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.

The Blame Game

 A bit of a weak re-entry into the blogosphere, but right now I'm so impotently pissed off with just about everything, I thought I'd have a rant. Also, because it's important. And also because I'm trapped in a box for the next five hours, and have already been here for four.

I managed to fantastically screw up at work the other week by forgetting one single thing off a giant checklist. It could have been completely unnoticed apart from a string of ludicrous and unfair coincidences that resulted in shit creek bursting it's banks and cascading, wholesale through my place of employment.  Complaints made by people who are legally in the right but morally in the wrong had gone to the highest level and the resultant fall-out, to go back to the earlier point, is like a shit-tsunami. It retreated briefly, luring us all forward to gaze at the fish flapping on the empty sea-bed before crashing back like a huge, smelly disaster film. Entire villages were wiped out by the rolling sea of effluent.

I'm pretty sure that life is a sick game where the idea is to pass on as much blame as possible while avoiding any yourself. If it helps, imagine its like an Al Qaeda children's party where the traditional pass-the-parcel is actually a bomb, and the goal of which is to kill everyone. Also there is no cake. Wait, that's a shit metaphor. A better example is my water bill.

My water bill is split into two invoices which go to make up the full total. The first invoice is for the water I am assumed to use, although god only knows how they work that out. The second is for collection of the water that falls on my house. That's right, I pay for the water that falls on my house. As if that was my fucking fault. It doesn't matter if I own the house or rent the house. All that matters is my geographical relationship to the building, apparently. Am I near it? Yes. Is it raining? Fuck you.

If anything, it's victim blaming. I didn't ask to be rained on. It just happened to me. I did nothing to deserve it, and I don't even like rain. Victim blaming is so endemic in our society it is almost a national pass-time.

Everyone knows that if you wear a chequered shirt, you're gonna have a bad time.

Let's make it a bit more serious. Let's escalate it from inconvenient weather into stuttering, jowl-wobbling contempt perpetrated by Daily Mail readers against people on benefits. The Mail are so renown for this that 'inciting hatred' had to be removed from the Olympic Games on account of being a foregone conclusion. Pointing out that hating on the Mail has become a cliche has become a cliche in of itself. It is where the most abhorrent of people find the comforting self-assurance of their fellow reptiles.

It isn't just Mail readers who hate the poor. Anyone can hate people on benefits for no particular reason. But nothing quite encapsulates the blinding, gnashing contempt that humans can have for other humans quite like the Mail comment section. Hate the player, not the game. Blame the people who least deserve it. Sorrel - who became a minor celebrity recently - posted this sound advice. 

 But wait, it gets better. And when I say it gets better, I mean it gets much, much fucking worse.

Almost the 'trope namer' for Victim Blaming is the attitude that people have towards rape victims. The sheer, blind hatred of wilful ignorance that possesses a person to have a go at someone who has been sexually violated, usually in defence of the perpetrator. The victim instead is then put under intense scrutiny - their clothes, attitudes, social standing, previous sexual experiences and even geographical location are all used by victim-blamers to, well...

Yeah.**

Name that trope.

A drunk girl is raped by two young American High school players. Nothing is said about the victim on national TV reels, which lament the boys loss 'promising careers' etc. Meanwhile, social networking explodes as people not constrained by the threat of a lawsuit start calling her a whore, questioning why she was drunk and the like. Because those are the the big things, right? How did she get drunk? It's kind of important BECAUSE NO IT FUCKING ISN'T.

I don't know what drives a society to become a baying, howling mass of people who are presumably cynical, jaded and powered entirely by blinding hatred. I could take a few guesses, but I'd probably just end up roaming the streets howling like a feral dog and attacking anyone - anyone - on sight.

And right now, I think it'd be their fault.

* This is probably one of their nicer articles. It's the comment section that'll get you.
** Trigger Warning. Also, probably the best argument against gun control I have ever seen. A positive marketing strategy for nuclear holocaust.

