Dumbfuckery and consequences

How I would love to blame this on someone else. But that shithouse choke yesterday at the exam was 100% Mistress La Spliffe, and now my mighty organs of indignation and anger must be turned against myself. I can't blame the examiner; he was clear, reassuring, and friendly; I can't blame my instructor, who taught me how to drive well enough that I did everything else perfectly - painfully perfectly; I can't blame Belgium, because while it's given me innumerable examples of drivers doing exactly what I did to fuck up the exam yesterday, that has translated into innumerable opportunities for me to curse Belgians for their dangerous stupidity - there was certainly no pressure to emulate it.

It really hurts to have managed the parallel parking, the three point turn, the following the flow of traffic, the signalling, the left turning, the braking smoothly and safely in time to avoid mowing down a family of geese ambling across the road without risking getting rear-ended, and all the other things that had me shitting myself, just to fuck up in this new, dramatic, dangerous, and fucking mentally debile way that I never did during my lessons or practice sessions. But what it is informing me is that despite my finesse behind the wheel and my reasonably good impression of calm, competent driving, if I'm happy to tool out on a roundabout without judging my distances properly at my fucking exam like a fucking retard, I'm not ready to drive on the roads unaccompanied yet, and that's all there is to it.

Well, not quite all. Here's the thing: I know how to drive now, and have even mastered the roundabout - I never would have driven on and cut somebody off on a roundabout if I hadn't been having a massive brainfart; I'm aware of the fucking laws of priority, painfully so, because they're so counter-intuitive from a Canadian perspective, as we don't have roundabouts and every intersection is adequately signposted so we don't have to fart around with the massive trust exercise which is Rightwards Priority. So the worry is that what's making me unfit to drive isn't my driving skills per se, but my inadequate brain, and that's worrying because while one can improve their skills, it's a different proposition altogether to improve one's brain.

So in punishment but also in an effort to help myself, I'm cutting off the reefer. No more reefer for me. Not until I've got that fucking dimestore salmon foldy piece of shit these Belgian stone-age nincompoops call a full fucking B-class license. I've already been cutting down but now I'm cutting out. Even when I go to Amsterdam at the end of the F-word's school term. I will go to Amsterdam and I will not smoke or eat reefer. I will watch David Attenborough ocean documentaries and I will not be high while I do it. I realize that makes my blogonym a little non au courant, so in the meantime you may address me as the Dread Pirate Jessica.

The Red Dragon gets on her high, grassfed horse

Alright, marvellous, swine flu. That's just fucking fantastic. 10-to-1 odds I'm offering that the virus started in the southern US, in one of those massive, moronly inhumanely crowded and insalubrious feedlots/abattoirs where they illegally employ Mexicans in their thousands to make sure your typical North American Anglo asshole can have meat that's cheap enough to eat two or three times a day, fuelling their massive fucking waistlines and their health insurance companies' massive fucking profits.

You know, one of those situations where everybody is happy (except for the animals, and one assumes the disenfranchised and underpaid illegal workers, though frighteningly perhaps the alternative employments available are worse), especially those selfish assholes who pretend to be libertarian whenever there's any sort of governmental suggestion of interfering with their mammoth appetites - the sort of selfish asshole that, in my experience, Canada and the US produce record numbers of. The sort of gargantuan, stupid prick who trots out the line like 'next they'll be trying to ban red meat, WHERE WILL IT ALL END?' whenever there's a move towards banning smoking in public spaces or raising sin taxes or something of the sort.

Look, you stupid fucking cunts, where it should end is that I don't get a fucking pandemic so that you can eat cheap pig twice a day, every fucking day of your futile, parasitic lives that serve no immediately visible purpose aside from being a spend-happy consuming cog in a large, soulless capitalist machine that's already caused international damage you obviously haven't been educated to appreciate. Where it should end is that domestic animals don't have to live in shit-caked conditions that would fit without much alteration into the Inferno - in conditions that are both inhumane (if you have soul enough to care) and incredibly fucking unhealthy (which you would care about if you weren't a goddamn cretin, considering that sort of lack of hygiene and overcrowding are the perfect conditions for the genesis of virulent disease).

Fuck! It pisses me off. To rip off a line from Margaret Atwood, why does my veggie household have to pay with our 'freedom froms' (pandemics, in this case) for your 'freedom tos' (be a big fat cheap cholesterol-burdened fuckwit, in this case)? Okay, it was a dystopian novel. But capitalism itself is getting so dystopic that unless we find a voluntary way to balance our 'freedom froms' and our 'freedom tos' now, things are going to get so stupid and chaotic that a bunch of people who figure they know best will find a way to take all our freedoms away.

By the way, you goddamn 'libertarian' babies, it's only in the last two years I've lived in a place that didn't outright ban my appetite of choice, and somehow I managed to get by for a decade without particularly feeling my human rights were being trampled on because I had to act mildly furtive when I bought pot in the supermarket from the dealer who worked at the deli counter. Fucking grow some balls. There's an entire drug-addicted subculture around you who's gone on happily getting fucked up despite their governments outlawing the things they like best, and they're on drugs, for fuck's sake. You're straight and you're still scared of the big fat government? Oh, boo hoo for poor little you. Fucking whiny losers. Fuck.

No mind is more murderous than hers

We watched Pasolini's Medea last night. What a bummer. She didn't get away on a chariot drawn by a dragon in this version. He tried to make it all plausible and you know what? It isn't plausible. And in a very real way murdering your brother and then chopping him up into little pieces with an axe in a very small, confined chariot when you're a post-weight-loss Maria Callas is just as unrealistic as enchanting your bigamous husband's new wife's wedding present to set her and her father on fire. Fucking Italians, man. They have such psychologically interesting ideas about plausibility.

But it was interesting to see it, because Medea is interesting, and Maria Callas was so compelling playing her. So much Greek mythology seems to be about taming the cthonic, the Big Feminine, the woman religious figures that went about ritually sacrificing men before the macho Hellenes flattened everything. You read a spot of Robert Graves and it's all about the Eternal Feminine getting its comeuppance in verse . . . and then there's Medea, this murderous juggernaut who just keeps going and going, and benefits from a few dei ex machini in tight spots. Did she end up populating Iran with Medes? Did she just go home eventually? Too many stories in circulation. But there are no stories in circulation about her being held accountable by other people for her 'barbarism'.

And then there's Euripedes's play. I don't read it as feminist - it was classical Greece, for fuck's sake, you might as well have been a goatist - but it's very hard not to see it as some sort of emotional outlet for the monumentally oppressed women watching it - a reminder, 'if you chose to be absolutely ruthless, this is what you have the massive and frightening power to do, and the reason your life is as unfair as it is, is that you are not ruthless, you don't have to subject yourself to the horror of the loss of your family, so really, everything is okay . . .'