That Sounds Like Something I'd Say...

Women

2011-12-19T11:36:00.030Z

“The female of the species is more deadly than the male” – Rudyard Kipling, 1911.

Men are useless now. Years ago, back in monkey times, women needed us for a few things; we had to kill animals, and gather vegetables and sticks and carry them home without losing ourselves or dropping them, especially during pregnancy; we had to use our superior physical strength to fight or kill other poor idiot blokes like us when food was scarce; and finally, importantly, our ugly, shoddily-evolved genitals contained exactly half of the key formula for making more of us (along with all the evolutionary imperatives of grabby-rapey hormones.) Not any more.

While women still contain the all-important wombs and mammary glands, of course, whatever men were bringing to the baby-making equation – which was only ever a teaspoon of slop, anyway – they’ve had stored and refrigerated in sperm banks en masse and worldwide for years. If I was a paranoid man – and if anyone ever tells you that I am, don’t trust them – I would look at paid sperm donation as the beginning marker of a global conspiracy to further shuffle men to the cliff-edges of a well-deserved extinction. The majority of smart women now already regard guys as oafish, dense sort of muscles on legs – shaved up-right gorillas that couldn’t open a jar and answer a question without somehow exploding a shed – and who can blame them? It’s a reputation we actively encourage as we bloke around the pub competing for girls’ attention like dim puppies, constantly and subconsciously ranking our cocks against each others through sports, cars, beer and lifting. We’ve only ever had about two useful purposes throughout history anyway: sperm and being a bit stronger; just about everything else we did involved getting in the way and murdering each other. Now women have access to incredible, industrial machinery, guns, sex toys, votes and all the spunk, men are basically redundant, and it won’t be long before women start to realise this, and hopefully wonder why in the name of name of God’s ovaries they are still putting up with so much of our shit.

Because men, almost exclusively through the use or threat of aggression, have oppressed and subjugated women on-and-off, but mostly on, throughout history, with rape and violence, then religion and politics, then war and wages, then cultural and emotional control, but that tide, however slowly, is retreating.

Imagine a future where all men suddenly vanished from the planet – women, you can pretend we all simultaneously burst in a shower of glitter and compassion, if you’d like – the human race would surely not only survive with only the slight aid of pipettes, but it’s not a difficult feat to imagine it would absolutely flourish; perhaps in to some kind of glorious war-and-worry-free utopia, with free-range flowers and fair-trade orgasms everywhere, and a future fresh generation of good boys that actually magically respected the women who birthed them. Reverse the occasion, though, getting rid of all the ladies – and men, you can imagine some terminal frantic orgy, if that helps – and not only would the complete extinction of humanity be looming within a lifespan, but that time would be spent in a violent one-handed rampant haze of reckless masturbatory abandon that would render every continent uninhabitable to complex life by breakfast.

OK. Fine.

Men in their current form, then, are doomed, but fortunately for us (men, of which I am one) we still have some time to resist our fate -- a lucky and much needed head-start to improve ourselves -- because some of the silliest women now are still not quite over keeping themselves down. Ignoring the constant incredible cycle of make-up, plucking, shaving, bleaching, scrubbing, dying, waxing, cutting, trimming, poking, pulling, pushing, nipping, tucking, wearing of self-inflicted high-heeled torture devices, and whatever-else-society-encourages women to do in order to appear 'younger' or ‘prettier’ for us ugly lumps, the worst culprits, in my opinion, are still the women who insist on being treated like a woman. “Chivalry is dead,” moans Nora Mongingbottom, a woman who is in no way fictional, whenever a man doesn’t hold the door for her, or pull out her chair first, or hit someone who insults her fat ankles. Brave women jumped in front of horses for that kind of equality, and every time some pie-footed dolt like Nora insists on preferential treatment purely because of their gender, they’re ignorantly menstruating all over those achievements, and giving some men exactly the excuse they need to keep oppressing women.

It is almost exactly these kinds of women, too, that are often the ones expecting men to buy them drinks at the bar in exchange for their company, or the potential chance of some future fucking, and reinforcing, always, the idea that they are sex objects – slightly subtle prostitutes that need only be paid with a dozen vodka-cokes and a casual compliment. Indeed, the withholding of sex, at all, by less liberated women is perhaps part of this same sad power struggle, even though this party-pooping peskiness relies at some level on the puritan notion that women don't need or enjoy sex as much as men, which if you are a woman, or have ever had sex with one in the correct hole, is clearly wacky. All the orgasms and the bouncing and the cuddling and such, it’s equally good fun for everyone, but once again some oppressive or self-censoring forces seem to make it more difficult for women to indulge in the same entertaining, common and condomy exploits as men without earning some evil, oppressive label (far too often from their own camp) like 'slag,' 'slut' or 'cock-slappy vagina wind-flaps whore-trousers.'

Regardless, it is the strongest women who do not seek sex for emotional validation, or withhold it for the same reason.

Agreed.

Yet it’s hard to find these positive role-models for young women in the Media today, led as they are in Music by sellotape-dressed dullards covered scalp-to-toe-ring in a four-inch armour of make-up, slutting around on rooftops in front of on-fire helicopters, and singing about lip-gloss while systematically exposing as much nipple and vagina as is currently legal to televise to teenagers; and in Literature and Cinema by Bella, the cooking, cleaning, can’t-smile, coma-dump, kill-yourself psycho-bint heroine of Twilight, a franchise that grossed enough money to reconstruct a Caribbean island in orbit entirely out of jaffa cakes, but has done about as much for the empowerment of women as 2 Girls 1 Cup. Indeed, even the young free-market economist and social activist Beyoncé Knowles, the main one in popular arse-wobble unit Destiny’s Child and Jay-Z’s 100th problem, once praised “all the mommas who profit dollas,” [Child, D., “Independent Women,” 2000] but then later conceded in a radical reversal of her post-feminist stance (while thrusting and spanking herself in a swimsuit and heels) that “if you like it then you should have put a ring on it” [Knowles, B., “Singles Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” 2008].

"All I want is to be respected as a human and an artist. (Please untangle me.)"

Either way, while it is clear that more control is, and should be, shifting back towards women, men have still obviously got a bit of time left to get their shit together, and develop at least some small reasons that women might want to keep us around if we want to have any part of a future rightfully belonging to peace-loving lesbians. I don’t know exactly how, but I’m guessing a good start would be to get over our runaway macho-macho bullshit, commit to the thinking of fairness, stop lying to get into girls’ pants, satisfy them when we do, give up words like ‘slut’ as nasty useless weapons, insist on sharing the bill and the drinks and the door-opening, stop calling women ‘crazy’ without the slightest acknowledgement that we may have helped, and learn that expressing a ‘girly’ emotion once in a while does in no way lessen our manly ability to punch to death a charging elephant.

SHE'S WATCHING YOU, MALE.

Then, and only then, may the future play out this common, heterosexual scenario:

A first date ends, and a ‘good’ first date it was too – there was some touching of the knee and elbow, not enough food because neither party wanted to be caught chewing, two bottles of whatever the fuck was 3 lines under the House wine (because nobody in their right mind knows anything about wine apart from what to order when they’re pretending they do), a bit of giggling and some eyebrows, one conversation about a mutually interesting topic like Paris or trombones, some lip-bitey business, then even a walk home that involved further cackling and some of those cheeky sentences with two possible meanings about "coming up" or "going down" or whatever. The increasingly convincing-looking pair eventually meander themselves intact all the way to the Man’s front door, and the Woman goes enthusiastically for The Kiss, maybe even a little penis, but the Man quickly pulls back. “I’ve had a lovely evening,” he says, “Good night.” He pecks her lightly on the cheek, and then jogs up the stairs, closing the door behind him. As the lady lingers on the step for several seconds, he leans back against the door and melts into a delirious dopey grin... before she finally turns away with a melancholy smile, hands deep in her pockets, the Man still on her mind, and walks away in to the long and lonesome night.

Weird / Different

2011-12-08T17:57:00.038Z

People are a fascinating bunch of animals because the more of them you meet, the more you become convinced they’re all basically the same, give or take the odd genital or language, but the more you also become aware of how much they believe they’re not.

There seems to be no end to the clever systems they use to divide themselves, or limits to the creative ways that they can split our oven-rising humanity pie into smaller and slimmer slices. It’s easy to waggle disappointed fingers at religions, nationalities, cultures, and political beliefs, of course, but they’re just the crust of the overly pie-based metaphor, and not the real filling of how people pretend to be different to each other.

The common consensus, essentially, is that there are two kinds of people. I don’t mean men and women, obviously, who would all be the same anyway if you actually managed to keep them away from each other for long enough, and I definitely don’t mean children and adults, who are only different in height, hairiness and how much they’re pretending to like each other. No, the two kinds of human are normal people, who are easily identifiable as the people most like you, and weird people, who are, obviously, all completely silly.

It’s a simple system, and the nicest part about it is you can start dividing people up straight away without having to obtain any of that pesky information stuff, which the internet has proved there is far too much of anyway to ever do anything useful with, other than invent the internet to hold it all.

A normal person in America, for example, does not need to learn where Montenegro is to decide that they’re never going there, which direction a Muslim is praying if he's not blocking the drive, or what an anarchist’s political beliefs are as long as they are far enough away from the living room that they can’t stamp on the cat or steal all the nice bowls.

Weird people are easy to find because they believe, look like, and get up to all kinds of bonkers. Some of them dance around with weird limbs and joints that shouldn't exist, some live in bizarre places that are definitely far too something to live in, others do peculiar and unnecessary sex stuff involving the bum, and some have strange hobbies that make as much sense as stapling your shopping list to the middle of your back and going to a disco with lots of tinned soup inside your hat. Weird people’s eccentricities can be as vast and varied as they are obviously outlandish, but the point is they’re not normal.

Freaks

Normal people, on the other hand, are even easier to find because they’re the people like you. Nice, normal, lovely you. You know how normal you are? Well, they’re like that too. They’re a much smaller group of people, admittedly, but they are a lot more obvious because they are nearer and, well, they’re not so bloody weird. In fact, the key trick to finding these normal people, if you ever lose them, is to listen out for which group of people is calling a different group of people ‘weird.’ Give them a bit of cheese, and you're in.

That's all society is, after all - a lot of people trying and failing to peacefully share the cheese.

That’s the current system, anyway, and people seem to like it because it maximises the amount of time they can spend sitting down, inflating themselves with wine, and hating people they will never, ever meet unless they accidentally leave The Pub for thousands of miles in the opposite direction of their television. On a personal level, it’s simple, easy and familiar, and it takes all that looky-thinky-choosey nonsense out of decisions about who to like and dislike.

On an institutional level, it works well for governments because once politicians have figured out which group has the most people, or which people are most like the other people and least like the people not like the other people, they know exactly who to promise a future lovely biscuit to while they pepper-spray everyone else in their actual faces. And it also works well for companies and advertisers too, because they can keep selling people stuff that keeps them normal, like all the other normal people, and that business is safe in the future because they can even change what 'normal' is once-a-year by adding an extra gigabyte of Angry Birds to your bra, or insisting that Vicious Slut Red is the New Denim, and Bland Old Monogamous Red is for frigid trolls in wicker sandals who still think it’s 1991.

I'm afraid it's the pepper-spray for you chaps

In fact, it works at almost every level of society, from countries to classes, from regions to religions, and from friendships to families. As long as the little folks know who the normal people are, they know who they are working with and who they are working against.

It’s perfect.

Well, almost perfect.

To be honest, it does still have one single teeny-tiny pesky Sarkozy-sized glitch that prevents the whole thing from running quite as smoothly as it could. While you might think it would be as simple as Shakira for people to split themselves into the two groups provided, the problem is that everybody thinks they are normal. The Hindus and the hipsters, the punks and the priests, the socialists and the scouts, the chavs and the Chinese, the goths and the gays, the Eskimos and the emos, the drivers and the druggies, even the fucking Australians.

Basically, because everyone decided to jump aboard the Good Ship Normal, it meant that all the people who weren’t like them, which ended up being most of them, were automatically left floating somewhere in the big wide Sea of Weird, but all those same ‘weird’ people thought they were normal too, and that the other ‘normal’ people were the weird ones.

Bloody humans, nothing’s ever simple is it?

Either way, what could have been a beautiful and efficient engine has struggled on for years, like Eddie Murphy’s integrity or a car full of crisps, spluttering occasionally with the same small, common and continual inefficiencies. Hatred, discrimination, lynching, wars, etc. You know, minor niggles.

That's rich coming from black-and-white people

There is a very simple upgrade available, though, and that’s incredibly lucky because clearly the human race can’t do anything more complicated than carry an egg without murdering the Jews.

Firstly, to ease the transition, we can stick with the ‘normal’ category if we want – that part of the plan was working out alright anyway until we all piled on it like Dan Brown at a shit sentence buffet – but we have to change the second word from weird to different. That’s all.

Weird to different.

The problem before was that everyone was certain they were normal, because they were surrounded by other people who were like them, and because nobody ever introduced ‘different’ as a comfortable alternative, that meant they thought everyone who wasn’t like them was weird, even though they were normal too, just in a different way. It forced people, especially their awful fucking leaders, to invent all these incredible groups that only ever existed in their minds, arranged on concepts as diverse as music tastes, wealth, colour, piercings, philosophy, politics, hairstyle, diet, outfits, traditions, magic beliefs, accents, absorbency, puddingness, pigeonability, whatever. And it meant a lot of problems because there was no room for anything that wasn’t normal, but that was equally true for both sides, so conflicts were as inevitable as the intestinal collapse you’d suffer if you had to drink a pint of liquid éclair every time Alan Sugar was unnecessarily pleased with himself.

Every day, everywhere, everyone gets up in the morning with roughly all of the same objectives- food, safety, shelter, love, health, happiness, avoiding wasps and Mormons – yet somehow manage to get in each other’s way at almost every available opportunity like too many pricks in too small a pickle jar. Humans cause each other almost constant unnecessary trouble and suffering for the simple reason that they don’t understand each other, and they don’t try to.

Hand, wall, stranger, BANG, world peace

The new system will gradually put an end to all that, and it’s incredibly easy to introduce. It’s slow but it’s simple. It just involves one person at a time realising that the word ‘weird’ has always meant ‘different,’ and that ‘weird’ only ever existed because we were so convinced that we were normal. We created all the sides and teams and classes ever, like a silly, magic spider conjuring more legs so it could kick itself in extra ways, and that is why it shouldn’t sound like naive idealism to say that we can get rid of them all again, if we want, with just a simple and consistent shift in our thinking; with one big, little realisation.

Nobody is weird and nobody is normal.

We are all just different.

Now can someone please tell that attention-twat Lady Gaga before she tries to put an entire industrialised town on her head and breaks her neck penis-humping some film prop made of tits and madness.

Death

2011-11-23T21:06:00.021Z

According to numbers and science and stuff, 100% of us are going to die. That’s a lot. Yet despite this important, common event being one that we will all share regardless of race, sex and bank balance, the fact of our mortality is the one that we collectively seem the most poorly adjusted to. It’s the topic that we try to think and talk about the least to avoid unpleasantness, and yet the one that has caused the most problems for our species since we became the only animals clever and arrogant and silly enough to start worrying about it. Indeed, Professor Numbers from the University of Guessing says that 90% of the people on the planet are still so afraid of dying that they spend their entire lives pretending and telling each other that they won’t, and choose instead to believe that they’re going to come back immediately as a butterfly or live forever in a big cake in the sky or something.

The reason that these childish fantasies have persisted through thousands of years of science, philosophy and logic, is, of course, that we still don’t know what happens when we die. More specifically – because we do know what happens when other people die (they become suddenly, infinitely boring, then later smell funny and melt) – we do not know how to reconcile our weird, subjective experience of reality (our consciousness, or ‘soul’ if you want) with the idea of an objective universe without us in it to experience it. Sentences like that aside, we literally can’t imagine not existing. We’re very used to it, and we’ve never experienced the opposite. It’s impossible for us to think about what it’s like to not think.

Yet we know that one day we are going to die, we know that every living second brings it closer, and we know there is absolutely no way to cheat it.

It is no wonder, then, that the lack of any right answer to a question that fully changes everything terrifies us more than the thought of being locked in a room with Mel Gibson and some gin. And it is no further wonder that the impossibility of disproving any claim about death is what protects religion’s attempts to have a cheeky guess, and why people desperately want and try so, so, so hard to believe those guesses regardless of how little they seem to make sense or explain anything.

However, just because we cannot be Right does not mean that we cannot be Less Wrong, and luckily we don’t even have to die to realise that some of humanity’s biggest, or at least latest, theories aren’t entirely convincing. Take the Judeo-Christian idea of Heaven, for example, which looks absolutely lovely in the brochures but makes about as much sense in the real world as trying to give a surprise reflexology massage to a sleeping alligator.

We can forget entirely that Hell sounds exactly like the kind of place humans would invent to scare their kids into eating their peas, that separating people in to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is a moral system about as complex as Danny Dyer’s acting, and that concepts like pleasure are entirely impossible without an equal and opposite kick-in-the-balls to compare them to, and consider the notion of Heaven rationally, logically, sarcastically, to figure out if it contains any impossibilities or paradoxes. The idea of the Christian afterlife (and no other religion is much different) is that a being that exists separate to everything in our universe in an unknowable dimension outside of space and time, that has existed forever, don’t ask, apparently not evolving, created you, specifically, and your appendix, in a different dimension inside space and time that he controls, with a master plan, and free will to choose for yourself, obviously, don’t ask, because he loves you, ignore those fossils, but judges you, because he knows everything, Jesus, and can change everything, praying, then judges the sum worth of your obedience, forgiving you, sort of, on a simplistic scale of human behaviour from the separate and unknowable dimension, angels, to choose whether you should once again rejoin, somehow, that separate dimension outside of space and time, without sin, to exist as yourself, again, but forever, not evolving, don’t ask, or go to a third dimension, separate to all other dimensions outside of space and time, but hotter, which is for naughty children and gays.

