Just Say Probably Not

"Oh my fucking God, it's real money!"

Today I accidentally donated £2 to the Socialist Worker Party.

As I was walking into work, I saw a Ban the Cuts stall with 3 sad looking people on it. They were watching all the Trustafarians and Ugg ungulates pass by.

I felt sorry for them, so I went over. They were trying to get rich, spoonfed students who notice them, but without offering naff double entendres (Shag/Pounded etc) and an RnB soundtrack, they were invisible.

"No more compliments, please!"

Not that I am any different. I still believe Tony Blair is the best PM we’ve ever had, with his lovely hair and smile.  Tony, you’re welcome to pop round for tea, as long as you bring the pudding.

Anyway, I went over to the socialists and they instantly came alive like robots on tandby. There was a jolly middle-aged woman, an over-excited long haired boy, and someone who was so unnoticeable I just didn’t notice him.

I signed their petition, but halfway through my name, I realised that there was a box for Donation at the end of the line, and everyone so far had entered an amount. Shit.

I don’t do donations.

“If you give us 75p, you get a sticker” the woman chuckled.

I had 2 £2 coins in my pocket, and I wanted to get my lunch and a coffee with them. I pulled one out, and as the gold disc gleamed in the afternoon sunshine, a gold glimmer lit up their socialist faces.

Just before I was about to ask “Do you have change for this?”

T he young man piped up with “Oh, that would be wonderful, thankyou”

“Oh, yes, there you go” I said, watching my hand lower it into the lip of the money pot and drop it in.

Like the fairground fortune teller in Big, as the coin dropped, the longhair came to life, gushing about how he was running for council and he was talking at a big talk somewhere and he was growing his hair until the socialist party got into Westminster.

I wanted a bloody coffee, and now I couldn’t because these cunts had used my politeness against me like a weapon of mass niceness. Yet again I had gotten myself in a fix because I could’t say no.

"Red is SO my colour"

God how many hours of my life have I wasted trudging along on some stupid, pointless or scary journey because I couldn’t work out how to avoid it? (Answer- a lot)

I nearly got abducted by the Moonies because when an overfamiliar man asked if I wanted to go and see a video about how to be happy. I thought “He can tell I look miserable, so he will never believe me if I say I don’t need to watch his video”. So I went to some cult HQ where people attacked me with smiles, and watched a video about Sun and Yi Moon, the Fred and Mary West of Eastern religion.

"Smile you godless heathens"

“I don’t think I am ready to commit” I said after it finished, and was escorted out by a man who made the joker look sad. I found out later that the party trick of this cult is nighttime abductions. I should have put Harvey’s address down.

"Sorry"

Oh. I just killed a midge. I wouldnt mind, but I wanted to save it from Esther, who would have crushed it if she’d seen it first.

I saw it and grabbed it before she did, and threw it out of the window to freedom. Then I noticed it was half crushed on my palm. Balls. I can’t do right for doing wrong.

What’s the point of morals if they just make you feel crap because you can’t live up to them? I want to go around punching pregnant women in the stomach and trapping old lady fingers in doors and shouting at disabled people who can’t talk properly.

I want to do everything I am scared of doing by accident because I am crap at not doing them. Life is a constant series of near social disasters, where the thin membrane of convention and decency is ruptured and ripped by my semi-erection of clumsiness and apathy?

"Down with morals, up with erections"

 

 

Those Pesky Time Flies

"A late 20th Century torture device"

Esther found out that the Japanese earthquake has made our days a few micro seconds shorter FOREVER because it made us spin faster on our axis. Now she can’t stop thinking about this lost time.

“What if the next earthquake knocks us completely off our axis and we go spinning out into space?” she quivers.

“Well then, I guess we’re all fucked” I reply. No, I don’t actually because she’s the boss and such a quip would be considered insolent. Instead I comfort her with logic.

“That will never happen, I’m sure they would tell us etc”. At this point you conspiracy theorists will be sniggering at my naivety. As I have already told you, I think the man is misunderstood, and I enjoy the feeling of his/her big overprotective/oppressive arm round me. Oh how I wish I’d had a big brother to wrestle some sense into me. And to compare penis size with/ experiment with mutual masturbation. You know, the usual time-honoured family escapades.

“How many micro seconds are there in a second?” she asks

Google tells me there are 1 million.