The Hall of Fame

I've not written anything in a long time, not properly anyway, and writing is one of those things I can't just dip in and out of. Getting back into posting anything even remotely offensive funny after such an absence has been more than even my collosal intellect can deal with. So, here is a post about me. And since posts about people who write them are genuinely cringe inducing, it's probably better if you don't read this in a location where vomting is not fashionable, like work or during a funeral.

Oh, and the formatting is messed up because the pictures wouldn't load properly because the council computer wouldn't publish the work and because... beacuse fuck you.

Truth be told, it's less about me and more about people I look like. I have, in the last ten years, been compared to a lot of different people/animals, and the runaway favourite to win 'who do I look like' is 'a total fucking prick'. But since they're ten a penny, we'll go straight onto the runners up. In first (second) place is:

1) Neo - The Matrix

The glazed, mis-matched stare of a man who really hates cereal.

"Here, it's fucking Neo!"

Yeah. I used to get that a lot. The main problem was that I wore a big black coat beause OMG I'M A GOTH*. So I guess I brought it upon myself. But since I need to have a carthic venting experience about the years of abuse I suffered, I'm going to say that it was deeply unfair at the time. I hadn't even seen the Matrix, and certainly did not hang around looking mopey and pretending I was a vampire, which was the acceptable alternative.

Pros: Flying, stopping bullets, being the hero, being right all the time because other people are fucking sheep plugged into a giant machine etc etc.

Cons: Keanu Reeves. Everything.

2) Snape - Harry Potter

Everyone has a hot teacher. Even blind, parapelegic war-veterans.

Incidentally, it wasn't 'Snape' when I was first compared to Snape. It was 'Hey, are you Alan Rickman?' Since my entire association with Alan Rickman is his incarnation as an evil German Hans Grubber in Die Hard. It was only later did I realize he meant the sex-on-legs teacher in the Dark Arts, with greasy palid skin and an expression that ranges between 'I hate you' and 'What the fuck am I/are you doing?'. I've never had much to do with the Harry Potter series, but I gather he's fairly important. I also gather he dies. And that he's a prick anyway so no one cares.

Pros: He's a fucking Wizard

Cons: He's a dick. He's also ugly as sin, which whilst that would be a step up for me, isn't exactly going to get me into bed with anyone. Well, anyone I'd want to end up in bed with.

3) John Cusack 

I guess look a lot like that. Only much uglier and less stupid.

 I don't think I've ever seen a John Cusack film. Being John Cusack kind of just happened to me one day - I can't quite remember why. I suppose, since I have a leather jacket, and all the important facial features, I could look a bit like John Cusack. I wouldn't know.

Pros: There are worst people to be compared to. Evil-minded people. With evil minds.

Cons: There are better people to be compared to. On balance, since I don't really know much about John Cusack, it's rather like being compared to anyone else I don't know anything about.

4) Winnona Ryder

I don't know either. I occasionally have a beard just to start with.

This one definately had me stumped. I assume they meant 'Winnona Ryder when she had long hair', 'the back of Winnona Ryder from a distance in poor light,' or maybe 'Winnona Ryder when she looked more like you'. It has been many years since anyone compared me to Winnona Ryder*, but it still had to make the cut. I included it only because it was weird, and that made it strangely fascinating, like a complicated murder investigation. It's kind of flattering, I suppose.

Pros: ???

Cons: ???

5) Jeremy Irons - The Lion King

Without the ears and claws, he'd make a great Rasputin.

I cheated a bit on the last one. I've never actually been compared to Jeremy Irons. I have often been called Scar, though. I'm pretty sure this fits in with people's middle-class sensibilities on young men who have nicknames and look like they'd slip a knife in your ribs for a chicken sandwich before making off with your cherished ramekins and Ikea 'bundle of sticks in a vase'.* The truth of the matter is I'm only guilty of having a thick accent and friends who find solace in not using my real name. I suppose that's in case they say it backwards too many times and I tear my way out of the body of a nearby pedestrian.

