The Voice of a Lobster Could Help You Save My Life.

Anyone who has known me long enough will know of my duality. There are two parts of me that have equal status; one side is altruistic, thoughtful and conscience-led, and the other is the anti-personality to this - destructive, free and hedonistic in ways that only Keith Richards knows.

Oil and water? I guess so. But underneath each personality lies the foundation for both. Logic.

Yes, logic. The same thing that the majority of people use as an excuse to live selfish, superficial lives that will no-doubt come around and smack them in the face at age 45 with the baseball-bat of truth and the wagged-finger of reality. Logic.

You see, to me, logic dictates that life should be all-or-nothing. There are no half-measures. If you believe that life should be as happy as possible for everybody - regardless of age, gender, ethnic origin, nationality or sexual preference (and you should), then you must do everything in your power to make this possible. Because whilst you are making life good for others, they are doing the same for you. And nearly seven billion people pooling together to make you a more gleeful individual will most certainly make a difference.

Logic.

You should evaluate each choice that you make and weigh up the benefits it brings you against the impact it will have on others. It makes complete sense. Anything BUT this way of living is really a bit twatty, especially if you’re aware of this kind of thinking. Which you are now even if you weren’t before. To not heed this logic means that you are consciously being an arse, or at the very least disregarding the plight of others. Which also makes you an arse. A selfish arse.

That’s logic.

There is no denying it. Of course, most people will try to deny it simply by stating ‘I’m not an arse’ or making a ridiculously convoluted argument so that they can continue to accrue chrome-plated blenders without having to feel the guilt of truth every time they make a smoothie. Why bother worrying about resources, waste and human inequality when you can sit worry-free with a banana-froth moustache? I’ll tell you why – because for every one of you who’s sitting there burping up fruit, there are a thousand others living next to their own poo or watching their child starve as a DIRECT result of your ability to turn solid foods into slop. This is the inescapable truth. It really is. I’m no spoon-fed leftie with a penchant for conspiracy theories and hemp underpants. It just makes linear, honest sense.

It is, in other words, logic.

And the above logic is what prompts altruistic, thoughtful and conscience-led me into action. Again, anyone who knows me is aware that I will always weigh up the ‘ownership’ of things that I have against the need of others. If someone has a requirement that can be filled by a superfluous commodity of mine, I will happily give it away. Some people need my time; others need my thinking; others may need money or an item that I have in my possession. And all are freely available if I have excess and others needs are greater than my own. It just makes logical sense that if I have something that’s redundant, why not let it be utilised by someone who can use it?

Which is where this logic hits a brick wall and shatters into a million, screaming little pieces.

Because, as much sense as this makes, when it’s only me that’s living this way, everything I own becomes involved in a complex paradox. I hit a loop which leaves me a consistent deficit as nobody will return the gesture and provide for me when I really need it. I therefore need to work my arse off to get money, which then becomes soaked-up by time-off / slowing-down / giving resources away when helping others. And then I start the loop again. Altruism becomes a one-way street that cannot be sustained by myself and myself alone. It’s amazing to watch people become incredibly selfish when all of a sudden it’s their choice to offer the excess. It’s the stuck-record of my life and the reason why at the time of writing this, I live nowhere in particular with a ‘personal’ debt that makes me feel giddy every time I think about it. I am genuinely a victim of being a good human and living via a belief that should only serve to make this world a better place.

So, I’m always left to make a choice. Do I live via something I know is right, or ignore everything in my soul and live much easier in a system that only seems to provide for arses?

Well, the choice is always retrospectively made for me via the soundtrack to the Water Babies.

