Why Hanging Out In Bars = #1 Fun

    Unusual as it is for me to blog from a bar, I nonetheless find myself slung between cheapo speaker squeals of James Brown at his ferocious best, wondering what it is with this supping ale and writing degrees of crap kinda nonsense.

    Maybe I'm a Bohemian, genetically pre-gravitated to embrace a funk & quill lifestyle as Buddhist monks favour shaving and waving.  Or maybe the beer and the writing are incidental and I’m merely a hapless slave to the whole James Brown SEX MACHINE Arghhh! Arghhhh! Arghhhhhhh! groove.

    One thing is for certain-as-yer-Nooveau-Iron-Curtain* — this Brown palaver rocks way more like a Ken Hom wok than the musical rumpus generated by the other famous musical Brown, namely Errol from Hot Chocolate.

* Crimea: Harass, Arras, Impasse.

    Let's examine the evidence.

    Here's Brown (James, Machine of Sex), testosterone bursting from his soul in vanderGraaf hairdo fractals:

    And here's Brown II (Errol, Thing of Sex), feigning an orgasm while choking on a cucumber of unknown origin:



    This is why I hang out in bars.

    As fusions of entertainment and speculation go, hanging out in bars bulges from an otherwise flat landscape like...like...like — hell, I dunno...

Is that a gun in your pocket — or are you from the 70s?

Happy 'Hold Up A Potato For Exactly A Minute' Day

Alternatively, at 3 mins to 5 tonight (GMT, not Waspe Heure or DraggunKloKK) you could Spring Equinox on down with the glee of the make-up woman responsible for shaving Fiona Bruce's underarms prior to an Antiques Roadshow shoot...

Hey, St Anthony! Help Me Find My Shit!

    I’m no religious zealot — hell, the chickens I’ve slaughtered and offered up to Satan can be measured in neck miles — but right now I’m heavily reliant for my day-to-day survival on the services of St Anthony.

    If you know anything at all about saints then you’ll probably already be aware of two key facts about these hypermortals of legend and song:

    1) Most of them have utterly ridiculous names that only the most devout would wrest from the Wholly Bib as part of any Name That Screaming Infant Challenge.  Like St Augustine of Hippo.  Gotta love that guy.

    2) Despite rumours to the contrary, neither Elvis, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Hitler nor Dale Winton is a saint.

    What you may not realise is that St Anthony — by far the most practically useful saint since St Bottle Opener and St Spare Pair Of Trousers Just In Case It Rains — began life as a practising buddhist monk.

    If you think about it, this kind of makes sense.

    Why do we ask St Anthony for help?  Like I say, right now, for me, it’s a matter of survival.  I’ve lost so many things this week that I may have inadvertently opened up a partial vacuum in the cosmos capable of sucking another Star Trek film starring William Shatner from the vortex.  Without my prayers to St Anthony, mankind is doomed.

    That’s where the whole buddhist trip came in so handy for dear old Ant.  He spent so much time soaking up the Here & Now into every fibre of his being that he got to know more about where stuff was than any of these socially inept spectacle savants who can memorize the contents of a telephone directory before BT has even allocated the numbers.

    “Oh, yeah, that Carling Black Label ring pull from Rod Stewart’s fourth can the night he played the Manchester Apollo in 1971with Jeff Beck and the peculiar looking one from Sweet.  It’s rusted and gone now, but if you have a millennium or two I can let you know where all the atoms of tin and aluminium and nickel are, along with every last molecule of Stewart’s  subsequent showy urine fountain for the benefit of the groupies.”

    Having friends like this in the afterlife is very useful indeed.  Only problem is, St Anthony clearly has something of a backlog. While my lime green underpants and my matching canoe and chivalric trumpet fanfares CD might be very dear to me, they’re both a long way down the goodly saint’s hit list if my current wait is anything to go by.  We know from Kit’s Law that there are always more missing cats then people who can be bothered to find them, and after the knees-up festive season we had last year, everyone knows someone who’s still missing a light-up bauble, so I’m on a loser here right from the outset.

    All I can do is wait, quite literally for something to turn up.  If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll get lucky — a chance meeting of happenstance and serendipity that sparks a revelation about my underpants.  If not, then maybe I’ll forget that I even forgot where I put stuff, forever to wander about the house in a confused daze.  Reminds me of that thing Lon Chaney said about the things we don’t know we don’t know.

    Or was it that other guy from Sweet...?

Creme Shot

    Back in the good old days, people washed with SOAP.

    Now we have GEL, WASH, BALM — and if we’re lucky, maybe JUS.

    Right now, my showering preference is for GEL.  It’s smoother than a soap but not as liquified as an OIL or a CREME, and there are usually plenty of decent options to choose from in Wazzda.

    But do we really need such a beguiling range of options?  For scented semen-alike we spread over our skin?

    I mention this because in addition to the variety of available brands and scents and colours, shower gel also comes in gender-specific forms.  Some is FOR WOMEN, the rest is FOR MEN — which can only mean that some ad agency’s portfolio is about to split at the seams from an ejaculatory promo of frothing FOR HERMAPHRODYTES.

