Post Baggage
I suppose it's only fitting--nay, well-nigh obligatory--for me to remark, as I launch into this here post, that it at once sets and closes out a record in the five-month-con-cambio-long history of The Angry Londoner; by which I meantersay it sets a right bookend alongside an unprecedented two-month-spanning period of blogospheric silence on my end. Not that I mean, in so remarking, to tender any kind of apology for my late close-fingeredness (for Fannie Adams alone knows who I'd be apologising to); it's just that, in view of the sheer bulk of maisonette-bound, arse-cheek-numbing chrono-hoovering necessitated by my previous posts, this disinclination to blog in and of itself constitutes something of a story worthy of a banner-headlined, front-page news article in the Mcgyverer Allgemeine Zeitung. And the thing is, the newsworthiness of this self-same story only increases with every stab I take at bashing out the copy of the article; each time I get as far as 'A high-ranking McGyver Maisonette official, who asked not to be named, attributed the delay in bloggage to...' and then tear the paper out of the typewriter and start all over again a day, two days, sometimes even a week later. It's not that there aren't scads of perfectly plausible explanations, any one of which would probably pass mustard as the explanation in the okies of the hypothetical otherbloke who gave an art's razz whether I blogged or died, but merely that none of them passes mustard as such in my own okies. Earlier today, though, I recalled that a certain uxoricidal Frog commie philosopher, a smattering of whose writings had been forced on me by one of my UEA lit profs, had a word for the SOA that eventuates in these sorts of explanatory imp-arses; he dubbed it overdetermination. In lowfalutin terms, what overdetermination amounts to is this: if a cow farts in your face whilst you're milking her, there's no point in trying to suss out after the fact whether it was the hay she ate earlier that morning, or the thorough rogering she got from your stud bull the night before, or indeed your own all-too-indelicate handling of her tetons that caused the aforesaid noxious gaseous discharge. You just have to lump it and realise that it was all of these things, and, at the same time, none of them, that precipitated the fart, which thus may be described as an overdetermined event. As far as actually explaining fuck all goes, of course, this notion of overdetermination is about as useful as a Heinz Salad Cream coupon in a Stateside Safeway's, but at least in terms of philosophical pedigree it beats my usual 'Fuck me with schlong-shaped object X if I know' hands down. And even more important than that, if I hadn't recollected it this morning, I very probably wouldn't be typing this here post atcha tonight. Talk about your undertermined events...
'On this here overdetermination tommyrot,' the nonexistent reader nudges me.
'Yes?'
'Would counsel care to approach the bench and explain its relevance to the price of chee in China?'
'Ah, yes, M'lud. M'lud was referring, I take it, to potential alibis for my client's blogger's block.'
'Even so, counsel. Please proceed.'
'Thank you, M'lud. I proceed thus:'
Vis-a-vis my own late diggital impotence, I'd say that the overdetermining analogues to the hay, the rogering and the rough-milking are, respectively, as follows. In the first place, writing up the account of my Christmas sojourn in East Anglia rather soured me on the notion of my day-to-day life as a subject of reflection and remembrance. The hypothetical reader may recall that I started out this here blog philosophically rather ill-disposed towards this very notion; and he may also have subsequently remarked that by and by, in spite of my initial prejudices, I rather warmed to the putting of the notion into practice. Well, by the time I reached the end of that last rather lengthy four-poster, I had come full circle to the philosophical GO! square on the Monopoly (or Chavopoly) board. That whole blow-by-blow, soup-to-nuts recunting of my holiday adventures started out pleasantly enough, but by the end of it I felt a bit like that Biblical bloke making a beeline out of the flaming remnants of Buggerville--minus the salinisable wifey in tow to lend at least a soup's son of metaphysical heft to the whole ordeal. In other words, I felt as though the irredeemable shittiness and outright pointlessness of my holiday experiences in culo had just been driven home to me because and only because I had been so gormless as to suppose they might be worthy any destination other than that of the Ruggerian mental wastebin. Wellsir, on top of that, within a week of my return to London and bidness as usual at Proctologitex, as if by way of punishment for my cuntish fabrication of a scenario along those very lines in service of my own cuntishly petty ends, a massively devastating explosion rocked P-Tex's factory out in Stevenage. No one was hurt, but the blast blew a hole the size of Wembley Stadium clear on through the roof, and destroyed tens of millions of pounds worth of inventory into the bargain. The final report from the insurer's investigation just came in last week: they think what happened was that one of the blokes from the floor stepped outside for a smoke, and that, on account of the fact that he was standing flush against the back wall of the building--i.e., several cunt-hair's-breadths within the no-smoking zone--a spark from his cigarette was sucked into the ventilation system and thereby brought into contact with the pure-oxygen atmosphere of the cooling room, where the newly-manfactured examination gloves, tampons, etc. are allowed to rest for a spell in the open air before they're packaged. Of course, as there were no injuries, I was not, as in my counterfactual version of the event, conscripted for factory work. In hindsight I rather wish I had been. You see, what with all of the fiscal calculations necessitated by the purchase of new materials subsequent to the disaster, the accounts payable people were absolutely swamped with work, and I was obliged to take up the slack on my end; such that every one of my formerly several-hundred-strong wanking and snoozing minutes was now completely consumed by report-running and spreadsheet-updating, and that, right on through to the beginning of the present week, I would arrive back at the maisonette well and truly knackered, with just enough energy to crack open a single Hoegaarden, park my arsecheeks on the futon and flick on the telly. But at least as far as recent weeks are concerned, if I were asked to pin my blogger's block to one particular cause, if someone were holding the proverbial schlong-shaped jizzim pistol to my head and ordering me: Press Button A, B or C or your hair is nair'd, I'd have to go with Button C, namely, Aresnal's late entry into the run for the European Championship. How, I ask you, if there were any justice in this world, would this tatty pack of cuntinental swashbucklers have been suffered to slip through the elimination rounds like an armadillo-sized rat through a cunt-hair-wide gap in the floorboards, to emerge at the other end transmogrified into England's last best hope in ought-six, a veritable batallion of Winston Churchills decked out in the armour of St. George--and this at the very moment when they were only just beginnning to get their long-overdue comeuppance at home? People are always going on about these cataclysmic events--the Holocaust, 11/9, the Boxing Day Tsunami--that make them question whether an essentially benevolent God is calling the shots up there and down here. Well, the reader already knows with what gusto I am capable of besmirching the butcher's-half-dozen squares of printed loo paper comprising this very question; he knows what manner of cuntishly depraved demiurgal bookie has rigged the whole cosmic schlongfight in my okies. All the same, I have never quite managed to let go my grip on what you might call the negative cosmological hope that if only and for once in my adult life Arsenal would finish the season closer to the bottom of the heap than to the top, things might turn out to be not so bad after all in the long run. All along, a culo, it's been this hope that's impelled me to shift my arse cheeks out of bed and up the GNR each weekday morning in loo of lying there for days on end waiting for the white-coated blokes with the butterfly nets to turn up at the front door--and a fortiori, in the evenings, to devote myself to such less spiritually corrosive pursuits as this here blog. But now that the Gunners are the sole UK team in the running for the European Championship, that hope has precipitously dropped down to just-barely infernal levels. Granted, depending on the outcome of the showdown with Juventus on the 28th, the hope-o-meter could spike up as high as the purgatorial reading before the end of the month, in which case I suspect you'll be hearing from YFC's truly quite a bit more often than of late. On the other hand, in a worst-case scenario in which Arsenal (Hoegaarden forbid!) win the Championship, come 17 May, the whole hope-sprung mechanism could blow itself to pieces, in which case, most likely, the sole question I'll be capable of posing to myself for the indefinite future will be, Out of which side of my tranquiliser-slackened gob am I going to drool today?