When I was a wee-pip, my aunt bought myself and my siblings the musical diction to the animated film with a story about kids that inexplicably lived underwater, but had a baffling ability not to go blue and die. Due to not having any other records (other than my mother’s Carol King collection or my father’s Who album with a scary photo of Roger Daltry in a bath of baked beans on the sleeve), it was almost constantly on loop for a good portion of my early days. And for some reason, a lobster with a bass voice had a profound effect on me when it told me to ‘Do as You Would be Done By’. These words made complete sense to me. My logic told me that if we all did this, we would all live equally and fairly. And I assumed that this was a tenet that all people lived by. I believed that I should live to be as good to others as I hoped they would be to me. It made absolute sense. It was flawless.

It was logical.

It was a thorn in my side that dug deeper the older I got. As the beauty of simplistic thought was stripped-away along with my pre-pubescence, reality hit me like a banking crisis. People were shit. People were selfish. And no amount of helping anyone else would change that. But it was too late. I had already realised the truth behind that simple line in the lobster’s song and couldn’t live any other way.

Well, not until I discovered drink, drugs, loud music and an approach to hedonism that meant I could ignore the conflict in my head and have a good time to boot.

Logic made an appearance through the fact that if I made a sincere effort not to give a flying fuck, I could get through each day without wanting to tear my own face off in frustrated anguish. My mental self-preservation became the logical choice.

At the risk of repeating myself, logic dictates that life should be all-or-nothing. Which is a dangerous thing when ‘all’ equates to ploughing through life at mach-6 with a burning septum and waking-up in a hedge. But you have to live like this to understand the sincere relief that can be afforded when an ugly world is viewed through the caramel-coloured-haze of Southern Comfort and openly despising the world enough to not give a damn about consequences.

It almost killed me.

And as my social conscience – yet again - starts to bruise me with the painful beating that logic brings, I find this other side of me creeping up from behind with a dark and enticing grin, tapping me on the shoulder and whispering suggestions that are more tempting than I could ever explain with my limited vocabulary.

So, I ask you a favour. It’s not a big ask. Make like a lobster and do as you would be done by.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Because if you don’t...

You’ll be killing me again. Literally.

Dee.

I'm not a Gay

I am not a gay.

I just happen not to be. In fact, I’m heterosexual if you need to define me via a commonly-used term. I have a tendency to be sexually attracted to females. That’s just me. If I get a bit ‘interested’ in the trouser-area, it’s because I’ve noticed some smooth-bodied, swollen-hipped lady rather than Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. It’s just the way I was built.

I’ve tried to remember when I first discovered I liked girls. But I can’t. I’ve just always known. I can recall ‘coming out’ to my parents when I was still quite young. I told them that I liked girls. Neither seemed to give a shit. It wasn’t a particularly memorable day.

I suppose an outsider may have noticed the signs very early on in my life. I tended to play with Meccano and Action Man figures, or fight with local lads in puddles and muddy patches of grass, before going on to kiss one of the screaming harpies stood at the edge of the green baying for blood. As I got a little older, I covered my walls with pictures of Winona Ryder and Dannii Minogue during her Home and Away years. My father wasn’t concerned in the slightest and even helped me build a go-kart without once mentioning my sexual preference. Thanks dad.

In my early teens, when my brain had developed itself enough for me to consciously start questioning my world, I used to wonder if my sensual response to females was in some way ‘learned’ behaviour. I distinctly remember Biology class in school, a class which sometimes doubled-up as ‘sex education’. In much the same way as calculators produce poetry, these lessons taught me of the ‘wonders’ of sexuality when I was at an age that my hungry little body was caught in the curious loop of priapism. We’d get lengthy lectures about the individual roles of men & women in the sexual process, including bizarre x-ray footage of orgasm, which, according to our state-appointed mentor, existed solely for the purposes of reproduction. I used to think that maybe, just maybe these classes had influenced me in some way. To be honest, I used to wonder if modern culture in general was to blame – there is so much straight pornography just a click away, and many of the mainstream soap operas have heterosexual storylines. It's unavoidable.

