Jon Elkon

Author: Jon Elkon

  • Thanks but No Thanks?

    Give thanks for ingratitude! That glorious confirmation of every stereotype and prejudice ever nursed in the deepest corners of the ungrateful soul….
    Brian said, and I was amazed. Brian Trainis he was called then. He said, when you do things for people expect nothing back!
    Oh, I said, of course! Because there will be payback when you really need it, right? Calling in favours…I said this because Brian was CFO of this thrusting little company I was working for. Known for his sharp practices, his ruthlessness in dealing with suppliers and customers alike. Ethically, a DarkSpace.
    No, he said. I meant it when I said expect nothing back. Ask for nothing back. Never call in favours!
    But, I said.
    But nothing, he said.
    He was, despite his ruthless reputation, something of a mentor and a guru for me. I felt that he let me see into his soul and inside there was a sweet, good little boy who just wanted to be liked. Which was the reason he screwed customers, suppliers and staff…he just wanted the boss to like him.
    I said he was Brian Trainis but now he isn’t because he killed himself a few years ago. His girl friend apparently said she didn’t like him anymore. Ungrateful shit.
    I followed his advice for years and I still do, and it’s incredibly liberating, expecting nothing back. Because if you do, well it’s such a bloody surprise! I mean, people give you awards – I have shelves of the things and I have no idea why. Not to mention “likes” on Facebook! The negative is the embarrassment which people think is false modesty, which it may be….

  • Brecksshit – Broken Britain?

    Last Thursday approximately 52% of British voters declared their preference for stepping out of the European project and turning Great Britain into Little England. Awwwww diddums! They’s so cute, these intellectually challenged ethically deficient people with their charming belief that they are Not Racist But. And their conviction that they have voted out of sincere nationalism and patriotism. Their conviction that the anchor on this island can be raised and if we all row like crazy, we can steer the British boat away from the great big bullying continent next door. Their conviction that they have been convicted for years of the offence of being subordinate to an “unelected plutocracy” which is essentially anti-British, self-serving, dedicated to a political union…

    Awwwwwwww diddumsssessss (emphasis on the dummm) – how many misconceptions does it take to build a wall between the Us and the Them? Ask Donald Trump.

    Many commentators today are saying that despite the vote it can never happen. Boris wouldn’t dare, they say. The implications for the unity of GB have begun to sink in, they say, and anyone with intelligence could never allow Scotland and NI to pull up their anchors and row away. Yes diddumses but that’s exactly what we were saying before your idiot referendum decided to deprive 48% of the British people of their country. I would bet, certainly, that many are regretting their Out Vote.

    Well tough titties baby! You made your lying bed now fart in it!

  • Brexit Wrecks it!

    Bye bye Great Britain, we’re Little England now

    We’ve dumped the Euros and de-standardised the cow

    We’ve resmoked the air and unstocked the Thames

    And put things all back together again!

    We can now go back to living in sin

    Just as if we had never been IN!

    Immigrants all have packed and they go

    Our NHS and our businesses are no no no!

    And ruled by our saints Boris and Nige

    We can sun ourselves in noblesse oblige!

    So Euro bye bye

    Here’s mud in your eye

    We can all now roll over

    And die…

     

     

  • Japanese and Compassion?

    Japan 1600: the Legalists under the Tokugawa end centuries of internecine warfare between clans and unite Japan, with the Emperor a powerless figurehead. Four hundred years followed of oppression by sword. Enforced by a network of samurai and informants. The slightest infraction and instant and savage death would be meted out, not just to the accused, but his whole family would be slaughtered.
    Katana and wakisashi were tested on live “criminals” and graded according to how efficiently they cut through living flesh and bone, according to the part of head or torso targeted.
    Buddhism flourished. This religion which taught compassion through meditation and study; in which masters were revered and deferred to with slavish adulation. While samurai raged over the country, joyous in their butchery as they enforced the rule of the shogun or their clan.
    Many samurai were Buddhists.
    I will shortly be in a dojo practising the Japanese “art” of causing pain and harm to others under the excuse of self defence. An art developed by Okinawan peasants to protect themselves against the samurai, based on techniques learned from Chinese sailors
    After almost 40 years of practising this Art I am trying to put it into context.
    Understanding the Japanese?
    And there’s their finesse! Their art and poetry which is so very fine, nuanced and spiritual. The simplicity and beauty of their homes. The incredible variety and cleverness of their food. Their music which fills and fulfils. I know many Japanese. Without exception they are delightful- witty, kind, so compassionate to me when I attempt to emulate their excellence in the art of Karate and fall about myself. Friends who have travelled to Japan confirm this.
    And there is the katana with its horrifying perfection.
    Post-Meiji, of course (1868) the pollution of western trade brought change – from battleships to Hello Kitty. From the ferocity of their attacks on Russia, then China, to Pearl Harbour and the whole democratic West itself.  Why? Expansion, of course. Arising out of the deep-seated conviction of their inherent superiority in all things. Were they right about that? But they lost! They refer to westerners as Geijin – barbarians. Yet their hunger for western goods and western ways goes back to the demise of the Tokugawa. Assimilate and conquer perhaps. With Godzilla.
    So we have our revenge. Mcdonalds, KFC, Starbucks, Ways to murder them with obesity and diabetes, heart and lung destruction and what is not destroyed by our fast food we slash with our dreams of a world ruled by the gun. And the atom bomb.

