14

I feel a bit angry today. I'm mad at *you-know-who* – again – and also Dave Gormless and his bumchum Danny Wallace. Can you believe the blurb for Mr Gormless's new book?

"Gamely, Dave beds down in a Colorado trailer park, sleeps in an Oregon forest treehouse, and even spends Thanksgiving with a Mexican family in Kansas."

He even spends Thanksgiving with a Mexican family in Kansas? Oh, fuck me sidewards with a rusty bent tuna, Kerouac and Thoreau must be spinning in their graves! All I can do is shake my head and wonder – I mean, is this what the world has come to, these two goggle-eyed burglar boys adventuring into the world with their unlimited credit cards and ready-made publishing deals, and the best they can come up with is sleeping in a treehouse? And if those are the three highlights…Jesus, what the hell's in the other 381 pages? It makes me want to wank myself stupid.

Danny Wallace, you suck arse! Your Short List shorts are shit – and made all the more shitter [sic] by your insistence on plundering your last two paragraphs from the pages of Women's Weekly. Yes Man? How about, Suck-My-Cock Man? And I hate your glasses and your hair, your teeth and grin and eyes. I probably hate your girlfriend too.

Meanwhile, Mr Gormless has shrunk to the size of an amoeba and lodged himself in the groove of an old tramp's shoe, so desperate is he to hide from the state of the world he's created. How can he live with himself? I hear you ask. Answer: he can't. That's why he's seeking refuge in the netherworld between pavement and sole and carpet. And I, for one, don't blame him.

Oh, anger bites my arse and lodges teaspoons in there behind my very eyes! The anger of seeing these two buffoons every which way I turn, reminding me that they've made it, and done their typing, and got their deals and earned their crusts, while I sit here fuming – sit right here with an actual real story tucked safely away in the cracks of my cheeks – and plunder and spit and do nothing about it. I spent Thanksgiving with a family of Mexicans (in Texas) – and that was ten fucking years ago! And it was so insignificant to my journey it hasn't even warranted a mention in the long ago completed Part One! God, I'm so fuckin' pissed at others stealing in on my limelight and patch, and me sitting here paralysed and unable to do anything about it; gnarled fingers and bitter, disgusting armchair here I come; it makes me want to cry. "Do it then!" you'll shout; "Aaaarggghh!" I'll scream, in reply. "Cocksuckers and arseoles and Millibands and typhoons, I just can't!" "Aaarggh," I'll say again – note the use of less letters, no exclamation mark, to show that I'm calming down – "there's no such word as can't." All this anger is the sign of envy that points the road that shows the way to what you want to do and what you have to do if you don't want to feel this way anymore. Is it right to hate these two twits – and their girlfriends (assuming they have them) – and to call them twits? Of course…it is…not; of course not. But…come on! For fuck's sake! If there's a place for this – for saying, "hey, I've got an idea for a madcap adventure, can I have a load of money to go and show the world how cool life could be if you just go out there and do stuff, and when I come home – to my nice, cosy home – I'll write a book about it for you" – then there's got to be a place for the actual, real, undiluted, uncontrived, lived and breathed and true-to-the-core-of-my-motherfucking-bones experience, right?

So, once more: arseoles and cocksuckers and big brass platyhelminth motherfucking sock-eating giblets, I quit! Being a loser. Oh yes

:-)