The perils of responsibility

I miss grass. A lot. It took awhile for it to really kick in - I haven't got high since I was in Belgium - but here it is. I think it's the blood pressure thing. I've always tested normal or low for blood pressure, and thinking back the main difference between all those tests and now - aside from the obvious little Ren in my belly - is that I don't smoke anymore. When all the breastfeeding is through - and since I'm hoping for long nursing followed by Ren's little brother or sister and more nursing that could be fucking aeons - I think I'll start smoking again. Or during business trips when I can pump and dump to make sure I'm not contaminating my offspring before they're ready to start contaminating themselves.

Of course, if my blood pressure goes back to normal after I pop, I won't have an excuse. Nor will I need one. I'm a big girl and I'll do what I like. Except I won't, of course. The deal I'll make with the devil inside, or the angel, or whatever the fuck my sociopathic excuse for a conscience amounts to, is that if I manage to keep not drinking coffee, I'll reintroduce the grass. One recreational carcinogen at a time's enough. And at the moment I miss grass far more than I miss coffee. At that, my dears, is a sentiment I never expected. I've always loved weed but I've loved coffee more. No interest at the moment, though.

Another part of it is the Great European Trip will be through the Netherlands for about a week, and I'll be stopping in towards its tail end with some people I used to do a lot of getting high with. And then Berlin. Most of this trip will be spent with friends and family but in aid of my blood pressure and just out of self-regard, I've decided to treat myself to three days on my own in a forest outside of Berlin. Not a spirit quest or anything. It'll be in a really nice B&B with awesome restaurants nearby. But I've always really, really loved being high in Berlin. I've loved being anything in Berlin, really. And gosh, going there for a few days in July is not gonna help with my nostalgia for it in the long term.

But that's fine. I just want to chill for a few days by myself in a forest in Berlin. This could be my last chance to do that for 22 years. And yes, a little weed would be nice with that. Oh well. The things I don't do for love.

Around the World in 32 Years

I now know, and do not simply believe, the world is round, having arrived safely in Vancouver. God, I love this city. Favourite Vancouver moment so far, whilst jogging through a park close to Burnaby:

Mistress La Spliffe (to two young men approaching her on the path): Good afternoon.

One young man: Good afternoon. Sorry (in reference to all the smoke from the spliff they were enjoying)

Mistress La Spliffe: Don't be sorry. It's a pleasure.

One young man: Oh, would you like a toke?

Mistress La Spliffe (by now distant due to her unremarkable fleetness of feet): No thank you!

That, world, is fucking manners. It is so nice being back in Canada.

There is a reason that I didn't accept the toke, besides being paranoid of social diseases and besides already being winded from the running and that, my dears, is that I don't think I actually smoke spliffs anymore. It's been almost a year, and I'm fine with that. I think the Netherlands ruined me for smoking in the rest of the world: I simply find it too depressing to have to be even a little bit furtive, and to live in putatively capitalist societies where my choice doesn't count, and I have to smoke any old shit dealers find for me. Also I don't catch cold as much anymore. That might have more to do with living in the subtropics, though.

Anyways, back to the Dread Pirate Jessica for me.

Graphic content

I hate to be graphic, but if someone had been graphic with me like this years ago, so many things could have been different, so here it is.

I've still been running four or five times a week, and now kayaking on the off days, and after a couple of months of this I'm probably closest to 'fit' that I've ever been in my life. The corollary of this, which I guess I wasn't expecting quite so, well, practically, is that I'm much, much better at fucking now. I've never got any complaints in the past, and certainly drive has never been a problem, but the difference is (pardon the pun) fucking dramatic. Seriously. It has really sparked off a concern within me that the world is absolutely packed with people who aren't giving the loving their partners deserve.

It's funny, these unspoken but horribly useful truths. I guess most people have a vague idea, if someone mentions the topic, that if you're fit you're a better lay, but it's never an explicit part of the campaigns to try to make people fit, as far as I've seen.