“Oh, that’s rubbish” she mutters. “I don’t give a shit anymore”.

Real life always disappoints. Nobody discovers their junk is worth millions on Antique Roadshow. You don’t get model scouted on your way to Tesco. Getting high only leads to plummeting lower. Weird stuff that does happen is never the amazing things, always the mundane or sinister or depressing.

Thus, Lisa has become too scared to walk Devo in the cemetary in case the Polish man proposes. She has been forced to take affirmative action to point out to the overfriendly Pole that she is a taken woman.

He found her on facebook, and last week she agonised over a message that would put him straight. “I have a boyfriend” was all she could think of saying.

Unfortunately it only made him defensive. “I have a girlfriend too, of course” he wrote back. “Why should that stop us from meeting and talking?”

Lisa and Esther decided instead to avoid the park around the time he usually bumps into them.

"Goddammit, why isn't he looking at your beaver?"

I got really jealous the other week that he fancied Lisa and not Esther. “Why doesn’t he want you too?” I asked. “Maybe you’re not attractive enough” I thought. Fucked up as it sounds, I keep needing to know my girl is pretty to other people in order to have proof of my own attractiveness.

“You’re weird” says Lisa when she overhears me.

“Fuck off and get counselling” is Esther’s understandable reply.

A few days passed, and the girls managed to miss the Polack, thinking that maybe he had got the message and has backed off. Nipped his European openness in the bud so to speak, slapped a restraining order on his free spirit.

Today though, he finally caught up with them. He went aggro, singing raucous Polish songs to himself and throwing sticks at their heads, yelling “You should have safety helmets, hahaha”. He had replaced the behaviour of a lech with that of a sociopath.

“At least he had to stand further away to ‘accidentally’ throw sticks at us” Esther reasoned.

Is it better to be murdered than raped? Better to offend strangers than to have to pretend to be their friend? Better to throw sticks than to invite ridicule?

Adam Ant once went to his local for a quick pint, only to be bullied by chants of “ridicule is nothing to be scared of.”

When he could take no more, he slunk off home and returned with a gun in his hand and a righteous glint in his eyes.

Poor Adam. He’s just like me, but famous. He likes to rant and get naked, and he can’t take any flak.

He’s welcome round mine any time. I really want to ask him how to apply eye shadow convincingly.

Today I dared myself to walk round Topman with a pair of purple glasses with flip-up shades, flipped up proudly. I managed a quick circuit of the men’s bit, then fled down the stairs, pretending to multitask on my fone so I didn’t meet anyone in the eye.

This is phase one of operation ‘pompous, public and proud’. More to follow. Ridicule is nothing to be scared of. No pain no gain. Or, as Rihanna sang, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me”.

"I meant it metaphorically"

 

Vegging Out

Last night we went to see Dom’s band the Death Rays. The most beautiful girl in the world was there, djing in a neglige.  There were lots of young sorts too, with angular haircuts and leather jackets. I had gone for the ageing Teddy boy look, and felt a bit like Richard Hawley’s talentless brother.

"Cool daddio"

I was consumed with lust for the dj and so to ease my conscience, I tried some reverse psychology on Esther.

“Isn’t it really easy to just wear your underwear?” I commented, slipping with relish into the role of gay bitch that comes so naturally to me,

“Oh that’s so obvious” Esther and Lisa chimed disapprovingly.

The theory behind this is that men are weak and any woman who wants attention can merely wear something that leaves little to the imagination if she wants her objectification fix. Any woman who does this is of course a backstabbing biatch who is breaking the code of demure femininity.

Instead of conveying my latent lust, I ended up sounding like I was jealous of her. Me, jealous! As if! Who needs to be ridiculously hot anyway?

Right now, Esther and Lisa are asleep in the bed like two courgettes comatose in a grow bag.

The tv is muted so as not to disturb them, and I am watching ‘Ad of the Year’. The talking heads on it are minor characters from Corrie, and Lorraine Kelly. The ad breaks in it seem kind of superfluous.

Last night Govinda had a KLF moment and decided to rip up her paper money. She tore a fiver into 4 pieces and threw it in the air, and fired up by the moment, deconstructed a Twenty into ten tiny pieces. She was egged on by Damon, poet and aesthete. In the end, £35 floated down the street like billionaire’s confetti.

