Punched in the face and jerked off improperly

I wrote this in mid summer 2025. It's part of the Shalala, which is my ongoing attempt to pull the latent transgenderism from Philip K Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly" via a suite of stories, meditation poems, and live coding.

“Punched in the face” is one of the early stories in the set. I've been thinking a lot about how the internet bleeds into everything. I said to a friend recently that it can't be overstated how much the world is currently being shaped by the echoes of Less Wrong, Something Awful, and Rotten.com. We never really appreciated that Bum Fights and the culture of unmoderated message boards would shape not just culture but economics and borders.

I write this on the day that for the second time, a number of (almost certainly US government staff or inner circle) have won last minute polymarket bets on the invasion of a foreign country. One of our non-zero probability hopes against such illegal warfare is that yet again, military secrets will be leaked on a War Thunder discord, and operations will be scrapped.

In the UK, the government’s only response to the murder of a trans teen has been to instigate some of the most draconian restrictions on digital freedom in the world. Insisting that under-16s be banned from social media , banning VPNs, and requiring ID to access Discord.

It would be horrendous if it was just about limiting the opportunities for young people to find their peer group in a Britain increasingly hostile towards anything but the most white nationalist conservatism. However, it's transparently yet another deal between the UK government and the private sector, and will oversee a staggering amount of compulsory personal data being handed over.

Fucking slop world.

Anyway, here's a story about the Grateful Dead.

“Punched in the face and jerked off improperly"

These things need to start with a loser, and that’s fine because I have one to hand.

I’m at the multi use games area by one of the city’s many rivers, sitting on the floor of the vaping corral where the heavier scents of used cooking oil, burnt polypropylene, the oldest varieties of urine, and possibly natural gas, have collected. No one is playing right now and the floodlights don’t come on unless you put a token in the slot. On a midweek night this patch of darkness feels like it has been sunk into the earth so it is just a few metres lower than everything else. Just the white and red lines marking floating boundaries under the moon.

Phone alerts have piled up and I’m now well over any grace period for checking back in at ‘the job’. The plausibility of my excuses has worn thin, and I feel diminished along with them. Any more delay and this might be taken out of my hands. That can’t happen.

My backside scraping against the gravel, I pull from my bag first my work phone, and then a second phone that I bought specially for one purpose. On my work phone I open up the verification app, all thin seductive fonts and torpid haptics. The input areas whisper to me expectantly.

Jamming the work phone under my armpit, I turn to the second device (visually almost identical to the first), that an anon had assured me can open a game that will bypass the verification on my work phone.

“Its easy, u just hold them up to each other xd xd” they had said helpfully.

“If u say ‘now kiss’ it will work better’ they added as an afterthought, but I’m not sure how that could be.

Although it looks so similar, this is a much cheaper device than my work phone. But by accident of cost cutting measures it has the unique capacity for one task. Using my delicately scarred index finger I press the only icon on the screen:

The phone stalls,

reboots,

flashes some pornographic pixel art next to the name of the Warez team,

reboots twice more with the screen resolution halving each time,

then launches a windowed browser already directed to a file on a community Flash game repository that then loads line by line as if being transcribed in court.

In the washed distance beyond the black of the sports fields, a row of cars tracks endlessly along the curved flyover exit, each the same year and model and filled with the same intent. Trees die a little more from industrial run off and a loose dog barks at nothing anyone else will see.

Waiting makes my mind wander and upsets my stomach and I have to suppress a dry heave before the file loads in the layers of dirty emulation the hot little phone is running. Mercifully, the splash screen for the game( that I have been assured can bypass the work phone’s verification), appears. In flat fields of blue, yellow, and green, an unpleasant rendering of Edmund J. Sullivan’s ‘A Skeleton Amid Roses’ is filling the browser window.

The image oscillates between two frames of animation. The same flower strewn skeleton in each, but different and flickering without hope of resolution.

I find it impossible to look elsewhere, and panic takes this opportunity to sit confidently in my chest. I can’t see a way out. Cant see any escape from the flickering image made for Omar Khayyam’s poem and the lines that read;

‘One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.’

There’s no ending to this. That’s horrifying. That’s just how it is going to be forever. A coin flipping, a siren blaring, a cell dividing. The valves of a heart that will run indefinitely with a gallop of bloody terror that we cannot hope to resolve.

And then my cold shaking hands catch on the touch sensitive screen of the cheap and remarkable mobile phone and the next scene begins to load.

and with it, I once again feel the ground under me and hear the white noise of the river a little way away.

The phone now shows a distorted image of a cartoon castle, in the same ragged lines of blue, yellow, and green. At the front of the image is a mouse with a very unpleasant look on its face sitting as if at the bottom of the keep’s wall in a dark crack between the rocks. Veins of green run through the blue of the stone like mold. I tap the phone again with my numb hand, smearing the glass. The image freezes and then a stuttering clock wipe brings the game’s title to the front.

‘The Saddening Sad King of all of Southern California’

I tap the phone without meaning to, my finger shaking as it hovers.

The browser image stalls, flashes a warning, and then crash cuts to a figure on the battlements.

A sunken face, a cartoon crown, a look of defeat that revolts me, makes me salivate. The eyes black twin eclipses. A green aura for all the world like the prelude to a migraine.

I find that my free hand has wandered on its own up to my face, the fingers feeling around the edges of my eyesocket like a spider stalking around a drain. I don't remember why I moved my hand, but I have caught it straying before. Tracing the strands of rope, wetly stroking sharp objects with an over inquisitive pressure. I try to park the hand somewhere, settling for an awkward limp hovering over the phone.

Blood drips at the edge of the frame and I move to wipe it before reminding myself that it is only within the image.

I smell dog but I'm not sure, since there’s no dog around.

My free hand is wandering again. A wounded animal that is disorientated and looking for its burrow.

I try to recall what I’m meant to do next, maybe put this phone where the other phone can see it? That sounds logical doesn’t it? One needs to watch the other.

But I can’t find the elegant work phone with its elegant verification app.

I look down into the river, not remembering when I got up and walked over here,

and I throw the phone in.