Bring me your nihilists, your anarchists and defeatists

Every morning on the Tube I see TFL's posters with inspirational quotes.  I have to give them points for effort -- I like the lengths they go to with culture on the tube, from displaying poetry in ad spaces, to these quotation posters that are extracts from a booklet of quotes for Piccadilly line staff share with passengers.

According to TFL's own press release the booklet "aims to generate a more positive atmosphere during peak times." It apparently also "encourages the many voices of the Tube’s staff to re-enter the environment of the network, bringing some of the personalities which have made it famous to the forefront once more. Coming from a wide range of philosophical, political and historical sources, the quotes provoke thought on life in the city, especially as heard on the London Underground."

My trouble with them though is that they are so safe, and uninteresting.  Gandhi.  Nelson Mandela.  Great men, but who can really argue with them?  Although I did actually meet a man recently who thought Gandhi was bad, but that's not really the point.

I appreciate that the quotes are meant to be uplifting, inspiring even, and optimistic -- but wouldn't it be more interesting if they could prompt some discussion?  Maybe they want to stay away from provoking debate when people are tired and packed into crowded trains that are frequently dirty and often subject to delays and mechanical failures.  Would you really want an argument breaking out in a stifling hot tube carriage when there is nowhere to escape?

At the bottom of the posters is a web site address where you can submit quotes.  I amuse myself thinking of inappropriate submissions of quotes from people like the radical Edward Abbey who offered thoughts that should be embroidered on cushions, like “Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.” 

And who can forget the timeless wisdom of the great Hunter S. Thompson, the pioneer of "freak power"?  It is next to impossible to choose just one quote from the man who felt the same way about disco as he did about herpes, but my favourite is "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro".

The author Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favourites, and he denies that he is a nihilist -- instead saying he is a romantic.  Either way, as a former journalist and compulsive blogger, I find this thought fitting: "The best way to waste your life, ... is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don't participate.”

Also making my fantasy list of submissions would be:
"If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important" Bertrand Russell
"Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do" Oscar Wilde

Wouldn't these give you something more to think about on your way to work each day?  So, share with me your quotes.  Not your uplifting and inspiring mantras -- but the unconventional, nihilistic and anarchic that wryly amuse you.

Courier for the day

With no sponsorship licence in sight for her this week, the girl's company suggested she become self employed and work for them freelance from Australia. It wasn't a great solution, but the girl needed the income, and so I got in touch with some people from her office about taking them her work laptop. The idea was that they could then get it sent to Australia by courier.

And so it was on a grey and rainy London afternoon I set off in my best suit, with my portfolio and the girl's laptop, to an appointment I had in the city.

I was already tight for time, the meeting had been set up at the last minute and I'd had time only to get home and change my clothes in a Superman-style whirlwind to catch a train. A train that as I waited at the station was getting further delayed every few minutes. Periodically, freight trains would come storming straight through the station, but my train was delayed without explanation -- and I had to get to the gleaming towers of Docklands.

While I was waiting I got a text from the girl asking me very nicely to call her. I didn't have our spare mobile with the cheap overseas calls, but something about the message told me it was important. The girl got to the point quickly -- it might not be necessary for me to take the laptop to her work after all, since their licence had finally arrived.

This means that after advertising her job for a couple of weeks, the girl will be able to apply for her visa and get all her biometric data recorded, as well as a GPS tracking chip embedded under her skin, as I am sure is now standard procedure in a surveillance society such as ours.

Thanks to the joys of internet access on my phone I was able to buy a little time before my appointment so I didn't turn up breathless and rushed, so that went well. I wasn't expected at the girl's offices any particular time, and I think I shared the lift with her Swiss colleague. I was curious to meet some of the people I had heard so much about, and the few I had emailed, but I got no further than the receptionist. I handed over the laptop, and was off again.

Soon now, the girl will be returning, and I am already mentally making plans for fun tings to do -- I won't talk about any of my ideas here and now, but if there was one thing my visit Down Under showed me it is that surely nowhere in England is beyond reasonable driving distance.

