Walking In On Yourself - A Poorly Written Morality Play

...wherein a disembodied Twitter voice rightfully pegs me as an idiot.

WARNING - This is all a SPECTACULARLY wanky load of drivel written in order to make myself feel a bit better as well as being some sort of vague apology to nobody in particular. If you are in the middle of growing fingernails, I'd recommend you get on with keeping an eye on that unfolding situation rather than wade through this badly written, mostly unintelligible, crapple.

Contains frequent references to Twitter and mild peril.

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Cast your minds back, if you will, to those heady days of the Saturday just gone. Sun was shining and weather was inclement and windy. Some of the country were waiting with baited breath; would JLS hang on at the top of the hit parade, or, would Cher Lloyd reign victorious? Another, mostly older portion of the country also waited with baited breath; would someone please explain what is a JLS or a Cher Lloyd? Whatever happened to that nice Mark Goodyear? He done the charts back in the olden days when lady popstars were still allowed to wear trousers and we had proper music, you know, the Roxette & the Vanilla Ice and all them, the proper, old bands that wrote some of their own songs....

No? Not ringing a bell? Surely you remember how I'd been up the Asian supermarket to stock up on brightly coloured packaging with unidentifiable contents with which to stuff my kitchen cupboards in such a way as to ensure that said coloured packaging falls out of said cupboards at unexpected moments and nearly kills me, like a sort of kitchen Russian roulette?

Still nothing huh?

Oh, and there was this riot going on in Tottenham. Got it? Yeah. Those were some ker-razy days.

So now, forget most of that stuff because it's not relevant. Forget it all except the bit about the Asian supermarket & the rioting. Then forget about the supermarket as well.

And even nower, picture this scene. It is some time mid that Saturday evening. A lady is sitting in bright pink pyjamas which feature a recurring monkey motif. She is not visibly ashamed of this fact. She is staring, slack-jawed, at a computer monitor, browsing banana cake recipes and tapping out inanities on a keyboard and hurling them at an indifferent universe of Twitterers. She is seated with her back to the TV and is listening to a repeat of Marple through earphones that, frankly, are not up to the job. Occasionally, she pauses to shovel baked beans into her yap. She is also a bit pissed on a little bottle of Sake she bought from the ASIAN SUPERMARKET that then fell out of a cupboard & almost killed her.

Reader, would it surprise you to learn that I was that tipsy, baked bean guzzling, monkey-pyjamad, slack-jaw? S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y-NIGHTS! I KNOW how to live!

So. I'm on the Twitter, via the medium of Tweetdeck, which, it goes without saying, was being a tweet hoarding bastard, holding on to dozens of messages then suddenly belching them out in one sudden, violent, extrusion making reading any of said tweets a bit of an ordeal requiring the eye muscles of an Olympic Speed-Reading Champion.
News of the trouble in Tottenham starts filtering into my time-line. I am already in the midst of a drunken twittersation (not a real word) with my cousin, moaning on about being old & not knowing what a jaegerbomb is. I am interspersing these complaints with my usual pointless observations about adverts being a bit shit & offering unsolicited advice re not mixing Sake with chewing gum. I intersperse those interspersations with retweets of the wisdom/rambling/comedy stylings of other people. Some of these retweets concern the riot unfolding in London.

But, as with most things internet, I am not giving any part of twitter my full attention. Ive got Miss Marple knitting in my ear 'oles and pictures of cake clogging up my eye 'oles and a medium amount of strong liquor making me even more moronically stupid and, as it's tweeting rather than speaking we're...er..talking about here, carelessly loud-fingered, than usual.

At some point I notice a tweet directed at me & another person from someone who, I was astounded to discover, not only followed me but actually seemed to be reading the bullshit I pumped into the virtual ether every 15 seconds or so.

This tweet bore the simple legend:

IDIOTS

I am confused. I read it 3 or 4 times. I am still confused. A tiny portion of my brain, which is apparently indifferent to alcohol, and is also, for some reason impersonating Homer Simpson, stage whispers

"I think she means you".

