Monday, 20 October 2008

The I Hate It Here Guide To Surviving The Credit Crunch

Pictured above: You, next Thursday.

We're going through some dark times, people. The financial world is teeter-tottering on the brink of appalling collapse, for reasons that are far to boring and complicated for the likes of me to comprehend (although I suppose you'll claim to be totally au fait with the whole thing, won't you? You condescending sack of shit.). So here, for your reading pleasure, is a brief guide to the options available to you once Western civilisation has imploded like a tin of beans at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

1.Deny, Deny, Deny.
A popular choice, this, and one that's long beloved of humankind the world over. Its popularity rests on its staggering simplicity: you just carry on with your life as if nothing is happening at all. Apply for credit cards, take long foreign holidays (and to heck with the carbon emissions!) , fit granite worksurfaces in your specially designed kitchen - because hey, you deserve it, right? - and generally continue to exist in a state of luxury and opulence unheard of by pretty much every other generation to ever walk the Earth. Those of a more philosophical bent might like to argue that since money doesn't, in fact, exist - being as it is just a bunch of numbers on a computer somewhere - then they can't actually take it away from you. That's like, logic. Although please bear in mind that logic can't fill up a sandwich or prevent you from dying of hypothermia.

2. Blame Someone Else.
I hear Iceland makes a convenient scapegoat.

3.Stockpile.
In the very near future cash will be most likely be worthless. In such a scenario what you need is stuff. Real, actual stuff. I won't presume to tell you what possessions you should be amassing because, frankly, I'm not your bleeding mother and I've got my own problems to be dealing with. But I will say this: do your research. You need to be looking at things like clean drinking water, petrol, shotgun shells and kendal mint cake. If it all goes tits up and you're wandering around with a wheelbarrow full of wetsuits and Bee Gees records then you've only got yourself to blame.

4.Retreat!
This goes hand in hand with item three. Mass rioting in every city on every continent will make beating a hasty retreat a top priority. Plan your escape route and leg it as soon as possible before you're raped and butchered for your last bottle of Evian. You could come round to my place, if you like. I'll have plenty of work for you on my methane farm.

Pictured above: Me, in a joke that will be meaningless to anyone who hasn't seen Mad Max 3.

4.Retrain.
With the resultant change in the job markets that will inevitably come with our new global situation you might want to consider retraining and brushing up on skills that will be more useful during the coming apocalypse. But Pete, I hear you piteously whine, my relatively sheltered childhood and pointless university degree have only prepared me for a life of soul sapping low-grade admin work. What skills do I have that will see me through the hard times ahead? And my answer is this: don't do yourself down, my friend. You have many assets that will always be in demand, regardless of prevailing global trends. Those lily-white buttocks of yours, for example, will fetch a pretty penny in the souks and casbahs of the new radioactive wasteland. My advice would be to cultivate that tiny secret deadness that we all have inside. Nurture it, feed it, and soon you'll be choking down the profits like an old pro. It really won't be that different from life now, when you think about it.

Saturday, 18 October 2008

A Fairly Triumphant Return.


As the Wildhearts once opined in the sleeve notes to Fishing For Luckies - I think, although if I'm wrong I'm sure someone will correct me - 'Self expression is like sex. The less you do it the more you find that you don't want to'. And how right they were. Visit a foreign country, I thought. Expand your horizons. Gain valuable life experiences. Work on your (pretty fucking limited) writing skills. Start a new, cheerier blog and maybe prove that you're not a completely miserable cunt.

And it has been very sweet indeed. I've had fun. I met people, and seen things, and been places I never thought I would. I've even fallen in love. But the problem with people and things and places and love is that they take up a lot of time, time that in previous stages of my life would have been spent trawling the internet for inspiration and banging my head against a keyboard until the blood pooled into a joke about cocks that I could then post. I've been too busy for that kind of carry on, and the lack of a net connection hasn't helped at all. Seriously, how did people gather information before the internet? It's beyond me. Just a lot of library time, I suppose, when they weren't chasing mammoths over cliffs or unlocking the secret of fire.

