Get fucked, I like it.

These are the words of the utterly delightful, endlessly amusing, and really quite titchy AndyB. Andy is pure misanthropic awesomeness whose blog every cunt and motherfucker, and everyone in between, should spend some quality time perusing.
Here’s what I’m thinking: this is an excellent way of living, of being, of telling the world to go fuck itself, that you’ll live by your parameters and no one else’s and that, really, not only is it offensive to behave as though your way of being is the only reasonable way but it’s seriously fucking childish [the language owes much to reading Andy, and well, because I’m a foul mouthed bitch with very few pretensions about who she is and where she’s come from]. So you know what? Get fucked, I like it. I’ll give you a list if you like. I might give you a list anyway.

I like my rediscovered and totally crappy and o-my-god-is-it-ever-lame Degrassi. I like my boxed set of Star Wars [the original, don’t fuck with me]. Likewise my boxed set of Monkey – best couple of hundred of someone else’s bucks that I have ever spent – really no exceptions. I like Pulp. I fucking love Jarvis Cocker [please, may I have your babies? How about if I know ALL the words?] – this has been covered elsewhere, ad nauseum, so I’ll try and stop…ugh…so hard…Jarvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvve… On music I also love Belle and Sebastian – this would have been so much easier if I’d just filled in the profile, wouldn’t it? I love the sixties as a period, period. Especially musically. I like rock and roll from the fifties on, I like the history of it, I like the ‘fuck you’ attitude. I like that my ipod has everything on it from Dylan Thomas to The Clash to Edith Piaf to Wagner to a serious glut of Pulp to Arlo Guthrie to The Birthday Party to what-the-fuck-ever. This is why I bought the one with the humungous memory. I like movies that come in crappy trilogies and have teenaged or childish themes – Back to the Future, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars [again, the oneth]. I like books that come in series and trilogies – not all of them, mind, but some. I like Douglas Adams, but then, everyone does these days. I like that Douglas Adams had such an effect on my young mind. I like that I scream and shout and act like a total cunt half the time and a total hermitic psycho freak the other. I like that I can mix it up and do it all at once. I like contradiction. I like my own contradiction. I like getting drunk. I like drugs. I like that I feel no shame about either of those. I like that my parents understand. I like that I can blame my own inadequacies and craziness on other people – when it suits me. I like that my dad who is he is, or what he is. I like Creedence Clearwater Revival. Get me some of that fucking bayou. I like that I don’t quite know what I’m typing. I like that I’ll shove this load of irritated and irritating shit on the internet. I like that I can be polite to people who are rude to me. I like that I can be so subtly sarcastic that you just aren’t sure if I’m being sincere or a bitch. I like that my personality is somehow threatening. I like that I sometimes dare to be myself completely. I like the Beatles [fuck off, Mark]. I like that I find the world endlessly amusing. I like that I need a wife. I like that The Lovely Lesbian Lawyer recently acquired one. I like that I have cards and presents for no less than four people sitting on my table waiting for me to get around to sending or giving them to their recipients. I like that the would be recipients love me and don’t give a shit about my hopelessness about getting around to things. I like that this will go out with barely any editing and I won’t care. I like that this is crap and a RANT. Yes, a RANT. I like that. I like that I mostly don’t feel the need to try that hard or compete with strangers. I like that I earn my own money. I like that I support myself entirely. I like that I can, and do, look after myself. I like that I don’t need anyone – it makes the wanting so much sweeter, you know? I like that my ipod just threw The Mamas and The Papas at me. I like that I never quite remember what I’ve read until I read a little of it. I like that my memory slips and slides and plays games with me. I like that I dream so vividly that I’m sometimes unsure if something was real or a dream. I like the fact that most of my real life people don’t know this heap of crap exists. I like the fact that this is my blog and it goes by my rules. I like that this post doesn’t mean that I’m back, fuckers, it just means that I’m pissed and I want to share it with the fucking world at small.

And for all dissent or any other crap anyone wants to throw at me this day or this week or this whenever I just have one thing to say. Get fucked, I like it – and I really don’t give a fucking damn if you don’t, arsehole.

Sooner or later, the big stuff comes around.

It’s not you, it’s me.

You know what this is, don’t you? I’ve barely typed a score of words and already you can see it coming. Maybe it’s just me. I can see it coming. You won’t believe me but I do loathe those last hurrahs, those look-at-me-things, those grandiose gestures of rubbishy half-emotion, especially as this isn’t a last hurrah.

What? Why? Huh?

I’m sorry, internet, but I think it’s time we had a trial separation. I think we both know that it’s been coming for a while. I’ve been using you, you see. No, actually, you don’t, do you? That’s what I need to explain. Some of it has been okay, a mutual using. I get a little something, you get a little something and we’re both happier for it. Only, I’ve been using you for more than that. Quite unforgivably, I’ve been using you as an excuse not to do other things. You’ve been my pleasure, my fun, my fancy, my procrastination. It’s gotten rather unhealthy. There are things that you can’t provide that I need to sort out before they turn catastrophic – relative to me, that is.

