Brave New Essex

In Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell wrote: 'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four'. To which the cast of ‘The Only Way is Essex’ would reply: ‘Wait,’ before counting their fingers to ascertain that this was correct. ‘One…two…wait… one…’

            Yes, at first, I was dubious as to the quality of TOWIE, as I am with anything that can be abbreviated into the sound a Geordie might make when you stand on his foot, but with time I came to realise that what we had on our hands was nothing short of a Dystopian classic, for which Orwell would have gladly put his name to.

'Don't put my name on Jack-shit, Blunden'

            I know what you’re all thinking: what’s a Dystopian future, and where are my shoes? Well, I’m not going to answer that, perhaps you can Wikipedia the first and check under things for the second whilst I continue.

            The Only Way is Essex first came to my attention when several girls started tweeting about it. ‘What the fuck is a TOWIE?’ I thought. ‘Vajazzle? Is that some vagrant Jazz? Reem? Why is this guy reem? Is reem a shade of orange?’ I was over my head in terminology I didn’t understand, and when it was explained to me it left me feeling dirty and scouring myself in the shower until I was red-raw and willing to face this Brave New World as depicted by ITV2.

            Weeks were spent cowering with fear about this new phenomenon; days were spent in my room, sobbing, when, having had a Vajazzle explained to me, I couldn’t shake the image of one of those underwater sea creatures that glowed in the dark. Only this sea creature was trying to molest me. And was a vagina.

VAJAZZLE!!

            This ignorance of mine didn’t last long though (although the idea of a Vajazzle still repulses me like the idea of a disco ball labia) because I read one line so iconic that it reverted all my previous views of what reality is and how we perceive things:

"The Only Way is Essex shows real people in modified situations, saying unscripted lines but in a structured way."

            What. The. Fuck.

            See, I approached this in much the same way you would approach any reality TV: as an overweight, middle-aged woman with little-to-no social skills. But, with that quote, I approached it as the BA Hons graduate that I was: with pigeonholed English and a basic knowledge of classics.

            What we have, in fact, is much more closely related to Big Brother (the TV show). Only this time we don’t get to control the content, the director does. But it’s real. But it’s structured. The stars can do whatever they want: provided they do it to fit in with the structure their dictator (strike that, 'director') has arranged.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

UNSCRIPTED IS STRUCTURED

REEM

            Essentially what we have here is a new Dystopian classic in which our protagonists faced structured lives, but hold onto an overwhelming sense of freedom despite this.

            Quite frankly, in a time with so much financial struggle, I can see TOWIE becoming a classic of our time. Certainly, it is mocked now, but wasn’t Brave New World, when it was released amongst all of the utopian futures that foresaw nothing but joy, mocked? With one critic even going as far to say that it was well not reem?

P.s. Thanks to Jenny Parker for explaining what the fuck ‘reem’ meant. (‘Reem is a word one of the characters @JoeyEssex uses constantly. You can be/feel/smell reem. It's a state of mind.’)

I wish this was 1930, and that I was Dylan Thomas a.k.a. Fuck my laptop.

In 1930 Dylan Thomas started the first of several notebooks in which he scribbled this-and-that, couple-a poems here, possible drunken rant there, and so on. It's quite nice to think that at any point, some jack the lad can pick up a pen and then, in 23 years time, they will have written something as classic as Under Milkwood. And that was how it was done at one point: the writer had to pick up a pen in order to scribble and jot until something formed. Brilliant, they would think, I have created something and now it is in my hands.

Now-a-days we have computers. I fucking hate computers. Using computers is an over-complication of a simpler form. I must record something, you used to think, so you would jot it down on paper, perhaps copy it, and send it off to someone who will go: I now have this information, for it was written down and sent to me, hurrah! But look at us, so trusting of our pieces of plastic which contain smaller, more complicated plastics inside, which we now use. They're cretinous machines, prone to disease and over-heating; who want nothing more than to ruin your life. Moses delivering the ten commandments would have been much less interesting if he had to defrag the stone tablets first.

Certainly, computers have opened up the world to us (I often talk daily to people on the other side of Wales!) and they are certainly handy little fellows to use. Hell, mine is looking after 76 pages of a novel, God knows how many short stories and poems, and three unfinished blogs that I was going to post over the next two weeks (They were about: rape jokes and why they are not funny (well, when you tell them), watermelons, and the best way to end a TV show). Only, I've invested too much trust in my little laptop.

