Tommy boy

If someone asked me why I run the streets of Helsinki like Usain Bolt in the middle of the day,

I would say,

"It's because I'm so happy"

or maybe I'd say, "It's because I'm so sad"

or maybe I'd say nothing and just keep running.

Being so charming is wearing me out.

I ate pasta the other day and thought that something must be done with this brain of mine.

17th October 2013

So, yeah, it's been over a month since all this happened so I guess I'll finally write about how I met Morrissey.

One morning I read this: Morrissey will appear at Akademibokhandeln Nordstan in Goteborg (Sweden) on Thursday 17 October to sign copies of his Autobiography.

(It was absurd. Morrissey's finally written his autobiography, and the signing tour's only stop is in Göteborg, Sweden?)

So a couple of days later I was in Göteborg with my sister. We took the cheapest plane and booked the cheapest hostel. And then we were there.

The signing took place at a huge shopping mall called Nordstan. The night before there were already about 20 people queueing. The next day when we joined the line about 5 hours before Morrissey was supposed to appear, the number of people was several hundreds. Young intelligent hipsters, young cool hipsters, young non-hipsters, middle-aged hardcore fans, hippies, handicapped people, activist types, intimidatingly normal-looking people, and me and my sister.

The queue was chopped to pieces using those fences that you see in amusement parks:



It squirmed through the first floor of the shopping mall.

So, there, next to a surprisingly unnoticeable McDonald's restaurant, we waited for hours. I sat on the floor and stared at thousands of people walking by. I noticed things: that there are a lot of very tall girls in Sweden. And a lot of very short immigrant men. And that many Swedish girls wear fur, unlike Finnish girls who never wear fur. (I don't think that the fur Swedish girls wear is real, but anyway.) And that a lot of old men in Sweden wear red James Dean jackets:



Sometimes a passer-by would stop and stare at posters that said WE WELCOME MORRISSEY and then ask us 'Vem är Morris-say?' and my sister would answer, sounding surprisingly Swedish.

At one point I went for a walk in the mall. Harriet Wheeler sang in my ears (because I had earbuds in them) as I walked around in an H&M store without a cause. I was happy.

After hours of waiting, we got to take 15 steps forward. Morrissey should be there in a couple of hours. There started to be something hysterical about the situation. Everybody was holding their copies of Autobiography, leafing through the pages, imagining themselves talking to the Mozzer. A woman with a British accent appeared out of somewhere and gave us little sticky notes, what are those called, I mean these:



Are they just sticky notes? Ok.

On these notes, we were supposed to write down what we wanted Morrissey to write on our books. I didn't know what I wanted Morrissey to write on my book. So I simply wrote down Olli Brander.

And we waited. I stood there, thinking about things that I usually think about, penises and vaginas and penises entering vaginas, and the fact that if somebody's gonna make it, it's gonna be me, when suddenly I realized that I was staring at a morrissey. In fact, it was Morrissey. He was there, 15 minutes earlier than he was supposed to, alive, inside the bookshop, walking towards his signing table that had roses on it.

It was Morrissey. Just 20 metres away from me. It was Morrissey.

People were screaming. I climbed on the fence to see over the heads of screaming people. I stared at Morrissey. It really was Morrissey. His big head. His autistically kind eyes. His underbite:



And now all that happened in front of me. In 2013. Right now. It was weird. He really exists.

I was surprised at how healthy he looked. He really looked healthy, really healthy. For the past 18 months he'd seemed to be on the edge of some sort of physical breakdown. For quite a while, he'd looked like an unhappy zombie. But now that was all gone. He looked healthy and happy, which made me healthy and happy.

The line started crawling. Really, crawling. 10 minutes, one step, 15 minutes, two steps. Morrissey spent minutes talking to every single fan; the fans cried, Morrissey hugged them, Morrissey signed their books and necks and teeth and asses and everything. It was nice that apparently, he was sincerely interested in every fan he encountered, but it was strange and slightly infuriating that nobody seemed to care about the fact that there were hundreds and hundreds of people that had traveled from afar and waited for hours. At this pace, most of us would never get to meet Morrissey.

