I Make a Brave Decision

Readers, I must be quick for I fear my dead mother may be eavesdropping. I have made a firm decision not to kowtow to her any longer. I will not cut off my right hand. Of that I am sure.


Last night I dreamt that Lion-O visited me. He told me that my innate goodness and reluctance to sin was not the debilitating condition I took it for. No, he told me that I should consider it a strength because all heroes everywhere, up to and including Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon, are good. Goodness is a defining characteristic of all the most admired men (and some women) throughout history. This wisdom imparted, Lion-O faded from my ken.



But readers, his words rang true. Readers, I am good. I will be rid of my evil mother's influence. I will do it. I will surely do it.

Mother's Punishment

My dead mother demands that I sever my right hand from my right arm as penance for my lack of sins. Only then will she be satisfied that fealty has been served.

Readers, I must admit reluctance on my part to cleave my right hand from my right arm. As I am right-handed, I asked if she might reconsider and allow me to cut off my left hand instead, which I currently only use for novelty value and for maintaining a sense of symmetry, but my mother is adamant that it be my right hand.

I expect she will eventually persuade or cajole me into going through with this grim task, but I will be very sorry to see my right hand go - it has served me well these last few years and has been instrumental in many of my happiest moments on this earth.

I turn now to Microsoft's comprehensive collection of cliparts to provide illustrations of common uses of one's right hand, to convey to you exactly what everyday activities I will be missing out on when I sacrifice my hand.

Use 1: Cradling a russet apple

Use 2: Depressing buttons

Use 3: Rehearsing for an imagined day when golf courses shrink

Use 4: Shooting things (specifically guns)

Use 5: Mimicking arthritis

A Heartfelt Apology

Readers - if readers ye be, and not illiterates who have stumbled upon this page by chance and cannot understand the strange hieroglyphs you see before you - I owe each of you an apology. In the past few entries I was convinced by some delirium or wicked hex that I was monstrously evil and capable of terrible deeds. I have insulted you by refering to you as "halfwits" when I know that most of you are actually "fullwits". I have mocked you and tried your patience innumerable times and relished so doing. I have forced you to read about my various horrible acts, up to and including maiming a ladybird and trussing up a Pole.

For this I am sorry. If I could send each and every one of you a gift by way of an apology, I would, but I know that a great many of you dwell in the US (America), so postage and packaging costs would be prohibitive. If it is any consolation to you, you must know that my dead mother, in the form of the little scottie dog from Monopoly, is even now formulating my punishment, which will no doubt consist of prolonged torture culminating in a low and ignominious death. She remains wholly evil and can no longer tolerate a good and moral son such as I.

Do not weep for me. It is no more than I deserve.

Shamefaced

My late mother is furious with me. As you have no doubt ascertained through reading between the lines of my recent entries, I have been living a lie.

I am not evil and do not think I will ever be able to live a normal evil life. There is a perverse streak of goodness in me that quite prevents me from going through with evil acts. When push came to shove, I was unable to skin the Polish fellow. Moral repugnance and guilt stayed my hand. There is unfortunately no doubt that I am good. I apologised to the Polish man for letting him down, and allowed him to go free, unskinned.

"You worthless piece of ****!!" my dead mother bawled, "You're such a disappointment, Horton! You're useless! You're beyond useless! You've let me down! Why do you always shame me? You *******! That's it! I don't want you around me! Get out of my sight, you ****. I must concoct a suitable punishment. If you cannot be evil, I must harm you. I will thrash the goodness out of you! You stupid, worthless ****!! You've let me down!"

I cannot help but feel that I have let my mother down.

I Skin a Leg

Readers, I am beginning to doubt the extent of my evilness and fear that the life of a dark lord is not to be my destiny. I cannot deny that the Pole's constant weeping has aroused my sympathy. Furthermore, I have suffered the occasional pang of guilt throughout the day as I went about the grisly business of skinning the man.

