Diary of an up and coming sociopath

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test

Level 6 - The City of Dis
You approach Satan’s wretched city where you behold a wide plain surrounded by iron walls. Before you are fields full of distress and torment terrible. Burning tombs are littered about the landscape. Inside these flaming sepulchers suffer the heretics, failing to believe in God and the afterlife, who make themselves audible by doleful sighs. You will join the wicked that lie here, and will be offered no respite. The three infernal Furies stained with blood, with limbs of women and hair of serpents, dwell in this circle of Hell.

Well, I’m back in Oxford now. It’s taken a day or so, but I’ve managed to avoid putting everything away just yet…

The drive back was definitely a feat of superhuman levels. I had previous maintained that it was unlikely, if not impossible, that Nikki and I could both get back in the one car, but we did manage it. And probably contravened certain rules about car overloading. And albeit at speeds not exceeding 60mph. Still, it was worth it to get her back with me rather than face an uncertain amount of days here without her.

This morning’s lecture was interesting, to say the least. The lecturer threatened to kill us 3 times through various methods and it transpires the module is, as I suspected, some kind of glorified HTML course. I was quite lucky to find the lecture theatre this morning since I only stumbled across is about 3 minutes before the lecture was due to start, and, thankfully, Ian and George were sitting in there already so I didn’t have to do things alone.

After getting back, we went into Oxford for what turned out to be probably the most pointless journey in recent times (for me) as it transpired that the deposit machine was broken and the queue was too long to put in Rob’s cheque, and I need my log book to get a parking permit. Fuck.

Nikki, on the other hand, managed to get her prescription for her newly developed eye infection. Litres of pus oozing from the eyeballs, sealing it shut in the mornings probably describes both it and one of my worst nightmares, so I was naturally glad to hear it is highly contagious…

Tomorrow I have my next lecture, then I’ve got 5 days off. Maybe more, since next week’s lecture is probably unecessary. I have no idea what I’ll do for the majority of those, of course, but I’m sure I can think of something.

Well. My last leamington-based entry for a while. The past couple of days I’ve spent mostly with Nikki. On Friday I took her and her sister to Stratford and Leamington shopping, and hence spent time doing such masculine things as “Waiting outside changing rooms with bags” and “looking at women’s underwear”. I did manage to get my comics bought though, so I managed to claw back some humility there.

Later on, whe watched “One-Hour Photo” which was quite good. Robin Williams makes a disturbing nutcase and frankly, it’s convinced me to remain with digital photography for the rest of my life. There was also something that I’m going to call the “eyeball exploding” dream that I’m currently hoping to repress.

Today (Saturday) Nikki and I bought Mum’s birthday present, attempted to fit the ultimately broken on arrival soundcard to her mum’s PC, taught her sister (now a Geek in Training) how to do it, and visited my grandparents to say goodbye before we go back to Oxford.

Currently, my hotmail account is receiving shit huge Spam again, so if anyone is trying to mail me and getting things bounce, that’s why. I try and clear it out a couple of times every day anyway, so resend in a few hours and things should be fine.

Ah well. That’s about it for now. I got my loan monies through, which means I can ignore any potential financial problems for a couple of months at least…

Well, let’s see. In the last few day’s I’ve not done much. Nikki’s been ill so I spent time there watching the WWTBAM documentary, and part of The Phantom, a spectacularly bad adaptation of the comic.

Yesterday, Sam, Nikki, Graham and I went to see the Bluetones. It wasn’t a great gig, it didn’t help that the crowd was unable to mosh because immediately behind the people standing on the barrier were about 8 girls with huge handbags and high heels blocking any moshpit from getting going. Sam had an interesting argument with a wideboy who pushed in front of us, whereby he first tried to start a fight, and when Sam told him to grow up and such, they guy decided Sam was his best friend and spent the next 10-15 minutes talking to him. Interesting. Also the sound system was a bit shit and, let’s face it, the venue is pretty bad too. If nothing else, it convinced me that there’s really no reason to pay another £15 to see them again in Oxford.

Leaving Coventry, we managed to get utterly lost. I say “We”, it was my navigational error, but since whenever I go to Coventry I rely on the fact I always drive the same roads to get to the same places, as soon as I deviated slightly I became totally confused, and Sam had to direct us out.

