StrangeReality

I don’t dance, not unless I am extremely drunk. No, I don’t dance - and not just for the obvious reason, that I cannot dance, and that I cut a risible figure when I attempt to dance. No, the other, stronger reason that I don’t dance is that dancing is an inherently absurd activity. A largely pointless and unenjoyable one, even. Alone or with companions you walk or stagger purposefully toward the designated area. Perhaps the song that has prompted this surge toward the dance-floor is already into its first chorus and everybody around you is screaming the lyrics. The house DJ bellows something that nobody hears. Everybody puts their arms into the air. You stand on the wooden flooring and you shake and grimace. The grimace is crucial: it shows your intense appreciation for the music and for the occasion of dancing. Then you walk away when none of your companions are looking. You reach the edge of the dancefloor, quickly dodge behind a pillar or a knot of bystanding revellers, and check back anxiously to see if you’ve been made. You haven’t been made. Your companions remain where you left them, happily dancing away over there, oblivious to your flight. No one is coming after you. (You feel a keen disappointment.) You think: I’ll just get a drink. Over at the bar it’s five deep and people are pushing and shouldering behind you, trying to get to the front before you. That’s enough, you think. You make the forlorn journey to the cloakroom. You make it outside. A taxi is at the kerb, light on and the driver nodding at you familiarly, knowingly,  as if he has been waiting there all night just for you. You get in. The next day no one calls or texts you to find out where you disappeared to. You feel nothing.

PLANNING TO PULL A SICKIE TOMORROW & FRIDAY

I have spent the week so far on a training course in connection with my new job.  Sitting in front of a computer screen 8 hours a day, puzzling over the intricacies of a key application.  For five weeks I have done nothing but learn new stuff.  I have a headache and I've had enough.  There's not much of consequence left to go over, so what I currently am planning to do, with reluctance, for I am generally cowardly about such things, is to pull a sickie for the remaining two days of the week.  At 9:00 prompt tomorrow morning I will take a deep breath and dial the number that will connect me to the training officer.  Then I will impart my bullshit excuse, and roll over in bed and go back to sleep.  Yes, this is what I'm planning to do, at the moment.

Here I am, back again. Notice how the mornings are getting darker, the nights longer? Oh yes: it’s on its way all right, is winter. The yearly shock is a palpable reminder that time is passing and that I am wasting my life. ‘Wasting my life’ - now isn’t that a truism… Possibly there isn’t anyone who doesn’t, in some way, waste their lives? Even the implication of the phrase is frustrating: implying, as it does, that there is some secret purpose to existence that one is supposed to see and understand and act upon. And perhaps there is. If so, where, what, is it? I believe that I have searched everywhere that I can, interrogated all the categories of thought and perception, gazed into the abyss, and, in Nietzsche’s memorable phrase, all that happened was that ‘the abyss looked back at me’.

...and why didn't Jack, at the end, ask President Palmer to pardon Tony Almeida? But enough about loose ends in 24. It's raining here at the moment and I'm listening to the radio commentary of a football match: Chelsea vs Manchester United. I say 'listening', but that isn't strictly accurate.  Better to say that it's just on in the background while I'm doing this - while I'm typing this. I've been to the shop and stocked up on cigarettes and alcohol.  Scattered on the floor are the dozen or so books that I really should get around to reading.  Scattered in what passes for my mind are the dozen or so books that I could and should devote my time to writing, one day.  But I suspect that I won't.  I suspect that this is it for me: mundanely existing, day-to-day; entertaining remote dreams of transcendence and escape; going to work and coming back from work; fiddling about with the PC; and then, sometime later, the end.  I coulda bin somebody.  I coulda bin a contender.  Laughing out loud.

Ach! I did it: watched all twenty-four episodes of season 3 of 24 in four days.  It's less arduous than it might sound: a single episode of 24 on DVD lasts barely longer than 40-45 minutes.  The commercial-free BBC, before they meekly surrendered one of their most popular American shows to Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV, used to show 24 on Sunday nights between 10:00 and 10:45.  I started watching on Wednesday night after work, watched some more episodes on Thursday night after work, watched many episodes last night (Friday) after work, and then today I watched the remainder.  I feel a little dizzy and I can't quite focus properly on distant objects. But otherwise I feel fine.

