For Tomorrow

You could say:
These days, life just seems to slip past in a blur of non-events, non-days, non-weeks where nothing happens to no one and everything stays the same while imperceptibly fading in colour, imagination and joy.

Or if that's too dark:
As the days blend into one, a calm sense of normality wraps itself around, a warm blanket against the chills of the world; the firm belief that nothing changes without reason.

Less abstract:
It's bloody hot outside, and the stifling heat frankly kills any desire in me to go and "do stuff". I'd rather just sit inside and hide my skin from the burning sun, tearing through a DVD collection and chuckling at daytime repeats of ancient sitcoms.

Existential pessimism:
Life is like sliding down a muddy slope into a hole. We cling on to any sodden clay that our fingers can grasp, but ultimately it is all a futile resistance of the inevitability of slipping deeper and further, down into the dark, away from the light, until eventually we hit the bottom and are trapped forever.

Grounded practicality:
Why is it that the one repeating coincidence in my life is that between my sudden desire to write on my blog and my desperate need to get a haircut. Does my power come from my hair?

The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect

"Take a seat please, sir."

I meander towards the coat rack, shrug my jacket off and in one move swing it round and up onto the hook. I feel my feet slip a little on the thin layer of human hair that lies slick on the tiled floor. The humus layer of the hairdresser's salon. My nostrils wince from the constant sensation of sniffing the tip of a bottle of shampoo.

The leather chair is too low for me, and it takes a couple of awkward shuffles in the seat to get comfortable. It's slightly clammy from the previous occupant, having been vacated only seconds before, and my jeans stick a little as I moved around. The leather lets out a pained groan.

The top I'm wearing zips up to about halfway up my neck, just gracing the bottom of my hair at the back, and the Man comes over and wordlessly unzips it by about six inches, folding the collar down into a V-neck.

"Arms out, please!"

I catch a glimpse of the baffled look that contorts my face in the monstrous mirror facing me. As I slide my arms into the plastic tent that will shield my crotch from the cascades of falling curls, my mind registers that I need to remove my spectacles. The tent is pulled tight around my neck - so tight that I let out a little gurgle of shock.

"Just a bit off the length please, and sort of smartened up around the sides."

This is pretty much word-for-word exactly what I have said to any person about to use scissors to decimate my horrendous white-man-fro in the last 10 years. And yet this time, the Man looks at me as if I've just asked him to shove two cabbages up his jumper and pole dance to a CD of Ukrainian electro-funk. I return his facial puzzlement in kind.

"I need to wash your hair first. The hair, it is too curly and I think you have hair gel in that will stick to my scissors."

I try to hide my embarrassment at what is clearly his disgust for my dirty hair. In actuality I washed it a little over an hour ago, but I acknowledge that the hair putty I liberally applied yesterday may have lingered and could cause problems. Maybe I smell.

"Erm, well only if you think it really needs it..."

His eyes narrow.

"It's not going to cut very well without it. I need to put some conditioner in."

I'm trapped, so emotionally pinned into this chair that I may as well be handcuffed to it. I feel like a kid who's grown up on the wrong side of the tracks, being forced into admitting culpability for a crime he didn't commit. A crime of fashion - a crime of curly hair. It would be absurd to leave now, and yet the Man has all but told me that if I don't pay the extra to get my hair washed that he's going to be reduced to lopping it all off with the sort of industrial shears usually reserved for sheep.

I admit defeat and agree. Only then do I noticed the sink in front of me. This is the first time I've ever had the wash-n-cut treatment, so I'm not quite sure how this is going to work, but I'm fairly confident it will involve some sort of rotation mechanism being brought into action. I will leisurely recline and take the chance to reflect on an article I just read in The Economist about a recent coup in Madagascar. Maybe even pick up the magazine again and have another quick browse.

"Lean forward."

With a snap I realise that I've been living in a fantasy world. The Man's instruction is laughably simplistic - far more than having to lean, I have to arse-wiggle my way to the very tip of the chair (the leather moans with each squirm), and gingerly tip my head over the sink. I'm fairly certain that my underwear is showing at the base of my spine above my jeans.

