There’s this girl who lives in my
house. It’s her birthday today.
For my birthday, earlier this year, she bought me (among other things)
an 18” Terminator 2 doll (‘poseable battle exoskeleton’) and a Kindle. I’ve
looked at the Terminator doll every day and thought ‘Oh Stan Winston, you
genius. You’ve built the scariest motherfucker in the land and made a whole
generation fear for the future.’ I’ve also used the Kindle every single
day, taking food out of the hands of starving orphans who I would so often fund
with my book-buying charity splurges. It’s all electronic, now. If I didn’t
enjoy contributing to human suffering so much, I’d feel bad about the guilt.
A challenge appears: What in the
heck do I now buy for her that will in any way compare to two of the best gifts I
have ever received?
What do you do, Tim?
I don’t know.
You could buy her some diamonds?
Perhaps an extravagant vomit of flowers delivered to our door every day of the
week leading up to her birthday? A sex oven?
Get real, Tim. A sex oven would
just be a present for yourself. She’ll see right through it (through the little
window, at least. When the little light’s on.) At least there’s a timer.
And
she can control the amount of gas.
Anyway, I got her what I did: a
mound of tat. There are two ways to approach the inevitable couple-gift-wars on
a budget. 1) The nuclear gift. Pretty much what she did to me – inadvertently
creating a rod for her own back when she did it. Her future is fucked. She’s
peaked too soon. Or 2) Buy a whole mound of tat, substituting quality for
quantity.
Worked like a charm. She totally
fell for it. Who’d have thought a 4” LED illuminated perspex statue of The
Virgin Mary would prove so popular?
Then…someone turned up at the door.
An entire governmental department squeezed into a little brown envelope. One of them jumped
out of the first thumbed opening and smacked me in the face with a frying pan.
My girlfriend laughed. I was on the floor, bleeding from the nose and eyes. She continued opening the
envelope but she couldn’t reach the end before they’d burst out of the lumpy,
writhing package she’d been wrestling with. Someone ran over my head on a
unicycle, and I swear the naked trapeze artist stole my design.
One of the ‘Dancing Clown Firework Army’ ran up to
my girlfriend carrying a big creamy cake, handed her a fat cheque, then slammed
his face into the cake (sending the cream topping flying into all of my
electronic equipment) before farting Stop
(Right Now) by The Spice Girls.
‘Oh yeah!’ my girlfriend hacked through fits
of laughter as I lay comatose and leaking all over the floor, ‘A sweet tax rebate!’
Jesus, HMRC. Way to upstage the
king. I was doing really well up until this point. I’d done pain au chocolat
and everything. This Government.
So, now the only thing I can hope
to get away with is fumbling my way through a cool recording session tomorrow
where we’re hoping to do some live sessions of some of the tracks with the Phorchestra, and shuffling flat-footedly through our
forthcoming gigs, 11th, 12th, and 20th
November in London and Brighton respectively.
So long as Santa doesn’t turn up
in a fucking Mustang and start handing out chocolate covered credit cards, my
mediocrity should go unnoticed, and even praised, just as planned, and just as
I’ve gotten away with thus far.
It’s better to be the best regarded giver than to receive.
I hope you are presented with
everything you hope for this weekend, whichever way you take it.
Tim
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