Wednesday, 18 January 2012

DREAM: 16th January

I was watching some Questions and Answers type panel show and the topic of discussion was aliens and the supernatural. Two people were adamant in the existence of both while Chris Morris was giving glib surreal answers which seemed to heighten the absurdity of the occasion.

DAY: 17th January

Desperately Seeking Putin - idea for sitcom.
See a paint splattered inverted Impressionist builder holding a bread roll of cholesterol and a tabloid paper like a sick tongue lolling from his armpit in Tesco. Splashed on the front page is a picture of Kim Kardashian in a low cut top, it's almost like the picture was taken from space. It's that tasteful. Attention is their oxygen. Take that away and they die. What will she leave behind? Donate her breasts to Michelin.
On the tube to work. Pretty girl in the distance is weaving her hands through her hair. From the corner of my eye it looks like wheelchair bound Tai Chi or Capoeira. Or just fighting off metaphysical bees.
See a poster for hair removal. 39 quid. Mother Nature and Time is my hair remover and its free. I win. For now.
Man beside me is smiling incessantly. Unsettling. His smile seems otherworldly, like St. Peter at the Gates of Insanity is waving his knob around, coaxing him in.
Girl to my left is wearing a fur hat. Looks like she is either falling down the arse of a tiger or pushing her head out for air. Fur hair.
Man still smiling. Maybe he's happy. Maybe he's on his way to the hospital to embrace his new born son. Maybe I am just projecting my own cynicism?
Man reading the jobs section in the Law Gazette. Picture of a jockey in a speeding chariot. The chariot has spinning Pimp My Ride wheels with rims. The title of the picture says " Crims on Rims."
Man with folded arms and nosy eyes, watches every movement of this Gazette reading man. So do I but from a purely sociological perspective. M'Lord.
"Judicial Diversity group fails to meet"
Bump my head on the way out of the train. Like a character from The Remains of the Day trapped in an Akon video.
See a unfashionable girl read a fashionable magazine as the train pulls away.
Joke with a fellow employee about how the hot dog meat is most probably extracted from the elbow of ducks.
Talked to a really friendly girl from Kent. We share our stories and journeys, how we managed to find ourselves here in this room, at this point in time. She used to work as a managerial assistant in a trendy bar where she availed of the copious free flowing alcohol. She quoted George Best. We talked about Bukowski and how he paints a picture of alcoholism that seems almost noble, a coping mechanism to take the edge off the absurdity of people and the world. I mention I'm a vegetarian and that I'm not a vegan. I don't lick stones to survive.
We talk about yoga. I tell her how I deal with people that give me grief over it. I tell them I'm not doing yoga for spiritual purposes, I purely do it so I can live long enough to attend their funeral. How I will interrupt the weeping widow during her speech and ask the congregation " Does anyone fancy anything from Tesco?" Thereupon I will return with a shopping bag of Choc Ices and sporting a sombrero. In the foyer, I will then do a voluntary interpretative dance about his illness which will climax in a headstand in the shape of a cigarette as a tribute and warning to the remaining few. Maybe this is what goes through all the fitness fanatics heads? A long life is the greatest revenge. Especially if that life was purposefully boring and uneventful.      
 
 


   

Thursday, 12 January 2012

DREAM: 10th January 2012

Scored the winner for Arsenal.