I'm behind on some of my other projects, so I haven't time to deliver a comprehensive review of the season or anything.  (My other projects include: Not writing a novel.)

Just some thumbnail impressions:

A great season of 24. Not as good in some respects as seasons 1 and 2, but in other respects better.  Jack Bauer and President Palmer continue to mirror one another's heavyweight status in their respective storylines.  Likewise, their respective female mirrors - Nina Myers and Sherry Palmer - both got bumped off.  Nice symmetry there.  Most affecting moment of the series: Ryan Chappelle's death.  Most puzzling/frustrating element: The brooding British bad guy's totally unexplained motivations.  Most anti-climactic moment: The climax.  Seasons 1 and 2 both ended with savage twists in the tale: season 3 ended with Jack having a bit of a cry in his car. Aaah....

And something I've noticed, or remembered having noticed: None of the protagonists in 24 are ever seen eating, and none of them ever visit a bathroom.  Is this the house style?

So where could season 4 possibly go?  I've heard rumours that next time there'll be a 'political kidnapping' - if true then it would have to be the kidnapping of the President, who presumably won't be David Palmer in season 4 after his 'shock' decision not to seek re-election.  Will Palmer even feature? How could he not? His counterbalancing storylines are crucial for the plotting dynamic that permeates 24 and makes it work as a whole.  So I think he will feature, in some form.

So there is a whole year to wait. Once again I expect the BBC will chicken out of the bidding to screen season 4 in the UK, and I'll either have to get satellite TV to watch it on Sky, or once again wait for next August's release of the DVD boxed set.  I think I'll wait: and I can't wait.

Whoo-hoo, as they say in Springfield and also in the tranquil halls of - what's it's name? - that place in Kill Bill Vol 1 where Uma has the big showdown with the Crazy 88 and Lucy Liu.  The House of Something, I think. The 5,6,7,8s perform Whoo-Hoo as all the characters mill about prior to it all 'kicking off'.  Great music in that film, but anyway: my boxed DVD edition of 24 season 3 arrived today, courtesy of Amazon.  Season 3 was only shown on satellite TV in the UK, due to the poxy BBC declining to stump up the asked-for cash.  I do not have satellite TV, so am reduced to the extreme of paying £34:99 for the privilege of watching what is, in my opinion, the best drama series currently in existence.  Why do I like it so? Why, given that I tend to actively despise and avoid all TV drama in general?  I believe that its form has a lot to do with it: the split-screen boxes, and the outrageous plotting, thick enough to stand a spoon up in, with improbable twists and shocking revelations and the famous episodic cliffhanger.  Sheer storytelling in a highly concentrated form, in other words.

I am excited.  I am also a little apprehensive.  I missed out on series 1, and similarly invested in that boxed DVD edition as well - and I watched all of its twenty-four episodes in the space of 3 days.  I did little else but sit and watch 24, for 3 days.  So I'm a bit wary of ripping open the cellophane wrapping and popping Disc 1 into my player, because where will it all lead?

I think I'll wait until Friday night. And if that blonde bird, what's her name, Elisha Cuthbert's character, continues her habit of blundering into mischief and distracting Jack from his real business...

You are in a toilet cubicle at work and you are about to leave to go outside and wash your hands and return to your desk.  Your hand is on the toilet cubicle doorhandle.  Then you hear voices outside. 

They're the voices of two other workers, who may or may not be known to you.  In any case, whether the two people outside are known to you or not, you do not want to encounter them in person.  You see and hear more than enough of people as it is, thank you very much, and you regard your toilet breaks as 'quiet time' away from the interpersonal hurlyburly that turns into a veritable maelstrom at times. 

