Possible new blog titles…

1. Shouldn’t have eaten those quavers.

2. Why do people on buses not trust comparatively young people?

3. The despondency of desk work.

4. Who still reads newspapers?

5. What I miss from my old life.

6. Have they changed any of the basics of sex in the past four years?

7. The seven sins, why I actually used to worry about them.

8. Morning song is detestable.

Couldn’t be bothered to write an actual blog so thought I’d tease with what I will write about in the near future. I say tease but when there’s no-one to tease it really is not teasing anymore. It’s procrastinating. I think.

Sliding scales of slippery slopes

So minarets are to be banned in Switzerland. Protestors demand the BBC don’t allow Nick Griffin on Question Time. Religious intolerance is punishable by prison.

We are a nation that prides itself on freedom of speech. We were one of the first countries to fully embrace democracy. While much of Europe was in the grip of fascist resurgence in the early 20th century Britain stood removed from such worries. We must embrace the key components of democracy and promote them to the world. We are a multi-cultural society because we allow it to slourish and we should be applauded.

But religion is all kinds of messed up. I believe that’s what a teenager would say. Religion has some excesses that I find profoundly disturbing and even promotes an inclination to call for things to be banned. So what sort of slippery slope can be accepted by a multi-cultural deomcracy?

Should we ban a leader of a political party from expressing his opinions on national television because the majority of the population find them abhorrent? Perhaps, but perhaps a better idea would have been to allow him to bury himself under the strain of his own warped little mind rather than systematically bullying him and creating an underdog. And don’t the British love an underdog?

Should we ban minarets so as to send a message to Islamic leaders? Perhaps it would act as a clear reminder that we will allow anyone to worship whatever faith they want but the host country will still retain overall control. Perhaps some of the more extremist elements won’t be so encouraged to traipse over to enjoy the freedom of democracy and then act like complete dicks simply because they have been reading their holy texts with an anti-west, violent and misogynistic current becoming the over-riding themes.

Should we ban the denouncement of faith and attempts to incite religious hatred? Perhaps, but then what if the incitement of religious hatred leads to violence. Isn’t a society that features less violence but more imprisonment preferable? Or was Frederick Douglass right when he said “Better even to die free than to live slaves.”?

Dark Water, my wife and I…

About six years ago I watched the Japanese horror film Dark Water. I rented the DVD from the local video shop, cooked a meal for my wife and placed a bowl of sweets by the door. It was Halloween and I was determined to rent the scariest film they had. Dark Water was recommended to me.

The meal went very well, I was particularly proud of the red wine jus. It was always an aspect I had managed to fail spectacularly at despite the fact that spectacular failure and jus are rarely interconnected. We sat down to watch the film and I was immediately confused. The film didn’t seem particularly horror-like. About half an hour in my wife (I won’t use her real name online, but trust me – offline and I am happy to use her damn name!) turned to me and said she was tired, or whatever her in vogue phrase was for sleep will become my refuge.

I said I’d join her, I think I had had a bit of a rough week, my mother was ill and I just wanted to spend some time with my wife. She spent 20 minutes criticising my movie choice and complaining that a film would think someone so stupid as to be scared of water stains. Through my encroaching lack of consciousness my brain latched onto her view and it became mine.

Then everything happened, divorce, fired, new life etc and I catch Dark Water looking at me at Blockbuster. It seemed like a symbol of my old life. A film I only got part of the way through until my wife realised I had made a mistake and bailed. I decided to investigate Dark Water again, with a clear mind.

It is clearly one of the best horror films ever made. A masterclass in building a believable world, slowly amping up the horror and leaving any viewer significantly disturbed and with a profound sense of unease. It lasted for days with me. It’s why I don’t live in a block of flats or a tower block or anything like that. It’s a recurring theme in Japanese horror – a palpable atmosphere and a focus on unsettling and disturbing the audience. Loud noises scares aren’t currency. Dark Water led to me watching Audition, the Ring series, The Grudge and various other lesser known films. The best of those, besides Dark Water, is Audition. The one film that Hollywood has not remade.