White, handsome Jesus explains his appendix to some tramps

It’s all about as lovely-sounding and unlikely as the sky raining hammers on an open-air Justin Beiber concert. Still, I hear you ask, why would you want to strip this comforting illusion from someone, you smug, awful cunt?

There is a common opinion, I think, that because atheism or science or mushrooms or yoga do not provide any convincing alternatives to the Afterlife that this freedom-from-facts is supposed to make good and rational people tolerate religious beliefs, no matter how bonkers they seem when you bullet-point them on a badger, as long as they do something, anything, to help people cope with the potentially agonising dilemma of Death. And it’s very hard to argue against the idea of giving a little comfort to someone who is frightened or grieving without looking like the kind of prick who would kick down a sandcastle or abuse Christmas in a basement, for almost the exact same reasons that it is easier to continue certain other simple lies rather than confront a difficult truth. But there is, I think, an extremely urgent, important and humane reason to challenge these beliefs.

Children believe in Santa Claus because a lot of us adults tell them he’s real. In one way, it’s an abuse of our supposed moral authority. Children ask us questions about how the world works because they’re truth-seeking, pooey little curiosity-machines, and then we tell them about flying, bullied reindeer, magic slave elves who prefer rich kids, and obese jolly men who disobey property rights and work for Coca-Cola. Of course, it’s generally regarded as an OK lie to tell, because it’s a pretty weak tangle of fibs that falls apart on the first tug of the tinsel. Children should work it out fairly young as long as you don’t drop them too much, and adults should admit to their collective deceit quickly unless they want to seem as daft as two ducks juggling. It basically works out alright, doesn’t it? The child cries for an afternoon, Mum apologises through the door, Dad has a brandy, Granddad falls down a manhole, and everyone carries on as normal with just some minor trust issues that therapy can always iron out later. However, imagine for one christmassy minute that a child starts to wonder if Santa Claus is real, and asks the parents, who insist that he is, but who eventually get angry or end the conversation if it persists. Imagine if the same child kept asking other figures of moral authority – teachers, priests, politicians – and they all maintained that Santa Claus is real, got upset or angry or offended when the child kept asking, then also refused to continue talking about it. The two options for the child are obvious; he would either continue to believe in Santa Claus because it is too painful to imagine that all of the sources of moral authority in his life would lie about their lack of knowledge, or he would be ostracised from the collective belief by the Truth’s inevitable ability to expose liars, frauds, arseholes, and sneaky, pretend present-givers.

This is, of course, atheism’s relationship with religion in far too much of the world.

Some people find it extremely difficult to hear because religious beliefs are almost universally protected, pandered to and pussy-footed around, but there is a reason that we’re afraid of death, and afraid to talk about it. It is because religion cannot prevent our fear of death; it can only create, prolong and protect it. It gives us the flimsy promise of an afterlife in exchange for our blind, unquestioning trust. It dangles the incentive of eternity in front of us, a reward for our earthly loyalty, and then tells us to close our eyes and wait for it. It performs a crafty but unconvincing magic trick, on children mostly, that defines mortality out of existence. Disregarding how much people really trust their faith, and I suspect the truth of that is masked often by the real, psychological harm inflicted on young minds by lying and abuse, religious beliefs are so profoundly damaging because they arrogantly divert us from perhaps the most important question of all: what if we are temporary?

There is absolutely no reason to believe there is an afterlife, at all, and the people most likely to find that hard, sad or scary are the people who have always had their fingers in their ears, deluded themselves into passivity, and naively extended their existential expectations to the borders of infinite. These people aren’t stupid. They’re not fools. Their irrational beliefs aren’t the product of an intellectual shortcoming of any kind. The reality is far sadder. They are the victims of a subtle but lasting child abuse. They were told what to think by all those who claimed to care most about them in the world, people whose good intentions were so often only matched by their inadvertently disastrous results. To question certain beliefs, unfortunately, is to question the authority and moral good of the people who believe them, and there are strong emotional and social stigmas in place that make that difficult. You can see it, I think, in the way some people live their lives – especially when it looks like they’re not living them at all, but just trying to get through them as quickly as they can and without dropping too many jars in the supermarket. The worst offenders follow The Rules, whatever they’re told they are by anyone with a haircut, place their happiness inexplicably in collecting things, carbon-copy the lives of their parents, look increasingly like someone with a bag of charity shop clothes and a cruel sense of humour has mismanaged a walrus, and grow old and fat and slow in a house never more than 80 footsteps in any direction from the bit of land some awful vagina plonked them on to.

Death is a really important thing to adjust to, and not to hide from as we are so actively encouraged, because it should be the biggest driving factor of how we choose to live our lives, decide what we want, and manage our health and happiness. You are going to die, so is every one you know, that inevitably is governed by no rules or regulations about how, why, where or when, and as you get older with those around you, it will become an increasingly regular part of your life, and, of course, as looming, indifferent and ever-nearer a certainty as the next Twilight novel. Think about how quickly it felt that you got to where you are now, and then imagine, if you can, how quickly the second chunk ahead of you will go. There’s no fucking time to waste, really, and you will never be younger than you are now. There is no afterlife for you in any form that is like you are now -- this is it, right here, right now, and it shouldn’t take the clichéd near-death experience to trigger some productive, excited urgency deep in your bones. Life is the near-death experience.

If the thought of dying still scares you, it’s probably because you’ve never been given the chance to adjust to it healthily. It might be a kick in the head now, but it’s a kick in the head when you're napping on the train track. It might be painful, but it’s the radiotherapy that will cure the cancer.

We should think about death, a lot maybe, and we should talk about it, and we should carry it’s presence around as a proud and constant millstone on our necks – not because it is depressing or frightening, but because it is what reminds us that we are alive now, and that we won’t be for long. It should inspire us, motivate us, help us forgive, forget, and remind us not to worry about what we can’t change, or scream at us to repair our priorities from the bizarre and crazed arrangement that society now encourages.

And once you’ve killed the delusions of religion and refused the corrupt pledges of an afterlife, there is no reason to be afraid of death. There will be no final judgement on your character, no hierarchy in which you will be assigned a place forever, no eternity to anguish over your mortal mistakes, and, healthiest of all, no lasting reasons to despair over the deaths of others. Amy Winehouse, as we all found out by text message, recently and accidentally boozed herself dead, with the final coroner's report concluding that she died of ‘misadventure,’ arguably the most fun of all the possible causes. The whole episode was pasted in the news as a tragedy, and it was of course, but for us, I think, not her. She was watching telly and listening to music, steadily glugging her way through several bottles of vodka, slipping numbly and unknowingly into her Last Sleep – and, perhaps for someone who seemed to fit so uneasily in this world, release. She started with nothing and ended with nothing. It is us who suffer, grieve, weep and wonder in her wake, or wait for a sombre, slapped-together collection of B-sides at Christmas, while she, simply, does not exist anymore. Her deathday was shared by hundreds of thousands of others on our planet, as is everyone’s, yet the fact that we cry most for those we know best should be the biggest clue to the selfish fear at the heart of our grieving. We have lost something, the Dead have not. Funerals are not for them.

Because when we die, we are not there.

When your time comes, it is not you who will die -- it is the Universe that will end.

There is nothing to be frightened of.

Death is not a call to Futility and Depression. It can be nothing, I’m sure, but one loud and desperate, pleading Call to Arms. To adventure, experiment and investigate, to dream and dare and dance and drink, to race and run and fight and fall over, and get back up, crash around, and do it all again every day your body lets you; to trade pleasure with pain however you can, and to grow and change and fix yourself; to laugh at Fear and Doubt when they whisper their pathetic noises in your ear, to cram as much love and laughter in to your life, and as many good others as you can find, as you can, while you can -- to live as one big shiny, screaming Fuck You to whatever indifferent forces dropped us here without a map or purpose, and an even bigger one to whatever now keeps us from living how we want. Death shouldn’t be the handbrake that leaves us rusting in some garage of our own invention, but a red and seductive pedal clamped to the end of our legs, that wont let go until the cliff edge is behind us, the canyon’s fall in front, and all we can think as that Last Wind rushes through our hair is what a great, mad ride it was when we really, really wanted it to be.

Children

2011-09-30T14:44:00.011+01:00

Humans absolutely love having children. That's not just my opinion, you can see it on charts. Some scientists even believe that the world's population is now so explosive and dangerously unsustainable that by 2050, the Earth will begin to tilt off its axis and float away from the Sun. That's not true, obviously, that's just a bit of fun. The actual reasons we're fucked are a lot more real and bleak and terrifying, but I don't want to upset any one in the meantime so instead I've compiled a happy little list of the Top 10 reasons why maybe not having kids could be good as well, yeah?

Top 10 Reasons to Maybe Not Have Kids

Children will ask you questions all the time as soon as they can yap their stupid little heads into familiar bloody sounds, and you’ll have to answer them all, try to, or at least lie to them. If honesty is a characteristic you cherish, and it probably should be, then you’ll very quickly find yourself having these regularly annoying and annoyingly regular conversations where you realise you can’t really explain why you’re wearing a tie, or why bedtime is at 9, or why you’re hugging one animal whilst eating another in a bap, or why you told mummy she looks pretty even though she woke up looking like Picasso drew a mushroom. You’ll have to try and explain these things, of course, and they’ll keep asking why, why, why, daddy, why, mummy, why, why, why, and then somewhere down that line of questioning you’ll realise that you have no idea why you’re saying what you're saying at all. You’ll realise there is no sensible reason that you wear a tie, or why bedtime is at 9, or why you do almost anything in life. Then maybe you’ll take the easy route, lie and tell them that Santa Claus just wont love them if they don’t be quiet, right now, for the tooth bunny in Heaven so you can have a little bit of quiet time alone to put wine and sausages in to your head.

What if it doesn’t like being alive? That’ll be your fault, wont it, and they’ll definitely tell you with all the indignant whining of a prick with a dropped popsicle. You’ll get “I wish I’d never been born!” screamed at you every time you pause their MegaKillerStabbyGun game for two minutes, or make them eat a bit of vegetable with their oven-melted chicken glow-sticks. Once they’re born, they’ll have to deal with all the confusion involved in being alive, stuck on a track now that’s hard to get off, and heading always towards that sticky and uncertain end. Maybe that little life is happy wherever it is in yours or someone else’s bollocks, and it shouldn’t be yanked into an increasingly busy and complicated world – maybe it’s swimming around somewhere, just fine, living a lovely little sperm life where you're not making choices for it at all.

You can’t drink with children. Well, you can, obviously, but they wont be very good at it. And they’ll probably grow up deformed and lumpy in all the wrong ways, and making bleugh-bloops-gurh-gurh noises instead of words until they're 29. Not only that, but it also becomes a lot harder to drink with parents because they're now indefinitely busy with wee, poo, snot, dribble, and sick. Meanwhile, however, if you don’t have kids you can be that smug arsehole who asks their mummy-and-daddy friends about how their Saturday morning swimming lesson was while waiting impatiently to completely story-top that boring shit by replying that your weekend binge-eating LSD-laced doughnuts off young strippers’ bodies was “alright” as well.

What if you have a child and it just turns out to be rubbish? Imagine if you raised David Cameron, how absolutely fucking disappointed you’d be. You’re not allowed to just put it in a big sock and hit it on the mantelpiece, of course, that’s illegal, so you’ll just have to keep cooking for it and buying it trousers as it gets taller and taller and louder and louder, until it’s just spitting, boozing and lolloping around your neighbourhood looking enough like you that it might as well be a big neon sign on your house that says, ‘WE'RE SHIT.’

On the other hand, blimey, what if it grows up and it’s just fucking brilliant? That’s even worse! Then you’ll have to worry about the thing constantly, as it inevitably runs around aiming itself at nails and blunt objects with all the co-ordination of a camel that’s had its bones replaced with butterbeans. And if it survives all that, and nowadays it probably bloody will, that’s only the start of the never-ending nightmare of unconditionally loving someone. You’ll then have to worry about bullies, and perverts in vans, and if they're learning to spell quick enough, then they’ll get older still and you’ll have to worry about drugs, and STDs, and their precious, stupid hearts, then they’ll get even older, and you’ll still have to worry about their jobs, and their balding, and that ever-sneaking suspicion that their fated life partner is probably just some smiling, cheating demon who’s waiting to cripple them emotionally and steal half their plastic.

You haven’t always got to do what your naturally-selected instincts tell you to. You already have to pander to your biology every time you’re hungry or thirsty or tired or threatened or horny, all of which are hormone-induced feelings evolved to keep you alive and fucking. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s hard-wired into us to fancy each other’s firm or curvy bodies, and then to try and plug our genitals into each others -- an impulse Nature uses to convert those hormones into more humans. None of us know why we do these things because there is no reason. No reason at all outside the unexplained-but-desired perpetual survival of our species. We already have to die as a necessary sacrifice to our collective gene pool, so why not keep screwing Mother Nature with a condom until she's quite ready to explain why exactly you shouldn't.

The world is already over-populated. Look around you, we’re bloody everywhere. Snow, deserts, volcanoes, space, Swindon, there’s literally nowhere shit enough that we won’t put bricks around us and sit there until we die. We’ll basically settle anywhere; in any grey, lifeless, bog of a hole, and yes, I know Swindon’s got a pool club. Humans move about and spread into all the gaps, grinding the environments around them into stuff to make their lives more comfortable, and then continue multiplying like the virus-holding-sticks that they are. If everyone keeps having kids, they’ll literally be walking around banging into each other all day with nowhere to live and nothing to eat, until we can finally invent a big, expensive NASA cannon and start shooting them optimistically in the direction of Mars.

And what about that Global Warming thing that everybody and their squirrel is radically altering their lives for? If you’re somewhat environmentally-conscious, or a hippy-ish kind of person that loves a bit of tree, or even one of these annoying new breed of people who masturbate over the idea that the human race should, for some clumsy reason, survive, survive more, and continue surviving, then you’re the last person that should be having a load of kids, unless your plan is to literally bundle them all into the walls like a horrific meaty insulation paste. You can cycle all you want to the airport, and compost your toenails, and wash an oil-covered crab, and put your 6 Blu-Ray players on standby while you separate your thick paper from your thin card, but if you choose to have a child your carbon footprint is still going to be the size of an Electric Elephant's. Our own methane emissions, our ridiculously lavish food demands, our burn-all-the-things energy and transport systems, and our childish desires to have every brand-new shiny iPhone 76 and the latest strip-screen, 4D nuclear-satellite television, means the act of having a child now is basically the same as popping out a smelly, smiley pollution factory. If you’re gonna do that, you might as well drive to Australia in an asbestos tank towing a caravan of large rare mammals and set fire to all your batteries in an igloo.

If you do get old (and there are at least 23 reasons why that might be OK too), and you do suddenly find yourself looking in every direction at an orchestra of happy parents around you while you’re lying swastika-shaped in a hot tub eating cheesecake from a cup and decadently farting, you might well be pray to a nagging, silly thought that somewhere in your Free and Farty little life you made the wrong decision, and now you’re missing out on something. By this point, you’re very likely to be staring at your misshapen and useless genitals, haggard and lonely, and weeping a single tear into your bath or mug of cake. But then, hopefully just before you reach for the toaster, you’ll remember... ADOPTION! That’s right, other people’s kids! While almost every other sheep-like, caring cretin in the world is holding hands and crossing roads with their accidental DNA-smashed-in-a bag offspring, you’ll be able to choose yours! What do you want? A fat one, a thin one, black, white, too many legs, not enough arms? They’re all there! Or you could just do what celebrities do now, and fly out to some entirely devastated African country-or-other with your publicist and a photographer, and bring back a few handfuls of your favourites in a sack.

Let's face it, all your bloody friends are going to have kids, anyway, and they’ll probably be more than happy to share. Who needs your own, when you can have a whole range of bonkers little things that you can parent a bit on a Sunday but then give back when the football’s on? You can even be that ‘cool Uncle’ character entirely absent from Irish Catholic stereotypes, and teach them mischievous things like punching and swearwords, but then not have to deal with the boring consequences at things like Parents Evenings and Court. In fact, if you absolutely adore children, that’s one of the best reasons to never have your own. Just remember that bit of advice that’s famous for being entirely fucking creepy when used in the context of kids. Why read a book when you can join a library?

Page 32

2011-08-18T18:01:00.016+01:00

Back in January, on the morning of the 17th to be precise, I was hung-over and on my way home from some stupid night in London where I had almost certainly treated my primary bodily organs with all the care of someone who didn't plan to continue using them. With the morning’s rush-hour commuters heading decidedly in the opposite direction of fun, I slumped down on the train and picked up a discarded copy of the Metro, a free city newspaper primarily published so people have something to point their bleak fucking faces at instead of each other. I browsed lazily to find out what the Daily Mail media conglomerate believed me and every other literate Londoner needed to know about the planet’s adventures since the morning before.

Two people you're definitely not encouraged to judge immediately as freaks

‘We have 28 rats – and we love ‘em,’ reads the first headline over the page, underneath a photo of an unsmiling couple with a dozen pet rodents crawling on them, an oddity you’d probably notice quickly if it wasn’t for the massive and quite frankly mesmerising bogie suspended so proudly in her nostril.

After I eventually managed to pull my eyes away from the lady’s baffling inattention to things inside her face that she probably didn't want published, I meandered through a few more pages. Headline highlights included: ‘Pickles admits ‘gentle’ battle,’ a small story about a Tory politician called Eric Pickles who did something or other that nobody gives a bun about because he is outrageously, openly fat, and called Eric fucking Pickles; ‘Kelly sex op shock,’ page 7, where ‘it has emerged,’ apparently, that Kelly Osborne’s former fiancé cheated on her with a transsexual, although it might as well have been an exhaust pipe or a rolled-up receipt or a damp cabbage going by his obviously crippled sense of judgement; ‘A whiff of Neverland puts the eau in Jacko,’ a title so baffling it makes the attached article on page 25 about an illegal immigrant selling perfume made from a deceased man’s flowers look absolutely fucking sensible; and finally, ‘British Bruce Lee makes it in China,’ where Ross McGuinness, who is clearly a genius for convincing at least one person in the world he's a journalist, begins his piece on page 29 with, ‘IF THE British had made a version of Enter the Dragon, it might have turned out a little like this,’ before going on to explain how the actual events that he’s word-spazzing about --a man from Brighton judging martial arts students aged seven to seventy performing solo routines—are so far unlike that film that he might as well have begun his article with ‘IF BRUCE Lee’s spirit possessed a cracker...’ then waffled on about some blissful, alternative reality where people called Ross McGuiness aren’t allowed within 10 metres of a keyboard.