Freak on a train

I was talking to a crazy man on the train the other day.

You know how it is; you get on the train and look around for a place to sit. But all the seats are taken and you really don't want to stand. Then you notice one man sitting on his own and several empty seats all around him. And you just know there must be a good reason why nobody wants to sit near this guy, but you aren't going far so figure you can take your chances.
And it all makes good blog fodder.

I sit down and this wild-eyed, toothless madman looks at me. I pretend to be fascinated with something outside the window. Then a girl listening to her iPod sits down next to crazy man. She is listening to her music loudly, so that all you can hear is the tinny, hissing beat. Crazy man says something to me. I don't know what it is, but I figure it's something about personal stereos not being very personal. I make a noise of agreement. "What?" he says "Hm, nothing" I mumble and continue to look out the window. But I've spoken to him now.

He keeps looking at me, and looking at this girl, then he leans towards me
"Is she with you?" he asks
I laugh "No" I tell him. This doesn't seem clear enough to him.
"Is she your girlfriend?"
"No. I only saw her for the first time when she sat down."
"Nice, though, isn't she?"
"Yes, she's very pretty"
"Why don't you ask her out?"
"I don't think my girlfriend would like that very much"
"Fair enough, I'm just trying to help you out, mate"

I thanked him for the thought, but assured him it wasn't necessary. Then crazy man starts complaining how nobody talks on trains any more. It did seem a little strange when he mentioned it, the carriage was full of people, but also completely silent. Except for him. He was telling me how in his day people would all talk to each other on the train. I was tempted to tell him that people are likely to think you're a crazy freak if you talk to them, but figured it best not to call him names, in case he stabbed me for it.

He moves on to the subject of work. I'm dressed in my finest black suit since I'd just been to an interview and he asks me what I do. I think we can see where this is leading. I was tempted to tell him I was an astronaut. But instead I tell him I'm an artist, I was carrying my bird canvas with me, after all. He says "Really?" and makes a drinking gesture with a questioning look. I laugh and tell him, yes, I'm a piss artist. He points out that I said it and not him, so I can't get mad.
"But really," he wants to know, "what sort of thing do you do?"

If you ever seen Spaced you will remember the artist character, Brian, who whenever he was asked that question would reply with "Anger...Pain...Fear...Aggression...". It took a world of restraint not to take the piss and repeat this to crazy man. Instead I talked a bit about photography and a move towards painting. He asked me if there was a lot of money in it. None at all, I told him. I don't make any money out of art. He told me I should be a plumber, like him. How he was earning 35k a year, and when he completes his next course he will be on more like 50k.

You'd think with that sort of money he'd get some false teeth or something, since he had only one or two mangled, discoloured lumps for his gnashers.

Luckily about this point it was my stop, so I was able to bid farewell to the freak and his misguided matchmaking and try to navigate my way from Deptford to Goldsmith's College...

Sex Pistols, Brixton Academy (and everything related)

We left off on our story of this intrepid adventurer and narrator last week with me holding a pair of Sex Pistols tickets and nobody to go with.

My friend Dominic that I know from volunteering was actually very excited and eager to go -- but unfortunately he couldn't get the night off work. At the last minute, my friend Christina (whom I don't think I've ever mentioned here before) contacted me via Facebook to say she really wanted to go, but didn't know anyone to go with. I felt a little bad for not asking her originally, but didn't think we really knew each other well enough to be going to a gig together, just the two of us.

But considering she spent most of the day with only Rhys when we all went to see Aerosmith in Hyde Park, she's not someone who gives that kind of thing any thought. In the end, it was a similar story for her though -- she couldn't get the night off. And I stuck the ticket on Ebay.

I actually put it on Ebay before I heard from Christina for definite, but gave it a reasonably high "buy it now" price. I figured if Christina was unable to go I could then drop the price right down to get a sale. What I hadn't bargained on was being unable to change that later because there were bids on the ticket. Or in this case, one single, solitary bid of a pound.

