Glob-a-log

Language is the most beautiful toy. It’s more than individual words or grammar. It goes beyond accuracy and fact, beyond sentiment and propaganda. It’s all of that - and so much more. Sometimes language becomes part of something infinitely bigger: some lines become part of the archetypical linings of the human cave.

Sometimes, it is a particular context:

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
“I’m not a crook.”

Sometimes, it’s the occasion:

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Sometimes, it’s the sheer orgasmic finality of things:

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Sometimes though, language simply makes an easy victim for lazy writers who want to get away with murder, so, yes, I’m very much afraid,

“Th-th-th-that’s all folks!”

I firmly believe you should either do things properly or not at all. Most of the time that gives me the perfect excuse not to do things. Today though, I’ve made an effort:

- One illegally downloaded Stevie Wonder single (Happy birthday to you)
- One photo of the cat, taken while it was sleeping (so it couldn’t escape or make silly faces - or kill me…)
- Five cheese sticks
- A handful of mouse-shaped meringues

(Check – check – check – check. Yes, good and ready indeed.)

The cat sleeps through the early preparations, which is a definite plus. So, I’ve been able to pin its photo (with a silly cap and pink mittens picture-pasted – or whatever it’s called precisely – in the right places) to its scratching post, without the cat trying to scratch my eyes out.

Now, it’s time to bring in the cat’s breakfast: a cake-shaped mess of cat food, with five cheese sticks playing candle sticks on top of it.

I wake the cat by throwing the mouse-shaped meringues in its general direction. It opens its eyes, stretches, looks disdainfully at the meringues, curses when it sees its picture and frowns at the breakfast dish I now place on the floor.

“Many happy returns.” I say.

“Oh, grow up.” says the cat.

Then I put on the Stevie Wonder song and the cat gets really abusive. It disapproves mightily of the singer and absolutely loathes this particular song.

So, the cat finishes its breakfast as quickly as it can – which is quite fast, considering all the hissing & booing and plain evil cursing it manages to do at the same time.

When it has finished its meal – at the same time as the repeat thingummy kicks in for the third time – it gives me its hottest, murder-most-foul look and says:

“You… you… you…!”

I smile sweetly back and say:

“Oh, I forgot: I’ve invited all your little friends to come over later, for a proper birthday party.”

The cat growls, takes a swipe at my right ankle (but misses – I saw that one coming from a mile off, thank you very much) and then leaves the room through the huff side of the catflap.

“Just kidding.” I mumble, looking at the mess the little monster has made of its birthday cake.
As if I would have invited even more felines to the house. Not bloody likely, that.

Still, I reflect, while I clean up the mess, shred the stupid photo having turned off the music first (since the cat is not the only one who deeply disapproves of that nauseating song), here’s to a job well and truly done.

It’s not often you can mess up a cat’s mind and the start of its day so thoroughly. It will pay me back in any number of highly interesting ways later, no doubt but for now I feel rather pleased with myself and the world.

Sipping from my first cup of tea, nibbling on one of the cat’s abandoned birthday candles and still feeling rather victorious, I start to make a list of all the people I might decide to annoy & insult later in the day, per E-mail, letter, through the phone or in some snooty column.

Right:
Bush, the milkman, the paperboy, Blair, that computer idiot from work, our own prime minister, that TV quiz host, the Pope, of course…

Hm; busy, busy, busy.

I pour myself another cup of tea, finish off the last cheese stick and put on some Dead Kennedys.

The big K was right, I decide – in a way:

Ask not what the world and its cat can do to you; ask what you can do to them first.

The difference between literature and Hollywood is most easily expressed through numbers. Where Hemingway could spend a whole book talking about some old guy wanting to catch a fish,  Hollywood would just grab the old man, give him a tunic and a helmet, put him way at the back of the advancing Persian army at Thermopylae and kill him off with one careless arrow within the first ten seconds of the first action scene.

Or, take a poet – Hell, take two:

Here you have Wordsworth, in his one-man-and-his-cloud poem, going barmy about a bunch of daffs that were:

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Here you have Gertrude Stein with her famous and, to be honest, quite annoying and insane bouquet of roses:

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Loveliness extreme.
Extra gaiters,
Loveliness extreme.
Sweetest ice-cream.
Pages ages page ages page ages.

Like Hemingway with his old man, these two poets would have been happy enough to remain forever locked in an intimate embrace with their daft daffodils and roses.

