Saturday, May 28, 2005
Whistles of doom
The alley formed by the college wall and the houses is like some Satanic pipe for calling errant minions in for tea. Or maybe it's just there so I can hear just how windy the wind is and gauge it without having to put my hair outside. Yes. Thanks.
The small yappy-type dog has started up four doors down. I hate that little beast. It's in a state of constant hysteria. It sticks its idiot snout through the gate and just goes yap, yap, yap at nothing, about seven times a day. So self-righteous. Gratifying though to occasionally pass by with murderous red-eyed K and hear it go into overdrive.
Little Cesar-eating fucker. I remember one incident that contributed to my inexorable slide towards delinquent dog-ownership - a small yapping dog left outside all night in the yard of the house opposite. I was asleep on the sofa at about 1am and was woken up by a combination of the dog itself and people shouting for someone to shut it up. I shuffled out in dressing-gown and peered over the tall gate in the pitch dark, greeted by an unconvincing growl. It was raining. I got my torch. There was a kennel of sorts but it wouldn't go in. No water, no food. Shit everywhere. And this pathetic little black terrier-type just standing around, barking. It quietened down when I spoke to it. It looked old. I got it a Digestive biscuit. Then I rang the RSPCA who said that it was clearly neglect but they couldn't do anything. I put the phone down. I thought briefly about bringing the dog indoors. Then I went to bed. In the morning it was still there, shivering. I gave it another Digestive biscuit. A few days later I saw a full-page ad by the RSPCA, showing a dog left out in much the same scenario, with accompanying text saying that they're pushing to be allowed to intervene before abuse takes place and not just after it has done so. I tore it out and posted it through their letterbox.
Cunts.
It occurred to me at this time that I could do better.
I cannot get K to walk nicely on the lead whatever specially-engineered head collar he is sporting. It's like dog evangelism. "Heeyul. HEEEE-yul." But he will sit nicely outside the shop now when I fasten his lead to the paper box. I think his psychosis may be gradually loosening its hold. Depending on which scale of dog years you use, he is in his mid or late thirties. Should be settling down, then, sorting out his priorities, learning from his mistakes, getting to know himself better. Watching his weight. Being aghast at evidence of right-wing tendencies lurking around the edges of his personal philosophy. That kind of thing.
He's a handsome beast, though. If he were a dopey flavour-of-month Irish chain-smoking filmstar he would be Colin Farrell. And he'll look good when he starts to go grey, like George Clooney. (I'm still talking about the dog. The dog has black fur. He will age well.) Presently he (the dog, still the dog) is lying on his folded-up duvet bed on the landing. "Look at that!" I said, meaning that splendid example of wolf-evolution. He did not look, but gave his tail a cursory wag. I am happy now. Canine buoyancy.
This would be an appropriate moment to rave about beauty and how people's faces change and become more and more lovely and astonishing the more you study them, and how the face is perhaps the one thing that the imagination cannot improve on the reality of, but time is not on my side, alas. The Brief, fresh from Cos and tonsillitis (ah for there must always be Payment), is coming round in an hour for pizza and um, pish. I have London withdrawal. People there insist on telling me how lovely the weather is, how abundant and delightful the company, and how shiny the shiny things. I shall hunt each down and smite them.
I need a camera. And some energy. And too many other things to list although some of those may just be wants which are making so much fuss they could be mistaken for needs.
The small yappy-type dog has started up four doors down. I hate that little beast. It's in a state of constant hysteria. It sticks its idiot snout through the gate and just goes yap, yap, yap at nothing, about seven times a day. So self-righteous. Gratifying though to occasionally pass by with murderous red-eyed K and hear it go into overdrive.
K: Your mother sucks cocks in Hell.
Yappy Type: Yap. Yap. Yap. Ulp. Yap! YAP YAP YAP! YAP (breath) YAP (breath) YAP (breath) YAP.
Little Cesar-eating fucker. I remember one incident that contributed to my inexorable slide towards delinquent dog-ownership - a small yapping dog left outside all night in the yard of the house opposite. I was asleep on the sofa at about 1am and was woken up by a combination of the dog itself and people shouting for someone to shut it up. I shuffled out in dressing-gown and peered over the tall gate in the pitch dark, greeted by an unconvincing growl. It was raining. I got my torch. There was a kennel of sorts but it wouldn't go in. No water, no food. Shit everywhere. And this pathetic little black terrier-type just standing around, barking. It quietened down when I spoke to it. It looked old. I got it a Digestive biscuit. Then I rang the RSPCA who said that it was clearly neglect but they couldn't do anything. I put the phone down. I thought briefly about bringing the dog indoors. Then I went to bed. In the morning it was still there, shivering. I gave it another Digestive biscuit. A few days later I saw a full-page ad by the RSPCA, showing a dog left out in much the same scenario, with accompanying text saying that they're pushing to be allowed to intervene before abuse takes place and not just after it has done so. I tore it out and posted it through their letterbox.
Cunts.
It occurred to me at this time that I could do better.
I cannot get K to walk nicely on the lead whatever specially-engineered head collar he is sporting. It's like dog evangelism. "Heeyul. HEEEE-yul." But he will sit nicely outside the shop now when I fasten his lead to the paper box. I think his psychosis may be gradually loosening its hold. Depending on which scale of dog years you use, he is in his mid or late thirties. Should be settling down, then, sorting out his priorities, learning from his mistakes, getting to know himself better. Watching his weight. Being aghast at evidence of right-wing tendencies lurking around the edges of his personal philosophy. That kind of thing.
He's a handsome beast, though. If he were a dopey flavour-of-month Irish chain-smoking filmstar he would be Colin Farrell. And he'll look good when he starts to go grey, like George Clooney. (I'm still talking about the dog. The dog has black fur. He will age well.) Presently he (the dog, still the dog) is lying on his folded-up duvet bed on the landing. "Look at that!" I said, meaning that splendid example of wolf-evolution. He did not look, but gave his tail a cursory wag. I am happy now. Canine buoyancy.
This would be an appropriate moment to rave about beauty and how people's faces change and become more and more lovely and astonishing the more you study them, and how the face is perhaps the one thing that the imagination cannot improve on the reality of, but time is not on my side, alas. The Brief, fresh from Cos and tonsillitis (ah for there must always be Payment), is coming round in an hour for pizza and um, pish. I have London withdrawal. People there insist on telling me how lovely the weather is, how abundant and delightful the company, and how shiny the shiny things. I shall hunt each down and smite them.
I need a camera. And some energy. And too many other things to list although some of those may just be wants which are making so much fuss they could be mistaken for needs.
You've got red on you
It's been irking me that I didn't quote the full quote from the end of this. It was
There. I know there's another whole book about the story behind it, and who the fox was and who the rose was and his wife and his mistress. And they let children read this. Gasp.
Sigh.
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
There. I know there's another whole book about the story behind it, and who the fox was and who the rose was and his wife and his mistress. And they let children read this. Gasp.
And the roses were very much embarrassed.I just ate a Chocolate Orange bar. It was bliss. Listening to Matthew Jay, wishing I could remember the name of this effects pedal which makes me go all shivery and remember things. He's dead, now, Matthew Jay. He fell out of a window.
Sigh.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Daily petal count
Warm and not sunny and humid today, like breathing into your pillow, and I've just been sitting in the garden like a tired old person. Watching the dog conduct studious investigation of the garden. I love his professorial seriousness just as much as I love his manic leaping idiocy.
Pleased to see paeony coming out again. Presently the flower is a perfect green ping-pong-sized ball with just a sliver of red showing through. I know from last year that it'll unfurl as a positively pornographic thing in the kind of red you can hardly stand to look at, it's so red. Very Georgia O'Keeffe. Last year I would look at it every day and note with great pleasure its slow progress, and I didn't know what it was going to look like either so I was quite excited, as it looked promising. Then one morning I looked out of the window, and it was not there. Just a headless green stalk. I was bemused. It was too big for a bird to have dispatched it, even if a bird had any reason to. Then I was out of ideas.
