The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. It's Saturday, I wake up after a good night's sleep and it's 8 am. My girlfriend and our two sons are still asleep. So I get up and have some time to do some back stretches and listen to Sonic the Comic the Podcast for half an hour until my girlfriend and our oldest son, 4-year-old, get up. 4-year-old gets me to read him a couple of Barbapapa books. And then we make some blueberry jam together because we've seen it in the books,

I decide I need an objective for the morning. And it's going to be that I have to make a very quick version of the film, which I'm going to submit for the Barcelona Subtravelling Film Festival this year. [Note from the future: I entered the competition but did not win.] After making it out of Duplo, it's going to be stopmotion. So I'll go to the third bedroom, the spare bedroom, which is now pretty much just a Duplo room with Duplo constructions scattered all over the floor along with the Duplo Metro that I've made. The thing is it's all such a mess, I can't start filming until I've tidied up a bit. So I'll start putting random bricks away. But some of the 4-year-old’s Superthings, figures and other random figures away. 4-year-old comes in and wants to know what I'm doing. He starts building something out of Duplo and says it's going to be a surprise for me. So I'm not allowed to be in a room. So much for trying to make this film today. So I leave the room and spend the next half an hour wandering around the apartment, tidying up, and putting things away. It's always like this every Saturday. I get angry because our apartment is a mess. Seems I'm the only one who cares about putting things away where they should be. Girlfriend doesn't seem to care. But 4-year-old is responsible for most of the mess. Girlfriend’s vibrator is in a drawer in the living room, I don't know why. There are sanitary pads on the living room table. There are bits of paper 4-year-old’s scribbled on and given to me as a present. The ones where he's put no effort in, I just throw those in the bin when he's not looking.

I sit down at the computer to do some work but a couple of minutes later 4-year-old says, "Daddy, the surprise is ready". So I get up, go to the third bedroom and he says, "Look daddy," and he's made a Duplo town out of Duplo bricks. It's got all the Barbapapa characters. It's got all the colours right as well. He's made a pizzeria and some other stuff, I'm impressed and also kept him occupied for half an hour by himself, so that's good.

I'm always telling Girlfriend we need to get more Duplo but she never wants to. She says we have too much. So when I buy more I have to buy surreptitiously, secretly and sneak into the house when she's not there.

Noon

Now it's noon, still haven't started this film yet. 0-year-old's crying like a banshee, Girlfriend is begging me to go take him for a walk in the pram to see if he'll fall asleep. So I take him for a walk .I walk him up and down for half an hour and he was still awake. He's just staring at me from the pram now. Sometimes he rubs his eyes, so he might be tired.

I'm walking by the river. Someone has written in spray paint the words "Dance until it's all over" under the bridge. It’s supposed to be a nice sentiment but the difficulty of writing in spray paint means, especially with large letters, that the letters are malformed, so it looks like it's been written by a child, and makes it look menacing. I like it though. That's the trouble with writing things with spray paint, it almost always looks menacing and threatening no matter what you write. You could write a phrase by Gandhi or Mother Theresa - “Peace is always beautiful” - and it'd still come out sinister.

Girona's merry-go-round

I walk past the town's carousel. This carousel has seen better days. From afar, it looks okay, but when you get close, you start to notice the greasy, grimy, dirty roof. Some of the horses have things missing, the tops of the poles, they're supposed to have a ball on. Some of them are missing the balls. Many of the light bulbs no longer work, and no one's bothered to change them. And then in the middle of this merry-go-round there's a great big plastic teddy bear statue and he's holding in one hand, he has a bucket of bubble mixture and then the other hand, he has a wand. And in the past, he would move his arm up and down and dip his wand into the bubble mixture, bring it to his mouth and blow and bubbles would come up. That was years ago and now he hasn't moved, he just doesn't blow bubbles anymore. I don't know, if I owned a merry-go-round, I would put every effort into improving it while the guy who works there just sits there all day collecting money. As far as I'm concerned, the merry-go-round just keeps getting worse and worse. I mean, at what point will action be taken? Will it be when the doors have fallen off the cars? Will it be when the unlicensed and frankly, amateurish paintings of Disney characters have faded so much in the sun that you can no longer tell Mickey and Minnie apart? Will it be when the merry-go-round itself no longer spins and the kids pay just to sit there stationary?

4 pm

We're in a car driving to an outdoor swimming pool. Girlfriend doesn't know where it is exactly. We park, we get out, and we walk out a bit in the blistering hot sun (actually only 30 degrees but feels hotter). Girlfriend says, "Sorry, I think this is the wrong place." So we all have to walk back to the car. I'm carrying 0-year-old, trying to protect him from the sun by draping a sheet around him. We get back to the car, I follow Girlfriend’s instructions on where to drive, and we end up in the wrong place again. She doesn't know where this swimming pool is. She can see the location on a map on her phone but she doesn't know how to get there. Unfortunately, I call her "fucking stupid" in the heat of the moment (literally heat, because my forehead is plastered in sweat from the heat at this point). in my defence, 0-year-old's crying in the backseat so I'm quite a bit stressed. Girlfriend says I've never called her stupid before, let alone fucking stupid. I guess there's always a first time for everything. Girlfriend gets out of the car to look after 0-year-old and I find the route on my phone to get to the swimming pool.

[Anyway, we got to the pool, had a good time, so I guess all's well that ends well.]