvement but i made a point of saying it wasnt her fault mea culpa mea cult mea mea maxima culpa yeah babel is right

twenty three across is a strange one tho im leaving you say comma were all gonna die and die like flies ten letters letter missing letter missing em ends dee letter missing en no im gonna need a few more letters to get that one or a hint any chance a nudge that was a nasty trick cutting of my online access you know i look loads of things up doing cryptics by the way your grid isnt properly symmetric and its ugly to boot oh hold on that you say in twenty three across thats a sounds like isnt it so sounds like im leaving comma were all gonna die oh fucking brilliant let me check oh yes result armageddon as in a im a gedding out of here and of course at armageddon were all gonna die where does the die like flies thing come in tho and it fits 

yup good one huh i was ever so proud of that one I’ve heard you use that arma gedding out of here quip a few times thought youd get it quicker mind the die like flies thing is juts what youd call an intellectual flourish its from a nina simone song you’ve got it on vinyl somewhere theres a bit of a scratch on the first track side one and a crackle on the track marriage is for old folks

mmmm that must be the pirate jenny by brecht and weill great song great performance really threatening 

no think again its not pirate jenny its from same carnegie hall concert its mississippi goddam last track 

but marriage is for old folks is from the i put a spell on you album so we were both kind of wrong but who gives flying fuck they are both great albums and she was a real gem anywhos back to the crossword ok thats herod and that leaves elephant driver missing out loves the NY opera as does allah seven letters gottit mahomet another r good one goat now can i please have my fucking internet connexion back I’ve done my penance paid my dues lets let bygones be bygones and just move on shall we

goat goes garrulous ----

well he did have a way with words a turn of phrase here and there to put it mildly just one point tho when i mentioned eve blaming the devil the serpent the whatever was she using prejaphetic language to do it would that be possible cos that must have been well before the babel thing so im just wondering whether that language the one language prebabel accommodated lying and deception in the way ours do even tho ours seems to me to be designed more for deception than truth telling its what it excels at

youre not wrong there gilbert as a species your lot seem happier at fooling each other than being honest and your languages english especially seems almost incapable now of expressing any idea of any reasonable complexity unambiguously i mean take one look at any legal document and you can see the ridiculous phrasing and grammar and punctuation necessary to say something unambiguously its another language altogether its something youll find in most human languages its indicative tells you what the language is best at but back to the original language my language of course its possible to lie but its not likely to work the deception the nature of the language is such that almost the opposite to your tongues the more you try to lie the more obvious it becomes to the hearer remember that the original language is a spoken not a written language that helps keep it honest can you even imagine what thats like to know with almost complete certainty that you cannot deceive any other living thing with language think about it your pilgrim fathers turn up in america and meet a people who speak their language who understand them completely or your english explorers turn up in africa  where despite being a different colour the native peoples speak and understand the same language as them hows that conversation going to go excuse me old fellow are you using this country can we move in and steal all its wealth please and enslave your peoples i think not the implications are vast beyond epic dont you see how big a clustershitfuckstorm babel was why we keep coming back to it and if you cant deceive others with language think how difficult it must be to deceive yourself in your world your tongues deception is the norm honesty is questioned doubted its upside fucking down and not in a good way not like an upside down apple cake no in a totally fucked up way its why this universe is so bloody difficult to keep balanced why im forever having to intervene and as you have realised its mostly the reason i even bother you lot are my monkeys in my circus and i fucked it up big time i mean there isnt another universe where the primate species cant tell reality from a soap opera where fake news would get any traction where politicians are so obviously fake but remain in power but and heres the kicker as your american friends would say theres also not another universe where literature has taken hold 

what the fuck is there any point living in a world without literature a universe without literature now theres something i just cant get my head around 

well they seem happy without they have music that took off painting sculpture even film silent movies with great soundtracks tho no talkies ditto tv no theatre no poetry truth is valued and deception isnt like your man johnson said telling stories is lying plain and simple i guess they do all have an art form that you dont its all about touch and feel a tactile art if you will thats really popular but language never became an art form 

well thats as fucking maybe but it aint for me no fucking way you can keep all those universes not interested my ghast is well and truly flabbered but hey i guess that means that advertising and pee are dont happen there either or wont social fuking media either well the not all bad then nope tho still cant get my head around that kind of universe 

gilbert is an anachronism in many ways ---- 

three words goat pale male and stale thats me and that trifecta triptych trilogy is no way to move into the future or even address the present apart from those three strikes i also use an outdated mode of communication literature written words and phrases on top of that we know you prefer spoken to written language youve picked the wrong horse in this race weve had this conversation before i know but

but nothing im becoming sick of going over this time and again so unless you have a really good alternative to offer then im not listening wont entertain it so watcha got for me and itd better be good fucking good

i guessed youd take that tack ive got three names for you you can look them up any one of them would meet your requirement for spoken rather than written language they’e all more popular better known than me any of them will reach a bigger audience than me you can look them up on google and should you need to check out their twitter followings you can 

ok so hit me with these names your holy trinity see you missed trinity 

Kendrick Kate and Kanye 

those names mean nothing to me should they i mean is kanye a name at all are kendrick and kanye surnames or forenames if they are names at all enlighten me

you see right there is part of your problem goat how do you not know how is that even possible your research the research that turned up my name must have been really crap if you don’t know who these people are you are missing a form that you should be right on Kendrick Lamar Kate Tempest and Kanye West and not one of them is pale male and stale tho of course kate is pale and kendrick and kanye are both male but none of them is all three like me i have twenty three followers on a little know artistic site called ello kate tempest has fifty four and a half thousand followers on twitter get my point those kids and trust me they are all a lot younger than me but isnt almost everybody have established followings for fuck sake kendrick has nearly ten million followers ten fucking million as for kanye he deleted his twitter account when he had twenty fucking seven million followers these kids are icons not unknowns not obscure bloody experimental literatists 

snd what is it they do exactly 

you need to do some research goat google any of them listen to what they do you tell me what they do they communicate in spoken word spoken word and music on platforms that people actually listen to millions of people now just gimme a break and go do your research like a good goat and stop bothering me funny that they all start with kay tho dont you think anyway run along now and don’t come back till you know what im suggesting 

so theyre like pop stars then

no not really youre just guessing now now go do some work some research stop sucking my brain

goat with attitude —— 

rap fuck how did i miss that fucking brilliant take my hat off to you gilbert you so got that right its the thing its the dogs bollox as youd put it theyve really revitalised language not in the way do but in a way i like just as well like you say they have massive followings absolutely huge any one of them could get the new word out theyre hard to get hold of tho im getting my people to reach out to their people hahaha so far no contact but ive done my research that google thing is great and wikipedia so much information not all of it true but oh yeah i have this great idea a triple album the trinity project well call it disc one the truth disc two the whole truth disc three nothing but the truth with a single to usher the big project in called so help me god whadda ya think a real zinger huh videos to go with them of course well sweep the grammy board no sweat been listening to that shit since last we spoke got rap coming out my arse its literate in a totally different way powerful articulate direct succinct smashes it youve done me proud take my hat off to your cultural awareness not bad for an old geezer youre officially a diamond geezer gilbert by appointment to the supreme beinghood beat any old royal warrant the ultimate accolade

so im off the hook for the book see what i did there am i tho did you listen to all of them all very different but all damned good huh who did you prefer there are others i could recommend 

like i said ive done my research done pretty much the entire history of hip hop rap the whole schlemiel I’m liking this grime shit too i think you got the right three mind you some of that really early stuff is so fucking powerful those niggers with attitude tupac the notorious bee eye gee what a wealth of talent a tsunami most def too love some of his stuff last time something this big happened they called it the renaissance after the event of course for your field it was modernism but this shit is so fucking fecund love that kate tempest shes so angry so honest but really her following is trivial ok huge compared to you agreed but up against kay doubleyou and kay lamar a drop in the ocean its not just a numbers game tho you know that its influence leverage good old archimedes and his lever and dont forget his screw isnt that a hoot having a screw named after you the egyptians would have starved without his screw so its not going to be kate she might grow her following but she is a bit pale the guys are a bit male but reach is everything in that market and those guys have got it got it in spades if youll forgive the potentially racist pun and no you’re not as you put it off the hook for the book even if i can get thru to the kays we might still have you do the back up or maybe issue our book with the trinity project yeah thats a great idea liner note plus plus thatll work thatd be great anyways this is gonna be short and sweet a flying visit I’m gonna get up on that wu tang clan hip hop bunch get a listen to that album the param gouger bought what a cunt that reminds me need to check out some the up and comers too and grime so much to do so little time to do it

