Sometimes it's good to have an pseudonymous blog

My reaction was complex. But the dominant thought in my brain, which was being too complex to actually be hurt or whatever you might expect in the circumstances - though what would one expect in the circumstances? - perhaps like it felt the first time, incredulity at the poorness of his decisions, that had led the poor man to the point in his life where, despite our fluid-based association having ended years ago when I'd left town forever, he had failed to realize in the meantime that his balls and all their contents belonged to me in perpetuity in testament to the awesomeness that was his Manhood having been in my Womanhood in a mutually satisfactory sort of way.

Anyways, the dominant thought in my brain, instead, was "aw, why can't I fuck up the rhythm method?", which is a very silly dominant thought to have, as I would never use the rhythm method - "oh, I've got a great idea, I'll contraconceive by refusing to let my man plunge deep and climax in my pulsating Womanhood at exactly the time of the month when every fibre of my physical and emotional being most wants my man to plunge deep and climax in my pulsating Womanhood." Yeah. Fucking genius. That's why no-one ever says 'as smart as a childless Catholic'.

Two conclusions:

1. I'm glad he told me now, when I can channel any possible resulting funk (from complexity, and from the sudden inevitability of acknowledging that the fucking banging in my cranium may not be incipient psychosis but is in fact the 'ticking' of my biological clock) into my rambles through the woodland of my homeland and into the hectic preparations for Magnum's wedding next Saturday, instead of subjecting the F-word to it, who knows as well as I do the logistical problem with replicating our awesome DNA nine months from now.

2. I'm glad you're here, dear readers, to read about things without thinking too hard about who's who and whether it's who you think it is, since so many of you don't know who anybody is anytime I use a pronoun in Costume Jewelry, and the rest of you are almost definitely barking up the wrong tree at any given moment, and certainly right now. I can't tell you how soothing that is, because it's lovely to write the things it's not a good idea to say out loud. But today I think I've already written enough. Some things get to fester, or mature, or distill, or ferment, or something. It builds character. But thank you. Thank you.

5 am and ready for lunch

Jet lag. Home again after a year and a half and no one else is awake. It just struck me that the birthday party I fell asleep three hours before last night is probably still happening somewhere but I don't feel equipped to do anything about that.

Yesterday drove through my old neighborhood, the darling Cabbagetown, to take care of some business with Luke Duke. Past my old apartment. I love Cabbagetown. That was such a great place to live and I was very happy there. Yes, visible signs of drug abuse all over the place; yes, lots of people wandering around who should have been institutionalized one way or the other. But when you live in a market economy, the only cool-ish smack downtown neighborhood a kid like I was can afford a one-bedroom in will be one crack addicts, halfway housers, and the victims of Ontario's criminal budget cuts re. low security psychiatric hospitals can also afford. And when you're as cheap as I am, that's not likely to change with age. Why pay a premium to live in a boring, isolated neighborhood? But perhaps my tune will change when I have children.

Anyways, going back there reminded me how Cabbagetown was just so great. So many restaurants and shops that I loved in one tiny area, that great park, Jet Fuel, everybody who's head's together being pretty friendly, especially by Toronto standards, and a lot of the crackheads being quite decent too. Part of the reason I want to move back to an Anglo country is that I want to live in a neighborhood like Cabbagetown again, and I've never found one in a European city. Saint Gilles has a lot to recommend it - I love living there in a different way - but some Anglo neighborhoods like Cabbagetown still promise big things for people with a good idea, without needing to be historical or hipster-ish or exclusive or expensive or uncomfortable.

Ah, maybe I'm just happy to be at the place that's closer to being home than any other place, unless you can count my man as my place which you can't, because he's a person.

Are you sure that's what you meant to say?

So you know I love Joseph Conrad. And these couple of sentences are a reason I love him, as well as a sort of symptom of what makes me love him:

"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."

I've read and nodded my head 10, 20 times at that before, but today it rings true in my head more clearly than it ever has. Not just as a quick, effective literary device to make Marlow into a living, breathing thing in Heart of Darkness - dear Marlow, I've got such a crush on him - but almost as a manifesto.

It's because of my job, of course. As a business journalist I'm lied to an a daily, hourly basis, and when I'm not being lied to I'm being obfuscated to, and not being a political animal to me it's the same damn thing. And what hurts the most is that these are grown men lying to me, lying in a bald-faced manner that they can't possibly expect me to believe, but they do expect me to believe.

Because I'm very vain, the most painful thing about that used to be that I couldn't bear so many hundreds of people thinking I was stupid. But I got over that, as it's nothing personal; I could be fucking Einstein and they'd still be trying to bullshit me. Now the most painful thing about it is that I feel these grown men (and I mean men -female contacts aren't more forthcoming, but when I ask a question whose answer they don't want to give me they usually stand on the fifth) are lying with the gracelessness of children, but that they're grown men, so it's tragic.

It's tragic because they're stuck in the worst of childhood (guile and bullying) while spinning their way to the worst of age and mortality (greying, balding, fattening, coarsening, suppurating, drooping, and losing their health and energy), utterly wasting the incredible luck (if you're an atheist), the incredible beneficence of our creator (if you're garden-variety religious), or the incredible opportunity for discovering the higher nature of existence (if you're Buddhist - I think, I'm just guessing about that religion based on all the Monkey! we've been watching) that is the fact that I'm alive, you're alive, that we're all alive and who we are. Utterly wasting all that like it means nothing, and they might as well already be dead.

And all that's standard - that's how industry, how business works. I can't bear it sometimes. Frankly, it stresses me. My job isn't horribly demanding in terms of the quantitative workload but sometimes it does get hard to bear all these damn, stinking lies. But at the same time, I love it. I love exposing a lie. I love being lied to and then slapping that lie with the truth. I love collecting two dozen lies and extracting the truth from them. It feels really good. It feels like an abusive but, shall we say, very satisfying relationship, and I don't write that lightly.

Still, I need to find a way to deal with all of this without getting stressed. If I move from business journalism into political journalism or standard garden variety journalism it's not as though I can expect the lies to get any less frequent, blatant, or brutal. I need to find a way to not be so stressed by them.

Lessons from the Drunken Master

So last night I had my second driving lesson, moving on from steering, stopping and going to the Gearbox and Clutch. Oh. My. God. First, I'm not saying my instructor was drunk, but he smelled like he was drunk. Seriously. Nice man though. And second, using a stickshift is not fucking easy. Re. the automatic, it was like the difference between a tricycle and a bicycle. By the end of the two hours I was sloooooowly figgerin'er out and I think I have the gist of how not to stall when you're trying to go, but I'd still be as helpless as a babe in the woods if I had to drive a woman in labour to the hospital in a standard, and now I fully understand why civilized countries insist on a better grade of license to be allowed out of an automatic. It's totally fucking different. It feels like I've been practicing in a go-cart and now they want me to fly a B-29 over North Vietnam.

Speaking of which, carrying on with Tell Me No Lies and read the 'Through The Looking Glass' excerpt from James Cameron, his account of North Vietnam during the American bombings, etc, and followed that up, just to keep things cheerful, with Wilson Burchett's 'Atomic Plague', an account of the devastating radiation poisoning subsequent to the nuking of Japan. Both men's loyalties were questionable, especially Burchett's apparent willingness to forgive anything that called itself Communist, but they did something in those two stories that Western journalists don't seem to do anymore by going places that their national governments didn't want them to go, and indeed where it was very, very dangerous indeed to go. What do we have now in that regard? Robert Fisk blogging out loud in the Independent from Lebanon? That's something. Al Jazeera English? That's something we sure didn't have when Cameron and Burchett were alive.

I shouldn't whine. Frankly it's probably a golden age of news in terms of being able to find things out. But it seems so strange with the war in Iraq that the journalists for the big American and British outlets are not particularly involved in Iraq, particularly when locally reported news is treated as a little bit suspect - local figures, local accounts always coming second to official military accounts - and when it's so very dangerous to be a local reporter. There's an interesting article from last year about that in the British Journalism Review.

But I do whine a little, because sometimes I wonder if you need to have Cameron-y, Burchett-y maniacs to bring certain realities home to people. Because the reality of Iraq seems very distant from the general Anglo consciousness, and I wonder if that's partly because we, as Anglos, have a sort of racist mental defence that lets us value official military accounts over local Arab sources. Especially as the big scandals out of Iraq, like the Abu Ghraib perversions, were largely whistle-blown by people in the military. So does an Anglo need another Anglo to write 'this is what I saw; appreciate the horror as it's divulged by my skinny fishbelly lips' to get a grip on it? I don't know. The thing is, if it hadn't been for Burchett, whose autobiography I don't otherwise wholly admire, maybe we wouldn't have known exactly how dreadful and how special nuclear bombs are. Maybe we'd just think of them as really, really big bombs. Maybe we'd be even more blasé than we have been for the past 20 years about the prospect of people having them around in sufficient quantities to destroy our race. I really don't know.