My other favourite in that sense are anti-drug campaigns. They never mention the undeniable truth of how fucking good drugs are. They always concentrate on how bad drugs are, how using them is all pure lose, and then when a kid finally gets their nose into some drugs and spontaneously discovers how fucking awesome they are, of course they're going to go apeshit on this whole unexpected world of win. I can't help but believe that if these sorts of campaigns would be more effective if they could at least admit that drugs are jolly fun, but ultimately too dangerous to be worth all the fun, like being a pirate.

Sitting naturally high on a well-saddled horse

I used to think that when it came to don't-do-drugs songs, it was pretty much equivalent to wear-a-condom songs - there was only one good one. That's right, "2 Become 1" totally gives me a lady-boner. I can't believe I miss the Spice Girls, but in these degenerate times, I do. Not only did they have personalities, if pre-fab ones; I just can't see any modern pre-fab nympho pop productions singing about putting on a condom, certainly not so convincingly.



But I understand I'm a bit gay for the Spice Girls, mostly because of listening to Spice on headphones at the dentists whilst tripping my tits off on nitrous oxide and getting my wisdom teeth yanked out and it just being superb. Of course the reefer is my true love even if we're taking a break - moving to a country where it's illegal again after it having been such a casual, simple thing in Europe has just made the whole thing sort of sad and pathetic somehow. But reefer aside, now that my non-reefer drug days are probably more or less behind me (at least until I spend my old age tripping my ovaries out) I have to say I think tripping my tits off on nitrous oxide whilst getting my wisdom teeth yanked out and listening to Spice was the best drug experience I've ever had, and I've had some really nice ones. I need to get my hands on some more nitrous oxide. I hear that's the first drug pain relief when you give birth . . . hmm . . . maybe time to ignore "2 Become 1"'s contraceptive message. People have kids for dumber reasons.



Anyways, speaking of drugs, Curtis Mayfield's "No Thing On Me (Cocaine Song)" is the don't-do-drugs song that I used to reckon was the only good one, though then the F-word started bringing all these great reggae albums home and I realized I was wrong. It's still fucking good though.

Beneluxury

Dordrecht did the job. I'm almost back on the rag, have another week of absolute shit in front of me, and our washing machine gave up the ghost a few days before we left, but still both the F-word's and my own bad moods were gone by Sunday morning after hours and hours of bike riding on Saturday. And then the Sunday morning kayaking in the Biesbosch was rather grand, many many different types of birds and a fairyish mist coming off the water - also the channels were narrow and overgrown so one got double that little kayak thrill, of "I'm going somewhere other people can't." And flowers, and green, green, green.

As the morning wore on there were more and more people, so I was almost not upset the park centre had "fucked up" (read: "purposefully altered when they got an afternoon group booking") our reservations so we only got three hours instead of five. Not to mention, in the bigger channels my crappy little tub of a kayak handled like a donkey on amphetamines and made me miss my lovely Jemima, that big beautiful 14.5 foot bitch who tracks like a crow flies. But it was magical and it did the job.

We've decided, or rather the F-word has acquiesced following some very undignified begging on my part, to head to the other Stayokay hostels in the Netherlands for weekend trips over the rest of our tenure in Europe. I'm very fond of the Netherlands as a generality, and its proximity, impressions of wide open empty spaces despite super-high population density, and high-functioning marijuana market would be enough to make it a really attractive weekend destination in any case. But on top of all that it has something most of Belgium, northern France and Germany lacks: complete bike-friendliness.

I think it's only in the Netherlands, and possibly some of the Flemish parts of Belgium, that I feel absolutely comfortable hopping on a train, arriving, renting bicycle at the station, and then having absolute liberty and security of movement for my stay because the dedicated bike paths are everywhere, without having to fart around with unfamiliar public transport systems. And I don't have to wear a helmet so I can feel the wind in my hair. That's important. It's something I hadn't really experienced otherwise since being an uncomplexed child of the mid-80's and it's something that it's a goddamn shame drivers are too shitty and dangerous to let children experience now.