Hmm. I guess that’s all. I don’t really have a lot to do at the moment, which is about to change when I get to Uni. I got the course notes through for one of my modules and it seems to read that the whole module will basically entail learning how to make a website, and some shit about how MIDI works. At least that should guarantee a good mark and little need for me to attend everything.

Sam asked me where my examination of Busted lyrics was in the last entry. Here’s my answer:

Busted: A lyrical dissection of the sociocultural themes and intraconsciousness displayed within the piece “What I Go To School For”

When considering Busted, you must first examine their unique dichotomy - the metaphor they embody so well. A pop band holding guitars may initially seem like some cheap marketing gimmick, some half-arsed way of appealing to the guitar-based counter-culture that exists in music. It’s cool to be an outcast, and Busted bring that coolness to the mainstream,while managing to remain self-aware. The guitars that they brandish so competantly are merely held rather than played. In a way, the guitars represent the group, mere instruments directed in a semi-meaningful fashion in the direction of the public by those holding them - in this case the record companies - while providing little input of their own other than to look and sound cool; the notes the guitars play aren’t their own - a reality echoed by the fact that Busted’s philosophies and attitudes are no more their own than the sounds the guitars mime to.

So, having considered the unique artistic position displayed by Busted, we must now examine the art. Busted are again unique to pop. Their work is a new kind of meta-pop, each song is a simultaneous paradigm and parody of the genre wrapped in an almost post-ironic sense of internal description. The state of the art hasn’t been this good since Andy Warhol was shot at.

Consider their song, “What I Go To School For”. Blink 182 would kill for lyrics like this, but Busted have had them literally given to them, the joke being, of course, that the lyrics to the song require the intelligence of a 12 year old to figure out - whoever wrote these for Busted was clearly mocking such sophomoric bands as blink 182 and their pop-punk peers, saying “Look, I’m going to take your brand of humour and make it into a top 10 hit with the stroke of a pen, and without playing a note!”

Her voice is echoed in my mind/I count the days till she is mine
Can’t tell my friends cos they will laugh/I love a member of the staff

Talk about sense of rhythm. You can practically hear the song as you read the lyrics. I tell you, Shakespeare and Wordsworth would’ve killed to get this level or linguistic excellence. Iambic pentameter indeed. Of course, the lyrical content is just as important - as ever, Busted simultaneously mock and embrace the subculture of being outcasts - where the lamented S Club and Steps might have encouraged everyone to “Reach for the stars” or told them that “there’s not a cloud in the sky“, Busted identify with the other half of everyone, the part that feels different from other people. Of course, again, you have a hallmark of Busted’s self-awareness - “Staff” and “Laugh” clearly don’t rhyme, but it’s the half-unrhyme of the line that serves the overall tone of the group, things aren’t what they seem, Busted are being made to do things that don’t fit with themselves for the sake of getting an overall result.

“I fight my way to the front of class/To get the best view of her ass
I drop a pencil on the floor/She bends down and shows me more.”

An interesting stanza in the poetry of Busted. Subtle acknowledgement to the american influences of music are slipped in - the deliberate omission of the definite article when invoking the noun “class” brings things in line with the accepted US standard, in the UK you would expect to “fight your way to the front of the class”. The next part brings things back home though, with the famous Busted social commentary never far from their songs (clearly their song “Year 3000″ tackles current society head on with the delightful mixture of parody and irony Busted always display). The teacher, it would seem, is lowering herself to the protaganists level in order to show them “More [pencils]”. Initially a confusing line, but taken in a social context we can see Busted are saying how modern schooling insults the intelligent - the teacher lowers themselves rather than raises the pupil - those who are capable do not learn, they are simply fed the same information again and again (this information being the metaphorical pencils discussed herewith).

That’s what I go to school for/Even though it is a real bore
You can call me crazy/I know that she craves me
That’s what I go to school for/Even though it is a real bore
Girlfriends I’ve had plenty/None like Miss Mackenzie

Again, Busted and their social awareness. The repetition in the first and third lines achoes again the state of examinations, whereby information is merely memorised and parroted rather than understood. Again, the final line displays the half-rhyme seen earlier, a hallmark of their ironic performances evident many times again throughout the song. As the piece progresses, its lyrics become more and more tenuous, a sad but true indication of the pop music model, whereby things are initially good and slowly deteriorate towards to end of the pop career.

