Conscious and subconscious both come to heel

Last night I dreamt I had a dog as well as my cat. We had been travelling around the world, with the F-word as well and maybe some other people in the entourage, and ended up in some pretty warm place with lots of parks. We went out to a grocer's to get some beer and cheese, and the cat followed.

The dog was fine, he was trained to heel and didn't need a leash. Lexie, however, wasn't allowed to go if she didn't accept wearing a cumbersome collar that would let us track her down if she got lost. I was trepidatious about the whole thing - as I said, where we were was full of beautiful parks and I was concerned she'd shoot off and tree herself or get hit by a car or something. In my jet-lag dumbness I'd also forgotten to collar her before we left the executive suite where we were staying, so I'd have to do that on the street.

I was expecting a potentially dangerous struggle as I leaned over to put the tag around her neck, but she came over and accepted it with mild enthusiasm - as though wearing a bloody stupid collar for a little while was the price she had to pay to for some freedom. She trotted along with us, a little more curious and cautious about her surroundings than the amiable, loyal dog who trotted to heel without looking left or right, but she kept pace.

My subconscious doesn't make things opaque for me. Needless to say I am less angry than usual about going into work today. Also the sun has finally come out, and I've decided that if we go Plan Gold Coast I'll spend two months of each year in Canada. So there's no more problems for the moment.

At least I'm spoiled for options

Dale of the Passion Thereof interviewed me awhile back, and has now been interviewed by me in turn. He gave good answers to silly questions so check it out. Pay particular attention to his tags, generally speaking. He's an artist of taggotry. Anyways, Dale likes opera which reminds me to my sadness this morning that I'm very far away from my opera friends. The F-word falls asleep at the opera, like many people do, and the English people I work with don't listen to anything more 'retro' than Simply Red. At least I don't think they do, but I'm probably just being bitter because I miss people in Canada.

How much I miss them has been playing on me lately because a life plan B (or G or H - there are so many when you're a bourgeois Anglophone) has been presenting itself, namely to pack together a nest egg here over four years or so in my executive bourgeois role and then move to the Gold Coast of Australia. The Gold Coast is very, very far away and unattractive for that reason, and also unattractive because every time the F-word moves back to Australia he flips after about a year and moves back to Europe, and I have a feeling the next place I go will be where I want to really develop a good ass groove on the couch.

But it's the Gold Coast. It's the middle of winter there, and the sun is shining and it's 24°C; about 6°C higher than it is here in Brussels in the middle of the fucking, cocking terrible cunt of a summer. And I've always preferred the idea of raising children that come out of me in an Anglophone country because I'm a massive linguistic chauvinist. But England is a chilly sodden mess that's like here except with floods and unaffordable housing, Canada is either really cold or else British Columbia - well, that's a thought too - and the States is what it is. So there's Australia.

Hard to know what will happen. At the moment, I'm comfortable being €500 and ten hours of travel away from my friends and family in Canada. Let's see if, in three years, I'll be comfortable being €1200 and 28 hours of travel away. And let's see, in three years, if there hasn't been some global financial cataclysm that renders world travel out of the reach of all but the growing ranks of the super-rich, because if that's the case I'll have to engineer a bourgeois revolution before I think about moving anywhere. And let's see if I get through the rest of my probationary period at work without being tossed out on my ear.

Also at issue is that I'm considering becoming a part time shiatsu therapist to give me time to write and make babies under the auspices of Plan Gold Coast, and it remains to be seen if I can comfortably leave the ranks of the executive bourgeois to enter a manual industry, interesting and attractive as that industry is in so many ways that being an executive bourgeoise isn't.

Does that sound snotty? It should. It is snotty, and not the sort of attitude best calculated to increase my happiness. But something in my brain that sounds like my mother's voice, bless her, says that even thinking about the possibility of no longer being an Editor and being a Massoose instead is a silly step backwards socially speaking. And then something that sounds like Daddy's voice, bless him, says that's not why I went to school for so many years. And then a little five year old Missy La Spliffe pipes up, 'Hey! When you were my age you wanted to be a garbageman so you could jump on and off the back of the truck and throw shit! What the hell are you doing letting your spine curl into an S shape in an office all day! That's not me! That's not who I'm growing up into!'

Sigh. Only one thing is for sure, and that's that I'm starting to think I quit analysis too soon. I don't want to go back to my old analyst but I think I'll soon be ready to be analysed again. And this entry has been spellchecked, Dale, so I'm still saying a blog can only stand in for 15% of a talk therapy session.

Have you ever met that paralytic reefer man?

Saw the Simpsons movie last night. There was one bit where I almost died of laughter and I kept a fairly steady stream of chortles all the way through. Still, it was about the same as watching a good episode, except with a plot and visual effects that let it be long without being painful. People who like the Simpsons will like the movie - it's not like the South Park movie, that I think would appeal to millions who wouldn't have time for the show. Although I suspect that's more because the South Park movie was way, way better than the show, and not because it's better than the Simpsons movie.

