Saturday, June 11, 2005
Outing
A long-sort-of-lost London pal had a gig here tonight, in the other bar of a big sprawling pub full of. . .well. . .Staffordshire Bull Terrier owners. The back bar was only accessible through the main room, which was full of people neatly seated listening to a professional karaoke singer. We did wonder if there was such a thing and if this was what we were listening to - apparently this is the case. It was fun to be mildly conspicuous and curious in there, although I was less so than my friend who is nine feet tall with feathery black hair, in black jacket and shirt and white tie like the missing Hive.
The dark back bar was like all the places I spent my life in for about two years solid, smelling of sweaty cotton and fags and beer that had crept away to die, band gear plonked in corners and wires trailing across what would usually be a dinky dancefloor. Why does smoke adhere so easily to skin? I can smell it on my hands now.
The band were very good and I was pleased to see my friend, and they were touchingly chuffed that I had come because they were doing a gig in a strange town and were grateful for a bit of implicit cheerleading. What a great thing it is to be fond of people and know that they are fond of you. It's a much overlooked thing, misinterpreted, seen somehow as tepid or also-ran but it's vitally important to have it somewhere in your life. These are the people who anchor you.
We have some kind of clumsy gangling fond thing. We met at a festival because I thought he was someone else. Then there was some drunken dopery in Camden - he's the only person I know now who still lives in NW1 or anywhere near there, they've all gone east, although everyone I know used to be clustered around that stubbornly lovable dump. Fair Britpop's noble seat. Now it's turning into Covent Garden and choking on itself, but it'll be a few years before it's completely mutated - still time for good times. Yes. We swigged a bottle of champagne in the little fenced park by a crappy bedsit I had, then after it got dark and they came and booted us out and locked it up we went in and read the Sunday papers in silence. Then we fell out for a bit. He sent me a CD with an appallingly inappropriate card. Then we were friends.
He got mugged and beaten up, and I didn't know what to do at all so I took him some mini muffins and some fucking Sainsbury's pasta stuff that he couldn't eat cos he was a vegetarian. This he never forgot. When I was sitting amongst half-packed boxes at 2am getting ready to leave London in a few hours, feeling adrift, he happened to stumble across my number in his phone and phone it in his inebriation - he hadn't known I was going to be leaving in the morning, and when he found out he probably didn't say anything fantastically supportive or helpful, but that was better because I could infer from his burblings that things would not change all that much. People would still be there, wherever I went. Nothing much would be different, nothing important. In fact he probably did say something which made me realise that. This I never forgot.
I said to him tonight that it's great when you see people you haven't seen in a long time and nothing has changed at all, cos it hadn't, and he agreed. "It's some sort of time-travel thing, yes!" he said, waving his hands about.
I had a bit of the usual awkwardness, being the interloper, sitting there with a band and trying not to sound like a loudmouthed fucking idiot. I sound awful to myself sometimes. But fuck all that, frankly. There's a slightly affected mode you slip into amongst slightly affected London people, music people, meeja people. But I like this. I like the ritual of kissing people on the cheek when you meet them - it doesn't devalue kissing itself, as some people seem to feel it does, rather it's a different use of it. It starts you off on a positive note, gives you that bit of actual contact which has some tiny calming effect, and you can use it to show where your line is at the same time as gleaning from the other where theirs is. It sets the temperature of the conversation - you can tell if it's going to be a brief and relatively formal one or a long boozy friendly one.
There's a lot to it. And I miss it when I don't have it. I find the physical reserve of northerners unnerving - no, not actually disquieting at all, I just feel the absence of physical punctuation, I suppose. More than that, it's just sad in a very basic way when you know you can't make actual contact. There's nothing worse than invasion of personal space - I flinch from people putting their hand on my back to get past in a crowd, can't bear the casual imposition - but it isn't hard to develop an instinct for when to touch people and when not to. That London pretention that puts people off - I find it somehow comforting when I know that the people are good people, it's just like a personality joke, a quip putting a thin layer over deep sincerity. Crammed into the pokiest of personal spaces, they have an understanding of social dynamics that people rarely give them credit for. People who define themselves by this knowledge, who consider and proclaim themselves straight-talking, sincere and (sniffle) Honest Folk, often expend so much energy demonstrating all this that they don't realise it's a facade; behind it they're capering about gossiping and sneering for all they're worth, still thinking that everything they do comes from this lofty position of down-to-earth-ness.
People assume personal integrity is some kind of birthright, that it comes from the ground they've always lived on. I have greater respect for London people who have quietly rejected where they are from, have discarded the notion that where you are from is what you are and to turn your back on it is shameful and cowardly, and have made their own self. Not to say there are not many, many cunts forged in that particular foundry - shining, sharpened cunts, everywhere you look. It's just that I feel more inclined to trust those who have made more choices for themselves, struck out a bit, rather than inheriting and absorbing some false notion of what a person should be.
I came back and sat in the garden, the air so clear that I could hear the students in the college grounds doubling entendres about bushes. There's something poignant about their drunken caterwauling. Everything's going to be fucking poignant this summer. I don't want to go. But then I don't want to miss what is going to be the next bit of my life - I can glimpse it already and it looks great, although I've done that before and it hasn't materialised properly, just some frustratingly fuzzy approximation. Possibly I expect too much. (Gosh, there's a thought!)