Finally, I reached pages 32, the first half of a double-page spread that affected me enough at the time to save the entire newspaper, place it in a drawer in my desk, and ignore it until some elusive, future time when I would locate it again and write what I might have written then if I didn’t have so much flat booze sloshing around my guts.

Where page 32 was different from the rest of the newspaper, it seemed to me, was that it contained a small piece of text in the bottom-left corner, squashed beneath a massive advert for a credit card and two articles glorifying British soldiers for their past ‘bravery,’ that was actual news, here in fun-ending full:

"21 civilians die in string of attacks

A TOTAL of 21 civilians were killed in two roadside bombings and an airstrike in Afghanistan at the weekend. Nine of the dead, including a child, were hit by a bomb yesterday as they drove to a wedding in Pul-e-Khumri in northern Baghlan province. Another six – half of them children – died the previous day in a Nato-led airstrike on two houses in mountainous eastern Kunar; local officials said. The raid killed ‘numerous’ insurgents identified as an imminent threat to ground forces, claimed the Nato’s International Security Assistance Force. Six civilians were killed by a roadside bomb in Helmand Province."

It was amongst the smallest pieces in the paper, yet it seemed to me to contain the most tragic of events. Why was it not a big story? Why was it not the biggest story? Are we so desensitised to war and violence that it just wasn’t interesting? Are we so far away from the consequences of our militaries that we just don’t care? Are we just so beaten down by the relentless stream of similar stories that we are too numb and passive to react? I don’t know.

What is perhaps more enlightening than the apparent insignificance of the death of 21 civilians -- including the three children killed by the entirely unaccountable Nato military force – though, is the context of the article within the Paper. The top article, ‘Mechanic’s war heroics told on film 70 years on,’ tells the story of Wally Harris, a veteran of the Second World War, who shot and killed up to 15 German soldiers in an action the Paper and the filmmakers describe as ‘heroic,’ but which he himself describes as “terrifying” and “daft.” Further down the page, but no different in its patriotic tone, is a second article, ‘Ex-soldier puts his MC on eBay,’ a story about the former infantryman Alan Owens who was awarded the Military Cross medal for his “bravery and selfless commitment” in Afghanistan, then auctioned his small piece of literally useless metal on eBay with a cheeky starting price of £25,000. The connection between these two men, though their actions were separated by 70 blooming baby-booming years, is that they are both British and, therefore, the good guys.

As we digest the information that 21 civilians – real people, like us – were blown to pieces by explosives in a region thousands of miles away from the governments that sanctioned their deaths, we are equally expected to regard other soldiers who blindly followed orders as the bravest and most heroic of our citizens.

IT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT.

We don’t even need to learn anything new to realise it, either, just un-learn some of the silly whizz that we've probably never scrutinised. And, if you'll bear with me for a minute, I promise after to explain how this entire massive rant was the product of me drinking too much coffee, then getting angry at a packet of ham.

Humanity is a species whose work you’re probably familiar with. Lightbulbs, picnics, hinges, et cetera. There’s close to 7,000,000,000 of them at the moment, all alike except for culture and how they do their hair, and they’ve been divided crudely but apparently convincingly into about 250 major clubs that I refer to, perhaps far too aware of my own ironic tone, as ‘countries.’ Anthems, wars, netball teams – you’ve seen them.

However, these ‘countries,’ through the unattended practice of having political masters, leaders, hierarchical systems and governments, can and should be more accurately described as tax farms. They require things like walls, fences, borders, militaries, passports and ID cards to envelope an effectively non-consensual group of similar-ish people, ‘citizens’ we’ll call them, within their borders from whom they can forcibly extract money. Borders aren’t so much gatehouses to keep ‘them’ out, whoever those pesky problem people are, but more like the pen that keeps ‘us’ in.

Each club, or ‘country,’ has its own leader, or small groups of leaders, who, after attacking or tricking their ‘citizens,’ or at the very least spoon-feeding them the illusion of democracy, are protected in this role by the very guns and bombs and armies that they use to wrestle resources from each other, which they have done throughout history, and still do as completely obviously today to any one not living inside a discarded fridge. Meanwhile, these unbelievably violent and greedy acts of war are committed at the expense of soldiers, and funded by the very tax-payers that they claim to represent the interests of. Tax-payers, incidentally, that when asked would presumably insist on preferring better roads, teachers, nurses and water cannons for spraying fires and young people, than a trail of dead, brown people somewhere bloody foreign.

The 'them and us' has never been 'our' people and people from different countries, no matter how much we have always been actively encouraged in to that mode of thinking (the French! the Nazis! The Communists! The Immigrants! The Terrorists!) The idea that there is an ‘us’ at all is perhaps the biggest lie told in all of politics.

It is also not hard to see what a farmer could want to take from another farm, and inherent in that shit, nursery-level sentence is the basic truth behind every single war since the beginning of these fucking cults we call countries. The 'them and us' has always, ALWAYS been the people of the world and those who rule them; those brainwashed and forced to kill each other, or fund it with stolen chunks of their pay-checks, and the people who control that system. You cannot have violence abroad without first having violence at home. You cannot point guns at foreign citizens without first pointing them at your own.

If all this is making me sound like a hippy-lefty-liberal-something-conspiracy-sensationalist-bloggy-twat-sort-of-a-man, here’s an illuminating quote from one of modern history’s particularly cuntiest cunts Hermann Göring, the Nazi general who had one of the nicer jobs in the long and unpleasant series of events we call World War II, who later picked up prizes in both the War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity categories of the Nuremburg Awards Ceremony, then killed himself the night before his death sentence:

“Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Nothing has changed. It is not British soldiers fighting Iraqi or Afghan soldiers, for example. Thousands of men weren’t sitting around either side of a continent, twiddling their trigger-finger-fucking-thumbs and getting increasingly hateful towards another group of people they’ve never met before. No, it is the British (Replace As Appropriate) government fighting its ‘enemies,’ and ‘our troops’ are merely the currency of exchange used to achieve whatever political ends are being sought. Oil, contracts, strategic military footholds, revenge, whatever -- it doesn’t fucking matter really when we’ll buy any old twonk about terrorists hating our freedom, or weapons of mass destruction (remember them?) being pointed directly at our local pub. We’re fools to believe that governments care about soldiers' lives. Soldiers are not individual people to these warmongering arseholes -- they’re pawns in a real-life game of chess. They’re dispensable. Statistic-wrapped resources. And the saddest thing is that soldiers will keep being used as tools and meat weapons because we keep pushing them into harm’s way with our dreadful, hysterical fucking nonsense.

Help for Heroes! Support our boys! Hell, if you've stayed with me through all that heavily-caffeinated ranting, you deserve to know that the reason I remembered to write this thing at all today was that I went to the fridge to make a sandwich, and saw written on a packet ‘SUPPORT OUR UK TROOPS PURCHASE THIS HAM;’ a pork product I can only pray was purchased for its primary function of being ham rather than its contributions to a pervasive culture in our society of glorifying those most blatantly abused by it.

Nationalist Ham

Slices of deceased pig, quite simply, should not be encouraging you to support soldiers. In fact, I’d prefer my ham to have very few political opinions at all.

So next time you see an article in a newspaper and it pulls out one particular dead soldier’s name (and, inevitably, neglects to mention the many, non-allied civilians who died that same day), praises him or her as a hero, tells you they were brave for dying to protect you and your freedom -- know the cold, hard truth. They did not die to protect you... they died for nothing that can be deemed a moral good. Their glory, their fame, their front-page obituary, is tragic, temporary and fleeting; no more-or-less than tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper. It’s a nudge in your ribs to keep you believing what you should.

To keep supporting soldiers.

To keep supporting war.

To keep supporting ham.

That soldier’s extinguished life, the lives they probably took as well, and the grieving relatives either side of the gun they were paid and ordered to carry --all that loss and suffering-- cannot be measured in gains to your freedom or safety but only in the bank accounts of the military-industrial complex, oil companies, politicians, lobbyists, contractors, mercenaries, and pork peddlers – nobody, NOBODY, who can legitimately claim to care about them or you.

When you glorify soldiers, praise them, worship them, or martyr them, you become a small part of the social machine that sends them to war -- one hand amongst many that pushes them towards danger and death.

Oh, Death, you wacky liberal

The whole myth falls apart when we value every human life equally. When you realise that EVERY SOLDIER on EVERY SIDE does WHAT THEY ARE TOLD and BELIEVES THEY ARE RIGHT, suddenly it doesn’t seem so fun to keep sorting them in to lines, pointing them at each other, and whispering in their ears what the other lot said about their mothers and a courgette. When a war is ‘won’, and you won’t see much of that any time soon, what has really won is the idea that war can solve problems. That complex, intricate matters like drug trafficking or border disputes or religious fanaticism can be solved by splitting into teams and slinging a stubborn amount of violence, cash and ignorant rage at each other. Yes, kids, adults solve problems by trying to explode them; adults solve problems by shredding up each other’s internal organs with terrifying metal projectiles.

In fact, the primary cause of every war ever is Statism, and the division of people into these imaginary clubs by their owners. If you defend the State as a noble solution to social issues like education and road-building and healthcare, you also carry with you the millstone of the millions of deaths caused directly by their very existence. 40 million people in the First World War, over 60 million in Part Two, millions and millions more before, in-between and after due to the clashing ideologies and intentions of all those in power with the means to mobilise the world’s poor against each other with violence and financial incentives. Add to this history’s conquests, genocides, revolutions, civil wars, terrorism, government-caused ghettos and famines, and it suddenly becomes very difficult to make the case that the State and its agents were ever there to protect you. The encouraged mentality –and that’s mostly all the State really is, a firmly-rooted and heavily-propagandised idea in our collective consciousness-- has almost always been the biggest threat to your life and your livelihood that exists. Indeed, as it forces you to pay your taxes, auctions your future in the form of debt, imprisons you if you break its rules, has a monopoly on violence, can draft you into the military whenever it wants, and will always, always protect its existence over yours, it’s difficult to argue that it is anything but the absolute enemy of your freedom. That’s why blind patriotism is so consistently encouraged by those in power. A very lucrative myth would crumble without it.

We’re actively taught and encouraged to worship 'our' soldiers, to believe that simply being a soldier, regardless of any individual characteristics, makes one good and brave and heroic. We are further encouraged to maintain the long-established nonsense of past murdered men having “died for our freedom” rather than the enforced protection or expansion of borders and tax-bases. To criticise this herd mentality, to remark on this zealous, foolish nationalism, or to even open a discussion to the idea that soldiers aren’t automatically amazing and brilliant and admirable, is to be accused of being unpatriotic, treacherous, unappreciative or ridiculous. It is the most powerful and perverse of social stigmas that those who care the most can so easily be accused of caring the least.

That is, perhaps, how four murdered children end up as a small note in a little grey box on page 32.

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Further Reading: U.S. Soldier Ethan McCord talks about his time in Iraq. A difficult-to-watch but important video. Informative and tragic.

The Evolution of an Atheist

2011-06-24T22:46:00.027+01:00

I was an atheist from a fairly early age.

Like perhaps the majority of the Western World’s greatest sperm, I was born. As such, my geographic location just north of London meant my dance with the divine began in an old, cold building with a white man in a dress putting his wet finger on my confused baby head. He splashed me a bit, read something from the best-selling book of all time, and a lot of people I would later meet smiled co-operatively while pretending not to give a toss that they could have been three or four Bloody Marys happier somewhere else. At that moment, even though my cognitive function was not yet developed enough to avoid shitting myself all day, I apparently earned the rite of passage into the Christian Church. I know it might seem initially exploitative that I had no apparent free will when entering such an important spiritual contract but I can honestly tell you, at the time, I didn’t give two milky tits about it.

In fact, all that Christianity stuff worked out fine for years. This God bloke, despite being all-knowing and all-powerful, generally seemed to keep His nose out as I thundered around nursery school, falling over and bonking girls on the head with a big rubber hammer. He didn’t stop me making faces at the teachers, or peeing on the toilet seat, or putting my dinner in my hair. I liked Him, and it seemed pretty obvious that He was kind of fond of me too. He let me get away with loads of naughty stuff, sort of like a cool, hip dad that let's you drink some beer if you promise not to tell your mother. One time, while all the strict adults were out and I was misguidedly trusted to look after a dog, God even let me take a decorative Shaolin sword off the wall and try and slice an apple in half with it, just like in all those movies I wasn’t supposed to be watching and getting ideas from. To my naive surprise, the apple didn't splice in two, cleanly separate and slide apart like I had expected. It fucking exploded. I spent the next hour frantically cleaning up an incredible amount of apple debris off the walls, floor, ceiling, furniture, sword and dog. There was almost definitely a commandment about not doing that kind of shit, I was sure of it, but it still didn’t seem to matter -- I got away with it again. Me and God, we were mates.

Not far from this time, then, did it seem entirely silly to the increasingly thinky thing inside my head that the World might just revolve around me. Boring adults were always telling me it didn’t, of course, especially whenever I did something obviously clever like eat all the jelly in the building... but how could they prove it? I certainly couldn't. For all I knew, adults left the room and suddenly disappeared, just like my foreskin did that time I woke up in a hospital. On the other hand, I knew that I existed because I could smell myself. When I went to bed, the whole world went away just because I wasn’t awake to look at it, and then it magically came back again exactly as I finished sleeping. Then I got thinking about that definitely real, true story that I was told about Jesus. He was due back any minute now, apparently, but nobody knew exactly when. Well, I was the only person that I knew definitely existed, and I also seemed to me like a pretty nice kid, especially when you ignored all those times when other people thought I wasn't.

... well, couldn’t I be Jesus?

With all those songs they made us sing about being God’s children in primary school, no wonder the idea occasionally fluttered on the nose-picking periphery of my subconscious for a while. I was a good lad. When I was punished, I remember, it was always unfair. Whenever I did something wrong, it was never my fault. Whenever I was bad, it was always an accident. There was certainly no way in Heaven that I deserved to go to Hell. Burning, flaming, awful, unbearable torment and torture for all eternity just because I found swearing hilarious in school, lied about kicking a mirror while practising karate, and occasionally stole a Twix? Yeah, right, I thought as I planned out my dream mansion in the clouds, complete with Sega Megadrive game library, Pop Tarts for every meal, and my beloved Right Said Fred tape on endless repeat.

It was around this time, though, that God stopped doing Himself any favours. On one hand, He kept making me taller, which I obviously liked for the immediate benefit of being able to reach more stuff I shouldn’t, but on the other hand, he was giving me a bigger head. There was literally more brain in there, and it was using all the extra space it had annexed from the outside world to do more thinking about all the stuff going on out there. By the age I was falling out of trees with frightening regularity, I started to understand that not everyone in the world believed the exact same things about God, life and death as I did. On other parts of the planet, apparently, people didn’t think that Jesus was the virgin-born son of God who could save your eternal soul if you loved him telepathically, or that all animals exist because two of each species got on a boat with a 600-year-old farmer and survived a genocidal flood sent to cleanse the blood of humanity, or that evil exists in the soul of all people because a woman made of dust and rib talked to a snake then ate a forbidden fruit from a magic tree. No, these other people believed in all kinds of nonsense.

By my fingers-and-toes counting estimations there were thousands of people on the planet and the majority of them, it turned out, followed entirely different religions to the one I did. There were ones that sat down a lot, some who wore bedsheets or hats, others who didn't like women very much, some that pointed in a specific direction every day, ones that wouldn't eat burgers and another lot that knocked on your door and pissed you off. At first I thought I was pretty lucky to get the right God, but then my increasingly pesky head started to think that it actually seemed a bit strange that most of the world’s population were going straight to Hell just because they weren't born in the right country, continent, or hemisphere. How could so many people believe such different things and still believe they were definitely right? It started to seem to me that there were more gods than Pokemon, and they couldn't all be in the sky, surely, otherwise there would be no room for the birds and the aeroplanes. I was young, but I was starting to figure out something that some of these taller humans seemingly hadn't.

Either nobody was right, or my friend God, the ultra laid-back babysitter dude who once let my young cousins and I entertain ourselves by throwing live crabs into traffic, was not really giving everybody a fair chance. To create a world and universe just for People, then send the majority of them to Hell just because they weren't born in the right place to read His autobiography seemed a bit devious and arrogant to me. It was sort of like hiring a teacher, stealing all their clothes and spraying them with lighter fluid, then hysterically blaming them for being a dangerous, flammable pervert that ruined the carpet.

I started getting a bit brave with the Almighty. Testing him. I called him an idiot first, then a sky idiot, then a pretend, useless flipping cloud-twat. No lightning, no boils. So I swore at him, ‘God, you dicky twatcabbage... you tossy slapping prickhead.’ No floods, no plagues. It was then, somewhere between the age of 7 and whenever I figured out how to swear properly, that I realised the World was the same colourful, silly, chaotic, fun, strange, dark and indifferent place whether He was there watching it or not, and, quite obviously it seemed, He wasn't.

However, there were still times as a child that I would get scared, and my faith in my lack of faith would suddenly seem less certain; perhaps on rainy nights with coloured, cartoon covers bundled to my chest, and when the looming anxiety of getting caught for something particularly bad would creep under all defences and grip me like a vice; when I felt entirely powerless to prevent the unfolding of some uncertain future, I would still pray.

“Please, God, help me... please... I promise if you help me not get caught I will believe in you again... please... I promise, God, just help me.”

