I’ve been grumpy lately. So I need to get out. No, I’m not fucking apologising.

I suspect its because I’ve been busy. So I thought I’d draft a quick troubleshooting guide for people to understand clearly where they might have fallen foul of me. I remember everything: every little gesture good or bad, every tiny thing that you don’t think I did. The way I work is like a bank account, with people making withdrawals and getting credits paid in. If you piss me off, you make a withdrawal, and if you do something kind, you get a credit to your balance. I remember that £1 you lent me when I needed it or the time you cheered me up or refreshed my soul. I also remember the time you were selfish and childlike for a second.

But I don’t tell people when they offend me. I just keep my private sliding scale working away quietly and naturally. When you reach my tolerance limit, you get cut off without warning, completely. So go ahead and be an utter fool, try it on, take the piss and think you’ve got the better of me. You won’t know how far along you are, and for all you know right now reading this, you may be a hair’s breadth away from never speaking to me again. I can think of a dozen people who I’m letting swing the rope around their own neck to hang themselves or I’m happily watching walk over a cliff they don’t realise is there. I’m sure for a lot of people that doesn’t really upset them too much, but I can assure you it means even less to me.

Just because I don’t tell you my plan doesn’t mean I don’t have one. Just because I’m calm doesn’t mean I’m not sick to the back teeth of you. I’m quite brooding and intense so most get the message without needing words by reading in between the lines. A very good lady friend once said to me, “You talk a lot, but you don’t talk a lot”, by which she meant that although I’m a talkative guy, you could have a conversation with me 8 hours a day for 3 years and end up knowing absolutely nothing about me at all. Or knowing a lot of things that I want you to know but aren’t really the true me.

Wow, mysterious I know. If only it was as dramatic as that, but unfortunately the truth is far less glamorous.

I choose a small inner circle people to be bonded to, those I’ve seen I can trust, who understand me and are wise. People who bring something to the table. I know that I have a knack of being able to make people feel very special, and I’m quite open with compliments. Its hilarious how vain and haughty homo sapiens becomes once you give them positive feedback. I appreciate beauty, so I’ll often tell the girl I’m talking to that she’s beautiful. Almost always she thinks I’m totally under the thumb and can play any game she likes and I’ll tag along like a loyal salivating puppy. Not so I’m afraid.

Yes Roxie, that means you. You’re today’s living example of why not to fuck with me when it comes to presumption. Tomorrow there will be another. I’m not sorry, one tiny little bit. That wasn’t nastiness, it was just honesty. When I’m nasty you’ll definitely know about it. You just have to try harder thats all. If I had a penny for all the girls who think they’re well in there when they’re nowhere near, I’d be buying the drinks.

Allow me to share with you the other side of the equation. Yes you’re beautiful to me, although you may not be to someone else as we all have diffeing tastes. I usuallly just state it as a matter of fact rather than with some deviant intention. But I think flowers and movie scenes are beautiful too, and I don’t take them out to dinner, have a conversation or make love to them. If you’re beautiful, congratulations, but it means relatively little. You might want to review exactly the control you think you suddenly have over me by me pointing it out. You’re basically a mannequin, and there are 50 beautiful girls every second. They’re ten a penny. What I want to find is something extra, the bit that makes me vibrate out of my seat.

It might sound like I’m being defensive, but I’m actually a very private person underneath all the talk and bravado, and sometimes its weird to think how few people know who I am. I agree with my sis when she says I’m like marmite, as I’m a person of extremes that people tend to either love or hate. My purpose in life is to disrupt, as its my character as a weapon and how I’m used depends on the situation and context. But its all about tearing things to bits and making a real mess. I get bored as easily as I fall head over heels in love with someone or something. I work in shortfire bursts and binges rather than at a steady pace. Once you understand some of these things, I become a lot easier to live with.

Let me put it very bluntly. I am a Machavellian. If you don’t know what that means, you need to retake GCSE English. Have a complaint? Want to whinge about how I mistreated you? Preach away. Feel free to criticise. Scream your head off. Deploy your spite in full measure. I don’t care. I’m not just saying that for effect. I genuinely don’t care. You’re just slowing me down and as such, you’re irrelevant and a hindrance.

You’re either on my side, or you’re in the way.

Don’t fucking talk to me about any of these things. If you do, you’ll get a very sharp response which should get the message across that I’m not remotely interested in even thinking about them, let along having any kind of conversation that they feature in.

