Snuff Film

The reel of celluloid continues to unravel like the endless peel from a fruit. I bite into the mental movie again, the desolate streetscape leaving a bitter aftertaste in my brain. Another boy racer slowly passes, the passengers with their boxed-in eyes seem so unreal look more like extras in a bad B movie. Wish I could fetch a bucket of popcorn, get comfy and switch off the killjoy part of my brain that thinks it’s a film critic. Difficult to enjoy the cinematic experience when you’ve just been spat at. Forlornly I look down at the spit eclipsing my solar plexus so astronomically disgusting the whole universe fades to black.

Cut to a happier scene of life on the ground, two goons on a street exchanging notes on a colorful cast of characters in the town suffering with mental health issues. My friend and I are so like actors from a Vaudeville flick, revamping old-school slapstick. Laughed so much the spirit nearly left my body, could not believe the nutjob was using the exact same routine on him too. Not exactly a romcom when it first started, scared the shit out of me from the get-go. First tailing me right up my ass, spewing crazy accusations embroidered with death threats. Blah blah blah, the usual echo. One day I lost the plot, after ten years of ignoring him, I turned around and went right up into the bigger mans face. I roared at him, go back to your hole you effing crazy cunt. Wow, he was like a pussycat after that.   

‘Madness is defo on the rise.’ I lament to my chum who at this stage is familiar with my diagrammatical mansplaining graphing the downward slope of decline in consciousness mirroring exactly the upward line illustrating the rise in mental health dysfunctions. ‘So, where is the attention going that might otherwise be channeled into improving lives?’ I ask rhetorically before waxing lyrically on the fruitless mining of minds in the world today.

Extract from Seescapes intro.

All Images © Stuart Christie