It was good to be stoned in the cinema again, especially in front of a comedy since I don't usually like comedies and since our effort to see A Night at the Opera on Saturday backfired miserably. Frankly it's just plain nice to be stoned, even though it has a poor effect on my imaginative faculties. Obviously the reefer is nice here. We're right next to Netherlands and we're within the Schengen area - lord love Europe. Even the hash is good. Also, I believe both personal cultivation and possession is legal and I think that conspires to create a quality market.

That, combined with reading an entry from Baywatch getting upset about recreational drug marketing, pulled me into a line of thinking that bothers me from time to time. And that's that not-really-free markets have a distorting and dangerous effect on drugs. Their point becomes to get as fucked up as possible as fast as possible with as small a volume of the drug as possible.

Coca leaves become cocaine become crack. Dirty chunks of opium become candy. MDMA gets mixed up with all sorts of silly shit, 'hopefully' with little brown flecks in it. A yummy delightful sess becomes wheelchair weed. . . . and suddenly everybody is much more boring in the best case and much worse off in the worst case. I don't know how much that sort of concentration generally has to do with an addict needing to step up his dosage and how much it has to do with market restraints putting an emphasis on portability. But as reefer isn't addictive in the normal sense, only a market-conditioned idiot or someone in DIRE need of self-medication could think he needs to drop fun weed in favour of paralytic weed. So at least in reefer's case, I'm voting for portability, although I'm sure marijuana has more than its fair share of market-conditioned idiot fans, as well as those in dire need of self-medication.

I realized that to my sadness in Toronto, the day I realized I didn't know where to buy a nice gentle sess that would make me want to fuck and giggle anymore. What I was smoking there made me want to take a nap. At first I blamed age, but then when I went to Vancouver, where everybody and his mum represents an open market for all intents and purposes, or up north, which is too big to have rules, there was the nice fun sess again. It was probably in Toronto too, but the nasty weed was delivered right to my door, or to Lady's.

It made me realize paralysis isn't what I signed on for. I want things to be funny, and I don't want to medicate my mental problems into oblivion. I have a health plan that would let me do that for free in consultation with a professional. Anyways. Whine whine whine. I live in Europe now so my life is okay, and if I go back to Canada I'll move to the west coast, so my substance problems are over.

Brain hijack

Bad mood today. Red Dragon is flying in for a landing, and I'm pissed at the way the first day of smoking reefer again is light, lovely, fluffy and fun and the following days just create a big void in my brain and make me feel like I haven't slept. Life is unfair.

Also can't stop thinking about the Sopranos, which makes me feel like my time is being wasted. So he's dead. I'm still sure. The thing that's bothering me is that there is always a tip about the place where the guy is going to be, to lead up to the hit. Always. It's never about the person who's going to die getting followed, and it's not like the Sopranos created groundbreaking new mob plot devices, so I'm not believing it would start in the last five minutes.

In this case, though, since it was only a family dinner, who gave the tip about where Tony would be? Was there some indication Carmella figured out what happened to Adriana and Chris? Did that little moron AJ make a connection about how brutal the world was and how brutal his dad was? Did Meadow tell something to her fiancé, who was somehow a creep, or whose dad was somehow a creep? I seem to remember there was some story ages ago with the dad, but I don't remember it. I also wonder who would have ordered the hit since Phil Leotardo was dead. Did Paulie or someone get worried about Tony's relationship with the FBI just as he was about to be indited?

So the thing is, there must be something I've missed, but I won't watch the last episode again. That show has already stolen enough of my life, and the odds are good I'm not missing anything and that it was just all crap. Or maybe this is where the ambiguity for a movie comes in, but I hope to fuck it isn't, because I really want to be done with that show forever and if there's a movie I'll have to watch it.

The beauties of Maastricht

Went to Maastricht this weekend to enjoy some really nice reefer. At least that was our original reason for going, and it worked out well for us, but I have to say I fell in love with the city a bit. It was cute. There's an overwhelming cuteness to the nicer cities in the Benelux. Fairytale-ish medieval buildings and streets that are narrow without being oppressive; gives the impression that maybe life wasn't as bad as you know in your heart it was before the invention of penicillin and labour unions.

Being here, especially being stoned here, lets you understand where Bruegel and Bosch and all those sick motherfuckers were coming from with their fantastical monstrosities. It sounds a bit twee but I've never seen anything like the sky around here. They have the most incredible sunsets and sunrises, and cloudbanks are so imposing it's almost as good as flying above them in an aeroplane. Hallucinogenic. Like a Bosch, like a Bruegel. It's a strange place.

And Melbine, you may feel free to take this as a compliment: Dutch people are fucking gorgeous. I suppose it hadn't fully sank in as previously I'd only spent time in Amsterdam, which I can't imagine has too many Dutch people in the parts where I was. Anyways, in Maastricht there were lots of staggeringly beautiful people who were just like strapping, healthy corn-fed gods and goddesses.

And they seemed to keep looking really good at different ages, although the much older ones looked like they'd been living 'prosperously' for too long. The entire group of people there, and the city itself (though I understand Maastricht is a bijoux city, quite special) gave me a strong impression of prosperity and good income distribution, like Antwerp and Luxembourg. It's slightly creepy in a way, but probably only because I'm jealous. I think there's a really positive social contract here. Too bad the weather is shit and the Dutch language makes all these beautiful people look like they're spitting at each other. For shame.