Life is a Long Lesson in Humility

Albert Frank Worthington Huxtable Wenchly, also known as "Tragic Waste" was executed this morning by lethal injection.

Gathered around him were his closest friends and family who were said to have been "delighted" with the outcome of the execution.

RIP Tragic Waste.

One of the things that has been stressing me out more than anything at the moment is the relentlessness of it all. The news today is always of economic meltdown or the economocalpse (can't take credit for that one)

So it is actually a kind of relief that the US presidential elections going on. Ive been abroad recently and Im not long back, but even on the continent everybody is obsessed with the theatrical, campy farse which is the election campain and its frenzied coverage. Sure its not exactly relaxing but its just stupid enough to be incredibly entertaining which is better than being depressed.

So it is not surprising that todays hot search on freeones.com was for a video one of the gophura people mentioned at some point Whos Nailin Paylin? starring the lovely Lisa Ann dolled up to look like the bulldog hockeymom Sarah herself. If you haven't seen any of it yet you should watch it. It is extremely good.

I just got back from Morocco. Well, I say "back" but I'm actually in an airport in Malaga; unscheduled stop, no idea why. No explanation was given.

I'm here for the night, at least. They've put me in a crappy hotel, at no extra charge. I've also got a token for some food, which is OK I suppose. The stop has enabled me to reflect on my trip.

Kent, two weeksm four days ago.

Winter is on its way and I am yet to take any holiday this year from the job which is destroying my life force a little more every day. I've put on weight over the summer, not left the house much except to go to work, where I sit like a zombie in front of a screen, putting numbers into XL tables, copying them and pasting them into new XL tables all day, trying to avoid everyone's eye and parying to God I won't have to go for a piss and walk past all their accusing eyes. The rest of the time this past summer I smoked a lot of weed, drank a lot of brandy and ale; put untold numers and variations of different powders up my nose and festered in a self-important and pseudo-adolescent bubble of my own pathetic depression. I am the guy you hope your children will never become. I am the junkie you warn them about. I am the man for whom you have no sympathy.

And yet you don't think about what drove me to this; and to be honest with you, neither did I until quite recently. I toyed with different ideas -was it Jane leaving me? Was it my Uncle's recent death? Was it when I ran out of washing-up liquid halfway through doing the dishes and sat down on the lino to weep for about 3 hours before masturbating furiously in the shower, smoking a little op-ah and sleeping for an entire day?

No, it was none of these things, just as it was all of them. The single dominating factor, however, had to be my pure, intense hatred for this country and everybody who inhabits it. I had this epiphony at 4am in a park near to the house -my face covered in misty rain, staring into the river under the willows. A "moment of clarity" perhaps.

And I decided to go to Morocco. I wanted to smell the hot winds blowing North off the Sahara. I wanted to get lost down narrow little alleyways, stroll through the balmy streets at night, drink sweet black coffee and smoke hookahs and absorb myself in my own anonymity a long way (culturally, if not Geographically) from England and its festering bloated footsoldiers of ingorance, decay and debauchery.

Purge

Cliche though it may sound, I wanted to get away from my life for a while. So I booked three weeks off work and on the first day of my holiday filled 32 black bin bags with all of the possessions I felt were weighing me down. Most of them. When I was finished all that remained in my flat were the utensils in my kitchen, a few books, my bed clothes and a pile of dog-eared, much-loved books. Everything else: clothes, television, CDs, piles and piles and piles of documents (unopened mail, vehicle papers, postcards etc.) magazines, mobile phone (not the first time I have parted with one. if you have never tried, I strongly recommend it. The feeling of freedom is quite tremendous.) was ditched. Wonderful. I have kept my out-of-date, small and ugly laptop computer, which I am typing into right now. My other posessions are gone and good riddance to them. I was staggered at how many bin bags it took.

I calculated, however, that almost half of them contained genuine rubbish: packaging and refuse. Another ten or so contained the kind of items which are almost rubbish: a yoga ball (unused), a hockey stick, the mouthpiece from a clarinet, a tea set, a plastic Yoda. The remaining few binbags contained the tainted baggage of my life as I have come to know it -the very life I wished to purge. Out it went.

Shopping

I went shopping that day; my desire to flee from England (and be prepared) for a while a  little more pressing than my revulsion of shopping centres and my boiling, bubbling disgust for shoppers, capitalism, people, crowds and public places of all kinds.

