Dinner With Joneses *Morbid blog post touch typed with idle fingers. ‘’I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone’’ (Lord Byron) I’m often quite good at avoiding social gatherings, but having exhausted most of my myriad list of dead relatives, #life threatening illnesses and lost voicemails, I fear my acquaintances are suspecting that something is amiss. Which is why I was obligated to have dinner with the Joneses (that’s not their real names). As I exited the stench of the London underground, I made my way through the streets of almost middleclass concrete suburbia. Not too smartly dressed, I begrudgingly put one foot in front of the other as I tried to weave through a group of stiletto wearing asos girls and their sartorially challenged dates for the evening. I ended up stuck in the middle of them, walking awkwardly as their movements carried me down the street. They glanced at me and then down at the reasonably priced bottle of wine I was holding. They knew what I was. I was one of the ubiquitous Friday men who usually walk this street on their way to dinner parties. I lit a cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke, my rudeness creating enough of a gap in bodies for me to escape. At Paul and Abigail’s door (my hosts for the evening) I finished my smoke, stubbed it out in one of their adorable pot plants and knocked once and was immediately let in by Paul who greeted me with practiced informality. He had taken to calling me ‘’bro’’. It annoyed me. But I shook his limp hand and nodded. I walked through the hallway of politeness leaving a cacophony of greetings and ‘’nice to see yous’’. My footsteps against the vinyl floors disguised by some sort of instrumental background music, I walked through the big open plan room and headed straight for the kitchen. Abigail was dumping something green into a colander. I leaned over a mess of herbs and kissed her on each cheek. I hadn’t seen Abigail in over a year. She’d certainly changed. Her once long, golden hair was short and a washed out yellow, her porcelain skin was now sallow and she seemed to have picked up this habit of blinking rapidly every time she finished a sentence. She was still attractive, just not as beautiful. The remnants of her beauty still glimmered somewhere in her blue marble eyes as it threatened to leave her at any moment. She took me in as I did her. I stood amused for a while, wiping her foundation off of my lips as she berated me and poked me with a wooden spoon. When she was done we talked for a while about nothing important. She first told me that Paul had recently been promoted and seeing that this didn’t impress me she grabbed my bottle of wine and we took turns to drink out of the bottle and bitch about our current situations. Her grievances were mainly about Ms Thomas (her son’s maths teacher), the fat collecting at her arms, Paul’s sleepwalking and how terrible the fifty shades film was. My grievances with everything else seemed somehow less important as I reached the bottom of the bottle. A timer began beeping and as Abigail stumbled towards it, I was told to take my seat at the table. I walked over to the table slowly, scrutinising this evenings guests. Other than Paul and Abigail, I’d never met them. There were three others already seated. A pink, greasy skinned portly man with an interesting hairstyle I myself sported when I was 12, an equally pink woman with unfashionable black curls sat caked in makeup next to him and opposite them sat a slim, pixie faced blonde girl sporting an expression of boredom. They all looked up at me as I walked over, I stared back enough to make them uncomfortable and sat down. Introductions were made but names were forgotten. The two pink people were married as were Paul and Abigail and the pixie faced girl to my right was a trainee solicitor who went by a Russian sounding name… Slutlana? I forgot. Paul tried to pull me into the conversation. They were discussing something political. I was already bored and ravenous so I ignored him and reached for some bread on the table. Pixie face mumbled something unintelligible, I ignored her until I noticed she was fiddling with a pack of mentos sweets under the table. I leaned over and conspiratorially asked, ‘’Can I have one of those?’’ She glanced across the table and then looked back at me speaking over the sound of crashing pans in the kitchen with an accent that was a mix of English and what I thought was Russian she said, ‘’I’ll give you candy if you answer questions.’’ ‘’Sounds like too much bother.’’ I said and turned away. She grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back around. ‘’You want candy or no?’’ ‘’I’ll need one in good faith.’’ Manicured fingers slipped a single sugary orb into my hand. I tossed it into my mouth and putting my elbow on the table I rested my chin in my palm and gave her my attention. She started, ‘’How do you know Paul and Abi?’’ ‘’I went to uni with Abigail, I’ve known her for years. How do you know our hosts?’’ ‘’I’ve never seen you before. I know Abi and Paul from friends, I’ve known them for a few years.’’ She said, slipping more compressed sugar into my hand. We went back and forth like that for a while. Trading insults and compliments when she’d run out of sweets. I surmised that she was mostly Ukranian, she worked a lot, she disliked her father and adored her mother, she was sweet in that way most optimistic twenty somethings are before the city devours their souls and leaves them jaded. After what seemed like hours, Abigail showed up at the table. My hunger already satiated from the bread and my illicit under the table trade with pixie, I accepted the plate that Abigail placed in front of me with silent acquiescence. Pixie nudged my shoulder and tilted her head up towards where Paul was sitting. It had escaped my notice but it appeared that since my short exchange of words and sweets with pixie, Paul had become quite drunk. His face had become flushed and beads of sweat ran down his face all the way over his chin and down his neck where it formed semicircles on the collar of his shirt. I laughed out loud breaking the silence that had started when Abigail sat down. Abigail glared at me and then blinked rapidly. If her beauty was unsure earlier, it had left her now. Her cheeks grew very red, very quickly, either from anger or embarrassment. I suspected it was the former because she started to mutter obscenities at Paul under her breath. The pink man tried to alleviate the awkwardness, he gestured to me with his glass. "Kash, what is it you do?" "Not very much." I said, forking through the salmon and pastry on my plate. I felt nauseous. Abigail noticed. She glared at me. "Not hungry Kash?" She asked. I was about to say I'd turned vegan, when Paul butted in. "He filled up... Bread... And stuff." He said proudly. Well... If he was going to throw me under the bus, I was going to take him with me. "Paul's drunk." I said. That shut everyone up. The atmosphere grew tense. The pink man's face grew brighter. Displaying his benevolence, he tried to calm the situation. "We had a few drinks. My fault." He said. I smiled at him. 50 shades of pink was growing on me. I imagined that despite having just met, he'd give me a great eulogy. His efforts, however, were in vain. Abigail began muttering in loud whispers as she grimaced at her husband. It was uncomfortable to watch. I had to avert my eyes, I tried to look at anything but them. I glanced over at pixie, she was staring at her lap. Then I looked over at Mr's Pink, she winked at me awkwardly... Gross. My eyes finally focused on a shiny silver box sat on a shelf at one end of the room. I recognised it as the cigarette dispenser I'd gifted Paul and Abigail when they married. It was different now, one of the tiny handles had broken off, the lid was missing and instead of cigarettes, it held takeaway menus. It's appearance had changed as much as it's owners. My rumination was abruptly ended with the sound of metal clattering on china. Our hosts were arguing unashamedly now. Pixie reached out to me and we sat holding hands under the table like two small children hoping their parents would stop arguing. I stared at our hosts. I wondered if this was my fate. Would I be sat at the other end of the table in five or ten years? "I should be so lucky" I thought. More likely, I'd end up like the cigarette dispenser, battered and broken and shaped into something different. I'm not really a hugger but I felt something between sympathy and empathy for her. I stood up, walked over to her and pushed her matted fringe out of her face. "I think I'll go now." I said. She smiled a sad smile. I waved awkwardly at pixie. Flipped off Phil and left, grabbing my cigarette dispenser on the way out. "I'm taking this."