DAY: 11th January 2012

In the shower singing Shine On You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd followed by a selective stroll through Scott Walker's back catalogue. I sound better in the shower. It adds ten years to my voice.
In the midst of meditation and I keep getting interrupted by outside sounds. Two bickering rubbish collectors arguing over the right of way on a one way street. They sound like the Chuckle Brothers debating the best way to pass an ice cream maker through a window. I think of a concerned neighbour at her wits end, finally calling the police due to the repeated domestic disturbances at the home of the Brothers.
The lorry starts to turn and emits a beep and an quaint English voice repeats on a loop "Keep Clear, Vehicle Turning." I try to refocus my mind.
Hear building works in the distance, sounds like someone chopping a carrot into a microphone. BBC Sound Effects Volume 8 perhaps. Or a giant Jamie Martyr Oliver making a sugar free salad for some disenfranchised teens. Drenching London with his overbite spit. This is then followed by a noise that sounds like a manic elderly man testing his wooden cane on a footpath. Maybe it is all just a big tape recorder blaring out sound effects and all the property developers are really in the Cayman islands tanning themselves beside the pool, ill gotten cocktail in hand, lounging around like free ranged veal, while female transition year students rub their bellies and weep beside them, devastated with the fresh knowledge that they can never go home now.
Try again to focus my mind.
My stomach makes a noise that sounds like a man falling down a well. Dalai Lama wept.
Watched a video about the Jarawa tribe from the Andaman islands in India. A tribe that has shunned contact with the outside world but that all changed in the 70's when a highway was built through their forest. The video depicts members of the tribe dancing for tourists in exchange for food. One girl, completely naked except for a bag of grain, childlike, rocks uncomfortably on her feet, embarrassed and exposed like Eve. The police are supposed to protect them but they accept bribes and act as tour guides for the "human safari". The tribe is under threat from outside diseases and also there has been reports of sexual exploitation of the tribes women. Sick to my stomach.
Walk to Tesco. See a sleep weary zombie father bumbling forward while his son follows behind. The boy is eating a pink sprinkled donut. He takes a bite, grimaces and screams "I don't like this."
See a ready made pot of food called " All Day Breakfast Pasta."
Buying tomatoes, fake ham, pasta shells.
At the counter and need to open my jacket to fish out money from the inner pocket. Unbuttoning my coat on command it crosses my mind: how many times has a Tesco retail cashier been flashed? Or how many times has someone pulled out strange objects from his pockets in the search for coins like some pornographic magician.
Leaving Tesco I stopped to write outside the Arsenal football stadium. A bird flies toward me at head level. Think about leaving it to the last second and then try to header it.
I wait for my parallel housed neighbour to walk home first. It's not anti-social to evade people you don't like. That's just logic. She routinely stands outside her front door, night and day, cigarette in hand, staring into our living room window, secret smile drooping off her Loose Women face. She's like some freelance Neighbourhood Watch cottage industry of gossip. The kind of person that if you were involved in a car crash would only join you to the hospital so she could have something to say at her hairdresser.   
Listen to The Electrician by the Walker Brothers before I head off to work. It's like they plant a throat lozenge in your brain, smash it and all the healing liquidy goo transports you to Heaven were you are then breastfed by Jesus.
Walk to the tube. See a mother push her baby in a pram. Her facial expression seems to convey confusion; almost like she hasn't fully worked out what the little breathing thing in the pram is.
On the Piccadilly line and see two teenage girls sporting big headphones like earmuffs and they seem to be dressed in pyjamas. They exchange stories about a boy who was "slapped."
Young trendy adult boy with red skinny corduroy jeans and Eraserhead haircut gets on. His face reads like a man who has just lost the code to the American Apparel after party.
See an ad for a type of Night Nurse medicine called Rescue Night. The blurb reads " Rescue Night can help switch off those repetitive, unwanted thoughts so you can enjoy peace of mind."What's next? A nice fuzzy, warm instant cuppa - prozac with extra croutons of serotonin.
See posters for the film Shame all over the tube. Deservedly so. Heartbreaking film. One that rattles around the system for days after viewing. Fassbender is a legend in the making.
See an old Chinese man asleep, head lolling lower and lower. From a distance it looks like he is sulking.
