Messages

Wheres this bookshop? I haven't seen any copies of Young Death in years. Dammit, I was really looking forward to reading it again, as my memory of it had gone all hazy and blurry, like a camera lens smeared in vasseline. If anyone sees any copies, please post the location of the shop, as I would love to get hold of a copy again.

Definitely! KotW deserves to be seen properly after all this time.

"Valentine Dyall's dead too (voice of Deep Thought) (at least, I think so. I'm doing this from 20 year-old marinaded brain cells). "

He was also the voice of the guardian of the Total Perspective Vortex, in the Frogstar (the most evil place in the universe), into which Zaphod Beeblebrox was thrown.

You too?

Very true  - the First of the Few(?) if memory serrves, and definitely up there as one of my favourite Rogue stories. I think it was reprinted in a Winter Special as well (the one with the Zenith interlude and the Dredd 'flea-anarchist').

"A longshot I suppose, but in one of the issues in the mid-eighties there was a fantastic future shock about a man who invented a time machine and got to go back and relive his childhood, and the teist was his time machine was him throwing himself off a bridge and drowning"

This was The Time Machine, in prog 324, by Alan Moore and Jesus Redondo, one of severall strips between the two. It was also reprinted in the Titan book Alan Moore's Twisted Tales. Redondo was on of 2000AD's most neglected artists, and with Alan Moore, produced some of Moore's best short, twist stories, and did some of the best work he would ever do, both in and outside the magazine.

The full list of Moore/Redondo is:
The Writing on the Wall (prog 268)
One Christmas During Eternity (prog 271)
Sunburn (prog 282)
Ring Road (prog 320)
The Time Machine (prog 324)

Ohhh...It's been another looonng day! Kids chucking plastic grapefruits and Winnie the Pooh balls at my head, their parents barging me out of the way to get behind MY counter to get said ball, claiming it was theirs, even though it was someone elses (namely ours!). And there's one little girl who...well lets just say she's a right little madam. Thinks the whole world revolves around her. Keeps shouting at me to do this and that for her. She was even leaning around the counter taking tickets out the draws, whilst her mum looked on smiling at me like a retarded elf. And she keeps on changing the videos she's borrowing! She's clearly incredibly spoilt - I think her parents are divoced (she was blackmailing her mum about what her dad lets her do), and I don't think she's ever been told off in her life.

There again, she just asked if she could date-stamp the videos, and when I let her she seemed really chuffed and excited, even referring to me as being 'kind'. Maybe I missjudged her a bit (just a bit, mind).

 

Brief coda:

Having just left work, I thought I'd try and cheer things up a bit by buying some fags and a milk based drink. As I was walking across the zebra crossing outside the shop, the milk based drink fell from my grasp and was immediatly run over by a car, as it burst with a loud pop. I could do nothing but fall into slightly manic laughter.

Fate sticks her rusty shears in my heart and dances a jig on my lungs.

The thread has risen from the dead like Peter Andre's career.

Well, it's been an 'interesting' day for me. I'm not really sure if interesting is the most accurate description I could be using. Disastrous, catastrophic and bloody weird are all phrases which seem to fit equally, if not in a better fashion.

Let's recap. I found out today that I have a stalker. Seriously, this is no joke. Apparently there's been some mad old crone coming in when I haven't been here, asking for me by NAME (I never give my name out as a matter of course), and has been making strange pronouncements involving her and myself, claiming that I am "the only nice one working here", and refusing to discuss her business with anyone but me. She's even been asking about what days I work here! Apparently she's a known troublemaker, so to be honest, I'm really shitting it at the moment. I'm getting really paranoid. I keep imagining someones behind me. I'm sure I can here those strings from Psycho...