I took K for a walk, and in the cobbled alley behind the main road's houses I found some of the local kids I knew, two sisters and their mate the only black boy for some miles. All eight to ten and intensely annoying and ubiquitous, always outside and pestering me when I was attempting gardening. Great to see that children still play outside, of course, but I did wonder if this was more apathy on the part of their parents than any desire to help their development. So there they were surrounded by little pots and green things and bits. The eldest sister greeted me in her disquieting unsmiling way. I greeted her with a great lack of enthusiasm.
"Would you like to buy a flower?"
There was the paeony, all sprawled out, sitting in a beaker of water on the ground. I was furious that they got to see it finally open, and I didn't. "That's mine! You nicked that from my garden!" I said, refraining from adding "you grubby little bastards". They proceeded to lie through their baby teeth ("no, it's from his gran's garden", accompanied by wide-eyed Betty Boop stare) and then accuse each other. I was appalled in the way that people's grandmothers are appalled by Kids Today. I got it back (without having to pay for it, or do anything violent) and kept it in my kitchen until it wilted. This year I should be able to enjoy what I missed last time.
The Pagan has just been round. She can talk, that woman. I don't agree with her on everything and she can be fantastically air-headed but she is very likeable, and very admirable. She's maybe a year or two older than me, with two children and a cat and a dog and before she managed to get the house she was more or less homeless. She has a certain indomitable spirit. She was telling me how her dispute with the college is ongoing - they've cut down one of the trees that was blocking out all her light, but she's still trying to get them to get rid of one whose roots are threatening her garden wall. It doesn't look too steady, I have to say. There's this strip of land between her garden and the college grounds which may belong to either, no one seems sure. So two blokes from the college came round to do some measuring and messing about, and she asked one of them to go away because she'd felt he'd been "very rude" the last time, and she'd asked the college not to send him again. I would have just swallowed that, being forced to speak to someone I didn't like, and sat there feeling sick on it and on my inability to stand up for myself.
She tackles things and she isn't an idiot about it, she is cheerful and what they used to call 'plucky'. She gots Da Pluck.
A friend of hers has just come back from Egypt raving about the generous spirit of the people. Apparently they have a phrase they often repeat which I couldn't hope to spell here but it means: all movement is a blessing. I'd go along with that, I said. Well, it's true, because you have to use your life up, and the less afraid you are of doing it the more you have the chance to experience, and all of it is good as long as something is happening and not just nothing.
One of the ways that being grown-up slowly reveals itself to be at least a little different from being young and emotionally gangly and unco-ordinated, is that you start to see that there is no finish, no goal. I want to publish some books and I think I have a decent enough shot at that once I actually write the fuckers, but a few months ago I realised that after the initial jubilation at getting into print it will just become Normal, and I will start to look for the next reason to throw my arms in the air in glee. Achievements will fade rapidly and will need replacing with new ones. I tried to come to terms with the idea that just getting an OK from a publisher, or just seeing something of mine on a shelf, if it happens, will not put me onto some new level of fulfilment on its own. It'll just be another thing, after a while. And I'm not complaining, not by any stretch, and I know how to wring the good stuff out of everything because I always tried to do that to offset the bad stuff, and so I will appreciate it maybe more than the next person would. But the fact has to be assimilated - there is no Ultimate Thing. I mean, there is progression, just not a point at which everything will even out into Great. And it will all end with a comma. Or maybe an ellipsis. I like those. I think reading The Little Prince (mind which translation, though, there's a crappy one floating around HMV at the moment with all the poetry surgically sucked out of it) at the age of about ten engendered that. . .
It's sort of sad to think that; it would be simpler to imagine that one thing would happen that would make your life pop up like perfectly done toast, and this is the idea that has been sold particularly to women (find a good husband, have a baby, have another, have a nice house that is a credit to you). But it's great to have freedom from that, and just think of everything on its own terms instead of how long it's going to last or how good it is for you or how it fits into some larger pattern that doesn't actually exist.
Blah, blah de blah. I'm alright. I could make myself sick whittling everything into a nice palatable glurgey shape the way I do, but if I'm honest with myself I don't regret any of it. I don't think that's the point. People waste so much of life in the dismissing of things, like kicking a pot of emulsion back across the nice painting they spent months or years on. What use is that? I like myself too much now to want to punish myself with that sort of crap.
Fuck, though. I have to allow myself at least one "fuck, though".
One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed dot dot dot
Apparently Marilyn Monroe gave Joe DiMaggio a watch engraved with that bit that the fox says about what is essential being seen only by the heart, and asked her what the fuck did that mean. The obtuse ball-thwacking dullard. He was the most distraught when she died, though, and visited her grave for years afterwards. I wonder if he finally got it. There's another Marilyn thing, someone (and it wasn't that cunt Sinatra) saying "Marilyn hangs like a bat in the heads of men who have known her". Seems as good a legacy as any.
Pleased to see paeony coming out again. Presently the flower is a perfect green ping-pong-sized ball with just a sliver of red showing through. I know from last year that it'll unfurl as a positively pornographic thing in the kind of red you can hardly stand to look at, it's so red. Very Georgia O'Keeffe. Last year I would look at it every day and note with great pleasure its slow progress, and I didn't know what it was going to look like either so I was quite excited, as it looked promising. Then one morning I looked out of the window, and it was not there. Just a headless green stalk. I was bemused. It was too big for a bird to have dispatched it, even if a bird had any reason to. Then I was out of ideas.
I took K for a walk, and in the cobbled alley behind the main road's houses I found some of the local kids I knew, two sisters and their mate the only black boy for some miles. All eight to ten and intensely annoying and ubiquitous, always outside and pestering me when I was attempting gardening. Great to see that children still play outside, of course, but I did wonder if this was more apathy on the part of their parents than any desire to help their development. So there they were surrounded by little pots and green things and bits. The eldest sister greeted me in her disquieting unsmiling way. I greeted her with a great lack of enthusiasm.
"Would you like to buy a flower?"
There was the paeony, all sprawled out, sitting in a beaker of water on the ground. I was furious that they got to see it finally open, and I didn't. "That's mine! You nicked that from my garden!" I said, refraining from adding "you grubby little bastards". They proceeded to lie through their baby teeth ("no, it's from his gran's garden", accompanied by wide-eyed Betty Boop stare) and then accuse each other. I was appalled in the way that people's grandmothers are appalled by Kids Today. I got it back (without having to pay for it, or do anything violent) and kept it in my kitchen until it wilted. This year I should be able to enjoy what I missed last time.
The Pagan has just been round. She can talk, that woman. I don't agree with her on everything and she can be fantastically air-headed but she is very likeable, and very admirable. She's maybe a year or two older than me, with two children and a cat and a dog and before she managed to get the house she was more or less homeless. She has a certain indomitable spirit. She was telling me how her dispute with the college is ongoing - they've cut down one of the trees that was blocking out all her light, but she's still trying to get them to get rid of one whose roots are threatening her garden wall. It doesn't look too steady, I have to say. There's this strip of land between her garden and the college grounds which may belong to either, no one seems sure. So two blokes from the college came round to do some measuring and messing about, and she asked one of them to go away because she'd felt he'd been "very rude" the last time, and she'd asked the college not to send him again. I would have just swallowed that, being forced to speak to someone I didn't like, and sat there feeling sick on it and on my inability to stand up for myself.
She tackles things and she isn't an idiot about it, she is cheerful and what they used to call 'plucky'. She gots Da Pluck.
A friend of hers has just come back from Egypt raving about the generous spirit of the people. Apparently they have a phrase they often repeat which I couldn't hope to spell here but it means: all movement is a blessing. I'd go along with that, I said. Well, it's true, because you have to use your life up, and the less afraid you are of doing it the more you have the chance to experience, and all of it is good as long as something is happening and not just nothing.
