Busker/Beggar/Bum/Cuntrag

I have just witnessed something with my very own peepers, that has left me in a state of limbo somewhere between wide eyed disbelief and incandescent rage.

On my daily circular trudge to town and back in search of passable sustenance, I pass through the Moss Eisley Space Centre otherwise known as The Bear Pit. There amongst the various living stages of evolution on display are people who usually ply their musical abilities amiably in the hope of meagre reward. Buskers.

This has been going downhill recently, well more of a mild rolling from a very low hill to a lesser hill really as I can’t recall it ever reaching a particularly heady altitude of any steep gradient in the past. Apart from a wonderful always smiling Hungarian man and his accomplished accordion accompaniment and once a soul filling rendition of the late Lou Reed’s  “A Perfect Day” from a young girl who heartbreakingly looked like she had not seen enough of them.

Alas today, they were not there, and in their place was a young lady of dishevelled yet not impoverished appearance and a couple of her cohorts, dressed in similar festival fashion, sat happily swigging lugubrious low cost libations, dancing to music, laughing carelessly and generally wiping their asses on the very fabric of modern society.

There was I, tired and unwontedly returning to work, the work that I go to not out of choice but in order to earn money to feed, clothe and shelter my family at the ever dwindling cost of my own soul and sanity, and here they are, this special brew/Rum Bunch having a regular old Hoo-Haa!

This would all be a merely irritating yet everyday occurrence that I imagine many of you suffer  BUT the part that really made my shit itch, the part that tightened my teeth and made me growl crude and depraved things like Muttley with Tourette’s, was….

Down on the floor in front of them was a small speaker attached to an iPod, this speaker was perched on the edge of a hat, within the hat lay coins of various denomination, and by the hat….(breathe, breathe) was a sign.

The sign said “Need Money for Laundry”.

Immediately, mental images of this wrongful picture were swooshing towards my mind as if I were watching the titles to Superman in reverse. The laughing: life is tough at the bottom, the drinking: at 1 in the afternoon, how continental, the iPod: You know, like every discernable Tramp worth a damn has these days, the hat: a bloody hat, and the sign, THE FUCKING ASS RAPING CHEEK OF IT SIGN!!

Laundry? Not “Please spare change I need shelter for the night”, not “Home repossessed, kids going hungry”, not even “Cold, Alone and scared” but “Need Money for Laundry”.

In a mind montage I unleashed a almighty torrent of verbal violence upon them and then grabbed and hurled each one in different directions like BA Baracas in a bar fight,  but in reality, like a true English person I mildly waved my raised clenched fist once a sufficient distance away from the riling rabble and made my way back to my cell/office.

I had every mind to pull out my iphone, play a song through it's tinny speaker and start asking for money to redecorate my lounge, or stock my liquer cabinet, or pay the exsorbitant energy prices that rape my wallet monthly in order to keep my own vestments clean.

A busker is a musician that applies his trade in the street for appreciation and donation, a beggar is someone who usually through no fault of thier own has fallen through the cracks in society and is trying to climb back up, a Bum is a person who has made the choice to live life outside of the rules of convention, most likely with the aid of crack and White lightning.

What I saw today was a piss taking bunch of bonafide trustafarian 24 carat Cuntrags.

As the day wore on, I found myself dwelling on their audacious belief that blasting some shitty ditty though a smartphone, that no doubt was bought as a last ditch attempt by Daddy to lure their little princess back to finish her architecture degree, whilst masquerading as down at heel forgotten-abouts was somehow a splendid creative offering, a dazzling display of unfathomed musical showmanship.

A staggering achievement of naivety and incomprehensible thought processes, that the world somehow owes them a living for their awful audible contribution, and that sharing their considerable gift with us is worthy of our appreciation and kind donation to the most heart felt of causes, clean clothes.

The whole sorry spectacle was put into perspective on my journey home as I saw the nice Hungarian accordion man wearily lowering his instrument into its case, his overworked cold fingers twitching from the days duress, whilst the deluded digital minstrels of malevolence had seemingly moved their party elsewhere...perhaps to the laundromat. Perhaps to the seventh level of hell.