More pertinently, I have an evil, evil job. Not just because it's a bank job, although that would qualify it for at least a special merit badge from the Great Beast, but because it's stolen my words. I spend all day leaving notes on a computer system and these notes require me to use - at most - thirty different words in various combinations. If there's anything that'll murder your ability to write more effectively than spending 40 hours a week writing the same thirty words over and over and over again then I don't want to know about it. Taking a header off a high dive into an empty swimming pool would do it, and at least afterwards you'd get a special helper to come round and wipe your arse for you.

I've got nothing. I'm dry. Bereft. There is a whole world of interest just outside my window, with fascinating characters and ideas and locales, and beauty and misery and ease and hardship, and all I can do is stare at a blank computer screen and obsess about how badly I suck. I'm having a great time right now, but it's killing me.

So I've come back here, where I started. I'm wrapping myself in the oily black cloak of I Hate It Here, a name I stole, to maybe rediscover the little bit of me that knew how to put the words in the right order to make the few people who listened smile for a minute. For the record, I don't Hate It Here. I'm actually, believe it or not, happy. Is it possible to spew toxic rants at the shitty state of the shitty world whilst still feeling an overall contentment, the like of which I haven't felt in literally years? I don't know. But we might as well find out. Fuck knows, it's not like we're up to much else, eh?

One final warning: you people are going to have to sit through some tedious, self-obsessed wank before I hit anything resembling a good patch. Like, for example, the article you've just graciously sat through. Waste of fucking time that was.

Thursday, 17 April 2008

Mr Here He Was, Where's He Gone.

Where? I'll tell you where. He's gone over here.

Wednesday, 2 April 2008

One More Time.

I nicked this from some other gullible fool's blog. Ha! And ho!

Well, shit. Looks like it's time for me to be moving the smeg on. Tomorrow I leave for New Zealand, not to return for an undisclosed number of months, which means that dear old I Hate It Here serves no further purpose. I started this blog as a means to stop me from losing my mind while I was trapped here in Stourbridge, a function it has performed admirably. One brain, intact. Job done. And it seems to me that this last installment should be given over to appreciating the people, things and institutions that have also helped fend off screaming collapse. So:

Mum and Dad, for letting me move back home when they were probably sure they'd got shot of me. Best. Parenting. Ever.

Glyn, for being an all round top quality little brother. And he can gut a fish like nobody's business.

Stella, for being the iron fist in Glyn's velvet glove.

Denyer, long-time bestest buddy, web-wizard and big noise in the rarefied world of transformers fandom. In a crazy and changeable universe you are a valued and necessary constant.

The Aberystwyth massive. Scattered to the four winds we may be, but I don't think 'family' is too strong a word to describe what we've got. I'll will return. Promise.

Little Dan, for being the best goldfish a boy could have. Ditto the snails.

Robert Green, Ad Connop et al, for the drinks.

The fine people at Stourbridge Housing Office, for the job.

Crystal Leisure Centre, Stourbridge, for use of the facilities.

Bill Hicks (for the laughs), Atmosphere (for the beats and rhymes) and Chuck Palahniuk (for the words). Because, no matter how bad I feel, they always cheer me up.

Warren Ellis, for writing Transmetropolitan and thus inspiring this blog's title. And for writing Nextwave, which is also fucking ace. Seriously, you should buy it.

All those who suggested ideas for and voted in the penis competition. I needed humouring and you humoured me but good. Thanks. Am-Heh, Devourer of millions? I have to say I never saw that one coming. Hey! I punned! Arf!

And to everyone who read the words that farted out of my brain-anus and splattered on to the internet. I'm sure you had better things to getting on with.

So that's it. Finito. End of. There'll be a new, more cheerful blog detailing my wacky misadventures on the other side of the planet. Think of it as an extending showing of someone's holiday snaps, except possibly more boring. Now....