One of the ways that being grown-up slowly reveals itself to be at least a little different from being young and emotionally gangly and unco-ordinated, is that you start to see that there is no finish, no goal. I want to publish some books and I think I have a decent enough shot at that once I actually write the fuckers, but a few months ago I realised that after the initial jubilation at getting into print it will just become Normal, and I will start to look for the next reason to throw my arms in the air in glee. Achievements will fade rapidly and will need replacing with new ones. I tried to come to terms with the idea that just getting an OK from a publisher, or just seeing something of mine on a shelf, if it happens, will not put me onto some new level of fulfilment on its own. It'll just be another thing, after a while. And I'm not complaining, not by any stretch, and I know how to wring the good stuff out of everything because I always tried to do that to offset the bad stuff, and so I will appreciate it maybe more than the next person would. But the fact has to be assimilated - there is no Ultimate Thing. I mean, there is progression, just not a point at which everything will even out into Great. And it will all end with a comma. Or maybe an ellipsis. I like those. I think reading The Little Prince (mind which translation, though, there's a crappy one floating around HMV at the moment with all the poetry surgically sucked out of it) at the age of about ten engendered that. . .
It's sort of sad to think that; it would be simpler to imagine that one thing would happen that would make your life pop up like perfectly done toast, and this is the idea that has been sold particularly to women (find a good husband, have a baby, have another, have a nice house that is a credit to you). But it's great to have freedom from that, and just think of everything on its own terms instead of how long it's going to last or how good it is for you or how it fits into some larger pattern that doesn't actually exist.
Blah, blah de blah. I'm alright. I could make myself sick whittling everything into a nice palatable glurgey shape the way I do, but if I'm honest with myself I don't regret any of it. I don't think that's the point. People waste so much of life in the dismissing of things, like kicking a pot of emulsion back across the nice painting they spent months or years on. What use is that? I like myself too much now to want to punish myself with that sort of crap.
Fuck, though. I have to allow myself at least one "fuck, though".
One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed dot dot dot
Apparently Marilyn Monroe gave Joe DiMaggio a watch engraved with that bit that the fox says about what is essential being seen only by the heart, and asked her what the fuck did that mean. The obtuse ball-thwacking dullard. He was the most distraught when she died, though, and visited her grave for years afterwards. I wonder if he finally got it. There's another Marilyn thing, someone (and it wasn't that cunt Sinatra) saying "Marilyn hangs like a bat in the heads of men who have known her". Seems as good a legacy as any.
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Nice v not-nice
Bugger Star Wars (if you feel even the slightest twinge of disappointment that there is no link there, kindly fuck off far away), the real epic Battle Between Good And Evil happens in the mundane streets of everyday life. Let's tot up today's score, shall we?
1) Something amusing on someone's blog (+ 1)
2) The rampant onslaught of corrosive idiocy (-8)
3) Kaine behaving in gentlemanly fashion towards the Pagan's dog (+ 10)
4) Kaine trying to hang himself with his lead at sight of another dog (-4)
5) More drivelling fuckwittery compounded by my own inability to rise above it (-7)
6) Rather sad report about the exclusion of pupils but also uplifting and plus job well done (+1)
7) Episode of Black Books (+3)
8) Olives and feta cheese (+3)
9) Sun! (+8)
10) But it's wasted on me with my inability to wear summery clothes and go outside and frolic and oh I would like to go and sit outside a pub but there is no one here but meeee-o (-5)
Total for the day: +2. A narrow victory for Good. Oh, and I forgot entirely the kind action of a passing woman who saw me standing guilt-stricken over a heap of poop and offered me a spare Asda bag. And the dumb actions of the footie-wankers who took it upon themselves to holler in the street and set off fireworks until 2am. And my lovely friend who got back in touch. And my ongoing teeth-grinding anxiety about one thing and another. But tomorrow is another day. Bimmel-de-dee, said Strapless.
OK, alright, a Star Wars link. Bang to rights. And wrung out of the reluctant Grauniad via Google and not its own entirely useless search facility, which didn't even recognise 'Motley Crue' earlier. BLITHERING CATALOGUE OF INCOMPETENCE.
Damn, that's taken me down to -3. Blast.
1) Something amusing on someone's blog (+ 1)
2) The rampant onslaught of corrosive idiocy (-8)
3) Kaine behaving in gentlemanly fashion towards the Pagan's dog (+ 10)
4) Kaine trying to hang himself with his lead at sight of another dog (-4)
5) More drivelling fuckwittery compounded by my own inability to rise above it (-7)
6) Rather sad report about the exclusion of pupils but also uplifting and plus job well done (+1)
7) Episode of Black Books (+3)
8) Olives and feta cheese (+3)
9) Sun! (+8)
10) But it's wasted on me with my inability to wear summery clothes and go outside and frolic and oh I would like to go and sit outside a pub but there is no one here but meeee-o (-5)
Total for the day: +2. A narrow victory for Good. Oh, and I forgot entirely the kind action of a passing woman who saw me standing guilt-stricken over a heap of poop and offered me a spare Asda bag. And the dumb actions of the footie-wankers who took it upon themselves to holler in the street and set off fireworks until 2am. And my lovely friend who got back in touch. And my ongoing teeth-grinding anxiety about one thing and another. But tomorrow is another day. Bimmel-de-dee, said Strapless.
OK, alright, a Star Wars link. Bang to rights. And wrung out of the reluctant Grauniad via Google and not its own entirely useless search facility, which didn't even recognise 'Motley Crue' earlier. BLITHERING CATALOGUE OF INCOMPETENCE.
Damn, that's taken me down to -3. Blast.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Underexposed and dead wrong
I refuse to believe this works. It just looks too precarious. And where's the Joy, a?
I know why I feel inclined to move house. It's because that's usually the only time I get to have a proper clear-out. It's like if you can see a move coming upon you in the next couple of months you can just let it all slide in the meantime. But I must find some motivation from somewhere. I find comfort in clutter but this is no longer picturesque, contained happy-shambles. It is just Mess.
I very much need to sort this room out, the study/what estate agents would call without a blink the 'third bedroom'. Fucking estate agents. Not looking forward to tangling with them again. Although this time I will wear a nice jacket and look Serious, like someone who is only renting temporarily, someone with Options. I'm fortunate in having my mother's phone voice, which kicks up a plummy gear at every hurdle presented by the other end, but with estate agents I think it's important to get in their face and scowl like a person who knows what they want.
There was one agency I went to in Camden, who let and managed two of the flats I lived in a year apart (one of which I got by an amazing instance of serendipity, and then proceeded to suffer as it gave me no end of trouble culminating in bastard landlords dropping frozen spears of urine on me from their own private jet. Anyway). I used to sit there waiting for Denis, a delicious Parisian person who seemed genuinely keen to help and often bitched about how rotten estate agents were. But it was probably just his schtick. Hell, he was probably from Croydon, the fucker. So I'd wait for him to come back from a showing and roll his enormous brown eyes at me in conspiratorial manner and would watch one of the two bosses talking on the phone. Knowing the sociopathic obliviousness of such people to the reactions of others, I felt fairly safe staring at him, but I would have been compelled to stare even if I thought he would come over and poke me in the chest. His thin face was folded, always, in this expression of intense hatred and rage. The eyebrows scything in towards the top of the nose. The eyes glaring and slicing the air. The hollow cheeks conspiring with the lips in a moving sneer. And out of this face would come the most modulated, pleasant, almost unctuous tones. The voice of a smiling person. I was transfixed by this giant sustained gulf between facial and vocal expression, and was always very pleased that I never had to speak to him. I think he forced his features into some facsimile of affability if he actually had to conduct a conversation face-to-face, but he must have had to go home and confess his sins to THE DEVIL afterwards.
