Posh Paws

When did the spelling of swap swap to swop and then swap back again?

Taking Pains

The human being, the human mind and the human spirit are repositories for pain.

We carry our pains with us like internal scars, like the rings of a tree recording when we have suffered each blight, or fallow year, or ten.

Some of those pains have been thrust upon you, delivered by people who don't care.

Don't care whether you live or die.

They do care about something of course. They care about their own personal impact on their own personal world. They care about their visibility. Causing pain to others reminds them they are alive, and those closest are ground zero. They may exercise their freedoms by damaging you, in the way that teenage lovers might use a pen knife to tattoo a 100-year-old oak. 

You are simply an object - a dispensable process in their coping strategy.

Perhaps at the end of an e-mail or text. A nasty word. A jibe more cruel than the sword. 

Anybody can press the trigger on an enemy they can't see.

Anybody can shoot a Space Invader. 

Anybody with 20p can point a Glock at a Galaxian.

Pain ebbs and leaks. It flows through the cracks like poison. It makes people react with the most unruly, least tempered parts of themselves.

The challenge is to mitigate this with a counter strategy.

When you claim to notice a model like this you hope it has some sort of descriptive merit, that your theory, idea or model has validity. That it may allow some new understanding. Understanding in turn might allows rationalisation and compartmentalisation which helps some personality types (but not very stupid people) cope.

In other words you begin to know what part of your brain to store these pains in and make a note of how frequently you should or (preferably) shouldn't visit.

People with enough emotional intelligence and imagination might find some value in it.

But the pain doesn't really go away, it just becomes part of the tapestry of your life, hopefully contributing to the context of better judgements and decision-making.

Our soap operas and scummy chat shows involve rash of people who give away their pain.

They give it to others.

They punish. To feel better about themselves.

These sort of people should perhaps go down the local soup kitchen and give something of themselves in order to receive and abate. De-prioritise the self as a neo-analgesic.

Some bottle it up. But pain is a yeast. It can break a glass container from the inside out. It needs a pressure valve. 

Ultimately, we all have to carry our pains around with us.

They survive in us until we die, either naturally or because we can't stand it any more.

How often we visit our pains decides our overall happiness, because regular visits make the memory fresh, new and bright. 

And these are bright crimsons, not bright yellows. 

All too frequently, these visits are toxic.

But the pain can be genetically altered before it's given away.

It can be tempered and planished and polished into something approaching good advice.

It can be shared over a pint, or a laugh.

And when we die, our lifetime of pains finally goes away.

It dies with us.

Only it doesn't. 

In the process we make new pains for others.

Pain breeds.

Pain replicates.

Pain breathes.

Pain is a survivor.

It deserves your deepest disregard. 

Why OCDs Grill Bread.

All of time and space...and we can't invent a toaster you can clean.


If I read another instruction telling me to empty the crumb tray and
clean the outside with a damp cloth .....well, that bit I could work
out...

Failing The Duck Test

If it looks like a lion, roars like a lion, and its head is now
mounted three feet above your fireplace like a lion, then it was
probably the endangered King of the Jungle known as the lion.

And you are probably an American dentist.

The Game of Me

I underwent the latest, and possibly final, immersive experience from the Belgian theatre company ONTROEREND Goed last week.

It is an experience of shared conversations and two-way mirrors, observing and being observed, and at the end of it, you are given a disc.

In keeping with this review I thought that this might be a disc of video. The reviewer did not bothered to play it before posting their review.

I've just played mine and in fact it is an audio disc.

The first stage in the production has you sit in a chair on your own opposite a mirror.

You may correctly speculate that the mirror is a two-way mirror and that you are being observed.

In fact you're being observed by some other ticket buyer  a few minutes further on in the production from you. They give their opinion of what they read from... well from you.

The subject I observed later was a lady in a colourful dress that I named Olga and to whom I awarded several cats.

So as I sat quietly in my chair, this is what somebody apparently read from my face (or rather made up from their own imagination).