Another grown-up thing - you have to surrender yourself to forward motion, somehow. Decisions are no longer easy. Lists of pros and cons balance out into meaninglessness and you might as well consult your shopping list. You want the mutually exclusive. In the end you have to pick whatever is new because. . .you have to. At least while you are young and resilient. Or maybe after that. When you are older and toughened. So I have to wait a bit until momentum gathers, like it did before I came here - some eerie natural push from somewhere. When it comes to getting onto the motorway it won't be such a big deal. All big overwhelming stuff is still subject to Tuesdays and Wednesdays and lunchtimes and cups of tea and ordinariness, and that's how you break it down and deal with it. Rather, that's how it is dealt with for you. When you're in the middle of it it isn't at all overwhelming, it's just Wednesday. If I write that down now, hopefully I'll remember it.
They gave me an orange vinyl 7". I should get something to play it on, and then start collecting terrible albums from charity shops. More crap to lug from one rented place to another.
The dark back bar was like all the places I spent my life in for about two years solid, smelling of sweaty cotton and fags and beer that had crept away to die, band gear plonked in corners and wires trailing across what would usually be a dinky dancefloor. Why does smoke adhere so easily to skin? I can smell it on my hands now.
The band were very good and I was pleased to see my friend, and they were touchingly chuffed that I had come because they were doing a gig in a strange town and were grateful for a bit of implicit cheerleading. What a great thing it is to be fond of people and know that they are fond of you. It's a much overlooked thing, misinterpreted, seen somehow as tepid or also-ran but it's vitally important to have it somewhere in your life. These are the people who anchor you.
We have some kind of clumsy gangling fond thing. We met at a festival because I thought he was someone else. Then there was some drunken dopery in Camden - he's the only person I know now who still lives in NW1 or anywhere near there, they've all gone east, although everyone I know used to be clustered around that stubbornly lovable dump. Fair Britpop's noble seat. Now it's turning into Covent Garden and choking on itself, but it'll be a few years before it's completely mutated - still time for good times. Yes. We swigged a bottle of champagne in the little fenced park by a crappy bedsit I had, then after it got dark and they came and booted us out and locked it up we went in and read the Sunday papers in silence. Then we fell out for a bit. He sent me a CD with an appallingly inappropriate card. Then we were friends.
He got mugged and beaten up, and I didn't know what to do at all so I took him some mini muffins and some fucking Sainsbury's pasta stuff that he couldn't eat cos he was a vegetarian. This he never forgot. When I was sitting amongst half-packed boxes at 2am getting ready to leave London in a few hours, feeling adrift, he happened to stumble across my number in his phone and phone it in his inebriation - he hadn't known I was going to be leaving in the morning, and when he found out he probably didn't say anything fantastically supportive or helpful, but that was better because I could infer from his burblings that things would not change all that much. People would still be there, wherever I went. Nothing much would be different, nothing important. In fact he probably did say something which made me realise that. This I never forgot.
I said to him tonight that it's great when you see people you haven't seen in a long time and nothing has changed at all, cos it hadn't, and he agreed. "It's some sort of time-travel thing, yes!" he said, waving his hands about.
I had a bit of the usual awkwardness, being the interloper, sitting there with a band and trying not to sound like a loudmouthed fucking idiot. I sound awful to myself sometimes. But fuck all that, frankly. There's a slightly affected mode you slip into amongst slightly affected London people, music people, meeja people. But I like this. I like the ritual of kissing people on the cheek when you meet them - it doesn't devalue kissing itself, as some people seem to feel it does, rather it's a different use of it. It starts you off on a positive note, gives you that bit of actual contact which has some tiny calming effect, and you can use it to show where your line is at the same time as gleaning from the other where theirs is. It sets the temperature of the conversation - you can tell if it's going to be a brief and relatively formal one or a long boozy friendly one.
There's a lot to it. And I miss it when I don't have it. I find the physical reserve of northerners unnerving - no, not actually disquieting at all, I just feel the absence of physical punctuation, I suppose. More than that, it's just sad in a very basic way when you know you can't make actual contact. There's nothing worse than invasion of personal space - I flinch from people putting their hand on my back to get past in a crowd, can't bear the casual imposition - but it isn't hard to develop an instinct for when to touch people and when not to. That London pretention that puts people off - I find it somehow comforting when I know that the people are good people, it's just like a personality joke, a quip putting a thin layer over deep sincerity. Crammed into the pokiest of personal spaces, they have an understanding of social dynamics that people rarely give them credit for. People who define themselves by this knowledge, who consider and proclaim themselves straight-talking, sincere and (sniffle) Honest Folk, often expend so much energy demonstrating all this that they don't realise it's a facade; behind it they're capering about gossiping and sneering for all they're worth, still thinking that everything they do comes from this lofty position of down-to-earth-ness.
People assume personal integrity is some kind of birthright, that it comes from the ground they've always lived on. I have greater respect for London people who have quietly rejected where they are from, have discarded the notion that where you are from is what you are and to turn your back on it is shameful and cowardly, and have made their own self. Not to say there are not many, many cunts forged in that particular foundry - shining, sharpened cunts, everywhere you look. It's just that I feel more inclined to trust those who have made more choices for themselves, struck out a bit, rather than inheriting and absorbing some false notion of what a person should be.
I came back and sat in the garden, the air so clear that I could hear the students in the college grounds doubling entendres about bushes. There's something poignant about their drunken caterwauling. Everything's going to be fucking poignant this summer. I don't want to go. But then I don't want to miss what is going to be the next bit of my life - I can glimpse it already and it looks great, although I've done that before and it hasn't materialised properly, just some frustratingly fuzzy approximation. Possibly I expect too much. (Gosh, there's a thought!)
