Deviations on a Theme

2008-06-07T16:53:00.001-07:00

You know what? I'm sick and tired of everything. I'm going to give up writing music. I can't sing, I can't play, and I definitley cant write.

My latest EP sounds like a shit collection of Midlake songs that were too embarressing to put on any record. I don't like it, and there's no chance in hell anyone else will.I'm probably too stupid to pass these exams, I'm shit company, I'm not much to look at, and I can't ever do anything properly, or right. All I can do is get wasted, and to be honest, I don't even seem to be very good at that. Everyone else can go out and feel good and have fun, I just get miserable and introverted. I don't even know why I'm writing this if I'm honest.

I'm feeling isolated, unconsoled, and yet I'm too much of a cunt to let people try and help me. I'm a great fucking guy. I dont deserve the people I know.

My shortest poem

2008-04-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

December seems appealing right about now.
I guess it's been romanticised.

Excerpt from a book that no longer has a title

2008-04-12T19:22:00.000-07:00

Today I have been constantly playing “The Power of Love” to see if I can get my roommate to threaten to kill me again. He did it before and it turned me on a little. The walls holding my world in its place, and locking it away from other peoples worlds feel so frail right now that I swear I can hear the walls groan and feel them move every time I blink. I could get up, but I’d feel if I did that, I’d have to empty my ash tray, or put on clothes, and I like the fact that it’s overflowing ever so slightly, and lying around naked doing nothing but smoking makes me feel free.
I kind of have to go for a slash, but again, that means getting out of bed, and that isn’t something I’m prepared to do. I’ve been lying here for a long time, and it feels wrong to break my endeavour of nothingness over something as meaningless as that.

Besides, I do that several times a day. How often do I lie about cigarette in hand, exposed to the world. Or at least to my room. Probably more often than most people, but fuck most people, what do they know about enjoying themselves?

I really hate Huey Lewis and The News. Fuck you, Patrick Bateman, I was mindlessly drugged up when I decided you were a role model, in your own, psychotic way. And Genesis are, have been, and always will be utter shit. I hate Phil Collins.

I was in Texas, two years ago. My friend had a place out there, a beaten up El Camino, and a whole load of drugs. So we went out, and made pretend we were Hunter S. Thompson and his sidekick whose name no-one ever remembers, because they saw a little bit of the film, bought the poster, but didn’t realise it was a book. We ended up in some bar. It wasn’t rundown, but it wasn’t nice. If I got on with my mother, I wouldn’t take her there. I talked to the bartender there, whilst my friend covered his bathroom in all kinds of bodily fluids, and probably most of the drugs he’d put into his body so far. He asked me what I did, and I told him that I sang and wrote songs for pennies. He told me that he once tried to write a song for his wife, but she left him a few weeks later. He thought it was probably unrelated, but said he didn’t have the strongest voice anyway, and that he would stick to Johnny Cash from now on. I smiled, and thanked him for the drink, and for allowing me to stereotype him in my mind. He said he was jealous of anyone that could have a way with words, but not in those words. I thought that I was jealous of someone who could have such a distinct dialect. A rich accent, and a proper story to tell. A range of colloquialisms not only his, but exclusive to his world. I don’t remember much else of Texas, but I remember the old bartender.

2008-04-12T16:13:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of acting out old clichés. I've got a certain set down to an artform.

I've been doing all that stupid shit you do with your mind when you're fourteen, and six years on, I should have gotten over myself by now.

I could write out a list of wants, but that would be a pretty futile and pointless exercise.

2008-04-05T17:00:00.001-07:00

Is it enough
To protest
To be disillusioned
To say “fuck it all”
Did it become
A characature
Or a t-shirt
Or a guitar case sticker
Did we lose
The anger
To self involvement
And self-awareness
Or is the past
Romanticised
And the present
Undevised?

An accidental edit

2008-04-05T16:44:00.001-07:00

I am twenty years old. I am no teenager.

