Holiday 2013 – Days Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve & a bit of Thirteen

I'm back in England now. Why would I want to write about my holiday? I was wearing shorts, for Pete's sake! I packed eight pairs of socks and didn't wear any of them. It was a different world.

And now I need to cast my mind back to day NINE?! The number is meaningless. I'm sure I was still alive on day nine, but I wasn't the same person I am now. I'm wearing socks today. To not wear socks is unthinkable.

But I can't abide a tale half-told. I can't stop my holiday account at day eight. It would be improper. And would confuse future-me. He'd wonder where the time went.

So here it is. Day nine was, what, Saturday? I was probably wearing shorts and wishing I could trim my moustache. But you can't take scissors on a plane or buy them once you arrive. Bin Laden deserved to die, if only for that.

Here are some things.

We went to a place called Göcek. It's one of those yacht places. You know, with, like, a wet bit where the boats go, and then a dryer bit where there are shops and cafes and mooring posts and people staring at yachts? A yacht place.

(Do you know what the sad thing about this story is? It happened on Day Eight. But I'm so confused, I'm writing about it here.)

Apparently, the rich and famous go there. Our tour guide said that sometime in the late 90s, Sting and Dustin Hoffman visited there. In the same yacht.

I don't get yachts.

I'm not totally immune to the allure of a millionaire's lifestyle. I can see why people would like luxury cars and mansions, and why they'd like to have a diamond-encrusted George Foreman Grill.

But yachts are stupid. How can a tiny boat be luxurious? It's just a bobbing caravan. Get over yourself, Hoffman.

If you chose to get on a boat, you have abdicated all authority anyway. You can drown at a moment's notice. Every seaman is nothing but Neptune's bitch. A rich movie star on a boat is just shark food in an expensive suit.

If I was a millionaire, I wouldn't want to be robbed of my dignity. I'd stay on land at all times. People can look up to you if you're on land. Nobody looks up to boat people.

Stick with what brung you to the dance. If you're rich, you made your fortune on land. Stay there.

Unless you're Daryl Hannah. She has one fin in each camp, and a stupidly-spelled name.

When we were in Göcek we had tall frozen lemonades, with lots of fruit. They were the most refreshing drinks. Mmm. I'd like one right now.

Also, earlier on the same day (EIGHT - NOT EVEN NINE), we went to a treetop cafe in the mountains. We had Turkish tea and saw dragonflies and horses. But that's not what I'm going to write about, because I'm not a square.

We'd walked down some rocky stairs to photograph a waterfall or a unicorn or something, when our tour group started moving on. We went to join them, but an old woman was coming down the stairs, blocking our way. She was having difficulty making the descent. Her family was helping her. She had a walking stick. She was taking ages.

If this was a more interesting story, we might have found ourselves cut adrift from the rest of our group, forced to climb through the mountains and find our own way home. But that didn't happen. We just waited.

When we got to the top of the stairs, one of the Turkish cafe staff (who had been watching our predicament) said to me in perfect English, "one day, we will all be old."

He was right. It was a nice thing to say. He obviously understood the situation and didn't want us to feel angry or annoyed at the woman. He recognised that she was only human, and our having to wait a few extra seconds wouldn't make much difference. There but for the grace of God, go us.

We agreed with him. One day, we will all be old. He was right. We shared a moment of human empathy that crossed national boundaries. At that moment, we were united by our appreciation of the fragility of life.

Then he said, "one day, we will all be dead".

Now, I thought this was one sentence too far. It's true of course. We will all be dead. And it seems like a continuation of his previous thought. It's an understanding and wise statement. But it didn't really apply.

The slow woman was old, but she wasn't dead. Empathising about her age was warm and humanistic. Empathising about her death seemed premature.

"One day, we will all be old" is a beautiful and melancholy piece of language.

"One day, we will all be dead" sounds like a threat.

Of course, I agreed, and hurried off. I'd gone from moved to unsettled in about five seconds.

But the cafe worker was right. Because, as we looked back over the beautiful scenery and watched the river flow down the rocks, much as the the river of time does flow, we saw, through the dappled sunlight and the vivid forest flowers, that the old woman had fallen down the stairs and died.

One day, we will all die. He was right. It was an appropriate thing to say. As I looked at her corpse and her broken walking stick, I thought: "that will be me one day".

He winked.

Some of that story isn't true. You can decide for yourself.

Anyway, where was I...?

Oh yes. Day nine.

Nothing.

Day ten. Nothing. Some swimming, I guess.

Day eleven. We came home.

The journey was long. Our bus to the airport left at 10pm. Our flight was at 2am. Our bus on the way back was at 5:05am GMT, which would be 7:05 TMT (Turkish Man Time). We got home at about 6:30am GMT, then had to go out again.

