On a Wednesday…

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I got my contributor copies of the Fall 2014 issue of Saturday Night Reader this morning. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the publication, which features my light-hearted flash piece, Would You Like Fries With That? splashed over a couple of pages. The magazine is a collection of several of the most recent additions to the website (where you can still read my piece if print is not your thing), and is a nice bonus to the original iteration.

I’ve grown accustomed of late to the shoddy nature of certain periodicals, so I have to admit that I didn’t expect too much from this one. But full colour, A4, and with no ads (as proclaimed on the cover), the Canadian-born Saturday Night Reader is actually a well presented collection of tales that I’m happy to say I’m a part of. It’s also got a nifty app you can download for ‘more content’, such is the way of technology these days.

Sometimes I need a little reminder that I’m actually a writer.

I’m finding it very difficult to generate any sympathy for this guy. I guess – in the loosest sense – you’d call him the victim of the article.

We should all applaud the father: I know I am.

It’s Just a Number…

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This website has recently passed ten thousand views. I’ve been here for two and a half years so while it’s not a particularly fantastic number, I took the opportunity to look at the breakdown of those numbers by country. Here are a few of the interesting ones:

  • UK – 7,200
  • USA – 1,100
  • Australia – 340
  • China – 1

No, that last one is not a mistype. Access to WordPress is banned in China – mainland China, that is – so either there’s one guy from Hong Kong who stumbled across the site or, the much  more interesting theory… some mysterious internet ninja managed to bypass all the communist security just so that he could view my site.

Nice one.

Coincidences Don’t Exist…

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One of my favourite songs as a teenager was the funky rock number, Love Rears Its Ugly Head by Living Colour (an underrated band that never got the kudos they deserved). I loved that tune and played it endlessly… on cassette, of course, but that was a long time ago. Until yesterday, I hadn’t even thought about it let alone listened to it, for years – maybe a decade – and then it just popped into my head for no particular reason while I was at my desk at work.

And it was the very next song I heard, two hours later when I got into my car.

Somebody up there is watching me… and likes good music.

Remember That Time When…

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I met up with an old friend today – someone I’ve not seen for a long time. I’ve known him for fifteen years and he’s been a good mate ever since. He moved over to Canada with his bride a while ago and has spawned a couple of kids along the way. It was great to see him – albeit briefly – and catch up on the family gossip… even if some of that didn’t make for easy listening.

I went to live with my girlfriend in Northern Ireland in 2003. I didn’t drive at the time, and he was the one who got me there… with all my worldly possessions in the back of a hired van that was falling apart faster than we were travelling. We had to exchange it for something a little more road-worthy only an hour into the trip. Anyway, eventually we arrived and I waved him goodbye the next morning. Although we have had many other more experiences typical of two guys in their twenties, I think sometimes a friendship is defined by one particular event, and I guess that one’s ours.

It’s a pity the world is (still) such a large place. Canada may as well be the moon.

Have a safe trip back, buddy.

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Grumpy Old Man (Items 31 – 35)…

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It’s about time I resurrected this one…

  • Confirmed atheists who insist on saying ‘bless you’ when I sneeze. I’m not religious, which is one thing – I’ve made my peace with that – but if you’re not religious who are you seeking to be blessed by? Neither of us believe, so why are you so upset and/or annoyed when I don’t say thank you?
  • Pretentious iPhone users who still think that owning one has any cachet whatsoever. Why are they the only people who feel the need to tell me what kind of phone they have at every single opportunity? Samsung owners don’t do it. Ditto HTC. I’ve just dropped my iPhone, they say, or I’ll check it out on my iPhone. Can you send and receive text messages? Can you make and take calls? Yeah, me too. So shut up already.
  • When people tout for (usually overseas) charity. Let’s buy a donkey or a camel or a… bottle of water for someone in Africa. No! If you want to do that, fine, good luck to you. I wish you all the best. But don’t try to hitch my wagon to that cart. And don’t ask me in front of a bunch of other folk either to try and appeal to my moral compass either, because my stubbornness will kick in and I’ll say no just to look like a selfish prick. But don’t assume that just because I’m saying no to you, that I don’t do anything for charity. For all you know I could have a monthly direct debit set up just for that purpose. Or maybe I throw a quid to every beggar I see on the street. Or perhaps I simply don’t have a fiver to give to you to give to someone else. Charity begins at home, and if I had money to buy a donkey, I’d get one for myself – it’d be a helluva lot cheaper than my car and parking wouldn’t be an issue.
  • People who say they don’t like something (usually food) that they have never tried. If you’ve eaten prawns and you don’t enjoy the taste, that’s fine. I accept that. But don’t tell me it’s because you don’t like the look of them.
  • After-Christmas sales that begin on Christmas Eve. You’ve just said it’s called an after-Christmas sale. It’s December 24. The clue’s in the name: it’s right there on the side of the box! What am I missing here? This one’s an easy fix but nobody seems to have gone to the trouble to do it.

Ah… now that I’ve got those off my chest, I feel better.

I Heard it on My Radio…

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censorThe last song I heard on the radio this morning before I arrived at work was I Touch Myself by Aussie rock band Divinyls. Great song, but it’s blatantly about female masturbation. I was living in Australia at the time it was released, and even at fourteen I remember wondering how on earth that made it past the guys with the red pens. It’s not even vague or metaphoric -it’s the goddamn title of the song!

