#benrik

Well fuck, looks like I gotta leave every room I go into then? I know it's meant to be hilarious and shit but it's not like people can control their weight if their metabolism is fucking nuts (Like mine) 

Another one that makes me question the state of the authors today, as the book instructs me to revert to childhood. Which okay, mostly isn't too bad - the suggestions are things like draw with crayon, eat too much icecream, play videogames.

The problem is the rather large footnote at the bottom of the page, which suggests that maybe everything bad in one's life might come from the trauma of toilet training, and the dedicated might wish to reverse this. And just like that the book has made things weird and uncomfortable. Also I think we can agree this runs entirely counter to the spy training theory. No one wants an incontinent spy.

Alright, so I don't do that. Instead I opt for making a pile of cushions on the floor to sit on and play videogames (though unlike actual childhood instead of collecting gold rings I'm shooting a million pirates in the face and skinning endangered animals to make ammo pouches). I drink too many sodas and see if I can get a sugar rush. I would eat ice cream but there's only chocolate, which I don't like. So instead I indulge the childish impulse to look at some food and go "Blech, yucky" and refuse to eat it.

So that's my day long return to a childlike mentality. I guess some rich, high powered types spend a lot of money to have structured childhood days to legitimise doing this sort of thing and taking a break from their lifestyles? Or they develop weird fetishes. Either way.

Weekend catchup time!

Day 80: Prepare my home for a zombie invasion.

Step one obviously is to decide what kind of zombie invasion I'm preparing for. I'm politely informed that fast zombies are "stupid" and the Rage virus totally doesn't count as zombies. So setting aside any kind of cultural criticism of what zombies mean as a tool of horror or how to make them relevant and threatening for the modern day (rather than an endless source of parody and shitty nerd humour) I guess I'm going to be preparing for a regular Dawn of the Dead zombie invasion.

The house is pretty well made for that, I think. It's above an office and only has one entrance, which leads into the house via a narrow, defensible stairway. So unless the zombies learn to use tool and bring a ladder, or the mountain of corpses grows 12ft high, the windows aren't a likely source of undead ingress. Good, saves me boarding them up. I think the landlord would object if I did that now.

I dump all the large, heavy sofa cushions and some chairs at the bottom of the stairwell, a makeshift barrier against the door. Then I put it all back because Sean will be home soon and I don't want to have to explain that he can't get in the front door because of hypothetical zombies.

Food: We have enough dried noodles in this house to last out weeks of zombie infestation after the fresh food runs out.

Weaponry: I once dressed up as Frank West out of Dead Rising for a party and carried a blood splattered guitar as my zombie killing tool of choice. Since then the guitar has had various bits of heavy copper tubing bolted onto it, making it even more skull mashing. I think I'm sorted here.

So that's my zombie prep done. I'm still refusing to buy anything written by Max Brooks though, or to engage in that weird crypto-libertarian NRA-approved nerd fantasy of living in a zombie apocalypse.

Day 81:Speak the unspeakable.

Friday sees me tasked with saying things that should not be said. The book's examples include "The Virgin Mary wasn't a virgin", and "Adolf Hitler was a hero and a gentleman". So apparently by speak the unspeakable the book means be a low grade troll?

No wait, on further examination the book doesn't want me to actually say anything, it wants me to find a phrase I wouldn't actually be willing to say in public. No mention of whether or not I should actually say it. This is apparently meant to be a backlash against the verbal incontinence of the modern age. So I guess this is one of those introspective tasks, not one of the get out and act type tasks.

Alright, so what wouldn't I say where anyone can hear? This is a pretty wide field, since it doesn't have to also be something that is true. But to settle on one, non-comedy option, I'm not willing to publicly say anything involving racial/sexual/etc slurs. I will never thrive on Xbox Live is the takeaway from this task.

Day 82: Examine the cheese/dreams relationship.

Does cheese in fact cause bad dreams? Eat some before bed and find out. This is totally how science works. I've read Popper, I know what science is.

So for my totally serious scientific experiment into the effects of cheese on dreams I have a bit of cheddar before bed. I would have preferred a nice Pont-l'Évêque, but this was a short notice kind of thing.

That night I do indeed have a bad dream, involving someone close to me enumerating all my flaws, real and imagined, explaining that they were never talking to me again, and that they'd hated me for months and betrayed me in various ways. So that was rather unpleasant and left me out of sorts all morning.