  • Destiny

    Ready to leave? Yet?
    Put away Regret?
    Brushed the carpet?
    Fed the pet?
    Is your face scraped
    And your underwear clean?
    Licked the window?
    Packed away
    The Dream?
    Have you any idea
    Do you know
    How, precisely, you’re going
    To go?
    Or where?
    No?
    No!

  • In the garden at the V&A

    Wishing I were an exhibit
    An iconic one
    like Tipoo’s tiger
    Or a Rodin
    Immobile
    And Composed
    Receiving as my due
    A glance or two.
    I’m stuck.
    Alone, like you
    Unable to summon the pluck to say hello.
    You go.
    And I, gobbling Benugo’s pie
    By the still pond
    Where ducks die
    Pose. Stuck. Immobile by reason of indecision and pain
    Have to get up!
    Have to be human
    Again.

  • More and Less😐

     

    In my journey
    From A to Z
    Now near the end of my alphabet at last
    (Or at least I hope so)
    Here where
    Everything is so much less
    (Even less clear)
    where maintenance is the only task,
    Repairs more onerous
    And less reliable
    And more expensive
    And less like fun
    And more frequent
    And much
    More painful

  • Silly hair 😉

    How the people stare! When you indulge in silly hair
    If gold or green
    Or something between
    Or cut and shaped like a soup tureen
    Or styled  with dash
    Above the eye
    Or tortured with
    The latest dye
    Or tied or teased
    To defy
    Gravity!
    Or perched on pate like flattened rat
    That silly inane baseball hat!
    Best to hide
    The riches inside
    In scarf or (dab)
    Or green hijab
    Or turban white
    Or something big
    Perhaps it’s best
    To buy a wig!

  • Tube Mind

    One of a series of short short stories written about London’s sweaty Underground system, this story is on the darker side of the imagination and is especially poignant in these times….what would you have done?

    Straphanging on the Piccadilly line, near the door. Sitting on the nearest seat to me and the exit, this blokie. He has style without styling. That casual perfection in the rolled up jeans and streaky blond slicked hair which, greased and jabbed at with a comb, curves up and back as confident as a ski run. He has a beard but it looks more like a fashion statement than a political or religious one. He reclines like a drunk, legs wide apart in the close fitting grey jeans. Sparky clean, straight from the machine.

    He is not drunk.

    His watch is two tone, half silver, half pink, cost thousands. A chunk of complications including timer, date, dual time, each relentlessly, impertinently accurate.

    His Louis Vuitton bag sprawls between his open legs just slightly ajar, enough for me to see the bomb nestling inside. I know it’s a bomb, because that wire and that tape could be nothing else and it’s my job. Or rather, it was when I worked in Security at Heathrow. Until yesterday. when I was fired for being drunk. In the five years I was there I never saw a bomb. Until now.

    The woman standing next to me stinks. Sunken deep into her iPhone, ringed fingers zooming about, her face writes her despair. She’s young enough to be desperate.

    Knightsbridge.

    No signal. I can’t dial 999. I could pull the emergency chord but that could make him panic into detonating…

    The couple snogging next to the urbane bomber are ingesting each other orally. I hate them. They are oblivious to my wound, they are so sunken into themselves they believe they have a right to dig into my pain and turn and pull and wrench. Selfish shits.

    He’s looking around, really alert.  Is he aware of me?

    The fat bloke standing next to me is in a striped shirt which gapes incontrovertibly open at belt level so that shreds of belly hair and blobs of pale flesh can get a good look at the women in the carriage. Head down into his mobile, playing a game.

    Who else deserves to be blown up? Well I do.

    Green Park.

    When I left Marie both she and the baby were screaming accusingly. When he grows up he will never forgive me. I think I hit her but perhaps I didn’t.

    Love was never meant to be in me. It was just something I did, to get sex. Or is it the other way round? I really don’t care. Now there’s a baby, with me in him. Poor little shit. Better daddy is blown up than he has to say daddy left when he was a baby, because father was drunk and couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.

    Piccadilly Circus.

    He’s scratching his head and looking about him. With similar thoughts?

    Similar thoughts. He doesn’t look like a terrorist, not the type we were trained to spot. So Slick. So casual.

    Leicester Square. My destination.

     

  • I Read the Guardian this Morning and Wept

    Apparently Omar  Mateen visited the Pulse disco several times before he attended with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol and a .233 calibre AR-15 style assault rifle. On the occasions when he visited before, did he dance? Did he have a good time? Did he pick up guys? Did he get rejected? At what point of his life was he radicalised? We need a timeline here. A narrative is hiding in gunsmoke and our fury that this outrage can have happened. With guns bought legally. By a mentally ill (probably) homophobic (certainly) radicalised (definitely) angry obsessively violent terribly dangerous individual.

    We know that many of the most homophobic individuals hate gays because they hate the gay in themselves. It’s almost a cliche – the “methinks he doth protest too much” line has so much truth in it. Many homophobes resent the fact that they cannot express their true sexuality for a variety of reasons – family, religion, the opinions of their peers, prejudices injected by generations of ignorance – so much that they spend their lives railing against lgbt people, sometimes physically attacking them. I am writing a novel about this. Let’s face it: a person who is confident about their own sexuality has no reason to criticise others for theirs.
    My heart is broken. Not just for those beautiful innocents who had their lives destroyed by this barking madman with his legal guns – but also for the cruel combination of events and genetics that drove this person to his night of madness.
    what they know about Mateen: http://qz.com/704952/what-we-know-about-the-orlando-gunman-omar-mateen/
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