When the F-word and I started the fundraising venture that is our life in Belgium, he warned me that there were big parts of me - the fun, creative parts - that were going to have to go on ice for awhile. To make the money I make, to work the hours I work, to concentrate on capitalist minutae, was going to of a necessity mean that I had very little energy left, not to mention time, to do the creative things that people like us go a little nuts without doing. He felt prepared to offer that warning because he went through his super-hard-work-nest-feathering period a few years ago, and is now sitting on a big pile of money, working part-time and painting like a lucky, lucky motherfucker.
That's well and good, and information I tried to take on board through a few deeply depressing and exhausting initial months, when I felt as though I was throttling myself with a money noose. And I have taken it on board. 1.7 or something years into my job, I feel like I've got to a point where I can see what I'm doing, and why I'm doing it, and why the present is helpful to the future beyond the ever-growing stack of money hidden in the basement, which is always strictly abstract: though I have a euro figure in mind, as the philosophers say money-making is an activity without a goal, without a natural and satisfactory stop-point, and part of the frustration of those early months was that money seemed like such an unsatisfactory thing to be working for.
So. Now I've resigned to keeping that part of myself on ice. But. The consequence of that is sometimes the glacier splits and vomits up a few literary or creative boulders. Yesterday, while sitting at the millionth fucking conference this year about how industrial actors can convince consumer audience they give a fuck about the environment, what got thrown up was a bunch of stuff about France.
Now every young lady should benefit, as I benefited, from a hedonistic and anonymous block of time in their early lives; in my case that was Italy. It's only recently that I'm accepting the fact a block of time like I had in France is probably necessary on some sort of character-building level too. I've said it was before, but without really meaning it. And I'm not going to pretend the years I spent in Paris were all dogshit and drizzle. I had a lot of fun, some really great sex, and met people who I hope to be friends with all my life. But there was a degree of adversity and misery in some events there - and I'm not just talking Bluebird, who I appreciate more and more was sometimes a victim of me and my circumstances, as well as the vice-versa being the case - that changed everything.
And this is becoming fodder, not for anything biographic, or even journalistic, but for the strangest sort of epic that ever crossed my mind, with a microscopically specific component on one side, and something big, sweeping, and ridiculously macroscopic on the other. It's been on my mind for two or three years now in one form or another, and all I can do is take notes; note down some of this extreme chatter in my brain on something so bizarre, and try to get myself together in terms of the mechanics of drawing a realistic picture of France - while I'm benefiting from living right next to it without living in it. I can't schedule time for that sort of note-taking, so sometimes it spills over, and that's what I spent the white-noise part of yesterday's conference doing. Spilling over into notes. And it makes me feel much better to know that the chatter is there and that I can note it down to work with later
But fucked if I don't feel like Lilly Von Schtupp afterwards. I guess if it's not one fun, creative part of you on ice it's another. At least it's only one a time. Once more for posterity:
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