Based on this sample of 1 cheese has a 100% chance of causing bad dreams. There were no other causative factors involved, no experimenter bias, and I am entirely representative of all humanity. I'll be publishing this in Nature soon. I might also put out a press release linking cheese dreams to cancer, so that the Daily Mail will run a story on my discovery. You read it here first, avoid cheese if you value the sanctity of your dreams.

Day 83: Tell everyone I've lost my home, done crime, etc.

The goal apparently is to see who still talks to me after I've lost all social status and who abandons me to hard times. This honestly would probably have worked better if I hadn't been sitting in my home with people when I told them. People who'd been around me the last couple of days and seen me not committing any sort of crime.

This is another of those tasks that would be interesting to do over a week or so, and might actually lead to some interesting experiences. I'm going to keep a note of it to do at some future juncture on my own time. Book into a hotel for a week, take a week off work, show up to talk to people at strange hours throughout the night and day, getting increasingly more disheveled, making it steadily more and more apparent that you're at rock bottom. See how people react.

The downside to that of course is that while it'd be interesting it'd also basically involve trolling one's social circle for a week just to see what happened, possibly making people genuinely worry for you. And that's honestly kind of a dick move. The sort of person who'd toy with people like that maybe deserves to be abandoned during tricky times (has anyone seen Escape from Hong Kong Island? It's a sort of related film and really good). So okay, I'll shelve that plan, I don't want to be That Guy.

This task was all about getting back to some old-school polytheist roots. Specifically by praying to "out of date" gods. The book lists Minerva, Loki, Thanatos, Nerthus, Poseidon, Ra, Moloch and Mars in particular. We'll ignore that Thanatos wasn't really a deity, because there is only so much mythological soundness you can expect from a comedy book.

The old religions certainly had better stories than most modern ones. Swan sex, dressing up as a lady to get your magic hammer back, turning people into stars, all kinds of hilarious japes. Norse and Greek pantheons seemed to have more in common with reality TV stars than anything else.

I'm a little hesitant to actually pray to any of them at first. One of Aesop's fables, the Frogs Who Wanted a King explains this: So there's these frogs, chilling in their pond, and for poorly specified reasons they desire a king. So they pray to Zeus for one and Zeus drops a great big log in the pond, freaking the frogs out. When it doesn't move they hop up on top and start laughing and making fun of the log. They still want a king so they pray again, like "Seriously though Zeus, can we get an actual monarch this time?"

This time Zeus sends a water snake down, which starts feasting on this fabulous fucking frog buffet. The frogs pray a third time, all "What the shit Zeus? Sort this the fuck out!" Zeus just replies with "Lol, nope" and leaves the frogs to die. The end.

So the moral of this fable is obviously don't pray to Zeus, the guy's a dick. Then I remember that none of these deities exist, so it's pretty risk free to offer up some prayers.

I don't feel quite on board with any of the book's examples though, so I send up my prayers to Bacchus. If ever there was a god who knew how to part it was that guy. Also how to drive people into terrible orgies of violence and disinhibition. Bacchus/Dionysus cults and myths got dark. But we'll gloss over that. Also, plays a key role in one of my favourite Tim Powers novels, Earthquake Weather.

So I pray for the miraculous appearance of some delicious wine, but it doesn't appear. Damn you Bacchus, you've let me down for the last time. No longer shall I pray to you.

A weird but also kinda fun one? I have to act as a freelance traffic warden and put tickets on cars. The book helpfully provides some of these on the page.

So I rip out a couple of tickets from the book (there was nothing important on the reverse, fortunately) and set to work.

Problem 1) I am not a traffic warden, nor have I ever had so much as a single driving lesson. This does not leave me best qualified to recognise parking offences. I guess things like expired meters or double parking? Or given the slightly silly nature of this task I can just make up things to ticket people for, I guess. I'm going with that one.

Problem 2) It feels weird walking up to someone's car to tuck a piece of paper under the wiper and then take a picture. What if someone sees me put a pretend ticket on their car and comes up to ask what the hell I'm doing? "Oh, sorry, I'm pretending to be a traffic warden because a book told me to, and I want to write about it on the internet."

Problem 3 you can see for yourself: My handwriting is fucking atrocious. But those of you can decipher it will note that Thelonious Blount has moved on from writing to governments and is now committing acts of fraud by masquerading as a traffic warden.