Of course she wished she hadn’t the next day, but it was a spontaneous punk gesture that only a drunk person would dare to carry out, and it gave me a rare thrill.

"Money is funny"

 

Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the most fucked up of them all?

"Mother versus Memory Foam"

This week I have had a headache because our bed is too comfy. I have wanted a soft mattress for ages and now I have one, my spine is dissolving into it.
Last night we watched ‘The Kids are All Right’. I wish I was gay and funny. But instead I’m bicurious and uptight.

It’s nice to know that everyone goes through the same shit (yes I like seeing other people in pain, it makes me feel better).

All relationships go through the same stages: the sexy honeymoon; the cooling off bit where sex gets less but comfort grows; then the long dry years where all your neuroses re-take hold and you start to be repulsed/angered/numbed by your other half because they remind you of yourself.

Julianne Moore has just stopped being lesbian and faithful and shagged her sperm donor:

“sometimes, you know, you’re together for so long, that you just… You stop seeing the other person. You just see weird projections of your own junk. Instead of talking to each other, you go off the rails and act grubby and make stupid choices…”

Esther has become a fairground mirror reflecting back my own shit scary junk. I nearly cheated on her because I thought being with someone else would make me feel good.

I don’t like fairgrounds or mirrors. I remember when Desperate Dan was once kicked out of a Funfair because he was too strong, and was winning all the prizes. On his way out, he ripped off the ‘F’ so it just said ‘UNFAIR’.

 

"I'm a little self righteous"

Last time I went to the fair, it was the pikeys that flock to Endcliffe Park every year. A rash of robberies and underage pregnancies follow in their wake. I went there and was persuaded to go on the Dodgems by a friend. I don’t like competitive rides, unless I am going to win.

As soon as we climbed into the cars, a horde of gypsie boys descended and filled up the other cars with expressions of gap-toothed relish. For the next half an hour, I was rammed, smashed, shunted and kettled by the feral children, while I tried to smile it off as my knees smashed again and again into the steering wheel of the kid-sized car. Finally it ended and I climbed off with shaky legs. The children of the corn had disappeared into their holes. I had bruises for a week.

‘Pike-strike’ they should call it; a flash mob of free swinging knobs, hammocked in the finest tracky bottoms their cousins could afford.

Oh well, it added to my hard-done-by martyr complex. I can feel justifiably angry because I am one of life’s victims. Hehe.

Help I’m a Desperate Introvert!

Linda is halfway through her incarceration. She has a litter tray in the corner of our attic bedroom, and every day goes she climbs in, circles round and sticks her bum out to wee. Then she scratches at the litter and the tiles pathetically, before puffing up her chest and standing like the Nowhere Man in Yellow Submarine while she poos.

Quickly, before it stinks out the room, I have to run over and gather it up in some loo roll and flush it down the toilet, while she carries on trying to cover it over.

She presumes she has done an amazing job at covering it up.

This weekend I was again reminded of the hazards of accompanying pretty girls in public. I was walking Devo and Goldie in the park with Lisa, Esther and Govinda. As we marched along, 2 chav boys sat up on the hill wolf whistled. I was the only one of us that heard and as I turned round, they shouted

“Not you, you nob”.

I have to say I was disappointed. I’m here too you know. I especially hate walking along with Lisa because I become practically invisible- women look on in envy/amusement and men look in confusion at her punky tomboy femininity.

I just can’t compete. Many of you probably think I shouldn’t even be trying, but I’m far too vain for heterosexual rules.

22nd March

We are telling Govinda how me and Esther met. I summarised it as follows:

“You were looking for a victim and I was looking for a bully”

and then

“I was looking for the right thumb to be under”

Esther pipes up: “And I was looking for someone who wouldn’t wriggle”.

Apparently she gave me 10/10 for looks

Then noticed my personality,

So knocked it down to a 7.5.

I can feel a personality crisis coming on.

Lisa has started to watch educational daytime TV programmes. Here comes her thought of the week: “it was the Romans that did it, they came on elephants”.

"I have to be drunk to talk to the elephants"

Not to sound downright rude, Esther was the elephant in the room. Before I met her, I could only see a certain style. I could only see girls’s faces if an edgy art school fringe framed them. Esther had none of their ‘I’m so kooky’ affectedness and so she was invisible, despite spending many hours ogling me, working out if I looked gay. After a while she presumed I must be.

