Wonders did not cease on Wednesday

So you know what's funny? There were zero problems with the trains getting here. None. Nada. Easiest train ride I've ever had in this green and monkey-stuffed isle. And one of the most pleasant, because all three trains were very close to empty. Thank you, British "journalism", for ensuring everybody was too scared to leave their homes and giving me whole train carriages to stretch out in. But now I feel as though I have a karmic debt that I will be paying off when I try to get home on Sunday.

It's nice here. I've never seen it snowy like this before and it's pretty. My grandmother doesn't remember me, or much else, but I think that makes her like me rather more. So good for both of us.

Preparing for adventure

So I'm off to the fucking UK tonight and it will be an adventure, because they're having one of their seasonal national meltdowns due to the cold and snow. I'm due in at Scarborough around midnight, and I guess I knew there was always likely to be some sort of snag involved in managing that. And what with winter acting up, it's anybody's guess where I actually sleep tonight. My guess is York. I think I'll make it as far as York. And then maybe I'll sleep in the Royal hotel, because I have travel insurance. Although a nice B&B wouldn't come amiss. As long as I get bacon for breakfast. Mmm, bacon.

God, that country is stupid. I complain a lot about Belgium, I know, but honestly the real debate going on inside my head is whether it's Italy or the UK that's stupider on a national level; Belgium isn't even in the running, too many things go right here (though not Electrabel - the retarded bastards are still billing my missing-presumed-dead boss for their services despite his mother telling them he was gone a couple of months ago. What are you going to do, you stupid fucking cunts, ruin his credit rating? God, they're cunts).

At the moment, the UK is winning the debate, mostly because of this nugget from their prime minister from the afore-linked article, responding to claims that the country is in the grip of a gas crisis, as private citizens have been asked to limit their use while the (of course, privatized) gas companies emergency source from the Continent:

“There are always difficulties when we have a long spell of bad weather.”

In other words, a developed country, one that prides itself on not falling victim to Continental mischievousness like functioning public services, strong trade unions, and reasonably representative democracy, loping from crisis to crisis - and that the sort of crisis that could lead to people freezing to death.

(Slow clap)

Best fucking mashed potatoes on the planet

I've heard other people - many other people - say exactly the same thing about themselves or about their girlfriends, or in one case about their common-law husband, but in my case I'm pretty sure it's true: I make the best fucking mashed potatoes on the planet. And now, kids, you can too.

This mashed potato mania was brought on by what passes for winter here - a fucking brutal, wet mess of a season that leaks into all the houses through the picturesque Art Nouveau windows. We are always cold and always seeking to eat things that seem to promise some sort of insulation. It was also brought on by a weekend trip to Petits Riens, where the F-word and I scored one of those hydraulic orange presses and a potato ricer, both apparently untouched, for a grand total of 10 euros. We love Petits Riens. It's the perfect place to simultaneously indulge our charitable, acquisitive, and parsimonious urges.

And finally, it was brought on by stoemp, which must have the funniest name in the culinary world. It is said to be a Flemish working class staple; one of the few signs that Brussels used to be a Flemish city rather than a mess of expatriates being listlessly served by Francophone mental debiles is that stoemp continues to be served. My recipe is a variation on it, with the usual cream and butter and meat stock replaced by buttermilk. This creates the same silky, rich taste, but with the two added bonuses of a very mild sour cream flavour contrasting with the chives and onions, and of the ability to take a shit within the next twelve hours without any really significant quantities of animal fat jamming up the works - a quality in buttermilk I really adore, and a general requisite for me to consider food good.

10 medium sized potatoes
A cup and a half of buttermilk
Two stalks of celery, split down the middle and finely chopped
A handful of chives, finely chopped
Two cloves of garlic, finely chopped or grated
A spring onion, finely chopped

A teaspoon of sea salt
A teaspoon of thyme
Chili pepper to taste - the three ground down together with a mortar and pestle

Soak the potatoes in lukewarm water for ten minutes and then scrub them off, cutting out the eyes and gross bits. Boil them until they're soft enough to run through the ricer - ten minutes at pressure in a pressure cooker will do it if time is of the essence. Drain them.

In a large saucepan gently heat the buttermilk, and add the vegetables, salt, thyme and chili pepper. Whisk and then rice in the potatoes, whisking each one in before ricing in the next.

This recipe is flexible in potato skin terms. The ricer catches the skin so there's no need to peel the potatoes at any point, making sure you don't miss out on the "inner skin", where all the good nutritional stuff is. But then we also use organic potatoes; non-organic potatoes pick up an inordinate amount of chemical shit on their skins so - well, I don't know, there are probably worse things for you, like breathing in a city. For extra roughage, which obviously I'm in favour of, salvage the skins from the ricer, chop them up fine, and throw them into the finished product, whisking those in too.

And then voila, you've got the fucking best mashed potatoes on the planet.

Next step in my mashed potato adventures is perunasoselaatikko, a Finnish casserole made of mashed potatoes. I had it once there at the worst time of year for it (June) and still loved it, and now it's time for it here. The Finns are a people who have managed to make it through history without blowing their own heads off too frequently to breed despite their atrociously dark winters, so I intend to copy them to deal with my seasonal depression. Saunas and a decently insulated house would help too but beggars can't be choosers.

Psychoresolution

I've decided 2010 is going to be insofar as possible a mental health spa of a year. Go to the weekly meetings, start analysis again, try to sleep more, save getting really high for occasions a bit more special than having had a hard day at work - they're all going to be hard days at work until work stops - basically try to get myself a little better-regulated. 2009 was a bit of a tough year in mental health terms with work diving into an even greater cross to bear than I had been expecting, and I'd been expecting things to get quite cross.

Of course it was my boss disappearing, making things about twice as difficult in practical terms, and horribly different in emotional terms - coming in every day and sitting in my desk next to his empty desk, his Chupa Chups and slippers and fucking Ribena waiting for him - just waiting. HR Goddess was going to clean it out until being told his mum is coming to the city soon to deal with his apartment; she thinks his mum may want to see it - even clean it out herself - none of us know how these things need to be dealt with emotionally. How could we? Luckily this is a horrid, freak occurrence that really doesn't happen often enough to make it into any manuals.

You know, I'm quite sure he's dead but once in a while that's still tempered by not believing that this is happening.

They're going to replace him soon and I suppose I'll believe it then - although soon, in these terms, is not likely to be soon, since they need someone with quite a lot and a specific sort of experience, and the woman who's doing the choosing was an extremely good friend of my boss who worked closely with him for years and years, and will need to work closely with this next one for years and years, so she won't be too easy to please. I just hope to god that they rearrange the office when it happens. My whole 'not believing this is happening' shtick is aggravated by occasionally having a question about what I'm doing and looking up to ask him and realizing no - he's still not there. I think I'm going to lose it a bit if I look up to ask him a question and there's someone else there instead.

Anyways, so things continue dreadful but the thing is, that's life - and a lot of horrible things will happen, and a lot of lovely things will happen, and I want my brain to be capable of dealing with both categories with more or less grace.

In which I discover the limit of my personal tolerance for post modern relativism and the narratives of the loser

I've been totally drawn into Far From the Madding Crowd, which is even beating out the AK 47 book. Mind you the AK 47 book is far too narrative-y for me. I just want dirt on how people get them, who sells them, and how and when knock-offs start getting produced, all that good, if dry stuff - and so far the book, which is decently well-written however much I complain, is just stories about people who had or loved or shot or invented AK 47s.

That having been said there was a good narrative about a north Vietnamese guy who was supposed to have shot down a B-52 with a Kalashnikov. That sort of thing in more depth would be nice to read about the Vietnam War - something from the perspective of the north Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, which whatever you think about the wherefores really did something amazing in historical terms; rather more amazing than what the US managed in the same conflict. Gender terms, too. All those women fighting. I'm not the only one that fascinated, of course. A while ago I saw this 1967 article from Time. "Sullen, sloe-eyed Victoria-Charlenes" - wow. The whole article reads like a justification for little old ladies or pretty young ones getting napalmed once in awhile. Fascinating.

But now I'm at the point of being sick of hearing about the conflict from an American perspective, be it yet another book or fucking pacificist-martial movie or hippie movie or Rambo movie or rant about the loss of America's innocence, like Cuba and the Philipines and all of that pre-World War II manifest destiny crap was just some sort of forgettable childish temper tantrum or whatever the fuck else. When I was a history student I was sometimes unhappy about how the perspective of the victor was so necessarily dominant in the records of past conflicts - I felt like I was missing big parts of the story - but in this case I'm starting to realize that the perspective of the loser really has its limits too, in terms of failing to be interesting rather than obsessively navel-gazing. On a human level, Americans were a tiny minority of the people who were fighting and getting horribly traumatized and slaughtered there, and on a political level the outcome turned out to not matter much for them - they lost and somehow their international empire kept ticking over. So really, how many Apocalypse Nows can I take seriously before getting to hear something from the perspective of the victor?

