Subject Matters

I anonymously published, in a quarterly workplace journal, distributed only to members of a particular sub-group within those workplaces, and read by a sub-group of that sub-group presumably in idle moments between obligations, let me be clear, an account of an event: the twice-yearly conversion, by their line manager, of a working human's current value, potential value, and behavioural desirability, into a dot on a graph. The account's tone was one of inquisitive sarcasm. It ended with three questions. The last word of the last of these questions was: sinister. The use of this arguably overly-dramatic or maybe even paranoid adjective was proportionate as a response to the emergence, during the twice-yearly conversion, of a queasy situation regarding the crusading-and-prevailing new business doctrine: if you don't say you love the doctrine, if you say you don't love the doctrine, if you scamper about the office pointing out the doctrine's snags and foibles, your dot will never be placed in the upper third of the graph, because your questioning of the doctrine that produced the graph counts as undesirable behaviour. Never mind how well you perform in the day-to-day tasks, you will never be deemed excellent unless you learn to say you are a fan of the compulsory one true path.
Shortly after everyone'd had their twice-yearly conversion, and before the doctrine's implementation-assessors visited, to convert the whole building into a multi-million pound dot on a self-congratulatory ideological conquest display unit, there was a noticeable office-wide increase in I-heart-the-doctrine pomp and fanfare, and judging the sincerity of this here grisly flag-waving, and those there frantic declarations of fervent belief, became impossible.

Furtherance Merger

Anyway we saw some music in a field and would not stop banging on about it with unruly mouths and screeching ears for days afterwards. It was noted that banging on about it won't bring it back, unless the banging on about it is kept up until the moment the same thing begins again, which from a look at the tour dates is either a very long time or an expensive distance away. In response to this being noted it was noted that if we're going to be noting things then the function of the banging on about it was to confirm and describe the enormity of what'd been heard and seen and detected, rather than to somehow resurrect the experience through nerdish incantations and slow shakings of the head, so there. I left to spend three days in a popular northern hill factory, eating fish and chips and slowly shaking my head. While there I saw this. It was very good. When I got back to the south they'd thoughtfully put piles of speakers on every street and were playing different musics through them, and we gathered at a few of the piles and did things worth banging on about.

At All Possible

I'm sending this from one of those chain pubs where all the lights are on all the time. In traditional pub symbolism this would indicate that it's time to leave. In this one they're right, but less for that reason, and more because it's a sanitary shitehouse and I can smell J2O from sixteen feet away and violently sensitive beef-droids with footballs for eyes are assessing my manliness and my opinion of their manliness and by god there's nothing more important to a manly man's man than making sure everyone agrees with your own opinion of how manly you are, sweet stinking Nelson we'd better put that concern above everything else forever lest anyone get the wrong idea about how well we're coping with our gender. I've had a lot of fun recently and none of it was in here.
Now, why come at all if you're just going to whinny and gripe, etc?
Because I don't feel even slightly bad about sitting down to hoover up the wifi without even pretending to buy a drink from the joyless characterkilling motherfuckers who dump these blaring hells onto every street in England, is why.
Now, why not get the internet installed in your new quarters, old chap?
I dunno maybe I can do without it for a while, like I can do without furniture and intimacy.
Now, how did that glitter get onto your pillows?
That's a good question. Maybe it was on somebody else's face, which was then on my face, which was then on the pillows, I could be wrong. A human being fell on my head last week and I've lost all interest in the truth.