Monday morning slap-a-wake

Nice weekend, though rather lazy as I recovered (mostly there, certainly there enough to show up at work today, which I'm a touch sad about). My last with the F-word for a few weeks as he won't be joining me in Canada-land. Looking forward to Canada like crazy but really at the moment sad about how he won't be there. That's the thing about the F-word. I don't just miss him when he's not there, I get homesick for him. But still very much looking forward to Canada.

Watched There Will Be Blood. Pretty damn good. Very actor-y; I bet they all got a nice kick out of that, particularly the Day-Lewis. 'I drink your milkshake' indeed. And great soundtrack. Still, not much more to say about that, it was just fine but, well, it wasn't Best in Show, which by the way we also watched, during a couple of hours of amused abstraction. What else? An episode of The Life of Birds. The whole first season of Monkeydust. I love it, though it does sometimes make me want to vomit. There's something so merciless about it, but so funny. Usually very focused on the misery of the UK but a running feature focused on the idiocy of American big budget cinema, of which the following is an example:



What else? After finishing Chain of Command (very nice), read a couple of excerpts from the John Pilger edition Tell Me No Lies to carry on in the investigative journalism stream. One from the pinko Mitford sister, Jessica - 'The American Way of Death'. How absolutely revolting and not much changed, I don't think. When my Grandpa died in England, his going-away rites were the right sort of thing, I think - no fucking makeup; viewing just by the family, and a nice speech from a preacher he'd liked. But then that was C of E, which hardly counts as a religion in comparative terms - I think Catholicism has a lot to do with Egyptian-style funerary ridiculousness. Anyhoo. It was all very revealing and gross, but it provided an opportunity to discuss our preferred way to have our bodies disposed of, which is an important talk for couples to have.

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.

My name is Mistress La Spliffe, freak of freaks: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Oh my god, I'm so sick and revolting. I bet my recovery time is going to be pretty fast though, because my fantastic corpus has already kicked into the goopy lymph phase of auto-immune protection. The human body is endlessly fascinating and its disorders even more so. Speaking of which, check this out. I love the way one of the researchers says it's more a matter of historical interest than anything else - not a matter of historical blame, of course - never mind that there are billions of people around who can still remember damaging overt, political, imperial European colonial machinations in Africa from the 1960's, and no matter that such machinations continue, both overtly and not, and no matter that AIDS, you know, continues to be a bit of a problem.

Jared Diamond wrote about the human damage of constructing European cities in Africa in Guns, Germs, and Steel, I recall. I believe his line of thought was that when the mountainous bushy region that's the Congos etc. now was a functioning African empire/state/however it worked, people lived in smaller groups at higher, dryer altitudes, and then Europeans constructed cities in Africa in the lowlands, close to navigable waterways for trade, and forced large groups of Africans down for labour, and everybody caught malaria. Brilliant. But malaria couldn't spread internationally, and HIV could, and now Europeans can't fuck without condoms. Hah! I'd say there was some sort of poetic justice in that, but considering eye-for-an-eye type justice in the case would be the ruination, decimation and enslavement of the European population by a kleptocratic African ruling class, I won't.

It's like a replay of syphilis spreading east from all the South and Central American populations the Spanish and such treated worse than animals, back when being Spanish still meant something besides having the most annoying voices in Europe. Syphilis is a really interesting disease. There's still some debate about whether it did spread out to Europe via Central American yaws, but I'm really convinced by the timing - first outbreak 1494? Come on, what's that two years after? - and by its virulence and the complete lack of resistance to it in the European population, but not the native American population, especially considering the native American population got fucking clobbered by basically every other filthy contagion Europeans carried.

Anyways, I get to stay at home today while my immune system goops everything up, and I can ponder the origins of my favourite venereal diseases to my heart's content, but probably what I'll actually do is read the rest of the lovely Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command and ponder the nature of investigative journalism. It's an awfully good book. Not really bringing any revelations home to me but it's making me think of what investigative journalism is - what being a muckraker is - and it's journalism as a primary source, journalism responsible and direct enough to be something that future academics will be able to look at with the same seriousness as a government memorandum or a law - a forum for a primary truth that would probably not have any other public forum, and risks being lost to history forever.

Someday, not too far into the future, Chain of Command and those Bob Woodward books and things like that will probably be required reading for people studying the 2001-2009 period of American history - and you can bet your asses the asses will be studied off of this period, since it marks the end of an empire and of a certain philosophy of power. There's something in my academic's brain that that really appeals to, and something that explains to me why I'm so drawn to investigative journalism over the academic world that beckoned vigorously to me all through my undergrad and my masters via all those parental profs and incredibly good marks . . . I'm simply too conceited, too full of myself, and too concerned with my place in history to study primary sources when I have the possibility to write them myself.

On that level, the narrow, industry-specific investigative work I'm doing now is more satisfactory to me than the funnest, most interesting papers I wrote about poetry or drug politics in university, because it makes me feel like a participant in rather than an observer of history. And as of yesterday I have a byline. So somewhere, some obscure toiling academic may know Mistress La Spliffe existed, even years and years after her phenomenal (if presently mucus-y) body has crumpled, aged, died and dried to dust. And if I achieve my ambitions, not only will I be providing a valuable public service to my compatriots, but maybe someday long after I've left this mortal plane someone will love me like I love Herodotus.

Fuck, that's weird. The only thing more interesting than the human body is the human brain.

The Red Dragon doesn't like big dirty whores and nasty cunts

It's that Belgium time of the year that makes me want to die, and will one day be something I look back on in such a way that will make whatever sun-soaked paradise I move to in a year or two seem that much more paradisaical. Dark. Frigid. Rainy. Infectious. Like an extremely untalented dirty whore. I have my first cold of the season - made it to October this year. Fuckin' great. At least it's now, before next week's driving lessons and TRIP TO FUCKIN' CANADA! Wheeeee!

Speaking of big dirty whores, check out this story about Italy's Equal Opportunities Minister. Sometimes there are just no words. It did get me thinking about what constitutes being a big dirty whore, though. Ask me a year ago and I would have said letting people fuck you for money. Okay. But what about Craiglist handjob artists who only let you come on their tits to help them pay their university tuition? Still whores, obviously. There's an orgasm some sad sack of a man has to pay money for in there somewhere. But what about people like Mara Carfagna, who sell men's mags photographs of their tits and to help 'readers' prep for dates with non-whores through a quick 18h30 rub-a-tug? How's that qualitatively different from being a Craigslist handjob artist, besides knowing you're not going to get pinkeye from any splashback? Well, it makes it one degree less scandalous when you get your ministership by sucking off your goddamn penis of a prime minister. Fuck, what a big dirty whore.

Oh, and here are some more words. You know what I hate the most about hypocritical, filthy Italian bitches like Carfagna, besides the unhygienic way they shit on other women? That they make the male gender look like a bunch of fucking useless morons when they get involved in a nice mutual exploitation sting with nasty cunts like Berlusconi. And nasty cunts aside, I love the male gender. They have sexual organs that compliment my own, and they can open jars really well, to name just two uniquely wonderful things about them. But now there'll be a generation of Italian girls who'll look at the self-described antifeminist their penis of a prime minister has chosen as an Equal Opportunities Minister, and that'll either make them think that men are too moronic to bother with, or that men are too moronic to have any relationship with except as credit card holders. And that will continue the Circle of Life that has become gender relationships in post-modern Italy - massive mutual disrespect. And then everybody will have equal opportunities to be miserable and unfulfilled in their emotional and sexual lives. Brav-fucking-a, Carfagna.

Chasing the Red Dragon

Headed home early yesterday because of the uterus becoming the owwwwwterus. Probably exacerbated by some psychological things mixed in there as a friend here is having a real medical uterus scare, and by the fact I'm stressed over the prospect that I'm stressed, if you know what I mean. I mean, if I'm stressed, and I think I am, what do I do about it at this point? A fat fucking load of nothing, that's what. Keep being stressed, is all, for another good long time; they just promoted me, for heaven's sake. And just keep having the escapist fantasies about things I won't be able to do for another good long time. Yesterday I found out what the minimum wage in Australia is, and okay, it's less than half what I get post-tax each month, but still enough for me to have a house and a family. Insane, though in a good way of course. North of $2000 a month. Imagine! A country where Labour-with-a-capital-L is still important enough to get a minimum wage it can actually live on!

