I'll be your knight in shining armour, riding to your relocative rescue

I wonder if other women's fantasies tend to be wrapped up in someone coming (heh) and taking them away from all this. In fact, I wonder if some women fantasize about men coming (heh) and taking them away from all this, or otherwise solving their problems, as the fantastical moneyshot, rather than sexual congress. The question is on my mind because I am fantasizing about being taken away from all this like crazy right now.

Charles Bronson chucking me over the saddle and riding away from this fucking apartment over the steppes. Lord Peter Wimsey sending in Bunter to take care of business while we go get fed and sloshed at Brussels' finest restaurants and then steal policemen's hats. Magnum PI evacuating the building charmingly while Nick Cave sets it on fire; watching the glow of all my burdnesome possessions and contracts conflagrating in the rear-view mirror while we drive off squeezed into the Ferrari. This one stinking hot South Asian CEO I deal with buying Belgium and making me the queen so that I can formally instruct everybody to get fucked. Jake Gyllenhaal showing up at my door and cleaning up this fucking pigsty, barking angrily in American-accented French down the phone at all the institutional pains in my ass while I smoke a joint on the sofa and just watch. Holy fuck, that would be so awesome.

I mean, I can hardly express how fucking hot these fantasies are for me at the moment, and yet how asexual they are (though obviously it's not the stick-shift I'm sitting on when we're all squeezed into the Ferrari. I'm not made of stone).

In fact, in form if not in specifics, I'm fantasizing about men the way the television, from memory, does. Not as irresistably competent sex-gods, but as fixers. And that begs the question: is this how a lot women actually fantasize? I know I don't usually lead a frightfully stressful life; I don't have to worry about money, I don't usually even have to worry about cooking and cleaning - but right now with the move and with the F-word having fucked off to Rome I am fucking stressed in a way that I suspect most adult women, especially those juggling children and work and incompetent partners, are pretty much all the time.

And it doesn't take fucking Jung to work out that may be why the idea of the Prince of Persia bursting into my apartment, embracing me passionately, and then grabbing a mop instead of my titties, etc, is really awesome. And maybe that's why television hero-men have so few boners and so much general competence. It's a strange thought, and I don't know whether it's frightening or not. I think I would have thought it was frightening before I started having these fantasies myself, because they're - well, I'm not sure why, actually. It's not as though many sexual fantasies are any less unrealistic and potentially damaging in terms of expectations for most Real Life men than knight-in-shining-armour fantasies; in fact I suspect a decent quantity of men would prefer to fail or be replaced as fixers than as congressional partners. I guess it's frightening because I really don't like the idea of television getting me, because I'm a snob.

Anyways, I'm getting enormous comfort out of these fantasies at the moment, so that's something; and I'm reaching a point today - even if I'm procrastinating with a big old weekend blog - where there will not be anything else to be done by the end of the day until other people (not knights in shining armor, sadly; none of those on these fucking rainy Belgian horizons) start playing their roles. And I guess the lesson in all this is that men should make sure women are less stressed so that women have more time to think about sex, and that way we'll all get laid more, and in more creative and exciting ways.

The Red Dragon's got no more patience

Oh dear. Being temporary and imposed is still really not stopping the present situation from becoming stiflingly oppressive. I don't remember the last time I was this miserable and bleak in this awful sort of unremitting way. And since I'm cruising the Dragon* that's translating into a general unfocused fury.

Hopefully things will start looking up after I go through the fucking Cavalry of giving away Lexie - oh holy fuck, what an awful thought. Thank god it's to Sugarplum. I can't imagine how I'd be doing if I was poor, and couldn't afford to bring her back to Canada - having to put her into a shelter or something - fuck. Or if Sugarplum couldn't take her, and I had to give her away to someone who wouldn't be able to give her a better living situation than I could, so I'd have to feel guilty on top of just fucking bereft.

Anyways. The clouds lifted briefly the other night, actually. I was walking home from a pleasant smokeratif - naughty of me to get so hooled in company when I should have been working on the apartment but we all have our break-points - walking back to more packing and cleaning and organizing, but nicely snaked and ready to be in a tired-but-brave kind of mood instead of the standard fucking misery.

The weather’s been clearer than usual lately. It was the sunset – kind of early, it’s getting dark here already, and that bugs me what with the SAD - but then it was okay, because I glanced up and there was a sunset going down on Rue Americaine, where Horta’s house is, glancing warmly off the shiny Art Nouveau bricks. A plane flew above me into the blushing sky, leaving a white streak across the shining violet. I relaxed. I took a big gulp of air.

And swallowed the vilest lungful of pure unadultered garbage breath my body’d ever been subject to. I have no idea where it came from but it was like stepping in dogshit for your circulatory system. I’m serious, I’m not just being a Canadian used to rarified mountain air blowing in over the trembling pines.

So yeah, I pretty much hate this place. I’ve never been so ready to split from somewhere, including Paris, and I was out of Paris the second I finished my final exam. But I didn’t hate Paris so much as some of the people in it. Here – I hate it. I hate pretty much everything about it because even the nice things come served in a turd. And if I didn't hate it on its own fucking merits I'd hate it because it's the inhuman shithole peopled by cunts who're forcing me to give away my cat. All the twee fuckery is not simply Latin and picturesque; it's fucking unlivable, like Spain drained of all the charm, kindness and beauty.

And my arsehole neighbours still have their fucking abandoned swimming pool up and my flat is still fucking full of mosquitoes, and it's autumn, for fuck's sake.

