New Year Promises, New Year Lumps

In an effort to regulate my sleeping patterns and the order of my day, I’m trying to break myself into some good habits, which of course everyone’s always trying to do. But, I have a powerful weapon on my side, a tool of great power used for decades by self-congratulating self-help gurus. I have a list.

The list is the key to harnessing the power of our own guilt, look at those bulleted points there, each unaccomplished goal a sneering attack on your character, your own ambition mocking you in a booming voice, holding a knife to your throat and threatening to rape your self worth.

Ahem. So, yeah, a list, the same sort everyone makes at the beginning of the new year, full to the brim with hungover repentance and promises to the almighty Me of a better tomorrow. I have a slight advantage though, for starters it’s not New Year’s Day and I’m not hungover and I haven’t been hungover for a few days now. Which is where my list begins.

1. Drink less. Now listen up Davies as I’m only going to say this once, drinking every night no matter if it is just one or two jars, is totally unacceptable. You can feel your body working a whole lot smoother today after a few days off, can’t you? Right, there you are then. So, from now on you drink only a few times a week, and if you like you can go apeshit on those days, get so ballsed that you try to seduce streetlamps by crooning Lady in Red whilst wearing nothing but your mother’s underwear. Just have a couple of nights off a week so you can wake up in the morning and feel fresh, instead of being eaten inside out by the black hole of memory from the previous night.

2. Food. More of it. Better quality. I’m not succumbing to whims of Jamie Oliver here, but I truly think I was eating better in Comprehensive school, when the only crap they served was pizza comprising of 80% olive oil and sausages comprised of 40% expelled fellow pupils. At least 2 meals a day, at least one of which is lovingly crafted with your own hands. And no Davies, lifting the plastic film off the shit storm stroganoff, stirring it and putting it back in the microwave is not lovingly crafting it.

3. Books. Read at least 30 of them this year. You know all that time you spend constantly refreshing the pages of websites that only update twice a day? Well you can cut that right out now and go pick up book instead, you’ve got a pile of them to your right that you haven’t even touched yet, despite spending 2 quid on them and I will not have you wasting money young man. The 30 is just an arbitrary number and not that important, it’s just a goal to work towards, the important part is just getting some regular reading in. Before bed would be a good idea too, remember we discussed having a more regular routine earlier? Well this’ll help out with that.

4. Writing. Go back to all those half finished pieces and have a good crack at finishing them. Don’t criticise or over think them until you get to the end, that’s what redrafts are for. Don’t cut yourself down until you’ve finished. Get back to writing something everyday, write about how many tiny dead flies there are in the store room, write about the intricacies of clipping your toe nails, write about knocking one out to an episode of Thundercats. Write anything, you don’t even have to bother with sentences if you don’t fancy it, try just an endless stream of imaginary curse words, it’ll pick up your spirits if nothing else, you pansy ass fromelinger.

5. Exercise. Hmm, not so sure about this one. No in fact, sod that, I like my beer belly just the way it is, in fact this year I think I’ll attempt to join a heavier division. Right, so no exercise and more fags, got that?

There are more here on this bit of paper but I’m fed up of talking to myself in a condescending voice, I’d rather just get on with it now.

For the record, the growth in my armpit that has been expanding and contracting for the last 4 months has turn into a boil, complete with three massive puking yellow heads on it. Either that or a boil has grown over the top of it, there’s no way to be sure yet but I promise to keep you posted.

Update: Boil is popped and leaking like your momma’s minge when I saunter in wearing her negligee, suckers. Whether the boil is a seperate entity to the lump is still unknown.

Right then, let’s have some MF Doom and Tubeway Army to celebrate.

let’s start with a toughie: time

My relationship with the passage of time goes back to my earliest memories. I was a pure sci-fi absorbing machine as a child, I blame this on my parents, who are unwitting sci-fi nerds the likes of Star Trek, Quantum Leap, Doctor Who, were all crammed down my entertainment hungry neck. Even on Saturday mornings when I had free reign of the remote control, most of the programming I selected had a fantastical element, but then that’s what kids enjoy. They like to see imaginative characters in mind-bending situations, or at least they did when I was one, seems like now they start off wanting to listen to oddly shaped creatures talk gibberish and then eventually progress to cheering people hitting each other with swords. I would spend hours each weekend constructing various time machines, cockamamie contraptions adorned with calculators and watches, attached with sellotape or blue-tac. Upon the ignition of that weeks contraption I could never be sure if I had travelled back in time or not, this being an age before I knew the significance of the hands on a clock.

I assume my love/hate relationship with time started at that point, but I only suggest this as it’s the first time I can remember questioning the constraints of time. As with most things of an emo nature, my gripes with time started during my teenage years, when my rapidly expanding laziness began to conflict with the seemingly quickening passage of time. The stock excuse of “There aren’t enough hours in the day” was merely code for “I can’t be arsed”, but as we all know, regularly used lies have a way of rooting themselves solidly in the field of the mind and becoming fake truths. And so it was that I came to curse the slow progression of the hands of a clock, each tick another second where I did nothing and each tock a following second where I regretted it.

Before the laziness came awe. The concept of a dimension, unlike the physical ones we take for granted, that could not be manipulated fascinating; time travelling paradoxical episodes of Star Trek, a basket of excitement and a can of questioning worms, all of them arguing and trying to be louder than that obnoxious worm on the opposite side of the can. Even today I’d rather watch old episodes of Doctor Who than almost any other television show. Of course, this is rooted in a compost of fantasy, the desire to be a master of time, a controller of destiny (specifically mine), must surely come from deep set regrets and general feelings of inadequacy? Well, probably, it is a power fantasy after all, and inadequacy can’t help but crush on power, gazing at it from the back of the classroom, drawing their names inside a love heart with an arrow through it on inadequacy’s notebook, when it should be paying attention to its coursework.

So I was very surprised when I experienced time which wasn’t linear A to B stuff. It was during my hippy, devil may care days of being a recent university dropout, a housemate and her chauffeur came home from a free party, still whizzing on MD and special K. So when they offered I had no choice to accept, after all, you can’t be sober and enjoy the company of the head fucked for a jealous man that makes. Why I said yes to a phat, 45” single long catch up line is still somewhat of a mystery, but up my nose it went. Sometime after it kicked in (it’s always difficult to figure out when you’re fucked on K, until the point when you become too fucked) I did my spiderman act, electing to clamber up the walls from the basement rather than use the stairs and with heavy set, wonky legs stumbled into the kitchen. It was there that I found the object I had been searching for all my life, a time machine; it’s form, a washing machine. Staring into the reflective barrel I became detached physically from time, I was stood in my room before my drugged up housemate came home, I was in the basement getting drugged up myself, I was having a garbled conversation with another housemate that hadn’t occurred yet. It was a hell of a fucking K-Hole, I couldn’t be sure if I was high or not, all I know is that linear time was a difficult concept to abide by until I woke up the next morning. And that’s where that story ends.

These days I don’t care enough to question time, or to manipulate it with substances and such. I don’t even care enough to study our great physicians, I’d rather wait for the simplified version to filter through to the storyline of a random science fiction program. I’d rather spend my time watching it go past whilst strolling around in my own head, at this very moment I’m perfectly contented with being lazy, so time no longer need be my scapegoat.