But as I got older, I just accepted it. I stopped thinking that it could possibly be something I’d brought on myself. I was lucky enough to be close to a large heterosexual group most of the time, and being straight was never an issue to any of my gay friends. In fact, I don’t think that any of the homosexuals I know have ever mentioned my sexuality as a negative thing. Writing this now, I distinctly remember one of my gay friends persuading me to approach this girl I’d fancied for a while. They didn’t judge my wanton behaviour and it was never mentioned again after I’d copped off with her in the local bus-stop after getting her pissed on Babycham. I remember going back to the pub and worrying that my sticky fingers, light whiff of Chanel number 5 and gormless grin would have them taking the piss.
They didn’t bat an eyelid. I’ll always be grateful for that.

Entering adulthood offered-up the biggest difficulties I suppose. By now, I was fully immersed in my sexuality, and remember an incident when I was studying at university. I was approached to work for a newly-opened gay club - to design a logo and flyer for them, ready for their opening night. Of course, I accepted. I was working for them as a graphic artist, not a heterosexual graphic artist. In my mind, my sexual orientation didn’t come into it.

How wrong I was.

Things started to take a turn for the worse when, after 30 minutes of discussion relating to the project, the owner of the club left the table to go print the paperwork. I was left alone with a locally-renowned drag artist who I’d twigged had been looking ‘suspiciously’ at me during the majority of the meeting. I should mention at this point that throughout my university years I used to dress colourfully and tastefully, was known to dance well, spoke with an extremely open-mind and always took time over my appearance. In other words, I was displaying many characteristics of the gay man. Within five seconds of the club’s owner leaving the room, the drag artist eyeballed me with a sideways glance and asked... “are you gay?”

I was mortified. I remember sitting there feuding with myself to give an honest response. Do I answer in the affirmative and run the risk of being discovered? What if I’m invited to the opening night and don’t give license for someone to cop a feel? Or, flipside, do I just tell the truth and face the prospect of losing the work and being judged as a straight man in a gay man’s environment?

Obviously, gay men are lucky. They have the example of the bible and thousands of excitable people with placards to help them with any ‘confusion’ over their predilection. I had to sit there – nonplussed - whilst this man asked me not once, but twice if I was gay. I wanted to scream at him that I really wanted to be gay, but that I didn’t know how to be anything other than a man that fancied women. I saw how much fun this chap must be having on a nightly basis, and how his world was full of colour, sex, music, dancing and generally having a good time. I cursed my straigntness and my narrow-minded ability to not speak up when someone I know states that Elton John is a ‘fucking poofter’. I sank a few inches into my seat before making my mind up as to what to do.

After two seconds, I realised that there was zero chance of me getting a kicking or a barrage of hetero-phobic slurs if I simply answered with my heart. I said ‘no’, signed the papers and was on my way within 25 minutes. Maybe it was 30. All I know is that it was after having several free drinks and a good laugh. And being offered free entry to the club any time I wanted. It was a narrow escape.

But as a straight man, the hardest times come when I lie in bed at night thinking. When I realise that I am part of a sexual subset that will always make me an outsider to the (generalised, of course) aspects of the gay man. The rather unprejudiced taste in music. The ability to leave the house dressed in any way they fancy and still look great. The uncomplicated sexual freedom that can only come from two people with the male penchant for promiscuity. The ability to truly understand the nature of love without the social expectations of monogamy, making babies and gender definition. The character built from having to deal with a society that still has pockets of belief that it’s a lifestyle choice...

I’ll never know these things.

I’m a straight man. It’s just the way I am.

Dee.

Being Half-Asleep With the Snooker on and the Resulting Epiphany.

I woke up, showered, brushed my teeth, got dressed, walked down the stairs in a fashion that would be familiar to people who've acquired badly-programmed robotic legs, sat on the sofa, switched on the television and sat there feeling like my skull was filled with foam.

20 minutes later, I discovered I was watching the snooker with a facial expression usually seen at car accidents.

