Put it Away!

or: How I Know that Bared Human Flesh is an Abomination.

This is a piece I wrote (facetiously) for my comedy groups communal blog The ACRE Fourthought. The topic was nudity, and this is what I done written. I will post a link at the end should you wish to read the other ACREs pieces.

*****

Good heavens! Scarcely can I venture from the grounds of my land, nor peep from the upper echelons of my towers without my oracles suffering a cannonade of unfiltered humanity. I cannot bear to see bared flesh, it makes my stomach churn with the violence of a child drowned in a storm. I must apologise for the strength of that analogy, but I feel it is entirely necessary to kindle in you an appreciation for quite how distasteful I find the sight of skin. Grargh!

Humanity developed clothing for a reason. It is because our bodies are hateful to us. The soul within the body is trapped, like a dignified gentleman bedecked in formal regalia forced to travel via a zorb ball of muck, carried aloft on a canal of effluent. It is clear in both examples that we are better than such things, and must strive to rise above of our imperfect transport.

The bodhisattva Siddhartha Gautama knew well this problem, but incorrectly identified that it is life itself that is suffering. Wrong, Siddy, wrong. It is our bodies which are the source of suffering. Look at them for Cruijff's sake! They are loose, sagging, peach hemp sacks holding on for dear life! The Sisyphean effort of the human form to defy gravity is a pathetic reminder of our imperfection and must be summarily ignored. Of course not everybody agrees with me, and those whose conclusions differ from my own are, quite simply, cretinheaded pocks.

There are even such fools as believe the human body is a thing of beauty!!! I have a mouthful of vomit simply considering such an untenable position. Beautiful, they say. Good spirits, I should fucking well say not! The droop of a breast and a willy's wrinkles and not things to be celebrated. They are things to be covered up, as all fundamentalists correctly know. However, they also believe that god created us perfect, which is clear nonsense. No sensible thought had a hand in designing a human being. Should we shit when standing, our excrement would travel down the backs of our legs, which is wholly unpleasant. A further example of the imperfection of humanity are the people who, most perversely of all, enjoy these sorts of things. People who would like nothing more than to have flecks of faecal matter in their eyelashes. Dirty dogs! It is horrifying to think that even if people appear decently dressed, it is still possible they are harbouring essence of dookie in the hair near their eyes, the eyes they are looking at you with. Cack. But I digress.

No, I will digress. Surely we cannot be perfect beings, how perfect can we be when in experiments run by Berrendium University, 98% of sane humans were unable to differentiate between an image of a testicle sack or of an elbow. What caring creator would copy and paste between two such incompatible areas? Not a cowing one! It wouldn't and didn't happen.

I was once so disgusted with my own physicality that I bit a chunk of flesh straight out of my arm, but this only succeeded in upsetting me further.

Cover yourself up!

It just occurred to me that you could be naked reading this, and it revolts me. I'm freezing cold right now and I'm wearing a quarter of a million togs worth of duvet. How cold must you be whilst naked? Very cold indeed, but of course you cannot feel the cold because you are being protected by Diabolus, King of Hell, who loves nudity because he is perversion. Cover yourself up or burn forever in angry sulphur! Get some wool about you for the love of all that is good.

It is an undeniable fact that all bad things happen when at least some part of the skin is clearly visible. The only human who ever successfully lived without sin was Breton Diarckaluuma who was born into a large hessian sack and spent his entire life in there, being fed by his parents who gunged porridge through the side of the sack. The only way they could tell whether he was a girl or a boy was asking him to provide a detailed verbal account of his genitals, which he did with undignified eagerness.

I had sexual intercourse once, and I was so ashamed with both my own body and the body of my accomplice I drowned us both in a vat of dimethylmercury where we both would have died had I not INSISTED that we be clothed in an Iron Maiden of kevlar. I patented this cleansing procedure under the name Nudity-Expunging Baptism. Whenever I masturbate I don't look.

Fashion today is like the worst kind of cooking, tiny proportions and inappropriately ineffective dressing. Just as a sprig of parsley does not cover up a big bowl of oats, so too is vacuum-packing yourself in skimpy garments which do not cover up your skin unsightly.

If my expert evidence has still failed to convince you, consider this, every single person in the history of the world who has ever died at some point had their skin showing. The exception of course is Breton Diarckaluuma, who is alive and well in space, hidden. Be decent and cover up your inane appearance, and you too could live forever.

*****

The full blog is here.

The Sun Shines Out of Mine

My day today has been coloured by a constant niggling level of nerves, due to having a gig in Swansea tonight.


I've written new stuff to flesh out my set, and been occupying myself by running and re-running through the set in my head, recording it and replaying it to myself and making a bullet point list of the running order of it in a series of tedious attempts to remember it.


My all-in attitude to memorising this new stuff comes from having blanked completely during my last gig and being left on stage open-mouthed and silent, looking like a grade-a bellend, and no mistake.


