In English, Please

It isn't unusual for my to begin writing a blog whilst I am drunk and raging incoherently. Some of the efforts I've been proudest of have been written halfway through a binge, when some terrible, stark realisation about the futility of the human condition has overcome my mind, possessed my fingers, and forced an oozing path from my brain into the ether. Tonight, it has been the news.

There are a lot of bad things in the news recently. By now, everyone is aware of the terrible violence in Woolwich a few days ago. I'm not writing about that now, because its serious and important, and better saved for another day. No, the article on the news tonight that has turned me into an incensed toad is from that most glorious of newspapers, the Independent.

I figured since I don't have a working T.V but do have a working phone, I'd get news apps which could keep me up to date with the world and also be trendy at the same time.* No one wants to be a woolly jumpered Guardian reader, so I opted for the Independent on the basis that it wasn't as completely evil as the remaining options. I'll hold my hand up now and say I was wrong. It is evil. The Independent is thoroughly, irredeemably stained with an indelible - and remember that word, it will be important later - an indelible curse.

If you've been fortunate enough to avoid reading the Independent, then here is an except from today's frontpage. This is about the closure of Birmingham library, and if you listen very closely, you can hear the mournful peels of the bells that they ring whenever an overly florid, pretentious journalist - through a bout of misty-eyed sentimentalism - KILLS THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE a little more.

"If only there was a less grandiloquent way of expressing 'The duck a'la orange titillated my palate with the raw intensity of a lover's kiss. Food so divine I was forcibly contrived to reassess and confront the entire praxis of dietary consumption. For me, this exquisite bounty has been a redemptive tour de force.'

 The Man Who Built Brum: A lament for the demise of John Madin's Brutalist Birmingham.

"The architect's buildings were supposed to leave an indelible, futuristic mark on his beloved hometown, but they are now being inexorably torn down.

My palms are pressed against Birmingham Central Library's rough exterior, but my mind is elsewhere - sifting through memories of kisses and fights. In a recurring dream, I'm the silent spectator watching a blonde-haired heroine wake up at spots around Brimingham where modernism was at it's wildest... ... soon this building might only exist in dreams. The council wants to erase it, and erase the era it represents.

His buildings were supposed to leave an indelible, futuristic mark on his beloved hometown. But they're being inexorably torn down by city fathers whose father's generation clamored for the concrete that's fallen from fashion... 

The mind boggling ziggurat of the Library captivated me... ... A fantasy formented: to write about this building; to write the great Birmingham novel; to being it here. It was a flâneur's apprenticeship: wandering, composing a satire set among the skyscrapers...

... ... prosaic annex... ... save a vision which once flamed bright - but now merely flickers... a forgotten scion of provincial architecture... ... the silent fulcrum."

And done. 

I seriously can't read anymore without shitting out my own guts. I have no idea what this guy is on about, or why. Why is this important? The Independent's Front Page and News section is full of stuff like this. Surely there's something I can do to filter out all the preachy, self indulgent hipster articles highlighting artisan bakeries, existentialist films, underground music venues and other random bullshit that buries all the stuff I actually need to know? The important stuff.

I have no doubt that language is wonderful, but this has to be taking it too far. It sounds like the author is attempting to write Shakespeare's Opus. Between that and accidentally liking 'Secret Cinema' on Facebook, every time I use my phone I have to deal with awful articles like 'The Rise of Chocolate Puritianism' dreadful phrases like 'Love is wild and free. If we were like the wind, the passion in my heart would soar my spirit like a dove.' What the fuck? 

I'd like to think that somewhere deep underground is a giant, screaming ball of flesh and horribly mutated paper. All that remains of a Faustian pact created when a thousand English students performed a Satanic orgy with Roget's Thesaurus and created some kind of literary monster. The tangle of limbs, the shifting, agonised faces on the front cover. Forced to write endless articles to impress Independent readers, who seem to enjoy wasting their time trying to discover new words in an effort to blot out the collapse of civilised society. I know it isn't true, I just think it'd be easier for us all if it was.

Summarised for people who enjoy this sort of thing, I have to say that such stylist posturing by writers obsequiously pandering to the burgeoning emotional neediness of an intellectually troubled middle-class leaves me with no expectation of grandeur in the remainder of humanity. Lamentably, this has left my fragile ego sundered and scarred with inedible bleakness, putting upon me a mantle of despair and a desire to leave this fool's paradise by means of self termination with a blancmange. And so, au revior!**

* I desperately need to feel loved by my peers.
** Translation: Fuck this shit, it makes me want to kill myself with a fancy dessert.