There’s a certain clarity when your brain hasn’t quite switched on - that bleary-eyed moment after your first cup of tea, but before you get punched in the forehead by the lucid prospect of getting on with work or having to speak to another human being. It’s like a regression to when we were five years old and were able to avoid the trappings of political correctness; days when it was perfectly normal to wonder why that person looked like a cabbage-patch doll before it was explained to us that they had Down’s Syndrome.

And with this naive clarity, I looked at the impossible situation on the screen in front of me and thought: ‘?’
I mean, how on earth can we label these people athletes when they move at the same pace as last-night’s sandwich through my colon? I sat there completely bemused at this thought, which then did its usual thing and splayed itself through infinite variables until I could make sense of the whole spectacle. And by ‘making sense’ of it, I mean that I could understand the complete stupidity of it.

Don’t think for a second that I’m dismissing the skill that these ‘athletes’ have in abundance. I’ve played snooker on many occasions, and through the keen understanding of potential/kinetic energy, a fantastic grasp of spatial awareness and beautiful fingertip dexterity, I’ve managed to hit several people in the groin with the cue-ball. I’m as naturally predisposed to snooker as I am getting through a sexual episode without thinking about how long it’ll be before I can audibly fart.
The fact that these people have such skill is precisely what spins-me-out. Because they’ve used their unique – and quite brilliant – skill to whack a ball into another ball with the tip of a beautifully-crafted stick that’s lightly guided by their chin-cleft and strategically placed knuckles, until one ball goes ‘plop’ into a small hole. And that’s it. That’s the point of the whole thing.

And to help provide the best-possible spectacle, the game is played on a table made from perfectly-milled slate that sits under a pre-heated fine-weight cloth that’s produced with such fine tolerances that it makes some silk seem a bit tardy. The balls themselves are made from a particular form of Phenol Formaldehyde Resin that has a chemical composition so complicated that the molecular structure makes the London tube-map look like the front cover of a minimalist coffee-table book. Then there’s the beautifully carved setting / legs and the wooden cues that have been crafted so well that each could quite easily be pushed through your solar plexus without you noticing.

All to make a ball go ‘plop’.

Snooker is therefore my new poster-boy for the wasteful word we live in. It’s a perfect analogy for how we take incredible amounts of knowledge, skill, scientific thought and energy to produce things that are flamboyantly stupid.

And as I look around me at the clutter on my table, flamboyant stupidity is everywhere. Just look at some of the items on your desk / coffee table / mantelpiece and think of the amount of effort, thought and scientific brilliance that has brought you the mundane and relatively useless items before you.

As a hands-on example of this immense ridiculousness, take a look at my cup. My tea-stained and reliable drinking receptacle that has served me countless numbers of brews, quantifiable by the large ‘21^st Birthday’ print slapped on the side (complete with ribbon and confetti).

To make this item, raw materials have to be mined from the earth and transported by people driving around large trucks, who then dump it onto large conveyor belts that whisk it through a number of purifying processes in a factory. Other chemicals are added to make the ceramic strong, at which point chemical dyes are added to produce the required colour. The still malleable ceramic is then shaped via numerous robotic machines and mills, and the handle is manually added by someone with a meticulous attention to detail, before being fired in a computer controlled oven until it hardens. A chemical glaze is then sprayed over the cup, before it is re-fired and left to cool in preparation for the transfers to be added into the side. The transfers themselves are chemical-dyes printed on top of a flexible polymer, which stick to the side of the cup when it’s – again – fired in the oven. At the end of this, the cup is packaged, logistics are sorted and the cup finds its way via rail, sea and air to the shop which it was bought from. Now, if you think that each of the above processes has an immense set of sub-processes (the prospector who went through a particular geological education to find the raw materials, the amount of engineering in the trucks & machines, the computers that control the factory processes, the raw materials used in the computer motherboards, the programming etc etc), the song-and-dance becomes a massive and overcomplicated headfuck. For a cup.

Something that does the same job as half a coconut.

