Steubenville Rape Rap.

I watch a video of a scientist proving that human imagination can alter the diffraction patterns of a laser passing through a double slit in a closed box, a logical impossibility, and then read about two young footballers prosecuted for rape in a small town outside Pittsburgh. I’m struggling to understand why I’m wanting to make a connection between the two. On the one hand it appears the mind operates behind the locked doors of sensory perception, and on the other imagination appears to have an effect on actual reality irrespective of sensory connection and physical distance. The concoction of drunk lads, a paralytic girl and iPhone cameras made the case open and shut. The evidence was collected by the perpetrators as a testament to hubris. What was shown to friends with pride bit back with tears in the dock. But for the inventive minds at Budweiser and Apple the evening would have been very different. So in a very real sense our inventive minds can through imagination bring things into being which we thereafter must live with. In the scientific experiment those who meditated far outperformed those who didn’t, as did musicians, artists etc, creatives who are in the business of bring things into being. This suggests that the mind can be disciplined to receive and create or if left undisciplined be at the mercy of the concoctions of its own sensory isolated domain. In fact if anything connects the two stories it’s that being prosecuted for rape was also a logical impossibility in the minds of the two footballers that evening. As an inventor I’m used to ideas being somehow ‘in the air’ for one to catch. Years ago one morning I had an idea that would revolutionise the optics of photocopiers only to be shown a hot new paper in the afternoon of the exact same principal, and our cat Betty definitely knows when we’re thinking of taking her to the vets. It’s as if we’re all connected by thought in one way and disconnected by it in another. Is this thought I’m having purely ‘my’ (disconnecting) thought, or ‘a’ (connecting) thought? With a supplementary question of ‘how do I differentiate between the two?’ And possibly a third question, “How the hell do we catch Betty to take her to the vets!?”

Call the Midwife.

Today Mothermouse is expecting a cat-flap. She receives a text to say she will be fully dilated between 12.15 and 1.15pm and to expect a delivery. She waits in. By 2.15 tension rises as her cat-flap becomes overdue. Another text, “Your parcel was delivered at 94 Tilbury.” This is puzzling, there’s no road or neighbours named Tilbury nearby and as the crow flies we’re some two hundred miles north of the famous dock town, and why 94 when we live at 109. We try Margaretmouse opposite at 94. She has not received a cat-flap, nor 96 or 107. 105 was out and 111 wouldn’t take it in for us on principle. Our bundle of joy appears to have been delivered to the wrong number of the wrong street of possibly the wrong town. We enter a period of post-natal depression. At 4.20 Mothermouse gets a phone call from a lady enquiring if she was expecting. She explains that she lives at 94 and was looking out of the window and saw a courier trying to make a delivery at 109. The lady at 109 is elderly and so she offered to take the parcel in to deliver later but the lady at 109 is shall we say post menopausal and is not expecting anything. The lady at 94 is as stumped as the intended mother at the other 109. After several enquiries to the courier company she finds a telephone number on the parcel and rings it- Mothermouse. The conversation explains all and I go round to Moorview Road to collect it. It’s a small world, well at least mine is.

Teresa F May.

Look it’s bloody cold this morning, my desk is cold, my mouse is cold, I’m cold and I’d still be in bed if I hadn’t needed a pee. I am not best pleased with my bladder. And then Teresa F May explains, “something only we conservatives understand” in her bid to stab colleague Cameron in the back and ‘take one down for Maggie.’ She began by stating her deeply held public service aspirations to help, care for, support and succour every hapless inhabitant of her country in terms that would make the Mother of the same name blush, and then added, “ but it’s much more than that”, as if intimating Jesus may have been a jolly nice chap but not of the calibre required to lead the Conservative Party. The bitch went on, “we know you can’t help people by handing out money, they must learn to help themselves.” No doubt she had bankers in mind here as the illuminating stars in the night sky over Bethlehem, but in my parlance the message is far more succinct. “You unfortunates can fuck off.” Obviously her concept of ‘service’ in her devoutly held principles of public service is more akin to the shafting of a plethora of cows by the farmers prize bull as in “get them sponging vagrants out of my stable.” But lets assume she’s right, benefit of the doubt and all that, how might the poor help themselves? Obviously squatting’s a start if you’re pregnant, homeless and can’t afford a room at a Holiday Inn but lets really think outside the box. Well there’s shop lifting, drug dealing, bank robbing, car theft just for starters, and if Ms May and the Conservatives are serious about helping us learn to help ourselves they could put on courses in pilfering, perjury, robbery, breaking and entering and for advanced students, manipulating the Libor rate. To be honest I don’t think Teresa Fucking May has really thought this through.

Farce in Perpetuity.