Well, I'll do some serious looking later - after the AK-47 book and after Far From the Madding Crowd, which is a monstrous big beast of a book, and will take a long time despite being compulsively readable and full of male passion. I think that's one of the things that makes me love Thomas Hardy - I think he had a remarkable talent for passionate male characters - George Eliot had a similar talent. I have the same sort of crush on Gabriel Oak that I've got on Adam Bede, and Farmer Boldwood is really unsettling as well.Both Hardy and Eliot also had a remarkable talent for imperfect women who manage to fuck everything up due to masculine traits in their personality, which hits home with me a bit. I haven't fucked everything up lately but I mustn't get too complacent.

Christmas books

¡Guerra! was good. Recommend it. Very well written and hardly twee at all. Ghosts of Spain was more a collection of anecdotes and self-conscious but inevitable condescension. Don't not reccommend it, but don't reccomend it either. Very Guardian. The author's phrasing suggested that what he didn't understand wasn't quite worth understanding, in opposition to ¡Guerra!.

Now reading Far From the Madding Crowd. I fucking love Thomas Hardy, I can't help it. There's something about those overworked, laborious sentences of his that is absolute butter on my toast. And his feeling for scenery, even if he does use sentences no self-respecting modern writer would ever allow to run on so, is flawless. Look at this paragraph he uses just before he describes a painful boy-girl meeting:

We turn our attention to the left-hand characteristics; which were flatness in respect of the river, verticality in respect of the wall behind it, and darkness as to both. These features made up the mass. If anything could be darker than the sky, it was the wall, and if any thing could be gloomier than the wall it was the river beneath. The indistinct summit of the facade was notched and pronged by chimneys here and there, and upon its face were faintly signified the oblong shapes of windows, though only in the upper part. Below, down to the water's edge, the flat was unbroken by hole or projection.

Now, I don't know if either the boy or the girl is going to chuck themselves in the river before the end of the story literally, but one or the other is sure to figuratively . . . maybe both, maybe one of each. I don't know, because Thomas Hardy is one author who I must insist lead me gently to the conclusion, so I don't know what's going to happen. I've decided that's why Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles just haven't worked out for me, since far too many film versions had let me know what would happen - it's not like they're fundamentally more depressing than some of the others I've loved.

However, the Hardy was interrupted by a late Christmas present from the F-word, Michael Hodges' AK-47: The History of a Gun. That man knows me fucking well. Only on page 20 so far so will hold off on judgement. So far a bit pop, but oh well. I'm back at the fucking office as of yesterday so my brain is toast enough to enjoy pop.

Spain, as far as I can tell, shits all over Italy. The past few years have represented embarassment after embarassment as I head to southern European countries that have had histories as full of oppression and invasion and regionalism andall the other stuff Italians blame for their country being such a fuckery, and see that those countries are less of a fuckery. Probably most dramatically Croatia. But Spain felt like a more apt comparison size-wise. And we were in Madrid, which felt quite equivalent to Milan, where I've also spent a good deal of time - too much. And I can tell you this with absolute certainty - Madrid shits all over Milan. It's more friendly, cleaner, better public transport, nicer restaurants, and there are things to do besides shop and be a big stupid wanker. I really don't know why Italy sucks so much. I don't. I have theories. But right now I'm writing about Spain.

The Red Dragon self-flagellates

Sick as hell. These past couple of months have taken me and broken me, and my fucking body has decided to punish me for not getting pregnant yet by getting rid of my dragonly cramps and replacing them with nausea; I'd really prefer the pain . . . I have a degree of paranoia that I'll be one of those pregnant women who spend the whole nine months puking and the present situation isn't helping me deal with that paranoia. But the lovely Rodelinda, that gem among women, sent me Marks and Spencers chocolate-covered gingersnaps and those have fixed allllmost everything. No wonder men all lose their fucking minds when she dumps them. She's so awesome.

In the meantime, my Christmas vacation has now started. Luke Duke sent us a couple of books on Spain as we're flying out tonight - luckily throwing up all over aeroplanes won't be breaking any new experiential ground for me - which means I am going to go get busy reading them, now that I'm done with Stalin's Children. Which was fine. The first half was really good and the second half wasn't, so, altogether, fine.

Luke Duke's gifts: Ghosts of Spain and ¡Guerra!. They look pretty good. You know what I love about Spanish? The fucking upside-down exclamation points and question marks. That is really awesome. You know right away at the beginning of the phrase if it's going to be exciting or interrogatory. I love that. And yesterday I was given to understand that our Asian division is haemmoraging money so the odds of me being able to continue my job without interruption whilst moving to Australia are poor - but honestly work has stressed and exhausted me so badly over the last little while that I had to welcome that news - especially as it means the F-word and I get to pursue one of the more attractive Plan B's we've ever had: before moving to the Antipodes, we go spend a few months in Spain, doing the Camino and learning that awesome language. I don't speak a word of it of course, but I can usually figure out what they're talking about if they want me to because of its similarities with Italian, so I think given three or four months there I'll be able to pick up a lot of it.

In the meantime, my sweethearts, I'm not going to be posting on this blog; will return the week after Christmas, hopefully stuffed to the brim with tapas and ham, ham, ham. Very lovely holidays to you all; may your indiscretions be discreet, your pleasures shameless, your carbon footprint smaller than mine, and you and yours very very happy above all.

Attrition position

I shouldn't whine, first of all; the distribution of work after my boss disappeared was equitable and then this week I went back to my 'normal' workload, since when I leave for vacation means I'll be missing a deadline; so my other boss was the one who really broke her head over the proceedings for the publications-in-process. But in any case the lead-up to Christmas is bloody hell.

Possibly you remember last December, when my own company sacked 10 people in December to squeak the cuts in before the end of the calendar year? Well on the offchance you're some sort of corporate innocent, a teacher or a family-owned business worker or some such fucking quaint thing, and sacking a whole fuckload of people just before the Most Wonderful Fucking Day of the Year seems inhumane to you, here's some sad news: all the fucking public companies do that shit.

It gives them a chance to write down any losses involved in severance in the old year, it gives them a more attractive cost base for the new year, and it gives them a couple of weeks when the people they sack had already made plans to spend time with their friends and family in a way that our professional lives no longer permit us to do at any other fucking time of the year (and I whine this out as a European with five weeks holiday a year), which cuts the chances of difficult confrontations and even of really stiff or extended severance negotiations. Etc. Ground we've covered before.

But the arse of it all as far as I'm concerned at the moment is that December isn't on the easy end of the 'normal' workload because there's so much goddamn news about the cash-strapped companies in my industry shutting down factories and sacking a kajillion people. Yesterday afternoon, whilst working toward our 4 o'clock deadline, some fucker of a fucking northern European company announced a bunch of shutdowns and sackings at about 2:50. And the cunts scheduled a conference call for half an hour later. And I had already been juggling writing some other shutdowns, as well as a couple of near-fatal accidents (which also seem to step up around Christmas). I mean, the fucking bastards.

Anyways, with any luck today the clear sailing starts. And then Friday night we leave, and I come home to some light and non-pressing of Orthodox Christian and Muslim markets. But I'll tell you, for the fucking moment my head is close to bursting.

Pathologilarity

Lately we have been enjoying John Safran's new ABC series, Race Relations. It's pretty fucking awesome, and for me roughly - errrr - x 1,000,000 better than anything Sacha Baron Cohen has done since the Ali G interview with Noam Chomsky, and even that was only at parity.

The really remarkable thing about John Safran relative to other comedians who use shock-and-awe interviewing techniques with unsuspecting subjects for sheer hilarity is that the sheer hilarity grows out of John Safran leaving you with a niggling suspicion that John Safran is a complete fucking mongoloid whose mental problems go well beyond the average comedian-neuroses. And gawking at that doesn't weigh on the conscience, because obviously he isn't, or at least not pathologically enough that he's missed out on having a thriving career. It's not as fucking funny as it is because of horrid mothers pimping out their babies for photoshoots, or because of baying white trash Americans getting pissed off by two guys making out - things which I would argue, whatever their merits as documentary, aren't fucking funny at all.

Here's the clip that convinced the F-word we should watch it:



And here's a clip of what I mean about the pathological mental problems :



And I promise you it only gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective.

