The Drool Of Law

2 vignettes from my working life:

  1. I detect a slightly sour smell on the lapels of my jacket.

    After some sniffing and recoiling, I come to the conclusion that I must have fallen asleep (at my desk) and drooled on myself at some point earlier in the day. How very embarrassing.

  2. I have a little free time while waiting for a colleague to come give me work, so I start reading this perfectly normal, perfectly innocuous, merely wanky, i.e. totally work-safe (or so I think) “Best Triple Bill You’ve Ever Seen” thread on ILM just to take a break for a few minutes. Then someone posts “Missy Elliot” in reply to the thread title and I choke loudly and messily on my masala tea just as said colleague arrives. How very embarrassing.

Now I have to go to the dry-cleaner’s again. KNN.

It Took A Lifespan With No Cellmate

One down, a lifetime more of heavy-lidded days to go. I’ve started work. Many rude shocks were involved with today. Waking up before noon. Being forced to use Internet Explorer, in which this blog looks like ass. (To everyone who views this site through IE, I’m not actually as mentally, structurally and aesthetically challenged as that browser makes this blog look.) Being told by my friend that my recent haircut, which I thought was subdued enough to help me blend into corporate zombiedom, is apparently still noticeably funky.

On the bus ride home I was trying to persuade myself to listen to happy harmonizing Northerners but found I was more in the mood for dark starburst guitars and a voice like a cracked slab of concrete. I know everyone says Antics sounds too much like Turn On The Bright Lights, but discussions on musical evolution and the sophomore album are really quite irrelevant when you’re teetering in a crowded bus with your iPod volume too high, heading home on the first day of the rest of your downhill life, because when the chorus hits in Evil, and Paul Banks announces “You’re WEIGHTless, you are exOTic, you need something for which to care” – for a moment, you almost forget where you are.