Disruptive Obedience

...would be better than whatever what we're upto now is, although it's a spicy proposition to get anything through the bugle on a schoolday these days. The moguls have iron elbows and scrutinise non-verbal expressions for whiffs of sass, which can result in any respectable clam-head you care to mention being trounced into the nudge-tunnel for the required probe into whether what their visible parts recently exuded was agonised wonder about how to galvanise a breakthrough in The Year of The Fist, or a deplorable lack of exuberance, both of which have near-identical appearances, and we find it best to find out as soon as possible which of these it might have been. We want big swigs of happiness during choppy times. We're only breaking ribs by accident.

When Public Facing

I put my expensive but not really when you think about how long the blades last and how little blood they shed shaving device in my ear, to see if it could discourage the twigs and parsnips that've lately, sorry, begun to think they live there, because I'm ninety five years old now and this is the kind of thing that happens, or it's a thing that happened ages ago and I only just noticed it after a couple of what may or may not've been ear-directed quizzical micro-glances my way at work, or whatever, I'll take it over wisdom teeth any day or night of the rest of my life thanks.
The blade didn't help the removal though. It helped me to bleed from somewhere I've never bled from before, known to specialists such as myself as the I'm not exactly sure although I studied the bastards at university sir, call it the non-flappy outer ridge shall we, alright yes, this wasn't important to start with and it's only getting less so.

Gisting

I went walking round a potential new postcode. I'm going to live on my own, in the special home for irritable bachelors. I just haven't found it yet. Soon though. Requirements include: the bed not being in the kitchen, the rent not being more than half the monthly income (ambitious, this, but not impossible), and the distance on foot to town being not more than twenty-nine minutes. This postcode turned out to not be good for aimless scuttling, but it did have a shop called World of Doors.
Later, in a crowd, I hit a man in the eyes with the back of my head and he insisted I not worry about it, and we carried on being riffed senseless by american hands.

Competence

Notes: Recipient again attended interview to assess suitability to perform functions already contractually obliged to perform. Recipient approached interview with surplus of I's in mouth ready to deploy after surplus of we's deployed at other interview led to impression of insufficient individual worth. Interview performance an improvement. Again a wait and while waiting performing functions contractually obliged to perform but not deemed capable of performing. Again the assessment unsuitable. One part of second interview feedback lamenting lack of banging-on re: teamwork. Probable cause: surplus of I's taken on after previous interview feedback highlighted we-surplus and I-dearth. News this time received Thursday afternoon, reaction of recipient being immediate exit of building. Friday morning recipient booked appointment at doctor's for following Thursday and again performed functions contractually obliged to perform but twice now deemed incapable of performing. Weekend: rollercoaster. Monday morning recipient attempted to perform functions contractually obliged to perform but stopped after thirty-five minutes, exited building and went to library. At library recipient attempted to read books of familiar, soothing, perspective-enhancing nature, Tropic of Capricorn, but found library didn't stock such books or if it did they would not be due back for many terrifying weeks. Recipient went to coffee place with achievable crossword and drank coffee and didn't achieve half of crossword, finding during the non-achievement that the silent recital of the alphabet when, for example, thinking of what a half-filled word's final letter could be, didn't go like the silent recital of the alphabet usually does, sometimes skipping from f to t, sometimes just stopping, and sometimes changing into thoughts of what seemed at the time like life-enhancing physical violence. Recipient left coffee and coffee shop and crossword and went home to wait until time for doctor, the new dissonance-cocoon varying in severity but never falling away. Doctor had recipient give a first-person account of the above, and offered recipient some information and some people to talk to, and a six-month course of anti-depressants. Recipient declined and was surprised by offer of anti-depressants, and accepted information and people to talk to. Doctor forbade for two weeks recipient's performing of functions contractually obliged to perform.

