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.
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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
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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.

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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