The joys of the childless bourgeoise

Few objects make me 'get' objectophilia but my new shoes get me pretty close. My emotions toward them stop just short of sexual but there's no doubt that their kind and caring embrace of my feet makes me feel warm and fuzzy. They are fucking beautiful and feel as though they were made for me by fucking German fairies in a good mood. Meindl Como. Lovely and wide to accommodate my big fat fucking flipper feet.

I'm so glad that they're Meindls mostly because that means they should last forever and I'll never have to throw them away*. My last shoes really broke my heart. They were Keen PTC laces. I wore them every day I couldn't wear sandals and didn't have to look pretty for a year, because they were comfortable as hell and could take five or six hours walking without my feet getting sore. And then by the end of the summer the soles had practically worn away and the leather uppers were falling to bits despite mending over the year. Beautiful design, especially for people with fat fucking feet like mine, but absolute peices of shit. Like Ava Gardner in The Killers.

So anyways as I was paying for them I realize I buy really expensive shoes. I don't know how they compare to the retarded pretty designer shoes television tells me women fetishize because when I buy 'pretty' they tend to be artisanal clogs or Clarks factory seconds (oh please, let me be an extra on Sex and the City III: The HRT Diaries), but there is no doubt they cost a fuck of a lot of money. And there's also no doubt that despite being as tight as a healthy asshole I don't really hesitate to drop the money on shoes.

Or mattresses for that matter. Which is on my mind, because yesterday I sold our bed to a nice American girl. As she drove away with it I reflected nostalgically on all the fantastic fucking that had been done on it, and also on the F-word, who's even tighter than a virgin's asshole (you can thank Das Boot for that bit of tastefulness), telling me once that I'd been right to insist on us buying the most expensive mattress in Ikea with the most basic frame (men, never hesitate to tell your women when they're right; it softens their hearts and creates cherished memories). The thing is dropping tonnes of money on mattresses and shoes feels like a good thing to drop it on, like an investment in not having to have back surgery in twenty years.

Which got me to thinking about something else he'd said: that once I move to Australia, because of the contract I got, I'm going to be fucking loaded in a way that will change my life. An idea I poo-pooed of course because it'll be contract work, it could end any time, I'll be saving for dear life, I disdain lifestyle inflation, I already feel like I haven't been denying myself anything, etc, etc. But he pointed out it wasn't so much that as that I can buy the things I reckon I need - super fucking awesome shoes and really nice mattresses among them - without worrying about debt and things like that. That I'd be able to fly Lexie over to Australia without worrying where the money is going to come from if she doesn't work out at Sugarplum's. The big life-changing, he felt, would be in me losing a certain class of worries.

I like that.

*Because they're the men's model of course, Meindl's women's models are CRAP that fall apart if you breathe on them, I know from experience. I always get men's shoes/sandals now for any purpose that doesn't involve looking pretty because a) I'm fucking butch and b) they actually last more than a season.

Beautiful degeneracy

I've been reckoning I'm done with Europe, but I just booked us a B&B for the night before we fly to Singapore and it has a balcony looking over the Vatican (albeit distantly because we're cheap). Despite me feeling the Vatican is a monument to hypocritical, degenerate and enduring cupidity, that still gives me a little frisson. What better way to say goodbye to Europe than to take our breakfasts staring at the Vatican before flying off and spending a week gorging ourselves on lovely, lovely Asian food in a tropical climate? I guess dropping a tab would make it better, actually. But I freak out in aeroplanes as it is.

In a week I depart Brussels, and I think that's what I'm really looking forward to, more than departing Europe. The F-word tells me that my time here will become very distant and dreamlike very quickly, and that Romans are quite lovely people, much nicer than the people in Florence, where we bonded more than a decade ago over tales of tourist-gouging cuntitude. Well. I'm starting to get stoked over it all. Also he tells me it's still sandals-and-t-shirt weather down there. Fucking A+.

And despite me being sick of how fucking crowded the whole continent is we do have plans to come back. I want to learn German which means some months in Berlin, and we both want to learn Spanish which means some months in Spain - for some reason I'm not too curious to go to South America, besides Brazil, and even that I could take or leave. And it won't even be too long from now since it's something we want to do before the potential kiddies are school age; my guess is that getting canned at work will be our cue for a mammoth trip.

Anger ligament snapped

Oh boy oh boy. The clock's a'tickin' on this fucking place. Been idlly planning our trip up the Pacific coast of Australia and I'm starting to get totally stoked. Fuckin' animals and botanical gardens and beaches the whole way. Fucking A+.

The upshot is that this morning when I was doing my qi gong and on the fifth movement of the cycle - I forget what it's called but it's the 'angry' move, a sort of haka on ketamine, when you're intended to focus your anger - I realized for the first time in literally years, I'm totally short on anger. No joke. I've been fucked around like crazy since getting back here by institutional types, as has been normal and infuriating, but I don't fucking care; in fact I've laughed in three people's faces after they've presented me with one logical monstrosity or another.

The thing is it doesn't matter anymore - I've got my tickets, my cat's safe, I'm willing to walk away from my apartment deposit, I'm leaving a fake address, I am so outties - and these poor trogs are stuck in this mildewy puddle of a failed state for the rest of their naturals. Schadenfreude and anger are simply not compatible. The sad part is I think they know it. I've got more passionate, hurt responses out of people from laughing in their faces these past few days than I ever did from becoming visibly angry and spitting out insulting truths. Oh well. As long as no one stabs me, I'll be good.

Oh yeah, except one of the institutional types to fuck me around and who I started laughing at was at the post office, so I'm not getting my mail forwarded, so definitely don't send anything to me here. Ever. Again. Fucking A+.

Like the guy in the thing there

Back in Brussels and exhausted, sick, but recharged. Spent the afternoon trying and failing to do administrative things and the silly Kafkaesque impossibility of it all is just funny now. Since Lexie is safe and on the road to happy at Sugarplum's and our stuff is being shipped and I'm 10 days from my departure, I'm starting to feel footloose. Nothing left here I couldn't walk away from in 30 seconds, as the guy says in that movie.

Sort of crappy to come back to the empty apartment though. I used to pride myself on my self-sufficiency, but take away my man and my cat and suddenly the place that's been my home for three and a half years feels like a temporary kennel when I come back to it from a sojourn at an old friend's house and Luke Duke's basement. Love is quite a thing; love is home. I don't think I'd ever quite realized that before. And there's no love for me left in Brussels, so it is very strange to be back, especially coming from Toronto, which is so full of people I love, and despite years of seperation is off the chart, relative to Brussels, in terms of what feels like home.

Anyways, I'm not self-sufficient. And I see how I could be, and it looks like shit. I have a new respect for cat ladies; they've really made quite a psychologically healthy choice by having all those animals to love, relative to your typical modern Western shut-in.