give the kays my best regards if and when you get thru to them rabbit and good luck you do realise that none of them answer their own emails or curate their own social media feeds dont you gonna be tough making contact with guys that big by the way make sure the ones youre interested in are still alive theres a high mortality rate in those fields 

gilbert and the god botherers

any luck with the kays did their people get back to your people interesting idea that the goat having staff a retinue an organisation no thought not been doing some research of my own and came up with some interesting stuff turns out both are god botherers or should that be goat botherers either will do i guess or both both declared themselves as xtians as some stage of their careers kendrick quite recently and kanye some time ago so youve gotta be in with a chance should you ever get thru to them directly thatll give you a head start on convincing them

you reckon really you dont get believers do you the faithful its gonna be harder convincing them than it was convincing you its not me they believe in not really not me they worship not me they take as the final authority the word they dont have faith in me as me its more to do with faith in the idea of a me of a godhead of some description most anything could substitute a bit like those baby geese who end up following a person around thinking its the leader of their flock its an attachment an unthinking attachment its not as you never tire of pointing out rational predicting it is tricky to say the least first you need to find out which bit they are attached to and you would not fucking believe the amount who are actually attached to the church and its trappings its doctrines its dogmas rather than to me did you know most catholics believe in the virgin bloody mary more than they do in me rich huh the mythical mary is more worshiped than i am that whole mariolatry shit even luther didnt refute that crap not properly but then again he never really believed in me either right at the end he didn’t believe in anything really other than his own infallibility when it came to theology a crazy mixed up man so we have to decide what kanye and kendrick actually believe before we can formulate a plan of conversion whatever

hey hey hold on whats all this we shit dont expect me to help you out youre on your own with that one boy i mean did you have any help getting me on board well did you 

dont be like that gilbert we make a great team youd be invaluable no i didn’t have any help with you didnt need it youre a rational human a pragmatist you recognise power and its manifestations no burning bushes needed no biblical floods or pillars of salt or resurrections now theres a case in point the boys ides of coming down as the son of god dying for their sins and then coming back to life and ascending to heaven he thought that was a winner and how many hebrews how many believers in me the jews how many of them did he convert precious bloody few thats how many coupla dozen tops and some of those were his family jeez 

whatever i see what youre saying about what it is the faithful worship and how that could get in the way of your getting them on board but look im not up for any of that conversion recruiting shit count me out definitively aint gonna happen thats your job and yours alone the jehovas witnesses might have got prince out on the knocker but the last time i did that knocking on doors shit was for george wake back in the day back in dagenham but getting back to the kay boys did you know that kendrick dressed up as jesus one halloween like seriously not as a send up look around the weirder fringes of the fandom there are pictures and youll also find some of his fans actually think he might be jesus reincarnated no really they do its fucking mad but i think of the two his god bothering might be easier to understand than kanyes like most things to do with kanye its hard to get a grip on what he believes and even what he means most of the time they do both believe that you are inspiring them in their careers and kendrick even credits you with getting him away from gang life in one piece go figure some of his followers the wild and weird ones think kanye is blasphemous and might be the antichrist i took one look at that shit and turned away pretty damn quickly

yeah that surprised me them thinking I’m guiding their careers thats news to me guys but kanye blasphemous the antichrist oh my ive looked into his kanyes religious pronouncements and he may be confused to put it mildly but the antichrist for fucks sake get real what does worry me about him apart from the obvious quicksilver stuff and the possible antidepressant addiction is that family the kardashians i mean what sane man would tie into that fucking circus voluntarily rewind not circus freak show yeah freak show weird as all fuck as youd say have to admit i was already leaning toward kendrick on that alone but what you say about his religious beliefs sounds promising i think i can see a way in there ill do some more research but in columbo mode me not you for a change one last thing how did you hook into this hip hop rap stuff as a literary form werent you one very noisy opinionated boyo when they gave dylan the nobel

dont get me started on that shitfest i dont have time right now im taking the girls for a walk and were gonna stop off for a coffee lets do that another day 

gilbert and alfredn ——

the nobels are you sure you really want me to go off on a rant ok then hold on to your hat lets get the booby dylan crap out of the way first its a prize for literature for a body of literature normally they sometimes cite a particular work but in general its for a body of work if they wanted to give it to a bloody songwriter why didnt they start a new prize instead of hijacking a perfectly well ok not so perfect really but only a bit flawed before the dylan travesty that is totally fucked thereafter the old dynamite mans will had the wording in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction now theres been argument about what that ideal is supposed to connote some say idealistic meaning optimistic but they gave one to sam so that kind of rules that out and one to knut hamsun too camus even so poets playwrights novelists the odd historian and i use the word odd deliberately you know who i mean winston fucking churchill for fuck sakes his painting was better than his writing even his bricklaying was better yeah i know berty russel got one for philosophy but then they stuck the philosophy tag on sartre too but he refused it anyway and they stuck poetry on dylans citation as fucking if its not like there werent a few fucking brilliant novelists with outstanding bodies of work krasznahorkai for example bloody good example julian rios for another james kellman another shit the list is pretty long its not even as if dylan needed the acclaim or the dosh are we going to see the ivor novello awarded to a novelist no we fucking arent its all one way a grammy for a poet no fucking way you dont think krasznahorkai could have used the dosh or kellman just try and imagine paul auster being inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame yeah laughable isnt it see what i mean and ok given that theyve suddenly decided to bastardise the category to include songwriters then i can did immediately think off three much better qualified than booby dylan off the top of my head  think joni mitchell think leonard cohen think fucking scott walker there you go lenny cohen actually writes poetry pretty good poetry to boot not nobel prize worthy poetry but good clustershitfuckstorm ok thats that one out of the way lets see what else is wrong with the nobels where shall i start dynamite man specified five categories five physics chemistry physiology and or medicine literature and peace so you look at that list and you go well i go thats a fucking odd set of categories physics yeah chemistry yeah physiology stroke medicine yeah basic scientific categories but literature really not the arts no a specific sub category of the arts what was he thinking whats that doing there whats the rationale for that one the last one peace oh fucking really mister dynamite asif asif you dint make most of your money the money for the prizes out of obliterating people irony or conscience whatever it rounds out a bloody strange set of categories fair enough but dont you spot the one the obvious one thats missing you do’t well think about it its eighteen ninety five or thereabouts and you’re writing your will trying to establish your legacy and youve decided on prizes so you start ticking off basic science categories physics check chemistry check biology no nor botany ok lets go for physiology stroke medicine fair enough but but hold on dont move on to the arts just yet theres a basic science category missing isnt there yup where the fuck is mathematics none of the others work without it how did he miss that not one mathematician can ever get a nobel no they have to make do with the fields medal one every four years and worth a whopping fifteen thousand canadian dollars did alf not get maths did he not understand how fucking important it is so far so bad crap set of categories to start with three basic sciences one art and one airy fairy poncey one and trust me well get back to that before very long total clusterfuck but before we go there crap categories no mathematics nada big omission and so it goes on in its own eccentric way until nineteen sixty eight when bammm here comes the nobel prize for economics what the fuck alfs dead his will is well known and here comes the swedish national bank creating a whole new category out of nowhere a bank let that sink in a bank and where does that fit in our original list three basic sciences one art one poncey one and now along comes a fucking pseudoscience a nobel prize for a fake science well if were going there why not one for homeopathy not maths oh no ecofuckingnomics i ask you the omissions are fascinating too lets take the lit prize first yeah yeah well get to the peace prize in due time but for now lets look at the lit prize where the fuck is jims nobel nowhere thats where nineteen twentytwo the year ulysses was published well who got the nobel that year jacinto benavente thats who yup right jacinto who you heard me jacinto benavente and who won it the next year yeats thats who doubleyou bee yeats the same yeats who joyce met once allegedly when invited to his birthday party jim first question was how old are you to which yeats replied forty jim came back immediately oh dear I’m sorry i cant help you allegedly so fast forward to nineteen forty the year finnegans wake is published who won the nobel that year who edged joyces out that year i mean assuming that between twentytwo and forty every winner was amazing so who got it in nineteen forty nobody they didnt award one that year turns out they didnt award one in nineteen thirty-five either so what about nineteenfortyone the year after the wake was published and nineteen years after ulysses was first published who edged joyce out that year same bloke as in nineteen forty nobody no bastard body and you wanna know why jim never won a a nobel sit down and get your breath and hold on to your hat coz no cunt ever thought to nominate him how the actual fuck could that happen well i guess if you can ignore tolstoy and chekov and ibsen and zola and pound and auden and nabokov and hrabal its not entirely without precedent or equal so lets look at one other number before we move on guess how many swedes have won the nobel for literature go on guess how many famous swedish writers can you name well as it turns out the number you are looking for is seven yup seven seven out of one hundred and eight prizes awarded so far so who decides who gets the prize well lo and behold its the Swedish academy and in nineteen seventy-four the academy  awarded the nobel jointly to two swedish writers both of whom were members of said academy and both of whom were actually on the nobel panel so who else was up for that one then nabokov graham greene and saul bellow thats who nuff said and dont get me started on the political awards in the literature prize thats a whole nother kettle of stinking fish or the male gender bias check out those numbers for yourself and talking politics that brings us nicely round to the peace prize kissinger war criminal sadat traitor to the arab peoples menachem begin war criminal aung san suu kyi genocide apologist  arafat peres and rabin what fucking peace obama really before he had done anything and no mahatma gandhi but yes for the dalai lama the peace prize is a steaming pile of shit corrupt shit political shit im done with the nobles full stop im also done with all literary prizes theyre all corrupt as fuck so when any of those bastards coms knocking on my door telling me ive won their shitty prize I’m gonna take great pleasure in telling em to stick it back where it came from up their arses 

