Floundering Bounder.

I saw today something that occurs everyday, in fact, i see it every day. Today though, I really saw it.

I was feeling vulnerable on my daily route to work. The wind was biting cold and i had selected a thin Plastic Mack to shroud my quivering cocktail stick bones. My belly was empty and had tightened itself into a cramp when faced with the morning revulsion of feeding the cat. Cat food is so oppressively pungent and looks like a war ration. The last thing i need as i attempt to iron shirts, hunt for matching socks and find those bloody keys that I've hidden from myself, is to be reminded of World War one and all the suffering that makes my morning shout, stamp and whinge look like a trip to Hawaii with Pamela Anderson in tow.

I stopped in the street on my last leg of the journey, shoulders arched up over my head like a wing-ed Demon. I stopped because i wanted a respite from the nature of the journey to work. A to B. A, being a desirable though ultimately purposeless home, full of beds, meals and idle entertainment. B, being the work place, my physical bread and butter, though my metaphysical desert inducing famine.

When people travel from A to B, especially if it is work related, they seem almost entirely single minded, operating on some sort of auto pilot. The strangest thing is the level of frustration they display when anything obstructs this journey, even for an instant. Often, it has been apparent that the traveller will almost be searching for frustration, huffing with indigence at the person in front who objected to leaping fearlessly in front of an oncoming Juggernaut travelling at 60 mph, and shouting at it, 'BACK, BACK YOU VEHICLE OF SATAN, I AM RIGHTEOUS, I AM GOING FROM A to B AND THOU SHALT NOT OBSTRUCT ME LEST YOU BE SMOTE'. It seems somewhat unreasonable on reflection.

I on the other hand like to stop at any given point on a journey, simply to re-assert my freedom. I will go to work, I will go to B, but I will do it my way, in my time and i will find something to enjoy or to involve myself in en route if it bloody kills me. The feeling is not one of defiance or of a desperate search for individuality amongst the grinding cogs of social necessity, it is similar to the childhood trudge toward a ticking off.

One figure of authority would send you to visit another, be it parent or teacher. In between, whatever happens at the two ends of spectrum, is your time and yours alone. So why rush it? Inevitably i would be moping along like a rain soaked beagle either brimming with indigence or racked with trepidation but also guilt. I was rarely reprimanded unless I had crossed some moral boundary, caused misery, inflicted something upon someone and was as such shaken to my bones by an empathy that rendered my previous action senseless. I would on these walks, stop, sit, idle, chew the fat, fatten a goose, goose a gander anything to create a personal experience separate from the point of the journey so that I might take something of my own from the experience.

That is what I was doing today, when I saw it.

A man in his 50's wearing a suit looking pained by despair, jogging on the spot behind a small cluster of people moving slower than he wished down the street. Not enough people to be a permanent block, a brief obstruction.

Why? It is unlikely that this was an impromptu bid to reclaim the fitness of a forgotten youth. It is unlikely that he was a raging but bold agoraphobic bravely but desperately racing to his destination like a child that needs the loo.

It is likely that he was late or at risk of becoming late. It is also likely that he was high enough up the food chain at his age, that it was the shitty rod that he has shoved up his own anus and inflicted upon everyone else in the name of protocol that he was beating himself with.

Or was it that he simply wasn't thinking? If he was late, then he is exactly that, late and no amount of running on the spot will turn back time. Ambitious though running against the turn of the earth on it's axis is, it won't get it moving the other way, and even if it did, the desired effect would not emerge. If he is nearly late, then he will be in work there or thereabouts on time, a few minutes either side and simply walking at a higher pace where possible would suffice. Attempting to plow through the thudding grey rock of London Commuter crowding is only adding frustration and a sense of being wronged to his plight.

It only takes a brief look around to notice that they are all doing the same thing, panic stricken, desperate to get to work convinced of their purpose.

Why is this so distasteful to my palate?

It's the greed, the way they demand that their journey is more important than everyone else's and even worse, the way this futile act that tickles the gag reflex creates an almost universal sense of righteousness permitting them to take the aforementioned shitty stick and jab it in my eye whenever my methods, my scribble, drifts outside of the line that they are all adhering to with Biblical fervour.

