Dumb it down.

It's my day off and my assistant manager is calling me. No doubt someone has called in sick, or gone home, or straight up just not showed up. I'm in my pyjamas and listening to Death Cab For Cutie, feeling sorry for myself and looking like shit. It would be so easy to ignore that call and pretend I am asleep, then wait a few hours until they couldn't physically need me any more and call back and apologise, maybe have a nice little chat. But I'm not that kind of person, so I pick up.

Hi, how are you, I'm alright, what's up, cut to the chase. I think of how much I need the money and how I can't turn down a shift vs. how shitty I look and feel and how I've got three shifts tomorrow and could really do with the day off. I think of all the excuses I've ever used and try and think of something new. I hold my breath.

"There's a food tasting in Cross Keys." She knows me too well. The place or the pub? The pub. Will it matter if I'm vegan? I don't know. You get paid for it though. Get to the chopper!

I take a shower and get dressed and you know what? I don't look like shit at all. I set off, still listening to relatively depressing music. I put on Lagwagon instead. They're fun.

When I get there, I sit down with a lovely lady and give her my details. She asks what type of milk I'd prefer and I say soya. Not a problem. But alas! the cereal I am required to taste is a new type of Special K, and that shit has milk in it. I tell her I am lactose intolerant and slowly admit that I am in fact vegan, and she doesn't give a shit. She actually says "Does it look like I give a shit?" as she goes on and breaks all the rules. She says not to make it obvious whilst she eats the cereal for me. She hasn't had breakfast and she is grateful.

So there I sit at a table opposite a delightfully funny woman, filling in a questionnaire based on her answers. "Oh, it's very hard! But crunchy, too. It's not very nice. Yes, it's far too sweet for me. Look, it's gone kind of soggy. Put that down." We go through four different cereals which are slightly different from each other and she concludes that the last one is the best by far. She tells me to circle "exactly right" on all the questions regarding hardness, crunchiness, strawberry taste, cereal taste, aftertaste. There are some really bizarre questions where I have a set of four words and I have to circle the words I am both most and least likely to use to describe the cereal. Sounds pretty straightforward, but not when the words include 'powerful', 'youthful', 'embarrassing' and 'pretentious'. Kelloggs are fucking weirdos. The lady and I laugh at the questions and she admits that they are truly ridiculous. Then we talk about tattoos and she shows me the one on her foot. It was the last thing I expected her to come out with and when she told me about the tattoo she had going from the bottom of her back to her neck I was astounded. She was such a smart and respectable, friendly lady. Wow.

When I finish the questionnaire, I hand it in and get paid a tenner which I use it to buy breakfast I actually want to eat. Fuck you, Kelloggs!

When you need directions.

Teeth knackered. Parts of body don't work. Job prosperity zero. Marriage on the rocks. Can't go to 5 Bells in the night. Social life zero. Money coming in £113 per month. Smoking 40 fags a day. Been in some jams in my life but this is the worst. Car only worth £300. I have managed to lose all my self respect and I suppose deservedly so. Made family's life hell with my selfish and really childish behaviour. I hate myself for what I'm doing to everybody. I don't know the future but it's looking very bleak. The nights are the worst. Long and watching TV. When I awake in the morning the feeling of emptiness is overbearing. I finally realised my head has gone. Had to have lager, reminiscing, can't go forward. Still stuck in the past. Destroying family. I hate myself. Saw J. Morris. Couldn't face him. Went different way.

My life is finished.

Last night I dreamt my dad was alive.

As crazy as it sounds...

I wonder how long I will leave this entry on here. I can feel myself whining before I start. I haven't seen any batshit crazy people, except for that one woman running outside of Costa. Shit, I can't even explain it. It was like love.

I've been writing my dreams down. I have noticed a few things, mostly that it really annoys me when my handwriting looks like shit, which it does when I first wake up. I don't believe that you can analyse your dreams to a large extent, or that dreaming of pooping brings you money (even if it's true for my mam) but there must be correlation between what you consciously think and feel and what your silly head comes up with when you're snoozing. Recently I have been dreaming of looking after a young girl. This girl is either my own baby (who in the vast majority of these dreams rejects me entirely as a mother) or my cousin, Allisia. She's sixteen (or seventeen, shit!) but I haven't seen her so much in recent years, and so I always think of her as eight or something. I don't have any children, I promise, and it's a fucking miracle if I'm pregnant. I don't even want kids. Well, I don't want to have to think about it right now. But then there was always that feeling that I'd have a kid in my early twenties. I don't like getting feelings about things, because I am always right. Gross.

I want to finish my zine, but I think I am too dumb. There is a show at the Punkalow tonight.

Get some sleep.

I should probably do this more regularly, turns out some people like reading this crap. My stomach is currently a battleground between my menstrual cycle and the latte I had earlier. I want to go to bed.

Today in work a lady with the fattest bottom in the whole world came in. She said she was looking for a face mask and I sold her a cleanser too. I don't know why I'm not the manager. Anyway, during the consultation (which was full of shithot essential oil knowledge), that bloody fat dyke kept staring at my tits. What a pervert! In hindsight I should've got an expensive moisturiser and placed it firmly infront of my breasts to see if she took the bait. But whatever, I'm no sales whore.

I've actually been meaning to write about some fruity people I've seen around recently. I'll try and recall...

Easter weekend I went to the crematorium to see my dad. I nearly bloody slipped there was so much shitting mud everywhere, what a fucking disgrace. It's a place for mourners and sorrow, not comedy slips. Saying that, mam and I had a hearty chuckle over it all. I was arranging some lovely roses when I noticed a boy, I'd say he was about fifteen maybe, walking around talking to himself. He was definitely cracked as hell but it was hard to work out just who he was talking to since, being a generic teenage boy, he was mumbling a lot. I like to think that he was talking to all the people whose powdered remains were buried there. Like the Sixth Sense, or something. Because real life is mostly like the movies, right?

On a shitty ten minute lunch break not so long ago I was walking to Holland and Barrett's, the place of vegan dreams, to get a pasty. Yum. I heard a guy doing the most insanely terrifying death metal whispers. He sounded like the fucking devil! It was way cool. I didn't cop a good look, but I did notice he was walking with someone who was on the phone and seemingly oblivious to his mental friend. I swear to god, he sounded like Michael Akerfeldt in a library.

A very cute little girl came into the shop last week. She wasn't mental, just really sweet. She saw a robot ballistic that prompted her to swing her arms about and shout "exterminate!". Seeing a three year old girl in massive pink sunglasses jump around chirping "esstermunate!" is about as scary as, well, it's not very scary at all. When I tuttied down to ask her if she'd like a little label on her bag, she almost gave me a cuddle. As she was leaving, she stopped at the feet of a tall lady, a complete stranger, and looked up to say "BYE!" and then skipped off. What a cutie.

I'm boring. Come to the Bridge & Tunnel / Young Livers show on Wednesday. It'll be fun. Go on.

BYE.