Gay Italian dads

When I wake up in the morning, love,

And the sunshine hurts my eyes,

And something without warning, love,

Bears heavy on my mind ..

I'm back in my favourite computer cluster again.

I was working earlier when two blokes and a little kid came in. This was a pretty odd sight at 8pm in a university computer cluster, but I didn't really question it. The blokes were maybe mature students and as far as I'm aware, gay and speaking Italian. The little kid spoke English and Italian and didn't seem to have a sexual preference.

One of the Italian guys, who we will call Luigi, is wearing this shirt with "God made weed. Figure that out!" written on it. Figure out how god made weed? I don't get it. The other one, who we'll call Mario, had a t-shirt with "AMSTERDAM" written on it. It gave me an idea for a sitcom called "My two gay Italian dads who like to get high". The kid, about 5, who we'll call Tony, thankfully wore a shirt without a stoner motif.

The guy they sat next to was British. He was alone in here, like me, with these thick black chunky glasses and a little mini-fro. He looked like he read Hemingway and had aspirations to be a poet or novelist.

Anyhow, they're all sitting there in the row in front. Luigi reaches into his bag and started taking out some food.

Now, I'm all for breaking the 'no food and drink' rules in computer clusters, but this was really untrue. Out of the bag came sandwiches, big bags of kettle chips, fruit, one of those tubs of mini-flapjacks, a flask, 2 cans of Relentless and other assorted bits. It was like the Mary Poppins bag; it could almost have been a stunt. Hemingway, unlike me and 10 or so other people in the cluster who are watching with our mouths slightly open at the sight of all this food (munchies joke, anyone?) continues to work, apparently oblivious.

Mario then takes a can of Relentless, and hands it to Tony. The thing had either been shaken up good and proper or Tony was shit at opening cans, because without warning the thing suddenly fizzes out and over and a jet of energy drink hits Hemingway squarely in the face. Upon seeing this, the kid goes "ooh" and drops the can, where it fizzes and spills round on the floor, meaning Hemingway has to jump up in full view of the cluster, dripping Relentless, to avoid it. This was where the humiliation factor kicked in.

I felt bad for the guy, but he took it pretty well. You can't really get mad at a cute little kid in a computer room, not least one with two mysterious high Italian dads. They're just unpredictable. And then Mario tried to laugh it off a bit, and Luigi joined in, which seemed a little too optimistic, but they were probably high, who can blame them?

The saddest part was that it happened to this guy. It could have happened to anyone else in that cluster. If it had been a group of guys, they'd have got a kick and more of a laugh out of it. If it was a girl, everyone would have rushed to her aid. But instead it was Hemingway, probably a Fresher, a little self-conscious, maybe the first time he's dared to venture out of his halls to a computer cluster, and the first thing that happens is he gets sprayed in the head by a kids can of energy drink, in front of a small crowd.

They say university can be tough but no-one deserves to be humiliated by an Italian kid with his two gay dads that are high.

Euthanasia and my new haircut

Like a bird on the wire,

Like a drunk in a midnight choir,

I have tried in my way to be free ..

So I got a haircut recently, months and months after I promised myself one. I had it done in Huddersfield, as always, purely because it's the same woman and we have crappy hairdresser conversations that amount to nothing but pass the time beautifully. It must've been the 5th or 6th time she's done it now and although I still haven't got to the point where I can stroll in and ask for "the usual", she still always asks "what are we having today then?" in a way which suggests she can sense the same-old answer.

One day I'll surprise her. I'll go back in about 4 or 5 months and she'll be all "What's it gonna be this time?" and I'll respond with "Hitler youth". Just for the reaction. Or challenge her; "Yeah, I'd like two donkeys fucking under a sunset shaved into the back".

The only thing I've really learnt is that my new shorter hair doesn't respond well to spending the day under a bobble hat.

Recent stats checks show a hit yesterday from getdentalimplantsinfo.com" and 3 hits for "80s crisps". These don't quite measure up to the current champion "european romantic mild porn" which came up a few months back, but they're the best ones of late.

When I was roaming round uni earlier, I caught the briefest of snippets of a conversation of two people walking by. All I heard was "yeah, but the worst thing that can happen is you'll die". I wanted to know what came before that, and after a lot of walking-home-deliberation, it strikes me that there aren't a great many scenarios where dying is the worst thing. I feel worse things would be stuff like paralysis, brain damage, becoming a vegetable trapped in your body or maybe a coma.

I feel I can't bring much to the euthanasia debate. In my opinion, we should pull the plug. I understand the family and friends holding out for a glimmer of hope; thats pretty much by-the-by. I don't really understand the religious angles on this sort of thing, which is that we shouldn't do it because only God can take a life. To these people I say: maybe God is saying "hey, can you pull the plug? I've been trying to take this person for 5 years but you keep feeding them."

