Friday, May 20, 2005
Same old lightning, quiet thunder
What a comfort and a cushion is a blog. I'm starting to understand more fully why people go on Jerry and Trisha and Rikki and Maury and Montel and Jenny Jones (really, look at that one, I'm amazed it hasn't happened more). Since they spend their lives watching TV they can only truly make sense of their own once put into that same context. Plus, it has the added safety buffer of making your own life slightly unreal to you, and thus less important. Observe the eerie blankness of the faces which should be flushed with candour and vulnerability. It's not just idiocy. It's insulation from reality and harsh truth and culpability by way of the blessed shiny reflective studio floor and those cheap podgy waiting-room chairs that force you to sit up straight and push out your gut to the world.
Yes, I don't know what it is that makes telling things even in the most shrouded and roundabout ways a rapidly-addictive relief, but something in the human psyche seems to need it. At least this human psyche. It's probably just the solution to yet another modern problem that no one had in 1783. Although that wouldn't explain all those brothel memoirs.
Mmm.
The dog is also a tonic. He provides endless opportunity for distraction and amusement. Like some fur-covered inflatable that ensures, oblivious, that I'll never sink too low. I can watch him rub his back on the carpet (wriggle squirm pant). I can tell him he has a shiny head. I can pretend not to notice his stealthy occupation of my lap. I can ask him rhetorical questions such as "whaddizit?" over and over and be delighted by his dumb responses. I can wonder what it is about that part of my trouser leg that makes him want to lick it with such solemn diligence. It's the small things, it is, it is. The small bad things pile up until hopelessness ensues, the small good things accumulate until days are manageable and the suspicion is raised that you might be alright after all. This is partly why I changed my name - every time someone mispronounced it, with this vague edge of accusation in their embarrassment (Why do you have such a silly name? What is the matter with you?), a tiny cluster of happy-cells would die.
I don't understand why more people don't do it. Especially Fenella Fudge.
London! It got written about on the train back up north before I fell asleep with an armrest carving its name in my back. But now it sounds a bit contrived so I may have to just plagiarise bits of it.
London. All of human life is here, all of human technology, all of human emotion and all of human things you put in your mouth to make you feel good. The whole place, and maybe I ended up just as numb to this as anyone else after four years and probably will do again, does nothing if it does not vibrate. Maybe this is why some people can't bear to be there for more than a day, it only has a couple of frequencies - some of us are charged with it and run on it, and some of us just pick up nasty Norwegian death metal in our fillings and flee.
It makes me burble like a fool. It's not like I don't know what it's about, how cruelly indifferent and preoccupied with the inconsequential it is. It's still stubbornly charming. And it is mine mine mine. I was born almost in a black cab and then practically in the Thames within earshot of post-punk Parliament squabbling. When I went to primary school Up North a teacher of Romany extraction suggested to my mother that I might be a changeling and should be rubbed with a concoction of amaryllis and soot near an open fireplace.
Some of it deserves rhapsodising over. The stuff that's so oddly functional and everyday and beautiful and extraordinary and constitutes some kind of wondrous gentle mental and emotional jetstream that lets all the self-clogging bullshit and unhappiness trickle away. I had at least one whole day I might possibly remember all my life. But remembering isn't necessarily the point - it's not the mundane details or even the nice things said and done that ultimately adhere but the sensations and emotions and sense of things. You might never be able to relate it accurately to anyone who wasn't there, but you know that it's wormed its way further in than the usual brain-compatible experience, and that it will be stored in some warm mid-level of your skin instead of another typed file in your head.
Added to that particular kettle of bliss was the fascinating and only slightly disconcerting - and entirely new - sense of actively running under my own defences to get somewhere. The defences constitute quite a slick and sophisticated operation so it was fun, and sexy, like Britney threading bendily through the laser security deely in the 'Toxic' video. Only with less leather. I'm still not sure how reckless this was - from here it seems like the overriding of an over-zealous natural failsafe, a smoke alarm that shrieks at normal domestic emissions. "Toast! Toast is cooking! You're all gonna die! Wake the children. Oh God! Toast."