The Grudge was terrible, The Ring was perfunctory and I gave up. Dark Water was a film I managed to ignore until today. As I mentioned the other day, I spend a lot more time reading other blogs than writing my own. One in particular has amused me recently and is called The Noughties Were Shit. Amongst blogs about Gordon Brown and Back To The Future (my favourite!) is a blog about passable new films based on pre-noughties intellectual material (to kind of quote the author). the comments section ended up mentioning the remake of Dark Water and so I decided to rewatch the original this evening. I’m glad I’m did.

 

But what on earth could Hollywood have done to such a good film? It really does worry me. But I’m glad that this weekend my major worry will be what a film I never have to watch is like. That’s not bad, I guess.

Remembered this today

I ruptured my cat’s spleen once, it was the act of a clumsy boy. And is a reason why I hate cats. It seems unfair when it was I who brandished the weapon but in context it was just another idiotic decision from a moron of a cat. Seriously. At two in the morning you don’t expect a cat to be waiting to get into the house, especially when there is a cat flap, the traditional entrance for a cat. As I stumbled through the garden, unaware of the feline presence. Quietly fumbling with my keys and laughing at myself, I swung the door open and crossed the threshold. At the time I remember this being so much of an achievement that I opted to slam the door shut behind me just as Misty made her dash for the threshold. She made it halfway before spleen ruptured, ribs fractured and parents ran down the stairs. She didn’t die but she looked like a fucking mess for the rest of her life.

It felt like one of those moments when a woman pledges to love a man forever, no matter what, and then he immediately gets his spine snapped in a freak thresher accident that also rips off his face in a startling display of wrong place, wrong time. She then has to spend the rest of her life feeding him pureed food and massaging the general area of his colon before putting him to bed and sneaking out to find any man who could possibly make her feel better about the desperate decisions she’s made in life. Good times. So, looking after this cat became a mainstay of my life, mainly due to the huge guilt involved in slamming a door on a living thing. This, in hindsight, was the very first example of any kind of grand plan, I somehow appreciated how shit I felt about this cat. I’m not saying that it made me happy, more that the feelings of guilt, shame, self-pity etcetera gave me an emotional spike that at some cognitive level I really appreciated. I’m not sure, but I think that when most people experience negative situations that they long for it to end as swiftly as possible and for a form of solace to arrive. Apart from the mentally ill, but that’s a different issue, I would consider myself well-adjusted, clear-thinking and normal but at the age of seventeen I experienced my first taste of negative appreciation.

And now I’m fully back into writing about myself. I don’t feel good about it but remembered my cat story at work today and resolved to publish it for the world. I don’t feel better about that but perhaps that is what I hoped for. Fuck it.

Tested the water, pH was acidic

I posted up something quite personal a few weeks ago. It was misguided. I tried to evoke how I feel about it now, perhaps a better tactic would have been to write about how I felt then. The trouble is that I think words fail to express such extremes of life. In fact, I’ve been reading blogs a lot recently to discover if anyone else can explore extremes.

There are a few blogs that seem quite capable at delighting in the minutiae in far more lyrical styles than I thought possible. But mostly it was prosaic and of a particularly self-obsessed clan. I felt like I had googled ‘mirror’ and encountered hundreds of hits that made me feel uneasy about what I had so naively entered into a few months ago. Blogs aren’t meant for individual stories. That’s what instant messaging, twitter and youtube comments seem to be for. Blogs work far better when acting as a lighthouse.

I enjoyed Derren Brown and his events shows recently and his blog seems well-pitched. Appropriate posts about whimsical topics, serious issues and fascinating research. You know when you visit his blog that it will be themed around psychology, magic and rationalism., it’s why you visit. Why visit and individuals blog when far more entertaining stories are told on television every hour of the day?