A large, rough hand grabs the back of my head and shoves me face first right into the sink, so that my nose is mere centimetres from the plughole. Around it congeals the remains of whichever poor sod last had this treatment. A ginger, by the looks of it. I try to escape from my current predicament by imagining the terrible bullying this poor ginger must have faced as a child, similar perhaps to my own torment as a curly.

The next few minutes are a hazy blur, a collage of sound and darkness, but afterwards I recall a warm wet sensation, a lot of rubbing, the dizzying smell of freshly-cleaned public toilets and a vague sense of violation. My eyes sting, as does my sense of pride and English reserve.

"Tissue."

I'm flung back in my seat as the Man massages my head and growls perversely.

"I love your hair."

As he begins to cut, I settle into my more comfortable hair-cutting rhetoric. Oh yes, I say, you may love this curly hair but I guarantee you wouldn't if it was yours. I try to point out the horror of having to contend with a monstrous, wilful mass of wiry curls that scream defiantly from your scalp, laughing in the face of any hair-product / comb / rage based offensive. The Man banally mutters some unlikely annoyance at having straight hair, his outrageously well-controlled coiffure cackling in its pointy fascism at my ever-depleting Brillo-pad mop.

"Is your mother Asian?"

Sans spectacles, I can't tell in the mirror whether a look of dry irony has painted his face, so I try to suppress my puzzlement and explain that I get my curly hair from some long-forgotten Scottish ancestry. His only response to this is to brutally shove my head to the left (a twinge of whiplash) and start cutting, a little too close for comfort, around my ear.

This goes on for some time, with intermittent conversational niceties invariably being interrupted by an unexpected assault on my spinal column. At one point he helpfully points out that I should get myself a nice London girlfriend, before puffing out his cheeks and blowing the detritus of my former fringe into my reddened eyes.

Eventually the agony is over, and I'm invited to put my spectacles on to feast my eyes on the new me. As the world blinks back into focus, I stare expectantly at my own head in the mirror. The hair is a fair bit shorter than I wanted, revealing rather too much of the bulk of my obese cranium. It's far shorter at the sides than at the top, and has been slicked back by the Man's strong hands. The net effect is somewhere between Will Smith circa the early nineties, and Christian Bale in American Psycho. I feel slightly sick.

"Yeah it's great, thanks. New man!"

I stretch my mouth into a smile, which is reciprocated.

"Hair gel?"

I shake my head kindly.

"No, thanks."

His eyes sparkle. A smile plays about his lips. I hear his stomach rumble as he prepares to administer the coup de grâce.

"Chili sauce? Mayo?"

It takes me a second to realise this is a joke. I try not to look like I'm about to spew my lunch all over the plastic tent covering my knees, and reject the offer through a judder of nervous laughter.

"No, thanks."

I get up from my seat as a previously unseen hair monkey (read: trainee) scuttles out, apparently from under my chair, to snatch the plastic cover off me. We make our way to the cash register and I pull my wallet out of my jeans. The Man meets my eye and smiles.

"Hope to see you again!"

I grab my coat off the rack. No longer do I notice the coating of human hair across the floor, nor the acrid burn of shampoo in my nostrils.

"I'm sure you will."

I shove ten pounds into his outstretched hand, the scissors still hanging off his little finger, and sharply turn and walk out the door. The breeze is cool on my scalp, and I quickly pull my hood up round my ears.

Agoraphobia

And so once again that time of year has come. Fairy lights lining the streets, nights closing in ever earlier, and bugger me if it isn't freezing cold outside. Dark in the morning and dark when I leave work, daytime sunshine outside is a tease, taunting me with its warm glow as I sit at my desk hammering away at an icy keyboard as my fingers slowly seize up from the cold.

In the evening, why would I want to go outside? Keep inside and warm, and a whole world of entertainment is at my fingertips. And so it's a marathon of art films, new albums (via Amazon and iTunes, natch) and, for the first time in a while, video games.

