Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:18:46

The bird dives back into the tree. It shakes, some leaves fall.

Rain, starting

I'm getting bored and he can tell, so he shifts the topic towards me. He tells me he'd spotted me chatting to a girl earlier, a black girl, and asks what I thought of her, if I liked her. I mimed affirmatively.

what do you mean

After I get away from the old racist failed actor, I go to see my Korean colleague. He's just arrived in London and I want to see how he's handling the party. We'd been invited as fresh meat for some of the older, gayer attendees. We aren't aware of that.

Thank you, Jack, for telling me I'm just as bad as the characters (actually they're people, if that means anything to you) that I'm writing about.


the site i am dreaming

which magnetises chains of pins

yeah

what do you think my name is

As I'm trying to tell my Korean colleague / fresh meat that this is abnormal, that most people in England aren't like this, the host of the party emerges from the bathroom to a roar of laughter and applause. He's a fat middle aged Frenchman and he's changed into traditional Indian dress and a turban. He looks fucking ridiculous. I try to back away, to avoid the inevitable photo of me in this moment that will one day appear to ruin my life, but everyone is crowding around, trapping me in the middle of it.

Her English is poor but she manages a brief introduction before getting to the point. She asks if she can touch his face. She's already reaching out and gesturing at it. Koreans are way too polite, he's just laughing awkwardly. I put my hand kind of between them and wave it to try and indicate no to her. I'm still in fucking mime mode. I say no, but it's not really to her, or to him, just no, in general. This is all too weird. Dejected, she departs with a comment about having never seen someone like him before.

It was about a crazy lady who lived above his flat in Pimlico. She would let pigeons into her flat so she could feed them. Apparently she didn't want her presence in the flat to interfere with the natural behaviour of the pigeons, so she would let them nest and shit in there and she wouldn't clean it up, because it wasn't natural to do so. The pigeons would die, but apart from the smell and the sludge and the gas, the corpses weren't really a problem. It was the rats that came to eat them. The rats would eat the rotting pigeon corpses mixed in with the rotting pigeon shit and they would get ill and die too. New rats that came through wouldn't mind though, and they'd start to eat the mass, only to get sick and die in it later on. The population grew steadily as more pigeons and rats came from in the cold, to live naturally. They fed the mass further.

like magnets

My inability to confront the old racist failed actor is distracting me. I decide not to tell her about it.

i really havent

Thank you for telling me that I'm failing to see how I'm reproducing the dynamics I'm trying to critique by only describing my Korean colleague / fresh meat and the black girl in relation to others and myself.

i hadn't considered this pedagogically or as a kind of personal knowledge management system (puke) at all but i suppose it is both of those things

And thank you for telling me that the manner in which the narrator consistently fails to act morally is really compelling. Fuck you.

yeah people dont get it they assume its ahnaf

no like which do people call me

i guess imagine a multimedia obsidian or notion that behaves according to some insane arcane rules that you can't ever really determine

god being the centre magnet



i was tempted to lie about my name

The old failed actor genuinely believed this girl was of a lesser race. He believed she shouldn't be talking with me, shouldn't be here at this party, shouldn't be here in this country. He wanted a white England. I didn't really challenge him on it. Sometimes I justify it with thoughts like I was drunk, or baffled, or it isn't an argument I'll win, or he can't hear me anyway, or whatever. I didn't argue with him. I just cut off his rant and left with a pathetic "In a bit."

Thank you, Jack