Yes. Bastards. I'm glad this house is not mine because I don't think I could bear them coming round and prodding at it. But then this house needs quite a few grand spending on it to make it habitable by anyone who doesn't harbour a deep and barely-rational affection for it. The bathroom suite is in three different shades of avocado.
It just occurred to me today while watching the news that I haven't shown any indication thus far that I am at all aware of world events, or any events outside my own pretty liddle cranium. The fact is that I often actively avoid the news. It's part of the whole 'small bads v. small goods' theory that I've come to adopt. I stopped reading the music press some time before I stopped writing for it regularly, and I still feel the benefits of that; then I stopped buying newspapers, almost without realising it. Recently I've hardly been watching the TV news. And I'm here to tell y'all, it's bliss. Now when I do watch it, I'm dismayed at how our TV news is becoming more tabloidy, Americanised, sensationalist. Or perhaps I just didn't pick up on it before. I can hardly bear the bad journalism, let alone the bad politics, bad things, bad badness. I keep up now with a brief check of a few sites, sporadically. When I am old they will say "don't let her watch the news, it upsets her . . . system".
In the course of my news-eschew I have been most careful to blot out the Michael Jackson trial. It wouldn't surprise me at all to hear that he had behaved in the kind of inappropriate and damaging manner that necessitates conviction, but as in plenty of other child abuse cases I think this behaviour would have been the result of a lack of conception of proper boundaries, an inability to understand the implications of selfish actions. If there was ever anyone who never had the chance to establish those, it's him. It's too easy to get out the pitchforks and start tossing 'evil' around. What I think though is that he didn't do anything beyond sleeping with boys, in the sense of sleep.
The kid's mother seems to have that particular manipulative, extortion-happy disorder of the personality which makes cancer a positive boon. If that is the case it's hard to tell whose mind is the more undone. She seems to show genuine maliciousness, whereas he has only ever seemed to me to be lost. But having stayed away from most of the leering, gluttonous coverage I'm not really in a position to back up any such incendiary comments with, er, what may or may not be the facts of the case as presented by lawyers with their own agendas and then by journalists with theirs. Sheesh, by the time the truth has been filtered through all of those oaky barrels you'll be lucky to get something you could float an ice cube in.
The thought of it all makes me terribly sad. Anyone has threads that run back through their lives as long as they can remember, things about themselves or the world that they monitor like aspects of pop culture or their own psychology, and the one thing that I have in that respect is the astonishing ugliness that Michael Jackson has always brought out in people. More than any other famous person I can think of. It's an accepted pastime now of course to shoot down 'slebs but this was always different. Rapacious and unabated. It was like; if you could go into a room and kick a person to death, and then walk out and suffer no guilt or consequence - you would want to do it, just to see how it felt. It's that streak in people that seems to come rampaging to the fore at the mention of his name. This wellspring of absolute nastiness - and righteous nastiness, too, the kind that thinks it is just and is impervious to any counter-argument. It's still gushing away now, and there is no sympathy for this person who has lived his life like a bag of broken bits. And it makes me sad, more for human nature itself than for him.
Unless he's guilty of course, in which case I will immediately change tack and join the world in gleeful teeth-grinding discreet-thigh-stroking condemnation of the multi-nosed, powdery, shoulder-padded, ageing shrieking WEIRDO FREAK. Sick. It's so sick.
In Other News, the Millennium D'oh!me is going to be rebranded - Joy! - as the O2 Arena, and play host to enormogigs by supadupastars despite having notoriously shitty acoustics. This is as well as its hopeful role as a venue for the Olympics. Please God, no. Give it to Paris, for chrissakes. People are angry about this.
Oh, and apparently the man who did the voice for Tony the Tiger has died. The man who did the voice of Shere Khan killed himself in 1972 and left this note:
Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool - good luck.
You can imagine it in that voice, can't you?
The people behind Crazy Frog, Sweety, Nessie and all other Chipmunk-throwback ringtones should probably invest in cyanide capsules now. They're at the gates. They're closing in. Alles is loss. Schnell. The cunts are going to keep 'Speed of Sound' off number one and while I do not care and have to admit it sounds a bit 'With or Without You' in the flabby midsection, it does not diminish their cuntery one iota. There should be some kind of online hostel for good songs that are wasted on the public.
I know why I feel inclined to move house. It's because that's usually the only time I get to have a proper clear-out. It's like if you can see a move coming upon you in the next couple of months you can just let it all slide in the meantime. But I must find some motivation from somewhere. I find comfort in clutter but this is no longer picturesque, contained happy-shambles. It is just Mess.
I very much need to sort this room out, the study/what estate agents would call without a blink the 'third bedroom'. Fucking estate agents. Not looking forward to tangling with them again. Although this time I will wear a nice jacket and look Serious, like someone who is only renting temporarily, someone with Options. I'm fortunate in having my mother's phone voice, which kicks up a plummy gear at every hurdle presented by the other end, but with estate agents I think it's important to get in their face and scowl like a person who knows what they want.
There was one agency I went to in Camden, who let and managed two of the flats I lived in a year apart (one of which I got by an amazing instance of serendipity, and then proceeded to suffer as it gave me no end of trouble culminating in bastard landlords dropping frozen spears of urine on me from their own private jet. Anyway). I used to sit there waiting for Denis, a delicious Parisian person who seemed genuinely keen to help and often bitched about how rotten estate agents were. But it was probably just his schtick. Hell, he was probably from Croydon, the fucker. So I'd wait for him to come back from a showing and roll his enormous brown eyes at me in conspiratorial manner and would watch one of the two bosses talking on the phone. Knowing the sociopathic obliviousness of such people to the reactions of others, I felt fairly safe staring at him, but I would have been compelled to stare even if I thought he would come over and poke me in the chest. His thin face was folded, always, in this expression of intense hatred and rage. The eyebrows scything in towards the top of the nose. The eyes glaring and slicing the air. The hollow cheeks conspiring with the lips in a moving sneer. And out of this face would come the most modulated, pleasant, almost unctuous tones. The voice of a smiling person. I was transfixed by this giant sustained gulf between facial and vocal expression, and was always very pleased that I never had to speak to him. I think he forced his features into some facsimile of affability if he actually had to conduct a conversation face-to-face, but he must have had to go home and confess his sins to THE DEVIL afterwards.
Yes. Bastards. I'm glad this house is not mine because I don't think I could bear them coming round and prodding at it. But then this house needs quite a few grand spending on it to make it habitable by anyone who doesn't harbour a deep and barely-rational affection for it. The bathroom suite is in three different shades of avocado.
It just occurred to me today while watching the news that I haven't shown any indication thus far that I am at all aware of world events, or any events outside my own pretty liddle cranium. The fact is that I often actively avoid the news. It's part of the whole 'small bads v. small goods' theory that I've come to adopt. I stopped reading the music press some time before I stopped writing for it regularly, and I still feel the benefits of that; then I stopped buying newspapers, almost without realising it. Recently I've hardly been watching the TV news. And I'm here to tell y'all, it's bliss. Now when I do watch it, I'm dismayed at how our TV news is becoming more tabloidy, Americanised, sensationalist. Or perhaps I just didn't pick up on it before. I can hardly bear the bad journalism, let alone the bad politics, bad things, bad badness. I keep up now with a brief check of a few sites, sporadically. When I am old they will say "don't let her watch the news, it upsets her . . . system".
In the course of my news-eschew I have been most careful to blot out the Michael Jackson trial. It wouldn't surprise me at all to hear that he had behaved in the kind of inappropriate and damaging manner that necessitates conviction, but as in plenty of other child abuse cases I think this behaviour would have been the result of a lack of conception of proper boundaries, an inability to understand the implications of selfish actions. If there was ever anyone who never had the chance to establish those, it's him. It's too easy to get out the pitchforks and start tossing 'evil' around. What I think though is that he didn't do anything beyond sleeping with boys, in the sense of sleep.
