Desecrated tombstones

Well, I've been home sick, and while I've been home, they've cleaned off his desk, and I've been negotiating clearing out his apartment. His apartment is weird enough, but it's his desk that's filling me with dread. It was somehow very nice to go to work every day and having everything just as he left it, like that semi-conscious expectation of mine that at any point he'd walk around the corner and just sit down was right and true . . .

This experience is teaching me something about the nature of pity, and how damn useful it it. It is an interesting and unique emotion in that, more than love on its own, more than compassion on its own, it has the capacity to overwhelm negative feelings - disgust and disdain and anger, even hate - you can feel all of those and then feel pity on top of them, and while it doesn't neutralize them it certainly makes it easier to live with them without turning into the world's massivest fucking bitch.

Anyways.

And this little piggy cried "waaaaaaah" all the way home

Back to work today - yesterday worked from home, which is completely different. Gah. This little time coming up won't be days of wine and roses but at least I get to go to Turkey next week. Extra painful because the F-word is back at school now, and I hadn't fully realized how much I like him being on vacation (ie, more present, less stressed)- combined with not having quite realizing how much I'd missed him. In a healthy world I'd be able to cuddle him all day today, getting it out of my system. In this unhealthy world, we'll both work ridiculous hours, come home cranky, and I'll snap at him when he treads in my cat's puke and fails to clean it up and he'll snap at me when I do whatever revolting, inconsiderate thing it is I do, and the cuddles will be under-realized.

Fuck you, work.

At the moment, also missing my family and my kayak like crazy. My family rather more. Especially the kids. It does my head in to be so far away from the kids. And Luke Duke too - I don't have favourites but he's the one who's always been most present whilst having the excuses to be the least present, so it's usually rather more of a tear to go away from him. God, they're so great. And while there was no hesitation in my heart about rushing back to my lover, I am FUCKING PISSED to be in this stupid shithole of a country if I must be away from my awesome family. Oh my god, what a nasty, soulless crappery Francophone Europe is.

I knew I was fucking home when I went to the TGV platform at Charles de Gaulle aeroport, put up my feet, waited for my 7:45 train, and got told off by some cunt of an SNCF worker for waiting on the platform when my train had just been cancelled, and to get up to the main concourse immediately to find out what I'd have to do to move my exhausted self and my fucking 70 kilos of luggage to Brussels instead. That's this fucking place, man. That's Francophone Europe. When some absolute bullocks happens to someone, like their train from one shitty European city they don't want to be in to another they don't want to go to getting cancelled when they've just been on a fucking overnight transatlantic flight and shed a kajillion tears saying goodbye to their awesome, awesome family, the institutional reaction is aggression to the victim.

And the thing that really fucking pisses me off about that is that it's not because of an unfocussed aggression or film-y frenchy existentialist angst or anything that fucking picturesque; it's pure fucking laziness, because minute-for-minute it saves time to pre-emptively aggress someone who might get justifiably angry into going away from where you are instead of just presenting the situation to them like a fucking grown-up and possibly having to listen to them get upset about their fucking, fucking train to Brussels getting cancelled.

One more year, one more year, one more year. I can do it. If the past two weeks flew by so unbearably fast, I can do it.

The Red Dragon verges on the lachrymose

I could fucking weep. Here it is, cocking squatting bullshitting Monday morning, and I fucking swear, it feels as though it was Friday night three fucking hours ago. This is the thing. Like a lot of people, I have a bit of a seasonal affective disorder. Key parts of my brain and personality, most of the ones involving enthusiasm and tenderness for example, shut down pretty solidly for ten weeks of the year out of what feels like sheer self-protection. I mourn that and I mourn the impact it has on the people I'm closest to - it's unpleasant to watch yourself being a bitch to the man of your dreams, for example, though one supposes it's rather harder for him.

And those ten shitty dead oversalted weeks a year are 20% or so of the reason I'm gagging to move to a place without real seasons. Whenever I hear some celebrity bitching about how they want to leave Los Angeles or wherever and live in a place with seasons, I want to fucking bitchslap them to PNG and back. No, bitch, you want a house in a place with seasons. And the second you get tired of the cold and the dark you'll fuck off back to the tropics. Shut. The. Hole. Brat!

Where was I? Right. Those ten weeks came to a close on Wednesday or Thursday last week, and I'm back to what I flatter myself is my 'normal', enthusiastic, tender self, certainly a self I like much better. But here's the thing. The ten dead weeks feel, as I mentioned, like self-protection. Because I know the days are so short and I'm so exhausted at the end of them it's a struggle to get anything human done in the evening. Because I know I'm going to have a cold or a flu or any other manner of illnesses that're going to fly up my ointment. Because I know that the weeks after the Christmas holidays are always the busiest, anywhere I've ever worked, and where I work now they're really really really the busiest, especially as the economy is crashing around our ears and we can spend all day uncovering new bankruptcies and cash flow problems, so if I care too much or prioritize other things that aren't work too much I'm going to be stressed and disappointed because I won't have the time.

