THE PEN IS MORE PORTABLE THAN THE SWORD
The House That Jack UnBuilt...
There are reasons aplenty to be lax in your blog postings but the front of your house burning down is probably the best.
Nobody got hurt but there are few scarier wake-up calls at half two in the morning than "wake up - I think the front of the house is on fire!" I don't think this picture really does it justice but standing outside watching it sweep through the place and eat everything it touched while licking its way down the fences towards the main part of the house was possibly the most frightening thing I've ever seen.
Stupidly, I thought it would be a good idea to move one of the cars before it caught fire as well. Yeah, I know... but you don't think straight in that sort of event. Your head moves into business mode and nothing less. As soon as I got in I knew I shouldn't have. It was so, so hot in there and as soon as I turned the engine over, the back windscreen blew into the car... not nice, but thankful that I have all this hair still even if it is a bitch picking it out.
I really can't even begin to get across what it's like watching something that out of control coming towards you. No matter how brave/stupid you feel, there's simply nothing you can do against hungry 60ft flames and a good headwind helping it along.
The Fire Guys turned up as quick as they could considering the house is in the middle of nowhere. Once they were on the scene, all you can do is stand back and watch them do what they do best. How 2.30am turned into 5.15am I'll never know but it did.
Once the fire had been reduced to red hot wet ash and dawn broke, there was little more to do but stand there, think what was there a few hours earlier and what's there now. Which as you can see here, is nothing at all. Now, I know it's not my house and I'm moving shortly, but these people who I rent some rooms from, lost at least half of their personal possessions. Thirty plus years of collective life gone in 20 minutes. Bad, bad shit.
The fire guys had a good look round and despite hearing a car at some vague time before the fire started (which is unusual for the middle of nowhere) put it down to 'maybe an electrical fault'. Arson or electrical fault, I don't know but I stood there coughing up ash and wondering if I simply hadn't given enough food to the angels that live in the field across the road. Maybe they'd gotten a taste for Yorkie's and were less than impressed with the apples I had thrown in there that had fallen off the tree. Seriously.
Anyway, it's been the most exhausting week and there's a lot of aftermath to blog about: A fire, a divorce, moving house, a magazine, stories and poetry... if you made it this far, you may wish feast away on this video featuring the last few moment of Monday morning. We had to wait until there was nothing left to burn before we even got this close... scary.
Look after yourselves people... death can come on swift wings.
http://www.youtube.com/get_player
Currently listening to: Roxy Music
Currently reading: The Likeness: Tana French and Red Rackham's Treasure
Currently: Also sleeping a lot
The House That Jack Built...
Looking for somewhere new to live is an interesting process to go through.
Over the last four to five weeks, I've seen some flats and houses that made me think I would be better off living in the car. I've seen places that are beautiful and overpriced, ugly and overpriced and just plain dull - and overpriced. I have learnt a lot - the main point being that even though the whole world is rocking on its credit starved ass, everything is still overpriced.
I've been to agents who think they're doing you a favour by showing you around a place and are generally a bunch of cocksuckers. I've met agents who are really decent and agents who haven't got a clue what's going on.
After weeks of this nonsense, a cool thing happened. Around a month ago, we put up some flyers in local newsagent windows and on Friday evening, got a call about a house that was priced perfectly and in theory sounded like it fell out of the sky into our lap.
I did a drive-by on it on Friday night and fell in love immediately. A small cottage in middle of nowhere... that was pretty much the directive from the start. Come yesterday morning, further talks took place which led in a meet yesterday afternoon and the deal being signed, sealed and delivered by the end of the day. That's less than 24 hours.
The moral of the story? You can go through normal channels to try and find what you want, you can register with every agency under the sun or you can stand in the middle of a field and request an audience with the Angels of the Sefiroth and ask for their help. Laugh away non-believers of supernature... wait until you see our new house.
A word from the wise though - nothing comes for free. Always remember to find out the terms of the deal before you start. In this case, a Yorkie bar - which will be delivered this afternoon as promised. It's one thing to piss off your landlord but another to have the Sefiroth fucking your life up over a forgotten chocolate bar.
Currently listening to: Maroon 5 | Songs About Jane
Currently reading: The Suspicions of Mr Whicher | Kate Summerscale and Good Living With Rheumatoid Arthritis (don't ask)
Wine...
I blame the wine...
Midnight of yesterday was the closing date for the Bridport poetry/short story competition. I was hoping to finish up The Tuba Farm to submit but just as I was getting to the end, I thought of a much better ending and I have decided to hold it back so that it's a much better story all round. So instead I submitted a couple of poems: The Fallen and The Girl With Venetian Eyes.