Everyone I noticed was aloof and made me feel invisible. I was looking in the wrong place- looking at girls I wanted to be, with status and style that I wanted to possess.

It was only when my housemates told me they’d met a girl who they were going to ask back to ours that I saw her. Dammit I thought, she is gorgeous and I’ve got no chance against the three extraverts I lived with.

To cut a long story shirt, she still wanted me after I’d made her sit through Night of the Hunter (what a date movie), lost miserably at thumb wars, and seen my housemate writhing around on top of the kitchen cupboards in a monkey costume, throwing everything food at us.

Right now, as I write this, Esther is lying in bed next to me and every 5 minutes I roll a fruit pastille down the pillow to butt against her mouth, which opens to let it in.

Love, eh?

Lovers Haters and Undecideds

What I have learned from TV:

1. Keeping secrets is the worst but only thing to do,
2. Because the truth will out, and when that happens
3. Drinking whiskey is the only way to feel better.
4. Sex is better with someone who isn’t your partner;
5. Hence, relationships never last because
6. Being young and beautiful is the only thing worth having
7. But wealth and status are the only remedies to age, and
8. The older men get, the younger the women they go for,
9. While women will happily accept an older uglier lover.

15/3

I am the latest in our group of 3 to buy an all in one suit. I got a tiger outfit from Primark. Lisa has a mouse suit that she wears so much, which is actually a rabbit suit from France. Esther has a pink dogtooth outfit, with a self-made split to allow toilet visits. A common grumble is that they can’t wear their all in ones to the shop without facing ridicule and humiliation.

Esther: “I know, why don’t we just wear tracksuit bottoms tucked into Ugg boots. It’s the ultimate comfort outfit”.

Lisa pulls a face.
I begin to think about Chavs and why we hate them. Could it be coz we are all middle class snobs? Chavs wear leisurewear without shame, as a symbol of not working, or of having the kind of job where it doesn’t matter how scruffy you are: labourer, binman, dinner lady. And we pride ourselves on wearing our status in its crisp, clean smartness.

There’s a class war still on, and we are instigating it. It offends our bourgeois sensibilities to see other people who care less about being smart and presentable. We believe that neatness and conspicuous consumption demonstrate a civilised mind, but who are we kidding? We’re just keeping up with the Joneses, a well-groomed dog v. dog fight.

"I mourn the loss of stuff the world over"

News: A man was arrested for burning poppies during the 2-minute silence. What law is this breaking? Annoying nationalists? Surely that’s one of the pleasures of life?
And what about the student who pissed on the memorial wreath? It makes me so angry I want to wank on one, or have projectile diarrhoea.

Why do people insist on dredging up the milked-dry corpse of war with perverted pleasure? There was nothing great or respectable about it, it was nasty, immoral, greedy. We didn’t have right on our side, we just had the bomb. I can understand why we shouldn’t forget the horror. But there’s a whole other side to it: thinking it was our greatest moment is like when people say that school was the best time of their life. Only psychopaths and bullies liked school- only soldiers like wars, and only bullies become soldiers. Fuck off to Afghanistan and die, bullies.

I’d like to write a history of Hatred. I wouldn’t talk about wars and violence and rape because they are more about power than dislike. Instead, I’d write about the anger that drove Johnny Lydon to scrawl “I HATE” over his Pink Floyd T shirt.

People define themlselves against what they don’t like- I find it easier to reel off a list of things I detest rather than what I love. Rappers don’t sing for their fans, they sing for all the haters.

My all time favourite prick/genius, Malcolm McLaren (he created Bow Wow Wow by getting a 14 year old schoolgirl to sing with Adam Ants band and he got Adam Ant to put makeup on), once created a tshirt manifesto which set out the battle lines for punk philosophy. At the top it said

‘You’re going to wake up and KNOW which side of the bed you’ve been lying on…:’

Then came 2 lists- one of the pitiful remnants of a stagnant culture, the other of future heroes…

"My bed's got 2 wrong sides"

This kind of idea has been boiled down and refried a million times over, and now gives us Heat magazine’s Manometer and the Guardian Weekend’s Barometer of style.

