Have you seen the little piggies?

I reckon I'm a closeted fur-monger, because despite being a pinko I totally do not get people fussing over other people wearing cute animals. And I write this as a cat lover who would enthusiastically disembowel any Swiss fuck who tried to get my Lexie for a blanket. The thing is, if Lexie was a piggie, I'd be just as enthusiastic about eviscerating any Italian fuck who tried to turn her into salame, because I'd love her no matter how big and fat and delicious she was. I feel there's something much worse about habitually eating meat twice a day than having a couple of fur coats in the cupboard. And hence, there's something proportionately more retarded about getting knickers in a twist over stray cats being strangled for their pelt or baby seals getting their heads bashed in than over kabillions of piggies being slaughtered in revolting abattoirs after consuming far too many primary food resources that could have gone to stopping Haitians and such from rioting over their hunger.

I'm not saying I'm going to rush out and buy a fur coat after I make my first €100,000, because unless you live in a cold country they're Bad Taste, and baby, I taste like fucking candy bars. But I'm so fucking sick of animal rights activists basing their compassion on cuteness. They need to face it: the cuter an animal is, the cuter it's going to look as a coat. Maybe they think it'd be easier to whip the world up into a big orgy of caring about general animal welfare if they concentrate on the cute ones, but can anybody except another cute-lovin' animal rights activist take that sort of thing seriously when piggies - a much brighter, more sensitive, more affectionate, more intelligent, AND more unclean animal than baby seals or cats - are getting killed in their billions in slaughterhouse conditions that make getting your brains clubbed out on a chunk of ice or getting throttled in the Swiss countryside look like a sojourn in a thalasso spa?

I suspect it's also a question of money. I don't think anybody ever got rich clubbing baby seals or choking Swiss cats, but I think a lot of people have got rich from being assholes to pigs. And I don't think the shriller animal rights activists have the guts, brains, or resources to focus their sights on that sort of industry, no matter how engaging pigs are (really, they have lovely personalities, and they're sooooo cute when they're babies) and no matter how popular Charlotte's Web was. So PETA does fucking wet, retarded, alienating, things like get shirty with famous people over their dogs, a bully like Heather Mills tries to tackle a cottage industry in an economically depressed shithole by posing with seals, and a fucking flake like Brigitte Bardot does a number on Swiss entrepreneurs. Good god, what a bunch of attention-grabbing wets.

Sumer is icumen in, lude sneeze cuckoo!

Absolutely clotheslined by hay fever. Nature has punched me hard in the back of the knees, and just when I was trying to love on her too - it's so lovely and green and flowery out there. If I was a normal person I'd be among the blossoms, humming Terrell/Gaye standards and composing Springtime poetry, but unfortunately I am not. Hay fever this bad makes me think I'd have been selected out if I lived even two hundred years ago, and as it stands I ask for your prayers and good wishes as I try to walk the sociopathic streets of Brussels without wandering in front of a speeding car because I stupidly assume, in the haze of medication and plummeting blood pressure, having the right of way will keep me safe.

Always hard to predict where I'll be clotheslined by hay fever and where I won't be. Ontario was pretty decent this way, I reckon because springtime was so short. Italy was okay too, the centre of it anyways, despite springtime there being an extended, lovely affair stretching liesurely from late January to May. Oh Italy. Still not over the Berlusconi thing. Thinking about Italy now, especially while I'm living in Belgium, its uglier and equally incompetent cousin, is like remembering a really hot lover who gave fantastic head and fucked like an avenging archangel, but robbed liquor stores. Which more or less describes my second-most memorable Italian lover (the current one has the passport, and I can still recall his last name, so there you are), but I was blogging about hay fever today.

The F-word wondered yesterday, as I lay very still on the couch staring dully at online episodes of Frontline, getting indignant about over-medicated children being fed microwaved pogo sticks and the Bush administration getting away with everything, how I will do in Australia in this respect, his daddy being laid flat by hay fever each spring in the fruit-growing part of Victoria. But we are looking at a sub-tropical, rain-foresty bit of New South Wales, and I figure daily rains will keep the air clear. Sub-tropics. I cannot imagine. Green all the time? What? How? We will visit in their springtime to see how I do - not this year though - this year Magnum is getting married so I get to see Ontario wearing her incomparably beautiful autumn colours instead.

