Oh u just mad cause I’m stylin on u

Ok so the other day I learnt that my former secondary school had received an official complaint about my facebook conduct. Because that’s a thing now. Facebook conduct. That’s a thing that exists. That’s something that can be complained about to educational establishments. Yes. The complainant was a woman who we’ll call ‘Jane Simpson’ (name changed to protect the reactionary and moronic), who was absolutely outraged about a poem I’d reposted onto a group about famous dead baby ‘Baby P’ (it’s like a codename to protect his real identity, like Captain Scarlett. Or Prince).

The group itself was a satirical group called JUSTICE FOR BABY PEA. Now let me explain: the joke in this case is that the ‘P’ in ‘Baby P’ sounds very similar to the word ‘Pea’, referring to the small green vegetable. So it’s like a pun. You know, satirical, because a lot of groups are all like ‘Justice for baby P!!!’ and this one is ‘Justice for baby Pea’, and then there was a picture of a baby dressed like a pea as well, so frankly the whole thing was a nice idea, cleverly put together, a perfect combination of opportunity for verbal wit followed up with the correct brain response and satirical nous to successfully carry through the idea, andYES I KNOW IT’S NOT VERY CLEVER and neither was the poem I reposted, which was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air lyrics but instead of talking about a young rapper being relocated to his stuffy posh Aunt and Uncle’s house in Florida, and I’m willing to accept that fact.

However.

This was the email sent.

Dear *mr headmaster*
I thought you might like to be aware of the above student's idea of a joke, as I presume if he is to be believed a student at your college. He has joined a Facebook group which has been set up to mock the death of a 17 month old baby after months of torture and has very kindly added a poem for other members' amusement. Perhaps you may not feel that this is anything you would wish to be involved with, but it may be interesting to you that this sick individual happily states that he is student at your school - which is something I presume you would not wish to be linked with. Several of the members are students at various universities - it is sickening to think that these are some of the young adults that are supposed to be also our privilaged ones.
I leave it with you to deal with as you deem necessary
Regards
Jane Simpson (a sickened campaigner for tougher measures against child abuse).

See, I like this. I like the way it’s structured. I like the way that Jane plays with conventions of language – such as in her premodifying of ‘joke’ with ‘the above student’s idea of a…’ to imply that she, indeed, doesn’t think a poem about child abuse written in the style of the theme music from a Will Smith sitcom from the 90s is any sort of thing to be laughing about. I like the dark, biting globules of sarcasm that drip like tar from ‘has very kindly added a poem for other members’ amusement’. I like the three different variants on the word ‘sick’. I like the use of dramatic irony – the build up of describing my crimes, then the sudden thematic u-turn as it hinges, swivelling the sights of criticism purely on the school who have been made guilty by association of my own misdeeds. I like the places where it formally parts company with fact. I love the fact that Jane describes herself as a ‘campaigner’, as though there’s a huge political movement dedicated to preventing ‘tougher measures against child abuse’ and she’s the one solitary firebrand left to stand up for the kids, waging a ceaseless war against the twin evils of ironic poetry and no-good beatnik teenagers, using well-aimed molotov cocktails of passive-aggressive emails and tattling to old schoolteachers.

I like to imagine the creation of this email. In my mind’s eye I see Jane surfing Facebook in the middle of the night, her jowls glittering in the darkness of her empty flat, going through every dead-child related group one-by-one until by some horrific mistyping she inadvertently lands on an ironic group. I can imagine the look on her face. It would be somewhat similar to this smilie:

D:

I can imagine the thoughts that flowed sluggishy through her mind. ‘This is it. I’ve seen moral standards slipping in my time. I’ve seen them letting homosexuals give heart transplants, lesbians drive buses, blacks present Blue Peter, and I’ve said nothing. Because things move on. But no more. NO MORE. For too long I've made myself a sacrifice to the altar of progress, but this is it. These little bastards have gone too far. I’m drawing a line in the sand HERE.’ And then I imagine her pushing the eight cats off of her computer to write the email, laughing derisively as she poured forth her bitter and unrelenting scorn, thinking ‘yeah that’s how privileged is spelt’, then concluding with the frankly bizarre linguistic and orthographic gymnastics of “these are some of the young adults that are supposed to be also our privilaged ones” and sending the email off to a schoolteacher. JOB WELL DONE. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. THE CHILDREN ARE NOW 6% SAFER THANKS TO JANE SIMPSON. YES

