Oh Dear.

Just to prove the Stiffmouse Blog is actually written live-

OK so I’m out with my mate Paul, all ears no mouth right, but a far superior drinker than I am. We doscus, wel I disvcuss occurancies since oout lart meeting. I wonder whether to engage my spell checker  but decide the truth isd better mispelst. It rains and fue to an umbrellaa misdfunction fomd pourseves in the company of a black gut off his head on  chewing some shuit. He lights up a dubie, only in the Vine, and in place of conversation makes hasnd jestures. Of dep significance. Our eyes connect and he is saying somethinf as foreign to him as it is to me but it’s true. And that’s all I’m interestred in, you know, the truth. We talk in inter[planeary space. Three undergrad footaball supporters join us in consciousness, wonder what the fucxkf is going on and leave to plasyt pool. Only in the Vine. The black guys eyes pick on me a knowing but he elavesin a funk of something elsde. Jeez I’m pissed, but tthat’s alright. It’s funny. OK bthqat’sd it Stiffmpouse isd goiong to bed. Wenjoy your life3 it’s the only one you have. \I’ll be better tomorrow. Bod bless.

The Choir.

Watched ‘The Choir’, fabulous. Goes to show life is far better meeting challenges than sitting on your status quo. Quite made my heart weep with joy seeing all that delight generated by meeting them. But tell me, why do men move like they’ve never had sex in their life? I mean I’m no different but it intrigues me. We move like puppets. You can see our brains going, “So I move my knee to the right, oh right, OK now my left arm to a horizontal position, oh God and now my head round AND smile, no, no it’s all too much!” It’s not that with practice we could do it quicker it’s that this is our body we’re talking about. It can actually move itself very effectively without intervention from ‘head’ office. Burn your finger and it’s out of there before the e-mail about the forthcoming meeting regarding digit retraction has landed in a top floor in-tray let alone been discussed and a highly politicised memo passed back to the brachialis muscle in the forearm. But there’s probably a suspicion in all of us that to not go through this laborious process would lead to either collapsing in a heap on the floor or running naked through the streets shouting, “My mother was a sprout!” Abandon doesn’t work like that. Head office can still maintain an overview whilst leaving the lower floors to do a splendid job on their own. Everyone knows we do a better job than some muppet in the boardroom. But the inculcation of these management structures into our psyche is evident everywhere. “What on earth could my knee, or God forbid, my genitals, tell me about managing my personal corporate situation? Even my internal organs couldn’t grasp the complex decision making necessary to run this organisation!” We need to get a management consultant in. “Sir, may I call you Sir, you fail to realise you have an exceptional workforce using its best efforts every moment to support your company. Your constant interventions from above to control all their hard work is its single most damaging factor. Every single member of your workforce is best given the freedom to do what they do supremely well. All they need from you is good working conditions and to be listened to when they’re over worked.” Of course management says, “That’s all very well for him to say, he doesn’t have my responsibility to the share holders to think about.” What bloody share holders!? “Well there’s my family, neighbours, that person over there who’s looking at me, the woman on the train this morning who may have thought I had insufficient deodorant on, they’re endless.” And then to save the day Gareth Malone appears, da da didlly da de da, “Why not form a workplace choir?” Fabulous idea Gareth!

Lead into Gold.



OK this obviously appeals on many levels not least to one who's Mothermouse has been globe trotting this last fortnight. But the object of this mock-up book cover is to test audience reaction to the idea of a Stiffmouse Compilation in book form. Being not plagued by self-doubt, in fact being rather more prone to self-aggrandisement I’m quite used to seeing my sow’s ears as a Dolche and Gabana handbag, so I want to get a more disinterested view from the many, well ~20 readers of my blog before I camp out in Hodder & Stoughton’s foyer. Answers out of 10 can be submitted in Facebook comments. Please enter the first number that comes to mind. Disregard subsequent considered additions and subtractions on the basis of me being jolly nice chap and easily disappointed or a misguided self-opinionated twat who you’ve always hated and can’t resist this glorious opportunity to put the boot in. These will not do. It’s purely whether you think a commuter from Surbiton to Charring Cross will enjoy it. PS, it should read “by Stiffmouse”. Silly mistake there, rather gives the game away.

