Everbody Love Me Baby, What's the Matter With You?

The things people become fans of on Facebook sometimes concerns me. Not concerns me, but I fail to see the point of becoming a fan of something like ‘laughing’, or ‘holidays’ or ‘the Animals of Farthing Wood’, because these it is only natural that people would like these things and becoming a ‘fan’ of them is just redundant and doesn’t say anything about you apart from the fact that you have not realised this. Not becoming a fan does not mean that you do not like them. Facebook stalkers do not find your becoming a fan of ‘music’ useful to their studies.
Music. Has anyone ever been known to say ‘I hate music’ or even ‘music... hmm it doesn’t really bother me.’ ?
It must be that everyone likes some kind of music to some extent.

Maybe varying is how much music affects people. Several times a day something that happens, something that someone says or something I think of it reminds me of some lyric or other.
It happens so often that I hear a lyric that seems to encapsulate what I am thinking, or what have thought at one time or another that I wonder whether I really do think and feel these things, or I only do because I listen to the music?
Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable or am I miserable because I listen to pop music? Which came first, the music or the misery?
But it is not just misery. It is everything.

It is comforting though, knowing that someone else has felt the same as you do. Even if you are only to interpreting according to what you think and how you feel.
For example, just hearing Ben Folds singing ‘...and now it’s been ten years I’m still wondering who to be...” makes me feel a whole lot better about being confused about who I am.
Musicians as therapists –they let you know that other people understand how you are feeling, even if no one seems to want to listen to you.

I could write a whole list of lyrics which I find particularly meaningful but that would be extremely boring and a lot of them have changed recently after a lot of ‘come on mood shift, shift back to good again’

I seem to have recently come to the end of a friendship. A good old being ignored for no reason and avoided at all costs has brought on my ability to find a huge amount of meaning in many different songs. Pretty much the whole of ‘My Party is Better Than Yours’ by Emmy the Great is excellent, except maybe the last line ‘and I hate you as much as I miss you’, which doesn’t seem to apply in my situation. Of Montreal Cato as a Pun: “I can’t even pretend that you are my friend, what has happened to you and I? And don’t say that I have changed, ‘cause man, of course I have. Are you far too depressed now even to answer the phone? I guess you just want to shave you head, have a drink and be left alone’ = extremely appropriate.
Even The Mountain Goats’ ‘No Children’ is, although more extreme, is pretty useful in expressing my sentiments to a certain extent.

‘I hope it stays dark forever I hope the worst isn’t over I hope you blink before I do and I hope I never get sober and I hope when you think of me years down the line you can't find one good thing to say and I hope that if I found the strength to walk out You'd stay the hell out of my way I am drowning there is no sign of land your are coming down with me Hand in unloveable hand and I hope you die I hope we both die’

Good stuff. Although I don’t feel quite that strongly.

I did say that it is not only misery that you can find in songs, although to be honest, that is what I find them most appropriate for. There is a huge amount of love songs which I am unable to find a place for in my life experiences regardless of how much I enjoy listening to them. Although some may argue that the difference between a love song and a miserable song isn’t all that big. I can’t say. But that’s what High Fidelity seemed to tell us.

‘And so I do what I do and at least I exist. What could mean more than this? What could mean more, mean more?’ Excellent.

‘I wanna see her so that I can say Hey... KATE’ Excellent

‘If I hadn’t left early last night I would’ve made a speech to you. You’re not the only one you’re going to hurt. If you don’t believe me I don’t believe in you. It makes it all feel better does it? It makes you feel like heaven does it?’ etc. Excellent.

