Dragons, Orange Juice and repeat ad nauseum - 23.10.12

The lifecycle of the human being; you are born, grow up, go to school and education, get a job, retire and die.  There are many nuances with this depending on personal preference; having a family, holidays, trips to outer space (depending on one’s career choices).

There are certain things in your life that you have no choice or standing on whatsoever.  You can complain about them, moan and have a nervous breakdown over them.  Those not prone to flights of psychological unrest might opt to take a more traditional War Time approach: The Put Up and Shut up Maxim.    I’m talking about family... Or am I?

Having been raised by a single mother with assistance from her mother, I got a very “lady-centric” point of view on the world, all aspects there in and, of course, men.  Then, add my elder sister.  They formed an enchanting triangle of oestrogen which would allow no manner of testosterone to penetrate the feminist zone (that sounds very lesbi-onic...)

Don’t start – Im not a misogynist.  It just made things a little difficult for me growing up.  Hormones a-flowing, gangly limbs a-growing and all that.  As soon as I hit puberty, along with my sister, my Mum shortly followed suit and became The Dragon Lady as I referred to her: The menopause had landed.

The memory that floods most prominently to mind is the Orange Juice Incident.  In my mind, this will forever be the most terrifying my mother would ever prove to be.  

On a warm summers day, what’s a 14 year old lad to do, but to make himself a nice cool glass or orange juice, with ice – Add in vodka and you have one of my tipples of choice! However, as my mother will still tell you to this day, I was more than a little clumsy as a teenager... and we had a beige carpet.  The glass slipped from my hand as I was walking through the living room and landed on the floor.  One glass of orange juice with ice and carpet, please!  The short end of the tale would be on that fateful day, I learned how to use a Vax; not one of those silly stand-up-vacuum-shaped contraptions they call a Vax.  It was a proper Vax – bright orange and looked like an space ship.  I’d say she went mental, but it wouldn’t be doing her any justice at all.  I had no idea one woman could yell quite so loudly.  She didn’t speak to me for days, even though there was no evidence it had ever happened.  Crazy-lady-hormones!!

So between a Grandma, a menopausal mother and a teenage sister, I have had my fair share of crazy women.   If I were prone to such thinking, I might suppose my sexual orientation could be attributed to my upbringing, but I don’t swing that way on the theory, so we won’t bother.

As you grow, develop and progress through each of these stages of your life, you are thought of and treated differently by those around you.  You might be regarded as a leader and pioneer in your workplace, but the brew-bitch at home.        

                 

In the same way, very few people will go through their entire life in the same situation; people change homes, careers, even life partners.  So why is it that I find myself in a situation not too dissimilar from my 14 year old self?  On my left I have a woman, not four months my senior of a hormonal and highly strung persuasion today and on my right I have the most politically-incorrect-busy-body-to-walk-the-face-of-the-earth.  Neither of them are bad people, like my mother and my sister.  I’d go as far to say that I like both of them.   But,  like when I was 14, sometimes the safest thing to do is just keep my head down and keep my mouth shut and await the eventual passing of the Oestrogen storm.

I have been left wondering; despite all the changes and alterations that we make in our lives, does anything really change, or do you change crazy bitches you live with for crazy bitches you work with (And for any man who works in a family business with his wife, God help you around her time of the month)?   Is the whole of life as monotonous as listening to the same track on your iPod for the rest of your life, only sung by different artists or, perhaps worse, learning a foreign language at school?  J’mappelle Michael.  Je suis vingt six ans.  (sp?!)(It’s been a very long time since I did French!)

There is so much repetition in our lives, even the bare basics of our work lives and routines to a daily life, sometimes it’s hard to see the big difference between growing up, school and work. 

   

Oh, wait!  I have found the difference!  I get paid in seven days!

Bleak - Written 21.10.12

It is the bleakest of things.  It is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.  In fact, in the current job market, being in work is not a bad thing.  I’d hate to appear ungrateful.  I have been on the dole; I know how bad things can be.  However, at some point in the day, one simply begins to wonder if an axe murder, taking a swing at the back of your head would actually be such a bad thing. 

Why?  Yes, a perfectly valid question; what on this earth could make a mad man with an axe seem more appealing than continued existence?  I won’t deny it to be a rather extreme or drama-queenish solution to the problem.  The system is running slow.

