Perhaps the Last Judgement has Taken Place

BAUDRILLARD: We have undertaken to inflict the worst on ourselves, and to engineer our disappearance in an extremely complex and sophisticated way, in order to restore the world into the pure state it was in before we were in it.

NOAILLES: Perhaps the Last Judgement has taken place and we’re carrying out the punishment.

-Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles in conversation, printed in Harpers Magazine, Oct 2007

(I think maybe they are interpreting global warming and terrorism as a collective suicide, but who knows?)

Today, for reasons of my own, jetlagged and weary, I was fussing around the library in a small town where I grew up. Outside, the shopping centre we loitered around as teenagers is being demolished inch by inch, which gives the remaining shops a strange air of evanescence and uselessness. All the big companies, the chain stores, have pulled out – a fabric shop called “Material Goods” and a Christian bookstore / café hold out against the developers and the increasingly bleak autumn light and dead space.

So I wondered down to the library, and what should I find in star position, sitting incongruously at the head of a great flotilla of books on display, but “Complete Microwave Cookery” by a woman whose name I forget. This book, published in 1988, had been checked out many times in the 80s and early 90s but hardly ever since, and is dedicated to the creation of complete meals in the microwave. Hollandaise sauce, swordfish, rabbit, foie gras with crackers, you name it, here are instructions on how to make it in a microwave, and solely in a microwave. On the cover, the author stands showbiz-wackily in front of variety of dishes on a large trestle table, in the airbrushed suggestion of a manor house, with a lurid green shoulder-padded dress and bleach blond hair in a kind of horrendous Lady Diana doughnut-shape. It buried me in the 1980s with a sudden feeling of panic, and I remembered that they were no fun at all. I don’t think I could survive back there now, it would all be too alien, too incomprehensible, bright and stupid.

I walked through the mall for one last time, tracing the footsteps that my friends and I had taken when we were 16 and 17. A faint dizziness made me reel a little. The others, of course, are all elsewhere now, and their youthful ghosts seemed at peace. It struck me as I shuffled through, maybe we all actually ARE ghosts. Maybe the Last Judgement has already happened and nobody bothered to tell us. Letting me go on wondering around, trying to make sense out of nonsense, and talking to moronic Christians at bookstores, keeping me in hope and ignorance, that would be part of the punishment, wouldn’t it?

I returned to the library, wanting, for purposes of verisimilitude, to note the Microwave author’s name, but of course the book had vanished. I’m sure if I had searched their records there would have been no trace of it either. A clue, a small part of the world's infinite and secret catalogue, had been left out, then hastily hidden away. In some abstract sense, as I cycled home in the rain, I realised the attraction of engineering one’s disappearance and returning the world to the pure state it was in before one was in it.

Bed Bugs

I woke up this morning covered in bites. Not inflicted by an enraged Peter Bjorn and John fan. I think the hotel bed had bugs in it. Now I wonder if I should burn my clothes. Maybe I will anyway. Tour madness has set in I think. Thanks to all who have come out and cheered us on though, it's been great fun.

We are in Seattle waiting to soundcheck. This venue always gives me the heebie jeebies for some reason, a strange melancolia falls on my shoulders the minute I walk through the door.

Today I read that the Neolithic peoples of Scotland fled from the invading Celts by pushing deep into the forests and sheltering in their ancient and remote burial cairns. Apparently the Celts' sightings of this mysterious and almost historically undocumented people gave birth to the legend of the "little people", a magical race which were called fairies in a more innocent age.

I also read that the Celts believed that if you dreamed of a grey horse, it symbolised the sea, it was the spirits of the sea attempting to invade your mind. And that the German poet Holderin believed that the banks of the Danube were haunted by all the old Greek river Gods, long missing from Greece. How all this connects is currently beyond me but I'll get it into a song somehow when I get home.

Unemployable

At work, in the late 1990s, I would attend several weekly meetings during which the window caught my full attention, Soho Square's gardens murmured in the breeze, and I would... drift away a little. Soon a sharp question about "batches" or "output" or something would be barked in my direction and I would hit the earth with a thump. The remainder of the time I half-listened and half-doodled, hiding my notebook from those traitorous colleagues who might snitch on me and expose my lack of attention to our Great Leader.

For some reason I kept the notebook; I re-found the doodles today, 10 years later, and stuck them together into a collage. I feel I have reclaimed some of my wasted time, or at least condensed a load of stupid shit I went through on to a page. It's a bit like the Surrealist exquisite cadaver game, except with a mysterious leaden weight of boredom crushing your mind into a pancake. I suggest anyone who reads this and works for an honest living does the same, using the stains of spilt coffee, biro marks, a scalpel and some glue, and whatever bizarre images pop into their head whilst they traverse the psychological Himalayas of boredom during a business meeting. We could invent a new, truly democratic art movement.