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.

The Shoddyssey Part V

Things I will miss about Belgium:

1. Raw goat milk for morning lattes

That's fucking it. This stupid fucking country. Every time I look at the Art Nouveau and the lovely view from my window and start getting tinges of thinking perhaps I'll be nostalgic one day, memories or whole new examples of functionarial retardation overwhelm me. Of course it's worst at the moment since moving is always a pain in the ass and the modalities of moving out of Belgium are overwhelmingly technocratic.

The other day I realized I was in dispute with four different government institutions, and of course it is "I", that lucky bastard the F-word being as insulated as possible due to his lack of French and the functionaries' lack of English - nonetheless he's got enough of it that he's tearing his hair out too, and he's been really emotionally hit by the way we've been forced to give Lexie away - he has lived with her, after all, for four years now; just a little bit less time than I have, and she is a fucking charmer of a cat.

Anyways, I'd say I was in dispute with the four institutions, but I think they - if the 'disputes' are on their radar at all - would call it business as usual. It is hard to see how any dealings with them at all could avoid feeling like a 'dispute' to a person like me, who's been raised in a society where civil servants perceive their jobs as a series of problems to be solved, and who is now operating in a society where functionaries - they are far too unhelpful to be called 'civil servants' - perceive their jobs as a series of procedures to be enacted.

Reading Voltaire's Bastards again as I go through all this and it's like John Ralston Saul is cheering me on in a commiserating sort of way. I read it for the first time when I was 19 or so and liked it well enough, but I only had the vaguest idea of what he was on about. Now I'm being slapped in the face with so many concurrent examples of stupid fucking cunts who have, as a society, foresworn memory and common sense in favour of 'rational' process that it's really hitting home. And it's the memory thing that is most remarkable. It's as though little fairies appear every night at the bedside of Belgian functionaries and take a shit on their brain.

The other night, as we said bye to some friends we're not likely to see again before departing, one asked what it was like to move from Canada or Australia to Francophone Europe, and obviously there are a few things to discuss in that respect, but the most striking is the difference in brains and notions of intelligence. In terms of quantities of facts we have in our heads, New World Anglos are fucking ignoramuses; our knowledge of international history and geography, maths and the sciences usually fails to come up to scratch with even a stupid Franco-european. And I'm sure our general ignorance would shock to the point of offending almost any Franco-european exposed to it.

But due to the paucity of synthetic and practical training Franco-europeans get - I know one aristocrat here who'd gone to top-crust schools all his life, studied art every year of his education, could comment on every painting in the Louvre, and who had never been taught to draw in perspective; you know, Grade 3 shit - they tend to come off as absolute helpless, incompetent idiots to us as soon as they're presented with a problem. And the thing is, life is a fucking series of problems. That's not even 'sad but true', it's just true, and I'd venture to say it isn't even a problem that life is a series of problems.

Anyways, in a bid to problem-solve myself, I'm trying something new. For my remaining weeks in Belgium, I'm going to try to deal with my problems the way I imagine a Belgian would, which feels like thinking about everything stupidly. Case in point: our neighbours' mosquito-breeding pool. Since I wasn't sure what house it belongs too, I just wrote to our commune (city hall) to tell them about the problem. But rather splendidly, the boundary between my commune and my neighbours' commune runs between our gardens, so I got an email back from the commune - full of exclamation points no less - about how they'd like to help but couldn't because it wasn't in their jurisdiction. More for a joke than anything, I wrote back explaining I wasn't capable of getting in touch with the commune that my neighbours live in because I live in a different commune, so would they please forward my concerns to their counterparts? And you know what - it worked.

Gah

Things are looking quite bad for the cat, my public tears don't seem to have the power they once did, and my last-ditch hope in the matter is that the Belgian ministry will accept the Australian ministry's permission to not be fucking noobs in the case. In a nutshell, my vet can complete the lacking formallity in an afternoon, but in that case the ministry still won't accept his prior rabies vaccinations and blood tests - we'd have to start again and that means Lexie spending an unacceptably long time in quarantine. In which case she's much better off moving in with Sugarplum.

Well, she is in any case. I think that is adding an extra dimension of pain to the situation, but is also a mighty reassurance: she would have been much better off there in the first place, but I just wanted her to stay with me so much, and maybe this is all me being unacceptably greedy. Well, of course it is.

And my landlord has started being bullying. I can deal with bullies well in English, particularly the sexist sort, like him, who try to bully women and then are all nicey-nicey with men; those type tend to buckle like poorly made bridges in an earthquake when you demonstrate a touch of spine and shouting. But in French I find them crippling. So the F-word is mostly taking over landlord-us relations. I just can't bear it anymore.

And work. And all that. Fuck. If I wasn't going on vacation tonight, I'd be fucking shit myself with the sort of generalized stress.

The Shoddyssey part IV

I am in a state, my dears, a fucking state, I tell you, and feeling so sorry for myself I reckon I must be about to hop on the Red Dragon's back, which is fucking perfect, since I'll be taking a ten hour flight to Vancouver on Saturday. And what is doing it is something very fucking simple: uncertainty. Uncertainty at work (I know I'm getting a contract for Australia, but at the moment, have no fucking idea what kind of contract it'll be, and judging from the goings-on there I won't for awhile, and it's doing my head in) and uncertainty over the cat.

There has already been a vast amount of hand-wringing over her, of course, as I've written about before, but yesterday it looked as though finally at least the present stage of things was getting sorted out - I had one more peice of documentation to get, from a government ministry, to be able to apply for her 'visa'. I even had an appointment to go in and pick it up. And then I got a call. It turns out her vet here isn't actually a vet. Apparently the problem is that he didn't bother picking up his diploma from the ministry when he got his qualification 15 years ago, so now the ministry won't issue the paper, because he's not on their rolls as a vet. He is trying to sort things out, obviously, and hopefully the professional inconveniences will light a fire under his fucking retard half-ass (and yes, I'm angry; who the hell doesn't pick up their diploma, for fuck's sake?). But this could basically deep-six the whole fucking thing.

