I was a teenage juggalo

I have a confession to make.

This is a secret I have kept from most of my adult aquaintances, friends and colleagues, and only a select few close friends have ever known this. But, in the interests of full disclosure and to set me on a true path of recovery, I have decided to come clean.

I was a fan of the Insane Clown Posse, or I.C.P., otherwise known as a juggalo. To the uninitiated, a juggalo is the term for a fan of this band, and possibly some surrounding acts such as Twiztid, Marz or Rob Van Winkle (the artist formerly known as "Vanilla Ice").

I.C.P., as their name suggests are a white rap duo from Detroit, who started off relatively normally as "Inner City Posse" in the early 90s. At some point, I guess they decided that simply being a couple of white dudes wasn't quite gimmicky enough, so they changed their name to Insane Clown Posse and painted their faces up to look like spooky clowns. To this day, I remember the style of facepaint on both Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. Oh, and I remember their names as well.

Their albums, at least as far as when I used to listen to them, were based on a dream or a "vision", or a "made up thing to sell records to idiot teenagers" that the fat one (Violent J) had at some point. In this vision, he apparently saw the Dark Carnival, this being a carnival (obviously) with a few different circus archetypes imagined in a horror-esque way. For example, there was the fortune teller The Great Milenko, a RiddleBox, a pair of jugglers known as The Amazing Jeckel Brothers, etc. These characters then became the theme for a set of albums known as the Joker's Cards, and it was around the release of The Great Milenko when I first started getting in to the band. But hey, you're on the Internet, you can look this shit up if you didn't know already.

I think my retarded infatuation with this band first started when someone made me a mix tape. At the time, I was pretty much exclusively listening to The Offspring, with maybe a bit of Lit if I was in an exotic mood. So when I was skateboarding around, hearing some hip-hop (however awful they are, ICP are still technically hip-hop) was like experiencing an entirely new genre to me. I'm sure things would have been very different if the first hip-hop I had heard was Run-DMC or Grandmaster Flash, but the way fate dictated it, it was I.C.P. And you know what - I liked it. I wasn't ashamed at that time. My first email address was even "juggalojack", and I bought T-shirts proudly bearing their logo, all in ignorance of any quality hip-hop.

And this was an arrogant ignorance too - I only listened to artists on the same band-run record label as I.C.P. (Psychopathic Records) and learnt to draw the little hatchet man label logo freehand and covered my school exercise books with that shit. I hated Eminem, for no good reason other than the fact he had a feud with I.C.P. at some point, little realising the futility of this. I mean, it wasn't like Eminem was going to get all upset because some middle class kind in suburban England doesn't like him. For Halloween 2001, I went to a local rock nightclub dressed in baggy cargo shorts, an oversize I.C.P. ice-hockey top and full face make-up in the style of Violent J. Amazingly, I didn't get laid that night.

Around the summer of 2003, like "Rowdy" Roddy Piper in They Live, I woke up. I had no super-powered sunglasses, but I did have a copy of the latest (and last in the "joker" series) I.C.P. album, entitled "The Wraith -Shangri-La". The last song on this album was called The Unveiling, and promised to clear up any mysteries surrounding the preceding six albums, all dealing with this deeply interesting (to a teenage me) Dark Carnival mythos. This song, this last song, had a lyric which in just a few short seconds changed my perception of I.C.P. forever. This lyric was: "When we speak of Shangri-La, what you think we mean? Truth is we follow GOD, we`ve always been behind him, The Dark Carnival is GOD and may all Juggalos find him!"


Fuck that.


After all this time, after all the carefully built-up mystery and cult-like encouraging of fans, after all the cool demonic imagery, it was all just a bloody evangelical project? In 30 seconds, all the fanboyism I had built up was shattered and replaced by a cynical mindset. That same day, I had also bought the infinitely better Beastie Boys album "Ill Communication", and I haven't listened to I.C.P. since then.

I do regret the time I spent as a juggalo, and I have never experienced those levels of fandom in anything, which may be interpreted as kind of sad. However, I'm happy just enjoying different types of music now without also being infatuated with the people that make it. I am through the darkness and can now appreciate good things, which don't have quite the same embarassment levels.

My name is Jackson, and I used to be a juggalo. But I'm alright now.

It would be nice if the film Inner Space became true. Just having the ability to employ a little man to fly around your insides and figure out what the hell is going on with yourself would be fantastically useful, I'm sure.