Shit too heavy

I've started having nightmares about my missing boss, who I see standing with his back to me, and who won't turn around even though I yell at him until I wake myself up. So I'm restarting analysis. Any excuse, apparently.

Just when you thought that a navel couldn't get any more gazed . . . Luckily this is Belgium, so there will probably be a certain degree of ridiculousness involved in even getting an appointment.

Gah.

Things to address with a professional

Finally it's colded up here, dropped below zero with the attendant fucking off of the bloody seemingly inexhaustible supply of grey drizzly clouds and the sun reappearing in her finest ice-maiden form. Thank god. I was about to lose my shit. I think the F-word and I understand each other decently well, but there's a bit of a gap in the weather-sense; I'm fine with cold as long as there's sun, he's fine with no fucking sun as long as it's good and warm. Hopefully we find a way to reconcile that. My plan at the moment is to buy a cottage in Canada with Luke Duke and Magnum so that I can spend northern hemisphere summers there, and southern hemiphere summers, well, in the fucking southern hemisphere, obviously. But for now with wide blue skies and the sun out, I'm ace. Brussels is really pretty with a touch of sun.

Reading Stalin's Children, at the insistence of a Ukrainian colleague, who probably insisted because I ask her too many questions about the Ukraine and Russia, because I'd like to go see what it's like myself but I'm afraid I'd get beaten up for looking too Jewy. Here's a Westerner who really understands what things there are like in what used to be the USSR, she said. Well damn. It's not a bad book (though maybe a little turgid when it comes to the description of the author's first-hand impressions of himself and of modern Russia, which is really annoying but at page 150 so far mercifully brief) but it sounds like things are absolutely shitty there and have been for ages.

Reading this book with rapt attention, especially so soon after reading Goodbye to All That with rapt attention, especially especially after managing to sit through 2012 even if I didn't enjoy it besides the car chase close to the beginning, makes me wonder if I have a thing for humanitarian disaster porn. Probably something I should address with a professional.

I have seen the friture brother, it is murder

Yesterday I was chatting with my boss about how a halfway decent restaurant next to our office suddenly shut down with no fanfare or warning, and how it was a bit of a shame, and how it would have been nice if it had served fries, when she dropped this bombshell on me: it didn't serve fries because it wasn't part of the union. The fry union. The National Union of Friturists. I'm fucking serious, here's their website.

Frankly I'm still not wholly believing this isn't an elaborate joke being played on me by my boss. But it does stand to reason, because there is a particular technique of fry-making here which is ubiquitous, and ubiquitously good, but also more labor-intensive than the typical chop-dry-boil-serve of Anglo-Saxonia. And now I find myself doing something I rarely do, which is praise Belgium.

Belgian fries are fucking good, and make it almost utterly non-worthwhile to buy fries back home from the vast majority of places that serve them, except from a few places, sometimes dreadfully expensive pretentious type places and sometimes greasy spoons, that use what is the ubiquitous method here: chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve. Far more crispy, and perhaps counter-intuitively far less fatty, at least as far as taste and texture go.

Okay - once in awhile, when you've been roughing it in the bush for a bit in Northern Ontario and you've got a dreadful hunger on and there's some chip truck selling fries with fresh pickerel or something lovely like that, it's quite nice to have a big soggy mess of piping-fresh chop-dry-boil-serve potatoes to eat because they still taste like potatoes, in a way, and the dripping-fattiness isn't unwelcome. And as a convert to the joys of poutine, I believe, perhaps erroneously but blow me, motherfucker, that it wouldn't be nearly as good with chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve chips as it is with chop-dry-boil-serve, because with poutine I believe the whole point is to ensure maximum dripping fat uptake in an effort to soak up a drug and alcohol binge (thank you for helping me live with my vices, Quebec).

But I find I have to really be in the mood for those, or else dead drunk or coming off amphetamines, the second of which won't happen again until I have a mid-life crisis in twenty years, while chop-dry-boil-drain-boil-serve chips, while in the end rather less recognizably tasting of potatoes, are always really fucking good.

So anyways, good on you, National Union of Friturists. Solidarity! But I wonder what they do to non-unionized people who make chips, or union members who commit heresy and make chop-dry-boil-serve chips. I almost don't want to know how this particular delicious sausage is made. . .

Would we recognize ourselves 40 years ago

Reading more Hannah Arendt now, On Revolution, and starting to get the feeling - I'm only about 15 pages in so maybe it will be corrected soon - that the poor woman died at the right time. Never saw the 80's and never saw Western society's flawless, splashless dive into utter individuality and the consequent annhilation of the polis, of her ideas of freedom and equality, and indeed of ideology in an abstract sense though I don't know if she'd have minded the last.

I mean, what would she have made of a jerkoff of a blog like this one I'm writing right now, where I whine about my feelings and how I think World War II should have been fought and go on about my favourite kinds of trees, which I write in the morning before I head off to a career which exists in some sick nether-zone between work and action . . . oh I don't know. It's not as bad as all that. I'm just in a poopy mood.

And really my job isn't as bad as all that, in some ways it's smashing, and I've even started largely appreciating our Yankee overlords, though we'll see how long that lasts if they neglect to give me the Australian contract, that will propel me into the upper - count it - the upper middle class. And anytime in the past week or so that I've been feeling poopy about my job, I've looked at this blog, that was on one of the Friday mail-outs by the guy who runs Sickipedia, and I count my blessings.

How not to end a war

Whilst going off to all and sundry here about how awesome Rotterdam is, how exciting the new architecture is, how beautifully arranged it all is, I have got reactions ranging from disbelief to curiousity to agreement to Miss C's - she couldn't find it, as a reconstruction, beautiful because of the suffering that had been involved in its flattening. Can't contradict that, of course, it's quite true. Rotterdam on the brain, combined with the fact that its flattening was used as a reason, to a certain extent, for the beginning of the RAF assault on German civilians, and Hilts' obsession, and certain inevitable thoughts at the moment about the suffering of the innocent, is making me sit around thinking about the second world war.

Back in my strategy concentration in Paris, we were taught that the role massive city bombing played in World War II was an emotive one, to a point. The Luftwaffe were doing too good a job knocking out British airfields in the first part of the war, so the RAF broke with accepted practice and started the massive bombing of German cities, beginning with Berlin. This produced the desired effect of nudging the Luftwaffe into retaliating with British city bombing, drawing their limited resources away from strategic bombing - sacrificing British proles pawns, so to speak, to keep the queeny-poo of ensuring air superiority. And after that the city bombing had its own twisted, retributive logic.

But did it hasten the end of the war? I don't think so. It's a sort of Law of Nature that gets drilled into you in strategy studies - Air Power Doesn't Win Wars. Maybe mutable or not, but one thing is sure in this case: Germany didn't surrender because German civilians were tired of getting bombed by the RAF, it surrendered because the Russians had arrived. And while the argument that Germany was easier to overrun because of all the important things that had been bombed is a persuasive one, I find it less persuasive than the argument that the German army and population went on fighting as long as they did because of their fury over how their cities had all been burnt down, or because of fear of what enemies who had shown so little mercy to civilians would do to them if they put down arms.

I honestly believe the Germans could have allowed fifty genocidal tyrants to come to power, and the English could have allowed their governors to go on murdering and enslaving darkies in the colonies for another 50 years, and neither group would have morally deserved to have their lives, happiness, and sanity abused by their leaders in such a disgusting and futile way. But who deserves anything anways.

The joys of being middle class on a fast train to Paris

Had a smashing weekend in Paris. There's a sentence I never thought would come out of my brain but I guess eventually things just stop doing your head in, which is a good thing to know in the present context. La New Yorkaise is moving home definitively on Wednesday, and like a good former fellow inmate of the fucking madhouse that is Pars when you're underemployed, I swanned down on the Thalys and helped her pack. Which translated into about two actual hard slog hours - she's already shipped most of her stuff - and me getting some really great castoffs that wouldn't fit in her hold luggage, like a camping chair and an awesome sleeping bag and enough good quality acrylic paint to make the F-word's eyes light up. So the time spent with her was lovely and the time spent with Miss C, whose loft we stayed in once more, was even lovelier, in a way. She starts a year-long treatment programme for hepatitis today, and has no idea how it will go, so I suppose she drank her last few glasses of wine for a long while with us . . . both of those women are so dear to me in such different ways.

And discovered my theory about Paris is correct - if you have lots of money, it's actually a great place to be.