On a lighter note, I thought that as long as I had the editing window open, I might as well include in the present post an open letter--only the second I've received to date--that arrived in my personal inbox towards the end of last month. The author of the following appears to have made a much more thorough exploration of the AL than that undertaken by my correspondent of last December, Mrs Trippett-Jones--sorry, Ashby-Jones (keeping up with all the Joneses in my lifeworld has certainly got to be a bit of a pain in the co-jones). Indeed, to judge by the sheer breadth of reference of his letter, he seems to have pored over every word publicly composited herein since opening day last September; which implication, I must admit, doesn't quite give my desperate spirits the lift they've been craving. For, not to look a readerly gift-horse in the mouth, as off-putting as the thought that I might be typing into a void undoubtedly is, the alternative thought that I might be typing straight into a single not-entirely-sympathetic pair of fenokies watching me every move is isn't exactly on-taking. But enough of my paranoiac ravings: I'm already violating blogojournalistic etiquette in not letting my correspondent speak entirely for himself from the get-go. As with the last OL, my own piss follows post-scriptically, this time in a more conventional titty-for-tatty format.
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Wassauf, Hünden?
Or, as your people would put it, How do you do, sir? I write to you today on behalf of the Greater London and Home Counties Swabo-Liberian Diaspora (GLHCSLD [quite a mouthful isn't it, meine liebe Hünden?]), a community numbering a whopping 300 souls, all resident within the scant 500-kilometre circumfrence of the London commuter belt. We Swabo-Liberians enjoy a rich cultural heritage worthy of vying with that of any people who have yet pitched camp or driven plough on this earth since the Mesopotamian era--a heritage to be proud of, nay, smug about. For each of us may boast not only of cententially-strong genetic and cultural ties to the erstwhile and present Republic of Liberia, in virtue of our direct descent from some member of that famous nonet of Liberian expatriates who, having been obliged regretfully to flee their homeland in the wake of the waves of insurrections precipitated by the bankruptcy and virtual collapse of the Monrovia government, disembarked at Dover in the autumn of 1910; but also of sesquicentennially-strong genetic and cultural ties to the ancient Helvitio-Teutonic region of Swabia, in virtue of the direct descent of each of the aforesaid nine from one Hans Mörike, who, having been obliged equally regretfully to flee his homeland in the wake of the waves of general stroppiness precipitated by German unification (precipitated in its turn, need it be said, by the egomaniacal machinations of that vile Prussian parvenu Bismarck), disembarked at Buchanan in the summer of 1872. When one does the genealogical maths, factoring the Swabian tree by the Liberian one, the results are quite staggering: there is not a single Katze Johannes or Hünden Juliette among us who cannot claim some international luminary of the past three hundred years as near or distant kin. I alone can count among my cousins and/or grandsires such leading lights of the eighteenth-through-twentieth centuries as Charles Schwab, Benjamins Banneker and Franklin, Alberts Einstein and Sharpton, and Oprah Winfrey.
But I did not elect to put mitt to keyboard this instant for the purpose of crying up my own people's unimpeachable claims to singularity and greatness. I write today ultimately in the wholly disinterested service of a cause in which, I trust, I stand united with all Londoners worthy of the civic epithet, namely, that of cultural diversity.
You see, for all of our undeniable and scarcely-overstateable world-historical importance, we Swabo-Liberians constitute but a single tile in the vast multicultural mosaic comprised by the 33 boroughs of Greater London. Indeed, according to the latest white paper issued by the City Hall Task Force on Diversity, Greater London is home to the representatives of no fewer than 20,000 cultures and ethnicities, each possessed of its own absolutely unique heritage; on which account our Mayor has seen fit to dub our august Capital the Most Culturally Diverse City in All of Human History. (Do you hear that from across the pond, New York, New York? You so-called Cutting Board of the American Melting Pot, with your piddling 500 spoken languages? You Big Apple-achians might as well start drawing up your annexation application for submission to the Arkansas State House, and in future direct all of your self-promotional literature to the prospective producers of the next Beverly Hillbillies or Dukes of Hazzard movie; because henceforth all modifutuacious spirits in search of the true embodiment of enlightened cosmopolitanism will be shopping elsewhere, namely on the High Streets of our principal districts.)