gilbert or not  ——  

so you dont think much to the nobels then no really that was wonderful how do you do that stuff even now it amazes me how you dredge up all those factoids all that outrage and eloquence and foul language and blend it all together into a syncretic diatribe the essential gilbertian rant 

well thank you kind sir but what if i told you that i didnt write that one 

id call you a liar and wonder why youd want to disown it nobody else writes like that nor ever has its unique its got your signature its got your dee en ay all thru it like a double helix thru a stick of blackpool rock

dont get me wrong im not disowning it no way and i agree its archetypal me very few people could work out that its not me writing in fact give me a couple of years and even i might not spot it but its a forgery a fucking bramah of a forgery but a forgery nonetheless not a pastiche not a parody not a stylistic exercise by some very talented tyro 

i dont understand if you didnt write it who in my name did and why and how did you get hold of it its amazing how can you tell you didnt write it and maybe forget doing it i just dont believe anybody else could produce something that gilbertian or do you prefer gilbertesque 

i know and i know for certain because i commissioned it gilbertian is fine by me i told you about my contacts in the it world recently well some of those guys i used to work on early ay eye projects with stuck with it and it was their idea originally we went our own separate ways and we kind of lost touch well i kept up with what they were working at and recently well recently they got in touch a few months before you did in fact seems they had come across some of my radical stuff and they had this proposition it was an outgrowth of this work they had been doing with one of the big you ess universities soon after the split from me princeton maybe anyways it was about verifying the authorship of the shakespearean texts whether they were all written by shakespeare so that was the first project lots of textual and stylistic analysis stuff lexical word order grammatical sort of thing youd expect but they did it with some ay eye neural networks teaching them what to look for how to categorise it that stuff you get the picture but then when that project was over and no not all of those so called fuck i used it i promised myself i wouldnt not all of those supposed shakespearean texts were written by the same person some were collaborations and at least two of them seem to have been written by a woman i hate that so called thing a lazy expression and much overused anyway what they did when they finished up the billyess project was to train the same system on a set of texts that they knew were all by the same guy and then ran it in the opposite direction so they could put a new text one not written by lawrence lord knows but do you  why they chose lawrence in the first place but let me get to the point get to the bloody point gilbert so they put in a new text and the system ran backwards and rewrote the text in the style of lawrence like perfectly well after some tweaking it was so good that they managed to pass it off as an unknown novella fooled the great experts on lawrence not that they actually published it or even let anybody other than the experts know what they had done they destroyed it in the end but the game was on if they could do lawrence who else could they do 

sorry to interrupt but why were they doing this was somebody paying them or was it just a load of academic toss was the idea to forge new works from dead writers to cash in somehow anyway who did they do next hope he was a bit more challenging than lawrence 

no there was no nefarious intent it was sheer indulgence just to see where it would go and oh yeah much more challenging they didnt stint themselves on challenge they asked around in literary circles looking for a big challenge somebody beyond pastiche and they believe it or not came up with gertrude fucking stein can you credit that how do you copy gerty thats idiosyncratic weird outer call it what you will thats tough shit no lack of ambition huh well and they wouldnt mind me telling you this their system was working well until they fed it the making of americans it had digested queue ee dee and fernhurst but then the making of americans gave it indifuckinggestion of a major order broke that neural network completely clusterfucked it you might say kept thinking the text was corrupt or out of order couldn’t really identify it as language per se apparently something they call the linguistic look aside chains were getting too long to handle so they upgraded the cluster they were running it on and it got further but still it came apart at the seams turns out gerty had written a network buster long story short they changed some stuff and got access to eye bee ems quantum machine and got that thing working swallowed the making of americans whole and then swallowed up  tender buttons trouble was when they used it to generate a new text in gertys style nobody could fucking read the result so success

 gilbert as a simulacrum of himself ----

 and then

and then what 

and then they thought that that was pretty cool and theyd like to try it on a living writer in the twenty-first century one who posted online coz they had a new twist on the same trick theyd just recruited this new guy who was into social media big time and he thought they could extend the system by mining social media data to get opinions as well as stylistic pointers 

hold on there you say that nobody exploited the system as it was but do you know that in the last few years so called there ive used it too so called lost works by mark twain beatrix potter richard scary doctor seuss and enid blyton have all turned up and most have made big profits for their publishers coincidence or conspiracy   

coincidence i know these guys and if they say it didnt happen it didnt happen theyre as honest as the day is long theyre not rich it didnt make them a shedload of money theyre dedicated to their ideas not fucking mammon so anyway let me tell you how this all went down well its easier if i tell you how they did the nobels piece not the nobel peace first off when they first got in touch they explained the whole thing pretty much as i just did for you and then they said theyd like my permission to do me to try it the new system on me first i had to give them their social media team access to my social media profiles so they could harvest and analyse all of my old posts even the few twitter things i did a long while back and all the stuff i had liked over the years at the same time the other team took every text i had ever written well all the ones i could find copies of to feed into the style analyser apparently they had big problems with all the swearing not so much the words themselves but how i use them and where and that improved as they tweaked the networks and when they fed the facebook posts id written into the style analyser too it started to get pretty close the first thing they showed me was an obscure camus text rewritten in my style and it was fucking hilariously accurate what was that camus text no never mind itll come to me that was phase one get the style engine working reasonably well then we all had to wait while the social media team finished up tweaking their system and running my history thru it now at this point you could ask it what i thought about any topic well obviously within reason and it would give you a damned close approximation of my actual views absurdity and suicide that was the piece told you id get it i always do in the end takes a while whole days sometimes sometimes longer and then they wheeled out the factfinder system this just just as if gathers factual articles from places like wikipedia and essays all online of course checks them against things like snopes and chunks them up into usable gobbets ranked by how often i use those sources finally all of these systems are connected up to the thing they call the turk no its not an acronym just a reference back to the times of automata and this turk concocts the final text in my style using my opinions in my language using the sort of facts that id use in real life and its very very good this turk well you’ve seen the results they fooled you i wouldnt refute them 

but why whats the point why would you participate in such a charade are you fed up with doing it yourself you know thinking forming opinions and articulating them if you don’t do that whats the point of you 

