venerdì, ottobre 03, 2008

Not so lush

I'm still so sick. Went to the doctor's yesterday because I knew I wouldn't be making it to the office today, either, barring a miracle, and he told me that Brussels is a polluted hole that squanders billions of euros of its gross civic production by having roughly half the workforce ill like I am at any one time in the winter. I already knew it but it's good to hear it from a health professional and good to imagine that someday I'll live somewhere that won't fucking make me sick.

Didn't finish the Seymour Hersh book yesterday because I watched the entire first season of a twee little BBC comedy called Gavin and Stacey one of my bosses lent me. British television seems to have got so fucking cutesy and don't-worry, you'll-all-find-love, even-if-you-give-it-up-on-the-first-night-while-your-best-mates-fuck-in-the-hallway. At least there's a refreshing element of realism there. All my most emotionally satisfying and enduring romantic relationships began with a genital collision at the first opportunity, mostly because all of my romantic relationships began with a genital collision at the first opportunity. Why waste time, why deny yourself physical joy just for the benefit of cockteasing some poor sap into thinking you're less accessible than you feel? Sometimes I've wondered where my Britishness comes out, besides the passport and the inordinate fondness for money management, and I think I can safely say that my sexuality used to be far more British (why waste time?) than Italian (wherein the vagina is a wrench to be used sparingly to extract various benefits and concessions) or Canadian (Cosmo-style internal wrangling and calculation about when to first give it up, in a generally futile effort to emotionally compete with a Canadian man's PlayStation). But now I'm in a long-term relationship and those are little nationalities onto themselves, or all over themselves as the case may be.

Anyhoo, Gavin and Stacey was almost unrelentingly twee but I couldn't look away. And the Welsh accents were so cute. And now it's behind me. After that the couch was too comfy to move so I watched the rest of The Life of Mammals - the tree animals, the monkeys, and then, in the final episode, the Us - the great apes. I'm all for giving those other assholes full status as humans. Why not? They might be a pack of big homicidal jerks, especially the pan trogs, but then so are people. And seriously, how is an orang-utan any less human than a 17-th century drunk from a Hogarth engraving or the sort of moron who feels represented by this? Anyways, David Attenborough is class on a stick, man, that alone makes up for every bit of twee crap the BBC has invited me to laugh at.

mercoledì, ottobre 01, 2008

My name is Mistress La Spliffe, freak of freaks: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Oh my god, I'm so sick and revolting. I bet my recovery time is going to be pretty fast though, because my fantastic corpus has already kicked into the goopy lymph phase of auto-immune protection. The human body is endlessly fascinating and its disorders even more so. Speaking of which, check this out. I love the way one of the researchers says it's more a matter of historical interest than anything else - not a matter of historical blame, of course - never mind that there are billions of people around who can still remember damaging overt, political, imperial European colonial machinations in Africa from the 1960's, and no matter that such machinations continue, both overtly and not, and no matter that AIDS, you know, continues to be a bit of a problem.

Jared Diamond wrote about the human damage of constructing European cities in Africa in Guns, Germs, and Steel, I recall. I believe his line of thought was that when the mountainous bushy region that's the Congos etc. now was a functioning African empire/state/however it worked, people lived in smaller groups at higher, dryer altitudes, and then Europeans constructed cities in Africa in the lowlands, close to navigable waterways for trade, and forced large groups of Africans down for labour, and everybody caught malaria. Brilliant. But malaria couldn't spread internationally, and HIV could, and now Europeans can't fuck without condoms. Hah! I'd say there was some sort of poetic justice in that, but considering eye-for-an-eye type justice in the case would be the ruination, decimation and enslavement of the European population by a kleptocratic African ruling class, I won't.

It's like a replay of syphilis spreading east from all the South and Central American populations the Spanish and such treated worse than animals, back when being Spanish still meant something besides having the most annoying voices in Europe. Syphilis is a really interesting disease. There's still some debate about whether it did spread out to Europe via Central American yaws, but I'm really convinced by the timing - first outbreak 1494? Come on, what's that two years after? - and by its virulence and the complete lack of resistance to it in the European population, but not the native American population, especially considering the native American population got fucking clobbered by basically every other filthy contagion Europeans carried.

