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:
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:
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 your sweet love hasn't died.
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.
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.
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 good and distant friends in the hinterland of the Atlantic ports 3,000 miles away. To you I say, take the bitter polemic as a symptom of a national disease, not a deep-down expression of my inner crapness (that has its own motor).
Much love, going away now.
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?
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.
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, that you don't guide your oil and engine, into the sodium bright avenues.
Instead you think of the base blue welcome of another misremembered destination; a slack and lax definition of where the heart is, where your kidneys are.
Because, driving with hands clutched on the steering wheel, you're looking: hypnotised by the recurrent cycle of lamp-lights, signs, and fenceposts pulsing as they pass black in the night.
That's when, for a minute there, you feel at one, engine under you, speed behind you. Be happy, that's the best you can do.
That's when, you smile, but momentarily.
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 quantum effects are the seat of consciousness, which is a step up from the pineal gland.
So, I got to thinking (obviously a few nanoseconds afterwards), and someone said, the following:
In another world, this made sense
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.
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.
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 strawberry (the thing you paid serious money for, after long consideration), just take a good look at the twat who starts the conversation. Look for these signifiers:
I'm not saying this situation is exclusive to iPod/iPhone/Mac users; anyone who has made a considered choice on what expensive thing they buy (car, computer, house), because they are buying it, will sometime come up against the arrogance of one of these spittle-flecked trolls.
They have one thing in common: they didn't pay for the thing they think is superior, and they are ugly, mean-spirited fuckwads (that's two things), and they have no taste (three things, then).
So don't bother to defend your choice, you're not going to persuade them; their agenda in talking to you is not to have a reasoned debate, they just want to demonstrate their superior intelligence/taste. And it's all arrogant willy-wagging.
And they are ugly.
"But you said you'd tell us how to deal with them, DG. What's the advice?" I hear you ask.
When they start, stop them mid-sentence, look them up and down, and maintaining eye contact as you turn back to your iPod/iPhone/Mac, once turned, look away and say, "fuck off."
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 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:
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 clarity and decisive intent, that it's unclear and undecidable. That appealed to me.
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 congregate in concierge communion, for a smoke, a coffee (from an unlocked vending machine we've hidden, and only wheel out on days the suppliers come).
Everyone is there at one time or another, even Butler, who responsibles around the top floors, the executive washroom, and is therefore the king of all of us; yet he is thick as two short planks and does not realise quite how much we take the piss.
But I have a room of my own, it's on floor 12, it's an elevator maintenance room that's neither top nor bottom of the elevator's run so is little used. It's where I keep my magazines, tea-making facilities and detergents. It's where I retire, and sit on my office chair (purloined from the engineer's floor, where those geek twats wouldn't miss it) and listen to the windings and Radio 4.
The thing I like about my room is this: it's the real deal with this building, there's no truth-to-materials architectural bullshit here, no maple and granite, glass and steel, it's poured concrete imprinted with the grain of the plywood forms that framed it, steel-fixer's marks still there. Because you, Mr. Important Executive or Ms. Shithead Client were never meant to see this maintenance alcove, so the ersatz cladding of bronze and polarised glass is neglected.
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:
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:
People who should get an iPhone, publicly and with much fanfare:
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:
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 the snappy cuddle, and let's rope it's not too wrong before we near the shatter of spiny tweet
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 before me expands (visually, like that pull-focus track-in camera cliché). Everything else is pushed into the halo of disregard that's circled 220º behind my head.
Like now, for instance.
Technorati Tags: cheap therapy, OCD, Asperger's Syndrome, trouble and strife
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 whim.
It's a wonder to me that I only see the issue now I'm doing something about it. I didn't drink daily and regularly, but when I did drink I'd binge.
Still, I'm not planning to go completely tee-total, I just don't ever want to be drunk again. So I'm going to stay off the plonk for a couple more weeks, and then see if I can have a drink without following it up with another 8.
Technorati Tags: cheap therapy, alcoholism, binge-drinking
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, cigarette, wind and so on, and having read said bar-stink article I decided to get another weak lime cordial based drink (because you can't have too much, it does fuck all).
And the article was right, the pub did smell of disinfectant and sweat. Also lager, bitter, musty old guys and existential despair.
Not much point to this post, must be hypergraphia.
Mince on a stick
A selection of smells
Gritted teeth, and dimpled cheeks drizzled with tears
Schadenfreude
Napkin, stretched over a bowl, as a trampoline for peas
Mud and water, salted
Beef shoes
The horrors
Sugar
Lots of fucking cheese on a fucking plank
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:
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 mystery needs preserving.
