I left my heart in Anjalakoski

I'm in love with Finland. It's hard to know where to start in terms of describing the place and all I loved about it, so I'll say this: having spent this past week there, I understand the desire to be rich. I would like to be rich and spend May, June, and July on an island in the Finnish archipelago close to Turku. I would sit in the sun for 22 hours a day, I would live in an outdoor hammock occasionally cursing the rain, chill, and mosquitoes, and I would never be sad again, because after those months were over I would follow the sunshine somewhere else.

It was a press tour so we drank and didn't sleep much, having to leave each town or area early each morning to go to the next facility. That was rendered easy by that sun, that perpetual sun . . . anti-drugs campaigners don't have much pull with me because they're never honest about the great things involved in smoking reefer, like fantastic sex and television being so much more interesting. In the same vein, all that struggling and neat-o sunlamp marketing at the SAD crowd always fails to mention that the other side of the coin is the fucking Scandinavian summer. I have slept about ten hours in the last seven days, had my tits bored off by what felt like hundreds of PowerPoint presentations and hours of conversation with men who were incapable of mentally handling any subject outside of their own mighty prowess as human beings, and drank roughly 10 times more than I drink in the course of a normal week. Yet I feel monumentally refreshed.

And it was beautiful, and the people were so kind, and their grim, unsmiling humour so bloody appealing. I have anecdotes about the random kindness from absolute strangers there that rival and surpass any anecdotes of mammoth stupidity and incompetent bad intentions here. I know I've got the rose-coloured glasses on: I needed a change of air, a break, and I got it over a sunny week courtesy of a flourishing industrial company that was happy to spend thousands and thousands of euros to impress me - and oh yes, I'm fully aware that being made to feel awfully important and clever by the organizers might have something to do with my brimming goodwill towards the place. Doesn't matter. I love the pants off it.

Also doesn't hurt that the food was fucking marvellous. They eat salmon the way Americans eat pork, except salmon is probably cheaper there than pork is anywhere. And so many wild mushrooms; it was morel season - and then the sturgeon, the fish eggs, the piles and piles of fresh lake perch - and then the berries - the strawberries, currants, blueberries, the sea buckthorn . . . Frankly, I'm pissed off to be back.

Jerusalem syndrome

"They attempt to reconcile Jews and Palestinians, speak to God and genuinely believe he answers them.” Hmm. Sounds like every American president for the last 50 years.

Joking, joking. I don't think they were really trying to reconcile the Jews and Palestinians at all. But seriously. Not to sound all Scientologist but sometimes I get a little freaked out when I reflect that if the Messiah did come, we'd certainly try to slap him or her (I'm banking on a her) in a mental ward. It's not crucifixion, certainly, but over-medication to the point of vegetation would be a rather more effective way to deal with her. No memorable martyrdom involved, no screaming at the sky about how her Dad should forgive her murderers because they don't fucking know what they're doing. Just some sort of firebrand transforming into a gently smiling lump. Gives me the willies . . . maybe I only think this because I'm slightly mad, but I think society needs a little madness to help people keep things in perspective.

Anyways, as far as Jerusalem Syndrome goes, I hope we can trust the doctors to tell the difference between faith-fuelled American yokel fatties who get too much sun and history and actual Messiah Candidates. It doesn't seem like such a difficult distinction to make, but who knows.

Speaking of madness, I am about to go all Al Pacino because tonight I am off to Stockholm to spend a little less than a week going around Sweden and Finland on a boozy press tour. The sun is out here in Brussels until after 10 and up ages before I am, even though my my internal clock wakes me at 6:30 every morning so I can make a nice café latte, blog, take care of my investments, stare out the window, think about funnies I want to Reclaim for the People (that is, rip off) from my business associates and conservative politicians (usually Boris Johnson; thank god the people of London were stupid enough to jettison that boring socialist mayor for a wise-cracking right-wing drunk), and generally ease myself into the day. So there I don't expect to see dark.

And with any luck at all I won't even have to look at a computer until next Wednesday, so I'll bid you all a happy week and leave you with Nick Cave's take on Messiah Wards.

Kiss my ass and call me in the morning

This weekend, in between me morphing back into a human being instead of twitchy stressball, and in between the much more resourceful F-word making pasta and pizza bases again, not to mention ice cream (my hero), we watched Sicko. I had really resisted watching it because I abhor Michael Moore. It wasn't bad, though.

His usual problematic relationship with the truth in an effort to prove his central idea was less annoying than usual - though present. I know he's trying to cram everything he has to say into feature-length, but surely we could have been spared the minutes he spent yelping into a megaphone and the story about how he rescued the wife of one of his detractors from cancer to give a more well-rounded overview of the health systems in the countries featured.

I don't think it would have harmed his argument, and it would have helped his credibility, if he'd mentioned there are some real problems with the Canadian system in terms of access to experimental drugs, for example, and some real problems with the French system in terms of massive over-prescription and a complete systemic inability to usefully treat chronic mental illness. That doesn't make universal health coverage in those countries any less desirable, and it doesn't make the American system any less shameful. The thing is, I think it would have worked better as an aspirational film - picking out the problems and the benefits of each system - rather than as a 'dang, us Americans is stupid health-wise compared to them furrners' film. Because frankly, anybody who's really thought about it knows that already.

But Sicko was much better than his other two big budget documentaries and I was quite sad that he only made it the time he'd alienated everybody except the choir he was preaching to. Because it's much more important. Too bad. San Francisca used to be an emergency medic, and yesterday we had a chat about it - she said she'd have to bellow into the faces of stab or gunshot victims and car crashees 'DO YOU HAVE INSURANCE?' to figure out which hospital to take them to - or go through their pockets and wallets looking for their insurance cards.

How can anybody possibly think that's a good idea? How can you bear the thought that if a member of your family gets hit by a car, the first-response medic team is going to have to spend some of the time they could spend treating them or even just holding their hand to reassure them yelling at them about their insurance or going through their pockets, and depending they may have to wait longer than necessary to get to hospital? Puke.

Medieval History 420

We have this phenomenal weed at the moment, and I have this phenomenal book to read whilst high: The Civilization of the Middle Ages, by Norman Cantor. I'm not sure where it came from, but at a guess it either belonged to Magnum or Luke Duke, who did history degrees, or to me, whose undergrad focus was on the Middle Ages in second year. Probably from the extra courses at the U of T that I took when I switched concentrations, since at our home college they didn't let us have secondary texts. It stands to reason I wouldn't remember it, because that year two was my year 'off', in the same way year three was my year abroad. Year two was when I figured out I could still pass if I was high all the time. I had fun and learnt alot on a human level but in retrospect, I regret it a little - we had some great professors who I apparently did my best to ignore. I'm glad I shaped up in fourth year.

But this is not the story of my particularly White Upper Middle Class regrets and rehabilitations. It's the story of this book, that's great to read whilst high. The author draws history in embracing, strong lines, demonstrating in a few vague but powerfully argued pages the unbroken chain of authority linking the Roman Empire with the Roman Papacy, or the wildness of Rhine Germans as one of the bases of the urge towards democracy in European culture. Drawing in one or two pages the emasculation of the Christian church as the notion of social dissent all but fell out the bottom of it in the interests of keeping the institution growing. Lovely, sweeping vaguenesses! I adore them when I'm high.

Apparently the author, Dr. Cantor, was quite anti-post-modernist. I'm sure he had great personal and intellectual reasons for that, but again at a guess I'm going to say it was because of the fact that he was happy to write such sweeping truthinesses, that are very strongly focussed whilst being too general to be wholly meaningful. Post-modernists dissect and pinpoint and agonize and can't conclude their way out of a paper bag, which to me is simultaneously a strength and a weakness - strength because a really clever person and a good arts academic should always have the consciousness that they might be wrong or that someone else's interpretation might be more apt - and weak because it's boring to read while I'm high. Not The Civilization of the Middle Ages. That's ace.

