The Uranium Tipped Pen

As people are probably sick of hearing, the US is opening the doors for a 700 billion dollar fund of corporate welfare, to reward bankers for fucking the world economy.

 

Frustrating, yes

Scary, yes

 

But one still can’t help but feeling a little smug. Since this essentially constitutes socialism (welfare, benefits, the collective protecting itself) bailing out capitalism.

 

Maybe they’ll be less quick to espouse the virtues of US capitalism, now that it has fallen at the feet of it’s rival ideology for mercy…

 

Well one can but hope.

 

We all know that a capitalist isn’t <i>really</i> opposed to taxes and welfare, so long as it is being used to feed and clothe the rich, who have worked so hard for this hand-out.

Why, all over Wall Street rich men are singing the praises of pulling together, and helping out our fellow man.

It surely won’t be long till we see Oxfam appeals, live from the stock exchange, showing poor starved executives, who must walk 700 yards to the nearest bus-stop, and don’t even have a trophy-wife to their name anymore, and just a few million pounds a month could end these woes.

 

“give a man loan and he’ll be rich for a day. Give him control of the national banking infrastructure with an almost bottomless bail-out fund, and he’ll be rich for the rest of his life”

 

Cut  to scene of laughing fat men.

 

In other news, unemployment is rising, with no notable increase in money set aside for the dole

Vegetarianism

If you were a Martian visiting the planet Earth, you could easily be forgiven for believing that vegetarians were a bloodthirsty, militant sect, positively armed to the teeth and prepared to make war against the helpless and peaceful denizens of civilisation. Judging purely by what the other ninety four percent of the population has to say about us that is.

 

Yes, yes, I can already hear the words coming out of your mouth:

 

“Oh no! He is one of those militant vegetarians about to jump on his soapbox!”

 

Well yes and no. I’ve never considered myself a “militant” veggie, in fact, I’ve always found the term somewhat mystifying, never having encountered one. Most of the vegetarians I know are reluctant to speak about their dietary choice, unless talking to another veggie, or pressed into conversation about it by an omnivore.

But I am about to jump up on my soapbox. Sorry folks, but this has been building for some time. It’s strange, but vegetarianism has been the only thing I have ever experienced any form of prejudice over, yet I’ve never tried to “convert” a non-vegetarian, and tend always to shy away from debate on the subject. Despite the fact that I would eat most omnivores alive in such a debate, and despite the fact that virtually every omnivore I have ever known has at least once tried to convince me of the merits of their diet, and furnished me with unrequested justifications for their murder of other species.

 

I get treated like a nuisance and a chore at meals and trips out, have been verbally abused by staff at restaurants, and am expected to endure any number of jokes at my expense with good humour. If any vegetarian should dare to answer back to the standard barrage of bigotry, they are instantly labelled a wild militant proselytising veggie.

 

I need to get this off my chest, so here it comes. My normally unspoken response to the stupidest things I hear said about my diet.

 

The Myth of the Militant Veggie

 

Every omnivore will talk about these people as though they cannot even get out the door without having to fight one off. Odd, since we don’t even constitute a tenth of the population in most western nations. They will roll their eyes and tut about how much they loathe them.

Here is some news for you:

There. Is. No. Such. Thing. The so-called extremist veggies, are usually just people you have cornered at a meal table. Every time my diet has been discovered by an omnivore, I have been expected to defend it, as though the very fact of my existence is a challenge. Every such discussion will mean having to endure the standard of effluent mush from self-appointed diet and ethics experts explaining their half-baked theories of why my diet is wrong. Most people that get pigeonholed as militant veggies are simply people that are sick of this shit. We just want to eat our meals, so please don’t take offence when you decide to pounce on us, and we reply in a manner that is less than obsequious.

 

What annoys me most, is that the smug critics of “militant veggies” are usually equally militant about their own moral qualms, it’s just that they aren’t forced to defend them every lunchtime.

 

Imagine if every time you tried to sleep with someone over 18, someone barged in and said “Oh my god, you don’t believe in fucking twelve year olds? Why?” And proceeded to explain why you should (twelve is the legal age of consent in more than one country you know…) and you might understand why some veggies start to feel a bit touchy on the subject of their diet.

 

So someone is a tad sensitive about having to defend their ethical stance against murder every meal time?

Well gee-fucking-willikers! What a surprise.

 

Humans Are Designed to Eat Meat…

 

Don’t you love it when people use superstitious anthropocentric teleological brain-farts in place of logical discourse?

Right.