Yesterday was also the closing date for entries to the competition at United Press. I submitted a couple more poems out there and then had the dumbest idea. With five minutes left to submit entries, I thought I would submit a "live entry" - one written on the spot with no editing and submitted without reviewing. Now, I don't think this is good or bad because it is what it is - me hammering words together at the speed of light in a poem like structure and calling it a poem. In the spirit of fair play (and mirth), here it is:
The Animals That Broke The Law
Donkeys.
Hundreds of.
Marauding in the streets.
Throwing bricks through windows
Stealing TVs they will never get to watch.
Chickens.
Jaywalking.
Heads on sticks.
Iguanas.
Out of place in the high street.
Cold and lost.
Run off with a fan heater from Comet.
What the world needs right now is Bob the Rooster.
He will sort this mess out.
There seems to be an avalanche of competitions out there at the moment - maybe they're always out there. I've never looked that hard before, but I certainly have enough material to be shipping out to them. The Boy With Wasps For Eyes can go next. I'm struggling a bit with my own self-imposed word count on that one and there's a nice looking comp with a 2000 word maximum which means I can cut it back and tighten it to within an inch of its life.
I've been meaning to blog this next part for a while. In Waterstones - or maybe it was WHSmiths - I forget now, but they are both the same anyway - they appear to have developed human tragedy publishing into a whole new marketing experience. How much human misery can the reading public actually need? Quite frankly, this is shameful. Shameful of the authors, the agent, the publisher and the bookseller. All of the covers even have the same Lucida Handwriting font design so that tragedy can be easily identified by idiots.
...and before anybody starts, I know it's not Lucida Handwriting but you get the picture. Is it the same all over the world? Google Analytics is telling me that Zodiac Lung has readers everywhere these days... if you're from out of town and made it this far down, please leave a comment if you're familiar with this human misery factory. I'd really like to know if there are books about how a shepherd broke into your bungalow in Cuba one night and locked you in a cupboard...
The Poseidon Adventure
There's a scene in The Poseidon Adventure in which, to escape the oncoming onslaught of um... Atlantic Ocean, the remaining survivors have to swim underneath a staircase (or similar) to get to the other side where they can then battle *insert random plot device here, to further their escape. Anyway, in this group, there's a really fat woman and when you're watching the movie for the first time, you automatically think, 'she's next to die'. But no. In Poseidon, she turns out to have been a champion underwater swimmer or something when she was in high school and navigates the underwater labyrinth like a big blubbery seal. It's a great scene, but the crux of it is that her husband (I think) can't swim even in the bath, but he has to otherwise he will drown anyway.
This is kind of how I feel today. Like a mixture of these two characters. I know I used to be able to (metaphorically) swim for miles underwater, but something is making me stand still for far too long and though I don't think it's fear, I can certainly see the Atlantic bearing down on me and am not moving. It's an odd feeling, waiting to be swept away - hence total lack of posting this week. It won't last forever, it never does and when it blows away, expect to see something stupid like a million posts a day as the clouds blow away.
I think the answer lies in a big torch that got shone on me this week, though at the time it was more like a whole set of floodlights bearing down on me. It's hard being told your weaknesses and being grown-up enough to recognise them as real. Truth of the matter is I fucking hate being criticised - even constructively - and am just about grown-up enough to brush my own teeth, but I'm willing to go through this because for once - and it really is just once - I think I might be a better person on the other side. In this particular instance, the torch revealed that I am guilty - make that GUILTY - of sometimes not liking the things that the world throws at me but never doing anything about it to change those things. That's a really fucking hard thing to admit to yourself when you've always considered yourself a bit fearless.
It's even harder writing them down here.
It's a bit like walking into a room where there are a lot of people you know along with some you don't and announcing something you think is really awful and personal but the truth of the matter is, the people who know you are all thinking 'yeah, we could have told you that years ago' and the people who don't know you, don't actually care either way. They just came for the free biscuits and the chance of a few laughs because it was free to get in.
But you know what keeps me smiling and happy? The fact that you're all just as fucked up as me in different ways that you choose to display/not display as applicable. Which reminds me - I forgot to post up Communication Breakdown in The Wasteland. Will do that later today. Tut tut.
It's not all doom though. I'm about 500 words from finishing up The Tuba Farm short story for a big-ass competition. It's about time that got wrapped up once and for all but it took said conversation above to set some big and heavy wheels in motion in my head to get it moving again. There's a couple of other competitions lurking over the next couple of months too, so there will be a fair bit of offline writing going on - with a pen!
