I’ve decided to join the boys for sushi at lunch today. I’m going to start with a delicious bowl of envi, then a half dozen salmon jealousi; this I’ll covet cover with soy sauce mixed with plenty of strong green wasabi, and I’ll make sure I pay the bill with yen.
8 —— 500k / acre / year
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$10 ——
$1m]
$1m] |
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4 free
There’s nothing quite like a high-quality shirt. Although to be fair I know nothing about shirts - it’s possible that this one is simply the first one that’s ever fitted me properly. Nonetheless it wasn’t as cheap as the rest of my shirts, and it feels sturdy and soft at once on my skin, and I feel as though in terms of shirts I’ve been cripplingly malnourished my whole life and I’ve just had me the shirt equivalent of a succulent 12 oz fillet mignon wrapped in bacon for support and served with an enormous baked potato and a smaller potato stuffed with a luxurious reduction of red peppers and mushrooms.
The untrustworthy ones,
oh, you watch out for them -
the person whose friend is your enemy’s friend -
you watch out for them, or you’re screwed,
for you can’t comprehend
the untrustworthy ones -
and you won’t get a chance to condemn -
and your enemy’s enemy’s enemy’s friend
is your enemy too.
It’s too late when you read the review:
‘X appears to be less than familiar with Donne’s
second cousin, fifteen times removed.’
Yes, you watch out for them when you work in the Arts -
or the Faculty of, anyway -
for as quick as those cloistered old cunts will declare you a genius, they’ll lop off your operative parts
in the Grub St Biannual
(a most influential
square metre of papier maché),
which is not to imply
that it’s wise to rely
on a BsC or MBA.
there must be something in the beer. for the last hour or so before i get back to my hotel room i can think of nothing but this one particular song. now, that happens a lot, where a song enters your head and won’t leave without a good brawl or some of the hard stuff, but the queer thing is that this song wasn’t even one i liked especially. it’s a song i’ve heard a few times, on account of it lying next to a song i do like on an album i generally don’t, and my being too bone idle to get up and see to the thing, if you take my meaning. but it’s not a song i like, or a song that says a great deal to me. and the other thing is, this isn’t your ordinary song stuck in head situation, because i’m quite done over with the urge to listen to the thing. i’ve been losing my concentration all night, and not just because of the beer, now, and i’ve been stuck uncommon hard on the chorus of this song. and when i get back to my hotel room, after a glass or two if you catch my meaning, i can’t do nothing, not a thing, but hunt down this song, this song i don’t really like, and listen to it on the old laptop computer, which is terrible quality sure, and no bottom end and no top end neither, but it’s there all the same, it’s the song, the one i’ve been wanting to hear. now don’t look at me like that you know, there must be something in the beer.
“…the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
- Joyce.
Shh.
Every snowflake is supposedly unique (although I suspect this is propaganda spread by the liberal elite) but for practical purposes and Esquimaux notwithstanding there are only three kinds of snow:
1. Big Snow, falling in big, sloppy flakes, simulating the nuzzling of a big, damp dog as they land on your face. Like Big Government and Big Tobacco, Big Snow is a victim of its own success. But people don’t organise protest rallies against Big Snow, they just stand around gawping at it and admiring its Bigness and Snowiness.
2. Small Snow, which falls in a bitter bad wind almost horizontal, small and hard and scrunched up and cold, much colder than Big Snow. Small snow doesn’t look like it’s sticking to anything, but then you turn around and it’s up to your ears, like work over which you’ve procrastinated. Small Snow has a Napoleon complex and isn’t good for anything at all.
3. Liquid Snow. Also known as ‘rain.’ Liquid Snow is drinkable but a poor building material.
4. White and the Seven Dwarfs Snow. A brand of snow made long, long ago in a far-away land.
5. Snow-Donia. Snow from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
6. Snow Joke. Also known as Snow-fakes.
7. That’s enough types of snow. Ed.
Glurge alert!* You’ve probably had to clear this particular cack-nugget from your inbox on more than one occasion. The first time, maybe you smiled in a world-weary way, one corner of your mouth upturned, the other drooping, like a constipated Connery-era Bond. The second time you stifled a scowl, the third time, you found your brain recoiling slightly at the notion that “Noelle,” age 7, has discovered and articulated that “love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it everyday.”
It was probably just me and my abysmal 7-year old dress sense, but no Noelle ever told me she liked my shirt, and if she had, I’d have made damn sure it was inside out and smeared with shite the next time I went near a girl with it on.
So we’re expected to believe that little Billy, just 4 years old (i.e. pre-school), conceives of Love as follows:
“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.”
Right. Because “Kindergarten Cassanova” Billy’s been around the block, eh? Let’s try a little experiment - let’s just think about any quote from this manifest of mush, and pretend it’s not Billy, age 4, piping up, but Bubba, age 44. Do they still sound insightful? No, almost all of them sound like infantile schmaltz. And what is “Billy” saying, anyway? As far as I can tell, he’s saying that love is when people don’t dis your ass in public. But wait! He’s only four years old, so it must be a pearl of innate human wisdom! These obviously aren’t real children - the briefest glance at the phrasing and vocabulary demonstrates that. They’re disguises used to perpetrate heinous acts of mawkishness on countless numb, loveless cubicle-dwellers who are short of any ray of a daydream.
One or two of these aphorisms are quite clever. But they’ve clearly been handpicked from a selection of puke-inducing checkout tomes and inserted into the mouths of babes to give them an extra-thick coating of glurge. I don’t know what love is, and neither, I suspect, does this homogenous gang of made-up, all-American oiks.
Wait, I do know what love is. Love is failing to figure out what love is. And I also know what love isn’t. It isn’t something the nature of which is enquired of by “a group of professional people” and posted endlessly and without credit on (where else?) the internet.