Richard Lewis Communications

Working For The Man

2008-10-07T23:16:00.002+01:00

Greetings from the downslope of the credit crunch… That greasy freewheel towards realising that everything in your house is nothing more than a pawn-able bauble in the face of no food and – worse – no liquor. It is at times like these you can just about swallow working for the man… As much as you hate them, they are the reason why you don’t go home to a street corner and have to think about terribly inventive ways to use your asshole to gain money. They are the reason why you aren’t known as “Crazy Dave from down the way, the one who will beat himself up for pennies” and in times of tight belts we all do well to remember that. No longer can we entertain the fantasy of quitting in a spectacular explosion of sour grapes and moving to that BETTER job across the street to gloat at our former slavers. That better job doesn’t exist any more… The building was closed down because they could no longer pay the rent and have had to downsize. The developers circle like the vultures they are, ready to build a series of luxury apartments that can only be bought up as second homes for yuppies that consider a trip to where you live as some kind of safari…

I too now work for the man and internalise the mental breakdown that this reality causes in all of us. It is worse for me as I am now an employee of my city council, meaning I am office bound and surrounded by cretins. It is the way of the council that you fail upwards – the only people who get promoted are the terrible fuck-ups that have spent nine or so years staring at photographs of their many waterhead children while they work and have asked no questions, their inability to progress misinterpreted as a quiet inner steel despite their continual failure at even the most basic of aptitude tests. But we live in times where the most important person in the world struggles with children’s books so maybe it should come as no surprise when these buffoons are moved into that bigger office, where they have room for more pictures of more kids with glazed eyes and can sit around being carried by some smarter, delusional subordinate.

Yes, when it is public money you’re spending, what real pressure is there to spend it wisely? An ethos that only fucked a few now fucks everyone globally and the final irony is that it is our money that is requisitioned to bail these pigfuckers out. We just operate within the culture of fear and perfect our shit eating grins… Ho ho ho. I apologise for this dark cul-de-sac. These thoughts belong in another place in another time. I was making some humerous observations about working for the man. Besides, comedy is a requirement in times of economic depression or times of international crisis, even if it isn’t that funny. It would be remiss of me not to oblige.

Any analysis of working for the man needs to include an answer to the question “Who is the man?” that invariably comes up. I can’t tell you who “he” is, but I can tell you some facts that might come in useful. The man is not always a man – increasingly they are women but it is still correct to refer to them as he. The man will only speak in jargon and slogans. There is sign of the man at ground level – if you look upwards you always see the man. Despite this fact the man will ALWAYS be stupider than you are, no matter how stupid you ultimately are. The man will tell you to do things such as “pretend that your working” when you have nothing to do. The man only measures thing by how well they follow protocol, not by the results to which they lead. The man is a figure of pity and ridicule because he doesn’t even know he is the man – he believes that he is a kind of benevolent figure, a good person when you scrape away all the outer layers of skin. He doesn’t entertain for a moment that if you did this you would reveal an android…

Sound familiar? It should – because in one way or another we all work for the man. The secret is to find something in work that keeps you sane and gear your entire working day to pursuing it. I had a friend who was working for the Electricity board back in the day and he would send out crank letters to clients… Bizarre ramblings that would tell the customer that they could retain energy by drinking their own urine, or that businesses could generate enough energy to power a PC by sticking an immigrant on a bicycle wired to a dynamo and pay the peddler less than the cost in energy. It was his oasis of calm amid the insanity of the office hustle and bustle. Rules that don’t make any sense, tedious work and the ideas that management put into place to try and fool you into thinking you have it good. Such as the dress down Fridays that are supposed to inspire loyalty and improve morale, while at the same time highlighting the ridiculous conventions we all are supposed to buy into. But it’s OK because we all get to leer at the Office ride’s ass and wonder on what payday night out we can get ourselves cosied up to it.

Yes, you have to find something to occupy your time if not your mind. Council workers are not only stupid, but they are incredibly ugly… At least two of the guys in my department have mail order Thai brides that don’t belong on their deformed arms… But I did manage to find something other than hammering Cadred forums. Some beautiful piece of skirt that works way down in the post room. She brings me my mail and I like to lurk nearby as she reaches down to pick heavy parcels that have sunk to the bottom of the sack. If I see her make a break to the toilet I might go press my ear up against the door and listen to the soft porcelain tinklings… Not for any perverted reasons you understand. Just to make sure she is real. If you saw the other gargoyles that swanned around the office you too would wonder if she was a figment of your imagination. She works on the franking machine and once I have thought up a suitable pun – something better than “franks very much” at least – I may even speak to her…

Working for the man is a motherfucker. The only way out of it is to become the man or to be so good at something that the man eventually has to deal with you on your terms because they need what you have for their own ends. In the meantime keep yourself as sane as is possible by any method you choose to do so. Just don’t get caught. There is no room for goofing off down the dole office.

Glory Hole

2007-07-19T15:55:00.000+01:00

Being watched is a bizarre experience at the best of times… How many of us have a concept of what it is like to be the viewed as opposed to the viewer. I can understand the fix – Catching somebody doing something, watching them from afar without them being aware. We all do it. To me a peeping Tom is someone who is curious not necessarily perverted. In our present society it seems that you can observe just about anything in its natural state unless it is a person, then it becomes some kind of violation…

This is the kind of shit that used to come out of my mouth until I was on the receiving end. I now understand the truth in the phrase “a liberal is a conservative who hasn’t been mugged.”

I was in town with some of the guys steeped in some macho vibes, you know, a total short sleeved affair… We prowled up and down making casual sexist and racist remarks at passers by while eyeing up ‘things’ we wanted. Then an amble over to a fast food place whatever was closest in the inner city maze of outlets… It probably had a big ‘M’. We stuffed our faces while carrying on with the tone of previous conversations… Not that we necessarily believed any of it. I certainly had my doubts as to whether we could lay the blame for certain societal ills squarely at the doorstep of ethnic minorities… Gittins was more confident of this than I was, but this was the nature of pay day weekend banter and even that which we disagree with becomes tolerable for the 48 hours or so we have money…

There is something about the confines of town that makes me hostile for no reason anyway. I can’t explain the changes that come over me. I do indeed become hyper aware of how many ethnicities there are around me at any given point… I know realistically that it is the same percentage as you probably find anywhere else because I’ve never been one to swallow nationalist or conservative hysteria, but they are there. It makes me feel more of an island, more of a freak… Like somehow I don’t belong in the urban decay that is my spiritual home. And of course I am here with my tribe on the turf we were given and maybe it just burns a little to see that our territorial sprayings mean nothing.

I equate these feelings to my inherent laziness allowing my male hormonal aggressiveness take over… No more odd than mood swings in menstruation, misery located within depression. Some times you just can’t help feeling hostile and everyone is a potential target…

The fast food makes me want to shit. This is not unusual. It never seems to take long to work its way through my system. More than likely this is my body rejecting the foulness as quickly as it possibly can, but this is what happens when you eat out of convenience ahead of choice.

Because we are already back prowling the town it isn’t feasible to use the “restaurants” toilets so I tell the guys that I’ll nip into the nearest public shithouse which is near some multi story car-park. I can feel the Mcgreaser working its way through my colon so I up the tempo, fearing a photo finish, and make my move.

Now I don’t usually mind male public toilets despite the bad press they often get. Sure they smell, are infrequently cleaned, the floor is soaked in piss and you will regularly find used drug paraphernalia strewn throughout a cubicle. The real saving grace is the graffiti. No matter where you are geographically you can always be guaranteed something on the walls to make you smile or get you thinking. Like the whole is it fake/is it real homosexual advertising you will be subject to. I know cottaging is a dying practice – you even find CCTV in public facilities these days – yet every wall is riddled with “meet me here for sucky sucky action” type scribblings…

Meet me here at eight for a good fucking

I’ll meet up with you for a good fucking alright – I’ll give you a good fucking with a baseball bat you sick queer fucker.

And other such genius. Immediately you can see the perils facing the desperate faggot in this part of the world… But we’ll come to that in just a moment.

So the long and short of it is that graffiti will always save you a paper at the very least. Not all entries are soliciting potential cocks, some are jokes, limerics, visual gags and recantations of trips to away football games. So I’m scanning for the most entertaining entries while I’m dropping my arse and then I notice to my absolute horror, no exaggeration, that there is an eye looking at me through a small hole in the cubicle divider.

I start, that is to say, jump right there on the toilet and I’m looking right back at it just in case it isn’t real. It’s blinking…

I have to take stock of the situation and decide that it is best to quickly pull up my attire without wiping for two reasons. Firstly, that it facilitates a quick getaway and secondly that I don’t want to put on some kind of ringpiece titillation fixated show for the person who I imagine the eye belongs to.

So I’m by the sinks and urinals sweating and feeling queasy. The beginning of a spin out is washing over me and all sorts of thoughts are rebounding off my minds parameters. Part of me wants to run, just bail from this faggot haven after having achieved the only reason I was here in the first place… But another part of me wants to just simply kick in the cubicle door and lay the fuck into the twisted creature that lurks within.

I’m waiting, looking around at the collection of bungled and botched that are flitting in and out of the toilets, all of them nervously coughing and avoiding eye contact, while I try and make it look like I have some reason still to be here. I’m tempted to announce really loudly what this fucker in the cubicle has done in an attempt to rustle up some kind of mob to lynch this fucker but I decide against it. After all there is that outside chance that there are more queers in this place than first appearances give away… Nightmarish images of armies of mutant homosexuals pouring out of ventilations shafts and drainage openings to descend upon me and my arsehole…

The fear is there, that there is the possibility that this faggot is like a fucking massive trog type closet case who, to protect his macho rep, gets his kicks in public toilets in secret. He’s just curious… He only wants to watch… At first…. But if confronted he will fight like some kind of frenzied ape to keep his little secret exactly that.

With one fearful foot already outside the door I launch the other towards the piece of plastic covered plywood that separates us and it pops open with ease…

No trog here, just a pathetic looking middle aged man, the reek of defeat and alcohol masking everything but his fading erection in his hand… There’s another awkward pause before I throw my first punch just out of fear of accidentally touching his exposed flesh. It knocks him from the toilet seat and on to the pissy wet floor where my boots start to work him over.

I vary between stomach thrusts with my toe ends and facial stomps with my soles. Each blow that lands brings a sigh or a yelp out of his mouth and each one sounds like “Thank you” but I can’t stop not even as I see the blood mingling with the room temperature urine and watch it slide into and over the cracks in the tiled floor…

No idea how long this is going on for… then the guys are shouting after me. They are there and seem confused. Gittins says that we better get back to his car and make moves in case anyone has called the police. He manages to get a few boots in of his own as he pushes me out of the cubicle…

- What the fuck was that about? Mikey asked me in the car

- Just the fucking lunatics taking over the asylum I mumble as my pale face stares out of the car window.

- They’re everywhere agrees Gittins as we drive away from town back to the sanctuary of our local.

The Rope Hangs To Keep Us All Awake

2006-11-06T06:24:00.000Z

So, it's been age. So much has passed but I've tried largely to ignore it. Like a swine wallowing in my own filth, eyes placed barely above the muck line. Completely absorbed by the petty pursuits, the personal interests and desires that come all too easy to fulfil I've barely batted a scum encrusted eyelid.

Yet if there is one thing that can bring one such as me (A loudmouthed pig to some, a political analyst to a few, and a journalist to me alone) it is the sheer glory of being absolutely stonewall right about something... To call something so frighteningly accurately an age before it happens and to see it come to pass just the way you said. Is to predict not the future a godlike thing? And when you do it do you not want to tell the world?

So the rum is poured, the PC fired up for something other than entertainment and we go about sharing exactly what it is that was called - either in a bar to total strangers or to semi-literate friends who just nodded and pretended to understand - some time ago. But make no mistake that what is currently running over and over on all the twenty four our news channels and even inspired Fox news to drop their state of national alert bar one shade, is not coming as a shock to this souse.

As with all stories the ability to travel through time is essential and one that the storyteller can bestow upon the people paying attention...

December 2003 and Saddam Hussein is captured by American military. It is revealed that the aging former dictator has been hiding in an underground bunker for some time and has been living under atrocious conditions. Much is made of the capture and the images of Saddam Hussein, looking more like the wild man of Borneo, being subject to a medical exam are stamped upon the collective conscious of people throughout the world.

At this point it was speculated that Saddam would be brought before the Hague to be tried for his many war crimes in his tenure as initially US sponsored leader of Iraq, including the persecution and attempted genocide of the Kurdish people. And indeed this is how it should be. A truly international community should have a centralised and impartial court for world leaders accused of atrocities that bring shame and despair to people of all nations.

Yet it quickly became apparent that despite the infrastructure of Iraq being far from stable or even - as the US had hoped for - totally under the control of the West, the decision was made to have Saddam stand trial in Iraq for his crimes against Iraqi people. We were all reassured that the trial would be totally fair and impartial, that it would be carefully watched and monitored by the "responsible" West. After all, and as was trotted out by grey haired weasels in sharp suits, whatever Saddam had done he still had the right to a fair trial in a court of his peers.

Now let's cut to a drunk and an audience of deaf ears:

"Bloody Fucking hell... They're gonna feed him to the fucking wolves. A token gesture. We'll give you five minutes alone with your tormentor and let you do whatever you want, and that's our show of good will... You dig?"

People stared at me glassy eyed

"Don't you see there's only one outcome of this trial? The death penalty, maybe even with some of his own favoured gas, and no-one will give a fuck because it's reasoned he deserves it. This totally over-rides the basic defining principles of international justice, that even in the lands of heaven Satan himself should receive a fair trial. Fucking whole trial will degenerate into a farcical pantomime."

Some slack jawed morons got side tracked about a debate over whether victims should be able to have a say in punishment and sentencing of the criminals who have commited crimes against them, a truly foolish notion, and I went back to my drinking.

We can jump to July 2004 when Saddam makes his first appearance in front of the Iraqi courts after a period of "convalescence and co-operation" with the US government. In his statement he brands Bush and Blair to be the "real criminals" a point on which he was only partially right, because of course they are all a bunch of rotten-to-the-core bastards who ultimately should have been sharing cells on the same strip of prison ground.

The resulting trial is an absolute joke, the kind of weird twisted bullshit that could only happen in the kind of clown court circus that had been set up especially for this occasion. Walkouts by defence lawyers as accusations of a total lack of impartiality by the prosecution and indeed the court itself are ignored. Accusations that Saddam was beaten and tortured in US custody are ignored. No attempt made to protect witnesses coming forward for the defence, no anonymity for those who may want to volunteer something that would support or substantiate the claims of the ousted dictator. They would have to face potential assasination or mob justice if they wanted to come forward, the whole trial being televised to the degree where the judge himself was making statements direct to the cameras, wires strewn across the courtroom floor.