This only further complicates things. Why am I being called an idiot by somebody who, to the best of my knowledge, has never acknowledged my online presence in any fashion before this point?

I re-read the tweet 7 or 8 more times just to be sure. I notice the other named idiot. A-HA! A CLUE!

I trawl back through my own mindless out-pourings. Even in my thick-headed state I start to realise that my own time-line resembles the ravings of a crazy person. One moment I'm offering complete strangers Google+ invites because I, you will be amazed to discover, do not have 150 friends, acquaintances or even enemies to offer them to, then, seconds later, farting out a stream of terrible puns as part of some hashtag game I have clearly misunderstood the premise for. And, mixed in with all this garbage, are retweets which alternate between making light of people burning down their own neighbourhoods and forwarding bits of information about it. And, when viewed in chronological order, well, it makes me look like a bit of a dick. I mean, if I stood outside bellowing stuff like

"I'm sorry Hazelnut Mikado but today I met Green Tea Pocky & we are very much in love. Ive left your stuff by the front door."

followed up with

"A-HA! Ive got it. That annoying divey boy thats all up in the adverts? Spencer fucking Moon. It's been bugging me for ooh minutes at least."

and

"I Dram The Walrus #weightsandmeasuresmusic"

at passers-by I'd be, like, put on an ASBO at the very least. Or given a spot on Michael McIntyre's roadshow.

I locate a retweet in my own time-line that I don't remember seeing before. The gist of it seemed to be about not bragging about what an awesome time you had burning down that carpet shop in case the Metropolitan scuffers get to hear about it. It doesn't reflect my feelings about the situation & I'm momentarily perplexed as to why I'd have sent it out. I attempt many, many bloody times over to delete the thing but Tweetdeck decides to be a knob about it and not co-operate. I consider appealing to my accuser on the grounds that "Honestly I have No Idea How That Got In There Guv" but realise that that's exactly the kind of thing someone who's been caught out being a bit of a dick would say.
I look back through the timeline of people I'm following to see if I can find out whose words I meant to steal & pass off as my own promote. I locate the offending tweet & immediately below it is the thing I remember wanting to forward on to the world just as Tweetdeck vomited up another chunk of...chunks & evidently distracted me; a joke about Gazza, a fishing rod and some chicken.

"Oh, Hi there @twitterperson who thought me a callous idiot for retweeting dubious advice regarding not blabbing your criminal exploits round the pubs of London. Nah mate. You got me all wrong. I'm an entirely different type of callous idiot who apparently intended to retweet a joke about a mentally ill footballer who...wait...why are you blocking me? Hello? Hello?"

And I, metaphorically, look at myself and go

"What you doing? What the FUCK. Are. You. Doing?"

End OF Act I

Increasing The Amount Of Nothingness

I have no idea what the fuck's gone wrong with me lately. I mean, I was fairly wrong to start with, what with the chronic misanthropy, my crippling lifelong terror at being alive and my shocking ability to not only miss, but actively destroy opportunities. But, recently, I've started to feel, well, even more wronger.

Sadly, for me at least, being the inarticulate, talent-free, borderline moron that I am, I can't really put these odd feelings of 'more wrongity' into proper, recognizably English, words. The weirdness I'm experiencing is, at least in part, an actual physical sensation; a sort of tense, ticklish feeling at the front of my brain, the sort of feeling you get when you're sure you've forgotten something important. I've been living with this for months. So either I have forgotten something SUPREMELY important, or, I've got a brain tumour. Maybe I've forgotten that I have a brain tumour.

Aside from that it's all boredom, ennui, tedium and 'mono no aware' (I just put that last one in to look smart. I've been reading me some Murakami lately). I'm not sure if this is some sort of new variant on the vague feelings of sadness I've lived with since the age of, ooh, 4 or if this is an entirely new not quite mental illness I'm now experiencing. To be honest, I don't have the energy to find out.