I'd forgotten this simple pleasure. The worries of the world dissolve when you can hold, in your sweaty palms, the ability to take a small yellow rat, summon the power of lightning and use it to explode a Giant Evil Robot. Cackle in glee as you mercilessly plug poorly-realised archetypal villains in the face with an excessively loud blast of hot lead. Squirm around in fear as you bat the fat zombie woman off your neck long enough to take a swing with that fire axe you found lying around in the preposterously outdated water well round the corner. Smile as you see her head pop off and rather more than eight pints of blood come flying out of her neck.

Video games invariably get a lot of hate thrown at them. As with cinema and rock 'n' roll before it, the fantasy provided by these simple games proves an easy scapegoat for explaining away societies' problems. Rising unemployment, a domineering drinking culture and an increasingly disenfranchised populous are, of course, minor factors in catalysing the spread of violent crime when compared to a teenager unloading his stress by shooting a few badly pixellated zombies in the face in front of his television. Or a child imagining he can race around a cartoon world on his little kart, flinging bananas and storm clouds as heralds of simple and impermanent death.

Violent video games are the new video nasty, and in many cases the publishers of these games couldn't be more pleased. As the exile to VHS allowed the development of a truly independent film industry spawning classics such as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Cannibal Holocaust, The Evil Dead etc., as well as establishing a proving ground for future mainstream directors such as Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro, who started with schlock zombie horror and ended up directing Lord of The Rings and Pan's Labyrinth respectively, so too have studios such as Rockstar games, makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, flourished under their initial classification as outsiders.

The truth of the matter is these games are no more dangerous in precipitating violent culture than the many generations of equivalent controversies that went before them. In no way is this more in evidence than a consideration of the one of the most passive and frankly boring computer games ever created.

Microsoft's Flight Simulator was a flagship application for many years, and remains probably the least offensive computer game ever created. Yet it is also the most closely linked game to the single most violent and despicable act of terrorism of the 21st Century. In the same way that it would be preposterous to accuse Microsoft of training al Qaeda, so too would it be completely inappropriate to fling accusations of encouraging youth violence at what is, at it's core, a fledgling creative industry.

Ultimately video games should be treated as what they are - games. They do not encourage political doctrine, they do not promote violent lifestyles. They are the homeground of the geek and the techie, and they open their arms to those with a desire for a winning combination of fun and sloth. If we really want to deal with the rising problem of violence in society, we need to look to the root cause of the problem, not what is at worst an unfortunate offspring.

Anyway I must be off. The bloodlust is rising and there are banks to rob, police to kill and zombies to mutilate...

Space Dementia

I just can't help myself, the mad impulse in me is screaming skip to the end, and only through some incredible force of will can I hold myself back. It arrived four days ago, sheathed in bubblewrap, squeaking a little when I pulled it gently out of the packaging. I want to rip it open and force it into my DVD player, scream like a giddy schoolgirl and sit there and watch all ten hours at once, my eyes hollowing slowly, the feeling draining from first my fingers, then my toes and my feet, as I slowly slip, smiling, into an ecstatic and vegetative state of satisfied hardcore geekiness.

As you may (or may not) have guessed, I'm talking about Battlestar Galactica season four! Through some woeful timing I've gone back to start watching the entire first three seasons with my flatmate (a BG virgin) and now I can't bear the fact that it's going to be weeks (weeks! weeks!) before I can quench the giddy thirst for more, more, MORE with which I was left, panting, after the end of season three.

For those of you who have never watched this magnificent television programme, think The Wire in space. With robots and explosions and demented scientists and all the same intelligence and brutal allegory. As with all genre-based television, Battlestar Galactica is a hard sell to people who wouldn't watch it anyway, so I won't bother trying to convince you. I will say however that it sits neatly in my top three teevee (sic) ever - along with the aforementioned The Wire and Kieslowski's Dekalog.

