Things you can tell yourself next time you feel like crap

According to my naturopath, when you hold onto bitterness, you get stomach problems, so I feel that positive affirmations are very important. Say you’ve had a shit day. Say you got yelled at during work in front of everyone, or you fell down in a really awkward and embarrassing way and laddered your new tights. Maybe you found out your ex-boyfriend is getting married to an 18 year old and you stop watching where you’re going and sixty yards of barbed wire hits ya right smack in the puss and then a wild animal comes over and runs away with your shoes and your car blows up suddenly and your windshield-wiper ends up in your mouth and ya can’t move and the mud's rising up to your nostrils and you’re sinking fast and ya can’t hear yourself screaming anymore? Is that what’s on your mind, cousin? Perhaps you need to give yourself a good talking to, like I have below….

So other people appear to have perfect lives full of sunshine and flowers. Well, they might have something going on that you don’t know about, like they’re allergic to peanuts or they can’t find jeans that fit - problems that, though small, may be slowly making their lives uncomfortable in some way. You’re definitely not wishing that on them, you’re just saying that could be the case.

But really, your life is pretty excellent. You have so many great shoes and that really nice orange coat that everyone comments on. That is a great coat. Even though the rest of your clothes don’t fit and everything you buy falls apart pretty quickly, makes you look old or like an overgrown high school kid, that coat is still amazing. Well done, you own one piece of clothing which doesn’t make you look like an idiot.

So you think you’ve sent that guy one message too many. So what? If he’s scared by that, he’s a wuss and do you really want a skittish man as the protector of you and your young? No, yo mamma taught you better than that! And it’s not as though you’ve done anything really crazy. You haven’t sent five messages a day or kidnapped any pets. You don’t know if they have any pets anyway because you’re not a crazy Facebook stalker either, and even if you were, Facebook stalking isn’t actually stalking. It’s checking up on friends and that’s what Facebook was made for.

Anyway, if anything, it shows that you are persistent. And polite. So polite, you should teach a course in manners.

You don’t have the time to be stalking anyone, what with your glittering social life full of extra –curricular activities and sophisticated friends. You know loads of interesting people who bring boutique beers to parties and let you try them, and buy you hamburgers on your birthday. With friends like these life is a big bowl of cherries! And you’ve got the spoon man, the silver spoon!

In fact, you staying home eating macaroni and cheese both Friday and Saturday was the respite your body needed after this week. You’re a pragmatic grown-up who takes care of themselves. You make wise decisions regarding your health and finances and that $70 jumper with ‘JUMPER’ written on it was a wise investment in comedy clothing and I’m proud of you. And think of all the weight you’ll lose now that you can’t afford to eat this weekend!

And look at your hair. You hair is perfect, every time. It’s like a realistic My Little Pony’s mane it’s so shiny. But you’re better than a mere pony, you’re a horse, a tall graceful, lithe horse. You are a Silver Brumby of a woman.

So what if today was way stupid? That doesn’t mean that tomorrow will be. Tomorrow might be the best day that ever happened to you,  the beginning of the rest of your life. Just because life usually plays like a guinea pig running in a wheel, around and round with the same old crap doesn’t mean that the same thing is going to happen tomorrow. In fact I know that it won’t, because if most of the day seems like shit, I just found $2 and I’m going to use that to buy you a mars bar for dessert tomorrow. That’s right, you get a mars bar, you’ve earned it.

Hack Literature: The Celebrity Story

I just finished reading The Bryan Ferry Story by Rex Balfour (1976), an unauthorised biography about my equal 1st favourite rock-star

For those of you that don’t know who Bryan Ferry is, he’s the front man of the 1970’s rock band/ art project Roxy Music, with a simultaneous solo career that’s been going on for about 35 years now. He was the guy who caused a bit of trouble about ten years ago when he was misrepresented as a Nazi sympathiser, when in fact he had just expressed a liking for the work of Leni Riefenstahl. Not the same thing, but deffinately not great publicity...

Whilst they may be no argument as to Ferry’s musical innovation, inspiration and slight genius, this biography portrays him as the mad stylish reclusive wizard who single handily invented music. An all-round toadying piece of fanatic clap trap.

Moreover, the book was written only three years into Ferry’s career and since then he’s had many more hits, fox-hunting children, divorces and affairs, not to mention the whole Nazi thing, and I can’t help but think ‘wouldn’t it have been better if they had waited?’