The kid's mother seems to have that particular manipulative, extortion-happy disorder of the personality which makes cancer a positive boon. If that is the case it's hard to tell whose mind is the more undone. She seems to show genuine maliciousness, whereas he has only ever seemed to me to be lost. But having stayed away from most of the leering, gluttonous coverage I'm not really in a position to back up any such incendiary comments with, er, what may or may not be the facts of the case as presented by lawyers with their own agendas and then by journalists with theirs. Sheesh, by the time the truth has been filtered through all of those oaky barrels you'll be lucky to get something you could float an ice cube in.
The thought of it all makes me terribly sad. Anyone has threads that run back through their lives as long as they can remember, things about themselves or the world that they monitor like aspects of pop culture or their own psychology, and the one thing that I have in that respect is the astonishing ugliness that Michael Jackson has always brought out in people. More than any other famous person I can think of. It's an accepted pastime now of course to shoot down 'slebs but this was always different. Rapacious and unabated. It was like; if you could go into a room and kick a person to death, and then walk out and suffer no guilt or consequence - you would want to do it, just to see how it felt. It's that streak in people that seems to come rampaging to the fore at the mention of his name. This wellspring of absolute nastiness - and righteous nastiness, too, the kind that thinks it is just and is impervious to any counter-argument. It's still gushing away now, and there is no sympathy for this person who has lived his life like a bag of broken bits. And it makes me sad, more for human nature itself than for him.
Unless he's guilty of course, in which case I will immediately change tack and join the world in gleeful teeth-grinding discreet-thigh-stroking condemnation of the multi-nosed, powdery, shoulder-padded, ageing shrieking WEIRDO FREAK. Sick. It's so sick.
In Other News, the Millennium D'oh!me is going to be rebranded - Joy! - as the O2 Arena, and play host to enormogigs by supadupastars despite having notoriously shitty acoustics. This is as well as its hopeful role as a venue for the Olympics. Please God, no. Give it to Paris, for chrissakes. People are angry about this.
Oh, and apparently the man who did the voice for Tony the Tiger has died. The man who did the voice of Shere Khan killed himself in 1972 and left this note:
Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool - good luck.
You can imagine it in that voice, can't you?
The people behind Crazy Frog, Sweety, Nessie and all other Chipmunk-throwback ringtones should probably invest in cyanide capsules now. They're at the gates. They're closing in. Alles is loss. Schnell. The cunts are going to keep 'Speed of Sound' off number one and while I do not care and have to admit it sounds a bit 'With or Without You' in the flabby midsection, it does not diminish their cuntery one iota. There should be some kind of online hostel for good songs that are wasted on the public.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Sad slash lonely
Sniffle.
Pinching all the pollen
It must be good for the creativity, abstinence. It must. Conservation of energy. Look at me, I'm doing drawings in lieu of leg-jiggling. It just ain't right.
This descending weight of, I don't know, anticipation. I was looking at my study wall and thinking I should take down the cards and clippings that are now irritating me, and then I could see myself going on from that to take pictures down, and do all those little things you must do when you move house that make you want to curl up into a ball. Taking down things from walls is the thing I leave until last - it's practical, I suppose, but also I have to do it on the morning of a move because waking up to bare walls is some sort of death. I am very sensitive to these things, this process of peeling yourself off the surfaces of a house. And this house - as everyone who has visited me here knows in some tedious detail, I've been visiting this house since I was very little. When there was a cupboard under the stairs and Nick had hung a grotesque inflated spiky pufferfish in there. It had a beak, and was perfectly spherical. The place was scruffy and atmospheric and full of books and I thought it was the essence of bohemia before I knew what bohemia was.
It is creepy having an urge to take down pictures. It indicates separation starting. It's uncomfortable, feels like betrayal; but then if you waited until you knew you were ready to do everything, you would never do anything. Ever ever. Readiness might be like justice or happiness or perfection or something - it's not achievable, it's just a concept that you have as some sort of horizon to focus on.
Houses soak things up. They are porous. This one made me think, when I moved into it on my own at the end of the summer before last, of that bit in The Bell Jar where Esther has riotous food poisoning, and wakes up to find the walls of her hotel room hovering around her as if considerately withholding their weight. (I was also reminded of that particular set text recently when thinking of how I'd like to live in the country and the city both at once, please. 'The perfect set-up of a true neurotic', Buddy claims this desire indicates. Tee hee.) Yes. It is a considerate house of expansive spirit. My grief at leaving it is only going to be compounded by the knowledge that it's going to be sold within months. But much as you think it will be great to keep your boltholes in terms of places and people and states of mind, it's probably better to let them get filled in. Nostalgia is nostalgia for, like, a reason.
I am some kind of hormone snowstorm. This surfeit of sentimentality sloshing about. Getting all over this blog, as well. Ugh. Got sent a Blue Cross catalogue and on one page there's a ladybird-roosting box, a sparrow-nesting box (they're declining, no one really knows why, and they like to nest in little communities so don't go for your usual one-room bird boxes) and a bumblebee box. Bumblebees are also declining, in part due to fuckwits not being able to tell them from wasps and boshing them out of existence with rolled up right-wing dailies. Or being able to tell them from wasps well enough but killing them anyway out of fucking lumbering illogical post-9/11 kneejerk self-righteous idiotic fear. And thus presenting yet another sparkling example of how everything good and pure and endearingly fuzzy and aerodynamically-enigmatic is getting sucked into a black hole of duhhhhh.
I would like very much to soothe my own mind and provide a cosy haven for beleaguered bees, but it seems it's too late for this year as the queen needs to nest in early spring. So this garden, with its bracken and Grinchian tree and old ceramic sinks used as planters and dandelions and um, dogshit will never see one, at least not while I'm here.
But I will have a garden elsewhere, and I don't know what it'll be like, and that is exciting. So shut up, blubbering fool.
I shall get a decent camera before I leave here, so I can take all of it with me.
Bees. Ahhhh.
This descending weight of, I don't know, anticipation. I was looking at my study wall and thinking I should take down the cards and clippings that are now irritating me, and then I could see myself going on from that to take pictures down, and do all those little things you must do when you move house that make you want to curl up into a ball. Taking down things from walls is the thing I leave until last - it's practical, I suppose, but also I have to do it on the morning of a move because waking up to bare walls is some sort of death. I am very sensitive to these things, this process of peeling yourself off the surfaces of a house. And this house - as everyone who has visited me here knows in some tedious detail, I've been visiting this house since I was very little. When there was a cupboard under the stairs and Nick had hung a grotesque inflated spiky pufferfish in there. It had a beak, and was perfectly spherical. The place was scruffy and atmospheric and full of books and I thought it was the essence of bohemia before I knew what bohemia was.
It is creepy having an urge to take down pictures. It indicates separation starting. It's uncomfortable, feels like betrayal; but then if you waited until you knew you were ready to do everything, you would never do anything. Ever ever. Readiness might be like justice or happiness or perfection or something - it's not achievable, it's just a concept that you have as some sort of horizon to focus on.
Houses soak things up. They are porous. This one made me think, when I moved into it on my own at the end of the summer before last, of that bit in The Bell Jar where Esther has riotous food poisoning, and wakes up to find the walls of her hotel room hovering around her as if considerately withholding their weight. (I was also reminded of that particular set text recently when thinking of how I'd like to live in the country and the city both at once, please. 'The perfect set-up of a true neurotic', Buddy claims this desire indicates. Tee hee.) Yes. It is a considerate house of expansive spirit. My grief at leaving it is only going to be compounded by the knowledge that it's going to be sold within months. But much as you think it will be great to keep your boltholes in terms of places and people and states of mind, it's probably better to let them get filled in. Nostalgia is nostalgia for, like, a reason.