I hate Belgium. I hate it so fucking much. I wish it would fucking die. This fucking shittery of a country should get shoved up France's ass and die like a fucking de-limbed hamster. And this miserable crap-puddle could be the thing that costs me my fucking cat.

To ice the fucking ragecake my fucktard, shitwit Belgian neighbours built a pool in June, swam in it twice, abandoned it (it's now a lovely shade of bright green), and let it turn into a fucking mosquito farm so our apartment is fucking infested with the fuckers. Last night we put up a mosquito net and managed to get our first good sleep in two fucking weeks. Of course I've written to the commune to complain. At this rate the sons of bitches will get on the case in December, when the fucker's frozen over, and then send me a bill for wasting their time, because of course by then there'll be no fucking mosquitos left.

Oh fucking give me patience, lord Jeebus. Or arm me with fucking thunderbolts. Either way.

High social standards

Conscious now of doing a lot of things here for the last, or maybe the last, or the second last time, etc. More than half the time that's a cause for joy. But going to Amsterdam and having no idea when I'll go again, if ever (I've promised myself a few days exploring the Hague before we go and I have some ephemeral plans for spending a month kayaking the Netherlands' industrial waterways someday but who knows what the future will bring) actually really hurt.

Not least because the last time I went was the time I first discovered their lovely botanical gardens. Really small, the size of a postage stamp! Much smaller, I think, than the gardens they've abandoned here in Brussels for the Plantentuin in Meise. And yet they have so much good stuff there. It was a lovely combination of the uncanny Dutch genius for organizing space over time to the best effect, and of lots of butterflies and plants and things. And naturally me being high. Butterflies and lovely plants and being very high is a hell of a combination, I don't care how macho you are.

Speaking of being very high, all the marijuana is not even very high up on the list of things I'll miss about the Netherlands. However, it is sort of symptomatic of what I'll miss most about the Netherlands - a microcosm, if you will, or an ecological marker; in the same way that really awesome sex isn't the most important thing in a relationship, but it is a sign that you're doing something right, and not having any is probably fatal. And it's a marker, or a microcosm, of what seems to me like a sort of well-organized moral honesty that is really appealing.

Let me explain: last time I was in Amsterdam, I was with a bunch of visiting Canadians, one of whom remarked that the front curtains of people's houses were always open. So I told her something that could just be bullshit but which several Dutch people have told me: you always leave your curtains open so people can see that you're not doing anything wrong. And her response - natural from a Canadian perspective - was, well, what if you want to do something wrong?

But the thing about the Netherlands is, what is doing something wrong in a country that tolerates so much? When your most unpleasant, virulent right-wing, xenophobic intolerance is based on a conviction that the problem with foreigners is that they're not tolerant enough - when even the politicians who make it into the international press looking like white supremacist fascist zealots are still about twenty degrees more socially liberal than anything on the market in the Anglophone world - when you have not only legalized but commodified soft drugs - what would count as the sort of wrong behavior that you'd want to close your curtains and hide from the world? All it leaves is actual bad behaviour, because you've basically done away with the idea of 'naughty' being wrong, and there's a sort of honesty in that which is very, very appealing - as though they save moral energy/outrage for things that are actually worth it.

And here's the kicker. Belgians are tolerant too - tolerant to a fucking fault. They'll tolerate the most ham-brained stupidity from their institutions and from each other. They'll tolerate streets caked in dogshit, the horrible, horrible driving on and condition of their roads with the attendant high death rates, and all sorts of inexcusable inconveniences in their public life. The F-word thinks it's an unconscious national conspiracy to universally lower the bar of what is required in terms of being a responsible member of society. Maybe he's right. I don't care, I'm through analyzing; basically, fuck this fucking place; fuck its weather, fuck its landlords, fuck its city halls, fuck its utility companies, fuck its tax department, fuck its retard drivers, fuck all the old ladies who look the other way while their ugly little fucking dogs befoul the sidewalks, and fuck pretty much everything about Belgium that involves more than three of these fucking people congregating for a single purpose, which almost invariably involves the creation of some fucking Lord of the Flies-type pig fuckery.

My point is, not only are the Dutch tolerant - any lazy asshole can be tolerant - they're also sensible. To bring this all back to reefer, not only am I allowed to walk past a police officer sucking on it and smiling (which legally and theoretically I can also do in Belgium), but also that police officer is not going to react in some arbitrary fashion (police arbitrariness is actually enshrined in the drug laws here), and I will have purchased that reefer from an institution at least as much a part of the national taxation system as a bar. And then I can sit down and enjoy it on a clean public bench overlooking a biologically viable canal (Brussels' one river, the Senne, is almost completely covered over, biologically dead, and oh, by the way, apparently the sewage treatment plant they fired up THREE YEARS AGO has already gone offline again, so they're dumping their shit into it unadultered again, which is a major driver of North Sea pollution), and unless I'm in Rotterdam (which has compensatory charms) I'm not likely to step in any dog shit while I'm doing that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in love with the Dutch; particularly in the north they have these atrocious loud, strident voices that makes them sound like some unholy cross between a donkey and a rooster. And as the product of a middle-class English mother I instinctively find their complete lack of tact horrifying. And that whole Black Peter thing is beyond the fucking pale, man. But still. I find their social, moral efficient honesty just so damn refreshing and special and I'll miss it a lot.

The Shoddyssey part III

I've just realized I've got something like 10 weeks before we leave Brussels. Obviously in one way that's an extremely happy thought; but in another, nuts-and-bolts short-term sort of way, it's like this place is putting me through an extended exit hazing in terms of all the absolute bullshit I have to go through with with taxation, local and utilities authorities just to put this scaphic pond behind me. Whenever a suspicion creeps in that I might miss this place, some new incidence of idiocy rolls out.

And this week it has been contrasted painfully - sweet-bitterly, because the potential future sweet is rather more dominant than the transient bitterness - with the utter competence of the Australian authorities. There have actually been a few examples thereof in the last few days, but here's the most remarkable: the F-word called the Australian taxation office to reconcile some old charge. The first thing they did was offer to call him back, since it was an international call. The second thing they did was patch him straight through to the person who could help him, who did - within five minutes the issue was rectified AND he got guidance on what to do when he gets home.