Entertainment is so precisely because it focuses on the entertaining aspects and jettisons the irrelevant and dull minutiae (second use of the word minutiae – I promise I knew this word before today). Current affairs, science, theology etc has a mass of information that needs to be dulled down for a lay audience to be able to enjoy without getting bogged down in the minutiae (and counting). That means that those entertained by the basics may end up being thrilled by the minutiae. The minutiae now made easily available by blogs up and down the internet.

On finishing this post I have convinced myself that I’ve engaged in a circular argument. The minutiae of current affairs is interesting – current affairs is diluted to be entertaining for the masses – the minutiae is then unpacked for those interested in blogs. Dramatic entertainment eliminates the minutiae because it’s dull – the masses enjoy the broadstrokes – intimate, personal blogs are just ego-driven pulsing member stroking.

That, I believe, is my first phallic imagery. Congratulations all round and a most appropriate end to a most rambling blog.

An unwise revelation?

The first thing you notice about a car crash is how loud it is. Well, for a few seconds. Then the deafening silence as you realise your friends are all dead. The only desire then is for the sound to return, just something to flood your brain as blood slowly drips onto the lifeless face of someone you’ve known for eighteen years, nine months, five days. I’m not sure how you’d describe the feeling, it certainly sticks in the mind; like a bad song can float through your thoughts and make a break for your mouth. I suppose the simile breaks down there, if not earlier, as inevitably you transfer the song to float with someone else; I’ve been left to float through life knowing that certain moments will never leave me. It’s a reassuring thought don’t you think?

 

Bear with me, I am going somewhere with this. I hope you understand me, I really do.

Haven’t been online for three weeks

Well on wordpress. The most depressing aspect of that is eagerly logging on, having ridden through the waves of shit that have buffeted my terribly makeshift boat for three weeks, and seeing my stats.

Three weeks and precisely 3 views. That’s not per day. That’s an entire 21 days of my life, passing by without my presence being reported. 3 people may have noticed my absence.

Let’s raise a drink.

Let’s talk about applying a little make up

No-one ever just writes about a house burning down these days. You don’t read a book that has someone buying a new car because that’s exactly what people do. Houses burn down, leaden with imagery. A man watches a bird because it’s a metaphor for yearning for freedom.

James came over to my desk today and announced that he thought the email I had sent out to a disgruntled client was very well put. I thanked him, mainly to annoy him and it seemed to work. He set about analysing my email, a print-out of which he was the proud owner. I don’t mind that he’s higher up the food chain than me, or even that he does actually eat my food. It’s an awful time in your life when you make a conscious decision to stop buying pop tarts because the big boy keeps eating them.

I mean, how do you reconcile that event with being an adult? Firstly, we’re talking about pop tarts, a fat child’s breakfast. Secondly, the issue is someone eating them when they shouldn’t. An event that could be neatly sidestepped with a variety of actions. Concealment, reporting the offence or tackling the offender head-on. I chose to stop eating pop tarts. I had exactly the same response to a problem in school. A girl, she was pretty. I only mention that to highlight the insignificance of that fact to ten year old Ian. A girl would regularly copy me when completing the end of day test. In order to resolve this issue I filled out my test, the results of which I was prone to taking great pride in, with completely the wrong answers. My code was that I selected A instead of D, B instead of A and so on. The grand plan was to then switch all the answers to the correct ones with one minute remaining. However, I completed the test in record time and sat back, delighted at my speed and the teacher’s impending pride. The one minute warning came and went, I handed in the test and left school. Just after Newsround was when my error set in. I was upset.

