The Infidelity of the Music Collection

The first record I ever bought was 'Power to All our Friends' by Cliff Richard.  Ah come on now, you can't blame me, I mean what else would you be spending your First Holy Communion money on? Well ok, there was also the pink nightdress case (that I still have) and a gold watch with a black face that I don't still have. My Mammy is still minding the rest of the money until I'm big.
It was a single, in a sleeve, and even if I can't remember what the song on the B side was, I do know that I played both sides over and over until it was too scratched to get any sound out of at all. But by then I had two records. The next one was Gary Glitter 'I love, you love.' And I did. I loved Gary Glitter so much that come Christmas I even got the Gary Glitter 1974 Annual. If I'd only known at that tender age that he might even have loved me back had I played my cards right...
Skip a few years to the Boomtown Rats, and the Moving Hearts. Blame the hormones for the Clash, the Sex Pistols, anything Punk or Bowie with a secret few bits of Abba and the Carpenters.
But my point is this - they were records, and as one of the obnoxious teenagers asked me when he was but a child: 'what are those black circle things in the thin covers?' Whatever they were, they are gone. Replaced by the cassette tapes that ended up tangled on trees. Followed by the CD collection that ended up as a collection of empty boxes with the CD's piled into the glove compartments of cars or stacked on top of sad domestic ghetto blasters that you could never turn higher than half it's potential because of neighbours or babies or just because it's loud.
So along came electronic media. It seemed like a good idea at the time. All your music on your laptop and you put it on to your ipod and you do a back up too, just in case, but you actually don't, and then the laptop gets stolen and the ipod falls down the toilet, so you start all over again. Then you plug in your ipod and the whole laptop goes into meltdown, or sometimes you don't do anything but you just lose all your music anyways and your kids smirk at you because you actually paid for music so it must be your own fault really.
Much worse though, is having about 64 of whatever those giga yokes are called, jam packed with every song in the universe that you ever listened to, but you still can't find a song you like and you spend most of your time clicking on to the next song. Then you hear a song on the radio that you think you can't live without having on your ipod but when you go to download it, it tells you that your ipod is full. So you delete some other song but a week later you miss that song and want it back. But you have to be cruel to be kind.
Music collections are just unfaithful. I could sing about it...

God Loves the Atheist

One thing that annoys me about God is that he (and there's no point in even considering calling him she, or he/she or it, because let's face it, there is no religion with a lady God, is there?) Well, he seems to prefer atheists. I mean, I don't believe in him and he makes good things happen to me all the time. And he seems to pick good godfearing believers to make bad things happen to, maybe he wants to test them or something.

But in another way you can't blame him. Atheists solve their own problems without asking God to do it for them. They leave God alone and don't expect him to solve all of their problems like they were kids who need to ask a parent for everything. And atheists don't go to war with other atheists because they believe that their way of being an atheist is better than someone else's way of being an atheist.

And atheists don't go around to peoples houses when they're just about to sit down for dinner and start talking about the lion lying with the lamb or ringing bells and singing hare hare krishna. And because of that, God loves them.

I suppose God is being clever. He loves atheists so that they'll love him back for being so good to them. And we do. So remember, before you knock them: atheists do love God. And remember the thing about how it's easier for a rich man to get through the eye of a needle? Well Churches are rich and atheists are not. So guess who's going to heaven first? Thing is, I'll probably hate it, it'll be full of bible thumping do-gooders and tame lions.
Ah well....

Money

I was on this training course there the past few days. It was hard to keep my mouth shut really, because I sometimes teach courses like the one I was on, and I just had so much to contradict and when I wasn't contradicting I was shouting up the answers before everyone else, because after all, I've heard all of this at least 100 times before. Well actually, I didn't keep my mouth shut, so I suppose I can't say that it was difficult as it didn't actually happen.
Well the old question came up on motivation: does money motivate people?
You had to write your answer on a post-it note and stick it on the wall, when it would later be revisited. I knew that the clever answer would be no, because the next part of the exercise would be writing down all the things that motivate and/or de-motivate you, and of course nobody was writing down money (except me of course, just to annoy the trainer as I knew that the next part of the exercise was going to be him pointing out that none of us had listed money as a motivator).
Well actually, I do think that money is a motivator. Even if you are loaded, what you get paid to do your job is symbolic of how you are valued. And even though it's the root of all evil and all that, it still is the axis upon which our world turns.
Money - the reason that people, countries, continents, can starve to death. The reason that a small bunch of arseholes can rule the world, the reason that I haven't gotten to see as much of the world as I'd like to, and the reason that we eat pancakes shortly before pay day.
I'd like to go into more detail, but because of money I'm doing a day job these days and am too tired to write much or do or say anything creative. Because of money I can't work full time as a writer, not even as a bad writer. But that said, working for the man is good writing material. Well it will be, eventually, when I get the gold watch and the pension, probably at age 75.
So what does motivate people? What makes you get out of bed in the morning? In my case its my bad hip. I need to stretch it. After that, I need to get out of the house before I have to speak to the bunch of teens who live here.
And the other things - recognition, thanks, success, teamwork and all the usual crap. Well they all end in money I suppose, somehow.
Even this blog, c'mon, I want your donations, want it to make money. And when it does, then I can sit back smoking a lady pipe and throwing wildly extravagant parties telling people how money don't mean nothing...