Stories and that.
Thirty One Things
I am thirty-one things…
I am more successful than I deserve to be, but not half as successful as I desire.
I am my growing collection of half-read books.
I am my ability to spot a liar.
I am the knowledge of when to leave a party.
I am more Sal than Dean Moriarty.
I am the t-shirts from my teenage years still sitting on my shelf.
I am trying to sleep more to maintain my health.
I am this newly found need to connect.
I am the aches and pains that I collect.
I am losing the fight against encroaching pessimism.
I am older, wiser, smarter, stronger.
I am not able to maintain this rhyming scheme for that much longer.
I am worried that everything of note has already been made.
I am my fear of just doing okay.
I am seeking more comfortable trousers.
I am the devil’s advocate.
I am slowly figuring this whole thing out.
I am not able to park a car like my Dad.
I am not currently in ownership of a car.
I am my acute sense for potential dangers.
I am proud of my contradictory nature.
I am my best stories told over dinner.
I am quite happy to let you be the winner.
I am hoping science elongates the life-span of dogs.
I am my thousands of projects, never to be finished.
I am my disdain for doing the dishes.
I am my ever expanding list of rejections.
I am more at peace with being rejected.
I am my wish to go to Japan, alone.
I am starting to appreciate the wonder of trees.
I am barely getting started…
M.G
From Paris, With Love
In which I visit Paris for the tenth time and finally change my mind.
Call me a hack. Call me narrow-minded. Call me anything you want to call me or better yet, don’t call me at all…
The fact is, when I travel, I like to do so in clichés.
In Paris, I want to walk past that forty year old, trench-coat wearing ex-model on the corner who is actually closer to thirty, but she’s been smoking twenty a day for the last fifteen years so you’d never guess it.
I want to see the guy in his striped white and navy shirt playing Le Vie En Rose on an accordion with garlic hanging around his neck like Pepe-fucking-LePew.
I want wine, I want bread, I want cheese, I want coffee, I want pastries, I want a professional level of nonchalance and I want it now…
Paris though, Paris has never given deux tosses about what I wanted.
It has always just carried on being itself. Unabashedly. Not buckling under the weight of mine, or anybody else’s, expectations.
Some call it confidence, others call it arrogance.
Whatever you call it, you either get it or you don’t.
And I’m not afraid to say that I never really got Paris.
Until…
My train gets in on one of those spring afternoons you only find in 50’s movies.
This is Paris two drinks in at an all day Wedding.
This is Paris straightening its spine after a thirteen hour flight.
If there’s ever a time to fall in love with a person, or a place, it’s right here and right now.
The entire city is bathed in a biblical golden light and the atmosphere outside Gare du Nord is as thick with cigarette smoke as it is with pick-pockets.
Cigarette smoke always reminds me of my Grandmother and pick-pockets are just the charming Disney rogues of the criminal underworld.
It’s quite the sensory cocktail.
Those ornate black-iron balconies sit above the traffic with their dirty windows flung open. Old ladies watching the world pass by beneath them chasing skin cancer with a smile.
(You’d be smiling too if you’d been making a mockery of lung cancer since ‘93.)
Cyclists pour through the streets. Old men with baskets stuffed full of baguettes and flowers freshly bought from Le Market.
Young couples zip down Le Alleyway headed off to some secret place they ain’t gonna tell you about.
It’s electric here.
I’d only ever seen the run down Renaults before now. The bad graffiti. Rows upon rows of cyber-cafés plastered with sun-bleached posters for a French TV show I’d never see unless some privately educated wank at Channel 4 deemed it worthy enough for British consumption.
All that stuff is still here, of course… but it feels different today.
At first I think it must be a trick of the light.
Like the sun has pulled down an Instagram filter over the city, giving it bigger eyelashes and a tan.
But then it hits me in Le Face and I’m all like shit, maybe it’s me?
Maybe I’ve changed.
Maybe Paris, the two-thousand year old city that she is, has patiently been waiting for me to grow up and appreciate her.
See, I only recently moved to a big city myself.
The shock of the noise, the sting of the bad air and that crazy fucker on the corner over there picking a fight with a pigeon for Le French Fry, they just don’t cut like they used to.
After all, a midnight siren is just a lullaby in London.
Either I’ve grown up and learned to stop looking for the postcard view of the world, or Brexit has made me come over all nostalgic-like for a Europe I never really thought about until I was no longer a part of it…
Or it’s, y’know, the wine…
Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. I understand it was me, Paris, this whole time it was me, not you.
How about you let me buy you Le Drink to make up for it?
Maybe we can take a moonlit stroll down the Seine and maybe look for that accordion player and maybe he’ll just be there because maybe he actually does exist?
Because some clichés you just gotta embrace, non?
You think we actually use those red telephone boxes?
M.G
Five Rules For Good Pizza
And for the record, pineapple is fine.