I knew it wouldn't change anything, I think, but if I did get what I wanted there was still one last thought I couldn't help but direct towards that expansive sky with no one in it.

“Haha, tricked you again.”

Aliens

2011-06-22T14:47:00.023+01:00

This gigantic man is Brian Cox. He’s a particle physicist and a university professor who also makes decent telly programs about space for the BBC and your mother a bit aroused. He seems like a nice, cheerful sort of a chap -- certainly the kind of person that you would rather hire a boat with for an hour than purposefully direct towards a sniper battle in a landfill.

So in a pub last week, if I had been the Supreme Leader of Planet Earth instead of just a bit alcohol poisoned, he was the person I would have chosen as my ideal ambassador for humanity in the eventuality of aliens ever landing here.

I think I owe Brian Cox an apology.

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Aliens almost certainly exist. If you don’t think they do, you might just be a bit confused about how big the Universe really is. Have a look at this for a cheeky refresher – that’s just the bit of our galaxy and beyond that we can see and take photos of. Each one of those dots is a star like ours, and a source of energy to the planets caught in its gravity, just like ours, each a hub in space for all of the same elements we’re made of, and each governed by the same physical laws that arranged those elements into something like us. There is estimated to be between 200 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way, our galaxy, and at least hundreds of billions of galaxies in just our bit of the Universe. Not that these numbers mean anything beyond stonkingly flipping massive by this point, especially considering that the pesky Universe hasn't proved itself to be anything but infinite yet. Basically, we might as well say there’s a sillion bananillion gorillion stars and planets for the amount it helps us to comprehend the situation.

However, the reasons that aliens almost certainly exist are also the exact same reasons why we will probably never meet them, and also the exact same reasons why we never want to.

Our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4 light-years away, or 24,000,000,000,000 miles from us. To not help put that in some form of perspective, the interstellar probe Voyager was launched 33 years ago and has only just begun to breach the edge of our solar system 10 billion miles away. It will be another forty-thousand years before it reaches even the very nearest planetary system to us. Me, you, Earth, the solar system and even Brian Cox are all effectively lost in this cosmic quarantine. Even the 100 light-years our radio broadcasts have travelled seems as about as significant as a widowed ant's anniversary plans when we consider that our Milky galaxy alone is 100,000 light-years from end to end. The space we’re hiding in is just so massive that the statistical improbability of advanced alien civilisations finding us is great enough that you could assume the word astronomical was invented for occasions just like this unnecessarily insulting sentence, idiot.

That’s also based on the slightly smug assumption they would want to find us at all. There are more stars just like ours than there are grains of sands in all the deserts in the world, so if life exists here and at least one other place, then it’s logical to assume it exists everywhere. Suddenly, we’re not the special, magical wonderstuff that invented trousers and hair-cuts; we are insignificant, common, generic. Like every commodity in existence, life is worth less when it is in abundance. We treat pandas kindly because they are rare, but we’ll happily plough a minivan through a parade if we think there’s the slightest chance we might kill an extra wasp or two. Aliens, if they’ve found us, and that’s generally the kind of thing they like to do, could have found so many other planets and life-forms that they would probably regard us with the same level of enthusiasm we’d devote to Paris Hilton’s opinions on anything more complicated than a sausage. The chances are, they won’t fawn over how impressive we are, or invite us to join some intergalactic ride-sharing space union, or begin imparting their advanced scientific knowledge to us. No, they’ll probably stop for a photo, giggle at an aeroplane, and move on.

The other common thread running through many science fiction stories and UFO conspiracies is that we want to meet aliens because they’ll probably be somehow like us. Even NASA, which you’d assume must contain at least a few people you could trust to hold a hot coffee without dipping their ears in it, seems to subscribe to this idea as they launched with Voyager a golden long-play record complete with a map of our solar system and an audio track of uncharacteristically peaceful messages from a planet that’s been at war almost non-stop since it was clever enough to invent nations, gods, sharp stuff and things that go bang. And right there could be our problem.

It’s exactly because they might be like us that we don’t want to meet them. To reach Earth, extraterrestrial life would need technology that means they could travel trillions of miles in their life-spans, and we’re still executing each other with lumps of metal to get the best price on a finite, black liquid we have to burn to get to the shops. I mean, seriously, have you fucking met us? Think about how well humans historically have treated life-forms they see as inferior to themselves. Ask the Native Americans how being friendly to visitors turned out for them. Ask an African a few centuries ago how excited he was to see a boat. Ask the dolphins and penguins in the zoo how they came to the peculiar decision to move to a fish-tank in North London. Humans don’t discover anything and think ‘look at this thing doing absolutely fine without us.’ No, we bomb it, dig it, skin it, mine it, catch it, poke it, spill it, lose it, break it, plant a flag for the press conference, move in the bulldozers and set up a gift shop.

So while “Hello. Let there be peace everywhere,” might sound like a confident message to sling deep into the cosmic dark with a trail of breadcrumbs home, perhaps we’re more like the lamb that’s rolled itself in herbs and butter and is lolloping happily towards a man holding a pita bread, a shotgun and a barbeque.

These bloody aliens apparently possess wizardry that allows them to bound across time and space just for a laugh, and I was going to send Brian Cox to go and shake their hands/claws/tentacles like we’re equals? No, no, no, I’ve changed my mind. I’m so sorry, Brian. At the very first sign of a spaceship landing, please take my lovely, smiley Brian Cox, put him in a helicopter with a pencil and get him up a mountain somewhere thinking up new ideas for super guns.

If I can choose again, I vote for someone with at least one finger up their nose, a face that could divert traffic and a name like Wally Fumblebricks.

Better still, send a pig in a cardigan and hope they don’t figure out we’ve got 20,000 nukes.

Old Age

2011-06-07T01:33:00.044+01:00

The fact that something called 'anti-ageing' cream exists in our society tells us three things: Firstly, in a world of relative scientific enlightenment, a lot of people are still very confused about the relationship between moisturiser and the nature of Time. Secondly, this confusion about how lotion can somehow disrupt the linear sequencing of events means that the same people would probably continue buying it even if it was called something less subtle like Time-Idiot-Nonsense cream. Thirdly, it tells us that an entire silly industry can exist just because a lot of people aren't very keen on the idea of getting old. Perhaps it's easy to see why, though, as older people are always gumming on about things being better in the old days, youth being wasted on the young, and cautioning us pups for not appreciating our hips. While they stare fondly back into a romanticised past that often seems more golden because they've forgotten the dullest lumps, the young are conversely obliged to resist their future of disloyal knee caps, talcum powder, mild-to-moderate racism, and putting their glasses in stupid places like the oven. Unfortunately for them though, no matter how many inch-thick layers of expensive fib cream they smear on their bodies, there will always be a grey, silly version of them waiting just the other side of their mortgage. However, to prove it wont all be completely dreadful, here's a list of the 23 best things about being old I could possibly think of, arranged for no good reason beside a bunch of photographs that absolutely fucking delight me.

The 23 Best Things About Being Old

Short-term memory loss means you can do things for the first time, lots of times. It also means you can forget birthdays and blame your batty old brain.

People have lower expectations of your physical and mental abilities. As well as making it harder to disappoint them, it also means it's easier to impress them. Watch Country’s Got Talent, for example, and you’ll quickly realise that all you need to win an audience's respect is the ability to do a normal thing whilst being old.

If crosswords and knitting are suddenly so entertaining, think how much fun you’d have at anything called a 'cocaine horse fight.'

Been there, done that. Now you've got a monopoly on twaddle, bullshit, jabbering nostalgia. “When I was your age," you'll say, "all we had was a Nintendo Wii, 14 megapixel camera phones and Facebook installed in our fingernails. Kids today don’t know they’re born.”

Wheelchairs. Stairlifts. Mopeds. No more of that leg nonsense.

You’re a drain on society, but it's basically an unwritten rule that nobody’s allowed to say it to you. In fact, as long as you look like some daft old fucker in a cardigan, you can get away with practically anything from stealing, to telling your relatives they’re fat, to using the word ‘coloureds.’ You can blabber on about any lunatic opinion you like and people will still defend your attitude as being "from a different generation."

You’ve forgotten more than most young people know.

You can grow an excellent beard, regardless of gender.

You don’t need to worry about how quickly science and society are progressing; you’re old and deranged, it’s a ‘democracy’ and all of your age-group vote. If you don’t want them young people to have their marijuanas or their raves or their human rights, don’t let ‘em. Humbug.

Who? What? Where? Exactly, it doesn’t matter anyway. You’re staying in and trying to remember your name and which hole to put the biscuits in.

Viagra.

You can hang hang stuff on your Zimmer frame like it's a mobile storage unit. What about some shelving, a wind-chime, or a selection of fine, Italian cured meats?

There’s booze and buffets at funerals (and normally at least one widow if you fancy a steamy session round the back of the crematorium.)

Morgan Freeman.

You get some money every week, or a bus pass, or free wood in the winter or something, don’t you? You're also worth increasingly little to kidnap. It's the little things.

By the time you reach old age, technology will be insanely, terrifyingly advanced. Just ask Japan. Toilets that clean your arse for you, years ago. Air-bags that catch you when you fall over, you bet. CarerBot9000 simultaneously writing your will, blowing on your soup, and scraping a layer of tough, orange fungus from your ankles, probably.

Maybe death is a little worrying, but it’s got to be better than watching 20 people fail to grasp the concept of probability every fucking day on Deal or No Deal.

You can now use words like ruffian, hoodlum, scallywag, delinquent, scamp, rapscallion, hooligan, scofflaw, lout and rascal to describe any one under the age of 30 who is sitting on a bench.

After decades and decades of seeing ridiculous styles and trends come and go, every young, ‘fashionable’ twonk on the street will look like a yohgurt-minded fool to you while you loaf around shopping centres in your your warm, durable corduroy tracksuit.

Your piss? Yep. Your poo? Yep. Your problem? Not any more.

It’ll be exponentially funnier when you make crude, rude or cheeky remarks. Ever heard a sweet, doddery elderly woman say, "phwoar, I'd smash their back-doors in"? Me neither. Be hilarious though, I reckon.

You’ve made it this far, right? Global warming, peak oil, unsustainable population growth... - who gives a spine? Pass the smack and the nail-gun, let’s get on the motorway and drive at some traffic.

“Life imprisonment”? Bitch, please.

I hope that cheered you up about your impending biological collapse, and if it hasn't, remember that growing old is a privilege not granted to everyone. Now I hope you're not too confused to get back to whatever whipper-snapping social media site you came from.

Twitting? Click? Facewhat? Get out.

Procrastination (Part One)

2011-06-01T03:44:00.010+01:00

I was going to write a thing about procrastination, but I haven't yet got around to it.

That sounds like a shit joke, and of course it is, but it's also really, really, exactly, actually true.

I'm procrastinating. The thing I think I 'want' to do, of course, is actually a thing I don't really 'want' to do at all, especially compared to the things I'm doing instead, apparently, otherwise I'd be doing it instead of them, wouldn't I? That's basically what procrastination is and I'll go into more detail about it soon when I'm not as heavily involved in it as you are now.

That must be why you're here, presumably, as reading this definitely isn't as important as cross-referencing all of your available skills and assets against the projected cost of your perceived life goals in order to maximise your directional potential for long-term happiness or, I don't know, sewing.

I bet you haven't tidied that place where you can never find batteries, manuals or your passport?

Or e-mailed that quite important person you've clicked 'Mark Unread' on 8 times?

Or booked those tickets to that thing you know will definitely be good but is too far away to not guarantee something better will come up?

Of course you haven't.

I bet you haven't even written that article about procrastination yet, have you?

Didn't think so. Neither have I. Well, while we're both not doing the things that we should be doing, we might as well be looking at a list of other things that other people are doing while they're not doing the things that they should not be doing. *

From the Basement - a performer-friendly and classy-to-fuck video project that aims to showcase the close-eyed, soul-bearing artistry of today's best song makers.

Romantically Apocalyptic - a funny, engaging and stunning web comic crafted with live actors, stock footage, green-screens, Photoshop and, presumably, an elephant bum-load of patience.

The Daily Mash - savage, brilliant satire and often the antidote to whatever bonkers 'real' news we shouldn't be wasting our paper and ink and and eyes on.

Post Secret - people write secrets on postcards and send them anonymously to this mega popular community art project blog jobby. It's anonymous, it shows, and it's a real treasure.

Decadent Lifestyle - a simple, multimedia blog of a lot of people having more fun than you.

Sky Survey - a big, zoomy picture of the night sky. Sounds dull, but a few minutes with it regularly will at least make you go oooh and stop worrying about anything less significant than destroying your head in a lawnmower accident.

TED - all the best people in the world talking about all the best things in the world and you can watch it all from your desk with the added convenience of realising you're a useless, chair-wasting pleb in comparison.

Freedomain Radio - philosophy website run by big happy, wisdom egg Stephen Molyneux, a man who's frighteningly right about basically everything. Not, or especially, for idiots.

That's enough for now as I have other things I need to avoid to do, which I can now start not doing now I've not done this.

Part Two coming soon...

It isn't.

* [Incidentally, this is the point that my friend came round and I even stopped writing a post about not writing a post for hours while we binge-watched funny videos on YouTube like a pair of socially inept gonks.]

You

2011-05-09T20:53:00.053+01:00

Hello. Right now, you’re strapped to a bit of dust called Earth by an unexplained force called gravity in an incomprehensibly large absence of matter called space, orbiting at extraordinary speeds around a massive ball of plasma called the Sun in a period of relative cosmological calm, and at a convenient distance and temperature that support a baffling little magic mindfuck called Life. Lucky, really. Yet this cheeky little phenomenon, while often lovely and interesting, has been confusing our tiny little brains ever since it invented them for us. There are concepts so baffling to us that when we try to imagine them, our minds literally seem to recoil in defence like there’s an inbuilt shut-off valve to protect us from the full horror or wonder of understanding them. Like everything. You know, all this, hydrogen, magnets, cushions, where the fuck exactly did it all come from? How does anything, let alone everything, come from nothing? If before something there wasn’t something, then, you know... what? And infinity. How can space and time not have boundaries? How can anything go on forever? If infinite doesn’t have a start or an end, and it doesn’t, then, you know... WHAT? Then there’s life itself. Is it just here or absolutely everywhere? How did it start and what happens when it ends? If we are ‘alive’ but we are just made up of loads of stuff that is not ‘alive,’ then, you know... FUCKING WHAT?

You get my point.

Take you, for example, the sitting, reading trophy of four billion years of evolution. You’re interesting. At one point you were the youngest person on Earth, remember? You’re amongst the most complex creatures to have ever lived on this planet, maybe anywhere in the cosmos, and you exist now at the end of an unbroken chain of successful reproduction, adaptation and genetic transfer that stretches all the way back through time to the very first interactions of boring, inanimate molecules that sparked the beginnings of life. Or to put it a cooler way, none of your ancestors were barren or sterile or failed at getting laid, even before they had fannies and willies, and even before they had to fuck themselves to get things done. If you don’t have any children, you’ll finally be ending a continuous pattern of humping that’s been going on since your ancestors were about five-thousandths of a millimetre in length. If you think that puts pressure on you to try and get some sperm or other into a warm place with good career prospects, then consider the alternative: if you don’t reproduce, you’re at the end of that chain; the zenith; the apex; the pinnacle of a single billions-of-years old evolutionary strand. Every single event and atomic encounter since the beginning of time led exactly to you. Here. Now.

This very instant, my special little sausage, you are floating somehow, somewhere in a part of the liquid phenomenon of Time we call the Present, both the oldest you have ever been, and the youngest you will ever be again.

Despite this, however, everything you see and experience happened in the past, even though you, now, again, comma, have never been in it. The sunlight that warms your mayonnaise at a picnic is seven minutes old, a bullet could already be in your pelvis by the time you’ve heard a gunshot, and this sentence will take entire nanoseconds to reach the middle of your brainbox, even longer if you’re reading it underwater or reflected off the highly polished skin of a dolphin. The ‘present,’ ultimately, is a figment of your imagination, a deceptive trick of the senses, a concept that we claim to live but are more realistically ever chasing after like a fat kid, bumbling and wheezing half way up a staircase, trying to figure out what the fuck just happened, what the fuck’s going on, and, oh for cock’s sake, now fucking what?

Meanwhile, the whole time we’re ignorantly faffing around in socks and jobs, we’ve also got no idea if we’re even in control of ourselves, our thoughts or our actions, and we're hurtling without brakes towards a cliff edge of uncertainty.

It’s not like you could ever be expected to figure out these brain-raping fucking conundrums, though, being as ill-equipped for philosophical computing as you are. After all, you’re just a sort of colourful, thinking soup in a human-shaped bag; a pulpy, watery mass made of blobby, smelly things and meat that is constantly renewing, refreshing and replacing itself. The thing you eat today will be part of the brain tomorrow that recognises what that thing is, so no wonder it’s asking a lot to figure out if it has free will or not. That quite unintelligent looking potato in your flabby lap, for instance, could tomorrow be doing complicated maths, or solving an intricate moral dilemma involving a duck, or even remembering your first kiss. And when it does remember that first kiss, incidentally, it will trick you again into believing that you were there.

Except you weren’t.

Not a single atom in your body now was there then. Every bit of you has since been replaced many times over. Whatever you are, therefore, is not what you’re made of, but is somehow and not-simply contained in the gooey, temporary arrangement of what you’ve eaten. To put it more delicately, you have a hole that runs through your body, practically uninterrupted from your mouth to your arse, and its job is to disrupt the flow of matter from one place to another in the Universe and momentarily assemble it in to a recipe called You. You’re a glorified food tube, basically; a squishy-squashy tunnel that supports your head; an egg-type structure that contains your brain; a grey, shaved hedgehog thing that worries and gets addicted to cigarettes. You, or your idea of whatever you are, is just electrical signals bouncing around somewhere inside a spongy slab of meat that’s structure is constantly changing, adapting, making new connections between neurones... it will be literally, physically different after you read this sentence. And this one as well, strangely enough, even though this one doesn’t have an .