2 hours went by. The line crawled. Finally there were only just about 30 people or so ahead of us. A girl with tears on her cheeks told the people behind us that Morrissey wouldn't leave until every book was signed. No matter how long it would take, he wouldn't leave. Where did you get that information? I would have asked, but unfortunately, I don't speak.

Then, 15 minutes later, a freezingly friendly female voice filled the air. The voice said that Morrissey had stopped signing and left, but all I heard was frustrated screams. The information emptied my head and my heart and all I can remember is that I started running.

I guess I just simply ran through people's bodies, but 20 seconds later I found myself on my knees outside the bookshop, and a security guard was shoving me in the chest. Morrissey had disappeared. All I could do was curse in Finnish. A screaming punker chick threw her Autobiography at the closed glass door and I understood her completely. I would have rioted too, but I was too tired and empty.



The atmosphere was a lot more chaotic than what it seems in this video ^. There were grown men (and women) crying like the world had ended. It really felt like all hope was lost. For a moment, I almost understood tragic lunatics who spend years of their life on a Morrissey fan forum called Morrissey Solo, every day writing how Morrissey let them down, unable to let go. (The site is full of them. There is something about Morrissey that lingers. You just can't let go.)

After that, my sister and I wandered aimlessly in the night of Göteborg. "People are gonna start dropping very soon," I said repeatedly. I wasn't going to kill anybody, but saying that I was helped a little bit.

The next day on the flight back to Helsinki, having slept for maybe 2 or 3 hours, I read Autobiography here and there, and for some reason, I almost cried. Above the clouds it was sunny, and I felt strangely happy. I didn't want to murder anybody anymore.

I'd seen Morrissey, and then Morrissey had disappeared. And that was part of the magic.

This beautiful male lion

An American TV presenter and 'hardcore huntress' Melissa Bachman posted this picture on the Internet, writing, "An incredible day hunting in South Africa! Stalked inside 60-yards on this beautiful male lion... What a hunt!"

Seems like the whole Internet attacked her after this. I was surprised, since usually when it comes to animal rights, people on the Internet are psychopathic idiots. Not this time.

Or maybe this time too. What hundreds of thousands of comments seem to say is that Melissa Bachman needs to be tortured, raped, slaughtered, and murdered for 'murdering a helpless animal'.

What? Why is everybody suddenly so angry?

These same people have no problem giving their money to things like the modern meat industry. The modern meat industry tortures 60 billion animals on holocaust-like factory farms every year. It is a much, much greater crime than killing one lion. Why the fuck are you attacking one woman for doing something horrible and cruel, when usually you seem to have no problem with 'helpless animals' being 'murdered' every day, all the time? You even pay the bad guys to do it.

Compassion for animals is one of the most important things a person can possess. But don't be a hypocrite.

Things could be worse though. At least the people on the English-speaking Internet are trying to be the Good Guys. Out of curiousity, I wanted to find out what kind of comments the case has received in Finnish media.

So I checked out a couple of Finnish articles. What the comments under the articles said was pretty much that Melissa Bachman is a hot lady, and that these Finnish men would want to go hunting with her and that shooting the lion was great and well done and that killing animals is fun.

What I've noticed before is that, in terms of animal welfare, Finnish people are strangely cold-hearted compared to people in other Western countries. I wonder why this is?

I have no idea. All I can say is: if you, my invisible international reader, are planning to move here... don't. This is a place to get out of.

Every night they play Michael Jackson on the radio, and every night I become more certain that Michael Jackson was a genuinely good person. 'Man in the Mirror' is one of the only important songs that ever get played on mainstream radio, along with 'Where is the Love?' by The Black Eyed Peas, 'Same Love' by Maclemore & Ryan Lewis, and 'Raise Your Glass' by Pink:

P!nk - one of the only actual rebels of rock nowadays.

________________

I'm really good at falling in love.

Probably better than most.

Man

demoman90. do the rest of us a favour, and destroy yourself and all the other mini psychopaths who sincerely struggle to see 'what's wrong with this'.

So in love

So in love it hurts.

With myself too.

