Introducing yet another investigative reporter for the Rotten Elements, Frayed Bentos, that old poison dart trick Hello folks.
Pop music? What do we think? Eh? I've been toying with my name: frayed or fraying? You decide. I'm the sorta Ringo Starr of this set-up. I'm the one who's learning mad chess moves in the corner while the rest of them cats knock the shit out out front. Stick your bloody sitar up your arse, or something. But all the while I've bin accumulating knick-knacks. Stolen letters from Gloucester, a sort of epiphany. I'm kinda useless but every hamster has its day. Forty-seven year old, from Madrid. In 30 minutes I took her to, I took her. 'It's your Barbour, man. Your killing 'em.' But I'm only an apprentice here, man. Down here on a visit...
Letter for Bentos, 14 May 2011
Dear Mr Menthos,
Sorry I haven't sooner written to you, sir. I've had problems with the old lady's uterus. Home surgery's never been a strong point in our family and I've had some bad incidents over the years, so that I, metaphysically speaking, have to put a tourniquet on my emotions and do the algebra in my front room by the fire. I don't like the questions where you yourself have to pose the question: I'd rather just find the solution. Otherwise I get chapped lips.
It all started with a 'sausage roll'. Life's not a Carry On film and I only expected sausage meat in a flaky pastry casing. That's all I expect and all that I want. I define it as a sort of hinge upon which a weekend can rotate. But a 'sausage roll' became a tussle with Rose on a stained duvet. My dignity collapsed after this filthy scuffle and I asked myself (time and again, in my head symphony, I'm a big fan of Brahms and Wagner, the actor guy), why I would even contemplate buying a hot snack from a council house.
But the real trouble started when I started looking for a builder in a contact magazine. In between the sense of heightened expectation and blacked-out eyes, I was seeing Blenheim Palace on an autumn day and my body suspended from a scaffold as I gazed out on another world, a sort of space scene with floodlit dumper trucks and Martian handling machines. Lunar. I felt fantastic, like Alexander the Great. But the patio turned into a kind of regal monolith. I lay awake for hours, my heart pierced by hard concrete, listening hard for the screams and groans, the pleasure that had 'gone wrong'.
When I next looked, I'd been scuffed out, five miles down the road. Will you forgive me, Menthos? I think not. And, in a more refined sense, I don't want to be forgiven. I'm living in the hostel now but I'm still on a metaphorical mound of skulls; living as a kind of Pol Pot for Greater Manchester.
When I next looked, I'd been scuffed out, five miles down the road. Will you forgive me, Menthos? I think not. And, in a more refined sense, I don't want to be forgiven. I'm living in the hostel now but I'm still on a metaphorical mound of skulls; living as a kind of Pol Pot for Greater Manchester.
I did agree with what you said about that Tottenham Chances place. Surely, that is the ultimate oxymoron.
Yours sincerely,
Dirk Solder
