Wednesday and Chocolate

Poverty Hole Train Station is a rather ugly place, set inside of a tunnel that at least keeps out the rain. Its seats, as with all Metro stations, are thin and designed so that actual sitting, in the truest sense of the word, is impossible without the aid of one’s legs.

I was attempting to find a comfortable position to write in; ever-moving yellow slab of plastic beneath me, left foot out and straining against the floor, right knee over the left knee and notebook unevenly resting upon my knees as I hunched. I was unfortunate—I remained uncomfortable.

A brown woman walked by me, dressed all in black. At first she struck me as a young girl, though after scrutinising her figure for a second or so, I realised her to be—perhaps, as this is merely a rough approximation; a gentleman doesn’t ask a lady her age, though whether she was a real lady or a crass whore remains a mystery to me—around thirty years old. She had brown hair with golden-blonde highlights, curled and tied behind her head, spreading out like a sweet flower of hair spray.

She passes me, sits upon another of the yellow plastic ‘seats’ and then rummages through her bag for some perfume. This is shaken and then sprayed all about her from every angle—even below her gut; a monumentally large organ that I consider momentarily—until the air is now filled with the sweet scent of something marketed to single women as a means to the end of an orgasm caused by wild sex with a mysterious and bizarrely-single handsome young man, too busy or too attractive to shave his neck and chin, whilst his armpits (the man is always topless in advertisements for perfume) are often kempt and well-kept.

This person, sitting one spare place; one foot; twelve inches; thirty centimetres away from me, impresses upon me the fact (not idea) that she takes good care of herself in every aspect other than physical fitness, for soon she fishes in her bag once more—such is her skill that no ‘rod’ is required—and pulls forth a chocolate bar. I watch her take care not to damage the perfect petit bâton du plaisir with her long-pink-false-fingernails, before undressing it. Its blue plastic coating melts away like a woman tossing away her dress in one swift motion, and the rippled skin of the ‘Wispa’ bar is naked and the same colour as her face, her hands… her neck.

“Oh, mon cher, you must not live a chaste life without self-indulgent consummation de chocolat! Lick it: I want to see the contrast of your pink tongue and chocolate and chocolate skin.” I silently provoke whilst sure that my eyes would convey this if she were to realize and look into them, unable to remove my gaze from the gluttonous girly-woman and direct it elsewhere, for this obese woman swallowing a chocolate bar whole is in some way both delightful and desolate; horrible and happy; a joyous tragedy!

Just beneath the cotton layer covering her chest is a black or ‘bisque’—she strikes me as the sort who’d wear a mundane colour like ‘bisque’ on her underwear—bra, cupping and supporting her large water-balloon-breasts, dark with darker-still and typically large areolas.

I’m staring. She notices me staring. Embarrassed, she stands whilst I politely return to writing. I’ve written the entire scene in a hastened scrawl! It is burned into my memory. Vaguely, I see her board the train on another carriage, her parting gesture the crinkling of the thin blue robe that was once around the chocolate bar now boiling inside of her beer-belly. The train disappears. I sit. I forget about her for some time.

Instead, as I doze lazily upon something slightly more comfortable than a bed of nails; weary, it’s raining, bleak and dreary, I ponder dark Egyptian princesses with wide green eyes, more beautiful than the ruby-red rubies that adorn their black dresses, with their gold and their bare feet and their long dark hair. Bare feet? Suddenly I am taken back to that first night with my first girlfriend: the soles of her bare feet press softly upon my chest and her legs are slightly spread, her emerald eyes are wide with anticipation of the act to follow.

My dreaming is ruined by the violent rocking of the train and my head cracks against the window. I get off at the next stop then begin to walk towards my doorstep.

I clap my fist into my palm and mutter, with some excitement, “I know! I’ll write about her!” I take my dictaphone from my pocket and speak into it from memory, then find my desk and begin to type. Certainly, she deserves a chapter.

Thursday Morning

Thursday.
I awoke at six-thirty to a blurry world and the dull sensation of a full bladder. Heading at once to the bathroom, I emptied it over the course of at least two minutes and then thoroughly washed my hands.