In other news: I am on the Twitter. I have become one of the sickening, brevity indulging tweeters I previously claimed to despise. Turns out that, like the internet generally, Twitter is both terrible and awesome and that the average of these two things equals 'ok' (maths is hard). So, you know, fuck you old (by which I mean slightly younger) sonofajoiner, you square.

Sad Birthday

And the rant begins.

I'm a Tarvuist. There I've said it. I follow the teachings of the prophet Tarvu & the Tarvunty is my bible Tarvunty. I prize orange food highly & enjoy reading about irrigation. The Tarvunty wisely tells us that there are two universes; Universe A &, the rather bafflingly monikered, Universe B. We, of course, live in Universe B.
Except today. Despite definitely going to bed in Universe B, today I appear to have woken up inside Universe A. It's the only thing I can think of that explains the bizarre place I find myself in. See, rather disappointingly, Universe A appears to be stuffed to bursting with forelock tugging mentals who believe it to be both wise & appropriate to throw union flag decked parties to 'celebrate' the marriage of 2 total strangers who think nothing of taking your money to pay for their gaudy extravaganza but will have the police shoot you dead if you come anywhere near them (although the source for that whole 'police shoot-to-kill' policy is The Express. So. You know. Use your own judgment there).
I literally do not have the words to describe the bewilderment I feel at the complete lack of any sense of proportion on the part of the media who have gone on & on & on about a couple of people getting married in the breathlessly excited tones of a telephone sex pest, (whilst studiously ignoring a riot going on in Bristol) as well as at the apparent lack of any intelligence on the part of vast swathes of the UK population.
And whilst the weirdos in Universe A are waving their flags and dressing their infant daughters as Disney princesses (& I could spit a gallon of bile on that subject alone), the British police are jollying about the place pre-emptively arresting people deemed to have 'subversive' political opinions. And then there's the whole 'we're-totally-in-this-together-we-promise-heh-heh-heh' austerity bullshit where the poorest British children of Universe B must forgo a couple of free books because the Britain of Universe B is stony broke. But a few million quid for a couple of rich kids to yoke themselves together til the inevitable phone sex scandal for life could be found down the back of the governments sofa, no problem.

I'm almost as angrily incoherent about it all as this guy.

Oh, & today was my birthday. And a fairly miserable one it was too. Thanks Universe A. I'll be choosing my novelty religions with more care in future.

Be Like The Others

What up.
Look, look, 2 in a row! I'm totally getting the hang of this blogging lark.
This is just to say that 2011 is already looking to be a bit less of an arse than it's predecessor 'cos I got me an x-box, all the better to be fleeced to the scalp by Microsoft with...by....something. Hooray for capitalism and in your face 2010. In your ugly face.

Also, it is with absolute ambivalence that I bid farewell to my Nintendo Wii which will soon be winging it's way across the country to disappoint then utterly bore some other human being. We had some good times, the Wii and me...I'm sure......there was that one game that time...Okami? That was ok. I mean, the controls were terrible and OH MY ACHING BUTTON MASHING THUMB the unskippable cut scenes of event horizon proportions. You know, but otherwise a...fine...game.......hmmm....oh there was that other.....No. No there wasn't. No, in my experience, Wii games are mostly terrible.

See, I am a PC gamer at heart. I just can't get enough of those 15 hour installation times for games that inexplicably also require Steam to download files that should be on the disc sitting in your disc drive, that you forked over many, many pennies for. Or the scratting around the internet looking for player made patches that actually fix the 5 hundred million things that are broken in a game that you have forked over many, many pennies for. As far as I'm concerned, it's just not fun if you can pop a disc in and get on with playing a game straight away. Besides once all the pain, sobbing and extravagant swearing involved in getting the stupid bloody game to run is over, you are left not only with a sense of accomplishment but also with, most of the time, an excellent game to play. The Wii lets you pop in Alone in the Dark and get going in moments. But, you know, in the end, you're playing Alone in the Dark.

