Anti-Catholic guilt

Cheers, Spotify. Not only have you given me access to all the Joni Mitchell albums I already own; but now every time I sleep with someone, I hear your stupid pro-condom advert play in my head. I was brought up Catholic and as soon as I manage to repress all the repressed baggage that comes with escaping the church, I get hit with “Yeah, man, lastnight I slept with Kelly, yeah?” and I get this horrible image of a black man impregnating Kelly Osborne and pretty much all hell breaking loose.

The only upside to this is that I am becoming increasingly impotent – a direct result of that Amy MACDONALT advert playing more than once.

Thanks, Spotify. Thanks for ruining life’s pleasures for me.

Remember MySpace?

I do – or at least I remembered I have a neglected-since-2007 MySpace page when I saw this t-shirt:

Never mind the fact that Woodstock is in the public consciousness, in comemmoration of its 40th anniversary – nor that the Woodstock-Woodstock connection is very easily made – this is an obvious breach of copyright. Copyright belonging to none other than me. Sure, you can’t copyright an idea, and I never made the connection on a t-shirt; but I did express it on my goddamn forgotten, public MySpace!

ASOS I’m onto you. You’re going down like Rowntrees.

Crazy correspondence

This website rules! For example, I could imagine Kathy ditching the family with a note like this one; and this made me actually die. Actually.

I love websites like this. Crazy People is this weeks Texts From Lastnight; and is infinitely funnier than the Fail Blog. And in any case, if my Rowntrees campaign goes down the toilet, at least I know where to send the shameful evidence.

You know what, Natasha? You’re right. You’re fucking right. Rowntrees Randoms are a blight on the vernacular of youth. The minute big businesses or Madonna get a hold on something cutting edge, you may as well forget it like another notch on the Oxford English Dictionary’s lexical bedpost.

Not that using the word “random” was ever cutting edge – unless you define cutting edge as using the same word as an annoying substitute for a real adjective as every other thicko. And if you do, you’re too young to be reading this page. Go back to mourning Pokemon or “ironically” watching repeats of Power Rangers on whatever fucking exploitative channel owns the rights to the dead horse.

Exploitative, that’s the word I was looking for. Rowntrees should have known better. They pay research people not to be dicks. They have a cultural hegemony over our children (i.e. other people’s – I remain childless), and therefore have a responsibility not to perpetuate the misuse of what is, in fact, a damn fine word.

random (adj) lacking any definite plan or order or purpose; governed by or depending on chance “a random choice”; “bombs fell at random”; “random movements”.

Right. Rowntrees, was there no plan in your release of Rowntrees Randoms? It reeks of boardroom to me. The fact the word random has been used as not only the name, but pretty much dominates the entire ad campaign for this detestable product, suggests not a whole lot of thought went into milking this cash cow. You just got in there with bare hands and ripped those bovine nipples apart. Was the selection of the “random” shapes you’ll find in each packet actually random? Did ice cream cones and  car tyre morphs come out of the Rowntrees production line? No, that’s ridiculous. A lot of effort went into the creation of each mould – to make a limited number of glorified Fruit Pastilles in crappy shapes.

The biggest issue I have with Randoms – the biggest indicator of boardroom – is that the shapes have so obviously been through a long selection process to make them all pointlessly PC and child friendly.

Had Randoms been truly random, Rowntrees would have used all the suggested shapes from the brainstorming session – not just the “safe” ones. Don’t even lie, Rowntrees, the original ideas were dirty. You can only come up with so many “pineapple”s or “palm tree”s before you suggest something dirty like “fanny”, “swastika” or “chocolate spider”. I bet they had some killer ideas.

Had they used the dictionary definition, Henry James stream-of-consciousness Rowntrees Randoms; I wouldn’t complain. Noone would. I bet they’d sell. Natasha, I know you’re into this as much as I am. How about we start a petition to get some new, proper random Random moulds made at the Rowntrees factory?

To get you in the mood – here’s a transcript of what the Rowntrees Rrrrrrandoms(!) advert will be like once we overturn the retrograde capitalist boardroom decisions of this once-loved sweetie company:

Rowntrees Randoms television commercial.

(Some pure bint in a weirdly manufacturer-free motor pulls up to a young Alex Salmond walking down a road. Any road. Anywhere within, say, 40 miles of central London.)

