Pounds and Porcine Tears

We are a fat, wobbling mess, puffing and panting our way through our tubby existence. Our children don't go out to play, but from the safety of their own homes, never having to lift their rotund, whale like derrières from the couch, their dumpy little digits thrashing away at their Xbox controller as they blow little Mike from next door to smitherines. These butterballs will enter adolescent life with fantastic hand eye coordination skills but lack the ability to talk to anyone who isn't comprised of pixels and dressed in futuristic war regalia. As they get older the media will make pariahs out of them, they will cry porcine tears and dream of a skinny and slender world of asymmetrical haircuts and 17 year olds who drive brand new cars. To live the dream, they will swallow their pride, dignity and morality. They will join a gym.

I know why most people avoid gyms, its not blood, sweat or tears, its not its testosterone pumped patrons strutting around like two swinging bollocks at a eunuch rally. The reason why people avoid working out is solely due to the mid numbingly tedious music pumped from 1000 speakers (all of are usually directly above where you are sitting). Often its feel like the scene in Star Trek - Wrath of Khan (I know, I was small and it stuck in my memory along with another film where a naked woman got beaten to death with a baked bean can). In this scene, what looks like a common garden slug is forced into a hapless crew members aural canal (obviously not key cast), lays its eggs and waits to strike. The immigrant parasite eventually slimes its way around the ear canal, again and again and again, causing fierce and biting pain which dramatically escalates until the poor sod clutches his head and jumps into the nearest vortex. Gym music, however, is much more severe, its spreads through your auditory synapses like an STD in Texas, ripping them apart with its wishy-washy, over produced banality until your noggin blows clean off your shoulders. Its just a shame I know I'll be whistling the latest Lady Ga Ga song while little Mike chases me through a pixel rendered rainforest, bullets whistling past my ears.

Mother Nature's vicious hand

The new David Attenborough documentaries have scared the living hell out of me.I remember a warm voiced David, like a nice old Uncle bringing you a hot chocolate before bedtime and soothing you to sleep with yarns of dozing jaguars and fuzzy small mammals nuzzling themselves in warm hay. Something has happened and the BBC have had a bad dream, in their apocalyptic new world Gazelle's throats are being ripped out by blood hungry Hyenas whist the newborns eyes are sellotaped open, forced to watch the decimation of thier kin. I remember a time when animal documentaries only glanced at the horrific nature of the wild, this has however dived in to the gorefest head first, splashing claret, sinew and guts without abandonment. I was going to go for a walk after to clear my mind but thought better of it in case a blood maddened prickle of hedgehogs rampaged my ankles, felling me and then finishing me off like a human pin cushion.

So nature is awful, everything eats everything and then eats things back. Imagine popping down to the local pub and having to watch you back in case a group of psychotic 12 year olds dismembered you and ate your liver (though I think this actually may happen in places like Sheffield). The lion, king of the jungle also has a pretty harrowing life, being constantly fought for superiority within the pride and finally ousted, left to scavenge around the wilderness for tit bits (similar to Vanessa Feltz's TV career).

Then I thought Lions don't have it too bad, in fact they don't have to deal with Recruitment Agencies, Tax offices or wasting their Saturdays while pre-pubescent pimply numpties infiltrate every shop on mass. Actually Lion, I would trade places with you in a moment. I would gladly watch you negotiate with Estate Agents, hey, I would even sellotape his child s eyes open whilst you rip his trachea from his still warm body.

On last word, MTV it is okay to show African women's breasts, you don't have to air brush them out on your 'documentaries', they are non sexual, traditional and actually used to feed babies. If that gets 15 year old boys feeling frisky,well fine at least it goes some way to obliterating racism. At least the air headed clots at MTV didn't dress them all in Prada catsuits fending off hyenas and jackals in a perfectly choreographed dance routine.

Cometh the Job Seeker, I have a quest!

OK, so Latin America did have all these things combined with corruption and hey, it even had Twix's! Imagine the shock! Luckily they didn't taste as good and after some in depth research into the side of a wrapper (actually a 28 hour bus journey with ill prepration and no reading material). I concluded/guessed it must be a chemical added to the chocolate to stop in melting at higher temperatures, which as a side product also makes it taste like mud, not a fresh mud or mud that can be easily identified as mud, but something you actually hope is mud, because the other option would kickstart your gag reflex.

After 12 months of hard bribartering (the complicated act of bartering with an offical into how much you are going to bribe them) I returned home, to embrace the tyrannical hard arm of UK corporations and to beaten back into a simpering mess of a man, sorry, worthy member of the community.

Im now looking for work in a community of fear, not good old fashioned terrorist fear that mainly unhinges the paranoid (who, by thier nature are already scared of the backs of people heads and animals talking abusively in crowded places) but a fear that cripples everyone. The fear the corporations have of not being able to make enough profit to buy all the stakeholders a limo full of champagne and high class hookers (is there a school for hookers or a GNVQ? What qualifies high class, do you need an in depth knowledge of fellatio whilst spurting quips from Niche inbetween gobbles). Corporations are scared, spending is cut and jobs are lost. Job seekers (I like that title, makes it sound very Lord of the Rings) are left continually job seeking, like looking for invisible lint in Andre the Giants navel.

Finding work (sorry Job Seeking) now makes me feel like a male prostitute in Whitehall. I'm strutting by Tory politicans Mercades Benz, rubbing my tushie on drainpipes and teasing them to wind down thier windows (or press the down button). Most slow down then speed off, but some do grind to a halt, the window creeps down and then they gasp horribly as they witness the elephant man with inch thick, deep rouge blusher and bulging leather hot pants, seductively licking his garganutan blistering lips. Perhaps I need to work on my CV or not write my covering letter on yellow lined paper in green crayon.

The Pre-rant

I spent years shopping in large supermarkets, mainly due to being a lazy idiot and mainly because this was the time of a slight Twix addiction, something to do with biscuit and caramel in the late afternoon sent me into a mindless frenzy. The staff preyed on my addiction, knowing they had their clammy hands firmly gasped around my man sack, knowing as long as they stocked the 'stash' they had free reign to sell me whatever rotting, fetid wares they could haphazardly throw onto their shelves. So I came home with bags of lettuce leaking brown water, tomatoes you picked up and your thumb slipped into its core like prodding a dead badger you found on the side of the road. I promised everyone I would stop, that I would buy fresh from a local greengrocer, that I wouldn't support this form of self abasing. I had to break free, free from the corporate exploitative arseholes who are happy to sell me rubbish at extortionate costs..I had a plan, leave everything and run away, run away from the large supermarkets, the large banks and the large coffee chains. Run away to Latin America!