The Expendable 2010

The expendables!

Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis, and that grey-haired guy of of Mariah Carey’s Videos where she’s getting married but ditches the old guy for that young guy off of prison break, you know, the pretty boy. And that’s just the ones I’ve seen / heard about.

Oh boy, I’m gonna love this!

Nual Bums.

That is correct! I have two ne albums which I purchased for full price monies fromt he shop rather thasn the bargain bin. Well, nearly after price cuts and store discount, but still! Nu stuff!

First to say I’ve given a listen to is… “Brand New Eyes” by Paramore. Produced by them and others and mostly written by a couple of the band members, it’s a bit of the same but a bit more different to what they’ve done before. I mean, I’m a big Paramore fan, but this new album seems like a big Paramore fan album, to the extreme where the lyrics are more about pleasing people that wanted to hear more Paramore.

I know there’s a whole story about how the album has helped them to get back together and every song has a message that is reflective of their battle, and I think that’s great. I just find it a little bit boring at the moment. Hopefully it grows on me. I do appreciate that the structure of their music has remained pretty unchanged. I don’t understand how, when I read the lyrics for the first time, they would fit to music, but it makes sense when Hayley starts singing. I am glad that they’re back though! EDIT: Decode is awesome! So So Awesome! And ignorance has also grown on me.

Next album is… “Tongue N’ Cheek” by Dizzee Rascal. The music that it’s being sold on, the dance and trance is what I was really enticed by. I thought it would be very different to the other albums I owned of his, which I liked for their griminess, but I wasn’t expecting this one to be housing some old-school Dizzee grime tracks. It’s got Bonkers and Dance Wiv Me on it, which were wicked summer hits, and Holiday which is something that brightened up my summer a whole lot during festival time. Tune! But the other stuff on there is surprising with him spouting his ghetto insults. Hahaha, oh Dizzee, I mean it’s hella good fun reciting “old Skool” from his previous album (or the one before, I’m not good with names, dates, places, people or stuff in general).

Mixed bag with both albums, but on trying to sell to people, it doesn’t do them justice to just have a listen once. You’ve got to give em some time to sink in.

I’ll be playing Dizzee out loud in the car *evil grin*

Step out of the vehicle please sir

The metropolitan police. People say they don’t do their job. I disagree.

R: “Do you mind giving me a lift to the end of the road?”

E: “Nah, ‘course not, jump in”

R: “I got run over last week innit. Car was going 40 mph down **** Street, speeding innit, and he hit me and dragged me on the bonnet to the traffic lights”

E: “Shit, what the hell? Did you report it?”

R: “Yeah but they’re saying there’s no record now, the guy moved his car cos i went back then and it weren’t there. Then when I found it the plates were gone but there was still a smashed windscreen where I hit it”

E: “Bloody hell, what about the hospital? They got a record don’t they?”

R: “Yeah but it’s not enough. Well, thanks for the ride, take care man”

E: “Yeah of course, try and take it easy from now on hehe”

On turning my car around to face the other way, and about to drive off, “R” crosses over to me again.

R: “Do you mind giving this back to my mum, I took her phone by mistake. Can you tell her I’ll be back in a bit as well?”

E: “Yeah, okay, take care. See ya”

*Black car with London Metropolitan Police sticker drives by in front of where I’m going to pull out*

I continue down the road, noticing the black vehicle pull over to the left hand side and then rejoin the road behind me. Here we go. I reach my door and pull into and empty space; black Met car pulling up alongside me and asking me to step out of the vehicle “please sir”.

P1: “This your car sir?”

E: “Yes…”

P1: What was that you just took off that gentleman by the end of the road?”

E: “His mum’s phone, he took it by mistake and asked me to return it to her”

P1: Could I see the phone please?”

*Handing over phone and then addressed by other officer*

P2: “Where do you live sir?”

E: “in this house here” *pointing*

P2: “And where does the gentleman you dropped off live sir?”

E: “the house over there” *pointing*

P2: “Could you tell me your name and date of birth please?”

