Jimmy Page’s Trousers

Words pretty much fail me on this. Check out this video to see the horrible mess that the world would be in were it not for our American chums (albeit it sounds like only the crazy right-wing nutjobs) sticking up for us. Thanks guys.

And, as if that’s not infuriating and annoying enough, if you check out the web site of these morons, you can see some of the plugs for other concepts for the ‘World Without America’ advert. My personal favourite is the closing image that the first lady suggests to her advert concept. Watch out for it - I think you’ll find it a moving and powerful image. And not stupid at all.

So good to me.

You gotta love Mondays and this one was extra special. I woke up before my alarm and leapt from bed. I threw back the curtains to a beautiful sunny morning. Birds were singing and a friendly milkman gave me a wave as I stood, naked, in the window. “Morning Milky” I called before heading for a bracing shower and refreshing shave.

As it was such a beautiful morning, I decided to bicycle to work (despite there being almost no traffic to mar a car journey). I popped my lunch package in the basket on the handlebars and set off at a leisurely pace. As I went, mothers and small children smiled at me and I smiled back. An amiable market trader hallooed me and threw me a rosy, red apple. I deftly caught it, put it in my basket and thanked him over my shoulder as I bicycled on, whistling as I went.

On my arrival at work, my boss clapped me on the back and said “Trousers, you are the heart and soul of this place. Were it not for you, I would fear for the future of this company and its many workers. Thank you for your effort, your dedication and above all, thank you for being a friend. You are the wind beneath my wings.” Galvanised by this expression of gratitude, I set to work at a more furious pace than usual (all the more impressive as I love this work - it is both satisfying and rewarding).

All in all, it’s been a good Monday so far.

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OK, so I know you didn’t believe it. I’m still in bed. The day is the usual grey colour and I can hear the line of traffic outside my house which means at least a 15 minute tailback just to get to an actual road that goes somewhere. Monday, Bloody Monday.

As Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers popped off with Baby Trousers this weekend to visit her folks, I had, what is colloquially termed in these parts, a free gaff. Decided to get The Brother over for a visit and perhaps a drinkie or two.

Picked him up and headed to the off-licence for some beers. We bought a lot of beers. So much so that we found ourselves wondering what we were doing buying so much beer. “Never mind” I said, “I’ll just drink the leftover stuff over the next week”. The pretty eastern-European girl serving in the off-licence even commented on the amount of beer and I have to assume that she sees lots of people buying lots of beer.

Well, we drank it all. I even recall ringing the off-licence, to request a delivery, at quarter to two in the morning when I realised that we were running short. Needless to say, they didn’t answer as they’d been safely tucked up in bed for the last two hours.

The last thing that I remember was playing air guitar to Queen in my sitting room and The Brother telling me I was getting the chords wrong. After that however, we apparently retired to the kitchen and listened to some Bowie. We called it a night after The Brother fell asleep sitting up on the kitchen worktop. It’s entirely possible that I did likewise.

The kitchen bit is all based on second-hand information as I don’t recall it. Hunky Dory was in the CD player next morning though so I’ve no reason to doubt it.

I’m considering revising the look of the site.  I’m concerned that the light text on a dark background is a bit hard to read and that it may cause the medical condition, Woozy Eyes.  I’m not a doctor but I think I recognise the symptoms when I have to reread some of the rubbish I’ve written here to see if it makes any sense whatsoever.

I did lighten the background slightly a few days ago (thanks for noticing), but I don’t think it’s made any significant difference the the Woozy Eye factor.

The current look is actually my second in the very short time that I’ve been doing this though and I’m worried that I’ll get a reputation as being flighty.  In reality, I’m not really flighty - just bored and woozy-eyed.  RockMother, who has kindly been analysing the meanderings of my subconscious recently, may consider that this urge to redecorate has something do to do with my need to make changes in my environment and my inability to do so in the workplace.  Who knows, she could well be correct.  Rather than getting too hung up on the psychological drivers for this however, I’m playing safe and concentrating on the physiological - Woozy Eyes.

Do any of my regular readers (I believe there are now three) have any thoughts on the matter?  Maybe something in green…

I have a hard time with people that don’t get sarcasm. Or wit. Or any form of humour.

While chatting with some colleagues over lunch today, I lazily decided to reprise a theme that I’d discussed in an post here and discussed my daughter’s Terrible Twos.

I mentioned that she was becoming a handful and regaled them with a story of naughtiness. I told them that, after the incident in question, I popped her straight into the naughty box. A middle-aged female colleague became wide-eyed and in an incredulous-sounding voice, asked “You put her in a box?“. After I replied “it’s got air holes in it, I’m not a monster” and my other colleagues laughed, I think that she eventually figured out that I was speaking in jest.

