A wise admonishment from the man who coined the phrase "the Righteous" to describe those who call themselves liberals, and who demand control over thought, language and action: read it, think and act appropriately here.
Meanwhile, Jack Straw thinks that this government has done more for civil liberties than any other (and presumably did not read Kerry McCarthy MP saying that she is very suspicious of this whole "liberty thing" or somesuch idiot words - which can also, I'm sorry to say, be sometimes read at Harry's Place).
For all that self-styled liberals think that individual liberties are just so,like mid C20, and that progressive politics just, you know, demands a certain sacrifice for the good of socierty; for all that they hate people who don't agree: there is a battle being fought, and we, the lovers of individual liberty, are losing. We are losing in the streets, in the homes, and in the workplace, where left-wing politics are being encoded into contracts, and supported by government lackeys and fake charities (see any recent case of a non-atheist being suspended/fired/disciplined for daring to live by their non-atheism, as is their right). Individual liberty is, it seems,a lost cause. As Leg Iron points out: they want a "fucking riot" in order to cut off democracy at the root: and their subordinates in the police, ACPO and LGA are already preparing the ground. They want us to riot and this time there will be no Scarman Report: just the savage repression they have been waiting for.
Don't do it.
WRITE letters to The Daily Telegraph;
SEND emails to the BBC cricket live-text;
MUTTER in the bus-queue;
BE IRONIC when you praise the Labour Party at work;
SLAP the steering wheel when the Today Programme is on;
LAUGH SARDONICALLY when atheists tell you how stupid religion is and how civilised atheism is and by the way disabled people or unwanted babies should not exist because that is better than you know, being a pain in anyone's arse;
SAY when you are asked about your sexuality when you buy a house, that it is "normal" (and CHEER when you are then taken to the cells);
RESPOND when your employer tells you that you CANNOT opt out of a GOVERNMENT MANDATED SURVEY of your private life, but do it in a bit of a bad mood;
SNIFF A BIT when someone tells you that Mrs Thatcher was evil;
UM AND ERR when someone tells you that de-industrialisation happened SOLELY between 1979 and 1997.
FAIL TO LOOK CHEERFUL when Gordon Brown comes on the TV.
LOOK A BIT SHIFTY when someone tells you that we all need to either die, or live in caves, to save the planet. But say nothing. Or you'll be a Nazi*.
SNORT when some public sector snout in the trough DEMANDS your money for their pension ON PAIN OF A PRISON SENTENCE**, while you know perfectly well you'll get fuck all when you retire. But, again, say nothing.
I think that should do it.
COMRADES: Buy THE DAILY TELEGRAPH now! And we will go forward in revolution.
* This is a REALLY BAD THING and it means that your views are seriously at variance with a socialist's. As a general rule, if you think people are a good thing, you're not ashamed of your existence, you don't think the world is about to end, you move from A to B sometimes (but, crucially, in doing so,ARE NOT spreading the word about imminent destruction of everything), you don't agree that hatred consists of merely disagreeing with someone, you want as many people as possible to say whatever they want whenever they want -
well -
then, you are a Nazi.
So be careful.
Stay Calm.
** Yes, yes ok I am a public sector snout in the trough. But at least I'm not a hypocrite. Much.
Friday, 27 February 2009
Friday, 20 February 2009
I Am The Master, And You Will Obey Me
I have grown a rather cool goatee, it even frightens my dad, and bus drivers just sort of let me on, and BMW drivers overtake me with a bit more decorum than they used to, librarians don't fine me, barmen don't hesitate to serve me, blokes in hoodies don't actually eyeball me and I can cross the road _without even looking_...
so I have spent the entire evening looking at, eyeballing the mirror...
but sadly it has had no effect, and the mirror still does not obey me.
so I have spent the entire evening looking at, eyeballing the mirror...
but sadly it has had no effect, and the mirror still does not obey me.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
Searching for a Strong Leader
There's a strange and frightening fantasy gaining currency in the West.
In fact, it has been doing it these twenty years of economic expansion: we have called it "management skills" or "leadership skills" and our companies (many of them now shown to be crooks, or swindlers, or simply twats) have wanted only those with "leadership skills". They have, consistently, wanted people whose desire it is to control the thoughts, work and output of others.
To build profit, of course.
Now, I have no problem with profit. Profit is good. Profit works.
But we know now that these "leaders" were scamming us all while they hired and fired, while they wrote big thick books on how to be team players (there's no I in team), while they set up the human resources departments full of discipliners, counsellors, facilitators and time and motion tossers.
We also know that many of these people were simply given a job with which to indulge their passion for fucking up the lives of others; for holding them to made-up government standards; for refusing to see the evidence of their own eyes - for, you see, the evidence of one's own eyes is as nothing compared to a government tick list of targets.
In Alastair MacIntyre's book, "After Virtue", the philosopher sets out how managerialism strikes: firstly some guy who knows his job invents a tick list to make it easier. Then someone else takes over and uses the tick list a bit more than the first guy. Then someone realises that the tick list is comprehensive and makes the next guy learn the tick list first. Then has the tick list become the first and key part of the job, and it drives the people who come in, over and above the knowledge of their area. Expertise is then driven by knowledge of the list, and people are brought in to maintain the list.
I have no idea if this holds.
But my experience of people suggests it isn't far off the mark.
I think there are a lot of people - a lot - for whom being in charge, and control, is desperately important. I think these people pretend they do it for "the good of the company" or to pay the bills, but in fact there are lots of ways to pay the bills. There is however only one way to control people, and that is to control people.
So they do it. And they hide behind codes of conduct, contracts, best practice, inspections, assessments, reviews: at the end of it all they want to tell other people what to do and they do it.
So here we are in a serious recession and there are bloggers and columnists calling for strong leadership.