By February of this year Saddam and some of his co-defendants are enagaged in a hunger strike, quite easily one of the most unsuccessful and unremarkable types of this gesture that there ever has been. People simply did not care. Why the sudden shift in methods from the man himself? Well, the crux of the trial was focusing on the 1982 massacre of 148 civilians from Dujail, the prosecution claiming to have substantial evidence, including statements from people who were then in the employ of Saddam Hussein and documents signed by the man himself approving the atrocity.

1982 is an important year incidentally as it was a year that the US provided Iraq and Saddam Hussein with billions of dollars in "aid" to enable him to purchase weapons to war with Iran. Of course any notion that some of this money may have trickled down into the more genocidal activites of Saddam Hussein is nonsense, and to go as far as to say that such a relationship with the US may have instilled some kind of sense of political unaccountability and invincibility is also absolute rot. You see, there's simply no way you could view the US government as co-conspirators of this terrible atrocity. Their hands were clean, and would be even more so once the Iraqi courts had decided to slit Saddams gizzard.

By June the prosecution have made it clear and public they will be gunning for, no pun intended, the death peanlty. They are now focusing on events in 1987-88, the time when Premier Hussein stepped up his anti-Kurdish offensive. The case against him is less cut and dry than what has been revealed in regards to the 1982 massacre in Dujail, yet a host of eye witness accounts are brought forward before the court. Guerilla soldiers who were exposed to the gas attacks, fathers who lost wives and children, mother still grieving... All these witnesses providing accounts that the media devoured and regurgitated wholesale as a testament to the evil of Hussein. Yet no-one actually stood and questioned the relevance of the testimony that had more in common with the slushy melodrama of a Hollywood courtroom based movie than the actual mechanics of due process.

All the while the media jumps on the petty outbursts of the main defendant as he refuses to sit down, abuses the judge, heckles the witnesses... Saddam is routinely removed from court and proceedings halted by a man who is onyl too happy to play up to his status as pantomime villain. What is all the more disconcerting is the apaprent lack of control of the court, and indeed self control, by the presiding judge Rizgar Amin who seemed just as interested in establsihing dominance over the accused as anything else. Something I expect to see from the tawdry Judge Judy but not from a trial of a former world leader.

Indeed, on one occasion he was chastised for being late by the judge despite the insistence that he was shackled at all times, something for the cameras as opposed to a realistic practicality. Was their any danger from a 62 year old man in ill health? Did Saddam even want to escape? I doubt it - He was relishing the spotlight way too much.

And so we come to it - the sentence of death on the 1982 massacre is passed less than 24 hours ago and the world reacts as if we should be surprised. The fact that there is still no sentence passed for his involvement in the Kurdish offensive, yet the witness testimony is still ringing in the ears of jurors, is just one of the many reasons whyt his trial has been a farce. Even Amnesty International, an organisation know for their work in assisting the victims of Husseins legacy, have come forard and spoken out about the trial. They are actually calling for the death penalty to be overturned at appeal.

Incredibly, despite his signature bing on the legally binding documents that will enable a state approved execution of Saddam, the new president Jalal Talabani is opposed to the punishment and is so far as has been stated opposes the death penalty as uncivilised. Yet the Iraq Prime Minister - Nouri Malaki - Has said the sentence is what is required to close the book on the dark history of Iraq. I wonder just exactly where these seperate agendas converge.

As riots break out in Saddam's home town of Tikrit, the defence steals itself for what the world already knows to be an unsuccesful appeal. This will only take 3-4 weeks. No 15 year waiting periods on death row in this country. The bulk of their appeal will revolve around government interference in the trial itself and irregular trial methods, both of which have indeed taken place. Yet we can expect a, doubtlessly, televised execution of a Muslim former leader around about Christmas. Shades of Ceausescu.

Does Saddam deserve life imprisonment? Of course. But what is to be said of Western benevolence and justice when we turn those we oust over to the people with their ready knives sharpened for some mob justice. Forget the robes, the pomp, the ceremony. That is exactly what happened here. And no doubt George Bush, no stranger to executions as his time as governer in Texas will testify to, will have some popcorn ready and his whitehouse DVD recorder all good to go on the date that the man who "tried to kill" his "daddy" (Bushes words, not mine) is strung up by the neck until he twitches his last and pisses his pants.

The rope is hanging as a reminder to all the others out there that challenge the Western hegemony "fuck with us, and it could be round your neck" and nothing more.

It's seven in the morning and my Cuba Libra is starting to taste a little flat.
Told you.

Sick of Porn

2006-05-01T00:24:00.000+01:00

When did porn become as tired and generic as the everyday sex lives we try to remove ourselves from? No matter the “stars”, no matter what the title implies, no matter what source you acquire the material from, your porn will be the same and it will become fucking boring… Like daytime television with one show becoming unrecognisable from another running into each other as one long nauseating blur.

I remember when porn was full of ideas and innovations, when you could pick a film for a specific masturbatory mood. This should never have ended, but as with all things there is now nothing but a tepid and uniform approach that leaves the true pornographic connoisseur unsatisfied. It is not so simple to relive the glory days by watching the old, oft watched movies… Anyone who knows anything about porn knows it has a very short shelf life, maybe six times in the mix before it becomes nothing more than a pointless gesture to have it on in the background… Six times tops, just like the real thing.

I’m sick of the faceless, nameless clones all with goatee beard and sweep back hair over thinning monk patch. I’m sick of their typical bodies all with decent chest size and perfunctory six-pack poking through. I’m sick of the boring tattoos, always a bicep band… I’m sick of the average sized cocks that make you long for the days of John Holmes and Ron Jeremy. I’m sick of the same said average sized cocks jutting out of shaved pubes and atop of small, tightly wound balls, shaved to exaggerate shaft size. I’m sick of those translucent condoms that make them look like they have the dick of a mannequin.

I’m sick of having to watch them go through the motions, the same set of positions in order every time… He eats her, she sucks him, she gets it on top, he flips her around and dogs her, a now token anal scene before facial. I’m sick of predictable sex in something that should fulfil a fantasy for some dumb cunt too lazy to think of one. I’m sick of watching the woman stimulate her clitoris when in this movie the cock is all she should need.

I’m sick of the noises these women make, like the sounds that drift across the tundra in walrus mating season. I’m sick of them being so clearly fake. I’m sick of the woman spending more time pouting in to the camera than getting down on the dick. I’m sick of the women who blow the guys but clearly don’t want to get come in their mouths… You don’t like the taste of spunk? What the fuck you doing in a skin flick? I’m sick of the way that they try and make a guys load look more by diluting the come with spit.

I’m sick of guys who can’t even maintain an erection for the entirety of the scene, floppy, lardy pricks displaying just how not aroused he is and removing any credibility to what is happening. I’m sick of the guys, usually blacks, who can’t pull out a decent come shot at the end… I want to see the increased load of a man who is sexually excited smattered everywhere.

I’m sick of the same shots being used, the same angles, no variety whatsoever, just by the numbers in every department. I’m sick of the gimmicks and quirks the females implement in an attempt to be distinguishable from one fuck piece to another… The different arrangements of pubic hair, the small tattoos, the stomach brandings… None of this gives them an identity, nor do I care for them to have one. I’m sick of prolonged foreplay in these movies. It has no place in pornography.

I’m sick of improvised dialogue that does not ring true, badly stilted expressions like “lick… those… balls” as if the notion of a running commentary somehow adds to the eroticism. I’m sick of contrived plots and the masquerade of romance. I’m sick of naked women who keep their shoes on for no apparent reason. I’m sick of pigtails having to match up with white socks. I’m sick of women dressed up as school girls and the complete pretence that this doesn’t appeal to the nonce in all men.

I’m sick of men who make way too much noise when they come as if it’s never happened before. It’s embarrassing and it could only be made worse if they immediately burst into tears afterwards. I’m sick of “lesbian” porn and the tentative lapping of cunt that it brings. I’m sick of titles that mimic those of popular films because they’re just not trying anymore. I’m sick of guys saying they’ve seen “shaving private Ryan” when there’s no such film… It’s “shaving Ryan’s privates” and it’s a gay porn flick guys… It’s fucking gay.

I’m sick of average looking girls with gap teeth and badly bleached blonde hair getting in to these flicks just because… I’m sick of the piss poor attempts at deep throat that make horrible noises as they push through the gag reflexes. Practice that shit on your own time, not when I’m trying to beat off.

I’m sick of scenes where the woman is clearly not enjoying it but continues with the pretence. I should never see those scenes. I’m sick of guys who go through all that fucking to just jerk themselves off at the end anyway. I’m sick of the fact that no-one has realised double penetration doesn’t really work, looks shit, stops pornographic momentum and never happens outside of the confines of a porn film.

I’m sick of the kisses, the shit fucking kisses these people give to one another… What is that shit? What are you doing with your fucking tongue? Why all the noise? This inadvertent comedy counters hardness like a whack with a cold spoon. I’m sick of the music in the background which everyone pretends is funk and slap bass, but more often than not is the kind of soft rock nonsense you get in the background of straight to video 80s movies. Even now.

Porn, porn, porn… Why hast thou forsaken me? Fuck you porn. You’re meant to be a source of joy. That anti-porn gauntlet that all guys run, the bullshit about it being exploitative, the arguments with women who destroy your stash then frig themselves off to “Thelma & Louise”, the time that we make just to spend with you, porn… It’s no longer worth it.

I’m sick of porn.

All Fronts

2006-04-27T18:23:00.000+01:00

Well, we’re back online after some time and the main reason for the absence has been a foul combination of legal battles on all fronts. This after finalising the overly long and protracted legal battle with my former employers that eventually ended with an out of court settlement. It is true to say that he who goes to law takes a wolf by the ears.

First there was the matter of an arrest to prevent a possible breach of the peace – The first time I’ve ever been arrested for the crimes that I may decide to commit in the future and a real indicator that we are moving closer towards a police state under the facist-lite policies of New Labour.

Then came problems with some of the content of this modest blog itself. Does it really glorify terrorism? I’m not so certain it does, but I found myself having to justify the content and context to strange and shadowy sources of threats against my freedom of speech. Not only am I potential danger to the public, my words actually qualifies me as an enemy of the state.

When this finally blows over I find myself involved in litigation with both my bank and credit card companies over matters that I truly can’t let slide. I’ve had enough of these fucking robbing vampires trying to strong-arm me into paying money that is actually illegal for them to request… Pay close attention fellow degenerates: The banking ombudsman has insisted that the banks drop their “charges” to no more than £12 per instance of them having to employ administration over returned payments and the like… Anything over this amount is clearly a profit making exercise and is therefore illegal under the rules and regulations banks have to adhere to. Incredibly the bank is happy to go to court to somehow defend their flagrant disregard of the law, and I’m happy to finally go and turn the screws on these rabid motherfuckers for a change. The black and white of it is they can’t win.

So as I’ve been out into this sewer of a country to try and fight the various evil factions I haven’t had time or access to the means to keep this up to date. But that should all change with each passing victory.

For the Love of God...

2006-02-07T23:50:00.000Z

Hard to believe that February 6th has seen the first deaths in relation to the continuing protests concerning a cartoon depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammed. Armed police were forced to open fire on a crowd that would not disperse killing perhaps as many as five Afghan men. I think it’s a safe bet that this will add fresh impetus to the riots and will give some fresh venom to the speeches of the extremist minority currently whipping crowds up into a frenzy.

Although I have often stated my desire for religious tolerance, despite the fact that I view all organised religion as odious, I can’t help but feel that this whole series of events is ridiculous to the extreme. All those organisations who have tried to portray Muslims as evil savages with no regard for freedom of expression must be feeling pretty satisfied watching the way these rioters are conducting themselves. There will be many liberals who find this whole affair distasteful and disgusting, doubtlessly allowing a slight touch of prejudice to creep into their otherwise egalitarian mind…

And why not? There can be no bigger priority than protecting someone’s freedom of expression and the root of this ideology is also the same one that is tolerant of all faiths. While Islamic groups are calling for their faith to be respected they are also now calling for the people who drew the offending cartoons to be beheaded… It really is difficult for me to swallow.

The Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, that printed the cartoon knew there would be controversy surrounding the images. I’m quite sure they had no idea that they would be responsible for nearly ten days of global rioting, Danish embassies being besieged and would result in their address appearing on a Muslim terrorist website as a potential target. So why exactly did they do it anyway? Quite simply, to prove the point a lot of us are now thinking is true, that to criticise Islam in any way is an extremely dangerous thing to do.

A Danish author had contacted the newspaper stating that he could not find anyone willing to illustrate his new book about the life of Mohammed. The newspaper responded by asking twelve illustrators to draw the prophet for them and then published the resulting pictures. Over 5000 Danish Muslims took the streets in protest the day that the images were published and leaders of their groups demanded apologies. The editor of Jyllands-Posten rejected this as a necessary move stating, quite correctly, that:

“We live in a democracy. That’s why we can use all the journalistic methods we want to. Satire is accepted in this country, and you can make caricatures.”

There are those that maintain the move was done deliberately to provoke Muslims but the exercise was performed to show that there are many artists and writers who censor themselves through fear of extremist Muslim reaction. Surely in true democracy, a secular society, there can be no special treatment handed out to one faith, especially if that treatment is a product of fear of violent reprisals. Such pressure has more akin with fascism than a faith that promotes peace.

Of course the Christian notion of god, that of a vast, old, white bearded old man, has appeared in numerous sections of the media. The same goes for Jesus Christ. I’ve even seen Buddha being arrested for stealing a car and threatening a police officer on The Simpsons. After these images, both blasphemous and insulting to certain people I have no doubt, there were no riots, no calls for bloodshed. There may have been a few strongly worded letters to the BBC… Even when Jerry Springer the Opera was aired on television, with its images of a homosexual black Christ engaged in direct contact with Satan, by comparison it barely called a ripple. If Monty Python had created a film today called “Life of Iqbal” parodying the life of Mohammed and also cleverly demonstrating that there will always be groups of people who will follow anybody, would anyone have the courage to go to the cinema to watch it?

Deities and prophets are the perfect targets to satirise as they represent the divine, an abstraction that cannot possibly exist within the human form. If we take it that they have existed / do exist it is safe to say they are beyond the trivial concepts of image. No matter what you say you will never shake a believers faith so it does not impact on the religion in that way either. And if there is some kind of all-powerful being out there it’s a safe bet, given the cosmic scheme of things, they have a fucking sense of humour. Are these people really so insecure in their faith that a picture poses such a threat in their eyes that they must destroy those responsible?

