A drug-fuelled weekend of debauchery leaves our pukey protagonist with an expense account swollen to the size of the Bolivian gross national product, and Spider is forced to work off the debt as a features writer for his publishing house's leading women's lifestyle magazine.

Yes. It's...

The fashion business. How to make (Joe)anna public look ridiculous and pay you for the privilege. And before you start, I've seen you out there in your 'Sweatshops of Old Kentucky' T-shirts. You do realise that's not a joke, don't you?

My own thoughts on the matter. Good guys wear black. Bad women wear red. Let this be your guiding principle and the world will seem infinitely less complex.

If God has Sundays the Devil takes Monday mornings and uses them to lubricate his infernal passage. The mother of all hangovers is dropping her offspring into my brainpan in time to a speed metal version of Beethoven's 5^th.

On the kazoo.

I am tired and I am tender. Whoever would have thought the Whores for Courses Education Fundraiser could take so much out of a guy? And I'm paying for it. The next time I see Mitchell Royce I will smile sweetly, sink my teeth into his scrotal sack and evacuate vital organs using his dick as a straw. In some dark and disused catacomb of his mind there twitters the pitiful atrophied fragment of a once personality. A sense of humour. Oh yes. Royce thinks this is incredibly funny.

So here I am, with a stack of back issues that reaches the ceiling, attempting to familiarise myself with 'tone' of the medium. From politics to nail polish. From general elections to failed erections. 1000 ways to turn your lover off so that you can roll over and get some godamn sleep.

I hate this magazine. The last time I filled out one of those sex styles multiple choice questionnaires my score translated into -

And I cheated. Is the entrance exam getting harder anyone?

I'm immersed in a dense layer of indecipherable trade jargon, buzz words and hot/not references.

'Our sizzling tip this week is the new micromesh crack enhancer from the Free Radical collection, in this seasons must have vermilion palette.'

'Pure Poison –

Re-live the worst night of his life. Become the worst night of his life.'

Clever scent eh? Which, as everyone knows, cooks up to become a street drug known as Venom. A truth serum derivative. The substance on which to dump your partner. It allows you to lose it without, you know, losing it. In tones of ever escalating reasonableness a user can go on to describe all the corrosive insights they've filed to the back of their mind in the name of regular sex and personal development. It also turns your spit black, cleaves your tongue and leaves you with the impression your ears have been syringed with ant powder. Suprisingly popular amongst schoolteachers.

'Star mangled banner is our nouveau retrograde style. America's past takes it's future from behind.'

Give me a yell when your shit filter begins to clog. These people think an oxymoron is an O2 addict with a low birth weight.

I have been given the responsibility of overseeing the April photo spread. They run like clockwork. The thinking, I believe, is that even I cannot fuck with a fashion shoot. I will be there in a supervisory capacity only. Needless to say this suits me fine. We are waiting for the models to arrive and the assembled crew are taking orders from the atmospherics consultant. He runs the ambient light levels from sub Saharan sunstroke to Paris by gaslight and complains that I am blocking the flow of positive energy around the centrepiece. Whilst I wouldn't normally take orders from a man named Frute Joose, and consider telling him to solder his genitalia to one of the aural sculptures, I give a shit even less.

The door opens for a crocodile of seven diminutive flame-haired beauties. It brings a whole new meaning to the term fashion clone. These, I am told, are Shard-Anne. Apparently that's the agency trend. It saves on time and administration costs.

'Hey! Screw the silks and satins. Lets film a lesbian replicant orgy. I have some contacts on the distribution side.

If you need me to hold anything..?'

My one creative contribution is dismissed out of hand. I retire to the corner of the room to play the Kramer versus Kramer portion of Marital Kombat 4.

'This time, it's for the kids'

She's Dopey, Dopey, Dopey, Dopey, Dopey, Dopey and, wait for it, Dopey. Which reminds me that the only drugs within a 15 minute radius are thrice laced with laxatives. Helps explain why we can't get through more than a couple of shots without somebody needing to go powder their parts.

I am distracted from my custody battle by the overwhelming smell of hairspray and shit. One part fascinated to three parts disgusted as I watch as a twelve year old cosmetics co-ordinator preening plumage. He meticulously lifts and separates every eyelash, seemly unaware the model is sitting, sans consciousness, in a greyish pool of fresh diarrhoea. It's a head shot. Who cares? Filth, artifice and radiance. Out of nowhere I have a thought. I manage to keep the grin off my face and sidle towards the exit. I am not missed.