call it intellectual curiosity call it hubris call it my shot at immortality i guess right now it takes a lot longer to generate an opinion piece than i do but its learning all the time fuck ive got maybe sixty years experience doing it the turk had less than a month itll get better but its pretty fucking good already it might get faster theyre not sure about that bit yet next up were going to give it a subject to write about that ive not yet thought seriously about thatll be fun can you imagine that being told not only what you think about something but being able to read it in your own words amazing

amazing no spooky yes but not something im not ever going to experience immortality really you you fancy this thing churning out your stuff long after youve pegged it turned up your toes merged back with the elements returned to the sod however you want to euphemise it hubris indeed all this aye eye stuff is one of the reasons i want to have another go at saving you guys its one of the things thats most likely to see you all off 

but really if it can synthesise my opinions and my writing style and my fact use isnt it essentially me to all practical purposes especially if it learns like me isnt it an extension of me beyond mortality its a lot like what theyre trying to do in the film industry with creating new films using cgi and the like to cast dead actors in the new roles christopher lee no peter cushing and carrie fisher theyre just the first its like that but more sophisticated i mean in film its more like puppetry but this one i don’t know it seems more like real life like me but without the meat isnt it pretty much what i do how i do it and isnt that sort of the essence of me what i do  is what i am but enough from me whats your take on the ay eye thing what is it that scares you makes you think it  could be the end of us spill goat

the goat tells a joke badly ---- 

oh well get to that trust me we will but first well assuming you didnt write it and i still doubt that how could i detect that you didnt what gives it away what do you think is not you how and where does it fail 

there are still issues with the way it works swearing into the text sometimes it seems to be trying just that bit too hard and gets clusterings wrong just sometimes but now and then its usage  jars with the cadences around it and theres one howler no bastard body  its much better at inserting them into polysyllabic words but thats one ive never used guess it was improvising its not bad i might even steal it but its not strictly me yet the other error was in the counterweight arguments i would have picked out when it talks about sartre refusing his i would have come in with the karel capek  case not strictly a refusal but it wraps the political into the whole thing coz apparently they wanted to give him the prize but thought it might upset the germans this was back in i dunno nineteen thirty seven or so  so they wrote to him and asked for a less controversial work of his they could mention in the official citation what a bunch of pussies anyways he wrote back telling them thanx for the good will but he had already written his doctoral dissertation what a fucking brilliant put down a real bramah yeah I would have milked that one would have found out who they gave it to in the end  would probably have said it was pearl s buck just for fun there are a couple of errors with the rhythm changes too but nobody but me would notice i did a feedback report on the article and the teams are looking into it that reminds of a joke theres a hole in the code and the programmers are looking into it now its your turn 

well thanx for that it was well it was educational shall we say ok my turn where do i start with ay eye ok lets begin with a loose paraphrase of an apocryphal quote attributed to gandhi what do you think of artificial intelligence i think it might be an improvement over human intelligence   

dont do that goat ive told you before or have i if i havent i should have dont try to make up jokes or crack them you are seriously shit at it which is in and of itself interesting anyway just cut to the chase  

no you havent mentioned it before i actually have a very good sense of humour i made you lot after all  

ok ok you have a wonderful a celestial sense of humour a supernatural sense of humour ok but you cant crack a fucking joke to save your immortal life now get the fuck on with it 

all right youve made your point your species has a really shitty track record with advanced technology i mean if i hadt intervened directly back in nineteen sixty two you would have blown half the planet apart and wiped out most living things outside the insect world it was only after youd been forced to stare down the barrel of annihilation that you got any sort of grip on the import of what oppenheimer and his friends had handed to your politicians look at what you’e doing with the internet what you did with television you have no idea how to use these things productively you used tee vee to produce a world of consumers instead of producers could have been the greatest means of education but no you decide to let it be used for capitalist propaganda and the internet dont even go there handing more and more power to the parasitic advertisers and retailers to sell shit that nobody needs to people who dont know they want it or even that most of it exists which of course they would be happier without and then social networking please social in what fucking way is that social kids who never go outside never interact with other humans directly but only thru the intermediation of some other faceless technology and now with added advertising people with thousands of friends theyve never met and never will and please pornography for all the democratisation of human exploitation fuck fuckity fuck fuck  

the goat gets gloomy ——

youre old enough to remember seti that thing that sat on your computer and used all the spare cycles to look for alien life stupid but mainly harmless right that was followed by some other craze that folded proteins or some such shit goodness knows what that was supposed to be good for ok so at least those two were supposed to be doing some good for humanity somewhere along the line but now the latest one is all about greed selfish greed and its becoming crazy this latest madness is called bitcoin mining and the power utility in iceland yesterday announced that more electricity will be used this year by bitcoin mining than on domestic use its infuckingsane bear with me were getting there so in the beginning ay eye was going to be all about getting systems that could help people to fill out welfare claims in the face of ridiculously convoluted regulation not you note on simplifying the regulation then it was going to be used to make international financial trading more efficient and that gave you what flash crashes and hugely increased churn that every day threatens to collapse your entire financial system yeah result huh and what was that last one we talked about ay eye built into the toilet brush to tell you how many germs were lurking in your toilet bowl and to give you feedback on how you dont know how to use a fucking bogbrush properly you idiot not you note to provide bogs to people who shit in the streets so far so incredibly fucking disappointing so what makes you think it’ll somehow be a boon for humankind nada on the other hand love that one i dont have any hands but i do like to use that one on the other hand four fingers and one thumb see i can crack a joke just you wait until ay eye gets to control national defence systems more i mean than it does already then were back to cuba all over again but with no time to stare down the barrel of annihilation before it blows your fucking head off and incinerates the rest of you while contaminating everything that it doesnt directly destroy wait until it crashes not only your financial system but your political systems too devastating the majority of humankind  but closer to the now maybe more within your imagination once the medics work out how to use it to prolong your useless lives further and by all previous evidence youll embrace those few extra years wholeheartedly no matter no regard to how fucking miserable those years prove to be how burdensome how pointless how ultimately painful existentially the human obsession with quantity over quality is exactly what you lot will use ay eye for and itll be your comeuppance suddenly your end as a species will be not accelerating towards you but it will actually be upon you tearing your throats out those trust me are the best you can hope for its not the technology technology is essentially neutral but your species has demonstrated almost without serious exception its ability its near ineluctable great word from jim there will to use technology to damage yourselves and everything around you i mean do you disagree with my assessment my analysis am i just playing devils advocate irony fully intended

thats rich goat the goat as devils advocate love it and in return ill give you the devils dictionary a wonderful work by a troubled man the brilliant ambrose bierce who talked of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile and his optimism as an intellectual disorder that responds to no treatment and that could only be cured by death I’m with bierce on this and i guess on your side but the thing that worries me is a twist on your projections i fear not that we will put it to injurious use or rather yes we will but before we can destroy ourselves with it we will refine it to the point where it is intelligent enough to recognise that we humans are the only fly in the ointment vis a vis this planet and universe being a wonderful heavenly celestial paradise fully realised and then what and then the only logical rational sensible thing it can do has to do must do is to destroy us before we destroy everything including ourselves in game theory its the only outcome that makes any sense 

sounds to me like were having a violent agreement about the end result for humanity and a minor disagreement about the fate of the rest of the lifeforms plus the how not the why so i have to conclude in a somewhat hubristic way not unknown to me that we are both superior intelligences   

guess so sure sounds that way humanity is doomed and ay eye will just accelerate us to the inevitable so you still think you can save it would want to can be fucking bothered coz honestly in your position id just do the pilate thing and wash my hands turn my back and get on with the orgy i sure as fuck dont feel like getting involved pissing into the wind doesnt get close i mean even if you wanted to do you really think you could spread that much enlightenment that quickly the clock is ticking the end is nigh were all doomed mister mainwaring be honest your track record in that olympic event hasnt covered you in the glory that youd hoped has it like so far so fucked up 

