Spines Out

The numbers people will want to see my research before they give me any of their numbers. I would like you to be part of my research, please (hello). The aim is to see if opening a book shop is possible. Or it's to see if it's possible to convince the numbers people that it's possible to open a book shop. I need your honest hands:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6QPJHH3

Week Month All Time

I applied - this might take a while but you'll barely feel a thing - for a job and was interviewed in a glass-walled corner-booth in a small-town thousand-person office complex. I sat down and showed them my hands and asked them when I'd be starting and if I could have the first couple of Fridays off, whenever they are, for some crucial appointments. But they wanted me to answer their questions first. And I didn't get the job despite all the lies I gave in response, such as:
I can be relied upon to care about targets. I care about targets all day and all night, I think of them as a kind of powerful sauce that I can't get enough of, can't actually eat without.
Or:
I am subjectively, objectively, rationally, emotionally, historically, romantically, obviously, and chemically the strongest member of any team I'm in or on, whilst I maintain an alluring indifference to accolades and a robust but nuanced lack of smarm.
Or:
I can prioritise tasks in a unique manner that has caused more than one area manager to describe me as the auto-acknowledged yes-bulb of self-propelled co-operative procedurality.
I could go on, I'll not go on. It was remarkable, at the start, in the booth, that both my hands remained unshook. That was the verdict. We might've ended there.

Select From Popular Items

- You can mute the self-checkouts, my precious little battered sausage.
- I'm ecstatic.
- Civilisation has really gone up a notch.
- You never stopped striving for justice.
- I have decommissioned my ballistic vengeance.
- I am delighted beyond belief.
- I can process my bargains in beeping serenity.
- I am a ten-floor four-star hotel of satisfaction.
- And do you know what else?
- I have no knowledge of anything at all in this world.
- The security hawk has ended his campaign of unreasonable scrutiny.
- I am smashed by a joyful hammer.
- Our dreams have entered reality by the medium of triumph.

Full Cost Recovery

- and there's a decrease in intensity sometimes?
- nngh.
- is it both elbows?
- always.
- and any other symptoms?
- the sky is full of graphs and charts.
- bar? pie?
- the gamut.
- you ought to've mentioned this at the beginning.
- I ought to've a lot of things at the beginning.
- yes.
- but that's not what the beginning's fucking for.
- if we can just focus on getting a full description. is there anything else?
- the graphs and charts smell like airports.
- thankyou very much for coming.
- I arrange my shoes in chronological order.
- we'll have the results in fourteen days.

Nixon Affinity Brunch

Forgetful Martin came round, fixed a cupboard door and talked about roofing and memory lapses. I've found that if I'm worried about forgetting something, one thing that can help is to apply the meaningful end of a pen or pencil to some paper and make a shape or series of shapes that will evoke the thing to be remembered, and lacking the ability to draw anything that looks like what it's supposed to look like, I most often resort to aligning little groups of "letters" into "words" that describe the thing to be remembered, and, if necessary, underneath these "words",  other shapes called "numbers", that represent the "time" by which the thing to be remembered is to be remembered. Or if you're in the future you could chisel these words and numbers into the little yelping screen that lives in your pocket and abrades your thighs whenever a deadline looms large enough. Just some ideas Martin. He became a mumbling mist and rose through the ceiling, leaving a faint brown smudge and the smell of incompleteness.

Pestilential Swank

Debated whether or not to fill a box with cobwebs so at the new place I can recreate what I'm used to. But they're difficult to put back up, so just I stood on a chair and snorted them right off the walls. No, I binned them, then filled half a box with stuff I haven't looked at or thought about since the last time I moved. And the music-playing cube that works plus the other one that almost works.
Next Monday there'll be a different underpass to swoop through and an impossible-to-tell-if-this-is-quicker route to the keycard thing next to the door to wait for the formerly green but now just absence-of-red light to signal it's still alright to clock in, sit down, sneeze, finger the computer and slaughter the inbox.

Big Super Normal Time

, but using the phonetic alphabet when stood two feet away, while neither one of us was in a blizzard or a war, was too much, and it was only my long-standing and well-known commitment to appearing professional when I can be arsed to, that stopped me asking him if he was taking the piss. Maybe he'd always found the sound of y hard to distinguish from the sound of q, and used the names yankee and quebec as a confusion-reducing courtesy to my thick-eared and disengaged face. I asked him to repeat himself.

