A Thing.

This is a thing I drew this week:

It is of a man I know. Quite well, as it happens.

What else did I do. I baked some cookies, and as I was too lazy to wash up, put them in little muffin cases. I tried to tie my shoe laces one morning and threw my back out - after this, I thought it would be jolly good fun if I proceeded to spend the next three days in whimpering agony - so I did. For lunch today I had Moroccan cous cous and some turkey breast, with a side order of spittle flecked fury.

I think that's it, really.

Wine-brain Chronicles

I wrote this whilst quite lit up on old grapes, but I'm putting it up anyway. It was originally titled something stern and manful, but no. Just no.

I have often thought about what it actually means to be a human being these days.

In my romanticised visions of yore I am greeted with a man who, should he wish it, become whatever he wishes to be: should that be a successful farmer, a writer or painter, if one applies themselves to an art form that is under represented they could excel.

What are we now? Our own individual quest for uniqueness has resulted in a world that is saturated in our unoriginal tripe, that is spewed forth from our wine addled minds and into the collective consciousness – a consciousness that cares more about the haircut of some vanilla pop star called Ken who has swoopy hair than what atrocity is being committed against this or that minority. Oh no, he saw a girl, then didn't like that girl any more. Atrossy-what? Oh. Is that the thing where Chantelle and that MMA fighter snog?

Maybe that's the whole point? What is the point in being worldly? It only serves to depress the hell out of us. We can opine on the great topics and lament woe, woe is the human race but are we better than the people buried up to their arse in their iPhones because we are more miserable than they are? Ignorance is bliss, to be sure. Who are the rest of us to deprive ourselves of that optimism, that the greatest worry in our day is if that Chantelle character from that film kisses Ken with the swoopy hair. Maybe we should all get back to writing about teenage vampires and call it a day? There's no such thing as an original thought any more. The second someone realises this they can churn out the same old garbage and rest assured we will be there to dig in. How many rewrites and sequels have we seen in the past two years? Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy of a rehash - but we can no longer be original; that would alienate our audience. If there is one thing we work towards is that of gaining more of those bits of paper with pictures of our current monarch/president/voodoo priest on it. So why does it have to be original? Originality is something that is no longer lauded - we look at it, mutter 'Random', tweet it to our twenty thousand followers and move on to a remix of a great song that has been butchered to death by auto-tune and a man proclaiming himself a creative genius. Christ.

It seems we have stagnated as a race. Being different is weird, thinking is frowned upon, being stupid is cool. That is the human condition – we have ended up consuming one another, either indirectly or otherwise. Imagine a snake made of words, and that bites its own tail: in its twisted shape, the consumed part of it is bent and distorted, digested and excreted, but its all the same material in the end. We are at a point in our society where this great snake's excrement is sifted through for sustenance and forced back into its slavering jaws. What chance does originality actually have? It is only when red wine thunders through my veins do I actually write about the wriggling serpent that lurks in my brain pan, and all it's foetid leavings it creates. The chemical element of consciousness alters my being for a few hours, and when I awake and read this with a massive hangover I will bite my fist.

So what, I say. Say a ten-pound cuss to a Policeman: he or she has heard it before. Don't say please or thank you: the recipient won't care, not in the end. Let etiquette dissolve. In the grand scheme of things there is nothing more to say, or do. Wade into obscurity up to the neck and let yourself float on your back in the warm waters of insignificance. Who cares? Why try? Oh yeah.

Pride.

The above is one thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. It something that has driven us to great things, and as driven us to commit great sins. Is it good? Of course not! But we'd be nothing without it. So if you have something to say, just say it – it may not be listened to now, but maybe a few decades down the line, when you're lying maggot-ridden in your coffin someone will sift through the drunken wreckage of your life and sift out a grain of truth, and that small grain might just alter that person's mind in some imperceptible way.

Isn't that amazing? The answer you're looking for now is yes. Yes, that is amazing.

Ad Infinitum

I've found myself staring at the wallpaper for this laptop for about twenty minutes. I've found myself back into the doldrums of that most hated beast, one that has crawled on suckered appendages straight from the devil's asshole and is getting fang marks all over the furniture:

Writer's Block.

Ideas are everywhere, when you know where to look for them – I've quite a few of my own too, but I'm damned if there's anything I can do to get them down on paper. I have always imagined this phenomena as a cluster of shoppers waiting from Tesco's to open. The doors are locked, and very small, but they all crowd around and bang on the glass, their forms misted and obscured. Muffled snatches of impatient shouting meet the ears of the staff inside, who behind their barricade of deli counter are met with discordant cries of vague idea-ettes, too small and malformed to be of any use and are discarded as mad ravings.

If you have ever had the misfortune of being near a supermarket before it opens, it is generally the case that the people that are at the front are the ones who squirmed their way through by biting, gouging and generally smelling damned unpleasant. The rat-faced, neck tattooed floaters of ideas of Hey, I should write a novel about a guy who finds a thing! And what if that character was actually DEAD ALL ALONG (that's never been done before!) are first to squeeze their Lynx Africa and not-showered-in-two-weeks Adidas tracksuit through the doors and all over the laptop screen. These ideas are looked at, and then discarded with a disgusted hitch of the lip.

The ideas that I would like to enter and start browsing the shelves are at the back. Theological Dependence and Psychological Ramifications of Immortality are still stood in the car park, far too polite to push their way through. The sun tracks its way across the sky whilst what if he was gay? Yeah, great!, What if, like, the church is like, a metaphor? And I think one of the characters should die unexpectedly! All get their greasy fingers over the pastries, and before they know it, the store closes without them ever getting inside.

So I must sit here and write about the only thing that I can think of, which is the one thing that doesn't allow any decent ideas. Writer's, bastard, Block. By writing some hackneyed trash relating to supermarkets and chavs, I exorcise the demon that sits in my skull and sprays shit down my frontal lobe bit by bit. I feel it now, writhing about in there, pulling apart synapses and controlling my brain like Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis (one of the most satisfying parasitic fungi to say – just say it. Out loud. You'll be glad you did), but rather than me leaving my colony and seeking sunlight about about a foot off the ground it forces me to type out half a sentence, look at it for ten minutes, delete it, get assy at myself, resent the success of others and try again.

Oh. You may have noticed that all the other posts have disappeared. In a transparent effort to get further up search engines I will be throwing some older posts from a few years back in with new stuff that I'm doing so I can actually stand to a regular update schedule, but with none of the actual effort that people who are actually good at this utilise. I will actually try and post about things other than what a complete shit I am as well – cooking, biking, drawing, D&D and novel writing? Those things. Yes.

So happy new year. Here's hoping it's less rain and more Gin Ocean than last year for all of us.