For a while now it's been wheezing and heating up like a syphilitic whore, and I have done my best to try and improve its station in life; stopping short of actually molesting it better. (Can you molest something better?)

So now I can no longer do work on the little bugger; I often get about ten minutes into using it before it seizes up in one of its death throes. 'Don't die,' I'd whisper, 'please.'
'RrRWRrrrRW,' it would respond, doing its best impression of an asthmatic dwarf powered hand-dryer.
'Please...'
'RrwrarRrwr, bleep. Bleep, grr, whirr.'
'Wait, are you getting...'
'RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!'
'Son of a...'

Fade to black.

This is just me saying: my laptop is screwed. And I know most of you are thinking: that's not so bad.

Fuck you, 'it's not so bad'! I now find my self with, no money to get a new laptop, unable to write. Worst of all, the several or so job applications I'm filling out... on my laptop. My novel... On my laptop. Everything I have considered worth noting is... wait for it... on my laptop.

It's just frustrating to think that all of my stuff is now inside a machine that seems to have died of something akin to cot death (that's all I can think of calling it, as it came so suddenly when I was drunk and not paying attention).

Don't get me wrong, I have back-ups. Who'd be stupid enough not to? But the death of my laptop has led to a death in motivation. I can't work on my own machine ergo I won't work. This isn't the late nineties where the whole village gathered around one hazy monitor as meatspin loaded. This is the era when my phone can hold more information than a pig covered in dictionaries (to cover your pig on dictionaries you'll need a good wood glue). So why should I go back to communal pcs? Time-sharing with pedophiles and the young in libraries (I love libraries, but not THAT section)? No, thank you.

But this is what it has come to, until I can secure a new job and buy a new laptop.

Dylan Thomas's most famous poem is 'Do not go gentle into that good night' and it goes:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against...

But then his laptop died and he went down to the pub, frustrated.

Seven Reasons Why I Would Kill A Panda And Eat Its Fucking Face

Note: This started out as a joke but it turned into me getting very angry. If you want to get to the real point of this rant, please skip to point seven. Sorry for the swearing. Links at the bottom.

First off: fuck pandas. Look at ’em. Everywhere… not literally. But they have become the poster child of suffering and cruelty in the world. Why? They’re just the vapid Paris Hilton of nature. Nobody knows why they are famous, and all we want is to see them have sex.

1. The News
How often have you tuned on the news and seen a piece about two pandas trying to have a baby in a German zoo (always, I don’t know why), and the news reader/writer makes it out to be some epic event. What do they think is the importance of this? If they have a baby, what then? Will we get a bank holiday? Will it offset carbon emissions? Will Panda Jesus emerge? No. It’s as un-newsworthy as a royal wedding or anything happening in the London transport system. I don’t care.

2. The sex
Any species that cannot be bothered to fuck does not deserve to live. It’s like being averse to breathing because, fuck it, I’m eating bamboo. Plus, if the Germans can’t get them to get their freak on, then who can?

3. My friend Wyn
He has a shirt that says: ‘Yum, yum, Panda Burgers’. It makes me piss myself every time.

4. The WWF
If you are going to have the panda on your logo, at least have it in a PPV against the Undertaker.

5. Survival of the cutest?
‘Awww, look at its face. Innit cute?’
No, and what does it matter if it does look adorable? Does that grant it anymore reason to survive than, say, the Yellowfin Tuna? It’s an animal we put a lot of time and effort into keeping alive despite the falling number of others. It’s the purebred Spaniel in the dogpound of the endangered species. You pick it because it’s cute without any consideration for those more deserving.

6. It’s not awesome
It’s a bear and 99% of its diet is bamboo: That shit that your placemat is made of in any Chinese restaurant. What. The. Fuck. I’m vegetarian (sort of, I guess, but that’s another blog), but my survival doesn’t depend on me eating ANYTHING WITH MORE NUTRITIONAL VALUE THAN A FUCKING PUB BARMAT!
Also, its survival is ‘reliant’ on human intervention. It’s the World of Warcraft kid who still lives with its parents. And we all want them dead, don’t we, internet?

