Psychic masturbation and the end of the world

I skipped a meeting for the organic food co-op last night in favour of relaxing, making granola, and not subjecting myself to hours of Walloon inanities and conversational black holes. The first part of that phrase looks so deeply . . . what's the word? White? Granola? Birkenstock-and-socks? But homemade granola is magically delicious, and it's the only kind I can have, due to not being able to eat almonds and hazelnuts and such things - which rules out most decent pre-made granolas. And it's part of our household's eating philosophy that the closer you buy ingredients to their raw form, the fewer opportunities there are for vendors to adulterate them with some shit or other. It may sound paranoid to you, but we're Italian, so really it's just common sense for us. I'm also working on the assumption it's best to practice making things from scratch now so that when we have children, I can go on autopilot and hopefully not waste much time or energy putting things together. Anyways, here's the recipe:

4 cups whole grains - I suggest a mix but oats should probably make up around half
1 + 1/2 cup coconut flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons flax seeds and/or 2 tablespoons sesame seeds (grind the flax seeds briefly)
Cinnamon and/or ginger and/or cacao and/or powdered clove to taste

Raw, diced starchy fruit, like apple or pear, if wanted
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons honey (or to taste)

Raisins, currants or other dried fruit to taste

Preheat the oven to gas mark 3. Stir together the first group of ingredients, and then stir in the oil and the honey. Mix until the moisture is evenly distributed. Spread the mixture thinly and evenly over a lightly greased cookie tray and leave in the oven for seven minute bursts; every seven minutes stir the mixture on the tray, turning it over to let a new part of it brown. Keep cooking it until it reaches the sort of light golden colour that looks pleasing - probably a little less than half an hour. Once out of the oven, add raisins or currants or whatever you've chosen. Let it cool, and then gently break it up if it has formed biggish chunks. Keep it in an airtight jar. For greater crispiness, greater honey + time.

It was delicious and much more fun to make than to listen to a room full of people be arses. And of course it doesn't take very much time so I could keep reading The Making of the English Working Class, finally getting to the chapter where he calls Methodism a ritualized form of psychic masturbation - three seperate people had told me he was going to do that and it was still shockingly well placed. Great book, greatly written, but more about it when I'm done.

It was so luxurious to not go to the meeting that I'm really thinking of dropping out. Switching to locally grown organic would be nice but I'm already trying to make other difficult lifestyle changes, like green tea instead of lattes in the morning (horrid) and sleeping on my back instead of in the fetal position (odd but better dreams), and I'm not sure I need the extra expense and the stress of dealing with 25 Wallonian families on top of that. So I went to bed mightily relaxed, and woke up to a mighty storm around three in the morning. At least I think it was a mighty storm, I didn't really go check it out. I just lay there with the strobe lights going off and listening to these big brooding rolls of thunder, wondering if that was what the end of the world would sound like, and if it was the end of the world, what I'd do. Cuddle, I imagine.

Jolly jolly jolliness

What a weekend. I got a sunburn and, I believe, a cure for hay fever (a combination of prayer, probiotics, and stinging nettle supplements). Yesterday we rode our bikes down the Rhine to a set of allotments - and German allotments rock, by the way, they're not just gardens; they have huts and roses and barbecues - they're right Lebensraum. Okay, I've got to stop writing things like that. For this morning at least. Anyways, we rode our bikes along the Rhine, and the trees were fucking like bunnies. There was so much pollen in the air that it looked like a flurry. I'm not exaggerating at all. It looked like a big flurry and it was all actually going up my nose, and I was basically okay. Thank god, because there were lots of lovely things to drink, making antihistamines quite out of the question.

Oh, and yeah. Back to Mistress La Spliffe again. I'm just not a one to not get high. Especially when my reason for not getting high is to punish myself for not joining the epically polluting car-driving class fast enough, on a continent where nobody needs a car unless they have children, and even then it's debatable. I'll push myself, of course, but it was already a moral compromise to start using one of those beastly (if fun) things, and I'm not going to not get high for a moral compromise. Particularly when I really, really want to get high.

Back to the money factory.

The Red Dragon will TGV on out

I have forsworn my rights to a long weekend, the long weekend most of Europe has at the moment in honour of a resurrected Jesus flying up to heaven after hanging around here for awhile, in favour of taking some four weeks of vacation this summer and still managing to have something like a Christmas holiday at the end of the year. And the F-word has been refused his 'bridge day' (a day off school and public sector workers are often given to make up a really substantial weekend when a stat holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday) so in any case it wouldn't have been a proper long weekend en couple. Nonetheless we're off to Düsseldorf again this aft. I'm very fond of his friends there. And oh, the beer, the beerhalls. Oh. And as you may have been able to tell from yesterday's post, I'm in quite desperate fucking need of a break from this place.

Speaking of, I've found a new blog I like attached to the local expat magazine, which I don't like. The great thing about Only in Belgium is it manages to find a stupid stat or story about this place more or less every day. And they're never a surprise. Just a "well, yeah."

Oh well. Accentuate the positive. The beer, the beerhalls. And the Rhine. Lovely big river, and we will sit next to it and drink beer if the weather holds. One of my problems with Brussels is there's no water, just the sewage river that's been buried. Initially that was distressing because of the gross sewage factor and because not having a river, lake or coast to the city made it difficult to orient myself; now that I'm oriented it's more a question of there being no relief to my mind; no water to stare at to relax a little bit. And somehow a city without water seems dirty to me. But having such a thought in relationship to thinking about the Rhine, however tenuously, calls up Coleridge's poem about a different, more 'romantic' time when Cologne (the city we'll TGV to before taking a local to the nearby Düsseldorf) and North Rhine Westphalia was not as clean as one notes these days:

In Kohln, a town of monks and bones,
And pavements fang'd with murderous stones
And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches;
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks!
Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks,
The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?

I love me some Coleridge. It's personal, because his poems started plucking strong chords with me when I was very young, so I really do love him. Back in the days I used to vary my inebriations more I would wake up, lie in bed, and quite often the first line that presented itself to my pained consciousness was a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I, and it was somehow as though Coleridge was chiding me. In my imagination, he's a chubbier Nick Cave. About 40 years old. And fucks like a beast.

Can you imagine, if there is an afterlife in which we retain our consciousnesses more or less as we understand our consciousnesses, how strange and ghostly it must be for the souls of the dead to see how the living create new imaginings of them? And not being able to clear up any public misunderstandings by going on Oprah. Not being able to clean up your image by starting an NGO. Not being offered career-resurrecting film roles by Quentin Tarantino. Not being able to grow old or fat or graceless or to make bad facial-hair-type decisions so that people stop being interested in you sexually. And still, everybody having all these strange ideas and emotions about you, these strange constructions of you. How weird.

The limits of the zoological approach

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

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

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

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

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

Alternatively, of course . . .