Anyways, I get to stay at home today while my immune system goops everything up, and I can ponder the origins of my favourite venereal diseases to my heart's content, but probably what I'll actually do is read the rest of the lovely Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command and ponder the nature of investigative journalism. It's an awfully good book. Not really bringing any revelations home to me but it's making me think of what investigative journalism is - what being a muckraker is - and it's journalism as a primary source, journalism responsible and direct enough to be something that future academics will be able to look at with the same seriousness as a government memorandum or a law - a forum for a primary truth that would probably not have any other public forum, and risks being lost to history forever.

Someday, not too far into the future, Chain of Command and those Bob Woodward books and things like that will probably be required reading for people studying the 2001-2009 period of American history - and you can bet your asses the asses will be studied off of this period, since it marks the end of an empire and of a certain philosophy of power. There's something in my academic's brain that that really appeals to, and something that explains to me why I'm so drawn to investigative journalism over the academic world that beckoned vigorously to me all through my undergrad and my masters via all those parental profs and incredibly good marks . . . I'm simply too conceited, too full of myself, and too concerned with my place in history to study primary sources when I have the possibility to write them myself.

On that level, the narrow, industry-specific investigative work I'm doing now is more satisfactory to me than the funnest, most interesting papers I wrote about poetry or drug politics in university, because it makes me feel like a participant in rather than an observer of history. And as of yesterday I have a byline. So somewhere, some obscure toiling academic may know Mistress La Spliffe existed, even years and years after her phenomenal (if presently mucus-y) body has crumpled, aged, died and dried to dust. And if I achieve my ambitions, not only will I be providing a valuable public service to my compatriots, but maybe someday long after I've left this mortal plane someone will love me like I love Herodotus.

Fuck, that's weird. The only thing more interesting than the human body is the human brain.

martedì, settembre 30, 2008

The Red Dragon doesn't like big dirty whores and nasty cunts

It's that Belgium time of the year that makes me want to die, and will one day be something I look back on in such a way that will make whatever sun-soaked paradise I move to in a year or two seem that much more paradisaical. Dark. Frigid. Rainy. Infectious. Like an extremely untalented dirty whore. I have my first cold of the season - made it to October this year. Fuckin' great. At least it's now, before next week's driving lessons and TRIP TO FUCKIN' CANADA! Wheeeee!

Speaking of big dirty whores, check out this story about Italy's Equal Opportunities Minister. Sometimes there are just no words. It did get me thinking about what constitutes being a big dirty whore, though. Ask me a year ago and I would have said letting people fuck you for money. Okay. But what about Craiglist handjob artists who only let you come on their tits to help them pay their university tuition? Still whores, obviously. There's an orgasm some sad sack of a man has to pay money for in there somewhere. But what about people like Mara Carfagna, who sell men's mags photographs of their tits and to help 'readers' prep for dates with non-whores through a quick 18h30 rub-a-tug? How's that qualitatively different from being a Craigslist handjob artist, besides knowing you're not going to get pinkeye from any splashback? Well, it makes it one degree less scandalous when you get your ministership by sucking off your goddamn penis of a prime minister. Fuck, what a big dirty whore.

Oh, and here are some more words. You know what I hate the most about hypocritical, filthy Italian bitches like Carfagna, besides the unhygienic way they shit on other women? That they make the male gender look like a bunch of fucking useless morons when they get involved in a nice mutual exploitation sting with nasty cunts like Berlusconi. And nasty cunts aside, I love the male gender. They have sexual organs that compliment my own, and they can open jars really well, to name just two uniquely wonderful things about them. But now there'll be a generation of Italian girls who'll look at the self-described antifeminist their penis of a prime minister has chosen as an Equal Opportunities Minister, and that'll either make them think that men are too moronic to bother with, or that men are too moronic to have any relationship with except as credit card holders. And that will continue the Circle of Life that has become gender relationships in post-modern Italy - massive mutual disrespect. And then everybody will have equal opportunities to be miserable and unfulfilled in their emotional and sexual lives. Brav-fucking-a, Carfagna.

lunedì, settembre 29, 2008

Chasing the Red Dragon

Headed home early yesterday because of the uterus becoming the owwwwwterus. Probably exacerbated by some psychological things mixed in there as a friend here is having a real medical uterus scare, and by the fact I'm stressed over the prospect that I'm stressed, if you know what I mean. I mean, if I'm stressed, and I think I am, what do I do about it at this point? A fat fucking load of nothing, that's what. Keep being stressed, is all, for another good long time; they just promoted me, for heaven's sake. And just keep having the escapist fantasies about things I won't be able to do for another good long time. Yesterday I found out what the minimum wage in Australia is, and okay, it's less than half what I get post-tax each month, but still enough for me to have a house and a family. Insane, though in a good way of course. North of $2000 a month. Imagine! A country where Labour-with-a-capital-L is still important enough to get a minimum wage it can actually live on!