Image Domination-food For Thought *long nonsensical rant. We live in an IMAGE BASED CULTURE. ‘’I saw it with my own two eyes I did’’ (Some random drunk guy everyone knows) I’m leaned back in a wobbly chair playing with fate and half hoping I’ll fall over. Across from me are a few of my acquaintances, all with their heads down staring at their phones. My phone, is in my pocket. It’s dead (like my hopes and dreams). So I twiddle my thumbs instead and yawn exaggeratedly hoping someone will look up at me and say something interesting. Maybe they’ll comment on my thumb twiddling? I’ve been practicing. ‘’Did you hear about BB King?’’ Someone asks me. ‘’Yea, I read abou…’’ I’m not allowed to finish my sentence. A phone is shoved in my face. I see a picture of BB King under a headline that read something like ‘’Legend dies aged 89’’. I’m sad. Not long after, someone else shoves a screen in my face. There’s apparently something amazing I have to see. I’m more interested in the fingers holding the screen… How did they manage to paint all those little stripes on her fingernails? I look around the room that we are all procrastinating in. There are a few screens on the walls. On one of them a man seems to be suffering from some sort of seizure after chewing ‘’5gum’’, on the other what appears to be a 10 year old named Ariana Grande (sounds like a type of coffee) is singing about something I can’t make sense of. There are a few posters on the wall, a black cat, a revolutionary under a ubiquitous #quote about capitalism, coca cola, Tanya Chalkin’s kiss, et cetera. I’m being bombarded with images. An old lecturer stopped me once and said ‘’we live in an image based culture’’. I thought he was referring to personal image and that he was likely making a passive aggressive remark about my freshly polished shoes and my vanity. I know now he was talking about something else. I know this because some months later I sent him an email and asked ‘’image based culture?’’. And like any educator worth their pay, he directed me to where I could find answers… That is, google (other search engines are available). Undoubtedly, we all live and have been brought up in an image based culture. If you bother to keep up with the news it’s usually what you see on the tellybox or online where graphics, charts, photographs and videos are on display. Or perhaps you’re someone who likes to get their daily news from facebook? In which case you should self flagellate with a selfie stick. Most of our news is visual. Indeed even education is visual to a great extent… Textbooks aside, go to any uni campus and there is without a doubt someone looking like a moron trying to get powerpoint to work. Ok, so that all seems perfectly normal to me. Though I do wonder about people who lived before our image based culture. Before images dominated our lives, you either read about current events in a newspaper or you heard about it. If you were educated, it was through reading or some sort of verbal discourse. Sounds bloody boring. Without getting into conspiracy theories about subliminal advertising, surely there’s nothing wrong with an image based culture? The only obvious one I can think of is language. I’ve moaned about the decline of language before so all I’ll say is this… If we are dominated by images instead of words, it is no surprise that there will be an inevitable decline in the quality of language. You get me fam? Some of you will no doubt be thinking I’m painting images in a negative light (pun intended). In fact images have been around for most of history and they’ve helped us to understand things when words were not present. But language is still dying. People like, don’t like, talk like they used to talk like. Most of you have heard of Marx and Feuerbach. Two German philosophers who if alive today would likely have been modern day hipsters residing in Shoreditch. They both had something interesting to say about essence (no not the new Armani fragrance). They make the assumption that the essence of something is what it is inherently made up of. On the other hand, its image or appearance is simply a reflection of its essence. Make sense? I went to a new bar recently. Buckets of ice were on silver tables, on the walls were retro neon signs shaped into words like ‘’drink’’ and ‘’shots’’, in case anybody was confused as to where they were. I asked the bartender for a whiskey ‘’We only have pilsner and cocktails, would you like a drinks menu?’’ He asked? ‘’Are you taking the fucking piss?’’ My eloquent response before I was politely asked to leave. ^ The bars essence was one thing and its image was something else. Nick Clyde of refine the mind has a better example. After the Charlie Hebdo killings, crowds of French citizens lining the streets appeared to show a strong stand against twisted ideology and the killings of innocent people. Yet nobody paid much attention when France banned rallies against the murdering of innocent people in Gaza… or in fact when the 12 innocent people on their way to a wedding were killed in a drone attack in Yemen. Whilst each incident shared a similar essence, their images portrayed something completely different. What if we had just read about each story? Would our reactions have been the same? In schools, test scores give us the appearance of intelligence or lack thereof, it’s there to see in numbers, letters and charts… Until we grow up and realise that most of us are as clueless as each other. Another likely consequence of an image based culture is alienation. Why should I bother checking on my friend John when I can see from the photo of him he uploaded to the interwebs that he is having a great time. I don’t game, but if I did I could escape into a virtual world with ‘’insane graphics’’ for hours on end… If I wanted to. I’m not even going to mention virtual reality. Most of us are attracted to people who display the traits of those we are told/shown are conventionally attractive. Models plaster photos of themselves and their happy lives online as they jet from one city to the next. The deplorable and immutable truth being that nobody gives a shit about what they have to say, and if you know models you’d know that most of them are incredibly lonely. Men hit the gym to build up some sort of image of strength or masculinity… Most people don’t give a shit about what they have to say either. Not when people such as I, were less interested in Ed Miliband’s speech as we were in him almost falling over. I guess, after saying all of that... Image dominance has caused a decline in culture as a whole. Maybe I'm wrong? Well there’s some food for thought. Rant over.

