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.

I was the walrus, but now I'm John

I had a dream of being sacked in December, around the time they work out the 2009 books, sort of like how San Francisca got sacked a few months ago. That dream would have seen me get a four-month payout under Belgium's Claeys formula after I'd saved up enough for a down payment on a house, tuition and expenses for another university degree, and a little more besides. Which would mean, with the Claeys formula money, I could have bought us a ticket to Australia for a berth on a freighter, which would give us something like two months on a ship in luxury accommodation, with me reading books and writing books and banging my sweetie and playing in the pool and visiting bizarre ports of call and staring at the horizon and not fucking working, until my corporate brain was healed and I'd be ready to hippy the fuck out in the rain forest. The thinking goes that after two months at sea I'd be so bored that poisonous snakes, plague toads, larrikins ands saltwater crocodiles would be objects of interest rather than fear or disgust.

Anyways, that dream has dwindled to almost nothing. We're a five-man department. One of the men has got pregnant and will be out on maternity leave for most of the second half of the year. And then yesterday, another man who's senior to me quit because she wants to go to teacher's college this summer. Good for her - I think she was going through largely the same sort of thinking I've been. But what it means is that now, after less than two years, I'm basically unfirable next December. Despite this fucking economic meltdown, despite my constant refusal to brush my hair or bleach my moustache before I go to work, despite my piercings, despite my pottymouth, there is almost no chance of my getting fired next December now, especially since my managers reckon our owners are only going to let them hire one more person to fill the breach - but we needed that one more person anyways, without replacing anybody, because we've expanded our coverage.

Okay - it's not the end of the world. And anyways people in my department never get fired, because it's traditionally been easier to wait until they freak out and quit. So it was always a pipe dream. But I imagine it's like losing a lottery ticket that you had a really good feeling about. I guess the hope isn't quite extinguished. This is a very, very remarkable economic situation: now, as a senior person, I'll be making significantly more money than new hires, in a situation where my employers would have access to some really phenomenal candidates. I'd fire me. But I think I should just ignore the hope. When I change my life, I'll have to be the one who changes my life. It's time to take a stand. Time to look my Protestant work ethic (which won't let me be incompetent and get fired in the normal way) in the eye and say, 'fuck you, Protestant work ethic, I'm so much more than my job.'

Alternatively, I could just start shitting on other people's desks . . .

The Red Dragon verges on the lachrymose

I could fucking weep. Here it is, cocking squatting bullshitting Monday morning, and I fucking swear, it feels as though it was Friday night three fucking hours ago. This is the thing. Like a lot of people, I have a bit of a seasonal affective disorder. Key parts of my brain and personality, most of the ones involving enthusiasm and tenderness for example, shut down pretty solidly for ten weeks of the year out of what feels like sheer self-protection. I mourn that and I mourn the impact it has on the people I'm closest to - it's unpleasant to watch yourself being a bitch to the man of your dreams, for example, though one supposes it's rather harder for him.

And those ten shitty dead oversalted weeks a year are 20% or so of the reason I'm gagging to move to a place without real seasons. Whenever I hear some celebrity bitching about how they want to leave Los Angeles or wherever and live in a place with seasons, I want to fucking bitchslap them to PNG and back. No, bitch, you want a house in a place with seasons. And the second you get tired of the cold and the dark you'll fuck off back to the tropics. Shut. The. Hole. Brat!

Where was I? Right. Those ten weeks came to a close on Wednesday or Thursday last week, and I'm back to what I flatter myself is my 'normal', enthusiastic, tender self, certainly a self I like much better. But here's the thing. The ten dead weeks feel, as I mentioned, like self-protection. Because I know the days are so short and I'm so exhausted at the end of them it's a struggle to get anything human done in the evening. Because I know I'm going to have a cold or a flu or any other manner of illnesses that're going to fly up my ointment. Because I know that the weeks after the Christmas holidays are always the busiest, anywhere I've ever worked, and where I work now they're really really really the busiest, especially as the economy is crashing around our ears and we can spend all day uncovering new bankruptcies and cash flow problems, so if I care too much or prioritize other things that aren't work too much I'm going to be stressed and disappointed because I won't have the time.

So the way my brain always rationalizes the SAD lockdown is that it's better to be on a low even keel than take life in the wintertime as a series of rather disappointing punches to the face. But the SAD lockdown is over now, and that means we had a busy, delectable, fun, productive weekend, and Monday morning is coming as a fucking punch in the face. Holy shit. For a doggedly prescription-free person it makes it so clear why SSRIs come with a warning that they might make you kill yourself. The depression lifts and suddenly there's enough energy and giving-a-toss to make going back to work on Monday seem like the end of the fucking world. Suddenly I care enough about my life to really want it back.

Seperate but equally fucking annoying

What little I can say about Marseille after 14 hours - the cab drivers are nice, the five star hotels don't offer enough freebies, the internet doesn't work well enough for me to check my Outlook (which is sweet), it does get cloudy from time to time, the sea is pretty, and Finns seem to find it a relief.

