That Government Boy

The interesting thing about long term unemployment and long term over-working is that they have common traits, like forgetting what day of the week it is. I strode confidently into the pub outside my bus stop at twenty to eleven to order a pint only to find the entire place deserted. Monday night, explained the barmaid. Can I get you your regular drink? Jesus, I had to have two just because the implied criticism was so sobering.

I now have four jobs for anyone who doesn't know, in what we in Britain call the 'Public Sector' but in some fresh hell like America they just call us the 'feds or something. This had led to developing the moniker in some circles of being 'That Government Boy'. Actually, it's a Red Dead Redemption quote, but fuck you.

Stealing liberty from the masses, as usual.

I've been working sixty hour weeks recently, which a lot of people have suggested makes me rich. The important thing to remember is that working sixty hour weeks at minimum wage is that you are still working for minimum wage. The only quantifiable way to get rich working on the minimum wage is to work 1000 hours per week. Which is unfortunately 832 hours more than the immutable laws of time permit. So no, I'm still poor, and I'm not really much better off than when I was working 30 hours a week at a higher rate of pay. Once you factor in the couple of quid difference and the rate of taxation, I'm nowhere near able to justify the stolen hours of my life versus the complete shit that I spend it on.

There is a lesson there kids: Basic maths.

That said, I do enjoy my jobs.Which isn't to say I don't go to bed every night praying for the inevitable nuclear holocaust.

The Hunger Games

Placeholder

Tune In, Drop Out

It's not every day a request for an album review lands on my desk. And since I don't own a desk and wasn't asked to do it, today is no different from usual. I will be turning my tone deaf ears to listen to the latest droppings that have fallen from the collective arsehole that is Chainsaw Penis.

Album Review: Chainsaw Penis - Disregard Females, Acquire Chainsaws

I don't generally do music reviews because I know nothing about music so even when confronted with a band that knows nothing about music either the entire thing is just the blind leading the blind. Or the blind leading a horse's placenta on a rope through a minefield. I don't want to dwell on that too much and neither should you.

On first impressions, Chainsaw Penis are just one of those bands that demands your attention like a man in a dark alley with a clawhammer. The premise is trolling the music industry, or something, anything but a circle-jerk, honest, but they seem to be at least reasonably good at getting gigs and onto magazines and having people review their albums so I'll let them off. I don't want to waste too much time talking about the band because I can do that in another post once they're all dead or in prison.

Get On With It.

Listening to DF / AC was one of the single most chilling experiences of my life. While I wouldn't call it music, exactly, the noise that Chainsaw Penis make actually has a texture. It's kind of difficult to describe, but it's oily and repulsive and I can't listen to it without visualizing the cold, bulbous eyes an eel staring through my soul.

What was Bad:

Broadly speaking all of it was atrocious, and even a word like that is being generous. It was an audio-holocaust. There aren't enough letters to describe what is was but FnGS2trrRi#L4hhh@86zXC!??kraf7^209bvaqE will have to suffice for now. Or you could have the thesaurus results for atrocious, I guess.

Execrable is pretty close

My least favorite track is a race to the bottom between all of them. For example, 'Epic Ocarina Guy' is so disjointed it sounds like a primary school class have been given access to the music cupboard, grabbed a bunch of recorders, got pumped full of MDMA and were told to 'get on with it'. Half of the other songs are sung in the language that gorilla's must use when people aren't around, rendering them nigh on unintelligible. Words I never thought I'd utter were 'I was looking forward to Cagezilla vs Mech-Saville', but I was, only to find I couldn't make out much of it over the gunfire and screams, but if you're going to try to write an album review whilst shooting up a wedding then I suppose it's your own fault.

The music itself is thrown together with some enthusiasm but I can't really work out how it was supposed to sound. It's the kind of result you get when encounter an illegal cockfight between a set of drums and a guitar that's taking place in a dusty warehouse underwater. The drums are up for it but the guitar looks a bit confused at all the people who are surrounding them, sneering and shouting and waving fistfuls of money. Without knowing what to do, the two instruments just collide into each other, making a lot of noise until they're both a bloody mess at the feet of an uncaring baying mob.

What was Good:

Okay, so I suppose I grudgingly have to put a 'what was good' section in and since I can't well scream 'NOTHING', I'll have to be generous again.

