Solemn Sardines

I've seen baby horses, but never a baby donkey.

Hardback books can be awkward beasts. I was reading mine this morning (comedian Russell Brand’s eloquently written and hilarious autobiography) sitting at my computer at home during a short tea break from lyric creating.

Tea finished, I got back to work and noticed the spine of the book had been resting on my keyboard and somehow I'd inadvertedly sent a chat message to one of my mates’ girlfriends which simply read:

"Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..."

Wonder what she made of it?

Anyway, back to the here and now. I received an email this morning from Jake, the guitarist in this band I used to be in. Weird fellow he is. Don’t get me wrong, I love the man to bits and he's a great musician, but let's just say he's a little touched.

I lent him a pair of jeans once. Nice pair they were. He wore them down to Brighton, shagged some filthy scrubber without taking them off and returned them a few days later, replete with semen stains round the fly.

He’s was in a Spanish jail for a while. He got busted on an ill-conceived drug run between Gibraltar and Madrid. He took a course in video production in jail and after his release, stayed on in Spain. He's now working in an editing suite somewhere in Valencia - which just goes to show crime doesn't pay, but does pay-off in the end.

Anyway, Jake was just emailing me to let me know his work chum Julio had been struck by lightning in the street where their office is. I emailed him right back, asking whether it might be a porky pie.

Jake's reply came streaking into my inbox like a quick, streaky thing. He was adamant the story was true. He even attached a photo of little Julio standing outside their office, grinning, all black and charred.

Life, lurking within tent

Popcorn. Cop porn. Be there a difference?

The recording session from which the next Bo Molasses album should be thrust kicking and screaming (guitars and harmonica) into the world is planned for this coming spring. I’ve written lots of music for it, but no lyrics as yet. Inspiration for wordly-wise wordies is in shamelessly short supply.

My ability for outstanding use of alliteration is not.

I had planned to spend the festive season getting down to some serious work, and had reassured my fellow bandmates as such, but I’ve procrastinated and procrastinated until physically, no more procrastination is possible.

If a Procrastinating World Champioship had been held over the Christmas period, I would have won. (Except, I probably wouldn't have got round to sending the entry form in).

Lately, I've essentially done nothing but tread water about a mile and a half offshore in the Sea of Nowhere, smoking dope, drinking beer infront of the box, desperately hoping a conveniently lashed together raft will just happen to drift by upon which I can paddle back to the Beach Of Being Creative, Getting Off My Arse and Doing Something.

But, unfortunately, there’s been a moderate offshore breeze and well, time has just slipped quietly by.

I think I’m in what’s called the creative doldrums, perhaps a symptom of my current state of mind. I keep thinking, surely my life must have some point to it? But then I think, hang on - perhaps there is no point to life, and therein lies the rub.

Life certainly has a habit of sneaking up behind me, slapping me hard on the back of my head and looking away innocently when I spin round.

I find life just too confusing a concept to contemplate. I can’t quite get my melon round the actual origins of it, of how we came to be here on this planet of ours in the first place.

I mean, when I stop to think about it, the whole basic concept of life on Earth is just so outrageous. The fact that we exist on a giant ball of rock in the middle of nowhere is so far-fetched, so hard to believe, it just has to be made up, you know?

I’ve recently read a book by Michio Kaku, this particle physicist chap who claims that our universe may be nothing less than a membrane hovering near ten other parallel universes that multiply like soap bubbles when they collide.

Hmnnnnn...

And I saw this article in a magazine recently giving credence to a theory I’ve heard before, you know, about the Earth. That it could be nought but a microscopic speck in the constitution of some other vast living entity, like, I don’t know, an atom in the cell of an eyebrow hair on the forehead of a beaver.

Actually, do beavers have eyebrows?

Well, maybe beaver eyebrows wasn’t the exact example they used in the magazine article. Can’t remember exactly what they compared our planet to now, you know, in terms of its infinite smallness, but, well, whatever it was, it got me thinking.

Thinking how strange it is that there are only two pretty much universally accepted hypothesis of how life on earth came to be.

It basically boils down to The Theory of Evolution versus God.

Why aren’t there more theories? Why aren’t there six or seven? (Maybe there are, and I just haven’t heard of them).

Similarly, why are there only a handful of official styles for people to swim? Why does it just have to be breast stroke, front crawl, backstroke or butterfly? Why can’t you just combine elements of all of them, you know, depending on your mood?

The doggy paddle with breaststroke legs, for example.

I mean, if some Olympic athlete stepped up for the final heat of the 100m. freestyle and dived into the pool, surfaced, then began to doggy paddle his way up and down, people would find it a little odd, wouldn’t they?

He also wouldn't win.