Huge cock
It's a pitiful state of affairs when you have to resort to underhand tactics to drive some traffic. Just taking a look at the stats for this blog and the day after I posted using the title Popular Dogging Site about the sheepdog trials, my traffic went up by 3,457% according to Google analytics. Some of them even stayed for a while which is nice of them before they go off into the wilds of the countryside to get their kicks.
It's an interesting experiment and one I would like to repeat again today to see what happens. Yesterday, we went on a road trip to gather some collateral for one of my other (and as yet undiscussed here) projects and found ourselves at this place, where coffee is freely available along with cigarettes and some decent chat. Behind her studio is a chicken house and I swear, I thought her rooster was a model until it moved. It was at least 3 feet tall and must weigh eight fucking stone. I've always been more or less satisfied with my lot but now I want a huge cock as well.
Jealous...
Thought of the day: When you plan to go somewhere in the evening, don't lie on the floor and fall asleep...
On being Byron-esque
The idea of getting out and about is gaining a little momentum. This seems like a good place to start (and yes, I've just realised that this in in fact, tomorrow)...
Our next Orange Street Poetry Night is on Sunday the 21st of June at 5:45pm. Entry as always is free, please come along and support your local writers. Creative writing groups and individuals are invited to bring promotional literature for their own events, and may also bring their own publications to sell on the night.
I shall of course be reporting back - either with a) lots of positive things to say or b) slamming the event from the top rope. I've always found these groups hit or miss with no in-between but this one I'm feeling pretty good about. I have been known to be wrong, but not often. Most interested in the quality of what's going on out there and maybe more so in the purpose... anyway, we shall see.
If all else fails and it sucks like a lemon, maybe it's time to form some kind of elite group that only performs once a year at a secret woodland location on the summer solstice. Now that is the kind of poetry group poets should want to be a member of. Maybe next year... being as that's also on Sunday. Then again, you only need two people to make a group. Would feel a bit of a loser going totally alone.
Curds & Whey | 1000 x 100 Word Stories (4)
"What I'm saying is, you can't call a Funeral Home Curds & Whey. We'll never get any people through the door, dead or alive!"
"...and what I am saying, is that it's traditional to use the surnames of the partners. I don't mind if we call it Whey & Curds, but those are our surnames and that's what we should be using! On the other hand, although I don't mind using it that way around, it's not half as snappy. You have to admit Curds & Whey is very memorable and comes quite early on in the Yellow Pages..."
Hard Boiled | 1000 x 100 Word Stories (3)
I never wanted to be a private detective. It just kind of happened.
My old man was the best private detective in the world. I know this because he told me so on several occasions.
My Ma died when I was only a few weeks old. Dad felt that in order to give me the best possible start in life, that he should work every case that came his way.
So he kept me close in his middle drawer. Top drawer: gun. Middle drawer: me. Bottom drawer: bourbon. I guess the apple really doesn't fall too far from the tree.
Out and about and some other bits...
I rather suspect that it's time to get the lead out and interact with some of the human race. There's a lot of good things going on around here that I've missed simply because most of the time I either have my head in a book or up my ass.
It's a little late in the day for most of these, but this last one is certainly worth checking out:
8.30-10.30,
Thursdays; 21st February, 27th March, 25th April, 22nd May, 26th June
Brown Jug Inn, 204 Ramsgate Road, Broadstairs
'Poems & Pints': Round-table readings of poetry in a traditional pub.
This is an on-going event occuring each Thursday.
Full listings for Poets on Fire can be found here. Maybe it's time...
Also going to see what's going on at the Folkestone LitFest this year. 19 to 24 September gives me a reasonable amount of time to get something decent together...
Observers with eyes will also see that I've started to post 100 word stories. Seemed like a good idea at the time! I quite often get half-baked ideas at the most inconvenient of times and nearly all of them lie blowing in the wind, so they're just being emptied out into somewhere a little more constructive than the ether. There will indeed be 1000 of them in all. I have no idea how long it will take or even what they will be like - if indeed they need to be like anything. What's a Zodiac Lung for if not something to empty your head into.
Kicking Leaves | 1000 x 100 Word Stories (2)
The Cat Carousel span around and around in the haze that was mounting beneath the canopy of the burnt oak.
Most of the cats were behaving themselves and stayed on the ride just as they had been told by the Man with the Nehru Collar, but Tabitha and Barabas had jumped off as soon as his back was turned.
