Amazingly! These ramblings have nothing to do with quiz or trivia
(Why not? Because I felt like it okay? You got a problem with that and want to sort it aht outside? Thought not)
Ooh, can you sense the tumbleweed and the harsh wind propelling it across this blog? It has been a bare and desolate place for the past week, whose only sounds have been the echoes of passing visitors growling: "He never updates anymore! The swine!"
I've often thought that a blog is a reverse-garden. Let me leave you with that thought for a sec, while I try and rustle something else up (sadly, it is not a hot Sunday dinner. For that I apologise.)
Sunday morning. Summer. Sigh. Morning becomes afternoon with no perceptible difficulty. Another sigh. It is all really dead time until September isn't it? Apart from burning blocks of toilets at Reading Festival, nothing gets sorted in the late July and August hedonistic holiday plunge, so you put off life until everyone slopes off back to work like Resident Evil zombies on a Valium prescription, waiting for the nights to draw in and Christmas to come and thinking of another, more interesting summer to come and turn us into sweaty, mad monkeys again. Anticipation of the future is much more exciting than actually living in the present.
Here's a summation of the last week for me:
Tempus Fugit Like Crazy
1) Where the hell did it go? Where did June go? The days seem like hours at the moment. A minute ago I glanced at my computer clock and it said 06.12 and now it's 15.46! That might be a slight exaggeration, so what? Am I actually using some mild time-travelling device, which speeds up life by 20%? I want it to stop functioning so well. Because I have no idea where all the time goes, as Sandy Denny once asked before dying in some silly-tragic way I can't recall. Nina Simone sang it too, but she spent most of her time getting abused by thuggish husbands, trying to remove people's heads with the sound of her angry Diva-empowered voice, and shooting French children with her air-rifle. (Another ace TV programme idea from The Quiz Blogger factory: Shooting Delinquent Hoodie Kids with Nina Simone. Pity she's dead. It would have been a ratings winner.)
Impure Shores
2) I've been to the beach twice this week. The first time in six years that I have deigned to sample the seaside delights of Littlehampton and swim in the sewage-tastic brine of the English Channel.
Why go? Minor healing reasons, the fact that it is ten minutes walk away and, forgetting the further implications of the incoming analogy, like Mount Everest was to George Mallory - "Because it's there!" - and the unappetising thought of being stuck in the house and being slowly roasted like pork crackling to the sound of Noel Edmonds yakking on like a deranged, self-appointed Messiah about his "dream factory". One solitary and senseless reason, however, takes precedence over the rest: the L.A. coast has a charm all of its own. The same kind of cheap charisma that I can't help falling for in a packet of sour Skittles or salt and vinegar Squares. Shabby, but surprisingly nice. Home.
I embraced the flashbacks to younger years when as a significantly skinnier teeanager I spent time hanging out with my brother and assorted temporary holiday buddies by the river, in the arcades, tennis courts, pitch and putt courses, on the promenade and just about anywhere I would avoid at the age of 27 as if they were breeding grounds for plague rats. This reminiscence was further elaborated on when I bought an ice cream cone (dipped in a chocolate covering for a 10p surcharge... yes, classy) and waved a shotgun in rubbish fashion at House of the Dead II. They were underwhelming, and made me glad to think that novels and assorted poncey literature had rushed in to fill the bleak vacuum vacated by doing rubbish teen-stuff, like trying to obtain Playboy specials and forbidden bottles of Newky Brown. Man, all those years I spent playing Final Fight (they didn't even have Street Fighter II anywhere). When I could have been reading The Brothers Karamazov! Shiver-brrrr.
I was burnt by the sun too. I know this because for two days afterward having a slightly warm bath felt akin to having the skin flayed from my body and buckets of Super-Scovilled chilli powder being poured on and rubbed vigorously into every pore vigorously. Yowser. I found out that my easily-browned half-Asian skin was not immune to the sun at its cruellest and most devastating height at Glastonbury 2003. My face turned a bit Singing Detective. It scared people. Yet, I did not learn, this week I stayed in the sun's pitiless gaze as if daring it to try and fry my epidermis. It did. Taught me proper. My arms now look as if they have been grilled medium-rare.
And so I wondered most of all, just who goes to a beach on a weekday? Except for aspiring Oblomovs like myself, naturally. I look around and see youngER people and think bad and insidious things about how unemployed they are. After all, they can't all be Portuguese or Polish (immigents filling up our street and not talking the language: it's disgustingful). So your increasingly Tory mind concludes they must all be on the dole, living it up, grrrr, paddling in taxpayers' seawater, grrrrr, basking like glazed peacocks in scorching sunshine we working folk paid for. It's enough to make you want to start brandishing a nailgun.