You’ll believe me that it was better on the bus on the way home. I had a thousand ways of saying this that weren’t so lame. You’re great, really, and we’ve had such fun. Oh stop looking like that, I know you’ve heard it before, we’ve all heard it before. This isn’t really the end, it’s just a little break, let’s give it a week, two weeks, a month and then we’ll see how we stand. I know it won’t be quite the same, not now that I’ve done this, but I don’t ever want to be quite the same again. I want my motives to be purer, my interaction less desperate, my world to be bigger. Please, don’t make this harder than it is.
It’s not like I won’t see you, there’s still email – that’s barely even the internet anymore, more of a necessity , I’ll still be needing to deal with email, and with email comes you. We might have the occasional interaction when I realise just how much I rely on google. I will be using other means of reference though. My OED has dust on it [you fuck] and it’s time I brushed it off, caressed its spine, and flicked lovingly through its pages – stopping here for half an hour before flitting there. We used to have a beautiful relationship, OED and I, but it’s been neglected lately.

At the end of the night I’ll switch you off (see how I’ve cunningly given myself this one last night?) and that will be that. Tomorrow I expect to go to bed with clean kitchen and shining sink and the glow of one who has made it through the first day.

And so, for now, au revior.

The long dark teatime of the soul (Volume X)

The following is series of half-arsed thoughts cobbled together from boredom and pointlessness and because the process of writing, even about nothing, helps me marshal my thoughts.

I’m starting to suspect that without work I do not know what to do with myself. I have nothing that I would call a hobby – certainly nothing I dedicate concentrated time to. With everything I am distracting myself in two, three, four ways – I read and watch tv and get up and peruse the ever dull internet, I make a half-hearted attempt to do, well, anything, before distracting myself, getting up and stalking around, and flopping back down. I’ve written this before, I know I have, I’m not sure where. Such is memory, I suppose, my memory, never anchoring things securely – knowing them but not from where. That might explain why life is so oddly repetitive. It is repetitive, isn’t it? And with such stretches of nothingness in-between.
All this (boring) introspection is not without some product, we know how important the product is. Unfailingly depressing views of what my life is, shall be, always will be. That is as much a product as anything else. The aloneness, I fear, is for always. Not that I mind being alone but I would like someone to annoy occasionally and a sometimes reference that I have not gone completely insane. Some days it’s hard to know.
Now I’m writing in a blog what I once would have written in a letter. Letters are beautifully personal – I miss them as a form of correspondence. Such a shame that all the letter writers have grown up and gotten married. Such a shame that I am locked in a perpetual adolescence. I’m sure, though, that no-one misses my handwriting – the act of deciphering my missives was as interesting as the content, if not more so. Oh, how I miss our childishness, joy in the world, ridiculous mindless cynicism, utter precocity, and the white room with the red text swirling into delightful nightmare. I thought it was delightful, at least.
Where was I ten years ago? Much the same as now – sitting in front of a computer typing aimlessly, though I suspect that I was clad in more than just my underwear, such are the joys of the parental home, but where once I had dreams and ideas I am now somewhat clueless with blankness stretching before me. Interestingly, I have become both more and less of a dreamer than I once was. I now know the place of my dreams and most of them will remain firmly stuck inside my head, they don’t actualise as easily as I once thought.
I am suffering now from the dual terrors of boredom and sexual frustration. I am halfway to convincing myself that both are states of mind and that if I think about it the right way I can put them into little boxes and not have to deal with them again. I look for no disillusion of this idea, it suits me and my desire to delude myself and shape the world into something that I can deal with. Boxes are healthy, ask any obsessive. Goodness that was rather defensive. Oh yes, can you feel the quiet desperation?
Soon I’ll be packing my computer away, not literally - though that wouldn’t be a bad idea, maybe I should try a trial separation from the internet, only see it at weekends and then only on business matters – just a closing down and switching off as I have an appointment with beer. I suspect that my liver will ache tonight; it seems to have something to do with my level of interest in the drinking process. Is that not an expression of boredom?

I miss history.

For this I blame Suite Française.

And, possibly, my own laziness.

