One Hundred & Twentieth : Mixed Bag

 

 

Sent to you by D via Google Reader:

 

 

One Hundred & Twentieth : Mixed Bag

via "Les Confessions" by dante.fs@gmail.com on 17/03/06

I apologise for the disjointed nature of this entry. This can partially be attributed to the fact I was drunk when writing parts of it. Secondly I am simply out of practice. And finally perhaps I am not in the best of moods. You see, I write this in the middle of what might be termed a "losing streak". My Friday, that is, St Patrick's Day, was a bit rubbish, all things considered. I'll gloss over some financial stupidity on my behalf (suffice to say I made things worse for myself) and then point out that for the first time in four years my pay has been messed up by the payroll department. Or rather, the entire companies pay has been messed up.

The details are rather boring but basically we're all being paid late. With all the ensuing hilarity that brings. Direct debits, cheques for charitable events, standing orders will all probably bounce, costing me probably hundreds of pounds. I should be able to claim it back at some point but it's safe to assume that point won't be right now, when I need the money. The fact I am £600 past my overdraft limit does not help matters. To say I am screwed is to indulge understatement somewhat excessively.

So anyway, to cheer myself up, I decided to go to Synthetic Culture at Egg.

As most of you know, I like clubbing. I will one day give the subject a thorough written examination that it deserves but suffice to say I believe it as an attempt (among other things) to counter the alienation experienced by young modern city dwellers. In fact, I'd be unsurprised if the vibrancy of a cities club scene is in some sense influenced by the level of alienation felt in day-to-day life.

So while I have often complained that when trawling city streets I encounter almost no-one whom I know personally this is generally reversed when clubbing.

I am not a Friday clubber as a rule, my usual haunts over the last two or three years have tended to be Saturday orientated for one reason or another and had not been to Sin City in months. Nevertheless last week when I went out I bumped into fourteen or so people I knew and talked to many more. Last night, at Synthetic Culture, I did not bother to keep count but it was in excess of thirty or so. And not just people I could give a cursory nod - people who talked to me about their upcoming trips to the Whitby festival, going back home to the United States, who could demonstrate elaborate and confusing card tricks, or simply who I could hug with the memory that I had drunkenly got off with them at some point in the past. People I knew.

More specifically, I like Synthetic Culture. I do not think it has the undefinable charm of Slimelight but it is a wonderful venue, and the crowd is diverse and pretty enough for most. True, it is expensive and the security are vaguely unfriendly, but these are crosses we all bare. It is definitely somewhere I will have to get high at soon, something I have somehow avoided doing thus far.

The point of all this is that despite all this positivity my losing streak still managed to curse me. So example one : I lost my wallet. True, it was returned, but sans bank card & Oyster card. So that was one annoyance. And then I was talking to some girl - a rather nice, pretty girl - to whom I delivered what I believed to be my most charming line in banter. And we laughed for a while, and then she punched me in the mouth.

Here it is important to realise that while I am indeed plagiarising Allen I am also being entirely literal - although it was more a slap, but the principle remains. You know those conversations where you're joking about something and the other person goes along with the joke and then you're both presumably working off the joke on so many different levels that it's different to keep up? Well yeah, I had one of those, but then it turned out they may not have been joking at all.

I suppose this merely goes to show my old adage of there being a lot of shit in this world that's disguised as irony. Still, it's all good.

And then there was the journey home. I have been spoiled slightly in that I am used to journeys home from clubbing taking half an hour. True, I am usually accompanied by a 6ft transvestite which means there is a degree of awkwardness, but the journey itself is utterly painless. Not so tonight, thus the losing streak. Without my Oyster card there was a four mile walk to get to an appropriate bus stop. And then there was a half an hour wait. And then, of course, there was a fight / altercation on the bus which meant it randomly had to stop for twenty minutes. I believe there was some debate about who had taken whose wallet, and perhaps whether a punch in the face was going to be forthcoming for someone or other. To be honest, I'm not sure - I just sank into my seat and tried to avoid the world while the bus driver was called a cunt by various passengers who turned out to be, almost certainly, customers of my work.

Overall I had a good night, but I am worried slightly. What will this losing streak hold for me on Saturday? Should I stay in bed and simply watch television? Is that the safest option?

Hey, that's my home town!

Spinal Tap : "This morning we were driving down...route 401 .

[ Loud Cheering ]

Bart : "That's only four miles from my house!"

There is a certain childish satisfaction from seeing your school / home town / what-not in the general media. So when my old school hit the news as most improved school in the country some years ago, it was strangely pleasurable - despite my general feelings for the institution.

I'm not really sure if there is a term for this sort of psychological phenomenon but it seems fairly widespread. And indeed I was mildly interested to find out that the fairly humdrum housing association block of flats I grew up in had been thrust into the limelight last week.

I learnt of this indirectly ; one of the pleasures of not having a mobile phone (or at least, not using it to the point where it's never on) is that no-one can ever contact you. This is of course also one of the downsides.