Another grown-up thing - you have to surrender yourself to forward motion, somehow. Decisions are no longer easy. Lists of pros and cons balance out into meaninglessness and you might as well consult your shopping list. You want the mutually exclusive. In the end you have to pick whatever is new because. . .you have to. At least while you are young and resilient. Or maybe after that. When you are older and toughened. So I have to wait a bit until momentum gathers, like it did before I came here - some eerie natural push from somewhere. When it comes to getting onto the motorway it won't be such a big deal. All big overwhelming stuff is still subject to Tuesdays and Wednesdays and lunchtimes and cups of tea and ordinariness, and that's how you break it down and deal with it. Rather, that's how it is dealt with for you. When you're in the middle of it it isn't at all overwhelming, it's just Wednesday. If I write that down now, hopefully I'll remember it.
They gave me an orange vinyl 7". I should get something to play it on, and then start collecting terrible albums from charity shops. More crap to lug from one rented place to another.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
The tension!
Making up for last year, there's not just one giant obscene bloom but three. All at different stages. One is a teeny tiny ping-pong ball still wrapped up. One - this one ere - is gradually opening in the grumpy and pointed manner of a teenager removing itself from bed. The other one has no shame whatsoever. This makes me happy.
I've put all my pictures up here. In a year I will look at them and laugh. Ha! Like that. Or possibly blub, if I no longer have some approximation of this to gaze upon.
Ah, there's my joy, just under the lettuce
My own completely unaffordable camera is on its way. Excellent.
I am not entertained
I am not entertained
Steamed
Finally got to try out the Pagan's sauna. Such an odd thing to have in your garden, a sort of Scandinavian torture chamber. Satan's Portakabin. But feeling your flesh start to slide off your bones while birds sing outside, a profusion of greenery framed in the square glass at eye level, offsetting the small vicious rectangle of red by the floor - it could get addictive. I forget what a fan I am of nice fresh sweat, because I hardly ever generate any of my own. I mean, it's great to be mostly fragrant and perspiration-free but it's highly satisfying to feel your pores start going for broke. Slightly transgressive, like you're pushing something past where it should be.
I should stop calling her the Pagan, it sounds vaguely derogatory when it isn't meant to. She's only the Pagan because I told some Jehovah's Witnesses not to bother knocking on her door either because "she's a pagan". I was astonished at my own temerity. I suppose I was emboldened by my brusque confession of atheism. I did feel imposed upon - there were three of them, two loitering at the bottom of the garden while the other came to wheedle at me. How dare they? I mean, what gives anyone the right to go to the home of anyone else to try to influence their beliefs? It infuriates me. I knew the Pagan would really go to town on them, and say exactly that kind of thing, and keep them there until they were the ones making excuses to leave. So in part I didn't want them to waste their time, but I didn't know what I was going to say or in what tone until I said it. It sounded very insolent. Tee hee.
They went anyway, of course, and I peeked. There's nothing funnier than watching a conversation you can't hear but know the basic gist of. Anyway, she's not really a Pagan, although I'd be fascinated if she was. She's a homeopath and Reiki practitioner. And she is strong but she is over-burdened, not just with her pack of children and animals but with her thoughts as to how the world is affecting them. I'm a fairly big believer in the psychologically absorbent qualities of children who are too young to be able to form memories - anything you take in before the age of three cannot be made sense of by your developed mind later, so people have to be extremely fucking careful - but she has taken this so much to heart, she seems crippled with worry about her little boy. She feels that the dog runs away so much because the dog is unhappy and neglected, and that the boy won't sleep because of some stuff that's going on with her. There's something in it, but I had to tell her to give herself a break, because you can't control everything, and she is doing heroically.
She went to roast herself and within four minutes Tiny was screaming down the monitor. I went up and found him lost in giant bed. I don't know what to do with children at all - I have some fractured sense of what they are about when they get to five or six but before that they are alien. I was such a solitary and intense child I probably never figured out what other children were like, and I suppose I missed my little sister's development because she was born when I was 13, and then I was being an intense and solitary teenager. I get on brilliantly with F, P's seven-year-old, she's one of those prodigious minature adults; Tiny though is nearly two, and never smiles, and I cannot gauge where he is in terms of cognitive skills. Can't connect with him on any level. He is a long way away. He made lots of noise, I talked softly to him and got nowhere until I asked if he would like to go downstairs and watch some telly. Very clearly - "yeah". Shunting of baby body with purpose.
P came back in to find me buried under a heap of vibrating cat, sullen baby and oblivious dog. She fretted afresh about what a bad neighbour she had been to not see me more often, and said sweetly and in the usual flood of syllables that it makes a positive difference, seeing people makes a positive change in the world. . .I can never recall exactly what she says later on because it's always such a rush of organic herbal overheard-in-the-Green-Fields-at-Glasto stream-of-consciousness, but it's unfailingly touching.
Tiny was asked to say 'night night Sarah'. "Night night Sarah" he said into her shoulder. "Awww," I said.
I don't think I could bear to have children. They affect me too much. They are on some other level of existence that you can't get to at all, and you just have to guess and make large gestures and hope. That's if you give a shit. If you don't, you carry on as normal and occasionally grunt something like "gerroff" and then you act surprised when your kid grows up to hate you and themselves and to be aggressive and hateful to the rest of the world. It seems you have to be prepared to ruin your own life to an extent so that they are spared. If you jealously hang onto yourself as your first priority, the crap is still there and someone has to carry it and it will end up being them. And it will really show.
P does remind me ever so slightly of my older half-sister, to whom I haven't spoken in years. I was definitely the lucky one of the two of us. I don't even want to work out how old she is now because she might as well still be 14. She's intelligent enough and a talented artist but she is entirely mangled. I'm getting the usual sinking feeling around the racks of Father's Day cards, and all the ingenious new marketing angles like CD compilations of Oasis and Black Sabbath. Bleurgh. Happy, obviously, that these are just residual niggles, but they will probably always stick. I start to get misanthropic. I resent the fact that some people really will pick the most syrupy gloopy sentiments they can for their dear ole pa. I resent that for some people it is that simple. I resent that they take for granted even the knowledge and the experience, even if it doesn't amount to a lot of actual affection or positive feeling. I just don't have anything much to go on. It's mostly stuff I had to generate myself to fill in the gaps, stuff that was just squeezed out of me that I had to then fashion into the facsimile of a parent, and then figure out the details, and then get rid of.
