Tears, many tears

as I watch this:

Plantentuin

Have discovered the botanical gardens here. It's not just that peice of shit downtown, they have something that'll really be world-beating out in Meise, just outside of Brussels, when it's properly established. Right now the greenhouses are just a cacaphony of young plants and the grounds are full of babies too . . . but also have a metasequoia . . . and when I went last weekend everything was juuuuust about to burst into leaf. By the time I get back it will have. Buds are pregnant with promise everywhere and I've started eating nettles again because the air is about to be full of plants having sex and making hay fever sufferers sneeze.

So it's very exciting, it means I've survived another damn winter, and now I'm moving to Australia so I've almost made it . . . Seriously, winter, fuck yourself.

Also love botanical gardens because they are the Mistress La Spliffe versions of five-star hotels, in that they keep out the riff-raff. You can pay several hundred euros for a night in an institution which keeps out poor and middle class assholes, which just leaves you with rich ones. Or you can go to a botanical garden, where nobody goes unless they're the sort of people who like botanical gardens, who are the sort of people who don't make me feel crowded, which keeps out rich assholes as well as poor and middle class ones. In Madrid, for example, when we came across some kids who were getting high in a greenhouse in the botanical gardens, they didn't just play loud annoying music or speak in awful high-pitched voices, they shared. Mind you that's probably just Spain. God, I love Spain.

Wrong side of the picket line

Finished the Colin Tudge book. It's the sort of thing that makes you want to rush out and plant a forest. Speaking of which, some environmentalist groups that like forests picketed us yesterday. Not us-us, as in our grunt work office, but shiny-happy-MBA-us, which at the time was congregating with hundreds of our shiny-happy-clients, including some whose companies are responsible for some ecological hecatombs. Shiny-happy-MBA-us is abuzz with annoyance that they would have dared.

Me, I think it's a great idea. Okay, maybe you can raise a nice stink having a dowtown demo about how great forests are and how it's shitty to cut them down. Maybe you can chain yourself to some excavators. Maybe you can even get on the fucking news. But I think it's a far better thing by far to show up at industry events like ours and make every effort possible to embarass the motherfuckers who are actually in the process of paying for the cutting down. I have to talk to these people on a daily basis and they are absolutely convinced of the rightness of what they're doing; maybe a little personal embarassment will force them to re-evaluate their morality. Probably not. But it's worth a shot. And the least they deserve is a little confrontation.

I was talking about this with the F-word last night - trying to work out how many lives your average Catholic paedophile priest can ruin over a career (my guess was 800) or a serial killer can put a full stop on (I don't know, lots?) and how many lives one of these companies at the industry event in particular has ruined or ended by this point (without even counting the orang-utans). I'm not saying anything in defence of Catholic paedophile priests, mind, or of serial killers. But I was just a touch overwhelmed that society is so unfond of them, and then are willing to pay executives of these life-ruining companies tonnes of money to keep up the good work - especially the people, there but for the grace of God go I, whose job is to paint environmental turds green. Okay, I know the wherefores. But last night the irony got to me.

Running out of fantasy fodder

You know - and I this is on my mind not merely because Corey Haim died, because I don't know him from Croesus, but because another guy at work died, and yes, you may have noticed that's been a disproportionate number (three in a year, if you count M, but this one worked in a different office and my interactions with him were limited, so I'm unnerved by the unexpectedness and sad for his circle but not at all fucked up as I was/am over M) - I really am not looking forward to how I'm going to feel when celebrities who I wanted to have sex with when I was pubescent start dying. Teenagers manage this ridiculous level of passion for total strangers and I have a feeling it echoes through the years, as I still can't pass over news reports about them in utter indifference.

David Bowie having a heart attack was worrying, as were those "Jeff Goldblum died in New Zealand" rumours. Mick Jagger is totally living on borrowed time and I have no idea what years of heroin use have done to Nick Cave's physiology. Tom Selleck and Robert Smith have both been worryingly quiet lately. Paul McCartney has those billions to keep his brain alive in a jar if all else fails so I'm not too bothered on that score. But every morning part of me fears reading that David Attenborough has given up the ghost. He just doesn't trek through the jungle on camera anymore so I have no way of knowing if he's still so - you know - vital or not.

Mind you when Michael Hutchence died I dealt with it quite well, and I'm quite sure that I wanted to have sex with him when I was pubescent, although now, not having kept a detailed enough diary, I don't know if he fell into the post-15 yr old "hey wait maybe sex isn't icky" catchment area that I'm still living in, or if he fell into the "maybe we can play with My Little Ponies together" pre-15 yr old catchment area. When did Kick come out? I don't even remember. Sunrise, sunset.