Shaky Scouse Guy.

(note to self)
Backstage at the X Factor Christopher Maloney is ushered into a dimly lit room. “Sit down Chris”, a voice from the slanted light of a desk lamp. “You heard those comments?” Chris nods. “Gary doesn’t get it, you need to listen.” Chris trembles slightly, mouth a little open. “You started with that wobbly microphone remember, that was genius. This guys going to be shite, we’ll have a good laugh at this one and bam, you slayed them with the voice. You confounded their expectation, a nice guy and he can sing as well, right?” He nods again. “And now all these comment because that’s all you are, a nice guy with a voice. But you don’t want to not be a nice guy do you?” Chris shakes his head. “No, because your image of a nice guy is shit. ‘Oh look it’s our Christopher on the TV, isn’t he doin’ well, he’s a lovely fella, he’ll lick your shoes if you ask ‘im.’” The voice pauses. “You’re a ferry singer. Go back to Liverpool and dine out on meeting Gary Barlow.” Chris breathes deep and opens his mouth to... “Forget it I’m talking. Singers don’t choose their stage, the stage chooses them and at the moment the Rotterdam ferry lounge’s little semicircle playing to bored passengers looking at their watches and getting pissed is choosing you. But you don’t want that do you? Chris, body language isn’t scratching your arse means you’re randy, it emanates like a light from every movement and what we’re getting is, ‘I desperately want to please you’, yes? We’re pissed, talking, eating crisps, looking at the time and still ‘I desperately want to please you.’ That’s how ferry singers are, it’s their job, that’s their stage. You get me? Now correct me if I’m wrong,” the voice rises, “ but the X Factor fucking stage is no fucking ferry lounge, is it?” Chris begins to wobble; his mouth opens a little more. “Nice guys haven’t drawn a line that says this is who I am. They can’t because nice doesn’t include the hero, the warrior, the man who doesn’t want to please you; he wants to please himself, which happens to include giving you pleasure. Yes? The nice man runs after his wife, ‘Would you like a cup of tea dear?’ The warrior grabs her firm, draws her to him looking deep into her eyes and gives her the gentlest kiss, barely touches her lips. And you want to make us a fucking cup of tea, on the X Factor fucking stage!? You understand me?” Chris’s mouth won’t open any further, he smiles. “And don’t give me that boyish charm, it won’t wash. I know for a guy like you it’s bloody difficult but you’re going to have to go out there and show your naked pleasure in doing it, doing what you want on your stage and, from a place you’ll struggle to find, draw that audience to you, eye to eye and give it the gentlest kiss. Jesus Christ, Michael Buble got it straight away!”

This time Maybe?

Is it me or is something going on? I mean I’ve been wrong before, you know, wishful thinking and stuff. And then this evenings ‘Have I got News for You’ with Conrad Black being ripped to shreds by a thousand barbs, sitting there like Jaba the Hut smirking at all humanity, proof if it were needed he has no blood left to bleed. But that’s just the latest thing. A two year sentence for inhuman care-home workers, a documentary on Donald Trump’s sociopathic inhuman bullying, Jimmy Saville being turned in his year-old grave, and even the BBC genuflecting on its part in their favourite uncle’s fiddling about, as in the Who’s double album, Tommy, that blew me away in ’69. A trader being prosecuted for losing £1.5 billion trying to save the bank that he “love as his family”, a ‘Thinking Aloud’ mental health radio program about thoughtless harassment in the workplace. Then enter Darren Brown as a media suicide bomber, well almost. His premise is to take one individual through the ‘reality’ of Armageddon hoping to show his uncaring drift away from humanity can be reversed. This individual began an average, intelligent couch potato uninterested in the finer points of compassion, heroism and real affection. The program follows his horrific journey courtesy of explosions, gory makeup and actors. It’s difficult to watch because he is not an actor; he’s real like us, affected like we would be, scared, confused and interested in his own survival. He shows little outward emotion, no easily readable facial expressions, no glib lines of dialogue. This is really happening to him. And that’s the end of part 1. So is there a confluence occurring? As we wake and sleep are there creative forces aligning themselves behind some thrust to reinstate humanity? Might the amorphous desires of the flower power sixties be reprising itself in a more structured muscular form? Is woolly liberalism being replaced by the concrete findings of neuroscience, sociology and psychology? Or will it take some real armageddon to wake us up to it? I don’t know, I’ve been wrong before.