In the meantime, I'm contrasting this with the pie-eyed idiocy and utter fucking runaround I've got from moronic Wallonian public servants over getting my tax refund, which has been pending since fucking April . . . luckily the HR manager took pity on me and that's being sorted by our accountants, or something.

I've decided to try to deal with the rest of the bullshit that crops up by always choosing the Flemish language option when calling large institutions and trusting that they'll speak English, because honestly, three years in this place has left me convinced that the only reason it doesn't sink into the sea is because the Flemish are holding its head above the water. I don't know what's wrong with the Wallonian school system that it creates such a quantity of myopic, bovine, lumpish idiots with which the country's civil services have been burdened.

And I really hesitate to approach the Flems in this fashion . . . it feels really disrespectful to call people up and ask them to speak in another language in their own country. But I've been driven to it by fucking years of dealing with these Frankish dolts.

Anyways, another painful point of comparison between where we're going in Australia (this district) and Brussels is that it's fucking winter there, and the middle of summer here, and the weather is still better than it is here. Adjectives of disgust fail me.

These years in the wettest, moldiest parts of northern Europe have left me with a mighty revulsion for those human traits that have left us incapable of controlling our violent and acquisitive urges sufficiently to all live in harmony in the subtropics. No; instead we're a race of jerk-offs, who have hounded each other to the degree that uninhabitable temperate rainforests, which is certainly what Belgium must have been before being burdened by Belgians, have provided a sodden recourse for entire civilizations.

Anyways.

All else is going well or badly, depending on whether it involves Belgians or not. My visa case officer has all my papers and is processing them, now that the Mounties have came through; she's suggested it'll be another month. The darling woman got in touch with me the day after she got back from vacation; if she was Belgian . . . well, luckily she's not.

Work would like me to spend a week transiting in Singapore to get to know some people there; that's fine with me as we wanted a transit week anyways, and I have a feeling the food and the botanical garden will be superb.

Also I need the nice gentle introduction to Asia that Singapore is reputed to be. Shanghai didn't really count because I was staying at the Four Seasons, which was like a Four Seasons anywhere, except with better food. I have a feeling that in the coming years I'll be eating great quantities of mind-bendingly delicious food, to the degree that the wonton soup they serve in the lobby there will seem utterly plain and uninteresting. But nevertheless I'll never forget it; just at the moment I needed wonton soup the most, there it was, fucking deliciously, after a near-total desert of anything even vaguely Asian in my diet for the previous three years . . .

With the cat, I don't know where things are at. The vet - Wallonian of course - went on holiday after leaving me in the dark about the fate of her blood samples, so the whole process is basically at a stand-still until the end of next week. That's bothering me.

And everything else ticks by . . . slowly but surely.

The invisible line between incompetence and fraud

In a reasonably foul mood this morning. Have been subject to a bout of incompetence or petty fraud (always hard to tell the difference in Belgium) from a local ASBL, the Partenariat Marconi, over our organic drop-offs. There is something unutterably repellent about grown-ups lying like naughty children who've been caught in the act, and something infuriating about them then using the fact that they're non-profit as some sort of excuse. Anyways, I've been having a hard time walking it off, probably because it was combined, yesterday, with a few other pieces of egregious Belgiousity, notably from my old bugabear Belgacom, the very first full day I'm back from vacation . . .

Goddamn it, am I ever sick of this place. My consolation up until now has been "at least you're not still in Paris," but ever since I lost my horror of Bluebird, and left the starving student class behind to take my place in the financially comfortable bourgeoisie (the class for which Paris was quite literally made), and started going back on visits and appreciating afresh its startling beauty, and realized that they have fruit and vegetables there that aren't grown in a hot-house and thus actually taste like what they're meant to be, and that constant low-level Parisian hostility is in many ways preferable to constant elevated levels of Walloon childish incompetence, no matter how many smiles the bollocks is couched in here versus there - well, that trick has lost its charm. I have reached the end of my tether. Have I said that before? Well, this time, I mean it more.

Luckily, the Mounties have shocked my pants off by, about a week after writing to tell me they hadn't yet received the criminal background check application I'd sent them in April so it was likely to take another four months, sending me my criminal background check. That means all the requisite papers for the Australian visa are together, and hopefully it will not be long before it clears. Thank god. We already have a pretty defined shelf-life in terms of Brussels - we already knew when we were going to leave. But now it is sorted for us to dash straight into the arms of another summer, not long after this one finishes. European Winter, you can shove yourself up your own ass.

Red herrings, red rubber and a fucking Wallonian idiot

In between other things recently I re-read Heart of Darkness. I made myself read it more slowly than usual, really sinking my teeth into each sentence. As the F-word says, it's an epic book, an epic in less than a hundred pages. I'm not confident that I'd given it that sort of treatment sufficiently in the past. Of all the books where not a single word is wasted!

To me now of course it's a book about Belgium: I honestly believe that Conrad had in mind to write a book about how much Belgium sucks. But naturally after I've spent three years here that's how I read it, and I'm sure in another year or two I'll read it in a completely different way. And if I could travel back in time to me when I was 15, and read that book for the first time, and say, "Little Miss La Spliffe, this is a book about how Joseph Conrad thought Belgians blew, and you will understand that after you've spent three years with the fuckers," I think I would have given myself a very funny look indeed.

But the thing was, what Belgians did in the Congo was a hecatomb. As an achievement of debasement, the Congo Free State is right up there with the Holocaust - so many millions dead in such a short period of time. I'd even argue that in a sense it was a much greater acheivement of debasement than the Holocaust: first because it was all managed without gas chambers, railroads or massive race paranoia, and secondly because the world's collective response to its repurcussions has been an almighty shrug of the shoulders about how those Congolese can't manage to stop murdering each other, instead of the sort of enduring efforts at popular reparation that let the Israeli army shoot Americans in international waters with a minimum of popular fuss.

The way Antwerp has gone on being an international diamond trading centre for no good reason and the fact that small arms manufacture is the only productive industry left in Wallonia - those things just slip under the radar. It would be like if Germany managed to just slip under the radar as the world's leading producer of striped pyjamas and blue tattoo ink. It would be like they had lost the second world war, had to apologize, but were allowed - no - encouraged, ordered by the rest of the world to keep the Jews, Gypsies and gay people working at the labour camps for another half-century . . .