Then, upon leaving work, the first song I heard on the radio this afternoon was Can’t Stand Losing You by The Police. Another fine song, but this one is about suicide – specifically about a man’s inability to cope with the loss of his significant other. All right, it has a depth of story to the lyric, but it still ultimately details one man’s descent into depression, with the sweet promise of death to look forward to in the final verse.

Both of these songs got me thinking about censorship, and how the rules of the radio seem to be very specific. It appears that the mild expletive shit is not permitted – even when sung (or rapped) in a non-threatening way – but the line: and she never lost her head, even when she was giving head from Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side is fair game at any time of day. Surely the meaning of that has got to be harder to explain to a child than a word they’ve probably heard at school a thousand times by the age of six.

Then again, we live in a world where, last week, on the same radio station, I heard Pearl Necklace by ZZ Top. Fair enough, the title is used somewhat euphemistically, and the bearded rock gods just about manage to get away with it as an innocuous request for jewellery from a demanding girlfriend, but – newsflash – it ain’t. A casual listener who is not familiar with the song may not… get it, but you just have to scratch below the surface a little to get to the nectar.

It seems that you can write whatever you want into the subtext of a song, and you’ll get airplay.

Can’t Live With ‘Em, Can’t Kill ‘Em…

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I spend too much time around old women – specifically, the ones in my family.

Every weekend I visit my grandma. On Saturday my aunt is there; on Sunday, my mum. The conversations always touch the same clutch of topics and rarely is anything new said about any of them, but I tend to just sit there and drink my coffee anyway. I don’t say much, and when I do speak it’s either cutting social commentary or to correct something one or other of them has said: typically, language and grammar; or indeed… casual racism.

My grandma will see her doctor and instead of simply telling me what he said, she feels it absolutely imperative to firstly make me aware that he is from India, you know, as if that geographical note assists the storytelling in some capacity, yet she has never once specifically pointed out to me that anyone was white. To be honest, all of the older women in my family are just like that.

When I ask her how she can be sure he is Indian, she says; because of his accent and the way he looks. Ah-ha. I see. I had, of course, forgotten that my grandma specialised in sub-continental dialects and skin tones. I guess I should just be thankful she doesn’t say; because he offers me a papadum when I get there.

So, having established where he may be from, she then gets to the important bit – what he said, right? Well, yes, except now that I am familiar with his place of extraction it seems she now has carte blanche to relay his diagnosis in broken English. Why, I’m not sure: she is not a good mimic, and it adds no value to the anecdote. Ironically, he probably speaks a higher level of English than she does.

They don’t mean to offend, I’m sure, but I rarely allow that little nugget to stop me from telling them. It’s an age thing… they say, as if too many birthdays is an excuse to be ignorant. I remember one conversation, before my granddad passed away: it was the only time I walked out on them. I stormed out of their house and went home. That was many years ago, and my grandma is still waiting for an apology. Family or not, it makes no difference to me.

I’d like to think the kind of attitudes and opinions I still see in them will die with their generation: that once they go, so too will all this stupidity and superficiality.

But I doubt it.

When Did You Last Do It…?

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As of yesterday, I have given up the use of the shorthand expression lol.

What started off exclusively as an instant messaging curio in the dim and distant past quickly became prevalent in text language and over the years has diffused into other forms of communication such as emails and increasingly, even speech. A few years ago it was even added to the dictionary. Dark times indeed, huh?

Apart from the fact that very little these days actually makes me laugh out loud it seems its definition has been bastardised and corrupted to such an extent that it barely even resembles the genesis of the acronym anymore. It is no longer literal (if it ever was) and is overused constantly. Sometimes it is thrown in to a sentence as nothing more than an arbitrary placeholder, halfway between the capital letter and the full stop… then again, you’re lucky if you get both of those these days.

So, with that being said, here’s one for the road:

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A Standing Six-Count…

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Rocky_Saga_560x330Yesterday I sat down for all six of the Rocky movies in a row, because what else am I doing on a Saturday, right? Watching the arc in one sitting like that, it became clear that the series is as much about the titular character’s relationship with Adrian as it is about what he does in the ring. She carries an emotional weight that resonates throughout the ten and a half hour running time, despite the fact that (*spoiler alert*) she dies in the timeline before the opening credits of the final entry.

Sure, the narrative shifts from the gritty reality of episodes one and two; to the almost comic book stylings of three and four; to the ‘black sheep’ of the family in episode five; before finally returning to its roots with the melancholy and sentimentality of six. I know it is not perfect, even by the most elastic of standards. It is not the most consistent movie series ever produced either, and it’s perhaps a little too formulaic (in its entirety) to be considered classic.

But the love between Rocky and Adrian transcends its pugilistic background to become one of the great romances of modern cinema. We see Rocky falling in love; we see him being in love; and despite the ups and downs along the way, that never changes.

It is telling that after all the bloodshed and beatings that have come before it, the final shot of the final movie isn’t aggressive in any way, or filled with blunt-headed male bravado – hell, it isn’t even about boxing – but it is instead a quiet moment between a man and his memories of the one thing he loves above all else.

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