According to the slightly messy new Todd Solondz film, no matter what you do or where you go you'll always be the same. Is that comforting or terrifying? I don't think I've figured out my default setting yet - I always figured it was bound to be gloom and weakness and frustration, but given my continuing sense of alrightness in the face of quite a weight of aaaarrrrrrrrrgh lately I shall have to consider the possibility that I might be a normie after all. Ahhh, or perhaps this period of sanity and clarity is itself deeply neurotic. Perhaps the healthy and normal reaction to such upheaval would be prolonged hysteria, extreme introversion and gentle rocking for hours on end.
I should write a book. 'Embracing Neurosis'. Trees bending in the wind as central metaphor. If you don't succumb once in a while to bouts of irrationality, narcissism, compulsion and derangement then you're not human. And need the help of someone like me. See, I am now validating your own weaknesses, which I know you have because they made you buy this book in the hope that it would save you. It's OK to be that tragically reliant on outside influence to help you through the problems that are locked away inside. There. Better?
It's got to be coming. There's a new diet book which aims to teach something like 'The Seven Instincts of Naturally Thin People'. It's about developing intuition when it comes to food - knowing when you can eat a bit more without it making much difference, and so on. Sensible, and since it's almost impossible to impart something like that I'd think it would work. But I'm not sure you can ever teach yourself intuition. You can learn to listen to your inner voices, yes, but then you have to identify each one of them and occasionally translate them from some obscure dialect, build up some knowledge of each one's personal background and prejudices and blind spots, keep track of when they're on their period and don't quite mean what they're saying. Mine just started to sound like a performance of Carmina Burana and so I gave up and did my best to combine sound decision-making with an inclination to go with the flow Like a Twig on the Shoulders of a Mighty Stream.
Why is this not enough? Why must there always be Work? This is why we deserve the moments, hours or afternoons or evenings or nights of pleasure we can engineer for ourselves. That's where they put everything, all the sweetness and truth, and you wonder why you can't have it all the time, why you can't spread it out. But I don't suppose it matters. The rest of it is finally good enough for me. Although really, honestly, if one more drama student full of synthetic and petulant faux-altruism tries to trip me up in the street on behalf of a charity whose guilt-extracted donations are blown on lobbying the government to reclassify cannabis as if that would help future sufferers of psychosis one damn bit, there will be blood and there will be screaming.
My future is encroaching somewhat on my present which is going to make life difficult for me. But difficult is OK, I suppose. Meanwhile I've got to slash inexpertly at the garden with inappropriate sharp objects, and find a driving instructor, and make some money. Nuff distractions. Heaps of small things. Jars of them in many colours. Fuck, must go to bed.
Yes, I don't know what it is that makes telling things even in the most shrouded and roundabout ways a rapidly-addictive relief, but something in the human psyche seems to need it. At least this human psyche. It's probably just the solution to yet another modern problem that no one had in 1783. Although that wouldn't explain all those brothel memoirs.
Mmm.
The dog is also a tonic. He provides endless opportunity for distraction and amusement. Like some fur-covered inflatable that ensures, oblivious, that I'll never sink too low. I can watch him rub his back on the carpet (wriggle squirm pant). I can tell him he has a shiny head. I can pretend not to notice his stealthy occupation of my lap. I can ask him rhetorical questions such as "whaddizit?" over and over and be delighted by his dumb responses. I can wonder what it is about that part of my trouser leg that makes him want to lick it with such solemn diligence. It's the small things, it is, it is. The small bad things pile up until hopelessness ensues, the small good things accumulate until days are manageable and the suspicion is raised that you might be alright after all. This is partly why I changed my name - every time someone mispronounced it, with this vague edge of accusation in their embarrassment (Why do you have such a silly name? What is the matter with you?), a tiny cluster of happy-cells would die.
I don't understand why more people don't do it. Especially Fenella Fudge.
London! It got written about on the train back up north before I fell asleep with an armrest carving its name in my back. But now it sounds a bit contrived so I may have to just plagiarise bits of it.