But yeah - one mustn't make that comparison, must one? Part of the reason I'm feeling Heart of Darkness is a work of classic literature about how Belgians suck is because Belgians are still sucking. Hard. A la Louis Michel, sadly not just some fucking crank on the street, but an ex-EU commissioner whose work focused on the Congo, and who remains significant in post-colonial affairs. I understand that the Nazis had a genocidal philosophy and that the Belgians didn't, as Michel insisted, but that is the red herring of all time. It's a common Belgian defence when the Congo comes up, and a feature of the African museum's only updated exhibit here - minimizing the slaughter by arguing successfully what no serious historians disputes - that the Congo Free State was not an effort at genocide.

However, the fact the Germans murdered millions of people with a plan and the Belgians did it because they didn't give any sort of fuck about whether black people lived or died whilst they were being brutally exploited doesn't incline me one way or the other in terms of who out-evils who. Really just encourages me once more to think of the Belgian history in the Congo as a truly supreme example of debasement: they committed or facilitated all those murders in a psychopathic, unthinking fashion, when you'd think that sort of damage would need to be carried out by calculating sociopaths.

All of which is a long way to say I hope this goes somewhere. There have been apologies; there was the almighty stink a century ago occasioned by Casement and Conrad and Mark Twain and a bunch of other people who worked out the horror of what was going on, maybe one of the first such stinks. But has there been any accountability? I saw Leopold II's sarcophagus the other week, he sleeps soundly with all the other dead kings in an empty white room, where a sarcophagus lies waiting for the present king, with no splash of colour except a security guard making sure visitors don't take a shit on anything. And the post-period - the entire Belgian Congo - the population here has no more idea on that one then what they get out of Tin-Fucking-Tin (though it's nice to know that eventually Herge felt bad about all the hunting scenes in that book).

I'd been wondering how I'm going to accept living in a country like Australia, where it's much easier to argue that genocide did take place with no repurcussions to the population that did the cleansing, and insufficient compensation to them as have been cleansed. Trust a nice spot of upper-class Wallonian idiotic surreality to persuade me it'll probably be an improvement on here. Thanks Louis Michel, you fucking twat.

Get me out of here

Still stuck into, in a savouring way, the True History of the Kelly Gang. Yesterday stumbled across the Jerilderie letter that Ned Kelly himself wrote and that Peter Carey used for the narrative voice. It is a little bit beautiful and the state library of Victoria has scanned and transcribed it. Bless them.

I can't wait to live with a bit of space around me, somewhere warm. And I really can't fucking wait to live around libraries again. What a good fucking idea public libraries are and how I took them for granted as a child. I sometimes have this sort of impersonal memory of my adolescent self mooching around the library, my nose stuck into some book by some author a million miles away in time and space and thinking from my northern Ontario shitburg in the 1990s. And even though I was an angry young thing, these strange escapes made everything tolerable, and now I'm so glad I had that to keep myself from sniffing glue all the time, but at the time I didn't notice at all, and I think assumed it was what everybody did, which was silly because the library was always empty.

Travel abroad and the absolute library dependence engendered by the humanities degree stopped me from taking libraries for granted by my 20s. And then whilst studying in Paris, the school not having its own library - having lending agreements instead with the semi-private libraries of the French 'public' institutions or whoever (by the way, if any young nymphos heading to Paris read this, the military library in Paris is a fucking awesome place to meet fine, trim martial ass) - well, that's when the yearning started in me for the proper way that books were made accessible, face-slappingly accessible back home, for students and the public.

And while there is a whole truckload of things I miss about Toronto, the public library system there has to be close to the top of the list. It is AWESOME. A fucking behemoth with outlets everywhere and a delivery system so you can get books from anywhere and drop them off anywhere, new releases super-fast, and just about everything I wanted. I only had to dip into the U of T library about 20% of the time whilst writing my thesis for the Parisian school, that's how fucking awesome the public library was there, and I was an absolute pig in shit.

Now here I am . . . yearning for a library the same way I'm yearning for space and warmth. And I'm yearning. Yesterday meeting his parents wasn't nearly as awful as I'd been expecting but it was still awful. They look so much like him, which stands to reason, and his father has the same giggling laugh. I just wanted to hear that laugh over and over because it was like hearing him laugh again.

Anyways, afterwards I really badly needed to get wasted, and so became so. Came home to the fucking freezing Art Nouveau apartment, cranked up the futile heater and lay on the couch for awhile, trying to finish my brain off for the night by getting enormously high, bundling up in a housecoat and the Snuggie Magnum had sent for Christmas. And while I got comfortable pretty damn fast because this Rotterdam reefer could soothe Richard Simmons at his tweakiest, I felt so fucking oppressed by the damn Nordic darkness tapping on the window and leaking in through the cracks, and the heavy housecoat and the heavy Snuggie and the lightless blue of the gas fireplace and having to curl up on the couch just to be warm enough to get comfortably numb, and I wanted with all my heart to be somewhere where I could be outside - where I could sit under the enormity of the sky and look over the enormity of the earth and not be fucking shivering - I felt that I was already buried in a tomb here.

So yeah, I'm fucking yearning. I feel that I'm close to the end of my tether and I'm starting to choke.

Suicide trees of the world

So this feeling of liking trees better than people probably has a lot to do with social dissatisfactions springing from the unsavoury things being done to and with trees that I come across at my job. A lot of it probably also has something to do with getting really high and watching The Private Life of Plants and thinking it was just the coolest thing ever. (Still do.) A lot more of it also has to do with growing up with a surfeit of trees and a deficit of people, while presently living in a situation with a deficit of trees and a surfeit of people.