Notes from the land of staggering, badly-intentioned incompetence

The Red Dragon and that Peter Sellers sensation have both flitted away, leaving me in a good enough mood, though still rather furious about what a shittery Belgium is. The F-word and I have been subject to a scam by the leading internet/telephony/television provider here, Belgacom, that used to have a monopoly, and it pisses me off when companies try to scam me. Don't they know who I am? I'm Mistress La Fucking Spliffe, for god's sake. Anyhoo, it didn't work so far though I doubt we're out of the woods yet . . .

A few days ago a huge box arrived here by courier, full of accoutrements for a television cable set up, and accompanied by a letter in Dutch, which obviously neither of us speak - we registered with them as French speakers. Hmm. Outside of the Dutch, there were two problems with the delivery: we hadn't ordered it, and we don't have a fucking television. Triple hmmm.

The F-word had to spend a few days (seriously) getting an English speaker on the hotline, as I've been crashingly busy at the office and as their hotline is only open during business hours. Finally he reached one yesterday, who explained to him that someone at the company had illicitly 'ordered' the package for us. In the meantime, the F-word had spoken to a few of his Anglo colleagues, to whom the same mysterious wrong-language letter and box of accoutrements had arrived - to be followed by a bill for €200 three months later . . . so he was able to get suitably furious over the phone. Fine. Handled. Our complaint was registered and the order stricken off. AND THEN . . .

1. The cunt asked the F-word to bring the huge box of accoutrements back to the store himself
2. The cunt asked if we'd like to expand our package
3. The cunt asked if we'd like to renew our service contract, which is set to expire at the end of the month.

How fucking dimestore. Honestly, the whole episode, combined with a bunch of peripheral things that have been happening and I'm in too much of a rush to go into now, have left me convinced that Belgium is like Italy's younger uglier brother that got dropped on its head when it was a baby. That same intense laziness, incompetence, and graspingness at the organizational level, combined with the sort of shit-headed stupidity that's going to make you ask someone who your company has just tried to defraud to carry a big box of ripoff back to the store, and then to buy more of your shit.

The F-word very suitably refused to bring the box back, so now we wait for more shitcanery. There's something almost funny about it. Sweet motherfuck, I will not be sad to see the back of this country.

The Red Dragon and Kylie Minogue

Fuck, I'm depresseder than yesterday. Thank god Nick Cave made having a crush on Kylie Minogue socially acceptable, because I just can't fight it anymore. She gets to be the replacement for Nicolas Sarkozy as my retarded celebrity crush; I can't maintain now that he's crapped out so bad. And just like him, Kylie is so small - so perfectly wee - brings out the Reducto in me.

Also, her 'In My Arms' single makes me think of kinky sex every time I hear it, and it's huge in Belgium right now, so I'm thinking about kinky sex all the time, which is alright with me. There's something about the resignation of the lyrics, combined with all those whiplash sounds, and the narration of a sexual encounter in such an innocent, composed popgirl voice that makes me reflect on why I enjoyed and excelled at doing what I used to do for most of the time that I was doing it. And that can only be healthy manouevre on the road to arriving at my Integrated Self. Right? Right.

Now let me look at Kylie Minogue pretend to sing and dance. It's better than kittens.

The Red Dragon and Peter Sellers

I bet the BBC wouldn't have bothered covering this at all if they hadn't made the person on the card look so bitchy. Look at him. Hands on hips, big angry Charlie Brown mouth. Insisting on his right to die. The sort of person who'd join a demonstration in that spirit, except obviously once the card becomes relevant, he can't anymore. So he gets a bitchy-looking card to do it for him. Neat. I don't want one. I pay taxes and an inhumane amount of money for insurance; no health system, whether public or private, is going to cut corners on my interventionist resuscitation with my complicity. No matter how neat and bitchy the card looks.

I'm in a mood - worked myself into an exhausted stupor yesterday and today promises to be more of the same. Because of all the interviewing and the trying-to-make-people-tell-me-things-they-aren't-supposed-to-tell-me, my job is emotionally exhausting. Although I'm aware what a blessing it is that I'm not a 'real' journalist who has to try to interview the relatives of murder victims or Austrians who have been rescued from their batshit crazy father's basement prison. Nonetheless work exhaustion makes me feel like my life is being pulled out from under me. Which I think is combining with some elements of modern public discourse to contribute to my apocalyptic-ish angst. I really understand Christian Survivalist nutjobs a lot of the time. When your life is slipping away from you in an absolutely artificial societal contract where you need to do long hours of busy work to keep your families in the toys, when your politicians behave like monkeys and when human life is overtly not at a premium anymore, then the apocalypse really starts looking like an attractive direction for your life to take.

This is me in a room full of Peter Sellers in Bonn which somehow captures my mood at this particular moment. You can only just make out the Peter Sellerses on the wallpaper, holding a briefcase and sticking out an arm. At the moment, you could nicely encapsulate my angst by saying I feel like I'm living in a world full of Peter Sellerses, who aren't being funny.

The Red Dragon cooks around her nausea

I used to hate the very sight of mushrooms and would not eat them for the greater part of my life to date. Choked down a couple at the behest of my family as a child and then objected to it ever after; I didn't grow up in an indulgent household but I managed to put my foot down about not eating mushrooms, not eating zucchini, and not playing the bloody fucking violin anymore after puberty.

What changed all that was the F-word and not wanting to look like a pansy in front of him when he cooked mushrooms for dinner on our first 'date', I suppose you'd call it. So I ate them and they were good, and was the start of my love affair with non-magic mushrooms. The F-word and I have had rather more dramatic ups and downs than two fundamentally good hearted guinea kids deserve, but through all of the downs I nevertheless retained some tenderness for him by remembering he was the creature that had made mushrooms palatable to me.

The oyster mushrooms I picked this weekend, however, are all in the bin. I had got greedy and picked as many as I could carry, including some that were past their prime. So last night, when I was preparing about half of them for a Hungarian mushroom pie - a lovely-looking recipe from a book by wunderkind Arto der Haroutunian (fuck, Armenians have the coolest names) - I realized that there were some maggots in them. I'm not the sort of cool nature girl who can look at maggots and think 'ooo, extra protein, and anyways once it's all cooked up it'll be sterile.' No. I'm the sort of middle-class cold-climate girl who wants to puke when she even thinks about maggots. Maybe someday I won't be such a fucking pussy but last night was not that day.

So crash went my tummy and slop went the mushrooms into the bin. Lesson learned. Hunt and pick early, don't pick anything past its prime, and most of all DO NOT fucking go to church in the morning while insects reproduce in your fucking mushrooms and then come back in the fucking afternoon. Carpe diem. Carpe fungiem. Honour God by not being a bonehead.

My appetite was gone but I still needed to prepare dinner for the F-word, who was at French class, and myself, who bears too much responsibility on her stately shoulders to go as anorexic as she'd like to whenever she thinks about maggots. Also I had started preparations for the mushroom pie. I needed something that would use what I had prepared, that would tempt my appetite enough to overwhelm my nausea, and that didn't use mushrooms at all, as besides the maggoty oysters all we had in the house was a big bag of dehydrated Chinese I didn't have time to rehydrate. So I rolled myself a big fat joint, ignored my churning tummy, and did this:

1.
1 Splash milk
2 eggs
dollop olive oil

2.
2 tomatoes, seeded, cored and diced
1 cup baby spinach, minced
1 little can albacore tuna
10 anchovy-stuffed olives, halved
1 teaspoon minced basil
1 teaspoon minced oregano
1 teaspoon dried red chili
Touch of salt
Some black pepper

3.
3 slices of old multigrain bread
1/2 cup milk

3 tablespoons cornbread breadcrumbs

Leave the slices of bread to soak up the milk. In a large seperate container, beat the eggs with the splash of milk and dollop of olive oil. Add Group 2 ingredients to the eggs and mix. After, break up the slices of bread that have soaked up the milk. Mix the little peices into the egg mixture. Evenly spread out the mixture in a pie pan that you've lined with greaseproof paper, because of course you're a lazy fuck like me and don't want to do any scrubbing when you wash up. And cover it evenly with the breadcrumbs, then cook at high-ish heat for 20 minutes until it's lovely and golden brown on top. And then eat it.

