The Resolution of a Ridiculous Man

Sometimes I really hate this country – specifically the weather. The other night, there was the most distraught looking fog covering my street, and it is getting too cold to stand outside for more than five minutes. Even when I’m just sitting about the house, it’s too cold to remove myself from the bed.

The other night, I came home in the taxi of my favourite driver – not only does he let me smoke in his car, he gives me cigarettes and a light – and we were discussing this depressing weather. He made reference to the fact that we had no summer to offset the cold.

Now, we are already being bombarded with television adverts for Christmas – the first being Tesco’s completely inappropriate advertisment for toys. Why are they trying to whip children up into a toy-frenzy at the beginning of November?! No child can sustain excitement for so long. I suspect Tesco are trying to catch the idiot-mother-buying-presents-now market as well as the omg-my-child’s-head-has-exploded market; hoping that the latter group will be buying first aid kits from their supermarket along with the weird pig-thing from the adverts which inexplicably requires batteries.

Anyway, the point of this rambling is that I have become unable to work – uni work has come to a complete dead end – and am somehow shifting my focus ahead by two months. Specifically, I have been thinking about new years resolutions.

Last year, for 2007, I wrote quite a comprehensive essay detailing my new year’s resolution. However, for 2008, I don’t seem to have bothered. The entry in my diary closest to this date a year ago (Sunday, 9th September, 2007) reveals that I was considering leaving my course and applying for an English Literature and Politics undergrad degree. I did actually try to apply for a course around this time, but soon forgot about it – possibly because I was getting confident in (or just too busy) with the course I evidently stuck with; possibly because I hate filling in forms.

The impression I get from this pre-2008 entry, and the subsequent entries which begin again a week into January, is that nothing was ventured and nothing was gained. I set out no goals and achieved nothing – at least in terms of things which one sets out in a resolution!  That sounds negative, from a superficial point of view – I did pass my degree this year, but that was something I had already set my mind to. The point is that I see a resolution as a time to change one’s outlook, or habits. I think the end of this year signals the time for me to consider my own mindset. The 2007 resolution worked well in my favour, but it needs to be updated for 2009. Obviously.

I don’t have much else to contribute right now, other than that I think this short story, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Dostoevsky should be read. I read it lastnight and it is so powerful – a great example of the great man’s writing.

Screw You, Anonymous Backstage Lesbian!!

I have written before about karmic balance, and I am sure my crazy theories came into play yesterday, but the intricacies are just too deep and convoluted to speculate upon too deeply. Thus, this blog will deal only with the facts, leaving the metaphysical well alone.

Anyway, I should have known my well-planned day was not going to go well when – for the first time in many moons – I got to the bus stop one minute before the bus arrived. Not only that, but it stopped when I put my hand out; instead of driving on, with the driver’s hands momentarily raising from the wheel into a two-finger formation aimed in my direction. Now I understand that certain bus drivers don’t want retard passengers in spectacularly gaudy white jeans and a t-shirt far too tight for its owner’s torso; but yesterday, this particular get-up seemed to work in my favour. Obviously blinded by what he thought could only be light reflecting from a fashion-challenged woman’s brilliant-white trousers, our antagonist slowed his vehicle. By the time he had realised he had made a rookie mistake by letting me on the bus, I had already motioned an inaccurate amount of change in his direction and was feverishly whispering something about a single ticket to Peacock Cross.

So, to recap: Bus ride = good thing; stuff to follow must = bad thing.

Bad thing did happen. I was due to film an interview between my good friend Carla Callaghan – Scotland’s greatest living journalist – and the band Primal Scream before a secret gig at ABC. Because I was so lucky in getting transport to the venue, Bobby Gillespie was not. Carla and I sat around a couple of bars for hours – literally hours – with the camera equipment, discussing our excitement and other anecdotes such as this genius episode from her uni days – which were simultaenously my uni days at the same institution – involving one most excellent lecturer:

Ken came in one day with a hangover and got us all to sit in the wee telephone room (a 5×10 foot shoebox of a room with a telephone in it. Big whoop.) and forced us to call the prime minister. No-one wanted to do it, but Ken coaxed us:
“Come on, anyone, who’s going to phone the prime minister?”. Eventually, he chose one of the girls, and she picked up the phone.
“Hello, operator? Emm… Could you put me through to 10 Downing Street? No? Ok…” And that was that lesson learned; in typical vague, inconclusive fashion.
As usual, Ken’s unorthodox teaching methods got him in trouble with The Man; but Ken didn’t care – he’s only in it for the money and has perfected the art of high-distain for all those around him.

The band eventually sound-checked. “Simon”, the tour manager who turned out not to exist, somehow, told us we were unable to do an interview with the band. Fuck. Camera equipment lugged to Yates’s faux-Wetherspoons bar nextdoor. Other camera-wielding down-and-out types looked similarly disappointed; presumably both at their lack of interview footage as well as having to sit in Yates’s; with it’s needlessly crap promos and extraneous “s”.

So, to recap: On time for interview = good thing; no interviewees + Yates’s = bad thing.

Picking up information like the human transistor radios Carla and I are – i.e. eavesdropping – we discovered that the band, or at least certain members of the band, had eaten lunch in this very Wetherspoons booze-a-like – at the same time Carla and I were being told they were unavailable due to not actually being in the country. Interesting. Further eavesdropping revealled that the band had, the previous night, been hitting the bevvy too hard. Maybe they’d been to Yates’s. Surely noone could pass up a night of disappointing alcohol and frankly threatening clientele.

So, to recap: Alcohol = good thing; bands = good thing; band members + alcohol = bad thing.

Carla and I, determined not to let the opportunity go to waste, set out to:

a) get into the bloody gig – for free [ ]

b) interview anyone [ ]

c) get hammered [ ]

d) beat up Simon (who we still thought existed at this point) [ ]

e) go to the afterparty NO MATTER WHAT [ ]

You can get a pen or pencil at this point, and tick off boxes a), c) and e) on your screen. We never managed to get any interviews because band members + alcohol = bad thing. We did get into the gig, we did enjoy the gig, and I even got into a great argument with some guy in the toilets for absolutely no reason! Miraculously, we also managed to drunkenly scam our way into the backstage area, where we got drunk(er); listened to a pretty good DJ remix some Bowie tracks; then as it slowly dawned on us that the interview was not going to happen and that Simon was not going to pick up the phone again – since we were told by the REAL tour manager, Derek (or whatever), that “there is no Simon” and that he was just a figment of Carla’s imagination – we formed one last plan to really shift the karmic balance into our favour: some old groupie bint with a man’s haircut and no bra nor sense of humour had left a couple of so-very-not-rock-and-roll Tesco sandwiches on a table to our left. As we were high-tailing it out of there, I bagged the sandwiches and ran! Screw you, anonymous backstage lesbian!!