1) Celebrities
Totally vacuous, vain, useless, money-grabbing, time-limited, pathetic wastes of time and resources. These people mean absolutely nothing to me. They bring nothing to the greater good whatsoever and are worshipped for it. Why do people admire others whose only achievement in life is meaningless and ignore those who have changed the face of human history and actually should be admired? I don’t want to hear about the story you read in Heat, how this person was in the Sun or why you think Jordan is great because she’s so good with the press. Save it for the council estate.

2) Football
I hate football. Its a ballet game played by overpaid metroxsexual little girls who prance around like fairies and complain when they get the slightest scratch. We’re not even that good at it, yet for some reason its worshipped with religious devotion that gets shot down every time we inevitably fuck it up. More than anything else, its just utterly boring - reptitive, scripted and about who gets to be the hero. I’ll pretend I’m interested, but I’m not. You’ll bore me in about 30 seconds. I don’t know about any of the leagues, teams, players, scores or any of that asinine rubbish you seem to really enjoy filling your walnut brain with.

3) How amazingly amazing your little fwends are
We all love our friends and family (otherwise the wouldn’t be our friends now, would they shithead?), and I don’t want to hear you gooing and awwing over these people who I have never met, don’t care about and have no interest in. Tell me in a “baby voice” and you really will be throwing down the gauntlet. If you want to tell everyone in the whole world, pay for a full page advert in a newspaper for fucks sake. Why would anyone care how much you drool? What do you want them to say in return?

4) Reality TV
You watch it because there’s nothing else on? Oh really? No you don’t. You watch it because you like it, but don’t have the guts to admit it as we all know its a load of shit. But its pointless, cheap, tacky, socially-bankrupt dross that barely passes for entertainment and is designed to strip you of your pocket money when you use the telephone to interact with it. Its a dead genre thats past its shelf-life, but for some reason you still think its great. You are a loser who has no intellectual capacity and belongs in the herd with the rest of the cattle. No I don’t want to hear what happened last night in the BB house. Please do not breed. Join the “invalid” queue.

5) Ex-girlfriends
I have a few exs, and although I’d love to be able to forgive them all, I just can’t get past finding them so totally irrelevant. They’re always trying to have their little digs, playing their games and hoping for that occasional jab they can deliver to see if you still care. Well, I don’t. I sincerely mean that. I really could not give a flying fuck what they are doing with their lives, as I have enough in my own to keep me more than occupied. And for some reason they always go radically downhill in the looks department post-Cameron. Get over it. Stop wasting your time and energy and get on with your life.

6) Your right-wing politics
Very dangerous territory. Think immigration is evil? Dislike Johnny Foreigner? Want abortion banned? Want sex removed from television? Religious family values taught in school? Drug addicts imprisoned? Hard line on crime? Hate the Human Rights Act and want more punishment? Want national service, corporal and capital punishment brought back? Want people who help the terminally ill to commit suicide tried for murder? War waged on all who defy the British empire? Read the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Telegraph or The Times? Stay the fuck away from me.

7) Your dogmatic (but naïve) religious beliefs
My faith is private, and I don’t want to know about yours unless I ask you because your preaching is fucking vulgar and offensive. There’s nothing worse than someone whose faith is based on nothing but blind allegiance to what they’ve read or been told. Happy clappies whose house of cards comes crashing down at the briefest of inspection make me sick. Think, for fucks sake. Question what and why you believe. Don’t quote religious texts to me as I’ve read them all. Don’t try to preach at me or convert me, or you will get it. Are you a scientologist? You fucking moron. Get out of the gene pool for the sake of the rest of the population.

Clubbing
Its dull. Its never half as exciting or rewarding as anyone makes out. People get massively over-excited about it like its some kind of badge of honour to have been stripped of all your cash and crammed in a sweaty room listening to a sonic boom of false electronic “music” with other equally stupid people who think they’re the shit. The only thing that makes it seem remotely interesting is the drugs you are taking. Its soulless, expensive, empty, unfulfilling, boring and tacky. Don’t try to tell me you go to dance. You go so you can tell people you went clubbing. Sad. Very, very sad. Don’t ever ask me to join you at one, as I’ll take it as an insult and you’ll be dealt with accordingly.

