A Nod’s As Good As A Wink To Blind Bat, eh?

It’s a much anticipated Friday night in the pub near work with a group of close friends, but a big greasy fly is floating in the lager. Alan, a big, belligerently boorish motormouth from a print shop I regularly use, spots us through the pub window. A cuckoo-in-the-nest is now making his ego comfortable among us and inevitably he starts to piss on everybody's chips… "I've got this, I've got that, I earn this, that cost this much. Mortgage? All paid matey… Essex? Fucking shithole fulla slags. Kent. Garden of England innit? What? Coulda gotcha one of them for a tenner Mac… you was fucking robbed… Mine's a Lowenbrau. Love? She asked for my love alright, so I gave her 8 inches… Ahahaha… Wanna see a saucy picture of the missus on me phone? Look at the gristle on that, phwaarrr… Nah? Awright! Fucking suitchaself. Jokes? Lissennathis, Paddy and Seamus walk in a pub…"

Christ almighty. Chaos. Conversation hijacked, we're all appalled, and I'm harbouring a rapidly building level of resentment and rancour that could only end badly. We’re subjected to a barrage of verbal diarrhoea resulting in instant grinding migraine. Everything grossly out of context or wholly inappropriate. Whatever you’d done, he'd done, but ‘way fucking better’. Wherever you'd been, he'd been, but ‘didn't fucking like it. Whoever you’d mention he'd already seen or met and thought they were ‘fucking wankers’.

None of us are pedantically PC but Alan took the fucking custard cream. A series of incredulous ‘WTF?' moments ensued. Slack jawed, we stared at him like he’d beamed down from Mars.

To put the tin-hat on it, Alan possessed not a soupcon of pub etiquette. Didn't buy a round or offer his tucked away Marlboros. Sat there, brass necked, ignorance personified, short arms and long pockets, clinking his lighter against empty glass till somebody felt impelled to offer a drink or a fag, whereupon he would launch into another crass anecdote as if singing for his supper.

I’m getting the skunkeye like I'm responsible. The pulse in my temple is pounding, like hammers on sheetmetal and the only positive thing running through my head as I’m watching this tosser is the Anti Nowhere League’s refrain of "So what? So what? You boring little cunt."

Suddenly Alan stood, "Gonna release a brahn trout… back in two shakes. Keep an eye on me jacket." Big Rich arose, grim faced. He picked up Alan’s jacket and followed him into the toilets. Moments later he returned, frown gone. "Boys, out the back before it goes nuts." A torrent of questions… He shrugged, "Must’ve bored himself to sleep. ‘Nuff said." Awed, we looked at each other, smiling. As one we supped up our beer, collected our fags and quietly ducked out through the beergarden.
In silence…
Order restored.

©Words John Mac

She Took Me Half The Way There

She turned and walked away saying don't worry about me, I always do it this way, as though it was something that happened regularly. I stared at the dimming mercury driven street lights and noticed the misty rain falling in their fading amber glow, and couldn't help thinking that if a million bright ambassadors of morning arrived that particular morning, nobody would get to see them. Would everyone be systematically dragged from their homes and shot for not attending something that was supposed to happen but didn't?  After a sleepless night I wanted to get to my bed and leave the world behind, but the world wouldn't leave my mind, so I reflected on all the things that hadn't happened over the past couple of weeks. What had happened was perfectly clear to me, but 20/20 vision is useless if you can't see from the opposite direction - assuming you want to. Was this the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, I wondered.
 
I looked back on all I had done up to now in my life, and all that I hadn't done, and what, if anything, there was to come. There are so many things going on that I don't know anything about, but how can I know? I thought about her journey and how she was feeling, both physically, mentally and emotionally, and whether hers was a one way journey as I contemplated how stubborn, guarded and secretive she was about displaying feelings or emotions, apart from a few occasions when she flowed relatively freely in, perhaps, a deliberate or planned manner, or an unguarded moment... who knows? Now you see it now you don't. Playing games is tiresome at times, particularly when you've played them so often.

I only know what I'd like or want, so why do other people judge me and tell me what I'm thinking or how I feel, particularly when I don't know myself at times? All I want is more time, but I wouldn't want to bore anyone with details from my life. At times I'm happy and content, and at times I'm not, and I like not having all the answers and not knowing things. I create things, and that makes other people happy from what I'm told, so stone me to death if you like - I'll die of something anyway, and although I don't like it myself, a lot of people enjoy being stoned. Am I the most boring person in the world? How the fuck would I know, I haven't met most of the other 7+ billion people living here. Ask someone else - I'm sure they'll be able to tell you.       –

© Words Sean O'Connor

Who Is The Dullest Person In The World ?

