Oldness, and Where Did The Last 18 Years Go?

It's my birthday soon. I will be 36. 36. Thirty. Six. No longer can I fiddle the way I say how old I am to say 'mid-thirties', no, from here on in, it is most assuredly 'late thirties', or 'late mid-thirties'. In short, I am getting old. So old, in fact, that half my life ago I was old enough to a) drive, b) get a mortgage and c) join the army and get killed in some pointless war we should never have been involved with anyway fight for my country (ahem). Not old enough to bugger or be buggered, however - not that I'd want to, I am as hetero as they come, but it always amuses me that, before they changed the age of gay consent, you could be entrusted with a financial burden like a mortgage, have a child, be trained to use a gun and go murder people in a foreign land, but not old enough to have consenting sex with another man. 

So, half my life ago I was 18. My Grandad had just passed away, which saddened me as he had been a huge figure in my life, I was doing abysmally in my first set of 'A' Levels due to having discovered my guitar and a social life, and was single. This latter wasn't out of choice, I hasten to add, I was just repellent to women in those days, I think. During that year I started college, taking a Performing Arts course, which taught me several things; that performing artists are largely neurotic, bitchy shits, and that I really should have done the media course instead, where I met several people who would become long-lasting friends, including the inimitable Zorg.   I was addicted to Frontier: Elite 2 on my Amiga this year, and had an all night bender where I played it non-stop for about two days running, stopping only to eat, make coffee, wee, and poo. I had to sleep eventually as I was convinced that somehow I was building a bridge with only one brick, my brain's way of saying "FOR FUCK'S SAKE, LET ME GO! LET ME GO!"

And now I'm almost 36. In the intervening years, I have been married, divorced, had two children, had several jobs, been to college (again, though this time got far better results), been to university, made music, written lots of bloggage, and met my perfect woman. Yet all of this sometimes seems to have happened in the blink of an eye. It was my daughters' 10th birthday the other week, and that made me realise how quickly a whole decade had flashed past. I blame work. When you work, you get up, all sleepy, you have coffee, you blunder out to work, spend most of your time and energy working, come home tired, have tea, sleep, and repeat, and on your days off generally fill them up with all the odd jobs that you can't do when you're working, like going shopping, or taking the car to the garage to get new tyres, or one of a billion other things you'd really rather not have to do. The last 10 months have been wonderfully clear, and thoroughly enjoyable despite being unemployed and therefore having no cash; the whole day belongs to me, and I can write, finally; I can also piss time away on Second Life or playing Battlefield 2 if I want to. But this time has passed at what I consider to be a reasonable pace, and it has made me appreciate time in a whole new way that I hitherto suspected. Namely, that work is a vampire that, in a very real sense, sucks your life away from you, and before you know it you're old, tired, and about to die. 

Now I just have to get some writing published so that I can justify doing sod all all week and make that a job...

Astounding Ignorance (The View From the Far Right)

The sheer mindlessness of the far right never ceases to astound me. Just when I think that humanity can't possibly be dragged much lower and made much more inhuman, someone bellows something from their slack-jawed mouth across the internet that makes me realise that not all of our species is actually sentient. This morning, Ian Martin (@IanMartin) tweeted a link to a trending topic on Twitter. This topic was #2wordsliberalshate, and contains some of the most appalling, scary and downright imbecilic political comments it has ever been my misfortune to read. My personal favourite (for proving to me that most Americans haven't got a clue what liberalism actually means) is the way that variations on the words 'Proud Americans' crop up with such regularity. Some actually try to be political ('Afghanistan War', 'Shooting Range'), some are genuinely funny ('Republican Party', 'George Bush') but most of them are sadly massively misinformed. Some of these people actually feel the need to tweet incessantly, creating a foul river of bile towards people who don't share their political idealogies and demonising them, painting them as subhumans. I'm going to pick one, a chap called @CREinstein, whose bio on Twitter states "I am a Conservative Republican, Elected Precinct Committeeman, I am an expert on matters of security and some Statistical fields. Veteran and Truck Driver". His tweets demonstrate exactly how schoolyard and pathetic US political debate really is - this guy actually is in the political system, and here's a selection of what he got up to on Twitter this morning. There were well over a hundred tweets to choose from, by all means go and pick your own and let him know what you thought of them:

"Bush Won" (Yes, after the results were 'recounted' in his home state where he has no influence WHATSOEVER over such things...)