Bearable Onslaught

The weather got in bed with us and would not respect our boundaries. Weekdays we all worked beyond our thresholds in breezes bought from Wilkinsons that made an office-wide soup of our deodorants. Widened margins of error let photocopied rectangles land on previously unthinkable desks. Chiming phones were gripped in sweaty trepidation. Remarks were made. The customers were hungry for rain.
In the unwaged hours we groaned in parks showing our feet to each other and suffering leisure. A frisbee is a machine that takes away from the people in its immediate vicinity the ability to fully relax and replaces it with the faint but persistent worry that at any moment some jovial wrist will launch a silent disc at your favourite nostril irrevocably.
A memory wails: before a P.E. lesson in the gym this tall guy was spinning round under a basketball hoop with a rounders bat in his left hand. Others were gathering in a bored and fragrant murmur in the middle of the court and under the far hoop this older tall guy was stretching and doing smiling older tall guy stuff. The first tall guy increased the speed of his spins until he felt queasy and then stopped spinning and also stopped gripping the rounders bat, which was then launched across the basketball court in a dead straight untumbling line towards the back of the other tall guy's head, past and through and inbetween everyone else's white-clad adolescent necks and foreheads and oozings and worries, and as the other tall guy tuned into the collective clench of expected horror he turned to receive the fat end of the bat with his mouth half-open at first and then shut just before it bulleted into his face. Half the audience looked at the other half for an indication of how to react appropriately.
He staggered into the changing rooms and leaned on the sink and spat out a tongue of blood and shattered tooth. The bat thrower stood just inside the doorway, unsure of the etiquette, crying. The teacher picked the tooth fragments out of the sink and took the boy and his mouth away. The rest of us played games with no projectiles.

Not The Best I've Seen Him

I had some orders and a gate. People weren't allowed in through the gate but were allowed out but not back in unless they were wearing something that made them look like they might have a job to do. Outside the gate were other larger gates that I had no control over and car parks and the sun. Behind me and my gate and along a corridor and up some stairs was a football stadium with people and a football match in it. I could hear a lot of mouths and feet and see nothing happening on a screen that didn't work. Fifteen thousand breaths became a balloon of long low vowel sounds and an ambulance went to the gate adjacent to mine and I wasn't sposed to let anyone out until it'd gone. Half time happened and it still hadn't left and while I was telling people who wanted to go out that they had to use another gate they were telling me that the ambulance was there because a football player's ankle had failed and the noise I heard was the reaction to the ankle failure's unexpected amount of exposed bone and consequent gruesome angles and bright afternoon blood hitting thirty thousand eyeballs at an unavoidable plethora of trajectories and this-can't-be-happening instants. People in the closer rows had heard the sound it made and weren't smiling while they tried to describe it. I winced and said I was sorry they couldn't go out the gate yet. Some angry men were angry about this and as soon as I sent them away the ambulance left and I opened the gate and everyone else went out and smoked and talked about the score and the likely result and the other times they'd seen the structure of the human body rearranged. The second half started and I let everyone in. It was noisier than the first half and the wrong team started winning and the angry angry men started leaving through the gate and I was obliged to tell them they couldn't re-enter and they said things like I wouldn't fucking want to. One of them said this and walked away just before there was another colossal ballooning noise and he turned around and walked up to the gate and I didn't open it or say anything. He listened to the way the noise was changing and concluded a goal'd been disallowed and the wrong team was still winning and went away.

European Cinema

The Thor riots went largely unreported by the mainstream media. Thousands took to the cinemas to kick the piss out of Kenneth Branagh effigies. "It was his vision", they bellowed, "and he is therefore most blameworthy. But don't think we aren't also going to smash the teeth out of Natalie Portman's cardboard cut-outs, and the face and brains out of anyone who dares to go around resembling Anthony Hopkins."
And they did, and it went on for seventy five hours, and even those with no limbs turned up just to scream things like "Branagh is a wallet-raping dangleberry."
The cost of the damage is still being calculated, but insiders say the total is likely to be "nowhere near enough."
Hopkins has been fired into space, where he will be safe from the families of the goats, goblins and Cleveland Steamer enthusiasts who were slaughtered just for looking like him.
"I'm off", he said, in a statement read by his lawyer. "If I'd've realised how woeful the finished product would be, I'd've nailed Branagh's thespian ballsack to the wall of a public toilet and streamed his whimpering demise live on my website. Suffice it to say we are no longer on kissing terms. I hear the Chinese have had him placed under house arrest even though he lives in Suffolk. If you ask me, they should cover him in duck shit and stab his shins with a chisel until he's fucking dead."

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.