Land of Diskgrinder

META: about not of Every once in a while I take myself out (by bootstrap in my navel, hoist by my petard) and look askance at what I have I written. And with that helicopter view I see the curlicues of spiral grammar and allusive circumlocution (because the editor is there) and I have to say this is where I am: happy in the round

Where the bombs in my head go off, one after the other, Making spouting neurone fireworks (touch blue paper and retire to old man resignation dotage where wrinkles conspire to make a map of Mars on my face) That's where, in pleasant green hills grandfatherhood, I will look upon my golden retinue of children and children's children. The perpendicular gothic of stone beams and concrete arches will be a part (apart) of the defining way (a road to, an avenue between). All happy then, indescribable joy descends. Pick the meaning of the preceding, there's something there for all of you.

There's one reader of this blog that may feel some guilt attached, Some unreasonable responsibility. And to you, I have to say, don't take any blame, it's not you, never was you. Be happy in your various pursuits, your imaginings and realisations. It's all the same to me; undifferentiated needle points on the graph. You did your best, and your best was good enough.

Obviously not so very happy at the weekend. Wrote some things I thought were funny at the time (not deleted, still there). Reading them back they still make me smile, but I can see how some could find them offensive.

The homunculus editor in my head falls asleep before I do, and I get to say the things I wouldn't otherwise, like: I went to court for ABH (actual bodily harm), and case dismissed, because, although I harmed the actual body of the plaintiff, the magistrates agreed with me that he (the otherwise bully who poked his pool cue in me, the railwayman) deserved to have his front teeth smashed down his throat - he picked a fight that he should not have picked. I'll tell you about that one day. I love ultra-lounge, listening to perfidia right now gone for another reason too soon, too much

By now you will have realised that this blog is very up its own arse (ass, for you colonials). Here, I only write about me, the me that is. It's cheap therapy for me. I get to write (talk) shite for no cost. But, occasionally, I will break out of my navel-gazing (take my eye off the microscope in my tummy button) and write about something outside the endless introspection. And you know what - it all scans, it has a certain rhythm, a broken pentameter (because there's five), that makes the words move over themselves until they trip over the end of the sentence; the full stop. And I can break that with the opportune injection of a semi-colon; like that. And then I'll stuff an out-of-place conjunction in a place where some other word should be. And. But. But it's narrow in its service to the whole, the accelerating grammar of (something). See what I did there? No? Listening to Elvis now. You were always on my mind. If I made you feel second best. Tell me that you...

... of opening the comment stream, if I don't get comments? Eh? answer me that then. Surely I have been controversial enough to elicit some kind of feedfront? No? Fuck off then. Instead, I will rely on my imaginary friend, who always (invisible and anonymous) pulls me up short, and makes me think in generous ways.

"Again"? Those intelligent nano-pixies are predicting in my hypothalamus

It's not fine, it's not dandy. It's not a part of the bright life I imagined. When, years ago, I looked to the lit path, I didn't see the shadows. If there is a god, a bearded patriarch sitting up on a throne made of atheists' skulls, and if I get up there, and realise that all these sterile years that fucker's been there, my first thought, and last thought before I burn in hell, will be why didn't you tell me: you're omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent; with all that ubiquitous vision and power couldn't you have let me know? I will be exasperated .

Have at it. Still got a capcha, should weed out the botnets.

Pessimistic, miserable drizzling cynics. That's us, a nation of jealous, pasty complainers with bad teeth (well done you, good teeth, but fucked-up healthcare , I know what I prefer - having stained incisors over being a self-medicating trauma victim any day - I'm sorry, sir, you're not insured for involuntary decapitation, have a nice day ). We talk about the weather because we have weather (and a history). And whilst we invented concentration camps and genocide , we didn't feel righteous about it - if there was one reason the British Empire had to exist, it was to destroy the Nazis, and then fuck off into sunset obscurity. To vote (by a landslide) for the dissolution of our evil back in 1945 . But we are still envious, unpleasant snobs. We are still sanctimonious prigs. Joy is anathema to the intellectual Englishman, our forte is complaint and guilt, shame and desperation. You look up, we look at the pavement (it's not a fucking sidewalk). I have made some...