It's not the most exciting dish in the world, but it was really tasty and I ate a fair amount of it despite having desperately wanted to vomit a mere half hour earlier. I reccommend it for those days when you or your general household is recovering from some sort of stomach complaint, with a world of variations possible in the Group 2 ingredients. Eschewing a crust in favour of milk-soaked bread gives the thing a really light, special texture that's somehow friendly. With the combination I used for Group 2, it came out as a delightful sort of savoury summer pudding, but I imagine by adding an extra egg or using heavier vegetables - or even, god forbid, meat - you could make it quite substantial.

The Red Dragon risks her life for gastronomical science

I have a feeling most of the northwest of Europe is actually meant to be a temperate rain forest. You know the longest Belgium has ever gone without rain was 36 days? The weather here is massively shitty, just massively shitty. Like, Vancouver-shitty. But in Vancouver it's much easier to take, because they have things like Stanley Park (a bit of rain forest right there in the city) and the sea and the mountains - most of all, they have trees. Massive amounts of trees. Here they only have a few trees, corraled into a few paltry reserves, like nomadic Great Plains natives all stuck in a shitty neighborhood of Regina. But give this city ten years without human attention - give it a Chernobyl, a Khmer Rouge - and just like Vancouver it would completely disappear under the weight of its own vegetation.

(Having quite a nice red dragon ride, as you can tell - not much personal angst, and only a touch of city-by-city apocalyptic ideation. In view of my job and the fact that I live in a shithole that should be a beautiful temperate rainforest, I'm feeling a bit indignant for the trees.)

But the area around Brussels has a few of the tree reserves. Yesterday, I was going for a little constitutional in one of them when I saw a huge tree that had come down onto the forest floor since the last time I'd been there. Something compelled me to walk up the trunk, checking out this massive fallen giant. It was still growing, still putting out leaves, I was shocked and enchanted to see. Then I saw it had fallen down crosswise on two other logs that had been there much longer. And one of them looked like this:

Now, you know what those are, right? I don't want to type it out in case some fuck googles 'o-ster m-shrooms Brussels' and manages to locate my secret stash. Initially I found it hard to believe, as in Ontario my father normally doesn't expect them until the autumn. But I've checked, and there are no poisonous lookalikes in the area as far as I can tell; also it's been autumnal, as we had that week-and-a-half of fucking gorgeous weather, followed by mighty buckets of rain. To make sure, I sent the photo above to Daddy, and this one of them picked and washed:

He was quite sure they were what we thought they were, but suggested I feed some to the F-word and see how he copes. Ever the gentleman, however, I've just eaten a few of them myself, prepared rather blandly in a breakfast dish. No ill effects so far, though now that I think about it if I do get any I'm liable to confuse them with the normal turbulence of my red dragon ride.

Anyhoo. The real point of this story is that I didn't pick the things above until I'd gone back home, tried to find out from the Internet if they were dangerous, went to a Quaker meeting, spent nearly the entire hour of worhsip wondering if some other fuck had came along and picked them, and then ran home as fast as I could, praying wildly and proprietarily that no one had taken my fucking o-ster m-shrooms. I don't know when the last time I cared about something that wasn't a person so much - my master's thesis, maybe? And for the first time, I really understood Daddy's absolute fury with Mummy when she told one of his brothers about one of his hotspots. Funny, I felt so close to him when I was panicking yesterday, even an ocean away. Even closer when we finally talked that night; one of my graduations aside, I'm not sure he's ever been so proud of me.

Bouncing around

I think the F-word's father really wants him to move back to Australia - he sent a bunch of tourist brochures and stuff from the area we're thinking about. It's rather sweet. I don't like being so far from my own parents, but they have three other kids and then the grandkids - the F-word's father only has the F-word.

But that is for the future. In the present, we're trying to work out our summer holiday, which now looks like it will be an Amsterdam/Hamburg/Copenhagen trifecta. We thought about the south of France, but I think work may send me to Lyon in August when the F-word can come, and I know work is sending me to Marseilles in September, when perhaps the F-word can come. Better to get the tourist destinations subsidized whenever possible, especially during their peak summer seasons. The Copenhagen thing is a bit strange because I'm going on a week-long work binge/tour through Sweden and Finland - fuck - really soon actually. I never expected to spend that much time in Scandinavia, certainly not all in one summer. And now it means I have a moral obligation to get my arse to Norway so that I will have seen them all.

But delving far, far back into the misty past of Mistress La Spliffe . . . call it hubris but I have to strip back a full eleven years to find a real regret, or at least one I can remember, and it has to do with turning down the chance to live in Copenhagen for awhile. When I first left home as a teenager, it was for London, for a live-in job I'd accepted from Canada so my parents wouldn't worry about me too much. It was crap, so I went to an agency for such things once I got there. They offered me two options on the spot: another live-in in London, or else a contract in Copenhagen, where my 'work' would consist of looking after two dogs in a downtown flat. At the time I thought I was allergic to dogs, and I wanted to stay in London, so I made what I now conclude was the wrong decision. London is just a big fun city that's more expensive than other big fun cities, and the year or so I spent there didn't teach me anything that spending a year or so in some other overpriced big fun city would have taught me. And Copenhagen . . . well . . . anyways, we're going there now, and I don't have to look after dogs to do it this time.

Less tangled-webbedly, I think it will be really great to go to Scandinavia in a couple of weeks and then again in early July so I can enjoy freakishly long days. I have SAD, so I can't wait to get fuckin' sun-bombed for 20 hours at a stretch. Wheeeeee! Bring on the amphetamines. And giving Brussels its due, I'm really enjoying the freakishly long days here too - we're farther north than my part of Canada, so in proportion to the degree I wanted to shoot myself all winter, I want to giggle and play outside now.

Weeded out

Goddamn it, got up to Episode 10 of Season 3 of Weeds, and it's just gotten too fucking silly, even for me and my post-nine-to-five need for pap. Thank god for Television Without Pity. Although at the moment I don't even care enough to read about what happened. Nancy has turned into a complete idiot and all the other characters are no fun anymore.

I hate this about 'quality' American television. Take a neat premise, a good cast, some tangled skeins and developed characters - go through them and then once they're all sorted out, just keep on truckin' until nobody's watching anymore and you get cancelled. Endless trucking is alright for low-concept television because formulas are endlessly variable through tiny shifts and changes. But with high-concept television with realistic characters it doesn't work at all. Not just because of plotholes. Also because it's obvious that no real person is going to be as stupid as high-concept, 'realistic' television characters need to be to sustain highly dramatic plotlines for years and years at a time. And if they were going to be that stupid, they aren't the sort of people I feel like looking at for 27 minutes a pop.

Just quit, goddamnit. Quit after two seasons and recycle the set and actors. The English do it, and they still turn some sort of profit, I think. Sell more merchandise, for god's sake. Bongs with the characters' faces on them. Sex toys modelled after cast members. Members. Hah. Anything but this ridiculous, extended, intrusive-life-support system in place now where the shows last fucking forever until I can't even remember the good times anymore.

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.

