Bluebeard: His Part in My Vacation

Off to Paris tonight, I think - after the last abortive effort I'm not making any sweeping committal statements about my ability to get there anymore. I have some skeletons in my closet and the worst one isn't actually in my closet, it's in Paris. So sometimes I wonder if transport strikes and civil unrest aren't Carl Jung's way of saying 'don't go back'. Wondering if stepping on to the coach is like turning the key in the lock of Bluebeard's forbidden room. I don't think so, though, I think I just enjoy the drama of the simile and the aesthetic juxtaposition of a heavy, foreboding, cobwebby door at the end of a dank dark passageway in a eastern European tyrant's schloss and a fluorescently lit Eurolines coach that smells like piss and multi-ethnic impatience. I'm 90% sure that my trouble in Paris was resolved some time ago everywhere except in my own head, which is the only place I'm likely to find any Bluebeard's chambers, though if going to Paris helps me find them I suppose it's all to the best, then I can go on being rescued and moving on with my life.

On to happier subjects. Besides the sweet-ass Meindl boots that can climb a mountain but have so far only climbed to the office and back, the F-word also got me Spike Milligan's war memoirs and they're fucking fabulous. Mostly about his training and then time in Africa as a gunner. The world's funniest man writing about one of the world's most vicious conflicts? Can't lose. The titles of the three volumes tell you most of what you need to know: 'Hitler: My Part in His Downfall', '"Rommel?" "Gunner Who?"', and 'Monty: His Part in My Victory'. Last night I had a very shouty appointment at my bank - I think our relationship is coming to a close, I've been seeing ING behind its back and it's time to stop living a lie - which the cunts had the temerity to keep me waiting for after I'd gone to all the trouble of sneaking out of the office early. I was well primed for a fight and more and more pissed off as each moment passed, but kept breaking into laughter in the waiting area at some - just - fucking - brilliancy in "Rommel?" "Gunner Who?". A wonderful Christmas gift for any war-obsessed Irish Catholic Communists of your acquaintance, speaking of Hilts, which I wasn't but there you go, or for anybody really.

Save the trees

Yesterday was a conference. The conference part of it was actually interesting because it was about a sort of public certification system for environmental sustainability, so that consumers and converters can be made fully aware of how nice to the planet each producer is. My industry isn't really known for its environmental sustainability, so there was lots of moaning and groaning from the floor, lots of 'why us and not the people who make tin cans?'

And you know what else there was? Resignation. Business is figuring out that, if nothing else, being environmentally responsible and transparent is a way to make their products value-added, and it's also starting to realise there's simply no choice. Laws and consumers are intersecting, forcing things to be better. Keep fighting the dirty vicious fight, people, and remember: business is there to serve you; and not vice-versa. Make that bitch your slave.

This morning, at least, I'm very optimistic about the future of our race. Still a bit depressed in my own right, but dealing with it as best I can. Here's a picture so that I can avoid typing about it. I don't know where the F-word took it. Could be anywhere in Belgium as this country is absolutely full of trees on crutches. If I ever have a contract with a publishing house that demands I produce another book for them before I get released so that I can get a much, much better contract with another publishing house, I think I'll release a coffee table book of Belgian trees on crutches.

He seems to like me

Conference today. I'm not a proponent of getting high for work but I'd get shit-eyed for this one, except I have to go to the office in the afternoon to wrap up some deadline stuff. Mistress La Spliffe is feeling that she just can't win these days, I'm afraid. It's a little absurd - I have money, love, friendship, a great bike, best reefer of my life, a job I have to think about - everything but sunshine and free time, really. And while those are key, I get impatient with my funks when about 2 billion people would kill to trade places with me. Back when I was in analysis, my analyst used to tell me such thoughts were useless. But I'm not paying for that sort of reassurance anymore.

So how's about some Tom Waits? Googling the lyrics to 'Cold Water' is easier than finding my Yeats collection on those disastrous bookshelves and I desperately need a little lyricism today. Maybe something to remind me as well that my only relationship with freeways is being chauffeured down them.