Ah, but that's how the X-box works sonofajoiner. Plug in and play. Easy and, therefore, by your logic ultimately boring. HA! Not if you want to play the copy of Fable 3 that came bundled with your shiny new console. Or anything else. Nope. You need to set up your console, spend 48 minutes trying to make X-Box live understand that the email address you are using is actually yours, then faff around with your tv and x-box settings over several hours in the hopes that you can make the stupid bloody console play your copy of Fable 2 at the 60hz the game requires, then trawl the internet for over an hour trying to avoid the creeping sense of dread that the problem will turn out to be with your needlessly expensive telly, then discovering that Microsoft have started selling their shiny x-boxes with cables that are inferior to the ones they used to use and blah and blah and blah. It took 24 hours (including 18 hours sleep) to get to a point where I could actually play anything. But you know what? Fable 2 is pretty good so far. So for me, initial hassle seems to equal ultimate happiness. My name is sonofajoiner, and I am a gaming masochist.

So farewell little Wii. You made, and I'm sure will continue to make, an excellent door stop.

Happy New Year

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

What? It could be New Year somewhere. China? Venus, maybe. What are you, racist against Venusians?

So, as I say, Happy New Year. And fuck you 2010. You were a truly psychotic prick of a year. Who knew, for example, the earth could quake so much, and so often? Or that Iceland, ironically, had quite so much fire underneath it. 2010, that's who. And 2010 just couldn't keep it to himself could he? The bastard.
And there were the government decimating plane crashes, and some explosions, and more explosions, and more explosions, and the bloody old man pope popped in to moan on about the sort of things old men tend to moan about, and Ireland started giving away all it's cheese, and Greece something something the euro and Germany was all like, Oi Greece something something don't make me come over there, and some Israeli soldiers went sailing, and there was all the usual flood, famine, war and disease but turned up to eleven. Oh, and of course, 2010 allowed the fucking Tories, and their airbrushed overlord, to win the general election despite the fact that more people voted against them than for them, and have set about selling off the country with unabandoned glee. And everywhere you looked, 2010 kept shoving footage and pictures of a creepy Australian egomaniac in front of you until you just wished Flanders was dead 2010 would hurry up, finish the job and wipe every last one of us out in a quick and legally binding fashion. That'd have been one in the eye for the Mayans!

But also, 2010 seemed to have it in for me personally. Well, not exactly 'have it in for me personally'. More sort of 'seemed determined to annoy, inconvenience, impoverish and upset me and those dear to me for no damn good reason, and at every opportunity because 2010 was a complete, ball-aching, bastard'.
2010 had it all, from repeated expensive car repairs, to making all our hot water piss out of an overflow pipe for 2 weeks before anybody noticed resulting in huge water and energy bills. It featured death, and near death. It doled out illness in quantities the likes of which I had never seen before. It dished out accidents and serious falls, divorces and job losses, nervous breakdowns and paralyzing depression.
So, yeah. I'm not sorry to see the back of that massive turd.

And 2011? I'm onto you mate.

Mummy, what's a Christmas?

Way back, in the olden days of, ooh, 2009 or so there was this thing called Christmas. Perhaps you've heard of it? Apparently we used to have it every year. Being an ancient, withered, old biddy I do actually have some vague memory of the thing. If memory serves, I believe Christmas was where your entire family was legally obliged to sit around your mum's television in order to hold some sort of drunken eating competition which was judged by the queen. The winner was then made to wear an unpleasant jumper knitted, or at the very least picked out, by an elderly relative with deep-seated, passive-aggression issues. Boxing day would, of course, be spent engaged in the traditional, spiritually uplifting, practice of shopping for half price sofas.

Unfortunately, you won't have any clue what I'm on about because this morally sanctified celebration of family bickering and cheap sweat-shop produced gifts, this clearly very pious religious festival has been slowly eroded over the last few years and is now, finally, about to become illegal because something something immigrants and something dum-di-dum bloody atheists and their bloody something and brigade of politically correct warriors using unmanned drones to bomb Christmas which has also caused Easter to catch on fire and Oh well done, you've gone and made baby Jesus cry. Nope. Instead we're all going to be made to spend 'Winterval Secular Inclusion Day' as christmas will probably be renamed, doing things that in no way include said baby Jesus. Things like watching the Eastenders and ignoring the walnuts your mum inexplicably persists in buying every year.