You can call me Evan.

Priorities

I've written Uber on the side of my Focus.

I'm Bus-Lane Happy!

Role play

You know the phrase..

If you can''t say anything positive, don't say anything at all... you know that?

I use that.

Not all the time..but more often than most. 

It is in my arsenal.

Is it in yours?

Thought not.

It's just a postscript in aphorism history to you - the Oxford Book of Cliches.

Well wake up, moron. 

And be nice. 

Your grandma knew what she was talking about. 

She wouldn't have go to balls, dinners and proms in a man's DJ or wear a trouser suit unless it was the sort of onesie that the goddess known as Anneka Rice made her own. 

(She didn't make her own).

Imagine those who tweet you before debate you, criticise before bother to learn something, score a point and recruit their friends against you..imagine the bitches who do that. 

"You're a loser". 

"You're wrong". (WTF) 

"You're uninformed". 

"You're a dimwit". 

"You're an ...ist". fill in your own... it barely matters...it's the diagnosis of a half -modern half-wit.

I say bitches because this is a female thing. 

Score higher by scoring others lower. 

Anti-improv.

Is it any wonder men like to drink "alone"...by which I mean "with other men"?

Then the laydeez can just do it to each other..and perhaps stretch it to a catty Edinburgh Show. Get drunk. Get sad. Go home. Show me a man who has ever done that.

Not everything needs to be facebooked out of context, instagrammed for likes or tweeted for followers and digital affection or whatever the language is.

GROW 

THE FUCK

UP, GIRLS.

Or is that sexist?

Don't answer.

It's rhetorical.

No Spitting

I have just been for a "steam"..

A steam room,  Turkish sauna - is that the same thing?

I'll never know - I have given up Googling and everybody I know is stupid.

Two girls spat at me.

Allow me to explain. And stop me if you know this and I am the only one who didn't.

The first came in and leaned on my shoulder (permission not given), then spat at the wall, which fell on me. She apologised and told me 'Everyday's a School Day'.

Not everyday love, I thought. We are not that lucky.

Her friend came in, repeated the action and missed the wall so it went down my back.

They explained the "thing" on the wall was some kind of thermostat.

Spit cold water at it and the room heats up.

I suggested there could also hold the water in their cupped cleavage in a tacky US mid-west whore sort of way.

At least I was going to... then decided against it

This is Scotland.

Somebody had to be a bit English.

So I actually told her that now I had something I had to write about in my blog tonight.

Aaand you are upto speed

The Circus

I don't watch football anymore.

I understand the faux investment, the highs and lows, the need to feed the masses with bread and circuses.

To the outcome is so binary.

Win. Lose. Who cares.

I'm better than you,

No you are not.

Where is the nuance?

What has anybody ever learned in life from watching a football match, the occasional fightback aside....how to spit? How to fall? How to cheat?

It's a poor lesson.

It's a pretty sad obsession.

Why not follow entertainment with edge, thrust and drive, with nuance and flair, with originality and depth and which enriches, teaches, strengthens, informs and has few laughs in it.

There is more play in a play that on a pitch.

When you think about it following a few millionaires kicking a ball is a pathetic pastime. Sorrowful. They deserve our pity and fear.

What's a good result for the season?

How about having our heroes rape 10% fewer teenagers then they did last year?

Shooting too high?

OK then try 5%

Sub Zero

You can relax....with Corrie, or in a bath, in a white room, with your favourite TV programmes, CD or book, at the pub.

But the following day you might feel stressed.

Still.

That is the definition of a treatment not working.

At least these are harmless things to do (unless washed down with litres of wine).

But it is temporary.

Transient.

A pause play with bubbles.

A distraction.

It may be that it is an Elastoplast over deeper worries - gut-burning debt, illness etc...so it's understandable.

But still pressing "stress" is an unuseful response to select.

You need to learn to deliberately deselect it.

To relax...Plus.

To wind down ...to the max.

To Superchill.