And they're finally introducing mandatory paid maternity leave - next year probably - and the plan they're looking at is rather more generous than the existing mandatory plan in Belgium, so I'll never need to regret refusing to breed in this paedophile's playground. Still a shit plan in Australia, of course. Women who breed should get a year paid at least, and so should their partners. The Bulgarians really surprised me on this one! Just like with the way they wouldn't participate properly in the Holocaust. Nobody ever talks about Bulgaria as anything except a place where they're assholes to gypsies and aren't Hungarian, and here they are with this fantastic parental leave programme and WWII history that's slightly less shameful than the rest of Europe's.

That's all I have to write this morning - too stressed, too owwwterus-y - enjoy the financial meltdown, everybody! Americans, don't worry, you're insured up to $100,000 in bank accounts - if all else fails you can cash out and move to one of the countries your administration has spent the last century bankrupting, $100,000 still goes a long way there. It's all good! And if, in fact, you don't have $100,000 - if, perhaps, you have $100,000 in debt - just relax and watch that debt devalue as your currency crashes. Laugh at all the silly people who struggled to keep their heads above water and pay down their credit when the dollar was strong. All you have to do is fuck off to Asia for a year and teach English and/or sell your used underwear, and then you'll be singin'.

His name is Barack Obama, for fuck's sake

Madame Pariyorker weekend, and I am walking into Monday as exhausted as I was Friday night. Oh well. Madame Pariyorker inevitably has spent some time being my token American friend, because part of the reason we hit it off so well in Paris all those years ago, despite having very different brains, is that it was 2002 when we met. And all the French people around me were giving full fucking rein to how much they detested and despised Americans for their dreadful imperial foriegn policy and their consumptive lifestyle, supposing I'd be interested, I suppose, because they had mistaken me for an American and were rushing to assure me that despite their incapacity to tell the difference they could assure me 100, 1000, infinity%, by using highly objectionable language, that not only did they understand that I was not American, but that I was as 1000% better than Americans as they themselves were.

This was also the time I was choosing my academic path in international relations, however, and when it was coming home to me how corrupt, murderous, anti-democratic and repellent French foreign policy was and continues to be, and the only reason it's not talked about there as currently as American murderousness is is because they're a nation of cultural chauvinists with a media as supine in its own way as that of America. Ask your typical French person about Africa or Oceania and you'll wait through days of ejaculations about the charms of the beaches of Senegal and Tahiti before you even get a fucking word in edgewise to ask about 'defense agreements' - the nice term for arms sales to kleptocratic maniacs intent on murdering their own people in old African colonies or the nuclear bombing of Polynesian atolls. Ugh. Make me fucking vomit. I mean, the fuckers still have colonies, and they think they have anything to say about anything?

Anyways. I met Madame Pariyorker in 2002 when French people were informing me about what a big asshole I wasn't by explaining how they knew I wasn't American, and Madame Pariyorker was constantly receiving instruction about what a big asshole she was . . . and now it's 2008, and maybe she's not quite such a big asshole because possibly her nation will vote for un Noir, and mark my fucking words, by the time they let a black man run for president in France - well, look, it's just not going to happen. Even so, they're having no problem going up to her and saying, with the sort of supreme Gallic shitbrained confidence that let the Germans kick their asses irreperably twice in a row using the same technique within 25 years and the supreme Gallic chauvinistic inability to attach a human name to a brownish face that made the wars of liberation in their colonies some of the most brutal of the post WWII period, 'le Noir ne peut pas gagner. Pas dans une telle societé'.

Ugh. If I was American I'd vote for Barack Obama just to piss in France's eye. Well, there are a lot of other reasons I'd vote for Barack Obama, ranging from his reasonable positions on the issues to the fact that that's the sort of peice of ass I'd rather see on newspaper covers than a septagenarian warmonger. But that would be one of them, and anyways, I reckon the reason he'll win is that the economy has gone to shit and I can't imagine the most raving lunatic racist in the most atmospheric movie about the south of the States that I've ever seen voting Republican when the economy is this shitty. But then I have no imagination about some things. And this post was going to have some sort of point, but now it's time for work.

The Mistress in Her First Class Compartment

God, I'm getting sick of work. Luckily Canada is coming up soon. Marseille, besides the fantastic weekend with its fantastic kayaking, was a nasty hit not only of work but of anti-fun, with fucking cunty mosquitoes no less - no kidding - I was bit ten times whilst sitting through all the presentations. That shit was not quite hell, but purgatorial for sure if I've read my Dante right. And now I'm in the thick of report season. It's almost done. One more. And then - well, it's not smooth sailing, who the fuck am I kidding? I'm going to have indignant Teutonic fuckers bitching me out for the rest of my tenure at this job about how I'm not believing their lies over the lies some other Teutonic fucker is telling me. One of the sectors I cover is just fine, and most of the Teutons I interview are just fine, and I know the sectors my colleagues cover are just fine. It's just this one that's an everlasting pain in the ass . . . but at the same time I'm too interested to give it up, even if someone volunteered to take it off my hands. It's so interesting when adults lie, and this sector has a more chequered history than most, I suppose, though I'd never dream of boring you by telling you anything substantial about it.

Anyways.

On the train between Brussels and Marseille I sat in the rarefied airs of the first class compartment, reflected on my usual half-baked Marxist theories about how in the modern world bourgeois premiums don't get you shit besides an absence of proles, not even a fucking glass of wine or a nice packet of crisps or anything. Two things complimented, even improved my reflections: The General in his Labyrinth and the Arcade Fire's albums.

The General in his Labyrinth wasn't Love in the Time of Cholera or 100 Years of Solitude; it wasn't even Love and Other Demons, but it was pretty damn good, In Evil Hour good, though less supernatural. It worked very well as a cold portrait of physical disintegration, and also the disintegration of a dream, a political dream that went beyond abstracts like freedom straight to a new world, a huge new world . . . it made me care a lot more about Simon Bolivar, reading it. The sun shining out of my ass as it does, to me Bolivar was important because he inspired Garibaldi, and to me Garibaldi was important because whilst marching against the Papal States he got shot in the foot in Aspromonte, and Aspromonte is important because it bred the olive half of the Almighty Me, hence saving me from melanoma, so far at least. Thanks, Simon Bolivar! Anyways, it's made me much more interested in him, and very interested in her too, who Garibaldi went to visit in her destitution in Peru. There are all of these fascinating lives that we can only imagine. It's enough to make me want to get some mescal and head out into the desert in a pukey bid to try to recreate history. But then most things are.

And the Arcade Fire albums - not much to say about those. I like them both a lot but they annoy the hell out of me unless I listen to the whole thing in one go. Song by song it's all just trembly nonsense and my brain focuses too hard on the bad-cranked vocals, but if I have, say, a five-hour train trip between Marseille and Brussels to while away and all too much concentration to spare, they're perfect. That Bruce-Springsteen-kicked-in-the-balls-and-with-more-instruments jitteriness is like a pathetic but pleasant rallying cry for all the non-insane people in the world to stop the insanity - I don't think it will work but it's nice if I have enough time to sit down with the entire albums. I like Funeral better. And that's all.

Get ready to economize

So, whilst on vacation I read rather less than usual. Part of this was due to the old demon foe television. Especially BBC World News, I can't look away from that shit, even though it's nonsense. Everything's a fucking catastrophe there. And everything is black and white. Russia black, Georgia white. Buyouts white, government inaction black. Jesus, it annoys the hell out of me even though I can't look away. But at a peak moment of displeasure with it all, I had a sudden flash of something that's flashing on me increasingly these days - thank god I'm not American. If I think the BBC is bad, I guess it's the mercy of all fucking time my only relationship with CNN is to laugh at the home page occasionally. Not to mention the others . . . ugh.

But to mention this ridiculous $700 billion bail out - those poor people are going to foot the bill towards keeping the global financial markets liquid enough for an orderly global retreat from it. I always wondered how their economy being owned from abroad was going to ruin them and I think I'm finding the answer now - those people will be subjected to insane inflation and increased taxation without any fucking improvement of their services, because with all this public fuss aver the national debt, whoever wins the presidency in November will have a great excuse to not improve health care coverage or social security or anything, for that matter.