My dead mother jeered and questioned my manhood when I expressed doubts, then likened me to a 'Soho Fruit'. Such mockery spurred me on to swallow my indecision and make a start on removing the Pole's skin. How the man wept! I told him not to take it personally, but he seemed determined to do so and kept asking, "Why me? Why do you do this thing to me?" Another favourite refrain of his was, "Please stop. Please let me live. I will give you money. Please, I have a family. I don't want to die. Please." Honestly, they're a talkative lot those Poles! His pleading, irritating though it was, caused me to feel pity for the man, which was most inconvenient.

I spent the entire afternoon hacking away at the man's left leg with a breadknife and a saw. The man's skin was shiny and hard and quite impossible to penetrate - my scissors and Stanley knife proved useless in this endeavour. Try as I might, I simply could not remove the skin from the Pole's leg. The man squealed and moaned the whole time too, which only served to make the process more annoying.

When Newsround came on, I gave up, utterly exhausted.

"Dear god, man! Are you protected by some voodoo and/or hoodoo?" I asked the Pole. "Try as I might, I simply cannot remove the skin from your Polish leg."

Well, readers, between heaving sobs, the Pole admitted to me that he had lost his left leg in a threshing accident as a child. Ever since then, he had been forced to wear a prosthetic.

I thought it was most rude of him not to make this known earlier, for he could easily have saved me the embarrassment of spending four and a half hours trying to skin an artficial leg. How humiliating. What must he think of me? I have promised him that I will do better next time.

As punishment for his cheek, I have confiscated his leg and have forbidden him from watching Jonathan Ross tonight.

The Skinning Begins in Earnest

Greetings halfwits!! I have made some headway in skinning the Polish fellow that lies bound and gagged in my bedroom. I believe this initial success has proved that I am evil beyond reckoning.

In the early hours of this morning (11:15am, after BBC 1's Don't Get Done, Get Dom), I stepped into my bedroom, which I have now come to think of as 'The Flensing Room' because it sounds a little more evil, and announced my intentions. The Pole at once began to weep, which I found somewhat tiresome and unmanly. Ungagging him, he told me in faltering English that his name was Franciszka and that he had a wife and three children to support. Evidently, he hoped that I would see him as a human being and let him off with the skinning, but he did not take into account that I am now very evil and immune to such emotional blackmail. A little cheeky of him too, I thought.

With a large pair of scissors and a Stanley knife, I set to work on my wicked project. His howls of terror were very distracting, but I managed to ignore them and ran the blade slowly up each arm, tenderly peeling back the top layer sufficiently to slide the scissors in and begin cutting. Snip, snip, snip. How the man wept!

The arms were the trickiest part, but once I'd managed those, I used the knife upon the back and was able to remove a huge layer in one fell swoop. It was like peeling an orange. All this took about an hour, during which time the Pole cried and pleaded like a man undergoing some sort of horrible torture. How he wept!

I laid down my tools and surveyed all that I had achieved during my hour of slicing and snipping. I had succeeded in completely removing the man's denim jacket.

At one point though, my scissors had jabbed the flesh on the man's elbow, which probably hurt him a little. I apologized, but he would not cease his caterwauling. Goodness only knows what he'll be like when I actually start removing the skin from his miserable body.

I Attempt to Garrote a Hound

Once again I have failed. Initially, all proceeded as intended: I successfully abducted a dog using every ounce of guile and evil at my disposal, by creeping stealthily into Dundee's Animal Rescue Centre and offering to adopt a dog so that I might take it home and care for it by taking it out for regular walks and treating it to tin after tin of Pedigree Chum. The well-meaning fools were duped and gladly gave me one of the many mangy brutes that had been cruelly abandoned or abused by the evil folk of Dundee.

When I got the dog home, I prepared to test my mettle by garroting the cur with a length of wire. However, as I tautened the cord around the wretched creature's neck, my dead mother's voice could be heard.

"Horton Carew! What on earth do you think you are doing?!" she ejaculated.

