Saturday, August 29

tips for blissheids

If you're a blissheid, it helps to have some advice on techniques that can make your life a bit easier.

So here's a trick that allows you to tune out anywhere and any time, without anyone noticing.







Secondly, when you're doing yoga don't attempt this position, unless you want to walk around like a flatheid with your heid up your own bottom.


Sunday, August 23

alma mater and crime and punishment

In postmodern fashion I'm reading two books at the same time on the ipod. The Real Alma Mater and Crime And Punishment.

Thanks to the wonders of intertextuality, it has become a unique moral tale about a desperate Edinburgh student, McKolnikov, who murders the bourgeois Hendersovich by pushing him off Salisbury Crags. Consumed by guilt, he subjects himself to drink, drugs, meditation and other punishments, but the deities catch up with him in the end.

Wednesday, August 19

autobiography of a crackhead writer

I know some of the people who visit here have wild lives, but then I read about this guy who just published his memoir, The Night of the Gun, about his time as a crack addicted fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke.

Some quotes:
I do not have a good memory, having recklessly sautéed my brain in fistfuls of pharmaceutical spices.
I subsisted on Pop-Tarts and Mountain Dew, along with LSD, peyote, pot, mushrooms, mescaline, amphetamines, quaaludes, valium, opium, hash and liquor of all kinds. Total garbage head.

Friday, August 7

too nice to be successful

Being sympathetic, kind, co-operative and warm may lower men’s likelihood of becoming bosses, according to a study which found a strong link between personality type and jobs.

One of the authors of the research concluded that "people who aren't very nice are more likely to become managers."

We all knew this, but it's nice to have it scientifically confirmed. And it explains why Dances Etc and myself are the only folk from our school who managed to avoid success, with the result that we could spend yesterday morning at a museum, and all yesterday afternoon at the pool. For a while, we had the whole indoor and outdoor pools to ourselves. There were just a few folk loafing in the sauna and the scalding in the steam room.

A few hours later, well knackered from swimming and poached from the sauna, we sat at the poolside cafe and had hot drinks and handmade cookies, gassing while the pool filled up with mums, kids and office workers. After his second coffee, Dances's natural talkativeness went right off the scale, like speeding. At one point he was explaining, with mimed actions, the merits of different ways of killing yourself. I noticed people staring, at the point where he was describing how to slit your own throat and how far the blood would spurt.



Dances trying to stand upright after the steam room

Tuesday, August 4

another day off in paradise

The day so far.

Walked dog. Went back to sleep for an hour.

Even in winter here, the cold is made bearable by bright sunshine. So I painted the window outside, while listening to Brian Keenan's book called, I think, An Evil Cradling. I had read it before, but this is him reading the audiobook.

Caught up on blogs. Now it's off to the city to support the partner at her meeting with a financial adviser, maybe head him off if he's thinking of advising her to dump me as a liability.

Then I may take myself to see Harry Potter. I avoided all the others in the series but this one looks like it might be enjoyable by grown-ups.

Tomorrow will be a long day at work, like yesterday, but the days off inbetween always help balance things out.