Now let’s get something straight. I am All For small children not being tortured to death. I think that what happened to Big P was horrific and naturally as soon as I heard, I sprinted to my computer, logged onto Facebook and joined “Justice for Baby P”, “Remebrance for Baby P”, “Baby P' .. we want justice!!”, “SIGN BOOK OF CONDOLANCE FOR BABY P”, “Baby P Killers should be hanged Drawn and Quartered”, “PETITION GROUP TO GET " BABY P" A MEMORIAL PLAQUE” “'Baby P' another child left to die by our so called public services!”, “Join The Petition To Get The Parents of Baby P Life In Prison!” etc, just to clarify my righteous sense of morally-absolutist anger. And yeah, I do believe that there are certain things that shouldn’t be laughed at, such as the mental image of thick craft-paper papercuts on the head of an erect penis, the increasingly-unhideable nature of the scars on my legs from my rampant self-harming, and – indeed – the sadistic murder of small children. Now my longtime blogging audience might find that last one difficult to reconcile with my output so far – after all we all know that there are some epic lulz to be gotten out of dead baby jokes HOW DO YOU MAKE A DEAD BABY FLOAT TWO SCOOPS OF ICECREAM ONE SCOOP OF DEAD BABY LOLolol, and yes, I’m unlikely to win an award for not inadvertently saying offensive things to girls and the disabled, but you have to realise that what’s funny in these jokes is not the actual act of the baby being cut into pieces. You idiots. What’s being mocked is the sense of disgust felt by the listeners; in imagining these perverse acts of horror, we’re transported out of our comfort zones and forced to react. It’s either LAUGH CRY FIGHT OR RUN and the easiest option is to laugh. We’re turning round and laughing at our inabilities to reconcile the horrors of the world with our own delicate sensibilities. Which is where the entire point of shock comedy comes from, and it’s why Jimmy Carr still has a career. And so we made a facebook group to make fun of the Baby P Facebook groups and we had an ironic laugh by combining the banal with the horrible. My natural reaction was to laugh. But laugh ironically, which means that I had to do air-quotes and actually pronounce the individual ‘ha’s.

Jane Simpson’s natural reaction was to cry. Actually her natural reaction was to throw her hands up in the air in an ineffectual display of horror, fall of her chair, and, in an act of self-righteous morally convenient rage, spasm every muscle in her body and suck her crusty tampon up through her uterus into her poisonous and fetid womb where it will hopefully give her some kind of ulcer. And then write an ineffectual email. And then my school formally asked me to cut all public ties to them. And my mum said that she was disappointed in my lack of morals. And you know what? All this makes me sort of wish that that baby hadn’t even been killed at all. Seriously.

This all raises a question though. Why does this sort of thing always happen to me? I’m not the only person I know who has a blog or who is on facebook but I’m the only one getting accusatory hatemail and being called ‘sick’ by middle-aged women with millipedes crawing out of their vaginas. The other kids have blogs that are objectively of a lower standard than this one, and THEY don’t have get 50 comments accusing them of massive self-harm and of having ‘less than below average looks’ which to be honest is such a diss if you think about it. Perhaps all of this is just the beginning of the anti-Tom backlash. It’s not like I haven’t expected it coming; after all you can’t fly as high and burn as brightly as I’ve been doing without being aware of the sword of Damocles hanging ever more dangerously above your head. I just guess that I’m one of those people who makes other folk Sit Up and Take Notice. I’m not like Darfur: you can’t ignore me and hope I’ll go away. I’m like Israel – people are on the streets protesting both for and against me. Arabs are dying in foreign countries over my right to exist. It’s the best and brightest flowers that are the first to get picked, after all, and if you’re a young agent provocateur like me you are BOUND to get in the face of ‘the man’ and the rest of his fat-cat blood-for-oil cronies. They’re all like ‘what do you think you’re doing’ and ‘you young rebel, put on a tie and get a job in an office and be a nine-to-five wage slave like the rest of the corporate drones!!’ and ‘you’re self pitiful, self loathing with less than below average looks and a childish attitude towards life’ and I’m just going by on my fixed wheel bike with my keffiyeh and an my American Apparel hoodie and my sweet Nikes and I’m like ‘chill out man, anyway gtg I have some more bourgeoise power-structures to deconstruct with my cutting wit and inflammatory prose’ and they’re all left wearing their brown raincoats standing in the terraced streets of Brixton and waving their fists ineffectually after me while I go off and probably hook up with some babes or something.

