Another Little Disappointment

I’ve just been to Burger King.

I ordered the Cheezy Bites, because I’m something of an explorer. There was something about the Mini-Angus Burger from the kids menu that stank of pedestrianism, and I fancied something a little more… recherché.

My hopes have rarely been higher, so you can imagine my disgust when I unfolded my greasy paper pouch to uncover these hopeless fingertips. “I can’t bite these,” I wailed internally. “I could pop them in my mouth, but that’s chewing, not biting”

“Oh, I’ll eat them,” I thought defiantly, popping the last two in at the same time, “but I’m not happy.”

I glared at the backlit poster of the Three Cheese Double Angus, while the young lady behind the counter looked at me like I was pretending to act out an internal monologue.

“Yes, I’m aware that bite can correctly be used to mean small amount of food,” I continued to think. “But I maintain that these would be better called Chew-Chooz, Cheesy Pop-ins, or Masticatory Curd Baubles.”

It was at that point that I saw, out of the corner of my eye, another fat man staring sadly at a tiny golden ball of fried cheese, and silently mouthing angry words at it. I woofed at him, and he woofed back at the same time, so I jumped onto his back (see, it wasn’t a mirror) and steered him home using his ears. We’ve now been married for six years. Which brings me onto:

THE ROMANTIC MANOEUVRES OF FAT MEN

From Maximum Awesome’s indispensible bear FAQ
Q: How does one bear greet another bear?
A: Easy! One just says “woof”, and/or growls.

This is true, but not terribly refined. You woof first, and if they woof back, you may growl. Growling without an answering woof could be seen as aggression, and if you are on the fat man’s home territory he might attempt to devour you. This operates on the same scoring system as conkers – if an eighteen stone man eats a superior 21-stone man, he becomes a truly awesome thirty-nine stone bear, and is entitled to some sweet disability benefits.

Once you are both growling, you should retire to the nearest pub’s toilets, and spoon in a cubicle until Spring. In an attempt to spread understanding of fat gay bears, I have written Wooftard Rendezvous. It is a short play about fat gay bears.

INT. NIGHT. A BEAR BAR.

JEFF
Woof

STEVE [looking around]
Woof?

Steve spins around on his stool really fast. When he stops he is facing Jeff.

STEVE
WOOF

JEFF
Grrrr

They rub their hands all over each others shirts, their heads tilted backwards and their mouths open.

INT. DAY. KITCHEN, THREE YEARS LATER

Jeff is looking pleased. He is holding a jar of mayonnaise and parading up and down the kitchen. Steve is rummaging in the bacon drawer.

JEFF
Woof. Woof woof. Woof. Woof…

There is a knock at the door.

STEVE
Wu! Wuwuwu!

Jeff rolls his eyes and answers the door. It is Damien.

DAMIEN
Woof! Woof!

JEFF
Wooof!

Steve looks down at the heart he has made from strips of crispy bacon, and slams a pawful of angry mayo onto it. Instantly regretting what he has done, he eats it all and goes to sleep, standing up.

INT. EVENING. BEDROOM.

Steve checks all the windows, locks the door.

STEVE
Why did you woof with three o’s at Damien?

JEFF
I… I didn’t. I… was doing a French woof. You know, like wurf. Stretches the vowel sound out.

STEVE
Oh. Well, why were you woofing in French?

JEFF
He’s just come back from a trip to Paris.

He holds up an official document with the word WOOF and a paw print at the bottom

STEVE
Oh, that’s interesting. Because it’s not what this sworn affidavit says.

JEFF
Have you been issuing subpoenas to my friends?

STEVE
You didn’t leave me any choice. I had to subpoena something

JEFF
Look Steve, what do you want me to say? That I’ve been spooning Damien in toilet cubicles until Spring? Because for the last three years it’s always been you. Just you, Steve.

STEVE
Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise I was such a chore.

JEFF
This is pointless. I’m opening this door and we’re going to go out there, and we’re going to woof at each other like this never happened.

Jeff opens the door

STEVE
I’m going to eat Damien. Perhaps then you’ll love me again.

PASSING JOURNALIST
I didn’t know fat gay men could talk. Or that they ate each other. What a scoop!

JEFF
Oh nice one, Steve. Way to give us away to the Muggles. We’re going to be in shit with Dumbledore now. And it’s double potions tomorrow.

END

That’s pretty much all I know about how fat men do it. If the gay bear lifestyle appeals to you, you can become fat simply by eating more food than your body needs, and you can simulate hair by asking a doctor to implant a powerful magnet in your guts, and rolling around in iron filings. This will have the side benefit of aligning your chakras, which should allow you to fly.

