Residents Of West London - I Am Studying Your Necks Intently

My cinema mission has got off to a mixed start. Film not bad, more on that later (try not to whoop yourself right off your chair). But one of those things happened that is the cranial equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death, or Red Ring of Death, or...I don't have a Mac alternative as, like all those wonderfully vibrant, multi-cultural people on the adverts, I'm a pissy...where your brain reboots and leaves you reeling in confusion. In my case, reeling directly into the path of one of Shepherds Bush's many purveyors of the dubious pleasures of the more dubious flesh, who cheerfully told me to fuck off before continuing on her unsteady way.

I had lost something during the reboot, as you often do. A much-loved, currently very useful and irreplaceable without great expense thing. But a very unexciting thing. You see, I had a scarf, from Ecuador, spun from the wool from the only the very snootiest and disapproving of llamas (ie all of them. Llama humour!) My chronic ability to buy any souvenirs of anything anywhere for fear of finding exactly the same product on the shelves of my local Tesco Express had meant I had nothing to remind me of the rather epic time I had in that lovely country (three weeks of harrowing emotional turmoil punctuated with starbursts of utter wonder. Another story for another day) so the young chap had kindly given me one of the many trinkets he'd accumulated along the way, the aforementioned scarf. It was a nice scarf, and it kept my neck warm. And it has accompanied me for three years, to three continents, through drunken nights where all up to and including dignity had been lost, into new homes, out of the front door, onto the bus, and into the cinema. It sat quietly all the way through the film. Snuggled nicely into my bag for the exciting walk out into the gathering dusk. Then there was a glitch in the matrix, and it was gone.

I had it. I distinctly remember placing it in my bag. Then it suddenly wasn't there. False memory? Very stealthy wool-seeking thief? Loose thread in the fabric of reality? Or did I just drop it on the way out like a dolt? No way of knowing. But it's gone, and my clavicles are chilly.

Luckily this happened after I had watched The Wrestler, which had not exactly packed an emotional punch, or indeed bodyslam. Anything more powerful and I would have thrown myself under a bus in scarf-mourning. Film all very well and good, but the "wrestlers are a noble band of brothers" schtick was laid on a little thick. And the device of the camera mostly hovering behind the shoulder of the characters, looking at the back of their heads, which I'm sure is a fabulous directing trick meant to evoke an overwhelming feeling of something or other, but just left me feeling like I was playing a really dull FPS with no ammo and a broken right analog stick.

I am really not intelligent enough to be allowed into the cinema. I don't appreciate the films and I litter the place with articles of clothing. I even needed extra assistance with my hotdog purchase, not being able to figure out myself where in the holding hierarchy it fitted in as I was already clutching a wallet and a ticket. But Vue has given me a money-off voucher, the total pricks, so I'm off again tomorrow to nod thoughtfully at another Oscar-botherer, whilst in my head the little monkey keeps on clanging those cymbals together...

I Must Confess I Still Believe, Still Believe

So off I shuffled to the lovely, sprawling scourge of west London, Heathrow, which would normally be a journey I would do with a song in my heart as it means I'm off to do something ribald in a foreign country, but this time was coloured by sadness as I was sending the young chap off for a two-week business trip. This is not an occurrence that usually would impinge on our lives, as we are happy in our relatively minor and menial positions in the hulking media behemoth that pays our wages, and in return for our continued suppression of any career aspirations, we are given no responsibilities to weigh down our brows after we clock out of an evening. But, alas and alack, the young chap's natural abilities have shone through his disinterest-encrusted exterior, and he has been given a promotion he didn't ask for. So off he's veritably buggered, leaving me with two weeks to make my own entertainment, in a strictly non-euphemistic way.