We have had twenty years of embedding exactly this concept into the professions. Everyone in the professional castes now believes in the virtues of strong leadership (many management teams have switched from the word "management" to the word "leadership"); no-one really knows the way out of this recession, but we all seem to be clamouring for someone who does.
In the last global fiscal depression management theory had made its first major strides, based in part on the shovelling-human-beings-into-the-bin strategies of WWI. People had become targets and target-fulfillers.
This is stage two. People have been target-oriented now for longer than they recall. They have been, knowingly and willingly, not even cogs, but teeth on the cogs.
Now we are desperate for the Leader. We all look to leaders, we all ache to be a leader, so it makes sense that we are mad keen for the Leader to take us out of all this.
(In the meantime we will fire and destroy whoever is below us, to preserve our productivity and our action-oriented status, and we will pretend it is for the company - a sort of working towards the Fuhrer technique, where evil is driven as much from below as from above).
The Leader. Who Are They? Where Are They?
Please Save Us, Leader. We Look To You. We Love You.
Well, here is TTD's message to The Leader, whoever she may be:
Fuck off.
Fuck off and die.
Believe you me, it is for the best.
Fuck leaders: satirise, expose, humiliate them wherever they occur. Destroy, fire, suspend them wherever you can. It is leaders who will take us down. Take away their pretensions, their jargon, strip them of their powers, force them to admit what it is they really want: hold leaders to account, before and above their followers, and subject them to the same torture their followers suffer. Fire them on a whim, cut their hours, cut their shifts, send them down the job centre. Don't let them whine about their hours, about their stresses and strains, about their heartbreaking responsbilities - they wanted it, they loved it when times were good and they were out of the limelight. Let them do it, let them go down. Fuck them.
Only people, real people with good ideas motivated by love of their ideas, will help us. Let us build a world where ideas, concepts, work is valued above the people who organise, manage and sift those things. Where thinking is good, in and of itself, not where it needs to tick x number of the right boxes.
People who wish to control will fuck everything.
Yet again.
Fuck the Leaders.
In fact, it has been doing it these twenty years of economic expansion: we have called it "management skills" or "leadership skills" and our companies (many of them now shown to be crooks, or swindlers, or simply twats) have wanted only those with "leadership skills". They have, consistently, wanted people whose desire it is to control the thoughts, work and output of others.
To build profit, of course.
Now, I have no problem with profit. Profit is good. Profit works.
But we know now that these "leaders" were scamming us all while they hired and fired, while they wrote big thick books on how to be team players (there's no I in team), while they set up the human resources departments full of discipliners, counsellors, facilitators and time and motion tossers.
We also know that many of these people were simply given a job with which to indulge their passion for fucking up the lives of others; for holding them to made-up government standards; for refusing to see the evidence of their own eyes - for, you see, the evidence of one's own eyes is as nothing compared to a government tick list of targets.
In Alastair MacIntyre's book, "After Virtue", the philosopher sets out how managerialism strikes: firstly some guy who knows his job invents a tick list to make it easier. Then someone else takes over and uses the tick list a bit more than the first guy. Then someone realises that the tick list is comprehensive and makes the next guy learn the tick list first. Then has the tick list become the first and key part of the job, and it drives the people who come in, over and above the knowledge of their area. Expertise is then driven by knowledge of the list, and people are brought in to maintain the list.
I have no idea if this holds.
But my experience of people suggests it isn't far off the mark.
I think there are a lot of people - a lot - for whom being in charge, and control, is desperately important. I think these people pretend they do it for "the good of the company" or to pay the bills, but in fact there are lots of ways to pay the bills. There is however only one way to control people, and that is to control people.
So they do it. And they hide behind codes of conduct, contracts, best practice, inspections, assessments, reviews: at the end of it all they want to tell other people what to do and they do it.
So here we are in a serious recession and there are bloggers and columnists calling for strong leadership.
We have had twenty years of embedding exactly this concept into the professions. Everyone in the professional castes now believes in the virtues of strong leadership (many management teams have switched from the word "management" to the word "leadership"); no-one really knows the way out of this recession, but we all seem to be clamouring for someone who does.
In the last global fiscal depression management theory had made its first major strides, based in part on the shovelling-human-beings-into-the-bin strategies of WWI. People had become targets and target-fulfillers.
This is stage two. People have been target-oriented now for longer than they recall. They have been, knowingly and willingly, not even cogs, but teeth on the cogs.
Now we are desperate for the Leader. We all look to leaders, we all ache to be a leader, so it makes sense that we are mad keen for the Leader to take us out of all this.
(In the meantime we will fire and destroy whoever is below us, to preserve our productivity and our action-oriented status, and we will pretend it is for the company - a sort of working towards the Fuhrer technique, where evil is driven as much from below as from above).
The Leader. Who Are They? Where Are They?
Please Save Us, Leader. We Look To You. We Love You.
Well, here is TTD's message to The Leader, whoever she may be:
Fuck off.
Fuck off and die.
Believe you me, it is for the best.
Fuck leaders: satirise, expose, humiliate them wherever they occur. Destroy, fire, suspend them wherever you can. It is leaders who will take us down. Take away their pretensions, their jargon, strip them of their powers, force them to admit what it is they really want: hold leaders to account, before and above their followers, and subject them to the same torture their followers suffer. Fire them on a whim, cut their hours, cut their shifts, send them down the job centre. Don't let them whine about their hours, about their stresses and strains, about their heartbreaking responsbilities - they wanted it, they loved it when times were good and they were out of the limelight. Let them do it, let them go down. Fuck them.
Only people, real people with good ideas motivated by love of their ideas, will help us. Let us build a world where ideas, concepts, work is valued above the people who organise, manage and sift those things. Where thinking is good, in and of itself, not where it needs to tick x number of the right boxes.