Time

Lets face it Time is a cunt. As an abstract construct installed by God or some other wanker to try and measure our pitiful inconsequential existence from point A "Birth" to point Z "Death" it has become increasingly obvious that Time is indeed a complete fucker.

My absence from this very site is accredited to the slippery little piss-weasel as my current life is being so utterly derailed by it's devious tomfuckery that it feels like I'm trapped inside Christopher Nolan's mindrape of a film “Memento” or I'm watching his film “Inception” without the part where they vaguely explain what the hell is going on as I slip and slide in a dreamlike state between unrelated consciousness with places and faces familiar yet unfamiliar blending and blurring into one continuous stream of events.

Maybe I should stop putting mescaline on my cornflakes but even on the days I don't I have come to a definite conclusion that Old Man Time is fucking with us all and laughing as he watches us helplessly trying to save, spend, chase or control it to no avail.

If you're reading this at work you're probably already experiencing the long drawn out hours it makes you spend looking at its various faces of display as the seconds chime away like hours and the hours seem to fall as languidly as the flipping date on an antique clock, with every tick and tock slamming down like a bookcase falling on the floor of a empty sports hall.

When that snoozefest ends, you are then made to wait for a bus or train that either takes forever to turn up or you have to run with all your work paraphernalia looking like a charity runner who's chose to do the marathon dressed as a comedy ostrich. When was the last time you turned up and it was simply there as you casually strolled on or pulled up just as you got to the stop?

Fucking never because Time is being a Prick.

However, when you get home, the tempo inexplicably speeds up as 5.30pm becomes 6.30pm before you even hang up your coat. You sit down briefly and let out a deflating sigh and contemplate making a cup of tea but as you slouchily drag your tired carcass off the sofa and make your way to the kitchen you pass a clock that now reads 8.30pm!

All of these glances at the smirking digital metronome amaze and befuddle you but yet simply get passed off with a simple “what the fuck!” as investigation into such matters would only prove more consuming of your ever dwindling evening.

The weekends too take an eternity to arrive but seem to slip through your fingers like grains of sand pouring from an hourglass that mocks your fevered tightening grip as you fumble to capture any left as it inevitably falls out of reach.

You barely take a sip of that first Friday pint and before you know it , it's not “Time” being called at the bar but the chime of the swinging pendulum's master as it strikes midnight on Sunday and you begrudgingly make your ascent to bed. I've even noticed the slowing of Sunday's later hours as if it was getting ready for the seemingly 72 hour day of Mon and the trudging week that ensues.

Left unchallenged this abuse of continuance will probably result with us eventually dying straight after we're born with our only vague memory being one of making a cheese and pickle sandwich at some random point in time which on devouring was all rather disappointing.

The only hope is that Dr Emmett Brown and his Flux Capacitor can make its move from celluloid to real life and that finally we could start to give Time its due payback and kick it right in it's arse by turning every weekend into a summer long festival of joy and continually setting the working week to fast forward!

Until then my fellow slaves, we shall have to keep up the good fight and chase Time as if it were a speedy child in a playground, running in front of you and turning to taunt your feeble efforts of catch up in order to make it trip on its own arrogance and fall into a massive pile of well deserved shit!

Then we can all stand around it and collectively chant “Ha Ha! Fuck You Time!! look at you now you shitty little grazed weeping cuntrag!” and we shall all laugh...

We shall all laugh for as long as we fucking well like.

For The St Patrick Day Hungover

The Lonesome Death Of The Catch Up

There is something disappearing. Something that is decreasing at a trouser shittingly alarming rate. Covering an area that dwarfs the desecration of the worlds' rain forests and is at a red alert level risk of becoming extinct sooner than any Polar Bear or Panda. A global catastrophe in the waiting and it is man at the helm and yet man who will suffer when this weary wordy ship finally hits the jagged rocks of social meltdown.

The Catch Up: The quintessentially civilised beginning of any conversation in which one has not seen another for a measured period of time, be it a week, month or year, is rapidly vanishing from our everyday conversations.