When I heard this topic, my first thought was "That's me." Seemed easy, little research required to identify the world's dullest person, just a matter of looking into the mirror but not so fast, maybe that's just vanity, there's lots of folks who might qualify just as well. Humanity's capacity to make things mundane is undiminished and the modern world abounds in dullness, increasingly oriented to public/iconic personages, i.e. the cult of celebrity.

The idea of 'the world's dullest person' implies some celebratory distinction. Has dullness become a treasured benchmark of civilization? What does dullness mean? No fun? Entropy shuffle? Heat death of the universe in slow motion? A slow creep of cultural and personal glaciation ? We are mad for memes and factoids, standardised and multiplied by internet search engines, beamed back and forth to the heavens like Wells' sullen sphinx beckoning the Eloi to the catacombs. Celebrity-veneration is the red carpet gateway to dullness, not the other way around.



The space age brought us not flying cars but satellite delivery of Facebook and its digital kin. Their torrent of junk-info includes much mid-20th century nostalgia for future visions and terminally recycled memories of Hollywood and rock and roll. Celebrity icons like Elvis and Marilyn have achieved prominence they only enjoyed fitfully in real life.  Television and the rock explosion took the old Hollywood celebrity thraldom, and spectator life, to new excesses. Many dull lives were assimilated into Dylan and Beatles worship. When these heroes couldn't take it, they were eventually replaced by sports stars and sitcom deities. As Tom Wolfe pointed out in the 70's, it didn't take much exposure to real space flight for Americans to change channels. 70's nostalgia has been slow to gain popularity because its main achievements, disco and punk, became outdated and dull so quickly. That era bred few heroes so maybe it wasn't such a bad time after all. People still led their own lives, though increasingly corralled.

By the 80s, only things really new were video rock and hip-hop, both realms whose repetitiveness has high dullness-potential. [Reagan wasn't even new] Superstardom returned with Michael Jackson, Madonna, etc. The digital age's navel gazing followed quickly, along with philosophic questions about 'the end of history'. Excitingly dull and other stuff was happening like lingering undeclared wars, federal/corporate bureaucratisation, environmental oblivion, national insecurity. This often seemed impersonal ... dull fare compared to celebrity-worship, whether of the living or the dead. Collateral celebrity from crises and disasters does not last long.

Nostalgia sites are fun till they homogenize our sharpest memories into a dull Velveeta-type product. Should this be any surprise ? Is this what we deserve for forgetting our artifacts were often junk in the first place? Can we be blamed for finding this salvage more fun than contemporary product?  We have fewer new major fictional characters, dull or otherwise. Now, we have more fictionalised, real-life personalities, dulled down even as they are sensationalised.

Digital numbing 'reality' television dull-athons like American Idol and Pawn Stars make apparently witless dolts into familiar faces. Spawn of the undead like the Osbournes and Kardashians erase the idea of personal sharpness as a prerequisite for fame. Sport stars rise and fall like restless royalty. Political commentators are celebrated at a level beyond Walter Winchell's wildest dreams. Political figures have deconstructed to celebrity bureaucrats and business tycoons tour the networks like whistle stop campaigners. The people who really run the world, managers, are deemed too dull to notice ... camouflaged.

It may be a dull sport to take pot-shots at these fish in the open tub of 24/7 saturation publicity. How can we pick favorites when so many of these celebrities are so similar. Is there really so much difference among their dullness?

Let me state my own bonafides as a contender in the dullness sweepstakes. I'm a diplomatic historian, a very unexciting trade, specializing in Cold War topics, like nuclear-arms control, the Berlin Crisis and US-Soviet detente. Most people would rather watch cinderblock walls than hear the details, and for good reason. I like how Walker Percy's protagonist, Binx, in The Moviegoer celebrated the dullness of his life in the New Orleans suburb of Gentilly, also my former neighborhood. Gentilly is sometimes described as a place where something is always 'about' to happen' but .... Since Katrina, I live in the country swamps in the fairly dull north shore of Lake Ponchartrain. Many here want more exciting suburbanization than mere Gentilly. They find trees boring ... dull.

Words Richard Williamson

The Dullest Person I Have Ever Met - Part One

http://www.zani.co.uk/the-dullest-person-i-have-ever-met-part-one