This situation needs to be brought under control and instead of respected Muslims fuelling the fire by calling for beheadings and other such nonsense, they need to start calling for some sense of sanity, one big fucking reality check for the people they represent. This reaction is completely unwarranted and there can be no excuse to suppress the freedom of the press. Especially as there is absolutely no harm done as a result of the pictures that have sparked these scenes other than a few people have been offended. If these riots are not brought under control soon we’re going to see a backlash from people who have been waiting for the Muslim world to do something that will be easily accepted en mass as a typical reaction from a dangerous people. The people leading this backlash may also have a few surprising faces amongst them. Country simple - this is mob mentality at its most repulsive and ignorant.

And as I finish typing this it’s brought to my attention that one Muslim from Brussels has retaliated by creating a painting of the Virgin Mary with her naked breasts exposed. Although there have been some small murmurings of disquiet from a few Catholics, we have yet to see an eruption of violence. What punishment for the Muslim who created such a graven image? A subsidy from the Belgian ministry of culture…

Dear Agent

2006-02-06T02:24:00.000Z

Dear Agent,

Early in to the letter and two mistakes already. That’s what you’re thinking. First was the “headed” letter paper. If I were important enough to warrant it I wouldn’t be writing to you to ask for your representation, which amounts to little more than help in achieving my goals for a percentage. Then was the fact that I didn’t use your name. I just spat out the word “agent” like it was something negative, derogatory and sums up your entire being in two syllables.

It’s ok for me to make these mistakes given the circumstances. You see this might be something you’ve not received before. This is a piece of hate mail in anticipation of the rejection you’ll be sending back to me. That’s if you bother at all and you’re not one of the jackals who have the nerve to leave some small print bullshit in your advertisements along the lines of “we are extremely busy here and if you don’t hear anything from us then you have unfortunately been unsuccessful on this occasion.”

I’ve had these rejections before, the entirety of my failure summed up in three simple sentences that betray just how generic they are. The image in my head is of a secretary being told to send rejection letter number one to the following list of addresses. It probably doesn’t even matter if you’ve read what they’ve sent you. But I can sympathise with that part… The not reading part. God knows I’ve heard plenty of people who think they’re talented writers, listened to them read their stuff out with a feint smile on their face at writers groups. But it was drivel and no one wanted to tell them, not even me. I just sat there and smirked along with them holding on to some notion that all “art” is valid or some shit.

You’re different because you tell people, you reject people, you hurt people. And I think I don’t really deserve or warrant this treatment because I’m different to all the others. I am actually talented. My work actually has merit. I know this because I think if I was one of the saps who had no real talent, if I knew deep down that my work was sub standard as all people do, I’d tolerate the pile of letters that inarticulately express just how untalented I am. Yet people like you have told me that I am just like these poor chumps and I can’t bring myself to believe it because it just does not sit right.

I can’t believe these people like you have actually read what I’ve sent them. Not properly, not all the way through. If they had they would see and understand. But maybe I’m placing some kind of expectation on people that does not truly belong. After all, you may have no understanding and appreciation of good, honest writing. It’s not a pre requisite of what you do. You might just understand what is marketable, what is similar to work that has won bullshit literary prizes based on flavour of the month ideals.

It’d be a lot easier to take if you people were part of a consistent voice in my life. I think by now I would have got the message if that were the case. Everyone else who reads my work stresses how good it is. Partners – who come and go – friends, family, lecturers, fellow writers, journalists... I’ve already enjoyed a moderate degree of success you see. Edited ‘zines, had bits and pieces printed in some places of note – like The Guardian if we’re name dropping – but fuck that because where has it got me? Where has any of my “achievements” got me in your eyes or in the eyes of anyone else?

I tried to follow that middle class code that seems to get ordinary people further than where they truly belong. Network with anyone who’s vaguely famous or reputable, never lose a friend no matter how badly you treat them, if your values are controversial or offensive or others, alter them to something more palatable… Funnily enough this approach has left me unsatisfied and was always doomed to failure because I am not one of those people. But what I am supposed to do in a time when everything, even that which is presented as edgy and outlaw, has to be conformist, sterile and standardised?

I detest the idea that I’m mediocre and I detest anyone who tries to tell me that. You and your kind included. Fuck what male pattern baldness, my being overweight, the crude simplicity of my addictions tell me. I can’t believe that the world would not want to read what I have to say. I can’t believe my opinions and articulation of these opinions is so utterly meaningless that I should just accept some pointless job in a call centre with nothing to look forward to than half hearted masturbation in toilet cubicles on my lunch breaks…

Drifting into being crude now it seems. Well, I’ll give you a bit of honesty that may just take away that foul image from your mind. When I was a child, even younger than what would be considered a teenager, I watched a film called Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. It wasn’t the 1950s version with the “happy” ending either. It was the seventies remake with Donald Sutherland with the distinctly more brutal climax. It fucked me up beyond anything a film should do. I couldn’t sleep for days at a time until exhaustion would take me. I had weird lurching feelings when anyone would talk to me and seemed even just slightly odd.

My mother explained it to me that I was just scared of my family being taken away from me. She was wrong. A child shrink who I had to see just to be allowed to stay in my school (it turns out being able to read and write above your decreed level in a colliery town brands you a “danger” in the same way that I may have branded a witch if I lived in Salem all those years ago) told me that it was a fear that emanated from a lack of control. There I was thinking it was just a scary movie.

But where the fear came form was a psychic glimpse of the future where everyone is uniform and mediocre and the same… Where people don’t want to rock the boat and make decisions that might leave them with an unpalatable “maverick” or “oddball” label. Isn’t that why popular entertainment has become the worst it ever has? Isn’t that why all art tries to appeal to everything that is wrong with society? Isn’t that why the BBC has dumbed down and pretends that it doesn’t provide exclusive advertising to Google and other such companies?

Every area that once relished and welcomed people who were special and different no longer does that. I tell myself that if I were born thirty or more years ago my desire to be successful would be enough… It was for all the people I aspire to be like regardless of their talent. My Bodysnatchers fear just shows that I can’t believe people with no talent or SOUL have infiltrated everything and prevented people like me from ever getting in where they are. The door has been slammed firmly shut from the moment they got in and any chance of being “given a break” has gone. All the people who inspired me, I read their biographies. They all got a break against the odds. Where’s mine? When’s it coming? I ask that over and over…

You see the crux of the whole thing lies in the belief - in the face of evidence people like you provide that I have to tell myself is falsified – that I’m special. That my work has something to say to people at large, that I have an undeniable talent that would constitute marketable if exposed to just enough people because my voice is one that we all speak with but just don’t know it yet. Or something. But I’ve been drinking and I’m at the half way point of feeling like a god but also wanting to die.

If you want to actually see some of my work then write to me at the above address. Better yet call me on ***********. If not at least this information will help you secure a restraining order. And it might be an idea for you to do that because I am out of my mind with this shit.

Regards

Richard Lewis

The New Mythology

2006-01-13T08:17:00.000Z

Greetings and Happy New Year oh not so avid readers.

And what a start it has been. Charles Kennedy admits to being a souse in what was the worst kept "secret" in politics. We had the near joy of Ariel Sharon seeming to be all but dead only to have it cruelly snatched away from us with his near miraculous recovery. Iran has continued to defy the West and develop nuclear capabilties. Fishermen turn rogue in Thailand and set about raping and killing helpless young women. And just yesterday over three hundred and fourty Muslims during the Hajj pilgramige are trampled to death by stampeding crowds.

We're not even half way through January.

But I'm not going to talk about this. No, I address something far more trivial that I've known for years but only now do we have statistical evidence to back it up. Because there is a new mythology present in our society. One that is comparable to the ancient Greek myths that enthralled us all as children and not just when we were watching Clash of the Titans for the umpteenth time.

This is the whacked out belief held by as many as one in ten 16 - 19 year olds that dropping out of education to pursue some kind of reality television show would be a good move. sixteen percent of these talentless, brain dead dunderheads actually believe they will become famous. The top ten greats they wish to emulate are:

Richard Branson
J K Rowling
David Beckham
Andrew Flintoff
Tony Blair
David Attenborough
Frank Lampard
Stephen Hawking
Ms Dynamite
Alan Sugar

Do we see a pattern here? Millionaires, talentless hacks, corrupt politicians and moronic sports people. Pity Stephen Hawking. When he sees the company he keeps on this list his computer is going to experience a malfunction of some kind, quite possibly rendering an empty shell unable to express his disgust and fear to the outside world. Just how did one of the leading thinkers of our time end up on a par, as a role model for future generations, with David Beckham? David Beckham says:

"Yeah, we want Brooklyn to be Christened. We just haven't decided into what religion yet"

Bravo David. That'll teach them. Rowling can't write and has exploited the pressure put on parents to cave into childrens consumerist fads. That and the fact that it's mostly simple adults who read her books. Ms Dynamite is a pretty talentless musician with pretensions of somehow being political because she films her music videos on pretend council estates. And she drunkenly attacks police officers. Branson & Sugar obviously have no soul between them. Obviously. The least said about Blair the better.

Anyway, fuck pointless character assassination. The point is that young adults don't want to have to accept the somewhat grim realities of the dime a dozen existence that awaits them. And everywhere the media feeds them the tissue of lies to fuel their delusions. Because in much the same way that the ancient Greeks believed that through bravery and honour they could ascend Mount Olympus to sit alongside the gods as equals - as Heracles did after completing his labours - the fools of this generation believe that there is a market for being a vacant buffoon who does nothing but stare at two things all day: A mirror and a camera.

They hold on to the idea of that big prize, the winning ticket. But, as someone who was also from a generation of children who were told they could achieve anything, there are some marked differences. I actually wanted to be good at somehting. You know, like a talent of some worth. Most people I know did. They never harboured the belief they could just stroll into the living room of the nation without anything to offer the viewer. It just didn't happen back then.

Now it has happened for a small minority of cretins and the ugly scene has proliferated en masse. Most girls at school would rather be a Jade Goody or a Coleen
McLoughlin than someone with a skill. After all, these are working class morons who aren't particularly good looking that have millions in the bank. One for being teeth grindingly stupid on national television, the other for fucking a talented footballer with a penchant for prostitutes of all ages and sizes. It beats working for a living. And this new bar-lowering in standards required to be a household name has really got everyone thinking "I'm as stupid and ugly as that, why not me?"

That said with drivel such as this being offered by Ruth Bullen, LSC Spokeswoman, is it any wonder:

"If making money is the reason a young person wants to become famous, then by staying on in education or training they can significantly increase their future earning power by gaining these essential qualifications,"

Ho Ho Ho. If only this were true. If you want to make money you need to lower your standards to fit in with the foulness that pervades through our society with each passing moment. "Great" Britain has become decadent and depraved and cares not for those of intellect. Far better that instead of going to university you actually become a plumber or an electrician. Start learning the trades that those with money don't want to learn to do themselves. That'll make you money and you don't have to pay extortionate student loans back the rest of your life to do it. I graduated and got a job that paid £18,500. I have friends mamking in a week what I was making in a month and they have one thing in common. they're idiots who dropped out of school and learnt to do something that would be utterly demoralising to someone with half a mind.

There is too much out there for the average moron to profit from. The smartest people I know are also the poorest. Still, we can but hope that enough of this generation fucks itself up by buying into the myth that fame can be easily acquired. Let them labour under this delusion for as long as they like. When all the plumbing, electrician, mechanic, engineering, refuse disposal and other inexplicably high paid jobs have gone it might usher in a new dawn for me and my dying breed. Let these assholes wait on my table still preening themselves in the hope of a talent scout crossing their path. Like all myths this one exists to provide false hope to the incapable, an aspiration for the unimaginitve, a blueprint of action for the indecisive but it will provide no explanation for, or solace in dealing with, the almost inevitable failure.

Christmas

2005-12-25T09:13:00.000Z

-Letz get to tha goodztuff, enthuses a fat sweaty man, red of neck, as he scratches his obesity through a grubby vest.

-The presents, Pa? Asks one of the many children in the room

-HELL YEZ, ZUN…

Large family bundles through room after room, incredible in what seems to be a tiny trailer home. Water swollen wood, and bent rusty nails attach walls that shouldn’t hold. They search for the gift-yielding tree. They know it is tucked away in a room that smells like a hamster cage.

-Where do we keep it? Asks pregnant wife

Husband answers with backhand slap, typical reply that has now become as painless as words.

-I’m thinkun’ bitch

Room is eventually found, large number of gaudy-wrapped presents under frugal looking tree, pine needles brown.

-Come an give Pa his presents…

He places his worn, sticky armchair under the wilting tree, and opens arms to family, like an obscene Buddha.

-Here ya go Pa, mumbles boy with teeth missing

-What iz it?
Tears at wrapping paper – A BOOK

-A book of history, Pa. You’s always telling us how proud we should be about our herry-tij.

With effortless anger father throws son to the other end of the room.

-READING IS FOR FAGGOTS YOU LITTLE RED COCKSUCKER! I ALREADY KNOW ABOUT OUR GOD DAMN HERRYTIJ. I DON’ NEED NO STINKING LIB-RAL INTER-PREE-TASHUNS OF WHAT MAKES US GREAT… NEXT…

Eldest son, laden with pressure to carry on lineage, illiterate, brings over a wooden box. It is opened and Pa’s eyes light up…

-CEEGARS! I LOVE CEEGARS!

Son sighs with relief, eyeing his brother in a bloody heap.

-They’re the finest in the world, Pa he adds with a victorious smile

-What, domestic?

-No, they’re from one of them foreign islands that grow and…

Unseen by the child, his father’s blood boils and hands snake out to grab son’s throat.

-You bought these from one of those countries – YOU LITTLE FUCK – THERE’S REASONS WHY THESE GOD DAMN THINGS ARE ILLEGAL. YOU BUY CEEGARS, THEY GO AND BUY MISSLES…. Or something…
SqUEEZES hARDer
-ALL I KNOW IS THAT THEM ARE EVIL. EVERY CENT IN THEIR POCKET IS A BULLET IN THEIR GUNS. THERE’S A WAR ON YOU KNOW… YOU FUCKIN’ LITTLE SYMP-EEE-THIZOR

Somewhere between the purple faced stutters there is a sound of the neck snapping, and the corpse is thrown on top of the other.

-No Zun of mine, snorts the father

-Perhaps you were too hard on him, whimpers the wife

Sound of full-blooded punch to the face

-PERHAPS I’M NOT HARD ENUFF, YOU FUCKIN’ BITCH. SHOULDA KILLED THAT UN A LONG TIME AGO. UNDER MY OWN ROOF… A SYMP-EEE-THIZOR…

He pulls a look on his leather face that says “where did I go wrong?”. In the right company he knows this would induce quick sympathy, a comforting purchase of beer, a firm slap on the shoulder… He lights up a cigar from the box and inhales deeply, look on face slowly changing as he takes in the smoke.