What am I doing, gotta stop doing this for a while, seriously, argh

Argh

Dreaming about Harriet Wheeler

Jesus Christ, I have to stop dreaming about Harriet Wheeler.

When I say 'dreaming', what I mean is having nightmares.

Harriet Wheeler sang in The Sundays twenty years ago. Then she disappeared and became a normal person. Then, 15 years later, I found the songs, and her voice is the most beautiful, haunting voice I've ever heard. I am in love with the voice, which is disturbing as I know absolutely nothing about her as a person. I don't want to know, and fortunately there's almost no information at all to be found about her.

My brain doesn't like this.

Lately I've been having nightmares where Harriet Wheeler suddenly enters my life and turns out to be a horrible person. Either an arrogant diva who takes over my house, or a cruel teenage girl who torments people and then becomes a drug addict and dies.

2 hours ago I woke up on the sofa from a nightmare where Harriet Wheeler was a strange unintelligent gypsy mother who just kept giving birth to endless children, and, of course, ruining people's lives.

ARGH, I WANT THIS TO STOP. I'm sorry Harriet Wheeler, I wish my mad brain had nothing to do with you, it always destroys everything beautiful.

I read what I wrote last night. Some questions:

1) Why am I always against everything that everybody else seems to like? When other people like something, I usually automatically find it morally unacceptable.

2) If I tell a bully that he should 'rape' and 'murder' his own children, am I any better than he is?

Life is all about the LULZ

Excuse the quality of this screenshot. I'm too tired to do anything about it.

And it goes on.
I can't remember how I stumbled upon this hilarious dialogue, but I did.

When I read the dialogue, all I did was giggle and all I knew was that this David Thorne person is clearly a funny person. Then I found out that this David Thorne person, 41, is 'an Australian humourist, satirist, and Internet personality'. Apparently he's somewhat Internet sexy for doing stuff like this. I understand why. The email conversation with George Lewis is great.

But it's not this simple.

Soon David Thorne ruins it.

"Did she eat them?"

George is clearly painfully unintelligent. He obviously knows only one way to debate, and this is it. ("We would smash your fucking skull in.") What's disappointing is that David kind of ruins the whole joke by asking whether George's fat girlfriend 'ate' her dead family.

What made the thing so extraordinary in the first place was that David didn't lower himself to George's Neanderthal level. But then he did. He did, because this is the Internet, and the First Unofficial Rule of the Internet is that if you CAN hurt someone, you MUST hurt someone. Hurting others will make other monkeys laugh, and when they laugh, you're socially accepted, and being socially accepted is the only thing that really matters for people like this, people like David Thorne.

George is an idiot. He can't help it. It's very easy to bully him, but the most radical, and ultimately the most hilarious, thing would be to be nice to him.

I wanted to know more about David Thorne. The more information I found, the more I started to despise him. Turns out that Thorne's humour is mainly psychopathic. The more I found out, the more I started to despise myself for having laughed along.

Like many Internet humourists, Thorne is a bully. In most of his jokes, the funny element is how he humiliates people that are a bit slow, a bit sensitive, not so good at getting the joke. The motive is simple: if I do this, the other monkeys will reward me.

The other monkeys are predictable.
David Thorne 'made his co-workers life a living hell' (apparently because the co-worker was a bit dim and listened to Nickelback; every self-respecting Internet badass must know that Nickelback, just like Twilight and Justin Bieber, is on the list of Things That We Hate) and then bragged about it online. Here are some of the reactions.

See Cynthia Chalmers wisely noting that the tormented co-worker should have stopped 'bitching' and instead, left the workplace. Very good, Cynthia.

And when Herb Roe asks, "Why is everyone so happy with the antics of a bully?", here's what Johnny Metall has to say: "Awww, did you guys get picked on too? :D"

It is obvious that David Thorne is a bully. The individuals above^ would probably say that they're against bullying if you asked them. But this time the bully is articulate and funny, so they get confused and forget to pretend that they're Good People. Many of the social mechanisms of bullying can be seen in the comments of these fine people.

I mean, if it's funny and it's on the Internet, how could there possibly be something wrong with it?