    But what’s the difference between a girl gel and a boy gel?  Actually?

    And what am I to do with my latest purchase from Wazzda?

    I just got into the shower and removed the cap on my Dolphin Musk FOR MEN only to be struck by the notion that I was about to misuse its azure latherness.

    The label clearly says FOR MEN — yet as I ran my eyes round the crisply tiled walls of my shower cubicle, I felt certain I was the only man present (unless a curious dwarven assassin lay coiled like a spring in the airing cupboard).

    The label does not say FOR MAN.  So will I break my Dolphin Musk if I use it alone?  Or will its oceanic gloopiness somehow break me?

    Nether The Samaritans, the Citizens’ Advice Bureau nor Goog-gel could help with this conundrum, so I’m holding fire on the whole washing thing until I’ve got my facts in order.

    Or sourced some other MEN.

    Maybe that’s how it works.

Saluting The Captain

    It’s funny what you remember about your early years.

    All those characters from infant and junior school.

    Like MANDY and her RUBBER.  Why do I remember Mandy and her rubber?  Because she would never let anyone borrow it.  “You’ll wear it out,” she’d say, like somehow this was against the rules regarding rubber usage worldwide.  I remember remarking once that wearing rubbers out was both inevitable and kind of the point but Mandy never saw it that way.  That’s why we haven’t been on each other’s Christmas card list since 1973.

    Then there was PHILIP and his TALKBACK.  Why do I remember Philip and his talkback?  Because he would talk back to the teacher every morning when she called out the register.
    “John.”
    “Here.”
    “David.”
    “Here.”
    “Philip.”
    “Here. [great comedic pause]  I’m always here.”
   
    But what about Whatserface Girl?  Whose name I’ve forgotten, and about whom I can remember next to nothing?

    Whatserface Girl came and went, like Stu and Bev and Kim and all those kids who were around at one time before they disappeared.  As the years passed, at high school and Do Your A Levels school, I’d bump into some of these kids again, maybe exchange a few words, but by my early 20s, late 20s, and onset of multiple stomachs 30s, it typically took an unusually obtrusive prompt to get me summoning their spectres once again.

    So I’m walking down my local high street, some time in my stomachy 30s, and I see Whatserface Girl — and I salute her.

    I do this because she is The Captain.

    I can only presume that the reason she’s The Captain is down to the volume of black & white 50s films the TV companies insisted on screening in the 70s.  One featured an unenthusiastic conscript called Binns, and me and my friends spent the rest of the week playing out the scene where he’s peeling potatoes while a sergeant major screams at him.  As to where The Captain game came from, or what inspired it, I haven’t the faintest idea.  All I know is that nearly a quarter of a century later, all it took to make me engage in an activity so missing, presumed dead that I might as well have been a knee-jerk zombie was for Whatserface Girl to have her Whatser of a face in my face.

    It’s ludicrous, silly, ridiculous, but like 1920s Railway Station moments, this kind of thing happens all the time — and we’re lucky if we can match the stimulus to the response.

Turtles Up Your Crack

    When I booked in for a checkup with my doctor, I never expected to be told (accompanied by the dourest Beethoven tunes ever, boosted to BASS BASS MAX c/o a shitty pair of NHS speakers), “hey, big nose — the reason you’ve been feeling under the weather of late is because a two hundred year-old turtle has taken up residence in your shit pipe.”

    It’s at times like these that doubletakes mutate into tripletakes mutate into quadruple-then-polywhoople-OTTgazoopletakes, all of whose net nervospazzular flash results (bizarrely) in no reaction whatsoever.

    My doctor coughed, as if a dog had died — alive — in his throat.  “You seem unduly unbothered by this news of your imminent anal collapse-cum-potential-reinvention-as-a-novelty-theme-park.”

    This is when the turtle finally shifted, upended from the horizontal unparticular to the distinctly perpendicular rectilinear.  I thought only dwarf acrobats could do this, but no.

    I’m tempted to say that my heart was in my throat at this point, but sadly it was 35 feet away from my cranium, propelled c/o a turtleshifty shunt, and saved from flying off into the stratosphere only by a strap of unduly taut aortic tissue gifted to me by leathery ancestors unknown.

    My op is at high noon tomorrow.  As I understand it, some guy from the UK Olympic shot putt team is coming down from Scotland to help get my heart back into my chest.  A similar out-of-body hearting happened to Simon Le Bon live on stage during a Duran Duran comeback tour when he forgot the lyrics to Rio and panicked.  Shot putt guy was in the audience, and raced onstage to save Le Bon’s life.  Since then he’s gone on to make a decent living for himself as a professional cardiac eructatoprolapse specialist.  Can’t wait to meet him.

    As for my pipe reptile, I have to put up with its random wrigglings till some time in August — unless I can get a construction industry pal to nick a JCB and paw my crack with its scooper.

    The moral of this story?  Get regular health checks for all the essentials: heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, dumpy drooper.

    And don’t forget to bag the I HAD A DOCTOR’S HAND UP MY BUM sticker.  Mine’s going on the fridge over my magnetic glow-in-the-dark Martin Clunes.