Too many people cower to criminals
I’ve just been down the park with Luffy, chucking him the ball with the ball chucker thingie. I’ve got an old iPod and some bulky professional headphones I’ve started wearing to listen to music in the backyard while I lie on the cat’s banana lounge. But there was no shade in the backyard this afternoon, so I decided to go down the park instead. The headphones wouldn’t fit under the only hat I have big enough to fit my overly large head, so I didn’t wear it. The long shot is I got sunburn again anyway.
I was listening to the old The Fall album Grotesque (After the Gramme). I was listening to the song ‘NWRA’. The bass line is mostly one distorted note. I was thinking: ‘That’s a great tone. It sounds like they ran it through a mike pre-amp’. The energy of it, the anger of it, got me feeling excited. Then I started to feel like a phony.
I’ve been feeling old for years. I’m middle-age now, forty next March. That should be considered old. I don’t want to be young forever. People who remember being young with fondness are mostly full of shit. Life gets better in almost every significant way the longer you live. But I never felt like a phony before.
I just wrote a fairly long piece about my recent experiences working for the ABC, more for the therapeutic value than anything else. I’ve been putting out feelers to a few people I know with the idea of publishing it somewhere, adding a little assurance that I can always get rid of the swears. From the replies I’ve been getting the general consensus that Quadrant will be my best bet, enemy of my enemy and all, but that even they might be worried about the more defamatory bits.
So I was thinking about how I could edit the piece to get it past lawyers and I was listening to Mark E. Smith singing: ‘Too many people cower to criminals.’
That’s when I started feeling like a phony. Because once upon a time I wouldn’t have given these things a second thought. I wouldn’t have even considered whether or not it was defamatory, just whether or not what I wrote was true, an accurate representation of the events as I saw them. Nothing else mattered.
When you get older I guess you start worrying more about what people think of you. You learn to recognise all your flaws, and then you start to think: I don’t want people to think I’m a gossip, or that I’m self-righteous, or that I’m intolerant, or that my fucking shit smells. I’m going to cover it all up and pretend. I’m going to have them all thinking I’m a meek motherfucker, just like them.
And then you realise you’ve started cowering at criminals. Because you’re thinking: ‘You get more flies with honey’, and how the extra money comes in handy.
Fuck that. Flies get squished. So I’ll wait a couple of days and see what happens. If nobody wants to publish the thing I’ll put it online here. With all the swears left in.
Cunt flaps.