It was not unexhausting.

The flight was strange. People were sleeping, but I was not. I couldn't get comfortable, even though there were lots of spare seats, as it wasn't a full plane.

My arm kept... being there. Humans should evolve retractable limbs. I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

Humans should evolve retractable limbs.

There was an eerie light everywhere. My fatigued brain started playing tricks on me. The clouds looked like the sea. There was a thin blue line of dawn on the horizon that never grew, because we were flying away from it. It couldn't catch us, but was shaking its fist.

The soundtrack of my delirium was this short song by Adam Buxton (of Adam and Joe fame). It's about nettles:



This song played in my head about five thousand hundred million times.

Nettles - also like the band The Police...

There was a child sleeping across the seats in front of us. I was worried that my stupid non-retractable arms and knees would be disturbing her, so I was semi-frozen in shaky discomfort like a shit statue.

Lucy got some sleep, lying across the seats next to me. She had a shawl draped across her, which took on an odd luminescence in the artificial night light. The shawl rose and fell, and seemed to me to be undulating like a wedding-white jellyfish.

Nettles! Nettles!

Eventually, we landed in that land of my forefathers: Gatwick.

I slept on the coach on the way home, leaning against nothing, my slumbering head flopping around like a melon on a weak spring. I retained verticality by biting the inside of my mouth at regular intervals. It was relaxing.

By this point it was technically day thirteen, but who's counting?

This holiday journal has never been a systematic catalogue of events. It's more of a series of impressions, bound together by hyphens. If you want to give a sense of an experience, there's no point in trying to replicate it. You have to just say things like "you know how sometimes it's all a bit fleeeuuurrrgg?".

AND PEOPLE SAY YES I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN.

Oh - also we had a big bread that was like a steam-whale. That was day twelve, but who's counting?

I can't believe it's all over. It was so interminable and so brief, like a mayfly opera.

Time to put away the shorts.

Time to put on all the socks.

Time to post photos to Facebook to tell the people - who, unlike you, dear reader, are not my real friends - that we had a well good time and look at my muddy torso and don't you wish you were here? Don't you wish you were there? Don't you wish you were me?

And the Facebook people will be all like "yes, I do wish I was here/there/you. *like*".

But you, dear reader, are my real friends. And you know in your heart of hearts, that whether you're there or here is nether here nor there. The only thing you're sure of - from reading this very blog - is that you'll never wish you were me.

Would that you were.

Would that you would.

Holiday 2013 – Days Six, Seven and Eight

We continued our pattern of two days doing nothing, followed by one day of doing too much. Today (day eight), we went on another trip. This one was really nice – we went to good places that were warm and interesting. I didn’t spot any “funny” billboards though, so I’m LIVID. What does a guy gots to do to get blog fuel around heres, huh? (That’s how I talk for the duration of that sentence.)

Luckily, I’ve finished the Stewart Lee book, so my writing style will no longer be so derivative. Or if it is, it will be derivative of something completely different. I’ve just finished Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, which is an unsettling horror story. I don’t think I can write like him though.

The other thing I’ve been reading is a volume of Jamie Hernandez’s Love and Rockets comic. (His brother Gilbert also does them, but I haven’t got anything by him yet.)

Man, it is a classy comic book. It’s full of strong, complex, predominantly female, characters, beautiful artwork, wrestling, punk rock, Latino slang, sex, dinosaurs, gang violence - all combined to make incredibly funny and often moving stories. Love and Rockets began in the early eighties, and is still going (or at least was until recently). Classy, classy stuff.

I’ve started to use ‘classy’ as a compliment more and more recently. I think the word fell out of fashion when it became associated with monocles and hot tub chandeliers. But it’s time it was reclaimed for things refined, sophisticated, and of high quality. They don’t have to be posh or stuffy.

Love and Rockets is classy.

The three things I’ve recently been describing as classy are:

1)      Love and Rockets

2)      Former AWA wrestling champion Nick Bockwinkel. To be fair, he probably fits the original definition too. He was a star in the seventies and eighties. In character, he was a superior heel. Out of character, he seems like a real gentleman. Classy.

3)      Rickie Lambert, striker for Southampton FC. He's a classy footballer. People who don’t watch him regularly may think he’s just a big, strong lower-league brute. But he has a vision and touch that’s a joy to behold. He can knock the ball down, or hold it up and bring others into play. His passing is incredible. He’s a bit like Dimitar “the Scimitar” Berbatov in that he moves slowly, but everything he does is crafted beautifully. He may not have pace, but he has vision. And he scores goals. And he’s good in the air. And he’s excellent with set-pieces. And he’s never missed a penalty. And Andy Carroll is in the England squad ahead of him.