And all so that foreign countries and entities that have relied on the stock market to get good returns for capital funds, superannuation and pension plans - the sort of pension plans that most Americans can only dream of - and such won't be unhappy enough to fuck around with their reserves or pull out their investment dollars wholesale. America is becoming the bitch of the world. And that's alright with America, because the ruling class has figured out how to make the larger classes take the pain. Jesus. It's not Africa but it's nasty.

I don't have incredible faith in the financial stability of Europe but I'm fucking glad to live in a fiscal place where protecting residents from inflation and hits to their purchasing power is mandated above encouraging wild economic growth at the central bank, and that the bank actually practices what it preaches despite massive industry pressure and lobbying. But then I guess Europeans have always been a little more ready than Americans to challenge their governments and governmental structures, and so Europeans keep their governments scared and attentive. For better or for worse. Sometimes that means fantastic social services and sometimes that means Nazis.

Anyways, I was going to write about the only book I did actually read during my vacation, The General in His Labyrinth, but I guess that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Planning a vacation south of Gomorra

I just booked our vacation. Two weeks in Italy, one in Calabria with the family and one in Sicily. That will be very nice as I've never spent that much time in Sicily - just long laborious daytrips down from Aspromonte on those monumentally shitty roads the damnable parasitic mafia has siphoned all the money off from, and then across the legendary straits of Messina on one of the damnable parasites' damnable ferries.

Goddamn them, if God will pardon the imperative which I'm using for metaphorical purposes, in the understanding that God will damn only those who He in His wisdom judges it right to damn . How many people have died on those third world roads in Aspromonte? How many people have died in Aspromonte because emergency services couldn't get there fast enough? Lousy money-grubbing rapists, burglars, murderers, and motherfuckers. No wonder some southern Italians still miss that fascist maniac murderer Mussolini: he's the only leader that country's had with enough balls to line them up against the wall and give them the killing they deserve. And that's the most fucking pathetic thing in the fucking world. God, Italy's fucked up.

Anyways, that's where we're going at Christmas and New Years because one of my cousins is getting married, and I need to brush up on my Italian badly, and it will be nice to see the rest of my family there, and we both very much want to spend a good chunk of time exploring Sicily. We'll be staying in Syracuse, where I've never been before, but which sounds fucking legendary. And yes. We'll be going kayaking. Rock. I had to book this early because at Christmastime about a kajillion southern Italian economic migrants head home for the holidays - frankly I'm not pleased to have left it this long - the tickets cost almost 400 euros each and we were lucky to find that.

Not much else to say at the moment because work is so insanely busy and stressful. Yesterday, after finishing a fucking Homeric effort of a market report, my brain was so fried that I had to think about it for three minutes or so before I remembered my home phone number. Dear oh dear.

Taking a Cézanney view of the world

I have a sneaking suspicion that if I had declined to cherchez l'homme, as they say, and if I had moved from Italy to Marseille in 2002 instead of from Italy to Paris in 2002, I would have completely different prejudices regarding French people today. Much nicer ones. In fact I loved Marseille so much that now I'm going to have to oblige us to go back for a week next summer so that I have time to at least scratch the surface, instead of lightly brush against it, and hence be able to explain to myself for the rest of my life why the hell it is I don't live there.

Brushing against its surface revealed a few faults: most of the city smells like pee, there's obviously a lot of indigents, and considering it's not a rich town everything except accommodation was Switzerland-expensive; it is a tourist destination on the Mediterranean. Otherwise I was shocked by how fucking awesome it was. Everybody who I met, outside of one cabdriver and one hotel receptionist, who don't count because they have shitty jobs, was cheerful, warm, friendly and helpfully polite - striking up conversations, sharing food, proud of their city and wanting to talk about it in a way that didn't come off as chauvinistic . . .

And the men were gallant. It was a bit strange after the dead fish-face quality of Brussels, where men only eye-fuck you during the week or two of summer weather we get, to suddenly be back on the Mediterranean where they all look so appreciative all the time. But during my peregrinations and during the day of sea-kayaking, when I was the only female in a group of seven, they combined that appreciativeness with this sort of nonthreatening helpfulness that frankly I'd got to thinking only existed in books, at least when it came to French men. I've known for some time, since spending time in Alsace and Brittany, that I'm very wrong to judge France by Paris. But now I really know it; I've been pleasantly punched in the face with the fact.

Anyways, the sea kayaking - this is where we went:


View Larger Map

Except by water rather than by road, of course. Around l'Estaque, which Cézanne liked to paint. It was beautiful. Cool, crystalline water that was fine enough to swim in during our lunchbreak, little black fishies swimming around, hot white beaches, breathtaking views of the savage limestone escarpments jutting out of the sea, little anenomes, caves, mussels, this whole shoreline ecosystem we could bump ourselves around. Birds. Silence.

And the lovely relaxed-swimming feeling of pushing yourself along, as fast or as slow as you wanted, in one of those fucking great boats. I love the feeling of kayaking. And then when we were coming back to the launching point in the late afternoon, the wind picked up a little bit, and there were waves that seemed big to me, who'd never kayaked on waves before, and that was fun. Kayak goes up, kayak goes down. Enough to give you motion sickness but since you're right on the surface of the water, which is moving more or less the same way you are, there doesn't seem like a point to that. I think it will be necessary to sea kayak in Australia. Sharks and saltwater crocodiles notwithstanding.

Anyhoo. Off to work again. They promoted me yesterday - I'm going to take that as permission to tell the Yankee executives to fuck themselves when they need it. In closing, I didn't take my camera to Marseille as I was going on the water but this Cézanne gives you a pretty good idea of what the land looked like from the sea:

They're all laughing at you because they're scared

Home again home again. It was hard to leave Marseille because after the conference ended, or rather after my patience ended and I did a runner, I fell deeply in love with the city.

I've never been so relieved in my life to do a runner, I think. You have to understand, and I consider it a problem beyond the credit crises and political brouhahas (but I'm being paid in euros and most of my savings aren't on the stock market), that our Kings of Industry are damnable cunts. They know some things are right and some things are wrong in moral terms, but they choose to do the wrong things. That can't be pointed out often enough. I think they're often presented as being the agents of the invisible hand of the market that really wants to help us all out . . . but the way the international financial system runs in terms of companies with publicly traded stocks is a deeply flawed one - very deeply, very fundamentally flawed.

In terms of my industry, that means a complete disregard for sustainability as anything but a half-hearted marketing tool, and even that wouldn't play any sort of part in their thoughts unless consumers weren't getting more clever about entire life-cycle, chain-of-custody issues (so you are making some sort of difference, angry people, just get angrier, and keep being angry). . . but of course the most illustrative example was the Yes Men prank re Dow Chemical and Bhopal. The text in the link is interesting for the omissions Routledge lawyers demanded, but for me the whole key to the story, the whole interest is here:

"We expect the story to be retracted immediately, but Dow takes two hours to notice that alas and alack, it's done the right thing. The full interview therefore runs twice, and for two hours the story is the top item on news.google.com. CNN reports a Dow stock loss of $2 billion on the Frankfurt exchange. After Dow notes emphatically that it is not in fact going to do right by those non-shareholders in Bhopal, the retraction remains the top Google story for the rest of the day. Back at Andy's apartment, we help Dow make its share price rebound by mailing out a more formal retraction on its behalf . . ."

I love the Yes Men. They do brilliant things. Seriously, Morgan Fucking Spurlock, you may be more famous but eat your heart out in terms of quality. That is, if your kitchen slavey vegan girlfriend will bend her principles enough to cook it for you they way you reckon women should.

Anyways. I did a runner from the conference and fell in love with Marseille because the final speech on Friday started sounding like a Yes Man prank, but I knew it wasn't as I'd heard the guy before at conferences. The level of contempt for consumers, for the people these companies rely on to keep the profitable, is just staggering, just repellent - I don't know if that's because the link is indirect or not but I'll tell you it even makes me miss the moral bankruptcy of television - at least television execs care what you think over time, even if they are willing to exploit the very worst parts of you.

Maybe tomorrow I'll write about how lovely Marseille was, and how lovely the sea kayaking was, and about how I reckon I'll have to sea kayak even in Australia despite the sharks because it's just so fucking awesome. But now I have to go to the office and do a monumental amount of work. Let's just say that part of Marseille faces west over the sea and the sunsets are tear-jerkingly magnificent from the promenade; when I arrived back in Brussels, happy to be heading home to the F-word but inestimably sulky to be away from the raawk that is Marseille and saw the sun setting over the repellent Gare de Midi, it was like some sort of covenant between me and the world that I would keep being able to see beautiful things.

Temper fray

The bad news: I'm earning my salary at this fucker.