Thrillers are like life

Oh, puke. I cannot stand the way this show makes women act like retards with a guru. "Women feel like they're watching themselves"? Do you live like that? Do you fucking want to live like that? I can't even begin to think about it without wanting to explode in a torrent of pseudo-Marxist ranting that would touch on the shoddy purchasing power of 80% of British women, the way credit enslaves the middle and lower classes, the idiocy of vastly overpriced ready-to-wear brands, and the nauseating fact that this story is in the same paper giving us news about 10,000 dead Chinese and a kajillion dead Burmese. And that would be unseemly because I quite liked the first season.

So moving on. The Ministry of Fear was great. The transparent plot twists were not the point, and the story wrapped up with something that wasn't a plot twist so much as a natural evolution of the story that nonetheless kneecapped me. It was very, very good, and seemed to be not so much a spy story as a study of pity, like The Human Factor was a study of loyalty and The Power and the Glory was a study of duty and The Quiet American was a study of prejudice or innocence or something.

The thing is, as far as a spy novel or thriller, it's not great at all - not just because of the transparency of the plot twists (perhaps they were opaque in those days, like how Agatha Christie could surprise people back then). Also there are big gaping holes in the plot, holes that make Weeds look like tightest-wound skein of television you can imagine. Why such a likely pass-phrase for the cake? Why stage a death to frighten Rowe away? Why put him in the loony bin instead of finish the job the bomb started? Tonnes of holes. But it's still a great book, because it's such a great and believable study of the inescapability of pity and moral - what's the word? - you know - when something isn't black or white. Moral Mediterranean-ness.

And what I wonder is - a 'thriller' with that many holes, that transparent a plot - would it find a publisher today? I doubt it. Or if it did, not the sort of publisher who would promote it as a work of genius. How many Graham Greenes are there floating around out there with all sorts of important things to say about our human factors, but who can't express them in the sort of tight perfect-plot writing we expect now?

My hero

Nice, restful weekend, much of it spent outside in the creepily wonderful weather. This is like last year, which saw a beautiful, beautiful, creepily warm and sunny April, followed by 12 months of mushy shitty weather. I guess the summer weather is moving surely but surely back towards the summer? We'll see. The prognosis is good for the rest of May so though it's creepy that it's summer so early I'm going to enjoy the fuck out of it while it lasts. Sleeping naked and no sleeves at the office! Wheeeeeee! Fuck clothes.

In terms of productivity the F-word outstripped me by far this weekend. While I ran around outside learning to use the boomerang he got for his birthday, watched most of the rest of Weeds, fell in and out of a doze during The Fog of War (though I have a feeling it was pretty good), read the first half of The Ministry of Fear (finger lickin' good so far, though it's one of the more unlikely of Graham Greene's books - the plot twists are not the point in his writing but these ones are a little too transparent) and came to understand the massive but enlightening mindfuck that is my Japanese abacus and the idea of complementary arithmetic (why, oh why didn't someone show me this shit when I was a child?), he achieved much of the same (book titles changed and he's leaving the abacus to me) BUT ALSO figured out how to make pasta.

I try not to be a food snob. I believe the small amount of time most Westerners spend on food is overall a good thing rather than a bad thing, because you can't escape the fact that when we spent a lot of time on food, it was actually women who were spending a lot of time on food. I love good food, but women have minds that are too flexible and fertile to be confined to the kitchen while men's monorail brains run the rest of the world. That's why, while I'm no fan of McDonald's or any other fast food chain, I thought Super Size Me was reactionary, gimmicky shit whose subtext, if not surtext, was all about how women should fuck off back to the kitchen and rescue their families from obesity.

That being the case, I nonetheless have to say: when someone else is making it, home-made pasta is totally worth the trouble. It shouldn't be. What the F-word learnt to make was just the straight, Southern Italian semolina and water pasta - just a special kind of flour and some water - exactly the same ingredients as in packaged pasta. But, I think because homemade pasta is just hung to dry for an hour or so whereas packaged pasta is industrially dried until it's very brittle, the homemade pasta is a much, much nicer consistency and soaks up the sauce so much more effectively. It is so fucking good. I'm the luckiest girlfriend in the world.

Hourglasses

Creeping towards the weekend like a parched man dragging himself to a well. Starting to get a disconnected feeling. No time for my own brain. Mighty force of will to give the F-word some of the attention he deserves. Bad dreams about being trapped in a library with the fear Bluebeard will pop up behind me and we'll have to try to have a conversation, or else a duel to the death - either would suck. Still can't believe my aunt is gone.

And on top of all that, I really don't like Bruce Chatwin's Songlines, or at least the first 72 pages of it. I love Bruce Chatwin as a travel writer, and I really liked On the Black Hill, his weirdo Welsh epic I read a couple of months ago. Songlines is crappily smug and tedious in comparison. That hurts, as it's the first thing of his I haven't liked, and I like liking all of what a person publishes. Like Jane Austen or Nick Cave or Patrick Süskind or Bach. Knowing that I can grab whatever of theirs and get into it without worrying that I'll be wasting my time with crap. Time . . . can't waste it.

I have a feeling Emily Brontë would be another person who would have written stuff I'd have loved consistently. You know, they reckon she did write another book before she died besides Wuthering Heights. Her sister Charlotte burnt it, after Emily died. If that's true, Charlotte should be remembered as much for that as for Jane Eyre. But I suppose time has tamped down the possibility of knowing that for sure. Time - always a question of fucking time! It's why I would have liked to be a professional historian - cheating time a bit and finding out its secrets before it buries itself in itself forever. And it's also why I chose not to be a professional historian despite the exhortations of my professors - I was afraid I'd bury myself in time before my own personal time buried me itself.

Slippery time

No time, it's the story of my fucking life right now because it's report season. Even less time as I've finally given into addiction and started watching the rest of Weeds. Co-opting my time, just like the Sopranos did, except Weeds has even more plotholes, like why didn't the Armenians rat out Nancy's operation when they were arrested? But it's funny and feeds my taste for brainless quirk. It's either that or Jackass repeats - I find when work is too hard I need the sort of pablum I'm usually all judgemental about when I get home. The F-word told me a statistic about how something like 90% of America's Funniest Home Videos viewers were college-educated professionals in executive jobs. I can believe it.

Today I have no time because I have to get to work early so I can leave work early and go see les flics about my permanent residency card. And then I will do so, and wait, and get home and get high and eat a nice dinner and watch Weeds. And life will whizz past until it is Friday and one of my aunties back home has her funeral. The parents told me yesterday that she'd died all of a sudden-like on Monday and I can't believe it - it hasn't registered that I'm not going to see her anymore. She was sick the last time I saw her, but no sicker than she'd been for the last twenty years, as far as I could tell.

And now she's gone, and life is whizzing past, and time will roughly peel away the people I love like a drunk chef tackling an artichoke. And I too will be roughly peeled off, leaving the people who I love that are left artichoke-naked and tender, and what the hell is the point of all that?

We have ways of pissing you off

I didn't read much while on holiday because I was too busy being on holiday. Coming back from holiday, however, was a different story. The Thalys high-speed train track went down somewhere between Aachen and Belgium, and though fuckin' Douche Bahn knew about the problem for at least two hours before our arrival in Aachen, we still had to wait there for a further two hours for a coach to come pick us up. Apparently German organizational skills don't extend to counting the number of the people on a train and then ordering a corresponding number of coaches to take them to their final destinations, no; it's better to wait until they get to a transit point, watch them mill around in an open square angrily, and then order coaches individually until, after about four hours, everybody has stopped complaining at you. The F-word, who worked there for a few years, explained that in his experience it was the most organized country ever until something went wrong, and that when it come to making contingency plans they are among the most inept people in Europe. I suppose that's how the Nazis got in.

Anyhoo, now we're having a cat emergency so I have to go deal with that instead of writing about Spike Milligan and Bruce Chatwin.