What I can say about first class travel in the TGV between Brussels and Marseille - it's less about sensual luxury and more about who's not in the car with you. And I don't approve. Rich people are just as annoying as economy class people. They have smelly little lapdogs and bitter marital strife that can be audibly explored over five fucking hours - just because they're not yelling doesn't mean it doesn't bug me, anyways I can deal with volume via my MP3 player. The rich older people smell like diapers. The rich younger people smell like perfume, which makes me sneeze. So come on. If I pay for first class travel, I want the neck massages, the dancing girls, the in-car wading pool, new releases, drink and song. I don't just want to be segregated from annoying working and middle class people with equally annoying middle and upper class people.

Same with this five star I'm in. What the fuck the point of this place is besides segregation is beyond me. At least last year in Lisbon there were some touches of real luxury and in the Scandinavian five stars they serve caviar. Not to mention, even in a Scandinavian three star they'll have a sort of neat-o shower bidet so you can bathe your bits after every evacuation. Here there's not even a fucking bidet. Conference rate Euro 220 for a double, normal rate more than a hundred north of that, and not even a fucking bidet. What a crock of shit. Let's admit the only point of this place is that the proles are all deferential and in uniform.

Got in late last night and watched BBC World make an arse of itself over Ukraine and Russia and the global credit crisis. Crisis my ass. Ever read Gone With the Wind? I recommend it. Seriously. Weirdo book but moments of clarity amid all the slavery apologias and nostalgia for a society worse than fascist. At one point Rhett Butler tells a whiny Scarlett O'Hara that there's slow money to be made in the building of an empire, and fast money to be made in taking it apart. All we're seeing now is fast money. Lloyds and HBOS merging in an absolutely uncompetitive and unethical way with the encouragement of the British government, whose job should be to prevent this sort of rubbish - their customers will pay for that and the executive class will walk away singin'. Vomit.

Now I'm going for a calming walk along the seaside.

The Red Dragon values family

I seem to have stumbled into some sort of temporal vortex on Friday night whilst pissed and high because all of a sudden it's Monday morning. God, five day weeks make me want to shoot myself. What an arbitrary fucking number anyways - five. How about four? How about some family values cunt of a politician jumps up and down on his stupid fucking holy roller bandwagon and says 'I care so much about the sancticity of the family that I'm going to give everybody a three day weekend so they can spend more time together'? How about that, family values cunts? But noooo, I suppose it's much easier to make a stink about stopping the gays from getting some goddamn lame license and to make speeches on Father's Day. That's like the family-values-defending equivalent of making a noodlecard. GIVE US A THIRTY HOUR WEEK IF YOU WANT US TO MAKE PROPER CHILDREN. Fuck.

It was a good weekend though, fundamentally. If so. Fucking. Brief. And speaking of family values, at some point we watched Billy Elliot, which I hadn't seen before, and I thought it was very good indeed. I really liked the way the story rolled out over the disenfranchisement of the miners, and I liked the nasty harshness of Billy's family - and the realism of Billy unwittingly managing to bring his father around by catching him through dance at a very, very drunk moment. Rather than being simply a feel-good film, it was a terrific advertisement for the utility of slapping, punching and piss-ups in domestic relationships. I also liked that Billy was not simply a nice boy with a penchant for self-expression through dance. You could really see him becoming a proper primo ballet dancer - a real Nureyev type; passionate, punchy and possibly not so pleasant all the time.

Another good thing was finding out Comedy Central's website is now streaming full episodes of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. That's nice. The F-word has a low tolerance for those shows, though. Too much shouting.

The importance of importance

Sometimes the future frightens me. I think that started in the heatwave of 2003, when all those old people died while I was in Paris. Maybe that's why I chose military strategy instead of economy for my masters there - maybe I had some paranoid expectation that one day the overheating world would be so resource-poor and violent that I would have to protect my family through assymmetrical warfare and the deft use of international alliances. It was either because of that paranoia that I chose military strategy, or because I'd already figured out that it doesn't fucking matter what you study in university in terms of getting a job so I might as well do something interesting and with fewer numbers than economy. That's pretty likely.

What is probably the most likely reason that I studied military strategy (and do bear in mind this is all speculation - I couldn't swear to my reasons for doing anything I did between 2001 and 2005) is an understanding it was important. Not just the hows of people killing each other en masse, but the whys, and the way to get them to perhaps stop it or at least ways to get them to not do it elsewhere as part of the same conflict.

This is on my mind now because Iraq has turned into even more of a hecatomb in a way that will impact all our lives, yet all the papers in Europe are front-paging instead with the Austrian who spent 24 years raping and impregnating his daughter. I'm not saying that's something that should be taken lightly, but it's not very important to know all the details about it. Not unless you like feeling slightly sick, or unless you want tips on how to keep your own enslaved, abused, ever-growing incestuous family captive in your fucking basement. And honestly, looking at the headlines - "Images Emerge from the 'House of Horror'" and whatnot - it looks as though that's the way the coverage is leaning. A how-to guide in extreme and violent perversion. Fuck, we live in degenerate times.

