Bill Hicks would have been 49 today.

That’s young. How tragic that Bill Hicks is not around and Jimmy Carr is. Do we have a contemporary equivalent for Bill Hicks? As I’ve mentioned previously, there’s Doug Stanhope, within whom the Hicks is most definitely strong, but the hope seems lacking. Hicks balanced his righteous ire out with a pure and beautiful hope for a better world, a thing that illuminated work that otherwise might have been little more than #RAGE. Rage, whilst undeniably an energy, like it’s pothead cousin anger, is ultimately limp without hope. You end up like Alex Jones or something. Not that I delight in casting aspersions upon the much maligned Texan professional bullhornist, but I had to stop listening to him some years ago when the two dimensional nature of his schtick became too much to bear. People like him had me with my head entrenched firmly in a sandpit of my own devisings for a long time.

I certainly got a lot less stick in the sandpit. I forget how much stick I used to get. Or sticks. Enough sticks to make a house that a pig could live in and a wolf could blow down. It is strange how one’s beliefs can upset those that don’t share them so much. I don’t give a crap if you believe in a 5000 year old earth made by a white guy with a beard (although I do mind if you try and teach that to my kids as fact). But there they fly, those outrageous beliefs, charging around the globe at the speed of hate, pressing people’s dislike buttons. I have no desire to press buttons. I don’t say what I think because I want to upset people. I say what I think because I remember how it felt when it seemed there was nobody alive in the world that thought like I did.

I try very hard to be honest, and unfiltered, which is nigh on impossible, but it is a good goal. I am fully aware that by doing so I alienate some people, that I become uncool in the eyes of others, and I appear ignorant and foolish in the eyes of more. I am comfortable with that. I don’t need everybody to like me. I think I was cool for about two weeks once about a decade ago, but it was pretty lame all in all. And as for appearing ignorant and foolish, I am ignorant and foolish. I wish upon bended knee with my fists in the air that I knew and understood more… If knowledge is an ocean, I am a cracked teacup, if wisdom is a cardigan, I am leaning to knit, and if there’s an award for shitty metaphors, I am not going to get it because mine are just too durned pedestrian, AND THAT IS OK, because I am trying very hard in all areas, and have been for as long as I can remember, and I believe that one day I will reach the summit of the mountain.

(And I don’t have anywhere to put an award anyway. Which means that I need to make some room, a little wisdom my old manager blessed me with shortly before I decided I didn’t need his services any more.)

If I have any advice at all, it is throw your telly away, and don’t read newspapers, especially the free ones they litter cities with. Now, I don’t mind if you don’t take that advice, nor would I call you an asshole in public (or private) for not doing so either. I might get annoyed with you for constantly tweeting about X-factor or something, but really I should know better than to look at Twitter when X-Factor’s on, or I should file you away into a column I don’t have to look at in Tweetdeck, or something.

I just this moment cast my eyeballs across Tweetdeck, and lots of people seem to be watching a show called Come Dine With Me. I have never seen it, bit I know that it’s a reality-based TV show about food, and that there’s a woman on it who’s breasts “look like a boot.” That last one I got from Narstie. Cheers, Narstie. Narstie was watching Jeremy Kyle earlier, from the stinky safety of his sickbed. That happened to me once too, in an Irish hotel, and it scarred me for life like 2 Girls One Cup. That pain will never leave me, and I have only myself to blame for letting it into my head, from which it has been drip-drip-dripping into my conscious and my unconscious ever since, like piss into a bog.

For the most part, it looks like we must all accept full responsibility for that which we let affect us, and for what we then choose to do with that infection. German pop star Nadja Benaissa got a two year suspended sentence and 300 hours of community service for knowingly infecting a man with HIV, while whole towns are coming down with archaic diseases because we’re just too damn clean nowadays. I am not, as I have recently been accused, railing at politicians and and royals and newsreaders because of “perceived privileges afforded to them by their class”. I want balance.

— Thursday, December 16th, 2010