I’m in Australia and I don’t know where I am. In Australia. Somewhere - my sister has gone out for beer and it will be a miracle if any of them come back.
Here is my friend. Pretty much my only friend, apart from my sister who has gone for beer and who will never come back:
He’s a bit like birdy num num of whom I spoke earlier, but he’s green and orange and comes from Australia. And he sits on yer finger and eats toast.
My sister has come back without beer. I feel doomed.
I can do 35 push ups.
May not seem like much, but this time last week I couldn’t do even one. I’d just lie face down on the floor, unable to move and unable to reach the remote control to the TV which meant I had to watch all sorts of tedious dreck about people renovating houses etc, and actually listen to the adverts, which I never ever ever do. No one in my family does - it’s a trans-generational tradition. No Taylor has ever been exposed to a TV advert - except for those rare occasions when we can either not find, or not reach the remote.
So anyway. 35 pushups.
I’ve found that it goes up by 5, every two days… which means that if I keep this up, I’ll be doing about 5000 a day by the time I’m 70, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. It would take 1/2 the day - on a good day.
So that’s why I’ve stopped doing them and have gone back to playing bloons instead. I can beat it on the hardest level - without using super-monkeys - which takes a fair bit of doing, believe you me. I’ve got a “can-do” attitude when it comes to that sort of thing.
So yes - a close call there.
I’m in a pub in my hometown Wanganui - Angie is playing on the stereo and I am drinking champagne for breakfast. I’m going to Australia in a week - my sister says she will give me a haircut when I get there, which will be a relief because I look a bit of a wreck at the mo. Maybe I ought to do before-after photies.
There was this girl I knew once - went to a fancy dress party with her friends, all dressed as giant mice etc. They dropped some acid on the way there so it would be kicking in when they arrived etc.. and then got arrested.
Spent the night in the cells, dressed as mice, on acid.
There’s something about acid - the unreality often seems to leak. The first time I nearly met Keanu Reeves was on acid. In a transvestite nightclub in London.
Ok, I think maybe the reason that google has stopped indexing this site is that it’s running on an old version of Wordpress that gets hit with invisible spam.
So I need to upgrade it, which is annoying because I’m extremely busy and irresponsible and I simply don’t have time for that sort of thing.
Similar to the phobia I have about accidently being transported back in time to the 13th century, I sometimes find myself trying to explain my life (as I gather it’s called) to my grandparents. “yea” I’d say “my blog is being hit by invisible spam - google’s stopped spidering it”. These people fought Hitler. They’d have absolutely no idea what I was talking about
And The Internet. Try explaining the Internet to someone who’s never heard of it before. It’s not even that old - I was using a browser that couldn’t display images yet in about 94. The scale and the rapidity of the change is absolutely phenomenal - and the amazing thing about this incredible glittering world-changing utopia-machine is that a good 80% of it is a massively annoying (or boring) pain in the arse and the whole thing is riddled with hassles and pitfalls.
Like invisible spam.
I found this picture on a forum over thair ——->
reminds me of this girl who I almost used to know a while back.
She didn’t look exactly like this of course… different hat, not actually a cat etc, but it’s a similar sort of vibe if memory serves. She turned up at a friend’s gig once and I was totally knocked sideways. I’d never seen anything quite like her in my life - and I spent the next YEAR (I kid you not) driving from where ever I was (Oxford/London) over to Reading (which was where she was) to hang around in the places where she might be and then be either too shy (or drunk) to actually talk to her. A hovering shipwreck waiting to happen… but never happening. I was so in love I couldn’t see straight.
In the end (and it was fairly early on), the only time we were actually introduced, I’d just taken a massive hit of amyl nitrate and was spinning out all over the place - managed to say something like “mmmererrrf….”, and that was it.
I don’t think I made much of an impression. She made a huge impression on me though - and as a result I’ve spent more nights sleeping in the carpark of The Reading Arts Centre than any other human alive. Word to the wise kiddie-winkies : if you’re going to sleep in your car whilst pissed, always “lose” your carkeys outside somewhere so if you do get questioned by the cops, they can’t do you for being drunk in charge of a vehicle.
Anway, I also managed to shag two of her friends, which (looking back) was less of a mistake than I’d thought at the time - and kindof indicates that I was not in fact the desperately lonely stalker that I might appear (at first) to be. I was just a kid, and kids do batty things etc. They’re supposed to, particularly kids like me.
I still occaisionally stalk her over the internet etc - and I suspect very strongly that she’s moved to Cornwall and became Cornwall Media Woman of Achievement Of The Year Award Winner etc… a bit like that Caroline Catz who used to hang out in the Falcon in Camden back in the day. She also moved to Cornwall. I think she turned into a school teacher and wound up with the one with the ears off Men Behaving Badly, who became a doctor.
Caroline, with the beginnings (or the end) of an icecream
Anyway, I was on the rebound from Susan at the time… a period frought with “incidents” because she wound up with the guitar-player in my band, and I reacted fairly badly. I took the law into my own hands and threw his watch into the canal after turning up drunk one night and leaving one of those pub football tables in Susan’s flat. And I stole a candle and slept in the car… and when I woke up the next day I felt guilty and tried to replace it - but it had melted in my jacket pocket (which was in the sun) so I molded it into more or less the same shape that it was before and put it back where I found it, hoping no one would notice.