What I do mind about James is that he is convinced that I am an enemy to be neutralised. I try to look at it objectively and work out, if there was a film made of our office, whether I would be a good character or a villain. James looks like the romantic lead, whereas I look like the person who gave up acting when it was clear that puberty wreaked havoc upon the symmetry of my face and the build up in my pores. But for all intents and purposes I’m the nice person and he’s the villain who plans a new pop tart heist every day. And probably would shoot a child to get to them (just to make it clear he’s not a gentleman thief). I’m not his enemy, I’m just one of many random co-workers that don’t earn as much as him.

A way of gaining some kind of parity with this man was treating any of his infamous suggestions literally. That’s how the office email system had the chance to distribute a photo of a stuffed monkey sat at my computer. I thought it was funny, some other people did. Some others thought it was a pathetic riposte to a popular manager who merely offered an observance on the similarities of my working style with a primate. Very funy James, very funny.

I remain unsure whether it’s an innate desire for simpler prose or if simile fatigue has set in. I now find myself purposefully ignoring any attempt at metaphor and trying to take everything I read at face value – a childish rebellion for a petty complaint.

Good deed indeed

So my weekend plan was to do a good deed, I wanted to re-assert some positivity. But it can be quite difficult to get away with a good deed hwen most people aren’t expecting a good deed. Friday I just watched Derren Brown and was very impressed with the episode, not sure what I felt about the series – the man amazes me but it was a strange up and down experience. But the end of the casino episode was really good television. Anyway, I’d written off Friday evening in terms of good-deed-doing. But Saturday I set out with all sorts of crazy thoughts in my head – help an old lady cross a road, help a child with their homework, rescue a cat from a tree.

My first chance came when someone didn’t have the right change for the car park and I genuinely thought that I was going to achieve my goal within minutes of starting but as I strode over and announced that I would help I realised I only had notes with me and the machine only took coins. Worse still is that they looked at me as if I was a bad person for getting their hopes up. I felt like an idiot but wasn’t helped by this person, they could have at least given me a half-thanks. It was probably made worse that then there was two of us hanging around the ticket machine and accosting passers-by for change. It made it seem less like an innocent shopper and more like an orchestrated tramp attack. I’m not a tramp, I just wanted to go shopping.

Three hours later and I was leaving the shopping centre having done precisely no good deeds and possibly caused one or two facial injuries. Didn’t feel good. However, I did have better perspective on the initial ticket machine/change incident and I did have a good giggle about it on the way home. I considered about whether or not to postpone the good deed till Sunday but realised that if I did do that then I’d probably have another day of frustration. I pulled over at a bus stop and an old lady was sitting there. I got out my car and approached her, she looked terrified. I handed her £20 from my wallet and asked her if she could take it for me. She didn’t answer verbally but I got the jist that she meant to say: “Err, what? Please don’t hurt me, whatever you want.”

And did that feel good. Strangely, yes. But still not as much as seeing a blind woman walk through a glass door. Or being outcast by every friend you’ve ever known. Or telling a woman you love her just so that you know that trying to kill yourself will really upset her. Not that I’ve experienced any of those things.

I should get back to work.

Really getting onto this online business now

I got twitter yesterday and have been loving it. Arnold Schwarzenneggar (?) was tweeting about Tony Blair! I can’t believe we all get to read about this sort of thing. I have genuinely been checking it every couple of minutes at work to see who else has updated their inner thoughts. And I’ve again struggled to think of things to write.

I think I prefer to observe rather than actually integrate. It’s easier, to observe. More interesting for certain.

Anyway, to everyone out there who may have read an inch of what I’ve written, I apologise. I’ve been terribly dull recently and posted some pretty poor thoughts. If this is the first post you have read of mine then I would suggest maybe reading an earlier post, perhaps the one where I saw a blind person break a window. Honestly, I still giggle about that at times.

I need to do something nice for someone other than myself this weekend. Maybe spend that extra money I planned on spending – pay for someone’s car parking or buy them a jacket. Why would I buy someone a jacket? I’ll work out a better plan at some point and report back on whether my positive bank balance (it still is in credit!) has been used to do a good deed.

I really want to do a good deed.