*Not to mention, gagging over the irony of how my efforts to save the world, and my laundry, by using DivaCups are going rather poorly as I'm on my FOURTH now. The F-word accidentally threw out the first, and two more were in my luggage as what got stolen on my way to Canada - more on that some other day when I have less fury to vent about other things.

She runs for the shelter of Mistress La Spliffe's little helper

I’ve been dealing with my situation by getting high a lot more than usual, and it’s had the predictable effect of helping me deal with my situation. It could be worse; I don’t mean to whine or complain when I say the present situation is like suffering depression, except that it isn’t depression. It’s just what amounts to an imposed physical and mental mire that’s got all the symptoms of a depression.

My body is either working on the apartment or working on work or trying to sleep 24/7; just like the lethargy. My brain is not capable of dismissing constant thoughts tied up in the quadruplet subjects of giving away my cat, cleaning up my apartment, closing down shop in Belgium (from the paperwork POV alone that’s a full time job) and sorting out work; just like the in old way it’d been incapable of dismissing the drab dark blue thoughts.

(My situation, BTW, is that I allowed the F-word to dismiss his duties and swan off to Rome for a month while I shut this Brussels shit down. Honestly, he deserves and needs it – Rome, I mean - more on that another day. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that, though. Especially now, because his company, help, and amatory skills would have let me pole-vault over all of the mammoth hassles involved in packing up and fucking off so well – well, so well that I wouldn’t be suffering an imposed depression. It turns out getting laid all the time is really great for your brain and then suddenly knowing you're not getting laid for a month is fucking terrible. Who knew?)

Anyways, it’s not so bad, it really could be worse, but the situation is having the very interesting effect of giving me a tourists’ eye view of depression. I’ll tell you, it’s prettier from here . . . Especially since it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m fucking moving to Australia. Holy shit. Also it’s reminding me why I used to be high pretty much all the time. It really served a purpose. There is no way this shit shouldn’t be available on prescription.

I've suspected for years, I guess, from first-hand experience and from other people's accounts, that reefer does tend to spin out a depression past its sell-by date; I still suspect that. All the same, when you're actually in a depression, well, there you are - smack in the middle, as far as you know. Like being stranded in the middle of a desert made out of molasses. And things like hope, anticipation, and that sort of general effervescent feeling of 'isn't it all rather grand' go off the radar. So at least getting really high adds a certain degree of shits and giggles to the situation, as well as the possibility to remove yourself from it one or two degrees and look it over, albeit imparedly and circularly, with a touch of objectivity.

Book on plane

Just one from this past trip, actually, which is a bit of a shame. But what can I do? It's getting to be standard practice on aeroplanes now to have the monitors and a choice of a kabillion movies, and American films are really good at distracting me from my conviction the aeroplane is about the fall out of the sky. So before I get to the one book, a quick rundown of the movies; there were more than this but I can't remember them:

Robin Hood. It was silly but Russell Crowe is still a peice of mecha-ass, even if his head is shaped like a cabbage. And Cate Blanchett can make almost anything believable. Okay - maybe not the beach battle scene at the end. Actually there's no way I can pretend this was a good movie, but it didn't offend my easily offended sensibilities so that must be worth something.

Prince of Persia. I ended up being more emotionally committed to this movie than I would have believed possible because I started watching it on the plane from Vancouver, and then we landed sooner than I'd expected, so I didn't see the last half-hour until flying back to London, and it drove me crazy all week. Even sillier than Robin Hood but Jake Gyllenhaal is even more of a peice of mecha-ass than Russell Crowe.

Green Zone. So extremely silly and Matt Damon such a non-peice of mecha-ass that I gave up after half an hour. Who the fuck enjoys movies like that?

Anyways, Green Zone being so extremely bad more or less released me from the monitor and drove me back to the one book I got around to reading on planes, which was Patrick White's Voss. My literary friends tell me it's the Great Australian Novel. Hmm. It was pretty great, actually, I really enjoyed it, but it was as laboured as a fucking Italian wedding cake. And that isn't all bad, of course, and for me as a reader it worked very well when he was talking about the environment and people's relationship with it - and since that's what the bulk of the book is about, the book works quite well.

Consider:

Heavy moons hung above Jildra at that season. There was a golden moon, of placid, swollen belly. There were the ugly, bronze, male moons, threateningly lopsided. One night of wind and dust, there was a pale moonstone, or, as rags of cloud polished its face, delicate glass instrument, on which the needle barely fluttered, indicating the direction that some starry destiny must take. The dreams of the men were influenced by the various moons, with the result that they were burying their faces in the pregnant moon-women, or shaking their bronze fists at any threat to their virility.

That's nice, right? I like it anyways. But when the style was applied to Voss's relationships with everybody else, or Laura Trevelyan's, and certainly their relationship with each other (which was so miserable, antagonistic, and unappealing a romance I wonder if I would have guessed White was gay without three or four people telling me before I started reading) it got too thick and deliberate. It's hard to drive a plot with poetry, I suppose. But White did well enough as far as I'm concerned, because I really liked the book in the end, even though bits of it came close to making me laugh out loud.

Also there was something somehow ballsy about the labouredness. I have a hard time imagining the shitty male writers who get the most press these days having that sort of commitment to conjuring up mental and environmental states in such painful detail - a commitment to their subject to the exclusion of even sounding like you're making sense. Yeah, that's ballsy. Assholes these days are too busy writing veiled movie treatments or expounding their own retarded views on the state of Modern England or whatever. For Jeebus's sake, just get a blog.