And really I won’t consider myself any sort of success until I’m officially branded ‘sick’ and possibly ‘vicious’ by the Daily Mail, and I suppose that this is a good start. Overall a good day’s work, all told.



* * *
in other news
SELF HARM UPDATE
so I was in the kitchen and was pretty drunk on gin and the crashing inadequacies of my life were pressing down upon me from all sides and I didn’t know what to do because my cutting blades were downstairs so I just leapt into action and took a cheesegrater to my calves for like twenty minutes until the back of my legs looked like Ronald Macdonald’s hairdo

Holy shit guys guess who I bumped into at The Bridge the other night (semi-ironic depression itp)

(I’ve re-read this post and have realised that it’s fairly easy to pinpoint the exact time when I lost interest in writing it and instead began to stare listlessly into space and contemplating my own bitter loneliness, I have marked it with an asterix, also I apologise for it in advance)

The other night I grew weary of sitting by myself in the darkness of my bedroom, listening to ‘Against All Odds’ on loop, softly weeping for hours on end and carving <3 <3 ROSIE <3 <3 on the inside of my thighs with the blade of a pencil sharpener, so I decided that the time was right to Go Out and Get Hammered at The Bridge (the twat’s nightclub of choice); the aim being to quench the agonising eternal pain of the flaming ginger train wreck that is my life with a long cooling stream of gin and tonics, tequila shots, Jaegerbombs and cheap cheap nightclub wine.

To be honest, when I put on my purple shirt and my Trendy Trousers From Topman, I thought it would be Just Another Night Out. I thought I’d just get a bit drunk, loudly out myself as a racist/homophobe/human in front of my fellow students, dance ironically a bit, pull a girl (pulling technique: stare unrelentingly into the face of the target in a neurotic attempt to achieve eye-contact for twenty five minutes, ‘accidentally’ brush up against her on the dancefloor, follow her about her like an indie Barry George), buy a kebab I didn’t want, eat half of it, throw up on myself, reconsider my circumstances, decide that my life really is an unending black pit of despair and loneliness, start listening to Linkin Park on my new iPod, and possibly conclude the night by bursting into tears and toppling over into a gutter like an ancient mossy crumbling statue of Troilus, screaming incoherent bellows of rage and loss into the chasmic depths of cruel and remorseless night sky against which my pain and heartbreak is little more than an ephemeral mote of dust.

To be honest my best-case scenario was to stand in the corner and glare at kissing couples for an hour and a half and then walk dejectedly home and lie to my diary.

But what I didn’t realise was that the night had bigger plans – and bigger surprises – in store for me! Because guess who was at the nightclub… none other than Ali Bartlam!

!!


!!!!!!

[Hmm. I guess that my problem here is that a lot of my new fans (if you define ‘fan’ as ‘any random weirdo who has come up to me out of the blue and started talking to me about my online diary’ then I have Six) don’t really know the general history of my life or the literary heritage of this blog; they won’t get my many examples of reference, allusion and implicature. It’ll be like writing a 2,500 word long essay on Milton and not having ever read the Bible (imagine that); all of my comic references to spadeface, Gnat Bell, clamclamclam, Tiffin, Hampton, SWPS, Kings, Lois the batfaced Newtgirl, The Adventures of Emoboy, MYSADDO, Steve’s all-encompassingly cavernous needle-filled vagina, rooooose, Greg I want to be bad Stoddddddart, Marios, the Oli Gill Rape Technique, The Flask, The Fleece, The Hiking Boots, KrisMas, Cassie my favourite whale Bowman, Alex nice but dim Patrick, etc, etc, will just fly over your heads. You will be sitting there and wondering what I’m talking about, who these people are, and why bumping into my exexex-girlfriend’s little sister at a shite Oxford nightclub was so significant. I mean it wasn’t really THAT significant in the general scheme of things, it’s nothing compared to the bombing of Gaza or orphans with AIDS or being powerless to stop your combined romantic hopes and dreams for the future being throttled into unconsciousness and then dashed into bloody scraps on the unyielding concrete floor of apathy and resentment, but for the purposes of this blog, and to my drunk drunk mind, meeting Ali was the most significant thing that had ever happened in to anybody ever up to this point.]

