Freshly Spilled Thoughts

My grandfather was in the second World War but he didn’t talk about it very often.

If I ever asked him what he did in the war he would reply, “I was the one who made the doughnuts”.

I never knew if he was just joking or whether he did actually make the doughnuts as well.

As a kid I think I thought it was pretty cool that my grandfather knew how to make doughnuts.

He never missed a beat, going to work for 50 years and he was the least materialistic person I’ve ever known.

He was happy if he had an old TV to watch and a few teabags to make the next brew with.

If I hurt my arm or leg, he’d bring out a rusty old saw and say, “Which one is it? Let me know and I’ll cut it off for you”.

My great aunt used to say, “You shouldn’t do that to kids, Bob. They don’t understand.”

I did though. I got his humour, it’s the same as mine.

I never heard him moan, whinge or complain about his life. I never heard him feeling sorry for himself, even when he lost vision in one eye and his heart was failing.

My grandfather was the living embodiment of the expression, “salt of the earth”, and always will be MY HERO.

I can talk with the best of them, but deep down I’m a thinking man that enjoys my own peace and quiet. Or to put it in a more eloquent way, “I enjoy diving into my own pool of quiet contemplation”.

I wasn’t really talkative until I got into my late teens, so I grew up knowing what it was to spend significantly more time listening than talking.

A lot of people I know, who only see me being ‘chatty’ in company don’t realise this about me and probably never will.

Side Note: Some people think they are good listeners, but really they are just gob shites who enjoy talking about themselves.

That sort of amuses me, that you can know certain people for so long and they never REALLY know you.

That’s okay with me, most people are so consumed with their own lives they haven’t got time to really understand another person. They also feel better pigeon-holing someone else instead of considering the fact people are capable of being multi-faceted.

Just because someone is capable of being very talkative in social settings does not mean they are an empty vessel. I’ve met plenty of empty vessels in my time and I know the difference.

It works both ways I guess…

Anyway, today I just wanted to share the words of Plato with you:

Wise men speak because they have something to say.

Fools speak because they have to say something.

On that note, have a great rest of your day.

The author, Harper Lee is a curious one.

She wrote and published a book called “To Kill A Mockingbird”, which was adapted to film (starring Gregory Peck, no less).

After that she never published anything else outside of essays, unless of course you count “Go Set a Watchman” ,which was basically an early draft of “To Kill A Mockingbird” (so I don’t really count it). I half-believe assertions I’ve read online that she was somehow strong-armed into the publication of the latter ever seeing light of day. I guess we’ll never know the definitive answer to that, will we?

I read somewhere that this book generated something like £25 million over time, so it’s not like Harper Lee was ‘hard up’ in any way. Quite a nice life really isn’t it. Pen a book, help with the screen-play and then spend the rest of your life in relative obscurity whilst also being almost as rich as Croesus.

That’s a big “winning at life” in the book of Dean.

I read she was once good friends with Truman Capote, who got ‘well jell’ at the runaway success of her first novel.

Now, nearly 10 years on from her death, they’ve released a set of short stories she wrote in her youth and rather charmingly called the collection, “The Land Of Sweet Forever”.  I’m not sure she would have approved of the publication, but it’s here all the same.

Now I’m a sucker for a short story or two, but I’m not sure how much this set of stories would grip me. I’m still tempted to pick up a limited first edition of this though.

Will I ever read it? Dunno…

So yeah, I got attacked by a seagull yesterday. At the park by me there is a big pond with a shit load of seagulls hanging around. Sometimes I think it’s a youth centre for seagulls.

Anyway, I took bread with me to feed the ducks but they had all gone somewhere else. Rumour has it they were at the local pub down the road. Since I’d brought the bread with me anyway I thought it would be rude not to feed the seagulls.

It all started off well. I threw a few pieces in the air and they caught them in mid flight. Kinda cool.

Next thing I knew there was what I would regard as a “Seagull Call to Arms” and about 100 of the things started circling me. At first I quite enjoyed this bird groupie attention until it got out of hand and one attacked me by bouncing off my head.

