21.12.2009 - 3:36 p.m.

'tis the season for families, family strife, or abject loneliness under a relentless commercial onslaught of faux festivity. Christmas as presented by Cosmo means if you don't measure up to what we say you should then you're a loser in life and you should sacrifice everything that makes you you to emulate the hollow success of famous people all round the world, then you can be held as a pinnacle, a guiding light to souls who wish to lose their individuality to the burning torch of mass corporate homogenisation.

Fuck christmas, the christians just rebranded an existing pagan celebration from late december, and then that was rebranded in the 50's in line with 'modernism' and now the whole shebang is co-opted by commercialism and shop owners everywhere measure their annual success and overall worth by the small percentage spike in december, completely fucking ridiculous.

A bint in the Mail was moaning about how apart from her 17 cats she will be alone at xmas, or at least that's what i thought she said, there were repeated references to a husband but i couldn't determine if he was current or ex, in any case he sounded like a small flaccid cock. But with 17 cats how could anyone be lonely, statistically at least a few of them will be talky cats and even with them working shifts you'd always have at least two climbing over you at any point in time. Anyway she's a columnist, so put an ad in the rag and work your way through the respondents until you find one who isn't a unstable narcissistic leech, a cleverly worded and adequately long questionnaire should be enough to bamboozle the weirdo�s into exposing their true selves at least once, and with that they can be discounted. I'm not saying it works every time, and it surely represents a mountain of work, but it's better than moping about writing about how lonely you are. Mind you as i met my wif by sheer chance (or divine intervention depending on your beliefs) and put no work into it other than turning up for work where she was already working, maybe i should keep my big whore mouth shut.

Anyway i've always wanted to have a lonely christmas, just me and the tv, big comfy chair, PS2, chocolates, big bag of dope/grade A's and takeaway (or similar, although i can and will cook if necessary) and 10 days of solitary, but you know what families are like, when i was single i felt obliged to spend at least two days with the olds to satisfy them that their offspring weren't psycho isolationists, now J's family are all within a mile so we do the 'traditional' lunch, too much to drink and then old people dozing, as much as i like it i'd like to get away from tradition. Keeping the parents happy and someone else making dinner are small prices to pay, but now at least we have reasoning behind the choice to partake in activities usually attributed to traditionalism, it's both selfish and altruistic depending on your position and the objective in question.

Traditional activities don't seem to have a great deal of worth, "why are you doing this - because we've always done it, it's traditional" Child abuse and sectarian violence are also traditional and they still go on today but no-one uses the 'tradition' argument as to why they are still going, and indeed many people are working to end these activities. History is a poor standard by which to define or justify actions in the present, maybe we should just be up front about stuff for a while and see how that goes.

As i sit here, annoying my coworkers with muted trancemix piped through the interwebs, i'm reminded that pure trance (that which is actually pure, not what some MinistryofShite compilation tells you is pure) is the most sublime of all musics, able to bypass ears and travel directly to the part of the human brain that searches for and processes patterns (the brain is a fundamentally a pattern seeking organ, which causes problems for the more gullible amongst us), thus cutting out the requirement to actually listen to it, in the listening is where problems creep in, once nestled in the brain the deliciousness can be extracted from the loops and chords and harmonies to bring light and happiness to the soul, my soul is powered by music.

I don't know who brittany murphy is, i'm not even bothered that she was younger than me, is it possible to have a 'good year' for shalabrity deaths ? i reckon george michael is next, if he is i'll be pissed i didn't put any money on it.

We got some book tokens from my parents and headed to a Borders having a closing down sale intending to clean up, i went up to the girl with two arms full of barely balanced books and dumped them on the counter, i had the tokens in my hand the whole time, the girl rang them all up and made the appropriate discounts, then she looked at the proffered tokens and said "we're in administration so we can't take tokens" i said ok and walked off without looking back, not really a great loss of books, but a waste of time and expectations.

Great wasted expectations, the other book by dickens that didn't sell so well, even in a closing down sale.