Anyway, of the two hypothesis about life on Earth, I’d like to think I believe in the theory of evolution because I’m not a religious person at all, at least in the traditional sense of going to church and believing in God and that he created everything.

Then again, I find this whole idea that living creatures developed at random from tiny single-celled organisms in direct response to their environment so hard to believe.

First there was a big bang in the middle of what was up to then a vast nowhere, then millions of years later single-celled blobs began mooching about in primordial swamps and eventually morphed into creatures so advanced they were able to invent cheese, build trousers and fly rockets to the moon.

I’m not so sure.

Take ears, for example. Ears are there to detect sound, right? And sound is basically air moving about. But until you’d grown a set of ears, you’d never know that moving air about even made a noise.

So what happened?

How did so many of earth’s creatures know they should grow ears?

Did the majority of creature-kind just embark on evolving them by chance, albeit simultaneously, you know, on the wild off chance there might be some sound about to listen to?

Or was it merely a few select adventurous species that went for the ear option as their contribution to the evolution effort, just to find out if sound existed?

And if that is how it went down, then presumably thousands of years later when they discovered that sound did exist and it was really groovy stuff, well, then they must have let a lot of other creatures know, ‘cos so many of them have ears.

But that begs the question, how did they let the others know?

By mime?

Sometimes I even worry that I’m not actually real and everything I see and experience has been artificially created in my mind, like a computer program.

I can easily imagine my whole life being part of some closely monitored scientific experiment carried out by some superior being in a laboratory somewhere.

I mean even the astronomer royal raised the question of whether mankind itself was just a computer simulation. And he’s the astronomer royal, for balloon’s sake. If he’s not sure whether this shit is for real or not, what kind of chance do I have?

Oh, what am I rambling on about?

It’s all so complicated; as is the concept of a supreme being having created everything. But please don’t get me started on the possibility of a supreme being and the conceited notion that somehow the universe must have been preordained for us humans because we’re so well suited to live in it.

That’ll just make me feel dozy.

Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that time is the most precious thing we have, you know? And by that I mean the time you or I have here on this earth.

Thing is, unlike money or possessions, it’s unquantifiable. None of us know how much of time we each have.

Imagine if after you die, and assuming there is a heaven, or some sort of holding place you’re taken to - a pre-heaven auction house if you will - and you were given a big fat wad of ghostly earth money to bid against all the other trillions of undead souls to buy back your own time on earth again.

How much do you think it would be worth, you know in earthly pounds and pence? Or Dollars or whatever?

How much do you think each second of your life would cost, you know at free market value?

It’s mind blowing to think about it.

Personally speaking, I wouldn’t try to buy back my own life. Well, at least my own life so far. I’ve made far too many mistakes, gone wrong too many times to want to do it all again.

Nah, I’d be happy to move on to the afterlife, if indeed there is one, and hope that my earthly experiences would stand me in good stead for whatever fate awaited me.

Then again, on the other hand, if I could buy my life back and relive it knowing what I know now so perhaps I could do things a little differently, well then of course I’d go for it like a shot.

Meet Weird Bob

I knew a French bloke once. Ex-copper by the name of Serge Warrant.

A loud and insistent knocking at the front door woke me up at some ridiculously early hour this morn. And whoever it was wouldn’t go away. I was forced to get out of bed, fling on some boxers and a t-shirt and open up.

An icy blast of wind shot in through the open door and up my bare pins.

Weird Bob stood swaying about on the doorstep, shivering his nuts off, bloodshot wasted eyes swivelling wildly in their sockets like fucked radar trackers, those beastly teeth of his clattering together. He was clearly off his head on something and held a large carrot in his hand.

He shrugged. Slurred something about having been out all night and lost his keys. Before coming in, he stared down at the carrot, then hurled it away.

"I was at a mate's house, yeah," he gruff-mumble, crossing the threshold. "And I met this lady aircraft mechanic. And a gay boy, and a wicken." He paused for a bit, struggling with his own equilibrium and thoughts. "I mean, what are the fucking chances of that?"

I didn't care. I just wanted to climb back into bed and told him as much.

It was clear though, without his keys (and therefore access to his own abode), Weird Bob would require a period of shelter in my place. Almost certainly the location of a locksmith via telephone, quite possibly some of the contents of my fridge and, if our historical interaction is anything to go by, some of my weed stash too.

And there would be a wait until the locksmith came, during which he would talk incessant shite until my ears bled. A terrible enough ordeal anyway, but more so at such an early hour.

I pondered whether to just leave him to his fate in the hallway, and had decided to do just that when Weird Bob produced a partially squashed sandwich from his coat pocket and held it up at eye level, inspecting it carefully.

He had difficulty focusing, and stroked the thing with his long, bony forefinger, lifting the top slice of bread with the kind of caution a bomb disposal expert might display when checking out a suspicious package.

He peered in.