Anyways. Besides youthful obsessions echoing through the years, the thing is, in sexual fantasy terms, they're just not going to be replaced en masse with new celebrities. I like to think, fondly and foolishly I know, that part of the reason I don't get many new celebrity crushes anymore is because I'm in a satisfying adult relationship, though it's apples versus oranges really, or rather all of the exciting and nourishing fruits of the forest versus a well-marketed Twinkie. But I don't think it's just that, because now all the new young heart-throbs are so young. So obviously young. Which is gentle, woman-code for 'fucking moronic looking'. Plucked and poofed like fucking prize chickens. I fucking ask you. Can you point me towards a famous putatively attractive celebrity male of my own or the younger generation who doesn't look like Magnum PI's fey little doormat?

Losing my workigion

These days I have the feeling of clawing my life back a little bit. There was another brief firing orgy at the office recently which has reminded me - as it always does, and as I always forget due to this strange habit I have of anthopomorphizing everything to be cute, making it seem like my company is a nice, jolly old man who has some concern for his employees - that I work for a very typical sort of firm whose motive for existence is a short-term bottom line, and I could break my balls for a million years for them but that won't prevent them from getting rid of me the second I become inconvenient.

And the present fact of the matter is that I'm currently working two full-time jobs for them, have been since the middle of last year and will be until I leave, at the same pay I was getting in 2007, and they're still not ready to give me any commitments as to the mid-term future. I would like one - I'd like to stay with them - but in view of the utter fucking ball-breakage I'd also like not to. S0. Time to stop breaking my balls.

Part of that is that now I leave at the crack of five on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, or the commensurate hour based on when I arrive in the morning. The new CSA we've joined that I have to pick up from at 17h30 on Mondays provides an excuse, oh it's so much better than the last one, I just show up with money and leave with food, and no more fuss or muss involved than is inevitable in view of the fact that it's a Flemish organization whose local chapter is run by Francophones who can't even decipher the label "kleine groenten" on the small vegetable packet. Wednesdays and Fridays are obviously fucked, but I plan to leave at five on those days too on the days when I'm not the one putting out the magazines.

Mostly it's a frame of mind though. Understanding my company isn't, in fact, a kind jolly old man who will reward me for working insanely long hours and breaking my balls at my 2007 pay is very liberating, very stress-alleviating, something like becoming an atheist after being raised Mormon would be, I imagine.

And when you combine that with the fact that the recent firing orgy is a damn clear indication that not only do they not give much of a fuck about each of us as individuals, they also don't give a fuck about the quality of the product we're putting out - well, it obviously signals I can untwist my knickers a little about it too. I remember - heavens, this is so naive - feeling until quite recently that it was odd that I was very conscious of doing an absolutely crackerjack job in a lot of domains, and yet not getting any positive feedback at all from my boss boss - have never got any positive feedback from him, or indeed any feedback of any kind, though he said all the right things when M disappeared, which I appreciate.

I used to think that was because he was one of those types who was concerned that if he offered positive feedback his staff would get lazy, but now I'm pretty sure he actually honestly doesn't know or care - us doing a really ace job is not what his rewards or motivation is based on.

Fair enough.

Mr. Right is losing his muscle tone

HOLY SHIT.

Work has been so busy, and promises to be so busy next week, that I, a lily of the fucking field if I'm anything, have been out of my fucking brain. It was a relief to wake up sick this morning so as to be able to call in sick, though I'm still taking care of a pile of stuff here and dealing with a situation which will only get more annoying as the weeks go on; I'm nearly hoping it implodes, as I know it eventually must, in the near term just so I can get it over with, but since I'm that annoying stage of under-manager I have no power to make it do so, which is 3/4 of the frustration in itself.

Anyways, you know how busy I've been? I don't even remember the last time I've had a wank. Can you believe that shit? I'm a female, childless grass consumer in my early thirties with a boyfriend who works long and tiring hours; I should be servicing myself - well, actually, I don't know how often I should be servicing myself in statistical average terms, but my common sense tells me at least twice a week. But nope. Nada. None. My week: come home late from work, spend some couple time, read a dozen or so pages of whatever book, conk out, roll out of bed, and go to work. It sucks. Frankly I'd nearly forgotten how. I hate being a yuppie. Don't know how much longer I can last. I love the money too much, that's my fucking problem.