Now, most of what I spout out of me is complete shite, designed to amuse myself and stop myself from considering the grim reality of everyday life. I don’t know how to talk to these joke-proof people.

Or rather I had.

Last night I dreamed that my former employers had requested my current employers send me back for a short period to fill in for my successor there - the bloke that’s doing the job I used to do. He was indisposed for some reason that nobody would talk about and everyone looked about suspiciously when I asked where he was. When I went to his desk, I found a wheelie bin there. Also, for some reason, his assistant/sidekick had taken in a stinking stray dog and had it living under his desk where it had defecated all over the place. There were big, slow files buzzing around everywhere and the place smelled of dog-shit. Also, in the manner of dreams, both their desks appeared to be in a field.

What do you think it means?

Christ, I’m depressed. Not melancholy or a bit down. Depressed. It’s a bit weird actually. It began yesterday and I’m not really sure why I’m even depressed (which I’m taking as a bad sign, depression-wise). Part of it is probably due to obsessing about the job interview I had last week and realising, in hindsight, that I wouldn’t have given me a job. Part of it is due to the extremely petty reason of not being able to purchase something locally, that I wanted to purchase locally and that I now have to order from the Internet and wait a fortnight for. All told though, I’d say that’s contributing to maybe 10% of my current malaise - say 9% for the interview and 1% for the purchase (approximately). What of the other 90%?

Don’t know. Honestly. I moped around yesterday, annoying Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers, for no good reason I can think of. Then I annoyed myself. It’s all quite weird and slightly worrying. I tend to know what’s bothering me and don’t usually get into such a morose state without something on which to focus my ire. I’m going to hazard a guess that the issue responsible is this stinker of a job that I have at the moment. Jesus, I hate it here. I have absolutely no interest in any of it. None. One of my colleagues has just left my desk after five minutes of talking at me about something and I couldn’t raise even the slightest interest. As she was talking, I found myself wondering if my lack of interest was due to my current, depressed state or if it was, in fact, simply due to a lack of interest. I concluded it was the latter as I have noted a similar lack of interest every day for the last three or four months. Not even slightly interested. Not a jot. She chatted away about something that I’m going to have to do and I couldn’t tell you what she said. It didn’t even make it to short-term memory, much less travail the difficult trek to long-term. My mind wasn’t even sieve-like. Nothing stuck. My mind was a pipe. It all flushed through, leaving no residue whatsoever. The fact that, soon, people are going to ask me about this thing made no difference. Why? Did I mention the lack of interest?

Maybe it’s not my job that’s causing my gloom but it has to be a strong contender. I can’t really think of anything else and I therefore need to grasp at it to try assure myself that I’m not, in fact, mental or that I haven’t made the leap to proper depression. The one with the clinical-sounding term, ‘clinical’ in the title. Not sure what that actually means, but I’ll bet it wouldn’t be good.

My apologies for the rather miserable and sullen post. I hope that normal ranting will be resumed soon. I’m off now as I can’t think of any more synonyms for ‘depressed’.

I’m worried about music these days. For many reasons. To the casual onlooker, the most obvious reason is that today’s music is bland, insipid, homogenised tripe designed by insignificant, insincere, inadequate little men in expensive suits (I’m looking at you Louis Walsh). Bands’ images are also being put through the same machine (similar to the machine that company canteens use to remove all flavour from food). Years ago, bands were dangerous. Rock and roll was the work of the devil and all his little goblins. If a rocker didn’t like you, he might pull a knife. Or something. Anyway, the point is that there was some personality to bands and music. Possibly because they were bands and not just a collection of tone-deaf tossers that happen to conform to whatever the ‘look’ of the moment happens to be and are therefore made into a ‘band’ by those little men mentioned above.

Even bands that are trying to be ‘hard’ are pretty sad. Punk is no longer punk, it’s pop-punk. That bloke from Greenday with the mascara? My mam could beat him up. I hear when ‘Preston‘ of the Ordinary Boys walked off Buzzcocks recently because they slagged off his (made-up-celebrity) wife’s autobiography, he said “when someone bad-mouths your wife, you either leave or knock him spark-out”. What? His name is Preston for fucks sake (actually that’s his surname but he thinks it’s cool to just use that).

It’s all a pile of shite. A steaming, stinking pile at that.