London. All of human life is here, all of human technology, all of human emotion and all of human things you put in your mouth to make you feel good. The whole place, and maybe I ended up just as numb to this as anyone else after four years and probably will do again, does nothing if it does not vibrate. Maybe this is why some people can't bear to be there for more than a day, it only has a couple of frequencies - some of us are charged with it and run on it, and some of us just pick up nasty Norwegian death metal in our fillings and flee.
It makes me burble like a fool. It's not like I don't know what it's about, how cruelly indifferent and preoccupied with the inconsequential it is. It's still stubbornly charming. And it is mine mine mine. I was born almost in a black cab and then practically in the Thames within earshot of post-punk Parliament squabbling. When I went to primary school Up North a teacher of Romany extraction suggested to my mother that I might be a changeling and should be rubbed with a concoction of amaryllis and soot near an open fireplace.
Some of it deserves rhapsodising over. The stuff that's so oddly functional and everyday and beautiful and extraordinary and constitutes some kind of wondrous gentle mental and emotional jetstream that lets all the self-clogging bullshit and unhappiness trickle away. I had at least one whole day I might possibly remember all my life. But remembering isn't necessarily the point - it's not the mundane details or even the nice things said and done that ultimately adhere but the sensations and emotions and sense of things. You might never be able to relate it accurately to anyone who wasn't there, but you know that it's wormed its way further in than the usual brain-compatible experience, and that it will be stored in some warm mid-level of your skin instead of another typed file in your head.
Added to that particular kettle of bliss was the fascinating and only slightly disconcerting - and entirely new - sense of actively running under my own defences to get somewhere. The defences constitute quite a slick and sophisticated operation so it was fun, and sexy, like Britney threading bendily through the laser security deely in the 'Toxic' video. Only with less leather. I'm still not sure how reckless this was - from here it seems like the overriding of an over-zealous natural failsafe, a smoke alarm that shrieks at normal domestic emissions. "Toast! Toast is cooking! You're all gonna die! Wake the children. Oh God! Toast."
According to the slightly messy new Todd Solondz film, no matter what you do or where you go you'll always be the same. Is that comforting or terrifying? I don't think I've figured out my default setting yet - I always figured it was bound to be gloom and weakness and frustration, but given my continuing sense of alrightness in the face of quite a weight of aaaarrrrrrrrrgh lately I shall have to consider the possibility that I might be a normie after all. Ahhh, or perhaps this period of sanity and clarity is itself deeply neurotic. Perhaps the healthy and normal reaction to such upheaval would be prolonged hysteria, extreme introversion and gentle rocking for hours on end.
I should write a book. 'Embracing Neurosis'. Trees bending in the wind as central metaphor. If you don't succumb once in a while to bouts of irrationality, narcissism, compulsion and derangement then you're not human. And need the help of someone like me. See, I am now validating your own weaknesses, which I know you have because they made you buy this book in the hope that it would save you. It's OK to be that tragically reliant on outside influence to help you through the problems that are locked away inside. There. Better?
It's got to be coming. There's a new diet book which aims to teach something like 'The Seven Instincts of Naturally Thin People'. It's about developing intuition when it comes to food - knowing when you can eat a bit more without it making much difference, and so on. Sensible, and since it's almost impossible to impart something like that I'd think it would work. But I'm not sure you can ever teach yourself intuition. You can learn to listen to your inner voices, yes, but then you have to identify each one of them and occasionally translate them from some obscure dialect, build up some knowledge of each one's personal background and prejudices and blind spots, keep track of when they're on their period and don't quite mean what they're saying. Mine just started to sound like a performance of Carmina Burana and so I gave up and did my best to combine sound decision-making with an inclination to go with the flow Like a Twig on the Shoulders of a Mighty Stream.
Why is this not enough? Why must there always be Work? This is why we deserve the moments, hours or afternoons or evenings or nights of pleasure we can engineer for ourselves. That's where they put everything, all the sweetness and truth, and you wonder why you can't have it all the time, why you can't spread it out. But I don't suppose it matters. The rest of it is finally good enough for me. Although really, honestly, if one more drama student full of synthetic and petulant faux-altruism tries to trip me up in the street on behalf of a charity whose guilt-extracted donations are blown on lobbying the government to reclassify cannabis as if that would help future sufferers of psychosis one damn bit, there will be blood and there will be screaming.
