To The End

so i was in the taxi for close to 5 hours and my final destination ended up being about 400yrds from when i was picked up

the taxi was for a gig in blackpool, however when we got there we couldn't find the venue ['winter gardens 2' anybody?], so i let the driver keep searching and fell asleep, a couple of hours later i wake up to the driver telling me we couldn't find it and it got a bit late so we're headed for standish instead.. 'standish' i declare ' you mad food! i can't go there, i have nowhere to sleep there.. my bed is in Preston!'

he sighs and turns off onto a dirt track towards some woods.. for a moment my mind reflects on the potential personal dangers the world has taught me such a move might bring my way, but i quickly reason that i've been asleep in alond in this cab for a couple of hours so if 'that' was gonna happen it would already have

as this drive continued there were points where i found myself strpped to the grill at the front of the taxi [which now resembled the A-Team van] as it took part in a cross country motercycle race.. there were also points where i followed behind on a hover board, taking part in the race myself before we finally approached preston from a road i'd never seen before but flanked by the most beautiful houses and streets i have ever seen whilst having an argument with the driver about his declaration that the only drop off point in preston being the Holdiay inn

dreams are fun

life is less so, of course, to the point where i'm feeling increasingly tempted to do a FilBlog where i actually write down my genuine thoughts and feelings, but as any of you who have ever become close to me only to find themselves pushed away without rhyme or reason can testify to, that is not my style so i'll simply make vague references to my continual day to day disappointments and general turgid existance.. and you'll bloody well like it.. alright?

i'm done with drinking culture.. there must be a better way than organising your mistakes and regrets [which after all is what memories are comprised of] around the bars in town, than paying increasingly attractive girls to give you toxins that make you an increasingly less respectable person, than spending daytimes lacking self-respect and night-times lacking self-restraint, than visiting the most talked about cities in the country, and the world, only to organise your experiences around the bars

not very rock and roll, and certainly at odds with the way i make my living.. 

you know you can learn to fly a helicopter for £250 and hour? that's a whole lot of cash, i reckon it'd be worth it if you could also fly and land aa helicopter in ordinary car parks so it was a practical method of transport... but it's just not... that's a shame really.... then again, seeing as it's taken me now 7 days, and counting, to get round to making a simple phonecall to arrange having my car fixed... i'm perhaps not the right person at this moment in time to be allowed to be in charge of something that can fall from the sky.. so it all works out fair in the end

i irony back in fashion? i can't keep up these days

Land of Milk and Honey

a day of laying around watching the various documentary channels is a good way to spend sunday.... plus i'm quite pleased to have watched a documentary on the crusades [human beings, it turns out, have always been absolute dicks.. but i guess we already knew that] on the same day i'll be watching a couple of episodes of 24.. nice book ends to the afternoon

also, the best thing in the world to do with an afternoon of dedicated nothingness is to look at moving pictures of marine life while david attenborough talks.. it's like aa desert of relaxation only punctuated by mild explosions in your brain as it cries 'that's pretty mental'

i haven't blogged in a while, largely because i've had nothing to say.. a theme, it seems for russell in 2007, always a fan of the 'if you've nothing worth saying keep your bastard mouth shut you boring twonk' philosophy i've always been more of a 'replier' than a 'stimulator' conversationally but i'be usually managed find either one topic of mutual interest with a person or at least a phrase colourful enough to raise a titter.. but this year it seems my mind brain is less concerned with aiding my social interaction and more involved in.. well.. bugger all really, bastard lazy grey matter i'm gonna poke it with sticks

but yeah, the lack of words to say is a problem, because there's only so much time you can spend with people not saying much before they run out of things to say to you too and from their it's a fast slippery slope to spending 4 days & nights sitting around in a blackened room eating curry in soiled pants, not sleeping and planning the slaughter of a group of people you've singled out for no oher reason than the fact they've smiled in your direction recently.. y'know.. for shits and giggles.. or because god is telling you to do it, and to do it while wearing bermuda shorts and a pair of comedy glasses & nose things

anyway

i haven't blogged.. but i have done shit... well 'a' shit if you pardon the expression.. i went to 'our nations capital'.. we played a gig.. influential people came to watch.. it was ok.. fun even.. adventures were had.. food was eaten - [oh the glorious food.. 'can i have a MEAT sandwhich please sir.. and incase that isn't enough MEAT.. can you sprinkle some MEAT in my beans too?".. and i managed to grab a few hours of time with my number 1 myspace friend [i'm so 21st century].. but that's my pleasure, not yours.. then it all went a little.. mmm... i think the locals tem is 'pete tong'