Upon returning to the King’s chamber, I slid back the blinds—instead of beneath the covers—and opened a window in order to survey my kingdom: green grass, tired-faced and well-meaning mother (and neighbor) picking at juvenile son’s ugly shirt. Azure sky untainted with fluff or cloud, hot sun, faint scent of seaweed, cool breeze.

“Is it possible you have kidney stones? Best detoxing is a fruit & veggie detox—only eat fruits and veggies for a day or two … And drink tons of water. Just make sure you also get some salt in your diet … If tests say normal I doubt it. Could be a food allergy. Try detoxing for a few days and see what happens.” – Cameron Chapman

Detoxification? My bloodstream is filled with the ugly aftertaste of a daily regimen of medication, as prescribed by either myself or my doctor. The anti-depressants do nothing to relieve depression, but actually encourage it, and therefore are left outside of my body—what more misery could I possibly wish for? Liver and kidney detoxification will be researched when there’s more time. But, well, without a dialysis machine on hand it’ll likely just involve eating vitamin-rich fruits and vegetables, whilst guzzling as much water as I can.

Anyway, I feel less sore about yesterday’s argument. Whether this is due to the 50mg of diazepam or not, I am unsure. I am no physician. I feel forgiving of Hannah, guilty and embarrassed at my own behaviour. James does not want her back, but he wants her back: the tigress.

Sweating at the train station, I attempted to amuse myself with the day’s headlines and nothing caught my eye. The breeze did not occur often enough to wash away the layers of sweat heaped upon my skin, much like a second skin, by the burning sun. Sky still azure, no scent of seaweed: just a longing for one’s troubles to be pulled away with a passing train.

James boards the train and feels his reigning misanthropy burning as a glance takes in the livestock. Oh, why can’t I have a seat to myself, I wonder, inwardly. The thought is soon lost as my ongoing inner monologue continues and I pull out a pad of paper, a pen and an idea for something to write about.

I sigh. Out loud. If I am to accomplish any piece of writing that bares any resemblance to the truth, I will require time alone in the locations my stories take place. When education is finally done (education is never done) I shall be free to dispense my savings into the hands of travel agents, who’ll organize my nomadic itinerary. The concept of “home” will vanish, its denotation mutating into “the bed for tonight” and I will be, ladies and gentlemen, a traveller once more! Amsterdam is first on my list, for ‘tis one of my favourite cities, not least for its deceptive hype; not in any way a heaven of hedonism (a title that belongs to France), the culture is one of drinking, smoking and otherwise ‘drugging’ oneself into a stupor and spending a few Euro notes upon a prostitute, her skin tainted pink by the red-light hanging from the ceiling of every room along a cobbled corridor of pimps and paid-for-sex.

I shall not get into the after-dark army of hooded negroes offering dirt-coloured bags of crystallized benzoylmethylecgonine hydrochloride—we all know it as ‘Cocaine’, but NaHCO3 (‘Bicarbonate of Soda’) is what you get—or the spiral-shaped public toilets, or the smell of the canals or the Dutchmen in top-hats who look like they are bound by some extraordinary sense of justice to murder prostitutes in the shadowed nooks and hiding places of the Red Light District.

I will not even begin to speak about the fog that is not fog at all, but a blanket of old cannabis smoke, for these are for another time.

I’ve yet to even cover the day!

Thursday.

I awoke at six-thirty to a blurry world and the dull sensation of a full bladder. Heading at once to the bathroom, I emptied it over the course of at least two minutes and then thoroughly washed my hands.

Upon returning to the King’s chamber, I slid back the blinds—instead of beneath the covers—and opened a window in order to survey my kingdom: green grass, well-meaning mother picking at juvenile son’s ugly shirt, azure sky, hot sun, faint scent of seaweed, cool breeze.

“Is it possible you have kidney stones? Best detoxing is a fruit & veggie detox—only eat fruits and veggies for a day or two … And drink tons of water. Just make sure you also get some salt in your diet … If tests say normal I doubt it. Could be a food allergy. Try detoxing for a few days and see what happens.” – Cameron Chapman

Detoxification? My bloodstream is filled with the ugly aftertaste of a daily regimen of medication, as prescribed by either myself or my doctor. The anti-depressants do nothing to relieve depression, but actually encourage it, and therefore are left outside of my body—what more misery could I possibly wish for? Liver and kidney detoxification will be researched when there’s more time. But, well, without a dialysis machine on hand it’ll likely just involve eating vitamin-rich fruits and vegetables, whilst guzzling as much water as I can.