Running in the shadow of the oak, they whooped and kicked up an unholy mess in the leaves, not caring one iota that the Man with the Nehru Collar would skin them alive when he discovered his rules had been broken.
Quarantine | 1000 x 100 Word Stories (1)
So there I sat, alone, the skin peeling off my body in increasingly large strips. Tense, with my back up against the cold brick wall in a pitiful attempt to not fall apart completely, I let out a scream that held the entire weight of my soul behind it.
The observers in the green and white coats - one colour presumably being more important than the other - simply looked back through the glass at me with hanging jaws.
Whatever had decided my body was a suitable host had grossly underestimated how habitable it actually was and now, we were all paying.
Less is more/Black Dye White Noise
This evening I was trying to figure out how best to control my out of control meandering for the best and one of the things that was becoming a real grind - at least to me - was keeping up with the concept of multiple blogs. So instead of separate sites and feeds for things like Extracts from The Wasteland and Letters from..., they will all be posted here and be easily spotted by their tags - lovingly displayed at the top of the column opposite. I know a lot of you are a little slow of mind due to the trepanning in the woods, so over the next week, there will also be some highly crafted graphical interfaces deposited in that column too. I think they call them icons these days.
So, if you've been keeping up with the Code of the Zode, best kill off those other RSS feeds for they will work and be updated no longer. It also means that Tales from... will be updated more regularly and with far more random offerings.
It makes sense to me and will hopefully come into its own once the short stories and other promo scraps are posted.
I'll also be adapting a few other old items that have been sitting in the wings for far too long, the first of these is the rebirth of Black Dye White Noise. At the moment, this will come in the form of playlists archived at itunes. We'll see where it goes but in the meantime, here's the first:
Thank you. You may now return to your seats.
A tip of the hat...
I forgot to post about a range of books that I found last Saturday in the comic store (which I also forgot to post about). Picking up the Umbrella Academy second series, I found a rack of imported and translated European graphic novels collected from old comic book titles.
The guys that do this are Cinebook and they have a pretty damn good site if you're looking for something a bit different to fill the hole in your soul. There's some great stuff available that I used to be into back when I was a kid... though God only knows how I used to get hold of this stuff back then.
Most worthy of attention are the Lucky Luke and Blake & Mortimer series, particularly the latter for it's blatant homage to Herge's Tintin artwork. Even the covers are decked out in the same font and total style package. Luckily the stories hold up to scrutiny. Also worth a look is Madame Tussaud if you're looking for something a little out of the ordinary.
Nice - whichever way you slice it.
Popular Dogging Site
Nice post title. That should drive some traffic.
As you would expect at such a place, the dogs were a lot more amenable to being sociable than the people they were with. There seems to be some general backlash against "hobbyists" who come to these events with their pets (who are nevertheless, well trained) as opposed to working dogs with their Shepherd owners. As I learned, there aren't many Shepherds around anymore. I can't help but wonder why this is. There are certainly as many sheep as there ever where. How do sheep get from one place to another without Shepherds and their dogs? Do farmers ride bikes at their sheep? Is there a machine that goes out and does it in the blink of an eye? Maybe the sheep just get left where they are - which would kind of make sense because you only have to put them back out in the morning. Surely they wouldn't get cold in the night with all that wool on them. I have slept outdoors in a woolly jumper before and I must say, it is most comfortable. Then again, foxes and wolves weren't trying to rip my head off for a snack... but if you really want to know, it was on Euston station, which if you've ever slept there, is at least twice as dangerous as sleeping in an open field in the country.
As Denis Leary once stated, it's the little things that get you through life. This weeks great little things have been, in no particular order:
A coconut slice from a rough looking garden centre, the egg mayonnaise filling in the sandwich shop suddenly becoming very tasty, the huge chunks of fruit cake that Sue has also started selling in there, the killer chips that they have started serving in the Three Tuns in Staple and both of the tins of Rice Pudding I ate stone cold out of the tin this evening. There was also the carrot cake in Costa Coffee and the shortbread thing from Starbucks... there are many others I could add to this list including the aforementioned egg and bacon roll at the sheepdog trial...
Did I mention I had started eating again?
I have lots to say about proper work things too, but I think I shall do that tomorrow... I appear to have suddenly become very tired.
And hungry. Maybe I have a tapeworm?
Time Snatchers
Snatchers? That will never make a good Doctor Who type of phrase. Snatching at time suggests that all you can steal is a few seconds that won't be missed by anybody. This however is not the case. Whole days have gone missing this week and I don't know where to. What I do know is that a LOT of things have pissed me off this week.
