Triumph of Life

It has come to my attention that I don't actually enjoy very much at the moment. It's a myth (that unfortunately, I think I fuel on a daily basis) that I hate everything and everyone and that being misanthropic comes first, and then if you're really lucky, I might like something. This isn't true. But it's becoming much more so. So here below is an incomplete and rather haphazard list of things that right now, at 4.30pm on a dark, wet Thursday in December, that I actually find a modicum of pleasure in doing, and the problems that play amongst the pleasures.

1. I like walking around the perimeter of Roath Park lake listening to the Red House Painters and other Mark Kozelek projects, especially just as it's getting dark, and feeding the geese. I haven't done this for weeks because I just don't have the energy to do anything after work, and every time I've decided to drag my aching body out of the house on a day off, it's been wanking it down with rain to the point that even walking to Tesco (which in an exercise of monotony, I worked out today takes just under three minutes, or for more accurately, it takes EXACTLY the length of 'Glenn Tipton' by Sun Kil Moon to get to Tesco, take three cartons of orange juice off the shelf, and walk to the checkout) is a chore. Plus, the geese don't tend to come out that much in Winter because geese are no fools, and know they can maximise the amount of breadcrumb scraps they can achieve if it's sunny, there are children with new bicycles riding around, and families in pushchairs.

2. I like watching films that make people go 'Whaaat! you've never seen *insert painfully worthy film that populates AFI top 100 films list* ????" under the impression that I'm going to find them overrated and boring, and then surprising myself that I actually really like them. Star Wars is a terrific example of this, and were it not for the fact that The Empire Strikes Back is absolute piffle, I'd cite the example more often. I still haven't seen Pulp Fiction from start to finish mind, although I've seen the same 6 or 7 scenes repeated ad nauseum, so waitching it from start to finish will just be a duty-bound couple of hours filling in the blanks, which is unncessesary because it's non-linear anyway. I also get a similar pleasure to the above when I discover that a band that appear on every conceivable level to be and utterly hopeless bunch of dead-arse fuckers, have at least one good song. For example 'House Party at Boothys' by Little Man Tate, 'She's Attracted To' by the Young Knives, and more recently 'Amylase' By Cajun Dance Party. Bands which have no actual valid right to exist, let alone exist in a world that my ears go anywhere near, but all three of these songs are fantastic, and the odd sensation of not knowing just how bad they are for my aural diet, but gorging anyway, is actually very fun.

3. I like reading out the best sellers at work. I can probably fit the number people who don't work at Borders who don't know what the Best Sellers list, on the back of a tandem, but I'll divulge anyway. The Best Sellers List is a list of the products which sold the best the previous day / week / month / designated time period. Obviously. I like finding out what they are, even though they are mostly eye-bogglingly obvious (Rugby players autobiographys, Rugby miscellanys, a DVD about Rugby, a calendar of Wales, a book written by a author from Cardiff etc) It's when something bizarre crops up it sheds a little stardust on an otherwise predictable day. Like Season 1 of Flight of the Conchords was a bestseller on Saturday. Last Saturday two people decided that the entire box set of Cadfael was a must have Christmas gift. I wonder if they were my parents. The finding out of the best sellers is fun especially, as you can turn it into a cross between Articulate, Give Us a Clue and a general slanging match, on a good day. Also because one of my few good life skills is remembering useless information about irrelevant things (this is what I eschew forming meaningful relationships with people for) it comes in handy. Where else can you drop wisdom like "did you know Russell Brand shared a bed with the guy that plays Martin in Green Wing for a while a few years back, like Morecambe and Wise?". Fascinating.