Consider this my will. If that ever happens to me, I wouldn't like to be kept alive. I'd feel bad for my family having to take care of me. Unless Kellie or Dan offer to adopt me, then just pull the plug.

I have an idea for a sitcom about a guy in a coma and his carer, and whenever the carer's back's turned, the coma guy gets up to zany antics behind his back. But, you ask, how does he do zany stuff when he's in a coma? That's it! He's not really in a coma! The other guy just thinks he is! When his back's turned, zany shit goes down! "Zany" is how critics will describe this sitcom!

There will also be a neighbour, some sassy precocious black kid who knows the coma guy's secret. He'll be played by Jaden Smith. He'll walk in and go "What up, veg?" to which coma guy will respond "West-siiiiiiide" because thats how he imagines black kids talk. And inbetween the zany antics, there'll be life lessons about not judging people because of the colour of their skin, played out in the form of the banter between coma guy and the black kid, Tyrone.

Helmed by J.J.Abrams, this will be bold television.

Christmas

I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind, I feel free now,

But the airwaves are clean and there's nobody singing to me now ..

That film Knowing was on telly the other night. What an anti-climax that was.

It started off well, with some great special effects and some half decent acting. And then somewhere down the line, somebody stole the film's plot, ate it, shat it out and wiped it all over the last third or so of the film. Not since Kubrick has there been such a poor attempt to meld science fiction, piss-poor science and a healthy religious undertone in a way which doesn't scream 'trying too hard'.

The only redeeming feature was watching the poorly-executed shebang of a last third being incinerated by a solar flare. Oh, and the fucking terrifying disaster scenes. Like, genuinely. That bit with the plane messed me up good and proper.

For the sake of clarity, here is my christmas list 2011.

• Modern Warfare 3. Yeah, I'm a slave to Call of Duty but come on. That shit is good.
• A new belt. My current knackered one is still clinging to life but it's got past the stage where I can pretend it's vintage.

That's actually it so far. I'll keep updating as things come to mind.

It's come round to that point on the eve of christmassy stuff being acceptable where the political correctness thing comes into play. I forget where I read it this time round, but somewhere, the debates been re-opened as to the use of the word 'christmas' as opposed to such religion-neutral phrases as "The Winter Festival" or "The festive season". Stuff like this comes around each year because some hardcore atheist or Shinto worshipper tries to sue their local council for wishing them a merry christmas.

I know the governments not supposed to endorse one religion over another, but really, who fucking cares? Christmas isn't a religious holiday any more, it is a celebration of consumerism, of our love for material goods, a statement of our belief in capitalism. Gifts are always nice. Gifts are a sign of how much we love people. True, the price tag probably doesn't always equate to the amount of love being given, but I imagine generally there's some correlation. In the words of cheapskates throughout history the world over, it's the thought that counts.

The one regret I always have at christmas is the whole santa complex. How great did that used to make christmas? As a child, I believed both of those lies: number 1, that santa exists and number 2, that he will bring you presents if you're good. This lie began to unravel when you went to school a week later and you compared with the kids who were complete gobshites and they'd always got the best stuff (no disrespect to my parents, who always did great at christmas).

The paradoxical opposite of most peoples paranoid fantasies of losing all their stuff: an overweight guy breaks into your house to give you things.

But in the days when santa was real, you often began to wonder what you'd done wrong, or what kind of a fat cruel bastard santa was to reward these kids better than you.

I just had a brainwave; is that meant to be the message to set kids up for later life? If you do good, you'll be rewarded accordingly? Wow, I never even considered that til I spelt everything out. But meh, the only thing reality really seems to preach is that the cirumstances of your birth are the only real factor that affects what you get in life.

Professors and Kellie

If I could, then I would,

I'll go wherever you will go,

Way up high or down low,

I'll go wherever you will go  ..

We just had a seminar with two of the staff from our German department who are professors. Paul Cooke and Stuart Taberner. They're googleable, their list of books is longer than my lifes achievements. It was actually a really awesome seminar with lots of debating and shit, although it did just reinforce just how depressingly clever people can be and made me feel like a spaz.

In the first half, we were looking at pictures of corpses being cleared up in Auschwitz and bodies piled up after the firebombing of Dresden, debating what it meant to be a victim and what defined a clear-cut perpetrator. We had an hour of being mindfucked in this way, mainly involving us saying stuff which we thought sounded clever, usually followed by Stuart handing out shovels for us to dig our way out with. In the end, after some pretty good debating, we'd got to the point that we were just shouting out agreements to his logical sounding arguments until he pointed out that we'd all pretty much just relativised the Holocaust and made it sound acceptable. Don't fuck with professors.

I also managed to work in that I didn't like Pearl Harbor. Not everyone was impressed with that.