I'm not one to rubbish people in public - (honest) - but recently I've found myself working alongside some piss-ant little boy who looks like a monkey puppet a small child forgot to finish and then threw in the road to be rained on and forgotten about. Anyway, handsomeness aside, there's been this mini-project going on at the moment to design some adverts. I'm not the greatest designer in the world but I'm not the worst either. He however, is. So imagine my genuine surprise this morning when in my inbox I discovered an email praising my work with the tagline of "well done" at the end. Some of you will have seen me cross before, but this well and truly rattled the Smith-Cage.
The oddest thing about it was that he had sent me his designs so I could look at them suggesting I could look at the fonts for him along with some of the design parts. I threw it in the trash faster than you can read this. In this scenario my simian pal, what exactly are you bringing to the party? The sheet of blank paper it goes on? Jesus...
Then there was the two fuckhead estate agents who think they are all so big and clever by confronting me with the fact that I am a smoker when the property I had just viewed was advertised as non-smoking. I asked him if it was a problem and he said that it could become a problem...
My first response was that I may be a smoker but I didn't look like a child molester. Neither do I mainline heroin, break into houses, drink-drive, smack bitches up or charge vastly inflated administration charges for doing pretty much NOTHING AT ALL TO HELP ME. So, as much as I really like their property and would dearly love to live there, they can kiss my exhaust.
The shit list is long this week, but I shall stop there lest I get into trouble - I actually feel better now. I'll hang onto the other fuckers in case I need to vent again tomorrow.
Fact. I've been in the shittiest week long mood I have ever been in. Tomorrow I'm going to make an attempt to fake my way out of it until it becomes real. This is mostly because I think I thought my way into it, so there must be a similar way out.
The Coffee Table...
Putting some more finishing touches to Burn 13 tonight and I am so far behind, I've started to shame even myself which is quite a feat. Anyway, on my travels, I've come across some seriously good artwork on book covers that I thought I'd share here in case the whole project falls apart before I get to the end.
The first one is a Spanish cover for one of the issues of The Umbrella Academy. I don't know what it is about this, but I'd hang this in my house any day of the week and stop in front of it regularly.
Comics seem to be getting far too generic these days, almost obliterating the whole reason they were created in the first place, which surely was to let an artist do whatever they please.
I like the Marvel/DC state of mind a lot because it's keeping the standard high and that's always welcome, but now and then, I think I need to see something a little out of the box and this, apparently, is ticking qall of my boxes.
I was also looking for the cover of the edition of Factotum from Bukowski that I ordered from amazon this week, but then I found this one. Again, I don't know what it is about it that's rattling my cage - and I wish I could get hold of it somewhere - but this is a real peach in the book cover department.
I've not seen a book cover for a long time that said more about the book than the blurb on the back did. I must watch out for a copy of this somewhere along the line...
Slightly off from the book cover train of thought, is this excellent pastiche of TinTin called ThingThing - or, how Herge would have illustrated the Fantastic Four. Again, I would hang this in my house simply because it's so undeniably brilliant. The whole story behind it is here at Dustin Weaver's blog.
Finally, Eleanor sent me this just because it's really dumb fun. Dan McCarthy has loads more neat stuff here. I'm thinking that maybe I should get in touch and rustle up an interview for the next issue of Burn.
Nice.
That's me done for today.
Fucking hammered, to coin a phrase.
From Dusk Till Dawn
In The Guardian at the weekend - at least I think it's the weekend, the damn thing always takes me days to get through - they publish this half page filler piece called "My Writing Desk" or possibly "My Writing Room". I forget which, but you get the picture. It's basically a picture of a writer's desk and inevitably it's always some huge hulking beast of a mahogany thing with a soft leather top.
Sometimes they're neat and tidy, sometimes they're a royal mess of a thing, but they are always big and are surrounded by special things that the writer may look at for inspiration. So I thought it would be fun to take a picture of my writing desk, which as you'll see is neither large nor inlaid with leather. Luckily though, it does the same job as those big fuckers - it lets me write.
The great thing about my desk is that on a daily basis, it's never the same. It's always in the same place (facing the wall so that I can't look out of the window) but tomorrow, discounting the iBook and the Dalek mug, it's highly unlikely that any of this stuff will still be there, and I like that. A better picture would probably be the almighty mess of things behind me where I clear the desk and stack them on the floor, the bookshelf, the fridge and so on, but that would reveal me to be more messy than I really am.
Honest.
I need to finish Burn 13 tonight but I'm more in the mood for finishing off a short story, so it might turn out to be a long one...