Gripe gripe gripe. Oh well, one day at a time. Will get through more work, light a pipe, and put on some Spiritualized. I wonder if anyone else thought the lyrics to "Soul on Fire" were
I've got a hurricane between my legs," rather than the much lousier "I've got a hurricane inside my veins". I also wonder if there's any single band over the last 15 years that so many women have soundtracked their self-service to. This is the sort of thing I really wish Eurostats would look into.

So much to read

So little time. Rodelinda loaned me An Instance of the Fingerpost a little while ago and I made the mistake last night of reading the first chapter whilst in the thick of The Secret Life of Trees, which continues beautiful. Fuck. The first chapter snared me. But I will wait until done the tree book.

I've put the Nancy Mitford omnibus by after finishing The Pursuit of Love, which I found actually terribly moving. Thought about just continuing reading, going on to Love in a Cold Climate, but I found I actually needed a rest after that. I think the closing line of the Pursuit of Love is one of the best in the history of literature. I have a nasty habit which I work with occasional success to suppress of reading the final few lines of books after reading the first chapter - in the case of The Pursuit of Love I failed to suppress it (though I didn't go back far enough to 'ruin the ending' as it were). But that last line still managed to catch me absolutely off-guard.

Breaking the naughty language barrier

Yesterday during a moment of mental pause, whilst on the rowing machine - I do some of my best thinking on rowing machines, a poor second to kayaking but what do you want, I live in a city where the only river is both biologically dead and underground - I asked myself to what degree my pottymouth may have held me back in life. I don't feel held back in life, I feel like I'm more or less where I want to be, lack of sexual congress with Tom Selleck as he was in 1981 notwithstanding, and I don't think having dropped the pottymouth would have helped me with that.

I think it came from my recent trip to Oxford. Rodelinda mentioned to me that she'd warned her friends I swear like a sailor, for example, and some of them nonetheless went glassy-eyed when I went off an a tear about something. And this in a country that has produced some of the most gifted, lyrical potty-mouths of all time. John Cleese dropped the F-bomb at Graham Chapman's funeral for heaven's sake.

But then I always find Rodelinda's British friends somewhat discombobulating. This odd, specific class of upwardly-mobile-middle-class Brits are bizarre. I don't understand what the hell they're still doing there, first of all; they can take all their pounds and go off and live like queens in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. I mean I don't pretend Back Home is Shangri-La, but it's at least a place where you can live in a house without tying up all your capital and where the social services more or less work, ie the police still serve a purpose besides ticketing the hell out of everybody and steadfastly avoiding any situations they can't reliably club their way out of.

And then this odd class drinks their faces off, make showing up hungover to job interviews and suchlike some sort of virtue, and fuck each other like the world's about to end - I mean, really make utter tits of themselves over their drunken promiscuity, and I say that as a former roundheels who's only got a few regrets, none of which involve wishing I'd fucked less. But break out a spliff and they go all trembly. This in a country where everybody else, besides this odd, odd in-between class, has a very close relationship with drurrrrrrgs. What is it? Why is it? Is it watching too much BBC following the government line about weed suddenly being a super-dangerous drug now? You know - this is one of the funnier things I saw there, 1984-ish coverage of the Afghan violence aside - BBC newscasters don't call it marijuana, they call it "cannabis", in this low, very serious, very worried sort of voice, like it's going to break into your fucking house and rape your daughters.

Fuckin' please, bitch. Please. It's marijuana for fuck's sake, people have been smoking it since the English were still wiping their asses with thistles, and somehow the world continued to turn until Americans realized in the early part of the last century that they're allergic to Mexicans.

Anyways. So far The Pursuit of Love is providing some answers . . . albeit archaic ones. Cracking good read!

Somewhat imbalanced

Reading The Pursuit of Love from Nancy Mitford and it's very good. Though don't have time to go into it this morning because I require a rant.

If we need any proof of the inherent sexism of popular perceptions of the the literary establishment, here's one: hardly anybody talks about the fucking Mitford sisters anymore, and a pair of father-and-son turds like Martin and Kingsley Amis can still make it into both the broadsheets and the Daily Mail. Neither have done anything more exciting than be massive pricks and follow conventional literary lines, versus the Mitford sisters, who besides having two excellent writers in their ranks, fought in the Spanish Civil War and got interned due to fascistic tendencies during WWII and had an affair with the French military chief of staff and shot themselves over Hitler and lezzed it up and testified in front of the House of Un-American activities committee and and and . . .