-That’s too good… Must be domestic.

He turns to the wife, nose still dripping blood. He asks – One for the baby?
The wife thinks about declining, but nose is a painful reminder. She takes the cigar and smokes with fake enthusiasm.

-Must be domestic honey, she repeats

He twists her arm up her back, just shy of snapping point

-WHA’ DID I JUS’ SAY, YOU FUCKIN’ WHORE?

The sound of canned laughter rains down from non-existent clouds and penetrates the swollen rotting wood of the trailer to nest in Pa’s non-symmetrical ears. And Christmas day roles on by in similar fashion, a room full of corpses left at the end, a few whimpering children trying hard to smile as they play with meagre gifts…

-YOU BETTER APPRECIATE ‘EM AS WELL. BEEN A HARD YEAR TO BUY FOR ALL OF YER. BUST MY GOD DAMN ASS….

+++

It is a few hours later and the family members who have survived the opening of the gifts have gathered around a warped home crafted table that is covered with a layer of grease from non-cleaning. Various plates of similarly coloured food slide around slowly as children shuffling knock the table and then quickly look at someone else to shift blame. Hunger has made them anxious, a whole host of subconscious ticks manifesting themselves and totally beyond their control…

-WILL YER FUCKIN’ SIT STILL…. PA HAS TO CARVE THE TURK-AY. THAT IS WHAT THE MAN OF THE HOUSE HAS TO DO!

With this he picks up an electric carving knife that is rusty and clogged with the decaying food from last major meal. Sound like an old chainsaw that brings smile to his cruel face… Then carving with no artistry, hacking at an undercooked sorry looking carcass… Fat and blood spurt out as turkey parts fall to plate and the floor. Their faces covered in the juices, their concentration snaps, and some of the younger children grab handfuls of food and scuttle off to corners and crawlspace.

- YER FUCKIN’ LIL’ BASTARDS!

The carver is wielded in dramatic fashion and is waved at the invading limbs, to fight them off from the best cuts. A vicious laugh.

-MUST ER’ WINGED ONE OF YER.

A segment of finger lies next to the bowl of mashed potato. It is knocked to the floor as Pa helps himself.

-IF YOU’RE GONNA BEE-HAYVE LIKE A BUNCH OF SAVAGES, THEN YOU CAN FORGET ABOUT YOUR DINNER.

The older children who have remained obedient sit at the table still and stare at the knots in the wood, in the hope that their father will change their mind, or they will disappear entirely. They try not to salivate as he tears up hunks of food with his teeth and slops portions down his front. Mother picks at these with quick hand pecks, like a bird living off of a larger creature.

After Pa has quelled the beast inside, having gorged himself like a tick, he offers what is left to some of the boys who haven’t already eaten. He smiles at them with yellow teeth.

“It iz ChrizMuz…”

Mother nods approvingly.

+++

After meal time it is back to the TV. The Christmas channel is showing constant updates of the war abroad and in between news reports instead of commercials we get pictures of grunts in Santa Claus outfits sending messages to their loved ones.

-Those brave men… whispers she, her head rested on the beginning curve of his pot belly.

-I coulda been one of them. Ol’ injuries kept me out of it. From football.

A crescent of children has gathered to watch the television, but also to witness this moment of rare calm and comparative tenderness from their parents. Blank minds try to scratch in this memory above all the others. The smiling faces on the television beam bright and reflect off the skin and eyes of the viewers as the national flag starts to fade in slow, hovering in the background. A continual reminder of the knee-jerk patriotism held by all working stiffs. Thank the lord for your country and thank your country for all of this…

A slow build up of music comes from nowhere unheard by the family in the room.

Thank the country for unaffordable housing. Thank the country for low employment. Thank the country for poor standards of education and high levels of illiteracy. Thank the country for this war. Thank the country for tainted food products. Thank the country for greed driven imperialist expansion. Thank the country for industry that leaves the land like a polluted, bloated corpse. Thank the country for high infant mortality. Thank the country for low-grade television. Thank the country for a controlled, biased media.

The music is building to a crescendo, stirring tones and notes float through the air like tangible articles that you would need to duck for fear they would smash your face. The family still does not stir entranced by the glowing box.

Thank the country for being your country. Your country is New Rome. Thank the lord for your country…

The national anthem starts to play on the television, the flag now all that is on the screen. The father jumps up quick, his vest stretching back up over the gut it struggled to cover. The wife is jolted from a partial slumber as hairy arm coils past the back of her head.

- ALL STAND… THIS IS OUR ANT-THEM… STAND, STAND…

The children do as they’re told, so close to seeing another day it would be foolish not to, and follow their fathers movements as he salutes the television. Their mother gingerly follows suit.

As the anthem plays increasing in volume tubes with cobalt shine behind black snake their way through the floorboards. The heads look like microphones but project noise…

“It is time for bed people… It is time for bed. Your country needs you to go to bed. Sleep is good for you. The time for sleep is at hand…”

The familiar voice crackles, the tubes worm their way around the floor brushing past legs and moving to other rooms to ensure they are heard.

“Time for bed people… Do not forget to turn your lights out. We are at war. Your country needs you to turn out the lights. The time for darkness is at hand.”

It continues in this manner as the family shuffle to their various bedrooms. This Christmas is over, one of the better ones. The bodies of those who have failed will be removed in the morning like they were never there. Another day, another day. No bedtime stories. The children huddle in single beds to keep warm, pushing each other on to the damp, cold walls in a continual struggle. The lights are out…

“Goodnight little ones. Say your prayers before bed…”

And with that their father takes his wife to bed, lying close to her in the dark. He fumbles around in his shorts for his penis and slowly jerks himself to a state of readiness. Without a word he forces himself into his wife and rocks back and forwards oblivious to the tears that cannot be seen in the dark. The children try and shut their ears out from the rhythmic banging through paper-thin walls.

And all across the trailer park lights go out, all across the country lights go out until all is black like the country was in mourning.

R.I.P. Motherfucker

2005-12-12T00:33:00.000Z

Richard Pryor was the motherfucker born to say the word "motherfucker". And he's no longer with us.

He has passed away at the age of 65 after a heart attack. He had been suffering with MS for many years.

Growing up the first exposure I had to Richard Pryor were the films he did such as his appearance in the Superman franchise and his regular pairing with Gene Wilder in late night televsion classics like "Stir Crazy".

It was only as I got into my early teens when I realised that not only did Richard Pryor used to be a standup but he was one of the funniest that there ever has been. So masterful with an audience, unafraid to lapse into regular converstaion, never scared to improvise material on the fly... He was a comic genius. The only person who surpassed his skill with an audience was Bill Hicks, also sadly deceased.

As I started to watch his material it didn't really matter to me that a lot of it was aimed for black America. There was nothing lost in translation. Pryor was championing freedom of expression and attacking the dominant ideology of America at the same time as being incredibly funny.

I knew, like all great minds, he had his demons, that he had grown up in poverty and lived in a brothel where his mother would turn tricks. It was remarked that one of the reasons that he had some of the views that he did was because every white man he met when he was young was going to fuck his mother...

I went to his home town of Peoria, Illinois when I had a stint in the states. Not much had changed. It was still a poor area with a high black population. I wasn't sure what I was doing with this kind of sub-pilgramige, but I'm glad I did. I felt that his whole outlook made a bit more sense. As a bum from a colliery town in the North East of England I knew what it was like to want to get out of your surroundings and achieve something. Anything.

Pryor started by effectively impersonating Bill Cosby who at the time was the acceptable face of Black America, being beamed into the homes of viewers all over the country. But he realised that this charade was not him, would not bring him what he wanted. He knew he needed to be tru to himself. The rest is history.

If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery then Pryor can consider one of the most flattered comedians. Every black stand up comedian owes him a huge debt, especially those like Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence. Every stand up comedian who wants to talk explicitly about sex, drugs and personal issues owes him a debt too. So candid were his stand up shows that his new material regularly came from all the stories that were reported to the papers about his addictions and health problems. He would always tell the truth behind these stories on stage, even if the truth painted him in a worse light than the papers had already attempted.

2005 had already been a bad year. We lost a lot of good men. This is a bad way to cap off the year. I'm just glad he's no longer suffering.

Richard Pryor leaves a proud legacy. R.I.P.

If you thought Ratzinger was bad...

2005-12-09T18:40:00.000Z

A lot of my colleagues bemoaned the appointment of a Nazi Pope. Hell, I did as well... Why elect someone - who is as powerful, if not more so than the president of the united states - who believes homosexuals are evil, is against female priests, will not budge on the contraception issue and quite possibly used to sharpen Hitler's knives for him?

I guess the idea of an African Pope just freaked the Catholics out too much. Just in case he told all those people living in countries where AIDS is rife that they can actually use protection to stop the spread of the disease. Religions evolving and adapting to ensure they remain relevant to people who wish to belong to them? Not fucking likely.

We all know the Catholic church is little more than a collection of greedy, thieving, deceitful, chauvinistic, paedophile protectors. Unfortunately, for reasons beyond my comprehension, their particular brand of quaint superstitions seem very popular across the globe. But, if like me, you think a Nazi Pope is the sign of bad things to come there have been far worse:

Ratzinger is not the first Nazi Pope. Pope Pius XII was a supporter of the holocaust and was such a big Hitler fan he refused to excommunicate him for his "sins". Under Pius XII the Vatican's considerable coffers were used to protect former SS members and nazis on the run.

John Paul II, the last one to die, is often heralded as a great man. Not for me. He probably did more to ensure the spread of AIDS than any one person could hope to achieve and was known to regularly play tennis with murderous dictators such as General Galtieri of Argentina. He also instructed priests in places like El Salvador and Chile to show support for the regimes that were active there and not provide counsel for any guerrilas or insurgents.

Pope Leo X used Vatican money to fund orgies. Such were his extravagances the Vatican was starting to find itself in danger of crippling debts so his underlings plotted to have him assassinated. It was unsuccessful.

Pope Benedict IX was the youngest of Popes being elected to the position at just eleven years old. The idea was to appoint a Pope who could be controlled. Instead his reign is often remembered for the "debauchery" that took place, including orgies comprising of both heterosexual and homosexual couplings, incestuous sex and bestiality. Not convinced? St. Peter Damian says so in his "Book of Gomorrah".

Pope Sergius III murdered his successor to ensure that he was elected Pope.

Pope John XII was feared by all under him. So terrifying was his bloodthirsty nature his deacons did not dare speak out against the orgies he held on THE TOMBS OF ST. PETER and ST. PAUL! he would regularly murder hsi priests. The lucky ones were just castrated. Towards the end of his reign he reuqested that Germany declare war on Italy then when realising the Vatican is surrounded by Italians decided to retract his request. Died during an act of adultery...

Most hilarious of all, especially given that the Vatican is against female priests, has to be Pope "John" VII sometimes referred to as "Pope Joan". It wss only discovered that a woman had been ordained when she started to give birth.

So, what do we learn from this little history lesson? That the Catholic church is full of shit, has a history they should be ashamed of - it sounds more like the Borgias - and is utterly corrupt. But we knew that already.

Ratzinger has some way to claim the big Pope hat of evilness...

Best, Booze, Big Brother & Britain

2005-11-24T14:17:00.000Z

Perhaps it is no coincidence that on the day liquor licensing laws are extended in Britain, allowing ceratin bars to stay open serving alcohol for 24 hours, George Best's personal physician announces he has only hours to live. You can be sure that the Daily Mail will somehow try to link the two, a depressing tenuous link leading to the spewing forth of statistics about more people dying from liver failure at a younger age than ever before...

"We shall see many more like Best before this blinkered New Labour plan is through" one grey haired cretin shall quip, truly believing that this line distinguishes him from the rest of the journalistic world as some kind if insightful genius. The Daily Mail should just stick to being plain old inciteful.

But before this digression kicks in and poisons the rest of this post, much like the internal bleeding that has ravaged the great George Best's body and left it beyond repair, let us breath deep and smell some reality.

Extended licensing laws are a good thing. If you think otherwise, you're wrong. You're probably the same kind of moron who moans about your local shop not being open 24 hours when you want to satisfy your sickening, consumer driven cravings. Alcohol is a product, something that many reasonable people want to consume at differing hours. The people who binge drink and go on to perpetrate crimes and "lower the tone" of precious middle class England, by doing things like shitting on benches in public, would be doing the exact same thing if there was prohibition in this country... They are morons, yes. But morons can still be resourceful when it comes to enbaling their moronic acts.

If they couldn't get it together to brew their own alcohol from vegetables, they'd drink cough syrups that make them drowsy. If that was cut off they'd buy sleeping pills and take them. Let's not forget the basic fact that they would also flock to cheap hashish or anything else that got them into the state of being fucked up in public.But that's irrelevant because they would find a way to illegally buy alcohol anyway.

The key thing here is that these people need to be drunk and disorderly in public, even going to the extent of faking just how "out of it" they are in a crowd, like apes trying to establish dominance in packs. They equate being drunk to being adult, wild, wacky, interesting, hip, whatever the fuck... They cover their lack of intellect and personality by operating in such a state that them and everyone around them is unable to clearly distinguish them as idiots.

This after years of witnessing adults secretly drink after sending the kids to bed, wine with meals and being told "this is for grown ups", parents down the pub for hours leaving kids with baby sitters, alcohol not covered in the curriculum in schools and whsipered about by teachers... By the time you first get your hands on a drink you think you are doing something dangerous, criminal, wild. Something that proves you are the equal of any adult. And that is all kids really want to do in all their activities.

We, as a country, fucked up in our approach to alcohol. We made it taboo. Which is odd when you consider licensing laws in the form we knew them up until this day were brought in during the war to ensure dilligence in factory work places. Can't have those drunken workers affecting the war effort. Like so many things, after the war we just couldn't be bothered to revise it.

I've travelled all over the world, and while it is a great exaggeration to say that if you bump into someone who is pissed and aggressive abroad they are always British (plenty of the French, Dutch, Spanish and Italians guilty of this on my travels) it is a depressing majority. It never makes the people rethink their licensing laws... Just how many stick aorund in tourist season.

Hey, here's a good idea. Let's film these beasts and run the shows every day on Sky, Bravo, ITV and Channel 4. Let's make minor celebrities out of the brain dead. We've been doing it for years after all. But in the pretence of highlighting the problem, the media are actually glamourising the bad behaviour they supposedly deplore. And they know it too.

We should not be fighting a nanny state/big brother government actually giving us some freedoms back, nor should we allow an idiotic MAJORITY - yes, majority folks... Look out your window - to fuck this up for those who just want a cold beer at whatever time we want one. This, along with gambling, are two vices we're actually being allowed to do. Thank god. If I wanted to live the life that the Daily Mail are proposing we should be I'd join the clergy.

