Tahini 2: Open Sesame

Julie -  as not even vaguely requested by you, here is another fucking terrible screenplay, this time about that time you tried to buy some tahini in a supermarket even though I wasn't there & you have told me next to nothing about the occasion because why would you & there's some time-travel & shit & maybe a robot. I don't know. I haven't written the thing yet.

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FADE IN: INT SUPERMARKET -er DAY probably.

A glass fronted cube of despair with one of those ceilings where you can see all like wires & air conditioning vents & all that even though I don't know why they wouldn't just Artex that shit over but what am I a builder?

SWOOPING SHOT ALONG CRISP AISLE

All the crisps are Doritos. The red ones. This is not important.

The camera follows A WOMAN (that's you Julie, played by Ashley Judd/Wynona Judd/Judd Hirsch or someone else) sashaying -SASHAYING- down the crisp aisle. 

ZOOM IN As A WOMAN approaches HANDSOME a young supermarket employee (played by Ashley Judd/Judd Hirsch/Judge Judy or someone else) who is under 30 & is therefore probably playing music on a mobile phone because apparently they don't make earphones any more.

A WOMAN (brightly, to HANDSOME) - Excuse me?

HANDSOME  - Ok.

A WOMAN (a little confused, as though someone has just said something that has confused her.A   little)

                        - Right. Yeah. Um. Could you tell me if you sell Tahini paste?

HANDSOME (Insouciantly. Possibly. Note to script editor. Look up what 'insouciantly' means)

                        - Teeheehee?  Face?

A middle aged woman with a shopping trolley blinks into existence briefly. She is wearing a tunic with a needlessly COMPLICATED NECKLINE (which is, entirely coincidentally, also her name) & silver lipstick so we KNOW she is from the future. Also like, maybe her hat is made from water or something because, like, in the future they will almost definitely be able to make hats out of water.

COMPLICATED NECKLINE is holding onto the handle of a shopping trolley. It is a hover shopping trolley, so we KNOW it is from the future. COMPLICATED NECKLINE who is definitely from the future yells something about preventing Future Hitler from being born.

COMPLICATED NECKLINE (shouting. And maybe, I don't know, she's French. It would amuse me)

                        - I am here to stop Future Hitler from being born.

COMPLICATED NECKLINE runs at A WOMAN with the shopping trolley & but as she bashes into the back of her ankles we PULL BACK to reveal that COMPLICATED NECKLINE  & her HOVER TROLLEY (which is alive. Did I mention that? This is not important) are only 3 inches high. 

COMPLICATED NECKLINE swings the trolley around for another go but as suddenly as she arrived she blinks back out of existence & is replaced for a few seconds by what looks like a Nazi astronaut from the year 2450 as imagined by the 1970s who then also disappears. This is not important.

A WOMAN (with mild annoyance. As though she has just been rammed in the ankles by a tiny trolley. I'm no good at similes) 

                        - Ouch, Don't do that...oh she's gone. Anyway about my tahini.

HANDSOME (smirking like a right dick)

                        - Your Teeheehee?

A WOMAN  - Pardon?

HANDSOME - (sniggering)..... Your. Teeheehee. Sounds a bit like vagi...

A WOMAN (looking around)- Yeah...erm ...is there someone else I can talk to?

HANDSOME - There are potato smiles in the freezer? Is that it?

A WOMAN (becoming a bit testes no not that testy)- No. Tahini. Ta. Hee. Nee. Paste.

HANDSOME (mouth slack, eyes glazed, one of his pupils rolls around inside his iris - .....

A WOMAN - In a jar?

HANDSOME (frowning with all his might)- ...Marmite?

A WOMAN - (sighing)..... Ok. Forget the tahini...

HANDSOME - teeheehee

A WOMAN - ..stop that & just point me in the direction of the pot noodles instead?

HANDSOME (looks around in guilty fashion then shouts very loudly) - I'm sorry madam, but this establishment does not sell dogs of any kind and if you've been told otherwise...

A WOMAN (crying) - All I wanted to do was get some tahini then fuck off home & eat some biscuits.

A WOMAN falls to the floor crying & crying & crying & crying.

A giant, poorly cgi'd ROBOT blinks into existence next to the display of I Can't Believe You Believe This Has Any Cheese In It Nacho Dip.

ROBOT (roars) - Must stop future Hitler

ROBOT begins flailing his massive human-pulping fists all about the place & some crisp packets fall on the floor. The manager  will not be pleased about this. This is not important.

SLOW MOTION SHOT of crisps being crushed by ROBOT'S human-pulping fist. In his eyes we see that he knows he is over-qualified for this assignment. When he gets back to the Future Hitler free future he is hoping to create, he will totally go to the bank about that small-business loan & open a bait shop.

FADE TO BLACK

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Cut. Print. Millionaires.

Goodbye Sunshine, the Night is Mine

Sleeping.

What's that all about eh? Do you ever do that? Sleep? Do that, do you? Lie down in the dark, approximating the resting pose of a corpse, feeling your heartbeat slowing, slowing, every breath becoming shallower, until, eventually, everything fades to black as your consciousness ebbs away, and you gradually disappear into the waiting nothingness, not knowing whether you will see another dawn?...That? Do you do that? Do you? Shit isn't it?