Killing Time

 This is filler, just to get back into writing. If you don't like it, you can do anatomically improbable things to your sexual organs. Or stop reading. Or cut out your eyes. Or all of them, I don't care.

"We are all succumbing to entropy."

At least, that's what someone in a pub told me. The pub is incidental, by the way. The person isn't, in case they feel forgotten. Hello Daniel, thanks for the nightmares.

I was in another pub the other week, because if there is one place you are guaranteed to find a bitter, cynical young man, it is taking out his faux misery on alcohol. Mainly because I enjoy being drunk, but also because we all know tormented alcoholics are cool really and get the best sex and so forth. I was drinking with a workmate, because I don't have any real friends.* We were moaning about relationships, since she is in one that she doesn't like and I have an egalitarian approach to hating everyone who could broadly pass for human. I don't even know why anymore, but that's not the point.

"You're alright, Steve," she said, "You're still young. You can't be more than what, thirty-one, thirty-two?"

I'm twenty-six, and if anyone has ever been in that situation, you will know the absolute spine-tingling chill that shoots down your back like a runaway train. I had, somehow,  transformed from being the fresh-faced young man who always got called out for ID in bars, who dragged everyone down because we'd have to try somewhere else. I was that guy. Now I was thirty-two. And I was just coming to terms with the whole not-a-teenager-anymore syndrome. And still dragging people down.

That's it. It's all over. I might as well be DEAD.

When I got home, I flicked through my phone to write a shopping list** and found another list I'd made. It was 77 days old, according to the phone. The new phone, which I got recently. Which I got 150 days ago. Eleven weeks of my life, just like that. Half of the to-do list was still not done, and I was categorically 77 days more dead than I was when I first wrote it. Despairing, I turned on the X-box, loaded a game, and stared mutely at the screen which told me I was 123 hours through my fifth playthrough.

I've always thought You Only Live Once, was more a stark reminder of the frailty of human life than an excuse to go planking on a train track. After all, most of the time you hear people saying 'YOLO', like a cool hipster fuckwit, it's usually before they try and shoot a firework out of their arse, skateboard of the 34th story of an office building, or generally do something stupid, as if doing stupid things starves of the inevitability of death and guarantees invincibility. Thankfully, it doesn't.

So now I'm sat at work, cheerfully reading the "FIVE REGRETS OF THE DYING" on Facebook, because there is nothing really better to do and you can only eat so much popcorn while waiting for a fire to break out. Should one occur, I will leap into action. Until that point, I'll sit here killing time. None of them actually apply to me at all, which is great.

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

I wish I'd had the motivation to live the life some people expected of me, instead of wasting my time.

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

Speaking as a manager, I can categorically say that I have never worked hard in my entire life. I graduated from school two years late, got an extension on my final year at University, and have managed to work myself into a position based entirely on responsibility and not at all on actually visibly doing anything.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

If I had, at any point, expressed my feelings, I would almost certainly be in prison for murder. That is just how it goes. It's for the best.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

See footnote.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

I am fucking ecstatic most of the time, in defiance of what people think. Presumably people assume I spend my spare time folded into a box or crying in a bathtub whilst summoning the courage to kill myself. Or something. I don't let my inner mania show as much as I could, true, because that last time I tried the whole 'positive outlook on the world' thing, I got slapped hard across the face in under an hour by someone who screamed "WHO ARE YOU?". I never went in for positivity after that, since people obviously aren't used to it. Thank you Jez.

In conclusion, there is nothing really to be gleaned from this post at all. Sure, I've recently been painfully reminded that I'm older than I was, but the same can be said for when I first started writing this about half an hour ago. I expect you wanted some sort of wrap-up. Maybe some poor philosophy or something funny. Next you'll want the world.  The only thing I've really picked up on is dear God, I need to get out more.

Also, TV tropes is a huge cancer on the bowels of productivity.
 
* Friends are what happen to other people. Instead, I have a cadre of committed drinkers, more than willing to sit in truculent silence and drink with the steady, relentless determination of the damned. 
** Because I'm a fucking adult, apparently.