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About Me Meander

A full evening

7:30!

Yes, tonight I was back in the flat for 7:30pm. I dropped my keys, I was so eager to get in.

I’ve got my whites in the machine, a Pulp CD on the music making compact disc player machine apparatus (the volume control creeping a little bit further clockwise with every track), and a can of Guinness Original by my side.

I have deemed it to be too cold and windy to walk to the gym, and seeing as I don’t get my car back until tomorrow evening, I have undressed and donned my dressing gown for a night of pure relaxation. I shall phone all the friends that I have been neglecting in my late evenings of working, and I shall watch a DVD from my pile of films that I bought under the mistaken impression that I would have time to watch them all.

I shall eat stupid food too. The pathetically small amount of time that I have been spending at home has left the need to buy food nonexistent, so it looks like I shall be eating onion rings, potato wedges and battered mushrooms. Certainly I have had no fruit for weeks.

And then I shall pick up my guitar and play. I shall play my little heart out. And the next time that I am home at such a reasonable hour, I shall dedicate the entire evening to songwriting, and record a little ditty and make it available on this very site. How does that sound?

I’m currently onsite at a client’s buildings, and I’m sharing an office with a crazy lady of Italian (or Sicilian, I’m not sure) origin. She’s great fun, and swears at her computer a lot. But once you get over the swearing, she’s got a heart of gold underneath.

At 5:30, as we were turning off our computers, I mentioned that I was off back to the office to do a bit more work. You see, she has the sort of job where she works pretty much the same number of hours every week, and given my current situation (the words “compulsory unpaid overtime” spring to mind), I find that an appealing prospect.

I enjoy my job, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes I wish that it bore some resemblance to the words that I was fed in my interview. I made it quite clear at my job interview that I was a social person, and that I needed plenty of human contact, and I didn’t want to work absurd hours. So what happens? The number of employees halves, and I find myself working every evening for a fortnight. My only consolation is that things should be a bit better for the next two months while I am onsite.

Maybe it’s rose-tinted glasses time, but when I compare my life now to my life two years ago at University, I feel like I’m losing the things that kept me going back then. I used to be able to put time into my interests – a lot of time. I played in two bands and had a weekly show on student radio. Nowadays it feels like they are just things that I use to pad out my CV. I get so little free time that I have to use it all just to catch up with my friends.

It would be nice if time could be reallocated. There are people who are begging for tomorrow to come a little bit sooner, and here am I, wishing that I just had 28 hours in the day. I don’t even dare look at analogue clocks anymore, simply because it is too easy to tell how close to the end of the day it is.

All I can say is thank goodness for ‘bel and her daily e-tea breaks.

Categories
Meander

Blue Smoke – A Short Play

Scene: INTThis means “interior”, for all you idiots out there silver Honda S2000 sports car. The roof is down. PETE is in the passenger seat and HIS BOSS is driving. The car is stationary at some traffic lights.

PETE sees some blue smoke coming from somewhere down by the side of the car.

HIS BOSS: “What’s that smell?”

PETE: “Smells like brakes burning.”

HIS BOSS: “I hope it’s not us.”

HIS BOSS looks at the handbrake.

HIS BOSS: “Shit. How long has that been on?”

PETE: “Since the traffic lights two miles back, I’d guess.”

HIS BOSS: “My wife will kill me.”

PETE: (thinks: That would be a shame. Then I’d have to get another job.)

HIS BOSS: “You’d best not tell anyone about this.”

PETE: “My lips are sealed.” (thinks: but my fingers aren’t! Haha!)

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Meander

Excuse

My bedroom.

Morning.

I awake. There is light creeping in around the edges of my black curtains.

I look at the clock. It flashes 1:26.

Power cut.

So what time is it really?

I roll across my bed and onto the floor. I slither up the dresser and claw my watch from the surface.

It’s about 7.30. I have woken up at pretty much the time that my alarm would have gone off.

I go back to bed. Now I’ve got the perfect excuse for a lie in.

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Meander

Boredom

In my boredom, I attempted to fold a CD in half. I think I was expecting it to bend and snap cleanly, like a credit card. Fortunately I turned my face away as a precaution, as it shattered into pieces, spreading shards of plastic and slivers of aluminium foil across my desk.

My boredom was not satiated though, so I decided now was the time to experience first hand the CD-in-microwave phenomenon.

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In The News

Pioneer 10

Pioneer 10’s power source has finally decayed to the point that we probably won’t be receiving any more signals from it, so off it goes, spiralling into the black void (read all about it).

I wonder what will happen when it gets discovered by aliens, which we all know are real and exist somewhere and communicate by telepathy.

Pioneer 10Maybe they will think that Pioneer 10 is an old crippled human warrior, lost on his way home from battle. And they will be able to trace its source, and will be surprised when they arrive on Earth to find that the dominant species (and I use this term very carefully, reserving the right to change it at a later date) are carbon-based.