Remember the times when you'd arrive for the Easter holidays at your cousins' house and those awkward stilted first moments where you could only talk about your journey there, which was unfortunately void of any danger or excitement of any kind, so you would would sometimes have to elaborate on a hairy moment near the Milton Keynes bypass, until you were suddenly and magically transported into the familiar living room of normal relaxed conversation with people you knew perfectly well and wondered how or why you ever had to have these strange little epilogues every time you met, similar to each time you'd go ice skating after getting rather good the last time, only to find yourself back at square one, scrambling round the ice like a Chuckle Brother on mescaline.

In the following dialogues proceeding that oddity of Englishness, one would normally set about talking to everyone about what they've been up to since last they met. Holidays, Birthdays, Deaths, marriages, happy news, sad news, new arrivals, new acquisitions and so on but these small introductory news bulletins are in serious jeopardy due to the multitude of modern day communication networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogs and other assorted interweb interfaces.

These growing behemoths of chattering tit bit are crushing the possibility of having anything new to learn of someone what so ever that hasn't already been divulged in a news flash style communiqué of some sort, trespassing onto your computer like an Ebola virus attacking your immune system.

Those ingenious programmes and systems that were no doubt designed to bridge the gap in global communication are now being used for such menial and pathetic situations and tasks that it probably has the staggeringly rich cyber boffin inventors crying into their Sim avatar's digital porridge.

In this age of celebrity pointlessness these things have managed to persuade the everyman and woman that if a star can be born from nowhere on such programmes as Big Brother, X Factor and the multitude of 'Fly on the Wall' docu-dramas then they too should be transcribing the chronicles of their every thought and wim to the entire planet.

Resulting in people using space bound technology to make sure that the whole pissing galaxy knows that they're 'having Pasta for tea' or that a man on the bus is 'wearing a funny hat' or that you're on the fucking holiday you told everybody you were going on ample times before you left just to make sure they don't send such titillating information as Wagner's possible departure from X factor or that your mate Tommo just followed through in the cab home from Wagamamas as you couldn't carry on filling your face with over priced Paella if you missed out on that life changing info-fucking-mation.

I am now so fully informed of everybody's whereabouts and daily shenanigans that i meet friends out on a Friday night after work and sit in absolute silence until someone pipes up with someone else's news that they've recently read to which the writer of which can only simply acknowledge with a “yeeeaah!” and retort with a similarly quoted piece of recent gossip which everybody in earshot already knows 'cause they fucking read it already too!!

I'm now surrounded by iPhone obsessed drones that look like they've lost all the muscles on the back of their neck who peruse the inner world as they ignore the outer one, begrudgingly bowing to the small glowing once bitten Apple god like a drugged up Mooney cult and the only people that aren't subscribing to this geek revolution are outside polluting their outlaw rebel lungs with cancer sticks probably swapping actual stories of things that actually happened to real people that they didn't put on fucking Twitter earlier that day!

I'm thinking of starting up my own site called “Twatter” and what it cleverly does is tweets anybody who Twitters anything saying “Nobody cares what you're doing you egotistical delusional Fuckwit! Get on with your silly little inconsequential life and stop bothering us!”

Then maybe one day soon on a hopeful, brighter day, people will be skipping through the parks laughing, gayly swinging round lamp-posts, singing of the joys of spring, cigerettes will be proved to be vital to good health and bans will be lifted to the sound of triumphant trumpets and iPhones will be made illegal after being proven that they turn you into a unsociable 24 carat cunt and i will finally be able to sit in a pub filled with smoke, drinking my pint out of a straight forward non branded pint glass and chat the kind of shit i'm now driven to only writing down to my attentive friends who are filled to the brim with all their news and gossip, unheard, unspoken, unwritten, un fucking facebooked until it all goes deathly quiet....

...and then we'll all start talking about how we miss it all! Arse.

When Penguins Turn Peado

Emoticons

What kind of star spangled cunt nugget invented emoticons? For thousands of years humans have been developing expansive, complicated and highly evolved languages and have been writing these down in a multitude of ways including ink, blood and even stone and chisel over the centuries. For the past 8000 years or so people have have to make do with using these 'words' to convey the message they wished to get across by simple arrangement and with the forethought of making the message clear and precise in order to not be misunderstood or misconstrued.

