Author: Domingo Cullen

This happened again.

This morning I absent-mindedly bit into the nail on my right thumb, removing a sizeable chunk. One of those ones where you lock-on, achieve pretty good purchase, get a third of the way along, assess, then close your eyes and drag on through. I didn’t reach the quick, it wasn’t painful. But it was pretty schoolboy.

Cutting your thumbnail a little shorter than normal shouldn’t normally warrant a lengthy bit of reportage. But things get interesting when I throw in the curveball of owning 2021’s most retro mobile phone.

Not something the tap-screen populace have to take into account anymore, but for complete manoeuvrability, a phone of this size is one hundred percent reliant on the maintenance of average to full length nails at all times. When you tamper with this paradigm, the phone’s user experience jumps straight off the 58th floor. The buttons are just too small. Having long nails should be the focus of the first chapter in the nokia 310’s freaking phone manual.

Basically I’ve screwed myself.

This is how I’d usually use the phone, sending a text to a broad.

This is me this morning trying to press the exact same buttons.

On a particularly memorable raid during the Blitz in World War II, the Luftwaffe succeeded in bombing a key munitions factory by the London docks, whilst absent-mindedly taking out the whole of Lewisham and Deptford.

It’s a situation I’m newly familiar with.

Using my phone this morning is a total shot in the dark. With thumbs my size and no nail to focalise my aim, I have to press five buttons blindly in the hope one of them will be right. That’s a 80% probability I’ll screw it up. I have no choice but to blanket-bomb my keypad with the surface area of a bratwurst. Imagine how long a text message is going to take. It’s no wonder nokia went under.

So yeah if today’s text repertoire isn’t up to scratch, channel some empathy and feel my pain. It’s a freak predicament. I mean, imagine someone with fingers as fat as this deciding to take up one of world’s smallest and most fiddly musical instruments, like a ukelele or something.

Ridiculous.

Oscar Wilde once remarked: 



The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

In the last few years as I’ve watched my parents lean inquiringly over the parapet of their own mortality, it’s like they seem to be trying their damndest to be more and more down with the kids. My mother’s fondness for abbreviated txt spk annoys me in an adolescent way I should really rise above, as does her newfound need to walk around everywhere with her iPad strapped to her forehead. I thought my old man was faring a bit better, but no.

I got this email from my mum on Saturday entitled.



 Pops watching Grease on lovely summer afternoon.

And the attached photo.

On one of the balmiest Saturdays to hit rural Buckinghamshire in recent memory, with the mercury pushing 32, it’s a photo of my old man, inside, chair pulled up to within 6 inches of our 2003-model Hitachi, hypnotised by the hit musical Grease. This is a man who chastises my brother and I as idiots, who can hardly bear to have a conversation with us because we haven’t finished In Search Of Lost Time, and who has about 0.4 friends because it takes him all of half an hour to declare anyone he ever meets a bore.

Not so intellectual now are you pops.

Annoyingly the case for my father’s defence is being aided by my mother’s obvious ‘mastery’ of the technology at her fingertips. The photo is that size because my mother sent all 12KB of it.

Would the below stand up in court?

That could literally be a vase with some pussy willow sticking out of it. I sent her an email telling her it was possible to send photos as well as just their thumbnails and she went mental.

*


Then again, this is all good news.

My mum being in the throes of an unrequited love affair with her iPad and my father watering his unhealthy obsession with John Travolta is actually the best thing ever. Because what kills us faster than old age is loss of enthusiasm. And as much as all this makes me want to roll around on the floor and moan like a twelve year old, it’s also proof my parents aren’t throwing in the towel any time soon. Which means I don’t have to take any responsibility for my life. None whatsoever. Not yet.

My old man isn’t self-portrait photography’s number one fan. To say he’s got beef with having his photo taken is an understatement. I don’t know if this is out of vanity, or because even in these twilight years he still needs to max out on security because of the coke racket he’s eyeballs deep in. He took me aside once when I was four and with a look on his face I’ll never forget said, remember this hijo mio, it’s not getting in that’s the hard part, it’s getting out. I thought he was talking about the front door, which was confusing. Now it all becomes clear.

I shot the below straight from the hip as I pointed to the right and screamed WHAT THE HELL IS THAT at the top of my voice. He never saw it coming.

Anyway, I was hanging out with him the other day in his study at home, and told him I wanted a photo of him to take back to my flat and put in a frame.

He turned, and looked at me in the manner of someone placed on the earth for the sole purpose of answering a question they have waited their entire life to be asked. His lips trembled. He held himself together. Claro, he replied in the porteño of his youth. And reaching down to the second draw of the desk he pulled it open and fished something out, his voice cracking imperceptibly. 

Take it.

Are you sure?

I can’t take this one I protested, it’s such a great photo, I don’t want to take your only copy. He shook his head gravely and insisted. No, I want you to have it.

It was a moment. It felt like a symbolic changing of the guard, my father giving me a photo of himself – that rare thing – and one he was evidently proud of, I mean with reason, he looks great. Who doesn’t cherish that kind of photo of themselves. One that evokes more than the person you are, the person you want most to be. It was a little faded and clearly old, with a lovely quality to it.

And yet it felt like I was taking something away from him. It saddened me. I couldn’t help imagining it as something he would keep close to him always, in the second drawer down, as a testament to his youth, a memento, to clutch onto as the dark clouds of old age drift across the horizon. It’s not like he knows what the hell a scanner is.