Yeah. Lovely, lovely sleep.

So, sleeping is something I have never had an aptitude for. As a baby I slept for no more than 4 hours a night, which is all I apparently required to be fully recharged for a heavy day of screaming & screaming & screaming & screaming (because, I clearly had the world sussed for a terrifying pisspool even at that young age. I was a very smart baby). For some reason though, my parents seemed to be of the opinion that 4 hours sleep a night was, like, half of what they needed to be able to function in a way that didn't make them want to kill me. I mean, we la-ha-ha-ha-ugh about it now...

So I got off to kind of a bad start with sleep from the very beginning and it only got worse from there.

I mean, as a kid I would sit up into the early hours reading. My mum cottoned on pretty fast that you can't yell a kid to sleep, so to save herself the stress of fighting me into my bed every evening, she'd rather let me get on with doing something vaguely constructive with my nights. Sadly, however, what I was actually doing a lot of the time was something not all that constructive. Like, instead of reading some improving tome, I'd be sitting with my copy of What?Where?How?WhY? on my lap, staring at a drawing of a policeman trying to rescue a boy from quicksand and freaking the fuck out. Or reading that copy of Jaws I pinched from Louise Austin's house and freaking the fuck out. Or reading the bit in my book about space that covered the big bang & wondering what existed before anything existed and FREAKING. THE. FUCK. OUT (or sometimes I'd just pretend the periodic table in my Junior Pear's Encyclopaedia was a computer...You know...like Penny from Inspector Gadget had ah forget it).
So, when I did finally fall asleep it was frequently into that uneasy, vaguely sweaty, twilight place of anxiety dreams & existential nightmares that I, being like 8 or whatever, was not equipped to deal with. All of which meant I was never all that keen to go back & visit the world of sleep & I'd try that bit harder to stay awake the next night.

As a teenager, my brain tended to sulk all night & refuse to let me go to sleep because that's what they want you to do, those bastards or whatever. Plus, you know, the angst & the hormones. Oh my aching parts, the hormones! And by the time I was a student (hoho) I found I could only sleep, entirely coincidentally of course, during those parts of the day when I was supposed to be attending a lecture or a seminar. Or sometimes an exam. In fact the only way I ever got to sleep at night was with a heady mix of John Peel, Happy Shopper wine & cheap, incomprehensibly subtitled Bollywood films. My dreams, though, were fucking magnificent.

For me, being up all night though is like getting to have a 2nd, secret life. Nowadays my daytime existence is pretty much empty & entirely without purpose or direction. But at night, I feel a bit more me. As though after dark I can relax, stop pretending to people that I am in any way not full to the brim with crazy & just get on with stuff. Especially what with that internet. And especially on the twitter there. Where once I'd have to lie in bed with a walkman tuned to whatever poor bastard had the radio 1 graveyard shift to feel less alone, now I can watch all those others who are unconsciously challenged tweet their strange thoughts & bizarre Star Trek episode recaps...no that's me isn't it? In a way, though, it's also worse, having an audience for your insomnia. Because in the olden days of no internet & television close downs there really wasn't much else to do at night except try to sleep. So I'd try really bloody hard, out of pure fucking boredom if nothing else. But now, I get into bed, lean back slightly, decide it's not worth lying the full way down because I'm clearly not tired & get back to tweeting shit about how Sleep is a total bastard & one time I touched Robbie Williams.

These days I feel as though not sleeping has more to do with wanting to wring as much time out of each day as I can, in case something happens & I miss it by being asleep (that & wanting to avoid the hours of quiet panic that lying alone in the dark with just my brain to talk to causes. My brain is a complete shit most of the time). Like I am choosing not to sleep.
It's as though by going to sleep I am admitting defeat somehow, that I have lost at...something. Life, possibly. When I go to sleep at night I am admitting that today was yet another day like all the others, a day where I haven't achieved anything. A day where I've moved a bit closer to death by forgetting to do any living. A day where I have sat & waited, instead of getting up & doing. And so long as I'm still awake, there's still a chance...

And, yes, I may hallucinate terrifying black shades trying to grab me from time to time. And, yes, the headaches after a prolonged period of no sleep are quite the motherfucker. But being bad at sleep can have it's advantages. I mean, there are things that you only know about if you don't/can't sleep at night. Sometimes, I like to open a window around 4am & listen to the outside. Because 4am is the moment when the world seems to slow to almost nothing (well obviously not the whole world, I mean, I have heard of time zones, I'm not a monster). 4am is the day at it's magical best. It's generally too late for people to be coming home from anywhere & still too early for them to be going out anywhere. Even the birds, who seem to worship, via the medium of shrieking, the streetlights in my road as some weirdly uniform pantheon of gods every other hour of the night, even they knock it off for a few moments.
And the quiet lasts barely any time at all but sometimes it's so still you can feel the silence settling on your skin.
And then the Lord Chief Rabbi of the birds starts squawking that it's time to get back to shouting praise at the streetlights & the moment fades. The traffic picks up, lights go on & the whole, terrible business of another day on earth starts over again.

