The Death of Original Thought.

Howdy y'all.

I have come to a strange and paradoxical conclusion based on nothing more than a random thought and a Google search.

We spend our time being creative. We write, or draw, or paint, or record our thoughts and feelings in the vague hope that it will come across as the next great Insert-Your-Nationality-Here work - and I have found that there is simply nothing new any more to say or do. It is merely a rehash or re-imagining of a fundamental idea. Take fantasy for example: there is a staple set of "rules" that govern a fantastic world - anything that deviates from this set of criteria run the risk of becoming too abstract and so will fail to engage a consumer. Consumer. That looks like it's spelt wrong.

Wait a second.

Nope, it checks out, so anyway. Tolkien had given a large audience what we now as a collective consciousness refer to as 'fantasy' - Elves and Dwarves, Magic, epic destiny and so on. Trying to be original in a world where the standard template is that of the above is pretty tricky; it has been done, but only by toning down such ideas and making it more 'real' - Joe Abercrombie's "The Blade Itself" series is an awesome example, touching lightly on the concept of magic but instead of branching out within the genre it chooses to sit firmly within the trunk. That's fine, and his portrayal of his characters as merely fallible people is amazing.

I have written a book you know. I now pull on my finest smoking jacket and smuggest, most shit-eating smile I can muster. I enjoyed writing it, but I felt constrained to comply to this archetype of Fantasy and the Hero's Journey or Monomyth in which the hero goes through a set of attitudes and challenges (Wiki it; it's very interesting to look through and compare it to anything you've read so far; you may even raise your eyebrows whilst exhaling through your nose at it), simply because everything involving fantasy, even from the Redwall books I read as a nipper to the Wheel of Time follows this template to a certain degree.

Still, in my story a man gets a clout in the mush. I won't say who, because it might spoil it.

OR DOES HE

Maybe the template is just a means to insert your own attitudes and beliefs into a fantastic setting through which you engage the reader, and in doing so put across those beliefs without feeling contrived or preaching. Who knows?

In other news, I went biking with a good friend of mine for four days. I was awesome, and then I fell off, hurting my limbs, body and face areas. It hurt. And still does, though not as much. I didn't cry though; at least not in view of anyone, so that's pretty manly, right?

This whole, stupid block of text came about as a result of a conversation with my better half and realising that ducks, instead of beaks, were wearing dog masks. Seriously, Google a duck and look. Underneath this dog mask they have either:

• A grotesque, Lamprey like maw, all fangs and cartilage
• A perfectly formed human mouth

I considered going to the park in which to apprehend a duck, leaping upon it and wrenching the vile disguise from its head but that could either reveal the ducks for what they truly are, resulting in the deaths of millions of people, as they would decide that now they have been rumbled they should wreak havoc upon the world. Or more likely, result in my arrest for breaking a duck's neck in a public park in front of two misty-eyed toddlers feeding them bits of a bread. I'm not sure my conscience could take it.

You win this time, winsome water fowl. I actually Googled 'duck dog masks' and found that a lot of people had the same idea - hence the title.

I bring shame upon the clan.

How it steals my senses.

I'm fairly sure normal, mentally stable people do not do the things I do when they've had one too many.

Popping down the pub and chatting up the human being that is closest to me, or taking off my clothes and skinny dipping, or picking a fight with a total stranger, or finding true love for a few hours, or laughing myself silly at the old stories of when we were all in school would be a more normal thing for a person to do.

Yet, I found myself two thousand words into a tirade about the human condition and the nature of survival at ten minutes past midnight. I am beginning to get the feeling that I am a bit of a jackass. All these grand ideas thought up when alcohol with a yellow label slips under my brain and goes "You know what? We should write a novel!" were laid out in the window that I am typing into now, in the drunken hope that my daft thought processes would blow the lid off of the entire world.