Hot News.

Forget the US election, this is momentous. A couple of years ago our smart ginger cat, Britney, worked out how to feed herself from the ‘Cup of Plenty’, the mug we use to dole out dry cat food and which often has a bit left in it. One terrible day I watched Dave, our black cat with one eye, the only thing that differentiates him from Cocky Black Cat who doesn’t live here but plagued us all until we fitted an electronic cat flap, eat that asshole! Where was I, that sentence has gone on too long. Oh yes Dave watched in awe as Britney dispense herself morsel after morsel from the Cup of Plenty by paw dipping. After she left he crept towards it, sat by it and waited. And waited, and nothing! Not a single morsel leapt out for him to eat. I’ve never seen a cat so dejected. Dave’s heaven is a constant, moment by moment supply of food and being already 6-7 kilos he’s not going to get that any time soon. Seeing this heaven tantalisingly dangled in front of him and then cruelly wrenched away must have been terrible. Months later Betty also learned the magic of the Cup of Plenty while Dave could only barge into our ankles as we walked about the kitchen. But he must have been watching, taking mental notes of cause and effect, studying techniques. And today I can announce that Dave now has a GCSE in paw dipping. Parents amongst you will recognise the swelling breast of pride one feels at moments like this. Our Dave, who’d a thought it, paw dipping. I briefly considered banishing the cup but even Dave’s not going to get fat one morsel at a time. But if he learns Betty’s later technique of knocking the whole blood lot off the worktop onto the floor, well that’s another matter.

A Necessary Dream.

I give my card to the assistant to the secretary of Donald Trump. “Department of Sociopathic Affairs?” she enquires. “Head of” I say importantly, “Tim Seaglitz.” “Government?” she enquires again. “Yep. “What is this regarding?” “We’re beginning a study of the special characteristics required to be a successful entrepreneur. It’s a new initiative to kick start us out of this slump. I hear it’s straight from Obama. And who has them more than Mr Trump,” I smile. I get the shrug off, leave my card and wait. A week or so later I get a meeting, Mr Trump will see me for fifteen minutes the day after next. I enter, smile, we shake hands and I sit down. “Sociopathic Affairs?” he opens, “Sounds ominous.” I laugh, “I’m a research psychologist. Everything we do sounds ominous. We’ve the only office I know where the sign says, ‘You do have to be crazy to work here.’” This shmoozing goes on. The only purpose of this meeting is to get the door open a little further. It’s agreed we can have a further session for me to identify his special characteristics. After three sessions my notebook is full and I have everything on my voice recorder, ‘for reference.’ Back in the office I convene a meeting, me, my boss and three other eminent psychologist, professors from Harvard, Stanford and MIT. I hand out my transcripts with various responses sharpied to save time. There’s a silence. Jim from MIT breaks it. “You’re making a case for Trump being a sociopath?” “Well what do you think, what do you all think?” “Well take away the name and this person is hundred percent sociopath.” I look at Michael. “True, no doubt about it.” “Dangerous?” I ask. They nod. I conclude, “So four eminent psychologist would give evidence as expert witnesses that Donald Trump is a sociopath right?” They nod again rather reluctantly. “So what do we do?” As you can guess this is a long story so I’ll cut to the chase. We put in an application to have Trump questioned with a view to having him sectioned. He had his layers crawling all over us but this wasn’t a legal matter it was mental health. We had him pulled in for appraisal, he went ballistic and he ended up in a straight jacket, that’s right a straight jacket! It took three male nurses and a shot of sedative to get him in it. Well the media had a field day, “Trump diagnosed insane”, and I was 24/7 trying to put them right. Sure he was mentally ill but it was a condition brought on by years of being a wealthy oligarch. It can happen to anybody, possibly everybody put in that position. Suddenly these powerful people in finance, commerce and politics were being judged on whether they were sane or not, not how much power and money they had. And I and other psychologists and psychoanalyst had the professional expertise to diagnose it. The lawyers were powerless, the movers and fixers in management couldn’t get a handle on it, in fact they were more interested in going into therapy to prove they were sane than saving their bosses. Of course they came out of therapy with something they weren’t expecting; like personal growth you know. I tell you in one year this whole thing advanced the human race more than inventing the wheel. There are now more people in care institutions than there are in prison. Even Trump’s responding to treatment but I don’t think they’ll ever let him out.