The good news: I'm earning a salary.

The best news: 14 hours to go.

Seperate but equally fucking annoying

What little I can say about Marseille after 14 hours - the cab drivers are nice, the five star hotels don't offer enough freebies, the internet doesn't work well enough for me to check my Outlook (which is sweet), it does get cloudy from time to time, the sea is pretty, and Finns seem to find it a relief.

What I can say about first class travel in the TGV between Brussels and Marseille - it's less about sensual luxury and more about who's not in the car with you. And I don't approve. Rich people are just as annoying as economy class people. They have smelly little lapdogs and bitter marital strife that can be audibly explored over five fucking hours - just because they're not yelling doesn't mean it doesn't bug me, anyways I can deal with volume via my MP3 player. The rich older people smell like diapers. The rich younger people smell like perfume, which makes me sneeze. So come on. If I pay for first class travel, I want the neck massages, the dancing girls, the in-car wading pool, new releases, drink and song. I don't just want to be segregated from annoying working and middle class people with equally annoying middle and upper class people.

Same with this five star I'm in. What the fuck the point of this place is besides segregation is beyond me. At least last year in Lisbon there were some touches of real luxury and in the Scandinavian five stars they serve caviar. Not to mention, even in a Scandinavian three star they'll have a sort of neat-o shower bidet so you can bathe your bits after every evacuation. Here there's not even a fucking bidet. Conference rate Euro 220 for a double, normal rate more than a hundred north of that, and not even a fucking bidet. What a crock of shit. Let's admit the only point of this place is that the proles are all deferential and in uniform.

Got in late last night and watched BBC World make an arse of itself over Ukraine and Russia and the global credit crisis. Crisis my ass. Ever read Gone With the Wind? I recommend it. Seriously. Weirdo book but moments of clarity amid all the slavery apologias and nostalgia for a society worse than fascist. At one point Rhett Butler tells a whiny Scarlett O'Hara that there's slow money to be made in the building of an empire, and fast money to be made in taking it apart. All we're seeing now is fast money. Lloyds and HBOS merging in an absolutely uncompetitive and unethical way with the encouragement of the British government, whose job should be to prevent this sort of rubbish - their customers will pay for that and the executive class will walk away singin'. Vomit.

Now I'm going for a calming walk along the seaside.

Evil under the sun

To paraphrase the proverbial Irishman's foreplay, brace yourself, Marseille, I'm coming! Two days of the same event I attended last year that gave me my first glimpse of the way the rich and powerful tick pleasantly along. Looking forward not to it, per se, but to Marseille. I won't have a vast amount of time to explore the city, aside from where our event will be shuttled to - another series of beauty spots, judging from the brochure - because though I'm staying in town afterwards, it will be on the water for my first foray into sea kayaking. Fuck, I'm excited!

Especially since if we move to Australia I think my hitherto-unstarted sea kayaking days will end, because yesterday I saw this shark attack/fatality chart in the Economist with its absolutely disproportionate-to-the-population numbers for Australia. I could probably imagine a worse way to die if I concentrated on it but there's something awfully unpleasant about the thought of having one of those things swimming around you and your last moments being caught up in the idea of 'will I bleed to death, or have my head bitten off, or will I just drown?' Australia is weird, man. You have the sharks that eat people, and then the crocodiles that eat people, while Canada is so much bigger and the only thing that eats people there are polar bears, and they're totally where I don't go.

Anyhoo. I'll be on the Mediterranean, which is so polluted that I doubt anything but the aquatic equivalent of cockroaches can survive, and so full of tourists thrashing around like injured seals and hapless Africans desperately making their way to unfriendly, racist post-colonial shores in flimsy leaking boats that even if a hungry shark does stumble through the straits of Gibraltar I doubt a kayak will be the first thing she sinks her teeth into. But we'll see. I'll try to update over the next couple of days to keep things in perspective but on that score as well, we'll see. The next two days of work, despite the luxury, will be difficult in more ways than one but I think I've thought up a couple of ways to deal - one of them so clever, so Machiavellian and yet so morally tidy, and so very Memento, that when I thought of it I yelled 'yeah dude, I rock!'

Thankfully at the time I was in the gym completing my rowing machine ordeal, so nobody noticed, as my gym is full of people shouting exclamations about how awesome they are. If we do move to Australia, I'll get my exercise kayaking on the crocodile-free rivers instead of at the gym - less onanistic screaming.

We're gonna have a real real cool time

So wrapped up with Hirst-hating and Hughes-loving yesterday that I neglected to point out what a chart-topping mood I'm in. As you know last week was the height of frustrating, as far as work is concerned. Now I'm not saying I'm so great at dealing and don't take my anger out on the people I love in an inappropriate fashion, but for some reason my troubles with the Yankee management have made me more than less aware of how super-great, uber-great, Mohammed-Ali-minus-sexism-and-brain-damage great the F-word is. Romance aside, that man rocks.

And that combined this past weekend, among other things, with a lovely trip back to Antwerp on the sort of crisp sunny autumn day that makes Europe seem worthwhile, and a wade through the art gallery there, with all its Ensors and oils and old things. The Ensors were the highlight of the gallery for me, besides the single sultry Modigliani, who was looking at the F-word that way, and of course that's great, because my reptile brain registered her as a threat as well as a beauty and I love it when tricks are played on my reptile brain.

But Ensor wins. He combined absolutely inappropriate colours and a sort of shimmery pointillist-without-the-headache movement (his people - and his objects and corpses, for that matter - look ready to bounce off the surface of the painting) with a deep morbidity, or skepticism, or fatalism, or something to do with death and vanity in a way that really satisfies me. The Antwerp museum has tonnes, versus the fucking none in Ensor's home town of Oostende.

Anyways, for much of the weekend, I was at that point of happiness where the only fly in the ointment is that not everybody is this happy. Even the trembling under-knowledge, the teenage paranoia of 'if you let yourself be this happy you stand to lose so much' was just the lime in the sorbet. And any troubles from work seemed part of a little part of a little something, like braces getting tightened, a nothing, a bagatelle that wasn't even a story yet, an unobtrusive skin rash.

Of course that set off its own worry for me Monday morning as I walked to work deafening myself with the Bad Seeds' last album and visualizing a violent burlesque routine (still love it but it sounds more and more like stripper music to me); I wondered, does ignoring work like that, thinking 'work is not real life, real life is real life, work is a task I do to fund my real life until I retire or get a job that counts as real life' lead into the kind of evil professional behaviours that allow people to do truly horrible things with no guilt at all, just because it's their job to do them? But that's not enough of a worry to ruin my mood. I don't do horrible things at work. I just write about other people doing them. And that may be a moral cop-out, but as Baywatch pointed out last week this only is a temporary nightmare.

Anyways, another good thing about Antwerp was the train reading, which was the rest of the Mosquito Coast. Eesh. That's a fucking great book, an epic of a lip-smacking good read. My favourite by Paul Theroux, possibly. Over the travel books, even, which I love. Adventure and Oedipus-complexes and adulthood and puberty and jungles and marital strife and racism and religion and murder, oh my. Speaking of Oedipal-complexes, how do you describe the father with a complex about his son, or a grown man with a general complex about young men? As having a Laius complex? The fact that there's no popular name for something so apparent when we're attributing formative murderous hate to all the little babies in the world makes me hate Freud more than I already did. Atta blame childhood, Herr Doktorb, obviously none of the shit in your brain is anything worth dealing with if it came up post-pubescently.

A lot of things going on there in the Mosquito Coast, in short, and yet never too busy, if you know what I mean, never hard to fix the mind on because of all the things and words going on, like books by that World According to Garp guy, which are just too magenta for me to get into. I recommend Mosquito Coast 100%.

More like beautiful up your own ass forever, shitbird

Love-hate relationship with my prime loved, hated Robert Hughes coming down hard on the side of love following this little diatribe about the Hirst auction. Oh, those sentences of his! So damn sloppy and so fucking horrible in his stupid fucking autobiography and so damn tedious in The Fatal Shore, and yet so punchy in his art criticism, like a lighthouse beacon punching its way through the fog. Seriously, I get physical pleasure from beast sentences like this one:

The now famous diamond-encrusted skull, lately unveiled to a gawping art world amid deluges of hype, is a letdown unless you believe the unverifiable claims about its cash value, and are mesmerised by mere bling of rather secondary quality; as a spectacle of transformation and terror, the sugar skulls sold on any Mexican street corner on the Day of the Dead are 10 times as vivid and, as a bonus, raise real issues about death and its relation to religious belief in a way that is genuinely democratic, not just a vicarious spectacle for money groupies such as Hirst and his admirers.