"Why, mother," I replied, somewhat confused by her unanticipated ejaculation, "I am preparing to garrote this hound. I assumed that this would please you, evil as you are."

"No!" she ejaculated again, "I am horrified by what I see!"

This latest ejaculation perplexed me no end, for of course, it was my evil mother who egged me on and persuaded me of the value of killing a dog in the first place. Now it was my turn to ejaculate.

"What horrifies you mother?" I ejaculated furiously, "Surely it pleases you to see a dog murdered?"

"Of course!" she ejaculated, "But not that breed! You have selected a scottie dog, you halfwit!"

She went on to explain that because her soul is currently housed inside the little scottie dog from Monopoly, she could not bear to witness me strangulating a dog of that breed. It felt like a personal attack, she claimed. She regarded it as highly symbolic and an eerie reminder of my rejection of her some 13 years earlier, and could not suffer it.

So, dear readers, I have had to abandon my scheme of garroting that hound. At my mother's insistence, I released the brute onto the streets of Dundee, where it scampered freely in the fresh March air. My mother did not see what followed, but a large lorry mowed the creature down under its collosal wheels, which caused me to laugh uproariously and brought a feeling of warmth to my heart. From this unusual reaction to a splattered dog, I think I may safely deduce that I am truly evil. Either that, or my reaction to the death of that particular breed of dog is symbolic in some way, and is therefore too specific a case to extrapolate that I would act similarly evilly towards all dogs.

Who knows? Whatever the case, I will get started on skinning the Pole tomorrow, as I feel it's only fair to the man. I have, after all, been promising to skin him for several days now, and, evil though I am, I do not wish to gain a reputation for being unpunctual.

I Fail to Establish my Immorality

Today I precipitated the demise of a cat through ghastly methodology and felt no concomitant guilt. From this success I deduced that I was indeed truly evil. Boasting to my dead mother of my feat, I was surprised to hear that this was by no means sufficient proof of wickedness, because more than half the world's population hates cats and would kill them themselves given half a chance. My dead mother, who is knowledgable about such things, informs me that cats are creatures of evil anyway, so technically I have committed a good act by ending its miserable life.

This is a step backwards. My dead mother suggests that a better project to test my evil nature would be a dog. All dogs are innocent and wholly good, with the exception of Zoltan (hound of Dracula). My mother proposes, and I have taken her up on the challenge, that tomorrow I find a dog and garrote it. This I will do, and monitor the levels of guilt I feel consequently. If no guilt is felt, I am undoubtedly evil.

I hope I can do my wicked mother proud, or else that poor Pole will never get skinned!

I Perform a Hobbling

Hello halfwits!! In order to regain my wickedness I have eaten the crystals of evil in their entirety. I am certain that it has succeeded for reasons I will explain below.

Yesterday, to test the strength of my evilness, I crushed the leg of a ladybird (it was innocent of any wrongdoing and deserved no such torture). It was exactly like that scene in the film Misery where the fat woman cripples the writer with a sledgehammer, except that I merely used my finger to destroy the ladybird's leg and, of course, the ladybird was not a romantic novelist. I am confident that I am imbued with the evilness of ten devils for I felt practically no guilt after performing this nefarious act. In point of fact, at seeing the ladybird hobble away, I laughed aloud.

I remain wary of skinning the Pole until I am absolutely assured that I am 100% evil because I do not want to be bothered with pangs of guilt midway through administering the skinning and be forced to stop, for that would be embarrassing and would be most unpleasant for the Pole.

Tomorrow I will take the life of some creature. If I suffer no guilt and I delight in the creature's death, then it is certain that I am evil and I can safely graduate to skinning the Pole. However, if I feel sorrow at my actions then it will be painfully apparent that I am not evil enough to flay another human being and I will be forced to abandon my ambitions of becoming a world-renowned Dark Lord.

Keep your fingers crossed for me you halfwits!!

An Uncomfortable Avenue of Thought

Today my dead mother said something which gave me cause to worry. As is her wont, she had been expounding at length upon the nature of evil and had been tutoring me in the most efficient methods of bewitching the good people of the world.