It's something we talk about at work once in awhile, you know - relief we don't have to titillate our readers, or struggle like jackals in a pack to wring interviews out of impossibly emotionally vulnerable or pathetically evil people. And our industry is important in that it effects a bunch of people at once in ways the people effected don't understand. And our job in terms of reporting on the industry is a little more key to the operations of that industry than, say, the role of the mainstream media is in terms of rescuing a woman who'd been imprisoned by her father 24 years ago by reporting on it in obsessive detail after she'd been rescued. No investigation - just scandal written up through police reports and after-the-fact interviews . . . providing one more ordeal, the ordeal of scrutiny, that could finish off any victims who had survived.

My head is full of thinking about the role of the media at the moment, as you might be able to tell, and also of the importance of importance in the media. I watched the Frontline special about it last week when I was in my hayfever half-coma and I do reccommend it, if you have four hours of loose ends at your fingertips.

I'm glad I came but just the same I must be going

Now that the last bit of retardation at work has been sorted out, I'm looking forward with baited breath to my trip to Lisbon. Only two of the five days I'm there will demand actual work and that work will mostly involve getting companionably drunk. I enjoyed being in Portugal so much last time - the sun, the frozen drinks, the delicious, delicious, delicious food . . .

I need a thing like this to help me relax; I've hit a point of tension. Luckily the F-word understands, as do several other people, but not everyone does - been getting pissy emails about why I don't call, why I don't email, and they make me want to hit the roof as they're always from people whose lifestyles have less stress built into them. Do they think I like being busy? Do they think I wouldn't rather be being a better friend, and then sitting in a park in a much warmer, sunnier country, smoking a spliff and reading the Bruce Chatwin novel that I've been slowly stumbling through every night before falling into a deep, deep slumber, punctuated only by dreams of bizarre sexual combinations, positions, and locations?

Last night, for example, I dreamt I was sitting in a park watching television with about 200 other people, mostly exchange students at the school I was attending. I thought there was something wrong with the hedges behind the set, so I got up, checked, and saw two Russian couples, one boy-on-boy, the other boy-on-boyish-but-female-little-person.

"Can you please go fuck over there?" I said, pointing to the forest behind where the 200 people were sitting to watch the television. "When you do it behind the TV it's distracting. Also, if you face it from the forest, that way you can fuck and watch TV."

"Liz Phair!" shouted the little person.

"I wanted to like her, but I didn't," I said glumly.

"That's what I like about Canadians," said the man who had been fucking the little person. "They always say what they mean."

"I wish," I said even more glumly. And everybody laughed.

It's times like this I miss my analyst.

Spoiling Rebecca

Woke up this morning at 6:30 and thought, 'good lord, how bright it is. The days are certainly getting longer. I love springtime. Springtime . . . springtime . . . springtime . . .' Got up to bask in my good mood and saw this:

I hate Belgium. I'm starting to not be sure I can stay here long enough to leave with all the tonnes of money I was planning on leaving with. At least the children and the F-word aren't working this week so they can enjoy the white fluffy bullshit. I know it's beautiful but you know what? It was a lot more beautiful in Canada and it was still one of the reasons I left.

Well, moving on with my fucking existence. This weekend I read Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, which my boss had lent me. I like her - she has good taste and our department functions better than most at our corporation, which I'm finding out to my unending stress these days. Anyhoo, I read Rebecca and now I'm going to spoil it. If you haven't read it, I suggest you stop reading this and do, because it's definitely worth reading for the suspense. Okay, you've been warned.

I've heard Rebecca was partly inspired by what could measurably be my favourite novel, Jane Eyre. I think 'partly' is putting it mildly. I can see Daphne Du Maurier sitting at her nice little pigeon-holey writing desk, like the one in Mandersley's morning room, asking herself a four part question: "What would Jane Eyre be like if

a) it was moved into the early 20th century
b) Mrs. Rochester was a slutty bitch instead of a slutty lunatic
c) Mr. Rochester was post-Victorian instead of pre-Victorian
d) Jane Eyre was spineless to the point of semi-idiocy?"

And the answer is essentially Rebecca. That's not to knock Rebecca - I liked it. But it is to testify a bit to the greatness of Jane Eyre - that it's rich enough to bear a spin-off like Rebecca, and also like the Wide Sargasso Sea (Mrs. Rochester's post-feminist backstory, a cracking good read as well).

I liked the pacing of Rebecca a lot - there were moments of real tension, real fear; certainly a different style from Jane Eyre, whose heroine-narrator was too strong to communicate panic to us. The nameless narrator of Rebecca was fluttery, ghostly by comparison, and finally, after she finds out about the murder of her predecessor, far less steely in her morality. Nothing bad can happen to Jane Eyre in the end, we think, she's too strong and conscious of her own mind - she knows how to beat back the pre-marital advances of her horndog fiancé without alienating him, and she has the wherewithal to walk away from love and happiness when it will pose to much of a challenge to her fundamental self.

Not Rebecca's narrator. The difference between them is that Jane Eyre breaks and tames her loving, nasty Bluebeard, while Rebecca's narrator is only grateful to be loved by him. So there is much more vulnerability to her, and we read in the anticipation that something fucking horrible is going to happen any second. Especially as the character of Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, and the equivalent of Jane Eyre's Mrs. Fairfax, is so venomous and great.

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