So, I stood and watched him go, it took him fucking ages and i thought it was hilarious when he smacked his brief case against a lamp post and ran on as if it hadn't happened.

Then I went to work, my journey my own.

'Everything happens for a reason'.

This morning entailed a bus journey and me nursing my 5th hangover of the working week.

I was acutely aware of the 'imago horribilus' of my fermenting features.

I looked like alchohol someone who had experimented with Botox with a do it yourself kit, ultimately only managing to inflate ones own face.

This in mind, despite the misery of attempting to catch a morning bus and the gymnastic one footed stance required to sqeeze into my allotted centimeter square (a right of the londoner), I carried with me a sympathy for my fellow passengers endurance of my presence.

However, there is always one person who insists on approaching the boundaries of tolerance, then burns the boundary, invades your space and claims it for their own is there not?

In this instance the protagonist of my pompous huffing was a South African lady making a phone call at incredible volumes. The volume itself was a mere trifle, her piercing accent a light clip around the ear and the dullness of her responses nothing more than a barely noticable headache cureable with a quick popping of a 16pence paracetamol....

...Her crime was far more sinster, a lurker of a crime, the type of crime that should rest naked in the cold, damp, dripping corner of a medieval dungeon, fed only with rats and mouldy bread.

She finished almost every sentence of her conversation with the remark, 'Every thing happens for a reason'.

Be sure that it does, but i fail to see how this oral parping can be tolerated. A statement designed to console or explain, but offering none of the necessary facets or functionality required to achieve these things save to be open to interpretation. The extended reach and purpose of this abomination is that the woman has not formulated an opinion on what is being said to her. She has been presented with a problem by someone in need, glanced into the dusty cupboard of her mind and lazily hurled out, 'Every thing happens for a reason'.

I hardly think that a survivor of a Tsunami would be greatly comforted by the sentiment, nor indeed the actual reason.

Most tsunamis are caused by earthquakes generated in a subduction zone, an area where an oceanic plate is being forced down into the mantle by plate tectonic forces. The friction between the subducting plate and the overriding plate is enormous. This friction prevents a slow and steady rate of subduction and instead the two plates become "stuck". As the stuck plate continues to descend into the mantle the motion causes a slow distortion of the overriding plage. The result is an accumulation of energy very similar to the energy stored in a compressed spring. Energy can accumulate in the overriding plate over a long period of time - decades or even centuries. Energy accumulates in the overriding plate until it exceeds the frictional forces between the two stuck plates. When this happens, the overriding plate snaps back into an unrestrained position. This sudden motion is the cause of the tsunami - because it gives an enormous shove to the overlying water. At the same time, inland areas of the overriding plate are suddenly lowered. The moving wave begins travelling out from where the earthquake has occurred. Some of the water travels out and across the ocean basin, and, at the same time, water rushes landward to flood the recently lowered shoreline.

So there you go. Your family is dead. Your house destroyed. The family pet missing presumed searching for his bone, never to find to it, eventually becoming stuck in a rabbit hole and starving to death. Worry not though, because as a South African lady on the number 243 once told me, 'everything happens for a reason'.

Unfortunately, I spent such a lavish amount of time and energy chewing on this wasp, that the insufferbale journey was over before I knew it, leaving a real window of opportunity for this woman with an elbow instead of a brain, to with reasonable cause suggest to me that, indeed, 'everything happens for a reason'.

Bronchial Heroism.

Sometimes all we need to re-invigorate our souls is a change of scenery.

If one stays in the same place, visiting the same shops, seeing the same faces and routinely travelling along the same routes for too long without loving, (and i mean loving like I loved my Optimus Prime action figure when i was 8), one's environment it all fades out into background noise. The subtle daily differences become lost behind a deafening drum, a hum drum to a hum bug.

The turgid mud that becomes day to day activity amid almost complete sensual break down is almost impossible to observe as the total annihilation of the senses by this routine trudge is so complete as to mask even it's own existance.

