April 10th: Feel inspired

It was about time for another mid-life crisis. I'd postponed my last with moving countries, settling, and drinking heavily with my newfanagled friends. But what am I doing? What do I want? It's these questions that, while I writhe in my thought infested sick bed on my days off from serving social degenerates and saints (and never the twain do meet) coffee and sandwiches. 

I've always imagined an impressive life for myself. A life of travel and inhibition, where my stories were filled with dramatic and unlikely characters, filling the pages notebooks and reams of loose pages found decades after my sudden yet timely death by rhinoceros horn. Yet my living life, pre-humous to the incident with the land unicorn, I imagine to be just as intoxicating, raising statues of marble around the world to say I WAS HERE I WAS HERE I WAS HERE. 

If I were a dream, and if I were as motivated in the between moments as I am now, I would have done more with my days off this week than watch Friends and Brooklyn Nine-Nine and read Maya Angelou and book domestic flights and wait for phone calls and emails and the profit of ambition previously fulfilled to come to fruition. 

I admire goddesses, and gods. The god of Thunder never wondered what to do with his days, where he'd be in ten years, if he should save this £10 or buy the pizza (I bought the pizza). The gods never had to be adults and make adult choices. They'd behave like children unsupervised in a department store, wreak whatever havoc they felt inspired by, and continued their life in whatever direction chose them. And they get to do cool tricks like ride goats and make things disappear. ffs. 

x

February 19th: Cafes and Wankers

There is an etiquette to cafes. I've only been in the industry a handful of years, but my ability to suffer fools who insist on encroaching on my life has dwindled from a once smouldering camp fire to the fizzle of a match thrown from a jetty to be swallowed and devoured by the moistness and the dampness of the Pacific Ocean. from inane, moronic orders to reverent disregard for the bog suckers who get paid to laugh at racist jokes, hospitality is the least fulfilling rent payer this side of prostitution.

They enter, glance for space, maybe smile the staff a polite hello cause mama raised 'em right, and then they claim their category - agreeable, or beast.

Agreeable customers make us say, "we like them. they can come back". Beasts earn carefully inoffensive bitch faces, raised tones, and curt, monosyllabic replies. "that'll be £4.50 (you little bitch come at me mother fucking) awesome honey we'll (little fucker) we'll bring that over for you".

It would be great to have an easily accessible information guide to answer the moronic questions asked daily.

If ordering a take away you must greet, order, pay, and stand in as non intrusive a hole as possible. Do not stand at the till, do not watch the barista making your coffee, and GIVE ME STRENGTH do not talk to the bastard making your coffee.

If you are paying separately, order separately. 

Do not order 'a coffee'.
(In the UK) flat white is strong white coffee. Latte is shit white coffee. Cappuccino is also shit white coffee, but with chocolate on top. Long black is good black, espresso based coffee. Americano is shit black coffee. Filter is batch brew, is made is bulk and, if done well, is life. Espresso is for wankers, the exhausted, and Europeans. Mochas are for 12 year olds and we do not talk about them.


There is no 'X' in espresso you sick fuckers. 

November 23rd: Pasta strainers

Do you want to know what pisses me off? Pasta strainers. They're seemingly a simple household tool, used nigh on daily by those of us with carb dependencies and yet are one of the most impractical items to clean. You cannot fill a pasta strainer. It's sole function is to NOT HOLD WATER and so how does one rinse a pasta strainer? I'll tell you.

Firstly, fill your bathtub with boiling water, epsom salt, and bleach. A few drops of tea tree essential oils is also a good trick for getting those stubborn grease stains loose. Turn all the lights in your house on, then off, then on, then off, singing Waltzing Matilda in E Flat and standing on the outer balls of your feet. Grab your cheese grater and just go on and grate some first born straight into the tub, agitating the water all the while. Leave overnight. The oils from the bleach and salt will activate with the lilting tones of Waltzing Matilda in E Flat, cutting the grease from your pasta strainer and allowing you to just wipe away the grime of last nights dinner. If it doesn't come clean as easily as Mulan's makeup, add some more first born and agitate the water more.

This trick works every time and while some of the tools can be tricky to get your hands on (epsom salt can be a real bitch) it's well worth it.

CHEESE GRATERS, on the other hand, are a far worse cleaning foe that we just will NOT get started on.

January 15th: Control thyself

When you are born with the self control of a lonely goat herd, financing becomes a long forgotten fancy, a fantasy you'd heard about in books and whispers but nothing so tangible to actually be held or understood. 

Brain: ok Liv, we're gonna be frugal. 

Me: yeah, see, I get that, but doughnuts. 