Humans are not designed to do anything, you fucking imbecile. Keep your absurd religious beliefs to yourself, and then maybe I’ll keep my diet to myself. Humans evolved, from monkeys. Early human diets probably got their protein from small insects, not great lumps of cow flesh. Yes, human evolutionary history certainly includes the eating of meat, it also includes rape, living in trees and throwing shit at one another. This does not present us with a teleological imperative to eat meat, it is not a justification, it is simply a fact about the past. Trace our ancestry back far enough and you’ll find fish, should modern humans breathe underwater? The only “fact” about our diet in this regard is that we require protein and certain vitamins, all of which are attainable through a vegetarian diet without supplements. Meat is one way of getting those things, but it is not the only way.

 

You’re as bad as us! Cos you kill plants and plants might be able to feel pain!!!

 

This argument does genuinely does make me reconsider my stance on vegetarianism. Because I think “anyone stupid enough to try and field that as a rational argument, clearly needs to be removed from the human gene-pool for our good and theirs” and fuck it, if we’re killing them anyway, we may as well eat them for tidiness sake.

Now, I appreciate that you were probably never told this in primary school. This was because most primary school educators assumed it was self evident, that not even a lobotomy victim would fail to grasp the startling fact… Plants do not have brains. They do not experience life the same way that we do. Yes, there may well be some plant equivalent to displeasure, but to claim that their experience is analogous to ours, or even comprehensible to us, requires a special degree of mental ineptitude. Oh yes, you can invoke rhetoric and intellectual dishonesty, and point out that I don’t know what it is like to be a plant, and they might well feel pain and unhappiness at being eaten, but this argument could quite easily be applied to anything. It has the same degree of intellectual substance as claiming that eating shrimp may well upset Jehova.

Yes, Plants may well feel pain, and the invisible pink unicorn may well punish us for eating corn flakes. The simple fact is, we cannot possibly know, so as a statement it is entirely without meaning or content. However, we do know what physical pain is like, we do know what fear of death is like, we can clearly see that animals experience physical and emotional distress just like ours when confronted with pain and death.

We also know that an omnivorous diet is not a nutritional necessity, but simply a meaningless lifestyle choice.

Oh I know the “plants feel pain” defence was your favourite, I know, I know, it was a beautiful theory ruined by an ugly truth. Get over it. It wasn’t a valid argument when you spewed it up, it isn’t one now, and it won’t ever be. The only thing it provides evidence for is the possibility that you aren’t a thinking intelligent creature.

 

Well you aren’t saving any animal lives by not eating meat…

 

Well, aside from being an outright lie (the meat industry is a good 6-7% smaller than it would be if we ate meat, simple logic, give it a try sometime) this statement is based on an extremely shaky ethical assumption.

The point isn’t that we are saving all the cows, the point is that we aren’t killing them. Would you apply the same logic to abortions or the holocaust? No? Of course not, because it’s fucking ridiculous.

If a woman is going to be raped anyway, would you join in?

 

Vegetarianism is a luxury, what if you were starving to death and had nothing but a cow/sheep/duck/kitten/etc?

 

If there was a famine, and people were starving to death, why the fuck would they waste the bulk of their edible resources raising an animal, that will provide them with barely a quarter of the same amount of food in return?

When you produce meat, you are throwing away food because meat is a secondary food source. The idea that hard times would force people to adopt meat-eating diets is patently absurd. Why don’t you take a trip to the third world, and ask them how many times a week they have steak?

Meat is a luxury product, ecologically unsound and wildly inefficient to produce. If you were starving in a desert, you wouldn’t eat a cow, you would tuck into your grain like everyone else, imbecile. Sorry to break the illusion for you.

And if for some reason I were forced to kill an animal to survive, well what of it? It’s a completely different ethical situation to our current one. We don’t have to kill animals to survive. We have a choice. And one of those choices leaves you less prone to cancer, is better for the enviroment, less expensive, causes less heart disease…

 

 

 

But we stun the animals, so they feel no pain…

 

And I drugged your sister with Rohypnol, so she won’t even remember…

 

But it isn’t wrong to kill weaker beings for food…

 

Good, I’ll eat you

 

But…but… but

 

Shut up already. I’m done (exhales). So next time you’re at a meal, and about to abuse the veggie with the usual line-up of flaccid inanities, please, just think back over this, see if it has already been covered. You might just spare yourself an encounter with a militant veggie.

Our diet is better than yours, morally, ecologically, medically and economically. But if you don’t bother us, we might just keep it to ourselves. 

It’s finally happened folks.
We’re on the retreat, dragging our strap-on dildos and gimp masks behind us,
applying the lubricant to our feet for a quick get-away,
We never thought it could happen, but we’re finally learning how uncomfortable it is to try and run away from an angry mob wearing a full body leather skin-suit.

The counter-insurgency has driven back the tides of the sexual revolution, and we’re fleeing, fleeing like cowards with our dicks between our legs.

How did it happen?