These jumbled and bundled assortments of alphabet have given us the worldly wise philosophy of Socrates, the poignant poetry of Pablo Naruda, the dark twisted tales of Edgar Allen Poe, the exquisite wordplay of Shakespeare and of course the fantastical autobiographies of Katie Price.

Then some clever piss biscuit invented the 'Text Message' and all that went to shit.

Whereas before, they had to think of lots of words  to use in phone calls and responses to questions and sometimes even mild chit chat, they could now syphon down their word usage to it's most economical form in order to save valuable time not having to do things like talk or get in touch with friends and family.

But due to the great greed of mankind these new character limited bulletins soon also became too laborious for our ever dwindling attention spans and the bastardised language of 'Text abbreviation' was born.

Cries of “I can't waste precious time typing in an ,E,E,Y,O,U,A,T and a fucking ATE! I've on level 6 of Super Mario Bollox on my Nintendo Gameboy! and then Eastenders in on!!” emanated across the land.

And so “See you at 7 mate!” became “C U @ 7 M8” but it didn't stop there and soon this abrupt new street dialect became so hard to decipher that you had to employ an 11 year old street urchin to translate the covert dyslexic transcripts as if you were a top code breaker on the trail of a madman.

Then in a cross pollination from email etiquette and Internet forum geekdom, acronyms of phrases from camp teen fodder programs became common practise but all the while, one problem persisted. One obviously colossal omission from modern day communication.

This break down of language meant people sometimes didn't quite get how you meant something and would sometimes leave you waiting for minutes for their witty riposte whilst they tried to work through the possible double meanings of your ill worded communiqué. The timing of responses became as important as the messages themselves, with a 10 minute wait meaning something entirely different from a 2 day interval.

Multitudes of random possibilities began firing through the fevered craniums of textees and the paranoia would grew by the hour to the point where hypothetical situations of people gathering to laugh at your incoherent scribblings whilst ignoring you on a day out visit to Alton Towers deliberately organised without you became full gone conclusions.

Pretty soon, handbags were swinging in the streets, names were hastily being scribbled out from address books and even the leaders of the great super powers had a moment where their hand quivered over the red button in incandecent rage at the 17 minutes it took Boris Yeltsin to text back “LOL” to George Bush's fart jokes he made at his recent climate change conference when anybody used the word “Emissions”.

So in order to solve this growing global pandemic, some no doubt be-specktacled NASA schooled fucknut went and invented something that alleviated the receiver from having to work out how the message was intended by reverting to one of man's most primal instincts - Facial recognition.

Yes, by using all the now rendered pointless keys around the everyday keyboard that used to be used for varied punctuation back when we could remember how to write properly, we then starting using them to make a variety of face shapes like :) and ;( and ;0 to display our intended meaning.

Then people starting thinking their phone was simply on the blink so the fucking “Emoticon” was wheeled out like some demented Transformer baddie and the world was saved.

Now when i get a message with a little smiley face I simply take it that the cheeky cunt that sent it assumed i'm such an incredulous moron that i wasn't capable of working how he meant what he said by merely reading, computing and then judging the text to the best of my ability. Should a cheeky wink face not suddenly appear at the end of "I'm gonna bloody kill you!" then obviously we should all run around screaming and franticly dial the police should we?

My feelings on the matter are that we should try and devolve back to using proper language before we end up back at grunting and angrily shaking a stick to make our points but until i can persuade the whole feckin' emoti-conned universe to do so i have come up with some of my own to join the smiley,cheeky,happy gang!

( ! ) = a normal woman from a gynaecologist's point of view

( ? ) = a women who's had a baby with complications from a gynaecologist's point of view

( @ ) = an Anal gape

( # ) = Arse like a broken cat flap (i.e after a very hot curry or prison gang rape)

I'd work out more but i've got some texting to do and it takes bloody ages when you spell out all the words and that!

C U L8ER M8 :/*

Garfield Minus Garfield - One man's slow decent into madness