Cryogenics

In the least morbid possible way, let's assume You went missing. On the flipside, in the most optimistic cloud-silver-lining kind of way, let's assume Your disappearance is nationally newsworthy. If You were newsworthy, the newspeople would have a picture of You so they had a face to the name. Also, people watching the news would know who they were looking for when they went looking for You, in Tesco Metro where You were seen buying spinach and ricotta ravioli, or at Natwest where You were seen withdrawing an undisclosed amount of money, all stuffed into one of their DL-sized envelopes or at the local outdoor swimming pool where You were seen doing backstroke for what seemed like an eternity.

Have You ever thought what picture they'd use of You? It's an important picture. That picture will be sat like a pride-of-place painting, at two o'clock to George Alagiah's head every six o'clock until something more terrible than Your disappearance happens somewhere else in the world. Your face in that picture will etch itself into the minds of millions, reinforced when they go online to read the newspapers, where Your Face will once again crop up.

How important is that picture?

In the most morbid way possible, let's assume You're never found. That picture is what You will look like forever. Sure, if You're really newsworthy, The Sun will do a computer-generated mock-up of how You might look today. And You might think your close friends and family will retain a proper likeness of you in their minds. Your lover will remember the concentration in Your face when You cooked a Hangover Cure Full English the afternoon after the night before for the pair of you; friends will remember your air-guitar face on nights out whenever The Chain by Fleetwood Mac would come on; the parentals will remember when you ran in the house after passing your driving test at the first attempt, which was remarkable given that You'd only had ten lessons.

I asked you how important that picture was.

The answer is, that picture has a bouncebackability that even Your Mother can't fight and she too will eventually be brainwashed by this immortal image of You - your age, your self-image, your emotions on the day that picture was taken, all frozen in time.

The question is then, how do you want to be remembered?

Adventuring

Where have you been my little friend?

Have you been hiding in a cupboard?
Maybe you were truffling in the shrubbery?
Possibly it could be that you been sniffing dogs bums?
...Or perhaps you have been to the bermuda triangle and back?
Can you have been taken hostige by pipe smoking parrots (of the kakapo variety)?
Or were you swimming with cephalopods?
Somehow you may have been dancing with Babushka dolls?
Or hunting the rare Mr L. David?
Have you been fighting with albino wasps?
Or maybe travelled to the Vatican to frolick with the pope?
Playing sudoku against your leg?

Off the radar is where you are.

(Written by J.J.Hartley)

Fly Season

You know, Sometimes
at the end of the summer
You figure you've just had Fly Season.
You've been
swatting,
potshotting
flies all summer season long and it's taken you to the end of the season to realize that you've just had The Summer Season of Flies.
Fly Season.

Screensaver

Philips,
Philips,
Philips,
Philips
Bounces from corner to corner
Rebound within borders
Taking orders from the rules
of his universe.
Every action, every kinetic action
taken by Philips
is returned with equal and opposing kinetical
force
'Til Philips lands on Samsung.
Pythagoras proud and
Toke took;
It's time to watch the film.

The Ballad of Bard and Roses

A soporific street on a soporific night
is dragged from REM to daylight.
A SWAT team bust in, survey the scene
of decadent squalor and elegant licentiousness.

"Who are you and what's your game?" he says. I says

We are

Graffers,
Taggers,
Authors,
Paupers,
The sons and daughters of
Mixed martial artists,
arsonists,
artisans and the partisan.

We are

Concoctors,
Conductors,
Concoctionists,
Brawlers,
Maulers,
Filthy kerb crawlers,
Ballers,
Shot callers,
High rollers,
Bank rollers
Rocknrollas and trequartistas.

We are

Anarchists,
Self-publicists,
Public house frequenters,
Deviants,
Miscreants
And anti-war protesters,
Tree-huggers,
Chuggers,
Illegal ingesters.