But you won't know about that, you sleepers. That's just for us night people.

Titles are not my forté

So.

Been a while, yeah? A long, weird while.
And stuff has happened and other stuff hasn't happened and the world goes on with it's wonderful, terrible business.
And that's fine. It's how the universe operates.
And here I am. Halfway to orphan-hood, death circling my remaining family, circling me, like a demented flock of birds. For real this time. Not in the Grampa-Simpson-pointing-at-lamps-seeing-death-everywhere way I've spent approximately, ooh, all my life so far doing. Seeing death everywhere & being so frightened by it that I forgot to, you know, do any living. Choosing to just give over responsibility for myself to other people in the belief that they couldn't do a worse job with my life than I would. (I was wrong about that by the way. Which in a weird way just serves to prove my point).

Nope.

Death certainly seems to be gunning for us 'Joiners in a big way. Or whatever the bird equivalent of that might be. Shitting on us in a big way? Yeah. Death is shitting on us. And there really is nothing like a lot of death going round, shitting on you, as a motivator for not sitting about waiting for death to get around to shitting...on...you yeah I'm sorry about starting this whole bird analogy now.

Anyways.

The point is, I'm back. And this time, it's personal...or more frequent. The 2nd one. I'm back, and plan to post shit no one reads more often. Probably. I mean, I literally have nothing else to do, except not sleep & tweet about how much I hate Riker.
Fucking Riker.
So I'm bound to post at least, pff, what, twice more this year, at least?
You're welcome internet.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far...no...sorry, in this galaxy, I was once 9 years old. And 9 year old me was a bit of an aloof, arsehole, know-it-all that none of the other kids at school cared about much one way or the other. And for the vast majority of the time I did not give a toss.

Except for this one time.

This one time I came home from school, went straight to my room & sobbed silently into my, with hindsight, frankly terrifying clown decorated pillow case. This was not something I tended to do, pretty much, ever. And strangely, to this day, I have no idea what had happened at school to make me quite so upset.

After a few minutes my Mum came up to see if I intended to come & eat the standard 1980s meal of crispy pancakes & waffles with the rest of the family & found me crying. This was not something that she tended to do, pretty much, ever. She used to tell me that she liked the way I let the mean things other kids said & did roll right off me, so she was startled to find me in such distress.

She sat silently on the edge of the bed & stroked my back whilst I sobbed & attempted to stammer out the woeful tale of what name some snot-nosed bastard kid had probably yelled at me as I passed through the school gates. Eventually she calmed me down using the usual mum techniques of forehead-kisses & bone-cracking hugs before prescribing a warm bath, clean pyjamas & an early night (all things the non-sobbing version of my 9 year old self would've kicked in the face before sitting up all night in my school uniform to read The Hobbit).

When I was finally clean & tucked up beneath the red-nosed horrors of my duvet, my mum told me she had something for me & produced a little green & white knitted rabbit. She'd bought him at my school's Christmas bazaar that same day & had intended to give him to me as a Christmas present. But she wanted me to have him early, because I was sad, & she didn't want me to be sad anymore. We called him Minty. You know, because of that whole...rabbit/toothpaste...thing...yeah. I was never much cop at naming stuff.

And that night, instead of my usual book-induced insomnia, I fell asleep quickly, holding Minty in one hand & my Mum's hand in the other.

 In recent weeks, I'd been coming back to this memory of my Mum over & over again. Mainly because I was starting to worry that I didn't seem to have many childhood memories of mum where she wasn't angry or upset with me, or me with her. I know we can't have spent all of the eighties & nineties screaming at one another but I really couldn't recall another occasion where Mum had shown such softness towards me. I know that there must have been other times where she tucked me in, & stroked my face, & told me she loved me. I just can't remember them. All the memories I seemed to be able to dredge up were ones where she had made me feel bad, or where I was sure she had scuppered my plans. And I had started feeling all sorts of weird, misdirected resentments towards her.

And then, 2 weeks ago, out of fucking nowhere, she died. And all the head stroking, & kisses & bone-breaking hugs I had in me couldn't fix her.

And, even though I don't for a single second believe in life after death, or heaven or any of that jazz, I couldn't bear the idea that Mum would be alone on her very last journey. I also knew that should there turn out to be a place where dead people do hang about watching their loved ones like some sort of creepy stalker, Mum would be so sad to see how sad we all were without her. And I instantly thought of Minty the rabbit. My Mum once gave him to me so I wouldn't be sad anymore. And I wish I was able to let her take him so she wouldn't be sad anymore. But if I gave him to her, I wouldn't have that one, precious, connection to her. So I gave her a photo of him instead. And on her way into the Big Sleep, she went, holding Minty in one hand &, I hope, the memory of my hand in the other.

No, I haven't Read The Bible. Why'd You Ask?

And a Merry Easter spent dodging His heat-seeking laser eyes to you all.

Please Don't Read This

When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, "what will I be?"
And she said "what the fuck do you think I am? Psychic? Now fuck off outside & play. Mummy's got one of her wine headaches coming on".(*)

Ha ha ha.