I bought simple, cheap unbranded clothes. Dark grey shirts and black linen trousers. Anonymous brown leather lace-up shoes, a plain, featureless black suit jacket. A single suitcase. A pair of chep-but-not-too-cheap sunglasses. Navy blue boxer shorts. Black socks. A wash bag. I had everything I needed to begin anew.

And off I went.

I have no pictures, I'm afraid. i didn't take any pictures. I went on holiday for me, not for the bloggers, not for my remaining family members who I never see, not for my small group of distant and degenerate friends. For me, no camera.  The following picture I just found online. It will have to do.

Marrakech is the correct spelling of the city I fly into. It's the perfect place to disconnect; reassemble. I have a lot of respect for Morroccans. I have a lot of respect for Arabs. Their lives seem less tainted, less flabby and wasteful than ours. They're a beautiful people, in a harsh and unforgiving sort of way. They say it like it is, they don't mince words. They live by their beliefs and yet demonstrate a moral felxibility which can result in acts of astounding deceit and cruelty. Twice I was ripped off, once by a cab driver and another time by the police. Still, less than a hundred pounds of my money was taken and I am not angry by either incident. I was stupid enough to fall victim to fraud and deserved it, I suppose.

I stayed in a hotel on the south side of the town. A simple, clean place full of natives and coloured tiles. No AC here, just old wooden fans and many windows. There was no television in my room, just a lamp and a small desk fan. In the evenings on the first couple of days I would walk through the town and then return to my room and write down my thoughts, before falling asleep and dreaming of orange sands and white sunlight.

Danny

On the third or fourth day I met Danny. I was drinking tea out of a tiny glass cup at a table in a narrow alleyway (my wish came true) and watching an old, hunched woman in black robes making slow and doddery progress along the cobbles, a basket of oranges in one hand, a walking cane in the other. Danny sat down opposite me with no invitation and gestured to the waiter, who instantly poured him tea. He sipped from his glass several times before looking at me for the first time and extending his hand in greeting. I shook it and introduced myself. He told he he was Danny. He told me he lived in Marrakech; and had done for three years. He used to live in London. Now he lived here.

We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in relative silence, our glasses being topped up occasionally, watching Marrakechians come and go on their daily business. Every now and then Danny would light his pipe and puff dirty brown clouds of hashish smoke into the airr. He had no fear of arrest, he had no fear of anything, from the look of it. He would hand me his pipe and I would furtively gulp back a few draws and quickly hand it back to him and there was a twinkle in his eye -he found my nervousness amusing.

Heroin

Danny wrote for an English newspaper. He lived alone in a filthy ground-floor apartment with a mangey cat called Samson who came and went as he chose, often dragging the twitching remains of dead rodents with him, shedding his flees and his brown hairs on the floors, counters and windowsills. Stinking the place up. Danny seemed to have little affection for Samson, and shared his accommodation with the ungrateful beast in much the same way as one might co-exist with a selfish, smelly flatmate. They would exchange uninterested looks with one another, invade each other's space. I did not care for Samson.

Danny read a great many books. they were heaped in piles all over his apartment. Some had leather covers. Some of the piles of books were used as work surfaces, cluttered with teacups and ashtrays. I felt strangely at home when I was in Danny's home, and had to remind myself from time to time that my home now looked very different to this place, very empty and very anonymous.

Danny smoked a great deal of heroin. One of the reasons I chose to leave my life behind for a while was to get away from the hard stuff, but in those surroundings and in that company it would have been absurd to decline, so join in I did. And for eight days I barely left his apartment, except after the sun had set. We sat and chattered and mused and pondered and pontificated and at night we walked thorugh the streets and soaked in the city through our seeping pours until it was time for me to leave.

And here I am, shivering in a hotel in Malaga, preparing myself for the journey ahead.

I sit, ravaged by boredom and frustration. My life is a scattered deck of cards and everything around me is meaningless and obscene. The pretty people on television mock me with their chirpy joy; everywhere there are people having fun -it's a great big party out there and nobody invited me.

She's been here recently.

It's 8.15am and she's left for work already, but the smell of her shampoo dances on the fluttering thermals of this room and the empty coffee cup on the table is still warm. I thumb through some of the letters on the desk; mostly financial. One postcard from someone called "Chris". I jot his name down in my notebook and saunter into the kitchen.