At this point my mind flashed to a scene out of “Birds” by Alfred Hitchcock and I rapidly went off the things. Even as I was walking away, they kept flying quite literally less than a metre away from my head.

Fuck the Seagulls from now on. I’m going to give my bread to more deserving winged creatures.

Amazing eyesight though. Imagine if Seagulls played darts. They’d be better than Eric Bristow in his prime.

I’m not going to pretend to know much about Williams S Burroughs. I’ve never read any of his books and I certainly didn’t know much about his life, but one thing that really does interest me is his take on magic vs science.

I instinctively know he was onto something. Now I am not saying he was 100% correct but Science doesn’t know it all either. Magic is a real thing as far as I’m concerned and I believe that power exists within all of us.

The transmutation from thoughts into tangible reality is a magic of sorts as well. We can manifest that which we believe in and it begins with what we conceive within our own minds. If that isn’t magic, then I don’t know what is.

Burroughs also used to practice putting curses upon people (sounds like a nice guy). One can take this sort of thing too far but I know someone else who believes they wield this power to exact such a thing. I shall not bother trying to convince you one way or the other and if I told you the full story, you would not believe me anyway.

Some interesting stuff from Wiki by Burroughs:

“In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that’s just ridiculous. It’s as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it’s for a reason. Among primitive people they say that if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.” ~ Source: Wikipedia

and this:

“The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of “will” as the primary moving force in this universe – the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self evident … From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic.” ~ Source: Wikipedia

Well last night was very exciting. The Cinderella Man story continues!

I got attacked by a seagull today, which was a bit shocking but I survived.

More on that another time…

I love street art (art in general actually) and I bumped into this on a wall today, so I thought I’d take a photo of it before some no-talent ass clown sprays over it with the art skills of a drunk person holding a crayon.

Behold the autumnal scene that inspired me to stop and take a photo so it can be admired as intended…

I’m a big fan of the animated cartoon series, Bob and Margaret. The first two series nail being quintessentially British and middle-aged.

They did this short cartoon before that. It’s 8 ish minutes long and it’s about this old bloke called George who big-time fancies the woman across the road. Can someone tell me why she leaves a goldfish bowl (with fish in) outside the house whenever she goes out…

This psychedelic rap masterpiece by Nas, called “The World Is Yours”, always makes me feel both optimistic and wistful at the same time…

“Born alone, die alone, no crew to keep my crown or throne, I’m deep by sound alone.”

X (Or Twitter as I like to call it) is overrun by DM bots these days. I never realised this until I temporarily allowed anyone to message me. Here’s basically what is happening behind the scenes as far as I’ve gathered:

1) Someone (either the model or the agency/affiliate for the model) buys or somehow acquires a real aged Twitter account and pays for it to be verified. This acts as a burner account. I think they pay for verification to make it look more legit, and the laws of idiocracy means people trust blue ticks now.
2) The burner account is then userd as a bot driven DM conduit to an Only Fans page where they try to get mug punters behind a paywall for the model (mission accomplished)
3) 3 or 4 photos are added to the burn account to hook the lusty types in.
4) A bot then goes out and engages with people in DM’s. Should someone accept the chat it then initiates a disarming AI driven sales script with the end goal to get them to pay for an Only Fans subscription. It even tries to hit with you guilt/manipulation tactics to suck you in if you’re on the fence about w*nking your way into the record books (no other way of putting it).
5) During the course of the conversation some lewdish photos are posted by the bot in an attempt to get the male recipient into a state where only the lower brain is engaged (not difficult to do).

I sometimes engage in conversations with bots just to see how sophisticated the AI Chatbot is. One of the things about AI is it will trip up if you ask it to describe the surroundings in a photo or even right now. It will do that by over explaining what is in the background, but it just won’t sound right.

I asked it this question and it told me there was a painted wall in the background. LOL nobody talks like that in real life. If somoene sent you a lusty photo and you replied with, “Cheers for that, do you mind explaining what is in the background”, I suspect most people would think you were a nerdy weirdo.

