Intelligence (POEM)

Intelligence

Stegosaurus

won't eat walnuts.

He doesn't know

whose heads they came from.

A Stag In The Dark

This weekend marked my first ever ‘stag do’ attendance. I can’t work out if this is unusual for a 27-year old – I’m aware that many people with whom I went to school but no longer keep contact are married, so do I move in particularly commitment-phobic circles or are those settled former acquaintances themselves unusual?

Whatever the answer to that particular riddle, Saturday was a bloody good day. The fashion these days might tend towards ever more elaborate (and expensive) celebrations – much to the delight of best men everywhere, I’m sure – but as an excuse for a group of friends and family to spend the day with the groom-to-be and do something different, it’s difficult to argue with the concept.

I must admit to having found it a little uncomfortable saying that I was “going on a stag do”. The kind of images that phrase can conjure up do not befit the way I like to spend my time, and they certainly don’t befit the mood of the day. It got me wondering if tradition is all it’s cracked up to be and, more precisely, whether it’s entirely necessary to stick with ‘stag’. Personally, I prefer the rather more elegant-sounding ‘elk’, if we are at least going to continue using deer-related names…

Saturday morning was spent doing a variety of activities, namely driving a pick-up while blindfolded (with a navigator in the back banned from using the words ‘left’ and ‘right’), time-trialling a Honda Pilot buggy round a short circuit, and attempting to disintegrate clay pigeons with the help of a shotgun. The afternoon was spent toiling against a slightly larger and significantly more ‘enthusiastic’ group in five games of paintball, one of which we actually managed to win.

For the evening, we went for a curry and a few drinks. The best men (for in the case of this wedding, there are two assigned to the task) arranged a theme for the night, cladding the main man in a white dress uniform ala Tom Cruise’s ‘Maverick’ from Top Gun. The rest of us donned crisp shirts with US air force badges and our very own nicknames from the film, and from thereon had to refrain from calling each other by proper names.

While city centre bars and clubs are not my natural stomping ground (that cliché being a good nomination for ‘understatement of the year’…), the most enjoyable aspect of the night was that we weren’t out to seek attention. There was nothing ostentatious or outrageous, just a group of us helping a friend have a good night. One or two people noticed, maybe passed comment or made a friendly joke, and I think one person even wanted a photo.

But that was it. Which means I really like the idea that there were people waking up on Sunday morning – bleary eyed, dehydrated and craving fried food – with hazy recollections of seeing a half a dozen or so guys all dressed in white, but not being entirely sure if we actually existed. I know most of us probably don’t have a lot in common with those 80s film stars, but that doesn’t mean there can’t have been a few people wondering exactly what bar they had been drinking in the night before.

There is one final admission I should own up to: I’ve never actually seen Top Gun. I know the main protagonists, certainly, and can hum a few bars of Take My Breath Away, but I’d never heard of my namesake Slider (he doesn’t even get mentioned in Wikipedia’s plot summary for the film!). Most intriguing, for a staunchly heterosexual man I found myself more ‘impressed’ than I would ever have expected by the sharp creases of a bunch of well-ironed white shirts (you need to be looking really hard for the mango chutney stain I accidentally got on mine). Which means I now fear ever watching Top Gun in case I start developing unwanted feelings towards Tom Cruise, particularly at the point he dons the dress uniform… And if that isn’t the complete antithesis of what stag parties are usually about, then I don’t know what is.

Onward And Upward?

It is with a certain amount of pride, and also a little nervousness, that I present to you my new website:

‘Indie Cinema Tour’

The ‘tour of the indies’, blogged about in such fastidious (and slightly amateurish, I have since realised) fashion here, has morphed into a project all of its own. Regular readers will know that independent cinemas have had something of a profound impact upon me – I like what they stand for, and how they do it. I would like to get involved in their world in one form or another, and this is my attempt at doing so on my own initiative.

It may flourish, it may wither and die. We can only wait and see.

Well, you can wait and see. The ultimate result depends on me putting a bit of effort in first. So where does that leave this here blog, yet to even reach its first anniversary?

‘The Repository 2’ will continue. At this stage, I can only hope that I find enough time to still write the occasional post on a random subject. I’ll certainly endeavour to do so. Quite possibly, it will end up as a string of pub quiz round-ups and I’ll rename it ‘The Repository of Quizzing Knowledge’. I’d like to think I’ll still write the odd poem too, but that seam remains largely un-mined at present. It still exists though; it’s not a dry well.

When I awoke on January 1^st this year, sat up in bed and lazily continued reading Bill Bryson’s Down Under, wondering at the back of my mind what the following 364 days might hold, I didn’t imagine that nine months later I would have quite so much I wanted to try and achieve. By some people’s standards, perhaps I’m doing it all quite slowly, or even ineffectively. To my mind, the main thing is: I’m doing it.

None of it is making me any money (of course/yet/will it ever?), but then a lot of people do things for no financial reward. Don’t get me wrong – everything I’m doing and trying is for the pure enjoyment of it. Crucially, though, I feel like I’m getting ‘better’ (more confident) each step along the way, so if it were to lead me down a new and vaguely-related career path at the same time, I would be one happy man.

I’m a patient person; I still believe in “good things come to those who wait” as much as I now understand how I need to make things happen for myself. Perhaps the next stage is to learn how much patience is too much patience, and how long is too long before realising what the next stage after that is. This is such a new way of thinking for me that I still can’t quite smother that one niggling thought – what if it doesn’t work at all, what if it is a complete waste of time? I guess the only answer to that is – I have to make sure it does, and that it isn’t.

No pressure then!

Because, Yeah, I Could Do A Better Job Myself

A presumptuous note about Stephen King

Many authors can finish a novel within 500-600 pages, often less. Some stories need more than that though, which is fine. At 933 pages long, Needful Things is certainly a fine example of current bookbinding techniques, but it is not unusual in the Stephen King canon. The Stand, for example, is one of his finest works and every bit the modern epic. While that story spans the entire United States of America, Needful Things is rather more localised, so far focussing on the single town of Castle Rock in Maine, and the titular shop gracing its high street.

“So far” because I’m only just over half way through it and, honestly, struggling a little. It’s good, certainly, but also the very definition of a ‘slow-burner’ because it only properly grabbed me between pages 300 and 400(!). The intriguing and creepy central premise kept me going, but it’s hard to believe other people wouldn’t have given up well before the chapter that sees two women and a dog lose their lives.

The setting is crucial, for a group of people travelling across a continent are bound to encounter new people here and there (in The Stand, the majority of the population is wiped out by a virus). When you set your story in a small town, and spend a LONG TIME describing the arthritic troubles of one of the main characters, it feels like the picture has been painted. The main thrust of this argument, then, is the fact that at 450 pages in, your favourite author and mine chooses to introduce a new character.

450 pages! For pity’s sake!

Some writers see wars start and end, or tear entire galaxies asunder, in less paper than that. Here, for nearly the entire first half of Needful Things, Ace Merrill doesn’t get a mention. Not even a namedrop at page 75 to foreshadow his later appearance. Honestly. Anyone would think novelists just make it up as they go along sometimes.

Haircut (POEM)

Haircut

Zzzzzzzzzz, went the Remington shaver.

Zzzzzzzzzz, went I

in the warm embrace of the barber’s leather chair.

“Going anywhere nice on your holidays?”

he asks.

Zzzzzzzzzz, I reply.

Dreaming about Magaluf.