I advert at last, Herr McGyver, mein Hauptmann, to the central topic of my epistle, namely the relevance of this formidable aforementioned demographic finding to your own blogospheric activities. The first salient attribute of your blog to claim the attention of the casual browser (e.g./viz. myself, a week and a half ago) is its title: The Angry Londoner. One might—and, indeed, did—well suppose that any individual endowed with Kugeln of the mass and thickness requisite to one styling himself the Angry Londoner would be endowed supernumerarily with the degree of acuity and curiosity vis-à-vis his fellow townsmen requisite to one arrogating to himself the task of speaking in and on their behalf. And as our Mayor has effectively proclaimed cultural diversity the main nub, the keynote, the Stadtsgeistsgrundgedanke of the London of the third millennium, one is only entitled to expect that such acuity and curiosity should manifest itself in the form of at least a smattering of attention to our multicultural mosaic, and of some sampling of the 20-myriad-fold tesselae of which it is comprised [sic (RMcG)]. Understand, Herr McGyver, that I choose my words carefully here; that it is not for nothing that I write of a smattering and a sampling rather than of an exhaustive survey or a so-called full Monty; for I am at Arsch a Praktischesmensch who appreciates that it would scarcely be possible for a single human being to canvass the entirety of our Kulturschaft on his or her own, that by such a reckoning, even at the penurious rate of a blog-post per culture per day, one of your comparatively tender age would have attained his octagenarity by the time he had paid off his balance in full (and even then, he should be obliged to take out a second loan of treble the principal balance of the first; for, if current projections are to be trusted, by 2050 the number of cultures resident here will total roughly 80,000, or one for every ten Londoners).
But in perusing The Angry Londoner in its present state, as of this Valentine's Day 2006, one looks in vain for the vaguest adumbration of a smattering or sampling of the London Kulturschaft; one is tempted, indeed, to cry out to the author/editor, in unspeakable agony, on behalf of the entire local Kultursübergemeinschaft, 'Has the concept of a reach-around ever penetrated your calcified chav's brainpan?' In five month's worth of posts, from September to January inclusive, its only acknowledgment of the mere existence of a multicultural scene in London takes the form of a merciless hatchet-job on the poor Kernevistanis; who, I have lately learnt, are about to close up their restaurant in Hoxton due to a 'recent decline in volume of clientele'. (Viel danke, Herr McGyver! Whither am I now to repair for my hebdomadal mabyar kernewek fix? To your Mum's kitchen in Diss? Nachbar, bitte! As if by Fickensalles's stretch of the imagination an insular East Angelina could be counted on to cotton to one of our kind darkening her doorstep.)
To be sure, Herr McGyver, you yourself have already evinced in passing some sense of the fatuousness of your blog's claims to geographical exemplarity, in joshingly suggesting, as you did on one occasion, that it might more properly be entitled The Something (What was it--Pacific? Feisty?) Barnetian than the Angry Londoner. But I submit to you, Herr McGyver, that on the evidence of the tenor of your performances to date, even styling yourself an exemplary Barnetian would be an act of civic hubris; that your blogospheric cursus has been too narrow-ranging even for one presuming to speak for his own borough; that only an epithet as redolent of unregenerate hickishness as, say, The White Male East-Anglian Transplant would do justice to the shameless parochiality of your authorial ethos.
To be sure, even by marmite-on-whitebread standards of north London, Barnet is a dispiriting desert of cultural homogeneity, yet even within this desert there are to be found oases of genuine diversity--particularly on its southeastern fringes, in the West Indian communities of the Two Finchleys--oases that it should be incumbent upon every Barnetian worthy of the name to explore. But on your personal 15th-century mariner's map of the borough, these oases essentially figure as uncharted waters inscribed with the legend Here Be Dragons; holed up in the cosily WASP-ish confines of your precious Woodside Park local, and of your Potters Bar office cubicle, you rest content to wallow in blokishly bibulous oblivion of them. And on those rare occasions when diversity dares to rear its lovely particoloured head in your painfully straitened monochromatic Lebenswelt, you waste no time in brusquely ushering it out of the room with the tip of your chav's walking stick. I am thinking here in the main of an episode of your post of 7 November, surtitled 'Take Back the Night,' where a handful of individuals hailing from non-Anglo-centric cultures--Manish Shah, Jay Gulati, et al.--are mentioned by name without being vouchsafed so much as a few inches of web-space in which to speak for themselves qua representatives of their respective cultural cohorts. Here, solipsitically immersed as you were in the account of your jingoistically anorakish fabrication of the so-called Bloke Fawkes holiday, you let slip a saffron opportunity for wafting over to your readers' noses a gust of the doubtlessly uniquely aromatic Punjabi or Upper-Pradeshian perspective on Woodside Park nightlife.
But am Arsch I do not intend this letter to serve as a conduit of negative energy, and I shall accordingly perorate on a positive note. Am Arsch, we should always regard the diversity of our Capital as an occasion not for napalm-torching the rivers that already divide us from our fellow Londoners, but rather for building bridges of communication across these divides. The realisation of this cultural-cum-spiritual civic works project is, need it be said, all the more exigent in the light of our imminent hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games. It is vital that all of us--Black and White, Jew and Gentile, Gay and Straight, Sikh and Hindu, Chav and Toff, Kernevistani and Swabo-Liberian--should close ranks with all speed, and in a spirit of Stadtsbruderundschwesterschaft, so that, six years hence, we may put on a jolly good show fit to make those tatty foreigners fairly retch with envy of our multicultural bounty; and thus, in conformity to this selfsame spirit, I hereupon extend to you, Herr McGyver, an invitation to attend GLHCSLD's next Märzfest, to be held at 19:00 next Saturday week at the Swabo-Liberian Union Hall located directly opposite the soon-to-be defunct Bosty Drog restaurant at Hoxton Market. The evening commences with all assembled--dressed, natürlich, in the traditional folk costume of our people--(for women the Dirndl, for men the Loden and Lederhosen)--betaking themselves to the dance floor to cut a rug or ten's worth of Greenvilles to the accompaniment of the toe-tapping strains of our traditional folk music, die Blauen. There follows a buffet banquet of traditionally delectable Swabo-Liberian delicacies--Heisshunden, Schweinshängebacken, Bratkartoffeln, washed down with great steinfuls of Märzenlager and Verrückthund; and punctuated, at evening's end, by a rousingly traditional Tortespaziergang, undertaken in competition for the grand prize of a magnificent Buchananertorte concocted beforehand by one of our more culinarily-gifted Huasfrauen. Our Märzfest is indeed a spectacle fit to dazzle the Augen of the uninitiated, seeing as how it has have late become, in effect, the signature Swabo-Liberian holiday, having long since eclipsed in point of popularity its equinoctial counterpart and erstwhile festive centrepiece of our calendar, Oktoberfest. To be quite heisshundlich, Herr McGyver, our Oktoberfest has in recent years devolved into something of a Knackwurstfest (I trust, in view of your evident familiarity with this particular conceit, I may dispense with the explication thereof). It's hard enough to get the Fleischersdutzend women of our community to turn out once a year, in the Fickendestage of springtime, let alone in the autumn. But I digress. I was, after all, supposed to be wrapping up. And so, to attend to the aforesaid Einpackung, Herr McGyver, till the 25th--and, I hope, not a day later--I wish you a heartfelt auf Wiedersehen.