Relish Lack Be Enjoying

Situations lunge. I said yes to a three-day course in a town by the sea. The Union will welcome me and I'll be fully informed and riled up for baptism. I've put a toothbrush and all my prejudices in a sack made of high horse leather. I'm already practising responses to being called comrade and hearing it spoken between respectable folk. Weeks ago at the sixty-thousand people thing I couldn't stay for the speeches. We shuffled and whistled and listened to the chants. I found it hard to want to start chanting, after listening to the chants. I smiled at the bits of the air the chanting was in, and at the helicopter above it. The Union had a large yellow balloon and a band. Back at work I was interviewed for the same job as now but for forever. The questions were the questions for when the job was for six months. As soon as I noticed this I made up a rule that I couldn't use any of the answers that I'd used the first time. This was unexpected. I spent so long answering one of the questions that I forgot what it was.

Only To Be Expected

Every not often next-door has a party in its back garden and as I exit my front door at sundown to begin another Desecration Wednesday or similar, I find at our wall a shiny young guzzler wondering how close to the right place they are. Very, I say, and while they ask if I've got any phone credit and if yes can they borrow the phone and some of the credit to summon someone from the next-back garden to the next-front gate, I hoist them like a fat baby over my shoulder and through my cluttered hall and thin kitchen to the back door, where they wonder what I'm playing at and I undo all the locks and plod through the shin-deep weeds and hurl them neighbourly over the fence without warning or apology.
Later, at large, as I thrust the empty bottle of anything-over-five-percent into the municipal waste-heap, I feel a vague sense of community.

First I'd Heard

There's a new cash machine in the neighbourhood and it doesn't charge one ninety nine. It doesn't charge anything at all. It made the news, obviously, and in the queue we lamented all the one ninety nines we've slaughtered in the name of cider binges and new crisp flavours and emergency unnecessaries. Who did we think we were? Who did they think we were? Who did anyone think anyone was? A feeling of relief slithered round the postcode and the mayor stood by the machine for an hour at dusk to wink at people and pat them between the shoulder blades and say petitions work, petitions fucking work, and we all smiled and punched him on the shoulder and wept.

Doubt Corral

There are a lot of Post-It notes on the wall in front of me and the wall to the left and the bit of wall that sticks out to the right. They've all got vague things written on them in capital letters and are arranged in groups in a way that's supposed to seem methodical. Behind me is the door and sometimes I leave it open when I go out so that anyone walking past can look in and think of incremental potential fulfilment and move their mental image of me a bit closer to their mental statue of Winston Churchill. One of the Post-Its says ELBOWS, one says RICHARD GERE, one says STOP MAKING SENSE with SENSE crossed out and JOKES written underneath. I sit down and look at them and tell myself I know what it all means and I'm really onto something and have a good haircut. There will be nothing to compare the result to so I'll be unable to think it wasn't a successful arrangement. A major breakthrough. An ivory trench. Please send me a photo or pickled head or drawing of your own system along with ten thousand letters about how it is or isn't helping.

The Plans Upstanding

The next thing has been applied to the old thing and now we wear better shoes. I can't say I'm qualmless. Lucky something new found me right after I wondered aloud what I might fall into. I was going to get a career demolishing orphanages with my pelvis. But I accepted a new bar job. But only because there's less paperwork. And the bar is new so it'll be a while before I can be the cause of its ruin. And this might not terribly happen. And soon I'm going to try and sell you a book. I'm going to get zesty. Maybe you should get some goggles or something. I hope you will also sell me your output. My pillows are full of malice, for example. I'm trying to be polite about it. It's possible you're excited about the forthcoming Swans album. We could endure it together. I'm generally busy on Thursdays.

Fogwash

I'm glad I have a job and that shops still provide employment opportunities. Unlike in the future or the Japan I've never been to where shops are massive vending machines powered by robot juice and greed that never close or run out of anything.
We are being elbowed in this direction by the new brilliant ideas, which require fewer workers to do more work in less time. Competence is now laziness and being amazing the bare minimum. The till administers electric shocks based on unknown measurements. And they've put up pictures of the robot arms that we're keeping out of employment. And the ones that haven't clenched their fists have all got their middle fingers raised. It's a bit much.

Solve

It was the type of selection weekend where you have to stand out and fit in and demonstrate a lack of over-confidence. I passed, so next Sunday is the start of evaluation week, where, who knows, you could be asked to demonstrate that you have the initiative to let someone else take the initiative, while also guiding them towards a desired outcome without actually giving them instructions, within a strict time limit, wearing a blindfold, in a potentially bruising environment, just before dinner. Should be a piece of piss.
I injured the soft bit of my right foot and both thighs don't quite work properly so now I walk funny. And slowly. Because if I try to get along at my normal speed it hurts a bit and I look like maybe I'm recovering from some rear-end trauma. The main disadvantages of going slowly are: it takes longer to get to places, and: people with clipboards have more chance to point their faces at you and stand in your way. On the way home from work a man being paid to collect money for a charity said "hey you look laid back today man", and instead of replying "yeah let's keep it that way" I said "thanks" because "yeah let's keep it that way" was not the first thing to occur to me, it was the second, and by the time it popped in I had left the man and his clean irking face behind.