That’s what I go to school for/That’s what I go to school for

Again, repetition.

So she may be thirty-three/But that doesn’t bother me
Her boyfriend’s working out of town/I find a reason to go round

“Thirty-Three” a clear reference to the Smashing Pumpkins song of the same name - obvious because of Billy Corgan’s influence on Busted’s work - probably because it contains the line “I know I’ll make it, love can last forever” which is especially relevant to the overall narrative of the piece. And again, the half-rhyme Busted slip into each verse as a persistant reminder of their nature.

I climb a tree outside her home/To make sure she is all alone
I see her in her underwear/I can’t help but stop and stare

A probable reference to the music industry. The act of elevating yourself above normal civilians in order to join the media as a famous person, climbing the metaphorical tree of success, until you get to the top and discover the harsh reality - the initial inferrence of the song may suggest that things look good, but when taking into account that the “woman” (industry) is well past prime, the truth is that things look worse than they seemed down on the ground, with layers obscuring the truth.

Everyone that you teach all day knows you’re looking at me in a different way
I guess that’s why my marks are getting so high
I can see those tell-tale signs telling me that I was on your mind
I could see that you want it more when you told me that
I’m what you go to school for/I’m what you go to school for

An interesting technique employed at this critical juncture of the song - redundancy. Tell-tale signs tell the protaganist something. A tale, perhaps? one wonders what else they would do. Of course, what might initially might appear to be an absolutely brain dead way of making the line fit the music, Busted’s track record leads us to examine deeper. Perhaps the redundancy is an indication of the outcome of the approaching content - the relationship between the protaganist (outcast sub-culture) and the (music industry) lies exposed and suddenly things look bad - repetition in this case represents the final throes of many bands - maybe a failed attempt to recapture the past or some bad cover versions - and redundancy is indeed on the cards, as the final verse suggest:

She’s packed her bag, it’s in the trunk/Looks like she’s picked herself a hunk
We drive past school to say goodbye/My friends they can’t believe their eyes

A final americanism (”trunk”) serves to tie together all the themes of the song for the final verse. The protagist is still outcast, the music industry has chosen something new (though obviously outside the context of the song this would be a new fad rather than the protaganist) and the return to school is merely to say goodbye, not to reflect on what has been learn or gained, but simply to dismiss - as occurs with modern education. The song draws to a close with the fadiug of the guitars, which again represent the Band, as Busted recognise that their career will finally draw to a close with the slow fading of their popularity much as the sound of the guitars finally and ultimately fades into silence making way for what is almost certainly, a vastly inferior song.

At present, I’m listening to some of my favourite songs, so I figured it’ll fit with my new agenda of writing interesting posts to discuss them a little. I wanr you that things will definitely get pretentious and self-inflated as I slip in and out of the Sixth Form English Essay mentality. I’ll be writing and correcting each entry as I listen to the song too, to set myself a time limit, so we’ll see what kind of crap I come up with.

The first object of deconstruction is “Legacy” by Mansun. It’s 6 minutes long, but it gets away with it, just. I have a notoriously short attention span for music and any song longer than 4 and a half minutes has to really struggle to keep my interest. There’s something about the Legacy that makes the music and lyrics fit together really well. My current belief is that Legacy is about pondering the end of life and how your achievements and experiences will disintegrate after you die - the title of the song implies that much, but you get support for the idea in the form of the lines “Won’t be here so I don’t care” and “Nobody cares when you’re gone“. Both are lines that I love, the first because it displays an interesting attitude towards death, not caring about it because you won’t be around - and the second because I think it encapsulates the tone and meaning of the song - Your “legacy” is ultimately nothing because eventually people won’t care that you’re not around.

It’s not an especially cheery song, as you might imagine, but I don’t find it depressing, except for the sentiment that “All relationships are empty and temporary” - it’s hard to disagree or agree with. Relationships of any form are temporary by the very nature of human mortality, but does that necessarily mean that they’re emptying? I think I’d argue the point of human relationships is to establish a full life, because you get plenty of time for the emptiness when you’re dead.

I’ll continue the theme of deaah here and talk about “Airbag” next. This is my single most favourite song ever. I’ve mentioned very recently that if I had one song to listen to for the rest of my life, it’d be this. I could write pages about the opening instrumental alone - I think it conveys a sense of new awakening (in keeping with “I am born again“) stunningly well. It’s not often I covet the creations of others, but I’d sell my right arm to have written that piece of music.