Sincerely,
LaMont Mörike-Jones
President, Treasurer and Sergeant-at-Arms
GLHCSLD
P. S. I'll be sure to keep an extra Heisshund and batch of Bratkartoffeln warm for you.
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The Angry Londoner replies:
Dear Mr Mörike-Jones:
First off, thanks for the invite to your little do down in Hoxton. Second off, to deliver a walloping sock in the co-jones or mainspring of your whole tirade, fuck Ken and his task force. Fuck them with a diverse, 20,000-strong, array of culinary and surgical instruments. I'd sooner trust a white paper issued by the Third Reich's propaganda office than I would one issued by those KL-patsies down at City Hall. (Yeah, I know Ken himself is given to these same sorts of Nazi-derived shit-slinging sallies; I suspect, indeed, that before it's all over every journalist or building-contractor who's dared to look sideways at him will have been assigned his own personal stand-in drawn from the historically-verifiable ranks of Hitler's inner and outer circles. Well, I say, if Ken wants to dish out Swastika-shaped spagghetioes, he should expect to receive gobfuls of the same in return.) I don't know where, apart from their own cavernous anal cavities, Ken's minions could have pulled this statistic of 20,000 unique cultures and ethnicities. It sounds mildly to wildly inflated to these orioles. But even supposing Ken & Co. are right, and we are indeed living in the Most Culturally Diverse City in All of Human History, I believe that I am entitled to reclaim at least a sliver of umbrage from your county-fair caricaturist's adumbration of YFC's truly as a kind of latter-day Alf Garnett or East-Atlantic David Duke; in other words to protest your chalking up of my admittedly scrimpy treatment of the local multi-culti scene to a kind of congenital allergy to all things culturally diverse, or to a virtually antiseptic lack of contact with them. The fact is that there are all manner of phenomena that flit past my okies each and every day, but that I have seen fit to pass over in silence in these here pages, for one reason or another--sheer co-jone-numbing apathy being the most prevalent among them. You may have noticed, for example, that with two hardly notable pseudo-exceptions--my brief metaphorical Portrait of the Bloggist as a Young Dragoonsman in my post of 7 January, and my account of a run-in with a certain fake-beardy trick-or-treater in my post of 1 November--I have yet to make mention of a single person's sporting a moustache, or indeed any other form of facial hair. Would you then be justified in concluding, on the basis of this sweeping omission, that every bloke who crossed my path from September to January was clean-shaven? Or that I somehow have it in for the mostachio'd and bearded blokility as a class? I think not. (But if I am mistaken, and if, perchance, in addition to being the President &c. of GLSWLD you are also a member of the Greater London Bearded and Moustachio'd Gentlebloke's League; and are thereby impelled to seek satisfaction from me on account of my egregious and repeated slighting of your fraternity, I say, Step up! I've got a wardrobe full of old shirts that I'd just as gladly consign to the gutters of Shoreditch as to my local Salvation Army shop.)
In brief, in my lifeworld I put the whole multi-culti bidness on par with moustaches and beards, and treat it accordingly in these here pages. Thus, just as you shouldn't expect to learn the facial-hair-bearing status of any of my mates until, say, one of them decides to grow a 'stache or beard or to shave off whichever of the two he already has, so you shouldn't expect to learn just how culturally diverse any of them is until this diversity becomes a matter of at least some cuntishly slight degree of dramatic interest.
Third, but not least, off: from the point of smell of this rabbit, the carrot of your argument is too puny and too far off down the patch to be worth hopping after, especially after a judiciuos comparison-sniffing of a certain schlong-sized alternative carrot dangling within biting distance of his bunny's incisors. You write of the need for all of us Londoners to close ranks in preparation for the Olympics in 2012. Well, a lot can happen in six years, Mr. Mörike-Jones, to upset the best-laid plans of mice and Ken--a bird flu pandemic, for instance, or the outbreak of a Sino-American war (a.k.a. WWIII). And in the meantime, much nearer to hand, we have another cause that IMOSHO is much worthier of your noble rank-closing, namely the derailing of Arsenal's cuntishly all-but-ineluctable progress towards the European Championship. It is vital that all of us Londoners--Black and White, Jew and Gentile, &c.--should close ranks to extirpate the tumour that is Arsenal from the colon of our civic body politic; that we should join together in one unanimous cry of NOT IN OUR NAME! loud enough to carry clear on over to Spain, reverberate from the stands of the stadia of Turin, Milan and Madrid and echo thence back in our own ears; that we should ultimately flood the streets in a mighty procession bearing aloft the decapitated heads of Arsène Wenger and Thierry Henry to the Tower gate. And it is in this spirit, the spirit of Stadtsantiarsenalschaft, that I hereupon extend to you, Mr Mörike-Jones, an invitation to attend the next plenary session of the North London Arsenal-Bashers' Association, to be held at 8 pm next Thursday week at the Sedulous Ape in Woodside Park. The evening commences with all assembled--dressed, naturally in number shirts culled from the liveries of teams who have scored at least one victory over the Gunners in the past six months--getting liberally pissed to the accompaniment of whatever happens to be playing on the house jukebox. There follows a round-robin exchange of anti-Arsenal jokes, anecdotes and rants; punctuated, at evening's end, by a blind-drunk but heartfelt choral rendition of our Association's fight song, 'Arsenal, O Arsenal, They Should Have Named You Cuntsenal'. Whether you are already a confirmed-if-closeted Arsenalophobe, Mr Mörike-Jones, or are merely a sceptical fan of a non-Arsenal club, your presence at our session would be decidedly welcome; and if, upon adjournment of that session, you shall be pleased to accept a bequest of a sealed letter of induction into our central London sister association, you shall have in exchange a pledge from me, redeemable on my word as a gentlebloke, to be present at your Märzfest from the cutting of the first Greenville rug to the devouring of the last crumbs of Buchananertorte. If, however, you prove so unregenerately deaf to our gospel as not to make an appearance at the Ape on the 23rd, rest assured that I shall not be darkening your Union Hall's doorstep on the 25th; and that, having in virtue of your absence excommunicated yourself in advance from our church as a de facto Arsenalophile, you may subsequently, and in good conscience, consign that Heisshund you would have set aside for me to some other purpose, preferably that of the passionate and repeated violation of your anal schphincter.