If you want to buy my vote…

A tax cut would be lovely; I’m a low income earner. Please change HELP back to HECS – too ironic and so far there’s been no help just debt. Make it less of a millstone that we both now that I’ll probably never pay off now. Or maybe I will as it seems likely that I’ll be barren by choice or non-choice because with the huge rents and the low wages and the dribs and drabs of money slowly leached away by my oh-so-hedonistic lifestyle and eternal singledom and my desire not to become a whore for money or security it seems I’d never have enough money to pay for the hospital costs let alone the things a child needs and no, I don’t think five grand covers it, not a minute of it, certainly not a lifetime. Since I’m barren by choice could you please stop spending my hard earned money on private education for the children of the wealthy – I’ll never have either children or wealth so it seems a bit of a cruel irony to finance someone else’s, nor is it that I had such an education and I guess I’ll do alright as one of the worker bees slowly bringing back the pollen, or whatever it is, for the lucky inner circle, bet then, I was never meant to be one of the leaders of the next generation was I? they’ve already been chosen by their parent’s success. Of course, we all know that success in life has nothing to do with the situation of your family and birth and everything to do with your actions – so long as you have that backing and none of the crippling fear of the poverty you’ve barely known and are too scared of to chance or even, for a few who I admit are far better people than me, the poverty that you’ve known and could know again and which frightens you so little or so much that you will chance everything every single time to never live it again. Being in the middle is quite the horrid place, neither one thing nor the other.
But I digress, we were talking about how you could buy my vote. I would like to not be afraid that every employer that I have for the rest of my life will have so much power over me that I will be a slave, you may never have met this condition but it doesn’t feel very good, it does not make for peace of mind. I would like that those less capable or less rational or less intelligent or more easily cowed or simply less able be protected from those who would and could fuck them over. I’m even more worried about them than me, those are some good people and I count many of my friends. I worry, you see. For my friends and family with babies and uncertainties I’d like the safety nets to be fairer and less crippling. For the crazy old codger I call Papa and others of his generation and their successors in Iraq I should like assurances that they will always have access to the things they need, the help, the money – we owe them more than most will ever know; and several billion apologies too. Likewise, mental health for all and to all a goodnight – this experiment of some thirty years has not worked, some people need to be looked after, they need help when they ask not after they’ve dialled triple fucking oh. Parasuicide should not be necessary in getting help for bi-polar or for any other kind of help. And while we’re on the topic, don’t you think that depression is getting a little passé? Everyone seems to have it some of the time and some all of it, I would have thought of this as symptomatic of a society in serious decline - though please prove me wrong.
I’m afraid that health and welfare [the original meaning, not that cruelly corrupted by a thousand governments] are high on my list of priorities. I care about my own, of course, but I care about everyone else’s as well. In this vein, dental health is as important, possibly even more so than mental health given the holistic nature of health. I don’t know that it was supposed to become prohibitively expensive, but it has which is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Maybe it’s that I’m too fastidious but I feel that my wellbeing would be well better if more people could more often access dentists. Especially on public transport – what a nightmare in winter, the stench of bodies on heated busses, wet clothes and umbrellas, and rotting mouths. Yes, public transport, sorry, I know I’m not a priority and my vote is very much unwanted but private transport seems a bit of an excessive way to escape the horrors of people when those horrors can fairly readily be fixed. Pity that public transport can not so readily be fixed – I understand that in not using it you regard it as a non-event and, in fact, trains often are – but it is a way for me to get to work and the whole money/work/spending thing is supposed to be good for the economy and I know how we feel about that.
There are other things but I am, essentially, a realist and I really believe that in looking after people, or assisting people in looking after themselves, you make for a stronger healthier more determined work force. You create a people who are capable and confident and who are more willing to give of themselves and to create a better society. It’s a silly old-fashioned notion but not one that I’ve been able to let go of. Don’t get me wrong, I do not think that we should be without struggle or that we should have anything simply handed to us by the gods above. The simple fact is that it is us and our collective earnings that make the money you spend and it might be nice if it was spent on the things we really need, as a whole, rather than those we think we need or that you think we need. I do believe in user pays but, alas, I seem to be doing an awful lot of paying, and am expected to pay even more, and really very little using. Oh but I tease myself so! No-one wants to buy my vote because I am of the saddest demographic – a single childless woman! Still, you know…

The Sideshow

Paul McDermott back on the tele.

Swoon.

Comedy.

Swoon.

Singing.

Swoon.

Paul McDermott back doing a proper show.

Swoon.

Not his best work but did I mention? Paul McDermott….


Swoon.

A Sally by any other name

I have had, for this week and for my lifetime, a surfeit of being called Sally. This is largely because it is not my name. General consensus would have me named Sally but general consensus did not name me, that task was left to my rather dear, sweet parents and, quite frankly, they could have done a lot worse and almost did. I loathe the name and I make no apology for it. I’m quite sure it’s a nice enough name if you have it and I’m sure we’ve all known nice girls called Sally. Alas, however, I am neither nice nor Sally. I would greatly appreciate it if people listened as I spoke my name – I am a star enunciator – and stopped assuming I was called by such a silly little name. My own name is silly enough as is. It has no proper form. It has terrible trashy and cheerleader connotations. Still, however, it is my name and I much prefer it to Sally. I even understand how the mistake could be made given that my name and Sally share a letter or two or four. Only, I never do call myself Sally and I’m sure that not even I mumble to the extent that my name comes out all Sally. I am, in short, fed up with being called Sally. So much so that the next person who calls me Sally is going to have their head ripped from their neck with my bare hands and, hopefully, painfully forced up their arse – all in the nicest possible way, of course.

Sudden, inexplicable, gross paranoia. What a hideous feeling.