Bugger off!

Wednesday, 19 March 2008

Democracy in Action.

I'm going to use it to intimidate you at the polling station. Like in Iraq.

I'll keep this brief because we all know why we're here - voting on my nom de cock is now officially begun. Since opening a big can of pester on your collective asses I've been inundated with suggestions of varying quality and appropriatenes; Glyn and I went through them and the pick of the bunch can be found above, so look to your right and vote ye. Multiple votes are permitted.

I'm dimly aware that a prize was mentioned but unfortunately I have no clue what form said prize will take - possibly a guest of honour spot at the celebrity gala unveiling where I wipe it down the red carpet. Maybe. I'm working on it. But heartfelt, gushing thanks to all those who suggested names; if yours hasn't been shortlisted then you can take consolation in the knowledge that it's probably because it was rubbish. Power to the people!

Tuesday, 11 March 2008

Look, just think of some names or the puppy gets it.

Bonzo is saddened by your continued antipathy toward my penis and its lack of a name. Look at him. Just you look at him. You did this. His misery is on your head, you unspeakable cunt.

Well, you've had nearly a week and the response to my competition has been nothing short of completely underwhelming. I've had a grand total of two suggestions, which will be dissected in further detail below. It's almost as if you don't care about my penis, as if you had better things to think about. I know that's not true, so what's the freakin' problem, people? This just makes me glad that I didn't go with my original penis competition idea, which was to have you all try to come up with a theme tune for it. Anyway, here are the nominations so far. You bastards.

1: Clive. Suggested by: Stella.
As far as I can tell, Stella came up with this one off the top of her head. The big drawback from my point of view is that I have an uncle Clive and I believe that in some cultures naming your wang after a relative can get you stoned to death. Calling my penis Clive would make it difficult for me to look either of them in the eye again. Sir Clive, on the other hand... now that's a different matter.

2. Mr In-My-Pants. Suggested by: Kim's flatmate.
Now this one I quite like. Kim's flatmate (I don't know your name, but thanks for taking the time) has come up with a cheeky little number that doubles as a pun on Mr Splashy Pants, the Greenpeace whale. Actually, Mr Splashy Pants wouldn't be a bad name itself, if only it wasn't taken. Eerily accurate, too. But Mr In-My-Pants has a nice Red Indian ring to it that I find appealing... like 'Gets-Caught-In-Gussett' or 'Pokes-Woman-In-Small-Of-Back-As-Sun-Rises'. Although, as to that last one, chance would be a fine bloody thing.

All I'll say is this: there's a little girl out there who loves Bonzo very much and if I don't see some co-operation very soon he'll be going back to her in a fucking jam jar. I'll even include my email address so you don't have to dick about with the comments thing:

blackcountrybloke@hotmail.com

You dig?

Wednesday, 5 March 2008

Competition Time!

How about 'Optimus Wang'? That's not bad.

The premise is simple - it's just occurred to me that, despite the commonly-received wisdom that all men have a pet name for their penis, my own member remains nameless. Anonymous. I think that's a shame so I'm throwing it open to you, the general public, to decide on a moniker. Submit your ideas and the winner will win.. something, I haven't decided what yet.

'The Defoliator', perhaps... or is that just unnerving?

Some of you might think that this is a bit weird. IT IS NOT WEIRD. I'm genuinely interested in hearing what you come up with. This is what happens when you haven't updated for a while and feel like you really should but can't think of anything.

Err... let's just back slowly away from that idea. Although it might, alas, be closest to the truth.

I mean it. I know there's only four of you out there but I'm deadly serious. If you're on facebook or something then get all your 'friends' to join in. It'll be put to a vote, which I will abide by. Forever. So get creative. My cock is, metaphorically, in your hands.

Just to reiterate: NOT WEIRD.

Sunday, 17 February 2008

Malingering Bastards.