We are

Boys on choppers,
Girls with whoppers,
And girls with itty-bitty titties too.
Leisure pirates,
Lager louts,
Ticket touts,
Them with pumped-up Botox pouts.

We are

Buskers,
Beggars,
The unemployed,
Drunks,
Punks and Buddhist monks.

We are

B-boys
And Fly Girls
That dance On The Road,
Light-fingered bastards
Fuck the barcode!

We are

The good that die young
And the good that survived.
The frigid,
Asexual,
And the massive sex drives.

We are

Rude boys,
Ragamuffins,
Ravers,
Rave-savers,
Organ grinders,
Winder-uppers.

We are

Nit-pickers
Knicker-sniffers
Strippers and tabbed-up daytrippers,
Hustlers
Con artists that did youse like kippers.


We are

Plotters,
Schemers,
Utopian dreamers.

We are

Workers,
Strikers,
Heathens and vegans.

We are

Vagrants,
Vagabonds,
and James Bonds.

We are

Martini drinkers,
Shaken or stirred.

We are

Pint sinkers,
Words get slurrrrrrrrred.

We are

Boy racers,
skirt chasers,
shirt lifters and grifters.

We are

Stags and Hens
And Lads on Tour.

We are

David Nutt
Sir Ian Gilmore.

We are

The Wired sat down to a Naked Lunch.

We are

Ladies what lunch sat down for brunch.

We are

The Mods
We are the Mods

We are the,
We are the,
We are the Mods.

We are a splendid lot,
My gang and me, (I says to the heaving, sweaty SWAT)
And if we're guilty,
Lock us up and throw away the key.

C'est la Grève!

I prognosticate a dystopia
Lines of the Listless
Reams of the Restless
Spun out, wrung out, hung out to dry
In the cold
Where they don't feel the benefit of social engineering
An ethnic cleanse that contends
With the measures of Slobodan Milosevic
I'm sick of this sweetening with molasses kiss
Spare me the bullshit.
"We're in this together."
We're antithetical!
A compassionate con;
This time was supposed to be heretical!
Instead,
Fat Cats on the back bench titter and snigger
While the trigger on the Magnum pop-pops with vigour
The rounds aimed at the ligger
Who's pot for getting the Stella's in gets bigger and bigger
But it's the taxpayer who's got the hangover
Said yesterday's chip shop wrapping paper.
So rank, (apparently)
They single file
For fifteen minutes of fame on Jeremy Kyle.
Braggadocio of the braggarts that get them all roused
Of eight mothers for eight kids and a free council house,
Four teeth of which three of them are gold
Family silver and values are sold
Then good old Jezza gets them told.
"Go out, get a job and work like the rest of us have to!"
Of course, it's Trident tested years ago
Jobs for the boys, we look on amazed
At new improved ceilings, double-glazed.
Everyone's sat about thinking,
Pick your victim accordingly,
Don't slash the system remorselessly
If wielding the axe is a necessity
Then for the love of God,
Let's do this progressively.

Million Pound Drop

If you think it's too obvious, it's probably the right answer.

Ill Cry

Just when I thought it would be impossible to go any lower, I've reached the ultimate in emasculation. I just had a ill cry. You know, when you cry for no reason, because you're ill. Ill cry. I might tender that to Urban Dictionary. The Ill Cry.

The Indelible Jeff Stelling

Sometimes, when I watch Sky Sports News, I find the news keeps happening over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Again.

Sometimes, when I watch Sky Sports News, I find the news keeps happening over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Again.

Sometimes, when I watch Sky Sports News, I find the news keeps happening over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Again.

Sometimes, when I watch Sky Sports News, I find the news keeps happening over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Again.

Sometimes, when I watch Sky Sports News, I find the news keeps happening over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Again.

Sometimes, when I watch Sky Sports News, I find the news keeps happening over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Again.

How I Learnt To Be The Perfect Person

I observe cunts and try not to be like them.