due to a combination of poor planning, lack of local transport and geographical knowledge and.. well.. intelligence... at Midnight on a Friday night in London i found myself alone, whilst my two companions were many miles away, un a part of london they didn't know, 12hours drunk, with no transport and trying to find their way to me. This left me with 2 hours with very little to do but wander around central london and soho... it started ok, i found a man to sell me a waffle... it wasn't a great waffle and a made a mess of eating it.. to the point a young woman walked past me.. pointed.. laughed and shouted 'chocolate face!'.. now whilst i did find the amusing it dealt quite a blow to me self esteem and my lust for a mirror and running water overcame me.. if this meant having to buy burger and chips in burger king.. well that would be a cross i had to bear [bare?]... then i witness a strange phenomenan that i have imaginatively titled 'the arrival of the tube workers' where by dozens of such men in high visibility jackets arrived and hung around under a giant statue of freddie mercury for up to 90minutes whilst they waited to be allowed into the tunnels under london city to do.. well..whatever it is large groups of men do a mile or so under the capital of england at night. i also witnessed what i believe is 'the most polite mugging in the world'...; 'there's no point mate, i lost my wallet', 'no it's ok, it's here somewhere' *rifles through pockets'.. bless those cheeky cockneys.

other than all that.. as capital cities go.. londons pretty dissapointing.. all very big and flash.. but pretty regimented and very expensive.. and not altogether the most beautiful of cities... of course i will give it more chances.. but for now.. i'm sticking north of hadrians wall for my big city fun times.

that's all i have to say about that.

oh yeah.. for valentines.. send me white roses not red... i have mixed feelings about the red.

x

I'm trying to help you out so can you stop being a twat

right.. first up.. thanks to a small friend of mine using a partciular sentence as her msn name i've had the lyric "oh my god you must be joking me, if you think that you'll be poking me" running round and round my head for 24 hours now - which is not only annoying but largely innaccurate, because even ignoring that fact that i'm a most definately poker rather than a pokee... let's be honest, it's not a sentence i could ever really stand behind, cos all someone really has to do is ask nice, and maybe give me a cake...i'm kind like that

second up... because i know you've all missed the reports on my sleeping patterns... the nightmares are getting worse and they are getting layered, last night i 'woke up' roughly every 15minutes in fear.. though most of these were simply waking from one dream to enter another.. it was altogether a very confusing exercise which i do not hope to repeat anytime soon... any remedies greatly received.. not that i mind nightmares.. i love to be scared.. but the waking up is playing havoc with my despite to be asleep as much as humanly possible

thirdly.. and please god hopefully lastly because i'm hungry... but i've started so i'll waffle.. i've been thinking about myspace [i know, the bullet is in the gun, the barrel is in my mouth... i may eat it] and more specifically the way people use it

i'l explain.. there are 4 primary ways in which myspace can be used to communicate with your 'friends'... these being message, comment, bulletin and blog.. and they all have their individual uses, one for private messages between individuals.. one for messages to an individual that you don't mind people 'over-hearing'.. one for a message you want to send out to all your friends, and finally one where you just saying stuff and who hears it, hears it

now i've never claimed to be the sharpest tool in the box.. actually that's a complete lie, i've claimed previously to be anything from 'the oracle' to 'god' and believed it.. but that is beside the point... i'm just a simple man, but i understand the sepration between the four methods and their uses

yet it seems to be an increasing trend to use the 3rd where the 1st would have been more appropriate.. [incase you're too slow to follow... using a bulletin where it should have been a message].. i see it everyday, and everyday it bothers me.. not so much because it's a clear method of screaming 'pay me attention, do it now! wah! wah! wah!.. because hey, when i went to school it was full of 15 year old girls, so i've gotten used to that as a fact of life [also, i'm writing a myspace blog for ahabs sake, i'm not exactly averse to the culture of seeking a little attention] but more for this reason... 

the 'real life' equivelant of sending a bulletin when it should have been a message is this: you walk into a public place, say a local pub, filled with your friends and associates.. the person you wish to speak to may or may not be there... regardless.. you stand on a table and proceed to shout your message.

i can't spell bulletin or equivelant

now in real life the consequences of a person taking this action or anything from large scale pointing and laughing while a few cheeky wags make that 'loopy' gesture where you twirl your finger just above your ear.. to the more extreme 'men in white coats' scenario

this is why it bothers me.

so if you see someone on your friends list commiting this offence... help them help themselves... take a picture from their profile.. write the words 'village idiot' across it, and bulletin that

everybody is a winner!