Weekend Musings.

Friday evening with Suzy and Julie, Saturday evening with Antony and Sunday watching doc on Donald Trump. There’s a spectrum! Friday lots of play and disclosure, Saturday stories, referencing and theories, and Sunday a full-blown sectionable psychopathic billionaire. And not forgetting me who, as I vaguely remember saying, am sliding towards femininity. As I said to Antony I see men or masculinity as building layer upon layer of conjecture on top of some essential reality of being. “This is what I know, these are the stories of who I am, these are my theories of everything etc.” Men do this and I do this in their company and it’s essentially boring. There’s a sense in which we are a disconnected cognition trying to build a disconnected cognitive existence. I suspect the male process is self-justification in respect to their mothers where women are processing their covert rivalry with theirs. Born same and born different. Anyway. Oh right yes so anyway then there’s Donald. He is a supreme example of a disconnected cognition who conceives of ‘being’ as controlling his own avatar in a Second Life game where nothing is of consequence except ‘the rules’ of his game. But then we’re all to a ‘normal’ extent in the process of constructing a dictionary of equivalences. In fact most mental health problems are caused by erroneous equivalencies. So I guess in my search for a reality of being I’m losing the need, gradually, for my ingrained self-justification. Maybe one day I’ll be able to shout, “Hello mum, it’s me! Your equal.” And in that there’s an encompassing of the feminine. Maybe similarly women, in their search for a reality of being must overcome the self-doubt induced by their maternal rivalry to find their own solid ground. Maybe. And then there’s Donald again. Disconnected cognition desperately needs confirmation. It can be from scientific proof, an enclave of like minds, or the brutish simplistic surety of a psychopath such as Mr Trump. It’s as if all our power structures are built on and for the ersatz pleasure cognitive disconnection. Plainly human bodies, the currency of the feminine, have no part to play in the schemes of the disconnected. So answer this Donny, “Where did you misplace your reality of being?” With thanks to you all for our wonderful conversations.

Are You Indigenous?

Just watched ‘You’ve been Trumped’, BBC1 10pm Sunday and I’m fucking angry. Clark Kent has left the building! The program is a documentary about Donald Trump’s planned golf complex in the west coast of Scotland. The Trump process on our good old British soil couldn’t be more like the American’s treatment of their own indigenous Indians if it tried. The scheme was thrown out by the Council planners as failing miserably their sustainability guidelines and would also mean the destroying of an important SSI. Trump took it to the Scottish parliament who overruled that decision. Then began a long process of harassment of the local people. Involved in this harassment were the local police assaulting, yes assaulting, and arresting a journalist for no offence other than reporting the situation. They strictly enforced Trumps wishes yet were strangely ‘powerless’ to act on behalf of the locals. Trump’s workers ploughed up a local’s wooden fence on his own land and ‘nothing could be done’ but when the local pulled up a few little red boundary markers the local was prosecuted for causing £15 worth of damage. When another local’s fence was demolished without permission he got a bill for over £2,000 for Trump’s rebuilding of it and again no prosecution for the original vandalism. Trump has now destroyed acres of sand dunes and natural habitat. His figures, on which he sold his idea to the Scottish parliament, are on inspection wildly inaccurate. The local farms and houses he wishes to destroy are typically rural but are described in the context of his wonderful scheme as eyesores, ugly and offensive, the local people, the indigenous people of Scotland, though he didn’t say as much, worthless white trash. What Trump is doing is the equal of the decimation of their own ingenious Indians; a concerted series of ignorant and offensive acts, but for his actions to be sanctioned and supported by the Scottish government and our police is barely credibly and equally offensive. Alix Salmond will be turning in his grave when he gets one. The question Clark Kent is struggling with in a phone box somewhere is, are we losing our fight with the Psychopaths Club, are we becoming an indigenous people?

