Day 187: Halloween

Hey you. Have you recently walked into the break room at work to find Gale and John and Lizzie chatting about decorations, and you've said, Oh, what are the decorations for? and they've paused and looked at Gale, who has coughed and said he's throwing a small Halloween party tonight, just more of a get-together really, a quiet affair, and then he's paused again and no one has said anything and Lizzie has started looking through the snack cupboard intently and John has busied himself at the coffee machine, and then finally Gale has asked if you would like to come to the party, and you've said that, yes, that sounds lovely, and Gale has said Great, well, great, OK, yes, OK then, and the three of them have walked out of the break room and now here you are with a Halloween party to attend and no ideas for a costume?

Well, if so then fear not, because I've got you covered with this handy list of practical and cost-effective costumes to ensure your night goes spooooookily well!

- That celebrity you sort of look like. Remember that time you wore your hair down and Todd from accounting called you Emma Stone in the morning meeting, and then when everyone was changing their Facebook profiles to their celebrity lookalikes you set yours to a photo of Emma Stone, and after a second glass of wine you added a comment to the photo in which you tagged Todd and said you didn't see the likeness yourself but maybe he was on to something, and you thought for a long time, on your sofa, alone, with now your third glass of Australian merlot, and finally you added a winking face emoji to the comment, and pressed send, and then you waited on your sofa not really watching Holby City on catch-up until past midnight when your phone buzzed with a notification telling you Todd had liked your comment, and you wore your hair down the next morning, and every day of morning meetings for three months, but Todd never said anything again, and later you found out he'd been sleeping with Lucy from HR since the office pub quiz last Christmas to which you'd not been invited because it would have "made the teams uneven"? Well, maybe it's time to bring back that classic.

- Something slutty. Why not crack out that risque dress from the back of the wardrobe you bought online two years ago and haven't yet had the courage to wear? Oh, but now you try it on you remember that it does make your breasts look less like the plump grapefruit of the model in the picture and more like two pale, shaved guinea pigs that have been gassed to death in their burrows. And the plunge neckline draws attention to that birthmark on your shoulder you hate. And your only tights without obvious ladders are the wrong colour, so there'll be no hiding the lumpy twists of your varicose veins. Maybe a slutty mummy then, which, contrary to the obvious interpretation, is just you in the dress and then wrapped head to toe in thick bandages. Perfect.

- Something political. That's what your co-workers appreciate about you, right, the fact you're au fait with current affairs? How about going as the woman "too ugly" for Jair Bolsonaro to rape? Someone "grabbed by the pussy" by the current Republican president, who bragged about it to the old Republican president's first cousin? Or an immigrant mother fleeing torture and rape in her country just to have her baby torn from her at the US border and interned in a barbed wire camp without adequate resources while being used as a symbol of hate to distract the masses while the ruling elite take all the money and give it to the already richest and most despicable of society? Or, no, maybe a Bangladeshi garment worker, sleeping on a concrete floor with fifteen other girls in a makeshift factory in an export-processing zone thousands of miles from her home village and family, earning a dollar and change for 80-hour gruelling weeks in horrendous conditions, where birth control pills are handed out like candy by managers who think pregnant women make for unproductive workers, and where those who do give birth have been known to do it under desks while at their machines, sometimes flushing babies down the toilet for fear of reprisal from bosses - and all this so the people at the party you are attending, these very people, can buy cheap costumes from Primark and Topshop and wear them once and then throw them away, which of course is also a contributing factor to the fashion industry being one of the worst offenders for pollution on the planet. Err. Why are you doing this again?

- Lucy from HR. She of the office pub quiz. She of the insouciantly tousled bangs. The thighs just the right amount of plump in her designer-label pencil skirts. The spine that arches seductively as she bends over Todd's desk and musses his papers playfully, picks up his pens and chews on them, pulls slowly but firmly on his tie with those long, elegant fingers, pulling until the tie goes taut, just a touch further, before letting it fall back and straightening herself and walking away on six-inch heels that surely she must have taken lessons somewhere to be able to glide so demurely across the room upon. Why not go as Lucy from HR? Slap on makeup, dye your hair, squeeze your calloused feet into heels, drink all of a bottle of Aldi-brand peach schnapps, and turn up to the party screaming to Todd that you've made yourself into the woman you know he wants. A foolproof plan.

- Yourself. Or go as yourself. You're 35. You've been single for four years now. You're not even sure if you're mentally secure enough to raise children, whether you want to bring them into this bitter world sliding inexorable into far-right fascism, but you're rapidly running out of time for that even to be an option. You've been overlooked for promotion on a continuous basis since you started at the firm that you were only ever working in as a stop-gap but in which you've now laboured for so long that it's listed as your employer on your Bebo profile, if Bebo profiles are even still a thing. The wallpaper has been peeling behind your dresser since at least last spring, and you have neither the energy nor the inclination to fix it. It just peels gradually higher and higher, and you feel a similar peeling inside yourself, down in your soul, it is as if your being is tearing slowly asunder, and soon you will tear right through and fall to the floor as two wispy sheets on the ground, not even making a mess because there is nothing, you feel, of any substance, nothing real or pulsing or beating, inside you. It is all dust. And your cat doesn't love you. He only stays because you feed him. You haven't painted in years. You look at your old sketchbooks now and it all looks so mundane, so uninspired, and you wonder if anything fuelled your old belief in your secret talent beyond that central illusion that you were special, that you mattered. But you are not special. You do not matter. You will die, alone, and then you will be gone, and no one will remember that you once lived, just as the universe itself will fade, the very energy that fires it pushing it slowly away from itself, into the reaches of oblivion, until every grain of matter comes to rest isolated and unseen and abandoned, staying there, in stasis, for eternity; empty, meaningless, dead.