After exchanging these details, and seeing them put on a record of who I can only presume they are going to tail from now on, the second officer speaks over the radio regarding the vehicle they’ve just pulled over.

P1: “Is that a years road tax?”

E: “Yeah, it’s only a 1.2 litre so economic”

P1: “1.3 ain’t it?My car costs that for six months”

Radio lady: “Car registration plate shows vehicle ran a light at ****. Vehicle has been detained by officers”

E: “huh!?”

P2: “Could you check plate again please licence *******?”

Radio lady: “Oh… er… Red Fiat Punto, no history”

E: *Bolero Red” *mumbling in schoolchild manner*

P2: “Okay thank you. *walking over…* Okay, thank you for your time sir, sorry to bother you, have a nice evening”

P1: ” Sorry about that, just we’ve been having a lot of drug dealing going around in this road and we saw that gent handing you something in the car”

E: “Fair enough, bye”

And that was that. My run in with the law. I thought there had been a problem with the car, and there almost had been due to misinformation, but to be accused as a drug dealer? Now that is something new.

Last time I do the friendly neighbourhood driver-man role. I’m just a criminal apparently…

I returned the phone by the way. The first police officer wanted my free McDonald’s glass in the back of my car. I saw him eyeing it up….

I guess it’s goodbye

Buses aren’t meant to reverse, but what are you going to do if you have foolishly conitnued to drive down a narrow road even as you have seen a gigantic coach, which truth be told shouldn’t have been down this road in the first place, comes pelting down with its size acting as its dominance.

She was on the corner, no where else to really go, penned in by a white car behind, a lamp post, an electrical box and the local route bus, on of those smaller ones that scare you as they hurtle towards your car in the street that was not designed for the metal dinosaur.

Sasha didn’t ever see it coming; waiting there patiently in the darkness, lit only by the nearby lamp. And then it happened. The coach driver, acting as a “spotter” directing the bus, which is NOT SUPPOSED TO REVERSE remember, without reverse lights even, directed our sorry bus driver ride into her, scraping her along her ride side… and back right-wing and bumper.

Confused? Shouldn’t be. Sasha is my car.

An M registration Vauxhall Corsa – Red. Built arounf ‘94, in the family since august ‘99. I found that out today. I’d never known the car had been with us for a full 10 years. I’m not even sure if it has been EXACTLY 10 years but it’s pretty close.

Sasha, given name by myself and uni buds, is my first car. I experienced a sense of freedom that my driving lessonsand driving with my dad never let me achieve. It was something new; driving wherever I wanted to go, to do whatever I wanted to do. Late night snack? Service station visit? Realising I could do both of these things in one night at the same place a long drive away meaning lots of night-time driving and comfort music? I got that all from Sasha.

The I got a new car. A real beauty: the new model Fiat Punto – 06 plate, with the Aston Martin style headlights, and smooth design. “Two cars!”, I thought, “brilliant!”. They are both fun to drive and I liked how I felt driving them, like they were for me. My judgement on buying my new Punto was based on an imperfection. something wrong with the way the boot flap – cover, which covers the things in your boot / trunk, i.e. your shopping, didn’t work properly. The Corsa had it – one of the elastic thingys was broken so it wouldn’t hold it up. The Punto has it, one of the plastic bridges that the boot lid sits on is snapped but it meant that I couldn’t attach the elastic things or the boot wouldn’t close properly. Seems a stupid reason to be sold on a car but its true. The imperfection made it fit.

I’ve been driving my new car to a work placement I’ve had over the summer, for my uni degree. It’s been great. Whizzing around in a 1.2 may seem weak but it has a lot to give, and allows long distances which sadly, Sasha was not allowed to do (more just in case than actual law).