That was weird. My three things there relate to comics, wrestling and football. These are three of my main interests, but I don’t talk about them much. I suppose I worry that people won’t be interested. But how would that explain the rest of my content? I can’t be writing my usual meaningless waffle because I think people are actually reading.

My other main interest is comedy.

Hey here’s a joke that I sort-of thought about, but gave up before finishing!

My cousin wrote to the police repeatedly, claiming she was being “storked”. They didn’t seem to take her seriously. Which just goes to show – spelling matters. Ironically, she ended up pregnant.

The good thing about the storked/stalked confusion is that it’s a joke which doesn’t work either out loud or written down. The mistake might make sense in some third medium – i.e. telepathy.

Also, why would she write to the police? Also, why wouldn’t she offer any further details? Also, is this a "rape joke"?

As I said, I never finished it. There are a few kinks to work out.

4)      Comedy. Classy.

***

Isn’t it weird that “worship” and “warship” are only one letter different, but are completely different things? And, to a lesser extent, “workshop”.

I think the Turkish air is doing wonders for my ponders. When I’m back in Blighty (which is what I call my kilt), I’m going to grind to a halt. That’s why this blog is such a valuable resource. It’s like a humour reservoir. A reservoir-ha-ha, you might say. In the barren months ahead, I can revisit these blog posts and think “Storked. Yes. There’s something in that.”

Holiday 2013 – Days Three, Four and Five

You may have noticed that I’ve increased the rate of my reportage.

This is for two main reasons.

1) There isn’t enough content on each day to justify its own entry. See Day Two for evidence.

2) More importantly, I’m only six blog posts away from number 800. As you know, I like to mark each of these anniversaries with a feature-packed avalanche of content, and feel this can only be started on British soil. I’m going to have to squeeze all of my holiday adventures in before that.

Day three has now become completely unrememberable. Not unmemorable (though it was that too), but unrememberable. Nobody could remember it. Not even if their brain was a computer(‘s brain).

I think we went to the beach. We might have caught some sun. I might have worn sunglasses.

I don’t usually wear sunglasses. I bought them especially for this holiday in a Gatwick shop. Having viewed some photographs of me wearing them, I’m suddenly aware that they’re a bad idea. My eyes are the saving grace of my face. (The Saving Grace of My Face is the provisional title for my autobiography)

I need my terrified eyes to counterbalance the viscous smirk of my cheeks, mouth, chin and philtrum. This is a very delicate balance indeed. It’s a bit like this blog, with the eyes playing the part of my self-deprecation, and the rest of my face playing my prose. One false step, and the apple cart has lost all credibility.

Day four was a very nice day indeed. We went to a private beach that our hotel has some sort of relationship with. It was at a place called the Blue Lagoon. It was a lagoon, and it was blue. It was very tranquil. We swam. Lucy taught me how to float. I’d known how to do it before, of course. In the pre-beard days. But I had to re-learn it, like an amnesiac re-learning to furrow her brow.

We had a nice lunch and there was a big fluffy white dog there, who looked hot.

And hot he very well might (look).

I think it was 34 degrees. So hot, I can’t even be bothered to find the degrees symbol.

°

Ah. There it is.

Wait, that symbol is used for temperature as well as angles, right? I never paid attention in thermometer college.

Day five is very fresh in my mind because it is this very day. Not only can I actually remember things, but we actually did some things.

We went on an excursion, which was run through our holiday company. It’s a good way of having an adventure without having to use your initiative.

I could spend many paragraphs talking about the exciting things we did. Carpet weavers! Mud baths! Sulphur pools! Boat trip! Turtles!

(In fact, today we saw a turtle, a sea snake and a couple of lizards. I think we win Reptile Bingo.)

But instead of talking about those things, I want to talk about a couple of things that happened on the bus on the way home. This was the most boring part of the day, but was also the most recent. Events that have just happened always seem more exciting than those of a few minutes earlier. Forgetting the past is an evolutionary knack. It helps us get over the pain of childhood and being beaten up yesterday.

We was going down the road, right? Right. A policeman flagged us down. After a few (Turkish) words with the driver, he boarded the vehicle.

He was a proper Turkish policeman. He had a gun. (I didn’t actually see the gun, but Lucy assures me it was there. She has never been known to lie about firearms.)

Everyone felt very tense. I suddenly felt a wave of baseless guilt wash over me. I noticed there was a seatbelt sign in the bus, but I wasn’t wearing mine! What if he chastised me? My sphincter contracted to further conceal the small balloon of heroin that I obviously wasn’t smuggling over the border.

I didn’t want to go to a Turkish prison. They are legendarily uncomfortable.

My fellow tourists must have felt the same thing. There was a tension in the bus.

The tour guide finally – after four agonising seconds – revealed that the policeman just wanted a lift down the road.