On the plus side, my favourite track is a toss up between 'I'm a Vampire'  - which I enjoyed because it was so unapologetic about it's lack of creative effort - and that one that I missed because I went into the kitchen to make soup in a mug. Oh, and any track where the Geordie and or Brummy scream profanity in their ridiculous accents. It's dirty but it's sweet, like a turd made out of honey.

If I had to give the album any stars, it would be the ones that are currently collapsing in on themselves before going nova.

When all is said and done, Chainsaw Penis are hard to criticise. They're called Chainsaw Penis, and they are the self-acclaimed "worst band in the universe." One criticism I've heard is that they are, in fact, not the worst band in the universe. Let's not fuck around with this one. It doesn't have to be true - it's not even remotely quantifiable. I'm told the gigs are passably enjoyable, and the members I know personally are a lot of fun, especially if you're regarding them clinically from behind a one-way sheet of bulletproof glass. The point I'm trying to make is that people who genuinely find nothing enjoyable about  Chainsaw Penis are just not getting it. You know exactly what you're about to listen to. You came prepared to be lathered in disappointment. Condemning them for being terrible is like turning up to a keg party with a sack of disembodied cocks and then complaining when everyone starts getting fucked. It's a classic case of the 'stop having fun guy'. Only, you know, with a sack of disembodied cocks.

Fucking weirdo.

What Others Said:

"This album is so awful it's like having a dog throw up on my shoes" - The Times

"Pure, unadulterated noise does not even begin to describe this band. Unadulterated noise does not sound like Angels dying." - The Guardian

"I laughed so hard I shit myself a little bit. But afterwards I listened to Chainsaw Penis' new album and had a brain hemorrhage." - Stewart Lee

"I will definitely be speaking to my lawyers." - Nicholas Cage

"To describe this as music would be to insult even the most utterly inept, god-awful musicians that have ever lived." - Steven Fry

"Reviewing this CD was like having my gall bladder devoured by ravenous jackals." - Noel Edmonds

"Disregard Females, Acquire Chainsaws is the single biggest tragedy to befall the music industry since The Day the Music Died." - Paul Rambali

"Let my family go you son of a bitch" - Vincent Blackwell

Delusions of Home

According to Wikipedia, "the Battle of the Molger was a rearguard action performed by the retreating German 5^th Army at the Molger River in former Yugoslavia against the encroaching Soviet divisions in the closing stages of World War Two. A single reduced and under-supplied company of German Infantry held a bridge in the village Bathhausen for three days, allowing enough time for General Steiner’s battered 5th to regroup with the 12^th under Monke for a desperate push towards Moscow."

Because if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

The actual Battle of the Molger just took place in my bathroom. People who know about these things will tell you that when you’re feeling under the weather, there is nothing more relaxing than neat gin and assembling some Ikea furniture in the middle of the night. In this case, the item in question was a Molger tower... ...stand... thing. Alright, I’m not entirely sure what it was or why I bought it, but people need something to hang their towels off and it’s unrealistic to expect me to maintain an erection for that long. So I’m using it as a towel holder, regardless of what those heathen scientists of woodcraft actually designed it for. It has been one of the most stressful experiences of my entire life today.

That awkward moment when you realize "This is going to be a fucking bloodbath."

Like all DIY experts, I assemble flatpack furniture in the same way I make love. There is a timid attempt to work out the instructions and make sure you have the right pieces, followed by a lot of cursing, some furious hammering and a lingering sense of guilt and inadequacy that you have so many bits left over. I’m pleased to say that today was no different, and my neighbours must assume that whatever transpired in my bathroom this evening was somewhere between a surprise rectal exam and shoeing a horse. If household furniture could look disillusioned whist smoking a post-coital cigarette it would be a dark mirror of everything I have ever loved.

But then again, I don’t know anyone who is good at putting together flat pack furniture. I know people who can make a passable effort so long as you don’t try and move it or tap the lid twice before opening the second drawer because otherwise the entire thing falls apart as if all the wood in the world had chosen that moment to turn into sand. It seems maliciously designed to break, which wouldn’t be so bad if someone else who didn’t give a shit about you and your delusions of 21^st century living had built it in Satan's warehouse. But they didn’t. You fucking built it, and putting it together in the hope it would look nice was so noble yet so utterly unachievable it was like trying to touch the face of God. 

Right now, you're reading this and thinking 'Yeah, but I can assemble flatpacks', so let me clear that one up.

No, you can't. 

