My Wasted Life - April 7th, 2006:
Chicks dig scars…
true ain’t it ladies?
I’ve never had concrete proof of this other than guys saying it amongst themselves… but the popular notion is… chicks dig scars. So what about sports injuries? Well it’s a link that is in many ways somewhat tenuous… but sports injuries… scars… sports injuries leading to scars… I guess you could accept that as a transition of sorts.
Anyway… it’s just a way of bringing up the subject of sports injuries… see… not being a sportsman – one of my school reports from the sports department contained the testicle shrinking missive “Paul has no natural athletic ability”
Yay… thanks man…
Of course… in those days sports stars didn’t earn the mega-millions they do in this day and age… and it was never top of my list of career paths… so it never seemed to be too much of a problem.
But of course… as the years drift by you kinda sorta wish you had a little bit more of that innate ability that was obviously sorely lacking…
But the thing is… sometimes life can work in ways that are best described as mysterious… because a lack of natural ability on the sports field can help with the injuries… and as I vainly… that’s as in ‘in van’ rather than some root of the word vanity… try to hobble me bones around on a soccer pitch one a week or so… I’ve managed to pick up a small gaggle of injuries of a sports related nature…
The usual scraped knees that make you yearn to be a kid again… I knackered up me wrist by falling on it… you know the type of stuff I’m talking about.
But this past week I picked up a totally different type of sports related injury… an injury that I’m sure in no way… not even with my warped vision of the world could be twisted in any way… shape or form into anything even remotely resembling cool…
So what sports injury am I talking about…?
I’ll tell you.
I’ll reveal my shame… after all… it’s not like my sports career hasn’t been one long litany of shame over the years.
The sports injury I became afflicted with this week is…
Mosquito bites.
What the fuck!
You heard me right… mosquito bites.
Like I said… I’m no champion sportsman… my sports related injuries have been pathetic and totally un-chick attracting… and now… all those years after reading that I had no natural sporting ability… I then found myself afflicted with what can only be described as a plethora of ‘gnat’ bites…
How cool is that?
I’ll tell you how cool… you even know how cool it is. How cool is it? It’s totally not cool… un-cool in the extreme… not even remotely warm in the cool department.
Yep… my skinny little string bean legs were alive with the sound of furious scratching as I laid in bed… little motherfuckers… jesus do they itch like crazy…
So… yeah… sports injuries…
Chicks might well dig scars… but furious scratching? I think not.
I found a use for spam the other day… and it’s a long ways from the days when you eat it. I know most people’s association with and knowledge or, spam is limited to the sketches of Monty Python… but it’s true… back in the day, we did used to spend a great deal of our time consuming things like spam and luncheon meat. Not like it was a hobby or anything, spam was pretty disgusting truth be told… but it did form a large staple in our limited diets.
Where I grew up there was a little parade of shops around the corner… in fact, that was how they were described… “I’m just going round the corner” meant that you were going to go to the little parade of shops. And yes, they were actually on the corner… the intersection of two roads… so the ‘myth’ of the corner shop is actually no myth… it’s based in fact… there were corners and people put shops on them.
They changed over the years…
When I was young enough that I can barely remember it today there was a kin of sewing type shop on one end… it sold sewing stuff… yarn… wool for knitting… things like that. Then there was the staple of any good parade of shops… the newsagents. I’m not sure what the American version of a newsagents would be… probably a newsstand… except that a newsagents was actually a shop so it was all indoors.
Then there was a gap as the second part of the parade was actually around the corner so the back yards of the shops backed onto the side of the newsagents…
Right on the corner, the traditional corner shop if you will was an Off Licence. For those of you unfamiliar with the term… or who live in Basildon where such things do not exist… and off license was a store that sold beer, alcohol…you know the type of things… in their attempts to keep life as simple and understandable as possible for everyone, the Americans call them Liquor Stores… but in the UK they are called Off Licence’s because they have to have a license to sell alcohol – in the same way that a pub or bar does… but these shops are licensed to sell beer but not for people to consume it on the premises.. so you had to buy your liquor and then take it home… or to the woods… or school to consume it. If was a license to consume alcohol off the premises and hence term off license.
Next to the Off License was a ladies hairdressers… oh yes… never mix men’s and women’s hair care… no sirree bob.