I was raised in a colliery town, taken down the local working mens club at an early age, given "pub shandies" while I tried to knock the pool balls around a table I could barely see over. I was surrounded by the fat, old, defeated ex-miners that were simply content to drink themselves to death. I was surrounded by the labourers having a few quick lunch time beers to make their days toil a bit more bearable. On a night I listened to awful comedians telling jokes I didn't quite understand and witnessed the middle age drunks try and do karaoke, the weekly moment of fame in a life packed with mediocrity and compromise.

Nothing glamourous there and although it didn't put me off alcohol for life, I had peeked behind the curtain that Britain has tried to keep closed to young people and realised what goes on in pubs and clubs is not so glamorous or exciting after all.

It is a tired argument that is being used by the people who are for this legislature: "Longer hours will reuce the temptation to have that big round at last orders" they say, along with "And not everyone will be leaving at the same time, so it will reduce crowding and fighting over things like taxis". Yawn. Yeah, it might just do those things. Unless everyone decides to go for the "hardcore" route and stays until the later kicking out time, or if it's 24 hours, until they can't stand.

In the short term we will see wankers go berserk and push it to the limits. The tabloids will tell us everytime someone is drunk and disorderly after midnight now. They'll have a field day if someone actually drinks themselves to death. But so what? The people who can actually handle drinking, eating, and other basic functions without killing ourselves should not have to be dictated to when, where and what we can put in our bodies. Let's evolve, instead of de-volving, for a change and let these neanderthal morons fall by the way side. Let them drink themselves to death. Let the police do with them what they will. I want a beer when I want a beer and that should be a right we all have.

As for Best. Well, everyone's blaming his decline on the booze. This infection that has lead to the internal bleeding that's killed him is a result of the medication he's taken to prevent his body rejecting his liver transplant... Sure, it was drinking that lead him to have his liver transplant, but he fucked himself up way before 24 hour drinking. Anyone can drink at any time behind closed doors. When he dies at first they'll mourn the passing of a legend. Then over the next few days will come the editorial pieces about the tragic, booze sodden decline of a great talent... Maybe even Paul Gascoigne will get trotted out to tell kids not to drink, along with photos of Best's yellow corpse... Within a week they'll be those who say we shouldn't have any sympathy for him at all because it's all self inflicted. They're the ones who just say anything different from the crowd to establish themselves as "brilliant, witty and informed". You watch Carole Malone and Richard Littlejohn's columns. Safe bet they'll spew the poison.

But we all won't end up like Best because of extended licensing laws because there is a clear difference between alcoholism and binge drinking, one which does not seem to have been highlighted in any stage of this sensationalist, tabloid gibberish.

Enjoy it while it lasts my friends. A conservative government is round the corner. When they get in we'll go back to the old way. Maybe a few changes... Like only being allowed to drink, at home, with the lights off, under a duvet. Except of course in the sophisticated setting of the House of Commons or a Gentlemans club. After all the elite can handle their drink.

Blinky Blunkett Jumps

2005-11-03T15:26:00.000Z

Rejoice friends!

Good to see that Blunkett has been forced into resigning his post for the second time within a year. To think this sorry fiasco even began with "bullish defiance" according to sources at the BBC. To think he believed, even for the briefest of moments, that he had done nothing wrong. But now he concedes that violating the ministerial code, trading on his reputations and connections to improve the fortunes of a business he owns shares in and holding meetings with business associates while in office are indeed "mistakes" and "errors of judgement". Yeah, errors of judgement the same way a fox makes when unleashed in a chicken coop.

That fucker is so bent, so inherently corrupt, it would not surprise me if someone threw a tennis ball at him he'd catch it. He's told so many lies, broke so many rules, why not?

But we can rest easy because he will not be back in such a position again. No second chances now through his chummy prime minister pal to look forward to. Instead just a lifetime of obscurity. His talks of taking legal action against those who have characterised him as corrupt is also laughable. I would like to see it go to court, would like to see exactly what evidence comes out... Even his "friends" have appeared on news programs to underline exactly what he was doing and it sounds even worse than first feared.

This could be the start of the death of the dinosaurs... Those within the New Labour party that have sought to take away our freedoms, force through legislature the majority does not want, wage wars against countries that do not threaten us as well as get away with as much greedy money grabbing along the way. This government is for sale, Blunkett's dodgy dealings the tip of the ice berg...

It would be a much happier day if the Conservatives weren't the alternative. But, for the first time in my life time, it is sad to say that the Conservatives are to the left of the Labour party. Dark, worrying times that we live in.

But do not concentrate on that for now and just smile and share a drink. Blunkett has gone. He shall not be missed.

The Battle is Lost... But the War Must continue...

2005-10-10T20:20:00.000+01:00

Post deleted for legal reasons.

Looking forward...

2005-09-09T00:35:00.000+01:00

I've not been able to post anything for a while as I fight my own battles with various foes. It's been extremely time consuming and something I will post once it has emerged whether I am to be victorious or not...

Yet I can see that some time has passed since the terrorist attacks on London and we haven't declared war on a country that has no links to the attacks whatsever. Our American allies must be most disappointed with the way we are conducting ourselves. Had these attacks taken place on their soil they would have had them tied to Iran within the week regardless of the lack of evidence to support such action... And our government would follow them blindly...

But we still place the blame for these attacks on the phantom like Al Qaeda, an organisation that seems to be to blame for such atrocities even when it has been proved they are not. Prime example being the two attacks on London... Neither were linked, there was no "master plan" and neither had any connection with the other. Yet they were both repeatedly referred to as cells of Al Qaeda by the media. I'm waiting for the history books to be re-written and the London fire actually be attributed to an early cell of al Qaeda... Maybe the black death was their first tentative experiments with biological weaponry?

It's a nonsense and because of such nonsense we are no closer to solving the real global issues that will make our country and the world a safer place. Equipping itchy trigger finger policemen with automatic weapons and upholding the execution of anyone with dark skin does not make us any safer... To think there are people out there that still support the slaying of a Brazilian electrician because "the police have a difficult job to do in such times" is a disgrace. Maybe they could have felt that there were no wires under his t-shirt (not a heavy coat you'll notice) as they pinned him down before firing rounds into his shoulder and face... Just maybe.

A difficult job to do? What's so difficult about not murdering innocent civilians? Most of us manage to achieve that little goal every day. But no, what we need is more police, more guns, more media panic... With these things we can move forward, ensure those terrorists don't come and get us.

Racial attacks, not coincidentally, have increased significantly since London. I have heard more and more muslims and Asians being insulted quite openly in public. The fever is spreading to anyone without a white face, much like the London police that fateful day. Toilet attendants receiving racial abuse for seemingly no reason... The fact they've came here from Africa seeming to be ignored and swept aside as they are goaded by people who want to try and reclaim something they haven't lost.

Britain will not become any more free if we try to take away the freedom of those against whom suspicions are held without foundation. It starts with the morons puring out half arsed vigilante action against innocents, then the politicians intervene with promises of a safer future. The same morons vote for parties and policies that take away each of our freedoms, bit by bit, but we come no closer to resolving deep seeded differences that lead to conflict and hate.

Never forget that terrorists and politicians have one thing in common: Both are willing to sacrifice YOUR life for THEIR cause... They just have different methods of doing it. And even suggesting this fundamental truth is enough to get me sent to jail. Hell, I won't even rule out a long stay in the "Gitmo Hotel" the way things are going at the moment...

I just hope we can come through this without the loss of any more innocent life. No more terrorist attacks. No more wars. No more sanctions against countries in this fictitious "axis of evil"...

History Repeating...

2005-07-11T01:38:00.000+01:00

As we continue to look to aportion blame following on from the attacks on London and bear witness to kneejerk reactionary panic such as the alert in Birmingham it got me thinking as to where this might all lead. Quite possibly another war with another country that has, until now, been off our political radar...

Reminds me of what happened in the aftermath of September 11th. We all knew there would be a war on the back of that attack. It was just a matter of how the Americans were going to spin it based on who they thought attacking would yield the most benefit for themselves...

I wrote an article about it at the time when we had just watched the Americans finish wiping their hands of reprisals in Afghanistan and were looking for their next target. I had to deliver some talks at a NUS gathering shortly after the article was printed and got heckled and threatened by several members of the crowd that had come to attend. Hell, I even managed to get a few anonymous death threats posted to me stating that I was clearly a supporter of terrorism and an enemy to democracy. Although, looking back, everything I said turned out to be strangely prophetic if I do say so myself and I still stand by everything I said.

I have decided to post it here as I feel that the search for a new economically viable enemy will be at an end soon and we shall look back on these attacks not as a tragedy but as a triggerpoint for a series of tragedies on all sides. That is what happens when we believe in the media created Al Qaeda bogeyman and the lies we are told in the name of the war against terror.

SEPTEMBER 11TH – ONE YEAR (AND A BIT) ON

One year onward from one of the biggest and most surreally traumatic events that we will probably see in our lifetimes and all we can establish is the list of conspiracy theories is as long as the list of countries President Bush wants to attack… I was not standing silent and solemn on September 11th with a black band wrapped around every possible appendage. Why? Quite simply the attacks on this fateful day were inevitable and, some would argue, necessary. Yes – a tragedy but surely no more tragic than the loss of life inflicted on all the countries that America has sought to dominate over the last fifty years. There is an old Greek saying, so I’m told, that roughly translates as “everybody has a plate of shit to eat”. If America’s plate comes at only just over three thousand lives then it shall be relatively easy to digest compared to some of the platters they have served up to “lesser” nations.

I’m going to ignore the whole debacle in Afghanistan and most definitely steer away from the fact that Osama Bin Laden had CIA funding and training because you will know that already. A fact often spewed forth from the kind of student radical who think he’s living on the fringe because he’s heard of Kropotkin… I’m going to ignore the fact that only months before September 11th Bush gave the Taliban over fourty million dollars for them to denounce growing opium and therefore assist America in winning the war against drugs. I’m even going to ignore the fact that after years of the Taliban committing human rights violations America decided to bring them down for allegedly harbouring terrorists that had allegedly attacked America. They then helped bring into power a new regime with an equally appalling human rights record. It is certainly a wise idea that I ignore that one of the main pieces of evidence that lead to the entire situation was that of an Afghanistan passport found in the flaming wreckage that was so hot as to vapourise entire people and even steel… God bless America.

But I’m ignoring those things and I’m going to concentrate on Bush’s insistence that they need to invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein. It has never been proved that Iraq had anything to do with September 11th. It has never been proved that Saddam Hussein is gathering “weapons of mass destruction” (got to love that phraseology… As if gathering weapons of light to moderate destruction is something we should be turning a blind eye to) and it has never been proved that he has been illegally purchasing chemical weapons.

So then it is apparent that Bush wants to invade Iraq for flimsy reasons and certainly not the kind of reasons that wars should be fought for in this day and age. Things such as securing oil prices are not sufficient enough. And it is not the done thing to scream “this one’s for pappy” while you push toy soldiers around the pentagon desk in the nude.

We know that America has been targeting Iraq and other countries for some time prior to 9-11. In 1998 government officials put forward a “nine point strategy” for bringing down the Hussein regime. Ten of the officials who backed the motion are now high rankers in the Bush administration. In August America launched its greatest air attack on Iraq in six months but this went on relatively quietly without much media coverage. Let me point out as well that air attacks on Iraq are a regular thing. It is estimated that between the American sanctions and the air attacks Iraq is losing as many as five thousand lives a month and these are usually the most vulnerable such as children or the elderly. Notice anything about that number? Greater losses than the world trade centre casualties every four weeks…

The sanctions that contribute to this number mean that the people of Iraq can’t treat their water properly and this leads to disease and a shortage of drinking water. They have also lead to the health service having a lack of medicines, something the West has continuously tried to blame on the Hussein regime rather than the U.S. Of course the American government can merely great these facts with a shrug and trot out the party line:

“Sanctions are not intended to harm the people of Iraq”

U.S. State Department, March 2000

After the world trade centre came tumbling down Bush started to speak of an “Axis of Evil” that included Iraq… Right on cue came a spate of Anthrax attacks throughout America that were blamed on Iraq almost instantly. It was skirted over that when the Anthrax was analysed the agent it was mixed with to help it disperse through the air was the same kind used by America (they use Silica) rather than the type used by the Iraqi military (they use the far cheaper Bentonite). Even a group of independent scientists from the FAS (Federation of American Scientists) concluded that the Anthrax must have come from an American defence laboratory.

It seems obvious to me and hopefully to most people with a brain that Iraq is not a military threat. Not to anybody at the moment, but certainly not America. Many of the worlds leading military experts have come to this conclusion and you would not require their credentials to do so. All of the rules and regulations enforced by the UN have crippled the industrial and technological base from which Iraq could develop weapons. It may be said that there has not been a formal weapons inspection for over three years however hundreds of no-notice inspections prior to this made sure that anything that may have been hidden from inspectors was discovered and destroyed. The main production site of Iraq’s supply of Anthrax – Al Hakum – was demolished with high explosives. In the last formal inspection it was noted that there was no sign of Anthrax or any other biological agent. I am no great fan of Hussein’s reign but he is an old man now, rumoured to have cancer, and the resultant struggle for power after his death will almost certainly tear the country apart as loyal fanatics continue to fight on long after the falsified U.S. approved elections take place.

So, Bush’s patriotic mumblings aside, any military action against Iraq would be perpetrated for fraudulent reasons. Spetember 11th was a retaliatory action against America for their past “crimes” and decades of terrible, arrogant foreign policy. If anything should be gleaned from the twin tower attacks it is America needs to live in peace with its global neighbours rather than obliterate any nation it does not understand, deems to be a “threat” or has something that it wants. The legacy of the world trade centre should be one of peace and not the taking of more innocent lives in their names.

July 7th 2005

2005-07-08T15:25:00.000+01:00

It took something both strange and savage to snap me out of my inactive stupor. It was only two days ago we will have witnessed the uniquely British nationalistic chirpings as the celebrations of the 2012 Olympic bid took place. Now what we can look forward to in the more immediate future is an eruption of violent reprisals and political posteuring following yesterdays terrorist attacks within the nations capital.