I am, Sir, TBS, your most humble Servant,
Rugby W. McGyver, Esq.
Treasurer and Sergeant at Pints
The North London Arsenal-Bashers' Association
'On this here overdetermination tommyrot,' the nonexistent reader nudges me.
'Yes?'
'Would counsel care to approach the bench and explain its relevance to the price of chee in China?'
'Ah, yes, M'lud. M'lud was referring, I take it, to potential alibis for my client's blogger's block.'
'Even so, counsel. Please proceed.'
'Thank you, M'lud. I proceed thus:'
Vis-a-vis my own late diggital impotence, I'd say that the overdetermining analogues to the hay, the rogering and the rough-milking are, respectively, as follows. In the first place, writing up the account of my Christmas sojourn in East Anglia rather soured me on the notion of my day-to-day life as a subject of reflection and remembrance. The hypothetical reader may recall that I started out this here blog philosophically rather ill-disposed towards this very notion; and he may also have subsequently remarked that by and by, in spite of my initial prejudices, I rather warmed to the putting of the notion into practice. Well, by the time I reached the end of that last rather lengthy four-poster, I had come full circle to the philosophical GO! square on the Monopoly (or Chavopoly) board. That whole blow-by-blow, soup-to-nuts recunting of my holiday adventures started out pleasantly enough, but by the end of it I felt a bit like that Biblical bloke making a beeline out of the flaming remnants of Buggerville--minus the salinisable wifey in tow to lend at least a soup's son of metaphysical heft to the whole ordeal. In other words, I felt as though the irredeemable shittiness and outright pointlessness of my holiday experiences in culo had just been driven home to me because and only because I had been so gormless as to suppose they might be worthy any destination other than that of the Ruggerian mental wastebin. Wellsir, on top of that, within a week of my return to London and bidness as usual at Proctologitex, as if by way of punishment for my cuntish fabrication of a scenario along those very lines in service of my own cuntishly petty ends, a massively devastating explosion rocked P-Tex's factory out in Stevenage. No one was hurt, but the blast blew a hole the size of Wembley Stadium clear on through the roof, and destroyed tens of millions of pounds worth of inventory into the bargain. The final report from the insurer's investigation just came in last week: they think what happened was that one of the blokes from the floor stepped outside for a smoke, and that, on account of the fact that he was standing flush against the back wall of the building--i.e., several cunt-hair's-breadths within the no-smoking zone--a spark from his cigarette was sucked into the ventilation system and thereby brought into contact with the pure-oxygen atmosphere of the cooling room, where the newly-manfactured examination gloves, tampons, etc. are allowed to rest for a spell in the open air before they're packaged. Of course, as there were no injuries, I was not, as in my counterfactual version of the event, conscripted for factory work. In hindsight I rather wish I had been. You see, what with all of the fiscal calculations necessitated by the purchase of new materials subsequent to the disaster, the accounts payable people were absolutely swamped with work, and I was obliged to take up the slack on my end; such that every one of my formerly several-hundred-strong wanking and snoozing minutes was now completely consumed by report-running and spreadsheet-updating, and that, right on through to the beginning of the present week, I would arrive back at the maisonette well and truly knackered, with just enough energy to crack open a single Hoegaarden, park my arsecheeks on the futon and flick on the telly. But at least as far as recent weeks are concerned, if I were asked to pin my blogger's block to one particular cause, if someone were holding the proverbial schlong-shaped jizzim pistol to my head and ordering me: Press Button A, B or C or your hair is nair'd, I'd have to go with Button C, namely, Aresnal's late entry into the run for the European Championship. How, I ask you, if there were any justice in this world, would this tatty pack of cuntinental swashbucklers have been suffered to slip through the elimination rounds like an armadillo-sized rat through a cunt-hair-wide gap in the floorboards, to emerge at the other end transmogrified into England's last best hope in ought-six, a veritable batallion of Winston Churchills decked out in the armour of St. George--and this at the very moment when they were only just beginnning to get their long-overdue comeuppance at home? People are always going on about these cataclysmic events--the Holocaust, 11/9, the Boxing Day Tsunami--that make them question whether an essentially benevolent God is calling the shots up there and down here. Well, the reader already knows with what gusto I am capable of besmirching the butcher's-half-dozen squares of printed loo paper comprising this very question; he knows what manner of cuntishly depraved demiurgal bookie has rigged the whole cosmic schlongfight in my okies. All the same, I have never quite managed to let go my grip on what you might call the negative cosmological hope that if only and for once in my adult life Arsenal would finish the season closer to the bottom of the heap than to the top, things might turn out to be not so bad after all in the long run. All along, a culo, it's been this hope that's impelled me to shift my arse cheeks out of bed and up the GNR each weekday morning in loo of lying there for days on end waiting for the white-coated blokes with the butterfly nets to turn up at the front door--and a fortiori, in the evenings, to devote myself to such less spiritually corrosive pursuits as this here blog. But now that the Gunners are the sole UK team in the running for the European Championship, that hope has precipitously dropped down to just-barely infernal levels. Granted, depending on the outcome of the showdown with Juventus on the 28th, the hope-o-meter could spike up as high as the purgatorial reading before the end of the month, in which case I suspect you'll be hearing from YFC's truly quite a bit more often than of late. On the other hand, in a worst-case scenario in which Arsenal (Hoegaarden forbid!) win the Championship, come 17 May, the whole hope-sprung mechanism could blow itself to pieces, in which case, most likely, the sole question I'll be capable of posing to myself for the indefinite future will be, Out of which side of my tranquiliser-slackened gob am I going to drool today?