And read two books on trains - well, finished one, read the other - Bad Medicine by David Wooton and Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. Decline and Fall - well. Brideshead Revisited was such a nasty little downer (in a good way, though) that I was not expecting that surreal little romp. I enjoyed it a great deal though. Very talky, very visual. I've written before about how awful I think authors like Ian McEwan and that guy who wrote The Hours are, in that their shitty books read like script treatments instead of novels and it's an abuse of the medium. But besides me hating Ian McEwan et al, I think that also has something to do with the way I hate most movies. Because Decline and Fall reads a bit like a treatment for an exceptionally good stage show - very dialogue driven - and I still loved it. But then the narrative voice was still awfully good, so not completely. Anyways. It was ace.

Bad Medicine was alright too but sometimes the argumentation was a little laboured. Wooton keeps so busy reminding you that he has an argument that it can get quite distracting from the actual elements of the argument. He was fitting so much into such a small book that I have a feeling a few conjunctions ended up on the cutting room floor when a few too many protests from Wooton about why he should be allowed to write about progress as a historical fact stayed in when they shouldn't have.

I get it. Progress. You like it. It exists. You wrote about it in your fucking introduction. Please, write a history of medicine, and write a history of the history of medicine, but if you're going to splice them don't do it in a mere 320 pages (though I understand it fits nicely onto the bestseller list at that length, but that's no more excuse for writing an insufficiently readable book than the fact that 'novelists' like McEwan make the big bucks from actually selling their books as film treatments), not unless you've got Darrin fucking McMahon level expressive finesse. And I'll tell you - Bad Medicine isn't a bad book, but Wooton does not have Darrin Fucking McMahon-level finesse.

It's a valid comparison, even if I'm only making it because I got the F-word Happiness for Christmas. McMahon, when he wrote about happiness and the history of happiness, forswore historical accounts of people who didn't write much or who wrote outside of the 'canon' (ie everybody post-Bhagavad Gita in Asia) as it was called back in my undergrad days. Wooton restricted himself similarly. Obviously that still leaves you with rather a lot of material, so if you're going to spend 15% of your words explaining to the reader that you're picking a fight, and if you lack McMahon-type finesse - honestly it's a wonder the book is readable at all. But it is, almost despite him.

Victor Jara has had his second funeral.



Impossible to juxtapose that death and that voice. Not without getting into Jesus talk. People are such stupid brutes; he'd just been a rather lovely folk singer before. Now juxtaposed forever with some ugly foul-mouthed troglodytes in Washington who thought the world was dominoes.

What a life.

Not okay

Last night I hit the point of smoke re-uptake where I started writing poetry again. It was nice. I have to work hard at blocking out a million little voices though. Especially Virginia Woolf's from Orlando, talking about all those unwelcome s's.

If I was clever I'd start seeing a headshrinker here. The other night as I was walking home I saw a man who had been hit by a car on one of the main streets lying very still. I scuttled on as usual, not wanting to be one of those awful people who gawk, not wanting to risk getting in the way of emergency services, who were already there getting a stretcher ready. But as I was almost clear I heard a high-pitched thready wail that sounded like a child in trouble and I had to turn and look.

It was still a grown man lying very still. But for an awful moment I saw him as a child-that-was, and all of us as children-that-were - and my missing boss was quite childlike in some ways, so it was no problem to think of him that way, and it's been a combination that's been torturing me, actually, thinking of him as he could have been at the end, a scared child - and the panic that came out of that, a horrible feeling that one wants to leave behind with childhood - "oh shit, who's taking care of us all?" - was almost overwhelming. I hadn't had a panic attack in years and I wasn't about to start having them again next to a possibly fatal accident scene where the emergency services didn't require a distraction, so I breathed heavy and scurried back home.

But this is something that needs to be addressed. I've been in a constant state of low-key panic that bursts out periodically for weeks now every time someone I have regard for does anything a little bit risky - and I'm talking a little bit risky - works too hard, comes home too late, doesn't call at the exact time they usually do. It risks turning me into one of those worn-down women with only one mode. And just like Magnum PI, I know what you're thinking, but actually the smoke re-uptake is a coping mechanism. All this was worse before I started getting high every night again.

Sweethearts letting the world tick over nicely

So we had our group therapy session at work about my missing boss. I don't know how helpful it was, because as I've mentioned at length I'm still unwillingly exploring a rather unwelcome emotional landscape at the moment. But I was very touched that so many people were so concerned about me. Funny how gratifying that is. I guess my missing boss and I had been rather loud and laugh-y in our interactions over the past couple of years, by his standards anyways. It feels like a grain of comfort to think that perhaps the last couple of years of his life, the work part of it at least, were a little more loud and laugh-y for having known me. It would be payback. I'm a much better person for having known him.

The night previous a young South American intern who hadn't been able to make the session caught me when I was staying late, which I have to do fairly frequently in these turbulent days, and after we'd both had a few drinks in celebration of one of the Money Men going back to the CIS country he'd been born in some years previously. We'd always exchanged the proper pleasantries but now we talked. Well, mostly she did and I listened, once we finished talking about my boss, because she had rather a lot going on in good and bad ways, including being the daughter of one of the richer men in her country.

But at some point in the conversation I mentioned that once in awhile, I missed Kraft Dinner, and I hadn't actually eaten any in years and years. And yesterday morning, there as a box of it sitting on my desk. Isn't that sweet? But remind me the next time I have a tête-à-tête with an extremely rich person to mention that I miss $10,000 in small unmarked bills.

Tighty righty comedy gold

Australian opposition politics has gone apeshit over a proposed emissions trading scheme that the Labor party is shoehorning through for a vote before the Copenhagen conference. Tony Abbott is the new head of the Liberals, an anti-labor party who are in coalition with the Nationals, who used to advertise themselves as a force for Senatorial honesty, made a few compromises too many, and now advertise themselves as a bunch of morons who will bend over backwards to assure rural Australia that the country's environmental catastrophes have nothing to do with their ridiculously inefficient and consumptive farming practices.

Tony Abbott, a fuckwit anti-choice dried-out lizard carcass who can barely speak, replaces Malcolm Turnbull, who was one of my favorite right-wing politicians: he has principles, after a fashion, and is anti-monarchist (Abbott, on the other hand, compared Australians who wanted their own republic to 'stupid children blowing raspberries'), and did his best to try to kick his party into ratifying the ETS. Also Robert Hughes' nephew-in-law. Too clever by half - you can tell when he speaks. He argues well, but he argues like a lawyer, not like a demagogue, and that simply does not do on the right side of the life, when rallying your support means appealing to a pathological level of paranoia.

And one knows all this because Australia, unlike Canada and the States and the UK, makes their politicians have interviews with Kerry O'Brien instead of letting them have infrequent press conferences. Kerry O'Brien is really great. One of my favorite ways to unwind after a long hard day is to get stoned to the eyeballs and watch him make the leading politicians of his country go "errrrrrr . . .". He just asks the most inconvenient questions one could possibly ask. It's fantastic. The F-word gets a limited pleasure out of it because he points out the moments of clarity are few and far between - that as good an interviewer as Kerry O'Brien is, the person he's interviewing is merely a politician, and therefore still just trying to sell a turd with a birthday candle stuck in it, even if they do get stuck for answers occasionally. But I just find it so fucking gratifying, I can't even tell you.

Something else that helps me unwind after a long hard day is getting stoned to the eyeballs and watching Yes, Minister. It used to be Margaret Thatcher's favourite show, you know. I'm sure she's excellent company. Just like Satan would be, if Satan had a drink in his hand, his feet up on the ottoman and his full quota of ruined souls for the day.

Rotterdam mijn liefde

We just spent the weekend in Rotterdam - pictures to follow. For weeks all and sundry who were aware of our destination, which I chose to go to with some passion to celebrate my 31st birthday on the basis that passing through Rotterdam on our way to and from Amsterdam was driving me crazy because I wanted to get out and look at the beautiful modern buildings, warned us we were heading into a grey shithole that everybody hated.

Now it may be because I'm incurably contrarian, but having spent a couple of days there I have to say anybody who doesn't like Rotterdam is a fucking asshole. Rotterdam is fucking awesome, I've never seen anything like it. I could compare it to Dusseldorf or some other German city that got completely wrecked in the last world war and rebuilt in a reasonably interesting and livable way, but Rotterdam leaves them behind: Dusseldorf and similar German cities were rebuilt in a very reconstructive fashion, comparatively, with an eye to recreating past glories and conditions: but in Rotterdam, somehow the clipboards ended up in the hands of people who had decided they would do everything they could to make their City Mark Two very fucking human.