Hollywood however, if it got its paws on the movie rights to portray the lives of those poets, would first replace Wordsworth with Brad Pitt and Gertrude Stein with Angelina Jolie.

Then some pair of villains (probably very much looking like Wordsworth & Stein) would shoot the hero (who would, temporarily, lose his memory but not his looks) and kidnap Jolie (who’d lose almost all of her clothes in the process but not – yeah, you guessed it). Then, with a florid flush of violins, a cutely bandaged Pitt would leave his hospital bed to go rescue the beautifully under-dressed Jolie, before this perfect pair would happily adopt all kinds of weird and photogenic life-styles for the rest of their lives (and perhaps, at the close of day, stare into space a bit with dreamy looks and the quivering tip of a quill resting on their half-open lips – which is all that Hollywood poets need to do to live up to their rep.).

AND WHAT ABOUT THOSE FLOWERS, THEN??!!

Ah yes. Not to worry. In the penultimate, cliff-banging scene, the villain is chased by the virtuous Pitt, who is riding an enormous, heavily armoured lawnmower, through a field of flowers (daffodils and roses, yes: very good!) shredding them by their millions – which makes for nice, quasi-apocalyptic visuals.

So there, the difference between Hollywood and literature, brought to your screen in a decorous & decidedly modest 470 words!
Not to boast, of course, but many a movie has been forged from baser materials.

There’s a guy on the TV, driving a car and explaining to me and the cat why we should also buy a Toyota - a Camry Hybrid, to be exact.

The car comes with lots of trees, an impossibly blue sky with an eagle flying through it and a lake that looks like it should have featured in some uppity mouth wash ad. The car also comes with a truly kidney-shattering, high octane & highly obnoxious kid in the back seat.

I look at the cat; the cat closes its eyes. So, no, sorry; we’d rather French kiss the hormonically enhanced adenoids of Sylvester Stallone.

Then the telephone: it’s the girlfriend. She says she missed me so much, she had to come back from Tokyo - and now she’s waiting for me to pick her up at the airport, wearing nothing more than a smile, two trunks of sexy underwear and a large bottle of massage oil.

(It’s not the girlfriend, of course. Just someone who wants to tell me everything I never wanted to know about mortgage rates.)

The cat yawns and tells me I should finally buy an answer machine or get rid of the damn phone altogether. I tell the cat to get lost.

It reminds me who owns the retractable claws in this relationship.

Just one of those days.

One of these days I will simply tell the girlfriend to come back from Tokyo and marry me or else. One of these days I will take the cat on a holiday to the Grand Canyon and leave it there on the business end of the longest bungee jump known to cat or man.

One of these days I will learn to speak Chinese, play chess, love my neighbour & my cat and flap my arms and flyayay awaaay.

In the meantime, I really must remember to buy new batteries for the remote, so that I don’t have to watch these stupid commercials all the time, stop answering the bloody phone - and just put up with that stupid cat of mine, I suppose.

Ah well, as some great sage once said: Such is life and it gets sucher every day.

I love the Internet. Whether you want to learn about God & bananas or listen to Leonard Cohen’s Anthem by way of people who can actually sing a bit, someone on the Net will have put up something that will inform, delight or simply irritate the sheer Hell out of you.
Now if only real life people were that entertaining.

Ah, yesss… Talking about people – and computers…

Here you are: it’s another Saturday evening and you’re in the pub, or at a cocktail party, or suffering some family do. In other words: you’re around people. Boring people. People who go on and on and on about their new:

a) girlfriend
b) mobile phone
c) car (and/or)
d) baby.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if you then could just shut them up; if, in computer speak, you could RSS feed the whole bloody lot of them to one of the oldest nightmares that we know. Actual fire walls would also come in handy; ditto real life mute buttons and spam filters. (Or, in new Cockney rhyming slang: mutton and ham.)

And wouldn’t it be just brilliant if you could then turn to the host and say:

“I’m very sorry but your party just crashed.”

I’m trying to sleep but the cat is reading from Leonard Cohen’s Book of Mercy:

“Here the destruction is subtle, and there the body is torn. Here the breaking is perceived, and there the dead unaware carry their putrid remains.”

I open one very tired eye. The cat looks back at me, too smug for words. That is, I can’t find the words. The cat continues:

“All trade in filth, carry their filth one to another…”

“Alright already – I get the message!”

The cat closes the book and starts to lick its page-turning paw in a highly annoyning, self-satisfied way.

