A Yorkshireman displaced

I’ve found that as a result of my job I’ve gotten really good at day dreaming. Early for reasons that are too dull to go into, I found my self wandering the streets of Birkenhead performing a relentlessly repetitive task. In situations like this my brain tends to free wheel and I imagined myself taking the pencil held in my hand and grafting it into the side of the nearest tree creating a pencil tee. Then over the years the pencils (including their leads) would multiply, covering the tree and turning it into a carbonised porcupine which any passing person could farm for pencils.

I decided to extend the concept and allow that any wooden object, fruit of vegetable could be grafted in a similar manner to generate:

Furniture trees (I realized whilst think about this that people don’t make that many things out of wood other than furniture or pencils)
Toy trees (only if the toys are made of all natural materials)
Grass trees (like trees but covered in a soft downy fur of grass)
And trees that have root vegetables growing from them (just cos)

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Bathroom rituals are amongst the most potent generators of deja vu

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The building I work in spontaneously combusted today – thankfully it was only a small fire and no one was hurt (I think it was the lift winch overheating). So I’ve been sent home on this splendid afternoon, still probably won’t get paid cos I’m a temp. The sad thing is that is almost certainly one of the most exciting things to happen in my working life – almost 10 years of low wage, low prospects employment, yeah!

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I had one of the strangest work based conversations ever yesterday, ranging from the plausible (but not necessarily true) story that Walt Disney’s deceased body was placed in extreme cryogenic stasis at the moment of his death and the likelyhood of his ressurrection, to whether the universe has an end, via quantum theory and time travel – One of the upsides of my job is that my coworkers all seem quite educated.

I guess this is one of the effects of Tony Blairs education policy – the duller and more career minded you are, the higher you rise. This leaves a glut of quite interesting people to day dream their lives away in dead end jobs. Mind you – Einstein had his most interesting idea as a file clerk in the patent office of Bern in Switzerland. I think the government needs to start a think tank or research organization to harness the combined intellectual power of mass daydreaming.

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This weekend I became non-displaced again in order to visit my parents. I think trips home now are the only way I can really (at lest pretend) to time travel. I forget how much my parents house hasn’t changed since sometime in the 80s and given their strange desire for flowery soft furnishings, you can subtract maybe a decade from that so the overall effect is like going back in time to the 70s (I should point out however that I was born in 1981, a child of capitalism and the digital age). Ikea was something that happened to other people not my parents, their sofa cushions are so plump that they threaten to capsize anyone who rests upon them, and our kitchen has tasteful faux wood panelling up to waist height and flowery wallpaper from there on up.

Also I forget the fact that they come from the Starch-Is-Fun school of cooking (face it you might as well just blend a potato and inject it straight into your bloodstream). Everything seemed to be boiled too. My parents are learning though – they have DVD and a TV hardrive so I can’t be too harsh. I should point out that I actually do like my parents, I just think they’re too set in their ways to change.

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Weather reversal today – everything is damp. Though I prefer this to the sweatering heat of yesterweek.

I bought myself Prisoners of Love an introduction to Yo La Tengo the other day. Good dreamy yet happy music for otherwise dull afternoons would be my one sentence review. Saw "Awesome.." the Beastie Boys movie around a friends house too – and it is as awesome as it’s name implies.

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