But he insisted.

Take it.

And as I descended the stairs it was remarkable how touched I felt.

I vowed to find a frame worthy of it, so whenever my father came to visit, it would be there, in pride of place, shining out like a beacon for all to see.

On the way out I saw my mother, and opened my bag to show her.



Look what papa just gave me.



A peculiar pained recognition traced its was across her face.



Oh God, she said.

And she groaned, and I watched her eyes roll alarmingly far back inside her head. That photo. About thirty years ago your father, for the only time in his life, set foot inside a photo-shop, and had 45 copies of that photo made. Forty five. Your father has had a thirty year love affair with that bloody photograph. Our marriage has suffered because of it. The bloody profile. That wistful look. That yellow coat, it comes to me in nightmares. He hands them out like sweets. He’s trying to get rid of them. There are drawers full of them.

In their droves.

In fondo…



è un trucco.

Sì, è solo un trucco.

Every 20 minutes…

Pride of place.

He copied me.

Damn that was a good look boi.

Spot of guerilla marketing.

Old St roundabout, 2015

Los padres.

When my mate Guy was about to become a dad I followed him around with a couple of cameras. The result was two award-winning docs.

Probably time for part III.

Kid is going to rule the world.

Words that are like whaaaaa.

This man has been circulating on many peoples’ radar of late.

Wim Hof is his name.



Chilling in sub-zero temperatures is his game.

They call him the Ice Man, and he’s basically trying to get everyone to follow his sub-zero lead and alter their early morning shower and bath rituals in keeping with his philosophy; that prolonged exposure to very cold temperatures has a vast wealth of health benefits. Asides from shrivelling your nuts to pre-pubescent levels and halving your heating bill, apparently it’s supposed to make you feel great, something to do with oxygen to all parts of your body and dopamine and stuff.

Plus you get to look like a gee.

I then watched a most interesting video, about the merits of cold showers, and the importance of sleep.

At first I wondered if this stuff only applied to people with one syllable first names and surnames. Fuck it I thought, only one way to find out.

So I took the plunge.

That was one week ago. I’ve been having ice cold showers for one week. Do i feel better? I don’t fucking know. Am I confused?

Yes I fucking am.

I’ll tell you why. An ice cold shower is fundamentally a very unpleasant experience. Not even when you’re past the stage of hyper-ventilation and you’ve semi-gotten used to it, is it even vaguely enjoyable. I’m not going to lie, the immediate aftermath is other-worldly. The feeling as you dry yourself off and begin to warm up whilst still feeling all tingly is incredibly invigorating. Kind of like the feeling you get when you use that mint shower-gel, but with the bonus of not looking about twelve.

But the shower itself is I repeat not enjoyable.

Which throws up an important philosophical question. Should we do things that are fundamentally torturous because we know we’re going to feel better after having done them? That seems a little like focusing too much on the destination whilst letting the journey go to shit. Like living a life of pain and martyrdom only to earn eternal salvation once we move onto the next life. Sounds familiar.



Surely life is in the doing. And showers are one of life’s great pleasures. The last time I enjoyed a shower was over 8 days ago. At the moment they are sources of incredible discomfort for me. Just thinking about them at my desk makes me go all Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.

Stop taking cold showers then dickhead.

I CAN’T.

Because these one-syllables punks Wim Hof and Paul Chek have got me thinking that if I continue to prostrate myself at the hands of their cultish teachings, then my life is going to be better in a myriad of different ways. One of them says it’ll even improve my sex-life, which is interesting, seeing as I literally can’t remember the last time I had sex.

I can’t go back to the joys of hot showers because as much as I might enjoy being in them, I won’t enjoy the sadistic feeling of coming out of them. And now, if I even think of cranking the dial towards hot as I lie there in the foetal position convulsing in the corner of my shower crying out for it to stop, I keep imagining the Ice Man looking down on me and shaking his head sternly like the terrifying dude in the painting in Ghostbusters 2.

This sub-zero Catch 22 is ruining my life.



Fuck you Wim… I’m into it.

Stuck for real quality on Netflix?



Look no further.

I haven’t seen it admittedly.



Word on the street is that it’s feel-good.

But regardless of the documentary or the subject of it, who I met a couple of times and seems nice, it’s the review that has me salivating. It’s the only one on there, single-handedly responsible for the film’s one star rating. But it’s remarkable; a study in precision, syntax, and restraint. Whoever wrote it deserves a pulitzer.

Some dude came up to me once and said bro if your blog is called dropthebeatonit why the hell don’t you put more tunes up. I laughed and protested the last thing the world needed was more Shania Twain, knowing full-well my flashdance mc hammer shit would fly over the top of this guy’s dome. But now and again I come across a tune that emanates a love I feel morally obliged to spread.

If you see a homeless-looking dude on the streets of Melbourne with an outstanding collection of adidas sweats, odds-on you’ll be staring at Chet Faker aka Nick Murphy.

Below is I’m Into You.

No man has got me this aroused since Jay Kay dropped Space Cowboy back in ’98. This is the kind of tune that makes me want to buy a second hand keyboard and croon until my neighbours stage an intervention and I get evicted. Then I can look homeless too.

The verdict is in.



Girls want him. Guys want to be him.

Anyone selling a keyboard.

Amy.

This is really good.