Then came today. After driving back home, dad driving Sasha, he said ” If it wasn’t for having enough cars and if I was able to afford to keep another one, I’d have this car until the day I died”. I’d have to say that I would have agreed with him. This car has brought me up just as much as my parents have, which is not much, but it’s been there to help me drive on (pun) through the trouble and strife (so much strife!). It’s also been the ferry to my crew(s). I’ve used it to transport people to and from airports, go on little expeditions and obviously to take me to and from uni during my second year.

He just had to jinx it. Not more than 2 hours later, after my dad proclaiming there to be a horse passing by outside (which turned out to be the mega huge coach), we witnessed the “BANG” as we watched from our doorstep our ten-year-old family member get struck in the prime of it’s life. The pain.

There was me, worrying about my new car which was neatly parked further into the pavement than out due to it being a bit of a wide bugger, when what I should have thought about was, what about the sentimentality of the one at the end of the road that no-one is caring about?

To put it simply. I’m a little bit upset. sure about my car being hit, but about the fact that it soon won’t be my car any more. It’ll be scrap metal. After just getting the exhaust fixed so it’s never sounded better than ever. After I gave it a 2 hour wash and wax and checked the tire-pressure and oil and did all the things to it that I said I would do when I got a car.

I am a hoarder. I’ve kept nearly everything that evokes a memory, but that has slowly been changing. I plan on clearing a lot out over the remainder of the year and into the next. A clear-out of the past, and welcoming of the new. There won’t actually be much to look back on and say “oh yeah, I remember that”.

This is an experience where nothing really happened, but I won’t forget the effect it had on me, and that’s why, I sadly say, Goodbye Sasha, you will be missed.

*Cue emotional heartfelt, gut-wrenching music and tears*

Stuck On You

Love her voice…

I heard you driving in my car
Then in a frozen bar
And I claimed I didn’t care for you
But your verse got trapped inside my head
Over and over again
You played yourself to death in me

I thought I’d drop you easily
But that was not to be
You burrowed like a summer tic
So you invade my sleep and confuse my dreams
Turn my nights to sleepless itch

Stuck on you ’till the end of time
I’m too tired to fight your rhyme
Stuck on you ’till the end of time
you’ve got me paralysed

Holding on the telephone
I hear your midrange moan
You’re everywhere inside my room
Even when I’m alone I hear your mellow drone
You’re everywhere inside of me

Stuck on you ’till the end of time
I’m too tired to fight your rhyme
Stuck on you ’till the end of time
You got me trapped inside

I can’t escape your incessant whine
When you beam it out all across the sky
No I can’t escape
(stuck on you ’till the end of time)
your insipid rhyme
(I’m too tired to fight your rhyme)
When you shoot it deep
(stuck on you ’till the end of time)
Straight into my mind

Little did I know that it was a cover

Solemn Gollum

The idea of adventure excites me. I get lost in fantasising about “what if”. “What if took a year out after uni?” – would never happen as it takes too much planning and would require me to trust a person as having my back as we went different places. “What if I put myself out there a lot more?” This seems like something alien and hard to do. It’s not in my nature and when I do stuff a bit out of character I always get brought up on it.

I think what ~I need to do is keep on moving forward. I’ve noticed I don’t like to be tied down too much and being put into new situations helps me to thrive. I’m good at first encounters, in fact, it’s the best way to experience me. Hello and goodbye. But I couldn’t make a living from it.

Right now, what’s keeping me going is thinking outside of reality. Getting lost in fantasy worlds like the paranormal and alchemy; zombiefication and alien encounters. I’ve been into this stuff a while now, but I’ve started applying it to reality. Asking questions from everyday encounters, analysing the people I meet or brush past, even thew places I visit or even just hear about. Everything just seems so much more exciting when you think about its potential.

I don’t want to say I’m bored, I feel like I’d be tempting something to happen that could be a bad thing, but what else is there. “What if something exciting happened around here?”, “What if that something caused unhappiness?”

I admire my brother a lot more than when we were younger. Being the older brother, I always used to dislike that he kind of “tagged along” with all I did. My mum kept telling me I’d regret always trying to get rid of him at a earlier stage in life, and she was right. I shouldn’t have been that kind of person, but that’s all gone now.