I've reverted to my old tactic of attempting to mesh the material in a (perhaps somewhat contrived) narrative flow, so that it is less staggered, and therefore, in theory, easier to remember. It seems to be working so far, and actually outlining the blow-by-blow of the material (this is a pun given the nature of the set, so I will titter to myself) has helped no-end in committing it to memory. Of course all this blathering might be hugely premature, only time will tell. I also plan on putting the bullet points on my hand before I go on, which I've not done before, but I think it's necessary, I want at all costs to avoid the complete blank that happened before.


I am a lot happier with the new material than I was with the stuff I had planned to say before I blanked, which I think will also be a lot of help. Being genuinely enthused by the things you want to say is likely a much better catalyst than trying to remember a story that you think people are going to react badly to. I also hadn't learnt it well enough.


This entry has devolved quite quickly into anxious hypothesising, it is essentially the blogging equivalent of rubbing palms together or biting your fingernails.


So in a slight change of focus, I am quite awed by how difficult it must have been to attend far-flung nights without the aid of e-mail, satnav and google maps. I have a spot tonight in a bar which I've never visited, and despite this I not only know exactly where it is, thanks to google maps, I also know where I'm going to park, as well as being aware of several alternatives should those spaces be full.


I am very grateful for all this technology, if I had to potter around Swansea by myself looking for the venue on the night, I think I would be reduced to a gibbering nervous wreck. Even as it is I am not wholly comfortable with the process, I get infused with a mix of excitement, of feeling very grown up indeed, and then with an acute feeling of being very clearly outside my comfort zone, which probably isn't hugely conductive when I am attempting to remember a new story I plan on telling.


I'm sure the only answer is to heed the advice that the Pub Landlord would surely give, which is to SNAP OUT OF IT!


The gig tonight starts quite late, so I am confident that I'll get there with plenty of time to spare, and I will use the time beforehand wisely, running through my set like I should have done before, where instead I sat staring into the middle-distance like a vacant dolt. That's right, a dolt.


This blog is a burst of rampant solipsism, I must apologise. Hopefully it hasn't been too nauseating getting to see the view of the inside of my brain, which seems to be lodged squarely up my own arse.


This has been an exercise in releasing nervous energy, if it's not enough I will have to torture a kitten or something, who knows.


Expect a blow-by-blow post mortem of the gig tomorrow. Actually, don't.

A Document Regarding Frivolous Patois

"Don't people in Roath have the same right to a decent night's sleep as everybody else?"

This is the only line from a news article that I have discovered today that I found noteworthy. I reproduce it here, out of context, in the hope that the vagaries surrounding the quotation will add to its oddness.

I am unsure what to write about today, so I will allow myself what I originally believed this blog would not become, and write an entry specifically about myself. Oh dear me indeed.

I have been surrounded by children recently, due to the nature of my job, and I have discovered that the youth of today has adopted a number of odd colloquialisms that I find jarring. This is hardly surprising, and indeed is one of the things to be expected from generation to generation, but as I am only 21, I am slightly flummoxed to note the difference in language use already present in people 7-8 years my junior. I appreciate that I may not be a legitimate bastion of current slang, as evidenced by my use of terms such as “flummoxed”, “legitimate” and “bastion”. However, some of the language used without even the thinnest veneer of irony or self-awareness is flabbergasting.

I am no stranger to the concept of “ownage”, though it is feasible to assume that I would not use it straight-faced even in its original definition. What is most surprising to me is the new usage that has cropped up where kids, referring to their armour on an online game, inquire hubristically: “Do I look ownage?” Despite being employed as a glorified child-behaviour paladin, my degree in, and passion about, the English language lead me to view this use of language with an air of haughty distaste.

Another example of ludicrous patois is the decision of the children to actually declare, out loud, with their voices, out of their own mouths, into the air, where you are HEAR it: “OMG!”. Actually spelling out the letters instead of saying the words these letters have come to represent. I have come to the point where I allot myself 15 lashes if I ever use the actual phrase “oh my god”, and to hear little human whelps using the bowdlerised phrase with no sense of how idiotic they sound leaves me chilled. I think it all comes down to the fact that I hate children, and in this sense I am both not suited and perfectly suited to being in charge of them. They also say “noob”. I am agèd beyond my days.