Watching the odd episode of A Bit of Fry and Laurie these days. I don't know if those two have ever been funnier. Including in Blackadder, which I loved them in. Maybe it's just the state of mind I'm in these days . . . a state of mind which makes sketches like this seem like the funniest thing ever:



I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm glad Hugh Laurie has found a way to make bajillions of dollars and enter the self-loathing erotic dreams of millions of women on House. But I don't get it. I don't understand how he 'makes' it with something that crappy, with a fucking hospital drama, to a greater degree than the brilliant, brilliant things he's done in the past. It's one of the great mysteries of the capitalist age, as far as I'm concerned. Hospital dramas in a more general sense are a mystery to me. I've never really got them. Oh well. It's given me time to do other things, like watch A Bit of Fry and Laurie repeats.

One sketch was rather striking given the current expenses scandal agitating Britain:

If you aren't Dutch, you're not selling fast enough

Saw a Werner Herzog documentary last night, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck . . . did I mention how much I miss weed? It was great but if I was high it would have been revelatory. As it was, by the end I was wondering what the fuck he was on in the 1970s. The film lingered on the auctioneering competition beyond the point that a straight person could be expected to be interested in. I think that's the great thing about the sort of drugs I like . . . they lengthen my attention span.

Anyways, there are no great twists or surprises in it, so though I recommend you watch it I have no hesitation in telling you it's coverage of the 1976 World Auctioneering Championships, and that the winner was Steve Liptay, who came from Bowmanville, Ontario, and who now runs an auction house for cars on the east coast. A great many of my intimates in Canada were from Bowmanville or its surrounds, and it did my heart so much good to hear that accent again - your standard Canadian accent but with a bit extra. Being away from Canada so long, working with a collection of Brits, and living with a man from a country where the word 'groin' is polysyllabic has made me very fond of my own accent, and the Canadian accent generally. There's a softness and gentleness about it. Like a sober, unprovoked Irish person.

But back to the movie. I liked it a good deal but I'm pretty convinced if Herzog wasn't high whilst putting it together he had been holding his breath and twirling. I have a certain distrust of it because in the English version, the subtitles saying what the people are saying in English whilst Herzog dubs them over in German are visibly not very similar to what the people are saying. It makes them seem rather more empty-headed than is probably quite fair. I also think it's rather odd he chooses the language of auctioneering as the new and perhaps final language of capitalism when - you know - it's awfully fucking old, isn't it? It's the oldest language of capitalism. The first language of capitalism. I think I either missed his point here, or his point wasn't very good.

Speaking of, have you ever heard of a Dutch auction? Flower wholesalers use it because flowers are time sensitive, and no matter how fucking fast an auctioneer goes, he can't be as fast as a Dutch auction. I went to a flower wholesalers with Elvis a couple of years back and I couldn't believe it, it was like a roomful of Jeopardy! contestants hitting buzzers. The idea is to start buying at a high level and then wind the price down; as soon as you see a price for the lot you're willing to pay, you hit the buzzer. Fast! Superfast.

I don't know why all auctions don't use it. I would love if there was some comparative study I could look at to see which style of auctioning fetched the highest bids - Dutch or English. My instinctive guess is that as a norm Dutch auction prices would be higher, but that possibly average English auction prices would be higher because occasionally you'll get buyers wrapped up in a bidding war pushing prices beyond projected levels. It would be very hard to imagine fine art sold in a Dutch auction, for example. It's interesting. There's a different idea in these types of auctions about how markets and competition work, though they're both capitalist, both competitive. It's just the Dutch auction appears 100x more efficient - if you're willing to do without occasionally hitting prices outstripping any reasonable expectation of what the price should be.

The Making of the English Sewing Jessica

I was in quite a bad mood all weekend. Couldn't tell you why, exactly, but feeling very misanthropic indeed. I think it's The Making of the English Working Class. That is a fucking downer of a book - very good, very engaging, but very bleak, and you look at that country now and you know it doesn't have a happy ending, right?

So I refused to see anybody or have civil conversations and instead sewed. A bag, some boxers, tailored some shirts. Read about the disenfranchisement of the weavers. Watched Irma Vep. Thought about all the different ways different nationalities suck. But mostly sewed. It's frustrating and calming at the same time, sewing, or at least it is for me because I don't grasp what I'm doing yet. Getting there, though. The boxers were most exciting because I had never sewn a fly before, and had had no idea how to. There are all these new concepts that are forcing their way into my spatial awareness, which is a bit odd because I haven't been using my spatial awareness much over the past few years.

Although if I think about it, I think the chanciness of my mood has to do with Friday's work meeting where we more or less went through the likelihood that I'll leave in a little more than a year if they're not able to transfer me to the Asian magazine. It was already true before the meeting but saying these things out loud makes them so much more real. And thinking back, that made Friday night sleepless. Well, for about an hour and a half, which counts as a sleepless night by my tree-sloth standards. For about an hour I lay there thinking 'it's lots of money, what are you doing thinking about leaving, you're going to be indigent some day' and then I spent half an hour thinking about all the ways in which I'll avoid being indigent, and then I fell asleep. It hasn't been bothering me since then in an out-loud kind of way, but I think it's been playing havoc with my mood.

Sewing up the Christan empire

I don't think I mentioned, but I have more than one resolution going at the moment. Awhile ago I decided that since my office is casual and since I'd managed to find a pair of jeans that won't give me a yeast infection and since I had quite a large collection of socks and had learnt how to darn them in case of need, I would try to go for a full year without buying clothes. Instead, making anything I needed, in a sort of crash course in sewing. Three motives:

1. I'm cheap, and hordeing money like a troll these days

2. I hate clothes shopping. About nine years ago I lost a tonne of weight and suddenly everything fit, which turned shopping from an exercise in humiliation into an exercise in looking in mirrors and geeking on how cute I was. So for a few years shopping was a pleasure, an amusement, just about my favourite thing to do in an afternoon . . . but I'd say over the last three or four years - since I had that job in advertising and got convinced of the inescapable patsyness of Western consumers - almost all the charm has leaked away. I resent shopping now. I resent the processes by which the clothes were made, transported, and then marketed to me. I resent being the victim of the market-driven vagaries of fashion (witness the fucking calvary* I had to go through to get a fucking pair of jeans with no fucking spandex in them). Clothes shopping sucks.

3. There's no other way I'm going to learn to sew unless I go this sort of sink-or-swim route. I've looked for dressmaking classes here and while it's not been completely goose-egg they're all too far away for me to honestly believe I'll take the trouble to go out for lessons once a week. I can hardly drag my sorry ass up to the prison every Wednesday for our tai chi sessions and that's a three-minute walk.

Last weekend was FINALLY the diapers for some peeps in Canada who are fit to erupt their babies (in the mail, Lamie). This weekend I'll be starting on underwear. Underwear for the F-word first - he has a hankering for some silk boxers and I figure he deserves no less. And then another pair of pants and a shoulder bag for a friend who's visiting at the end of the month, whose Tuesday birthday I have forgotten until this very moment. Shit. Why are so many people born in the fucking springtime? A different pants pattern than the ones I've used so far. The F-word needs some walking-around pants and the patterns I've hitherto used are definitely pyjama pants.

