When I was getting the train home this morning from somewhere I'd stayed for New Year's Eve there were these pointless little bits of Velcro on the headrests, and so my hat got stuck to them and made a weird noise. Instead of brushing this off with my usual characteristic smile and a wink at any nearby stranger who had noticed; I in fact went off on a lengthy internal diatribe; where I bemoaned the fucking lunacy of the person who added sticky-crap to the front of every single head-rest, on every single train, in the whole fucking country. At one point I became so enraged that small pieces of my head started falling off, until I resembled a half-boiled foetus given to a dog for a chew-toy by some 'sofa-on-the-front-lawn' sadomasochistic rednecks. Just recounting these harrowing events has lead me into such paroxysms of hatred that I have temporarily forgotten how to chew and swallow, and have thus choked twice on my lunch. So, like a prissy self-appointed débutante disallowed entry to the latest gala because of insufficiently arrogant millinery, I became more and more angry until I was shaking so visibly that people were beginning to stare. Which only made me want to spontaneously combust, and take their lamentable pity with me to our graves, even more.
Some cretin offered me the kind of banal platitude designed specifically to promote verbal incontinence in all of those unfortunate enough to be within earshot, and though instinct has taught me to bear these pointless, hackneyed irrelevancies with Eyre-like countenance - I had to repeatedly punch myself in the eye to subdue the irrepressible desire to pour scorn like tar all over this complete and utter moron. I could have laughed it off with a shrug and a mock-hangover sigh, but against all of my conditioned tendencies my brain obviously decided it would much rather sneer at the person as if they'd just denounced all black people as paedophiles or something. That kind of contortion is normally reserved for the scummiest of townies who flick their hands at me because I've ruined their day by my very existence. For my own avoidance of incarceration, and the antecedent brutal caving in of his skull by my boot, it was lucky that the next stop - and last - was mine. Obviously. Much as I'd have enjoyed spending the next three-lifetimes being repeatedly ass-raped by a gang of hirsute and podgy white supremacists, for the protection of my prostate I am glad - if for nothing else. I'd have loved trying to escape by killing everyone in the whole world ever.
When I got off the train, there were no connecting trains. Bear in mind that this was the eight-thirty-fucking-two am train, and I was woefully under-dressed and it was fucking freezing and I was so very annoyed and everyone else was gurning like they'd just discovered how to shit and all of the staff looked like the resurrected dead come back to work for pennies on the pound - bear all of that in mind, and forgive my impotent rage. I had to walk into the middle of my shitting town, looking like a bloody emaciated orphan straight from a Dickensian empathy-tweaking pseudo-accurate novel-wank, and then wait fourteen-hundred hours for a bus because apparently New Year's Day requires only as many buses as did the aftermath of Chernobyl. And they were all liquid. To fill in the time, and to avoid looking at the suspiciously conspicuous and extreme presence of grit all over every single pavement, I decided to go and get some coffee. Only to be offered pastry by some towering pair of teeth with a face stuck on as an afterthought. I was, at this moment, literally bent double, over the counter, trying to avoid vomiting at the agony of it all. The last thing I wanted was buttery-rubbish processed by someone who looks as though they were carved from the silicone-fake-additive-laden-crap they supervise the production of. Also, because I committed the most heinous crime anyone has ever perpetrated - intentionally or not - and ordered a size that they don't offer, this apparently meant that I just got whatever volume they decided I could get. Logic would dictate that if someone orders a 'medium', and you only do 'small' or 'large', and then they order an extra shot of espresso, you'd round it up so that it wasn't an apocalypse of bitterness. Then again, logic would probably dictate that I wouldn't be so stupid as to assume that anyone who ever works in the public sector has anything other than a debilitating mental condition, and limited access to the family brain-cell. So I got my shitty, undersized pint of lukewarm brown piss, with enough strength to kill a pensioner, and I felt really bloody emasculated. I thought I should go out into the streets and shout for the nearest child to come to me just so I could masturbate and explode with hot-gooey-manliness all over his dimply cheeks. It would have been like that sickeningly heart-warming scene in A Christmas Carol (I think) when that guy, who had it right to start with decides that in fact his entire lifestyle wasn't actually based on any thought and was more just his massive indifference and stubbornness to accept the facts of misanthropy - yeah that guy - when that guy has his stupid, moral epiphany and sequesters that awful, gangly pleb-child to go buy him a plump turkey. Just like that scene. Except with significantly less snow, and much more semen.