Or maybe they will just say “Wow, how DO those Earthlings manage to pick up such a weak signal? Evidently they must know that we are here, and this craft is clearly a declaration of their technological superiority, and a prelude to war. Quick! Pre-emptive strike!”

And so the aliens will rush over to Earth, all tooled up and ready for a ruck, only to find that we have all been killed already, because some guy with a hard-on for fighting managed to get into power.

Categories
Fiction

The Robert Palmer Crazy Food Game

This is a game that Robert Palmer introduced me to when we used to buy petrol at the same garage. It’s very simple.

  1. Buy some food, the greasier the better.
  2. Buy some barbecue dip.
  3. Put both in the fridge.
  4. Wait for a few days.
  5. Take food out of the fridge.
  6. Record a cover version of “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” with UB40.
  7. See how much of the food and barbecue dip you can eat before you run to the bathroom screaming, or throw it into the bin in a fit of repulsion.
  8. Kick your shoes off, do not fear.
  9. Bring that bottle over here.
  10. I’ll be your baby tonight.
Categories
Photos

Cashback

humpsA cheque fell out of an envelope this morning. £70, from my grandmother. Attached was a letter, fully addressed, signed and dated. The words were to the effect of “Here’s the outstanding balance on your Christmas present – sorry it took so long.”

I paused, and attempted to figure out… well, anything. I suspect that she has heard from my sister that I have no money, and has taken it upon herself to send a donation. If this is the case, then I don’t really want to accept it (damn my foolish pride), but I feel that it would be rude to metaphorically throw it back in her face. What to do?

On another note, I had my first dream in ages last night. It involved a popular high street bookshop and a copy of a cartoon kama sutra starring a black man with a 24″ penis. And yet, surprisingly I am totally unconcerned about the state of my psyche.

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Meander

Following a blogmeet

“Hi, I’m in a bit of a peculiar situation. I’ve arranged to meet a group of total strangers at this pub tonight, and I don’t know what any of them look like. Seeing as you are a group of total strangers, I wonder if you are the group of total strangers that I am looking for?”

“No, sorry.”

“Ah, never mind.”

“Try downstairs.”

“Oh, there’s a downstairs? Splendid, I’ll give that a try.”

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Uncategorized

24

I remember the first series of 24. At the time I was totally hooked, but in retrospect I felt a lack of enthusiasm, and it plopped promptly from my mind. I attribute this to being totally daunted by the concept of ever watching it again.

After all, if I were to watch one episode again, I’d have to watch all 24, and that would be just too big a chunk of my life to lose on a repeat.

So I haven’t really been awfully excited by the arrival of the new series on these shores. The concept itself is no longer original, and the plot threatens to be a rehash. Yet I watched it last night, and unsurprisingly I didn’t feel the buzz of excitement which I did at the end of series one, episode one. However, I can be sure that I will be watching next week.

I wonder how many times Kim will get kidnapped. Oh, and I’m glad that Kiefer had a shave. After one hour of that fluffy golden West Country-stylee beard, my nerves were starting to wear raw.

And while I am being picky, what the hell is it with all those identikit-blondes? I can’t tell them apart, though maybe that is intentional on the part of the scriptwriters.

Categories
About Me

Barcode Battler

Two things made me stop dead in the street at lunchtime.

The first was walking past a mobile phone shop. My contract is nearly up for renewal, and I am going to attempt to talk my current provider into giving me a new phone and a better deal, by threatening to switch to a different network.

As I walked past this shop, I stopped quite abruptly. My sidekick kept walking, but turned around just in time to see some guy narrowly avoid walking into me. Needless to say, the sugar in our veins, coupled with the elation that arises from being out of the office, raised this simple event to the status of “funniest thing that has ever happened.”

The second thing that made me stop was a sudden recollection, of a toy I had when I was a kid. Does anybody remember these:

Barcode Battler

This was the Barcode Battler. It was fantastically bad.

The concept was that you would scan in a barcode and it would be converted into some mystical character or powerup or something. Some were provided with the set, but the real beauty came from scanning in your chocolate bar wrappers, upon which point you’d realise that you had, in your possession, the weakest and crappest warrior that ever existed.

The graphics were on a par with half a dozen digital clocks. Who am I kidding, there were no graphics. It was all just a bunch of numbers. All the trouble that the manufacturers went to when making up these characters was sadly wasted, as when it came to battle, all that mattered was the transitive nature of the field of integers.

It was a dreadful toy, and I probably only played on it for a couple of hours before chucking it to one side.

As a final note of interest, Barcode Battler was a lot more popular in Japan, where it led to Barcode World, which actually spawned Pokemon. So now we know who is to blame.