It's a feeling I don't doubt people who drive feel all the time, and explains why so many people (especially men) of my acquaintance insist on taking their cars everywhere, even to places like Paris where they'll beggar themselves in parking fees alone. So while I still can, I'm going to enjoy the fuck out of it here in the Benelux; I think it's quite unique in the world.

Jolly jolly jolliness

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

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

Back to the money factory.

Highkus

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

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

David Attenborough
gurning at a stinkflower
means less to me now

Hyperventilate
twirl until I fall over
and hope I feel high

The Red Dragon autodomesticates

My mum is coming to visit this evening, which means - once more - fuck all about the Locrian women as I engage in a last minute struggle to ameliorate the state of the apartment. It's just a reflex at this point. I'm 30 years old. I've been living without parental supervision for 12 years, and been visited by them frequently, especially my globe-trotting mum, in that time. During some of that time I was occasionally much less functional than I flatter myself I am now, and Mum has seen some fucking dire things when visiting my apartments. I always get them spic and span in the parts they spend time in - their bedroom, kitchen, living room - but I could never bring myself, during my druggier years, to actually clean my own bedroom. Hangover adolescence, probably. 

I have a distinct memory - I don't think it's just a hallucination - of my mum walking across my bedroom in one of the apartments I had in northern Italy so she could look at its balcony, and casually kicking a used condom out of her path as she did so. Unbelievably disgusting, I know, but if it makes it any better, I'm pretty sure it was fresh.  Ho hum. Credit to her for never saying anything. And credit to my brothers for raising her tolerance so high. Why bother getting upset with your daughter for being a slutty drunk piggy stoner when your sons are . . . well. When your sons are my brothers: three of the greatest men on Earth.

Anyways, that's all, it's back to scrubbing for me. In the meantime, please enjoy some Buraka Som Sistema. Besides M.I.A. whining out the refrain so charmingly I have no idea what they're going on about, but it's good marching music and it will help you ask yourself some tough questions about how you've let your life get to where it is now instead of devoting all your time to learning how to dance that awesomely. 

The Red Dragon has an appetite for development

Wow. I'm in a very dragony mood indeed today. Better think pleasant thoughts.

1. Appetite for Destruction. Had the F-word acquire it after having a dream that I'd heard the first single from Chinese Democracy (which I haven't) and that it was surprisingly, enchantingly good (which I doubt). Remembered what a good song 'Mr. Brownstone' was and demanded the whole thing. I'm glad I did, except for some of the lovey-dovey crap in those whiny grating vocals, ugh, but mostly glad to have 'Mr. Brownstone' again. That must be one of the best songs ever. Add it to the list, I guess. I always think I would have liked that sort of '80s grock music better if the composers had limited themselves to writing about drugs. Once they start singing about sex or violence I start figuring I should either be listening to soul or the Bad Seeds. Anyways. 'Mr. Brownstone'. Awesome.

2. Arrested Development. Finally MSN is streaming the full episodes to markets outside of the US and we're trying to watch it all before we leave for Italy on vacation, after having seen and lurved the first season. Almost there now. Well into the third. I can't find ways to praise that show enough, besides to say I don't think I've ever seen such a successful American television comedy, besides maybe the first season of the Sopranos. And that makes it the funniest situation comedy ever, as far as I can figure out. Don't believe me? Watch the fucker and try to argue. Or at least read this exchange:

Gob: My God. What is this feeling?
Michael: You know, the feeling that you're feeling is just what many of us call... a "feeling".
Gob: It's not like envy, or even hungry.
Michael: Could it be love?
Gob: I know what an erection feels like, Michael. No, it's the opposite - it's like my heart is getting hard.

That's all I can list at the moment. Very hard to look for bright sides today. Tomorrow will be better, when deadline is past and I can really appreciate we're about to go somewhere warmer and sunnier for a couple of weeks. It's just so dark here - so cold and dark - half a week away from the darkest day of the year. I fucking detest living this far noth. A full seven fucking degrees north of Toronto. It may be easier to die of exposure or get frostbite in a Canadian city than it is here, but at least there's some light. At least you don't get fucking rickets there. I could cry. But I won't. Instead I'll drink a coffee and work.

