Tuesday 29 April 2008

It's one of those days.

What's the fucking point, eh?

Can someone please let me know? I must be missing something. I've been sit here all day just staring at the monitor screen in front of me. How did this happen? How did I end up sitting here; waiting.

When we're young we're taught many things but the cruelest thing we’re taught is ambition. We're told we can be anything we want to be. Well for a start, that's a complete fucking lie. Tell me about Father Christmas, God, The Tooth Fairy, that TV and wanking will make me go blind, if you really want to, tell me when I turn 17 a huge flying goat called "Dick Rippington" will come and rip off my cock and spit fire down my arse whilst singing "The Eye of the Tiger"...just don't tell me I have the opportunity to make something of my life because that's fucking child abuse and no amount of therapy is going to help you deal with that shit when you get older.

Sure some people might just about fluke something and then convince themselves that's where they wanted from the start but for the huge majority of us it’s just not true. When we grow up, we don’t do or create anything like all our childhood dreams and fantasies told us we would, our only function is to choose. Choose and consume.

We spend our childhood sat in classrooms, bored. If we’re lucky, we go to sit in lecture halls, bored. Then later we get jobs in offices, counting down the hours, the minutes, the seconds until we can go home and watch idiots on TV, start an alcohol habit, lie in bed awake all night, unable to fight through the weeds and the bracken to force through one single intelligent thought to completion…and finally it happens, the thought reaches it's completion........and it’s…well it’s shit. You’ve just wasted your fucking time.

So you learn not to bother. You rely on reflex and reaction. The small clearing in the forest that represents original thought is lost, eventually you get used to that, and you forget it ever existed.

I told myself when I was young that I never wanted to work in an office. It looked soul destroying. But I didn’t try hard enough to avoid that fate and so ended up betraying myself. It’s pathetic….I’m pathetic. but I can't get rid of the feeling that maybe I’m just a boring person. Maybe I’m meant to be here. Maybe this is as good as it gets. All I know is that given the chance, I wouldn’t be in front of a computer screen, writing this shit, whilst pretending to work.

It’s still 3 hours and fifteen minutes until I get to wait for a crowded train, wait for the train to reach Oakleigh Park and wait for sleep.

I reread this entry and realized that…well it’s shit. You’ve just wasted your fucking time.

Friday 25 April 2008

Today's ramble

I used to be baffled by why people read the Gutterpress or how people could think that a person could be born evil, why did people follow Hitler, how does a person believe that everything was created by an omnipotent guy in 6 days or that one race is biologically more moral than another....etc ad nauseam.


I guess the answer was made more clear to me when reading a recently Richard Littlejohn column. Before you say it, I know! I grumble about the reactionary gutterpress and yet seem to spend half my time reading it. In it, Mr Littlejohn writes that John Prescott, who recently has confessed to be suffering from bulimia, is lying because.......well......he's fat.


Well yes, that..if you think about it makes sense......except it's bulimia NOT anorexia you fucking oaf. Two completely different forms of nervous eating diseases, then main difference being bulimics (because of the bingeing nature of the disease) often gain weight. It's like saying someone who tells you they have had surgery to remove skin cancer is lying about it because they haven't lost their hair from chemotherapy. It takes 2 minutes to find out that bulimics gain weight. Fortunately, I don't have any close family or friends who have suffered from an eating disorder (to my knowledge) but even I knew that bulimia is not anorexia. So why does this kind of thing get published....and uncritically read by millions.


It's because it's simple. People like simple. Life's fucking complicated at the best of times. Even the simplest of our actions require hundreds of tiny judgements; what we buy, what train we get into work, where we sit, what we look at. In all this noise it's so comfortable to simplify, simplify, simplify - So bulimia becomes "eating disorder" and "eating disorder" means anorexia.


Keeping a handle of what's going on at any point in time is like trying to keep hold of a child's turd in a swimming pool, it's slips and slides everywhere and even if you do manage to get a hold of the thing, you'll probably just end up with shit on your hands....so what the point, just ignore it like everyone else.