Obviously I love it so much because I agree. And then, I've never seen a single work by Damien Hirst whose spirit couldn't be encapsulated in 30 words or less, and if you can do that, what the hell is the point of appreciating that it has been brought into existence as an object? Especially when it has no merit as a craft or technique. I can't stand the notion it, Koon's shit, or anything, for that matter, has some intrinsic value merely because it reflects the spirit of the age. You know what else does? Events. Beliefs. Conclusions. Traffic jams. Silicone spatulas. Words. The problem is you can't pretend those are art and sell them to fuckwits for 50 million a pop, though I'm sure some Hirst-esque cunt will have a go with the spatula, given enough time. Pack of parasitic whores.

The thing is with Hirst, I get the sense his brain doesn't work well enough to use words instead of uberobvious symbols he can hire people to create for him. He responded to Hughes' criticism by calling it Luddite, which actually made me laugh out loud. I know Luddite and Philistine both sound clever, but that doesn't make them mean the same thing. How exactly is it that Hughes would like to smash the industrial machinery of the modern world, you stupid bourgeios fucker? Unless, of course, you're pointing out that your own activities are not art, but industrial machinery - much like an HP printer that provides a clear but annoyingly useless metaphor for the modern rhythm of existence by jamming all the fucking time. Which begs the 50 million dollar question . . .

Too pissed off to blog

Holy shit. I mean, holy shit. Holy shit. You know, yesterday, when I was dealing with work crap, the thought kept beating through my head - god I wish they'd fire me, god I wish they'd fire me. Today it's a roar - a massive, internal roar. Between you and me, I'm pretty fucking good at my job. I report. Oh, how I report! Like a madwoman. I make connections. I've even brought a degree of clarity to some number-y messes, and numbers and I have had a difficult relationship in the past. And I won't surrender my game, because it would leave the rest of the staff on my magazine, who I like and enjoy working with, in the lurch. All that leaves is being rude to executive management. Luckily, executive management are making it easy by being rude to me.
Anyways. I'm off.

UPDATE: In one of life's great ironies, which the non-Sagittarians of the world call 'luck', the day I come to the office pissed off enough to sabotage any future career I may have here by saying 'fuck' to the CEO is the first day I ever get called up by a headhunter. My head is fine where it is, thank you, but flattering nonetheless.

Cholera, the musical

Hell of a pisser this morning, and I'm blaming it on the combination of reading the first couple of chapters of Mosquito Coast, the shitfight at work, and this ludicrous lipstick flap in the States. Let me start with the lipstick.

On leaving North America, and meeting lots of lovely yankee expatriates who've become good friends, and being constantly mistaken for a yank myself, talking like a yankee and working at a yankee company as I do, I've struggled against the widespread European notion that the United States is a nation of fucking retards. And you know what, it has been a struggle. Especially lately, speaking to Americans at work whilst in the company of Europeans, and hearing these Americans are satisfied about the way things are going in Iraq now post-surge when those poor fucking people are getting cholera - cholera! That's a sign of things going well? Holy fucking shit! What the fuck is the matter with you? Oh Lord, the depth of Your mercy, patience and mystery that You suffer such coldblooded idiocy to blight the face of Your creation and to employ me at my present company! Fucking cholera! Holy fuck! Do you know what happens to a person when they get cholera? Fuck!

Anyways. You know what some more, lots of people are dangerously under-informed or misinformed about the horrible things their countries did or do abroad. The two most anti-American countres I've spent any length of time have been here and France. And in France, despite your typical asshole on the street having a better generalist education than most Anglos and a better understanding of international, well, everything, people generally had very little idea of their own country's relationship with Africa. And here - well, let's just say that they haven't quite got around to revamping their Congo museum yet - it remains an unironic trophy case touting how they rescued the darkies from the Arabs and brought civilization to the jungle - civilization that involved rape, murder, kidnapping and slavery on a truly staggering scale - fuck Belgium, in short. So, yeah. There you are. People are all idiotic assholes; Americans haven't cornered the market. Hence my struggle against European opinions on the intelligence and moral fiber of your typical American.

However. If this lipstick thing flies - and by this lipstick thing flying, I mean Republicans winning the next presidential election - I'm fucking done. I mean, it's right there. The stupid is right there. The lie is right there, the bullshit is right there, it's right fucking there. It couldn't be more obvious if John McCain whipped out his cock and started slapping you around the face with it. And if these unabashed crybaby liars are voted into office, I'm going to have to assume all those European ideas of Americans - too lazy, selfish and stupid to do anything but go with their ENORMOUS guts, like goldfish gorging themselves to death - are simply not worth struggling against anymore. It's right there.

Anyhoo. Moving on. Shitfights at work. One thing to say: my main problem is the disgust. Similar to my disgust at the prospect of the lipstick smear working, actually. Disgusted that the two men who are giving me grief at the moment despite having left records about how they obfuscated, fucked up - lied, in short, about the two different issues at hand have a) conveniently edited the truth out of their memories: b) no relationship with the truth, but function from moment to moment like sharks swimming through the sea, doing whatever seems right at the time, or, c) the theory that if they're loud and bitchy enough it won't matter that they're full of shit because I won't want to be confrontational. And you know what? I don't want to be confrontational. Confrontations give me headaches. They fill me with disgust. They make me feel like I'm lowering myself to some sort of adolescent level. I hate confrontation. But I'll fucking do it, and be all the more pissed off they've forced me to! This isn't a presidental election and I'm not a political party tip-toeing around, trying to get a black man elected in a racist country.

Anyways. Combine the political disgust with the professional disgust, throw in Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast, and you've got the shitty mood I'm in this morning. So far (50 pages in or so) the father, the 'hero' of the book, is the sort of insane I can feel pounding against the inside of my own chest when I get over-indignant, as I am at the moment, about all the rottenness in the world. Great, I think, cholera in Iraq, threats of pandemic stupidity in the most overarmed country in the world, and apparently I'm a fucking lunatic too. Perfect. That said, the book's pretty good so far, and I hadn't been a fan of Theroux's fiction up to the moment. He has a child's voice narrating and I think it was a good choice for him. When he uses adult narrative voices or perspectives he starts writing about sex, and his way of writing about sex is one I find to be both squicky and sterile. Like ultrasound gel.

Checkmate

If this is our final day or existence, which would be more than we as a species deserve but rather less than all those lovely creatures on all those David Attenborough documentaries deserve, I've at least found a track to make us shake our fucking booties on our way out:



I don't know if I've ever heard a better song than that. But wait! A song for dressing to slaughter! A song for all us women without the social skills to pretend to be admiring acquiescent retards, whose main baiting assets are our vertiginous curves and voracious sexual appetites, a song about a dress so awesome, so horny, so transcendent, that it's - why, it's a fucking soulful dress . . .



We've all had soulful dresses - I used to have one that I had to actually throw out after wearing three or four times; it was just too powerful for me to handle, and I got tired of picking of all the jizz crusts at the end of the evening.

Ahhh. How utterly tasteless. I needed to press the taste barrier a bit this morning - cheer myself up - I'm in a foul mood. Problems at work. Stupid problems. Other people's problems they're trying to make my problem. Not enough to stress me out - if work chooses to stress me I'll choose not to work - my escape route is so clear in my head that stress is not really an option. But enough to put me into a bit of a foul mood, a defensive mood, a 'fucking try me' mood that is not appropriate in terms of dealing with the people who give me money, the sort of mood which makes me think I need to establish my own business so the only incompetence I have to deal with is my own, and my suppliers, and my own employees, who I'll be able to sack.

Like Chris Rock said once upon a time, we all have a bitch at work who we like to complain about - I'm no different. Remember the office poolitics? I'm pretty sure I know who was doing that, and yeah, I like complaining about her, though not about the way she poos, because it's a fucking indelicate conversation. More about the way she's not nice to people. But she's small fry - all the bitches at work are small fry - compared to a much crappier class of people - the aging exec whose glory years were during the boom times when the company could afford to give him an assistant to keep his shit in order, and who obviously doesn't have one now, and is incapable of remembering or unwilling to remember what he approved and didn't approve, and will attempt to hang other people out to dry when he's caught tweaking his own numbers to give himself a better result, despite having left a paper trail a mile fucking wide. What a waste of the world's time.

Oh well. At least I have my escape strategy, and at least the F-word has downloaded the Chess Story, a wonderful compilation full of fucking bitching tunes like the two above.

