Nick Cave and the Noob Seeds
Nick Cave is a small man with a long moustache, who happens to be from Warracknabeal in Victoria, near where I've just spent four days (and broke my wrist). Nick Cave is one of the only musicians who can inspire me with a single song, and send me into mild schizophrenia with a second one. Nick Cave (and his band the Bad Seeds) will be playing at a venue very close to my house in January, and I am going to go hear them play. A once in a lifetime opportunity for someone like me, and to celebrate this amazing event I put on 'Song of Joy' and 'Stagger Lee', one after the other, and while I was listening I wrote this. Please note I'm very inebriated and as such this probably won't flow like a story, but simply read it like a more-intoxicated version of Finnegans Wake. Let the words flow, perhaps read it out loud. Poetry more than story, song more than poetry in parts. But enough from me. Enjoy the fruit of my labours, ye my bretheren.
It was a dark and stormy night.
I was a doctor then.
A flash of lighting, staccato, machinegun quick.
Joy and the children were alone in the big red barn, waiting out the storm - sheltering from the ominous green maelstrom that was slowly but surely advancing through the sky. I was called to the house to attend a desperate emergency, and to this day I cannot remember travelling blindly along the midnight roads, only that I eventually arrived at the barn to be greeted by a viciously brutal sight. She'd been tied up in a sleeping bag and stabbed six times, through her heart and her lungs. The three girls - Hildy, Haley and Holly - had been robbed of their lives. The method of murder was much the same as the horrific slaying of Joy, my wife.
I couldn't feel emotion, only think clinically, coldly. And listen to the metronome in my head keeping time.
150 BPM.
160BPM.
150BPM.
Allegro.
Staccato.
Allegro.
The noises and sights of the outside world, wretched though they were, faded away to blackness; leaving me with only the frozen images of the last time I saw my beautiful family alive to taunt me, tell me I'd been too late.
I was a doctor then.
The police wanted to know where I had been, what I had been doing.
I answered; truthfully; I'd been sleeping in the clinic the last two nights as Joy and I had had a fight, but I spoke to her earlier on the telephone and she said to come home.
I wanted to go as soon as I heard her voice, but I'd been working triple shifts, 48 hours at a stretch, and I just fell asleep...
Those poor four innocent lives. They never caught the man, he's still on the loose. It seems he's done many many more, all the same, six times with a razor sharp knife through the heart and lungs. No reason for it. No motive. Just bodies - corpses, stiffs, meat. That's all they were to him. And after a while, that's all everyone became to me, just so many animated pieces of meat wandering around the planet, destroying it all because they don't know any better, after all; they're only meat.
Nobody seemed to be able to offer a reason for me to live, when all I felt was pain and loss and sorrow. He used to write on the walls in the victim's blood. In my house he wrote 'In His RED right HAND'. That, I'm told, is from Paradise Lost. Milton. I don't know why it's relevant - I think it's a metaphor for Lucifer, the Fallen One, but I'm unsure - and besides, I'm atheistic.
Atheistic and cynical, pessimistic and fatalistic and my whole life is lived in Karmic defiance. I do whatever I can to shit the whole world off, and yet the world still keeps on pouring solid gold success upon me. Until now.
Now my life is emptiness. No more success. No more defiance - there's obviously someone out there, and he hates me.
"Well Mr. God, do you know who I am? I'm the bad motherfucker called Stagger Lee. Mr. Stagger Lee!" Those were the last words one of the victims said, you know. Just before the killer put four bullets in his motherfucking head. That's how I want to go though. A few well chosen words, and an instant death. Fuck me, it's a brutal world out there, and you can only run along the edge of the knife so long before you fall - and get cut in half. Or filled full of lead.
You might as well make it quick and sudden with a 7.62mm full metal jacket round, instead of slowly; with a fit drawing liquid heroin, Bic-warm flowing opiate filtering through the trimmed end of a cigarette filter and into the barrel of a menacing sharp syringe. Constantly dreading the pain and discomfort of ramming a recycled needle into their already track-covered arms, but needing and craving that blast of ecstasy as the Hammer deacetylates into 6-monoacetylmorphine and then finally to morphine. Embrace it, let it surround you, then at least at the peak take you with it, you die with the answer a breath away, and then you're gone,
AS THE FINAL RUSH COMES
It was a dark and stormy night.
I was a doctor then.
A flash of lighting, staccato, machinegun quick.
Joy and the children were alone in the big red barn, waiting out the storm - sheltering from the ominous green maelstrom that was slowly but surely advancing through the sky. I was called to the house to attend a desperate emergency, and to this day I cannot remember travelling blindly along the midnight roads, only that I eventually arrived at the barn to be greeted by a viciously brutal sight. She'd been tied up in a sleeping bag and stabbed six times, through her heart and her lungs. The three girls - Hildy, Haley and Holly - had been robbed of their lives. The method of murder was much the same as the horrific slaying of Joy, my wife.
I couldn't feel emotion, only think clinically, coldly. And listen to the metronome in my head keeping time.
150 BPM.
160BPM.
150BPM.
Allegro.
Staccato.
Allegro.
The noises and sights of the outside world, wretched though they were, faded away to blackness; leaving me with only the frozen images of the last time I saw my beautiful family alive to taunt me, tell me I'd been too late.
I was a doctor then.
The police wanted to know where I had been, what I had been doing.
I answered; truthfully; I'd been sleeping in the clinic the last two nights as Joy and I had had a fight, but I spoke to her earlier on the telephone and she said to come home.
I wanted to go as soon as I heard her voice, but I'd been working triple shifts, 48 hours at a stretch, and I just fell asleep...
Those poor four innocent lives. They never caught the man, he's still on the loose. It seems he's done many many more, all the same, six times with a razor sharp knife through the heart and lungs. No reason for it. No motive. Just bodies - corpses, stiffs, meat. That's all they were to him. And after a while, that's all everyone became to me, just so many animated pieces of meat wandering around the planet, destroying it all because they don't know any better, after all; they're only meat.
Nobody seemed to be able to offer a reason for me to live, when all I felt was pain and loss and sorrow. He used to write on the walls in the victim's blood. In my house he wrote 'In His RED right HAND'. That, I'm told, is from Paradise Lost. Milton. I don't know why it's relevant - I think it's a metaphor for Lucifer, the Fallen One, but I'm unsure - and besides, I'm atheistic.
Atheistic and cynical, pessimistic and fatalistic and my whole life is lived in Karmic defiance. I do whatever I can to shit the whole world off, and yet the world still keeps on pouring solid gold success upon me. Until now.
Now my life is emptiness. No more success. No more defiance - there's obviously someone out there, and he hates me.
"Well Mr. God, do you know who I am? I'm the bad motherfucker called Stagger Lee. Mr. Stagger Lee!" Those were the last words one of the victims said, you know. Just before the killer put four bullets in his motherfucking head. That's how I want to go though. A few well chosen words, and an instant death. Fuck me, it's a brutal world out there, and you can only run along the edge of the knife so long before you fall - and get cut in half. Or filled full of lead.
You might as well make it quick and sudden with a 7.62mm full metal jacket round, instead of slowly; with a fit drawing liquid heroin, Bic-warm flowing opiate filtering through the trimmed end of a cigarette filter and into the barrel of a menacing sharp syringe. Constantly dreading the pain and discomfort of ramming a recycled needle into their already track-covered arms, but needing and craving that blast of ecstasy as the Hammer deacetylates into 6-monoacetylmorphine and then finally to morphine. Embrace it, let it surround you, then at least at the peak take you with it, you die with the answer a breath away, and then you're gone,
AS THE FINAL RUSH COMES