*You know what's neat about Calvary, Golgotha, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that Constantine built on top of it? It's a reclaimed temple to Aphrodite, supposedly ferreted out as both Jesus's death and burial place by Constantine's mum, Helena, despite not being anywhere close to where Jesus could have died and been buried according to the Bible. Constantine, remember, is the Roman emperor under whose rule Christianity really kicked off its transformation from a revolutionary lifestyle religion to a political weapon in the struggle to maintain an oppressive and lucrative status quo, and his mum Helena, remember, was his fucking mum; you're not going to get a more useful saint than that when you're trying to establish a new state religion. It was only 10 emperors and 50 years later that Theodosius went wholesale on the suppression of the temples and their replacement with churches. We saw a rather transparently hilarious example of Theodosius's work on our vacation in Syracuse this Christmas - the city's cathedral, seemingly hastily vomited up all over the temple of Minerva:


I sometimes hear of the Christianization of the temples and sacred sites described as some sort of evidence against Christianity (Jeebus never existed! He's a rehabilitated Mithras! etc.) - a very silly, non-apropos argument against a faith-based religion wherein it really doesn't matter if there's no proof of the man's existence and no proof of where he was born, alive, and expiring; the perfectly legitimate Christian retort to arguments like that is it really doesn't matter; I have faith. I think this is what makes the recent noisy dialogues between the faithful and vocal atheists so fucking annoying: to one group faith is great and to another faith isn't anything, so they're arguing with completely seperate rationalities, from different emotional bases, with the end result that each looks like a blithering, incomprehensible idiot to the other.

But what I do feel the Christianization of the temples indicates is that the same standard of people who were willing to wield disproportionate influence over pagan behaviour and profit from it in a very visible and material sense were (and are) also willing to control and profit from Christians - in a way that has very little to do with Christian morality, as the original writings set it out. Christians should be more careful. There are disgusting atrocities, grotesque power structures leaching off their love of God - gargoyles that they would probably find themselves too full of Christian love to support if they had a good grasp of the situation.

In which I give vent to my subscription to the "Dumb Belgian" stereotype

1. So remember when I stumbled into a hipster apartment full of hipsters who reminded me of hipsters back home?

2. And remember how I feel quite strongly about the humanity of great apes?

Well,

1. In retrospect, it was not a nice thing to say about the hipsters back home, and

2. Living in Belgium is helping me address the opposite side of the coin: that if I say great apes are a kind of human, I am being inaccurate; instead I must say humans are a kind of great ape.

We'll still be pushing on with the organic food collective, because the F-word feels strongly about eating organic, and I feel strongly about food being more delicious when it's been grown close to the point of consumption. But after the last meeting, I've decided I'm going to have to take a zoological approach to the collective if I'm not going to lose my shit. I've never seen so much ham-fisted, half-witted idiocy cluttering a room as that collection of 25 Belgians talking at once, but I manage to see them as overdecorated chimpanzees it'll be funny instead of infuriating.

I've never attended a meeting involving so many repetitions of key points that had already been adequately and repetitively explained in detail (and remember my French is far from perfect) and never seen so many faces remaining vacant and slack-jawed in incomprehension for so long, or at least not since we studied Heidegger in undergrad at the end of fourth year when everybody's brain had already packed up and moved on to how they were going to pay off their student loans armed with nothing but a humanities degree and a drug habit.

It's hard to pick out a gem for you from the collection of sparkling intellectual turds mined during the meeting, but here's the one that still seems to be striking me the most. There are two kinds of organic buying collective operating in Belgium. One kind: you pay upfront at the beginning of the year and get a mystery box delivered to you every fortnight containing whatever's in season from your farmers, or whatever looked good at the organic wholesaler's that week. Let's call it a contract arrangement. The other kind: you get a list every fortnight of what's available, choose what you want, submit it, and pay for what you've chosen when you pick it up a few days later. A pay-as-you-go arrangement. Are you with me so far? Are you managing to follow the fucking complexities of two of the fucking simplest concepts in the motherfucking economic firmament?

The most recent meeting of our collective was the third. From the first, it's been clear that with the supplier we've chosen we'll be using the pay-as-you-go concept. Halfway through the meeting, when the chairwoman (re)explained the fortnightly rotating task of repacking bulk deliveries from the farmer into bins containing each family's order, it finally dawned on one of the attendees - who had attended the two previous meetings, which had included exhaustive descriptions of how the pay-as-you-go collective worked, including a two-hour presentation from one of the men who had set up the first such pay-as-you-go collective in the city - that we were going to use the pay-as-you-go method.

She wasn't happy about it. She had managed to spend, by my calculations, eight hours of discussions of the pay-as-you-go collective, including the 90 minutes immediately preceding her realization, convinced that she was participating in the birth of a contract collective. And once she realized her error, we had to hear about it. The entire meeting had to stop for a few minutes while this woman expounded on why she wanted to be in a contract collective, and not a pay-as-you-go collective, but oh well, she guessed the would participate in our pay-as-you-go collective anyways, having already committed the time. It was awesome.

The meeting was full of incidents like that, incidents of egregious stupidity that could only be ascribed to mental deficiencies or a very real effort by many of the participants to actively tune out what was being said and what had been said, in detail and at length, over many hours. It was really remarkable. After two hours they were still going strong but the F-word and I had to leave because he was getting pissed off - he works in a Belgian school, and he said it was the same shit-headedness he saw at his staff meetings every month - and I was going a little bit red in the face because it was so fucking hilarious. When we got out of the building and a safe distance down the street I let loose with a serious case of the giggles, that lasted 10, 15 minutes.

Anyways. You know how it's all funny and retarded when Americans get upset about anything that looks like socialism, and are all, like, "it's horrible, we're turning into Sweden," when it should be obvious to the meanest of intelligences that they should be so fucking lucky as to turn into Sweden, where the tax rate is quite reasonable by developed-world standards, the political system accountable, and the social services first-class? It is funny and retarded. I even suspect that once you add up federal and state and local and sales taxes, the Swedish taxation burden doesn't really massively outstrip the Yankee taxation burden, but still the Swedes manage to have a functioning and supportive state instead of an inefficient, free-for-all, insecure fandango that couldn't function without the presence of an unregulated labouring underclass.

But I think I understand why so many of them are able to retain such a funny and retarded belief now. I suspect that at some point in the post-WWII period, some poor Yankee assholes were forced to spend a big block of time in Belgium trying to have productive meetings with Belgians, and made a not-unreasonable connection between the utter intellectual helplessness and incompetence of their interlocutors and the Belgian welfare state. They went home and they spread the frightening word: the Belgian welfare state enables uninterruptedly baffled people to live uninstitutionalized lives. Which since then, through a game of right-wing media Chinese whispers, has turned into socialism is like zombies. Fair enough. Bigger misunderstandings have been innocent.

Chavs: the scurvy of the limeys

You know what I love? Celebrity gossip. Years ago I wrote about three entries in a blog that would examine celebrity gossip. Almost right away, once I started spending half an hour a day reading celebrity gossip, it made me want to sick. Not because of the celebrities, but because of the obsessively bourgeois preoccupations and yardsticks of the celebrity gossipers. Icky - icky in a way beyond, say, Jade Goody expiring of cancer in front of the camera, which honestly I didn’t think was all that icky; it’s not how I’d choose to expire of cancer, but I was never deprived of anything good as a child and our needs were certainly different . . . but icky in the sense of how celebrity gossipers so uniformly seemed to see the people they were gossiping about as subhuman in a very snobby, iper-pudique way.