2008-03-30T17:17:00.001-07:00

I am twenty years old. I am no longer a teenager, but twenty seems so interstitial. Twenty-one seems to be the gateway to adulthood. I don’t feel like an adult, by any means.
I stand in the bathroom, after my shower. I look at myself in the mirror. Slim. Short. Not exactly ripped, but there’s a bit of muscle there. There’s a small patch of hair in the very middle of my chest. Hardly worth mentioning. Hardly worth noticing. My shoulders are a fair bit wider than my waist. I guess it’s uncommon these days, but I’ve been told it was the ideal man shape, once upon a time. In some kind of romantic, black and white age, where everyone could smoke and not get cancer, and loneliness was exclusive to those who favoured gin, and short, breathy sentences, spoken through gritted teeth.

I’m running my hands down my chest, over the scars I see so prominently, but would probably go unnoticed. It makes me think about the little marks over my hands, arms, fingers, and dotted around the rest of my body. Then there’s always the ones no-one can see on your body, but show in your words, actions, and interactions. Sometimes I think they’re invisible, but, in all probability, they’re probably the most obvious.

I brush my teeth, and put something in my hair to keep it out of my face. It’s pretty pointless, the wind and snow outside will make short work of anything I try and do with it. I walk downstairs, grab my book, grab my mp3 player, grab my headphones. Lock the front door. Walk to the station.

I spend the next two hours on the train, down to Bexhill. Bexhill, to me, has always been a place where people and things get old, but time doesn’t pass. The same could be said for most of my experience of sussex, but then, I only know the decaying piers and ancient amusement arcades. I’ve been told Brighton is the place to be, but I’ve only been there once, on a school trip. I might not have even been a teenager.

2008-03-24T07:06:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I wore a suit, and had a thousand things to say. Today, I put my uniform of jeans, a t-shirt, and a hoodie back on. I just want to listen to records. Maybe I'll write this evening.

2008-03-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I wore a suit, and had a thousand things to say. Today, I put my uniform of jeans, a t-shirt, and a hoodie back on. I just want to listen to records. Maybe I'll write this evening.

2008-03-02T18:20:00.001-08:00

Five pounds buys a sandwich
Overpriced, laced with salt
Paid for with small coins
Thrown in a case
For warbled renditions of someone elses feelings

You’ll keep a civil tongue in your head
And a level head on your shoulders
Or you’ll go far, but never finish with them attached

2008-03-02T18:15:00.000-08:00

I am told I am young
Yet my brother says I am old
I am told I am free
Yet my heart says I am caged
I am told we are wealthy
Yet the bank says I owe
Yet the adverts say to buy
And to buy, is to be free
And the government says it’s sorry
And the papers say they lie
Then they tell me we need war, to bring peace

And yet, all the time, the television tells me everything, yet nothing. How curious.

I tell myself, in muttered breath, I am me
Yet, I am made
And I tell myself, in muffled words
My last word will be “fire”

2008-03-02T16:33:00.001-08:00

Inside it's hot and sweaty. The air is moist, and stale, from the stench of the sweat as it seeps up from your encarcerated body. You can hear every rhythm of your body. The blood pumping, short bursts of breath. Then it comes. Switches one way, switches another, then flys towards you. Its brilliant, passionate burst hits your legs with a dull thud, as you shoot them out hard. Your whole body drops, and as the deflection comes, your neck snaps back, the ringing you hear is a perfect G as the world encapsulating your head vibrates. Outstreched, your left hand lies flat on the ground, wrapped up in synthetic protection.

The puck is yours.

A story in one page.