In the weeping Forest of Le Vulva

So. Whilst waiting for the Bad Seeds concert to start the F-word and I sat in a nearby park, eating chips with samurai mayonnaise and talking about Roswell and Scientology. And I was wondering what possesses people to believe the most far-fetched things, to become absolutely credulous and devout later in life - not as a malleable, impressionable child with your parents forever dragging you to church and carefully indoctrinating you, but as a mature person who surely knows better, and who has money and a standing in civil society, and who gives it up for creepy strangers who appear to be absolutely fucking insane.

A half hour later in Forest National (shitty venue - only bother with it if you know you're going to like the act), I sat in the audience, waiting for the show to start and thinking about how fucking rich Nick Cave must be. Rich as a rich Scientologist. I had paid about Euro 40 for the tickets, and there were roughly a kabillion people there, which means he was making 40 x 1 kabillion, minus costs, which according to my new Japanese abacus is still north of a kabillion. I had a moment of cursing myself for not having been a rock star; I could have retired by now.

And an hour later in Forest National, I sat in the audience, watching the show and wondering if there was a way to throw my entire cunt on to the stage - forget the underwear. So I suppose I got an answer to my earlier question.

I've said before there's a risk that if I'd been me 150 years ago, I might've have tossed everything to docilely tail around Nick Cave or Tom Waits, if they'd have been itinerant preachers. Now I reckon I know why, and it's all in the term 'charismatics'. It's fascination, a chance to forget yourself; a good charismatic is charismatic because he sets the example and makes it safe. Even when Nick Cave was younger his persona had lots of crazy old man in it. Now it's vastly crazy old man. Screaming. Writhing. With a boner. And you don't know where to look, so you look at him, and before you know it, you're wondering if there's a way to throw your cunt on the stage, and you've already gone over April's disposable income budget to even be there.

So it was lovely and semi-religious. But of course it wouldn't have worked if the music hadn't been very good and if the band wasn't picking up the melodic and rhythmic slack whilst Nick Cave was moaning at the audience and abridging some of my favourite verses. (Time constraints? Dotty memory? Wanting to wrap up sooner and go to bed early, and thinking the non-Anglo audience probably wouldn't notice?) Two drummers! It was loud, and that was good, though Forest's sound isn't so good.

They played most of the last album, which was also good as I like the last album a lot, and then a few old favourites. Audience were dead fish during the loud songs, except for 'Papa Won't Leave You, Henry', which I guess not even dead fish can resist. They waved lighters for the tinkly ones. I was happy about the 'Stagger Lee' and the 'Tupelo' - the latter of which I hadn't liked much before hearing it live and very loud. I wished they played 'No Pussy Blues', but they didn't, and 'The Curse of Millhaven', but I knew they wouldn't as they were keeping every rendition to five minutes or less. The whole thing was just too fucking short. But sweet.

Bonntastic

No time to write as I'd like to, but I'll try to gradually get everything I would like to get out over the week, including a little blogasm over the May Day Bad Seeds concert, whose imperfections only rendered it more lovable. We went to Bonn and had a lovely time over the long weekend - I relaxed muscles that I thought had turned into bone by this point, I've been so tense, and I feel like I got a bit of perspective on my high-pressure yuppie life and how to end it without physically destroying myself.

It's hard to pick out a high point for a quick Monday morning bloggery, as so much of it was so damn nice. It's a lovely little tourist city, absolutely built for geeks like me; lots of spacious, pretty parks to smoke joints in without feeling like you're setting a bad example for the children, interspersed with some of the best museums and galleries ever. We went to three, which were all awfully good one way or another: the Arithmeum, the Kunstmuseum Bonn (full of wierdo modern art), and the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the post-Nazi German history museum. Of the three, the history museum was certainly the most impressive - it really must be seen. From the archive footage of little kids who were looking for their parents after getting seperated from them in air raids to the deliciously dry, informative accounts about each successive federal election, it was all so much better than PBS and the BBC rolled into one. All the signage is in German, so either bring some Germans with you or buy the English guidebook at the beginning.

However, I must say I enjoyed the Arithmeum the most. This is despite the fact that numbers are my enemy and I wish we, as a race, could drop Indo/Arabic numerals altogether and just go back to 'one, two, lots'. It was full of cunning machines and devices from the last three or four millenia for calculating things - originals under glass, and then reconstructed models with instructions that you could fool around with until you understood. It was so fucking awesome, and we went there first thing in the morning so I wasn't even high yet. I learnt how to use a Japanese abacus! They look like this:





The counters on the bottom are units of one (so there are four), and the counter on top is a unit of five. Starting from the right, you stick numbers in, first rod for the ones, second for the tens, third for the hundreds, etc. - so for 84, you'd stick up four bottom counters on the farthest-right rod, and then three bottom counters and one top counter on second-farthest right rod - then you do things to add and subtract. You can use them to vastly simplify multiplication and division, too, if you know your multiplication tables, which is essentially all I know when it comes to math.

Anyhoo, the beautiful, lovely, kind F-word bought me my very own abacus, and while I was fooling around with it on the train back to Brussels I suddenly realized what my Korean students in Paris had been doing every time I'd asked them to reckon a number, and they'd done it in record time by counting in some way absolutely impenetrable fashion to me on their hands - they were using their hands as little Japanese abaci. They'd tried to explain it to me at the time, but between their difficulties with English (which is why they were seeing me) and my utter incompetence with figures, I hadn't understood a fucking scintilla of a notion of what they were doing. Until I got my own Japanese abacus. I have to say, I'm fucking pissed off I wasn't given one of these as a child. They're so fucking smart, and they re-contextualize arithmetic as a physical, visual thing instead of an ever-lengthening and ever more wrong series of numbers stretching down a page in a slow, desperate rightwards diagonal.

Do you stop being you just to be how he wants you, oh yes I do, the stew is blue as the doves coo in the kangaroo zoo next to the emu, and how do you

There's no time to write adequately about last night's religious experience of a concert as we will dash off to Bonn the moment my darling covers his shame adequately for us to venture to the train station. Instead I'll leave you with Nick Cave's 2001 cover of Pulp's 'Disco 2000'.



What I find most interesting about the cover is how it makes it mercilessly clear that Different Class had very silly lyrics, no matter how charmingly Jarvis Cocker yelped them out over catchy rhythm and melodies. I still like it though. Different Class is Dr. Seuss for teenagers, and I was a teenager when it came out, which makes 'Disco 2000' my 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand', or my 'Bang a Gong', or my 'Come On Eileen', or my 'Can't Get You out of My Head', depending on how many decades older or younger than me you are.

But I don't like it as much as His'n'Hers. I heard that when I was 12 and hence it was very Dr. Seuss-y, in the sense of teaching me lessons as basic as that one must try green eggs and ham before deciding that one does not like them. It gave me my first clue that sex was messier than in the Harlequins under the chesterfield, and that one should never decide to fuck a boy based on how much one thought he wanted one, because there was a whole world of boring, depressing adult perversion to get trapped in out there. It made me a more sensible teenager, in terms of my twat at least. And to this day 'Pink Glove' sometimes vies with 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone' in the running to be my favourite song ever. Not often though.