Although, for me, I guess I would employ a shrunken psychologist who can work out what bits of memories or chunks of brain matter are causing me to act in certain ways or say the wrong thing in different contexts. Or, to use a different metaphor, at least a team of Numskulls who you could question to find out how your brain is running, and what problem areas need to be sorted out.

Y'know, not just like tumors, but things like confirming what you're feeling about certain matters, or even just figuring out what the fuck I do feel about some things. I need a tiny Jack Bauer synapse beating the shit out of an especially reticent memory bank to find out what it knows, and then decide what to do about it. It would be even better if you could somehow transport that mini-Bauer in to other people's heads, just to see if their mind and their mouths match up to what's being said.

Instead, were all left to fend for ourselves, and for those of us who don't know what their own brain is trying to tell them, how the fuck are you supposed to know how to help anyone else? The system just doesn't seem fair.

I sure don't make life easy for myself

I have never been that patient with technology. I can use it to an intermediate degree, and I do consider myself a bit of a geek, but I just do not have the time for it if it starts playing up. A computer has less than five seconds to boot up correctly before I start impotently raging at it and swearing in futility. I even hurt my hand once smacking a monitor around (I told people it was a football accident). I mention this in order to try and explain how I have gotten myself in to this situation.

Basically, after years of putting it off for no other reason than I couldn't really be bothered , I recently set up online banking (although I would almost certainly have saved time overall by setting it up earlier, as pointed out to me by many friends and family) (but then again, they should know that the best way to stop me doing something is to tell me that I have to do it). Regardless, I eventually joined the 21st Century and went to my bank's website to enable this time- and stress-saving solution. Or I tried to.

My memory of this is a tad hazy, but I do strongly remember becoming very frustrated with the security questions section. If I recall correctly, I think it required you to write a question, wait for the page to load, check the question, wait for the page to load, spell check the question, wait for the page to load, answer the question, wait for...you get the idea. And then my browser crashed. Twice. At some point I must have struggled through this process and got a security question set up, so I could finally get in and look at how little money I had. Things were sorted, the browser remembered my password, I had a special locked .txt file with some reminder details just in case, everything was golden.

For about four months. Up until yesterday, in fact.

Yesterday, I tried to access my online banking, but I had apparently deleted all cookies for some reason, and I couldn't remember which password I used when setting that up. Not a problem though, right? They have a system set up to deal with this kind of thing. All I have to do is answer my place of birth, my mother's maiden name and of course, the answer to the secret question that I, myself, wrote. Fantastic. The only problem is that I seem to have phrased my secret question with some profane elements. Specifically, my secret question is "Fuck you, you piece of shit computer".

You may notice that, in fact, that is not even a question. More a statement of intent. I tried a lot of different swear words while guessing the answer, but to date I have not been able to get through. At all. This leaves me with the horrible realisation that I will now have to call Halifax directly and have a conversation about specifically why I cannot get access to my online banking. And I will feel like a naughty schoolboy explaining to his form tutor why he wrote "bums" on the front of his science notebook. That actually happened.

Not every story or anecdote has to have a moral, but I suppose if there had to be a particular message people should take from this, it is not to get overly worked up about technology. And the very second that you try to prove that you are better than the computer, that is when it will burn you as much as possible. I bet this wont even post properly now, the stupid motherf

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

The thing about change is that, from a logical standpoint, you know you go through a curve of feelings before you are necessarily comfortable with whatever the thing is that has changed. And that's all fine and dandy, and I can understand that. However, logic doesn't necessarily fully come in to it, especially at the point where you aren't quite sure if you're having a shit time because you actually are, of if you just think you are. I'm not even making sense with this sentence, but essentially, how do you know how you feel about a certain thing? I have no idea whether my feelings are actually true or if I'm just being a big emotional entity.

Oh, I know about the Kubler-Ross stuff, and how change becomes accepted eventually, but what if the thing you accept is going to be horribly bad for you in the long run. What if that? But maybe, just maybe, that is acting a little irrational and over the top. The thing is, I'm not normally that bad at change. I consider myself fairly good at rolling with the punches (not literally, I'm rubbish at fighting), but there's something about this thing. In the words of countless parodies of Star Wars, "I have a bad feeling about this".