So if anyone did, and is still (20 years later) wondering what happened (get over it FFS, it was only a candle), that’s what happened.
Anyway, the reason I’m mentioning this is that I saw that Ghost World (which is actually pretty good) last night and the blonde one looks exactly like Genevra as well… only I also kindof remember her like this:
Although she didn’t actually look like that at all - but she looked more like that than the cat at the beginning - if you fuse those two together in your mind - along with the blonde one off Ghost World, you’ll start to build up a picture etc.
Genevra, if you’re possessed of a sufficient level of vanity to google yourself and find this… that line from the Elliott Smith song that goes:
I’m never gonna know you now
but I’m gonna love you anyhow
is from me, to you, by someone else and 20 years too late. To be fair you’re not the only one I’ve ever fallen in love (by any means) with but you were probably the best. Reality never managed to intrude, and from here, now, it’s a mixture of beautiful, stupid and funny, which isn’t a bad mix.
Hope you’re having fun.
Ok - I’ve become increasingly bothered by acronyms lately but before I go into a massive rant about that, I’ll first go off on a tangent and list all the different projects that I’ve got on the go at the moment.
Those are the ones that actually got online-ish. In addition to these there are a load of 1/2 written things on my laptop:
Apparently more Americans say they want to write a book than have actually read a book. That’s ok. I’m not American, and I have read a book. I’ve actually read a number of them - but not recently on account of doing being to busy doing all this crap. I think I may have a problem actually.
In addition to those there’s a couple of others that other people have been involved with so they’ve gotten a bit further, namely:
And that’s on top of my main job which is a fairly massive educational platform for kids who haven’t learned to read yet. Email with pictures etc.
So there you go. I don’t have time to go on about acronyms - I’ll leave that one til later.
On card-castles within card-castles and the circular nature of time
“A Pyramid Scheme”? “It’s a fucking RHOMBICUBOCTAHEDRON scheme!!!”
Well…. not entirely, what it is, is a card castle built by Escher out of “Structured Investment Vehicles”… which are themselves cunningly disguised card castles. In money-laundering terms “layering”, although it’s obviously far more complex than that…
… the complexity being the whole point: to keep the regulator struggling to keep up. But it’s ok, because when it does all go tits-up, and someone says “hang on, none of this is real” we taxpayers have to step in and bail everyone out, so the party can more or less continue as was. In a decade or so, once the dust has cleared.
But not today. People are still treating their houses as credit cards and something resembling a global aristocracy has emerged from what is increasingly resembling a 1920s style class-system… having provided no value to society at large whatsoever. Hurrah. Hurrah for billionaires.
Still. I digress.
Brighton, back in the day - the year of the Kennedy assasination, and the birth of your’s truly.
The Who are at least partly responsible for me being the way I am now… they caught me at an impressionable age… well, a Quadrophenia did. I’m not that old. Anyway - instead of going and working in a bank etc, I went off in another direction entirely…
…and history being ever-circular, the late 90s found me living in The Royal Albion for about 3 months, trying to deal with some sort of miscellaneous drug addiction. It’s not a holiday if you spend the whole time hiding under the bed.
OK, it was making me irritable, irrascible, ratty, scratchy, agitated, arsey and unstable. It’s hard to tell how crackers you’re going from the inside… but I could tell it wasn’t good.
So I gave up - I’ve been bed-ridden for several days. Holy crap that was rough. I’ve cold-turkeyed on a few things in my time… and most of them are kindof intermingled with hangovers so the bad comes out with the worse… but not coffee. Blinding headaches and about 2 hours sleep a day. They don’t tell you that on the coffee adverts.
Anyway. Done that now. Out the other side - and I feel better than I’ve felt in ages. I don’t think it’s very good for you to be honest - seems to create this general background level of aggravation.
Speaking of which, here’s another one of those videos where someone takes an excellent song and superimposes it over the top of the soppy bits from some totally unconnected soap opera that you’ve never seen and which looks like an arsequakingly banal, humourless, tooth-grindingly annoying dorkfest.
Shriekback being the band… and they actually looked like this:
Which is a craftily constructed link to a Chinese site because those cockweasels from the record company have incomprehensibly blocked their own band’s memes from propagating via youtube. They should be sacked.
Anyway, I saw Shriekback play once when I was young enough not to know better and thought they were the best thing I’d ever seen in my life - then went and saw them again in Australia… and being up for a big night out etc, downed four bottles of cider on St Kilda beach outside the venue before I went in.
And found that I’d turned up about 4 hours early and couldn’t get out again… so there was nothing to do except wander around this vast empty, echoing mausoleum of a nightclub, which seemed to be done up like Ancient Egypt, drinking myself sideways on Scotch which I’d just discovered, and didn’t really understand.
At some point I started to starve of course so tried to feed myself by eating loads of crisps out of some sort of machine… and then I was harrassed by a bouncer for sleeping in the wrong place. I don’t remember much about the gig itself. I don’t think it was as good to be honest.
Anyway. Shreikback. Too clever for their own good, but anyone who can get the word “anacrusis” into a song is ok by me.