The real question here is - should I stick to my arbitrarily-defined principles and save season four until I've re-digested seasons one (excellent), two (better) and three (spectacular) first? Or should I whore myself to the god of hedonism and shove it merrily into my gaping eyeholes, cackling with delight at the naughty pleasure of a televisual binge, and finally admitting to myself I'm a demented child of the now-now-now YouTube generation?

Clowns

Proof, if it were needed, that the old adage is true. If you don't have anything worth saying, then don't bother writing an article on it in a national newspaper.

I am, literally, speechless.

Once And Never Again

Today the Long Blondes announced that they have split, following the stroke suffered by guitarist and songwriter Dorian Cox in June. Quite simply one of the best British bands this century, it is not only a personal tragedy for Cox and his family, as well as the band, but also a great loss to music. In 3 short years the band leave a legacy of a mere two albums, each spectacular in their own way, as well as a clutch of catchy singles, inventive b-sides and infectiously fun demos.

Intelligent, witty and spiked with humour, the Blondes' music has often driven me to (entirely justified) hyperbole, and catching a handful of live performances throughout their career ensured that they remain cemented as one my favourite bands. From their ramshackle early performances in Sheffield before they signed with Domino, through the indie pop perfection of debut Someone to Drive You Home, up to the slick electro of their second album, the Blondes always carried off indie rock with more style, panache and personality than any of their peers.

With a small but devoted following, the Long Blondes will hopefully be reclaimed as one of the most overlooked bands of the decade, and Cox as a great and underrated songwriter. With songs lamenting a weekend without makeup, dissolving in the seduction of fast cars, or simply floating on dreams of running away on motorways to relive your glory days, the Blondes provided something rare in music. Virtually every band in existence offers the listener a choice of style or substance. With the Long Blondes, quite simply, you could have both.

Honey Bee (Let's Fly To Mars)

The Chinese are going to the Moon. Take a moment to digest this information, and then ask youself, why?

When the Apollo 11 Lunar Module touched down on the surface of the Moon, on the 16th of July, 1969, it was no small step for a nation striving to prove that it was the leader of the world, free or otherwise. Logistically, economically and politically the Apollo programme was a nightmare of epic proportions. Let me put this another way; only 12 men have ever walked on the surface of the Moon, and the last one left nearly 36 years ago.

The scientific benefits of going to the Moon were minimal at best. There is little useful you can learn from the low-gravity, zero-atmosphere surface of the Moon that you can't learn from the zero-gravity vacuum of space. Why else would Alan Shepherd be allowed the luxury of playing golf on one of only 6 manned missions that have ever reached the Moon's surface?

The real impact of the Moon landings was political. The twelve men who stepped onto the surface (and the six who merely circled a couple of times round the block) were instant patriots for America. Great war heroes, who had won a war against seemingly insurmountable odds. They gave a nation that craves jingoism a victory, that somehow clouded the rather more real defeat in Vietnam.

China is embroiled in no crippling war. The struggles that China faces today are those of the Western media, and the impact of Western ideals on a culture which must unfurl its protective shell in order to blossom. The 2008 Olympics, marred as they were by protests, arrests and an uncomfortable silence, marked China out as, at least in part, a modern, developed, and spectacularly wealthy country. To put a man on the Moon would show them as the true economic power on the globe today - as there is certainly no other country with the resources, financial backing and political single-mindedness to be able to achieve this feat.

Yet it seems likely that the true benefit for China would be more intangible. Throw aside the political, scientific and nationalistic benefits, and imagine the sheer kudos. Imagine a world where a country can prove its superiority not by tackling it's human rights issues, nor by eradicating internal poverty. Where a country can openly deny free speech, outlaw religious tolerance, spend years occupying and oppressing a peaceful country.

Imagine a world where, despite all of this, one man standing on the surface of the Moon can look back at the Earth, and see that his nation has taken a great leap to become the most powerful and important nation on the planet. And imagine, as he looks back, how small and insignificant the Earth must seem.