And now I'm back in the Bragg cluster, which has probably absorbed a part of me into it's permanent memory, because Kellie's writing an essay on a film and is waiting for me to post stuff about my life to distract her at the end of every paragraph she writes. The best part is, she's trusting me to hand the essay in for her tomorrow because she's cavorting around in London ill.

DISCLAIMER: Contrary to popular belief, Kellie is not scouse.

People are ridiculous at 4am

It's gonn' rain down like black hell,

You don't know what it's like to be dead,

I'mma teach you now, teach you well,

It's gonn' rain down like black hell ..

Top story on BBC news: "Justin Timberlake has kept a promise he made to a member of the US Armed Forces by escorting her to a ball on Saturday night".

Thank goodness for that.

I'm back at uni because my sleeping patterns still buggered. It's been another corker so far.

As I was walking into uni about an hour ago, some bloke shouted "hey!" as I got on campus. I had the initial pang of 'shit I'm about to get mugged' feeling you get just because you're alone and it's dark. I turned round and there was a guy over the road wearing a bicycle helmet but without a bike. I looked at him and he shouted "D'you know if there's a shop open near here?" And I told him no, with the most condescending look I could muster, the facial equivalent of "why are you asking, its 3 in the fucking morning", and "where's your bicycle you helmet-wearing moron?"

Not 5 minutes into reaching the cluster and logging on, another guy walks in and slumps into the chair next to mine. Alarm bells are ringing again because there are 40 other free computers in a room half the size of a sports hall. Am I about to get mugged in a computer cluster? Then he goes "Man, I've had such a terrible night". I think he was moving along the lines of me to follow up with "Aw, y'wanna talk about it champ?", but when its 4am and I'm in the swing of working, I don't really give two shits about anything short of a buffet opening outside.

Anyway, I think I grunted, probably with my eyebrows raised a little too high. Our conversation went as follows.

Guy: Yeah, sorry to bother you, I've just had a really terrible night.

Me: Uh-huh.

Awkward silence

Guy: Yeah, it's just been really bad.

Me: Shit ... (Silence goes on too long) .. what happened?

Guy: Just about everything (I fucking hate this response)

Me: Just before you carry on, nobody's died right? I dunno how to handle stuff like that.

Awkward silence. Guy just stares off into space. I start thinking oh fucknuts, someones died.

Guy: No, no-ones died. I just had a big argument with my girlfriend .. (dramatic pause, big intake of breath) .. it turns out she's pregnant.

Me, expecting something more overwhelming: .. Uh-huh .. (Regain composure) .. Ahh shit.

Guy: Yeah ..

Awkward silence

Me: There's worse things could happen though, right?

Guy: .. I guess.

And then he left, leaving me with an all too brief feeling of 'am I a terrible person?' I feel bad for his predicament but jesus he was annoying. There are worse things in the world than a pregnant girlfriend. Unless it's not his. Or maybe she has a very angry conservative family who've been saving her for marriage. Or maybe she's not pregnant at all, she was just using it as blackmail in the heat of their argument. Man, I should write a sitcom for these people.

One thing I realised during the beginning of the conversation was that I carried the thing on. There's a technique apparently that high pressure salesman use when trying to make a sale: at the end of their pitch, the salesman says nothing, and if the customer feels the need to continue the conversation and say something, the guy is more likely to make a sale. Apparently I'd be crap at rebuffing sales.

Just to deviate before I finish up I had a dream the other week where me and my good buddy Dan were working together in an office somewhere, and on that particular day, Hitler started working at the office. All I remember is that me and Dan were standing in some generic office environment and Dan turns to me and says, perfectly seriously "So, do we just call him Hitler or what?". I'm pretty sure this is one of the best dreams I've ever had.

Last thing: I also have to walk past some student halls on the way to the computer room I use. There was just general fresher noise as I went by, but as I got to the end, somebody started blasting out christmas music. It's November 15th. The fucking 15th. I enjoy christmassy music; it makes me want to frolic and reminds me of childhood, but this is entirely too early for christmas music. It's like someone singing you happy birthday a month and a half early. It's out of control. This is the time when we actually need the Grinch to steal christmas, or at the very least borrow it and then give it us back in a month or so.

Until it's colder, and December, I'll endeavour to be that Grinch.

Bert

It was twenty years ago today,

Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play,

They've been going in and out of style,

But they're guaranteed to raise a smile ..

Hey there. I'm in the library at uni and holy crap its half past 3 in the morning. That's actually real-time typing surprise there, I thought it was earlier than that. In any case, the work's going fantastic. Five minutes ago I yawned and a bit of drool landed on the keyboard.

Apart from being distracted by the internet, there's a bloke here in this computer cluster over the other side of the room who is having a phone call in French and also looks just like Bert from Sesame Street. If I had a camera I'd take a picture for you because I keep glancing across at him and suppressing giggles.

I mean really, all this guy needs is a rubber duck and a funny voice and he's Bert.