My future is encroaching somewhat on my present which is going to make life difficult for me. But difficult is OK, I suppose. Meanwhile I've got to slash inexpertly at the garden with inappropriate sharp objects, and find a driving instructor, and make some money. Nuff distractions. Heaps of small things. Jars of them in many colours. Fuck, must go to bed.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Tired slash emotional
I am very tired. Perhaps less so than I was yesterday but still Very Sleepy.
Done in. But at least if nothing else I have line breaks again.
It's midnight and I want to talk to someone. Talking to people plugs the leaks. But I'm just going to go to bed (without the dog, who has a mild but noticeable case of Kennel Whiff - but is happy as a sandboy with a big bucket, or something, so no trauma there) and moisturise my poor lizard hands and read some more of the extremely disappointing book I'm reading. Apparently the end is astonishing and brilliant, though.
Where have all the good adjectives gone? Where? The NME ate them. Oh, and there's a new music magazine and they want me, apparently. But do I want them? more to the point. This is one abuse of punctuation I enjoy - question marks and exclamation marks mid-sentence. "She had red hair and a lovely smile, but that didn't matter! because! she had big tits."
That band !!! can fuck right off, though.
This, apparently, is your brain not on drugs.
One London pal has come off his anti-depressants claiming to feel no better or worse on them. I said that given that one of the side-effects of anti-depressants is depression itself, he probably got to some point of perfect chemical balance and the benefits and deficits cancelled each other out. I say bring back ECT and Clockwork Orangey conditioning with the Beethoven and the eyelids and the ultraviolence and the screaming and glaven.
What was the name of that guy who devoted his life to the semi-academic research of recreational drugs and expansion of the mind? Timothy Leary. Always confuse him with Timothy the other Timothy of Oklahoma bombing infamy. Anyway, I want to be that guy. The drugs one. Not the bombing one. What bliss! to be in permanently altered state and never have to be sad and bothered and lonely.
Still, work is icumen in and I have books to read and insect bites to scratch, and I am Not Afraid.
Done in. But at least if nothing else I have line breaks again.
It's midnight and I want to talk to someone. Talking to people plugs the leaks. But I'm just going to go to bed (without the dog, who has a mild but noticeable case of Kennel Whiff - but is happy as a sandboy with a big bucket, or something, so no trauma there) and moisturise my poor lizard hands and read some more of the extremely disappointing book I'm reading. Apparently the end is astonishing and brilliant, though.
Where have all the good adjectives gone? Where? The NME ate them. Oh, and there's a new music magazine and they want me, apparently. But do I want them? more to the point. This is one abuse of punctuation I enjoy - question marks and exclamation marks mid-sentence. "She had red hair and a lovely smile, but that didn't matter! because! she had big tits."
That band !!! can fuck right off, though.
This, apparently, is your brain not on drugs.
One London pal has come off his anti-depressants claiming to feel no better or worse on them. I said that given that one of the side-effects of anti-depressants is depression itself, he probably got to some point of perfect chemical balance and the benefits and deficits cancelled each other out. I say bring back ECT and Clockwork Orangey conditioning with the Beethoven and the eyelids and the ultraviolence and the screaming and glaven.
What was the name of that guy who devoted his life to the semi-academic research of recreational drugs and expansion of the mind? Timothy Leary. Always confuse him with Timothy the other Timothy of Oklahoma bombing infamy. Anyway, I want to be that guy. The drugs one. Not the bombing one. What bliss! to be in permanently altered state and never have to be sad and bothered and lonely.
Still, work is icumen in and I have books to read and insect bites to scratch, and I am Not Afraid.
Feels like a midget is hangin' from my necklace
I've tried 56 times to sort out the line breaks here because they are fucking essential to coherence and etc but I give up now.
Really.
I quit.
Here I go.
Is this thing working? Whose finger is that blocking the lens? Ah.
Really.
I quit.
Here I go.
Is this thing working? Whose finger is that blocking the lens? Ah.