Registered Charity No.90210

when you wake up miserable and in the certain knowledge that the thoughts running round your head will continue to keep that misery festering and jabbing at you for the next set of waking hours, the only really sensible thing is to take your glasses off and go back to sleep

if this return to oblivion means that you next wake at 2.30pm feeling groggy and confused as you wrench yourself from a dream where you were having a great msn converation with a hollywood starlett fresh from playing a side character in a remake of buffy the vampire slayer yet it was all going a bit wrong because your fingers weren't working properly and, despite her great efforts to tolerate you, she is starting to tire of the fact that you keep replying with 'rliid;ih;idh jdjpkp1 rdxsbnp [[ppihi', 'iilguewwyuguy' and 'ppoipdephi suyquywidl', and just as you're coming to an aquaintence of yours announces his intentions to 'add her'.. then so be it!

at least the misery is diminished.. i won't say gone of course because i we know the 4 noble truths of the russah are 1) life is woe, 2) the origin of woe is being awake, 3) the cessation of woe is impossible and 4) people are insufferable dicks... anyway, what was i saying? yeah, woke up feeling a little better

it's been a crazy few days in the united states of of kingdom land, it got a bit windy on thursday and, well the long and the short of it is that, everything fell over [i love commas, and the fact that when you put two of them in a sentence you can ignore the words in between and pretend there was a pause.. often reads so much better].. but yeah.. chaos, trains stopped, motorways closed, schools and businesses shutting early and sending everyone home, millions of pounds lost, people on the news screaming THE CHILDREN! WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN!, grown men in the street dropping to their knees in prayer and people losing faith in the construction industry left right and centre, not to mention a disappointing lack of upsurge in kite sales [does nobody watch Mary Poppins these days].. and most bizarely, the changing off all linked text on myspace to an eye burning bright red [it must be wind linked.. what else has happened?]

anyways it's over now and people can get back to pissing and moaning about our climate being slightly damp most days and them not having breakfast delivered to them each morning by a flying blue hippo with a smile that could unlock the gates to heaven itself

in other crazyness there was a conversation took place between a group of individuals who happened to be being filmed and broadcast for a reality tv show that made uncomfortable flirtings with the race line. however instead of the 'intelligent' public doing the old fashioned 'watching, listening, judging the individuals by their words and actions and then moving on with their lives' what actually happened was that hundreds of people phoned 999 to complain! "hello would you like fire, ambulance or police"... "erm, i dunno, but that girl on my tele just said a bad thing, can you come round and turn me tele off?"... "oh dear sir, i think maybe the best thing we can offer you is the sincere hope that you die in a freak accident involving a toaster and a fork".. hundreds of thousands of people complained to the tv station.. who if they had any balls at all should have issued the standard reply of "it is clear to us that you are unable to operate your remote control, or indeed have the power of free will, so allow us to give you the following instructions.. 1) lower your pants, 2) take your remote firmly in your best hand, 3) position the end of the remote at the entrance to your rectum [the smelly bit], 4) shove really hard. we hope that helps. thankyou for your feedback".... even worse than all this, there was a serious statement issued by the police that they were considering going into the house and making arrests... it's lazy to scream 1984 comparisons.. but dear lord god, do the police need the press that badly?

*breathes*

enough of this.. i must now return to the meaningless of my day to day existence... there are mind numbing tasks that i couldn't care less about to be attended to...

oh, and as people only care about blogs that reveal intimate personal details... i had sex once, it was ok

Silence is Golden

i think i was just dripped on.. which is quite worrying.. being inside my flat and all

i haven't blogged in a while.. but a friend posted a few questions for a school project type thing and i was gonna responed and figured it was far more blogworthy than my usual ramblings about sleeping/pooing patterns and how life is all part of an unavoidable spiral towards the void.. so why not do it here

the basics of the questions are.. this. the communication age.. all the new fangled forms of digital communication.. a good thing, or just tools that destroy social skills in The Youth Of Today

now people hold opinions on all kinds of stuff referencing this and that and applying this precident to this case and showing their take on their part of their available evidence to back up their theory... but in the end the only opinions really worth anything are those based on personal experience.. so that's the angle i can come from on that

up till the age of 18 i lived in a world, at least my world, in which digital communication was still nobody i knew owned a mobile phone or was hooked up to the internet, and myspace was still a piece of dust in the corner of toms wallet.. today my work and lifestyle means i'm online for anything up to 16hours in a day and my phone is permenantly switched on.. so there's a decent contrast to work on

now the argument is that face to face conversation is more expressive than digital communcation, easier, or at least more accurate, to read, ultimately more rewarding..that may be an argument, everyone is different etc.. but from my point of view, that's almost backwards.. 