You're fooling nobody but your bloody selves.

I might be straying into controversial territory here but I've got to say this lest I burst like a blood and pus filled balloon. You know those people you see trundling around on those plastic mobility scooters, taking up the whole pavement and blocking the aisles in supermarkets? Well I reckon that about 80% of them are putting it on. They're fakers. They just can't be arsed to walk.

If you're in a wheelchair and you're wheeling yourself about, using the only limbs available to you to mobilise yourself, then fair enough. Good on you, in fact. Equally, if you're paralysed from the neck down and have to use your chin to press the go button then you get a pass (how generous of me!) But whenever I see some fat bastard tooling about on one of those things I have a sudden urge to push them into oncoming traffic. 'Oh, but I'm too heavy to walk and I get so tiiiired', they might say, to which I would reply: well, you ain't gonna lose any weight rolling around on that thing, are you? Eh? EH?

In Las Vegas they rent mobility scooters out to the deserving, the only problem being that fat idle fuckers keep bagging them all so they don't have to heave their bloated, doughnut-stuffed carcasses between casinos. Shameful. But here's my solution: a little device of my own invention called the bee-zooka. It's a gun that fires laser guided, exploding bees. One blast from that baby and we'll see who can walk and who can't.

Sunday, 10 February 2008

Remember that you're an individual... just like everybody else.


Go out now and buy a copy of Bizarre magazine. Actually, don't; it's a bit of a waste of money. Just take my word for it that there's a regular section where people (women) send in a sexy picture of themselves and a brief description of their preferred sex practice/fetish. There's a bit for men as well, only smaller. Every month, dozens of them. Probably hundreds by now. And they're all pretty much identical.

'Demonika wants to be tied up and eaten out by a naughty nurse and to have a threesome with Alan Rickman and Marilyn Manson. The strangest place she ever had sex was in a shopping trolley behind the Tunbridge Wells branch of Costcutter.'

Accompanied by a picture of a girl with the same pink hair, same pseudo-goth rubber get-up and same tattoos as all the others who thought that their fiercely boring sexual peccadilloes somehow merited inclusion in a nationally circulated magazine. What winds me up is that Bizarre caters for the 'alternative' crowd, who look down their pierced noses at normal, everyday people; people who dress conservatively and just have sex without feeling the need to honk on about it all the fucking time... and yet here they are, all exactly alike within their carefully described boundaries - the same clothes, the same opinions, the same tawdry little fantasies. Read one and you've read them all.

(And before you say anything: yes, I know I have tattoos, and used to have a piercing or two. I'm including myself in this rant. Why do you think I'm so pissed off?)

But it's the same all over. Derren Brown, the famous television hypnotist/mind control guy, has a book called 'Tricks of the Mind'. It's a cracking read and I heartily recommend it. There's a bit where he gives a group of students an envelope each and tells them that it contains a personal 'psychic' reading that will describe their personality and innermost thoughts in great detail. Upon opening it (surprise surprise) they're all shocked and amazed at the reading's accuracy. One stupid bitch even accused him of looking at her diary, such was the eerie precision of what he'd put down.

The thing is, there was only the one reading. All the envelopes were exactly the same. The trick worked because people are, basically, quite unoriginal creatures. We all go through similar stages in our lives, where we worry about similar things at similar times, and have similar experiences and similar wants and needs and goals. All Mr Brown had to do was play the percentages, and it didn't steer him far wrong. I'm desperately trying find this comforting, like we're all in the same boat or some such fucking thing, because it depresses the hell out of me if I dwell on it too long.

So thank God, says I, for the internet, where you can stake out your own little piece on Facebook and do it up how you like, or amass reams of personal information on strangers and make out like they're your 'friends', or maybe even start your own blog where you rant to a world that's not listening about things people already know as if you were a real person who actually exists.

