It's not TMI if you use fancy words

The F-word is back, and indeed it wasn't a second too soon, because I'm in oestrus. Have been for a couple of days. For the first time in more than a year I've had nowhere to channel my state of oestrus, so I've been observing it carefully. And I don't just say this because I myself am endlessly fascinating: women are endlessly fascinating creatures.

One of the remarkable things is the staring. The way a pert ass walking by makes the head swivel. The irresistible up-down sweep taking in the goods, that my middle-class manners can barely keep subtle when a nice piece of something passes on the street. It's very mannish, and it backs up my theory that men are just women who live in a perpetual state of simultaneous oestrus and pre-menstrual tension, so we should all try to understand each other a little better than we do.

Another of the remarkable things is the sense of smell, which suddenly goes from a sense to a superpower. I can smell perfectly clean people from ten paces on a windy day, and perfectly clean men from farther. It's the oddest thing when smelling can inform you who's walked in the room, or that the fecking gorgeous blue-eyed Sicilian pizza guy is just around the corner as you walk to the falafel shop. We don't pay enough attention to our sense of smell generally. If you haven't read the massive Swiss blockbuster Perfume yet, get to it - I think it's one of the best novels of our generation.

And finally, there's the way that sex with almost everybody becomes a realistic possibility - not an attractive one, mind you, indeed usually exactly the opposite. But nonetheless a visualizable option that a conscious part of your brain has to reject, instead of a hypothetical one that doesn't even bother swimming up from the subconscious. I have a feeling that's also fairly mannish.

And all of this, as well as a couple of subtle physiological things, within the framework of concealed ovulation, so that outside of the fact that maybe women stare a bit more and know who you are without looking up from her desk, the rest of the world has no idea.

God, human beings are so strange! So beautifully and oddly adapted! For me, this sort of thing is what really separates us from the other animals - not our opposable thumbs, our big brains, or our porcine ability to eat almost any old rubbish - but things like concealed ovulation, the female orgasm, minimal but key sexual dimorphism, and the way willies hang out of gentlemen's bodies on display for the ladies instead of getting tucked up inside them until they're in use. Our sexual organization in general.

It is so gloriously fucked up compared to all the other animals - the most poetic sexuality out there - except maybe for the bonobos', but I don't like them that hairy. So hurrah for sex, ladies and gentlemen: it's more than a replacement for television. In my book, it brings us closer to that Big Bonobo in the Sky.

Nick Cave has an opinion on this too:

What a wicked thing to say

The F-word is coming back sometime today and it won’t be a moment too soon. I miss him something awful. Gross, isn’t it? But I’m feeling a little fragile as winter has set in here. Last night I came home around 8 – the night before that, 2 in the morning – and there was absolutely no difference in the quality of the inky, damp, chilly darkness. I live in goddamn Scandinavia, except it was too goddamn cloudy all goddamn summer to get any of that Land of the Midnight Sun shit.

So I’m going through my last month of probation at work and obviously I’m on tenterhooks, because after five months I’ve really got used to being given money. Had a bit of hair of the dog last night with an IT-er from work who explained to me that the high turnover in my department was down to people quitting and/or losing their fucking minds, and that getting the sack should be the least of my worries. Do I feel better? Sure.

Speaking of. This week, whilst the F-word has been painfully absent from my life, I've been distracting myself by taking an interest in my surroundings at work and whoa, nelly. These people talk. You know, about each other. At one point, a girl who'd been telling me lots of juicy shit, like about the annoyingly naïve young thing that sits across from me nailing the assembly-line hotty in sales and my predecessor stalking my boss, paused in her conversation when the name of another girl at the office came up. She looked at me straight in the eye and said, "I'm telling you. Look out. Look out. Watch what you say to her because it will spread around."

Alright. I'm not complaining. I love hearing gossip, particularly gossip that adds some dimension to the annoying girl who sits across from me or to the reason my boss is a bit abrupt until you get to know her. And that's what it's all about, isn't it? Adding interest to our relationships. Making people seem complicated and engaging somehow. Livening up our workdays. But I better let go of the illusion my words have any kind of privacy in there, and accept that they'll probably have legs that will take them to meanings I never even dreamed of.

You know what it amounts to, don't you? My next piece of investigative journalism; you give a a music video 12 years and it turns funny. I mean, it's a pretty song and reminds me of Wild at Heart and all, but when he stares at the camera singing I can't suspend my sexy disbelief anymore:

Lesson One in becoming a Muckraking Journalist:

Journalists drink a lot. You don't drink a lot. Don't go drinking with journalists the night before deadline. Gah gah gah gah gah.

Muck raked this morning (briefly - excuse me - efforts to be human call) - when Madonna collaborates with young performers, she sucks away what modest soul they may have in a way that reminds me of Elizabeth Bathory, and when David Bowie does the same, it makes me want to cry in a nice way.



I'm missing the Arcade Fire at the beginning of November. We're going to Berlin instead. That will be sweet - I love Berlin - but still, fuck. I think I'll try to see them elsewhere on the tour on a weekend away. After all, I'm middle class now; I can do that sort of shit.