I am some kind of hormone snowstorm. This surfeit of sentimentality sloshing about. Getting all over this blog, as well. Ugh. Got sent a Blue Cross catalogue and on one page there's a ladybird-roosting box, a sparrow-nesting box (they're declining, no one really knows why, and they like to nest in little communities so don't go for your usual one-room bird boxes) and a bumblebee box. Bumblebees are also declining, in part due to fuckwits not being able to tell them from wasps and boshing them out of existence with rolled up right-wing dailies. Or being able to tell them from wasps well enough but killing them anyway out of fucking lumbering illogical post-9/11 kneejerk self-righteous idiotic fear. And thus presenting yet another sparkling example of how everything good and pure and endearingly fuzzy and aerodynamically-enigmatic is getting sucked into a black hole of duhhhhh.
I would like very much to soothe my own mind and provide a cosy haven for beleaguered bees, but it seems it's too late for this year as the queen needs to nest in early spring. So this garden, with its bracken and Grinchian tree and old ceramic sinks used as planters and dandelions and um, dogshit will never see one, at least not while I'm here.
But I will have a garden elsewhere, and I don't know what it'll be like, and that is exciting. So shut up, blubbering fool.
I shall get a decent camera before I leave here, so I can take all of it with me.
Bees. Ahhhh.
If you could see it, then! you'd understand.
Yes indeed, Keane can eat a bowl of cold fuck. And lick any spillage off the table when they're done.
There was this advert for ice-cream a few years ago with an enjoyable faux-doc about a benign hippyish life-improvement retreat. Slightly manic American, frowning: "I literally woke up one morning and said 'hey - Where's My Joy?'". Pookie adopted this for a while (in the most sophisticated media-savvy way, of course, not in some crippled-imagination Crazy Frog regurgitating way) and would text shouty texts of it. (At some point in response to his general exasperation I said "one man's meat is another man's fun night in", which I repeat here only because I know that's when I peaked and everything subsequent is as a Jim Davidson retrospective. Bah. You can stop reading now in that knowledge, and I can get on with my waffling in peace.)
I did get considerable joy earlier on when I finally got round to doing something artistic. I know now that if you 'get' these abilities from people then I got this one from my mum, who has started to craft astonishing life-filled figures out of this air-drying clay stuff. If this were a film she'd be Discovered, or something. Yeah, so one thing turned out wonderfully and as on one occasion before, I had happy thoughts that all kinds of lovely feelings would remain preserved in it like a prehistoric mosquito in amber. Not to the point at which I'd be embarrassed to show it to other people, but tangible enough. The other thing was less like this, and I'm sure it will show. Under the circumstances it was quite telling. Suggestive of definite shift. Which is. . .Good.
"I opened the fridge, but it was me who filled it with light."
I used to want to go into advertising until I realised it was the career of Lucifer. I could have been a decent creative were it not for pesky issues of conscience. Imagine the things you could do if unburdened by that, and by useless flabby outcrops of superfluous brainpower. A crayon up either nostril might do it. Hey, if they isolated the conscience gene, they could excise it from certain individuals who would then grow up to be super-efficient government assassins.
This all demonstrates why I should have gone to bed much, much earlier.
Anxious, small, adrift. Need dog hug.
There was this advert for ice-cream a few years ago with an enjoyable faux-doc about a benign hippyish life-improvement retreat. Slightly manic American, frowning: "I literally woke up one morning and said 'hey - Where's My Joy?'". Pookie adopted this for a while (in the most sophisticated media-savvy way, of course, not in some crippled-imagination Crazy Frog regurgitating way) and would text shouty texts of it. (At some point in response to his general exasperation I said "one man's meat is another man's fun night in", which I repeat here only because I know that's when I peaked and everything subsequent is as a Jim Davidson retrospective. Bah. You can stop reading now in that knowledge, and I can get on with my waffling in peace.)
I did get considerable joy earlier on when I finally got round to doing something artistic. I know now that if you 'get' these abilities from people then I got this one from my mum, who has started to craft astonishing life-filled figures out of this air-drying clay stuff. If this were a film she'd be Discovered, or something. Yeah, so one thing turned out wonderfully and as on one occasion before, I had happy thoughts that all kinds of lovely feelings would remain preserved in it like a prehistoric mosquito in amber. Not to the point at which I'd be embarrassed to show it to other people, but tangible enough. The other thing was less like this, and I'm sure it will show. Under the circumstances it was quite telling. Suggestive of definite shift. Which is. . .Good.
"I opened the fridge, but it was me who filled it with light."
I used to want to go into advertising until I realised it was the career of Lucifer. I could have been a decent creative were it not for pesky issues of conscience. Imagine the things you could do if unburdened by that, and by useless flabby outcrops of superfluous brainpower. A crayon up either nostril might do it. Hey, if they isolated the conscience gene, they could excise it from certain individuals who would then grow up to be super-efficient government assassins.
This all demonstrates why I should have gone to bed much, much earlier.
Anxious, small, adrift. Need dog hug.
Monday, May 23, 2005
Sick as all grown men know is a good excuse
Found my illicit (mmm, say that again) demo copy of mclusky's 'G.E.R.M.S'. Their 'lost' album, deliberately named possibly so that F could indulge in sneering down inane enquiries as to whether it was a snide reference to 'J.E.E.P'. (If you're reading this, F, and are sniggering at my tokenistic abbreviation of your name despite explicit mention of your old band, feel free to put me straight on this. It's affectionate, you should know, a bit tongue-in-cheek, like. And I'm not putting 'G.E.R.M.S' up on eBay or anything. I want to keep it all to myself. But put something else out soon or I'll get stroppy.)
Yes. So there are some great half-polished hunks of unhearditude there amongst some tracks that got re-recorded and ended up on their album proper. I can't remember which song it was that made Radio 1 history by being played three times in succession by Zane Lowe or some other swine, but I'm sure they were heartily embarrassed by that event. Anyway, I remember hoping that this one particular excruciatingly slow moody track wouldn't end up being jettisoned, but it was. I think I probably whinged aloud, and then privately had a bit of a mourn. Whether intentionally or not (suspect emphatically not), it was reminiscent of 'That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore' if only because it faded out at the end and then - and then - faded back in again. I'd forgotten that it did that until just now. In place of "I've seen this happen in other people's lives, now it's happening in mine", the refrain is "What's wrong with getting what you want? What's wrong with getting what you want?" in a sort of plaintively loutish tone. Fade back in on anguished howls. Stop. Other gems included
Selling sex to kids can fuck you up, it can, oh yes it can.
Waiting at the bar with their claws on my credit card
She wants to live and work in a gay bubble
That last one is a song title. "A gay bubble wants to live and work in her. Some days the smell in here could make a grown man sick." Should have been a single, really, if there were a just and fair God.
I can't tell if it's raining or not. How intensely annoying.
What's wrong with getting what you want? What's wrong with getting what you want?
Yes. So there are some great half-polished hunks of unhearditude there amongst some tracks that got re-recorded and ended up on their album proper. I can't remember which song it was that made Radio 1 history by being played three times in succession by Zane Lowe or some other swine, but I'm sure they were heartily embarrassed by that event. Anyway, I remember hoping that this one particular excruciatingly slow moody track wouldn't end up being jettisoned, but it was. I think I probably whinged aloud, and then privately had a bit of a mourn. Whether intentionally or not (suspect emphatically not), it was reminiscent of 'That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore' if only because it faded out at the end and then - and then - faded back in again. I'd forgotten that it did that until just now. In place of "I've seen this happen in other people's lives, now it's happening in mine", the refrain is "What's wrong with getting what you want? What's wrong with getting what you want?" in a sort of plaintively loutish tone. Fade back in on anguished howls. Stop. Other gems included
Selling sex to kids can fuck you up, it can, oh yes it can.
Waiting at the bar with their claws on my credit card
She wants to live and work in a gay bubble
That last one is a song title. "A gay bubble wants to live and work in her. Some days the smell in here could make a grown man sick." Should have been a single, really, if there were a just and fair God.
I can't tell if it's raining or not. How intensely annoying.
What's wrong with getting what you want? What's wrong with getting what you want?