On second thoughts, maybe you won't go to that party after all. Happy Halloween though!

Day 32: How to gain mainstream appeal

In an effort to make my work more desirable to publications such as Buzzfeed and LadBible, I have written a list detailing the fifteen habits shared by all bartenders. Everyone knows a bartender, or was him-or-herself a bartender, or is still a bartender, stuck in an endless cycle of depression and self-loathing and alcoholism. So here, without further ado, are fifteen common behaviours that I've personally witnessed in bartenders the world over:

1. Holding up an attached barrel in the cellar, giving it a shake, and saying, "I reckon there's about another three pints left in that," despite no one having asked how many pints there were left in that.
2. Forgetting that the distance across the bar top is not actually soundproofed in any way, and discussing the intimate details of sex lives and bodily functions while preparing a margarita as if the customer a mere foot away was not able to hear every word said.
3. Opening bottles with a bar blade gripped in a style that is to regularly-held bar blades what the sideways gangster pistol is to just holding a gun the normal way, yet with a nonchalance that suggests the bartender has no idea they're doing anything to draw attention to themselves, and certainly didn't practise popping off bottle tops using this grip every day for the first six months of having the job.
4. Becoming instantly critical when leaving the home bar and going to an away bar on a rare night off. "Christ, that absolute amateur never even offered me a glass with my Rochefort 10, and when I asked for one he gave me, get this, a Stella glass! Harrfff harrfff harrfff," is what the bartender with the night off is custom-bound to say.
5. Laughing disdainfully at the mangled ways customers pronounce esoteric product names, because the idea of someone having, say, a full-time job, or a family, and not spending every moment of every day surrounded by beers and spirits learning what they're all called is, to the bartender, something too tragic to comprehend.
6. Putting the word "ware" on the end of the word "glass" to produce the phrase "glassware", out of a mistaken assumption that referring to glasses as "glassware" will trick anyone overhearing into believing bartending is serious profession. It won't, and it isn't.
7. Walking home at 2am and sucking the nutrients from the linings of discarded crisp packets found lying in the street because minimum wage is in fact not enough of a wage to live off.
8. Uploading flaming cocktail pics to Instagram late at night, alone in bed, in the hopes of attracting a regram from a famous bartender in the field, thus validating the bartender's many poor life choices up to this point.
9. Going for a sit-down wee mid-shift because pretending to wipe the back bar for an eighth time would surely attract the attention of the duty manager, so going into a cubicle and locking the door and pulling out the trusty phone, having a cheeky peruse, and seeing a notification of a new comment on last night's flaming zombie pic from Derek Nugglins. A beat, then a double take. What! The Derek Nugglins who can stir down six negronis in ten seconds? The one and only Derek Nugglins who was in '08 part of the Perfect-Serve Seven who turned a raw-fish fiasco on Mad Friday into the biggest Christmas sushi event the North had ever seen? The same Derek Nugglins who the bartender's own bible, the discerning Difford's Guide, named "Best at Banging on the Speed Rail in Time to the Killer's Mr Brightside while Pumping His Fist in the Air to Attract Swooning Middle-aged Women" three years in a row? Yes, it's really him. The comment on the screen, lit by the flickering toilet bulb, simply reads: "We have been watching you. We are pleased. Be at the ice machine at 0600 hours if you believe you are ready."
10. Going to the ice machine the next morning, a coffee clutched groggily in hand, to find no one there. Waiting fifteen minutes with a rising sense of self-doubt, before finally kicking the metal panel in frustration -- and watching as, with a mechanical groan and a hiss of escaping gas, a small door swings slowly open on the back of the large, whirring machine. Looking around, seeing the usually busy pub eerily empty, hearing only the sounds of the cleaner off somewhere buffing the tiled floor, and so with a hard swallow crouching and pushing through the waiting door.
11. Crawling down the clammy, moss-covered passageway onto which the door opened, feeling a lump in the throat, reaching out on the twisting downward path to grasp at jagged, cartilage-like protrusions jutting from the earthen walls, slipping occasionally in pools of clinging mucous, until finally, with a rush of fetid air, finding the tunnel give out onto a dark chamber lit only with the lambent flames of a ring of torches rising from the spongy ground.
12. Hearing a chilling voice mutter, "Welcome, my child," as a cloaked figure steps into the dancing pool of light, whereupon a thick, hessian hood is thrown back and the face of Derek Nugglins arranges itself into focus, but slowly, as if the light itself was giving the features form, and in the same place moments ago there would have been nothing save a thick, dripping blackness.
13. Listening to the voice -- a shrewd, serpentine voice, seeming to not arrive through the ears but grow instantly in the mind -- continue: "We have watched you for many years. You felt alone and yet you were not. Our eyes eternally have looked upon the dark places in which you slept. We saw your dreams. We caressed your thoughts. And now we sense that you are ready."
14. Turning, as if in slow motion, to find the entrance to the chamber has sealed itself shut with a squelching, organic slurp, feeling a surge of breathy wind, turning back now suddenly inches from the body of Nugglins -- a body now hunched, jerking spasmodically. Seeing the man's cloak flung back and a dark shape rising, rising, unfurling itself into the heights of the cavern, a towering, chitinous thing, flocculent and suppurating and horrific, insectoid arms scratching spectrally against a tumescent belly pocked with matted fur. "Witness my true form!" the Nugglins cries. "Witness and join our cause. For though powerful, I am but the gatekeeper. This great hall sits directly below what you call your bar. For it, and all bars in the land, are built upon the remains of temples constructed in aeons past by my kind in worship of the Ancient One we call in the old tongue Caa'Lyng. He slumbers yet, but with your help he will awaken. Each day more of the young and lost of your species join our ranks. You may recognise these acolytes by their long beards, haggard eyes, by the arcane symbols tattooed across their skin. Just as I serve my lord Caa'Lyng, their role is to serve the sacrificial caste, the ones above who grow round of waist and florid of cheek and simple of mind, their brains rotting from devil liquor. You will tend this flock, help our human lambs fatten themselves and lose motor function to the point where the old tongue flows from their lips and they begin to chant the summoning ritual: 'Du Ydu Caa'Lyng', over and over, building in crescendo to the final prophesied night of Baa'Nk Hoh-Lii-Day when the Ancient One will rise and engulf the world in a purifying flame of blood and semen and cheap mainstream lager. So make your choice, mortal: join us and be reborn as one with the swarm, or turn away and be immolated with the rest of your puny kind..."
15. Sighing when a customer orders a Guinness as the last drink of their round. So annoying!