People who wish to control will fuck everything.
Yet again.
Fuck the Leaders.
No Longer Knowing What is Truth
Pontius Pilate, in one Gospel account, famously accosted Jesus with the question, "Truth? What is that?" or "What is Truth?"
Oddly enough, the gospel in question doesn't record the answer.
In a vivid instant, the New Testament captures our own anxieties, two thousand years later. What IS truth? But note how the question is framed - not "what is the truth?" but more like "I do not understand what you mean by this word 'truth'. Please explain."
Although, how you translate John 18:38 makes a big difference here.
Still - the essence of Pilate's question is clearly not "what is the substance of this allegation?" but "what the **** are you ****ing talking about?"
Pilate - a twat for our own age.
And what was he talking about? Jesus' claim to be "witness to the truth" (John 18:37). Tellingly, from whatever perspective you take it, Jesus does not respond to Pilate's piss-take. Verbally, at least.
So. What is truth?
Who knows. Maybe - the revealed truths of mathematics, which underpin the sciences. Yes, perhaps mathematics is truth. 2+2 = 4 generally obtains, except in Nineteen Eighty Four (but then my little book shows that the structure of the novel proves that 2 + 2 = 4 after all).
And for us? For us young apes? What is truth for us? The cultural certainties of an authoritarian age?
When we lie, so much and so often and so skilfully? When we make livings out of lies? When we pretend to ourselves unto death that we did not know the truth?
Who knows.
Truth? What is that?
Oddly enough, the gospel in question doesn't record the answer.
In a vivid instant, the New Testament captures our own anxieties, two thousand years later. What IS truth? But note how the question is framed - not "what is the truth?" but more like "I do not understand what you mean by this word 'truth'. Please explain."
Although, how you translate John 18:38 makes a big difference here.
Still - the essence of Pilate's question is clearly not "what is the substance of this allegation?" but "what the **** are you ****ing talking about?"
Pilate - a twat for our own age.
And what was he talking about? Jesus' claim to be "witness to the truth" (John 18:37). Tellingly, from whatever perspective you take it, Jesus does not respond to Pilate's piss-take. Verbally, at least.
So. What is truth?
Who knows. Maybe - the revealed truths of mathematics, which underpin the sciences. Yes, perhaps mathematics is truth. 2+2 = 4 generally obtains, except in Nineteen Eighty Four (but then my little book shows that the structure of the novel proves that 2 + 2 = 4 after all).
And for us? For us young apes? What is truth for us? The cultural certainties of an authoritarian age?
When we lie, so much and so often and so skilfully? When we make livings out of lies? When we pretend to ourselves unto death that we did not know the truth?
Who knows.
Truth? What is that?
Monday, 16 February 2009
Good Luck to Matt
With the new blog
but, assuming I could remember how many "a"s it has, in the wake of atheists routinely denouncing their opponents as "mad", and given that they seem to support any bullying authority over any individual who doesn't share their worldview, I think I will give the debate a miss.
If Matt can get Alex back to work then that would be worth joining, of course.
but, assuming I could remember how many "a"s it has, in the wake of atheists routinely denouncing their opponents as "mad", and given that they seem to support any bullying authority over any individual who doesn't share their worldview, I think I will give the debate a miss.
If Matt can get Alex back to work then that would be worth joining, of course.
How Do You Martians Say "I Love You"?
Crikey O Reilly this is hard work.
Campaigning against the bankrupt Labour-fascist government? Nah.
Reading the comments at Harry's Place? No. It's a pleasure.
Slagging off the atheists who call everyone who doesn't share their worldview a nutter? Erm, no, though that's quite hard (I probably am mad).
Trying to make serious contact with women?
*ahem*
Fuck me this is like scaling the north face of the fucking Eiger (not that I've done anything harder than walked up the hill to the fucking pub - and nor do I intend to).
For crying out fucking loud, when will human beings (and I think we've been this way for a hundred thousand years or more) - understand that love and hate, far from being opposites, are two sides of the same FUCKING COIN! Depth is depth, passion is passion and ties are ties. We are bodily connected but then we take it further, away from cock and cunt, and we carve ourselves into another's soul.
They do it to us too.
When they stop doing it, when they stop writing with their words and their looks into our hearts, then we notice the absence of the twinge and we feel the pain of the heart scabbing itself up: repairing and redrawing its surfaces. That hurts so much more than the initial wounds, and the hurts of the repairing last for the rest of our lives.
And some fool always, always, asks if we are over it yet, or worse demands that we get over it. Well, if we did, we'd be machines, monstrous, evil, unfeeling, machines, who move from body to body absorbing whatever we can take from it and moving on.
No.
In love someone carves themselves into you, you do the same, and you bind yourselves together in whatever hormonal feelings you have that then become part of thought and part of weltanschauung: we carry another person (not body, but body and soul) and they (hopefully) carry us.
We are not bonobos and we are not chimps (no common ancestor for 7 million years). We lie down together, weep together, fight together, die together.
Except that we don't, anymore. We don't die together.
We die apart, in nursing homes or hospices, or on late night roads on the way back from work. We die with memory, if it has survived, looking at those who loved and left us, those we left: we die with our "life partners" in mind and all of them either dead or many, many miles away, in another nursing home, or if they are lucky, in another family. We die with them giving us no thought at all. Ten years, twenty, thirty: it doesn't matter. In the end, they do not think of us, and we do not think of them, except, unconsciously, in the breath of the moment we see the hillside; in the glance at the youthful oak tree; in the shadow of the face of a young person.
We don't want to die together because it hurts. So we fuck someone else, and we think elsewhere, and we have porn, and we lie about our own bodies to ourselves.