OK, enough beating around Kate Bush. These are the facts:
I have a new job. I started Monday. It is an outgoing call centre job. Currently, I hate it.

But will that change? The only way I can currently see this properly changing would be if I grow to accept it and become stuck in a role that I don't enjoy but happen to make some money on. But I don't really give a shit about money (well, I do, because I like takeaway food and that), but should I really commit to a not just slightly disliked, but legitimately hated job, at the expense of my own wellbeing and happiness? OK, maybe, but I don't want to.

Or, to look at it another way, perhaps I just need time to get in to this thing properly. I'm not going to go in to details about what it consists of, but it is certainly not something I see myself doing. People say that needs must, but do needs really must? These aren't rhetorical questions, I would genuinely like to know the answer.

The problem is, when you open up to this level of self-analysis, you have to be prepared for the question - "what do I want to do?". And the answer to that is never set in stone, but I am like 98% sure that I want to work in the games industry, for peanuts if necessary, but doing something I actually love and enjoy. Then, like a proverbial stacked domino, comes the reasons why not:

I don't have the necessary skills -> to get the skills I need, I would need to retrain -> to retrain needs an investment of time and money -> i'm already way past University age and have little to no capital -> I should get a job, temporarily, to earn this money -> I don't enjoy this job, I should do something I actually enjoy more.

Man, that circle is more vicious than an un-licensed rattlesnake/pitbull genetic experiment. I think I need to do a plan, with pro and con listings and all of that jazz, but that takes effort and everything. If only I had some kind of incredibly talented, intelligent and pretty much betterthanme girlfriend to help with this. Oh wait, I guess I do. Maybe life ain't all bad after all.

If only "ninja" was still a viable job option.

I do think I tread too softly most of the time. I don't mean this is any kind of metaphorical sense, I literally am just a bit light on my feet (which I realise is one of those curious euphemisms for homosexuality, like "puddle jumper" or "he's good with colours", but that isn't what I am implying). I have no idea how to remedy this, apart from wearing clumpy Herman Munster shoes, which I suppose I could try. I'll update this if I get some and they make a difference.

Anyway, I get reminded of this pretty much every time I have to walk from a place to a different place. Yesterday, I was visiting a friend (who claims he is a druid, but that's another story) who lives only about fifteen minutes walk away, and in that time I managed to get in three (three!) separate awkward encounters due to my status as a "softstepper" (it is fine if you have Ini Kamoze's 1994 hit "Here Comes The Hotstepper" in your head now, as it was kind of my intention. Best not to draw parallels between me and Ini though).

So, yeah, first one: I was walking along and could see these two teenagers, a boy and a girl, having fun, you know like kind of dancing and giggling and like sort of dodging each others grabs and that. And as we all know, seeing other people having fun is terribly rude and insulting. As I drew close to them, the boy had his back to me and "dodged" right into my path. Luckily, I have been trained in the correct "Portsmouth man" response to this kind of situation, so I kind of pushed this dude's backpack and marched past while muttering "prick". Point to me, I think you'll find.

At this point I thought it would be wise to stay off the main thoroughfare, so I turned down a residential back street. Things seemed to be going swimmingly and I got faintly distracted because somebody had written "where oh where did that fishy go?" on the road in chalk, and I couldn't remember which Monty Python film that was from ("Meaning of Life", I believe).

But then I realised I was walking kind of uncomfortably closely behind this middle-aged woman. And what do you do in that situation? I was like five feet behind her and she had clearly not noticed me, and at my then walking pace I would have slowly sailed past her like an awkward barge or a socially inept catamaran. Do I speed up and walk past, pretending that I'm in a hurry somewhere? If I do that, I have to keep up the same uncomfortably swift pace all the way to the end of the road, otherwise I look weird(er). Do I slow my pace to slightly slower than her? That would take ages to get to where I'm going, and if she noticed me after that I would also look strange. In the end, the only available course of action was to do a little conspicuous cough (and there's a knack to that too - you have to kind of make it sound like you do have a real cough, but at the same time not that you have tuberculosis) while I was pretending to find somebody's front garden really interesting. It sort of worked, because she did notice me then, but she also did a little gasp, clutched her handbag closer to her chest and briskly crossed the road. I don't think I looked like a mugger, but it is better to be safe than sorry I suppose, and it did mean I could carry on walking at a comfortable pace. Another point to me.