"It is quite simple to hex the Godly," she said. "With the power of evil, we can make good people believe practically anything. The mentalist Derren Brown, for example, is adept at such mesmerism, for he is one of us - a being of pure evil."

This factoid concerning Derren Brown was not the thing that gave me cause to worry. After all, why should it? A man's moral tilt does not affect his ability to entertain and Brown is a showman of no small talent. No, the thing that worried me was this:

"Did you see how easy it was for me to bewitch that ass Gland and the two policemen?" she asked. "I merely twisted reality so that any good person in the immediate vicinity of our victim would perceive the victim as a pillow effigy. Of course, you and I saw the truth of the matter for we are each of us completely evil and have no trace of good in us, but the good doctor and the two lawmen saw a pillow effigy. Now Horton, fetch a blade at once! That Pole won't skin himself you know!"

You understand why this gave me cause to worry? I too had seen the Pole transformed into a pillow effigy when my mother cast her spell. Does this fact mean that I still have good in me? I hope not!

I have managed to put off skinning the Pole for the time being whilst I consider my options. I have fobbed my mother off by saying that because I am so evil, I wish to savour the Pole's terror for as long as possible before skinning him and she seems satisfied with this for the moment.

I do hope I am still evil otherwise I won't enjoy skinning the Polish man at all.

Dr Anthony Gland Pays a Visit

Hello halfwits!! On Wednesday evening I received a visit from an overwrought Dr Anthony Gland who was accompanied by two policemen. Before I had time to invite them in, the policemen stormed through the hall to my bedroom where the weeping Pole was bound and gagged, awaiting a skinning. As they did so, Dr Anthony Gland talked slowly and gently to me and reassured me that everything was okay now. He explained in measured tones, as though talking to a child or a simpleton, that he had read of my recent actions on my blog and was deeply concerned about my welfare and the welfare of the unnamed Pole.

"Tell him you made it up," my dead mother hissed. Evidently she communicated telepathically for Gland heard none of it.

"My dear man," I said, "Forgive me for the confusion caused, but I simply made all that business up. It is mere fiction. Dark subject matter of course, and certainly not to everyone's tastes, but fictional nonetheless. You did not seriously believe that I had abducted a Pole and meant to skin him? Why, it's palpably absurd!"

At this point, the policemen reappeared and urged Gland to accompany them to the room where the bruised and bloody Pole lay quivering on the floor. Well, I was certain then that the game was up and my indiscretion would be uncovered - there was no denying I had a bound Pole in my room. I followed them and was alarmed to see that in place of the weeping Pole, there was a collection of pillows tightly restrained by a length of stout rope.

"I have bewitched them Horton," my mother whispered, "They believe that the man is a mere pillow effigy crudely decked out to look like a Pole. Go with it Horton and all will be well."

"Is this the Polish man you wrote about on your weblog Horton?" asked Gland, indicating the pillows.

"Of course!" I said, "You see? The whole thing was a mere fabrication! This collection of pillows is no more a Pole than you are a jar of tartare sauce. Now that this is settled, would you care for some Um Bongo?"

The policemen, peeved at having their time wasted, gave the house a cursory once over then left. Gland spent some time talking quietly to me about any worries I might have and any strange ideas I might be having. He told me to phone him if ever I felt angry or glum, to which I agreed.

As soon as he left, the sound of weeping could once again be heard. Checking my bedroom, the pillow effigy had returned to its true state as a trussed up Pole. He knew he had been naughty, that Pole, and sensed that his punishment would be swift and sharp.

The Pole in his form as a pillow effigy

Further Wickedness

The itinerant Pole eventually regained consciousness. Currently he is tied up in the living room. It was I who trussed him up in such a way, because it seems that I am irredeemably evil. How he weeps! If I wasn't evil, I would certainly be wracked with guilt and fear over my inhuman actions to this Pole, but I am evil and hence feel no such guilt or fear.