Also, His'n'Hers has the song 'Babies', which has the pithiest couplet in the English language - the Tristan-und-Isolde tragedy as explored through each story-telling medium through the ages, culminating in a rehashing in every television series that ever got past the pilot episode, summed up in 20 Dr. Seussy syllables:

I know you won't believe it's true
I only went with her because she looked like you

Tweedle-dee, Tweedle-dum, and Tweedle-doesn't-eat-quite-as-much-shit

Having suggested Obama was vanilla yesterday, today I have to point out that he's still the least repulsive candidate by a long stretch. This was driven home to me last night when we watched the latest Four Corners (an Australian documentary series that I'm using to acclimatize myself to the culture of the country that may be my home someday, as I don't have access to a barbeque or a visible native underclass in Brussels - the Wallonians look just like me). It was quite a crap episode and didn't help me acclimatize to Australia at all as far as I can tell, but there was one moment in it that was fucking beautiful. Let me see if I can find it on YouTube because it was just so good:



What a little shit-eating fuck. What is it with the States that the politicians have to be such shit-eaters? Why can't a right-wing candidate say 'I didn't want any more national holidays because I think they're a waste of money, no matter how marvellous Such-and-Such was, and the black vote wasn't that important in my constituency at the time so, well, there you are', and either be congratulated or criticized for that decision? Why can't that awful creature Clinton say 'okay, that Bosnia thing was kind of a lie, but it sounded good, didn't it? By the way, my husband really fucked that Balkan shit up. He fucked a lot of shit up. Really, putting that cigar in the intern was the least of his fuck-ups. I won't be such a doofus if you vote for me' instead of mis-use words like 'mis-spoke'? Both of those moves might have been mistakes, but they were mistakes that the mistakers probably consulted their advisors about making - there were reasons those 'mistakes' were made - and eating shit in public will not help deal with those reasons.

And in the context of campaigning alongside two champion shit-eaters, Obama looks least worst. His speech after people first noticed his pastor was black and pissed off was not a shit-eating speech. And if his own pastor is now willing to sabotage his candidacy mid-campaign by stoking up the scandal over being black and pissed off - especially by saying he's pretty sure Obama secretly agrees with his thoughts on being black and pissed off, which is tantamount to calling him a liar - maybe I'd drop him too. But then, if I'm anything I'm a Quaker, and we don't have inconvenient, self-aggrandizing, book-selling, collection-plate passing, and in my experience insufferable creatures like pastors. There's a time and a place for mouthing off like a know-it-all madman, and it's called the Internet.

God damn America! God save the Queen!

As a born and bred Canada who has given up her residency and lives as an Official Expatriate in a ridiculous country she strives to ignore, it's not often I get sent a massive 'fuck you' from a government I can call my own. It is inevitable, however. For besides being Canadian I am also, thanks to the fine bloodlines of my mummy, Anglo-Saxon nationalism, and the bounty of Cold Queen Bess, officially one of the Inselaffen, who are told to fuck themselves by their government with a tedious regularity.

While I have a certain love for that green and pleasant land, I have an overwhelming disgust for its political system. Perhaps it's the most bullshitty one in the world - it's right up there, anyways. I still sort believe some people involved in the American one believe their own bullshit on some level. Though less and less so, particularly this morning. I don't understand how that country can be at a point where it has a serious black presidential candidate, but where the political system apparently requires him to be so deeply vanilla that he has to disown Jeremiah Wright because of some fairly mainstream pulpit-thumping.

And how can that pulpit-thumping be so deeply villified without being addressed? Forget about whether he was right or wrong about lots of the naughty things he said - the thing is, lots of people believe the naughty things he said. Saying them got more people into his church, I don't doubt. How can such ideas just be dismissed by a democratic political system in the height of the race for top office? How did those people get to be such pussies that the ones who disagree won't even calmly explain why they disagree instead of freaking the fuck out over the idea that some brown and black people at home and abroad are seriously fucked off by what the United States did and continues to do with them?

Though it was the height of temerity to tell God to damn America. That's the problem with these weirdo religious types - always telling their omnipotent lord what to do. I don't get that at all, you know. If he's omnipotent and perfect why the fuck are your prayers coming out as imperatives? Sit back and enjoy the ride, I say, and God will no doubt damn who He damn well pleases without being ordered around by one of His lesser creations.

Anyhoo, all I meant to do this morning was complain about the bullshitty tone of this response to a petition I signed a few months ago regarding the shutdown of the UK passport office in Brussels, but now I'm just happy I'm not American. A sentiment which the UK and Canadian political institutions have depended on for decades in terms of getting us to put up with their own brands of bullshit. "My eyeballs don't count under national health coverage anymore? Oh well, at least I'm not American." Et cetera.

Oh well, fuck you too, Cold Queen Bess.

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.

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!

Have you seen the little piggies?

I reckon I'm a closeted fur-monger, because despite being a pinko I totally do not get people fussing over other people wearing cute animals. And I write this as a cat lover who would enthusiastically disembowel any Swiss fuck who tried to get my Lexie for a blanket. The thing is, if Lexie was a piggie, I'd be just as enthusiastic about eviscerating any Italian fuck who tried to turn her into salame, because I'd love her no matter how big and fat and delicious she was. I feel there's something much worse about habitually eating meat twice a day than having a couple of fur coats in the cupboard. And hence, there's something proportionately more retarded about getting knickers in a twist over stray cats being strangled for their pelt or baby seals getting their heads bashed in than over kabillions of piggies being slaughtered in revolting abattoirs after consuming far too many primary food resources that could have gone to stopping Haitians and such from rioting over their hunger.

I'm not saying I'm going to rush out and buy a fur coat after I make my first €100,000, because unless you live in a cold country they're Bad Taste, and baby, I taste like fucking candy bars. But I'm so fucking sick of animal rights activists basing their compassion on cuteness. They need to face it: the cuter an animal is, the cuter it's going to look as a coat. Maybe they think it'd be easier to whip the world up into a big orgy of caring about general animal welfare if they concentrate on the cute ones, but can anybody except another cute-lovin' animal rights activist take that sort of thing seriously when piggies - a much brighter, more sensitive, more affectionate, more intelligent, AND more unclean animal than baby seals or cats - are getting killed in their billions in slaughterhouse conditions that make getting your brains clubbed out on a chunk of ice or getting throttled in the Swiss countryside look like a sojourn in a thalasso spa?

I suspect it's also a question of money. I don't think anybody ever got rich clubbing baby seals or choking Swiss cats, but I think a lot of people have got rich from being assholes to pigs. And I don't think the shriller animal rights activists have the guts, brains, or resources to focus their sights on that sort of industry, no matter how engaging pigs are (really, they have lovely personalities, and they're sooooo cute when they're babies) and no matter how popular Charlotte's Web was. So PETA does fucking wet, retarded, alienating, things like get shirty with famous people over their dogs, a bully like Heather Mills tries to tackle a cottage industry in an economically depressed shithole by posing with seals, and a fucking flake like Brigitte Bardot does a number on Swiss entrepreneurs. Good god, what a bunch of attention-grabbing wets.

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 is competent

I was all set to be indignant this morning about how Hillary Clinton isn't a bad memory yet, but I've decided that I don't care who wins the primary or the presidency or anything in the US as long as my stocks keep going up and as long as their economy stays on course for deep into the shitter so that the world can force it to abide by some sort of industrial environmentalist framework, in the interests of protectionism if nothing else. When I choose a country to live in, I will care desperately about who wins what there. In the meantime, I will simply laugh as the so-called 'left wing' in the US ties itself into insoluble knots; as Italians make themselves the monkeys of the world by electing an offensive tapeworm like Berlusconi; and as Belgium continues to be Belgium. Hah. Hah.

I dislike people who tell other people not to care so much, and yet I am at a point in my existence where I must tell myself not to care so much. The chemical rages of the past week or so which are finally, slowly abating served their purpose, as the monthly hormonal rages each month do in a less traumatic manner. Namely, to put things in perspective. Three lessons:

1. Other people's fuck ups cannot be controlled by the power of my mind. This came clear to me last night as we watched an amateur theatre group. A young kid was doing a solo routine and sort of losing the audience, and it was making me miserably uncomfortable.

"But wait," I thought. "That's not you up there. That's some boy with chutzpah who knew what he was letting himself in for. Why are you uncomfortable? Just try not to look bored in case he glances at the audience and you've done all you can; this is his show."