Is it brutal and savage to say that although I feel sympathy for the loss of individual life I feel little sympathy for those who have survived and are now putting blush over fresh wounds to talk to the cameras about the horror? What was that old saying… If you share a bed with the devil, expect to get fucked… Or words to that effect. This attack was all about when rather than if. It was always going to come for as long as we pursued our current approach to foreign policy. I said after the pathetic jingoistic display after we won the Olympics – how many fucking losers did you hear say things like “The best part is we beat the French”? Turns out they are the same kind of depraved pigfuckers who shout abuse at their television about century old wars while watching the Eurovision song contest – that we could look forward to terrorist attacks on the capital. Many have come to me since treating me like some kind of political genius and messiah. Of course I meant in 2012. They don’t know that and right now I take it where I can…

The vast majority do seem oblivious to the obvious links to the G8 meetings. The think G8 are a group that won fucking Pop Idol or something… You should hear it. “It’s a deliberate blow to knock Britain just when it was riding high on the crest of some glorious wave after the Olympics” to paraphrase the average moron. God help us all. We’re a nation of buffoons. And those same buffoons were the ones who went and burned mosques, trashed takeaway restaurants and beat British Asians to within an inch of their life on the grounds that we were somehow at war following the September 11th attacks. I see no reason as to why they will act restrained following on from our many dead in Iraq and now a terrorist attack on home soil. It will be the straw that breaks many of our immigrants’ backs…

I’m faced with the prospect of having to live with these people, these rabid scum… Maybe we can find some common ground. Maybe I can be accepted into the group once I have burst my first "suspected terrorist conspirators'" head like a melon with a baseball bat… Grim times lie ahead for us all and pretty soon I feel they will come for the liberals like us. Get plenty of supplies and start learning how to use a gun. At least we may take some of these fools with us.

I’ve said it many times. As long as we continue to suppress foreign nations and make Muslims feel like the enemy within their own home this is the kind of action marginalized people will have to resort to in order to make their opinion heard. We boldly declare we will not negotiate with terrorists, as it achieves nothing and will only ever result in further attacks if they feel it is a valid method of forcing the West into change. Yet I do not see any sudden stop to these types of attacks any time soon even while we openly declare that it will achieve nothing. Good honest folk like Bigley will continue to be beheaded when all it would take is the release of one or two prisoners (and who really knows what they’re guilty of?) to secure their safe return…

We need to start negotiating. Encourage the radicals to put away their guns and bombs. Do we not enforce this same view on the Irish political parties who disagree? Do we not demand that presidents of African nations stop warring with their neighbours and reach a diplomatic solution or we withdraw foreign aid? Yet while we force the idea of Western democracy as the only way to live in some kind of harmony despite its obvious shortcomings for those who reside within its confines we are not prepared to enact one of its most fundamental principles with those who currently threaten our civilians… That is diplomatic negotiations and resulting compromise.

After all is there not one fact that the government never wants us to realise and that is the terrorists and our elected government share one core thing in common; that is that they view us as nothing other than expendable and disposable. They can hide behind us while they voice their beliefs safe in the knowledge that it is those in front of them that shall topple first. It is people like you and me who will be blown up during the many attacks to come… It is the economically disenfranchised that terrorist leaders prey on and convince to be suicide bombers with promises of paradise. It is the numbers of the dead that both terrorists and government officials use to measure their relative successes and failures… I for one would much rather they sat down and started negotiating rather than have the likes of Blair sacrifice my life for what he feels is right and proper. We all need to start waking up to this. Put down our flags and wake up to the fact that those we’ve elected to protect and serve are happy to feed us to the wolves and then let the media jackals move in and pick at what’s left.

Alas I fear the British mindset is going nowhere. Not if the pathetic scenes on television are anything to go by. And living here in an area that has a strong muslim community I feel I shall have a front seat as the racists and conservatives crawl out of the bigot-holes to tear what is left of this region to shreds in the name of what is good and proper…

The Strange and Terrible Story of George

2005-05-31T17:02:00.000+01:00

I was on a bench across from my local bus stop, swigging a beer and contemplating just what my next move of the day was going to be. I heard some loud laughter across the road. Not normal laughter you understand... The kind that sends shivers down your spine. It sounded like the voice of some mischievous retard who could no longer differentiate between good and evil, more than likely as a result of his disease...

I was staring at the obese, yellow faced source of this laughter and it hit home that the reason that this sound was so haunting and resonant was because the source was familiar to me. Ye fucking gods... It was him. I regressed there and then with a mouth full of cold beer as the fiendish creature banged on the doors of a bus shouting at the driver to let him in because he knew him and didn't want to stand outside.

George ****** ****** *****-******, sometimes plain old George, had been at my school along with all the other doomed ones. I gave him short shrift, putting his stammer and nervous ways down to some kind of gimmick designed to attract attention to himself. It wasn't that I was a bully like some of the others. It was just I believed that he was able to communicate properly and elected not to because of all the other problems this brings. Fuck it - if he doesn't want to endure the woe of communicating with those around him and instead would rather enjoy the altogether different woe of being marginilised then that was his call. I could entirely take or leave old George. And that's how it was.

I saw him was when we graduated from college. People were in high spirits talking about what it was they were going to do with their lives, intently dissecting each others possible new chapters. George stated quite plainly he wanted to be an actor. Sure, he'd lost weight, his stammer was less obvious and he had started wearing sleeveless t-shirts. But an actor this guy was not.

He knocked things up a notch as the beer was flowing later on in the course of the day... As former students mingled with teachers for the first day of mutual acceptance and the red faced knowledge that it wasn't all that bad... George decided to cement his reputation as an actor by declaring he was gay. And that he was moving in with a guy who was going to help his acting career really take off.

What really knocked it up a notch was when he started stripping off naked in the middle of our local bar and started to writhe like some kind of obscene belly dancer. People tried to stop him, others sat there slack jawed, aghast at the foulness of what they were seeing. It was, naturally, only a matter of time before he got thrown out... Which he did and that was the end of that chapter, right?

Apparently not - He turned up within the year, his spirit broken, his asshole in tatters and his dreams of acting nothing more than a smoking pile of ashes. He ended up being committed, to the same institution that helped claim the life of the footballer mentioned on an earlier post, and was not even allowed the occasional day release. I'm told he would regail people with tales of the non-consensual sodomy he endured in the pursuit fo his dream... I'm also told he would alternate these tales of horror with tearful outbursts pining for his gay lover who never visited him once.

Some even went so far as to say the whole sorry episode existed all in his mind and his mind alone. Who knows, or wants to know? The doctors who allegedly put the stitches into his ass are the only ones who could give us defining evidence either way.

And here he was now as I snapped out of my beer fuelled flashback and I couldn't help but feel a little bit sorry of what had become of him. The weight was back on, the skin even more yellow than I remembered and the "treatment" he had received had elft him devoid of mental sharpness. He was now a loudmouthed bufoon, unaware that his enthusiastic, childish burblings were greatly offensive and terrifying to all those around him. The bus driver had that look of fearful disgust on his face and wouldn't let him on the bus despite his enthusiastic banging. He instead was left to converse with a bag lady with whom he was on first name terms.

- 'Ello Georgie she rasped

It all made me realise that my next move was to do anything but go near the bus and risk making eye contact with this deformed ghost from my past.

Whatever happened to students?

2005-05-02T17:01:00.000+01:00

I've been away a good few weeks re-visiting my glory days by going back to my old university. Every day of my five years that I spent there would result in some form of drunken carnage that would live long in the memory. This was, after all, what university was about... For most it is the first time the umbilical cord is truly cut, the first time you can really experiment with whatever you want free from prying eyes and fears of disappointing loving family members.

This was not the case for me but, not wanting to miss out on anything, I pushed it just about as far as I could go, a continuation of the debauchery that blighted my young life. It was a great time - a stand alone point of my life where there were no real responsibilities, no-one to put ahead of my own selfish desire...

It should have been nice to revisit this. Instead what I saw was disgusting... A sea of banality and mediocrity. A university populated by middle class students so desperate to impress with faux home county voices and sensible haircuts. Even those that touched upon being different or individual did so in a way that appeared to me to be some kind of parody, like the characters in the young ones made real. It was awful.

Attempting to make the worst of a bad situation I tried to cajole and coax these greenhorns, to explain stories of a past when students actually did things. when mayhem did not equate to having your first pint at three in the afternoon. Their eyes glazed over, I don't think they understood.

I continued to try through my time there, managing to spark a few incidents but nothing like the days of old. Why such a spectacular fall from grace? Because of student loans. I, like so many others, had to return home from university in thousands of pounds of debt only to walk straight back into the same shitty job I had before I went away, now with the added indiginity of seeing the idiots who stuck around and didn't get an education zooming past me in beemers boasting about their 40k a year incomes. The young people I work with now tell me only a chump would go to university. Despite the good times, on reflection they may be right.

Working class people are taking this advice to heart, staying away from higher education. This in turn is leading to the student bodies of such institutions to become boring, bland and ultimately self-satisfied. My year was the first year that it was a loan. We didn't really look forward. We just took the loan,the overdraft and the credit card and didn't say anything. Since that experimental year people have learnt the hard way not to bother.

Not that you don't get personalities in the upper classes you understand. But put purely middle class people together and there is no reason for them to get up to anything, no-one to lead them down roads they have never previously explored.

The knock-on effect it has had on the student movement as a political force is evident as well. NUS is at an all time low, ridden with petty, self important, bickering imbeciles. It acheives nothing for its members, and dedicates way too much of its time to national issues it can't change because it echoes the debating teams they all used to be on back when they were at their private schools.

Bigots find their place in the sun

2005-04-13T10:28:00.000+01:00

The amount of times I hear people say "It's true - it was in the papers" Then you ask "which paper?" only to hear "The Sun" and they are being serious. My god.

Little Anecdote. The Sun printed a story in the build up to Christmas the Eden Project had banned Christmas from even being mentioned. All parties who were booking to have Christmas family fun there were being told that it was a "none denominational festival" that was called the "time of giving gifts". There would be no symbolism that was specific to Christmas used in any of the literature circulating about the Eden project.

This was "PC gone mad" once more and had to be stopped - and Muslims were probably to blame. SO SAYETH THE SUN!

Anyway, I rang their press office posing as a local journo - So pissed off I was at the bigots in the office mumbling "bloody muslims" and "it's PC gone mad" over their packed lunches - and got told the following.

"off the record? It's absolute bullshit! On the record - and please use this quote - it has been referred tot he festival of giving gifts because it runs from the start of December until Easter time. To use just the word 'Christmas' in our literature would be bad for business because people wouldn't think to come and visit us after Christmas had finished. It is not none denomintaional - it is multi denominational - and, of course, this includes Christianity. If you look at our current leaflets promoting Christmas parties, not only are they called Christmas parties, they have all sorts of traditional imagery on the leaflets... At no point have we received complaints asking us to "ban" Christmas" (the phrase "Sorry, Christmas is banned" appeared as the headline)

When I asked what they would be doing the press officer just said "We have seen the report, it has only appeared in the Sun that we know of, and we will be passing it to our legal team". I never knew what come of it.

Phasing Out - The Morgan Factor

2005-04-06T17:59:00.000+01:00

You start a new job, you obviously have to make new "friends" - Pals at work can fall into two categories: The slack jawed gormless bufoons that you keep in the loop purely and simply for the reason they are easily impressed by your life "achivements" thus far

(of course new job equates to a whole new series of lies you can tell about yourself... In a call centre everyone you meet has come from a better job, higher position, more pay. A terrible, dark tale of woe as to how they have been reduced to the staus of your colleague will usually follow. The simple joy of lies)

OR people you genuinely think are made of the right stuff and that you gradually bring into your real life outside of the work illusion.

Make sure that you both share the same opinion though, otherwise you will be subject to what is now known as "The Morgan Factor". It happened to me recently, and it continues to do so...

Morgan was a colleague/friend of mine that totally knocked it up a notch. One day he was at work, everything was normal. The next he was on the sick. The next thing I new he'd left the company and had set up a new life in Cornwall. The number to his phone altered, all attempts of contact defaulting to a messaging service no-one checks.

The phase out was brutally swift. A few calls during the stint of sickness and then complete non-existence. All the favours left unclaimed, the items loaned out in good faith. Dust in the Wind.

I'm not quite sure what people think... That somehow a new job - the thing we do to pay bills, feign responsibility, fund debauchery - equates to requiring a new life. I think people just can't resist the urge to have a chance at a series of new "first impressions" to make, to be able to reconstruct a new identity for themselves bereft of any of the flaws the previous work force may have been aware of, all the work nights out you've acted like a cock... They can all disappear and never be brought up again.

Bottom line - It's bullshit.

Generation Doomed Pt. 2

2005-03-23T21:04:00.000Z

Talking about the doomed generation and the mysterious disappearance of one of our numbers triggered my memory...

I wrote this letter at the time a body had been discovered and I was certain that it would be what was left of my friend. Turned out that the identification revealed it to be the body of a local smackhead instead. The mystery was still there.

This is more than accurate description of events, however I have omitted the names for reasons that are obvious. Nobody who is one step away from grieving needs to know the truth about how the person for whom they feel arrived at wherever they have.

Well it looks almost certain that the mystery of what happened to ***** ********** is going to be unravelled fairly soon. As you may or may not know a body has been found in Nunthorpe woods, the body of what is only described as a “white adult male”. The body had been there for some time, buried under a pile of logs, not far from a footpath that although isn’t strictly for the public, is in common use anyway. ***** went missing at the back end of February; If I was *****’s family I would fear the worst…

And yet could this whole sorry state of affairs have been avoided? I mean, I spoke to mine and *****’s mutual friends and it all seems to be about money. I’d bet top dollar some of these “friends” even know more than they are letting on. What is for sure was ***** owed some very nasty characters money, and it came back to haunt him. The money was a mixture of Cocaine and gambling debts, certainly going into the thousands. And yet, even though I know the workings of the world and all things criminal, it seems incredible that a man nearly six months younger than I should have been murdered over what amounts to quite possibly the same amount of money I owe in student loans. Wasn’t there somebody he could turn to in order to secure this amount of money - He was not from a deprived background by any means. And if he knew the trouble he was in, why not come clean and tell your parents, friends, anybody, about the ugly situation you’re in? Anything to get that money, to pay off the debt that ultimately killed you…

I can’t quite get it clear in my head - But I can take a guess as to why. Perhaps what ***** never understood about this world, not coming from a deprived background, not mixing with these people on a regular basis, and certainly having no status in the “underworld” of Middlesbrough, is that these people can never be your friends. I envisage him having run up debts before, paid them off just before it got to bone breaking time, and then ended up laughing the matter off - “These people know me, they know I’m good for it. They’re good old boys. I’m exempt from the same treatment the others get”. But no, there are no friends in this business, as both you and I know.