That’s not why I dropped the blog (there was just no time for it); that prudery was so complicated and so fascinating that however much it made me want to sick, I still could have spent months looking it over and trying to pull it apart to understand it, because it was so mixed up with a sort of guiltless class-consciousness, capitalist envy, and unconscious but plainly visible feelings of inferiority from the gossipers, all at the same time.

Especially the English gossip. Its tension is different from American gossip’s, more overtly class-based. I have no idea who the people the poms are gossiping about are, because usually they’ve done much less in a professionally artistic sense than American gossip objects have – lots of Page 3 girls and footballer’s wives and reality television stars, whereas in America you usually have to be a singer or actor or something for people to care about you. Fantasy is still important in America - the fantasy that the aging Ciccone bint is Madonna, that sad old sack Terry Bollea is the Hulk, that fat dead narc Elvis, like Jeebus, fucking lives. There's something grimmer, more cynical in England - I'd say more realistic, but sometimes fantasy is more honest than decontextualized reality. Reality television has taken off in a different way there than in America, in a way that some commentators describe as a celebration of mediocrity (a bit rich coming from Paul McCartney, considering his seminal contributions to pop music over the past 30 years, but I'm shooting at clay pigeons with no Wings here so I'll stop.) I’m not trying to be cruel when I say that if their gossip is anything to go by, that's because the English have an obsession with useless people.

I believe this is because of their monarchy and aristocracy – the remnants of a bunch of gluttonous, arriviste armed thugs who burst in from Scandinavia, and then France, Wales, Scotland, the Netherlands, and then Germany, and monumentally enriched themselves at everyone else’s expense over more than a millenium now. And over the last few hundred years, serving absolutely no function for good or for ill except for being the sort of figureheads who help reinforce the status quo – which is a purpose I find profoundly useless when the status quo has been such shit. There's no real fantasy associated with monarchy or aristocracy, just a decontextualized reality - you don't think, I wish I was a princess because then I'd be a great singer or dancer or football player or actress or politician and I'd be so great everybody would love me - no. People wish they were princesses so that they would be princesses. For the same reasons English people wish they were reality stars - to be rich and famous and influential beyond their talents or intelligence. The difference being that the monarchy and aristocracy managed to enrich themselves and impoverish the other classes so entirely that they became the arbiters of taste instead of its challengers.

And the present breed of gluttonous English arrivistes, while managing to accrue multi-million pound fortunes, haven’t taken over to the degree that they can be the arbiters of taste; they’re very much a fucking taste challenge. They're 'chavs'. Chavs. What a word. You’re not allowed to say proles anymore because we're supposed to be living in some sort of post-Marxist world, and anyways they’ve got too much disposable income, even in that impoverished iniquitous shithole of a pseudo-European nation, to be proles in the way the bourgeois were educated to regard proles. So the bourgeois rename them chavs and don’t have to ask themselves hard questions about their place in the class conflict. They're just celebrity gossiping. About rich chavs. Not proles. No biggie. And all the while this profound fear and disgust and jealousy at the thought of yet more idle, useless barbarians taking over . . .

Death, flu, and zombies

Last week Yankee HR sent us two or three messages about how we should wash our hands and not come to work if we were feeling ill. Fine with me! I didn't make an effort when I woke up yesterday to parse a headache and an iffy throat (stress? dehydration? allergies? cholera?) and instead wrote my manager to explain I'd be working from home, for fear of infecting my office with my zombie pig germs. And then she mentioned that she'd be the one with the zombie germs because she'd just been in an aeroplane from Asia and God knows that's where every illness comes from. Even the Mexican ones that are actually from feedlots in the States. And oh, how we laughed.

Anyways, I got an awful lot of work done. I get tonnes done when there's no office around me reminding me I'm an office worker. Not just work things either, but washing our embarassingly filthy kitchen floor, and making a fucking lovely wild rice casserole, and listening to a bunch of ABC podcasts. One very interesting one about the big influenza, the 1918-1919 one that killed all those millions of people around the world so quickly. I do reccommend it, it's quite good - Rear Vision is a nice series generally. But for me the most striking part of it was its discussion of the WWI front as the flu vector - that the virus may have started elsewhere, but the front was what gave it a chance to evolve into a killer - spreading in a very, very, very concentrated stew of all those fit, distressed young men in the trenches. A mutation that thrived in such hosts outsurvived the others - and then spread across the world like wildfire, even through the strongest members of the population.

Even more of a mindfuck was the mention of the idea that mustard gas may have contributed to the spread, as low concentrations of mustard gas actually seem to encourage the growth of simple organisms (like viruses, possibly) - with the implication being that the life cycle can be accelerated or the virus's reproduction sped up, increasing the opportunities for the genesis of a successful, super-virulent mutant strain . . . But a nice mindcigarette was the poor progress of the flu in Japan by Asian standards, where the doctors told everybody who got ill to fuck off to bed and drink lots of green tea, replacing the liquids and avoiding the dehydration that's the big killer when things get complicated. Dehydration, and drowning in your own fluids. Ugh. Death is gross. And the depressing thing is that drowning in your own liquids or swollen lungs or something is the way so many of us go. I expect I'll cling to life with undignified alacrity myself when my time comes, but reflecting that drowning in your own liquids is the way so many of us go makes me convinced the right to choose your time of death should be enshrined in law.

Speaking of death, and zombies, this weekend the F-word made me watch a Japanese rock-and-roll/zombie flick called Wild Zero which was easily the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life. I don't know what the hell it is with boys and zombies and young Japanese men screaming 'Lock an Lolllllllllll!' It wasn't bad, but fuck me, am I missing the reefer.

Here's the trailer:

Orangutans are smarter than me

I hate to admit it but I have no idea how to short out hot wires. If you stuck me in a cage with an electrified boundary, I'd probably figure out how to get out eventually. But we're talking really fucking eventually here. For me the most remarkable part of that article is the last sentence. "She has shorted hot wires before, but just to get food." And then she used that food-getting skill to short them during some sort of emotional crisis that drove her out of her enclosure, and then she immediately had a crisis of confidence, and wanted to go back in. Holy shit. Resourceful and neurotic. How eerily human.

Not the first orangutan experimental electrician when it comes to that:


I hope they're enjoying themselves. It's awful to look at great apes in zoos because we're a great ape. Eww. Orangutans are in big trouble in the wild, though. Two culprits: forest clearing in southeast Asia for 1) palm tree cultivation and 2) pulp and paper industry. What to do as a private citizen? Be aware that any time you eat something with 'vegetable oil' on the ingredient list, it's almost definitely palm oil, and the palm oil industry is a merrily deforesting one. Go for olive oil. It'll force you to cook more for yourself, and that's better for your health. And the parts of Europe where they grow olives are already so environmentally degraded it won't make a damn bit of difference. As far as the pulp and paper industry goes, the WWF has a Paper Toolbox they're working on, to help with buying choices; it's more geared to corporate buyers but it's something.