Of course they had the natural advantage of it being a port town full of canals and the river, so it's a very watery town, and that makes for a sort of default pleasure for the eye: I don't know about you but I find it pretty hard to maintain a bad mood when there are lots of boats and pretty diving birds all over the place. And then there's the typically brilliant Dutch organization of circulatory space: bike paths coupling and outnumbering roads, ubiquitous footpaths, roads all nicely arranged to keep the cars out of everybody else's way, and comprehensive public transport that we didn't bother to use because this was very much a walking weekend: outside of meals, drinking, a couple of pitstops at the quick serve windows of coffeeshops, and a long visit to the terrific Van Beuningen gallery, we spent the entire weekend looking around the city at the startling architecture.

Take the cube houses, for instance. The cube houses remind me of Venice or the Guell park in Barcelona because they're something that can't be appreciated until you're in them. When I saw the pictures I thought they were a rather neat if ugly idea, but I wasn't particularly excited to visit them. However, when we ended up there on our Rondje Rotterdam stroll, seeing the way they were arranged, took (or failed to take) up space, and where they were on the Oude Haven (where, when I'm a multi-millionaire, I will definitely be buying a pied a terre) - why, it was just fucking lovely.

And the relative goodness of the food, ready availability of kibbeling, the friendly student/multicultural vibe, the utter lack of American tourists pretending they were being dirty by getting high, and the exciting fact that it only rained for about 1/4 of the time we were circumnavigating the city (the sun actually came out twice) sealed the deal. Fuck, what a great town. I loved it so much that while we were there I actually got my first pangs of panic at the prospect of leaving Europe. I haven't fallen for a city so hard since Barcelona.

The only stomach ache is in my head

We're on our way to Rotterdam tonight. Thinking about all the lovely modern architecture we'll see there (only a 20 to 40% chance of precipitation over the weekend! No better touring weather in the Netherlands!) and all the reefer I'm a-gonna smoke is helping me in the leadup to our first office group therapy session about my missing boss. I don't know what it will be. The thing is I'm absolutely blind in this situation. You know the parable of the blind men and the elephant? That's how I feel at the moment about how I feel: like I'm touching a part of it, but I don't know what the rest of it is like, and honestly I don't know if I'm going to be as fine as you can be in this sort of situation, or if tomorrow I'll be ripping off my clothes and smearing turd on the walls of an opera house.

Well, it's not likely. Rotterdam doesn't have an opera house. And right now I'm just annoyed. Just a burbling feeling of annoyance. But not the normal, garden variety Mistress-La-Spliffe annoyance; instead it's the sort of annoyance which turns into a headache around the front part of your head. The sort of annoyance that feels like hate. Which is unhelpful.

Anyways. Onwards and upwards.

To: Mistress La Spliffe . . . . Love: Mistress La Spliffe

You should see the sky out there. It's a pale but electric fuchsia. The pollution here make for really great sunsets and really great sunrises, but this is the sort of sunrise I imagine sailors curse at. Well, thank goodness I'm not a sailor. It's working, the trick of reminding myself that the sights I'm seeing now, I'm not likely to ever see in the same way again, because of our departure before the next time the seasons fully rotate. I'm enjoying it more here in general, and while it may be a bit of a stretch to say I'm enjoying what is extremely likely to be my final full northern European winter, I do hate it less than usual.

The word "final" is a little difficult today. Yesterday the Yankee manager, who is going about things very decently in view of my boss here going lost, more decently than you'd have expected from the mean way I wrote about him in the past when he did things I didn't like, called me up and asked me how I would feel about them beginning the search for the missing man's replacement. I said I saw the necessity of it, and he said he disliked the finality of the move, and then I made some reassuring sounds . . . but that word has been sticking with me. Finality; knowing things end. It's what makes a linear perception of human life and its phenomena piquant and bearable and at the same time utterly fucking miserable. Sort of like MSG.

Probably a cyclical view of time is a little more healthy. There's a certain irony in that, given the popularity of MSG in traditionally Buddhist countries. But I think I'm the only person in the world who appreciates the irony, given I'm the only person in the world who'd be ridiculous enough to compare mortality to MSG. Nonetheless, I do appreciate it awfully, so I shall give it to myself as a birthday present, not least because the first thing I saw clearly when I woke up this morning, automatically put on my glasses and stumbled around my apartment was my naked reflection in the bathroom mirror; and so the first semi-coherent thought I had on the morning my 31st birthday was "holy shit, that's a sweet piece of ass."

Deadlines and lifelines

I turn 31 tomorrow, and in a desperate race against the clock, today will see me call, chair, and boss my way through my first managerial meeting. I remember half my life ago, on the November 24th of me being 15, in a desperate race against the clock during those days of printer paper with wee holes in the side that kept jamming, I was printing out my first novel so I could say I'd finished writing my first novel when I was 15. I'm mildly perturbed today that by one practical measure I'm farther from my vocational dreams now than when I was 15. But what I wrote when I was 15 was utter balls and what I write now is much better, so I'm getting over it.

I've never felt less festive in a birthday sense, and that includes the years I spent in a very real and pressing depression. I'm not depressed at the moment. It's odd, all these emotional discoveries one makes when this are all fucked. I'm dangerously overworked, stressed, grieving and yet sort of basculated because we still don't have a body and I still expect him to walk into the office at any moment, and certainly my SAD is giving my brain some good sharp kicks, but even though I'd say things are a right shittery at the moment I know I'm not depressed. I'm still showering, for one. That's a bit of a giveaway that my depressive centres aren't acting up too much.

All the same I'm finding it a little bit difficult to give a fuck about my birthday. And that's partly because it falls on Wednesday, which is deadline day, so if I manage to get out of the office before 19h, then that will be a minor fucking miracle. For someone who isn't depressed I certainly complain a lot, don't I? But that's another bit of a giveaway my depressive centres aren't acting up too much.

All the same I shudder to think what sort of state I'd be in with the F-word. In fact I don't want to think about it because I don't want to know how dependent I am on his awesome. I'd rather just focus on his awesome.

Last Night's movie

In the spirit of all the apocalypse that's been floating around here, but actually mostly because of peer pressure, I went to see 2012 yesterday. I either have a great deal to say about it, or very little, and since my boss has disappeared we are so fucking swamped with work that I'll go for the "very little" option.

1. The car chase was sweet. If the whole movie had been that car chase, and if I'd been allowed to smoke weed in the theatre so that I was still buzzing after the car chase, the movie would have been roughly 100 times better.

2. Most of the rest of the movie was so bad that I spent it mentally comparing it with Canada's own sun-sparked apocalypse effort from a few years back, that helped launch the lovely and talented Sandra Oh to the dizzying pinnacles of becoming a Grey's Anatomy Regular, which by my calculations makes her the most famous entertainer of Korean descent known in the Anglophone world, or at least second between Kim Jong Il and Margaret Cho - the altogether tolerable Last Night

3. The erstaz Russian, Johann Urb, was a peice of super-ass. Whenever my mind wandered from comparing 2012 to Last Night in a microcosmic mental experiment to work out the fundamental difference between Americans and Canadians, it moseyed over to getting a damn good spanking from that. He looked like a Sean Bean that doesn't punch people for fun.

4. I discovered the reason John Cusack is such an engaging actor; he plays his characters so that you know, after they kiss the girl, that their cock has gone chubby. Funny how most American actors fail to communicate that fundament of a good, satisfying, emotionally charged kiss so spectacularly. When my mind wasn't fixed on the cinematic symptoms of the difference between Americans and Canadians or on getting a damn good spanking from an ersatz Russian pretty boy, it was wondering if the vast majority of American actors are gynophobes, gay, chronically impotent or just utterly bereft of any fucking dramatic talent whatsoever.

My birthday is coming up, and to celebrate Roman Polanski now being in prison awaiting some sort of evaluation of his case for longer than the big bad old 48 day sentence he ran away from in the 1970's, and with no immediate prospect of release, I'd like to post Chris Rock being Chris Rock, that is, awesome.

I heart DILFs

You may have gathered by now that I'm not Brussels' biggest fan, indeed that I'm counting the days, but nonetheless there are some really great things about it, and now that I'm back to being only seasonally depressed and not quite so gutted about the tragedy at work - amazing how one just gets used to things being totally fucked - I'm able to appreciate it more. Some of these things are tied to what we spent the weekend enjoying, ie culture, which all and sundry are warning me Australia is utterly bereft of so I should get it while I can. Fair enough.

Another thing about Brussels, indeed most of northern Belgium which is pretty sweet is the DILF population. I'm not very well positioned to enjoy it as I'm in a satisfying long term monogamous relationship with the man who I'd call my soulmate if I was the sort of fucking wet who believed in soulmates. But as the bishop said to the vicar, no one has poked my eyes out, and all the hot young men with babies is a sight to soothe their soreness.

