While I’m working on another book, there’s been a distinct lack of posts on the site.  You have my sincerest apologies. In an attempt to make it up to you, I’ve gotten in contact with a certain street urchin who’s posted on this site before. He agreed to “write” a guest post for you in honor of Charles Dickens’s birthday.

The only edits I’ve made have been spelling when it hasn’t taken away the charm of Tim’s distinct writing style. Clarity and cohesion be damned.

Hullo there, friends! It’s me, Tim Timiny Cheerio Idiot again and let me tell you, it has been a long while since I was last able to put me thoughts down on paper. It is like that mostly because I had a job at a steel mill! That was fun! There was all sorts of men who looked at me all weird-like and said, “Boy, yer accent is fuckin fake, don’t fuck with us.” But my accent isn’t fake because I’m from London Town and this is how we all talk at least from the time when I was born. I can’t die, you know. It’s because a Gypsy woman put a curse on me when I was ten and stole a pocket watch from her because it was shining in the light and my boss the man who takes things said, “Timothy, you go steal that watch or I’ll beat the piss outta ya” and so I did. But the Gypsy woman caughted me and said, “No,” and then put a curse on me that made me never age or die.

Anyway! I told the men in the steel mill all of that but all they said was “Fuck you, kid,” and tried to ignore me but they couldn’t because I was working there right alongside them. At least I was until the day that my hand got stuck in a machine and the machine chopped off all of my fingers. That was bad. And I couldn’t do anything with my hand because they gave me a metal hand but the fingers didn’t move because it wasn’t hooked up to my brain so all it could do was just sit there. Children in the street called me The Claw and it wasn’t funny at first, but eventually I thought it was and until the time I broke several car windows on accident and had to go into police costidity it was fun. After that, the police brought me to a hospital for the deranged who then gave me a specialer claw that lets me move the fingers so I can actually grab things and eat food. I like hamburgers even though they remind me of the eel-cat pies that used to be all the rage in the urchin homes in London but weren’t good but we ate them anyway because they were so cheap and Phillip the overseer often didn’t feed us on account of him being drunken all of the time.

Anyway! I was walking through the library today and then I saw one of the computingers that was on the Google site and the Google site had a picture of a bunch of urchins and I said to the person in the chair, “That’s me!” but it wasn’t me, because it was a picture on a computinger screen. The person in the chair puked up something green and then ran to the bathroom but I didn’t worry because the man was a vagrant and I’d seen him puke up worse things not to mention the vagrants in London when I was even younger than I Am Now often had red boiling sores on them and that was something to worry about.

One of the people who work at the library came over with a mask on her face and she cleaned up the green vomit and I asked what that picture was about because I’d seen the Google site before and it hadn’t always looked like that. The woman who looked like she was about to puke up her breakfast told me that it was for Charles’s Dickens’s birthday and I almost peed myself in enjoyment on account of I knew Charles Dickens! That’s right. Tim Timiny Cheerio Idiot hisself knew the great and Intible Boz even before there was a movie made of his books.

The writer Charles Dickens wrote a book about urchins and I think it was good even though I never read it on account of the many head injuries I have had over the span of my life make it hard to read if I spend more than five minutes staring at a page with writing on it and I know how long the books can be! Even though people told him that he would be stabbed several times if he came to our part of London Town he did so anyway just to talk to urchins and so we talked back to him and sometimes we stole from him even though he never realized it. We stopped stealing from him though because he bought us eel-cat pies sometimes and we felt bad stealing from him because that might mean that it would make it harder for him to buy us eel-cat pies.

He came to urchin town one day after the Gypsy woman had put a curse on me and after my leg had almost been torn off by a dog that belonged to Phillip but was just about the most savage creature that God ever created. And so the writer Charles Dickens saw my leg with the gaping wound and said, “By Jove, child we must get you to a hospital!” I tried to tell him not to worry it would just seal back up eventually and then Timothy Timony of the Sewer would be right as rain but he would not listen and brought me to a hospital.

So I was in the care of doctors and nurses who kept repeating “You should be dead you should be dead” and I just laughed because the Gypsy woman’s curse was helping me but at the same time it wasn’t because I was in excruciating pain and I thought that contradiction was amusing. Anyway! As I was being healed by the doctors the writer Charles Dickens talked to me and asked me about my life and all the things I have done. I told him that I stole in order so that I could eat food and that Phillip wouldn’t beat the piss outta me and the writer Charles Dickens said that it was bad and that I should tell him my story and if I did that he would pay me money to use me in a book of his.

And I thought Oh Boy this is Timothy Timiniy’s time to shine and that I would be living in a country mansion in Kent soon enough and out of London Town and so I told him everything that had happened to me straight from the time I was born underneath Blackfriar’s Bridge until the day the writer Charles Dickens brought me to the hospital because he thought my leg was going to kill me. And the writer Charles Dickens spent the whole time nodding and making notes in a book and telling me “Go on, lad” and asking “And then what happened?” I heard that he was a newspaper man and you could tell because of the questions he asked like “Why didn’t you seek help when the dog bit you?” And I laughed and said that police constablurals usually just ignored me and the writer Charles Dickens sighed and shook his head.

And so it went like that for a few weeks until all of the gang reen was out of my system and the doctors shook their heads and said, “I cannot imagine why we did not have to amputate.” And I laughed again because I was cursed, that was why. But the doctors said I was crazy and the writer Charles Dickens just said, “No, the boy is a born writer,” and I laughed because I couldn’t write.

But that didn’t stop the writer Charles Dickens because he said to me that he would send me a sum of money every month for giving him so much material that he could use in a book and so I said that I just talked but if he wanted to I could use the money. And so we parted ways and the writer Charles Dickens surely did send me money. But Phillip the overseer saw that I was getting money and took it from me every time it came in and used it to buy alcohol and continue to get drunk until the day his liver popped and he died screaming terribly and we urchins were finally free.

I went to Liverpool the next day and from there went to America where I lived in New York City’s amazing sewer system for decades but all the time I thought about the writer Charles Dickens and his odd idea to listen to me speak.

Happy birthday, sir!