“Egg mayonnaise,” he murmured. "A veritable bitch of a sandwich this one. Not at all sure she should be here this morning.”

He let it fall to the floor, having trouble co-ordinating his foot to mash it flat on the carpet, then turned and stared me out, all a-furrowed brow and mythical Gatekeeper teeth.

“You remember about six months ago, when I was Burt Reynolds?”

“No…”

“Well, I think I’ve become him again.”

Weird Bob conjured a clear plastic spoon from the sleeve of his coat and held the rounded side up close to his face, searching for his own convex reflection for proof. Then he held the spoon up to my face.

“Can you see him?”

Even by Weird Bob’s surreal standards, this was strange shit and given the unholy hour, I wasn’t in the mood.

Weird Bob moved the spoon about slowly up and down and side to side in front of my face, giving me the full range of angles of my own semi-transparent warped reflection until I batted his hand away and made a move for my front door.

“He’s in there somewhere the little fucker,” Weird Bob muttered.

He growled at the spoon, then popped it in his breast pocket, his increasingly intense stare suddenly giving way to a befuddled grin. He produced his keys. He let himself in without another word.

I spent the rest of the day in a vague state of agitation, strumming my acoustic guitar wistfully, flitting through Internet porn, trying to think of lyrics to songs I need to finish.

Freaky little gaff

Beatlemania, petomania - it’s all the same to me.

As I afforded you a tantalising glimpse of who I am yesterday, perhaps today I should tell you a little bit about where I live?

Well, my place is a small rented one-bedroom ground floor garden flat in Haringay, North London.

It’s pretty basic affair, but cheap. Close to a tube line. The electricity falters wach time a train passes.

I share the building with Weird Bob, or Robert Mercer as he's known to local Police. He's an unemployed half-man, half-beast with toe-curlingly unfortunate teeth who lives in the flat upstairs. As far as I can tell, Weird Bob spends his days strung out on psychoactive chemicals creating industrial techno music under strobe lighting conditions.

Behind our shared front door, there’s a short entrance way. Letters regularly litter the floor under the letterbox all addressed to the quite mysterious Humphrey Goggle.

In the summer, the hideous red swirly patterned carpet in the reception hallway acts as a graveyard for dozens and dozens of dead wasps. Where they come from, I haven’t the faintest idea.

At the end of this little reception hallway, there’s a door that leads up to Weird Bob’s place (and who knows, maybe a home-made torture chamber containing 14 year-old kidnapped girl) and another that opens up to mine.

According to my girlfriend Zosia, my flat reeks of stale sweat and flatus. Whenever she comes round she moans in her crap English accent that I should open the windows to air the gaff once in a while.

I do but, stale sweat and farts? Surely that’s just the smell of a real man?

I concede that maybe Zosia has a point about the sweat thing. When I sleep I really do sweat like a bear, always have done, ever since I was a kid. Sometimes, even in the middle of the coldest of winter nights, I’ll wake up to go for a pee and discover I’m drenched.

The mattress on my bed even features a yellowy me-shaped sweat stain on it, like one of those chalk drawings on the floor at murder scenes. The pillows have taken on a distinctly yellowy hue too.

And yeah, I suppose I do have a certain tendency towards hurricane force flatulence. Zosia once suggested I strike a match each time I let rip. I can easily get through a whole boxful of an eve.

But the main thing that irks Zosia about my flat is the tidiness, or rather lack of it.

The crusty pants lying about on the floor, the unwashed plates stacked high in the sink, the bin crammed with empty beer cans, the recreational soft drug paraphernalia strewn about the place, the various musical instruments and amplifiers, the ash on the floor, the permanent skid marks in the toilet; all of this she cites as incontrovertible evidence of my slobbish behaviour.

I admit I’m not totally anal about hygiene. And maybe I don’t get round to cleaning the loo as often as I should and yeah, perhaps there is a certain degree of debris lying about and shit, but well, I try my best to keep on top of things.

I’m a full-blown heterosexual man, for fuck’s sake. I’m not supposed to be tidy.

The best thing about my flat, as Zosia readily concurs, is the garden; my own personal green oasis in the vast concrete jungle that is London town.

I know it’s overgrown with weeds and climbers and bushes and roses that grew taller than two men, all wildly dangerous branches and skin-tearing thorns. I’m aware the patio is dangerously uneven with broken or missing slabs between which grass and weeds and other brightly coloured wild flowers that I’ve never bothered to learn the names of grow unchecked. And okay, birds do flit hither and thither, dropping shit bombs on the warped and rotting cable drum that acts as my garden table and the solitary aluminium chair with the dodgy back.

So what?

So what if the occasional cheeky fox passes through? Rats and mice too. The odd Basking shark? I just take all this as proof that, despite not actually doing any gardening, or more likely because of not doing any gardening, I am the curator of one of the most eco-friendly gardens in the city.