"The Truth" (That great friend of the far right, The Truth. Such as hiding most of the contents of the US PATRIOT act from the house until the very morning of the vote when nobody could read it properly to see what it was they were voting for. The Right likes the Truth...on their own terms, and when it paints them in the right way. That ain't a leftie thing, it's a political thing full-stop.)

"In God..." (He apparently doesn't understand the difference between 'liberal' and 'atheist'. There are plenty of Christian liberals and plenty of atheist Republicans around that might be able to explain this to him)

"No drugs" (Are we including alcohol and tobacco in there? Or are you still happy to peddle two of the most lethal drugs to the masses so long as you get your cut in taxes?)

"Pro-life" (Again with the confusion between liberalism and atheism.)

"Hetero sexual" (Given the number of right wingers who get caught out in homoerotic romps, this is a little bit like throwing stones whilst living in a Victorian Conservatory)

"No unions" (Yes, because then unscrupulous employers can get away with really treading all over the working people, pull paid holidays without notice, force people to work at a couple of hours' notice, make them work with minimal or absent safety measures, etc. In other words, the cornerstones of the Right that they try damned hard to hide [there's that pesky thing, The Truth, again] so that they can get the ordinary folk to vote for them in elections without appearing to be a bunch of rapacious greedy rich cunts who would happily work everyone into an early grave as long as profits were up.)

"pay bills" (Because liberals never pay their bills. Not sure where this one comes from. Some Republicunts fevered imagination, like the whole 'Death Panels' thing.)

"Rent due" (And they never pay rent either? Wow, I wonder how so many liberal people actually own their own homes, or make rent payments without fail if they don't believe in paying bills or their rent.)

"unbiased news" (Like Fox? 'Cause they're really neutral.)

"Jesus Christ"  (And again with the whole religion / politics confusion.)

"The Bible" (Ditto)

"After life" (Ditto) 

"Ten Commandments" (Fuck's sake! Someone get this man to a nightclass or something.)

"Fight Terrorism" (Like those well known Iraqi terrorists? I think possibly he misunderstands, either due to a lack of general intelligence or because he purposefully avoids actually looking at the issue, the difference between liberals hating 'fighting terrorism' and liberals hating governments using terrorism as a bullshit and flimsy excuse for invading a country, butchering tens of thousands of it's man, women and children, and stealing their oil.)

"Personal Rights" (Durrr, you mean the things that is the entire purpose of unions and liberal human rights organisations? Are you trying to have your cake and eat it and also call it a ham at the same time?)

"Personal Property" (Oh, this is a special stretch that shows a complete failure to grasp the span of viewpoints across different poiltical idealogies. Apparently he now ignores the vast gulf that lies between 'liberalism' and 'communism'. Jesus, man, do some basic reading in political theory and realise what a dumb shit you sound making statements like this.)

"Full transparency" (Because the right wing's track record in this area is so unblemished. [Makes a coughing noise that sounds suspiciously like 'PATRIOT act'])

"Patriot act" (Yes, liberals hate this, just as should any US citizen who likes personal rights [quoting you here], full transparency [and again], The Truth [are we getting the point of this yet?])

"US Army"

"US Navy"

"US Airforce"

"US Marines" (So, that and the previous would be liberals...and the rest of the world, then.)

"Coast Guard" (Citation, please. I'm dying to hear of a link to liberals hating coast guards. I suspect it's an allusion to border controls, but it just sounds hilarious to think that this guy imagines liberals all protesting on the set of Baywatch or something.)