Nature is not much on vacuums, and so lots of nice healthy stuff sprouted when that one was finally cancelled out. These indifferent spaces are the things you hope to avoid - big empty arenas of shrugging absence, important scary things crowding around outside them but with no way in. Everyone involved acting like it's normal. That was the worst of it - the pretence that this is how life is conducted, and that if you feel a bit uncomfortable and like something isn't right then it's your problem, babe. Years of that persistent denial, whole herds of elephants stomping through living room, and I think you at least earn a scowl at Hallmark.
People don't always recognise that there's a big landfill of emotional rot between the two supposed poles, just horrible swathes of nothingness; like they don't anticipate the worst thing about grief is the boredom, the tedium of having only the same finite batch of memories to rehash to yourself, the fact that you wake up every day and they're still not there and you are just so fucking bored by that fact. That's where the worst of life is -not in the sickly lurching of events (all movement is a blessing) but in the hanging around of non-events, the horrors of inertia.
The great thing is though that I'll never have to do all that again, not that particular slog, and because the vacuum is no longer there I'm not going to start leaping out of my seat with instinctive reactions. The sensors were certainly warped for a while, but not now. Any current expanses of echoing space can't be mistaken for that epic gap, nor for anything like indifference. I'm too determined that life ought to be at some constant high temperature, with those waves of sensation which are half-pleasant and half-frightening, but you can't be in a permanent state of glowy-faced. . .sogginess. No sir.
Hot chocolate, I think. For being such a good girl.
I should stop calling her the Pagan, it sounds vaguely derogatory when it isn't meant to. She's only the Pagan because I told some Jehovah's Witnesses not to bother knocking on her door either because "she's a pagan". I was astonished at my own temerity. I suppose I was emboldened by my brusque confession of atheism. I did feel imposed upon - there were three of them, two loitering at the bottom of the garden while the other came to wheedle at me. How dare they? I mean, what gives anyone the right to go to the home of anyone else to try to influence their beliefs? It infuriates me. I knew the Pagan would really go to town on them, and say exactly that kind of thing, and keep them there until they were the ones making excuses to leave. So in part I didn't want them to waste their time, but I didn't know what I was going to say or in what tone until I said it. It sounded very insolent. Tee hee.
They went anyway, of course, and I peeked. There's nothing funnier than watching a conversation you can't hear but know the basic gist of. Anyway, she's not really a Pagan, although I'd be fascinated if she was. She's a homeopath and Reiki practitioner. And she is strong but she is over-burdened, not just with her pack of children and animals but with her thoughts as to how the world is affecting them. I'm a fairly big believer in the psychologically absorbent qualities of children who are too young to be able to form memories - anything you take in before the age of three cannot be made sense of by your developed mind later, so people have to be extremely fucking careful - but she has taken this so much to heart, she seems crippled with worry about her little boy. She feels that the dog runs away so much because the dog is unhappy and neglected, and that the boy won't sleep because of some stuff that's going on with her. There's something in it, but I had to tell her to give herself a break, because you can't control everything, and she is doing heroically.
She went to roast herself and within four minutes Tiny was screaming down the monitor. I went up and found him lost in giant bed. I don't know what to do with children at all - I have some fractured sense of what they are about when they get to five or six but before that they are alien. I was such a solitary and intense child I probably never figured out what other children were like, and I suppose I missed my little sister's development because she was born when I was 13, and then I was being an intense and solitary teenager. I get on brilliantly with F, P's seven-year-old, she's one of those prodigious minature adults; Tiny though is nearly two, and never smiles, and I cannot gauge where he is in terms of cognitive skills. Can't connect with him on any level. He is a long way away. He made lots of noise, I talked softly to him and got nowhere until I asked if he would like to go downstairs and watch some telly. Very clearly - "yeah". Shunting of baby body with purpose.
P came back in to find me buried under a heap of vibrating cat, sullen baby and oblivious dog. She fretted afresh about what a bad neighbour she had been to not see me more often, and said sweetly and in the usual flood of syllables that it makes a positive difference, seeing people makes a positive change in the world. . .I can never recall exactly what she says later on because it's always such a rush of organic herbal overheard-in-the-Green-Fields-at-Glasto stream-of-consciousness, but it's unfailingly touching.
Tiny was asked to say 'night night Sarah'. "Night night Sarah" he said into her shoulder. "Awww," I said.
I don't think I could bear to have children. They affect me too much. They are on some other level of existence that you can't get to at all, and you just have to guess and make large gestures and hope. That's if you give a shit. If you don't, you carry on as normal and occasionally grunt something like "gerroff" and then you act surprised when your kid grows up to hate you and themselves and to be aggressive and hateful to the rest of the world. It seems you have to be prepared to ruin your own life to an extent so that they are spared. If you jealously hang onto yourself as your first priority, the crap is still there and someone has to carry it and it will end up being them. And it will really show.
P does remind me ever so slightly of my older half-sister, to whom I haven't spoken in years. I was definitely the lucky one of the two of us. I don't even want to work out how old she is now because she might as well still be 14. She's intelligent enough and a talented artist but she is entirely mangled. I'm getting the usual sinking feeling around the racks of Father's Day cards, and all the ingenious new marketing angles like CD compilations of Oasis and Black Sabbath. Bleurgh. Happy, obviously, that these are just residual niggles, but they will probably always stick. I start to get misanthropic. I resent the fact that some people really will pick the most syrupy gloopy sentiments they can for their dear ole pa. I resent that for some people it is that simple. I resent that they take for granted even the knowledge and the experience, even if it doesn't amount to a lot of actual affection or positive feeling. I just don't have anything much to go on. It's mostly stuff I had to generate myself to fill in the gaps, stuff that was just squeezed out of me that I had to then fashion into the facsimile of a parent, and then figure out the details, and then get rid of.