9) Your unrealistic business idea or invention
Your dotcom idea is revolutionary and will change the world! You have no experience in what you want to do, no idea whether someone else is doing it, no customers lined up, no idea whether people even have a need for it, no idea on where the market is going, no idea how to make money from it, but its still the most amazing idea ever! Its definitely going to work - all your friends agree! All you need is £3k cash to start with and people will be queuing at your door as soon as you’ve built it! As soon as Richard Branson reads the letter you sent him about it he will call you in and buy it! You’re going to be a millionaire! Like fuck you are. Get a fucking clue.

10) Fairytale love
You just saw them and fell in love that moment, it was destined in the stars. Your wedding day will be the most beautiful and wonderful romantic thing in the whole world ever. If you love each other you will never argue and everything will always be OK, you’d just anything for each other, just because of your love. Your love with conquer all, no matter what happens. If the rest of your relationship isn’t like the first 3 months, you’re not meant to be. You just know when you see “the one”, which everyone has somewhere. You utter, utter fucking naïve, pathetic, drooling, foolish, immature drifter. Grow the fuck up.

11) Your loans and credit cards
If you don’t realise these things are here to make other people, then you are a fucking idiot. They’re not there for you to live your dreams, have free cash you don’t have to pay back for ages or fund your delusions of grandeur. The practice of charging interest on loans is called usury, so look it up and for god’s sake work it out for your own good as well as everyone else’s. If you ran up debts or took out loans to cover your existing debts, if your own fucking fault. No-one wants you to pay off your debts, simply as the longer you have them, the more money they make from the interest. For fuck’s sake stop being so weak and falling into the same trap over and over. You know you’re fucking up, so just stop it.

12) How trashed you got
Wow, you poisoned yourself so much that you could no longer function and/or vomited on the street. Its the only way anyone can actually let go and lose themselves in this country, and its become the de facto social activity somehow. You smell when you’re drunk. Your breath stinks, your clothes stink and you act like a total, utter wanker. Same goes for drugs, which give the incoherence that is apparently so dignified and appealing. When did your lack of ability to stimulate the minds of others become such a key selling point? You fucking bore me senseless. We did it when we were kids, then we grew out of it. If the major highlight of your week is suppressing your nervous system on a Friday night, you need help.

13) How tough you think you are
Think you’re the hard one eh? The problem is we live in a cutesy little country where you can kick bins over as a rebellious statement of your own callousness to impress your pathetic little monkey friends. You’ve never seen anyone die, mummy and daddy clean up the mess, the apathy of the public at large means you’re ignored and allowed to continue at your leisure and the chances are you’re only ever remotely brave when you’re surrounded by a larger group. If you put any of these people in a situation where they were really in danger, the yellow streak would be flashing so loud it could flag down a 747 flying overhead. You’re selfish, spoilt, boring cowards of the highest order. Stop fucking trying to be more than you are because you think people think so little of you.

14) How little or much money you have
I honestly don’t care whether you have a little or loads of it. Its utterly irrelevant because what truly matters is the person you are. Money doesn’t solve problems, it brings 10x the amount of new ones. If you’re poor, educate yourself and get a new job that gives you more, or find a way to generate some cash. You have the internet, which is the world’s greatest encyclopaedia of information available, so get off your ass and work it out. If you want to boast with all your status items, we all know its not a big ego, its a little baby one of someone desperate to impress everyone because you lack so much elsewhere. Feelings about money that drive you to behave in certain ways make you a twat, pure and simple. Stop whingeing. You’re fucking lucky to have the things you do and to be as healthy as you are.

15) Procrastination
No you won’t do it tomorrow, or when that something happens to stir you into action. You always have to wait for someone else to do something first, or for something happen before you get stuck in. That day will be like today, when you put it off. You couldn’t spot an opportunity if it smacked you in the fucking face, let alone seize it. Its never going to happen unless you fucking make it happen, so again, get off your fucking ass and do it right now. Your life will pass by quicker than you think, so if you’re sitting there wondering why it didn’t happen, look in the mirror because its your own fucking fault. All we have is now. You have no idea what could happen tomorrow. There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t do it today. You’re lazy, you’re apathetic and you don’t deserve it. Read a book on why you delay. Its an anxiety-minimisation tool.