It's cooler in here; the little plastic fan built into the window is rolling lazily in the September breeze. There are magnets on the fridge -little replica bottles of French wine. I jot down the châteaus in my notebook and mark the Clarets with an asterisk. At the bottom of the sheet I write "secret santa?" Outside the beeping of a rubbish truck floats up through the vent. The street is full of people making their way to work, heads bowed into the wind, three-piece suits buttoned. Collars up. The light is cold, white. Winter is coming.

I don't think of myself as a stalker. The way I see it, if she got to know me she would know that I am her "one" -that there's nobody else on this ball of rock and saltwater who could make her happier; that I am the answer to all those questions she asks herself every night as she falls asleep in the arms of her lover. She doesn't even know I exist, but I'm working on that -gathering data, biding my time. It's all so clichéd, I know that, but you wait and see.

I sit in her armchair and light a cigarette. She won't mind- she won't even notice. She's a smoker too. I pick up one of the lipstick-stained butts from the orange clay ashtray and jot down "B&H" in my notebook. The lipstick gives me an idea, so saunter into her bathroom; a dark-blue tiled cube -immaculate and anonymous. I open her cabinet and open my notebook; writing the words "L'Oreal Glam Shine Natural Glow". Who comes up with these names.

I promised myself I wouldn't steal anything this time, so instead decide to leave something of my own behind. I want to infiltrate her sanctum, mark out my presence here. I reach into my pocket and put my fingernail clippers at the back of her cabinet.

"Piece by piece." I say to myself.

I leave.

I am in agreement with Furious Gopher about the "end of summer". As our tans fade and the North wind grows chilly, as the days shorten and we pile on the winter lbs, this is the beginning of the dark time; we lament the summer sun for another 6 months.

It's enough to make anyone wonder why we still live on this cursed island -it's not that I hate winter, as such. I like being with my family at Christmas, I like the girls with tinsel in their hair, I like mulled wine and open fires and crisp white snow as much as the next man, but I hate the dark and I hate the cold and both of these things dominate my winter experience from about mid October to mid March.

Maybe I should move.

You know what this is about? It's about information.

Take coal and diamonds. They're the same stuff, it's just the arrangement of their molecules which makes them so radically different. That arrangement is information. It's the code, the order of construction, the "method"... it's the information and it's the salvation of man.

A bundle of wires and plastic sheets and blobs of solder is nothing really, it's just raw materials, until it's assembled in just the right way and: "hey presto" you've got yourself a computer to download, edit, upload, watch, copy, rip, burn and distribute porn.

Long strings of amino acids and protein? Big deal. But get them in just the right order and you have a unique biological life form.

This is what's so important about information; it's the missing step between chaos and divinity. It's the link in the chain between great festering heaps of matter and intricate, functional organisms, machines and equipment.

This is why the internet is so important: it is a means of conveying human information to the masses (by the masses, for the masses). It's the first ever mass-to-mass information interface and it enables people all over the world to share ideas, plans, data, concepts, facts and nonsense.

Some people think that "information" should only refer to scientific fact or "meaningful" data. I disagree. I think anything winging its way across billions of meters of data cables is information and that the nonsense and gibberish is every bit as significant as the "meaningful data". Why? Well, it's because it's up to US, the end-users, to determine whether or not the information we are receiving has any worth. It is up to us to filter our search results and to ignore that which we do not want or need. this is an evolutionary step: the internet has opened the floodgates -everyone has an opinion. Everyone has their own blog (I have about four) everyone has a website, everyone cherishes their own mix-and-match part-science, part-spiritualist philosophy. Everyone talks and talks and talks about television and music and celebrities and sex and relationships and the economy and climate change and it goes on and on and on and the only thing we can do is:

choose which information has meaning and importance for ourselves

I see a day in the distant future when technology is affordable and available enough for every single man and woman on the planet to have unlimited, free access to the internet. Maybe not within our lifetimes, but I see the day when even the very poorest, most underprivileged people on the planet have access to all the information they require: information about their corrupt government, information about what's in their drinking water reservoir, information about how to grow crops more successfully in arid conditions, information about sexually transmitted disease, hygiene and sanitation, employment opportunities, aid organisations, alternative power, alternative fuels, alternative medicine... information to boost us another rung up the evolutionary ladder. Information to unite the species, to create a single, constantly evolving hive mind: where all of the achievements, plans and ideas of the species are alive on the internet, available for anyone to adopt, develop, improve upon. Assuming we can hone our ability to disregard the information which has no value, we can continue to expand our intellectual understanding of the universe around us and continue to add to this great databank of human achievement.

