Above: A couple of guys who can relate

Death
[The ageing process]
Rating: 0.1

Holy cows’ hairy assholes, getting closer to the big sleep sucks. The nearer you get to the end of your body’s worthless existence, the more tedious everything becomes. See how happy kids are? That’s cos this shit is off the radar to those dicks. See how miserable most of those coffee-breathed shuffling humans on your commuter train are? Yep, that’s cos they know they’re getting older by the nanosecond, and with every passing tick on their fake Rolex they’re becoming more and more useless. Every burger you stuff in your mouth is one burger nearer to the last you’ll ever eat. Every mildly euphoric orgasm you put your increasingly flabby body through is closer to being the last pop. Every time you put on your favourite song, you know, the one that makes you feel like an untouchable kickass teenager again… yep, you guessed it. One day you’ll listen to that song for the last time and you won’t even know it. Hell, maybe you already did. Your favourite movie? The Godfather? Goodfellas? Casablanca? Breakdance 2: Electric Boogaloo? That’s right – one day soon you’re gonna watch that movie for the last time ever. Oh, it’ll still hang around after you’re gone, getting watched up on all kinds of high-def bull-dung by upstarty pricks that aren’t even alive yet, but you won’t be around for it. Nope. Someone else’s favourite movie now. Get used to it.

Also, death sucks so much cos it’s all so painful and confusing – which are two things that should never happen to one person at the same time. Painful because our dumbass bodies haven’t evolved so far yet that they realise that pain is no longer necessary. Yep, you heard me – what is the holy motherfingering point of pain? It might have served a purpose when we were cave-dwelling jackanapes, hunting dinosaurs and inventing wheels, but that’s cos we didn’t know what fire was back then, and we didn’t realise it would kill us if we were on it for too long. We know now. Being on fire is bad. So we don’t need pain any more to tell us. Are you telling me that the only reason we still have to endure pain is for the presumably small percentage of blind people out there who catch on fire every year? Seems like we’re punishing the many to help out the few here. Political correctness gone fuck-simple, if you care to ask me.

So yeah, pain is a total waste of resources. And confusion? Well, the whole death scenario is pretty confusing due to all the unbelievable claptrap we’ve had fed to us from all kinds of corners. Heaven? Hell? Paradise? Purgatory? Limbo?

I’m sorry?

It’s just…

Well, I thought we were all a bit smarter than that now. It’s very simple: death equals a big load of nothing. It’s OVER. That’s it. Now, you can carry on skipping through your tedious existence not thinking about this or, like me, you can take TEN FUCKING MINUTES every day to think about this: one day you are not going to exist any more. Simple and terrifying as that. Like my dad used to say, “Enjoy your life, son, cos no other fucker’s gonna enjoy it for you.” Yeah, well thanks Dad, but I think I’ll take my advice from someone who hasn’t already gleefully ended three lives, and would be finishing a whole lot more if it weren’t for the justice system.

You – the near future – probably still reading fucking blogs but your balls don’t work

Anyway, the whole death thing is such a huge nightmare, maybe you docile dorks are just as well pretending it’s not going to happen. Maybe you’re all happy to trundle along doing your fucking recycling and inviting neighbors for dinner and watching Mad Men and rapidsharing 320kbps pre-releases and shredding your bank statements and taking your dogs for walks and getting married and drinking vodka tonics and smiling at cute Down’s Syndrome kids and throwing Frisbees and shaving your pussies and your balls, but you know what? Take a good look at that pussy or those balls. Go on – look real hard. Get in closer. See all that sweet shit right there? That nice pussy? Those nice balls? Well, keep lookin’ at ’em, cos one day that’ll all be gone too. Sucks, huh?

Alcohol
[Purveyors of booze, since man realised this is all there is]
Rating: 8.6

As genres of self-abasement grow ever more diverse depending on the social circles you hang in (seriously – if you party with meth-whores, you’re a meth-whore), it’s worth bearing in mind that there are great levellers in the intoxicantosphere that unite arthritic b-boys, harassed middle-aged middle-managers and bladed-up tweens alike, and none more so than sweet, sweet liquor. You know what? Keep your cocaine – it’s expensive, cut to shit with baby laxatives and makes you jabber like a Miyazaki voice-over artist. Keep your weed – it’s stinky, it makes your eyes red, and it makes… whoa, when did I start using the Oxford Comma? You know, that third comma before the last ‘and’. Was it since Vampire Weekend started banging on about it? And how come they call it the Oxford Comma when we all know it’s the Harvard Comma? Is that another pretentious Anglophile thing, like when Pavement didn’t call themselves Sidewalk? And what are Vampire Weekend doing name-checking Lil’ Jon? What the fuck is happening here?
Anyhoo, screw marijuana. Makes you lose your train of thought. And paranoid. And tedious. So what are we left with? Crack (nope), smack (nope), acid (double-nope)… Yep, you really have no other choice – it’s the demon drink. And what a curvaceous, lip-smacking, bubble-butted demon it is. No other mood-altering substance out there accentuates the highs, helps you out with the lows, levels out the middles, and thoroughly humps with your shit like booze. It’s, like, why do we worship Gods and Buddhas and prophets when there’s something sitting on your shelf at home that can make you a) way more spiritual, b) concurrently way more attractive and attractable, and 3) shuts you down like Alt-Apple-Escape when you need to be silenced. Here are some examples as to why it’s so freakin’ great:

1: You’re lonely.
Okay, so you’re sitting at home with a deficit of buddies and/or sexual liaisons. What do you do? Well, you don’t lovingly prepare a quiche, tune into Big Brother Germany on satellite, and slowly sup a Coke float, do you? Fuck no. If life’s racing past you and not offering you a lift, you get out there, get the swankiest bottle of bourbon your piss-weak job affords you, and you tank up. Why? Here’s why: so you can get truly loaded, get online, message ex-girlfriends, leave abusive Facebook wall-posts on one-time drinking pals’ profiles, rediscover your love of gonzo/horror/snuff movies on eBay/Amazon, max out whatever credit you have left, and laugh yourself silly at whatever stupid noise your mouth decides to make. All night. No-one to stop you, remember? You’re lonely.

2. You hate your life
Again, stupid noises become hilarious, you can fall around and toast dead relatives you kinda wish you’d gotten to know after all, and you can block out all the moaning/recriminations from any nearby spouses/well-wishers/employees without a care as to what they think of you. It’s like my dad always said, “Son, when you’ve got nothing left to lose, it’s time to really let loose with the fuck yous.”

3. You like being dizzy
See how much you can drink before the room does that spinny thing and you have to shut your eyes but that doesn’t work cos it’s still spinning behind your eyes and you realise it wasn’t the room that was spinning after all it was your eyes but the thing is when you open them again it still looks like the room is spinning and now all the people are spinning in it too so you look at your hands and would you look at that those fuckers are spinning now and it’s like whooaaa the whole world is spinning which I guess is kinda the truth cos it really is spinning you know and sometimes I can see it spin man you know sometimes when I look up and I know I shouldn’t be able to see this but I can and I can see the world spinning but WWWHHHRRHHHOOOAOARGH!

Yeah, there’s one downside to alcohol, which is why it doesn’t get the highest ever Bitchfork score of 8.9, and that is the dumb ol’ way we’ve somehow evolved into being utterly poisoned by it. I guess that’s to stop us pouring it on our Bran Flakes, or going to bed wearing one of those plastic baseball caps that hold two cans of beer (or a vodka and mixer if you’re dainty). It’s probably for the best, but it is pretty annoying for those of us who can’t face a sunrise, sunset or afternoon without applying ethanol to our blood. Ah well, you do your best. Whaddya want? I’m buying…

Rat Banjos, June 10th, 2008

Tha Alkaholiks – Only When I’m Drunk

[See post to listen to audio]

Spoilers
[Idiots, since man learned to communicate]
Rating: 2.3

I loathe spoilers. Even good ones. Spoilers are super-nasty. Yet they’re everywhere. I can’t walk down the street these days without catching a few spoilers on the way. Indy goes on a fucking spaceship? Spoiler! That guy in Prison Break gets stabbed? Spoiler! Those two humps in that movie with the doo-hickey where one of ‘em turns out he’s the other’s dad but he isn’t really cos he already died? Spoiler! Spoiler! Spoiler!

The first recorded spoiler was in the 7th Century BC, when a lowly Greek cutlery merchant was overheard explaining to his wife that Odysseus (star of Homer’s oral poem, The Odyssey, which was a big hit the previous century) didn’t die in the Trojan War, but actually went back to find his missus, who thinks he’s de…

Shit. Sorry, I should have written SPOILER ALERT in front of that, shouldn’t I? Damn. I’m really sorry. I guess dishing out spoilers is easier than I thought. I was gonna come over all 0.7 out of ten for spoilers but I guess I’m going to have to amend that. Well, it’s not like you were ever going to read it, is it? Hell, I said I’m sorry. Yeah? Well, fuck you.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, so this merchant was explaining to his wife what had happened in the poem he’d just listened to, and a passing nobleman overheard the shit about Odysseus not dying. Thing is, this nobleman had tickets for him and the wife to go see a reading of The Odyssey that weekend at the local ampitheater, and he’d been holding out on not hearing what happened in it. So that screwed that. The nobleman flew into a rage, things went fuck-shaped, and there was an almighty scuffle. See? No good can come of a spoiler.

Other notable spoilers since then include: the drunk guy who came out of the cinema at London’s Marble Arch after a screening of The Sixth Sense yelling, “Woooo! I’m a big scary ghost Bruce Willis!” to horrified on-lookers; the drunk local radio DJ (who can’t be named here for legal reasons) who live on air gave away the ending of Melville’s Moby Dick to a horrified Norwich listenership one windy 1987 afternoon; and the time my dad told me not to bother getting married cos it’s “a fucking disaster, son”. He sure gave away the ending there.

Anyway, spoilers are annoying and I seem to spend two thirds of my life covering my ears trying to avoid them. It even spoils my enjoyment of something if I know a potential spoiler could ruin it. Cos then I’m just trying to figure out what the spoiler could be. I spend a whole season of Lost trying to avoid hearing a spoiler about the season finale. That can’t be healthy. And for what? Just to find out XXXXX’s dead? Hey, who blanked that out?

Rat Banjos, June 4, 2008