Naturally, I just logged in with my alternative ebay account and bid on my own auction to raise the stakes a bit.

The bid-snipers came out in the closing minutes, and in the end one user in particular won the auction for a massive £21. Almost half price, it was a whole £19 less than I am paying for the ticket -- but beggars can't be choosers.

Once the auction ended I started emailing the buyer to arrange details for how to pay me and how I would give them their ticket. The buyer turned out to be a young lady named Jools who was very grateful for the ticket and on exchanging numbers to arrange to meet with the ticket on Thursday night, we spent much of Wednesday night having conversations via text.

I wondered if perhaps I wouldn't be seeing the band on my own after all, and although we knew nothing about each other, thought perhaps there could just be the beginnings of something more.

Fast forward to Thursday night: I finish work and walk into the storms ravaging England. Luckily for me the rains had lessened considerably from earlier in the day -- but Jools was apparently not so lucky. I called her when I arrived in Brixton and she told me she'd had to go home to change, as she'd been soaked. But she gave me directions to the bar where we were to meet.

Finding the bar was no problem, but I hesitated before walking in. I was dressed in my old torn jeans, Zero t-shirt and black leather jacket -- through the window of the bar I could see the clientèle in suits. But with the alternative being wait outside in the cold and the rain, I held my head up high, walked in and ordered myself a beer.

Within seconds I was having second thoughts about Jools, when I noticed the bar's rainbow flags. Still, although I don't much go in for the gay scene I know that I can walk into almost any gay bar in London and be certain that unlike a lot of places the staff will be friendly and I won't get any trouble.

I stood at the bar and read my book for an hour before Jools arrived. I was just finishing my second drink when my phone started to ring -- I picked it up and answered, and noticed Jools walking in.

The signs should have been obvious to me sooner -- the fact that she was new to Ebay when she bought the ticket, and confessed to being thrown by setting up a Paypal account, there should have been alarm bells ringing. I wondered if not unlike the bus-stop girl she might be a teenager. What I didn't expect was a 50 year old.

On Wednesday night when we'd been texting she'd made some comment like "I wonder what the crowd will be like?", and I'd replied saying I expected they would be older than the band. She probably smiled to herself about that, at the time (although she's not older than the band).

It turns out Jools had never been to this bar before and didn't know it was a gay bar, but if I had put any thoughts of something more between us out of my head earlier, they now positively dropped and rolled in their hurry to get out.

As it happens, Jools was very good company. She was both very grateful for the ticket and extremely generous (though she could have been more generous and given me the face value), buying me drinks and not even questioning why I was on my own. I'd probably said in the auction's item description I was on my own.

I was introduced to her friends as they arrived -- just as Jay, the nice guy that had sold her the ticket -- who were all of a similar age, but also it seems in their own ways quite successful. Although what she does now, I don't really remember apparently Jools used to be someone very important in the media with a close and long-running professional relationship with a certain radio DJ and television presenter. Maybe this person is in my life not for personal reasons but professional ones?

Looking back, I wish perhaps Jools and her entourage had been a little less generous with the drinks. We didn't bother watching the Cribs who were supporting, and although I lost track how much I drank that night, some rough calculations since then have suggested it was something like 6 or 7 pints, more or less on an empty stomach.

As for the gig itself, we were stood at the absolute very farthest back wall of Brixton Academy. We could see the stage, but I don't think I got a glance of Johnny Rotten all night. The band were good -- very bloody good, consider it's been thirty years since Never mind the Bollocks was released -- and Johnny Rotten remains as funny as ever, in his very strange posh/cockney way. Despite being so good "considering" they weren't amazing. They played their songs well and with passion, but I don't know... It just wasn't spectacular. That said, I never expected the band to be amazing -- they never were, what they were was incredibly influential and a sort of catalyst for the times -- for the whole movement. And I wanted the chance to see the original band playing their own songs -- it's one thing to hear records, to hear live records, to hear bands playing Pistols covers, but it's something else to hear Johnny Rotten singing, right there.