Top 18 alternative lyrics to sing instead of the eponymous last line to Snoop Dogg's “Smoke Weed Everyday” if you want to prove that drugs no longer hold any sway upon you

1. Scoff brie everyday
2. Wear a fleece everyday
3. Gluten-free everyday
4. Listen to Creed everyday
5. Brush your teeth everyday
6. Buy artisanal organic honey expensive enough to have been produced by living-wage-funded and fully-unionised bees everyday
7. Tackle greed everyday [only sing this if you believe Jeremy Corbyn will be the next prime minister]
8. Surreptitiously dismantle the NHS before ramping up pressure on the Beeb everyday [only sing this if you believe Jacob Rees-Mogg will be the next prime minister]
9. Hide in eaves everyday [in the current climate, best pitch this from the angle of an anthropomorphic mouse/Borrower/ninja hiding in said eaves, rather than from that of a middle-aged white man peering down into a room while masturbating furiously. A middle-aged white man with a face not unlike that of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Not that you're saying Jacob Rees-Mogg would do such a thing. Hunched, a rabid glint in his eyes, his upper half still pin-stripe-suited, his chalky legs and pallid genitalia shorn of cover, caressing a splintered wooden beam with one hand, madly grappling himself to culmination with the other. This is precisely the kind of thing you are saying Jacob Rees-Mogg would not do. He wouldn't]
10. Laugh at dweebs everyday
11. Use Fabreze everyday
12. Rub knees everyday [again, steer clear of allusions to elderly news anchors/film producers/Moggs, perhaps by changing surrounding lyrics to make it clear this line is the catchphrase of a benevolent genie who appears out of old people's knees and grants them alleviation from any joint pain they may be experiencing. Or something]
13. Watch your hairline recede everyday
14. Fail to breed everyday
15. Go to a bar and drink too much Jameson and attempt to flirt with the party of businesswomen on the stools next to you, but as you do so catch sight of your doughy, jowled face in the mirrored ice-well behind the bar, the reflection of your face frozen in a rictus of forced insouciance not adequately masking shame and fear, and so you hurriedly pay your tab and leave everyday
16. Stand by your kitchen window staring sadly out at your shabby patch of garden as the sun goes down, your heart sundering at the ephemeral, delicate nature of being, aware of how lacking the shallow casings of words are to hold the enormity of your emotions, before sighing and turning back to see whether you set your Freeview box to record last night's Holby City and to pour more wine, as outside a vast darkness gathers and an unnamed wind silently soughs the bristling leaves everyday
17. Maybe you'll just find that last illicit contact in your phone you couldn't bring yourself to delete and order just maybe one little twenty-bag to get you through the night... No, no, you mustn't... just get up and go to work and come home and go to work and retire and die and then finally the pain of existence will be over as the sum total of your experience becomes a rotting corpse upon which the worms will feed everyday
18. Quietly weep everyday