At first I was afraid, I was petrified. Kept thinking I could never live without him by my side. Or more realistically, that I'd be really bored without someone to laugh indulgently when I start ranting at the television, or the computer, or the gods. But now I have two whole weeks on my own, I can't see how I'm going to fit everything in. At least four cinema trips (smuggling in contraband coke to reduce snacking costs), my Richard Herring book has arrived and needs to be rapidly consumed, there's a whole lotta Liberty City that requires ripping the hell up, and I may even fit in a few slivers of time for interactions with other pleasant humans. There's a good chance I'm going to have so much fun that I will never want the young chap to come back and litter up the place. Apart from the long, crippling bouts of loneliness, I'm having a ball.

So I may even be blogging slightly more often over the next two weeks, although my creative momentum may not get the opportunity to build up too much if I'm just absorbing other bits of culture. My rotary momentum, however, is building up way too much as I spin round and round and round and round on my cheap-assed Ikea office chair. I think I miss surfing-whilst-on-couch ability more than man who has taken said ability away with his laptop.

Good thing he never reads this, huh?

Altogether Now - # Joey Ramo-o-o-o-one! #

As I be-twittered the other day - and time, space and generally 1am-ness prevent me from expressing exactly to what degree my life has been incomplete without broadcasting my tiniest thoughts in a great, splattering sneeze across the internet - my fantastic, immortal headphones turned out to have a weakness, and that weakness was being used every day for three and a bit years. And so here I am, cruelly bereft of noise in one ear, and that, my friends, is one ear too many.

Anyway, that was not the point. This is the point. In the death throes of my headphones, as I slumped home from work in not-so-glorious mono, my iPod sensed the doom in the air and served me up a double-header of Dying All Young by Chuck Prophet and the following work of genius which I had quite forgotten about by The Awesome Power Of William Shatner. (Excuse the fan vid. That's YouTube for you)




Question! What's the most blessed part of this thing? Is it: a) when Shatner suddenly lists random celebrities who have carked it? b) When the backing singers respond with a beautifully harmonised "Dead!" after each name? c) When the backing singers spell out "You're gonna die" D-I-V-O-R-C-E-style? Or d) when they sing the list of interesting or imaginative ways that your, my, everyone else's life is going to suddenly END?

What's the best? Why, all of those things, of course! Once again, in the words of Futurama: the Shatner has found a way.

Point Of Order: I Am Not And Never Shall Be Indie

"Sigh. Yeah, that's right. Sigh. Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a piece about the world's bizarre insistence on marrying me off..."

Quoth the Brooker on Monday. And may I add: Sigh. That means it was two years ago, almost to the day, that I wrote this post about that piece. Here's what I said in summary back then, to avoid any unpleasant whiplash-type effects from being forcibly dragged two years into the past by your linky-click-finger: Ooh, Charlie Brooker's single! Look at all those internet losers flinging themselves at him. I flung myself at someone off the internet once, and it really bloody hurt. But still, I actually got a response and a soul-destroying total non-relationship out of it, not like you losers. Never catch me doing that again. What losers. What I meant, though, was an entirely different manner. I was, in fact, climbing into my copper suit, moistening up my joints, dragging my metal bucket of water to the top of the highest hill, shaking my fist at the sky, loudly casting aspersions on the sexual proclivities of Thor's mum, and generally willing with all my might that lightning would indeed strike twice.

Although if I really did want that to happen, I probably could have tried a little harder. I wasn't even one of the millions of tiresome indie girls who left oh-so-nonchalant "Yeah, I'll marry you, although of course I'm completely not bothered"-type comments. Only cos I'm completely not bothered, you understand. And, more importantly, because I'm not an idiot, and I realise no-one anywhere in the world could read a 20-word comment and fall head over heels in love, no matter how pithy, witty, and goddamn sexy it might be. Indie girls, take heed: The Brooker will not read the comments. He will not then look at your commenter profile, will not find your blog, will not read it all in an evening, be charmed by your turn of phrase and identify deeply with your cynical view on life's little idiosyncrasies. He will not email you saying that he didn't quite know why he was emailing a stranger but just somehow felt he had to, you will not embark on a hilarious and increasingly flirtatious email exchange, he will not tentatively suggest you meet up, and he will not see you across a crowded pub and be struck dumb by your indie stylings. He will not react, at first, in an angry and defensive way, as he is forced to re-examine all his opinions of love in the face of an unexpected onslaught of emotions he is unable to process. He will not gradually soften up over the course of a number of evenings where you discover a mutual love of various high points of low culture. And most of all, he will not eventually realise that you are the one person who could crack through his hard-bitten hack exterior and when you're there, he can finally sleep at night.