Ahem. Anyway, that's how life is. Your ideas are meaningless, your dreams are ridiculous and you are an idiot. And that's fine, I suppose - we're all in the same boat, after all. But please, Bizarre women: don't make out like you're some spirited free thinker because you own a rubber basque and have maybe thought about having a woman eat your snatch. I mean, it's your life, so do what you like and good luck to you. I, however, am not fucking interested. I've got my own tedious non-life to be getting on with, thanks all the same. Just take your nipple clamps and your Hello Kitty butt plug and fuck off.

Wednesday, 30 January 2008

She will be mine. Oh yes. She will be mine.

Big news, everyone; I've fallen head over buttocks in love with singer songwriter KT Tunstall. She was on Later With Jools Holland the other week and thanks to her lovely face, quirky specs and the lubricating effect of a bottle of red wine I was completely smitten.


She's Scottish, you know.

And has been known to wear interesting hats.

Here she is doing the guitar thing. Perhaps now might be an opportune time for me to re-evaluate her musical oeuvre; I wouldn't like to embarrass myself in front of her by admitting that I couldn't name one of her songs if my entire comic collection depended on it.

This is her speaking at Live 8 about the need to be kind to animals and poor people. The woman is an angel. I'm sure if I actually did meet her she'd be nothing but nice to me, and would ask her security people not to mark my face when they dragged me away to give me a quality kicking.

I'd have mentioned this earlier but I've been caught in the grip of post-Christmas malaise for the last couple of weeks. By which I mean I've mostly been staying in, reflecting on my own worthlessness and wanking too much.

Form an orderly queue, ladies.

Thursday, 24 January 2008

Life and Death on Teh Internets.

Oh, calm down - it was dead when I found it.

Death: there's a lot of it about. Seven Welsh kids commit suicide and Bebo gets the blame. Heath Ledger swallows enough pills to give Keith Richards pause and promptly shuffles off, his passing marked by ten thousand tasteless Brokeback Mountain jokes. Aged chess champion Bobby Fischer dies of being old and mad and gets the same treatment. All life can be found on the web including, apparently, that uncomfortable bit at the end.

Which I reckon is fair enough. People live their whole lives through the net these days so it makes sense that they'll die there as well. I'm less sure that, as has been stated in the press, the internet can make you spontaneously want to kill yourself but I suppose 'Internet Death Cult' makes for better copy than a sober, reasoned analysis of why seven perfectly normal, perfectly healthy teenagers would decide to take their own lives.

(Incidentally - six boys kill themselves with nary a peep from anyone; one girl joins them and suddenly it's all over the press, a national fucking tragedy. It's almost like society doesn't care what happens to young men. Oh, hang on... it doesn't, unless there's a war going on that we need some corpses for. Sorry about that, the memo has only just reached me.)

The net seems to be to be just another aspect of this huge, gigantic mess we call life, one that reflects stuff that's already there. If you're going to top yourself then you'll have found the reasons and rationalisations elsewhere; the only thing the internet will do is confirm or deny what you're already thinking. Possibly the realisation that, despite Myspace's claims that you have 250 friends, you have not one single person to go to the pub with might do it, although it seems unlikely. But if you are thinking of killing yourself (and, frankly, I'd rather you didn't) then you should read this. It might help.

Sunday, 13 January 2008

Paint nothing.

Get thee behind me, Satan.

I've just spent an hour wrestling with colour charts on the Dulux website and I hereby declare it to be one of the most boring ways to waste a perfectly good Sunday afternoon I've yet found. You lose your grip on time and space, lost in endless shades of white and off-white and near-white and anti-white. And the names! Bracken salts. Labrador sands. Volcanic splash. It was a nightmare.

But I'm glad because the moment you start to care about this stuff, the day you find yourself fretting over the miniscule differences between Sundrenched Saffron and Desert Island, the day your stack of colour swatches is bigger than your stack of Batman back issues, is the day that you are officially a lost cause. It's all over. Life has broken you.

Luckily, it bores the arse off me. So I ain't dead yet.