So, the day after the birthday.
I have to keep reminding myself that I turned 25 yesterday because, despite the numerous texts / facebook messages / phone calls, I really don't feel any different.

Drinks last night was fun(ny) everybody got fairly drunk and I appear to have ended up better off than most but I'm in trouble at work because Derek is so hungover he had to leave after 20 mins this morning!
Hahaha.

Awesome.

Overall it was a good night, despite me having my annual mid-party sulk for a bit.

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Here's a puzzle for you; somehow I manged to come home with more money than I left with.

Despite buying drinks a couple of times and buying takeaway for 5 people at the end of the night.
And I didn't hit a cash machine once last night.

Talk about odd...

So that's the big Q people, it feels the same as everything else.

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Oh yeah, this month has been mostly about the Beach Boys and 'Black & Gold' by Sam Sparro.

I just thought you should all see Bob being the Legend that he is...
Plus I wanted to check I knew how YouTube worked.

The first 4 videos are 5 mins each so feel free to skip them if you want/can.

 Bleep-bleep-squeedely-blop-bop

Hey everybody.
I'm back on the work placement scheme and hitting the hayfever tablets.
Combined, this is making me VERY tired when I get home.
That's this months excuse for not posting.

I don't have GTAIV yet, and i'm not particularly bothered - it looks good but seems to be pretty much the same old stuff.

I do have the new Portishead album - it's good but isn't exactly what I expected. Much more industrial than the first two albums.

I also have a new "Best of the Beach Boys" LP (1966 one).
Listening to which inspired me to spend £30 on more beach boys cds on amazon.

Also, think I finally got my xBox live fixed but have no time to play on it.

Full-time work sucks.

Back in another month.xxx

I am having a bad day.

So tonight I came home drunk.
Not drunk enough to embarass my father, who'd been at the same party as me, but drunk enough to confess to a woman I've known for 6/7 years that she is , in fact, my image of the perfect woman (at least in the real world as celebrities no longer count as real. Although  I honestly believe she could give Eliza Dushku a run for her money.).

So anyway, I sit at home watching the tv, messing with the channels, and end up on "The Hits"'s Superstars of Noise,.
\Random routine "emo" (see Nu-emo) bullshit, i expect.

But no, although it started out with 'Movies' by Alien Ant Farm (not neccesarily a serious tune, but one I've always felt  a certain affection for) and then 'Thnks fr th mmrs' by Fall Out Boy (Also not exactly to be tsaken seriously, but a blistering rhythm section)  it progressed (slowly) to a point where I kept saying to myself, "See if the next video's any good, then go to bed". It went through a catchy Marilyn Manson tune that I remember from my youth, through a shit LostProphets piece of garbage to some Linkin Park song that was actually pretty good (Breaking The Habit) and 'Want you Bad' by The Offspring 'til it got to 'No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn' by the Beasties.
I sat there thinking to myself, "Finally, I can go to bed after this. The only way they can beat this is that Smashing Pumpkins song." Lo and behold, what comes on next...
The Smashing Pumpkins - Today.

Fuck me, they impressed me for some crappy freeview music channel showing "Rock" videos leading up to the weekend....

Now I know it's not "Life On Mars" (which I think I believe to be the greatest song ever written, though not my favourite)  BUT i'm starting to honestly believe that it is the closest my generation will ever get to a song of that caliber.
It is our 'Life on Mars' - the perfectly written 3/4 minute song that's so... accurate. To everything.
It encapsulates everything I want to be able to write, while seeming effortless.

I dunno, I never really knew what the point was of what I was saying, I was just hoping to figure it put before I got to this point in the post.

The meaning of life isn't in either of those songs; I'm pretty sure it's contained in 'Horse With No Name' by America (and i've been convinced of that for well over ten years now), but there's something there - a certain summing up of everything, a sense of closure almost...

Ah, I'm being pretentious now. Or reading pretentious anyway.
I'm gonna stop and go to bed.
Night dudes. Nice to finally speak to you.
Hope you're all (both) well!

One day soon, i'll post again properly, really I will.
It's just so much easier.... not to.
It's not the fact that i don't want to, it's just that there's so many other things I could do instead. Better things.

Hmm.
That reminds me, I've got job applications to fill in.

Back soon amigos!

Hmm, 2008.

Doesn't look too bad.

I guess.

Goodbye 2007.

You weren't that spectacular.

Oh well.

I forgot to mention that I slept wonderfully last night - I had a dream that I was a butterfly.
I hope I'm the butterfly and not the poet.

 I carnt sleep, nothing new there...

You know when you get something stuck in your head and you just carnt sleep because it's going round and round, keeping you awake? It's that.

Maybe it's because I've done nothing all day and my brain's still whirring, maybe it's because I was telling somebody about it this week but something that happened two years ago is playing over and over.

Anybody who's known me for a while now will probably remember me posting something about me getting hit in the street one saturday night but I'll recap just in case.

Walking home from the pub, about 2am with some friends and a guy runs up to me in the street for no understandable reason and punches me in the side of the head. I black out completely and come to in some bushes with a broken ankle.
In between, this bastard has smacked two of my friends in the face and I have been pulled, unconcious, out of the path of a fire engine.

Now, the 4 people I was walking with are big - really hard - people. This much is obvious to anyone who sees them.
And I was walking literally a foot, maybe 2, away from them. It makes no sense that this one smallish guy  would pick a fight with us, but for some reason he did.
One of my friends smashes into his head with a full beer bottle (Newcastle brown ale, so a BIG bottle) and his friend turns up to pull him away.