Google Analytics points out the continuing struggle to win the hearts and minds of the parvenu colonials (more green=more hits). Need to find some way of attracting the mid-west. Marshmallow-stuffed turkey ? Because I know you have fairly disgusting diets out there in the nasty blank miles of between. Or maybe I should find god? (Stuck to my sole). Rant incoherently for a while on plainly daft theories of ontology and epistemology? (How do I know I'm evolved from slime-mould?). Or is that too up its own fundamentalism? So if you have a friend (or a backwoods flange of interbred cousins you don't talk about) in the dead miles between cities, drop them a carrier pigeon and get them to access my blog (with their steam-driven Babbage engines , or hay-built abaci), let some slightly dingy British rain into their golden-corn lives. Also, it appears I'm not appealing to the redneck constituency. What's the matter with y'all? Too busy fucking your sisters?

The experiment is ended. The not drinking was fine for a while, and I was ok with all of that. The excess part is not such an issue. Anyway, I'm better looking when I'm pissed. Do you want a fight?

Just checking in, see how the pixels are, everything ok? Ok, good. See yah!

When I was studying at Oxford (polytechnic, architecture, 1984) I fell in love with a woman and didn't tell her, her name was Phillipa (and she asked me to nickname her, and I couldn't, because I loved her). For that summer year I had eyes full of light. At that time I was what's called a psychobilly (laughable now, and laughable then, as I had little ear for the defining music and was mainly quiff-centric in my admiration of the genre) and she was a northern-noise nearly-goth eccentric. I spent a year in total, distant love. And hated every silent minute that slipped by, without my saying so. But other shit happened there (badness in lots of hues) that got in the way, and I ran off.

is my favourite word Today I told my mother that we (the wife, the me) had come to the end. That was difficult because I didn't want her to take sides. See, I have a proportion of blame that counterbalances the whole thing. I'm not such a nice guy as I like to think I am I have a foible, an idiosyncrasy, that's past mending in this I'm big, I'm angry, I'm less than sympathetic But I'm not a bad man.

She lives in Clifton, on the hill above, looking out of her Palladian sash-corded windows, on the heaving red-lit, brake-lit commutation of car boxes below (A4 bound, and bound in ways that are vehicular and peculiar to that mini-headed, horizonless myopia of the driving unter-mensch) where tail-gating, nylon-suited and neckless, red-faced potential stroke-fucked frowning drones bang up against each other's foam-filled anti-pedestrian bumpers. That's the parametered and cloistered world, narrowed in by lane markings, cats-eye boundaries, that have a certain grace in the middle, median, of the night. Where you - on the boundless motorway, with lights and reservations sweeping by the dormitory conurbations, the suburban landfill hutches where dad and uncle, sister and cousin fill out their raining, weeping, days - where you fill your hole with grit and hard shoulders. And you, the focus of the typical lens, the eye, are behind the wheel - the wheel that you don't turn, th...

Wife leaves at the end of the summer and takes the three small sons with her. She becomes not a wife. I become not a husband. But we're still mother and father. It's ok. That's what we agreed. Long time coming, and mixed relief and sadness in there (in a corner). Normal life resumes.

Time to lighten up (like the tobacco smoke blue dawn that's at the window right now). Time to make an observation. Here's a thing that made me laugh (and at the same time cut me quick, because future opportunities for this are running out): quantum mechanics as applied to consciousness. There's this thing that's been going around for a while now in science circles (which are conic sections ): consciousness lags behind action. There's been experiments that show that intent to do follows after the done thing . Experiments involving dots on screens and stuff (no citation here). Anyway, the upshot is we're creatures of habit, no free will (and not in a Calvinist pre-determined way), we're clockwork toys; neurological and philosophic automata. And then you've got Roger Penrose theorising that there are structures deep in our neurones ( mitochondria probably) that are so small that quantum effects come into play. He goes on to speculate that these q...

I wanted to write about On being a man , because I think I have something to say about that: not hunch-shouldered laddish snickering , or creepy beardy bombastard; but confidence and generosity, respect and strength. Time to reclaim maleness from the cocksure thirty-somethings, the man-boys, the Tory twats, the lax and slack, and the loud and arrogant. Time to think, and keep what you think to yourself. Time to retrench to reticence. Time to shut up. But if it was that time, I wouldn't be writing about it. Best advice I got from my dad: there's nothing you can't say "fuck off" to.

