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.

Get me out of here

Still stuck into, in a savouring way, the True History of the Kelly Gang. Yesterday stumbled across the Jerilderie letter that Ned Kelly himself wrote and that Peter Carey used for the narrative voice. It is a little bit beautiful and the state library of Victoria has scanned and transcribed it. Bless them.

I can't wait to live with a bit of space around me, somewhere warm. And I really can't fucking wait to live around libraries again. What a good fucking idea public libraries are and how I took them for granted as a child. I sometimes have this sort of impersonal memory of my adolescent self mooching around the library, my nose stuck into some book by some author a million miles away in time and space and thinking from my northern Ontario shitburg in the 1990s. And even though I was an angry young thing, these strange escapes made everything tolerable, and now I'm so glad I had that to keep myself from sniffing glue all the time, but at the time I didn't notice at all, and I think assumed it was what everybody did, which was silly because the library was always empty.

Travel abroad and the absolute library dependence engendered by the humanities degree stopped me from taking libraries for granted by my 20s. And then whilst studying in Paris, the school not having its own library - having lending agreements instead with the semi-private libraries of the French 'public' institutions or whoever (by the way, if any young nymphos heading to Paris read this, the military library in Paris is a fucking awesome place to meet fine, trim martial ass) - well, that's when the yearning started in me for the proper way that books were made accessible, face-slappingly accessible back home, for students and the public.

And while there is a whole truckload of things I miss about Toronto, the public library system there has to be close to the top of the list. It is AWESOME. A fucking behemoth with outlets everywhere and a delivery system so you can get books from anywhere and drop them off anywhere, new releases super-fast, and just about everything I wanted. I only had to dip into the U of T library about 20% of the time whilst writing my thesis for the Parisian school, that's how fucking awesome the public library was there, and I was an absolute pig in shit.

Now here I am . . . yearning for a library the same way I'm yearning for space and warmth. And I'm yearning. Yesterday meeting his parents wasn't nearly as awful as I'd been expecting but it was still awful. They look so much like him, which stands to reason, and his father has the same giggling laugh. I just wanted to hear that laugh over and over because it was like hearing him laugh again.

Anyways, afterwards I really badly needed to get wasted, and so became so. Came home to the fucking freezing Art Nouveau apartment, cranked up the futile heater and lay on the couch for awhile, trying to finish my brain off for the night by getting enormously high, bundling up in a housecoat and the Snuggie Magnum had sent for Christmas. And while I got comfortable pretty damn fast because this Rotterdam reefer could soothe Richard Simmons at his tweakiest, I felt so fucking oppressed by the damn Nordic darkness tapping on the window and leaking in through the cracks, and the heavy housecoat and the heavy Snuggie and the lightless blue of the gas fireplace and having to curl up on the couch just to be warm enough to get comfortably numb, and I wanted with all my heart to be somewhere where I could be outside - where I could sit under the enormity of the sky and look over the enormity of the earth and not be fucking shivering - I felt that I was already buried in a tomb here.

So yeah, I'm fucking yearning. I feel that I'm close to the end of my tether and I'm starting to choke.

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.

Dumbfuckery and consequences

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

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

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

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

I am not an animal

I made a mistake in Berlin. On Tuesday, in my ongoing quest to be unacceptably insubordinate whilst sparklingly competent, I gave the talks I wasn't covering a miss and went to the Berlin Zoo. I hadn't been a zoo in twelve years and about as soon as I entered and ran to the ape section I remembered why. I don't have much of a problem with seeing most animals in captivity; I think most of them are probably deeply relieved nothing's trying to eat them, or that there's enough food just sitting there, or that, if it's a proper zoo, there are others of their kind and they can fuck and communicate.

But some animals need more than that, of course, and hoofing it to the ape section right away reminded me of that. Chimpanzees and gorillas are ugly hair people, and they're in small enclosures, and their tits are visibly bored off. They look like characters from Oz during a bit of violence downtime. As much as I hate to sound in accordance with people who annoy me as badly as Richard Dawkins and PETA, here it goes: it was visibly obvious they're people - ugly hairy people in a gawking-jail - or that we're ugly naked apes, imprisoning hairy apes and gawking. They have our mannerisms and features and visible symptoms of our mental agonies. It was a fucking downer, and while it's totally unfair, it was the first thing in four days that made me remember I was in the old Nazi capital.

The only great thing about it - besides the largeness of the revelation that they are ugly hairy people and should be respected as such - was that a bunch of moronic Italian teenagers were standing next to me next to the gorilla enclosure, going on about how ugly and stupid the greyback looked, and then a mouse popped out of a nearby hedge, and they freaked the fuck out. It was great. Mock something that shares most of our genetic code and could tear your arms off when a nice big ditch is separating you, and then lose your shit when approached by a harmless overfed rodent. Beautiful. They were boys, too.

The other thing that was deeply depressing, besides the gorillas and chimpanzees (the orang-utans, surprisingly, weren't depressing at all - they seemed to be having a marvelous time playing on a swingy rope-maze), and maybe one of the most depressing things I've ever seen, was Knut the polar bear. Now, I'm not a fucking animal psychologist. But that poor fucker obviously has no fucking idea he's a polar bear, and on getting back home I've read one of his handlers agrees. He was pacing back and forth on the part of his enclosure closest to the audience - back and forth - I watched for ten minutes, went away for half an hour, came back, he was still pacing - another half hour, still pacing - staring at the people, sort of tossing his head around and struggling to make eye contact with them. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen an animal do when it wasn't in actual physical pain.