Actually, I take that back. Half a coconut wouldn’t shatter if I dropped it on the floor, nor does it inherently transfer the heat from boiling water to my unsuspecting fingers.

And if you look at each item sat on your desk / table / mantelpiece, you can follow the path of its discovery & manufacture and see just how much better this world would be if we used that brilliance, those resources and the crazy amounts of energy to make the world a better place.

Damn, I just noticed a bottle of shower gel and almost had a panic attack.

But anyway, I sat there looking at the screen, pondering this stupidity with concern on my face. Then I heard the ref say ‘touching ball’. I edged forward on my seat, thinking ‘how the hell is he going to get out of this one?

I was enjoying the game immensely. Mark Williams to win.

Dee.

Take Responsibility And Understand That Nads Are Not To Be Hoofed

For eight long years we sat and laughed at George W Bush and his mouth-born balls-ups, printing quotes on t-shirts and creating head-slapping compilations of his inadequacy on You Tube. In fact, Dubya creates more ‘memes’ during his tenure than any other single person I can think of.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone create a record-breaking animation show called ‘South Park’ that satirises some of the most ridiculous traits of the western world, and go on to write the song ‘Blame Canada’ as a scathing observation of the American blame-culture and foreign policy. It gets an Oscar nomination.
Paul Verhoeven directs Starship Troopers, a thinly-veiled celluloid middle-finger to the socio-political ethos of modern warfare.
Channel 4 tackles political and corporate corruption in the Dispatches documentary series. It becomes lauded as a groundbreaking, no-holds-barred current-affairs programme.
Before he became ‘uncool’ to the cultural idiot, Michael Moore brings Chomsky-style political and social narrative to the masses in any easy-to-digest-without-freaking-out format. Oscars are won.
Chuck Palahniuk writes Fight Club, a fictional ride through modern social and psychological breakdown. Dealing with the vacuousness of modern consumerism, it becomes a prominent and much-quoted feature of early-noughties culture.
Green Day release the concept album ‘American Idiot’, a rock-opera that chronicles one man’s struggle in corporate America. The album reaches #1 on billboard charts worldwide selling over 10 million copies.
Etcetera.

And not a single bit of it made a blind bit of difference. I can guarantee you that many of the people who watched Fight Club on DVD sat there with their feet up on a Swedish minimalist sofa during the reel, feeling indignant as the narrator sarcastically talks of Ikea’s ‘versatile solutions for modern living’, yet completely missing the irony of their current situation. They probably even hit McDonalds afterwards for a beef-flavoured sugar-rush. Without the beef flavour.

Amazingly, the general populace doesn’t have to sit through political lectures or read books about socio-economics to get a gist of what’s going on. It’s spoon-fed on a regular basis through subculture and entertainment. But the only effect it seems to have is one of providing quotes during social gatherings, so that one can feel ‘clever’ during pseudo-political discussions. To most, the state-of-the-world-address is now as pertinent to our society as an episode of Mock the Week, and usually holds less interest for us.

So, most people who converse about socio-politics are basically taking small bites of information to spit back out if necessary. At no point do they swallow. It seems that apathy rules when it comes to genuinely having a firm grasp on the application of ethics and morality – probably because most people know that if they allowed themselves to truly understand their situation, they’d have to have second thoughts about buying that personalised number-plate. And who wants to understand the terrible impact of pointless acquisition when the front of their Ford Focus could read ‘B16 DOG’?

But, if I’m honest, I know that it’s not completely our fault. We can only learn via our close environment, and our direct environment isn’t exactly open to free debate or the provision of truth. Our culture is one that talks of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ – two philosophies that have been completely redefined via complicated language and politics, until they’re no longer recognisable as their literal selves. Not that we’d know it of course. But that’s the point. Cake is only cake because our grandma and Delia Smith have told us as much. Democracy now means ‘being allowed to vote for someone from a public-school club who shouts a lot in a very expensive London-based building, whilst their mates wave pieces of paper at the opposition party and yell ‘wyeeeeaaarrrr’ a lot’. Our confusion is therefore understandable.