I don't know if it's the excellent creche system or the comprehensive social security at large or just if these people aren't very handy with the condoms, but damn, there are some hot young professional motherfuckers who look like Ken Dolls except you can tell are swinging some serious pipe by the knowing way they smile at you, and who you can tell have pipes that work by the legions of little poppets hanging off their arms and being pushed around in prams. Too bad they're all blond. Blond men in general just look sort of imaginary in an unattractive way to me. Having boffed a couple I can say I really dislike getting them naked and looking at the startling lack of contrast between their skin and their hair. It's alllllmost gross. At least redheads have comic value.

Orientalism rising

Besides making it to the concert last weekend we went to one of the attractions at the Europalia festival, which this year has as its theme China. Synchronously this is the first week I'm editing the Asian magazine solo, and I'm realizing in a whole new and much more concrete way that I don't know shit about Asia. And from the magazine's perspective, while China isn't Asia, it's 80% of Asia. At the moment that's far more interesting and exciting than intimidating; working in a town like Brussels while I edit features on China is a very gentle introduction to something I don't know shit about.

Anyways. As mentioned, that is happening at the same time as the Europalia festival, which is about China, as stated, and this past weekend we went to see a photo and architecture exhibition. A few weeks back we'd already seen the Son of Heaven exhibition, which was neat, I guess, especially the jade burial suit, but where I learned that I've stopped giving a shit about ruling class lifestyles and objets d'art in an internationalist context, not just a European one.

I enjoyed the photo and architecture exhibits a great deal more, because sometimes it seemed like I was looking at things that came from somewhere else entirely somehow. And the F-word and I found a place we will have to visit, as photographed by Ruan Xiarong - Gulangyu Island, where in the ultimate in urban decay there are trees growing out of old Victorian embassies, and which apparently has the highest number of pianos per capita in the world.

My lovely horse, you're a pony no more

On Friday I felt like ass on a plate, or as the French say, 'une assiette'. Both physically and mentally. It's cold season, which explains the physicality, and mentally - well, of course it's my boss. I sort of swing between missing him and realizing for the first time what a shithole the world can be sometimes.

Nonetheless that night I dragged myself to a concert with the F-word and some of his friends: this one. And it was lovely, and I don't think anything else could have reached me properly that evening, since when I've been feeling substantially better. Julia Charkova of Khakassia - her instrument and her nasal tuneful singing - was very lovely and sent my brain off thinking about Mongols and what they've done to music as well as the map of Asia.

And then Albina Degtyareva of the Sakha republic was incredible. I read the programme, I knew she's been to university to put as all in a shamanistic state of mind, but it put me in mind of some militant First Nations guys who used to live around my hometown, who were anxious to recover their culture and willing to do so through the medium of dreams and meditation in the cases where us fishbellies had successfully expunged the record. But in Sakha I guess the degree of isolation was so huge that even the Russian Orthodox Church is calling them syncretic, and going to one of the republic's university's is a way of dreaming or meditating . . . I don't know. It gave me a powerful urge to go there, though.

And she was incredible, it was really incredible, what can I say? It took me outside of myself at a time I really needed to be taken outside of myself. Like a Jehovah's Witness knocked on my door right after my dog died. I'm grateful I just had some quick shamanistic exposure on Friday instead of bumping into any religions that would require me to stop boffing the F-word extramaritally, now that I think about it.

Here she is with her old band:



Here's another with more giumbarde - sorry, just can't bring myself to call it a jew's harp - except I guess I just did.

Sin before suffering

Wrapping up the Jarrett. I've never read a book like it and the further I get into it the more bizarre it becomes. I don't know where its academic utility would be exactly - perhaps not for history; more, I think, for training people in how to be literary critics or commentators or psychoanalysts, which I think was his idea too, to some extent. I do know that I would love to write books in this one's style, but I don't have the general knowledge, or the in-depth understanding of a given era.

A history of the imagination, it calls itself, from Victoria's accession to World War One; a history of the more changeable bits of collective thinking that seem so immutable when you're the one thinking them. A self-confessedly Jungian history, with an unexpectedly dramatic tone - almost something serialized about they way he organizes it, the way Conan Doyle and Victoria and Gladstone and Disraeli pop in and out of focus . . .

The other night I was struck by an account from the "Watchers upon the high towers" chapter, which is full of apocalypse. Many people before 1881 thought the world would end that year, and many people after 1881 thought the world had ended - that they were now in post-Rapture chaos or the reign of Christ on earth (I can never keep all those Christian stories straight). Jarrett mentions one extremely popular lecturer and author, Josiah Strong, who I'd never heard of before, who believed that the Christians of the United States had it in their power:

". . . during the next ten or fifteen years to hasten or retard the coming of Christ's kingdom in the world by hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years." But first they must stop letting members of inferior races into America, since only the Anglo-Saxons were "exponents of a pure spiritual Christianity". Then they must steer clear of idleness, atheism, popery, alcohol and above all socialism, "which attempts to solve the problem of suffering without eliminating the factor of sin". . . the Librarian of Congress later said the book had an impct second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Looking into this sort of thing strikes me as incredibly important, and incredibly underdone in terms of how history is presented to dilettantes like myself at least. . . the beginnings of ideas, the emotional bases of what we're convinced is our rationalism, seem to me like one of the most important things you could know about history. Socialism isn't just a problem because the rich have to sacrifice some of their wealth, it's an emotional problem because you don't know that the people it benefits have done anything to deserve that we attempt to relieve their suffering - there's a moral angle to the history of the massive resistance to socialism in the United States that needs to be understood, if not admired . . .

World's cutest degenerates

There are lots of benefits to having an Australian boyfriend. One of them is the unfailing funniness of the way he says words like "beer" and "groin" and "shit" - despite his years and years of living abroad and modulating his accent to be comprehensible to Europeans and Canadians, some words, like the three just listed, are said with multiple syllables and vowel sounds that just don't exist in any other mouths I've ever experienced, and it's hilarious. "Beeeeeiiiyaah." Marvellous. (He laughs at the way I say "gazebo", "granola" and "coffee" so it's allowed.)

Another is that being excessively fond of him has made me more interested in the country he comes from, which is interesting in its own right due the bizarre flora and fauna. Take koalas. They're fucking adorable, right? Look at this fucking adorable koala:

Until the F-word started dominating my consciousness I was content to leave it at that - "aw, koalas, adorable" and move my brain along to the next task at hand. But do you know what else about koalas? They're the fucking dregs of society in the classic Daily Mail sense. They spend all day sleeping, getting stoned out of their minds on psychotropic leaves, once in awhile managing to lazily fuck each other without either protection or discretion, and spreading the clap across their population like wildfire. Lazy, venereal disease-ridden junkies. Marvellous. Except it's killing them. And the government isn't going to take it anymore. No special treatment for those nasty little things. Just because everyone adores them doesn't mean they can be filthy decadent hophead sluts and expect the rest of us to clean up after them.

Poor koalas. I still love them.

Well. A nasty little entry about the world's cutest animals dying of the clap was my attempt at an fluffy escape from blogging about how fucked up everything is. Some of you have been sweet enough to worry about me. I'm actually okay, I think - not to worry, at least. We're getting counselling at the office, I have fantastic support from my koala-loving partner, I've been super-touched to have your sweet messages, and this is Belgium, not North America; I can go on stress leave if I need to, and I will if I need to, but right now I don't.

I don't know if it's as morbid as all hell or not, but I worked out that around the time my colleague disappeared, I had this song in my head, and listening to it once every morning, as I'm blogging and getting ready for work, is somehow a massive comfort:



Soon I'll be ready to start thinking about things like the long-term philosophical view about souls over bodies, which gentle Rodelinda, with great emotional delicacy, suggested suggesting. Not yet though. Right now I'll just keep listening to the Final Fantasy song that was stuck in my head when he disappeared, morbid as hell or not.

Four escape routes

Speaking of escaping into books during a time of fuckery: the bookshop across from my favourite grocery store where I picked up Decline and Fall as soon as finishing Brideshead Revisited is fucking ace. This weekend I got quite a haul besides the Waugh:

Goodbye to All That - sqeeeeeee! Robert Graves is awesome on a stick. No wonder Ava Gardner hit that when it was already old enough to break. And there's so much more of him to read as I've only had the awesomeness of I, Claudius/Claudius the God and his Greek Myths. Both are really really worth reading no matter what sort of relationship you think you have with classical studies, and the Greek Myths is earth-shaking, as far as I'm concerned anyways. Each chapter tells the myth in a way directly drawn and referenced from a range of source texts, and, following the references, gets re-interpreted Gravesianly - through the lense of murderous fertility cults, matriarchies, and hallucinogenic mushrooms. And he is just the silkiest, friendliest writer - a real sort of formality to his phrasing which is nonetheless inviting, engaging - a nice big wingback easy chair; imposing, but upholstered with comfy velvet instead of patrician oxblood leather.