Now what I have is random moments where I just sit down and have these weird conversations with someone that I find my intellectual equal. He can relate to what I say and I to him, but we’re not close enough to actually share everything with each other. In fact, he’s just like me in his vagueness. Always specifically vague, so people won’t ask questions most of the time, and that’s just how we like it.

No, instead we have these stimulating conversations where we both sigh like we’ve been through hardships in life. It’s like the atmosphere you get from reading a well-told story and the characters are remembering harder times or merrier times, but times past all the same. They’re not coming back.

His conversations always lead to me learning something; like he knows a lot of stuff for being younger than me. I feel like I should be the one looking out for him in pursuing his future, seeing as how my family is so dysfunctional that he won’t get any help from where he should be getting it.

It takes a dull day and and over-reactive imagination to get this way.

Goals at the moment: Find a new home, get a new adventure, help the people that inside I know I should be helping and want to and, less vaguely, take it further than just thinking about: summer camp. Watch this space.

Return of the samey. Gah!

So it’s been four months since I was last on my wordpress blog but I have occasionally been thinking about weird and wonderful ways I could bring it back with a happy vibe somehow. All of my previous posts have been so sombre and depressing, mainly how I liked to see how everything functioned in life, but over the past four months I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching and finding.

Too many things were stressing me out and I’ve pin-pointed them and dealt with them in the best ways I can. Work, play and definitely. And I told myself I’d be creative with my new remixed blog to reflect my new neutrality on all things around me, but my day has been sooo long! I woke up to go to work at 4.45 am after a wedding the previous evening (Turkish weddings take place between 6pm and 1am, at least they used to).

Now work has started to grate on me as, even though I love my job, people taking the piss and getting away with everything is very annoying to me.

And family. The biggest thing today that ticked me off.

I think it’s time to take more action in my life, move on up and out. I’ve already taken the baby steps but it looks like things aren’t going to change unless I exeunt sty.

It can’t be that hard to move out. I have a small trickle of income and some money saved up for a car which I can rather use on necessities. Get rid of my car and get a ped which I’ve always wanted and it’s one more step to getting rid of what is always holding me back. Too much respect and values for the family. It seems everyone else has got it from an earlier age but I’m getting there now.

Soon! Victory will be mine!

Numb

Anybody else seen the film “Numb” with Matthew Perry of F.R.I.E.N.D.S fame? It’s about a man who is battling a condition known as depersonalisation – a mental struggle to decipher what is real and isn’t, even when it’s attached to his own body i.e. seeing his hand but not recognising it as a part of him.

It has a bit of a love story attached to it, and by that I mean it becomes the driving force in this tale which is quite moving. This kind of detracts from what the film seems to be about – and it’s the feeling of isolation and of being alone.

A couple of times you get to see Perry hyperventilating due to anxiety and stress and I found it quite… uncomfortable to watch. Not because of a brilliant performance (although I’m not saying his acting is bad – I like his style even if it is a bit “TV show-like”).

Basically I thought it was pretty good. Very slow, a slightly depressing take on life and the fact that this is used as a selling point to the audience; the back of the box reads: “… Numb will warm the heart of anybody who has ever teetered on the edge of breakdown”. Hmm.

I’m not quite sure if it is setting out to make people a little bit unhappier as it tries to end on a better note with him working his issue out a bit, but throughout the film you just see his “suffering”.

Not one to watch if you’re feeling a little down. Perhaps one if you’re feeling a little deep / broody.

Busy bodies

Working hard and the antibodies job.

Today has been a busy day. First of all I had to go to work on my day off due to unforseen circumstances with other collegaes. This was okay – working until 11 isn’t too much hassle (getting up at 5 am is worse).

But due to a huge increase in sales projections and therefore stock orders, it took a lot longer to fill the store.

I ended up leaving work at around 5.30 pm having witnessed my manager (and the managers of other departments) getting a bollocking from the second in command. Ouch.