‘And when no hope was left in sight on that starry starry night, you took you life as lovers often do. But I could’ve told you, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.’ Excellent

Injuries to my thumbs

One of the most disturbing things, I find, is when I take a look at the ‘time played’ on Burnout III, and it tells me I’ve played for 123 hours, 48 minutes and 53 seconds. And then I wonder why I have wasted my time running vans off of ramps into busy intersections, trying to cause enough damage to get the points I need to be able to do the same thing but with a fire engine.
Most playstation etc games are just as useless. Actually, the best playstation games that I’ve played are the older ones with early 21st century graphics, the ones with really strange quests and voice overs that sometimes don’t have anything to do with what is going on. We have a great supply of these, seeing as most of the games we own are second hand from a friend. They are actually hilarious, ok.
A particularly good example is the first three Harry Potter playstation games. One of the problems Harry can get himself into in the second game is that he may run into a ‘hallucination mushroom’. After finding out the great joy it brought him to pick up some of the ominously named ‘cauldron cakes’ and was always carrying around some bottles of some sort of mood-altering liquid, we started to suspect a drug problem.
We had the first game in the computer version. How fun it was when our computer was so old that it would take over an hour for the video of Dumbledore welcoming Harry to Hogwarts to finish. The graphics in this one were particularly impressive. Things like Professor Flitwick gliding off a table, and Mrs Norris jumping very slowly from bookcase to bookcase in the library were some of the more interesting features.
Some of the extra quests you can go on are also particularly amusing, such as when Neville gets stuck behind a tapestry and for some reason the way to save him is to run to the greenhouses, and also the ‘foot race’ against an unknown student which I don’t think is actually possible to lose.
The fourth one is slightly better, and we have it on loan from my sister’s friend, due back ‘when they finish year 12’. This results in the occasional joke of ‘We’d better finish playing this, because we only have 3 years until we have to give it back!’ Such wit.
Another game which is the Lord of the Rings. In one of them there is a little part at the beginning when you choose which character you want to be. If you choose the little fat dwarf with what looks like a very solid beard and begin the game, you see Legalas run ahead of you, stand on the edge of a cliff and just fall off into a ravine. Seconds later he is back by your side shooting arrows into the faces of orcs.
We had the good fortune also to be given a loan of guitar hero for a few weeks. Any awesomeness usually associated with this game was diminished a bit because we didn’t actually have one of those really realistic miniature guitars, and so we had to play it using the normal playstation controllers. So we could pretend we were rocking out, but anyone watching could tell that we were just stupid. A note to anyone playing guitar hero 3, by the way, have a look at the audience at some point. Their dancing style is really one to be envied.
Yes. That’s right. Time Waster 2000 or what?

A game

This is a game. It’s not a very fun one, but you can do it if you are very bored, and occasionally has some slightly humorous results.
What you do, is go to an internet translator like Babelfish at Altavista and type in a little sentence or something and translate it into another language like German, for example.
Now what you do is translate the German BACK INTO ENGLISH. Outrageous, I know.

For example:
Once upon a time Little Red Riding Hood went into the woods. She was taking a shortcut to her friends house where she was going to take part in an all night orgy or sex and violence, given that her friend had just acquired a video. Unfortunately, along the way, she encountered a twisted old woman dressed as a wolf who stole Red Riding Hood’s red riding hood, making her Little Naked. She ran home and contacted the police.

And now IN GERMAN

Einst stieg Rotkäppchen in das Holz ein. Sie nahm eine Abkürzung zu ihrem Freundhaus, wohin sie im Begriff war, an einer Orgie oder ein Geschlecht und eine Gewalttätigkeit die ganze Nacht teilzunehmen, angenommen, ihr Freund gerade ein Video erworben hatte. Leider währenddessen traf sie eine verdrehte alte Frau an, die als Wolf gekleidet wurde, der rote rote Haube der Reithaube Reitstahl und bildete ihr wenig blank. Sie lief nach Hause und trat mit der Polizei in Verbindung.


And now in English again

Once Little Red Riding Hood entered into the wood. It took an abbreviation to its friend house, where it was in the process participating in a Orgie or a sex and an act of violence the whole night had assumed, its friend a straight video had acquired. It unfortunately meanwhile found a rotated old woman, who was dressed as a wolf, the red red hood of the riding hood riding steel and formed it a little brightly. It ran home and approached with the police.