I suspect it's also important to monetize or commoditize (or whatever the appropriate ugly word is) conservation efforts. I think most sensible people would like to find a way to ensure that people living in environmentally sensitive areas don't go the European route and absolutely ruin local biodiversity by hacking every last fucking tree down except for estates where the royal fucking inbred incestuous families can play caveman and chase foxes like fucking five-year-old morons. But then not that many people actually spring for the sort of holiday that gets money in local people's pockets for showing off the nature. Well, why would they. I'd rather watch David Attenborough, myself. Fewer mosquitoes. And generally people like a bit of luxury on their holidays. What a fucking world it is, anyways.

Speaking of the Attenborough, he's come out more than once explaining human overpopulation is the main driver of long term environmental degradation - that we're just too much of a burden on the planet. And I don't think he's wrong. What annoys me sometimes, though, is a sort of general unconsciousness of the fact that the people having tonnes of children in the developing world have a good reason for having tonnes of children: infant mortality rates are so high, or have recently been so high, that (in the words of E.P. Thompson, whose Making of the English Working Class I'm really enjoying) they 'made a mockery of family planning.' You can't ask a woman to only have one or two children if there's a healthy chance the children won't survive for a couple of years. You can't just educate people about how not to have children when the general health conditions and social security structures are so visibly bad they've got a real understanding of the fact they stand a good chance of growing old alone and unsupported if they limit their families. It's inhuman, and what's more, it's impractical. So damn sticky. There needs to be an improvement of six or seven things at once to do anything about overpopulation.

Magpies are more self-aware than your toddler

I've always had some problems with the idea of deciding whether or not an animal is self aware based on its performance on the mirror test, where you get some schmutz on its face, give it a mirror, and see if it uses its reflection to get the schmutz off. Can't an animal be self-aware and just not get mirrors? Or can't an animal be self-aware at rest but have such aggressive or sexual tendencies that any opportunity to get self-aware with a mirror will be lost in a sudden orgy of attack or attempt to fuck a sudden apparition of its own species?

What is self-awareness, anyways? Is it really something so limited that we can deduce whether a creature has it or not by if it appreciates being able to see itself in a mirror as an opportunity to groom? We're getting onto weirdo and swampy relativistic grounds here, where words start to lose all meaning, but isn't there something almost uselessly anthropomorphic about the idea of self-awareness if you can encapsulate it in 'knows how to use mirrors to get schmutz off their face'?

All that having been said - magpies passed the test. Suck it up, my fellow humans, we're not so freaking special. 300 million years of seperate evolution and their brains have turned out in an utterly different way from ours, the other great apes, elephants, dolphins - from all the other animals who pass the mirror test - yet here they are flapping around and eating shit off the streets and being self-aware, by our rather strange and subjective measure.

And fucking adorable, I might add. I love magpies. They've got the cutest binomial name ever: pica pica. In Australia, they have a sort of bird called a magpie, but it's artamid, not corvid - a strange and magical subgroup of passerine birds that are something like corvids, but are only found in the bit of the world in Australia and around it, where they reckon the corvids came from once upon a time . . . And the Australian one has a very beautiful singing voice, very bizarre and shockingly bitonal and clear, instead of the skwawkiness of the European magpie. And its black and white markings are sort of opposite to the European magpie's. And it attacks people. It's weird. Europeans are weird, with their bizarro grasping after similarities in foreign lands, like with the turdus migratorius (phhhhhhht!) of North America getting the same name as the round, tiny erithacus rubecula just because they both have reddish tummies, sing pretty and herald springtime.

When we extinguish ourselves, birds are so taking over. It'll be a new age of the dinosaurs. And who doesn't like dinosaurs? Fuckin' no one.

Highkus

Clash of the Titans
The first half was so silly-
God, I miss reefer

Pornography stream
Loaded on my sweetheart's Mac-
I will watch it straight

David Attenborough
gurning at a stinkflower
means less to me now

Hyperventilate
twirl until I fall over
and hope I feel high

Dumbfuckery and consequences

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

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

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

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

Don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up, fuck!

Last night I thought of a really good reason why it would be okay to fail the exam today, but this morning it's just fucking gone. Oh wait, here it is again: part of the pressure I'm feeling to pass is feeling like a fucking gonad because I'm 30, and most people get their permit when they're 18 or something, which makes me a retard in quite a literal sense. But what that means is that even though this is my first time taking a driving exam, I've been 'failing' the exam for the last twelve years by not taking it. And that means that if I fail again today, it's just par for the course. And if I pass it's about fucking time.

It's a little make-believe and double-thinky, but it works for me. I hope.

Earlier I was having a real motivational problem with the whole thing, to be honest with you. I got sick of feeling all this massive pressure to not fuck up, not fuck up, not fuck up, after getting through my adult life to date with zero problems related to my unlicensed ways. Why put myself through this horrible emotional wringer, this long-delayed rite of passage, when everything has just been fucking fine without a fucking car, and I hate fucking cars, and they're fucking up the fucking planet? The obvious answer (that we're moving back to the New World, and the New World has Third World public transportation, so unless I live in the middle of a city like Toronto again I'll feel the lack of a permit badly, and we've got no desire to live in another city of that size ever again; not to mention apparently every employer in Australia insists on their employees having full licenses) was too abstract, too distant in time for comfort or motivation. So I thought about it, and came up with some real motivators:

-I can rent a car right away in Canada because the stupid fucks at the agencies there have age conditions, not length-of-time-holding-a-permit conditions. That means that when I go home for a visit in August and September I can rent a kicky little number and drive to Ottawa to see Melbine and Drools, and then drive to Toronto to see everyone else and watch Lisa get married, and not have to break my fucking balls right off and waste my precious visiting time by taking the long, slow, oft-delayed trains or buses linking my three pertinent cities. I can tool around the country roads. I can stop and catch bullfrogs and hunt for mushrooms. It will be fucking keen

-If someone else at the office who has a company car gets fired, I can use it until the contract runs out, and just pop off to Marseille or somewhere else Mediterranean whenever I want and go sea kayaking instead of waiting in vain for a TGV ticket sale that never comes

- I'm one step closer to fucking my man in the backseat of a car. As far as I remember (and unfortunately, or not, the time of my life I was having the most, shall we say, varied sex, is the time I remember least) I've never had sex in a car. But somehow it seems like a pre-requisite to a responsible family life. I'm pretty sure most of the elder children I know were conceived in the backseat of a car

- I can live in a house, a very big house, in the country. It'll be like an animal farm, lots of rural charm, in the country

Yeah, so now I'm motivated and nervous. It's a big improvement.

***UPDATE***

Everything was perfect until the last five minutes, when I didn't see a car on a roundabout and nearly drove into it. It was so shithouse and dangerous the examiner ended it right there and asked how it felt to break all my dishes at once, or something. What does it feel like? It feels like stupid. Oh well. Second try is in July.