Next to the hairdresser’s was a butcher’s and it was the butcher’s that put me on this whole remembering track cos going from luncheon meat, I was remembering the guys who used to run the place… even my great uncle went in there for a short time to help out – you see I come from a tradition of butcher’s on my mother’s side… betcha never thought that huh?
Anyway… you’d go into the butcher’s shop and there’d be sawdust on the floor and big glass cabinets with all the multifarious meat products on display. You could pick your luncheon meat or your corned beef and they’d pick up this huge slab of stuff and plonk it on the slicing machine and run off as many slices as you could get for your quarter pound or whatever weight denomination you were there to buy.
This was before we knew about the delights of stuff like MRM… which for the squeamish or uninformed is an acronym for mechanically recovered meat. It’s how they made sausages and burgers and try to ensure that they get the maximum bang for their buck out of a carcass. You see once the knives had taken off the main cuts of meat from a cow or pig there was always a little bit of meat and gristle left. You remember when you ate pork chops or belly of pork strips or a rack of spare ribs… you’d be comfortably finished but mom would always point out that there was ‘plenty of meat’ left on there…
Sometimes there was a lot of meat left on there an you knew it but you just couldn’t be bothered to scrape it off or you didn’t feel like eating… but there was often a fair amount of meat left on the bone – it’s what the dog would look lovingly at you for… knowing that with hours left in the day to chew stuff… they’ get a good old dose of meat.
And so it’s the same in the abattoir or wherever they make the initial butchering of a carcass come to ass.
So they have a skeleton held together with sinew and muscle and a lot of meat that they don’t want to waste and so they came up with the process of mechanically recovering it whereby they shoot a high pressure jet of water at the carcass and strip the flesh right off the bone. It’s the same process they use when cleaning stonework on old buildings.
So they end up with a floor covered in this thick slimy drudge of water… gristle… muscle… sinew and some meat… and that’s what they use to make sausages and burgers and processed meats and all of that good meaty stuff that for reasons you never quite understood, never actually looked like it came off of an animal.
So I was in the butchers with me dad or me grandma, cos she used to come down every Wednesday afternoon – in fact it was she (yes, I know mum… ‘Who’s “she” the cat’s mother?’) but it was me grandma who was the actual butcher – used to run a butcher shop in the east end of London all through the war.
And I was looking through the glass case at all the meat products and there was a long cylindrical slab of meaty stuff called ‘lunch meat roll’ or something.
And in my wide-eyed childlike wonderment, I asked “How do you make a lunch meat roll?”
And Mr. Butcher said…’it’s easy’
And he took this long cylindrical slab of meat out of the cabinet, put it on the counter and with his hand… rolled it along the counter.
“There you go,” he said “that’s how you make lunch meat roll.”
Oh they were happy times… simple times… but happy times.
But since we’re only one shop away from the end of the parade, I just have to mention that the final store was a general store. It had a little post office in the far back of the store and upstairs there was a barber shop where you could go to get your ‘short back and sides’ which seemed to be the only haircut anyone had in those days.
Now that was a time-consuming and unexpected diversion through the old memory banks… I did the whole thing cos I was thinking about the lunch meat roll story which was triggered by talk of spam which was the whole point of what I was talking about at the time because… like I said… I’ve come up with a use for spam… only it’s not the type of spam you eat – it’s the type of spam which clogs up the inbox of every computer connected to the internet.
You see… it’s not written on paper so you can’t wipe your arse on it which leads many people to believe that it’s totally useless and completely aggravating – which it is.
But as times change and people and things seek to find new avenues to get past spyware filters and email scanners… they’ve begun looking to make spam look less like spam and more like a regular email that you might actually be expecting or wanting to receive.
Now being a writer… (click on moves or books if you don’t believe me) one of the trickiest things I find is coming up with interesting names for characters.
You could buy books or programs or do what I’ve done in the past where you just randomly open the phone book and stick in a pin… but now spam has come to my aid.
Before I send them all to the trash and block their addresses… I check out the fake names they are using to try to disguise their spammy origins.
Take this random sample from the ones I received today…
Harder F. Tips
Antoinette Brand
Roxie Clausen
Marvyn Szczepanski
Luana Cardon
Grazia Laughter
Now I don’t know about you… but I wanna see a movie with those character names in it… I don’t even care about the genre or nothing.. let’s just throw those characters into a situation and sit back and watch the drama unfold.
Now that my friends, is tangential thinking…