Anyway, I feel less sore about yesterday’s argument. Whether this is due to the 50mg of diazepam or not, I am unsure. I am no physician. I feel forgiving of Hannah, guilty and embarrassed at my own behaviour. James does not want her back, but he wants her back: the tigress.

Sweating at the train station, I attempted to amuse myself with the day’s headlines and nothing caught my eye. The breeze did not occur often enough to wash away the layers of sweat heaped upon my skin, much like a second skin, by the burning sun. Sky still azure, no scent of seaweed: just a longing for one’s troubles to be pulled away with a passing train.

James boards the train and feels his reigning misogyny burning as a glance takes in the livestock. Oh, why can’t I have a seat to myself, I wonder, inwardly. The thought is soon lost as my ongoing inner monologue continues and I pull out a pad of paper, a pen and an idea for something to write about.

I sigh. Out loud. If I am to accomplish any piece of writing that bares any resemblance to the truth, I will require time alone in the locations my stories take place. When education is finally done (education is never done) I shall be free to dispense my savings into the hands of travel agents, who’ll organize my nomadic itinerary. The concept of “home” will vanish, its denotation mutating into “the bed for tonight” and I will be, ladies and gentlemen, a traveller once more! Amsterdam is first on my list, for ‘tis one of my favourite cities, not least for its deceptive hype; not in any way a heaven of hedonism, the culture is one of drinking, smoking and otherwise ‘drugging’ oneself into a stupor and spending a few Euro on a prostitute, her skin tainted pink by the red-light hanging from the ceiling of every room along a cobbled corridor of pimps and paid-for-sex.

I shall not get into the dark army of hooded negroes offering dirty-coloured bags of crystallized benzoylmethylecgonine hydrochloride—we all know it as ‘Cocaine’, but NaHCO3 (‘Bicarbonate of Soda’) is what you get— or the spiral-shaped public toilets, or the smell of the canals or the Dutchmen in top-hats who look like they are bound by some extraordinary sense of justice to murder prostitutes in the shadowed nooks and hiding places of the Red Light District. I will not even begin to speak about the fog that is not fog at all, but a blanket of old cannabis smoke, for these are for another time.

I’ve yet to even cover the day!

Airbrushing and Retouching Part Two

This will only be a fairly short post, as what I’ve done to the image is fairly simple and perhaps difficult to notice. Fortunately for myself, the brown facial marks on the girl in the portrait are quite easy to notice and even easier to remove.

I’d like to show you the beauty of Adobe Camera Raw and its Heal tool as well as the Clone tool. A combination of these tools can allow any blemishes or unwanted marks upon an image to be quickly and easily removed. Simply choose an area that you’d like to replace and move the green circle over something similar.

The size of the area to be healed or cloned can be altered using the mouse. It’s best when these tools are used in combination and I’d at least try and find a similar area of skin in terms of color, tone, texture and such to replace it.

Notice the marks on her face, some on her chin & around her nose.

As this was mostly a rushed job, I haven’t tackled all of the spots and such upon her skin; it was late and I was simply playing about with possibilities after reading a few tutorials online. However, I don’t think that Adobe Camera Raw should be underestimated. To use this:

• Open Adobe Bridge
• Find the image you’d like to edit.
• Double Click (or right-click & choose “Open in Adobe Camera Raw”) on PC
• From there, once you’ve finished playing with the image, you can move onto Photoshop.

I must point out that the alterations you make to your image in Camera Raw are not actually applied to the image itself. It appears that they are stored either as a set of instructions within the program or a seperate file that Photoshop and other programs can then read and act upon.

Quite useful. Extremely simple. Powerful. I’ll post a color-corrected (I know the colors are off) version of the completed image when I move onto the next stage, in which I plan to manipulate this image further.