Nature is not much on vacuums, and so lots of nice healthy stuff sprouted when that one was finally cancelled out. These indifferent spaces are the things you hope to avoid - big empty arenas of shrugging absence, important scary things crowding around outside them but with no way in. Everyone involved acting like it's normal. That was the worst of it - the pretence that this is how life is conducted, and that if you feel a bit uncomfortable and like something isn't right then it's your problem, babe. Years of that persistent denial, whole herds of elephants stomping through living room, and I think you at least earn a scowl at Hallmark.
People don't always recognise that there's a big landfill of emotional rot between the two supposed poles, just horrible swathes of nothingness; like they don't anticipate the worst thing about grief is the boredom, the tedium of having only the same finite batch of memories to rehash to yourself, the fact that you wake up every day and they're still not there and you are just so fucking bored by that fact. That's where the worst of life is -not in the sickly lurching of events (all movement is a blessing) but in the hanging around of non-events, the horrors of inertia.
The great thing is though that I'll never have to do all that again, not that particular slog, and because the vacuum is no longer there I'm not going to start leaping out of my seat with instinctive reactions. The sensors were certainly warped for a while, but not now. Any current expanses of echoing space can't be mistaken for that epic gap, nor for anything like indifference. I'm too determined that life ought to be at some constant high temperature, with those waves of sensation which are half-pleasant and half-frightening, but you can't be in a permanent state of glowy-faced. . .sogginess. No sir.
Hot chocolate, I think. For being such a good girl.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Hoggage
It's supposed to say something about my personality, but I think it just says "you tend to bore easily, are generally malleable in this softened-up state, and follow links to things like pig-drawing exercises without really knowing why".
The point here as I think we'll all agree is that the piglets are hungry. Does no one care? Can't they see this is a cry for help?
Heh.
The point here as I think we'll all agree is that the piglets are hungry. Does no one care? Can't they see this is a cry for help?
Heh.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Say it with syntax
I've been cancelled on at a moment's notice with no explanation. This I do not like.
I am rarely lonely and even more rarely bored - I have that cat thing of being able to just sit and stare, and be disconcerting to people - but now I am bored. Not just nothing-on-telly bored, some kind of tissue-deep boredom of the musculature. Pissed-off, petulant, nervous boredom. And I even have a feeling that I wrote something like that not that long ago. Insufferable cock.
Not bored in my left arm, though. Left arm go crazy. For something like three weeks now it's had this strange sort of twingey itchy ache, flaring up when brushing against things. The nearest comparison, although this is still a long way off, is the feeling you get the day after you've got sunburnt. Sort of numb yet over-sensitive yet something. Something something. This was just in the mid-bit, around the elbow, but just this evening while I've been sitting here, dealing with work nonsense, it's made a break for it. Upper and inner arm afire. Fingers threatening suicide of the nerves. No! I like my fingers. I do not want a marigold glove for a hand. I still love the fact that I can touch-type, just like the old-style secretaries, this mysterious economical scuttling and look! words appear.
Yes. They said that this kind of thing would normally be attributable to nerves in the neck acting up, in an old person. In a young scamp like myself it's not attributable to diddley. I'm a walking medical. . .whatever. I fucking hate hypochondria. I must find some way to burn off all the stubborn attention-seeking energy. They did take it surprisingly and gratifyingly seriously, though. Will certainly miss northern healthcare.
I'm not even going to start looking up something as vague as this. I'll find that I have everything in the book, like the narrator of Three Men In A Boat (To Say Nothing Of The Dog).
I am rarely lonely and even more rarely bored - I have that cat thing of being able to just sit and stare, and be disconcerting to people - but now I am bored. Not just nothing-on-telly bored, some kind of tissue-deep boredom of the musculature. Pissed-off, petulant, nervous boredom. And I even have a feeling that I wrote something like that not that long ago. Insufferable cock.
Not bored in my left arm, though. Left arm go crazy. For something like three weeks now it's had this strange sort of twingey itchy ache, flaring up when brushing against things. The nearest comparison, although this is still a long way off, is the feeling you get the day after you've got sunburnt. Sort of numb yet over-sensitive yet something. Something something. This was just in the mid-bit, around the elbow, but just this evening while I've been sitting here, dealing with work nonsense, it's made a break for it. Upper and inner arm afire. Fingers threatening suicide of the nerves. No! I like my fingers. I do not want a marigold glove for a hand. I still love the fact that I can touch-type, just like the old-style secretaries, this mysterious economical scuttling and look! words appear.
Yes. They said that this kind of thing would normally be attributable to nerves in the neck acting up, in an old person. In a young scamp like myself it's not attributable to diddley. I'm a walking medical. . .whatever. I fucking hate hypochondria. I must find some way to burn off all the stubborn attention-seeking energy. They did take it surprisingly and gratifyingly seriously, though. Will certainly miss northern healthcare.
I'm not even going to start looking up something as vague as this. I'll find that I have everything in the book, like the narrator of Three Men In A Boat (To Say Nothing Of The Dog).
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
Such a sweet book, that. First read it when I was twelve or something and still fall off things laughing at the bit with the pineapple tin.
. . .I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.
We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry - but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.
There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it. . .
Oh, bollocks, more pins-and-needlesishness. No amount of endearing antique bloke-fumblery can lift my mood.