Unfortunately, I had pulled out a knife after the third agonising second. I am now in a Turkish prison. The Wi-Fi is spotty.

Hahahaha! Not really! That was just a made-up end to a story with no climax.

(A Made-Up End To a Story With No Climax is the provisional title for my obituary.)

The other thing that happened on the way back was we passed a billboard. I don’t know what it was advertising, but it was illustrated with two cartoon pictures. One was of sarcastic comic strip cat Garfield. And the other was of Jerry from Tom and Jerry.

It was just the two of them.

It seemed like a strange combination. Admittedly, they are cat and mouse. But as far as I know, they’ve never even met.

Seeing Jerry solo was a bit strange. He’s almost always seen in conjunction with Tom. To have one member of a double act on his own is unsettling. It would be like seeing a billboard featuring Dec from Ant and Dec, but not Ant from Ant and Dec. Just Dec. Together with... let’s say... Norman Mailer. You’d wonder what the advert was for.

Don’t get me wrong – if I was going to choose only one of Tom and Jerry to feature in an advert, it would definitely be Jerry. Tom ain’t selling shit.

No kid is going to point excitedly at a sign that just has Tom on it. “Hey! It’s Tom!”

At least Jerry has some energy to him; some pizazz. Tom is a born loser.

He’s one of that school of Warner Brothers cartoons featuring a loser and a winner, and the roles are never reversed.

Tweetie-Pie and Sylvester; Bugs and Yosemite Sam; the Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote. It’s a strange dynamic for a work of fiction. If your protagonist is never under threat, where’s the jeopardy? How can the perennial winner be a hero?

I suppose it works on the basis that, in real life, the winner is the underdog. The mouse generally loses to the cat, the bird loses to the cat, the rabbit loses to the prospector, the roadrunner loses to the schmuck with a middle initial. It must originally have been an interesting inversion of the natural order.

But after a while, that premise must have worn off. Suddenly the story is just about a dick defeating a starving wretch. No-one cheers for the Roadrunner, do they?

That’s the thing, I suppose. I’ve never met anyone who cheered for the Roadrunner. Even though the bird and the mouse are ostensibly the heroes, we want to see them beaten.

Wile E Coyote is the real hero.

Which makes the whole thing quite depressing really. We keep watching, knowing that we’ll never get what we want. These cartoons are just harrowing vignettes of perpetual disappointment. It’s a wonder they’re so popular.

Anyway, I’d like to see a cartoon featuring Garfield and Jerry. I think they would enrage each other, and not in a conventional way. Garfield would be his usual curmudgeonly self, and Jerry – sensing that his foe was unwilling to engage in a chase – would get antsy, and would probably turn to drugs.

The final insult of this billboard was that Garfield and Jerry were not to scale. They were presented as being the same height. Ridiculous. That kind of unreal nonsense is part of the reason that I ignore all advertisements, and never give them even a second thought.

That sulphur bath smelled bad. I can still smell it. The mud made my skin feel nice, though.

There are photos of us all mudded up, but I’m not ready to share them. Also, the internet isn’t working here, so by the time you read this, it will be Day Six. Who knows what kind of reptiles we will have seen by then?

***

Oh. It's working again. That's good. It's still today. See you for Reptile Watch 2013 again tomorrow. Chris Packham will be dressed as an egg.

Holiday 2013 - Day Two

I usually start my blog post with a relevant photo. With these holiday entries, it would make sense to use actual holiday pictures. We have taken some, but don’t have the facility to get them onto my computer. So for now, I’ll just have to use text to paint a picture.

UUUUUUUU

IIIIIIIIIII

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Look. That’s an accurate depiction of wine glass parts, before assembly.

It’s hot. How hot? So hot that you could fry an egg topless.

Our first day was a mixed bag. I'm not really interested in giving a full description of the resort and town, but it has nice food, music that’s too loud, a nice pool where the music isn't so loud, other people (none of whom we've spoken to, but they all seem fine), some birds, some insects, a spectacular mountain, lots of paragliders, a shingle beach, lots of touristy shops and bars, and a mysterious cat.

I don’t really like the idea of doing a serious holiday journal. It’s not just because of the reasons I listed on day one’s entry, but just because I get bored relaying things. I've lived them once, I don’t want to relive them in pithy sentence form.

It will probably make this whole thing unreadable. Then again, my blog has always been about nothing in particular, so this will just be a continuation of that. But slightly more Turkey.

I don’t really have enough clothes for this trip. I'm going to have to make some new ones out of local materials (kebab meat, fezzes and... oh I can’t even be bothered to be racist. It’s too warm, really. And now I'm stuck in brackets. How embarrassing.)