Brain: oh. Yeah. Fair. 

I'm a 1% with the bank account of the other 99. I'm Donald Trump without the personality, beliefs or bank account. I'm greedy, moronic, and abhorrently whimsical when it comes to the purchasing of pizza and cup-a-soups. I don't know why cup-a-soups. The other day I spent $80AUD on books about Denmark. I can't afford $80AUD on books about Denmark. Why Denmark? There's no reason. My friends are equally entertained and dismayed by the lack of purpose behind my actions - but Denmark just seems like the place to be. So naturally I spent $80AUD on books about Denmark. 

So silly. 

So I've decided to embrace my inadequacies in the department of the financier and surrender myself to a life of self induced poverty. Or I could start budgeting but that sounds uncomfortable so nah. 

January 5th: Review - Testament of Youth

Good film. Depressing as two fucks alone on Mars, but a good film. 

Don't watch at two in the morning after Saving Private Ryan - your tear ducts won't thanks you. 

Also Jon Snow looks so young, sweet child of death and unfortunate character ends. 

That's all I have to say about that. 

October 26th: In the beginning

The truth is: there is no such thing as truth. Our lives are subjective and facts are only facts depending on how, when and where you were born. Villains can be heroes; mighty victories, shameful defeats. Love can be love from one eye and cruel from another. Who you are now and who you have been define your 'truths'.

These are my truths.

They're a little strange, yes, fucked up, quite possibly, left of field, for sure. Can you really expect any more from someone who spends 90% of their time in a world they created with people only real to them? Of course not! I'm crazy, insane, certifiable even. Hell, I'm a fucking writer.

This blog has three (3) titles:
Hops, Scotch and Chocolate: How to Aggravate Friends and Alienate People: A Writers Fable.
I'll be the first to admit that it's, arguably, a little much, but if you can't have your way with the internet, what can you have your way with? Even with it's pretentious, grandiose pointlessness, these are truths - they're my truths. It's what I love, what I do and what I learn (respectively). This is me.

If you leave me today with nought but a thought let it be this one:

Writers are fucking nuts.

I mean seriously. We spend our day and nights murdering people, torturing them and taking away everything they love. And we get off on it. So if you know a writer, be warned, because writers are fucking nuts.

I have a theory about this, actually.

Any and all Creatives - writer, actor, artist, musician - hop between two worlds a million times a day. Sometimes they leap far enough and return to the real world, sometimes part stays behind; and sometimes, most of the time, they don't push off hard enough, they leap, they fly, the sink, they fall, deeper and deeper into the gap between their worlds. This is what makes them so fucking nuts. It's quite hard to climb out of the Mariana Trench once you've settled in.

My theory involves these two worlds and the gap between .

The Real World / Your World: rent, taxes, social lives.
Their World: characters, conflict and control.

Your World is full of dangerous, uncontrollable things. Your body can betray you, your lover, your friend. You can find yourself from hero to zero in a blink and visa versa. This is the world where everything comes to an end. In this uniquely definite realm people piss on each other, break thing and drive each other to hell and back. It's beautiful.

People do things they hate for people they love; they break mirrors to see the beauty it hides. People kill, laugh, hurt and survive. I don't think you can quite capture this, not in words or pictures. It's a feeling.

And yet you can see it, and you have to. One day this Real World of yours will disappear and take everything with it - it'll take them one day, them and Their World.

This is why we have Their World.

Some of us are born with a gift - they can see the beautiful things, the tragic. And they tell us about it, show it so the rest of us can see. They show us so we can know what we're missing  because our eyes are so glued to our reflections in our fractured mirrors.

I'm not one of these people. I'm a different kind. Where some see where magic is, others see where it could be. We cast aspersions on the chaos of the real world and escape to our own but these writers, artists, musicians and dreamers are really just fucking nuts.

I mean seriously:
Q: What colour is the sky?
A: It's fucking green. A dragon hatched from the roots of an old gum tree and farted the first mosquito. Now the sky is full of their tiny green bodies, biting, sucking, scratching.
Q: Mosquitoes aren't green.
A: They're fucking green.

Never trust an artist to do the expected. Because they won't - of course. They don't know how.

In Your World you just ate a giant burrito without dying, in Their World they just stopped a mass murderer from killing the last unicorn and taking over the planet.

Can you see? Do you understand? We're freaks, hypochondriacs, drama queens and divas. We're doctors, magicians and astronauts, politicians. We're tragic, but we're fun, broken, unexpected.
If you're unfortunate enough to love one of us then please, grab something sturdy, because we will drag you into the hole in which we live.

Because we're fucking crazy, and that is a truth

LBH.