What a world, what a varied, crazy world, with opposite seasons and weird plants and singing cuckoos and Italian stallions and all the rest of it.

The Chemical Dragon is competent

I was all set to be indignant this morning about how Hillary Clinton isn't a bad memory yet, but I've decided that I don't care who wins the primary or the presidency or anything in the US as long as my stocks keep going up and as long as their economy stays on course for deep into the shitter so that the world can force it to abide by some sort of industrial environmentalist framework, in the interests of protectionism if nothing else. When I choose a country to live in, I will care desperately about who wins what there. In the meantime, I will simply laugh as the so-called 'left wing' in the US ties itself into insoluble knots; as Italians make themselves the monkeys of the world by electing an offensive tapeworm like Berlusconi; and as Belgium continues to be Belgium. Hah. Hah.

I dislike people who tell other people not to care so much, and yet I am at a point in my existence where I must tell myself not to care so much. The chemical rages of the past week or so which are finally, slowly abating served their purpose, as the monthly hormonal rages each month do in a less traumatic manner. Namely, to put things in perspective. Three lessons:

1. Other people's fuck ups cannot be controlled by the power of my mind. This came clear to me last night as we watched an amateur theatre group. A young kid was doing a solo routine and sort of losing the audience, and it was making me miserably uncomfortable.

"But wait," I thought. "That's not you up there. That's some boy with chutzpah who knew what he was letting himself in for. Why are you uncomfortable? Just try not to look bored in case he glances at the audience and you've done all you can; this is his show."

So I stopped being uncomfortable and he managed to pick the thread back up, and I learnt a lesson that most people probably learn in their early teens: I'm not the fucking omphalos of the universe. Not rocket science, but I'm happy to have learnt it, as now I'll be able to watch figure skating, ballroom dancing, and ridiculously extended Democratic primaries without using far too much of my energy crossing mental fingers and repeating "don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up" on someone else's behalf, with more emphasis, I must say, than I ever use on myself.

2. Memory can be a burden. Again, hardly rocket science, and you'd think all that psychoanalysis would have helped me to that conclusion a long fucking time ago. But it did not. Suffice to say, there are still people and events in my head that are no longer in my life, and in each case there is an excellent reason why they are in my head and not in my life. Some of them have no further use outside of cautionary tales, character inspiration, or occasional archetypal reference in dreams. And many of them used up their concern credits years ago.

And yet I have a tendency to relive people and events periodically. Fine. Everybody does. But it has been compromising the present - perhaps inevitably, as I'm in a sort of long-term, rootless transition state, living in a country where I don't plan to settle - nonetheless, excessively. The present may be transitory, but it always is, and it deserves more of my energy than it's been getting. And there should be a sort of freedom to leading an existence as transitory as mine is at the moment that I have not been enjoying as much as I could.

3. In the grown-up world, competence is all you need to impress people. Maybe I spent too much time in higher education to appreciate that while university professors will grade you anywhere between A+ and E, the professional world is Pass or Fail, and all you have to do to Pass is make sure you know what you're doing and then doing it. And then fundamentally, the only way to get extra credit is to Pass more things.

Yes, that A+ used to feel so good. And the fact that I miss how good it felt points to the fact that I should, at some point, turn away from the grown-up world and start working on projects where perfection is a beautiful dream rather than something I can manage by making sure my feature covers all the right industrial issues with all the right sources, in accordance with our in-house styleguide. In the meantime, I'm getting money and I shouldn't get into a tizzy too much over something that has much more economic than emotional significance. Care yes, ulcer no.

I knew she was trouble

I've been holding out, because if there's anything more alienating to my halfbaked Marxist perspective than a rich chucklehead singing a catchy anthem about how she can't be bothered to go to rehab in a country where underpriced Afghan heroin and social desperation have made opiates the opiates of proletarians who can't afford the sort of lovely rehabs she could drag her bourgeois ass to but probably need them far more, it could only be Jennifer Lopez singing about how she's still from the block.