Well, it died the same way every revolution died, we got complacent folks.
When the prudes started saying “oh well I’m not a prude but…” we remained silent.
When pro-virginity movements (with evengelicals pulling the strings) swept across Europe, and received widespread media coverage… we remained silent.
When people said “I don’t want my children growing up too fast” we submitted quietly and said, “well I suppose… if its the children“.

For all our pretensions towards sexual openness, we remain a nation of uptight repressed sexual lunatics, and I use the word lunatic in full accuracey, because a repressed nation is a factory for sexual deviants.
Not to mention the alarming rise in teenaged pregnancies…

I have news for you folks, it wasn’t the media, or rap music, or the lack of prayer in schools, that made little Daisy go out and get knocked up. It’s the result of trying to hide sex, from people whose bodies have reached sexual maturity.

Oh boo-hoo, you didn’t want them to grow up too fast?
Maybe we should start castrating them and feeding them growth reduction hormones too? Then we can carry on dressing them up in cute little outfits and playing with them like toys.

A Child is a transitory state, it is the process of transforming from a creature with the awareness intelligence and motor skills of a pot-plant into a complete human being, to try and arrest that growth, because we’re squeamish about sex, is no different to not feeding them, or lying to them about the world.

Childhood is the process of becoming an adult. To say that “adult things” are not for children to learn about is a form of abuse. In this case, a form of sexual abuse. And the result is we rear generation after generation of people that hide in the shells of adult-bodies, but are sexual children, with no idea how to carry out safe and healthy sexual relationships, that are a staple of basic human existence.

Everywhere we go, we see that “respectable” outfits, in society will have nothing to do with sex, or else use exhaustive and repressive means to hide and censor any “inappropriate” content from those martyrs to our bizarre neurosis, children.

Take youtube, I mean Jeez! just try finding some decent porn on that website!
or in your local library or bookshop, or on normal tv.

Something needs to be done.
A true sexual revolution would see a reduction in teen pregnancy, sexual offenders, paedophilia and what’s more, might lead to a nation of happy, relaxed people.

Have you seen the soaring sales in anti-depressants lately?
Of course, this might mean people cared more about living happy normal lives, and work less hard in their offices and factories, and this could be a disaster!

So we can never rely on governments and schools (whose job it is to churn out good little cogs for the social machine) to implement these changes.

We need to start the revolution from scratch.

Firstly, things like mainstream media outlets refusing to show “adult” content (Human content, really).
Why do they do it?
Despite the vast bulk of media created probably being porn (we’ve all been on the internet long enough to know this)
Despite the fact that porn is the main thing people seem to be interested in seeing (ask google - cumshots are bigger than Jesus)
Despite the fact that it is a massively lucrative industry.

They won’t touch it with a barge pole. Even though, they surely want to touch it…

They fear the backlash, they fear being associated with “Smut”, they don’t want to risk turning people on.

Well there is a simple way to fight this.
We’ll all just have to start getting aroused by mundane content, so they have no choice.
It won’t be easy. We’ll need to go into bookstores and start jacking off to the harry potter section, we’ll need to post on youtube, saying how hot that water-skiing squirrel got us, we’ll need to fake orgasms every time any “Respectable” corporation does anything.

It’s the only way.
Once they are marred by the association, they’ll be in a position where it is probably more profitable to just open a Smut section.

Next, sex education. It’s no use trying to reform it.
We came up against the stalwarts of the PTA, and they were mighty.
The headteachers and behavioural scientists all know we need decent education, that failing to teach it properly is as bad as not telling kids not to eat.
But the phalanx of moral crusaders blocks the way.

It’s time for guerilla warfare, we need to start cvreating sex-manuals, covering all conceivable topics, and simply putting them places where young-adults etc can easily get hold of them.

No, it doesn’t make kids have sex earlier than they should.
It has the opposite effect. Look at the countries with liberal sex-ed and open sexuality, compare their pregnancy levels.

We need to stop sanctifying marriage.
It isn’t the state’s job to give approval to one kind of relationship at the expense of another. Monogamy is a great thing, it works for me, but it isn’t the bloody Perfect Model of what works.

finally, we need to counter the effect of generations of Lying To Children.
Of telling people sex is bad, that god will punish us.
Because these things transfer into adulthood.

We need a new, better lie.

If you’re sexually repressed, the Great Stunted Human Development Bear will cum in your mouth…

It’s the only way people

After being rejected by almost every living publisher, and even some of the dead ones, I’ve finally taken the decision to publish my book “Cold Turkey and the Case of the Missing Crime” with Melrose Books, a Commissioned Publisher.

 

Naturally, I was dubious at first. There is one warning that you receive as a new writer, one warning they repeat, again and again and again.

never go with a publisher who expects you to pay your own printing costs. The reasons they give are many, explaining in great detail how all these people want is your money…

 

It’s almost convincing, almost makes you think that the big publishers are after something other than a share of the cash from your work, that in fact the nice folks in the big publishing houses (which you soon realise are all owned by the same very few companies) really care nothing but for high quality literature.