My problem is that I'm writing this on Day Four, so I can’t just share my current thoughts. I have to remember what my thoughts were two days ago. I can’t even remember what my eye colour was two days ago.

I’ll just skim over the past and get to the present.

CAN I BE THE NEW MICHAEL PALIN NOW PLEASE?

Holiday 2013 - Day One

I’m in Turkey. The country, not the supermodel.

But geography can’t stand in the way of a good blog post. It can’t stand in the way of a bad one either.

Don’t worry though. This won’t be one of those annoying holiday journals, full of sunny photos and descriptions of exotic meals. I hate those things.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who willingly talks about their own holiday is a filthy scumbag. I don’t even want people to enjoy their holidays. But if they have to enjoy them, they should have the decency to hide that fact from everyone. Even if they’re directly asked how the holiday was, people should simply shrug and mutter something about mosquitoes.

When I see someone outlining the joys of their vacation, I feel sick. And as for people who post holiday snaps on Facebook? Vermin.

Worse than vermin. Liars. Lying vermin. It’s always an airbrushed, carefully edited selection. You never see photos of the corpses and cockroach vomit that comprise most foreign excursions. And to misrepresent travel like that does a disservice to Britain. If you chose the right pictures, even a weekend in Gosport can seem like a technicolour wonderland.

So it won’t be one of those. I’m not going to brag about the fun stuff I’ve been doing. If I mention an event and you think it sounds like fun, you’re wrong. It isn’t fun.

Nothing is fun. Holidays are always terrible, and this one is no exception.

Hmm.

I may have gone a bit too far in the other direction. I do want to avoid gloating, but I don’t want to go the other way and make it into a whiny confessional. I don’t want it to be disaster laden Watchdog misery porn.

It should be something in the middle. I’ll be even handed. I’ll give you the facts and you can make up your own mind. It will be like a David Attenborough nature documentary. Yes, there will be scenes of tremendous beauty. But there will also be brute facts of the natural world. Real life isn’t one or the other. It contains both heady highs and disturbing ant fungi.

I’ll start with the journey. I’ve just realised that I can write an entry for each day, boosting my post count. It will make me look prolific.

We got the plane from Gatwick, and we had a two-hour bus trip on either side of the flight. It was a long day.

At the airport, we saw professional know-it-all John Sessions sitting in Pret A Manger. It was probably the most middle class piece of celebrity spotting ever done. I’ve emailed the story to Heat magazine, but have yet to hear back.

The flight itself was four hours of being in the sky. We were flying at sunset, which I don’t think I’ve done before. We were travelling east, so the sunset was twice as fast. You can get things done more quickly if you work as a team.

The sinking sun made the evening look apocalyptic; big plumes of cloud like atomic candy floss. As night fell, the roads far beneath us glowed like rivers of lava. I ate some biscuits.

We were exhausted by the time we got on our connecting bus. We were told to put up the arm rests on the outside seats in case we were flung out at sharp corners. Lucy’s arm rest didn’t work, so I held on to her leg. I should consider seatbelt as a possible future career path.

We barrelled along the dark alien roads, hot and barely conscious. We passed strange signs in a language that seemed totally not English. It was as though we were in a different country.

We were discussing whether or not Turkey was in Europe. We hoped that it wasn’t, because it will sound more exotic when we tell people about it. But not you, dear blog reader. We know each other too well for me to invent minor geographical milestones. Except the time I went to Super Wales.

I’m pretty sure we drove past a shop called ‘Pedo’, but I don’t want to google it to check.

We arrived at our hotel at 2am and pretended to listen to what the receptionist said. Before being shown to our room, they stuck paper wrist bands on us. This was so we were identified as guests of the hotel, so we could get our free meals and wouldn’t wake up in a bath full of ice, sans kidneys.

I don’t like the wrist band. I don’t like wrist band as two words, even. How does the spell check feel about wristband?

It’s fine. I’ll use that from now on.

There’s something a bit demeaning about wearing it all the time. I don’t like being marked out. Wherever we go, people are judging us as clueless tourists. It’s true, of course. But I prefer the old-fashioned method of exposing my own ignorance through conversation and too much politeness.

The wristband makes me out as a member of a certain group. It’s oppressive. “Now I know what concentration camp tattoos must feel like,” thinks an appalling man who has nothing to do with me.

My first thought was actually the film The Running Man. Or is it just Running Man? I can’t check. The internet here goes in and out. That’s why I’m writing this in Word. You might find the font or formatting of this post unfamiliar. If so, it will give you your own flavour of exotic adventure. This is a reciprocal relationship. You’re feeling what I’m feeling, and I’m guessing what you’re feeling.