These reflect products the authors have an interest in promoting, or ideologies they buy into (high end fashion/macho men).  But I still believe that setting out your aesthetic boundaries is a way of defining yourself:

It used to be simple. I hated:

Authority

Emotions

School

Mr Blobby

Now my hates are more varied and confused:

Coronation Street

Scrubs/Two and a Half Men (most popular show in America? You sad fucks)

Earnest Folky types

"Mumford and Sons: gentle, honest schmucks"

Piano/Funky-House music

Self conscious arty movies (usually starring Michael Cera and/or Ellen Paige)

Yuppies and Chavs- the middle class is best

Christians- you creep me out with your ability to ignore facts

David Cameron and his cronies- Your face and your voice make me want to puke you smug wet lipped posho with plastic hair.

N-Dubz (Actually I think that they are clever and funny and I was just being a chav snob)

I Love:

Lady Gaga (I’m so over her)

Jodie Foster. She is the most private famous person ever, and I’m sure she’s a lesbian.

Katy Perry (Sorry I’m bored of you now)

Sandra Bullock (same reasons as Jodie Foster)

Jean Baudrillard- bad boy philosopher who wrote a whole book about Seduction

Eastenders (only for Stacey Slater, Jay, Jean Slater, Geniene Butcher)

Canada (coz America hates it)

The sick fuck film producer Jud Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad, Knocked Up, Funny People) These films have something deep to say about men. I haven’t worked it out yet tho.

Seal and Heidi Klum: the best celeb couple EVER because they don’t give a shit what they look like:

However, the older I get, the more that the hate list begins to appeal, and the more I despise what I used to like. I have sudden revelations: that a Coldplay song is really good; M People did some great songs. Coronation Street isn’t so bad. WTF?! Lady Gaga? What was I thinking?

The hate list shows exactly what my prejudices and snobbery are at that moment in time- whatever I afraid of or jealous of. Then at some unspecified stage, I become less uptight and the stubborn refusal to like certain things mellows.

I’m going from being an ‘Angry Young Men’ to being an ‘Anything-Goes Oldie’. HELP!!

Ooh look, Strictly Dancing is on.

I’m gonna shoot the frickin TV and piss in the holes. Bruce Forsyth is everything that is wrong with family entertainment.

Nope, still got some hatred in me.

Onion rings and shameless things

"Please go away, I can't hold this fake smile for much longer"

Unsent Letter No. 3

Dear, Dear Carey Mulligan,

I don’t know what it is about you. The French would say you have a certain I don’t know what. Ever since I saw you as a schoolgirl in An Education, I have been in love with your cute puppy-dog eyes and your old woman’s face.

One question oh prematurely aged one. Why Shia Le Boeuf? You look too classy to eat (Heaven Forbid!) beef. I imagine you snacking on a ripe Gala Melon, with the sap all running down etc. I live round the corner from a fruit and veg shop, so keeping stocked up on them won’t be a problem. If I change my name to Vienne Aux Melone will that entice you back to the fatherland (we can play who’s the daddy if you insist)?

Yours

V x

Esther is cutting all our fast food menus up. Not as part of our diet, simply because she is bored.
“You’re going to make a mess on the floor,” notes Lisa.
Esther grunts, furiously chopping. “Argh, the agony of creation” she shouts in a northern bloke/Vic Reeves voice.
She has finished cutting and lifts her creation aloft, opening it out into…a long thin strip.
“You’ve done it wrong you dickhead” says Lisa.
Esther screws it up and rolls a cigarette.

When you live with a girl, their feminine mystique dissipates pretty quickly. I’m completely transparent, so Esther never had anything to learn about me, but she was stand-offish and cynical from the very start, like a mouth full of sour skittles fighting back as your saliva glands flood with lust.

Oh actually, I’ve just remembered that Esther said that she thought I looked like a model until I opened my mouth- then a pair of dopey rabbit-teeth poked through and I grinned like a village idiot. The illusion was shattered by my nerd personality.

"Please don't make me show them again darling"

When we were younger, me and my friends planned all manner of ways to get girls to notice us. Harvey went through his psychic stalker phase where he told me excitedly about a technique called ‘remote influence’ where you could get girls to do what you want by simply willing it through astral projection. He spent many hours developing this skill, but never got a girl to do anything for him, except look at him with pity.

My speciality was the unflinching stare of longing. I would stare brazenly at my object of lust until I caught her eye, and I mistook her look of panic for attraction.