I can imagine quite a few people still get taken in by this because half of the population are brain dead.

Here’s one I got the other day:

As you can see, if that account was genuine the model joined X/Twitter when they were 6 but managed to hold off messaging on there for over 10 years.

The bot is very sneaky and it tries to get you to believe that you have so much in common and that they live nearby. This one reckons she (if you can call a bot a ‘she’) lives in Wolverhampton. Yeah, right.

Over time all this shit is only going to become more convincing and we’re going to end up spending more of our time conversing with f*cking bots online thinking they are real people. Don’t think that this isn’t becoming part of your life, there are armies of human customer support people being replaced by AI as I type this.

This aint good Rodders, as Del Boy would say. All I can say is that there must be a fortune to be made as a numbers game promoting people on Only Fans. The fapping brigade clearly can’t get enough of all this… whoever said the internet was full of w*nkers.

This could have been a fully fledged blog post but I’ve lodged it in the today section. Be careful, it’s a jungle out there kids.

Online, everyone is a commodity for these automated parasites and if you’re not careful, you end up being ‘the mark’.

You know what really makes me sad?

There are people out there who aren’t very computer literate who will perceive they are talking to their dream woman who likes getting her tits out on OnlyFans. There’s something rather tragic about that.

Mug Punter: “I met my dream girl online”
Not So Mug Punter: “Yeah?”
Mug Punter: “Well, she messaged me one day on social media”
Not So Mug Punter: “Yeah?”
Mug Punter: “Then she sent me a picture with her top off”
Not So Mug Punter: “Interesting. What happened after that?”
Mug Punter: “She got me to subscribe to her Only Fans for £5 per month”
Not So Mug Punter: “Wow. You’ve hit the jackpot. You can’t put a price on love, but if you did, £5 is a steal”
Mug Punter: “I know. I’m helping to support her through her studies. She wouldn’t be doing it otherwise”
Not So Mug Punter: “Sure. Keep drinking that Kool-Aid.”

Someone I know once met up with a hooker for an actual date from some adult website (i.e. he wasn’t a punter). Imagine the ad headline: “Hooker By Trade, Seeking Love In Between Clients”. He was a really genuine guy as well… but it gets worse. She’d just seen a client so he had to wait for her to finish before they went out.

That must be the worst date scenario I’ve ever heard of in real life. What was he thinking!?

He said to me, “FFS you’d think she’d have taken the afternoon off at least.”

The tragedy of it mixed with the comedy still makes me laugh… but I felt overwhelmingly bad for him as I could tell he was just a decent guy who wanted company.

Loneliness is a funny thing – some people can’t cope with their own company. They don’t want to know (or can’t cope with) who they are, so they have to fill the void with something before they go crazy.

Anything will do. I think these people would go out with a loaf of bread if it conversed with them and wore bright red lipstick.

Sometimes in life you just can’t get your hat off to what goes out there in the urban ghetto.

Considering we’re nearly in November it’s a beautiful day.

My niece’s horse this morning:

I swear to God that sometimes I think that the universe is listening, and everything is already kinda mapped out for us.

It’s either that or it’s a case of spooky recognition. You know, like when you buy a Mini, all of a sudden you notice every single Mini on the road that passes you. Our brains ‘tune in’ to that frequency.

Here’s a case in point…

The other day I watched a programme about time travel and I was quite literally thinking about this subject earlier. Someone I don’t know, decided to slide into my DM’s and sent me this:

Spooky, don’t you think?

Even if that’s a bot sending me a message, it’s still too uncanny for me.

The universe knows something. I think we send out energy mentally – a bit like telepathy… and that orbits back to us somehow.

Now I love the IDEA of time travel, as far as books and movies go. After thinking about this though, I don’t really want this to ever become a thing and I hope humans never accomplish it (assuming they haven’t already).

Sure, I’d love to go back to the beginning of Hollywood and work with Buster Keaton on a movie.

Sure, I’d love to go back in time and spend a bit longer chatting with my grandfather while we picked blackberries. Oh, how I’d love it.