That's why we simplify, like when a blogger repeated use a metaphors to explain something. We digitalised things, put them in clear black and white categories, on or off....in the deafening white noise of the tiny judgements that make our decisions. But things are not digital, they are analogue, beyond true categorisation.


That's why people believe that god created the earth and life, because the alternative is can't be explained in less than 20 seconds. That's why people used to believe that the earth was flat, that people of a different race were a lower species, that homosexuality was the work of the devil, climate change was a myth....etc ad nauseam.

But without this way of simplifying we couldn't function. We'd be fucked, unable to make a single simple decision, constantly re-waying the consequences in a constantly shifting reality. We'd just be stood there, like a crashed computer. (This happens when I try to decide which DVD out of the hundreds to watch...I'll stand there for half an hour just reading the names. Unable to make a decision).

So we need it, and it's nice but the real judgement we all need to make is how much to use it. For a final metaphor - Simplicity is like a nice warm bath......except if you're not careful....it's a bath that will eventually be full of child's turds.....

.....and Richard Littlejohn.

Wednesday 23 April 2008

Let's all tut loudly and feel better about ourselves

A friend, knowing full well what it would do to me, sent me a link to this article on the Daily Heil.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=561401&in_page_id=1773

It's typical death-watch journalism by the mail about the singer Amy Winehouse. Apparently she was seen with a rolled up cigarette which could be a joint (SHOCK HORROR). This apparently means that she's on heroine again and about to die! Also she was seen with a man! And lost her keys! What a mess, let's all tut loudly and feel better about ourselves. The online article (I'd never actually buy the paper, I'd feel less guilty repeated stamping on a box full of kittens) comes with loads of pictures of her not looking her best. There are also "hilarious" sarcastic, cowardly comments under each one. So here's my message to serial offender Donna McConnell.

You're a journalist, you didn't do this job for the money, you did it to report news and information to the public, you have a fucking responsibility to do that, not only that...you're a fucking human being so start fucking acting like one and stop abusing the concept of "the public has a right to know", the public DOES NOT have a right to fucking know the details of some pop stars medical condition and mental health issues, it DOES NOT have the fucking right to know which club she goes to, when she goes out, who she hangs around with. She's a fucking singer. Not a politician or someone whose lifestyle and behaviour has a direct influence on the public's day to day life. You don't get to judge her because not only have you abandoned your sold your morals as a journalist to the fucking Daily Mail, you have abandoned your basic responsibilities as a human fucking being.

It's St George's day......

...but what exactly is a patron saint, and who the hell was St George.

Well obviously it's a Christian thing and to explain what they do......well it's kind of like a call centre, you see God is really busy up there in heaven listening to all these prayers and it's not like he can hire a few temps or outsource the business to India or whatever. So to try and deal with your prayers more efficiently you can go through your patron saint, which I guess is sort of like a customer advisor. They're meant to fast track your prayer to the guy upstairs.

This is where Patron Saints come from. St George has been working at the Heavenly call centre now since 303AD, in fact we actually celebrate on his first day of work. He was decapitated by a grumpy Roman Emperor called Diocletian for not killing Christians. So far so good. Anyway, he's now been working as a patron saint in this call centre for the last 1705 years. In that time St George has sort of specialised in dealing with prayers from people with skin conditions, herpes, syphilis and and the English.

According to the UK statistics, STD's have increased a staggering 63% in the UK over the last 10 years.

To be honest, I don't want to be too harsh on the guy but I think this shows that St George has probably lost all enthusiasm for his job. I don't blame him, I temped in a John Lewis call centre over a Christmas once to earn some extra money and it was soul destroying; he's been doing it for over one and a half millenia!

so today, whatever you do, don't forget poor old St George.....the patron saint of skin diseases, syphilis, herpes, plague and.....oh yeah England.