Back and Forth

There's a lorry outside my house that's picking up a skip or loading the recycling bags or something similar, and it's taking a long time doing what it's supposed to be doing. The noise that it makes when it either picks up or drops whatever it is that it's either picking up or dropping, is exactly the same noise as our letterbox makes when a parcel, letter or pizza delivery pamphlet makes when they drop onto the front door mat. Because I've got my bedroom window open in a failed attempt to welcome the summer into my bedroom and to usher out the wine and fag smoke from last nights 'Dorm Party' (me and Chris Rock's 'Never Scared' up all night) into the street, then the distance the sound traveling is identical to the distance from the front door, through my bedroom door. Normally I don't care, because I don't receive much post, except parcels of review copies of crap like the new Offspring album or the just-above-average She and Him album, sent to me by Playlouder, and occasionally I get to open the Liberal Democrat propaganda addressed to 'Occupier' or if I'm feeling particularly majesterial, to whom it may concern.
But at the moment I'm actually waiting for a new hard drive to come through the door. Since I only know what size the drive is in terms of how many crappy mp3 files and Microsoft notepad files I can't motivate myself to delete I can shove on there, and not how physically large it is. This is the first thing I've bought off the internet that hasn't been a standard size. A CD, like The Dismemberment Plan one I'm expecting to arrive any day now, is always CD sized, a DVD is DVD sized, a Sun Kil Moon t shirt, although far too big, is still just about the size of a t shit. The problem with buying things like hard drives or similar off Amazon is that although probably somewhere down in the small print, probably in a box of text you have to click and drag for the white text to show up, they give you the weights and measures. Like most people, I figure that because I've already committed myself to cretinous laziness by not getting on the bus and going to PC world, I might as well continue the trend and not look at anything except the price. This hard drive could be the size of half a house brick, which I'm expecting, or it could be the size of a kettle, or a toaster, or a badge maker. I have no idea, they didn't print a picture on the search page of a human hand holding the drive, so I'm lost. At least in the Argos catalogue, if you're buying a set of swings or a paddling pool, you get a picture of the first child of summer pranking about on, in, or under it. If you're buying a board game, you often get some close ups of a ritalin-ruined toddler with a gormless expression that tells you JUST how fun the board game is. I miss those pictures. They should put them on packets of twiglets, to remind you how much fun twiglets are. I guess the internet doesn't have the resources to have pictures of people standing in front of, or holding every object in the world, so more fool me if the drive won't fit through the letterbox and is so heavy I can't even put it on my load-bearing desk.
I went to the cinema yesterday and saw something funny. No, not The X Files: I Want to Believe, that shit wasn't funny at all. I did see a group of teenagers running their mouths off on the escalator telling anyone who cared to listen that "Cineworld ain't got no respect" and "You don't wanna come to this cinema, it's shit" and "fuck this place, don't go to Cineworld, they don't let you have fun", which alerted my curiosity. One of the problems with always listening to headphones when I'm out and about, is that when base-level incidents of mild amusement involving conflict with other people arise, it's really hard to get involved with eavesdropping without looking obvious. As the groups of teenagers were descending the moving staircase and being apprehended by a heavy duty guard by the revolving doors, I had a quick scan up the line of people waiting at the box office. Everyone, without exception, was trying to subtly eavesdrop on the incident in the corner of the room. Everyone. Not even, the inarticulate degenerate couple who go the cinema because they have nothing to say to each other, and then spend twenty minutes deciding what to see (10 minutes gawping at the pretty pictures outside, ten minutes trying to remember what pretty picture corresponded to what title, inside). Not even the quartet of acne-crusted teens in Lost t shirts going to see Batman for the fifth time. Especially not them, I think they were excited to be seeing a real live scuffle that didn't either involve them, or someone who can fire laser beams from their elbows or turn themselves invisible. The scuffle was minimal, but I was far away enough to get away with taking my headphones off, pretending that it was because I was nearing the box office, rather than just wanted to hear a bunch of scally teens getting mouthy in a cinema foyer. I think the general gist of the scenario was that the group were either shouting, or talking, or generally being awful in one of the screens, and had been forcibly removed by a member of security. I think their defence was that they were having fun. Since when was "it's fun" ever been a defence against anything? . I'm sure Harold Shipman found giving old ladies lethal injections fun as well. The only excuse poorer than "it's fun" is "I was bored". I didn't get to hear the extent of their cries because they were ushered out of the cinema before any more of their suggestions to other people not to come in could fall on any more deaf ears. The queue of eavesdroppers averted their attention back to thumbing through their Unlimited newsletter or drooling "so what are we seeing again" to each other, simultaneously, because they're got a psychic connection because they're so in love. I think as soon as they realised the scuffle wasn't going to be resolved with gouging and bloodshed, they had to resign themselves that the film was going to have to be their primary anecdote tonight,

On the subject of eavesdropping though, it did remind me of an incident I saw on Saturday Evening. I was at The Big Weekend, which is an annual horror show where everything shit about life in South Wales all conglomerated into a seething, sweating mass, drinks and lot and makes life hell for everyone else. It's a breeding ground for seediness and dirtiness and every unpleasantry under the sun. Three-legged rabid spongefuckers with backwards fingers and green teeth who live underneath rocks of sea slime in the caves of the Welsh Valleys. even they make their only trip to civilised society for the Big Weekend. I took a detour through the fairground which they crowbar into the roads surrounding the museum like vomit through a sluice gate, because fairground rides make good photographs, especially when it's dark, and patrons are drunk and queasy. The camera battery ran out almost instantly, leaving me stranded in the fairground with no reason to be there. I did see a fight though, and the strategy for listening in on this required more acting skills than in the cinema. If anyone of the people involved in this drunken near-brawl saw my obvious attempt to slow down and take off my headphones so I can really, truly enjoy the sight of someone with a fake diamond earring getting a good lamping on a Saturday Night. My solution was simple. I decided quickly and for no reason, that I really wanted to take a photograph of exactly what was next to where this scuffle was taking place. Obviously knowing my camera was out of battery ,I took it out of my bag and tried to take a photo, giving me a reason to stop, and I could then see what was going on out of the corner of my eye. Then, because the camera wouldn't turn on, I had to take the headphones off to listen to it, and look intently at why it wasn't working. I found myself doing this impulsively. Why do people take their headphones off to do things that don't require silence to do. It's like when my dad used to turn the car stereo down because he thought he could smell gas. It worked, I had a good listen, saw that it wasn't going to end in bloodshed, it was just some petty shit, obviously about a girl, and carried on home before I got killed.