In Running Man, there’s a prison camp where the convicts wear explosive collars. If they leave the prison grounds, it detonates, and the wearer gets all blown up and that. I don’t think this wristband is explosive. But I have it on my left hand anyway, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

I keep wanting to take it off, but I can’t. It’s waterproof, so at least we can go swimming. But can we swim in acid? There’s plenty of time to find out.

We found our room, which is perfectly nice. I eventually got to sleep. Lucy didn’t.

That was our first day. It seems a bit negative, this post. I’ll grant you that.

But I’d like you to keep in mind a couple of things.

Firstly, we hadn’t yet seen the hotel or the grounds or the town. That was to come in the second day. So any negativity on my part comes from the inside of my head. You can’t blame Turkey for that.

Secondly, I’ve been re-reading Stewart Lee’s book here, and so I’m sure I’ve taken on certain elements of his writing style. He’s sarcastic and glib. I can’t imagine him writing a gushing holiday journal. Having said that, he does describe various interesting places he’s been on tour, interesting people he’s met, and life-changing experiences he’s encountered.

These are all explained through a veil of cynicism. But shining a torch on your life, even if it’s a critical torch, is still reprehensibly arrogant. Just because you’re glib, it doesn’t mean you’re not a dick. Just because your holiday journal is peppered with misery, doesn’t mean you’re not forcing strangers to read about it against their will.

It’s a lesson I have learned, and will continue to ignore. I need to keep this month’s post count up after all.

Stick Your Face In Something

A straw man takes off his straw hat, and conducts a straw pole vault. You can't argue with that. You can't argue with him. He broke the world record and the camel's back.

We could spend another two hours editing and honing that little vignette, but there are more important issues to consider.

More important than the straw hat, and whether he might take off the hat, and then "take off" in a jumping sense. More important than whether the camel was being used in place of a crash mat. More important than whether conducting a straw pole vault would require a straw pole or a straw baton.

There are bigger fish to fry. Don't get bogged down in the minutiae. It will only keep you from what's truly important. The poll has been conducted. The minutiaes are out of luck. The minutiNAYs have it.

Right. Those paragraphs should have weeded out a few readers. To have made it this far, you must have an iron constitution. Sometimes I'll begin a blog post with my most oblique writing, just as a test. I don't want anyone reading this who might be afraid of imaginative and linguistic experimentation.

Some people will come here thinking "I like blogs; I like reading about events and opinions". If that's what you like, you've come to the wrong place. Events don't interest me and I don't have any opinions. Events are like shredded carrot at the bottom of a pre-packed supermarket pasta salad snack. They fill up a lot of space, but nobody wants them.

Opinions are like the little collapsible compact black plastic fork you get in a pre-packed supermarket pasta salad snack. Everyone feels obliged to use them, but you'd be much better off just sticking your face in there and snuffling around like a pig.

This blog has no events and no opinions. It's 100% snuffle. And if you're too precious or too cowardly to stick your face in something, there's no place for you here.

My writing is a journey to the unknown. You have to be willing to take risks. You have to wander not just off the beaten track, but into an alternative dimension where nothing is beaten and tracks are extinct.

You need to be willing to follow me, even when I'm making no sense. For AGES.

Each blog post I write is a training exercise. They are training you to think in different ways, and to commit to things that no-one could possibly find useful. I'm pushing you in mental directions that don't show up on any compass.

I'm literally changing the shape of your brain.

That's why you're feeling so nauseous right now.

***

I'm back from lunch. I had proper salad bar salad. I didn't have any shredded carrot (though it was available) and I ate it with a full-sized metal fork.

Pretty standard, all in all. Pretty standard.

Beauty isn't always dewy tulips and Tea Leoni. Sometimes it can be found in the banal. The beauty of repetition, the beauty of the drudge, the beauty of the default, the plain, the nothing.

The beauty of slowly getting older, like a leaf unfurling, almost imperceptibly, into a urinal.

The beauty of a blog post, sagging further and further down the screen like

an

old

man's

eye

bags.

You just need to know where to look. It's everywhere.

The thing is, gentle reader, when I came back from lunch, I re-read that stuff at the beginning and resolved to be a bit more normal. I thought I'd counterbalance the opening nonsense with something that made sense. I thought I'd write like a normal person writes.

But it didn't pan out that way. I still seem to be the same person I was before lunch. I thought I might have had my madness pickled out of me by thousand island dressing, but apparently not.

I want to be coherent. I do. I want to be a member of society. I want to deal in events and opinions. I want to eat with a little plastic fork. But desire cannot change my course.

All of this is genetic. It's the fault of my DNA. 

The same DNA is going to force me to publish this, even though there aren't any good bits in it. Even the straw man thing at the beginning doesn't work. I wouldn't even tweet it - that's how bad it is.

But I've spent so much time writing that I can't afford to delete it all.