Also: someone kindly alerted me to the fact that soeone had rammed a whole toilet roll down the u-bend of the kids toilets. Which meant it was time for me to don ineffectual rubber gloves and scrabble blindly away, my upper arm submerged in toilet water. It never occured to me before, but sensing a toilet roll fall to pieces in your hands because it was so saturated with water (I hope!) is actually quite a disgusting experience.
Incidentally, it occurs to me to wonder why so many of my annecdotal stories end with my arm up some pipe full of shit. I think I'm beginning to develop a complex. And I was already fairly obsessive as it was. Evewn now I can't bring myself to toch my face with the offending hand!

I'm going to kill myself (or preferably someone else) for agreeing to work today. Why? Why did I agree to work an eleven and a half-hour shift today? WHY, GOD, WHY?

You see, you get a nice warm nest to go back to, and a nice warm Boo Cook to suggle up to. What do I get? I have to wait in the pissing rain for my brother, so that I can give him money and help him buy presents for other people. Bloody students! I won't even be able to smoke till i get home damnit!

Thats the best plan I've ever heard! Its much better than mine, which just simply involved hitting some customers in a couple of minutes before sufferring a fatal brain embolism. Why is it that, even though "'tis the season to be jolly", everyone who comes into my work is so fucking miserable? And WHY GOD WHY did I ever agree to work on Saturdays?

Gem - are we the only boarders who work on a Saturday? This place is deader than Michael Jackson's career and about as active as Rod Hull. I need the inane babble of my fellow boarders to quell the hatred for hmanity which even now grows deep within my breast.

Most of all I NEED NICOTINE NOW!
(but I have to wait till after five!!!)

Just done almost three hours on my feet after lunch, and 'm about ready to drop where I stand. It has been absolutley non-stop today. Why is it that when you have a huge cue of people in front of you, plus about fifteen other things that you have to do AT THE SAME TIME, people suddenly decide that now would be a great time to engage you in a long and pointless conversation.
"Three weeks isn't long enough!" they spluter. "I want longer, I want to take it to Spain on the 12th January!".
"Three weeks is the standard loan", I'll wearily reply, "But you could renew it over the phone nearer to the time".
"Thats no good!" they cry. "I don't want to spend the money".
I think. "Well, you could renew it over the internet. How about that?"
"Ooh no. I couldn't trust the infraweb. You never know who might be looking at me. They might see me without my clothes. I'd much prefer you to do it" (which I can't physically do, of course!)

And why do people, especially when theres a growing que behind them, never have their ticket ready when they get to the counter? Oh no, they'll tun up, gormless smiles on their faces, holding their books out in front of them looking expectantly at you.
"Have oyu got your ticket?" you say.
"Oh. Oh no. Oh gosh. Now where is it? I'm sure I had it once. I remeber it was in my house, because my grandson was chewing it. It's not in my pocket. Maybe you've got it. Is it behind the counter?"
And it always turns out to be in the most obvious place - the wallet, and then it turns out that they haven't been here for five years and their cards expired, so they want to be enrolled all over again, which takes about fifteen bloody minutes, during which time major wars are fought, won or lost, peace processes are put into action and grind to a halt and the que in front of you has grown to encompass the whole world.
 

Hooray! I've just finished work and am now on annual leave. This is the first weekend I've had off in the last year.  Having a look in the charity shops by my work, I saw walking down the street a large bald man wearing a all over black 'moo-moo' style mans dress, who kept pestering me about printing in an incomprehensible manner (I don't know if et's come orfe"); a fransiscan monk; and a man who looked as though all the blood in his head had been drained out of him - not surprising really as he was walking down the road dragging an IV drip behind him, which was attached to his neck! I promise this is 100% true. Eventually two policemen stopped him, presumably to find out where he'd escaped from.

(On the plus side, I managed to pick up some bargain records from the charity shops, including the original 45's of The Beach Boys Good Vibrations, Eddie Cochran's Cut Across Shorty, Frank Sinatra's My Blue Heaven and Grand Royal preliminary studio pressing of Luscious Jackson's Electric Honey. Sorted!)

A librarians job is never easy!

Typical idiot-bastard customer query:

"Ah, The Lion King! That's got lions in it then, has it?"

"Yes, sir or madam, what a shatteringly perceptive insight you posess."