what I want to do in 2011

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It’s the New Year, day 1, and I feel worst for wear. I guess drinking a bottle of Glenfiddich with your mate on New Year’s Eve has that effect.

Anyway, it was a good night with good company in the quiet of my mate’s house. We talked a lot of shit about politics, music, and old times. We’re both in our forties, married with multiple kids, mortgages, jobs – the usual stuff of domesticated primates.

Back in the day I would’ve been scouring the neighbourhood looking for a party to crash with evil on my mind – itching to get drunk and get laid. Mostly I just got drunk and passed out. It took me a few years to realise that whiskey and sex have an inverse relationship. The more whiskey you drink, the less likely your chances of getting laid. The whiskey lowered inhibitions but also broke the vital communications link between brain and penis. As I said, I usually just passed out.

I once woke up on New Year’s Day and thought I was dead. I was on the 151 Bacardi Rum back in those days. I was at a house party with my wild-ass army buddies. We were young. We were dumb. And yes, we were full of the white milky stuff. Lots of it. I drank a half of bottle of rum lightly coloured with coke. It didn’t take long before the rum hit me like a hammer and I went from legless to unconscious before the clock struck 12. When I opened my eyes again I was in complete darkness. And I mean there was absolutely no light. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced that kind of dark before, but let me tell you, it’s unnerving, especially when you can’t form a coherent thought or remember how you ended up in the dark. The only conclusion that I could come up with was that I was dead. Panic set in. Holy shit, so that’s it, I thought. Eternal darkness. At least I wasn’t burning in Hell.

It took another 20 minutes before my senses started to return. I realised I was lying on a bed. I worked out that I could move. I stumbled around in the dark until I bumped into a wall. I groped the wall until I found a door. Suddenly I was back in the land of the living. I vowed never to drink that much alcohol ever again. That was 20 years ago. Ooops! Looks like I did it again.

Oh well…

It’s a New Year. Time for new things, new adventures, new goals. But first I need to find a greasy spoon joint to clear up this hangover. I have a taste for steak. A bloody piece of meat is always good for bringing me back to my senses. The blood awakens the natural man in me. It’s a primal thing, you understand.

I’m in Bristol, so a greasy spoon joint is not hard to find. At the next round about, I see just the place. I screech into the carpark, hungry and full of hate.

It’s not long before I’m seated and my waitress, Gemma, mid-thirties, short black hair, cute smile, hands me a menu and takes my drink order.

She returns with my pint of diet coke. She must have sensed my desperation. Instead asking for my order, she recommends the rack of ribs. There’s something savage about eating a rack of ribs. You have to hold them in your hands and tear into them viciously, like a lion into a gazelle.

Hunger satisfied, I turn my attention to figuring out what I loosely want to do in 2011. This is what I came up with:

Read more history and politics
Stay current on world affairs
Blog daily (which equates to write daily)
Build my social network (on and off line)
Write more essays
Write another book
More adventure
More travel
Create content
Create useful products to sell
Make documentary short films focused on telling people’s story
Stay fit

I know I’ll have to sit down with these and figure out the details, but at least this gives me a direction of travel.

I signal to Gemma that I’m ready for the cheque. While we’re waiting for the card machine to give the ok, I ask Gemma what her goals are for the new year.

“I want to fall in love, run a 5K, find a job I enjoy and see new places.”

Sounds like a plan to me.

old bangers

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Wham, bam, thank you ma’am, 5 minutes and £25 is all it took to pass inspection. MOT inspection, that is. My banger is now road worthy. I must add, it’s just barely road worthy considering I used cheap labour and cheap parts to get it through inspection.

Not to worry, it’s now our spare vehicle. I recently bought a used Ford Galaxy with only 53,000 miles on the clock. The tax runs out on the Astra today, so I’ll park it on the drive and keep it around as the emergency vehicle when one or the other of our vehicles is being fixed or serviced. I only deal in used cars anyway, at least 10 years old. They don’t cost me much and generally I’ll run them until they fall apart and aren’t worth fixing.

I’ve only ever owned one new car in my life and the whole time I hated it. I hated paying that monthly car note. I sold it after a few months and went back to my trusty old bangers. I’m not one of these guys who equates their car with their penis or who is bothered about status. Old bangers, to me, have personality. And as Samuel L. Jackson said in Pulp Fiction: “personality goes a long way.”

some thoughts to consider

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Here are some thoughts to consider when you sit down to reflect on 2010 and start making your plans/goals/resolutions for 2011:

“While others were hiding last year, new products were launched, new subscriptions were sold and new companies came into being. While they were laying low, websites got new traffic, organizations grew, and contracts were signed. While they were stuck, money was being lent, star employees were hired and trust was built. Most of all, art got created.” – Seth Godin (you can read the full text here)

If there’s some stuff you wanted to do in 2010, but didn’t do it for whatever reason, remember someone out there did do it and they probably faced similar challenges to yourself, but they soldiered on anyway. I know I’m guilty of letting bullshit reasons get in my way. It’s easy to do because the reasons always sound so convincing. But what it really comes down to is this:

How bad do you really want it?

stand by your man

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I wonder what was going through Tommy Sheridan’s mind as he stood clutching his wife outside the courthouse, where he had been found guilty of perjury, while she gave a canned speech about standing by her man.

A man who had been outed by the News of the World as being a swinger and a serial adulterer. Why that was news to anyone is beyond me. Politicians have been doing this kind of thing since forever. It seems to come with the territory. Power and sex go together like salt and pepper, peanut butter and jam, ham and cheese, well, you get the point.