Nothing to see here (that you haven't already seen), move along

With the iPhone , and all things else that glitter tech wise in the land of Mac, occasionally you will come up against the snorting derision of an Apple-hater. Usually, when I have been confronted by these killjoys (what the fuck has it got to do with them what my platform of choice is? Why do they feel I would benefit from their insight?), I immediately leap to the defensive, and get into pointless partisan arguments about feature (OS) X versus feature Y (oh why). And one day, during the usual boring debate, I stepped outside myself and saw what the situation was. The guy making his digs was jealous, but more to the point, ugly. Any other discourse was not open between he and me, he was a stained tee-shirt wearing, dribbling nerd, drinking real ale, and smelling of single man; in other words, a window-licking social leper who could only connect using a fucked up outbound filter , someone I would have no wish to talk to otherwise. So next time someone pisses on your tech strawberr...

Feeling flat, mainly, but still happy about being me, still got enough vanity to post a photo of me glowering with threshold adjusted.

This is where, on occasion, I get to wax lyrical, and floors, where the pine scented, spine dented, back of my troubles are, Where, because I have an audience measured in inches and newtons, I can say the thing I like to say, where words tip up and trip up and make no sense, And I get to have that irritating poet cadence: the falling off of sentences, like Cantonese (listen to Jackie Chan with subtitles on), where the smelly curly haired twat invests his piss-poor scansion with import and meaning just by trailing off, Am I making any sense? (no, don't think so) Boo bollocks.

Doesn't seem like such a bad vibe (hippy) in the house today - on a peak of the sine wave. Discussed, dissected and decided, all in an evening, and feeling better for it.

I made the mistake of forgetting who my best friend was, I said too little, and said too much, and pointed at things that didn't need identifying, And wished I hadn't, When I was fifteen I discovered that a copper spring pushing an oval wheel would make a moving vehicle, with wooden slats, painted black, That would move forward without proper thought, or volition,

You are all wonderful people, in your corners and alleys, on the stairs and looking out of small windows, Or standing on your roofs whilst flood-water laps around the eaves and gables, Looking at the grey clouds clearing over the horizon, You, your sister, your father and uncle, all together now at the end of the sunset, With your ancestors, looking on, and slightly fucked off by it all.

I said sorry one thousand times, but should I have said a thousand and one, or did I say nine hundred and ninety nine too many?

I can finally admit that the 2 years of separation, trials, and effort, have culminated in the agreement to divorce. It's a sad day. There's no real recrimination (irreconcilable differentiation, integral to the lowering gradient, a succession of infinitesimal steps). This blog, in a way, has been the cryptic diary of the end of a marriage. Onwards and upwards.

I am diskgrinder, and I am larger than an ant, but smaller than someone taller than me. I'm also a damn sight cleverer than someone far more stupid than me. I can speak 7 languages, 6 of which I made up myself. I am spiritually indeterminate - somewhere between an agnostic and an atheist, should they be sitting quite close together. I have no beliefs except the firmly held one (as it's slippery) that you shouldn't believe everything you read in a phone directory. I take laudanum as a pick-me-up and take a snide remark as a put-me-down. I am diskgrinder, I am all of me.

More cursor fun-time, run your happy little pointy stick round the cartoon landscape. And when appreciating the motion mountain view, between blue-stripe stream and cloned trees (I hope you do), consider this: Is it cold? Can you touch a tree, is it plastic-wrapped and slick, or round and filling hand? Can you hear the wind, the stream, or is it silent running? When you breathe, what flavour is the sky? Or is it just pixels moving on your screen?

Once I was a mathematician. I looked at the endless white clouds of platonic reality , and saw obscure machinery in black typography rearing up. When I grasped a notion, a mathematic engine, I'd see in focus the whirring proof, built up in towers of interlocking cogs. Return to the beginning, reductio ad absurdum , and see what I said to you was bollocks, so what I'm saying now, well, it's not bollocks - quite demonstrably the opposite of bollocks. QED. I never liked statistics, there was something jagged and unfinished, and it lurked in the depths, brute and ignorant, concrete intrusions into what is otherwise clean and clear. All that discrete nastiness anchored in mud, with rusty barbs to snag and pull you under. My favourite was mathematical logic. The recursion of ideas that bite and eat themselves to prove that proof is unobtainable, a ghost, a trick of the eye that won't resolve. And if you had that resolution, you'd be resolved to decide, to say with clari...