And they're finally introducing mandatory paid maternity leave - next year probably - and the plan they're looking at is rather more generous than the existing mandatory plan in Belgium, so I'll never need to regret refusing to breed in this paedophile's playground. Still a shit plan in Australia, of course. Women who breed should get a year paid at least, and so should their partners. The Bulgarians really surprised me on this one! Just like with the way they wouldn't participate properly in the Holocaust. Nobody ever talks about Bulgaria as anything except a place where they're assholes to gypsies and aren't Hungarian, and here they are with this fantastic parental leave programme and WWII history that's slightly less shameful than the rest of Europe's.

That's all I have to write this morning - too stressed, too owwwterus-y - enjoy the financial meltdown, everybody! Americans, don't worry, you're insured up to $100,000 in bank accounts - if all else fails you can cash out and move to one of the countries your administration has spent the last century bankrupting, $100,000 still goes a long way there. It's all good! And if, in fact, you don't have $100,000 - if, perhaps, you have $100,000 in debt - just relax and watch that debt devalue as your currency crashes. Laugh at all the silly people who struggled to keep their heads above water and pay down their credit when the dollar was strong. All you have to do is fuck off to Asia for a year and teach English and/or sell your used underwear, and then you'll be singin'.

domenica, settembre 28, 2008

His name is Barack Obama, for fuck's sake

Madame Pariyorker weekend, and I am walking into Monday as exhausted as I was Friday night. Oh well. Madame Pariyorker inevitably has spent some time being my token American friend, because part of the reason we hit it off so well in Paris all those years ago, despite having very different brains, is that it was 2002 when we met. And all the French people around me were giving full fucking rein to how much they detested and despised Americans for their dreadful imperial foriegn policy and their consumptive lifestyle, supposing I'd be interested, I suppose, because they had mistaken me for an American and were rushing to assure me that despite their incapacity to tell the difference they could assure me 100, 1000, infinity%, by using highly objectionable language, that not only did they understand that I was not American, but that I was as 1000% better than Americans as they themselves were.

This was also the time I was choosing my academic path in international relations, however, and when it was coming home to me how corrupt, murderous, anti-democratic and repellent French foreign policy was and continues to be, and the only reason it's not talked about there as currently as American murderousness is is because they're a nation of cultural chauvinists with a media as supine in its own way as that of America. Ask your typical French person about Africa or Oceania and you'll wait through days of ejaculations about the charms of the beaches of Senegal and Tahiti before you even get a fucking word in edgewise to ask about 'defense agreements' - the nice term for arms sales to kleptocratic maniacs intent on murdering their own people in old African colonies or the nuclear bombing of Polynesian atolls. Ugh. Make me fucking vomit. I mean, the fuckers still have colonies, and they think they have anything to say about anything?

Anyways. I met Madame Pariyorker in 2002 when French people were informing me about what a big asshole I wasn't by explaining how they knew I wasn't American, and Madame Pariyorker was constantly receiving instruction about what a big asshole she was . . . and now it's 2008, and maybe she's not quite such a big asshole because possibly her nation will vote for un Noir, and mark my fucking words, by the time they let a black man run for president in France - well, look, it's just not going to happen. Even so, they're having no problem going up to her and saying, with the sort of supreme Gallic shitbrained confidence that let the Germans kick their asses irreperably twice in a row using the same technique within 25 years and the supreme Gallic chauvinistic inability to attach a human name to a brownish face that made the wars of liberation in their colonies some of the most brutal of the post WWII period, 'le Noir ne peut pas gagner. Pas dans une telle societé'.

Ugh. If I was American I'd vote for Barack Obama just to piss in France's eye. Well, there are a lot of other reasons I'd vote for Barack Obama, ranging from his reasonable positions on the issues to the fact that that's the sort of peice of ass I'd rather see on newspaper covers than a septagenarian warmonger. But that would be one of them, and anyways, I reckon the reason he'll win is that the economy has gone to shit and I can't imagine the most raving lunatic racist in the most atmospheric movie about the south of the States that I've ever seen voting Republican when the economy is this shitty. But then I have no imagination about some things. And this post was going to have some sort of point, but now it's time for work.