I'm gonna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench

M and I had a running stress-reliever - the word "Boner", which we made workplace-acceptable by referring to the Growing Pains character, who of course the presently missing Andrew Koenig played. Fucking best American television character name ever. Well, it's not unknown for people who were formerly famous cracking up and disappearing themselves, permanently or not, and considering it's been around five months since M disappeared it's pushing things a bit to freak out about Boner disappearing after M disappears.

But synchronicity, as an emotion or a perceived phenomenon, is a strange thing. It's there, certainly. Involved with a plain, garden variety sadness, in that I can't turn around in my office chair and say, or hear, "they can't get a Boner," "maybe Boner was dysfunctional", "I'm going to spend this weekend searching for Boner, you know, really reaching out" . . . or just "hey - Boner!" you know . . . tonnes of fucking comedy gold that aren't funny anymore because now M is missing, and even though this guy had the fucking awesomest television name ever I can't laugh about somebody being missing anymore.

No wonder adults have no fucking sense of humour. It must get harder and harder to laugh at things the more indescribably horribly shitty things happen to you and the people around you. Everything gets a little too synchronous and has this whole hollow weight of loss and sadness beneath it, which swallows up the giggles like a sinkhole. But would M have wanted me to stop laughing at Boner? Will me not giggling at the name make things better? Probably not. Anyways, who'm I kidding. The word "boner" is always going to be fucking hilarious. But I'll always remember M while I laugh at it. I guess the best way to deal with the synchronicity is to laugh enough for both of us.

Anyways. In terms of the emotionally devastating synchronicity it's not as bad as A-Ha announcing they were going to break up on the day (we found out retrospectively, thank you very fucking much, you fucking turd of a British Foreign Office - may you collectively catch scabies and scar yourselves indelibly with frantic scratching, may you find relief from nothing short of the rough side of a cheese grater, you pack of useless, irresponsible cunts; may boners always be remarkable in your beastly, functionary lives by their paucity) that M disappeared. He was the only non-Scando I've ever known who liked them a lot. Indeed, the only non-Scando who claimed to have heard a single song of theirs beyond the ubiquitous, and awesome, "Take On Me".

Speaking of, I assume you've seen it but just in case - I can still laugh at this, anyways. I guess if someone near and dear to me had been clocked in a pipe wrench fight I couldn't, so, well, carpe diem:



And to be fair, here's an A-Ha single from 2000, that M really liked and sent me as proof that they'd released things in English besides "Take on Me". Apparently Morten Harket (and it's not your imagination; the man is a phenomenal piece of ass, as, my Finnish and Swedish lady friends breathlessly inform me, an unfair proportion of the male Norwegian population is - something to remember if the F-word ever dumps my ass) holds a note for 22 seconds in it, which Wikipedia says is a British chart record, beating Bill Withers' in "Lovely Day".



Another difficult thing about synchronicity is that that song has moved in my estimation from being an example of a fucking marvellous falsetto somewhat wasted on a half-decent pop song with lyrics that make no fucking sense to something indescribably sad. I miss M. I miss him so much.

No wonder adults listen and get attached to horrible mawkish shit like Phil Collins or The Boatman's Call (I've had "Brompton Oratory" stuck in my head since Saturday and I'm getting resentful). Nothing is allowed to be funny anymore, and repellent, repellent turds like "I Can't Stop Loving You" suddenly assume this crushing emotional weight and substance. I guess I should count my lucky stars that M wasn't into anything worse than A-Ha. Well he was, actually, he was quite fond of Madonna. But frankly the fucking Nazis could have played that shit over the loudspeakers at Treblinka and it wouldn't have given it any emotional weight or substance. Fucking. Hate. Madonna.

Let it bleed

Now that my time left in Belgium is countable, I'm trying to quantify the things that I'll miss to help me appreciate it here, and one of them was demonstrated yesterday.

I have a scratch on my finger, a nasty one but I don't know how it got there, which suggests to me it was the cat from when we were playing, as her claws are of a surgical sharpness and it's not unknown for me to not realize she's put me in my place until I'm mopping up the gore some time later. Anyways, I went to the gym yesterday, and whilst fishing around for my membership in my pocket realized that the nastiness I'd felt when I was slinging on my backpack was the wound being pulled back open; I realized this because I had bled all over everything.

And the reaction of the man at the desk, as I narrowly avoided dripping on it and him, was to get me a band-aid and be very pooooor you, you just rush right in to the changing rooms and wash yourself up. No Seinfeld-ian disgust, no health-and-safety face horror, which I really appreciated, even though I thought in the grand scheme of things, there probably should be a little health-and-safety horror at least; I mean, I know my blood is lovely and clean but how could he?