4. I like drinking orange juice. Not orange squash, I'm not a complete masochist, and at any rate, the general weakness of orange squash these days means you have to fill over half the glass before you add the water, without it tasting like pot-boiled piss. I'm talking about pure orange juice without any shite in it, that you can buy in a white, blue and red carton from Tesco or Sainsbury and it rarely costs more than 50p. This stuff is the shit. I mostly like to drink orange juice out of mugs, or wine glasses. In our house we have two of these large goblets, the sort of ridiculous vessell Falstaff would drink ale from in Shakespeare, which can hold almost a pint of liquid, and this is probably my favourite thing to drink orange juice from. I broke one of these last week in a bizarre incident which involved me dropping the external hard drive of my laptop into it whilst it was empty, and it erupting into a mess of shards and debris on the lounge floor. I then got loads of bits of glass stuck in my foot every time I ventured over there for the next couple of days.

5. I like watching exactly the same things on TV day-in, day-out. I know this makes me boring, but I'm perfectly content with being boring. There's nothing wrong with routine, and at the moment when I have a spectactularly small number of reasons to go out and 'live life', so I'd rather be boring and content. It starts, if I'm home in time, with either The Weakest Link on BBC2, or Paul O Grady although I tend to cook my dinner in the kitchen whilst thats on so that I don't have to actually listen to his vile, nasal Liverpudlian shite, and can bop around the cooker to unappreciated vile, nasal indie shite instead. Then at 6 it's the only thing that guarantees me infront of the television at any given time - a repeat of an episode of the Simpsons everyones seen five thousand times. Although at the moment actually, Ch4 are showing a series that I haven't seen many episodes of, thank fuck, because they're dreadful. Yesterday, Bart for bitten by a mosquito found in Krusty the Klown merchandise (plot recycling #245) and had to live in a bubble. Impossibly bad. At 7 it's Back-to-Back episodes of Whose Line is it Anyway, which after a couple of months I'm fully versed on and I think I'm borderline expert. Having said that, there was someone on there yesterday that I'd never seen before, but he wasn't funny anyway. After that, it depends a lot on what day of the week it is. I don't like Tuesdays much because Dave repeats episodes of the Apprentice and Dragons Den which annoy me, especially Dragons Den, because they insist on showing 'best bits' of Dragons Den, which defeats the point because I challenge anyone, anywhere to admit they like it on Dragons Den when the Peter Jones is grovelling to the client, rather than the other way round invest. Exactly. It's why sadists like me stop watching the X-factor after the audition stages because after that point the people can actually sing and nobody gives a fuck.

6. I like nice photographs. By this, I don't mind endless pages of pixellised losers grinning inanely infront of the lens and filling up so much space you can't even tell where the picture was even taken, so you're left with photo albums of identical pictures and captions saying "dunno where this was taken". These are not even photographs. Although I'm not going to pretend I've not appeared in at least a few of these sorts of snaps, but then I've also pumped several gallons of pollution into the Ozone layer in my lifetime too, and I didn't enjoy that either. An example of a nice photograph would be a hungry looking horse looking wistfully over a fence towards a patch of carrots during lunchtime at a Medieval Renaissance fayre just as they're about to roast a pigs head in the 'murder' tent. Anyone who has a picture like this, please help. I typed in "murder, horse, and carrots' into google and just got pictures of Shergar.

7. I still like making mixxes and making mathematically complex lists of music. As it's now December, I'm starting to compile my tracklistings for my annual CDs which I make for people. These take the forum of 'plus' editions and 'minus' editions, (just like DVD-R's) - with the extroverted tracks going on 'plus' and the introverted tracks going on 'minus'. So far the shortlist for 'minus' is a lot longer than the shortlist for 'plus' which may or may not be a statement on the year as a whole. Probably just because I can't make up my mind whether certain songs are plus or minus. Anyway, this annual process usually sets the scene for the compiling of my top 100 songs of the year, which is, as a rule, deliberated and written out on Boxing Day. I genuinely find this process exciting, although year-on-year, there are less and less people to actually read it, and even less people who might actually enjoy reading it anyway. But having read some magazines and online ballbags with their lists, I can thoroughly assure fans of the Animal Collective and Battles that neither of these two vastly overrated and frankly pathetic excuses for bands are going to feature on my list. Hooray.