Long live information.

I know she faked it. I know she faked it because I faked it. As I faked it, she faked it and here we are, lying on the floor pretending that we don't think the other is faking, pretending it was mind-blowing but knowing that it wasn't.

I don't want to be rude about her or anything; and were you to see her in a low cut top you'd find it extremely difficult to look anywhere else: yup, when fully clothed Julie has a rocking body and an enormous set of tits.

But Julie's had surgery, you see. She's had breast enhancement surgery. They cut a whole under each breast, inserted an empty bag into them and filled them with water. The nipples were removed first, moved higher up the breasts and reattached. It's a disgusting process, prone to mishaps and mistakes and is followed by a painful and lengthy recovery period. Added to that, they don't even look like breasts: they're too round. They're stupidly round. They're almost comical.

It's like some nice looking lady had sex with a cartoon character and Julie is their first-born.

I was completely undecided on fake breasts until I met Julie. I had never seen a pair in real life (knowingly) and I'd certainly never touched any. Half the little strumpets in your average lad's mag are enhanced and I'd fuck them in an instant; so what changed?

here's how it all went down:

I was out and about, head full of mescaline and bourbon (I hate whisky, but this American Rye shit isn't bad. Expensive though, fortunately the mescaline was free: gift from a client of mine: I built his website for free, he gives me drugs now and then. It's ideal.) looking for something to do. Then I run into Mitch, who's eyes are glowing in his face like he's possessed or something so I do exactly as he says in case he destroys me or some shit like that; it's difficult to ascertain what my motives were at the time, not everything was very clear back then.

He says (in a booming voice that echoes off the walls of the inside of my head like Brian Blessed with a fucking megaphone)

"Follow us, we're going to go and party."

We go to this club I'm always hearing about but have never actually visited. It's underground in a damp but interesting vaulted structure which is common in merchant's houses in this part of down, on this side of the river. The music's awful but it's cool and dark and anonymous so I'm happy here. And I meet Julie. I have a moment when I think I'm in the Matrix -the club, the "follow me" the mescaline, the girl. Then I have a moment when I think I've shit myself and I have to check with a none-too-subtle hand down the back of my cords to make sure but it's OK because I haven't. That never happened to Neo. Anyway, back to Julie.

I've met her before (before the surgery) but now she looks different somehow, like her tits are bigger or something?

Long story short she gets fucked up on some filthy PCP that one of her "girlfriends" has on her (she's like one of those cooler-than-thou hippy types who always smells and has horrible dreads), we go to her place together I get her shirt off and I laugh. I actually laugh, out loud. I can't even help it man, it just pours out of me like air out of a puncture. Not a nervous chuckle or a single guffaw either; it's an uncontrollable, heartfelt laugh. She's not happy with this and once I get myself under control I apologise and decide, on balance that it's best if I leave.

I can't describe what those fake tits were like. I guess what they actually WERE is "balloons" -plastic bags full of water under her skin; why the fuck would anyone want to do that? I mean, they look great until you see them naked, and then it's all like: "dude, no."

So now I have made my decision. Fake tits? Gross man. Gross.

It's too much for me, man. Too much for my fucking brain to handle. This is the way I knew it would be and yet always hoped I could avoid. But I can't avoid this shit, I'm not a blind man -I see the way this is going.

The spliff I'm skinning up right now is truly gigantic. It's a full six inches long and fucking fat at the top. I packed the best part of a teenth into it and I'm about to smoke it. I'm out of whisky, you see. Bang out of whisky. I hate whisky, actually; can't fucking stand it. I'm out of brandy too, though. No booze. Just this big bag of weed, which I've long since developed a vicious tolerance to. Long, long ago. Hence this monstrosity in front of me right now.

But I know it ain't going to do me any good. I'm probably going to slump forward on my desk with my forehead and just mong.

Fuck it, I'm lighting up.

Later.