I mumble-curse, get up and head for the kitchen. It is extremely irritating of course but the bloody animal does have a point: it’s been a few days since I put fresh litter in its box.

Two hours later. Showered, dressed, fed the cat – got fed up with the cat, left for the park.

It’s a beautiful day: dry, not too sunny; no people, so no boom-boxes, babies or dribbling dogs. No pigeons, pterodactyls or other flying pests. Quite simply, it’s one of those odd, perfect points in time…

…so, of course, like some demented Tardis, a barrel organ noisily appears out of nowhere and starts screeching like Siouxsie giving birth to a quintuplet of Banshees.

I look in the general direction of the sky-box and do one of those Why, God, why??!! half-sighs, half-moans.

Then I strangle the organ grinder, grind the horse, set fire to the barrel organ (okay, but in my wilder dreams I do) and head back for home.

There I find the cat, sitting in my lazy chair, smoking my pipe and perusing my much cherished copy of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

(The cat adores Hobbes; it’s got the T-shirt, the coffee mug and the bed spread.)

It’s very wrong to kick your pet, so I don’t. I just put on some Dylan instead, which annoys the cat much more than any half-hearted kick could have achieved. It disappears through the huff side of the cat flap.

(Two years ago the girlfriend painted directions on the cat flap. Coming in it reads ‘hug’; going out it spells ‘huff’.)

With any luck the cat will go to the park, cross paths with the organ barrel and strangle the man, grind the horse etcetera. With my luck though I’m sure the evil little bastard will just return with a dead pigeon – or pterodactyl.

The camera zooms in. The guy in the weird suit lifts his left foot, like a sleepy dog aiming for its early morning lamp post. He holds on to the ladder, almost losing his thoughts, then says:

That’s one small step for a man, one giant lea…

Then – absolute darkness: no pictures, no sound, no nothing. Does a tree fall if no-one gets crushed beneath it? Does Armstrong finish that whole yawn-inspiring soundbite before Aldrin manages to let him know that they have just lost all connection to planet earth?

Some time later, while the whole world is still hopping mad and not afraid to show it and Neil is sulking on the toilet, the following conversation takes place:

Aldrin: What the Hell happened there?
NASA clean up news team: Sorry about that but we had to cut you off.
Aldrin: Why?
NASA c.u.n.t.: We really need to find out what took place there on the moon today.
Aldrin: Huh…?
NASA c.u.n.t.: We owe it to the people, to future generations, to the truth!
Aldrin: Then why in the bloody name of sanity did you morons cut us off?!
NASA c.u.n.t.: Your pictures might have confused the public. People might have drawn the wrong conclusions from those images. We need some expert team to investigate what really happened and then report back to us.
Aldrin: But…
NASA c.u.n.t.: In order to preserve the truth we had to destroy those pictures.
Aldrin: Have you all gone totally and completely…?!
NASA c.u.n.t.: Is that tape running?
Aldrin: Hello… Hello… Hello…?!

Anyway, with all the usual suspects screaming abuse at each other from high-handed, mouth-froth pulpits and well-designed if somewhat leaky, government issue bunkers, chances are we’ll never find out now what really happened out there on that crowded Afghan highway. One thing does seem absolutely clear, though. It will take a really good clean up team to get rid of all the bloodstains on the marble steps outside that majestic court house and more than one award-winning PR company to resuscitate the poor, mangled body of Captain America.

The guilty undertaker cries,
the lonesome organ grinder sighs;
the silver saxophones say I should refuse you…

Nice. Some people get a streetcar named desire. Me, I’ve got a cat that sings old Dylan songs in my dreams, until a very early garbage truck comes around to murder sleep.

Bad: I don’t like waking up to the sound of screaming bin bags and a handful of irritating early birds, on a Monday morning at the tail end of a sheer endless & utterly boring winter.
Good: the cat is no longer mauling Dylan.

Bad: Now I have to feed the bloody animal.
Good: I can make a nice cup of tea while the cat is still preoccupied with its food.

The cat now sleeps on my bed. My tea has gone cold. Gmail tells me I’ve got spam: nine more Viagra ads - how nice. No new E-mails from my beloved - bugger. I could try to draw conclusions from the respective presence and absence of these mails. I could also go outside and kill a few of those irritating birds and try to find meaning in their still steaming entrails. I could even, just for the Hell of it, throw the cat in front of the garbage truck, bringing both to a screeching halt.

