I don’t understand people who drink coffee even though they say they don’t like it. You say it’s just for the energy boost, but why not lob some ProPlus down you and have done with it? Drink a boiling hot liquid that you don’t enjoy the taste of vs swallow a small pill. I dunno, man.
Even that idea of just being in it for the energy. Where does that stop? There’s this stuff called The Black Blood of the Earth, a kind of distilled coffee that has 40 times the caffeine of a normal cup. You’re not so much asking for as demanding trouble there. You’re sitting in a tank at the National Trouble Convention, and the exits are barred, and you have nothing to lose. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s time to kind of start weaning yourself off? Translate this into a different kind of habit: I like a few pints with my friends, I really do, but the day I catch myself thinking it might be more efficient to just inject sodium pentothal into my sinuses is probably the day I’ll hang up the old spurs.
Anyway. As is often the case, this is all a lead-in to Look At This Crazy Stuff I Found in the Asian Market.
100ml of your finest Lipovitan-D, in a glass bottle, “under licence from Taisho Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd, Tokyo, Japan”. I don’t know who’s trying to fool who by putting this in the energy drinks section, but it’s very obviously the kind of lab-developed superdrug you chase in a computer game while hordes of roided-up ultrazombies try and ruin your day.
As it happens, I’m in the middle of some fairly busy days which I’ve neglected to schedule all that well, so in the interests of poor decisions and the mild entertainment of strangers I’m going to see how well this stuff stands in for a night’s sleep. If you don’t hear from me then I’ve almost certainly unleashed the T-virus, and you should calmly and coolly make your way to the nearest open seaport. Bottoms up.
There’s a category of idea you can’t really express without over-expressing. Without sounding like you’re completely overthinking it. There’ll be a core of truth and true feeling but the idea will be so abstract, and expressing it will require a tone of such extreme seriousness, that the idea becomes, for most people, irresistibly easy to poke fun at and dismiss. One unhappy result is that the people who want to express such ideas very often do it in this kind of bowing, apologetic way that robs it of even the small impact it might have had. So that’s no good.
But if you express the ideas in or as comedy, you can keep the idea and the feeling and the serious tone intact, and just blithely sail by the apologies and the apron-wringing. The sense that you don’t take yourself entirely seriously can take people off their guard, can undercut the abstraction just enough that the core of the idea gets through without everyone feeling like they have to dismiss you for being a ponce who sits around thinking about things.
It’s sometimes much easier to take an idea seriously when you can laugh at it.
Fun start to a bank holiday weekend: stuffing toilet paper in your ears at 20 past five in the morning because your broken fucking house alarm’s been going off for two hours. Though if we’re being picky, I guess the START of the weekend was being woken up at 3.20 and running downstairs in the nip wielding a golf club (ladies). Not that I sleep naked (ladies), I just reckon I look more intimidating that way. Hence also the Xena-like warbling. Also it’s an 8 iron, if anyone’s wondering.
What’s interesting about barricading your eardrums in such a manner while buried under three (three!) blaring bells is the interference patterns it produces. Interesting in the sense that you start to take them for granted, and then you realise you’re taking them for granted and you start hearing them again, and you start hearing how weird they are, and you cock your head and then ohh there we go, the pattern changes, and you blink a lot and get confused and then lie down and forget who you are. Until hours later a man comes and rips the guts out of your alarm system while you hover anxiously behind him, and then suddenly it’s completely silent except for the weird dying-penguin sound of the ever-more-broken bell outside, and then you start laughing and weeping and everyone feels a little bit weird about the decisions that have led them to this point.
Anyway! A fun way to continue a bank holiday weekend, based on the above, might be to not hear much and fall asleep a lot. I tried that – I really did! – but it’s hard to sustain when you’re off at a music festival eating top-hole minty peas and riding on chairoplanes. Two things that would, I suspect, solve three-to-five eighths of the world’s ills were they instituted in any kind of serious way at a transnational policy level, which let’s be honest, don’t hold your breath with the kind of leadership we’re dealing with these days. We live and dream though, do we not. Do we not. Ha ha. Yeaaaah.
You know where you wake up in the morning and decide you’ll curl up and lie there for a while just to let things get up to speed a bit, and after a while you decide you’re probably as functional as you’re going to get without putting shoes to floor, and so you grudgingly get out of bed and wash yourself and go downstairs and eat your breakfast and leave the house and get a bus, and then realise that you haven’t actually moved at all and you’re still lying in bed and half asleep? Advice: starting from right now, take whatever steps you need to take to avoid having that experience while you’re already sleep-deprived and working with a five-minute snooze timer, because otherwise you will find yourself stuck in the fucking Groundhog Day of dreams.
What’s worse is that I got to the stage of knowing I was dreaming, and standing in my bedroom in the dream wondering what might be the best way to break the cycle. And then getting Lynchianly paranoid about whether or not I actually might have already done so, and is my vision hazy because I’m asleep or because I’ve just woken up or, oh, maybe that’s just my very self evaporating before my eyes. I don’t mind telling you that this is some heavy shit to be wrestling with on a Friday morning, especially when the “normal,” properly dreamlike dreams that acted as a prelude to these fiendish recurso-shenanigans involved
- creating and then being stalked by a psychotic character called “The Painted Man” and
- walking into my bathroom and immediately having a panic attack because everything was mirrored and there were three times as many doors as there should have been, none of which led back out to the hall.