You remember how, when you were a kid, people were, like, almost obsessed with what you wanted to be when you grew up? It seemed as though you'd get asked that question on almost a daily bloody basis. There you'd be, minding your own business, for some reason drawing a picture of a clothesline heavy with underpants, and people would start getting all up in your grill (or 'face' as it used to be known in the olden days; faces were like grills, except not so popular amongst the rappers) about where you think you're headed, and you're all "mate, I'm 4 years old. I'm still not entirely convinced the people on telly can't actually see me. I'm clearly an idiot. What are you asking me for?" I mean, you personally might have said something else, like "astronaut" or "call centre operator" or something. I don't know, I wasn't there.

Anyway.

I had all sorts of different futures in mind for myself when I was little. Mostly based on whatever, with hindsight, wildly age inappropriate TV show I was obsessed with at the time. For example, whilst watching LA Law at age 7, or thereabouts, I was determined to become a Californian lawyer because it meant I might get to meet Amanda Donohoe. And Amanda Donohoe made my tummy feel all funny....ahem yes well. That's not for here. Moving on.

But the one thing I wanted, more than anything else, was to be an author. I wanted to write stories & get money for them & live by the sea in a lighthouse.

I wrote nearly all the time. At primary school I would often negotiate my way out of having to learn anything, you know, useful, like maths or joined up handwriting, by offering instead to write a 25 page epic about a hot air balloon that ran on laughter. I developed a fierce literary dispute with a boy in my class over whether every story needed a happy ending (it will surprise you, I am certain, to discover that I was firmly in the downbeat camp). I would spend hours crafting palaces & sea lairs & vampire discos on paper. Poems, short stories, existentialist essays, you name it I'd write it. My output very probably exceeded that of Barbara Cartland. And was just as fucking awful.

So that was my secret dream. To go on writing & writing & writing until all the stupid crap that kept me awake all night was written down for other people to have to endure. And I had this dream right up until the age of 10.

And then;


I stopped having any dreams.


Wow.
Pretty dramatic right? Yeah. You see exactly how I have robbed the literary establishment by abandoning my writerly dreams. What with my amazing ability to craft tension, and my masterful use of commas(**), I would have taken the world by storm. Yeah, you get it. You totally get it.

"But sonofajoiner! What could possibly have happened to you to make you abandon your deeply held desire to make a modest living from peddling your nonsense to the public?" absolutely no one cries.

Well, to be strictly truthful, my dream didn't disappear overnight at age ten. It was, however, dealt a blow that would eventually prove fatal..

When I was ten, I foolishly agreed to accompany my mum & dad to a school parents' evening. See, I was one of those obnoxious little child shits who fucking loved school & who never turned down an opportunity to hear how awesome I was doing at the whole business of learning.(***) Also, my teacher was a pleasant enough woman who kept a prayer card with a faintly terrifying image of a crucified Christ right there on her desk. My mum, on the other hand, was one of those murderous atheists that have been in the news a fair bit lately for bombing all the Christians to death by making them be polite to gay people in public. And in my childish way, I thought I really ought to be present to keep the peace, just in case my mum took it upon herself to headbutt some secularism into my teacher, or attempt to openly piss on her prayer card.

Now, I am aware that human memory is a notoriously unreliable thing. So in the interests of balance I have provided my parents' recollections about what transpired on this particular parents' evening as well as my own, in the hopes that somewhere in the middle, the truth may be found.

My memory of the evening goes as follows:

Mrs Teacher - "Here are some things that came from the amazing imagination of your child proving that she clearly is amazing & we must start ringing around publishers immediately"

Parents look at one another with WTF faces (although in the olden days such faces were known as 'confused' & were marginally less sarcastic than their modern day counterpart).

Parents laugh so hard they catch on fire.

I secretly vow to have my revenge on them both by never writing another word ever, ever again.

My mum's memory of the evening is as follows:

"For the last bloody time, I have no idea what you are on about"

My dad's memory of the evening is as follows:

"I'm sorry, which one are you again?"

Obviously, I am exaggerating a little bit.
My teacher didn't use those exact words, but that was the general gist.
And I don't really think my parents fell off their chairs in hysterics & crawled out of the classroom hyperventilating at the very notion that their daughter might possess a talent(****).
But they did look at the proffered poems & laugh.
And my teacher did look sad that they laughed.
And she did ask them to at least consider what she had said to them.
And they did chuckle about it on the drive home.
And they did refer to my teacher as 'nuts'.
And they did stress, repeatedly, to me that I was really not good enough to make a living as a writer, because hardly anybody was.
And I did go home that night & cry until I fell asleep.
And I did wake up the next day knowing I could never let anybody read anything I wrote ever again because if my own parents thought my writing was laughable rubbish, well then, it must be laughable rubbish.

I did keep writing though, in secret, for myself, for a little while. But it had stopped being fun. I became my most ferocious critic. I would have what initially seemed like good story ideas but I gradually became terrified about writing them down. I couldn't bear the thought that someone might read my thoughts, and then never stop laughing. And eventually the ideas stopped coming altogether. By my teens the only shit I was able to drag out of my brain onto paper was the worst kind of angst-ridden, death-fixated, deadly, deadly serious poetry that still produces teeth-grinding embarrassment in me every time I stumble across it.