Steve: do you think cockatiels enjoy singing like we enjoy singing

Log: I wonder if they’re trying to impress us into having sex with them. I thought that’s what birdsong was all about. Or territory. Perhaps they’re telling us to get out

Steve: well, when we sing we are trying to impress people on to our cocks/into our vaginas

Log: I suppose. Singing in the shower, we might as well be saying “i am naked, i couldn’t be more ready for sex”

Steve: nobody sings during sex as it is redundant

Log: Unless the other person begins to look bored

Steve: then you might hum something

Log: Personally, I’d bring out the big guns. Belt out a couple of verses of nessun dorma, right up em

Out of interest, it is Steve’s 23rd birthday today, and he’s having it at a karaoke bar. Girls – if his eyes land on you when he sings “and it’s as big as a whale!” from Love Shack, cross your legs immediately.

Happy Birthday, Steve!

To some people, the 80s were all about the rivalry between  Duran Duran and Wham!

People talk of the playground being divided by a huge tennis net, and long lunch hours spent with their faces pressed against the mesh, their snarling maws hungry for the flesh of the enemy. Geography lessons dominated by the constant slinging of sharpened 45 records, like saw-wheel shuriken. Midnight atrocities committed on the all-weather pitch, atrocities that still replay themselves in the dreams of the victims.

Well, here’s what you can do with your old pop rivalry. You can take it, and you can fold in into a paper aeroplane. Then you can hop onto your back, thrust your legs into the air, and stabilising yourself with your left elbow, launch  the paper aeroplane directly upwards. Then – quickly, you don’t have much time – put your hands on your hips, and manouevre your bumhole into the path of the plane, so it goes right in (hint! You can tear little rudders into the rear of the wings, and it’ll make it look like you have a superior understanding of aerodynamics).

Fuck ‘em. The real battle for the hearts and minds of British schoolchildren (by which I primarily mean me) was between Jennifer Lynch’s tale of amputation beyond the call of medical duty, Boxing Helena, and the moral comedy Eating Raoul, in which a pair of “straights” invite dogfucking dwarves into their home and kill them.

To say I’ve never seen the films until this week, they’ve had a lifelong disproportionate hold on me. It’s the titles. Even though Eating Raoul is a bit of a spoiler, what with the killing and eating of Raoul being the punchline of the entire fucking film, and even if Helena spends close to no time in a box (and even spends the first forty, long minutes of the film with all four arms and legs), that didn’t stop those two titles sitting in the spit on the tip of my tongue.

PAUL: What do you want to do tonight
ME: Well at 7 we’ll be Eating Raoul, but after that I’m free if you want to pop around Helena’s, she needs boxing.
PAUL: Dirtboxing?
ME: Don’t be childish.

ANYWAY RIGHT, I’ve just watched both films, and this is what I’ve learned:

1) I have rewritten my life to believe that Boxing Helena came out when I was in school. In fact, it came out in 1994. So that conversation wasn’t me being a charmingly precocious twelve year old, it was me being a subnormal twenty-something. Then again, I just did this in Tesco, and the most remarkable thing about this is the fact I’m 36.

Also, what the fuck is Tarragon? It sounds like a robot from the seventies. Who buys this shit?

2) Because I’d been told the shock summary about Boxing Helena – “it’s about a man who cuts off a woman’s arms and legs, and keeps her in a box,” I’d imagined a very different movie. The other line that people always said, to demonstrate a profounder understanding of human behaviour, was “but the thing is, she’s always in control“. Naturally, I imagined Helena riding her surgeon around the house, guiding him with the reins in her mouth, and being snippy with him.

3) Speaking of people pretending to have a deep insight into movies, my childhood friend John once told me that “Star Wars isn’t a story of good and evil – it’s cleverer than that. They let you make your own mind up”. I see on Facebook he’s joined the group “ENGLAND IS FULL – NO MORE IMMIGRANTS”. I guess I should have seen that coming. This doesn’t have much to do with Helena or Raoul, I’m a bit bored with the format though

4) It’s OK to keep a woman hostage as long as a) she eventually likes it, b) any sex scenes have the limbs momentarily restored, and c) it was all a dream anyway so like what the fuck.

5) It’s OK to kill and eat Hispanics as long as they’re taken with a decent wine

Now to put my life lessons into practice – if I’m not back in three hours, split my possessions amongst yourselves.

So we all know about the basic Hanky Code, right? It’s the failsafe method that gay men use to find a husband. If you’re straight, here’s is how it works:

1. Choose the colour that represents the thing you like.

2. If you like doing it, but the hanky in your back left pocket. If you like having it done to you, put it in your back right pocket.

3. Go to a gay bar. Press your bum against the bum of a man you find superficially appealing. If two similarly-coloured hankies meet, a small klaxon will sound. Stay perfectly still and a pride march will begin to happen.

It was invented in the 1920s, when web design looked like this, and we’ve invented loads of sex since then: so here’s the July 2009 update, which you can print out and insert into your gay manuals immediately.