(Almost funny story: a couple of nights ago, we were walking home and I - ever a pleasure to live with - was maintaining an unbroken stream of profanities about stupid Belgian wankers, et cetera, incapable of all of the fundaments of livable civilized organization, et cetera, plus the weather sucks . . . on the last stretch, the F-word broke in to request I shut up so we could concentrate on enjoying the evening air. I obliged, but almost without missing a beat a guy ten feet in front of us started being violently, noisily, extendedly sick on the pavement, and a yelling drunk chick thirty feet in front of us started leaning on her car horn. Neither stopped until after the arrival home. Nearly a moment of win, except it was really disgusting and annoying.)

Anyways, wherever the liking-trees-better-than-people has come from, obviously it's made me quite interested in trees, and the more I find out the more interested I'm getting. They are so fucking cool and their reproductive strategies are mind-blowing - or rather, their life cycles are mind-blowing, in the sense that time and mortality to a tree mean something completely different than what time and mortality mean to an animal, that is to us.

I guess the most remarkable example, because of the way these different conceptions of time and mortality intercept with a homonym, is the suicide tree. Say it to some people, and they'll think of the cerbera odollam, an Indian/Malagasy swampy tree, used as an ornamental, whose kernels have been used countless thousands of times to stop the beating of otherwise healthy human hearts in some of the most crowded and impoverished parts of the planet, where our race's life has been, as a generality, fruitful and yet horrendously, unignorably short. And yet not short enough for some. (That having been said there are an awful lot of them in Kerala, which is a remarkable place.)

Say it to others and they'll think of the tachigali versicolor, a central American jungle-y rainforest-y tree that lives to be about a hundred years old, grows to about 50 meters tall, flowers once, and then dies. The thinking goes that the gap it creates in the forest canopy by its death benefits its saplings by letting them get a little more light than they would otherwise, and that the benefit of releasing seeds so seldom (the species has a seeding event every five years or so) is that predators are rather less likely to eat them or the saplings: flowering, seeding and sprouting so intermittently, they would never be a primary food source that predators would learn or evolve to rely on.

Tai chi is a kind of martial art, I suppose

Really need the brief escape to the Ardennes this weekend. Last night in tai chi I spent about 15 minutes of what should have been pure tranquility, what should have been my mid-week détente with my professional stress, wanting to punch these dumb gallic bitches who wouldn't stop chattering in their dumb gallic high-pitched squeaky little voices during the exercises. Punch them right in the mouths. It doesn't matter that I'd cut my hand on their teeth and get an infection, I thought. It'd be worth it. I'd enjoy the memory all my life, long after the antibiotics stop making me poo funny.

Of course I didn't. It would have embarrassed the F-word, who was there too. And even though I certainly wouldn't go to prison as they're too full in this retarded country for anybody who gets a sentence under three years to actually be incarcerated, and even if I did I could just escape via helicopter because these fucking fuckwits here are too fuckwitted to co-ordinate putting up a couple of goddamn wires (the prison in the story, BTW, is a seven-minute walk from our place), it might interfere with my Australian residency application. Lucky gallic bitches.

Anyways, I have my doubts about the tai chi class this year. Too many chattering gallic bitches, it's been moved from seven minutes away (directly across from the prison in the story, actually) to fifteen minutes away, and the timing is way off - 20h30 to 22h. That means I have to eat before-hand, but Wednesday being deadline day I can't do so early enough in the evening to avoid feeling like I'm going through the session with a bowling ball in my tummy. Also I find tai chi beautifully energizing, which means I don't really get any sleep Wednesday nights anymore. And finally, 20h30 is usually the time, these days, that my professional stress catches up with me and I get really good-for-nothing exhausted, making it fucking penitential to go out into the fucking Nordic darkness of the early autumn nightfall.

Big wah

Working from home today. Sniffly, coughy, and fucking frightened of getting sick before going to Portugal. Mind you I was coughy and sniffly before going to Croatia, and the minute I stepped off the plane there everything seemed to clear up. Sometimes I wonder if the flu actually exists as a virus rather than our bodies demonstrating their misery at us making them live in a Neanderthal climate. And once in awhile it turns into a pandemic and a kajillion of us die. We're not Neanderthals, for fuck's sake, we're fucking savannah monkeys. What are we doing up here? What the fuck are we doing up here?

In other news, the sun is out for now, so at least I can write about the disintegration of western capitalism on my balcony. Yayyyy! Also last night we started watching Coast, and it's adorable. In a deeply public school way, though . . . had some discussions with Rodelina about that - about people from public schools in Britain, and people who are invisible, or football players, or people fucking football players. Sometimes I wonder why anybody stays in that country - why be sidelined like that?

Riding the moronic road

Practicing waking up early in preparation for my upcoming second-go-round of the driver's exam, which is scheduled early in the morning later this week. I'm nervous, but it's not as bad as last time - different rather - thinking that I'd be a real asshole if I failed twice, rather than thinking it's going to be very hard to pass. I feel a great deal more ready than last time, and honestly think I'm better than most of the other drivers circulating around Belgium, which sadly is saying very little (and is far from a guarantee that I'll pass the exam, as they tightened up their giveaway policies a lot over the last 20 years). For example, I don't box intersections and if there's a t-junction immediately preceding an intersection I brake a little earlier so I don't block that either. As far as I can tell about 1 in 3 Bruxellois drivers are intellectually capable of such a feat. They are real shitheads on the road - oblivious motherfuckers - and haven't really kept up with the changes in their own driving laws.

Pedestrian crossings are the most obvious example to visitors and new arrivals, most visitors and new arrivals being obliged to cross streets quite early on in the process. It's only been within the last ten years that the rules have been changed and that drivers are obliged to stop when people are using them, and of course they don't. Why would they? There are no fucking consequences if they fail to stop. There are no traffic cops hanging around with cameras. They can even buzz a crossing whilst talking on a cellphone and kill a fucking pensioner without any jailtime or even substantial loss-of-license time. And judging from some of the really fuckwitted behaviour I've seen and heard of here, either many drivers are utterly unaware of the change in the law, or else become such self-involved sociopaths when they get behind the wheel that it loses all meaning.

