people just don't understand. well, in one case they did, and in the other they didn't.
leaving ed's, perhaps drunker than i'd realised and planned on saturday night, i got on the tube at finsbury park, plugged into my walkman and opned up the iain m. banks book ed had lent me. oh ok, and i dropped out. i couldn't read properly. there was a guy next to me with an ipod on, and i couldn't resist. i did what i've wwanted to do ever since i moved to london - i asked if whe wanted to swap headphones.
he was very happy to. i wasn't sure if i meant to swap mp3 players - i don't know about putting a stranger's headphones in my ears, it's a bit 'unprotected'. but he was happy to and i couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. he was listening to alice in chains, which i had never heard before but they have quite interesting vocal layers. i had mone on random - he was treated to ( i checked afterwards) mugison, audioweb, zabrinski and lester young. i only told him the name lester young as it was the one that was playing when he got off. so nothing to unfriendly came up. he enjoyed it and so did i. next to try it sober, and on a sufficeintly hip-looking girl wh's obviously cool but not one that i'm blatantly attracted to (because that would just be a chat up line, and this is such sa better scheme than that). of course, the ultimate aim is to be cool enough to use it on a girl i am actually attracted to without it being a chat up line but actually it is and i know it but actually it's not, honestly.
so then i was waiting for a bus last night, sat next to an older fella. he starts talking about the buses that go from here... you have to wakl to this stop and it's aslightly further but sometimes it's worth it because of the 607 express and that. then he says soemthing odd about all these people researching things when they should be researching the things that are really going to save them, and that's their fate (he might hvae said 'faith', it's impossibleto tell with his accent). we had a discussion on the way home - he was going on about the whole allah thing. you know - no democracy, this is allah's world. he didn't say anything that would actually convince me he was right, it was all just scare mongering and reinforcement - ooh, i'm going to hell if i don't believe in god. yes, but why should i? i a=would ask him. i can live my life fine withou god, i told him - it's god who needs you to believe in him. a cruel god, a miserable god, the usual stuff i pull out on peolpe. except that he was actually agreeing with me, yes, god is cruel. he tried to worry me with the fall of man, and i asked him how the hell did satan get into 'paradise' (he said it was satan, not me, which it is in the quaran). and i asked him how to decide between a real prophet and a false one - and he replied that god knows. well that's all very well, i said, but how do we we tell the difference between what god tells moses and what god tells the yorkshire ripper?
all this with a book about middle eastern mythology in my hand. i just hadn't got around to the islam section yet. not that i'd have had him anymore than he had me because he wasn't listening to me and his arguments waere pathetic - he tried to convince me that because the quaran drew on older material, that showed it was divinely inspired, he actually said that. but hat least he was old so i didn't think he'd actually attack me or anything, although he was very impaasioned..
all this time we were standing at the front, and when he got off i didn't notice the bus driver telling me to move down. then someone piped up after he got up the bus - picked me up onthe whole 'cruel god' thing. 'et the millionare driving around in his sports car doesn't think it's such a bad world, eh?' he said. his head lolled around in a wierd way. i agreed with him and tried to develop the point, but it seemed to come out like i was disagreeing with him.. went on like that for a bit until we were both very confused.
then i went home and played oblivion for four hours and wondered where the time had gone.
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