In a jarring change of topic, I will now stop talking about something that frustrates me and begin discussing things I enjoy. I was let loose into a radio studio recently, along with my future co-presenter, to “get a feel of the room”. What we achieved in the hour or so we were allowed in there was, though it is swell-headed of me to say so, beautiful. We quickly came to grips with the technology and the software by ourselves, since we are such tech-savvy clever Richards, we then proceeded to ‘practice’ and prepare an off the cuff non-recorded pilot of what we think our show should be. It essentially comprised of songs we don’t like being seamlessly faded in and out of each other to an accompaniment of us cachinnating cacophonously. In the heightened oddness of the studio, which I am going to refer to as The Atelier, even the most spurious joke or funny story became hilarious, sending us into rapturous bellowing laughter. We gleaned far too much enjoyment from being ‘naughty’ and pronouncing Foo Fighters as though it was a naughty word (which of course we cannot do on air due to the Don’t Say The Naughty Words! Act 1914), and also from a frighteningly accurate impression of Sarah Millican, which no Rhondda-born man has any right to be able to do, and also a very poor John Lennon. We toyed with the idea of pretending to be from other community radio stations located around the country, welcoming imaginary listeners in a heavy faux-cockney accent to Pearly Kings FM, and topping this off with a gravitas laden “Have a banana”. It was all scuppered however as the manager of the station walked in on us raging through an angry dialogue pretending to be from a Liverpudlian station. I think we scared her quite a lot, and perhaps made her question her own judgement in terms of letting us in. Regardless, we had a swell time (I am very much on board in the attempt to re-popularise this term).

As well as our being-silly centric live shows which we will be broadcasting on the weekend when the radio gets started (if all goes well), we are also planning on doing a number of pre-records using a format I dreamt up last year, and that we have been meddling with in order to amuse ourselves. I am very excited to be planning and preparing for the Cultural Exchange Program, the premise of which is very simple indeed. We will be picking a genre (of Jean Reno as we will be attempt to rebrand them) each, amassing a selection of songs from the genre, playing them to each other and discussing them, in the hopes that The Exchange will make us better, more rounded individuals, and failing that, that some laughter will have been created. Despite having prepared fastidiously for the first show, I won’t put details here as it is still far enough away that I feel I must keep as much information to myself in order for it to remain fresh on the day.

Suffice to say, preparations for the show have been engrossing and enjoyable, even when certain songs cannot be chosen due to the often colourful language my preferred genres contain. I take these instances to be a challenge, and tracks that are unsuitable for broadcast have already forced me to seek out other tracks, which have often proved better. Hopefully we will be able to incorporate a “Tracks We Couldn’t Play” section, in order to explain the reasons they couldn’t be used, which I have already discovered often have quite amusing reasons.

To close up, here is a track that I most certainly couldn’t play, and is a chirpy, although somewhat abrasive, piece. See if you can spot why it’s inappropriate.

Answers on a postcard please.

Aeroplane Creativity

Here is a poem I went to the liberty of penning whilst on an arduous 7+ hour flight from London to Vancouver. It is entitled ‘Air Crusade of Righteous Indignation (Full Upright Position)’.

I swallowed my spit and I rubbed at my eyes,
I kept my rage inside, where it grew instead of died.
I longed to reduce you to catarrh and paste,
The gas-mark of my raging grill could have
scorched the whiskers from your inconsiderate face.
With frantic eyes, manic grin,
I longed to tear beard from your chin,
The look splattered on your face; agog,
Your tongue; with the cat, in your throat; a frog,
At the very best, this will suffice for a blog.

My poetry is sometimes quite prognosticative. Either that or this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I also created one which was slightly shorter and direct:

Oh! reclining Denthead,
how you love your EZ chair,
PRICK!

I’m unsure as to whether these illustrate what actually happened or just provide an insight into how inconvenienced and frustrated I felt, regardless, there was a tool in the seat in front of me who’s seat was essentially in my lap. Inconsiderate fucker. I did however watch Armando Ianucci’s ‘In the Loop’ (good film) and bred myself a Gold Chocobo (arse-whoop).

Here is yet another, more freeform and whimsical, effort. Please read it as though you are Tim Key, if you are unfamiliar with Tim Key, please familiarise yourself with Tim Key before reading this, my Tim Key style effort of a poem:

"Is your hair-band metal?" quipped the inquisitive man.
In honesty, he was less inquisitive, and more of
a frisky sort of guy,
Seeing as he was a security guard at the airport.
I doubt he was interested in my hair-band,
in fashiological terms.

I also wrote some horrific homebrew jokes, which I was going to send to Adam & Joe but their show is on holiday for a bit I think so I will put them here instead:

**Disclaimer**

These jokes are purposefully awful.

Q: Where does Osama bin Laden keep his seasonings?
A: In a spice Iraq.

Q: Where do you cook ja stir fry?
A: In ja pan.

Q: What does the chocolate obsessed craftsman do after Mars-sanding and Snicker-filing?
A: Aero-planing.

Puns in the past are past puns, puns in the future are future puns, but this one is a current pun.

I could have been the best croquet player in the world ever but I suffer from hoop-wrist (hubris) (the best jokes have to be explained).

I think pooing is a little game because I play it with a toylette.

My injury burst into flame and was healed by the curative wind.
It rose like a knee-fix from the ashes.

What's the difference between a plane and a drunken bum?
One has toilets at the rear and the other rears at toilets.

Why didn't the bear wipe his arse?
He was suffering from paw-shitty of ambition.

What is the similarity between Dracula and Sigmund Freud?
Neither were satisfied with just Igor/Ego.

I am ashamed.