Yankee Doodle Cunt (alt: The Infectious & Sometimes Annoying Appeal of Ice Cream Truck Music)

Every afternoon around knocking- off time aka have a little sleep time let's be specific 5.30pm as I lay me down for a minor kip, this fucking ice cream van starts up its

Musical signature doodle doodle dood

dood doot doodle doodle doo doot

It comes from NSEW (from my bed

I can track its progress around the roads using 3D

visualisation) and the chance of any brief,

gentle descent into slumber is dealt

a fatal blow

Any tune would destroy me

in this state but this, do you

know the words to this, I mean

look them up, and so it comes to pass

at 6pm every day I Murder the Ice Cream Man

- from Voyageur, July 2022

Reasons why

I haven't written anything today:

The fridge needed defrosting

Bottle of wine 'not going to drink itself'

Need to charge phone (minor)

TiVo 75% full, must spend time

watching/deleting programmes

Note to self: define TiVo for future generations

Plus, you'll obviously remember all

the amazing slash mundane ideas you had today and

write them up later on some loosely

defined (series of) date(s)

And, it's Friday

You'll be on official holiday soon

Also, it won't be any good anyway

You're too old for all of this

For starting all of this business again

- from Voyageur, July 2022

Vince (an English fellow)

A recent challenger on the song guessing app Was Vince (an English fellow); we played a few times

Were evenly matched, all very good, and then

I saw he’d messaged me

He’d posted a pic of some leggings and asked

‘You like Ron Hill tracksters?’

I didn’t really understand, maybe I wasn’t

The intended recipient of this enquiry

But then he wrote twice more asking if I liked to wear

Ron Hill tracksters, with different pictures

Which prompted me to

a: search ‘Ron Hill tracksters’ which seem very affordable and

attractive athletic wear should I ever decide to get cracking

with the parkrun I’ve been talking about for years now, and

b: delete Vince from my contacts

- from Voyageur, July 2022

The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) a fish species synonymous with the River Thames and wider Thames catchment

You've seen the eel twice now I saw it once on Our weekend walk and I have to say, it was genuinely thrilling

Mysterious and often overlooked Perhaps lost in the Ornamental canal Some distance from the river now

Sharing water with ducks, swans, a small Fish family, the lonely heron And those crab carcasses which are A mystery unto themselves

- from Voyageur, July 2022

James Last

In 1976 my parents came home from one of
their grownup parties, mildly tipsy and
in possession of a James Last LP
which as a vinyl deficient household
was certainly something rather than nothing but
even then I was never going to listen to it

Years passed
    decades passed
        centuries in their way
and now here I am
        way older than they were then

Watching James Last at the Royal Albert Hall on Sky Arts
        with the sound down
        the snobbery runs deep and long
man do they look like they're having fun...

And the audience - such pure joy
    this is the best night of their lives!

Wonder if I took the wrong step years ago
    and there are 190 albums to check out
        but I'll never be part of this communal joy

The man's been dead for nearly 10 years
    and like Rave or countless other areas
        you missed the boat

James T. Farrell

You don't hear much about James T. Farrell anymore

The novelist and short-story writer known for his
realistic portraits of the lower-middle-class
Irish in Chicago, and best remembered
for his Studs Lonigan trilogy

A consummate realist in viewpoint and method-
who now will ever read the Danny O'Neill Pentalogy
or the Bernard Carr trilogy

He wrote about people who were
victims of injurious social circumstances
and of their own spiritual and intellectual shortcomings

He depicted human frustration, ignorance, cruelty
violence, and moral degeneration
with a sober, relentless veracity

And he determined that he would write
"regardless of the consequences."

"I have a lot of work to do," he said.
"I write 20 hours at a stretch;
I hate sleep and I fight it."

His sentences follow one another
like bricks in a well made row.

His prose is simple and direct,
powerful and blunt.

His courageous stance against Stalinism
took a toll on his literary reputation,
and later, as the naturalism he employed in
his best fiction slipped out of vogue,
his work fell into neglect and his star dimmed.

Grundrisse

"Free time – which is both idle time
and time for higher activity –
has naturally transformed its possessor
into a different subject,
and he then enters into the direct production
process as this different subject."

"See also

the analysis and the resonant call

by Prof. Eva Swidler: To restore

a social world and to retain the commons,

the Working Class

has to rebuild
a shared culture of leisure."