I come to this conclusion because *****, although knowing he had the debts and obviously talking to people about the debts (not the right people as it turned out), went out and got drunk at the ********** in Middlesbrough, and it is from there he disappeared. These are not the actions of somebody with massive debts and problems, yet we know they existed despite his behaviour. He even left by himself, no back-up if there was trouble. This almost smacks of confidence. Can you picture how it went down? Did they follow him, or pull up in cars? Did they act friendly and lure him away with promises of more drugs or a party? Or did they plump for getting straight down to business and dole out the beating that killed him there and then… Coroner’s report says four “serious” wounds to the head. Naturally the flesh is in such a bad state of decomposition by now they would be unable to see the bruises that doubtlessly covered his body. The serious wounds, the ones that they can detect, broke bones. Perhaps ***** knew what was coming, and was past caring. Depressed and miserable, he went out for one last drink instead of hiding and panicking in his house…

When I last saw him it was Christmas time. Me, Rich and Phil had gone to a party in Middlesbrough to see a mutual female friend and ***** happened to be there. I say happened, I think it may have been his house. I was too drunk to care. I was pleased to see somebody from School, especially one I had gotten along with well, and hadn’t seen in about a year. But he didn’t come over to greet me, and instead sent over our host. She told me he couldn’t remember if I wanted to beat him up or not, if I hated him or not. These were clear and obvious signs of drug psychosis, that slow creeping paranoia that gets you eventually no matter which drug it is, just as long as you keep taking something. The mind was not built to exist in permanently altered states of reality, not after the formative child years of setting down what is real… But you can push it so far and still keep a hold of something that qualifies as reality. *****, even at this stage, had gone too far…

I explained that far from “hating” him, I was pleased to see him and would like to have a drink with him. She relayed the message and he came over to talk. He was gaunt, pale, poor complexion to how I remember him in school, and he looked a lot thinner. Increased metabolism with diminished appetite no doubt the cause, classic signs of the nocturnal drug taker. We talked about some good old days at school, football, mischief, you know the drill, and he told me about his new job (as an estate agent if I remember rightly) and what clubs he would frequent. But I could see that he was a derelict, a derelict with a child’s face. Which was the weird thing; he hadn’t aged since school, his thin build accentuating his young appearance.

When he was at school all the girls used to want a piece of him, but ***** didn’t want the nice posh girls who would let him get his fingers, or maybe even suck him off. He would opt for, and fuck, the girls from the estates, the ones who would drop mewling brats out of their boot topped cunts in record times, creating an army of bastard children all uglier and denser than the parents that sired them… He got lucky that not one of his “conquests” became pregnant. Together me and him would down half bottles of Vodka round the back of the school disco, wanting to get wrecked and face the music of horrible adolescence. Some nights, on the rare occasions, he would even take ecstasy tablets, for a school fucking disco no less, one of the few people I knew who were genuine in their drug use at this age. Despite how abnormal this may sound, all of this behaviour made total sense to me at the time and he had my utmost respect.

Yet, despite his obvious qualities and ability to not get bogged down with teenage bullshit and go his own way, he always tried to ingratiate himself into the gang of “hard” fighting kids (in a lot of cases much older than we were) from Marton and Nunthorpe. Why? He had no real reason to, people pretty much left ***** to his own devices, and he was popular enough. Who knows why? But he did start to hang round these guys who were going on to graduate from a very different kind of school we were going to - Me and him and many others like us wanted to experiment with the things we weren’t supposed to have, to prove that not only could we handle them but we could take more than the older generation that had forbidden us to touch them… Such joy from a simple agenda when young. Those kids were going to graduate from a school so brutal it makes the ones our parents hawk to us (The so called “school of hard knocks”) seem like a holiday camp. Life in these places was savage, and these kids were the product of that savagery, knowing that to make any kind of name for themselves, to secure any kind of future, they would have to be more brutal, more savage than the generation before them. Why would anybody want to become a part of that if they didn’t absolutely have to? But violence and crime can seem glamorous to those who don’t know it’s true colours.

It would come as no surprise to learn that it was one of these “old friends” that helped put the boot into ***** as he looked up helpless, held by two men both infinitely stronger than him. He more than likely tried to beg, tried to reason, maybe even went so far as to mention the good old days, but this was what these people had to do. Even with someone as ultimately small time as *****, because if they didn’t, then maybe it would be them in his position, and somebody with all their fears in their position, sticking the boot into them, as they choked blood and spat teeth and hoped and prayed for just one more chance to see their family and friends, even from the bed of a hospital.

Hell, I’ve made a lot of assumptions and conclusions, but I’ve seen this before, I know how it went down. Even if this body, by some crazy stretch of the imagination, doesn’t turn out to be *****, it is a matter of time before we do find his battered corpse somewhere. He died owing money, with money in his bank account, money that makes it look like he is dead because it has been untouched since his disappearance. Money that might have bought him time. But no, he is gone, and the money will go on something less important than keeping him alive, more than likely on his own funeral arrangements. A part of me would like to go to the ceremony, pay my respects to a kid who was little boy lost, a good guy with a good heart. But I doubt I will, because the whole thing is so fucking tragic and sinister, and the people there in attendance are more than likely just as guilty as the people who beat him to death. This could have all been avoided, that much is fact, even if everything else I’ve assumed is wrong.

Generation Doomed

2005-03-20T14:13:00.000Z

I bumped into an old friend a few days ago who told me that one of the "successful" sporting graduates from my school days had decided to hang himself in a nearby sanitarium. Just how had he got there? A few years ago he was playing up front for York City and was the subject of a possible one million pound transfer to Sheffield Wednesday...

Apparantly a spiralling heroin addicition saw him kicked out of club after club until he had a complete collapse. The Ultimate in collapses. He was sectioned in our local "mental health hospital" and had access to the means to end his life. His life had not been an easy one. He was a black guy with white foster parents. Turns out, kids can be cruel.

Still, he always had his sporting talent to fall back on and while I was slugging it away in a call centre he was earning a thousand pound a week and having all his accomidation and travel paid for. Based on this I cannot see why he ever felt the need to anaethetise his pain with heroin. He had other means with which to do it, and he must have known that heroin is not exactly conducive to a sporting career.

I suspect that he never knew exactly why he was doing what he was doing. Rather, there was some kind of in built self destructive trend that he could not resist and lead him down dark paths without him figuring out why he was treading them.

Much like the guy I used to live with who now sells the Big Issue on my local streets - another product of foster care. Or an old friend from school who has been missing for 2 years. Or the best guy I ever knew, who died in the Iraq war...

There are many others. Too many to mention, list and do justice to with a few anecdotes. It feels to me that there is some kind of in built programming that we cannot override. Maybe you can call it fate, but I look around at the faces that shine with defeat around me... We are resigned to this biological sub-routine kicking in and we know there is nothing we can do. We will be seduced by this calling. It is the old matter of time.

Chavs - A Call to Arms

2005-03-13T23:08:00.000Z

We will all be familiar with Chavs by now. We will see them even in our small and quiet towns. They are there on street corners, down alleyways, sat in cars listening to the latest Ibiza mix album. They sit across from us in bars and mumble to each other about their days graft, only disturbing us to ask to “borrow” a cigarette, or to impart some of their knowledgeable views on politics.

Yet I can remember when they weren’t about in such numbers, when the Chavs were a foolish, laughable minority to be the subject or ridicule and pity and very little else. But in the dark corners of Britain, the estates nobody wants to visit, the high rise flats no-one can be bothered to climb, their breeding has gone unchecked and is spiralling out of control. This is a call to arms – we need to know the Chav, loathe the Chav and beat the Chav back into the dark grubby little caves they came from before it is too late. If we do not do this now then it may be too late for us and future generations… Indeed, we run a risk of ourselves being forced to become Chavs in order to survive.

What is alarming about the proliferation of this sub-culture is its complete lack of culture. Chavs do not read books or swap underground literature amongst themselves, nor do they create their own like the Beats of the 1950s. They have no interest in art whatsoever, not even in the destruction of art as art. The graffiti that we have seen carried over from the 80s and into the popular skating culture that endures today is not even of interest to these people despite their indulgences in defacement. They have reduced an art form of the street to mere crude signposts about their relationships and locale – “Shazza woz ere 9T9” and so forth.

They do not go to cinemas to watch films, not to congregate, not even to “make out”. They only frequent these establishments for the sole purpose of disturbing others. When this endeavour proves to be fruitless, they will leave.

The intake of drugs in itself serves no purpose. It is not to expand their minds. Neither can it be justified as a form of escapism from a working class world within which they revel. They do not boast a drug of choice; The 50s had marijuana, the 60s LSD, the 70s had both with heroin rearing its head, the 80s had cocaine, the 90s had ecstacy… The chav will hoover up whatever it can lay its hand on. It will do so on en mass amongst its social groups for nothing more than petty status and boasting rights. You will often overhear these grubby little tales of how many pills have been boshed in one night… Nobody asks why or what happened. They simply discredit it, make a mental note to try and beat it and so the cycle continues. Even marijuana is abused to this extreme, lungfuls of cheap, dirty hash taken in any form that is plausible to see who can be induced to suffer acute cannabis poisoning first. Whoever “throws a whitey” will face much mockery, but will almost certainly fare better the next time around.

The uniform consists of nothing that is out of the ordinary; the striped tops that are readily available in discount clothes stores and sports shops, tracksuit bottoms tucked into white cotton sports socks. It is instantly recognisible and yet altogether forgettable at the same time. A stark contrast to biker gangs who wear their leathers and denims with fervent pride, the gang colours associated with black and latino street gangs, the parkers made famous by the mods… Even in their attempts to be rebellious they are ultimately fearful of having to operate on the fringes of society and being marginalized because of the way they look.

The Burberry caps are popular amongst them are borrowed from the hooligan subculture that still clings desperately to the underbelly of the sterilised, family approved, big business world of English football. Somehow they know it is a symbol that is associated with violence and thuggery despite many of them being too young to remember when hooliganism was at its height.

I can remember clearly the first time I realised that this sub culture was dangerous and was becoming more and more the mainstream… I was on the Newcastle Metro and as I was waiting for a train I saw a group of charvers – as they are known in Newcastle – sharing a bottle of cheap cider, some diamond white equivalent. A student came down and was carrying some bits and pieces as well as a satchel full of books. This made him an instant focal point for the group and they started to bombard the young guy with the kind of questions that most folk would do anything to avoid having to answer:
“Are ye a fucking student, like?” ventured the alpha male

“Of course he fucking is man – look at all the shite he’s carrying”

The student shuffled nervously, his internal monologue cursing the day he selected Newcastle university as his place of study.

“Yeah…” he said

“What are yer fucking studying, like?”

“Art”

“Can ye fucking draw git good an all that like?”

“I suppose so”

This was his first mistake. A part of him must have believed he could communicate with these savages, that they would be able to appreciate his talents if he was just humble about them. A schoolboy error…

“His drawings will be in them tubes he’s got”

“Let’s have a fucking look at how good you are then” and the leader took the tubes and started to open them and pull out the paper contained within…

“They’re just some sketches” the student offered apologetically

“These are fucking shite man”

“Leave him alurn… I think these drawings are canny like”

This is the trigger for violence. You see, the female likes something that this student can do, something he never could. In the animal kingdom when your breeding privaliges are threatened by a newcomer you must lay things down in no uncertain terms. He started to tear up the paper he was holding…

“Yer think you’re something special you fucking students” he says pushing the target of his anger. The student says some words like “no” and “it’s not like that” but it’s too late. A punch is thrown and he goes down. The other charver, smaller, younger joins in now that the student is on the floor, starts working the shoe on his back and legs.
A couple of stooping punches from the alpha male…

“Howay man, you’ll gerrin trouble again” the girl screams
They look over at me and I just stare back, blank eyes. Not too bothered about what happens next. A roar comes down the tunnel bringing with it the closest you get to fresh air in the underground then the train pulls up. All of us get aboard, them at one end and me at the other. They forget about me now and I sit listening to their boasts:

“You see how he fucking went down after just one fucking punch. He was soft as owt”

Even the girls who hadn’t seemed to want the violence to happen in the first place were laughing. The art student had entered into the mythology surrounding the alpha male, tales that would be passed down to his illiterate, illegitimate children that either already existed or were all too soon to be born.

I have often thought why I didn’t do anything that day. After all the student was kind of like me and I have intervened in such matters before in the past. It was not fear that kept me sat down watching the sorry scene unfold. It was my perverted liberal ideals that stopped me getting involved. Thoughts like “it’s not their fault they’re like that” and “I dread to think what kind of childhood they have had”…

Again it is comparable to examples we see in the animal kingdom. The liberal is a non-aggressive creature, doesn’t mind sharing its territory and food sources.

You can be safe from them in certain places. Higher education is one place to hide from them. After all, in their parlance, they "wouldn't dare" become a student. Libraries, The countryside... All places that remain largely chav-free. But if you do cocoon yourself away, if you ever have to come back to the part of the world where they are thriving and breeding in dark corners, what will you do against such prolific numbers?

The Collapse

2005-03-10T00:48:00.000Z

Have returned home for the first time in days. Thought I would share what is meant by "the collapse". It seems appropriate.

The collapse is that awful feeling when you have been drinking, indulging in narcotic consumption, not eating or sleeping... The part where you feel so awful that death may well be preferable. In fact it may even feel like the moments before death. The awful sick feeling that lurks in your belly, the weight of your eyes pushing down into your face, the long stares that start to feel strange like you could fall out from your head via your pupils. Inability to maintain thoughts or conversation. Movement shakes through you to your core...

The are only two ways to beat the collapse. Either to have more of the thing that has put you into this state (as the 18th century fisherman is fond of saying "What makes you bad makes you better") or to huddle up and pray for merciful sleep to take you.

It is called the collapse not just because you feel like you want to collapse, but you also feel like the part of your being that is you, that takes your surroundings in, is so far deteriorated and foggy that you are collapsing in on yourself. Your reality starts to feel eerily unreal and the world around you starts to collapse.

The collapse comes to us all and it is upon me now.

Piracy is Theft - FACT or FICTion

2005-03-06T04:35:00.000Z

Have you ever been to the cinema and watched the whole FACT type warnings before the film starts? I’ve often laughed derisively at the warning that “anyone caught with recording equipment will be ejected from the premises and prosecuted” and the request “to be vigilant at all times, reporting those who bring such equipment into this movie theatre”. Images of some toothless video pirate sat at the back row hoping the whirring noise emanating from his Super-8 recorder doesn’t attract attention, desperate to be able to sell the latest movies months before they are commercially available in shops. It just never seemed a plausible scenario to me.

Not like the bootleg recorders you would bump into, as you would drunkenly stumble around a mosh pit at a gig. That makes a little more sense. With even lo grade equipment you will be able to capture a recording that is decent enough; you can also go so far to say that these recordings give people who have never had the opportunity to hear their band of choice in a live setting without the studio covering up their deficiencies… I remember the disgust that throttled my intestines when I heard Soundgarden live for the first time. Cornell’s voice way off, the guitars leads way too complicated and polished on the album to translate live, and long pauses peppered with twittering, drunken speeches between songs… It made me appreciate the albums a whole lot more.