It's just another diatribe (because less than two tribes, going to war, would be a monotribe). What's the story? I held court with my peers (the janitors at corporation X) today and wowed them with my wit. James, floor 1, who has one eye and responsibility (sole ownership) of our one-and-only wide broom (oh, how he lords it over us as he trammels dust and cartons towards the janitor's door in reception, his reflection as smug as he) was fairly impressed - enough so I saw his teeth at one point. So I was saying (with plastic cup of coffee and home-rolled cigarette) something good in my estimation (I am young and marking time in this big corporation, with its polished floors and eye-level beyond my level executives striding through, elevator bound, before I take the next step post-college) that made my older, condemned, colleagues smile (or show teeth anyway). We (the cleaner unter-mensch) have a room, just off reception, next to the fifteen elevators, where we congre...

Still the same old living room, just with new wallpaper and a fresh coat of paint on the fixtures and fittings. Does the transparency work for you? Or are you still using that broken old piece of shit browser? Try this one instead. It's beta, so you may get some random features.

adj. angry, irritated. Having the countenance of one who shaves with pliers. Loosely derived (see misspelt) from the Latin slantus fascista , a Nazi with one leg shorter than the other. Another entry from the Dictionary of Nothing . My word (and the dictionary is full of my words) we're on a roll now, but in the egg mayonnaise sense.

People who will get an iPhone, won't appreciate the love it brings to their sad, blinkered and fairly shitty lives, but will also be a poor advertisement for the godPod: Republicans and tories, David fucking Cameron Creationists and Intelligent Design apologists Metallica Hippies Jerry Bruckhymen Fox news (w)anchors David fucking Winer YBA tools: Jake and Dino fucking Chapman and Tracey fucking Emin Dick Cheney Any spice girl, except maybe emma bunton Simon Cowell or Sharon Osbourne The people who won't get an iPhone, but it'd be kind of funny if they did, and would be (at best) ambivalent publicity: Bill obviously Gates Steve (I'd laugh my ass off) Ballmer Gordon Brown Ozzy Osbourne E.T. Bart Simpson People who should get an iPhone, publicly and with much fanfare: Dr. Who Shigero Myamoto Lemmy Nelson Mandela Lars von Trier Hayao Miyazaki Ian MacEwan Charlie Brooker Richard Feynman (posthumously) Eddie Izzard The Queen

Eggcorns are mismatched wordy phrase bones that make a kind of warped sense. I have an acquaintance who is a a passed master at these, see: It's not rocket salad It's like treading on eggboxes It's like a ghost train in here He's like a bulldog in a Chinese shop Don't shoot the massager Rake hay while the sun shines Many a twix between cup and lip But his piece of resistance was a speech he gave at a friend's wedding. I can only remember bits (I was a nearly full glass of water at the time: slightly drunk), but it went something like this: Stood leavening, rabies and Bethlehem, Unaccustomed as my ham, it is with straight measure that I strand beer too gay. I have blown the pride and broom mince I was a tall coy, and I chav to pray I clever snort I stood me branding steer, sneeking to hutch a fig blathering of all their trends and camel pee... and so on until he rounded off with... So, trends, lotions and monkey men, I seive you a boast: to th...

Analytics from the colonies I still know where you live

This is the basis: Smaller squares next time.

No they don't, they come in one long stream of inexorable storms, one after the other, you just give up counting after three. And how come I'm supposed to count my troubles ( modulo 3 ), but I'm not allowed to count my blessings or eggs? Who made that rule? Enumerating unhatched roosters, and the benisons of a god I don't believe in aside; being borderline OCD, and definitely a chair-rocking worshipper at the altar of Asperger , the idea of recording peaks in the graph of fortune (with pie-charts and bullet points) appeals on a basic level. If I could be bothered. I would be full-on OCD and Aspergic if I didn't have the countervailing vices of sloth and apathy - all that hand-washing and stamp-collecting looks too much like hard work, and the Protestant homunculus in me gave up the holy ghost years ago. My mildly obsessive nature manifests itself in protracted but irregular periods of deep tunnel-vision concentration where the periphery narrows in, and the task ...

