Festering In My Own Disdain

Greetings, everyone, from the real world. I’m back again, back in the nine-to-five humdrum of getting up, going to work, and then inevitably returning home to bed. This goes a long way to explaining my lack of blog-related activity, or any other activity for that matter. For this reason, I don’t have anything to say except that I’m not sure I really like the real world anymore.

The whole not-being-at-work phenomenon gave me a delicious taste of what it would be like to be unemployed. Sure, you can’t really afford to eat properly, or live anywhere, or wash, but once you look over all of these little details, unemployment affords an amazing sense of freedom.

Of course, this notion is made completely out of fantasy and it wouldn’t take very long for a person to die of said freedom, but wouldn’t you rather live for a few days, enjoying boundless liberty than spend scores of years locked into some pointless struggle for survival?

Is that a stupid question?

Don’t mind me. I’m just a little sore at having to return to ‘normal’ after a fun-filled couple of weeks of Facebook, guitar, Dr. Who, Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil 4 - the rest of the time, I just wasted. My disappointment is partly caused by God’s bastard-ass decision to hide the sun away for all of that time, only to whip the cloth off on the evening of my last day of idleness.

So now, the weather is lovely and I’m enslaved from nine until five in a bookshop with an inflated opinion of it’s own importance. On the plus side, the shop has air-con, so I don’t have to enjoy the warmth at any point of the day. I can close my eyes and pretend it’s November, merrily whistling Here Comes Santa Clause to the confusion of the sweating public.

I wouldn’t mind, but I’ve returned to an atmosphere akin to Stalin’s Russia, with some angry force on a mission to find and destroy all dissenters. This is all due to an anonymous opinion survey, some less-than-favourable results, and a management with bruised pride who would much rather delete those with an unsavoury point of view than address the issue in question.

But you don’t care about that.

What you really want to know is what I’m going to do about it, right?

Hello?

Well, screw it, I’ll tell you anyway.

I’m going to wander off into the wilderness like Christopher McCandless, except I’m not going to eat the wrong berries and end up dead - I’m going to wrestle deer to the ground and spit roast them up a mountain somewhere. It can’t be that hard.

Actually, I’m going to play the lottery, because you never know…

Well, what I’m really going to do is just sit here festering in my own disdain. Check me out this time next year. I’ll be the one complaining about my job and wishing I was unemployed.

If I’m really, really lucky, it’ll be the other way ‘round.

No Survivalist's Wet-Dream...

I didn’t read anything last night, except subtitles - but I’ll come to that later.

The Road has been out on DVD for a few weeks now, so I was a little late jumping on the bandwagon, but jump I did.

For those who don’t know, The Road, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s book of the same name, follows a father and his son as they try to survive in the wake of an unnamed apocalyptic event.

It’s grim, it’s grey and it’s harsh as hell.

This is a world in which nothing grows and the only signs of life happen to be other survivors who have lasted that long only by killing and eating the weak.

In such a brutal climate, you have to wonder what possesses the characters to stay alive but it’s not long before you realise that this urge is there conditionally. The father, known only as the Man, carries a revolver holding two bullets, one for him and one for his son, and the question is ever present - will he be able to pull the trigger when the time comes?

Although the many concepts in the film are nightmarish, much of the horror depicted in the book has been omitted in favour of placing the focus on the Man’s struggle to protect his son at all costs. Also, since the Man is clearly dying, it’s up to him to teach the boy how to live in his absence.

But it is the boy, ultimately, who is the teacher. His simple, polarised view of the world is a constant reminder to the Man that they are supposed to be the Good Guys and forces him to consider the moral cost of their survival.

I’ve always been a fan of apocalyptic fiction but unlike George A. Romero’s Dead Saga or the Mad Max series, The Road is no survivalist’s wet-dream. Survivalists barely come into the equation in this near-future dead world - here, God’s forgotten children simply pass the time until their inevitable starvation and the matter isn’t ‘how shall we continue to live?’, it becomes ‘when everything dies, what do we live for?’

Needless to say, once the credits rolled, I was pretty bummed out. I had to find something to lift my spirits and I found it on BBC4.

Storyville is a strand of international documentaries and this edition featured the trials and tribulations of the Swedish National Male Synchronised Swimming Team, hilariously entitled ‘Sync or Swim’.

The film follows Welsh film-maker, Dylan Williams, as he struggles against adversity in his new life in Stockholm. He’s about to hit 40 and all of the associated mid-life anxiety is crashing around him when he decides to pursue meaning with a group of similarly disenchanted Swedes.

Who cares, right?

Why on earth should I give a damn about a bunch of old men splashing around in a pool?