This will be the theme, as I go onto the street in search of 'talent'. The sick. The aged. The unlovable. People you wouldn't touch even if they were wearing a portable biohazard environment. The transhumans. The whores. The junkies. The single mothers. We are lesion. A photo essay on a fractured aesthetic.

I make a beeline for the nearest GU clinic.

"Hey aren't you..?"

My first candidate is all stumpy 'weiler ass and permanent salivation problem. Eager to please.

"It's that reporter guy! You know. You know.

I Hate it Here!"

"Down girl"

I hand out calling cards as I go.

And on the back,

It's a simple tune to pipe. Three chord changes.

"Do you want to be famous?"

These are the people you trip over in the street. Because you don't see them. Because you don't want to. Somewhere along your trajectory you bypass the bag lady to get to the bagel lady to get to your mistress who is waiting in the car. It's awkward and inconvenient to consider that they might have feelings. Being ill-favoured is not a crime. I lie. It's a social crime. Come the revolution the ugly will be first against the wall.

Understand me. I, personally, wouldn't fuck anything that has a beak, but even Cephalopoids deserve representation.

It takes me the rest of the day to track down and capture suitable subjects, and the night to port and sort the images.

What have we got?

A SWAT team of top stylists attempting to give 190 pounds of camera shy werewolf blonde highlights for something called a 'blunt cut stepped bob', several layers of Easi-tear TM fahionwear flapping around her haunches.

Nice close up of her shave though. Lon Chaney Jnr in profile across the lower back. Who says doggies have no sense of humour?

I have the pleasure of reporting she then went on to do something utterly unspeakable to Monsieur Joose's open toed platforms.

A sequence with Brad Langoustine, lead vocalist (Geek Chorus) out on a promotional tour, flashing his ample cleavage in my face and agitating for a name check.

Corporate tittyfuck. This is what happens when you have too much money and too little imagination. Talent, of course, is a moot point.

Madonna and...er...squid? Rolling footage as she picks up the child, singing a strange clickchirrup lullaby. A red rash of sucker marks across her neck, like a mosaic of tiny love bites. It suckles on a stream of milk the colour of waterlogged peat. Rose, sepia, violet, electric blue fluttering beneath a translucent ocean. It's bulbous head is a constantly shifting sunrise, pulsing with the signals of simple satisfaction. Hypnotic. Beautiful. You can almost see it's brain working.

We get gynaecological with a girl named Spunkplug, who offered to do me for a written endorsement of her 'product'. What a fucking awful mess. I swear I heard something tear. There were scorch marks along her inner thighs.

This isn't pussy. It's the roadkill remains of a street fighting alley cat

You can re-create this look at home by injecting local anaesthetic and charging 8 bucks an hour to be porked by some overcompensating teenager wearing the latest in penile expansion kits. Hey boys! Why do you think it's called the RamRaider ?

A deadhead, deadbeat pioneer. Flesh peppered with an acne of chrome-lipped jack sockets. Tech infested with innovations decades past their use by date.

Headphones connected to the hipbone.

I left him propping up the chic end of a Latino/Pollack cigar bar in $120,000 worth of designer accessories. Sleeping blissfully inside the looped liquid soundtrack of his own body dying.

The model is just a clothes horse, right?

The 'your Momma's so fat' woman half way through a packet of Oak-smoked folk singer crisps (one of last years zeit-cuisines. That little holo of Joni Mitchell roasting slowly on a spit warms the depths of my cold cold heart). I select the frame where she's chomping on a part of Bob Dylan's anatomy I'd rather not contemplate.

Two of the auburn-headed splinter group hacking at each other with a pair of pinking shears. Here's the weird thing. In all that time not one of them made eye contact with their facsimiles. I kept snapping away until it occurred to me they were actually trying to kill each other.

And finally Mrs Drexler. Marnie Drexler. Eyes shining. Fire fuelled with a crate of assorted Latvian homebrew, who played dress up for a while and then laid the clothes to one side.

"Why d'you stop?"

"I'm tired.

And I know what you're up to."

She stripped off and bared her 117 year old body, executing an awkward pirouette.

Skin the texture of used tea bags. Legs marbled with purple veins. Hands a twisted obscenity of arthritis. Everything given into gravity and gone home.

She plucked irritably at her drooping flesh.

"We're not very good with our limits are we?

But... If I can live with it, you can fucking look at it."

And then she gathered up her stuff and hobbled away.