But anyway, that’s not the only reason that I’m worried about music these days. It’s the marketing. Basically, won’t somebody please think of the children? Now, Baby Trousers is, so far, too young to care about much other than her nursery rhymes CD but what happens when the time comes that she looks further afield in search of musical entertainment?

What am I blathering on about? At a recent children’s party in my neighbours I observed a group of three or four girls aged, I’d guess, between six and eight all singing Shakira’s “My Hips Don’t Lie” and teaching each other the dance routines to accompany the song. Dear God. So wrong.

Maybe I’m insane on this and maybe it’s all ok. Am I overreacting in worrying about this? Is this just what my grandparents worried about when those mop-topped popsters, the Beatles burst on the scene? I realise that the first half of this post and the second seem slightly opposing but I still can’t reconcile the Shakira thing in my head.

It just don’t seem right.

Yours

Prudey McPrude

Had an interview. Job sounds good and the package is not too shabby either. Fingers are well and truly crossed that I may be able to blow this shit-heap that is Perdition Inc. It seemed to go ok but obviously the interviewers had poker faces. Just playing hard to get I’m sure.

A couple of painful issues though. Since I haven’t worn a tie for work in some years and as I’m pretty unlikely to ever wear one socially, I discovered last night that all of my ties seem horribly dated. I’m not normally what you’d call a dedicated follower of fashion so, if I can see that they look dated, they are pretty damn dated. I may as well have went to the interview wearing a tie that has been cunningly fashioned to resemble a kipper. I like to feel I project substance above style though (let’s hope I pulled that off).

The second painful issue was the last question asked by one of my interviewers. He threw me a real curve ball…

“What do you think your current boss will feel or say when you tell him you’re leaving?”

Ouch. Didn’t see that one coming. What a stinker. Obviously the truth is not an option… “I reckon that he may do an impromptu jig while hooting with joy. Either that or he’ll run ecstatically through the corridors of Perdition Inc. wishing everyone and even every office and storeroom well in the manner of Jimmy Stewart at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life“. That sort of thing’s not going to get me a new job, no matter how much someone might like the canon of Jimmy Stewart or Frank Capra.

“I hope he’ll be disappointed” was all I could manage to fumble together, while trying desperately to resist the urge to hook a finger in my shirt collar to loosen it.

Oh, I also found that the waist in my suit trousers appears to have shrunken since the last time I wore it. Damn cheap suits.

It appears that Baby Trousers has well and truly found The Terrible Twos and made them her own.

On Monday night, I came home about an hour after my darling daughter’s bedtime and opened the front door to much wailing and screaming. I popped upstairs to see what the fuss was and found Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers on the landing looking frazzled. I glanced into the room from which the awful noise emanated to see Baby Trousers standing in her cot (she’s getting a bit big for it - bed soon) having thrown everything but the mattress out. The floor was strewn with blankets, sheets and had enough fallen effigies of Pooh Bear and his mates that it looked like a massacre in the Hundred Acre Wood.

Apparently, she had been in similar mood for the last hour as she had decided that bed wasn’t quite the thing for her at that time. I utilised the negotiation skills I’d learned watching some Bruce Willis film and, over a loud hailer from the landing, I managed to talk her down. Then, I threw the Negotiators Handbook out the window and went in. Luck was on my side and I managed to defuse the situation without having to get all Jack Bauer on her.

Cut to last night. As I was busy making the dinner, Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers witnessed a ‘throwing stuff on the floor incident’. Despite a clear warning, the perpetrator did not comply and Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers was forced to apprehend her and place her in the naughty corner (on the mat out by the front door).

Displaying her new-found disrespect for authority however, Baby Trousers decided that this punishment would instead, be a fine new game. Cue much running from the corner into the kitchen and much merriment as Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers placed her firmly back each time. Next, my little miscreant decided that she’d rather sit on the stairs than stay in the Corner of Shame. Her jailer duly placed her back and told her to stay on the mat. On investigating the next scampering noise, my delinquent daughter was found to have placed the mat on the first step of the stairs and was sitting on it. Back she went.

After a couple more returns, she seemed to be getting the message and there was no movement for a while. Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers and I exchanged hopeful glances but before we could breath a sigh of relief, the door was flung open and Baby Trousers ran, completely naked, into the kitchen and proceeded to do a little dance in the middle of the floor.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to appear strict and authoritative when there’s a nudie toddler dancing in your kitchen?

Back she went though and after some more effort, she did her time. Not before telling Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers that she ‘didn’t like mammy’ during a couple of trips however.

Jesus, it’s tough going. I’m considering a ‘Naughty Box’ with some sort of locking lid for the future.