Trust me, I thought the same thing for the first ten minutes or so, but once you’re past that hurdle, you begin to warm to these underdogs and when they qualify for the World Championship in Milan, you start to wish you had a Swedish flag just so you can wave it around in support.

Check it out, it’s not a bad way to spend an hour of your life and if you don’t mind subtitles, it’s certainly more uplifting than watching the world slowly die.

A Portable, Moral Compass

I haven’t finished any books since the last one and it’s becoming a matter of extreme urgency that I do. Everything is becoming, in some way or another, an analogy for the Israel-Palestine conflict. This monomaniacal tendency must stop!

Right now, I’m reading two books.

The first is A. C. Grayling’s the Meaning of Things which I highly recommend to anybody eager to attach some philosophical significance to their lives.

The book spawned from his column in the Guardian, the Last Word, in which he turned his attention a different topic each week. He deals with all aspects of life from love to hate, prudence to intemperance, and explains the ins and outs of each in a very common-sense, matter-of-fact way.

Among it’s virtues, the biggest selling point, for me, is the brevity in which he tackles these subjects, rarely stepping over the three-page mark, making the Meaning of Things an excellent bathroom book.

Furthermore, you can read the entries in whichever order you prefer and, if you’re that way inclined, you can use it as a reference book for life or, if you have none of your own, a portable, moral compass.

Grayling’s CV is impressive, to say the least. With a shelf-load of other books to his name and an extensive list of academic achievements under his belt, there’s little reason at all to doubt a single word he says.

I’d go further than that, actually - I may just abandon all free will and leave my every future decision in his hands.

Therein lies the problem with philosophy - something I’ve been meaning to rant about for a while.

For every problem you encounter, if you’re a regular person as opposed to a world leader, you can find, in philosophy, as many arguments for a decision as you can for it’s contrary.

If you take this too seriously, you end up considering the ‘philosophical connotations’ of every little thing to the point where the only remaining action is no action at all.

In extremes, philosophy amounts to little more than a cause of inner turmoil and an excuse for sheer bone-idleness. For this reason, 99% of the world’s philosophers remain unknowns, conscientiously avoiding employment whilst sleeping under bridges.

Rant over.

Book two on the bedside table is Bad Blood by Colm Tóibín, in which a lone Wexford novelist goes for a walk along the Irish border in the wake of the Anglo-Irish agreement in 1994.

In many ways, the book concerns a past which, touch wood, has been banished to the annals of history, when Ulster still said ‘No’ and you could still smoke in the few pubs that hadn’t been blown up or purloined by the British Army.

But I’ll come back to that once I’ve finished it.

That just about wraps this entry up but before I go, I’d like to make a formal, public apology to Robert Green for selling him those new, experimental gloves. In my defence, Robert, you were forewarned that the technology hadn’t been properly tested and any unfortunate consequences are largely due to your own impatience.

So, no. You can’t have your money back.

No Happy-Ever-After...

Yesterday, I finished reading Teach Yourself: The Middle East Since 1945 which, as you might expect, ended on something of a question mark. There’s no happy-every-after, especially when you refer to the Middle East.

Having read it, I still don’t feel informed enough to choose sides. Is Israel the promised land of the Jewish people or is it just a piece of land given to them by the West as compensation for the Holocaust? Are the Palestinians an isolated, homeless people or just a fundamentalist pest?

These questions are a might too serious for my liking and I’m not even sure I’m asking them properly so I’m happy here, on the fence, shrugging my shoulders.

But is that enough?

Is it not the duty of we free people to join together and help the poor savages of the desert? Well, arguably it’s thinking like that which helped create the chaos we see today but now that the mess is there, and we’re in such a comfortable position, the least we can do is to ensure that they have all the benefits of televisions and wi-fi and 24 hour Tesco without the fear of angry, exploding people.

But what do I know?

I’ve only read one book, and a pretty overarching, non-specific one at that. I’ve seen the news too, once in a while, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying that the situation is far enough developed to render the news reports virtually meaningless - like walking in on a random, five-minute snatch of a Steven Segal movie - there’s a lot of violence and explosions, but plot…?

It’s war, at the end of the day, so you can excuse the senselessness of it, but you can at least make a blind stab at what’s happening without doing too much homework.

At the risk of being too general, we have at least two different sides who all want the same land and the same resources. They can’t share because they have each placed the annihilation of the other on their to-do lists. They can’t trust each other because every time there is a ceasefire, some nutter decides that it’s time for some target-practice.

We have, ladies and gentlemen, legions of ignorant puppets led by a minority of angry leaders, hell-bent on having their own way. Somewhere in the middle are thousands of ordinary civilians trying to put bread on the table but they can’t do that because there’s no bread in the shop, the table is in the house and the house has just been blown up.