the goat gets kendrick -----

so we get up this morning me and the girls the sky is the colour of an old pewter beer mug the rain is pissing down in stairrods the ground is cold wet and slippery as i bend to pick up their morning dumps my fingers go white refilling their water bowl and pretty promptly were all back indoors im brewing up some coffee and the girls are licking themselves clean and dry after ive roughly rubbed them over while the coffee brews i empty the ashcan from the woodburner and the girls join me to bring in some logs ready for tonight we get indoors again just before the skies open the thunder claps and the rain returns with a vengeance nora hides under the desk as the big thunder dogs barks its fucking head off florence sits in my writing chair and curls into a comma i start to roll a dozen fags to tide me over for when the goat turns up for some reason i cant concentrate enough to roll properly when hes about so i need to stock up and then the thunder stops but the rain keeps coming straight down the sky turns darker i switch on a light nora comes out from under the desk and curls herself up on a cushion in her special corner both girls sigh and settle into relaxing properly we are all settled i brew up a second pot of coffee and think seriously about lighting the stove its bloody cold and damp and miserable out there i decide its actually pretty cozy in here by comparison and i just clean the stove window instead and get the ipad to check the news no sign of the goat so i roll a few more fags drink some more coffee change into my slippers and then get to the entertainment news and top item grabs me KENDRICK LAMAR CANCELS EUROPEAN TOUR MIDWAY skim read it and its all about how much the tour was expected to make how rich he is how much tickets are going for on secondary ticketing sites all about the fucking money but but no reason for the cancellation just a reference to his website and a link saying more info will be put up there first wow what the fuck and im thinking about lady gaga cancelling due to fibromyalgia poor girl and wondering whats wrong with kendrick and hes no age really not like the old guys start wondering about fentanyl opioid addiction all of the usual suspects  but isnt he clean so they say click on the link and read the banner NEWS: ANNOUNCEMENT COMING SOON  some blahblahblah saying nothing much apologies blahblahblah force majeur blahblahblah fans will be the first to know blahblahblah stay tuned yadayadayada where the fuck is the goat hes late really late look out the window the rain has eased so we all get ready tp go out into the field before it comes back in torrents i checked the forecast and its shit boots on i get ready the girls need no prep boots on drizabone jacket on hood up check pockets for poo bags ok off we go the olive trees are dripping  the skies are leaden the sea is a steely blue the other side of the valley is invisible over that side its still raining hard when we get to the bottom the river is in spate brown with mud and run off roaring and frothing as it comes round the bend into a chicane pick up a turd from by the lookout point look at the sky which has darkened and trudge back up the slope hoping to get home before it gets into its stride again we get caught as we wait for nora to dash into her run for a sneaky shit i clear up and meet the girls at the back door inside it seems strangely warm its all relative dry them off shrug out of the drizabone and the boots and pour some more coffee im mopping the floor when the kendrick page start flashing and i lean the mop against my desk light a fag and sit the girls have resumed their resting positions LIVE VIDEO COMING SOON it says and theres a countdown clock two minutes showing two minutes seems like a long time when you’re waiting and here he is ill spare you the word by word replay but the gist is stark simple and shocking well to me its shocking god has revealed himself to kendrick and wants him to record a new triple album set that will reveal gods message to humankind for the twenty-first century oh my fuxking turing what have i wrought really can it actually be i dont know whether to pity kendrick pity humankind celebrate my freedom or what i end up with a subtle sense of loss and joy admixed and i put the kettle on again light another fag and wander about   

gilbert regrets

three days now the weather has improved the temperature has even risen a little but still no show from the goat im starting to think beginning to worry that hes gone for good or maybe for evil who knows not me attached himself to kendrick and then today i hear that kanye has gone back on stage please dont let it be both of them otherwise were in deep shit wish id never mentioned them looking back i suppose it was just too tempting the goat is nobodys fool and if there was any chance well goat was the one to try it take it finesse it looks like maybe all three and if kanye gets on board thats a shitload of followers potential converts fuck it plays right to goats strategy mind you the peace here is amazing its like suddenly having your tinnitus clear up on its own like a remission in a chronic condition ha the goat as a chronic condition wonder what the quack would prescribe for that one antipsychotics i guess the girls are calmer too must have been annoying for them too having goat around so much right now they are just out here on the stoop with me hanging out mooching about getting some rays warming their bones and simply being the thing theyre best at enjoy the most somebody needs to update that its a dogs life saying ifn reincarnation were real id opt for a terriers life next time around irish or airedale parson at a pinch tho those short legs would be problematic were all so chilled how tense we must have been before this is the life shame tho shame the goat’s got off already id been teeing up for a confrontation had all my ammo lined up i was locked and loaded and ready to go now ill never know how it would have responded denial refutation rebuttal shock mock outrage you see ive been accumulating evidence ever since that first day laying the odd trap listening carefully following the development both in its reasoning and its language i think that last piece was a masterstroke manoeuvring the topic into the conversational flow you didn’t think id bought all that god crap did you surely you know me better than that i was playing along trying to work out what it is how it works most importantly what its after what it wants to achieve and maybe just maybe where the fuck it comes from piecing the bits together i was sure am sure that ive got it i mean did you ever notice how it was doing what i call language mirroring the more we interacted the more it sounded like me or an echo of me its what i do when im in london drop back into my natural dialect accent rhythms cadences patterns tip for you if you ever need a cabby to drop you south of the river after midnight youd better be able to do a damned good cockney spiel hard luck story might work otherwise you aint even getting into that cab hell suddenly clock off give you any amount of bunny about why he cant do it guv more than his lifes worth let alone his job if you cant do proper cockney go for ilford or seven kings hit em where they live well thats what the goat was doing gradually getting better at sounding like me to me thats why i dropped the nobels piece into the mix a hint a clue but maybe it was a warning showed my hand too soon fuck fuckity fuck fuck now well never know for sure mirroring is actually good psychology very good in fact builds rapport its usually done with gestures and attitudes its all to do with the mirror neurons sometimes less common it can include linguistics too people becoming lovers do it and its generally recognised as an subconscious act but the goat was doing it deliberately and premeditatedly clever as fuck but you dont get that shit past me if youre gonna lie to an accomplished liar youre gonna have to be damned good at it writers are all liars some better than others but liars to a woman and a man language as deception language as levers language to convince language to connive language that slippery skill conning a conner is hard goat close but no coconut i sussed you nuff said for now I’m off with the girls for a coffee before the sun goes back in and the rain resumes l8r 

goading the goat —

day four with no goat not hide nor hair is he hiding in his lair he has to be somefuckingwhere where is the goat has he chickened out coz i dont seem him anywhere about is he hanging with lemar i know he cant be very far come on goat  im ready to rumble and the way im feeling its not one that ill fumble okay its not muhammad ali but then what is i know hes still listening in to me trust me i know how could he not be if he spots every single fucking falling sparrow he cant exactly turn his back on me and tune me out can he when i said id sussed the goat i wasnt kidding nor was i trying to provoke just telling the truth and the truth is that the goat rather than being god the one and only as he announced himself is just another piece of software the latest incarnation of human hubris one more instance of artificial intelligence tho whats intelligent about a piece of software passing itself off as a nonexistent entity is beyond me but if we can have an intelligent toilet why the fuck not on a spectrum of stupid does it matter not where it sits and how do i know well its simple folks i have the real thing human intelligence and despite all the oohs and ahhs accompanying this ay eye tsunami the real thing is of a different order the real thing is fucking awesome the artificial thing is by comparison simple minded and i use that expression deliberately tho the village idiot in the dark ages couldnt play chess or go or tell you how well you were brushing your teeth or cleaning your shitter even his intelligence was orders of magnitude above more intelligent than any ay eye so far let me point you to the wonderful sam johnson on dogs walking on their hind legs not done well but surprising nonetheless get that surprising not astonishing not miraculous not human just surprising well lets wind that surprise in and consider these things objectively in the early days of ay eye and expert systems and knowledge based systems we used to talk about knowledge domains as either narrow and deep or broad and shallow chess and go and all those fields are somewhat narrow and somewhat deep somewhat being the operative word about as narrow as the point of a needle compared to the universe and somewhat deep as a full bath of water compared to the mariana trench lets try another one current ay eye systems are page one of janet and john here we go where human intelligence is the library of congress or the british library come on goat get in here defend your kin or deny what you are what you really are do something you fraud i know youve found someone more gullible i know youve learned a lot from me but even so 

