Hibernating Again

It's getting that way anyhow. Last night I lay about smoking some very stale grass I had left over from my last visit to Cork, and playing Forza, which is a racing game. I hate racing games. But I also hate sucking at things. So I lay about, smoked, and played it till I could drive round in the big complicated circley thing without writing myself off too badly.
So today, when I had stuff to do, like scour Belfast for a job, then fuck off to Derry to beg more money out of the Credit Union, I was incapable of rousing myself till gone 4, which is less than no use to anyone. Just enough time to roll into some kind of clothes and dash off up the town for a pointless walk which was essentially a cold shower. The only thing of any use I managed to do was direct a lovely French woman with a silly long cardigan and an enormous nose to that Victoria Square joint. Don't trust that place. Is it outside or inside? If it's inside, why's it so cold? And if it's outside, why do they stop you smoking?
But none of this matters. The fact is I'm sitting in Queen's library again, mostly hiding from the landlady, who's probably beating the door down about now looking for two months' rent. The internet isn't the nicest place to be relegated to. So far I've applied for every job in Belfast where they let you sit down, and looked up everyting from the Ibanez Roadster series guitar to Jimmy Krankee, the scary little fucker. I've even applied to take online surveys, because they apparently pay quite well, and I've a bank account I'm using for nothing else. It's not as if they can scam money out of me, is it? And did you know, it takes at least two weeks before the dole will give you money, after you first apply? I mean, what if I was really in the shit? With kids to feed, bills piling up, mortgage and whatnot? It's a good thing I'm a radge, with no needs other than the occasional drink and the odd bowl of stodge, dodging the landlady and the electricity people (who, I'm reliably informed, couldn't catch AIDS in a Malawian whorehouse), because if I'd a lifestyle to support I'd be fucked. As me granny used to say, "Thank God for nothin', fer there's no bother with it." Must be a full-time occupation holding onto money.

...Or not

It turns out hangovers don't help when you have to audition for shite U2 ripoff ballbag bands either. I intentionally stopped drinking at the perfectly reasonable hour of half 5 in the morning on Monday night, so as to be perfectly rested for the audition with the Beat Poets in Warrenpoint at half 11. Imagine my surprise when I'm woken at half 12 by the singer of said cunts, asking where I was, and not to bother showing. They'd found their bassist, and would be holding no more auditions.
Fair enough I suppose. Punctuality is an important trait in the world of professional rock and roll. It may just be sour grapes that I didn't show enough self-control to at least land out to the audition, that makes me feel just a leetle irked that these cunts are having any kind of success at all. Have you heard the pricks? This is precisely the gutless, soulless, pointless shite that made me pick up a bass and an overdrive pedal in the first place. Why even bother writing songs, if this is all they amount to? I applied to play with them for two reasons. One, as Graham Chapman put it, there's no laugh as good as a supressed one. Imagine playing to hundreds of screaming fans every night, when you know they're wrong and they've wasted their money to see a nonentity of a band. Second, they're looking to tour fairly extensively during spring and summer of this year. I thought it'd be quite a nice way to waste a cpuple of months, then jump ship to clear off to Edinburgh and do something enjoyable. Like study Law for 6 years.
Still, this episode has taught me something. Never deny something you write because you think it's not good enough. Get it out of your system, and move on. There are enough people in the world with godawful taste that some schmuck's going to like it.

Note To Self...

...Hangovers help neither the ability to blog (hate using that as a verb) nor to fill out application forms. And Colm lied, the eggs did nothing. Never liked him anyway.

Jesus, these mornings are getting addictive...

Look at this shit! It's daytime, for the second day in a row, and I am not only vertical, but fully-clothed, have fed myself, and can type out sentences and that! I like it a lot.
Turns out yesterday evening, before falling asleep at a computer in the library (I woke up about a minute and a half later with a snort, and made an old lady soil herself and have to leave), I went on Fastfude, where all the Belfast tuney-makey people go for a good old-fashioned virtual circle jerk. Anyway it would appear I replied to an ad in which an apparently established band requested a bassist with a degree of flexibility for practicing, and especially flexibility for touring Ireland, the UK and the Yankee Places. Looks like the fuckers are positively crying out for an unemployed ginger bastard to swan into their ranks for a spot of world domination. The only thing left to do is to to find out if they're any good, and indeed who they are, then meet them and convince them I'm indispensable. Shouldn't be too hard; they're only musicians after all.
That said, the last time I replied to one of these types of ads, I ended up in Ballymacash in the flat of an obese ex-drummer who can neither sing nor play the guitar, who I still owe money, and who now wants me to shell out £200-odd quid towards recording his bullshit songs. And the fat prick's got me bass.
Still though, I've always quite liked the idea of hijacking another cunt's musical dreams and making a mint out of them by going "dumdy dum bum bum" when he asks me to. 'S why I picked up the bass in the first place.
The lad wants an audition at the start of next week. That gives me this week to find the bus fare to Warrenpoint and back. Expect more on this subject.