We all think these things and have these ideas: after a couple of pints we all become philosophers and gain the ability to put the world to rights, and then in the morning where everything is too bright and white noise is buzzing in the back of your head and the pound, pound, pound of dehydration and lack of blood-sugar is marching through your veins we find ourselves half-chuckling to ourselves and thinking at what a bell-end we were those few hours ago. I find myself quietly ashamed of the thoughts I have when I am hammering away at this poor, re-conditioned laptop's keyboard, but why should I? Another part of me thinks that these tangential thoughts are really what define us as individuals: my thoughts may align, but not replicate, someone else's, and that in itself is fairly wonderful. Chances are I'll look through this and think to myself that I really should smash my router to bits with a hammer to prevent the world from being exposed to this pseudo-conspiracy theorist brand of bullshit.

But hey. In forty years when I am sat at the same desk in the same flat with a gut that sags more and hair that is more silver than black I'll think to myself "Hey, at least you didn't wind up swigging the cider you're drinking in the park!".

Oh well, small blessings I guess. Chances are I'll wake up and read this, grimacing to myself at what, as above, a bell-end I am.

But as with everything else, I will leave it up as a monument to my inadequacy, as it is my faults and cracks and fractures and scars that make me who I am, and make me stronger as a person.

Fade to black, roll credits, something touching on a piano.

Doing it properly, again. Honest. Maybe.

Well, this is a strange feeling.

I have, in the interests of keeping myself off the streets, peddling 'Mary Jane' and 'Jazz Cigarettes' to our impressionable youth, I have decided, once again, to re-re-start this blog. This will document my boring little life, the people in it, and any alcohol-induced thoughts that I might happen to stumble across when I buy whatever beer or wine that has a yellow price tag in Tesco's.

You see, gifted though I am with a lot of free time, my ability to fill this time with things other than listlessly looking at pictures of cats is lacking. I am constantly filled with the desire to push myself to great and noble deeds: to write the next great British novel, to lift a car over my head and to play the saxophone on the back of an aircraft carrier, whilst wearing a billowing linen suit-jacket.

However, though the mind is willing, the body is sluggish, pasty and slightly translucent from weeks of not seeing the sun. I will take a deep breath and rise from my chair with a pressing desire to change the world – this feeling tends to last between four and twenty seconds, at which point I will sit down again, slightly out of breath.

It is clearly not I that is to blame here, but society. When I am confronted with nothing to do there is no pressing need to survive, as my survival is more or less guaranteed unless I try to eat batteries out of the remote or try to ride my bike down the stairs; these things would be my fault, and as I am too lazy to try them, I remain alive through inactivity. However, the choice I have when deciding on things to do paralyses me: so high is this level of choice I am no longer selecting one activity but eliminating thirty others. This blog is a way of adding yet another choice to the already heaving mountain of trite time-sinks.

Good on me. I give myself a pat on the back.

Back in second, I just need to check something.

I have discovered that it is eight paces from the desk I'm sitting at to the front door; handy to know, in case a gunman runs up the sixty or so steps to my flat, runs past all the other doors to mine and kicks his way through to my living room. That should give me just enough time to lethargically rise from my seat before I am riddled with hails of psychosis-fuelled gunfire. As I lay bleeding on my charity shop rug I gaze through the lounge window, and the last thing I see is the permanently shocked/perplexed expression of a local pigeon.

Well, I've run out of things to say. I might update this again, but knowing me I'll just forget about it, because let's face it: I'm a bit of a twat. I'd like to talk about cooking, and D&D, and bikes, and the horrors of writing something longer than a blog post, and the heart-breaking levels of abuse you must receive as a result of such an endeavour, but we'll see.

I am now off to a place where I will try and do a karate chop on someone then fall over, giving myself a concussion.

Good day. I said good day sir.

And now for your regular scheduled program.

Hello!

