Inexorable

What I wouldn't give for five fucking minutes, just five fucking minutes. It took until my grandfather was actually dead for some bitch to say 'at least he lived for a really long time.' And then she told me a story about a senile cat she'd had put down.

Fucking Russian Latvians.

What would Charles de Gaulle do?

Let’s see if I can write this post without breaking any of the blog-type rules I’ve set myself – no overly personal details about me (though I think the Jarvis Cocker/cocaine quip drove a stake through that one’s heart) and no overly personal details about my friends. Hmm.

Yesterday an old friend called in tears – I mean wailing tears, so hard I thought she was laughing at first. She’d done an accidental, very minor stupid thing, and her partner got disproportionately upset, probably because of the chronically annoying position that partner’s life has been in for awhile for various non-my-friend-caused reasons.

(I love that now that I’ve written ‘partner’, people will think for sure I’m talking about a couple of lesbians. Is it a bluff? Or is it a double bluff and I’m talking about two guys? Ha ha ha ha, if only I didn’t wax my facial hair, I could twirl it.)

Anyway – maybe you’ve guessed this is another in my constant repetitions of how we shouldn’t use the people we love the most as punching bags, figuratively as well as literally. It’s the most disconcerting thing when someone you adore starts screaming, starts with the unveiled insults, starts with the bowel-icing passive aggression – one wonders what one did wrong and has an almost impossible time understanding it wasn’t so much a question of that as everything else going on.

Sure people get cranky. Sure they ride the Dragon. Sure sometimes our lovers do things that are just too stupid to laugh at or ignore and rub us the wrong way when we’re already stressed. But can we not try to measure our reactions a little bit? Can’t we be, you know, courtly and a little De Gaulle about it all? You know how polite he was to his wife, despite all the mistresses French politicians are supposed to have and the stress of governing a country populated with veal?

Yeah, so as you can see I have little enough new to add to what I’ve already gone on about this. Just that now, if any of my friends see me doing this, they’re allowed to punch me in the fucking face. Carte blanche.

Insert whine onomatopoeia

Things are stacking up on me again. I hate this feeling, it’s why I hardly ever smoke reefer anymore. And then when I get it when I’m not smoking reefer I feel gypped that I’m not at least stoned to smooth it out. Even though that makes it worse, because of course I’m just feeling this way because the one or two things out of a life-litany of hundreds of good ones that are bad at the moment are taking away my energy to deal with the practicalities that are now stacking up on me, and reefer makes that worse. Shit, was that even a sentence?

Yeah, I’m a mess and writing like one. Sorry. Maybe it’s because of the Red Dragon, I don’t remember. But I think it’s just because of going away on Saturday; I’m so fucking scared of aeroplanes in general and this trip in particular. This blog has a couple of British readers – can any of them tell me if I can pick up a hot, cheap bike close to Manchester Piccadilly? I think things will be easier if I have a bike there and I don’t want to subject mine to the flight.

Things are hard all over. I’ve heard some spectacularly good news but also horribly bad news from people over the last little while. Sometime in the last year I’ve lost my capacity for schadenfreude, though. Who was it – some German philosopher whose name also started with a Sch – who thought schadenfreude was the greatest happiness in life – well, he was a sick fuck.

The Baseball

After an act of remarkable generosity from my editing partner, we went to the baseball last night – sober. Yeah. We each got one beer there and that was it. Ordinarily that would make me want to shoot myself, but baseball with Figaro is as good as cocaine with Jarvis Cocker. Dear God, I think that’s the most ridiculously emotional thing I’ve ever written here. I’ll move on. The Blue Jays won. Apparently this means they’ve finished second in something now. Yay Jays!

In much more interesting-for-me cultural event type news, I’ve finally decided to sit down and watch The Sopranos on DVD. Listening to dialogue from the first season from my hung-over bed of pain at Sugarplum’s reminded me how fucking good it is. So far we’ve managed to watch seven episodes, by dint of extreme laziness.

God, Livia is an insanely good character. The whole structure is just so fucking good; so good I nearly cried with Tony tried to compare his Uncle Junior with Augustus to get him to be more generous with the Capos, and then when that didn’t work told the joke about the two bulls. It’s so good and so inspirational I have to put it here (Sugar, if you haven’t seen the episode this is in yet, stop reading):

A young bull and his father were standing on the side of a hill, looking down on a valley full of cows. “Dad,” the young bull said, “how about we run down the hill and fuck one of those cows?”
His father looked at him and smiled. “Son,” he said, “how about we walk down the hill and fuck all of them?”

See, if they told jokes like that at all the fucking motivational conferences I go to, I’d never complain about them.

Should aulde acquaintance sound like a drug-addled schizophrenic folk singer

The Reunion was fun. I’d go to another College one, but probably not one for any other school I’ve gone to. Having stayed close to a good number of people there it was guaranteed that I’d have a nice time, but otherwise people I’d lost touch with were too nervous and guarded, or else seemingly crystallized into sharper versions of themselves that had annoyed me in the first place. So it was a touch annoying. Nice to see old professors again though, and feel a little teacher support network that is so very, very different from the French experience. And that’s all I have to say about that. Except I realized one of the professors, who I've always disliked in principle because of a reputation he has of being shockingly rude to his wife, sounds EXACTLY like Mickey (Eugene Levy's character) from A Mighty Wind. So much so I'm pretty sure they've met.

On the way over to the reunion I read Silas Marner, my first ever George Eliot book. Yay George! Longish sentences and a style of narrative I’m not really used to, in that years would pass in paragraphs – closer to a verbal storytelling style than I’d been expecting. It’s very hard for people to use such a style now, or at all, without sounding laboured and clumsy since you can’t really sync up events and present plot points in a sort of pleasing harmony very well when you do. Except when you’re George Eliot, I suppose, who in setting the fairly simple story of the weaver and his daughter against the tail end of Napoleonic war and the buds of the Industrial Revolution, pulls off a coup, a masterstroke, an oh-my-god that’s cool juxtaposition of the personal and the political.

Or maybe that’s just me, I don’t know. Read it anyways, it’s good.