Three examples:

1. Some asshole in an Audi cuts me off on the way to work. In my classy North American way, I flip him a bird. The cunt stops mid-intersection, blocking traffic of course, and starts to get out of his car. I'm far more bark than bite but I'm sick of nearly getting killed by these troglodytes, so I start walking over, determined to get in some beats even if it means getting the shit kicked out of me. Either the asshole in the Audi notices that I'm a girl, or that I'm spoiling for a fight, or that the early morning rush-hour traffic has been blocked by his stopping the middle of a busy intersection and everybody is honking at him; he closes the door and speeds off.

2. Next to the Porte de Hal, which cars go about quite fast despite a liberal sprinkling of pedestrian crossings, we saw some fat old red-faced fuck in an expensive grey convertible - I believe it was also an Audi, they're beautiful cars but they get driven by goddamn incompetents - slam on the brakes and narrowly avoid hitting a skinny little teenage boy who was halfway across the road. Embolism gets out of his paused car, blocking traffic of course, and walks up with his dicky chest out to have it out with the kid, ignoring the horns behind him and shouted abuse from the many pedestrians all around, who'd been freaked out by nearly seeing a minor's guts splattered all over the cobblestones. The big fat cunt takes a swing at the boy for daring to get in his way and lands two or three; as we go over to intervene, the boy cleverly retaliates by repeatedly kicking the front of the Audi. The man realizes he has rather more to lose in this situation, gets back in his car, and speeds off.

3. A friend of ours, another Canadian, who lives here with his family was partway across a crosswalk when another cunt - he doesn't remember if it was in an Audi or not - cuts him off. He's a temperate man but as he was holding his infant daughter in his right arm at the time, he angrily shook his left fist in the air as the car sped away. The goddamn jackass reverses, blocks the intersection (of course - it's just not an incident unless you're getting in everyone's fucking way), gets out of his car despite the imprecations of the woman sitting in the passenger seat, walks over to our friend, and punches him in the face - swinging over the head of the baby girl. Once more - and this was the same in all three examples - he pulls this shit in a very crowded location absolutely stuffed with onlookers, and in this case, according to our friend, about 20 people immediately descended from the nearby cafe and sidewalks, shouting at the asshole and explaining what sort of human being he was for taking a swing at a guy holding a baby over the head of the baby. Punchy mainly looks baffled.

I know that every nationality drives stupidly in its own way, though I don't really know it on a practical, experiential level about any other country like I do about this one. I've heard the French are congenitally incapable of signalling a turn or a lane change, for example, and Italians have the supremest disregard for the lives and limbs of cyclists that I've ever witnessed. But Belgians - honestly, the way they drive makes me hate their fucking guts. It makes me think all of the stupid Belgian jokes I've ever heard are soundly based in fact. I know they don't enjoy their Newfie-of-Europe stereotype, but when they get behind the wheel, they're not fighting it too hard.

The limits of the zoological approach

I am really having a hard time being here at the mo, especially since having the chat at work with my managers about when and how I'd like to leave next year - it means that now there is no chance they'll take the step of firing me (very expensive in Belgium), which means I'm almost definitely now here for another 14 to 16 months. It feels like a prison sentence today.

Of late, since I decided to take a more zoological approach to life with this nation of fuckwits, I've been having an easier time overall. As much as I'd like to slot entire nationalities into comprehensive stereotypes, you do find multiple intelligent and resourceful people here able to have an idea and take it to some sort of natural conclusion without accidentally suffocating themselves on it, and then when you find those people it's such a lovely surprise. And if you remind yourself that you're not here forever, some of the stupid things the Wallonians do, like name their dogs Caramel, or descend into utter blank-faced, lobotomized shrugging confusion when you scream profanities at them for nearly running you over on pedestrian crossings, or take 8 months to proceed through any bureaucratic process, get quite - well - 'cute' isn't the word. 'Zoologically interesting' probably works better.

The thing is, zoological approach or not, this is a bad, unhealthy place with the same endemic corruption as one finds in Italy, the same manipulations of power, the same culture of immunity and being above the law once you have a certain amount of money or a certain amount of fame. All the way from the child-rape-and-snuff-party-lovin' elite (multiple people claiming to have been victims came forward to identify and testify; no follow up) to TV presenter and children's author Gie Laenen (sentenced to four years in prison a year ago for sexually assaulting 25 boys over a 30 year period last year; has not yet been arrested to begin his prison sentence and, apparently, will not be) to an annoying 26-year-old TV presenter, David Antoine, who killed a pensioner with his Audi last year while she was using a pedestrian crosswalk and he was talking on his fucking cellphone (his license was suspended for two months and he has to do 100 hours of community work).

In all those cases and hundreds more, there's a pervasive, revolting tendency to fail to protect the most vulnerable in favour of protecting the ruling classes. And the ruling classes don't even use their immunity to develop any sort of competence. They just use it to give the world excellent basis for those persistent rumours Madeleine McCann is here - in the fucking paedophilia capital of the developed world. Retch. Tout court, this place is disgusting and hay fever isn't the only way it makes me fucking sick.

I guess it's been given an excellent example of victimizing the defenseless with impunity by its dominant religion. I love how the Catholic Church pretends to be falling all over itself to address instances of child abuse at its institutions in the past, and still goes through every arduous and expensive legal channel it can find to prevent its child abusers from being named or facing criminal prosecution. When Mum converted I tried hard to respect her decision and her revelation, but I had to ask eventually how she could stomach the very, very old corruption of the Church as an institution. She'd actually brought it up with her spiritual advisors, and they'd helped her draw a distinction between the spiritual and the political sides of Catholicism, which had reassured her. Which, I forebore from pointing out at the time and will struggle to continue to not point out, out of respect for her decision and her revelation, is marvellously fucking convenient for the political side of Catholicism.

The Red Dragon hears unhealthy mental voices

One day, this coming year I have left in Belgium will seem like a mere iota, like a speck of dust, like a tiny tiny sliver of time I'd nonetheless give one of my eyeteeth to get back on my deathbed, or when I have exhausting children and familial responsibilities, or when my vagina stops working. But right now, at its beginning, the enormity of it all is pretty fucking exhausting to contemplate. Making it more enormous at the moment are two things: my suck at driving practice last night, and a growing pessimism and nervousness about Monday's test - it has a 70% failure rate, because this fucking moronic nation I live in has decided the best way to make the roads safer is to crack down hard on the young drivers, instead of stick a bug up their cops' asses to get them on the road cracking down on the execrable, and I mean fucking staggeringly execrable older drivers who got their license back in the days when you didn't need a license (not obligatory until the 60's here).