I’m a staggeringly sensitive person. I’m perfectly attuned to humanity, and the energy that human emotions transmit along the fibres of the universe. When someone is sad, their sadness consumes me – unless someone is standing between us laughing, in which case I’m struck by a serene sense of balance, and can resume shopping.

But when a force as powerful as Michael Jackson is suffering, it’s like a spear landing in my chakra, and my response is an unearthly spiritual howl, a reality-shearing scream that cuts directly into the higher dimensions. You might have missed it: it’s easy, when your mind is full of the nothing mush of the physical world, to not notice someone screaming in the sixth dimension.

This is why I stood outside, screaming. People need to know what is coming. I am the only one that knows Michael Jackson is going to die.

This is my vision: a shadow spreading over the Kingdom of Pop. A child’s face in the sun, her tears extinguishing the flames. A suddenly-visible moon, presiding over the baronies and feifdoms of pop’s subgenres, basked the peasants tending the paedofields in a ghastly unlight.

The world is coming apart, Pop is ending, and there’s nothing we can do. It’s already happened in my head, and you cannot change what has already happened (in my head).

I give him two days. And that Farah Fawcett looks like she’s got a dicky tit, too

I’m always hearing amazing conversations. Other people say they don’t overhear any great conversations at all, so the only logical explanation is that my threatening presence makes everyone put in a bit of extra effort. It’s certainly true that spikes of conversational excellence occur at that precise time I shake my fist, drop my trousers, and make huge snarling whoops. Take this conversation, that I overheard on the bus, this very morning.

Son: I hope this bus does a loop the loop
Mother: If it does, I’ll park a tit on your leg

Bouyed by this warm cross-generational interchange, I disembarked and entered my regular morning newsagent. It is here, that I always cast my eye over the Pork Farms pasties. I imagine them in my mouth, and try to work out whether that would be a thing I’d be happy paying £1.79 for.

This is my benchmark of acceptability: every day that I decide not to buy and eat a Pork Farms pasty at 8:30am, is another day I have passed the human test. Imagine my surprise when I overheard this!

Customer: My hand’s stuck in this bag of Monster Munch.
Shopkeeper: Have you tried taking it out?
Customer: Tried for a while, but now I quite like it. It’s like a crunchy mitten.
Shopkeeper: A mitten… of monsters!
Customer: Yes!

Cheered immeasurably by this stolen banter, I wandered out of the shop, where I overheard a homeless gentleman trading bon mots with his carrier bag.

Man: Did I tell you about my time at the Danish Embassy?
The carrier bag billows out an unearthly gasp, and paisley swirls envelop the man.
Man: It was the grooviest year of my life.
The bag catches a gust of wind, and rockets into the stratosphere, where it is struck by lightning
Man: And I haven’t stopped dancing yet!
The man snakes himself around a lamp-post, where he remains perfectly still, but for the wild muddling of a lazy, prehensile erection.

Even at work, the people around me have incredible conversations, which I overhear with overstated reaction shots. Cupping my hand to my ear, blinking six times and saying “whu-uuu?”, or simply hooting like a maniac: everyone knows when I’ve overheard something, because I’m standing up, and repeating it word for word. This is a conversation that I’m overhearing right now. I’m piping directly from my ears to my fingers. It’s coursing through me like cake batter, and you are my ovens.

Gelatinous Cube: Man, HR are being such dicks about this tribunal hearing.
Halfling: Dude, I heard about that. You shat out a skeleton soldier in the atrium lift?
Gelatinous Cube: Fuck, when you put it like that, of course it sounds bad. He came out as he went in. Undead.
Halfling: He says you shat the helmet into his face. He says you did it with such deft comic timing that it could only have been deliberate.
Gelatinous Cube: Haha! I totally did that. I thought “he’s just done a double take and collected his thoughts, long enough has passed for everyone to think it’s over, now’s the time for a strong visual punchline”. The Beholder cracked up, it was awesome.
Halfling: Don’t come out with this shit at the tribunal, man.
Gelatinous Cube: You worry too much.
Halfling: You know what, I’ve always wondered why skeleton soldiers carry gold around. Why do the undead need money?
Gelatinous Cube: You still working on that open mic set?
Halfling: Fuck you.

That’s all I’ve overheard today. If I hear anyone saying anything else, I promise you, you’ll be the joint second to know.

I thought going freelance would be the kickstart I needed to maintain the blog. It turns out, I’m only really productive when I’m in a job I hate if I get paid regularly.

Does anyone have a job where I can just sit there, silently fuming into the internet at the cunts on the next desk? And it has to be in a company where no-one knows how to use the internet, or Google their own name.

In the meantime, I’m trying to develop a non-offensive Tumblr habit, so look at that if you like.

http://disappointment.tumblr.com