In fact, your body, the only thing you can ever really claim to own (though it’s more like a loan from some elusive magic bank that can snatch it back at the slightest tickle of a pickle), came from something you or your mother once consumed. More than that, everything you are came from the Earth and will one day go back to it. More than that, everything you are is currently at the furthest point it has ever journeyed from the very beginnings of the Universe and its origins in the nuclear furnaces of emerging stars. The atoms that make up your left eyelashes come from different stars than the ones in your right, and their brother and sister particles are scattered all across the cosmos up to god knows what outside the blinking bonanza of your face. You’re made of the same basic building blocks of matter --matter which is almost entirely space, incidentally-- as everyone and everything that there is. While I’m sure you can do something bafflingly impressive like shit yourself to music, you are in essence just hydrogen that was left alone with nothing to do for long enough that it got smug and started thinking about itself. Before you knew it, that hydrogen was reading slightly jarring one-line paragraphs on the Internet.

We are all one.

While that might sound like the kind of pretentious, wanky nonsense you’d avoid all day from any fucker in a tie-dye wigwam that grows their own lentils, it is literally and unarguably true. We’re all related in every single conceivable way possible, and the level of separation between us exists only in our minds. Stretching out from your family, you are related to every other human, every other animal, every other life-form on this planet, and subsequently the very Universe itself as everything ‘living’ is made up of stuff that is invariably ‘nonliving.’ Biologically, chemically, and physically you are, like every other lump of life that is mucking about here, part of the same single eternal organism. Just as the innumerable bacteria in your stomach and microbes on your skin are part of the wider ecosystem of your body, so your body is part of the wider ecosystem around you. While you could certainly get the impression that you’re some kind of unique, special individual, especially when someone compliments you on that wacky cutlery you bought from Ikea, more realistically you are a tiny, dispensable constituent of something entirely bigger: a walking, wobbling nutrient and gas conversion bit in a massive, alive and complex engine called Earth. Indeed, with enough scale, the entire sprawling presence of humanity on the surface of this planet wouldn’t look unlike mould on a floating, blue Orange – or Bluorange, if you will – in space. As our species multiplies at exponential speeds in every available direction, spreads into every liveable nook and planetary cranny, and rapidly converts everything green and available into more smoke, dust and grey matter than you’d find in Margaret Thatcher’s evil cunt, it’s probably far safer to assume we’re more likely a fleeting, arrogant space virus than some amazing fallen race cast in the image of a divine creator.

If the idea that the average hilariously self-important human is no more individual than a single spore of something growing on an unattended armpit seems a bit daunting, though, or if you’re not quite ready to be the prick in the garden explaining how “we are all, like, interconnected, man,” then you might still enjoy the more digestible, placebo fact that the average human is a 28-year old Chinese man. If this doesn’t get a polite, interested nod from the dullard opposite you who actually thought it was fine to bring hummus to a barbeque, then you could try the more cryptic, esoteric observation that the average human, perhaps, is a dead one. A hundred billion of our human ancestors, it is speculated, have been and gone, along with 99.99% of all the species to have ever existed on Earth that slept quietly into extinction. Which, on a side note, is why it’s so irritating when someone tries to save a fucking panda.

And you too, of course, will die. While your birth may have been an almost unfathomably unlikely statistical improbability, your impending death is an absolute certainty. Indeed, one day this year is the looming pre-anniversary of your death. The same day every year, of course, until your timeline is intersected by a particularly sharp object or a heart attack and becomes the post-pre-anniversary of your death. By which I mean the day you'll die. You probably won’t enjoy it, either, but hey, it will be quick and you won’t remember it. You literally won’t know you’ve stopped living, incidentally, so unless you’re the kind of person who shits yourself every night before you go to sleep, it is really nothing to be afraid of. It's not you that will 'die,' after all, it's your world that will end.

Then what, though, you might ask?

Well, while we don’t have the right answers to probably the wrong questions we’ve been asking for millennia, we do know exactly what happens when you die. Just like all the matter and energy that comprises you was something else before, so it will be something else again. Matter and energy can’t be destroyed, only transferred, so you’ll just begin the next phase of your fluctuant cloud-like existence. Maybe you’ll be buried or burnt, or wedged into a gap to support a table. Maybe your body will gradually break down into its constituent parts and go straight back to work as a mushroom, or an ant, or a bit of stick. Maybe you’ll be eaten by something large and toothy, and eight hours later be sunbathing as a poo.

You will die, and everything you are, and have ever been, will just become something else.

Sounds a bit bleak, sure, but in a way you could argue that you’re already dead. You weren’t alive for billions and billions of years before you were born and you won’t be alive for billions and billions of years after you die so life, really, is just a temporary phase - perhaps even an illusion - in between. You’re a passing, interesting arrangement of matter in a massive, shifting equation of energy; a confused, momentary mist of material and purpose in an infinite environment without one. Your human life is less than a blink in the cosmic time span, and I bet you still get bored if you’re left at a bus stop for five minutes without someone to text.

So assuming we don’t invent immortality milkshakes this week, in about one hundred and twenty years not a single person alive today will remain. The Earth will have an entirely new set of humans, which at the very least means none of them will be Donald Fucking Trump, and it'll be a big shit global party where you don’t know any one, nobody knows you, you're dead, and you're made of dust. Our generation’s names, only, will be peppered thinly in memoirs and memories; most of us forgotten, some of us footnotes, and a spare few celebrated by history if they’re on the side that writes it. Most of us will not be remembered a generation after we die... all of us will not be remembered eventually. The legacy of world-changing Genghis Khan of Mongolia and company policy-changing Sally the Human Resources Manager of NatWest will tend towards the same equilibrium as every other life form to exist now or ever, here or anywhere.

On top of that, nearly seven billion people walk the Earth today with the internet and a buffet of past gods, religions and philosophies to nibble at, and we’ve still not got a whiff of a clue what-how-why-when-or-who did the shit, even though our noses are moving nearer and nearer to the fart every day. Everyone that says they do know what happens when you die should be avoided like a shoe full of pubes, obviously, and we should also be careful believing ourselves too often. Most of the things we think we know about anything, after all, were learned through billions of other people like us, processed and filtered through the collective mind of humanity and history, whittled down to an expressible essence, twisted to self-interest and delivered to us in a manageable chunk; something we plucked quickly from a conveyor-belt as it glided towards incorrectness or irrelevance.

In short, we know almost nothing about anything, and we’re probably the smartest stuff going on for at least 24 trillion miles in every direction. Furthermore, we’ll probably never understand the fundamental paradoxes of life, death, space, time, or reality... especially on our current, misguided oil-guns-and-money species trajectory. Our existence unarguably is meaningless, but only because what we conventionally understand about “meaning” is meaningless. However, from this apparent crisis in significance and purpose and moral abandon, emerges a fun and therapeutic opportunity: You can do anything you want. You can create your own meaning. You don’t have to follow other people’s rules, or directions, or social structures. You don’t have to do what you’re told, or feel guilty about the opposite. You can make up your own rules, your own meaning, your own purpose. Best of all, you can’t go wrong unless you go wrong by yourself. Nothing matters unless it matters to you.

On a warm and starry night you can look up at the sky with no roof between your silly, mostly-happy human head and the astonishing scope of infinite beyond it, part of both the nothing and everything you percieve, and choose to do with the tiny, little life that you've been gifted whatever you think is right.

You should probably choose wisely.

You (abridged version)

2011-05-09T20:52:00.002+01:00

Cannabis

2011-04-20T08:27:00.027+01:00

Cannabis has almost certainly been illegal for your entire life and that's quite a long time for a certain impression to form on you, I think you'd agree. If you are brought up with certain rules, those rules still hold today, and you buy into this idea that you're part of a society where the Law reflects the will of the people, you might be prone to accept that they're probably the status quo for some amazingly complex and thoroughly superb reasons. Reasons you may not have had time to investigate, perhaps, on the assumption that there must be really clever and noble people out there, with big graphs and nice pens and special rooms for this kind of thing, and they've checked with everyone, and definitely made the right decisions for you and everyone you know. Weed is a drug, and drugs are bad.

But what if they're wrong?

No. If they were wrong about that, what else could they be wrong about? If Santa wasn't real, then what about God or ghosts or soul mates or unlimited broadband? I mean, have you actually ever seen a terrorist? How different could toothpastes really be? Where do countries end? Are you special? Are paragraphs really paragraphs when they're just a list of questions? What was that noise?

See, now you've frightened yourself. It's easy to see why we might go along with lies to ourselves and each other if there could be real reasons to be afraid of the truth. It is, after all, an easier life to follow the majority and not question what you're told. However, here's the conundrum: people are often wrong and, for some curious reason, seem to get collectively more wrong the more of them you put together. Throw politicians and bad journalists in to the mix and before you know it, everybody is so wrong about everything that when somebody comes along who's actually right about something, people stare at them like they're a bizarre poo fetishist who's asked to borrow their grandmother.

So it is with cannabis, I believe, and what follows are perhaps the five most common myths likely to splatter loudly on the windshield of your face when you try to have a rational debate about it with the kind of dullard who will one day be wandering around your neighbourhood with a lot of carrier bags and a face like a punched ham.

1. Cannabis is dangerous/bad for you.

Originally I was going to bang endlessly on - like every righteous, boring stoner you’ve ever met in the wrong corner of a bad party - about how cannabis doesn’t affect your memory, its many medicinal purposes, its legitimate uses in reducing anxiety, easing pain, increasing appetite, the false-proven claims that it damages your brain, the false-proven claims that it causes cancer, the original ‘evidence’ of its harms involving the suffocation of monkeys (we’ll get to that), the endless propaganda that’s smeared shit all over our naive little minds, the inability to overdose, how it doesn't affect your memory, the many harmless ways it can be taken without smoking, the entire absence of a single attributable death in its thousands-of-years-plus history, the rank hypocrisy in the staggering contrast of the millions-of-people-a-year megakillacide caused by tobacco and alcohol, and how it doesn’t affect your memory, but then I thought it’s so much simpler than all that.

What right does anyone, especially the tiny minority of people that make up a government, have to tell you what you can and can’t do with your own body?

We, quite simply, just don’t accept this shit anywhere else.

You can cross roads at night, motorcycle, get tattoos, pierce any and all the flappiest bits of yourself, live near volcanoes, sky dive, fill yourself with steroids, be reckless with cutlery, bleach your hair, lose weight, gain weight, touch the genitals of any other adult that will let you, own dangerous animals, live on a boat, climb trees, base jump, cable-tie staplers to your thighs, be a builder, or just sit in a caravan until the end of your days, never exercising and eating endless biscuits until you burst in a spectacular explosion of gore and dry cake.

There’s no end of ‘bad for us’ activities that we are allowed to undertake without the bubble-wrap brigade sticking their pissy little noses in. Even if cannabis was incredibly bad for you, what makes it different from any other legal trade-off between risk and reward? We didn’t ask for legislation to protect ourselves from ourselves. We didn't ask that rules be doled out with moral authority by the kind of corrupt, joyless fucks who couldn’t figure out what 'fun' is without a diagram and an expenses scandal.

We all make choices between short-term benefits and long-term costs all the time, and, inevitably, sometimes we do make the wrong decisions.

But they are our decisions to make.

2. Cannabis is addictive.

Cannabis is not, if at all, very chemically addictive. In fact, all of the recent studies that have measured the harms and addictiveness of various substances have put it at the bottom of the spectrum - well below tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, underwear, jogging, and compliments. You won’t crave more after you try it, there are no physical withdrawal symptoms after even heavy use, and no permanent changes occur in a healthy brain that could cause dependence.

Indeed, addiction is a lot more complicated than a switch in your head that can suddenly be triggered by a chemical, contrary to the message of almost every anti-drug campaign ever, from the murder-raping, one-puff psychopaths portrayed in 1936 film Reefer Madness to the 1980s all-singing, slogan-on-a-pencil-case, celebrity prick-a-thon Just Say No.

No. The problem is a lot more deeply rooted in pre-existing mental disorders, personality traits, and hormonal predispositions than in ‘wrong’ choices, uncontrollable consequences, and naughty bloody children not bloody doing what they are bloody well told. The truth is if you aren’t predisposed to compulsive behaviour, then there isn’t any reason why you shouldn’t be able to enjoy cannabis, or almost anything, in healthy moderation. And for people who are predisposed to addiction –some estimates place the figure at around 10 to 15% of the population– they have the capacity to get addicted to all kinds of vices, from gambling to religion to coffee to violence. And if you gave me the choice of a day with someone who would risk their own kneecaps guessing that a ball might end up more times in one place than another, any twat who tries to give me books about their imaginary friend, some jittery fuck who’s talking too much, someone that’s sizing up my head for the point their fist will bounce off the easiest, and a cannabis ‘addict’, I know who I would choose. Then I’d ask how you got into my house, why are you offering me these people, and how much?

But ignoring how much fun it would be to actually buy five addicts and pit them against each other for their fix in a twisted Big Brother-style experiment, it’s easy to see how mainstream society gets so quickly confused between people who are addicted and people who enjoy something regularly when the thing in question is something they personally don’t understand, use, or approve of.

Maybe you know countless people who have tried and enjoyed weed, then started smoking more of it. Well, isn’t that just the obvious thing that happens with things that you like? You wouldn’t call someone addicted to The X Factor if they watched a few episodes of it, liked it, and then ended up 'abusing' it every night from then until the Big Crunch. If you like something, it doesn’t negatively affect your life, and you want to do it again, are you addicted? Of course not, otherwise you’d have to say I was addicted to breakfast, washing and murder. Indeed, whether you are addicted to something or not seems to be a diagnosis you can only apply to yourself. For most people, they would define themselves as having a problem at the point when they realise their habit is negatively affecting their life but cannot stop regardless, or the point when they suddenly become aware that they’re standing on a church roof, naked and swearing, with binoculars and a mouthful of pastry, wearing two policemen for shoes and staring at neighbouring chimneys with manic, hallucinogenic lust.

And that happens half as much as you'd think.

3. Cannabis makes you stupid/lazy.

The stereotype that pot makes you lazy is as old, absurd and as soon to be full of holes as Colonel Gaddafi’s face. That’s not to say that lazy people aren’t going to smoke it and get worse, of course, but that using cannabis isn’t going to have any backwards motivational effects on who you are or your life goals. Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate this is to name-drop a few high profile and incredibly successful, out-of-the-closet cannabis smokers.

So if you think that smoking weed precludes you from success, you could talk to ‘Sir’ Richard Branson, balloon-commuting rich man and owner of anything you can slap the slightly giggly word Virgin on. He smokes weed with his kids, petitions for it to be legalised, and is standing ready with price stickers for when it inevitably is. Or Ted Turner, hat-wearing multi-billionaire, the biggest landowner in America, inventor of the unendingworryfest that is the 24-hour news cycle, and Time’s 1991 Man of the Year. Or Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York; Al Gore, the Nobel Prize-winning former Vice U.S. President; or Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California and Terminator. Or if you think that the problem with smoking weed is that it stops you from being motivated, you could also talk to swimming, walking pants-commercial Michael Phelps, the most successful Olympic athlete of all time; a young man with enough gold around his neck to buy a mid-sized Fijian island, who founded his own charity, but was still dropped by his munchies-funded sponsor Kelloggs after one photo of him surfaced with a bong. Now one Google Image Search of him with the word ‘pot’ brings up so many hundreds of pictures linked to shitty, sneery 'journalism' that you’d be forgiven for thinking his crime was close on the spectrum of evil to pissing on a blind child while strangling a rare owl.

You could even talk to the last three Presidents of the United States, all of whom openly - and rather hypocritically, you might think - admitted to smoking cannabis... although Clinton famously exclaimed, “I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale.” Well, it’s easy to see roughly where you’ve gone wrong there, Bill. You probably wouldn’t enjoy your first game of football either if you sat outside the stadium thinking about your shoelaces. As for the next President, skipping any coke-taking, drink-driving intelligence gaps in between, Obama replied to the same question: “I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”

In short, it is only if you are lazy already that your lack of motivation could lead you to heavy cannabis use, the same way it could lead you to overindulgence in video gaming, excessive masturbation, dependence on fast food, or any other unproductive hobby like painting your body green, gluing toy animals to yourself and pretending you’re a farm.

Weed can’t make you lazy, it can only capitalise on your already fat arse.

As for it making you stupid, it would probably be a shorter task to list the creative people who haven’t used it. There are cannabis smokers who are and always have been at the very highest peaks of every major artistic craft in the world, from writing, art and film-making to acting, stand-up and, of course, music; People so renowned and respected you only need to list their surnames to generate a smug, simple argument: Shakespeare, Picasso, Wilde, Sagan, Speilberg, Lucas, Stone, Tarantino, Fonda, Clooney, Nicholson, Pitt, Kipling, Kerouac, Thompson, King, Dylan, Marley, Lennon, McCartney, Cash, Jagger, Jackson, Hendrix, Cobain, Dogg, Gaga. Indeed, Bill Hicks probably summarised it best: “If you don't think drugs have done good things for us, then take all of your records, tapes and CDs and fucking burn them.”

Basically, all that ‘stupid’ stuff, that’s a bubbling pint of cow bile too.

But this... but that...

But what? Even if it was true that smoking weed did make someone stupid... so? One more moron for the pile. Let’s face it, people in general aren’t really behind the idea that our collective intelligence should be the noblest driving force in society – how else could you explain the existence of both nuclear warheads and Justin Beiber concerts? Or the fact that in America almost anyone can own a gun and yet Sarah Palin has absolutely no known bullets in her horrible fucking head? We still bite our tongues, sleep-dribble, and forget what we came in to the room for. English-speaking people still quote the Bible as definitive instructions, blissfully unaware that it’s been translated over 30 times and is originally from a language that we’re still missing massive chunks of. Twilight is the fastest selling book of all time; Big Momma’s House 3 grossed over $30 million in its first week; and people happily insist on continuing to point cameras at Bear Grylls while he runs around the woods acting like a deranged child who's had too much marmalade and not enough attention. I guess my point is that if we live in a world where ‘democracy’ and homeopathy can apparently co-exist without any level of irony, how worried can we seriously be about more fucking idiots?

