Land of Diskgrinder

This is the thing, the thing that sits in the corner of a room with a door I locked long ago, the thing that spits and smiles. That thing

And it was all variously good. Each of those years had one little happenstance that made the next year wanted. Same again this year. Big things are happening. Some not so good. But at least, if you walk barefoot through the park, and tread in shit of dog: well, at least you have toes to feel the warm embrace of canine clart in between. I'm not saying that's good, I'm just saying that's better than anaesthetic disregard.

Throw out all the old shit Clean up, clean out, garage sale of gathered crap Clean slate, clean room, cleared out Everything must go, including all your shit Five year plan, with necessary purges Fuck off to Siberia, stay there, write a book no-one will read Then burn it

Seriously unimpressed with the way the world is now Growing up in the desperate grey seventies it was my ardent wish that the future would be at least one lumen brighter. Places to go, people to meet, pellucid waters of some foreign clime enticing. But no, if I am to believe the media, every border is either bursting with snarling fucks wanting to kill me, or economic (read, nearly dead through poverty) migrants wanting some of the tax and surveillance we have in our sparkling enlightened democracies. And America became the land of fat dribbling morons and evil capitalist morons. And Britain became the land of whiny liars and lying morons fucking everything up for the short-term lucre. And the voluntary sector got filled with sanctimonious cunts. And politics became an end in itself. And most people are exactly shit and variously needy. And nothing works just right, but there's always excuses. Let's just admit it, things got too complex for our ape brains to handle. Th...

After having done something fairly heroic. Maybe involving fire, or subsequent seismic movements in the underground: one complete rock grinds against another mile high piece of thing thrusting and pushed up plate tectonics. And me in a cape and tights (but not zentai) do the laser eyes thing, and all is set to rest.

Sometimes things are like picking scabs, all of them are almost just as nasty, but one is nastier than the others, so that's the one you'll choose. You keep on coming back to it, like the keys you know are on the fucking mantelpiece , and yet they're not, but you keep on looking there, shuffling through the bills and picking up the ornaments that otherwise would be unbalanced - if your keys were under them. And all the time they're in your hand - one day you'll let yourself in your house, with your keys, to find your keys. But you can't resist, it's there, it has an itch that can be momentarily satisfied (but amplifies ongoing). Conversely, you can rehearse conversations that will reverse and therefore never happen - "if they say to me: this thing; then I will say: that thing; and I will be the winner". Not going to happen, things don't work that way, there's always something missing. So you keep on coming back, to see if it's stil...

There's this thing that Carlos Castenada would shit on about: self importance. It's where you think everything you hear, or read, or see, is somehow related to you. In this respect, it's a less fundamental reading of solipsism (in that it's not as up its own fundament). Unlike this post, this post is completely not about you. And there's the paradox (the soap powder that washes blacker), related to Epimenides' thing: what I just wrote was true; but reading it makes it false for the few that do. "You won't read this," is more true than it isn't for the majority. Really, this isn't about you, it's about seven o'clock.

Even though I'm an atheist (though I prefer the term afairiest, as I don't believe in fairies as much as I don't believe in magic-man-in-the-sky) I am extremely superstitious. Apparently we have this spiritual gland that's buried deep in the grey pudding in our skulls - a little illuminator that lights up the corners in our heads. Mine is atrophied, but like an appendix (another evolutionary cul-de-sac, punctuating the colon) it occasionally shoots some bitter issue into my digestive tract, and I have to eat my words. So I have an abhorrence of pavement(sidewalk)-spanning ladders and black cats, and deeply, deeply believe in karmic retribution (although I think that's a network effect - what goes around comes around: you put shit into the world machine eventually the cogs will churn you up). That's it, and that's the end: shit in; shit out. Live your life with less than brio and half-burned, you'll get a lacklustre and tepid experience in return. T...

With cellulose X-rays. I've noticed recently that my posts are degenerating into little more than tweets; thin dough leavened with the occasional yeast of dirty music I have banged together with music hammers in Garageband . I have an oldest and dearest friend, with finely tuned sensibilities, and a horror of amateur musical twiddlage, who would be disgusted by my attempts at harmonious hoo-har . But I get pleasure out of it, in the same way I get pleasure out of doing bad DIY. I have built my house over a number of years: heavily over-engineered; brutalist with ogees ; Le Corbusier in frills. I did architecture for a moment in the early eighties, at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University, because the word polytechnic got associated with sixties socialism and, well, brutalist architecture, and that's not good marketing). There's a thought: socialist marketing; there'd be top billboard campaigns . I have a kind of affection for all that nasty concrete...

We English people say "arse" to rhyme with farce. And to us, "ass" (rhymes with mass) is another word for donkey, so it doesn't sound right to say "shove it up your donkey," or "Jesus rode into Damascus on his ass". I have a theory that American swearing is a lot harsher than English swearing (and differs from Glaswegian swearing in the same way). Americans appear to have no equivalent of "bugger" (which can be affectionate), "twat" (which is dismissive) and "bollocks" (which is a gentler way of saying "bullshit"). American swearing seems so much more venomous and nasty - "cocksucker" and the "mother-****er" concatenation (even I can't write that one full, it is deeply nasty) are super-aggressive. Also we tend to find the word "fuck" a lot funnier than they seem to. For instance, I can say "fuck off" with a smile, meant to mean "you're hav...

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...

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?

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...

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...

Well, more spam goodness for you. This is a particularly poetic and resonant image - lucky pickled herrings setting a trap for unwary cod. See below for cod philosophy . or don't fish are not known (how can they be? They have nothing to say, that isn't bubble-wrapped and reliant on gills) to be philosophers. so where's this idea that cod have philosophy come from? What next: Bream Scientology ? Chubb Macrobiotics ? Tuna Musicologists ? (Arf!)