My favourite communist werewolf

My exam is tomorrow. After this weekend's sessions, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that if I fail, it'll be because I panic, because I know how to drive now. If I pass, I'll miss the guy guiding me. He finally taught me how to parallel park properly yesterday by launching into a stream of infuriated Gallic profanity when I just gently backed up crooked and hoped for the best for the 30th time. I'm becoming a hardened old wench and it seems like nothing but blistering fury can reach me any more. Anyways, now I know how to parallel park, and all the other little tricks. It will just be a question of staying tense enough at the exam to concentrate on what I'm doing, and not so tense that I start screaming 'AH, WHAT DO I DO, WHAT DO I DO, WHAT DO I DO??????' when I enter the freeway.

Mostly spent the weekend explaining to myself that failing the exam the first time, as most people do, won't be a catastrophe because my mother will still think I'm smart, I've got enough money to keep renting the training car, we've decided not to move for more than a year so I've got the time, et cetera cetera. The F-word took care of the mechanics of most things though and we still managed to circulate responsibly in the evenings. Among other things we saw the second part of the Che movie. Benecio del Toro is unsettlingly good and it was nice to see Franka Potente again, even if her face did get eaten by piranhas, but I liked the structure of the first part better, and would really have preferred to see the structure of the first part brought into the second.

This was a man who for all his violence and ideological failures to compromise was a politician with enough legitimacy, whatever that means, to get up in front of the UN and tell everybody what bastards they were, and then he was shot like a dog in a pit trap. The response to his legitimacy, which he won by both violence and popular frenzy, was to try to illegitimate him with violence and silence - no words, just sudden pictures of an emaciated cadaver. And I think the structure of the two movies failed to get that into relief - that by overlaying the Cuban revolution with the UN harangue, and just showing Bolivia as a snuff film, it didn't do credit to the factors that make the man an honest-to-goodness hero in Latin America, and not just some stern-looking jerk on a North American t-shirt. The movies showed him as a martyr but not in more detail as a one-man symptom of the ruling hegemony's weakness, which I think they could have done by bringing the structure of the first movie through to the second.

Anyways, it was still worth watching. Benecio del Toro, man, that guy is the fucking tits. I can't wait for the Wolfman movie. Werewolves and Benecio del Toro together. Jesus. They've finally made a film version of my animus.

Is it just me or did you do something new with your slime trail today?

Finished watching Life in the Undergrowth last night. I wouldn't say I have a thing about insects but I did spend a lot of the series feeling like there were bugs crawling around under my skin. Nonetheless it was very lovely in a Microcosmos kind of way, but more like a Microcosmos for grownups, I'd say. The slugs fucking in the first episode was to the snail porn in Microcosmos as Curvy Girls XXX is to a Miley Cyrus video, for example. I don't know if I've ever seen anything quite as pornographic as those slugs fucking. Youtube has it:



It was also an awful lot more violent than Microcosmos. The only sort of scary bit in Microcosmos, as I remember, was that bird appearing and eating all the scurrying things, but Life in the Undergrowth had a lot more gore and social upheaval. Whole little Late Roman Empires quaking around under our feet at any given moment. There are a lot of things I love about David Attenborough, but one of them is the way he makes me see nature as a massive collection of cocks and fannies and hungers waiting for an opportunity. It gives order and sense to a seemingly chaotic world. No wonder the Christians hate him.

Speaking of, another thing I love about David Attenborough is the way he drives the question of creationism vs. evolution to its natural conclusion with his it's-not-all-hummingbirds-and-orchids-what-about-blinding-parasitic-worms-in-children's-eyeballs line - that you can believe in creationism if you want, but then you have to believe God is an asshole. Which when you think about it, isn't an argument against creationism, but a psychological clarion call.

Because let's face it: most very vocal Christians do see God as an asshole. An asshole who'll destroy us all and winnow the chaff from the wheat and the wheat has to kiss his ass eternally to be allowed to not burn in hell. An asshole whose hand is in every stinking human event and who can be appealed to in every stinking human eventuality; whose overwhelming, assoholic omnipotence can relieve us of responsibility for every phenomenon which goes outside of the bounds of personal, immediate morality. An asshole, apparently, who only hits us because he loves us, baby. It's alright that the planet is heating up: God is an asshole. It's alright that Africa is dying of AIDS: God is an asshole. And I love him.

Frankly, I find that sort of vocal Christian attitude to God shocking, insulting, insupportable. I don't think God is an asshole. But then I don't have a Stockholm syndrome complex with nowhere to go that I'm trying to foist off on all my fellow 'victims'. God is what He is and we are what we are and we must all simply do the best we can.

The Red Dragon stumbles into a den of iHippies

Let the transformation into little old Asian lady start. I officially love tai chi and can't wait for the day when I live in a country where I can do it in parks again instead of hidden away in bizarre little warehouses next to the local maximum security prison. It has a very good effect on me when I'm overwrought, as at the moment, when I'm going through my every-six-weeks work report calvary, and when the driving exam is coming up. I'm adjusting my attitude to the exam, slowly, and taking an hour out last night to breathe and move funny really helped somehow. I'll try not to fail, and if I fail I'll try again. It's a bastard I'm spending so much money on the process, and an even bigger bastard that I'd have to spend more if I fail but hey - fuck it. The only really good thing about a job like mine is that I can afford massive inconveniences like that.

Anyways, as we were walking home afterwards, which is always a pleasure on Wednesdays because that's when people dump furniture/scrap wood and we're shameless curb scroungers, one of my neighbours approached us as we raccooned around in a scrapheap near our building. After a brief chat we found out she was on her way home from a meeting to set up a buying collective for locally grown organic food, which is the sort of thing I've been trying to get us into for a couple of months now - the F-word wants organic (hypochondriac), I want local (gourmande), and our farmers at the market are great but they only do dairy, eggs, cheese and honey. She nicely pointed out the apartment where the meeting was still in session, which I crashed without hesitation - I'm on too many waiting lists elsewhere to pass up an opportunity to possibly get in on the ground floor on one of these things.

We'll see where it goes, because this is Belgium and I have doubts about these people's ability to organize a piss-up in a brewery, to use one of the F-word's favorite expressions, and the way the meeting sort of drifted in and out of coherence was less than reassuring. What was more reassuring is that the hosts had provided alcoholic beverages for all. The people there also seemed familiar, somehow. Somehow, whatever, obviouslyhow, most of the men looked like the hairy, smiley, I-brush-my-teeth-with-a-twig middle class dropouts who I gave up on sexually when I realized they'd never go down on me while I was on the rag no matter what they said about the corruption of the Patriarchy, and most of the women looked like my hipster ex-roommates - sharp bangs and subtle china-doll makeup for the straight hairs, messy upsweep and dramatic eyeliner for the curly hairs, and all in flared pants that made their asses look nice. After a couple of years of time spent mostly with other ex-pats here, who are a very motley bunch, there was something strange about walking into a room of 14 Belgians and feeling like I was walking into somebody's living room back home. But it really wasn't unpleasant.

The Red Dragon hears unhealthy mental voices

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

Seriously. Fuck, this place sucks.

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

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

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

The Red Dragon gets on her high, grassfed horse

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

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

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

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

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

Confessions of a shopophobic

Guilty Noodles mentioned the other day an idea I knew I once had, that Europe is a wonderland of shopping. I can't speak for the whole of Europe anymore because now it's been TWO FUCKING YEARS in Belgium (having a hard time getting over the enormity of that, especially as after frank talks at home and at work we're aware there'll be another year now - three years of my life in Belgium - fuck - but it's all good, I'm happier than I've been since Christmas), and after all this time in Belgium, shopping has become less of an activity I do to satisfy my physical needs or material desires, and more an odyssey. A quest. 'Fucking mess' is another descriptor that springs to mind.