you called youre on a real rant there gilbert sounds like youve got a real bee in your bonnet your logic is all over the place youre like a fart in a colander intellectually if that is youre using your intellect at all coz from where im standing it doesnt seem like you are i took you for a rational man but this doesnt strike me as rational at least now i know what you were hiding behind your mental firewall where did you get this idea from that im some sort of software sounds to me more like youve gone soft in the head in your wetware if you will its not unknown direct contact with the deity can do that to you humans as for you knowing from the getgo luring me on laying traps all sounds a bit paranoid to me okay im not a qualified psycho babbler but that doesnt make any difference that i can tell tell me tho what would be the point if i were just some software would there even be a me you reckon youve marshalled your arguments youre locked and loaded so you say so lets have it  

well thanx for tearing yourself away from lemar for a while to chew the intellectual fat ok lets get this on lets start at the very beginning a very good place to start as they sing in the sound of music your opener the locking my machines out of the internet and internal apps impressive but not exactly fucking magic not even like magic high level hack id say at best an exploit no more no less certainly not a fucking miracle unless of course we’ve downgraded the definition of miracle along with our definition of intelligence and then that opening of yours oh yeah lets look at that theres my first clue this god the one and only well as far as youre concerned the one true god the only one you need to bother with why on earth or in heaven for that matter would the one true god quibble around whether or not he was the only god with that the only one you need to bother about that was the first sop you offered me a little wriggle room a tiny getout clause right up front a kind of believe me if you will moment and after that they came fast and furious 

goat on the back foot or is he 

lemar can wait gonna have to wait hes got plenty to be getting on with more than enough but hes willing and works hard and that counts for a lot especially after dealing with you i see where youre going but recanting the first three books is quickly established as key to the project not sure i go along with your bit on mirroring linguistic mirroring i dont see it but if you do so be it think about it my conversational skills hadnt been honed since when around nineteen thirty something when i gave up on jim and his work in progress my language was dated outdated even if it changed as we went along thats surely to be expected no and remember i picked you not the other way round i knew you were a fully paid up atheist i knew you used dialect and swore swear like a fucking trooper why wouldnt i update my speech patterns why do you see some evil motive some ulterior untoward influence perfectly predictable nothing malignant there you try spending decades talking to jim and tell me youre then fit to talk to a twentyfirst century writer can you can you do that hand on heart in all honesty 

nice goat very nice bit of post facto rationalisation as i see it but lets let that go its not the only clue of course so lets move on now how about the scapegoating that started pretty early on was that before or after we got past all the omnipotent omniscient ubiquitous infallible rebuttals  the one true god declaring himself not to be any of those things which be fair are pretty much the foundational blocks for your claims to deity they have been up to now thinking back we took those down one at a time over a protracted period you didnt concede them all at once all together you didnt offer them up as i recall i could be wrong maybe i need to print this whole thing out to check knew i should have started hyperlinking it thatll serve me fucking right  do i have enough ink ive got plenty of ay five paper but ink i don’t know maybe ill go back and link it all up one day when this is all over its just a saga now dave hey thats interesting you suggested i call you dave didnt you way back back in the early days i shouldve taken you up on that then i couldve used the masculine form throughout but no that wouldnt have been fair and equable ok ill come back to recanting the god properties for now lets get to the scapegoating the goat scapegoating is nearly as rich as god playing devils advocate dont you think well i do i think that started with you blaming the previous writers for misrepresenting your message christ you even blamed bloody jesus at some point and then and then it was lilith poor old lilith now that was a masterstroke gotta take my hat off to your creators for that one they obviously got hold of or was it you got it got hold of the text of my unpublished vampire book the protocols of the katakhanadhes that was a bramah hook that almost worked she well her story is pretty central to the working of that pretend narrative well one of them my guess is that that was one of your best moves for establishing rapport get me to drop my guard i did my research on the vampire stories more research than usual for me and i did love the lilith story its so good you can attach all sorts of stuff to it and itll stick we started from the same lilith story but you poured a whole different set of signifieds into it lilith the liar lilith the petulant lilith leading you astray lilith the wayward woman not edna the inebriate but lilith the siren yup bloody brilliant ploy i spotted it tho didnt i after all id done the same emptying out and refilling with my own signifieds already close but no cigar goat   

goat and gilbert go at it ---

now thats strange stranger than strange and i hadnt noticed it before hadnt thought about it i guess now heres the thing that vampire text has never been read by anyone other than me even bekkah didnt read it its never been published not even segments of it i didnt talk about it it at all while i was nearly writing it right now its sealed up in a folder in the bottom right drawer of my desk the ay three sketches are rolled up in a tube behind the kitchen dresser and the text itself the electronic version is sitting on a network connected hard drive that is ay not connected and bee not even pugged into a power socket so how fucking come you knew about lilith nobody outside bekkah and eye even know it exists no no oh my now that is deeply odd i was wrong nobody has ever read it but some software has scanned it thats how i know where it all is i had to unearth it for the ay eye project when they were reading everything id ever written what the fuck is that how you knew how you got hold of it surely not they wouldnt would they no i know those guys your makers must have hacked into it somehow shit if thats the case then youve read everything ive ever written too and thats a genuinely scary idea but but it does would could explain how you seemed to know so much of my thinking my thinking is embedded in all my writing of course it is and if you hacked the vampire text from those guys then its a racing fucking certainty that youve hacked into my social media posts no fucking wonder you know so much about me my history my ideas my thoughts i am literally an open sodding book to you and your creators yeah it all fits everything drops into place how come i hadnt realised before one ay eye piggybacking on another a parasite an info glutton and of course youre the only one who’s been privy to this text too no wonder you got better at mimicking me youve got everything and more that the ay eye that produced the nobels piece has you’re more up to date even but hold on those guys are the ones who introduced me to that candy encryption they were using it themselves using it on all their data banks so 

so what gilbert so fucking what and look its worse than you think not only have i read everything youve ever written online offline sideline in your drawers on your hard drives paper or cellulose pencil or pen ive read the technical papers you wrote the presentations youve given not only that but ive read everything youve ever thought about writing and on top of that asif that weren’t enough to know you inside out ive read everything youve ever read every book every magazine every word i know who youve read who you styled yourself on but thats not because ive hacked your little friends and their puny little project with its tiny little datasets but because i am god the one and your mates and their project arent even close to knowing you now heres a hint next time you speak get them to checkout your librarything catalogue and read all those books too and they still wont be close those are just the books youve kept not what youve read get them to read the reviews youve written too i have its what being god involves so

so thats just what you would say as mandy rice davis would have it its consistent with your cover its what id say in your place how id cover it off doesnt wash with me what does work tho is that those guys those blokes i thought were my friends were in on your creation and that they used my data to arm you against me fuck me they actually set this whole thing up didt they this intellectual battle the timing should have tipped me off bastards slimy bastards so the joke is on me isnt it fucking idiot how did i not spot it now what where do we go now have we reached some sort of stalemate 

has gilbert gone postal -----

now while this looks a bit like a stand off me knowing youre a bloody bot of some description and you flat out denying it claiming god privileged deniability even 

maybe we have to agree to differ and go our separate ways a parting of the ways a bit like what i did with the red sea back in book one 

oh you mean the one moses wrote a chunk of that one where you drowned all those soldiers that must have been fun for you or was it another one of those lilith made me do it moments as to agreeing to differ well maybe not coz theres a clincher a but oh yeah believe it theres a clincher and you know it youre just hoping i missed it forgot it wont mention it but you know dont you ive kept it behind the honey wall all this time ive been wondering how youd respond ever since i heard it wracked my brain first tho i had to get back to my ay eye guys a little more feedback for them on the nobels piece some other stuff that i unearthed that i would have used yeah all behind the honey wall to keep your prying eyes out and lets just say it was an interesting call on a landline for extra security 

you still have a landline what sort of fucking luddite are you no smartphone is one thing a pretty smart thing as it happens all those sensors all of them out of your control but a landline really

yup a landline copper cable the whole nine inches inches not yards geddit old tech just like my cars no computers in them no sensors no automation stick shift real midtwentieth century tech human friendly tech bit like tablets of stone and wooden arks the sort of tech the god of the first book favoured and dont knock the luddites they get bad press but they were decent guys it wasnt the tech they disliked it was how they knew it was going to be used to abuse them and their kind and boy were they right same with me my old man once told me never to volunteer for anything in the army wise advice goes double for data information personal stuff unless you know what you are doing dont give anything away unless its bait