So you stand and wait in the toilet cubicle until the people outside have done their business, until they have washed their hands (hopefully), and until they have left - leaving a gloriously empty, peaceful bathroom.  But their voices go on and on: perhaps they touch on topics and on personnel who are known to you.  Perhaps they even mention you.  (And if they do mention you, then how quiet your breathing becomes, how intently you hang upon every word.)  Time passes: the voices don't stop.  The splash of water and the roar of hot air hand-dryers: the voices speak loudly above them.  At a certain point you start to feel a little paranoid.  They know there's someone in here, you think, in this cubicle, and they're wondering if whoever it is (me!) is deliberately waiting for them to leave before coming out...

So you tear off a strip of toilet paper, being certain to make a loud noise in doing so, and you crumple the toilet paper, again in a noisesome fashion, and perhaps you even sigh and/or cough in a carefully-contrived casual manner.  Saying, in effect, to the folks outside your toilet cubicle: Yes I'm in here but I'm not waiting for you to leave before I emerge.  I'm occupying this toilet cubicle in a perfectly legitimate and non-strange manner!

Eventually you hear them leave, their voices echoing recedingly, and you judge it safe to leave the cubicle.  At the sink, you wash your hands with a slow, almost melancholy rolling of one soaped fist over the other.  And you stare at the reflection of your face in the wall mirror.  In the otherwise silent and empty bathroom, you stare into your slightly pinched, tired-looking eyes.

Ach! I was going to try and come up with something special for the 100th instalment (give or take a sidetracking schizoid interlude or two). But I can't think of anything special.  I was going to post a never-to-be-published novel that I wrote a few months ago, but 36,000 words? Nope: not an option.  So instead of 'something special' we have more of the same pointless random ramblings:

Saturday night just gone was the hottest night of the year so far.  I stayed up until four in the morning, drinking far more vodka than is good for me given my various neurotic debilities, and playing Counter-Strike in my usual rubbish fashion - getting taken out by headshots a few seconds into each game and then sitting glumly watching everyone else enjoy themselves: a bit too close for comfort to my actual life. I climbed into bed headachy and sweating, but it was only the weather. Nothing to do with the alcohol and the 6 hours of screen-staring and futile mouse-clicking I'd just got through. 

I watched a few minutes of TV before I fell asleep. A show from long ago: The Invaders (a Quinn Martin production). Starring Roy Thinnes as the architect David Vincent. The segment of an episode that I saw on Saturday night saw David Vincent hanging around in a sweaty nightclub, for some reason that I never found out. One of the nightclub waitresses was the kind of vague blonde who always has the hots for David, and he had managed to convince her of the alien threat. The nightclub owner was working for the aliens and when I switched off he had just advised his extraterrestrial masters of the presence, in his nightclub, of that perrenial thorn in their side, the architect David Vincent and his soon-to-be-ex-missus… Because these temporary characters always die at the end of an episode of The Invaders. There was little or no continuity from one episode to the next: each was a self-contained little drama.

I fell asleep, so I never found out what happened to David Vincent.  Of course he evaded the aliens: he always must evade them, otherwise there's no show next week, and in any case, the audience demands that the 'good guy' must always win.  This universal practice of plot-writers ruins any chance of suspenseful TV viewing experience for all but the very young.  Do you know what I would do, were I a scriptwriter for a formulaic TV drama like The Invaders? Let the bad guys win one.  Kill off the hero.  Turn the show around completely, and make the audience root for evil for once.  As they say on the Internet: Bwahahahaha.

Just finished reading a book by Janwillem van de Wetering called 'Afterzen', the third instalment in his series of books about his 'efforts' (Zen doctrine requires quotation marks around such words) to live in accordance with the most demanding and perplexing philosophical school that there is.  Demanding and perplexing due to its insistence that nothing at all truly exists, that reality is made up of emptiness, not in a manner of speaking, but actually and literally - reality is empty.