Sure, I’d love to pop in and see what Henry VIII was like on a good day before he shouted “off with their heads”.

Or rewrite bits of history like Groundhog Day until I got it 100% right.

But life isn’t like that and it’s not meant to be. I hope they never find a way to travel through that worm hole and come out the other end in one piece.

Humans screw up too many things to trust that we’d use that power wisely. No thanks, you can keep your time travel in real life guv’nor.

All we have is the wonder of now. It’s possibly the most fluid and liberating thing, if you embrace that without wanting to get in a DeLorean and go somewhere else. Right now is always where it is at and it’s what you are thinking and doing right now that will shape tomorrow.

Time travel. Bloody love it in books/movies, and that’s where it will hopefully always stay.

I will leave you with this…

A spark becomes a thought. A thought becomes an action. An action creates movement. Movement builds momentum. Momentum becomes energy… and that energy can grow into something unstoppable.

It all starts with something so small, on another day you may have just dismissed it.

Have a great rest of your day.

Have you ever noticed that when you don’t go to the dentists, you don’t need any work doing.

Reminds me of a conversation I had once with a friend of mine:

Friend: “I haven’t got any fillings”
Me: “When did you last go to the dentists?”
Friend: “About 10 years ago”
Me: “Yeah, that’s why.””
Friend: “Shit.”

I’m also reminded me of this joke (and it’s a good one)

Today I was hoping to get away with a scale and polish, then just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.

After going over my x-ray with a fine toothcomb, it turns out I’ve got to have a filling drilled out and re-filled.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens!?

I am not a big fan of teeth and the pre-requisite amount of brushing required just to keep them in your head.

They are such a high maintenance thing – whatever was God thinking of?

I think the omnipresent one should have given us all titanium teeth from the outset.

I’m bulletproof, nothing to lose
Fire away, fire away
Ricochet, you take your aim
Fire away, fire away

You shoot me down, but I won’t fall
I am titanium
You shoot me down, but I won’t fall
I am titanium

For fun, some people find abandoned buildings and explore them. It’s pretty amazing what is still inside some of them – they are like museums for nostalgia. I thought this thing found in an abandoned care home was pretty sweet…

I was being a bit coy referencing “Into the Wonderful” in my last post.

When I was about 15 my mate gave me a copy of a game called “Gods” and there was a speech sample on it I’ll never forget, where the person speaking on the track says, “Into the Wonderful“.

Doesn’t sound like much now, but back then it was mind blowing in a way that’s impossible to articulate in 2025.

I liked it so much I bought the domain on a whim, but I haven’t done anything with it.

Yes, I own intothewonderful.com (don’t bother checking it there’s nothing there lol).

Some things just stick with you, don’t they. Happy days, our kid.

Here’s the remaster:

Did you miss me, or just the wordy chaos?

I knowww, I went quiet for a bit on here.

Not on purpose… I got temporarily kidnapped by the distractions of life and didn’t bother to struggle too much.

Anyhoo, coffee’s poured, words are flowing, and the nonsense machine is back in business.

As if it ever really stopped, eh.

Back now with the usual spontaneous verbiage and some freshly spilled ink.

Let’s do this thang and ride the thought wave as we go ‘Into the Wonderful‘ (whatever that is).

I think I’ve bought every Stephen King Short story collection since the very first one I picked up in early 2003.

It was called ‘Everything’s Eventual’. At the time I remember liking the story, “Lunch At The Gotham Cafe”. I was in love with a girl I was seeing at the time, and she liked Stephen King as well, so I bought her this book. Basically, I thought she was ‘the one’ but, as is so often the case, life did not work out that way at the time, despite my efforts. On a lighter note, the story she liked was, “The Man in the Black Suit”.

It’s a bit worse for wear now but I’ve still got the collection…

King and Michael Marshall Smith are probably my favourite short story writers. Whenever I pick up a new Stephen King story collection, I always wonder what she would have thought of them.

I remember reading another short story collection that year by a writer called Matthew Klam.