Catch my reflection in the window. My fringe looks like a solitary badgers paw.
Get the Holborn train to Queensway and the stench of urine in the air is now circulating through my own tubes.  
An elderly couple get on and the wife takes the seat beside me while her husband decides to defiantly stand. I ask her does he want my chair when suddenly the train takes off and she falls into my lap. I felt like a Japanese businessman with sensory weighing scales for hands. We laughed about it and I moved one seat over to allow the husband to sit down and to also put a further hole into his dam of futile perennial protest.
A businessman gets on and basically sits on my arm. Somewhere Hugh Hefner's inner right ear is burning.
A pretty middle aged woman wearing a black beret and holding a bulging bouquet of flowers is intrigued by my writing. We make eye contact and her eyes drop like hot scones.
Even if strangers demand to see what I'm writing they won't be able to make head nor toe of it. I even tried to read something I wrote the other day and it was incomprehensible. It looked like hailstones. Dyslexic braille.
Old builder to my right doesn't know were to park his eyes, woman trying to sleep with her hands in the prayer position, bald businessman doing a crossword, businessman who sat on my arm is messing about with a game on his iphone. The game is of a man in an office. Perhaps he is the computer character and this is just a 3D version of his office diary. He could have virtual sex with his secretary. Marriages might last longer if this technology existed.
On the crammed silent human eyeless dull lift with fellow hound dog's body commuters wearing Buster Keaton masks of conveyor belt numbness. A Judi Dench- like voice tells us to keep clear of the doors.
Walk to work. Meet a fellow employee on the escalator. He asks me "You going?."  I say "No I'm coming." I asked is he going? He says no, he just came early. We laugh at how we both came early. I am 25 years of age.
I am counting 1p's from the greasy leather money bags belonging to the waiters. The insides of the bag seem to be coming apart. Little strings like Jewish ringlets hang from the penny pieces. I instantly thought of Daniel Goncalves.
Catch my reflection in a life sized mirror. I look like a strange child in my dull, ugly uniform. Was talking to my sister Eleanor last Sunday about our pay structure and how we don't get paid until after the next month. How are you supposed to survive? Just let yourself eat your own insides. So I am basically on involuntary hunger strike and I don't want to wear my uniform. Accidentally like a Bobby Sands Martyr.
 A girl at work I have never seen before says "Hello John." Unsettling.
I inform my fellow money counting colleague that I will be doing a breathing technique to pass the time. Just so he doesn't look over and think I am strange. I don't want to put my finger on my nostril because of all the greasy coins I have been sorting out. We talk about spots. I told him I don't want any facial blemishes, especially before marriage. Then when I tie the knot I'll immediately let myself go. No sentimental hygiene. Not even wash my face. Cycle with my mouth open.
Decided to use a pen on my nostril. Free will.
We spoke about relationships and how you can never be friends with ex-lovers. It just never works. It feels like your talking to an aunt. Too forced and no room for spontaneity. "Never go back to a lit firework" my co-worker says.
We talk about land and borders, my father's dreams of businessmen pulling cabbages out of the field, the full moon and it's affects on people and on A & E records, how a waitress was attacked and robbed last night on her way home, about McDonald's and how it all came from humble origins, American dream bollocks, Walt Disney and the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi's and nuclear energy propaganda for kids, L.A oranges and hatred, Irish history, nationalism and fanaticism, selective history and memory.
Running for the Picadilly line home.
See a girl in the distance ambling around in strange high heels. I do a double take just to make sure it isn't my overworked mind skipping.
A young man and woman share drunken stories. Cuts, kisses, quiz nights, bruises, drinks, kebabs, shags.
A self contained pretty young woman with a Mia Farrow haircut sits rigidly upright. Her confidence could be an act. Maybe shes 4 minutes from bursting out in tears. Who knows. She watches a couple go at it with reckless abandonment in the corner.
See a New Age woman wearing some green beaded jumper. Has a degree in finger paint, worships Saturn and murders crows with a boot on her fist. Probably.
See a bald future self of me. Looks like Moby with protein.
Now the young man and woman are talking about school romances. 
On the tube cabin door the word RETCH is crudely written with a marker.
Watch Breakfast on Pluto and think how us Irish speak riddles and surrealism but it's never reflected in our film, music, television.  
The moon casts its glare and acts as my bedrooms nightlight.