Firing Squads Kick Ass

I have to say, I've yet to comprehend the mass hand-wringing, tutting and desultory nose-gazing against the state of Utah. Not for executing Ronnie Lee Gardner, no, but for doing so by firing squad.

What baffles me is that the shock and horror is not actually over the fact that the USA still perpetrates capital punishment - albeit almost entirely by one or two yee-haw States such as Texas - but that they've merely sort of revived a slightly dormant form of execution because a guy asked for it. And why the hell not? FIRING SQUADS KICK ASS. Despite the fact that he actually stated that 'I lived by the gun, I murdered with a gun, so I will die by the gun', we still see that 'demonstrations were held on the steps of the Utah State Capitol building'. What the hell did they want instead? Have him watch Michel Gondry films in a chair without appropriate lumbar support until he possibly develops Deep Vein Thrombosis? Have him waterboarded with warm Evian? Be force-fed asparagus that... that ISN'T organically sourced?? You sick, sick bastards.

Now, I daren't even poke at the myriad ethical minefield that is the death penalty, but suffice it to say that I oppose it in principle.

However.

If I ever find myself with a hankering for unspeakable crime amounting to an almost certain Death Row penalty, I sure as hell am choosing Utah as my romping-ground. I mean, at least Gardner got a choice. And with that limited choice he decided to die like a real man: eat a steak, watch Lord of the Rings, and then be blasted to shit by four massive rifles. How the hell can you dispute that choice against the others? Well, apart from, you know, not having to be killed 30 years after you shot a bloke in the stomach this one time, but, hey, this is America after all. Honestly though, if I had to choose between having my life slowly trickle away as I wilt like a sad little flower from a crappy injection, or have my still-beating heart explode out of my chest via the business end of four high-powered rifles, well... sign me up for the latter any day. Talk about dying like a man, christ, I want to go out the way I came in: screaming, naked and covered in bloody entrails. Even better, push me out of a plane, that'd be equally badass. Or make me fight two lions with only a paper plate and a can opener for defence. I mean, if the end's inevitable, I'd at least want it to be interesting. I don't smoke either, but I feel that smoking a cigar as you're blown skywards is also more or less a crucial necessity for the quintessential manly death.

I laugh mockingly at the other contenders. Electrocution? Jiggle about in a chair for a bit with a sponge on your head. Hanging? Dangle boringly from a wooden climbing frame like an incontinent Christmas fairy. Stoning? Be the human equivalent of a badly-done pebble drive. Lame. All of them.

Moreover, if it could somehow be staged to exactly replicate Protest the Hero's 'Blindfolds Aside' video, I'd be all the more happy. Just so you know. Check it out.

Finally, in the inevitable situation in which I've been bitten by a zombie in a war-torn post-apocalyptic wasteland and have but 15 hours to live before I devolve into a subhuman brain-eating machine, I fully intend to pick a method from Maddox's list and go with that.

An Interesting Day

Yesterday was an interesting day workwise. We usually get an interesting variety, be it the man who wanted to know if he could electronically tag his children on holiday, or the person who wanted to know whether testicular examinations were actually routine when he was at school, or whether the schoolmaster was merely sneaking a sly jingle of the coinpurse.

A lady with PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) called with a medication query. It was really just a routine thing - relating to her prescription meds for her condition and her newly-announced pregnancy - but you could honestly hear the joy in her voice that they'd managed to conceive and overcome the huge odds stacked against them with her condition. It was nice to hear.

Also had a surprisingly lucid mid-80 year old woman in which we took a while to establish the real meat of her problem, which was... *drum roll* that her son hadn't rung her in a while. Yeah. Now, I'm not entirely unused to the odd confused oldie call (I've been asked to sort out their council tax and to fix the volume of their telephone to name but two), and their charming eccentricities can usually be put straight with a bit of helpful redirection. I was about to say that, basically, there was nothing we could do to get her son to go and visit her more often. But I noticed a tone of panic in her voice and recalled a recent elderly negligence call one of our nurses took (the lady had no electricity and so was freezing without any means of cooking for two days) so I erred on the side of caution. I took background info on how often her relatives visit her, how she gets around, gets food etc, and passed it to a nurse in breathless anticipation. But, of course, I'd spelt the name wrong. Very rare for me I must admit, but as a result I missed out on the note on her real record stating that the lady has Alzheimer's and can't remember anything in the short term beyond the last ten minutes or so. And, sure as day, there was in the note a mention that she often complains of her family abandoning her and taking her money. Thing is, they visit her every day. She just can't remember.

Often we also deal with toxic ingestions. Kids'll eat all kinds of crap (often literally) on a whim and get mum in a hysteric frenzy over their sampling of either her liquid foundation or a highlighter pen. 99% of the time this is the case, and occasionally we also get adults who've accidentally OD'd on prescription meds, but this one was a new 'un for sure. It was about a 34 year old male... and he'd swallowed an earthworm. 'He thought it'd be a laugh like' says dear sister. 'Oh and,er, he's also an alcoholic' she mentions. Figures I guess.