The Dark Lord Is Risen (1)
In the darkest of foul moods today. Tried to push it down but it kept coming back up to haunt. The day decided to get along with its life with or without me though, thus:
Propelled by yesterdays purchase of Ham on Rye, I figured I hadn't been over to Rye for a good couple of years, so jumped in the car to make sure it was still as sleepy as it should be - and it was.
I even found an indie bookstore that didn't suck. It's called Martello Books, which is a name that does suck, but their stock is pretty good, sporting lots of things not on the chain-store shelves including a copy of Warren Ellis's Crooked Little Vein which superficially looks like something I would go on about for months, so it had better be.
I also picked up a flyer for an exhibition that I must go to - that's a worrying two in two days - but this one is a no brainer. Dave McKean and Brigitte Evill have Narative Arcs going on at the Rye Art Gallery from 12 September to 11 October. Don't question it. If you're in the area, drop in - Dave McKean is simply the best in the business.
Been thinking over the weekend about organising a calendar for next year... or maybe even the back end of this, doing some readings at festivals and some other similar events. There seem to be more festivals than ever this year and I don't doubt that there will be even more kicking in next year. I know nothing whatsoever about any of them, so this will be a nice learning curve with maybe even some kind of payoff at the end.
On a similar subject, Eleanor and I were discussing poetry yesterday ('discussing' makes it sound more intelligent than it probably was), and what the hell I was going to do with all these scraps of paper and notebooks I have lying around. So I'm going to collect them all in one book and publish them pretty much as I'm doing with Wasteland and Blackout. What it shall be called I'm not sure but it's all here to put out so it may come quicker than expected. Alongside of that, she suspected that poetry was going to swing around and become very cool again over the next year or so. I'm no coat tail rider, but in that instance, I have no qualms about hitching a ride especially as it's not my main thing.
That's my day - more or less. Looking back over the post, it doesn't seem like I was in that dark place at all - but I was. Maybe still am but I've got an unbelievable amount of mag editing to do this evening for Burn and I guess I should really start getting my hands dirty in those poetry boxes...
...but first I am going to watch the new Torchwood Children of Earth trailer for the seventh time
Currently decided to read: Crooked Little Vein (Ham on Rye can wait I think)
Naming and shaming an awful book: Love and other Near Death Experiences by Mil Millington. It sounded good on the surface and ultimately delivered one of those sticky wet fireworks you get every now and again. Any publicity is good publicity but this is shit.
Binge Reading
Another week has passed me by with a lot less posting than I would like...
I got up this morning and decided I seriously needed to binge read over the weekend so I went to every decent bookstore I could find in search of a hit. It's a shitty and sad state of affairs out there at the moment. My adoration of crime thrillers is quickly becoming an albatross around my neck as the only authors on display are either those who I have chewed up and spat out already or those I have buried in a ditch out of disgust separated only by those who have let their books into the big bad world with awful cover designs and will therefore never be bough by me or anybody else. As a slight aside to this, I have totally given up on horror. If somebody could get their ass into gear and publish something good, they would clean up. Nothing good has come out of that stable since Barker pimped out Gallilee... what's that? Ten years ago?
Please don't bother leaving a comment that says "why not try Joe Hill". I'll tell you why - he sucks that's why. He might be Stephen King's son but that counts for nothing on the shelf. Heart Shaped Box was the most disappointing book in living memory.
Where was I? Ah - the bookstore. We have two branches of Waterstones in Canterbury. One is going downhill faster than a stream and the other is faring slightly better as it either a) has more choice or b) has the same choice but is better laid out. However, the first thing I see in the slightly better store is the staff's 'Desert Island Choice' which included Wuthering Heights and Catch 22. That my friends is one suck-ass desert island library to be stuck with. I think I would rather have Joe Hill.
Anyway, I settled on a copy of Bukowski's Ham On Rye (who is fast becoming a favourite around here) and I thought I would go with a gut instinct and also picked up Bringing It All Back Home by Ian Clayton. I was in the mood for coming back with a big stack to wade through but this was not to be. I think I'll throw the book money in a big pot instead and when The Lovers comes out, go and buy it from an indie book store at full jacket price as a (useless) gesture at the chain stores.
I hope this isn't all going the same way as record stores...
Some other cool stuff infiltrated my life today as well. I have always liked the thought of liking art - art that you hang on the wall, not art in a comic book - but I've never really been that good at appreciating anything about it. I tend to run on instinct and therefore like only Bosch (who hit me where it hurt first time round), a fair amount of pre-Raphaelite guys and whatever the name of the guy is who painted the Samurai on a Horse print that I have - yeah, I should probably find that out.
