Archive for the 'Rants' Category

So, as normal, I’m operating on a timezone that bears no relevance to my current location. While the rest of the world is slumbering, I’m exhausted, wide awake and have absolutely no inclination toward going to sleep in the near future. And, whenever I find myself writing a blog post at this time in the morning, it’s usually the end result of being in the same mind-numbing scenario: I’ve run out of company, entertainment and drugs. And, while I have a few beers at my disposal, I don’t think it’s likely that drinking them all will lead to a particularly restful night.

Being in this position, I end up letting my thoughts wander all over the warped and pitted landscape that makes up my subconscious, and the things that I find there scare me from time to time. By this, I neither mean that my thoughts are notably evil, nor that you would be likely to find them in a low budget, painfully dated, ‘gore is more’ horror film. No; the thing that scares me isn’t necessarily what these thoughts are even about, but simply the sudden realisation of how much certain thoughts have managed to play on my mind for weeks, months, or even years in some cases.

Traditionally, most people will write their new year’s resolutions as a way of bettering themselves, whether by means of giving up smoking, using that gym membership or limiting themselves to only 2 hookers a week. Unfortunately, the tradition follows that after writing said resolutions, most people will shirk, begrudgingly ignore or otherwise fail to adhere to them within a fortnight. I, however, have decided that I might as well just write down all the things that are playing on my mind, and solve them one-by-one across the course of the year. Theoretically, if I can solve these issues, I should hopefully achieve some sodding inner peace. And, if that doesn’t work, then I haven’t exactly done any worse than the other 20 new years preceding this one.

So, seeing as the internet doesn’t quite have enough information about me already, here is a non-exhaustive list of my fears and anxieties. I think a lot of people will know where I’m coming from, although not necessarily on all fronts.

• I have about £3 in my wallet, and that has to see me until my student loan comes through.
• Hindsight taught me that I found it too easy to fall in love. Now I’m wondering if I’m finding it too hard.
• I take incredibly bad care of myself, and one day I’m going to have to give a shit.
• My parents are disappointed by the waning anti-climax that is my educational career, and I can feel it whenever I’m around them.
• If the world continues on its current downward trajectory, all my children can hope to live for is slavery, ignorance and futility. That thought alone is honestly enough to put me off having children.
• No matter what I may tell my friends, my family, and even tell myself, it’s been almost 2 years and I’m still not over it. Worse yet, I don’t think I’m getting over it with time, only getting numb.
• I get on much better with people who smoke weed, but I’m still not sure if that’s causality or mere correlation.

Addendum: There are other things playing on my mind, far greater than anything in the list above, but I don’t feel that I have the writing ability to express them in a way that won’t immediately dump me in a particular pigeon hole. Whenever I’ve attempted it before, the end result is that people see me as a bad combination of a dumb hippie stoner and a miserable emo kid, regurgitating the same clichéd shit that they’ve heard a million times before. So, for the sake of not further stereotyping myself, I’ll sadly hold my tongue.

So here I am, sat amidst this piggy pandemic,
with the news readers telling us our bodies are pathetic;
Nobody’s immune to this deadly strain of virus,
it keeps the people scared and effectively requires us

To spend more time alone and keep stocked up on medication;
Tamiflu is powerful – at market penetration;
It’s that name you turn to when you need to treat flu,
Cuz it’s sold around the world and it’s target market’s you.

While I might sound like I’m being unreasonable,
Think of all the finance that could become feasible,
If part of your business was a Tamiflu merchant,
Just as a “lethal” strain had turned emergent;

I wouldn’t fuck about, I’d get straight down to thinking,
I wanna make some cash but our economy is sinking,
So I’ll raise the markup on the flu drug that I’m whoring,
Demand is forcing market clearing price to keep on soaring,

Every time you sneeze or cough, a vapour is expelled,
In which you’ll find a multitude of germs being propelled
So catch it, bin it, kill it, don’t give them the satisfaction
Of profiting from illness that is acting as distraction

From all the flak the government has taken as of late;
The expenses scandal hasn’t surfaced on the TV since the date,
That the W.H.O. (yeah, who?) told us all,
We’re expecting a pandemic; human race is set to fall;

So rush out to the shops but be sure that you don’t breathe,
It’s probably much worse than we have led you to believe,
Make sure you buy that medicine, even just in case;
It might even kill you! Nah, we’re lying to your face.

The only people dying are the elderly and weak,
Don’t think that influenza’s going on a killing streak,
It’s only going to effect a third of us at peak;
Don’t believe the media, it’s truth that you should seek.

Typically my blog is filled with Facebook quizzes and meaningless apologies to non-existent readers for not having written anything for months on end, but I feel it’s about time I wrote something with depth.