Then one day I realised, I was no longer anything approaching a writer. But, also, I wasn't anything else instead. And that's how things have remained.

Little pieces of my dream obviously still float about in my head. I sometimes catch the thud thud thud of a vampire disco somewhere in the back of my brain but I don't think I will ever find my way back to it. The roads leading to my imagination are almost entirely sealed. On odd occasions things still manage to slip out, but a lack of confidence means I hesitate to write them down and then my inner censor gets in on the act & the whole thing is usually over before it starts.

And sometimes I manage a blog post that doesn't go anywhere. But I make sure I do it late at night, when no one's looking, so no one knows I wrote it & I won't know that you're laughing.

(*) My fictitious lawyers have asked me to point out that such an event never took place. My mum drank gin exclusively.
(**) Grammar, punctuation & how to count accurately are just 2 of the many things I was never taught because from age 6 I could apparently out-manouvere grown fucking adults.
(***) Don't worry though, secondary school educated that right the way out of me. By age 13 I had absolutely no curiosity about the world left in me whatsoever.
(****) I do really think that.

The Future Will Be Amazing

Julie, as requested, please find attached a fucking terrible screenplay about robots returning a kettle. With, like, a week to spare.
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FADE IN: INT SUPERMARKET - NIGHT

An almost entirely windowless joy void, glowing yellow-green with fluorescent misery.

PAN TO A number of stanley-knife wielding people, wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the legend "Work Experiencee", shuffle around the seasonal goods aisle, slicing mirthlessly at cardboard boxes & the occasional carotid artery. (Oh yeah, & also it's like the future & shit. So maybe the stanley-knives are, like, made of lasers or something, yeah? And the t-shirts are, like, all silver and have an inbuilt speaker system that, like, brays out stuff like "Join a union? What are you, an illegal immigrant?" & "If you worked harder maybe you'd be getting paid for doing this job". Inspirational stuff like that.)

EXTREME CLOSE UP on the under-clad hind quarters of a young lady who is making her way through this hapless crowd, swinging her hips with such wild abandon they render several onlookers unconscious.

CUT TO the front wall of the supermarket exploding inwards in a rainbow of breeze blocks, asbestos & sonic booms.

EXTREME CLOSE UP on lady arse again. A hand comes into shot briefly to fiddle with a gusset.

CUT TO the decimated shop front. ROBOT 1 & ROBOT 2, two enormous, poorly CGI'd robots, enter through the gaping maw & punch their way, through the bodies of around 100 dead & dying security guards, towards the customer service desk. ROBOT 1 is clutching a carrier bag in it's blood & brain spattered fist.

ZOOM IN on LATE NIGHT, a lady employee who inexplicably receives a wage for being no fucking help to anyone at all.

SUBLIMINAL FLASH of Coca-Cola logo projected onto an underclad bum.

LATE NIGHT (not looking up from magazine article about a woman who married her Dad who was also a convicted murderer & a ghost):
Yeah?

ROBOT 1: KETTLE BROKE.

ROBOT 2 (addressing ROBOT 1): The cigarette kiosk is closed.

ROBOT 1 (ignoring ROBOT 2): KETTLE BROKE. MONEY BACK. QUICK. WANT FUCK OFF HOME. EAT BISCUITS.

ROBOT 2 (addressing ROBOT 1): Mate, you said we would be able to get some Rizlas, yeah? But look mate, the kiosk.....it's all closed up or something, yeah?

LATE NIGHT (looking up from an article about twins separated at death): Yeah?

ROBOT 1 (smashing his human-pulping fist down on the counter): KETTLE. LEAKING. RECEIPT HERE.

(ROBOT 1 opens his brain matter flecked hand metal hand to reveal a tiny slip of paper. Made of lasers or something. It's the future)

ROBOT 2 (clawing at ROBOT 1's arm): Ask her about the Rizlas yeah?

LATE NIGHT (sighing her lungs up out of her body): safter6oclockeveryonegonehomecantdorefund.

ROBOT 1: RECEIPT. IN HUMAN PULPING FIST. MONEY BACK.

LATE NIGHT (her eyes slowly drifting down to gawk at photos of Kerry Katona's preserved head wearing a jar that makes her look fat): safter6oclockeveryonegonehomecantdorefundanywaythiskettlesbeenusedso nowayyougettinganymoneybackanywaysorry.

ROBOT 1: LAW SAY RETURN FAULTY PRODUCT WITH PACKAGING AND PROOF OF PURCHASE GET MONEY BACK. HERE IS PROOF OF PURCHASE. MONEY BACK.

ROBOT 2: Mate. Mate. MATE. Rizlas. Mate.

LATE NIGHT: safter6oclocknocustomerserviceeveryonegonehome....

ROBOT 1 (collapses across counter, weeping. His sobs sound like someone typing the word 'CRY' repeatedly into a Speak & Spell): CRY CRY CRY. JUST WANT FUCK OFF HOME. EAT BISCUITS. CRY CRY CRY.