On a lighter note, I thought that as long as I had the editing window open, I might as well include in the present post an open letter--only the second I've received to date--that arrived in my personal inbox towards the end of last month. The author of the following appears to have made a much more thorough exploration of the AL than that undertaken by my correspondent of last December, Mrs Trippett-Jones--sorry, Ashby-Jones (keeping up with all the Joneses in my lifeworld has certainly got to be a bit of a pain in the co-jones). Indeed, to judge by the sheer breadth of reference of his letter, he seems to have pored over every word publicly composited herein since opening day last September; which implication, I must admit, doesn't quite give my desperate spirits the lift they've been craving. For, not to look a readerly gift-horse in the mouth, as off-putting as the thought that I might be typing into a void undoubtedly is, the alternative thought that I might be typing straight into a single not-entirely-sympathetic pair of fenokies watching me every move is isn't exactly on-taking. But enough of my paranoiac ravings: I'm already violating blogojournalistic etiquette in not letting my correspondent speak entirely for himself from the get-go. As with the last OL, my own piss follows post-scriptically, this time in a more conventional titty-for-tatty format.
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Wassauf, Hünden?
Or, as your people would put it, How do you do, sir? I write to you today on behalf of the Greater London and Home Counties Swabo-Liberian Diaspora (GLHCSLD [quite a mouthful isn't it, meine liebe Hünden?]), a community numbering a whopping 300 souls, all resident within the scant 500-kilometre circumfrence of the London commuter belt. We Swabo-Liberians enjoy a rich cultural heritage worthy of vying with that of any people who have yet pitched camp or driven plough on this earth since the Mesopotamian era--a heritage to be proud of, nay, smug about. For each of us may boast not only of cententially-strong genetic and cultural ties to the erstwhile and present Republic of Liberia, in virtue of our direct descent from some member of that famous nonet of Liberian expatriates who, having been obliged regretfully to flee their homeland in the wake of the waves of insurrections precipitated by the bankruptcy and virtual collapse of the Monrovia government, disembarked at Dover in the autumn of 1910; but also of sesquicentennially-strong genetic and cultural ties to the ancient Helvitio-Teutonic region of Swabia, in virtue of the direct descent of each of the aforesaid nine from one Hans Mörike, who, having been obliged equally regretfully to flee his homeland in the wake of the waves of general stroppiness precipitated by German unification (precipitated in its turn, need it be said, by the egomaniacal machinations of that vile Prussian parvenu Bismarck), disembarked at Buchanan in the summer of 1872. When one does the genealogical maths, factoring the Swabian tree by the Liberian one, the results are quite staggering: there is not a single Katze Johannes or Hünden Juliette among us who cannot claim some international luminary of the past three hundred years as near or distant kin. I alone can count among my cousins and/or grandsires such leading lights of the eighteenth-through-twentieth centuries as Charles Schwab, Benjamins Banneker and Franklin, Alberts Einstein and Sharpton, and Oprah Winfrey.
But I did not elect to put mitt to keyboard this instant for the purpose of crying up my own people's unimpeachable claims to singularity and greatness. I write today ultimately in the wholly disinterested service of a cause in which, I trust, I stand united with all Londoners worthy of the civic epithet, namely, that of cultural diversity.
You see, for all of our undeniable and scarcely-overstateable world-historical importance, we Swabo-Liberians constitute but a single tile in the vast multicultural mosaic comprised by the 33 boroughs of Greater London. Indeed, according to the latest white paper issued by the City Hall Task Force on Diversity, Greater London is home to the representatives of no fewer than 20,000 cultures and ethnicities, each possessed of its own absolutely unique heritage; on which account our Mayor has seen fit to dub our august Capital the Most Culturally Diverse City in All of Human History. (Do you hear that from across the pond, New York, New York? You so-called Cutting Board of the American Melting Pot, with your piddling 500 spoken languages? You Big Apple-achians might as well start drawing up your annexation application for submission to the Arkansas State House, and in future direct all of your self-promotional literature to the prospective producers of the next Beverly Hillbillies or Dukes of Hazzard movie; because henceforth all modifutuacious spirits in search of the true embodiment of enlightened cosmopolitanism will be shopping elsewhere, namely on the High Streets of our principal districts.)
I advert at last, Herr McGyver, mein Hauptmann, to the central topic of my epistle, namely the relevance of this formidable aforementioned demographic finding to your own blogospheric activities. The first salient attribute of your blog to claim the attention of the casual browser (e.g./viz. myself, a week and a half ago) is its title: The Angry Londoner. One might—and, indeed, did—well suppose that any individual endowed with Kugeln of the mass and thickness requisite to one styling himself the Angry Londoner would be endowed supernumerarily with the degree of acuity and curiosity vis-à-vis his fellow townsmen requisite to one arrogating to himself the task of speaking in and on their behalf. And as our Mayor has effectively proclaimed cultural diversity the main nub, the keynote, the Stadtsgeistsgrundgedanke of the London of the third millennium, one is only entitled to expect that such acuity and curiosity should manifest itself in the form of at least a smattering of attention to our multicultural mosaic, and of some sampling of the 20-myriad-fold tesselae of which it is comprised [sic (RMcG)]. Understand, Herr McGyver, that I choose my words carefully here; that it is not for nothing that I write of a smattering and a sampling rather than of an exhaustive survey or a so-called full Monty; for I am at Arsch a Praktischesmensch who appreciates that it would scarcely be possible for a single human being to canvass the entirety of our Kulturschaft on his or her own, that by such a reckoning, even at the penurious rate of a blog-post per culture per day, one of your comparatively tender age would have attained his octagenarity by the time he had paid off his balance in full (and even then, he should be obliged to take out a second loan of treble the principal balance of the first; for, if current projections are to be trusted, by 2050 the number of cultures resident here will total roughly 80,000, or one for every ten Londoners).