Thon Wumman (in her best telephone voice): “Esscuse me?” (she holds out a piece of paper she is RRRANDOMLY holding) “Do you know where Dover Street is, please?”

Thon Man (in a noticably more working-class accent than Thon Wumman): “No problem, fishnet stockings; your best bet is to follow your roadkill cat, go right past the rubber dildo, and then you need *noise* let meh think…”

Thon Wumman (looks RRRRANDOMLY uncomfortable)

Thon Man (popping a dolled-up jelly tot for inspiration): “Yeah! Follow your anal miscarriage until you get to the used tampon and then Bob’s your needle scarred prozzie. All right, uncomfortable stiffy?”

Thon Voiceover: “Billions of random combinations in every bag. Let your random side out with new Rowntrees Tourettes.”

I genuinely meant to write a few blogs on my holiday in Croatia, but I don’t think I’m really up to it.

The holiday itself was really great, but I had a few melancholic days because of a number of things going on in my brain. Easy Realism doesn’t usually shirk from confessionalism, but I don’t see the point in writing down all the banalities of what was going on – especially now that they have, for the most-part, resolved.

Anyway, I have decided I want to work in Canada for a year, so I am trying to save at least £2000 by the end of this year. It isn’t going well.

I graduate in November and am seeing Fleetwood Mac in October, but other than that, I plan to work endlessly. I felt like, previously, I was “living for nothing” like that line in the Leonard Cohen song; but now I have something to work towards. It is a little healthier than working towards nothing; but the melancholy remains in the fact that this 200 word blog is the most I’ve been able to produce lately.

I would like you to consider this blog a preamble to the upcoming Croatia issues, to be posted over the coming week (or month, or sporadically, or not at all – you know how patternless my updates are).

To contextualise, I was in Croatia last week and will write a series of blogs on what I did there, contrary musings and outright lies. This was my first proper holiday abroad in about six years; so I wasn’t used to holiday clothes, tanning, beaches, foreign people, currency that isn’t Sterling, or flip flops.

My ineptitude as a globe-trotter resulted in this purchase – a pair of £12 shoes. For the beach. Or whatever.

Yeah, that’s right. Following a long line of ridiculous fashion purchases, those are bright orange canvas shoes. Orange canvas is, of course, only really acceptable in Rousseau. After considering the place of these shoes behind the silver jeans and endless “smock-like shirts”, I thought the best course of action was some hardcore bleaching.

White is always acceptable. Unless you consider white jeans – especially when attending a formal award ceremony (though they do go largely unquestioned in a strip club).

The shoes underwent a triple bleaching with Domestos, Cif, and – for good measure – a different bottle of Domestos.

You can see the bleach not really affecting the outside of the shoes, but affecting the inside. This produced a really cool – but totally pointless – effect:

And also some pretty sucky effects:

And on the outside, the only white was a patina from the cocktail of bleach products.

By this point, the smell was getting to me. And the rest of the house. I was thinking about weird Victorian abortions and – since my crappy shoes could survive being drenched in bleach – whether or not I would survive if I drank straight from the Domestos bottle. I decided it was time to end this obvious failure of an experiment.

Surely jamming the shoes carelessly into the washing machine will do the job? All that bleach and washing powder will get rid of the embarassing colour – it must!

…Or just turn them pink…

…And rip the soles off them

Epic shoe fail? I think so. I can’t decide whether the biggest insult to this fashion injury is that:

a) I spent over a tenner on shoes, just to ruin them with my incompetence

b) They were effectively replaced by a £3 white pair from Primark

c) The stupid orange shoes were next to a white pair in H&M

d) I overspent on holiday (see aforementioned incompetence) and could really do with that £12 right about now…

I am currently quite upset with the magazine I work for. I wrote a very negative review about a film I felt very negatively about – in other words, I told the truth. However, the magazine did not print the piece I put a lot of time and effort into writing – seriously, the film was painful to watch. My job as a journalist was to tell the truth. The magazine’s job should have been to print my pretentious, biased viewpoint in its full 400 word glory, but my crusade was cut short by the iron claw of Marxism. Here are some episotolary emails:

Editor:

I have just received 5 copies of Behind Enemy Lines to give away!!!