That’s probably why it’s so hard to choose sides.

Who do you support when you have, on one hand, a manufactured state constantly defending itself with pre-emptive strikes, and on the other, a group of religious fundamentalists who would gladly bulldoze the infidel into the sea? With a choice like that, you really have to question the sanity of anyone who claims to know which side they are on.

But what do I know?

I’ve only read one book.

Actually.....

Well…that was interesting.

Ever since setting myself that task, I’d felt a growing panic. Now, when I’m nervous, I drink. To settle my nerves, I poured a little whisky into a glass and supped it like a gentleman. An hour later and I was slugging great mouthfuls from the bottle like a dirty tramp.

After that, things get a bit hazy and the next thing I know I’m stood at the condiment table in Wetherspoon’s talking to myself and drinking vinegar out of those sachets. I left before the authorities were called and passed out behind some wheelie bins.

When I came to, I decided that I definitely don’t have time to set myself ridiculous challenges like reading every VSI in a year.

Here’s me making sense of it -

I read really slowly, it takes me about 2 minutes to read one page (and I’ve timed myself, with a stopwatch.)
Given that there are, on average 150 pages in each VSI, that’s 5 hours per book.
In order to complete the task in a year, I need to find a spare 5 hours every day.
Not to mention the fact that each book costs £7.99 - a total of £1733.83 for the series.

Where I an unemployed millionaire with two broken legs and a food tube, it would be a great plan, but I’m not. I have a job, I have a life already brimming with self-appointed, mind-sucking responsibility and it‘s getting shorter every day.

Besides, I already have 80-odd books on my list that I actually want to read - why should I want to add another 217 about which I don’t give a good god damn.

It’s a daft plan - out the window - it’s made my life a misery already and I haven’t even started it. There comes a time when you just have to accept your intellectual limitations and recognise the fact that if you really cared, you’d know about it already.

Maybe I don’t know everything , but I know that I don’t care about Cryptography (VSI 068) or International Migration (VSI 157) and I don’t see why I should force myself to for the sake of some public announcement.

People lie all the time - you can just call that one of mine and feel free to judge me when you’ve met all of your personal targets.

So, bang, it’s been eliminated from my roster of failures before it had the chance to appear.

Pre-emptive strike.

I win.

As for the blog and my foolish quest to make it ‘about something’ - let’s just say that as soon as I’ve decided what I’m about, then I can work on pissing specifics into a black corner of the internet.

I’ll write it, I’ll be fairly regular, but here’s the end to me considering it as anything more grandiose than a simple pass-time.

If the blog is about anything, it’s about me stroking my own ego and enjoying the thrill of seeing ream after ream of disconnected ramblings appear on the screen - just like a real publication.

And trust me, I enjoy it.

If anyone else does, that’s a bonus.

A Dangerous and Stupid Idea

So I was having a bit of a crisis last night as I tried to sleep and it spilled over into today. It dawned on me that I am essentially ignorant.

Ask me about politics and I’ll tell you I don’t vote.
Ask me about the news and I’ll tell you I don’t understand.
Ask me about anything and I’ll nod and agree but neither view nor opinion shall pass my lips.

Does it matter?

Well, not in the day-to-day loving yourself way that all of the hippies talk about, but it certainly has some significance if you’ve decided to write a blog.

Which I have.

For good or ill.

So I decided to do some research into the causes and cures for ignorance.
Apparently the only cure is patient absorption of knowledge and one of the chief causes happens to be apathy.

So I did a little research into the causes of apathy and do you know what I found out?

I’m depressed and I should talk to my GP.

Man, the internet is full of shit.

With that in mind, I decided there’s only one way out of the stupid-trap - I need to learn more stuff. If only there was a series of books that gave a brief overview of a great many topics.

And there it was, staring at me from the little shelf at the bottom of the stairs - the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction to Modern Ireland.

I could hear cogs grinding in my head and you know what that means - I was about to have a dangerous and stupid idea.

There are, to date, 217 books in the Very Short Introduction series, each one amounting to about 150 pages of condensed knowledge. So I thought (brace yourselves) that I might just read them all, in order.

But where’s the challenge in saying I’m going to read all of them eventually - what I needed was a realistic deadline.

Then I thought, where’s the fun in a realistic deadline - I need something utterly absurd.

So here it is, friends, my crazy self-appointed task:

217 books, one year, no excuses.

The timer starts as soon as I start the first one. Place your bets now as to how long it will take me to lose interest completely.

An Argos Catalogue of Good Intentions

This week, when I haven’t been watching terrible films, I’ve found plenty of other reasons not to write my blog. The foremost distraction on the list is Shelfari.

