Edgy electro pop music is kids’ music with swearing, X-rated playground chants, skipping songs with Tipper stickers.

Walking north along London Road, I’m tailgated by a man in a brand new Shoprider Deluxe electric wheelchair, protective plastic film still on the headrest. He’s not been driving electric wheelchairs for very long, he still drives impatiently, angrily. After a few minutes I slow down and drop away to one side, pretending to look at the vegetables stacked outside a caribbean grocer’s shop, allow him to pass. Almost uncomfortably close to a display of cassava, yam, ocra, aubergines. He glides past and I notice that he’s had a hydraulic system fitted, so that the front of the chair can be raised and lowered. He bumps it up and down a couple of times, rolling down the street, smoking endo, sipping on gin and juice, laid back, with his mind on his money and his money on his mind.

These are the end times. No rubbish worth nicking in the skips, it’s all toxic: MDF, chipboard, PVCu.

An ambulance with smoked glass windows pulls out of St James’s Park, rolls eastward along St James’s Road. Gently, symbolically, linguistically, guided around the corner of Hogarth Crescent by the markings and the signs. Tinted windows; transporting shady emphasymics, 40-year cannabis veterans. What tales to tell, tales to tell of the ends; what tales to tell, tales to tell of the ends.

On the wall of a derelict pub, last signed The Oakfield:

To the thieves. This building has been broken into 6 times. There is nothing left to steal.

Break into the church opposite instead. Stel their sound system, their drums, their synthesisers. Nobody around here can afford to drink in a pub that can charge enough to cover the decoration pubs need to be attractive to human beings: computer-generated neo-flock wallpaper, pork belly bistro meals, steak and oyster pie, home made, £11.50, served in a floorboarded, high-ceilinged dining room.

Some blows leaves with a petrol-driven hairdryer machine; blowing leaves from the concreted front yards of the houses in the shade of the mega-tree they’ve been pruning. He looks a bit antsy, because he can tell what he’s doing is wrong: why hasn’t he got a broom? How is it more effort to sweep the  leaves into a pile, for composting? Why does it take less energy to blow the leaves away from… everywhere… than to sweep them into one place? Why is it more cost-efficient to dissipate the leaves with a £300 blower… why could his company not buy him a Twix, and tell him that it will provide him with the extra energy he’ll need to sweep the leaves into a composting heap? Is it his pride? “I’m not just a skivvy, I’ve got a machine like a Robocop machine-gun prosthetic on my arm, gas exploding at high speed from the nozzle hundreds of times every minute, nature scattering before my power.” Is that somehow more palatable in terms of pride to someone raised on first-person multi-player shoot-em-ups? FPMPSEUs. I’m not just some cunt with a broom, I’ve got a gun built into my forearm. What you see is leaves being blown, what I see is me shooting your ribcage through.

I pass a sex shop, Pillow Talk. A dummy in the window wears knickers that are a little bit loose, like they’ve got enough capacity to be worn by men or women.

The Leslie Arms, another shell of a pub with Pan-like demons’ heads carved above the doors, CCTV cameras attached to the walls. “Grip Fast,” says the heraldic motto in the sign. Hold tight to your dream, to your ego dream of what you are, because that means that you require stuff. Require the stuff, you idiot. Stuff to sustain your idiot dream.

Beefy Boys cafe. Fat Bellies, Big Bellies.

Where does binge drinking come from? From having an ego dream so obviously wrong, so never right, that part of you wants to smash it down, even while part of you struggles to maintain it.

Lashed to the grille of a cultural juggernaut careening towards the grill of an entropic meatgrinder.

Chill out in our heated garden!

18kW of heating for three cunts smoking fags outside the pub.

If I sit near an air conditioner, I crisp up. They burn my skin. Cold, dry death pours from them. 3kW pumped into the atmosphere to cool the Firetrap concession in the men’s clothing department of House of Fraser.

The resource wars of the 2020s were hilarious: they were fought definitionally because we were running out of exactly the things we needed to build technologically advanced weapons, it was decreed by those in social strata high above the melee that the fighting should be fought with rusty old crowbars and blunt knives. And as we had plenty of people, but little energy, the dwindling spoils would go to the side with the largest army, the most aggressive warriors. The solution was personnel-intensive and exciting to watch, if you could afford not to fight and to own a television.

A group of schoolchildren young enough to wear that “disproportionately large brain casing” look flow past the window of the cafe, onto the pavement of St Johns Hill, mingling with passers by, walking past newspaper hordings: Joesf Fritzl pleads guilty; Jade Goody’s mother breaks down in tears outside her daughter’s house; Jade Goody’s eyes sink into their sockets. This is the age of high-definition, high-speed data that hoses continuity of thought, washes the wisdom from our collective mind.

We’ve been pumping entropy out of our stupid boat, and we’re about to be broadsided by a huge wave.

The ego is a self-perpetuating, self-defending language-tornado, an autopoetic complex of ideas about What You Are – although the ideas aren’t really about You qua You at all, they’re about each other. Self-supporting threads of illusion from which a straw man self-weaves. The ego is a spinning-together of an ecosystem of linguistic thoughts. Our raw, animal consciousness/awareness is infected, and often obscured, by the linguistic ego: we bocome aware of ideas, not of the present moment. Perhaps a major part of the responsibility of a parent is to ease a child through the development of the ego: to help it deal with the suffering that can so easily result from linguistic identification of self with ego, with ideas.

“You are so naughty,” says a mum to her daughter, dragging her by her arm away from the sugar station.

It’s us or the air conditioning. Destroy air conditioning.

Seen while out walking in Thornton Heath, north Croydon: an advertisement for Fosters Scuba, canned lager containing a compressed gas cannister which introduces bubbles into the liquid – ironically, like coming up too quickly from a deep dive would give you the bends, gases released from dissolution in the blood.

I once had a dream in which an old-fashioned aqualung, which looked something like a fire extinguisher, was forced into my throat. My face was battered to pieces, rags and flaps of bleeding flesh. The top of my head was pushed back and back, my jaw dislocated, then broken. Through my skull, the sound and feeling of my neck vertebrae crushing and cracking. The caustic electricity of visceral panic, which in real life would be silenced by death. Metal gouging gullies in my larynx, my lungs torn and pulped. Gargling, spraying blood and mucus, bone fragments driven through tubes and membranes, ribs splintering.

The morning after, I wondered whether I’d been lying on my back, felt some compression in the back of my neck, fantasised a violent misexplanation of those feelings and been carried away with the imagining. But when I asked a dream analyst about it, some time later, he suggested that the dream represented a self-imposed terror of fellatio, that I was programming the suppression of homosexual urges.

Fosters Scuba: slips down like a dream.