I still refuse to believe that beauty should be met with subtlety. Surely the only thing to do when confronted with gorgeousness is to drink it up gluttonously? Yet everyone else I know swears by a demure half glance and then feigned disinterest. How anyone can tell anything from that sort of namby pamby body language is beyond me. I’m with the autistics on this one.

"I want you"

What is it with me(n) and mirrors? Ever since I felt the buzz from looking in the full-length downstairs bathroom mirror when my parents were out, I have been an addict. I would take all my clothes off and watch in the mirror as merely the act of looking made my cock hard. I would get turned on by own turned on-ness. At the very last second, I would have to run in and direct my upward protuberance down into the porcelain bowl to shoot my load.

Those last few seconds are the very heights of pleasure, but they have forever been associated with sudden responsibility- anal retentiveness takes over from penile attentiveness. Joy turns into mess.

I never understood in films how men could wank with a box of tissues. I need lube; I need something to stop the chafing. I’ve tried glycerine, Vaseline, yoghurt, soap and finally a well-placed shower head (common to both sexes I believe). But I refuse to rub my dry head with my slightly sticky hands, which harbour the few but proudly worn calluses of a lower working class man. I envy the worker, whose oppressed cock responds only to grating pain as an asbestos grip pummels the foreskin into bloody submission. Or so I imagine.

"I'll have 2 sore heads in the morning!"

How many onion rings can you fit our your cock/strap-on/mutant clitoris? I think this should be the new measurement to replace inches. Like horses are measured in hands, and engines are measured in horsepower.

I’m a 5 ringer (on a good day). How about you?

The Happy Medium. The Marvellous Mediocre.

"Look, there's me in the middle"

Apparently Esther’s experience of my penis is akin to Goldilocks’s breaking and entering experience at the 3 bears’s house.

While her first boyfriend’s cock was “longer and thinner”, her successive boyf’s member was “shorter and fatter” than mine, which apparently lies slap bang in the middle. Goldilocks has found the right pot of porridge.

So, either I have found someone with a miniature vagina, or she’s lying, or I do actually have a normal sized (erect) cock. Either way, it’s a winner.

Is it so bad to be neither brilliant or terrible, to just simply ‘do’? When Esther’s family friends first saw a picture of me, they said, “He’ll do”. For what I wonder? For Christmas dinner if they run our of turkeys? For sucking like a sugar daddy?

I am fit for purpose, reliable, reasonably priced (cakes are my only vice). I’m not Tesco Finest, but neither am I Buy One Get One Free. Or Buy One Get Three Free as I saw the other day. WTF?

We spend our first 40 years looking desperately at the young, rich and beautiful, and turning away from those uglier and poorer than we are. Everything that happens to our bodies after the age of 21 is shit. I missed my chance to be buff. Now I need to get the fuck over it.

"If I buy a Day Saver, can I go back the start again?"

Esther’s cat Emma died last week. She turned from an ADHD ASBO kitten with tourettes into a slow, silent old lady. Her tongue went from pink to white, and her black hair fell out. She died a different person than she had lived.

Her Emma-ness had been eaten away, or had faded, and all that was left was an imposter.

By the time we die, we expect to turn into a pathetic parody of ourselves: a weak, leaking burden who lives somewhere far removed from reality. Alzheimers, Parkinsons or Cancer will be having its way with our organs, and we will unintentionally hurt everyone we love by not being ourselves. This is our collective fate, unless something intervenes earlier.

“The Stupid Club” is a select group of cultural icons who died at the age of 27, preserving their beauty and virility forever. Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Janis Joplin, Marc Bolan. Its members are incapable of dealing with the onset of middle age. The latter part of ones twenties brings with it a devastating taster of things to come: first white hairs, buying NME and not knowing anyone in it, being rejected in favour of 21 year olds. These eternally 27 stars couldn’t imagine themselves being old, ugly and unable to function, and so topped themselves or were careless enough to die.

"Join the Bitch Club, it's way cooler"

I finally get Esther to watch The Runaways with me. I am glad that it is not overtly sexual, because then we she would make me turn it off. A turn on is a turn off. The best thing about the movie is their manager Kim Fowley who looks like Eddie Izzard’s big brother and he says exciting, fucked up, high falutin’ things like

Dog shit! Urine-stained dog shit! Rock ‘n’ roll is a blood sport, a sport of men. It’s for the people in the dark, the death cats, the masturbators, the outcasts who have no voice, no way of saying I hate this world, my father’s a faggot, fuck you, fuck authority – I want an orgasm! Now, growl! Moan! This ain’t women’s lib, kiddies – the is women’s libido! I wanna see the scratch marks down their fucking backs! Now, do it again. Again. Like your boyfriend just fucked your sister in your parent’s bed. LIKE YOU WANT A FUCKING ORGASM!