Summer days

Neat.

In other news, feeling really gross this morning about Omar Khadr. It's a nasty precedent for two countries to set. As someone who wants to make babies when she gets a spare moment, I don't want them going to prison until they're old enough to know what they're doing to put themselves there. And I'd like to think the country I'm usually proud of coming from would support me in that ambition. Oh well, at least my hero Dallaire is on the case. When did he get to be a senator? When did I stop reading Canadian news?

Last night I got high chez San Francisca and decided to take a 'shortcut' home that I thought would have fewer cars on it, not having cycled high in some time. Fuck, it's nice to be high and on a bike on a summer evening. Which is lucky, because I got reeeeeeal lost. And fuck, it's nice to be high and on a bike on a summer evening, reeeeal lost. I felt like a sailor navigating an unknown Art Deco sea - knew which direction to go in more or less, but a little less than more. Brussels is really a beautiful city in the sunshine and in the warm, which the F-word and I are experiencing for the first time now. I could - well, I couldn't stay here forever if the weather was better. Or could I. Let's face it: we'll never know. But I could love this place a lot more if it was summer a lot more.

Sprung

Springtime has come to the willies of the men. This weekend was hot and sunny and lovely; all of Brussels hit the patio with an enthusiasm that rivals Canadians' on the first +0° sunny day of the season. And all the men are looking at all the women with hot, sultry eyes after a winter of resembling dead fish. I don't know if it's because of people wearing fewer clothes, or that they don't have to keep the animal part of their brain busy by bracing their poor bodies against the cold, or if it's just that the spring has made people more happy, the women walking around with little smiles instead of annoyed scowls, the men finally able to lounge outside on chairs at the right angle to appreciate the ledgey jut of tits in a t-shirt walking by.

And me, I haven't been able to stop thinking about riding face for more than ten minutes at a time since last Thursday. The thought pops into my head with a still-shocking regularity: when the more-appealing men are lounging back on their patio chairs, smiling up glowing-eyed at my tits and sandal-wearing swagger, I am only three steps away from stepping over and straddling their heads. Sometimes I wonder if I'd be able to keep a lid on myself if I wasn't in a satisfying relationship. Actually, I don't wonder, I know I wouldn't.

So it's a chicken-and-egg question at the moment: am I loving the horniness of Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! so much right now because I'm so horny, or am I so horny because I'm loving the horniness? I think the most rampant sexuality I've ever seen was from people who have just given up on the drugs, and since Nick Cave stopped with the heroin it's been horniness after horniness from him. I like it; I like it as much as his hallucinatory madness from the eighties and nineties - still just hallucinatory enough now to be poetry but - well - hell. Next time I hear somebody ask about what might have happened to Coleridge as a poet if he wasn't rotten with opium, I may have an answer. Though I suppose Coleridge couldn't have got so deep into the horniness, professional-writer-wise, seeing as that was an era when only prostitutes liked sex.

Anyways, it's really good. 'Midnight Man' has been stuck in my head ever since I crowbarred Amy Winehouse out by stealing her CD and then not liking it much, and I love having it stuck in my head. It's like my head is an iPod. And we're going to a Bad Seeds concert on Thursday before our trip to Bonn! Yay!

Sumer is icumen in, lude sneeze cuckoo!

Absolutely clotheslined by hay fever. Nature has punched me hard in the back of the knees, and just when I was trying to love on her too - it's so lovely and green and flowery out there. If I was a normal person I'd be among the blossoms, humming Terrell/Gaye standards and composing Springtime poetry, but unfortunately I am not. Hay fever this bad makes me think I'd have been selected out if I lived even two hundred years ago, and as it stands I ask for your prayers and good wishes as I try to walk the sociopathic streets of Brussels without wandering in front of a speeding car because I stupidly assume, in the haze of medication and plummeting blood pressure, having the right of way will keep me safe.

