This is from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
(Omar Khayyam is O.K.)

One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One Moment of the Well of Life to taste--
The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing
--Oh, make haste!



THE BEASTIE

MonsieurFantasy is fed up with writing his journal, so I have taken over. Do not attempt to control your computer; I control the horizontal and the vertical. I will take you from the innermost mind to… Tony Bungalow part time window cleaner, at your service. Monsieur F. has paid me ten quid to do this job for him. I reckon it’s money for old rope; I mean, how difficult can it be? Artists make such a song and dance about what they do. I wouldn’t give you the skin off a rice pudding for most of what you call art, and as far as I’m concerned artists are a waste of space. Take MonsieurFantasy. For starters, he’s no more French than I am, no more French than a Lancashire hot pot. But do you know what he said to me? “Tony,” he sez, “Tony, the wallpaper is no less real than the wall. We are what we pretend to be.” My eye we are! He’d be spouting a lot less of that sort of rubbish if he had to run up and down a ladder all day for a living the way I do.
I’ll have to tell my wife Betty about this journal-writing though; it’ll give her a right laugh. She’s got a sense of humour has Betty Bungalow. “Hey Bet,” I’ll say, “I’m a Deviant artist now. Maybe I should start a deviant window cleaner’s site. What do you think Bet?”

But I digress, that’s what they say isn’t it, I digress. I’d best get on with the job in hand, that being Monsieur F’s journal. Well, it seems MonsieurFantasy and his Missis are riding along on their caravan through an alamagorical forest, when they fetch up in front of a little beastie standing in the middle of the road. The thing says that he is lost, and could they possibly give him a ride out of the forest, and take him back to some place resembling civilisation. The Beastie is very polite, if a little bit smarmy. Well, not being one to leave a fellow traveler in difficulties, Monsieur F gets out and gives the thing a leg up onto the seat. So now there’s this thing, this ominous presence crouching between Mr and Mrs F, and Monsieur F. has already begun to get a nasty feeling that he has made a big mistake. And he’s not wrong, because straight off Beastie grabs the reigns, and gives the old horse an almighty crack on the backside with the whip! Of course poor Vie not being used to this kind of treatment is, to put it mildly, somewhat startled. She shoots off down the track like an express train with the caravan rattling along behind her in a great wild whirl of multicoloured leaves. The noise is deafening, and you’d swear blind that all four wheels are about to fall off at any minute. And all the while the horrible Beastie is growing bigger and biggerer. He is terrifying to behold, he is for sure. But the funny thing is that the Beastie is impossible to describe, you look at him one time and you see maybe something resembling a big ugly toad, you look again and he’s more like a great black vampire bat. In fact every time you look at Beastie he looks a little different. There is only one thing for certain about Beastie, and that is that he is nobody’s friend! Before long the critter is so large that Monsieur F and his Missus barely have half a cheek each on the seat. They’re hanging on for dear life, and expecting every moment to be their last, and all the while they have to put up with Beastie who is screaming and shouting fit to burst their ear drums. A torrent of all kinds of strangeness is gushing out of him, like…………

“I am the Beastie from under the bed,
A visit impending from Mad Uncle Fred.”

Well to be one hundred percent honest, Beastie didn’t really say the Mad Uncle Fred bit, I made that up. It’s poetry like what that Omar Khayyam wrote… but better! I think that chap was taking it all way too seriously. The thing is he’s pushing up daises now, and where I ask you did all his philosophising get him? Nowhere that’s where!

I tell you what, I would just love to put in some sex and violence into this story, I think it could really do with something like that to spice it up a bit, perhaps a naked wood nymph or two, and maybe a gang of goblins armed to the teeth with machine guns, you know the sort of thing. I think that kind of approach could get Monsieur F’s journal turned into a computer game, and there’s money to be made from that. Ah, but I know the old stick-in-the-mud wouldn’t go for it, so I suppose I’ll just have to leave it out.

Oh well… this is where my bit of journalism ends. It’s all done and dusted now, so I will leave the faux Frenchman and his Missus hurtling away into the night, heading for the dawn of nothing as O.K. would have it. And as for me, well I must make haste, and hurry myself up a bit. I’ve spent far too long on this job and there’s more than enough window cleaning to be done before I’m finished for the day.

Cheerio.