Sitting on the bench in Evelyn Gardens at 4.20am, I always have a lot of time for reflection. While I would normally frequent the same bench to enjoy my favourite Class B pass-time, tonight was a night of empty baggies and desperate, futile grinder scrapings. So, instead, I was smoking a king-size roll-up, and watching the beginnings of another Monday in London. The sun had already risen behind the looming grey clouds, and I had a feeling that things weren’t going to get much brighter today.

Throughout my life I’ve suffered seemingly random bouts of insomnia, and this week has been no exception. Normally, I would lay the blame upon my exams or a piece of coursework that was due, or even the occasional woman trouble that seems to come with the increasingly occasional women in my life, but recently I’ve been wondering if perhaps there’s something else to it. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been developing an overbearing apathy, which has only seemed to worsen with time. People tell me that my problem stems from smoking too much weed, and part of me wants that to be true, but I know that my herbal intake isn’t the problem. There’s something much darker causing it — the fact that I have an exam at 2pm today and am yet to sleep feels like the least of my worries.

So what on earth were my bigger worries? Sitting on the same bench, looking across the road at the same beautifully architectured church, I pondered this question in great depth. I usually avoid this kind of perusal of my subconscious — deep thought without anybody there to validate it tends to see me remembering and dwelling upon the shit in my past that would best remain buried and fragmented — but all I could feel this morning were a sense of detachment from the world and a sickening disgust towards the people who were simply out to serve their own needs.

I’ve read a lot, and been told even more about the real state of modern human society, and the more I read and hear, the less I want to believe it. And the more I hear, the less I can disregard.

We are all living in a global empire, where nation by nation, the world is being chewed up, swallowed, and defecated back into place as a well-templated victory for those who rule. Institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, posing as a saviour to the monetary needs of failing third world nations, give out enormous loans to allegedly save the impoverished. When, surprisingly, these loans cannot be repaid, conditions are imposed upon the nation: their electricity suppliers, water boards and other public amenities are put up to auction, trade restrictions are torn down, and soon large multi-national corporations move in. These corporations set up their businesses, using their huge capital to lower their prices and undercut those of natives, exporting the nation’s valuable natural resources (whether oil, diamonds or foodstuffs), and soon people are forced to work for these corporations for a pittance in order to earn enough to survive.

This, sadly, is again, one of my smaller worries, but my biggest worry of all lies very close to it. These empirical corporations all seem to run under the same golden rule: maximise profit, regardless of the social or environmental impact. It is this golden rule which scares me the most. Greed-fuelled profit maximisation is the biggest constraint on our development of technology, culture and society in general. Ever since the industrial revolution, our technological development has been stifled by those aiming to cut corners and reduce costs – spending money on researching new technology is, after all, spending money. Furthermore, if an improvement in technology were to lower the price of a commodity, then where is the incentive to improve at all?

Take the car, for example. In order to use your car to travel, it needs fuel and regular servicing. If we are such an advanced race, then why do we have to spend so much money as consumers on having our ‘advanced’ technology repaired and maintained? Now imagine that every car in the world didn’t have a petrol/diesel engine, but instead had an electric motor — we could travel for a fraction of the cost and not be concerned about filling our streets with caustic exhaust fumes. In fact, there are electric cars available that can travel 300 miles on a single, inexpensive charge cycle, with performance equal to that of a similarly priced petrol car and a much simpler design with less to go wrong. So, why aren’t we all driving clean, efficient, reliable electric cars? The reason is simple: there is much less money to be made from efficient, reliable cars — if we aren’t paying almost a pound a litre for a diminishing resource, and spending hundreds of pounds a year to keep our cars running, then how can oil companies and car manufacturers earn their keep? They can’t, so they buy up patents for related technologies and make it near-impossible for development to occur.

So why don’t we hear about this in the news? Consider News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates, better known to you and me as owner of The Sun, The Times, 20th Century Fox, Sky and countless other newspapers, magazines, TV stations, etc. This corporation, and others like it, are the people who control exactly what we see and hear in the media. It stands to reason that business would not be booming quite so well, were they telling us the truth and endangering the profits of fellow companies.

I hate this feeling that we are being told bare-faced lies to keep us from realising the truth. Whenever I hear the term ‘terrorism’ in the news, used to describe someone standing up for their livelihood, I start to see the hideous irony behind it all — if terrorism is supposed to be controlling a populous through fear, then you have to wonder who the real terrorists are.

Then again, I could be wrong. I hope so. I’m sorry if this doesn’t make much sense, but I hope I’ve got my point across. I could wax lyrical about the many other aspects of this establishment, but I fear that the more I say, the less I will be taken seriously. And that is a sad truth about the world.