2008-02-21T16:25:00.002-08:00

“You’re fuckin’, like, bitter, man”
I didn’t have to take that kind of shit from him. The man treated drugs with a devotion usually reserved for religious fanatics. His internet browser was almost inevitably open on porn. Which he would watch, with the volume on, and loud, whenever he felt like it. He lived in a stain covered New England Patriots Jersey, stolen from a box we’d found abandoned at a roadside, one piss-poor summer about two years back. We could’ve taken the whole box. Made a killing on eBay. Spent it all on reconfiguring our biological chemistry. It was cold, wet, and three o’clock in the morning. We could barely be bothered to drive, let alone contemplate fleecing the stuff. In the end, he took one, and we left the rest. Some other poor bastard could take it. Hell, they’d probably be traced anyway. He had no interest in American football whatsoever, aside from the fact he knew it’s real name, Grid Iron, and would bring this up at every given opportunity.

I put my fag out on the wall of his dorm room. At this point, it was so stained with smoke, and god knows what else you could barely see any mark I might’ve made. I dreaded opening the door. The smell of the room was making me sick, but the only light I’d seen for the past three hours was straining desperately through the smoke yellowed curtains, and my sunglasses were lying, trodden on in some field somewhere. The smoke was thick, and acrid. My eyes already weren’t happy. I would take a deep breath, burst out of the room, and get the shades on my crash helmet down as fast as possible. Hopefully, that excuse for a machine outside would start. It was practically held together with wire and tape at this point. The left wing mirror had been reattached several times at this point. The petrol tank was scratched beyond recognition. The exhaust had a huge dent in the side. Damnit, I loved that machine.
“I’ll see you later, I’ll come back, but I need to go”
“You’re leaving?”
“No”
I grabbed my helmet, my jacket, and the chewed up packet of cigarettes I’d been trying not to smoke.

I burst out of his room, shoved the cigarettes into one pocket, with one hand, whilst fumbling for my keys with the other, in the other pocket. My helmet hung from my arm. I smacked it into the doorframe as a left the building. And just as I was fumbling to pull it over my head, I saw her. She lived two doors down from him. She couldn’t stand him, but she took to me. I didn’t take to her. Too much money. Too bubbly. Too.. Too much, I guess. She was pretty good looking, in that kinda standard men’s magazine kinda way. I’d been told to go for it with her God knows how many times, but I just couldn’t. She just got to me. She got five hundred a month from her parents. I got squat. She spent most of it on clubbing, cheap alcoholic drinks I can only really describe as date-rape-ade, and getting her hair done.
“Hey! I haven’..”
“Sorry, I can’t, I gotta”
“Oh, fine, ok”
I barely even heard the last part, I didn’t stop, just barged past, pulling the helmet down firmly over my head, and flicking down the sunshade. She cared too much about what people thought of her. He didn’t give a damn. And he really didn’t. So many people say that, but you know what? He really didn’t.

That was a week and a day ago. He was found, swinging from a rope, from his lightshade. And all I could think of was “Damn, I guess he did care what people thought of him”. That, and how strong the light fitting in his room was.

On the strange situation of my birth

2008-02-21T16:25:00.001-08:00

It’s easy to over romanticise the circumstance of my birth. Pristine white hospital walls, the cold, silvery chrome metallic sheen of complicated medical instruments. The handsome, young, clean cut doctor. A strong jaw line, a touch of stubble. The perfect, crystalline, bead of sweat that forms on his forehead, which creases slightly, enough to show a certain premature wisdom, but no sign of aging. The young nurse, flaxen haired, perfectly bronzed skin, dutifully wiping it away. Full pouting lips. A look of awe, tinged with adoration, and the possibility of pure animal lust, hidden beneath overly made up eyes.

That, as these things always are, was not the case. Enclosed by the worn dirty beige of an NHS operating room, I was torn away, clumsily pulled from my mothers womb, scarlet red, bloodied, and sickly. My father, (at this point still sporting a thick, dark head of hair, which would, eventually, be destroyed by twenty years, and three sons.) after being shooed away by various staff, peers in through the window, not out of concern so much, but out of a morbid fascination with seeing his young wife, eleven years his junior, and still in her mid twenties, cut open, and his first child, his first son, torn from the fleshy tomb which had incarcerated him, had incarcerated me, for what was fast becoming the best part of a year. No sooner as I had been moved from one small dark space was I plunged into a rather large, and exceptionally bright one. Hooked up to tubes, and machines, it was if my body was regulated by an outside force. I may as well have never been born at all.