Mummy won it as a school prize some decades ago and it was sitting on my grandparent's bookshelves when I was a bored 13-year-old; one thing led to another, and, well, I don't think there's a single work that's had more of an influence on my symbolic or metaphorical thinking than that one, for better or worse. I didn't buy into it but I swallowed it whole, if you can see the difference. Part of my brain forever.

Grapes of Wrath - for the F-word. He hasn't read it yet. Enough said.

Far From the Madding Crowd - someone told me that this was the least depressing of Thomas Hardy's books and that it was even more or less funny. Well, I'll believe it when I read it. Personally I didn't think the Mayor of Casterbridge was depressing, I thought it was just awesome. Okay, the will at the end from the guy as read by his !!!SPOILER ALERT!!!! pseudo-daughter was tragic - it was a tragic book - but depressing? Anyways. I'm nonetheless curious about Far From the Madding Crowd. And I'm running out of Hardys that I'm willing to read. Tess of the D'Ubervilles - I gave up on that one halfway when I fully realized what a downer that was going to be - and Jude the Obscure - uhm, no. I've heard too much about it.

Murder on the Orient Express - it's a Poirot novel so I was hoping it'd help with my perceptions of Belgian retardation. It didn't. But I enjoy the language - already archaic - it happens so fast! Pukka sahib indeed.

Some histories need to end

Brideshead Revisited, ugh, a nasty little book about horribly nasty people, but such a good read that almost immediately upon finishing I bought Decline and Fall from a lovely new used bookshop that just opened across from my favourite grocery store.

Waugh provides a ghastly cure for anybody who fears that they're finding Graham Greene's bleak and gruelling vision of British Catholic duty has anything convincingly heroic to it outside of the Graham Greeniverse. Mind you I liked it very much, if not as much as the Graham Greeniverse, upon accepting the world of the novel for what it was . . . a place populated by the sort of people Monty Python made fun of, the End of Old Money History.

BTW, the End of History is such an interesting idea, isn't it? You'd think Fukuyama et al would have hestitated a bit more before proclaiming it considering the consistency to which it's been proclaimed over a history of our race and planet which, whatever else you'd like to say about it, certainly hasn't ended yet. As a matter of fact, offhand I have to say they way people Keep! Reporting! The END!!!!!! Of History!!!!! is one of the best advertisements I can think of offhand for postmodern historiography.

People are attached to their world view, to their own lifespan, to the extent that generation after generation can proclaim the End of History with amazing regularity, and re-arrange history to argue that it has led up inexorably to that End Point. I think it's probably a fairly natural instinct, as far as anything we've had an instinct to do since we started wearing clothes is 'natural', but I also think that inclination is a damn good reason to bend yourself into pretzels in the effort to take an objective, distrustful view of history. And people who say otherwise smell bad. But I digress.

Brideshead Revisited, grim, awfully grim. Not utterly without humour though. It is so nice to escape into books these days. Everything continues fucked, as you can imagine.

Processing revisited

I'm backing far, far up from this search. Last night it hit a level of wierdness beyond my comprehension, I mean super-uber-ultra beyond my comprehension, and that when my comprehension had already been baffled beyond its limits. I spent an hour sitting on the couch, watching the F-word shopping for a new harmonica on German websites, with my mouth hanging open, just trying to process. I haven't gone into that mode in years. In justice to myself I was really high at the time. But still. There's nothing I can do besides pick up his mail, hold everybody else's hand, and wait.

I will say this though: I've got more hope now than I've had in more than a week. In my head, the two likeliest things that could have happened to him were accident or running away, and I always dismissed running away because I couldn't imagine what he'd be running away from, and now I can.

In other news, reading Brideshead Revisited and getting an interesting sense of how the other half lived and thought. That it was didn't get obvious until Charles Ryder went back to England from France when he thought he was being morally called upon to beat up the proletariat. Smashing book so far.

Know when to fold them

Yesterday I did the only thing I could think of to do; I dumped the problem I was having with his family on four other people who loved my missing colleague more than I did. Three of them agreed with me and are taking over where I folded. One flipped out, got really offensive, and, well, I won't have to worry about choosing out Christmas presents for her anymore. What the fuck is wrong with Americans, anyways? She's the same person who calmy explained to me once why it was right Hillary Clinton didn't dump her husband when he stuck that cigar up the intern (because she's a politician, and she knew that people would never elect a divorced person to be president, because divorcées couldn't possibly keep the country in order if they couldn't keep their own marriage in order, and yes, Mistress La Spliffe, that makes perfect sense.) I keep discovering new and unsettling veins of weirdness and conventionality in those people.

Last word on this aspect of the subject:

Bigotry isn't just things you yell at wops, krauts, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here, etc, on the street when you're fucking insane. It can also mean not informing the investigating authorities of someone's woppitude, krautdom, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here etc. when they go missing in Central America on vacation, you suspect foul play, he hasn't been robbed, his woppitude, krautdom, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here, etc., may have left him vulnerable to foul play, and, erm, he hasn't yet told his parents about the woppitude, krautdom, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here, etc.

It can mean prioritizing the sensibilities of family or friends as concerns the woppitude, krautdom, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here, etc. over exhausting every possible (indeed, in the circumstances, reasonably probable) avenue of inquiry as to the fate of said wop/kraut, insert derogatory ethnicity/sexuality/visible denomination here, etc.

I haven't stopped feeling like being sick. But at least I've made it other peoples' problem now to decide about going over the family's head, instead of mine - dumped it on the consciences of consciousnesses more wrapped up in this than I am. And in the process, I also feel like I flushed a bitch out of the closet, although probably in a few weeks or months or years I'll calm down and start missing her salty company. That's fucking DELEGATION, baby, it's awesome. No wonder U2 wrote a song about it. At least I think that's what those micks were yowling about.

But fuck, I miss him so.

Must actually get around to watching that 1996 Mike Leigh film with the great title

Oh readers, my heart is breaking. You know how pissy I get every time something I think is stupid is said or done, which makes me pretty pissy most of the time. But this is the first time I've had to watch stupid erase all my hope that someone I love is still alive.

I know it looks like fun, kids, but stupid KILLS.

I don't know how I get over this or move past this or anything. This is a grief I can't see the other side of. When people who I love died in the past, there were so many differences. I was prepared for it in a sense, but more importantly so were they. In at least two instances they waited patiently for their family's permission to let go and die. And we could all celebrate their lives and reflect on the great good they'd given us together, and we could all say "there was no stone left unturned in our love for them, we all did everything we could and loved them as well as we could."

But now . . . no. Not only the pain of the manner of his death - which is still a matter of some speculation - but of feeling that no, not everything was done. That some things that don't matter a good goddamn in Mistress La Spliffe Land mattered more than this man's life in the Land of His Family. And the horrible, wormy thought that I don't believe myself but which is nonetheless damaging my own conscience like fucking termites: what if he is alive and is waiting for help in the circumstances that I fear?

No, I don't see the other side of this. I don't see any lessons coming out of it. I don't see a single fucking speck of good or celebration or anything that isn't pure fucking never-ending suck, and I'm so sad and I miss him so much that I don't even have the energy to find refuge in pissiness anymore.

Some of you Blogrollers have families that seem like more of a curse than a blessing, and I've read and I've sympathized but I haven't understood for shit. What sort of sheltered existence have I led that this is the first time I've looked at a man's family and understood that concept as a reality? Is this a lack of emotional understanding on my part? Is it the case that many families are like this - just ticking along with all their secrets and lies, and then choking on those secrets and lies in a crisis?

Maybe that's the only good that can come out of this as far as I'm concerned - I always thought secrets and lies should be kept to the bare minimum but perhaps this was the practical demonstration I needed to make sure to stick to that once I start pumping out the kiddies. I guess we'll never fucking know.

Angry grief - Griefgry? Quite griefgry today

The search for my missing colleague is getting dumber and dumber. Really terrific media exposure now . . . I guess that's what happens when you're a missing journalist. And that's great. But . . . gah. I wish the family would try being completely forthcoming with the police before thinking about bringing in a psychic, let me put it like that.