We've been here before. I'm covering old ground. That's what I do.

Who am I kidding? This isn't an anomaly. I should stop apologising for what I am.

I'm a person who writes whatever my brain tells me to. I always have done.

For me to claim that this is all "weird" or "unexpected" or "incoherent" is missing the point. It is me.

I can't disown this. It would be like Eagle-Eye Cherry disowning 'Save Tonight'. You can't throw your essence on the fire without getting charred.

I need to accept that this blog - the blog called Headscissors - is its own animal.

Cut its chains. Let it roam free. Put down a dish of water in case it gets thirsty.

AND STOP BEING EMBARRASSED BY IT.

Yes, it is naked. But animals should be naked.

Cats in jackets make me sick.

Nothing But Now

One blog post per week is the bare minimum.

Film Pitch: BARE MINIMUM - Sex comedy in which a "dorky" teenager (glasses, likes books, etc) must see a certain number of exposed breasts in one day, or he'll be thrown out of his fraternity/damned for all eternity by Billy Bob Thornton's hilarious demon character. I'm happy for either approach. Or both.

Film Pitch: BEAR MINIMUM - A bear is shrunk down to microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of, let's say, another bear.

Film Pitch: FRÈRE MINI-MUM - Some schlub discovers his brother is really just a small version of his mother. Driving a Mini.

Film Pitch: DAMNED FOR ALL FRATERNITY - Demon bear invited to kegger. The rest writes itself.

I've been distracted today. It's been fun.

(Hilarious fact - I accidentally typed "It's been bun" just then. Imagine! It's been "bun"! Instead of "fun"! Imagine all the fun I could have had with that slip! Remember Bunno?)

I haven't been able to think about anything, and so haven't been depressed. Now I see why stupid people are so happy. Thinking about things has brought me nothing but strife 'n' ulcers. I'm going to start killing braincells.

What's the best way to do it? I can't think. I can't afford to.

Alcohol is said to kill braincells, but I don't think it can. Unless you leave braincells in a shot of tequila overnight. They might dissolve.

I'm moving on from this topic. It is not productive.

The thing is, second-to-second living is fine. I'm very lucky. I'm not in tremendous pain, I'm not hungry or thirsty or cold. I'm in a comfortable seat. My ulcers are metaphorical.

Each second is fine. It's when they're strung together that's the problem. It's like bees. One bee on its own is a delight. But when they're all stuck together in a horizontal line, ploughing through pedestrians like a buzzing hyphen, they're difficult to handle.

If my life wasn't a continuum, I'd be fine. I need some kind of amnesia ray. I could use it every second, as long as I remembered to keep it charged. I'd have to leave notes for myself. It would be like that film Memento, but less Guy Pearcey.

Now is heaven. Then and later are hell.

I need psychological blinders. Horses wear physical ones, and they get on fine. It stops them looking at stuff by the side of the horse road, like advertisements.

I need them in my mind. I'm terrified by the future, so I need something to block my view. I'd rather not even know that the future was there. It's too big. I can't carry all that weight.

Have I written something similar to this in the past? I suspect that I have. I just searched 'blinders' and 'blinkers' but got nothing.

That's the trouble with blinders and blinkers. I blocked out the past as well as the future, and now I can't remember whether or not that's new information.

I'm looking through a pinhole, and all I can see is a flashing cursor.

In fact, my pinhole is so small that I can't even tell that it's flashing. I can see the line or nothing, but never both.

This idea is too abstract, even for me.

Film Pitch: BARE MINIMUM 2: BARE MAXIMUM - The dorky teenager can only see a certain number of breasts. If he exceeds that limit, he will be thrown out of his fraternity/the demon thing again. Not wanting to ration his sexual consumption, he pursues liaisons with women who have had mastectomies. The characters, the actor, the director, and the studio heads are all unsure whether they feel comfortable about this idea, but they've already printed the posters.

In other news, "mastectomy" is spelled with two 't's. Learning this has justified the whole enterprise.

I'm going to try to keep living in the immediate present for the rest of the day. Which means NO PROOFREADING.

Hidden Depths

It struck me that I haven't done a tweet compendium blog post for a long time.

How are my tenses in that sentence?

Should it have struck me that I hadn't done a tweet compendium, or does is strike me that I haven't?

It's not important. Time was invented by fat cats in top hats as a way to sell pendula. Tenses are equally meaningless.

It turns out that I haven't done one since the end of last year. This is mainly because I haven't done much tweeting beyond pimping my blog posts and my jams. This twit-lull seems to be a permanent thing.

But I have done a few actual tweets. And I'm always on the look-out for content. So I'll compile the tweets of 2013 here. If there aren't enough of them, I might extend this post by analysing each of them in far too much detail.