Pain

In the beginning,
Way back when,
When I was younger,
I used to think of Pain
as a quantifiable, tangible thing
In your body.
Like blood.

The Fifth Musketeer to the Four Humours.

Small tumours would congregate
In my mouth
I'd lacerate
With the sharp side of my canines
'Til it all came out.

It never came out.

Excuse

So, this is how we do
We meander along meaningless rivers of bunf
Synonymous with the inebriated sway of the sotted street drunk
A series of sycophantic platitudes, beatitudes, sententious sentences
Back and forth, forth, back and forth
We go, spitting nuggets of Foucault
With topspin, So
The ball bounces at awkward heights
I set sights
On a sliced backhand down the line
It's returned
Red wine gets decanted into rants
Convoluted bants
All really an excuse, just to say hey.

Ten Men Went To Bed, (Cunt) Went To Bed With Ashley

Last week, Facebook made its biannual homepage change. The problem is, nothing commands the wrath of the mob like a biannual Facebook homepage change. People get proper vexed about it; oh Lordy, my news feed's all over the shop, says one girl from a high school in Massachusetts, why don't you just leave it as it is? Facebook's now a gay bell-end, says a boy from a high school in Minnesota, only faggots use this shit now. I'm going back to MySpace, threatens a goth.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and in a democratic demonstration of the rage, the mob resort to bringing out the big guns and do the only thing they can do in such a situation – they set up a Facebook group, because they solve everything. There's one particular hate group which shouts SWITCH BACK TO THE OLD FACEBOOK, all in capitals, mind, just in case we couldn't hear. (I don't want to be a cunt about this, but there's internet etiquette to be adhered to. To write in capitals suggests you got beef, and unless you wanna ease up on the decibels, I intend to tenderize your beef.)

They're so furious about something essentially quite trivial. The numbers for the afore-mentioned group total just over 1.3 million members. Compare that to Crackbook's own Global Disaster Relief page which has got a piddly fifteen or something. It cracks me up how disproportionate their rage is.

Does it really matter that your inbox is in your outbox or whether or not you can like someone's like of your like? Of course, it doesn't. But that's Anger for you. It's completely irrational. If you're minorly a bit miffed by something, you can usually keep a lid on it and try and resolve the situation with like, mediation and discussion, but Anger's a different beast.

You know sometimes when you get angry and you're all pissed off, palsied with rage, crippled by apoplexy and you'll bitch like a bitch to anyone who's not listening. You know you look like a prick, but Anger, it's kinda addictive, no? Like mephedrone.

Anger gives you licence to say and do things you otherwise wouldn't have the balls to say or do. You only get angry when you're wrong, but Anger makes you feel like you're ten foot tall and made of gold, so you don't care that you're chatting wolf. You indulge that Anger, you wallow in its warm, sanguinary arms. And it's lovely and safe there.

Sometimes, when I'm feeling a little too content and the pacemaker is a little bit too stable, I'll do something to get the ticker ticking a bit rapid. One of my favourite ways to do this is by reading the tabloids. The red tops are a readymade rag of red in my Guardian-reading face. I challenge you to make it ten pages in to the Mail before you read about how an illegal asylum scrounger is living at 10 Downing Street, rent free while Gordon Brown is giving them therapeutic foot massages daily.

The News of the World is no better. It's ridicularse to one minute read about Sarah's Law on one page, hearing Littlejohn or whoever rant on about how we gotta vigilante the fuck out of paedophiles, then on the next page have an upskirt pap shot of Hermione's minge on her way to Hogwarts.

I know I should ignore it, but this lot set the agenda for so much of the country. The power they wield is so much that The Sun has famously never lost an election (they've already pledged allegiance to David Cameron, and with recent news of Gordon's bullying, it looks like a Tory formality).