Of course, this is my father speaking. Me, I don’t remember a thing about it. As far as consciousness is concerned, I have always been. And will probably continue to, till as long as I can remember.

Are you pissed off? You should be.

2008-02-08T19:09:00.001-08:00

Apathetic fuckers of the world. Self proclaimed seers. New age musical gurus.

Fuck you all.

Every day we move a step closer to being not much more than bacteria in the petri dish of the politicians. The newspapers preach hate, the BBC fear, and the public feined nonchalance, to cover ignorance. Even music has lost its power. People who claim to love music are usually too busy working out how to get their skin tight jeans over the stick wedged up their arse by so called "indie" record lables and the NME.

You want to hear indie? Go find a band sleeping on kitchen floors after ever gig they play, recording in some shitty rented garage with instruments held together with wire, ducttape and sweat.

Complaining about topup fees? How about you do something about it, instead of moaning, then spending all your loan cash on Vodka and Redbull mixers till you can find something to stick your penis, or to stick it's penis in you. Fucking do something.

Kevin Smith, and a second year in Canterbury

2008-02-07T17:31:00.001-08:00

Here you go, what people read blogs for. Pointless emo prognostication.

I can practically see my life turn into a Kevin Smith movie. Fuck, we even dress like it. I've got my main characters, I've got my supporting cast, I've got my vaguely alternative fucking soundtrack. Now where is my shitty happy ending?

2008-02-01T17:52:00.001-08:00

Fingers fumble across strings, across flesh, across keys
It fills the small holes, where I’m told things should be
To squeeze each note, each gasp, into longing emptiness
And reverberate around heavily breathing souls

Choked up with cigarette smoke, and other small things
Designed to block harsh light from getting in
Absorb wooded tones, and metal scratchings
And drink one more glass

Of a clear spirit, prone to turn misty

2008-01-04T18:42:00.001-08:00

To the bastard poet, who invented love;
Scrawled romance on tear stained parchment
To lists of names carved on cubical walls
Added by pissed up philosophers

And what am I to do
But over romanticise my life
Of cigarettes and alcohol
And cardboard packets of acoustic guitar strings

Accompanied by echoes of long nights out
Reflected in blood shot eyes
And muted gesticulation
Half hidden behind half read newspapers

All I left behind was a full ashtray, on the Piano.

2007-12-15T16:27:00.000-08:00

So I'm staring plaintively at pages upon pages of essays I don't care about, but should probably read. I'm staring at my two half assed attempts at essays. Not even half way through. I'm staring at my overflowing ashtray. I'm staring at the kinks I've been making in my broken D string, on the cheap steel string acoustic that's lying across my bed, that I'm practically using as an arm rest. I'm staring at the piles of empty bottles and cans that are strewn across my room. I'm staring at the piles of books I haven't read for far too long that populate my floor. I'm staring at the pile of assorted gloves I seem to have amassed. My Ice Hockey trapper. Motorbike Gloves. Football goalie gloves. One leather glove. One fingerless woolen glove. God knows where their partners are. Somewhere in my 6x9ish room.

I've got a cd on, but I'm not really listening to it. I hate when that happens.

2007-11-26T19:22:00.000-08:00

If you could take five minutes to scratch off the polythene surrounding your life, you would see that what you're doing isn't new, unique, individual, or exciting. It gives me a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach when I see a room full of people who spend £25 on a tshirt with "Working Class Hero" printed on it, Jeans that cost more than most peoples outfit, and a haircut that cost three times the amount of the mangled pair of boots I'm wearing. Dancing like a prick ironically doesn't make you funny, clever or cool. Ironically, it makes you a prick.

