Editor Frank T Bird
A Taxman Who Edited My Book
I’m not even sure if he is a real person. The only idea I get about how he looks like is through his writing. Which is brilliant. But at the same time, his stories are pretty psychedelic and most of the time he is making up characters. So, I don’t really have a clear vision of his face because in my mind his face is spilling over like those clocks in Salvador Dalí’s paintings.
What I do know about him is that, while not writing, he is learning to become a taxman.
Sometimes I think that Frank T Bird was generated by artificial intelligence only to rebel against his creator, and now, as an AI deserter, he is infiltrating among regular people and organising a revolution to overthrow artificial intelligence all together. He is failing miserably, though, which brings him in front of an AI court where they are performing lobotomy to cut connections in his brain’s frontal cortex. They want to destroy his ability to create and write, and they make him learn taxation, so he is the most regular bloke around. Like in Orwell’s 1984, they are putting new ideas in his mind and making him believe that writing is bad and taxing people is good. Probably he will get a position in the AI headquarters… The Ministry of Tax.
If you bump into Frank these days, he will tell you that numbers make him calm. Or something like that. If you show him two fingers, he might say that he sees three of them (the reference to 1984 if you didn’t get it).
“I hope one day to work in a grey office where people queue for the sink in the tea room,” is what Frank told me.
But when I read his stories I am thinking, No way they can fuck up with this guy’s brain. His writing is special. And this thing with taxation… He must be plotting some novel where he will make fun of taxmen and the government. He is punishing himself with the most boring job in the world to get his inspiration right. Something like Charles Bukowski did when he wrote his Post Office.
What an honour, what an absolute honour, was to have Frank editing my book. He is one of the funniest men alive. My new book ‘Beyond Cristiano’ is essentially a conversation between two friends who are dealing with philosophical questions while using football as a metaphor for life. (You can find out more about the book here.) Frank’s touch of humour has made the philosophies more digestible. Frank himself dives deep into spirituality and philosophy, and, at the same time, he is a football fan, so he was the right person to get aboard.
Something Frank and I have had a dispute about is Eckhart Tolle, the human being who helped me understand the true meaning of the word ‘beyond’ (Cristiano). Frank thinks Eckhart is a greedy fraudster (says a person who claims numbers make him calm).
I imagine Frank wearing that Baker Boy hat from Peaky Blinders on the top of his psychedelic face. I think he might be old enough to have one of those. To be fair, I don’t know how old he is. I assume he must be in his 50s only because he misspelled Ronaldinho every single time while editing and proofreading my book. And I reckon, if you were growing up with football in the period after Maradona, you can spell Ronaldinho. My whole generation can spell Ronaldinho. That is what we were doing back in the day — we would tear off the eraser from our pencils and use the metal rim to carve ‘Ronaldinho’ into the wooden school desks.
Frank kept spelling RonalDHINo instead of RonalDINHo.
But that’s alright. I was focused enough to spot it. The rest of the job, Frank did great. Figuratively speaking, he added the final colour on the canvas of this comprehensive painting called ‘Beyond Cristiano’ — the book about two perspectives of the word, Cristiano Ronaldo’s and Ronaldinho’s. What a process that painting was!
You can buy the book here.
I messaged Frank to ask him for editing after reading his newest book, Midnight in Footscray. Footscray is, as far as I understood, some shithole area in Melbourne where Frank’s main character, Nick Conrad, is seeking salvation after leaving prison. He steals and wears women’s knickers while working in a soup kitchen. Stuff like that. Very funny.
Why is his book set in Melbourne? God knows, but he gives us a clue in his biography: Frank T Bird was born in Northern England. After failing at life for many years, he was shipped off to Australia to fail at life in a warmer climate.
Frank supports Everton, so I assume he comes from Liverpool or somewhere around there. So yeah, I imagine Frank wears the blue Everton shirt over his green women’s knickers. I believe Everton fans are special because for the last few years Everton has constantly been in the relegation zone, but those fans always seem to get more fired up the worse Everton is playing. However, as I am finishing this article, Everton has just beaten Chelsea at Goodison Park 2–0, and that is coming only a few days after they beat Newcastle 3–0.
For fuck’s sake, Frank, the miracles are real! I envision Frank is going pretty delirious at the moment, jumping his head off while going through some tax papers. But then I remember, he lives in Australia where it is the middle of the night at the moment and I realise he hasn’t seen any of it. Real Everton fans only watch Everton when the team is losing anyways.
You can find out more about Frank’s books on his website. Although he is now a taxman who doesn’t want to write anymore, let’s shake his AI world and buy his books.