So I received a message from a friend who had received a message from another friend who had received a message from my wife. The message was simply "Call your mother".

There was relatively little drama but it turned out that this had happened in the flat above my mums. For those suffering from link fatigue, I quote at length :

A young couple were victims of a "cold-blooded murder" when masked men armed with a shotgun killed them in their home. Jordan Jackson, 20, was found in the hallway of the flat in Menlo Gardens, Upper Norwood, south-east London. He had been shot in the neck.

Leyla Djemal-Northcott, 21, was shot in the head as she lay in bed.

Mr Jackson's twin brother, Kieran, was also shot on Tuesday and remains under armed guard in hospital. Another woman has been treated for shock.

Police said the two gunmen fired at least six shots during the attack at about 0640 GMT.

My mother mentioned she heard a loud bang, some continuous screaming for a period and then what sounded like furniture being moved around. She was relatively unconcerned by the incident, presuming the victims were "druggies" (it's interesting to see how people's moral abacus work) although she was mildly concerned when she realised the girl worked in the local post-office.

Interestingly (well, not really) when I lived in West Norwood a man was shot in the head in a local barbers up the road from us. Apparently that guy was a friend of the victims here, or somesuch. The only other thing of note (aside from the cool yellow stickers which were put everywhere over the stairs by the CSI types when I visited to represent blood splatter) was the totally random coverage. The initial Reuters report had at least 2 major mistakes and was barely fleshed out as a story. The BBC report only made the front page of the England section for about an hour before drifting onto the London section and then disappearing altogether. Despite this, the story for some reason is on the Gulf Times (Qatar's top selling English paper) website.

My (ex)wife's reaction was rather more comical, she's moving out as a result. She says she cannot be comfortable again there. I did mention she was crazy, yes?

All Indifferent Things Come To An End

When I was in Edinburgh, I woke up one of the days with a flash of inspiration. Chelsea weren't going to win that day. I didn't even know if they were playing, but I knew they wouldn't win.

I had £100 and I needed to bet it all on them drawing that day. Keep in mind at this stage I didn't actually even know who they were playing so my confidence may have been slightly misplaced. So I scrambled up, checked BBC Sport and realised they were playing Everton. To give some context, the form for both team in the Premiership so far was :

Everton : L-W-L-L-L-L-L-L
Chelsea : W-W-W-W-W-W-W-W

Despite this, I couldn't quite shake the feeling I had. But £100 was a reasonable amount of money at that point. I mentioned all this to my then girlfriend who implored me not to be foolish. For some reason, I listened.

The eventual score was 1-1. The odds were 7-1.

I tell you this not because I want to big up my psychic score-predicting abilities or to blame my current financial problems on those who have, for one reason or another, seen fit to care for me. Instead it demonstrates the old adage "all good things come to an end". Or in the case of a Chelsea winning streak all not-particularly-good-unless-you re-a-Chelsea-fan-which-personally-I'm-not things come to an end.

In a similar vein I want to take this opportunity to outline my betrayal. I have changed. Turned my back on what all that I once believed to be holy and good.

There's no easy way of saying this, but...

Well...

After what must be ten years of abstiencne, I now have started wearing a coat.

In my defence, it is not a very good coat. In fact, three separate people have insinuated that it is rather homosexual. Not just in the sense it's gay and thus, in our new street lingo "not very good" but gay as in the sense that it actively looks like I'll be getting greased up and entering Mr Leather International.

I'm sorry. It started as a simple lend from a friend. I had decided to switch my Slimes clothes slightly which required an outer layer of some description, lest I freeze to death in this arctic weather we've been having. And of course, I faced ridiculed and abuse from my peers for wearing it. Quite rightly. But now I'm stuck. I of course cannot give into their sneers so I'm forced to wear it, possibly for months. Possibly through a hopefully insanely hot summer. I hope they're happy with themselves.

Everything Else

So much time has passed since my last update, it's difficult to know what to say. Little of actual consequence has occurred, life is pretty much as "normal" as it ever is in the Dante-verse. Among my non-adventures I have;

• visited a fetish club (of sorts).
  
• was offered a free lobotomy by an axe wielding drug dealer
  
• consumed what seems like a sea of vodka and a hundredweight of pills.
  
• received a pay rise (in fact, this was dated the first of January which means I achieved one of my New Year resolutions in ZERO seconds. Beat that, fuckers).
  
• made friends with what seem to be rather orthodox Jews.
  
• project managed a shift in the way we deliver hazard data to our partners (well, sort of).
  
• been late for work umpteen times.
  
• been elatedly happy more times than I count and much more than I deserve.
  
• quit my second job.
  
• tried to update this thing at least a dozen times and let a blank, white screen defeat me.
  

I hope to update again soon, but then I hoped to not be a dismal mediocrity in this life, so who knows when I'll speak to you next?

 

 

Things you can do from here:

• Subscribe to "Les Confessions" using Google Reader
• Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favourite sites