Not so lush

I'm still so sick. Went to the doctor's yesterday because I knew I wouldn't be making it to the office today, either, barring a miracle, and he told me that Brussels is a polluted hole that squanders billions of euros of its gross civic production by having roughly half the workforce ill like I am at any one time in the winter. I already knew it but it's good to hear it from a health professional and good to imagine that someday I'll live somewhere that won't fucking make me sick.

Didn't finish the Seymour Hersh book yesterday because I watched the entire first season of a twee little BBC comedy called Gavin and Stacey one of my bosses lent me. British television seems to have got so fucking cutesy and don't-worry, you'll-all-find-love, even-if-you-give-it-up-on-the-first-night-while-your-best-mates-fuck-in-the-hallway. At least there's a refreshing element of realism there. All my most emotionally satisfying and enduring romantic relationships began with a genital collision at the first opportunity, mostly because all of my romantic relationships began with a genital collision at the first opportunity. Why waste time, why deny yourself physical joy just for the benefit of cockteasing some poor sap into thinking you're less accessible than you feel? Sometimes I've wondered where my Britishness comes out, besides the passport and the inordinate fondness for money management, and I think I can safely say that my sexuality used to be far more British (why waste time?) than Italian (wherein the vagina is a wrench to be used sparingly to extract various benefits and concessions) or Canadian (Cosmo-style internal wrangling and calculation about when to first give it up, in a generally futile effort to emotionally compete with a Canadian man's PlayStation). But now I'm in a long-term relationship and those are little nationalities onto themselves, or all over themselves as the case may be.

Anyhoo, Gavin and Stacey was almost unrelentingly twee but I couldn't look away. And the Welsh accents were so cute. And now it's behind me. After that the couch was too comfy to move so I watched the rest of The Life of Mammals - the tree animals, the monkeys, and then, in the final episode, the Us - the great apes. I'm all for giving those other assholes full status as humans. Why not? They might be a pack of big homicidal jerks, especially the pan trogs, but then so are people. And seriously, how is an orang-utan any less human than a 17-th century drunk from a Hogarth engraving or the sort of moron who feels represented by this? Anyways, David Attenborough is class on a stick, man, that alone makes up for every bit of twee crap the BBC has invited me to laugh at.

Baseball porn

Double fisting books at the moment. First, carrying on with Gould's Full House, which is just lovely and gets better with every page. Last night I stopped reading just before the chapter where he starts talking about the death of the .400 batting average so we'll see if he can maintain my interest. I only like baseball if I'm at the game and if I'm fucking drunk. I'm not a big drinker ordinarily; they don't not call me Mistress La Tipple for nothing. But at a baseball game I like to swill down the liquor and scream at the diamond. God - makes me miss Canada. Once we got kicked out of the Skydome for having smuggled in harder stuff than the watered down beer they served exclusively, and it was awful because I hadn't fully got my drink on yet. But one of the guys in the group had just yelled at a player called Jermaine that the Jackson Five wanted their least popular member back, and I was still laughing.

Anyhoo, listen to this nice passage from Full House - comes in the chapter where Gould describes his own first, non-fatal but badly prognosised bout of cancer:

. . . we must stand resolutely against an unintended cruelty of the "positive attitude" movement - insidious slippage into a rhetoric of blame for those who cannot overcome thier personal despair and call up positivity from some internal depth . . . How dare we blame someone for the long-standing constitution of their tendencies and temperament if, in an uninvited and unwelcome episode of their life, another persona might have coped better? If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed to the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.

The whole thing so far is written with that much clarity and incision. Fuck, it's good.

Anyhoo, double-fisting that with a book of shorter fiction from the inescapable Paul Theroux, The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro. Bought it in all innocence without realizing it was going to be soft porn. Oh, Paul. Well, alright then. Very masculine soft porn, of course, with passages about well-preserved beauties licking jizz off their lace gloves after getting their jollies without even being touched down there, but soft porn nonetheless. I like porn so I'm enjoying it, but not my favourite Theroux so far. Still, I know there'll be some sort of thoughtful or creepy sting in the tail, whether it will be good or not, so I'm hoping that the quality will come half as hard as the Countess does.

What's striking at the moment though is how closely the central female character, besides her age, resembles the media image of Britney Spears. I have a feeling someone in Camp Britney read the book and told her it would be really cool to act crazy in public like the chick in the Paul Theroux porn. Or maybe Theroux is just better at describing a certain kind of crazy lady than I'm appreciating amid all the staged coercive sex. Time will tell.