Mood:
happyNow Playing: E upstairs playing the piano with her headphones on so that all I hear is the thumpa-thumpa of the pedals.
Topic: Stephen Says
Well what can I say; Friday was a pleasant night out in Greenwich and Saturday was borderline apocalyptic. I was up at about 8:30, having only gone to bed around 4/4:30ish and in dire straits with respect to my need for food since, as is the norm, little to no food was consumed the day previous. E&I left the flat with promises to return with food and I hit the corner store, wolfed down 2 chocolate bars as we headed for the market and, eventually ate at a very nice but so over priced it’s not even remotely funny organic breakfast place that catered to a steady stream of yuppies just popping by for their soy milk latte as they wrap up their Saturday morning jog. And by jog, I mean excuse to walk around thinking to themselves ‘Someone please look at me. I’m beautiful.’
It was during the meal that I realized that I was going downhill and, perhaps, it was not a good idea to stay in London. We got on the DLR (Free for some reason) and things were cool until we got to Canary Wharf and I threw up, oh, pretty much everywhere. Serves them right for not putting garbage cans anywhere. So yeah, I coated pillars, glass doors, etc. and the funny thing is that no one reacted. No one pointed & laughed of avoided me or gave me a dirty look. We got outside by the water & I was feeling much better but my face was pretty drippy and I didn’t have anything to wipe my face with. Luckily E had a spare pair of knickers on her person so that I could blow my nose & make myself as presentable as possible until we found a public restroom where I could wash up. Everything else was pretty easy going – caught the tube & train back to town and, after a bath, I had a snooze and dined on freezer pizza for the rest of the day.
The Guardian was giving away a free copy of Super Size Me so E bought that and we watched the film that is weird to watch when you’re already aware of all of it and making a go of being organic already. According to my wife; it’s a nice companion piece to The Corporation & Not on the Label. It certainly makes a lot of sense in relation to The Corporation which, I’m realizing, is a documentary that gets better & better as time goes by because of the way that it’s affecting my thinking when dealing with random corporate idiocy and/or evilness.
Anyway, as I got in yesterday morning, I grabbed a copy of the Woking Informer that was hanging around outside our flat. This is the fabulously informative (ahem), free (except that it’s 25p where sold) weekly paper about Woking. This week’s front page scandal: “Church furious at ‘seedy’ sex shop.” That’s right folks, Woking wants it’s very first sex shop and many people (Primarily church-goers, according to the article) feel “the enterprise would give the town a poor image, attract undesirables and lower the moral tone” of the area.
Excuse me?
Woking, already in the top 20 crap towns? Woking with it’s alien & airplane statues? Woking of the horrible damp and dark tunnel? Woking with it’s nightlife so pathetic that people actually go to Guildford instead of Woking? Woking whose existence is based on being either a feeder town for London or a source of low-cost houing for people on the dole? Woking whose tunnel is pasted by food and vomit (Not mine) on a Friday night? Woking whose contribution to literature is that H.G. Wells hated it so much that he had is aliens blow it up first? Woking whose most famous (And I use the term loosely) living person is a Portuguese transsexual who won a reality T.V. show? That Woking?
The Woking of the high moral tone whose only modern claim to fame is that it has… a mall? I mean when you’re selling your town on the fact that it’s got precisely what every other town has, you know you’re in serious trouble.
But apparently for some, a sex shop that will stock “videos, books, magazines, marital aids lingerie and ‘ancillary items’” is crossing the line.
Yet again, I’m bowled over by the way in which people who claim to be spiritual are so utterly scared shitless of s-e-x. I suppose that if you wanted to do something to make the town better, you could address it’s ever increasing homeless & rough sleeper problem. The fact that it’s got a huge percentage of people with mental health needs that aren’t being met. You could address the fact that there are huge issues with bored & under-stimulated youth, binge drinking and the fact hat the council is more interested in holing up in it’s brand new offices that look ever increasingly like one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces (read: bomb shelters) than providing the people who pay their salaries with the basics of safety, health and hygiene around the town (Does the pay-toilet in the market count?).
Or you could lobby to ban a sex shop. Good for you, religious community of Woking. You’ve buried your heads in the sand once again and are showing just how out of touch you are with the world in general. Keep up the good work protecting your own petty & narrow scope of what you try to define for others as being right. Next time I’m dodging puddles of vomit in the tunnel, I’ll think of you. Next time I hear how the council is cutting basic services that should be provided to all people, I’ll think of you. Because, God forbid, somewhere out there, there might be a person with a vibrator. Having an orgasm.
Or maybe people will do the right thing and just ignore your silly little petition and realize that the one thing that Woking doesn’t need is yet another discount sports clothing store and then I’ll be able to find out just what those ‘ancillary items’ are. I’m hoping they’re going to be cream filled chocolate penises.
Mmm…penises.