Good morrow you filthy Fabians.
I hope everyone had a charming week.
The Christmas break has come to an end and we embark on another year of Mahi. There is a quiet optimism about the year ahead. However, based on the last few years, things seem to be getting progressively more stressful as time goes on. Finding the time and energy to do the things we enjoy are getting less and less.
It is important to find the time to do the things we enjoy. Distractions are all over the shop, especially if you are participating in activities that require quiet and concentration.
This is the premise of my two resolutions.
It is important to set realistic resolutions. Unrealistic resolutions can make you feel like a cunt if you don’t stick to them. A few times I have said that I’ll quit smoking, then I don’t and I feel like a failure. This does a number on my self-esteem.
So The two things I have set for myself are simple. The first one is that I will go to bed earlier in the evening. Usually I will go to bed around 2 AM every day and then feel like a Afghani goat’s rectum the next morning. This leads to me being fucking knackered all day. I love the extreme ends of the day. I find solace in the uncomfortability and silence of these ungodly hours. I remember a few years ago I’d go walk on the beach at like 3 AM in the pitch dark. The discomfort and fear awoke something inside me.
What I will do now is sleep by 10 and then wake up by 3. At least this way I will have had rest and I can still be up at a stupid time.
The other thing is that I need to focus a bit more on my fitness. I haven’t been to the gym in ages and it is something I used to enjoy. It was fun being fit and I want to get back up to a decent level.
Both of these resolutions are reasonable and positive. And if I happen to drop the ball on them a few times, I won’t beat myself up too much. I’m like Evil Knievel, I get gratification from the attempt.
Nobody enjoys going to work. Unless of course you make porn or work as an ice-cream taster.
But besides getting paid, work does serve another purpose.
During the dead days of the December holidays I find that I just exist in the ether like a plastic bag floating about in the breeze of existence. I don’t sleep when I should be. Three AM may as well be three PM and when I see something that is scheduled, like the 6 o’clock news, I feel like I’ve been punched in the face with a hammer made out of time. So even though I say I don’t feel like starting work in two hours, I quietly know that it is good for me.
The Marketing place has still not opened yet. So this is still being done for love only. So a like and a share is the only thing I ask of you.
If you enjoy this blog. If it brings you entertainment or solace, share it with a friend. Speak kindly of it. If you don’t like it, or think that it is shit, that is fine also. Don’t like and share it. But please don’t slag it off publicly. It might just not be for you. Slandering something that is simply not for you definitely just makes you a cunt.
It’s not often that my wife and I don’t have our 11 year old with us during the week. It’s even rarer that we go out to a cafe for breakfast. I don’t really eat breakfast. I should be, but I just can’t get it in me.
Cup of coffee and a smoke is my gig. Followed by long sturdy gogs on ye ‘ol porcelain scooter before sitting down at the Imac for a bit of writing.
We went to a little cafe down Birkenhead Wharf way, I won’t mention names. I have been living in this area for around two years now and I haven’t really explored much of the surroundings. I fish down at the wharf now and then, sometimes I’ll take the bike and a book down to the beach. That’s about it really.
At the cafe I chose to sit outside. The weather has been gorgeous in patches this summer. Not really full on beach days, but if you time it right, you could make the best of this climate change situation. It was overcast, the air so thick, you could feel the weight as it got gobbled down by your trachea. I’ve always hated humidity, the worst humidity I felt was when I visited Singapore. It was fucking horrendous.
This was bearable though. My beautiful wife was with me and the spontaneity of going out for breakfast has put both of us in a good mood.
Both of us got a Salmon Eggs Benedict, I got a coffee and she got an orange juice. Except that they weren’t called these things on the menu. They were called some other shit. The meal was called an Egg Bene, the coffee was a Flatty and the juice was called O Jay. It didn’t take much to decipher what was what because everyone would extrapolate the context, so no issues there.
Except that the menu was written on an electronic chalkboard and when the orange juice came, it was in a fucking jam jar. Not really a jam jar, but a purpose built glass jar with one thread that would never work on the top and a handle on the side.This skepticism made me realize that our food came on cutting boards too.
When did this shit happen?
We spent the rest of the morning milling around the antique stores that make the promenade of this little seaside town. Although I was fully immersed in the conversations I was having, I couldn’t stop thinking about the jam jar. I even started noticing things in the antique store that weren’t even antique, they were just fashioned to look antique.