It's Only The End Of The World

Hysteria is a strange creature. It spreads, a virus, infecting everything it touches. A virus, yes, but one that feeds on a conscious surrendering to the apparently inevitable. The most rational mind becomes gripped by the desire to give in and follow those around it as they slip into despair. The nauseating and reassuring feeling of falling suddenly. The human impulse for calamity beyond personal control.

Economic turmoil is a factual eventuality not because capitalism is a flawed structure, though it is, but because the collective being of civilisation is a coward and a fool. It fears its own weaknesses and thereby succumbs immediately to them. Its sight is narrow and self-involved, and never looks beyond the present. It never sees further than the near past and does not consider the yet-to-be.

A scapegoat is always to be found. Rich bankers sucking the system dry and lining their pockets with the residue. Irresponsible investors throwing aside acumen for chance. A tactless media whipping up frenzy in a bid to stave off the growing spectre of irrelevance. The truth is that all of these are symptoms of the human virus. Capitalism is the distilled form of the most vulgar and strong of human impulses - the need for success. The need to rise above the rest. The perverse notion that the individual is the driving force behind everything. That one person can stand alone in victory.

If the sudden downturn in global markets shows anything, it is that the individual does not exist as a distinct entity. All of us are affected. As the drunken headiness of success crashes in the gutter to spew out the half-digested notions of charity and economic and social responsibility, the weakened state is infected with a hysteria that impacts every person it touches. Those at the top slip on the edge of a precipice, and those at the bottom shelter from the debris that rains down.

As with violence, greed and jealousy, panic begets panic. A recession is not the apocalypse, but if confidence is the life force of a globalized economy, and hysteria the cancer that eats it away, then brace yourself for a shock. This dead meat is going to start to stink.

It's Raining Today

As the rain falls lazily from the grey sky, he sits inside feeling the chokehold's absence. Breathing space has afforded a momentary awakening. A loosened grip on the throat of his mind's voice, usually held firm by the hum-drum, cash in hand, out of pocket, day in, day out existence, has lifted the dizzying fog, and gasping for air he reaches for the nearest bowl and thrusts his face into it.

A purge of thought, emotion and control leaves him shaking, a steadying hand reaching for a towel. Hot and damp, it burns his skin, searing the expression of disgust, and cauterizing the gaping wound in his intellect.

He collapses back, breathing deep, feeling the cool air percolate through his nostrils. A reflection catches his eye, an unrecognised figure, haggard, distant and stern. It's lips purse, and then open to speak.

"Get a haircut."

Sexy Boy

Accuse me if you wish of not understanding the feminine mind, but I reckon there must be nothing as attractive as a man with a head cold. Quite besides the stream of soothing ooze that flees your foggy brain through the scenic route of the nasal passage, there are a multitude of often overlooked aesthetic benefits.

When I have a cold, my eyes insist on lubricating themselves to excess, becoming itchy and watery. A fetching red blotchiness ensues, that softens the gaze and comes with an appealing tearfulness. It tells all the girls that you're that caring, sensitive guy they've been dreaming about.

A swelling and scratchiness in the throat can imbue your dulcet tones with a sexy husk, as your singing voice morphs from ugly Welsh lady-boy Aled Jones to manly god of cool Tom Waits. Coughing will work wonders here - the looser the phlegm, the more gargly the voice. And gargly just screams sex appeal.

Cough enough during the day and you'll undoubtedly start at night. An unhealthy lack of sleep will hollow out your eyes, highlighting bone structure and accessorizing those pink, tearful orbs. Blow that nose hard, long and often, and a reddish hue will soon appear. This will make it look like you've been knocking back Irish whiskey. Women love hard-drinking men.

If the coughing, sneezing and choking becomes too much, you may get quite a severe headache. That pained frown will tell all maternal man eaters that you're a tortured soul who needs saving by a good woman.

With all of this at your disposal, you'll be a killer with the ladies. Just remember guys, fresh breath is paramount! As you move in for the kill, know that there's nothing more appealing than the sweet aroma of mentho-lyptus cough sweets.