Whoopsie a review slating it then wow do you want to win a copy! Lol

You have left me with a nightmare here btw

Me:

I can’t lie – it sucked… though maybe there are readers with a morbid curiosity!

But evidently, I was wrong. Readers would prefer to win a crappy DVD and not know they’re going to hate it. The only reason I even chose to review Behind Enemy Lines: Colombia was because I thought it was that documentary Ross Kemp made about Afghanistan. I was wrong, and I’m sure many of the competition winners will make the same mistake I made. Maybe some of them will think they’re getting Ghostbusters or Mommy Dearest; I don’t know. But for those people, here is the questionable review in full:

I have been in a lull for at least the last month – which is why I haven’t posted anything. Sorry for the absence. Although there has been a lot going on over the past month, I haven’t had the motivation to keep the blog up to date. Even writing pieces for the magazine were difficult for the same reasons.

Wikipedia says: “A recent meta-analysis found that, contrary to the stereotype of the suffering artist, creativity is enhanced most by positive moods. Negative, deactivating moods with an approach motivation (e.g. sadness) were not associated with creativity, but negative, activating moods with avoidance motivation (e.g. fear, anxiety) were associated with lower levels of creativity.”

Thanks.

Goodbye education

I finished uni and am currently waiting on results. If my dreams are accurate (which they will not be, of course), I have managed 81% for my dissertation and somewhere around 30% on both exams. I’ll keep you posted on that one. Maybe.

Hello foreigners

I’m off to Croatia in three weeks, on what I have tried to convince myself is a photography holiday; but which I know is more likely to boil down to extensive drinking, stressful travelling and being raped on beaches and public transport. I can’t wait! We are flying out from Brighton (?) on the 29th and have a hostel in Dubrovnik booked for the first night. After that, we have a week of unplanned mess to make.

Return of the Mac

After that, I have no plans for the rest of my life minus one thing: on October 22nd, Fleetwood Mac (the Rumours line-up minus Christine McVie, my favourite member) are playing Glasgow. Regrettably, they are playing the SECC, but it doesn’t matter! I managed to get two tickets before they sold out. They may have been overpriced, but £140 for a two and a half hour show by one of the best geriatric bands in the world isn’t too bad! I have been looking at the set list (they play the same show every night) and I have calculated I will cry at least nine times before the show ends.

I had no idea the band was going to bring the show to Scotland, so when I saw the story on the front page (!) of The Herald on Wednesday, I was in shock. Beautiful, beautiful shock. They even made the political cartoon!

An excuse for more photos

RR Angela gave me a sharpie the other day, which I have started using in some sketches. I’ve been trying out a new style which has been described variously as: a departure from the usual “Gauguin-style self portrait that I’m used to”; and prison art. I realise I need to pay a little more attention to the preliminary sketches, but these examples were each completed within ten minutes, just to test the new style and see how it worked out.

This one is standard fare, making up this blog’s mandantory Joni Mitchell mention:

This was inspired by the Fleetwood Mac ticket scam affair:

And this one just makes me laugh:

I feel incredibly guilty when I receive blog traffic from Total Politics. These users are  looking for the proposed SNP-friendly political blogger advertised on their site under this address. I feel this guilt especially when I post blogs like the monstrosity below. Part of me – my inner conservative – genuinely wants to make this a proper, professional, journalistic blog. Sadly, this professional aspect is easily suppressed, which – since I often forget this blog is available through Google – may one day prevent me from entering the news industry. The remaining part of me would like to welcome you back to the journalistic hovel that is Easy Realism and hopes you enjoy your stay – even if you were looking for serious analysis of Sturgeon.

The new DSLR camera is great, thanks for asking! We’ve gotten on very well from the beginning – even though I was, and still am, unprecedentedly broke after buying it. Plus I still don’t really know what I’m doing with the thing. That is beside the point. Results so far have been visceral: I made someone throw up yesterday just by describing the results of my latest artistic project. Personally, I think it is a pretty interesting idea: I’m taking pictures of all the things that really piss me off about my family. I’m turning the negatives of family life into productive positives. Here are some of the early collections of images from this ongoing project, all based on my sister’s stomach-turning habits and ignorance of basic hygiene or decency:

1. These are some pretty bog-standard things to get pissed off about. I mean everyone forgets to flush now and again. That can be forgiven. It may even be an attempt to save water:

Though for the sake of cleanliness, please for God’s sake, don’t let a pot get all orange and weird with mould. Because the internet is a totally inadequate medium for MY ART, I am unable to convey the smell that came off this thing. The mould had a smell:

Our shower is broken. The “on” button is messed up. I improvised with some tape to get the thing working again, on the promise that it would be properly fixed within a few weeks. That was eight months ago. There is now some black thing presumably LIVING underneath the tape and the whole set up is frankly disgusting. I use the shower to clean, not to be contaminated by some tape-dwelling rank as fuck creature. The shower head itself also needs to be fixed as it keeps falling down mid shower and soaking the floor. I want to fucking kick the thing in every time it breaks while I am trying to wash and focus my anger on that fucking makeshift tape “on” button bullshit thing!

Again, this must be some attempt to save the fucking planet by not using so much water: my sister has this fucking habit of spitting out her toothpaste and not washing it away. I THINK IT IS ACTUALLY RANK. Sometimes I have to wipe the toothpaste-spit away by hand before shaving. The thought of her spit inadvertantly touching my face makes me boke. I want to strangle her every time I see STUFF in the sink that should have been washed away. I want to fucking choke her. Here is an example of her having spit on the tap itself:

2. I spoke a few blogs back about having problems with food and in an attempt to reverse this food-aversion, I started buying more fruit. In particular, I started buying melons and grapes. Melon was the saviour of my stomach – until my fucking sister started taking my fruit for herself.

I said she “takes” my melon for herself, not “eats”. As this picture clearly shows, she doesn’t fucking bother eating my food, she just fucking pokes at it, ruins it with her fucking teeth, and fucking leaves it behind. Not only does this mean she has to go and clean her fucking teeth and leave spit all over the tap like a fucking savage, but leaves her not-eaten dinner in the living room to fester and not be eaten and grow stinky mould all over it until I clean it up like the fucking butler. More melon, James??!?

3. “Right, some cunt keeps leaving her fucking pants in my toilet!”

“I just came in here for a shite and look what I need to deal with!”

4. Not visceral enough for you? Here’s what she did when she took off her underwear:

WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!?!? Yes, that’s right. It’s a half-congealed globule of period blood. On the rim of my toilet. Just left there to stare at me until I CLEANED IT OFF WITH A BIT OF TOILET ROLL. Here’s a close up for you:

That opaque shadow makes me want to fucking throw up.

5. So then, I came downstairs, and I saw this on the wall. I thought the toilet was following me – ghosts of periods past dripping their way down my kitchen cupboard like a menstruating Slimer.

But no, it was actually worse. Some absolute manky twat had broken a glass and chucked it into the basin – already filled with crockery and water. Great, broken glass actually in the sink WHERE I HAVE TO PUT MY HANDS.

You absolute bitch!! Fucking clean up your own fucking mess! I am not your fucking butler!! I cut my foot on the floor because there were shards on it. My sister thinks everyone around her is a fucking tool. She came home and I asked her about this incident. She was the only one in the kitchen when it happened and it was pretty obviously her fault. She tried to pretend she had no idea what happened. ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT. There is no way this could have happened without her noticing. The official line that came out of her disgusting, Colgate mouth was “I had my work uniform… over there… it must have knocked it”. Call the fucking ghostbusters, Slimer has taken over her clothes as well.

And the worst bit? Kathy takes her fucking side; believes the ridiculous lie and is taken in by the farcical acting! I got the blame for the broken glass and stained sink – even though I was bleeding from the foot! Walking wounded!!

I have been considering options for what to do with these photographs. I’m thinking I should take photographs of every globule of menstrual blood for a year without telling my sister and turn it into a lovely calender, with a different period for every month. She’d like that. Or maybe I’ll just take a fucking shit under her pillow and resign as fucking chambermaid.

The internet is rife with corruption, disrespect and dirty, dirty porn. This will come as news to noone. However, I’ve been finding more and more evidence of this web-age paradigm corrupting mainstream media and our children!!