(LATE NIGHT continues reading magazine. CLOSE UP on horoscope. "Libra. There is a very good chance that you will die at the human pulping hands of a stoned robot. Call in sick")

ROBOT 2 (leaping across the sobbing frame of ROBOT 1 towards LATE NIGHT): Riiiiiiiiiizzzzzzzzlaaaaaaas!

EXTREME CLOSE UP of LATE NIGHT'S face being pulped to meat paste by a giant robot fist forever & ever & ever & ever....

CUT TO the still sobbing body of ROBOT 1 exploding all over the place for some reason.

JUMP CUT to underclad lady backside for no discernible reason.

FADE TO BLACK.

FADE UP to lady bum.

FADE BACK TO BLACK.

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Cut. Print. Shit.

Shut Up A Minute

I am not what you could call a "people person".
In actual fact I believe I was born coated, not in your usual womb juices, but in actual people repellent.
I have the social skills of a damp face-cloth. Actually, a damp face-cloth quite probably has better social skills, evidenced by its occasional contact with an actual human face.
Small talk is beyond me. I'm not baffled by it or anything like that, I just can't do it. I can never think of a single thing to say. Nothing. This is particularly strange to me as my brain usually teems with the sort of inconsequential nonsense perfect for such situations all the live long day. In fact, my mind probably most closely resembles a busy ring-road heaving with tiny inanity & trivia stuffed vehicles going about their idiotic business. This road is so horrendously jammed with this flow of stupid traffic that any possibly intelligent or deep thoughts that may also come into being lie trapped beyond it, with no way out other than to chuck themselves in front of the juggernauts of dumb. And that is where nosebleeds come from. Or something. What am I? A fucking doctor?

What were we talking about?

Oh yes. I can't talk to people. So I don't have any friends. Oh, I managed to snag me a boyfriend some 126 years ago and it was such a relief to have done so that I have doggedly held onto him despite...well...let's just leave it at despite. Mostly my hanging on for dear life meant I didn't have to go through that whole awful meeting-and-talking-to-lots-of-different-people-until-you-find-someone-with-whom-you-think-you-could-discuss-mortgages-without-wanting-to-weep-at-the-loss-of-your-youth-before-turning-the-gun-on-yourself. Because that's a thing people look for in potential partners isn't it? But he is a rare exception. Mostly I have passed through life making no impression on anyone. If, for example, I was the focus of It's a Wonderful Life, Clarence would amble up to me as I clung on to the bridge, simply shrug and say "s'up to you mate".

And I have been at peace with this for quite some time.

But recently...I don't know. Not so much.

It's not that I'm lonely as such, more, soul-blackeningly bored and, thanks to that terrible, beautiful thing known as the internet, more aware than ever of how utterly without merit my existence is.

I may have mentioned that thing called the twitter? And that people go on there and they type out the contents of their heads and their stomachs and, quite often, their underwear? And that I have gone on there and tried to do the same? And because that's what everyone's doing, it should be a total piece of piss to join in and witter endlessly on about tits and ConDems fucking everything up and how much you hate the tv show you're watching? And that people will just read whatever shit your fingers fart out via the medium of keyboard and think you are awesome and chat to you and all that?

Except.

Except I go on that there twitter and am still somehow identifiably covered in people repellent.
I try being funny. I try being weird. I try being melancholy. I try listing stuff I like. I generously retweet other peoples' opinions that I think I would quite like to have had myself (if I could be remotely arsed to form opinions on anything whatsoever anymore. But that's a whole other load of old wank). And am pretty roundly ignored.

And I have stared to realize that the reason why, in the offline world, no one has ever really liked me or wished to be seen in public with me, the reason why people turn off the lights and pretend to be dead when I drop by isn't that I am some uniquely 'ungettable' specimen of humanity, that I am a dodecahedron of awesomeness forced into the round hole of humdrum existence. No. It is simply this.

I am a boring twat with nothing to say.
I am a boring twat with absolutely nothing to offer the universe.
I am a boring twat who lacks even the merest hint of a talent or skill.
I am a boring twat who has made it a point never to try because that way I can never, ever fail.
I am a boring twat who is paralyzed with terror at the thought of someone seeing me for who I am or, even worse, who I fervently dream of being.
I am a boring twat who has no idea who they actually are, other than being a boring twat.
I am a boring twat who writes interminable, self-pitying, blog posts analyzing all the reasons why I am a boring, friendless, twat.
I am a boring twat who can't even furnish their blog post with a conclusion.

And you realise your plan is a not good one but carry on regardless

I am no longer afraid of dying.
And I am afraid of that.

Apropos Of Nothing

Hundreds of years ago, when the this here internet was all just fields, I used to work in a d.i.y. store. It was...let me see...hmmm...yes....the worst fucking job I ever had. You know, except for aaaaaall the others.

I hadn't been working there very long when one day a man came in & hung about the aisle with all the white spirit in it. He seemed quite sweet, in his clean if shabby tweed jacket and red bow tie. He walked straight up to me and began chatting.

He twinkled away to me about the weather and what promising adventures I might have lined up for the weekend, and as he did so he nonchalantly picked up a 2 large bottles of methylated spirit and put them in his trolley. He smiled and chuckled his way through a little more small talk before wending his merry way off to the checkouts.

And I said to myself, there goes the jolliest old soul I have ever encountered.