I suppose when I move to Australia I can bid goodbye to that sort of shit. I think they get drunk and beat on each other a fair bit more than Canadians but from all accounts I understand they're also a good bit more health-and-safety than here, like us. And the upshot is that once in awhile houses collapse on people for no good reason here, and they don't in Canada or Australia, and that's bad, but then I can bleed all over the check-in desk of my gym and be sent off with a bandaid and a pat on the head to work out in it, and that's good, for me at least.

Remind me to wash my hands more often though.

I'd rather be reading

Reading The Secret Life of Trees, by Colin Tudge. So far quite nice. Very conversational style without being illiterate, which is something that the vast majority of popular fiction and non-fiction writers seem incapable of lately. And it's nice to read a book about trees by someone who evidently likes trees and understands many many people like trees who perhaps couldn't yet tell their haploid from a diploid. That is, me. Early days yet though. We'll see how it goes.

Also making my slow (and during working days, it is very slow, or slow for me, anyways) through the Men At Arms episode of the Sword of Honour trilogy. At this point, mostly fascinated with jacket blurb from Cyril Conolly about how this is the only WWII book guaranteed to survive to posterity. Really? Well . . . anyways it has its moments but I'm not completely enjoying myself and sneaking suspicions keep making their way in that I'd rather be reading the Trees book, and honestly - and maybe this is why it's a really good thing I never went into a university lit programme despite my propensities - I think Spike Milligan's war memoirs are about four times better. There's a sort of innocent cynicism to Evelyn Waugh that makes it almost a burden to wrap up. But it all hangs together very nicely.

Chirping nerves

The birds are going apeshit. Crazy loud in the morning and you can hear them in the middle of the afternoon too now, even over the city ruckus, trying to get laid and -gulp- set up lifelong relationships. It's rather inspiring to see them go at it, actually; 300 million years of seperate evolution and so many of them have come to the same conclusions about how to love and live life that we have. I wonder what birds the F-word and I would be if we were birds. I like to think magpies. Magpies are cool. And I do like shiny things.

On my mind of course because, birdlike, preparations for my own migration continue apace, thoug rather more paper-shuffling involved than stuffing myself with high-protein food to build up fat reserves for the long flight. This morning, feeling really nervy for the first time about moving to Australia. Maybe it's partly watching my pile of euros magically shrink relative to their dollar. Thank god I hedged my currencies when the euro is peaking. I appreciate my own paranoia when it comes to money; being scared of heights has really worked out well for me these past couple of years. That's how granddad got rich late in life, Mum told me, betting on the dot com boom and then pulling out when he was in his late eighties and realized he didn't totally know what was going on, which happily took place shortly before the bust.

Anyways. Doesn't matter. Hedging aside, things'll calm down; just have to wait for the Chinese to decide commodities have got too expensive and shut down buying again, crash boom, Aussollar'll crash. I'm hoping it'll happen before the end of the year but it doesn't matter, I'm not in a rush.

No. I think what's really making me nervy today is understanding what Australia entails - the rest of my life. Semi-retirement, children, and finally - but also intimidatingly - being thrown upon my own creative resources. And I don't know much about the country all that will be taking place in, except that dealing with Australian bureaucrats after three years of dealing with Belgian bureaucrats feels like getting a tongue-bath from a gentle Brad Pitt. So I'm a little nervy. But I'll tell ya, it makes a fucking nice change from being a SADdo, so - good.

The Physical Possibility of Springtime in the Mind of the Chronically Pissed Off

In England, there were crocuses and tonnes of little erithacus rubeculae flirting around. The trees were getting that reddish look of being thinking about bursting into leaf, there was no snow, and the sun didn't go down insultingly early. Back in Brussels, and back to absolutely shitty atmospheric conditions, but I think you can take me off of seasonal-topping-myself watch this year. I know I'm calling it early but since it is hopefully the last nordic winter (off to the Antipodean Embassy in a mo to wrap up the documentation for the fucking-off-forever visa) I am pretty damn optimistic.

And it really must be said . . . I make fun of inselaffenanity all the time because it does drive me mental . . . but England makes a lovely break from Belgium. Belgium is just too damn crowded. And now that I'm middle class I eat way better in England than I can in Belgium - oh yes I can, wipe that smirk off your face. Unless you've got a root vegetable fetish Belgium gets old because there are, to quote the sole decent line in The Witches of Eastwick, 'not enough orientals.' The feed I had in London and Oxford over the past few days - oh god, the fucking dim sum alone - will morally sustain me until such a time as I finally leave this potato-heavy porkroast of a country behind forever.