One of the creepiest sides of the whole David Thorne thing is that he puts the names, pictures (!) and, in some cases, phone numbers (!!) of his victims on his website for millions to see. Let's hurt people and those close to them, let's really hurt them and see if we can destroy their lives; they don't need their lives anymore, because they were too slow to get your joke.

(There's a small grain of hope that these people are not real; that Thorne himself made them up. I truly, truly hope that this is the case, but I'm afraid it's not.)

Thorne humiliates people who contact him for unusual reasons, and people who are disturbed by his behaviour or defend the ones he's targeted before.

To me, one of the most unpleasant of all these cases (and sigh, also one of the most popular of them) is an email conversation he had with a woman whose cat was missing.

The dialogue continues as you'd expect. Shannon tells David that she's "extremely emotional over this and was up all night in tears", and David, the cool unfeeling Internet person, tortures her oh so hilariously. Shannon, understandably upset about her missing kitten, keeps ignoring the fact that David's making fun of her, while David, once again, torments her in hopes of later making other monkeys on the Internet laugh.

Instead of helping Shannon out, David makes stuff up about his amusingly cool life, pretends to be unable to understand what Shannon's asking him to do and spends time creating amusing movie posters about the missing cat.

Yes. It is funny. I laughed too, but strangely, I think that whether something is funny or not is not the only thing that makes a difference.

But why would you need weird crap like compassion on the Internet? If you CAN turn another person's tragedy into a comedy about you, you MUST do it.

Apparently we're supposed to be on David's side. We're supposed to think that Shannon's call for help is completely ridiculous and unreasonable; Missy's 'just a cat' and Shannon must be a real sentimental lunatic to care about losing her.

I mean, David's got "two clients expecting completed work this afternoon". So instead of spending his day 'making his co-worker's life a living hell', he's forced to waste his precious time HELPING another person. How unfair. I'm glad he refused to do such an insane thing.

Wait... What? It's the Internet and I'm being serious? I'm DEFENDING the sensitive kids and the slow kids?! What's wrong with me?!? Very disturbing.

__________________________________________________________

I guess the difference between people like me and people like David Thorne is that I don't do things like these to other people. I don't want to destroy anybody's life.

If I somehow managed to destroy another human being's life, I would hate myself deeply. And then, if a group of assholes came up to me and told me that what I did was "hilarious", I would hate them just as deeply. Their approval would mean nothing to me. I'd do everything I could to fix the situation and help the person whose life I'd destroyed. Because if I didn't, I'd spend the rest of my days thinking about that person, hating my pathetic self for having done what I did.

I guess that's the difference.

Karl Ove Knausgård

A month or two ago I bought the First Book in the series of autobiographical novels by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård. I don't know why I bought it. I was walking around in a bookstore and I just ended up doing it.

I've read 2/3 of the book. It's a long book and for some reason, most days I don't want to touch it. I don't know if I like it. The most important thing is that you certainly FEEL something when you read it. There are good parts. There are very good parts that make you feel that this is something truly important, something true and brilliant.

At the same time I'm a bit annoyed by Karl Ove Knausgård. He looks annoying. I'm annoyed by the thought of him sitting down and writing 6 Bibles about his ordinary life. Also, some of the things he says are annoying. For me, it was a real turn-off when he referred to his cat as 'just a cat'.

Turns out Knausgård is really hot in the literary circles (of the world) at the moment. People outside the literary circles are reading his books a lot too. Apparently many female readers are saying that by reading Knausgård they've finally got the chance to 'understand boys and men'. When people write or talk about Knausgård, they always say that Knausgård's writing is very MASCULINE.

Why? Because he has a beard?

Anyway, it's good that he wrote this.

Happy Halloween

This blog has become a place for stupid stuff having something to do with James Dean.

Am I somehow in love with James Dean? Lol, no, I don't think so. I'm just becoming increasingly unable to know the difference between James Dean and myself.

Do I even look like James Dean? A little bit. Not much. Not much. But there's something relaxing about forgetting about the Now and living in the 1950's instead. Those were nice times, especially because I didn't have to live them.

Okay! Thanks, Matthew, I'll try this.