Aunt H's bath salts did not suit Edvard's delicate constitution.
A few days ago, while watching the news on TV with my Dad and nephew:
Nephew: "Please. Can we watch Cartoon Network? Pleeeaase?" Me: "Sorry buddy. You know what Grandpa's like if he doesn't get his hourly news fix. Look, an explosion!"
Nephew: "Whoa! What is that?" Me: "Oh, some terrorist somewhere basically strapped a bomb to his chest and then let it go off in the middle of the day in a shopping mall."
Nephew: "O.K. What was that?" Me: "Pretty cool huh? It's called an earthquake. The earth just kind of starts shaking, like that building in Italy, see? The shakes get so bad, buildings start tumbling down."
Me: "Oh come on, Dad! Why do you always turn it off when the sports bit comes on?" Dad: "I don't want your nephew to grow up thinking winning is everything. Sports is too competitive." Nephew: "Yeah, I want to play a video game." Dad: "No more video games for you. Too much violence."
Dad and I step out on the veranda to look at the moon, grunt at each other and say things like "looks like rain, oh she's 'bout to come down hard" though we know nothing about such matters. It helps us feel manly. That's when we hear the strains of the most terrifying music known to man.
We run back inside, but it's too late. The lights have been turned off, but the TV is on as we know only too well. The opening credits roll to a halt, and the screen is ablaze in the fiery reality of Junior MasterChef.
Looming out of the wasteland between couch and TV is the silhouette of what was once my little nephew, wielding remote control in hand. I stifle a 120 million dollar scream.
"Get the power drill," says Dad, "we have to finish him before he turns, or he'll infect the others."
Icy Highs's Music Recco: "The Dope Show" from Mechanical Animals (1998), by Marilyn Manson
Two years now since my contemporaries started regaling me with tales of the indescribable joy of being a home-owner. That moment you sign on the dotted line, they said. That first "honey, I'm home". Love on living room furniture.
Yesterday, I took my own tentative first step up the property ladder. Not an actual piece of land of course, not even a studio. That would be too permanent, too real. I refer to a little oyster named the world wide web, virtual estate, if you will. I bought my first computer.
Yes, my first computer. In this day and age, you mutter. Fucking hippie, you shake your head. I'm familiar with them things of course, I didn't just crawl out from under the metaphorical rock. I just happen to have lived all my adult life in 24/7 cities with 24/7 internet cafes. Chennai, then Glasgow, then London (where this blog was concieved), back to Glasgow, now Singapore. Or my flatmate had one.
I can't honestly say it was a concious decision not to own one, but I know I felt a certain pride at the disbelief in people's voices when they found out about it. The few times I've had a computer lying around at home -a girlfriend's say, or a mate's- it just meant I was more in touch with people I didn't particularly want to hear from. I mean listening to voicemails freaks me out.
Why now then? Because I've hit rock bottom, mostly. I counted, and counted again, and came to the conclusion that I have a total of about 2 real friends. One of them is my ex, so that's only going to last so long. I figure I'm too old to spend birthdays and new year's eves by my lonesome, or worse, with other equally lonely souls.
Oh, I realize emails and facebook are not going to save me from myself. No, the plan is to do stuff. And since I cannot be arsed to scale peaks or save lives -as these good folks do so well, by the way- I decided to do the only thing I really enjoy. I'm going to sit down and finish that novel. And I'm going to send umpteen unsolicited emails to publishers and print out all the rejection letters and build a life-size papier-mache cast of my cock - bit like this lovely lady here. I'll just have to recycle most of them, really.
Anyway, I didn't want to buy a PC though they're much nicer to type on. I just can't get over the 'Personal Computer' oxymoron. They're machines, for God's sakes. Someday they're all going to come alive and eat our babies. They're not personal. That's as bad as dressing up your microwave for dinner. 'Laptops' on the other hand are too literal. Yes, you mostly use them while they're perched atop your lap. Where's the imagination in that? I can't write on something that boringly-named.
So, sentimentalist that I am, I bought this thing named -endearingly- 'Notebook'. Which is nothing like a notebook of course. And the keyboard was clearly designed with the next evolutionary cycle in mind. They certainly don't accomodate human fingers. But 'Notebook', neverthless. My mate says they're a few things short of being a superior thing which means it's much slower and much less efficient than other superior thing-fitted computers. A bit like my social skills.
I leave you with this (slightly modified) quote from Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides:
"From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able catch the rainbow of conciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent immigrant, I'm dipping into principal, spending it all..."
A friend of mine, well-intentioned as he always is, emailed me this song by a band called The Honey Trees. Even before I hear the first needy purr of the synthesizer, before the slickly produced video begins to roll, before the bridge mellows out into the chorus, I know exactly what's coming. It's the same whineysweet tune you've heard a hundred times before, the harmless type that fades nicely into the background, that Volvo will probably feature in an ad sometime in the near-now. The girls all look and dress and laugh like Zooey Deschanel, and the boys...well, the boys look like Zooey Deschanel too. How did this happen?
Have you bought a pair of jeans lately? Did you know they've completely done away with the old system of measurement? Its not enough to just look for a 32 waist any more. There's a skinny 32, an urban skinny 32, a slim 32, a slimmer-than-slim 32, a so-skinny-you're-probably-just-bones 32. And if you ask really nicely, the so-skinny-she's-an-alien shop assistant will fish out a comfortable 32 from the back of the establishment. If it's a busy day, they're yours for free. If it's not crowded, she'll direct you to a little room at the back where the fat people pay for their clothes. Rip off the label with a jackhammer, throw the garment in an anonymous, plain white bag and whisper: "just don't tell anyone you shop here, yeah?"
They're everywhere, these Slim Jims. At work, at the pub, at the cinema. I've even seen a couple at the local take-away or I'd be convinced they're all starving, morally-ambiguous vampires. Some of them are even known to sparkle. They are believed to breathe only through their eyelashes because their noses are in a constant state of being turned up in disgust at the Mainstream. But who or what is this Mainstream? I look around and all I see are clones and clones of clones and clones of skinny people. I see brogues and fedoras and waistcoats and teeshirts with pictures of bands that look and sound and laugh like other bands. I see The Great Depression, or a Truman Show-like screen at the end of the horizon that's actually a cleverly disguised vagina with an extended clitoris that's cleverly disguised to look like a conveyor belt, delivering row after row of Topshop-babies, one after the other, in an unending line.
I'm no more alone in my despair than they are in their indie-kinship of course. I've heard the odd grumble about these beautiful men looking like they're photoshopped, the odd celeb outcry against Size Zero. But these upholders of dignity of the horizontally challenged are all ridiculously fit themselves. Sure they can talk! As a 90s child, this whole thing scores heavily on my injustice-meter. Cable TV and sitcoms have let me down again. What happened to the lovable, overweight losers who get the cute girl? They're hung by their excess skin on a clothesline in Zooey Deschanel's garage, that's what. She's probably waiting for them to loosen up a little to make a holder for her folder full of quirky brain n' bean salad recipes.
