The Idler

INDICTED TO A PARTY

Steve Aylett has a few guidelines designed to make your evening swing.

Picture any social occasion. Concessions circle like vultures, Each welcome to the bar is thinner. There may be twenty or more ears floating in one room but these are not to be mentioned, nor used for hearing. Dynamite trenching and the throwing of cinders is discouraged, but like so many rules, this one is ever spoken aloud. Indeed so many rules are unvoiced that we are left to jerry-build our own protocol from years of trial and error. Below are the sparse scraps of certain knowledge I have managed to nail down.

1. Arrive in a midget car, bursting with anger.

2. Give in to a non-existent badgering and sign a tremulous autograph on the face of a terrified child.

3. Whisper “Loan me a robot nifty” and display teeth like brackets.

4. Develop a film of colour over your nose, remove the membrane and drape it over a light bulb, drenching the room in puce loveliness.

5. Begin frantically praying.

6. Walk through walls of their condescension, continuing beyond them.

7. Refer urbanely to the host’s residence as “this death trap of yours.”

8. Say the fern is your beautiful mother.

9. Juggle your merits fast to make them look more numerous; or slowly to better hide your slack, empty face.

10. Insult someone without information, your abuse a snarl of zigzagging guesswork. Fade down into tongue-twisting underbreath vulgarities.

11. Refer to your nostrils as “the keyholes of illness.”

12. Point to someone’s wife and say “I’ll give you double what you paid.”

13. Show obvious reluctance to stop kissing the dog.

14. Plug awkward pauses in conversation with one or all of the following phrases:
(a) “I gave orders I was not to be disturbed.”
(b) “Burny Sex is learny sex.”
(c) “I insure the water in my head.”
(d) “How would you handle a stolen pair of caskets?”
(e) “Approved to drown, I trembled n the pallid morning.”
(f) “Souls won’t rescue your bacon species.”
(g) “Abnormally meek, aren’t you?”
(h) “The lady pushes her sides out real perty.”
(I) “No doctors.”
(j) “A dungeon is very uneven isn’t it?”
(k) “Die.”
(l) “Algorithm monkey.”

15. Perch snickering upon the side-table, feasting upon an unidentifiable rodent. You rasp slime from wound of mouth. You are desperate for a world where the social gathering is more than a diversion.

Daybreak smoulders.