4. Cannabis must be illegal for a reason.

The history of cannabis prohibition is just less than one Elvis moon-lizard away from being a full-blown conspiracy. The roots of the plant’s current illegality are dug deep in racism, fear, greed, lies and stupidity. It’s a story that has a whole lot more to do with money than morality, a history skewed towards the false narratives of the industries and individuals who profited from its criminalization, and a saga littered with widespread deception, rampant sensationalism, the constant dismissal of scientific opinion, and more lunatic quotes than you’d find on the walls of an insane asylum after the warden lost a big box of crayons.

It all starts with hemp -- the durable, versatile fibre that can be cultivated from the cannabis plant and used for paper, chemicals, textiles, biodegradable plastics, fuel, everything and food. It boasts being amongst the fastest growing known biomasses, requires no herbicides, few pesticides, can be grown almost anywhere and is incredibly environmentally friendly. Indeed, it was so useful that the first laws regarding hemp in Virginia were ordering farmers to grow it. For many, it was the plants other wonder product.

For others, though, it was a very dangerous rival. To the bullies in the playground, hemp was the handsome, sensitive boy at school, the only one comfortable enough to join Drama and play netball, and the one who was now being orbited by wet, willing fanny while they stood around, grunting and hitting each other, and looking about as attractive to girls as a pork scratching in uniform. It would be too difficult to compete fairly, of course, so this large and varied gang of thugs, including the Egyptian cotton industry, nylon-inventing petrochemical giant DuPont, and timber and newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, gathered behind the bullshit bike shed of my metaphor, smoked a carton of bummed cigarettes and hatched the recurring master plan of every bully for centuries:

Lie. Call them names. Maybe grab their bollocks at playtime when nobody's looking.

Luckily for the Baddies of this particular story, this all coincided with the mass exodus of cannabis-smoking Mexicans into America and the rise of weed-friendly black jazz music in the South. So, what better way to ban a fashionable new ‘drug’ than by scapegoating it for society’s problems, demonising its effects, and then giving a sinister nudge in the direction of all those brown people? Thus ‘marijuana,’ itself a racialist term coined to connect the plant with certain undesirable ethnicities (while distancing it from white-friendly hemp), was widely and publicly smeared with the help of Hearst’s newspaper empire to gain support for its prohibition. It worked incredibly well. Indeed, to get a sense of the source of the most heinous myths surrounding cannabis, and the height of the plateau from which they have had to erode over time, we have to spend a bit of time with wind-up one-man moron Harry J. Anslinger, the Commissioner of the US Bureau of Narcotics between 1930 and 1962 and ‘The Father of the War on Drugs.’ He explained to us, presumably with the help a sock puppet and a self-invented contraption he called The Big Audience Silly Hammer, that marijuana “produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death,” "makes darkies think they're as good as white men," “leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing," and “is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.”

I know.

“You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother,” he went on.

Yep.

... But that was year’s ago!

People didn’t know as much about it back then!

People in positions of power don’t say stuff like that anymore, you might say.

Well, you’re right. Except you’re not.

For instance: Ronald Reagan, the actor, said in the ‘70s, “permanent brain damage is one of the inevitable results of the use of marijuana.” He knew this, apparently, because some cunt scientists had pumped 63 joints worth of cannabis smoke into strapped-down monkeys for five minutes, once a day, every day, for 90 days, then were giddy with themselves for finding out after that they were more brain damaged than a man who sprinkles batteries on his salad. Hooray! (It later turned out to be from suffocation, incidentally). Or ten years later in the ‘80s, when the White House’s Drug Czar Carlton Turner said, all on his own, that “marijuana leads to homosexuality ... and therefore to AIDS." Or one more slow decade onwards, when kind-natured, loveable Chief of Los Angeles police Daryl Gates remarked in the ‘90s, with all the tact of a clumsy rapist at your wedding, that “casual drug users should be taken out and shot.”

Nearer to home though, and that period that I’m still not sure if we’re calling the Noughties (are we?), this baffling Daily Mail article struggles its way through a thousand theatrical words on the flimsy premise that the risk of schizophrenia might go up in 3% of people, perhaps, that are already prone to psychotic disorders, maybe. The author unashamedly goes on to end her vague-as-trousers argument with the unsettling photographs of three murderers and the details of their horrific acts, before making a causal link between cannabis and the crimes with all the authority of an ice cream man standing on a beanbag shouting at a yoghurt.

Mental, isn’t it? But that’s alright because it’s not like millions of people read it every day, or like it has the second biggest readership of any British newspaper, squeezed as it isn’t between The Sun and The Mirror, two papers you couldn’t rub together to prevent brain cell genocide. When you understand that these millions of people, who have never knowingly been within twenty metres of their own opinions, are the popular masses that politicians must pander to, you can see why it is a lot less of a risk to maintain a popular, wrong policy than it is to reverse it. Yet it’s not like you can blame these people for their views, any more than you could blame a melon for having the words 'Fuck All Eskimoes' carved on it. Sure it’s offensive, ill-informed, racist and wrong, but it’s not like the melon formulated that opinion itself. Of course not, it's a fruit. And if you believed without question what you were told about drugs from your parents, your school, your church, the media or a cartoon character called Terry the T-Total Tortoise, you might just be the same as that fucking melon.

Indeed, to further contextualise this madness, just think about the many millions of voters who, on one hand, continually insist on believing in a divine, good and all-knowing sky man who created everything on Earth, and yet on the other are still happy banning some of His arts and crafts. How's this for a sensible sentence? People you've never met spend your taxes tracking down and destroying a wild plant because they don't think you should have it. God, could there be anything more unnatural than banning nature?

Yet we do, and it’s the ill-informed opinions and general ignorance towards the issue of legalization that means politicians won’t do anything about it until they absolutely have to. Your liberty is only as real, after all, as it’s allowed it to be. In the meantime the dark reality is that, while society suffers, some powerful forces make a lot of money from criminalization. Those who still profit from its continued restriction range from the massive pharmaceutical industry, which would lose both its monopoly on cannabis as medicine and revenue from the wide range of drugs it would replace, to the alcohol and tobacco industries, who would both prefer you to keep pointing your angry, waggling finger anywhere but at them while you fill your gob with their wayward little goods. These private industries can and do sponsor (‘buy’) political candidates, fund anti-drug commercials, hire expensive lobbyists to penis-prod governments, and even finance their own ‘scientific’ studies. These soulless researchers –also available to deny global warming for Oil money, by the way– usually publish any slight trend of potential concern as FACT and then jizz over themselves and each other with all the righteous self-importance of a prick in a parade. It doesn’t even matter that their findings are normally disproved by lunchtime because by that point politicians and the mainstream media have already seduced you to the ground, put their knee on your head and pissed them through your ears.

Meanwhile, the police, the military and the privatised prison industries can all keep dipping their hands deep into the tax pot in the name of ‘fighting drugs,’ whatever that doesn’t mean in real life, and you can’t even numb the pain of the bill by smoking a joint without being on the same side of the law as Charles Manson.

If you’d like to further elaborate on that slightly paranoid-sounding theory, then you might also like to smoke that joint anyway and ponder the rather interesting reality that cannabis seems to alter the way a lot of people think, and often in ways which seem in opposition to the intentions and motivations of those in power. The main active chemical in cannabis, THC, works mainly by mimicking the actions of certain chemical neurotransmitters in your brain that prevent the release of inhibitory messages between neurons; sciencey flaptrap aside, it means your thought processes are less inhibited. Weed makes you interested in things, insightful, connect information into thoughts and trends, and maybe even scrutinise certain ‘truths’ that you’re offered from a new perspective. It can help you appreciate life and art, empathise with people, and nurture contentment, all while really wanting a cake. And maybe this is just a shit, gaudy generalisation on my part, but it’s something I’ve certainly found to be true: weed smokers seem to be more friendly, peaceful, appreciative and tolerant people. In short, precisely more like the kind of people who the most rigid, conventional, uptight, productive, greedy or aggressive people in society would judge and attack as hippies, wasters, losers, spongers, brand ‘stoners’ or ‘potheads,’ and associate with ‘unsavoury’ counterculture lifestyles. Well, here’s the goofy, tin foil hat sounding bit: if you have a system that perpetuates through competition and conflict, where money gravitates like magenets towards the rich and from the poor, where greed is rewarded and harder workers can be taxed more, where money buys power but charity is unprofitable, where war is deemed necessary and soldiers deemed noble, questioning either is unpatriotic, and you’re at the top of that system with a monopoly on deciding what other people can and can’t do, well, maybe legalising cannabis just isn’t in your interests.

And maybe that’s just always been the case. Maybe the lies, laws and legislation have always had less to do with protecting us and more to with baking a big fat money pie that we can’t have a slice of.

But, hey, that’s just, like, you know, my opinion, man.

5. Cannabis is a gateway drug.

The logic behind this persistent bit of guff is that cannabis should be illegal because it inevitably leads people to trying harder drugs, you know, the same way that trying a nice chocolate biscuit could lead someone to trying a slightly nicer double chocolate biscuit.

Or a drive-by.

So, firstly, while it is important to clarify that there is nothing in the physical or chemical make-up of any form of cannabis that creates the psychological effect of desiring other drugs, that is not to say that there isn’t any valid point hidden in this propaganda. There definitely is. The problem with this myth, however, is that it confuses correlation with causation. Put simply, just because someone does X then Y, does not therefore mean that X causes Y. Weed is often, for simple and logical reasons, the easiest drug to get hold of. It doesn’t have to begin its journey in the rainforests of Columbia, or leave Afghanistan up an arse, or be synthesised from toxic chemicals by some amateur chemist called Darren who’s got a bathtub, a stick and a modem. It can be grown in a warehouse or a shed, or in your loft, or you kitchen, or in your pocket, or on a slow-moving tortoise. If you’re the kind of person who is inclined to take illegal, conscience-altering substances, it stands to reason that cannabis is likely the first one you would try... because it’s cheap, it's safe, it’s easy and it’s there. To say that everything you do after weed is therefore caused by it, though, makes about as much sense as rubbing shit on your nipples and jumping off a bridge with a spoon for a parachute.

Hell, if you’re going to be that silly, you might as well say that people having children is a gateway to people dying, so maybe we just should ban being born then eventually nobody would die any more. But you wouldn’t say that, would you? People who say that kind of thing don’t get invited back to the house. No, they get given names like Bonkers John, end up on registers, and eventually make friends with the spiders in their garden.

However, this is where it really gets fucked up. If you’re one of the people who support the criminalization of cannabis because you believe that it is a ‘gateway drug,’ then you are a huge part of the problem that you’re invoking. As we’ve seen, the lies, intentional misinformation and propaganda surrounding weed are as crazy and widespread as they are easy to disprove. Well, here’s the thing; If you keep lying to kids, however unintentionally, the smarter ones that can’t be scared into doing what they’re told “just because” are going to very quickly realise that you’re wrong. They will figure out that you are ill-informed, or ignorant, or stupid.

Or lying.

They’ll grow up, and after any minor initial hesitance that you’ve scared into them, they will bow to peer pressure, or listen to their friends, or simply be overcome by curiosity listening to their musical heroes, and they’ll try weed.

They won’t become violent or stupid. They won’t get addicted. They won’t hurt anyone. And they’ll probably enjoy it.

Then maybe they’ll wonder what else you were wrong about.

Cocaine?

Meth?

Heroin?

There’s your ‘gateway.’

Now we get to the real point. The War on Drugs is and has always been a catastrophic failure. In its seventy plus years, it hasn't succeeded at all in keeping drugs out of society; hell, it hasn't even succeeded in keeping them out of schools or prisons where every criminal and small idiot is smacked off their tits, presumably. In the meantime, states have wasted billions of dollars all over the world and imprisoned millions of their non-violent citizens, all the while creating and nurturing the enormous criminal black market for illegal drugs -- an untaxed ‘industry’ that's global revenue is estimated to be just behind arms and oil. The kind of money that people are given no choice but to inject into this sleazy network of veins beneath society makes criminals’ rich, gang warfare inevitable, and murder competitive. It means teenagers can buy drugs younger, cheaper and easier than they can buy booze, and there's nothing stopping dealers from selling them anything. Worst of all, these guys are winning, because for all the decades that the drug war has been extended and expanded with enforced taxation, it has not reduced the amount of drug users, or even prevented that number from growing to the highest it’s ever been. And therein lays the problem:

You can't fight a 'war against drugs.' You can only fight a war against people.

So as drug cartels in places like Mexico and Columbia become powerful enough to destabilise entire countries and tax-guzzling policing agencies like the DEA grow in futile response to the size of increasingly unchecked and poorly restrained armies, we are all in the crossfire of a war where we created both sides. While the weapons industry swells happily to arm everyone involved, we're all victims regardless of how we ever felt about drugs in the first place because even if the ‘war’ is not against us personally, we’re still paying for it with real money and the safety of society.

It’s got to change.

The only way it is going to change, however, is if we change and, like any revolution against the established ways of old and evil, it requires truth, integrity and a dash of courage.

You change things by sticking up for what you believe. You change things by telling the truth, whether you think you're directly affected by these crazy laws or not. You change things by talking to people and not letting them bully you into outdated and unfounded opinions. If you smoke weed (or take any drug, for that matter), it’s because you don’t think it is the bad thing you've always been told. And you’re right. Yet every time you hide it, or lie about it, or deny it, to any one, for any reason, at any time, you’re enforcing the false, bullshit narratives of whomever you’re pandering to. If you’re not ashamed to do it, then you shouldn't be ashamed to admit it. You’re preventing change, protecting ignorance, and showing a cowardly lack of consistancy between your actions and your beliefs. As much fun as you might be having in there, it's time to come out of the cannabis closet.

It’s time to change.

Language

2011-04-15T23:04:00.011+01:00

Language today is a wonderful, funny and complex thing. It is so second-nature to us now that it's hard to imagine a world without it. It's incredible, really, and if you don't think it's a bafflingly complicated and amazing thing, just think about how it must have started. Once upon a caveman, there was no 'language' other than the most basic of primal communication;. angry noises, warning shouts, horny grunts, et cetera, but nothing you could use for anything useful like describing a sunset or insulting a turtle. Its evolution was slow to begin with no doubt, and the total amount of language to exist at any one time would have fluctuated enormously depending on how much was being passed on to the next generation of bitey, rapey, arse-scratchy, stick-hitting humans and how many of them were dying from things like disease, cold and each other.

Language starts simply. Imagine you're an early, bewildered looking savage with not much of anything going on outside of your own beard, then one day you point your dirty knuckled digit at a big, yellow, warm thing in the sky and go 'eurgh.' Then when it goes down, you go 'aurgh.' If enough of your tribe does the same, and passes these familiar grunts on to the next generation, they start to become recognisable words or phrases that represent consistent ideas, in this case big shiny warm thing go up, big shiny warm thing go down. Before you know it, you're pointing your poo-tipped finger at trees and women and feet and spiders and waves and your genitals, and bam!, you're in language town.

Fast-forward to now, though, and we've got all kinds of words like 'form,' 'kinds,' 'intricate' and 'sentences' and we can use them to form all kinds of intricate sentences. Word is the word for word, for instance. We need language to learn language and think about language and discuss language, so I think its important we take care of this profoundly old and well guarded gift that has been passed down to us from our ancestors from the very beginnings of our rapid, mad evolutionary dash to a world of chocolate, satellites, blogs, whiskey and telly. It's one of the most ancient and powerful tools of our species, and it's here like it always has been, to be utilised by humanity in what ever circumstances we now need it.

That being said, here's a whole bunch of ways that people use it or don't use that get right on my boobs.

People who tell you to follow the 'rules' of language. Nobody owns words or punctuation or grammar; nobody patented the comma; there are no rules. If its makes sense, use it however you want. Fuck being told you can’t start sentences with and. Or because. Or or. Because it’s acceptable. And I don't care you if you disagree.
Fuck not making up your own words when you fancy it. Your made-up words share the exact same origin as every other word in history, why can't they become part of the ever-shifting cloud of human glossary?
Regardlessly, fuck you if use sickening portmanteaus like 'Brangelina,' 'Bennifer' and 'TomKat.' They are individual people, not cheeky moron scrabble scores. How would you like it if I started calling us Paulcunt?
Fuck censorship.
Fuck the Grammar Police. If you attack someone’s argument for their spelling and grammar when you know what they mean instead of responding to it, you’re cheap.
Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can never hurt you (apart from through much longer-lasting psychological damage.)
Rihanna lyrics. We get it. Fucking. Now stop telling 9 year-olds.
Sticks and stones might break my bones, but whips and chains excite me. NO. THIS DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING. JUST STOP.
While you're there, could somebody nip in and quickly explain to Alanis Morrisette what irony means, please.
Really, really, really fuck off if you mock someone for not being able to speak your language properly if you don’t speak theirs. They are still one odd sounding sentence smarter than you.
Fuck the the unasked for tricks your brain performs that lets you understand somehtnig even when words are are repaeted or even scrmabled up. You sneaky brain, you.
Fuck not being allowed to use the words nigger, coon, wog, paki, spic, fag, dyke, flid, cripple, spastic, retard, mong, etc. If you can’t use them, you can’t change what they mean. However, fuck you much harder if you use those words in a derogatory way then blame ‘political correctness gone mad’ when people criticise you for it. Political correctness hasn’t gone mad, people are just telling you that you’re a twatend.
Why can't there be more words like bed and shark that look like what they define? bed. See? shark. Yeah. Boob even seems to show three different angles of boobs, for tit’s sake, so why can’t other words? Vagina could be iivii or something. Actually that looks more like two couples carrying an upside-down tent. Ignore me.
The word racecar is OK, I suppose, but strap-on is no-parts backwards. Ohhhhh.
Fuck you if you don’t think it’s funny when villages are called Bum or Piddle or Shitstain. It is, and if I can’t nick the sign I'm at least getting my picture with it.
Fuck newspapers that write f**k. What’s the fucking point?
Spork and shart are legitimate words. If it’s a spoon and a fork, it’s a spork. If it’s a shit and a fart, it’s a shart.
Fuck you if you constantly avoid using longer words that are the most appropriate because you're worried that people might not understand them -- you're helping to kill off our language. Similarly, if you avoid using appropriate slang, cultural references or foreign words out of snobbery, you’re stopping language from evolving. We have dictionaries and Google now, screw the Stupids. However, if you who use longer words than necessary just to sound impressive, especially if you use them wrong, I hate you. The bassist for The Killers just used the word 'disseminated' on the radio to explain how his band went in different directions. I was so annoyed I nearly sharted.
Fuck the Welsh village Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogo-goch. No one likes a show-off.
Fuck trying to preserve your dying shitty language in Cornwall or Wales or wherever. What’s the point? To re-affirm your traditional sense of national identity? Sounds to me more like a club I’m intentionally not invited to. Fuck off.
The word phoenix.
No, fuck you SpellCheck red squiggle, it is pheonix. Right click. Add to dictionary.
Sorry SpellCheck, we’ve all had a drink. I didn’t mean what I said. I need you. Red squiggle again, babe? You don’t even consider yourself a real word? Right Click, Add to Dictionary. Let’s never fight again.
Fk ovrly cndnsd txt spk. Stop it, there are more enjoyable things that my brain could be doing than decoding your fucking number plate nonsense. Its fine, as long as I know what u mean, just dt2mcho2ws uno?
People who always describe every little thing that goes wrong in their life as ‘a nightmare.’ It’s not a nightmare, you’re just damaged to the point of not recognising your warped priorities.
Fuck whatever reasons have and are preventing the international adoption of a universal international language in schools across the world, despite several scientific systems having existed for decades. Why aren’t we talking about this? Oh. See? It’s a big silly, cycle of silly.

