I am wearing dirty overalls and a shirt I tore off a cadaver in the street. I have no shoes, not by anyone. My tie is by Circus Freaks of Prague and Co. My jockey shorts are three sizes too big with moth-holes. The one lens in my spectacles is shattered and the frame constantly slips from my nose. I consider myself to be the most urbane person in all of Armenia.

I did not watch Oprah on television today. Television has been nationalised. In protest, I mailed a civil servant to Chechna (third class). I wanted to stick a rat up his butt, but the fucking peasants have eaten them all. I wanted to use power tools, but I don't have any. Besides, there's no electricity. And the nuclear power station has leaked again. We'll be picking feathers out of our fish rations all month.

I take a Xanax and feel slightly better. I pass another sanitary agent on the street. His hair is more unkempt than mine. I rubbed my hair with sand this morning just to get that dirty street bum look. I feel jealous and wonder if Olga will let me fuck her without jumping up and down afterwards and douching with Coke. Besides, she needs a shave. Her knuckles are a disgrace.

I rented Andre Tarkovsky's Nostalgia three weeks ago, but I haven't taken it back yet. I began masturbating when the poet carried the candle across the screen. The fishmonger I strangled with a piece of army surplus shoelace is starting to smell. It'll cover the stench of rat droppings. At least the roaches are eating him and not me for the moment.

As usual, there's a long waiting list at Chez Piotr because of the wheat famine. But I know the maitre d'. I slip him a one dollar bill I found on the black market. I order lobster Thermidore with a bernaise sauce (really rat). Radmilla Plashenkov and Mariana Natayevska are at the bar, dressed in sackcloth and ashes (probably stolen from some trendy landfill). They are both obesely overweight, the dense undergrowth of black hair visible under their arms. I find myself strangely attracted. I would love to fuck Mariana in the mouth. They are both sipping brackish water from tin mugs. I feel suddenly unsure of my face... my hair must look almost neat. I run from the restaurant before my meal arrives, elbowing my way through the throng of starving peasants on the sidewalk.

Mariana sends a message in a cleft stick to me some time later. I mace the messenger, then club him on the back of the head with a piece of broken furniture. He's dazed, not quite unconscious, so I hold his head in the toilet bowl until I realise that they've turned off the water again. Distracted, I smash his face repeatedly into the bathroom wall until I can't tell where his eyes end and his nose begins. He looks a little like Leonid Breshnev now.

I put the new Armenian Funk Band's bootleg cassette into my scratchy, tinny radio/cassette player and sink into a restless sleep.

The Armenian Funk Band first came to prominence in 1987 with their intertwining of traditional Armenian folk music and hardcore American hip-pop. "Ooh Baby Let's Do It All Night (If The Bloody Russians Don't Invade Poland)" was their first major Continental hit, selling almost four copies in France, Belgium and Luxembourg combined. Momentum was maintained with the release of "Oh Fuck There Goes My Hair (Song To Chernobyl)" which climed steadily to number fifty-six on the Armenian People's Weekly chart. After the death of lead singer Mikhail Trofimov in the late eighties, the band entered an experimental and less accessible period in their existence. "Indulgence Song" was the only track to make an impact on jaded fans, but gained the Funk Band a huge following amongst peasant farmers who often slaughtered cattle in times of drought to its slow, sensual rhythms. The latest album sees a return to more pop-oriented formula with cuts like "Are We Fucking Independent Or What?" and "Mortar Shell In My Chimney" gaining almost cult status with the military and reactionaries alike.