Airbrushing and Retouching Part One

Using photo-editing software is rather relaxing and passes the time when I should be writing. However, it can be quite useful and I’d love to learn as much as I can about altering photographs, from simple color changes to altering the shape of the subject’s body. Expect more, hence “Part One”.

My First Attempt:

I found the original photograph whilst browsing sxc.hu and chose it to be retouched because it appeared quite ‘cool’ in terms of coloring; I altered the CMYK colors to match a ratio of C10 – M30 – Y32 (not actual numbers) and then altered her lip-stick:

• Added an adjustment layer.
• Played with curves in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key – Black) to add warmth.
• Created another Layer.
• Selected her lips somewhat clumsily.
• Feathered selection with 10px.
• Changed the ‘Saturation’ to +65.
• Played with lip-stick opacity.

First five-minute attempt at retouching a photograph (taken from sxc.hu)

I know it’s simple, so I’m not looking for feedback but instead leaving this as a milestone of sorts; I intend to continue to work with the original image in order to add certain other features, edit out blemishes, perhaps alter just her skin-tone rather than the colors of the entire image and even accentuate her eye-lashes and perform other tasks people undertake in order to make real women into fake and flawless dolls.

There may be copyright issues surrounding this image and therefore I will take it down and remove it if asked. Please do not copy it, either.

Travel Bites – Canary Islands

Airport lounges are all the same. You can tell who’s been where, or where they’re going, just by looking at them.

There’s the four person family; cheap package deal, self-catering, going to or coming from one of the islands of Gran Canaria. Probably Tenerife.

The Canary Islands are barren and unsightly. I’ve walked on almost all of them. There isn’t a desert, there’s no woodland to speak of, they’re simply bubbles of dried volcanic rock. Unfortunately, the tourists arrived before nature had the opportunity to make these places lush and verdant on their own. I wonder what would’ve become of them had they remained untouched.

Were you to go there, you’d understand that they’re consumer vaccuums running on capitalism: tourists arrive, pay for a square metre of space on one of the island’s many beaches, bake themselves for a while in the hot sun, then they get up and walk around. The shops are like an unending airport duty free section, with greasy Spanish men pushing cameras into unwilling hands, charged with the task of selling these already-obsolete goods.

I say drop the camera that’s pushed into your hand. Drop the whole island into the sea. Let its inhabitants sink to the bottom of the Atlantic, but compliment them for their dilligent attempts at cockroaching through existence all of this time.

If you look up, there’ll be an almost endless series of hotels perched upon dubious foundations around every mountain in sight. Roads snake around them and slowly upwards, straining tour buses. Were there anything else to see, perhaps I’d take issue with it. But, there isn’t anything else to see. No ancient civilisations. Very little history. Just sun, audibly crackling tourists and inhabitants whose skin has leathered, tough and brown.

The beer is cheap. The cheap beer is bad. The best beer is imported, but still bad. The restaurants try to be exotic, perhaps to make up for the lack of natural scenery, putting all kinds of strange seafood dishes on the menu; buttered baby squid, swordfish. You’d just like a steak, not a meatless rabbit.

Sewers are open in places; a sharp contrast to the beautiful and long, loose dresses of the darkening tourists that pass them, their hands covering their wrinkled noses. I’d rather keep my sacred pale skin; an umbrella perhaps, but that would defeat the point of coming here.

Here, where there is only sun, sand and a cosmopolitan mixture of “home”.

Cicadas shake marraccas at night. Hotel pools are still. The noise of the filter, coupled with the cicadas, makes it peaceful.

Climb a mountain and escape the din of the city and its night-life. Look behind where the hotels are. There’s nothing. Not even desert. An endless quarry of hard volcano, unfinished roads and unfinished hotels. People live around the coasts; sand is a luxury that you can charge money for. A handful of Euros per square metre. Sell the beach. Sell the sea. Sell the herd of dolphins beneath the waves. Grow crops indoors, plant vines in potholes and wish you lived anywhere else.