Breaking the Whaaaaaaa?

So at the moment I’m reading The Waves and taking a long time to do it. I’m the sort of reader who throws words back like lemon filling at a pie-eating contest, but that’s not a book you can do that with. It’s poetry. Reading it slooooowly is a joy – letting each character sink in – each clearly delineated person with their little motifs and their loves and their patterns of seeing, and then thinking about it during the day, letting it recur.

And such rich, fine language. You know, fuck Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. I don’t really mean that, mind you, at least in Graham Greene’s case as I really do love him, but just to make a point for a second, fuck them. You want balls in your writing, you look at Virginia Woolf. She was willing to stretch language to the breaking point to get across the images and emotions she wanted to get across, and she did, AND she never quite broke the language. None of that pared-down choose-your-own-adventure shit for her.

I love her something fierce. There’s this one section in Orlando when she writes about how frustrating it is to have too many s’s on the page when you’re composing something, and since reading that I've loved her like she was some person I knew. She seems to have had such a conscious relationship with language, and a healthy one - one that had been psychoanalyzed by a competent professional. Pity that such a degree of consciousness wasn't the right kind to stop her drowning herself, but illness is illness and illness has got rid of lots of my favourite writers before their time. I'd punch myself in the face for another Emily Brontë novel, for example. Even if it was crap. Imagine. One novel from Emily Brontë, twelve and counting from Martin Spewbag Amis. What a vomitous world it is at times.

Last night, when I was taking a break from The Waves, I watched Barton Fink, and for the first time in a long time, a movie made me honestly think ‘what the fuck?’ Just to keep it simple for myself, I’m going to pretend the whole thing was an autobiographical movie script Fink imagined when writer’s block first set in and he looked at the picture of the lady on the beach while pondering the creative process in a commercialized context. I don’t fully believe that, but it’s tidy, and in any case as a plot device it’s better than anything they’ve done since they started using the A-list. I reccommend it, but I reccommend it with reefer, which I didn't have last night.

All the world loves a lover

The F-word is off on a school trip and I miss him pretty bad, but I’m also enjoying a bit of girly time with girl friends, and having some girly time to myself, listening to girly music like the Grinderman album and writing girly poetry about how I’d like to turn into an elephant so that it would take 500 bullets to bring me down. The conviction is there, but it’s not writing itself. Not angry enough these days.

Last night, I got high and watched a documentary about making gays stop being gay. You can find it on this page, under the title Gay Conversion. What a money spinner that looks to be. It’s times like this that I know I have principles, because if I didn’t that’s a bandwagon I’d jump onto faster than a young, naked, beckoning Charles Bronson. Invent a therapist qualification, move to the States and get my business card into the hands of broken-hearted parents. I could have lovely foamy money baths while having a money fight with my expensive ponies as they galloped past through my money fields, but I won’t.

Couple of reasons. One: I still remember the day I first had a chance to get a gay man to stop being gay - a gay man I’d been finding very hot to boot. And while this was back in my most undiscriminating days, I put his drunk ass in a cab for Boystown without a second thought. Even then, when I'd make bets with myself in the morning over what bed I'd end up in that night, I couldn’t stand the sudden conviction in the air that one hole was as good as another, which is all I think gay conversion programmes, no matter how expensive, can convince somebody of.

Which leads to the second reason: the God angle driving the thing is false advertising. I’m sure the loving, all-powerful God who I invoke whenever some Belgian twat opens a car door in my bicycle’s path doesn’t care about holes as long as we’re kind to the people they belong to. But when one pretends He does, money becomes no object – do you want to keep your money, or do you want an eternity of hellfire for you and your child? And if you start on children young enough, you don’t even have to restrict the financial bonanza to gays and their families – you could extend it to the families of millions of poor little kids who play doctor with their friends or stare quizzically at each other in the shower, trying to work out what’s normal.

I’m in awe at the way the corollaries of American Christianity bleed the flock dry. Tithing I get – it’s like taxation, if your ministry has an admirable social agenda. But convincing the flock that gayness is wrong enough to spend $2000 a week ‘curing’. . . can’t you imagine God calling these people to account and asking, if they had the power to extract that much money from their flock, why they didn’t use it to relieve the suffering of the truly desperate instead of to try to convince their clients that one hole was as good as another? What fun.

No, gentle readers, I fear God too much to become an ungayist, and you have spoken, or at least 11 of you have, and 72% of that 11 suggested that I become a muckraking journalist. So instead I will ferret out the iniquitous and unexpected in our nasty, naughty world, and throw it at your feet. But I’m not going to Russia; that place is fucked up. And I also reserve the right to be 13% novelistic and 8% ornamental. So here’re the results of my first investigation – what an early-70’s Japanese commercial for a product called Mandom, advertised by Charles Bronson, looks like.

Answer: I want to say NSFW, but I think I’m the only person who’d see it as pornographic instead of just fucking hilarious: