Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Say it with syntax
I am rarely lonely and even more rarely bored - I have that cat thing of being able to just sit and stare, and be disconcerting to people - but now I am bored. Not just nothing-on-telly bored, some kind of tissue-deep boredom of the musculature. Pissed-off, petulant, nervous boredom. And I even have a feeling that I wrote something like that not that long ago. Insufferable cock.
Not bored in my left arm, though. Left arm go crazy. For something like three weeks now it's had this strange sort of twingey itchy ache, flaring up when brushing against things. The nearest comparison, although this is still a long way off, is the feeling you get the day after you've got sunburnt. Sort of numb yet over-sensitive yet something. Something something. This was just in the mid-bit, around the elbow, but just this evening while I've been sitting here, dealing with work nonsense, it's made a break for it. Upper and inner arm afire. Fingers threatening suicide of the nerves. No! I like my fingers. I do not want a marigold glove for a hand. I still love the fact that I can touch-type, just like the old-style secretaries, this mysterious economical scuttling and look! words appear.
Yes. They said that this kind of thing would normally be attributable to nerves in the neck acting up, in an old person. In a young scamp like myself it's not attributable to diddley. I'm a walking medical. . .whatever. I fucking hate hypochondria. I must find some way to burn off all the stubborn attention-seeking energy. They did take it surprisingly and gratifyingly seriously, though. Will certainly miss northern healthcare.
I'm not even going to start looking up something as vague as this. I'll find that I have everything in the book, like the narrator of Three Men In A Boat (To Say Nothing Of The Dog).
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
Such a sweet book, that. First read it when I was twelve or something and still fall off things laughing at the bit with the pineapple tin.
. . .I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.
We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry - but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.
There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it. . .
Oh, bollocks, more pins-and-needlesishness. No amount of endearing antique bloke-fumblery can lift my mood.
'X&Y' is in fact a very good album. I avoid all mention of Coldplay now, especially in reference to the fucking Frog and smirking fools suggesting that it's somehow the natural successor to Elvis and the Pistols and fucking Dylan and whateverthefuck. Yes, it just makes me sad. I'm too tied up with them - when I started at the First Magazine their first proper major-label EP was one of the first things I was sent, and then I met and interviewed them once or twice. He was the most conspicuously good and decent and likeable bloke; clearly intelligent, clearly sensitive, friendly and open. I know that when the first album went apeshit he almost quit, in horror of what was to come. I'm really glad he didn't, and I cannot imagine he has genetically mutated into Wanker Popstar since making the decision to hang onto the rising balloon. So it stings me to see him written up as that. It offends my sense of what human nature should be. I mean, this is someone I spent about half an hour with in total, but I was green and new in my business as he was in his, and even then I could tell an arsehole or arsehole-in-waiting and he wasn't either.
I hate to hear the band dismissed as overblown and bland because I used to listen to that EP non-stop and it's got so much darkness in it, the kind that doesn't just evaporate or get sanded off for commercial reasons. It resonates in everything they do, but maybe if you came to them fresh now you wouldn't be able to extrapolate it. I hate to hear them compared to any number of lesser bands who don't have the same fanatical craftsmanship and sensuality. And I hate to hear Chris Martin slagged because he was a nice man and why, why assume that nice people become bastards when they become successful? They don't, always. They adapt to survive the kind of pressures we can't conceive of. So I don't want to hear about what presumptive, prescribed-worldview-clutching idiots think of this person, who pleaded with the tour manager for a crappy t-shirt to give scruffy 21-year-old girl writer (I've still got it, although I lent it to the Brief once to sleep in, which was crazy of me). No. No idiots. Just the music.
I know there are still people who can write beautifully about music, who can enhance it, or who write so well that you'll read what they've written about the most obscure band you've never heard of. I want to read what they've got. I just want to shut out all the shite. I don't think I was necessarily part of something inherently nasty or futile. But there is so much slurry, a slew of banal gossip-mag dung and pretentious reactionary merde. Have it all. I'm going to try books again.
Bah.
More people emailing me asking for help starting out as my competition. Does everyone get this? Jeebus.
The clouds are pink. Pollution has its benefits.
I know the formatting in this post is fucked but you can take it up with my lawyers.