Why Europeans age with some small grace

Got an email from my conference flame yesterday, checking if I'll be at the next one. Tush, you say, or some other disapproving sound. But don't fret. My conference flame is simply the man who I would allow myself to be pursued by every time our paths cross at conferences (which they often do) if I was on the market (which I'm not) and if I was the sort of girl who baited men at conferences (which I'm not) and if I was attracted to Teutons (which, you've guessed it, I'm not). Things being what they are, our relationship is comprised of eating our buffet breakfasts together and chatting about things that are more interesting than our jobs or the conferences at hand, like Brazilian cuisine or European foreign policy.

Obviously I'm touched to have heard from my conference flame because my self-esteem is a voracious monster that undiscriminatingly devours any reinforcement at all. But he is illustrative of a larger point, or rather I am, by enjoying his company, and it is this: business people, yuppies, are not by definition boring, soulless creatures. They haven't necessarily given up their dreams (although if he's ever dreamt of us having room service instead of buffet breakfast, he should) or their interest in life. I'm talking out of more than defensiveness here - I have an escape strategy from Businesswomanland, so I have a hard time identifying myself as a current denizen. I'm talking against the conviction that I see from far too many people from where I come from that once you take the good upwardly mobile job and decide to keep it, that's it - that's the end of a thoughtful life.

Most Europeans, I think, would agree that's wrong. A small part of this is that Europeans tend to have a better generalist knowledge of the world around them than your average Anglo because of all the things that get crammed into their head in highschool, and it gives them the right background to stay interested in things in general as they age. Anglos, Brits included, are the ones who tend to fall into the trap of thinking yuppies can't possibly be interesting or interested. And yet I appreciate the Anglophone method of education, which is far more self-directed, far more critical, far more egalitarian, and far more creative than methods in France, here, Italy, and Germany - also far less generalist; I did one non-arts course in my final year of highschool in Ontario, which I was quite happy about at the time but which is also a fucking travesty which has left me, at the grand old age of 29, furrowing my oft-furrowed brows at the 1946 British version of 'Geology for Dummies'.

But I don't blame Anglos' education for the way they think a thinking, thoughtworthy life ends upon entry into the rat race, to be re-started again only with the sort of midlife crisis that has spawned an entire revolting genre of movies about wretched men getting their boners back and wretched women getting their groove back. No. I blame how our holidays are too short, our working hours are too long, and we watch too much television.

I would love to think that sort of quality of life issue was up for debate in the upcoming Canadian election (which I won't be participating in, not paying taxes there anymore) or the upcoming American election. But no. No, no, no. God fucking forbid. Instead it's all bread and circuses without the bread. Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country; for example, you can work twice as many hours as is necessary from a productivity point of view, and you can abstain from clinging to any 'spare time' that would give you the freedom to learn about the most urgent political issues at hand, or to make informed decisions as an electorate, and or to educate your children to be anything but a semi-literate cog in the wheel of a car that's lost it's brakes and is careering down into the rising sea levels of our own suicidal societal stupidity.

Men aren't only good for fucking

I can come off as sexist from time to time because of my belief that the only thing that seperates us from other primates is the rhythm of female life, featuring as it does menopause - the cessation of childbirthing duties and the transformation of Woman into the repository of her group's acquired knowledge and artistic consciousness - and of my belief that if you segregated men from women, putting each group on an island by themselves, the men would universally revert to pan trog behaviours within a month, and women would carry on basically as usual except with a great deal more complaining about how there's no cock to be had.

So maybe I am sexist. Fine. But. From time to time boys say things that surprise me with my own stunning lack of insight. For example, about six years ago Bluebird and I were sitting around eating rösti and smoking his cigarettes, talking about nuclear holocaust, and I sez to Bluebird, I sez, 'nuclear armament is too dangerous because you saw how the Americans flew off the handle and blew up those Japanese cities to end that war quicker and that wasn't good, was it?' And he sez no, the Japanese had already lost, and the Americans blew up those Japanese cities to show the Soviets they could and would, and that was the rather hot beginning of the cold war.

'Oh,' I sez. Bluebird and I never saw eye to eye about much in terms of how the world works but trust a broken Swiss to tell the right time at least twice a day.

I'm far more accustomed to agreeing with the F-word about almost everything, but nonetheless I was a little shocked this weekend when we were talking about the upcoming American presidentials and the global economic downturn. 'I don't know if the Democrats can lose,' I sez to the F-word, I sez, 'they always win when them yanks are more paranoid about the economy than about the hostile world around them.'

'Yeah,' he sez, 'well, last May, when we listened to that show about Georgia, you said you never thought a teeny tiny country like that would risk pissing off a great big country like Russia by trying to reclaim their breakaway territories before getting into NATO. And now four months before the presidentials, something made Georgians think it was okay to risk pissing off Russia by trying to reclaim a breakaway territory before getting into NATO. What made them think it'd be okay? I don't know, but they had 2,000 troops in Iraq. Their military is supplied through American contracts. They're a big recipient of American foreign aid. Why would they be stupid enough to risk pissing off a great big country like Russia by trying to reclaim their breakaway territories before getting into NATO unless their biggest partner had told them it was okay? And why would their biggest partner have told them it was okay, when it so obviously wasn't, four months before an American presidential election wherein heretofore the main preoccupation of the electorate has been the economy?'

'Oh,' I sez. The F-word is probably about 4 more degrees paranoid than I am but let's face it, it wouldn't be the first time this sort of thing has happened, would it?

Anyways, if the American media wants a break from breathlessly waiting for that lousy pork barrel fiend from Alaska with the fuckable husband to talk to them about her 'positions', and if it wants a break from desperately basing the slant of its reporting on unscientific opinion polling about how much people want to fuck each of the candidates, maybe they can look into why this bullshit is happening now. But any mention of how maybe, possibly, there was some American complicity in all this is always tied to some idea of Russians being conspiracy theorists - even in an article about how America is dumping a billion dollars on Georgia in the middle of its own economic meltdown. Fucking tossers. The fourth column has erectile dysfunction.

The Red Dragon comes to the tough conclusions*

*and invents a brand spanking new swear word. A big shiny prize to whoever spots it first.

San Francisca and I talk American politics a bit. Mostly we talk other things because she's been so embarrassed by what a farce it's become - Sarah Palin has tipped her over the edge. I find that encouraging because she used to be a Clinton supporter. But then San Francisca is a smart girl so I don't know if all her compatriottes who were pro-Clinton will feel the same way. I'd imagine they wouldn't be retarded enough to take up the sop that is the Alaskan yahoo, and only my misanthropy would make me say that I'm sure they're not retarded enough.

But yesterday San Francisca and I had a little talk about who would have been a better sop, which I needed to discuss with someone, because for the life of me I couldn't figure out why it hadn't been Condoleezza Rice. In image terms she's certainly come out best from this lousy shitfight of an existing administration; she has so much experience, all of it unbeatably pertinent to the job; and she can string three words together without sneering. In fact she has a lovely soothing voice. Would I ever vote for her if I was able? No. Would I invite her over for dinner? No. If I bumped into her on the street, would I abstain from pelting her with high-absorbency menstrual pads whilst screaming 'oh my god, it's leaking all the way from Iraq!' No. But if I was an American woman, I wouldn't find her nomination to the vice presidency the least bit inexplicable, condescending, stupid, or worrying.

But as San Francisca pointed out, it was just too much for the Republicans. A woman - edgy! A black woman - erm . . . A black woman who has not Chosen Life through good clean heterosexual breeding herself and who can't evade saying she's pro-choice? No. No, no, no. These are the Republicans we're talking about, aren't they? Better to nominate an inexperienced yahoo with a secessionist husband, condomless daughter, and pork barrel politics than a woman who, for all her indisputable qualifications for the job, is black, not a baby factory, and doesn't expect anyone else to be. Because choosing an inexperienced yahoo with great tits will be enough to make all the women who are upset about Hilary Clinton losing swing their politics 180 degrees. It will make them vote for two lousy shitheels who are willing to criminalize rape victims that refuse to bear their violators' children.

Conclusions:

1. Seriously, one million fuck yous to the Republicans. They couldn't shit in a pot if it insulted their mother.

2. And if their shit works, America will get the government it deserves. This isn't 1990 anymore. The last eight years have turned its dollar to mush, its economy into a repo man orgy, its military into a fragile, overstretched blanket snagged in two of the crummiest countries in the world where it's driving up the price of a commodity that makes its political rivals richer by the second, and its yuppies into indigents. All of that may be fine and dandy as far as the Republican Party is concerned, and as far as the witless fuckels who are willing to vote for it AGAIN are concerned.

