601: GO!

It's like I'm new to blogging, like I've never done it before, tentatively taking my first steps into a world of writing about whatever in the vain hope that someone reads it, while simultaneously hoping no one does. Wanting to write something, and being so self absorbed as to write almost entirely about oneself, but so unconvinced of ones own worth that can't think of anything more tedious than ones own thoughts and activities. God, blogging is boring. I'm unofficially considering myself on a wee bit of a hiatus.

It's times like this when I really ought to be working hard to find my own unique take on the Queen's diamond jubilee or the relay of the Olympic torch, but I honestly couldn't give two flying gibbering jabbering moulting leaping squawking squatting wanking fucks about either of the tedious fucking things. I'm hostile to them both. But neither particularly knowledgeable nor hostile enough to be able to string together coherent rants or arguments. So the easier option is just to act like neither of them are happening. Which is lucky, cos neither of them are happening. They are just a collective delusion, the madness of crowds, the flag-waving of the rank and file, the sycophancy of the enslaved.

Other subjects or recent personal experience any writer worth his salt would be using and abusing for source of copy are the awesome ring I now must wear as a 'keep off' sign to all the billions of the world's women who happen not to be my wife; the experience of delivering a speech and the surprising relaxed ease in which it was done; the weird, fucking weird, experience of being a customer in an Apple store (which could not be more weird, fucking weird, if it were staffed by the suicides manning the desks in Beetlejuice's afterlife bureaucracy); having a massage for the first, and so far only, time. And all the others. Breathing in and out and catching a bus. Oh, and I saw my first Orange marches in Belfast, immediately followed by (in a different part of the city centre, not as part of the same cultural event) capoeiristas, drummers and berimbau players presenting a display of Brazilian music and martial arts.

Stuff to write about, I'm just well wound down and finding it difficult to return to the same level of urgency. …..GO! ….....GO! I'm trying to get myself going, and this fairly pointless post about nothing is my way of encouraging myself.

564: Huh? The who what now?

The internet makes no sense whatsoever. Somehow the top site referring to this blog today, behind Googles dot-com and dot-co-dot-uk, is one pointless little hate-spout called Americans Who Hate Obama dot-com. Presumably these are the sort of deluded self-hating confused bigots who would have been forming Christians Who Hate Christ sects in Judea circa 25AD. I have no evidence for that, but whatever. It's the sort of website that contains such self-defeating gems of babble as:

We urge you to make your voice heard now, so that generations from today will not look back and say, like they now say for Hitler's regime;- Where was all the good Germans? Where are all the Good Americans?

Er, yeah? I just can't help looking at Obama and being reminded of Hitler. It's like whenever I see Postman Pat I'm reminded of Genghis Kahn. Whenever I see Dr Sam Beckett I'm reminded of Dame Edna Everage. Whenever I see Chandler Bing I'm reminded of Harold Shipman. Humphrey Bogart reminds me of a mutant turtle called Donatello, teen-aged and skilled in the art of ninjitsu. Richard Feynmann reminds me of General Zod and, conversely, King Zog reminds me of Nina Ricci.

This is because I have a chemical imbalance in my brain stemming from a severe head injury in a previous life. The shockwaves of the incident reverberate through time and I am still bobbing on the eddies generated in past aeons. That bloomin' Hitler, eh. What a twat he was. Such a bastard. Always trying to provide better access to affordable health care, wasn't he. We never did see Hitler's birth certificate did we. We did? Pah, obvious fakery.

I'm babbling badly-written nonsense obviously. But no more so than the extreme Americans who seem stubbornly ignorant to the complete differences between Socialism and National Socialism. The thought path seems to be: Obama wants to help the weakest in society and prevent the strong from unfairly exploiting the weak & society equals Socialism & Socialism equals Fascism. As if all of a sudden the strong need protecting from the weak. We demand our freedom to oppress. Blah blah blah.

This post was going to be about how boring, middle of the road, emotionally flat, and samey all those dreary songs by Adele are. It still is about that, but it's also about a pile of other crap too. Or something, or nothing. I think I might have drifted off halfway through. Bedtime, fo' real. Stop writing and go to sleep.

509: Pour myself a cup of ambition

A snapshot into my life in especially excruciating detail; I hope you enjoy. I compile a list of products; a particular type of stock which one might browse and purchase when out and about in the high street. These products have, to me, no names, merely numbers for example 72153. Being au fait with the workings of these product codes I am able to disregard the initial seven, knowing like I do that it merely represents my department. The following 21 is the sub-department, and the 53 indicates the style. Therefore I am able to communicate basic ideas about stock using mostly numbers. Working from a list of paper, which looks like 73423, 73283, 73342, 77923, 79893, 79223, 73123, 71293, 74291, 71912, 73989, 79128, 78992, 72912, 79932, 77272, 74322, 71232, 74321, 74121, 73122, 78829, 71923, 73192, 73192 x2, 71922, 71291, 79322, 71492, 71923, I am able to pull from the dusty stock room a large towering pile of boxes. Each box contains between nine and 40 of a product, usually individually wrapped with plastic and paper.

Standing beside the piles of boxes, I create a smaller pile three or four boxes high so that the top-most is at a comfortable working height, requiring me to neither bend nor reach beyond a limit unacceptable to me. Using a safety box opener/knife which I usually keep in my right trouser pocket I slit open the lid. Sometimes I find the safety knife has made its way into my left pocket, and there is usually a moment when I think just a minute, where has that silly little knife gone and put itself? Once the box is open, and the four leaves/tabs are folded back out of the way I proceed to unpack the stock. One at a time I lift each item from the box, remove it from its plastic bag, pull out any cardboard or paper, or any further plastic, and deposit the packaging into an orange bin bag. The bin bag is often tied to the side of a trolley (more about the trolley soon; much more), or sometimes just hung off the side of the box. Sometimes I even put the bag inside the box. More and more recently this has become my preference, as it results in the minimum need for unnecessary twisting and turning.