But in perusing The Angry Londoner in its present state, as of this Valentine's Day 2006, one looks in vain for the vaguest adumbration of a smattering or sampling of the London Kulturschaft; one is tempted, indeed, to cry out to the author/editor, in unspeakable agony, on behalf of the entire local Kultursübergemeinschaft, 'Has the concept of a reach-around ever penetrated your calcified chav's brainpan?' In five month's worth of posts, from September to January inclusive, its only acknowledgment of the mere existence of a multicultural scene in London takes the form of a merciless hatchet-job on the poor Kernevistanis; who, I have lately learnt, are about to close up their restaurant in Hoxton due to a 'recent decline in volume of clientele'. (Viel danke, Herr McGyver! Whither am I now to repair for my hebdomadal mabyar kernewek fix? To your Mum's kitchen in Diss? Nachbar, bitte! As if by Fickensalles's stretch of the imagination an insular East Angelina could be counted on to cotton to one of our kind darkening her doorstep.)
To be sure, Herr McGyver, you yourself have already evinced in passing some sense of the fatuousness of your blog's claims to geographical exemplarity, in joshingly suggesting, as you did on one occasion, that it might more properly be entitled The Something (What was it--Pacific? Feisty?) Barnetian than the Angry Londoner. But I submit to you, Herr McGyver, that on the evidence of the tenor of your performances to date, even styling yourself an exemplary Barnetian would be an act of civic hubris; that your blogospheric cursus has been too narrow-ranging even for one presuming to speak for his own borough; that only an epithet as redolent of unregenerate hickishness as, say, The White Male East-Anglian Transplant would do justice to the shameless parochiality of your authorial ethos.
To be sure, even by marmite-on-whitebread standards of north London, Barnet is a dispiriting desert of cultural homogeneity, yet even within this desert there are to be found oases of genuine diversity--particularly on its southeastern fringes, in the West Indian communities of the Two Finchleys--oases that it should be incumbent upon every Barnetian worthy of the name to explore. But on your personal 15th-century mariner's map of the borough, these oases essentially figure as uncharted waters inscribed with the legend Here Be Dragons; holed up in the cosily WASP-ish confines of your precious Woodside Park local, and of your Potters Bar office cubicle, you rest content to wallow in blokishly bibulous oblivion of them. And on those rare occasions when diversity dares to rear its lovely particoloured head in your painfully straitened monochromatic Lebenswelt, you waste no time in brusquely ushering it out of the room with the tip of your chav's walking stick. I am thinking here in the main of an episode of your post of 7 November, surtitled 'Take Back the Night,' where a handful of individuals hailing from non-Anglo-centric cultures--Manish Shah, Jay Gulati, et al.--are mentioned by name without being vouchsafed so much as a few inches of web-space in which to speak for themselves qua representatives of their respective cultural cohorts. Here, solipsitically immersed as you were in the account of your jingoistically anorakish fabrication of the so-called Bloke Fawkes holiday, you let slip a saffron opportunity for wafting over to your readers' noses a gust of the doubtlessly uniquely aromatic Punjabi or Upper-Pradeshian perspective on Woodside Park nightlife.
But am Arsch I do not intend this letter to serve as a conduit of negative energy, and I shall accordingly perorate on a positive note. Am Arsch, we should always regard the diversity of our Capital as an occasion not for napalm-torching the rivers that already divide us from our fellow Londoners, but rather for building bridges of communication across these divides. The realisation of this cultural-cum-spiritual civic works project is, need it be said, all the more exigent in the light of our imminent hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games. It is vital that all of us--Black and White, Jew and Gentile, Gay and Straight, Sikh and Hindu, Chav and Toff, Kernevistani and Swabo-Liberian--should close ranks with all speed, and in a spirit of Stadtsbruderundschwesterschaft, so that, six years hence, we may put on a jolly good show fit to make those tatty foreigners fairly retch with envy of our multicultural bounty; and thus, in conformity to this selfsame spirit, I hereupon extend to you, Herr McGyver, an invitation to attend GLHCSLD's next Märzfest, to be held at 19:00 next Saturday week at the Swabo-Liberian Union Hall located directly opposite the soon-to-be defunct Bosty Drog restaurant at Hoxton Market. The evening commences with all assembled--dressed, natürlich, in the traditional folk costume of our people--(for women the Dirndl, for men the Loden and Lederhosen)--betaking themselves to the dance floor to cut a rug or ten's worth of Greenvilles to the accompaniment of the toe-tapping strains of our traditional folk music, die Blauen. There follows a buffet banquet of traditionally delectable Swabo-Liberian delicacies--Heisshunden, Schweinshängebacken, Bratkartoffeln, washed down with great steinfuls of Märzenlager and Verrückthund; and punctuated, at evening's end, by a rousingly traditional Tortespaziergang, undertaken in competition for the grand prize of a magnificent Buchananertorte concocted beforehand by one of our more culinarily-gifted Huasfrauen. Our Märzfest is indeed a spectacle fit to dazzle the Augen of the uninitiated, seeing as how it has have late become, in effect, the signature Swabo-Liberian holiday, having long since eclipsed in point of popularity its equinoctial counterpart and erstwhile festive centrepiece of our calendar, Oktoberfest. To be quite heisshundlich, Herr McGyver, our Oktoberfest has in recent years devolved into something of a Knackwurstfest (I trust, in view of your evident familiarity with this particular conceit, I may dispense with the explication thereof). It's hard enough to get the Fleischersdutzend women of our community to turn out once a year, in the Fickendestage of springtime, let alone in the autumn. But I digress. I was, after all, supposed to be wrapping up. And so, to attend to the aforesaid Einpackung, Herr McGyver, till the 25th--and, I hope, not a day later--I wish you a heartfelt auf Wiedersehen.