Hoo boy, it's been a while. There has been a huge amount of what people from the ninety's (nineties?) would call 'funk' (the bad kind) in my life this past while and it's put a cramp in my proverbial and non-existent style. One event shall not be mentioned here, but others will include:

• I moved house
• I changed job
• I was reading through another blog and website, and drunkenly got inspiration to restart my stupid, non consequential blog.

Anyway. What's been going on... Oh yeah! These past few months, namely eight of those said months, have been spent writing a book. I've sent it to someone who will hopefully be very kind and will not savage it as a household cat would maul an innocent shrew (you need a cat or a pair of cats in a rural setting to 'get' this metaphor) who will forward it to other kind people who will print it in paper form called a 'book'. Then he will give me a cheque for fifteen million pounds and I will buy the solid gold Rolls-Royce I've always dreamt of.

If you're wondering, I have had more than one pint of alcohol to drink tonight. hello

It's been a strange few months; from going to the regimented environment of my mother's flat in sunny-middle England to a top-floor hovel in a what is essentially a fairly pleasant hole in the ground filled with drunken polish men has been a huge adjustment. I can now, for example, walk around in nothing but an off-white pair of tighty-wighties without having to answer to 'the Man', but having to cook and God help me, clean for myself has been a terrible burden. How do people do it? Lucky for me I'm a hard working diligent human being* that can meet these hurdles with ease, employing my incredible physique** and towering intellect*** to overcome these tasks.

As for leisure activities, I went mountain biking in Wales with a good mate of mine recently, and I did a skid. I may have done a jump, but this needs to be corroborated with a third party to confirm. It was awesome, and I got absolutely, completely, soaked. It was gross.

But then I did another skid.

I'm sure that I will speak in more detail in future, but I am, in the term of a Californian writer, 'lit up' and in no position to talk. Good night, and hello

*Not true
**So damn not true; I resemble a hessian sack filled with cake mixture, which has been beat with an oak branch to resemble a vague mockery of a human being
***so unbelievably true, I am currently being thrashed with police baton for this lie, which carries a sentence of twenty years of thrashing.

Envelopes.

Envelopes.

My life is envelopes. Are you an envelope? I can't see through my folded paper eyes any more. But I can smell them now. I can taste them.

I'm on to you.
Envelope.

Today I packed and sealed one thousand, four hundred and fifty eight envelopes. In a row. I tried to eat my lunch, and between each granary roll lay an envelope covered in a thin layer of mayonnaise. It was rough, and it dried my mouth to eat them, but I did, choked down each cheerily designed slice of tender paper. Opening my fizzy drink, the fsssssst of the surging bubbles took me by surprise and droplets of water spat from the lid and fluttered and floated down toward the ground, landing as little rectangles of paper. Bending down to inspect them closer, I saw.

Envelopes.

After work, I handed my temporary worker's envelope to the kind woman behind the reception counter. She fluttered at me, her wide and gaping mouth spewing forth an invoice for £3.63. I exited the building and walked across the car park, stifling hot in my too-small shirt. I unbutton it- agh, paper cut. Getting into the car, the music that issued from my speakers was a, a rustling, and brown windowed squares flew from the air vents.

I drive, harrowed, my mind filled with a papery voice, offering a 31 day payment plan. Final notice, it said. The sun, a huge white rectangle looming on the horizon, was setting onto the brown fields. I pulled up to my envelope, and opened the flap.

I fell inside. I sit here now, on the TOTAL TO PAY line, gazing up at NEVER-END PENCILS x 15 £51.99, and I type, my fingers rutted and bleeding from each razor-sharp key press.

Tonight I will wrap myself up, and fold over the covers, my face pressed against the thin clear window. Did someone lick the adhesive glue? I see the flap close, slowly, slowly. I panic, mind filled with strange noises and the skchcreeeee of jamming franking machines.

My fear peaks; I am unable to move.

I am an invoice for eight thousand CARD- PINK units priced at £4.37 each.

The envelope closes.