I can also shut down the computer and go buy more cat food. Man is but a slave to his pet. Before I close the door behind me, before I will be swallowed whole by Monday morning’s embarrassing embrace, I decide to get my own back. Unwise, I know. I will pay for it later, for sure. Still, it’s done – and I cannot help but grin madly, when I hear the machine wake up slowly and scrape its throat, while I tiptoe out of the room.

Behind me now the bleak morning sun; behind me all thoughts of online erection salesmen and fickle, faraway girlfriends; behind me the sound of a still hungry garbage truck moaning its way through Monday’s moody streets; behind me too, no doubt, a very angry cat. I imagine I am now inhabiting its dreams, singing:

My cracked voice and washed out horn
blow into the cat with scorn…

until it wakes up to the fully tanked up power of the music machine and the sound of master Bob’s cranky voice, singing I want you – over and over and over again.

The cat is not talking to me; the girlfriend is still in Tokyo. She did send me a nice Kafka quotation though:

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Only problem is: the cat shares the room with me and the cat is in a serious bad arse mood. Right now the Sistine Chapel wouldn’t be big enough for the both of us and my room – with its slightly pathetic thirty square meters – ain’t exactly Sistine Chapel material. No Michelangelo hanging from the ceiling to cheer us up either.

No idea why the bloody animal is in such a foul mood. Not that cats need that much of an excuse to sulk or wave disgruntled banners. Your average cat does not hang Forrest Gump posters in its bedroom. It might go online and buy a T-shirt with a dementedly smiling Jack Nicholson, maybe – but a smiling Tom Hanks: God forbid.

Anyway, whatever Kafka says, the cat is most definitely not rolling in ecstasy at my feet. It would probably cheer up if I turned into a cockroach though.

With only some four hundred shopping days left till the next presidential election all kinds of candidates and pressure groups are getting understandably nervous. One of these organisations is the very publicly secretive Council for National Policy. One of those guys who knows God’s first name founded it a quarter pounder of a century ago. That’s right: Reagan was in the White House, Thatcher ruled Britannia, so the Reverend Tim LaHaye concluded that it was high time for some CCC (Conservative Christian Council) to steer the USA even further to the right.

Which made perfect sense indeed. As the elder Bush had remarked when he was campaigning against Reagan in 1979: “We all know what kind of guy shot Lincoln.” Thatcher, of course, was a woman and in Reverend LaHaye’s Good Book women were only slightly less suspect than the snake that had tempted the Very First Lady in the Very First Place. So, both leaders definitely needed watching. After Reagan came Bush and after the protracted hiccups that were the Clinton years, came yet another Bush and all seemed to be well in the land of the CCC. As one Council member (secretly) said about the current president: “You don’t even have to set fire to this Bush for God to speak through him.”

Right now though the CCC is sorely troubled, for where in the name of the Trinity is their Bush Mark Three? Well, that’s the rub – or revelation: he ain’t there. On the one hand you have New York’s mayor: a thrice married, cross-dressing, pro-choice son of a mobster. On the other you have a guy who was actually liked by liberals and who, last time round, ran on an anti-Falwell, anti-CCC platform. These two candidates certainly would not pass the Council’s trusted litmus test: Would John Birch have wanted either of them as a son-in-law?

Still, the CCC is not an organisation that accepts defeat gracefully. So, if there is no logical choice, no natural Christian warrior to gather round and support, there is always faith - and faith’s second cousin: good old conversion. Drive drunk, sniff cocaine and get stopped by the highway patrol? Say, Hallelujah, praise the Lord, I’ve seen the light. You might think the CCC crowd would be tough on sinners – and they are, up to a certain fiscal level, but they are also suckers for a good conversion. Go ask the non-burning Bush and he will tell you it works like a charm, every single time.

There is this little thing the CCC calls secondary virginity. It’s what happens when someone who is no longer strictly speaking a virgin, suddenly wants to impress Jesus by having no more sex till he or she is safely married. This born again virginity seems to be quite popular with high school kids these days and this coming election it could also mean salvation for the CCC – or at least for some designated Council champion. So, enter master McCain and enter chief Giuliani and let the best man enter the river Jordan and be cleansed. Raise him head and shoulders above the crowd, let the confetti rain like dandruff and let all those nubile cheerleaders for Jesus, virgins all - be it secondary or truly immaculate - chant and wear proud T-shirts, loudly reading that You have always one last chance to make a first impression!