Sincerely,
LaMont Mörike-Jones
President, Treasurer and Sergeant-at-Arms
GLHCSLD
P. S. I'll be sure to keep an extra Heisshund and batch of Bratkartoffeln warm for you.
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The Angry Londoner replies:
Dear Mr Mörike-Jones:
First off, thanks for the invite to your little do down in Hoxton. Second off, to deliver a walloping sock in the co-jones or mainspring of your whole tirade, fuck Ken and his task force. Fuck them with a diverse, 20,000-strong, array of culinary and surgical instruments. I'd sooner trust a white paper issued by the Third Reich's propaganda office than I would one issued by those KL-patsies down at City Hall. (Yeah, I know Ken himself is given to these same sorts of Nazi-derived shit-slinging sallies; I suspect, indeed, that before it's all over every journalist or building-contractor who's dared to look sideways at him will have been assigned his own personal stand-in drawn from the historically-verifiable ranks of Hitler's inner and outer circles. Well, I say, if Ken wants to dish out Swastika-shaped spagghetioes, he should expect to receive gobfuls of the same in return.) I don't know where, apart from their own cavernous anal cavities, Ken's minions could have pulled this statistic of 20,000 unique cultures and ethnicities. It sounds mildly to wildly inflated to these orioles. But even supposing Ken & Co. are right, and we are indeed living in the Most Culturally Diverse City in All of Human History, I believe that I am entitled to reclaim at least a sliver of umbrage from your county-fair caricaturist's adumbration of YFC's truly as a kind of latter-day Alf Garnett or East-Atlantic David Duke; in other words to protest your chalking up of my admittedly scrimpy treatment of the local multi-culti scene to a kind of congenital allergy to all things culturally diverse, or to a virtually antiseptic lack of contact with them. The fact is that there are all manner of phenomena that flit past my okies each and every day, but that I have seen fit to pass over in silence in these here pages, for one reason or another--sheer co-jone-numbing apathy being the most prevalent among them. You may have noticed, for example, that with two hardly notable pseudo-exceptions--my brief metaphorical Portrait of the Bloggist as a Young Dragoonsman in my post of 7 January, and my account of a run-in with a certain fake-beardy trick-or-treater in my post of 1 November--I have yet to make mention of a single person's sporting a moustache, or indeed any other form of facial hair. Would you then be justified in concluding, on the basis of this sweeping omission, that every bloke who crossed my path from September to January was clean-shaven? Or that I somehow have it in for the mostachio'd and bearded blokility as a class? I think not. (But if I am mistaken, and if, perchance, in addition to being the President &c. of GLSWLD you are also a member of the Greater London Bearded and Moustachio'd Gentlebloke's League; and are thereby impelled to seek satisfaction from me on account of my egregious and repeated slighting of your fraternity, I say, Step up! I've got a wardrobe full of old shirts that I'd just as gladly consign to the gutters of Shoreditch as to my local Salvation Army shop.)
In brief, in my lifeworld I put the whole multi-culti bidness on par with moustaches and beards, and treat it accordingly in these here pages. Thus, just as you shouldn't expect to learn the facial-hair-bearing status of any of my mates until, say, one of them decides to grow a 'stache or beard or to shave off whichever of the two he already has, so you shouldn't expect to learn just how culturally diverse any of them is until this diversity becomes a matter of at least some cuntishly slight degree of dramatic interest.
Third, but not least, off: from the point of smell of this rabbit, the carrot of your argument is too puny and too far off down the patch to be worth hopping after, especially after a judiciuos comparison-sniffing of a certain schlong-sized alternative carrot dangling within biting distance of his bunny's incisors. You write of the need for all of us Londoners to close ranks in preparation for the Olympics in 2012. Well, a lot can happen in six years, Mr. Mörike-Jones, to upset the best-laid plans of mice and Ken--a bird flu pandemic, for instance, or the outbreak of a Sino-American war (a.k.a. WWIII). And in the meantime, much nearer to hand, we have another cause that IMOSHO is much worthier of your noble rank-closing, namely the derailing of Arsenal's cuntishly all-but-ineluctable progress towards the European Championship. It is vital that all of us Londoners--Black and White, Jew and Gentile, &c.--should close ranks to extirpate the tumour that is Arsenal from the colon of our civic body politic; that we should join together in one unanimous cry of NOT IN OUR NAME! loud enough to carry clear on over to Spain, reverberate from the stands of the stadia of Turin, Milan and Madrid and echo thence back in our own ears; that we should ultimately flood the streets in a mighty procession bearing aloft the decapitated heads of Arsène Wenger and Thierry Henry to the Tower gate. And it is in this spirit, the spirit of Stadtsantiarsenalschaft, that I hereupon extend to you, Mr Mörike-Jones, an invitation to attend the next plenary session of the North London Arsenal-Bashers' Association, to be held at 8 pm next Thursday week at the Sedulous Ape in Woodside Park. The evening commences with all assembled--dressed, naturally in number shirts culled from the liveries of teams who have scored at least one victory over the Gunners in the past six months--getting liberally pissed to the accompaniment of whatever happens to be playing on the house jukebox. There follows a round-robin exchange of anti-Arsenal jokes, anecdotes and rants; punctuated, at evening's end, by a blind-drunk but heartfelt choral rendition of our Association's fight song, 'Arsenal, O Arsenal, They Should Have Named You Cuntsenal'. Whether you are already a confirmed-if-closeted Arsenalophobe, Mr Mörike-Jones, or are merely a sceptical fan of a non-Arsenal club, your presence at our session would be decidedly welcome; and if, upon adjournment of that session, you shall be pleased to accept a bequest of a sealed letter of induction into our central London sister association, you shall have in exchange a pledge from me, redeemable on my word as a gentlebloke, to be present at your Märzfest from the cutting of the first Greenville rug to the devouring of the last crumbs of Buchananertorte. If, however, you prove so unregenerately deaf to our gospel as not to make an appearance at the Ape on the 23rd, rest assured that I shall not be darkening your Union Hall's doorstep on the 25th; and that, having in virtue of your absence excommunicated yourself in advance from our church as a de facto Arsenalophile, you may subsequently, and in good conscience, consign that Heisshund you would have set aside for me to some other purpose, preferably that of the passionate and repeated violation of your anal schphincter.
I am, Sir, TBS, your most humble Servant,
Rugby W. McGyver, Esq.
Treasurer and Sergeant at Pints
The North London Arsenal-Bashers' Association
Labels: Arsenalophobia, Kernevistan, Post Baggage, Swabo-Liberians
posted by Rugby McGyver | 1:27 am
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