Stick to this advice

This image was the source of endless amusement in the Silly Season of Christmas 2009 so I thought it was time to resurrect it.

It may look like a crude MS Paint cartoon drafted by a jaded, whiskey soaked old journalist, but for me it is both beautiful and brilliant in its simplicity.

We could do well to learn a few tricks out of Stickman 2's book. Cut the bullshit and tell it like it really is once in a while. Here's an example:

Suitor: I'd like to sign up to be your German teacher. How about we catch up for a schnitzel next Thursday.
Heidi: How does 'Not in a million fucking years' sound?

In theory it's oh so easy. But I pulled out with the excuse that I had a rip snorting hangover. Pussy. It only delayed the inevitable.

So let's make a pact, you and I, to pull out the big truth guns every now and then.
Isn't that what all this new age sensitivity is supposed to be about?

February Fast - do you feel it

Went to dinner at a friend's house last night. An initimate group of some of my favourite people in the world. Took a couple of bottles of low alcohol wine because it seemed like a good idea. (yes, you read correctly.) When I arrived my friends were lolling on the lounge, there were hors deuvres on the table, and wine glasses scattered about. On stuff. Not in hands. I took a closer look. The wine glasses didn't have wine in them. This was big. What exactly did I walk in to here?
"Are you guys drinking water out of wine glasses?"
"Hmmmm." was the reply. Kinda like 'i acknowledge your question but I plead the fifth'.

I set about pouring myself a glass of wine. (Clearly I had not yet been lobotomised by this weird abstaining sect.) Like she had just disapparated from the lounge to my shadow, Fiona was right there behind me, reading the label over my shoulder "Is that that low alcohol stuff heidipants? Are you trying to be good or do you actually like it?"
"Hmmmm." was my response. I too, was afraid of the truth.

Dinner with sparkling mineral water revealed the chasm that truly exists between a lubricated saturday night dinner party and a monday night family detox dinner. We ate heathily. We sipped our drinks (me low alcohol wine, they ludicrously expensive mini bottles of italian fizzy water.) We shared the misery of sobriety.

We also rode the wave of possible failure. "Should I cave?" Steve posed, but we knew it was a rhetorical question. Withouth even so much as a 'hmmmmm' he picked himself up and worked through it. With another sip of water, a coffee, and a lemon lime and bitters. And then some herbal ecstasy.

Yes fuck. Can you believe it?
I had given up the fight for the night by then. Sod this drinking shit. Let's watch a movie and drink water. Then he pulls out a fucking herbal high. "as good on the dancefloor as it is on the couch" was the description on the back. I was now as confused as the herbal scientist who made the shit.

Well, I don't know what kind of party is in that brew, i was thinking, but he better be hoping for couch goodness because he's got more chance of harry potter popping in than he does of me getting my happy feet on right about now. Sober and all.

We watched a disney/pixar g rated animated feel good family number, then I pulled the plug. "How's that love drug going kids?"
"Hmmmm."
Oh, right I get it.

They did their little floaty thing back down the hallway as I walked to my car toting the left over wine and wondering why I had such a pounding headache. Why my friends have turned into mormons. And what is it with February? Let's hope this month gets old fast.

There's more than one way to skin a blog

As I watch my treasured feline slurping and gnawing the dreaded but dying fleabiters (aka bodyscooters) out of his fur, I realise it's time. No no, not flea assassination time - we just did that. It's a whole other time: It's BLOG time!

This blogging business has gone on far too long without me. I can no longer continue to lurk around the blogs of friends and strangers, marvelling at their dedication to the medium while I ignore my startling lack of the same. I will no longer steal the scene at late night booze benders with tales of crime and passion only to refer to the gaping hole in my story as 'the unfinished ending'. And I must not ever, ever, ever again start drinking wine at 4pm on a saturday with the excuse it's raining and cold and i'm bored. Bored? WTF? That whole concept is b-o-r-i-n-g.

So it is time. Axel my big black pussy-cat-face-man is used to me talking to him, to the plants and to myself, so it came as no shock, in fact he didn't even twitch (the fleas really are responding well to the treatment), when I turned on myself, gave me a short sharp finger poke in the chest, and said "Listen here you, there's more than one way to write a book. So what are you waiting for?"