"Obama's Records" (Actually I'd imagine the Right hate that more, seeing as how they were made to look like a bunch of incompetent, bullshitting, mudslinging baboons over this whole issue.)

"Welfare reform" (I think there are a hell of a lot of US citizens, liberal or not, who would actually welcome welfare reform - just not in the way that the NeoCons would like to reform it. Apparently someone in the right misspelled 'removal'.)

"Any evidence" (Sorry, when did this turn into #2wordschristiansandneoconshate? Liberals love evidence. It's what they thrive on, because it's there and doesn't involve being hoodwinked by jingoism and religious idiocy.)

"Ugly people" (This from a political party that, if they were all trapped in a burning building, would a) spontaneously ignite via their copious hair products and b) create a poison cloud of burned plastic, botox and silicone that would kill wildlife in a ten mile radius for a decade.)

"Fried Chicken" (I'm a very liberal person, and I, like many other very liberal people I know, love fried chicken. NYOM. Again, I suspect an allusion to a fallacious view, this time the view that all liberals are vegetarians.)

"All Meat" (A-ha. Here it is. All liberals are apparently vegetarians. What an oddly limited world this man perceives. I wonder what he sees when he goes to the shops. I suspect he feels all swollen up with manly patriotic pride whenever he sees someone with a side of beef in their shopping trolley, weeping a quiet tear at the fundamental rightness of that person and all they stand for.)

"School prayers" (Hang on, isn't seperation of the church and state enshrined in the Constitution, that thing that NeoCons keep on harping on about being the cornerstone of their 'perfect society'?)

"Christmas Tree" (Of course all liberals hate Christmas trees. I recall the popular Xmas tree demonstrations that raged across England in the winter of 2005 where vast hordes of filthy stinking vegetarian beautiful people raged across the nation burning Xmas trees.)

"equal justice" (You mispelled 'unequal'.)

"victim's rights" (Erm, completely failing to understand what liberalism is - most victim's rights campaigners are liberals. But I think we're getting that this guy might be a little misinformed in this area.)

"No recycling" (This isn't a liberal thing. If your brain pan isn't filled with scooped up dogshit, you'd be against people demanding an end to recycling. It's about our descendants not having to live in a world full of our own rubbish.)

"Intelligent Design" (No offense, but only a retard would take a look at the mountain of evidence for evolution on one hand, and the small man fervently insisting that you ignore all of that and look in his mouldy old 1500 year old book on the other, and turn away from the evidence to wander off with the little man...That ain't a liberal thing, that's an intelligence thing.)

At this point we are treated to a snide aside to another sycophant - "rofl... This is, as I told someone else, like taking candy from a whole nursery for me! Muwahahahaha" 

My gods, he actually thinks that he is being incisive and clever, rather than showing himself up to be a terrifyingly ill-informed and ignorant individual who is as guilty as any racist of painting an entire group of people with made-up, unrealistic, fallacious and downright contradictory stereotypes. He was far from the only one making such a tirade but I figured he'd be a good one to look at as he is clearly actively involved in the Republican party and thus provides a good insight into the how they view their opponents - the answer is quite scary, and makes us look back at the Dubya years and think "Ah, now it all makes sense." I knew the Republicans hated liberalism, but they confuse it with atheism, communism, vegetarianism, and, apparently, anticoastguardarianism. Is it done deliberately to misinform voters? Or do they genuinely believe it? I get the impression that this guy genuinely believes it. His comment at the end there sounds as though he quite genuinely thinks that he can see off any liberal with his points. I wonder if he's actually debated any of these issues with a real liberal, one with facts and figures at their fingertips. I somehow doubt it. But then I think that arguing with the NeoCons of America is akin to arguing with the religious. The problem will always be overcoming their ignorance and their unwillingness to listen or understand evidence. I'm too much of a realist to believe that a revolution will ever come, but opinions like this make me wish it would, because frankly, to have people who actually think this way make up the membership of one of the major political parties in the most powerful, biggest polluting, and most dangerous nation in the world scares the piss out of me.