Lyrically, Airbag contains some great images of near-death situations, but it’s “in an interstellar burst\I am back to save the universe” that really attracts my attention. I think it shows very well what the mentality of someone realising they have cheated death by a gnat’s whisker would be - a heightened feeling of power coupled with an exaggerated belief of your place in the universe. This song could’ve made an amazing music video.

I have a surprising appreciation for New Order’s song, “Regret”. New Order arent’a band I like a lot by, but I think Regret has a lot going for it. Two parts stand out, the first being:

Wake up every day, that would be a start.
I would not complain about my wounded heart.
I was upset you see, almost all the time.

I think this part of the song in particular portrays well what someone might look back on themselves and see when considering previous regrets and depression. Of course, the whole song is turned around by the final lines :

Just wait till tomorrow.
I guess that’s what they all say, just before they fall apart.

I love it. It’s like the sick twist at the end of a joke. The implication being, of course, that people can tell you to get over it, and you can try to, but in the long run you can’t escape that part of yourself because it’s what makes you who you are and it can still control you if you left it. I actually think I might be inferring slightly too much from just those lines, but it’s how I view the song.

I think I’ll make that the last full song I do, before it gets too large an entry. I’ll no doubt do this again because I like thinking about song meanings and the mechanics of constructing lyrics.

Finally, some short lines that I think are clever while I’m thinking about them:
At the Drive-In - One Armed Scissor: The line “Banked on Memory” is inspired wordplay. You bank on things. Memory comes in banks. I think it’s great.

Manic Street Preachers - Democracy Coma: “In walkman sounds hear Sony control” was a line I liked so much it was a hidden message on my last site revision for ages. I think it’s a really good way of condensing the idea that for each time you hear someone listening to their “walkman” (the song’s quite old…) you’re hearing Sony carving out a new place for itself with someone.

And so the entry is complete. I doubt much of what I have said necessarily inspires discussion, but I invite comments about this kind of thing especially.

Okay, today I actually made it to Stratford, with Sam and Josh. The record fair was good, but due mainly to budgetry concerns I only got cd2 of Ash’s “There’s a Star”, for the B-Side “Grey will Fade”. No easyworld or mansun stuff for Nikki, because I saw nothing she didn’t already have. The comic shop was closed and the bank holiday meant that 28 Days Later wasn’t in shops yet. Bugger.

The rest of the weekend has been fairly uneventful, I have a huge bounty of easter eggs, which I didn’t really expect at this age, but that’s not to say I’m not happy for it. I had dinner at Nan’s yesterday and got a large amount of cold turkey out of the bargain, since of what was cooked, only half was eaten by five of us, so that’s been mine and Rob’s tea last night, and quite likely to be mine tonight.

Saturday consisted of very little, I’m pretty sure I did nothing of worth. Actually it occurs to me that I made the “Site News” thing on my main page, integrating the blog fully, ethough it’s restricted to the one category for now. Friday you have the updates for, but in the evening I went to the pub with some friends.

And that’s my bank holiday weekend so far. Who knows how things will progress today?

Earlier, Nikki and I made the fatal mistake of attempting to drive to Stratford. When we made these plans, we forgot to factor in that today was a bank holiday, which lead to all sorts of hi-jinks.

Last time we tried to go to Stratford on a bank holiday, we drove through Wellesbourne. It took us a good couple of hours to do this, so, a couple of years wiser, we decided to just drive down the M40 to Longbridge, see how packed the A46 was, and then decide whether to go to Stratford, Cov, or Leamington. Good idea, no?

No.

It took us an hour to travel from the motorway entrance sliproad to the Longbridge exit sliproad, at which point we decided that there was no point even trying to go around the island which was practically motionless, took the first exit off and headed back home for an altogether more pleasant afternoon in Leamington.

Along the way, we saw no less than 3 cars broken down, 2 of which had died on the exit sliproad. A disgruntled girlfriend in one seat, an embaressed wide-boy in the other, and a steady stream of radiator fluid leaking out of the bottom of the car was probably my favourite sight. We also saw a dead hawk by the roadside, which interested me if only because I was unaware that wild hawks were especially abundant around here.

For those people who don’t care about the previous entry and want to get straight down to business.