My nickname is Scarf, and because us fuckin' 'ard Notherners (In-ger-land! In-ger-land!) do not have have soft nicknames unless they can be delivered in a deeply sinister way, like Billy 'the Silk' Smith or 'Smoothie' Matthew MacStabberson, people mishear what other people are saying.

"Scar? He's called Scar? He sounds like a faaackin' nutjob."

Scarf. There's a story as to why I'm called Scarf, and it is dull as a wooden spoon. It does not involve any strangulation, bondage, or other things you can do with a scarf if you were, in fact, a faaackin' nutjob. Scarf doesn't have the same 'quake in terror' connocations of 'Oh no, here comes Scar.'

Pros: Jeremy Irons is awesome. Also the ability to sing reasonably well. And the fact that people make room for you in a pub because they think you're a double wiskey away from cutting off their face.

Cons: The truth is horribly underwhelming.

  

* I'm not, and never was.

* Her name gets weirder the more you say it. Winnona, Win-no-nah, Winn-none-a, Whin-oh-nah.

* I wouldn't do that unless it was a really nice sandwich, or if I had better things to do.

Keeping Up Appearances

So I haven't updated this blog in about six weeks, but you don't need me to tell you that. You don't need me to tell you anything, you clever monkey. And if you're expecting an explaination, you might just get one, but it won't be the usual hilarious fare that I offer.

A lot of reasons people don't like 'the truth' - apart from it being an abstract construct usually only relevant to whoever is weilding it like a cudgel - is that it is boring. The truth is often so boring and uninteresting that it just gets passed over. You might do a thousand things in one day but they're so monotonous and pointless they aren't worth commenting on. So people often invent a different kind of truth to hold up as a shield to mundanity. Of course the royal family are reptillian space lizards. Because I don't like them, and I'm a decent person who gets on well with people, so they must be lizards, right?* The truth, in my case, is that I have just been really busy.

Ok, I will. I've just been really busy.

In the last three months I have celebrated Christmas** like everyone else. I've had minor surgery. I've moved house twice. The first was following a dramatic falling out between gravity and my landlord's laptop, which resulted in me doing a midnight imperession of Usain Bolt while fleeing the scene. The second is into my new home, which I kinda own. YEAH, IT'S A BIG ASS DEAL, PEASANTS. I've taken on so much work that my life has been recently characterised by the various different locations in which I get paid to log into Facebook. Anyways, yeah. Houses take a lot of work. So does work, incidentally.

No, it wasn't that funny and I promise I'll write something where I am literally boiling with rage in the near future, since you souless bastards seem to thrive on it. I have to go now, because I'm in a library and the computer countdown timer is tick-tick-ticking it's way to merry hell. I only really updated this today so that I could say I popped one off in January.

Hah.

* This may not be a shield against mundanity quite so much as being crazier than a sack of... OH DEAR GOD. In the library, a tiny child won't be quiet and has now broken into a chilling rendition of 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' like the cinematic trailer for Dead Space. I think I'm cracking. No, fuck that. I AM CRACKING.

** I didn't celebrate it, it just happened to me.

Playing By the Rules

So, fuck you society.

I went into the Orange shop the other day, because I have decided they are slightly less evil than Vodafone on the basis that they offer me a 20% discount for being a local government employee, and - importantly - don't shove dead babies through my letterbox.

After wasting a considerable amount of time being absolutely dicked about by the most fearsome amount of bureaucracy I have ever encountered*, the man tapped away on his computer and said.

"No."

No, that was it. No you cannot have a phone with us, you horrible little man. You can't have a phone because you have a bad credit rating - or rather - you don't have a credit rating at all. See the thing is, I've never really been in debt. Like a fucking chump, I play by the rules. I pay my bills on time, I don't own a credit card, I don't have an overdraft. So no, I can't have a phone, because I've never borrowed money.