By this point I was so incensed that I can't even function well enough to form a cogent metaphor to describe just how bloody vexed I was. I got on the bus - which incidentally had been decked out in some kind of epileptic's-seizure-design - and we proceeded to stop at every single stop for a minute or two, even when no one was there and there were no other people on the street. After what felt like aeons of time - though because of the infuriation I had, of course, lost all temporal awareness - we pulled up and driver of the year (who may or may not have been Michael Schumacher) changed for some new, racier model. It was like a trade-in; except the thing you got back was just as shit, but in a wholly new way. This one had clearly been spewing his guts up all night after hitting the Cava too hard, and was evidently still reeling from the alcoholic thrashing he had taken. If I wasn't clenched before - which I was (both from the rage and the almost irrepressible urge to shit myself) - then I certainly would have been then. I would have put my head between my legs and kissed my ass goodbye, if not for the fear that I'd end up crapping in my own mouth. Anyone of a delicate disposition may want to look away now: holding back the impending tide of excrement was fourteen-times more difficult to manage than the logistics of the Beijing Olympics, and about thirty-five-times less successful. Although at least my mashed-in ring-piece wasn't designed and orchestrated with CGI.
Getting home was like a race between an elephant and small piece of pipe. Except it was less of a race: more just an elephant squeezing itself impossibly down an inordinately long and ludicrously thin piece of tubing.
Relief was nice, though.
Now, I had best come clean and admit what the point of that verbal-haranguing was. I just wanted to kick 2010 off with a nice, big, steel-capped boot. I think I have achieved what I wanted. It concurrently, however, was meant to act allegorically to the point I made further down this page about bias and subjectivity, and negation of impact blah blah blah. I am sick and tired of people getting up-in-arms over the small, imperceptible slights they explode over. I cannot abide these god-awful people thinking that just because their so myopic and unable to empathise, or even think outside of their own obscenely-inflated ego, that they are - by default - correct. I can guarantee you that the more pig-headed, stubborn, and obstinate they are the more wrong they are. It's like the Monty Python Dead Parrot defence. Just blithely ignore everything until your accuser dies of angst. They are not wrong because they are biased - all activity is subject to forces of influence, that is the decision making process - they are wrong because they cannot see past their bias. Bias defines their answer, it doesn't inform it.
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So I've kind of come back to this because I should say something interesting about it. I had this whole thing mapped out when I had my hangover-bath (to cure it, not to cause it); and I'd be understating if I said it was anything other than "magnificent". There was this whole spiel about "the slight and imperceptible violations" and loads of other really verbose rubbish that didn't really say anything. So, when I say I had something awesome what I really meant is that I had something mostly uninteresting to say that would look pretty written down and would make me feel slightly better for not having done any work at all over this break.
Bias. The big B. Partiality, ideological predilection, inclination. Whatever you want to call it. It makes you a massive, throbbing penis.
That'll do.
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That's why they can get the shit out of my face. I had more to say but I can't be bothered. My staging was so complex and difficult to spew out that I've run out of anything even remotely interesting to say about anything, and am instead going to coagulate gently on my sofa, in front of House, until my friend comes down to stay for a few days. Like a gaol of jelly, my house shall be my wibbly-wobbly prison.
Incidentally: all of the above incidents are true (with a rare exception [no-one lobbed cliché at me, the driver wasn't drunk [though he was reckless], and the woman who served me coffee wasn't intolerably ugly]). The have been embellished by me to make this copy at least passably entertaining. Hopefully it may have made you realise why you're always wrong, and why I'm so fantastically wonderful. Although the story was based around facts, all of my alleged reactions were entirely fictional. I am not suffering from any kind of anhedonia, no misanthropy; I'm not world-wearied, or borderline-suicidal. Never fear: I remain the ebullient philanthropist you have learnt to love (ignoring the philistine in me, and the egregious bollocks I spout regularly). Imagine if I was really this supercilious? Pretentious, perhaps: haughty and arrogant? Never. Happy New Year.
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