Now school is out and hell has most certainly broken loose its army of noxious minions, who just happen to look like schoolchidren (they aren't kiddies; they be monsters and demons), across this parched land, across the paths that I had walked without previous encumberance. Trolls, pixies and Piczo glitter addicts of varying immature size and cheeky and dirty mouths will flood the pebble beaches and the pedestrianised town centre and kick their football repeatedly into our garden and then ask for it back in a such an astoundingly dumbened voice that it makes Wayne Rooney sound like Ben Fogle. They've done it three times today already, and still I am shocked at the words emerging from their slurred mouths. Must be all that pre-teen bingedrinking and crystal meth they're doing.
Beverage Newsflash
3) Coke Zero tastes even worse than Pepsi Max. Let alone Coca-Cola. You cannot imagine the disappointment I felt when I realised I was pouring flat battery acid down my throat and not a divine elixir that filled every cell in my being with a golden light. They heaped empty promises and spunky, youthful adverts on me. I was taken in like a barroom sap and now I lie broken at the side of the consumer road. Granted, Coca-Cola also tastes like flat battery acid, but there's so much sugar packed into every fluid ounce that you don't notice the simultaneously corrosive and dulling effect it has on your insides. The soothing carbohydrate rush covers up the internal rot all too well.
Also, I've just realised the double-edged sword that is the name Coke Zero. Zero as in nada, nothing, zip, zilch, Zelig. It should bloody well be called Coke Less Than Zero. At least, you would have looked cool imbibing something inspired by Brett Easton Ellis's young wasted wastrels. Even if it tasted like strained bogwater, you would have still felt the pure rush of contented nihilism flowing through your diseased veins.
Thus, I demand redress. REDRESS. (Don't ask me what that means)
That's It!
4) Apart from the sweaty film magazine party I briefly graced with my presence on Thursday, the free two-hour Mandarin lesson that scared the bejesus out of me (I can now say "One, two ... how are you ... sad... ten ...blue ... red ... white ... I am" in the language of our future Sinoverlords!), the five-second surgeon's appointment at Worthing Hospital, the surprisingly emetic effect of just two pints of Samuel Smith Alpine Lager, and the cursory preparation for the trip to both ends of the Auld Alliance. Nope, all those things were nought in the face of some ramblings about Coke Zero, how hot the sun is and how much young people annoy me with their sheer younginess and, of course, how time though eternal is always fleeting and fleeing from me. You see I've got my priorities exactly right.
Ooh, can you sense the tumbleweed and the harsh wind propelling it across this blog? It has been a bare and desolate place for the past week, whose only sounds have been the echoes of passing visitors growling: "He never updates anymore! The swine!"
I've often thought that a blog is a reverse-garden. Let me leave you with that thought for a sec, while I try and rustle something else up (sadly, it is not a hot Sunday dinner. For that I apologise.)
Sunday morning. Summer. Sigh. Morning becomes afternoon with no perceptible difficulty. Another sigh. It is all really dead time until September isn't it? Apart from burning blocks of toilets at Reading Festival, nothing gets sorted in the late July and August hedonistic holiday plunge, so you put off life until everyone slopes off back to work like Resident Evil zombies on a Valium prescription, waiting for the nights to draw in and Christmas to come and thinking of another, more interesting summer to come and turn us into sweaty, mad monkeys again. Anticipation of the future is much more exciting than actually living in the present.
Here's a summation of the last week for me:
Tempus Fugit Like Crazy
1) Where the hell did it go? Where did June go? The days seem like hours at the moment. A minute ago I glanced at my computer clock and it said 06.12 and now it's 15.46! That might be a slight exaggeration, so what? Am I actually using some mild time-travelling device, which speeds up life by 20%? I want it to stop functioning so well. Because I have no idea where all the time goes, as Sandy Denny once asked before dying in some silly-tragic way I can't recall. Nina Simone sang it too, but she spent most of her time getting abused by thuggish husbands, trying to remove people's heads with the sound of her angry Diva-empowered voice, and shooting French children with her air-rifle. (Another ace TV programme idea from The Quiz Blogger factory: Shooting Delinquent Hoodie Kids with Nina Simone. Pity she's dead. It would have been a ratings winner.)
Impure Shores
2) I've been to the beach twice this week. The first time in six years that I have deigned to sample the seaside delights of Littlehampton and swim in the sewage-tastic brine of the English Channel.
Why go? Minor healing reasons, the fact that it is ten minutes walk away and, forgetting the further implications of the incoming analogy, like Mount Everest was to George Mallory - "Because it's there!" - and the unappetising thought of being stuck in the house and being slowly roasted like pork crackling to the sound of Noel Edmonds yakking on like a deranged, self-appointed Messiah about his "dream factory". One solitary and senseless reason, however, takes precedence over the rest: the L.A. coast has a charm all of its own. The same kind of cheap charisma that I can't help falling for in a packet of sour Skittles or salt and vinegar Squares. Shabby, but surprisingly nice. Home.
