The Diaries of a Sozzled Scribbler #20

Transcribed by DMETRI KAKMI

2 November 2020

Dear sad pathetic creature who has nothing better to do than to read this column, I have good news. It has finally happened.

I have been recognised as a saint. The only questions is why it has taken so long. Given everything I haven’t done for humanity you’d think it would have happened sooner.

Following is the report in The Truth newspaper, if you don’t believe me:

In many ways, the Sozzled Scribbler was a typical member of the international jet-set. He loved spending money he didn’t have, hanging out with the rich and famous and generally being obnoxious. He favoured Japanese designer clothes, had a long-standing love affair with Tetsuo and enjoyed a drunken threesome with George and Laura Bush in the White House shrubbery.

But SS is 199 years old and still going strong with his curmudgeonly ways. What  is more, he is on the way to becoming one in a long line of unscrupulous men to be recognised as a saint by the Vatican.

SS, who is of no fixed abode, has been beatified, or declared ‘blessed’ by the Pope, after speaking out in support of disgraced Australian cardinal George Pell.

‘Georgy boy didn’t touch those boys,’ says SS. ‘And even if he did, so what? A good fingering in the sacristy doesn’t harm anyone. Look at me. I’m perfectly normal, aren’t I?, and Georgy boy had a fist up there once. We were playing glove puppets for the amusement of cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, what?’ 

The grand ceremony, in Rome, Italy, was the second-to-last step before SS can be canonised as a saint. Since his daring pronouncement SS has become known in some Catholic circles as a patron saint of assholeism and for his enthusiastic embrace of saying and doing whatever you like and getting away with it, which Catholic church says precisely reflects its holy doctrine.

When he was sixteen in 1837 SS set fire to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. The conflagration so excited him, he got an erection, stopped eating and took up smoking and drinking. He credits this radical change of diet for a long life.

‘I recommend all young people smoke, drink and hang out in parks at night,’ says SS. ‘It’s good for one’s prostitution—I mean constitution, what?’

Just before her death, SS’s mother, a Greek bear wrestler, said, ‘SS is the kolokythokeftedesin my eyes. He was an influencer— for what I don’t. Go ask his father, but he’s probably turning tricks in Omonia Square, the old whore.’ 

Mysterious sources petitioned the Vatican to make SS a saint. The diocese then dug into SS’s emails and computer search history, and found things too shocking to report. Then they waited for a miracle to happen.

One by one, people from all over the world came forward to claim that, when things were going right in their lives, SS appeared and ruined everything.

‘It’s a miracle,’ they said. ‘Things go from bad to worse when he’s around. I mean look at COVID-19, The Australian Fires, Fukushima, Amy Schumer’s face, Bill Clinton inserting a cigar in the intern’s oval orifice. The list is endless.’

This was enough for Pope Francis to declare SS a saint who makes the world a more alarming place.

‘Because SS is the saint of Arseholeism,’ Pope Francis said, ‘the Vatican is bottling his bowl movements and selling it to poor people at exorbitant prices and telling them it has healing properties.’

Now that he has been beatified, SS promises to become even more unbearable than before. He is leaving his newly acquired post as emperor of The Drunken Odyssey and going into the world to do bad.

‘John King can have his shitty job back,’ SS said in a media release. ‘I didn’t like it there anyway. Couldn’t find anyone more interesting than me to interview. Fuck the literati. They’re self-absorbed.’

There you go, mes petits escargots. It’s in The Truthso it must be true. I am holier-than-thou. You can pray to me all you like and I will ignore you.

À bientôt, mes amies.Je te maudis.

The Sozzled Scribbler was born in the shadow of the Erechtheion in Athens, Greece, to an Egyptian street walker (his father) and a Greek bear wrestler (his mother). He has lived in Istanbul, Rome, London, New Orleans and is currently stateless. He partakes of four bottles of Bombay gin and nine packets of Gauloises cigarettes a day.

Dmetri Kakmi is a writer and editor. His first book, Mother Land, was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia. His newest book is The Door and Other Uncanny Tales.