The Year's End Approaches ...
December 29, 2001
So, we've had Christmas and Boxing Day.
All the really naff activities are almost over. All we have to look forward to in the next 72 hours is the buildup to more bullshit, more getting legless and stoned, more cirrhosis of the liver and waking up to a brand new year with a stinking hangover.
I don't care what "the partying public" think: alcohol poisoning is not fucking funny.
I think all of the partying is just a way for the fishheads and assorted plebs, Mundanes and nomarks (see my Lexicon for translations) to duck the issue of what, exactly, they have been doing with their sad little lives of late.
Usually, they get wasted because they know that the answer is, of course, "Nothing." Knowing that one whole year has gone by, drawing them closer to death, and in that time they forgot to actually live their lives - knowing, in fact, that they have willingly wasted a year of their lifespan watching soaps and quiz shows - is often too much for most people to bear.
This Christmas, I cooked something new for Mum and Dad. That alone, plus the really interesting gifts I bought for them, made their Christmas complete. I gave them a Yuletide celebration to really remember.
Can you say that this Christmas - this life - is one you will remember?
This Year's Christmas Story: The Snowjob
So how was your Christmas?
Was it the traditional Yuletide celebration, starting with the obligatory round of drunken office parties, all the magazines publishing exactly the same trite warnings about waking up naked in a cupboard with the boss in a similar state of undress lying next to you?
Did you actually set out to enjoy the Christmas shopping, or was it a last minute round of frantic buying in the middle of a heaving crowd of furious mudheads like last year and the year before that?
Was your Christmas meal interesting and different, requiring you to actually think about the things you wanted to try out? Or did you really go out and buy "turkey and trimmings" thus buying into the supermarkets' con job and helping them maintain their unhealthy grip on market meat prices?
I mean, come on, you must know damn well that the supermarkets keep the shelf prices artificially high on goods they know are a "must - buy," like turkeys. How else do you think they can keep their rapacious hunger for Profit Über Alles satisfied?
Christmas is a warning, not a time of celebration and joy. We're all a year closer to death, and so is the world. The Earth is in a stinking state. If you look closely, you'll realise that you no longer have the time to worry about what's in the newspapers or on the TV.
You have this moment to live, and no more. Your past's done and dusted, and can no longer be lived again, only learned from - and whether or not you have a future is always uncertain. Only the present moment matters.
Do you want to live that present moment doing the things you wouldn't approve of other people you know and love doing?
Think about it.
Happy 2002 to you all.
Mourning A Man Of Peace
November 30, 2001
George Harrison is dead today at 58 from an inoperable brain tumour.
There we go. Bitter truth, plain and honest as a smack in the face from someone who hates you. No lies; no evasions; a truth that hurts to the core.
That's death for you. At least, as you see it from the outside.
If you want to see it from the inside, listen to George harrison's songs. Read the words of people like Wilde, Twain, Lao Tsu (the Tao Te Ching) and Niccòolo Machiavelli. What do each of the above have in common? Take a wild guess.
"All the people in this story lived and loved and fought a century ago. Good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, they are all the same now."
- to paraphrase the ending of the late Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.
Deep down inside, we are all the same. Only time itself is needed to prove that fact; and prove the fact it does, without possibility of refutation.
RIP, George Harrison. I hope you got to where you were going.
So What's New?
October 21, 2001
Four weeks in, a third of the way through my probationary period, and I've begun to adjust to life at my place of work. But what else has come along since the last journal entry?
Well, for one thing, I finally started up that college course. One unit of the course involves using Director v6 to create animations which can be viewed in Flash, among other packages. The other unit is a complete departure from my IT interests.
There's a course in college, Introduction to Drama. It's about plays, and the stage ... and it is absolutely fascinating. More about this in a later journal entry.
A New Life ...
September 28, 2001
This job has opened up avenues to a whole new life before me; a life of physical challenge, of social interaction and basically of fun.
I know that the title of my occupation, Customer Services Assistant at Mecca Bingo Hall in Wrexham, may be deeply unimpressive to many of you out there who probably expected better from me, but just look at the good points of the job I do:
- I meet lots of people.
- I've got workmates and team members to interact with.
- I get out a bit more.
- The work is challenging, but it's also fun.
- I am exercising my left brain a lot, without the drudgery accompanying left brain work.
- I am finally getting an opportunity to work off my paunch.
- Most of all, this job leaves me plenty of time to use my creative talents to the full.
I can't say better than that about the job I'm in. And considering the absolute hell that is unemployment, I think I've got a better deal than most of the hapless doleites I've had to hang around with these last eighteen months.
Stand - up people. Standing - up job.
Thanks, Mecca.
More Changing Times
September 24, 2001
Well, this week's seen some considerable transitions, but the most important one has been the first piece of positive news to come my way since I graduated.
I got a job!
I'm working in the capacity of Customer Services Assistant at a local firm in Wrexham.
Specifically ... I'm working in the Mecca Bingo Hall, as a Customer Services Assistant. In a waistcoat that barely fits, I might add. Maybe one day, I will be able to convince someone to have a photo of me taken in my costume ... it might even end up on the Net.