 

I want to dress like a Primark glam rocker, and be all style and no meaning.

As I drop off to sleep, I hear a sniffing sound. Esther’s got a bloody cold.

I turn over “Are you sniffing darling?” I murmur. Then the sniffs turn to sobs. Oh dear. She starts to sob and sniffle in earnest. All I can do is rub her back, in the knowledge that in normal situations my hand would be smacked away and it might now with extra force. “I want to hold Emma. But I can’t” she whispers.

Normally, I would try to find a solution. That’s what boys do apparently; they treat emotion like it’s a problem to be resolved, whereas girls empathise. I can’t solve the problem- we’ll never see Emma again. So I just wait for the emotions to come out and die down.

After a while, Esther says “Dakota Fanning looks like Emma,” she sniffs, “her facial expressions are the same. She’s a little lost girl with too much emotion”.

"FEED ME!"

The other day we tried to imagine what kind of voice Goldie would have if she could speak. It would have to be a frightened old lady, and we both shuddered at the thought.

Threadbare teddy bears get us used to when pets get old. Dead pets get us used to when people die. Dead people get us used to when we die.

If I get bigger and bigger pets, will I be less sad when my relatives die? If I have a bear, or an elk, will I not mind as much?

Whatever happens, I didn’t know Emma for very long, but I loved her. I don’t want to feel sad that’s she’s gone, I want to feel glad that I knew her at all. I just hope she doesn’t come back and get me for giving her an ASBO.

 

 

I joined the wrong Mile High Club

Saturday 12th March

I was going to behave like a normal person
But then I got high
I was going to look my friends in the eye
But then I got high
I woke up the next morning still in the sky
And I know why!
Why?
Because I got high, because I got high, because I got high…

I got so high that I felt like I was in a hypergalactic supermarket (or a supergalactic hypermarket) and I’d lost my mummy.

At one point I suddenly became phobic of my own voice and was mute for the rest of the evening, batting my eyelashes and blushing whenver people looked at me.

When I was about 13, I needed a wee while I was in town with my dad. He took me in a public toilet and stopped to smell the air.
“Can you smell that, son?” he asked.
I sniffed, and besides the ammonia and farts, there was a herby stench. I nodded.
“That’s marijuana, that is” he said with pride. “I used to sprinkle it on my coffee in the morning” he reminisced. “Lovely”.

 

Tuesday 15th March

Esther has just told me that it’s MY FAULT that we don’t have sex! Ha! My fault!

“You’re not getting any sex until you’ve had counselling” she proclaimed.
“You never want sex anyway” I sneered, wise to her game.
“I’m all better now, I can have sex whenever I want, but you’re a complete neurotic!” she stated. “And you’re getting worse”.

A small, well aimed A-bomb whistled down through my emotional cortex. As a mushroom cloud obliterated my thoughts, Esther went back to smoking her cigarette.

“Can you have this conversation later?” demands Lisa. “When I’m not here”.
We nod. But to be honest I prefer to have a witness so that Esther can’t later deny having said some pivotal, game-changing statement that rocks me to my core.

“You just think sex is a way of boosting your self esteem” says Esther.
“No I don’t”. Do I? No, that’s what cakes are for. I see it as a way of shining a spotlight on as many insecurities as I can at once: penis size, lack of co-ordination, inability to talk dirty, getting stuck in my own clothes.
“And you’re very unattractive when you’re mentally ill!” Ouch.
“You’re ugly when I’m mentally ill!” I want to reply, but then I would just be confirming her point that I have a problem.
I need a shrink.

Why does the 82 bus have carpet on its ceiling? Is it to make the next fall from an embankment more pleasant? So when it’s upside down on a train track, at least you get somewhere to wipe your bloody shoes before you crawl to safety?

I hate running for the bus because I know it must be full of people like me who are gagging to laugh at some nerd who is running for the bus and failing. It’s like I can see myself from inside the bus, and I look bloody funny. I sort of wither at that point and the bus pulls away. The me on the bus gets to work on time. What a wanker.