But don't worry and that. Do you know who's going to rescue Christmas from the evil christmas-strangling clutches of the muslims and DFS? Only the bloody pope! We'll be back to putting up our biblically mandated fir trees and decorating them with the holiest of christian symbols, the chocolate santa, without fear of death at the hands of the heavily armed militant atheist militia of militants in no time. No secular death squads will be able to stop us decking our halls with divinely inspired holly and tonguing one another in stock cupboards under wilting mistletoe at office parties so long as Pope Man and his Daily Mail wielding army are on the case. Because let's face it, christmas with the religious bits removed would look absolutely nothing...at all...like... Ah.

As you were.

If A Tree Falls In The Forest...

So.

This year, I ha' been mostly, eating taramasalata trying to sort myself out. And, let me tell you reader (ha ha, just my little joke) that is proving to be no mean feat. This is largely because I have spent the last 8 years living in a bubble of total loser oblivion. It's been sucky and has caused me and many, many others untold grief.

One day, however, out of sheer loserly clumsiness, I smacked myself in the face with a Henry Hoover and, as I sat there, cursing and kicking that red bastard in it's eyes, I realised that I Had To Do Something. I was suddenly sick to my very core with my life. Sick of being so pathetic that even electrical appliances felt obliged to give me a good beating. And so a sort of plan began to form. I was going to start putting right the things that once went wrong and hoping each time that the next leap... Nope, that's not it. I've really got to stop watching so much SyFy. The point is, I was left all aflame with purpose and, yes, even a little bit of hope for the future. For all I know that evil vacuuming git has left me with life altering brain damage, but if that's the case, I welcome my new ovanbfdjjjjjgf...

Thing one what I done was I went and got me a swanky haircut that costs a ridiculous amount of time, effort and money to maintain. Next, I lost approximately 75 stone in weight (please note that if anyone does find my lost weight someplace, it's yours to keep. I mean, you could take it down the scuffer shop, fill out the forms and wait two weeks for my weight to become yours legally, but I won't tell anyone if you don't. I would quite like you to waste the peelers time with handing it in though. That would amuse me.)
...Wandered off there...Oh look, a bee....

Right. Thing 3 is the part where I thought, on a whim, that I would apply for a position writing for a videogames website. Ah. I can see you're confused. Ah. I can see now that you're startled that I can see you. Ah. I can see now that you've closed the tab and gone off to the bright, reassuring lights of Boing Boing or Gawker, or some other well-populated area. Good for you.
Yes. The, and I'm being incredibly generous to myself here, 'writer' of this blog thought they had a shot at writing stuff that people might actually see for a website that people actually read.

I'll give you a moment to compose yourself.

Now, obviously, in real life, it takes more than an awesomely trendy haircut and some bingo wing reduction to land you your dream job.

Or does it?

Yes. Yes, it takes loads more than that. It takes stuff like, being bothered to maintain the blog you started, or at the very least being able to recall exactly what you named it without trawling through your unsorted bookmarks looking for something that seems vaguely familiar. It takes even more basic things such as, remembering to cobble together a CV out of the shambles that has been your employment history and sending that along with your cheery email.

And, of course, being real life, I didn't get the gig. The fine folks at Ready Up are obviously in possession of their full faculties and will plump for someone who at the very least knows how to strikethrough words in their blog post without having to google it first.
But you know what? They sent the nicest, most encouraging rejection email I have ever had in my life. And I have had well over 8 rejection emails (mostly, the companies I write to ignore me entirely. Or only contact me via restraining order.) It was so positive, that I organised my bookmarks, wrote down the name of my blog so's I'd remember it, and came back here to write this post.
It was so positive in fact, that I actually feel like making an effort to keep this blog going. Even if no one ever reads a single word of it.