New Year, or so people tell me

I really should do this more often. Being awake in daylight I mean. At the minute I'm in Queen's library, which unlike my house has heating, blinds on the windows, working chairs, a floor that wouldn't get you drunk (and very, very sick) if you walked on it without footwear of some kind, and computer-type facilities. Nice of them to have kept my computer accounts open, despite my getting heaved out last year. I think I owe them money too. Lovely people, these academics, I've always said so; must be nice having an attention span that can encompass a three-year degree. As always, I blame my sleep patterns.
See, when it comes to about the end of October, start of November, my brain apparently notices that the days are becoming shorter than the nights, and I start waking up when it gets dark, around 5 or 6 in the evening, and crashing again when it's light, about 9 in the morning. Now this isn't much of a problem when I've still money in my pocket to afford the essentials of such a lifestyle, namely Buckfast and the occasional dose of pills. But the rub lies in the fact that I always but always get fired from whatever I'm working at, usually mongrel reading-out-loud duties at Teletech, because I'm pissed/pilled/asleep/not there, so the money dries up, so I'm dodging landlords full-time for the first two months of the new year.
At the minute I'm in a period of very sober limbo, while I wake up at about 1 in the morning, stay up for about 30 hours, then collapse for about 16, as my body and brain have conflicting ideas on how to wake up at a reasonable time. Not too conducive to getting a wage out of somebody. So now the plan is get hold of the bastard layabouts at the Revenue and Customs and find out why they haven't employed me yet, then go home and kill all the lights in the house so the landlady thinks no-one's in if she calls about the two rubber rent cheques I gave her for December and January, while I waste the batteries in Rodgers' Wiimote playing Mario Galaxy over a couple of bifties. And who knows, maybe I'll make a start on this book... Probably not, but what's life without a good lie to yourself once in a while?

Stay sharp, peace to your kid brother

WOW... or not

Grieve, of http://www.thegrieve.co.uk/, came up with a rather interesting idea the other night. He intends to get some form of podcast on the go, in which himself, Matt the kiwi and Resident Protestant John talk about MMO's. Matt and John play EVE and WOW respectively, and Grieve is now playing the Warcrafty thing after a long addiction to EVE. He intends to get me involved in an unbiased everyman-type capacity, as I start playing one game or the other. Could be interesting. There shall be more on this.

More Priorites

Obama's won it then, by 349 to 161 with a couple too close to call and Nebraska tied, I think. Ain't it nice the way they only actually count the votes if they can't guess who's won a state? Very enlightened way of doing things, I think.
I had intended to stay up and watch the whole thing, with McCain's home state of Arizona being too close to call until about half 4, which I thought was great. What stopped me staying with it, though, was the fact that I could only get BBC and ITV coverage of the thing, both of which ragged my pish.
I started watching it on ITV, who coverage was quite slick and well done - quite Amercian actually, as usual - but it annoyed me how simpering it was. It was pretty much "Countdown to Obama-rama '08", which is fair enough, but as far as I could make out the polls were looking a damn sight closer than to warrant that. So I flicked over to the Beeb for some unbiased reporting. It may as well have been a Top Gear Election Night Special.
I didn't so much mind that none of the VT seemed to work (which it didn't), or that this bewildered and annoyed the presenter David Dimbleby (which it did, greatly). What got me, predictably enough, was the tone the whole thing was presented in. The programme had the air of... I don't know, did you ever meet a distant older relative in a bar when you're both a bit smashed, like the mouthpiece uncle no-one's that fond of? You know that condescending look on their face that says "Aw diddums, look at the wee babby actin' all growed up", when they're falling about the shop at least as bad as you are?
It seemed the whole of the BBC's current affairs staff had been briefed specially to find a Republican and pick a fight. They even had John Bolton as one of the guests, which I thought was inspired, although after about an hour of baiting it became clear that the majority of the BBC's staff knew far less about American politics than they thought they did, or than they should have if they wanted to go arguing with a former UN ambassador and unabashed flaming bastard of a rag-hoisting American. I actually found myself siding with him. Sweet and gentle Jesus.
Between Rajesh Mirchandani's interview slash argument with a high-ranking Republican in Colorado, where he plainly didn't know his facts, Katty Kay's assertions that Mitt Romney would have been a far better running mate for McCain than Palin despite the fact that as far as I can see no-one in the Republican party even likes the man, and Simon Schama's quite interesting scrap with Bolton being stopped by Dimbleby to go to a video feed which turned out not to exist, I thought it was a great laugh. But if it had have been made in a basement by teenagers in their spare time, it still would've disappointed me a bit. Good thing I don't pay me TV licence then, isn't it? Maybe I will when I get round to buying an aerial. At the minute I'm using an Ibanez bootlace guitar lead, resting on the pin at the back of my TV, held in place by Goldeneye for the N64, and I've yet to have a problem with it. What an age we live in, eh?