i, particularly as a kid, never really 'got' face to face communication.. especially with those that you are not familiar with.. for me there was too much going on it in, too easy to misread or get confused.. too much reliance on trust and confidence that their was no hidden agenda or meaning in what was being said to you, or not said to you, or how it was being said to you.. and of course then the intense pressure to reply, instantly, with the appropriate words, nuances, intonations, expressions... eye contact!! it was a lot to deal with and 8 times out of 10 i dealt with it badly

obviously i've got better at all that since i got older and more confident.. though, whether it means anything or not it's worth noting that i started getting better around the time i also started using the internet for communication... could just be coincidence though.. i'll let the 'experts' decide

now digital communication.. from the letter writing of emails [i honestly don't see the difference between an email and a letter, except people can read when i type.. mostly] to the nearest replacement we have for physical conversation.. instant messaging.. i get... it's words and you read them.. and we have a variety of tools developed to put some mre expression into them... but there's no misleading facial expressions.. and most importantly.. no pressure.. you take what time you need to make sure that what you are saying is actually what you want to say

sure it has its failings... there will always be misunderstanding in human communication.. it's like refereeing in sports.. it's what makes it interesting.... but it's just so much easier to deal with

yes, it's more detached... but rather than feeling that it makes me more detached.. it just makes me appreciate the closeness more when physical communication takes places [not that that's an admission to liking the closeness you understand.. detached is good.. safe... beautiful]

hell.. now we have blogging.. what was the predecessor to that? standing in front of a room and telling everyone what you wanted them to know about what was going on in your head.... writing a diary in the hope that your friends would steal it and read it... nah.. this is new... and as has been demonstrated, something i'm a fan of.. but of course i am motivated purely by ego.. and the suffering of others.. so each to their own and all that

i'll probably change my mind on all that tomorrow.. it's a lot of words so i'm not reading it back now... hell.. sod itl.. argue with me... that's what communications all about isn't it? proving what you think is better than what i think? that you love me more than i love you?

or something. x

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wll

i rode my bike

now i'm blogging about riding my bike

you gotta love the 21st century

the bike ride in brief: you can't sit down on the saddle with a dvd from blockbusters stuffed in each pocket, this puts a lot of strain on your knees in the early part, and your thighs hurt a little, it's fun to annoy drivers by switching to pavement to bypass traffic lights, i can't find my iPod, this is a shame, it's easier when you sit down after dropping off the dvds.. which may or may not have been cracked by my arse, broadgate is much shorter on a bike than on foot, there are no lights in avenham park.. this makes the road by the river very very scary, but not as scary as the hill to bank parade, my head is sweaty and my legs hurt, a shower will fix all, till the shower door falls off, mid soaping, not good

this is all i have done today, the other 23hours15mins are just filler

toodles. x

Prisoner Cell Block H

some days you wake up an hour after your alarm was supposed to wake you, after a night of sleep disturbed by the recurring dreams you thout you'd got shot of a while ago and you just can't bring yourself to care about anything on your to do list that day

i say some days, we all of course know that i mean, every day, but everything is reletive so let's pretend i'm a sprightly, energetic, happy go-lucky-character that usuaally bounds out of bed and shouts 'HOWDY DOODY!' to the sun, before waving to my neighbours and jigging down the road with a whistle in my voice and a spring in my step *shudders*.. well.. if i was, today i wouldn't have been

having said that i had an almost ideal day at work, i arrived in the office, sat down, and nobody else came in the room until it was time to go home, and even then it was pretty much just to say bye.. so it was almsot as if i was sat at home in my big empty flat enjoying the silencs and the absense of human conntact.. which is all good

then i did something, a triumphant thing, a thing a should have done a long time ago, a thing that will change the world, well, my world, well ok not may world, but a part of it, a small part of it, ok so it'll give me an excuse to break into a sweat most days, make me feel a little better about the chinese takeaways [i was interrupted at the begining of this sentence to collect my chinese from the door].. having said that i've been good so far this year i think this is my 2nd, maybe even 1st of 2007... anyway... maybe sort ouot a few of the sleepless nights a little

you stopped caring what i did ages ago didn't you? me too.. i bought a bike, one that has working breaks and gears and everything [fingers crossed]

let's see if i use it now shall we.. it is pretty cold...

anyway, as i said, chinese is here.

see you all tonight. x