Anywhere that has something more…

Gallo Family Vineyards – Syrah Rosé – 2007

Where: Sainsbury’s Offer – Reduced to £3.99
Winemaker: Gallo Family Vineyards
Type: Syrah Rosé
Origin: California, USA
Year: 2007

Having found their Zinfandel Rosé to be fairly disappointing, I was hoping for something nicer in this budget wine from Gallo Family Vineyards. The Zinfandel was certainly sweeter…

I judge wine in keeping with Dylan Moran’s perception: there are three kinds, which can be described simply as ‘the good’, ‘the bad’ and the rare ‘ugly-but-drinkable’. One would expect a Rosé wine to be sweet and, when first opened, this wine certainly filled my nostrils with a sweet and unmistakable scent of ripe summer berries and similar fruits. However, its sweetness ended there…

The wine is certainly not very dry, nor is it particularly sweet. I’ve tasted both extremely dry and extremely sweet wines whilst in various areas of France and still cannot understand Californian wines: there is a distinct lingering aftertaste of ethanol, dry and spicy in an unpleasant way.
However, I deal mostly with budget wines; cheap and cheerful. This wine is not subtle and there’s a lack of consistency between the sweet and fruity first sip – or gulp depending upon how you like to drink – and the second, which is raw and dry; the lingering mist of ethanol coating your tongue.

Summary: Sweet on opening, then overpowered by alcoholic taste.

Is this wine worth the money? Yes!

Does it taste like vodka mixed with cherry pop? Hints at it.

Would I serve it to a guest? No.

Score:  4/10

Blog Material Sources

I’m particularly awful when it comes to consistently creating original content that follows a specific topic or category and therefore posted this in the “Random” category, but I hope to use this as something of an extension to Twitter, which I discovered fairly recently and took to like a duck to water! The limited number of characters leaves no room for the pointlessly verbose and rambling language I am famous for amongst my lecturers and peers – I write for fun and occasionally offer pieces for people to read, who mostly say the same thing: you’re too verbose.

Here’s a list of the various social-networking sites that I’m a part of. I’m not actually a part of any online communities just yet, but I shall be soon, I hope.

• Facebook was what I tried to get into first, after being persuaded to sign up by a close personal friend, but it simply lacks organization and order. Finding friends is difficult because there’s no back-and-forth: I can’t see what someone else is like before it’s too late.

• Twitter doesn’t have the problems of Facebook, despite people pretending to be celebrities that they aren’t – Kanye West recently painted the internet in capitals with his anger towards someone who’d created an account with Twitter and pretended to be Kanye West, becoming very popular. Aside from those issues, I’ve found this to be the most effective and simple way to meet fascinatingly wonderful people online: the API allows one to create applications that make use of Twitter in any language you’d like – as long as you can access the internets – and search for topics, words, phrases and the like.

• Digg has just come into my life to provide potential content to comment upon in this blog, along with…

• Glue, an extension for my web browser: I can visit a site with media content, such as Amazon, NetFlix or even Wikipedia and find people who are interested in what I’m looking at, like or dislike it and perhaps even commented upon it (gave it their “2 Cents”). I can, in turn, make comments about the items and perhaps find new friendships with other people through our common interests and passions.

• Reddit is similar to Digg and may, hopefully, provide some interesting stuff to write about. I enjoy using these simple sites and their Firefox add-ons in order to keep myself updated with both international & national news. The local news is something I’ll have to work on, as buying newspapers doesn’t really factor into my budget, but I think I can get it somehow…

• RSS Feeds are extremely useful too, but I’ve yet to actually manage to get into them seriously. My iGoogle page has news items and feeds on it. I rarely visit there. I look for bizarre stories; I have an interest in the bizarre. I buy a copy of th magazine with that exact title each month, though I’m somewhat disappointed because I’ve yet to have found a “Do-It-Yourself” guide to scarification, piercing or branding within their pages. Luckily, or unluckily if I end up an amputee due to infection, there’s Youtube, which is host to many videos of people practicing their favourite form of body-modification.

• Youtube is another social-network, amusing and entertaining, though I’ve rarely found anything worth writing several pages about on there.

To conclude, I’ve all of the resources out there to both create stunning content whilst also keeping up-to-date with popular stuff, like the news… or what scientists are going to try to pyrolyse next in order to create oil to keep us going.