Victor Jara has had his second funeral.



Impossible to juxtapose that death and that voice. Not without getting into Jesus talk. People are such stupid brutes; he'd just been a rather lovely folk singer before. Now juxtaposed forever with some ugly foul-mouthed troglodytes in Washington who thought the world was dominoes.

What a life.

Not okay

Last night I hit the point of smoke re-uptake where I started writing poetry again. It was nice. I have to work hard at blocking out a million little voices though. Especially Virginia Woolf's from Orlando, talking about all those unwelcome s's.

If I was clever I'd start seeing a headshrinker here. The other night as I was walking home I saw a man who had been hit by a car on one of the main streets lying very still. I scuttled on as usual, not wanting to be one of those awful people who gawk, not wanting to risk getting in the way of emergency services, who were already there getting a stretcher ready. But as I was almost clear I heard a high-pitched thready wail that sounded like a child in trouble and I had to turn and look.

It was still a grown man lying very still. But for an awful moment I saw him as a child-that-was, and all of us as children-that-were - and my missing boss was quite childlike in some ways, so it was no problem to think of him that way, and it's been a combination that's been torturing me, actually, thinking of him as he could have been at the end, a scared child - and the panic that came out of that, a horrible feeling that one wants to leave behind with childhood - "oh shit, who's taking care of us all?" - was almost overwhelming. I hadn't had a panic attack in years and I wasn't about to start having them again next to a possibly fatal accident scene where the emergency services didn't require a distraction, so I breathed heavy and scurried back home.

But this is something that needs to be addressed. I've been in a constant state of low-key panic that bursts out periodically for weeks now every time someone I have regard for does anything a little bit risky - and I'm talking a little bit risky - works too hard, comes home too late, doesn't call at the exact time they usually do. It risks turning me into one of those worn-down women with only one mode. And just like Magnum PI, I know what you're thinking, but actually the smoke re-uptake is a coping mechanism. All this was worse before I started getting high every night again.

Sweethearts letting the world tick over nicely

So we had our group therapy session at work about my missing boss. I don't know how helpful it was, because as I've mentioned at length I'm still unwillingly exploring a rather unwelcome emotional landscape at the moment. But I was very touched that so many people were so concerned about me. Funny how gratifying that is. I guess my missing boss and I had been rather loud and laugh-y in our interactions over the past couple of years, by his standards anyways. It feels like a grain of comfort to think that perhaps the last couple of years of his life, the work part of it at least, were a little more loud and laugh-y for having known me. It would be payback. I'm a much better person for having known him.

The night previous a young South American intern who hadn't been able to make the session caught me when I was staying late, which I have to do fairly frequently in these turbulent days, and after we'd both had a few drinks in celebration of one of the Money Men going back to the CIS country he'd been born in some years previously. We'd always exchanged the proper pleasantries but now we talked. Well, mostly she did and I listened, once we finished talking about my boss, because she had rather a lot going on in good and bad ways, including being the daughter of one of the richer men in her country.

But at some point in the conversation I mentioned that once in awhile, I missed Kraft Dinner, and I hadn't actually eaten any in years and years. And yesterday morning, there as a box of it sitting on my desk. Isn't that sweet? But remind me the next time I have a tête-à-tête with an extremely rich person to mention that I miss $10,000 in small unmarked bills.

Tighty righty comedy gold

Australian opposition politics has gone apeshit over a proposed emissions trading scheme that the Labor party is shoehorning through for a vote before the Copenhagen conference. Tony Abbott is the new head of the Liberals, an anti-labor party who are in coalition with the Nationals, who used to advertise themselves as a force for Senatorial honesty, made a few compromises too many, and now advertise themselves as a bunch of morons who will bend over backwards to assure rural Australia that the country's environmental catastrophes have nothing to do with their ridiculously inefficient and consumptive farming practices.