As each item of stock is removed from its packaging (a process we refer to as prepping; a whimsical shortening of the word preparing) it is placed in a large trolley. When the trolley is full it can then be wheeled onto the shop floor where the stock can be deposited onto the shelves in the appropriate locations. The convenience of the trolley as a medium for transporting stock lies within its possession of four small wheels (almost verging into the realm of castors), one located in each corner of the trolley's base, coming into contact with the floor, and enabling a significant increase in manoeuvrability than one would expect from a similar object lacking wheels. Once the contents of the trolley has been evacuated it can, and should, be wheeled back into the stock room and the process repeated. This is done until its time to go and have a cup of coffee.

453: something something i forget...

Manchester Syline by Glenn Clarke

Reach to the heavens and cry out good morning sky! I would do were it not for the ceiling and the cloud cover; that was the gist of the sentence that popped into my head this morning as I walked to the bus stop. It's not the exact wording, which is now lost to time. However, the way I composed it originally was better; sparser, more bathetic, poetic, beauteous, better. It may have been all those things, but time cannot tell – time hides it from me. I didn't note it down, having forgotten my notebook, and now it is gone. I can only fool myself unintentionally into believing I had composed something wonderful, and then perhaps I could shut up about it.

I had an idea, but I forgot it, oooh, what was it, what was it... is a fairly tedious way to conduct a conversation. It's almost up there with the twin giants of tedious conversation: I had this really weird dream last night... and Someone I know (or someone who I know, knows someone who knows someone...) saw a ghost, went to a psychic, did a Ouija board, felt something I can't explain; how do you explain that?... Snore. Not interested. There are real more interesting things out there, and I shouldn't have to listen to the tedious fantastical, nonsensical meanderings of your dreams or ghost stories. Of course I'm too polite to say so in so many words... Oh wait, no I'm not.

Here is the occasionally wonderful Tim Minchin to express similar sentiments to those touched upon in the previous paragraph, and to do so in a way clearer and funnier than I could do if I was a million monkeys with a million iPads:

I think I will never tire of that. I am already tired of his lesser stuff, that fucking dreadful song about dancing bears, for example.

I now keep a notebook with me at all times, unless I forget it obviously. I had a hardback A5 one which I could just about squeeze into the pocket of my work trousers causing and uncomfortable and inconvenient rectangular bulge. I now have a small pile of incredibly flimsy but much more useful 15p-each-from-Wilkinson beauties. I can whip them out and jot a thought or sentence at will. It's tools and tricks like that that will play a deciding in role in the ongoing battle between me not being a writer, and me being a writer. One day victory will be triple underlined in the signed edition of my novel.

Good afternoon world!

129: corrugated fibreboard and Kraftwerk

At work yesterday whilst hoovering some tedious rock song came on the sound system; not something I would usually even notice, but this pricked up my ears.  What is it, I thought; sounds familiar.  I have no idea who it was and stupidly didn’t think to ask anyone.  It was one of those terrifically tedious Coldplay-types I think.  The reason it sounded familiar was I instantly recognised it as a Kraftwerk rip off.  It took a few moments to place the song but I think it was Neon Lights off The Man Machine album.  The main synth melody from Neon Lights was repeated almost exactly the same over and over again in this mystery song.  But what was it?  Please help!  I just skim listened to Viva La Vida by Coldplay.  Not as entirely unpleasant as I expected; in fact I would go as far to say that it might be quite good if it didn’t have that fucking horrible singing on it.

After a bit of googling ‘Kraftwerk plagiarised’ I’ve discovered Coldplay did have trouble with another crappy song called Talk.  This is clearly ripped off Computer Love from Computer World.  I think this may be old news, and my inability to distinguish to completely different songs by one of my all time favourite bands says so much about my musical ear.  I need to get out more if this is the most interesting thing I can think to write about.  I should be living hand to mouth and tooth and claw, not home to bed and tea and slippers; wrenching every last drip of passion and gore from every fleeting moment of existence, tearing it (and other unspecified entities) up.  Instead I plod along ineffectually drifting, so much anger aimed in no particular direction, just floating without even the poetic allusions of clouds and dreams.  Just a solid but small lump of drudge.  If my life were to become visual form it may resemble a handful of matter scraped from the bottom of the canal; or it may resemble a medium sized 0.010 inch thick corrugated fibreboard box; or it may resemble a blank stare.

But I still can’t shake the feeling that it might not be that particular Coldplay song and that particular Kraftwerk song.  And also fuck you spellchecker for telling me Kraftwerk is not a word but Coldplay is; get your priorities right; ‘craftwork’ indeed!  Just wasted an hour reading about Stockhausen and Elektronishe Musik and a bunch of other related stuff on Wikipedia, whilst listening to similar sounds on spotify.  All I’ve achieved is a moment of elation upon realising that Pretty Hate Machine by Nine Inch Nails is finally on spotify.  Plus I’ve read a bit about Philip K Dick and his mentally ill writer stereotypings.  Then my girlfriend clearly said the word ‘substance’ in her sleep.  And I’m one stage from picking up the nearest object with writing on it and just copying verbatim.  Other ingredients: The cream also contains glycerol, glycerol monostearate, cetostearyl alcohol, beeswax substitute 6621, Arlacel 165, dimeticone 20, chlorocresol, sodium citrate, citric acid and purified water.  Directions: Apply to the skin as directed by your doctor.  Read the leaflet before use.  For external use only.