Daybreak sees me doing a lightening rumba down to the editorial suite. I save my best fanny waggle for the sub editor.

She scans the document with a raised eyebrow and gives me a super cooled stare that reaches down my throat and grubs about in my guts looking for a handhold.

"No"

Innocently, I.

"No?"

"Obviously not. This would make John Merrick weep."

"Get with it. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. The freaks have taken over the catwalk."

"I knew something like this would happen. Mr Jerusalem, we don't want you to be here almost as much as you do.

What have you done with the outfits?"

"I gave some to my models. We used the rest to mop up after that septet of shitty-britches the agency sent."

Her eyes drift away into the middle distance.

"I've added the cost of booking a new venue, hiring a different set of girls, paying the medical bills of our creative team and re-ordering the clothing to what you already owe. To say nothing of criminal damage. Perhaps you should be thinking about suggestions for our Christmas special."

The disk comes arcing back towards me at speed.

"Do it again. With the materials we give you. Or else!"

"When your IQ hits 50, start selling.

You're threatening me? With what, exactly?.

This is penance. This is my punishment!"

"Hmmm...we could re-assign you to the agony column?"

"I think I'd like to have a word with the Editor in Chief."

Panic backlights her diamante pupil eyes.

"Marcelle is a ferociously busy woman. Perhaps a video conference would...?"

"In the flesh."

I leap up and make a half-assed attempt to dodge round her and gain entry to the back offices.

"That won't be possible I'm afraid."

'Oh, I know. Which is why your miserable norm enforcing rag is going to put these images centre stage.'

I pull out a freeze frame of Marnie. Proud face over a ruined body.

"Here's your new cover girl.

Marcelle D'arcyBrown is more interested in the molecular breakdown of the latest 'Bruised Botanicals' cosmetics range than the it's laughable seductive properties. Hems up. Hems down. No fucking hem at all. Why should she care?

Miss Teen Nepotism, who's done enough personal product endorsements to fill twelve 24hr shopping channels, is a fucking foglet! What would your advertisers make of that?'

"We'd be about as popular as a yeast infection in a bakery."

"Come here! What do you see? What do you see you kevlar-nippled mother of a whorehopper?

We gaze down upon the piss stream of district tourists being panhandled from one unofficially official site to the next.

"People."

"And what are the people doing?"

"They're shopping, you depilated troglodyte.

So?"

"Well, I tell you what I see. I see a void. I see a bunch of self-obsessed vanity cases, too myopic to focus beyond the zit on the end of their noses. I see 'If only I looked a bit more like..', 'Perhaps if I just changed my hair I'd...', 'They'd love me if...' How many units does dissatisfaction shift? How many does contentment? How many times do I have to hear

"Jesus Spider. Why don't you get your fucking teeth fixed!"

"We didn't create the market. And why don't you get your teeth straightened? In this day and age there's really no excuse."

"AAAAARGH!

I tell you what I see! I see the triumph of shame over love! Ugly has it's place fuckdamnyoutocelluitehell! They'll soft-soap, soft-focus you from cradle to crematorium!"

"We did Transchic last July anyway."

"Tokenism"

" Commercialism. And now it's passé"

I snatch back the file.

"One day this will be you.!"

Her face is calm. Accepting.

"I'll download myself before that happens."

The magazine hit the shelves yesterday. Failure to pass it off as an April fool stunt sees them scraping shares off the stockmarket floor. I'm heartened to see my co-workers slinking off (more each hour) taking their plague to another office in another street. I say heartened because there is a small but important clause in my contract stating that any obligations (real or implied) are annulled should the company I'm working for become bankrupt. And they tied everything to this magazine in an effort to stop me shirking my duties. Suckers!

As a closing note I give a big thumbs up to L'Oreo's Liquid Skin Concentrate. My delicate lily white complexion has never felt so rejuvenated, replenished, revitalised, reconditioned, redeemed and recherché. I'm getting the hang of the lingo, don't you think? A quick maker scan of the ingredients decodes the quasi-religious / pseudo-scientific labelling to reveal the major components (after water) are black bear bile, silk moth pupae and extract of chicken urine. Of course, it could just be the enhancing properties of the Pro-Ritalin A.

Oh, and by the way, until this show rolls to a close you can send your letters to 'Uncle Spider' c/o the sub-editor and I will do my best to offer you compassionate constructive solutions to whatever personal difficulties you've manufactured for yourselves this week.

Now fuck off. The dentist's here.