And later that afternoon, I passed by that same old man sprawled across a flowerbed near the store, shitfaced, with a half empty meths bottle under his arm.

I mention this for no special reason other than it is a memory that has been keeping me awake a bit lately. And I'm not really sure why.

I See What You've Done There

Whenever I hear this


I imagine this

I think we can all agree that my imagination is quite poorly.

Converses With Idiots

A Screenplay. Based on events that happened and which were recounted in a furiously early in the morning phone-call to the writer who wasn't really awake yet.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FADE IN: INT. A SUPERMARKET - DAY

A strip-lit headache in chrome & despair.

People from every walk of life episode of Jeremy Kyle you've ever seen mill about by the fag counter which also doubles as the customer service desk (probably so you can buy cigarettes with which to hasten your death after being on the receiving end of a customer service).

We PAN ALONG the huddle of people who apparently believe they are forming a queue and ZOOM IN on SOME WOMAN, a customer whose only desire is to return a cd, then fuck off home to eat biscuits.

SOME WOMAN (stepping up to the counter):
Hello there SATURDAY EMPLOYEE! Good to see you.

CLOSE UP of the blank face of SATURDAY EMPLOYEE who remains silent.
CUT TO face of SOME WOMAN who has just finished rolling her eyes.

SOME WOMAN: I would totally like to return this cd of Shrieking Harpy & The Steampunks please. And look, here is my receipt so there should be absolutely no problem here yeah?

CUT TO the blank face of SATURDAY EMPLOYEE

SATURDAY: Can't....Becaaaaaause...errrrrrrmmmm... Copyright law? Yeah. Copyright law.

CUT TO SOME WOMAN. Her face shows that she is trying to decide between laughing and killing herself, right there, by the Kit Kats.

SOME WOMAN: Er....lolwut?

SATURDAY (mercifully off-screen): Copyright law. Can't return CDs.

(turning to address MONDAY TUESDAY THURSDAY SATURDAY & SUNDAY EMPLOYEE who is pretending to count boxes of Silk Cut and studiously ignoring the bellowing mass of increasingly irritated lottery ticket purchasees waiting to throw their pounds into the void)

Because of Somali pirates?

MONDAY TUESDAY THURSDAY SATURDAY & SUNDAY (nodding as though her neck muscles know no fear): The copyright law.

SOME WOMAN: I don't believe you know what you are talking about. Did I mention my receipt?

SATURDAY: Copyright law. Illegal to refund cds because it...funds.....terrorism. You know, cuz of the...the....the pirates.

MONDAY TUESDAY THURSDAY SATURDAY & SUNDAY (still nodding): Pirates.

SOME WOMAN (attempting to use humour to prevent herself from pelting SATURDAY with tic-tacs): Maybe I should've left the parrot at home today then! A Ha hahaha ha...ha ha......cough.

TRACKING SHOT of a tumbleweed rolling along the top of the counter separating SOME WOMAN from SATURDAY & MONDAY TUESDAY THURSDAY SATURDAY & SUNDAY.

SOME WOMAN: So, listen. IANAL but AFAIK...

SATURDAY: You talk like an internet.

SOME WOMAN: Yes. I can sometimes pass as a kidz. Anyway, copyright law has nothing to do with anything. Copyright law is all sorts of crazy about who is able to collect royalties on creative works, where and when stuff can be sold and how much they should get paid and junk. Copyright law has nothing to say on the matter of refunding CDs. It is not relevant. What is relevant though is the Sale of Goods Act which does not in any way exempt retailers from refunding CDs. I do understand that you do not have to offer me a refund or an exchange, even with a receipt, unless the product is faulty which this is not. Except if you count the singing of Shrieking Harpy which most definitely is faulty. It is, however, generally viewed as good practice to offer refunds in other circumstances, especially if the customer is returning a quite clearly unused product in the state in which it was purchased accompanied by a BASTARD BLOODY RECEIPT LIKE THIS ONE!

SOME WOMAN holds receipt up to camera.

SATURDAY: Copyright law.

MONDAY TUESDAY THURSDAY SATURDAY & SUNDAY (now nodding so viciously her head has become little more that a yellow/blue blur of perm & eyeshadow): Pirates. Pirates opened the packaging.

SOME WOMAN: YOU SOLD IT TO ME LIKE THIS!

MONDAY TUESDAY THURSDAY SATURDAY & SUNDAY (her head now moving so fast it's addressing SATURDAY from another dimension): Look! You can see the hook marks on the box!

SOME WOMAN (weeping): All I wanted was to be able to fuck off home and eat biscuits!

SOME WOMAN throws herself across the counter where she lays sobbing loudly.

FADE TO BLACK
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most important thing to note here is that this screenplay passes the Bechdel Test. I expect the offers to direct to come pouring in any day now. Any day now.

..then I took an arrow to the enjoyment centre of my brain

Here are a thing I enjoyed in 2011

Game of the Year - Pheasant.

A-ha-ha-ha.

But seriously.