The Favour I can't keep it level, putting pressure on the pedal. When I'm reaching out for angels while I'm walking with the devil. Lay you down on roses and wake you up on nettles. I can still your bones but I can't make you settle. I know I've made a mess of things and wrapped you up in my deceit. And I will clean it up again, destruction on repeat. I could be standing up for this, not sinking in my seat. But I told you I'm a lone man, island with no hope and... I'm only dragging you down. Take a second while I steal a couple more. You'll gladly waste your time on me, my selfishness ignored. I'll trap you in my apathy, a room without a door. You picked the wrong apple, this one's rotten to the core. I want to share my visions of the things you never saw. But you just lock them up again like secrets in a drawer. I could be stepping up for you, not bolted to the floor. But I told you I'm a lone man, island with no hope and... I'm only dragging you down. I can give you honesty, my lies they come so honestly. But you won't hear the truth of all the things we're never gonna be. I've wrapped you in my tragedy, your stubbornness is sad to see. We're leaning on this balcony, I'll throw us off this fantasy. It's time to exit unreality, I made us a catastrophe. You gave me love I turned to war and you're the only casualty. I can't take it back but I can stop your agony. It's time to be a lone man, island with no hope and... Stop dragging you down.

Jejune Indistinguishable accents eager to make sense of my two cents. Perched on my fence, liquor fuelled nonsense. Gregarious ashtrays filled with cigarette butt fossils, feeling nostalgic for secrets rolled in glass milk bottles. White shirts and black skirts tracing creases with dirty fingers. Obscure free verse in pseudo theses from wedding singers. Passive aggressive inside laughing, burning paper to kill your darlings. Overdressed middle children. Fortune faded stranded pilgrims. Counting seconds to twenty seven, saving blessings to exit heaven. Heed thy father, for history's repeating. Backwards feet make slow retreating. Pointing out the pointless with two fingers. Pointing out the pointless with two thinkers. Uncertain certainty, drowning all in revelry. Lead us to the cemetery and bury us in symmetry. Never be, be never me. Lending ears to dilettantes. Spare no time for sycophants. Flatten me with flattery. Stick me back and shatter me. Shower me with honesty with no degree of quality. Constancy in irony, cajolery comes constantly. On their skin I taste the vanity, cotton mouthed profanity. Cycle them, then cycle me, in melting pots of alchemy. Nowhere boys in legacy. History we'll never be. Never be, be never me.

Not Today. I left my coat on the train this morning. Next to that homeless man, eyes wide awake who couldn't stop his snoring. I stepped outside, the rain was pouring. I guess that I'm the only one who missed the weather warning. It's apathy with scattered showers. Falling on those skinny girls with wobbly shoes that look like bloody towers. I don't want to laugh. I don't want to cry. I don't want to frown. I don't want to smile. I wan't to get lost on these streets where you've confined me. Until someone comes to find me. I pass the morning's rowdy children. Plotting how they'll leave this place and make themselves a million. Stupid conversations on precious smartphones. I hear somebody's a bitch and everyone's an arsehole. The sweeping mans eyes are glazed. He's never getting paid. He'll be right back in a queue in twenty something days. I don't want to laugh. I don't want to cry. I don't want to frown. I don't want to smile. I want to get lost on these streets where you've confined me. Until someone comes and finds me. A lazy dog licks my shoes. His owner stands redundant selling altruistic news. I pass the mornings buskers. Cynical songs lack lustre. I think they want a clap, but a coin is all I muster. I avoid #life's familiar faces. Trying to make them think that we're going different places. I don't want to laugh. I don't want to cry. I don't want to frown. I don't to smile. I just want to leave these streets behind me and hope that no one comes to find me.