I have not yet done anything to physically harm him (apart from the initial bludgeoning), though my dead mother berates me constantly and urges me to do so. She calls for the Pole to be skinned. She is fixated upon this point and will not accept anything less. How the man weeps! It is difficult to concentrate with such a din.

In an attempt to placate my dead mother, I made some effort to torture the Pole by making a hot cocoa for him but I wilfully omitted the sugar so that he visibly winced at the bitterness of that drink. My dead mother was unimpressed by my barbarity and continued demanding that I skin the Pole at once.

How he weeps! Because I am evil, I suppose I must ultimately skin the man, yet something stays my hand. It cannot be guilt or pity because I am terribly evil and unaffected by such whimsies. I must take a while to strengthen my courage and remind myself that I am a being of pure evil.

Must go now - Dragons' Den is on.

An evil act is committed

Today I received a visit from an itinerant Pole. He was shabbily attired and asked in broken English whether he could sell me one of his drawings for £8.00. Doing so, he intimated, would allow him to support his family as well as leaving me with a drawing I could display in my home. I had no need of a picture of a daffodil, so prepared to send the cove on his merry way.

At once, my dead mother's voice could be heard urging me to accost the Pole. I gathered that the Pole was oblivious to these cries, for he did not react in any way to my dead mother's shrieking.

"This is your chance Horton," she said. "Capture this man and do evil unto him. You must hone your skills. Do it. Do it now!"

Because I am now evil, I invited him into the house. Swiftly, I struck him a heavy blow on the back of the head with the blunt end of an umbrella stand. He remains unconscious on the floor of my hall as I type this.

Dear readers, although I am terribly evil and revel in treachery and violence, I must admit to being shaken by my actions and confess that I rather hope my evilness wears off before tomorrow when my dead mother, whose maniacal laughter still echoes through my Dundee home, will surely force me to do awful things.

Some Drawbacks to Evilness

My dead mother has continued to persuade me to increase my efforts to be evil. Apparently the evil acts I have thus far committed are simply insufficient. Readers, to be candid for a moment, I feel I must admit that, evil though I am, and pleasurable though evil is, I am growing somewhat weary of the evil way of life. It is not without its drawbacks.

Today, for example, I sat down with a mug of miso soup and an egg mayonnaise sandwich (two of the most evil foodstuffs I could think of) and prepared to watch Diagnosis Murder with Dick Van Dyke. No sooner had I switched the television on than my dead mother screeched at me to switch it off. She explained that, because I was now evil I could only watch a pirated copy of the programme. If an opportunity to harm someone exists, regardless of how minimal that harm may be, the evil man must seize that chance. Thus I had to scroll through fan webpages on the internet to identify what episode I should be watching.

Satisfied that I had found the correct episode (Season 2, Episode 2: 'A Very Fatal Funeral'), I was then obliged to download it illegally on YouTube, though someone, in an ignorant effort to be helpful, had broken up that episode into several smaller parts but had named each file inconsistently. It took many hours to piece together the episode and the final result was unsatisfying. Tiny picture, tinny sound, and Dr. Sloan's moustache was far too pixelly to be appreciated as Van Dyke intended.

I found myself wishing, just then, that I could turn off my evilness for just the shortest amount of time, so that I could enjoy the legal showing of Diagnosis Murder on BBC 1. That feeling was fleeting however! I am properly evil again. I hate you all, you halfwits!