Always hard to predict where I'll be clotheslined by hay fever and where I won't be. Ontario was pretty decent this way, I reckon because springtime was so short. Italy was okay too, the centre of it anyways, despite springtime there being an extended, lovely affair stretching liesurely from late January to May. Oh Italy. Still not over the Berlusconi thing. Thinking about Italy now, especially while I'm living in Belgium, its uglier and equally incompetent cousin, is like remembering a really hot lover who gave fantastic head and fucked like an avenging archangel, but robbed liquor stores. Which more or less describes my second-most memorable Italian lover (the current one has the passport, and I can still recall his last name, so there you are), but I was blogging about hay fever today.

The F-word wondered yesterday, as I lay very still on the couch staring dully at online episodes of Frontline, getting indignant about over-medicated children being fed microwaved pogo sticks and the Bush administration getting away with everything, how I will do in Australia in this respect, his daddy being laid flat by hay fever each spring in the fruit-growing part of Victoria. But we are looking at a sub-tropical, rain-foresty bit of New South Wales, and I figure daily rains will keep the air clear. Sub-tropics. I cannot imagine. Green all the time? What? How? We will visit in their springtime to see how I do - not this year though - this year Magnum is getting married so I get to see Ontario wearing her incomparably beautiful autumn colours instead.

What a world, what a varied, crazy world, with opposite seasons and weird plants and singing cuckoos and Italian stallions and all the rest of it.

The chemical dragon rides again

An encounter a little while ago saw more slap than tickle, with the consequence that we had a latex wardrobe malfunction and I was forced to seek out emergency contraception. But Belgium isn't France; it's much more Catholic, and consequently they don't throw around la pillule de lendemain in such a confetti-like fashion here. After an hour of fevered searching on Sunday morning I was left with the unfocused impression that I'd need to go to a family planning clinic that wouldn't be open until Monday to get it; after another ten minutes of even more fevered searching I got the impression I could get what I needed from a special Sunday pharmacy, and I did. The experience leaves me with three things that really must be said:

1. I try to be open to the message of the pro-life movement, as I know that for many of them it's from the heart, but any campaigner of any category who is campaigning against access to the morning-after pill is a twat. The action of the morning-after pill is a contraceptive action, not an abortive action. It jellifies the works up there so that wee sperms cannot go anywhere or so that a fertilized egg cannot fix itself in the walls of the uterus and start sucking sustenance from the mother's body.

I understand that there's a big group of people who feel life starts once a wee tadpole from the daddy swims into a big beachball from the mummy. Well, they're fucking wrong. Life starts ages before that. The wee tadpole is alive and the big beachball is alive, and the action of the tadpole swimming into the beachball is a part of both their lifecycles. Things really get interesting when the beachball that got swum into by a tadpole lodges itself in the uterine wall of the mummy and starts sucking sustenance from her. Up until that point, however, it's just another short-lived cell in a body full of short-lived cells.

And I understand there's also a big group of people who are against contraception, and to half of them, I say: Catholics, let it go. You might be able to get your adherents to have big families, but you're just going to lose them to the Pentecostals anyways. They have childcare and singing, and all you have is guilt and gloomy rituals.

2. The morning after pill is a fucking bitch. I've heard that you can get the same effect, in a pinch, by swallowing 20 birth control pills at once, and it fucking feels like it. I hate the pill because it turns me into a raging, weeping mess, and I hate the morning-after pill even more because it turns me into a raging, weeping mess days after the fact, when it's not a reflex to make a connection between the sensation that the world is a torture chamber and the fact that six or seven days ago you ingested an elephant's dose of sex hormones. I didn't notice the effect so much before, because the last time I needed the morning after pill was when I was with Bluebeard, when I was a raging, weeping mess all the time. But now that life is fundamentally good and I'm generally in a chirpy mood, it's been nigh-on unbearable.