So. The only sensible conclusion I can draw is that the subtle mind-trauma wrought many years ago by the magnificent House of Leaves is finally catching up with me. Now that the absolute dissolution of my psyche is proceeding at a decent clip, I can move on to phase II: fall in love with a stripper and have the shit kicked out of me by a man from Gdansk. Stay tuned, Bat-fans, for more exciting updates from the mouth of madness!
From a catalogue’s pages untimely ripp’d:
magazine safety brake system to control the ejection of the front-loading magazine
Not just a stapler, this, but seemingly the most badass stapler in the world. The kind you’d find behind the blast doors of CTU’s supply cupboard. You can hear the chunk of the payload sliding home. You can feel the weight of it. Right now, you want to dive out of your chair and roll into cover behind the nearest filing cabinet.
And yet, and yet, it’s still not enough for me. I’ve written to the manufacturer inquiring about the possibility of throwing some thermal optics on there for late-night operations, and possibly a suppressor for when you’re hiding out in a foreign embassy and need to stick some pages together on the down-low. What pages are you stapling? Top fucking secret pages.
Don’t mistake this for sarcasm. I once closed a staple remover on my fingertip, so I know god damn well how much damage casually wielded Tactical Desktop Instruments can inflict. Safety measures are not to be poo-pooed. I reiterate: poo-poo will not be tolerated.
(or, The two-fold curse of a memory for detail)
I.
You end up data-mining conversations, mostly without realising it, so that out of the blue you mention some obscure aspect of someone’s life that you’ve inferred from various off-the-cuff remarks they’ve made over the past however many months, except of course they don’t remember making any of these remarks, nor any conversation where the fully formed detail might have arisen, and all of a sudden you look like some kind of stalker.
II.
The best-case of (I) above is that you get a reputation as someone with impressive recall, which is a fun little detail and maybe decent at a party (if you go to that kind of party, which I don’t think anyone outside of a Woody Allen film actually does), but also be aware that no one in your direct circle is probably out doing brain scans and reviewing the literature and making distinctions between different types of memory, so in the end all you’re left with is folks getting bunched up over stuff like how you forget their birthdays and their names and things they asked you to do two minutes ago.
So anyway you come out of work and you’re walking down the street and you think Fuck it, I’m gonna grab a cheeky bag of crisps, and you go into the shop and pick up a packet of smoky bacon because it’s been a while and to be honest you’re not up for the whole King-Tayto-King-Tayto dance you have to do every single time you go for cheese and onion, and so you pay up and you leave and you’re walking along and yeah, you made the right choice, these are reet tasty. Skip ahead a couple of minutes and you’re nearly finished and there’s a bin just up there, how handy… only you’ve misjudged how close to the bottom you were, so you end up standing beside the bin munching away like a div, and after a while the people who saw you leave the shop have passed by and now for all anyone knows you’ve been there the whole time, and you’re stuffing the last bits into your gob and getting more and more hassled and you want to shout at everyone how of COURSE you didn’t just WALK UP TO A BIN and fish around for a bag of CRISPS, you’re wearing a SUIT for god’s sake.
So here you are… approaching your 26th birthday, standing beside a bin, tie askew, jacket missing, wild-eyed, spraying wet specks of salty potato at passers-by. Pay close attention, children: dreams do come true.
I have a habit when taking quick notes of writing in all caps. This is partially because such notes are often for the benefit of others, and no one likes wrestling with handwriting, and partially because I’ve somehow convinced myself it’s faster. So but anyway, I got into the habit of doing this with my diary, and even now that I’ve realised it’s kind of weird I can’t quite convince myself to stop – it’ll ruin the consistency, you can’t run counter to house style, and plus if for some reason anyone else happens to look through it it’ll look like I’m admitting I was wrong. So caps it is. But ok, that’s all very well when it’s something sedate and sensible like OXEGEN or ANNIE’S LAUNCH or whatever, but then you get stuff like HONKIVERSARY or SOME CLASS OF YOKE IN LAN and soon you’re looking like some deranged concierge who doesn’t know how to quit, stringing syllables together and shouting them at the sky, hoping it sounds like enough like a real itinerary to fool the manager into leaving you be. So on balance, I should probably look into the lowercase, is I guess my point here.
Woke up. Fooled around on the internet. Cattle-penned into town on the Luas, watched Bad Lieutenant. Laughed my ass off. Got caffeined up, finished Cloud Atlas. Pinballed around Dublin in the rain, raided at least four bookshops. Watched with interest as my head and chest cavity filled with fireworks. Drank a can of Relentless on the way home. Texted my mother/sister/aunts about the mini-marathon – they did it in an hour and a half. Am impressed: it takes me that long to get up the morning. Current status: drinking cheap coffee out of a broken Elbow mug, writing formally adventurous fiction. Having slight trouble breathing, in the best possible way. Don’t know why days like this happen, can’t predict them, don’t really know how to bring them about; feel slightly gimpy drawing attention to it. But there you go.
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