It's a good book, in parts, but overall I was disappointed.  The tone is one of an ageing, disillusioned, frustrated man, whereas the earlier books were those of a man in his 20s and 30s.  There just seemed to be more joie de vivre in those earlier volumes - possibly due to them being anecdotal accounts of his times in various Zen monasteries and retreats in Japan and the USA.  The earlier books had great humour: they were funny. Zen itself is humorous, given the relative extremity of the doctrine it teaches.  'Afterzen' to me reads like a lament for lost youth, and a semi-bitter acknowledgement that the fire he once had in his belly to know reality is long gone and will never come back.

A state which I can identify with.  But I don't necessarily want to read about it.

Anyone who wants to read a witty, intriguing, provocative account of a westerner's encounters and experiences in a Japanese Zen monastery should read 'A Glimpse Of Nothingness' by Janwillem van de Wetering.  As well as being a memoir it is also a very fine introduction to key Zen concepts.  After reading it some 8 or so years ago, I immediately wanted to set off for Japan.  But I didn't.  That is so me.

What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small, lay quiet between the four familiar walls.

    & nbsp;   &n bsp;   &nb sp;   &nbs p;     ;         & nbsp;    -Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Usually I never wake up in the middle of the night for any reason.  But last night I fell asleep on top of, rather than in, bed, and with the window wide open.  I also left the TV on for good measure.  At some point I woke up shivering, in the pale blue of dawn, and bathed in the cathode-rays of some middle-of-the-night trashy TV movie.  I sat up (shivering) to close the window, then got into bed proper.  I reached for the remote to switch off the TV.  I found it, and switched off the TV.  (Not really a classic anecdote, this, is it...) The last TV image I saw was of a moustachioed gentleman sneering at another man whom he was about to shoot with a gun. 

Then I glanced up and out of the window, at the clearing blue sky.  It was 4:45 a.m.  How I used to love this time of day, back when I was unemployed.  This time of day was my evening: rarely would 6 a.m. see me in bed and asleep.  I didn't have a PC or a PlayStation back then.  I used to read all night, and dream of accomplishing great and unheard-of things.  All of those dreams have come to nothing.  It was 4:47 a.m. Up for work in 1 hour and 13 minutes.  I closed my eyes and fell asleep. 

In a quiet moment at work - yes, we're at work again: sadly, my whole life revolves around [i]work[/i], which is why I hate it so, not the work itself, but the imposition on my precious, never-to-be-had-again [i]time[/i]; hence my weekly habit of purchasing not one, not two, but [i]three[/i] Lottery tickets, because of that faint desperate hope without which life would be meaningless - where was I, oh yes: In a quiet moment at work I was browsing the Internet looking for pictures of the actress Madeleine Stowe. The reason being that Helen, one of my new colleagues, had asked me in passing what kind of women I liked.

"Brunettes," I had said, blithely, "although I don't completely rule out the likeableness of other common female types. I'm quite partial to Sarah Michelle Gellar of [i]Buffy[/i] fame, for example..." (Ouch. I really do talk like that. Must. Stop. Talking. Like. That.)

Helen, a delectable little brunette in her own right, it has to be said, frowned. "What kind of brunettes? Name some," she demanded.

"Madeleine Stowe," I said off the top of my head.

Helen knew the name but didn't know what Maddy looks like, so I summoned Google on my workstation PC as Helen stood at my shoulder (with one of her arms leaning casually on said shoulder: the nearest thing I've had to sex for a long, long while).

After a minute or so (isn't technology wonderful) we were both gazing at a full-screen photo of Madeleine Stowe, and Helen was exclaiming "Oh, [i]her[/i], wasn't she in [i]Twelve Monkeys[/i]?", and I was nodding and saying "And [i]Last Of The Mohicans[/i]", when all of a sudden I heard light footsteps behind us. They were the kind of light footsteps made by somebody who was trying to approach without making a sound. My spider sense all a-tingle, I hit ALT-TAB - too late.

"What," said my new manager Dora, who is already turning out to be a strict and humourless [i]bitch[/i], "is going on here? What was that picture on your screen?" she asked me.

Helen beat a hasty retreat, murmuring: "See you later."

"Er," I said. "Um."