So I stopped being uncomfortable and he managed to pick the thread back up, and I learnt a lesson that most people probably learn in their early teens: I'm not the fucking omphalos of the universe. Not rocket science, but I'm happy to have learnt it, as now I'll be able to watch figure skating, ballroom dancing, and ridiculously extended Democratic primaries without using far too much of my energy crossing mental fingers and repeating "don't fuck up, don't fuck up, don't fuck up" on someone else's behalf, with more emphasis, I must say, than I ever use on myself.

2. Memory can be a burden. Again, hardly rocket science, and you'd think all that psychoanalysis would have helped me to that conclusion a long fucking time ago. But it did not. Suffice to say, there are still people and events in my head that are no longer in my life, and in each case there is an excellent reason why they are in my head and not in my life. Some of them have no further use outside of cautionary tales, character inspiration, or occasional archetypal reference in dreams. And many of them used up their concern credits years ago.

And yet I have a tendency to relive people and events periodically. Fine. Everybody does. But it has been compromising the present - perhaps inevitably, as I'm in a sort of long-term, rootless transition state, living in a country where I don't plan to settle - nonetheless, excessively. The present may be transitory, but it always is, and it deserves more of my energy than it's been getting. And there should be a sort of freedom to leading an existence as transitory as mine is at the moment that I have not been enjoying as much as I could.

3. In the grown-up world, competence is all you need to impress people. Maybe I spent too much time in higher education to appreciate that while university professors will grade you anywhere between A+ and E, the professional world is Pass or Fail, and all you have to do to Pass is make sure you know what you're doing and then doing it. And then fundamentally, the only way to get extra credit is to Pass more things.

Yes, that A+ used to feel so good. And the fact that I miss how good it felt points to the fact that I should, at some point, turn away from the grown-up world and start working on projects where perfection is a beautiful dream rather than something I can manage by making sure my feature covers all the right industrial issues with all the right sources, in accordance with our in-house styleguide. In the meantime, I'm getting money and I shouldn't get into a tizzy too much over something that has much more economic than emotional significance. Care yes, ulcer no.

I knew she was trouble

I've been holding out, because if there's anything more alienating to my halfbaked Marxist perspective than a rich chucklehead singing a catchy anthem about how she can't be bothered to go to rehab in a country where underpriced Afghan heroin and social desperation have made opiates the opiates of proletarians who can't afford the sort of lovely rehabs she could drag her bourgeois ass to but probably need them far more, it could only be Jennifer Lopez singing about how she's still from the block.

And then yesterday, one of the gym attendants turned off the top-40 shit and put on Back to Black. Maybe it was relief that I wasn't listening to Britney Ciccone Aguilera carrying on over some 'borrowed' backing rhythm & melody that was crappy even before it was bastardized, or maybe it's that I'm an absolute sucker for anything doo-woppy, but I was really enjoying it. Then "You Know I'm No Good" came on. I'd heard it before and had ignored it due to the Marxist thing, but stuck on the rowing machine I had ample opportunity to actually listen to what she was singing - and singing, no less, in that strong voice.

Okay. It's not Shakespeare. It's not even Lennon/McCartney. But it makes sense, scans, and it's evocative, and I can't remember the last time I heard pop that did that. Unless you count the Bad Seeds, and that's something else altogether. For one thing, Nick Cave isn't a 24 year old who sings about banal-but-deadly girl things in a rich girl voice. And sadly enough, all those girl bands from the 50's and 60's who Amy Winehouse and her producers are ripping off never managed to do that because producers then never cottoned on to the fact that the style of music did not necessitate singing charming repetitive inanities about loving, loving, loving and following, following, following, giving the whole delicious phenomenon a bafflingly short shelf life.

Anyways, my halfbaked Marxist objections to everything about Amy Winehouse stand, but I really like Back to Black, so I shall steal it. Problem solved.

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.

The 12-month programme

Good news from work - my boss has decided that our jobs will be a lot more interesting. It will be harder work but that's cool. I was already showing up and that's 90% of the pain in my ass already. Showing up, unlike today, or at least this morning, when I get to "work from home" in anticipation of my trip to the maison communale to finally get my residency card. It will be long and annoying and full of civil servants, but it has to be done if I want to get a high-yield savings account - otherwise I can't imagine why I'd bother, I've been living in this country for more than a year now and nobody else has demanded more than a smile in the way of papers.

More than a year, and it's been a year since I got this job, I reckon. For the first time in awhile, I seem to be more or less where I imagined I'd be 12 months from then. It's okay. And I'm getting fonder and fonder of Belgium as the weather slooooowly warms up. If we get a real summer this year I may forebear from cursing blue at the uselessness of the place. We have committed, between ourselves, to stay here for awhile, but who knows what will happen? We could go apeshit and take off. But San Francisca and her man had been looking at two or so years, and here it is seven years later . . . And others at my office, especially the British, no longer show any inclination at all to leave. The quality of life here versus English cities is not to be compared. Sometimes I wonder that anyone lives in England anymore, though I miss Yorkshire from time to time.

Still, we're both having some mental problems in terms of putting down roots. Easier for me maybe as I'm a bit younger and care rather less, though it does give me a floaty schizoid feeling from time to time, and no doubt alters my behaviour as, practically speaking, I don't give a fuck as long as the money keeps rolling in. Worse for the F-word, probably, as he needs roots. You know what 'roots' means in Australian? Third person singular of 'to fuck'. Hah!

Anything Sarkozy can do Putin can do better, he can do anything better than him

You know how I thought that the marriage of my eeeeurgh-I'm-gross-crush Nicholas Sarkozy, to the aging professional-slut Terminator was the joke of the year? Well, it just got a little funnier. The Russian press is reporting that Vladimir Putin, an evil, evil man who's got more sex appeal than the entire French cabinet in his index finger (which, by-the-by, can be used to push a much better nuclear button than Sarkozy's - eat your heart out, Carla), has been divorced from his wife from some time, and that when he leaves the presidential office in June he will marry this woman.

That's right. A young, unethical, world champion gymnast. She can put her feet behind her head and then walk to the fridge to fetch you a beer like that. Anytime I need to enter an empathetic mental state to help myself understand the heterosexual men in my life, I will ponder her. And she looks like this:






It's too good. The morning just got a little better as I imagined Sarkozy crying himself to sleep. Every. Night. "Why did you settle, Nicholas? Why did you settle?" All I'm waiting for now is for Silvio Berlusconi to hook up with Paris Hilton, and Angela Merkel to dump that out-of-the-spotlight scientist for Nancy's hot dead husband from Weeds, or possibly Viggo Mortensen, and the circle will finally be squared.

Small mercies

Bit of a funk today. In lieu of whining, I'll post a video from Bulgaria's hottest export since Vladislav the Grammarian. You've all seen it, no? Most popular video on the web, et cetera?



Well, I've never been a fan of Mariah Carey, and I figure the above version makes about as much sense as the original, but watch the classy way she shuts down this wizened French bitch who wants help making fun of the contestant:



Even at my lowest moments - and I am not over Silvio Berlusconi's victory - I can still thank heaven I'm not French.

Third time fucky

To my father's people:

Congratulations! You're now the joke of the universe, and you've really done something for my relationship with the French by making me resolve to never mock them again without adding "but at least they're not ass-clenchingly moronic enough to vote Silvio Berlusconi into office three fucking times." Thank you for illustrating so beautifully that this goddamn sexist, racist, kleptocratic knucklefucker is the governor you deserve, so I can stop feeling sorry for you. Thank you for giving me a warm fuzzy feeling about my family and all the other people of Italian descent who live outside of Italy, by convincing me that the useful ones have all left.

So have you simply accepted that sponging off your parents until they die of some cancer triggered by the foul miasma of toxins with which your industrial and waste disposal practices have flooded the country is an adequate response to your long-term economic shambles? Have you decided that the enslavement of the south to politically connected organized crime is an august tradition that must not be interfered with? Have you decided that the enslavement of your political system to the industrial class (not such a seperate issue from the last) is the best way to approach the challenges of the new millenium? Or have you just stopped caring?