But now the rest of the planet has better things to do than put up with a country run by the political equivalent of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. Even fuckin' Paruguay has better things to do these days. Empires have to fall sometime and if it's in the next four years, all of us who WON'T be getting the government we deserve will live with it. Maybe we'll even be better off.

3. And Palin's secessionist husband is a total piece of ass. State's right on top of that! I wouldn't kick him off my snowmobile. I'd fish his salmon. I'd handle his state trooper. And et cetera.

Awwwwwww, GEEK OUT!

Le geek, c'est chic.

Which is Mistress-La-Spliffe shorthand for 'I've become a fucking podcast addict.' Can't be stopped. I'm that sort of boring learner who was always pulling in the big marks in uni without being all that competent - the sort who can sit there and listen, maybe read from time to time, and learn all she has to learn to get the fuckin' As that way. All of which means I am prime podcast country and they have settled me like crazy. I fuckin' love them. Listen to them an hour a day whilst trekking to work and back, and even at work if all I'm doing is transcribing, and I swear to you no subject is too boring that I can't listen to a nice podcast about it.

The CBC, Canada's national broadcaster, has some nice ones. So does the ABC, Australia's national broadcaster, which have the added benefit of getting me used to that ridiculous accent in people other than my own sweet darling F-word, who would be my own sweet darling no matter what retarded accent he talked with - even if he talked like me, who easily has the single most retarded accent in the Anglophone world. Think one of the whores from Fargo who's been living with an Australian for a few years in a Francophone country, and you've just about got the sheer fucking ugliness of it. God, am I ever glad I don't have to listen to my own voice during sex. It must be fucking atrocious.

Anyhoo, yesterday I heard an absolutely lovely one from the IIASA that I must reccommend from heterodox economist Ha-Joon Chang. Don't be scared by the 'economist'. It's a lovely talk that cuts through all the political cant about free-trade-good this and protectionism-bad that - far more of a historical than numerical focus, as it was a talk given to a bunch of non-economists. Go on. Give it a listen. For nothing else, then for Ha-Joon Chang's adorable accent. I could listen to Koreans speak English all day. Fuck the French and the Queen and Southern Belles and everybody else who's supposed to be all cute when they talk English. The Korean accent easily beats them all, both for clarity and prettiness.

The Red Dragon asks the tough questions

The American political cycle has spiralled down into farce, in-your-face slapstick that many of my friends who traditionally ignore the American political cycle can't help but comment on. I'm left with four questions:

1. Was it just a random chick pick, or is Sarah Palin the sort of thing that John McCain personally feels is both representative of and appealing to American women? A gun-toting, equal-pay stimying, global warming denying sneer machine who is against women's right to choose and - to me far more importantly - a girl's right to learn, and who'd even dream of allowing her teenage daughter to get married just because she got pregnant? Teenage. Pregnant or not the whole girl's life is ahead of her. If I'd married who I'd wanted to marry when I was 17 I'd have shot myself by now, and I think I'm quite typical in that.

2. Is he right? Or is he the biggest cocksucker in the world?

3. If Americans are stupid enough to vote a 71 year old cancer survivor into office whose immediate successor is the gun-toting, equal-pay stimying, global warming denying sneer machine whilst the country is engaged in two wars, the global economy crashes, Russia confronts NATO in its near abroad, ocean level rise threatens to create a refugee class the size of which the planet has never seen before, and China keeps being China, how long will it be before Japan just buys up everything south of the Canadian border and north of the South American leftist nationalists who don't play ball anymore and turns it into a Toyota factory?

4. And at that point, will the price of Toyotas go down? Because I sort of want one when we move to Australia. They get fantastic mileage and they're safer than my emotional choice, a Mini Cooper. I know they're already pretty cheap but I'm the world's biggest skinflint.

Lovely as a sleepy lizard

Like everybody, I could complain about my job. Really only about the hours - I'd like to work as hard as a rentboy at a televangelists' convention three days a week and then have four day weekends. I suppose I could also complain about the fact that my office is in Brussels, but that's not my office's fault, and if it was in a better city where apartments aren't so cheap they'd have to pay me more, or else I'd be complaining about my salary. So there you are. And my job has great benefits, like the way I'm being paid to fight with people on the company blog - I gave up looking at comment sections of anything a long time ago because of the contribution it makes to my misanthropy, but hey, if it's my job, cool - and knowing about what's happening in Mozambique and the way I get to go sea kayaking in Marseille in a couple of weeks.

And yesterday my job benefited me by teaching me, in the course of research for one of my articles, that Abu Dhabi has a falcon hospital. And it's one of several in the region. Can you believe it? That little scrap of information took my breath away - slapped me across the face with the fact that not only do people live so differently from me, but people love birds in an absolutely different way from me. There are so many wonderful things in the world. Obviously I shouldn't have had to look all the way to Abu Dhabi to realize that, but you know how things jump out at you from time to time.

Also varied and wonderful is something the F-word got for me, Life in Cold Blood, narrated by the mighty Attenborough. I don't know the last time I've seen something so pretty, though there're so many reptiles and amphibians making it that from time to time I feel like I'm watching porn that's missing my horny mark. It's all the relationships within a species that really gets me though, not just the jissoming relationships, or not just the jissom in the jissoming relationships. Like the je t'aime moi non plus of Australia's sleepy lizards, who spend two months together a year, and then split up, and then get back together, and who mourn their partners if they die. Or the ritual combat of king cobras, who can kill a large animal with a single bite but whose menfolk content themselves with wrestling and pinning each other down to settle territorial disputes. I swear the more we learn about animals, the more mysterious they get.

Refreshing a tired businesswoman's brain

Lots of quite nice things happened this weekend, only a few of which I'll write about in the interests of space and decency. After getting such a lift from the preceding two weekends of countryside and kayaking, we see we have to use our weekends, and use ourselves on the weekend. My own conclusion is that I need to spend more time staring at trees and birds, and less at people, as my misanthropy threatens to become unmanageable. I'm not unhappy these days, either in my personal or professional life, but I'm starting to feel a bit like an extra-terrestrial. Not in the sense of being above it all, or being a super-evolved intergalactic voyageuse, but in the sense of just not getting it a lot of the time.

Anyhoo. Weekend extended backwards by a staff trip to an adventure park on Friday - one of those places you chain yourself to security lines and swing around the trees. I lasted three hours before my vertigo insisted I sit down and start drinking, which is three more hours than I'd been expecting to last. Not one panic attack, though I did consider it as a possibility at one point. Out in a town called Wavre, which was lovely, green and much cleaner-smelling than Brussels - helpful, considering the sudden onset of warmth and summer. I like the people I work with well enough. The ones who I'm not actively fond of don't demand too much of my attention so it's all good.

Yesterday dealt with the continuing warmth and green by going to Tervuren for some fresh air, where we had a nice picnic in the grounds of the African museum. The F-word went in to draw some of the weirdo stuff they've purloined from the Congo and I went for a long walk in the woods, reflecting on my misanthropy (set off hard by the allegorical statues in the entrance hall of the Spirit of Europe rescuing the Spirit of Africa from the Spirit of Barbarism and Arabs; I've never seen such an elegant and unabashed translation of murderous hypocrisy into expensive kitsch, but then I don't listen to American political speeches), and then settling down to read about half of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel. A neat little book, suitable for tired businessmen's brains, which means it's suitable for mine. It'd be perfect for a three hour flight. Opens a window on a time when our societal paranoia was the same, but with a different object. On a time when academics and scientists were just as territorial and bigoted, but in the sphere of Royal Commissions instead of universities, broadsheets and books for pop audiences. Oh, the humanity.

So enjoyed both Wavre and Tervuren, though my enjoyment of all that fresh air in Wavre would have been tempered if I'd known there'd been a radioactive gas leak from a facility close to Charleroi (Wavre is halfway there) which the government has been falling all over itself about after trying to cover it up or downplay it for a week or so. Fuck, Belgium is a mess.

Anyways, lots of other nice things happened. For example, I invented a new technique for making tomato sauce which is so revolutionary and so delicious I think it will become a Spliffe Family Secret. I also made rhubarb upside cake in the skillet for the first time, which is a work in progress - it was good but it could be brilliant, and when it is I'll release the recipe. And custard. I've never been the world's biggest fan of it, but I discovered that if you whisk it continuously as you heat it, adding the corn starch as you go, it gets all foamy and ethereally exquisite. Expect that to be posted soon, under some charming name like Fairy Cum or Mermaid Corpse.