And then yesterday, one of the gym attendants turned off the top-40 shit and put on Back to Black. Maybe it was relief that I wasn't listening to Britney Ciccone Aguilera carrying on over some 'borrowed' backing rhythm & melody that was crappy even before it was bastardized, or maybe it's that I'm an absolute sucker for anything doo-woppy, but I was really enjoying it. Then "You Know I'm No Good" came on. I'd heard it before and had ignored it due to the Marxist thing, but stuck on the rowing machine I had ample opportunity to actually listen to what she was singing - and singing, no less, in that strong voice.

Okay. It's not Shakespeare. It's not even Lennon/McCartney. But it makes sense, scans, and it's evocative, and I can't remember the last time I heard pop that did that. Unless you count the Bad Seeds, and that's something else altogether. For one thing, Nick Cave isn't a 24 year old who sings about banal-but-deadly girl things in a rich girl voice. And sadly enough, all those girl bands from the 50's and 60's who Amy Winehouse and her producers are ripping off never managed to do that because producers then never cottoned on to the fact that the style of music did not necessitate singing charming repetitive inanities about loving, loving, loving and following, following, following, giving the whole delicious phenomenon a bafflingly short shelf life.

Anyways, my halfbaked Marxist objections to everything about Amy Winehouse stand, but I really like Back to Black, so I shall steal it. Problem solved.

The chemical dragon rides again

An encounter a little while ago saw more slap than tickle, with the consequence that we had a latex wardrobe malfunction and I was forced to seek out emergency contraception. But Belgium isn't France; it's much more Catholic, and consequently they don't throw around la pillule de lendemain in such a confetti-like fashion here. After an hour of fevered searching on Sunday morning I was left with the unfocused impression that I'd need to go to a family planning clinic that wouldn't be open until Monday to get it; after another ten minutes of even more fevered searching I got the impression I could get what I needed from a special Sunday pharmacy, and I did. The experience leaves me with three things that really must be said:

1. I try to be open to the message of the pro-life movement, as I know that for many of them it's from the heart, but any campaigner of any category who is campaigning against access to the morning-after pill is a twat. The action of the morning-after pill is a contraceptive action, not an abortive action. It jellifies the works up there so that wee sperms cannot go anywhere or so that a fertilized egg cannot fix itself in the walls of the uterus and start sucking sustenance from the mother's body.

I understand that there's a big group of people who feel life starts once a wee tadpole from the daddy swims into a big beachball from the mummy. Well, they're fucking wrong. Life starts ages before that. The wee tadpole is alive and the big beachball is alive, and the action of the tadpole swimming into the beachball is a part of both their lifecycles. Things really get interesting when the beachball that got swum into by a tadpole lodges itself in the uterine wall of the mummy and starts sucking sustenance from her. Up until that point, however, it's just another short-lived cell in a body full of short-lived cells.

And I understand there's also a big group of people who are against contraception, and to half of them, I say: Catholics, let it go. You might be able to get your adherents to have big families, but you're just going to lose them to the Pentecostals anyways. They have childcare and singing, and all you have is guilt and gloomy rituals.

2. The morning after pill is a fucking bitch. I've heard that you can get the same effect, in a pinch, by swallowing 20 birth control pills at once, and it fucking feels like it. I hate the pill because it turns me into a raging, weeping mess, and I hate the morning-after pill even more because it turns me into a raging, weeping mess days after the fact, when it's not a reflex to make a connection between the sensation that the world is a torture chamber and the fact that six or seven days ago you ingested an elephant's dose of sex hormones. I didn't notice the effect so much before, because the last time I needed the morning after pill was when I was with Bluebeard, when I was a raging, weeping mess all the time. But now that life is fundamentally good and I'm generally in a chirpy mood, it's been nigh-on unbearable.

3. Belgium is a fucking pain in my ass. It's the national equivalent of a teenage boy's bedroom. Getting anything done here takes so long, like, Italy-long, without Italy-weather or Italy-food or Italy-beauty. Having a panic as I thought I was due for an ectopic pregnancy through waiting too long to take the morning after pill because the centralization of information is an absolutely unknown concept here isn't even the most recent example of Belgium pissing me off. There has also been the fun of trying to get my residency card, trying to change debit accounts for my fuckin' useless health insurance, trying to go outside without choking on the visibly unhealthy air, trying to cross streets without getting hit by cars, and trying to stroll down pavements in a country where apparently people don't know how to walk.