# 13

Three things I've noticed today include:

A) Changing identity to suit my present psychological profile without an accompanying memo, a photo, flowers, an explanation and a meeting place to get re-acquainted with the people who thought they knew me can be confusing if your name isn't Andy Kaufman. More about that observation later.

B) The pipes, and possibly the taps and water, are on strike at the various places where I perform what are technically worded in the contract that binds my services to the places I frequent as consultations. As yet, time and a significant run in my care stockings have prevented talks with the entity responsible for the strike. A stick, approximately the length of my uninjured arm, I found this morning has been expertly whittled to a fine point and reinforced with rubber I personally tapped from a tree in preparation for any eventualities. My money's on copper and lead (a.k.a. the dark side of the wall), though history concedes that good wood and rubber can triumph in the face of adversity. Perhaps only frigidity will tell.

C) A man who is personally repulsed by me today realised the feeling reached beyond the act of walking along a one way street. It was mutual exclusivity that summoned the attention of everyone as they ignored the man's questionable social grace at lunch. While I was dining on savorless fish, he was busily extricating phlegm embedded deep within his oesophagus. Following several unsuccessful ventures, he produced the money shot of internal bodily extrications, spitting the guilty conglomerate emphatically into the washbasin; housed no more than two metres from my lunch tray. He then gargled a mouthful of water for forty-five seconds before depositing the backwashed prize into the same washbasin. With an encore to follow, the free midday matinee climaxed with a barehanded blow of the nose. I stopped taking notes after four blasts, but if form and commitment were a guide it probably concluded around the ten mark. Let's hope the rubberised whittled stick doesn't break before acceptances.

So there I was, wondering why Ultra Toast Mosha God, who doesn't need the publicity as he's sensitive and overawed by dealing with well-wishers who drape him with lavish attention of the written kind at his blog Contains Mild Peril, was the only regular contributor to the comments portion of this new site o' mine. Then it hit me: the new avatar has got the lad's temperature soaring and the groin veering to magnetic north. I imagined the ghastly concern of his work colleagues should his swivel chair be lubricated beyond standard means. It was a horrifying thought before breakfast and an even more horrifying thought post lunchtime nasal heroics.

Then I wondered if that was another back breaking occurrence where I gently nibbled the shaft of my own penis. It sure was. The Ultra Toaster is ecstatically coupled with a member of the opposite sex; a monkey, by all accounts, and I've been proudly married for almost five years to the most understanding and patient woman ever to have graced the planet.

A more realistic explanation of the situation finally dawned, coinciding with the cleaning lady switching on the lights in the broom closet to again sample from her hidden stash of cocaine, that people may not be aware that I no longer contribute to Fudge Puppets; better known by the moniker Neutralising the pH Level.

It also dawned that the sly devil proclaiming to be Bricktop351 (a.k.a. BT3), who instilled a sense of decency, compassion, adventure, naked notoriety, a fully-functioning model of family unity and regular and copious vulgarity onto the interweb, was perhaps looking for his brain somewhere in a field in Hampshire while I, Andy Kaufman, who was effortlessly handed BT3's identity, performed in a smoke filled room to crowds of up to three and four people on any given night.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to state for the record that BT3 is no longer in the house. He collected his wagon, filled it with the best non-prescription medication on the planet and headed west. Chances are that he will one day return, for Earth is reasonably round and all roads lead to Adelaide, but for the sake of humanity and all matters half-decent in this world, don't expect him to call, write or contribute to anything short of decomposition from here in.

RIP, BT3. Send my regards to Bill Hicks, Hunter S. Thompson and John Wayne Gacy Jr.