A bootleg also means you get to hear those all too rare cover versions that are only for ticket carrying fans. Green Day belting out “Eye of the Tiger” for example, or Rage Against the Machine blasting out NWA’s “Fuck Da Police”. The whole notion of “cover-songs” is something that all musicians can relate to, whether it’s your first lick on a guitar from Led Zeppelin, a cover of a classic blues track played by a local pub band, or the rare glimpse of the influences of platinum selling artists.

With images it can never be so simple. If you point a camcorder at a screen in a cinema, it will capture all around it, dark murky picture, bright light reflecting, poor sound quality… So surely this has never happened. I was convinced. Then the other day I was reading about these teenagers that had remade “Raiders of the Lost Ark” shot for shot, line for line, with themselves in all the roles. All the stunts were replicated; a garage was accidentally burnt down when re-enacting the bar scene with the Sherpas. It took six long years to complete, and all they had for reference was this badly made home video from an old video recorder they had smuggled into their local backwater theatre. There is talk of this version being included as an extra on a new Criterion edition of the Raiders… DVD.

So, I had to concede, that it had least been done. But it was in America, and it was in some small redneck community. The audience will have been allowed to take alcohol and guns into the theatre with them, shoot big wholes in the screen at the Arabs digging for the ark of the covenant, while they whoop and holler at the nazis exploits… So, fuck it. “This isolated incident is the exception that proves the rule,” I thought. I then put this idle jibber-jabber to the back of mind.

I’m going into work one day and my local cabbie picks me up – A bug bear for me at the moment is if I’m on an early shift, public transport is so shabby here I have to use a taxi service – at the usual time. He’s a young Asian lad called Ricky. Moved up north from London because he had some family and friends up here (don’t they always?) and set himself up driving cabs. He’s a good guy, always on time, always talkative… On this morning we got talking movies. Not film or cinema, just movies. Our views on films, not surprisingly, differed greatly. He thought “Euro Trip” was “hilarious”. I let that one pass me by, the waft of puerile filth coupled with the stench of feeble Americanised European stereotyping kept me away from it. I asked if he liked any other movies. He said he was a big fan of gangster movies. I approached him for his opinions on “The Godfather”… He said he’d never sat through it all the way through on the grounds that it was “too slow and too long”. “Plus” he added “What the fuck is that geezer who can’t talk properly all about”. I can only presume he was referring to the late Marlon Brando. A fitting tribute to his legacy…

We got talking about what was going down well in the box office at this moment in time, and we found a mutual respect for “Spider Man 2” if for nothing more than it was pure popcorn. He leans over and pulls something from down the side of his seat while we wait at traffic lights:

“You’ll like that then” he says, and drops a CD into my lap in a flimsy, transparent casing.

Aliens Vs Predator was scrawled across it.

Yeah, for all my above talk trying to make out I’m some kind of high art cinema critic this is a film that had been wetting my appetite. A fan of both sets of films it was a crossover I knew was doomed to failure, but one I had to watch anyway. I had been praying that it would at least constitute a “so bad it’s good” viewing experience. Better that than mediocrity on all fronts.

We concluded the transaction and I did a day at work wondering just how good a copy I’d purchased and whether the film would be much cop if I could indeed sit through the copy… I thought of all my pirate video experiences… The first dingy viewing of Robocop at an incredibly young age trying to figure what was going on and what the fuss was about, but still revelling in the amount of times I could hear the word “fuck” buzzing out of the speaker… More recently a version of Troy so badly put together that all the fight scenes on sand were so bright and lacking contrast and definition you couldn’t see the participants at all.

I then got thinking about the poor jokes old stand up comics made about pirate videos during the 80s in an attempt to prove they were cutting edge:

“Got a pirate video of E.T. the other day… Wasn’t bad either… Mind you, the little alien looked fucking stupid with a wooden leg and eye patch on it….”

You get the picture. I shuddered and went about the rest of my business.

Get in, decide to whack it straight in to see it the goods are “kosher” and yeah, the picture quality is good. A little fuzzy but certainly watchable. The sound is decent enough and the dubbing is right on the money. So I settle into the chair I am sitting in now as I type this and start to watch. The film is trundling along, painfully bothering to flesh out characters that we know are fodder for the real stars of the show, then I see a flicker of movement in the corner of the screen. Something black and smooth… The first glimpse of a xenomorph? A new kind of predator cloaking technology?

If only. It was the round, smooth shadow of the back of someone’s head. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Then, to completely shatter everything I had ever believed, someone else gets up and walks across the screen, easily as large as the actors up there on celluloid. This pirate DVD, of a quality higher than your average one, was indeed created by the same toothless, Super-8 carrying pirate that I had scoffed at for so many years. I’m sure I’m not alone in this mockery, but I have finally seen evidence of this and will hold up my hands – I was wrong to scoff…

I shall never renounce piracy as a bad thing, never. Nor shall I buy into the urban myth-esque tales of pirate video funding terrorist organisations: In the 80s the dreaded IRA, now the even more dreaded and omni-present Al Qaeda. The same business template of distribution that pirates are condemned for is used at the top where the entrepreneurs live. Purchase the “rights” to the original, replicate en mass through technology and distribute at a cost that covers overheads to make a profit. It seems insane to demonise one set of people to the level we do, while we applaud the multi-millionaires in their ivory towers and thank them for giving us the gift of entertainment.

All I am saying is that maybe those FACT pigfuckers and all the other anti-piracy groups know something after all. Which is more than I’ve ever conceded before.

Killing Time...

2005-03-05T02:16:00.000Z

Been quiet the last day or so as I've been working with a few guys who are in a similar situation to myself. We've finally got the bare bones of a website put together and we'll be looking to expand on that in the next week or so. The site is called "The Oroboros Collective" and there's a link to it over there on the right.

Ways to be Juvenile #128 - Urine

2005-03-03T01:56:00.000Z

Ok, looks like the first post was awful gibberish after all, but it gets left where it is for the sake of posterity. Here I find myself again...

I had talked about my behaviour becoming increasingly juvenile. Only recently did I complete perhaps the most juvenile and ridiculous thing I have ever done : The Urine Challenge

My girlfriend had gone leaving me with an empty house and a lease that was soon to expire. Every night since her departure had been spent drinking. Not through any kind of depression, just because it seemed like the right thing to be doing in an empty house. The boys rallied round expecting a tearful orgy of self pity every night only to find me ready drunk and in fine fettle. One such beer fuelled encounter resulted in us on an almost continuous pissing rota. Someone remarked the old adage "Have a pint - Piss a gallon".

In my mind I got to thinking just how much urine should we produce, do we produce and what about when we are drinking... A surf of the net, a few golden shower specialist sites, then a medical one that stated "the average person of perfect health produces between 1.5 - 2 litres of urine a day. This can increase if that person drinks a lot of water".

"I've produced way fucking more than that this evening"

And he probably had. At least six trips up those stairs in the last two hours...

"We should do an experiment boys. A bit of DIY science... Let's see how much urine we can produce over the next five days..."

some chuckles.

"I'm serious"

"Where the fuck are we going to store it all"

"Well let's make it interesting"

My brain - devolving, remember - came up with a clause of such subtlety and brilliance I still find it hard to believe.

"The person who produces the most has to have a bath in all the urine. So, it now becomes in our interests to store every last drop."

They all gawped at me. It was a serious proposal. Fuck it, we could all move into my place and just store the piss in my cupboards. All the woman stuff had been shipped out. There was room for plenty of bottles.

"Plus, if we only produce 2 litres a day, we'll only be looking at 10 or so litres of piss - that's not much even between four of us."

We agreed to this "challenge" and carried on drinking. We would start afresh on Monday.

Monday came - Gav, the fisherman, backed out. He sited medical reasons, but the bottom line was he didn't want his girlfriend to see him storing his own piss like some kind of terminal shut in and he wasn't mad keen on having a bath in piss should he lose. We were down to three; would we still be able to fill a bath? I didn't realise how foolish a question this was at this stage. The other guys, Jules and Mike, were both still going to partake.

Immediately it became apparent that as a true scientific measure this experiment was no good. We started sinking 5 litre bottles of mineral water and competed with each other fiercely measuring up totals on the first two days. We even got to the stage where we were producing perfectly clear urine. In appearance and smell it was completely undetectable as piss. We never did the taste challenge.

By day three we were hiding our bottles and lying about our amounts to each other. It was getting tense. I also felt like garbage, as did everybody else. I was producing between four to six litres of urine a day. I had also stopped eating because I was informed that you pee less if you are digesting food. The nausea was horrible, every gulp that went down... Still by the end of day 3 I had produced 15 litres of urine. The stuff from day one was starting to develop a foamy head.

Gav had come round to adjudicate at this stage, the mind games were getting serious. I was telling the guys I was only up to12 in the hope they would relax... We swaggered round pretty much constantly with a bottle hanging off our dicks to catch every last drop of what had become known as "liquid gold". I still felt awful. When Jules was out I had a look at his bottles. He was on about 22 litres. I felt worse after this but carried on drinking a mix of tea, water and lager. Sometimes in the same glass.

The final day came - Gav made the count... Now although I am not at liberty to divulge who had what (we swore we would never say who was in the bath) The results were:

The winner had 27.5 litres
The non-loser had 24 litres
The piss bath horror loser had 22.5 litres

The stuff from the first day now had a crust. It made me heave just to look at it.

So the loser sat in the bath wearing nothing but a condom and a pair of goggles and we began to pour over 70 litres of stinking urine over him. I was heaving with the smell it was so bad. As we heaved the bottles would buck upwards and squirt the sorry individual in the face. This made him vomit over himself and as his head jerked forward he would receive more for his trouble. Between retches he said "no more" but we finished it anyway.

It was the worst thing I had ever been party to and it was all my idea.

Dark tidings and babble from one of the devolving generation...

2005-03-02T03:30:00.000Z

Everyone was setting these things up. Usually I don't follow trends. Not because I'm some kind of true individual, but rather because I'm one of those people who says things like "Well it's totally commercialised now" or "It has become something of a cliche". I can't remember a time when I uttered the phrase "Well, I was into them/it before everybody else, but I won't put it past me.

Anyway, I set this up out of frustration. My friend Gav, a rugby player with a raging ginger beard that makes him look like some kind of 18th century fisherman, told me a tale about some Muslim guy he met in a bar. He believed that Darwin was sort of right, he just had it the wrong way round. People didn't evolve from apes, rather apes devolved from people. Gav, who isn't tolerant of other peoples views at the best of times, spent hours arguing with him, however Aqhmed could not be swayed.

So he told me the story and I laughed. We'd been drinking cheap lager all day, but I found the whole notion so patently ridiculous I think I would have laughed had I been sober. On the way home that night I encountered some horrible night creatures riding along on a slick of vomit and verbal abuse. Their incoherent anger was directed at the invisible phantoms that surrounded them as well as each other. They were totally incapable of violence yet seemed to crave it. It all made no sense, but it was typical of the scenes you see at closing time in Middlesbrough.

I woke up the next day, had my usual morning potter about (this may well be some kind of polite euphanism for wank) and tried to go about my day. Working as a call centre manager. At 25. Surrounded by people, in some cases my superiors, who were barely literate. I sat at my desk drinking the sump that passes for coffee from our vending machine - after a few uses the coffee, chocolate drinks and tea end up coming out as one brown sludge - and I started to think maybe Aqhmed was on to something. These people around me are devolving. Perhaps at a more alarming speed than people in other geographical regions...

Couldn't shake this thought for the rest of the day. Didn't want the staff in the canteen to touch my food in case I caught his devolution bug... Was it airborn? Just how contagious was it? Maybe it was too late even for me...

And just maybe it was and is. Seems my entire life has started to run backwards. After leaving university I ended up straight back in a call centre. After that I managed to get work, in another call centre - in fact the same fucking call centre I had worked in at 17. Not to worry, I had an "adult" life and some aspirations that would surely see the doom and gloom of call centre hell a far and distant memory. Turns out, that adult life had been eroding slowly without me even realising it. My behaviour was becoming increasingly juvenile, possibly a cause or result of - it's too far gone now to tell - my girlfriend leaving. The knock on effect was having to move out of my house as I could no longer afford the upkeep.

I had to shack up again with my parents, for me an utter defeat. Even more so when I realised that one of the reasons everyone else of my age who I knew had been doing it for years and that was why they appeared to be more affluent than me. They make no bones of it. It just seems people of my generation have to rely more on their parents than perhaps any other generation ever. Fitting for a devolving generation and, I suppose, amusing given that our parents lived in a time of full employement, only a subtle undercurrent of AIDS and crime that can be romanticised by historians, novelists and pub bores.

I spent the first few days alternating between refurnishing my old childhood bedroom, one I hadn't stayed in since I was 16, and reading rejection letters from the many newspapers I had applied to. Those applications are part of my "adult" life, those aspiration things... Despite my qualifications and experience (Fair enough - not that much, but I can write, edited the university magazine, got a vaguely linked qualification and actually want to do it) not one has come up with even an offer of interview. Does it not say something that I would be taking a 9k paycut? No, three lines on a sheet of cheap bargain basement laser printer paper tells you that you're not made of the right stuff.

Another reason to hate the previous generations - opportunity. You read about a icon. Turns out he just walked into the job, got it through luck, someone gave them a break. My generation will never be afforded that luxury. It is all about standardised forms and meeting percentages. Who wanted a meritocracy anyway? Don't give us a break - we're devolving. It would only be a waste when you walked into work to see we had smeared shit up the walls and were trying to mate with your desk.

Just how much had I done to get out of or prevent my situation? Less and less as I settled into a sweaty, sticky comfort zone. My efforts, had been perfunctory at best. It only adds fuel to the fire when I realise that I am part to blame for this horrible lack of evolution and development that is weighing down on me like wet sandbags.

So I have made some resolutions to myself about how I'm going to get out of this. The outlook is bleak. This is at least something that isn't typing up another covering letter, only to be told to fill in a form. It's all there on my CV and covering letter, why the form? We wouldn't want to judge candidates as individuals... Standardised forms are where it's at...It is something to do that doesn't involve me having to go out and face the horror that lurks around every corner. Maybe it might be a way of makig contact with other people that can feel this terrible prophecy being fulfilled for us all.

Or maybe I am taking another step towards becoming some horrible, shambling shut-in that will be reduced to being unable to communicate without a keyboard and monitor in front of them. You can tell who they are you know. Their fingers twitch seconds before they start to mumble.

Whatever the path in front of me, there will be articles posted up on here as well as stuff like this, that may very well get re-read and deleted when I've had some sleep and I realise it is awful gibberish.