Benjamin Hourigan

Last night I went “clubbing” for the first time in my life. Sure, I’d been to bars that play loud music before, and places with a dancefloor, and places where you can’t hear your friends when you try to talk to them. But I’d always tried to avoid places that are those things so relentlessly as to be called a club.

3000¥ at Club Pure Osaka will get a guy a plastic cup that entitles you to all the mixed spirits you can drink. Girls get the same for 2000¥. The rule is that if you don’t have an empty plastic cup, you can’t get the drinks you paid for, so you have to carry it with you everwhere you go. Most people dance with a cup in their hand, and going to the bathroom means setting it down on a free surface. I actually saw a guy drinking out of his cup while taking a piss, which was a great image of the absurd, and the instigator of a bleakly humorous moment of existential dread.

So, I drank, and I danced, and I watched poledancing Japanese girls, exchanged a few brief words with my friend Erika and a few people I hadn’t met before. I didn’t try to pick anyone up, because Japanese girls don’t interest me, and moreover because I don’t know how to act in those situations. The loud music, drowning out conversation, seems calculated to reduce the crowd to as close to mere animality as it can. The courtship rituals, the display of bodies and movement, become like those of birds. And I don’t like it much. I like being a human. It’s where my advantages are, in my intellect, in my speech, in my knowledge and my accomplishments. Those, too, are the things in others that most easily give me pleasure in their company, and the things that solidify my attraction to a woman.

Dancing is fun. Drinking seems fun, but is tiresome to recover from (and I ought to steer clear of situations with unlimited amounts of alcohol). But the idea and the fact of a room that strips away the human in us displeases me, much as it may be, for many, a welcome temporary escape from the burdens of being sentient.

Today I had the good fortune of being scheduled a lesson where none of the students attended. The room it was in had a computer and internet access, so I spent some time emailing and reading the news. I also came across “The Golly Files.txt” sitting on the desktop. The file is a series of satirical comments on my blog either written or collated by someone who has been making half-baked attempts to take the piss out of me at my workplace since late last year, by posting a series of odd and barely-sensical “Golly files” on a pinboard at work.

“Golly” is a name that this person has decided to apply to me, and comes from a photo posted on a board at work a while ago. In it, I’m teaching at a girls’ high-school in Osaka, and showing the class a teatowel made by my parents, with a design featuring golliwogs (gollies).

Quite a lot of effort has gone into these comments: someone delved as far back as my post on Japanese Story for #9, and #s 5, 7-9, 16, 21, 24 and 29 (see below) are all likely inspired by material from posts. I’m not quite sure why Declan McManus (a.k.a. Elvis Costello) is supposedd to feel “graphically abused,” although he has sung of others being “rythmically admired” (in “Welcome to the Working Week”), but hey, whatever… Observing the style and the range of literary references, I’m beginning to get a suspicion of who might be behind the whole thing.

It’s no mystery to me why someone moderately clever would amuse themselves here by making fun of me. There’s precious little to do here, and since a Western intellect will go to waste in Japan, it may as well be wasted on something truly inane. I am, I’ll admit, an easy target. Putting myself in an intentionally unflattering light, I am a short and skinny man with a deep sense of self-importance, a serious demeanour, and not much appreciation for irony or for typically masculine pursuits such as social drinking, sports, and saying unflattering things about women.

What’s slightly perplexing, though, is why said person would make fun so cryptically and without giving me any attitude to my face. Sir, you shame yourself by being such a coward. Be a man; if you dislike me, at least be an asshole about it. Insult me extravagantly and in public, while I’m in the room. Stand behind your words, as I stand by mine.

The contains comments on my blog, and so here they are, where they properly belong. Enjoy, readers.

Comments on Golly’s Blog here Please

1. Scintillating Wonderful prose :- Noddy
2. Compleat toss :- Big ears
3. Wakarahen :- Kenji tanaka
4.Full of sound and fury signifying nothing:-Jaques Derrida
5. lord luv a duck, leave it out guv !, ;-Ken Livingston
6. you misunderestimate us:- George W. Bush
7.How dare you quote me :- Matt Rusling
8. Pretentious crap:-Ben’s Supervisor
9.I was determined not to like this Golly’s blog, and so, unsurprisingly, I didn’t.:-end quote
10. Holy Metal!-batman
11. if you play this blog backwards it says”paul mc Cartney is dead.”;-John Lennon
12. i read this blog, and …:- lou lou on the bridge
13. i blog therefore i am:- little big man
14. I cannot answer this question as I may be arrested:-Ojima
shacho
15. This clearly proves that humans are an inferior species and should be exterminated;-Davros
16. we should be very afaid;-Canada Immigration
17. Will no-one rid me of this troublesome blog?:- Henry II
18. I cannot understand this blog-Stephen Hawkings
19. I was wrong-Charles Darwin
20. I sense a wrongness in the force-a latex puppet
21. ‘ere, who’s the git wot’s bean hackin’ me blog then?:- Golly
22.We should put these people in work camps..-hitler
23. Pure Unadulerated Filth:- Saint Andrew of Ashley
24. eye rub u golly-boy:- by Akiko
25. A shrivelled soul: Franz Kafka
26. Ods Bodkin!What manner of a man be this?:-W.Shakespeare
27.I boiled my head in the sea of tranquility and it still makes more sense than this Blog-S.Dali
28.I laughed I cried;-Dorothy Parker
29.I feel graphically abused;-Declan McManus
30.Pap;- God
31. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring….. ;- Alexander Pope
32.ANAL FAGGOTRY:- B. Baggins
33.I wants my precious-S.Gollum

BBC NEWS | Health | Intellect linked to suicide risk

The BBC today reports that intelligent young men are less likely to commit suicide than stupid young men. Well, that’s natural selection for you. May the fittest survive!