I got to do a tasting session of some of the fruits that I put out on an almost daily basis in my almost place of home. Two types of clementine, one mandarin, papaya, lychee, pomegranate, cripps pink, red delicious and jonagold apples and a carrot. Everything was alright (the clementines being the best of the (wait for it – here comes the fruit pun) bunch) while the worst was the mandarin which tasted like … bad.

Making my way downtown, walking fast, faces passed and I’m homebound.. (interlude)

Looks like I made it. Wish a happy brithday to my friend on the way home and a happy birthday to my dad as I walk through the door.  Manage to, in the end, persuade him to go out for a meal even though he didn’t really want to. I thought I was being a good son. He picked a place – set on going. It was in Tottenham.

Immediately when being told which establishment it was in a row of shops that looked a bit iffy, I thought it’d be better to ask my dad if we had the right place.

“Yes, this place was so popular with Turkish Cypriots before you were born.” “Your mum’s uncle’s wife’s nephew’s old place – new owners now though it looks like.” “Oh your uncles not together with his wife anymore? Too bad” (etc – I could paraphrase a lot more.)

My dad is a proud man. This is not a good influence.

We’re led through to the tables – everything looking way out of date except for the tables which are new fancy style carpeted with a easy to clean see-through nylon type cover. I have a weird feeling about everything else though and feel quite unclean all of a sudden. I exclaim that I am scared of what I order and I see all the negativity start to upset my dad. This is where it’s time to turn something you actually hate into something you appear to love… or can accept.

I order the kofte and chips thinking “doner will be really nasty if it’s going to be bad – at least this has spices in it which will have cooked it from the inside a bit…” Cluthicng at straws you might say but what straws to clutch onto… My brother got what I’d usuasally order – the dner was nasty. Chicken or lamb it didn’t matter. My sister’s boyfriend also didn’t touch much after the first bite. Both were a bit rank in tatse and look – chips were even barely passable as food (how can you go wrong?). My sister had the burned lamb shish (at least you couldn’t see it as raw), my gran the chicken shish, my mum the same as me and my dad the lamb shish and lamb doner.

The whole time I just felt this weird uncomfratable vibe from myself and dad – it really got to me how sucky this place was and the fact my dad would not admit this. Perhaps it’s gaining a year and looking back with fond memories trying to remember them. I wasn’t there though but this place sure wasn’t what he recalled (except for the decor).

Even just walking from the car to the place was enough to make me want to cry for my own area – two drunks outside a shop talking. That was it – I was off in my mind (some of the drunks had remained as we were leaving and proceeded on swearing down their phone. Nice).

My mum kept making comments – negative comments – the whole time and would not take a hint – again making me feel bad.

I got the food down me – the guy serving us took our plates without asking if we had finished. I did not care about this fact and was glad that we were leaving.

The fact of the matter is, my dad really wanted to go to this place and really wanted it to be as he had imagined. He tried to make it this and therefore kept an open mind. A biased mind but nonetheless. This place was not nice, I would not advice it to anyone and like I said I felt quite scared of what the food would do to me.

I just wish my dad  ahppy birthday and many more to come and hope I can make a better one next year or in the near future. He deserves it.

Now, my white blood cells need a good pat on the back too.

The Unborn

If you’re a bit squeamish, then you might want to wish this film unborn.

The premise is this. A girl by the name of  (I forgot this) is having these dreams about a child. A dead child. Also within this dream are images of a dog with a mask on (very scary) and an unborn baby.

I don’t want to reveal too much because I actually thought it had a brilliant riginal story. It has a bit of excorsism mixed with real life historical events and religion. Then there are lots of scenes where the main starlet gets her kit off. It has everything.

The special effects are amazing and shockingly accurate. I’m one to judge a film on the effect it can produce. My reaction was to have nervous laughter in the run up to points. Something that doesn’t happen for a lot of films.

If you want to cuddle up to someone this would be the film to take a date or significant other to watch. Just make sure they aren’t the ones comforting you…