7. The true point to my argument
Ask someone to name an endangered animal. Go on, I’ll wait. Right, did they say Giant Panda? Possibly Tigers? Maybe even Orangutans? But quite often what people overlook are the many, many numbers of other animals who are threatened but are not significant enough for the media to report.
I am all for animal conservation, and if we can save the Giant Panda then great! Let’s have a party and I’ll bake the cakes. But the problem is we are fighting a losing battle against their demise. Certainly, loss of land contributes to their lessening numbers, but what is really the problem is that they have hit an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Low birth rates, the territorial nature they have that spreads their small numbers over a large area, and their dietary choice of eating bamboo which offers them very little nutritional value, are all huge factors which we can do nothing about. Nothing. Fuck all. Nada.
I know this is an unpopular point, but it’s true. Just google Chris Packham, the Springwatch presenter who pointed out that pouring money into schemes that support Panda conservation is a waste, to see how unpopular it is.
But let’s get back to what we can do to actually save some endangered animals, particularly fish. One of the most detestable things that we do, as a species, is commercial fishing. Think of how many fish die to make a tin of tuna. You’d think one wouldn’t you? But consider how large the ocean is, and then consider the greed of people alongside our desire for mass production and productivity. I am referring, of course, to bycatch.
If you have never heard of bycatch, then you obviously do not care about your food or where it comes from and you can shove your free-range and organic shite up your arse. (Incidentally, for a chicken to be considered free-range in America, it must have access to at least five feet of outdoor space. Unfortunately, this does not mean every single bird is entitled to five feet of open space (open space being outdoors) but instead that a thousand birds are allowed one five foot square piece of land). Bycatch is industrial fishing’s form of burning down the barn to find the needle in the haystack. Scraping sea floor with huge nets can cause up to one pound of every four caught to be killed. An average shrimping vessel will catch, and kill, turtles, sharks, tuna, seagulls, and an endless amounts others, which will be thrown overboard dead or dying.
So while we all watch a German hand-rearing a Panda cub on the six o’clock news; how many other species, because of man, are teetering on the brink of extinction? Hundreds. We are drawn by these animals, who cannot survive because they won’t fuck or eat properly, whilst condoning the slaughter of others via ignorance.
So that’s why I would kill and eat a panda and its fucking keeper too. Because I can't make an argument about reducing our reliance on commercial fishing without, at first, making a stupid statement.

http://www.radiotimes.com/blogs/745-news-autumnwatchs-chris-packham-let-pandas-die/ (He made a much better argument about pandas than I ever could)
http://www.upc-online.org/freerange.html (On free range food... gruesome pictures)

http://news.mongabay.com/2008/1015-sea_turtles.html (Turtles at risk)

http://www.seattlepi.com/national/250412_fish01.html (bycatch)

http://www.oceana.org/index.php?id=93 (Bycatch... again)

These are just a select few. Please read-up on bycatch, it's something that needs to be known.

About me, rocks and why this blog will never make sense.

Well, let’s begin.

I think we should probably consider this as a sort of ‘about me’, but the first thing that you should probably understand about me is that I don’t think you can sum up human beings in an ‘about me’ section. Alas, if you feel you can adequately sum yourself up in one, then, well done! You’ve evolved to the level of a rock. A rock that can declare that it is a sentient being. ‘I AM A SENTIENT BEING!’ it declares, and nothing more. You are fully aware that you are alive, much like the rock. Hell, you may be able to tell me that you’re a rock, that you are grey and that you are a big fan of lolcats and Justin Bieber. But if that’s the case I feel for you. It must be horrible. Maybe I will comfort you in your simpleness.

‘I AM A SENTIENT BEING!’ you declare, and I no longer feel sad because you are obviously happy being what you’re being.

Right, my about me section isn’t going so well. I’ve made assumptions about the people who may be on the internet, yet I haven’t told you what I’m like.

Well, I’m a writer and stand-up comedian. My hobbies include small fires. Not starting fires, just small fires. There’s nothing more fun than finding small fires hidden about the house.

Anyway, this is what I mostly write:

Rover, Come Back!

My dog got happy today.

            He wagged his tail and barked with excitement. For a while this amused me, the jovial nature of my dog brought warmth to my soul. But suddenly his tail turned from a vigorous side-to-side wag into a whirling, circular motion. Rover took off from the hind quarters with a lack of direction.

            I chased for while, shouting, ‘Rover, come back!’

            But he never did. Instead he floated on, over the garden fences, and beyond the horizon.

He disappeared into the distance with his tail wagging, having never looked happier.

I am not widely published, although I do alright.

I plan on updating this every Monday and Friday, because I don’t do anything without deadlines, and you can expect rambling, bloated sentences and that’s about it. Occasionally I try to write poignant stuff, but it often comes out all wrong and it won’t wash out of wool.

Next: A mission statement, a parakeet, and a blog post that doesn't sound like shouting.

Ciao, for now,

John