Today I made my way to work on a route new to me, from my new rented accomodation. Every footstep was unsure of itself. This was not least to be blamed on 3 days of almost literally bathing in whiskey, but the way that each step and every decision was as potent as being stabbed with a pin was screamingly apparant.

The real gift, the santa's stocking brimming with brazil nuts and freshly ripened fruit that change brought me, was not fully realised until i entered an unto now unfrequented strip of tube journey. Necessity nuzzled me into the breast of Goliath of a man during the Londoners favourite early morning game of sardines made ever more exciting by it's jarring thrusting locomotion between A and B on the tube.

Just ever so slightly behind me, his brief case wedged into the small of my back was the vile criminal who was crushing my face into the warm embrace of an unwilling recipients chest. This man was in his mid 50's and was enthusiastically relaying to a younger near suicidal colleague something insidious. Regulations and their implications were being reeled off referred to only by numbers and the occasional snort of disbelief that regulation 24 could be mistakenly actioned as a regulation 432. The type of bone marrow disolving boob who is this enthralled by the intimacies of his job must invariably be singularly unimaginative, decidedly lonley or power hungry with about as much access to power as a communist peasant in 1950's Russia.

The man looked like someone had attempted to remove him from the fabric of reality with laser treatment. A faded imprint regretably conceived some 50 years gone, only a lack of technology had left his stain in place.

Despite all of his crimes it could so easily have been nothing more than a part of the morning din had this not been a special day glittering with new observations. However, the man seemed to have a bronchial condition and a sniff reflex. With the regularity and relentlessness of an artillery gun during the Allied bombardment at the Somme, he roared from the depths of his twitching raw pestilant lungs, then suddenly would snort a crackling rich thick slime back from his nostrils.

This sound, this horror, smashed into my ears, drowned my entire being like a sudden tidal wave of steaming manure, constantly withdrawing then swamping my arched tense expectant whole over and over.

Even now, 4 hours later, i want to scream at the resonance of the experience, shove him in front of a hurtling train then smash the remains into oblivion with a mallet.

Yet,

He's the best thing that has happened to me for 3 months and probably the best thing that will happen for another 3 months, because i actually heard him and will likely hear and see all of the wonderful things that have been thrust into context by him.

Thank you, you feculant, blabbering, oafish plague on mankind, may you spread your spluttering filth upon another deserving soul and bring them back from their unwitting brink.

If i were a German...

It was a dull grey morning in London.

It was THIS dull grey morning in London, and all was..is...well....dull. I'm sure it is all very exciting somewhere in the country.

Somewhere, a slack jawed youth with an unfathomably twisted mind, plunging inexorably downward into the depths of an ever darkening emotional state of the blues is caressing his fathers blunderbuss with menacing intent.

I however am content in my office, twitching, barking and occasionally dozing off in the 10 yard space that i can brand my very own. 'I'll put an open jar of pickles there if i so wish damn you, that bit's still my desk!'.

I read this morning of the shootings in a school in Germany. It made me feel uneasy, as if there were a madness floating indiscriminately around and could land at any moment....

Then suddenly from the foggy morning silence that rests upon the office, muffling acceptance of the rawness of the start of a working day...a shrill test of my credentials as a lunatic:

'I saw Watchmen last week.' States the ghoulish pissant who sits behind me.

'Is it good?' One of her foul culturally famished behavioural conformist associates, bleated in instinctual response.

'It was, but there was too much of the comic book in the film, it was too long, they copied it too directly from the comic'.

'Have you read the book then?'

'No.'

..................................

Is this the moment when I rise suddenly from my chair and begin firing, all of the worlds contradictions, disappointments and mundane vapid waste of potential, channelling through my veins into the pump action shot gun and onward, delivering armageddon to the infidels? Is it?

No.

The woolly headed fools have wrapped my tormented soul in a cotton wool, muffing all and any independent thought.

What a relief, I must be sane...

In communicado.

Man in streets: 'eh eh'

Me: 'Can i help you?'

Man: Waves his hands around, seemingly doing some sort of tribal dance.

Me: (noticing a cigarette balanced between his long nailed, crow legged, yellow fingers)...'Would you like a light'.