Anyway, I saw this picture up for sale and fell in love instantly - and also discovered that the artist, Govinder Nazran (now sadly no longer with us), has an exhibition on until mid-June. I should probably go. Stuff like this doesn't come along too often for me.
So apart from being accosted by a woman in the street for saying the Christian bookshop would never close down like all of the regular bookstores because it was funded by blood money (which was pretty funny really), being exceptionally disappointed by the zodiac floor I had based a whole book on in Canterbury Cathedral (but was still pretty damn killer for a million other reasons) and not being asked to be the new frontman for Queen (which I only want to be asked to do so that I can say no), I just had the best day I can remember for years on end.
Life is good. Let's go to work...
Currently reading: one of those books I mentioned earlier.
Currently watching: Nothing. Everything has finished for the summer. This is probably a good thing.
Currently listening to: Shinedown: The Sound of Madness and Jani Lane: Back Down To One
2: The Smoking Gun
I've smoked cigarettes since I was 18. It started out as being all about image. All the bad boys of rock n roll smoked, or at least all the cool people did. This elite group would never be seen dead with anything but Marlboro in their hands, so there was little other choice. Anyway, even with my poor math, I can work out that's 23 years, which is a long old time in anybody's book. On the plus side though, I think it shows great commitment. I started out with JPS Black but rumour had it that they had asbestos in the filter, so I changed pretty damn quickly to something far less "dangerous". It's hard work choosing a brand that says a lot about you - and this was a prerequisite for me.
In choosing a brand of cigarette, what you're essentially doing is making a life choice and if it's not thought out carefully, your entire life can be mapped out before you in entirely the wrong way. To illustrate, here's a brief summary of what the world thinks of you if you have chosen one of the following:
JPS Black: I want to die. Fast. Preferably now.
Marlboro Red: I want to die and love rock n roll.
Marlboro Lights: I want to die but not quite so fast as I made it past 28. I like rock n roll and stand-up comedy.
Camel: Other smokers don't even like me smoking around them.
Benson & Hedges: I am a genetic smoker. My mum smokes them and I steal them.
Black Cat/Raffles: I am so hooked, I smoke 60 a day as this is all I can afford.
Silk Cut: I am not really a smoker
Silk Cut Ultra Low: Smoking prolongs my life.
Roll your own: I fell on hard times.
Dunhill: My company pays me to smoke.
Embassy No 6/Regal: I am an absolute fucking dog and don't care what people think of me. I have no close friends.
Lambert & Butler: I am the dictionary definition of scum.
Even from this small and incomplete list, you can see that your choice of brand speaks volumes about you. Think carefully if you're about to start. If you're already knee deep, maybe you should consider switching brands to one of the cooler varieties - it's never too late for an image upgrade.
Now - here's the killing joke. We all know smoking will kill us. Smokers don't care, but I don't think it needs to quite so soon. Let's look at Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) for a moment.
The theory behind NLP is that you can rewire your brain to function in a different way by feeding it subliminal messages. If you are scared of flying for instance, NLP can sort you out with a few well placed subliminal messages and presto - two weeks in the Med coming right up.
I'm a big advocate of NLP, but consider this. On a daily basis, smokers are fed 'death messages' in the form of "Smoking kills" or "Smoking can seriously damage your heath". After 23 years of this, those messages must surely now be hardwired into my brain. Using the tried and tested NLP model, this must be causing my body to think it is sick and thus, begin killing me of its own accord. That's not the cigarette at work. That's the packaging - and in case some of the lower grade smokers (see earlier list) be unable to read or need it spelling out to them, we now have pictures on the packets to help us along. If NLP was taken as seriously as it should be, somebody should surely bring the government to hand over their part in this mass genocide.
Everybody knows the negative side of smoking, but it really is little more than the death which comes to us all. There are some positives if you know where to look - or at least there used to be before we were turned into outcasts. At a company I used to work at, we had free rein to walk outside and smoke whenever we liked. Naturally, this evolved into quite a social routine, so at various times during the day, I would be out there with, amongst others, the I.T. manager and even the H.R. manager. Having a relationship with these people gave me access to such items as a better PC than the guy who sat next to me and in one extreme, advance notice of oncoming redundancies. These are two valuable examples that will never be seen again in any company for the length and breadth of this Isle.
I've also met people all over the world who I would otherwise never have spoken to, formed alliances and long lasting friendships with smoking at its root and I would even go so far as to say when interviewing other smokers, that it's a huge ice breaker. Establishing common ground quickly can never be a bad thing in these circumstances.