Mostly because he's probably totally married already.

So why did I write this post, then?

Oh...

Stone Cold Reminisci-funk

This is a strange time of year for me. The limbo between Christmas and New Year means nothing to a shift worker such as my very excellent self. Life returns to mundane banality and work-work-work with a frosty slap in the face on 27th December precisely, but it's another week before the rest of the world catches up, so you're left in a hazy netherworld where everything seems normal, but the fridge is full of exotic leftovers and chocolate and the TV schedule's gone all weird. Most disconcerting. And on top of all that, New Year is here again, heralding the yearly visit from the Grand Old Duke of Vague Sense of Disappointment With Your Lot in Life. Hey-de ho, though, I am countering the waves of attacks from his soldiers of shame by staying in on New Year's Eve, going to bed before midnight, and generally pretending my name is Nico Bellic and all I need worry about is where to take women on dates so that I will definitely get laid.

And that, my friends, is my first resolution taken care of - more recycling in 2009! Yes, I wrote that last week, but could not work up the energy to think of a cohesive conclusion to my sorry tale, so just went straight on back to the Xbox. I did in the end go to bed early on New Year's Eve, like the crazy muthafucka that I am, but didn't get to smugly snooze through midnight like some kind of emo with a false sense of superiority, because, of course, the rest of the world was celebrating the arrival of the new year with noisy bang-bangs. Oh, and fireworks HONK HONK. So I marked midnight by grumpily rolling over and muttering about how early I had to get up.

Over Christmas, the normal family dinner took a frightening turn when my mother flung down the roast potatoes and announced she had finally had enough of my accumulated crap taking up valuable space in their attic, and that the time had come to clear it the FUCK out. (She didn't say that, but looking in her eye, I knew she meant it deep down in her foul-mouthed heart) This caused both my stomach to fall and my bile to rise, leaving a small black hole in the centre of my being, which collapsed under its own gravity, sucking me, my family, and the whole Christmas spread into an area smaller than a neutron. Or that would have happened, had I had my way. Instead, with a grimace, I mentally adjusted my plans for the rest of the day from hurtling down the motorway in an empty car towards the warm and loving embrace of my Slanket, to crawling around a cold and cobwebby loft, trying to sort through boxes of stuff not quite rubbish enough to count as actual rubbish, but not nearly important enough to be worth carting 80 miles to my already over-stuffed flat-ette. Thankfully, my mother sensed my discomfort at this turn of events, and instead dumped a shoebox full of photos in my arms and toe-punted me out of the door, to distant cheers of approval.

And so, back in the big smoke, and coincidentally in a cloud of big smoke, I found myself in the titular SCR-F. They were all pictures from around my university days, bringing back floods of mostly unpleasant memories, contrasted with a small amount of pleasure that my 18-year-old self looks very similar to my 28-year-old self (I have been labouring under the illusion that I have spent the intervening years gradually getting more repulsive, but happily, I started off with a healthy level of repulsiveness! Heh, that's maybe a little bit too self-consciously self-hating, even for me. Apologies) Anyway, I have singularly failed to keep in touch with anyone from uni, mostly because I am terrible at replying to emails, but also because there were never many emails to reply to to begin with; I did a quite magnificent complete job of isolating myself actually physically inside a bottle of Southern Comfort, mooning over various men. So where are they all now, these beautiful young things I have captured forever on shiny photo paper? Who knows. A bit of googling revealed almost nothing, so my reminisci-funk continues on unfettered.

Where are you, class of 1998 Fitzwilliam College Cambridge (I know, I know)?? Any information gratefully recieved. So my reminisc-funk can be reminisci-sunk!

Oh, yeah. I'm back, baby!