'X&Y' is in fact a very good album. I avoid all mention of Coldplay now, especially in reference to the fucking Frog and smirking fools suggesting that it's somehow the natural successor to Elvis and the Pistols and fucking Dylan and whateverthefuck. Yes, it just makes me sad. I'm too tied up with them - when I started at the First Magazine their first proper major-label EP was one of the first things I was sent, and then I met and interviewed them once or twice. He was the most conspicuously good and decent and likeable bloke; clearly intelligent, clearly sensitive, friendly and open. I know that when the first album went apeshit he almost quit, in horror of what was to come. I'm really glad he didn't, and I cannot imagine he has genetically mutated into Wanker Popstar since making the decision to hang onto the rising balloon. So it stings me to see him written up as that. It offends my sense of what human nature should be. I mean, this is someone I spent about half an hour with in total, but I was green and new in my business as he was in his, and even then I could tell an arsehole or arsehole-in-waiting and he wasn't either.
I hate to hear the band dismissed as overblown and bland because I used to listen to that EP non-stop and it's got so much darkness in it, the kind that doesn't just evaporate or get sanded off for commercial reasons. It resonates in everything they do, but maybe if you came to them fresh now you wouldn't be able to extrapolate it. I hate to hear them compared to any number of lesser bands who don't have the same fanatical craftsmanship and sensuality. And I hate to hear Chris Martin slagged because he was a nice man and why, why assume that nice people become bastards when they become successful? They don't, always. They adapt to survive the kind of pressures we can't conceive of. So I don't want to hear about what presumptive, prescribed-worldview-clutching idiots think of this person, who pleaded with the tour manager for a crappy t-shirt to give scruffy 21-year-old girl writer (I've still got it, although I lent it to the Brief once to sleep in, which was crazy of me). No. No idiots. Just the music.
I know there are still people who can write beautifully about music, who can enhance it, or who write so well that you'll read what they've written about the most obscure band you've never heard of. I want to read what they've got. I just want to shut out all the shite. I don't think I was necessarily part of something inherently nasty or futile. But there is so much slurry, a slew of banal gossip-mag dung and pretentious reactionary merde. Have it all. I'm going to try books again.
Bah.
More people emailing me asking for help starting out as my competition. Does everyone get this? Jeebus.
The clouds are pink. Pollution has its benefits.
I know the formatting in this post is fucked but you can take it up with my lawyers.
When to get off
Took many, many pictures today. House, garden, dog. What I've been looking at for the last two years. It did strike me when flicking back through them that most of them will have the capacity to chip a bit off my heart when I look at them in a few months or in a few years. You take photographs, personal ones, in a spirit of goofy happiness, not thinking that you're lining them up like razor-blade dominos, ready for when years have gone and you are older and you realise that whatever was in them isn't there anymore. No reason not to take them, of course, but it's funny how blithe we are about creating something that will in the future cause us some degree of pain.
I have no idea - how do you leave a house? I was distraught to leave the Funny Little House in London, and I'd never even been able to feel at home there - it was like living in an art gallery, it was beautiful but chilly and crisp. All that brushed stainless steel and bare boards. It had a spiral staircase which was great, and this huge skylight that poured light down it. It had been a stable once - there were big dents in the walls where beams had been, even a bit of beam left I think, and the owner had painted across the bricks the line of the original roof. Then it was a storage space for the supermarket next door. Then this South African artist made it into a house which looked like it had been there for years. Sash windows, antique bricks - the inventory did read like a gallery guide, everything had 'reclaimed' in front of it.
So this narrow little thing squeezed between ugly buildings on a little road just off the high street. It had a balcony with a tangled wrought-iron railing that looked like ornate brambles, growing out over its own edges. The road was very narrow, and because of Kentish Town's one-way system it was used as a rat run. Choking, standing, creeping traffic, twice a day. The back of the supermarket remained next door, and what we didn't realise when we moved in was that once a week or so a huge lorry would park on the pavement and almost lean against the house, wedge against the balcony. Its engine running, it would darken the house, take it over. More than once the lorry would graze audibly against the balcony; once a piece of the stone was knocked off. I couldn't stand it. T just thought it was an inconvenience, an annoyance - I felt like I was going to lose my mind every time the house went dark and filled with rumbling.
And the kitchen. . .it was very stylish, albeit built for a lanky Zimbabwean. All grey and silver with black granite surfaces. But it was small. It had white bricks on the one visible wall, stone floor, no window. The door at least had glass panels in it. The smoke alarm was just outside the door, and at the slightest whiff of steam it would go off. So we had to cook with the door closed, dash in and out with plates. T would emerge looking like he'd been in the oven. It wasn't the house's fault that it made me feel so squashed and squeezed and pre-crushed - the house was benign enough, but it seemed like it wasn't really meant for people to live in. It was aloof.
The odd angles of the rooms were pleasing to look at - the whole place was intensely pleasing, it was somebody's labour of love - but they closed in. The bedroom was the worst. The bed was fucked, for a start - it was like they ran out of money when they got to the top and just stuck an old knackered thing in there. It sloped down towards the bottom. Again, T shrugged it off, but it made me feel unanchored and upset. I need a good bed, just to have peace of mind, let alone peace of lumbar regions. The walls - the one on my side of the bed turned inwards, so a corner of it stuck out nearer my feet than my head. The door to the room was tucked inside this corner, out of sight. I don't think very much of feng shui, at least not as it's been bastardised and served up to tossers in recent times, but I picked up somewhere that one of the basics is the positioning of doors and windows - apparently, they're a Good Thing. Logical enough to think that if you can't see a door, you don't know how to get out, which creates a sense of deep unease and tension. I couldn't see the door from the bed, not even if I sat up and leaned forward, and whether or not Oriental wisdom suggests that this isn't good - it was really, really not very nice.