Read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the way back at Rodelinda's suggestion. Maybe I just don't read enough modern thrillers or detective novels or something so I don't understand how relatively good it is - and I assume it is relatively awesome judging by the amount of fuss that's being made about the trilogy. It was quite likable, and it made me curious about what it would be like to have friendly, loveless sex with Swedish investigative journalists in chalets without electricity, but really - not Dorothy Sayers. Still, a healthy helping of very enjoyable revenge porn that made it more than tolerable even though I could guess the ending about 500 pages before the ending. I suppose I reccommend it if you like that sort of thing, and you're out of Dorothy Sayers.

But really - what the fuck is with Anglophone publishers, man. Changing the title from Men Who Hate Women, which makes sense - actually it's quite a good title - to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which is lame lame lame? Such an incredibly shitty titling decision makes me think that the translation of the book itself was probably completely cack-handed too.

On the way there, read Three Bags Full, at B's suggestion. I guess I was a little disappointed, because I had worked myself up to hoping I'd be reading some sort of Perfume-of-sheep-psychology tour de force and it wasn't quite that. But still very engaging, and if you're high or running a temperature, both of which I was at the time of reading, by the end of the book you can imagine what it might be like to be a clever sheep. I reccommend this one too. A little more whole-heartedly maybe. Tops points for the effort, certainly.

Decompression crumpeting

In downtown Oxford, this land of crumpets and organic food and spooky churchyards and libraries, like some film version of England with no poor people in it. I wonder if there's some sort of contractual obligation to keep this place all Merchant Ivory for the benefit of the foriegn students paying 20 grand a year to be here in tuition alone. No wonder Rodelinda's been able to live in the UK for seven years and still like it, even down to stupid, stupid institutions like the House of Lords; I keep expecting someone called Algernon to poke his head through the window and ask if I'd like to play some tennis, and I definitely don't expect a teenager who thinks he's got bugs under his skin to poke his head through the window and then steal my laptop.

I'm not complaining. And I'm also. Not. Working. And feeling humanity starting to ooze back up to my brain . . . starting to be nice to people again. Give me time. I'll retire next September and then I'll start being a fantastically awesome person again, I promise.

Sympathy for the dickheads

It's been a reasonably psychologically harrowing couple of weeks but I feel a bit better now, no doubt at least in part because of some break time coming up - indeed, some break time right now as I take a bit of comp for what worked out to days of overtime over the last 10 or so. I think I could be a lot more comfortable with the emotional difficulties of life if I didn't have to work ten-hour days whilst dealing with them.

It's been an object lesson - I'm allowed to say that because I know my present situation is temporary - I had a Serious Talk with the Yankee manager about the Antipodean future and it doesn't look unpromising in terms of keeping my job, but it would be different of course. The thing is I have been so busy, so incredibly busy, having to remember and execute a kabillion different work things, and be quite psychologically distressed on top of that - and the combination left me with nothing. Just a yawning and rather unhappy void of a personality at the end of the day. No empathy, no patience, nothing as far as other people were concerned, and actually not too much for myself either. An exhaustion, with nothing healthy or honest about it.

So. It's been an object lesson in understanding how adults turn into these massive pricks. I'd never fully understood before these last couple of weeks - sounds naive or something, doesn't it? I mean I had some idea that being super-stressed on top of distressed fucks you up, but I'd never had my hands on the mechanics of it before. I understood in the abstract that the rhythms of modern life were deeply physically and psychologically unhealthy, but now I know it in the concrete. Headaches. Uncontrollable sobbing. Constant sleepiness. Absent sex drive. Bursts of rage. The Red Dragon has been to visit three times since Christmas.

I don't want to forget this . . . I don't want to ever judge assholes as harshly as I've judged them before. All of this stuff comes from somewhere. Because, you know, things aren't that bad for me - I actually like my job and my F-word and millions hate their job and their partner, I don't have any debt - and I'm already turning into a right turd. No wonder the world is full of utter cunts.

Ah, I don't know.