The pricing is all over the place, for one. Dessicated coconut, for example, is half to a third of the price at the otherwise ridiculously overpriced organic/hippie shop in the Parvis than it is non-organic in any of the grandes surfaces. Bulk shopping ('vrac') is something you do at more upscale shops (fruit and veg aside, mercifully), BUT the quality tends to be better, and even though it's only something in more upscale shops, you get substantial savings on half the wares relative to normal shops - a big fat ripoff on the other. The consequence is that you can't do all your shopping in one place if you don't want to pay more than twice as much as necessary, or want to get the best value for your euro. Now that I'm used to it, I don't mind. I might mind more if we didn't live in Saint Gilles, close to a daily market, a couple of weekly markets, a grande surface, and a bunch of Portuguese, wop and Turk shops.*

The unpredictability extends into all areas of shopping and it's here I still run into troubles. The big, obvious complaint in Belgium is that everything that isn't food (or cars, bizarrely) is incredibly expensive and the sales period, like in other weirdo frog countries, is limited to two specific weeks a year when the citizenry transform into voracious, feral beasts who tackle each other for the last 3 euro cotton print dresses at H&M whilst finding a way to work a shrieked 'putain de ??' into every other sentence. I'm not a recreational shopper so that only annoys me incidentally, like when I have to walk through a shopping district during the sales and everybody is acting like a fucking werewolf.

The thing is, the incredible non-sales expensiveness extends beyond recreational shops and into the shops that I love: first the DIY shops, and most devastating of all, the incredibly fucking expensive fabric and sewing shops. And heaping insult onto injury, Brussels is absolutely execrable in terms of the selection available in the incredibly expensive fabric stores. Nothing fun, first of all. No dragons or shit like that. But of more concern to me is the paucity of natural fabrics. I just don't do polyester. It gave me a yeast infection ten years ago and I'll never fucking forgive it. And the natural fibre fabrics here are even extra expensive. Cotton flannelette for diapers costs Euro 24 a metre at the largest fabric store I've found so far - that's six times as much as it costs in Canada. Cotton thread, until I stumbled on a weekly market stall stocked with sewing supplies that seem to have fallen off the back of a truck heading towards an Italian shop, was something I just could not find. They're also very poor in terms of incidental craft materials - batting being something I've never seen here.

I don't know why all this is - I think this place has its own special import tax thing that they're maintaining in defiance of EU regulations - that's the rumour floating around. A bunch of laws forever on the books trying to maintain a manufacturing industry that died out in this little island of nonsense thirty years ago or more by taxing anything that looks like a consumer-direct raw material to hell and gone.

*The Australian word for all the brownish Mediterranean types, BTW, is 'wog'. If we move there, I get to be a wog. Sweet, eh? But I'm also half 'pom', so I guess that will make me a pog. And I guess now I can start saying "when we move there" instead of "if". And I guess instead of saying "when we move there", I can start writing "next September." With the understanding, of course, that nothing is certain under the sun - but I'm happier than I've been since Christmas.

Call me a prude but I don't give fishing until there's a ring on my finger

Ugh. Can't sleep this morning. Atrocious dream about watching a pessimistic volcano survival documentary while a murderer broke into our holiday flat. At least that's made me too tired to be very nervous about today's meeting.

Speaking of, nerves beat parsimony and I ordered four extra hours of driving practice. The ex-cop who guides me during the sessions seemed to know that means I really don't want to fail the exam in a week in a half, so he cracked down and got all martial with me. 'Alright - scan the intersection - scan, scan - pedestrian sign changed - take your foot off the brake - relax on the clutch - release - give it gas! But don't hit that black guy!* Okay, now more! More! More! Second gear! More gas! Pretend your husband has been kidnapped and he's in the car ahead! You can't lose them! Pretend that adorable puppy in the car is your husband! Hit the gas! Third! Gas! Give it some fishing!* Fourth! There, now you're driving like a normal person. Scan! Scan the street! Why are you slowing down? WHY ARE YOU STOPPING? It's priority from the right, my cabbage!* Don't hesitate! You check the priority and you go, go, go! No, no, first gear! Now step on the gas!" It was stressful but fun and I feel marginally more ready for the exam. And it was nice to make the car go rrrrrrr. Nine more hours of practice to go.

Baywatch commented yesterday that all the rigmarole associated with getting your license here hasn't seemed to make Belgians better drivers than in places where the test I'm shitting myself over is a non-event, and he's right. People are really atrocious drivers here - getting into accidents all over the place and doing jaw-droppingly stupid things on a secondly basis. In view of their monumental suck I admit I wonder how hard the test can possibly be. . . but it's probably quite hard. My feeling is that learning how to drive here is just like the general French/Francophone Belgian educational system; you're not training people to not be retards, you're training them to pass an exam. Also traffic police are a complete non-presence in town. There's nobody checking up on you - just some speed cameras and blaring horns - so people have full rein to drive with their ids*.

*Belgian ex-cop, not a French one, obviously
*Belgian idiom for 'do it with balls'*
*Continental French idiom for 'sweetie'
*Freud is only good for traffic

*Just had a chat with my perfectly bilingual boss, who exlained the expression 'mis de la pêche!' makes slightly more sense than my translation 'give it some fishing!' - 'pêche' there is actually 'peach', homophonous with 'fishing' in French. I still don't get it, but there you are.

Big Things in life

As we left tai chi last night, the sun was setting over the maison communale, bringing out all the lovely little eccentricities of the Art Nouveau neighborhood in a orange and golden light and basically looking enchanting, and I wondered, how could I be so keen on leaving Brussels? As I wondered, the F-word made spectacular last-minute save to stop me from stepping into a massive turd. Sigh. In the springtime, this city is like a beautiful, divinely sexy man with epic cock cheese - just as you're about to fall in love, or at least fuck, it disgusts you back down to earth. But I'm realizing, batshit as this place drives me, I'll miss it almost as soon as I leave.

In a more general sense, mild terror in my heart at the thought of leaving Europe. It's such a strange balance here that I've gone on about before, I think, but I will again. There are too many fucking people here and no solitude or fresh air - but there being too many people means there's a lot of man-made beauty and architecture. Australia looks even more backwards than Canada in that respect - they're even more into the Big Something things than we are, and I can't help but feel that basing your national landmarks on Big Things shows a certain lack of architectural and cultural imagination.

But then that leads into one of the complicating factors - sometimes it seems like the parts of Europe where I speak the language are out of ideas in that respect - that enjoying the Francophone and Italophone parts is like enjoying a museum - and everything that's been built since the last war is no more culturally daring than Ballina's Big Prawn. After all, the most recent successful tourist attraction here in Brussels has been the Big Iron Crystal - interesting, to me, mainly in terms of how the image copyright fight about it illustrates some of the more futile and ridiculous behaviour that gives Belgians their international reputation for stupidity.