The primary lesson from this task is that I would make a pretty terrible traffic warden.

Sorry for the daily in updates, I was away slightly longer than planned over the weekend. (Protip: When you have the booking code for a journey in your inbox write it down on some paper, just in case your email service decides it would be fun to strand you somewhere by eating the booking.)

Let's catch up on what I've been doing the last few days.

Day 73: Threaten a foreign nation. This is, I guess, a logical continuation to the theme established by having me write to the military and the government. This time I don't get to actually pen the letter myself, I'm given a form letter to send to the foreign nation of my choice.

Since I advised the military to launch a preemptive strike on the US back in January I figure it makes sense to aim my threatening letter at them now. Have to be consistent with these things after all. The text of the letter reads as follows (text in <> denotes blanks in the form that I've filled in):

Dear Leader of <the USA>

I have so far tolerated your behaviour in the spirit of international forbearance, but enough is enough.

I am hereby issuing you with an ultimatum. Either you desist from your obnoxious course of action, or I shall be forced to invade. I have the full backing of my country's government and its armed forces, which are at the ready to give you a drubbing, should you prevaricate on this matter. You have until 11.59pm tonight to respond. Truly, you will rue the day you offended me.

Yours sincerely,

<Sir Thelonious Blount>, on behalf of <the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland>

So obviously I did not get a response from the president by midnight of last Thursday. I'm going to attribute this to the fact that international post is not magic and instantaneous, so obviously the letter didn't get read the day it was sent. Presumably my reply will be in the post any day now. Also, the authors of this book fucking love commas.

Day 74: Friday saw me having to follow my horoscope's advice to the letter for today. I'm not sure if there's a way to pick the least bullshit horoscope out of the vast platter of fresh hot bullshit presented to me by various online horoscopes so I just took the first one that google offered, courtesy of Mountain Democrat's website:

"LEO (July 23-Aug. 22). You’ll witness odd behavior and will be asked to interact outside of your comfort zone. Luckily, since all human beings have the same basic needs, it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure this one out."

Okay, so I was taking a train up to a gathering of hundreds of student geeks, odd behaviour is to be expected. Maybe there's something to this after all (spoiler: there isn't).

I spend the day being understanding. It's really not that hard, people are pretty much people, nothing too weird. I guess I'm lucky I got this and not something like "you will meet your true love, their name begins with L".

Honestly the weirdest thing I encounter all day is people wanting to drink in the substandard lower bar, and not the one with the good drinks. But I stick with it as the horoscope suggests and we end up playing a fun card game, so there's that?

Day 75: Listen to someone's inner workings. The book suggests reaching a new level of closeness with someone by putting your head to their chest, abdomen, etc, and studying the various gurgles their organs make until you really know the sounds of their innards.

That one is a bit weird and would probably lead to some slightly uncomfortable interactions with most people. I figured my Glamorous Assistant would be the least weird choice for this. Unfortunately, as we were all at a very well stocked union bar for most of the day my assistant ended up on the wrong side of a lot of cider and became far too drunk to help with this one. So that's a failure, but one I don't really feel that bad about missing out on.

Day 76: Insure my best feature. Citing the example of various Hollywood types the book suggests I call Lloyds of London and attempt to insure my best feature against harm.

I didn't expect to have any success with this, it being a Sunday, but apparently Lloyds is sufficiently fancy as to have people manning its general inquiries line (the book provides a number) on the weekends.

This is of limited help though, because as someone with no real discretionary income and no famous features it's not really practical for me to ensure a feature. I'm not even sure what my most valuable feature is. I have some quite nice tattoos I suppose? Let's go with that.

I'm counting this as a success anyway, since the book told me to try insuring my best feature, not succeed. And at least the task got me to think about what that is.

Day 77: Finally, Monday saw me solving all my problems with the implications of violence. While waiting at the information counter to ask where my bus back to London went from I consistently cracked my knuckles. I don't know if anyone noticed but I certainly got a swift and accurate answer. Though that might have been because I asked an incredibly simple and straightforward question.

I was on a coach most of the day, which limited my chances to threaten violence. I had a set of seats to myself, so didn't really have to scare people away. I did make sure to that dramatic neck cracking thing if anyone looked like they might want to sit next to me. Maybe that helped to keep the seats free? It's hard to tell.