Something I have learnt about biographies is that they should be all about mystery, scandal and intrigue. A Kim Kardashian book would just not be interesting because we already know EVERYTHING about her. I don’t think there’s anything I could find out in a book about her and her deepest darkest personal life that I couldn’t find out by simply walking past a news agent. Her life is not so much as open book as it is a large billboard on Broadway, and I don’t care.

Biographies are also all about timing.

It’s strange when young or uninteresting celebrities get biographies about them before they’ve had enough life lived to fill them. I just looked on line and discovered that Justin Bieber has a biography, Justin Bieber: First Step 2 Forever- My Story. Isn’t he about five? To fill a 100+ page book he would have had to start doing coke and getting divorced in kindergarten. All I’m asking is wait until the story is at least two thirds through.

Having said that, it would be wrong to say that celebrities should put out biographies until they are dead, in fact it’s probably good that they don’t, because we know how the story ends and because it means that they can do a big old money grubbing sequel when their lives go to shit. Take for example Rolling Stones Guitarist mark III Ronny Wood, whose biography Ronny came out for Christmas 2007. Not even a year later later he was in rehab, on sabbatical from the Stones, broke and divorced living with a 21 years Old Russian model. I can’t wait to read about that in Ronny 2: Oops, my bad.

I picked up where The Bryan Ferry Story ended in 1975 with another book, the autobiography of his erstwhile fiancé Jerry Hall, Telling Tall Tales. In this ‘book’ Hall goes into great detail about the cuckolding she did to poor Bryan with Mick Jagger, as well as everything she didn’t like about Ferry and how mean he was. Not only was this the airing dirty laundry to the equivalent of putting shitty undies on your doorknob, but it made her come off as a naive, foolish, mean, vain and self-sensationalising moron, which is a shame because I actually like her. Tell all, but don’t be cruel, or people will laugh derisively at the fact that the perfect home life you were so happy about by the end of your book will end in within 20 years.

By contrast Keith Richard’s Life is a beautiful book, one of the best autobiographies I’ve read. It’s told in the spare and wandering style of Richard’s own words, which aren’t half as confused as one would expect. Love, fame, fall-outs, appalling excess and deaths creep into the narrative in a quiet, funny way without wallowing in appalling excess or praising his fortunes. Richard’s neither attempts to rationalise or descends to self-pity.

In short, I would advise you to read this book, and if you are a celebrity considering a biography, I would advise you to wait for your life to become more interesting and so that the disadvantages of hindsight don’t come back to bite you in the arse. I would also recommend a good ghost writer, my services are available.

Weird Stuff on the table Part 1

You know that building in the first Ghost Busters movie which was specially designed to be a magnet for supernatural activity? Well my building is kinda like that, it was even built in the same time period (“Deco… very nice”) except that instead of ecotroplasmic temples and rabid Rick Moraniss, my building is a magnet for crap!

There always seems to be junk mysteriously turning up and lurking around. There was this huge blue velvet winged arm chair that someone chunked out two blocks down and a flight of stairs away for my building. For three weeks it sat there mouldering in the in the rain, I’m pretty sure a neighbourhood cat started to live in there. It changed colour, swelled up like a dead whale and started to smell of cheese. Then, one day, it was gone only to mysteriously appear on our roof, next the flaking veneer sideboard, the water swollen chipboard table and the rusted through barbeque. See! There’s crap everywhere! And I have no idea who puts it there.

There seems to be a culture of putting crap on places in this building. In the Art Deco foyer of my building is a coffee table which has become the unofficial trading post of the building, where people leave anything from CDs to lamps, bags of rice to corduroy paisley shirts. I’ve gotten some of my best 2009 Men’s Health magazines there. Things are arranged in artful little piles, orderly towers or strew across the joint like someone like someone was trying to escape a fire. Today I found this tantalizing object d’art.

Inside were a bunch of old cd’s which is laughable in itself, (CD’s, scoff! As if anyone has those anymore, you might as well have put a pile of 8-tracks and a Sega console out there!) but the selection of rejects was bizarre.

Amongst old Triple J top 100’s and a Matchbox Twenty album were four Queer as Folk CD’s, the soundtrack to Sex in the City Movie 2 and Fame Monster, see?

…. It’s like someone gave up being gay for New Year’s! The bottle, I should mention, smelt suspiciously like vomit. I figure it was worth a mention. I’ll be documenting the weird stuff I find on that table, if I find anything really good, I let your guys know about it before I swipe it.