So when I fled there I came here. This house is hardly any bigger than that one, although it does have a big attic. It has a tiny corridor leading to that which should by logic bother the hell out of me, but it doesn't. It gives me no grief whatsoever.
I'm not going to go on about this damn house all over again now, but it's going to be so hard to leave it. As hard as leaving any person I've known.
I played pool on Saturday. I was cross with myself for not being able to figure the physics of it in order to do it well. I went driving for the first time in a month on Sunday. I was mad at innumerable examples of my own ineptitude. My trouble - and I'm sure this is common enough - is that I've never had to work at the things at which I am very good, so the link between effort and results has sort of disintegrated for me. If I drive like a rotten learner, it's all my fault. If I drive like a competent driver, it's some sort of act of God, like writing - a happy accident. (Or not. What a bad choice of metaphor. The writing equivalent of wrapping it round a lamppost. Gah.) Once I am able to do something, I immediately find it difficult to take any credit for it, even to myself. Occasionally someone takes a plunger to my ego and I have a nice momentary gush of feeling all competent and worthy and S-M-R-T, which is lovely, and I am inching closer to being able to pat myself on the back for things - driving is a big big thing in that respect, I never thought I'd be able to achieve such a feat of co-ordination and courage (I mean, have you seen how fast cars go, and how many of them there are?).
In the meantime, I think this may be why I'm so suddenly and totally enamoured of taking pictures. Digital cameras do most of the work for you, and the results are amazing. Instant gratification. You still need a good eye, though, which I think I have. So it's perfect for me - 100+ years of sweat and experience (real photographers must curse the democratisation of their art in this way) all condensed into a cute little thing with a pushy button, no craggy treacherous learning curve, something lovely at the end without wretchedness. The plunger has been at work today. I am totally full of myself, at least with regard to my little razor-domino-snaps (which will follow, if you're very good, etc).
Yes. Yes. Say 'yes' more often. Unless there's a silence in which someone expects you to say it when you don't want to. Let others stuff the silences. Let the days be aimless. Do not advance the action according to a plan.
I have no idea - how do you leave a house? I was distraught to leave the Funny Little House in London, and I'd never even been able to feel at home there - it was like living in an art gallery, it was beautiful but chilly and crisp. All that brushed stainless steel and bare boards. It had a spiral staircase which was great, and this huge skylight that poured light down it. It had been a stable once - there were big dents in the walls where beams had been, even a bit of beam left I think, and the owner had painted across the bricks the line of the original roof. Then it was a storage space for the supermarket next door. Then this South African artist made it into a house which looked like it had been there for years. Sash windows, antique bricks - the inventory did read like a gallery guide, everything had 'reclaimed' in front of it.
So this narrow little thing squeezed between ugly buildings on a little road just off the high street. It had a balcony with a tangled wrought-iron railing that looked like ornate brambles, growing out over its own edges. The road was very narrow, and because of Kentish Town's one-way system it was used as a rat run. Choking, standing, creeping traffic, twice a day. The back of the supermarket remained next door, and what we didn't realise when we moved in was that once a week or so a huge lorry would park on the pavement and almost lean against the house, wedge against the balcony. Its engine running, it would darken the house, take it over. More than once the lorry would graze audibly against the balcony; once a piece of the stone was knocked off. I couldn't stand it. T just thought it was an inconvenience, an annoyance - I felt like I was going to lose my mind every time the house went dark and filled with rumbling.
And the kitchen. . .it was very stylish, albeit built for a lanky Zimbabwean. All grey and silver with black granite surfaces. But it was small. It had white bricks on the one visible wall, stone floor, no window. The door at least had glass panels in it. The smoke alarm was just outside the door, and at the slightest whiff of steam it would go off. So we had to cook with the door closed, dash in and out with plates. T would emerge looking like he'd been in the oven. It wasn't the house's fault that it made me feel so squashed and squeezed and pre-crushed - the house was benign enough, but it seemed like it wasn't really meant for people to live in. It was aloof.
The odd angles of the rooms were pleasing to look at - the whole place was intensely pleasing, it was somebody's labour of love - but they closed in. The bedroom was the worst. The bed was fucked, for a start - it was like they ran out of money when they got to the top and just stuck an old knackered thing in there. It sloped down towards the bottom. Again, T shrugged it off, but it made me feel unanchored and upset. I need a good bed, just to have peace of mind, let alone peace of lumbar regions. The walls - the one on my side of the bed turned inwards, so a corner of it stuck out nearer my feet than my head. The door to the room was tucked inside this corner, out of sight. I don't think very much of feng shui, at least not as it's been bastardised and served up to tossers in recent times, but I picked up somewhere that one of the basics is the positioning of doors and windows - apparently, they're a Good Thing. Logical enough to think that if you can't see a door, you don't know how to get out, which creates a sense of deep unease and tension. I couldn't see the door from the bed, not even if I sat up and leaned forward, and whether or not Oriental wisdom suggests that this isn't good - it was really, really not very nice.
So when I fled there I came here. This house is hardly any bigger than that one, although it does have a big attic. It has a tiny corridor leading to that which should by logic bother the hell out of me, but it doesn't. It gives me no grief whatsoever.
I'm not going to go on about this damn house all over again now, but it's going to be so hard to leave it. As hard as leaving any person I've known.