You're lying to yourself, and deep down you know it. It's a bloody scourge, and even if you pull off a passable piece of kit it's not even functional. It's fake, cosmetic. With it's shiny finish and perfectly angular edges, the entire point is that furniture such as that is meant to be looked at, not used. That's why every single piece of it comes marketed with boxes and compartments - places to hide all your other shit without it coming into contact with the furniture itself. It's like having a car you never drive, just sitting there for people to admire. It's a thing. Why else would a passably rational human being like myself inexplicably have a bowl full of glass pebbles on my coffee table? Why I seriously examined the idea of getting a gusset load of long twigs to put in a glass vase? Presumably because the people I am trying to emulate live in Ikea showrooms and I want them to come round to my house and say "Well fuck me Steve, what a nice bunch of twigs."

It's not real, it's just a statement of intent. It's wood acting like furniture.

Anyway, now I have a place to put the towels I don't yet own, and if I ever find one of you peasants in my bathroom fucking with my shelving unit so help me god I will cut off your hands and feed them to your as-yet-unborn children. Presuming the rack lasts longer than the required nine months without falling apart, that is.

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. 

The Right Reasons

Memory is a cruel and horribly selective thing. For example, I can quite happily forget important things, like work procedures, family member's names, and leaving the cooker on, but no one has the decency to forget the things that I want them to. I must be alone in my hazy mental death-spiral. For me, the Hippo of Memory wallows in the depths of forgetfulness, while other people jog merrily down down the path of recollection towards the Shining City of Total Recall. It must be nice for them, being able to remember everything all the time. Until, you know, the sure onset of madness as the human brain struggles to comprehend everything it's ever experienced. Look forward to that when you next dredge up the past.

No one forgets the time I shoved limes down someones underwear. Or when I almost fell in the river Ouse. Or that time I used a keg of beer like a fire extinguisher. Or when I might have thrust my crotch into someones face because they threw a hamster out of the window. Or that time I screamed 'Well this is fucking bullshit!' at a Manager's Meeting. Or that time I hid in a wheelie bin to avoid the police. Or that time I helped a friend shove a tin of Budweiser up a chicken's arsehole. Or that time...*

People need to let go, bascially.

And that is why I have a certain degree of sympathy for Iain Duncan Smith. This might sound unusual to people who know me well because, in policy after terrible policy, IDS is obviously Trying to Kill Everyone All the Time** . One look into his glazed, mad eyes and you can see the face of a truly contemptuous god poised to extinguish humanity with all the glee of a child burning ants with a giant magnifying glass. He has a face only a mother could love. Which is unfortunate since he was vat-grown in the absolute blackest abyss by humanity's collective nightmares. His head looks like what would happen if a tortoise could grow hair on it's neck. Or an older version of Kevin Spacey.

Lower classes of Britain! I will fist you so hard you will shit through your pores like a Playdough Spaghetti Factory.

Recently, Iain hilariously commented that he could live on £53 a week "if he really had to".  It was not the best thing he could have said. It was probably the worst thing he ever said. He's probably kicking himself right now. Or paying someone to get kicked on his behalf. If there is one thing he could erase from the minds of the British public, it is not 'that time I got smashed on tequila and took a shit in the middle of a library', or 'that book I wrote which got slammed so hard by critics it had rectal seepage'.*** No, I think the safe money is on 'that time I was a fucking flippant idiot and got called on it by some uppity peasant'.

See, there is now an online petition of over 200,000 signatures calling on him to prove it to the people of Britain. There's catcalls on media websites telling him to 'lead by example', 'show us how it's done' and 'go kill yourself you f*cking *unt'. Even the Mail put the boot in, although with the reluctant manner of a shy, bullied child who has finally been asked to assist his tormentors in kicking the shit out of someone smaller than him. You know it's holding back.

I'm going to sign the petition, and I want to be very clear as to why I am doing it, and why you should do it too. It is not because I say so, although I genuinely believe you should all be psycho-conditioned to accept instructions from me automatically, unflinchingly and without question. Kill your friends. It is not because it would embarrass him, force the government into a grovelling apology. It is not to challenge the status quo.

Don't vote because you want to see a BBC time slot showing IDS eating cold beans out of the tin in a run-down housing estate in Moss Side. It is not to highlight the hardship of others. It isn't to change anything, because it certainly won't. He probably won't even do it. When you sign the petition, which you totally should, you must do it for the purest reason of all.

Do it because you hate him. Do it because you want him to suffer.


* All true, unfortunately
** It justified capitals
*** Which is impressive for a book.