I found this disturbing and wrong programme schedule on my beloved http://www.tvguide.co.uk/. CBeebies is obviously under the control of some massive internet paedophile ring headed by an ageing Jabba the Hutt, out to brainwash your children’s minds into thinking it is the norm for older gentlemen to act in such a way:

And even the Dutch are not immune to the internet’s hegemonic deconstruction of values. Case in point, this interview (and part two) with Easy Realism Regular Reader Joni Mitchell (she must be. I mean, come on, everyone Googles themself at least once a day). The Dutch translation clearly reads: “She is a slut and a slag. Because of the internet. And there is nothing we can do to stop it”.

Look at the pain on Joni’s face. There IS nothing we can do to stop it. Won’t someone please alert the Daily Mail?!

ALL YOUR CBEEBIES ARE BELONG TO US!!!

1. I got my fancy cigarettes yesterday. I haven’t tried the Black Russian Sobranies yet, but I did give the much lusted after Natural American Spirits a try. I had built these up in my head as something special. Turns out I was wrong. Biggest vice let down ever.

2. To make up for this upset (I spent like £8 on those cigarettes!!), I went looking for the much lusted after DSLR camera on the net. I found an auction site which was selling a Nikon D90 for £4. I got excited. I was ecstatic. I went a bit overboard with the bidding. Turned out the website was a scam – THAT’S RIGHT, SWOOPO, I KNOW YOUR GAME – and I made the rookie mistake of spending £10 worth of bids on fuck all. That’s right. I lost a tenner to scam merchants.
3. I went into uni at 17:05 to do dissertation work. By 17:15, I had blown £300 on a Canon EOS 400D on eBay. DSLR lust took over and I was thinking from the groin. God, what a fool. I have £60 to last me the next three or four weeks. Even then, pay day isn’t going to bring me any joy. The worst part is, I don’t even know how to use a decent camera.

I can’t even write anything beyond this, I am in such disbelief. Please, someone, reassure me that I have not made a dire mistake!

This may or may not surprise you, but here at Easy Realism Towers, we are prone to bouts of depression.

I have been trying to come up with a rationale for this most heinous of downers (yes, I am trying to cheer myself up with Wayne’s-World-esque turns of phrase) for the past couple of weeks.

Am I doing too many shifts at my shitty job? No. I am doing maybe two shifts at the weekend. Hardcore shifts, one may argue: six or ten hours of “serving” the undeserving rich for less than minimum wage; building up serious pressure headaches from having to stare at these people through the disdain.

Am I making enough money from this otherwise needless weekend stress? No, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I make around £250 a month at present. I don’t have to stop myself from going out whenever I want as long as I don’t ruin my earnings on food* clothes or the much-lusted-after DSLR camera.

*Freudian slip: I just wrote “ruin my earnings on food”. Since this post is, for me, some surrogate psychology session; I may as well let you know that I have – at least partially – admitted to having a problem with food, after a thousand empty arguments with Kathy. Not a disorder. Not a serious problem. Just a minor problem. I have started buying more fruit to counter this minor problem. It is easier to imagine finishing a few slices of melon than some massive pasta, then the stomach demands more without feeling overwhelmed by a full on meal.

Speaking of arguments with Kathy, we had a huge fight – a battle – about smoking in the house. She said she was fine with me smoking outside, just not in the room in case of deaths (even though that is totally not going to happen). She reassured me lastnight that she was not “getting on” at me, then slowly built up a barrage of nip nip nip nip nips about how there are no benefits to smoking; how I am damaging myself; how she treats long term smokers on a weekly basis, and so on. Right now, I find “long term” an absurd concept. I have no long term.

Speaking of long term damage, I managed to find a supplier of these fancy cigarettes I have always wanted to try: Native American Spirit. I think this may be an invented memory since I cannot find a source of this information anywhere, but I am sure I read that these are the type Joni Mitchell smokes. I also bought these fancy bastards because I was incredibly tired when I found this site and thought I had money to burn. How foolish of me.

I am trying to get some work done with a function band just now but am not giving myself enough practice time and therefore holding everyone back. I don’t have time for this commitment right now.

I am experiencing dissertation panic as the whole thing is due in maybe two weeks. I wanted to go to Spain to see my dad before he moved back to Scotland, but because of the work load and making less money than I would like to, I can’t afford to go.

As blog catharsis goes, this has been rather good. A permanently recorded snapshot of low density depression. Surrogate psychology works better than the real thing. Thanks, doc; just don’t let anyone read my file.