Yes, it’s oh-so fun, I know. And it's not really a game.
Tell me yours

Henrietta

lived, like many other characters in my stories, in a caravan balanced on top of a steep hill.
One day there had been a strong wind, and the caravan had rolled down the hill, and into the local swimming pool. Henrietta had had to pay a large sum of money in repayments and had lost all of her possessions at the bottom of the diving pool. That was not a good day in the history of Henrietta. Luckily, most other days were good days, with only the occasional plastic bag over the head or chewing gum on the shoe incidents.
One night Henrietta went out with her friends, and woke up the next day in her caravan with a man named Frank. Her memories of the night before being very vague, she could only guess as to why this man called Frank was in her caravan, and, being quite an accurate guesser, was quite disturbed at the results. She had been about to label the day BAD on her desk calendar, when Frank started to make her a full English breakfast on the trangia that she used to cook her meals, complete with macaroni cheese and pickled onions. That day actually turned out the one of her best, and culminated in her marriage to Frank. They seemed to be made for each other, what with both of the having a certain penchant for beach fishing and sharing the ability to make milk come out of their eyes. Now, anyone could have told them that these were hardly a basis for a stable relationship, but Hank and Frenrietta managed to live together in the small caravan for 3 whole weeks before becoming sick of each other.
At the bottom of the hill, lived Mr Rodney Sayer, who, apart from sitting in the barber’s chayer, liked to watch Frank and Henrietta go about their daily business through his home made telescope. He watched them through the big end of the telescope so that they looked a long way away, and he would pretend that they were ants in the ant farm that he never had as a child. Rodney spent most nights alone, drinking ‘wine from a box’ and pretending that he was devastatingly good looking in his singlet and shorts. Rodney had a very sad life, especially when he didn’t take his pills.
Luckily, though, we don’t talk about him anymore, or you’d all be crying into your sleeves like Wade Walker.
Instead, we see some dots
.............................................................................................................................

Yes. I really do specialise in those little stories that go nowhere. What a talent. Sono la mia specialità, ma sono molto inutile.

Yes, Love

I have been spending far too much time with 60+ year olds lately. I don’t like it. People of this age group have a great propensity for stating the obvious, gossiping and talking about things which couldn’t possibly hold any interest to anyone else. Yesterday, for example, one old dear (relatively), told the story of someone else’s journey to Perth, giving detailed descriptions of all of the rest stops she took, her detour around Bridgetown, and even got so sidetracked from the point of the story that she told us what kind of sandwiches this woman’s children had (one was honey and the other vegemite). By the time this little story was over, I wasn’t quite sure whether it had actually had a point, or who they had even been talking about. Given the storytellers unfortunate ability to spout a large number of names in one sentence, wander all over the place within one particular theme, and talk incessantly, I was not even actually sure whether the main character of her story was in fact one or two people, seeing as, throughout the course of the plot, she seemed to have come through Bridgetown, gone on a detour through Boyup Brook to get to Donnybrook but was then able to recover from this traumatic ordeal for 30 minutes in Manjimup. (look at a map)
Along with a general inability to tell a story worth listening to, many people of this particular age have tend to over use the phrase “she said”, and it’s variations. For example: “ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now!’ she said, ‘I’ve just gone and dripped bleach on my trousers’ she said. So I said ‘Oh you dill,’ I said ‘you’ll just have to go and change them won’t you’ I said, ‘But I don’t want to get bleach those either!,’ she said.” Around this point, the listeners usually find some unfathomable comedic genius in what the speaker as said, and fall about laughing.
Other topics of interest seem to be describing chores they have done in detail, talking about their dogs and what they do to control them (complete with quality examples like “I just say ‘NO MEMPHIS’ and crack the whip), their own and their friends’ health/nervous problems, the repetition of stories of anything vaguely interesting that might have happened recently (like when they went to the pub TAB and won $57, and, my god, someone was drinking Jim Beam with a straw), and other madly interesting topics on which they are able to talk about for hours on end, all the while conveniently avoiding anything of any importance or significance in the rest of the world. And this is just the women.
The men of this particular age group all seem to think that they have acquired some sort of breathtaking wit with their age, such that it rivals even the likes of Wilde, Cleese and Kissinger. They often seem to forget that the last time they told a joke, no one laughed, and go on to make obvious, unimaginative and sometimes incomprehensible jokes. However, I have noticed during my studies that they often have a back up for the circumstance in which nobody laughs at their little witticisms. For example, one will always, ALWAYS, say “and, uhh…” after they have told a joke, as if this will somehow compensate for a lack of laughter. However, it often only serves to indicate to listeners that what has just been said WAS a joke and that laughter is the appropriate response. Sort of like a verbal-code-version of one of those cardboard LAUGH signs they have on sitcoms.
Anyway, when I’m 64, you’ll be older too, and will probably have grandchildren with names like Vera, Chuck and Dave, and we will insist on watching hospital programmes every night, too.