And in the end we die.
We never said "I love you" and meant it: we never tied our own being to another; we never wanted the commitment love brought with it; we desired to love to turn into hate, so we could leave, and go, and feel alright when it stopped being about the sex, or the attraction, and it had become more about the selves.
No I am no projecting - I did say "I love you" and meant it: I did want to tie my being to another and for us to die together, however slow it was, however long it took. I wanted the other half of my being to lock into me and for us to walk together to all those places: the cinema; the pub; the school; the estate agent; the doctor's.
I was eight years, my only adult relationship, with a woman. I wanted monogamy. I wanted love, I wanted to share myself, truly.
It does exist. It's not a game.
We're only names in a dying memory, floating out into the equilibrium, while the nerves and connections and veins die off into soil. There we go, evaporating into time.
Gone.
We've gone. And, in the end, no-one gave a flying fuck.
Campaigning against the bankrupt Labour-fascist government? Nah.
Reading the comments at Harry's Place? No. It's a pleasure.
Slagging off the atheists who call everyone who doesn't share their worldview a nutter? Erm, no, though that's quite hard (I probably am mad).
Trying to make serious contact with women?
*ahem*
Fuck me this is like scaling the north face of the fucking Eiger (not that I've done anything harder than walked up the hill to the fucking pub - and nor do I intend to).
For crying out fucking loud, when will human beings (and I think we've been this way for a hundred thousand years or more) - understand that love and hate, far from being opposites, are two sides of the same FUCKING COIN! Depth is depth, passion is passion and ties are ties. We are bodily connected but then we take it further, away from cock and cunt, and we carve ourselves into another's soul.
They do it to us too.
When they stop doing it, when they stop writing with their words and their looks into our hearts, then we notice the absence of the twinge and we feel the pain of the heart scabbing itself up: repairing and redrawing its surfaces. That hurts so much more than the initial wounds, and the hurts of the repairing last for the rest of our lives.
And some fool always, always, asks if we are over it yet, or worse demands that we get over it. Well, if we did, we'd be machines, monstrous, evil, unfeeling, machines, who move from body to body absorbing whatever we can take from it and moving on.
No.
In love someone carves themselves into you, you do the same, and you bind yourselves together in whatever hormonal feelings you have that then become part of thought and part of weltanschauung: we carry another person (not body, but body and soul) and they (hopefully) carry us.
We are not bonobos and we are not chimps (no common ancestor for 7 million years). We lie down together, weep together, fight together, die together.
Except that we don't, anymore. We don't die together.
We die apart, in nursing homes or hospices, or on late night roads on the way back from work. We die with memory, if it has survived, looking at those who loved and left us, those we left: we die with our "life partners" in mind and all of them either dead or many, many miles away, in another nursing home, or if they are lucky, in another family. We die with them giving us no thought at all. Ten years, twenty, thirty: it doesn't matter. In the end, they do not think of us, and we do not think of them, except, unconsciously, in the breath of the moment we see the hillside; in the glance at the youthful oak tree; in the shadow of the face of a young person.
We don't want to die together because it hurts. So we fuck someone else, and we think elsewhere, and we have porn, and we lie about our own bodies to ourselves.
And in the end we die.
We never said "I love you" and meant it: we never tied our own being to another; we never wanted the commitment love brought with it; we desired to love to turn into hate, so we could leave, and go, and feel alright when it stopped being about the sex, or the attraction, and it had become more about the selves.
No I am no projecting - I did say "I love you" and meant it: I did want to tie my being to another and for us to die together, however slow it was, however long it took. I wanted the other half of my being to lock into me and for us to walk together to all those places: the cinema; the pub; the school; the estate agent; the doctor's.
I was eight years, my only adult relationship, with a woman. I wanted monogamy. I wanted love, I wanted to share myself, truly.
It does exist. It's not a game.
We're only names in a dying memory, floating out into the equilibrium, while the nerves and connections and veins die off into soil. There we go, evaporating into time.
Gone.
We've gone. And, in the end, no-one gave a flying fuck.
How true
Indeed.
This story on the other hand, has to be a total fabrication, utterly without foundation.
It is ridiculous to suggest that we are governed by anything other than upright, honest, well-intentioned persons.
I mean, this is Britain.
Britain.
This story on the other hand, has to be a total fabrication, utterly without foundation.
It is ridiculous to suggest that we are governed by anything other than upright, honest, well-intentioned persons.
I mean, this is Britain.
Britain.
Sunday, 15 February 2009
England in Not Out Shock
Well, England are STILL BATTING after over ONE FULL SESSION in today's test match.
I'm just flabbergasted, utterly, utterly shocked.
I'm just flabbergasted, utterly, utterly shocked.
Not So Dreadful Valentine's Day
In fact, here are the latest figures from the TD exit poll:
No of girlfriends: 0
No of Valentine's Cards: 2
Relationships suddenly in the offing: 2
Excellent effort, that.
No of girlfriends: 0
No of Valentine's Cards: 2
Relationships suddenly in the offing: 2
Excellent effort, that.
Saturday, 14 February 2009
Thoughtcrimes Published
At last I finished my little project: to revise and extend my thoughts on Nineteen Eighty Four and publish it on lulu. Well it's done. It's not long, only 17500 words and it's fairly accessible by my standards (ie I think some of it makes sense). It only costs £2.00 also. That's a fat 11p profit for me on each copy I think.
I slipped in some b&w photos of the drummer heimat too. But I was a bit vague about proofing or reviewing it.
I slipped in some b&w photos of the drummer heimat too. But I was a bit vague about proofing or reviewing it.