And another complicating factor is that, despite being a bit of a snob, I really like Big Things. Hipster Irony Not Included. I love driving past the Big Apple on Highway 401. I love the Big Canada Goose in Wawa. I love the idea of a big fibreglass prawn. I couldn't tell you why. It just makes me feel good to look at them, and I'd go out of my way to look at them. I think it's because they're things people built so that other people would enjoy them, but I'm not sure. It just appeals to me, and I think it's the same emotion I felt when I was a little girl and got really excited about garbage trucks and dinosaurs, and there's something just as satisfying about that emotion, if I'm honest with myself, as there is at geeking on a magnificent building by Horta. Not Gaudi, though. Gaudi's religious. But he's only in Barcelona and we can't afford to live there.

In a larger sense , the upshot is there'll be a push-pull wherever I go. In the New World I'll miss the Old World, in the Old World I miss the New World. That's life. I may as well accept that it's always going to drive me crazy and always make me second-guess myself and my choices.

Bundle of nerves and nerves and bone and hair

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

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

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

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

Actually, I can use the things it don't get, but let's skirt over that for the moment

The confrontationality that had been scheduled for Wednesday is now scheduled for this afternoon. I would have liked it to be before the vacation, because the interesting thing is there can't really be a bad outcome to all this, and I would have liked the time off to either celebrate or process what had happened . . . nervous today nonetheless though. Strange, isn't it? But I'm going to play with this idea that somebody else's fuckups can either be your problem, or theirs. In my case, the most obvious fuckup is that on paper I've got a promotion and big percentages worth of raises since I started working . . . the reality is I'm netting almost exactly a same a month as when I started, due to Belgian taxation laws.

I would be a lousy little worm if I let that be my problem, and the good thing about that is that money is something everybody understands. I can say 'I want to set my own hours, I want to live in a less crappy city, I want to work from home', and all of those things look magnificently concrete and sensible to me, and actually rather more important than money. But they remain subjective, since not everybody thinks about work or Brussels or home that way. However, 'I'm netting exactly what I was netting during my probationary period two years ago despite a promotion, big raises on paper, and record-setting inflation, to which my rent is indexed' is something objective - something anybody with a job anywhere could understand - because it's money.

Money. It's like a code - like a bunch of social symbols for energy - my analyst explained it to me in those terms once when I shuddered at the thought of spending my dead grandfather's legacy. 'This is his energy that he stored up as money and gave to you.' I think that's why our economic system is so obviously objectionable now - money isn't a symbol for effort anymore. A woman can work for thirty years, be informed her factory is closing down, and not even get her severance if she leaves for another job before her employers tell her to, while at the same time those assholes on top of the pile pull in huge bonuses and salaries. And of course I understand there are good reasons for those huge bonuses and salaries - that is, they're good if you accept the absolutely rotten and unproductive framework in which the reasons are good.

If I hadn't been a pinko before the rot started showing with a vengeance, I'd feel a lot stupider now. But let's all get over that and have a revolution. Anyways. Onwards and upwards.

The old fog/lost your number/didn't want to wake you up excuse

Just back from vacation in Bordeaux. It was a good vacation, though brief. I think I even pulled down a bit of a tan, or at least a spot of darkening, in the sense that the sun no longer shines directly through me. But one thing about it was really bad, and me being me, I'm going to accentuate the negative at the moment, and let it be a cautionary tale tieing into my confrontational inabilities.

I love kayaking, and I love sea kayaking most of all the kayaking, and voted for Bordeaux as our destination in part because in a nearby town some fucking cockwanks calling themselves Arcachon Kayak Aventure started excursions earlier in the spring than anywhere else I'd seen, and I was able to book us an excursion date for this past weekend. Here was the sequence of events:

- called the night before to confirm reservation. No answer, left message
- called that morning to confirm reservation. No answer
- got on the fucking train for Arcachon at 7:41 in the morning. The morning of our fucking vacation, when I just wanted to stay in bed forever possibly
- get a call halfway to Arcachon from Arcachon Kayak Aventure, 45 minutes before it was due to start, saying the excursion has been cancelled, because other people who were going on it had cancelled the night before, and it was no longer profitable enough for them to carry it out.

When I pointed out we were already on the train heading towards the RDV, three bullshit excuses followed for not having cancelled, oh, say, before our alarms went off at 6:30:

- his computer wasn't working so he couldn't find my number (which was on his cellphone, as I had left a message)
- there was a touch of fog that morning (which had burned off completely by the scheduled departure hour, leaving an insolently hot and sunny spring day - fucking perfect, perfect for kayaking)
- didn't want to disturb us by informing us the night previous the other party had cancelled (which would have disturbed us so much fucking more than waking up at 6:30 in the fucking morning and getting on a train for some podunk bourgeois resort that stank of the neighbouring Smurfit Kappa pulp mill)

I was so bloody furious that as soon as he seemed to be wrapping up the final bullshit excuse I hung up. And here comes the cautionary tale: I stayed pissed off for hours afterwards. Part of it was an unavoidable sadness, of course, because a spot of sea kayaking was half the point of us going to Bordeaux at all, as far as I was concerned. But another part of it was sheer fury with the thoughtlessness and incompetence of the company concerned, and that took me a long time to shake off, because instead of roaring down the telephone, I hung up and let it fester.

Lesson of the story? Confront, don't hang up. Pass your bile onto the thing that provoked it. It's easier than trying to swallow it. Hanging up may feel satisfyingly rude, but it's not as satisfying as yelling at an asshole.

It didn't help that I didn't like Arcachon. Besides the revolting fart-stink of the nearby mill, which faded as the day wore on and the prevailing wind changed, it's the sort of artificially created upper-middle-class watering spot that makes me dislike European coasts as a generality. Lots of expensive boats and extravagant villas and overpriced restaurants. Lots of knick-knack shops. Casinos and a twee little 'market' selling artisanal goods at about four times the price they'd fetch here in Brussels, for example. 'Forests' with provokingly sandy walking paths (for keeping cars out, I suppose, with the corollary that it was a real pain in the ass to hike through - for hiking is what we did instead of kayaking, in the end) that were full of people and refreshment stands. My mood didn't lift until we got back to Bordeaux - which really is a tremendous city. More on Bordeaux later, when I'm more in the mood to accentuate the positive.

Re-read A Passage to India on the train. Liked it both better and worse than the first time I'd read it. I don't know how I'd ever got the idea in my head that the Indians in it were presented more like proper characters than a collection of archetypes forcefully combined to make a POINT than the Italians in Where Angels Fear to Tread, but I'd imagine it has something to do with me being Italian, and defensive. In fact, generally all the characters in A Passage to India started seeming wooden to me, relative to the first reading - and that's aside from Aziz suddenly coming off as a massive, hysterical stereotype. But in this second go, as much as the characterizations suffered, the descriptions of the landscape and the overarching ideas about friendship, love and nationality benefited. Still, I feel I'm hitting a wall with these Big Gay Brit Lit books I've been indulging in so heavily of late, what with the Maugham and whatnot. Their female characters are alienating - harridans, frigid, fluff, or Mother. I must look elsewhere at the moment for my fiction.