Man: Nods and grins. He resembles a child, except a smoking child with high waisted chino's and wrinkles. He accepts the lighter, and returns it.

Me: 'Thanks' (not sure why i'm thankful...is it for surviving the ordeal?)

Man: 'East London Mosque?' He points and shrugs.

Me: (Master of communication as I am, I presume that he wants to know where it is). 'What road is it on'.

Man: 'Yes, someone died'.

Me: 'What road it is it on?' (pointing at a road sign)

Man: 'Yes'.

Me: 'That way'.

Man: Hobbels off elated holding the cigarette near his mouth but without smoking it.

............................

'If I were a German, you'd be dead'.
Defiance 2008

Stop Horsing around you Clown.

At race tracks across the country men have turned the past time of betting on the races into a veritable art form. This sport is unlike any other form of betting as it is genuinely tangible to play the odds, study form and know the participants and the conditions well enough to have a talent for the gamble.

The Horse is as an important an individual in this focal point of public interest as the jockey or the trainer. Huge sums of money are invested in the purchase, breeding, training and maintenance of these beasts and often in the minds of the participants the Horse has become more revered and more beloved than the people.

This is just one example of how the common horse is held in such high regard. Show jumping, Polo, Rodeo's etc. Areas of police work rely on horses, soldiers across the globe have changed the shape of battles consequently the political map with careful usage of the Horse. What of Gengis Khan had he not had a Horse?

This fascination with the animal is so significant that some groups of people are actually referred to as 'Horsey'.

The Horse is without a shadow of a doubt a symbol of success, power, beauty and its absence would have profoundly changed the world and large swathes of social interaction, self perceptions and recreational activities.

How can it be then that the term 'Horsing around' is utilised with so similar a meaning as the term, 'Clowning around'?

After all, the current status of the average clown is far from prodgious and one might struggle to recall the last time a Clown changed swayed the pendulum of world political power (George Bush aside). There was even a BBC documentary on Clowns which exposed the sad state of the Clowning industry for what it has become. One Clown in question, Tommy Tickle displayed the rotting underbelly of being a clown in its rawest form, as quoted in the Times Tommy is,

'A plump, bald man with a voice as crusty as Krusty's, he even thought his own daughter “vile”. Kids these days, they had no moral boundaries. He always wore a cricket box, because you can tell a child 100 jokes but there is none as funny as punching a clown in the nuts. '

To put it bluntly, you wouldn't kick a Horse in the nuts.

Presumably, both Horse and Clown were once of equal ilk? Both often seen messing about, inducing hilarity but essentially ignoring the rigours of the day to day bind of a job in adminstration perhaps. The intimation of, 'Clowning' or 'Horsing' around is that it is a harmless though unproductive activity, the cyncisim in the statements is tapered with an endearing quality and unlikely to escalate to full reprimand or actual disdain.

How fortunes have changed for the Clown and the Horse. Horses have put in the hard graft, they are as reliable as a Horse for example. The key for the Horse is that they have retained a sense of independence despite becoming humourless grafters. This independence seems to have saved them from the pitfalls of team bonding. You never see a group of Horses out in a bar leering over a barmaid and downing pints of lager whilst standing on their heads.

The Clown has also retained an independence, but it is perhaps more an enforced lonliness that has slowly lead to an increasing alcholoism and hatred of Children. This personal abuse has since undermined the very essence of their point, to bring joy and to raise spirits. Instead they have been raising spirits in a darkened room all alone, in a glass....dressed as a clown.

A sorry demise for Clowns, a heroic rise to fame for Horses. What could possibly have lead to a situation where these two could have gone in such different directions?

The likely protagonist would appear to be the enemy of the people, the nemisis of the intellectual and the oppressor of the female race. Vanity. Quite simply, during those pivotal socially embrionic days of the latter Teenage years, who would it be less embarrasing to be seen with, a Clown or a Horse?

This is what the Clown must endure, as children of younger and younger ages learn to love horses and kick Clowns in the balls, Clowns lose their sense of fun and with every declining step lurch further toward extinction. As for the Horse, i fear their motives. After all, never trust a Trojan Horse.