Lose Mind Now, Ask Me How
Aha! That 'intuition diet' book.
Look dis:
Secret 7: Live An Intuitive Life
Naturally thin people have truly fulfilling lives (and it’s not because they are thin). Thinness is part of their experience, but it is not the source of their fulfillment. They have meaningful relationships with others. They enjoy significant experiences in both their professional and personal lives. They focus far beyond the number on the scale. Their focus is on enjoying life, exactly as it is, and making the best of things, exactly as they are. With this attitude of gratitude, they seem to attract more good into their lives automatically, without having to chase after it.
I shouldn't be at all surprised, but what a statement. The trouble is that I can see what they mean. Only it skips over the stuff about people reacting to you more favourably if there's less of you.
'Thin' is a nasty word, anyway. If this woman really wanted to help people she'd get rid of that and substitute something about the Apt Self, or some pleasing cod-academic phrase.
I must admit that I look at Girls Aloud (especially Nadine, the Irish brunette one who isn't the boring one or the psychotic yet intensely charismatic Geordie one) and have this instant reaction, this violent jolt of inadequacy. But for the most part I'm very happy to goggle at perfection of whatever kind and not feel I'm supposed to live up to it - mostly it's all behind some electric fence which happily divides me from a place I would hate to be. Still, I've had to grapple with that misplaced yearning before and I can see how it could overshadow your entire life. I know there's a lot more to the development of eating disorders than simply seeing someone thin and deciding to actively aspire to their state and beyond, but there is some kind of genetic panic that you can't escape, surrounded by perfected women who would make better mates than you. I somehow don't think we've had chance to evolve to keep up with advances in photography - you might know intellectually that Nadine has been airbrushed to fuck, but all your subconscious grasps is that here is your natural competition and you are falling behind.
Never mind seven intuitive habits, it is just luck that ultimately this is not what I'm struggling with. Do I have an attitude of gratitude? Yes I do.
I don't begrudge Amerie at all though. Legs everywhere all spindlesome, and why make any pretence to wearing hot pants when you can just say fuck it and shoot a video in your gym knickers? She looks great and that single would have put me straight into hyperbolic spasm if I were still reviewing, but would I want to look like her? Actively not. People who are happy with their bodies may have more meaningful and fulfilling lives, but actual board-crossing irrefutable beauty is a curse. It is. You don't belong to yourself. Consider then the kind of regime you'd have to maintain to keep your record deal and you reach instinctively for a Viennese Whirl.
Mr Fat Manager did a backpedal recently and ordered GA to put some weight on because they'd got too thin. Surely not.
My chief bodily concern right now is insect bites. I'm sure the worst ones were sustained when I got back home, rather than at the barbecue, when by rights I should have been eaten alive by swarms of holidaying mosquitos. New insects attracted by the marks of recommendation left by others. Someone should do some research. Given that I react spectacularly to residual bug spit under my skin, and that the weather is appallingly cold and grey and grumpy, that might be the last time my legs see the sun for another year.
I just had to lock the back door which has started to blow open if merely pushed shut. Blow open. In the biting howling wind. I'm going to move to Florida and swallow my principles.
Look dis:
Secret 7: Live An Intuitive Life
Naturally thin people have truly fulfilling lives (and it’s not because they are thin). Thinness is part of their experience, but it is not the source of their fulfillment. They have meaningful relationships with others. They enjoy significant experiences in both their professional and personal lives. They focus far beyond the number on the scale. Their focus is on enjoying life, exactly as it is, and making the best of things, exactly as they are. With this attitude of gratitude, they seem to attract more good into their lives automatically, without having to chase after it.
I shouldn't be at all surprised, but what a statement. The trouble is that I can see what they mean. Only it skips over the stuff about people reacting to you more favourably if there's less of you.
'Thin' is a nasty word, anyway. If this woman really wanted to help people she'd get rid of that and substitute something about the Apt Self, or some pleasing cod-academic phrase.
I must admit that I look at Girls Aloud (especially Nadine, the Irish brunette one who isn't the boring one or the psychotic yet intensely charismatic Geordie one) and have this instant reaction, this violent jolt of inadequacy. But for the most part I'm very happy to goggle at perfection of whatever kind and not feel I'm supposed to live up to it - mostly it's all behind some electric fence which happily divides me from a place I would hate to be. Still, I've had to grapple with that misplaced yearning before and I can see how it could overshadow your entire life. I know there's a lot more to the development of eating disorders than simply seeing someone thin and deciding to actively aspire to their state and beyond, but there is some kind of genetic panic that you can't escape, surrounded by perfected women who would make better mates than you. I somehow don't think we've had chance to evolve to keep up with advances in photography - you might know intellectually that Nadine has been airbrushed to fuck, but all your subconscious grasps is that here is your natural competition and you are falling behind.
Never mind seven intuitive habits, it is just luck that ultimately this is not what I'm struggling with. Do I have an attitude of gratitude? Yes I do.
I don't begrudge Amerie at all though. Legs everywhere all spindlesome, and why make any pretence to wearing hot pants when you can just say fuck it and shoot a video in your gym knickers? She looks great and that single would have put me straight into hyperbolic spasm if I were still reviewing, but would I want to look like her? Actively not. People who are happy with their bodies may have more meaningful and fulfilling lives, but actual board-crossing irrefutable beauty is a curse. It is. You don't belong to yourself. Consider then the kind of regime you'd have to maintain to keep your record deal and you reach instinctively for a Viennese Whirl.
Mr Fat Manager did a backpedal recently and ordered GA to put some weight on because they'd got too thin. Surely not.
My chief bodily concern right now is insect bites. I'm sure the worst ones were sustained when I got back home, rather than at the barbecue, when by rights I should have been eaten alive by swarms of holidaying mosquitos. New insects attracted by the marks of recommendation left by others. Someone should do some research. Given that I react spectacularly to residual bug spit under my skin, and that the weather is appallingly cold and grey and grumpy, that might be the last time my legs see the sun for another year.
I just had to lock the back door which has started to blow open if merely pushed shut. Blow open. In the biting howling wind. I'm going to move to Florida and swallow my principles.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Keep your fork. There's pie.
*
Yes yes yes. I had a sentimental moment of if not "aw" then at least "ahh" reading this, when it got towards this. You can only vaccinate yourself against so much glurge before some of it slips in and makes you sick in that enjoyable floaty way you used to get when you were little. I had the most amazing nightmare when I was ill once as a kid - it was just a metal ball travelling with excruciating slowness down a diagonal line in enveloping darkness. Some kind of surrealist sensibility developing. I woke up screaming and sweating. It was awesome, dude. In the sense that I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible.
I read the other day that Sammy Davis Jnr was buried wearing about $70,000 of bling, and when it transpired he had died broke his wife had him exhumed so she could pay off some of his debt with it. A fork sounds at least more humble.
It's disgraceful the things that make you fleetingly wish you weren't such a staunch atheist.
There's a ballsy wee sycamore growing out of a tiny crack by the back gate. It's spread itself almost all the way across to the wall, making it barely possible to get in and out. I'm going to have to hack it back tomorrow, along with the odd big-leaf'd unidentified thing that's sprouted up next to it in sympathy. I'm sure there's a metaphor to be had there, but frankly, who can be arsed. I applaud its pluck but given that I'm still avoiding cutting a path to my front gate, it has to go.
Adam & The Ants doesn't make relaxing Sunday night listening, but ah, it gladdens the heart. He's possibly the most incandescent example of what you can achieve, how far you can project yourself and how dynamic you can be when you're in a manic phase. Like having a brain full of champagne, buah hah haa, I am invincible and have no need of sleep, for anything up to five years at a time. I wonder if mania compensates at all, in some twisted way, for depression. If only because you can Get Stuff Done, put your mighty foot in the worldly butt. I'm sure it's just the inverse of depression and leaves you just as wasted and dessicated, too much energy being just as draining and isolating as too little. Just because what you are can give great pleasure to people who are looking on, prepared to pay to listen to you or read you or look at you, doesn't necessarily mean you are pleasing or even tolerable to yourself. If you're projecting something out then by definition you are getting rid of it. The best you might expect is some level of reflected glow, which probably just emphasises your distance from the rest of the world which is sitting on its collective arse being amused by you. Without any concept of what it's like to be stuck in there.
