Monday 21 February 2011

I am with you in Rockland

Oh, hello there debilitating mental and physical exhaustion, thought I'd lost you for a minute there! But it's okay, you're still here, ruining my life. *smile* What's that now? You'd like me to fall asleep in the bath and almost drown? Why, I don't mind if I do!

Welcome, welcome. Would you care for a hot beverage? I'll put a little milk on to boil while we get down to business.

Firstly, Jamie Oliver, if you're reading this, GET THE FUCK OFF MY TELEVISION. I'm sick of seeing you and your cringe-worthy idiosyncrasies.

My apologies for my absence of late. As you may have read in recent publications, I'm still ill, suffering with debilitating mental and physical exhaustion. It takes me a long time to organise my thoughts at the moment, so I've had some trouble coming up with a good topic for discussion. You know, something as stimulating and relevant as usual.

I'm currently very excited about the release of Howl, a biopic on the obscenity trial following the publication of Allen Ginsberg's EPIC poem, Howl. I was going to go into the intricacies of my love for both the poet and this poem, but every time I tried, I couldn't do it justice. I just suggest that you read it...and feel the immense power of the written word enveloping you, transporting you, changing you.

Goosebumps, folks, big juicy ones. Here's a photograph of Allen that I took this one time. I consider it my homage to a hero.



I'll be looking for someone to go to the film with; all applicants should send a ONE PAGE A4 letter detailing why they think they're suitable for the position as well as any relevant experience they may have. I don't want a formal letter, that just shows you can write formal letters. I want to read YOU.

Anyway, that's pretty much it. I have a whole list of things that I was going to write about, but it's just too...involving.

Here's a pseudo-poem I'm thinking about writing:

Your eyes are like windows into a little shop
that sells chocolates, the likes of which
have never been dreamt of;
where children stand gazing in -
the scene from a movie where the direction
reads, "Act hungry, like dogs";
where an elderly woman sits, darning furiously,
her fingertips hardened to the prick of the needle,
her face set and cast
in a deep orange light thrown out
by the small lanterns that surround her.


Ah, there's the milk. One cup or two?

Tuesday 1 February 2011

This One Goes Out to the One I Killed

Yesterday on my way to work I was troubled by something. I wasn't quite sure what it was until I got into Leeds and found my legs carrying me towards the stationary obsessives' paradise, Paperchase. As a self-confessed stationary obsessive, I knew then what it was that had been troubling me.

Having visited Paperchase a few days prior to this troubled state, I remembered that I'd seen My-New-Favourite-Range. I have a My-New-Favourite-Range at Paperchase every few months and I have to own at least one item from My-New-Favourite-Range otherwise a baby elephant will die. And as we all know, for every baby elephant that dies, Satan earns £1 with which to do evil. In other words, it's very very necessary for me to buy new stationary very frequently.

I got myself a big, hardback jotter and a pen that can do SIX COLOURS. Yessssss. I'm going to use these items especially for my blog. I know, I know, these volumes I produce seem like the rambling thoughts of a deranged nine-year-old, but really, I take an awful lot of time to bring you these insights into my life. Plus it's always good to have a hard copy in case computers go AWOL and start eating our hands so we can no longer type and then we die out because we can't make omelettes any more and then an alien race comes to earth and kills the computers with special vaporising guns and the only evidence they have of what life was like for humans are the details as recorded in my big, hardback jotter filled with blog-drafts.

And so to my point: I spent yesterday at work trying my best not to think about My-New-Favourite-Range. All the way home on the bus I didn't even look at what I'd bought. Then it was time to get off.

For regular readers, you'll know that riding the bus is a very traumatic experience for me and that I'm quite specific about where I'm willing to sit. Because it's now winter, my preferences have changed since the last time I mentioned them, but that's another story. All you need to know is that I was sat upstairs. Oh, and because of my mystery illness, I'm extra clumsy at the moment.

So I pushed the bell and went down the stairs, naturally scared for my life. When I got to the bottom there was an elderly man stood there (in this case, elderly means late-60s). I insisted that he go before me, but then he insisted that I go before him. We back and forth insisted at one another seconds on end, until the bus had almost stopped, so I just went for it. As I hurried down the last two steps, my bag, containing my big, hardback jotter got caught. So I pulled. I pulled and the bus jerked to a stop because bus drivers don't understand the concept of "gentle braking". And yes! You guessed it! My bag swung round and hit the elderly man IN THE FUCKING FACE.

Mortified. I walked home feeling like a really terrible person. And managed to convince myself that I'd probably triggered a sequence of events that would lead to the man's death. I had inadvertently murdered an elderly gentleman.

But then I realised why this had happened. I OBVIOUSLY didn't buy enough items from My-New-Favourite-Range, which meant several baby elephants died and then Satan did some evil.

And so the moral of this aimless, fairly boring story: Satan is a shit, do not appease.



(NB: Yes I apologised to the man. And no, I don't think he's actually dead now.)