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

Short 'n Curlies #13 by Si Spurrier

They Keyboard Is My FuckMonkey:

Let's roleplay.

Work's going terribly. Every sentence you write is a jagged-tipped teaspoon being dragged across the wet surface of your eyeball, and the pulsing flush of triumph after each new word is instantly mitigated by the cruel kidneykick of self-analysis. It's All Shit, idiot.

In disgust you leap from your chair to switch on the kettle — seeking solace in the righteous displacement of Yet Another Cuppa — and while the antiquated thing hisses and steams on its way to boiling you start thinking…

Oh-ho-yes, here it comes… That familiar, cloying burst of… mm-hmm… of panic.

I'm stood here, drumming my fingers, watching steam, wasting time!

I'm already behind schedule!

Fuck!

And so what do you do? Uncle Simon knows. You wander back to the computer, don't you — just to show willing — in the brief minute or two before the kettle goes Pop.

Stop. Wait. Listen:

This is the moment of creative crisis. SEIZE IT.

This is the moment in which all your self-loathing and guilt — spurred by the knowledge that all forward momentum suddenly has a deadline; that any hopes of creative energy will be lost again the instant the kettle boils; that if you're going to get anything done in the next five minutes of teabag-squeezing, cookie-coveting, email-checking procrastination it must be now — Kicks Into Overdrive. GO GO GO!

I have written whole chapters of my novel, each one a startled 300-words burst — like an upsurge of literary dysentery — while standing poised over the keyboard in these sweaty, guilty intervals between Kettle On and Kettle Boiled.

Here is my advice, oh wouldbe novelist:

Drink lots of tea. And always fill the kettle to the brim.

BrainFart:

We all have an unpopular opinion or two, right? Generally we keep our Pet Controversies stored away, safe in the knowledge that — no matter how ardently we might believe such things — our friends and peers probably aren't ready to hear, oh, The Saving Graces Of The Elektra Movie, or Why Charity Is Fundamentally Flawed, or "Yeah, Stalin Got Some Things Wrong, But Actually…"

Now and again our guard slips and we accidentally spaff these mimetic turds into the public domain; and are usually — quite rightly — Crucified By Default. Even more rarely we'll be astonished to find our friends and peers forgive us our loathsome misapprehensions on the grounds that they too have their share of hateful, guilty Pearls, and my secret failure to impressed by Heath Ledger's Joker — say — is mitigated by their toxic certainty that Grammar And Spelling Aren't All That Important.

Rarer still, we'll be startled when — once in a Marmalade Moon — out transgressions of opinion earn us not a round of jeers and a volley of disgusted pork scratching, but a quiet, guilty susurration of agreement.

Such an opinion did I recently express, and such an uncomfortable acceptance did I unexpectedly achieve. I now faithfully repeat it to you, oh tolerant reader, in the hopes that my hardwon Accord was not contingent on the poor character and inebriated state of my pub-lurking audience.

It is this:

Daleks. Basically, if we're honest… they're fucking rubbish, aren't they?

This Week I Have Been Mostly Hating:

Dear Foghorn-Loud Californian, sitting with his awestricken family at the table beside me in an unremarkable little bar in an unremarkable little fishing village on an unremarkable little Mediterranean Island,

I'm sorry that your stay on this "bronze-age rock" has been so dreary. I understand from your conversation — and please believe me when I say I haven't been trying to listen-in (quite the opposite, in fact) — that you've already done, drunk, eaten and fucked everything it has to offer — except better — elsewhere. I understand your frustration at "the natives" being inexplicably incapable of understanding English, no matter how much you wave your arms, raise your voice, and include "you retard" at the end of every sentence. I understand your confusion at a microcosmic world in which every greasy-haired "eurotrash" waiter hasn't been shat-out of a Consumer Machine specifically to tend to your every whim. I know all of this must be very frightening to you, especially as — somewhere in the Loud-And-Unfunny-Anecdote-compacted layers of your frontal cortex — you must be dimly aware that I, the waiter, your family, and every other human in this bar — Brit, Spaniard and American alike — loathes you with every fibre of their being.

But I do feel compelled, with a view to enlightenment and an early end to your self-generated suffering, to set you straight on one small thing, upon the subject of which you've been — forgive me — whining for the past half-hour while I've been trying to work. Here is a slice of Truth:

Access to a McDonalds restaurant is not, no matter what you may think, a Human Right.

It may help you to know that I was sadly unable to defecate in your albondigas tapas while you were complaining about the lack of French-fries on the menu. But I'm confident all the same, based on a complex suite of expressions and movements, that your long-suffering wife has been poisoning your meals for quite some time, all on her own.

In hopes of a speedy conclusion to this matter,

(up) Yours,

S.x

Find Me @:

Twitter: @SiSpurrier

WWWebbage: www.simonspurrier.blogspot.com

Send wurdz, thoughts, stories, Hatings, and glittering lepers 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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