In praise of rampant individualism

You know one of the bastardly things - one of bastardly many, of course - about the sort of tragedy rolling out at work? It's the sudden necessity of giving a fuck about what other people think and feel. We Anglos live in a painfully individualistic age, I know that, and I also have some awareness I'm sheltered from the worst aspects of that individualism because of the nature of my family, but nonetheless: you know why we got all individualistic as a society? Because it is great. It is really, really nice to not have to give a fuck about what other people think and feel.

The most apparent proof of this probably comes in terms of sexism, racism, not-liking-gayism, and religious bigotry. Are Anglos fundamentally a great deal less sexist than they were 40 years ago? Maybe, but they're certainly not proportionately less sexist to the much huger degree of social freedom I have as a woman relative to what my mum had: now I live in a culture that values the individual above all else so I can safely and reasonably not give a fuck if people like how I used to whore around, or how I presently live in sin with my dear F-word, and how I'm planning to have bastard children because I'm moving back to a common-law country at the end of the year (thank fuck; all this civil law shit it not nearly individualistic enough for me).

And you know what? Maybe it means I don't say hi to the people in my apartment building (but I do, of course, because some of them are German, and the Germans seem to have found some sort of magical middle ground between individualism and social community) or participate in any fucking village festivals and I'll have to live in an institution when I'm decrepid, but fine. Fine. I will take the fucking social isolation, and the freedom. Please and fucking thank you. And I understand that it works on the flip side of the coin too: I understand that I can sincerely believe Baptists, for example, are fucking insane, and also that they are highly unlikely to give a fuck that I think they're insane, and that's fine.

A strong proof individualism is great is how shitty things are when it becomes untenable, as in the present situation, where grief and worry gives a disparate group of people far too much in common to not become some sort of community, and to be forced, essentially, to give a shit about each other's stupid fucking opinions and feelings.

I've been hitting a bit of a watershed in the mourning process lately, I think - you know, that Hallmark moment when you realize the horrible pain of losing someone is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the great joy you had in knowing them. And since then I must say it's been nothing but shit. As if after you traverse the watershed, suddenly you're mentally recovered enough for all the Kafkaesque brutality of the bureaucracy surrounding someone's disappearance to start punching you in the fucking face, hence last Monday's utter breakdown.

On top of that, now there's this mini-row between the people close to M here over one of his friends circulating pictures from his laptop from a trip to a sunny clime in Europe a couple of years ago, in the company of an olive-skinned man. Dark olive. Kalamata, even. As it happens, Mr. Kalamata is a high-level executive at our company, and the trip to the sunny clime was a business trip - I was there too - and Mr. Kalamata is well known to all of M's friends, except the one who circulated the photos, breathlessly asking 'who dat?' The first conclusion I jumped to, of course, was that (as I know for a fact that M's computer is full of photos of strange men) his friend had seized on the only two showing somebody who looked Arab and hence suspect and that it was the sort of bullshit European open unquestioning unquestioned racism I'm so fucking sick of. I understand Canadians are also racist, and I've got the drift that Australians are SUPERFUCKING racist, but at least Canadian racism is closeted whenever the Canadian in question isn't drunk (and then, whoa boy. Seriously, try getting white men of a certain age in Canada drunk and talking about the First Nations people. Your hair will fucking curl. And a good way to get them going is by calling them 'First Nations' instead of 'Indians'), because we are all so individualistic and we realize that other people don't give a good goddamn about our stupid fucking racist opinions. Whereas Europeans are still fairly united as a community in their Arabs-as-paranoid-object so they don't feel like they have to keep it to themselves.

Anyways, as a fucking Canadian individual I forebore from subjecting everybody, indeed anybody, to my stupid fucking opinion about how goddamn racist this friend of M's was being, and simply wrote - he works here, I was there that weekend.

You know who else forebore from subjecting everybody to their stupid fucking opinions? Fucking nobody. Now it's all blah blah bla 'follow every lead', as if every fucking olive-skinned guy who'd ever shared M's temporal and physical space within the last two years is a fucking lead, or else 'fucking racists'. And you know what, I do think it was racist, and I don't want to fucking care. What would caring do? Europeans aren't going to stop being racist, and who the fuck gives a fuck about 'following leads' involving strange olive men on a laptop on one continent when nobody has as yet told the investigating authorities in a different continent that maybe men might be pertinent to the investigation of M's disappearance in a way they wouldn't be for 90% of the male population?