But our choice of ignorance isn’t...

...Because I know that we are smarter than this. We self-impose ignorance, because it means that we don’t have to take responsibility. And we get caught up in the same discussions, using the same clichés to make a point.

“Who do you vote for?”
“I don’t vote”
“What!? It’s your democratic responsibility to vote. Wars have been fought to protect your freedom to vote”
“Bollocks. Wars have been fought to maintain the status-quo of our economy and ruling class. Nothing else. It has sod-all to do with democracy, freedom or otherwise. If you are really interested in why wars have been fought for the last few hundred years, go read the plethora of books on the subject.”
“If you don’t vote, you don’t have the right to an opinion”
“That’s just being silly. It’s like this. Voting politically has an inherent flaw. Choosing between political parties is like asking me if I want a kick in the balls or a punch in the face. I refuse to vote for someone to do either.”
“There’s always a lesser of two evils”
“Maybe. But why choose evil at all? Isn’t that like saying that you’ll only rape someone when they sleep because it’ll be better for them?”
“So, what’s the alternative then smart-arse?”
“I don’t know. I’m not qualified to say. Give me time and I’ll educate myself enough to form an opinion. But right now, I just don’t want to give somebody the thumbs-up to kick me in the spuds”
“You liberals are all the same...”
“And you are hilarious. I’m as much a liberal as I am a Conservative. Can you only characterise people through standard, predefined political alliances? As far as I’m concerned, every ounce of the ‘set’ political and social spectrum is dog-balls. Left or right, hippy or elitist; If you live your life as any of these definitions, you are submitting yourself to ignorance to avoid the responsibility of thinking. Society evolves and is transient by nature. Therefore, as a free thinking human being, you should evolve and work within this transience.”
“If you don’t agree with the system, vote to change it”
“You have just made the most stupid statement you could possibly muster at this precise moment in time. If I voted, I would be taking part in a system that is corrupt in its entirety. It’d be like protesting against vivisection by punching an ox. I don’t want to have anything to do with the political system of this country. Politics in all forms is corrupt. Every last iota. It’s a system that allows a ruling class to create legislation to dictate to a subservient class. It’s simply a cleaner form of slavery. This, my friend, is a fact. I am not voting for slavery.”

At this point in the conversation, I’d expect the other person to stare blankly at me, scoff, then decide that it’d be much easier to go home and watch ‘A Question of Sport’ rather than give me or my views further consideration.
And for the record, I do go to the polling booth. But instead of ticking a box, I draw a big middle finger over the ballot sheet and artfully scrawl the words ‘no confidence’ or suchlike underneath. Spoiled votes are counted, meaning that my dissent is recorded alongside the usual conveyor of neat pencil-ticks. And I can guarantee that if enough people drew artful swearwords on their ballot-paper, the political world would start to sweat a bit. At the moment, the political stratus has no idea what goes on in the ‘real world’, and the ballot is the only bit of paper that guarantees to get your opinion through the doors of Downing Street. It’s the perfect solution for the non-apathetic non-voter, or citizen who feels like they don’t have choice.

Moving swiftly back to my point: Even if we weren’t to look further than popular entertainment, there is enough ‘education’ to at least help us understand the western socio-political climate to a half-decent degree. And anyone with even the thinnest sliver of conscience will see that we currently sit in the middle of a cultural balls-up. So we have absolutely NO excuse when the media glaringly inform us of global inequality, famine, death and destruction which we get piped to our televisions or slapped in the pages of newspapers on a daily basis. When all of the information we receive comes together, we should be motivated or at least shamed into actually standing up and making a point about it in a loud, clear voice. This is called integrity.

But then again, the car needs servicing and there’s a nice shirt in Burtons that needs to be purchased. The world can wait until later.

Dee.