Rizla's and Supermarket Brand Lager

I've come to understand that my life is actually quite boring.

I know, I know, you must have spat your brandy all over the monitor at this ridiculous statement, but it's true. Since moving back to Bath and not being at work all day has meant that I have been spending a lot of time just sat about, and no amount of cycling through some very pleasant countryside each day will stop me resembling a steak that's been boiled for four hours and is now just a grey, sweating lump of gristle.

"Wonderful" I figured to myself at first, smiling coyly; this will give me plenty more time to write and generally be a better human being, get all my paperwork in order and after several weeks, will emerge with eighteen best-selling novels, each one a scathing indictment of the various nuances of the Latvian eel trade. As I step into the street, my chiselled abs and 'glutes' (?) will glisten in the spring sun and a helicopter will arrive, and who should step from it? Mr. President! Why yes, it would be wonderful, but I can't become president now, there are too many lives to save. I would jump onto my chrome-plated Honda Goldwing, whack a bit of Journey on and speed away. I will then proceed to do not one, but two back flips.

Instead, a small trench has formed in the carpet, with coincides precisely the track to the fridge I take to cram something else down my face. I will open up some Documents, and look at them. Maybe for about twenty minutes or so. I will then open Firefox. I will then admonish myself for doing so, and close it again. Repeat until 5pm.

Unemployment, I have decided, is not for me. There is only so many times I can look at the front page of DeviantArt and be mildly disgusted with what I find there (Having just done so, I have seen three pictures, each one the rendition of a cartoon pony getting railed by something else. Hmm.).

This, now, has got me thinking about the art world. If I were in a position of responsibility, certain pictures you see on that website will cause me to frown, and find this persons address. Maybe check the shed, maybe the basement.

For torsos.

Time for some world class art and scathing political commentary go:

Note to any prospective news publications: I have a million of these, just email me. I've got it covered.

Let us never be that way again.

I am writing this at 07:30 hours on a Thursday morning from work. It is grey outside.

Trying to get to sleep last night resulted in my mapping in great detail what my ceiling looks like. Like a certain other act that will not be mentioned here I spent an hour preparing, getting keyed up for getting into bed and after all that, all that work, nothing happened. I spent six hours being increasingly frustrated with myself, angrily checking my clock, daring it to be later than I wanted it to be, and I managed to get to sleep about three hours ago.

I do not enjoy the company of my brain anymore. We have stopped talking and are avoiding one another in the house, it childishly huffing its way out of the kitchen when I walk in there etc. Grow up. It knows it’s in the wrong here but just won’t admit it, and it’s pathetic to watch. I’m going to suggest we start seeing other people.

A little while I got it into my head to watch all those films that people keep talking about, so I resolved to spend an evening drinking and have my world rocked and I finally got around to watching Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, which is the best film I have seen in a very long time; I gasped, I laughed and I had something in my eye in the- yes, that bit. After this, having fortified myself with classy cider that comes in glass bottles I watched the Expendables.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen or imagined someone on the motorway in the fast lane, sailing happily by you with a smug grin on his face, watching him shift down, only for him to accidentally shift into second instead of fourth and watching the vehicle spin away from the road with an expensive tinkling sound, his limp body flying into the grass verge, head striking rocks and twigs, surely dead?

My brain. That was my brain.

The change in tempo was polar; things exploded. A gun fired bullets that exploded, that hit something else, which then exploded, and then got punched in the face. And then someone had a knife thrown at them, and then he fell back onto something and then exploded.

There was a word I saw, I think it was Kris Straub who said it: it was an extravaganzmurder.

I’m looking forward to seeing the sequel.

Anyway, my shift starts in ten minutes and I need eighteen hundred cups of coffee to quell the shakes, and to prevent me from sitting on the nose of a plane, covering the dock in petrol after strafing it with cannon fire, firing a pistol back at the petrol covered pier and blowing it to smithereens. That was the best bit.