Iraqis Anonymous

I had to laugh upon seeing the headline on this story in the Guardian, that there is now a “13 Step Plan” to rebuild Iraq. Is this just so it’s like one step better than the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step-plan?

It makes me think of the Spinal Tap quote about the amps going to 11 so they could be one louder than everyone else.

Bunny Suits

I know this’ll mean fuck all to anyone outside the UK, but whyis it that every time I see the Easter advert for KFC (the one with the group of guys in Pink bunny suits) I start thinking that the next time I go out clubbing etc., it’d be fun to go out in a bunny suit for the night?

Not that I’m an attention-seeker at all, honest…

An improvement

Finally, the business bank account is now sorted, as both the bank and Companies House have finally got their combined bureaucracies in order and sorted. Needless to say, my blood pressure is now about 20 points lower than it was before everything was confirmed. The tickets for the Peter Gabriel gig arrived (Now I’ve just got to figure out what to do with the Erasure one for the same night) and having looked at the website, it looks like it’ll be bloody amazing.

So all in all it’s not been a bad day. Which makes a change, recently.

Massive Attack – Manchester Apollo

I’ve been wanting to see Massive Attack in concert for several years now, and when I saw that they’d be doing a concert in Manchester, I was one of the first in the queue for tickets, even before the new album came out. I had no idea what to expect, no idea how their music would translate to the live scene. But all the same, I wanted to see it happen. And last night was the night. Right from the start, it was always going to be different – all that could be seen was some purple lighting, and a red digital clock showing the time. It was dark enough that you couldn’t even see the band come on stage – but when the bassline for “Future Proof” kicked in, the lights came up, the “clock” turned out to be a huge screen, and the gig was utterly stunning for the next two and a quarter hours. The screen displayed various things all the way through the show, it was a geek extravaganza, bits of webpages, world statistics, NASDAQ tickers, news, weather reports, all sorts of things happening behind the band. The entire concert probably is better described as “an experience” – more than the music, more than seeing the band, it was amazing. Oddly enough, the actual members of Massive Attack were hardly visible – always backlit, very very enigmatic. A whole range of different singers for the various tracks – including Horace Andy, and Sinead O’Connor performing the tracks she sings on the 100th Window album. This really just added to my own enjoyment of the gig, because she’s another one I’ve wanted to see for a long time, so to see two long-term “want to sees” in one venue was a true prize. In many ways, it was a strange concert – considering the fact that I really didn’t like the Avril Lavigne concert because it was so technically perfect and passionless, which is exactly the same as the concert last night, but for Massive Attack it was somehow right, it fitted. The entire concert was about atmosphere, allowing the band’s music to speak for itself – and that’s what it did. Loud and clear.

Sitting on the hard-shoulder of the Information Superhighway

Not quite sure what happened yesterday, but the site appeared to disappear off the face of the Interwebnet for a while. No words from my hosting company on why it happened, but normal service has now been resumed. (Well, what I laughingly call normal, anyway)

Soap Box

For as long as I can remember, I’ve never wanted to do what everyone else does. I never wanted the entire marriage, kids, house, car thing that most of my peers seem to rate so highly. I never even wanted the stable job/career – for me, the dictionary definition of career, “to ricochet wildly from place to place” was infinitely preferable.

So for the last decade or more, I’ve lived my own life, never wanted any of the things that the people around me rated as important, and just got on with my own thing. Yeah, most of the time I’ve kind of stayed under the radar of things like authority, banks, credit scoring, electoral rolls and all of that jazz, but it suited my purposes. Because of how I worked, I moved around more in a year than most people do in a decade, so I just really never ended up registered for voting, credit, bills, or anything.

In the last three or four years, things have changed a bit. I’ve settled down, even to the extent of having lived in the same house now for nearly two years, and yes, I do want to buy my own house now. I’ve been building up my presence (for want of a better word), appearing on the electoral roll, slowly trying to fit in with what other people want and dream of. But of course I still don’t have the mental software to fit in properly – if I do these things, I still want it to be on my own terms, have no desire to do everything the way everyone else does.

But it’s hard – every inch of the way is a fight, because of the years I’ve spent not fitting in, it’s a hassle to get anything done. Credit scoring loathes me still, because of the fact that according to their records I didn’t even exist ’til about three years ago. Coming into this world of bureaucrats and computerised records that are “policed” by complete cretins who seem to have nothing better to do with their lives is a frustrating experience.

And I’m tired of it – tired of feeling I have to fight for every inch of every achievement, that anything I need or want to sort out has to be fought for, pushed for, trying to get people to do things they way they should be done, not necessarily the way they’ve always done them. The last two weeks of petty bureaucracy have pushed me too far too quickly, it’s left me in a state where all I really want to do is walk away, admit defeat, go back to the under-the-radar life I used to have. Long-term I won’t do that, because it’s just giving in, letting other people win, letting “the system” win, and I’m utterly crap at doing that. But just once I’d like to find a procedure that works smoothly without any hassle, where I didn’t have to feel I’d fought for it all. I doubt it will ever happen, but hey, I can dream.

I Quit

After two weeks of pure bureaucratic hassle with what seems like fuck all to show for it except higher stress levels, that’s it. They win. I’ve had enough of fighting everything every single inch of the way, of trying to chase up through layers of incompetence, of burning myself out trying to get things done. Fuck it all.