16) Text message language and business buzzwords
Fucking laziness, pure and simple. You’re showing me you don’t have a brain and like being one of the herd. You can’t be fucking bothered to take 2 seconds to spell something properly and communicate any more elegantly than a retarded primate could. You let your brain dribble rather than exercise it like a champion racehorse. Don’t be surprised when I look on you with absolute fucking contempt. let me help you here by explianing why you do it. You speak in vague, abstract terms with wishy-washy adjectives because you can’t be bothered to take time and care to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and communicate your thoughts to them in a simple and practical way they would understand. Go die, please. You’re diseased and contagious.

17) Your silly little emotional games
The perogative of immature girls and abusive men everywhere. There is nothing I hate more than morons who can’t find it in themselves to communicate like a grown up and instead prefer one of a library of silly manipulative tactics to get some kind control over someone else. I see it very quickly, as everyone else does. One sight of it, and you’re out the fucking door. Don’t let it hit your sad little ass on the way out. You’re human vermin and a nuisance that needs to be stamped out like the pests that you are. There hasn’t been one game thats ever been played by any retarded little girl that has ever had a positive outcome in the 5000 years of human history. But people still do it regardless. Do it once, and I’ll never see you in the same way again. Don’t risk it.

18) Your rabid envy/jealousy
You covet what others have because you don’t have enough in your own life. Its very simple. You want what you can’t have, and the grass is always greener. You think the things you have make you who you are. You are dumb. Baaaa. You’re insecure, and you need to control so you don’t feel vulnerable. I won’t fucking have it, so get used to the idea of being powerless. Try and control me or whinge on about how you want what someone else has and I’ll laugh at you and walk the other way. If you want it, go and fucking get it for fucks sake, stop complaining and wanting. One installment of psycho behaviour and I walk.

19) Rap, RnB & Hip-Hop
You listen to this industry-generated rubbish because you’ve been told its cool and that you’re supposed to like it because everyone else does. These artists are pathetically fake, and if you can’t see it then you deserve to be lied to. You are being sold fucking marketing, not substance. Its the same formula repeated over and over and over, with different packaging. And you fill the pockets of these charlatans who sit back and watch the cash fly in as you mindlessly follow their lead. The emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Thanks for just standing there and filling the space as a voiceless conformist coward. Die, die, die.

20) Your obvious lack of social graces
There are some people who are just born to make up the numbers. Do you hang around listlessly after a conversation has reached its natural conclusion? Are you stupidly rude to people because you think its funny and makes everyone else laugh with you? Have halitosis and generally bad personal hygiene? Is small talk your coup de grace? Talk in a monotone voice only about yourself and your mediocre life? Have nothing to make conversation about at all in the first place? Are you totally unable to empathise with, or be considerate to others? No-one will miss you. Squirming maggots have more value than your ugly excuse for a life. I hope you die, painfully. And when you do, I will laugh. The world will be rid of a pest and we’ll all have that little extra oxygen.

Phew. Breathe Alex, breathe.

I could very easily carry on. Why so negative, I hear you say. I must be in a very bad mood you think. There’s no need to be so down on everything and the stuff that no-one takes seriously anyway. You must be miserable company Alex. Everything in this article is sp depressing! No, the fact you don’t get it is depressing.

Balls I am. All of these things get in the way of whats real and important. Relief from pain is not the same as pleasure. How can you make room for the good things when your life is full of these revolting things?

This stuff is bullshit that needs to be fucking bulldozed out of the way so we can get down to the things that really matter. Life is precious and needs to experienced in all its many diverse guises, and I’m angry this shit is blocking my ability to savour and enjoy the wonders of the world and the wonderful curiosities of people and the details that make up their whole. I have no idea why its there and who on earth put it in place.

Its only by identifying the bullshit and calling it out for what it is that we are liberated to appreciate beauty, the compelling and the miraculous. Its only by seeing the darkness that we recognise the light. I don’t want to talk about these things as they are a hindrance to me being amazed and surprised emotionally, physically and spiritually by the people I love and the wonderful complexity of the world we all live in. These things are an ugly scar of pollution that clouds us from seeing what we could have if only we wanted it enough.

They fill a void in us which hurts like a hunger, one that is so desperate we’ll almost accept it being filled by anything so long as we don’t feel hungry again. But it never lasts, so we rinse, lather, repeat and forget how little they actually helped. I hate these things because they are foolish, short-lived, self-perpetuating and empty. I hate them because they interfere with my happiness, not because they are the source of someone else’s. So I don’t see them as nothing. I see most as great evils that need to be ignored, scorned or exterminated, not necessarily in that order.

I feel that because I love life, not because I dislike it.