I embraced the flashbacks to younger years when as a significantly skinnier teeanager I spent time hanging out with my brother and assorted temporary holiday buddies by the river, in the arcades, tennis courts, pitch and putt courses, on the promenade and just about anywhere I would avoid at the age of 27 as if they were breeding grounds for plague rats. This reminiscence was further elaborated on when I bought an ice cream cone (dipped in a chocolate covering for a 10p surcharge... yes, classy) and waved a shotgun in rubbish fashion at House of the Dead II. They were underwhelming, and made me glad to think that novels and assorted poncey literature had rushed in to fill the bleak vacuum vacated by doing rubbish teen-stuff, like trying to obtain Playboy specials and forbidden bottles of Newky Brown. Man, all those years I spent playing Final Fight (they didn't even have Street Fighter II anywhere). When I could have been reading The Brothers Karamazov! Shiver-brrrr.
I was burnt by the sun too. I know this because for two days afterward having a slightly warm bath felt akin to having the skin flayed from my body and buckets of Super-Scovilled chilli powder being poured on and rubbed vigorously into every pore vigorously. Yowser. I found out that my easily-browned half-Asian skin was not immune to the sun at its cruellest and most devastating height at Glastonbury 2003. My face turned a bit Singing Detective. It scared people. Yet, I did not learn, this week I stayed in the sun's pitiless gaze as if daring it to try and fry my epidermis. It did. Taught me proper. My arms now look as if they have been grilled medium-rare.
And so I wondered most of all, just who goes to a beach on a weekday? Except for aspiring Oblomovs like myself, naturally. I look around and see youngER people and think bad and insidious things about how unemployed they are. After all, they can't all be Portuguese or Polish (immigents filling up our street and not talking the language: it's disgustingful). So your increasingly Tory mind concludes they must all be on the dole, living it up, grrrr, paddling in taxpayers' seawater, grrrrr, basking like glazed peacocks in scorching sunshine we working folk paid for. It's enough to make you want to start brandishing a nailgun.
Now school is out and hell has most certainly broken loose its army of noxious minions, who just happen to look like schoolchidren (they aren't kiddies; they be monsters and demons), across this parched land, across the paths that I had walked without previous encumberance. Trolls, pixies and Piczo glitter addicts of varying immature size and cheeky and dirty mouths will flood the pebble beaches and the pedestrianised town centre and kick their football repeatedly into our garden and then ask for it back in a such an astoundingly dumbened voice that it makes Wayne Rooney sound like Ben Fogle. They've done it three times today already, and still I am shocked at the words emerging from their slurred mouths. Must be all that pre-teen bingedrinking and crystal meth they're doing.
Beverage Newsflash
3) Coke Zero tastes even worse than Pepsi Max. Let alone Coca-Cola. You cannot imagine the disappointment I felt when I realised I was pouring flat battery acid down my throat and not a divine elixir that filled every cell in my being with a golden light. They heaped empty promises and spunky, youthful adverts on me. I was taken in like a barroom sap and now I lie broken at the side of the consumer road. Granted, Coca-Cola also tastes like flat battery acid, but there's so much sugar packed into every fluid ounce that you don't notice the simultaneously corrosive and dulling effect it has on your insides. The soothing carbohydrate rush covers up the internal rot all too well.
Also, I've just realised the double-edged sword that is the name Coke Zero. Zero as in nada, nothing, zip, zilch, Zelig. It should bloody well be called Coke Less Than Zero. At least, you would have looked cool imbibing something inspired by Brett Easton Ellis's young wasted wastrels. Even if it tasted like strained bogwater, you would have still felt the pure rush of contented nihilism flowing through your diseased veins.
Thus, I demand redress. REDRESS. (Don't ask me what that means)
That's It!
4) Apart from the sweaty film magazine party I briefly graced with my presence on Thursday, the free two-hour Mandarin lesson that scared the bejesus out of me (I can now say "One, two ... how are you ... sad... ten ...blue ... red ... white ... I am" in the language of our future Sinoverlords!), the five-second surgeon's appointment at Worthing Hospital, the surprisingly emetic effect of just two pints of Samuel Smith Alpine Lager, and the cursory preparation for the trip to both ends of the Auld Alliance. Nope, all those things were nought in the face of some ramblings about Coke Zero, how hot the sun is and how much young people annoy me with their sheer younginess and, of course, how time though eternal is always fleeting and fleeing from me. You see I've got my priorities exactly right.
posted by That Quiz Guy at 8:28 AM
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