Anyone who doesn’t understand how I might be feeling, just goes to show you’ve never worked in an office.   Most people in the world at some point or another have waited for public transport.  With that in mind, imagine your train is late.  You’ve heard you automated station announcer bint declare that your train is running twenty-seven minutes late (At least with their terrible time keeping, Northern Rail can offer you some comfort in the exact timing of the arrival of said train...) and you have decided to twiddle your thumbs, buy a coffee, update Facebook, read Twitter, take a picture of litter and call it art via Instagram and you’re still only three minutes closer to the arrival of the train.   

                Some time, around twenty six minutes later, you see the lights of your train approaching.  It pulls up, you board, take a seat and relax slightly as you realise that all will be well, now you’re cooped out with a bunch of strangers  and surrender yourself to the hands of good old Bernard, bumbling at the controls, to take you on your merry way.

                Then imagine some gypo has stolen the copper from the signal communicators, meaning all traffic on the lines has come to a standstill.  Over the course of an hour, and releasing an intricate network of homing pigeons, it has been established that you are safe to move on a little further down the track.  As no one is communicating with you, your face cracks into a smile as you dare to hope that you’re getting closer to your destination, before coming to an abrupt halt at the next set of traffic signals.

                By the time you get off the train, its cold, it’s raining; you’re hungry and have no coat.  You have a half an hour walk home, and arrive through the door to discover your electricity has tripped out due to the torrential down pour.

                When the computer system you use to do every element and aspect of your job is running slow, that is what your day feels like.

Worse than all of that, not only is this going to be one bad day likened to public-transport-hell, every day is like this for the foreseeable future.  The faceless drones in IT have promised you an upgrade before the end of the year.  They weren’t specific about which year so you try not to be optimistic.  And as the days rumble on wards through October towards Christmas, somehow the whole of your life seems to be passing you by at break-neck speed, almost as though you’re in a bubble of go-slow, while the rest of the party are popping E’s and dancing like idiots around you.  Like the rest of your life, whizzing along like there is no tomorrow, the pile of work at the edge of your desk is growing at an unfathomable rate.  Moments like this reveal to you just how much you do, or don’t do, in a day. 

And despite the fact there is nothing you can do, somehow, you don’t feel any better.  It’s not like the moment depicted in cinema; the plane is crashing, there is nothing you can do, and you calmly surrender your free will to the void and exhale, to be engulfed by a ball of flame.  Instead, you’re getting wound up, gagging for a brew, constantly needing a wee, and counting the moments until you can escape your confines .

To pass the time, you find yourself sliding across from your desk to the printer and back like a child, just to liven things up a bit.  Perhaps whilst you do this, you might sing “Basket Case” by Green Day.  You might find yourself typing in strange and peculiar ways.   Both the above could have something to do with the eight cups of coffee you’ve consumed to pass the time.  This also explains the heartburn and almost constant need to pee.

Back dated and beginning

So... makes sense to start at the beginning, but I haven't.  This is part way through, so sort of like the start of Kill Bill Vol. 1.

I'm not going to waffle on for too long (I hope) but I do want to explain how this started as succinctly as I can.

I describe my creative "down period"  as my muse having left me for a guitar player.  Nonetheless, the spirit hadn't moved me in years.  I started trying to find out what had changed almost a year ago now and I still don't think I'm much closer to it, but I'm still plodding on in the hopes of self revelation.

I hoped that by starting to write something down on a regular basis, in a notebook, just how I used to, things might start happening for me.  I went over a lot of old and half completed things and began to work through those.  Nothing really happened except a lot of scrapping of some truly pretentious crap.

Then, one day - actually for many days in a row - we hit upon some technical snags at work that entailed me sitting and staring blankly at a computer screen, praying to the gods of technology (strategic small 'g') that something would change and the system might come back to life and I'd be able to do something worth while.  On the plus side, I drank my first brew at a warm temperature in over a year and a half of working there!  But I digress.  One day of immense frustration, as the work began to mount up around my ears, I surrendered to it and began to type out what I was thinking.

It comes and goes in waves, as I'm led to believe the creative tides do, but I'm trying to go with the flow and write when I feel the urge just to see if anything funny or interesting gets said.  I amuse myself quite well, so I suppose its up to any one who ends up reading it if I succeed or not.

I realised I have a few of these rants and, hopefully, more to come, so I decided to collect them all together in an Internet-based-pen to keep them safe.  What I'll be posting (when I've done editing them into shape) are the rants I've had over the past few months.  Some of them are from work, waiting and others are from "other places".  Anything after that will be new and current and come here to keep the back dated ones company.  Sounds like a lovely little farm for rants

So, enjoy.  Read away and try not to spill your tea as you nod off. =)