The Dissolving Language

Yes, I freely admit to being one of the Twitterati. OK, I only have a meagre handful of followers and I suspect that most of those are bots and spammers, but hey, that's OK. It assuages my need to feel like I have acolytes and that's frankly all that matters. What I have noticed on the scary times I dare to ride on the public timeline however is just how fast and how far the English language is dissolving in the sea of brief tweets. I'm well aware that, like text messages, tweeting is a very limited format in which you have to cram the entire contents of your head into no more than 140 characters (though in many people's cases that isn't a problem without using contractions or abbreviations), so I accept that in order to get the sense of something across in that space you sometimes have to use 'u' instead of 'you', and '4' instead of 'for'. But, like text messaging, the habit soon spreads until you see tiny short sentences that are almost illegible to a non-textspeak speaker, for example; "its nice wen u can make tym 4 ya frenz exspecially after hs". I mean, WTF? (See me getting into the spirit there?) It is a sentence that is ostensibly in English, but actually needs decoding before it can be understood! I am well aware that language is a fluid thing and that changes happen in it, but dammit, we'd just got to the point where English was codified and finally all sorted out, and now a bunch of kids and / or retards are out there reducing fine words into letter dysentry, to be shat out in a fetid stream onto any medium you care to imagine; forum posts, Myspace, Facebook, even emails, none of which particularly have limited space, and so no excuse to be compressing the language in this way. 

Another bug of mine that is on the same wavelength and thus relevant to this blog is the vast and hateful overuse of 'lol' - it isn't a fucking punctuation mark, dimwits! I am so sick of seeing sentences that end in 'lol' - "Hey man, I heard your cat died lol", "My face just had to be amputated because I dipped it in a superglue vat lol" - did you REALLY laugh out loud? Really? Did you? REALLY? I sincerely fucking doubt it. Not unless there are a hell of a lot of schizophrenics out there with inappropriate affect who piss themselves laughing every time their fingers touch a keyboard or phone. Exclamation marks do just as good a job of passing on amusement at a statement  and cost two fewer characters than 'lol'. Also, they make you look like less of a fuckwit brain donor. This also all extends to the similar overuse of 'roflmao' which seems to get used in the same sentence frighteningly often; "My aunt got run over lol it was by a jeep roflmao". 

On a serious note, and rantiness aside, they say that literacy standards in the UK are dropping dramatically, and I can't help but wonder if this is one reason. If everyone wrote proper English, people who want to communicate on the net or via text would have to learn to spell and punctuate properly, but they don't; their friends and peers all communicate in this lowest-common-denominator fashion whereby words are rducd 2 thr smlst bts tl u cnt ndstnd ne ov it. Fucking pathetic. 

In commemoration of the English language and the idiots who can't use it despite being English speakers, I am creating the Idiot's Dictionary. Feel free to drop your suggestions on Twitter at #idiotdictionary and I will publish the best ones here every month. To get you started, here's some I prepared earlier:

Ostracised - about the same size as an ostrich

Qualification - the process of turning ordinary chocolate into Quality Street

Procrastination - what you do before having a wank

Anemone - what tramps say to passers-by

Fibia - habitual liar

Nanotechnology - technology invented for grandmas

Genealogy - the study of genies

Neurologist - tense person given to bouts of drama

Agoraphobia - fear of fighting

Enunciation - liberating nuns

Paediatrician - special doctor who treats paedophiles

Chlorophyll - special pill that knocks you out

Disembark - to pull the skin off a tree

Faction - action film based on a true story

Depilation - having ones' pillows stolen

Compiling - jumping on a prone person in a playground and shouting "ALL PILE ON!"

Have fun, and spell your words properly lol