391: Yesterday and Today

SO yesterday, I sounded like an old man going on about this is a disgrace, but on the other hand one finds this marvellous when I should have had better things to do. The next stage of my downfall is contacting the Points of View television programme to put this and that to rights. The first thing I would like to complain about is the incorrect use of the of the term 4d to describe cinema experiences that as well as including 3d glasses also include smells, spraying water and other silliness. As everyone knows the 4^th dimension is time; as far as I'm aware there has never been a film without this element. That's what seperates moving pictures from photographs. It's not important; I'm just saying.

monkeyshines

On Central Pier, an elderly couple sat on the decrepit wooden benches framed with rusty cast iron that form the outer boundary much of the way around. I told you we shouldn't have come to this pier, she said. It's all the same, it doesn't matter, he replied. That's you two, my sis'-in-law said to my fiancee and I. On the glass floor at the top of Blackpool Tower I found myself picturing falling and smashing, dying in an explosive puddle of gore; not afraid of heights, but an overactive imagination inducing vertigo. In the lift to the top I looked out through the windows and observed endless metres of heavily rusted iron (or steel, or whatever), almost fully eaten through at some points. The glass floor at the top is robust and powerful, but the tower itself is likely to snap in a high wind.

Today I got off the bus near work and all around me seemed to be comedy chaos; a sudden surge of unlikely unlucky mishaps. Firstly a gentleman in front of me received his Metro from the hand of a Metro-person; he was perhaps too eagre to stick his nose in the day's news, and neglected to look where he was going. He crashed knees first into an item of street furniture (some box containing telephone or electric junctions) outside Dawsons. Almost flying over the top, like a wrestler sent crashing into the steel steps with an Irish whip, he clutched his legs. I suspect the shock and embarrassment was worse than the pain, but he stumbled and limped, and thanked me for my concern in a please leave me alone to deal with this kind of way.

Upon turning the corner I saw two glaziers working on fitting a massive new window into the space left by the rioting mindless. The window was clearly an expensive custom job; incredibly thick and upward of fifteen-feet tall. They used their little gaziers vacuum-cup handles to hold the pane vertical about a foot from its destination. They shared a look of panic as they discussed the huge crack running horizontally from one side to the other about two foot from the ground: shit, what are we going to do? I don't know. This is the last thing we need... They had obeyed the first rule of being a glazier: always park the van on the same side of the road as the job, but still they had been unable to prevent comedy smashage. Poor bastards. Back to the tin bath and lehr kiln.