Anyway, I've only been there for one day so far, and the real work hasn't begun yet. If the work gets to be interesting in any way, I will keep you all updated.
Changing Times
September 17, 2001
Looking around me, I can see the knock - on effects of Black Tuesday last week, in the bookshops, in the cinema and even in the store where I buy my roleplaying games.
Gone from the video shelves are such titles as Armageddon and Men In Black: gone from the bookshelves is anything featuring the skyline of New York, or thrillers involving acts of terrorism and the Middle East. Die Hard 1 and 2 are particularly noticeable in their sudden absence.
There were tour guides to the Middle East for backpackers in the Holidays section, and Teach Yourself Arabic. Not any more. There's even a shelf empty that held a special on Arabian Nights - style stories. There was a roleplaying game supplement called Hunter: Holy War, featuring imbued hunters in the Middle East. That's all gone off the shelves. Not the book. The whole game.
Several movies have disappeared off the forthcoming movies schedule. Collateral Damage featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger; Spiderman; the sequel to Men in Black; all indefinitely postponed or just plain cancelled.
And on the TV ... The BBC began showing this TV series from the Sixties last Monday, 10 September, 2001. In an action astonishingly poorly - timed, the BBC began broadcasting Gerry Anderson's Captain Scarlet and The Mysterons ... a science fiction puppet series ("Supermarionation") involving an organisation called Spectrum fighting against alien, faceless terrorism ... the pilot episode, with astonishing prescience, featured a high - rise building in NY being utterly destroyed by a terrorist bomb carried in by a suicide bomber.
This week's episode was pulled unceremoniously. But the damage was done.
There's no point to this argument. It's blatant censorship, and in my opinion to censor things like this basically lends validity to the cause of the terrorists. This is the free world, and the free market. If you're offended by something, don't buy it. But the offending item should be available for others to buy. By making something unavailable for the public to buy out of some misguided sense of political correctness, the terrorists have got you running scared of your own shadows. And that's just what they wanted all along.
Rowanwood - Now With Cookies!
September 17, 2001
There are ongoing changes to Rowanwood, which are designed to make your experience of the site that much more personal than before.
For a start, I've upgraded the site to respond to you personally. Click here and see for yourself.
Eventually, I will incorporate much more sophisticated elements to the site. Keep going to Rowanwood, and you'll see what I mean.
The Nature of Humour
September, 2001
Bored Scientist Alert!
From the news, I hear that a major endeavour is being made by scientists at a location in Britain to understand the nature of humour: what makes a human being laugh at something or someone.
I don't think the scientists will even come close. Here's why:
- They are concerned with obtaining "The World's Funniest Joke" - when the funniest incidents don't stem from puerile puns, tawdry bon mots and tedious after - dinner quips, but from life;
- The research will involve strapping subjects to a chair and planting electrodes to their heads so they can measure their brain activity while they are laughing - but being strapped to a metal chair with electrodes is hardly what you or I might call conducive to jaw - dropping, side - splitting laughter ... unless, of course, one were to introduce a whiff of nitrous oxide to the room containing the subject ... h'mm, let me get my pen, I've got to note this down ...
The reason why they won't get the point of humour is that humour has no point. It is irrational; it is as individual as you are; it's one of those things, like telepathy or instinct, that lie in the regions just outside of logic and reason, and more firmly in the realms of imagination and paradox; where a fact can be both true and false at the same time one moment, and then simultaneously neither true nor false the next.
Humour is as tasteless as a row of exclamation marks with a 1 at the end!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 It's as audible as a fart at a funeral; as sane as a foam rubber windchime; as profound as a piss puddle, and almost as yellow.
Get this through your ears:
Humour is the product of confusion.
And scientists do not like confusion. They like to be unconfused about everything. They like to strip down the paradoxes, derive logical, measurable results to understandable causes and generally obtain (you can sing along here, I'm sure you know the words for this by now) "a rational explanation for all of this."
So by the time they've done that, they'll have removed all the actual paradoxes, the confusion, the unreleased tensions caused by the subjects' anticipation of suffering (the buildup) caused by the sudden and unexpected release (the punchline) and thereby miss not only the joke, but also the whole point of the experiment.
Any priest or priestess of Eris Discordia could tell the scientists that in all humour there are elements of confusion; of fear and anticipation; and of suffering. Also, in humour, there has to be, most of all, the element of
Surprise!
Without that element of surprise, the joke falls flat ("I've heard that one before."), so in truth, I really don't think Science will get any closer to answering the riddle of humour, any more than they could get closer to answering the riddle of human consciousness, or indeed of human existence in the first place.
A Fresh Start
June, 2001
Time for a new beginning.
I've been sorting things out for a move into a flat in town. Unlike the last move, which lasted eleven weeks, this one is a move into a place I actually can call my own.
The place looked like absolute shit when I first clapped my sorry eyes on it. The previous occupants had left the place a Goddamned mess. Clearing the crap up took the better part of this month. But the cleanup's done, and the decorating's finished. All I have to do, now, is to buy food, essentials and sundries ... and move in.
Wish me success with this one. I'm going to need it.
This page, its contents and this whole site, are Copyright © Alexander T Greene, 2001. All rights reserved.
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