Going Out With My Girl
Well, it's Valentine's Day today so tonight I shall be seeing Stella, my lovely girlfriend. She is rather cold at times, but gives me a warm glow - I don't know how she does it, but she gets inside me. She doesn't mean it always but she plays with my mind - you know, makes me feel things about myself that aren't true. Boy do I love being with her - she gives me such ideas. I hold her, cradle her, and we communicate so much through lips - lips are the source of our relationship. Lips and tongue, of course.
Stella likes to be taken, repeatedly. She lets me have her four or five times a night. I struggle to keep up, to be honest and at the end of it I always feel dizzy, dozy, and sometimes a little sad - as if I've spent myself on this love that actually always makes me feel bad the next day.
Well, we're meeting up tonight - in our usual place: the bar. And I will be searching for love in her golden depths. As I do most nights. We might do dinner, but I think she loses her charm if food is involved - just a few bags of crisps - that'll do. And I'll take her home. With her stuck inside my head, to my utter, delighted, bafflement.
Stella likes to be taken, repeatedly. She lets me have her four or five times a night. I struggle to keep up, to be honest and at the end of it I always feel dizzy, dozy, and sometimes a little sad - as if I've spent myself on this love that actually always makes me feel bad the next day.
Well, we're meeting up tonight - in our usual place: the bar. And I will be searching for love in her golden depths. As I do most nights. We might do dinner, but I think she loses her charm if food is involved - just a few bags of crisps - that'll do. And I'll take her home. With her stuck inside my head, to my utter, delighted, bafflement.
Thursday, 12 February 2009
You Who Know All The Arn-sers
Well, goodbye Mrs S:
You furnished me with so many fantasies: with your curves and beauty and brain -
You touched me under the table, you rubbed against me, you eyeballed me, you locked me into your gaze, your unbelievably erotic description of differentiation.
Goodbye Mrs S.
You didn't even know any of this: you had no idea what your body was doing, and had you known, you would have disowned it. You felt nothing, knew nothing, and you built your own body inside mine.
Goodbye Mrs S.
You rub, smooth, stroke, flay. You burn your eyes into imagination and you just go on and on, with your balloon-bursting sexuality, as powerful as nuclear, as silent as space: on you go, by me, through me, past me - and you know it, but will say and think nothing.
You really did have all the answers, for a while.
If life is subtraction, you are the difference.
And the difference is?
A middle aged woman walks past a youngish man, her beauty causes him to stop, for a moment, because he thinks he remembers something: but the feeling is gone and the dance is over.
Goodbye Mrs S.
You furnished me with so many fantasies: with your curves and beauty and brain -
You touched me under the table, you rubbed against me, you eyeballed me, you locked me into your gaze, your unbelievably erotic description of differentiation.
Goodbye Mrs S.
You didn't even know any of this: you had no idea what your body was doing, and had you known, you would have disowned it. You felt nothing, knew nothing, and you built your own body inside mine.
Goodbye Mrs S.
You rub, smooth, stroke, flay. You burn your eyes into imagination and you just go on and on, with your balloon-bursting sexuality, as powerful as nuclear, as silent as space: on you go, by me, through me, past me - and you know it, but will say and think nothing.
You really did have all the answers, for a while.
If life is subtraction, you are the difference.
And the difference is?
A middle aged woman walks past a youngish man, her beauty causes him to stop, for a moment, because he thinks he remembers something: but the feeling is gone and the dance is over.
Goodbye Mrs S.
These Are The Things I Could Do Without (Part N)
1. Deception
2. Hate
3. Self-delusion
4. Self-pity
5. Persecution complex
6. Martyrdom complex
7. Thinking that a fucking middle ranking management job is harder than being the fucking prime minister.
8. Love of stress.
9. Love of power.
10. Ambition.
11. Busy-ness.
12. Love of, and belief in, authority.
13. Doing What The Government Tells You.
14. Not having the originality, intelligence or courage to do your own thing.
15. Manipulation.
16. Lies.
17. Shallowness, where feelings are related only to self.
18. Inadequate use of language, where your deceptions are leaked through your own utter incapability with language.
19. Lack of concern.
20. Exclusion.
21. Ridiculous projection.
22. Pathetic fallacy.
23. Thinking That People You Don't Know Don't Deserve To Lose Their Jobs, While People You Sacked Did.
24. Management/Worker.
25. Lying: specifically, about your non-existent love of literature and religion.
26. Saying And Doing Whatever You Like, Whenever You Like, But Being Mortally Offended When Someone Else Does The Same.
27. Teasing.
28. Bullying.
29. Emotional Manipulation Of The Crudest Kind.
30. Hypocrisy.
31. Denying the people who love you space in your life.
32. Lying: specifically, about things you never went to, because they did not exist, and sounding so hard done by when lying about those things.
33. Pretending you want a family.
34. Refusing to make a shred of effort for someone you "love".
35. Making up rubbish about "soulmates", then ditching it when you've got work to do.
36. Thinking that when your dog dies, so does your soulmate.
37. Slagging off your "soulmate" for retreating into the hole you've kicked them into.
38. Telling someone you're not slamming the phone down on them, then doing it.
39. Crying and shouting insults over the phone.
40. Slagging someone off, then walking out on them when they open their mouth.
41. Ignoring the one you "love"'s birthday. Again.
42. Telling them you'd rather be listening to shit rock somewhere in the arse of England than being with them on New Year's Eve.
43. Sleeping with someone else.
44. Probably.
45. Because you lie, and lie, and lie again.
46. Being fucking horrible and then never mentioning it again.
47. Refusing to touch, only talk: then refusing to talk, only touch.
48. Cutting down talk whenever and wherever you like.
49. Taking obvious love, and its action, and its proof, and ignoring and forgetting it whenever you feel a bit hard done by due to something completely different.