You cannot join the army. You've never actually killed anyone and that makes us suspicious.

The gentleman behind the desk suggested that I get into debt with a credit card, then pay it off. After all, it will improve my credit rating and I get to buy stuff, right? I suggested that he get himself a bulletproof face, then left. I have a phone contract. Hell, I'm getting a mortgage*. That's not good enough for Orange. It might have been because I conveniently forgot where I'd been living for the last three years due to a combination of awful memories and fraudulent activity. I'm pretty sure it was the credit rating, though.

To compound my thoroughly bad day, I returned to my old landlord's place to collect my chest of drawers, only to have the van driver turn up with a van you couldn't conceivably fit a cat into even if you put it through a blender.

"I should have probably emptied this," he said glumly. Well yeah, probably. I said I needed to move a chest of drawers, not two matchboxes and a chilled yogurt. After that I went to work where the supervisor in charge screamed "Well fuck off then!" at the top of her lungs and shoved me out of the way when I refused to do things that weren't in my job description. Getting assaulted in the workplace - cool way to end the day.

If there is a moral to this story, it seems to be that the next time you get a chance between fucking yourself and not fucking yourself, you should probably just go right ahead and fuck yourself. It's a more acceptable style of behaviour.



* Considering I work for a Council that keeps three daily spreadsheets on the movement of small cakes, it was pretty fucking feirce. 
 *Propetarian, I know, but if I'm going to get fucked by landlords, I might as well be fucking myself.

Wrapping Up

I haven't really updated this blog properly for awhile. I'm going to cite that is due to creative differences between me and the voices in my head. So to get back into the swing of things, I'll do a wrap up of what's been happening in the world aside from the endless crescendo of human anguish, which is just not as funny.

Unicorn Lair Discovered in North Korea

Bolstering claims that North Korea is best Korea, scientists and archaeologists in the closed state have discovered - or rediscovered - a unicorn lair. Helpfully, there is a sign outside that states 'This is a unicorn lair.' It is believed that the horned inhabitants were once ridden by King Tongmyong, founder of the Koryo Kingdom from 3rd century BC to 7th century AD.

Because why the fuck not?

Fox Steals Phone, Harrasses Friends.

When Lars Bjercke downloaded an App that imitated the sounds that rabbits make, he thought he was onto a winner. What can one do with such limitess power? Communicate with rabbits, make an infuriating and incormprehensible sat-nav*, create a particularly devious cipher for talking in sceret, or even mesh the noises into a pieces of elctro or synth to create groundbreaking new music. Instead, in a poorly-thought out plan, he used it to lure foxes into his back garden.

Subsequently, a fox stole his unattended phone.

Not content with stealing the phone, the fox went on to answer calls made to the handset, denying Bjercke the chance to trackdown his shanghaied communicator. If this wasn't enough, the cunning bastard then sent text messages to Bjercke's friends, written in the whimsical language of foxes. Although no two-legged meat-sack can understand them, it was probably - as the link postulates - to gloat about his success. Because I imagine that's what foxes do.

The fox is linked to a skulk responsible for a series of petty crimes in the area.

Spy Sues Cops for 'Failing to Prevent Love'.

Former undercover cop Mark Kennedy - aka Mark Stone - who infiltrated an environmentalist group, is suing the Met since they failed to stop him from falling in love. He claims that despite destroying many lives and participating in a Big-Brother style surveillance operation, he is the real victim. Mr. Kennedy wants between £50,000 and £100,000 in compensation for personal injury, loss of job/earnings, loss of wife/girlfriend and for destroying his reputation. His reputation, presumably, as an all round good-guy who cheats on his wife, lies to his lovers, grasses on his mates, and works for the police. So Karma was all like, "Stand back guys, I got this."

He feels so betrayed.

*In my experience, this is all of them