Why am I knot surprised?

I was tempted - and gave in - to walking home from work the other night with a cocktail stick in my mouth.  I thought it would be cool.  It was not cool.  It was, in fact, so not cool that once I had walked in to the more populated area of town, I proceeded to started to use it in the way that it should actually be used and started scraping at the gaps in my teeth.  I was so uncomfortable to swagger home with a little piece of wood in my mouth that to cover it up, I started to pick at my teeth.  I don't want to do either in future.  So I won't.  Lesson learnt.

I watched Aladdin the other day - just because the DVD player didn't work.  Otherwise I would have had to have watched diamond-boy, spade-in-the-face drivel; Twilight.  I'm so happy the DVD player wasn't working.  Even though I haven't seen Aladdin for well over 12 years now, it turns out that I saw the film so much as a kid that I was still able to quote the film (to myself so as not to annoy the other film watchers) and have the inexplicably warm feeling of knowing what was going to be said next, who was going to say it and what intonations and emphases they were going to put on the words.  It gave me a sense of smug, self-satisfaction that I am now eager to find again by watching every other film from my childhood.  Or The Princess Bride.  Me and my dad just quote that all the way through when it's on.  We're not geeks.

Yesterday, I was given the chance to go to Alton Towers.  It was going to cost quite a bit, but the offer was there nonetheless.  Because of the cost, I declined.  This was a mistake.  Although it meant that I was able to sleep in until 11:50 this morning, I was woken up at this point by my little brother.  It turns out that he is there, too.  That would have been enough to sway my decision to go, but to add insult to absence from Alton Towers, Derren Brown is there today as well.  Great.  Oh well, I guess.  At least I slept through the gym time I'd set aside for myself today and got up with aching shoulders and a headache.  I think I could be the winner of this situation.

I listened to the Stephen Merchant show yesterday on listen again.  I'm quite a fan of his laid-back-but-quick-talking manner.  It was not so long into the show when he read out a text saying (paraphrasing) "I love the show and want to thank you.  I moved to Norway from England a few years ago and, listening to your show is one of the things that I look forward to every week.  I get up at 7:30 in the morning every sunday to hear the show because it reminds me of how funny people are back home.  Thank you."

  This was followed by the announcement that the show was finishing next week.

This isn't the best week for me at the moment, it would seem.

So there it is, friends.  Another installment of vaguely filtered piffle.  It would appear that my filter is set to arbitrary.  I'm going to go and do some work, now.  I needed to do lots of work over the Easter holidays, but I thought that I wolud have a break.  (Because obviously spending two and a half weeks in America and coming back two days before the term ended wasn't enough).  I'll probably only end up drawing something completely unrelated but hey, at least I can post it here.

I'll talk again soon, no doubt.

Block party.

I use more toothpaste per day than I do shampoo.  Such is the virtue of having short hair.  It's not that I don't wash my hair (although people have been shocked to find out that I do actually use shampoo), it's just that I have very little.  I often wonder what I would look like with long hair - maybe a ponytail.  I think my head would be too round for it though.  I'll just cut it shorter and shorter until I have the Jason Statham look down.

I've held back from writing this second post for nearly the whole weekend.  I am both eager and hesitant to write this.  One part of me wants to type until my fingers wear down past the bone and all I am left doing is mashing a bloody keypad with soggy stubs whilst behind them, my body has become part of the sofa, with just my head distinguishing me from the soft purple cushions that so softly beckon me to stay.  Another part of me just wants to go to bed.  Then there's a third part that knows that if one brings on the crazy too soon, one will scare people away.  There's so much I want to say but, like some sort of editor or scolded child, I will think about what I want to say before saying it and then filter it down until nothing but gold remains.  It's a long process and I can't very well be expected to master it one the first try (hence this drivel), but master it I shall.

It would seem that I suffer from creative blocks at the worst possible moments in life.  At the moment, I have three and a half projects looming over me like a think fog.  It took me five hours to get through 1/4 of the final stage of one of these projects today.  I knew what I wanted to do and I (sort of) knew how I wanted to go about doing it, but it was taking me so long.  I suppose the best way to fight a creative block it to barrage it with creativity.  I just open a sketchbook and let the lines go wandering.  There's a picture in there somewhere - I'll come back to it another time and finish it off*.  All I want to do, as those of you who know me, is draw all day, every day.  It seems that blocks know when I'm needing to do actual work, though.  I don't understand.  It's still drawing - I just have something specific that I'm needing to achieve.  But no.  No no no.  If it's work that needs to be done, my mind won't let me.  Anything else, yea, go for it.  You want to draw a fish with a golf club?  Cool.  You want to draw a lumberjack with huge legs, cutting down a tree with six arms?  Do it.  You want to draw a castle?  What for?  Work?  Ah, then no.  No you can't.

(I'm still working on refining the drivel).

So me.  What can I say?  I'm a bloke.  I'm a Christian.  I'm a student.  I'm an artist.  I'm a drummer.  I'm a bassist.  I'm a singer.  I'm a goon.  I'm a Greenskin.  I'm a secret geek.  I'm a film buff.  I'm a hopeless romantic.  I'm a Cornerback.  I'm an Englishman.  I'm a patriot.  I'm an adventurer.  I'm a Stephen.  I'm a photographer.  I'm a novice gamer.

If you don't know what those are, I'll probably go into detail about all of them at some point in the future, so don't worry yourselves.

I've found that starting a blog is a lot like starting a sketchbook.  You don't know what to do on the first few pages, so you throw down anything that comes to mind.  You go back to halfway through old sketchbooks, redraw things from there and improve on them.  Unfortunately, the last written thing that I can go back to and work on is the opening to an essay on a designer that was born between the years 1750 and 1940.  Or a Facebook post.  Either way, it wouldn't bode well for you, the reader, so I shall end it here.  For the next post, I think I'll take notes and stuff like that.  I've already written and re-written a fair few sentences in this post.  Maybe I won't have to do that so much in the future.

I'm off to play Call of Duty with my brother.  It's late and I need to be up early but hey - what's life if you're not pretending to be in the Second World War?

* I won't.

It's bean too long.

So here it is.  Baby's first blog.

I write this with an air of excitement tonight, as I am ready to go and see my brother in concert for the first time.  He's headlining at a venue in Liverpool.  I should be there now, but one of the bands dropped out so I've got another hour at home.  It's good because now I've got a blog to show for it.

I'll keep it short for now.  I have a lot of work to be doing.  I'll update it as frequently as possible (I believe that it's the done thing with blogs) and I'll be putting various links, doodles and photos up (also the done thing).  I found out a few days ago that Facebook likes to take on the rights to anything you put on there in terms of pictures, so I'll be taking my drawings down sometime soon.  Apologies for that.  But hey - you've got this.  I'll make a website when I think I need it a bit more.  I can't do computers.

You too can check out my brother's band.

www.myspace.com/brontidetheband

I got the picture to work, too.  And only on the second attempt.  I'm getting the hang of this...