Finally, this looks like a bum with a little poo:

)).

Thanks.

Worry for Nothing and You're Thick for Free

2011-03-21T15:43:00.004Z

I have personally found that one of the most positive and liberating attitudes you can cultivate in life is a healthy attitude towards time. We don't much know about it, but what we all seem to agree on is that, to us at least, it is galloping unrelentingly in a single direction, away from what's happened and towards what's about to. It's unforgiving; not giving you the chance to say the much funnier thing you thought of after the argument. It's indifferent; never arranging the future according to what you would or wouldn’t like to happen to that prick doing a wheelie on his moped. And it's unstoppable; definitely on the way to wherever it’s going, and not about to change for any of your silliness.

And what's the point in worrying about anything that you can't change?

Events that have already happened, of course, fall unquestionably into that category. Until you invent that fucking time machine you're obviously working on, saying things like 'I wish I'd never kicked that dog's eyes off' are always going to be mean exactly cunt all. Blaming yourself for what you should have done makes about as much sense as electric soap; you didn't, and now you can't. Sure, you might not like the consequences of your action but that fact is immediately irrelevant. The new reality is that there's a canine missing its retinas, and your 'regrets,' as boring as they are, possess no magical abilities to reattach them. Instead, it's far more productive to think about what you can do presently to improve the situation, rather than what you should have done then to avoid it. Stop worrying. Stop moaning. In fact, stop all your unproductive fucking nonsense, and redirect that wasted energy into self-improvement – ‘how can I prevent the end of my leg from intersecting puppies' faces in the future?’, you could ask yourself-- or get on your hands and knees, start searching for them corneas and hope someone's got a Pritstick.

The more you practice this attitude, and it is often as small a thing as the pause it takes for your intellect to overtake your emotional response, the sooner it becomes your default way of dealing with the world, and the less anxiety you'll feel towards anything and everything that's out of your control. As an example, I crashed my car a couple of weeks ago -- just smashed it in the back of someone for a laugh -- and while my initial jerk reaction was to say 'fuck' to the airbag that didn't even reach my face, only a second or two later I was completely calm again. The new situation - and the fixed state of reality from that point on - was that I now owned a large piece of metal about as useful as Stevie Wonder's telescope, my next insurance policy quote would be about as cheerful as cot death, and I was now a full-time pedestrian again like all the rest of the world’s massive walky wankers.

While it's a fairly simple concept to understand in relation to the past, it can be almost equally applicable to the future. Expectations, indeed, can be almost as self-destructive as regrets. Imagine you're going to an interview for that recently decided career diversion into Veterinary Optometry. Just as you can never know what might have happened if you had made different choices in the past, neither can you predict how the possibilities and potential of your future will arrange themselves as they squeeze through your present and into the growing prison of your past. Yeah. Sure, you can choose how to dress, how you present yourself and how you prepare but beyond that, once again, you’re at the mercy of the Universe. You can't control who interviews you, what they want, or manage what they'll think of you and your past discretions with the fragile, frontend of a German Shepherd. You can't control the kind of room you're entering, the atmosphere waiting inside, or whether you’ll be allergic to the chair. You can't control the questions you'll be asked, or what already exists in your head with which you can answer them. You can't know or change who else will apply for the job, what the interviewer thinks of them, how they'll compare to you, or how many animals they’ve punted in the chops. Worrying about the future is as unhealthy as the past because, almost equally, you cannot control it.

You can only react to it.

With no expectations, you cannot be surprised. With no expectations, you cannot be disappointed.

In terms of unnecessary things to worry about, the Future might as well join the pile.

Death. The Past. Your height. Other people’s stupidity. Aging. Your parents. George Lucas cashing in on Star Wars. Pandas not fucking. Continental drift. Your skin colour. Your gender. Your genes. Yoko Ono. When all of these inevitable facts are raked in to the same dark and dusty corners of our mind where Catholics store scientific facts and their repressed childhood memories, the real priorities that deserve our attention begin to emerge and become clear. Once you let go of the things that are beyond your control, you can hold much tighter on to the things that are left within it. If you prevent wasting energy where it’s useless, it’s more available for where it can make a difference.

Now please open your Handy Gandhi pocket notebooks, skip past the photo where he looks like Gollum's just re-emerged from the caves with a degree and a bed sheet, and jot down the following in the Shit He Probably Said First section:

You can't change what people think of you, but you can change how you treat them.

You can't change your body, but you can appreciate it.

You can't change your past, but you can accept it.

You can't change that you'll die, but you can change how you live.

You can't change the world, but you can change yourself to fit better in it.

The Speeding Ticket

2011-03-03T10:01:00.005Z

On average, you've got somewhere between none and a hundred years on the surface of this colourful little rock, and that just isn't enough time to get to grips with all the stuff that’s going on all over its surface. It's too big for our little feet to ever tread, too complex to figure out, too strange to change. We're overwhelmed by the sheer impossibility of trying, or learning, or seeing, or doing even a portion of what exists to interest or intrigue us. Ignoring Pokemon cards, there's also the recorded artistic output of humanity's collective history available to our hands. On pages, in pictures, in words, on walls, in messages, in math. Generations of souls trying to outlast their time, and live in to ours. There's sports, and music, and tastes, and things you can put in your bloodstream to make you feel nice while you bumble between them like a doomed drunk in a disco. There are mountains and animals and rivers and seas, and fun people to meet or mock or share a night with all the way in between. You'll lose a day on the Beatles anthology, another building a shed. Learning poker, a good stew, fixing up a bike. You'll lose one day trying to get to the other side of the planet on a plane. We're cruelly spoiled by the abundance of activity in every direction, and yet we can try and have a happy time as we rush and bounce between it in our little, lovely efforts to get a bit of all of it, or at least all of a bit of it. With everything to do and so little time to do it in, it's a real cunt who wants to slow you down.

Unfortunately, believe it or not, these people exist. They've been given uniforms, feel legitimatized by the Law, and are out there trying to stop you doing what you want as if they’ve got it all figured out and you haven’t. They think they're right, and they're trying to stop you going so fast. But fuck them. Fuck them right in their hats.

Let's cut to some empty, boring Hypothetical Highway where you've been pulled over by one of the Shits in his big, flashing Shitmobile. You're welcome to assume they're fat, too, if that helps. Fucking fat cops. Everyone hates a cop whose skin is too far away from their skeleton, especially when what's in between is majority pie. He's pulled you over, maybe to put you in between some bread, and now he wants to give you a Ticket. But you're not going down without a fight, are you? Damn right.

Obviously first you should try some mild, elaborate lies about the much bigger and more important crime or accident that you just witnessed round the corner. If a simple distraction doesn't work, start with the basics -- dealing with the Police 101 -- flirt, look mental, speak another language to see if they can really be arsed with you, cry, pretend to faint, faff around in your glove box like a blind, armless pensioner trying to save a hamster from a soup, blink a lot, shit yourself, ask if its legally possible to arrest just one Siamese twin, maybe shout 'ejector seat!', throw your arms up and then just sit perfectly still for several minutes looking relieved.

Has the Officer gone?

A stayer, huh? Pesky. Well, fine. Let's face it, there's obviously a very good reason you were in a hurry; you're not some kind of prick, are you? All we have to do is hide that actual information, and replace it with a fast-flowing faceload of pigcum nonsense.

'My grandmother's diabetes has gone rogue', 'my life partner's been in a Code 17 caving incident', and ‘I promise, it was the Magnets!' are a nice start.

It is important to note at this stage, however, that if you choose to lie to the Police, you should spew all of your excuses at them rapidly like an incomprehensible, wordy mumble-vomit. Not only will it express to the Officer your extreme disapproval for the idea of this ticket, it will also be very hard for them to actually prove anything you've said. If by this point the Officer is still pioneering enthusiastically with the life-wasting, ultimately consequence-less procedure and you've exhausted the argument that it might be nicer if they were arresting real criminals like the Pope, it may now be time for the intellectual phase of Operation I Really Would Rather Spend That Money on a DVD Boxset and a Particularly Delicious Cake.

Please tell the Officer that for the next few minutes you are going to explain why he doesn't have any evidence of you speeding, that it is impossible that you were speeding, and that you will be from this point onwards be inferring that punishing people for speeding makes about as much sense as Gary Glitter's parameters on sexual maturity.

Right.

You know those laser gun things they use? You know, those we'll hide here and walletfuck a lottery pick of unlucky motorists all day, cunty laser gun things? They work on the same basic mathematical principle that the time it takes you to travel a certain distance can be multiplied to decide whether your speed is above the limit they've decided. So if they ('The Man') say you've travelled one meter in 12 miliseconds, that means you've travelled at 100 miles per hour which is too fast, tsk-tsk, naughty-naughty, what if there'd been a child in a packet of crisps? However, if you've been pulled over, exhausted every feeble last shitwhiff of an excuse, and are still feeling particularly argumentative, mischievous or tight, you could now go down the route of explaining to an increasingly tedious face that it is actually impossible to prove the distance you travelled. That one meter could be any length, indeed it could even be exactly 1.3 meters, just right to prove that you were actually travelling at 70 miles per hour. If you measure the road, you will inevitably find that it is a bumpy, uneven, windy surface. If you stretched and pulled and ironed it out, it would actually be considerably longer. If it still didn't reach the holy 1.3 meters, you could look closer still and see that all those bumps have bumps too. Press those out, and you could continue zooming to the macroscopic level, or microscopic, or nanoscopic, or the molecular level, or atomic, or subatomic, or the quantum level... by which time you're forced to conclude that any ‘one meter’ of road is actually infinitely long, and may not actually exist.

'How long does it take to travel across infinity, potentially, Officer?' you'll ask if there's time before his baton meets your teeth.

'And that’s before we discuss the complex, anomalous and relative nature of time,' you'll plead bleedingly.

Have you got away with it yet? No? OK.

By this point, although a lot of your main dental matter may now be displaced over a large area of tarmac, it is important not to give up hope in the scientific method, and persist with contextualizing this speeding ticket for the pesky Officer. This, after all, is not the Dark Ages. We've got SatNav and pre-sliced cheese now.

Continue to argue.

Amidst their violent power trip or nervous breakdown, the Officer may maintain that by all pragmatic, practically applicable standards you were still travelling at 100 mph in a 70 mph zone. This is where you grab his intellectual gonads. 'But, Officer, you were travelling faster than 100 mph!'

That's it, his brain balls, right in your hand.

'Only because I had to catch up with you!'

He thinks he's got you, the rascal. Reel him in.

'BUT YOU WERE GOING 900 MILES AN HOUR!' scream at his face. Now watch. He's looking at you like you're a genuine licking-battery lunatic. Savour this.

Now explain using as many whimsical voices as possible that because the Earth is rotating at 900 miles per hour, even though we're moving on its surface, everything is going 900 miles per hour. You weren't even doing 1000 miles per hour in a 970 miles per hour zone. Your refusal to be arrested while you patronisingly explain rudimentary physics, however, may now have lead you to the position of owning a smashed face and pulverised skeleton.

Do not be discouraged.

As you use your tongue to poke out bits of gravel from your damaged gums and wonder whether using GCSE science was the most appropriate and ultimately beneficial way to deal with this situation, it might be time to ease off a bit and consolidate your position. Take a break and refresh your creative energy by using your remaining time with the Officer to insult their most sensitive physical attributes. Faces are particularly good because you can lose weight, can't you, but it’s hard to change your face.

When you are ready for Round Two, you will no doubt be continuing your wanked-up doomed rant inside a courthouse after a lengthy boot-induced coma. However, if you believe you may have attracted the interest of any of the bored, angry looking group of individuals opposite you who thought that jury service was some time when they could catch up on the ironing, persist arrogantly that it was scientifically impossible that you were speeding. If courts do decide their rulings based on evidence then there's no harm in further explaining that we are also travelling around the Sun at nineteen miles a second in a solar system moving 40,000mph around the galactic central point of the Milky Way. It'll be hard to get to the bit about the universe expanding at a million miles a minute, however, because you will presumably be receiving further punches to your already shattered smug twat face by a surprisingly plentiful group of smug twat face-punching enthusiasts.

Did it work?

Ah.

If you are in jail now, it is no doubt because you abandoned the Gandhi method of conflict management at the last minute and switched instead to the more immediately productive John Prescott method. Naughty. But -- onwards -- you've now got lots of time to read and in jail you'll learn loads of new skills like how to hotwire a car, how to make a nail bomb, how to synthesise Class A drugs in your bathtub, and perhaps even how to cry yourself to sleep after discovering the staggering elasticity of your anal wall.

So, let's work on that Parole Hearing material. You've tried the bamboozlement method and the intellectual argument, so now it's really time to become a cunt. Let's dip our toes into the philosophical waters of the nature of truth. No?

Fine. It's your sixty quid.

Interracial Super Friends

2010-06-25T13:12:00.004+01:00

After an amazingly healthy breakfast accompanied by proper, proper coffee at our hosts, the Littlefield family’s house, we got in to our borrowed car, and typed an address into our gifted sat nav and headed to our next destination: scenic Lake George, northern New York State.

After relaxing on the lake beach for a while, we started looking for somewhere we could camp for free – the more bear footprints and shotgun shells, the better. However, we found somewhere lovely instead. We went to the reception to ask how much it would be… $22.

Well, I don’t know what five and a half bucks means to you, but to me that’s a buffet. Staring out at endless acres of woodland, and endless miles of lake, I was less than keen. However, this is when fate stepped in. More accurately, this is where fate waddled in. The Universe had just delivered to us large happy crappy camper Steve.

Steve, first and foremost, is not made for the wilderness. He’s barely made for surviving civilisation, bless him. But he saw us, four youthful brain-trained individuals, with time to kill. He asked us if we could put up his tent for him.

‘Of course! Get in’, we said, hugely pleased to be of service.

So, it turns out, Steve and his friend Sam (think Bubba from Forrest Gump but a lot more blind) are the two greatest men on the planet. Not only are they cute, interracial super friends, they are recovered alcoholics, ceaseless world watchers, and amongst the world’s most generous, simple and lazy creatures.

After setting up their tent for them (turns out they hadn’t read the instructions), we also set up their camping cots, six electric lanterns, their radio and their torches – all of which were brand new for their trip (estimated cost: well over a thousand pounds). It would later rain, and we quite simply could not imagine where they would have been if we hadn’t helped them (though in the dark, wet and upside-down would be a good guess.)

What followed was a night and morning of insightful quotes, nuggets of wisdom and insights into the workings of two minds that couldn’t figure out a zip… between two of them:

At three in the morning, “hey, Steve! How do you make this zip work?! I’m having so much trouble I think Ima have a accident!”

Paul: “Bad news, there’s no showers. Good news, I saw a chipmunk.”
Sam: “Oh yeh! I saw a chipmunk this morning… in the shower!”

Steve trying to take a group photo of all of us. Unfortunately for several minutes he is pointing the camera at his own face.

They take us out for breakfast, and please bear in mind we are camping on Lake George:
Steve: “Hey, look at this lake.”
He points at his table mat. Sam looks from Steve’s mat to his own.
Sam: “Hey, I think I got the same lake!”

Sam, a cigar-smoking basically blind man, meandering around the camp trying to get some photos of us on his camera-phone, and literally pointing it at anything that moved. He also insisted on using a flash, despite it definitely being the day. Steve’s photography was almost as wondrous. We asked him to take a photo of all of us together, but he protested that we wouldn't all fit in. We explained he would have to get up and move back a bit.

Paul: “Are you gonna do a fire later?'
Steve: “Depends if the trolley comes by with some wood.”
This is mostly funny because we were in a wood.

But it is difficult to describe what genuinely great people they really were. Charming, engaging, curious. We were so, so fond of them. Steve, apart from feeding us and taking us out for breakfast, gave us a $100 towards our fuel, for little other reason that he hoped someone might do the same for his nieces and nephews while they were travelling. Amazing. To sum him up though, please see this animated gif, shot on a self-timer over the course of about 2 minutes.

Pictured: Steve and the World that moves around him.

To read more, visit USA by Hammock.