Seriously. Fuck, this place sucks.

The good news is that last night when we drove out to the country to practice my manouevres, we busted a couple canoodling on an isolated grassy bank. They turned bright red, jumped into different cars, and sped away in different directions. Spread the fucking misery, man.

The second thing making the coming year enormous is chronic illness. My parents, who are hardly anxious for me to move to the arse-end of the planet where they'll have to sit their frames on aeroplanes for 24 hours to reach me (I foresee a great deal of meeting partway in Vancouver, which I'm already fucking excited about) and who probably worry about my finances even more than I do, are nonetheless all for me getting out of Brussels as soon as I can manage it because I'm always sick. No headaches, thank god, which the F-word seems to be maintaining his own constant of, but I feel like I've had the same flu for the last two years. Anyways, my parents still have the power to make me reframe debates in my head, and right now part of my head is saying to the other: 'who cares about money? Who cares about your career? Who cares if the F-word needs a chance to learn French? Who cares about all that when you're going to get fucking leukemia or something if you keep living in this filthy miasmic cesspit?'

This is not a healthy way to think. I can only hope I have a better perspective after I pass my driver's license exam. Actually, I can only hope I pass my driver's license exam.

Bundle of nerves and nerves and bone and hair

For someone who spends so much time whining on a keyboard every morning, it's astonishing how much I had to drum up my moxy to express myself to my employers, and say "I'm not happy," and have a go at explaining why. At the end I was so keyed up and so overwrought that my practice driving session later that evening was nearly disastrous for the entire city of Brussels. I think, however, the work confrontation went well, in the sense that I think I'll get what I want, or at least am much more likely to get what I want than I was before the confrontation. Now the F-word and I have to be quite, quite clear on what we want - and this morning, that's keying me up. Will the dust never fucking settle? Or does that have to wait until senility?

My driving exam is in two weeks. Less. A week and a half. After last night, I am not oozing confidence. It looks like being angry makes me a better driver, and being nervous, overwrought and preoccupied makes me a much worse driver. Go fucking figure.

But let's have a go at accentuating the calm and positive: my peas and lemon cucumbers have sprouted and the tomatoes/tomatilloes are going gangbusters. It has been a lovely sunny spring so far, very uncharacteristically so for Brussels, and that's been helping them along beautifully. I'm willing to dedicate my life to fighting climate change and it's going to be one of the greatest disasters our planet has ever known, but honestly, it can only do this fucking shithole of a city I live in favours.

Oh well done, Spliffe, that was some marvellous accentuation of the positive. I think I'm a little extra pissy about Brussels today because Bordeaux was also lovely and sunny, but despite being of a comparable sort of size, the air was clear - here things get hazy after a city block because of the miasma of car exhaust, industrial emissions, spores and pollen. Bordeaux has taken a lot of measures to get cars of the streets, and it's next to mountains and seas and farms, and Brussels subsidizes the criminal overuse of cars, and it's next to Germany's farting industrial asshole, which due to prevailing winds actually has better air quality than here.

Your grey-haired daughter loves you and knows how not to eat peanuts

My parents are here, oh them of the auspicous genes, having a nap at the mo while I don't, I repeat, don't go to the office, which is pretty great and makes up for any little niggling annoyance at being asked for the umpteenth time if I'm managing my food allergies properly or some such - God, no wonder I was such an asmathic little drip as a teenager. But in a larger sense I'm learning how to manage such little niggling annoyances - feel them and enjoy them. They're luxurious annoyances that not everybody benefits from and that I, assuming I manage a normal lifespan, will not always benefit from - not just because of mortality in his ugliest guise - but because of the aging process gradually reversing our dynamic of futile, unwelcome concern. So may as well benefit from the annoyances now. It all comes from love.

We've been having a nice time and eating superbly and now they understand why I hate my job, so will hopefully only worry the inevitable amount when I get fired/quit and hippy out. Drinking far more than I usually do; I think half the reason I became such a pothead is not liking drink as much as most of my family does. But it's fun. We went to my neighborhood's wine-tasting festival, which in a European context means something besides hipsters with nothing else to do that night sauntering around a congress centre being ignorant and putting on an act of slightly less ignorance. It means a big marquee full of overweight Belgians getting fucking sloshed on fine wine, peeing in the corners and then getting led out in handcuffs after paying a 10 euro cover. Frankly, it made me appreciate hipsters. I never thought I'd say that, but you try sampling wines in a tent full of moronic elephants sweating stale tobacco-scented grappa, and you'd appreciate hipsters too. It was fun, though, and then we went to my favourite tajine place. Generally we've been having a nice time. They're leaving in the morning. It seems dreadfully short, it's bizarre how these visits always seem so short when you're in the home stretch. Oh well.

Anything about anything

Remind me to not say anything about anything again, ever, when it comes to purchasing decisions. The F-word's illustrious Mac gave up the ghost this morning. It's as dead as my dead, dead Dell. Although my guess is that he'll be able to fix it again, or else the Mac people in Ghent will.* The Mac people in Brussels are morons, from all accounts. There are a lot of moronic things about this city. I'm fucking sick of it.

No, really. I'm sick of it. This weekend was a tipping point. Or rather tipping points, as springtime has came to the penises of the men again, so when I need to calm down and get some fresh air and solitude, which this poor little northern Ontario girl needs to do a couple of times a week, I can't go to the Dudenpark and have a nice sit on my favourite tree trunk and a nice think about things while the birds sing, or at least not without some poor horny bastards coming over and trying to fuck me. I get rather angry - I mean, I'm sitting in the middle of a forest by myself dressed like a lumberjack, obviously I want to be left alone, why can't you losers just fucking leave me alone - but at the same time, I don't blame them. Not because I'm aware of my remarkable irresistibility, of course, but because I understand that male sexuality is based on Eternal Hope, and they can't help it. It's a symptom of where we live - Brussels, Belgium, Europe in general. It's too crowded here. You can't be alone; there are always men when the weather isn't positively foul, and men will always try to fuck you, except, apparently, after you hit menopause when you become invisible, or at least that's what they tell me, and you know what, right at the moment being invisible to strangers doesn't sound half bad. Maybe I'll feel differently about it at the time.