Dora stared at me for a long time. But she didn't say anything about my illicit use of the Internet during work hours. Slowly shaking her head, she walked back to her desk, and I understood that I was being let off this time due to being new in the department, but I had better not get caught like that again. And a minute later Helen sent me an e-mail: [i]That was fuckin close[/i].

I spent most of today at work sending out replies to e-mails that customers had sent into the company's [i]very[/i] public e-mail address asking things. Knowing what I know about the company, about how the industry regulator monitors and enforces targets, I would choose to write a letter first, telephone second, and e-mail last of all, but the great unwashed Joe and Jane Public are not to know such things. Hundreds of inquisitive e-mails arrive every week and there's a backlog to be worked through. It's all part of the training, building up to me answering proper letters in due course. A typical e-mail says: [i]I have problem [/i]X[i] with my [/i]Y[i] thingum, can you tell me what to do?[/i] Ha! Of course I could. I received some replies to me personally, expressing thanks and saying how great it was that their [i]Y[/i] device (or whatever) was now operating properly. 4 o'clock rolled around in no time and I was out of the door, on my way home. What a tough old day. I think I'm going to like going to work again, at least for a while.

But an age-old problem has reared its head again: the atrocious quality of the food served in the staff restaurant. The quite-good chef that they had has left to go and - of all things - [i]open his own restaurant in Naples[/i]. Yup, that's Naples, Italy. He was (and presumably still is) Italian, though - so it's not that odd, really.

In his place there's a teenage girl who wanders around the kitchen (you can see her through the doors when they swing open) shouting at the rest of the staff just like she's seen chefs on TV do, the poor deluded cow. The food that is being prepared and served on her watch is worse than abysmal. Today I had a spicy vegetable burger and chips. The spicy vegetable burger was remarkable in that [i]it tasted of nothing at all[/i]. A feat in its own right.

Now, I am no gourmand, being generally satisfied when I get home by microwaved ready-meals, ravioli from a tin, boil-in-the-bag curries and the like. But really: a burger that tastes of nothing? What? How? Amazing, it has to be said. And as for the chips, or better to say the [i]alleged[/i] chips - they were like nothing on Earth. Their badness was indescribable, combining elements of every awfulness that can be conceived. Overcooked, undercooked, shrivelled, dry, soggy, and just as tasteless as the 'burger'. All in all the food there at the moment is like something that the staff, rather than cooking it on site every day, simply [i]find in the street[/i] on their way to work.

The solution is clear: take my own food to work. But that would mean lugging in my stern microwave ready-meals, my cheeky boil-in-the bags, my cheerful tins of spaghetti. It would mean approaching and using the battered old microwave, the grungy cooking ring, the scum-encrusted tin-opener. These things hold terrors for me, not least of which would be the inevitable [i]conversation[/i] I'd have to have with other, similar own-food-bringers. At luchtimes I generally want to sit quietly in a corner of the restaurant and do my own thing. So I'm going to carry on just doing that. Even if I have to starve in the doing of it.

Welcome and so on.

A truly steaming-hot day today. I haven’t done anything much. Got up at noon, smoked a few cigarettes, ate breakfast, watched some TV. On Channel 5 they were showing ‘Futureworld’, the poor sequel to the excellent ‘Westworld’. I watched for a while, as Peter Fonda & co swanned around trying to unravel the dark conspiracy behind the theme park. I think I was waiting to see Yul Brynner reprise his role as the suave robot gunslinger with a thirst for human lives. It’s been about 20 years since I saw ‘Futureworld’ all the way through, and I’m sure that good old Yul has a cameo appearance somewhere near the end. But the time was getting on - nearly 3 p.m. - and it’s a short day today, what with it being Sunday and having to be up for work at 6 a.m. tomorrow and all…

I had things to do, so I abandoned the film and came upstairs. I’ve just typed out about 700 words of a non-fiction book that I’m trying to write. I’m giving up on the whole fiction thing for now, and the current project is a kind of memoir-cum-fable. I think it could work. I’m off now to have a shower and shave my head. I shave my head every few months, when I can be bothered. It’s in tribute to Yul Brynner, don’t you know.