There's also a category in which I'd place a very small amount of people I speak to. It's the 'grizzled, wise veteran' category. These are the old people who've more or less seen it all. They don't piss about, and I have all the more respect with them for it. They're acutely aware of their own mortality and often poke healthy fun at it while having a robust grip on the real priorities in life. The man I spoke to was, in fact, an ex-manic depressive (which showed itself, I guess, in his sunny demeanour) who'd carved entire blocks of his life out in self-destructive stagnation. Whole swathes of his youth wiped out by his illness and by drugs, oscillating between homes and relationships, happiness and sadness. He got back on board later on, it seems. Found God, found a psychiatrist, found himself. Has a firm grip of what matters and on the importance of helping others. As he mentioned, 'I don't like to go out burping, looking at tits and shouting at footballs like the rest of 'em, so I have a bit more money left. And I give it to the kids. I help 'em out.' He acts as surrogate mentor and grandparent to a number of disadvantaged youths in the area. One of which, a 17 year old girl on the run from an abusive home life, sparked a phone call to the gentleman in question from her estranged father. The caller made sure to ascertain that this was, in fact the person who she'd been going to see recently. They then threatened to break his legs and to watch out; that they'd get him for what he'd done. Although he hadn't actually done anything. He was actuely self-aware, and more than perceptive of the social implications of what he was doing. He knew that having a beard, living alone and speaking to young people would equate to only one thing in everyone else's mind. He himself laughed at the very notion of his having congress with a girl of her age. He couldn't even if he wanted to, he said. Cheery and articulate as he was however, he was shaken, and his anxiety was worsening when he was on his own. No doubt there's more to the story, but he was a genuine pleasure to talk to. He'd made it out somehow and was, in his own way, paying something back to the world. Being a good Christian I guess.

So I saw Clash of the Titans and it was

clunky, boring shite. As if an able-bodied and bum-faced Sam Worthington wasn’t enough to make you instantly flaccid as he plays a confused loaf of bread in sandals, the clumsy plot and limp-dick anticlimax are balls-shrivellingly awful. Add to that the overpriced eye-rape of a poorly-done 3D botch job and there you have it.

Hermaphrodite Healthcare

As we often do, last night I received a call from dear old nana calling on behalf of her cherished loin-fruit, who in turn is calling on behalf of the darling cherubim of a grandson. I forget the name, but as these calls are often near-identical, I would place good money that he is either a Cain/Kane, Kaden/Zaden, a Tyler or a Taylor. I also once had a Christofa. No lie. Of course, the reason for the gran intermediary is, as is always the case, that mum is cruelly sundered from our welcoming arms by a pay as you go mobile, our local call-rate and the amount left of this month's giro. So it goes.

So, nana tells me in the vaguest of terms of the child's general illness: his fever, a bit of a headache, all in the last day or so (sadly, in our society of instantaneous wish-fulfillment and bloated sense of entitlement, we refuse to admit that anything so hideous as a high temperature might afflict our children for so much as a night without the doctor racing out to cure it for us as Britain's Got Talent drones in the background), that he's 'not right well', and 'like an oven'. Since her daughter and grandchild are, however, on yonder side of Bradford I decide just to ring her myself and get the hopefully more accurate down-low. So I take mum's phone number, her name, and, as per protocol, tell her to alert mum to the call before I get in touch with her.

I try the mobile number and... it's a dud. I try again - no dice. Thus I call dear old Nana back to clarify the number, but, of course, it's engaged. I try again five minutes later... still engaged. Obviously someone must've mentioned this week's Coronation Street in passing. So, as an adjunct to merely sitting there cupping my balls in contemplation, I search our previous records for any record pertaining to the child (of whom I have only a name, a vague location and an age but no specific DOB) and find a record that might, might just be the one. So I opens it up, and it's the wrong one. I can tell straight away - wrong side of the city, wrong age. But, something catches my eye in the previous call reason. And here I stand and tentatively clear my throat in anticipation as I read it:

'swollen penis, painful pussy 2 days'.

Now, I will admit that my colleagues' spelling is about on par with an adolescent gibbon at the best of times. But the surety of it, the lack of any kind of punctuation between 'painful' and 'pussy', well... it just makes me proud that we're here for those moments when even hermaphrodites lose their good judgement and don't use a condom with themselves.

This was possibly the most needlessly complex penis gag I've ever told.

Tim Westwood

'Hence it is, that the children of bishops carry about with them an austere and repulsive air, indicative of claims not generally acknowledged, a sort of noli me tangere manner, nervously apprehensive of too familiar approach, and shrinking with the sensitiveness of a gouty man.' Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821).