3. Belgium is a fucking pain in my ass. It's the national equivalent of a teenage boy's bedroom. Getting anything done here takes so long, like, Italy-long, without Italy-weather or Italy-food or Italy-beauty. Having a panic as I thought I was due for an ectopic pregnancy through waiting too long to take the morning after pill because the centralization of information is an absolutely unknown concept here isn't even the most recent example of Belgium pissing me off. There has also been the fun of trying to get my residency card, trying to change debit accounts for my fuckin' useless health insurance, trying to go outside without choking on the visibly unhealthy air, trying to cross streets without getting hit by cars, and trying to stroll down pavements in a country where apparently people don't know how to walk.

Weeded

So the F-word has gone on vacation with some friends in Switzerland, which I couldn't join them on due to my approaching trip to Portugal, which means I have a couple of evenings to myself. And what did I do with my evening last night? Catch up on my reading? Corresponding? Calling? Cleaning? Anything? No. Got dangerously high and watched Weeds. As I wrote previously, it had made a good impression on me, but less so on the F-word, so we haven't been watching any more of it - I mean we have sites that stream the Simpsons now, and Four Corners, and stuff. I love the Internet.

Certainly can't argue with the F-word for not being crazy about Weeds. It is a bit silly - certainly in terms of storylines it's hard to maintain suspension of the old disbelief (which is why me smoking the reefer is essential) and every time Kevin Nealon opens his mouth I know I'm more likely to groan than giggle. And as always the product placement annoys me and blah blah blah. But I have a real attachment to the lead character, played by, uhm, that pale chick with the big eyes - you know, Nancy - and to her bitchy friend Celia.

Despite the reefer being essential for the watching, it isn't the reefery subject of the show that has hooked me; I just really like its exploration of suburban life in the States. The reefer in the show just sets up a nice contrast between public and 'secret' personalities that aren't secret. Obviously I don't know anything about suburbs in the States, and hardly know anything about suburbs in Canada, and the consequence of not knowing anything about it is that I can watch Weeds and go 'ooooo, PTA meetings? Range Rovers? Cookie-cutter houses and neighbours you don't like? You have all that money and you spend it on that?', and then get some explanation of it from throwaway lines. Like when Nancy's brother-in-law was trying to get into the pants of his nephew's friend's mum, and telling her he sympathized with her horrible plight living in that suburb where everybody was all emotionally isolated from each other, etc., and she dismissed it by saying 'you do it for the kids.'

I can understand that, I suppose. My own middle-class family used the 'ex. geographically isolated city w. <100,000 inhabitants' strategy to let us grow up in a place where we could run around without being hit by cars - besides Elvis, of course, it was like the poor guy was carrying around an industrial magnet in his pocket. I don't think my parents were so unwise to go for that formula. I was so fucking cripplingly bored in North Bay that I thought to myself I'd never do that to my own children - and I won't. But now the F-word and I are considering eventually moving to an even smaller, more isolated city, in fuckin' Australia. I figure that the sub-tropical weather should make a big difference to the boringness, though. We'll see.

Pomp and heroin

First, because it's awesome, more Bill Withers, and more of his drummer. I like his drummer because looks just like me the first time I took pills for fun, except black and a man.



I think I also like my job. It's letting me visit Scandinavia for the first week of June for something that sounds like even less effort than a conference. Scandinavia is one of those places that I always said I'd visit if someone else paid, and hey, here they are paying. Considering extending my stay a bit and going to Copenhagen to hang out in Christiania - I figure either the powers that be (politicians or gangs, the 'tax-free' version of Wal-Mart coming in and shitting all over a community's economy) will crush it, or it'll be the epicentre of Europe's next revolution. Either way worth visiting.

Speaking of places that should be the epicentre of Europe's next revolution but everybody's too busy getting fucked up. Last night I had a couple of drinks with a Welsh girl and fuck, do you know how cheap heroin is in Great Britain? It is so fucking cheap. And it's got cheaper since the 'liberation' of the Afghanistan. Nice one, free world. I wonder if that's been the case all over the place. It was super cheap in the south of Italy for as long as I've paid attention to these things but I figured that's because it was doing the black market version of 'falling off the back of a truck' whilst in transit to some other part of Europe. I wonder what colour market that would be. What's blacker than black? I think I'll call it the jet market. Jet's pretty.