Toilet Seat Synchronicity.

Our toilet seat won’t stay up. I mean it’s not a bad case, some just fall straight back down. Ours hovers vertical for anything up to several minutes then bang, down it goes. It’s new-ish, from Wickes I think, with an off-set hinge and swivels for adjustment. This might appear a small matter but it’s important. You see having read ‘The Selestine Prophesy’, apologies for the spelling it was a long time ago, I am aware of synchronicity and the abstruse connectivity that underpins our physical existence. And that well honed awareness has allowed me to recognise the true meaning of this apparently insignificant occurrence. The stay-up-ness of your toilet seat indicates who wears the trousers in your house. It’s true. Our old seat would stay up like a soldier, rock steady he was, but this new one, unreliable. This of course means Mothermouse is gaining the upper hand. I’ve suspected it for a while but this is proof. Mothermouse is bidding for the trousers. I’ve been at it a couple of times with a screwdriver adjusting the swivels wondering if the alignment of the hinges is somehow inducing a subtle rotational thrust, adjusting it forward and back, but each time it just won’t stay. It just hovers there waiting till my back’s turned, and bam. I mean how’s your toilet seat? If it won’t stay up, it falls right back down, forget it you’re a doomed man, powerless in your own home. At least I’ve got a fighting chance. And if it sits there comfortably resting against the cistern well done, you has got no worries. (the ‘you has’ is the suggestion of my grammar checker, I’d gone with the more correct ‘you’ve’. I’m wondering if it was programmed by an African American, but I like it, it adds flavour) Where was I? Ah yes, no this is no plumbers misjudgement, not a faulty product; it’s the sign of a condemned man. Sorry that’s it. I read it in the Selestine Prophesy

The Answers.

As societies we’ve known for centuries that power corrupts and introduced democracy to limit its effect. Over those centuries psychopaths have leant to overcome it by forming two psychopathic groups for the public to choose from. It simply becomes a two or three-headed mutation of a one headed dictatorship. Or psychopaths in the non-democratic elite of commerce and the media join together to psychopath-ise government. We must remember that psychopathy is a latent trait in all humans that can become sociopathic under certain circumstances. It is not a personal failing, a rational choice of deception, cruelty or criminality but a creeping change in cognitive processing due to those circumstances. It is not appropriate to lord them then execute them, we need to change the circumstance. It’s as ridiculous as giving a person mind altering drugs then indicting them for believing they’re Napoleon. The real criminality is providing the drugs in the first place. But the fact remains we do need governance. In our current paradigm governance is responsibility is elitism is power is isolation is omniscience. Each follows the other like an inexorable line of elephants. The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters under this paradigm can be easily dismissed as having no leader, no proposals etc. What a bunch of brainless powerless losers. But their underlying phenomenology is so different it produces an unfathomable, confusing and frightening picture. We must surely build a new house before moving out of the old one. But this one is like moving from Downton Abbey into a compact sustainable self-build. OMG! Lets take the elephants one by one. Responsibility is for one’s own functioning not ‘for’ other people. Elitism cannot occur if responsibility is restricted to self-function, ‘how well do (you think) I contribute?’ The mindset of contribution, giving, does not fit with the mindset of power, which is taking, but then most current politicians espouse motivations of giving, supporting and providing without being particularly motivated by them. This is perhaps a result of the next elephant, isolation. Isolation provides fertile ground for misguided conjecture. For example in isolation greed can be appealing, a victimless objective, but with the consistent direct experiencing of its consequences a more realistic view can be maintained. The Wall Street protesters by camping outside its financial institutions are, as best they can, making this happen. To enact a policy of requiring direct experience as illustrated by TV programs like Secret Millionaire and The Shop Floor there would be benefits to governance as well as the personal well-being of all concerned. And finally omniscience. This whole structure is founded on a hierarchy of ‘knowing’, not the knowing of some scientific law but the individual knowing of the individual. This is merely conjecture. Here again the psychopathic tendency needs to be quelled, biffed on the nose. At the beginning of the Iraq war millions of British citizens protested but the government ‘knew’ best. Even without raw factual information the population ‘knew’ better. My proposal would be a new discipline within or adjacent to government tasked to provide independent, unbiased information and analysis to the public and for the public’s response to constitute a percentage, say 50%, of the vote in parliament. In all these things there appears a need for a paradigm shift to counteract the psychopathic clubs emerging at the top of all our major institutions. We need to do something if not for our sake for theirs.

