The Best Thing About 2012...

2012 has been one of my favourite years. The reasons are many, probably, I will hopefully think of some before the end of this but I have only just realised that I enjoyed it. On WorldNewsVine.com I used to do a predictions for the year to come in favour of doing the more common Year in Review style bit. This would be a terribly depressing thing to do this year. We made it through this year by the skin of our teeth and I don’t want to think about next year just yet.

Despite the best efforts of the Internet, conspiracy theories and the wildly religious, the world is still spinning and we are still alive, congratulations on your survival.

2012 will be remembered as the year in which many people thought the world was going to end. The rest of us will remember it as the year we realised just how many people are wasting valuable oxygen and are too fucking gullible. I am no retro-hipster-wank but I didn’t like the Mayan prophecy of 2012 as much as I liked Harold Camping’s Rapture in 2011. While Harold Camping and his Rapture For The Boys, so to speak, was as far from the mark and as hideously nonsensical as a bit of stone from thousands of years ago predicting the end of the world, it was much funnier thanks to the number of his followers who destroyed their lives and the lives of their loved ones by selling everything they owned in preparation for the Rapture.

Heaven has a cover charge apparently.

The good thing about Camping’s Rapture is that they didn’t commit mass suicide and are left alive to think about how stupid they are. But this is about what happened in 2012 so spare a thought for the idiots who are still cowering in the bunkers in their garden, too scared of things they found out about on conspiracy sites to open the door and confront their unfathomable stupidity.

The End of The World, Royal babies, the Olympics, singing contests, Mormons trying to fit into reality, my government supporting genocide in Palestine, famous people dying just like regular people, the NRA landing on “arm teachers” as their response in the wake of yet another mass shooting in a school.

These things happened. Some funny, some tragic, some out of order and some downright insulting things made 2012 the year it was. But none of the above are close to the thing I liked most about this year. The thing I liked most about 2012 was an offshoot of one of the biggest things that happened on the internet in 2012.

Stop Kony was a campaign that captured many hearts and much money in March this year, but failed to capture or stop, or even prove the existence of Kony. The short film released by an organisation called Invisible Children used a small white child to raise awareness for small black children being forced into fighting by a man called Joseph Kony. It was a sad movie and made good points.

What was truly wonderful about this movement, other than the immediate acceptance of it’s legitimacy based on nothing but our combined conscience, was what came next.

Jason Russell was one of the people behind the movement, the small white child in the video is his son, and he is the guy exposing his son to the horrors of life as a child soldier in Africa. Not too long after the release of the video Jason Russell was in the news representing himself, his family and his wildly conservative religion in my favourite news story of 2012, and potentially of all time.

If you make an effort to educate, be it through the medium of music, film, art, writing or anything else, and you make points that you are passionate about and wish others to take seriously then you have to be really careful not to totally destroy all that hard work.

Not too long after the release of the film Jason Russell, devout Christian, took mind bending hallucinogenic drugs and ran around the streets naked, stopping only to wank furiously in the direction of whatever poor bastard who happened to be near him. He wanked on the pavement, he wanked on the road, he jumped on someone’s car and wanked on that. After releasing a movie about a tyrant, giving his kid an early insight into the true evil people are capable of and making a lot of money for the charity and it’s investors he embarked on a Magical Masturbation Tour of San Diego which ended in jail and humiliation. But most importantly it destroyed his wee film. It destroyed his point. It took everything good about his film and replaced it with wanking in public.

I don’t think we will ever manage those heights again. If something funnier ever happens I don’t think I could handle it. I watched the newsreel of him jumping on that car more than most people watched Stop Kony.

The news on TV is one of the big casualties on this year, and now that they have no issues doing something as sickening as reporting live from the funeral of a child, they won’t have time for actual news anymore, let alone a video of a guy wanking ON San Diego.

2012 was fun on a personal level too. I spent 4 months of it in North America, starting with Biffy Clyro in California while they recorded their new album and ending in a sort of mini crime spree in Canada. I even managed to hold it all together long enough to write a book about the whole thing. Maybe in 2013 you will get to read it. As long as we are not wiped out by the many things we seem to create to keep us scared of each other, the sky above us all and the water that surrounds us.

I love you guys. You’re all totally smashing. We should all get together sometime and have an orgy. Let me know.

Dr Henry Hunter. 2012.

X

Hey Buddy, Update Time!

As is always the case I have been distracted of late, keeping me from updating this or doing anything else really. I have been writing this book since the day I got back from my trip. As far as I know it is going to be called Don't Call Me Buddy, Buddy! It has a long subtitle too, but so far that has only been for the amusement of myself and I doubt it will stick.

Even this blog, which I am doing to keep you up to date, is a distraction of sorts. I am lying in my pit watching Columbo, reading over what I have done already and hoping that I write some more before I have to go to work. But there is no stress. Much like my trip, it will be done when it's done. I hope.

Last week I had the mild blues brought on, I think, by doing nothing but sitting in various rooms writing and doing not much else. Today is the first time in a week I have even opened the file holding my story. I am not saying it is good, but so far I have resisted the urge to delete the whole thing and actually do something with my life that would get me out of this damn room.

Few things bring me as much pleasure as writing. I mean, there is always sex, drugs and whatever kind of music you are into, but I take a strange kind of pleasure from stringing words together. Albeit with a complete disregard for the entire concept of grammar. I am aware of this and don't need some fool pointing it out to me.

I hope to be done with this soon, I feel like I have been talking to you guys for ages about it. I have got rid of many distractions, facebook, shifts, comfort in the quest to wrap this up. But I have spent most of the last week procrastinating, pondering pointless nonsense like just what the fuck the people who made Lethal Weapon 2 were all about casting Juney Smith in the role of Tom Wyler, a member of the squad who looks far too much like Danny Glover to have been cast in the same police unit as him. I have worried that this idea makes me racist, but the guy is so much like Danny Glover that when Wyler gets shot dead - while hanging upside down for absolutely no reason at all - the South African badguy actually has to mention that he isn't shooting Danny Glover just so the audience don’t get confused due to sloppy casting.

I don’t think it is racist. I have given this a lot of thought. Go watch the movie, you’ll see what I mean. You should watch it anyway, it is the best one. By a fucking mile. See when Mel puts his shoulder back in place after winning his bet, watch the older cop right next to him as he slams his shoulder into the wall. This bit part actor delivers some of the greatest acting I’ve ever seen. A fine example of taking your chances. It truly is a wonderful film.

Anyway, I guess you understand my predilection to distraction now. I am always looking out for something to over analyse in favour of actually doing any work.

But I think I have a point. That cunt in Lethal Weapon looked exactly like Danny Glover from the shape of his face to the moustache on it.

I mean, it doesn’t really matter. But it is really fucking annoying.

Anyway. I can’t wait for you guys to read Don’t Call Me Buddy, Buddy! I just hope the Mayans were on the wind up and I will get a chance to finish it.