The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. There's a knock on the door. Just a single knock, like an angry stone thrown against a window pane. "Who is it?" I call out. No answer. I cautiously open the door. Standing there is my hideous old mother-in-law, wearing black trousers and a white Calvin Klein t-shirt- The t-shirt is slightly see-through, revealing her saggy bra-clad breasts and large protruding belly.

"I'm putting the rent up," she says, her breath stinking of nicotine. "Hard times, you know." My mother-in-law, by the way, also happens to be my landlady.

"What?" I say. "But you're a millionaire. I've seen the inheritance papers."

She cackles, revealing yellowed and missing teeth.

"I've wasted the inheritance on lottery tickets and bingo!" she says, laughing evilly. "When I die, no one will get anything!"

"You're an evil old bitch!"

But she just laughs, and laughs, and laughs. Her mouth opens up to reveal six rows of sharp, shark-like teeth. Her face melts like wax. Her mouth continues opening, wider and wider, into a gigantic yawn. Beyond her teeth is a cavernous, infinite blackness. And at the end of the blackness is a inheritance paper with a single ominous number written on it: zero.

I wake up screaming. Girlfriend tuts and tells me to go back to sleep.

****

It's morning. Girlfriend's putting her shoes and coat on.

"This might be your only chance to see 6-year-old sing in a choir," says Girlfriend.

"Sing? He doesn't know how to sing! He's only six years old!"

In an hour there's a Christmas choir at the town's auditorium. 6-year-old's taking part because he's enrolled in music classes at the local music school.

"Don't you want to hear your son sing?" asks Girlfriend.

"Hear him sing?" I say. "I won't be able to hear him sing over the noise of the other kids!"

She's probably imagining 6-year-old stepping forward out of the chair and breaking into a solo like Sister Mary in Sister Act.

Girlfriend tuts. She puts 1-year-old in the pushchair. She slams the door as she leaves.

A minute later, the intercom buzzes. It's Girlfriend.

"Well?" she says. "Are you coming or not?"

"Alright, alright, I'm coming," I say. "But let me just brush my teeth first."

"No! You don't have time to brush your teeth! We're going to be late!"

"If the kids expect me to sit through an hour of their wailing, I think they'll understand if I take a minute to brush my teeth," I say.

A few minutes later, I join Girlfriend outside. It's 1 degree Celcius today. It's almost literally freezing but at least my teeth are freshly brushed. It takes me five minutes to zip up my coat because the zip is broken. We get to the concert hall. There's a big line of people waiting to get in. Everyone is happy and well-dressed. They're wearing expensive coats.

And there are lots of old people. Lots and lots of old people. Why do old people like children's Christmas plays so much? Maybe someone told them there's free jigsaw puzzles inside.

We enter the auditorium, a big room with a stage and hundreds of seats. We find seats and sit down. The lights dim. A choir of men wearing black suits walk out onto the stage. A choir of women wearing black dresses walk out and stand in the middle of the audience. The women are right in front of me, almost close enough to touch. Then the choir of men and choir of women begin to sing Christmas hymns. Their voices lift our souls to the heavens. Not my soul though, as I don't have one. If I did touch one of the singers, my hand would probably dissolve into blackest ash, like a sinner touching an angel.

Finally, the men and women leave and then the kids enter the stage, all two hundred of them. There are so many children on the stage that my eyes can't believe it. It's a surreal sight, like a Where's Wally picture or a glitchy AI-generated image. The kids perform songs from The Nutcracker. The boys are all wearing red jumpers and black trousers like the titular Nutcracker. The girls are all wearing white dresses like the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Between songs, the children hold hands and weave around each other on the stage like an end-game of Snake where you're trying to avoid eating your own tail. I can see 6-year-old, just about. He's behind a kid wearing a Spider-Man jumper. 6-year-old's got one of those cheeky smiles young children have when they're in front of an audience. The play ends. The parents collect their kids. We go outside. One girl is clumsily twirling a stick around like YouTube's Star Wars kid.

"6-year-old did a great job," says one of the moms.

"Yeah," I say.

"Don't you think he did a great job? I'd never be able to go on a stage like that," she says.

What, you wouldn't be able to go on stage with two hundred other people?

We take 6-year-old and 1-year-old to the town's merry-go-round. Like everything else lately, the merry-go-round has become a victim of inflation. Last year, one ride on the merry-go-round cost 80 cents. This year the price was upped to 1 euro. And then today, the price has gone up again, to 1.10 euros. That's a 38% increase in a year.

Eggs have gone up from 1 euro a dozen to 1.79 euros a dozen. Cherry tomatoes, once cheap and bountiful at 2 euros a kilo, are now 4 euros a kilo.

6-year-old's riding on a carousel horse. "Daddy!" he shouts. "I want a crisp!"

I lean into the merry go round and reach out to hand 6-year-old a Cheeto pelotazo. If I fell over, I'd get pulled screaming into the carousel's machinery and they'd find my body days later, compacted into a neat cube.

I go back over to Girlfriend. She looks drained. Her face has a haunted look, like a trench soldier in World War I. The reason? She stayed out late two nights ago and she still hasn't recovered.

The merry-go-round stops. 6-year-old gets off but 1-year-old wants to go again. "Okay, just one more time," I say. 1-year-old sits in a little double-decker bus. The merry-go-round goes round and round. Then there's the smell of acrid smoke. Wait, what? Acrid smoke? Yes, a plume of black smoke is coming from the Pocoyo train engine, which is between the teacup and the army jeep. 1-year-old's in the double-decker bus, which is behind the teacup.

The man stops the ride. Girlfriend rushes over to the double-decker bus and pulls 1-year-old out. Black smoke is still coming from Pocoyo's train engine. It smells like the illegal fires my dad used to make in the garden, in a metal barrel, to burn his waste. There's a cafe next to the ride and the people there are just chatting away and drinking beer, oblivious to the fact a children's ride has apparently caught fire.

The ride has been shut down. The two old men who work on the ride are now trying to fix it. They are crouching under the Pocoyo train engine, looking at cables and fuse boxes under the train, while muttering things like “That’s never supposed to happen” and “How many years has that been loose, do you reckon?” I never noticed before how many electrical cables are under there. It looks like another Hillsborough disaster waiting to happen. In the end, they can't fix the problem so they close the ride.

The rest of the day passes. I read 6-year-old Dog Man 3 and Dog Man 2, in that order. In the evening, the kids have a bath. After the bath, when 6-year-old's dressed in his pyjamas, I show him DALL-E, an AI that can create realistic images from a text description. We try taking a photo of ourselves, the four of us — me, Girlfriend, 6-year-old, and 1-year-old. "Make this photo Christmassy," I tell DALL-E. DALL-E makes it Christmassy alright, by adding a Christmas tree, snow, and a stocking, and by removing 6-year-old entirely from the photo and by drawing me as a handsome anime hunk instead of the potato-faced uggo I actually am. I note that Girlfriend has also gained 4 to 5 attractiveness points under DALL-E's brush.

"Try again," I instruct DALL-E. "But include all four people this time. And give the woman Hispanic skin." So DALL-E tries again. After a minute of thinking, it produces a picture where I'm black and we have three kids instead of two. Still though, it's impressive it's done anything at all.

We live in strange times. AI can draw you beautiful, personalised artworks for free but I can't afford cherry tomatoes.