Down the guitar shop for strings and realise guitar shops are the closest men get to shopping comme les femmes. “Does my bum look big in this vintage Fender Strat?” Twiddles are twirls and a full-length mirror is a Marshal 100 watt combo. Bumped into a chap who played on Thursday, “Was that your wife? She’s got a lovely voice.” I say thanks but am secretly peeved at the absence of the other complement, MINE! At least I refrain from saying, “Well you were shit mate, and don’t give me all that bollocks about the guitar neck.” I explain that though she may appear a pleasant woman she’s a pain in the butt to work with. It relieved my resentment and sort of kept it in the family. Which reminded me of other fraught gigs I have known. A five-piece cover band in the East End where the drummer was going out with the singer who was also the manager’s wife. Said drummer offered an opinion that she was flat, she offered an opinion regarding his opinion, he reiterated his opinion with added expletives and she voted with her feet and left us an instrumental four-piece as she was the only one who’d taken the trouble to learn the words. Much guppy-ing. Later in a jazz ensemble in a pub in Attercliff, which is now a, er ‘gentleman’s club’, I got sent to look for the landlord for our measly twenty quid and found him hiding in the cellar. Actually I felt sorry for him seeing as if he had taken twenty quid that evening it would have been a miracle, and probably ours, jazz not being renown for its pulling power in Attercliff. Up at Crooks in a jazz improv session the trumbone player put the music on the stand and we all blasted away not realising it was in Ab, the sax was Eb, the trumpet Bb and guitar was concert pitch. Everyone playing in different keys is jazzy but not in a good way. In a play after hurriedly donning the wrong size tights I spent the performance joined at the knees, my giant pair of scissors came apart flailing dramatically but not as intended, and my nose started bleeding while prostrate so I had to play the rest of the scene holding my nose. In the final death scene of the ‘The Duchess of Malfie’ the imminently to-be-deceased fell on a box that hadn’t been locked down and disappeared off stage. It totally spoiled the dramatic effect when he had to walk back on to deliver his dying words. It’s no wonder I see life as a perpetual farce.

Barbara and Barbara.

Thursday night at our local, the Ale House. Tony is trying out a new open mike night. Mothermouse and I arrive early only to find the place already full of people clutching guitars. 8.45. Two pints. We sit with a couple we know whose simple delight in what life offers might make Jesus wonder if it was really neccessary to be so serious. The MC would have probably been a Rock God if his parents had had the presence of mind to call him Bono or Slash rather than Ainsley but he puts on a good show. He performs with various line-ups and introduces people he knows. 9.30. Two pints. We realise Ainsly has a secret weapon when it comes to open mike nights, he’s a guitar teacher so has a wealth of protégés eager to air their learning. We quickly count the guitar necks sprouting from the crowd and figure we might not get a go. Barbara impinges herself on Ainsley’s consciousness again to up our chances. After an hour or so he runs out of protégés and a group of lads he doesn’t know turn out to be very good. 10.30. Two pints. He does another few songs and it’s ten to eleven. Will he or won’t he? He finally squeezes us in, “and now it’s Barbara”. He askes my name and I say Barbara and so introduces us as “Barbara and Barbara” and the audience tries to figure out which one of us is the transvestite. Barbara does a full on Marilyn Munroe ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s best Friend’ and ‘Florescent Adolescent’ accompanied by Barbara on guitar and they love her, and then the guitar playing Barbara sings ‘Desperado’ (Eagles) and they love that too. And then Tony offers to hire us for a Saturday night! RESULT.

Mining The Poor.

OK we’re used to knowing the top 1% wealthies have huge amounts and the poor have next to nothing. Think of it as the poor being a Bergen Belsen survivor and the rich being a quarter ton bedridden Jaba the Hut. If it was like the law you had to carry your wealth around or eat 0.01% of it every day this couldn’t happen. It can only happen because great wealth is notional, it exists as numbers on balance sheets and it can only be created by those who know how to create big numbers on balance sheets. The poor and middle classes think very differently, that money is achieved by effort. Effort is required because they are used to the steady depreciation of everything they buy. The wealthy typically deal in things that go up and down in value, real estate, stocks, shares, currency etc. This produces two states, the profit state as value goes up and the loss state as value goes down similar to a piston in an engine. Thus profits (wealth) and losses (debts) are produced independently of each other in these two different states of an oscillating cycle. It then becomes a simple matter of ‘pumping’ supply and demand to lower and raise values (prices) and divert the rising wealth creating state one way and the falling debt creating state another. Thus finance can create a mountain of wealth and an apparently totally separate mountain of debt, one acquired by the ‘smart suits’ and the other by the ‘hardworking but feckless.’ Just as engineering has improved the internal combustion engine over the years financial engineering has improved this financial equivalent. In 2008 it became so efficient the mountain of debt it produced so overwhelmed the US property market it got fed back into the financial system like a rebounding tsunami wave. In southern Europe wealth extraction produced a similar tide of unsustainable debt. But even after this catastrophic impoverishment there appears no recognition that this financial internal combustion engine of ‘the markets’ has dented our belief in their useful social and commercial role. It’s as if there’s an excavator working between a quarry to its left and a mountain of dirt to its right and no one’s got the whit to wonder how the three might be connected. Even the suits in Wall Street and ‘the city’ don’t really consider they are mining the poor to produce their client’s dividends and their owns bonuses. If they did I believe humanity would find a better way.