Ye Olde Shoppe

I work at a place that calls itself a café and ‘shoppe’. What is the difference between a shoppe and an ordinary old shop?, one may ask. As far as I can tell, the extra ‘pe’ on the end is just there to add a certain quaintness and olden days feel to the place. Apparently this is also achieved through the use of handwritten signs, lamps, a general reluctance to remove dust from horizontal surfaces and the hanging of dried flowers and, for some reason, corn, from the ceiling.
Even on the instruction pages in the kitchen, there are directions such as ‘sweep the shoppe before leaving’ and ‘always greet customers in the shoppe’. I’m under the impression that the ‘pe’ might stand for something, maybe ‘pretentious establishment’ or possibly ‘panda enclosure’, though I don’t see the relevance there.
One of the other factors which helps to turn this ordinary old shop into an extra special ‘shoppe’ in which you might want to spend lots of money, is the music which must be constantly played on a loop. It’s what one can only described as music for the deaf. Meditation music with names ‘Soul Suite’ and ‘From My Heart’. Even more disturbing is the large amount of CDs which boast the music of different areas played on panpipe, like ‘Panpipes of the Andes’, and the pans of pipe playing the music of Greece and Ireland.
Yes, yes, this music may be very atmospheric, and it may be they type of music that they play in all ‘shoppes’ these days, but come on, it’s not an elevator.
So triantiwontigongolope.

Feeling of Cups

I don’t know what that means. It is on the side of a note book that I have, and sometimes I just think of it. I’m feeling of cups. Or maybe it is what cups feel like. I don’t know, and I don’t really care.

The aroma of meat
Today I came home from work, and the person who I am staying with had cooked up a charming array of meat in a pot for his dogs. Even though the smell that had spread throughout the house was bad enough, I decided I should test my nerves by looking inside said pot. The contents, which included fish, kangaroo and a variety of other old pieces of meat that no one wanted anymore looked like dog food. That was a surprise, but then that was only at the top, and the texture was probably different at different levels. I don’t know because I didn’t hang around to find out. What drove me away was not how it looked, though, because I have actually seen dog food before, but the overpowering stench that wafted out of the pot. It didn’t really waft, actually, it more came out of the pot in a cloud that I’m surprised wasn’t brown and floated around my head like in a cartoon, or when you run into a ‘hallucinating mushroom’ in the second Harry Potter game on playstation.
That particular passage was dedicated to my sister, who has become a vegetarian for an unknown period of time. Actually, this experience might have turned me vegetarian too.

Peanut butter
I need to buy some peanut butter. Not many people know it, but peanut butter is actually a very controversial item. Like, most people know that you should be careful about eating it in public, in case you leave a particle of peanut in the air which a child might inhale and have an anaphylactic reaction to. However, there are other evils associated with peanut butter. For example, my own grandmother campaigned against the use of crunchy peanut butter in the canteen of the school my father attended, on account of the fact that the little bits of peanut could cause a child to choke. Because everyone knows that you chew all of your food up to pieces smaller than a peanut granule before you swallow. Another controversial issue surrounding what I have been calling ‘peanut butter’ is its name. Most people call it peanut butter I think, and that’s what it says on the jar, but everyone from my mother’s side of the family insist on calling it ‘peanut paste’, seeing as it is not actually butter, but a paste made from peanuts. Which is all very well, but, following that logic, coconut milk should then really be called ‘coconut juice’, and finger buns called ‘buns with icing on top’ etc.
So, those are all of the interesting and debatable issues surrounding peanut butter/paste, which, to me, are of pretty high interest and importance.

All of this is quite pointless, but I’m bored, I’m the chairman of the bored. And so, probably, are you after this lengthy monologue.