Perhaps I’d better explain.

Basically Alz and I share something of a chequered history; a united enmity that I guess could possibly be a cover for some simmering inter-sororal sexual desire but is probably more accurately described as ‘mutual unrelenting loathing’. To be honest, it’s one of those weird historical oddities like the Sharks/Jets feud; the Ali/Tom Friction been going on so long now that I don’t think anybody even remembers how it even started in the first place! If I really stretch my mind back into the cavernous darkness of history, I recall that there was some sort of disagreement at somebody’s birthday party; certain people may have inadvertently referred to certain other people as ‘the fat sister’ at a in a fit of drunken insanity madness, and then certain other people found out and screamed me out of the house party, and then the next year and a half was filled with certain people shooting certain other people murderous glances unsuccesfully hidden behind gritted smiles every time Lucia was out of the room, but really I can’t quite remember what happened. Suffice to say, Ali was one of those people who I’d really have liked to get to know better, but the fact that we both despised each other with all the heat of the sun made it difficult for us to remain in the same room for longer than ten minutes without laudanum. Like, I was trying to decide who I’d least like to be trapped in a telephone box with for a year, and decided that it’d be a tossup between Paul Flemming, Hitler, our primary school music teacher who dragged me into a bush and molested me to the rhythm of Three Blind Mice, and A-B :)

To be honest by the time we arrived at the club, my attempts to drink myself into a blissful state of comfortable numbness were going fairly well; I couldn’t really feel much of my face and the dried blood oozing from my ear canal had more or less stopped, and I was halfway through listening to Pictures of You, and at the back of my mind I was fairly sure that I still wanted to lock myself in a cupboard and never come out until the world made sense again and so I was unable to muster up any emotional reaction to seeing that the club was filled with my ex-ex-ex's friends from back in the day and was quite an anti-tom place to be, all told, and frankly by the time I actually came into contact Ali I was so elephant’s trunk that I just have this image of her in my mind as some huge totemic vision of sunglasses and glaring, looming above my puny form like something out of Lovecraft. Cthulu Bartlam perhaps

It was weird. I wasn't even sure if we were supposed to loathe each other any more. It felt like we'd both teleported in from different yet subtly connected dimensions of existance that were intrinsically opposed to each other. When we clapped eyes on each other, it was a bit like a scene in a time-travel film when the dude goes back to the eighties and meets himself as a child on a space-hopper or whatever and they look at each other and, and like suddenly the universe and the entire consciousness of chronological space-time suddenly snaps out of it and realises that this is physically impossible, it can’t happen and there’s a brief flash of light and a tiny inter-dimensional wormhole opens up inside the brains of these characters and their perception is raised to like some eighth level of Karmic Nirvana just so they can envision the myriad spectrum of quantum infinity that their co-existence has breached and suddenly all of the knowledge of matter and everything is laid bare in an endless parade of subatomic magic. It was a bit like that except instead of understanding the intricate clockwork mechanisms inside every atom I started choking on a bit of lime and some of my drink went up my nose.

*

We tried to blank each other, there was absolutely no way that was happening, then there ws a fairly awkward conversation I think and the rest of the night passed in an alcoholic blur of Jaegermeister, wine, taxis and a dark instrospective sense of unstoppable onrushing hell comparable to the dizzying sense of dread felt by the soldiers in the D-Day landing boats mere seconds before hitting the beaches, but I’m reliably informed that after having some more drinks I re-approached Ali and attempted to have a chat which I guess went well because my spine is still attached

and

yeah

alex pearce was there too, for those who don’t remember her, she made me cake once, I vaguely remember me being impressed at meeting her and her scoffing ‘why don’t you go write a blog about it’ in an ironic way and then I said ‘actually I probably will’, thinking on my feet and then she said IF YOU DO I’M GOING TO SHIT

so

err

THE END

i wonder if its possible to salvage this post by adding 'lol' at the end as some kind of semi-ironic comment on something, i was joking about the pencil-sharpener bit

* * *
~*~*~*~in other news~*~*~*~

TOM’S GIRLFRIEND UPDATE
well,