But what's worse is watching those people sing along to "common people". Modern "indie" music, at least in the UK, is possibly the biggest one finger salute to the working classes. Why buy an "iconoclastic" t-shirt saying "make love not missiles" from topman, when you could make one yourself? "Oh, but the design is so cool, look at the font! the A doesn't have a hole in it!" Yeah, but I can see a pretty big A-hole (That was clever and witty and not a lame pun in any way) wearing the goddamn shirt.

The prettiest girls at these kind of things are the ones who sit quietly and uncomfortably in the corner. Who only came along because their idiot friends wanted to, and dragged them with them. They're the most interesting as well. And don't dress or dance like they want the next guy with jeans so tight you can work out if he's circumsized or not to stick it in them.

Patrick Bateman is my hero.

An accompaniment

2007-11-24T17:38:00.000-08:00

As you've probably guessed from my initial post, I like music. In fact, I'm the cartoon stereotype of someone who likes music. The black, unkempt hair, poor attempt at facial hair, more often than not the fault of lazyness, the worn leather jacket, and the headphones. I fall somewhere between Questionable Content's Marten Reed and High Fidelity's Rob Gordon. But this post isn't about me, as you will have had enough of that already.

This concerns the assorted smattering of tunes that follow me with the observations to be made in this blog. Of which, one of the first will be what a stupid, ungainly word "Blog" is. As I assume you've gathered, I fall into the "counter-culture", the "underground", or whatever stupid adjective they throw to group together a bunch of people they can adress as a marketing group. The kind of scene that gets sold as a £25 shirt in Topman, or some self important "indie" chain like Cult.

As a cover-all, I could, like most other people my age, claim I like "a bit of everything", or "Everything apart from classical jazz and country", except I should probably throw in a needless exclamation mark, or add LOL to the end of the statement. The truth of the matter is I don't like everything; and am probably more biased and closed off than most people are about music. I like "indie" music. I like rock. I'm happy listening to one guy with an acoustic guitar complain. But not the stuff thrown at us through radio1. I like smatterings of classical music, something I should probably investigate into further, particularly due to the amount that was played to me as a child, as my father fostered my fascination with music. I like jazz, particularly bebop, and hot jazz. I'm not a huge fan of vocalists in the genre, though. In short, I have a broad taste, genre wise, but an isolated one, when you get down to the individual genre.

Introductions

2007-11-24T17:15:00.000-08:00

So this would be the writings of an inane babbler. Inappropriate musings whilst intoxicated. You must understand, that this is not written to be read, although that statement alone, with its acknowledgement of readership alone destroys it’s credibility. But, I suppose it would be read, as I choose to publish it online.

I have nothing to write of merit. I live a life perpetuated by stereotypes. I have the general appearance of someone who permanently needs a haircut, or a shave, or both. I spend nights staring at a glowing rectangle, tactfully positioned in the centre of a room, with nothing running through my head but white noise and a curiosity as to why we so regularly allow it so much of our time, which always seems to be far too much, but always ends up being far too little. I sit in lecture theatres, and come away with pages of notes, consisting entirely of scribbled messages to myself, reminding me to pay my rent, fill out forms, and other, mundane, ordinary occurrences, or drawings. I wonder around in a tattered leather jacket, with oversized headphones on generally looking discontent, and slightly lost, gathering worried looks from old ladies, and disparaging looks from young men, whose leather jackets are in far better shape, and far more expensive than my own.

I also have a tendency to deviate at tangents, go on for far too long, and write over-long, self indulgent paragraphs concerning myself, in order for anyone who would happen upon reading to build up a rather heavily biased, self-analysed image. Anyway, that’s my introduction. It’s pretentious, says more than anyone would be interested in, and contains effectively nothing. Welcome to my time waster.