50. Being embittered, ugly, full of regret, and with the kind of blotchy and bloated face that knows it has only limited years in which to spread its hate-filled bile and its barely concealed self-hate, not to mention its certainty of its own inadequacy; though its knob is a good size, its potency is not, and its entire character is a pile of stinking fucking dog crap.
No 50 is clearly a remark by TTD directed at himself.
For the avoidance of doubt.
2. Hate
3. Self-delusion
4. Self-pity
5. Persecution complex
6. Martyrdom complex
7. Thinking that a fucking middle ranking management job is harder than being the fucking prime minister.
8. Love of stress.
9. Love of power.
10. Ambition.
11. Busy-ness.
12. Love of, and belief in, authority.
13. Doing What The Government Tells You.
14. Not having the originality, intelligence or courage to do your own thing.
15. Manipulation.
16. Lies.
17. Shallowness, where feelings are related only to self.
18. Inadequate use of language, where your deceptions are leaked through your own utter incapability with language.
19. Lack of concern.
20. Exclusion.
21. Ridiculous projection.
22. Pathetic fallacy.
23. Thinking That People You Don't Know Don't Deserve To Lose Their Jobs, While People You Sacked Did.
24. Management/Worker.
25. Lying: specifically, about your non-existent love of literature and religion.
26. Saying And Doing Whatever You Like, Whenever You Like, But Being Mortally Offended When Someone Else Does The Same.
27. Teasing.
28. Bullying.
29. Emotional Manipulation Of The Crudest Kind.
30. Hypocrisy.
31. Denying the people who love you space in your life.
32. Lying: specifically, about things you never went to, because they did not exist, and sounding so hard done by when lying about those things.
33. Pretending you want a family.
34. Refusing to make a shred of effort for someone you "love".
35. Making up rubbish about "soulmates", then ditching it when you've got work to do.
36. Thinking that when your dog dies, so does your soulmate.
37. Slagging off your "soulmate" for retreating into the hole you've kicked them into.
38. Telling someone you're not slamming the phone down on them, then doing it.
39. Crying and shouting insults over the phone.
40. Slagging someone off, then walking out on them when they open their mouth.
41. Ignoring the one you "love"'s birthday. Again.
42. Telling them you'd rather be listening to shit rock somewhere in the arse of England than being with them on New Year's Eve.
43. Sleeping with someone else.
44. Probably.
45. Because you lie, and lie, and lie again.
46. Being fucking horrible and then never mentioning it again.
47. Refusing to touch, only talk: then refusing to talk, only touch.
48. Cutting down talk whenever and wherever you like.
49. Taking obvious love, and its action, and its proof, and ignoring and forgetting it whenever you feel a bit hard done by due to something completely different.
50. Being embittered, ugly, full of regret, and with the kind of blotchy and bloated face that knows it has only limited years in which to spread its hate-filled bile and its barely concealed self-hate, not to mention its certainty of its own inadequacy; though its knob is a good size, its potency is not, and its entire character is a pile of stinking fucking dog crap.
No 50 is clearly a remark by TTD directed at himself.
For the avoidance of doubt.
Sunday, 8 February 2009
TD Rants about Education
Over at t'other place. Not quite sure it makes sense, but then I was a bit pissed when I wrote it. I think the main thrust - a bizarre emphasis on a wholly unnatural and often inappropriate concept of understanding in mathematics teaching - holds, mind.
Saturday, 7 February 2009
Disguises Wore Thin, With Less And Less Skin
How,exactly, do you earn change: do you earn growth, and development, and decline, and death?
You earn it by survival. Before that, it is a tragedy, or an excuse for someone to say you oughtn't to live anyway. After that, the same. When you are weakest, beginning or end, there are plenty of people who want you to die, and who want to make smoke out of your body. In the meantime, while you are strong, it would be a tragedy (in the _truest_ sense, of course), a waste, shocking, terrible, how awful for his lovely girlfriend, etc. But when you are bad, or wrong, and survived birht by the merest thread, and you shit your pants, and you cannot think, and no-one knows what happens inside your head; then, you should die, because you offend them, their notion of dignity, their notion of life; then you must die. No, don't look at me, don't survive, don't take my taxes: die, die, die.
Compassionate people do so love death.
After all, it's cruel to disabled people to suffer them to live, isn't it?
You earn it by survival. Before that, it is a tragedy, or an excuse for someone to say you oughtn't to live anyway. After that, the same. When you are weakest, beginning or end, there are plenty of people who want you to die, and who want to make smoke out of your body. In the meantime, while you are strong, it would be a tragedy (in the _truest_ sense, of course), a waste, shocking, terrible, how awful for his lovely girlfriend, etc. But when you are bad, or wrong, and survived birht by the merest thread, and you shit your pants, and you cannot think, and no-one knows what happens inside your head; then, you should die, because you offend them, their notion of dignity, their notion of life; then you must die. No, don't look at me, don't survive, don't take my taxes: die, die, die.
Compassionate people do so love death.
After all, it's cruel to disabled people to suffer them to live, isn't it?
Cricket Is Back!
I cannot think of a better New Dawn for cricket than for West Indies to fuck England by an innings (their first victory v England since Edgbaston 2000, also by an innings). To listen to Tony Cozier and Sir Vivian Richards purring on TMS was just plain beautiful. England deserved to go down like they did. Bad cricket. WI played fantastic cricket. It was a delight to hear their fast bowlers steaming in and their spinner just gradually tormenting England out. And I am as narrow minded a nationalist as you could wish to avoid.
West Indies are back. Cricket is back.
England - Britain- the UK- call it what you will - is fucked. Royally. And truly.
Bring it on.
If we could have lost to anyone,anyone, I would have wanted it to be WI: cricket has been so weak without them, their passion, their skill, their love of the game, untainted (until now) by the pursuit of $$$; WI play cricket - have done since Ramadin and Valentine - to fuck their opponents and today they did.