It was that second factor, the non-disclosure, which I've alluded to before, that made me decide I would do whatever I could to avoid this community of the bereaved. In that case I had to speak forcefully before I tried to scarper because I thought there was a chance it could help. The problem has been not being able to scarper, not being able to get away from this community; I haven't been able to prevent myself from putting myself way out there for his family, for his other colleagues, and him being an expatriate, this has also meant his friends, because I miss him and running around like a fucking chicken with her head cut off in an effort to tie up loose ends seems like a reasonable substitute for a funeral in terms of honouring M's memory. The intense homophobia of the situation hasn't left me unscathed at all and has put an end to at least one friendship that probably would have been enduring if this sort of tragedy hadn't challenged it. And great, now we all have to give a fuck about how racist/PC we all are or aren't.

Fucking marvellous.

Had a crack-up yesterday whilst trying to clear the rest of the things from M's apartment. Combination of waking up too early and the moving men being twats and plain old grief and stress and having 'A Day in the Life' stuck in my head and lord knows what else. Went home. I'm fine.

Also looking forward to this.

That's all I got today.

Giving a fuck

Still as seasonally fucked as I can be but had a nice weekend and I think I can start anticipating a light at the end of the tunnel, because for the first time since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I give a fuck about a movie: this one. By the same guy who did this one, which I wrote about here. I am on the edge of my fucking seat, frankly. This is going to be the best movie ever. Oh boy oh boy oh boy.

Promotional material

This mother of a mood indigo won't fuck off out of my head, although yesterday the sun broke through the clouds a few times, like at Exki (first bit of promotional material - it's quite nice. There. Quite is promotion, right?) one of the nice till ladies didn't charge me for a peice of lemon cake. I never, ever buy cake for myself because I'm a cheap bastard, but yesterday I fell for the consumer conviction that I deserve it, and I got it for free. Yay.

Second bit of promotional material: the BBC's How Earth Made Us. It's a backhanded promotion, because besides being something I'm enjoying whilst high, it's also a whole great load of almost laughable cackhanded cockwank, with this Scottish bastard with funny teeth showing up everywhere and ejaculating 'Amaaaaazing! Bloody briiiilliant! Thaaat's fantaaastic! ' instead of the time being properly filled up by just showing lots of awesome visuals and interesting facts about geology, one of my closeted obsessions.

I don't understand how the public television juggernaut that is the BBC, the mighty force behind the mighty Attenborough, has now figured that to make people sit still in front of educational programming for an hour at a time now they have to have some jerk-off taking up 40% of the screen time, jerking off. At a certain point I started feeling bad for the poor bastard, who I understand is a real-life academic and probably has a lot of hugely honest enthusiasm for his subject: surely it had to be ass-clenchingly embarassing for him to be made the Centre of the Thingummy like that?

But then again I'm not sure . . . there aren't going to be too many people who will hear the BBC say 'look, we're going to make a super-expensive and awesome documentary about >>>>, but you're going to take up 40% of the screentime jerking off over things, because our market studies have shown audiences like to have an emotional relationship with the narrator,' and say 'why no, I don't want to be the centre of fucking attention, please, please minimize me.' Anyways. All that notwithstanding, it's still worth watching if you're high or if you're the sort of geeky girl who likes Scottish geology professors who've still got all their hair. I complain but I know for a fact that in that case there are legions of girls who'd tap that. Diff'rent strokes.

Also helping me get through the mood indigo, besides free cake and weed and semi-crappy if beautiful-to-look at BBC documentaries, is lots of wine. But beautiful wine, because that way I'm not drinking too much; I'm enjoying my drink too much.

1. Macatela Tempranillo 2008, EHD (Spain)- a light aaaaaalmost fizzy wine, very new. It's sulfite free, or as sulfite free as commercial wine is allowed to be, so you can drink a lot of it without having a headache the next day. That's actually its main benefit - it's not really fantastic, not really exciting. But you can't argue with being able to sink half of it on a weeknight and show up at work without groaning the next morning.

2. Malbec Reserva 2007, Domaine Jean Bousquet (Argentina) - like the preceding, organic, but with the normal amount of sulphites as far as I know. But even though I get it at wholesale prices because I know a guy, the consciousness that it retails at about three times what I normally pay for a bottle keeps me from slamming it back like a self-aware advertising executive. Anyways it's probably worth the retail price. It's fucking yummy, with a rich, complex taste that doesn't linger any more than it should.

3. The Cork Grove Touriga Nacional 2005, Casa Branco (Portugal) - neither organic nor sulphite free nor, sadly, obtained at wholesale prices. But you know, out of the three I think this one's my favourite. It's like drinking really delicious water that gets you drunk, and in heaven there's almost certainly a stream where this lovely stuff runs and plays over the rocks.