Wickedness and Stan Brakhage

Hello halfwits!! In this blog entry, I'm not going to use any paragraph breaks and I'm going to write in a small font and use multiple different colours. In case you have forgotten, I am now evil so I am allowed to do this kind of thing. I derive an almost indecent amount of glee at the thought of you halfwits screwing your eyes up in a foolhardy effort to read this entry - because I am evil, I disrespect you so much that I want it to be an unholy chore for you to plough through this blog. You might be beginning to hate me now...GOOD!!! I am evil and thrive on hatred. My dead mother, in the form of the little scottie dog from Monopoly, keeps urging me to be more evil. She says my previous efforts have fallen short of the level of evilness she had hoped for when first she tempted me to eat the crystals of evil. To this end, I paid a trip to Dundee's Art House cinema this afternoon and sat through a Stan Brakhage festival (that man is also evil and does not wish to bring his audience any pleasure). Throughout the various screenings, I ate noisily from a large bag of TORTILLA CHIPS! CruNcHy! lol. The three other people in the audience were thoroughly irked. You might note that I just used the acronym 'lol'. This also derives from my newfound evil nature. I just love to think of my readers being momentarily annoyed because of me. L8R halfwits!!

I Explore my Evil Nature

Greetings halfwits!! I have continued my life of evilness with a great deal of pleasure. Yesterday I put potato peelings and banana skins into my general waste wheelie bin and failed to put them into my organic waste wheelie bin. Dundee City Council will no doubt be furious when they learn of this, because it is as though I am completely belittling their efforts to encourage us to be more environmentally friendly. Because I am so dreadfully evil, this thought amuses me greatly. My laugh, which has heretofore been a modest 'ha ha ha' has now aquired the prefix 'bw-' and the suffix '-aaaaaaah!!" in deference to my new evil status. Hence, when now I chuckle, my laugh is as follows: 'Bwah ha ha haaaaaaah!!'.

The day before yesterday, I stole a copy of Sliding Doors from HMV. That is correct - I did not give the cashier the £2.99 cost of the DVD - I simply took it for my own without any money changing hands, so evil am I. The film stars Gwyneth Paltrow as a women with two different hairstyles, and the man from Four Weddings and a Funeral as an ingratiating Scot. There's also something about alternative universes but not done very well because there are no evil twins involved.

The day before the day before yesterday I snuck into the Wellgate library and folded over the page corners of selected books by Kathy Reichs. Untraceable to me of course, but it gives me a certain amount of malevolent glee to think of various future readers being irked by the folded pages. Bwah ha ha haaaaaaaaaah!!

Today I saw a child dressed as Peter Pan collecting money for Comic Relief. I gave her nothing save a sneer of contempt. The look of disappointment on her crestfallen face warmed my black heart for the rest of the day. I do so love being evil. You halfwits!

Evil!!!

Readers, I am evil. Doubtless you will scarcely recognise my new mode of narration because I am now so unconscionably iniquitous, but I care not!! You will observe that I made use of two exclamation marks at the end of the last sentence. This is not in keeping with accepted rules of punctuation, but I am free of such tyranny now that I am evil. My dead mother was dead right - I have greatly enjoyed my albeit brief daliance with the world of wickedness - all my doubts and fears about embracing evilness now seem immature and misguided - I revel in my sins, and derive inestimable pleasure from committing atrocities, and not just atrocities of punctuation!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ;-)

You will see that I made use of multiple exclamation marks and a 'smilie' at the end of the previous sentence. Had I not informed you that I was evil, most of you would have guessed by now - no person possessing any degree of morality would deliberately choose to so offend their readers by utilizing such tortuous effects. My decent into the maelstrom of evilness is so assured that I can even leave glaring spelling errors uncorrected in my writing, as in this sentence!! I care nothing for my readers' enjoyment, so evil am I. Horton Carew? You must now call me Hellrton Scare-ew, because I am so evil. And bow when you do so.

You will see that I am late in updating this blog (it cannot escape your notice that I now use the unpleasant-sounding word 'blog' to refer to my electronic diary - this is because I am evil and no longer wish to protect my readers from the vagaries of irritating modern-day nonce words). The erratic approach to the updating of blogs shows severe disrespect for one's readers. Thus, because I am evil, I will continue to annoy you by not updating regularly.

From now on, I will refer to my readers as 'halfwits' because I am evil. Any photos I choose to post will be offensive in nature and will cause you distress. But who cares?!! Not me, I'm evil!! You halfwits.