It's just gone two in the morning, and I'm still not tired ( Morpheus is giving me the cold shoulder, arms firmly crossed). I think it might be to do with the unaccustomed as I am alcohol embargo; it's Tuesday and I would be a bottle and a half of wine in by now (and asleep), and I'm neither, so my body is out of sorts. Coincidentally, as I'm writing this there's the background mutter of a BBC3 documentary about binge-drinking in the periphery of ear. Occasionally some tidbit of alcohol-related nastiness will impinge, and make me stop writing for a moment - it's affirming in a way, and in a negative sense: good job I don't do that anymore. It's only now that I'm a week and a bit without that I've begun to realise that it was a problem. When I decided to stop drinking I didn't think I was making a big decision; I had no insight into the situation (you can't look in a box if you're in it). I decided to stop pretty much on a whi...

The Manchester Grauniad has a story about the smell of pub which makes the point that now smoking is banned in UK pubs, the true pub smell, once masked by tobacco fug, has become apparent. The article lists a bunch of publy guffs: barmaid's armpit, jogger, and disinfectant, and then wanders off into the usual smug chattering. I went to the pub ( this one ) at lunch with Grauniad in hand, and that's where I read the article. I'm a smoker, and I was sitting outside, trying to hold the newspaper down on the table as the unseasonable rain-spittled wind wrestled with it, a nasty roll-up clamped in thinned lips, left eyelash singed from overzealous disposable lighter (on napalm setting), rehearsing an internal dialogue, where I was really cleverly putting down the smart-alec who'd just taken the piss out of my drinking lime and soda (and lime and soda with no piss in it is completely flavourless). At the end of that long sentence I was still outside the pub, with paper, ...

Starter Mince on a stick A selection of smells Gritted teeth, and dimpled cheeks drizzled with tears Schadenfreude Main Napkin, stretched over a bowl, as a trampoline for peas Mud and water, salted Beef shoes Dessert The horrors Sugar Cheese Board Lots of fucking cheese on a fucking plan k The chef's special And so are you

I have decided to go non-alcoholic, a man of my Kaliber shouldn't be measured in a percentage (especially not the 54.7% of Pusser's rum). It's early days (mornings) yet - the fine selection of breakfast wines has been binned, and the vodka in the tooth-mug has been replaced with camomile tea. So now I go to bed with a head less fizzing (rather than collapsing in a garden), and I've realised that people don't have black lines round them, aren't cell-shaded and actually do say things worth listening to at least a fifth of the time. There are, however, some sober revelations: I actually am short-sighted; the blur is in the hardware, not the chemical Dogs can't speak English Newsreaders aren't comedians, and the news isn't a sketch show (except Fox News, of course) I have a job, and apparently I've been doing it quite well for some years No matter how quickly I turn round, I'll never catch shop mannequins talking about me behind my...

In the corner between the hill and bridge, where the birds chime and the bells sing, the trees are stone and the church has leaves. Where, sometimes the stream is, where sometimes the light flickers, there's the somewhere else that has the sun. That's where I'll be, that's where I'll look for you. And if you're not there, then that's ok. After all, that's what we left behind.

This just in: Trent Barber, our traffic-feed on the InterZoom reports a 10-lane multijam on the upbound skedway after a Ford Frisbee's PocketPark™ went into keyring mode. Both driver Chesney Fink, 42, and passenger Gladys Troop, 30, were still inside when the Frisbee smalled up. A Ford spokesneuter blamed a lint build-up in Fink's fanny-pack that "could of like, gummed up the Frisbee when it was last keyringed, you know?" So, guys, keep crap out of your manbag if you don't want to be micro-sized on the way to the mall.

And feeling better for it. He's been snapping at my heels (like that thing on the moor that time before ). The wind's blowing outside, and it's cold. I think there's rain coming on. Sunshine deferred for a while, but brighter later. Dead dogs and weather reports, more on that later. Over to our sports correspondent now.

Sometimes I imagine I have subtitles, just below my waist - if it's a midshot. If it's an establishing shot then whoever else is in the frame may have some words too. These would be in a different colour; so you can tell who's saying what (if they're hard of hearing they may say what quite often). The colour will follow that protagonist throughout the show: it's a consistent motif to help the audience. I've been followed by a colour, but I have special moves and I was able to lose the hue at an intersection. Sometimes I'll be doing something and I'll get crash-zoomed to a close-up of my hands (in general, the agent of the doing). This I can cope with, it's the jump-cuts that are difficult. The intervening time is lost: I have no recollection of the minutes edited out; I don't get to choose the cuts, the editor does not consult me. This can be handy when explaining things to the police, particularly if the plot needs moving forward but some myste...

in these midnight moments, when worlds are crashing, take a moment to relax

Early morning regret