 

almost convincing.

 

The argument-between-the-lines that they present against the various forms of independent publishing is: You need us to tell you whether your work is good or not. That is our right. We are the institution which gets to decide what is and is not good writing. Those “other” companies will let you publish anything, just because you wrote it and want to publish it!

How dare we even think that we could be allowed to see our work in print, without having a market-driven advertising executive deem that it is “real” writing.

 

In case you haven’t guessed, I’ve become less convinced of the Big Publishing industry’s position.

They cry that you might lose your money… which is ultimately an indicator of the flaw in their argument. They think writing and publishing is all about money, they are salesmen, not literate.

 

Don’t believe me?

 

Then check out:

 

Exhibit A

and

Exhibit B

If we were going to use financial success as the critical standard we would need to discount a thousand works of art and literature as “worthless”.

 

But that isn’t why we write.

 

Sure, no one is going to top the bible on the best-seller lists with an independently published book, but that was never the point. Only publishers see books as a “get rich quick scheme”.

 

I think it’s time more writers took the first bold steps into this area, and put down the prohibitive warnings, laid out by those who wish to hold an artistic industry in the iron grasp of crass consumerism.

The writing industry doesn’t belong to them, it belongs to us. We are the labourers.

It is us that reaps the field of words, and sifts the verbiage to produce the crop of pages.

 

They are the greasy salesmen and the spotty check-out clerks, who scan and package our material.

 

We need to remember that, I think

After my usual weekly swim through the London Underground, I surfaced for air in Sloan Square, as I am wont to do.

My neurosis about being on time ensuring that I was a fair 20 minutes early for the Young Writer’s Program as usual.

So I decided to indulge in a hobby I have developed since enrolling at the Royal Court, namely walking up the street and trying to find a single shop that doesn’t sell expensive labelled clothing.

One day I walked for 40 minutes in a straight line without finding anything. They even have a designer underwear shop for men. Wonders never cease.

 

All of this goes (I think) a long way towards explaining Shaun. 

Shaun is the homeless guy on Sloan Square, homeless and starving I suspect, not out of choice, but because there is nothing but clothing shops in all directions. Sloan Square is a desert of clothing shops. Look closer, and you’ll see that all of the inhabitants have a starved look in their eyes, like they haven’t seen civilisation, food or water, for months.

I think perhaps Shaun is like me, he just started walking one day, only he wandered too far and now he can’t get back. He is forced to crawl through the barren and inhospitable wasteland, sometimes running, gibbering towards what looks like a cafe, only to realise that it is a cruel mirage, created by the sun burning on the nylon of CK boxer shorts.

I like Shaun, because like me, he cuts an odd figure out here in the fashionable Chelsea district. And like me he receives the same frosty glares from well-dressed passer-bys. The one which says: “You don’t belong here”.

It all goes to reinforce my theory that Londoners actually have more in common with camels, than human beings.

They stock up on normal human contact, compassion, quirkiness, probably in some hidden Oasis, and then out they go into the Sloan Desert, storing it all away in a hidden hump somewhere while they trudge the faceless crowds.

 

But I digress,

 

It turns out that Shaun is not starving, in fact his situation is quite the opposite. Shaun cannot possibly eat another sandwich.

He explains that it has become the “in-thing” amoung a certain kind of people, to give homeless folk sandwiches instead of money, the theory being that you can’t easily exchange a cheese ploughmans for class A illicit substances.

Of course, as he explains, there are only so many sandwiches you can actually eat in a day. But this doesn’t stop people, so determined are they to give him sarnies, that one bunch of Christians refused to leave till he had eaten one, causing him to later be sick.

He was literally sandwich-raped.

He didn’t specify what the filling was

He had asked me to stop and talk so that he could present his case, and so that I could confirm to him, that he was neither insane nor ungrateful.

So for the sake of Shaun, I have written this post.

Asking you to please not feed the homeless in Sloan Square, just give them some frigging change.

Yes, they might spend it badly, it might not help them become pope or Prime Minister, or whatever career it was you had in mind for them.

But that isn’t the point. Everyone makes bad choices, I don’t actively try to improve the way you make yours, by refusing to lend you a bus fare, because you won’t spend it “going anywhere useful”.

That’s not what compassion or empathy are. It’s about human-contact, about acknowledging another human, their plight, alongside yours. Not stumbling blindly through the dust bowl of empty labels and shiny accessories.

You can’t fix these people, or anyone else. So instead, just shrug, drop some change, and share a moment with them.

Or don’t.

 

But for Christ’s sake. No more sandwiches.