FC-KR Derby

As something of an expatriate Hull KR fan (having emigrated from family territory in East Hull to, well, more of the Westward fringes) I'm obviously seething from the recent loss to the monochromatic bastards. Tight one mind you, and we're still leading in terms of total derbys won, but it's always a sore blow. As I was just going downstairs to fetch a cup of tea though, it occurred to me how absurd the fanatic, die-hard loyalty that surrounds clubs can be. While the hardened Rovers fans scream for the will of the Robin-God himself to be unleashed on t'other bastards, the righteous fury is actually coolly delivered by what looks more like a touring Australasian bodybuilding group.

Although it's something I have little to no interest in, football is much the same, if not worse. Quite simply, why cheer for your city out there when nobody on the pitch is actually from the bloody place? Yet the bloody-minded fanaticism of most suggests that most fans haven't factored-in that their team is essentially just a superfluous badge for a succession of preening dicks in hairbands. Since I rarely take note of football, every time I look it seems a uniquely Heraclitean experience: as he tells us that you can never step into the same river twice, I can never seem to look at the same bloody club twice either. Actually, Roberto Bolano prefaces his Nazi Literature of the Americas with a cute refutation of this by Augusto Monterroso: 'If the flow is slow enough and you have a good bicycle, or a horse, it is possible to bathe twice (or even three times, should your personal hygiene so require) in the same river.' So, I'm pretty much guessing that this is how Talksport phoners-in still manage to stay bothered then.

James Wright

Once I got over Wright's constant insistence on a very pure manner of practically Horatian craftsmanship - not to mention his predilection for over-obvious rhyming couplets that make you cringe at the sheer clanging sound - I found a succinct poet of humbleness and sublimity. Ostensibly a nature poet, he's one with fierce ties to the industrial working class, and a sense of the constant ghost of his birthtown of Martin's Ferry, Ohio that flavours his work the same way Detroit does for Philip Levine. Anyway, I'm not bloody wikipedia, I'm just saying that it's exciting to find someone new that honestly impresses me. I feel guilty, though, that I've not been able to feel as excited about any British poets for a long time, something that the recent watery mulch of the National Poetry award-winners has only served to prolong I'm sad to say.

Here's a bit of Wright's I admire from 'The Frontier':


A girl stands in a doorway.
Her arms are bare to the elbows,
Her face gray, she stares coldly
At the daybreak.
When the howl goes up, her eyes
Flare white, like a mares.


I gulped the whole stanza in one go and, as the collected inflections, meanings and associations settled, I was amazed to feel that little shiver you feel when something truly stands out for you. I don't want to analyse it for exactly that reason.

Wright's classical dedication to the sheer craft of form gave me something of a second thought. Though I always considered form essentially an archaic, sing-song affectation thrown in for sheer technical diversity in creative-writing classes, I've come to realise the difference that it can really make in the inception of a poem. Obviously no vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job, as our boy TS never tires of telling us, but in composition the prosodic rhymes are essentially just replaced with semantic ones. With a free rein, it's all too easy to fall into a similar path of associations at times, and, as Thom Gunn remarked, even the act of laboriously reading out every possible permutation of a rhyme can be immensely liberating and force a change in direction or approach that the pacey ramble of free verse could never happen upon.

Wright decided never to write again, that he'd said everything he could possibly say. Then, after the emotional and spiritual vacillations of breakdown and an epiphany, he returned with This Branch Will Not Break and Shall We Gather at the River, loosening his formalist tendencies of old. But again, I am not Wikipedia. Here's a bit from the final poem, 'To the Muse', from Shall We Gather at the River where, as far as I see, there's a tender emergence of the lost loved one and a bitter candour similar to that found at the end of Bunting's 'Briggflatts'. Although the baldness of his sentiment initially rankled to one such as me - raised with the sickly veneer of postmodern, smartarse irony daubed hideously over everything - it still managed to ring clear with me somehow. I can't help but feel that in itself that's an achievement:


You come up after dark, you poise alone
With me on the shore.
I lead you back into this world.

Three lady doctors in Wheeling open
Their offices at night.
I don''t have to call them, they are always there.
But they only have to put the knife once
Under your breast.
Then they hang their contraption.
And you bear it.

It's awkward a while. Still, it lets you
Walk about on tiptoe if you don't
Jiggle the needle.
It might stab your heart, you see.
The blade hangs in your lung and the tube
keeps it draining.
That way they only have to stab you
Once. Oh Jenny.

I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy
And disastrous place. I
Didn't, I can't bear it
Either, I don't blame you, sleeping down there
Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring.
Muse of black sand,
Alone.

I don't blame you, I know
The place where you lie.
I admit everything. But look at me.
How can I live without you?
Come up to me, love,
Out of the river, or I will
Come down to you.