So that's it for me and zoos. No more. It was dreadful. I'm still not opposed to them in principle but there are some species who are going to lose their fucking minds in there, and some animals who are going to lose their fucking minds if they can't remember what kind of animals they are . . . why do they need all the animals in there, that's what I don't get. Why isn't there some sort of acknowledgement that it's going to drive some species apeshit? I don't know. I'm done, though. No more. Next time I'll just get some pay-per-view porn in the hotel room.

Damn good cup of coffee

I used to think of Belgium as Italy's retarded little brother, but after having spent a couple of weeks in Calabria and Sicily I've been reminded of the fact that's not an apt comparison - that it's more a case of Italy being Belgium's attractive but sociopathic ex-con cousin. I'll explain. The F-word and I are rather fussbudgets when it comes to small comforts like coffee. We're so cheap that when it comes to the little luxuries we make them as good as we possibly can - just hold them down and fuck their brains out.  In Belgium that's been a bit hard. It's struck us whilst in Germany and in Italy that the coffee there is better than it is here, even within the same brand. Lavazza here is not nearly as good as Lavazza in either of those countries. I'm usually perfectly happy with Lavazza, but it tastes like steeped sand here, so we've been having the spring the double on Illy, which is painful when you're as fucking cheap as us, but there's no choice. 

I don't know why this is. Belgium could be a low-priority export market because it's so small relative to the German market, and hence could be getting the shitty end of the lollipop in terms of qualities.  Also, I've heard that this places maintains import customs, even within the EU, that involve impounding semi-perishables for a long time. I don't give that 100% credence because it's illegal, from what I understand of European law, but it would certainly explain why you have to pay 7 euros a pop to get espresso that doesn't taste stale, and also Belgium had a four year lag in terms of accepting EU passports as proof of the right of residency, which I believe was also illegal, but, well - I'm trying to be through complaining about this place as an abstract concept. 

That's not stopping me from complaining about the coffee here, but big fucking deal, it's not much of a problem, it just means that when we go to Germany, which we do with relative frequency, we stock up on coffee at the same time as we stock up on delicious, delectable German beer. What I'm getting it is that I've found the right coffee to stock up on, if they sell it in Germany, and if they don't sell it in Germany, I'll set up some sort of mailing scheme with my family in Calabria, as the processing plant for it is in Reggio, the nearest big city to their village.

It's called Mauro, and it's the coffee for me. Rich, fatty, hints of chocolate - not a slap in the face in the morning, more of a nice rousing cuddle - but strong. And one thing about Belgium - there's a shitload of farmers here, who sell unpasteurized cow and goat milk at the daily market down the road from us. All this week, I've been drinking the Mauro with goat milk, because I'm quite fond of goat milk, but today switched to the cow milk, and it was just perfect. Just so lovely. So complimentary. Almost like music, the coffee and the milk worked together so beautifully. 

So. Mauro is the coffee for me. But I understand why some people might like Illy better. Illy has a cleaner taste, and I think it's a little fattier, or at least it gets more of that creamy crema up top. And even if Illy refuses to participate in Fair Trade, it at least pretends to espouse some sort of social agenda in its bean sourcing, which Mauro doesn't even mention. But you know, I spent a lot of time in Reggio and the region around it this Christmas, and I can say without hesitation that supporting any business that provides employment there which doesn't involve processing garbage or killing people is supporting a very necessary social agenda. 

Which leads me to my final point. Which is fuck, Italy makes me sad. The article I wrote this week about the poor man who fell into the machine was about an Italian. Strangely enough, his name was Mauro too. I write about industrial accidents all the time, but this one is affecting me more because the liability has been written off - the parent company artificially outsourced the department Mauro was working in a couple of years back. From local accounts this was probably done because the machinery was antiquated and dangerous, and they needed to get themselves away from liability questions associated with it. And you know what, apparently the safety inspector had approved the machine for operation that same morning. And his co-workers didn't know what had happened to him. He was just gone. All minced up, in little peices in a truck. The machinery was so loud nobody would have been able to hear him screaming. Fuck, it's just such a nightmare, and the public relations woman I was talking to from the company whose premises it was on could say to me quite honestly, 'it's really not our problem.'  

Okay, things like that, much worse things, happen every day all over the world, but you know what? I'd have liked better from Italy. Call me a chauvinist - I absolutely am. But Italy is meant to be a developed country. And a man shouldn't be able to fall into a woodchipper and die in a developed country without it being someone's fucking problem. I think that should be one of the criteria for a country to be called developed. Oh fuck, now I'm crying. Perfect. Jolly good. Off to work. At least I've had a really good coffee to start the day. 

The death of my favorite litigant-in-person

I was sorry to learn that Paul Scofield died yesterday, adding another item to my list of regretting-I-didn't-dos, namely, that I didn't get to see him act in person. Here follows the rest of the list of things I regret I didn't do:

-See Screamin' Jay Hawkins perform in person
-See Otis Redding perform in person
-Screw that blond guy in York
-Be Serge Gainsbourg's (well-paid) psychoanalyst
-Live in Copenhagen for the year between highschool and undergrad

I think that's about it, these days. The shortness of the list may reflect hubris but probably only reflects the fact that I'm young yet.

And seriously, Paul Scofield as Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons has to be one of the best things ever. The almost ridiculous comparison between that fucking tour de force and Charlton Heston's turn in the 1988 film actually does a latter a favour by making it seem like high comedy - Bright Eyes from Planet of the Apes travelling back in time to Tudor England - instead of just shitty. Also, the Paul Scofield version has one of those entertainment cues that make me cry automatically-like. The point where he tells Wendy Hiller that she must understand why he's doing what he's doing is guaranteed to sqeeze a few tears out of my steely macho eyes. So is:

-'Grandma's Hands' by Bill Withers
-The bit in the Iliad where Hector says bye to Andromache
-The sight of Tom Hanks crying
-The sight of Will Smith crying
-'Try a Little Tenderness' by Otis Redding