I’m in the dingy downstairs of a city pub filming bad karaoke.

do lesbians ever put their boobs in their partner’s vagina? like a tit wank i guess. this was not a question jeeves could answer, maybe the 0 people who read my tumblr can help.

when i dropped out of university to pursue a means of funding my gambling habit, i felt a palpable joy at having severed the shackles of essays and exams. the receptionist job began at a set time and ended precisely seven hours and thirty minutes later. punch in, punch out, bring nothing in, take nothing home. at night, i was free of all anxieties, except the one that was blowing a chasm in my bank account.

come exam season, the gambling had stopped. my friends spent long days and restless nights cramming, practising and preparing, spent their hours stressing and complaining. i played xbox. the contrast made my liberty all the sweeter. coolio sang to me. the canteen gave me free breakfasts. i had stumbled upon the most important of revelations - that obligations hoover up all the joy, that the future is too remote and uncertain to plan. foremostly, that guilt-free pleasure is the greatest good to the mortal individual. immediacy, experience, presence, minimum pain, minimum cost, maximum benefit.

well it transpired that the reception desk itself sucked too much joy out of thirty eight hours of every week, so i canned it and ultimately wound up back at university. this time, though, i chose an easy degree that required only a small amount of effort to navigate. i was growing up.

now, four years since graduating, i find myself bound by a rather considerable set of obligations courtesy of teach first. why would i shelve good old lucrative brainless recruitment for essays, long days and work that follow me home on evenings and weekends? I have strong enough faith in my convictions - that is to say, the convictions that i will instinctively and successfully gravitate towards the path of least resistance - that i see no reason to answer that question. i must at some point have considered my options at great length and, perhaps using some kind of model to project the relative probabilities of mindless joy, have chosen to follow this path.

when a five thousand word essay looms, my faith does waver ever so slightly, but then i do a laughing gas or drink a beer or play a video game or eat a dinner and think yeah but. a couple of weeks ago i saw yo la tengo at the barbican with my brother. having watched them at primavera last summer, i expected something good but never great, like sex with a friend, familiar, worthwhile, an interesting point of discussion. however, it was incredible.

ira kaplan’s face looks like a waxwork, but his stage presence was fleshy and vibrant. they felt like your best friends between songs, and everything they played was immaculate. the venue is superb and i can’t wait to go back for whatever good they have going on in the near future, and yo la tengo were the perfect band for the setting. when they broke into sugarcube towards the end of the second set, i thought to myself i hope this never ends. that sounds clichéd but i swear just listen a moment, because usually i feel near the end of a show that i’ve got my money’s worth and i’m about ready to go home sit down reflect then sleep. with yo la tengo, i wanted to stay there forever. sure, the comfortable seat must have played some part, but boy oh boy did the music blow my comfortably seated body’s mind.

these experiences endure. they join the savings account in your joy-bank, easily accessed and withdrawn in an otherwise dull, empty moment waiting for a bus or stuck in a training session. this is an invaluable property for a thing to have.

the game i just completed, bioshock infinite, shares that property. kind of similarly to house of leaves, it weaves a dark, convoluted and shattering story around the love shared between a disfunctional parent and child. it ends extremely powerfully and leaves a note of melancholy hanging in the space it abruptly vacates. would it were that my abrupt endings could have such an effect.

what a year!

i do not speak for everybody, let them say what they will about the year. i mean my year, the 26th year of the james, the year in which this and that thing happened to change my life profoundly and so on and so forth.

this year had many answers! yes! no! the police lied! the gays are alright! guns!

but so many questions too.

what if someone terrible, say mr assad or mr rove, offered you a small fortune in return for nothing, only the knowledge that your small fortune came from a mr assad or a mr rove? would you take it? if not, why not?

does it matter?

or if you could go several hundred years forward in time, to be heralded as a relic of the past by a future civilisation, a celebrity of great significance, culturally, historically, philosophically? would you go? i decided to write a short story about this, but maybe it’s not too interesting. the short story is really about other things though, a cheap shot at pop culture above all else, which is one reason why i will never actually write it, the other reasons being that i am lazy and lazy.

i would choose to take cheap shots at easy targets if i could bring myself to do it, but any time i try i hate myself. how easy would it be to create an episode of dr who? or write a sitcom for bbc three? or perform love songs to a karaoke backing track, strumming three chords on a guitar, you’re beautiful, there’s only one love, oh baby, don’t break my heart.

i wonder about accomplishment, achievement. these words mean nothing out of context, but i wonder what is the context? in audition he asks the girls what are your accomplishments. i’d feel uneasy being asked that question, even more uneasy being asked what i hope to achieve in life. my only ever honest answer to that question is immortality, which of course sounds trite, lifted out of some manly novel with pretensions of grandeur (or maybe anything ever by woody fucking allen) but it’s true, woody fucking allen got it woody fucking right. but an achievement, i mean who cares really, fun is better, happiness is better.

that reminds me the other day i wondered whether parents who name their child sylvan ever call him woody as a nickname, because that would be quite clever but then i guess it’s a bit show-offy and actually is it really that clever? because i’m thinking of doing it.

i’m not really unhappy enough to be any good at this anymore.

every day has many races,

to supermarket tills,

to shower in the morning, and so on.

i miss being that

drunk jogger in sweat-soaked pin-stripes

who got home slightly quicker.

i found out last night that bill doss of the olivia tremor control is dead.

this article is very lovely and sums up my feelings much better than i could: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/161821-we-have-been-floated-a-tribute-to-bill-doss/

his music has changed my life. i met him at atp in march, and his positivity was infectious.

he was such a fucking cool guy. 

i hope for his sake that death is endless dreams, but it probably isn’t, so actually it’s just really sad.

fond memories are difficult to shake.

tonight i met a phd chemist who made a convincing argument in favour of voting conservative until the economy recovers. i disagree with him, but i found it hard to justify my disagreement. he was magnanimous in victory and i am a little frustrated at my ignorance.

back at warwick feels strange sometimes. i’ve resisted ‘back to my rootes’ puns until just now.

tonight john celebrated his birthday on the piazza. i met joe kirby, who was president here a few years back and who is now a teach firster too. his friend was the phd chemist.

i am looking forward to going home and taking my mushrooms.

i don’t know what kind of impression i give here. in my head i am a calm, sophisticated counter-culture representative, but i think the reality is closer to gareth from the office. we have learned much about the distinction between self perception and perception of others’ perceptions. we have also learned much about mindsets, specifically growth v fixed.

vain people lean towards the latter, and therefore i do too. it is proven through research to be a mistaken approach towards intelligence, to view it as an inherent and broadly unchangeable property. that is how i always pictured myself. but today i tried problem solving maths problems i would usually have shirked and it worked really well. a mosquito just bit my face.

i think i am vain even when i am trying to be modest.

well anyway.