I give my readers what they want. Nobody has said anything about not wanting that.

So buckle up for another edition of:

Thinly-Scraped Japes

(tweets in blue, analysis in black)

***

I'm starting this year as I mean to go off.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  It's difficult to imagine now, but this was topical then. I think I meant "go off" in the expired food sense, rather than the firecracker one.]

***

I can only be friends with people who are exactly as attractive as I am.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  I added in the italics, which I couldn't do on Twitter. This is an excellent tweet because it compels my friends to contemplate their own attractiveness in relation to mine. I wager that a lot of them immediately felt offended, insulting me by proxy. And now they feel bad.

Anyway, this tweet is factually accurate.]

***

Most tweets ending "True story." aren't really stories.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  A seemingly dull tweet, until you realise that the basic version would be saying that they "aren't really true". It's the word "stories" that makes this so effective.]

***

"You are!" "No, YOU are!" "No, YOU are!" "YOU are! *giggle*" - Me and my therapist discussing which of us is the most anxious.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  This has a lot of faults, but there's so much going on in the tweet that you get bamboozled into thinking it makes sense.]

***

Spend the afternoon tagging wine glasses in your friends' Facebook photos.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  I like tweets that are imperatives. I think this would be a genuinely funny thing to do, provided you could tag them as "wine glass". You might have to create a whole new profile for it, but it would be worth it.]

***

"Today's date is the first of March, nineteen ninety-four" is one of those phrases you just don't hear much anymore.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  A bit mainstream, this one. But you have to throw a few of these out there, just to please the less-discerning follower.]

***

A good plate is always slightly convex. My uncle used to work in the plate industry.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  The content of a tweet is only about 5% of its worth. It's all about the way it's structured. Here, the second sentence could have been put in parentheses. This would have made it unfunny. Similarly, the repetition of the word 'plate' (which was of course avoidable) adds an odd mechanical air to the whole thing. A real triumph of awkward phrasing.]

***

Just in case you missed it earlier, everyone was laughing at your accent.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  I think this might be the apex of my "in case you missed it earlier" series of tweets.]

***

I'm already applauding, just on the off-chance that your dog is called Aleister Growley.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  Phrase wordplay in an interesting way, and you can get away with something dreadful.]

***

My hips have never met, but I bet they'd get on.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  I don't have anything to say about this.]

***

Rollercoaster o'clock. Quarter-to-knifefight. Half-past Space-Olympics. Sex noon. These are exciting times...

[Paul/Editor's Note:  Hard work, but a worthy effort. I may have written about this tweet before. Though a solid conceit, it was fairly bog-standard until I came up with 'sex noon'. That's when the whole thing came together.]

***

I'm not willing to sacrifice anything to get anything. Net gain would be zero. THINK.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  This may take several attempts to understand. Try again.]

***

I'm worried that this giant magnet makes me look needy.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  Classic.]

***

I find the smell of Endor very ewokative.

***

That's why I don't try to do jokes any more.

[Paul/Editor's Note:  Quite.]

***

OK. So I've finally realised that DOB stands for Date Of Birth and not, as I previously thought, Death On Barrival.

[Paul/Editor's Note: Perhaps my pick of the bunch. It makes exactly the right amount of sense.]

***

4% of British landfill is made up of the missing ne'er-do-well "v"s.

[Paul/Editor's Note: I try to avoid this level of whimsy, but sometimes it slips out.]

***

I spent most of yesterday inventing fictional WereBears. My two favourites were probably 'Stabbz' and 'Murderer'.

[Paul/Editor's Note: True story.]

***

I wish people would stop judging me by my trident. I'm a complicated person.

***

You're wearing a shirt. Does that make you King of the Sleeves? No, it doesn't.

[Paul/Editor's Note: These two tweets go together as a pair. They require the reader to fill in the blanks. I might have been asking too much of people.]

***

"Ambulance" is one of only three English words to contain all of the invisible vowels.

[Paul/Editor's Note: I tried several variations of this, including "impossible vowels", "invisible consonants" and various different words. I'm not totally happy with the end result, to be honest.]

***

The subtext of the song 'Puff the Magic Dragon' is dragons have names.


[Paul/Editor's Note: Once again, this is all in the phrasing. Avoided using a catastrophic "that" before posting, and it's a good thing I did.]

***

I'm going to name my cat 'Something'. That way, I can tell people they look like something Something the cat dragged in or something.

[Paul/Editor's Note: Another tweet whose strength lies in the punctuation. Even a comma before the final "or something" would turn this into an ugly mess.]

***

Twenty-three.

That's not too bad.

I'll do this again in six months. I may not have any new tweets by then, but I can always re-analyse these ones.

Times and tastes change. I might be wishing I'd used that comma.