For instance, one morning on Euston station, an American in a suit came over to me and asked if he could have one of my cigarettes. Always sympathetic to another smoker in a predicament, I gave him one and he asked me:
"What are you angry about today?"
I told him that I wasn't angry about anything, I was just waiting for a train, to which he replied:
"Everybody is angry about something," and he handed me his business card saying, "when you remember what it is, give me a call, I'd like to know. Then he walked away. Looking at the card afterward, apart from the address and phone numbers, it said in big letters right across the middle:
Since the internet came along, I have looked for John Silver many times out of curiosity but to no avail. I suspect he has probably died of cancer by now.
To my mind, there is a far more dangerous side to smoking than the ones we are warned about on the packets. I've set my hair on fire countless times, nearly blinded myself with stray ash once or twice and on one occasion (I can only venture I was hopelessly drunk at the time - or at least I hope I was), burnt my penis whilst going to the toilet. That was just damn careless and in my defence, it was in the very early days.
Yet smoking accidents come in all shapes and sizes. Mine, apart from the penis incident, all come with the territory but I know of a couple of guys who were simply stupid. One, whose name I honestly forget, set fire to his face and torso smoking over a bucket of petrol he was sniffing. Those burns were bad and nobody deserves that, but if I recall correctly, there wasn't a lot of sympathy for him either. The other guy I know, whose name I do remember but choose not to mention, spent his whole life drugged up on whatever he could get his hands on. He eventually cleaned himself up, got a job, a decent place to live and even a girlfriend. Then he went and fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand. That's not a nice way to go at all. Perhaps, these warnings should form part of the packaging - they're far more useful than feeding us information we already know.
At the other extreme, I once found myself in a shopping mall in Syracuse on an absolutely freezing afternoon. Waiting for my friend, I sat down on a bench and lit one up only to be pounced upon by a security guard who told me I couldn't do that. On offering a truly indignant "What are you going to do, arrest me?", his hand went to the butt of his holstered gun and he replied "I can if you want." This is thoroughly uncalled for in any circumstances, but in hindsight, I wish I'd pushed him now to see how far he really would have gone with that itchy finger.
Yet, for all my commitment, I feel like it's time to call it a day. Not for any health reasons and certainly not because it's now so expensive I'll soon have to start housebreaking to afford it. Like an old friend that you simply have nothing in common with anymore, I think it's time to say goodbye.
We may run into each other on holiday sometimes and I may even call him in a moment of extreme need, but I feel as though our day to day relationship is at an end. We don't really have anything to say to each other anymore. The cigarette knows it will be smoked and I know I will smoke it - that's just taking each other for granted and is certainly no basis to live in each others pockets.
I wonder what kind of non-smoker I will be? After all, once a smoker, always a smoker. It just depends when you last had one. I know I won't be one of those people who sneers at a smoker when they're nearby because there aren't ever any smokers nearby anymore. There are no places you can smoke anymore in the company of friends or strangers. I certainly won't be one of those who says to everybody he meets that they should give up either.
What I do know is that when we part, there will be no substitute. The will be no gum or a patch because nothing can replace my friend. There will be no sweet sucking, nail biting, worry beads or knuckle cracking. I will identify the last one in the packet, we will go somewhere quiet together and part with dignity - although I must admit to being very tempted to light up in the middle of Marks and Spencer or Holland and Barrett, just to stick two fingers up at the world we have found ourselves living in.
It's simply just time. I watched my Dad's father smoke himself to death in the most disgusting way. He was a huge man who got Emphysema and spent his final weeks coughing up dirt and spitting it into a glass in between taking another drag, until eventually, I think the Reaper just took pity and came to take him away. My Dad's mother who was also a smoker, fared slightly better but eventually went in exactly the same way. They were both in their eighties though. I have no doubt that my Mother's father would have gone the same way from his pipe habit but my Gran nagged so much that he stopped - however, I think he would sometimes have preferred the pipe death to the nagging variety.
We - my brother and two sisters - were all brought up knowing that if we smoked, we all faced the beating of our lives. Yet somehow, we all wound up in this place - well, my sister with Down's Syndrome didn't. If fact, I don't think I've ever seen anybody with Down's Syndrome smoking which begs the question - who's really the one with the missing chromosome?
Next: Chapter 3: The Books of the Dead
Posting 15th June
Footnote: please feel free to leave comments, factual errors, report typos etc. Anything that will sharpen this up is much appreciated.