Getting home was naturally a struggle because the Victoria line -- the only Tube line to Brixton -- was closed, and buses were running instead. Jools sent me off after a bus, and the rest of the journey home was a bit of a blur. I got off the bus somewhere around Leicester Square, since I knew the area from when I worked there and sort of stumbled along to Liverpool Street and to the train home. Jon had kindly agreed to pick me up -- even though it was gone 1am by the time I got the station -- and I was barely through the door at home before I was bent over the toilet...

I woke up on Friday with the bedroom light still on. Even when I shifted the worst of the hangover with pain killers, caffeine and sugar the day was not fun.

Still, it's very punk.

Be careful what you wish for

I mentioned in my recent post the idea of attracting people into my life -- whether intentionally or unintentionally, and there was also the issue of not being able to make them do anything. Because even if you could, it's not such a great idea. You'll find ideas like this cropping up in various belief systems -- that you might have more power than you realise, but messing with someone or their free will really is not such a hot idea.

I've always thought you should be careful what you wish for, because you might get them. People disagree with me on this one, and maybe I should think more of crossing those bridges if I come to them -- but either way, it's just how I tend to approach these things.

What could be a case in point. It's no secret that I've wanted someone in my life for however-long now. I've tried the usual things -- placing ads online, meeting girls at punk gigs, all the rest, with very limited success. I have recently been trying to focus my positive thinking in this direction -- whether it's a matter of attracting love to me because I think it, or because I am happy and confident (two words that I have rarely used about myself before, but I am really feeling it a lot more often now) it probably doesn't matter. But as I say, you have to be careful.

I think it was Monday morning I was standing at the bus stop, trying to keep warm -- the usual stamping feet and blowing on hands and hoping the bus turns up this week. I'd noticed when I was walking to the town there had been a teenage girl walking a short distance in front of me, and paid no attention. When I got to the bus stop she arrived shortly after me, because either I'd walked faster or she'd walked a different way at the end. I wasn't paying much attention, just looking idly around at the other people. I saw this blonde girl and my first thought was "She's wearing way too much makeup". Maybe I was looking a little too long, maybe I had a faint, amused smile on my face as I looked at her. But she noticed. I thought I was going to get a "Wot you lookin' at?" sort of response, but instead she said hi to me. Slightly surprised, I said hi back.

The following few days I've seen her again. It turns out she lives over the road to me, I'd never noticed. I didn't realise the girls who lived there were even old enough to go to college. She has progressed in a few days to making a point of saying hi to me when she gets on the bus, walking home and talking away to me in the evening when we get off at the same spot, and last time I saw her actually choosing the seat next to me on the bus. Choosing the seat next to me, and not being content with just a smile and a nod in greeting but wanting me to actually take out my earphones and say hi to her properly. And perhaps even being a little sulky that I was reading my book the whole way home. When we got off the bus she said to me sorry, she hadn't been ignoring me, she could just see I had been reading. Haha, I miss those kinds of head games. In conversation I have established that she's about 17, and despite her attentions says she has a boyfriend. I also know she has been talking about me, because she asked didn't I used to be a policeman.

How she knows this is complicated, but one time Nick was round my house, watching a video when there was a knock at the door. The lady from over the road that I'd never actually spoken to but would smile and wave to in the street explained that she had just reversed into the side of my car. Except it wasn't my car at all, but Nick's car. Nick who had decided parking directly opposite her drive was a sensible thing to do. And so it was in his discussions with her about it all that it must have come up what he did for a living. He's the kind of person that has to tell you, it's a power thing.

So fast forward several years, and for this girl to bring up in conversation that she thought I was a policeman suggests to me that she has talked about meeting me. I didn't hesitate to put her straight that I was not now and never have been a policeman, nor would I want to be. And tried to explain who Nick was.

So, okay -- great, I can attract people to me, I can attract attention to myself. But I need to maybe work on it so it's not from 17 year olds who wear too much makeup and think I'll be impressed if they tell me they want a motorbike. This is what I mean about being careful what you wish for -- the "request", the idea, the thought needs to be more finely tuned.