Last week I watched Let Me In (2010), a pointless American remake of Let the Right One In. But I fell in love.
The vampire girl, Abby, is so beautiful that I would kill for her. I would die for her. I would give her my last rolo and my last drop of blood.
She is everything that makes me weak at the knees: power, self-assurance, innocence, vulnerability, and fucked-upness.
If only life was like that- instead of being an ugly loveless freak at school, I could have been an ugly freak who got the girl. The weird, psychotic girl who kills people and drinks their blood.
She is my current obsession. I always feel guilty about my obsessions so I say to Esther, “She has an amazing face”.
Esther knows what this means and plans her counterattack.
“Yes but I bet she’ll be ugly when she’s older” she states
“Yeah” I reply, to prove my faithfulness.

"Don't look at me, I'll make your face ache"

Things that are too perfect make my jaw ache. Nancy in the last Elm Street film is so beautiful that I almost can’t look at her. She makes my jaw ache.

I ought to go and see the doctor really. I’m sure all that energy should be going to my private parts instead.
In a seminar last year, I tried to get this idea across to the other students, to see if I really was a freak. “Someone so beautiful that it’s too painful to look at them” I explained.
Everyone else went quiet. “Err, not really” someone muttered.
“I know what you mean” one girl said, “I feel like that when I look at Jason Statham”.
This takes a second to compute.
“Each to their own” I reply.
The girl left my course shortly after to get married to a farmer. I imagine Jason Statham manhandling a tractor while she grapples with udders in the next field.

"I've got a brand new combine harvester"

What’s the washing-machine setting for ‘ethnic cleansing’?

12th March

Round at Dom and Lisa’s.
“Do you know what? This morning I realised how important the tools of someone’s trade are. And my trade is facial camouflage. Dom has his guitar, and I have my make-up kit”

I might write a romance novel. This line will go in it somewhere just before the first sex scene:

“I sat on my future son-in-law’s lap and purred like a kitten”

Question of the day: Why are old people so racist?

When I was 14, my granddad gave me some pocket money and said “Don’t spend it in Tesco’s because that’s a Jewish shop. Go to John Menzies instead” My nana nodded in agrement.

It was a very small shopping centre.

I just thought ‘bigots’ at the time, but now I’m thinking:

Was the War fought about who had the right to diss the Jews?

Dane told me his grandparents had a revelation recently. “All along I thought it was the blacks and the Jews, but I’ve finally realised it was the Americans all along” his grandad said with satisfaction.

"One Nation Under a Tash"

It’s 2pm. I am sat still half asleep in our new attic bedroom. I can hear a woman shouting “Becky”, “Abigail” on the street below.

Maybe it’s her cats. Maybe it’s her daughters.

I should care. I do- the whole time she’s out there shouting, I feel guilty. I can hear someone in distress who needs help. I should be out there helping her. But the thought of joining her in being a weirdo walking the streets shouting makes me hide inside and watch her do it. No one else is helping. Everyone must hear her; she’s walking the whole length of the street.

Apathy. Or fear.

There have been court cases where whole apartment buildings have failed to go and save someone’s life because they presumed someone else would do it instead.  Apparently it’s better to shout ‘Fire!’ than it is ‘Rape!’ because a fire might actually infringe on other people’s property. That’s when they give a shit.

Until this woman goes away I’m going to feel like a failure- like I’m in a society that I am refusing to be part of. Like I get all the benefits of being in a welfare state with a decent standard of living, and yet when it comes down to it, I wouldn’t help someone else. I fail to fulfil my side of the social contract. I should be sued, fined, or made to leave. But I’m not. Because everyone does it.

We have emergency services and laws to care on our behalf, so we don’t have to. Should I feel bad? If the police are coming for me, if I’ve transgressed, then I must feel bad. Otherwise, everything must be ok. Morals are ancient history- now you only know you’ve been bad if you get caught doing it.

I tried to cheer myself up yesterday by seeking out people who used to be popular at school on facebook. I wanted to prove my theory that people who enjoyed their school life went on to fail miserably as adults.

However, I found 2 of the fuckers and one is an international conceptual artist, and the other is a designer at Superdry. I am sorely disappointed and may ring the 24 hour Karma helpline later to complain.

"I'm fully prepared for my school reunion"