Here's to WI fucking so many more teams.
Fuck 'em guys, in the spirit of Sir Vivian Richards, Joel Garner, the late Malcolm Marshall, in the spirit of Brian Lara, in the spirt of the great Gloucestershire and WI servant Courtney Walsh, and all those great players who played through the seemingly endless decline.
The decline has ended: England's has begun. And it is wholly deserved.
And if anyone thinks I am being a patronising colonialist, well they can fuck right off because 4-0 would bring cricket to attention in a real way. And we all need WI. And we need England, full of lunches, assumptions and other people's money to wake up and fuck off.
Cricket is my favourite sport.
Love it.
West Indies are back. Cricket is back.
England - Britain- the UK- call it what you will - is fucked. Royally. And truly.
Bring it on.
If we could have lost to anyone,anyone, I would have wanted it to be WI: cricket has been so weak without them, their passion, their skill, their love of the game, untainted (until now) by the pursuit of $$$; WI play cricket - have done since Ramadin and Valentine - to fuck their opponents and today they did.
Here's to WI fucking so many more teams.
Fuck 'em guys, in the spirit of Sir Vivian Richards, Joel Garner, the late Malcolm Marshall, in the spirit of Brian Lara, in the spirt of the great Gloucestershire and WI servant Courtney Walsh, and all those great players who played through the seemingly endless decline.
The decline has ended: England's has begun. And it is wholly deserved.
And if anyone thinks I am being a patronising colonialist, well they can fuck right off because 4-0 would bring cricket to attention in a real way. And we all need WI. And we need England, full of lunches, assumptions and other people's money to wake up and fuck off.
Cricket is my favourite sport.
Love it.
The Baby P Case
Amid all the hysteria and tabloid outrage, let us not forget the real victim of this story. There is absolutely no reason why highly paid executives should take responsibility, nor should they be shy of slating opposition politicians, using the language of the government; nor should they regret anything they have done. They are absolutely right to use the state media to point out - correctly - that they have suffered, perhaps more than anyone else.
Please, let us stop victimising those in charge.
Please, let us stop victimising those in charge.
Friday, 6 February 2009
Journey in the Dark
An exercise in acting...
...which didn't lapse once...
Good heavens, these guys (and gals) were good. I mean really good. Is there a reason why bands like Delta 5 didn't make it big? Was it to preserve their genius? Was it to keep their special gift special? Was it because everyone in the world is a cunt?
Or is it because we men absolutely fucking hate any suggestion of female infidelity (which is not in fact suggested by this track, quite the opposite, but which *is* hinted by the music)? Yeah, damn straight it is. Girls like these were the object of crap songs, not the makers of piercing, modernistic love stories.
Fuck knows, but you know, I'd take Delta 5 over any mass production fucker any day - Elton John (hair transplanted) - fuck right off. Those girls were good. Really, fucking good.
Can you imagine Girls Aloud reinterpreting this? Fuck me, it would be all about how sex wasn't *quite* as good as the singer had hoped. About how his cock wasn't quite as hard as it should have been, and how he refused to fuck her in the back room (her "tutu" not quite to his liking, one imagines).
...one knows nothing, one knows the truth...
and someone *always* knows the truth
Human relationships obtain, despite the media saturation of genital contact, the actual relationships still exist, they are still real. Despite the non-contact of cock and cunt, humans still relate. Love still exists, humans co-exist, they seek each other, in the dark and they don't seek cock, cunt or arse. They seek each other. They seek truth - namely, the other. The other is -1, the self is 1. Together they are 0. It doesn't matter, and it is the supreme human calculation. Together we make 0. We make nothing. We slide into non-existence together.
That's the point.
...four days together....
....it gives another backdrop....
We have spent a decade building backdrops to relationships: glamorous, clean, shaven, plastic, unreal decor of a square room; light, always light, lots of light.
We are the backdrop to our own lives.
Our lives and pornography have merged, in a not-very-felicitous-concert: no difference between the two now: the achievement of sexuality is all we cling to. The achievement of body - ours or the other's - and of touch, the most brutal touch (devoid of time) - even people born at the time of Cuba are stoking their bodies with plastic and oil to make someone else want to possess them and nothing else.
In this late-capitalist world, possession is nine tenths of the law; debt the other tenth.
Grown ups really think that others will love them, for wanting their body for a moment. They really believe that slaking desire will give them life. They really think that in forty years, someone will be there, still addicted to their body, still giving everything for that word, fuck. Fuck, it will be the conversation of the dying in thirty years' time, the last word on our lips - but he wanted to fuck me, I wanted to fuck her, we wanted to fuck. We fucked. And still, while we lie, cadaverous, our bodies eating themselves, still we will say it, and still it will give us that thrill.
No end of fucking. Not now. Not ever.
End of love. Always, under the duvet, always, end of love is there. In the cry, in the thought. It is the stolen object that induces panic in the dream; it is the fence underneath the snow; it is the person who stares at you, inexpressive, silent.
No end of fucking.
Ever.
...which didn't lapse once...
Good heavens, these guys (and gals) were good. I mean really good. Is there a reason why bands like Delta 5 didn't make it big? Was it to preserve their genius? Was it to keep their special gift special? Was it because everyone in the world is a cunt?
Or is it because we men absolutely fucking hate any suggestion of female infidelity (which is not in fact suggested by this track, quite the opposite, but which *is* hinted by the music)? Yeah, damn straight it is. Girls like these were the object of crap songs, not the makers of piercing, modernistic love stories.
Fuck knows, but you know, I'd take Delta 5 over any mass production fucker any day - Elton John (hair transplanted) - fuck right off. Those girls were good. Really, fucking good.
