This Is How We Die

Christopher Brett-Bailey

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783196968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Playwriting

a motor-mouthed collage of spoken word and storytelling. tales of paranoia, young love and ultra-violence… from the desk of christopher brett bailey comes a spiralling odyssey of pitch-black humour and nightmarish prose. THIS IS HOW WE DIE is a prime slice of surrealist trash, an Americana death trip and a dizzying exorcism for a world convinced it is dying… 'Is this actually how we die? Driven at disorientingly high speed through the blazing landscape of our own riot-torn hearts, while the radio blares adverts for impossible products conceived in the agonizing heat of capitalism's terminal inferno? Christopher Brett Bailey auctions off everything we have and everything we think we know to the lowest bidder, leaving us stripped and spent and blissed out and beaten by language, that treacherous stuff we had thought was our friend. No, there ain't no sanity clause: but I'd trust Bailey with my life, and if this is how we die, you know, it's really not such a bad way to go.' Chris Goode

manhood is measured in pussies per mile, how many pussies to the gallon. how many women have you fingered, have you fucked? but it seems to me the manliest a man can be is to be the man that get’s fucked by other men. it is better to give than to receive. that’s enough of your jail-cell logic, pussyfart. we’re both inside and you’re inside me. all the great fashions came from inside a prison. tattoos, baggy trousers, low-slung homosexuality – all started inside a prison. and if a man beats a woman he’s a coward and if a man beats a man he is a hero, a neanderthal maybe, but a hero for sure.

we are killing ourselves and we have approximated hell. a generation of forever-babies bathing in radio waves and rocket fuel. under satellite and sedation, where did our paranoia go?

we live in a time of one gender, one race, one homogenous, milky, all-tolerant whole. me and you kid, we’re exactly the same on account of being here in shared space and shared time. any difference you perceive is programming that must be eradicated, a cancerous rogue-thought laying tracks across your brain that will be unpicked by government needle. pincers enter for a key-hole surgery through fresh lips sliced into the top of your head, tracing errant thought threads to their source impulses and unpicking them 100 thoughts per second, clusters of unauthorised impulses and seed ideas knotted like chinese takeout on chopstick, fed back through the lips in your head and examined under electric light. careful those thought threads aren’t long enough to wrap round your neck and hang you with cause i wouldn’t put it past them.

and the obituary reads: a young man, a young woman, hey what’s the difference, died today during a government-subsidized emergency mandatory surgery to the brain, coroner says there may’ve been pain and officials say if there was they probably deserved it. also dead today are the olsen twins, following shotgun blasts to their collective identity. cut this coupon out and get off your next visit to our digital marketplace. you can buy fishguts and stolen radios without even getting off the victoria line. isn’t progress a wonderful thing? our age and the age before ours trips over itself, farting out cliches and the freshest one is self-reflexive, the freshest one is this: political correctness has gone mad. gone mad. and i ask for a definition of mad and i am lead to understand that this cliche itself, with it’s casual use of the word mad, proves there is yet more linguistic whitewashing to be done if the perceived goal is to be the achieved goal. and i ask you, who is this straightjacket built for? have you heard our fresh cliche uttered by anyone of colour or minority persuasion? or is it the kneejerk chant of the great white alone? i have never met a black man who did not call himself a nigger, a rentboy who was not proud to be a whore. these are letters, words, sounds made with the mouth, they are meaningless, they are weapons of our own construction, of a mutual agreement based on idiocy, they are weapons of the past, they are only weapons if you treat them as such and can be dismantled any time, any place. they carry no more meaning than god, love, fate or any other magic carpet lithium crutch deployed by the weak to carry them through the desert and get them through dinner conversation. clinking glasses, fizzy wine flows and suddenly he doesn’t look so equine. daddy always loved them jewish comedians but wouldn’t he shit out a jackboot if ya brought one home? and wouldn’t that be exciting? the look of his face at breakfast. jews eat bacon don’t they? this is the 21st century. or is everyone a vegetarian? last train soon and i can’t remember if i’m wearing matching underwear. fuck it, he can’t be that shallow. he’s a jew. they are smarter than us aren’t they? now did they invent humour or did they just slap a trademark on it? slick tom breathes nicotine and tar deep into his lungs back when that was okay to do in the workplace, blue smoke curling round his brown ringlets, the last seconds of a jethro tull climax spinning on a record deck transmitting to truck cabs and taverns on both sides of the river. leaning into the microphone, going once more to the phones and this time it’s a woman who wants to hear that one by blue oyster cult and he tells her that she’s a wet dream and that he’ll gladly play her song. the needle drops and i’m pressed up against the window of the control booth, staring in from the street, barely tall enough to reach the window, snow melting in my size fours, and i’m in love because i too like that one by blue oyster cult. in love with her, with him, with the whole situation and the next year they move the station out to the suburbs where the rent is lower and the transmission signal is stronger. you can find the station online these days. but it’s just not the same.

they gave him a desk for the day but he was a writer of nightmares, couldn’t write in the day. took a stab at a daymare and ended up with a book about horses. surprise surprise it didn’t sell.

keep up junior, we’re Evolving and the odds of you winning the thumb war aren’t looking good.

in our city black and white segregation no longer exists as it once did, it is no longer black, it is no longer white, except in extreme circumstances and extreme minority and any white person that has lived in one of our few black neighbourhoods will tell you: it’s the other white people you are crossing the street to avoid. these hulking vermin, frothing idiocy at the mouth, pooling in their palms. an army of pram pushing proud parents pushing sacks of undead white meat towards forever. intelligent woman a turns to intelligent woman b and says ‘who would think to bring a child into a world like this?’ any opinion you have you do not have absolutely, that is, it is not 100% your opinion, or else you are closing doors and rest assured something valid has been overlooked. we sit in this room looking at eachother, me from my seat, you from yours, and the assumption is that we are not enemies. the conte...