I played pool on Saturday. I was cross with myself for not being able to figure the physics of it in order to do it well. I went driving for the first time in a month on Sunday. I was mad at innumerable examples of my own ineptitude. My trouble - and I'm sure this is common enough - is that I've never had to work at the things at which I am very good, so the link between effort and results has sort of disintegrated for me. If I drive like a rotten learner, it's all my fault. If I drive like a competent driver, it's some sort of act of God, like writing - a happy accident. (Or not. What a bad choice of metaphor. The writing equivalent of wrapping it round a lamppost. Gah.) Once I am able to do something, I immediately find it difficult to take any credit for it, even to myself. Occasionally someone takes a plunger to my ego and I have a nice momentary gush of feeling all competent and worthy and S-M-R-T, which is lovely, and I am inching closer to being able to pat myself on the back for things - driving is a big big thing in that respect, I never thought I'd be able to achieve such a feat of co-ordination and courage (I mean, have you seen how fast cars go, and how many of them there are?).
In the meantime, I think this may be why I'm so suddenly and totally enamoured of taking pictures. Digital cameras do most of the work for you, and the results are amazing. Instant gratification. You still need a good eye, though, which I think I have. So it's perfect for me - 100+ years of sweat and experience (real photographers must curse the democratisation of their art in this way) all condensed into a cute little thing with a pushy button, no craggy treacherous learning curve, something lovely at the end without wretchedness. The plunger has been at work today. I am totally full of myself, at least with regard to my little razor-domino-snaps (which will follow, if you're very good, etc).
Yes. Yes. Say 'yes' more often. Unless there's a silence in which someone expects you to say it when you don't want to. Let others stuff the silences. Let the days be aimless. Do not advance the action according to a plan.
Monday, June 06, 2005
They don't say 'have a dream', they say 'see a dream'
CraigsList
Script Writer & or Producer wanted - great true story! (San Francisco)
Reply to: f******@aol.com Sat Jun 4th
Norma & Bev- true and very factual story which is darn near unbelieveable!
They have been running with and from the "BAD BOYS OF BOSTON" FOR THE PAST 20 odd years on the streets and through the Court Systems! High profile real esate is involved such as the Suffolk Downs Race Track, businesses, nafarious attorneys and judges, greedy millionairs and a billionaire, Buddy LeRoux, past owner of the Boston Red Sox, beautiful National Champion Arabian and Pinto horses which might catch the interest of the likes of Sissy Spaseck or Julia Roberts, Morgan Freeman who all love horses! Mr. Freeman would portray as an excellent actor representing the Honorable Judge Julian Houston who is likewise a black man with intigrity. Laureen Bacall would make a great actress taking the part of Norma who lost millions of dollars of real estate without a court order, etc. etc. etc. Julia or Sissy would do justice to play the part of Bev.
Her ordeal is even somewhat like what Mr. Spielberg is going through with the bad boys of Boston when he attemped to deal with the bad boys when making movies in Boston, Ma.
Hey! Mr. Ben Affleck this story may be of interest to you, due to the neighbor hood and all of the Red Sox, etc. This truely magnificent story rips the heart right out of you!. It is like an ERIN BROCOVICH AND THELMA AND LOUISE STORY IN ONE, but with much more meat to it.
Bev is an Ann Margaret looking type gal who is now 61 years old and Norma in her younger years was like a Laureen Bacall type of looking girl who is now near 80 years old. For over 20 years she has never stoped going to the court systems in the Boston area to get all the property back that was stolen from her. Most of the bad attorneys and some judges she came up against were disbarred from the court system.
Us girls would be glad to hear from someone out there. Where are you Danny DeVeto? You did a great job with the Erin Brocovich movie! SOMEONE SAVE US AND GET OUR STORY OUT TO THE PUBLIC. "THE BAD GUYS WILL NOT PREVAIL THEN"
THANK YOU! F*** P**** 78*-**5-4**2
Script Writer & or Producer wanted - great true story! (San Francisco)
Reply to: f******@aol.com Sat Jun 4th
Norma & Bev- true and very factual story which is darn near unbelieveable!
They have been running with and from the "BAD BOYS OF BOSTON" FOR THE PAST 20 odd years on the streets and through the Court Systems! High profile real esate is involved such as the Suffolk Downs Race Track, businesses, nafarious attorneys and judges, greedy millionairs and a billionaire, Buddy LeRoux, past owner of the Boston Red Sox, beautiful National Champion Arabian and Pinto horses which might catch the interest of the likes of Sissy Spaseck or Julia Roberts, Morgan Freeman who all love horses! Mr. Freeman would portray as an excellent actor representing the Honorable Judge Julian Houston who is likewise a black man with intigrity. Laureen Bacall would make a great actress taking the part of Norma who lost millions of dollars of real estate without a court order, etc. etc. etc. Julia or Sissy would do justice to play the part of Bev.
Her ordeal is even somewhat like what Mr. Spielberg is going through with the bad boys of Boston when he attemped to deal with the bad boys when making movies in Boston, Ma.
Hey! Mr. Ben Affleck this story may be of interest to you, due to the neighbor hood and all of the Red Sox, etc. This truely magnificent story rips the heart right out of you!. It is like an ERIN BROCOVICH AND THELMA AND LOUISE STORY IN ONE, but with much more meat to it.
Bev is an Ann Margaret looking type gal who is now 61 years old and Norma in her younger years was like a Laureen Bacall type of looking girl who is now near 80 years old. For over 20 years she has never stoped going to the court systems in the Boston area to get all the property back that was stolen from her. Most of the bad attorneys and some judges she came up against were disbarred from the court system.
Us girls would be glad to hear from someone out there. Where are you Danny DeVeto? You did a great job with the Erin Brocovich movie! SOMEONE SAVE US AND GET OUR STORY OUT TO THE PUBLIC. "THE BAD GUYS WILL NOT PREVAIL THEN"
THANK YOU! F*** P**** 78*-**5-4**2