Well I woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold water
Woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold

Police at the station
And they don't look friendly
Well they don't look friendly
Well they don't look friendly
Police at the station
And they don't look friendly
They don't look friendly well
They don't

Blind or crippled
Sharp or dull
I'm reading the Bible
By a 40 watt bulb
What price freedom
Dirt is my rug
Well I sleep like a baby
With the snakes and the bugs

Well the stores are open
But I ain't got no money
I ain't got no money
Stores are open but I
Ain't got no money
Ain't got no money
Well I ain't

Found an old dog
And he seems to like me
Seems to like me
Well he seems to like me
Found an old dog and he
Seems to like me
Seems to like me
Well he seems

Seen them fellows
with the card board signs
Scrapin up a little $
To buy a bottle of wine
Pregnant women and
The Vietnam vets I say
Beggin on the freeway
Bout as hard as it gets

Well I slept in the graveyard
It was cool and still
Cool and still
It was cool and still
Slept in the graveyard
It was cool and still
Cool and still and it
Was cool

Slept all night in the Cedar grove
I was born to ramble
Born to rove
Some men are searchin for the
Holy Grail
But there ain't nothin sweeter
Than ridin the rails

I look 47 but I'm 24
Well they shooed me away
From here the time before
Turned there their backs
And they locked their doors
I'm watching T.V. in
The window of a furniture store

Well I woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold water
Woke up this morning
With the cold water
With the cold water
With the cold

Now is the winter of their discontent, but I figure we can still go to the Gap on rue de Rivoli

I've got no shame, or fairly little, in admitting I'm homesick. Probably all the birthday messages at once is what brought it on. Maybe knowing they get that extra hour or two of sunlight back home because it's a bit further south - maybe knowing that now the snow has fallen, what light there is will be doubled by reflecting off it. It could be because I know that whether I'm there or not, Time is, and I may not be approving of what he's doing behind my back, and perhaps the people back home will be shocked to see what he's done here. My job has given me acne, for example. Not lots of it, but some. I'm 20 fucking 9 now and I have more acne on my face at the moment than I had in my whole marvellously clear-skinned adolescence put together.

Anyways, enough complaining. We're planning Paris Take Two this weekend so the F-word was a little disconcerted to hear that the riots have started again after the cops killed those teenagers on the moped. In terms of the shopping/visiting/maybe a spot of opera sort of visit the darling and I have in mind, I don't think it'll have much impact. Last time the rioters only popped into the 20th and 18th arrondisements for a little visit and the disenfranchised seemed to be happy to fuck up their own neighborhoods instead of those of the dominant. No surprise there really. I remember watching reportage about Rodney King riots - I was very young at the time, twelve I should think - and wondering why all the black people were getting upset in their own neighborhoods instead of all those famous places in L.A. where surely everybody would pay more attention. One of my brothers helpfully pointed out that if they did that, they'd get fucking killed.

I've never been to L.A. and my knowledge of their police force is based on the Rodney King trial when I was twelve and then the novels of James Ellroy, but I'd imagine the same applies except much more so in France. I don't know if people fully appreciate how not-isolated and how precedented French police killing brown teenagers and getting away with it without even having to pretend to be sorry is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961 - yes, still haven't updated the browser, fuck off, you). Having spent far too much time for my tastes in Parisian suburbs I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty I'd riot too if I was a brown French teenager living in one of them and the police killed another couple brown teenagers in broad daylight, but I wouldn't dream of doing so downtown unless I had a deathwish.

Oh Tony, they're beautiful

Had a good birthday. F-word broke the bank on a pair of beeeeeyoutiful hiking/mountaineering type boots and I had a bit of a Carmella Soprano moment when we went into the outdoor equpiment store and told me to choose whatever my little heart desired. It turns out inappropriately inexpensive presents really do make me feel more affectionate. Then we went to Maastricht and smoked away the lousy weather while munching canoli and drinking champagne with a couple friends. Nice.

Paolo Szot is coming to Belgium. Long, long, long term readers of my blog, of which I think there's, oh, none left now that people keep moving to Web 2.0 (spelling mistakes in real time!) know what I think of Paolo Szot, whose schedule is linked on the sidebar so that if I ever get the time and inclination to be a groupie I can do so easily. He was Escamillo in, and the only good thing about, "Carmen" when it went down at the Hummingbird Centre a couple of years ago - besides the orchestra and the chubby blonde who sang the higher part in 'Melons, coupons'.

Anyways, he was sex on legs, or rather sex projected by a booming rich baritone, and my standard forever about what an Escamillo should be. Sexy. Now he's going to be Count Almaviva in "Le nozze di Figaro" in Ghent and my guess is he'll be sexy in that too. Stay tuned.