The Psychopath Club.

If you watched the film you’ll notice several things. These two guys are playful, intelligent and selflessly brave. Corporate people may be intelligent but use it along strictly prescribed lines; they have a self-learned blinkered vision highly attuned to hierarchy and the dictates of superiors, and a poor sense of play. Their response to occurrences and ideas outside their blinkered field of view are vehemently dismissed as lies, sick, twisted, cruel, irrelevant, vindictive, even possibly terrorism. Very much like any cult they have a careful mind-changing induction process, a high level of shared referencing within the group, a highly enforced boundary and a mutual perception and rejection of external attacks. This is the perfect home for psychopaths as superbly exposed in the documentary, ‘Enron The Smartest guys in the Room’.
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xIO731MAO4 )
Every characteristic of psychopathic behaviour is incontrovertibly evident in all the key players, and by implication their accountants, lawyers, even the then President Bush. Closer to home I observe my own, hopefully limited propensity for psychopathic thinking. In my internal dialogue about some fractious or fearful event I try to consolidate my own view and undermine the fearful element in a multitude of ways to diminish its presence. I take sides. It becomes quite imaginable in the extreme to solidify my view to such an extent that in stating it I don’t perceive myself to be lying. I could bully without perceiving myself to be brutal, manipulative in order to simply do ‘the right thing’ etc. If then a normal person like myself has the seeds of psychopathic behaviour and our institutions of power are breeding grounds for that behaviour to the point it has become endemic within them by what means can we overcome it or at least limit its effect? Answer to follow.

OMG!

Settle down and watch-

http://www.filmsforaction.org/Watch/The_Yes_Men_Fix_The_World_2009/

If it wasn’t obvious before let me reiterate ‘Psychotic Group Delusion’ or ‘Group Think’ as the CIA term it is rife in government, commerce and the media. It’s never been better exposed than here. What passes as corporate professionalism is a spurious delusion that otherwise sane and cogent men and women are weaned onto in the process of achieving their position. Once there their exclusive entry into their particular sphere of governance ensures the purveyance of their delusion as truth. Anyway just watch.

It’s So Unfair.

So I’m reading this ‘Conversations with God’ book and finding it full of omniscient authority that one might expect from an archangel. We’re all entities in clusters in the process of working our own way to omniscience through many lifetimes. I like it as a long view but am quite occupied with the one in hand. As almost an aside whilst talking about sex and how scrummy and beneficial it is and that it’s to be enjoyed wherever the fruit is hanging as it were God drops in that entities must serve many lifetimes as a male before progressing to one’s female lifetimes. That’s like, well in my terms, that’s like a promotion! Well that’s a slap in the face! I mean Christians refer to God as ‘he’ right so what’s going on. I feel stabbed in the back, a victim of son-icide. Chief hom casting his brothers aside as mere apprentice females. That can’t be right. After I calmed down I have to admit there’s a certain ring to it. I mean OK some females aren’t making a great job of it but as a whole, as it were, no smutty illusion intended, they appear connected to a strand of whimmery unavailable to us males. They can glimpse the bigger picture, which truth be told often confuses them, whereas males are content with 35mm slides of mere details that we blow up to immense proportions in order to prove our importance. Yet somehow we have to admit we are the seed drill and they are the field, we’re the moth and..etc. Oh and we’re the muscle and they’re the mouth. Perhaps that’s why while Mouthermouse is away I’ll be having a pint with Suzy on Friday, dancing with Sarah and an assortment of women on Monday, seeing Julie and Suzy for a candle light chat Wednesday, meeting up with Jenny when I can arrange it and hopefully seeing Pam some time and a catch up with Linda. Haven’t seen Linda in ages. I mean I do have male friends but it’s all ‘have you seen my slides?’ and anyway from my industrial experience it’s always a good idea to fraternise with the managers

It’s Kinda Obvious.

Big weekend in British Super Bikes, the showdown where the BSB championship is won or lost. It’s OK this isn’t about pistons.
Two monkeys in an experiment. Man gives both a slice of cucumber, both happy, man gives one cucumber and the other a grape, monkey throws cucumber back at man in disgust. Sound familiar? Oh and the other monkey happily eats the grape. It seems primates have a sense of fairness or to be more precise unfairness. We’re happy to get the grape and pissed off to get the cucumber. This leads to two effects. One, get the grape, and two, retaliate if you don’t. This explains the whole of human history. When all else changes these two themes are constant providing through the centuries the rich, the poor and conflict. From hunter/gatherers to industrial farming, tribes to states, wooden clubs to missiles we appear to have a Caligula complex. To us being either happy to get or pissed off to not get seem the obvious two sides of the same coin, but is that just a quirk of our primate brain? Other animals try to get because they need to survive, but once it’s been decided who’s got the morsel the other just turns to their own preoccupation of getting something else. Try the same experiment with squirrels and you’d get a different result. So we have these two constants throughout the whole of human history, i.e. they’re not about to change soon. But what has changed and continues to is our capacity to get more grapes and to retaliate. The rich have the potential to unbalance world economies and war has the potential to destroy it. It seems only a matter of time before our innate primate sense of unfairness destroys us. While we piddle about with our petty righteous considerations we overlook this deviant primate drive and its repercussions. Back to BSB. On the slow down lap the winner and loser stopped to give each other a hug of mutual affirmation. The winner when asked about riding with the pain of an earlier injury said, “I’m on a real high right now, you could kick me in the nuts and I wouldn’t feel it.” You don’t get that in Formula 1.

Toasters.

George Gideon Oliver Osborne hasn’t a clue. Let me explain in terms of toasters. The UK has say a billion toaster right, enough for all, but a small percentage of the population figure out a way of getting more and more. They stashed them in every available cupboard and cellar, in the attic and loads in the garage and next-doors as well because he’s got a driving ban and his wife went off with her therapist. Anyway over time these few cornered the market in toasters so much so that more and more people had to go without toast and toasted teacakes, which is my favourite. And scones as it happens. So to bridge the toaster deficit George Gideon Oliver Osborne took toasters from the poor arguing they can’t afford bread anyway. He took a few from the stashers but not too many because he didn’t want them leaving the country and take their toasters with them, then we’d really be in trouble. Well the stasher kept stashing and the toaster gap got ever wider. Then one day he hit on an idea. All he had to do was borrow the toasters from the few stashers. He wouldn’t take them like a toaster tax but let them keep ownership whilst distributing their excess toasters to the rest of us so we could all have toast again. They could hold say a thousand, which is enough for any man, and the rest would go into the government toaster bank. They wouldn’t be very happy but they still owned all their toasters, and it’s unlikely they’d leave the country without them. This allowed George Gideon Oliver Osborne to stop borrowing toasters on the open market and still have enough to cover the UK’s needs. And the stashers would only get paid for lending their toasters on the basis of how well the country as a whole was doing which focused their minds on all of us not just their own toaster fetish. 

Learn to Churn.

Tomorrow Mothermouse is going back in time to a land of wooden houses and picket fences, sheep and dairy farms, where even the Earth is still erupting like a youthful cheek: New Zeeland. I will be ever grateful to our NZ ski chalet rep for mercilessly taking the piss out of my pompous English cohort. Skiing is a recreational sport not a sign that one’s antecedents lived in Downton Abbey. Anyway being on my own for three weeks I will turn to music. I decide to internet shop for a new USB audio interface for use with my DAW. A DAW is a computer program that lets one record and manipulate a multitude of audio channels, add reverb, chorus, cut and paste, auto-tune, etc and add anything from a drum track to a full orchestra via a synth controlled by MIDI. So far so much the ultimate creative tool, at least so goes the blurb. Unfortunately this ultimately creative tool is so desirable it seduces even the moderately creative to use it, not to mention those that can’t even use a spoon imaginatively. As a result a pop record can be made in twenty minutes by cutting and pasting a 4:4 bar a hundred times, gargling over it and auto-tuning the result to resemble Three Blind Mice. Add a mildly pornographic video and rap section by a black person using a preschool rhyming dictionary and ca-ching. If only I were a digitised automaton I might enjoy it. But I’m not. Or said equipment used by a twenty something bemoaning the fact he’s still in nappies or is in, out, lost, found, over or under love, a word he has yet to define adequately. I’m not that either. So I sit with my guitar wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do with it now that music has been wormed to the core. It reminds we of meeting a newspaper writer who on asking said he was a ‘churnalist.’ That about sums it up.