Well, this year, not caring was the same as participating. Motherfuck, even the Economist was recomending that Roman communist over the fucking thieving filthy monkey you've chosen for the third time. You can't blame the CIA anymore. This was your fault. I cannot wait until he finishes running your institutions into the ground and you get kicked out of the Eurozone because of your incredibly huge national debt, so that I can go on holiday in your country and take advantage of your laughably weak currency (remember that?) to buy up your physical patrimony and ship it to a country that works. That is my hope for Italy now.

Oh, and if you, who benefit from a functioning multi-party system, ever lay into Americans for voting George Bush into office whilst they were stuck with their shitty two party system in my hearing again, I will vomit on you. Do you understand? I will tilt my head back, aim carefully, and vomit all over your overpriced, ill-fitting brand name clothes that make your legs look like sausages and your heads look like pins.

Holy titfuck, three times,

Mistress La Spliffe

The age of vacillation

We are stepping up discussions on where we are going to live one day, partly because more and more I have babies on the brain. My partner in the economist department came to work the other day, taking a break from her mat leave - she's been nursing and hence dropped all her weight and then some, and has stopped dyeing the grey out of her hair because that's meant to be bad for the babe or something. So compared to how she looked last time I saw her, it's like she has a really, really exhausting tapeworm. Her face was happier though.

And the question in my brain is, do we make babies here or somewhere else? The mat leave here is crap compared to Canada but pretty damn good compared to Australia, which is complete crap. But Canada is too cold, and if I have a baby here it will be Belgian. Yeeurgh. Then let's complicate the issue by wondering where to raise the babies. If it's Canada they'll pay through the nose for university and if it's here they'll get free university but it will be crap; in Australia it will be pricey but they have a genius repayment scheme. In Canada, whatever I spawn will have easier access to my people, but in Australia they'd have access to the F-word's people, and my people are so spread out over Canada anyways that they'd only have access to a few of them at a time.

At the moment the F-word and I are both leaning towards Australia to the point of looking at the real estate there but we have years in which to vacillate. No plans to leave Brussels for a good long time, especially now that spring is here, and no plans to get pregnant, as the idea continues to scare me shitless.

Shades of grey

Post-modernism is a talking point in our household because the F-word is an artist. To an artist post-modernism means something different from what it meant to me as an academic woman, and what it means to me now as a cultural participant. I think post-modernism is a uselessly, broadly accurate (not to mention ugly) term for a kind of relativism whose absence these days renders any academic or cultural inquiry worthless, and whose presence renders art wankerish.

But when it comes to cultural documents I sit around and read, keep your doubtless clever-ish post-war reinterpretations of everything, and give me a raging Oxbridge maso-queen who thought of women as 'raddled meat' and of Arabs as a society of lazy gorgeous dreaming males whose limbs quivered when they sexlessly, hygienically fucked each other in the sand.

Long way about of saying that so far The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an absolute lark. I don't know how long I'll continue with it though. 600 more pages to go, when there are so many other books in the world. . . And the bulk of my fascination with it is of the sort I feel when I'm listening to a sauced Englishman blathering about ethnic groups without any restraint borne of modesty or cultural relativism - I can enjoy it for an evening, and after that he's just another liquor-soaked twat who might as well be talking about football teams, and who thinks, if he thinks at all, that post-modernism is a communist tool to rob him of all credibility.

In that blathery sense The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is even better than my old favourite Wilfrid Thesinger - another of those hygienic, 'sexless' types who dug young Arabs and who had an enjoyably terse, funny writing style - because Thesinger seemed to have tried his best to become one of them (living for a long time with the Marsh Arabs in Iraq, who did badly under Saddam Hussein). Whereas, in his writing at least, Lawrence is so awfully English and the Arabs - not to mention the Turks and Jews - are so awfully not. I don't know if he loved them - he's certainly rather crueler than Thesinger about them - and so far he gives the impression that everything good they did was more or less an accident until he came along.

The thing is, books like Seven Pillars are the story of me, of us, as western Anglophones (nobody else reads this blog, do they?) - our identity documents. Post-modernist or not, I can't understand being impatient with or dismissive of these texts or the general Dead White Male canon, or primary sources in general. Incomplete, maybe; but meaningless? Certainly not! We can't invent a post-modernist past when we have such a profoundly pre-modernist history; we can't be revisionists; that's the only thing that's worse than being an asshole in the first place, and it stops us from knowing ourselves. When Lawrence writes that Arabs are incapable of seeing shades of grey, only being capable of seeing black and white, thus 'despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns', it tells us so little about Arabs but so much about us.

The Hormone Factor

Home again, thank goodness. It always shocks me how much I miss the F-word when I'm away. The last couple of days of this trip were rendered even more difficult by the onset of ovulation in a male-dominated environment - all these industrial conferences are just swarming man pits. High point of my estrogen-fuelled confusion was the mid-conference 'dinner-in-the-offsite-swanky-restaurant' event, when I was seated next to this attractive west-coast type I'd just met:

West-coast type: So what is it specifically that you do?
Mistress La Spliffe: I'm sorry, did you just ask me what it is I'd like to tell you to do?

Honestly, I totally thought that was what he'd said.

In the end it was a great event - I really enjoyed myself. The city was goddamn magical. And I think I have hit on a way of being social and networky at these events that doesn't make me feel like a massive corporate whore - using Elvis's old trick of being interested works really well; all these people are interesting, as long as I figure out how. Met some very nice people indeed. And had a little time to read, though the hotel's lovely spa seriously ate into my personal brain time. Also all the waiting around in aeroports was done with co-workers - a new and luckily pleasant experience for me. But on the plane ride there, I read Jamaica Inn; I played a bit of hooky during one of the sessions and read The Human Factor; and on the plane ride back, I read the first hundred pages or so of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Not as much time as I'd like to write about them this morning, but must say that The Human Factor is fucking awesome, as close to perfect as any novel I can think of offhand, from the first sentence to the last. I was very fond, as I wrote, of The Quiet American (fantastic narration) and less fond of The Power and the Glory (some good guilt but too much English-dagoishness); The Human Factor is quite different from those. It deals with duty and culpability in a more - adult? - way perhaps, in a less guilty, Catholic way. . . it's hard to say what I mean.

In all three books there's a sort of running thread of the inevitability of guilt and duty, but in The Human Factor it's as though the inevitability has overwhelmed the guilt almost completely. There's something more tired or resigned about it. When I have some downtime today I'll be interested to see when he wrote each. The Human Factor seems more like a book an old man would write and Maurice Castle seems more like an old man's hero. Top notch.

Briefly

I am a networking, gladhanding, business card throwing machine. It's worse for your brain than ecstacy.

Lisbon is a pretty great city. It makes me think of southern Italy without the utter hopelessness, stifling sexism, and filth. Before moving into to a hotel so swanky that the bathrooms in the double rooms have glass walls so you can watch your partner do their business (only the swanky are that pervy, I find), I was staying in a great non-swanky hotel in the Barrio Alto, where people offer you drugs and what feels like the whole city drinks and laughs and chats all night. Lovely. Good to get in that sort of quality time with a couple of my co-workers too, although I forebore to buy drugs in front of them. Must keep some mystique.

But this place is great - cheap, friendly, fun, and really really beautiful in a sun-baked way - and really full of the feeling that everything has been rough but is going to get better and better. Not like the south of Italy. This place feels both more cynical and more optimistic, somehow. Also very different are the women. Much, much more independent than in the south of Italy. Chicken-and-egg question - is that because the men are so much less insufferable? They smile and look up and down instead of catcalling and getting in your fucking way, as in Italy. God, Italian men. But that's a rant for another time. The important thing is it's been war menough for the construction workers here to not wear tps and that's awesome.