Pizza has no equal.
It’s a food haiku.
Simple, distilled. It's just bread,
sauce and cheese. Pizza.
Yeah, you just read a haiku explaining how pizza is like a haiku.
Meta /ˈmɛtə/: Seeing a thing from a higher perspective instead of from within the thing. Like being self-aware.
RULE ONE
Pizza should be as close to cartoon as possible.
Drooping and dripping. Tangy and stringy. Bright, obvious and unrefined.
You should have the very real fear that a Ninja Turtle might pop up out of a drain and snatch it from your hand.
RULE TWO
When people tell you that Italy make the best pizza, they’re lying to you.
I’ve been to Rome, Milan, Florence, Capri, Positano and Naples and I can say with some certainty, that Italy doesn’t make the best pizza.
Italians make the best pizza.
That’s the Italians in New York City, more specifically.
So, wherever you are in the world, if you want a good pizza and you don’t know where to go, look for the New York pizzeria.
I’m not saying it’s gonna be the best dining experience of your life...
But I am saying you’re more likely to get a decent slice there then at some place called ‘Pasta, Pizza and Friends’.
Which leads us to;
RULE THREE
The warmer the lighting, the bigger the menu and the more polite the staff… the worse that pizza is gonna be.
RULE FOUR
Hygiene is but a mild inconvenience in a proper pizza shop.
Don’t worry about it. That oven is coasting around 350˚C, it’s killing everything in there except the flavour.
Pizza has to be cooked in a greasy apron.
Your cook should be putting your pizza in the oven with one hand, texting his loan shark back with the other, and tonguing the nub of a dead cigarette out the corner of his mouth.
RULE FIVE
If you’re eating pizza with a knife and fork, you’re a criminal.
Not a ‘gentleman thief, sneaking into a museum at night and stealing a prized diamond,’ sort of criminal.
You’re more like somebody who has been caught rubbing a cat’s special place in a car park outside Sports Direct.
It comes in slices for a reason.
How many foods do you know come with their own edible shelf?
The Pasty, The Pie and the Pizza. That’s it.
So do yourself a favour and use it.
I don’t care if you’re sitting opposite the Queen. Just pick it up. Pinch it. Fold it. Slap that bastard right there onto your licker.
Eating pizza is the oral sex of food.
Loud, messy and best enjoyed without any regard for how you look whilst doing it.
And to you, so-called restaurants who think delivering pizza to my table garnished with a pizza cutter is an okay thing to do… it’s not.
Stop it.
You’re gonna make me do manual labour in order to eat the thing I just paid you to cook for me?
There’s a special circle in hell reserved for restaurateurs who think this is a good idea.
It’s right next to the place where all the white people go who never learn how to use chopsticks.
The Manifesto
Midnight Gonzo is born.
On this day, we hereby lay bare the intentions and motivations behind Midnight Gonzo.
This is a manifesto. A call to arms for the like-minds.
Midnight Gonzo is a part of you.
It’s the part that cackles at misfortune, because it’s gonna be a good story.
Who has strong, instinctual, and misinformed opinions.
It’s the hangover.
The layover.
The time killer and the oyster shucker.
It tries whatever that thing is on its plate.
It says yes when the body says no.
The hang nail.
The cigarette break.
The part that yearns to wear sunglasses indoors.
That finds itself saying what the fuck am I doing here?
That misuses the; semi-colon,
and winces at the 9-5 work week.
In the sprawling cityscape of the internet, you find Midnight Gonzo just off the motorway.
Halfway between the good and bad parts of town.
Equidistant from a Pret and a needle exchange.
It’s a dive bar with tables so sticky you hear a slrrrp as you peel your arm away.
A hot pink neon hangs above the empty bar, buzzing; More Tequila, Less Tranquila - and people steal photos of it for their socials because; huh, that’s pretty cool and it aligns with their intended aesthetic.
Locals pass by the place and wonder how the hell it makes any money.
They never see anybody in there.
It must be a Mafia front.
But the locals, they go to bed on a school night. They have careers and families and nightmares.
The punters of Midnight Gonzo are sun-rise regulars. They are dreamers of the day.
Midnight Gonzo is at the fringe of things and shall remain forever there.
Not quite a journal, never quite a blog. It’s a sharing of insights and anecdotes.
A place for all to retreat when the social feeds have run dry and the YouTube algorithm starts spitting Ben Shapiro videos at you because this one time you accidentally clicked on a Ben Shapiro video.
Up with nuisance, down with nuance.
Subtle things wither and die. This is broad stroke gonzo-something.
Picasso, not Rembrandt.
There is no other intention here than to make you exhale audibly through both nostrils as you’re struck by an amusing one-two word combo.
It exists only to help you fill the space between one thing and something else.
And it casts a simple mantra upon all who read here;
Be more gonzo.
M.G