Establishing the facts

Silence, like an egg, can be both golden and broken. Therefore, if one could see silence, would it be egg-shaped?

So, here we are in 2008. The Chinese Year of the Rat, which began late for me sometime around three in the afternoon, consciousness coming harshly with hurty head, dried out mouth and squinty eye. A hangover, weapons-grade.

Not surprising, really. Last night I ‘tied one on’ in glorious fashion.

T'was the New Year's Eve party in the back room of my local bar The Fox and Fanny that did it for me - a mere fifty notes the passport to a night of heavy revelry and mayhem with a gang of friends.

There were beers, spirits, cocktails, a DJ, drunken blokes grappling and sweating together, roaring, telling each other how much they loved each other, swearing undying allegiance, drunken girls dancing on tables, flashing their pants and being sick, laughing ‘til they cried, crying ‘til they laughed.

At one point I found myself seated on a chair, playing pretend drums to the DJ’s phat beats with my bare hands on three beer barrel tables I'd gathered together to look like a drum kit, bass drum achieved by tipping one over on its side.

Didn't go down too well with a girl sat at it whose drink went a-flying when I tipped it over. My offer to fetch a replacement beverage of her choice was met with a delicate response: 'Piss off, you fucking twat.'

Ah, these sweet rosy-cheeked North London girls, such a delicate way with words.

Afterwards, a few of us came back to mine to carry on the party. There was more booze, many illicit substances. The fact that I awoke fully dressed atop my bed would suggest I passed out at some point and my guests let themselves out.

Anyway, back to today and my hangover. I lay in bed for a bit, hot and fetid, sorry and sozzled, the thumping in my head ritualistically keeping the beat to the ghost of a song, a vindictive half-light seeping through and around my curtains as far beneath the sweaty, twisted mess of the duvet, a gaseous depth charge emphatically announced the state of my innards.

Not good.

Vague thoughts of getting up, having a wee, knocking back some Alka Seltzer and making a hot cup of tea rose silently through the deep still black waters of my mind, their focus becoming ever sharper until I hauled myself up and out of bed and set off unsteadily for the bathroom.

There was bitch red lipstick scrawled across the bathroom mirror. ‘You're a crack whore and yer kisses tate like piss'. Odd, but probably true. My reflection, a bleary apparition betwixt the make-up grafitti was fearsome, and my pee the tone of whisky.

Having popped some pills to ease my aching head, downed a litre of mineral water and knocked back a few strong teas, I still felt terrible and repaired to the sofa to laze about in front of the telly, debris from the party last night strewn everywhere. I couldn't be arsed to tidy up and dozed off. It was dark when I startled myself awake with a single loud snore.

I still felt rough.

I cleared the mess away, rolled a spliff, switched on my computer and sat hunched over the keyboard, a mug of hot tea cupped in my hands, pondering how to approach my first blog entry. More specifically, how I should briefly introduce myself to you.

This is what I came up with.

My name is Zacarias Bone (a good start). I’m 30 years old and thinking about growing my first beard, but haven’t come to a conclusion yet about how it may affect my friends psychologically. I’m the singer for the garage blues band Bo Molasses.

What else?

Oh yeah. I’ve got a girlfriend, called Zosia. She’s Polish. I’ve been with her on and off for about a year now. We met backstage at one of my band’s gigs. She came over and whispered conspiratorially in my ear that she likes to initiate sex with wrestling. My attention was instantly tweaked.

That same night I found myself back at hers. In her room, she said we would be doing it on the bare wooden floorboards because she’d burned her mattress the week before in a fit of rage. Before I could object, she had me pinned down.

What more can I say?

I’d like to tell you more about me as a person, about the kind of individual I am, the things I believe in, perhaps even the length of my old chap, but the truth is I can't be bothered at the moment. Perhaps it would be best if you find out more about me as my daily blog unfurls, like an old lady's long grey hair at bath time.

And besides, I’m not all that sure who I am anymore.

When I was a younger I knew exactly who I was and what I wanted out of life. I was a right cocky twerp. But somehow the years have gradually eroded my self-belief and these days, I often find myself standing as close to the mirror in my bathroom as possible, staring into my own vacant eyes desperately searching for clues, wondering who da fuck it is looking back at me.

Occasionally I glimpse the arrogantly confident person I used to be, or hear his far off cries desperately pleading for rescue from somewhere deep inside, his voice by turns loud then indistinct, like music blown by a howling gale. But just as suddenly the moment has passed and he’s gone and I’m be left alone again with my present self; a confused berk with a vacant grin who’s recently taken to rubbing himself down with his own excreta.

Actually, that last bit’s not true. Just thought I’d end my first post with a bold statement.