Sometimes, this country feels like being in a shit nightclub, and the newspapers are like DJs playing shit music and I'm stood there thinking, Great Scot, this is gash isn't it? and I look around for corroboration and everywhere I look, I see millions upon hundreds of drongos popping out of their polyester miniskirts and gymbos bulging out of their Superdry shirts going nuts for some of the most heinous crimes to ever to hit a cochlea. They're the pipers, playing shit tunes of really flawed logic and everyone's lapping it up.

Check this, front page of the Sun the other day has a picture of Cheryl Cole, scantily-clad with the headline, Ashley, how could you? I'm an Arsenal fan, so I've hated Ashley Cole for bare time anyway so I sit lazily at the sea shores of schadenfreude watching his very public fall from grace, which has been nothing but a joy to watch after declaring that he felt betrayed by his boyhood club over the fact that he was 'only' offered a five grand pay rise.

Poor bugger. I pay £30 a season to represent the latest XL Boys shirt (Thierry Henry used to wear his tight on his body and if it's good enough for him...) down the park with the lads for a kickabout and he's quibbling over five bags of sand. I swear down, I'll box that child.

The point, I enjoy seeing Ashley get castigated by the biggest opinion-providers in the country. And it's true, he shouldn't have cheated on his missus. Question. What's so flawed about the logic of the red tops this time? Answer. In featuring Cheryl in her knickerbockers, they hold her up to be a paragon of pengness.

And she's aight, no doubt but when they pair that pic with their headline, they imply that because she's so peng, she shouldn't expect to be cheated on. In essence, Cheryl's pengness makes her exempt from infidelity? This then begs the question, would it have been alright for Ashley to cheat on Cheryl if she was butters?

Do ugly girls have to just put up with getting cheated on sans contrition? (Actually, one look at The Jeremy Kyle Show in the mornings will probably confirm that. You don't half see some snaggletooths on that show.) With that sort of flawed logic, you could say that the people that survived the Holocaust were hench and brave. Does that then imply that those who didn't survive the Holocaust were pussyoles?

A massive blog post to illustrate the most minor of points, but this whole thing leaves a lot of questions unanswered. I thought Ashley was gay, so what are we gonna sing at the Emirates when Chelsea come to play now?

 

 

Letters

Hey Drapes,

Now, I freaking love you Crybabies, with the parties, afterparties and hotel lobbies. The times we spend under the red light are some of the most jokes times I'll ever have.

I thought to myself as I lay on the floor in my Doris's arms last Saturday, my face stuffed full of miaow, chimichanga, resin and regretamine, that this is the epitome of contented euphoria.

We're high school hellcats, on our own, and we love being bad 'cause it feels so good!

Recently though, the medicated state of mind I find is overrated. This week just gone, I have had the mother of all comedowns. You know those comedowns, the ones where you're tired all day but prang all night, you cry at Hollyoaks, masturbation's lost its edge and your veins start looking a bit fat and juicy... I know I'm not alone.

To combat this, I propose a detox. I really wanna stop doing as much drugs, but I really need your help with this cos I've got no willpower.

Weed gives me an awful case of daytime somnolence, regretamine does exactly what it says on the tin, that chimichanga sends me so west I end up east and miaow makes me so sleazy, I've often contemplated going up to Robin's room to rape him in the middle of the night. One time, I got so sleazy, I played Cummy Dodger. On my own. And I was hungry.

It's clearly detrimental to the structure of our lives so can we all like, stop for a lttle while and clean up a bit, at least so we're fresh for festival season. We all like each other, yeah? So let's like, hang out in the day? We live in London town and yet we see and do nothing.

We all live a bike ride away from the Rio and the Genesis, independent cinemas that offer extremely reasonable prices. Hell, it's awards season so let's get some good quality celluloid action on the go.

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker just won the Bafta for Best Picture and is a shoo-in for the Oscar and that's on all week at Genesis, as is Tom Ford's A Single Man for which Colin Firth won Bafta for Best Male Lead.

