This has gone on too long. Various personal issues of mine, various malevolent acts by various malevolent people, have made my job as your friendly neighbourhood astrologer hard. Certain people, namely my eyetwitchhairpull of an ex-girlfriend Emma A. Rust, have been spreading vicious untruths about me. Not just to you, my favourite audience, but also to the very source of my primary power—the stars—and now to the very arbiters of the future-telling brethren the Precognition Union New Zealand.
Unfortunately, the fools at PUNZ believed EAR’s lies and have taken the deeply misguided decision to take away my membership. They tore my cards from my hands like electric frogs taser-tonguing a nice little acorn baby from betwixt its mama’s hands. Which leaves us in a little pickle. Without my PUNZ certification I cannot publicly perform divination in any form.
Never fear, I am, as I write these words beginning the lengthy arbitration-slash-reapplication process to get myself re-carded and thusly be once again able to share with you, my wee army of tomorrow-hungry readers, the future. However, this week it looks like we’ll have to try something a little different. I would simply have foregone this week’s column, but the two-headed Salient control beast Rarahundwu is braying for words with a thirst that can only be described as dementedly alarming, beating its leathery wings against the bile-stained walls of the Salient cove. So, to appease this voracious succubus of student media, I am going to use this space to address some things. I want to talk to you about the massive lies of Emma Rust. I know she’s been talking to you and I just want to set the record straight. I am going to align the crooked LP of your delusions onto a stylus of sanity.
FACT: I have never been to Mexico. This makes it impossible for me to have ever run a small bar in Mexico City which was much more of a front for white slavery and drug smuggling than it was an actual bar. It’s simply illogical! I couldn’t have run Little Diabolo’s Drinksarooni. I just couldn’t. There is no way I would have been able to deal with all the crazed regulars. Like Snowy Joe who was always trying to shiv the Dusky Maiden (a sumo wrestling transvestite). Do you really think that I, Rutherford Dean, would have the fortitude to club two Interpol agents to death with my long gel-hardened hair as they screamed and begged for mercy through ragged, broken hands, telling me of their children and how if I let them go they wouldn’t tell anyone?
FACT: I never licked poison crabs then spat their venom into the wide, vulnerable eyes of endangered owls as they heartbreakingly hooted in distress and fear.
FACT: I have never ever lied about my own personal wealth. Is it really so big of a stretch to believe that I often have so much cash secreted about my person that it becomes physically impossible for me to move under the weight of it, necessitating the purchase of two bionic legs to replace my own? Why can’t there be so many zeros in my bank balance that I had to switch to online banking simply because there aren’t enough trees in the world to produce enough paper to contain my monthly statements?
FACT: I do not need to feast on the flesh of the living to continue this harsh unforgiving half-life of an existence as I trudge this blasted earth, roaming between the hollow husks of buildings, searching for some glimmer of proof that life on this darkened orb of a hell spire has anything worth saving or remembering, as herds of ravenous jackals bite limply at my callow stringy flesh with their rubbery, toothless jaws because no calcium could ever have survived the event.
Now, let me tell you, my venerated readers, about our shared former friend, Ms Rust. She hasn’t seen The Wire. She never responds to texts. She friends people who aren’t her real friends on Bebo. She mispronounces Björk. She degrades metal. She thinks that shorts skirts empower her. Her parents bought her a pony and she was bored of it within days. She thinks that knowing things is the same as understanding things. She presses too hard with pencils. She sold weaponised plutonium to North Korea. I only broke her heart because she broke mine first.
Next week a return to future telling.