So the way my brain always rationalizes the SAD lockdown is that it's better to be on a low even keel than take life in the wintertime as a series of rather disappointing punches to the face. But the SAD lockdown is over now, and that means we had a busy, delectable, fun, productive weekend, and Monday morning is coming as a fucking punch in the face. Holy shit. For a doggedly prescription-free person it makes it so clear why SSRIs come with a warning that they might make you kill yourself. The depression lifts and suddenly there's enough energy and giving-a-toss to make going back to work on Monday seem like the end of the fucking world. Suddenly I care enough about my life to really want it back.

The law is an ass - an idiot

What a strange book Oliver Twist is. I love his sentences - nice big Victorian monsters of sentences. Do love a big sentence. The coincidences were rather trying and made it difficult to suspend disbelief at every moment of the narrative, but most of the right emotional triggers were there and the death of Nancy was properly brutal and amazingly unsentimental. It was hard to believe, though, that Bill Sikes was going to get mobbed for murdering her if he hadn't been mobbed for any of the other dreadful things he'd done.

I wonder if that's just a spot of heavy literary irreality, or if perhaps there was a different attitude to murdering women back then. After all, Jack the Ripper only got through eleven or so, and that was the biggest media scrum ever, and Robert Pickton killed goodness knows how many just the other day, historically speaking, and confessed to it, and the justice probably won't even charge him with all of it. I reckon there's much, much more to that Robert Pickton shit than meets the eye. Well, fucking duh. Dozens get killed at a busy pig farm/events locale (???) and only one fucker gets charged for it - and he's sent up on second degree charges? What absolute bullshit. What bullshit.

Where's the Oliver Twist making people acknowledge what life and death on Vancouver's downtown east side is like? It needn't be so different. Ineptitude from the police and justice system, indifference from the public, and a swarming, uncomfortable scrounging life in bad rooms and wet streets only alleviated by fucking yourself up or by desperately underfunded social services. The main deviation would be that the general public isn't going to get too upset when you knock off the women like Nancy . . . not until gruesome details emerge from the slow and belated investigation about their flesh being fed to pigs and mixed up with pork. Oh, I hate it all this morning. What a comfort it is to believe in hell sometimes.

You've got to think, oh geez, would I do that?

Got the papers for my provisional license yesterday. Took them to the maison communale so as to get my actual provisional license - this thing is a Byzantine complex of complexity. But the maison communale was closed. Not because yesterday was a holiday - because today is a holiday, and they do the 'bridge' here to get four day weekends. And you know what? It didn't piss me off one little bit. I shrugged and walked on. It's like my boss told me once upon a time: when something in Belgium goes right (qualifying for the provisional license), celebrate it; when something goes wrong (incompetent, bloated civil service not showing up for work because nobody feels like it) accept it as the status quo, and walk on . . .

Today isn't any old holiday, but Remembrance Day. Actually, Armistice Day is what they call it here. Commemorating the end of the first world war, rather than the war itself, which is reasonable. In German (which is an official language here, as well as French and Flemish/Dutch - little known fact to help you at your trivia nights), it's Waffenstillstand. Isn't that adorable? Waffenstillstand. Hee hee hee. Who knew people who talk a language that adorable could murder millions of ethnic types so soon after the waffenstillstand of the first world war. Waffenstillstand. Precious. I guess it didn't stand still for long.

Anyways, I'm not doing much to celebrate. I keep thinking, living in Belgium as I do, that I should visit some of the nearby killing fields, get devastatingly high, and spend an hour or so mourning those millions of young men who were maimed and slaughtered in the interests of their ruling classes. Today's certainly not the day for that, though. It's raining, I'm working, and the killing fields will be choked to the gills with visitors.

But last night, we did watch some more Australian television, Four Corners this time, doing a special on how the first world war has been used and abused by politicians and different kinds of historians. I recommend it if you have a spare hour or so. One thing I like a lot about Four Corners is that the documentaries have an arc . . . 20, 25 minutes of the proceedings, and then around minute 30 there's some sort of fucking punch to the gut that alters the entire philosophy of the thing at hand. In this case, it comes from Garth Patten, an Australian teacher at UK's Sandhurst military academy, who after more than half an hour of war historians making more or less wanky arses of themselves - acting like the scarier kind of nerdy child who gets really excited over toy soldiers - sketches out why the first world war continues to be important in the training of the officer class. And it's fucking devastating, what he says.

The whole extended interview with him was fascinating. It was interesting to hear what all the interviewees had to say in the context of a discussion about how the first world war has been used, wankers included, but I would have liked to just listen to Garth Patten talk for the full hour. Whenever anybody asks me from now on why I went into the military strategy concentration for my international relations degree, I'm going to send them to that interview. Military strategy and its history tell you the horrible secrets about humans' relationships with each other. My undergrad, with all that literature, music, philosophy, language and art, was about the romantic secrets of how people relate to each other; the grad degree was about the ghastly, ugly, irredeemable secrets. And you know, it's the grad degree that prepared me for business journalism. Sigh. Off to the wars now.