1-1

2010-06-15T17:25:00.005+01:00

Americans are mostly rubbish at watching football or 'soccer' as it isn't called. They try, bless them, they really do. They put it on the television, just like the rest of us. They watch it down the pub with a beer, just like the rest of us. They say things like ‘yeah’ and ‘woo’ – sometimes at the right time – just like we all do. If you were watching from inside a deaf man’s head, you could honestly believe they were actual football fans from anywhere in the world. They’re not though, and owning sound converting ear things inside a bar in New York has proved this to me in an oversimplified and prejudiced way. I’ve heard them consistently not get it. ‘Come on!’ they shout angrily at perfectly normal tackles. ‘Are you frickin’ kidding me?!’ every time they misunderstand the offside rule. ‘Good kicking!’ nobody shouted at any point.

So, what’s the problem? I think there’s too much subtlety and not enough points for a nation weened on high-scoring, action-packed sports like basketball, ice hockey and American rugby (also known as 'football' to the natives.) I basically haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about when it comes to football. I have two generic conversations I can fall back in the pub if someone confronts me with an opinion. One's about how 'it's all, like, just a business, man' and the other starts something like 'I just can't understand why they haven't bought in video technology yet.' However, even I’ve played and enjoyed enough football in my life to appreciate the very basics of the game. Sit me in a pub with ‘blokes’, and I can shout things like ‘triangles!,’ ‘jog on! and ‘line him!’ almost convincingly. Put one of my made-up, stereotypical Americans in the same situation and it will be half an hour before they realise that the game has started.

This is why me and my friends have came up with a new set of rules to spice up the game for our transatlantic neighbours. Thanks, then, to Lucy, Alex, Andy, Aaron and Isaac, who may or may not have been drinking at the time, but definitely, definitely were.

New Rules Football:

All balls must go in the goal.
There will be one thousand footballs.
Balls can only be moved by tongue.
Goals can only be scored on horseback or whilst playing a mandolin.
Managers must be singing at all times.
Drinks may not be imbibed after the 35th minute.
No draws.
Goal keepers must wear ties.
The goal is indicated not by a geometric arrangement of posts, but by an elephant.
Every time a player scores, they must be replaced by a fan.
In extra time, the ball(s) will be replaced with a chair. The game is basically the same, except now instead of scoring goals the teams compete to all be standing on the chair.
Similarly, if footchair goes to penalties, the ball is replaced with a slippery pig. The winners must eat the pig.
An Amazonian tribesmen (who has never seen shoes) is chosen to draw the lines on the pitch and choose the chair. After, he is killed.
Fans have as many water balloons as they can fit in to their hats.
No hats.
Ronaldo must be waist-deep in the elephant at all times.
Buckets are to be used instead of shoes.
In order to encourage integration, leagues are organised not by country or region, but by first name, e.g. The Norman League.
Finals are sponsored by Mr Kipling.
Players must be wearing eye-patches. If the player fouls and gets a non colour-discriminatory circle card, the eye-patch must be replaced with glued-on binoculars.
There is no referee, ever, unless someone successfully convinces everyone there is.
Action replays are sepia-toned and projected on to the elephant.
Minimum game time: 2 hours. Maximum game time: the life expectancy of an elephant.
No players are allowed to advertise pants.
Players may, however, advertise Boris Johnson as a non-political human.
All team chants are ‘Magic’ by Pilot.
If the ball goes off the pitch, the nearest player must set him or herself on fire.
Should a player fall over, they may add a rule that lasts until the end of the game.
Games end when Lucy laughs hysterically and runs out of breath.
Rick Astley must attend every game and serve drinks until the 35th minute. Strictly no talking.
Players must take brain supplements.
Every team must have a player over the age of 80.
There are no rules.

I think it would take a while to transition between the current ‘old rules’ and our more logical new ones, but the result would be a world where Americans could not only join in with the fun of football but hopefully learn to understand even the simplest rules of the game a little better.

Pictured: Too complicated.

Mumble in the Bronx

2010-06-11T14:06:00.004+01:00

So… planes now. I flew to Florida when I was a kid to cuddle strangers in animal costumes, but I don’t have a sparkling memory from that age. I remember I cried when I didn’t want to go on Space Mountain (after queuing for an hour first. Thanks Dad), and my brother jumped over two beds and into a wall when lightning struck a nearby hotel. However, what I definitely don’t remember is every seat having its own media TV station thing where you can watch a catalogue of movies, play games, listen to music, and even follow the plane’s progress on an animated flight chart. I was apparently so spoiled for choice that I couldn’t even make a choice. I just watched bits of things and fell asleep. I especially enjoyed the first ten minutes of Ghandi. I hope everything works out alright for that lovely little bald man.

One plane landing, forty fingerprints and fifteen bucks later, we were not only on a government database but also outside Grand Central station, poncing wireless from a Starbucks and downloading directions to our first host, a woman called Lisa in the Bronx. At this point, we were still weighed down by our bags and looking a bit like four people trying to smuggle folded camels into a rucksack convention.

We did the looking-up-everywhere-touristy thing for a bit, then found a Subway station to get confused in. A lovely woman helped us press some buttons on a machine because apparently it was too complicated to figure out for ourselves, and then we went to the platform to watch lots of trains that should have had us on them leave without us on them. Finally, we confirmed the right one and boarded, rearranging as many tired commuters with our massive rucksacks as possible.

In the Bronx, it was pissing down but it seemed very fitting that four English people should arrive to their first Couch Surfing host absolutely soaked. Despite this, we stopped in a shop doorway for a few minutes, and met a black skinned, blue eyed man called Charles. Thirty seconds in, it was clear he was on the Diana side of the Queen vs. Diana debate, if indeed that debate is going on anywhere.

We got to Lisa’s and within five minutes were in love with her, her son Ethan and their place. I’ll leave Lucy to describe them as she already has a new 8-year old best friend. Meanwhile, we all went out to grab some shopping for dinner and blended immediately into the local neighbourhood.

‘Yo! Where all these white people come from?!’

Or not.

Pictured: 'When in Rome.' Us blending in to the Bronx.

To read more, visit USA by Hammock.

Stupidity

2010-05-03T12:53:00.002+01:00

There are a lot of stupid people. A stupid person is stupid. They don't know very much, especially about what being stupid is. This is because they often realise that they're 'stupid' from talking to 'smart' people, which is stupid. If they don't realise that this is stupid, they're really stupid.

There are quite a few smart people. A smart person thinks that they're smarter than a stupid person because they know more things. However, smart people often do not realise that there are lot more things that they don't know, and that very smart people are much smarter than them. If they do realise this, they know that they're comparably Stupid. If they don't realise this, they don't know that they're really, really Stupid.

There are some very smart people. A very smart person knows lots and lots of things, and they also know that they don't know lots and lots of things. The more a very smart person knows, the more they realise that no person knows lots and lots of things about anything. A very smart person, therefore, knows that they're stupid. If they don't know that they're stupid, they are really, really, really stupid. And a prick.

There are no perfectly smart people. A perfectly smart person knows absolutely everything and does not exist. Because a perfectly smart person know everything, lots of stupid people, quite a lot of smart people and even some very smart people think its very, very smart to call them 'God.' However, because perfectly smart people can not exist, this makes them really, really, really, really stupid. That is unless, of course, the perfectly smart person does not exist and knows that they don't exist, in which case, who gives a shit how clever they are? They can fuck right off, the smug made-up know-it-alls.

In conclusive summary, then, we are all proper, tongue-biting, spit-dribbling, battery-licking thick. I know that might be hard for you to understand, you dopey, cretinous, bumblemoron brainvoid, but the quicker we can all accept it, the sooner we can bridge the imaginary divides between us, unite humanity in its struggles, rise up against our common problems and, as one, try to lick our elbows.

The Luck Perception

2010-01-13T00:00:00.002Z

Everyone's brain is different. Not different enough to massively distort the shape of our heads of course, but certainly enough to allow for the broad spectrum of unique qualities that we can easily use to hate each other without any need for creativity. Our likes and dislikes, knowledge and ignorance, dreams and phobias, keep us separate and unique. Where we are all united, however, is the existence of a small hollow space in the center of the brain that we are instinctively compelled to fill with unnecessary shit to worry about.

Life is great, or at least more interesting than the alternatives, but as the recent bout of cold weather has been exemplary in illustrating, we can’t find enough little things to keep us awake at night and moaning in the day.

On one hand, it's a good thing. It's certainly better for society to have a population worrying about train times and finding spiders in grapes rather than, for example, the horrifying possibilities posed by asteroids, super volcanoes, viruses, mega tsunamis and nuclear weapons which loom ever menacingly over humanity like a lonely ginger child above an anthill.

But it can also be a bad thing. The fucking excellent way we are collectively deciding as a species that we're not really prepared to do very much in the face of global warming, for instance. There are people everywhere taking baths in their lorries and completely content because they believe we must have back-up planets. Unfortunately, for most people, the words ‘destroying the Earth,' for all the terrifying connotations of apocalypse that tiny phrase contains, is too large a concept to merit attention. Perhaps environmentalists should specify and contextualise the doom a bit more by explaining that the end of the world would also be the end of sausage rolls and Top Gear and that iPhone app that helps you navigate your way around London by leading you in to traffic like a fucking pleb.

Personally, I find it hard to worry about many of our often trivial Western concerns, like arthritis and petrol prices and the internet cutting off; the general point being if you've survived whatever you're moaning about, you've won life's blonking lottery. A bit of food and a roof chucked in too, and complaining about how difficult your existence is would be an offensive cuntpunt to Zanabu, the terminally ill, blind, disabled boy from Poorland who's lifelong misfortune comes on top of being given a borderline-racist name and being completely made-up.

I’m an incredibly lucky person. And not only because I live a decadent, middle-class existence where I can easily access over two types of cheese, but because I believe I am lucky. Luck is relative, subjective, and, most importantly, defined by perception. If you believe you're lucky, you are, and if you believe you're not, you're not.

It’s literally your own fault so stop being such a whinging bore. Let me explain.

To simplify this, we’ll apply my idea to two arbitrary characters, Person A and Person B. Actually, we’ll give them two arbitrary names, Frank and Razzer, to help follow the situation. Furthermore, again for clarity's sake, let's say that Frank is a dentist with no teeth and Razzer is a condom machine attendant who won the lottery several years ago but didn’t want the win ‘to change him.’ They sound pretty similar, right? WRONG. Frank is an optimist and Razzer is a pessimist.

Picture this. Frank finishes work, gives a cheery wave to his dental nurses and begins his walk home. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the same city, Razzer restocks his last pub toilet and does the same, although he slips in piss on the way out. Frank and Razzer have never met, although they have nearly passed each other several times on their daily commutes without realising. Today though, they cross the exact same road at the exact same time, and are consequently ploughed down by the exact same tram.

They both survive.

Inevitably, Frank goes home and gums to his wife Ethel about how lucky he is to be alive. She pauses knitting, stands to hug him and offers to cook his favourite meal, mash potato and soup, to celebrate. The two collapse laughing as that’s the only thing he can ever eat. “Oh, Ethel, you bloody ironic japester,” he says, “get in that kitchen!” They’re happy.

Meanwhile over in pessimism land, Razzer goes home to his mansion after the same incident, grumbling and moaning, and tells his wife Pazzy how unlucky he is to have been in an accident. "All this wealth is a nightmare, I'm still getting hit by large, railed metal transport," he grumbles. She’s not listening though because she’s fucking the Butler and using Razzer’s highly-prized collector’s condoms to do it. Irrelevant: they’re unhappy.

The point is, Frank is lucky because he defines himself so. You smash a tram into him, he goes home smiling because he's alive. You take his teeth, he thanks you for his gums. By the reverse side of the same token, Razzer is ‘unlucky.’ Despite his obvious fortune, both financial and dental, he returns home to his crumbling life, unsure why money hasn’t bought him happiness, and complains that he got hit by a tram and lost a mere leg. Rather than thank a fictitious deity or look on the bright side of the situation, he takes out the shotgun, pumps one bullet in to Mrs. Pazzy Razzer, then aims the last one at his own brain. He stares at the naked, terrified, blood-splattered butler. "Clean this up." BANG.

Exactly. So cheer the fuck up.

Snow Time for Jokes

2009-12-20T10:03:00.001Z

It's 10am and I'm in a warehouse. I had to get up at 7.30 this morning to be here in time to sit around for hours waiting for a lorry, and the overarching theme of the day so far has been what the fuck is the point in mornings. I appreciate that most people will see them as a necessary prefix to the day and all the disappointment that will contain, but for me they just seem like evidence of us wanting to punish ourselves. What kind of people have we become when we think, 'right, brilliant, it's dark and cold, what I really want to do is leave my bed and spend the next ridiculous amount of hours standing.'

Not that I have spent any time standing yet, come to think of it; my day so far having consisted of rolling out of bed into shoes, a hat and a car, before transitioning gently into another chair facing the internet in my friend's office. Thanks to the ice, I haven't even had to use my legs. I've just glided from one reclined position to another twenty-six miles away. Indeed, the only exercise I've had so far today is craning my neck to shout at reality-impaired four-by-four drivers who seem blissfully unaware that their cars are the most equipped on the road to cope with icy roads, and yet who seem to feel the need to slow to five miles an hour at every fucking roundabout, corner, and child in the road. If someone like me, who essentially drives what is a cigarette tin on wheels, is shouting at you to hurry the fuck up, there is probably something seriously wrong with your driving and brain function.

Go faster.

Not that it wasn't fun driving past broken down and broken spirited motorway users on the way here. Oh, it was. We delighted in the white, middle class 'nightmare' of today's life losers like they had personally slapped our children. It's the pseudo-drama of it all that makes it so amusing. It's snowing, one of England's most rarely observed meteorological phenomena, and it's fucking beautiful. The world, right now, looks like some kind of lovely meringue, yet people moan about the several hours that stretched out their commute to work. Well, who the fuck cares. I think it's funny you hit a tree. I've read several apocalyptic articles this morning about the terrible time had by thousands of motorists who had to sleep in their cars overnight. I did this last week for recreation. Sure, you wake up Z-shaped and feeling like you've been catching lead hammer rain with your body all night but it's entirely sensible. Once you've realigned the few dislodged vertebrae that have migrated to your elbows and levered the handbrake from your anus, it's actually rather bracing waking up in a car. It reminds you of a time when we didn't have houses, or electricity, or central heating and we all lived in our cars.

If you don't like it that much then you shouldn't be driving in what, quite frankly, are hilarious driving conditions. What other time of the year can you car-kiss perfect strangers like they're your best bumper buddies and get away with it? It's brilliant, although I appreciate it might be more fun when your car is worth the same amount as a tin of tuna rather than, for comparison's sake, a tinned tuna factory. Oh, you've got a nice car? Well, that's your fault. Nobody made you choose a car that you care about more than a second child in China. Yes, you've got seat warmers and working doors but you've also got a time bomb of a heart murmur that's aggravated every time you worry that someone's going to scratch it with their pointy trousers in Sainsbury's car park. If my car was stolen, I'd be more upset about the biscuits I'd left in the glove box.

No sign of the lorry yet so I'm going to ask if I can drive the forklift. I want some practice before I go out crashing tonight.

By the way, I drive this hunk of fun:

Two lessons here: 1.) Don't leave your car keys on the pub table. 2.) Don't have friends.

Flirting with Technology

2009-12-15T14:42:00.000Z

As a first post, it's hard to avoid the trap of explaining why I even have a blog. I know everyone's got one these days, but I'm of the general opinion that the majority of people shouldn't have keyboards and fingers, let alone blogs. There is something very self-satisfied and arrogant to writing a blog, I think. You're essentially saying that every computer-owning, internet-connected individual in the world needs access to your opinions on Nick Griffin and Twilight, and they need them immediately. The problem is that there is no quality control, so the internet - the wonderful, beautiful internet that we use for so many, amazing things - is getting clogged up by this sticky residue of moron, like clumps of hair in a plug.

So why am I pushing through a barrier of self-loathing and continuing to type? What makes me separate from the collective hive of fuckwittery that is the 'blogosphere'? I'm a white, middle class, heterosexual male, I've not exactly got Unreported World on my doorstep and a special badge for parking. My views aren't exciting. I'm not into racism and I like cucumber. That's about it. In terms of a unique selling point, the best I can offer is that I know how to use a comma. Therefore, I suppose, this blog is simply an excuse to 'keep my creative juices flowing' like the saliva from a stroke victim.

However, this does not mean that I am a 'blogger.' No, no, I am still a real person, which in this instance will be characterised by the fact that I'll probably get quickly bored of this new interactive trend based on my previous flirting with new technology. For example, I have one friend on MySpace. If you invited me to Farmville or Werewolves vs Vampires on facebook, I judged you. Not to be harsh, but I did. It was an impulsive reaction like the split second choice to buy a comb from a shop rather than, for example, a scratchy, bearded man who lives under a bypass. I'm not saying it was right, but in my subconscious I decided you were less of an important human than the rest of us. And I don't tweet.

In fact, I joined Twitter in its early days to find out what all the jazz was about. I didn't get it. I started 'following' Stephen Fry as that seemed like the thing to do and found out something trivial like he'd eaten a cake. Great. I promptly logged off and carried on with my life. I logged back on recently to find out I had 9 followers. NINE! Christ, when Jesus was alive, he only had the Twelve. I'm three quarters of my way to the Son of God's level of worship without any of the miracles. I haven't even sneezed on my keyboard, let alone posted a tweet. I imagine if I did, my nine mentally-unassessed anonymoids would masturbate all over their own faces and hair with ecstasy, dazzled in a mist of euphoria and incontinence generated by that first contact.

When you actually stop and think about it though, what I actually possess is an incredibly, almost infinitely, powerful tool. I can get a message, instantaneously, to nine people somewhere in the world that I've never met before. That is an interesting power, and I'm sure I have some opinions on it but now I'm bored of typing and want to go lay in hot water and quietly hate myself for actually writing a blog. Bye, World.