The Reason For The Season

It's been a while since I was into all this shit, but I think this is about right.

NEVER FORGET.

State of the World Address

A 200-mile wide toxic cloud of shit fans out into the atmosphere above us. I don't know exactly what's in it, but I know I wouldn't wanna roll it in a joint and smoke it in a hurry.

The rising levels of fresh water deposited in the oceans by melting polar ice caps appear to have caused the 30 percent slowdown over 12 years of the Atlantic Conveyor, threatening to turn Britain into fucking Siberia before we even hit the half-way point in this century.

The energy crisis looms, we're facing 50 years of the WAR ON TERROR!, and already conservative pundits in the US are urging Bush to take care of the threat posed by Russia, China and Latin America.

But forget all that. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is how I know that we are truly living in the End of Fucking Days:

In a trial certain to be welcomed by the estimated one million Britons who eat their lunch at their desks each day, Britain's biggest retailer Tesco will use technology similar to that used in singing greetings cards to sell musical sandwiches.

Opening the top of the sandwich box will activate a tiny sound module that plays a selection of music. This season's offering will be a medley of Christmas tunes including Jingle Bells, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.

...

"It's designed to provide busy office workers with relaxing music to make eating lunch at their desks more enjoyable than ever before," [Tesco Spokesman Jonathan Church] said, adding that the concept could be easily adapted for Easter, Valentine's Day or Mother's Day.

The Rapture Index has yet to be updated with this development, but you best believe it's time to repent.

Newsround

Explosion in Hemel Hempstead provokes mass idiocy. "I thought it was a bomb gone off, or a plane crash or something" said one resident who has lived beside the enormous oil depot for fifteen fucking years.

Margaret Thatcher's short term memory fading. She cannot remember the beginning of a sentence once she has reached the end, reports pathetic jungle arsehole Carol Thatcher. Department of Hate spokesman, Snotty McShot, said, "Ah, Margaret Thatcher is a murderous aul fuck."

Comedian Richard Pryor in denial:

Eh, actually dude.

Harold Pinter is a Dude

I haven't eaten since Tuesday.

I've just been violently sick after uncovering a three week old garlic chicken pasta in the fridge. Christ, the stench! It took me 15 minutes just to bag it up and get it out of the house whilst swallowing my own bile.

I decided against going to bed and decided as I hadn't seen daylight for 4 days I'd open the windows and get cleaning, not bargaining on vomit-inducing tagliatelle.

I don't understand Christmas music in shops. Why? Why would they do that? They don't have music in Tesco's the rest of the year round and I don't think anybody particularly misses it. I can't imagine anyone complaining about a shop having no Christmas music, just like I can't imagine anybody whose seasonal cheer quotient wouldn't skyrocket if they didn't have to hear The Chipmunks' version of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" while queueing to buy fucking tampons or whatever. It's a depressing enough experience lining up with everyone else to stare at the shelves of bland sandwiches at lunchtime without being driven demented by some tired and worn-out Christmas mix tape gurgling away in the background. Jesus, those things are on a fucking loop, too. There's currently a debate about a smoking ban in pubs, focusing on the rights of bar staff not to work in a nicotine fogged environment. What about the cashiers in supermarkets at Christmas? It's only a matter of time before one of them snaps from hearing Cliff Richard's "Millennium Prayer" six hundred times a day and brings a rifle to work, or unboxes a turkey carving knife for a slice'n'dice rampage. And if I'm in the shop when it happens I hope they fucking slit my throat, too.

Last night I saw these guys at the Garage in Highbury, with their huge, caustic, beautifully ugly mess. Craig Clouse is a madman. For the duration of the last two songs he climbed into the audience with the microphone, the cord all tangled up in the mic stand, and the crowd all stepped way back to the walls while he paced around swinging the stand around his head. We actually believed he would hurt us.

Back home, furiously drunk and humming with violent tinnitus, I stared at the television, not caring what came on and hardly comprehending what did. A man was on, talking straight into the camera, but I was so leathered I could see two men and two TVs, and my eyes struggled to marry the two images up. The man looked old and frail, but there was nothing frail about what he was saying. At some point I registered that the old man was Harold Pinter. I remember that he seemed, briefly at least, to be talking about his plays. But then he was talking about something else entirely, and it swiftly became the greatest single piece of television I have ever seen. It was fucking magnetic, and it felt like something that should never have made it into a national broadcast. I thought somebody must have made a mistake somewhere, somebody will lose their job in the morning. It was like a fucking portal had opened up and a freak dose of uninterrupted brutal reality was pouring through.

This morning I thought maybe I had hallucinated it all. But it appears I didn't.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

This Christmas, the Queen's Speech should be replaced by Pinter's. This year and every fucking year.

I am so monumentally hungover today I am impervious to all external influences. And it feels great.

Community Announcement: Part Two

Here's a recurring fantasy of mine:

I step up to a pelican crossing in London, and there's a car approaching, a fat shiny Beamer. It's clear that the driver has no intention of stopping for the likes of me. He's an important guy, after all; a busy guy. He has clients to see and briefcases to carry - where on earth will he find the four seconds it takes to pause his journey at a crossing? Time is money, people! He could privatise five hospitals in those four seconds.

As he prepares to sail right past, he stares straight ahead in some needless pretence that he has somehow failed to see me by the road side. At the last possible moment, I step off the pavement and position myself squarely in his path, turning to meet his eyes.

The impact shatters the bones in my thighs, my kneecaps split apart, and there's a collective gasp from the bus shelter on the other side of the road. My upper body pitches forward towards the windscreen, a grin fixed on my face, my eyes still locked on his as they widen in shock. My face hits the glass and there's just the tiniest fraction of a second during which the two objects resist each other, until suddenly they both burst. My lips are ripped off and my nose collapses. One of my eyes is torn open and my jaw is snapped back under my chin as I am propelled through the ragged hole. The glass shreds my throat and I spray the leather interior with copious black jets of blood. That suit is gonna need some fucking dry-cleaning too.

Right about now, his reflexes kick in, and he slams the brake pedal into the carpet. There's a kind of equilibrium as my body just hangs from the windscreen, my face hanging just inches from his. He can't take his eyes off my jeering, lipless, semi-toothed grin and the blood-streaked vitreous humour running down my cheek. My tongue flaps limply from the bottom of my jawless head, razzing him as he sits rigid in horror. When he eventually steps from his car, shaking and green-faced, he'll realise that the substance in his mouth is a mixture of brain tissue, skull fragments and clumps of matted sticky hair, and that's when he'll vomit. He'll be missing quite a bit of work for the next while.

In other words: drivers, please stop at pelican crossings for pedestrians. Somebody's gonna get hurt one of these days.