I was nearly at my destination at this juncture of our narrative, so I relaxed a little, which was a mistake. I ambled past a local antique shop, which had some of their stock out on the pavement, including a life-size gold cow, which admittedly was rather interesting. A woman also apparently found it interesting, as she showed by turning and bellowing in my face "LOOK AT THE COW!" as I was about three feet away from her. I sort of nodded and mumbled in agreement, but she looked at me like I was the one behaving oddly. Probably, as I realised at this point, because she was actually speaking to her boyfriend, who was behind me. I had managed to slip in between a couple without either of them noticing. I'm not sure who won this round, but its my blog, so lets say it was me. 3-0! Come on!

The problem is, I can't think of a useful application of this skill, apart from ninja, as the title suggests. And I would be bloody rubbish as a ninja, what with the whole murdering noblemen thing. I suppose if they needed someone to sneak up and eavesdrop I could do that. Actually, is MI5 hiring at the moment?

Anyway, I arrived at my destination, and had a cup of tea and a chat about magic mushrooms, which was nice.

Woodchuck epiphany

Today I realised that a woodchuck (as in how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood*) is an animal, and not a profession. In my mind, I equated it with what, I suppose, would be a fairly specific profession in the field of lumberjackery. Like the one guy cuts a tree down, another guy does the sawing, then the woodchuck chucks in to the back of the van. Or truck, whatever they use. But no, its basically a Lidl brand beaver.

This made me think how many other things I take for granted aren't actually the thing that they actually are. If you can parse that sentence. Anyway, its pretty humbling for someone as incredibly intelligent, sexy and modest as myself.

Other examples that my afternoon of Wikipedia surfing has taught me:

Draconian does not mean "like Dracula".
Bill Withers is black, not white.
Holland only accurately refers to one area of The Netherlands.
Jam Master Jay is dead.
Chuck D is still alive.

*I prefer the updated version of this tongue twister: "How many bears would Bear Grylls grill, if Bear Grylls grilled bare bears?"

Campophobia.

I hate the countryside. I detest the countryside. I loathe it. Vehemently.

Seriously, this isn't like some kind of class war kind of thing (although, I would generally err on the side of people who don't deal with foxes by dressing up and chasing them with a hundred dogs, like some weirdly specific historical re-enactment of 1921), I just hate all aspects of non-urban areas.

The thing that brought this home to me was that I had to drive to an interview today, for a job that was located in the arse-end of nowhere in an old farmer's bullpen. It was done up and everything, there weren't computers resting on hay bales and my interviewer wasn't called Seth or Jethro, but still, there was definitely something that made me uneasy about being amongst nature. I mean, ugh.

I come from a town, and have lived in cities since then. Small cities, granted, but enough to know that everything good about actually being in a civilised grouping of mammals is tied in to the very nature of urbanity. Put it this way, I wouldn't be able to sleep without hearing the occasional siren or brutal fistfight outside the front of my flat and I definitely wouldn't be able to drift off to the sound of stupid cows mooing or stupid cockerels crowing or, even worse, stupid, boring silence.

I'm not sure that is all of it though. Being in the countryside makes me uneasy in a way that I find hard to quantify logically. Sure, I have a fear of horses (hippophobia, its a real thing, look it up) but I don't think that's the reason. I didn't see any horses today, for example. I think it really it is everything about non-urbanised areas that I dislike, from the arsehole in a Land Rover who over-takes around a 70mph blind corner, to the quaint village pubs with their gourmet menus and live chickens wandering around in the garden. From the villages named Selborne and Empshott, bringing up images of blue-rinsed bigots terrified of asylum seekers (despite never having seen one) to the over-bearing tree boughs scraping my wind-screen as I screech from 70mph to 30mph with no warning. Drop me off in a random city in Europe and I will find my way to a hotel, bar, nightclub, gallery or information desk within minutes, but drop me off in the countryside, even just 40 minutes from where I live and I will panic like a small child abandoned in ASDA. At least in cities you can get a phone signal. There is a reason why most slasher movies take place in rural areas - say what you like about city life, but a bloke with a knife and his face covered ain't nothing special there.

Please do remind me of this when I am forty-five and looking to retire to a country abode with a hot tub. Although I doubt there are many situations where a hot tub wouldn't sway my opinion. I'm fickle like that.