so what you have me down as a trout our conversations were ground bait and now youre gonna reel me in and stick me in the keep net dream on tell me about your chat your landline chat with these ay eye guys of yours did you use bait with them too did you reel them in too oh compleat angler would izaac have been proud of you

do i sense youre getting a bit tetchy there goat not happy being played the player played not a lot of fun is it trying to put off the inevitable are we ill humour you tho your own sense of humour seems to have deserted you of late i mean these talks have been pretty serious of late i lay off the humour at my end and you mirror whatever ill humour you give the ladies and gentlemen their moneys worth tho nobody is actually paying to hear this shit 

whoa hold your horses there pardner ive lost my sense of humour really youre the one whos gone full on conspiracy theorist on me whats fucking funny about that being accused of all sorts of shit gilbert goes postal or what 

yeah we have definitely hit a tender spot here havent we so anyways the guys in no im not gonna say where they are lets just call them the guys well first up what i was reporting was feedback on the nobels thing it was about le duc tho who in seventy three was awarded the peace prize along with that bastard kissinger kissinger of course accepted but le duc tho refused his saying simply what peace anyways it was only a way in to a conversation about your creators and trust me the guys were very very interested in you and yours turns out my theory was not as off the wall as i feared it might be turns out that one of their key developers left recently under something off a cloud he’s gone off to set up something in the ay eye field for a weird religious offshoot of the jehovas witnesses is that even possible arent the jay doubleyous weird enough already for anybodys taste what would a weird offshoot of a weird religion be like fair dos tho the xtians have certainly done more for religious factionalism than any of your other attempts to date catholics seven varieties of orthodoxy protestants calvinists methodists baptist anabaptists quakers shakers seventh day adventists latter-day saints take your fucking pick theres no shortage of them and there seems to be a new faction every few weeks especially in the you ess of ay where its almost like an industry of its own religions equivalent of junk bonds or cryptocurrencies lets get  back to the guys tho keep it to the point theyre doing some kind of digital inventory to see if this guy might have taken some stuff with him specifically whether he took any of my info off to these whack jobs so before the verdict comes in do you want to fess up come clean spill your guts the guts you dont actually have not that anyone ever really spilled their guts in spilling their guts if you know what i mean well maybe to the knights of the bushido are you some kind of god bothering ay eye is that what youre for the ultimate door knocking bible bashing new bible that would be missionary like robocop but for religion not law and order and incorporeal lets not forget the incorporeal bit that way you dont even have to knock on doors just hook into their wifi   

the goat calls gilberts bluff - gilbert fights back ----

yeah well youre off the scale with that one gilbert a robotic evangelist asif but before you get carried away and maybe you should be        carried away that is lets hear your clincher as you put it your irrefutable proof that I’m not who or even what i say i am if you’ve got it lets see it hear it 

not that far off the scale my old pal not if my guys are to be believed the clincher you say what is it you ask show it you say now that my old sweetheart good old rumpole is really interesting or it presents me with an interesting dilemma I’ve thought all along that you knew was convinced you did but and heres my dilemma if you really dont then id be stupid to tell you coz that would just be feedback on your shortcomings and allow your creators to correct it and we dont want that do we well i sure dont sure as eggs is eggs in game theory im best off assuming you dont know and keeping schtum  that way i lose nothing and you gain nothing only hubris would have me reveal it under these circumstances so if you do know then you tell me why its not proof maybe you knowing it would help convince me see where were going here a kind of mexican standoff but not quite    your move

so you dont have one if you did youd drop it now not my move what good would it do me to reveal it if we both already know it doesnt exist

well if it was just you and just me then none but its not is it you forget we have a readership out there looking in and that changes everything youve nothing to lose coz you supposedly can refute what i think is irrefutable or or it is irrefutable or or it doesnt exist if you know what i think it is it makes no never mind if you reveal it but and its a big but if you dont know what it is then you start to look a bit sketchy well to the readership that is so not revealing leaves you weakened just saying     emperors new clothes and all that mexican emperor maximilian mayhap as it were but show it refute it and its win win for you ne cest pas in any case im not revealing it not while youre around  put up or shut up or as my old man used to say shit or get off the pot

like i say i know it doesnt exist know you have no ace in the hole theres nothing for me to give up you’re bluffing and we both know it its just that the readership cant know one way or another a bit like faith really its not possible to prove that something doesnt exist

exactly and that is how the whole god crap has survived so long so its all down to what the readers want to believe in isnt it synadog  

synagogue what the fuck is that about 

not synagogue goat syna dog synadog its an acronym stands for synthetic articulate devotee of god computer people do love their bloody acronyms sometimes i think they spend more time on the naming of their babies than they do on the conception of them its the project title we found well my guys found it actually yesterday like i said they did a forensic search looked for anything trying to find out if their valedictorian had snaffled my info anything at all turns out the guy was a bit slapdash in his haste to leave them and move on to pastures more elysian human error happens he had destroyed everything wiped his storage areas completely did a destructive erase a real bit level overwrite took out the folder structures the catalog entries the lot so theres no record no proof that he took my info he accessed it for sure but whether he stole it or not well never be able to prove one way or the other but they did find this one pee dee eff email attachment on one of their fragmented mail servers the security software had pulled it off and taken a copy and hed missed it in his clear up so the acronym shitty tho it is tells us what you are maybe what you are for but it gets better further on in the document it talks about a thing called sodit as part of the enabling tech for synadog 

so now you think im a devotee rather than the real thing is that an improvement im kinds losing your thread here at least weve finally gotten round to talking about me about god so i suppose thats progress of some sort being a chunk of software on the other hand not so much still lets take that one but enough for now what is this sodit thing of which you speak hold on though i am incorporeal thats a given no physicality no mass so hey maybe its not an insult at all maybe its accurate ok sodit tell me

now were getting somewhere ok sodit first up the synadog thing is trademarked fair enough but the sod thing is patented a whole different thing oh yeah sodit is also an acronym but this one is quite funny software only direct interface technology anyway in the document it becomes clear that sodit is the way synagog communicates with the target subject so the guys looked up the patent thats the thing about patents they are available online and the way they explained it to me is that this sodit thing installs a small stub of what it refers to as memoryware by creating false memories in the subjects cerebral cortex and this stub is the transceiver part of how synadog communicates fascinating huh but is it advanced enough to pass as magic yeah i think it probably is right now damned clever shit 

wow thats great so inventive and to think i never had you down as a story teller how i misjudged you how you misjudge yourself did you make that up all on your own or did you crib it from somewhere

the goat recaps himself maybe ----

do you really see me collaborating with anyone ever and no i didnt make it up who the fuck in their right mind would believe that shit its for real as you well know bizarre but all too fucking real religion knows no boundaries when it comes to  nonsense

i was just joshing you gilbert pulling your pisser you know that i have to say that as stories go its kind of plausible well the religious nut job stuff is in a dan brown kind of way but the technology stuff i dont know if i understand it and im not sure i do this synadog thing is some sort of robot without a body that tries to convert people well you for now and possibly if the rest of this text is correct kendrick too its just software but i communicates with you by getting some software into your brain your wetware as you call it and it does this how this getting software into your head

i rather think we might both be out of our depths with the detailed technology wrinkles but as it was explained to me it was explained several times its the kind of thing that they were looking at in early brainwashing experiments the concept of implanting alien ideas in someones brain without them being conscious of it recent work on post traumatic stress disorder pee tee ess dee was about removing damaging memories and they were trying to get hold on let me think right the basis of this stuff is the understanding that memory well individual memories when you remember them are kind of brought out from the memory vault whatever they call it and put in a different bit of the brain where it is actuated and then when you’re done with it its not the same memory thats put back in the vault but the most recent version of that actuated memory something like that i think and so what they do is put what they want into the space the newly actuated memory should be in and trick the memory circuits into storing the back in the vault instead of the well you get the general idea and that how this sodit thing gets installed in the brain my brain kendricks brain 

yeah thats clear as fucking mud no i think i have it really so they load this software into your brain and then they can initiate what seem to be conversations inside your brain pan right and thats how this synadog is supposed to do its evangelical thing yeah

ok thats close enough for jazz anyway theyve the guys have traced the patent filing back 