During a typically pleasant chat tonight I was reminded that being all messy in the head has its compensations, in that you can absolve yourself of a great deal of responsibility. It's that legitimate-time-off-school thing - you know you've got good cause to lie there and be acted upon, because you're sick and this has been confirmed, and you feel totally right with the world on some level even while you're puking into a potty. Once you know you're clinically heart/headsick and not just posturing or indulging in some treacly excess of melancholia, then you can either start to work towards not being ill anymore, or you can use it as a Get Out of Nasty Adult Duties Free card. There are probably more incentives to choose the latter, and the brain conspires in that because it's designed to establish routines and run to them and disregard efforts at re-routing.
Being - hesitate to say - better-adjusted has many, many perks, although you have to admit to yourself you might now just be boring in a different key. It's great to find that you don't suddenly become the Inland Revenue drone you have in your head as a reason to stay colourful. But you do have to take things on the chin. Some degree of comfort is lost. Something replaces it, just haven't figured out what yet.
I remember when I first started to get into some level of personal archaeology with my Little German Woman (they've got to be German, if only for your own mirthful sense of reassuring stereotype), starting to understand some stuff, and God I must have been dull because I suddenly developed this x-ray vision. I went from the usual assumption that I was the only mangled person in any given room to seeing that the vast majority had sustained some damage, and that most of them didn't even realise it. Some blustering dick in a pub, who would have cowed me previously, would be revealed as a frightened little wabbit. On crutches. Bleeding paws and glassy eyes. People struggling around oblivious to the fact that they had legs and arms and eyes missing, all dripping and fucked. Thankfully I don't recall pointing out people's figurative injuries to them, I might have sustained some actual ones of my own (and here I edit a very sick joke about self-harming Daleks) - still, I was overwhelmed for a while by this damn vision of the walking fubar'd. It was like that bit in Gone With The Wind with the field full of casualties.
Such are the diverting side-effects. Useful, though, good for developing empathy and keeping you from rectal disappearance.
Where did that come from? How I envy the succinct. Yes, responsibility, boring fucking pest. And stubborn equilibrium. It's a beautiful calm blue ocean of a state and I am grateful pretty much every day I manage to maintain it without feeling like a plate-spinning prat, but! I rather miss the abandonment to helpless blubberingness sometimes. Tonight, for instance, I'm keenly feeling the absence of people, of person, and would rather express that like a five-year-old than consider it from frigid position of chin-stroking safety.
I suppose you have to sacrifice something of yourself to get better, some expendable tissue, a portion of your spleen. It's just odd getting used to it.
Blast, I haven't washed up and I have nothing to blame it on. See? It's a waking immutable-rolling-ball-mare.
Yes yes yes. I had a sentimental moment of if not "aw" then at least "ahh" reading this, when it got towards this. You can only vaccinate yourself against so much glurge before some of it slips in and makes you sick in that enjoyable floaty way you used to get when you were little. I had the most amazing nightmare when I was ill once as a kid - it was just a metal ball travelling with excruciating slowness down a diagonal line in enveloping darkness. Some kind of surrealist sensibility developing. I woke up screaming and sweating. It was awesome, dude. In the sense that I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible.
I read the other day that Sammy Davis Jnr was buried wearing about $70,000 of bling, and when it transpired he had died broke his wife had him exhumed so she could pay off some of his debt with it. A fork sounds at least more humble.
It's disgraceful the things that make you fleetingly wish you weren't such a staunch atheist.
There's a ballsy wee sycamore growing out of a tiny crack by the back gate. It's spread itself almost all the way across to the wall, making it barely possible to get in and out. I'm going to have to hack it back tomorrow, along with the odd big-leaf'd unidentified thing that's sprouted up next to it in sympathy. I'm sure there's a metaphor to be had there, but frankly, who can be arsed. I applaud its pluck but given that I'm still avoiding cutting a path to my front gate, it has to go.
Adam & The Ants doesn't make relaxing Sunday night listening, but ah, it gladdens the heart. He's possibly the most incandescent example of what you can achieve, how far you can project yourself and how dynamic you can be when you're in a manic phase. Like having a brain full of champagne, buah hah haa, I am invincible and have no need of sleep, for anything up to five years at a time. I wonder if mania compensates at all, in some twisted way, for depression. If only because you can Get Stuff Done, put your mighty foot in the worldly butt. I'm sure it's just the inverse of depression and leaves you just as wasted and dessicated, too much energy being just as draining and isolating as too little. Just because what you are can give great pleasure to people who are looking on, prepared to pay to listen to you or read you or look at you, doesn't necessarily mean you are pleasing or even tolerable to yourself. If you're projecting something out then by definition you are getting rid of it. The best you might expect is some level of reflected glow, which probably just emphasises your distance from the rest of the world which is sitting on its collective arse being amused by you. Without any concept of what it's like to be stuck in there.
During a typically pleasant chat tonight I was reminded that being all messy in the head has its compensations, in that you can absolve yourself of a great deal of responsibility. It's that legitimate-time-off-school thing - you know you've got good cause to lie there and be acted upon, because you're sick and this has been confirmed, and you feel totally right with the world on some level even while you're puking into a potty. Once you know you're clinically heart/headsick and not just posturing or indulging in some treacly excess of melancholia, then you can either start to work towards not being ill anymore, or you can use it as a Get Out of Nasty Adult Duties Free card. There are probably more incentives to choose the latter, and the brain conspires in that because it's designed to establish routines and run to them and disregard efforts at re-routing.
Being - hesitate to say - better-adjusted has many, many perks, although you have to admit to yourself you might now just be boring in a different key. It's great to find that you don't suddenly become the Inland Revenue drone you have in your head as a reason to stay colourful. But you do have to take things on the chin. Some degree of comfort is lost. Something replaces it, just haven't figured out what yet.
I remember when I first started to get into some level of personal archaeology with my Little German Woman (they've got to be German, if only for your own mirthful sense of reassuring stereotype), starting to understand some stuff, and God I must have been dull because I suddenly developed this x-ray vision. I went from the usual assumption that I was the only mangled person in any given room to seeing that the vast majority had sustained some damage, and that most of them didn't even realise it. Some blustering dick in a pub, who would have cowed me previously, would be revealed as a frightened little wabbit. On crutches. Bleeding paws and glassy eyes. People struggling around oblivious to the fact that they had legs and arms and eyes missing, all dripping and fucked. Thankfully I don't recall pointing out people's figurative injuries to them, I might have sustained some actual ones of my own (and here I edit a very sick joke about self-harming Daleks) - still, I was overwhelmed for a while by this damn vision of the walking fubar'd. It was like that bit in Gone With The Wind with the field full of casualties.
Such are the diverting side-effects. Useful, though, good for developing empathy and keeping you from rectal disappearance.
Where did that come from? How I envy the succinct. Yes, responsibility, boring fucking pest. And stubborn equilibrium. It's a beautiful calm blue ocean of a state and I am grateful pretty much every day I manage to maintain it without feeling like a plate-spinning prat, but! I rather miss the abandonment to helpless blubberingness sometimes. Tonight, for instance, I'm keenly feeling the absence of people, of person, and would rather express that like a five-year-old than consider it from frigid position of chin-stroking safety.
I suppose you have to sacrifice something of yourself to get better, some expendable tissue, a portion of your spleen. It's just odd getting used to it.
Blast, I haven't washed up and I have nothing to blame it on. See? It's a waking immutable-rolling-ball-mare.
