venerdì, novembre 27, 2009

The only stomach ache is in my head

We're on our way to Rotterdam tonight. Thinking about all the lovely modern architecture we'll see there (only a 20 to 40% chance of precipitation over the weekend! No better touring weather in the Netherlands!) and all the reefer I'm a-gonna smoke is helping me in the leadup to our first office group therapy session about my missing boss. I don't know what it will be. The thing is I'm absolutely blind in this situation. You know the parable of the blind men and the elephant? That's how I feel at the moment about how I feel: like I'm touching a part of it, but I don't know what the rest of it is like, and honestly I don't know if I'm going to be as fine as you can be in this sort of situation, or if tomorrow I'll be ripping off my clothes and smearing turd on the walls of an opera house.

Well, it's not likely. Rotterdam doesn't have an opera house. And right now I'm just annoyed. Just a burbling feeling of annoyance. But not the normal, garden variety Mistress-La-Spliffe annoyance; instead it's the sort of annoyance which turns into a headache around the front part of your head. The sort of annoyance that feels like hate. Which is unhelpful.

Anyways. Onwards and upwards.

martedì, novembre 24, 2009

To: Mistress La Spliffe . . . . Love: Mistress La Spliffe

You should see the sky out there. It's a pale but electric fuchsia. The pollution here make for really great sunsets and really great sunrises, but this is the sort of sunrise I imagine sailors curse at. Well, thank goodness I'm not a sailor. It's working, the trick of reminding myself that the sights I'm seeing now, I'm not likely to ever see in the same way again, because of our departure before the next time the seasons fully rotate. I'm enjoying it more here in general, and while it may be a bit of a stretch to say I'm enjoying what is extremely likely to be my final full northern European winter, I do hate it less than usual.

The word "final" is a little difficult today. Yesterday the Yankee manager, who is going about things very decently in view of my boss here going lost, more decently than you'd have expected from the mean way I wrote about him in the past when he did things I didn't like, called me up and asked me how I would feel about them beginning the search for the missing man's replacement. I said I saw the necessity of it, and he said he disliked the finality of the move, and then I made some reassuring sounds . . . but that word has been sticking with me. Finality; knowing things end. It's what makes a linear perception of human life and its phenomena piquant and bearable and at the same time utterly fucking miserable. Sort of like MSG.

Probably a cyclical view of time is a little more healthy. There's a certain irony in that, given the popularity of MSG in traditionally Buddhist countries. But I think I'm the only person in the world who appreciates the irony, given I'm the only person in the world who'd be ridiculous enough to compare mortality to MSG. Nonetheless, I do appreciate it awfully, so I shall give it to myself as a birthday present, not least because the first thing I saw clearly when I woke up this morning, automatically put on my glasses and stumbled around my apartment was my naked reflection in the bathroom mirror; and so the first semi-coherent thought I had on the morning my 31st birthday was "holy shit, that's a sweet piece of ass."

lunedì, novembre 23, 2009

Deadlines and lifelines

I turn 31 tomorrow, and in a desperate race against the clock, today will see me call, chair, and boss my way through my first managerial meeting. I remember half my life ago, on the November 24th of me being 15, in a desperate race against the clock during those days of printer paper with wee holes in the side that kept jamming, I was printing out my first novel so I could say I'd finished writing my first novel when I was 15. I'm mildly perturbed today that by one practical measure I'm farther from my vocational dreams now than when I was 15. But what I wrote when I was 15 was utter balls and what I write now is much better, so I'm getting over it.

I've never felt less festive in a birthday sense, and that includes the years I spent in a very real and pressing depression. I'm not depressed at the moment. It's odd, all these emotional discoveries one makes when this are all fucked. I'm dangerously overworked, stressed, grieving and yet sort of basculated because we still don't have a body and I still expect him to walk into the office at any moment, and certainly my SAD is giving my brain some good sharp kicks, but even though I'd say things are a right shittery at the moment I know I'm not depressed. I'm still showering, for one. That's a bit of a giveaway that my depressive centres aren't acting up too much.

All the same I'm finding it a little bit difficult to give a fuck about my birthday. And that's partly because it falls on Wednesday, which is deadline day, so if I manage to get out of the office before 19h, then that will be a minor fucking miracle. For someone who isn't depressed I certainly complain a lot, don't I? But that's another bit of a giveaway my depressive centres aren't acting up too much.

All the same I shudder to think what sort of state I'd be in with the F-word. In fact I don't want to think about it because I don't want to know how dependent I am on his awesome. I'd rather just focus on his awesome.

domenica, novembre 22, 2009

Last Night's movie

In the spirit of all the apocalypse that's been floating around here, but actually mostly because of peer pressure, I went to see 2012 yesterday. I either have a great deal to say about it, or very little, and since my boss has disappeared we are so fucking swamped with work that I'll go for the "very little" option.

1. The car chase was sweet. If the whole movie had been that car chase, and if I'd been allowed to smoke weed in the theatre so that I was still buzzing after the car chase, the movie would have been roughly 100 times better.

2. Most of the rest of the movie was so bad that I spent it mentally comparing it with Canada's own sun-sparked apocalypse effort from a few years back, that helped launch the lovely and talented Sandra Oh to the dizzying pinnacles of becoming a Grey's Anatomy Regular, which by my calculations makes her the most famous entertainer of Korean descent known in the Anglophone world, or at least second between Kim Jong Il and Margaret Cho - the altogether tolerable Last Night

3. The erstaz Russian, Johann Urb, was a peice of super-ass. Whenever my mind wandered from comparing 2012 to Last Night in a microcosmic mental experiment to work out the fundamental difference between Americans and Canadians, it moseyed over to getting a damn good spanking from that. He looked like a Sean Bean that doesn't punch people for fun.

4. I discovered the reason John Cusack is such an engaging actor; he plays his characters so that you know, after they kiss the girl, that their cock has gone chubby. Funny how most American actors fail to communicate that fundament of a good, satisfying, emotionally charged kiss so spectacularly. When my mind wasn't fixed on the cinematic symptoms of the difference between Americans and Canadians or on getting a damn good spanking from an ersatz Russian pretty boy, it was wondering if the vast majority of American actors are gynophobes, gay, chronically impotent or just utterly bereft of any fucking dramatic talent whatsoever.