What’s to blame? Pre-millennial tension… the moronic slime who live across the street from me… maybe the Coen brothers…? (Heh, at least they can be sued).

See, a couple of months ago I’m at home, relaxing from my labours enjoying a TV screening of “Fargo”. It’s getting near the end: the leg is just being rammed into the wood-chipper. I’m wondering if I’m tired enough to sleep, yet. Not that there’ll be much chance of that, I realise. Some idiot in the street outside is sounding a car horn repeatedly. Now they’re shouting… revving an engine, too. Fuckers. My wife is sleeping. She worked the last two nights.

A wood-chipper starts up somewhere deep inside my head. I step outside and lurk in the shadows of my house. The twenty year-old who rents the house opposite is drunk and encouraging his friend to rush his car at my own parked vehicle, braking and halting the width of a ciggie-paper from the bumper.

The wood-chipper whines louder in my head. I make myself visible, hoping to discourage this irritating behaviour before police and insurance companies become tediously involved. Red rag to a bull. Drunk moron hurls abuse and offers a trial of strength. I tell myself I’m too old for that sort of shit and fade back into the shadows.

But the wood-chipper is chewing the shinbone, now. The pink mist is spraying. I count to ten. Slime is staggering towards his door. But he doesn’t make it. He stops by my car and kicks it. He’s got this stupid, slack sneer melting from his face.

No he hasn’t. It’s a look of terror staring up at me from the ground, hands waving protectively in front of it as moron, unbalanced by the flying kick I now recall I just rushed him with and planted on his ass, sprawls at my feet in the shadow of the hefty piece of logwood I appear to be brandishing over him, like a London cop at an anti-Chinese demo. And fuck! Is that savage, wordless snarling coming from me?

Now I’m scared. I don’t do this kind of shit. I don’t stove in peoples’ heads with clubs… especially not outside my own house, with witnesses. Fuck, I’ve only ever had about three fights in my life before, and two of those were before I was fifteen. What’s happening here?

The worst of it is that the old cliché “Don’t pull a gun if you ain’t gonna use it…” is running through my head. If this fucker jumps up, I’m going have to bash him. Best if I don’t hit him on the head, though. Maybe the collar-bone.

But the wood-chipper whine is fading. My rational mind is taking over. I recover the power of speech and, with vicious sibilance, whisper my disgusting threats of over-the-top retribution which I promise will be instantly forthcoming in the future if… etc., etc..

I’m not proud of those threats, but they seem to do the trick, eliciting a slurred apology which allows me to lower my weapon and withdraw, lumbering back to my own territory again. I look back from my threshold to see that moron has summoned a little defiance and seems to be attempting to urinate on me from a range of 35 feet while summoning the assistance of his compadres by means of a cell-phone.

This feat of co-ordination is doomed to failure, and the fucker just hoses himself sodden, of course. By the time I get back out of the house with the camcorder though, his tanks are dry. Shame.

I brood about my loss of control… the ability of the primitive to rear up through the thin ice of civilisation at any time… sitting up for hours imagining scenarios that might have been. Across the street, moron rampages through his house, smashing furniture and beating the walls for twenty-minutes, and then subsides into unconsciousness.

Now when he sees me he circles like a sly dog, shouting “Fucking psychopath!” from beyond club-range… but only when emboldened through supping the Devil’s Piss. I just go about my business, wondering if he’s right.

As punishment for my lapse, I endure six weeks in Hell Eternal, turning my comic book tale of everyday English neo-Nazi kids on a sex, guns ‘n’ suicide spree in Arizona into a screenplay. These sick fucks are fascinating, but ugly to live with and write about. Makes you feel weird and creepy when you go home and play with your grandson.

As punishment for trying to make money from such misery as Hell Eternal, my new computer with a screen as big as Texas – another extravagant attempt to cure chronic eye and back strain – self-destructs its hard-drive and about a million unanswered e-mails. (So if you wrote I didn’t reply, I apologise. Please feel free to try again.)

Fuck the 20th Century. I can’t wait for it to be over.

But before it is; it’s time to write another Great Satan episode. Well another episode of the Work Formerly Known As The Great Satan. Don’t ask. It’s too depressing. Suffice it to say that I’ll have thought of a new title for the series before it sees publication “sometime next year”. Whatever it ends up being called, I can’t deny I’m enjoying working on it. Art – by ‘new’ Croatian artist, Goran Suduka – for the first episode came in last week and I’m really pleased with the way it looks.

So, in order to end on an optimistic note, I think I’ll shut up for now.

From now on, this column will appear on a weekly basis without fail, or… or I’m a goddamn liar.