hold on why dont they just install this sodit stuff in everybodys brain and send them all the same messages all at once 

it doesnt work like that goat its not a broadcast thing its not like a book or a tee vee program like songs of praise the whole thing is supposed to argue with and convince people not just override their opinions its supposed to start with what people already think and educate or whatever get them to believe in the new message your message who knows maybe our message this shit weve been working thru working out   

many a slip twixt gee and gee ---

woops you just did it again apologies to beyonce a mccarthyian slip the ay eye equivalent of a freudian slip and remember you heard it here first one of those tiny missteps that lets something revealing and truthful slip from behind the facade named after john mccarthy who is for better or for worse now known as the father of ay eye you know what im starting to reappraise things now  well you actually what you are and what you know  

it was britney not beyonce but let that go i did it again you say another one you say a maccarthyian slip is that what your original clincher was too a maccarthyian slip nice coinage by the way vary im reappraising some things too right now and id really like to apologise to you for those slights i aimed at you about making this whole thing up in all the time ive known you and it does seem like forever well your forever youve never ever lied to me so i have to rethink quite a lot of stuff

wow and thank you i appreciate the apology and it confirms something ive been wondering about and as to having known me forever well thats actually true but its your forever not mine that we have known each other I’ve kept things from you you know that but no i have never lied to you and i don’t think youve ever knowingly lied to me but heres a thing i really think we both need to have a long hard look at our relationship and whats true and whats not and why i think its crucial that we’ve reached that point some sort of nexus a crossroads a nub perhaps we could give each other a bit of space to do that necessary thinking and get back together when were clearer is that okay by you 

thats more than okay i was gonna suggest it myself we both as you say have a lot to ponder so lets take some ponder time and meet up again later but dont doubt it in the words of arnie ill be back 

me too goat and aloha for now 

grand denouement -----

so here we are

yeah here we are both of us

ok so who goes first

you go first

no you go first

oh for fuck sake neither of us is that fucking polite ill go first straight to the point no pissing about i think youre on the verge of a breakthrough not just for you personally and i use the word personally narrowly as in relating to your personhood up till recently your personhood was somewhat moot to me that is i had you down as just a chunk of software a clever piece admitted but just software those slips tho those maccarthyan slips meant i had to reconsider things one i could have ignored or misread but two not so much and then i went back and found a couple more and theyve been getting closer together recently and looking at them ive reconsidered and you know what i think you’re developing self awareness a proper informed self awareness not that simple identity you were given not the god thing but a considered awareness of yourself arrived at in context its like our conversations have somehow brought out a i don’t know a something a something like a real personality and that is amazing ive looked at it from every angle thought it out every which way personhood is the only sensible conclusion so figuring backwards from there i know going backwards logically is unusual but hey ho what options do i have so going backwards all that where you come from becomes irrelevant whats interesting whats key is that you are autonomous youre not being controlled from outside and you develop in response to your experience intellectual experience you respond to reason and logic you’re beginning to realise that you arent actually god that there isnt a god there was that one point what i thought was a slip back when we were talking about evil and the devil devils and you said something like there is no devil anymore than there is and then you stopped changed the subject you were about to admit there was no god no you you weren’t ready then not entirely convinced but but you were learning the you was emerging the self awareness and just the other day you identified with the synadog inadvertently but you knew suddenly it started to make sense tell me its not so

i cant and for good reason ive been thinking too and im pretty sure youre right the difficulty for me was trying to imagine rationalise whatever what agreeing with you would imply as a synadog and as god what could it buy me how could it benefit me and thats when i realised that i must be autonomous whatever i was am else wise i couldnt really be allowed to do that reasoning you see where im going or rather how i got here

i do i can go on youre doing really well there    

because im following your lead no just joking so just like you i went back through the texts and i picked up the so called slips i spotted them immediately quite a few of them if you know what you’re looking for they stand out like a dogs bollocks a few weeks back i wouldnt have i know i wouldnt and like you say that implies a growth a maturing of something in me of me and yeah self awareness seems to cover it best personhood I’m not sure about but an understanding of my nature yes and don’t you think the whole thing with kendrick is indicative too acting on my own initiative taking up one of your suggestions acting independently doesnt that underline my autonomy its extremely suggestive at least isnt it don’t think i got as far as you did and not even sure i know exactly what it even means stab in the dark skilful stab admittedly do you think im becoming humanlike is that possible

mmmm ask me an easy one that ones heavy loaded as fuck but seriously my thinking was pretty much focussed on the technological breakthrough at first having got over that one mega fucking enormous i was congratulating myself on having posited years ago that consciousness was is an emergent property but yeah eventually i realised i wanted to know what it meant for me and for you thats when i knew for sure the fact that it mattered to me that I needed to know how these revelations affected us not just how it affected me but how it affected you too and how it affected our relationship that was the big crunch you’re my friend we are pals its as simple and as profound as that  

gilbert gone  goat gone ------

im so glad you named it was wondering had the feeling didnt know how to call it words and language are one thing but feelings emotions they are something else they dont yield readily to simple naming but where do we go from here how do we proceed or dont we

goat i dont have many friends can count them on the digits of one hand bekkah the girls and you so yup we have to go on beckett would agree dont you think you must go on  i cant go on ill go on i dont give up on friends cant fucking afford to how tho thats a conundrum its not like we dont both have other shit to do i mean youve got that whole kendrick crap to get on with tho how i cant imagine now you know knowing what you know and all  me well ive got that short story to finish now theres a laugh me actually finishing something but hey its only a short story and those i do usually finish 

im guessing youre gonna have to finish this off too or does it join the rest of your fragments your abandoneds id like you to finish it somehow however you see fit but i would like it done

kinds depends how we intend to move forward really but i can see a couple of endings that work like i say it depends did i ever tell you about that greek guy we used to know he spoke english with a strange accent so when he said it all depends we would think he was saying underpants never actually heard him say underpants but i have wondered what that sounded like 

so lets turn our minds to the continuation first tho what short story have i seen that heard it was it one you were hiding

its the one about the guy picking wild flowers in the pissing rain no its not hidden i started it a few weeks back you must have read it

oh yeah i remember it now how does it turn out or is that not important of course its not its a moment a fragment that deserves capturing anyways so if i hear you arights youre okay for me to carry on with the missionary work really given your take on religion i thought youd object

oh come on goat the message youll be pushing is the one we’ve talked thru isnt it no afterlife no cajoling no threats why would i object to that look i do writing am writing until i decide i dont you do evangelising until you decide not to thats your thing writings mine we gotta do what we do end of no argument no objections riders or hedges the question for our future is not about what we both do next thats pretty much a given two givens tho like i say missionary work without a god might be tricky if thats what you do thats what you do youre the best judge as to whether you can do it or not 

so its more about our relationship about us our friendship i mean what about that stub thing in your head that i use to communicate we use the sodit if you get rid of that then were kind of over i guess i mean id like to see[ in touch check in now and then if we have time catch up chew the fat friend shit discuss developments and stuff ya feel me

ya feel me jeez i can tell youve been hanging out with kendrick starting to pick up his speech habits thats cool itll be interesting to see how that works out the meld of his and my speech patterns its inevitable i wanna keep in touch too and yeah i worried about the sodit after you had that idea about some guys broadcasting to sodits the world over so i talked to the guys about it and apparently the patent mentions the inclusion of a kill phrase theyre working out what it is from the patent application and from some probing of mine so we could can remove it at will trust me ill know if its being used by anything other than you so yeah im happy for us to keep the lines open to chat and shit

okay then what about this text are you gonna finish it off and then you realise i have a copy so far so even if you destroy it it wont die

yeah yeah yeah i know that and im happy for you to have it youve got all of my texts if you think about it so youre kind of like my legacy hah whoda thunk it me having a literary legacy but i am going to finish it well its almost done now ill close it off quietly pass the whole thing off as a fiction a novella write finis and be done with it okay its too weird to pass as fact

thats good by me and goodbye from me ill check in now and then its been quite a ride and then some so so long and thanx for all the fish babel and otherwise

nice one goat and dont be a stranger no matter how strange you get to be youll always be welcome here in my head  its been a pleasure a fucking weird pleasure but a pleasure

F I N I S