Visitors to this page may have noticed, or may have not, that the blog is now fully integrated with the main site, deisgn waise. I’m not sure if I prefer it this way, but to be honest I’m more that willing to sacrifice a little aesthetic pleasure on the basis that the whole page becomes consistant.

In addition, im about to make a category for site announcements and add these entries retroactively to them, so those of you really interested in teh technical side of running a site can see my immensly interesting and original feelings on the processes involved.

Well, I won’t pretend life has been a hectic rollercoaster of ups and downs recently. In fact, it’s been so run of the mill, I don’t really have a lot to share. Instead, I think we should talk about one of the more basic human functions: drinking.

Now, as anyone who knows me well will be able to tell you, I don’t drink alcohol. The reason for this ties in with the same reason I don’t take drugs, to the point where paracetamol is effectively off the menu: I dislike the use of substances to deliberately alter one’s self physiologically or mentally. Obviously, where necessary, it’s fair enough, but I’ve have personally never come across a situation where painkillers was necessary. There’s a cut off point to this belief, however, and however rational or irrational that point is, for me, it’s caffeine.

Two of my favourite drinks contain caffeine. The first is Tea. Paul said to me, at Josh’s the other day, “I never figured you for a tea drinker” (or words to that effect). Now, I’m not sure what makes a tea drinker, but speaking from personal philosophy, I drink tea for many reasons. Obviously I like the taste, the ability to dunk biscuits and the fact that I was practically raised on the stuff, I drink far less now that I did say, 5 or even 10 years ago. However beyond this, there’s the fact that Tea is quite a quintessential British drink, to the point of being even Imperial. I consider that in this era of global homogenisation, drinking tea is both an admirable stereotype and a way of maintaining a connection with the history of Britain.

Douglas Adams was a rabid advocate of Tea, and devoted a fair amount of space to it in The Hitch-Hiker’s guide books. A sequence whereby Arthur Dent explains to a machine about the history of tea in order to make it brew a proper cup kind of hit a similar note with me, and I realise that when you drink tea, you’re drinking part of British History, and I like that idea.

Caffeine, of course, is present in another drink. One I like to refer to as “the dark mother-liquid”. I speak, of course, of former brain-tonic “Coca Cola”. Don’t even get me started on Pepsi or brand X versions, as far as I’m concerned genuine Coca Cola is the single most drinkable substance on the planet. There’s something about the way I can drink it to wake me up during a morning lecture and practically feel the stomach lining being stripped away, and the half-pain, half-relief I feel as it burns down my throat and tears form in my eyes, but I can’t get away from the stuff. I could pick genuine coke out of a thousand choices, I remain confident. To this day, it remains my biggest and probably most expensive vice.

That’s not to say Coke is the only soft-drink I consume. I’m quite partial to lemonade at the moment. For years I drank Fanta and Tango but more recently they’ve just been tasting a bit crappy to me. Vimto I’m never sure what to make of. It tastes bitter and doesn’t contain a single ingredient I’d willingly consume but again, I can’t get enough of the stuff. Recently I bought a cheapo bottle of limeade, which is something I haven’t done for about a year. It was a nice change and I’m starting to wonder if I should break the coke habit and stick to the less expensive sugar-free lime\cherry\orange\lemonades which have their own charms but cost a quarter of the price per bottle.

Beyond all this, I admit, I don’t drink the things I should. Water I hardly ever drink, it’s pretty much restricted to when I’m stuck in a moshpit and it’s free. Milk doesn’t get a look in unless it’s with tea or cereal. Fruit Juices are just as inabundant, I drank a lot of Um Bongo when I started Uni, in fact for the first two or three months I would wake up thirsty at 5am and use um bongo to quench that thirst, to the point where I just kept it by my bed so I didn’t even have to move to get it.

Well, I think that’s about as much as even I can stomach about my wild and exciting drinking habits, and I barely scratches the surface of my feelings on the various coke varieties, coffee, and explicit types of alcohol. Another time perhaps - I’m sure we can only wonder what I’ll come up with to entertain myself, and you, next…

In addition, and I’ll skip the unimportant bits, blah blah going to Stratford blah blah meeting friends at pub tomorrow blah blah get Robert’s birthday present blah blah killed some guy and hid the corpse in the river blah blah completed Monkey Island 1 blah blah must remember to buy 28 Days Later DVD blah blah good friday blah blah cya.