There's
a dead man asleep under my bed, and his incessant snoring is
beginning to grate against my good nature. This is no death
rattle anecdote; far greater men than you have recalled those far
better than I ever could. The dead man in question - one Anthony
O'Samaranch - has been dead for a couple of days, and his stomach
is filling with all sorts of crazy dead-dude gases, as they,
indeed, do. When all you nubile young beasts got your belly
buttons pierced, you didn't think how it would affect others, you
didn't contemplate for a second that your piercing would weaken
the already fragile infrastructure of your umbilical excision.
Did you? Hmm? Did you? Not a single fucking moment's thought, eh?
EH? Bastards. Because of your lack of thought (well, his, but
this is not the time or the place to assign blame to the correct
people) I'm left with a dead man leaking gas out of his belly
button. That there, dear friends, is the pig grunt of the cartoon
snore. I realise it's not a true snore in the true snore sense of
the word true snore, for a true snore, as lain down in the
Tibetan Book Of The Dead (pp.69-82), has the pig grunt on the
intake of air, whereas Anthony's death snore pig grunt is a
result of the expulsion of his gases. It sounds, however, too
much like a snore for me to just discard the Not Dead, Just
Resting metaphor aside like a pubic hair in the soup.
As
well as the creation of all sorts of malodorous gases, the
rotting of my dear departed friend Anthony is causing little
chunks of his flesh to flake off from his internal organs. These
are getting caught up in the gaseous currents running through his
withered frame and are getting trapped in his belly button,
restricting the flow of ... (what gases do dead people
create? All my undertaker friends abandoned me after I explained
my desire to be buried sans coffin, with my head sticking up out
of the ground in the back garden to remind my poor orphaned
children what their daddy looked like, before I ever got the
chance to pose the gas question). This restricted flow creates
the second part of the snore - the raven whistle - before the
build-up of pressure is too great, flinging the decayed flesh
free and completing the cycle, returning to the pig grunt. Aww
shit. That's another thing that I've gotta deal with. Not only do
I have a dead man snoring beneath my bed, but I now have to find
some way to get decayed flesh stains out of the underside of my
mattress before The Fielder finds out. Why the underside of my
mattress, and not the underside of the bed base? Ahhh, 'tis a
good question you ask good sir knight, and one that brings you
deep into the murky depths of my bedroom.
My
bed is, you see, not a common or garden bed, unless you happen to
be Japanese, a wankyposey prick, or have a bad back as a result
of years of attempted auto-fellatio. The first option, for
reasons of pure chance, eludes me; the others, for reasons of
either nature or nurture (debate that amongst yourselves), find
themselves firmly ensconced in my firm ensconcements, dude. My
bed, you see, is a futon. And that brings with it a metal grille
as a base, and, in moments of particularly fine weather or
particularly warped sex, a metal grille as a barbecue. (Ok, so
the warped sex thing has never got that far, but it's a thought
eh, my little lamb chop...?) Quite how a man can fit underneath a
futon brings us to both the epicentre and the termination of this
sweet little ditty. My good friend Mr. Anthony O'Samaranch
suffered from anorexia nervosa in extremis and was looking for a
quiet spot to just curl up and die away from the prying eyes of
all you bloodthirsty vultures. Never have I been one to deny a
hungry man...