Skeuomorphism is the practice of a sort of nostalgia that emulates things from our past to facilitate a perpetual feeling of familiarity. This is why phones make a shutter noise when we take a picture, or why electric vehicles look like regular vehicles. These cars can take any shape as it does not have an internal combustion engine. It could be in the shape of a giant cock and balls if it wanted to. Missed opportunity by the ELONgated MUSKrat.
But the jar was something different, they are not skeuomorphisms. Regular glasses were around forever, the mason jar thingy is fairly new.
I have a theory, and I’m blaming 9/11.
When America invaded Iraq in that illegal war in 2002, the world’s perception of the US changed. Even the most American American knew that it was absolute bullshit.
The military industrial complex has done these kinds of fabricated wars before, but never during the times of the internet. In 2002, the average 12 year old had more intel at his disposal than the US president just a few years prior.
I remember it vividly.
Growing up I was a massive fan of companies like Disney, Hannah Barbera and Hasbro. For me they symbolized freedom. I was raised in Post-Apartheid South Africa, so America seemed like a progressive place that every nation should strive to be like.
My dad took us to Mcdonalds once, I remember the burgers giving me a thick Brooklyn accent. “Um warkin hear!”
During the illegal war crimes in Iraq, these American Companies I held so dear were well and truly involved in the war. McDonalds, Starbucks and Burger King opened up stores in the areas being occupied by the US.
The world was against them. At one point they even asked France to help them, the French told them to fuck off, and for about a year, Americans changed the word French Fries to Freedom Fries. Fucking ridiculous.
Everything American was frowned upon, especially their food.
Then emerged the niche food culture.
American food is delicious. I love a burger and milkshake, everyone does.
So here is what happened next.
Small independent restaurants would open all over the place. Underfunded and run by young people with big imaginations. These small restaurants did what they had to do frugally to make things work. People eating off wooden cutting boards, drinking their Fanta from recycled jam jars.
These became a slap in the face for fine dining restaurants and big fast food franchises, adding an heir of authenticity to the experience.
Then in 2010 this new social media came out called Instagram.
I remember old Instagram. When Instagram came out it was designed with filters to emulate the old polaroid cameras from my childhood. I loved it. A fine example of skeuomorphism.
By pure chance, taking pictures of your food and posting it on Instagram was a big thing. People would go out and take pictures of their food and upload it on Instagram. So the adopters of Instagram were the first ones to frequent these types of restaurants and subsequently started the hipster movement.
I’m a fucking hipster, I like authenticity. I have a man bun and sometimes I wear a half helmet and take my 76 thumper out for no other reason than to look cool and authentic. So I’m not immune to ridicule, if ridicule is what you are taking from this.
Other not so small restaurants copped on to this, suddenly they have cutting boards as serving plates and jam jars as drinking glasses. They no longer have a printed menu, it’s a chalk board with ironic spelling on it. Calling things by shortened slang terms and using words like “squoze”
A few years later and this practice has come so ubiquitous that owners would do anything to make you take a photograph of your food. So now, you order a burger and chips and it comes to you on a tiny shopping trolley, or you order a pizza and it comes to you in a CD case, or you order soup and it comes to you in a Nazi SS helmet. So no longer was it your cool hipster restaurant in Ponsonby or Seapoint who was doing this, it was every cunt. So ultimately it became really uncool.
Now you go out to a restaurant and you order an Eggs Benedict and an Orange Juice, instead of reading it on a laminated menu, you have to decipher it from a chalkboard and when it is served it comes to you on a wooden cutting board and a jam jar.
Except that it doesn’t though. The chalkboard is electronic and fashioned to look like a chalkboard. The cutting board is not a cutting board, It’s a plastic square plate designed to look like a cutting board. The jam jar isn’t a jam jar, it is a glass mass produced in China to look like a jam jar. What jar has a fucking handle on it?
This is what happens when context collapses. The whole point of restaurants giving people drinks in jars was to show how authentic they were. They didn’t use mass produced glasses, they used actual jam jars.
This is how things go full circle. Something that was kind of niche and cool became mass produced. Then it just becomes tacky.
Maybe this is why I enjoy a coffee and a smoke for breakfast. No pretending when I go out to eat and no anti-wank Cornflakes if I stay home. I think I spoke about Cornflakes in a previous blog. It was designed by the Catholic Church to stop people from masturbating.
Time for work now.
Genuflect to a swan,
Wink at a pigeon,
Throw gang signs to a fish.
Till next week you bastards,
Dog Bless