It was called Sam the Cat, although it had nothing to do with pet cats. A woman at work asked me what book I was reading one day and I showed her the front cover…

She stared at it for a second as she took in the picture of the cat on the front cover with the attention span of a goldfish, before turning her attention back to whatever it was she was doing, prior to rudely interrupting me.

Judging by her disinterested expression, I’m sure she thought I was reading a book about cats or some kind of children’s book. She probably pigeon-holed me as some simpleton that sits there reading stories that teach me the alphabet.

I briefly contemplated explaining what the book was about, but she was a bit of an empty-vessel-type so I stopped myself.  You know, the sort that would get confused if orange juice said “concentrate” on the carton.

“How long before I can stop staring at this stupid carton?” 

Maybe she was hoping to borrow ’50 Shades of Smut’ off me when I’d finished it, and was left altogether deflated by my innocent looking cat-read (lol).

Still makes me laugh that she thought I’d brought a book into work to read about pets.

“Yeah, Michelle… it’s a book about cats, doncha know. Sheesh”

“Dean was reading a book about a cat called Sam, earlier. He’ll be reading Andy Pandy next.”

I went through a phase of watching comedy for an hour first thing every day before I did anything else. Let me tell  you something, it was absolutely brilliant and I’d recommend it to anyone if they have time.

Usually I’d watch:

Frasier (never used to like this at all but I’ve turned into Clive James as TV has dumbed down)
The World According to Jim 
Everybody Loves Raymond

Depending on what was on. They just happened to be on at that time when I got up.

Anyone who gets up in the morning watching news should do this instead.  You aren’t wasting an hour, you’re investing in comedy.

How to Massively Increase Your Happiness

1) Never watch the news unless it’s about a murder (everyone loves a good murder)
2) Swap news for comedy (spotting the pattern yet?)
3) Eat a banana (it’s nature’s answer to Prozac)
4) Decide you’re never going to become jaded, bitter or cynical. Kids don’t look at the world the way jaded adults do.
5) Do exercise even if it’s just walking. Your body is connected to your mind.
6) Cut the deadwood out of your life (cull fair weather friends and energy vampires)
7) Find someone that you don’t have to change who you are for. Don’t try to change them either.
8) Get out into nature. Feed the birds or something. Look at green things (apart from The Hulk)
9) Never lose your sense of wonder. Magic does exist, it’s already inside of YOU.
10) Bottom line people’s actions. It’s what people do that counts, not what they say.

Bonus: Cross The Bridge to Terabithia

Have a great rest of your day.

I’ve been hearing some crazy dating stories lately, the kind that make you question whether anyone actually meets naturally anymore.

I’d like to think people still met in a fruit and veg aisle or even a pub, but it seems that most people I talk to are lost in a world of apps, swiping right and left in between meals without ruining their appetite.

During one phase where I was single I went on one of the swipe-fast, swipe-often apps and recognised quite a few of the people on them in real life, including the woman on the front desk at my old gym. It was really quite surreal seeing these people on a dating app in a different context.

Eventually I got bored and just swiped right until I ran out of credits. I even matched my mates ex girlfriend which she obviously told him about on Facebook, because next time I went out with him he asked me about it. I didn’t even know I’d matched her until her photo flashed up on the app. You have to laugh.

It all seems a bit vacuous to me because you don’t know anything about them other than whether you find them vaguely attractive in a photo (unless you know them already of course LOL). A photo that could be 10 years old or something.

A friend of mine once met a guy from an app at a train station. He looked nothing like his photo, and when they went for breakfast, he didn’t even have the money to pay (yes, she bought him breakfast). She nicknamed him ‘Breakfast’ after that and dropped him like a bad habit.

I happen to think that eye contact remains undefeated and connections happen when you least expect them.

One thing is for sure, life is more interesting when you’re not looking too hard for what’s next. It’s a motto to live by.

Sightseers is a very dark comedy film about a caravan holiday.

Couple of quotes from it that made me laugh:

Tina: You all right?
Carol: I was just thinking about Poppy. She was me only friend.
Tina: Oh, Mum. I’m your friend.
Carol: You’re not a friend. You’re just a relative.