Tony Abbott, a fuckwit anti-choice dried-out lizard carcass who can barely speak, replaces Malcolm Turnbull, who was one of my favorite right-wing politicians: he has principles, after a fashion, and is anti-monarchist (Abbott, on the other hand, compared Australians who wanted their own republic to 'stupid children blowing raspberries'), and did his best to try to kick his party into ratifying the ETS. Also Robert Hughes' nephew-in-law. Too clever by half - you can tell when he speaks. He argues well, but he argues like a lawyer, not like a demagogue, and that simply does not do on the right side of the life, when rallying your support means appealing to a pathological level of paranoia.

And one knows all this because Australia, unlike Canada and the States and the UK, makes their politicians have interviews with Kerry O'Brien instead of letting them have infrequent press conferences. Kerry O'Brien is really great. One of my favorite ways to unwind after a long hard day is to get stoned to the eyeballs and watch him make the leading politicians of his country go "errrrrrr . . .". He just asks the most inconvenient questions one could possibly ask. It's fantastic. The F-word gets a limited pleasure out of it because he points out the moments of clarity are few and far between - that as good an interviewer as Kerry O'Brien is, the person he's interviewing is merely a politician, and therefore still just trying to sell a turd with a birthday candle stuck in it, even if they do get stuck for answers occasionally. But I just find it so fucking gratifying, I can't even tell you.

Something else that helps me unwind after a long hard day is getting stoned to the eyeballs and watching Yes, Minister. It used to be Margaret Thatcher's favourite show, you know. I'm sure she's excellent company. Just like Satan would be, if Satan had a drink in his hand, his feet up on the ottoman and his full quota of ruined souls for the day.

Rotterdam mijn liefde

We just spent the weekend in Rotterdam - pictures to follow. For weeks all and sundry who were aware of our destination, which I chose to go to with some passion to celebrate my 31st birthday on the basis that passing through Rotterdam on our way to and from Amsterdam was driving me crazy because I wanted to get out and look at the beautiful modern buildings, warned us we were heading into a grey shithole that everybody hated.

Now it may be because I'm incurably contrarian, but having spent a couple of days there I have to say anybody who doesn't like Rotterdam is a fucking asshole. Rotterdam is fucking awesome, I've never seen anything like it. I could compare it to Dusseldorf or some other German city that got completely wrecked in the last world war and rebuilt in a reasonably interesting and livable way, but Rotterdam leaves them behind: Dusseldorf and similar German cities were rebuilt in a very reconstructive fashion, comparatively, with an eye to recreating past glories and conditions: but in Rotterdam, somehow the clipboards ended up in the hands of people who had decided they would do everything they could to make their City Mark Two very fucking human.

Of course they had the natural advantage of it being a port town full of canals and the river, so it's a very watery town, and that makes for a sort of default pleasure for the eye: I don't know about you but I find it pretty hard to maintain a bad mood when there are lots of boats and pretty diving birds all over the place. And then there's the typically brilliant Dutch organization of circulatory space: bike paths coupling and outnumbering roads, ubiquitous footpaths, roads all nicely arranged to keep the cars out of everybody else's way, and comprehensive public transport that we didn't bother to use because this was very much a walking weekend: outside of meals, drinking, a couple of pitstops at the quick serve windows of coffeeshops, and a long visit to the terrific Van Beuningen gallery, we spent the entire weekend looking around the city at the startling architecture.

Take the cube houses, for instance. The cube houses remind me of Venice or the Guell park in Barcelona because they're something that can't be appreciated until you're in them. When I saw the pictures I thought they were a rather neat if ugly idea, but I wasn't particularly excited to visit them. However, when we ended up there on our Rondje Rotterdam stroll, seeing the way they were arranged, took (or failed to take) up space, and where they were on the Oude Haven (where, when I'm a multi-millionaire, I will definitely be buying a pied a terre) - why, it was just fucking lovely.

And the relative goodness of the food, ready availability of kibbeling, the friendly student/multicultural vibe, the utter lack of American tourists pretending they were being dirty by getting high, and the exciting fact that it only rained for about 1/4 of the time we were circumnavigating the city (the sun actually came out twice) sealed the deal. Fuck, what a great town. I loved it so much that while we were there I actually got my first pangs of panic at the prospect of leaving Europe. I haven't fallen for a city so hard since Barcelona.