For those of you who loved Amelie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Mic-Macs is out tonight and next Friday is Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in 3D, an Orange Wednesday must (cos 3D costs bares).

Eccles and Marilyn, you both work and play in the art world, tell us what's going on. I just went to White Cube where there's an interesting video installation going on at the minute, the National Portrait has it's competition on and there's some sick photos up, and my mate has a gallery showing at the moment in Weezy Eleven.

There's some sick ballet booking for June (Swan Lake) and some nang-a-lang flamenco at Sadler's Well's. And there's bare theatre for us to get to, which is cheap especially if you're under 26. Sorry Luki, Anita, Freddie, James...

And Robin, hook us up with some Madame Tussaud's shit. London Eye, Aqauarium, whatever, if you can, please. That'd be well safety.

I fucking love you guys, let's not end up a bunch of Heath Ledger's and Brittany Murphy's. Even if Valium is bloody lovely.

Are you a Drape or are you a Square?

King Crybaby (with a tear in my eye) x

A New Year, Another Morning After The Morning After

Forgive me father, for I have sinned. I feel it appropriate to offer trite words of contrition to my armada of disciples who religiously read this blog, for what can only be described as my Sloth. For months now, you've probably been sat on Facebook chat, gossiping amongst yourselves about my self-imposed hiatus, waiting for more teachings and shit.

Quite predictably, what happened was The Fame. It got too much. Since being featured in British Vogue as one of the people most likely to define the next generation, I did a tiny little Hatfield. I fell in with a bad crowd called The Cry Babies, made up of burlesque dancers, comedians, actors, read as druggies, dropouts and deadbeats. Since then I've been going mad.

At first, the glitz, the glamour, the clamour for my autograph was nang. I was on the guestlist for the guestlist for the some of the most exclusive Hoxton warehouse raves known to Jeff Leach. The miaow was being passed around as we sat at afterparties and hotel lobbies, chatting pure wolf with each other, like cats on a hot tin roof. Not like coke wolf, mind. Good wolf, where you have conversations with people instead of monologues at people. We'd partake in the most epic orgies. Caligula ain't blushing at these, he's swapped his Calvin's for a chastity belt and become a eunuch.

After a while, the screaming hordes of female fans got much too much. Soon, the olfactory's were at work again as I became addicted to the waft of dirty knickers lofted in my direction from all corners. I knew I had a problem when I was caught trying to sniff the crotches of American Apparel models through the computer screen by the Doris.

I was driven indoors, where I found solace on the interweb. I became yet another turgid penis on Chatroulette, relentlessly slapping the F9 key in the face, waiting for an Eastern bloc beauty to show me a slice of snatch. I finally hit rock bottom when I found myself cheating on the Doris with Ariane, a girl I met through mutual acquaintance. I found Ariane to be cold and monotonous at times, but the sex, it was too good. Invariably, I'd wake up the afternoon after the night before, the post-coital shame later morphing into guilt. I got depression or something, ballooned in weight and became an unmotivated recluse.

We created our own time zone in the middle of Newington Green where we existed existentially, sans boundaries, sans time and sans the washing up. In fact, the washing up became a source of sanity for me whilst I was struggling to come to terms with my stratospheric fame. I would just stand by the sink, running the Ecover-doused sponge over the plates 'til they squeaked, then when I was done, I'd sniff the sponge, the amalgam of marigold and camomile mixed with three-day old baked beans left out on the side proving to be an irresistible aroma.

I tell you, I've been to Hell and back. I was meant to come back a bit earlier, but I missed my connection and got stuck on the platform getting paranoid, convinced that the man hollering in my ear through his self-importance machine, was referring solely to me when he goes on about how I got to please remember to take my personal belongings with me. I write this now in one of those midweek car crash moments where the diazepam still isn't working, you're in tears because you can't sleep and you vow never to touch that stuff again. I will touch that stuff again, it's bloody lovely. But for now, your prophet is back.