What I don’t get is why he thought he could get away with it in the first place. I guess power has a way of making people think they are invincible. I mean if you go to a public place like the swingers’ club Cupid’s in Manchester with an entourage of people, one of whom is a journalist, how could you not expect to be outed? I guess Tommy thought the old Shaggy line, “It wasn’t me,” would be enough to give him plausible deniability.

I wonder what was going through Tommy’s mind when he called up his pals Andy McFarlane, Gary Clark, Katrine Trolle, and Anvar Khan. I count three men and two women. I wonder if he invited Gail along or was she stuck at home looking after their daughter?

I don’t condemn Tommy for doing the swinging thing. Hey, to each his own. What bothers me is he didn’t want to man up to his actions and tell the public and his constituents that yeah, he likes to swing every now and then. So what. You know how it is when you’re a married man in your mid 40’s and feeling a bit bored, sometimes a little swinging can put the swing back in your relationship.

It’s funny that Gail describe Tommy as “boring” and that he would rather play Scrabble than have sex. I guess Scrabble was his front. Or maybe he was doing what he thought she wanted him to do – you know, be a domesticated family man playing Scrabble as a gesture of spending quality time together, when actually all he probably wanted to do was jump her bones. And she probably wanted him to jump her bones, but he missed the signals, like men are prone to do. We find it hard to read women.

Maybe it’s the communications barrier. We all know we want sex. So why all the drama? Why not just get busy, like we did when we were horny teenagers groping each other in the park after dark or in the cemetery where we knew no-one would find us. I guess romance replaces horniness. Women want romance or at least that’s my perception. Men, we want to knock the boots with no fanfare. But then we’re made to feel guilty thinking of women as sex objects, a receptacle for our lust. So instead, we opt out of sex with our partners altogether and turn to extra-marital shenanigans. As Yasmin Alibhai-Brown alluded to, some times gentlemen prefer whores because its easier, like going to the grocery store and buying any other product.

It’s a shame Tommy boy didn’t just own up to his sexual shenanigans. Now if things don’t turn out in his favour in January, he’ll have to hope his girl will pay him a conjugal visit. Although, judging from her past actions, she’s more likely to send him another postcard from Barbados saying ‘Hope you and Bowling Bag Bob are having a good time in cellblock four.’

dirty little secrets

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I’m going to reveal to you, dear reader, a secret that I have never ever told another soul. It’s a secret shared exclusively to the readers of my blog (and by default, my twitter, tumblr, and facebook readers). But first…

The whores and the gossip mongers are turning tricks again to get the inside scoop. Amazon, afraid that some of the dirt might rub off on them, have ditched Wikileaks from its servers. There will be consequences for such cowardice. Nobody likes a rat that jumps ship at the first sign of trouble.

Is Julian Assange really a modern day Robin Hood stealing from the information-rich to hand back to the poor? I don’t think so. I think he’s just another dude with an axe to grind who has found fame by becoming the U.S. Government’s cyber-enemy number of one.

People love dirty little secrets. Assange has found fame by trading in the dirty little secrets of governments and big corporations. He doesn’t steal the information. Disgruntled employees leak the information to him and he has the balls to publish it on the Internet for all to read. So I don’t see what the problem with Assange is. OK, the U.S. Government is claiming he’s putting lives at risks. But is he really? If he were hacking into secure systems and stealing the information, then yes, I’d say he was an outlaw akin to Robin Hood. But since he gets his information from malcontents, then hey, don’t shoot the messenger, find the dirty rat bastards putting the stuff in his lap and shoot them. They are the ones putting lives in danger, if indeed any lives are in danger. The U.S. Government has been known to exaggerate from time to time. Remember all the lives at stake from Iraq’s huge stockpile of WMD?!

The U.S. Government’s latest beef with Assange is the release of more than 251,000 American diplomatic cables, mostly unclassified but including many labeled “classified” or “secret”. Here’s an example:

Karl Eikenberry, the current US ambassador to Afghanistan, in a 2009 cable describes Karzai as “insecure” and a “paranoid and weak individual”.

“Indeed his inability to grasp the most rudimentary principles of state-building and his deep seated insecurity as a leader combine to make any admission of fault unlikely, in turn confounding our best efforts to find in Karzai a responsible partner,” Eikenberry said.

Eikenberry added that Karzai continually blames the US and its allies for Afghanistan’s problems rather than looking at the problems of his leadership, and that his attitude was unlikely to change.

For me the real culprits are the snivelling puppies who leak this stuff. Assange is just the delivery boy along with all the other misfits, drunkards, and failures who are mired in the low trade of journalism (or in the even lower trade of blogging, like me.)

OK, so here’s my dirty little secret that no-one else knows. I once, out of fear, squeezed a parakeet to death. I was 7 years old at the time.

born again

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Born again.

I was tired of this life and decided to create another, in Second Life of course. Like a scene out of the Terminator, I materialise into an all white room.  I am naked.  A woman materialises next to me.  She is naked.  We are Adam and Eve.  Or in this case Clay187 and Whitelake.  I ask her if this is Heaven.  She is to concerned with her naked body to reply.  I have been reborn a biker rock-star dude with spiky hair. My dress code is all black leather.

The gods of Second Life have left a set of instructions on big billboards.  Six steps to a new life.  First learn how to walk.  Next learn how to zoom in.  And you have to learn how to sit in case you get tired of walking around this vast virtual world.  It’s a new world, how do you find your way around? With a map of course and in this new world I can teleport from town to town, island to island, country to country.  And when exploring a place, why walk when you can fly.  The Second Life gods are cool.  Man can fly.

Six steps complete.  I fly off into a brave new world.

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I meet my first friend in this new life, TheFallenPrince from Middlesex.  If any of you dear readers are roaming around the world of Second Life, look me up.  I am Clay187.