If you like books and organising things, you’ll love Shelfari. It’s an online bookshelf where you can list the books you’ve read, those you are reading now and those that you plan to read. Granted, you could probably do the same thing on a piece of paper but you wouldn’t get the same satisfaction of seeing all of your favourite books, face-out on a shelf in hyperspace.

It has taken up too much of my time already. The other night, I spent a good hour referring to Random House’s Modern Library top 100 like it was an Argos catalogue of good intentions. No doubt there are some brilliant books in there but for now, I’m not going to read them - I’ll just add them to my ‘plan to read’ list. A picture on a virtual shelf is all I need to feel good about myself.

While we’re on books, I’ve just finished Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer. I decided to give it a spin having grown bored of the TV series and…it was alright. It just showed me how warped the TV adaptation actually was.

The book deals solely with Lloyd Simcoe and the team at CERN (not Mark Benford and the FBI) as they inadvertently knock the whole world out whilst trying to find the Higgs boson. During the two-minute blackout, consciousness is moved forward 21 years (not just a matter of months as in the series) and renders all human endeavour utterly pointless.

For those of you who don’t get Sci-Fi, the tendency is to flash forward to the last chapter just to find out what happens, then throw the book in the bin. I did no such thing. Instead, I nodded with false understanding as I was bombarded with a disproportionate mix of theoretical physics and fuzzy plot.

That’s the problem with most science fiction, in my experience - they never get the balance quite right between science and fiction and you end up with something that’s not quite a novel and not quite a dissertation.

So, in conclusion, I think my time could have been better spent reading something else, something exciting and educational, something like Teach Yourself: The Middle East since 1945.

I’m half-way through it and it’s pretty interesting. With all of the noise on the telly about Gaza and Israel and flotillas, I felt ignorant.

The Middle East is a knot too complicated to approach in any other way than a concise, over-arching summary and in this, the Teach Yourself guides kick everyone else’s ass.

What I’ve gathered so far is that the Middle East is a land populated by people who hate each other and this is due to tribal and religious differences exacerbated by Western involvement. I’m sure you can find a thousand reasons why that statement is technically incorrect but that’s the nature of the Middle East - it doesn’t fit in a nutshell.

I’ve been doing other things this week, like eating and going to work but I do those all of the time so the novelty has well and truly worn off.

Pornography for Handbag-Fanciers

Hi guys.

Last night, I sold my principles off and ditched my morals.
I did something bad, something I consider a sin of taste.
I watched Sex and the City, the first movie...

Firstly, shut up!

I won't go into the hows and whys but I'll tell you this - it wasn't out of choice. I'd already used my veto on something else.

So, how do I review a film that I didn't like?

I approached it, albeit reluctantly, with an open mind. There was no way, I thought, that the franchise could have been any worse than it was in my head and to give it it's dues, it wasn't.

It wasn't any better either.

Sex and the City, if you don't know, is about four women and their folly-ridden, farce-infested search for love in New York City.

I just threw up a little in my mouth.

We have Charlotte, the ditsy brunette, Miranda, the red-head with a family, Samantha, the promiscuous, self-centred blonde and Carrie, the narrator and columnist.

Carrie has had an on-off thing with Mr. Big, the almost-perfect man, for the duration of the six series and in the first movie, they decide to tie the knot.
Naturally, this blows up in their faces when Big gets cold feet. It's just for a fleeting moment but it's enough to evoke a disproportionate response from Carrie who plunges into despair and spends the rest of the movie realising that the misunderstanding was largely her own fault.

Meanwhile, Samantha, the blonde whore, has trouble maintaining a solid relationship when a gigolo moves in next door, Charlotte falls pregnant despite being told it was impossible and Miranda kicks her husband out for sleeping with someone else.

Throw in a few other chick-flick cliches and you've got yourself a movie.

Of course, it's not all about the storyline. Sex and the City is pornography for handbag-fanciers and shoe-addicts. There's something shallow and pathetic about that but I can't really talk - my pornography is all about tits and asses. Having said that, it's hard to take the plot seriously when it keeps getting interrupted by fashion items.

Like I said, I'm open-minded, so I cant ignore the effect that the show has had on the collective unconscious. It battered down the barriers and opened the floodgates for women to talk about sex and relationships, not in the way that society would like to think they do, but honestly.

The unfortunate consequence is that we now live in a liberated society with nothing on TV except Desperate Housewives, Dirty Sexy Money and the L-Word all of which probably wouldn't exist had Sex and the City not gone there first.

Sex and the City 2 is in cinemas now.

I'm sure you're all thrilled to hear it.

I've got my ticket.