In a general sense, the crowdedness of the continent is something we discuss when we have a think about where we'll settle down. We both come from empty countries with cultural atmospheres that are not, by most measures, as rich as those of Europe, or at least as full, or at least as old. (Argument contra: what I miss about Canada are the multicultures; even Brussels, one of the most cosmopolitan cities on mainland Europe, can't hold a candle to the multicultures of Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal.) Heard the one about the difference between yoghurt and Australia? Yogurt has its own culture! Hah . . . hah? So we live in a crowded continent, and the benefit of that is a rich cultural life; if there's nothing attractive in Brussels culturally one weekend, we can breeze off to Paris, or Amsterdam, or Bonn, or anywhere we like, really, which wouldn't be a possibility if we were based in an Australian or Canadian city. That's the good thing about living in a crowded continent. The bad thing is . . . everything else. I have to say I'm coming to the end of my patience with the crowding.

*He fixed it himself, of course, in about three minutes. Remind me to say anything about anything I want, forever.

The Red Dragon is a learner driver

You fat Belgian cunts,

I'm driving around in a fucking car covered with fucking 'L's and other big signs about how I'm a fucking learner driver in a rental car. As a learner driver in a rental car, I'm not going to go fast. If you don't like that, you can

A) fuck off and die
B) pass me

But what you can not do - not, in any case, without revealing yourself as one of nature's own pukebags - is ride my back bumper with your highbeams on. You stupid fucking shitwipes.

It won't make me go any faster. It will just make me mad. I'm 30 years old now and I don't care what you think. But the fact that you're doing it to me means you're also doing it to dumbfuck little wired 16 year old learner drivers who have been drinking too many caffeinated sodas, who may eventually panic, speed up, lose control of the car, and flame out at great cost to human life and property. Is that what you want, you brainless clapped-out fucks?

Holy fuck, the idiocy of this made-up nationality really makes me want to vomit.

Yours, unfortunately, for another year or two,

Mistress La Spliffe

P.S. Holy shit.

Reflections on a European voyage

Travelling in this over-ripened cheese of a continent at Christmastime is fucking penitential. We had this intensely beautiful and amusing holiday in Sicily and Calabria - more Milos Foreman than Sergio Corbucci it may have all been, and I did have the exquisite pleasure of losing my keys on the first day, but by Sunday, when we were due to fly back to Germany, I was feeling excellent. Well rested, well fed, well fucked, well et cetera. Some of the more family-friendly aspects of the fortnight will no doubt get exposed here in the coming days.

And then, Stefanito got mixed up about when I needed to be at the aeroport - two hours away on dreadful mountain roads - and decided for a marathon session in the bathroom. The entire household took turns begging him to hurry but if there is an Irresistible Force in this world, it's an Italian man occupying a fucking toilet. Anyways, eventually he popped out, responded to the situation, and fucking gunned us across some of the worst winter roads in Aspromonte. That little Fiat was going so fast I thought it would disintegrate. Intensely beautiful region we were burning through, but an absolute shithole - our (Reggio) side of the mountain is okay, or at least as okay as Aspromonte gets, but the Santa Eufemia side is where they took the northern kidnap victims back in the day and no doubt where all sorts of bad shit is got up to now, up to and including some cockless guinea motherfucker taking a bead on us with a handgun as we whizzed by.

We got to the aeroport twenty minutes late, but it turned out that was only bad for my nerves, because Italy being Italy the check-in was crawling at a retarded snail's pace. In fact, we checked in ten minutes before the fucking plane took off, and security was a breeze - all the women setting off the metal detectors with their belt buckles, et cetera, all the security men gaily , or rather heterosexually, waving them through. Not such a breeze, however, that the F-word didn't have confiscated from his hand luggage my bottle of Burt's Bees skin creme Elvis and the Vermeer Lady had mailed me from Vancouver for Christmas (not available in Belgium) which for some inexplicable reason he a) had, and b) had in his fucking hand luggage. I was pissed. I still am.

Luckily for him, Europe was about to overshadow his inexplicability by losing my checked baggage. Not much more to say about that. If it doesn't arrive I'll be fucking pissed. Aside from all the stuff typically in luggage that one doesn't want to lose, there was some olive oil soap in it my family makes from their farm, and little things for the neice, and a couple of packets of Caffe Mauro, roasted in Reggio and, once more, not available in motherfucking Belgium. Not to mention another bottle of Burt's Bees moisturizer that my mum bought me last time I was in Canada. Fuck. Uberfuck. The F-word's luggage got through, but the jar of expensive and exquisite thyme honey we'd bought in Syracusa had got broken despite careful bubble wrapping. Fucking hurrah. Three cheers for European luggage handlers, the fucking trogladyte cunts.

So speaking of Canada, northern Europe is in the grip of a rather refreshing Canadian-esque cold snap, with reasonable quantities of snow on the ground and temperatures bottoming out around -7 C. Pleasant to me, utterly chaos-producing to these incompetents. Let's face a fundamental fucking fact here: Germany and Belgium are northern countries. The last couple of years have been warm, but the winters here traditionally involve cold, snow, and, you know, fucking winter. And then in the last three days, five fucking inches of the shit falls from the sky and has the temerity to remain on the ground, and suddenly it's fucking Armageddon here. Getting from Dusseldorf to Brussels last night had me in tears. Tears of fury rather than despair, yes, but tears nonetheless.

And then, to cap the whole motherfucker off, when we ground into town around 22h in no mood to cook, I bought us some falafel from my favourite kebab shop, and they've changed the fucking recipe or supplier or something, and now it tastes like deep-fried sand. Fuck. Titfuck. Fistfuck. Truckfuck. Et cetera. And as if all that wasn't enough, now I have to go to work, because I haven't been fired yet. Call this a fucking recession? Porca troia. And fuck.