Birthday Fun (Blog 26)

It was birthday day! I started the morning home alone as my dad was off at work. Therefore, I was free for a while. ‘What should I do?’, I thought. Well, I gave myself a birthday shave then headed down to Kingston (England) to get myself a couple of CDs. Even though I wrote a music review saying I didn’t like Judas Priest’s early work, I recently checked out their 1982 release ‘Screaming for Vengeance’, on Youtube and thought it was pretty cool. It was the time to contradict myself a little bit and buy it. I bought ‘Abysmal Thoughts’ by The Drums as well, as their other album ‘Portamento’ is one of my most listened to records. I’ve probably listened to it over one hundred times. At this time, I also looked for a certain Tom Green film called… actually, I’ll leave it at that, but sadly the shop didn’t have it. Never mind. After all this, I left for the train station.

I was late by one minute so surely I had to wait for the next transporter, coming in half an hour’s time? No! Because the vehicle I would have normally just missed was late by TWO minutes. Thus, I only had to stand around for a very comfortable sixty seconds. Success! After boarding, I soon got off at the stop, Hampton Wick, to visit Chandler’s Guitar Shop. There, I checked out a couple of distortion pedals. The first I wasn’t so impressed with; I didn’t like the tone and I have better sounds from my Peavey amp. Buying that would be silly. The second pedal however, sounded pretty awesome. It was called ‘Dr. Distorto’, made by Line6. It even made simple licks sound really cool so I had to buy it. I quickly left for the train station and once again was just in time. That was a hat trick of luck, already. Annoyingly, when I got home I found I didn’t have the required power supply, so I couldn’t rock out for a while. That didn’t matter though, as I drove to GBK to get the weekly chocolate milkshake and then I had a birthday bath.

Mid wash, my dad came home from work. I got out of the water and asked my dad if he had any compatible plugs. EVENTUALLY he did find something, but before I blasted out some pentatonic and minor scale licks, I decided to clean my room to the sound of retro heavy metal, JP style. Ambient/noise music hoover sounds followed. Cleaning up on my birthday? This mixed with all the frequent good fortune, made this already a very unorthodox day. One to be looked back on with confusion and positivity. When everything was refreshingly ordered and spotless, it was the time to go to the gym. Ah the gym, that free, healthy drug you get once you pay the price of inevitable torture. Ok, when I got back from there, I unleashed my shred metal escapades and my brother came home from work with more CDs. More music listening followed.

What I was really looking forward all day to however, was the go karting that I booked the day before. I went there with my brother on the back of his motorbike. That alone was fun. When I got to the event, all the soon to be racers were given a 5 minute talk about what to do on the track. As I had been karting there many, many times before, I didn’t listen to a word that was said. However, what I had never done before, was a traditional race and that’s what I not long ago arranged. (I only previously did ‘the fastest lap wins)’. Therefore, a new talk was given. I eventually realised I should have paid attention to the different rules, shortly after leaving the lecturer’s vicinity. I asked my brother what I should do and he explained everything in a few seconds. Yep, that’s all you need.

I didn’t do too bad at the practice run and subsequent race, for the most part. However, in the latter I got ordered to the pits as I was illegally overtaking people when the yellow flag was out. As I couldn’t find the place and I wandered around the track trying to work out what to do, I lost loads of positions. ‘I can’t believe you couldn’t find the pits’, I was eventually told. ‘Yeah, well I didn’t’, I thought. Then I was given a telling off. Despite this however, I finished in a respectable 13th out of 20 racers. Not bad I guess, considering. Especially as some of the contenders were really into the sport, with their special gear and all. I then left the event with the promise of curry. Very nice. What curry did I order? A flaming hot phall. It was agony. And that was it for the day, other than watching some mindless (and I do mean ‘mindless’) television. Bye!