The Answer is Now

Many roads have been leading me towards spontaneity recently, not me being good at it but trying to grasp what it is, what it looks and feels like. A little snippet from a book, Conversations with God, the big G saying, “The point I’m trying to make is that when you come to each moment cleanly, without previous thought about it, you can create who you are, rather than re-enact who you once were. Life is a process of creation, and you keep living it as if it were a process of re-enactment.” In Five Rhythms I’m reminded of riding a playful wave of creative choreography, shaping and reshaping in what feels like perfection, on X Factor when Nicole Shertsinger’s face flashed through three discrete expressions in less than a second, and Jessie J singing Domino. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrLNwNg6n9k  Though well practiced and highly skilled she’s not performing through thought but being in the uncomplicated momentary joy of a three-year-old. To quote the book again, “Remember you pre-sent this moment (the ‘present’ moment) to your Self because it contains the seed of a tremendous truth”, and by thought I preclude myself from seeing that truth. I’m reminded of Csíkszentmihályi’s observations of ‘Flow’, of the super speed of eye cues in NLP, that so much happens before my clunky thoughts, abstractions, expectations and judgments kick in. So how to get there? Alcohol does it after a fashion but badly, and thinking and learning about it conceptually only gives rise to further conceptualisation or worse creating a cognitive equivalent. My few glimpses of it reveal it to be simply ‘perfect play’, or to make it personal, my perfect self at play. Our problem seems to be that when we achieve it it’s so perfect we tend to overlook it and only notice the ‘fault’ that kicks us back into the ordinary. It’s nice to know the next most popular thing on the internet after porn is cats. Now they do know a thing or two about spontaneity.

Bugger!

As my recent sojourn into hyper domesticity nears its end and Mothermouse is able to donk around the house like Marley’s ghost rather than the heavy thud of an approaching Tyrannosaurus Rex I can look back at multitasking with a balanced view. Men do multitask but under a different heading. We perceive it as multiple overlapping time sub-streams that, by running concurrently with precisely calculated start points, reduce the overall time required for a required set of tasks. For instance when cooking a meal I will note down at the bottom of a sheet of paper the required eating start point above which I write the times required in minutes for each constituent part, peas, chips, sausages etc. then in an adjacent column I calculate their start points relative to the eating start point. I thus place the sausages in the oven at 6.45pm and set a timer for four minutes and then begin the potatoes. I set the timer again for seven minutes to notify me when the peas need to go on and then five minutes, which through the wonder of mathematics equates to the required eating start time. Thusly in the intervening periods I am free to do other things, clean the cat flap, wash up and collect mealtime accoutrements. This isn’t multitasking because I’m only ever doing one thing at a time. Women on the other hand do multitask by considering everything that needs to be done all the time in a frenzy of conflicting necessities. Whilst cooking a similar meal Mothermouse will be considering if the bins need to go out, the cats need water, the two-pound man is getting better, Margaretmouse’s broken metatarsal was indeed less severe than hers and whether to get me a cow onesie for Christmas. (I can’t wait) In a mans world this isn’t true multiple overlapping time sub-streams, it’s frying one’s brain with nonsense that will be done when the time comes and better left to a written list and forgotten about. Yesterday for instance whilst considering nothing more than the job in hand I mended an old watch and set it to the correct time, day of the week, month and phase of the moon, stuck a base on a cup, maintained our electric tin opener and took some rubbish to the tip, which due to government cut is now closed Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Bugger!