The emotions are rather dreadful - sort of cyclical around the central theme of "I Miss Him" - because this was a man who managed not to annoy me once in two and a half years, and I get fucking annoyed by everything, and he was sweet, funny, warm, seemingly soft but he could stand up for himself, and us, in a professional context, and I miss him, he was such good company. And then swirling around that is "We're All Going to Be Fucked Getting Our Magazine Out", "His Family Is Doing It Wrong", "Why Is Everybody Treating the Locals Like Incompetent Spics When They're the Ones Doing It Wrong", "I Hope It Happened So Fast He Didn't Even Notice", "I Must Try to Hope He's Alive Or It's Bad Luck Somehow", ad nauseum, ad nauseum.

What I have found, bizarrely, is that it really helps to laugh, so much so that I'm starting to think the tragic history of the Jews, on my mind at the moment after knocking off Daniel Deronda, is part of what makes them so fucking funny, which they weren't in Daniel Deronda but oh well. You'd think Poles would be a bit more of a laugh riot in that case, though - maybe they are and the problem is just that I don't speak Polish. Anyways. Here's something that helped.

The driest argument has its hallucinations

My colleague is still missing in Central America. His family has taken an us vs. them mentality with the police that has become factually obstructive. I think he's probably dead but if he isn't, I can't think of anything much less useful than that. But you know what, he's my colleague, not my brother, and if they want to be assholes about it, there's not much I can do besides fucking weep and flag to the authorities that I'll be forthcoming as I can if they question friends and extended family. They probably won't. I hope they don't. I know what I think is right but at the same time I don't like the image of myself colluding with a Central American police force against a grieving family, which is how it will be perceived by said family and by that part of my brain which is all "fuck the po-po".

Part of what is distressing in these situations, I've discovered, beyond the horrible grief and the gnawing worry and the absolute lack of control and other people, is one's own brain.

Other than that, I'm on the home stretch with Daniel Deronda. Still ripping and not a single disappointment so far, beyond the let-down of Mordecai's big life-vision that he needed to share and bequeath to Daniel being Zionism. That was probably more earth-shaking at the time that Eliot was writing but I felt a bit let down. I was hoping for unicorns, or some magical mystery truth of some sort. Oh well.

The Red Dragon tells a non-PC parable

Last night the F-word had a friend over for dinner and to take my mind off of the monstrous situation at work, I decided to make us some muffins a little late in the evening. So off to the small Turkish shop at the top of the kitty corner street.

A little background. Halfway up the kitty corner street, there's a residence for retarded adults. Sorry if 'retarded' is a bad word now wherever you live. The residents have a spectrum of conditions - a few people with Downs' and lots of others with problems that are quite physically obvious but not quite so obviously diagnosable during a casual stroll down the street. The one unifiying factor, as far as I can tell, is that they're all dealing with physically obvious brain problems.

One of them, an older lady wearing pyjamas and drooling ever so slightly, pushed into the store in front of me muttering a bit. She zipped off to the soda section, carefully counted out four large bottles of Fanta, and zipped up to the single cash register, pushing in front of the small line that had formed there, to pay with the exact change that she was clutching. All of this was fine with me despite me, at that point, standing in said line, indeed being the next person in it that was pushed to one side. Good for her, I thought. She's on a mission for the Fanta and she's carrying it out. Everybody's relying on her and she's coming through for them. It reminded me of my maiden solo drive to the beer store in Canada a few months ago, when I had parked like a retard, so preoccupied was I with safely getting the plank of Molson back to Magnum and his buddies.

What wasn't so fine with me is that seconds after she pushed up to the cash, a second line suddenly materialized behind her. In fact I even think a couple of people lining up in my queue dropped out of it to queue behind her. She even had to push past them on her way out of the shop with the precious Fanta.

Now, there was little enough practical annoyance for me in this. I'm half guinea, I've spent years of my life in the rudest cities in Italy, the fucking international capital of illicit line-cutting, and I've done years of jeet kune do; nobody buds in front of me without my fucking consent, and I simply manouvered my elbow in front of the solar plexus of the man who'd started the second queue to hand my money to the rather bemused cashier.

But as I walked home afterwards it dawned on me: that was Belgium. That was a parable of what Belgium is. Belgium is a place where people will queue up behind a retarded lady who's drooling a little bit who pushes her way past an existing queue to pay for four large bottles of Fanta with exact change if they think it will shave 30 fucking seconds off their trip to the corner store, and then they'll act surprised and wounded when you gently but firmly elbow them in the gut to get them out of your way.

This is a very silly place.

The Red Dragon has a serious question . . .

Do you think Martin Amis ever gets tired of sucking? Or do you think he has any idea?

Jesus. At least that fucking blight on the face of the English-language 'literary' establishment is punching in his own weight class. His novels are to the contemporary canon what the words "healthful" and "orientate" are to the English language; ungainly, redundant, pretentious and lacking any excuse to exist. But to be fair, healthful and orientate's fathers weren't Kingsley Amis so it's more on their own merits I have to keep fucking seeing them in print.

The Red Dragon begs for help

Relative to my last post. We are having an emergency situation from work, and not in terms of deadlines but in terms of an actual emergency. In terms of life: one of my colleagues, who has gone missing whilst on vacation.

Rack your minds, pets, rack them hard, and if you can come up with any contact information for helpful businesses or organizations, or any advice pertinent to an Anglo going missing in Central America, please send to mllelaspliffe@gmail.com.

We are clutching at straws. Throw them if you can.

Concentrating on anger

Hey, you know what I've just figured out about the Kübler-Ross model? There are five stages of grief because the fifth stage is so shitty. Anger, denial and bargaining, especially, are way better than acceptance.

On the anger side of that equation, I may have an absolutely blood-chilling story of inselaffen bureaucratic Brazil-esque bloodymindedness, something beyond their normal such retardation altogether, something entering the realms of Eichmann herself, a picture perfect demonstration of the Banality of Evil. But I hope with all my heart I don't, because the man concerned, who would be the victim, is someone I and many other people hold very dear indeed. With all my heart, with all my heart, I hope all I have to tell you will be an absolutely blood-chilling story of inselaffen bureaucratic Brazil-esque bloodymindedness with the potential to have been a picture perfect demonstration of the Banality of Evil.

I do know this already though: if ever I get in trouble abroad, I would like you, please, to appeal to my beaver-beater embassies, not my fucking inselaffen embassies. Because put any fucking inselaffen into a public service and they become incompetent, responsibility-dodging fucktards and I hate them, I hate them, I hate them. They are like lobotomized Germans with no fucking zest for life and a fucking case of the paranoias. I hate the inselaffen administration so much. They cut corners here and there and still manage to devote more and more money to harassing their own citizens, and then when you need them the most they fuck you up the ass and apologize the whole fucking time they're doing it, but they don't stop, because inselaffen shitheels don't have any balls, and I hate them. Fuck, may they rot in a receptacle where where the stunted may become strong and the perverted be restored.

There's a massive fashion there of police blogging, by the way, in which dozens of anonymous cops with huge followings and, often, book deals, bitch about how the public hates them and the government keeps giving them dumb, unreasonable shit to do. Well, news flash, porkers: the two phenomena are not mutually independent. No matter how often you tell the public you're being put upon by the government, poor fucking you, it doesn't change the fact that that putting-uponness tells on the public, and while the government may be the asshole stepping on the public's neck, despite your whining you've chosen to become and remain the boot. Congratu-fucking-lations, everybody'll fucking love you now.

The first days of SAD

Ugh. SAD. Ugh. Stupid short days and painfully finite mortal lifetime. Ugh.

That having been said, I'm reading Daniel Deronda and it's fucking ace. Don't tell me how it ends, I like to not know that with George Eliot books. Love her writing so much - such characterization, such dialogue, combined with such an aesthetic sense - unique perhaps - that I'm starting to seriously question the hitherto fundamentally unquestioned superiority of my shmancy undergrad degree: why the fuck didn't we read any George Eliot? Maybe they did in the lit concentration. Anyways. Water under the bridge. I'm reading it now and it's good reading material for a thirty year old; perhaps I wouldn't have liked it in my late teens and infant twenties.

We watched The Caine Mutiny last night. Not a waste of time despite that sort of dated direction that patronizes the audience so awfully and makes American movies so distasteful, because Humphrey Bogart was impossible to stop looking at. Also Jose Ferrer, was, well, Jose Ferrer. I didn't think much of the script and even less of his speech at the end to the crew, but when he trotted out the line 'I'm a lot drunker than you are so it'll be a fair fight' it made the whole thing worth it. Most people would have made that line stupid. Not him.