Game of the Year - There's this game my 2 year old niece made up where we sit by the back door and scan the skies during daylight hours, looking for the moon. Should we be lucky enough to see it we have to shake our fists at it furiously and yell 'clear off you pesky moon'. We do this until the earth has spent enough hours turning away from said moon (quite possibly in disgust) that it disappears from view OR one of us (me) is asleep. There is also a slightly more complicated version of this game that requires me to purchase and then don various items of invisible space clothing first so I can go up into space to bust the moon right in its chops but the invisible equipment I am required to purchase from my niece is prohibitively expensive.

Anyway, the point is that playing this repetitive and strangely exhausting game with a toddler for hours and hours on end is still a more fun, more satisfying and less disappointing experience than playing any portion of Skyrim for any length of time whatsoever.
So, to reiterate, the 'shouting violent, if impotent, threats at an indifferent celestial body' game that sprang from the still developing brain of a tiny child is my pick for game of the year. And not Skyrim.

I like lame stuff & I cannot lie

It's that time of year isn't it? You know, when people start telling you all the stuff they liked about the last 12 months?
They make lists of all the awesome music they've listened to, ranked according to how cool it makes them sound. Or they outline all the films they've inexplicably been able to afford to go to the cinema to watch in these new dogfood-for-dinner times (I mean, it's like, what, at least £500 a ticket these days. Some people. Cuh.)
And you read the lists and think about your own year & go, "what in buggery fuck have I been doing with my life"? And then, in your 1st world despair, you drink all the advocaat and eat all the cheese footballs you possess and after the extravagant vomiting has ended you say, "Fuck it. Imma make my own list. With blackjack & hookers". And then you just make some lists because you wouldn't know where to start with the casino/brothel portion of the project.

I like making lists.

Here is a needlessly aggressive list.

TOP TEN SONGS MY IPOD SAYS I HAVE LISTENED TO THE MOST THIS YEAR

According to the playcount in i-tunes these are the songs my ipod claims I have listened to more than any other this year. Pencils ready.

1. Saro - Samamidon (82 plays)

The. Most. Beautiful. Song. Ever. I cried a little when I first heard it because I had no other way of articulating the happysadterror it made me feel for which there is probably a German word. You can stick your Robbie Williams Angels balls up your clearly demented backside.

2. Hold Yuh (Major Lazer Remix) - Gyptian (79 plays)

Yeah, so, I sometimes like to jerk about to terrible dance music when everyone's gone to bed. What of it?

3. Days Of Our Lives - Restless People (72 plays)
See point 2. Shut up.

4. Nellie The Elephant - Mandy Miller (63 plays)

Now. You may be expecting some sort of explanation at this point. But that would only encourage you.

5. Generator 1st Floor - Freelance Whales (62 plays)

It must be obvious to you at this juncture that I get all my music recommendations from Hype Machine.

6. Strictly Game - Harlem Shakes (60 plays)

"This will be a better year" they said. No. No it won't.

7. Big Casino - Jimmy Eat World (60 plays)

I am as baffled as you are.

8. BTSTU - Jai Paul (57 plays)

Just leave it, yeah?

9. Stop The Cavalry - Jona Lewie (54 plays)

And it's not even fucking christmas. Sarah Palin aint got nothing on my maverickicity.

10. Bye Bye Bye - School Of Seven Bells (48 plays)

Listen carefully and you'll notice that there are actually 4 'Byes' used in the song chorus itself. What's that all about?

Now. I'm not saying my i-pod's a lying scumbag or anything like that. Except my i-pod is quite obviously a lying scumbag. Which will bring us to another list any minute day now. Soon. Possibly. Definitely before 2012 the heat death of the universe. If I have time.

Bitter

Fleeting sun
spurs on winter,
drawing in it's carriage of
silver.

Stinging air whistles
the same repetitive music,
weaving thin strands
of sugar-white through
naked trees.

Songless skies,
no longer drone
with lazy warmth,
and echo emptiness

as the frozen sun

shrinks

with every

shrinking day,

a sponge
drawing the light away.

I'm Making A Note Here, Huge Success

Still alive.*
Just.

Now where were we?
When we left our hero she was hanging off Big Bens' minute hand with the stolen microfilm stuffed into her bra. The Nazi spy pursuing her had put away his Luger and was simply waiting for the clock to tick its way from the horizontal safety of quarter to the hour and towards the certain vertical death of midnight...

No. No, wait...No, I remember now. That was a dream. I was the Nazi. The part of me was played by Russ Abbot, the part of Big Ben was played by the talking clock from Beauty & the Beast.

No. When we last spoke I was whinging on about showing myself up for a shallow, callous, moron on Twitter.

Yeah. So.

You know that episode of Futurama where Bender starts going out with Planet Express Ship? Yeah, you do. And there's this montage of Bender singing Daisy Daisy to it. Her. Whatever. Here it is.

http://youtu.be/mu_9gADvmyg (Can't embed for some reason)

And then Bender walks into a room and is all

"Well, I'm sick of her"

Yeah. That's pretty much me and Twitter.

Actually, that's pretty much me and being alive at the minute.

End of Act II

*I haven't, however, been doing any science. Except for not tidying the bathroom to see how long it'll take for someone else to clean it. That's like an experiment or something isn't it? In which case, I've totally been doing science.

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.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.