Posted in: Comics, Short 'n Curlies by Si Spurrier | Tagged: short and curlies, si spurrier

Short 'n Curlies #51 by Si Spurrier

BrainFart:

I know I've reached middle-age because I've just bought six bottles of wine and don't intend to drink any of them, because they look better in the rack.

Actually, stop: I know I've reached middle-age because I have a wine-rack in the first place.

The AutoCue Says Keep Filling:

Important! News! From Scandinavia!

Pity poor Jonas Nösurnæmgiven of Sundsvall in Sweden, whose Karmic Equilibrium started Taking The Piss.

His day began with a perfectly routine spot of home-improvement DIY, which resulted in a perfectly routine fleshwound on his leg and a spout of perfectly routine geysering blood.  He managed to schlep himself across (one imagines) the Valkyrie-haunted wind-lashed winter wilderness of his home, to reach the local hospital.

Where he was told to wait.

And wait.

And wait some more.

Ultimately deciding he'd been either forgotten by the authorities or snubbed by fate — and feeling his precious Bearded Lifeforce shrieking out of him like a Bird of Odin (how are these Viking clichés working for you, guys?) — he spotted some medical supplies left in a trolley and — yes — stitched himself up.

[It bears mentioning, of course, that sewing is an inherently girly occupation and no TRUE pointy-helmeted ManSwede would ever consider indulging in it, EXCEPT that all such Testoknuckular Conventions have an in-built clause which permits UnManly Behaviour as long as bleeding slabs of human flesh are involved.  Jonas's reputation, fret ye not, is intact.]

Happy ending to a shitty day, right?  Except the poor old sod woke up the next day to the sound of the Cops knocking at his door, and was duly informed he'd been reported for Theft Of Hospital Property, in the shape of the twine used for sutures.

This is Real and a FAKT and everything.

…'Course… you can't help feeling a REAL man would've counter-reported the hospital for stealing all the blood he'd left behind on the floor, or at the very least would've torn out the pus-moist stitches and returned them in Good Faith, but a) That's Just Silly and b) these fucking "quirky news" stories never finish the way they should.

I intend to remember this waste of text-space for its entirely fictional ending — in which a burly Arctic Moron tries to fix his own wound and ends-up accidentally sewing his balls to a wolf's forehead — and so should you.

Made Up Payoffs are only a problem if we let them be.

News From The Spursphere:

This column, my plucky vultures of desire, is precisely One Year Old.

Well, not precisely.  That's a lie.  I've missed a couple of weeks along the way and bolstered a couple of posts Of Dubious Meatiness with gruel-thin filler (see above, HA!), but despite the offputting title up-top this is the 52^nd post in the Short'n'Curlies Canon.

It all began as a daily spleen-vent via the @sispurrier Twit.  "HATING OF THE DAY" was a one-line gag-spot about Stuff That Annoys Me, which — you will have noticed — is a lot.  I did it for me, not for you, so when someone asked me to do it for Them (as it were), in a far longer format, it was a troubling sort of proposition.

It seemed slightly too self-satisfied to assume people would be remotely interested in 1000-word-long nuggets of Shit That Bugs Me — a white comic-writing guy with floppy hair from InGuhLand — and thoroughly implausible that they'd come back week after week for more.  The column was intended to be about Stuff I Hate, but I figured I'd rather it was about Stuff Of Interest with the hate sprinkled over the top, so I've tried to sling-in all sorts of abstruse and weird gurglings along the way.  I think that's worked out pretty well.

Sometimes, when work's crazy, it's difficult to find anything fuzzing around in my brain which is a) worth 1000 words of Your attention, b) nothing to do with the weird, frightening and often frustrating fiction I'm meant to writing for Various Clients, and c) remotely entertaining.  Maybe you've noticed that, at times.  Other days I get in from being Out In The Real World — so pissed-off by X or Y that I sit down and spooge-out a textual hatecrime without pausing to pee — and to some of you that's when this stuff is at its best.  Still others prefer the more abstract noodlings of a brain with Too Much Time To Think About Pointless And Silly Things.  Like, y'know, Unicorn Evolution.

But then, fuck — that's why this column's called what it's called: it's never too long, or too straight, to get dull.  For me, that is.  Hopefully you too.  Hopefully, even when it's forced, there's enough in the mix to make you smirk.

(And smirking, don't forget, is the Best and Evilest of all the smiles.)

I maintain, even though I've strayed from the pursuit of its purest, most selfish form over this past year, that Hhhate — when correctly employed and never acted-upon — is a fucking important and entirely healthy part of Human Living.  Many disagree, but of course we may indulgently Hate Them without guilt, and the sappy fuckers are doomed to Forgive us.

Anyway.  During the past year I've written a novel, quit smoking, published a bunch of X-Men titles, moved to a tiny tiny Mediterranean island, embarked on several amazing comicbook adventures with the fine folks at Avatar, started smoking again, begun writing an awesome serial with Wildstorm, quit smoking again again, broken some heads with Judge Dredd, returned to London, discovered several exciting medical conditions, pitched more projects than there are editors to annoy, had my bike nicked, written a screenplay, drunk too much Ginger Beer, eaten more strange and unsightly Sea Creatures than any man deserves, and trimmed my pubes precisely Six Times.  And yet here I am blethering about anonymous fuckwits in Sweden bleeding-out for want of a sewing needle.

Behold: the world As It Is.

I love you.  Keep coming back.

This Week I Have Been Mostly Hating:

…Nostrils.

What a stupid fucking idea.

Find Me @:

Twitter: @SiSpurrier

WWWebbage: www.simonspurrier.blogspot.com

Send wurdz, thoughts, stories, Hatings, and a year's worth of material, to the Only Checked Occasionally And I Might Not Bother Replying At All Ha Ha Ha email address:

Contact@Chop-This-Bit-Outsimonspurrier.co.uk

Or the It Might Not Get To Me At All But If It Does I Promise To Recycle It snailmail address:

C/O William Christensen,

Avatar Press
515 N. Century Blvd.
Rantoul, IL 61866

(Disclaimer: Secretly, I'm nice.)

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