That was pretty much it - 2 mins of madness.

Now this hasn't run through my head for months now - it's been just over two years and I thought I was ok.
It's been a very long time since this has kept me awake.

After about a month, I could walk again and the story passed into folklore as just a tale of something that happened once upon a time and is only brought up when joking about how skinny and weedy I am. Which is fine. I'm just glad my friends were there to look after me.
But they very nearly weren't and that is what is keeping me awake.

I was originally going to catch a taxi home and they were going to walk back to theirs but literally a minute or so before all this, I decided to stay at their place. If I'd gone for the taxi I would have walked directly into this lunatic, on my own, with my friends too far away to see or hear anything. The guy would have just beaten me to shit. For no apparent reason. 
From the little bits I remember of the incident and from what I've been told, this guy was just going crazy - he would have just kept beating on me if they hadn't been there.
If I'd gone the other way I would have been put in hospital at the very least - maybe worse.
I know that sounds like an exaggeration but it happens. More often than you'd think. All it would've taken is one kick to my head and I could have been gone. No more me.
That summer, so many things were going on in this hellhole called Bolton - a guy got stabbed to death outside our favourite pub for the colour of his skin. There were two attacks in the main park, one was a drive-by shooting which was serious but not fatal, the other guy was just beaten to death. It could've been me. So very easily.

So tonight, I lie in bed, all of this going round and round in my head, over and over.
I carnt sleep, I'm just having this mammoth panic attack wondering what the hell my mum would've done.
If anything serious had happened to me, it would've destroyed her.

I feel so numb right now.
I just had to get all that out, thanks for listening.xx

So, first (and most important) thing first, congratulations to my man the Ayatollah for completing his masters degree.

Hell yes! Good man.

Secondly, there's been a lot of nonsense over the last few months about this new UK Monopoly thing.
Keele has actually made it onto the board.
WTF?!
To be fair, everybody I know who is or was ever at Keele voted for it but... c'mon...

Clearly, like me, the rest of the UK didn't give a flyin F@#!...

Thirdly and slightly more important than the last bit, skate. came out yesterday.
Needless to say, about 90% of my waking hours since yesterday lunchtime have been taken up by this.
I'm glad I ignored Halo 3 to get this because it's awesome.
Harder than I expected -  but that's because I'm so used to the THPS series.

Don - if you haven't got it already, pick it up first thing monday.
Anybody else who has a 360, think about it.
The multiplayer's not so exciting as it only has two modes but i'm going to try it online tomorrow and see how it is.

Needless to say there are very few of you still reading this right now so I should sign off.
Nearly October.
Hell yeah.xx

skate. next friday.
awesome.

I wondered what would happen if I deleted my facebook account.
Then I did it.

fun.

Lately, my Lj posts have been made in my head.
That is to say, I've been playing my words out in my head like I was saying them on the radio, or writing them down here. Planning them out and then just repeating them to myself without speaking.

I do this, mostly, when I'm having a quiet cigarette in the back garden on my own.
It's become my quiet, peaceful time of the day.

Which brings me to the first thing - have I only had 4 smokes today?
That means I'll have a maximum of 6 today.
It's quite suprising how much I can limit myself when I'm having a lazy day at home - even on a bad day (and make no mistake, today has been a bad day).
It does help that my sister's been home half the day - I tend to smoke much less then.
It's fairly easy so long as we don't argue.

In fact, having my sister home has been great today.
It's fair to say that my ONLY high point of today has been playing on the 360 with her.

Yes, dear reader, as you have probably guessed - I'm fed up. 
The day has been entirely wasted waiting in for a friend who texted me continually to tell me he'd be late until about half 3, then disappeared entirely. Wonderful.

I should really have expected a bad day on the horizon - after the wonderfulness that was Thursday and, yes, even enjoying myself yesterday helping my brother move house, a sudden drop in seratonin was only to be expected.
Right now I really feel like nothing will cheer me up.
Well, one thing would - I have a lifeline.
But that's not up to me.

That won't make sense, I know, but it does to me.

Perhaps my day will turn around in the end - I have just remembered where Gilbert's cd is : )

Anyway, enough of the emoness.

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Yesterday I printed off tabs for "The Kids Aren't Alright" by The Offspring and then, just for a giggle, "Cowboys From Hell" by Pantera. (I have a guitar with 6 strings now, in case I haven't mentioned it yet)
I'm managing "The Kids..." pretty easily but the suprise for the week is that I can kind of play the intro to "Cowboys From Hell" !!!
Very slowly of course, and with a little difficulty but all the same, COWBOYS FROM HELL!

In associated news, I miss playing my bass.
She'll get some quality time this week hopefully.

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I get hardly anything done nowadays that I want to.
I rarely play my bass, or even the 6-string.
I never draw or paint anymore.
I don't call people, email them or write to them.

I'm about to get very emo on you all so I'll stop now.

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In comedy, more cheerful news, there was just a piece on BBC News 24 about a beard competition.
Can you guess who they used to soundtrack it?

Yep, ZZ Top.
Awesome.

Peace and Love.
xxxx


P.s. Just got a text as I was signing off, he has a valid excuse for failing to turn up and/or communicate!

Hello.
If the next 48 hrs of my life are as good as the last 48 hrs, I'm gonna have an awesome weekend.
And if things go to plan, at least some of next week will be awesome too!

Yes, I'm actually happy.

Love, moi.xxxx