Can you imagine Girls Aloud reinterpreting this? Fuck me, it would be all about how sex wasn't *quite* as good as the singer had hoped. About how his cock wasn't quite as hard as it should have been, and how he refused to fuck her in the back room (her "tutu" not quite to his liking, one imagines).
...one knows nothing, one knows the truth...
and someone *always* knows the truth
Human relationships obtain, despite the media saturation of genital contact, the actual relationships still exist, they are still real. Despite the non-contact of cock and cunt, humans still relate. Love still exists, humans co-exist, they seek each other, in the dark and they don't seek cock, cunt or arse. They seek each other. They seek truth - namely, the other. The other is -1, the self is 1. Together they are 0. It doesn't matter, and it is the supreme human calculation. Together we make 0. We make nothing. We slide into non-existence together.
That's the point.
...four days together....
....it gives another backdrop....
We have spent a decade building backdrops to relationships: glamorous, clean, shaven, plastic, unreal decor of a square room; light, always light, lots of light.
We are the backdrop to our own lives.
Our lives and pornography have merged, in a not-very-felicitous-concert: no difference between the two now: the achievement of sexuality is all we cling to. The achievement of body - ours or the other's - and of touch, the most brutal touch (devoid of time) - even people born at the time of Cuba are stoking their bodies with plastic and oil to make someone else want to possess them and nothing else.
In this late-capitalist world, possession is nine tenths of the law; debt the other tenth.
Grown ups really think that others will love them, for wanting their body for a moment. They really believe that slaking desire will give them life. They really think that in forty years, someone will be there, still addicted to their body, still giving everything for that word, fuck. Fuck, it will be the conversation of the dying in thirty years' time, the last word on our lips - but he wanted to fuck me, I wanted to fuck her, we wanted to fuck. We fucked. And still, while we lie, cadaverous, our bodies eating themselves, still we will say it, and still it will give us that thrill.
No end of fucking. Not now. Not ever.
End of love. Always, under the duvet, always, end of love is there. In the cry, in the thought. It is the stolen object that induces panic in the dream; it is the fence underneath the snow; it is the person who stares at you, inexpressive, silent.
No end of fucking.
Ever.
New Life (depeche mode)
...sounds just like my old Speccy.
From 3.14 onwards. Crumbs. It's just as if the pop groups of the 80s looked at the technology of the time and thought, "Well, I guess this is how communication is going to be".
As if they, being clever and nervous, living under the bomb, and being the only generation whose every family member, including themselves (born around the time of Cuba) would have grown up going back two generations under threat of total war and/or utter annihilation, looked at speech and thought and saw it being reduced to binary expression and simple synthesised sounds.
What a ridiculous idea, eh?
From 3.14 onwards. Crumbs. It's just as if the pop groups of the 80s looked at the technology of the time and thought, "Well, I guess this is how communication is going to be".
As if they, being clever and nervous, living under the bomb, and being the only generation whose every family member, including themselves (born around the time of Cuba) would have grown up going back two generations under threat of total war and/or utter annihilation, looked at speech and thought and saw it being reduced to binary expression and simple synthesised sounds.
What a ridiculous idea, eh?
Day Off!
Isn't it odd how history repeats itself. I'm sure it was two years ago more or less today that we last had a bout of terrible weather. So today my school is closed (the one that does sometimes close, not the other one - you do know I have two jobs?): leaving a tough decision - what to do?
Hmm. I know. I'll just stay here, looking out the window. After all, with global warming, this is going to become more and more rare.
Hmm. I know. I'll just stay here, looking out the window. After all, with global warming, this is going to become more and more rare.
Thursday, 5 February 2009
OMG! Snow!
This is just so like - wow! I'm like, what? well duuh, there's all this white crap on the ground? And you want me to, like, go to school? Hello? WTF? Do you want me to mess my hair up or something? WTF is this stuff anyway? This is like, so random? One time, I saw something like it on Sex and the City, and I was like, what? But it's like, I can't see anything, and there's all kinds of dudes going like really slow on the roads, all like old dudes driving like no miles an hour, and being really booring. I'm like, WTF? Get a move on grandad? So my mum's like yeah, the 4x4 is cool, and we're like flashing and beeping this dude in a Fiesta, cos he's just like going OMG, OMG, gotta go really slow. But he wasn't cool, cos he like looked at us when we overtook him and told us to "fuck off".
OMG!
OMG!
Sunday, 1 February 2009
Something in the Silence
I was thinking about yesterday's post and the need to have something going on in the background - Doctor Who music again at the moment - and why silence is difficult to endure.
Always I've worked to the sound of something - music I vaguely like, Radio 5, whatever. It can't really be drama or classical because that stops me thinking about what I'm doing.
But silence - I find it distracting. I find it slightly sinister: as if the air becomes pregnant with something. Like there is someone trying to say something to you. I always feel uncomfortable with silence. Houses, rooms, don't lend themselves to silence. They should be bustling with life and love. If I am working on something, like some writing, or some maths, I find the silence brings me too close into what I am doing. It makes me get too far away from the anchorage I seem to need. Too far away from ordinary society.
Silence opens up too much space for thought.
Always I've worked to the sound of something - music I vaguely like, Radio 5, whatever. It can't really be drama or classical because that stops me thinking about what I'm doing.
But silence - I find it distracting. I find it slightly sinister: as if the air becomes pregnant with something. Like there is someone trying to say something to you. I always feel uncomfortable with silence. Houses, rooms, don't lend themselves to silence. They should be bustling with life and love. If I am working on something, like some writing, or some maths, I find the silence brings me too close into what I am doing. It makes me get too far away from the anchorage I seem to need. Too far away from ordinary society.
Silence opens up too much space for thought.
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